David:          With the continuing world news about the crisis in Ukraine, it seems a bit self-serving to first update our friends regarding our ongoing bout with COVID.

Karen:          Our own little crisis.

David:          If it COVID has impacted our lives.

Karen:          So, we’ll begin this podcast with the report of how David and Karen Mains are doing, and then we’ll make more of an effort to look at what others have called The Power Of The Positive Opposite. Sounds intriguing.

Intro:             Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:          Well Karen, first of all, I’m saying we should just notify people that we have been vaccinated with the Modernas.

Karen:          Modernas, two Modernas and the booster.

David:          And the booster. So, we did all those vaccinations just as a way of reporting. I would count them back down my fingers. It was 12 days ago. It was a Saturday. Our son had come back from Michigan. One of his best buddy friends. His mom has died.

Karen:          Joel was very close to her in high school.

David:          Yeah, and he wanted to go to the funeral, and he did, and Joel came back and was not feeling well, and he had gotten some tests.

Karen:          Yes, some home tests.

David:          And he was positive for COVID. So, we knew it was possibility. Didn’t think about it that much. Saturday morning, I had breakfast with a friend in a restaurant and about three quarters of the way through the meal I said you know I’m not feeling really well. I don’t know what this is. And then I said it again a little bit later, “You know, I think I probably need to go home because I don’t feel well.” And when I got home it was about probably an hour and a half and bam. It was like a brick wall.

Karen:          Yeah, it was a brick wall.

David:          I never been hit with a brick wall before.  I don’t know how you wheeled a brick wall but that’s what it felt like. I was really, really sick. It went on for two and a half days and I was greatly concerned for a while and then I was not only concerned about myself. I was concerned about you because your immune system. You’ve had health problems. I thought oh don’t let Karen get this. Don’t let Karen get this. But you know after two and a half days I began to feel a little bit better, but something was wrong.

Karen:          Yeah, I pretty much came down with it about the thing that you did as well. You know I think on Saturday started to feel badly.

David:          you tested positive too then when they tested you.

Karen:          Yeah, the classic COVID symptoms pulled mail clinics treating COVID at home. Make sure we weren’t being stupid about things, but you know you’re woozy you’re achy.

David:          Your brain fog.

Karen:          Your brain fog is really a big part of it. The hacky cough draining at the back of my throat. I had a sore throat that I developed so every time I drained which was every time I took a breath it would hit that sore throat and that would keep me awake. So, I wasn’t able to get to sleep right away for the first couple of days. But you knew you were sick there was no doubt about it and it fit all the classic COVID symptoms that are listed in that mail letter and then we had home tests that indicated that we were indeed positive for COVID.

David:          After let’s see Saturday on Thursday I said to you, “Something’s still wrong with me.”

Karen:          You were really faint-headed and dizzy. I was woozy but not like you were.

David:          I said, “I just have to get to the hospital.” I don’t know what it is. Anyway, I got there.

Karen:          Joel took you over and dropped you off at the emergency room entrance because he couldn’t go in.

David:          No sooner had I gotten into the emergency room than there were all kinds of nurse. I said, “Let’s get it done with.” And I kept asking, “What are you talking about?” They said, “Your heart rate is very high.”

Karen:           It doubled the heart rate.

David:           I said, “What is high?” They said normally it’s 70, 80, 90 a minute and you’re at 180 something. And I said, “How come I can’t feel it beating?” They said, “Just look at the monitor don’t bother us.”

Karen:          They’re overloaded with COVID and everything else that was going on.

David:          Yeah, through the IV they gave me a thing that said this will bring it down, but it didn’t touch it and after about…

Karen:           Shot you up again.

David:           They did it again a pretty 20 minutes later, but pretty soon they got it under control. That stopped that dizziness. Anyway, having said that we are both in the recovery mode. We’ll be out of the quarantine in another day which sounds very good. Just so grateful for friends. Word travels rather quickly. It was nice to have people say, “We’ve been praying for you.” “Concerned about you.”

Karen:          This is sort of my ill-informed layperson’s assessment. I think we may have had the Omicron virus. I remember seeing an interview with Dr. Fauci and he said that everyone’s going to come down with the Omicron because it is so transmissible. So, I’m guessing that the boosters and stuff that we did have protected us from the COVID-19 itself and this was one of the variants that we came down with. We really got hit with it. So it’s nice to be able to say, “Pretty much we have another day to go but we’re feeling much, much better.” And that foggy brain is real and achy body, and you know the whole shebang. So, I’m grateful for it.

David:          Did you say you were grateful for it?

Karen:          I’m grateful that we’re feeling better but also in a way grateful that we experienced it. I wouldn’t ask for it, but I realized in what people are going through or have gone through we’ve had a lot of friends say, “We had it when it first came out or two months ago or last year.” But there are many, many people who have the long haul COVID. So, I want to remember as they recover to kind of hold them in my heart and say, “Lord be with them.” And one of the things I do try and do with my prayer life, and I forget I’m not great at this, but this to say, “Help me to remember to pray for those who perhaps don’t have anyone else to pray for them.”

So, I think that’s work that we can do you can’t measure it you’ll never know the impact of it. But I do believe that something that God gives us to do when we have an experience where we suffer like this or have a physical downfall of some sort to remember those who don’t have anyone to pray for them.

David:          Yeah, let’s do a transition now.

Karen:          Okay.

David:          And we’ll get into the topic that we have at hand. I don’t know whether you recall this. I remember hearing you say this phrase of the power of the positive and I don’t remember.

Karen:          The power of the positive opposite. I’d love to claim it as an original with me but it’s not. But it is a phrase that intrigued me because I think in my heart of heart there’s something deep in me that believes that this is a reality that we should learn to exercise. But we should be teaching one another to exercise, and we should teach our children, our offspring and our grandchildren how to exercise the power of the positive opposite.

One thing I did remind myself when I was down with COVID was: you don’t want to go into a negative frame of mind. What was me? And you know, groaning and moaning.

David:           It is hard not to do that.

Karen:          It is hard not to do that, but I’ve done a lot of research into the way that the body responds neurologically to healing processes. And one of the things that we can do for our body is when we’re in a sick state. Let’s just say, it that way is say thank your body for working so hard to make me well. I appreciate that I have a temperature, although we didn’t have temperatures with COVID that indicates that my body is fighting off this disease or this influenza, and so we do the prior “hurrah!” thing for our own bodies as it works to make us whole again because it does want to be healthy. So, that’s one of the examples of the power of the positive opposite that we can do ourselves.

David:          Here’s the scripture I’m going to go to. This is from Jesus Sermon on the Mount. We’ve heard it so many times and yet it is revolutionary. I’m going to read it out of Luke. This is Jesus. He says, “I tell you who hear me; love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.”

Karen:          Is something for our rancorous age, isn’t it? Wow.

David:          “Bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you; and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

This incredible. Absolutely incredible words. People listening to him, there’s something about this man. He does miracles but that’s a strange teaching.

Karen:          Yeah, revolutionary really. The normal human thinking process, this is revolutionary.

David:          Yeah, here is the next paragraph. “If you love those who love you what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners expected to be repaid in full. But love your enemies. Do good to them and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great; and you will be sons of the Most High, because God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful just as your father is merciful.”

Karen:          So, here we live in this rancorous age, calling one another names, divides. You’re on that side, that one’s on this side. Lobbying diatribes across the aisles across the way across the passage of one another. This is revolutionary thinking.

David:          It’s the positive opposite.

Karen:          It’s the power of the positive opposite. One of the things that I think of when I hear this, it just makes me want to weave, is that Jesus was concerned about the state of the evil perpetrator, about the soul in the condition of the evil perpetrator as he was about the one who was righteous and was being acted against. Now, that doesn’t take your breath away. He not only was concerned for them, you know his mercy falls on the just and the unjust, he expects us to be concerned about the soul of the one who is holding us at gunpoint robbing us; or the soul of the one who has evil things to say about us spreading untruth is about us, to really get down into the meaning of it. It takes your breath away.

David:          I really like this for the other guy.

Karen:          Yeah, like it for the other guy. Sure.

David:          I don’t like it when he applies it to me.

Karen:          Yeah, when Jesus applies this…

David:           …because it’s so revolutionary.

Karen:          It’s so revolutionary. I think of a story you heard of as older woman who was robbed at gunpoint by a younger man. And she said, “You can put your gun away. Tell me what you need and I will give you what I have.” Now I think that’s in the spirit of what Christ was talking about. It diffuses the power of evil in a way that the perpetrator is not prepared to be diffused. I mean something happens. Those who give themselves to evolve are often taken over by the evil one. And I think that that reduces his power, power of Satan in the lives of the people who are either through mental illness, through disastrous circumstances in their own lives, through examples of evil in their family or among their friends. It reduces the power of Satan in the lives of those people who are acting that way. It’s just extraordinary. It’s an extraordinary concept.

David:          Yeah, Jesus is not giving “how to solve the problem of Ukraine”. He’s saying, “In your normal lives, I’m talking to you people here on the hillside. This is how you are to live, and it will change your world. It will be the good of all. It will be favoring the way God teaches the way we should live and so on.”

Karen:          So, let’s lift it out a little bit from just the purely individual level. What I would suggest to listeners, if they haven’t done this is to go to that passage in Matthew or Luke; write it out as I have done, and you have done and I have it in my prayer journal and I have the page turned back so I go back and remind myself of what Christ taught us. But there are groups that are working on larger levels. And one of the groups I give to monthly, they just take $25. I mean, not a big gift, but out of my savings account is the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Now, these are the Quakers. We have three peace churches. Denominations.

David:          You had me telling you your background.

Karen:          Yeah, well, I come out of that background. So, there was the Brethren Church which…

David:           Church of the Brethren.

Karen:          Church of the Brethren, which much of my dad’s family was involved in. So, I remember, and I’ve said this on other podcasts, listening to those conversations as a little girl. Would you pick up a gun to defend your family? You know, I mean, it gets down to that nitty gritty level.

So, the Friends Committee on National Legislation is the Quaker group. Then there is the Mennonite group and then there’s the Church of the Brethren, which was what my dad was a part of.

David:           So, you’re referring now, I’m looking, you have a brochure in your hand.

Karen:          I have the annual report from the Quakers, although they use the name Friends Committee and they go by either on National Legislation and they lobby in Washington, DC, diligently and intently. And that lobbying group is growing every time I get a report. So, more and more people who are of this faith background are stepping into a very national kind of activity. And they’re lobbying for peace, not going to war, all the things that the Quakers have stood for that create a voice in the American legislation. Now, what happens in lobbying groups is very often people have a lot of money to throw around to encourage folk to support their projects. They give to campaigns, but the Friends don’t do that. They basically come in on moral grounds; create these dialogues and these information passing along systems that bring the concept of we need to establish work for and hold to peace processes.

One of the interesting things since I got into the literature, which I have just recently spent a lot of time on, is how do you heal the trauma of these bombings that are going on, right? I mean, every single one of those communities, all those people are going into trauma. Trauma lasts a long time in the memory system and in the body actually retains the memory of trauma, which is interesting. But that’s one of the things that the Friends Committee is working toward, to how to heal trauma and set up system for training people. And they’ve attracted the attention of many legislators because those legislators feel that this is a discussion that needs to be added to our national discussions.

David:          You’re just bringing it up as a way of saying there are people who take Jesus’ teachings on a very large scale.

Karen:           Right.

David:           We’re still the beginner scale, okay? You know, when somebody says something that’s not true about us, it makes you mad. And you want to fight back.

Karen:          Yeah, but we can contribute financially to groups that are taking up beyond what we as individuals can contribute, which is to mean to find out who they are.

David:          I’m trying to get this back into the place where most listeners are.

Karen:          Okay.

David:           If we can do that, I’m going to put it into a sentence.

Karen:           All right.

David:          One of the greatest tools Christ offered to heal a broken world is the practice of the positive opposite. Too fast?

Karen:          No, I was just thinking what an enchanting game this would make around your dinner table. You know, how do we practice the power of the positive opposite in our family? And then how do we teach our children to do that among their playmates or schoolmates? How do we do it with our cranky neighbors? You know, that was a wonderful practical conversation for families.

David:          Okay, leave the neighbor out. You just hit a guilt button.

Karen:          But I think those are the practical applications, the daily applications of this conversation.

David:          And what you just said was to bless those people.

Karen:          Bless those people.

David:          Yeah, I think that where there’s conflict, your emotions rise quickly.

Karen:          Oh, they do. And that is being fed and stimulated by our national conversation today. We don’t have a lot of conversation on the power of the positive opposite that I’ve heard. And yet the name calling, the categorizing, the labeling. That’s just being demonstrated over and over and over again.

David:          The failure to calm down.

Karen:           Calm down.  Consider the soul or the personality or the dilemmas of the person who is on the other side of the table.

David:          Yeah, or across the way. Yeah, these are difficult things. Jesus was amazing. Absolutely amazing. I mean, when you talk about somebody who had power, he had all kinds of power.

Karen:          Yeah, I could pray to my Father, and he’d send 10,000 angels. I can’t do that.

David:          So anyway, where we are then is you try to ratchet things down. I’m wanting to get out of the international relations area.

Karen:          We’re not there. Yeah.

David:           It’s nobody assigned me to solve that problem.

Karen:          Yes.

David:          And nobody even asked me my opinion on those problems. But I do find that I struggle with when somebody does something which in my mind is unfair or unjustified. I have an emotional response. Whether that goes to self-pity or anger. You know, you really want to punch somebody in the nose.

Karen:          Well, your first inclination is to respond in kind. That’s the human inclination.

David:          Yeah, to somehow deescalate that and then get to the place where you are exercising blessing to that person.

Karen:          And concern for them.

David:          So, for me, I have to get out of solving the thing on every basis because nobody said to me, “Okay, you’re the wisest man in the world. You can solve this.”

Karen:          This is what we should do with the national level.

David:          Yeah, pray for those people.

Karen:           Yes. Yes.

David:          Who have to deal with all that.

Karen:          Absolutely.

David:          Incredibly difficult problem.

Karen:          Yeah, absolutely.

David:          Again, it means in some ways you’re trying to say, okay, what would Jesus say? And much of what he says is in this relationship to the positive opposite. Well, that’s the opposite of what I would like to do, Jesus. You know, the opposite of what my inclinations are saying.

Karen:          Yeah, but there’s power in this. He says, try it. See what happens. Yeah.

David:           I think with the cranky neighbor area, I’ve come to the place where I’ve said, “Okay, I don’t want to start talking until I’m in control of my emotions more. Where my heart is at peace, where I can see the value of the other person.” So quiet is something that’s important. Learning to exercise quiet, not to say this is what’s happened.

Karen:          Well, and I think that the recognition that this may be on our human abilities, that we need to have the Holy Spirit take over our lives and do and speak through us in ways that we wouldn’t normally do ourselves. And I think we’ve left that out of this dialogue that we need to go to him and say, “Make me be more than I can be.” And these are the ways that we measure whether he indeed has been doing that.

David:          Lord, make me an instrument of high peace.

Karen:          Yeah. Yeah, beautiful.

David:           To be the… “blessed are the peacemakers.”

Karen:           Yeah.

David:           That’s a blessing that he says comes from God.

Karen:           Yeah.

David:          The people who value peace, whether that’s on international relations between nations or whether that’s between myself and somebody in the family. I think you’re good. You’re better at this, you know, but at the same time, my background is not Church of the Brethren.

Karen:           Yeah. I had a lot of tutoring in it. I mean, there was, you know, just those long discussions. I mean, that’s the way I grew up living.

David:          Maybe we should say, “Let’s begin this on the family basis.”

Karen:           Okay.

David:           Husband, wife, parents, children. How do we exercise what Jesus said when somebody offends you? You go the extra mile teaching that to our children.

Karen:          Yeah, that sounds great. Great place to start.

David:           Very big places. And that’s a hard place to start.

Karen:           Can be.

David:           But he did it first. You know, yeah. So, children and grandchildren. Yeah. And whoever you are as an individual. How do you become a peacemaker?

Karen:           Read that sentence again.

David:          One of the greatest tools Christ offered to heal a broken world was the practice of the positive opposite. Yeah. Those verses really come alive, don’t they?

Karen:           Yeah, they do.

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