Song of the afternoon

I've got the Dixie Hummingbirds playing this afternoon, the version from the Mama album being a little bit more upbeat than this one, but the truth is the same.

I grew up in the South when gospel song shows were the only other thing you could hear on the radio, other than preaching, before noon on Sunday. The earliest programs were the best because that's when the black gospel and the pentecostals had their singing, airtime was cheaper at 6 AM, y'know. About 8 was when the Methodists and Presbyterians took over with choirs and last week's sermon.  I guess I don't really know what came on after 10, because we were for sure headed to church ourselves, neither my mother nor my grandmother ever let us miss and where else would you be other than with one of them?

It's a good way to be raised, I learned some measure of self control keeping my mouth shut and my backside in the pew for the length of a church service. We were Independent Congregational Methodist Cumberland Presbyterian Southern Baptists when I lived at home, then I went off to college and belonged to nothing. Of course, that means when I finally started looking for a church home of my own, I became Church of God. I'd like to go to the Episcopal Church downtown because I really like the liturgy, but I'm not sure too many of them would understand how none of the above is in any way chaotic.

Church is about the fellowship of believers, not choosing a social club that thinks like you. You go to learn to think like Christ.

I bring up the Dixie Hummingbirds because thru them I really first heard songs that talked about friends and family failing you, even betraying you, but keeping on with the Lord who remains ever faithful.  I don't know why white gospel doesn't have very much of that, it still happens in white churches, we just are trained to never talk about it. King David talked about it, out loud, in church, and had the choir sing about it in the service. But we don't.

In any case, I recommend to you old gospel music and old hymns, you'll have something substantial to use when you need to lament. Lament? Now that's a very, very old tradition that completely confounds the moderns. We'll talk about it later.

I'll see if I can't do a couple of playlists on iTunes or amazon. Perhaps you'll find some really good new old stuff in there. Some old song to find something new in you.

Because I'm a little long winded

I've created this blog as a companion to Sweetbriar's because I tend to be a little long winded when it comes to the things of God, and I enjoy it. There is no end to His beauty and wisdom, and I could go on forever about everything I find in Him - but I have no outlet for that. I don't have the teaching gift, so looking for a Sunday school class to teach would be useless. Like evangelists burn to tell everyone the good news about Jesus, and pastors ache to protect and nurture and grow up the sheep of His pasture, and prophets must declare the message they've been given lest it become a fire shut up in their own bones, teachers must get what they have learned into their students.

If I give a beautiful exposition of what I've found in God, either in scripture or what He's taught me step by step, and someone still doesn't get it, well, that's alright, bless their hearts. I hope God takes them on into good things and His wisdom in His own perfect way. It doesn't have to be through me and they don't have to see things my way - which is a long winded way of saying I don't care, God bless you, and I'm moving on to the next thing.

However, the wretched thing about the internet (and getting used to using it) is that you just want to put your thoughts out there. I've kept journals for years, not religiously or daily, but I've got some entries set back that I still find fresh and revelatory, and it just seems a waste of God's grace to me to keep it hidden, only to be thrown into the dumpster when I die.* I've also entered a year of change wherein that change seems to be churning and working continually, not having yet faded with the usual washout of a New Year's resolution.

So, in celebration of the inner wheels turning and the fresh wind of hope that comes with it, I'm going to let this blog go into territory that is not so "recovery" driven, but is much more personal in some ways. This is the blog of an introvert who believes, so my way of sharing is to bring out all the treasures I find. To me, it will look like an old bookstore full of volumes that never made the best seller list and yet the proprietor swears each and every one is a little gem to be treasured if only you knew what was in it.

I'll be the crazy old lady in the stacks. If you come near enough, I'll start telling you all sorts of things as if you really wanted to know and as if you could understand everything I was saying. If you're not sure, ask. It's just a blog.

Leakey's Bookshop in Inverness, Scotland

Looks marvelous, doesn't it!

*Note: I've learned the hard way with my mother's death that 95% of all the stuff you collected and found valuable has fallen apart with use or been mouse pissed into garbage by the time you go. If you have something to pass on, give it while the giving is still good.

How can He wait?

How can He wait? How can the Lord delay coming to be with us, how can He stand to put off cleansing this earth of cruelty and murder and every evil thing and come and dance with us? 

If He had done it from the very beginning, we wouldn't be the multitude of multiverses we are now, but if the Father hadn't specified the day and the hour, and if the Son hadn't fully committed Himself to obedience, I don't know how He could hold Himself back. It is His very nature, love, and He wants to be found and seen and rejoiced and danced and loved with us. How can we hardly wait?

Time out of Mind

I found this article absolutely Fascinating, for two reasons. One, the 80 millisecond lag interested me because it seems that lights always take much longer to go off than that for me. That is to say, when I flip the switch that turns off the light, it looks like it takes almost a full second for the light to "run out." I couldn't imagine what the electrical excuse could possibly be for it, but it's probably just my brain. There are all sorts of implications in this article for people whose brains have a lag between one part and another, and for people (like me) who have especially high thresholds for attention spans and focus.

The second aspect, yet the trigger that brought me into the article, was the idea that things happen, but our brains lag until they've Formed the perception of it. As a Christian, I've always looked for some kind of analogy to explain to people how one "hears" God, because the word "hear" is so very audible, but the experience is pretty much guaranteed not to be. That is, God doesn't talk in your ear, he talks to your spirit, but the experience is not subjective - he is not you, he has his own words to say and, for the most part, they are not what you expected or particularly wanted to hear.

The analogy I've come up with is that when you "hear" him, it's the immediacy and the echo of someone who's just spoken. You know, like when someone at the next desk tells another friend, "Our English test has been moved up to this afternoon." Wait! What??? You were doing your own thing but the echo of those words are stamped very clearly in your mind. Or perhaps an announcement comes over the loudspeaker at Walmart, "Will the party meeting Darcy Milbanks please come to the Service Counter to pick up Mr. Milbanks." You may not be meeting anyone as you browse the cereal aisle, but the words catch your imagination a moment later as you recall, "Darcy Milbanks. That's a bit unusual for around here. I wonder what that's all about."

The voice of God is something like that. I'm not hearing it audibly, but I'm perceiving it as if the words still hung in the air between us. 

There's a second aspect to the voice of God that is ALWAYS true: He never disagrees with Himself. He will never say anything or ask you to do anything that doesn't line up with scripture. Count on it.

Now that you know that He always agrees with the Bible, you want to know where the best place is to hear Him? The scriptures. Just go read them. Read them so you are familiar with all of them. Don't worry about understanding them all, just read them all until you know all the stories really well, can recognise when someone is quoting the New Testament or the Old Testament straight away and (this is when you know you are starting to know the sound of his voice) you know when someone is misquoting the Bible. When you know someone has inserted words that aren't there, or has left out the the big context of a scripture so they can bend the truth and whine about their pet peeve instead, then you know you are beginning to recognise God's voice.

I heard someone make a great analogy once about knowing the scriptures and hearing the voice of God out of them, and it really is true. Imagine you had a little wireless teletype machine, one that you could use to send messages back and forth by radio, but the only messages you could receive would be the ones you had letters for. So if you only had five letters of the alphabet on your machine, you could make out short little words and do some little abbreviations of some others, and you could get some kind of information going back and forth.

Well, imagine if you got five more letters of the alphabet on your teletype message machine, what an explosion of information you'd have in your ability to send and receive message traffic! It's the same way with the voice of God, He is going to talk to you first out of the Word. The message of salvation is the same as it's been since that first day Jesus came out of the grave, and that's the first thing God is trying to get over to you. After that, He's trying to talk to you thru all the other things He put in those scriptures - and if you will go add those to your receiver, He can talk to you out of them, just like adding alphabet keys to your typewriter.

The Holy Spirit is your teacher and He is present with you always, and will never leave you. You don't have to go to every church in town or graduate seminary or hire a tutor to teach you about God. Read the scriptures, talk about what you are reading with your Father God, and let the Holy Spirit instruct you from the inside out.  If you are listening to Him, don't be rehearsing all the time what you used to think, just observe what's going on in the Bible and follow along with what He is saying in there. You'll learn if you LISTEN.

 (Don't worry, worryworts, the Holy Spirit always leads us to be in the company of fellow believers. Remember that in the scriptures?)

The glory of freedom

Christ of Maryknoll

"The icon does not make clear which side of the fence Christ is on. 

Is he imprisoned or are we?"

Sometimes we carry our prisons around with us. The barbed wire in that icon always reminded me of the barbed words and the ripping pain of trying to live free while still bound to being responsible in a very painful situation. Not free to leave, but free to know that if I did not stay, who would bring help? And who would I be if I left to comfort myself?

I'm still watching therapy videos online, last weekend was intense and cathartic. It is very rough, almost like some sort of deep tissue massage, to listen to a stranger speak of phenomena that always disturbed me, but I could not place. Why would she say that? How is it that these things happened, yet we were supposed to be a very average family? Why did this one respond this way, but he went that way?

No one therapist has my family framed, no pat answers are forthcoming, but the festering wounds are being relieved of their mystery as the patterns of abuse are uncovered and filth of deception is washed away. I was always, Always asking myself why did things have to be this way, how did they get this way, and why can't it just get better? No matter what anyone did, nothing ever got better. Well, the spring of bitterness has to stop contaminating everyone else - either by becoming sweet or drying up.

I'm discovering things like "no contact," which is a technique all of us tried in our own way, and "observe, don't absorb," which was my primary technique for the last 30 years. The basic NPD character and motivation of things like objectification, complete lack of compassion, and the NPD thinking of him/herself in the third person like watching a movie - all these things I knew, but I had no framework in which to place them. It takes time and review to pull this stuff up and work it out - going over the memories and making personal history rational instead of chaotic.

There's a response video to one SpartanLifeCoach put out, the response video being in favor of more therapy being required even after a root cause of trauma is discovered, that knowing why isn't enough. For someone dealing with Complex PTSD, (resulting from a lifetime of abuse at the hands of someone with a personality disorder versus short term or single event PTSD,) long term recovery, compassion, and deliberately cultivating new growth in your soul in all those areas that were stunted by the abuse is really the only way. Long term abuse takes up the years of your life, the world you could have had in the short term is gone, never to be seen again. It isn't enough to know what happened, you have to find new ways of living. 

I was talking to my Dad on the phone about my brother, who is Very Much like my mother, and is trying his bullying, accusatory best to cause legal trouble in regards to the Estate. The thing I found myself saying, in trying to reassure Dad that this would all turn out alright eventually and please don't worry, is that in having to go thru all the difficulties with Mother and then again having delays and unpleasantness in closing that portion of my life, I've become a different person. I would not be learning who I really am and what I can do and what kind of relationships I deserve if I did not go thru the terrific workout that is closing these relationships with kindness, forbearance, and with respect to the kind of effort God requires of His own.

If I had run off to Florida, I would still be the woman I was when I ran away.  If I shot my mouth off and responded in kind to my brother, I would take a step towards becoming like him. If I stay and persist, then I am still in the fire and can be changed into someone I've never been before...and perhaps have been seeking to be for a very long time.

Years ago, I received a prophetic word from a prayer ministry about God restoring the joy that was taken away from me. It spoke about a little girl in red shoes that was just happy and joyful, without burdens. Of course we all are that way to some extent as children, but the only place I could think of with red shoes was here.

 

A few months after this picture was taken, things happened. Offenses, pride, confusion, stupidity, separation, grudges, a whole host of bad decisions - all things precipitated out of a narcissistic wound - and really, our family never recovered. I became a parentified child immediately, charged with taking care of my mother. 

Now that's over and I'm free to be again. Just free. To be. To trust my own heart again, openly this time. To follow my own heart, without the endless second guessing that NPDs and their codependents layer on top to maintain control and satisfy their own interests.  Free to be happy, which is an extremely weird feeling after all this time! I mean, I question myself every time I feel "happy" lest I've forgotten something important I'm supposed to be doing instead. It's just ...odd. But I really like it!

The best bit is trusting my own heart, not just about life decisions or such, but trusting that the things I hear in my heart and the desires that flow out of my heart are true and trustworthy. I still have to consciously turn to listen and accept as is what is going on in there, and NOT layer it over with second guessing in my brain. That isn't to say my brain or my flesh aren't always chiming in with their own opinions on HOW I should follow my heart! They are still quite perky, thank you very much, and I rather expect them to stay that way, but I'm relaxing into letting my heart go first, feeding it more, and letting it set the agenda for where I'm going altogether.

That brings us back around full circle to being set free - thru the image of Christ. Second Corinthians 3:17-18 puts it this way: 

"Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (emancipation from bondage, freedom). And all of us as with unveiled face, because we continued to behold in the Word of God as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are constantly being transfigured into His very own image in ever increasing splendor and from one degree of glory to another: for this comes from the Lord, Who is the Spirit." 

[Edit 02/16/19 - I look at that verse now and wonder if we aren't looking in a mirror at something that is behind us or around us. We can't see it face to face or with our natural eyes, but the mirror shows the image true. Just a thought to consider, but I can't find "mirror" in any scripture related to Moses. Did Moses see a reflection in the pool of water resulting from striking the rock to provide water for the people? I don't know, but I'll be looking for any obscure translation or tradition related to that. :-) ]

I was lead back yesterday directly from the secular therapists' discussion on long term recovery to a teaching tape by Lynne Hammond that I've listened to over and over again for probably 20 years now. It's the first in the series called the Mirror of the Word. If you are secular, that's alright, there's quite a bit of very good observation in it about how our thoughts multiply like mice and get out of control, and then we don't want to be honest with ourselves and even look at what we've been thinking - we just close the door and pretend that stuff isn't in there. But we have to come back to the Truth and take every thought captive, exposing it in the full light of day, and then do something about every lie that wants to hang around by demolishing it with the Truth and our own words - spoken out loud.

You'll never win a battle with a thought by trying to think about something else, you have to talk back to it. 

If you are a Christian, as I am, then you might have caught on to the linkage in my being free to trust my heart without interference and the joy of a rediscovering fresh again a teaching series on prayer. If you are born again, the Holy Spirit and your spirit are joined, He has come to make His home in you, never to depart. If your mind can be corralled to let your heart have His way in you, then you are free to ask for whatsoever you want, and be confident that He is moving on that request. For you, for your friends and loved ones, for the nations, for the world, for anyone anywhere anytime. 

It's wonderful. 

The door may have always been open, but the crappy bit is that we don't always know that in our heads. Living this life here is messy, but freedom in Christ Jesus is glorious!

Living people

I am the youngest in that photo, my great-grandmother is the oldest. Her grandfather was living with her when he died in 1922, but had been in Pickett's charge on Round Top at Gettysburg, where he was wounded. He had become a pastor after the war, but had enlisted from Stokes county, N.C. under Stonewall Jackson. My mother became a Methodist minister and pastor herself after her divorce, and always spoke very highly of the godly example her grandmother had lived in front of her.

I also knew my maternal great-grandmother on my father's side, and it is my great-grandfather who bought the farm that we still own and love. My father's paternal grandmother is the one who supplied our (my father's and my) sense of humor and and ability to find the funny in just about anything, a trait often mentioned with fondness and relief by my great-aunts, and it is to her family's reunion that I go in two weeks. My ADD comes from my mother's father, and it is his creativity and talent for drawing that got passed to my nephew, who now works as a computer graphics illustrator.

If you are a geneticist or some sort of materialist, you might find all that information is some sort of confirmation that genes will out or we are all acting out of some sort of determined path carved out for us by Nature's influence on our physical composition. If you are the member of a family, you will recognise the cascade of taps on the shoulder, words spoken in season and out, and family legends passed on not in story or myth, but in lingering examples that shaped one person and then the next.

As I woke up this morning, I was thinking about the image of a gloved hand reaching thru time and the generations. If you were a scientist, you might think of that hand as ideas carried in people, and how powerful an idea can be as it stirs up change and influences every generation that finds it and acts on it. If you wanted to clothe that same idea in religious garb, you might think about how powerful habits, weaknesses and proclivities get passed from one generation to the next and how spiritual forces shape and move human beings. 

If you grew up in a family, then you'll know that hand as Una Mae patting you on the shoulder and pointing out how ridiculous Portly was in all his affectations and seriousness. You will watch Hallie sketch in the evening to relieve his stress and draw dry cleaner advertisements in the day to earn a living. If you are descended from a family, then you will pull out a doily and wonder how "Mom" made fabric out of thread and still cooked and cleaned and kept the grandchildren long past "retirement age." In every case, you will see that it is not ideas that are being passed thru time, but people who are giving of their lives to those that follow, and I am not a copy of their DNA, but I've been touched, tangibly altered, by the works of their hands imprinted onto living people.

The god conundrum works the same way. Some people think of god as an elemental force, the set of existence whereby things, including people, came into being and we describe his nature in physics and biology and sociology as great waves of events as effects ebb and flow. The more philosophical or religious elevate god to a plane where he has made laws and principles or declarations of intent and we all are measured against his standards and plans, creating our successes or failures along the way as we work with those concepts and ideas. Then there is the third way, where God is a person who is creating a family.

The way I met him was to watch him in red letters while he lived in front of his family. He loved little kids, like me, and he seemed to be always looking for the next guy to feed. I always liked how he could talk to the wind or the sea, and how the fishes would do what he asked, and how at the end of a big city disaster that got averted, he said how glad he was the animals wouldn't have to suffer any more, too. When I got older I really appreciated how he didn't talk down to women, and he would never embarrass someone if he didn't have to, even if they got themselves into a bind. I liked how he loved being with people so much that it didn't matter who was having the party, he was going to be there - so much so he got a rep as a drunk! (Man, talk about not worrying about what folks think about you!)

My favorite story of all time is when he was coming into town and and everyone came out to see him, but there was a blind beggar sitting in the dirt asking him for help, too. My God? He stopped, he turned around, and he saw blind Bartimus on the ground, and he touched his eyes with the palm of his hands. Blind Bartimus saw like a natural man. That I can type out a lyric that says God stopped, turned, saw and touched just blows my mind and is completely out of line with nature, but a living person can see and move and touch with love and kindness. To be family with him is incomprehensible, but true.