Mandy's Mercurial Monologue

"...having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation. Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake... For this is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men...." -- 1 Peter 2:12-15  I walked out during the sermon today. I wasn't doing it to make a point, but the guy torpedoed what was a good sermon by choosing to pass judgement on the hearts and intentions of others.  While Peter's first letter exhorts believers to submit to governing authorities, he does not say that believers should not make use of their rights as citizens. We are not Rome, of course, and ostensibly we the people are the government of this nation; at least that is how it was until 2009. Since then it has become the government who rules and "we the people" who are subjects. T...

Tonight as I am listening to music I used to love, I find myself going from one time in the past to another and feeling that I can't settle anywhere. This brings to mind the last moments our cat Poe spent at home before we rushed him to the vet at the end of his life. He couldn't move his hind legs, but he willed himself from chair to chair under the kitchen table, trying to find a place of comfort. They had all been satisfying before, but now nothing worked. That's how life feels now. Something drastic has happened, a tragic change, and there is no way to get comfortable or if there is, it won't last. I feel I will be torn from it... like Poe trying to grab the final chair and hang on as I picked him up to head to the car. Now I feel sick to my stomach, not about the past so much as the present and the future. In seminary we discussed civilizations under collapse; people try to recapture previous times, idealized and romanticized versions of the past, o...

I've been writing some variation of this or another at various sites on the internet all week. I need to say it here, but unless others pick it up and run with it, it's going nowhere against the hurricane of pro-Putin propaganda.     Clearly there are people with money, power and influence who are selling the opposite message. There are misinformed "conservatives" who have been fooled into believing that Russia Today is a non-biased news source and "libertarians" including Ron Paul who are eating up the Russian -state issued talking point and regurgitating them everywhere.   Nationalists did not overthrow Yanukovych. There were some nationalists in the mix; how could anyone keep them out of a popular uprising? The Maidan (pronounced My'-dahn) demonstrators and those murdered there by the Russian-backed snipers were mostly everyday citizens. They became engaged when the Yanukovych government used brutality, and later murder, against those who wer...

  I've been so consumed by the events in Ukraine for the past week that I haven't had time to blog. Far too much time and attention has gone into comment threads all over the internet and contending with people from various nations who are ignorant and apathetic.   There are some who would call themselves 'conservatives' or 'libertarians' who see Putin as the "good guy" because of his stance against homosexual and Muslim pressure groups in Russia . They also claim that he has limited abortion. I don't have information on that, but the good he may do in some areas does not constitute a pass on others. To give him a pass where he is wrong is not consistent with a conservative worldview and we must not do it lest we find ourselves promoting a villain.   These opinionated ignoramuses refuse to see that Putin is out of line for interfering with, undermining and threatening a separate and sovereign nation. They are content to see Ukrain...