Lies, Lies, Lies

Pastor Blob, Smiling. 
Lifted From A Northern CA Baptist Church Website

Well, true. It most definitely is not charitable to refer to the gentleman above as Mr. Blob.  May I postulate that charity is one sanctification that, for now, remains just beyond my wretched reach?

Doesn't help that my husband joins me in using this jaunty label. Might even be the one who invented it.
I dedicated this blog when first launched to "finally putting Christ at The Bottom." That meant that I would try to come to terms with Truth that is really true, that is TRULY Jesus; and commit to an exploration of how any lesser priority leads to frustration, deception and self-rejection for the Believer; and damnation for the non-believer.

The outworking of that simple goal has been to realize that I've been stewing in lies. A dark and murky swirl of them. They're a blend of self-idolatry and the opinions of others that I allowed to matter more than they should. Thanks to Celebrate Recovery* raw honesty over where our identity should really come from is finally possible.

All recovery programs call that swampy pit by the same name: Denial.

Opening my spiritual eyes to this has been a hard won discovery, but this journey enabled me to see that the 'mere man' pictured above has actually been a guest in my pit. More than a fellow liar, though, he has been the "foundation" of who I considered myself to be. He's been my deafening accuser.

Blob was "at the bottom," and not Christ at all.

I've been sidetracked by this accuser since his misfired ego wagged at me in 1986 and since that woeful evening, I've allowed him to remain a near constant presence. Some misguided voice inside my little head demanded that I endure his accusations; and for some dysfunctional reason I all too obediently obliged, paying heed to his berating belittling most days, into every week and through each year and decade.  When you're raised Catholic, you learn that authority is never questioned.  Leaders are always right.

Someday I'll tell the story of how he became stuck in my craw, a force to be reckoned with for three  insufferable decades, but first, the main point of my discovery:

At the bottom of every pathology, every crazy making habit, 

every mysterious compulsion or misbehavior, 

EVERY WEIRDNESS, 

there is ultimately some lie or lies we've subtly believed, 

either knowingly or unknowingly.

And my lie was this: Pastor Blob is a god, his opinion of me mattered, and forgiveness in Christ does not extend to those who are disgraced by a pastor whose authority loathed your sullied past.

So,

LORD Christ, my Saviour, Redeemer, Deliverer,  I repent of making a mere man into an idol whose tormenting judgement and Dallas Theological Seminary credentials condemned me to three decades of self imposed scorn.

Wherever he is, bless him with the knowledge that his misdeeds no longer curse at least one of his victims.

And may I someday learn that the witnesses who stood there when he let fly his thoughtless remarks did indeed come to my defense and put him in his place.  Something tells me they did, as shortly after that evening, maybe a year or so after we moved away, he was fired and the church simply fizzled. Poof! into the abyss.

OH, how relieved I was to hear the man was no longer a threat to my beloved beachside town.

And how revived I am now to finally feel relief from the relieving.

*founded at Saddleback Church by John Baker   Celebrate Recovery

Sex Talk

Another salute to FAMILYLIFE.COM:

By definition, all marriages are broken, because every human institution suffers under the frail realities of The Fall; and how much more so in the age of the The Madonna/Miley Bra (or lack thereof), Victoria'sSecret assaults, and the Internet porn invasion, where both sexes are lured into the lurid on an hourly, if not minute by minute basis.

But it's finally getting easier to hear sound teaching on sex, to comprehend God's purpose for it, and to implement that understanding into our childrearing and marriages.  Between Focus on The Family (Jim Daley), My Family Talk (James Dobson) and Family Life Today (Dennis Rainey), my favorite is the latter, where I've heard more solid sex teaching in the last 2 years than in the previous two decades put together. Thank you, God, for good old radio talk show hosts who know how to let down their guard and posit good natured, jovial banter in the service of Christ and HIS Body.

Imagine the misery of raising kids in the hellish 60's-70's, before the advent of Bold Christian Radio offered seekers "Help For Today, Hope for Tomorrow..."

Worse yet, imagine my own poor children being raised in 90's by a mom who suffered to grow up in the miserable 60's and 70's. My Poooor Babies!

Never fear, HELP is near.

Look Up FamilyLife.com, and hear today and tomorrow's broadcast boil down the essentials of making peace in bed. . . and in my head.

twitter: @familylife
6/26 The Place of Your Pleasure - Sex and Money with @PaulTripp on FamilyLife Today http://ow.ly/yh2hk 

BARCLAYS SETTLEMENT? SPANK HARDER!

- - OR, HOW I CAME TO BE AN L.A.TIMES BOOSTER

I STILL KEEP THIS 2008 FILE AS A REMINDER TO BEWARE BARCLAYS

OF COURSE my credit card beef with Barclay's was my fault. We should never have accrued an unpaid balance in the first place.  When this beef BLEW back in 2008, I hid the ugly battle from the innocence of children who, at the time, were all living at home and hearing the "debt free" mantra so loudly that our blatant contradiction had to be kept under wraps.  Why did Mr. Man use an Apple Juniper Credit Card to purchase our 2003 iMac? I do not know. For SHAME.

By January of 2008, there was another balance on that card, and minutes before the midnight payment deadline, I was skittering to pay by phone. Their system proved perplexing, as the automated voice at the Barclays end was incomprehensible, but happily, they offered a real person option to complete their electronic check procedure.

THE real person customer service agent was a clever "Michelle." Confident, emphatic, very reassuring. I believed her every word.  I explained that I feared I'd mistakenly entered the routing number of my check rather than my account number, but she assured me the payment had gone through, and that I had nothing to worry about.

Of course, it did not go through. To make matters worse, we did not have the internet at home, so when hubster tried to double check the account from his work Monday morning, their website for some strange reason would not allow access to our statement! He made a payment anyway, just in case, but it didn't matter. A fine was levied. It was a day late.

I PROTESTED. I filed appeals. I made calls and wrote letters.

What I did NOT DO was pay their fine.

I WAS adamant that I owed them nothing beyond my monthly payment and that they owed me an apology for the headache brought on by the Oh-So-Clever Michelle. Nevermind that I was too stupid to know the difference between an account number and a routing number. Such idiocy was unforgivable and they were incalcitrant. Stupid people unfortunate enough to fall into the lair of Michelle do not deserve mercy.

I folded my denied appeal letters into a manilla folder and stuffed it into the banking drawer of the file cabinet, trying not to spit whenever it crossed my path.  Then came a credit check during a 2012 home loan pre-approval process. It revealed that Barclays Bank had downgraded our nearly perfect credit rating due to a "pattern of late payments." Seriously.


L.A. TIMES TO THE RESCUE

THANK YOU Jim Puzzanghera. If not for your June 19, 2012 story detailing the process by which aggrieved bank customers can aire their fraud complaints, I would still be spitting nails when I do my monthly filing. I read his BUSINESS SECTION article, followed directions, and in less than a month,  received something CIVILIZED from Barclays. Barely.  They threw me a small bone, but it was SOMETHING.

Breathe. After four years of queasy spitting, I could finally BREATHE, even though all they agreed to do was reverse their credit ding. I didn't get my $35 back because "their records don't go back that far" and they couldn't prove I wasn't lying. Holy Sheissa. A credit card company's records don't go back four years? Someone tell the IRS.

WELL, Mr. Puzzanghera, if the Courts should find that my aggrieved state deserves a billion or two for pain and suffering out of all those zillion$ in fines flying around between aggrieved plaintiff governments of the western world [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-10/u-s-energy-regulator-seeks-court-order-on-barclay-fine.html ] and Barclays (and JPMorgan, and Lehman Bros, and...!), I promise to share a few hundred million with you.  Even if you are a demon democrat. Oh crap. I didn't just say that. Oops. Yes I did. [ http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-03/barclays-ceo-quits-after-record-libor-rigging-fine ]

JOURNALISTS rock. Thank you, L.A. Times.

Signed,
A Humbled Republican... who's really more of an independent. Seriously.

EVEN IN DECEMBER 2011 THE BARCLAYS FILE
WAS LAYING AROUND, HAUNTING ME

News That Was Not News

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2059604-2,00.html *

It would seem that a movement bent upon earning the acceptance of the rest of the world would be monitored by that world, and irregular findings reported in upfront fashion. Kudos to Time Magazine, then, for plainly revealing the soul of sexual excess in this Dan Savage quote from an interview in 2011:

"We talk about love in a way that is very unrealistic: "If you're in love, you're not going to want to have sex with anyone else but that person." That's not true.  We need to acknowledge that truth so that people don't have to spend 40 years of marriage lying to and policing each other."

The facts have been on the table for decades that the hmsxl lifestyle is not about monogamy; rather, that it's plainly about camouflage.  Getting those facts officially recognized has proven impossible in a media driven culture.

Witness the day I phoned a radio talk show hosted by Larry Mantle of KPCC in Pasadena. I read from a report listing a litany of disease statistics exclusive to the hmsxl community revealing epidemic levels of hepatitis, STD's, intestinal diseases, mental illness, yadayada.

Mr. Mantle hung up on me.

I was not only cut off mid-sentence (that's typically called 'censorship,' yet, who am I to judge, being a biased witness...), but I'm pretty sure my phone # was blocked, as all subsequent attempts to phone in to Mr. Mantle's show proved unsuccessful; I mean, I didn't just get a busy signal, I got rolled over to a dial tone.

My point? The dusting of respectability given the hmsxl movement by our media gatekeepers is not evil simply because they're withholding truth. It is beyond evil because it promotes behaviour that is truly a medically established deathstyle.

I implore Mr. Mantle and the TV networks to report truthfully in future, to stop glamorizing a lifestyle that defies basic human biologic function, and "acknowledge truth" that, for the average hmsxl, in-your-face promiscuity is actually the norm, and monogamy is, for the most part, a charade.

The in-our-faces acknowledgment that monogamous man-woman marriage is "in peril" does not justify promoting the very behaviour that contributes to that peril. Normalizing sex outside the bounds of the marriage commitment does not a secure culture make. Does not a secure family make. Does not a sound man or woman make. Yet the fiscal lives of most media moguls depend upon that peril.

Where is media coverage of Marriage Encounter, Love Won Out  or  Family Life Today Seminars?

Our attendance at seminars by FamilyLife.com has made a good sized dent in my all-too-human propensity to live myopically for myself, and has guided my husband's determination to deny himself the sexual gratification served up by every F-ING network and cableTV outlet, magazine, catalog and department store advertisement EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY. My husband is my HERO for withstanding, mostly, such chronic onslaught. When his fight wavers, he has men in his life who hold him accountable; and we have methods in place whereby our marriage is guarded and my expectations are kept in check. Because we all agree, there is not one man on the planet for whom sexual temptation is not a daily reality.

FLT's marriage seminars affirm and encourage mature adult commitments based on self denial, and confront the hedonism of Mr. Savage's sex column and the hmsxl movement's mantra of feel-good impulsivity. They've REVISITED & UNVEILED THE OLD DEFINITION of manhood: one where sacrifice, self-discipline, the courage to say what no one else is saying, and a personal commitment to hammer out virtue over vice can win the day; where, in the battle of the mind, positing a Christ centered marriage can actually buffet the sex drive. A Real Man say's no to his sexual fantasies and honors his commitment to make his wife the sole object of his lifelong passions.

Once upon a time, it was the FCC's mandate to do guard our culture. How stupid was that. Never trust a government bureaucracy to do a Real Man - man's job.

I join Family Life Today in calling out REAL MEN who will defy the new "norm" and reject a culture of "go along to get along."  To step up and speak out against media trespasses.  And to teach their daughters and sons that the vices portrayed in nearly every music lyric and video come with an abhorrent deathstyle price tag.

Maybe the good folks at FLT.com are dreamers; but OH how good it feels to dream. Hope is born of such things.

And hope is just what we need most right now.

(*Were I not in the thick of battle with depression right now, I would stop and pray for Mr. Savage.  Maybe you who are reading this will help a lame blogger and do it for me.

I guess the need of the day is prayer for us all. Recognizing the terminal end of an entire culture because truth has been exchanged for lies doesn't permit me to minimize the dignity of every individual within that sphere.  Every friend I've known who lives out a cohabiting lifestyle or hmsxl world view has suffered indignity and shame at the hands of some.  For that I repent.  I appeal to my conservative world to give every individual the respect and honor due them as a child of God worthy of the grace and love we all crave at the foot of the cross, while still recognizing the boundaries of good judgement... )


Update: On tolerating intolerance - or, not:   Thurs. December 12, 2013/MyFamilyTalk.com

http://www.oneplace.com/ministries/family-talk/listen/#Tolerating+the+Intolerable  

NOW, NOW... "They" Aren't Spying, Really

OUT ON THIS LIMB,
YOU CAN RUN but you cannot hide

If I didn't already know the outcry over government spying on private email and phone users would sputter out with a whimper when the dust settled, I wouldn't have bothered posting my little sidebar warning back in 2011.

If only the same public indignation (short-lived or no...)  could extend all the way to the topic of PRIVATE online spying.

Who hasn't wondered how powerful companies like Apple and Google, Disqus, etc, are managing to resist the temptation to exploit all they know about our lives? 

After years of tracking Who's Who Online, they can effortlessly single out the evil conservatives from the magnanimous liberals; the pinheaded Christians from those all-wise and ever enlightened agnostic secularists. 

There's unimaginable power there.  I don't even dare to elucidate on, it is so frightening.

Who hasn't thought, with the same chill down the spine which came fifteen years ago over same-sex marriage (whose adherents back then threw rocks, blockaded churches and taunted parishioners), that when the gloves come off of all the hyper-liberal internet providers' widget metadata yadayada, the enemies of state will have suddenly become us: the 'little christian guy' just trying to get along, assuming the first amendment will prevent their daily torture by media lynch mobs, peer pressure, and -GASP- a barrage of UNLIKE's on Facebook and Instagram...

First Amendment-WhAt? Trust the Justice Department-WhO?

WELL.

Good luck with that.

POE ‘EM FOR ADELE AND F.L.

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins and

Fraser Lance Thorneycroft-Smith

Set out one day to writ music

‘Bout rain‘n fire havin a rift;

But the clime was not rainy, no,

The sun shone full bore,

And the pair grieved a lack of

Inspired implore;

So they spun themselves round in playlists of seven

From Miss Etta James to André Previn,

Soaked in thrills from strumming waves of

Spelunking moods down mystic caves;

And up they came with angst galore,

Feast for heart sized ears and more;

Chilling, angry, frenzied pop

Abseiling rock faced charts to top.

So Fraser Lance Thorneycroft-Smith and

Adele came to drink from that gurgling

Wishing well, plumbed deep of granite songs, and sweet;

Fresh and clean, if bereft of meaning.

Which proves by rights, that men of plight and

Women of catchy tunes,

Will amount to nothing if ever their names

Aren’t hyphenated-elongated runes.

- - Penned whilst under influence of six weeks of coffee, Pandora, four hour's sleep, TSP, paint fumes and bloody finger tips ~ 2Feb-16Mar

Bathroom window I finally took out had to go back in.
And so it went,
from metal strips, vinyls and rugs, to support posts, flocked ceilings and 60's paint hues;
all that was old was new again at Hedge House.

~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ # ~ 

"There's asbestos under those 9" tiles"

Lesson learned: patch kitchen floor instead of replacing: $1,500 saved; patch roof instead of replacing: 7,000 saved; leave bathroom w/o window ventilation and leave bedroom sans new carpet and baseboard: 1,300 saved; understand when you rent out a house for $400 less than the going rate,  renters should just have to deal with worn interiors. 

NET EFFECT: WE NEVER LEARNED TO LEARN OUR LESSON before overspending $10,200. 
Damn.

Digs

Learned a lot about marriage, moving, and me, in the process of snapping 435 new iPhone images whilst the Monrovia relocation squeezed the lifeblood from us turnips. (The pic above, no, that's South Bend, IN...). Giving up Instagram for Lent (or, at least TRYING to) was one thing. Stopping the incessant photographing, quite another.

Now that we're actually replacing our spent adrenaline, cooking real meals, resuming ChoreMondays and thinking about resuming BudgetFridays,

ONE conclusion rings truer than all the rest:

When women get to have touches of beauty in a home, whether overhead, around her feet, in the air or in her head, there's a feeling unlike any other, if just for a fleeting second. She really believes --in that brief, momentary burst of recognition-- that she is

The Queen of something.