Prairie Musings

Like many of you, I’m sure, I held my breath this past week when reports of a shooting at Westroads started coming across my social media, remembering that traumatic and tragic December day in 2007, praying this was not a repeat. Just a few days earlier, I held my breath as we awaited details on the shooting at the FedEx facility in my home town, Indianapolis, since I have friends and friends’ children who work there. This week, like many of you, I held my breath and waited with anxiety and sadness for the verdict from the jury in Minneapolis deciding the case of Derek Chauvin. We are a nation obsessed with, infected with, violence. Surely we need to find new and viable ways to address the racism that is still so obviously and painfully present throughout our society, the hopelessness and voicelessness that so many feel. And, just as surely our police and first responders have a difficult and dangerous job—we send them running in where we ourselves choose to run away. But perhaps tha

 See what love God has given us, that we should be called Children of God; and that is what we are (1 John 3:1a). Easter 3B, 1 John 3:1-7 There’s this really great advertisement I saw on the History Channel for its series called “Vikings” that shows a pudgy, balding, middle-aged man running out to his mailbox day after day, disappointed that something—we’re not sure what—hasn’t arrived. Finally, the envelope he’s been waiting for shows up—it’s the results of a DNA ancestry test. He rips it open, scans the results with disappointment, but then, at the very bottom of the page, he sees it—0.012% Viking. Suddenly he jumps up, he screams, and he’s transformed into a fur-robed, sword-wielding warrior. He knew it all along—he’s a Viking.  According to recent estimates, 26 million people have purchased one of those genetic ancestry testing kits. The journal “New Genetics and Society” recently published an extensive study based on interviews with Swedish, British and American individuals who