Why Worry About Other’s Problems? Free Verse Poem

It came upon
a late evening, clear.
As she rolled over,
not connected,
and I tried
(in vain)
to reconnect
(even though she was
late-night medicine
falling asleep),
she mumbled:
“Did you ever notice:
You try to help others
with their problems?”

A truer social media observation
was never made.
Facebook philanthropy
is alive and well.
How easy it is
to fix,
chastise,
or praise others
from afar,
when we have
our own issues
to deal with
right where we are?

Why do we solve for others?
Because it’s easy.
Because it’s quick.
Because it makes us feel
good about ourselves
and what we can do.
Because it’s fairly risk free.
Because IF they talk back,
we can ignore them.
Because we have
no responsibility
if our advice
or our helping
is terrible.

But if I have to answer
my children,
my spouse,
my parents,
my relatives,
my friends,
my neighbors,
face-to-face,
or through a phone call,
or in real time,
that’s risky!

They might not like
what I have to say.
They might get angry.
They might get frustrated.
They might lash out at me.
It might not go well.

Then again,
of course,
it might go fantastically.
And wouldn’t that be worth
all the risk
that there could be?

Don’t Untangle The Tangled Mess: Thought-Streaming Prose

On a recent trip, my wife and I had several hours of drive time in the car. We decided it would be good to do some energy work on some friends and family. (Yes, they’d given us permission to do such work.)

For those of you who don’t know, Marnie is a SimplyHealedTM practitioner. Using her gifts of perception and empathy, she can tap into what’s going on energy-wise in people, and then (if it’s negative energy), she can clear it. She doesn’t have to know exactly what happened. She doesn’t have to go in and do any sort of interviewing or discussion or anything like that. She can just sense that there’s an energy that’s out of alignment and out of place and can move it so it’s in alignment. (Want to try it out? Get on her calendar.)

A tangled mess of rope: either untangle it or throw it away

As she was doing the work on somebody close to us, she stopped and told me “I just had a really interesting sensation and a sort of vision. This person is standing next to other people who are close (emotionally) to this person. They all have cords running out of their solar plexus. The cords all meet in the middle. There’s this big tangled messed-up ball, almost as big as they are, a big tangled pile of rope like the ones we have in our yard. Or maybe it looks like a big tangled mess of fishing line or yarn. These people who are all tangled up — and other people — try to untangle this mess. The lines, the cords, are the stories and the past hurts and all the bad things that have happened, that bring bad feelings into these relationships.”

Don’t Fix The Tangled Mess

All the people involved know that this tangled mess exists. They try really really hard to untangle the mess, but it’s just not working. No matter how hard they try to untangle it, the mess just gets more and more tangled. (Later I said: “It sounds like that scene from the Tar Baby with Briar Rabbit, when he keeps pushing and pulling trying to get away from the tar baby, and finally the narrator says ‘The more he tried to get unstuck, the stucker up he got! Pretty soon he was so stuck-up he could scarcely move his eyeballs!'”)

Everybody is trying to fix this mess by untangling all the cords, all the lines, all the hurt and anger and frustration. Then she (my wife) said: “I had the thought and the perception that they need to just let all of those cords go. In this case the Savior came in and picked up this big mess and clipped off the cords where they connected to each of the people and took away the big mess and threw it away.”

Now they can look at this relationship, where the big mess used to be, and say, “Okay, these things aren’t in the way anymore! Let’s just move on from where we are without any of this tangled mess, without trying to figure out what happened in the past or anything like that.”

Then as she continued to work on this scenario, she realized that there were people who were also attached to these people. As these groups of people faced each other, they had their own much smaller tangles. As they were released from the cords, the Savior could throw away the messy tangles.

As she talked about this, I realized that was something that I did with my family members. Yes, there were huge horrific stories and things that happened in the past and big tangled messes. It may sound like you’re just walking away. That doesn’t mean that you have to forget about your life experiences. You need to learn from the past; you should learn from the past. But you don’t have to try to unravel that big wad of messed up cords. You just let it go.

What Can Fix The Tangled Mess?

When we look at fixing the tangled mess, we are getting the question. In my case, I turned it over to the Savior, and said “I can’t do this.” That’s what He is waiting for. When we do that, then He takes care of it. He doesn’t unravel or untangle or analyze it. He get’s rid of it. He heals us from it. And as each person gets disconnected and liberated from the mess with the other person, then they can turn and have a very simple relationship where information is going back and forth.

People can start building these beautiful relationships that are clear. Everybody stands in their own power with each other. There’s no big tangled mess. It’s as if, as they disconnect from the tangles, everybody’s relationship begins to get much more solid and much more free-flowing and the energy between people is strong. When a cord is not tangled up it can hold the weight and the pressure. But when it’s tangled then it slips and things slip and move in a way that they’re not supposed to. Christ heals those wounds that lead to the tangles.

Sometimes you can go into the mess, you can have the hard conversations, you can apologize, and you can untangle things because you need to untangle them, and because you’ve caught them early enough. But it reminds me of when I was young: I would sit there and spend literally hours trying to untangle a tangled-up fishing reel with backlash. It would be a huge mess. That’s when my Dad would say: “Just cut it and put some new line on the reel. Then we can go fishing!”

The hard thing is to let the Savior take that tangled mess and throw it away. It’s hard for us to let Him move it out of our lives so that there is no more backlash, no more tangled mess, no more past mess. But we need to let Him do that. Because as we try to untangle things, we go back and re-examine and re-examine and re-examine and re-examine. Then new hurts come up, and we tell ourselves all these stories about what they mean and what they could mean, what they possibly should mean. And the reality is maybe they don’t mean any of that. The reality is if we just throw away those tangled messes and start over from what is so, and where things are, then we can really start to move and build these strong, clean relationships.

What happens next? She also saw that it was as if a chip were inserted to each person who’d been cut away from the mess. The chip could be labeled: “This is what good relationships look like!”

Most people who have these big tangles have never had a good relationship modeled. All they may know is confusion, calamity, distrust and sadness. It’s as if the Savior puts a chip into their heads, saying: “This is what a good relationship looks like.” With those inspired models they can start developing relationships. They stand in their own power instead of saying “Oh I have to live this way because this tangled mess is the way I always saw it, so I assumed that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” But Christ comes through and says, “No, it doesn’t have to be that big tangled mess. This is how it could be for you!”

As people let go and let Him take away that big tangled mess, they can find the truth, which teaches them the correct and easier way to do things. And then they can develop meaningful relationships without having these massive tangled messes.

The Flags We Fly: Patriotic Sonnet

Our household flys a few flags
outside of our doors.
Often just one or two.
Sometimes a few more.

In season there’s Packers, Badgers,
Brewers and Sounders flags, too.
Sometimes there’s an M’s or a “12” banner.
But there’s always the Red, White and Blue.

Old Glory waves proudly
from the dawn’s early light
and on through the sunset and dark,
when we shine her up with spotlights.

No matter what sport we might be cheering or involved in,
our house wants folks to know how much we love our great Nation.

My wife is so patriotic she wrote a book about freedom. Find out about “Restoring Liberty” here.