Fearless Wonder

No ones likes unsolicited advice...So with that said, don't read my blog if you don't want to hear what I have to say.  I know there were times when I was dealing with anxiety, depression and a fragile emotional state, that you could give me all the good advice in the world and it wouldn't take.   However, if it wasn't for the wise words of people in my life, authors I've read, and speakers I've listened to, I would still be back in neurotic fun land.  So the following is my little contribution to the people in my life who are suffering.  Take from it what you will. 1.  Don't be afraid of your anxiety, or depression, or emotions, or phobias or whatever it is that plagues you.  Your neurosis like to keep you afraid so you won't do anything about them.  They like to pretend they are big terrible monsters with fearsome teeth.  They are really just whiney little babies who have never been loved.  The sooner you can see them for what they ar...

So despite being an "Ex-Christian" I am a person of faith. I have faith in myself.  I believe and live by the faith that I will grow as a human in love and compassion.  I have faith that I will recover from my mistakes and that I will allow my successes and failures to transform me into a better person. I have faith that others are capable of learning to grow, think, love and recover from their mistakes. I have faith that living in the present moment will put my worries and fears into the right perspective. I have faith that the seeds of love, kindness and compassion that I plant will grow. I am trying to live this faith out from day to day.  It's not a complex -ology held together by a web of correctly ordered texts.  It's a faith born out of hardship and experience, joy and love. My faith is about being true to myself and the people in my sphere of influence,  rather than being true to a god or a religious text.   I know many wonderful peopl...

I've seen this statement going around today. "Dear God, why do you allow so much violence in schools?" "Dear Student, I'm not allowed in schools." If you believe that God's absence from schools is the reason for Sandy Hook and other school shootings, then why aren't you putting God back into the schools yourself? 2 Corinthians 5:20 We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. Christians, aren't you supposed to be God's ambassadors, his hands and feet?  If you are, then you can walk into the schools yourself.  You don't have to wait for the government to pass a law. I would love to have you in my classroom.  You could kneel beside a child and help them with their reading.  You could bring in school supplies to pass out to my needy ones.  You could read stories, sweep up spills, and wipe away tears.  You could tutor af...

Right now I am reading a book called "A Chosen Faith."  Its sort of a primer to the Unitarian Universalist faith.  I am thinking about formally joining our local congregation.  (I already sing in the choir.)   Unitarian Universalism seems to line up with where I am right now.  However I find myself still in the awkward getting to know you stage with the congregation.  Folk are fairly friendly and there is a lot to do and a lot to get involved with.  However there are not a lot of younger childless couples in the church so its a bit harder to form those easy friendships one does with ones peers.  This has me thinking about the place of awkwardness in the spiritual experience.  We'd all like to be up on the mountaintop, blissing out to a spiritual high, but life is not often made of moments like this.  I think the Buddhist view of the present moment helps.  i.e. "Dwelling in this present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment." Th...

This is a response to my friend's comment on my last post. Yes, I have heard the lunatic/liar/lord argument.  I know there are scholars from the different camps who have written extensively on the historical Jesus, some to give evidence for faith, some to destroy faith, and some who simply want to examine the facts honestly.   For me, to parse out the truth of what happened 2000+ years ago is an hopeless task.  To call myself even an amatuer history buff would be too much.  I enjoy history but only have devoted myself to it sporadically.  Yet even if I did devote myself fulltime would the conclusions I come to be any more valid than the countless other historian who have gone before?   I have trouble enough determining what is true in the here and now, let alone seeing the truth in a distant path, where much knowledge has been lost and forgotten. In truth I haven't given a lot of thought to the historical Jesus, to either prove or disprove his worth. ...

My blog is a bit mad at me for ignoring it for so long, and it went and collected all kinds spam comments to show me that it's feelings were hurt.  Well, I cleaned up the comments and now I need to go one step further and post something so that my blog can finally forgive me.  (Sorry to Noah, whose last comment was accidentally deleted while I cleaned up spam.) Sooooooooo....um......life, and meaning, and religion, and er.....stuff.    I recently finished both War and Peace and Anna Karenina.  Tolstoy got me thinking about a lot of things, but I fear that if I start in posting about what I've learned from Tolstoy that this post will end up the same length as War and Peace.   I am also reading a book on Unitarian Universalism since I am thinking about joining our local congregation.  I already sing in the choir.  But since I am still making up my mind about the UU I don't have anything clear to say about it.   I could post about...

Earlier this year I started taking anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication.   I had put off doing so for many years because of the bad experiences of some people close to me on various medications.  However, my therapist assured me that some of the newer medications did not have the same awful side effects and that if I did experience prolonged negative side effects I could always go off the medication and be no worse off that I was before.  I was at a crisis point in my life, where my depression and anxiety had become too difficult to manage on my own so I finally gave it a try.   After two terrible weeks of the initial side effects, the medication worked.  I was good.  I stopped have panic attacks and only had infrequent and short periods of depression, rather than the weeks on end depressions I'd had before.  Aside from that I finally knew what it was like to feel normal. Being on medication didn't put me in a fog, or send me to euphoric heig...