I like to explain myself, and enjoy it when I can peer into the workings of others. I am a packrat of ideas. I collect them like little shiny treasures and take them out and look at them with frequency. I’m hardly ever bored, and I suppose that makes me easily amused, but I thought that if you read my blog you might want to know why certain attitudes crop up or maybe you are one of those people who can’t tear away from looking at car wrecks… I don’t know, but you can peek below the fold if you are secretly curious.
In some ways I believe in destiny. The circumstances surrounding us, and the cards we are dealt seem to have a plan. I believe they are a plan, and that God authors it. I always was of a melancholic disposition and when I was a very young child people would express their surprise that a child could think. People don’t believe that children think on a deep level, but many of them do.
One of my earliest pivot points to adulthood is remembered in 7th grade. Seventh grade is a very vulnerable time, because you can’t quite tell what is real and what is not and whether the view you were handed as a child is a workable one or not. Maybe that is why some of the things that happen to you at that point stay with you.
I had an English teacher who was an icon for rote University learning gone wrong. She tortured our class day after day in proving that the girl in the seat down the row would get the parts of speech if only asked the same question time after time and carrying the burden of not letting anyone else in the class move forward until she did indeed get it. Needless to say we spent lots of class time going nowhere, and my heart would actually sink when that poor girl got called on. This sowed the seeds of determination that I would not have my children suffer the demeaning mediocrity of public school. I knew nothing of “homeschooling” then, that wouldn’t come til much later ; I was thinking “Montessori”.
This is not the major lesson this teacher left me, however. The most indeliable mark was after I handed in a book report on “The Lord Of The Flies”, a book which remains seminal in my thinking even now. I do believe, now, that this book impressed me to consider its implications due to its mix with the Reformed doctrinal thinking I had been raised with. It spoke to my conviction that man is indeed depraved, and that it doesn’t take much to strip off the refinements of culture. And that evil is personified, which man can symbolically represent with spiked boars heads…….. OK, I remember those things, but I wish I had that book report to read now as an adult, to more fairly judge the situation. Anyway, the gist of the situation was that my teacher took me aside and accused me of plagiarism, because ” someone my age could never have written that”. No other idea was forwarded and no other recourse was given. I was tried, condemned and confused, because I had actually poured myself into writing that report. And lastingly angry with a system that can’t imagine anything beyond its own presumptions. No wonder my counselors would call me in for underachievement in the years following…. such events take the wind out of the kids sails. Ugly lessons, my friends; but useful ones.
I now believe that encouragement and openness to children is one of the greatest platforms to the end of that person fulfilling their potential. Everyone needs someone, along some level, who believes in the dream: the person that one can become. I think children are more ‘people’ than many give them credit for, and that the Book of Job has it right: “I said, Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom.But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding. Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgment. ”
I do not have high regard for so-called experts, and diplomas may or may not represent something; the spirit of a man tells, I believe. Everything is up for critical thinking.
Next
I was coming of age in the late sixties, some of you know what that means and some just think you know. It handed us the issues we grapple with today.
I took for granted that the information I was given on abortion was correct. It was a raging issue of the day, and the common story was that a fetus is only tissue. So ingrained that even today you find many of those on the street still spouting the same misinformation. So well did the progandists do their job.
But a funny thing happened to me on the way to womanhood. I got pregnant. And then someone handed me little booklets on the development of that fetus in the womb. These were the usual things OB’s handed out. My 2+2 thinking started in gear and I realized that a fetus was actually a child. I went neutral on abortion rights for others and against for myself ( not that I was thinking that way, I celebrated the idea of having a child…which would grow to proportions that invited much criticsm, later). But it was a great shift in my thinking, and the awakening to the use of false propaganda amongst my beloved liberal thinkers. Blink::blink.
To this day I believe the greatest enemy that Abortion Rights people will face is not the religious right, it is scientific research.
Oh yes, There is More
I’m passing by lots of stuff to get to this. Why I have the attitude that I do on homosexuals. First, I never had that recoil that many people start out with, and there are other things, but there is only one important thing.
I was part of a prayer group some years back. We were all in the same church but a bit of a mix. I was on the intercessory high road, which most of you have no idea what I’m talking about, but anyway…. We did alot of praying for our society, for government, for groups of people, for the moral climate of our nation to change, all sorts of things like that. Anyway, the man who lead the group had a specific way of praying that – although I really loved him and his wife dearly- and they were wonderful loving people ( the best, really) – a way of praying that enumerated all the sins and sinners of note. It bothered me. I don’t personally like to pray that way, but as we were praying over the homosexual community of our city, God broke through and spoke something to me. When God does that in that way, it stays with you… on an extremely deep level.
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This is what He spoke to me: He longs over this community, there are many that are His, that He loves, and He is loathe to let them go. And that the Lord’s Church has ignored them and left them to wander on their own, and rejected them.
His love is a compelling love… it sends us out, it draws them in. and it is not at all indifferent.
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For a year or so previous to this I had heard from God that the Church was transitioning, that we were moving from the invitations to the going out into the highways and byways to compel guests to the wedding feast to come: to be clothed, to eat and drink in the presence of God.
It is time for the lame, for the halt, and the despised. And the proud will go away hungry.
It is not only the homosexuals that God is calling … it is the Wiccans, and the Satanists, and the Pagans; it is the Atheist, those in the prisons, and the Homeless. It is the outcasts and the disenfranchised, and the Church had better get itself ready, because it will be a struggling with God Himself, if it isn’t.
And this will color all I have to say upon the issue of Homosexuality.
At the same time, as I have moved forward to engage the people of these different sorts- mostly online, but I have never been shy about this- I have come to know some of the thorns and detours along the way. One is the absolute need for sound doctrine. There are lots of deceivers out there, and they have strong voices in the marketplace of public forum. We embrace, but we hold the line for the better way. Otherwise – to what end do we embrace? Locked in death or arising to life?
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As I said, there is more, but those are a few important things.