Shadow and Me. Shadow is the name of my mix breed dog of Dachshund and Pit Bull Terrier. He takes me for a walk each morning and I think as I walk. Organizing my random thougts is an exersize which is fruitfull. Rather than letting my thoughts be what I think. I organize them and then choose what I actually think. Having a thought is not thinking. Thinking is processing throughts.

There is a new neighbor who has a sign hanging on the front porch which reads "Do you believe in life after death?  Trespass and find out."  This prompted a lot of thoughts, the first was "how hostile, it might be cute on an adolescent's bedroom door, but not on a front porch."  Do I want to meet this new neighbor or not?  How about keeping enemies close?  People who think this way are enemies and I'm a christian who is called to love my enemies.  How do I love this new neighbor. I'd like to avoid him.  Is that loving him?  I really do not know. 

I think that there is fear and anger behind the sign and I wonder what it is about the person's life that creates such fear.  It can be a multitude of things in a person's life such as being abused as a child or being bullied as a kid.  It can be a chemical imbalance in the brain or some kind of mental illness or emotional disability.  The variety of possible causes remind me that there are so many people who do not have access (even though it is available) to proper diagnosis or treatment, and there are those who do have the access and don't seek it or don't till late in life.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that it is primarily a social and cultural issue and then a personal one.  We have the culture we want because we are the ones who create it.  It may not be what any of us individually prefers but it is a result of what we as a group produce.  There is still too much in our society that encourages fear of one another and violence as the answer for security.  Something happened after Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that "all we have to fear is fear itself".  We have progressively become a more fearful society since the 1950's.   I personally think that with our climb to the top powerful nation, we turned our fear in on ourselves; with the recent 9-11 event in our lives we also now have fear of ourselves and others.  We have moved into a nation of people who know no safe place except behind force.  This is false security because there is always someone else who will come along with a bigger or better gun.

My neighbor and I live in this social environment together and I choose to leave him alone.  If we are brought together somehow, I will do my best to love him as myself, and do unto him as I would want him to do to me.  Not be fearful of him and not try to change him and not be bullied by him.  I have been referring to him and it may be a her or a them.  At this point all I know is the sign.