#can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a reference to Paul from the Bible

[inkdragon1900]

Something about wether or not Paul is “keeping a piece of a dance card.” Or “Saving the last dance.” Something about how we have not begun to see the horrors of love.

[christian-perspectives]

God's Resources Are Unlimited And Will Empower You

I pray that from God's glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Ephesians 3:16 I probably don't need to ask, but I'll ask anyhow. Do you want God's unlimited resources to empower you? Who wouldn't say yes to a question like that? To us, Gentiles, the Apostle Paul gave us some encouraging words. He let us know that until Jesus came onto the scene, only the Jews had access to God's resources. In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope. But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ. Ephesians 2:12-13 Free eBook Don't you find it hard to believe that, at one time, our ancestors didn't have access to God? The apostle let us know that through Christ, He grafted us into the family as if we always belonged.  So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God's holy people. You are members of God's family. Ephesians 2:9 Paul continued by saying that God himself revealed His mysterious plan to him. God did not reveal it to previous generations, but by his Spirit, he revealed it to his apostles and prophets. And this is God's plan: Both Gentiles and Jews who believe the Good News share equally in the riches inherited by God's children. Both are part of the same body, and both enjoy the promise of blessings because they belong to Christ Jesus. Ephesians 3:6

The Apostle Paul's Privilege

The apostle considered it a privilege to serve God by spreading this Good News. So, first, he revealed God's plan. Next, he laid out God's purpose, which involves the church. God's purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was his eternal plan, which he carried out through Christ Jesus our Lord. Ephesians 3:10-11 At one time, God only extended His promises to the Jews and not the Gentiles. But now, through the saving work of Christ Jesus, we have access to all of God's resources. Paul then prayed in verse 16, this powerful prayer for the church. He asked that it receive God's glorious, unlimited resources with the empowerment of inner strength through his Spirit. The more we rely on God's resources, the more room we will have for God in our lives. Paul referred to it as letting the roots of God's love sprout and grow in us. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God's love and keep you strong. Ephesians 3:17 We begin to take on more of God's nature when the roots grow deep into our hearts. I once read a phrase that I considered profound. "Love isn't what God does. Love is who God is." And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. Ephesians 3:18

God's Resources and Love

We will always receive God's resources on a foundation of love. He wants us to go beyond just knowing about His love. God reveals it to us so we can experience His love. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Ephesians 3:19 Why can't we understand the love the Lord extends to us? I suppose the easy answer comes because of our finite thinking. We tend to put parameters around the amount of love we give out. Defining God's love will always fall short. What we recognize about His love includes the following. Unconditional, eternal, and freely given to everyone, regardless of their actions. The Bible gives us an idea of God's love in First Corinthians 13, the love chapter. That chapter tells us what love does and doesn't do, but our understanding of it doesn't go too deep. So, instead of trying to understand the Love of the Lord, the apostle says we should just experience it. Verse 19 continues by telling us what that experience will get us. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. Ephesians 3:19 The fullness of life we receive from the Lord means that God's resources will flow from us. Then, the Lord can use us to effectively minister the love of Christ to others. Think for a moment where we Gentiles have come since Jesus died on the cross and rose again. He made a way for us to become heirs of God and joint heirs with Him. In other words, He made us a part of God's family. Therefore, because of the rights and privileges of family, we can go directly to God in Jesus' name. So, give God glory!

All Glory for God's Resources

Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. Ephesians 3:20 God's glorious, unlimited resources have empowered us with inner strength through His Spirit. God's emphasis points to His unlimited resources, forever and ever. Glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever! Amen. Ephesians 3:21 Lord, thank you for making us complete with all the fullness of your love. You have provided us with spiritual strength through your unlimited resources. Check out these other related posts about the power of God - What is the Best Way To Experience God’s Power? - It’s Exciting To Believe God For The Unbelievable - He Gives Power To The Weak - The Lord Is My Strength And Shield Read the full article

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Okay, but if Jesus isn't real, why do historians believe he is real if the gospels are made up?

There are two things we need to be careful of: what we mean by "historians" and what we mean by "Jesus."

History is studied based on evidence. There are multiple lines of evidence for someone like Alexander the Great or even Pontius Pilate. For Jesus, there are zero. Jesus never wrote anything. People who supposedly knew him didn't write anything about him. No record keepers - or what we might regard today as journalists - traveled along with him to see what was up with this amazing man who definitely existed.

If a person existed today who could verifiably walk on water, wouldn't journalists and reporters follow that person around trying to get interviews and pictures and record everything they could about what this unique-in-all-of-history person said and did?

The bible says that people came from far and wide to have their illnesses cured. There aren't any records from doctors to indicate anything of the sort occurred. There aren't any records showing chronic leprosy outbreaks suddenly vanishing. We should be able to trace a pathway through the Middle East as he conducted his ministry, a route along which diseases were miraculously eliminated, with unusual levels of health and wellbeing. Even if we can’t find him, we should be able to see the effects of his activities.

Instead, what we have in the bible is stories written decades after by anonymous authors who weren't there, revised, expanded, rewritten and elaborated for 200 years before being canonized. There’s nothing anyone can tell us about Jesus that doesn’t come from the bible.

The only thing we can find in history is people who believed he existed. Even the bible admits this. But this doesn’t get us anywhere. We can also find people in history who believe Slenderman, Paul Bunyan and interstellar aliens existed.

None of the gospels were actually written by anyone named for the books. Believers often claim that they're eyewitness accounts, but we know they're not, and we know that the names given to them are by tradition, not by authorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel

The four canonical gospels were probably written between AD 66 and 110. All four were anonymous (with the modern names added in the 2nd century), almost certainly none were by eyewitnesses, and all are the end-products of long oral and written transmission.

The word “pseudepigrapha“ is a deliberately obscurantist term referring to bible lies. Many of the non-gospel writings, such as the epistles have questionable authorship: a good half of Paul’s epistles are regarded as fraudulent (that is, pseudepigrapha), having been written by other people pretending to be Paul; while other epistles are anonymous, falsely attributed to people who didn’t write them, or ambiguous.

Mark was the first gospel, and wasn't written until at least 30 years after Jesus' death. Believers like to cite writers like Thallos, whose writings were sketchy at best, and Josephus and Tacitus, despite Josephus not even being born until at least four years after Jesus’ supposed death.

Thirty years ago, the Rodney King riots broke out in Los Angeles. Imagine if no record of this event existed until today. Imagine if we relied entirely upon the records of someone born four years after, in 1996, to understand what happened at that time. The problem with citing either Josephus or the gospels themselves is that we know they didn’t get it first-hand. If these writers had sources, we should be getting those sources instead. But we’re not.

We know that the Resurrection story from Mark 16:9 onwards was added on much later by someone else (i.e. it's fraudulent). This isn't even controversial. We also know that Matthew is an attempt to revise and redact Mark and was written even later. In many cases it copies word-for-word what Mark says. Luke is similar. When they're not copying each other verbatim, they're often saying completely contradictory things.

John makes things even worse. The Jesus of John might as well be a completely different person. He's doing different things for different reasons. He isn't the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” Jesus of Mark, Matthew and Luke, he's bolder and unambiguously divine. Or as one writer put it: "John portrays Jesus as 'a God striding over the face of the earth.'" Just the kind of story you'd write if you were creating propaganda for a new cult.

We know that the nativity story was added at least a hundred years later. We know that the crucifixion story is ahistorical; crucifixions were not carried out that way or for those crimes, and bodies were left up to rot as a warning to others. He would not have been taken down and buried; the Romans would never have cared about Jewish custom. And there are no records of the other men who were supposedly crucified alongside him.

We also know that the depictions of characters such as Pontius Pilate contradict what we know of the real people. And nobody can actually find where Jesus supposedly was or did at any particular time.

We know the Cleansing of the Temple - where Jesus disrupted the moneychangers - is ahistorical. Despite most artwork showing a few dozen people being chased out of a church, the temple itself was multiple times larger than a sports stadium, taking multiple years to finish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Temple#Herod's_Temple

Reconstruction of the temple under Herod began with a massive expansion of the Temple Mount temenos. For example, the Temple Mount complex initially measured 7 hectares (17 acres) in size, but Herod expanded it to 14.4 hectares (36 acres) and so doubled its area.

A standard American football pitch is about 0.7 hectares (1.7 acres).

Because the moneychangers were a necessary part of Jewish worship - pilgrims were expected to bring an animal to sacrifice, but many traveling from afar would need to buy one locally and would only have their own currency - the act itself would have been regarded as an antisemitic scandal, comparable to plastering swastikas all over your local sports stadium, and reverberating throughout the Jewish community. It's written about nowhere in Jewish records. And considering it was supposedly perpetrated by a Jewish man, it’s clear the author had no idea of the significance of these practices.

None of this constitutes "history." It's not just that the gospels are explicitly not historical, it's that the history we do know about doesn't line up with what the bible says.

This is historical Neil Patrick Harris.

This is Harold and Kumar (H&K) Neil Patrick Harris.

Historical NPH is a gay man. H&K NPH is a drugged-out, heterosexual creep. It’s entirely possible that Historical NPH has gone to White Castle at some point in time. Does that make H&K NPH real? No. The existence of Historical NPH goes no way towards making H&K NPH real. 

Likewise, even if anyone could find a Historical Yeshua - and nobody can - we can concede the existence of some Jewish apocalypse preacher roaming around the countryside without any anxiety or pain. His existence goes nowhere towards substantiating the claims of the bible.

The Jesus of the bible was specific. He did specific acts, said specific things. Although even the bible itself is contradictory about what those things are. For example, the bible gives two contradictory genealogies leading from Adam - who we know to be fictional anyway - through to Jesus. As mentioned, we know that the Pilate of the bible is a fictional version of real-world Pilate, in the same way as H&K NPH.

Historical fiction is a genre of writing. “Gone With the Wind” is set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Didn’t happen. The film Contact depicts then-US President Bill Clinton telling us about alien contact. Didn’t happen.

We know that it’s only recently that writings in the “biography” genre are intended to be historically accurate. Prior to only a couple of hundred years ago, “biography” referred to a class of writings that were intended to be inspirational or to promote admiration for the subject, not tell an unbiased, accurate account of their life. In the case of Xianity, “hagiography” refers to this kind of propaganda intended to inspire people to convert.

The bible not being a historical document is even stated so at times by the authors. Paul openly states that he lies - he becomes like one of whomever he wants to convince. The author of John, in a section literally called “The Purpose of John’s Gospel,” claims to have written it so “that you may believe,” not to state reliably what happened. The author of Luke begins by saying that there are a lot of stories about what went on in those days, and that he’s going to provide the true account. And then proceeds to mostly regurgitate Mark.

The gospels aren’t even written like eyewitness accounts, being consistently in the third-person no matter who is around, including when Jesus is alone by himself, when Jesus is alone with Pilate, or alone with the Devil. Nor are they written like historical record, since they don’t provide the account of where this information came from, who told who, the records the author used to construct this history. They’re all written like fictional narratives. It’s weird believers don’t notice this.

The argument around a historical, real-world counterpart to the character in the bible is nothing but a distraction. Believers propose a divine, magical man, literally the son of a god, but when pressed on it instead try to justify it by the mere existence of some unremarkable Jewish man. It’s what’s called “playing tennis without a net.” When the net is imaginary, every ball you serve, no matter how weak, goes over it.

Any amount of historicity in the bible - and there isn’t as much as most believers think - is irrelevant.

Believers must find their magical, water-walking, water-to-wine-making, demons-in-pigs, fig-tree-cursing, flying-into-the-sky Jesus. The one the bible actually describes.

But first, they should actually try to write down a coherent sequence of events of his life using all the gospels, without leaving anything out. When they figure out that it’s not possible to form a coherent history of Jesus’ life, they should reconsider why they thought any of it was historical in the first place.

Until they can and do, we don’t need to put much thought into storybook characters. Much less worship them.

[ashintheairlikesnow]

The Fight

CW: Ableism against a child, references to attempted noncon/assault of a survivor, religious references to the Bible, conditioning, trauma recovery, trauma response

TIMELINE: Immediately post-Creepy Pet Lib Guy. Links in piece.

She hears his footsteps, the soft motion of him through the living room and into the den, where a single lamp is on in the corner on the side table next to the old couch Paul never could bear to throw out. Ronnie doesn’t look over at him, instead picking at a bit of duct tape affixed over a ripped spot while sipping her beer straight from the bottle.

There’s a show on the television - they have a new one finally, but Ronnie’s never thrown out a damn thing that wasn’t broken just because it got replaced and she’s not about to start now, so she moved it in here - but she’s not watching it. Not even sure what the show is, only that the laugh track is tinny and never seems timed to the moments of actual humor. 

The house is mostly silent, this late at night. There’s no sound but the occasional gurgle from the ice machine in the fridge, the soft hum of electronics that she never notices except when the power goes out, and then only because of its sudden absence. 

No sound but the television’s off-key laughter and the footsteps of her son, creeping up behind her. 

“Mommy?” His voice is so high and soft, fuzzy with sleepiness, and she turns with a tired smile to see him dragging his favorite blanket behind him along the floor. It’s a quilt she bought at a church’s Christmas market when he was two, and it had buttons sewn in with the patches, giving the cats the quilt is decorated with three-dimensional button eyes. 

His face is rounded and so like his father’s, even so, his face and eyes and his hair are all Paul’s, through and through. He’s an echo, a clone of his father, in a lot of ways… up to and including navigating a world that has already labeled him as difficult, and he’s only six years old.

“Hey, baby. What are you doing up?” She’s twenty-three with a six year old son, and doesn’t that seem strange, some days? So many of her friends from high school are still out until dawn, posting photos of their drunken shenanigans on Facebook, and here Ronnie sits… twenty-three, with a husband who works nights, and a six-year-old son whose teacher calls him hopeless, right to his fucking face.

“I, I, I had a bad dream,” He says, and his eyes are so, so big in his small round face. Paul’s eyes are like that, big and green and soulful. She’d fallen into them, her junior year, and she’d never wanted to climb back out. No matter that her friends thought he was weird, no matter that yeah, okay, he is weird - he’s her kind of weird, and she and Paul understood each other right from the start. 

“Oh, no.” She pats the couch cushion beside her and he clambers almost eagerly up to tuck himself in beside her. Her throat nearly closes as he carefully spreads his blanket out to cover them both, the simple gesture of care and love. How do you look this boy in the eyes and tell him he can’t do something? “What was your bad dream about, do you want to tell me?”

“Monsters,” He says, as if that single word relays all the information she could possibly need. Maybe it does, really - at least the monsters her son dreams about are easier to vanquish than the ones Ronnie has to help him learn how to face on his own as he grows.

“Good thing I monster-proofed this house before we moved in,” Ronnie teases. She moves her arm around his shoulders and he smiles, faintly, eyes closing as he leans his head against her collarbone, his ear right where he’s always wanted it, ever since birth - over her heart. Listening to her heartbeat. Sure enough, his fingers find their way to her stomach and start to tap in time with it, and Ronnie sips her beer again.

“Monsters aren’t, aren’t, aren’t real, actually,” He says, speaking quietly and without opening her eyes, and Ronnie thinks if her six-year-old well, actuallys her one more time… she read all the parenting books and has a whole shelf of parenting memoirs she’s picked up and not a single one mentioned that little kids are fucking know-it-alls. Not one.

“Well, if they’re not real, then why are you buggin’ Mommy at midnight because of dreaming about them, huh?” She keeps her voice light and affectionate, just this side of teasing. Tristan doesn’t react well to any kind of perceived anger or rejection, moping for a day or more around while his brain tries to process that she didn’t stop loving him just because he did something that bothered her. Tris as a toddler broke her heart more than once with terrified insistence that you, you, you don’t even like me anymore after time-outs or discipline.

He’s just being manipulative, her mother had said once, but Ronnie knew better. 

He’s three years old, Mom. He’s not trying to manipulate me, he’s scared.

He’s just doing what works, Veronica, you can’t always give in to it.

Mom. He is a little boy. Do you realize how you sound?

Now his teacher is repeating the same tired circular logic that cycles round and round her son without ever seeing him. Ronnie is staring down the barrel of another round of meetings, talking to administrators to try and get around the teacher’s rigidity and hostility, arguing for Tris to get moved into a new class, and all the while he’ll fall further and further behind in his in-class work - while at home he rockets through the homeschooling workbooks she buys, a six-year-old already doing second-grade reading and writing work, first-grade math, obsessed with a kid show about science that they have to watch every single day or he has seriously informed her he might die.

The knowledge is there, and his love of learning hasn’t been throttled by school yet, and Ronnie can’t do anything but try to work within a system that tells her that her son needs to be changed or cured in order to not be kept locked away from everyone else.

Monsters are pretty fucking real, in Ronnie’s experience. 

One day her son will have to learn that all the monsters are human beings.

God, she’s so tired of fighting, and so very aware that she’s not going to stop until the whole damn world remakes itself to give space for Tristan, until the world deserves how unreservedly her son loves it.

She takes another drink, then sets the beer bottle carefully down on the coaster - she ordered them last year, and they all have little stylized drawings of the three of them on it, faceless sketches of a man, a woman, a child - man and child red-headed, woman with brown hair. 

When she’d gotten the positive pregnancy test, right before Thanksgiving her junior year, she’d thrown up and cried for a week and been sullen and silent at the holiday table, trying to figure out what to do next.

But Paul had never hesitated. When she told him, his response had been to go home to his dad and ask to start working part-time with the Garden, running packages he never looked into, playing lookout outside of bars while the Garden met inside. His first pay - cash handed to him in an envelope - he’d spent some of it on a onesie, a baby blanket, and a stuffed puppy with fur so soft Ronnie could barely stand the fluff. 

Then he’d spent some more on ginger chews and ‘Preggo Pops’, lollipops that were supposed to help with Ronnie’s morning sickness, and three books on pregnancy for her and one book on becoming a dad for him. 

Paul did what Paul always did - took one look at a cliff he had to cross and simply leapt headfirst and hoped for the best. That impulsiveness that she loved and that had gotten him in so much trouble in life, the enthusiasm that carried her long with it.

There are monsters in the world, Ronnie thinks, running fingers through her son’s fine, soft hair. But there are people who help you fight the monsters, too. Even if the monster is just the stares from other students at school as her stomach grew, the way her friends’ parents stopped letting her come to their houses, the thin-lipped disapproval of the principal handing her a high school diploma as she half-waddled across the stage, refusing to be shamed, engagement ring on her finger. Even if the monster is a world that tries to shove her son into boxes that he can’t fit into, or a teacher who sends him home in tears convinced he’s too stupid to learn anything.

Her jaw sets.

Veronica Higgs has been headstrong since birth, and she’s never made a decision she didn't follow through on. Never turned away from a fight. She’s not about to start now, not when it’s her son.

Ronnie has never turned away from the sweet baby that had looked at her with such dark-eyed seriousness when he was born, the infant who cried for reasons Ronnie couldn't’ fathom, the toddler who screamed that the lights at Target hurt his skin, the little boy who lined up dinosaurs and cars and toy horses in perfect color gradients, the boy who rocks in her arms and hums when he’s happy, the boy she hopes will one day be able to live on his own without her, because…

Because if only Paul and Ronnie are going to fight for him, then they’re going to have to be a fight so fierce that everyone else can’t possibly hold out against them.

The doctors said he might not talk - and he talks a mile-a-minute, about any-fucking-thing that comes into his mind. They said he wouldn’t make friends easily, but he goes on sleepovers with his gymnastics buddies, just went to a party at Chuck E. Cheese with a little preparation so he wasn’t scared of the games and lights and noise when he got there. They said he would struggle in school, and-

Well, he does. But only because of the adults who refuse to understand that Tris learns just fine… if you let him listen in his own way.

“Hey, Tris?” She smiles down at him and he turns those big green eyes up to her. There’s a chapped spot on his lower lip that looks like he might have messed with it until it opened into a sore, and she reminds herself to get some vaseline on it. “You want to stay here with me for a bit? We’ll watch one of your shows, and then back to bed. How’s that sound?”

He smiles at her, and nods a little, still tapping along to her heartbeat. “Oh, oh, okay, Mom. Can, can, can… can-can… can we watch Dino King?”

“Yeah, sure.” Ronnie hates that show, but really - he loves it, and it’s one night, and she could use the way his open, brilliant happiness helps her forget that he’s going to have to work harder and harder to hold onto it as he grows.

She picks up the remote, brings up the menu, switches to a streaming network, and listens to the grating, familiar theme song start to play as her son’s eyes move contentedly to the screen. 

He watches the show, but he never takes his head away from her heartbeat.

---

Natalie Yoder has had easier nights than this one, that’s for fucking sure. She leans over the kitchen table, papers spread out in front of her, trying to figure out where they went wrong. This is one of their biggest grants, it’s a bit of funding that she has always relied on, and… denied approval for the upcoming fiscal year. 

Thousands of dollars she needs to feed and clothe and house her rescues, gone up in smoke, denied with a bloodless email and no ability to fight back, not for this one. Not this year. It could be a simple error, something she overlooked, sure. Or maybe the association that gives out the grants is suspicious of her story about transitioning homeless people into permanent housing, which really is exactly what she’s doing, isn’t it?

Just… not the kind of homeless people the grant givers are imagining.

She’ll have to call Vince to beg for him to help her fill in the gap, and that will mean time for him to speak with his finance guy and get another couple of shell companies to funnel the money through so it doesn’t go back to him. He’ll give it to her, to be sure - Vince could give her the money to run this place flat out for the rest of his life and still be one of the wealthiest men in America, thanks to his low-key lifestyle and strong work ethic meaning he spends more time filming or producing than he does doing anything else.

Nat knows why Vince doesn’t want to be home, to sit up alone with a bottle or a glass in his hand. She knows his work ethic is simply escaping the demons that will never stop haunting his footsteps, what he traded away for his success, what he lost, what the money and fame can protect him from but can’t remove the stamp of it already written over his soul.

He’s famous, and rich, and Owen Grant can’t touch him now… but the tradeoff of Vince’s survival was that some innocent kid was abducted and turned, through drugs and torture and horrifying assault, into Kauri.

Kauri, who hasn’t answered the phone or sent a text in a week.

Not since that fucking group meeting where Chris was assaulted and Kauri stood up for him. Not since Kauri’s intuition that Kyle had some less-than-savory interest in Chris had proven correct, because… it wasn’t intuition at all.

It was experience. 

Nat groans, rubbing her hands over her face, closing her eyes and reminding herself, teeth ground together, to try and stay calm. It’s not unusual for Kauri to disappear for a while, a week or more. It’s not a sign that something is wrong. He was hurt by Nat pushing him, he needs time to think. 

He’ll pop right back up again, smiling like nothing happened, like he isn’t giving Nat gray hairs (well, new ones, anyway) trying to tell herself he’ll be okay.

All she can do is trust that he’ll come back when he’s ready.

... and castigate herself for letting that fucking predator get close to Chris without picking up on what he was planning, and for not realizing Kauri wasn’t just being overprotective of a younger rescue, but - in his own way - waving giant red flags that Nat, and Jake, and everyone else just didn’t see.

That, and then losing the grant, have made for one hell of a fucking week.

Nat takes deep breaths. Her hands smell like dish soap and a hint of the roasted garlic she’d put in the soup for supper lingering. The kitchen still smells like the garlic, roasted parsnips and rosemary. Chris had never had parsnips before-

Not that anyone knows if he really hasn’t or not.

“Oh, Nat, you are a mess tonight,” She mutters to herself. “Just full-on moping, huh? That’s how we’re gonna play it?”

Then she hears the soft scrape of a foot on the tile and looks up, blinking, to see Chris in the doorway, leaning against the wood of the frame, the big purple fuzzy blanket she’d gotten him a few weeks back wrapped around his narrow shoulders, the hints of faded muscle that still linger there. Usually he’s draped in Jake’s clothes but tonight he’s only wearing his basketball shorts, no shirt at all.

The rare glimpse of so much of Chris’s skin - she hasn’t seen so much of him since the night he arrived in the pouring rain - tells Nat more than anything else that Chris isn’t okay, either. 

“Hey, Chris. What’s up, sweetheart?” Nat glances over at the oven, squinting at the clock, and then groans. “Jesus, it’s nearly 2 am. I lost track of time, I guess.”

Chris doesn’t move from the doorway, not at first. He’s gone quiet again, since the assault, regressing back into periods of stillness and silence that they were so sure he’d gotten past. Jake says he’s testing again, trying to push Jake and Antoni into repeating the patterns that were tortured into his mind as normal, reacting with relief at their rejections - and then testing again, within hours, reminding himself that they’ll never say yes.

Nat looks at him, the shadows under his green eyes, and tries, “Did you have a nightmare?”

He slowly nods, and she watches his hands twist a little into the soft fabric of his blanket, rhythmically twisting to the side and back, nearly invisible with how well he can hide what he does to soothe himself, a skill taught in all the worst ways, learned in a desperate attempt to keep himself sane.

“Hm. I can see that. Was it about the meeting, the other night?”

His eyes dance away from hers, move to the ceiling, and he’s staring upwards at the rough texture up there as he nods, chewing on his lower lip with his top teeth, worrying at a spot that she knows he’ll eventually work to bleeding, sooner or later. He pauses and says, softly, “Kauri… didn’t come find me. That was, was my... my dream. And... it. It hurt.”

His voice, slow drips of speech, hits Nat like a knife to the heart. She nods, slowly, and pushes herself up, chair scraping back across the tile. Chris flinches minutely at the sound, curling a little into himself. “I understand, sweetheart,” She says, softly. “I’m so sorry we didn’t know sooner.”

She thinks, looking at him, of Daniel in the lion’s den, an old Bible story that’s never left her. Daniel trusted God and walked out unscathed, but she’s always thought maybe he wasn’t quite as unscathed as the Bible wants you to think he was. 

It’s one thing to have faith that you’ll survive being thrown in with monsters - it’s another to be so inhuman that you don’t wake with nightmares, for months or years after, that you were never saved at all. She is certain, deep down inside of her, that Daniel dreamed of a lion’s teeth and a promise broken, a prayer unheard.

The stories talk about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in a furnace walking out of the flames untouched, but of course the flames had still touched them. Scars aren’t always written openly on your skin. 

Of course they dreamed of flames scorching their skin, curling their hair, smoke stealing breath from their lungs. They, like Daniel, must have woken gasping, certain that their faith had been misplaced, that their trust that someone stood between them and the monsters who would destroy them had been betrayed.

They must have breathed, panting, in the middle of the night, and sworn they could still see the smoke in the air, feel the heat against their skin. 

They must have needed to come fully awake to remember - and believe - that they had been rescued. They must have needed the reminder.

Chris has no scars from walking with monsters - all his scars are inside his head. Chris’s scars come in his fear that she will not want him, that no one really wants him, when he can’t fight back or say no or defend himself, when he needs someone else to be his defense, to go to war. They come in his insistent, constant testing of Jake, pushing to see if it’s all been a lie, if they only want to use him the way he has been taught he is made to be used.

“Kauri was smarter than any of the rest of us,” Nat says, feeling suddenly exhausted. “We should have listened. I shouldn’t have had to step in. You deserved better.”

Chris deserves a fucking angel to lead him untouched out of the flames.

All he has is Jake - and Nat. 

She fills a saucepan with cold milk while he watches her, his eyes on her back a tangible, palpable weight, and pops a lid on, turning the dial until the flames flicker up from the burner to start heating it to a simmer. 

“I’m going to have hot chocolate the old fashioned way,” She announces, pulling down a bag with some discs of melting chocolate in it. They cost too much and mostly nobody notices the difference, but tonight… tonight, she thinks the extra effort is worth it. “You want whipped cream on yours, when it’s done?”

“Yes, please,” He whispers, and she looks over at him with a small smile. His hair is mussed still from sleep, a hint of red on his cheek where he must have had it pressed into a pillow. His freckles stand out in the thin light of the kitchen’s overhead light fixture. 

Next door, at Miss Ruth’s, a light turns on, and Nat glances through her own window to see it. Jaden, probably - that kid sleeps about as little as Chris does.

“Well, good, because I’m having some, too.” She pauses, leaning her back against the kitchen counter. There’s a long silence that draws out between them. The milk heats, bubbling just the tiniest bit around the edges in the saucepan, and Nat carefully drops in the chocolate discs to melt whisking until the liquid is a rich brown, thickened, ready for her to pour carefully into two mugs and top with the spray-bottle whipped cream she keeps in the fridge.

Nat sets the mugs down on the kitchen table, pulling Chris a chair up right next to hers. He relaxes a little at the tacit, silent request for closeness, drops into his chair with a slight smile playing over his face. He picks up the mug with both hands and takes a sip, getting whipped cream at the end of his nose, wiping it off with a scrunched-up expression that lifts some of the fatigue that dogs Nat’s muscles in the early-morning hours.

“I know the dreams are scary,” Nat says softly, reaching out to lay a hand on his back. He looks over at her, with those giant green eyes in his narrow face, searching for something in her. Maybe just for certainty that the promises she’s made to him will be kept. “But Kauri did come to help you. And you’re safe here, with us. We’ll always come for you, Chris, no matter what.”

He leans over, with slow inevitability, until the top of his head brushes against her neck, his head just at her collarbone. She lets her arm slide around his shoulders, her hand moving to run fingers slowly through his fine, soft coppery hair. “I, I, I forgot how to say no,” He whispers, and presses his head against her. 

“I know, honey. But that’s okay, we get back up and try again, right?” Nat sips her own hot chocolate slowly, and Chris holds his cupped warm in his palms, but even as he keeps taking sips, he doesn’t pull away from her. Eventually, he puts the mug back down on the table and shifts a little, so his ear is just over her heart.

“We, we, we try again,” He whispers. “But, but, but I don’t want to, to, to, I don’t-... want to be, um, to be scared again, to… have someone-”

“I know.” Nat swallows, her throat closing, briefly, but she fights it back and keeps her voice - and her hand through his hair - steady as she speaks. “There are going to be bad people out there, Chris, who want to hurt you. But you’re not alone.”

She thinks again of Daniel, waking from nightmares of gnashing teeth, maybe kicking off blankets and pacing a room, his skin written invisibly with the aftermath of a terror that never punctured skin. She thinks of three men in a fire, dreaming again and again that the fourth never arrived to lead them out of the flames.

She thinks of promises made, and kept. Prayers spoken in desperation, and answered, although so often far too late.

She thinks of the prayers for mercy, in the cold white rooms, that are never heard at all.

She’s tired, but she loves them - all of them, who have passed through her doors and gone on to other places - and she can’t imagine being anything but their army, their defense, the wall they can hide behind to rebuild themselves until they fight on their own. 

Not on their own, though, never really on their own.

She may never know what happened to him, to bring him here to her doorstep - but she knows that he doesn’t have to face the monsters, the flames, the danger alone. Not anymore.

“You’re safe here,” She says, gently, and turns her head to rest her chin on top of his head. “You’re safe here, and loved, and there’s nothing we won’t do to make sure you’re safe. Whatever comes at you, sweetheart, we’ve got you. And we’ll fight it for you, every time, until you can fight for yourself.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then he asks, in a whisper, “Do, do, do you you-you promise?”

“Promise, Chris. Cross my heart and hope-”

“Don’t-... don’t say the, the end of it.” His voice weakens. “Please.”

“Sorry, sweetie.” She tightens the arm around his shoulders a little, and feels him snuggle closer in response, a low sigh of relief at the reassurance in the embrace. “Swear on everything. I’ve got you, and Jake has got you, and we’re not gonna disappear. I don’t-... I don’t know if we can always save the day for you, Chris, but I can promise you that we will always try.”

He hums, eyes closing. One of his hands slides over her stomach, and begins - slight, soft, barely-there - to tap. 

It takes Nat a few seconds to realize that he is tapping along to the beat of her heart.

---

Tagging: @burtlederp, @finder-of-rings, @endless-whump, @whumpfigure, @slaintetowhump, @astrobly  @newandfiguringitout  , @doveotions  , @pretty-face-breaker, @boxboysandotherwhump  , @oops-its-whump  @moose-teeth  , @cubeswhump  , @cupcakes-and-pain  @whump-tr0pes  @whumpiary  @orchidscript, @itallcomesdowntopain

[imuybemovoko]

I die inside while dissecting Jesus music

For this fun little exercise in self-torture, I’m going to find a weird worship song and dissect it. Today I feel like saying death-cult a distressing number of times so I’m going to find one that talks about how the next world is supposed to be better for this one. 

I’m probably going to regret this. And probably cope by blasting metal while I do this. 

I’ll go with a bit of low-hanging fruit for this first one: Even So Come. It’s attributed six ways to Sunday because like seven different artists/groups have a recording of it somewhere out public, but this lyric site thingy says Chris Tomlin. Some of these songs get wildly popular to the point where even as a church guitar guy (read: very large fan of this shitty music) I tended to find it a bit confusing to tell who originally wrote them. This is an example. I think it was probably Kristian Stanfill but uh... I can never be 100% sure. I’ve been wrong about ones I was way more sure about before.

This song is repetitive as fuck, like a lot of these, because what helps indoctrinate people more than literally singing the same words for 15 minutes? 

Let’s get into this shit.

The song

I’ll spare you a few minutes of your life if you want to keep it. I already linked the lyrics, but I’ll give this a quick listen to make sure Stanfill doesn’t literally freehand some new lyrics during the video; if he does, I’ll discuss that too I suppose. The whole point of this is that I’m listening to this shit so you don’t have to. But if you really want to, then go off I guess. I can’t and honestly wouldn’t try to stop you. Unless this shit is triggering to you. In that case please don’t listen. It used to fuck me up hard when my brother would blast songs like this in the shower after I deconverted. I don’t want that happening to anyone out there. Tread with caution.

Okay. I wrote that while I was listening, and apparently he doesn’t yeet off into new spontaneous lyrics at any point. I think that’s more of a Bethel thing, but I don’t remember it being exclusive to them so I had to make sure. 

Ok, let’s do this more or less in order. I’ll take it a verse at a time. But first, let’s talk formatting. The first two verses aren’t separated by anything, and the third is after the first chorus. After the third verse they play the chorus again, then the bridge. The AZLyrics entry under Tomlin lists it twice; Stanfill plays it twice. When I was on the worship team at a church, we’d typically play the bridge four times for extra drama. After this, they end with two tricks. First is that they play the first half or so of the chorus, then a whole chorus right after it. Again, this is for extra drama. The leader of the worship team at my old church would tend to point to one part of the song as the “climax” and we’d do a fair amount of this kind of shit leading up to it. In this particular case, it’s actually most of the chorus, leaving off only the “even so come” lines. The break is at a lyrically appropriate place more often than it’s just like “haha 2 bars into the chorus” or something like that because of course the message has to be consistent.  After this, they fade the song out by repeating the last line or two, like, umpteen times to foster a contemplative mood. (It works. I’ve been on both ends of this dynamic. If you’re in a more charismatic crowd, my experience suggests that this final repetition is the most likely point where someone’s going to fall out and start speaking in tongues or something. Also, in those circles sometimes one of the vocalists, most often the team leader because of course, will give some kind of “word from God” to the congregation.) That’s the format, and it’s a very common one. At church camps and retreats and events like those, often they’ll loop choruses or bridges or ending tags or, sometimes (but far less often), verses and extend a song like this one to like fifteen or twenty minutes. In a typical church service they don’t really do it that way though because people might get impatient or something. 

On to the lyrics of this song. I’ll address the verses in order, then the chorus and bridge, then talk ordering, because doing this chronologically would get annoying as fuck. The first verse is as follows: 

All of creation All of the earth Make straight a highway A path for the Lord Jesus is coming soon

Notice the equivocation in the first two lines here. The author most likely believes this is an accurate thing to equivocate, and so do most of their audience. 

The next two lines are a similar repetition, using both modern and more Biblically-flavored language, in reference to Mark 1:3. The particular language used is not altogether different from most English translations. These lines, both in the sense that the author intends and in their function in the song, are meant to prepare the listener for what follows:  “Jesus is coming soon.” A reminder of the inevitable apocalypse most Christian sects teach and, in their view, the second chronologically of two most important events in the entire history and future of the world (the first being the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ). Every verse of the song ends with this reminder. 

To boil the message of this verse down into one word:

(I have entirely too much fun with this image lol)

The second verse:

Call back the sinner Wake up the saint Let every nation Shout of Your fame Jesus is coming soon

“Call back the sinner” implies a return to origins and contains an implicit reference to the prodigal son in the parable in Luke 15. The implication is that being a “sinner” (and I’ll discuss the dichotomy in a second here) is a life of running away from God either by ignorance or by choice, and that they were originally with God. The typical narrative on the mechanisms of the fall of man seems to suggest otherwise because only Adam and Eve were technically originally with God and everyone else starts out separated because of that lovely little generational curse thingy, this is a bit of an odd take, but in light of the evangelical perspective that not only a god, but their god is so self evident that people have to make the active choice to not believe, this makes an entire hell of a lot of sense, and “calling back the sinner” could entail saying “lol stop wasting your energy running from what you know.” 

The next line engages in a bit of common guilt-tripping. Saying “wake up the saint” implies that believers and churches have fallen asleep in some sense, and that’s actually a perspective referenced in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, each church getting a different flavor of messaging like this. When churches and saints are called to “wake up”, it means to cease engaging in whatever behavior is apparently polluting their message, i.e. forgetting the original reason they’re doing this, normalizing “worldly” practices, bad leadership paradigms, etc. Thus, I’m inclined to read this line as something like “you’re better than the rest of humanity; act like it.

Also of note is this dichotomy established here between “sinners” and “saints”. This is, on paper at least, the only important distinction in evangelicalism. (In practice they have a lot of shitty perspectives on women because of Paul’s writings as well as some class and/or racial biases, unconscious or conscious depending on the particular congregation.) A “saint” is a “true” Christian, one who is “set apart” from the world by God. A “sinner” is literally anyone else. In addition to their entire laundry list of harmless actions that are considered sins, Evangelicals (and probably many other Christians honestly) will say that to be non-Christian is a sin. In my old church and its affiliates I often heard that to remain non-Christian for an entire lifetime is the only unforgivable sin, identifying it with the “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” referenced in Matthew 12:31. There are a wide variety of perspectives on what this “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” actually means, and I can really only confidently speak to Calvary Chapel’s perspective on that. In any case, this song makes use of the “sinner vs saint” dichotomy common in Christianity. I analyze it as a typical “us vs them” with an added twist that says “the ‘them’ can become us and that’s better”. 

After this is a reference to the passages in the Bible that speak of the Gospel being spread to “every nation” and things such as that, and that every nation will come under Christ’s lordship at the end of time. Then there’s a reminder that the singer is awaiting this apparently fast-approaching end. 

The third verse:

There will be justice All will be new Your name forever Faithful and true Jesus is coming soon

This third verse is mostly a reference to events predicted to occur after the second coming of Christ. In Revelation, among other places, there is a described sequence of events in which the world comes absolutely fucking unglued, falls under the thumb of a tyrannical world government run by some guy who lets himself get possessed by Satan, and then is yeeted by God and soaked in the blood of Satan’s armies at the final battle. A bit later, for some reason Satan has to be let go for a bit, but he loses hard once again. After this, God yeets the unbelievers into hellfire and makes a new world which he rules forever. In short, the collapse, battles, and Great Divine Yeet are what this “justice” describes. The remaining lines speak of this renewed world run by Jesus himself. Lastly, we have the reminder that this is all going to happen before very long here. 

There’s a bit of a double-reference thing going on here and in the second verse too, and I’m honestly not entirely sure what to make of it, but it shows up often in contemporary Christian music. They’ll switch between referring to God in second person (Your name forever) and in third person (Jesus is coming soon). It seems ...most likely to be a matter of convenience, and I’m rather inclined to treat it as that because the other things I think of seem either counter-productive or very, very outlandish. Like, are they alternating between addressing God and addressing the listener? Maybe, but the message of this song is so much more listener-directed that I find that thought kinda weird.

In any case, that’s the verses. 

Now let’s get to the chorus. This is repeated after the first two verses and again several times after the third, and it contains a lot of deeply cursed metaphors. I mean holy fuck. 

Like a bride Waiting for her groom We'll be a church Ready for You Every heart longing for our King We sing Even so come Lord Jesus come Even so come Lord Jesus come

So the first two little couplets here refer to a metaphor found in several places in scripture where the church is the “bride” of Christ.  This. is. CREEPY! In the old testament, the role of the wife is often analogous to that of property, so that’s deeply gross. Further, Paul says men are the head of women, i.e. have great authority over them, and women should be subservient. Jesus doesn’t honestly do a whole hell of a lot to resist this, and powerful women throughout most of the scriptures are either defined as attaining their power in “God-honoring” subservient ways like Esther or as dangerous demonic influences operating under the “spirit of Jezebel”. (���Jezebel” is literally a scriptural term for this kind of thing; one of the church letters in Revelation uses it. Many evangelicals/fundies add “spirit of” because of their borderline-animistic take on spiritual warfare. I might describe that in more detail in a later post. It’s a metaphor based on an old-testament queen who is presented as manipulative and narcissistic, taking the real power in the kingdom from her husband by manipulation and doing a great deal of damage with it.) Thus, in this context, I find the “bride” metaphors inextricable from a tyrannical, abusive relationship in which the man, or in this case Christ, is the absolute head. Biblical ideas on marriage and family life are an entire problem too, establishing what I feel very confident in describing as an abusive power dynamic. Thus, this song references a metaphor by which Christ is described as having abusive control over his people. @kristian stanfill thanks I hate it. @whoever the fuck wrote the bible thanks I hate it. The couplet in this song is describing a situation in which the church is waiting to submit to an abusive authority and it’s fucking disgusting and I hate that I used to live that way.

The next line, “every heart longing for our king”, indicates that it’s normative to strongly desire this power dynamic and expresses a probably-genuine (mine was) desire for more of Jesus on the part of the writer and the singer. So with these preconditions established, they say, “we sing, even so come, Lord Jesus, come”, repeating “even so come” and on twice for added weight. The chorus and bridge are, by the way, where this seems to get deathculty. 

Remember that in referencing the coming of Jesus, they reference ideas that this world is shitty and being dead and in heaven/having the world destroyed by God and replaced is going to be a hell of a lot better. The Bible and many churches, particularly evangelicals, will even use language like “dying to oneself” to refer to the process of laying down one’s life for the cause of Jesus. Thus, death metaphors infiltrate their literal daily living. The general attitude that’s expected for people to have in those circumstances is one of “I won’t seek death actively but I will welcome it when the time comes”, and coupled with the way the other forms of abuse broke me, this had me fantasizing about dying in third-world countries for getting too annoying about Jesus. So that’s pretty wack, I suppose. This belief system is one that puts death on a very disturbing pedestal. This entire song is about preparing for the return of Jesus, which is going to bring a hell of a lot of death if it happens as they predict. This very deadly event is what “Jesus is coming soon” entails, and it’s one of two possible interpretations that I can think of to apply to these “even so come lord Jesus come” lines. The other is that they believe that Jesus is present with them when they worship (Matthew 18:20) and they seek to experience this presence. But the preparatory nature of this song, in my experience at least, puts very strong priority on the first sense, even though it can be, and in church settings often functions as, both. These lines are a plea for personal transformation and for the apocalypse. In the vanishingly unlikely event that the Christian version of the divine turns out to be true, billions will die in wars and disasters (some actively caused by God’s agents) and many of those same billions and many more people, including me, will be victims of the Great Cosmic Yeet and land in hellfire forever. And they want this to happen sooner rather than later. That’s literally the main point of this song. 

So we wait We wait for You God we wait You're coming soon

This is the bridge. It’s typically repeated kind of a lot. Like, I mean holy fuck they repeat this. It’s literally just “we’re excited for the second coming of Christ”. You know, in case someone needed a reminder that they want billions dead, even more people yeeted into hellfire, and the entire world destroyed. Evangelical and fundamentalist strains of Christianity are literally a death cult. 

So with that rant-filled analysis out of the way, let’s see if I can talk formatting without dying inside again or getting too pissed off. 

On the lyric site I linked above (and I’ll link it again so you don’t have to scroll through whatever literal mountain of text and cursed images I’ve produced) this goes verse 1, verse 2, chorus, verse 3, chorus, bridge twice, weird most-of-chorus tag, chorus, the last two lines like several times over. Thus, already we have multiple repetitions of most concepts found in this song. Also, this two verses-chorus-third verse-chorus-bridge several times-chorus twice-ending tag format is quite common in contemporary Christian music, in the studio recordings, official lyrics, and chord sheets you’ll find out there. But I cannot stress enough that this structure, especially the bridge and latter choruses but the entire structure including the verses, is extremely modular. Anything can be repeated, or repeated more times. Anything can be re-inserted in another place. This is mostly a Bethel thing in my experience, but there can be instrumental breaks for one of the vocalists to yeet out entirely spontaneous lyrics. There can be massive empty instrumental breaks, or instrumental breaks with spoken words in them. And I’ve seen even less of that, but parts of other songs can be inserted just about anywhere too, and I’ve actually participated in that one on occasion. To an extent, any music can be handled in ways like this, but it seems to me like contemporary Christian music is consciously designed that way because its target audience goes nuts over long, “spirit-filled” songs played at church camps or an extra spicy church service. 

It’s also worth noting, and if I end up doing a whole lot of these I’ll probably explain this in a great deal more depth, that these songs can get reasonably similar to one another. I think that’s because to a very large extent, the words and structure matter a hell of a lot less than the way they set the mood. You can get the same impact on a crowd of willing Christians from probably literally any combination of these songs. I always had my favorites but that didn’t seem to matter that much. 

I’m inclined to say some of the same things about a lot of modern music, actually. It has common structures, a lot of music is interchangeable for certain moods, etc. But I can’t say a thing about the modularity of modern music. A song seems to be way more of a distinct unit in most environments. Mashups do happen, but massive repetitions of one piece of a song generally don’t in any context that I’m aware of. They’ll jam out on an instrumental for a while at concerts sometimes, but you really don’t get this, like, singing “Crawl on your belly til the sun goes down, I’ll never wear your broken crown, I took the road and I fucked it all away, in this twilight how dare you speak of grace” more than like the twice they do it in the studio recording from most groups like you do in very many Christian music settings. (The example chorus I put here was from Mumford and Sons- Broken Crown. It’s an amazing song, I totally recommend it lol it was the first one that popped into my head for this purpose.) Some other commonalities are present in a lot of modern music, but for the most part, that modularity would just come across extremely weird. I think just about every time I’ve either seen or been involved in the playing of Even So Come at a church, the musicians engaged in at least some degree of modularity, most often by repeating the bridge but sometimes uh... holy crap. Because of the extreme prolific use of these songs in church or retreat settings, I’m inclined to list the modularity as the single most important aspect of the formatting of this song and of many others.

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Episode 29 Review: The Missing Cyanide

{ YouTube: 1 | 2 }

{ Full Synopses/Recaps: Debby Graham | Bryan Gruszka }

{ Screencaps }

Welcome back to the isle of Maljardin, whose lush foliage and majestic château mask a deadly evil, one who has grown deadlier with the acquisition of a bottle of cyanide. SIx episodes ago, Jean Paul Desmond removed the bottle from the medicine poison cabinet in the former laboratory of the late Dr. Menkin, only for Jean Paul’s ancestor Jacques Eloi des Mondes to spirit it away shortly after and hide it the-Devil-knows-where. Now the inhabitants and detained guests of the island search for the bottle before its contents can spell their death.

We open with Alison searching for the vial of cyanide in the aforementioned poison cabinet. (Speaking of which, the fact that Dr. Menkin had a whole cabinet full of bottles labeled “POISON” makes him appear just as suspicious as Jean Paul. What kinds of experiments might he have performed that required the use of poison?) For those of you who love to make fun of YouTube’s automatic captions (I hope it’s not just yours truly), the opening scene is a treat, with a whole 30 seconds of subtitled background music:

The YouTube caption bots have officially gone mad.

She sees Quito and asks him if he has seen the bottle, even drawing a picture of it to make sure he knows which one she’s referring to. He tries to tell her using various gestures, but she doesn’t understand the meaning, and neither Raxl nor Jean Paul is around to interpret. During his first two attempts, he touches his head and then sweeps a hand either outward or upward: “Jacques possessed Jean Paul and swiped it,” perhaps? For his third attempt, he points at himself, then towards the doorway, then makes a “chatterbox” motion with his hand, then points below. I think that means, “I’m going to tell Raxl” (or “I,” “go,” “talk,” “down below”) if only because he goes to fetch her to interpret next.

THE DEVIL JACQUES ELOI DES MONDES, here playing the role of the Greek chorus. Colin Fox doesn’t appear in this episode[1], but he did record a voice-over for Jacques’ portrait in advance. Jacques is also looking especially rosy in this shot--very cute.

Back in the lab, Raxl interprets Quito’s signs, and it turns out I was close with my guess on the meaning of the first combination. According to Raxl, touching the forehead followed by the swiping motion means “the master took it.” Alison asks when he took the bottle, Quito signs some more, and Raxl translates: “Two days ago.” She adds that she doesn’t believe that Jean Paul intentionally took it, but that “I fear that he was under a spell of that accursed Jacques Eloi des Mondes.”

After Alison says that the bottle contained enough cyanide to kill everyone on the island, Raxl makes the Sign of the Great Serpent for the first time, albeit with only one hand instead of both.

This brings up the issue of who killed Dr. Menkin (obviously Jacques) and Erica (true cause of death still unknown), and is reminiscent of the mystery of where the conjure doll and silver pin was hidden. Alison begs her to search everywhere including Jean Paul’s room--which is normally off-limits to her--for the doll and pin, even though that will end her erotic dreams about dashing chevalier Jacques. I suppose we all need to make sacrifices.

In the Great Hall, Raxl tells Quito that she is going to contact the Conjure Woman aka Vangie Abbott. Quito shakes his head and grabs her as though pleading for her not to do it. This is reminiscent of the scene in Episode 13 when Quito freaked out over Raxl’s mention of Vangie’s father, the Conjure Man, and also begged her not to. Kurt Schiegl did an excellent job conveying Quito’s thoughts and feelings without speaking. He could have gone into silent films, if they were still a thing in the sixties.

Quito is undead. Does he even still have a heartbeat?

She descends to the crypt and then waits for Quito to join her before entering the Not-So-Hidden Temple (good, atmospheric scene).

Some favorite shots from the scene.

Meanwhile, Matt finds Alison calling for her in the Great Hall:

OK, Captain Obvious.

She tells him about the cyanide and convinces him to help her find it, but won’t tell him who she believes has it.

Meanwhile, Raxl lays out some Tarot cards in the Not-So-Hidden Temple. “The Tarot is as Evangeline Abbott said. Now with the help of the Great Serpent, I shall summon her.” She begins a ritual, bidding Quito beat the drums as she calls for the Conjure Woman to join her.

We cut back to the Great Hall and learn that Matt now considers Raxl’s beliefs superstition, because she believes in Jacques’ ghost and he does not. He doesn’t believe in witchcraft or possession either. Remember, this is a man who said nineteen episodes ago, “The Tarot is the soul’s way to God. Any path that leads to God should have a minister’s approval.” He’s far from anti-superstition when it comes to the Tarot--and besides, the Bible mentions witchcraft and possession, as Alison points out. But Matt denies that those two things exist and dismisses them as ancient, outdated beliefs. You know that his denial is making Jacques absolutely giddy and that somewhere in Hell (or wherever he goes when he’s not inside Jean Paul’s body) he is sitting on his throne grinning from ear to ear and polishing his ring.

Jacques, upon hearing that Reverend Dawson doesn’t believe in possession.

In the temple, Raxl lays some Tarot cards onto the altar. I have no idea if these cards were deliberately chosen to predict future events on Maljardin or if Cosette Lee just drew ten random cards, but I like writing these Tarot analyses, so I’m going to assume it’s the former. First, a photo of the cards, cropped, lightened, sharpened, flipped to show from Raxl’s perspective, and with the card names marked:

Because both the King of Swords and the Queen of Cups appear twice, these cards must be from two decks combined. (Normally, there is only one of each card in a Tarot deck, but some people choose to use multiple decks when doing readings. That's what I gather from a Googling "using multiple decks in tarot," anyway.)

Using  the meanings given to certain cards in previous episodes and the established interpretations on Tarot.com and The Tarot Guide for the others, here is my brief card-by-card interpretation:

Strikingly, two of these cards, the Ace of Swords and the World, have very positive meanings. The Ace of Swords can be about force (in the sense meaning power, not the sense of being forced to do things) or it can foretell a new beginning or the start of a new project, according to The Tarot Guide. The World denotes success and the fulfillment of dreams; some interpretations such as that on Tarot.com consider it to always be a positive card, even when reversed (although The Tarot Guide argues in favor of a negative interpretation of The World RX). The Tarot Guide says that the Four of Coins/Pentacles can mean "possessiveness,” but I'm thinking that it, if this spread of cards was intentional, Ian Martin may have meant for it to mean "possession" instead. I included both Elizabeth and Holly as posible Queens of Cups in my interpretation, because, although I am inclined to believe Raxl’s and Vangie’s interpretation of the Queen of Cups over Matt’s, either one may be correct.

When examined together, these cards suggest a “new beginning” for Jean Paul, Elizabeth and/or Holly, and Dan. Jacques will either possess them or have them become possessed, and this scheme of his will be a success. We know that Jacques foreshadows Elizabeth’s eventual possession (in his original outline for the plot) as early as Episode 12, and we also know from Episodes 6 and 19, respectively, that Dan and Holly both had counterparts on 17th century Maljardin. If Martin had been allowed to stick to his original outline, would Dan have ended up being possessed by d’Anton and Holly by the blonde girl in her dream? Was that his original intention?

But I digress. The Tarot is less significant to this scene than the fact that Raxl is trying to summon Vangie again to the island. Quito pounds on the ritual drum, Raxl prays in a trance while kneeling before the altar. Unbeknownst to them, the Reverend Matt Dawson sneaks into the temple to search for both the cyanide and Erica’s notes.

Raxl and Quito in the Temple of the Serpent.

Raxl: “COME, CONJURE WOMAN, TAKE YOUR PLACE ON THE ALTAR OF THE GREAT SERPENT...CONJURE WOMAN, TAKE WHAT STRENGTH IS LEFT FROM THE SOUL OF YOUR FATHER AND USE IT! USE HIS STRENGTH! USE HIM!”

Matt discovers that he’s not strong enough to force the door open and so gives up. “What doors are closed to me I suppose I have no right to open,” he tells Alison cryptically as the “sad Jean Paul” music plays in the background. (That’s what I call the cue at least, because it mostly plays during sad Jean Paul scenes.)

Raxl: “COME, CONJURE WOMAN!”

Vangie: “When I die, it will be here on Maljardin. Why did you call me?”

Vangie protests that “[she] must be brought [to Maljardin] some other way” instead of summoning, which is pretty pointless, because Raxl’s ability to summon her to Maljardin eliminates the need for an invite from Jean Paul or Jacques (or, in Holly’s case, skill with sneaking onto ships). She ends this episode with a cryptic line that could refer to one of several female characters on this show: “When the master of the house is no longer the master of his soul, the house needs a mistress."

Overall, a good but not very eventful episode--but then, at this point, you can’t really do much unless Jean Paul and Jacques are around to stir things up. They’re not the only interesting characters--I would be more than happy to watch this, too, if it were The Raxl Show--but Jean Paul and Jacques are the catalysts, the “movers and shakers” if you will. Fortunately, the handsome devil and his 20th-century descendant will be back next episode

Coming up next: Vangie tries to convince Jean Paul to bring her to Maljardin by boat and we try to determine if the Lost Episode summary for Episode 30 was truly for a lost episode.

{ <- Previous: Episode 28   ||   Next: Episode 30 -> }

Notes

[1] Steve (leafshimmer) sent me an article recently with behind-the-scenes information on the show, including the reason why Fox is absent from roughly one episode per week:

Last year [i. e. 1968], Fox broke his neck while taping the Stratford Festival company's Three Musketeers for CBC.  Although he doesn't have to wear a neck brace all the time, he still suffers pain. "Most of the early problems were cleared up, but it's much too exhausting doing this--working 12 hours a day," he said.  "My doctor has given me a letter which insists I get one working day off a week. I have less than 48 hours off, with rehearsals every night, including Sunday."

(Source: Sid Adilman, “TV’s Colin Fox and his Strange Paradise,” Toronto Telegram (Nov. 29 1969).)

[dailyaudiobible]

08/04/2020 DAB Transcript

2 Chronicles 35:1-36:23, 1 Corinthians 1:1-17, Psalms 27:1-6, Proverbs 20:20-21

Today is the 4th day of August welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I’m Brian it is great to be here with you today as it is every day, every day, day by day, step-by-step. And our steps will take us back into the book of second Chronicles today. We’ll actually conclude the book of second Chronicles today and move forward in the Old Testament tomorrow and then in the New Testament. We will begin a new letter, known as first Corinthians. And we’ll talk about that when we get there. But first, second Chronicles chapters 35 and 36 and we’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week.

Introduction to first Corinthians:

Okay. So, yesterday we concluded Paul's letter to the church at Rome. So, also known as Romans. And that leads us to the doorstep here of first Corinthians which is another letter from Paul to another church, the church in Corinth. Corinth was a city, a large city in the Roman Empire, an influential city in the Roman empire, cosmopolitan, a hotspot, a destination place, a huge hub of trade and commerce. This is…this is the fourth largest city in the entire Roman empire. So, lots of people, lots of ideas. Lots of spirituality, spiritual ideas of idolatry. Basically, everything that you would find in a large secularized society is in Corinth. And many biblical scholars think first Corinthians gives us like, bar none, the best glimpse into what early Christians in a urban area were thinking about or questioning or trying to live into or trying to understand and…and fundamentally, they’re having spiritual experiences by the power of the Holy Spirit. Like, this is what's drawing them together, right? So, like if Paul comes to Corinth, preaches the good news, people believe it, and then they start to worship together, but it’s just a dud, then they would just kind of fade away, right? Things were happening. The Holy Spirit was leading these people. It was drawing them together and pulling them together as a spiritual community, but they’re wondering like, “how does this translate to everyday life? Like how does these spiritual experiences…like how is this supposed to transform the way that life is lived?” And, so, some of these…some of these questions are asked of Paul, probably a letter sent to Paul. Like even in first Corinthians, Paul refers to a previous letter that he had written that to them. So, there’s correspondence going on among the Corinthians and Paul. So, he answers some of these questions, among other things. But fundamentally, you’ve got a bunch of people in an urban center following the leading of the Holy Spirit and they don't have a Bible, right? Like they could have the Torah, but they didn't have the New Testament as some sort of baseline for what's going on. They don’t have that. And, so, it's easy enough to come up with a number of ways of looking at things. We have a number of ways of looking at things even though we have the…the Bible, the New Testament now. And, so, Paul fundamentally is trying to look at everybody who's looking at things, and in a number of ways, and bring it all back around to unity. And again, not uniformity, but unity. And that makes his words in first Corinthians as poignant now is as they would've been then. And, of course there are portions in first Corinthians that are very, very famous, like, “seeing through a glass darkly.” “When I was a child, I spoke like a child.” And then very, very famous is first Corinthians chapter 13, which is known as the love chapter, which is…which is beautiful, and we’ll see that when we get there. But let's dive in and take a look into the early church, listen to what Paul’s…I mean we can kinda tell the questions that they're answering by the way Paul is answering the questions. And some of these are questions we have. And, so, let's enjoy as we enter this new territory. First Corinthians chapter 1 verse one through 17 today.

Commentary:

Okay. We just…we just talked about first Corinthians as we entered into it. And now that we have some verses under our belt here, we can kinda see this…this call to unity by the apostle Paul. And, so, it's…it's safe to point out here that this…this idea that the early church was a completely harmonious thing, it was like perfect and then it just got worse and worse and worse until we are here today trying to wrestle through all the stuff, that's not true. We’ve been wrestling through the stuff from the very, very beginning. So, like in this day and age there are some 40,000 Christian denominations of believers in the world that all have slightly different theological positions on different things that are very, very important to them. And we sort of see some of this evolving and being present in this letter to the Corinthian church. So, Paul says, “it’s been reported to me about you, my brothers and sisters, by members of Chloe's people that there is rivalry among you. And what I'm saying is this, one of you says, I belong to Paul or I belong to Apollos.” Now Apollos…Apollos was an early believer contemporary with the apostle Paul, whose reputation is that he was very, very educated in rhetoric and very, very good at communicating with words, a very good speaker. There are scholars that would argue that Apollos is the one who wrote the book of Hebrews. Of course, we’re not to the book of Hebrews yet and nobody knows that, but he just kind of like fits a certain profile. So, Apollos has been to the Corinthian community and spoken. And then there are others who say I belong to Cephas, which is the apostle Peter. So, it also seems that the apostle Peter has come through Corinth and visited with the church at Corinth. And, so, some of them are saying like, “well, I belong to him. He was a disciple of Jesus. He actually walked with Jesus. I'm going to follow what he has to say.” And then there are others who are like, “I belong to Christ”. I don't belong any of these people. I belong to Christ. The Holy Spirit is leading me. This is…this is who me and mine, this is who we belong to.” And, so, we can see even in the early church, this is an attempt to get an identity by who our leaders are, who we are following. And then by very nature then saying, “we are separate from those who are following this other teaching.” And, so, there's an “us and them” happening that Paul really, really doesn't like because it creates, as he said, “rivalry among you, divisions among you.” So, here in one of the earliest churches, like the earliest churches following Jesus that have been established this is going on. “I belong to Paul. “Well I am of the Apollos camp. I follow Peter. I follow Christ alone.” And Paul's response to that is, “is Christ divided then? Is that what’s going on here? Is Christ divided? Was I, Paul, crucified for you? Were you baptized in my name?” And then he kinda goes on to try to think it through everyone's he's baptized so that there's a very select few people that could ever claim to be baptized in Paul's name. We’ll get into this further as we get further into this letter and as we continue to move through the letters that are found in the New Testament and what we can learn about our brothers and sisters who were right at the beginning first, what they were thinking about and what they were going too because it helps us to realize, like most of the stuff that's going on that's like frustrating or that we can't quite figure out, this has always been going on. It’s not some kind of new phenomenon in our lifetime. And we’ll see Paul working toward unity even while acknowledging that people have different viewpoints on different things. What he will do though is invite us, invite his readers, which was them and now is us basically to think…to think…to raise the bar, to think hire, to understand that there’s a bigger thing going on than us just trying to find our camp. There’s a bigger thing going on that God is doing through Jesus and that bigger thing unites us.

Prayer:

Father, as we go through this letter and all of the different letters and all the different things that we have to talk about and all of the different things that Your word will illuminate inside of us, that will become a mirror into our own convictions and are our own postures, we invite You. We see that there was…that there was disunity or disharmony in the earlier church and that those things needed to be wrestled with and wrestled through and realize that is still today the same and we realize that our hearts, like our clothes may change and our technology may change, but our hearts, what we’re looking for, what we’re seeking, these things remain the same. And we are seeking You and we are asking the Holy Spirit, lead us into all truth as we continue our journey through the Scriptures. Come Holy Spirit into all of this we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

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And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

[hak-7]

WALKING ON WATER AND ITS SYMBOLIC MEANING History tells us that the original- followers of Jesus differ in a great degree from Catholicism and Protestantism. In a great degree. History traces the Christian Church back to the "Essenes". The Essenes from what history can decipher believed in a religion very close to that of John the Baptist. Their religion was merely an awakening, a call to the people's consciousness to leave sin, leave corruption and come back to the essence of faith.That's why they're called "the Essenes". Come back to the essence of faith. This later Christianity shows the structure and the framework of Idolatry, Paganism. It represents an attempt to put Jesus and his teachings in the language and framework of paganism. That's all that it represents. Peter is suppose to be the head of Christianity. Protestantism came as a rebellion against the rule of Peter.They broke off from the Catholic Church and formed what is called now the Protestant Religion.You see! Let us see now what the Bible says about Peter, who represents the beginning of the Church. The Bible says that Jesus stood upon the water and he beckoned to Peter to stand upon the water. And Peter stood upon the water, but soon began to sink. So the Bible is saying something about Peter. What does this mean? Some will say "oh, it means Peter wasn't equal to the Lord, Christ. Standing on the water is a feat only for God. Only God in Jesus Christ could do a thing like that." It is saying that Peter wouldn't do miracles, but Jesus could. Let us go back again and read the Bible. Jesus said "and greater miracles you will do after me". All right. According to their New Testament Jesus says in the Bible to his Disciples, to Peter, Paul and others, "greater miracles will you do after me". So that can't apply then, it was not a miracle, it's something else that it refers to. You have to understand what water represents. Why is water so important to religion? You think it only means water? You're baptized in water, for what? To be reborn a Christian. Why? Because water is symbolic of Christian morals or Religious morals. Water is a term common to all the great Religions. It is a term meaning rel https://www.instagram.com/p/CDLUqrxHBpF/?igshid=yw0kiu41n7l6

[thebarefootking]

The Vessel

"I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."

-- St. Paul of Tarsus, Galatians 2:20

"Holy fire burn away My desire for anything That is not of You, And is of me I want more of You And less of me, yeah

Empty me Empty me Empty me --"

-- William Murphy, "Empty Me"

---------------------------------------------------

I don't feel I'm overstating my case when I refer to my parents as "religious extremists" (though I will concede they are less extreme now than they were during my childhood, by a fair margin). I grew up in a series of denominations (or, in some cases, 'non' denominations, which were always a very specific sort of denomination in disguise) which almost invariably allowed for such things as female clergy, and who (at least theoretically, which is itself still rare in extremist circles) considered all those who "accepted Jesus" to be part of the Christian Church.

But they also, and my parents with them, believed that any Christian who was sick or injured (in body or mind) could simply pray or be prayed for, and "the infirmity would flee them, by the power of Christ Jesus". Incidentally, this particular view didn't vibe well when it came up against the anxiety disorder I have suffered from since childhood. No amount of prayer, sticky anointing oils, or exorcistic commands could send "the Spirit of Fear" from me. Which is not to say that it stopped my father trying. And trying.

And, eventually, implicitly, blaming it on my own lack of faith.

I suppose, after a while, I believed that, too.

So my faith wasn't strong enough to keep the Spirit of Fear out. I could live with that. I would just do my best in all other aspects of my faith life. After all, we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The important part was to do our best.

One's best, the church taught, should always be toward the goal of giving oneself entirely over to the will of God. The less there was of 'you', the more room there was for God to do good through you. To that end, our church practiced fasting, either as simple spiritual practice, or with an intent and request of God. Yes, even the children (though they were encouraged to give up something other than food). The message came through loud (though anything but clear, among the conflicting messages of 'be yourself!' and 'God has given you many unique gifts!'): Self was bad.

When I came to my teenage years, the message was reinforced. Unable to curb my personal oddity enough to cultivate many friendships outside of church, I decided that, if I couldn't figure out how to make God my identity, then making church my identity was the next best thing. I was the awkward, uncomfortable kid in Christian tee-shirts who invited everyone to special church events and called out their church fellows in front of everyone on their 'un-Christian' behavior.

It didn't prepare me for my self to fight back, this time with a new ally: puberty.

Not that I was too concerned with any lustful thoughts towards boys I might have had. I was an incredibly naive teenager, and was unfamiliar enough with sex that I hardly even knew how to fantasize about it. Boys made me giggly and overbearing, but nothing more.

Only… so did the girls.

Immediately, I knew: the Spirit of Fear had gone out, just like in the Gospels. It had found no rest, and decided to come back to me. I hadn't filled myself up with God, so it settled back in, this time with seven friends more wicked than itself!

I was oppressed by a Gay Demon!

I can't tell anyone about this! I thought. But the Bible said to confess your sins one to another in order to be healed! How was I going to un-gay myself without ruining my reputation? I knew for sure that anyone I told would never see me the same again, and most of them would spread the word, and not the Good Word, if you follow me.

They'll never let me teach a devotion at church again. I probably won't even get to go on the mission trip. Or camp! They'll never let me room with girls!

A proper misery set in. My identity was the weird church kid, and I didn't have anything else to fall back on. I was full up with a brainload of doctrine that couldn't help me at all in the face of actual, real-life people.

I hadn't filled myself with God. I hadn't filled myself with Me. I had filled myself with a rule book, and one that neither I nor anyone I knew could follow.

I did try for a few years. I struggled against my sexuality, all the while pushing the youth of my church to truly embrace the spirit of love and devotion that I felt underpinned the scripture. I drove them toward a passion for God, all as I suffered in His absence, an absence for which I believed myself to blame.

It seemed that I simply wasn't a proper vessel.

Adulthood joined the fray, throwing a few punches of its own: I had made it to the age of eighteen without forming any identity for myself outside of "weird church kid". No goals, no intentions. Those sorts of things were for people without God leading them; how could I say I had faith if I planned my own life instead of letting God take the reins? Surely he had some great plan for my life. That's what countless adults had been telling me since I was old enough to understand the words.

--------

At the last church I attended regularly, there was a woman we'll call Miss Lee. She has multiple sclerosis that, while I was attending there, was just then beginning to affect her mobility. She went from walking confidently on her own to needing to use a wheelchair most weeks. Nearly every week, we would pray for her, begging God to heal her, and demanding that the damage leave her body. And every week, nothing would happen. Well, not nothing. Sometimes the nerve pain in her toes would diminish slightly, or, more rarely, someone would say they'd had a dream or vision in the past week of her being healed. Once, she had a vision of her own that she would dance at the front of the church with one of her friends, someday.

That church dissolved some four or five years ago. Miss Lee's condition has progressed to the point where her mobility is severely impaired and she is often confused. She semi-frequently texts my mother asking for help because she's fallen and there's no one in the house to help her up.

---------

I gave up my birth religion gradually, over the course of a decade, and if you asked my what I believe now, I would not be able to tell you. I can tell you, though, that ten years has taught me that I cannot find healing in mea culpas, in prayer, or in waiting to see what God has planned. I have to acknowledge the makeshift self I have gathered together, and fill myself with it.

I might be late to the party. That's ok. I can still make something real.

[bishopkenneth]

A God Like Old Ben Weaver

“But nothing can be good in Him, Which evil is in me.” - John Greenleaf Whittier, The Eternal Goodness, 1865.

There was an aged man in town who reminded everyone of old Ben Weaver from the Andy Griffith Show. He always kept score and never let a slight against him slide. He was a stickler for doing things right, and the smallest deviation from doing things his way, the right way, was duly noted and registered in his little book that he might well have titled, The Misdeeds of Others. If anyone ever got on his wrong side - which was pretty easy to do - it wasn’t good enough to go have a talk with him, honestly tell him you were sorry, and ask for his forgiveness. He always demanded recompense, and a little extra in the payback. Did your child break his window with a baseball? Apologies be damned, you had to fix the window, which I suppose is understandable, but the way he figured, that wasn’t enough. I mean, the window was perfectly fine before your kid played Nolan Ryan with it and his life was disrupted with all the bother and the mess and the broken glass and the temporary patch job and the loss of peace of mind and house. Your boy saying he was sorry wasn’t enough. Your saying you were also sorry wasn’t enough. Your fixing the broken window wasn’t enough. That didn’t “even things up.” You still owed him because of the, what is it the lawsuits call it - “punitive damages.” And, I mean, he wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t much loved by his neighbors either.

Have you ever known someone like old Ben Weaver? Did you like them? Did you think they embodied goodness? Would you consider them Christlike? Honestly, would you even want to be around them?

I’m assuming by now you know where I’m taking this - why are these qualities considered less than good in old Ben, but perfectly fine and dandy when we speak of the person of God? Why are the qualities we find reprehensible in fellow humans somehow considered “good,” “just,” and “right” when applied to God? God keeps track of our misdoings - but that’s OK, he’s God. God demands payment for our wrongdoings - but that’s OK, he’s God. God has to be “satisfied,” not only with recompense, but even with punitive damages - but that’s OK, he’s God.

So many times when I bring up this incongruity, people respond with, “Well, the Bible says God’s ways are not our ways.” What does that even mean? Better yet, “What even does that mean?” We can’t throw that line out as some kind of defense of God every time we run across him being attributed qualities which are reprehensible in every other living thing. The truth of the matter is that when God says that of himself (in Isaiah 55.8 and surrounding verses), he is specifically referring to his extraordinary level of mercy, not his “just demands,” or his wrath.

In point of fact, in Amos 1.11, God condemns Edom for these very faults. Edom “cast off all pity,” his “anger tore perpetually,” and he, “kept his wrath forever.”

For the love of God, let’s all please stop saying that something is good when it is in God, but terrible when it is in creatures created in his image. God is not like the sins he condemns. Let me say that again in bold, God is not like the sins he condemns.

“But,” folk respond to me sometimes, “God is so majestic that even a slight sin against him demands justice. He is a great king, and a crime against a king is greater than a crime against a commoner.” Seriously, I’ve been told this, because this is kind of a classic argument from medieval days that has hung around till now. But I say hogwash. If a king has an orchard with 10,000 apples and I steal one, that isn’t a greater crime than me stealing an apple from my neighbor who has only one apple. In fact, the deed done against my neighbor is worse (remember Nathan’s parable to King David). God’s greater majesty doesn’t mean he is more exacting in dealing with offenses. It means precisely the opposite: “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, but not into the hands of men; for as His majesty is, so also His mercy.” (Sirach 2.18)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, oftentimes when I teach or write about God’s love, his mercy, his forgiveness, I am met with, “Yes, but…” and what follows is a demand that I balance it out with focusing on his justice, and wrath, and righteous punishment. Laying aside for a moment (actually for this whole article) that I believe good, solid, orthodox theology does deal with these issues without abrogating the mercy and love of God, what I find intriguing is that these very same folk, when they hear a sermon or read an article about God’s just demands, his wrath, his punishments, never bring up the, “Yes, but” remark then!

It is almost as if something within our spiritual framework can’t handle the idea of a God who really and truly forgives without demanding payment; that there is something in our spiritual condition that can’t abide a God who acts toward others the way he teaches us to act toward others. I suspect that maybe way down at the bottom of our hearts the reason we don’t want to see God in this light is because it would demand that we who follow him also really and truly live the same way. That “something” in our spiritual framework, that certain je ne sais quoi as the French say with such flair, is what St. Paul would call, “the flesh,” and it isn’t from God, and it isn’t like God.

John Greenleaf Whittier, whom I quoted at the beginning of this article, was a 19th century American poet, and a devout Quaker. When you read the whole of his poem, The Eternal Goodness, you discover that it is a conversation between Whittier and a friend who keeps bringing up the, “Yes, but.”

I walk with bare, hushed feet the ground Ye tread with boldness shod; I dare not fix with mete and bound The love and power of God.

Ye praise His justice; even such His pitying love I deem: Ye seek a king; I fain would touch The robe that hath no seam.

Ye see the curse which overbroods A world of pain and loss; I hear our Lord's beatitudes And prayer upon the cross.

I have a dear pastor friend who was discussing theology and the Bible with me one day, and jokingly said, “I’m going to go home and look it up in Greek, and make it say what I want it to say!” We both laughed, because he wasn’t serious, but he was onto something. Folk can make the Bible say whatever they want it to say. They can find verses here and connect them with verses there, and paint a very Ben Weaver portrait of God. I would suggest, instead, that we look at Jesus. “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” he told Philip (John 14.9). The Old Testament saw God, but only in shadows (Colossians 2.17), “but the substance is of Christ.” Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets - they saw God, “in many parts and in many ways…,” the writer of Hebrews tells us (1.1), “in bits and pieces” (Phillips), BUT, “…but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (1.2). If you really want to know what God is like, he is like Jesus.

I really wrote this whole long article to make a single point, which I guess I could have just come right out and said and saved everyone a lot of time and trouble: enough of this seeing something as good in God, but as evil in others. If it isn’t good in old Ben Weaver, it isn’t good in the Almighty either.

Not mine to look where cherubim And seraphs may not see, But nothing can be good in Him Which evil is in me.

The wrong that pains my soul below I dare not throne above, I know not of his hate - I know His goodness and His love.

[theritualofourexistence]

I know every mile will be worth my while.

This is a post about faith and mental illness.

I came up with the idea for this a good while ago when I was still using the word “Christian” to identify my faith. In my spiritual journey, however, I have found that the closer I feel to God, the further I feel from the Christian church. 

My faith began with Christianity, though, so for the sake of this post, that will be the primary faith-related focus. 

My best friend recently started a blog where she tackles LGBT issues in and with the Christian church (https://queerlychristian.home.blog/). Her last post emphasizes the need to read the Bible in the proper context and with the proper analytical awareness and she references a specific well-known verse in one of her illustrations. 

Paul calls the followers of God to “rejoice in the Lord always” in Philippians 4:4. 

When you incorporate the context, it’s clear Paul isn’t saying that lightly. 

He’s writing from prison, at perhaps one of the darkest times in his life. 

Paul tells us to, even in the darkest chapters of our lives, find a way to rejoice in the Lord. 

I grew up in a small town with a heavy Christian influence. It is only with time and distance that I have learned that many of the communities in that town would use verses like this to add pressure to already suffering individuals. 

“Rely on God in the hard times; God is all you need.”

“God is the answer to your problems, just have faith that He will guide you.” 

“Lift your worries and your problems up to God, only He can save us.” 

How dare you wallow in your grief and anger when you should be rejoicing in the Lord?

In 2009, exactly ten years ago, my abuser used my faith to manipulate me. He told me God wanted me to do the things I did and that God would punish me if I refused. At that time in my life, I was so afraid that I felt I had no choice. I did things that I cannot undo, things that I will carry with me forever. 

When I finally began the healing process, it demanded a pretty thorough re-evaluation of my faith. 

I spent a lot of time re-learning my God and his ways. I ultimately spent years exploring and defining my faith but none of that... and I mean none of it, could’ve happened if I hadn’t taken the steps to begin to heal.

My abuser left my faith in tatters. He left my heart in tatters. He left my soul in tatters. And I wasn’t able to devote energy to working through that until years later. When the time came, however... when I felt ready, I knew that before I could have a relationship with God, I needed to patch some of the holes in my heart.

I have friends with anxiety and depression who have been told by church elders and even their parents that they have nothing to worry about and that they should just give those feelings up to God.

Science shows that faith can be an important part of managing mental illness.

But “just give your worries up to God” is not what the science means.

When I was at my lowest points, and yes, there have been a few, I could barely sort out right and left and up and down let alone a relationship with an invisible, omnipotent, mass-Creator. 

When you can’t eat.

And you can’t sleep.

And you can’t take a breath that fills your lungs because your chest is too tight and too full of fire...

You need to help you before God can help you. 

It’s like being in a basement with no lights. I mean black darkness, true darkness. And you know somewhere in that basement is a flight of stairs to the light. In this metaphor, the flight of stairs is God or faith or whatever word you’d like to use. The problem, though, is that you are terrified and confused and you can’t find the stairs at all in the utter blackness that surrounds you and chokes you and pins your arms to your sides.

You are desperate for any hint of a light because you know there are stairs, you just can’t find them.

In my path towards healing my first candle in that darkness was therapy. 

Therapy was enough of a light that it helped me start to map out the basement in my mind. It soothed some of the fear and tension so I could start to look for the stairs. But, try as I might, I still couldn’t find them. 

My flashlight was anti-depressants. 

It wasn’t an easy choice for me. I would so much rather believe my body could do what it was supposed to do without help. Without... synthetic help. But no matter how much energy I put into looking for those stairs out of that basement, I could not find them.

It took a few weeks to get used to the medicine. It took a few months before I felt like I’d established stability. But then I found the stairs and I started to climb.

Once I’d put enough of my pieces back together, I learned something pretty incredible about faith. It is significantly easier to focus on praising God when you have a therapist to help you talk through the bad stuff.

When I was younger I prayed to God, sure. But my prayers were often begging for solutions to problems that seemed monumental at the time. 

“God, help me do this.” 

“God, can you please fix this.”

“God, I know you love me, why is this so hard?”

My therapist showed me how to start managing my problems and it changed my communication with God. I began rejoicing in the Lord in a way that I hadn’t really done ever before. I thanked God for my therapist, certainly, and for the medication that gave me back the power of rationality. More than that, though, I thanked God for the strength to challenge my distorted thinking... the strength to learn enough about my brain that I could manage my symptoms. I thanked God for the good days and I thanked God for giving me the tools to carry myself through the bad days. I thanked God for my support system, for the sunshine on crashing waves, for a cool breeze through rustling branches. I thanked God for the songs of the birds and for the love that I could feel flowing through me and the earth and the sky.

I feel very comfortable in my faith. I feel like I’m anchored in a force of light that ties me to every living and natural thing on earth. I feel like I am one string woven with billions of others to create a beautiful tapestry. 

After over six years of therapy and three years of anti-depressants, my faith is a very important part of my mental health.

But I would not have reforged my relationship with God without therapy.

I would not have reforged my relationship with God without anti-depressants.

I believe God led me to those things, in fact, because they brought me back to Her.

So, Christians, I beg you to challenge your understanding of God’s ways and to recognize that science is just another one of God’s remarkable tools. 

God wants us to be close to Him. He doesn’t want us to pressure our loved ones to follow scripture when we don’t even have the power to sustain a healthy lifestyle. God gave us tools to help us along the way and you may not know the harm you’re doing when you tell someone battling mental illness to simply give their fears to God. 

The route from A to B is never what we picture and never direct.

We don’t ask God to heal kidney disease all on Her own. We get that person medical attention and we pray for healing and we pray that the professionals providing treatment do everything in their power to start that person on a healing journey.

There is no reason that we should handle anxiety or depression any differently. 

Never discourage a loved one from seeking care that may give them a chance to reforge their faith. Never discourage a loved one from seeking care that may save their life.

God used therapy and anti-depressants to guide me back to Him and I am so grateful for that.

Note: my use of mixed pronouns was intentional. In the original language of the Bible, the pronoun used to describe God was non-gendered. My God is Love, and love is non-gendered.

[lesfeldickbiblestudy]

  Through the Bible with Les Feldick LESSON 1 * PART 1 * BOOK 54 James Prepares His Flock James 3:7 - 5:20 Let’s get right back into the Book of James, chapter, 3 and we ended with verse 6 the last time we were together, so let’s just go back and take a run at verse 7 by starting with verse 6. James 3:6 "And the tongue (the physical tongue) is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; it is set on fire of hell." The tongue is pretty much the beginning of a lot of wickedness, and James is emphasizing that. All right, in the next verse he speaks of everything in nature. James 3:7 "For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind:" Now you know what that tells you? I was just thinking about that on the way up here to our taping. I suppose Iris wonders why I’m so quiet, but I’m thinking, thinking, thinking. You know, I just thought of a little cliché in light of this very verse and I think it may come out of the evolutionists - that "the more things change, the more they stay the same." And isn’t that true? Here we think, that in our modern era, this is the first time that people have been able to tame the wild animals and do all the various things. No. They’ve done it from time immemorial. And so, even James could write that, even at that time already, men were training all of these wild animals for their various circus acts or whatever you want to call it. See, men have always needed to be entertained. That’s what the Coliseums were for, to keep people entertained. So everything is tamed. Now verse 8: James 3:8 "But the tongue can no man tame; (no one can tame the tongue) it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison." Now again, I’d better stop right here and remind all of us that James is writing first and foremost, not exclusively, but first and foremost, to Jewish believers, who I feel had been scattered out of Jerusalem and the Jerusalem congregation, by virtue of Saul of Tarsus’ persecution, as we see in Acts chapter 1. I don’t think these are part and parcel of Paul’s congregations whatsoever. I think these are strictly Jews. In fact, remember the last program? It wasn’t the church where these Jewish believers were meeting, it was a Synagogue. And so there’s no Church language in the letters of James and Peter and John - not a word. I went through it all again last night to make sure I was on solid ground when I say this. You cannot find one word of Church or what we call Church – the Age of Grace – language. In other words, there’s no reference to the Body of Christ. There’s no reference to the working and the controlling of the Holy Spirit - as over against the keeping of the Law - and it’s ‘legal.’ It’s like we’re seeing here. It’s not that the Spirit is going to control us, but that they have to go by what James is telling them. So, as you read these little Jewish epistles, remember there is no Grace-Age language in here. You also won’t find the plan of salvation in these Jewish epistles. Now, just like I said about Hebrews - you can’t go through the Book of Hebrews and find the plan of salvation like you do in Romans or I Corinthians, because it’s just not in there. Because, evidently, these little epistles were written before Paul’s revelations had even become known, and I think that’s the reason for it. But, don’t forget, it’s still Spirit inspired. Of course it is! It’s the Word of God. It’s Scripture. And we can take profit from it, but you don’t come back to these little epistles to find doctrine for us today. It’s merely, like I said the last taping, a lot like Proverbs. See, Proverbs just gives us a lot of tidbits of good things, well that’s exactly what James is doing. So, he says, "The tongue is on fire from hell." It’s something that mankind cannot contain. Now, then, we move on into verse 9: James 3:9a "Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men,….

" Now that doesn’t sound like Christian living to me. But here we have in one verse the tongue that is capable of blessing God; but on the other hand, cursing men. Now Paul would never teach something like that. That’s anathema to us as believers, but here was a problem that evidently was common amongst these Jewish congregations. Remember, for their salvation, they had to believe that Jesus was the Christ, and they’re still under the Law of Moses. They know nothing of Paul’s Gospel of Grace, or of faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord for salvation. And so, consequently, there are some things in here that almost seem contradictory, but they’re not. They’re not contradictory if you realize the circumstances in which James is dealing or writing. So, he says this to these Jewish people, I think, primarily, in the area of what’s today Turkey - Asia Minor - rather small Jewish congregations, no doubt, and this is one of their problems. They weren’t controlling the tongue. On the one hand, they could bless God, but on the other hand, they could curse fellow men. He said, these men that you’re cursing are just as much created after the likeness of God as anybody else. Well, what’s he referring to? Genesis 1:26 where God said, "Let us make man in our image." And that’s what James is alluding to - that even these people that they were bad-mouthing - they’re God’s creatures just as well as you are. And I think this is what we have to realize in light of our global situation today; regardless of who these people are, regardless of the religion they may be practicing, they’re still God’s created beings. And you see, that’s where we, in the Christian community, have a higher regard for life because we realize that mankind is the crowning act of creation. And that’s why mankind is in a special role in God’s eyes. Whether they’re lost or saved, in that regard, makes no difference, they’re still created beings from the Creator Himself. And so this is what James is alluding to. James 3:9b "…which are made after the similitude of God." Whether you curse men, remember, they are still made after the similitude of God. Now verse 10. James 3:10 "Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be." These people who were blessing God, but on the same hand, could proceed blessing and cursing, these things ought not to be. Granted - any of us know that much, that something’s wrong if you can curse and bless out of the same mouth. All right, read on in verse 11. Here he’s using a comparison from the physical world. James 3:11-12 "Doth a fountain (a water fountain) send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? (out of the same fountain? Impossible.) 12. Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? So can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh." It’s impossible. So now the analogy he’s drawing is this - it’s just as ridiculous to try to bless God out of one side of your mouth and curse fellow man on the other. James 3:13 "Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him shew out of a good conversation his (what?) works with meekness of wisdom." Now you see, James is a legalist. And he’s going to come back to this idea of good works over and over and over. And it’s almost like a man’s attempt to please God - whereas Paul will just simply say that it’s not of works. We’d better keep comparing. All right, let’s go back to Ephesians because that’s when you can see it most graphically. Ephesians chapter 2 and drop down to verses 8 through 10 - these are all verses I imagine most of you know from memory. And I just want you to see the comparison. Now it’s not a contradiction. It isn’t like people say, "Well the Bible is just a whole set of contradictions." No. It’s two sets of circumstances. James is writing from a totally different perspective than Paul is. James knows nothing of the Grace Age, and so it’s not contradictory. You just have to separate it. Look what Paul says here in Ephesians.

Ephesians 2:8 "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:" Salvation is not something you earn, it’s something you take as a free gift. Now verse 9: Ephesians 2:9-10a "Not of works, lest any man should boast. 10. For we (now as believers) are his (God’s) workmanship,.…" God works a work in us that literally makes us, now, what we are to be as believers - whereas James almost leaves it in the ability of the individual. So verse 10 again: Ephesians 2:10 "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works. That ‘created’ did not happen until we were saved and enjoyed salvation - then God works a work in us that brings us, as a result of our salvation experience, to practice the good works, "...which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." And over and over throughout Paul’s writings you have that connotation - that works are a result of our salvation and not a part of it. Okay, back to James once again. Verse 13: James 3:13 "Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him shew out of a good conversation (or manner of living, a lifestyle) his works with meekness of wisdom." Now maybe I’m getting overly picky, but I don’t think so. Do you see any reference here to the work of the Holy Spirit? He doesn’t say "Let the Holy Spirit accomplish this in you." See, now Paul would say that. Let me show you what I mean by comparison. Turn to Galatians chapter 5 verses 16 through 18, and we’ll probably use it again before we get out of James because this is just a whole different perspective than what James was talking about. Now remember what James just said. "Let him show out of a good manner of life, his works, with meekness of wisdom." Not a word about the Spirit. Now look what Paul says here in Galatians. Galatians 5:16-18 "This I say then, walk in the Spirit, (Holy Spirit. It’s capital ‘S’) and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. 17. For the flesh (that old sin nature) lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. 18. But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." Now, James doesn’t use language like that. See the difference? But now Paul says, "If you’re led of the Spirit, you’re not under the Law, because the work of the Spirit has taken the place of the Law." And then he shows the vast differences between the life of the flesh and the life of the Spirit in these verses. Well, we’ll probably be coming back to it yet a little later today, so we’ll come back to James. But I just like to show these comparisons. What a vast difference in the language in James, the legalist writing to legalistic Jewish congregations, compared to Paul, writing to us in this Age of Grace! James 3:14 "But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth." I think the truth he’s really referring to here is how to live a godly life under the Law. The Law gave them all the instructions they needed to avoid these pitfalls. James 3:15 "This wisdom (that is of bitter envying and strife) descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish." See? This wisdom is fleshly, it’s sensual - it feeds on the natural part of man and it’s devilish. James 3:16 "For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work." Isn’t it amazing how sin breeds sin. Families in the world, with all of their alcoholism and their immorality - well, what is the next generation? At least that much or more. And that’s the process - sin breeds more sin. And that’s what the Scripture is saying. Envying and strife will bring confusion and every evil work. Now verse 17, and we see the flipside. James 3:17a "But the wisdom that is from above.…" Now James doesn’t say, "The wisdom that comes

from the leading of the Spirit" - he merely is showing that God is still in His place of power and influence. But, it’s in a whole different set of circumstances than what Paul gives us in this Age of Grace and the working of the Holy Spirit. James 3:17 "But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy." Well, that’s the two opposites. Either envying, strife, hatred and sensuality; or it can be peace, gentleness, mercy and good works. James 3:18 "And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace." You want to remember - back when we were earlier in the book of James, I think it was, that he spoke of "religion." And of course, that’s what his adherents were steeped in. They were steeped in the religion of Judaism and all these things, and he hasn’t departed from that. And, therefore, you see none of the language of this Age of Grace. All right, let’s just move on into chapter 4. The language doesn’t change much. James 4:1-2a "From whence come wars and fighting among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? 2. Ye lust,.…" Doesn’t sound very nice, does it? That’s the life of the person still under the Law. He can’t have victory because he’s not controlled by the Holy Spirit. He’s still trying to do all these good things in the energy of the flesh. So it’s a warfare in the members. Now let’s go back again to Paul’s letters - let’s go back to Romans chapter 7 and see how Paul treats this very set of circumstances. The same set of circumstances, only Paul’s going to deal with it in a totally different way. Remember, now, James says "that these things are coming from the desires of the old nature that are warring in your members," - and then verse 2 in James he goes on to remind them that they "lust or they covet." All right, now then, Romans chapter 7 verses 21 through 24. Paul is now writing to us Gentiles under this Age of Grace: Romans 7:21-22 "I find then a law, (not the Ten, but a fact of life) that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. 22. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man:" In other words, he knew that the Mosaic Law was perfect. Now verse 23. Romans 7:23a "But (here’s the verse I came here for) I see another law in my members, (and what’s the word?) warring.…" Just exactly what it means. Conflict. And where there’s conflict, there’s no peace. So here he is in conflict, the old nature trying to keep the Mosaic Law - but on the other hand, he had this law of the Spirit that is attempting to bring him into a life of peace. Romans 7:23b-24a "…against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 24. O wretched man that I am!…." Oh, he said, "Wretched man that I am."All right, now we’re going to go back to those verses we just saw in Galatians, and I told you I’d be back in a minute and here we are. Back to Galatians chapter 5, and now we’ve got the same picture. And here I guess is where I picked up the term ‘war’ here in this verse in Romans. For years and years I often wondered where I got it because the word in Galatians is lusteth. But I’ve always, for some reason or other, used the term ‘war,’ and I know it’s because it’s out of Romans 7. Galatians 5:17 "For the flesh (the Old Adam, the old sin nature) lusteth (warreth) against the Spirit, (the new nature under the control of the Spirit) and the Spirit (warreth) against the flesh: (the Old Adam.) and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." In other words, you can’t just drift. It’s warfare. And warfare takes an expending of energy. And so it’s a daily fight to maintain the directing power of the Holy Spirit as over against the Old Adam. And then again, let me read what we just read a few moments ago in verse 18. Galatians 5:18 "But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.

" The Law has been crucified. It’s dead. It is no longer a controlling fact in our lives. The Spirit takes over. And then he shows in these following verses all of the things that pertain to the lusts of the flesh. And if anybody ever asks you, "How am I to judge the lifestyle of people?" Line them up with the Scripture. In fact, we again just talked about that the other night in one of my classes. When you go down the fruit and vegetable aisle in your supermarket, do you just grab the first head of lettuce that comes and say, "Well, I can’t judge?" Of course not. You go through that bin and pick out the very best, and if there were some bad ones, you’d leave them. That’s not judging, that’s just being discerning. Well, you do the same thing with ungodly people. If they’re out there living in immorality and if they’re living in drunkenness and if they’re living in lasciviousness and all the things that are mentioned here - then you have every right in the world to discern - they’re not living godly lives. They’re living the flesh. All right, now you’ve come all the way through that horrible list of activities that is part and parcel of the ungodly person. They can’t be a believer and live like this. And then you come down to verse 22 and you see the discerning of the believer. Now when you see a person who can practice these things and you see the fruit of it, then you have every right in the world, just by simple discernment. Now I grant you, you can’t judge who’s saved and lost. That goes beyond the human element. But, when you see a person’s lifestyle, you can pretty much line him up with the Scripture and determine what kind of a person he is. Now verse 22 of Galatians 5. And here’s the flipside again. Galatians 5:22 "But the fruit of the Spirit (The result of the Holy Spirit coming into the life of a believer) is love, …" Look the opposite of love up in verse 21. "Envy." Love and envy are as opposite as you can get. Galatians 5:22b "…joy, peace…" Well, there’s no peace in those actions in verses 19, 20 and 21. It’s anything but peace. Galatians 5:22c-23 "…longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, (trusting God and His Word). 23. Meekness. temperance: against such there is no law." You can’t find any of that in verses 18, 19 and 20. It’s just two totally difference lifestyles. And then people say that you can’t judge? Well you’d better, or you don’t know the Word of God. And it’s up to us as believers to, if someone is living in that wicked lifestyle, show them the Book! You don’t have to say it in your own language, just show them the Word. "Hey, this is what you’re doing and this is going to be your end." What does the last part of verse 21 say? Galatians 5:21b "…they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." That’s what the Book says - not what Les Feldick says. So always be prepared to use the Scriptures. Let the Word of God speak for itself.

[urfavmurtad]

PLEASE EXPLAIN THAT HADEETH ABOUT THE ROCK I’M IN TEARS 🤣🤣🤣

Aight listen. I am aware that this is extraordinarily fucking stupid, even by Mo’s standards, to the point that my young self actually laughed in the middle of class when we were taught about it before I realized my teacher was serious. But this isn’t just a random hadith. It’s supposed to be the incident of the Jews bothering Moses referenced in Al-Ahzab:

O ye who believe! Be not as those who slandered Moses, but Allah proved his innocence of that which they alleged, and he was well esteemed in Allah’s sight.

Meaning they accused him of having deformed balls and Allah made him get naked in front of them to prove otherwise. Because it is tied into the Quran, I regret to inform everyone that we must treat this story seriously, theologically speaking.

I remembered this hadith a couple of years ago and thought 2 myself “truly, what in the name of fuck”, so I looked up where it came from and I think I have an answer. I mean this is just a theory, I can’t prove that this is where Mohammed got it from but I really suspect that it is!

In the letters of Paul in the Bible, there’s this reference to a water-producing “rock that followed“ Moses’ people, which he turns into a metaphor for Jesus or something. If you look up what this is referring to, you’ll find that Jewish people at the time had the belief that a water source was literally following Moses and the Hebrews through the desert. As in… it moved. I dunno if it had legs or just dragged its rock ass across the ground, don’t ask me these questions. There’s a first-century Jewish book called Biblical Antiquities that says of Moses’ people that there was a “well of water following them”. So the question is, uh, how this thought came to be.

The answer seems to be that Jewish rabbinical writers noticed a continuity error and, as always, sought to fix it. See according to the Bible, YHWH sends mana to keep the Jews fed throughout their 40 years in the desert. But nothing is said of how they and their livestock didn’t die of thirst. The only time water is mentioned is once in Exodus 17, in which Moses strikes a rock and makes water come out of it (and that is also in the Quran), and then in Numbers 20, where he does the same thing decades later. The question is, what were they drinking in between? You’d think “rain”, but it never actually says that YHWH sent rain to them. So the answer the rabbis devised is that this one rock that makes water was following them the whole time, and every now and then Moses would hit it to make water come out of it. (The justification for this was apparently based on a mistranslation of the Aramaic version of a passage in Numbers 21.)

So the rock that makes water is literally following them, like… it moves. And in the hadith, the rock is right next to where Moses is taking a bath. I figure the rock made the water he is taking a bath in, right?! It must be this magic traveling rock that was part of Jewish and also early Christian tradition. Bc they’re just… wandering the desert there isn’t any other water besides the water in the rock. The thing that makes me 99% sure that this is related to the story in the hadith is this:

The Prophet (ﷺ) said, ‘The (people of) Bani Israel used to take bath naked (all together) looking at each other. The Prophet (ﷺ) Moses used to take a bath alone. They said, ‘By Allah! Nothing prevents Moses from taking a bath with us except that he has a scrotal hernia.’ So once Moses went out to take a bath and put his clothes over a stone and then that stone ran away with his clothes. Moses followed that stone saying, “My clothes, O stone! My clothes, O stone!” till the people of Bani Israel saw him and said, ‘By Allah, Moses has got no defect in his body. Moses took his clothes and began to beat the stone.” Abu Huraira added, “By Allah! There are still six or seven marks present on the stone from that excessive beating.”

The Jews do not give a shit about this moving rock that Moses is assaulting. They are not even somewhat concerned by this. They’re too busy inspecting Moses’ nutsack, actually. The fact that this magic rock moves and Moses hits its sometimes isn’t alarming to the Jews because A) they all have PTSD at this point and are like “yeah I seen ten times weirder shit in the past month this is nothing bruh lmao” and B) this has been happening the whole time!!

As for where the part about Moses preferring to take baths alone and the Jews making fun of him for it came from, I cannot tell you. I suspect that it was part of Arab Jewish oral tradition, which is now lost to us… maybe they had a whole miniseries about the wacky adventures of Moses & The Rock. Or else Mohammed came up with that detail himself and projected his personal issues onto Moses, as he sometimes did. Mohammed himself didn’t allow other men to see him naked, even while bathing, so maybe someone in Medina accused him of having deformed balls and he made up this story to defend himself. Idk.

But still… the mental image of a rock growing little rock legs and running away with Moses’ clothes while going “JAJAJAJA”, then he catches up to it and starts beating it with his underwear in front of all the other Jews, who are looking at his testicles swaying back and forth in order to inspect them is just… y’all…

[high-fructose-lesbianism]

The 5 Best and 5 Worst songs from 1959’s Billboard Top 100 Singles

The 5 Best Singles

5. Along Came Jones- The Coasters  (#80)

This is a fun, upbeat, catchy song about the narrator watching TV. I’m about that. The narrator’s watching some sort of Western where Jones saves women from horrible fates. The bridge to the chorus are variations of women about to be murdered before Jones saves them. What an excellent concept for a song plus the saxophone is great.

4. Three Stars- Tommy Dee and Carol Kay (#81)

1959 was infamously the year featuring “the day the music died,” which refers to a plane crash that killed Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly. This song plays tribute to it. It basically talks about how talented these three individuals were and how they’re in heaven. Personally, I find it a very sweet and honest tribute. Tommy Dee was not a musician but a disc jockey who released this song weeks after it happened. I don’t think he expected it to chart, he just wanted to pay tribute and I think that’s why the song works. There’s actual personal touches to each tribute. They talk about Buddy Holly’s classic look and how nobody knew him particularly well though his music brought everyone together. Ritchie Valens’ section focuses on how young he was and Tommy Dee does sort of struggle with the fact that he was so young when he died and I think that’s a sad, honest touch. The Big Bopper’s is maybe a little half-assed. It’s pretty clear the writers and performers knew him the least because basically all they said was he was large and talented. Overall, i’m okay with this tribute. It feels genuine as opposed to cynically cashing in on a tragedy.

3. What’d I Say (Parts 1 and 2)- Ray Charles (#50)

More than most songs that charted this year, this song feels like it predicts the future of musical trends. It has a swinging 60′s feel to it. It’s also very danceable. I can see the youth of yesteryear doing the twist and whatever else to this song at a house party. Ray Charles is also of course a great vocalist. He’s got more personality and talent than his bland, white contemporaries. I think you can tell this song is great because there isn’t a white cover of it. Even the professionals back then knew that some cookie-cutter white version of this wouldn’t work

2. I Only Have Eyes For You- The Flamingos (#73)

This is a proper romantic standard. The feeling around this song is great and you just know so many teenagers made out listening to this song. My main problem with so many of songs that charted in this entire decade is that they’re too watered down to properly express the emotion they’re supposed to be singing about. This song avoids that. It sounds properly romantic and longing.

1. Mack the Knife- Bobby Darin (#2)

This song is catchy and about a serial killer. I need nothing else. I seriously want to foxtrot around a dance floor to this song about murder and I don’t even know how to foxtrot. This is a classic of the “oldies” genre that deserves to be remembered 60 years later where so many songs that charted this decade are forgotten. I can’t say that it’s a snapshot of music of the time because it’s much better than its contemporaries. 

The 5 Worst Singles

5. (Seven Little Girls) Sitting in the Back- Paul Evans and the Curls (#100)

 Oh man I hoped this one would make my worst list because I have THOUGHTS. I know that the use of “little girls” was probably not to meant to refer to actual children but aside from the difference in meaning that phrase has 60 years on, I have questions about how seven adult or teenage females could actually fit in a back seat. I dunno, I can’t see this as anything other than seven children “kissing and a’huggin with Fred.” Meanwhile, the narrator drives and complains about how he’s not getting any action only for all seven girls to speak with seven mouths but one voice that he needs to keep his eyes on the road and his mind on his driving. It’s creepy in multiple ways and aside from my taking the lyrics too literally, it doesn’t sound good. The tune is bland and the girl voices they use for the chorus are creepy. 

4. Deck of Cards- Wink Martindale (#71)

This isn’t even a fucking song. It’s Wink Martindale telling a very boring story set to tedious music about how some guy managed to sneak cards into the army by explaining how they relate to the bible. Every single number card, the number of picture cards, the number of dots on a card, the four suits etc is related back to the bible. I respect this guy’s ability to bullshit the army but I didn’t need this as a charting hit. What makes it worse too is that it’s played earnestly. I don’t think you’re supposed to think that this dude is some brilliant liar but actually just a nice, Christian boy who sees god in everything. Oh and plot twist- Wink Martindale was that soldier all along! I have no use for this not-song.

3. Alvin’s Harmonica- David Seville (#48)

Alvin and the Chipmunks can burn in hell. On top of being obnoxious, something I didn’t realize about Alvin and the Chipmunks is that David Seville (or whoever the human voice in this is supposed to be) is basically abusive to Alvin, always yelling at him and singling him out. Alvin’s annoying as fuck but also seems to be a child so it’s rather uncomfortable.

2. Quiet Village- Martin Denny (#18)

This is just really basic, borderline discordant piano music with animal noises in the background. I hate it. There’s no chorus, no bridge, no way of knowing how long the song is. It just meanders from tune to tune and also completely fails to evoke the concept of a quiet village. At least with something like Alvin and the Chipmunks I see the appeal even if I don’t agree. With this song, I just don’t see at all how it became a hit. It’s not even elevator music because it’s too grating to be elevator music. Just fucking awful.

1. The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t be Late)- David Seville (#67)

Another fucking chipmunk song with a tune more likely to get stuck in your head AND it’s a Christmas song. Absolutely not. Also that abuse aspect I talked about in the last Chipmunks song? Still very present and with less antics on the track from Alvin, it’s less justified (if it ever was). Like the human guy pays compliments to the other chipmunks and then always critiques or blames Alvin. I don’t like it.

Other Observations on this List

I listened to this list over a year ago so I don’t really remember many songs worth mentioning or trends worth touching on. My bad.  

There’s a song called Baby Talk in which the narrator’s girlfriend only ever apparently speaks in a spew of gibberish which the narrator then translates. Also then, at the end of the song, it’s mentioned that the narrator is 5 and his love interest is 3. A bad concept for a song.

As mentioned before, this year was impacted by the day the music died. I’m so curious as to what music would have been like had that not happened.

Music trends from 1955 to 1959 have hardly changed at all. There’s a steady evolution but the popular genres remained more or less the same through this half decade. That’s very different from the charts in 2005 to 2009 in which multiple trends in music rose and fell within those years.

[audarkmist]

I’ve always been afraid of jesus coming back and I wonder if I’m not a Christian because of it??? I can’t tell if it’s just selfish fear or actual fear some days because it’s almost like denial, like I’ve heard dozens of predictions and I don’t know what to believe now? Doesn’t that make me a scoffer?

Dear Anon,

The scoffers refer to people who think he will never come back so believers are in a sense “holding their breathe in vain”. I encounter this when I meet atheists who say “It has been 2000+ years he is not coming back!”.

2 Peter 3:4 And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

You could be afraid of the second coming for many reasons even though it is not meant to. It is because we are supposed to miss our savior as we would a spouse or close friend. In the bible it even mentions that our intense mournful longing for his return should be the very reason we fast. Ever heard someone say “I miss them so much I have no desire to even eat” ?

Matthew 9:14-15 Then came to him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not? And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.

I was formerly worried too at one point about the return of Jesus Christ. I guess you could call it “cold feet” for the wedding of church and God. I thought “I don’t even know God. I will not even know anyone in heaven since everyone I know is an unbeliever. I will lose all my possessions not that I need them just that nothing will feel like home. I will lose all my daily habits suddenly be commissioned to an entirely different style of living. I am not sure I want to go to heaven…”.

Then remembered that I do know God. I pray to him every day following after his heart. I have seen his love for me and others radiate. I have seen he never failed me only wanting to best for me. I will be with my best friend who never gave up on me even at my worst moments. I will be in a house he specifically designed for me with possessions he knows I would love. I will feel more at home than I have ever felt in his presence. Is it so scary to finally be next to the one you have prayed to all your life? Is it so scary to be with the one who showed you love every day? Is it so scary to finally be with the one who loved you so much they died for you?

So you mention a concern that you may not be a Christian. That really depends on the reason for the fear and many other factors.

1. Is it cold feet?2. Are you worried about loved ones? Are you worried they will not be saved in time? 3. Are you afraid because you are afraid of judgment day? Are you afraid he “might” say “I never knew you?”.

1 John 4:18-19 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. 19We love him, because he first loved us.

I mean if you feel unsaved because you think you are not a Christian or fear you may have faith in your own salvation (#3) this would not just apply to the return it would also apply to dying as well. It would mean you were afraid of both dying and the return of the savior. In that case you may lack faith (only you know). Are you afraid of death and judgment just the same? Is it just the second coming?

When you find out even if you find you are not saved you are not without a mighty hope. Salvation is through faith alone so you have to trust Jesus Christ. Trust that He loves you that he paid the penalty for all your sins. He died for the removal of the penalty and power of sin. Repentance does not mean “fix yourself” to be worthy of God. It means “forget every idea of fixing yourself and just trust God”. Repent even from self righteousness. In the moment he was hanging on the cross He said “It is finished”.

Being good is a product of actually believing and following Christ. It is the difference between salvation and sanctification. In life when you trust someone or have faith you trust their advice? It is the same with God except He is perfect giving us commands as a guard rail not a fence. He wants full surrender of your faith and trust in Him. Jesus Christ gives us a new heart and spirit when we have faith that can obey Him.

As it is said “Nothing in my hands I bring simply to the cross I cling”.

Resources about faith.

Faith fight.

Doubting salvation.

A study on repentance.

Justification.

Paul washer story.

Woman faith story.

[woodworkingpastor]

Say What?! Money is the root of evil? -- 1 Timothy 6:3-10, 17-19 -- Sunday, August 29, 2021

In his Confessions, one of St. Augustine of Hippo’s reflections is of an event when he was sixteen years old: he and a group of boys stole some pears from a neighbor’s tree. I would imagine that this is the kind of misbehavior that most of us can relate to—what we might call, “not real trouble,” but still something that need swift discipline from our parents. Reflecting on this experience, Augustine notes that there was nothing desirable about these pears; they were ugly, they tasted bad, and he had access to good pears. All the boys did was steal them and throw them to the pigs. But what Augustine came to realize was that there was something depraved about their hearts that made them not desire the pears but made them desire stealing the pears. It was the desiring to sin that was attractive.

That’s probably a harder take on this event that we might take. For Augustine, it was the sign of a heart in desperate need of a Savior.

The love of money

That might seem an unexpected introduction to our last Say What?! sermon, this one on the phrase “money is the root of all evil.” This misquotation of Scripture is one that gets repeated a lot—it’s especially popular on social media; there is even a way to fold a $1 bill so that the words on the bill are rearranged to say this! For all of the sermons in this series, though, this one might be the simplest illustration of the point of the sermons. If you were listening carefully when Eli read the Scripture, you might have heard the correct reference in 1 Timothy 6:10:

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil…

As with many things, it’s the subtle differences that are significant. As we will see when we go along, money itself is not the issue. There is a God-honoring way to be in relationship with our money, and Paul will talk about that with Timothy. Before we get to that, however, let’s look at the real focus of this portion of Scripture. It’s found just two verses prior, where Paul says,

if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these (1 Timothy 6:8).

My question to us is, “Do we believe this?” Don’t give me the “church answer”—the “If the Bible says it, then I believe it!” answer that we’re supposed to give. Tell yourself the truth: do our lives validate the truth of this verse? Are we content with food and clothes—essentially the necessities for living? Or do we find ourselves desiring other things, not fully aware that our desires lead us to dangerous spiritual places?

The occasion of Paul’s letter

The Pastoral Epistles represent a development in Christian thought and writing. When we get to the letters to Timothy and Titus, enough time and space have passed since the era of Jesus and the apostles, that first-generation church leaders are beginning to write guides to second-generation church leaders, instructing them on right belief and practice. As Christianity spread beyond Jerusalem and began to incorporate non-Jewish persons into their life, church leaders not only had to teach people about God’s activity to reconcile all things in Jesus, they also had to provide a whole new ethical framework based on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

One of the areas of instruction involved attitudes towards money and possessions. There are some members of Timothy’s church who feel that the Gospel is a pathway to wealth, that “godliness is a means to gain.” The idea is that being a faithful Christian will provide material blessings recognizable by the standards of living of our times. It’s an idea that remains with us to this very day. What we are told is that this idea ultimately comes from those whose lives aren’t being shaped by the Gospel and are instead characterized by

envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among those who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth (1 Timothy 6:4-5).

Doesn’t that sound like the world we are living in? I’m particularly curious about the word “wrangling.” It turns out that this word is unknown in Greek literature other than here—apparently, it’s a word Paul made up and it means something like “constant friction” or “constant disputation.” It always interests me when a Biblical writer makes up a word to describe something; how much controversy and trouble were these teachers stirring up that the words that existed were insufficient to describe?

This is when Paul makes the pivot in his argument to describe the situation at hand. Actually, he says, godliness does bring gain, but only if it is combined with contentment for what we have, not a drive to accumulate more wealth or possessions. Godliness and the love of money are competing values. It’s an idea that’s seen throughout the Scripture. From the Old Testament, Proverbs 30:7-9 reads:

Two things I ask of you; do not deny them to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that I need, or I shall be full, and deny you, and say, “Who is the LORD?” or I shall be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God.

What a prayer! This is someone who has come to terms with their heart, isn’t it? We pray the Lord’s Prayer each Sunday—perhaps we add this to our liturgy every so often!

From the New Testament, we hear Jesus say something similar to us:

But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matthew 6:33).

This brings us back to the question I posed a few minutes ago: “Are we content with having enough food and clothing—having our basic needs met?” Do our lives proclaim the truth of 1 Timothy 6:8? Last Sunday we met with a few the persons who have been attending our congregation for a short while. One of the things I told them was that we really work hard at building connections among our members. Each of these persons has already been assigned a deacon, and that deacon was present for our gathering.

Should I also have told these persons, “If you follow Jesus with us, your finances will get rearranged, because we are a congregation who loves to be generous, and we invest in outreach all the time through our regular offerings and lots of special offerings. We are a congregation of deep pockets and long arms that reach all the way to the bottom. Hang out with us long enough, and you’ll be just like us!”

Should I have told them that? For those of you who are new-ish, would you have stayed away today if I had? Has our association with Jesus (our discipleship) and our connection with this congregation (our fellowship) led us to be more financially generous?

I believe it has. But the other temptation exists as well; it’s a temptation described by country music singer Chris Jenson in his song, Buy me a boat:

I know everybody says money can’t buy happiness, but it could buy me a boat; It could buy me a truck to pull it; It could buy me a Yeti 110 iced down with some silver bullets; Yeah, and I know what they say, money can't buy everything; Well, maybe so but it could buy me a boat.

Money can’t buy you happiness, but if I’m going to be unhappy, I’d rather be fishing! Or so the song suggests….

“Sermons about money make me uncomfortable!”

Why is it that sermons on money make us uncomfortable? Could it be because it’s one place—perhaps the first place—where our commitment to Jesus begins to cost us something (pun intended).

The thing is, a significant aspect of the Bible’s instruction on wealth and possessions really isn’t focused on our attitudes about money; it’s focused on our attitudes about God. Do we believe that God is who Jesus said he is, and are we willing to trust God in the places where our commitment to our faith is measured by sacrifice? Perhaps not, if our image of God is a Lincoln Memorial-type of figure, high and immovable, cold and distant. But this isn’t the picture of God that Jesus gives us; Jesus tells us that God is “Abba,” someone we can approach with confidence. Jesus tells us that God is like a woman who loses a coin and searches her house until it is found; God is like a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to go in search of the one that is lost; God is like a father who welcomes a wayward son back home, in spite of what anyone else thinks of him.

We measure our beliefs about God and money and the temptation to desire wealth and riches in relation to very real challenges: mortgages, college tuition, economic challenges, job insecurity, health insurance, nursing care—and our own temptations to maintain a certain status of living.

When we come to believe in this God; when our lives validate that yes, we can be content with clothes and food, we will know how to properly handle money—we will be generous, ready to share, seeking the good of the kingdom. Then we will have “taken hold of the life that is really life,” instead of having handfuls of ugly, sour pears that are only worth throwing to the pigs.