Tuesday, October 31, 2017

What does Joyce Meyer, have to do with Happy Birthday, Nan! ???

There are several different ways that I can walk this story out to y'all ... but the one I want to write about today is the slow rising of the Sonlight that has come with the marking of time since Those Couple of Years Where Everyone Turned A Corner .... something I only just put into actual speaking words, while talking to a dear friend a few weeks back now --

Love me some Joyce Meyer!  She has innumerable statements and insights that are as sharply edged and true, as Scripture says words should be! - one of which is - when life blows-up - when life knocks you flat on your back and you're struggling to breathe - "don't go to the phone - go to the Throne!"

As much as I would grin and cheer whenever she said so, I was actually well-known for doing so - for years and decades and 'in one century, out the next' .... And then I went through that time of amputation, when people passed over - several unexpectedly and as suddenly as turning a corner while your feet are on the ground in a small Southern city and - I'm in Budapest?!!  --and several more - all of them people I would phone rather than throne with -- walked out on me.

No, I'm not sitting here telling you that I no longer have friends, confidantes, accountability partners in my life - that - at least for me - would indicate that something wasn't 'just right' on a mental///spiritual level .... What I am telling you, tho, is that by such people being yanked right off the escalator I was riding on, it has brought me more and more,  closer and closer, to walking to That Throne, before telephoning or even typing.

And so .... there has been a tremendous spiritual giftedness out of such pain, that it felt like the skin was being peeled off my body.  On a day of giving gifts to someone whose birthday it is today, what I need to do instead is to thank her yes! thank her! for being part and parcel of a tremendously valuable gift from God +

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

My Mom's Experience With A Phone Creep

So I am sitting here watching a documentary on a man who is serving 30 years for being a serial stalker of 2400 women, and assault on at least one; and in the course of this, naturally, they interview an expert ... who includes 'telephone harassment' as a form of stalking behavior.  That immediately reminded me of when that happened to my mother, in the 70s .... and - even tho it resulted in the changing of our phone number - it actually had quite the funny story that my mother could never quite live down --

When I came home from school that day, my mother sort of leapt at me, and said in an unusually high-pitched voice that I was not to touch the phone - at all!  I was relatively young - I wasn't even a pre-teen sitting on the phone yet - and, in fact, with very few exceptions, I don't think I even made too many outgoing calls, so this sounded odd.  Nervously, my mother confided in me she had a dirty phone caller.

"Oh, I saw this on tv!" I exclaimed, telling my mother she needed to call the phone company and --

My mother smiled.  "Jeannee, Mommy has a plan!"  

My mother was then a lunch aide in the school system.  Finding out quickly alot of kids were so wild at recess a poor housewife could get a sore throat yelling at them, she took to wearing a police whistle on a lanyard around her neck.

Yep - that was her plan -"I'm going to blow his ears out!"

Oh, boy!  Considering the often-troubled relationship mom and I had even then, this was an infrequent moment of what would be called today 'girl power'///sisterhood !

Less than a half hour later, the phone rang ....

"Hello?" said my mother.

She listened.

I watched her listening.

She raised her whistle - blew me about out of the dining room!  - and slammed down the phone.

Still kind of shook, she quickly went back into her bedroom and lay down.  

The house was still.  I was probably either doing my homework or reading a book (or both), about a half hour later, when --

The phone rang.

I just knew it was safe now, so I answered it.

"Ahhh, Jeannee, this is Uncle Howie .... yeah - listen - is your mother mad at me? ... Because all I did was say hello, and she about broke my eardrum with some kind of whistle!"

;D  ;D  ;D  ;D   "Ah, Mom?" ..... ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

"History Lesson" by Jeff Coomer

History Lesson

By Jeff Coomer 


My grandfather left school at fourteen
to work odd jobs until he was old enough
to join his Lithuanian kin chipping
anthracite out of the Pennsylvania hills.
Nine hours a day with five hundred feet
of rock over his head, then an hour's
ride home on the company bus
to a dinner of boiled cabbage and chicken.
When the second big war broke
he headed “sout,” as he pronounced it,
for better work in the blast furnaces
churning out steel along the shores
of the Chesapeake. Thirty-two years
and half an index finger later he retired
to a brick rancher he built with his own hands
just outside the Baltimore city line.
The spring he got cancer and I got a BA
from a private college we stood under
a tree in his backyard while he copped
a smoke out of my grandmother's sight.
“Tell me, Pop,” I said, wanting to strike up
a conversation, “how did you like
working in the mills all those years?” 
He studied my neatly pressed white shirt,
took a long drag on his cigarette and spit a fleck
of tobacco near my shoes. “Like,” he said,
“didn't have a thing to do with it.”