I'll never forget the first time the local LC came to our twig out in a remote area...I was the twig leader because I had been in twi the longest (2 months)
The twig consisted of 3 hippies, a biker and a blind guy...
Our preparation of the "fellowship room" consisted of clearing out the empty beer cans, hiding the marajuana, and opening the windows to get the smell of dirty socks out of the room...
When the LC arrived, the first thing he saw was the poster of Jerry Garcia hanging in the living room. I'll never forget the look on his face when everyone lit up a smoke when he started teaching (our custom)...
When the fellowship ended, we asked him if he'd like to have a beer and he turned pale...
The guy didn't even know where to begin when it came to "reproving me"...
Of course several years later, I was stringing chairs at Emporia with the other mindless chimps... :blink:
...Almost forgot...We had found a "new person" to bring to twig that night...the lady who lived in the apartment next door (very troubled lady)...all through the teaching, she kept saying over and over (quite loud)..."praise jezuz, praise jezus" and then she started sobbing...quite the night, that was.
I was at the lc`s house....(when I was a wow and had gotten myself into a HUGE amount of trouble) there were three of us talking in the kitchen.... I was asked to take the sweet n low outta the bag and place it in a jar.....well first I just dumped it all in.....but we were having a lot of fun just yacking...and out of pure boredom...I started turning and sorting all of the packets so that they were right side up facing in the same direction in the bottom of the jar....when I finally handed the jar back .....the lc`s wife exclaimed with delight that with THAT kind of attention to detail...I was definatly corpes material and not to worry but that I was going to do very well
It was a really sweet thing to say because I was having such a hard time believing that I was worthey to walk the face of the planet....and breath the air.....much less attempt to be in the corpes as one of God`s spiritually elite.....maybe she was just trying to help me feel better.....
I was amazed that the position of the sweet n low packets was such a big deal....I sweat bullets and was nearly ill with the knowledge of how close I had come to ALMOST blowing it all by simply dumping them in to begin with ....and devoutly hoped that nobody would ever find out.....hee hee.
I prayed many a fervant prayer of thanksgiving on the way back to my area that day..... :)
Rascal: You must go to the kitchen right now and mix all your sugar packs every which way: it is a healing step that must be partaken by all of us.
Makes me wonder if the person who wrote the screenplay for "Sleeping with the Enemy" was a TC at one time. The bathroom had to be perfect, too, ya know.
When my ex-wife and I were running a twig at our home, we had a big coat rack next to the front door. We mainly had it because, although it was a roomy five-bedroom house, it didn't have much closet space. In addition to the coats, we started storing stuff on top of it, usually a big 30-cup coffee pot, and maybe some baseball caps. Our BC would almost get the shakes when he saw the "disorder" of that coffee pot up there.
After we were no longer twig coordinators, we really spread out our home schooling stuff in the living room. The kids would set up their desks wherever it was convenient: close to the book shelf that had their books on it, or near the window, or close to mom's table, whatever. Ol' anal-retentive BC came over and "suggested" that we line up all the desks, and line up all the pens and pencils in the desks :blink: - yeah, that helped them learn better.
No, but the float detector had to be working! (For my Way Corps bro's & sis's).
Everything matching, toothbrushes out of sight, towels lined up, floor clean, TP with paper on the outside (let's not start that debate), candle on back of toilet, "Footprints" poster prominently placed.
Generally I am a very orderly person, I like things in their places, and for them to be put back where they were. My dad was (is!) like this, and he got it from his mom. However, my ex-wife was not willing to do all the extra work that it took to keep all six kids at this level of "decent and in order". So I sympathize with rascal's husband!
Anyway, I had accepted it, although areas that were 100% mine, like my home office, were pretty orderly.
Our Branch Coordinators were newlyweds, and only in their second year of being out of residence (they were 20th or 21st Corps) They were pretty busy at the time of this story, maybe they were running the first batch of WayAP classes, I don't remember for sure, but they were running their @sses off. We decided to be helpful and offered to feed them. Nothing formal or fancy, just some tuna casserole and veggies. the idea was that we could contribute to "the moving of the Word" by freeing up our leaders from the duty of cooking and preparing dinner this one night.
At the time, all six of my children were living at home. My oldest was about 17 or 18, and the various other kids were aged 15, 11, 9, 8, and 4. We home schooled them, and I worked primarily out of the home, so usually the living room would be filled with school desks, piles of books, both our own and from the library, and stacks of boxes filled with school supplies and whatever else we didn't have room for in the closet.
Mr. BC was quite, almost sullen throughout dinner, answering questions in a curt manner, usually of one word. His wife looked confused, and kept looking to him for some kind of clue as to what his problem was. When he finished eating he got up, said good night and walked out.
The next morning I received a phone call from Mr. BC, asking if he and his wife could come over and talk to me and my wife over the noon hour. I told him that we didn't like to have our school day interrupted, and that I was working, but that noon was as good a time as any to take lunch. he replied that we would not be eating.
When they showed up we were ripped into for virtually every aspect of how we kept our house. From the living room to the kitchen to the garage. later, we were called before the BC's and several other leaders to be confronted again, since our cleaning and organizing wasn't up to par. This resulted in months of surprise inspections.
OHHHH GEEEEEZE Oak...I cannot BELIEVE the friggin liberties that they took with you guys...omg
I mean yeah they were anal about it when I was involved....but it was more of a ...*if you want to be spiritual* you will have these things in order.
I managed to keep everything in order untill the third child was born in under 4 years....then I lost all handle on decent and in order.
It got so bad.... my husband thought that I was a slovenly pig and loved it.
It took years to get that stupidity out of our heads.....We finally realised that I could either raise the children or I could keep the house to show room standard......there weren`t enough hours in the day for both....
We compromise...gave him a little area that was off limits to the kids and their clutter......
NOW have a moble home out behind the house he has an office and room out there and he can be as neat and orderly as he pleases.... he can go out there to recover when the mess and disorder of the main house get to be more than he can deal with...lol it is a win win situation.
The way I see it.....There will be PLENTY of time to keep the house compulsively neat after the children are gone.... but untill then I will continue to allowing the premepting of the vaccuming or dishes or laundry by requests to hunt crayfish, or read a story, hunt fossels, or go swimming whenever the oportunity arises.....I won`t always be getting these invitations.....
There will be plenty of time to catch up on housework then :)
I vividly remember fighting with my ex about where to hang that d@mnd poster the last couple of years we were married. I told him that he could hang it in the office on the wall beside the doorway where no one could see it unless they were completely and fully entered into the office. He wanted it prominently displayed in the living room. Nope. NO WAY! I told him we were no longer going to decorate our houses with posters from TWI, but rather we would hang REAL art in our house. It was a brutal battle, but I won that one.
We had the coffee table book and he bought all those freaking wallet size pictures, but could only lay them down on one of the shelves in the office because I wouldn't allow him to use them to decorate our home.
We went to visit some TWIts when we were in Mississippi one year and their living room looked just like every other TWIt living room we had ever visited - old, worn, hand me down garage sale furniture and all. It was cool at the time, but now it's kinda eery to think about it.
Meister also was on "house patrol' with our HFC one year and two couples got put on probation because their houses were "filthy" according to HFC standards and one couple's youngest was sick all the time....had to be them durn devil spirits ya know.
What's this coffee table book ya'll keep talking about? History of the Way Part 1, 2, or 3?
Came out in the mid- to late- nineties. It was a book of photos of the Way International grounds. If I remember correctly is was divided into 4 seasons. And yes, they did call it "the coffee table book". :blink:
Edited by Oakspear
How about when GOD himself was not up to Way standards of "decent and in order"? I can think of two examples:
Wichita, Kansas - A tornado had just come through the area. Power was out across the city, trees down, folks just beginning to emerge from their basements. The BC was driving across town, checking on the neighborhoods where his TWI people lived. That seemed a decent thing to do. BUT, when he arrived at one of my friend's homes, he got out of his car, found the man of the house assisting a neighbor in removing a tree from his crushed car, and instead of offering to help, he yelled at the twig guy for not having his gutters cleaned out. Apparently the debris in his gutters had caused rain water to back up and during the strom, the weight of the water had broken one of the gutters, so it was hanging from the roof of the house. The BC just got back into his car, and left, never lifting a hand to help anyone with recovery from the tornado damage. Later, of course, we heard about how the homes of all the believers had been spared.
Rural Utah - I was traveling with a Corps lady through the rugged red cliffs of Utah one summer, when she commented that the Adversary's work was so evident in that area. I looked around at the gorgeous scenery, and asked what she was talking about. She said, "Everything is so out of order here - God would have never created such an irregular and desolate landscape".
I guess if GAWD had designed the landscape, every mountain, tree, and rock would have to be semetrically placed, just like the candles on her fireplace mantle, eh?
I've climbed throughout Utah and personally I look for what she would call "irregular and desolate". Is there a big difference between God's artistic handiwork (which I believe He made for me) and what the 'devil' has done to the earth? Anyone who was in Divine Design care to comment?
some people are just idiots and will always be that way. I never saw anyplace in the Bible were God denounces the mountains.
I don't have any Way Coffee table books, however I do have a copy of th Pentecost picture hanging up - Why you may ask? Because I like it and it actually means something to me. I think I have that picture hanging up for all the right reasons.
Reading about how bad things got in the 90's and after is just so bizzarre, but even in the early 80's I remember the wife of a branch leader coming to visit and informing me that "death is at your doorway" because some dead leaves had blown onto the porch. It was Autumn.
And, I remember Craig spouting how mountains were designed by the adversary to divide people.
Hubby was in TWI I (pre-fog), and I was in TWI II (post-fog, nasty MOG) - it been six years this month since I found the door...
When I first left TWI, I was still in AR mode about things. Shortly after I moved in with Mathman (aka Hubby), I organized our CD's by group and then by title. Magazine were organized by publication date. When I finally put a new roll of toilet paper on the holder with one of those little triangle configurations, hubby said, "Knock it off!" And I still feel some stress when I see a brown, shrivled leaf on a houseplant - OMG! There's DEATH in the house!
Two kids, six year, and some time in the r-e-a-l world has made me realize that none of that matters. No one notices. No one gives a crap and I'm just wasting precious time. I don't even match socks anymore - I just buy lots in the same colors - problem solved! I don't fold underware, and I no longer dry my sink each time I use it. I'm happy if the laundry is caught up, the dishes are clean, and the kids are happy. The CD's, DVD's, and VHS tapes are all in a bin - with the kids' favorites on the top. Toys are everywhere.... usually...
Now whenever I get in a nasty-neat mode about the house, hubby always says....
(and I hate this - but it's also sort of funny....)
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GrouchoMarxJr
I'll never forget the first time the local LC came to our twig out in a remote area...I was the twig leader because I had been in twi the longest (2 months)
The twig consisted of 3 hippies, a biker and a blind guy...
Our preparation of the "fellowship room" consisted of clearing out the empty beer cans, hiding the marajuana, and opening the windows to get the smell of dirty socks out of the room...
When the LC arrived, the first thing he saw was the poster of Jerry Garcia hanging in the living room. I'll never forget the look on his face when everyone lit up a smoke when he started teaching (our custom)...
When the fellowship ended, we asked him if he'd like to have a beer and he turned pale...
The guy didn't even know where to begin when it came to "reproving me"...
Of course several years later, I was stringing chairs at Emporia with the other mindless chimps... :blink:
...Almost forgot...We had found a "new person" to bring to twig that night...the lady who lived in the apartment next door (very troubled lady)...all through the teaching, she kept saying over and over (quite loud)..."praise jezuz, praise jezus" and then she started sobbing...quite the night, that was.
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WordWolf
Well,
what I said was true-
That it's easy to require meaningless, obsessive-compulsive tasks
be performed when someone ELSE has to do them and not YOU.
The example I gave-sorting 'M & M's by colour-was one I came
up with to illustrate the kind of mindless, senseless, STUPID tasks
these so-called "leaders" told people to do.
(I was thinking of the old story about touring rock groups and
the riders that show up in their contracts.)
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rascal
ROFL that example reminds me of a funny....
I was at the lc`s house....(when I was a wow and had gotten myself into a HUGE amount of trouble) there were three of us talking in the kitchen.... I was asked to take the sweet n low outta the bag and place it in a jar.....well first I just dumped it all in.....but we were having a lot of fun just yacking...and out of pure boredom...I started turning and sorting all of the packets so that they were right side up facing in the same direction in the bottom of the jar....when I finally handed the jar back .....the lc`s wife exclaimed with delight that with THAT kind of attention to detail...I was definatly corpes material and not to worry but that I was going to do very well
It was a really sweet thing to say because I was having such a hard time believing that I was worthey to walk the face of the planet....and breath the air.....much less attempt to be in the corpes as one of God`s spiritually elite.....maybe she was just trying to help me feel better.....
I was amazed that the position of the sweet n low packets was such a big deal....I sweat bullets and was nearly ill with the knowledge of how close I had come to ALMOST blowing it all by simply dumping them in to begin with ....and devoutly hoped that nobody would ever find out.....hee hee.
I prayed many a fervant prayer of thanksgiving on the way back to my area that day..... :)
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topoftheworld
Groucho: Those were my favorite types of twigs
Rascal: You must go to the kitchen right now and mix all your sugar packs every which way: it is a healing step that must be partaken by all of us.
Makes me wonder if the person who wrote the screenplay for "Sleeping with the Enemy" was a TC at one time. The bathroom had to be perfect, too, ya know.
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Out There
I used to sort M&Ms but it was because I heard the green ones were an Aphrodisiac.
Get the new girl at twig to eat enough of them and you might just find a use for that broken sofa bed besides letting the LC sleep on it.
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Oakspear
When my ex-wife and I were running a twig at our home, we had a big coat rack next to the front door. We mainly had it because, although it was a roomy five-bedroom house, it didn't have much closet space. In addition to the coats, we started storing stuff on top of it, usually a big 30-cup coffee pot, and maybe some baseball caps. Our BC would almost get the shakes when he saw the "disorder" of that coffee pot up there.
After we were no longer twig coordinators, we really spread out our home schooling stuff in the living room. The kids would set up their desks wherever it was convenient: close to the book shelf that had their books on it, or near the window, or close to mom's table, whatever. Ol' anal-retentive BC came over and "suggested" that we line up all the desks, and line up all the pens and pencils in the desks :blink: - yeah, that helped them learn better.
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WhiteDove
The bathroom had to be perfect, too, ya know.
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topoftheworld
No, but the float detector had to be working! (For my Way Corps bro's & sis's).
Everything matching, toothbrushes out of sight, towels lined up, floor clean, TP with paper on the outside (let's not start that debate), candle on back of toilet, "Footprints" poster prominently placed.
Or.....maybe that was just me. Aauuhhh!
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Oakspear
More on my house and the evil BC
...
Generally I am a very orderly person, I like things in their places, and for them to be put back where they were. My dad was (is!) like this, and he got it from his mom. However, my ex-wife was not willing to do all the extra work that it took to keep all six kids at this level of "decent and in order". So I sympathize with rascal's husband!
Anyway, I had accepted it, although areas that were 100% mine, like my home office, were pretty orderly.
Our Branch Coordinators were newlyweds, and only in their second year of being out of residence (they were 20th or 21st Corps) They were pretty busy at the time of this story, maybe they were running the first batch of WayAP classes, I don't remember for sure, but they were running their @sses off. We decided to be helpful and offered to feed them. Nothing formal or fancy, just some tuna casserole and veggies. the idea was that we could contribute to "the moving of the Word" by freeing up our leaders from the duty of cooking and preparing dinner this one night.
At the time, all six of my children were living at home. My oldest was about 17 or 18, and the various other kids were aged 15, 11, 9, 8, and 4. We home schooled them, and I worked primarily out of the home, so usually the living room would be filled with school desks, piles of books, both our own and from the library, and stacks of boxes filled with school supplies and whatever else we didn't have room for in the closet.
Mr. BC was quite, almost sullen throughout dinner, answering questions in a curt manner, usually of one word. His wife looked confused, and kept looking to him for some kind of clue as to what his problem was. When he finished eating he got up, said good night and walked out.
The next morning I received a phone call from Mr. BC, asking if he and his wife could come over and talk to me and my wife over the noon hour. I told him that we didn't like to have our school day interrupted, and that I was working, but that noon was as good a time as any to take lunch. he replied that we would not be eating.
When they showed up we were ripped into for virtually every aspect of how we kept our house. From the living room to the kitchen to the garage. later, we were called before the BC's and several other leaders to be confronted again, since our cleaning and organizing wasn't up to par. This resulted in months of surprise inspections.
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bliss
Oak,
Not even a thank you for lunch?
What nice Christian folk they were.
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rascal
OHHHH GEEEEEZE Oak...I cannot BELIEVE the friggin liberties that they took with you guys...omg
I mean yeah they were anal about it when I was involved....but it was more of a ...*if you want to be spiritual* you will have these things in order.
I managed to keep everything in order untill the third child was born in under 4 years....then I lost all handle on decent and in order.
It got so bad.... my husband thought that I was a slovenly pig and loved it.
It took years to get that stupidity out of our heads.....We finally realised that I could either raise the children or I could keep the house to show room standard......there weren`t enough hours in the day for both....
We compromise...gave him a little area that was off limits to the kids and their clutter......
NOW have a moble home out behind the house he has an office and room out there and he can be as neat and orderly as he pleases.... he can go out there to recover when the mess and disorder of the main house get to be more than he can deal with...lol it is a win win situation.
The way I see it.....There will be PLENTY of time to keep the house compulsively neat after the children are gone.... but untill then I will continue to allowing the premepting of the vaccuming or dishes or laundry by requests to hunt crayfish, or read a story, hunt fossels, or go swimming whenever the oportunity arises.....I won`t always be getting these invitations.....
There will be plenty of time to catch up on housework then :)
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Belle
Oh gosh! So many memories!!
I vividly remember fighting with my ex about where to hang that d@mnd poster the last couple of years we were married. I told him that he could hang it in the office on the wall beside the doorway where no one could see it unless they were completely and fully entered into the office.
He wanted it prominently displayed in the living room. Nope. NO WAY! I told him we were no longer going to decorate our houses with posters from TWI, but rather we would hang REAL art in our house. It was a brutal battle, but I won that one.
We had the coffee table book and he bought all those freaking wallet size pictures, but could only lay them down on one of the shelves in the office because I wouldn't allow him to use them to decorate our home.
We went to visit some TWIts when we were in Mississippi one year and their living room looked just like every other TWIt living room we had ever visited - old, worn, hand me down garage sale furniture and all. It was cool at the time, but now it's kinda eery to think about it.
Meister also was on "house patrol' with our HFC one year and two couples got put on probation because their houses were "filthy" according to HFC standards and one couple's youngest was sick all the time....had to be them durn devil spirits ya know.
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topoftheworld
What's this coffee table book ya'll keep talking about? History of the Way Part 1, 2, or 3?
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Oakspear
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Xena
How about when GOD himself was not up to Way standards of "decent and in order"? I can think of two examples:
Wichita, Kansas - A tornado had just come through the area. Power was out across the city, trees down, folks just beginning to emerge from their basements. The BC was driving across town, checking on the neighborhoods where his TWI people lived. That seemed a decent thing to do. BUT, when he arrived at one of my friend's homes, he got out of his car, found the man of the house assisting a neighbor in removing a tree from his crushed car, and instead of offering to help, he yelled at the twig guy for not having his gutters cleaned out. Apparently the debris in his gutters had caused rain water to back up and during the strom, the weight of the water had broken one of the gutters, so it was hanging from the roof of the house. The BC just got back into his car, and left, never lifting a hand to help anyone with recovery from the tornado damage. Later, of course, we heard about how the homes of all the believers had been spared.
Rural Utah - I was traveling with a Corps lady through the rugged red cliffs of Utah one summer, when she commented that the Adversary's work was so evident in that area. I looked around at the gorgeous scenery, and asked what she was talking about. She said, "Everything is so out of order here - God would have never created such an irregular and desolate landscape".
Oh, brother. Xena
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justloafing
Hahahahahahahhahahahahahahaha
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Catcup
I guess if GAWD had designed the landscape, every mountain, tree, and rock would have to be semetrically placed, just like the candles on her fireplace mantle, eh?
And a doily under each boulder?
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outandabout
What is this thing about doilies? I thought only little old ladies had those in their homes. Doilies???
justloafing, I see your avitar is working again. That's good, I always thought it was so funny.
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Out There
I've climbed throughout Utah and personally I look for what she would call "irregular and desolate". Is there a big difference between God's artistic handiwork (which I believe He made for me) and what the 'devil' has done to the earth? Anyone who was in Divine Design care to comment?
some people are just idiots and will always be that way. I never saw anyplace in the Bible were God denounces the mountains.
I don't have any Way Coffee table books, however I do have a copy of th Pentecost picture hanging up - Why you may ask? Because I like it and it actually means something to me. I think I have that picture hanging up for all the right reasons.
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bliss
Yes, doilies. I had many of them. I was even given some as a gift from fellow twiggers.
It seemed to be the "proper" way to decorate. Put a doiley down, then a "eagle" statue on top....etc...
I am laughing as I type this, so ridiculous...
I think there still is a difference between being dirty and just being unorganized and 'living".
I think most confused the two and that is how it got so out of wack.
We should of called it "Power for Anal Living".
Glad, I can put my shoes by the front door now without getting the "evil eye" of an unexpected leader.
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tonto
Reading about how bad things got in the 90's and after is just so bizzarre, but even in the early 80's I remember the wife of a branch leader coming to visit and informing me that "death is at your doorway" because some dead leaves had blown onto the porch. It was Autumn.
And, I remember Craig spouting how mountains were designed by the adversary to divide people.
What an idiot.
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WordWolf
Like Mount Sinai?
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tonto
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ChasUFarley
Hubby was in TWI I (pre-fog), and I was in TWI II (post-fog, nasty MOG) - it been six years this month since I found the door...
When I first left TWI, I was still in AR mode about things. Shortly after I moved in with Mathman (aka Hubby), I organized our CD's by group and then by title. Magazine were organized by publication date. When I finally put a new roll of toilet paper on the holder with one of those little triangle configurations, hubby said, "Knock it off!" And I still feel some stress when I see a brown, shrivled leaf on a houseplant - OMG! There's DEATH in the house!
Two kids, six year, and some time in the r-e-a-l world has made me realize that none of that matters. No one notices. No one gives a crap and I'm just wasting precious time. I don't even match socks anymore - I just buy lots in the same colors - problem solved! I don't fold underware, and I no longer dry my sink each time I use it. I'm happy if the laundry is caught up, the dishes are clean, and the kids are happy. The CD's, DVD's, and VHS tapes are all in a bin - with the kids' favorites on the top. Toys are everywhere.... usually...
Now whenever I get in a nasty-neat mode about the house, hubby always says....
(and I hate this - but it's also sort of funny....)
"What's the matter? Is leadership coming over?"
Yeah... yeah... yeah.... I get the point...
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