Writing on my phone

Why does it feel safer than on my laptop?

Because it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere

It’s just on my phone. It can’t hurt anyone— can it?

I have to get started.

Keep going

Keep writing

I made a promise to god I can’t break, but every day I fail to write I break the promise

God isn’t mad at me, but I still feel like I’m failing him

He tells me I’m not

That I’m writing now, and it counts, even though it is just a little.

I wonder if I could actually write a whole book on my phone. With my thumbs.

It scares me

Everything scares me these days.

I know I have nothing to fear but God, but I’m afraid god will put me through more if I don’t obey.

That’s why I’m writing this. I promised I’d write something tonight.

It’s not about gender— the thing I know I’m meant to write about now, but it’s something.

I hope it’s enough. God tells me it is. God is merciful. He is much more gracious and forgiving of me than I am of myself lately, but I’m working on it.

I am just an ordinary man with no plan. Watching his steps.

Taking Sides

Everyone is taking sides, and I don’t want to. My side doesn’t have sides. My side only wants the fighting and hatred to stop. 

It is easy for me to say, sitting here on the other side of the world, but it is still a harder position to take than picking one side or the other in a stance of righteousness.  Nothing about this is righteous or right. Everything about it feels wrong to my bones. 

My grandparents on my father’s side lived in the farmlands outside Rotterdam during the Second World War, under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. My grandfather was active in the resistance. If you made it to the end of the underground railway on a boat to England, there is a chance it was my grandfather and his friends who put you aboard. 

Although we don’t know the details, there is reason to believe that he and these same friends executed collaborators in the night,  after the allied forces liberated Holland. He was a devout Christian, and it was because of his beliefs that he felt called to protect the innocent Jews and others who were persecuted at the hands of the Nazis who had taken his country. But participating in cold blooded killings must have been too much for him, because later in his life, after immigrating to the United States,  he suffered from severe mental illness, which led to periods of hospitalization. 

I have no doubt that he believed these acts were necessary. After the atrocities of Nazi occupation, for society to be reborn, these elements could not remain. I have no doubt that he saw no other option, and that justice would never reach those who named names for favors and protection, while innocents suffered and died as a result. 

But such acts take a toll on the human soul. It is not so easy to end a life and not be burdened by it. I won’t pretend I know first hand, but I am certain of it. 

Such is the state of Israel and Palestine, and the rest of the world while we watch on. How can we participate, or even observe and bear witness, and not be contaminated? How can we stand by and not be driven to madness by the horror? I don’t believe it is possible. We all lose something of our humanity as this happens. 

300 miles of tunnels. Imagine it. Like an ant farm under Israel. The only functioning democracy in the middle east. What else can they do? It is an infestation and stamping it out is the right thing to do, for history. Cut the cancer from the body and let the body heal. From a ruthless, purely rationalistic standpoint this is the right approach. In time they will have casinos and become sports mascots.

This is how colonialism works when all else fails. It is not unenlightened. It does not start with eradication. But if the native population refuses to conform to the laws and behaviors of the “civilized world,” it is inevitably where it ends. There is no place else for it to go. 

I can make no judgement from where I sit, comfortably in California, far from the obscene tragedy of war. I can only reflect that war will never end until we can truly love our neighbors, and our enemies, and ourselves.