What led me to become a Mennonite

53+ years ago, I married Deanna, a young woman I had met two years earlier, just a few days before we both graduated from High school. It was kind of like the old comment, "We went to different high schools together." Her school was some 25 miles away. We met at the skating rink here in our present home town. That building is now a paint store and a Chiropractor's office.

Deanna's mom wanted her three daughters at the skating rink every Saturday evening; sometimes on Fridays as well. It took a few years before I could get my mother-in-law to tell me how it was that they brought the girls in every week; not that I objected the fact. It was simple. She didn't want them dating boys from their home community. She really didn't trust them.

I've always been glad I met my wife for many reasons; our sons, our lives together and more. Right up at the top of my reasons for being glad is the fact that our romance and marriage led me to The Mennonite Church.

I was raised in a very "conservative" church that annually send thousands upon thousands of dollars over-seas to support missionaries places with indigenous Christian people who could have taught us more about Jesus than we ever have taught them. After all, some of the places were right where the Christian Church actually first began; places like Palestine, even Egypt where the Apostle Thomas formed probably the first Christian Church outside of Palestine. However, for all of the money we spent on foreign missions, that church had virtually no emphasis on carrying even a loaf of bread across the street to a needy neighbor -- especially if that neighbor wasn't a member of our own congregation or a sister church in the denomination.

I would often ask about that dis-synchronicity, but I my questions always were often answered with reprimands for questioning the doctrines, or with such as "You'll just have to pray about it."

So it was that in the final weeks of my High School Senior year I was seeking a better set of answers, although I didn't yet understand that I was looking for something totally different for a church. When we married just over two years after we met, we kind of experimented by alternately attending the denomination of my youth and a near-by Mennonite Church.

It didn't take long before I understood that HER church was the answer to those prayers I had been admonished to pray. Just a few months after our marriage, I experienced the joyful mission of helping clean up flood damage about 150 miles from our home. Finally, I had found the opportunity to carry that loaf of bread to a "nearby" someone in need. I had found an opportunity to be in mission here at home.

Years passed before I ever again attended the congregation of my high school youth. I ultimately became educated to a Master of Divinity degree from a Mennonite Seminary. While I never became a pastor, I have been in mission somehow ever since I became Mennonite. I've never gone overseas, and seldom have I even had to go across state lines to serve others. I seldom "preach" in ways that others think of, but I have had more joy in offering just that "cup of water" or loaf of bread to someone -- Christian or non-Christian -- who is in a painful situation.

There was a story I heard early in our marriage about St. Francis of Assisi (I believe). He took a younger brother at the monastery on a trip into town to preach about Jesus. They walked in one side of town, then to the opposite side and returned without stopping and without any exchange of words. As they were leaving town to return to the monastery, the younger brother said, "Brother Francis, I thought we were going to town to preach about Jesus? When do we start?"

St Francis replied simply, "We just did."

Now, 53 years later I am still married to Deanna, and I am still Mennonite.

CONGRESSIONAL FACT-CHECK

It has come to our attention time after time that the bulk of our Senators and Congressional Reps have not read the bills on which they are voting.

How they vote comes down to what their party leadership tells them to do.

The recent failed attempt to repeal Obamacare shows this problem for what it is. I would bet that not even 50% of Republicans bothered to read the thousands of pages involved in ACA. Democrats probably didn't fare much better here.

All were deprived of the opportunity to read what they were voting on. Even at the peak of the discussions, no one really knew the contents of the Republican plan, because it was still being written.

Perhaps there never was a "peak." With such lack of information, the whole discussion was a low-point of American history. A form of demagoguery seemed to be the code of the discussion from beginning to end -- perhaps unintentionally; perhaps intentionally. Half-truths, misstatements and outright lies were the rules of the day throughout the "discussions."

Thus; a simple proposal for better government with less demagoguery:

The Federal Government should be REQUIRED to establish and use its own "CONGRESSIONAL FACT-CHECK" organization, parallel to GAO. Such organization should employ no one who is not a speed reader; at hundreds of pages per hour with comprehension levels well in excess of 80% to 90%. No bill, and no amendment should be allowed on the floor of either HR or SENATE without a full review from this group.

Congressional Fact-Check would compile a complete table-of-contents and index for each bill and amendment to make it possible for Reps and Sens to check every statement/claim made by the authors/signatories -- and all opposing statements -- to each bill/amendment without having to rely on their party leadership.

This would make it possible for discussions to be based on total disclosure rather than verbal legerdemain.

All statements -- public/private, in Sen/Rep chambers or in private/public hearings -- SHOULD be accompanied by chapter-verse-and-line references so that all involved in the discussions and the general public can check the actual facts of the bills for themselves.

Until this kind of thing occurs we will never achieve TRUE representative government. ONLY THEN will we truly be able to hold lawmakers' feet to the fire and determine if they are doing their jobs, and not just taking orders from someone different from their constituents.

An Exercise in Self-Stigma

Foreword: I subtitle this as a "Forensics Tourney Version" of a post previously uploaded. This version came about due to my new acquaintance with a High School girl in one of the classes I was teaching a year ago. She was/is a leading member of her school's Forensics Squad; one of the most remarkable students I have known. When she learned of my involvement with NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Health), she wanted to share with me the script of her National Tourney piece. It had to conform to a strict 7 minute time limit. A few weeks we had her present to our local NAMI Affiliate, and the response was outstanding. Then I was asked to present my story at the next meeting. I already had written "I CAN NEVER AGAIN CALL" about a year previously, but I decided that if my young protege could confine to 7 minutes, then so could I. This is the shortened version. The full version was perhaps twice as long.

 An Exercise in Self-Stigma

"Forensics Tourney Version" of 

I CAN NEVER AGAIN CALL

I was in my brother’s town, and I couldn’t call to say, “Hi, Ron! We’re here.” He had died 5 days earlier, and his funeral was the next morning. That was a final line of sorts on my own story of self-stigma, and serves as my jump-off point for a general discussion on stigma.

I am an Adult A.D.D. That’s not an illness; not even a “disorder” as “Attention Deficit Disorder” implies. Neither is it deficient attention. It’s more like I’m over attentive to all stimuli, and it’s genetic. We ADD people are hard-wired that way. Perhaps the “deficit” for us lies in how our “condition” is handled by others. Until recently, we were seen as flawed. Many people, including therapists, sometimes believe that we need to be “fixed.”

That cannot happen. For me, meds never worked, and early-on most professionals categorically denied that ADD could exist in adults; if it existed at all.

I started Kindergarten in 1949 when the “Humane Mental Health Movement” was barely underway, and I graduated High School in 1962. Back then few professionals knew of ADD and it wasn’t until the late ’60’s that teachers and principals knew much of it. What we now accept as ADD was boiled down to behavior; good kids, bad kids and those who wouldn’t apply themselves. They knew “mental retardation,” but I was a bright kid with a volatile temper, so I was in trouble a lot.

Before I proceed, I want to state clearly that I do not blame others for what happened as result of being ADD I don’t want anyone to feel badly because of what I am about to say. I simply want to acknowledge it and use it as a teaching point. The past is done, and mostly I am reconciled with it.

At school I fought a lot; such that a black eye on campus was mine, or I had given it. I was shunned and/or goaded into more fights. I felt unaccepted and on the outside of everything to the point that a few years ago a past classmate commented, “I’m afraid we didn’t treat you very nicely in school.”

With very notable exceptions I even stood alone with teachers.

Ultimately, even now as an adult I expect “the other shoe to drop” every time I leave home.

As a teenager, I protected myself by pulling so far away that at my 50-Year High School Reunion, one of my classmates commented, “Jack, I remember you as a quiet boy.”  Little did he know that despite being quite talkative I had no one to talk to.

I responded, “The only reason I kept quiet was that if I didn’t, someone would be there to knock me down.”

Even in my family of origin, I seldom felt secure. From childhood I remember little beyond conflict. If it wasn’t my dad getting into it with me or an older brother, it was two older brothers fighting. It matters little where the onus for that may have lain. That is just how I experienced life.

Despite the fact that as a toddler I was doted on by my older brothers and sisters, I just didn’t feel unconditionally loved, and I pulled away even from them. I decided that some of my family really didn’t like me; especially Ron.

I saw “signs that proved” my belief. Despite the fact that when we were little, Ron and I were nearly inseparable, in time I came to avoid him. If I was traveling on business, passing literally within two miles of his house, I made a point not to disturb him. It hurt badly at first, but since I reasoned that was the way he wanted things, I began to “reconcile” myself to what I thought was reality. I would pass by; in tears at first. Besides, he was a busy physician.

Well, wouldn’t you know it? Just when I think I’ve got it down pat, my machinations start to break down.

When our school in Oklahoma held a 100 year celebration a few years ago I avoided checking to see if Ron was going even though we would travel the same highway. I was reconciled to my old classmates, so I thought it didn’t matter if he were there not. When someone said they saw him, I struggled with my response. Should I maintain my status quo and not “bother him?”

To my surprise, before I could decide, he looked me up in the crowd and gave me a warm, loving hug; the warmest family hug I had known for many years.

My inner response? “I didn’t know!”

From that time, I began to reconcile to Ron, and would make special effort to stop for lunch with him as I drove past. I hoped that without fanfare, in time I would be able to put things such as I’ve written here into the distant past.

Then, a couple of weeks before Ron died I had a phone visit with Glen, Ron’s best friend, whom we consider a part of our family. Glen told me of when he and Ron first met in the Eighth Grade.

“Jack, I don’t know if you know this, but when Ron and I became friends he knew you were treated badly at school. He made a point to say, ‘We’re going to be friends, but you need to know that Jack’s a part of the package, and that’s the way it will stay.’”

Glen said he had seen many times when someone treated me badly and Ron followed up later, confronting the offender and telling him to stop. Ron was a “big man on campus,” and most people listened to him.

Glenn finished, “You may not know it, Jack, but Ron always had your back.”

I never knew, and that’s “the rest of the story.”

I began planning a stop at Junction City on May 2, a planned visit to the State Capitol for the annual NAMIWalks, Kansas. I wanted to find a way to say, “Thank you for looking out for me even though I never understood.”

BUT, the cruel turn of fate was that my self-stigma became the final line of our relationship.

I can never again stop to have lunch with my brother. I can never again call him, visit him or write him.

I can never tell him, “Thanks, Ron.”