Steve Simms's Blog, page 177

If today was my last day (here’s what I’d say)

If today was
My last day
I'd want to
Do or say
Something
That would show
Someone
The reality
Of the living Jesus.

Here’s some samples:

Spiritual rejuvenation is to continually experience the free flowing of the living Jesus from within you. The more room you make for the living Jesus to take over your life, the more joy you will experience.

Vulnerability, humility, and surrender prepare the way for the free flowing of the living Jesus from within you. Tear down the dams that prevent the free flowing presence of the living Jesus from cascading thru your life.

A burning desire to be continually aware of the presence of living Jesus is the key to the ongoing rejuvenation of your heart. When Christ in you is repressed, you prevent his glory from being expressed thru you. If you’re unwilling to do something different, unexpected, and unplanned, you won’t be able to follow the living Jesus.

Sip and savor God’s living water. Bask in the presence of the risen Jesus. The presence of Jesus will put your weary mind at ease and help your broken heart believe. The contemporary church seems to lack the power to move people beyond theology and words, into the reality of the risen Jesus.

Rejuvenation with redirection won’t last. When Jesus says “Repent,” it’s an invitation to remove the ruble from your life, rebuild with hope, and restore what’s been lost.

Open your heart and let the living Jesus usher in the healing flow of His presence. A heart continually canopied by the overgrowth of day-to-day busyness seldom sees the splendorous sight of the Son of God.

The more adherence you give to the presence of Jesus, the greater the clearance of guilt and shame from your life. The more you listen to Jesus’ melody, the more you’ll joyfully sing with emotional harmony.

The devil wants to cheat you out of inner peace. Jesus wants to treat you to the ongoing wonder of His daily presence.

I love
To take the time
To just be
And let
The living Jesus
Flow thru me.

The inner jubilation
Of spiritual rejuvenation
Resounds within me.

For more of what I want to say about the wonders of a dynamic relationship with the living Jesus, get my book, The Joy Of Early Christianity.

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Ignoring history’s color-based atrocities devalues people of color

To downplay, deny, or hide atrocities that were done to people because of their color, is to devalue all who look like them. To be unwilling to openly tell and expose the full truth about the people who suffered race-based cruelty and abuse in American history, is to deny that their descendants are of equal human worth to any other Americans.

A fuller, more accurate story of our history matters. Healing only comes from truth. Even Jesus said: “The truth will set you free.”

When we value people, their history matters to us. I value the history of black people (and other minorities) in America. Here’s why.

Bias blots our perception
With toxic deception
Until we no longer see
Reality.

Nature’s sun screen (melanin) — a ridiculous reason for cruelty

The ability to see
Makes skin color obvious.
The ability to love
Makes it irrelevant.

Simplifying race:
Skin color
Is nature’s
Sun screen
That’s all.

Skin shade’s
An irrational reason
To be unfriendly
Or suspicious
Of people.

To mistreat people
Is to be
A traitor to
The human race.

People come
In shades of skin
That say nothing about
The person within.

I want to see people
From the inside out
And show them love
Without any doubt.

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Good skin / bad skin idea (Will evaluation by skin color ever end?)

The world
We’re born in
Too often labels us
By the melatonin
In the skin
We’re wrapped in.

Society has trained us to view people whose skin doesn’t match ours as mentally and emotionally different than us. That’s a lie. Noticing someone’s skin color has never been a problem but looking down on people’s skin color has released much cruelty.

Good skin color / bad skin color is a terrible game that people have played arrogantly for centuries, but it’s totally irrational. Attempts to define, confine, and consign people to an inferior status because of their skin color have caused immeasurable suffering

People enjoy connecting with their pets (no matter the color). Let’s try that with each other. We seldom evaluate the quality of things or animals by their color, so why do we do that with fellow members of the human race?

Categorizing humans by color was originally begun as an excuse to abuse and traffic people. Now it’s time to cancel the categories.

Sorting people by color is pretty nutty. If we would stop classifying people by race, it would make racism much more difficult.

We talk about White voters and Black voters. But nobody talks about Blue-eyed and Brown-eyed voters. If we can’t notice and appreciate people’s color without evaluating them by it, that’s racism.

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Origin of consciousness & rationality

A sperm and an eggAnd a time for gestation
Aren't an explanation
For the origin
Of human consciousnessAnd rationality.

What is the 21st century’s most ignored human right? The right to gestation (commonly known as “the right to life”).

Common sense concepts about race break with traditional thinking

No skin color is a reason for shame nor a badge of honor. Skin color’s just a physical characteristic like the shape of a hand.

Physical differences (like skin color) obviously exist, but the concept of different races is a man-created concoction. Unfortunately, common sense concepts about race seldom match the centuries of dogmatic, traditional thinking about it.

Skin color is merely a descriptive, physical characteristic of people. It’s not an identifier that defines who they are. Skin color isn’t divisive, but the concept of categorizing people and defining their value by skin color is.

If race was a reality instead of a myth, a person with a white and a black parent would be considered just as white as black. Instead of admitting the truth, historically a baby from a white and black parent was called black so that it could be legally human trafficked.

Most of us have been trained to see people as members of different races instead of as fellow members of the human race. Racial identity based on color was invented in the 1600s as an attempt to make one group inferior in order to justify slavery. Color-based racial-identity was intentionally set up to create the destructive illusion of intrinsic superiority and inferiority.

The history of how skin color was made into a false hierarchy of of human value should be taught to all so we never do that again. To heal America’s racial wounds, when we see fellow citizens, lets identify them as Americans, not by their skin color.

People notice eye color, but they don’t define people by it. Let’s treat skin color the same way.

Separating people into color-based categories released much hatred and cruelty in history. Continuing those categories is dangerous. Skin color’s a human characteristic, but it was wrong when humans began to use it to divide people into a hierarchy of categories.

When neighborhoods can be easily identified by skin color, there’s either intentional or systemic differentiation going on. If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves looking down on skin color that for centuries was used to label people as inferior.

I like my blue eyes, but I don’t want to be labeled by them; same with my skin. I’m an individual, part the human race. Fellow humans: The color of your skin doesn’t make you any more different than me than the color of your eyes does.

If racism was defined as “differentiation between people because of skin color” would you consider yourself free from racism? In a one color world, would some people have found other reasons than color to split the human race into races?

I've never been abusedSuspected or accusedBecause of my blue eyes.I wish things were the sameFor my fellow humansWith darker skin.Don't you?For more non-traditional think about race, check out my book: Off the RACE Track--From Color-Blind to Color-Kind . Thank you. Photo by Ono Kosuki on Pexels.com

To be vulnerable is to be valiant (the courage of nonviolence)

To be vulnerable is to be valiant. To be violent is to be cowardly cruel.

To truly love people requires us to be vulnerable. To dislike them or to look down on them, doesn’t.

Ego and vulnerability never team up. They’ve been practicing cancel culture since the beginning.

You can’t fake vulnerability because it never pretends that it’s something that it’s not. Vulnerability is the willingness to open up your heart, to deeply care, to be humbly honest, to dispense with defensiveness.

Joy can’t flow thru a shut down heart. It takes vulnerability to experience rivers of joy.

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A Christian’s focus: The living Jesus or the empty tomb?

Instead of focusing on the living Jesus, many Christians try to fill the empty tomb with religious activities. But Jesus left His tomb empty so that He could continually fill your heart with His presence.

The risen Jesus wanted His disciples to meet Him in Galilee (their hang-out place), not to decorate the empty tomb. Jesus wants us to follow His voice in our heart the way we follow the Waze app on our phone.

A church tends to be set up as an organizational hierarchy with little room for the direct leadership of Jesus. When Christians are trained to trust and follow human leadership more than the risen Jesus, His Spirit is systemically quenched.

Instead of training its members to be led by the living Jesus, a denomination sets up a hierarchy that tends toward domination. We need to learn how to practically follow and obey the living Jesus in day to day life.

When you were a tiny, living creature of a few cells, a robustly growing and developing human life, your life mattered to Jesus and it still does. Let Him show you His love.

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Is this CRT possible (Compassionate Racial Togetherness)?

The belief that our racist past has been fully dealt with is an illusion that causes America much pain and confusion. It’s time to take a compassionate and critical approach to the theory of race that was widely taught and accepted throughout our history and still lingers today. We can’t have Compassionate Racial Togetherness until and unless we face and admit our history.

Compassionate Racial Togetherness Can heal the racial divideThat torments our land.If we would listen with an open heartAnd humbly face the truth,We could get beyond our pastAnd America's racial mess.

A zeal for truth reveals
History that’s been concealed
And helps people be healed.

Whatever the source of the racial injustice in our past, it’s time that we openly include that past in our history books. Too much history has been erased (or at least hidden or ignored) and needs to be restored.

Much of the racism in American history has never been fully called out. It’s still there waiting to be faced, healed, and overcome.

We’ll never heal our racial divide if we continue hiding from our history. However, if we let past injustice come to the light, we can then truly heal from it. Reevaluating who we were taught to honor and why we honor them is an important exercise in self-awareness.

We need to learn how to love, respect, and listen to people whose skin looks different than ours. We need to make sure that skin color doesn’t cause us to ignore people, refuse to listen to them, or be unkind to them. Perhaps we should stop being partial to our view of history and race and become a truth-seeker willing to listen to other people’s pain. Somehow we need to begin to listen to each other with compassion instead of accusing and criticizing each other.

Racism can be so subtle that it’s not easy to tell when it’s gone. As humans, we need to make sure that skin color doesn’t cause us to ignore people, refuse to listen to them, or be unkind to them. We need to be critical of anything in our history that was used to justify racism.

Skin color doesn’t divide people into races any more than eye color. Slavery could have easily been based on dye of the eye instead of the color of the skin. We can move beyond our history.

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Are you too entwined to be genuine?

To be genuine
Begin to unwind
The myths
That have you entwined.

“Don’t be vulnerable,”
Is bad advice,
Because if you’re not
You’ll be cold as ice.

When your heart
Is shut down
Your mind
Can never truly
Unwind.

When “I’m okay,”
Isn’t true,
It’s probably not
The very best thing
You could say.

If you won’t share
What touches you deeply,
You’ll become unaware
And no longer care.

Apology
Requires the courage
To express humility
And vulnerability.

Part of being human is being wounded. Everybody needs a compassionate, listening ear to hear them. Be one. When you you try to make your heart vulnerability-proof, you lock it away in solitary confinement.

In a society that frowns on sharing personal information and experiences, it’s easy to think that we’re the only ones who feel the way we do.

Broken people gratefully respond to sincere kindness, but proud people are often threatened by kindness. If you open up and share something that has touched you deeply, it will inspire other people, too.

If we’re not willing to be vulnerable, we’ll feel like it’s necessary to be deceptive. Someone with an open, tender heart has much more ability to touch people’s hearts, than someone with a closed, hard heart.

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