Pith for the Day

RantWoman does not automatically look to blind geek email lists for spiritual guidance. Perhaps RantWoman should consider it a blessing sometimes to find such there anyway:

"People who say something is impossible should not interrupt those already doing it."

RantWoman feels obliged to seek spiritual guidance as to possible issues of pridefulness and how with at least a teensy bit more finesse to share her Light related to the above item. For RantWoman's trouble she has been served up:

"As we search the Scriptures, we must allow them to search us,
to sit in judgment upon our character and conduct."
Jerry Bridges, author, speaker and staff member of The Navigators
http://www.navigators.org/


From Musings of a Quaker Witch:
http://aquakerwitch.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-didnt-speak-up-and-my-conscience-is.html

RantWoman is reading this, substituting concepts and realities significant to RantWoman, to stiffen her own spine and force those around her to try again. Hold this in the Light!

I'd already asked a question that morning, which I felt was misunderstood and taken in a direction I hadn't meant at all.

There are other areas of my life where I feel criticized for "talking too much."

Most of all, I guess I was afraid of that cascade of things that can happen, that does happen all too often, when I stick my head up as a minority.

Ugh!

Even though the issue we were already talking about was one of justice for a minority among us -- what's more (!), one of which I'm a member, and pretty obviously, too, sitting there holding hands with my wife, who'd also given vocal ministry as a member of a same-sex couple.

I didn't want to go there. I didn't want those things to start happening. I didn't want to feel more alone. I didn't want stand up, expose myself as a further minority within my community, and risk things like being more isolated, having my concerns not heeded or simply not seen, being put down or dismissed because I'm a minority and therefore less/not important/because I'm not Christian and therefore less/not important, being told yet again that of course Quakerism is Christian even if not all Quakers are Christian, or that reality and the truth are too complicated for us to present to outsiders/too complicated for this document/not relevant to this issue...

...As if integrity and the truth are ever too complicated or irrelevant to our testimony and witness in the world and to each other.

And I kept hoping that lovely thing that sometimes happens in worship or worship for business would happen -- you know, where someone else says or brings up something, and then you don't have to. Every other thing I was at all uncomfortable about in the draft, someone else brought up. I really hoped someone else could be in the spotlight on this one and I would be off the hook.

Here, apropos of the above, Micah Bales on the glory and responsibility of abolishing the laity:
http://lambswar.blogspot.com/2012/01/abolishing-laity.html
RantWoman is meditating about how on earth thoughts phrased in such terms can apply to the Friend above without the verbal framing being completely disrespectful of that Friend's experience of what RantWoman is used to calling God.