Category Archives: Alaska

nice people: why we won’t cave to medical cowardice

Posted on by November 17, 2021

We got 13 inches of snow last weekend, and shortly afterward our daughter lost a lens outside while sledding. Or maybe it was when they put sleds away. Or maybe it was somewhere in between. She had no idea, so we scoured the yard in ten-degree temps looking for it after she came in and told us. And then that night, in zero degrees, my husband and I looked again with flashlights.

Yeah, no. We didn’t find it.

nice people: why we won't cave to medical cowardice

So we called to get it replaced. But no, you can’t just get it replaced; her prescription was one year and 49 days ago, and those 49 days make a huuuuuge difference because they mean she needs a whole new exam, according to the eye doctor’s office.

I told them we pay out of pocket, and we don’t do recreational medical appointments.

They gave us a little runaround but eventually acquiesced a little, to the point of making an appointment for me (because, Dorothy, we’re not in our 30s anymore) and during my appointment, my daughter could walk in to get the lens in her glasses replaced. So far, so good.

Until the lady said they require masks.

Now, just so you know…I have a medical exemption for at least three reasons. But this isn’t about medical exemptions, just as it isn’t about medical care or science or critical thinking.

This office didn’t care about medical exemptions; they require masks.

“So,” I asked, “your office discriminates against those who cannot wear masks for medical reasons?”

“No, this is a private practice,” the receptionist said. (I’m pretty sure this is the same one that answered the phone earlier with, “Hellocanyoupleaseholdthanks.” It wasn’t a good start.) “It’s Dr. Whatshisname’s policy.”

“Oh! So it’s Dr. Whatshisname who discriminates against people with medical exemptions?” Yeah, I’m that fun at parties, too.

After a few seconds of bluster and stammering, she went for the plandemic talking points about numbers and “safety” that have nothing to do with medical care, science, or critical thinking, as I already mentioned.

“If Dr. Whatshisname believes all that,” I said, “he’s not someone I would trust with any form of medical care for my kids or myself. Please cancel our appointments.”

And that’s when she hung up on me. (I bet she’s real fun at parties, too.)

Now, I know there are a lot of nice people out there just doing their jobs. Just sending their kids to school. Just going to work, just not rocking the boat. But don’t expect me to believe that these people are wearing masks for the health of others, because it is their perpetuation of the myth that prevents people like me who cannot wear a mask from getting medical care.

“I don’t wear it for me, I wear it for you” is a bunch of self-righteous BS and I’m over it.

Next we tried Dr. Whosit, recommended by one of my best friends. Made appointments. It looked good. And then they said to bring a mask.

Whoops.

“I can’t wear a mask, and I won’t make my kids wear them, either,” I said.

“Well, it’s our policy, blah blah, can you bring a medical exemption letter?”

“I don’t need to bring a medical exemption letter,” I said. “My medical history in other areas is none of your office’s concern.” And they know that, as does every other medical office, but they’re hoping you and I don’t know that, of course. (Hellloooo, HIPPA!)

“Let me find Dr. Whosit so you can speak to him.” Great, thanks.

A minute on hold, and Dr. Whosit comes on.

“Hi, can I help you?”

I explain our situation. Dr. Whosit is nice but admits that he just does what the State tells him. I answer that I am not going to the state for my medical care, I am looking for someone who actually practices medical science instead of political science in their patient care.

“Well, it’s only for a little while in a small room. Couldn’t you wear a mask for just that time?”

“No, I am not going to suffocate myself or my kid for just a few minutes. Would you?”

No, he wouldn’t, but he was asking me to.

And this is the (lack of) logic we are encountering at every level of this. These people would call OCS or DFYS in a heartbeat should you intentionally cause lung damage to your child or restrict their oxygen in any non-state-approved way, but they balk when you stand up against them for wanting to do it.

The reason they balk is because so many people have no problem actually allowing other people to restrict their children’s oxygen. How dare we question those from their lofty position on a high horse?

if your medical provider is still requiring masks, they either don't understand basic science or they agree to foolish things that morons instruct them to do. Find a better doctor.

I know, they’re just nice people, refusing to rock the boat while simultaneously making excuses for all the leaks in it. This is okay. It’s fine, we’re all fine…and the water just keeps rising, because nice people keep allowing it to.

King Hezekiah was a nice person, too. In the line of Biblical kings, he was actually a pretty good one.

One day Hezekiah gets sick and is about to die. So he prays, and God not only heals him but also provides a miraculous sign to prove that he’s healed. Pretty good, right?

But then Hezekiah gets an impressive visitor who has heard about his sickness, and sends envoys with letters and gifts to him. Hezekiah responds by showing off everything he has, exposing his assets and weaknesses to this foreign entity.

He makes himself look good while thoughtlessly endangering future generations.

But maybe it was unintentional. Maybe he just wasn’t thinking. Maybe he felt sorry about it later.

Or maybe not. Let’s read:

Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord: Behold, the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have stored up till this day, shall be carried to Babylon. Nothing shall be left, says the Lord. And some of your own sons, who will come from you, whom you will father, shall be taken away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” 

Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.” For he thought, “Why not, if there will be peace and security in my days?”

– 2 Kings 20:16-19

Why not? As long as it doesn’t affect my time, and my life is easy, and I’m not inconvenienced, who cares?

I’m pretty sick of nice people, to tell you the truth. Nice people are giving up our freedoms, rolling over so evil people can abuse our children and convince us that it’s the (self)right(eous) thing to do.

I found some leads and made appointments with a new eye care center who is so popular they are booked out for quite a while. Turns out, supporting freedom is actually pretty good for business.

But friends, this is a serious issue: Where are we capitulating? Where are we giving an inch, and they are taking a mile?

We are dealing with vax mandates this year because so many of us capitulated to mask requirements last year.

It might be inconvenient to find a new doctor or optometrist or dentist or hair stylist. I know it’s not easy. It wasn’t easy for us when we moved our whole family last year to a new medical provider, a different church, and new social media platforms. Hey, I can’t even remember our new PO Box number. Change is hard, I get it.

But we’re not called to do easy. We need to remember that. We’re called to do obedience, and to stand for freedom. And if we don’t do it now, our kids and grandkids won’t have a choice about it later.

as weird as you are: what homeschool really is

Posted on by March 10, 2022

Homeschooling has always been misunderstood, but 2020 didn’t do it any favors and now there’s even more confusion.

The fall of 2020 saw an unprecedented number of families transfer their kids from public and private school to homeschool. And this fall has been the same, for many of the same reasons; even more parents this year want to make the move to homeschool.

as weird as you are: what homeschool really is

It’s a bold, brave choice that requires a family to make significant changes, and it can be overwhelming. That has never changed; the overwhelm has always been there whether it was last year, this year, or sixteen years ago, when we started.

But this year I’ve noticed one difference: Many parents who wish they could get their kids out of public school have washed their hands of homeschooling because they feel like they tried it last year with the forced lockdown, and it was miserable.

So let me clear something up real quick. This is important:

If, because of lockdowns, you were forced into schooling at home, schooling online, or doing a ton of assignments with your kids that their school told you to do, then I hate to break it to you, but…you didn’t homeschool.

I hope that’s a relief to some of you.

Just because your child did assignments at home doesn’t mean it was homeschool.

If they were still registered with another school and doing everything that school told them to do, a repeat of that experience is not what you would be signing up for if you chose to (really) homeschool.

Because homeschool is not checking off a list that someone else assigned you. Homeschool is not hours and hours in front of a screen in zoom meetings or other online classes. Homeschool isn’t just doing the same things you would do at school, but moving the location to your kitchen table (or the couch, or your bed).

Homeschool is none of those things. So if you were given that impression last year and it left a terrible taste in your mouth, I am so sorry. No one can blame you for saying “We tried homeschool last year and we hated it” because we would hate it that way, too.

But we can show you what it really ought to be. And that should give you hope, especially if you wish there was an alternative to the indoctrinating mess that many public schools have become. If you are tired of the CRT and other agendas, the unhealthy mask mandates, the disregard of parental rights, and you want to make school about education again (whoa, what a concept!), let’s talk about what homeschool really is.

And right from the start, I admit that I can’t give you the full picture. Because homeschool is different for everyone, and that is the beauty of it. It is for you and for your kids, not for a predictable system so they will all go in different and come out the same after being squeezed to conform to a mold they may never fit into.

But here are some basic principles:

– We read. A lot. Out loud and quietly, to each other, to younger siblings, to older siblings, to Grandma, to the cats if they will listen. So many books, so little time. When someone’s sick, audiobooks work in a pinch.

– We do stuff: Projects and hikes and visits and crafty things and cooking and watching videos and I can’t even tell you what else. At home and elsewhere, on our own and with others, and we’re not limited to a 7 am to 3 pm schedule.

– We talk to each other, to extended family members and friends, and others. We discuss what we’re reading and learning. We visit people and talk on the phone, and we’re not segregated into only talking with those in our own age group, economic group, neighborhood, or gender.

– We try and fail and change things up, and try again. We’re not stuck with the math program that we hate. We try new language arts programs that might be a better fit. We don’t read the dry textbooks that put you to sleep.

– Our curriculum and schedule work for us, not the other way around. We are not a slave to the checklists and to-do lists (and neither are our kids). We adjust our school schedule to our lives instead of adjusting our lives to our school schedule. A new baby is born, or someone gets sick, or some major catastrophe occurs? We learn about basic skills and caring for each other for a few weeks, and the algebra and language arts can wait. There will be time to pick it up again when things settle down. We are flexible when we need to care for each other, help friends, do a major home repair, or get involved in community projects. So much that needs to be known is never learned in school…but it can be learned in homeschool.

Some of the most important learning is not academic, so don’t be afraid to go there.

So friends, if you want to homeschool this year but don’t think you can for a dozen or more reasons, listen to me:

You will be a terrific teacher for your kid. You’ve already been doing it a long time.

You can teach your kids. Yes, it’s hard sometimes. Yes, you’ll be sanctified. But you can go slow, read the books you want, do the activities you want, partner with friends, take advantage of online resources (they cover every subject or topic you could imagine), and make it your own. Make it for them. Make it for your freedom. Make it for their future.

We have all these preconceived ideas about what school should look like, and we feel like we can’t fit the mold. So, newsflash:

There was never meant to be a mold.

School is supposed to be as weird as you are. Go ahead and quote me on that.

____

Need a quick resource for more info? HSLDA has a terrific site right here, with everything you need to know (legal, local, academic, and otherwise) to get started.

prayer like clouds: when we notice things in a different light

Posted on by May 26, 2026

I’m not proud of it, but lately my domestic abilities are extremely…how do I put this? Minimalist. I don’t rearrange furniture, don’t buy cute décor, don’t keep up with style blogs. I suffer through necessary cleaning like everyone else. And now that Vince and I both work at home, our oldest kids do most of the cooking.

prayer like clouds: when we notice things in a different light (shannon guerra)

The only household chore I truly love is rearranging books. Thanks to seven kids who never reshelve anything (insert strict librarian scowl here), I get to do it almost daily.

Vin knows I love moving books around and he recently left one of his new ones to my disposal. It was light brown, clothbound, and he said I could put it wherever I wanted.

So I looked around, pondered, and dragged the piano bench across the library. Then I stacked the new book on a high shelf with some of his others.

He didn’t notice for a couple of days. Then one morning he found it and protested, announcing “it doesn’t go there.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t go there?” I laughed. “You said I could put it wherever I wanted.”

He threw up his hands in exaggerated despair. “I trusted you to respect the book, and you put it way up there! It’s a beautiful copy about the War of 1812. And I didn’t expect you to put it on a stack, sandwiched between a book by Ted Koppel and an old copy of The Silmarillion!”

The nerd is strong with this one. As you can see, he is a closet book rearranger, also.

That was in the morning. By afternoon, we’ve reached the part of the day when I am at my desk to write, and the ideas and motivations are just…poof, gone. I sit and stare. Open and shut files, open and shut my journal. Look at my notes. Rearrange things on my desk, and somehow it’s not any neater after a few minutes of doing so.

prayer like clouds: shannon guerra

Yet on Sunday night when I was getting ready to take a bath – on the wrong day, at the wrong time, and in a place without any writing material whatsoever – all sorts of ideas just flooded over me.

The creative thoughts are supposed to come when I’m conveniently in front of my laptop, or at least with a pen and paper handy. But it almost never fails; the creativity flows without effort in the most unexpected places. The expected place requires work, and concentration, and discipline. Which looks like a lot of sitting and staring.

I don’t think it’s Murphy’s Law so much as it is the need for fresh oxygen to stir up new thoughts, creating opportunities to observe and notice new things. Up here in my office, in spite of all the windows, the view doesn’t really change all that much: The desk is a mess. The floor is lined with throw pillows and crates of books and yarn. Usually there’s a few blocks or toys scattered all over. And out the window, trees are trees.

But…not really. It’s spring and the leaves are unfurling outside. The aspens are covered in millions of pale green stars that flash and twinkle in the breeze. Sometimes the sky is classically blue, but on this day it was cloudy and dramatic, steel grey, shot through with shafts of sunlight against chartreuse new leaves. My favorite. Or one of my favorites, at least.

And there, noticing life around me, I have a few sentences to write about. They string together and start to accumulate into something substantial.

That night I drove to Bible study, and prayer came the same way as I sat and stared, driving down the highway. It came out in small phrases, thinking of what we needed for the night: Good conversation. No one feeling awkward or out of place. Everyone to be at ease, comfortable in their own skin. More concerned with encouraging each other than with impressing each other.

Sometimes they were real sentences, and sometimes they were just one-second thought prayers: Safe driving. Peace in hearts. Healing. Truth. Just sentence fragments, because God knows how to fill in the blanks better than I do.

And I wondered about the weight of those instant prayers. Do they really do anything? They feel so effortless, just thoughts directed at God.

I turned off the highway and drove up the hill, noticing the patchy clouds in a grey sky. And His answer was right there: Some clouds are darker and heavier than others, some will drop rain sooner than others, but all carry a measure of water.

They all accumulate, contributing to the provision for those who are thirsty.

And, hey Love – answering prayer has never been about your efforts, anyway.

This is abiding, the thought-life directed Godward. Unpolished, unpretentious, unrehearsed. Our incomplete thoughts at scattered intervals, strung together and brought back to Him in surrender. Some of them are intercessory, filling the cloud for someone else. Others are internal, our own thoughts and concerns and desires, and they condense as Living Water that washes through us, irrigating our hearts, and bringing wholeness.  

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
    and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
    giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
    it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
    and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

– Isaiah 55:10-11

That night in our small group of women, we sat around a long table with steaming tea in paper cups and discussed the book we’re reading together. And we’re learning so much just from the reading, but we go so much farther when we hear each other’s perspectives and questions. We ignite thoughts in each other we didn’t know were there if they hadn’t had the chance to come up in conversation.

We notice more when we put our thoughts in different places. I didn’t know I thought that, until I said it out loud.

I didn’t realize that was true until I typed it out.

On the way home, rain spattered the windshield and rinsed the highway. It soaked the ground, and the leaves will be bigger tomorrow.

I thought trees were trees – that is, until the sky changed color behind them and they shook in the breeze, demanding me to take notice.