Category: God

Anarchy, Definitions, and Parallels to Continuous Delivery

Anarchy, Definitions, and Parallels to Continuous Delivery

by and | God, Government, Leadership, People

We’ve talked about Anarchy before, in part how it’s an incomplete “plan” for a political system. Twitter is sort of a hub of conversation regarding Anarchism and Libertarianism, and there have been some increasingly interesting arguments there lately, with people making some of those same points and arguing about what Anarchists actually want as an ideal state.

You can see one example in this thread:

https://twitter.com/Wesley_Gest/status/1386402544591724547?s=20

The argument can mostly be summarized like this:

Nice little farm - 9GAG
L: Except I don’t want chickens, because I’m allergic to feathers…

The general perception of Anarchists is that they want cities to burn, that they just want to do damage for the sake of doing damage. Anarchists say, over and over, “no, will you just listen” but a lot of people seem to be terrified of a lack of control. And when Anarchists show up and say they don’t want to be controlled and they don’t think that control is the right answer, it’s massively triggering for those people. When people are terrified, they don’t really listen so good…

Ace is one of our favorites on Twitter.

We thought this was great, and important, (and Ace is really good with words in general), but…incomplete. It covers the interaction pieces, or what it looks like to behave as an Anarchist, but we think it’s important to talk about the fact that it starts with accepting something about yourself, and what that acceptance means for the world around you.

Anarchism, to us, is a consistency of feeling and related action:

  1. You do not agree that you yourself need to be controlled, and/or you do not accept others’ control of you.
  2. You have no desire to control others, finding that repugnant and morally wrong. As such, you do not use any kind of coercion (including manipulation) to dominate others to your will.
  3. You resist and speak out against systems of control applied to people by other people.

That’s…it. No fire-throwing, no building-looting, no Molotov-cocktail wielding manifestos. Anarchism is, instead, the confluence of “I don’t deserve to be controlled” and the Golden Rule.

Anarchism is the confluence of “I don’t deserve to be controlled” and the Golden Rule.

We think people who want to steal and burn and smash just like to hide behind “Anarchy” instead of admitting that they are hateful, or really angry, and want to break stuff. Which we get, really, but could you process your feels before acting please?

What An Anarchist Utopia Looks Like by kickassia - Meme Center

If there was no government law against rioting, would you go out and burn down your neighbor’s buildings and businesses? If there were no government laws against doing heroin, would you go out and do heroin? No? Neither would we. Anarchists are mostly against the government’s tremendously violent history, and we just want to make moral laws consistent with state laws: states shouldn’t have the power to harm, jail, and murder people “legally”. We find that to be immoral. Unfortunately, a sober viewing of history shows that that is what all states do.

This is why we are Anarchists.

Continuous Delivery

We talked about how Libertarianism has a lot of overlap, conceptually, with DevOps (link). While talking about this post, we made an additional connection between Anarchism and Continuous Delivery.

One of the things we discuss in our talks is that Continuous Delivery can just…happen when you get enough barriers, bumps, and blockades out of the way of software delivery. Basically, if you remove enough pain points and things in the way, continuous delivery will just happen because developers want to write code/solve problems/deliver on technical business objectives.

Comparatively, to Anarchist good – focus on the fact that someone controlling you is fundamentally wrong, and…if you’re consistent there, you will treat others the same way.

If you focus on the fact that someone controlling you is fundamentally wrong, and you behave consistently with that conclusion, you will treat others the same way.

Remove control and fear about software delivery -> Continuous Delivery.

Remove control and fear in personal interactions -> Anarchy.

Anarchist Jokes

 

God Words, and Love

We’ll leave you with this, that Josh posted:

The Case for Christian Libertarianism and Anarchy

The Case for Christian Libertarianism and Anarchy

by and | Community, God, Government, Religion

We first had the idea for this blog a while ago, when Laine was trying to find the right words to describe her political leanings. Libertarian isn’t quite right. Anarchist is more accurate, but Anarchy as a whole seems like…a description of the problem more than a fully fleshed out societal plan. The fact is, what we both believe takes pieces from Libertarianism and Anarchy – but mostly, it coincides with the core tenet of Christianity. Since we first thought of doing this blog, we’ve learned thanks to our Libertarian community that actually…the overlap of Christians and Anarchists (and presumably Libertarians) is a common pattern.

Some Definitions, because Context

Libertarianism (see also the other posts we’ve written on the topic):

Libertarianism (from French: libertaire, “libertarian”; from Latin: libertas, “freedom”) is a political philosophy and movement that upholds liberty as a core principle. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing free association, freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association. (Wikipedia)

Libertarians also typically believe that the only time force against another person is warranted is if that person is violating the Non-Aggression Principle (or the “NAP”).

The non-aggression principle (NAP), also called the non-aggression axiom, is a concept in which “aggression”, defined as initiating or threatening any forceful interference with either an individual or their property, is inherently wrong.

Anarchy:

Anarchy is the state of a society being freely constituted without authorities or a governing body. It may also refer to a society or group of people that entirely rejects a set hierarchy. (Wikipedia)

The Core Tenet of Christianity

We’ve talked about The Jesus Cheat before, but the very very condensed arc of the Bible, Christianity’s origin story if you will, goes something like:

  1. God gave people a lot of rules they had to follow in order to be in a relationship with him…
  2. …they were terrible at it.
  3. God got pissed, because is it really that hard to keep your commitments, you guys?
  4. He tried again, with different people…
  5. …they were also terrible at it.
  6. Eventually, he sent Jesus, who was both 100% human and also 100% God (Yeah, that math tho…) to live as a person, among people, and be a sort of…proxy for all of the ways that people screw up and are broken and hide from each other and also God. Jesus was a proxy for this pain (or, if you will, sin) for all people, past present and future, because…God magic, basically? (there’s a reason we very lovingly call it a cheat…)
  7. Jesus died under the weight of all of that pain, including the worst pain of all which is complete separation from God. This served to allow God to (we think) freely give remaining in relationship with people even if they screwed up over and over and over. It also broke, or forgave, any obligation that people had to God and made the relationship purely choice-based.

Basically, God saved people from their own broken, and found a way to stay by pre-forgiving them forever. We get this pre-forgiveness and utter acceptance from God as long as we do one thing (instead of a long list of things) – and that one thing is, depending on who you ask, believing in the Jesus Cheat or just…trying to have a relationship with God – making the relationship “purely choice-based.” Said differently, the only requirement to be fully accepted by God is to choose to be in a relationship with him. Human choice was the only checkbox that God maintained, which would indicate that human choice matters a lot. To God.

…there are nuances of course, and several lifetimes of study and understanding possible regarding Christianity. Maybe in a month or a year or a decade, we’ll be like, no, that was dumb, it’s actually this other thing. But for now, that’s the best understanding we’ve got, and it’s done a LOT to inform our political beliefs.

Libertarianism and Anarchy and Christianity, oh my!

So, we’ve got…

  • Libertarianism: people deserve to be free
  • Anarchy: no human system is the boss of me
  • Christianity: God is the only boss of me, and he appears to have actively preserved my right to choose

As you can see, there’s overlap there… God thinks we deserve to be free to choose, and if we choose a relationship with him, that relationship trumps all other relationships such that we are not subject to the “rule” of…anyone. That means that people do not deserve, or even need, to be controlled, because God’s got this even if sometimes people do awful things. As Josh is fond of saying, karma always comes. If God doesn’t want to control us, then people definitely don’t get to.

Radical Choice-ist

If God worked that hard to preserve human choice, then…so should we. If we don’t try to control other people, and we don’t accept that we deserve to be controlled, then all of our interactions become rife with choice and personal freedom. As long as we aren’t violating the NAP, we have the inherent right to live our lives as we see fit.

LP and Chill: It’ll Be Just Fine – the Short Version

LP and Chill: It’ll Be Just Fine – the Short Version

by and | Community, God, Government, People

Sometimes we see a pattern, and we try to explain it, and…we end up looking like this crazy conspiracy theory guy. Not because what we’re saying is far-fetched, more because it’s so interconnected and there are so many examples and we care about it so so much that it’s hard to be clear about the points we’re trying to make. More than once, this has pointed us at toward the full explanation of the pattern ending up a longer-form piece of content – like a talk, or “maybe some day a book,” or…we don’t really know. Just..some stuff is too long or too complex for a blog, despite that being where we usually start when we want to talk about something outside of the context of “work stuff.”

Sometimes, though, we find that we can do a summary, or a short(er?) version, of the explanation of the pattern. We’ve been seeing, and writing, more about politics lately, especially the Libertarian Party (LP), because the crazy of the world has led us both to open our eyes about it. And…there are reasons that we think politics might be part of the overall answer, and that is the pattern we want to talk about.

There is a Culture War

Are you happy with the United States political system? This question is not, are you happy in relation to what came before, or are you happy ish, but are you really, truly happy about the people in charge of making, enforcing, and talking about the policies that affect your personal freedoms every day?

If you’re not happy with it, do you feel comfortable talking about that? Do you think that your friends and loved ones and coworkers and various other tribes will still accept you if you’re honest about the problems you see and how those problems make you sad, or hopeless, or angry? Because…we aren’t happy with the current system. And our comfort with talking about that varies, but…most of the people Laine at least interacts with on a daily basis just seem really happy that Not Trump is president.

The fact that the current state is depressing, and frustrating, and that we can’t talk about that without alienating ourselves, is a sign of a large-scale, many-factioned culture war. The Corpo State/Cathedral, the Woke, the Karens, the Conservative Christians, the Antifa’ers, the BLM’ers, the Thin Blue Liners… this isn’t even all of the factions, but all of these groups seem to exist primarily to tell people that saying or feeling something that the group doesn’t approve of makes that person a terrible human being who deserves to be dehumanized and disregarded.

[The factions] seem to exist primarily to tell people that saying or feeling something the group doesn’t approve of makes that person a terrible human being who deserves to be dehumanized and disregarded.

COVID has been a mess, and has added the Masker, Vaxxer, Anti-Vaxxer, Lockdowner, and Anti-Lockdowner factions. What is irrefutable is that the lockdowns that were supposed to keep us all safe have caused mental health crises, increased suicides, increased incidences of abuse, and business closures, with no end in sight because we have no coherent metrics for when it will be “safe enough” to go back, or forward, to some semblance of normal.

It Sucks

The culture war, that is. It sucks to be hopeless, and to be too afraid to talk about it. And with that many factions constantly sniping at each other, sometimes the hopelessness and the fear seem…legit.

It Leads to Actual Life-Threatening Conflict/War

In addition to leading people to live in fear, this culture war leads to actual war, if we use the “life-threatening conflict” definition of war. The government is willing to use force and violence to enforce whatever it thinks is important, mostly in the form of the police, although sometimes with agencies like the ATF. There are historical events, like Waco, and also current events, like insurrection and riots in Minnesota and on the west coast just this week. People think that the police are the bad guys for all the damage they do, and while an argument could be made that they’re choosing to enforce laws that are non-sensical and damaging, it definitely seems true that they’ve been handed an impossible task that will see them also getting hurt in the process.

People think that police are the bad guys for all the damage they do…but it seems true that they’ve been handed an impossible task that will see them also getting hurt in the process.

Some People Love the Culture War…

On the other hand, this culture war is great for some people. It distracts most of the American public from noticing that their freedoms are being slowly leeched away in the name of “safety.” It also helps people in positions of authority further cement those positions because they can position themselves as the saviors of humanity – or, they can use fear and intimidation to get compliance if not support.

The culture war also gives the people who are happily part of those factions a way to convince themselves that they’re right – they can simply be louder, and look around to see the people who are nodding in agreement, and then temporarily feel safety in numbers. The people nodding in agreement, even if they aren’t quite sure, can also find some feeling of safety because they aren’t currently being rejected by the people around them.

…because Control and “Safety”

All of these reasons to love the culture war are about control, and “safety.” People in positions of authority are trying to control everyone else into either being safe or making them feel safe, if they get some personal value out of being “in charge.” The loudest members of the factions are trying to control the people around them into making them feel like their opinions are right, and that those opinions will keep that group safe even if everyone else is screwed. And the people nodding in agreement are hiding – trying to control the people around them into not rejecting them, or kicking them out of the tribe.

But…we know, because of a lot of science, that control doesn’t work. Not at all, and definitely not long term. The problem is that people are terrified of the potential consequences of both not controlling and not being controlled.

But…You Have a Choice

The thing is…you don’t have to control other people. And you don’t have to accept being controlled. You have a choice. It may not be an easy choice, and it may lead to some of your relationships altering, or ending. But actually, you can just…process the fear of the potential consequences without changing anything. Processing the fear allows you to see reality more clearly, and to see that trying to control other people is never okay – which means that it isn’t okay for someone to try to control you, either.

You can just choose to process the fear instead of grabbing for control.

If, once you process your fear, you want to change something, then…comes the hard part. Learning how to give up control isn’t easy, and it’s scary, and it requires trust in something outside of yourself.

People

You actually can have some amount of faith in people, or in humanity as a whole. People do wonderful, beautiful things, and their capacity for good is often staggering. We said at the beginning on this post, “there are reasons that we think politics might be part of the overall answer, and that is the pattern we want to talk about.” The Libertarian party has seen an upswing this past year, for…reasons that may at this point be kind of obvious. And it’s not perfect, and actually we’re both more Anarchist than Libertarian by the strictest definition – but the Libertarian party has several voices who are saying, loudly and clearly and well, that personal freedom matters. That people matter. More than the government, more than rules, more than checkboxes and false safety. And they’re building communities and actively trying to make change to reflect that people matter at all levels.

God

…but faith in people alone isn’t enough. Both Josh and Laine genuinely have no idea how people learn to give up control without faith in something outside of themselves and outside of other people. We can very clearly see that all of this weirdness, and all of this unrest, and even the culture war itself, is God doin’ stuff. We have no idea what he’s doing, but if he’s doing stuff, he has a plan, and if he has a plan, it’s going to be awesome. 

There are no end states in life, which means that while things can never be completely safe, they also can never be completely broken and hopeless. And while the culture war sucks, it’s actually…okay. It’s growing pains, toward the next thing.

We Love Tattoos! (Part 1! Tattoos are Super Cool!)

We Love Tattoos! (Part 1! Tattoos are Super Cool!)

by and | God, People

It’s time to start a new series, apparently! We both really love tattoos. Laine has been getting them off and on since she was 14, and while Josh only started a few years ago, but regardless of number of tattoos or time spent getting them, it’s one of the best ways to get either or both of us babbling about the things we know and love about them. We plan to write about our favorite of our tattoos, and our recommendations for getting a tattoo (PRO TIPS! NUMBER FIVE WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!!!!!….actually not, just what we’ve learned as we’ve gone along).

So…the series as we have it roughly sketched out right now will go something like this:

1. Tattoos are super cool, here’s what we know about how they work and some of our fav artists (this post!)
2. The stories behind Laine’s tattoos
3. The stories behind Josh’s tattoos
4. Tattoo pro tips

Why Tattoos?

As you know, we love souls and the power they have, and we hate hiding them.

We believe everyone has a unique awesome to them, a shard of some great holy essence, a supernatural Meaning. So…hiding that shit is stupid. But not hiding it is kind of scary, for the reasons that we’ve talked about before and will continue to talk about that basically boil down to being afraid of being alone – well and truly alone – because of not hiding your soul well enough.

Tattoos have an interesting sort of cost/benefit when it comes to souls. They require physical pain, and sometimes emotional pain, to design them and to get them, and then they themselves serve as a monument to that pain. You would think that physical and emotional pain could not possibly be beautiful, and that it wouldn’t be something a person would want a permanent reminder of – but the pain existed regardless of it can be seen, and tattoos are beautiful. As a result, we’ve found that tattoos are a great way to show your soul, and intermingle your soul and what it loves and knows and means with a super talented artist. The mingle results in something beautiful and permanent and uniquely you, that goes where you go and helps tell your story.

How Tattoos Work

Tattoos are permanent body art that comes to be via stabbing someone repeatedly with a motorized cluster of tiny needles with ink coating them.  (Josh: I didn’t know this, I thought the ink flowed from inside the needles. This week I learned.) This article explains it well, although its advice for aftercare is old. Basically, skin has multiple layers and is a lot thicker than it seems, and tattoos deposit ink into the dermis/middle layer. The machine that does the tattooing is shaped a bit like a gun, but most tattoo artists prefer to call it what it is – a “machine.”

The palette of inks available is staggering, and you can get a tattoo in any of those colors that exist or any color that your artist mixes FROM those existing colors. The outline of tattoos is typically done in black, although not always, and the whole tattoo can be black and white and gray, or it can be all of those plus full color. Tattoos last a long time, but because you’re an alive person, and your skin is also alive, tattoos tend to fade and blur over long periods of time. There are a few factors that influence how fast this happens, or even if it happens in a way that’s noticeable. We’ll talk about those later, in the pro tips post!

You can see some interesting slow-mo video of how tattooing works here:

Do Tattoos Hurt?

Ribs: free real estate

…yes. Tattoos hurt. Sometimes they hurt a lot, because…you’re literally being stabbed, thousands of times.  How much they hurt varies depending on the person, and on the location of the tattoo. For us, it’s ranged from feeling like a light scratch to feeling like being cut open. In the later posts where we talk about our tattoos, you’ll learn that Josh has a massive rib tattoo – and I (Josh) can say clearly that ribs are not a fun place to get tattooed. But they are huge real estate, and sometimes that matters because bigger areas to tattoo mean…well, that you can have a bigger tattoo. And bigger tattoos mean that you have more space, or canvas, for beautiful detail and color and shading. Big tattoos can be really pretty, and that might mean getting a tattoo in a painful place.

In our experience, we both have a high pain tolerance (per our favorite tattoo artists, anyway!), so… we aren’t afraid of pain, especially physical pain. It’s worth it, and at times it can even be quite cathartic.

How Much Do Tattoos Cost?

Tattooing is not prohibitively expensive, although the cost can require some planning. Neither of us are what you’d call artists in any drawn medium, which means that we typically need a tattoo artist to do some design work for us on top of the tattoos themselves. Some artists will charge for this design work, and some assume it’s an included cost of doing business. For the tattoo itself, most artists charge somewhere between $100 and $200 an hour, and tipping is both accepted and welcome in our experience.

As a rough example, a well-done tattoo about the size of your hand could take between 90 minutes and 4 hours, which would translate to somewhere between $150 and $800, plus tip. The bigger the tattoo, the more detailed the tattoo, or the more painful the tattoo, the more sessions it might take to complete – which would mean one trip to the tattoo shop, then time to heal plus time for the artist to be available again (artists can be booked months in advance), then another trip to the tattoo shop…repeat as needed.

But…don’t forget, you get to keep the art forever. And it serves as a reminder to yourself, a memento of your history, a thought that brings you joy, or just something beautiful that you have as a permanent decoration on yourself. If you amortize the cost over your lifetime…they become relatively cheap.

We also tend to build relationships with people who do something as intimate as tattooing us, which means that we spend time and money to obtain something important to us, and we also get to hang out with friends. It’s a great way to spend a few hours and a few hundred bucks.

Favorite Local Artists, and How to Find a Good One

We’ve both had a significant amount of work done by the folks at Ministry Ink. Between us, we’ve had 3 tattoos from Adam Crane, who is also the owner of the shop, 3 tattoos from Kayla Grosso, and 4 tattoos from Shaun Friday.

Laine also got 3 tattoos in 2017/2018, all very different styles, from Trish, who owns My Little Needle Tattoos. We also both got a tattoo from (a different) Adam at Psychotic Ink in Clearwater, FL.

…which brings us to the “how to find a good artist” portion of the blog! There are two ways to find a good artist or shop – 1) recommendations from people you trust, usually people who already have tattoos that are not ugly, and 2) looking at artists’ work online and falling in love with their style. Ministry Ink, and Adam and Kayla in particular, were recommended to Laine by tattooed friends, when she was trying to find someone who would do two custom pieces. Instagram is great to see an overview of an artist’s style, which is why we’ve linked to artists’ Instagram accounts where we can.

You can research what makes a good tattoo/what a good tattoo looks like – Josh learned a lot recently by watching Ink Master, while Laine learned a lot 20+ years ago by scouring tattoo magazines. You should also meet with/consult with your artist before getting a tattoo and find out if you’re comfortable with them, if that matters to you. It matters a lot to both of us, because this person will see you at what could be close to your weakest, and…vulnerability + a jerk with a tattoo machine does not make for the best possible experience.

Next Up…

Part 2! The stories behind either Josh or Laine’s tattoos, depending on which one gets done first!

Two Kinds of Assholes

Two Kinds of Assholes

by and | God, Leadership, People

We’re going to use the word “asshole” a lot in this post. We both actually really love to swear, but if it offends you, feel free to skip. Sometimes that’s the most accurate word, though.

We work in a lot of different cultures with a lot of different strong-willed people. We are also both, as you may have noticed, extremely strong-willed.

Within these different cultures, we have individually and also together been accused of being arrogant and overbearing. We’ve found that in order to make change, it takes being willing to ignore people telling you to stop making change, and that often leads to this conclusion of arrogance or overbearingness. We’ve talked before about the ways that people try to stop you from doing what you think is right, about the ways they attempt to control. Some additional are, they’ll say you’re going to fail, or that you’re wasting your time, or that change is impossible. They’ll say it’s more complicated than you think, and unless you check and double-check all of the boxes and track down a million threads and make sure we’re all safe oh no panic eyes, you’re doomed to failure.

We have made a career out of transforming culture and bringing new perspectives by ignoring doubters, pushing forward, and taking risks that other people said were stupid. We ignored them after we tried to figure out if they were right, but often when we’d ask why they said what they said, they weren’t even sure themselves. So… we paid attention and we considered, but in general, we’ve had to learn how to ignore…a lot. At great personal and professional cost, although it always worked out really well over time.

The people we ignored, in addition to saying that we were arrogant and overbearing, also said that we were self-centered, and cruel. Based on their summaries of our actions, it might be fair to say that we are, both of us, assholes. Based on that, we came up with the following definition in an attempt to understand what people would say about us, and people like us:

Asshole: (n) a person who cares less about you and what you think than you would like.

But that definition was incomplete, and, honestly, kind of perplexing to both of us. As is often the case, the concept behind “asshole” seemed to mean (at least) two very different things – and one of them was accurate about us, and one of them very much was not.

Hot Take of the Day: There are Really Two Kinds of Assholes

As far as we’ve been able to puzzle out, there are (at least) two primary kinds of assholes – or two categories of people who are called assholes.

Type 1: A person who doesn’t care about anyone other than themselves

This is the worst kind of asshole. There are a lot of other names for this kind of person, but one of the most accurate is “selfish” – they use people. They think that people owe them…something, and they get angry and mean when the world, and the people within, don’t deliver on that …something. They hurt people, and abuse them, and ignore them. They’re controlling, and manipulative, and unkind. They often ignore feedback, and they proceed, blind and numb, toward their own end goals.

They may be good people, and they may have objectively good motives for what they do. But they also generally are quick to dismiss people as people – they do not see other people as inherently worthy of some amount of consideration and humanization.

Treating people as somehow less than human is awful, and it’s been the source of immeasurable amounts of damage from people with some kind of power over the people they see as “less human.”

Type 2: A person who does what they believe to be right, despite what other people think about them

I’m tired and angry, but somebody should be.
– Halsey, Nightmare

This is the kind of person who believes that there are more important things that people’s opinions of them.

They are often confused with Type 1 Assholes, but the key difference is how they actually feel about other people. They care about other people, deeply, and they see inherent value in literally everyone. However, they have bigger concerns than other people’s approval. Typically, this kind of asshole is actually a reformed, scarred former people-pleaser.

people-pleaser: (n) a person who has an emotional need to please others often at the expense of his or her own needs or desires

This kind of asshole has probably spent time trying really hard to take care of, or make happy, someone else – maybe multiple someone elses – and has had a series of events happen to them that broke their ability to do it. Probably they too suffered personal or professional losses when the ability to try to make everyone else happy fell down. Somewhere along the way, they learned that being themselves, and doing what they think is right, is more important than the (conditional) approval of other people.

With all of the resources they get back from actually taking care of themselves, these people also tend to have causes. Things that they care deeply about, a Big Important Purpose, probably related to the battles they won along the way to being free.  that they care about more than Type 1s: they care about people, and aren’t selfish – they are just concerned about more than other people’s approval. Things like, Solving World Hunger, or Actual Digital Transformation, or Helping People Who Have Big Sad Scars. Or Soul Repair.

These people often get their approval from something other than the people around them – they have to, because they know that that doesn’t last. They aren’t success- or fame- or money-driven, and maybe they just…rest in the Jesus Cheat and God’s love, and they know and work to accept that they were made Just Right and for an important reason.

This one is us.

Maybe “Asshole” isn’t All Bad…

In conclusion…

Don’t be a Type 1 Asshole. Care about people. Figure out your hurt and your strife enough to be able to see the people around you, and know that they are not responsible for making you happy.

But also…maybe don’t try so hard not to be a Type 2 Asshole. Don’t worry about being perceived as “nice,” or about modifying your soul to fit what might make other people happy. Care about people, and love them deeply, but care more about you and what you bring to the world and what you know is right. People, the right people who love actual you, will show up in your life when you are self-consistent (and you let them).

Our Favorite Villains: Joker (from The Dark Knight)

Our Favorite Villains: Joker (from The Dark Knight)

by and | Community, God, People

We have continued to talk between the two of us about how much we love “villains” of pop culture. We wrote a post about why Thanos is the best Avenger a long time ago, and decided to start a series. We recently watched The Dark Knight again (…again again, it’s a classic for a reason..) and we enjoyed Heath Ledger’s Joker so much that he got the kick-off spot for the series.

It’s an amazing movie, and ultimately it centers around the conflict between two moral codes: The Joker as an agent, or engine, of chaos, and Christian Bale’s Batman, who fights for justice, fairness, order, and self-sacrifice.

… at least it appears that way at first.

There are going to be spoilers for The Dark Knight in this post, but given that it’s about 13 years old, we figured that was probably fine…

Ledger won an Oscar posthumously for his work, and to be honest the character was a spectacular piece of acting. If you haven’t seen it recently enough that it’s fresh in your memory, stop reading this blog and just go enjoy it. Or, if you want just a vignette, watch this scene:

It sums up the character nicely.

So here’s the thing – a lot of people really loved the character of The Joker in this film. It’s one of the most iconic villain characters ever, and was arguably the best portrayal of The Joker until Joaquin Phoenix gave it a go (whose version of The Joker we will likely talk about in another Our Favorite Villains post). But…why? What’s so interesting and appealing about this character who could be described as a madman and a terrorist? What about The Joker in general – why is he an iconic villain, and a foil for Batman? What makes the Batman universe such a good fit for this kind of character?

Things We Love About The Dark Knight’s Joker

“Plans, everybody has plans.”

The Joker says some interesting things about planning, strategy, and execution – all reasons that we loved Thanos as much as we did. It’s clear from the opening scene of the movie (below!) that he’s thought out this heist step by step.

The arc of the movie follows his strategy to take over the finances of the mob, and use the control that having their money affords him to seize the reins of the battle between Batman and the criminal element of Gotham City. Interestingly, while the strategy is sound and he executes it well, the plan to manipulate and control is not one of our favorite pieces.

One key piece of this arc, and probably our very favorite scene, is The Joker trying to build a relationship with Batman in the jail scene. Basically, just like The Joker in The Lego Batman movie, this Joker needs Batman in order to be a supervillain. In a world without Batman, the Joker is just…bored.

Our conclusion from this is that despite The Joker saying he doesn’t make any plans to Two-Face, he does in fact make and execute plans. He outsmarts everyone, with plans that flex and build until the real end of the movie (more on that later).

The Joker stays committed to his stated goal: to bring clarity to people about who and what they are.

He’s playing a game, the real game, by real rules, when everyone else is playing a false game with made-up rules.

He’s clear – and clarity is success.

A lot of people in this movie hide who they really are. Bruce Wayne pretends to be Batman – or maybe more accurately, Batman pretends to be a playboy billionaire named Bruce Wayne. Batman also pretends to be an agent of law and order, when actually he’s an agent of chaos and his vision of justice, which is by definition outside of the law. The mob pretends to be invincible, but are actually paper tigers. The mayor pretends to be brave, but actually is full of fear. Gordon pretends to be dead, breaking his family’s hopes and hearts. Batman also pretends to be a guy who doesn’t do murder – but it’s a little hard to believe that all of the violence he does doesn’t kill anybody. Shooting high caliber autocannon rounds off the batbike in an urban environment is, we’re sure, totally safe. (</sarcasm>)

There’s also a whole subplot about who the real Batman is – in fact, it’s part of The Joker’s plan to force Batman to “come out,” as Bruce tries to wrestle with his default stance of hiding.

Contrast all that with The Joker. He shows up, he lays his cards on the table (…pun absolutely intended), and he tells everyone from the get-go that he’s here to bring clarity to the world. He’s here to show people that the rules they think they live by are moral forgeries. He also habitually lies about how he got his scars, which is a fascinating element of hiding in his personality. Generally, though, he is clear and he deals with the people around him in transparent, if off-putting, ways.

He’s committed.

Image result for joker not about the money

Commitment was one of the things that we loved about Thanos, in the previous post that we mentioned. That theme holds true here, too. A climax of the “Joker controls the mob” subplot of the movie is when we see that The Joker has “recovered” all of the mob’s money. He had previously negotiated with them that if he could recover their funds, he’d get half – and when we see him with the literal pile of money, he proceeds to light it on fire.

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
– Alfred, trying to explain The Joker to Bruce

The Joker is committed to his plan, which is, again, clarity. He enjoys bringing clarity to the world. He doesn’t care about the same things other people care about – in this case, money – and that causes confusion and fear in its wake. The Joker pretty much only cares about the joy of being himself and helping others see clearly.

He’s crazy, but…not wrong.

There’s an interesting question here, underlying The Joker as a character – is he completely insane, or…is he just living by different rules than everyone else?

At first glance, it definitely appears that he is erratic or just crazy. But we think there’s a deeper truth, that he is in fact just living by different rules than everyone else. This makes a person appear crazy, but it’s actually something more like a strong cultural difference. To him, not living in a fake world is more important than obeying laws, or being seen as a “nice person.”

That’s an interesting lesson, because laws, and perception of “niceness,” are not morality. Also, what is moral is not always what is legal, or what is nice. Slavery was legal. Racism was enforced by law. Many victimless crimes are currently illegal, such as growing particular species of plants.

As always, we love Reality quite a lot, and it was refreshing to see people have to think hard about what they really believe as the result of a chaotic person’s actions. Not that we’d know anything about that…

The RULES, and “all it takes is a little push…”

One key piece of this arc, and probably our very favorite scene, is The Joker trying to build a relationship with Batman in the jail scene…
– us, earlier in this post

In particular, we love this part of the jail scene:

The Joker: …their morals, their code… it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you, when the chips are down, these… these “civilized people?” They’ll eat each other. See? I’m not a monster, I’m just…ahead of the curve.

Batman : [grabs Joker] Where’s Dent?

The Joker : You have all these rules and you think they’ll save you!

Lt. James Gordon : [as Batman slams Joker into the wall] He’s in control.

Batman : I have one rule.

The Joker : Oh, then that’s the rule you’ll have to break to know the truth.

Batman : [getting impatient] Which is?

The Joker : The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.

Generally speaking, we are not fans of rules, which is probably why this appealed to both of us. We’ve also both been the targets of people who valued the rules over us, or over other people, which…hasn’t changed our opinions about rules in general. What The Joker says here is not entirely correct, and…he knows it. The Joker doesn’t follow their rules, but he does follow his own. He’s…consistent. But he points out a legitimate thing – it makes sense, it should make sense, to look at the rules that one follows and ask oneself…okay, but why?

What is my motivation for following the rules? Do I even understand that I’m choosing to follow the rules? What happens if I stop?

The Joker pushes the Batman, the mob, the police, and society as a whole, to stop doing what they’ve always done. He pushes them to look at the world in a new light, where old motivations (money, power) are challenged and the old rules of safety and control are broken.

Batman, as a counterpoint, spends the whole movie trying to control things into being safe. He tries beating everyone up. He tries giving up his identity. In the end, he even sacrifices the ideology and the very idea of Batman as a force of good, in an effort to control the perceptions of the people in the city.

The Joker pokes at peoples’ rules, points out the sheer ridiculousness of them, and then…lets them choose. He’s happy with whatever they go with, he just wants to put people in situations in which they can see the world in a new light. That, and he really wants to burn down what they perceive as their safety.

The Joker and the End of the Movie

The last time we watched the movie, we kicked around the real motivation of the movie. This is a Christopher Nolan movie – this is the same director who did Inception, and Memento, and Tenet. He is not what you’d call a traditional thinker. Up until a certain point in the movie, the movie itself is wildly consistent:

This movie is a love story to chaos, and a warning against (and biting satire of) the patterns of institutional and personal control and fear.

And then…that stops. The Joker suddenly cares about a particular outcome, not, as we said above, simply showing people that they aren’t actually bound by their rules. The Joker targets two ferryboats’ worth of people – one boat of prisoners, and one boat of Average Citizens. He tells the boats that they will both be blown up as of a time, unless one boat blows up another. The prisoners decide not to blow up the Average Citizens’ boat. The Average Citizens take a vote, which lands on “yes, blow up the prisoners,” and then ultimately can’t do it. During this time, The Joker and Batman are fighting and The Joker insists that one boat will definitely blow up the other. When that doesn’t happen, The Joker tries to blow up both boats anyway, despite it not being quite the time limit yet.

If The Joker were consistent with himself as per the rest of the movie, he would have accepted that people are not as broken and twisted as he thought, and adapted. Or, at a minimum, he would have waited until the time limit was up to blow up both boats.

The Joker and Purpose, Clarity, and Commitment

As always, we love Reality quite a lot, and it was refreshing to see people have to think hard about what they really believe as the result of a chaotic person’s actions. Not that we’d know anything about that… 
– us, again from earlier in this post…

When we have strong emotional reactions to things, we try to figure out why. Why did it resonate? What does it teach me about myself, or about God, or about other people?

We are both what could be described as chaotic – if you use the D&D alignment definition, chaotic means valuing “freedom, adaptability, and flexibility. On the downside, chaos can include recklessness, resentment toward legitimate authority, arbitrary actions, and irresponsibility. Those who promote chaotic behavior say that only unfettered personal freedom allows people to express themselves fully and lets society benefit from the potential that its individuals have within them.”

We firmly believe that God makes people exactly as he needs them to be. Neither of us tries to be chaotic, or to see the world in different ways than…it seems like most other people. In fact, thanks to the soul scars of trying to live this way, we’ve both tried various things not to be chaotic. This version of The Joker exists, for us, as a form of representation – we aren’t criminals, but we are wildly committed to the things we think are right. We’re good at making and executing plans. And we definitely think that clarity is success, and that people follow rules for reasons that are mostly fears of how they will be hurt if they don’t.

That representation, and the reminder of how God makes people, mattered to us because living your life in a way that’s consistent with who you actually are, how God made you, helps you find and execute your purpose. Also, it’s just…fun. It’s how you find joy in your life, and how you find people who feel joy in the same things, and in you.

On Bullies

On Bullies

by and | Community, God, Organizations, People

First, some history (and context!) from Laine…

I was overweight as a kid. Actually, I was overweight until I was in my mid-twenties, and then again for a while after I had my kids. But as a kid, in the 90s, it was an offense punishable by social ostracization. I was picked on throughout elementary school, to the point where I started calling myself fat so that other people wouldn’t do it first.

I moved at the end of 6th grade, to a much larger school. They mostly didn’t bully me for being overweight, but they did bully me for making out with my (female) best friend – which I did not, not that that matters aside from pissing me off even MORE about the sheer unfairness of it. I moved again at the end of 8th grade, to a smaller school, and found friends, and slipped into blessed nerd + “I’m in the school musical every year” semi-obscurity.

I dealt with one bully as a young adult, after I started my first job. I can see, looking back on it, that he probably felt threatened because, a) I was good at my job, b) I was on “his” project, and c) he perhaps felt like I was overstepping.

And then…no bullies. For a long time.

And then…more bullies showed up.

We’ve written about pieces of what happened at the church we were both members of. We have not written about what happened where we were formerly employed, out of (probably legitimate) fear of retaliation of some kind. But…suffice it to say that we’ve both run into a lot of bullies over the past few years. People we worked with, people we trusted. People we loved.

We try to explain a lot of patterns here. Patterns about fear and faith and hope and love, and how all of that comes together and applies to being a person. Patterns about how all of that scales to relationships (especially with God), and how it scales to and for organizations. A lot of these patterns, we figured out because…we lived them. We ran into really scared people trying to control what we did – and getting very very angry when we said no. That’s it. Just… no. We didn’t say, “you have to do what I say,” or “I’m going to make your life miserable for trying to tell me what to do.” Mostly we said, “please stop hurting us,” and “why are you trying to make me do something that I am sure is wrong?” and then eventually, just… no.

Sometimes “no” is a revolutionary act.

Decisions must be made…

Laine initially drafted this post in September of 2020. That’s actually the opposite of our usual process, typically we talk about things until it seems draft-able, then Josh does the initial draft. But this post began because Laine ran into a (comparatively mild) bully at work. And it brought back a lot of feelings about the other bullies we’ve recently run into, and a lot of sheer…exhaustion.

And then the election happened, and that brought with it more related feelings, and more exhaustion. And both the minor work bully and the election brought with them some clarity around what happens with bullies.

Bully (n): someone who does willful, targeted damage to other people in an effort to control them.

Because…bullies seem to win. The world actually seems to be structured for bullies – and for the control of other people. If you choose not to control other people, if you don’t play that game, if you flat-out refuse to play that game, then…you are an outlier. You stand out. You seem to invite bullies to take shots at you. But…that isn’t quite what happens.

Simply by existing, by living your life without controlling other people, you show the people around you that they too could choose not to control. You demonstrate, clearly, that another choice, a different choice, exists. This has the effect of forcing the bullies around you to choose if they will continue to bully – because some people behave this way because they don’t know another choice exists.

Bullies also force you to make a choice. Bullies force you to choose if you’re going to a) hide who you are in order to avoid the damage they might do, or b) very deliberately NOT hide, but instead choose that any damage is worth being yourself. As best as we’ve been able to figure out, bullies bully because they’re afraid they’re going to lose something that they think keeps them safe. Bullies need to control what they think keeps them safe so much that the people “in the way” become…dispensable.

So…if you’re the target of a bully, if you feel like your very existence invites bullies to take shots at you, then…that means that you’ve stumbled into the thing that they’re trying to hide away from the world – the thing they’re afraid they’ll lose. And it means that they don’t much like the fact that people exist who can’t be controlled into supporting their fears, and it means that they’re afraid that perhaps none of it was necessary at all.

It’s not your fault.

We’re going to say that one more time. It’s not. your. fault. We are emphasizing this because, again, it took us a long time to understand and accept it.

Mostly, with this post, we wanted to make something very clear – adult bullies exist. They exist anywhere that people exist, because people get scared, and sometimes those scared people end up with some kind of authority – real or imagined – over you and your life. This can be your boss, or your religious leader, or your government, or your significant other. Sometimes these people get SO scared that they forget entirely that you’re a person, and they just…want you to stop whatever you’re doing that seems to be a threat to them.

Regardless of what they say, it isn’t your fault. Bullies will tell you that it is, because they’re trying to convince you to change, and to hide, so that they feel more safe. You don’t have to do that. It’s scary not to, but…it is your choice. You can say no, and you can choose to be who you really are even if the bullies of the world don’t like it.

Sometimes “no” is a revolutionary act.

You won’t be alone.

The more we sort of…lean into this plan, the “be you and have fun” plan, the more we find other people who have figured this out. These people are some of the most truly supportive relationships that we have. So…while saying no to the bullies in your life, and choosing to be yourself, seems scary and like you’ll definitely be alone… you won’t. You will find your tribe, your people, your chosen family, and you will thrive. It’s worth it.

If you pay attention, it all works out pretty well

If you pay attention, it all works out pretty well

by and | God, Government, People

There’s a lot of weird stuff going on. It’s the second week of 2021, and instead of any kind of return to normalcy, it looks like the world is falling apart and the USA is tearing itself apart.

The news seems to be mostly designed to result in people thinking….uhhh…whatever the news people want their listeners to think? Probably? At best, the news outlets are perhaps trying to “fix” things the best way they know how – but that seems to mostly resemble trying to control people into aligning to their version of reality. To think like them, so everyone can be “safe.” Or, they’re trying to get ratings and behaving like a business instead of an organization with a responsibility to inform in a fair, balanced, accurate manner. None of these reasons, or any others that we can think of, are good enough to make inaccurate and downright confusing views of reality as presented by national news outlets not controlling, knowingly dishonest, or awful.

Aside from the news, the two main political parties of our national bipartisan system seem to be doing their best to rip each other apart – and in the process, rip apart any unity that exists in the country. They mostly act like toddlers fighting over an old, worn out blanket that they both have decided is their very most favorite.

Social media, AKA “people talking about stuff on the internet,” is doing its darnedest to implode. More people are talking than listening, and the resulting echo chambers are…well, echoing, at maximum volume. Everyone seems to be getting real offended at anyone who disagrees with them – and not just offended. People are seeing anyone who disagrees with them as an immediate enemy. With COVID, our primary social interaction has moved to online, and when it’s that hostile for dissenting opinions or ideas, something is very wrong.

Also, as of now, the sitting US President is so painful or dangerous to listen to (apparently?) that he doesn’t even get a voice on social media outlets. In addition, lots of other people who just…again, disagree, with the privately-held social media companies are banned. Literally silenced just for having opinions.

As two veterans of divorce, we recognize some of these patterns. It very much feels like the last stages of a relationship ending. Josh got some advice, about a year before his divorce was certain:

As long as you’re arguing, you’re okay – but if you go quiet, it’s just a matter of time.

As a country, we/the US has been arguing violently for about…30 years? We stopped civil discourse… at some point. We both began voting in presidential elections around the time that the results were so close to 50/50 that the winner could not be immediately determined. It’s not acceptable to talk about politics in “polite” circles, because it’s just assumed that we can’t agree and that relationships can’t survive in the face of that kind of disagreement.

You can’t have a political opinion in a public place without risking those relationships, and probably being disowned by at least two people. Any opinion at all is going to result in someone telling you that you’re a bad citizen, and not a “real” American, and also that you very definitely couldn’t possibly be a good person. Depending on where you say it, you will probably also be told that you’re not a good God person, or that you ignore science, or that you’re stupid and your opinions are irrelevant.

We do not accept differing opinions with a listening ear anymore.

Josh saw a video of a family being carted off to jail because they got together for a holiday party and can still hear the screams of their kids. Something is very very wrong.

What the hell happened? What can we do about it? What should we do about it? These are the questions we’ve been asking ourselves, ad nauseum.

We Forgot About Science

So…remember science?

Not, “you have to obey our commands or we will lock you up,” or “just listen to the experts without asking questions,” or “I have statistics so you have to do what I tell you,” or…really anything where people tell you what to do.

We’re talking about that thing where people went out and observed stuff, and thought about it intelligently, and then came to conclusions that were backed by empirical evidence. Maybe they had a hypothesis first, or maybe they observed a cool thing and then tried to understand and explain it. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, people said stuff, and then they went and figured out what they thought, for themselves. And often, they found out that they were wrong in their first, second, and maybe even third assumptions, and that the first and third conclusions were also wrong. But they kept looking, with open eyes. They also argued a lot, got offended, and generally disagreed, all for the purposes of finding the truth.

Science by this definition is, was, and always has been a violent attack on dogma. It doesn’t matter whose dogma, or which dogma, we’re talking about – but often, it was the ruling body and the church (or both). The “let’s figure out what reality is” crowd was perceived as a threat. Sometimes they were exiled. Sometimes they were killed. Often they were mocked and told they were crazy.

Also, sometimes they got rich, and sometimes they gave away their inventions for the good of mankind.

Pursuit of actual reality is one of our highest moral values, because that’s where you can most clearly see God. When teaching Actual Digital Transformation, or any other kind of soul healing, there is no substitute for Trying Stuff Out and Seeing What Happens (TM). We have considered actually patenting our methods, because they are so revolutionary today.

…LOLJK no we haven’t, that was totally some pained sarcasm, because the pursuit of actual reality seems to be painfully and confoundingly revolutionary, most of the time.

We’re sick of being told to “trust” anybody without question. Trust has to be built. We’ve individually, together, and also collectively as a society, been lied to for so long by authority figures that the idea of unquestioning trust of authority is offensive, and frankly ridiculous. Present evidence and let people choose, and allow encourage dissent, or GTFO.

If people are:

  • banning other people from saying they’re wrong
  • playing into our fear of being alone in order to try to manipulate agreement (“if you don’t agree, you aren’t one of us.”)
  • saying anything like, “you should blindly trust us because we’re the experts”
  • threatening, including “we’ll put you in jail”

…then they are very much not to be trusted.

We have somehow arrived at this stupid, and dangerous, place where we think that we can’t argue with something if it’s deemed “science.” We cover our ears and run when people say things we don’t like to consider. We can’t handle the thought of being wrong.

Why?

We Forgot about God

There’s something wrong with the world today,
I don’t know what it is.
Something’s wrong with our eyes.
We’re seeing things in a different way,
and God knows it ain’t his.

Livin’ on the Edge, Aerosmith

We seem to have forgotten, or perhaps some of us never knew or accepted, that there’s something bigger than all of us. Something so thoroughly Real that it is the authority we must all bend to. Something exists outside of all of us that it is beyond complete human understanding yet is present in every choice and action that we take. Something that if seen directly brings us to tears of joy and sweet sadness. It, He, can be found in being actually loved, or in seeing something so beautiful we cannot speak. It’s in every one of our souls. It’s in the babbling of a madman and in the unquestioning belief of a child, and in the most dangerous thought a person can have.

We forget that we can’t know things perfectly. We forget that we cannot control reality, and that we don’t need to control each other. We forget that any plan can fail, and that good things happen that we did not make happen.

God is behind all of this mess beauty and he’s working hard to break the chains we tend to put on ourselves. We bind our souls, thinking we must create all of the good we have in our lives, and we must keep ourselves safe from our greatest fear: being alone for who we are. That’s behind all of the “one of us” and the tribalism and the exile fears, and it’s why we think we have to agree (or at least pretend to agree) with our peer group, or risk that we ourselves will be excluded, exiled, and forgotten.

We Forgot We Don’t Have to be Afraid

Over and over, the damage we have taken personally, and the things that get in the way of actual good change, can be traced back to people being afraid.

Collectively, we’re all afraid. We’re afraid of losing the power to take care of ourselves. We’re afraid of being rejected, and as such, we’re afraid of whatever other people tell us we should fear.

A lot of those fears are real. People do sometimes hate us for what we believe in. People have lost jobs, and careers, because of economic fallout from COVID and the government’s response. The dollar is losing value at an impressive rate, so money isn’t really safety either (and in fact it never was…). People (us included!) have lost relationships once they decided they were no longer going to be controlled or hide. People hold on to their guns, and their stuff, and their relationships, and their opinions, and their tribes, and they hold on really really tight because they fear what might happen if they lose the things that they think keep them safe. People fear what they will do if they lose what matters to them, or if they lose what keeps them chained.

Angel of death and mercy,
come take me from this cage.
Cause these four walls and iron bars have been
witness to the rage,
of a thousand broken hearts, in chains…

In Chains, Shaman’s Harvest

We fight so hard to make laws and control each other in order to keep these chained things, but actually we do more damage to ourselves than to others when we seek to control – when we employ violence, rejection, hatred, disrespect, manipulation, denial of wants and needs, etc. It’s a national tragedy, and a human tragedy. We’ve fought these types of wars for decades – drug wars, culture wars, foreign wars, civil wars – because we thought that they were required in order to be safe.

But…actually, we don’t have to be afraid.

If you pay attention…it all works out pretty well.

We forget, so much, that love is much greater, and much stronger, than fear. It doesn’t always look like that, but…that’s how it lands. We forget that we can just…be ourselves. We forget that we can just be people and love each other and that…actually, life is pretty good.

You won’t be alone. People will like you, no matter your beliefs, statements, opinions, hot takes, or economic status. People will like you regardless of your tribe, your political orientation, or whatever other orientation you have. People will like you because you are a person. Not all people. Sometimes people will double down on being afraid, and they will not be willing to let you be free. But…you still won’t be alone. We know this because simple existence, simple “you are a person,” is all it takes for us to like someone. You are made of God-stuffs, and you are beautiful, and you are worth knowing and loving just because of that. If you’re hungry, I’ll give you from my food. If you’re sick, I’ll help take care of you.

It turns out, the real solutions win, most people are generally trying to be good, and love eventually wins over fear.

So…what now?

Yeah, it’s a valid question. And in some ways, we have literally no idea.

What we do know, or at least are pretty sure of, is that we need to apply the basic, and admittedly very complex, remedy of stop trying to control each other to the nation as a whole.

People have the literal God-given right to be free, and that needs to be respected and honored. We were once the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” and we seem to have en masse forgotten how to do that. But…actually, it’s okay, guys. As a nation, and beginning with ourselves, we need to process our feels, as much as that sucks, and default to freedom and not controlling each other. We need to realign to reality.

….aaand we’re back!

….aaand we’re back!

by and | God, Organizations, People

It’s been a long time since we blogged.

We’ve missed it. A lot. But…like our blog says, life is simple, not easy, and we’ve found that sometimes soul repair takes a lot of resources.

One thing we say in our talks is that transformational change starts with changes that individual people make in or for themselves. We think that’s probably always true, that large-scale change typically starts with individuals, and, meta, we’ve spent the time that we weren’t blogging working through a lot of stuff – stuff inside of our own souls and lives that needed to be processed, changed, and understood.

One major example of that is that we both got divorced. We each had to work through a lot – like a lot – of related feelings. Damage and scars, and…well, basically all of the feels. 

This is an accurate representation of what that process looked like:

I Just Have A Lot Of Feelings GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY
Having a lot of feelings, thanks Mean Girls!

We both came to points in our marriages where they were too broken to proceed. Divorce is complicated, and figuring out life going forward is a lot of work.

But we’ve done a lot of that work (probably not all of it, wince), and, as often happens, it’s turned out better than either of us thought possible. We expect that we’ll probably write more on the topic of divorce, but if you have any questions about the process or just want someone to talk to, feel free to reach out – our contact info is all over the place. I (Josh) didn’t even see it as an option for a long time, and only when Laine decided to do it did I even realize that I didn’t have to be stuck forever.

We’re both still processing a lot of what happened there, but it seems relevant given the other cultural things we’ve experienced. We wrote and delivered a new talk called Not a Cultural Fit, and we each drew on our marriages to see and explain and double-check as valid the patterns that we discuss in that talk. In the end…sometimes people just don’t fit, and trying to grimly power through only makes everyone miserable. You can find a new job, and you can find someone, or some organization, who actually likes you instead of tolerates you. (oof)

Our plan for the blog is to get back in the swing of making content regularly, continuing with our opinions on stuff, and also things, and the observations that we have. Basically, we’re going to pivot again and always toward our favorite piece of advice, for everyone:

Be you, and have fun.

If you’ve stuck it out, waiting for us to come back, we really really appreciate it. If you’re new, hi! Either way…

The Emperor's New Groove
BOOM, baby. We’re back.
The Human Scar of Exile

The Human Scar of Exile

by and | Community, God, People

In the course of getting ourselves kicked out of church we started to see a pattern of behavior. We referenced it briefly in the All the Problems of the World… post, where we said:

We’ve written about, and will write more about, this topic – but the summary is, people think that if someone near them is doing behavior X, it will cause them pain. They think that if someone near them is misbehaving according to God, then they will feel pain from God as a result.

This is an old, old cultural scar. Homophobia, racism, legalism, basically all kinds of hatred are examples of this. It’s a lie that people believe and respond to: “I need to control you, or something bad will happen to me. I need you to be what I think God wants, or we won’t be safe.”

We’ve gone over and over the ground of how people try to keep themselves safe. We even know part of why people do this – because of the one fear, the fear of being alone because of who you truly are. We do crazy, damaging things trying to keep ourselves and our relationships safe – and we do crazy, damaging things trying to make the people around us into our definition of safe as a result.

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