All Categories - trish hermanson

Brenda Received Her Calling before Birth

7/6/2020

Brenda received her life’s calling before she was born, but didn’t realize it for years.
     She was still in the womb when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her father and seven siblings took a vote and decided her mother should end the pregnancy so the cancer could be treated. Brenda’s mother objected. “It’s my child and I won’t do that.”
     She died five months after Brenda was born.
     Brenda told me, “My daddy never said my mother’s name. Never showed me pictures of her.”
     But Brenda loved playing nurse as a child and dreamed of becoming one. The dream nearly evaporated when she took on the rigors of nursing school while raising three children. One day she sat in her car crying and wished she could talk with her mother. “I heard an audible voice: ‘She gave her life for you, and she didn’t have to.’” That spurred Brenda on, and she finished school.
     I’m grateful she did, because today Brenda is an oncology nurse treating my daughter Ashley. As she told me her story, she had an epiphany: Her mother had cancer and gave her life for her; now Brenda gives her professional life to those with cancer. “I never thought about that before,” she said. “But I think It’s a calling.”
     Brenda’s story took my breath away. I’ve never audibly heard God, but sometimes I get a thought to call someone, or an idea to act upon. When I do, things happen that - dare I say? - carry the fingerprints of the supernatural.
     I think sometimes God nudges me.
  How about you?

Is America Threatening to Hit Its Expiration Date?

7/2/2020

Is America threatening to hit its expiration date?
     If we follow the pattern of other great nations and empires, our country will reach its expiration date six years from now when it turns two hundred fifty, according to author Cal Thomas.
     Thomas bases his prediction on the research of Sir John Glubb, an English scholar who traces the rise and fall of empires over three thousand years. Glubb concludes that the average time before empires fall from grandeur is two hundred fifty years.
     The United States is in the last stage of empires, the age of decadence, according to Thomas. “Given the history of other empires and great nations, the decadence that now is tightening its grip on America almost guarantees our demise or at the very least a radical decline…,” he says in his book “America’s Expiration Date.”
  Can we stop this downturn? “Possibly,” he says, “though the hour is growing late. But any revival of the American spirit won’t come through politics and politicians.… America’s central problems are not economic and political; they are moral and spiritual. If not addressed on that level, our doom is sure,” he says.
     Then how can we make America great again? Not through government, Thomas warns. Only through individual moral and spiritual responses will our country revive.
  So what is my part in this?

The Whack Heard 'Round the World

6/27/2020

Danuta Danielsson had nothing but passion and a purse when Neo-Nazis marched through her Swedish town in 1985. She was infuriated because her mother had been imprisoned in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, so she took what she had and acted.
     The whack of this ordinary woman was seen around the world and was eventually recognized with a statue.
     Is Danuta the kind of person we should memorialize? I don’t condone violence during protests, not even with a handbag, but isn’t it better to honor bravery like this rather than that of Confederates who enslaved people for their profit?
     We can laud ordinary heroes even if we don’t raise a memorial to them. We can revere people like Patrick Hutchinson, a black grandfather who carried an injured white man in London over his shoulder during a protest to get him out of harm. What he had was strength, and with that he crossed cultural lines to do what was right.
     I’m as unremarkable as Danuta Danielsson or Patrick Hutchinson, and I sometimes wonder whether anything I do could make any difference. But perhaps the real question is whether I’m willing to step out of my comfort zone to do what is right when I hear of or see wrongdoing. I could at least speak up.
     Would I dare?
     Or am I afraid to be an ordinary hero?    ***
Photos: top, Hans Runesson; middle, Romea.cz; bottom, Dylan Martinez, Reuters.

Oh, the Places You'll Go

6/22/2020

I don’t think this is what Dr. Seuss meant when he wrote “Oh, the Places You’ll Go,” but nature called when Duane and I visited Bayou La Batre, Alabama, recently. Recognize that name? It’s where Forrest Gump built his shrimping business.
     I wanted to explore this fishing village made famous by the Gump movie. Oh, the things we discovered, like a rusted-out Soviet submarine dry-docked next to a drawbridge - stories vary as to why it’s there. We drove by the Perfect Alternative Baptist Church - what’s it an alternative to? And the Odd Fellows Cemetery - it's named after an international fraternity, but do you have to be odd to be buried there? A sign advertised Murder Point Oysters, and I wondered if Rocky’s Gym of Faith meant you had to have faith that working out would do any good.
     These sites gave me chuckles. But another smacked me in the face with reality - a musty second hand store where profits go toward providing temporary food, shelter, and clothing to families in crisis.
     Such is life, both humor and sorrow. Our journey reminded me of writer John Steinbeck who said that “we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” He and Seuss were right: oh, the places we go if only we open our eyes and our hearts to all that is around us.
  What’s around you?

Lincoln Missed the First Juneteenth

6/19/2020

When I visited Denver’s Juneteenth celebration a few years ago to enjoy the hand drumming, I had no clue that the holiday carries significance far beyond honoring African American culture. I learned since then that Juneteenth is a shortened form of June 19, 1865. That was the day, two months after the Civil War had ended, that a Union general entered Texas, the most remote Confederate state, and publicly announced that “all slaves are free.”
     Juneteenth is America’s second independence day. More African Americans were freed through the Civil War than white colonists were freed from the Revolutionary War.
     But let’s be honest, the slaves were only set free-ish. What followed were lynchings and segregation and separate-but-not-equal and the re-emergence of white supremacy. As a country, we’re still reaping the harvest of America’s original sin - racism.
     Abraham Lincoln missed the first Juneteenth. The great emancipator was assassinated two months before. He had proclaimed in his second inaugural address that the Civil War was divine punishment for a national moral debt created by “250 years of unrequited toil.” Since then, I wonder if we have incurred another 155 years of debt, the consequence of our continuing bigotry.
     I’m as white as a fish belly, so I can’t claim to understand the degradation my black friends have endured. But on this Juneteenth, I honor this significant day.
     Because under God, we are all created equal.
***
  Photo: Hernan Pinera, Creative Commons, text added.