My Absolute Worst Fear

I have a lot of fears. 

Someone taking one of my children (kidnapping/sex trafficking)... someone robbing them of their innocence while at a friends house... a fatal car accident while Mike is driving with all the kids and I'm the only one left or worse yet... Mike having an accident that puts me in single parent mode forever (I'd make a HORRID single parent - like I'd screw them up completely.) 

See? I told you. And that's only the few related to our little family. Trust me there's more; which begs a few questions: why do your children get on a school bus each morning? Why do they go to a friends house to play? How can you let your husband pull out of the driveway with all of your children in the backseat? What if... what IF you get that phone call from some random police officer telling you that they think they found your husbands car and all the car seats are filled but no one appears to be responding? 

How?! I trust Him... and He is g o o d. It may sound cliche but it's true. I cannot trust in the safety of our vehicles, the moral values of other families, the knowledge and quick-thinking of teachers or bus drivers, or even (as good at it is) the driving skills of my wonderful husband. I must trust my all-knowing, all-powerful God. I fight to keep that in my thoughts as I hear the news and horrors like Sandy Hook and sex-trafficking stats for the Super Bowl. Even as the FBI made that daring rescue of those 16 children and some 45 women during the Super Bowl, the danger IS real and each one of those scarred women and children has a name... and one could have been my beautiful daughter. It seems logical (at least to me) that since I have no real control over what calamities befall our family, I'm left needing desperately to trust in a good God who works all things for my good - His glory. 

But...

What about the things I CAN control? Somehow those things don't make my desperation list. Things like: writing, staying fit, time management, not yelling at my children... things I am continually working on. But I've realized lately,  I've got this idea that since "I" am somehow working on them, I don't really need to trust Him with them. 

Screwed up, I know. 

Another thought hit me right about when that one did: what if someone who knows me started reading my little blog? This person could be my neighbor or friend or family member... someone who knows me outside of this online place. Would they have an "ah-ha!" moment seeing the words I'm writing lived out in my life or would they say "Her writing is pretty good if you don't know her." 

I love to craft words so that the reader feels the irony or their heart wrenches with emotion or they find themselves bust out laughing at the humor of a situation. But that idea of my writing not matching my life to the point of someone being completely turned off to the Truth I treasure... well, it just freaks me out. I've even let that fear be the reason to quit trying. It's very hard to believe that I have something unique to say about, well, anything. 

Trust me, if you take a look at the archives, there are articles about Kony2012 and the 2012 election and many others. I have lots of opinions about everything from the State of the Union debacle, to the current boycott of Girl Scout cookies, to being a mom and making a difference in the world by doing the next load of laundry. But so does e v e r y b o d y else and their grandmother. 

This is where the trust thing comes in. I must trust Him still. Even in the things it appears I can control - because let's be honest... who can control time management when your preschooler decides to take grapes and bounce them all over the floor while laughing hysterically and when they squish? Well, suffice it to say, he laughed so hard he couldn't breathe. Yeah. My little plan of doing this thing then and getting that done now... not happening. Or staying fit when one of the children's very-deserved consequences inconveniences me. 

I must trust Him that He has given me this desire to write and ask Him to show me what to say. Using the gifts He has given me IS a way to bring Him glory. But I must keep myself face down in His presence knowing how easy it is to get full of myself and negate the very Truth I treasure. 

I guess fear isn't such a bad thing if we take the time to dig through the why and come face-to-face with the Who at the end. 

How about you?  Let's chat!! 

What fears do you need to dig through to find the why and see the Who? :)

Where were you?

I was at Christian Liberty Academy, getting ready for the day. 

For once, I was in my classroom early and never heard the news reports until my students came in and told me that some planes had crashed. Since planes sometimes crash, I reassured them we would pray for those people during our prayer time.

We were well into our morning when a fellow teacher came up the back stairs crying uncontrollably. I rushed into the hall as she sobbed how the Pentagon was just hit. That’s when I knew something was really really wrong.

After crowding around a TV set with my fellow teachers (and later, listening to the fighter jets scrambling overhead), we got the full situation and sat spellbound, in disbelief.

It just didn’t seem real. It felt like Hollywood took over our TV screens. It had to be Hollywood, right? We hear about countries at war and bombings a regular occurrence there, but here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?! No way. Or wait… maybe… wow.

As we continued our day, I briefly explained what happened to my class. A hand shot up. A little second grade boy asked if we could pray for Mr. bin Laden that he would know how much Jesus loves him. My eyes filled and for a second, I couldn’t speak. When I finally could, I said, “Yes, Bryan. We can. Jesus died for Mr. bin Laden too. Didn’t He?”

That one question changed my class forever. Every single day that year, 21 second graders prayed for Mr. Osama bin Laden that he would know how much Jesus loves him and give his life to Him.

Eleven years later, so much has changed. The TSA has become almost dictator-like with what we can and cannot take on flights. As citizens, we undergo humiliating searches so we can board a domestic flight. The fear of “What if” rules every aspect of our life. We have military presence and are engaged on several fronts. Many soldiers have given the ultimate sacrifice for this country. Many young men and women watched the footage in Highschool and decided to join the Armed Forces to make sure this never happens again. I hope and pray it never does.

Before school this morning, as they dressed in Army camo and red, white and blue, I told my children what happened eleven years ago… Flight 93, the firefighters, the terrorists, the Twin Towers, the Pentagon… they sat motionless with their mouths open, disbelieving.

I said, “Never forget, Chloe and Michael. We have real heroes who dashed in to save people not caring what happened to their own lives. Honor our Patriots. Never forget!”

stushietoon.blogspot.com

God didn’t forget about America on that day. He took a horrific tragedy and used it to turn many hearts back to Him. 

Never Forget!

Warning: My Thoughts on Politics and this Election

I've been thinking and I need to write about it.

So, hang on tight, read until the end, and hear my heart. :)

If you were to join my in-laws, Mike and me for dinner, as we often do, you'd hear the discussion run the gamut of topics - from remodeling jobs to laugh-your-socks-off stories to politics and the election.

Just so you can have an accurate perspective, when I first began dating Mike, one of the first questions his grandparents asked me was if I voted and was I a Republican. I was very taken aback. I had no idea what to do with that because growing up in Chicago, politics and religion were two topics you don't touch with strangers not to mention anyone else. It's kind of like asking a lady how old she is and what she weighs.

Here in West Michigan, one of the first questions you ask someone recently moved, aside from "How are you?" and "What do you do", is "What church you go to?" THAT took a lot of getting used to. Also, West-siders mostly assume that republicans inhabit this half of the Mitten so there's more freedom felt to ask questions once a person knows you.

Okay... so you get the scenario. We discuss politics a lot. We don't always agree on everything, but it's very much an open point of discussion.

So... as you can imagine... dinner is very animated. :)

Back when Santorum and Romney were fighting it out for the ticket, we talked extensively over the presidential merits of one versus the other. Sorta like McCain versus Obama in the debates. (Unfortunately, Obama presented very well and looked very presidential.) I did vote for McCain, but only because he was the better of the two evils. The consensus we came to was that Santorum had no chance of winning over Obama should he get nominated.

That bothers me.

Why do I have to settle for voting that way?! Am I not American? Do I not have freedoms? Freedoms my brother and other soldiers are fighting for?

Why have we accepted that only Democrats and Republicans have a chance at getting a candidate to the forefront? Why must I settle? There ARE other options. Ron Paul, for example. Many other people would race forward if there were people who would stand in the face of this voting policy and refuse to vote either Democrat or Republican - allowing for a president who is there to truly do something not just make promises and sling mud.

I do not agree with Romney wholeheartedly. Massachusetts is one of the worst taxed/legislated states in the country. He gives wiggle room on the abortion/prolife issue and hangs his hat on the notion that it's not for him to decide that - but the courts. Life is life. When is it our right to say it's worthy of death when it hasn't taken a breath yet. A baby is a person. A heartbeat is still a heartbeat.

I do not fault him for having wealth. This IS America. This is the country that a poor immigrant can come, find a job, work hard, save his money, and build a legacy for his family. Have we really forgotten that?! If we allow our current President to strip us of our entrepreneurial mindset with his "You didn't build it" then, what can we offer that poor immigrant getting off that boat today? All we've got is, "Sorry, buddy. You'll have to go sign up at the Food Stamps office until you land a union job." Really?! Pretty miserable outlook if you ask me. Who wants to come here then... unless you're a terrorist ready to take out some landmark.

If you toss all my ramblings as that of a crazed lunatic... take these last points into consideration. 
1. If you are 18, you have the right to vote. Are you a registered voter?
2. Do you know where your local voting place is? Have you ever voted there?
3. Think carefully before you just use the "Better of the two evils" rationale.
4. If you are a believer, you have been given a redeemed mind and conscience by God. Vote BOTH.

I'm still figuring out this political dance... but you better believe I will exercise my hard-won privilege to vote.

 

Thank you Staff SGT Steven Thomas for your service. I love you. 

Where is God?!

A helicopter was just shot down in Syria.

The Taliban beheads 17 people for having a party.

Tropical storm Isaac is to hit Florida anytime.

The Republican Convention is delayed.

The GOP is worried that momentum will be lost.

The body of a Navy Seal is brought home to rest in Michigan.

Japan is dealing with tsunami warnings.

These are just a few of the things I just watched – courtesyof Mhz Worldview on PBS. (I find it refreshing to have a native reporter give the news of their country; not to mention hearing news that doesn’t just involve our little nation.)

Don’t get me wrong… the 2012 election is much discussed here at the Verkaik dinner table. Fears and concerns regarding where we are and where we are headed courtesy of the current administration added to the frustration of not being able to truly vote our conscience and we are left wondering: What can we really do?

Storms and natural disasters rampant, death-tolls high. Haiti, El Salvador, Japan… many more.

Wars. Unjust governments. Evil men.

It begs the question: Where is God?!

He's not far. He is there, holding the hand of the widow as her husband is washed away in the floodwaters. He is cradling the child as he finds out his parents were shot in the street-fighting. He is riding in the car with the family of the fallen soldier as the street is jammed with flags and people saluting.

He is not powerless but personal.

I will not give you a theological treatise on the sovereignty of God, but I can say from personal experience that the awful things that happen to you are not because God is far from you.

I know.

He is close to the brokenhearted. He saves those crushed in spirit. He is holding you even when you think He’s abandoned you.

I have no idea what is in store for our country. I want to blow a whistle and scream for the whole world to cease fighting and bickering. I want to take all the bombs away and put the bad guys in time-out. I wish I could fly around like Superman and prevent every disaster. 

But I can’t.

I must trust my all-powerful, all-knowing PERSONAL Abba God, Yahweh.

Join me?

My Thoughts on Trayvon

I find myself in a peculiar position... commenting on a incident that has become fodder for national gossip. On top of that, the facts are sketchy at best. No one saw Zimmerman and Martin or could tell you who instigated the fight... not to mention whether Zimmerman truly falls under the Stand Your Ground Law. (Wikipedia has a decent article. CBS has an interesting timeline of how this incident was handled.) Tensions are running high with deep emotions stemming from very personal experiences.

But, as before with Joseph Kony, there are issues beyond just the facts that bother me.

Racism. That ugly word has been slapped all over this incident. What appeared to be a law-abiding citizen defending himself has suddenly been construed to be a vicious attack on a black teenager. Even the President had the nerve to comment on it - an ongoing investigation, I might add - saying infamously, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."

Wow. No pressure there, Florida, to serve up justice. Sheesh. Thanks Mr. President.

I'm pretty tired of hearing the air whistle as that card is whipped out. I heard the slap as it was played during the last federal election and it's already making its voice heard in this current election.

Before you write me off as a nut who lives in white bread West Michigan void of any reality... please understand me. Racism is most certainly not dead. Civil Rights are still violated in many states without regard to the laws of those states. I have read The Help and was outraged, yet humbled by the possibility that had I lived during that tumultuous time, I might have gone along with the social norms simply because it was expected.

Those expectations, social norms, can be so dangerous. We are facing a set of those right now... in this tumultuous time with this very case. The problem is that those expectations are reversed.

George is expected to be proven guilty. The victim is given the highest priority and therefore least culpability. We automatically land with an emotionally appalled "I just can't believe this kind of thing could happen to a young man like this." Well, believe it. This kind of thing does happen and it happens far too often. However, consider the statistics. Young black men feature prominently with hispanic young men on the list of "those most likely to cause trouble" - even if they truly are law-abiding citizens and only want to be left alone. This is not racism. Nor is it racial profiling. It is simply the ugly truth of what police officers are forced to deal with every single day.

As a mother of 2 boys, I cannot imagine what Trayvon's mom is going through - her baby is gone, forever. As a member of a close-knit family, I cannot imagine the trauma the Zimmermans have to deal with as they deflect accusations and uphold George's character even when they don't know the full details of what happened.

However, as a previous white resident in a high-crime predominately black area in Chicago, I can tell you that your perspective on "race" changes drastically when you are confronted daily with people who look different than you. You begin to see each person as simply that - a person. They are not a possible thief or mugger but a person with hopes and dreams. You also begin to read people, taking them at face value, whether alike or different... the way women have intuition. Any woman can tell you the men around whom she has gotten "the creepy" vibe. It doesn't matter what color - people are people. Good or bad.

So what if we take color out of this...

What if there was a 17 year old young man who was acting suspicious in an area with frequent burglaries... meandering in the rain without an umbrella? What if a neighborhood watch guy called it in to the 911 call center in an attempt to do his duty? What if... I could go on.

Isn't it easy - once you take out the color of the young man - to see the neighborhood watch guy's response as logical?!

However, because any situation of this nature has high emotion and adrenaline, either man's frame of mind can and should be questioned. Was the young man just fed up with being suspected of everything and decided to teach this guy a lesson? Was the other guy being "over-dutiful" in his job as neighborhood watch?

Honestly, we will never know, that is largely due to the vast amount of facts mixed in with fiction and repeated by everyone and their grandmother.

I genuinely hope the prosecution can protect the investigation and truly give themselves to the search for the truth of what really happened - not what the President makes known regarding his feelings on the subject.

On that note... may each one of us see the other as a person with inherent dignity and worth given by the Creator.  If we can do that, racism will truly be wiped out.

Joseph Kony and Kony2012 - The Situation

In case you happen to reside under a rock and don't know what Kony2012 and Invisible Children refer to - let me give you a synopsis. Believe me, I looked at many websites and waded through a bunch of superfluous junk to boil it down to just these details.

The "Kony" part of the Kony2012 refers to a man by the name of Joseph Kony. He is a Ugandan warlord whom the International Criminal Court has indicted for crimes against humanity and has issued a warrant for his arrest.

Joseph Kony

How they plan on actually enforcing the warrants is anyone's guess. The ICC doesn't have a police force so the only way they can get the fugitive to the Hague is to convince the country that he is currently hiding in to hand him over. But, for the purposes of this conversation, that is beside the point.

What in the world has he done, you might ask? He started out as a good guy - helping the Army of Uganda, but he turned renegade when he saw the power and status he could acquire for himself. So, he's been waging a war with his army called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) for a couple decades by abducting children from their homes at night, forcing them to kill their parents and become his soldiers. He forces girls to become his sex slaves. His reign of terror has diminished steadily since 2005. Although, sources are mixed on that point.

Courtesy of invisiblechildren.com

So how does Invisible Children come into the picture?

It began in 2005 when 3 friends took a trip to Africa to create a documentary and ended up producing a film that showed the plight of the children of Uganda under Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army.
Invisible Children is based in San Diego, CA and has several programs that according to their website restore and rebuild the communities torn apart by war.

This charity has come under fire as of late regarding their financial statement and the fact that their resources were going towards a taking down a warlord who was no longer in power instead of a greater amount being given to the children on the ground in Uganda. Also, Jason Russell recently had a public nervous breakdown resulting from the sweeping criticism of him and his film and charity.

The 2012 part? Well, at first glance it looks like it's referring to the year we are currently in, however, it's been given more meaning that just that. The film creators identified 20 CultureMakers (Angelina Jolie, Bill Gates, George Clooney, Oprah...) and 12 PolicyMakers (George W Bush, Condolezza Rice, Mitt Romney, John Kerry...) to target via Twitter and Facebook to bring awareness from the sidelines to the trending topic list. Instead of seeing Facebook as simply a fad of this current culture, they decided to use it as a tool to create change.

Courtesy of invisiblechildren.com

Their film - Kony2012 - went viral. It is well done, excellently edited and very very moving. However, it's biggest criticism is that it's selective with the facts. It highlights only the ones it wants you to know but leaves out others that don't appear pertinent.

This situation is as troubling as the questions it produces...
Can a war be stopped with popular opinion from Facebook?
Why are all these young people up in arms about this... moral objection or the latest craze? or both? Moral objection isn't cool when someone says marriage is only between one man and one woman.
Are we as adamant about stopping the genocide occurring every second of every minute of every day here on our land?
How far should we go in pursuing a corrupt man and bringing him to justice? What about the many other corrupt men in power around this globe? What do we do about them?
What if that pursuit costs American soldiers lives?

Always more questions than answers...

Women's Rights

The other day, I saw a link for Women for Obama shared by a friend on Facebook. At first, my reaction was one of curiosity, but as I read the transcript of his speech as well as watched a clip of it, I began to think.

Women’s Rights.  Equal Opportunity.  Freedom Riders.

All of these things – in and of themselves – I think are good. They try to overturn the wrong done to a lot of people. They are watchdogs of sorts to prevent these wrongs from occurring again. They commemorate the strides our culture has taken in giving everyone freedom – not withholding it from anyone.

I enjoy having the right to vote. I felt reassured when I worked fulltime that my pay was equal to that of a man in my position. I enjoyed the freedom to attend college and learn. My mind is of equal value to educate as that of a man. In this time and in this country, there is not much that I do not have access to – being a woman.

… you know there is a “however” coming soon, don’t you?

So as I listened to the President wax eloquently about powerful women and all the things they can do. How there was a woman presidential candidate. How there is a woman Secretary of State. How the current Speaker of the House is addressed as Madame Speaker. I began to be very uncomfortable with how far women have come.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am so very thankful for the suffragettes who marched decades before I was born so that I would be able to go to the polls and vote for presidents, governors, judges, mayors, senators and representatives. I’m also very thankful for the women who decided that it was worth fighting for the right to be educated. I love to learn and it would about kill me to be told – "You are a woman therefore you are of less importance when compared to a educating a man."

While I am thankful and enjoy all these freedoms, I wonder if women should be in these positions of national power.

I wonder if our nation has forgotten how special the role of a woman is to her home.

I believe that in every woman – whether she admits it to herself or not – is the desire to create a place for her husband and family that they are excited to call home. Nothing necessarily fancy, but home! Memories, stories, delicious smells coming from the oven, a soft hug to welcome home from school, a smile that reminds them that whatever day they’ve had – it’s still okay and they are okay because they are home.

There are a lot of homes in our communities that are hurting in a variety of ways, from a variety of things. I wonder... what if we as women were more concerned with our function as God sees us than with our rights as women – how different our nation would be.

In a very real sense, we are on the frontlines of a war. We are providing the foundation for our children to be strong adults who know what they believe and can live it out courageously in a nation that does what is right in its own eyes.

Women of America – Unite! 

God sees all we do for Him. Be encouraged!

Don’t be fooled into thinking you are less valuable because you place your family ahead of your rights. Superwomen are not real women!

Trust Him in our marriages, families, children and nation.

He is worth trusting!!!!

A few Ruthisms for you!

A woman’s home is to her nation as a greenhouse is to a garden.

Strong families = strong nation.

A woman is to her home as sunshine is to a plant.

The difference between life and death.

A woman is to man as jelly is to peanut butter.

Sweetness to his life!