This is a Facebook post I wrote on October 13, 2022. Forgive grammar and edits that might be needed. I’m navigating life as o see it now. I’m seeing that wisdom I was gaining earlier is coming back to vindicate me. I can trust myself. I can also take a nap. Here’s the post: 
I just listened to the best podcast this morning. What I am going through right now is deeply holy work.
The podcast I listened to is “We Can Do Hard Things” and their guest Tricia Hersey who is the Nap Ministry Bishop. 🙂 She seriously started Nap Ministry and I have shared several of her tweets on FaceBook in the past. I have been in love with this social-political movement ever since I heard about it. Now I know a lot more about it and am proud to say I am participating in this movement, even though it is wild how I got here.
My book club bought me a Nap Queen shirt last year on my birthday. It is one of my most prized possessions. Some of you may remember I was advocating for more rest last semester by showing me napping at various times during my internship. It was fun, funny, and resistance. Rest is resistance. I have always believed that and I wrote a section of my credo with the title “Sabbath as resistance.” Now I know what I was doing was far more important than I knew at the time, and I am proud of myself for the work I have done to get here. I believe the journey led me here because I was calling out to God for this.
Liberation begins in our bodies as Tricia says in the podcast. Her theology, and she is a theologian, is rooted in Womanist and Black Liberation theology. Capitalism started on the plantations. I would also add capitalism allowed for Manifest Destiny to be accepted. This idea that certain bodies are machines and not divine beings is where the sin occurred. White supremacy is literally killing all of us, including the earth, and capitalism is making it so that none of us have any time to stop and contemplate that—or learn the actual history of capitalism. Rest is where clarity, imagination, and resistance is born.
Tricia says she is no longer willing to donate her body to evil systems that seek to destroy her body. We are not here for that. It is time to rethink productivity. Everything we have been taught is a lie and it is time to relearn our history. We are losing our workforce because people are waking up to this fact and are no longer willing to work for unlivable wages. We are dangerously and very close to losing all our public school employees. I can bear witness they are extremely underpaid and the whole system is understaffed by design. We have people in power who do not see the divine image in public school employees and it is killing all of us.
White supremacy is hurting white people too. The inability to see the divine image in another is a spiritual deficiency and is killing people who participate in this system from the inside out. White feminism is one of the worst movements. We would have been better off with no movement because it encouraged white women to play by these same rules and to do it all perfectly—even when hated. Every day politicians and the media are outright saying we hate you and white women are saying: How can we serve you better?
It is time for change. And the change comes through liberating our bodies. To see ourselves as divine beings worthy of being treated as fully human. It is completely counter-cultural to demand humanity out of our systems. The liberation is not coming from a system—it is coming from within ourselves.
As a Christian leader, I help people see that Jesus’ death was not an obedience to God to fulfill God’s wrath for fallen humanity. That is abusive theology. I show how Jesus’ death was complete obedience to remaining human—he did not have to, but he did—and the system killed him for it.
Oklahoma has a sizable death penalty fund that could be shifted to public education. Let those who call themselves a Christian in public office right now take time to rest and reconsider who it is they say they follow. Especially right here in Oklahoma that is going on an ungodly death penalty killing spree. The man they say they follow was killed by the death penalty!
Let the rest begin.
Praise be to God. It is good to be human.
There is Life Out There 