Dennis On: "What Do You Mean? "It's Just a Story""

What Do You Mean? "It's Just a Story"

If I had not....
 

...had a handicapped brother in the 1950's who had a bad habit of lighting the curtains on fire at our house.....then my parents  would not have felt he had to receive better care at a New York State Hospital.

Had he not been sent the NYS Hospital for the handicapped...my parents would not have seen so many parents drop their handicapped children off and never come back....

If my parents had not seen so many parents not come back to see their handicapped children ever, after dropping them off...they would not have started the Sunshine League for parents of handicapped children who did that and needed to go see their handicapped children and keep them in their lives.

If there had been no Sunshine League...my parents would not have met the Rosenthal family who also had a handicapped son who felt they needed to help stopping parents from just abandoning their handicapped kids to the State.

Had the Diehl's not met the Rosenthals, they would not have become such close friends and even vacationed together as adults and kids in the Adirondaks.

Had the Diehl's and the Rosenthal's not vacationed together, Jim Rosenthal and my sister would never have met. 

Had they never met,  Jim would never have asked his mom 15 years later if she knew anyone he could date when he came home from Ranger School in Boise, Idaho.

Had he not asked and the Diehl's not known the Rosenthal's from years earlier, she would not have suggested Diane.  

Having suggested Diane, and Diane saying yes  (she could have said no) they would not have married and moved to Idaho.

Had they not moved to Idaho they may never have heard of the WCG and asked for a visit which ended them up attending WCG in Boise, Idaho.
 

Had they not asked if I wanted to come for a visit and had I not said "you bet," I never would have picked up the Plain Truth during some pretty boring days visiting.

Had I not gone to church and heard a sermon on the size of the universe and realized that I never heard a sermon like  that, I may have forgotten all about it, but I didn't.

If there had been no Vietnam war, no JFK, RFK and MLK blown away,even though we didn't start the fire....I may not have thought of going into the ministry.

Had I chosen Roberts Wesleyan Seminary instead of AC I would have had a different religious experience but I went Pasadena instead and now how that went.

Had I not been able to stop my icy slide down the side of San Jacinto Peak 3000 feet to the desert floor in a stupid move on a freshman field trip....

Or...missed a flight to Boise that was hit by a fighter jet...

Or...choked to death on piece of meet at dinner

Or...killed in a head on in Kentucky that I still can't figure out to this day where that car headlight to headlight went..

Or...a whole bunch of other stuff

I'd have a different story to tell.  Or others would tell a different story about me.

But, none of us are our story because the story could go ten thousand different ways at any point along the way.  A left instead of a right.  A yes instead of a no.  A wave instead of a sneer.  


Someone else making a decision about you when they could have just as easily made it about someone else....is all it would take. 

We are not our story even though if the story is stressful enough, we have to medicate our "selves" to live with it.  If we seek counseling , what we really are doing is working through our story.  We council in how the story went.  How it hurt us or made us this way or that.  We try to understand the story or rewrite the story or maybe fix it.  But all that is within the story and we all have one.  

So what do we do with our stories?  I so have to watch out starting my story these days with, "I used to be a pastor."  You see, we all identify our selves by our story and giving up that story for a new one is not easy.  Actually most never do.  Most of us hunker down in our story and repeat it over and over as if somehow some magical change would come to make the story go away.  We are all capable of getting stuck in the muck of the anger, disappointment, fear, skepticism and resentment our story brought to us in living color.  

The mind has a wonderful trip it plays on our true self to keep the story going or at least to keep the rancor and bitching alive and well.  It builds us a pain body that hibernates mostly but then needs to come out and feed so that we never forget we have a story to tell and usually how bad it all was.  

Indulge me a bit on Eckhart Tolle's view of the pain body.  I find this rather hard to argue with.  From a comment by Barbara Clark...

"Our pain-bodies are the energy of our past hurts: the bumps, bruises and scars of life that we never really dealt with fully in the moment. The result is that we carry that pain in an energy field within us.

We all experience pain in our lives and pain-bodies are both individualistic and collective. Whether that pain is from individual circumstances or part of a collective pain because of our identity with a particular group in history that has suffered, negative things do happen to people.

Some people and groups have heavy pain-bodies and it is precisely these people who have a better chance to awaken spiritually than people with lighter pain-bodies.

Most people probably do not want to recognize that there is something within them that seeks negativity, pain and drama. But the reality is that for many, negativity is an addiction. Pain-bodies feed on negative emotion.

Nowhere are our pain-bodies more obvious than in our relationships. Often each partner will re-enact their drama frequently. The pain-body knows exactly which buttons to push in your partner, and it feeds on this drama in personal relationships.

So how do you recognize your pain-body? Becoming aware of your pain-body is the first step in diffusing it. However, it is not often easy to see the pain-body in ourselves, so it is often much easier to see the pain-body in another.

How do you strive to continually diffuse your pain-body? Author Tolle suggests that we must constantly strive to be present. Instead of being “caught up in the mental movie making” of our thoughts and emotions from the past or concerns for the future, he says that we can learn to not add to our pain-bodies by becoming as present as possible in all situations.

It doesn’t matter if these negative thoughts and emotions are from years ago or just minutes ago: continually practicing being present diminishes our pain-bodies because in doing so, “our very Presence then becomes our identity.”

Pain-bodies will fight hard to stay alive, so you may be thinking how could you let go of past hurts or collective suffering? Some may argue that we have to remember; that it is part of our collective identity as women or minorities, for example. Alternatively, individual pain-bodies may heavily identify with traumatic things that happened in our childhood. While there is nothing wrong with remembering, there is a difference if we define ourselves by our suffering. This is the pain-body feeding upon itself and in doing so, the energy of all that suffering becomes our identity. So the challenge is to move away from defining ourselves by our past and we do this by becoming present."

Consider this: “Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now: and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?”-  The New Earth-page 141

I don't know why I had to have the story I did with WCG, but I know it was just one of thousands of possibilities.  I can't change the story that has already unfolded but I can change the one that opens up from now on.  

"Comedian" Bill Hicks said it well.

"The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey - don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride."  And we kill those people.

I'm just sayin......

 

Dennis C. Diehl
DenniscDiehl@aol.com

God Gave The U.S. A Chance To Repent 7 Years Ago And It Did Not!

Armstrongism's magical god certainly is getting a work out lately.

From Facebook:

We all know God works in cycles, the #7 cycle being the one we all know! God gave New Orleans a major warning to repent 7 years ago when hurricane Katrina caused over a Billion dollars in damage. Apparently New Orleans and AMERICA has not repented. Hurricane Isaac will sweep into New Orleans 7 years to the day. WILL AMERICA AND EACH ONE OF US REPENT THIS TIME??

I wonder who Armstrongism's god is actually pissed at.  The folk in New Orleans, or the COG evangelists and ministers committing adultery, who steal tithe money for their own use, who utter false prophesies, who are arrogant and narcissistic, who stalk members and threaten them?  The list could go on and on.  Maybe this is a wake up call for the COG to open their eyes?

Samuel Martin on the Feminine Voice In Scripture

Samuel Martin (son of Earnest Martin, WCG) has a series of posts on his blog about the feminine voice that is found in a lot of scripture.  This is sure to gall many diehard Armstrongite leaders because God only works through men, at least in their eyes.

Samuel writes:

Yes, these books are known in ancient times by the Hebrew name, Megillot (meaning festival scrolls because they were read on specific festivals in the Hebrew calendar) and they appear in this order in the Hebrew Bible. We’ll have much more to say about this in future posts because I believe these books are full of feminine voices.

However, a major feminine voice appears in the book of Proverbs, which merits investigation. This text, in fact, is so obvious and presents us with an urgent blinking light telling us to pay attention, I think. So, of late, I’ve given Proverbs a fresh look and I am indeed glad that I did.

Before we get into that though, let’s look at this obvious text with a specific feminine voice. It is found in Proverbs 31 and I think it provides a type of a key of understanding.

No, it is not the “perfect woman” text per se that I want to draw your attention to. No! It is who the author of it is! The source of that section of Scripture is a woman! The evidence cannot be clearer.

“The words of King Lemuel. An oracle that his mother taught him:” (Proverbs 31:1 ESV)

Much more research is needed on this issue because not only did Lemuel’s mother teach her son some exceedingly beautiful and inspiring teachings, she did it in such a way that the English reader might not catch.

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Now, if we take a look at this abecedarian poem in Proverbs 31 through Mediterranean eyes a bit, what we may see here is a glimpse of a song/poem that a mother made up for her son (which is exactly what the text of Proverbs 31;1 says) with the idea that it would help him remember the qualities of a woman that she hoped him to find.

And who better to know the desirable qualities of a woman than a woman herself? A mother knows and cares more than anyone else about the type of woman that their sons marry! This is especially the case in a patriarchal society where daughters would leave the home and join the families of their husbands whereas wives would enter the home from outside of the immediate family and become a part of a new family.

The investment and interest that a mother has over who her future daughter in law is in such a society is of prime importance because it is her son who will be caring for her in her old age as she will probably outlive her husband. So, this is no small point for the future harmony of households in ancient and even modern times.

Now, this is just a taste of where I am going with this, but in the next post I will do, we are going to look at Proverbs 1-9 anew.

Feminine Voices In Proverbs?

The Church of God Trojan Horse

Silenced has an excellent post today on the desire of the Churches of God to live on the "fringe" while trying to maintain an air of respectability.  Silenced looks at UCG's recent attempt to try and be hip and cool with a series of videos trying to make God cool.  UCG is trying to imitate the successful  series of videos and books by Rob Bell called NOOMA over the last few years.  UCG cannot even come close.

Silenced is correct in calling UCG's video's "Trojan Horses" as they try to infiltrate mainstream Christianity.  Their videos may look harmless on the surface, but it's the deadly message inside the horse that is going to cause problems.

Living on that lonely edge has deterred growth, the COG withering on a vine of its own planting as it continues to promote a closed culture of control and unorthodoxy for its own sake. COG attempts to distinguish itself from the packs of other doomsday followings haven’t made the church stronger or more recognizable, nor has it added power to its message or microphone. Instead, the COG is left to dwell in obscurity even while trying to pour more money into its media projects. What most COG groups don’t seem to understand is that growth problems aren’t rooted in a lack of money and resources, things it constantly tries to hustle from its members for bigger and better toys. Rather, its message isn’t gaining popularity or recognition because it continues to embrace HWA’s legacy of rejecting the mainstream in a world it’s trying to warn.

In short, the cult’s message just isn’t inherently appealing to most and it hasn’t figured out a way to package fringe beliefs in more publicly-palatable packaging. COG tactics are outmoded and obsolete in the digital age, its words don’t resonate with the current generation and it simply comes across as insane.

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 Take UCG’s recent series of short clips, including the infamous Sand and Drive. These were attempts to flirt with mainstream Christian imagery and messages as a Trojan horse for its more unorthodox teachings.

Read their excellent entry here:  Packaging the Fringe

E W King: Hurricane Issac Punishment From God

Here we go again, another hurricane and Armstrongism's magical god comes to blowing in to punish heathen America for its sins. 

I remember years ago sitting in Jekyll Island as the tent was bouncing from the wind of an approaching hurricane with groups of men  holding each tent poles to try and stop the tent from blowing away.  Never mind the fact that the ministry of the Church was more concerned about holding a service than they were with the safety of the members.  Of course the story line then was that Satan was using the hurricane to destroy God's true church.  So the minister prayed, the hurricane turned around and went and killed hundreds in Cuba.  The Feast site rejoiced.  It did not matter that their "prayers" magically sent the hurricane to Cuba where it killed and destroyed property.  That apparently was OK in order for the TRUE Christians to be spared.

Every natural disaster that hits the US brings out the lunatics and spiritual deviates as they blame tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes on gays, abortionists, atheists, etc.  It's always "the other" that cause these things.

I am sure right now every single splinter cult leader is broadcasting out news that Satan is trying to keep the True Church from keeping the Feast in Florida, Mississippi and Alabama this year.  I don't even need to check their web sites because I know they are doing it.  History proves that.

So in typical grand Armstrongite style, E W King trumpets out today that the hurricane that bypassed Florida and that is pounding New Orleans and Gulf Coast is because a Mormon is running for president.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The Romney Storm...it's happening!

The Romney Storm

Many of you have read my “Prophecy Forecasts”. In early April of this year I posted a list of possible events. I have warned [as I did last year] that God may send violent storms to warn this nation not to vote for a president who follows a false prophet. Read my April forecast and look what has happened!

Now I have waited to see if Mr. Romney would postpone the Republican Convention due to the respect of those in New Orleans. Did he? NO, he did not. While the Republicans are having a party [at the same time] the hurricane will hit. Wow! This is a forecast of just what is ahead under Mr. Romney’s presidency [if elected]. The Real Worldwide Church of God-Really Real