accommodating whom?

“If you accommodate others, you will be accommodating yourself”
Chinese Proverbs

(The Mayor helping emptying the dishwasher / Julie Cook / 2019)

Ok…so I’m still struggling between feeling better and being zapped of all energy…but that
didn’t seem to keep my mind from racing from thought to thought during the course of the
past week.

I’d see this or that irony or idiocy and would make a mental note that a
future post would be in order.

Then I’d feel the fervery chills again or the Mayor would be racing off willy nilly toward
something alluring, putting her life at risk, and those thoughts would quickly dissipate.

But the passing of a rural church’s sign last evening helped to jog my memory.

However, let’s back up a tad.

Let’s consider a word.
The word being–
Accommodating

A word that means a willingness to please: that of being helpful, obliging.

Obliging, in turn, meaning indulgent.

Indulgent then in turn meaning a willingness to allow excessive leniency.

I think we see where this is going…

It is going to the notion of making life, or that of another’s existence, as easy peasy as possible.

It is something our culture is honing to a high art form…

Making everything easy peasy…while offering leniency for all as we indulge everyone and anyone.
Matters not your desires nor choices…

Oh, no wait….it does matter…
It matters only if you are a Chrisitan, a Jew, a conservative or a moralistic individual…
because we simply cannot accommodate those who hold such mindsets…
But if you want anything outside the circle of a Judaeo /Christian mindset, we’ll accommodate you til
the cows come home.

And this thinking came from a drive last night when I passed by a sign outside of a church
that proclaimed “We Now Have Saturday Church”

At first look and read, that little advert seems great.
Saturday Church for those who can’t “make” Sunday Church.

But this seemingly benign offering got me thinking.

How much has The Church—each and every denomination of the Christian Church,
gone in order to accommodate the masses?

Praise rock bands to draw in the young.
Coffee house settings to draw in the casual laid back.
Video theatrics to show our cutting edge use of technology.
Gay clergy to make the fringe members feel accepted.
Preaching openness and love to show our all-embracing nature.
Removing the ideas of sin, hell or consequence from our actions because we are love and love only.
Gay marriages to express our inclusion.
Petitions to change the wording of the Bible to show we are progressive…
God as the God-dess.

On and on we go because the numbers show that the Church is losing.

It is losing to a deeply divisive yet progressive secular culture that
has no room for what Christianity has stood for over the past two thousand years.

It hasn’t helped that the clergy has almost singlehandedly cast a heavy
veil of mistrust…with many heinous acts of predation, across denominational lines,
leaving many of the faithful with deep wounds and now disgust for the Church as a whole.

So in desperation, The Church lets out all the stops.
Desperate to accommodate any and all…
just please don’t go…
please just come…
back…

And yet it is The Bridegroom who has never changed.

He, the Godhead, has remained the same since the creation of our existence…

He was before such and He will be long after such…

He will never change, be changed, bend, beg, accommodate or oblige.

He gave everything He could give on a fateful day of betrayal and death…
He offered redemption.
He offered hope.
But He will not bend nor will He be changed…
despite our bending over backward for anything and everything other than God.

God is not human, that he should lie,
not a human being, that he should change his mind.
Does he speak and then not act?
Does he promise and not fulfill?
Numbers 23:19

we continue beating our heads against the wall

I am hitting my head against the walls,
but the walls are giving way.
Gustav Mahler

(a little moth sits on the garage wall / Julie Cook / 2017)

Once again we are left standing before the hard blank wall of this current time of ours,
beating our heads in bewilderment, disbelief and overwhelming sorrow and grief.

Once again a radicalized young man has decided to step up to the plate of all things
evil by willingly sacrificing his life in the demented notion of all
things Allah and Islam by blowing himself up to bits in hopes of inflicting as much
mayhem, fear and death as he possibly can….
upon children.

Never mind his overt cowardice in his choice of targets.
Never mind that his priorities and choices were all screwed up.
Never mind that there won’t be any reward, let alone 70 virgins, awaiting
upon his arrival in Heaven…for Heaven is a far cry from his final destination….

A suicide bomber is the ultimate in cowardliness…
for despite the skewed thinking of ISIS, that such a murderer is really a martyr
in disguise…
a suicide bomber’s actions are so grossly screwed that they possess neither glory
nor valor but rather an altered, dare we say, demonic view of reality.
Never to be considered a true soldier of war….but rather as a poser and pretender..
a mere shadow of a fighter hiding among the woman and children.

Yet none of this talk, none of the future ensuing blame game, none of the what if’s will
be of any comfort to this new set of grieving families as they now are left to sadly join
ranks with those other families who have preceded them in the grief of what is known as
terrorist attack survivors.

This phenomenon of surviving terrorism is becoming all too common.
Such that I fear the world grows a bit hardened.
The attacks, the tragedies, the lives left shattered, the lives torn apart, the pieces of
the world forever shaken, are becoming more frequent than we can mentally process.

We of Western Civilization are left with two choices.
We can either stand beating our heads against the wall,
all the while knowing that these sorts of catastrophic events will indeed happen again
and again and again….
or we can say enough.

And if we are indeed strong enough to say “Enough!”…
We will have to stand in solidarity against the politicians, the entertainers and
even our fellow citizens who insist on choosing to turn a blind eye to the root cause.

“Enough!” we say to those who want the world to continue on it this surrealistic
state of denial…
“Enough”! to those who say forget the vetting, forget the travel bans,
forget the carefree open boarders because we are a better people than that…

For it is in that naive line of thinking where our problem lies…

There was a time when we could welcome those wishing to come to the land of freedom
and democracy in search of a new life….
Opening our arms and embracing those who saw something of promise and hope
in Western Civilization.
These newcomers joyfully did what it took in order to contribute to their new home.
Seeking work, most often hard and labor intensive.
They sent their children to American schools and wanted their children
to learn to read, write and communicate in English

Yet now within the masses of those who are coming and going freely are the very ones
who say to us that we are not a kinder more open people but rather that we are a foolish
and grossly naive people…and that our demise is their only desire.

That is not alarmist thinking.
That is not xenophobic thinking.
That is just the reality of our current times.
For we are indeed naive.

The Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan is a small microcosm of perhaps our
own naiveté.
It is estimated that 45% of Dearborn’s approximate 95,000 total population are
Arab Americans with a large percentage of those devoted followers of Islam.
Sharia law is readily observed and Dearborn is considered the Arab capital of
America housing the largest Mosque in North America.

And whereas it is an example of an enclave of ethnicity and immigration where many of those who
live do so wishing to live a dual existence of being both Middle Eastern and American,
it is also an area of welcome…a haven for others whose desires are not as virtuous
as they may readily blend in unnoticed.
For it is an area that is more Middle Eastern than American.

Yet those who argue when eyebrows raise,
point to places like Harlem, pockets of minority living that are
cultural places for minorities to feel comfortable living while feeling connected.

And there will be some who find highlighting such a city and its dominate population as being
bigoted, insensitive, racist or that of some nutty right wing alarmist’s observation…

That is not this post’s intent.

Yet whereas many will say that Dearborn is simply like those once predominately Irish,
Italian or German neighborhoods of the turn of the 20th century…
there is one big difference.
And that is the difference of ideology.

For there is a vast difference between the ideology of the Judaeo Christian
Western Civilization seen in the Irish, Jewish, Black, Latino neighborhoods
verses the neighborhoods of Middle Eastern Muslims.

And it is in that same ideological difference that lies the unwillingness to adopt Western
ways or to assimilate while melding into the culture.
Rather it is preferred, or more aptly expected, that the host culture melds to the ideology
of Islam…where Sharia law takes precedence to local American law.

Yet in our manic desire to appear to be all encompassing and welcoming, we bend over
backwards to accommodate and appease.
And therein lies our problem.
Yet most of us simply don’t see a problem.

And whereas we can all agree that the times in which we live are indeed frightening and
most uncertain, there are steps and measures that we can take to bring an extra level
of safe guarding to the situation,
but the problem is that our leaders and even many of our citizens are yet not willing to do such.

So we’ll just keep beating our heads, raising our terror threat levels and literally
picking up the pieces of the shattered lives because we simply refuse to see
what’s going on….

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! … The fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog. … Insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. … A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity….”

“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property,
either as a child, a wife, or a concubine,
must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power
among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities…
but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it…”

“No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund,
Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.
It has already spread throughout Central Africa,
raising fearless warriors at every step;
and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science,
the science against which it had vainly struggled,
the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”
Winston Churchill
The Nile River Walk 1899