Faith, Grace, and Hope

A few days ago, I was driving down a busy Anchorage road with both my kids in the car. I glimpsed something in my lane up ahead and tried to make sense of what it was. As part of my brain registered that it was a crumpled American flag in my lane, the other part of my brain began to scan for where I could safely pull off and grab it, before it was run over, soiled, further disrespected. I have not said the Pledge of Allegiance in years. I remember clearly the curious looks I got for standing with my hands by side on my son's first day of kindergarten, silent while everyone else recited along with the principal over the intercom. I love to sing and the American national anthem is great for a soprano who wants to pretend she's Beverly Sills, but I stay quiet. My relationship to my country is not my greatest allegiance and I've pledged everything I've got to the One Who Loved Me First. Due to my activism, my efforts to bring change on a variety of levels of society, to

It is my father's belief that people understand history best if they know how they are connected to it. Thus, he used to explain that he knew his grandparents who had been born near the turn of the 20th century. The oldest people they would have known would have remembered the time before the American Civil War. The oldest people they knew when they were children might have remembered the presidency of Andrew Jackson or the War of 1812. Thus, because of my dad, I think of time in 50-year stories. I know someone born in 1954. If that person knew someone born in 1904, we've covered a century of knowledge. I'm only a time collapse away from a person alive before the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk. At confirmation, the other day, the kids and I did a little math. Let's say Paul's letter to the Galatians (the frontrunner for being the oldest text in the New Testament) is circa 50 A.D./C.E. 2018 - 50 = 1968 (so that many years separate us from the letter&#