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What should we DO with patriotic holidays in the church? Celebrate them? Mention the occasion in a pastoral prayer? Run for the hills? Bill and I talk about the challenges of patriotic holidays and offer healthy ways to approach them. Transcript of our conversation below!
Our Read of the Week
- Preaching in the Purple Zone: Ministry in the Red-Blue Divide by Rev. Dr. Leah Schade (And here’s the book’s website)
About Called – At the Intersection of Life and Ministry
For 50 years between them, Pastor Bill Smutz and musician Sarah Bereza have survived and thrived in churches big and small, urban and rural, good and not so good. With generous hearts and healthy boundaries, they share practical advice for church staff about working smart, cutting out the bs, and embracing the good in ministry. New episodes on 1st and 3rd Tuesdays.
Check out all the Called podcast episodes here, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
New this episode! A transcript
Bill: Welcome to Called, a podcast where we explore the intersection of ministry and the rest of our lives as church workers. I’m Bill Smutz.
Sarah: And I’m Sarah Bereza. Today we’re talking about national holidays, patriotic holidays – something that we do in America around Veterans Day and Labor Day and the 4th of July. And what does it mean for us in the church world?
Bill: And maybe a little civil religion mixed in there.
Sarah: Yeah, definitely a little bit. Here’s a little bit about Bill and I between the two of us. We have ministered in churches for over 50 years, and we haven’t burnt out yet.
Bill: I have pastored in primarily Presbyterian churches for the last several years. I have been doing interim transitional work in UCC congregations. And the churches I served have been large and small and everything in between.
Sarah: And I had been a church musician all over the denominational spectrum – mainline, evangelical ,Catholic, basically if they hire organists, I’ve worked there. Which means I’ve done a lot of “The Star Spangled Banner” over the years.
So today we’re talking about national holidays, patriotic holidays.
Bill: My sense is we’re talking about the area between how we try to be disciples of Jesus Christ, and how we try to worship God, and the influx of what does that mean particularly in the American context when we come to a Memorial Day weekend or a Veterans Day or any political season where the phrase “God bless America” is flying fast and free. And where members of the congregation may come with expectations for how their relatives or service in the military, should be reflected in their worship experiences, and how that not everybody shares that. And how sometimes pastors and other church staff are in agreement with that, and other times they have different opinions and that those differences, those separate perspectives can cause real points of tension within congregations and between individuals and can make ministry really hard.
Ask the WHY
Sarah: Yeah, it can. And I think that one of the things that we’re talking about now, is whatever we decide to do in those services around those patriotic holidays, we need to really understand why we’re doing that. And that’s like the framing question, whatever choice you come to: why, what’s the point? I think that that’s hopefully a question we ask about all the things that are in our services, especially services where we as the leaders in the local church have a lot of autonomy over the choices that we make. You know, I realize that not everyone listening to this has a lot of autonomy over the choices they make for a given Sunday. But for those of us who do, we really have to pay attention to the choices that we do make.
Bill: We do. And we have our own personal choices and our own theological preferences or understandings. It’s my experience over the years that what I believe personally or how I choose to worship and choose to lead worship can be at odds with folks who don’t share my theological perspective or who don’t have a similar history when it comes to people serving in the military. And even as I pay attention to why I’m doing things, what are my goals, what are my purposes, they may not be shared, and I have to be prepared to deal with that gap and to have conversations in that gap with people from different perspectives.
Responding to Different Viewpoints on Patriotic Holidays
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we’ve all been in situations where someone in the congregation wanted us to be a mirror, basically a neutral thing that they see themselves in.
Bill: You mean all the time?
Sarah: Yeah. This is just one particular point where we see this often, but it happens all the time that we as the leaders in the church are asked to be a neutral canvas to reflect people back.
Bill: Right. Right. And even for folks who want that reflection back, even the slightest bit of distortion is really upsetting. It really throws them, really upsets them. And it’s not, in my experience, a logical response. It’s purely emotional and because it’s so emotional, it can come with a lot more intensity than would seem to make sense. You end up with more intensity than you would expect, than you can anticipate. They may not be self aware enough, but it’s a very tender place.
That tenderness can be akin to holy ground, you know, when we’re dealing in the life of another, we really walking on holy ground and we need to take off our shoes. But the challenge is how do you hold some theological integrity, or how do you say this is who I, as the leader, understand us to be.
Sarah: Yeah. And how do you manage the whole group with its very different viewpoints.
Bill: Knowing they’re going to be all across the spectrum and yeah. And that you can never make everybody happy and probably shouldn’t.
Sarah: Yeah. Even Jesus didn’t make them all happy, as we know well.
Let’s talk about our histories regarding patriotic holidays.
And then we’re going to get into different challenges around these holidays and different approaches that we can take. So Bill, let’s start off with some history.
Bill: I come from a family where there has been military service, but it was never military career. My grandfather served in World War I, another grandfather who served in World War II, a father who served some time during the Korean War in the Air Force. But I have never served, though I’m named after a man who was a bomber pilot, flew B17s and B24s in World War II. And it was important to my parents, not because of his military service, but because of who he was.
So I have that in my background, but I never served. And I would also say that growing up, my experience particularly of Memorial Day was that was the day we went and visited my great grandmother’s grave. I understood it to be a day where you paid attention to your dead relatives if you could. And never had a sense of that as anything more particularly.
It was my third congregation when there are an issue arose about how Memorial Day had run on Sunday morning, from a couple of women whose father had been in the military in World War II. And they understood Memorial Day very differently. I was shocked. I just did not share that understanding. I had grown up, you know, 400 miles from where they had, and we had completely different understandings.
Sarah: And Bill, you grew up during the Vietnam war?
Bill: I did grow up during the Vietnam War. And my Vietnam Memories, I was the odd kid out who when I was seven, eight, nine and watching Walter Cronkite on the evening new, and one of the things was that, at least the CBS evening news did during those years was every Friday when the news was on the news, would end with a body count for the week. And that body count was how many US soldiers had been killed in Vietnam and how many Vietnamese soldiers, Vietcong, Communist soldiers had been killed. And there were always more Communist soldiers killed than American soldiers. But I remember this odd sense as I grew up watching this, of, “Oh, I guess I’m going to have to go off and fight in this war too, and maybe I’ll be killed and be one of those numbers on the news on a Friday night.”
And as I got older and more able to think critically and begin to think for myself, it was like, “I don’t want to do that.” I don’t feel called in that way. I wouldn’t have understood it as “called,” but I didn’t see myself as a soldier and well, when I turned 18, I was still at that time required to go register for the draft, go to the post office and fill out the little card. I knew even as I filled it out, that if I was ever drafted, I would try and be a conscientious objector because I just didn’t think it was right to participate in military that way. So that all that shapes my approach to this day.
Sarah: So like Bill, I have a lot of people in my extended family who served especially in World War II. But I actually grew up in a military family. My dad was career in the military, my stepfather’s spent his career in the military, my grandfather spent his career in the military, and my step-grandfather too. We did move around a lot, and so that really influenced not just my home life, but also the kinds of churches that I grew up in, because they had a lot of military people in them. So I think when we talk about different approaches, we’ll talk about one particular approach that one of my childhood churches had. But definitely, you know, military family, it’s a different cultural kind of thing,
Bill: And when you’re living in proximity to lots of other folks who are serving, or have a family member serving, it does create a different ethos. I should’ve said my wife’s, my father-in-law, was a career Air Force officer as well. And while he was long retired, by the time I met my wife and we got married, it was still very much an important part of his life. And he lived near the base and would be around the base a lot and lived in a community where there were lots of other active serving or retired military. And that was a very important part of the identity of that community.
Sarah: Yeah, for sure. And even sometimes, not even people in the military, but who are contractors. They can be a huge part of the economy of the local city. I grew up around an Air Force base in Georgia that was apparently the largest employer in all of Georgia. So those are our histories.
Challenge 1: The City Set on a Hill and Hero Narratives
Now let’s talk about challenges and we have alluded to some of these, but let’s start out with the cultural narrative that we have in the U.S. We have “the city set on a hill.” And Bill, I think you have seen some shift in the stereotype, like I grew up, you know, hearing Puritan stories of America as “a city set on a hill.” But you’ve seen a shift like since like 9/11, I think.
Bill: I think that sense of American exceptionalism and America as a special place, blessed by God, came with the Puritans who were escaping religious persecution and saw this new land as a blessing in this new land. And that that runs beneath our cultural heritage to this day. But the shift that you alluded to that I have seen, and this is just me, it may not be documented academically, but the folks I knew who served in World War II or who served in Vietnam, Korea, even even the first Gulf War, they were “doing their job” is how they would describe what they did.
There was one man in my church in Racine, Wisconsin, and he had served in seven major battles in World War II all around Europe, and came back and was a milkman for the rest of his life. And when I’d say, “Wow, that was a lot of service,” he would say, “I was just doing my job. I was doing what I was expected to do.” And he did not see his service as anything more than that.
Post 9/11, I feel like we’ve made a shift culturally where anybody who serves in the military or who serves as a first responder of any kind, we now talk about them in heroic terms. These are our heroes, our fallen heroes, our active heroes. And I’m not trying to denigrate anybody at all in saying this, but suddenly when everybody’s a hero, it kind of becomes difficult to parse out, were there some who were really heroes? If everybody’s a hero, is anybody a hero?
Sarah: Yeah. It can be really limiting for people who are labeled that because, “oh, now I have to have this particular identity. I can’t just be myself.”
Bill: I wonder, and again this is just my speculation, but as we as a culture have moved farther away from organized religion, a larger and larger percentage of our population are not involved with any organized faith on a very regular basis. We still need to have some way to talk about military service, to talk about war, to talk about those who die, in a way that’s meaningful to us. And without that faith base of “I’m in a church,” “I’m in a synagogue,” or some other particular faith – without that tight base, then we have to kind of spiritualize our experience of those who serve in any way, shape or form. And so they all become heroes. I liken it to when I was growing up and be driving along highways, I never saw little crosses or a little mountains of flowers, teddy bears, those kinds of things where somebody had been killed in an accident. But now I just see those all the time. And again, I wonder if those aren’t ways we’re trying to provide some spiritual meaning because we don’t have faith communities to which we’re connected where we find that meaning.
Sarah: So there’s a challenge. And especially if we think about, am I promoting a hero narrative in our churches and whether we think that’s a good idea or not.
Challenge 2: Patriotic Holidays Can Be Overtly Partisan
Another challenge is that sometimes these holidays and the way we talk about them in church can be really overtly partisan. And I’ve seen that just through my years in a really wide variety of churches. It seems that churches who are more likely to do something celebratory around Veteran’s Day, tend to be more red, tend to be more theologically conservative. And churches that don’t really do anything or do less, tend to be more blue, tend to be more urban, those kinds of things. And it just seems like hmm, that’s interesting. I wonder what are the deeper things there? And I think there are a lot of things there.
Bill: Yep there’s a lot of things, and I feel like I agree with you on that dichotomy, but I feel like it’s almost a false narrative. It’s like saying, that if you come from a blue congregation or a predominantly blue congregation, there’s no sense of patriotism or no belief in our country. It’s so much more complicated. Or if you’re from a red congregation, you’re not nuanced to say where’s the space for God? It leads to those kinds of false dichotomies that I think get us in trouble. And reinforces bad stereotypes for congregations that are not helpful to our worship of God, to our respect of one another.
Sarah: So there’s that challenge.
Challenge 3: In the U.S., There Is No State Church
Another one is that in the U.S. we are not part of a national church. There isn’t a national church. And so for our services, when we negotiate the relationship between the church and the state, it’s complicated.
Bill: Those are complicated dynamics. And I think we, the collective church, kind of want to keep a foot in each camp. And it’s not just the pastors and other staff members who want to be in one camp, and members who want to be in a different camp. It’s not that simple. In my Presbyterian world, where I’ve spent most of my professional service to congregations, there are churches that will fight about “Do we have a flag or not?,” “How do we recognize these various days?,” “What hymns do we sing on these days?”
But then there’s also the Barmen Declaration in our book of Presbyterian Book of Confessions. And the Barmen Declaration was written by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer back in the 30s, as the confessing church that was standing against the German Lutheran Church that had kinda caved into Hitler. And the confessing church was saying, no, we can’t give into these powers. And it’s a beautiful, four page theological confession about “how we will act towards the state.” And so that is part of our Presbyterian heritage that we celebrate as well. And so there’s this built in conflict of, “how do we have a foot in each camp?” And we live in the world. And I think that’s become more challenging culturally as we become more politically divided in this country, it creeps into how we think theologically and we can become theologically divided in ways we previously perhaps haven’t been or in ways that are more emotional than logical.
Challenge 4: Emotional Responses and Family Baggage
Sarah: So we’ve been talking about secular challenges, but now let’s turn towards the emotional challenges and the familial challenges. And Bill, you’ve mentioned sometimes you’ll have someone in a congregation who just really, you know, wants a special day to remember a parent or an uncle, those kinds of things. Or it seems that sometimes the emotions around these holidays can feel like if you don’t do X (whatever X is) you somehow don’t love your country,
Bill: Don’t love your country and don’t care for that particular parishioner. You’ve told him or her, “you don’t matter,” because you have trod on their emotional/spiritual expectation of what you’re going to do. Whether they’ve explained that to you or offered that to you or not. You’re supposed to be able to read my mind or read my spirit and know. And this isn’t the only area in church life that’s like that, but it carries extra freight, it seems like,when it comes to a mix of religion and patriotism.
Sarah: This is kind of like when we were talking on an earlier episode about settling into a new church and you really need to find out not just what the norms are, but what the sacred cows are, and think really carefully before you, I don’t know, delete that one special song from Christmas Eve or what have you. Because lots of people are gonna feel like you did that to them and you ruined their Christmas Eve. And probably that’s not what you want.
Check out this episode of Called on Settling in to a New Church
Bill: It probably takes three years of hard, intentional work, relational work to get to know a congregation regardless of size, to really get to know people. And it’s been my experience that the members of the congregation don’t see that as their work. That’s the pastor’s work, the staff’s work, you get to know us, but they’re ready to jump immediately if you aren’t understanding things the way they expect you to understand them. The trouble I had in serving a congregation with a couple of sisters on Memorial Day that I mentioned earlier, I had been at that church seven months when Memorial Day rolled around and did not respond obviously the way they were expecting me to and they just hammered me and may have ultimately walked away from that church.
Sarah: We need a memo here that like, hammering the pastor is really not what anybody should be doing.
Bill: I’m always glad to be in conversation to try and understand if somebody feels let down. I want to take that very seriously and be appropriately apologetic if that’s the right course. But there wasn’t that opportunity. They were just angry, and they needed a place to unload. And this is where I talk about the emotional response. I know it had nothing to do with me. I’m not sure it had anything to do with faith. I think it had to do with a lot of unfinished personal business they had with their father.
Sarah: This is reminding me of as an adolescent, I was playing at Jimmy Carter’s church down in Georgia. And, apparently there were some snarky comments about that at my very conservative church. And some people took that as the opportunity to leave. (It was this conservative Baptist versus those liberal Southern Baptists.) And I just remember thinking, this wasn’t the issue. This was just an excuse. Not that I blame them at all. There were a lot of problems.
Bill: I don’t want to be flippant as I say this, but I don’t think there was anything I could have done before or after Memorial Day to really work with those particular women. In that particular situation, if I had done Memorial Day as they wanted me to, even though I didn’t know what that expectation was, they might have stuck around a little bit longer, but they were ultimately looking for a way to move out the door. And again, I’m not trying to denigrate their sense of their father or their sense of patriotism, but we don’t read minds. It takes time for people to get to know each other, and we have to give each other the grace for the time to build that knowledge of one another.
Challenge 5: Theological Conflict
Sarah: The last challenge that we’re thinking about is a theological one, which is that we Christians have a lot of different views on what it means to be part of God’s beloved community here on Earth in our particular countries and national setups. There’re so many views that vary depending on the denomination that you’re in. Oftentimes those of us who’ve been in one particular denomination, we might think, “Well, this is the way that people think about this. Right?”
But you know, Catholics have a lot of different teaching about what it means to be as a religious person in a particular country that are really different from like what Presbyterians have taught or what Lutherans have taught. Just really different understandings of the relationship of what it means to be in God’s kingdom in that spiritual sense, and in this physical world and what is the relationship between the two? What should we do? Very different ways of thinking about it.
Bill: Even within your Baptist tradition, Sarah, you know, the larger world of Anabaptists…
Sarah: I just want to clarify that I’m not currently Baptist.
Bill: Your former Baptist tradition, Sarah.
Sarah: Although I love Baptists, and I’ve loved working in Baptist churches.
Bill: So there are those who embrace the believers baptism, that can run the gamut from folks who will be marching with the flag and want to sing “The Star Spangled Banner “and “God Bless America” as part of a 4th of July Sunday service, to Amish and Mennonites who withdraw from the world because they don’t want to, in part, fight in a war.
Sarah: So let’s talk about our approaches to these challenges. I think we have to start with the Pastor Bill strategy here.
Approach 1: Vacation….
Bill: My approach has been cowardice, more often than not. A strategy saying these are days that may not be wise for me to be leading worship because I am who I am. I bring a particular perspective about how I’m going to pray on a Memorial Day Weekend or a Sunday that’s close to the 4th of July. I bring a particular understanding theologically, scripturally… I tend to gravitate towards Jesus saying “Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall inherit the earth,” or we need to “beat our swords into plow shares and pruning hooks.” And so I tend to come more from that perspective and, if that’s how I’m preaching, if that’s how I’m praying, it can be in certain congregations, it can be more harmful to the larger whole than not.
And so Memorial Day is a great weekend to be on vacation. And there was a group of us who graduated from seminary for 20 years after seminary. We were away together every Memorial Day, us and our spouses. And it was a wonderful tradition. Now, it wasn’t just to escape, it was a three day weekend. So we got the Monday holiday. But it was advantageous in that way that I was away. For the 4th of July, I do tend to try and be away. It’s been a family time for us when we’ve lived away from where most of our extended family is. 4th of July was a holiday we could come to, because I wasn’t working. I didn’t have to work as a pastor like I do on Christmas or Easter. And so that was a time to be away. But it’s also advantageous to, again with my theological perspective, not to be there to say things that are gonna create conflict within the congregation. That’s avoidance. Hear me say, I know that and I own that. But that’s kind of the practical reality.
Sarah: That’s picking your battles.
Bill: Right. There’s all sorts of fights to have around the church, and some are more useful than others.
Approach 2: Thanksgiving
Sarah: So we’ve got that approach. One kind of approach that I’ve seen, especially when I was growing up in more military congregations would be something that would either be like a celebration of the holiday or something that could be read as thanksgiving. And as a kid growing up in churches that had a lot of military members, I remember a lot of times military members would be acknowledged in the service, like, you know, will stand up and applaud or something like that. As a child I perceived that not as celebration, but as thanksgiving as in, “Thank you for the service that you’ve done to our country. Thank you for protecting the people here.”
And I might have a different feeling now, or maybe maybe those churches would have a different kind of thing going on now. But I don’t think it’s wrong to say thank you to people, but yeah, it can be really complicated because then it can become a celebration. It can become hero worship. It can become somethings that are really truly negative.
Bill: Thanking people for their service to our nation is, I don’t think ever wrong. But where I struggle is again, that sense of exceptionalism that often goes hand in hand with “God bless America.” Like God blesses our country more than any other country or that we were somehow created more specially than anyone else. And yet if we’re all created in God’s image…
Sarah: I remember as a child, wondering, “I wonder what it would be like to be in a country that wasn’t the best in the world.” That is a sheltered childhood.
Bill: And I struggle with, when it does become hero worship, because I’m not sure we’re helping those who have served in the military. I remember, there was church I was serving in Indiana years ago. One of the youth leaders wanted to create a Veterans Day celebration. Have everybody stand in worship and have them come talk to the youth. And I said, “That’s great. I think it’s important to do that. Can we also ask them if they’d be willing to reflect on what it means to serve in the military and have certain scriptures that they grew up with that they were taught about, like the Peacemakers, thou shall not kill. What does it mean? What does it meant for them? Was the church supportive of them. How have they struggled with that? Are there ways that the church can help them?” And have a conversation in a very honest way, both for what they could teach the youth, but also, were there ways the church could be helping them if they were struggling with those questions?
Sarah: This kind of reminds me of celebrations of parenthood that don’t acknowledge how complicated parent child relationships can be. Like a lot of people don’t have good relationships with their mothers or they can’t become mothers or don’t want to, and the same thing with father’s day. And sometimes I feel like, you know, do we really have to get into this in church? Like, I’m glad if you can, it’s just really complicated.
Approach 3: Acknowledgement
So one other other approach to these challenges is just simple acknowledgement, in the sense of “oh, we’re going to mention this in our pastoral prayer,” something like that. I do it on the musical side around 4th of July. I do all American composers, and I have nice little note in the bulletin celebrating music by American composers this week. It’s an acknowledgement without really taking a side. In some ways it’s like, there’s room for a lot of nuanced conversation here, but is really a Sunday where hardly anybody’s here because – is that really the time that you, that you want to engage? Oftentimes it’s not.
Bill: Those conversations need to be much broader and deeper and take place over time. We’re often pressed in the church to give time for those things because the roof’s leaking or the Sunday school starts up in the falls, or whatever it is. And, and we’re busy rushing around trying to handle those things.
Read of the Week: Preaching in the Purple Zone by Leah Schade
Sarah: It’s time for our read of the week. And we only have one. Let’s think about one final approach for our challenges that we have here.
The book that I’ve read recently is called Preaching in the Purple Zone by Leah Schade. It’s a recent book about what do you do when you’re preaching in a church – that any of us could be in – where you’ve got people on the red side, you’ve got people on the blue side, and you want to be a spiritual leader to all the people in your congregation.
What Dr. Schade has proposed is a model with a sermon, a dialogue, and a sermon. And this model could happen over a couple of couple of Sundays or over a month. Basically the first portion, the first sermon or Bible study, whatever it ends up being, is what she refers to as a rooting sermon, where the topic is introduced to the congregation. Oh, we’re going to talk about, say, climate change because that’s a hot button topic. And not in the sense of we’re going to talk about climate change here and now, but for the rooting sermon, let’s talk about the importance of God’s earth. That God has created us, that God has made us to care for the earth. An introduction to the topic that isn’t necessarily drawing lessons for the here and now, but just saying, “hey, we have license to talk about this. It’s okay for us to talk about this. We get to talk about this.”
And then the middle portion is a dialogue which is set up to be a really, hopefully respectful conversation between people who want to participate, with a facilitator, a record keeper, those kinds of folks. And people are asking, what’s your relationship to the topic? What do you think about X, Y, Z, um,approaches to this topic? Like what do you think we could do in response to climate change?
And then the final portion is not a sermon that says, “Well, here’s what I think and here’s the right way”, but rather “here’s what the different voices said. Here’s what people in our congregation said about this thing.”
And the goal isn’t necessarily to come to any single viewpoint on the issue. That’s probably an impossible goal. But to actually have this dialogue, to be able to talk about something that’s incredibly, incredibly divisive in our churches and talk about it in a way that doesn’t divide the congregation. It’s a really a research based book. A lot of the research is based on her survey of over 1200 pastors in mainline denominations. So a research base to the book and of course, I love reading this kind of stuff. I’m like, “Oh, this is fun, Saturday morning reading.”
But this is an incredibly practical book. Even if you’re not like, “oh, what I really wanna do is talk about climate change in my church.” But even if you’re just like, “Well, how do we make a change in a congregation?” Well, this is a great model for how to make a change in a congregation or to open up new pathways without alienating people, without just saying, “Here’s what we gotta do. You’re gonna follow me.”
Bill: What intrigues me, and I haven’t read the book, but what intrigues me by the approach, that it’s really designed to keep the relationships within a congregation intact. Strengthened. And if the relationships are intact, we can get through a lot together, versus many of the approaches of our culture and practices of our church which I think are unfortunately mimicking culture, are really tearing relationships apart. We don’t know people that we disagree with much on social media.
Our congregations, our communities are all becoming more polarized in many ways. And this kind of approach invites us to say, “We needed a variety of relationships with a variety of people who think different ways. That’s how we function best together as a people, as a community.” And I think you can even push that, to “as a nation.”
Sarah: Yeah. So that’s it. Preaching in the Purple Zone by Leah Schade.
That’s it for this week’s installment of Called. Look for new episodes on the first and third Tuesdays of the month,
Bill: You can find show notes@calledpodcast.com.
Sarah: If you’re enjoying the show, please share it with your ministry buddies. That is the best way for them to find the show. We love to have new listeners.
Bill: And we also love to have feedback. If there’re ideas you have or you’ve got questions. Our email address is called podcast@gmail.com. I’m Bill Smutz.
Sarah: And I’m Sarah Bereza.
Bill: Until next time, cut out the bs and embrace the good.
