A Beach Day, in January

I got the notion that I would take you all to one of my favorite spots in Raccoon Creek State Park, and that was a good notion. In theory.

No swimming! But if you need this sign to tell you that, you probably shouldn’t be swimming in the first place.

I decided to take you to the lake beach where I like to go swimming in summer, because it’s also beautiful to walk on in the winter and look at the ice or the bleak cold moving water. And while I was there, I was going to talk about our obligations as Christians against Christian Nationalism, instead of saying everything I needed to say in front of the icons in my messy icon corner at home. Again, probably a good idea. In theory.

It is freezing out. I feel like I’m in Narnia and a witch just offered me bad English candy that tastes like aftershave.

And when I got home to listen to the video, I realized that I am an even worse cinematographer than I thought, and the cold winter wind blowing past my phone made about 1/4 of what I was trying to say inaudible. I have no idea how I’m supposed to stop that; I’ll keep working on it.

Welcome to the beach!

It took two days to upload the thing to my computer and now I feel silly.

So, for those of you who like pretty videos of moving water and like to hear my voice, I’m publishing the video with the auto-generated subtitles. But because it’s hard to understand in places, here’s the basic gist of what I’m trying to say:

We need to buckle down for a hard time. We need to get ready for a marathon. White Christian Nationalism is a heresy against the Gospel, and we have to practice our Christianity in the face of it. Our kingdom is never of this world and we won’t have a perfect country if we elect a bunch of Democrats either, but the American Right has become a sort of cult and we’re in a worst case scenario right now.

We need to do every little thing we can to stand up to the powerful: on behalf of immigrants, on behalf of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, on behalf of the poor. We’re right and the White Christian Nationalists are wrong, but it’s not going to seem like God is on our side for a bit because they own the country. We can’t get fooled. We have to keep living the Gospel.

My feet were about ready to freeze off as I took this photo.

This is especially hard for me, personally, because I was raised in a high control religious movement which was constantly scaremongering that a persecution is coming to terrorize us. In a weird way, that did come true. But it came true because these high-control religious movements joined forces with the Republican party to effectively kidnap American Christianity, so now the Christians trying to live the Gospel faithfully are being stomped on by MAGA Christians. That’s a shock, and it’s very scary.

So my first assignment for you is to brace yourself for a hard time and get ready. What are you going to do, if the things you most fear start happening? What little, sustainable things are you going to do to resist White Christian Nationalism and serve your neighbor, in Christ’s name, against the MAGA Christians? Make a plan. You absolutely can’t plan for every eventuality, but you can plan for some likely scenarios. Not to win a stunning victory, but to resist. What little things can you do to resist?

My second assignment is to find something that energizes you, and set a discipline of doing it every week. For me, that’s going out to look at nature and take pictures. I’m going to try to do that weekly. If I’m too tired or too busy to go hiking, I’ll at least go sit in a park. You don’t have to go hiking if that’s not your thing. You can set a date with yourself to go out for your favorite coffee, or go to the movies every so often, or go to the museum on your lunchbreak: something that makes you happy and fills your life with beauty, on a regular schedule so you’re not drained dry.

Next time I film live in nature I will have figured out the sound problem, and I’ll be at the Mineral Spring in a cave to show you the icicles!