Being in Yellowknife for a month has been enlightening. (And after writing that I can’t resist telling you I’m writing this blog on the longest night of the year where sunrise today is 10:07am and sunset is 3:04pm).

Yes, it’s been mind-numbing cold at times (-50 Celsius with windchill) and hard to get around by foot. But it’s also true that thirty thousand international tourists will pass through here in the next months to see the Aurora Borealis against the northern night sky.

As strange as this place may sound, I meet people well-settled here, some raising children and grandchildren, building careers, planning retirement, and celebrating their life. Most came from somewhere else “for a few years” and ended up staying-for decades. They feel at home here.

But I have been on countdown, thinly veiled as a Christmas countdown of “how many more sleeps.” This is new for me. Today (Saturday)  I measured out four more breakfasts and four more sleeps. I will fly home Christmas morning. Usually I come and go without any clock ticking away to when I can get back home. What’s going on, and why?

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I’m thankful for my savvy readers who find these misbegotten initiatives and send me the links. And it seems the new low is to call sexual-abusive relational disordered men “sexual strugglers”. So, here’s what passes for a “sexual struggler”:

https://rollingout.com/2019/06/06/megachurch-pastor-arrested-for-sex-trafficking/?fbclid=IwAR2hxKo8hN0WdPFN_Vg8_iQW_5yYi8Pnm0S-2yp6xyLZZ12hlGGkeoWszxw

And if you’re thinking, “Oh, no they don’t mean people who commit crimes!”, you are wrong. The example from those promoting a program event for partners and “sexual strugglers” was the story of man who raped his wife and then pretended he had no idea this was wrong. Each time, she would wake up as he raped her and be both traumatized and humiliated. Silly her! She imagined herself safe enough to close her eyes in her own bed with her own husband and go to sleep!

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I’m grateful for Tania Rochelle for so many reasons. This evening she posted this blog and I want to join my voice with hers. Please read it. Thanks.

https://www.sweetwaterretreats.org/blog

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I arrived in Yellowknife, the capital city of the Northwest Territories. Here’s a map of where that is: https://www.britannica.com/place/Northwest-Territories   It’s north of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and to the east of Alaska, once you get past the Yukon. I’m here to serve a congregation of the United Church of Canada, from now until Christmas day, when I fly back to Calgary. They’ve been without a minister for about a year now and have been doing most of the services themselves. So, here I am, having another adventure! And I feel privileged to be with them for this special season in our faith story. That’s also why the blog is late!

But nothing’s simple, is it? The week leading up to getting on the plane left me badly shaken. It wasn’t just all the things I had to get done, it was facing all the self-doubts about myself again and coming close to how thoroughly my ex-husband had shattered the integrity of everything that held me together. I was up all night worrying about how I would manage the logistics of the trip, the housing, the work, the people, and the unexpected curve balls that ministry always has in store. My confidence was gone. I’m in the thirty-second year of ordination and I was a blubbering idiot. And I wouldn’t have my partner, my family, my friends or my old dog to hold me steady. Anxiety grew each day. I was crying over things that worked out and things that didn’t.  I had forgotten how much it took to do my job and get through each day in those early years after dday. Here I was, over ten years later, shaken to the core, again.

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This week readers shared two spectacularly awful blog/articles with me. Neither one even pretends to hide the misogyny at work in the lives of these treatment personality authors—one a man and one a woman. These practitioners know that no one will stop them. No one will hold them to account. They have permission from their professional cohorts. I choose not to drive traffic to them by naming them. And the more they write in that confident arrogance, the more wives and partners can see not just what practitioners say, or what they do, but how they truly think about us.

By reading and listening to the ramblings of the industry trying to alternately defend, camouflage and then accessorize the misogynist underpinnings of its story, I am also aware that there are individual practitioners who do better than this. But with the various and uneven ways people get into this business and present themselves as specially trained to treat men called sex addicts and sometimes their partners, too, I’m not seeing a clear winner in that department. Are you? It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast.

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