An Indomitable Spirit

What I am thankful for...

A “pandemic walk” March 20th, 2020

It wasn’t until this morning, over a coffee, the day before Thanksgiving, that I heard how my dear nana made ends meet after WW2 was winding down. When my granddad finally announced he was leaving for good my nana got a job as a house cleaner.

As reference for new subscribers, I wrote my mum’s story in A War of Forgiveness. My longest piece. I thank you for your interest in my writing.

Mum and I were discussing the historical hatred, that’s risen it’s ugly head again, for the Jewish people. My mum told me that my nana, suddenly abandoned, with no means to feed them, went to work for a prominent Jewish family. She worked for them for several years. Mum said nana never understood why locals, and even my mum’s school friends gave them both a hard time for this. My nana was ridiculed endlessly, and my mum was cornered by a school mate asking “if it was true that she saw her mum riding her bike away from that family’s house.”

I felt my stomach churn thinking about

Eve Barlow

‘s latest piece, which I had read very early this morning. The overall fight and indomitable spirit of these women. I thought to myself, imagining my nana riding her bike with a German Buzz-Bomb overhead, as fast as she could to the bomb making factory in the early 1940’s, and how Eve is running, literally running miles, to breathe in 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

How Jews today are still living in fear.

I looked across the table at my mum and realized that her spirit lives within me. The refusal to buy into these last four years of madness and coercion. Go ahead and bring it. Cancel us. Some of her friends did their best. It never worked. She loved them anyways, although many stayed away and wouldn’t speak to her. The first thing my mum said to me about the forced vaccines “or else,” was, “I lived through a war.” Mum recognized immediately what a war on the people looked like. Or else what?? You won’t come to Thanksgiving?

When one of my husband’s family members found out I wasn’t vaccinated, we were uninvited. Oddly, I was thankful. I knew my spirit was intact. I experienced quite a bit of low-life treatment, yet I knew I was living inside of an indomitable spirit. A spirit that was nearly crushed to death.

I read

Justine Bateman

this morning too, about the grocery store and “the birth of the suffocation.” I pray it’s over, yet I am prepared for it to never end. As long as money and power are driving forces in the world, we can only rely on the truth we see and feel around us. She is another new hero of mine. Another indomitable spirit that never backed down against the powerful Hollywood crowd.

The blessing of this Thanksgiving to me is that I found myself in these last four years right back on those stones I described in my very first story. And I found others who never wavered through incredibly dark storms. We know the spirit of the salmon. The life force of a birthplace, holding onto the generations to come that somewhere along that river is a saving grace for the one who might carry the torch of free thinking forward. For our true freedom will never come from man.

I closed that first piece with this:

The endless river. Water running over stepping stones. Each generation rising, floating, sinking, repeat. Seeking better, crossing oceans, trekking prairies, leaving family, holding onto grief and loss from wars, plagues, famine., many dying along the way. Fighting for a piece of a dream, dying while laying the foundations of buildings, bridges, railways, toiling on farms and digging in mines. Stories that repeat themselves time and time again.

As I stand upon the Rock of my Maker, looking over the glistening river, and back through my own history I am so many people. They tie my story together as I will tie my grandchildren’s stories together. Whole, broken and missing pieces.

The story of us, like it or not, is the family we keep.

And to the salmon:

A salmon's life purpose is to swim upstream to be born in the freshwater rivers where its parents die. They spend most of their adult lives in the ocean, and then return to where they were born to lay their eggs. This behavior is driven by an instinctual need to ensure the next generation of salmon have a safe place to grow up in the calmer waters of the river tributaries.

Cheers to the indomitable spirits brought forth to go against the tides of dominions. I pray for the hostages to be released soon. I pray for the safety of my Jewish friends and the will of the people to stand up for what is true. I pray for wars to end, and for those who perpetrate evil, to be brought to justice. I pray for the characteristics of Christ to be infused into the minds of leadership throughout this world and for us, the people, to discern what is of good character.

I pray most for us to recognize that we are all children of God. There is no better or worse than the other.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on revolutionary Christianity:

Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear ... Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.

This holds true today.

Be brave. Deuteronomy 31:6

I wish for you peace in your heart this Thanksgiving and always,

ox

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on silent theology:

We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing — for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’ — for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Christ's ultimate command:

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.