1.
Today's old church sermon intro informed me that if I have trouble seeing the church as beautiful, it's probably my fault because I'm "too focused on the negative." I swear, the subtitle of this series should just be "Every Sermon Talking Point That Gave Hannah Church Anxiety." For being a series of sermons about how beautiful the church is, it's really doing everything it can to convince me otherwise. LOL.
Fortunately I'm in a pretty good mental health space today (wouldn't have attempted to watch it if I wasn't, I learned that lesson last week, haha), and can catalog that shame trigger, sign off, and let the rest slide off of me. I think that's partly because I did make sure to check out my Lutheran service's sermon today. It looked at the disciples in the storm and Elijah hearing God in the silence, and the takeaway was "God is with us, let us look for him and be comforted by him." There is a 95% chance that the takeaway from any of my previous churches would be "Stop sinning by doubting God, get yourself together." Which, I mean, isn't actually comforting.
2.
A Facebook acquaintance this week claimed that capitalism is the economic system that most recognizes an individual's inherent worth, and I just... don't think that's true. Perhaps in some idealized form, but definitely not as it has played out in the US. While, yes, capitalism allows for a lot of freedom and choice, I refer back to my previous blog to say that freedom means freedom for some and not for others. In this case, those who are able to work get more freedom than those who don't. Those who are rich end up with more freedom than those who don't.
And more importantly, I believe that the US' form of capitalism actually encourages us to link the worth of a human with their productivity instead of their actual inherent humanity. We see this in the outcry against providing housing and food for those who cannot afford it, in how those who are too ill to work have much greater difficulty getting healthcare, in the insistence that "we don't want our tax dollars paying for freeloaders" -- essentially, that if someone is not being productive up to our standards, we do not believe they deserve food, shelter, and medical care, at least not enough to do anything about it.
We make basic human needs contingent on whether not people have earned them, and if that's the system that most values humans' inherent worth, then we need a brand new system, stat, because this isn't cutting it at all.
3.
I do keep coming back to the idea that many of my evangelical friends seem to perhaps equate "encouragement" with "correction." Like as possibly the primary meaning? I'm trying to figure out how to ask this of them and do an informal poll without sounding like I'm being a judgy jerk. I've just been realizing more and more that that's usually how my former church pastors used the word, to the point where I tense up a little any time a Christian says to me, "Let me encourage you" because there's a good chance they're about to tell me I'm doing something wrong and I'm actually going to walk away discouraged.
4.
My card memorization skills are not speeding up at all these days, but they are getting more accurate. 14 minutes is still about the minimum I can do, but I usually get no more than one wrong. So... getting there, but it's not very impressive or cool yet.
5.
So this is set to post in about six hours. It's about 4am for me here, and I am just... not sleeping tonight. Stuffed up, congested, feel like I can't breathe, and it's most likely just allergies or anxiety attack, but either way I can't lie down comfortably so I left the bedroom and am just chilling on the living room couch.
I did learn, however, that business-y detail-oriented emails, which take way more effort and time for me than I think they do for most people, are easier to write when you're sleep-deprived at 4 in the morning because you're too tired to second (and third and fourth and fifth) guess everything. So I've just drafted all my emails for the day, read through them a couple times to make sure they don't say anything overtly wrong, and will mail them all out at a more normal work hour. This is not a strategy I typically suggest for anyone after, like, college, but I guess it's a reasonable pandemic work strategy too, should you already happen to be awake way too early/late.
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