Everything Happens for a Reason....

by Marilyn Moore

"Everything happens for a reason…" and then the voice trails away, because there really doesn’t seem to be a reason, and there’s not much more to say.  Many times this phrase is uttered in the most tragic of circumstances, such as a young parent who dies and leaves behind a grieving spouse and bereft children, or an accident claims the life of the most beloved member of your group of friends, or the highly-sought after elected position goes to someone else…those times when people gather in silence, and shake their heads, and someone says, “Well, everything happens for a reason,” and it’s supposed to be comforting, but it isn’t….

Sometimes those words are said in moments of great confusion, those times when everything is sideways and upside down.  Sometimes they’re said to convey the message that God or Allah or Yahweh or the Higher Power has caused a great shakeup to get our attention, to send a message. 

I’ve heard those words recently in reflection on the time in which we live now, a time in this country marked by a pandemic that we cannot or will not control and wide-spread unrest about social injustice and racism.  The speaker was searching for meaning in a time of chaos, and the speaker is not alone – millions are doing the same.  The hope or prayer within those words was something like, “I don’t know why you let this happen to us, God, but I know you have a plan, and I’m trusting you….” 

And it’s at that point that I have to back away, because I don’t think the pandemic or the racism at the heart of the social unrest is God’s plan at all.  I’m not presuming to speak for God, but the God I know and worship does not cause a global pandemic that has inflicted illness upon millions and death upon hundreds of thousands in order to send a message.  The God I know and worship does not cause a white police officer to kill a black man by kneeling on his neck in order to get us to pay attention to centuries of racism. 

I don’t dispute the assertion that there’s a reason, or many reasons, for what we’re living in right now...I just think the reason is human behavior, not divine determination.  We’re living in a pandemic because viruses develop and circulate and are transmitted without regard to borders...and it has reached pandemic proportions because we are reluctant to take the measures that would most effectively stop the transmission. 

And in the midst of the edginess of the pandemic, the constant worry about health and the uncertainty of economic security, the egregious killing of George Floyd became a flash point for people across the country and around the world, a flash point that burns from hundreds of years of racism, discrimination, and the reality that we are light years away from acting on the belief that all are created equal…and the disturbing truth that many people don’t believe that “all are created equal” stuff anyway. 

The cracks in our social structures that have always been there are magnified with hard-to-ignore clarity in this pandemic.  People of color have been impacted by job loss, by economic hardship, by illness, and by death to a greater degree than those who are white.  And in George Floyd’s death at the knee of a white police officer, we saw, everyone in this country saw, the inequality in the justice system.  The resulting stories in the following days, still more deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, the plea to say their names, the significant protests across the country, magnified and amplified the systemic racism in country.  All of this happened not because God wanted to send a message, but because of our own very human behaviors.

What I know from chaos science is that in the midst of chaos there is always a pattern…and it’s hard to see the pattern.  In fact, sometimes it’s impossible to see the pattern, because we can’t get far enough away, in either distance or time, to see the pattern in the chaos in which we are immersed.  It may be decades before the pattern, the big picture of this time, becomes clear.  But not seeing the pattern, not seeing the whole picture, is not an excuse for stepping back and waiting for God, or someone else, to fix this mess, this time when we disregard science because it’s inconvenient, and we don’t talk about racism, because it’s uncomfortable. 

The God I know and worship has created humans with minds to understand and solve problems, with hearts to love one another, with hands to reach across the street and around the world, and with courage to do what is right.  And that’s a reason to listen, to learn, to hear the stories and perspectives, and to act.

Finding my heart in a simple summer-solstice hug

By Mary Kay Roth

I’m not really sure how you describe a hug.

Webster’s says this: “To press someone tightly in one’s arms, especially as a sign of affection.”

Wikipedia explains that hugs are generally a “form of endearment in human communities, in which two or more people put their arms around the neck, back or waist of another, and hold each other closely.”

I can tell you this much. On Saturday, summer solstice 2020, I hugged my wee granddaughters – Scout and Everlyn – for the first time in more than three months. And they hugged me back. Tenderly. Fiercely.

It was a hug to end all hugs. A hug that defied Webster’s and Wikipedia.  A colossal, super-duper, wing dinger of a hug – filled with heart and soul, tears and giggles, affection and memory. A hug that my dad, who gave the greatest granddaddy of all bear hugs, would have been proud.

Yes, you can Zoom and FaceTime.  You can press your hands up against a glass window or door.  You can stand six feet apart, open your arms and pretend.  But it just doesn’t work like the magic of true touch.

The ongoing pandemic has created titanic losses in our world and I never want to underestimate the tragedy of losing lives and economic stability, nor the catastrophic glare of inequity that plagues this crisis. But forgive me, I would also count hugs as a monumental loss. 

A shoulder to cry on.  The simple touch of understanding. The healing power and wonder of connection. That wash of comfort that defies logic. The quiet embrace that says, without a word, everything will be all right. 

The word hug likely originates from 'hugga', an Old Norse term that first appeared 450 years ago and meant 'to comfort.' However, the history of the act of hugging is a little fuzzier, though many zoologists believe you can see beginnings rooted in the early history of mammals:  Elephants linking trunks, big cats nuzzling, chimps holding one another. 

On the other hand, scientific research is completely clear that there is healing power in a hug, as an embrace brings increased flow of oxytocin – a hormone that calms nerves and boosts positive emotions.  In other words, a good hug: 

·      Lowers your blood pressure

·      Lowers your cortisol (the stress hormone)

·      Increases your social connection and sense of belonging

There’s an old wives’ tale that professes each time someone warmly embraces you, your life is extended by one more day. I’m not so sure about the validity of that claim, but we do know that in several documented studies:

·      Students that received a supportive touch from teachers were twice as likely to raise their hands in class.

·      A sympathetic touch by a doctor gave patients an impression that their appointment lasted twice as long as it did.

·      Patients who received physical touch often experienced reduced pain and reduced symptoms of depression.

Healthy or not, hugs became one of the many casualties of this raging global pandemic, with responsible people shutting their doors and embracing the concept of no embraces.  Months marched on and curves indeed flattened.  But today, due to a monstrous lack of state and national leadership, we are left to navigate these turbulent and confusing waters on our own. To get a haircut or not?  To go to the pool, the farmer’s market, a restaurant – or not?  To hug – or not to hug? 

I believe each family has their own unique story, a patchwork of puzzle pieces they must consider. Like so many folks, my kids and I are scrambling for solid, sensible principles – aiming to make decisions based on integrity and good judgment.  Rest assured, I’m not heading for indoor rallies, and my daughter has opted to delay visits to public pools and community playgrounds. Our family members diligently wash hands and wear masks in indoor and compact public spaces. We are keeping tabs on community spread. And since my daughter is a nurse, we are also guided by significantly increased testing in the nursing home where she works.  Finally, we recognize that ongoing vigilance is required and at some point we might need to take a step back.

But for now we are taking a leap of faith and choosing to end the moratorium on hugs with my grandbabies.  I believe the hot summer of 2020 could be a rough one and I am going to fortify my home with the power of touch.  

I recognize – in the grand scheme of this chaotic, troubled, world –  the question of a hug seems pretty insignificant.  But for one moment, on this very first day of summer, it was everything to me.  

Some stories just beg for the telling

By JoAnne Young


I listened this week as a diverse group of people, about 175 of them, went to microphones set up for them in Omaha and Lincoln. They had been invited to tell their experiences, concerns, ideas and solutions surrounding racism and police interactions to eight Nebraska senators elected to make laws that oversee the state’s judicial system. 

I don’t know what the senators took away from those listening sessions. What I heard was 175 compelling stories, and I would love to tell every single one of them. 

Because here’s the deal. Our brains are wired for story – to tell them and to hear them. It’s been that way from the beginning of time. Even in our sleep, we craft stories from the chemistry that is our thoughts and memories, and call them dreams. Some insightful, some fright filled, many forgotten by morning. 

My love of storytelling is at the same time learned and organic. 

In my grandmother’s family, there was said to be an uncle who could enrapture people for hours with his tales. I may have had at least one encounter with Uncle Mace, but it’s a hazy childhood memory. He died when I was 10. My aunt, his niece, was also a storyteller. A columnist and author of several books, who dug into stories that came out of the history of Oklahoma. A typewriter was central to her home décor. 

I have been lucky enough in my career to be able to tell a few stories, to listen as someone chronicled at least a part of their lives and then trusted me to retell it. 

There is at least one story that has been with me a few years that I haven’t retold, but I know it deserves at least a longform telling. Maybe a book. I have researched it, visited other states to track down people and details, spent hours on the internet and some time on the phone talking to friends and relatives of the true-life characters that inhabit this story. 

Frequently, I can tell them more about the story than they can tell me. 

It’s always a surprise that a story can be so shrouded from the annals of family lore. Especially one that involves, as this one does, courtrooms and crimes and a dead baby girl lying in an old cemetery with no marker to show she existed, even for a short time. 

“Good lord. I’ve never heard this story. That’s fascinating,” a great-great-grandson  told me recently.

“Some things are harder to talk about than others,” his sister told me a couple of days later. “My family never talked about this.”

I found the story in a morgue, a newspaper morgue. It leapt out from the light of a microfiche reader. 

I have never met the people who populate the story. Its pivotal moment happened a hundred years ago, and they are lying in cemeteries spread from the southwest to the east coast. But I have come to know them through the gathering of details about their lives. 

I have no journals or diaries of their thoughts or feelings. Just the facts. 

I have thought from time to time I should find another story, like literary nonfiction writer Erik Larson (“Devil in the White City,” “Isaac’s Storm”), who chooses stories that have an ample supply of documents, journals and recorded history. But I can’t let go of this. One of the characters must want this story told. 

Maybe it’s the baby in the unmarked grave.

On May 29, she would have turned 100. And she has a hell of a story to tell.

LISTEN LEARN ACT

by Mary Reiman

My blog posts are usually stories of my life, things happening in and around my world view. But it is the time to take "I" out of the conversation. This week has reminded me that my time should be spent listening and learning from the stories of others, allowing the phrases to flow through my mind into my being and moving to action. Those S.E.E.D. (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) workshops seem so long ago, when Peggy McIntosh was with us discussing white privilege. And what did we learn and how did we act on what we learned?  Reading, reflecting, listening, learning, more reading, more reflecting, more listening, more learning. Words, thoughts, poems, teachings. Even with all the discussions, it was never enough. 

We need systemic change. 

Thanks to those who have posted thoughts and reflections and those who have reposted the reflections of others. Below are a few of the voices rising up this week. 

READ

National Museum of African American History and Culture

Talking About Race

LISTEN

LeVar Burton’s Story

READ

President Barack Obama

LISTEN

Adam Foss TED Talk: A prosecutor's vision for a better justice system

READ

President Jimmy Carter

LISTEN

Trevor Noah Breaks Down Reparations & White Privilege – Between the Scenes

READ

Peggy McIntosh

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack 

The list could go on and on. Each day brings another powerful message that needs to be heard or read...and absorbed. It needs to stay in the forefront of our minds, driving us to take action, to keep listening, to have the difficult discussions. Whatever words you find that speak to your heart and soul most clearly, that help you resolve to take action, revisit them. Revisit them often. 

And are you looking for books addressing systemic racism? Children's books about diversity? Young adult titles? Let me know if you can't find any. However, I doubt you need me to curate a list for you. There are booklists everywhere, such as this one from the Chicago Sun Times, as well as recommendations from our Lincoln City Libraries. Check them out. Resolve to learn more..and take action.

LISTEN

LEARN

ACT