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Are You Aware? We Are All Enlisted
This is part I in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. I have been thinking about the words “We are all enlisted till the conflict is o’er.” As a pacifist, I am generally not a big fan of battle-themed songs, despite their stirring and jaunty tunes. But this one feels particularly relevant to the lives we are leading today, and as I have thought about the message, I can appreciate the value of metaphors that allow us to identify and “fight” the battles in our lives. If you are like me, you have been worried about a lot of people, and situations beyond our…
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Healthcare Education :: PPE and Ventilators
As we’ve seen over the past weeks, we are all interconnected in the fight to slow the spread of COVID-19 and save lives. Social distancing was our first crucial step. As we continue to maintain social distancing protocols, if we do it right, we can “flatten the curve” of infection. This buys us precious time to ramp up our efforts on the second vital step: increasing the capacity of our hospital systems. As exponentially more people get sick, emergency rooms and hospitals will need far greater numbers of personnel and equipment. Frontline responders in hospitals across the country are already reporting shortages of essential equipment. This is taking place on a systems level,…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Every Person Counts
Scripture is replete with references to God and His servants counting their people. As our nation prepares for its decennial census, a count of our country’s population, let’s reflect on some of the instances where we see a census or numbering taking place. In the first chapter of the book of Numbers we read of God asking Moses to take a count of the Israelite community according to their ancestral houses, listing each and every name. Several chapters later, Moses is again directed to take a census or count and use it to apportion the land accordingly. In the Quran, we read in Maryam 19:94 of a Father that “has…
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Awareness Wednesday :: Xenophobia, Part IV — Let Them Worship
We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may (Articles of Faith 1:11). India is a secular federal republic of more than 1.3 billion people, governed by a democratic parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual, and multi-ethnic society. About 80% of the population is Hindu. Nearly 15% are Muslim. Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of the Republic of India. He was committed to the idea of India being a secular nation. In 1950, when the Republic was first formed, perhaps some felt they had…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Love in the Time of Coronavirus
A few nights ago, as we were falling asleep, my husband said to me, “I’m getting pretty tired of living in interesting times.” I feel the same way. The past three years have felt surreal, and the past week or two especially. I feel like I hardly recognize my world from day to day. As we read the Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon lesson this week, I was struck with Jacob’s fixation on and concern for his people. I was especially moved by the last verse of the reading. As he transitions into his analogy of the olive vineyard, he says this: “Behold, my beloved brethren, I will unfold…
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Awareness Wednesday :: Xenophobia, Part III — Never Again
January 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest extermination and concentration camp run by the Nazis. It is the place where about 1.1 million Jewish people were murdered; others were used as slave labor. As the second World War ended in 1945, the Allied soldiers found stacks of naked corpses in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. The few survivors were emaciated prisoners that looked more like skeletons than human beings. At the time of liberation, the prisoners had no food, no fuel, and no water. The Holocaust is one of the worst atrocities of humankind. It is a terrible reminder of our potential for evil. Sadly, the Holocaust was…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Knowing Christ Through Our Web of Community
In C.S. Lewis’ book “The Four Loves” there is an essay entitled “Friendship.” The following passage is a reflection on the loss of a member of Lewis’ close circle of friends: “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets… In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious ‘nearness by resemblance’ to heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each of us has of God… The more…
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Awareness Wednesday :: Xenophobia, Part II — Symptom of a Virus
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. — Chinese Proverb In the closing months of 2019, a novel coronavirus jumped from animals to humans and began spinning a web of infection, starting with the people of China and spreading with staggering speed worldwide. The virus, and its potentially deadly symptoms, are not the only thing being disseminated on a global scale. Xenophobia, particularly toward those of Asian descent, has seen a dramatic rise in the ensuing months, both here in the United States and around the world. A young woman from Brooklyn reported that while visiting Washington D.C., a man started making faces at her on the metro. She…
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Sabbath Devotional :: Fear, Faith, and Focus
I have been thinking a lot about fear. This is partly because I have been noticing a lot of fear around me. I see it in news headlines and election strategies. I see it in my Facebook feed and on campaign flyers in my mailbox. But the truth is that fear is not just something I have been observing in other people. I have been thinking a lot about fear because I have been feeling a lot of fear myself. I fear big things, like government corruption and global pandemics. I fear not-so-big things, like my children getting their drivers’ licenses. I feel fear when my children are sick or…
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Awareness Wednesday :: Xenophobia, Part I — Compassionate Eyes
“But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbor? And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves…” (Luke 10: 29–30). What follows is a beautiful and compelling parable. A Jewish man, robbed and beaten, his bloody and broken body left helplessly on the side of the road. Two men pass him, actually crossing the road to avoid close contact with the destitute figure. A certain Samaritan notices the injured Jew, and he stops. Two men look at one another. One broken, one whole. Two men trained and taught to despise each other and everything they represent —…
