Your mission (should you decide to take it – and, really, what’s the alternative?) is to keep hope alive in yourself so that you can bring it to those lost and weary in a valley of despair. May your irrepressible joy and never-ending good will to all bring light to the desolate, discouraged, and disheartened. May your generosity and open hearts transform the stingy, stodgy, and stuffy. May the bigots, bullies, and busybodies be transformed by your relentless kindness and unfailing patience. May you bring laughter to those in sorry need of a good laugh.
T’was the day they call Valentine’s and o’er all the land folks were giving out cards from hand-to-hand. There were cards with lace and cards with big hearts cards with words that rhyme and cards with moveable parts. There were funny cards and romantic cards, friendship cards and more. But what they all had in common was the love at their core. I love you! -Karen Molenaar Terrell
I’ve deleted my Spotify account and no longer have any podcasts through the Madcap Christian Scientist blog. I do have some other podcasts out there, though.
The last couple of days – in an effort to keep life in perspective – I’ve been making an effort to acknowledge all the 99.9% of life that’s good and beautiful and going on around me all the time – every creature that’s expressing life; every breath I take; every smile exchanged; every pretty little rock I find; the perfume of every flower I sniff in the Valentine’s display at the supermarket; every raindrop sparkling in the sunshine; every purr from my cat; every shared laugh on the boardwalk; every swan and eagle winging above me; every kindness shown me by friends and strangers – and I’m here to tell you that we live in a wondrous and bountifully beautiful world.
Karen Molenaar Terrell
Clara and her tail.December: Trumpeter Swan Flying over Skagit County, WATrumpeter Swans in Bow, WA (photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell)Otter Family
my memories of love aren’t confined within my brain aren’t held within the walls of cerebellum, cerebrum, and brainstem, tissue and goo, my memories of love are part of eternity – hid safe in the collective consciousness of Soul -Karen Molenaar Terrell
We created this home together – my love and I – and filled it with warmth and joy and now I sit in our “green room” and gather my memories around me like a soft blanket this is where Dad sat on his 98th birthday and reminisced with his old friends and there is his painting of Rainier and Mom sang and danced over there, and lived and died under this roof that last day, and over there is where the sons played the piano and laughed together and, later, their loves joined us under this roof and joined in the laughter while the pandemic made of our home a safe island and refuge
I feel all the love with me still Dad’s love and Mom’s and the sons’ and their partners’ and the love of the man who helped make this home with me
I feel the wholeness and fulness of my life and am grateful -Karen Molenaar Terrell
I have a whole universe in my thoughts. And I decide what happens in there. I am the boss of me. – Karen Molenaar Terrell
“Hold steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionately to their occupancy of your thoughts.” – Mary Baker Eddy
driving to the comforts of home imagining a warm fire in the woodstove a cat curled in my lap and a pie in the oven I know there is love waiting for me in my home
and then I feel a grin come to my face as I realize that I don’t have to wait to get to a house to feel a home
like a turtle carries his home on his back I carry my home in my thoughts – Karen Molenaar Terrell
“Home is the consciousness of good That holds us in its wide embrace The steady light that comforts us In every path our footsteps trace.” – Rosemary C. Cobham, Christian Science Hymnal #497
There’s a new review on Amazon for my book Cosmic Connections: Sharing the Joy! SB writes: “I often feel like I’m right there with the author in her small town travels and happenings. The writing is fluid, poignant, and personal, yet universal – easy to translate to any place. It got me thinking about life, love, and the smallness of this big world.”
I so appreciate when someone takes the time to write a review for one of my books. It means so much to me when I read a review like this because it helps me feel I’ve connected to someone else in a positive way.
This morning I finished reading Joanna Nell’s new book, Mrs. Winterbottom Takes a Gap Year. I love Joanna Nell’s books. Here’s the review I wrote for the one I finished this morning:
I so enjoy Joanna Nell’s stories. Joanna Nell gives dignity and respect to her aging characters. Her characters are full of life and humor, wanting to make use of every moment left to them. Her books inspire me. She makes growing old fun.
My father lived to be 101 and, even as he was losing his memory, he wanted to get out and go on drives and have adventures with me. As I read Joanna Nell’s books, I can see him as the hero in one of her stories. That makes me smile.
“Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man.” -Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 393)
I finally gathered my courage and watched Leave the World Behind on Netflix. I’d been reluctant to watch this movie because I’ve been feeling fragile lately – bombarded on the internet and television with images of disease and death, destruction and war and inhumanity – and I didn’t feel like I was ready for any more emotional breakage right now. But as I’ve been processing the movie in the last couple days, I’ve felt myself gathering courage, building a sort of steely resolve. If the people with financial and political power want us to isolate ourselves from each other, want us to be fearful and distrustful of each other, want us to cower in paranoia so that they can control and manipulate us – then, hell no! I am not going to isolate myself, or be scared or cowering.
I am going to be part of the resistance movement.
Wikipedia says this about “resistance movements“: “Resistance movements can include any irregular armed force that rises up against an enforced or established authority, government, or administration. This frequently includes groups that consider themselves to be resisting tyranny or dictatorship.”
In the textbook for Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes (on p. 29): “Christians must take up arms against error at home and abroad.They must grapple with sin in themselves and in others, and continue this warfare until they have finished their course.”
Note that Mrs. Eddy isn’t saying we should arm ourselves with assault weapons or bazookas. She’s talking about another kind of warfare all together. She writes in Science and Health (p. 225): “A few immortal sentences, breathing the omnipotence of divine justice, have been potent to break despotic fetters and abolish the whipping post and slave market; but oppression neither went down in blood, nor did the breath of freedom come from the cannon’s mouth. Love is the liberator.”
I’m going to take up arms of love and joy and hope against the would-be tyranny of hate and fear and despair. I’m going to consciously reach out with joy and kindness and patience to my fellow earthlings. I’m not going to let the images of war and hate we’re constantly bombarded with on television and in social medial deter me from my mission of kindness. I’m not going to let the advertisements and commercials filled with images of disease keep me shackled in fear and isolated from others. “Hell no! We won’t go!” there. -Karen Molenaar Terrell
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P.S. As I was pondering “resistance” the climactic scene from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle came into my thoughts. In this scene the protagonist, Meg, is resisting the hate and tyranny of IT. She’s been told she can fight IT with something she has that IT doesn’t have – and she’s trying to figure out what that is. IT is trying to get control of her thoughts, and she’s starting to lose the battle:
“…as she became lost in hatred she also began to be lost in IT…
“With the last vestige of consciousness she jerked her mind and body. Hate was nothing that IT didn’t have. IT knew all about hate…
“‘Mrs. Whatsit hates you,’ Charles Wallace said.
“And that was where IT made ITs fatal mistake, for as Meg said, automatically, ‘Mrs. Whatsit loves me; that’s what she told me, that she loves me,’ suddenly she knew.
“She knew!
“Love.
“That was what she had that IT did not have.
“She had Mrs. Whatsit’s love, and her father’s, and her mother’s, and the real Charles Wallace’s love, and the twins’, and Aunt Beast’s.
“And she had her love for them…”
“She could love Charles Wallace. Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. I love you, Charles. Oh, Charles Wallace, I love you. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was unaware of them…
“I love you. Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you.
“Slowly his mouth closed. Slowly his eyes stopped their twirling. The tic in the forehead ceased its revolting twitch. Slowly he advanced toward her.
“‘I love you!’ she cried. “I love you, Charles! I love you!’ Then suddenly he was running, pelting, he was in her arms, he was shrieking with sobs. ‘Meg! Meg! Meg!’
“‘I love you, Charles!’ she cried again, her sobs almost as loud as his, her tears mingling with his. ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’”
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 