Category Archives: Dependence on Technology

Jan28

The Us of Millions Becomes the Me of One, Thank God!

Posted on by
Standard
The Us of Millions Becomes the Me of One, Thank God!

January 28, 2025, 2:15 p.m.
I’ve decided I’m going to try and write everyday, as much as possible. The question, and the problem, is, what do I write about? I’ve never been very good at extemporaneous spontaneity. My mind doesn’t work that fast. I watch TV shows like Who’s Line Is It Anyway? and, in between laughing helplessly at the goofy stuff they do, I wonder how they can come up with all that hilarity so quickly, without thinking about it ahead of time. They manage to pull it off seemingly without rehearsals or any kind of preplanning at all. I don’t know if that’s what actually happens, but that’s certainly the way it looks.

I’m going to include another one of my poems, called The Us of Millions. I wrote it in March of 1990, 13 years before I was integrated in March of 2003. When I wrote this poem, I didn’t think wholeness was possible. Thank God, I was wrong!

My life is composed of blanks and holes,
each one a fragment from a shattered whole.

Each thought a shard,
each event a splinter of death,
camouflaged ground-brown
with the mud of denial.

My life it was,
the priceless vase that contained my soul,
that was my Self,
smashed by maddened tyranny
while yet under potter’s hands.

I purge away the mud
with tears of remembering,
only to find that what was can no longer be,
my baby Self shattered
into splintered confusion.

There is no glue that piece to piece can bring
to peace,
and the I that was Me is forever
the Us of Millions.

S.A. Kuriakos & Elliot
©March 6, 1990

Well, that was fun! I’m learning all kinds of new things in the process of writing blog posts. I decided to include the above poem, and I figured out how to do it using this thing called a Verse Block in WordPress, but I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the Verse Block and back into the regular Paragraph Block. It turns out it’s as simple as clicking on a different button, and I was making a much bigger deal out of it than I needed to. Way cool! Blogging is getting simpler and easier all the time!

Yippee!!

It’s now 6:03 on the 28th, and I’ve managed to accomplish a great deal with God’s help in a little under four hours.

I’m very grateful and glad to know that what I thought was hopeless back when I wrote that poem, wasn’t hopeless at all, but only appeared to be impossible to fix. I forgot that with God ALL things are possible,

But Jesus looked at them and said, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible.” ~ Mark 10:27, NKJV.

1Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: 2by whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that  tribulation worketh patience; 4and patience, experience; and experience, hope: 5and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. ~ Romans 5:1-5, KJV.

I love this passage from the Book of Romans, because it sort of tells the story of my life in a nutshell, and I’m so grateful to God for all the marvelous work He’s done in me to bring me as far as He has. I give Him all the glory, because I certainly couldn’t have done any of it myself, and if He’s brought me this far, I know He’ll take me the rest of the way until my healing is complete,

And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns. Philippians 1:6, NLT.

And with that I think I’m done with today’s writing!

Thank you Jesus!!

Dec29

Wherever You Go, There You Are

Posted on by
Standard

There have been many times, especially around the holidays, when I’ve wanted to run away, but whenever I think about doing so, I realize that running away won’t help, because when I get to wherever I choose to go, I’d still be there with whatever pain I’m trying to escape. You know, wherever I go, there I am? I’m stuck with me no matter where I am. I can’t escape myself, so trying to run away is an exercise in futility. And by the same token, trying to run away from God is also useless,

Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into Heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,” even the night shall be light about me; indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You, but the night shines as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to You. ~ Psalm 139:7-12, NKJV.

Not only is it impossible to run from God, but it’s also impossible to hide from His love, which makes sense if you think about it, because the Bible says that God is love,

We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love,* and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. ~ 1 John 4:16, NLT. *Emphasis mine.

Romans 8, one of the most amazing and beautiful chapters in all of Scripture, talks about the faithfulness and steadfastness of God’s love,

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?… For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. ~ Romans 8:35, 38-39, NKJV.

I just love this passage of Scripture! I had also read about His promise that He would never leave me nor forsake me,

Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for He has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” ~ Hebrews 13:5, ESV.

And about the fact that God never lies and always keeps His promises,

God is not a man, so he does not lie. He is not human, so he does not change his mind. Has he ever spoken and failed to act? Has he ever promised and not carried it through? ~ Numbers 23:19, NLT.

And then there’s the promise of His never-ending mercy and faithfulness,

This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Through the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. ~ Lamentations 3:21-23, NKJV.

These promises mean so much to me now, because throughout my childhood I was lied to at every turn, betrayed by both parents on a regular basis, and made to know that I couldn’t trust anyone to ever keep a promise. 

Once I realized God was on my side and not against me, I began to understand that maybe He was someone I could actually trust, and once I realized I could trust Him, I began to think maybe I wanted Him around me. I wanted to feel His Presence. I wanted to experience a relationship with Him. I had already started reading His Word on a daily basis, and had figured out that the Bible was the best place to go if I wanted to learn about Him, so I began reading it as if it were delicious food, gobbling it up voraciously. And when I finished reading it through, I started over and read it again,

When I discovered your words, I devoured them. They are my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, O LORD God of Heaven’s Armies. ~ Jeremiah 15:16, NLT.

I’m still doing that ~ reading it from beginning to end, then starting over, etc., etc. I’ve done it twelve times, and benefitted greatly from it every time. It’s harder now, however, because I’ve let pride creep in. I can hear the devil whispering in my ear, telling me, “You’ve read it so many times now. You already know it. You don’t need to read it anymore!”

I’m ashamed to admit that I have those thoughts, but there it is. And I’ve gone for long periods of not reading because of it, even though I still use my Bible during those times. Even when I’m not reading I use it all the time. When I’m writing an email or blog post, or talking to a friend, and I want to quote a Scripture, I have to remember where it’s located, so I use Blue Letter Bible to find it.

Blue Letter Bible is easier than searching through my Bible, because sometimes all I can remember is a word or part of a phrase, and since my memory is almost always imperfect, my Bible almost never yields the verses I’m looking for, and Blue Letter Bible almost always finds the Scriptures I’m seeking. And always, I pray that God will lead me, through whatever means possible, to what I need to know from His Word.

And through it all, wherever I go, there I am, with God and with His Word, and that’s the most important thing to me, that I have God’s Word with me wherever I go and wherever I am.

This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. ~ John 17:3, NASB.

Jun4

Technical Issues Notwithstanding, Writing About the Cool Stuff Again.

Posted on by
Standard

I hate it when I’m trying to write a blog post, but regardless of what I do, the website won’t save. I’ve prayed ~ bound the devil ~ prayed again ~ repented ~ prayed some more ~ yelled at God ~ repented for yelling at God ~ yelled at the devil ~ repented just in case ~ prayed yet again ~ bound the devil again in case the first time didn’t work ~ and prayed again for the umpteenth time. I’ve been at this for over two days, all to no avail. It’s become an exercise in futility.

This is SOOO FRUSTRATING!!! 

Here’s an update. I finally sent an email complaint to what WordPress.com calls their “Happiness Engineers” (seriously? Happiness Engineers?), and then came back here, at which point I decided to try saving what I’d written thus far. And of course it saved immediately. I hate when that happens. Now, when their lovely Happiness Engineers come and check out my complaint, it’ll look like I was making it up. SOOO frustrating!! It’s the same principle as when your car is making some kind of horrendous noise, so you take it to the mechanic, but once you get there, the noise is gone, and the mechanic looks at you like you’ve lost your mind.

It looks like the problem is solved. I did get a response from the Happiness Engineers, however, and they said that, based on past cases, this usually means there’s a problem with the connection between my browser and the wordpress servers, and I should try clearing my browser’s cache, and I should also unplug my modem/router for a few seconds to flush its DNS cache. The problem seems to have resolved itself without doing those things; however, I’m going to do them anyway.

So now I’m back to blather and whatever, what with the problem that motivated this post getting resolved. Plus, now I can get back to writing about the stuff I REALLY want to write about.

Cool.

A further update, over a year later: it turns out that WordPress has a desktop app, which I downloaded. And if I do my blogging on the desktop app, all the problems I had on the internet version of WordPress with saving, etc., just go away.

What a relief!