Sharing The Story

Why I Left The Left

Doc and Elaine — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 23:17:58 +0000

JENNIFER GALARDI

In 1998 I moved to Los Angeles, California and like many young women, I had dreams of something bigger than the small-town life I had experienced up until then. I had a desire to rebel against my rather strict upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania and conservative education in rural Virginia. I didn’t want to “go to school, get a job, get married, have kids” and put them in a nice house with a white picket fence. I didn’t want to shuffle them to soccer practice and dance classes in a Range Rover. How boring. I wanted to be free.

I packed up my four-door powder blue Ford Taurus with the shifter on the right side of the wheel and rallied a friend to drive west with me from Birmingham, AL. The dread of another day behind a desk in a 9-5 job was intolerable. Four days later, I arrived at my apartment across from CBS Studios in West Hollywood. I was clueless and jobless and intentionally disconnected from any past that could define me. I was searching for something without knowing what that something was. I was perfect fodder for the progressive agenda.

I abandoned my past to re-create a life I saw as idyllic and quickly fell into all the tropes of an L.A. starlet. I got an agent and began acting classes. I worked all sorts of different jobs to support myself but with no definitive direction, I was never able to save money or find stability, living mostly paycheck to paycheck. I was a “free spirit.” I bounced from blue city to blue city – L.A., New York, Austin, back to L.A. – and traveled to countries around the world. I enshrined myself in every self-help book and spiritual practice I could. Sound baths, breathwork, yoga, meditation, journeys to India and sacred sites, crystals, reiki, endless retreats and yoga teacher trainings, psychedelic voyages – these were my life. All in the name of evolving into a more conscious human. I even made a career of some of it.

While I was somewhat successful in my professional life as a fitness and wellness “personality,” my personal life was a mess. I became increasingly depressed, lonely, isolated, and self-obsessed. I lost any sense of who I truly was. I craved a sense of belonging and would bounce from group to group in search of a community where I felt I fit. Some might call some of my associations cultish. Looking back, I would agree.

I became increasingly fragile. I hid in spiritual safety and used my “voice” to rally against all the travesties of the world, much like an “In this house we believe sign,” ubiquitous on lawns throughout Los Angeles. Yet, it was never me who needed to change. Rather, the world needed to conform to make me more comfortable. In some cases, it needed to be completely dismantled. The patriarchy needed to crumble. We all needed to become aware of our white fragility. If everyone were just more enlightened like I was, the world would be a better place. Any challenge to my ideology was someone else’s ignorance or inability to see “my truth.”

As it did for many people, my life began to shift in 2020. I began to take personal inventory and examine where I was going. While the rest of the world was safely sheltering, a series of cataclysmic events prompted me to rouse me from the spiritual cave I had been hiding in. I realized how selfish I had become. I realized how much anger and resentment I was holding on to, despite all my attempts to “heal myself.” I realized how much I sought validation from the outside world. I began to take responsibility for my life and act on the things I wanted rather than try to “manifest” them with positive affirmations and visualization.

Most importantly, I was called to the Christian faith and woke up from the woke spell L.A. and the progressive narrative had cast. Jesus gave shape and form to my spirituality. It became a source of stability and comfort rather than volatility, angst, and reform. I returned to a sense of logos and reason that began to steady my pervasive and unpredictable emotional world. Jesus merged my head and heart together rather than asking me to abandon the former for the latter.

Having heart but using your head is a potent and empowering combination. The far left only wants to pull at your heart strings, and if you don’t respond appropriately, which is the way they want you to, you are a bad person. Thus, silence is violence and any dissension from their idea of a good society is grounds for shame, reprimand, job removal, or extrication from the public sphere. Following the far left requires an abandonment of rational, clear, and critical thinking.

While the far left proselytizes about empowering people, it does anything but. It insists you focus on all the ways you are a victim because of any number of external identities – race, gender, sexual preference, age, disability, geography – you name it, they’ll use it.

It peddles in grand abstractions assuming belonging to any one of these categories means that you’re just like everyone else in that group. It’s never about the individual, someone with a unique history or cultural ties. It assigns a unilateral experience on what it means to be black or lesbian or Asian or any other external parameter progressives insist one adopt. I’m a female therefore I must accept that I have been a victim of toxic masculinity and systemic oppression by the patriarchy. I did that for a long time, despite the fact it wasn’t true.

By today’s pedagogy, I was successful not through any effort of my own, but because I was “pretty” and “white.” At the same time, anything I didn’t achieve was because I was discriminated against. I can’t think of anything more disempowering.

The far left is neither grateful nor gracious. I consistently focused on what I didn’t have. Rather than feel blessed by my upbringing, I was burdened by it and constantly fighting against it. I could only see my younger years through the lens of trauma and emotional neglect although, despite sometimes challenging situations, I lived a quite idyllic childhood. I was loved and cared for. I never went without.

Yet, my L.A. gurus and therapists convinced me my traumas constantly needed to be examined as opposed to accepting myself and my past as unique and flawed. There was always more inner work that I had to do to achieve an ideal life. I had to be polished to perfection, every judgmental error in my bones washed cleaned. I loathed confrontation and avoided it at all costs, yet I would simultaneously be agitated when people didn’t understand what I was going through or my point of view. I rode a roller coaster of emotions and expectations and insisted everyone else to cater to them.

For the left, the list of travesties that need to be overcome is relentless and one is guilty until proven innocent. There will never be enough – enough social justice, enough equity, or enough change. Progressives are unyielding in their pursuit of a world perfected, despite the impossibility of such utopia.

It’s an exhausting way to live and I’m thrilled to say I escaped the insanity. My relationship with both of my parents has improved significantly. I’m a more pleasant person to be around. I can listen without being constantly triggered. I don’t take things personally and – gasp – my sense of humor returned! I am filled with gratitude and for the first time in my life, excited about my future, despite the uncertainty of what that looks like.

I returned to school to receive a master’s degree in public policy. I’ve become more educated on the roots of our country and returned to the ethics of responsibility and discipline I grew up on. I feel truly empowered not to change the world, but to overcome obstacles that will inevitably be placed on my path. Most importantly, I found a love and self-respect that only comes from a true connection to God, not some vague never-ending cycle of self-help or political party. I am more positive than when I endlessly repeated words of affirmation. I am content. I am at peace.

For those seeking as I was – those of you who feel lost, or confused, or like you don’t belong – know this: You’re looking for love in all the wrong places. The left will never fill the void inside. No person, institution, movement, or policy can. What they will do is feed on your insecurities and self-doubt and convince you that they have the cure. They don’t.

The world isn’t a safe space. It can be dangerous, unfair, and quite cruel. So, buckle up and enjoy the ride of life with all its speedbumps, potholes, detours, and dead ends. It can be a lot of fun when you accept who you – and others – are without trying to change everything and everyone to accommodate you. Look upward and inward rather than outside of you for the answers. Aim towards excellence and aspire to be the best version of yourself. Be inspired by others’ success rather than tearing it down. If you truly want to change the world, start with yourself.

Jennifer Galardi

The post Why I Left The Left appeared first on Sharing The Story.

My First Missionary Hero

Doc and Elaine — Tue, 03 May 2022 17:03:12 +0000

After reading the amazing lives of missionaries living in remote areas of South America and Indonesia they inspired and motivated me to start this blog. These wonderful people, who sacrificed their lives for the sake of spreading the good news of Jesus Christ must be shared to inspire others to go beyond their limits and serve the best that they can in the lives they were gifted.

After pondering these thoughts of sharing their stories, I did not have time to begin creating the blog as we needed to return to serve in our church in Florida. We travelled to eastern Canada, stopping to visit friends and family along the way.

While visiting our nephew in the Sudbury, Ontrio area, we were able to attend the church that his son is now a member at Whitefish, Ontario. This was a special time, as this actual church building was moved by my husband and his brother to this location many decades ago.

While visiting with the members following the service we exchange conversation with many but my husband was speaking with one man in particular, Rick Mitchell. That morning the pastor was away on holidays and Rick had delivered the morning message. Rick was a retired school teacher and was an excellent communicator. As I joined the conversation he was having with my husband I soon discovered that we had some common ground. Rick had a relatives in the same area of Ontario that I had spent my childhood. One in particular was a childhood missionary hero of mine, Don Phibbs.

Don was Rick’s paternal grandmother’s brother, his great uncle. Don was born in Ontario and raised on a 3/4 section homestead outside of Glenside, Saskatchewan. He trained as a chiropractor but doesn’t seem to have pursued that line of work for very long. Rather, he was a preacher/evangelist, initially associated with Apostolic Churches in the west and later in northern Ontario where he started and pastored the Bethel Mission from 1939-1949 in Timmins and then for a few years in southern Ontario near Sarnia where he conducted Bible studies at the Oban School in Plympton Township and some gospel activities at a little community called Becher.

Becher was where I attended church as a child and where my husband and I exchanged our wedding vows. It was a little white country church that was started by my great uncle Frank. I could digress at this point and share lots as to how this little church came to be, but I must not, as the life of Don Phibbs left an indelible mark on my childhood years and will continue to share his story.

As an evangelist in the west, Don often conducted series of meetings in rural school houses and even did open air preaching, at least once, in Carlyle, Saskatchewan. One person saved under that ministry was Don Merritt who was later the leader of Christian Service Brigade in Canada. Dot and Ed Johnson were saved at meetings he held near Nipawin, Saskatchewan; they became godly leaders for years at the People’s Church outside Wyoming, Ontario, which was formed with people who attended Don’s Bible studies at the Oban School.

Don Phibbs met his wife Ellen who was a pianist at such a meeting in the west. Their oldest son, Paul, became a deputy police chief in Calgary, and after the death of Don’s first wife, he married “Mim”, the daughter of the founder of the Prairie Bible Institute. Their younger son was David and their daughter was Donna Bell; unfortunately she suffered from emotional/psychological problems.

After World War II General Douglas Macarthur called on Western nations to flood Japan with 10,000 Christian missionaries to effectively change the character of the Japanese people. Don felt the call of God to go there and headed there with his family in the early 1950’s. I only met Uncle Don about a half dozen times but I do know he was a man of faith who saw some tremendous answers to prayer.

By the time, he went to Japan, he was completely independent and supported by no mission board. Later New Tribes Mission asked him if they would like to come under their umbrella so he did but he remained very much an independent. As an example, unlike most missionaries, he did not seek to establish churches, rather giving attention to “making disciples”. Just how he did this, I’m not entirely sure, but I am sure he had many inovative ideas.

He would put a sign in his window that said “English spoken here” and dozens of university/ high school student came to hear him speak English; some of them became believers as he only spoke to them about the Bible. For a time he had a short radio slot in the wee hours of the morning. I am sure he had many strategies that he used.

His family were with him for his first term in Japan but found it necessary to remain in Canada for the balance of his ministry there. His wife Ellen taught music in the area of Three Hills, Alberta in that time. Later in his time in Japan, he was joined by his widowed sister, Myrtle Baker, who was a practising chiropractor. Don had become conversant in Japanese but Myrtle did not have time to do so. She used English to teach cooking classes and became the chiropractor for the basketball team at the Christian Academy of Japan, a school for missionary kids.

Here are a couple of antedotes:

Don never had a bank roll for his needs. He depended on the Lord to look after them. On one of his returns to Canada with two young adult Japanese believers, they arrived mid-week at a town in the lower mainland of British Columbia … with only pocket change. However, it was mid-week so they resolved to find a church meeting and found themselves at an intersection with three churches, all of them holding mid-week meetings that night. After prayer, they decided which to attend. The others in attendance inquired of them, their plans and needs, etc. In short, they were hosted that night with someone in the church and went by transport the next day to Calgary with a trucker who relayed ahead to his dispatch office that he had passengers who needed to get to Sarnia, Ontario. Even though it was a great distance from British Columbia, via Calgary, all the way across the country to Sarnia, Ontario, God provided the means and the next Sunday they were at the People’s Church in Sarnia, Ontario. His nephew Rick was not sure if Don still had his pocket change!

On another occasion, Don was with a group of people who secured a less expensive trip travelling via Hong Kong, India, Israel and Britain than travelling directly east to North America. Just before their departure, he received a cheque which he did not have time to cash in Japan but which he needed to fund some of the expenses such as hotels and meals for that trip home. The plane landed in Hong Kong late on Friday afternoon and Don only knew one person who could verify the cheque for him and he did not have that man’s phone number. What to do? Well, he prayed, grabbed a taxi and asked to be taken to the nearest bank only to meet that very man at the door of the bank … with only fifteen minutes left before the bank closed for the weekend.

Don never had anything much more than his clothing and sometimes that became rather thin and shiny. Rick’s father once bought him a new suit as the one he had was so worn. Rick and his wife Donna visited Don and Ellen in Vancouver in August of 1980; they were living in Ellen’s brother’s home, her brother having gone to a nursing home. As for income, I didn’t know their circumstance. Ellen may have earned a small Canada Pension (which wouldn’t have started to accumulate until the country introduced it in 1965). Don did not qualify for Old Age Security until he had had a couple of years of employment in Canada; whether he had that or not, I do know that even in 1980, he went and preached to the men at a downtown mission a couple of times a week.

When I think of people who lived by faith, a few names come to my mind, but Don Phibbs is the name that is most prominent in my memory.

My grandmother who was part of the Ladies Missionary Circle at the Becher church would receive in the mail Don’s letters. These letters came on “airplane paper”, so light and fragile with such small writing to be able to fill every inch of the page with the lastest news of what Don was experiencing in his work in Japan. As these were shared at the monthly circle meeting they would be discussed, prayed over, and many at the church would contribute and participate in any way they could to help with Don’s work in Japan.

We will never know until we reach our eternal home, what an impact Don had on this world. But, certainly we know he was a man of faith and worked sacrifically for his master.

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