36 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 6-14-18”

  2. Very emotional visit to Arlington National Cemetary yesterday. It was like Auschwitz, I started crying even before I got out of the car.

    Patty is in a beautiful spot, but it was sobering to see all those women described on their headstone as loving military wives.

    That’s who I have been with the last three, rich, joy-filled days. While I won’t end up at Arlington, I could.

    I had to call home as soon as I walked away– just to hear my husband’s living voice– at least on the answering machine.

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  3. Off to a conference at the Museum of the Bible. I’m curious to walk through the museum afterwards.

    Splendid evening with the bride and groom from that black tie wedding 18 months ago, along with another niece last night in Georgetown.

    It’s so satisfying to see a young couple settled into their first home and loving their life together.

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  4. I have been to Arlington cemetery twice. Once to visit the Unknown and Iwo Jima monument, and one to the funeral of my brother-in-law. Sister’s husband, he was in the navy in WWII Sister will be buried with him.

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  9. I have been to Arlington a couple of times. Once was when my Own Personal WWII Veteran was doing a ceremony at the Mast of the Maine. He was Past National President of the Fleet Reserve. At the time I was engaged to his grandson, a midshipman at the Naval Academy. It was sobering.
    I saw Michelle’s post last night and thought of my other Navy Wife. Navy Wives are a special group. I was amazed to spend time with 4 of them as Leslie was dying. They blew into town, loved on her, cooked, cleaned, organized, and the list goes on.

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  10. My sister was a navy wife. Her husband retired from the navy. He spent a lot of time at sea while on duty.
    She said the most difficult thing was when he came home, he took over the running of the family.
    But when he was gone, she was in charge.
    I’m sure Michelle knows what she was talking about.
    I suspect it was a difficult adjustment.

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  13. I have not been to Arlington.

    My mother was a Navy Wife, but not the typical one. We stayed put in one place but my father was gone a lot. My parents decided it was best because of my brother’s diabetes to not be moving around but to have a more stable existence. But that meant we were mot receiving the emotional and physical support others received. We did not live near family either, but we had some family friends who did what we did, too, by having a dad in the Navy and being settled in a home long term.

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  14. That sounds like a very emotional trip, Michelle. I’ve never been to Arlington — and my parents met & married after WWII (my dad was in the Navy during the war) — but I grew up with the Navy stories. My (now late) uncle Bill was a Pearl Harbor survivor.

    The pelicans are being released by staff at the International Bird Center Los Angeles, located in our town. They’ve been flooded with some 50 California brown pelicans picked up along the coastline when they were found malnourished and anemic. These were very young birds and the working theory is that the food supplies normally available to pelicans that age — fish in shallow waters — were not available in sufficient numbers this year due to ocean conditions. But after being at the center most recovered in time and now are being released back into the wild at one of our rocky beaches.

    (That area, by the way, once had hot springs — prior to 1930 when they went away following, some think, the Long Beach earthquake) and something of a resort hotel (an old rock fireplace still stands wedged into the cliffside now). It’s a protected area, you drive down a long road to reach it, but it’s one of my favorite spots to take the dogs since it’s very close to where I live (but hilly and steep so we still drive there).

    They also release the recovered sea lions from our mammal care center out there. When those began in the early days, the center let me open one of the crates — guess that was before they realized civilians could get hurt by these animals. But it was a fun experience.

    And there’s just something uplifting about seeing these “born free” creatures heading out to the ocean (again), taking it all in — it’s home! — and then bobbing into the waves (sea lions) or taking to the skies and soaring overhead (the seabirds), free again.

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  15. A family friend is in the Army. His wife and son stayed in their home in South Dakota while he has been sent to various places in the states and abroad. He recently returned after a year in South Korea, in time for his son’s high school graduation.

    Here’s a story from another friend’s mom, who was a Navy wife:

    Her husband was on a submarine, and fell deathly ill, although I don’t think she heard about it until he was well again. One evening, as her daughters were sleeping in their rooms, she saw an apparition of him come into the apartment and walk into each of the bedrooms to look over the girls, and then he left. I don’t remember if he looked at her, too, but I think he may have. (They were a Christian family, btw.)

    What do you make of a thing like this? Like most (all?) of you, I don’t believe in ghosts (and he wasn’t even dead, unless he died and was revived), and I have wondered about this story.

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  18. Thanks AJ, pretty much low-hanging fruit, these guys just hung around so long before taking off (the first one was off in seconds, but the next 2 were almost posing for the cameras).

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  19. Another good piece by Veith (who raises some of the very real, this-worldly complications in how to apply all of this):

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2018/06/christian-identity/

    The Christian’s Identity

    _______________________

    … Is my race my identity? Is my nationality my identity? Is my social position my identity? Is my oppression my identity? Is my sex my identity? No. Christ is my identity. …
    _________________________

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  20. kizzie (or ‘cozy’ as spell check keeps insisting your pseudonym really is) I just started reading a book by Sproul called “Unseen Realities” that probes “Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons” — not sure if things like your story come up in its short 157 pages, but perhaps.

    I know many people who have a strong belief in seeing those who are departed, or ghosts if you will, and it is a challenge to know what to make of all that sometimes, I’ll admit.

    My own family history includes lore that’s been passed down about an angel who was seen standing next to the water pump in front of my grandfather’s house in Iowa (I still have the pump in the garage) to announce that a relative had died. Later, they found out the person had, indeed, died.

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  21. Kizzie, strange things happen. I have heard a number of stories of apparent angel intervention (though they did not look like angels with wings) over the years. But my experience with daughter also lets me see that hallucinations happen. Those are the brain misfiring in some way to put pictures in front of us. Nor do I discount demonic activity.

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  22. Kizzie @12:12: We are surrounded by a spiritual world, but it is wiser leave it alone. God does not encourage us to inquire too closely into that world nor seek to communicate with it. Mediums (the KJV uses the word necromancers) were squarely in the realm of forbidden practices. From what I have seen of the use of practices to summon or call the spirits, those who use it stand always on a knife edge and may at any time be overpowered and tormented by the power they seek to wield. The demonic activity that we witnessed the results of in West Africa was described by those who experienced it as beginning with seeing a man approach them. Angels, fallen or not, can assume a human form, and I wouldn’t put it past a fallen angel to disguise themselves as a particular person to create confusion. I always remember the story of the Witch of Endor. She was fully intending to summon an apparition, but she was not expecting it to be actually Samuel, which is what really disturbed her – she realized that Samuel’s God had overpowered her witchcraft to use Samuel to prophecy one last time to Saul. That Samuel complained of being disturbed makes it clear that those who belong to God cannot usually be summoned from the dead. I strongly doubt that those who did not die in Christ can be summoned either, rather, the demons impersonating them are what is summoned (that is, unless the medium is simply a fraud and making the whole thing up).

    My father, when he was in a coma from fat embolism in his lungs 22 years ago and near death, said that he seemed to be out of his body and being carried back and forth through a dark valley. At one end of the valley, there were hospital lights and doctors and nurses working on someone, while at the other end was a veil, beyond which he knew if he crossed, he knew he would not return. He said he was looking down on the doctors working, as if he was a third party watching from above, so that it seemed like an out of body experience. Whether he was actually out of his body, or whether it was simply that his perception was distorted, and all of what he was seeing was in his mind only (nonetheless real for all that – after all, the prophets did not have to exit their body to see their spiritual visions) we will never know.

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  23. On social media-fueled anger that seems to be sadly driving so much of the nation’s debate anymore:

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/justandsinner/has-social-media-outrage-become-the-new-judicial-system/

    Has Social Media Outrage Become the New Judicial System?

    JUNE 12, 2018 BY JORDAN COOPER

    ____________________________

    … Social media lynch-mobs have been around since the dawn of the platform, but they have only grown in power and influence. Recently, the CEO of twitter, Jack Dorsey, tweeted a photo of a purchase he made from Chick-fil-A to advertise for the “Boost” app. This then set off a firestorm of tweets in opposition to his having eaten a chicken sandwich from the great cultural sin of buying food from a company who has a CEO with views on a subject that you don’t like. The purchase of a chicken sandwich was taken to be an attack on the LGBTQ movement, especially since this purchase occurred during pride month. I am sure, of course, that Dorsey simply got hungry and ate some chicken without any thoughts about what the particular views of someone in the company are. However, the complete outrage at this led to a forced apology from Dorsey for simply buying some chicken.

    This event is simply one example among many. Anger about one thing or another has lead to advertisers removing themselves from various companies/individuals, to firings (such as from the recent one of a spokesperson from CrossFit for expressing his views on a personal Twitter account), and many other things. …

    … I don’t know what this means for the future, but I do know that the outrage of the masses cannot serve as the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong. For the time being, however, that seems, at times, to be the case.
    _______________________________

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  24. Roscuro – I certainly agree with not trying to contact anything in the spiritual world.

    I used to say that most people are wise enough to ask for proper credentials if someone shows up at their door claiming to be from the electric company, but many of them would swallow whole any claim from, or about, an entity from “the other side”.

    My SIL took my mom to a psychic several months before Mom’s death. She told Mom that Dad (whom Mom still missed deeply) visited her in her dreams and was watching over her. Well, Mom said she never dreamed about Dad (but I did – a lot). But Mom just figured that she must not have been remembering those dreams, and didn’t doubt the psychic’s claim.

    I don’t know all of what else she was told. Apparently, she and SIL felt the psychic knew things about them, and were impressed by her. The one other thing I do remember being told was that there would be a girl shortly entering into our family. Nightingale was pregnant at the time.

    So I was glad that Nightingale was having a boy (which Mom heard about before her death) instead of a girl, which put the lie to that. Although I suppose they could have pointed to Heidi, who joined our family in that time, as the “girl”.

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  25. Speaking of dreaming about husbands. . .When Hubby was alive, I kinda felt bad that, with all of my vivid and complex dreams, I very rarely dreamed about him. Well, now that he’s been gone, I dream about him fairly often, but the dreams don’t necessarily revolve around him (although last night’s dream did).

    One dream I had a few months ago, just before I woke up, was opening the front door to find him standing there. I felt joy and relief well up in me that he was back, but even as that happened, before I could reach out to hug him, I awoke, and burst into tears at the quick realization that it was only a dream.

    This thing wasn’t a dream, and it certainly wasn’t an “apparition” or vision, but I could “see” it clearly: A few days ago, I was sitting on my couch, and I looked left, towards the living room door, and imagined – very vividly – Hubby standing in the doorway, smiling and saying, “Hi Honey.” There were no other words, but the feeling was that he was checking on me, and was sorry to have been gone so long. The stance and posture I imagined was very like how he would have stood.

    I knew that it was only my imagination, that I had purposely daydreamed it, but the vividness of it took me aback a bit. Even thinking of it now makes me cry, because I could “see” him so “clearly” in my imagination, and I so wish it could have been real.

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  26. Kizzie, most of the people in my dreams are people who are dead or far away. Sometimes I meet someone who’s dead and have a moment of confused joy before waking up, like you described. Several times it’s involved my mom, who’s been gone 30 years. Not long ago it was good friend who died last summer in a car crash. I asked him where he’d been and why everyone thought he was dead, but I woke up before getting an answer.

    I can’t remember my wife or my son son ever being in a dream, and my daughter only once many years ago when she was a toddler.

    That’s one reason it fascinates me when WVers report fellow WVers appearing in vivid dreams.

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  27. Kevin – Funny you should mention that. Kim was in one of my dreams last night, the one I mentioned above that did revolve around Hubby somewhat.

    We were all in a big fancy hotel with conference rooms and restaurants, and Kim took Hubby to an expensive breakfast buffet the hotel had. I was trying to find them, but there were too many people and I didn’t know which way they went. There was more to the dream, with the beginning being just Hubby and I talking, and the end was Kim and I talking.

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  28. I remember an early dream after my mom died (an unexpected occurrence) — I was living in her house and heard the car drive into the driveway and I thought, ‘Oh, she’s home!’ Such a wonderful feeling as I ran out to greet her. Tears when I woke up.

    I’ve had a stressful day working from home, two stories to finish wile doing damage control online with folks who are outraged over our recently tightened pay wall policies. How dare we! I get it, none of us likes paywalls, me included, and I resisted them for some time. But the Internet is changing and most every legitimate publication will be going that route if they haven’t already. Still, people seem to think they can get “more” from the gossip pages on social media. Some of them are downright insulting to us, which is hard. But again, I get it. In large part it’s our industry’s own fault for giving our content away for free for decades. Of course, no one could see into the future and understand how the Internet would play out. But I sure wish we’d had a crystal ball back then!

    I’m off the clock now and sitting on my patio where there’s a very strong wind blowing. Our temperatures will be cooling off for the next week and I always like that. 🙂

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  29. And I remember that dream was really vivid, she even had suitcases that I helped carry into the house — so odd (and sometimes ‘real’), our dreams.

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  30. DJ – What you said about the car coming into the driveway in your dream reminded me of one day in the days or weeks soon after Hubby’s death, when Nightingale drove his car. As she drove in and parked in the driveway on the side of the house where Hubby would park (she parks on the other side), Heidi’s tail started doing the crazy-happy wag it would do when “Daddy” came home. It broke my heart that “her Daddy” would not be coming home to her anymore.

    I’ve often wondered if he has faded from her memory, or if certain things or smells bring him to her little doggie mind. (I do know that she would recognize him and remember him if he were to come through the door.)

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  31. Aww, I know. I wound up with my mom’s dogs after she died and I remembering thinking about all those things, They were pretty uprooted though and dogs adapt rather well to the “new thing,” I think, probably better than people do.

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  32. The amount of white crosses in Arlington is amazing. It is a very sobering place. We saw it up close in the rain, which seemed fitting.

    I had a fb memory come up wishing my dad and husband a Happy Fathers Day. I no longer have to wish this for my dad. It is sad, but I wouldn’t wish him back into the pain he had when he went through pneumonia over and over.

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  33. The author of the memoir Evidence Not Seen recounts how she dreamed about her deceased husband while imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp, and how God used those dreams to calm her heart. I think grief is something that is so all pervading, that sometimes we need to process it even in our dreams.

    Kizzie, it is not only wiser not to try to communicate with created spiritual beings, but also to not concentrate on them too much. There are two related reasons for this. The first is that sometimes the spiritual phenomenon we witness is demonic in nature. The demonic gains in power when people pay attention to it. There was a reason God warned the Israelites not even to investigate the occult practices of those around them. Satan likes it when Christians get distracted by him, even if it is just to attribute their big and little setbacks in life to Satanic activity [it is clear from Scripture, that it is often the Holy Spirit, not Satan, that stops Christians from doing things (benign things that are neither good nor bad in themselves), for example, Paul could not go into Asia, not because of Satanic opposition, but because the Holy Spirit would not let him (Acts 16:6-7)]. Saying that Satan has prevented us from doing something is forgetting that God is the One who orders and directs our lives, and we give more power to Satan than he has been granted.

    The second reason is that our only true connection to the spiritual is through the Holy Spirit of God. Spiritual things can only be discerned by His working (I Corinthians 2:14). Philosophical or scientific or even superstitious methods to explain or investigate the reasons behind spiritual phenomenon are incapable of truly explaining it. If we attempt by the efforts of our flesh to figure out the spiritual, we will end up where every culture that has sought to master the spiritual through works of the flesh has ended up, entangled with the wrong spiritual beings (every pagan/non-Christian culture, even the montheistic Judaism and Islam, has a tradition of demonic activity and possession). In Hebrews 1, the writer of the epistle emphasizes that Jesus is greater than the angels. The Jewish culture of the day was inclined to revere angels, hence the reason for all those waiting for healing at the pool of Bethesda for the angel to trouble the waters. But Jesus healed a paralyzed man without using the waters, showing himself to be greater than even the good angels (John 5:1-9). It is He whom the Holy Spirit reveals to us, and He is to be the focus of our spiritual lives.

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  35. I love Evidence Not Seen and even used part of it for a chapel service once. In fact, I may use it again this next year.
    I am rereading most of Hidden People today as I prepare to go out to the dedication tomorrow. An amazing story.

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