Chapter Seven
There Is A Point To Life
(We Have Lift Off!!!)
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Fifty-five. I am always amazed I made it this far in life. Yet, when I think about it, the reason is so simple. I have travelled much of North America, seen incredible countries, and have always travelled alone. I had nice times and bad times. Met an incredible variety of people. I visited all the places and settled no places. I did that for ten years.
I think we find what we think. If we expect people to be aggressive, then we are defensive, which makes them aggressive. If we are polite and open, then we have a chance of meeting lovely people. I look for lovely people. It was not always that way.
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I am married to my first husband, a Jamaican. I decided I did not want to be married anymore. I did not like being married,
not at all. So, I got divorced. We flipped a coin. I lost; he made a list of friends, picked one and asked him to say in court
that he had been with me. Shared a lawyer, taxi and lunch. All was very civilized, as they say. He paid for the divorce.
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I find myself an apartment, furnish it, and go to a regular job. I hated it with a passion, and when I thought this would be
the rest of my life, I despaired. I had no understanding of myself or my world. Everything was foreign, and it was obvious I knew nothing, but I still did not know that. I did not understand that I disliked being around people, hated being touched, and was not socialized. I had no picture of how angry I was, how unemotional I was about everything else but anger. I had no kindness or caring, and I certainly was not merciful. It has a nice exterior, no interior. I did have an intelligent mind, and I read.
I am a very curious person about everything.
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I am the second youngest of five girls. My younger sister got involved with the wrong character, which did a number on her head. Her foster mother told her that if she did not come to church and stop the nonsense, she would have my sister placed in the local mental institution. My sister went to church and started preaching to me. So, to shut her up, I got baptized. Please understand. No one told me I needed to ask Jesus as my Savior, no one explained salvation, no one asked me if I even believed.
Still, they baptized me. That water was cold; honestly, I was not praising God when I came up. I was mad. You know what, I think God took it seriously; that can be the only reason I survived almost ten years on the shady side. I did not belong
there. Females are very much prey to men in life. And on the shady side, females are prey, that's all. Very expendable and easily replaced.
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Most people do not like to look at or talk about sex. Yet, it is one of the worst messed up subjects of life, and the cost and
effect of misuse are so high to the human personality that society (who encourages the use of it) does not know how to deal with the impact. A subject that was to be a normal part of marriage life has become a priority in all people's lives, whether married or otherwise.
Life Chews On People; How Bad Depends On The Subject And The Duration.
There can be no comparison of stories. An event does something to one individual it may not do to another. What breaks one does not break another. I have been raped more than you, and I have fingers and toes. That amount comes before I graduate. I do not talk nor think of the next twenty years. But that is not the point I want to make. Mess me up in different ways, yes! Cause me to give up trying to learn to live? No! Yet, I have met ladies who caved in after one rape. Does that make them wimps? No! No! Never. All will think of themselves as unclean, violated, and helpless. It will occur every time. There is no getting used to it.
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The difference is that mine started at two. It was part of my training. I learned to be a survivor very young. I had seen young people who showed how angry they were and how they were treated; I was the same; I just learned not to show it. When you become an adult, you need to have adult tools. It's okay at the beginning to still learn to use them. The importance
is that you have them to learn to use.
If all you bring into your adult life are children's tools, then I guarantee you will not be a successful adult. It will become more than you can deal with. In addition, whichever way life has chewed on you and caused deficiencies, then it can get downright interesting trying to live.
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You ask Jesus into your heart; He comes, you revel in His Presence, His peace. Time goes on, be it short or long. You look
and see little difference. Life is still crazy!! What is the problem? Do you live on problem soup? I was asked not to bring such a thing to a person's house. I had to think of what he said. He explained that he preferred people not to speak of their problems much. If a person did, then all he was eating was problem soup. And when he got tired of those problems, he would dump them out and find a new set of problems to chew on. It was all they ate.
Put that way, who would want to eat problem soup? Yet many do. Not because they love the taste but because they know only how to eat that diet. Anything else is foreign.
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Train up a child in the way he should go [and in keeping with his individual gift or bent], and when he is old he will not depart
from it. (Proverbs 22: 6) Amp.
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That is for those who are correctly trained, even slightly, yet think if you were not trained correctly. For whatever reason.
You end up warped (to cause to deviate from the original design).
Does that mean the training is over? Not likely!! It just started when you asked Jesus into your heart. He is in charge,
not you. That is a hard thing for me to learn. Not because I am rebellious, stupid or not able to hear Him. No one has ever
taken charge of me, not in a good way. Is your life like that?
You are alone, with no one to talk to, trust, or help you figure things out without wanting control of you. You meet Jesus; you are not suddenly going to talk, trust, or look for help. Yet, it is there whether you recognize it or not.
I was given this picture. They wanted me to try a new medicine. It made me very thirsty, so on the way out to church that Sunday, the Lord told me to take my travelling cup. I thought I might get thirsty in church, so I picked it up without thinking of anything else. In church, not using it, I put it down by the pew. Speaking after with the pastor and requesting prayer, she did. I held the cup by the handle as she prayed, and as she prayed, I lifted my hand without thinking about the cup.
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I saw myself standing on a well of water. Not the planks of a well but the water of the well. I did not know I was standing on a well, so my cup stayed empty. Then I saw a mound of dirt. It was very dry, and the wind was blowing dust particles away. Then a cup poured water on it very slowly. The mound was so dry that it took many cups, but it came one cup at a time, very slowly, so it did not overwhelm or destroy the mound of dirt. Eventually, it was moist enough to be malleable.
Patience.
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A subject needed not to be studied but known intimately. It took more than half my life to make me. It will take a bit of time to correct me.
As an extremist, I can be very unbalanced. As a black-and-white thinker, I can be absolute, adding to a lack of balance. Yet, this is nothing to God if I learn patience. I need patience while I learn to think right, what to do with emotions, communication skills, and my temper. Patience while I learn to be a parent, learn to cook, and keep a house. Patience while I learn to make myself be around and learn of others. Patience till I get to heaven.
Living is work, and work takes patience. To take care of today's business, you must do a thorough job and learn to do your best.
The world wants tolerance; Jesus wants patience. What is the difference?
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TOLERANCE: the willingness to put up with the differences of people, customs & ways.
PATIENCE: the willingness and ability to put up with the differences of people, customs & ways.
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I may be willing, but I may not be able. I may be willing as long as it is not inconvenient to me or mine. Once I am not willing,
I will have problems. However, because God gives me a willing heart( Ps. 119: 32) and the ability (2 Pet.1), I can be patient
to learn, do, and be. I find much of life frightening. Yet, if I learn and make myself learn things of value, life will get much
less frightening. It is what I am storing up for future use, what I guard.
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People say, "If you could have become anything, what would you choose?" The answer is simple. "I want to be human, in all
that a human is meant to be." To me, there is nothing more important. It never has been. Sure, I love to study other subjects, and my next choice would be medicine, but all the other subjects would be worthless if I were not who I should be as a person.
I will probably refer to "me" as "we" for a long time. I will always see what I see, in and out of my head, yet I still want to
be the better part of what is human. I have been angry enough to kill and mean enough to hate and stomp. I have had enough money to be snobby and clothes to be spoiled. These things did not bring out the best in me. They brought out the worst.
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It does not mean I do not care for money, but I certainly had to learn to see it for what it is: a tool to obtain things necessary for life. However, as much as I am trained, the job I can obtain is as much as I will shake the money tree. That is the reality of money. After that, it is how well I use the tool.
Money will not make happiness and contentment, not the things it can bring. I, like others, thought it was.
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My parents fought for three months solid, and it started over a 13- or 36-cent scribbler. You woke up, and they were fighting. You came home from school, and they were fighting, and they were still fighting when you went to bed. They quit fighting when my mother left. I was nine. I had never thought about money, but I did after that. Money was important, and I would have lots of it.
And I did. Yet by thirty, I knew money alone was not what I needed. I did not understand, but I wanted to. So, I became a
miner again and started picking. What do I need to know, do, learn? Pick, pick, pick. The answer comes slowly, like the drip
of water. Over twenty years slow. This power I am given, what is it for, and how do I use it? As a kept woman, I had no power other than that which was in me.
People want power in their lives; they need a sense of power. Yet the need is not for power over others, though it
may come out that way. The need is for the power of self, for self. I had no power from the day I was born over what was done to me and who did it. I had no power over me when the government took over, and I certainly had no power as a person with a husband. By the time I am forty, I know I have little power over most of my life. Yet the desire is there in the yen. What to do, where to look?
If you look at the character in 2 Peter 1, there is a growing of self-control, which is repeated as a fruit of the Spirit in Galatians. It is twice given because it is doubly needed: self-restraint, whether sexually, morally, intellectually or emotionally. I only live in my skin, so I only know how I am in these areas—good, bad, or indifferent.
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Human nature is only that which is common to the homo sapiens species. There is a particular line to their creation and can only operate in that line. It is part of the whole, the original design, the original blueprint. One can only be what one is created to be. Human.
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A dog is a dog, and a horse is a horse. An alligator does not decide if he wishes to be a bird,; a monkey has always been a
monkey. There is a pattern for animals, plants, air, and people's lives. They can only run on this pattern, though there
is great variety. It was meant to be that way.
Adam and Eve were meant to learn their jobs and how to do them. They were to have dominion over all of the earth with its vast resources. They were being taught their jobs, one step at a time. Yet man was created, like the angels, with choice.
Adam chose his own way, and so set the course of man. All things are defined at the beginning and run on the patterns set out in the beginning. Time changes nothing. Gravity worked at the beginning of time and will work at the end of time. What was set at the beginning will stay till there is no more time, just life, with God, His Spirit indwelling each believer, getting on with the original blueprint. This is just a blip in the workings out of the whole plan. And yet, such attention is paid to the
individual workings, the individual person. It is incredible if you think of it!
So, what is the point of life now? Choice time. According to His Word in 2 Samuel, one will see that the enemies I fight are those in me. Yes godly people can change a nation, but they only do it as they do their own day-to-day living in a godly manner. So, what stops me as I learn His Word and His ways? ME!!
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Being led by wrong thinking, emotions, and habits. Whatever form they take in me, how they come out, does not have to look or sound like yours. The results will be the same. This is sin crouching at my door, looking to come in. I will either have the nerve to stare it in the eye and see things for what they are, or I will delude myself and think I am other than I am.
How willing are you? How much do you wish to look? The lift-off comes from choosing each day and moment to live your life in a manner pleasing to God. Despite my crazy head, my wrong habits, my wrong thinking. Choosing to learn to be led by the Spirit, not by Gloria. There is life. You just have to look.