Sheyna Land🌻

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

accidentally typed "boopsy" when meaning to type biopsy this morning. a truly hilarious typo on so many layers

and honestly a perfect capturing of all the weird cycles of hilarity, absurdity, and suffering in days of grieving

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

Primo Levi

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

I am fed up
With Jim Crow laws,
People who are cruel
And afraid,
Who lynch and run,
Who are scared of me
And me of them.

I pick up my life
And take it away
On a one-way ticket—
Gone up North,
Gone out West,
Gone!

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

“One-Way Ticket”
by Langston Hughes

I pick up my life
And take it with me
And I put it down in
Chicago, Detroit,
Buffalo, Scranton,
Any place that is North and East—
And not Dixie.

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

I pick up my life
And take it on the train
To Los Angeles, Bakersfield,
Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake,
Any place that is
North and West—
And not South.

[Beth Moore @BethMooreLPM]

We must take heed, is the thing. We must take heed lest we think we ever age out of foolishness or faithlessness. We don’t. Look at Solomon. Time doesn’t heal. Time tells. It tests. And tries.
Time can make us lazy. After all, who’s watching anymore? It can make us meaner. Angrier. Harder headed. More bitter. More prideful. More selfish.

It can make us freak out. Fear that our lives will end without us ever feeling “alive” again, how ever we might define alive.

We have an opportunity here to examine our own lives and take heed lest we assume we’re beyond blowing them up sky high.

Can we finish well? Yes. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, help me. This kind of thing scares the living daylights out of me. My story is not over and there’s still time to be even more foolish in my future than I’ve been in my past. And that’s saying something.

We CAN finish well. But it will not be accidental. It will not be incidental. It will take humility. It will take a radical mindset like that of the apostle Paul. He adopted one goal. One absolute pursuit. “This one thing I do.” All else was a far and distant second.

It will take everything we’ve got. And the revelation will be that Jesus IS everything we’ve got.

How I thank God for the cross of Christ. How I thank God for his grace. How I thank God that he loves Philip Yancey so much that he wanted him to finish well. To repent. To pivot. To love his wife and his family well. To love the Giver of eternal life well. Thank God, none of us can take that right from Philip. His public life may be over. Beyond repair in our eyes. His private life is not. That’s what’s so amazing about grace.

Jesus, be with them.
Jesus, be with us all.

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

...comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.

C.S. Lewis

[Susan Wise Bauer @SusanWiseBauer]

If you’ve been wandering around on any social media channels over the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen the polemical posts about Samantha Fulnecky, the University of Oklahama student who got a 0 on her response essay because she turned in an opinion piece instead of an academic response with proper citation.

I had a whole post planned about this under the impression that Ms. Fulnecky was a freshman. After nearly twenty years of teaching freshmen, I could 100% see this scenario unfolding. My take: the child headed off to the U of O having been thoroughly warned about the godlessness of a secular university and her responsibility to uphold Biblical truth. I’ve taught those kids. It takes them at least a semester to realize that we, the professors, generally aren’t out to sabotage their faith. (I say generally as I can’t speak to all motivations, but in the English department at William & Mary, we were mostly just trying to teach them close reading and decent writing.) Coming into a class with all of your defenses firmly in place is not the best posture for learning; I’ve gotten my share of freshman essays that footnote the Bible instead of dealing with the text.

And there would have been shared responsibility. It seemed that the TA grading the paper was too inexperienced to react properly—which would have been to invite the student to office hours and say, “You misunderstood the assignment. Let’s go over the criteria again and I’ll give you a chance to rewrite the paper. I’ll have to take one letter grade off for lateness, but you can still get a good grade if you’re willing to put in the work.” I’ve done this as well.

So that was going to be my post.

Then, doing a little fact checking before hitting “send,” I found out that Ms. Fulnecky is a junior psychology major.

A junior, taking a class in her major field, who turns in a completely inappropriate paper should absolutely expect to get a failing grade. She knows the expectations by year 3 of her college career.

I can’t speak to Ms. Fulnecky’s motivations any more than I can absolve all of my fellow professors of intending to indoctrinate. But the *appearance* here is certainly that she chose a class in which the TA was transgender (something which doesn’t actually have anything to do with whether the rubric was properly applied) in order to make a point. Which she did. The TA has been put on administrative leave and Ms. Fulnecky is being praised by TPUSA, among other conservative Christian organizations, for her bravery.

Higher education has its problems. This is not the way to address them.

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

@revdwashington Hello Brother, I'm enjoying Don't Despise Our Youth SO much - thank you for writing it! Youth director here!
Where can I find more info about "traumatrigenic"? It's a new term to me and I'd love to research it more. God bless you, your family, and your ministry!

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

Queen Anne's lace
is hardly prized but
neither is it idle, look how it
stands fiercely on its
thin stem, how it
nurtures its white budlets with the
gift of the sun, how it
makes for this world all the
loveliness it can.

Mary Oliver, "Passing the Unworked Field"

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

11yo: mom why are there signs for tr*um* 2028
me: because he wants to do away with term limits.
11yo: can he do that?
me: not without violating the 22nd amendment. that's why you see signs around that say "no kings."
11yo: yeah, we don't want kings. I mean look at the cons, girl

[Sheyna Land🌻 @SheynaLand]

@mulaney thank you for coming to Philly - if you'd like some primary source material demonstrating how truly unhinged we are here look no further than @TopDogLaw radio commercials
https://t.co/2MlvgHgSej

[Puritan Gold @PuritanGold]

Why does God sometimes delay the performance of his promise?

“Not because he is unwilling to give, but because he will have us better prepared to receive.

The baker watcheth when the oven is hot, and then puts in the bread.”

—Thomas Manton, Works 7:366