It's Okay to Play God

@rickblumenberg 

If you’re a writer of fiction.

I love to write and have now entered the world of the novelist. No publisher yet, but the writing is done, so now comes the tough part—finding a way to get the manuscript into book form and out to a waiting (I hope) public.

But back to playing God.

Actually the only way you can play God legitimately, is to be a writer of fiction. Then you can create your own world. If you’re not good at it, nobody gets hurt because few read it, but if you are good then maybe someone will be entertained with a good story, or find some other benefit from what you write.

Perhaps it will help them sleep on a late night when sleep won’t otherwise come. Many a writer has been my sleeping pill when the zzzzs eluded me so perhaps I owe something to other readers with a similar problem. Good books have no negative side-effects and can be far more effective.

Now I may not always agree with the way a particular writer plays God. I may not like the world he/she creates, but if I don’t like it I can put the book down and I’m none the worse for it. You can’t say that about people who play God by manipulating others for their own benefit—but that’s another blog for another time if I ever decide to write it.

Two River Island (the novel) is set in eighteenth century America, at the time, relatively untouched by Europeans. The main characters are Woodland Indians in the Old Northwest Territories around Lake Michigan. I began the novel about thirty years ago when we lived in Elkhart, Indiana, on the banks of the St. Joseph River and just across the St Joe from Island Park. 

So there you have the setting for “Two River Island” a novel about a ficticious Pottawatomi Indian village at the juncture of the St Joseph and Elkhart Rivers, across from Island Park, otherwise known (in my novel) as “Two River Island”. Remember, as a novelist, I’m playing God so in my world I can call it anything I want.

But the novel may have started many years before when my genealogy studies revealed my gr-gr-gr-grandfather Jessie Rich was married to a full-blooded Cherokee woman. They were married in the mountains of East Tennessee (where there is a Rich Mountain, but no one at the Smoky Mountain National Park knows of any Rich family who ever lived there). The reason, I assume, is that in the 1820s they sold Rich Mountain and moved to Ballard County, Kentucky.

The family story is that Jessie Rich rode into into Ballard County, Kentucky, with his Cherokee bride sometime in the late 1820s or maybe 1830, where they settled and eventually became prominent citizens. We still have “Rich” relatives who live in the area. I don’t know what their economic status is, but their name is Rich and judging from my Grandma Lula Arington whose mother was Caroline Rich, I know they were rich in all the ways that really matter.

Trail of Tears

A few years after Grandpa and Grandma Rich moved to Ballard County, the Cherokee Nation, was forced to march west, beginning in 1838, to the State of Oklahoma on the “Trail of Tears” that led through Ballard County, Kentucky, across the Mississippi River and through Missouri. A story must be there but I don’t yet know enough to tell it. 

Is it possible Grandma Rich may have watched those Cherokee people pass near their farm with both agony and fear? Agony, that family and friends were being treated so, when they had been successful landowners and upright citizens of their various East Tennessee communities? And fear, because had anyone known she was, beneath the Rich name, a full-blooded Cherokee woman, she could have been legally kidnapped from her Ballard County home and forced to join that deadly march to a strange western land most knew little about. If that had happened, she may have died, as many did, and neither I, nor any of her descendants would even exist.

Sadly, I know neither her name nor enough of her story to write it, probably because she was afraid to reveal her Cherokee family heritage out of fear of the consequences.

Living in Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan for the past thirty-some years, being a student of the native people from our area, and having a family connection (real or imagined, I’m not yet sure) with the Native People of North America, I just felt compelled to write.

"Two River Island" is written from the perspective of the Woodland Peoples of the Great Lakes area and from my perspective as a follower of Jesus. God knew these woodland peoples long before the Europeans did and His Holy Spirit worked in their lives from the beginning. Many called him “The God of Heaven” or “The Great Spirit”, their concept was that he was the creator of the world. They didn’t have the benefit of Jesus’ teaching, but many of them did amazingly well with just His Holy Spirit to guide.

Many who read my blog are consistent people of prayer, so I ask you to pray I will find a publisher—just the right publisher—so this imaginary world I created out of the history of this area, my fertile imagination, and God’s inspiration, can be published in book form.

Thank you! I knew you would pray and I’m counting on you!

I’m Rick Blumenberg and that’s

My View from Tanner Creek.
   

Slaughter of the Innocents—40th Anniversary

by Rick Blumenberg / @rickblumenberg

     
It is difficult to imagine a man like Herod. He was pro­bably one of the cruelest men who ever lived. Because of a pervasive fear someone would take his throne and he would be killed, he was vicious toward any threat, real or imagined. When he heard wise men had come to wor­ship a new Jewish king he called them to his palace to find and destroy the baby Jesus. (Matthew 2:13-23) His plot was foiled when God directed the wise men to go home by another route, but Herod devised another plan so vile we can hardly imagine it. He att­em­pted to destroy Jesus by taking the lives of every baby boy born in that part of the world who was under two years of age!
     

As horrible as that may seem, Herod's evil scheme was far surpassed in horror and bloodshed when the Supreme Court of the United States made it legal for anyone who chose to do so, to destroy their own unborn children through the practice of legalized abortion.

     
As we think about the 40^th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, now more than 55 million children have had their lives callously snuffed out in hospitals designed to be in­stitu­tions of healing. In hospital mater­nity wards and nur­series throughout the world, doctors struggle to save babies youn­ger and smaller than those being destroyed in legalized abortions!

   
Abortion by choice is a self-inflicted death-blow to the home. If we can so easily destroy our unborn children, our living ones come next. When “pro-choice” groups first advocated legalized abortion as a means of birth control one reason in its favor was that it would diminish the incidence of child abuse since unwanted children would no longer be born. We don't hear this much anymore because we all know that since the legalization of abortion the incidences of child pornography, child abuse and child molesta­tion have literally skyrocketed upward. When we devalue any person or people, we devalue us all.

  

Any mother who has ever carried a child to term, any father who eagerly awaits the birth of a child, or any parents who lost an eagerly awaited child by miscarriage, will tell you that at eight months the baby is very much a per­son—a living being with an already developing personality. Thus life (as an individual hu­man being) must begin at conception or somewhere between conception and eight months....or is it seven? Six? Two?

      

Conception is the only answer that makes sense.

     

When we claim the unborn child is not human, it is only a small step to saying the helpless child, senior adult, mentally handicapped, or some other less than “perfect” beings are also less than human and they, too, can be exploited. Even as I write this, persons come to my mind in all of these categories and I remind myself they are all perfect just as they are!

     

When we claim unborn children are somehow less than human and therefore reasonable targets for abortion, we return to the mentality that produced slavery, the persecution and near destruction of the Native American peoples, and the holocaust of Jewish and Gypsy peoples by the Nazis. When we want to do a really evil thing to an­other human being we always seem to rationalize it by pretending they are not human, or, are somehow sub-human.

     

Someday history will look back on the abortion massacre of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same revulsion with which we remember these other self-inflicted plagues of humanity.

     

On this January while we recognize the 40 anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, I know some of you who read this may have been deluded by the abortionists and agreed to a procedure for yourself, a loved one, or perhaps for unknown persons in an abortion mill. That agreement now leaves an ache in your heart that seemingly cannot be healed. I assure you Jesus Christ can heal your aching heart. He loves you and will bring grace and peace if you will surrender the pain to him. The Bible tells us there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) so I urge you to trust him for complete healing.

     

I’m Rick Blumenberg and that’s My View from Tanner Creek.
   

Slaughter of the Innocents

It is difficult to imagine a man like Herod. He was pro­bably one of the cruelest men who ever lived. Because of a pervasive fear someone would take his throne and he would be killed, he was vicious toward any threat, real or imagined. When he heard wise men had come to wor­ship a new Jewish king he called them to his palace to find and destroy the baby Jesus. (Matthew 2:13-23) His plot was foiled when God directed the wise men to go home by another route, but Herod devised another plan so vile we can hardly imagine it. He att­em­pted to destroy Jesus by taking the lives of every baby boy born in that part of the world who was under two years of age!

As horrible as that may seem, Herod's evil scheme was far surpassed in horror and blood­shed when the Supreme Court of the United States made it legal for anyone who chose to do so, to destroy their own unborn chil­dren through the practice of legal­ized abortion.

Since then, literally millions of children have had their lives callously snuffed out in hospitals designed to be in­stitu­tions of healing. In hospital mater­nity wards and nur­series throughout the world, doctors struggle to save babies youn­ger and smaller than those being destroyed in legalized abortions!

Abortion by choice is a self-inflicted death-blow to the home. If we can so easily destroy our unborn children, our living ones come next. When “pro-choice” groups first advocated legalized abortion as a means of birth control one reason in its favor was that it would diminish the incidence of child abuse since unwanted children would no longer be born. We don't hear this much anymore because we all know that since the legalization of abortion the incidences of child pornography, child abuse and child molesta­tion have literally skyrocketed upward. When we devalue any person or people, we devalue us all.

Any mother who has ever carried a child to term, any father who eagerly awaits the birth of a child, or any parents who lost an eagerly awaited child by miscarriage, will tell you that at eight months the baby is very much a per­son—a living being with an already developing personality. Thus life (as an individual hu­man being) must begin at conception or somewhere between conception and eight months....or is it seven? Six? Two?

Conception is the only answer that makes sense.

When we claim the unborn child is not human, it is only a small step to saying the helpless child, senior adult, mentally handicapped, or some other less than “perfect” beings are also less than human and they, too, can be exploited. Even as I write this, persons come to my mind in all of these categories and I remind myself they are all perfect just as they are!

When we claim unborn children are somehow less than human and therefore reasonable targets for abortion, we return to the mentality that produced slavery, the persecution and near destruction of the Native American peoples, and the holocaust of Jewish and Gypsy peoples by the Nazis. When we want to do a really evil thing to an­other human being we always seem to rationalize it by pretending they are not human, or, are somehow sub-human.

Someday history will look back on the abortion massacre of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same revulsion with which we remember these other self-inflicted plagues of humanity.

On this January while we recognize the sanctity of human life, I know some of you who read this may have been deluded by the abortionists and agreed to a procedure for yourself, a loved one, or perhaps for unknown persons in an abortion mill. That agreement now leaves an ache in your heart that seemingly cannot be healed. I assure you Jesus Christ can heal your aching heart. He loves you and will bring grace and peace if you will surrender the pain to him. The Bible tells us there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1) so I urge you to trust him for complete healing.

I'm Rick Blumenberg . . . and that's My View from Tanner Creek.