DIY Project 2025

Twenty years ago on Christmas day a tsunami took 230,000 lives in eight minutes. At the time, I lived near the ocean and decided to do something to help. Habitat for Humanity trained me in Plains, Georgia to become a Global Village Team Leader.

While there, I (third from right), met President Jimmy Carter (far left) and Mrs. Carter (far right) at church that Sunday where President Carter delivered the sermon before teaching Sunday School, as he always had in his home church. Afterward, I visited the home, now a museum, where he had grown up directly across from the railroad tracks. Everything about the house was as humble as he was when I stood up to shake his hand and he smiled that wide familiar smile and said: "Please sit down". He was not a tall man, but he was a big man.

Many people think President Carter was the founder of Habitat. He was not. The non-profit Christian organization had its beginnings in his hometown. The Carter's became life-long volunteers building affordable houses around the world. It was a project close to their hearts. They put their hands and hard work into it because they believed in Habitat's mission that everyone deserves a decent, affordable place to live.

I have had a long relationship with Habitat for Humanity. My first build was with my daughter's youth group who helped build a home for a friend. When the walls were raised, we wrote messages to the family on the studs. They lived in that house with our names in those walls throughout their school years. Working alongside others for a common cause taught me the value of community. I learned something about painting, too!

This coming year seems like a perfect time to have a Do It Yourself Project 2025.

There are many, many worthwhile projects meant to help others in our own communities. Most are looking for volunteers, people like you and me, to help fulfill humble missions: delivering food, tutoring children, teaching reading, growing food.

Last week I visited my son in Asheville, North Carolina. It was three months to the day that Hurricane Helene had taken that mountain city by complete surprise in the same way the Thai people had been met with a rogue hundred-foot wave in 2004.* Nothing could stop the water from rushing over their homes and town, taking everything away within minutes. In Asheville, the aftermath of strewn cars, trucks, shipping containers marks the landscape. Tree trunks and boughs and limbs once standing tall have been reduced to piles of sawed logs. Mud-filled shops and restaurants still struggle to clean up. Conversations with store clerks, cafe workers, hotel staff each referenced the pain of a year none will ever forget. In Thailand, the fateful day when life changed from a peaceful place to a project, could be seen six months later in that "thousand-mile stare" replacing their "land of smiles". Despite the trauma, these people were very grateful for volunteers from around the world who came to help in what was the greatest response ever to a natural disaster. Many have helped the city of Asheville by donating needed water, clothing, food. Habitat Asheville has begun its work on the ground building homes and hope.**

During my flight home from North Carolina I spoke with a woman my age who like me had grown up in Massachusetts. She had been visiting her own family in Asheville. Neither hers nor my family had suffered damage for which we were grateful. Knowing where she hailed from signaled to me it was probably safe to comment on the upcoming 2025 changes we will be facing as a country. She immediately said that she and her granddaughter had decided to"plant a garden, read books, play games and do something in the community". She had already created her own DIY Project 2025!

If we each create our own Do It Yourself Project 2025 we will not only help our community, but we will reap the rewards of reinforcing the positive in our lives, in our family, in our neighborhood . . . in our country. Together we can build hope!

I would be interested to learn about your own plans to face down a rogue wave that is on the way. Please share your DIY Project 2025 in the comments section below.

Happy Hopeful New Year!

*https://www.worldvision.org/disaster-relief-news-stories/2004-indian-ocean-earthquake-tsunami-facts

**https://www.ashevillehabitat.org/how-to-help/volunteer/

Christmas in July!

I chose this for my Christmas Eve blog because I believe this message delivered six months ago still stands. In another six months, if we can still hear hope we will have, each and everyone of us, stood the test of time in a changing world. Hence, the true message of Christmas will live on. It is up to each and everyone of us.

The sermon begins at 51:00 into the video without editing, but the bell ringers at the beginning are lovely too! Thank you, Rev. Dr. Lea Slaton, for permission to repost your sermon.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=3584975128315889

Merry Christmas to all!

A Smear Campaign against Christ-mas

"With the right amount of coordination, perhaps Christians – and in particular, Christian women – could garner support for a movement of their own, making demands around issues such as abortion and transgender rights, which Donnelly opposes.

. . . “Maybe it’s the school board, maybe it’s city council. Maybe you’re going to go to the library and start booking some story reading hours,” said Donnelly. “We’ve got to get on offense and have our voices carried all over America.”*

I see no other way to interpret the above quote as anything other than an agenda, or a mission. The strategy couldn't be any clearer: Infiltrate public places that are meant to serve the public and deliver a message contrary to loving one's neighbor in these arenas. Said another way, during this season of "good will towards all" one could easily interpret the message as a smear campaign against the true Christmas Spirit. Is this a stretch? Perhaps, but no more so than the "holy war" being waged across the country, in this case by women. These women who call themselves "Mama Bears" are organized. They are smart. They are educated. They are well-to-do. What they hope to do, and have successfully begun to do, is use their collective voice to convince as many people as possible that supporting anyone unlike oneself is contrary to Christianity, as they define it. Let's pause here and remember where this whole story began.

The Christian story begins in the humblest way with a tiny baby born in a stable surrounded by beasts. Today's sanitized nativity scene does not show how desperate this homeless couple was on the night a young woman goes into labor with her first-born child. I wonder how her new husband handled the birth with only lowing cows looking on? Everyone survived the messiness of the moment as the story recounts each and every Christmas Eve around the world.

The little family of three then journeyed onward on the backs of camels. Like everyone, they had to deal with issues of the day under an oppressive government. Like any next door neighbor, they faced all the struggles of raising a family. The Temple played a big role in their lives where the education of the young son began. He became a scholar before his time, so to speak. The message this young Jesus brings to the elders and into the public square is non-judgemental and full of expecations.

He openly holds up the oppressed as equally deserving of love. He befriends women of all "reputations", as defined by others. He won't abide those who call them by derogatory names. He reminds his friends, called followers, that they ought to do the same. He wants them to; He expects them to carry this message of love to everyone, but especially to the lamest of the lame, the sickest of the sick, the poorest of the poor, the lowly of the low. No matter what. There is no room in this message for condemnation of any other person. No matter who. In the meantime, what was happening with his own Mama Bear?

Mary, as the story goes, understood that the message her son delivered in the public square was unpopular with the powerful rulers. She did not stop him. She watched her son being challenged by the authorities and arrested for his words of good will towards all, not some, but one and all. She knew what was ahead for her son, Jesus. She knew better than anyone about the threats against him by those who disagreed with the concepts and precepts of loving one another.

Since the first, there was no place in this story, this Christmas story, the story where Christianity itself originates that accepts or advocates for treating anyone as less than; No place where the story deviates from the truth that love of neighbor, all neighbors, was THE agenda two millenia ago. To try today to change that story to fulfill a very different agenda is a smear against the story itself, i.e., a smear against the 2,000 year-old Christmas story!

Any agenda or mission to alter, and re-write it cannot be based in the truth that love was and continues to be the only message contained in the Christ-mas story.

Like Jesus himself, some scholars today say:

Ultimately, the intent of these celebrations is to emphasize the importance of Jesus’ birth and how Christians are expected to follow the example of Jesus as one who proclaimed love, peace and justice in line with the great prophets of the Jewish faith.**

This Christmas like all that have come, and will come, is not intended for any other agenda than the one that began in a stable one night long, long ago.

*https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/16/her-voice-movement-jenny-donnelly-ziklag-trump?CMP=share_btn_url

**https://www.brandeis.edu/spiritual-life/resources/guide-to-observances/christmas.html#:~:text=Christmas%20celebrates%20the%20anniversary%20of,(John%201%3A%2014)