Twinky

Good one, Bowtwi.

Just to add a very small thought to this thread: Teach suggested the mansions could be tents. A tent is a temporary place - the tent of meeting in the wilderness in Exodus was something that could be taken down, rolled up and put away. A mansion suggests permanence, always there. Like the new Jerusalem, in Revelation - a permanent city. Maybe the mansion(s) is in the new Jerusalem? These things are interesting to think about. However, they're a long way in the future and too much thinking about them can lead to "head knowledge" and not heart knowledge. After so much TWI "this is our private theory" and analysis of individual words, I always try to ask myself the question: How does this help me live my life better RIGHT NOW? We know we have the promise of something great to come in the future. Just as we cannot explain to a fetus how great life is outside the confines of the womb (where, that being a fetus's sole existence and knowledge, no doubt it was perfectly happy), I think God cannot explain to us how wonderful our new life will be. He gives us images to try to help, but we can only guess at it, in this lifetime. That said - carry on. Interesting thread.

Okay, just to bring it back on topic again: This guy was in rez. When he left, he painted a picture - copied it - which was widely heralded as special ability because he had learned to concentrate whilst in rez. He hadn't done any art work before going in rez. And knowing how busy things are in rez, it's doubtful he managed to do any art work in rez either. So it was all his improved powers of concentration that enabled him to do this picture. Well actually even God didn't get the glory. It wasn't the "Christ in him" that enabled him. No, it was what he learned in rez, his "stayed mind." And yet... ...you think back on all the real talent that was squandered...

To take it slightly off topic again, Pax: There's a Shakespeare play called "Measure for Measure" in which the local bigwig entrusts his huge estate and city governance to his second in command, and then moves in disguise around his city. The substitute governor displays all his hypocrisy and abuses lots of the locals. In the nick of time, the disguised governor reveals himself, sets matters to right, and marries the heroine. In another more modern, real-time, story, a church minister disguises himself as a drunk and lounges around outside his own church on Sunday morning. Members of the congregation step over him or look at him in disgust. Nobody stops to help or see if he needs medical assistance - much less invites him into the church. The service starts, and in walks this disguised church minister, to the mortification of the congregation. We're all special. Recognizing that specialness in others is sometimes harder. Quite a lot harder. Especially if you have trained yourself to think that you are superior. If you fail to esteem others more highly than yourself.

Or how about imagining that that person in front of you is - actually - Jesus Christ? Or Paul on his missionary travels? How then would you treat them, how then would you listen to what they have to say? I do some work with homeless people. They have so many do-gooders hanging around that they can be slow to talk, really talk, about who they are (rather than what they can get). But (some of them) once they start talking, well, you might find some amazing talent there. And some, just plain hard times, lost of a parent or guardian left them homeless and they eventually ran out of friends to sofa-surf with. Leviticus 19:15 KJV Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour. Romans 2:11 KJV For there is no respect of persons with God James 2:3 KJV And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool:

Interesting link, Charlene. Or, Bliss, just give'em a link to the Cafe.

And all these years later, I'm still trying to find that confidence I had before I met TWI.

God made you who YOU are, curiously and wonderfully made and knit together. God did not make you a clone, a robot, or an identical model with every other believer. To pretend that God did not endow you with particular abilities is really to deny God and his care for your life. Of course, there are less good bits too, bits that are perhaps less lovely. You are a fallible human being, after all. He accepts you, fallibilities and all. It's what you do with your God-given abilities that can make you special. So you're smart...do you use it to serve fellow human beings better, or to make life harder for them? So you're musical...do you use it to sing songs of joy, or do you use your voice to torment others? So you are a big strategic thinker...do you use it to plan to help others, think up big schemes that improve life...or do you use it to perhaps develop in criminal ways and become a successful crook? Don't bury your talents and abilities...be thankful God gave them to YOU and do something good with them. Agree with you very much that they squashed your ability. I'm no thicko myself, but every time I came up with a good idea or asked a question (especially about the odd and often inefficient ways that sometimes TWI wanted things done), I got "You're leaning to your own understanding. Just obey and do it the way I said." Crushing. TWI squandered talent and ability. Who knows how far they really set back the movement of (gag) "the word over the world" by shackling the hands of the laborers?

The no debt policy kept me out of home ownership for years...that was after they'd thrown me out. I was so concerned about no debt/no mortgage that I never bought when I could have done. Property prices rose considerably. Finally I got a job with lotsa money and moved to a new (expensive) city. Bought a house...property market collapsed three months later. As it happens, I have a lot of money in the house and the interest payments on the mortgage are much cheaper than rent would be if I were renting. Otherwise...move on when it suited. Sure it's easier to move to rented acommodation to suit your family's /household's needs, but no telling what sort of property you'll get, what condition it'll be in, and the previous renters may not have been the cleanest, neatest, careful tenants. Yeah, right, good for stability. For building up your home fellowship. When you might move to another part of the city at the drop of a hat. For kids' schooling, maybe having to move schools. What would the bl00dy trustees know about frequent moving and the disruption caused? How often did they move? Did they swap houses? [no, only mates, but that's another thread! ] Those who have been in rez will remember that every few months we had to completely clean our rooms out, then wait for a new room assignment. That might be with people we already knew well, had been roomies with before;..and might even be in the room we'd just moved out of. To teach us to "travel light" and to get on with different sorts of people. Yeah...we all wanted to be nomads, didn't we?

Whitewash...

What's changed? Life got wonderful. I got my life back... Oh, you meant, what changed for them? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Nothing changes there unless for the worst.

Being as the title of this thread is "Bologna Sandwiches & Tea" (polony, yeuk; a cross between sandwich meat and salami, double yeuk) - it's the "and tea" part I'm picking up on. Because most Americans don't drink "tea" though they may drink herbal infusions. As a Brit - I love my tea. I drink gallons of it. Truly. Somehow or other, during all my years in rez, I never ran out of tea, proper ("black") tea. It was hard to come by sometimes, but friends, visitors, spiritual partners...just gave boxes of tea bags to me. Twas not till I was preparing to leave and fly back home and GIVING AWAY my tea bags, that I realised how very blessed I'd been to have so much tea available to me. And on that note, I'll go and make myself another pot of tea. Teapot holds about 2 pints. This will be about my 6th potful today.

Broken Arrow, I'm sorry for your loss of your father. And for your difficulties in coming to terms with your grief. It's okay to grieve. My father died (also heart disease) at age 50 (decades ago now) - it was a sorrowful time. At least I had the comfort of knowing he was at peace and painless now, with God in heaven (as I then believed, being quite young). That's the peace you refer to. It doesn't stop us grieving or missing the deceased, but it does give us a reason to carry on living. While we are in this human body, sickness and death will come to us all. Doesn't matter what our goals are. Your dad's death wasn't his fault. Nor was it yours. Might be worthwhile getting regular heart/health checks yourself in case you have an inherited tendency to what he died from. "Believing" for a long life is as much about taking care of yourself now in purely physical things, as well as attitude to life. I love that OT description ... "old and full of days" - doesn't occur as often as I'd remembered, but it's a tender way of describing death. We all fell for VPW's line at least briefly. And it's mostly wrong. Some people do just give up when in a difficult situation, that they perceive as hopeless. And some spouses don't last long after their loved "other half" has died - their reason for living has gone. Very elderly people might set a goal - reach 100, see someone's marriage, see a new baby - and then, goal achieved, die soon after. But the will to survive is very strong; that doesn't happen to most people. For all we know, when VPW started spouting that line, he was already suffering from cancer and knew it was far gone and inoperable. That man abused his body in many ways and reaped the consequences. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was already sowing the seeds of his own post-death glorification and in his usual manipulative way, was saying (again) how much he'd done for us by his (cough) stand on the word.

I never heard that tale before. I did hear the regular twig explanation (though when I first started attending twig - not in later years); it was given whilst holding a horn of plenty: "This little end represents what you put in, what you give to God; and this big end represents what he gives back to you." Struck me as a naff explanation then. What I did like about the horn of plenty is that you could put your hand in and drop your offering without it being on display for all to see (=giving in secret), but then, where I was, we never got tangled up in reporting how much people had given. I didn't ever send in any form reporting how much my twig members had given.

George...don't be so sexist! Much better role model!! Sista power heh heh

If she is (was?) such a gifted teacher, how come everyone reports SNS as being so very boring? And why isn't she teaching "how to teach" (and make it interesting) to the WC and other leadership? Because as well as being "gifted" there are also teaching techniques that can be learned by those less gifted.

@teachmevp: not meaning to be difficult, but is English your first language?

He has a look in his eye that suggests he will be lively, mischievous, full of energy and you will (you will!) get or keep very fit. He will make sure of that. Have fun!

They did the chicken thing when I was in too (at HQ). We were in pairs, one to hold the chicken's legs and the other to wield the ax to chop off its head while it was on a chopping block. Then we peeled the skin and feathers off, cut it open and removed any eggs, as Groucho said. I doubt my partner and I did more than 6 altogether, and perhaps only 3. What I thought (after getting over the horror of killing something like that) was all the colors inside the chicken, the way everything fitted together...and that's just a chicken. And I thought how we, as human beings, are fearfully and wonderfully made...not just in our innards, which are more interesting, no doubt, than a chicken's, but all of us. We got chicken for dinner too. And it certainly hasn't put me off eggs, of which I eat a vast quantity.

Yah, Cara, I'd rather use cash too, than a check, for the same reason. Not that fleecing people for their ABS was a biggie where I was. Just as a side issue: When I was a little girl attending Sunday School, we had little round plastic moneyboxes, modelled after an African hut. We used to collect the pennies from our pocket money, big old heavy pennies, they were too - and every so often take the moneybox along to church and it was emptied. At the time, the Biafran war was going on in Africa. The money collected in these African moneyboxes was sent to help dispossessed people in Biafra, we were told (though clearly not in those words, not to little kids). A couple of decades later, I was witnessed to by a young man whose family had come as refugees from that very area of Africa. Often wondered if this little girl's pennies went to help that young man and his family in their time of need.

Huge bowls of fruit salad for the evening meal...not everyone's choice of meal, but something I love. (And because lots of people didn't like it and left it, there was always had more than I could eat.) Very nice yoghurt on Corps Nights for sack suppers. And (very surprising to me) a 5-grain cereal kind of porridge that we had for breakfast at times. As I hate porridge, always have, I was really shocked to find that I liked this stuff and would gladly make it for myself to eat now, if I knew what was in it. There was also plenty to eat that was a little strange to my palate. Mayo with most everything...

Oh and I have some tomato plants too. They are huge and there is abundant fruit on them. I have never grown such enthusiastic tomatoes. Last year they seemed to get blight, or damped off. These have great big trusses. All green so far, nothing beginning to turn red. JJ, gardening is really therapeutic. Agree totally with you. I used to have a very stressful job...come back home, do a couple of hours in the garden, and the stress would dissipate like dew. Tending anything that grows can be very therapeutic.

To beer, or not to beer: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler for a horse to suffer The saddles and reins of outrageous riders, Or to take arms against the seat of tyrants, And by opposing end them? (Okay Twinx. Leave it to Shakespeare.)

LOL, Ham, your cats sound funny. I've heard the effect of catnip on cats can be a bit like that of marijuana on humans. The little'uns can be mighty terrifyin' to the bigger ones... A couple of months ago, my mum got a rescue cat, Dinah, very small, 2kgs, kitten sized but apparently about 5 years old. Friendly cat but very thin and tiny. Slowly and pickily putting on weight. Mum came to visit me recently, so with some anxiety she took Dinah to my sister's. Sis has two very timid cats (only marginally less timid than my two). Dinah investigated my sis's house and her two cats did a runner. She ate all their food and pushed them out of their fave places. Sis's two sleep on her bed; Dinah also invited herself onto the bed. Dinah has sis's two firmly under her control. When she feels like it, Dinah also pushes sis's rather large dog out of its bed and curls up in the middle. The dog whimpers in the corner, but won't go near the dogbed. Now Dinah is back with Mum and seems to have found an appetite. No more pickiness; she chows down on anything, and in large quantity.

How lovely to have birds in the garden! I used to have some too, but have to scare them off now, if seen. Crypto my timid cat captured her first (baby) bird recently then came home with two mice (on two separate days). Mrs Blackbird is very wary but I don't want to encourage Crypto to catch birds. Easier to make the garden less attractive to them. After much effort my garden path is (partly) finished. The top part, at least, and some new steps. It looks nice but hardly worth all the effort it's taken. I have once huge 1/2 tonne bag of rubble left, and have disposed of the same amount at the tip. I have two sacks the same size of surplus soil which may be used later. This year I've hardly planted anything. I had some nice strawberries earlier. The autumn fruiting raspberries seem to have come in July and vanished (pigeons got there first, perhaps?). Last year's leeks are still in the ground, in flower, and I will collect the seed if any later. I have runner beans and there is enough for a small boiling; the plants aren't very leafy despite watering and Miracle-Gro over the past few weeks. My rhubarb is completely defunct. I do have self-setter potatoes which seem to be flourishing. Flowers have come and gone very quickly. Weeds haven't grown at all (that's nice). It has been a drought for the last 3 months, baking hot, too hot to be outside at all really, so pity the poor plants that couldn't grow. How any have survived is amazing. Have only cut the lawn x2 this year. Today has rained lightly all day. It will do the garden good. Probably be full of weeds tomorrow. I'd like to get some winter crops in - brassicas, maybe, if not too late. See what's on offer in the farmers' market, can get sturdy little plants ready for planting out. Ah. The joy of gardens....