“I later learned that behind the facade of a perfectly made up face, a sassy mouth, an incredible sense of style, and a quick brain (she was a junior in High School at 15) lay the broken remains of little girl who wanted to be a doctor when she grew up, but was being molested by her much older brother, with whom she lived…”

I was reading a book yesterday as I waited for the bus. The main character, a blonde Georgia peach, had just broken up with her fiancé.

While she was out fundraising, he had been cheating on her with a newly hired co-worker.

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To continue the discussions of Practicing Abstinence, Love - Part I and Love - Part II, let me tell you a little story.

Once upon a time there was a woman named Lee, who was in a relationship with a man named Dom. Dom and Lee had been together for twelve years when Lee got a message from God. Now Lee was a Baptist and Dom was a Catholic (Catholics didn’t seem to be in on the whole message from God thingy, or maybe it was just Dom?)

Anyway, Lee attended church every Sunday and was very active in the choir and any church events that came up. Although she would invite Dom to attend church with her, aside from one or two visits, he declined her invitation on the regular.

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By Christopher Donaldson, Sr.

Faith Experiences

These have come so that your faith-of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire-may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. ~ 1 Peter 1:7

One of the great tragedies of the Christian life is that if we fail to enter into a relationship with God that is born of the Holy Spirit, we are left with a religion, not a relationship. Many a person today lives with an intellectual belief in God, but without a relationship that is based on two-way communication. This is the greatest tragedy of all. It’s like having a brand-new car but never having the gas to run it. It can’t move you anywhere. It only looks pretty, but one cannot enjoy the ride or smell the newness inside.

Peter tells us that until our faith is proved genuine, we will never be able to give praise, glory, and honor to Jesus, because until such testing He will not be revealed in our lives. Peter describes this in the verse before: “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials” (1 Pet. 1:6). Trials are designed to bring us to a level of trust and experience with God that we would never know otherwise. These “faith experiences” with God allow us to know firsthand the faithfulness of God, the love of God, and the personal nature of God. If you cannot recount several instances when God has met you personally, then chances are your faith has not been born of the Holy Spirit into a living relationship with God. It is easy to fall prey to a relationship to God that never experiences His real presence; rather, it is based on knowledge only. This is a tragic place to be.

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It Stretches…
Beyond Race …
Beyond Gender…
Although I was slowly working my way toward it, I had no intentions of broaching this topic just yet. I was smack dab in the middle of Death and Love with the intent of making a nice little segue into abuse and list resources and everything.

Unfortunately, that game plan was prempted by a post made to one of my writing groups for which I have permission to share as follows:

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Excuse me for a moment while I do the dance of joy! Okay, back now. I started doing this blogging thing in May 2005 and now this is post number 93 and I’m still going strong with the help of my fellow contributors and you the readers/commenters. Y’all have been wonderful, just wonderful, (in my best Academy Awards voice) and I want to thank God, my parents…

Seriously though, I was gonna wait until I hit the 100th post or a thousand visitors. Well the thousand visitor mark slid by me yesterday, when I wasn’t looking…I mean I took a couple of hours off, to do some work and then…what do you know? 1016! I had to return the streamers, ballons and hats because the moment was lost (it was like a guy taping a football game–to be addressed in another post).

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I dreamt about my ex-husband last night. Disturbing? A little, since we’ve been divorced for over fifteen years. But in my defense, I will mention that before I fell asleep, I was reading a copy of “Grown Folks Business” by Victoria Christopher Murray, which deals with infidelity. The husband didn’t actually commit a sexual act, but he fell in love with someone else, a man.

 

Some folks would disagree and say that the main topic was homosexuality and the down low trend, which I’ve been aware of since the eighties, but is just now coming to light in the mainstream world. And they’d be right. In fact we both would, because there are many issues being touched in this story and since matters of importance are subjective, and this is my blog…I’m going with the infidelity issue this morning…lol.

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Did I ever mention that I absolutely love the company for which I work? If I haven’t, please pardon my oversight and here goes: “I absolutely love this Company!”

This is a follow up on my post of Dealing with Death in which I mentioned the fact that a co-worker was killed in a car accident on her way home from work the Friday before last.

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Today I’m coming out of left field: A coworker of mine recently had LASIK surgery. She was previously far sighted and in the corrective process she was told that she would only need reading glasses.

Well it’s been almost three months and she can only see about 8-10 feet away clearly and everything past that is a blur. To add insult to injury, the doctor turned her old pair of glasses into reading glasses so she has no glasses at all. She either has to drive really slowly at night or get in before dark hits.

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…Just byskimming through the articles, I felt better equipped; especially the one entitled “How to Help When You Don’t Know What to Say”. An inveterate talk-a-holic, death shuts me right up. Nothing comes to mind; well
some stuff does, but gets dismissed as stupid or trite nonsense. If like me, death renders you clueless, you might find the following helpful.

NOTE: Due to copyright infringement laws, I’m unable to display the articles in their entirety here, but I can hit you with the highlights. However, if you’d like a copy of any of the articles in their entirety, email me and I’ll be happy to forward.

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…Just by skimming through the articles, I felt better equipped; especially the one entitled “How to Help When You Don’t Know What to Say”. An inveterate talk-a-holic, death shuts me right up. Nothing comes to mind; well some stuff does, but gets dismissed as stupid or trite nonsense. If like me, death renders you clueless, you might find the following helpful.

NOTE: Due to copyright infringement laws, I’m unable to display the articles in their entirety here, but I can hit you with the highlights. However, if you’d like a copy of any of the articles in their entirety, email me and I’ll be happy to forward.

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