Sometimes there are patterns in our lives that seem to have always been, but have to have started somehow. Jasini and I have one of those that confuses many of the people that know us.
When one of us is speaking, who is actually speaking, that is the confusion. We speak as a couple: we speak as ourselves, I speak as Jasini, Jasini speaks as me.
I often, these days, say that all my best ideas are actually Jasini’s. Somewhere early on in our marriage we would be in a group conversation , Sunday School, whatever, and would have a small side conversation. She would say something insightful, I would tell her that was a great idea and go ahead share it. She would decline and tell me to share it. So I did, giving her attribution. A pattern developed, and even though I have attributed her ideas to her, people still think of them as MY ideas.
When I am not there in a group she is in, she often comes back and tells me of things she thought but didn’t say, and, like today, I tell her she should have said it. That is where the title line comes from.
Today is Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, and today I think of how the leadership and certain members of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church have taken the love of Christ and turned it into the ashes of the Hypocrisy of the Pharisees.
At the women’s meeting this morning VirJean had them all take the hands of the person next to them and tell each Woman she loved her. jasini did, but when they said it back to her, under her breath she said to herself “no you don’t”. She didn’t elaborate to me why they didn’t, but I will elaborate to you, my edit here, why they don’t love her.
They spend no time to understand her, they refuse to listen to her and ignore her when she talks of the pain in her life, pain they have been increasingly causing these past few months.
She was angry one Sunday, properly so, at the atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7, and I was her calming presence, and as usual, conveyed her thoughts about that and about the church’s apparent indifference to it, unlike every other international crisis that was mentioned and prayed about. A couple of months later I’m a different conversation, and it was mentioned to me, as a negative stab at me, how angry I was that day. When I told this to Jasini she was dumbstruck, and even angrier. You were calm, she told me, I was the angry one. Don’t I even get credit for my own anger?
You see, despite your denials, you DO make her invisible, you don’t really try to get to know her. She sees that, feels that, and of course she doesn’t reveal herself to your insincere, hypocritical, pharisaical attempts.
Me, I take the opposite approach. Since you won’t listen anyway, I will tell you the truth – out in the open is the best place to hide it from you. And if you really do hear it, and receive it, then you are the audience it was meant for, and have received the words of life, for life they are.
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit sayeth unto the churches.
At The Rainbow 