(1) Response to injustice
(2) What to do while you wait?
Tag Archives: Prayer
Self-comfort
I have suffered with obsessive-compulsive disorder and genetically-based clinical depression all my life. I first became medicated for these conditions, with SSRIs, in 1991, and the improvement was so drastic I never wanted to be without those medications again.
On or about December 6, 2015, however, it seemed as if they abruptly became ineffective. I was not in a position to find a medical doctor competent to change them. So, on the one hand, I’ve lived with clinical depression from then till now and continuing. On the other hand, a positive is that in this state I’ve obtained certain insights that I never could have “seen” any other way.
One insight in particular would have changed my entire course in life, had I only learned it as a child.
It occurred in four steps. The blue block quotes below are excerpts from my diary. However, I recall that C.S. Lewis referred to diary-keeping as a “time-wasting and foolish practice;” that a diary is, “even for autobiographical purposes,” far less useful than one might suppose. As to the first two steps below, I lost a good deal of time and effort searching for diary passages that didn’t exist.
In mid-December 2015 …
Podcast — Rodney
Many problems, one solution
Rodney
Related:
- The woman who vanished | The Homeless Blogger
- Blinded by the light | The Homeless Blogger
- Inexplicable
- Podcast – Brightening the sparks | The Homeless Blogger
Music: Laura Branigan, “Gloria”
Some more prayer exercises
Previous post: Some prayer exercises
Monday morning, Pastor asked me to pray about some anger management issues among our youth. Some have been somatizing their anger, e.g. having seizures; others have got in fights at school. Tuesday morning it came to me that I have already reported a number of techniques to use, in the previous post above. The new notions that came to me are here below.
It won’t be feasible for me to teach these to the children myself, since Youth Group meets on Sundays after the deadline for me to get back to the shelter. But some of them may be usable in Children’s Sermons.
Bootstraps
Psalm 150:6: “Let all things that have breath praise the Lord.”
At the homeless shelter where I stay, we’re required to attend chapel every night. Monday, for the first time in months, Jervis Ray preached. His text was Psalm 23. However, he was soon enough back to his same old same old, haranguing us that we’re not grateful enough for our “blessings.” “God woke you up in your right mind,” with the use of two arms and two legs.
He calls us to praise God that our bootstraps aren’t like others’. “There are lots of people in hospitals who don’t know where they are.”
That stung me, as my oldest brother will be soon enough in just that state.
Repentance and conversion
What did Jesus mean by those terms? Continue reading Repentance and conversion
Guilt porn
My patience ran out when a display ad for Feeding America appeared on my e-mail inbox page.
I am seeing their ads and their public service announcements (PSAs) everywhere. Like certain other charities, notably Autism Speaks and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, I wind up wondering if they engage in any activity beside fundraising. In recent years, Breast Cancer Awareness Month had such media saturation it seemed impossible to be aware of anything else.
What you “see” is what you’ll get.
This story from Ambrose Worrall’s The Gift of Healing[*] illustrates that not all prayer, however well-intentioned, will necessarily bring about the desired results. Some prayer may even interfere with obtaining the desired results.
Ambrose Worrall had been asked to intercede for a six-year old girl named Kay, who had developed encephalitis following measles. At the time he began, she was completely paralysed.
Verna Moeller, saint in light
We can change history.
My daily prayer time begins with prayer for various chronic health conditions. The last one on the list is my right ear: for years, I’ve had significant hearing loss in that ear resulting from a patulous eustachian tube. I believe my youngest brother, my mother, and her mother all have or had the same thing in the same ear also.
One morning, I came to that point in my prayers, and stopped. I noted that I have prayed for that condition every day for many years, and there has never been any change. I said, maybe this is no more likely to be healed in this life, than Verna Moeller’s disfigurement was likely to be healed in this life. She is beyond the veil, now, but at that moment I devoted significant time and energy to her healing.
Podcast — Housing update, 02/01/22
And thoughts about unanswered prayer.
Housing update, 02/01/22
Music: Cat Stevens, “Another Saturday Night”
The Homeless Blogger 