Month: March 2025

Beat the dontwannas

I had a serious case of the dontwannas as I approached this particular blog post. I paged through my journal for the last couple of weeks — “No, I dontwanna use that one. No, I dontwanna do anything with that idea yet. I just dontwanna even write a blog post tonight.”

And then I thought about how my attitude has changed about when I don’t wanna do something.

It started in church. This has happened so many times that I have lost track of the examples and it’s now a personal cliche: I wake up Sunday morning and the last thing I want to do is go to church. I would much rather go back to sleep or sit in my pajamas, drink coffee and binge-watch something. But I drag myself to church anyway, and something unbelievably cool happens. Every time.

It happened so many times that now, when I wake up Sunday morning and the last thing I feel like doing is going to church, I start getting excited. “Something cool is going to happen in church! I know, because I don’t wanna go!”

And so I got fired up and decided to write this blog post about that.

I believe there is a force in the universe that aims to pull us down from our best selves. Call it Satan, call it Resistance, call it whatever you want, but it’s real. And when you are close to something miraculous, this force will divert your attention and try to bring you down.

Pay attention when there’s something you believe you should do but you just don’t wanna do today. You will probably find that if you overcome your hesitation and do it anyway, your life will be richer for the effort. Something you never expected may happen and it may even change your life.

Can we all just get along?

The ol’ social media feed is full of political malarky, friends on both sides of the aisle posting or reposting one or the other party’s talking points and “gotcha” memes that set up straw men and shoot them down or otherwise distort the other side’s positions.

I am going through a healing season, seeing friends and family, writing books and composing songs, and growing a relationship with someone who is filling a hole in my life after an unbearable loss two years go. I wonder how other friends and family are doing, and so I look on social media.

But some mornings I seem to have walked into a bar where the drunken patrons have decided to brawl with one another over whether to eat their toast butter side up or butter side down.

It really can be that Seussical some days. Everyone wants to feed the poor and protect the vulnerable, everyone wants to remove violent criminals from polite society, everyone wants money to be spent frugally and sensibly, but it seems people with different ideas about how to do that are downright evil.

I’m trying to believe these are still the reasonable people I know and love, but the ferocity makes me wonder if they have somehow taken leave of their senses. My Facebook Memories remind me that this kind of barroom brawl has been ongoing for more than a decade, but the intensity has increased to the point where there’s an illusion that the butter side uppers and the butter side downers have encamped in two separate countries occupying the same territory.

And yet these are still the same friends and neighbors who have borne me no ill will personally — they just have allowed themselves to be riled up over unknown, faceless and nameless “others” who they imagine are not like their neighbors.

Except we all are neighbors on this little planet of ours, and it behooves us not just to get along but to love one another.

I am going to sit in this corner and contemplate what is good and pure and excellent. I am going to seek out kindness and peace and understanding. It’s hard to ignore the petty bickering, especially when the bickerers insist they are not being petty but simply trying to raise the alarm over existential evils. I’m not sure they even understand what existentialism is.

Nonetheless I will try. I bear no ill will toward anyone, and to those who bear me ill will because my political beliefs are different from theirs, I will try to offer a smile and a hand of peace with assurance that I am not the demon they imagine. And I will try to stifle the urge to throw the next punch in the bar fight, because the most I can hope to gain that way is a bloody nose.

Back Where I Belong

Before Samuel L. Jackson was Nick Fury, there was a 1998 TV movie called Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD starring David Haselhoff. It is better than it sounds.

I found it somewhere in streaming land and was enjoying the ride when out of the blue came the inspiration for a song. 

Nick Fury had escaped some sort of death trap when his pal Val comes running up and says, “My God, I thought you were dead!”

“I was,” Nick says calmly, “but now I’m better.”

The song wrote itself. You can find it on Spotify or Amazon Music or YouTube or Apple Music.

I was dead and gone, but now I’m better.
I was lost, but now I’m found.
I was broke in pieces, a lonely debtor,
Now I’m whole and I’m back where I belong.

I fooled myself so long, I thought I’d fooled everyone,
Crossed the solid line that measures right from wrong.
I was so dark, I could not stand the sun,
Now I can see and I’m back where I belong.

When you walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
It helps to have a friend.
I tried it alone, all balled up in fear.
Stubborn pride will get you halfway but you’ll become a slave,
You’ll never make it to the end.
There’s just one way to break those chains and make it clear.

Jesus, walk that path with me together,
The dark is vanquished now, the light is so strong.
I was dead and gone, but now I’m better — 
I’m whole again, and I’m back where I belong.

“Back Where I Belong,” © ℗ 2010 w.p. bluhm