Where is that you'd like me to go?

One of the positives to living in the deep south is the mild winters. Now, in my book, mild would be temperatures above let us just say the freezing mark. I realize when a tour guide is published about an area or region, the temperatures are averaged but that would still only allow for a night or two of outlier temperatures.

I took this picture one morning about 3 weeks ago when the temperature was 25 degrees. The reason for this picture was my complete fascination with the appearance of the little snow flake right above the temperature. How nice for the Volkswagen people to tell me when it is freezing. Ironically, I've never noticed a flame icon when the temperature is hotter than that place down below. And most of the time, it is that hot here. So, you see, there has been no reason to have almost 3 weeks of below freezing temperatures. We just weren't built to cope with that.

Fortunately, today was finally a nice day with temperatures in the low 70s. After just sitting in the yard for a while, some friends came over to visit. And have a drink. Or two. Why are we counting drinks? Carry on. We talked about all kinds of random things. You know about school. Then food. Then pets. Which, of course, led to pet poop. And from there, it was a natural progression to religion.

As we were talking about the Holocaust denier on the news, we started swapping stories about various people who've prayed for our souls. I'm always amazed by Holocaust deniers. Really, there is more evidence the Holocaust occurred than there is that Jesus walked the Earth (I'm not doubting it, just making the point about all the pictures and visual accounts of the Holocaust). Really, it pains me to see so many people have to say their religion is THE right one. I wish everyone could just accept that each person is allowed to have their own beliefs. But I digress. The whole point of this post today was I wanted to share this story with you all.

Once, over a decade ago when I was teaching behavior disordered kids in a middle school, a fellow teacher came into my classroom during our planning time. When I looked up at her, she had tears in her eyes. Thinking one of my students had had a moment with her, I jumped up to see what was wrong. She then said she'd just heard I was dating Mr. Strong.

I was speechless and thinking really, he isn't that bad. I mean, he sometimes runs a few minutes late and often can't remember to put the toilet seat down but nothing is majorly wrong with him.

Seeing the confusion in my eyes, she went on to say she knew Mr. Strong was Jewish and therefore he was going to hell. And if I was with him, then I was going to hell, too.

All I could say was, "Then I'd rather be in his hell than your heaven."

Years later, I still remember this teacher. She wasn't a bad person and her intentions were to "save" me. In reality, I wish it could have been me that saved her. If I could have, I would have saved her from having such a closed mind.

A special THANKS goes out to my mother for teaching me to find the good things about people - no matter what their beliefs.