Steve Simms's Blog, page 218
June 22, 2020
NASCAR takes a bold stand with #ISTANDWITHBUBBA
Concern for racial justice and freedom from the scourge of racism is breaking out all over. Even NASCAR drivers and crews are standing for racial healing on their race track!
A noose was found on Sunday in the garage stall of NASCAR’S only full-time Black drive, Bubba Wallace. Today on the Talladega, Alabama track, NASCAR drivers boldly stood and marched in solidarity with Bubba! Before the race, the hashtag, #IStandWithBubba, was painted on the infield grass and is trending on social media.
I wrote a book about practical ways to stand with Bubba. It’s called: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color-Kind and is available at this link.
[image error]Check out my new book, “Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color-Kind.
History’s fables, fibs, & facts
Too often, fibs have taken the meat off of the ribs of history and fables have taken us away from the tables of truth. History that ignores and/or hides disturbing details is more a collection of tales than of reality. It’s important to sort thru fables and fibs of history and try to discover facts.
Talking about racism brings it to the light for healing. Silence enables it. When people have nothing to hide or protect, they’re usually not defensive about open discussion of racism.
Truth has the tendency to turn the fables on you and make you uncomfortable. Fables that make us feel proud are usually preferred and defended over facts that make us uncomfortable.
In a land of fables, facts and fiction are meshed. To untangle them without friction requires compassion, humility and honesty.If you won’t let facts dismantle fiction, your life will go the way the fables are turned.
National fables are a pride-producing mixture of facts and fibs. Because truth deflates fables, loyalty refuses to see reality. For the whole story, we may need to add statues of: abolitionists, leaders of slave rebellions, resistant and runaway slaves, and racial terror victims.
Surrendering to the risen Jesus demythologizes minds and hearts thru supernatural insights, forever changing our perspective. The “army rising up to break every chain,” may not look like some singers of the song, “Break Every Chain,” think it will.
To be trusted when you’re innocent is a privilege that shouldn’t be based on color. We all need to respect the authority of both police and public health officials. To disrespect one is as bad as disrespecting the other.
Learn more about the fibs, fables, and facts of American history. Check out my book, Off the RACE Track.
June 21, 2020
The best streaming service
The best streaming service is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Continually streaming Him will make you pure in spirit. Live streaming the risen Jesus, in the human consciousness, is the most underutilized resource on earth.
Some Christians try to download Jesus and then cloud storage Him for the future. I prefer to continually live stream Jesus. Ever since the living Jesus came streaming into my life, I’ve been aware of His presence carrying me, regardless of my circumstances.
I like to binge stream the living Jesus. I never want to stop! When people learn to stream Jesus, life soars with God’s glory! I’d rather stream Jesus than anything available online.
When Jesus is live streaming in your consciousness, people will notice the gleam of His glory shinning thru you. Begin to stream Him now! When your stream of consciousness overflows with awareness of the risen Jesus, life becomes a continually joy! Live streaming the risen Jesus 24/7/365 is an amazing way to live.
If Jesus is living in you, let Him show His compassion and presence thru you. America (and the world) desperately needs to see Him. The cross and empty tomb invite you to stream the living Jesus within you. Click play.
Get more from streaming–more hope, more joy, more strength, more inspiration. Let Jesus stream within you, day and night
The Holy Spirit can’t be regulated. To try to do so is to distance from His presence. When “in the flesh,” we see from our human perspective; when “in the Spirit,” from God’s perspective.
What you stream within you is much more important than what you stream on a device. Stream against the current of anxiety, anger, and tormenting thoughts. Let the risen Jesus carry you upstream to peace, love, and joy.
Biblical Christianity is about humility. It’s not about pride. Spirit-led, Bible-based prophets get much more persecution than they do honorarium checks. However, no human praise or political point of view can compare with the glory of God.
Many things try to stop you from live streaming Jesus–pride, anger, fear, hate, depression, self-righteousness. Don’t let them. Step beyond religion and go with His inner flow.
There’s a Healer who
Connects people heart-to-heart.
Listen to the living Jesus,
Not to divisive politicians.
In every heart
Let Jesus stream.
That’s the hope
That is my dream!
When I want peace
Without alarm,
When I want peace
With all its charm,
All I have to do is stream
And let the living Jesus
Freely flow from within me.
June 19, 2020
Vibrant with the living Jesus
When Jesus introduced Himself to me, it wasn’t about theology. He made my blind eyes see. Church, without the actual presence of the risen Jesus, is like licking a picture of an ice cream cone.
There’s no reason for awe and heart-felt appreciation to be rare in life. The living Jesus can make every moment inspiring. Pure joy isn’t logical. It’s spiritual–an inner gift from the living God.
The boundaries of reality are not our five senses (or even scientific equipment). There is much that can only be perceived within.
I like to think about Jesus, but mostly I like to feel His presence with all of my being. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” When my heart melts and swoons in the presence of the risen Jesus, I’m overcome with indescribable peace, and joy. When I focus my heart on the living Jesus, He makes me tingle with amazement and totter with awe.
The living Jesus makes me vibrant from the inside out. I love to let His living water flow thru me.
Many Christians think it’s fine to notice and follow their whims and emotions, but odd to notice and follow inner prompts by the living Jesus. Being quiet and still has a way of making people aware of the conscious presence of God. “Be still and know that I am God.”
A thought that you regard as ordinary and ignore, might be the very voice of the living God speaking within you. Often our troubling and/or unkind thoughts are so loud within us that we don’t notice God’s comforting thoughts calling us away from them. However, when the resurrection of Jesus moves beyond an abstract concept to a personal reality, your life will never be the same!
Every person radiates the amazing wonder of human life, but we often fail to see and appreciate it. When you look beyond what you disagree with and dislike, and glimpse into someone’s heart, you notice yourself reflected there.
Christianity without an energizing relationship with the living Jesus, becomes dependent on institutions and religious professionals. There’s a big difference between following Jesus living inside you, and following a preacher’s teachings about Him. Being captured by the gravitational pull of the joy of the Lord, will let you orbit happiness everyday.
The more I connect with the living Jesus, the more I want good things for all people. When we, humans, begin to show and tell people that we care about them, and do that more than we criticize them, the world will be a different place.
You don’t need church authorization to follow and obey the risen Jesus. Every time you place a religious expert between you and God, you make Christianity more complicated that it’s supposed to be. When deaf to God’s sounds and blind to His insights, it’s easy to ignore His presence.
Modern Christianity doesn’t need more sermons or more hype or more political favor. It needs more of the life of the risen Jesus.
To know about Jesus only thru words, and not continually experience Him as the living Word, falls short of biblical faith. Words matter. They can lie, bully, and insult, or speak truth, encouragement, and compliments. However, true Christianity is much more than words.
Want more? Check out my book: The Joy Of Early Christianity at this link.
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June 18, 2020
Boxed thinking & the history of racism
By silencing (and/or ignoring) the history of racism, we hide away the answers that we need to heal our land today. People who don’t want to know the history of racism, will stay confused and bewildered about race.
Race is a historical myth, that was created as an excuse for human trafficking. The truth is: No person is inferior to me. We’re all “wonderfully made,” even when we persistently fail to live up to it.
Racism is failure! It’s the failure to appreciate who a person is as an individual. It’s time to take the lid off of our thinking about racism in America and shine the light for all to see the brutality, cruelty, and failure of racism.
History shows that when color is used to classify and categorize people, prejudice and contempt follow close behind. Then opinions begin to obscure truth. Through and most of American history, people had a legal right to mistreat and abuse other people because of their skin color.
By not calling out the color-based dehumanization of people in the past, we excuse color-disparity in the present. Then we ignore the fact that a person’s ability, character, and integrity have absolutely nothing to do with skin color!
Boxed thinking protects our pride from the fear that we could possibly be wrong. It insulates us from the lessons of history.
Color-based bias is the most irrational form of bias. It’s based on nothing but epidermis tone.
You can’t read a person by his cover. You have to look beyond the skin to truly know what’s within a person’s heart and mind. You can’t effectively evaluate people’s character until you can get beyond the color of their skin.
Humans are many colors
But that’s no reason
For some to mistreat
The others.
If you don’t know
The pain of Jim Crow,
You won’t understand,
What blacks undergo.
After centuries of l aws saying, “black lives don’t matter,” people are now saying, “Black Lives Matter.” Let‘s ALL say it!
Reading slave narratives helps heal racism. When I read those books I wept many times. I was shocked to see first hand accounts of the horror and terror of racism told by people who had personally experienced it. It made me see that racism is real and is evil and it made me realize I don’t want it in my heart, my mind, or my behavior. I put extensive quotes from slave narratives in my book about healing racial wounds. Check it out at this link.
[image error]“Black despair over white terror . . .” From Ebony Pictorial History Of Black America — a 3-volume set of books that I sold door to door when I was in college.
June 17, 2020
Both verbal & physical violence exacerbate problems
Arguing about issues isn’t the same thing as thinking about them. We need to think. Are you going to argue and insult people or are you going to think and inspire them? If what you believe makes you act mad and miserable, who’s going to want to agree with you?
It’s hard to break thru barriers that people have built in their head, but humility and kindness sneak around the hindrance and touch their heart. When I’m wrong, I need to lose the argument. If I win it, it only takes me further into deception.
People aren’t “peaceful” or “violent.” Kindness and compassion draw out peace. Making people feel safe, respected, and loved, tends to bring forth their best. However, disrespect and arrogance provoke violence. Making people feel fear, pain, and threatened is a major cause of violence.
Disrespect and demanding the upper hand escalate potentially violent situations. Respect and calmness de-escalate them. Enemy lives matter. That’s why Jesus tells us to love them. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, also said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Turn the other cheek.”
Both violence and kindness change hearts. Kindness softens hearts. Violence hardens them with bitterness, hatred, and revenge. When an argument goes in a circle, it goes no place, at a faster and faster pace.
When you begin to connect with people heart to heart, their defenses come down and you can see and appreciate their humanity. Sometimes the best argument is to show kindness to the person who is trying to argue with you.
If you feel a need to get angry, get angry at the evil hiding within you. Get mad enough to find it, overcome it, and drive it out. I think many people argue, not to persuade others, but because they feel their own opinion is threatened by other people’s views.
Using violence to defend our pride is nothing to be proud about. It has caused far too much human suffering for that. Colliding egos cause consternation. Humbly trying to find the truth restores peace. Just because you verbally or physically bully someone into silence and appear to win a political fight, doesn’t mean that your views are right.
The best protection and freedom from fear isn’t a gun. It’s hearing, following, obeying and trusting the risen Jesus.
Racism & equality can’t coexist
It’s difficult to treat people as equals if you don’t fully and completely believe that they are. It takes courage to admit that you might be wrong, especially when you’re convinced that you’re right.
What’s the matter with race? The concept was developed to legitimize the enslavement of people with darker skin. I believe that skin color means no more than eye color–that it’s decorative, not definitive.
To be great,
Close your heart’s gate
To all forms of hate.
People who are oblivious to racism think it’s crazy to talk about it. You can’t care about people’s plight if you don’t know what they’re going thru. To learn what they’re going thru, ask them, then listen.
It’s hard to deny institutional racism when you listen with an open heart to people who have experienced it. It’s easy to be unaware of systemic racism when it’s not part of a person’s daily experience, but hard to ignore it when it is.
Silence about injustice is cooperation with evil. The Bible calls Christians to “speak the truth in love.” The Bible also says, “Consider others better than yourself.” If we all did that, both racism and violence would disappear.
Search for my timely book: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Kind to Color-Blind.
Don’t settle for another Jesus than the living, resurrected One
The Bible talks about “a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached.” Refuse to settle for less than the living, resurrected Jesus!
If your lifestyle doesn’t follow suit with the Holy Spirit something has gone awry. Spirit-prompted Christians consistently manifest these characteristics: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
When Christians won’t express disagreement, with kindness, peace, love, and patience, we’re refusing to manifesting the fruit of the Spirit. When the body of Christ isn’t producing people who overflow with the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22), things are out of whack.
There’s a big difference between catching a wave and hearing a talk about waves. The same with God’s Spirit.
Let the living Jesus
Take over your heart
And heal what’s broken apart.
Allow nothing ungodly to stay in your heart.
Search for my book: The Joy of Early Christianity on Amazon.
June 15, 2020
June 14, 2020
Color-blindness ≠ kindness
Color-blindness fails to see that Martin Luther King’s dream wasn’t that people not see color, but that they not evaluate individuals by color.
Because color-blindness doesn’t see racial injustice, it doesn’t believe racism exists. Color-blindness doesn’t see that to be more suspicious of a black person than of a white person is color-prejudice.
It’s odd how color-blindness can make us unable to hear people who express pain they have experienced from racial discrimination.
Color-blindness says almost all discrimination is about things other than skin color (clothing, attitude, culture, behavior.)
Color-blindness ignores much of the racial injustice in American history. It doesn’t see it as having any relevance today. Color-blindness is a psychological defense mechanism that helps us avoid discussing racism’s role in America’s past and present.
Color-blindness doesn’t see that without slavery, there wouldn’t have been an American Civil War. Color-blindness doesn’t see why statues of men who fought against America to defend “states’ rights” to slavery, are offensive.
Centuries of color-blindness to the abuse of African Americans has squelched hope. Hope matters. It makes life so much more bearable than hopelessness does. Grab some hope and don’t let it go.
Anger is often used to mask hopelessness. It’s hard to be mad when you’re overflowing with hope. It’s time to see the racism that is robing billions of people of hope and remove it.
For more about color-blindness, search for my book: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color-Kind.
