Blog 156 – 11.6.15

For a period of about twenty five years in the middle of my life I tried to be an Atheist. During this time in the early afternoons just after I got home from my day job they ran reruns of Cheers, the popular NBC sitcom. I never saw them in their first run but really enjoyed them in syndication. The theme song at the beginning of each episode really touched my heart:

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
You want to go where people know
Our troubles are all the same
You want to go where
Everybody knows your name.

The churches I have known, and I know yours is different, just like your Senator or Congressman are “special,” were all in-grown cliques and weren’t very kind to their members let alone to strangers or visitors. In many ways the neighborhood bar is a better example of “family” than is the Christian Church that professes to be The Family of God. They say unashamedly that the Christians are the only ones that kill their own wounded. I attended a church once where the slogan was, “Where Love Abounds.” But according to truth in advertising standards it might have been more accurate to say, “Where Judgement and Condemnation Abound.”  One of my best buddies there stopped talking to me because I did something of which he did not approve. I still love him and wish him well but he has not spoken to me for over thirty years. I have to admire his ability to hold a grudge. I can’t stay mad long at anyone. It takes way more effort that just loving them and letting go anything that might come between us.

In the above lyric the line, “You want to go where people know our troubles are all the same…” is one that is a problem for many of us. If you really love someone you accept them as they are and if you see anything you want to change in them it is probably your own problem and you need to change it in yourself. “Physician heal yourself” was Jesus advice to those who thought it was their job to straighten everyone else out or line them up. A real self improvement project would keep most of us so busy we would not have time to pick on others faults or shortcomings. Remember others are only in our lives for us to learn to love ourselves better. What you find hardest to love in others is really something you have trouble loving and accepting in your self. By all means love yourself.

During my Atheist phase, and I wasn’t any better at being an Atheist than I was at being a Christian, I still believed in love, in Christmas, in the Golden Rule. I think it really doesn’t matter what you believe as much as it matters our knowing who we really are.

That is the appeal of going to a place where everybody knows your name, a place where everyone knows who you are.

I am your friend and fellow traveler, heading to Laramie, Wyoming for work this weekend,
David White