I wrote this in order to apply to be an MS Ambassador for the MS foundation, but then I got derailed by the Shingles and missed the deadline for this round. I am keeping it just in case another opportunity presents itself.
I have been diagnosed with MS for almost 20 years. I am waiting for the day when the years that I have been living with MS out number the years without. There are times when I don't think about it, and I am just a person going about my day. But so much of my day is impacted by my diagnosis, that it is getting harder and harder to slip into a comfortable level of denial and feel normal.
I think about MS in terms of what I can and cannot do in a normal day. My initial symptoms were common sensory disturbances: Hearing loss, dizziness, optic neuritis. Now, I am most impacted by my difficulty walking and becoming easily fatigued. No more long trips to the mall or walks down the block to the convenience store for milk. My thoughts are always on where and when I can sit down and, for God's sake where's the bathroom!
I enjoyed reading about the phenomenal people with MS who manage symptoms with macrobiotic vegan diets and long yoga sessions. I become inspire to change my own diet or twist my body into unusual poses while keeping my mind perfectly still. But it isn't long until I'm looking for the television remote control while reaching for a plate of full fat chocolate chip cookies. I feel guilty and then I forgive myself for being a regular person.
I have been a helper for my whole life. I come from a long line of clergy people and missionaries. I was taught that it is better to give than receive. I now find myself on the receiving end more and more often. I need help standing up after a fall. I need help carrying things to my car. I need help opening doors, making dinner, cleaning my house. And I forgive myself for not being able to come up with a fancy way to be self sufficient. I forgive myself for being a regular person.
I want to be an MS Ambassador because I am a regular person. I want to let people know that they are all doing the best they can with what they have from where they are and it is okay to not have the perfect diet or spend 8 hours a day in the gym. It is okay to be a regular person.
Although I have not been able to formal MS awareness activities, I try to live my life everyday, embodying dignity and realness. I try to be someone who make the world a nicer place in which others exist. I keep my sense of humor about myself. I appreciate other people for just being human. I want to be able to bring self-acceptance and joy to other people trying to be more than their diagnosis. I want them to know it is okay to forgive themselves for needing help or for barely making t the fridge let alone preparing a healthy meal. It is okay to be just a regular person, living an ordinary life. Managing MS on a daily basis makes you extraordinary enough!
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Monday, April 28, 2014
Here s part two of my answer to my niece:
Hello again, Misty,
Hello again, Misty,
I also appreciate the opportunity to communicate with
you! You probably don’t remember this at
all, but Uncle Dana and I visited CA way back when you were about 4 years old! That
was in 1992 or 93, I think. My favorite memory
of you, is that you fell asleep on Dana’s lap after lunch!
Regarding you questions:
My family and I attend the United Church of Christ. This is a liberal mainstream protestant
religion with roots in the Germanic Evangelical and Reformed tradition. I was never taught that the Bible was the
inerrant work of God, but rather a book of theology written by man using
metaphor and traditional lore to explain God to people in ways they could
understand. I was never taught that
there was a list of rules to follow, but rather, that I was to use free will
and thought to understand my place in the hand of God and how to live according
to the best interest of all mankind.
About God being energy; I do not believe God is an
energy. I believe God is The
Energy. The energy that animates life
and creates and inhabits everything. Everything
is energy and that energy is God. Because
God Energy makes up everything, there is no way for us to be separate from God
or each other. When Jesus said that if
you do something to my brother, you do it to me, he was not speaking
metaphorically! He meant, what you do to
one, you do to all since we are all connected through God.
This is my understanding based on all the teaching from all
the wonderful theologians in my world, but also based on my own knowledge of
the world and science. Science and
religion are not mutually exclusive. The
same God that created minister, also created scientists! Our job as thinking humans with freewill, is
to find God in all things, make sense of the knowledge provided, and then use
that knowledge to better the lives of ourselves and others.
The main teaching of Jesus to me is to love your neighbor as
yourself. To care for everyone and to
love the vilified and disenfranchised as much as anyone else. It is easy to love people who look like you
and think like you. It is much harder to
love people who are unfamiliar and who think and do things which are outside of
what you consider normal or moral. Needing
to turn the other cheek to those who want to hurt you, is the hardest part of
being aware of God in everyone.
My understanding of God helps me to love and have compassion
for everyone. I have to always be aware
of God in everyone in order to try to take a path to acceptance.
I believe I have probably over explained things! I hope tis gves you a little more insight
into me thoughts, and I hope you do well on your class project.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Somehow my original published post reverted to this one with no explanation of what this is. My niece (by marriage) asked me to answer these questions for a class project. She is a senior at Bob Jones University in S. Carolina. I hope my answers don't rock her world, too much! In the words od the immortal Margo Channing in All About Eve: Fasten your seaat belts! We'rein for a bumpy ride
Dear Misty Dawn,
I am honored that you have asked me to answer these very challenging questions for you class. I want to answer them as thoughtfully as possible.
Something you may not know about me is that I come from a long line of highly educated Theologians. My great grandfather Baur came to the US from Germany. He rode the train from the port in New York to Chicago then walked from Union Station to Elmhurst, IL (not a short walk!) to attend Elmhurst College. He eventually attended Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, Mo and became a professor there. My Grandfather also was an ordained minister as were two of his brothers. All six of his sisters were married to ordained ministers as well. The lone lay person of the 10 siblings became a psychiatrist because, he said, someone had to figure out all those crazy ministers.
My father followed his father into seminary as well. He has a doctorate in theology with a concentration on the old testament. My mother's father was also a minister and played a prominent role in the synod heirarchy.
So my thought re religion have been thoroughly informed by educated and thoughtful theology.
So here goes:
#1. Does God exist?
God most certainly does exist. God exists as the energy that animates and creates everything. Science tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can be harnessed and channeled by a variety of means. Extinguishing a light or turning off the TV doesn't stop the energy. It simply means we are no longer tapping into the energy that has no beginning and no end.. There is no such thing as a true vacuum (completely empty space) because, even in a vacuum, there is a field of energy. This energy is God. It is within all things around all things, continues through time and space. It is responsible for everything that ever was, is now and ever will be. The most pure expression of this energy in humans is Agape love; unconditional positive regard with no judgments and no limits.
This sort of answers your next question
#2. Where did I come from?
You, along with everything else in the Universe, come from the same all loving never-ending energy source that is God. You are part of everything that ever was or ever will be. You, me, the black ants on my kitchen floor, the tacos, the grass, Osama Bin Laden...we are all one. The energy that is God, created laws of nature that align to create biology and thus, human biological procreation. So the science was created by God, but very slowly (and sort of inefficiently) to get your beautiful self into your body.
So, #3 Where does human intelligence come from?
Well, the energy that is God is responsible for creating biology with the capacity for thought. In that very slow and inefficient way, life found a way to express thought, have emotions, understand our planet and attempt to understand our universe and what makes us,... well,... us. Human intelligence is a combination of things all of which are created and animated by the same energy source. The Energy source which is God has unlimited capacity to create unlimited thought and ideas with no judgement or censure which means that the answer to question
#4 Do I have a purpose? is most definitely yes...and no. Your purpose, the same as everyone else's, is to be an expression of the God energy: to create, to love, to be the best expression of you that you can be. But, no, I do not think that God would, or should, put specific people on the planet to do something that is pre-ordained. Free will, by definition, means that we get to choose our purpose and roles. What informs that purpose is our experiences and our biology and plain old chance.
Which leads us to
#5. Why do people suffer? Suffering is a part of the human experience. Because of free will, because of our human biology and connections to one another, we are provided with opportunity to experience the range of everything of which our biology is capable. Suffering provides us with information that creates new thoughts and ideas. Don't get me wrong about this. Stuff happens because it just happens. The creative energy created tsunamis and fires and mudslides, not for punishment or spite, but because they are part of the biology of the earth. The creative energy created free will and the experiences that create murderers and psychopaths, too. But this is stopped/ameliorated by our desire to change the stuff that causes this sort of thing in the first place. This is how suffering can lead us to make positive changes. Stuff like seat belts, early childhood programs, social security came from our human desire to stop bad things from happening to people. Despite the popular belief that the world is a dangerous place, it is actually safer to be human now than ever before in history. This is, I think, a direct result of our use of creativity, free will to find ways to stop human suffering.
One thing I absolutely believe about this, is that if we all remembered that we are all part of one universal connected energy source, we would stop treating each other so badly. We would stop judging each other and try harder to understand each other. Look at the word ATONEMENT. Take it apart and see that this word is actually At-One-Ment. If we were at one with this source that is God, we would not suffer in the ways that we do because we would realize our own worth and the worth of everything and everyone. However, I also believe suffering provides us with opportunity to be fully human and to gain empathy and compassion for others in order to bring forth love and kindness into the world.
#6 Is there life after death? Remember that energy cannot be created or destroyed and it is impossible for us to be separated from the source, even if we forget that fact. So our energy certainly continues after we separate from our bodies. After that, I can only speculate how our energy continues. I choose with my free will, to believe that our intelligence remembers our human experience and reconnects with others who shared this experience. I feel pretty strongly that we get to come back here as many times as we want in order to have the experience of being human in as many ways as we want. However, having never been dead myself, this is pure conjecture!
#7 Can evil be overcome? Evil is a creation of mankind. Mankind is a creation of God and God created the free will inherent in mankind. Woo! What a conundrum! My thought is, that if every person having a human experience suddenly become aware of our oneness, there would no longer be the expression of disconnection we call evil. But, in order to keep the human experience as created by the source energy that is God, we must keep our humanity and free will. So as long as human kind exists, there will probably be what we know as evil.
#8. Can I distinguish right from wrong? This is, perhaps, one of the more complicated questions. Right and wrong are human created concepts. God didn't create right or wrong. God created man with free will and logic and we created concepts of right and wrong in order to maintain order in the world. Humanly created "laws" are really just good ideas for us to follow so we can all just get along. It is wrong for me to take your possessions, because you would feel angry and upset which creates dissonance between us. This is not an expression of at-one-ness and this is not the best expression of the God energy. So I guess that means it's wrong in that sense. Does that make sense?!
#9 Can people know truth? They can hopefully figure out what truth is for themselves and then live it. But "truth" isn't necessarily the same for everyone. Reality might be, but I'm not even sure about that! All I am fairly sure about, is that laws of nature are pretty set. So find your truth, and express that truth. This is part of being the best expression of the source energy!
And finally, #10. Does education have a purpose? YES. Nothing is possible without learning. I'm not sure that formal education is absolutely necessary, but nothing occurs unless we are always learning and gaining knowledge. So, congratulations on completing (or almost completing you formal education, and I hope you never quit being educated by the beautiful Universe and all the experiences it provides for you!
Dear Misty Dawn,
I am honored that you have asked me to answer these very challenging questions for you class. I want to answer them as thoughtfully as possible.
Something you may not know about me is that I come from a long line of highly educated Theologians. My great grandfather Baur came to the US from Germany. He rode the train from the port in New York to Chicago then walked from Union Station to Elmhurst, IL (not a short walk!) to attend Elmhurst College. He eventually attended Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, Mo and became a professor there. My Grandfather also was an ordained minister as were two of his brothers. All six of his sisters were married to ordained ministers as well. The lone lay person of the 10 siblings became a psychiatrist because, he said, someone had to figure out all those crazy ministers.
My father followed his father into seminary as well. He has a doctorate in theology with a concentration on the old testament. My mother's father was also a minister and played a prominent role in the synod heirarchy.
So my thought re religion have been thoroughly informed by educated and thoughtful theology.
So here goes:
#1. Does God exist?
God most certainly does exist. God exists as the energy that animates and creates everything. Science tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can be harnessed and channeled by a variety of means. Extinguishing a light or turning off the TV doesn't stop the energy. It simply means we are no longer tapping into the energy that has no beginning and no end.. There is no such thing as a true vacuum (completely empty space) because, even in a vacuum, there is a field of energy. This energy is God. It is within all things around all things, continues through time and space. It is responsible for everything that ever was, is now and ever will be. The most pure expression of this energy in humans is Agape love; unconditional positive regard with no judgments and no limits.
This sort of answers your next question
#2. Where did I come from?
You, along with everything else in the Universe, come from the same all loving never-ending energy source that is God. You are part of everything that ever was or ever will be. You, me, the black ants on my kitchen floor, the tacos, the grass, Osama Bin Laden...we are all one. The energy that is God, created laws of nature that align to create biology and thus, human biological procreation. So the science was created by God, but very slowly (and sort of inefficiently) to get your beautiful self into your body.
So, #3 Where does human intelligence come from?
Well, the energy that is God is responsible for creating biology with the capacity for thought. In that very slow and inefficient way, life found a way to express thought, have emotions, understand our planet and attempt to understand our universe and what makes us,... well,... us. Human intelligence is a combination of things all of which are created and animated by the same energy source. The Energy source which is God has unlimited capacity to create unlimited thought and ideas with no judgement or censure which means that the answer to question
#4 Do I have a purpose? is most definitely yes...and no. Your purpose, the same as everyone else's, is to be an expression of the God energy: to create, to love, to be the best expression of you that you can be. But, no, I do not think that God would, or should, put specific people on the planet to do something that is pre-ordained. Free will, by definition, means that we get to choose our purpose and roles. What informs that purpose is our experiences and our biology and plain old chance.
Which leads us to
#5. Why do people suffer? Suffering is a part of the human experience. Because of free will, because of our human biology and connections to one another, we are provided with opportunity to experience the range of everything of which our biology is capable. Suffering provides us with information that creates new thoughts and ideas. Don't get me wrong about this. Stuff happens because it just happens. The creative energy created tsunamis and fires and mudslides, not for punishment or spite, but because they are part of the biology of the earth. The creative energy created free will and the experiences that create murderers and psychopaths, too. But this is stopped/ameliorated by our desire to change the stuff that causes this sort of thing in the first place. This is how suffering can lead us to make positive changes. Stuff like seat belts, early childhood programs, social security came from our human desire to stop bad things from happening to people. Despite the popular belief that the world is a dangerous place, it is actually safer to be human now than ever before in history. This is, I think, a direct result of our use of creativity, free will to find ways to stop human suffering.
One thing I absolutely believe about this, is that if we all remembered that we are all part of one universal connected energy source, we would stop treating each other so badly. We would stop judging each other and try harder to understand each other. Look at the word ATONEMENT. Take it apart and see that this word is actually At-One-Ment. If we were at one with this source that is God, we would not suffer in the ways that we do because we would realize our own worth and the worth of everything and everyone. However, I also believe suffering provides us with opportunity to be fully human and to gain empathy and compassion for others in order to bring forth love and kindness into the world.
#6 Is there life after death? Remember that energy cannot be created or destroyed and it is impossible for us to be separated from the source, even if we forget that fact. So our energy certainly continues after we separate from our bodies. After that, I can only speculate how our energy continues. I choose with my free will, to believe that our intelligence remembers our human experience and reconnects with others who shared this experience. I feel pretty strongly that we get to come back here as many times as we want in order to have the experience of being human in as many ways as we want. However, having never been dead myself, this is pure conjecture!
#7 Can evil be overcome? Evil is a creation of mankind. Mankind is a creation of God and God created the free will inherent in mankind. Woo! What a conundrum! My thought is, that if every person having a human experience suddenly become aware of our oneness, there would no longer be the expression of disconnection we call evil. But, in order to keep the human experience as created by the source energy that is God, we must keep our humanity and free will. So as long as human kind exists, there will probably be what we know as evil.
#8. Can I distinguish right from wrong? This is, perhaps, one of the more complicated questions. Right and wrong are human created concepts. God didn't create right or wrong. God created man with free will and logic and we created concepts of right and wrong in order to maintain order in the world. Humanly created "laws" are really just good ideas for us to follow so we can all just get along. It is wrong for me to take your possessions, because you would feel angry and upset which creates dissonance between us. This is not an expression of at-one-ness and this is not the best expression of the God energy. So I guess that means it's wrong in that sense. Does that make sense?!
#9 Can people know truth? They can hopefully figure out what truth is for themselves and then live it. But "truth" isn't necessarily the same for everyone. Reality might be, but I'm not even sure about that! All I am fairly sure about, is that laws of nature are pretty set. So find your truth, and express that truth. This is part of being the best expression of the source energy!
And finally, #10. Does education have a purpose? YES. Nothing is possible without learning. I'm not sure that formal education is absolutely necessary, but nothing occurs unless we are always learning and gaining knowledge. So, congratulations on completing (or almost completing you formal education, and I hope you never quit being educated by the beautiful Universe and all the experiences it provides for you!
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