Monthly Archives: July 2015

Jul19

Which Came First, the Chicken or Lily; Or, God’s Love Gave Me Jesus Gave Me Lily

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Which Came First, the Chicken or Lily; Or, God’s Love Gave Me Jesus Gave Me Lily

Following is a post about Lily from my old blog. Well, no; in point of fact, it’s about God and Lily, and it was originally written Tuesday, January 18, 2011. Anyway, here it is, updated…

I’ve been having this feeling like I should write about Lily. So here I am.

It seems like the way I love Lily is a metaphor for the way God loves me. When I contemplate the implications of that my brain seizes up, but I’ll deal with it. Lily is dealing with it by napping beside me and hugging her head. I think I like her way better.

I love to just sit and observe Lily. She’s absolutely fascinating to watch, especially when I’m in the bathroom. She always follows me in when I go there, and she loves to bring me wads of paper to throw so she can fetch them for me. She also loves to go behind the bathroom door, especially while my back is turned brushing my teeth. She goes behind the bathroom door and just sits there, and if I don’t notice her after a couple of minutes then she’ll say something.

I get the feeling when she fetches for me that she’s bringing me little gifts, because she goes through a process in choosing which wad of paper to bring me. She’ll smell one, and if it smells right she’ll pick it up and bring it to me. Sometimes she changes her mind en route and drops it for a better wad~or no wad at all.

The upshot of it is, if the Bible is right and I believe it is, God is with me, and identified with and connected to me with the same joined-at-the-hip intensity as Lily is, and a whole lot more.

I find that very exciting because it allows for an intimacy with God like nothing else on earth, something I’ve always desired but never felt like I could attain.

It’s a good thing feelings aren’t to be trusted and God’s Word is!

Jul17

Of Unsolved Mysteries and Old Blog Posts

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Here I am writing another post. I’ve discovered that I have to write a post, and finish and publish it pretty much all in one sitting, because if I take much longer than that the draft gets lost somewhere in cyberspace. I have yet to figure out where my unfinished drafts are on wordpress.com, and it’s not a little frustrating, because I have at least two drafts waiting for me if only I could find them!

So with that mystery as yet unsolved, I write on…

From time to time I plan on taking a post from my old blog and using it here. I can’t post there anymore because Google shut it down, but I don’t want those entries to go to waste. So, as appropriate based on topic, I’ll use old posts as is or altered, depending once again on topic. There were a number of key posts; for instance, the letter I wrote to Harry, which was quite therapeutic, by the way.

And then there’s the one I wrote about Lily. I had started a new post here about Lily and had planned on using the post from the old blog as part of the new entry here, but before I could do that I got distracted, and ended up losing the new post before I could publish it. So now it’s one of those drafts that’s floating around out in cyberspace and I have no idea where it is or how to find it, and I’m so frustrated! Harrumph!!

Sooo…

I’ll just have to keep on writing and posting, and trying to do it quickly enough that my posts don’t get lost! I’m also going to keep on looking for those lost drafts.

That’s all for now…

Jul13

Passive-Agressive Issues Notwithstanding…

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I realized something the other day, or rather, the Lord showed me something. He showed me that I’ve been passive-agressively not paying Mom’s bills to get back at her for not protecting me from Harry when I was little, and for abusing me herself. It explains a number of things and I’m glad to know it, because now maybe I can do something about it.

I’ve managed to significantly lower, and maybe even ruin Mom’s credit rating because I haven’t paid her bills in a timely fashion. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I hope it’s fixable. It seems like it would be. All I’d have to do would be to consistently pay all her bills on time over a long period of time, and keep on doing it, and keep on doing it, etc., etc.

So anyway, once I realized it, I took it to therapy and asked Jeff to pray about it, and he did. So now I have to start paying the bills! I’ve lost any excuse for not doing it. (In case you can’t tell, I’m not crazy about paying bills, passive-aggressive issues notwithstanding.)

I’ve often pondered the wisdom and plan of God in making me the one who’s in charge of my mother’s affairs once she reached a point in her life where she couldn’t handle them on her own. If my sister had survived her battle with cancer it would have been her, but she didn’t, so it was left to me. I’ve never been any good at managing money matters, though I am pretty good at paying my bills on time. My sister, on the other hand, was always meticulous about those issues, about everything really, to the point of being completely anal about it.

I asked God once why He gave me the responsibility of taking care of Mom instead of my sister, because in many ways I’m no good at it. His answer to me was that while she had the skill, I have the heart, and heart is better. Which makes me wonder, did He remove her from the scene by having her get cancer?

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. ~ Isaiah 55:8-9, ESV.

I’m so very grateful for God’s mercy in all of this. In many ways I’ve completely bollixed  everything concerning Mom’s finances, but God is so good, and so kind to me! It’s hard for me to fathom sometimes. Despite my clumsy handling of her affairs, she still seems to be in fairly good shape, thank God.

Thanks be to God for His unspeakable Gifts!!

Jul2

God and Me, In Words

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So, I’m doing it. Starting my new blog, that is. Finally! After Google shut down the old one I couldn’t figure out what to do for a long time, and finally I decided I couldn’t just not write, nor could I allow my posts from the Google blog to just disappear. So I determined to copy/paste the posts from that blog onto a Pages document so I’d have a record of everything I said, and then I’d find a place to start another blog. And SOOO, here I am on wordpress.com!

The purpose of this blog is to keep a written record as I recover from my childhood. I come from a background of extreme child abuse. My biological father was an angry, evil, and abusive man who made me the scapegoat of his rage. In addition, my mother was afraid of my father and abusive as well, though not as violently as my father was.

As awful and horrifying as my childhood was I’ve been able to forgive both my parents with God’s help. I couldn’t have done it without His help ~ I couldn’t have survived any of it without His help, but that’s neither here nor there, at least for now.

I’ve often had people tell me that I should write my somewhat remarkable story. Well, maybe this blog is a way of doing that, mostly because I’m not sure I have the emotional wherewithal to go through the process of writing a book and getting it published. Maybe that can come later and I can use these blog posts as fodder for that process, though at age 62 I’m not sure I want to put myself through all that. I’ll have to wait and see…

Well, I believe I’m done with this… It feels done anyway, this first post. Certainly there will be others, lots of them. I don’t know yet how often I’ll post. On the old blog it went in fits and starts, mostly fits. I’d start a post and then let it slide for months unfinished, or I’d post three or four right in a row and then go for six or eight months without a word. I’m hoping I can do better here. I think I’m a better frame of mind now, plus I’m more eager to put my thoughts out there~and maybe even let other people read them this time. No one ever read the old blog. No one, at least not that I was aware of. Well, maybe one person, but she was a Muslim who was out trolling for someone to convert to Islam, so that probably doesn’t count.

I think I was too afraid of people’s criticism and rejection to let anyone read what I was writing, both in terms of the spiritual content and in terms of what I was writing about my emotional life. But I’m more confident of my writing now, plus I’m more confident of what I have to say~in a number of different arenas. Yes, I’m branching out! I’m taking an apologetics course and it’s giving me courage and boldness to speak out about what I believe. In addition, I’m finding as God heals my mind that I’m able to think more logically than I ever thought possible. It’s the strangest feeling sometimes. I’ll be reading something and all of a sudden I’ll realize that it’s something I was never able to understand before and now I’m understanding it perfectly. Then I’ll start to giggle as I’m praising and thanking God for His mercy and grace in healing me.

So, now I really am done. Hehe…