Discernment....

 November 30, 2022

I saw a video on Twitter on Thursday last, and it disturbed me to such a degree, that I felt moved to write my essay this week on this topic.

The creator of this video proclaimed that those people whose lives were taken at the Club Q massacre on Saturday November 18, in Colorado Springs, don’t matter. That they got what they deserved and are currently burning in hell because, and I quote, “there was no evidence that they were Christian.”

I do not wish to repeat the name of the person who posted such an opinion because I really have no wish to give this person any kind of shout out at all. That would be feeding the craving for attention, and this person clearly has had enough of that already. But I do want to address the atrocious concept expressed in her video.

You see, I believe in God. And if I believe there is God, I also must believe there is a satan. It’s as simple as that. And I believe that God and satan are opposites.

One represents love, and life, good and light, and the other hate, death, evil, and darkness.

I have read my Bible, more than once. I have read all the words printed in red in the New Testament several times. I challenge anyone to show me where Jesus said anything, at any time, that can be considered a message of hate.

Of course, none will be found. He wouldn’t have done so because He is love and life and good and light. Jesus never lied, and He never hated. He did not counsel those who are persecuted to pick up an AR-15 and have at it, as one woman has famously said; He told us to turn the other cheek. In fact, while I try not to judge anyone, I will say that any person who suggests that Jesus would have used such a weapon under any circumstance needs to read God’s word again, because they clearly didn’t get the message the first time.

I am angry because once more people who are not of love and life and good and light have used my faith as an excuse for their hate-fueled actions. That offends me. I know this anger inside me is not a bad thing. It is, in fact, a righteous anger.

But I do not hate the woman who posted that message. Nor the one who suggested the AR-15. I do not hate those who spread these vile ideas to others. I do not hate anyone, regardless of being angry because of what they have done.

Jesus also told us to pray for those who spitefully use us. And as I do just that, it’s not anger I feel so much as it is pity.

I feel pity for those souls who were hurting, and were hungry, who were vulnerable, and who longed for something and for someone to hear them and help them… and believed the lies that have been fed to them by those who consistently and yes spitefully use them and their emotions for their own purposes. I feel pity for them because the time will come when they will see the lies for what they are, and they will feel a great weight of misery. They will know they have been deceived and used and they will suffer even more than they already have, because of it.

And I know, yes, I know, that no person can judge whether or not another is a “Christian”, that is, whether or not they have Christ within them, because that is truly a matter only between that person, and God.

That said, one can observe the fruit on the tree and know if it is good, or not. God did not leave his people powerless against the forces of evil in this life. He gave them many gifts to help them, including the gift of discernment. Discernment is that skill which allows us to recognize the difference between, say, love and hate.

The astute among you might at this point say, “hey, wait a minute, Morgan. That sounds kind of like the message you said disturbed you.” And you would not be wrong, exactly, to point out that similarity to me.

But there is one major difference: and that is whether at the heart of it all, the message given is one of love and life, good and light—or of hate, death, evil and darkness.

The difference, if one compares my words and the video that I have referred to, is really quite easy to see. My reaction, if I believed someone truly was “burning in hell” certainly would not be self-righteous satisfaction.

It would be grief for a promise unmet, and a chance wasted.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

Traditions....

 November 23, 2022

Sometimes it seems as if there is so much change and upheaval in these contemporary times, so much turmoil and anxiety, that we might fear we’ll be swallowed whole by everything happening all around us.

While it’s true there is much in our environment that we cannot, as single individuals alone do anything about, there is one area in which we have complete and near total control. And that is in the traditions we forge, and the way we use those traditions to cope with the metaphorical storms that buffet us.

This year, I’ve noticed a joy in the planning for the holiday season, a joy that had been missing in the last two years. It’s so palpable I can almost taste it. This is true especially for my American friends. I have noticed as I watch some of your nightly news casts that when asked, people will report a worry about inflation and prices and making ends meet. But at the same time, people don’t seem to be allowing those harsh realities to interfere overmuch with their holiday traditions. Yes, the cost of airfare seems to be through the roof compared to a couple of years ago. And yet reports say that flights are at pre-pandemic highs.

People are this very day, as I write these words, flying or driving “home” for the American Thanksgiving holiday, tomorrow. As one man interviewed said, “I’m going to sleep in my childhood bed and eat at my childhood table, and I can’t wait.”

Tradition. Just thinking that word brings to mind the first song in that wonderful Broadway musical, Fiddler on the Roof. Tradition is a powerful word for a powerful concept. But it’s not, in these days of a truly wider world thanks to social media, simply a matter of a tight enclave of several families that may share a common neighborhood and a common faith. Though of course, our faith will have, I believe, the largest part in determining the traditions we hold.

As change comes and we feel threatened, we often cling more tightly to the ideal of the traditions we hold. Which means that we alone, each of us, and each family of us, has the freedom to decide what is and is not traditional. We can tend to cling to the memory of the observances of traditions past to get us through our tough times as they happen. This we’ve done, many of us for the last couple of years. This year feels different.

Now our lives are no longer so tightly controlled by the threat of Covid. Now we know there are vaccines and masks, and best practices to keep us as safe as possible from this now endemic threat.

And now we feel the draw of our traditions. Now we feel we can respond to that draw, to go home, to gather together, and to give thanks. We understand that finally, as promised, we can meet again.

Not many of us would truly want to go back to the past to live full-time. Not many would truly want to return to the days of yore. We may yearn for a less complicated lifestyle especially in the middle of chaos, but that can be achieved without sacrificing modern life. Yes, there is that draw, that sense of “everything used to be so much more…. in the past” and here you may finish that sentence with your own word.

But that is nostalgia taking, and nostalgia is a uniquely human emotion. It is one designed I believe to give us a few moments of psychological respite as we are otherwise busy coping with life’s inevitable, and transitory storms.

Some people have seized on that emotion and have tried to use it to do their best to pull us back to those “good old days”, to convince us that the answer to our anxiety is to regress, to take away our right to be who we are, and to usurp our freedoms, replacing them with a pseudo-parental set of boundaries they will then try to convince us are for “our own good”.

But we do know better, and we do want better. And we will celebrate our traditions. At this time of year with turkey and stuffing, and “all the fixins’.” We will gather, and remember, and celebrate…and we will look to the future ahead.

That future will be as good, and as worthy as any that ever was—because it will be one of our own choosing.

David and I wish all of you, our American friends, a very happy Thanksgiving!

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Pollen swirling on the breeze...

 November 16, 2022

All things considered it has been a very mild November so far. But in the last couple of days, the temperature has dropped below freezing. To add insult to injury, there have been a couple of times in the last few days when I’ve looked out to see white pollen swirling in the air. And then this morning, horror of horrors, that white allergen covered the grass and the cars!

It might sound counter intuitive, but the truth is when the cold comes, and the snow falls, my arthritis aches less. I think there is a threshold of chill plus damp that is the hot zone for maximum suffering where this condition of mine is concerned.

I believe that’s why the spring and the autumn are the worst times for my poor body. It doesn’t mater that I don’t go outside very much during these times; the damp and the chill seem to permeate the house.

But I am very, very lucky—luckier than my mother was. She too had osteoarthritis. But back then, she didn’t have the pain medications that I have access to. She did allow herself what was available to her, and that was why she’d drink two bottles of beer every night. Just two. It was a good thing that she liked beer. Rarely did I see her with anything stronger. Except if we went out to dinner. She’d allow herself one cocktail.  And the only cocktail I ever saw her drink was a Singapore Sling.

I suppose that, like pain medication, the numbing principles of alcohol are best if they’re not overused.

I have worked hard to keep any political opinions I may have to myself. If I were living in the United States, I would be an Independent. There are members of both political parties who I admire. But I’m not American, and so do not feel entitled to tell those who are my opinions. I’m not after offending anyone. I can today tell you only that I have been offended by the use of lies as a political weapon. I grew up in a world where telling lies was the most offensive thing one could do. To be labeled a liar was the scarlet letter of my day. If you did something wrong, that was on thing. Lying about it put took the sin to a whole other level.

So to my American friends, thank you for restoring my faith in you and for the most part turning away from elected office those who are liars—and a liar is a liar regardless of political party.

Mind, you’ve let a few liars slip through, but I have hope that the sieve you use next time will be of a finer mesh so you can get them all.

Christmas is approaching as Christmas does. I continue to be shocked that this is so, but that is just me. No longer capable of doing as much as I did even ten years ago, I am working on being kinder to myself. I can only do what I can do. I have to accept that and let the small things not bug me.

We’re happy with our small, just under-five-foot-tall Christmas tree. We can’t have an actual real evergreen because that’s the only thing my daughter’s allergic to. And just as well. I don’t believe in murdering trees for vanity’s sake, and the artificial tree of today is quite life-like.

As much as I love that tree, what I like more is having children decorate it. Fortunately, we have our great-grandchildren—my daughter’s grandchildren—to do the task. But that’s not yet. This is only the middle of November, after all. We’ll look to doing that at about the time our son turns fifty this year, on December 11.

So for now, we’ll spend the days keeping our minds if not our bodies occupied. There are always, for me at least, new books and essays to be writing or reading, new recipes to discover and try, and music available on my television for those evenings when I want to relax in my recliner in warmth and peace.

We here in the Ashbury household don’t hibernate—at least, not exactly. But we do seem to get our most restful and thoughtful times when the snows come down. And maybe that’s the Lord telling us to sit back, relax, and take in this version of nature’s beauty.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

There's something in the air...

 November 9, 2022

David and I talk about anything and everything under the sun. We always have. We’ve never lived in each other’s back pockets, but we’ve never been without communication between us.

Our early married years, those years when, as a newly married couple you try to find your footing and balance were interesting for us, and I believe the fact that we’re still together, is because of the work we did in those very early and iffy years.

By all common sense and the consensus of all at the time of our marriage, we should have been doomed to failure and destined for a divorce. We were different in a lot of ways. David came from a family where his father would say “jump!” and everyone would ask, “how high, sir?” I, after the age of 8 and a half, was the youngest child of three being raised by a single mother, following the death of my father. I had no real memory of a father as the acknowledged head of the family. My mother believed very much that the husband’s role was exactly that, but I had no real connection to the concept myself.

Also the fact that I was a week shy of my 18^th  birthday, and David was just 19 at the time we got married seemed to point toward the likelihood of inevitable failure.

So right from day one, we had very different expectations. David only ever tried to tell me what to do once, and that was when I told him that I wanted to go to university. He didn’t want me to, even if I could get a student grant and loan to do so. (In those days, if one qualified, one could get mostly a grant with a small portion of loan to pursue a university degree.) Long story short, he told me I couldn’t. I wasn’t having that.  And then we compromised. I had left high school at the end of grade 12; he said if I could get my grade 13 (yes, we had grade 13 in 1973), and provided I could get financed through the student grant and loan program, then I could go.

I had no problem passing that grade and was admitted to university with childcare and living expenses included in the grant. Truthfully, it was as if I had a part-time job for the money I brought to the family. Sadly, I was unable to finish my B.A. because of two consecutive challenges: my mother died just before my exams at the end of my first year, and I became pregnant in my second year of Uni and was confined to bedrest. As I was preparing to return to school, I discovered I was pregnant again. With only the one child we already had, I could have managed going to school; with three children, that wasn’t financially feasible, no matter how much grant money I was offered.

So we worked at our jobs and we raised our children. Life was different than I had envisioned it to be, but not worse, not better…. just different.

As I said, David and I discuss all manner of things. My husband is very well read—had in fact read all my history and psychology textbooks while I was in university—and while we never seem to run out of things to say, we don’t always agree.

One of our milestones on the path to maturity was realizing that we did not have to agree about everything.

Also, the range of the topics which we will discuss doesn’t appear to have any limits, and not coincidentally, no guardrails, either.

This past Monday morning I stepped out onto the porch to check the temperature. David was out there, with one of our dogs on his lap. I had all the information I needed as soon as I opened the door and beheld him in his hoodie, with the hood up. It was most definitely brisk out. Since it was a bit breezy, I inhaled deeply and then turned to him.

“Fresh country air, today, I see.” That is a code phrase, one that originated with my mother. It’s meaning: the air was redolent with the aroma of…. manure.

“That time of year for it. They have to fertilize before the snow comes.”

I nodded my agreement. “Cow manure,” I said.

“Yes, cow manure,” he agreed.

Friends, I don’t know for certain what it says about us both that we can tell the difference between cow, horse, pig, and chicken manure. But we can.

For my own part, I spent the first 18 years of my life living in what we used to call “the sticks”, which means a rural area. There were enough farms in the vicinity that one got to know the bouquet, shall we say, of the animals being raised. Then, after we’d been married for a year, I came back to the country from the city, and David got his first whiff of country life.

We lived the next fifteen years in a rural area. Actually, we lived in the small house my mother owned (we became her tenants), the first house she and dad ever owned, which was right next door to the second, bigger house they bought the year before he died. When Mom died, my sister who had lived with her, traded houses with us.

David didn’t need to have grown up out in the country to quickly have learned the difference in odor between the various by-products of farming.  Now, I’m not certain how quickly truly avowed city dwellers would be able to develop this skill—except in the case of one critter. I promise if you ever have the unfortunate opportunity to smell a chicken barn, up-close and personal, the memory of that encounter will be forever seared into your otherwise delicate olfactory senses.

With that image planted in your minds, I want you all to know that yesterday, my beloved husband turned 70. He reminded me recently during one of our far-ranging chats, that he’d always believed he would die very young. I told him to hush up, because he still could do that.

Tonight, we go out to supper with our daughter and our second daughter—who also had a birthday yesterday, thus sharing the occasion with “grandpa”—and the only other guest at this outing will be her granddaughter.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

A clock story...

 November 2, 2022

The good news is that according to the Ashbury Household Standard Measure, the winter of 22 – 23 already has one month in the bag! We in this family hold as truth that winter in our part of Canada is from October to March, inclusive. The bad news is that it is November, and so far, while the temperature outside is slightly above normal for this time of year, it’s most definitely dampish out there—or has been until this morning.

Today is supposed to be mainly sunny the rest of the day. We’re at that point in the year when my gaze does tend to scan down on the weather network’s site to that all-important statistic: expected hours of sunlight. Yesterday I looked up the forecast for Wednesday, and saw it boasted we’ll have 8 hours today. But of course, just because it’s in the forecast does not mean it will come to fruition.

Monday was rainy off and on and Tuesday began with a bit of rain and completely overcast skies. No wonder the critters look around and begin to frantically prepare to hibernate at this time of year.

Stepping inside from outside, I can proudly report that our own “nut gathering” is complete, at least to the extent that we have room to store things. Our gardens have been emptied of vegetation, the first round of leaf blowing and bagging has been done, and yesterday saw another trip made to the town’s landfill site to offload a carload of junk. It is our goal to reduce the amount of stuff we have here. The top goal is to complete the renovations upstairs, to make the house more fuel efficient going forward. But there is just too much stuff stored up there to work—at least for the time being. It won’t likely take too long to fix that little thing.

But of all the accomplishments that have been achieved over the last month as we were in full winter-prep mode, the one that stands out is this: finally, after a period of about eighteen months, I once more have my clock up on the wall here in my office.

I suppose the fact that this clock is on the same wall as the front door—the east facing outer wall—is at the root of the challenge we’ve had, keeping that clock in place. My husband hung this clock the day I bought it, oh probably more than five years ago now, and yes, it’s kind of a fussy design, with a couple of spiral-like extensions that are supposed to look like vines, complete with leaves, positioned at 10 and 5. It’s a burnished metal in colour, the clock face is beige with tan leaves that you have to look closely at to see that they are indeed leaves. When I went clock shopping this was the one that I liked, so I bought it at our local Walmart, and yes, it was very affordable (but not quite cheap). And a necessary purchase as the previous small clock I had in that same position had stopped working.

The first time my husband hung the clock up it stayed up there for a few months before someone slammed the front door really hard—and the clock came down!

Of course, this is a very packed office and when that clock fell it went straight down to the floor, behind an almost five-foot high bookshelf. The only way to retrieve that clock was to go down onto the floor, on hands and knees, under my desk and reach behind that bookcase that is exactly to the right….

That first time it took only a couple of weeks for David to accomplish the task of retrieving and rehanging that clock.

The last time that clock fell because, again, someone slammed the front door, was roughly eighteen months ago. Note I emphasized “last time” because I think the total number of times its happened is 6 or 7). And in the interim, after that last time, both husband and daughter would come into my office, at least several times a week, and while in here with me for whatever reason would glance up to where the clock should have been… to check the time.

My standard line when that happened was: “The clock is not up there. It fell, if you will recall, and it can’t raise itself.” It got to the point that I would watch for that quick glance up, hoping beyond hope that at some point one of them would do what I absolutely could not do, physically. I hoped that one of them would retrieve that poor clock from its obscurity behind the bookshelf.

Now, David made a good first step back in May and finally went under my desk and did that very thing. I dusted it off and saw that it was still working, and then he set it on one of the bookshelves in an adjacent unit. He laid it flat, because that was the only way that clock was going to be able to be on the shelf. This meant, of course, you couldn’t read the time, but it was there. Ready for when he planned to come back a little bit later to hang it.

Finally, after more than one request on my part and several promises on his, David managed the feat last week. This time, he assured me, that clock was not going to come down, no how, no way. I’m hoping that since he used a drill and really seemed to be focused on the task at hand, his declaration proves true.

And while I could resist the pun, I am not going to, so brace yourselves and get ready to groan.

Only time will tell how long that clock stays up on the wall, going forward.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury