Anna M. Aquino

WARNING This post will probably offend you! In my book ‘Cursing the Church or Helping it?’ There is a chapter entitled “Looking At Situations with Offense-Colored Glasses”. In that chapter I talk about how once you take on an offense with someone or something it’s as if everything they do will offend you. One starts easily then ‘inferring’ things in someone’s speech, post, and every move that the person makes and then gets offended at. It’s as if they study the individual  or individuals looking for new ways to get offended at them. It’s like the phrase going through life with ‘rose colored’ glasses on, but opposite. Everything is filtered through the offense and when that happens it’s as if every little thing can offend someone. The Bible assures us that offense will happen. People will have a difference of opinion and people will be coming at situations with different worldviews. Offense is a choice. You don’t have to go through life offended at people. Choosing to thi...

  Twelve years ago my parents, my oldest daughter (then an infant) and I were in a hotel room in Cocoa Beach, FL.   My mom and I had walked down to get breakfast, and when the spunky petite waitress announced that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.    It hadn’t occurred to me that America and our world was forever changed.   Honestly we didn’t understand the severity of what happened.   My mom and I finished out breakfast, and found my dad outside.   Together we made our way back to the room, and stayed there glued to the TV starring in horror for the better part of the day.   I was watching Tom Browkaw try to hold it together as the first tower fell, and then the second.   I watched in horror as we realized the Pentagon had been flown into and as the plane on the field was discovered.   Being there in that moment only minutes down the road from an Air Force Base, with my father who was a grunt soldier in Vietnam, wa...