Thanksgiving with the family was wonderful; food, fellowship, and tannerite. It was good to have banked some ye olde family fun before heading into December.

Because December.

Making gifts, client work, prepping for year-end bookwork, getting the Christmas newsletter done for my website list as well as friends and family, helping with a large community event, and dealing with a family funeral—all with the low-daylight seasonal doldrums that hit at the same time.

A distant cousin, one who had scolded my sister last year on Facebook because our family doesn’t wear masks, sent me a card. “Be sure you vet well and listen to all voices. We mask and vaccinate for our good but also to protect others in God's community.”

I just shook my head. The only thing worse than propaganda are the parrots who give it life.

Oh, the genius of wrapping religion around informed consent to snuff it out.

A jingoistic weaponized Bible is a convenient thing. When you don’t read and learn the whole counsel of God, when you don’t understand how the Bible interprets itself as a tightly woven whole, you end up with a theology that legitimizes things like snake handling, or shaming people into thinking they’re possibly less in the eyes of God because they didn’t participate in a medical procedure.

“Loving your neighbor” is one of those cherry-picked concepts the Biblically soft or manipulative rip from context and like to wield like a weapon, along with “judge not lest you be judged” and various passages from Leviticus. You could pull a phrase or sentence out of just about any book or literature and turn the author’s intended meaning on head. Somewhere in Mein Kampf you’ll find a true statement, I’m sure.

What is “God’s community” anyway? I'm aware of the Jews, God’s chosen people. I’m aware of the Body of Christ (the church), those who follow Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, regardless of religious traditions, habits, or socializing.

But “God’s community?”

Community sounds like a good thing, right?

But community is just another one of those words that have been recently redefined (sort of like racism, anti-vaxxer, and vaccine) in an expanded way so that it acts like a broadsword you can whirl about and slay everyone around you. People operating under the traditional definition are sitting ducks, and when debate rolls around, so do their heads.

“We’re sexual deviants, but we’re a community.”

“We’re confused about what our identity is, but we’re a community.”

“We have a vague set of rules, and that’s our community.”

“We all had the same medical procedure, and that makes us a community.”

“We have defined who is other than us, and our community is based on stereotypes and exclusion.”

“We’re all imprisoned on cell block B, and that makes us a community.”

“I’m part of the reddit community. Screw 4chan.”

A community is now apparently any group of people, no matter whether based in reality or not, that finds a commonality and slaps the sticker on it so they can wield mob pressure on anyone not in their group. Community has become more about consolidating power to use against, instead of for. If you can prove a community exists, you can justify and legitimize anything.

Community should unite, but now it divides. Beware the “community organizer.”

It’s odd, how this new version of community, ends up partitioning the nation into smaller and smaller groups. Instead of e pluribus unum, we have from many, into even more, plus with finger pointing.

There is no “God’s community.”

Religiosity with casual faith association in a particular building or denomination, or any kind of faux spirituality, doesn’t cut it. There are those who are saved by the blood of Jesus Christ and have accepted his gift of salvation, and those who are not and who have rejected it. Vaccinations and masks have zero effect on that salvation.

It was a pretty Christmas card, mind you, but I sighed, putting the card back in the envelope and tossing it in a pile.

The rise of the coronavirus, and the rise of the scolds.

At the start, in the hopium-filled and halcyon days of “15 Days To Slow The Spread,” I followed the rules. I distanced. I stood on the floor stickers. I did pickup of food, and tipped extra because of “non-essential” workers being underemployed. I didn’t use cash and coins. I used hand sanitizer at the store. I even sewed some masks. I tend to be pretty good about obeying laws and rules (which made the early months of non-compliance quite difficult, though now I am a veteran non-compliant).

But more than a month or so later, as the data and information rolled in, I started asking questions about obvious things, listening to doctors and scientists sounding the alarm and being censored for it. I foolishly maintain that that is the civic duty of every good citizen.

I have to remember I’m not alone.

While mainstream media isn’t showing it, I’ve seen the endless videos posted online that show the hundreds of thousands of people of all stripes, an ad hoc “community” if you will, hitting the streets and marching in protest against mandates and dictatorial government edicts. London, Brussels, Barcelona, Paris, New York City, Tbilisi, Amsterdam, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Glasgow, Melbourne, Auckland, and all across Austria, Cypress, Italy, Germany, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K.

Getting a Christmastide written slap about not loving my neighbor because I won’t receive an experimental mRNA injection, or wear a mask, is almost comical in light of the uprising around the world right now. People are angry, and growing angrier, defying and breaking the delicately balanced edges of their society bit by bit as they push back because they recognize what is happening. The second law of thermodynamics proves itself again.

While I appreciate what those on the left—those who now find themselves standing with those of us on the right, unmasked, unvaxxed, and to blame for every stupid thing—have brought to the table so we all enrich the health freedom movement together with a full-faceted and thoughtful approach, I have to applaud the devil even more because he has done an amazing work in the past two years, fully blinding and dividing the world, the nations, the states, the cities, and all the way down to churches and families.

All of that, in just two years.

“I just can’t wait until it gets back to normal. Surely it will be soon.”

IT WILL NEVER GET BACK TO NORMAL AS LONG AS YOU KEEP COMPLYING.

“If you wear masks, we’ll get back to normal.”

“If we force some businesses to close, we’ll get back to normal.”

“If we only let the masked in stores, we’ll get back to normal.”

“If you are fully vaccinated, we’ll get back to normal.”

“If you get your third booster, we’ll get back to normal.”

“If we only allow the vaccinated to participate fully in society, we’ll get back to normal.”

“If you can show your health passport to eat and travel, we’ll get back to normal.”

How high does the water temperature have to get before you crawl out of the boiling pot? Who really believes any of these abnormal behaviors leads to normality?

We’re on an abnormal path; we don’t find normality at the end of it. Please see this. Please tell me how kicking a small child and his mom out of a restaurant because they didn’t have vaccine papers is normal? How we will ever get “back to normal” when too many have already internally normalized these abnormal actions?

It’s not the compliant masked and papered person that will move us towards normal, it’s the pilots, sanitation workers, union workers, teachers, desk clerk, and anyone else putting it all on the line to hold the line. It’s the military veterans in NYC, for example, getting arrested en masse nightly as they go into restaurants without a “vaccine passport” to force people to see the uncomfortable sight of veterans they cheered and thanked for their service now being arrested in restaurants for wanting to have dinner. They fought for freedom in the Middle East, and now they’re fighting for it again on our own soil.

They love their neighbor enough to do that, fighting for freedom wherever the battle is. They love their neighbor enough to hold the line for health freedom, which that neighbor will miss when it is gone. People who scold on social media, or confront people in Christmas cards, misunderstand the motivation of people like myself.

We are not selfish and misinformed (“misinformation” is the new darling of Newspeak). We are motivated by something else, and you can better understand that motivation by reading Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not By Lies.”

When you live by lies, you give those lies, and the people perpetuating them, strength.

Life in a lie is death to the soul.

It doesn’t matter if you have a community alongside you, living that false reality in-step. More duped people won’t make it any more true. Louder noise and larger crowds don’t indicate truth or reality; they just indicate noise and mass.

Freedom comes from Christ, and the prince of this world hates both.

Freedom (and the U.S. Constitution) doesn’t maintain itself in a status quo, because the status quo changes with the Zeitgeist, and our current Zeitgeist is a toilet. There is always a battle for maintaining freedom, and this time it’s happening on the private citizen’s doorstep instead of some overseas battlefield. Will you hold the line for the future, and be willing to live uncomfortably whether you’re vaxxed or not, or will you queue up for your endless “boosters” so you’re allowed to eat in an Applebees somewhere?

By this point, you’re either cheering or you’re angry. I understand.

I guess two years of all of that, and then a Christmas week with a family funeral and the emotional insulin spikes and crashes that come along with such a thing, mixed in with all the travel and events of Christmas, I have decided something for the coming year: I’m taking a Matthew 7:6 approach.

Granted, that verse has a specific context regarding the things of Christian faith. But hey, everything is spiritual now, including injections, right?

Basically, after two years, I’m done. I’m not wasting my time or my breath anymore.

“Let’s just be patient. Let’s not judge. Let’s just provide the data. Let’s share the information. Let’s just wait, they’ll surely open their eyes and see. We can be peaceable. If someone wants to mask or get a shot, that’s their choice. No one is forced to do anything,” was my general take, because I thought that’s what a peacemaker would do.

Two years, too late, twenty twenty two.

We’re not all coming to agreement. Whatever it is you believe is right to do in this particular situation, do it. But don’t levy it on me and wrap it in superiority and shame, cheering and nodding in support for punishment or exclusion, enabling the loss of freedom for those who took a different approach.

I’m not going to ruin relationships due to constant skirmishes, even if that means walking away or avoiding someone entirely. I don’t want to launch verbal missiles into the air that can’t be retrieved.

I’m tired of being angry.

All of this division and fighting is stressful, and stress kills. I can’t have any part in it going forward.

My friend was stressed the other day, and I told him that I had something that might help. It was a video that reminds me who God is, one I’ve watched a lot lately, one that makes me laugh at all the tin-pot dictators, spouting off around the world.

We watched the video together.

“This puts all the nonsense into perspective,” I said. “Remember who your Father is.”

My father is not the father of lies. I will live by truth—which is living in true love. Living by lies is slow internal death, though the shell remains animated.

And so here it is: I love my neighbor; therefore, I won’t live by lies.

Goodbye, 2021.