Well, not quite an accident. I’ve grown a lot in the past 10 months, and while I still want to share my story, there was a lot of negative emotions that were still there that just aren’t an issue or as much of an issue anymore. I think I have, for the most part, scrubbed the occult from my online accounts, and I have grown in Christ. This is my first Advent in a long time, and it’s been many years since I’ve celebrated Christmas, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m doing the Advent challenges for Hallow AND Ascension. I’m looking forward to celebrating the Incarnation, the greatest thing to have happened in the history of the world.

Advent is the beginning of the liturgical new year, and there is a four-year cycle. This is a C year, A gospel of Luke year. I like this gospel because there is just so much going on – the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Presentation, the Finding in the Temple – and all these things that weren’t in the other gospels. I personally think that Luke is the better storyteller, although Matthew is a great historian and catalogs things well, Mark writes like a lawyer and I appreciate that, and John’s focus on love eroded the cement that had sealed up my heart.

And I had a happy Thanksgiving. Sure, it was on my birthday, but I had a good dinner, with good people, and it even snowed. I have a stupid superstition that if it snows on my birthday, it will be a good year, or rather, I want it to snow on my birthday because it feels like a gift from Heaven. I took it as a gift from God. The last year of my life has been one of the best years of my life, if not the best year of my life, and I have a lot to look forward to as I officially enter middle age. I look forward to any and all of the years I have coming, because they’re all a gift from God. I know He gives back the wasted years just as He did for Job, although I’m not sure what that means for me yet. In some ways, this year has been difficult. There’s been losses, and there has been some hardship and some darkness. But there’s also been love and mercy.

And it still leaves me in awe that me, a non-believer or rather, a barely-believer, would have been given such a gift last January. Faith no bigger than a mustard seed, I guess, but God doesn’t require belief to perform as if He’s Tinkerbell, but rather, belief is to assent to God’s love, as God won’t force you to accept Him. Even still, anyone’s good fortune, joy, or happiness is still through His will, whether it’s His passive or Divine will, as the rain falls on the good and the bad, and even the pagans and the atheists experience love and happiness. Jesus told people repeatedly that it was their faith that healed them, that their faith in God was the cure: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Matthew 7:7-8. Although I have come to realize that it’s not necessarily on your own timeline, and sometimes, your heart deceives you: what you’re so sure you want and what you’re so sure is best for you just sometimes isn’t, and sometimes you learn that the hard way through disappointment and loss, and sometimes you learn that the easy way by simply letting the fever of the soul break on its own. Temperance is a great virtue, as it can break all kinds of fevers we experience in this modern age: in my own country, this would dissipate the idol worship of politicians from both sides of the spectrum that becomes much more pronounced during an election cycle.

I Went to Utah on a Post-Election Road Trip.

Listen: I know of grown-ass men – white grown ass men – who actually think that being physically present in a red state (Republican majority) is dangerous, as in, the population of those states are a danger to the people physically present in blue states (Democrat majority). Like, grown ass men! Grown ass men thinking that they can’t simply be present in a gas station or diner in a red state, like grown ass men from the Midwest thinking they’re in danger if they just happen to be standing in a cornfield a little too far to the west or a little too far to the east. Like, grown ass men who somehow don’t remember that we live in Chicago, and Chicago is blue island surrounded by conservative counties that even voted to separate from Cook County and become their own state because they’re sick of us (and as an Upstate New Yorker, I get it. I really do.).

This is why I now make it a point to take road trips to red states. By land mass, sticking to “blue” states because of some narcissistic victim fantasy is going to force me to miss a lot of this country that I love so much. I really love this land. I’m also a woman, so I need to be on alert no matter where I go. I’m also now part of a religious demographic that’s positivity reviled in a lot of places.

Fun fact: on the road from Dinosaur, CO into Utah, there was a sign for a diner that read “Happy Reformation Day!” which ignores All Soul’s Day and celebrates Martin Luther’s schismatic heresy, and that’s really the only time I felt like maybe I needed to get out of town a little earlier than planned.

But when I was unraveling my belief system nearly two years ago, when I started becoming gender critical and questioning the progressive politics, especially the identity politics rooted in things I studied over 20 years in college and accepted as true, it seemed important to actually go back into a part of the country more like where I’m from and just, you know, talk to the people. And I tell you: I had a great time in South Dakota, and the locals have diamonds for hearts. They even felt sorry for me for getting vaccinated (and I still get vaccinated, and I still eat GMOs, but I still avoid seed oils, and I still don’t use sunscreen), but they were very helpful and very nice.

And I even boondocked, for my first time ever, at The Wall in Buffalo Gap National Grassland, for my first ever time camping in my SUV, and I met people from all over the country, and they were all pretty nice. [I mean, the people from the Southeast were pretty loud, but I’m pretty sure that’s genetic.]

And the thing is: I felt at home. I didn’t feel like I wanted to move to South Dakota, but rather, I felt at ease. No one was waiting to hear me slip up. No one was sussing me out to figure out if I believed in the right things. No one even asked what I did for a living or where I went to school, although they had a lot of questions about what it’s like to live in Chicago.

Listen: there are grown ass men – grown ass men – here in Chicago who mistake wokeness, that hyper-vigilant vibe we got going on here, for a genuine interest in human beings. And I have to ask myself what kind of grown ass man likes imagining himself as a would-be target of some other grown ass man 800 miles away, looking at fishing lures at BassPro and minding his business, not having a single thought about Chicago or anyone in it.

But the most important thing was in making these trips during this two-year transformation that ultimately led me back to Christ, was that I stopped fearing the Other, because I remembered that I am the Other. I am from the red part of a blue state. I did eat food from gas stations. I did smoke cigarettes as a teenager. I did hang out in cornfields. I did drink in the woods. I did go to a community college. I did work in factory. I did bus tables at Perkins. I did hang out in pizza shops and diners. I did eat government cheese as a kid and get free school lunches. I did get discouraged from applying to college. I did take a very long way to become a lawyer. I did have to learn a lot from trial and error and work a lot of shitty jobs to get there. I still don’t have any friends who own boats. I still don’t own my own home. Why am I still pretending to fit into a world I don’t fit into? I wasn’t born middle-class, I don’t have the cultural capital of the middle class, and I don’t have a lot of the same core values, and I don’t make enough money to fancy myself a socialist since my survival isn’t ensured through owning multiple assets or through knowing I’m the beneficiary of someone else’s estate.

I’m also now at the age where I’ve escaped the mindset that all women have to make sure that everyone else is happy first – be kind – and you last, or you never. I don’t nervously look around the room before giving an opinion, and I don’t try to comfort the young women who are still nervously looking around the room for approval before having a thought. I know that I’m not the world’s wetnurse, and God never made woman for that: there’s an irony that the world tells women that it’s not enough to be a wife and a mother to just one husband and mother to just only their children, but instead, they must be the wife and mother to their workplace, to their colleagues, and their clients, and really anyone else who their job tells them to wife up and to mother, because otherwise, they’re just slaves. Don’t believe me? Who is under pressure to put on birthday parties, decorate for the holidays, make coffee for visitors, to smooth over disagreements as if a mere difference in opinion is going to cause WWIII? Who does the clean up after work lunches fall on? Who can be compelled to stay on the phone with a complete whackjob of a client who doesn’t have a problem you can address but certainly has no boundaries and knows that the woman on the other end isn’t allowed to hang up the phone? Who can be roped into every single team-building event that happens during unpaid personal time? Not men. Men can say no.

You don’t see this kind of shit in male-dominated workplaces. You don’t see a mechanic being forced to sit on the phone while someone who came in for an oil change is complaining about getting a parking ticket the next day, and the mechanic is required to calm this person down instead of hanging up on the whackjob and going back to his actual job. You don’t see factory floors where men are forced to ignore their quota so they can run around and get everyone to sign the card so Joe in finishing doesn’t feel bad that no one remembered his birthday. You won’t go to a construction site and see the youngest member of the team told to put down his jackhammer and come into the office to make coffee for a visiting investor simply because he’s the youngest man on the team and the consensus is that he just also doubles as everyone’s personal assistant and secretary.

I am still that working class, small city girl from Upstate New York, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and I know that my birth and the circumstances did not make me a bad person, so what kind of nerve do I have making the assumption that most of the country who is like me are somehow bad people for the same circumstances simply because they still live in those places?

How can a man be my enemy when he’s my neighbor? How can a man be my enemy when we drank out of the same hose on summer days? How can a man be my enemy when we worked next to each other.

So I have to escape blue islands now and then to understand why Christ gave the good news to the Samaritans, and when He healed the non-Jews, and when He even made a tax collector one of His apostles. They’re only The Other to us if we want them to be, but not to Him, just as no Father has “Others” among His children: they are all His, and we are more like the Other than we know, but if you look for Christ in people, you will find Him, because He wants to be seen for who He is, in Starbucks, in Cracker Barrel, at the gas station, and even in that post-election circle jerk that a colleague’s going away party turned into the day after the election, even in grown ass men who deny He even exists.

We only have one enemy – Death, as in, the eternal death – and Christ has already triumphed over it, and for 2000 years, the gates of Hell have not prevailed against Christ’s Church, and it won’t. The gates of Hell around my heart couldn’t prevail against it.

In years past around this time, I would be obsessively looking at my solar return chart, but other than a new moon – because I can see the night sky – and knowing it’s Mercury retrograde because I have overheard it, I don’t know what else is going on astrologically, and I don’t care, because I’m free now.

The theme for the first week of Advent is Hope. Hope for the coming of the Savior, both historically as we celebrate the first time He came, and as we await His second coming, and as we Hope to see Him and to be with Him when we greet Him at death or the final judgment.

The world has hope in it now. It’s still a good place to be. It’s a beautiful thing the Lord made through Jesus Christ at the beginning, and it’s full of beautiful places and beautiful people and beautiful moments because Christ is still here with us.

And I have hope. I have hope that the ironically divisive politics that are, ostensibly, meant to bring up together by giving us all a category