DarjeelinGirl

For the last few weeks my memory seemed to be even worse than ever. Shoot, even my thinking processes were whacked - for the life of me I couldn’t think my way out of a paper bag. It was so frustrating, but I tried to pass it off as just growing older. I couldn’t remember people’s names even if I was talking right to them. Trying to get ready for my classes was near impossible and that really bummed me out. I could barely work with or remember basic commands on my computer. I thought I was dealing with depression again - but had no reasons for it – my heart is healing and my view on life is actually getting better these days. I seriously worried that maybe I was falling victim to premature alzheimers or something. I even had to fight off irrational thoughts that people hated me – I chalked that up to spiritual warfare and prayed a lot. I shudder when I look back at the misery of the last few weeks!

With so much to do and three kids to care for, I cried out to God desperately at times during that week. Then on Tuesday night I went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. A container of low-carb creamer stood next to the coffee maker. As I poured the coffee, a conversation began in my heart. As if the Holy Spirit stood right there next to me, I heard, “Look at that. The ingredients. Sucralose. It’s just like NutraSweet.” Now I already knew that I couldn’t drink lots of diet pop or I would get all cloudy and feel air-heady. I can have maybe one or two cans a week. Then it dawned on me – sucralose is just like aspartame, an artificial sweetener – only for me it’s worse! I had only 1 or 2 tablespoons of that creamer a day – not like a can of pop a day. But the side-effects were so much thicker and deeper! So I threw the stuff out and used some powered creamer until I could get to the store.

On Friday morning Jamie and I went to SuperTarget to pick up some folders I needed for the SAT Essay Workshop I doing on Saturday. While there, we grabbed a few groceries. I remembered (a miracle!) I wanted some regular creamer and started to tell her about my revelation. She stopped cold in the aisle, her eyes wide, mouth open in shock. “Tell me again how you felt?” she asked. “I couldn’t think or focus. Couldn’t remember names or words. I just wanted to sleep. I felt all cloudy and really air heady.” She said, “Patsy, you left some of that stuff at my house and I’ve been putting it on my cereal. The other day I was so spaced out I couldn’t remember where to park my car to get to my house…”

Scarey! So I did a search, and of course, found lots of web pages about the dangers or side effects of sucralose, a.k.a. Splenda. Sure enough, of the myriad side-effects, depression, anxiety and a spaced-out or drugged feeling are on at least one list, plus a list of awful things it did to the test rats. Usually they wouldn’t even eat it. Here’s one that tells how sucralose is chemically similar to DDT! Jamie and I are definitely not the only ones to suffer from this stuff. I read that sites that try to expose the dangers of this stuff even get hate mail. Wow. We do like our sugar fix. Nevertheless, I am feeling much better and clearer now. No more artificial sweeteners for me – ever. It’s good to have my brain back.

Don’t get as sick as Nick did - you can listen to it here. First I wanted to call his mom, then I started to worry that I would get what he had just by listening to the podcast - he sounded so bad! Sure enough, later that night I got the chills and all achey and that stuff started running down my throat… so I drank a bunch of echinachea tea and went to bed early. I woke up at 4am feeling like crap. Then I remembered that I had a neti-pot and used it right away. I used it again this morning and am still drinking echinacea so we’ll see how far ahead I can stay - it hasn’t gotten me yet. It washes all that gunk out and doesn’t give it a chance to proliferate in your body. The neti-pot has always either usurped a cold or cut it in half (if I didn’t use it early enough in the game). This stuff is bouncing among as at church and we should all probably get neti-pots - actually everyone in Minnesota should probably own one… If you have cats or children, buy a plastic one. I’m on my third porcelain one and didn’t know about the plastic ones until I just found this neti-pot site. The porcelain ones at this site are cheaper than what I paid at Chinaberry or at the Healing Source at Calhoun Square, too.

After a severe server situation (as Josiah put it) darjeelingirl is back and better than ever, I might add. Thank you, Travis, for working so hard this weekend to get us all back up and running and being our trustworthy blog provider! Thank you, Nick, for your stellar handiwork on my title! This is just like I dreamed of, but had no hope for all by myself as programming skills are not of my repetoire (but big silly word constructions are…) I just love this page! I think it will be my “happy place”…

Speaking of weird dreams here and there, how about an ominous Cinderella-esque story of a postmodern ball that I didn’t get to go to early this morning..?

A group of about 10-20 hip and cool young people (a sea of faces from bluer) had gathered in our church office/home (it was a revamped rambler just like one of the very first Vineyards I ever attended in Connecticut and the office was the kitchen area) to rendezvous with Brian McLaren to go out to celebrate and discuss postmodernism. I was there working in the office to unpack and reorganize it for postmodern use. While Brian had gone out to bring around the van for everyone (it was snowy and wintry - and his van looked remarkably just like mine!), someone asked me if I was going along. But I told them I hadn’t been invited - but secretly inside I really, really, really wanted to go too. Brian returned and the party moved out the door. As I watched through the window, I saw my mom (in her younger, hipper days) turn to Brian, pointing towards the house. I knew she was asking him if I could come along. With a business-like air of authority and a little bit of irritation in his face, I could tell he refused. Without any reaction from the others including my mom, the whole party, continuing its jovial mood, turned to the van with carefree abandon and departed. Stinging with rejection and sorrow, and fighting anxiety that endured the rest of the dream, I turned to the boxes of materials that needed to be sorted and stored. One box contained myriad back up disks that each held a letter of the alphabet in a different font. Another box had just as many of those USB sticks with assorted data on them. I moved over to the counter to find a place for these items. There was a chest of small wooden organizer drawers (the kind I’ve been looking at for my silverware in my kitchen). Someone had stuffed the pieces to different board games in them. The checker board was askew in one drawer with lots of empty space around it (never mind that in real life it would never fit) and the chess pieces haphazardly lay in the drawer below it. So I started to pull the stuff out and organize it when a massive spider floated from the cupboards above across the room to the round kitchen table behind me. The table was cluttered with more church supplies to be put away and a large silver mixing bowl filled with papers. The spider landed in the bowl as I stirred up my courage to kill this thing so I could get on with my work. When I turned to face it, terror overwhelmed me when I realized how big it was - as big as a RAT and shaped like a RAT even though it was a spider. A huge glob of webbing mucous dripped from its snout and with an appendage shaped like a human hand, it reached up to wipe it off. It started to defiantly address me, threatening to harm me if I tried to kill it. Then my clock radio went off.

Boy, was I glad to wake up! Ok, now, I’ve stopped reading Neil Anderson before bed so I wouldn’t have bad dreams, but Brian McLaren and A New Kind of Christian..? And yes, I know my personal anxieties are wide open for the world to see here as well. This is kind of freaky. What’s with my mom in here? And what is with the RAT??? Mark Miron, it’s time to start your career (cause I can’t afford the professional help I probably really need…) Anybody got a couch I can lay on?

In Chapter 5 of Holiness Truth and the Presence of God, Francis writes about how some people are overwhelmed when they grasp a bite of God’s truth and want to run away or push Him away. On the other hand, some people react like me,

Barely do we glimpse the truth before we are boasting to others of what we now know, as though knowing a truth were the same as living it! …But the Holy Spirit reveals Christ to neither overwhelm us nor to inflate our egos. The ultimate purpose behind most revelation is that what we behold, we are to become. For as we behold the glory of the Lord, it is mirrored onto our hearts and, in Pauls words, we are “transformed into the same image” (2Cor. 3:18)

He explains,

To possess the Kingdom, therefore, requires attitudes that are uncommon to most Christians. We must not allow ourselves the false comfort that comes with a new layer of religious information. Let us grasp that the revelation of Christ, once seen, is the swinging open of a door God calls us to enter.

So hello, Patsy, it’s just the beginning of the next step verses thinking that I have arrived at a new spot and can celebrate. It’s been like someone showing me a map of a wonderful, and probably difficult trip that I’m going to take and instead of packing and heading out, I start jumping up and down, rejoicing (even boasting), “Yay! I did it! I did it! And,” (what’s even worse) “you should do it, too!”

In another place he sums up the journey the best way I’ve heard yet,

Our salvation begins with seeing the Kingdom and expands to entering it (emphasis mine).

He leaves me with these words of exhortation,

…the price to actually travel to that country, to taste its water and breathe its air, far exceeds the price of merely reading of its beauty in a book…

No kidding. Aye, aye, aye, Lord, please help my modern soul…

From Holiness, Truth and the Presence of God:

Sadly, many Christians have no higher goal, no greater aspiration, than to become “normal.” Their desires are limited to measuring up to others… Paul rebuked the church at Corinth because they walked, “like mere men” (1Cor 3:3). God has more for us than merely becoming better people; He wants to flood our lives with the same power that raised Christ from the dead! We must understand: God does not merely want us “normal,” He wants us Christ - like!

and

For most people, however, our sense of reality, and hence our security, is often rooted in the familiar. How difiicult it is to grow spiritually if our security is based upon the stability of outward things! Our security must come from God, not circumstances, nor even relationships. Our sense of reality needs to be rooted in Christ.

Our security must come from God, not circumstances...
I think Francis hits the heart of people’s issues with the modern age of Christianity here. I think people were/are seeking their security in the familiar. I know I did - my whole goal was to have all my beans in one bag. I still do struggle with it… I’m also reading A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren, thanks to Kari. McLaren’s got a couple pages explaining the hallmarks of the modern era. I wonder if things were changing so fast on a world-wide scale that unconsciously and spiritually people were reaching out for a something stable to hold on to. So they grabbed hold of Jesus, hoping He would keep still. But being a Lion that’s certainly not safe, He cannot be tamed. And so in His Name, the Church constructed an paradigm of stability that we now know (and love to hate) as fundamentalism.

…nor even relationships.
And I wonder if the postmodern era, with the emphasis on community and the emergent church stuff (crap? another modern wrap-up?), will struggle with demanding security in relationships - seeming that most of the population suffers in some way from the brokenness of families…?

Brothers and Sisters, let us cling to Christ with all our hearts. He may not be tame or still, but He is the Prince of Peace. My heart says of You, “Seek His face!” Your face, LORD , I will seek. (Psalm 27:8)

From Holiness, Truth and the Presence of God, Chapter 2:

There is only one thing that keeps most churches from prospering spiritually. They have yet to find God.

What a weak comfort is the praise of men!

To seek the praise of men is to be tossed upon such a sea of instability.

Francis talks about how the Lyconians sought to praise Paul, but a few days later they stoned him! (Acts 14) He also points out how the same people in Jerusalem who worshiped Jesus as he entered on a donkey are the same who cried, “Crucify Him!” less than one week later. (Matt 21 and Luke 23)

Thankfully Jesus and Paul knew people were like that. I’m still learning. I often get tripped up by worrying about what others think of me. I hate rejection and repeatedly strive to earn people’s attention/favor. Only trouble, my way of doing so is by playing the “helpless needy waif,” which I have grown to abhor. But she still seeps back in every now and then. She’s really diabolical. By playing the needy one, I am, ironically, looking down on others to use them. Idolatry is soooo twisted! By “lifting other things up,” I am actually trying to “get on top.” But the idol, like man’s changing opinions, soon brings me down lower than where I was before.

The “helpless needy waif” is also clueless. People’s attention/favor is not what she needs anyway. It cannot fill her. It’s not stable and it doesn’t last. Therefore,

As you touch Him, something will come alive in you: something eternal, Someone Almighty!

…determine to life the rest of your life in pursuit of His glory…

Instead of looking down on people, you will seek to lift them up. You will dwell in the Presence of God. And you will be holy, for He is holy.

Hmmm… A helpful holy woman… Yes, Lord…

of a conversation I had with my friend Jamie the other day. I said something that she said I should put on my blog, so here it is,

Bad things happen to everybody because we live on Earth and Satan hates us.

Christian or not, we all live on a fallen planet and our Creator’s enemy wants to destroy everyone to hurt Him. The point is that when we become Christians, our mission is to become like Him to take back this fallen planet. Like it or not, its a war. But our weapons are love and sacrifice and prayer. And our ammunition is Truth.

Relient K has a great line in a song on their new album Mmhmm. In “Be My Escape” they say,

But the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair.

A profound, WOW! That’s it!

Now I finally have an answer for those kiddos (and adults) who cry, “No fair!” when they are reaping consequences, or something good happens to someone else and not to them.

It’s grace.

Without grace, life would suck for everybody, everywhere, all the time.

So if life doesn’t suck too bad for you today, thank God for His grace.

I’m reading this great book. Actually its the third one I’ve read from Francis Frangipane. This one is called Holiness, Truth and the Presence of God. Here are some quotes from the first chapter (actually, the first quote is a quote from someone else, and it bears repeating):

“The bigger I grow in God, the smaller I become.” - Allen Bond.

A hypocrite is a person who excuses his own sin while condemning the sins of others.

Remember, Christ did not condemn sinners, He condemned hypocrites. He numbered Himself with sinners - bearing our sins and sorrows (Isa. 53). This is the humility we are seeking.

Christianity is just so ironic to me. The closer I grow to God, the more of my sin I see, the more I am forgiven, the better I feel. But I still struggle with the 80’s candy-coated happy happy joy joy gospel that walking with Christ should make life easier. Au contraire! It’s harder, but yet, more worthwhile. But that tempting Good News Candy Land is the breeding ground for hypocrisy and sometimes that’s where I slip. Numbering myself with sinners, daily bringing my sins and those of others (my family, friends, nation, world) to the cross - that’s my job description…

Pastor John was interviewed by a gal from MN Public Radio for Weekend America. He did a great job! Listen here.

I love it! This thrills me! This is what we do in my writing classes - get rid of eradicate boring and overused words. And here it is on a world-wide level. The words we ban are much simpler though - like big, little, love…

aaah… It’s nice gratifying to know I’m not the only word-nut out there…