God and the Blessedness of Jeff Brady

Maybe I should have called this post "Taking Inventory", because that's what I've been doing. My current mental ague seems to be lifting. I can see things more clearly. My Angels prodded me into talking last night and I feel much better. Thanks ladies. I had a good time.

As a side note, we all went out to celebrate my 60th birthday. Went to the Big Steer restaurant in Altoona. The place was packed, but the food was good and the waiter was bear-like, cute and very nice. I was hoping for a birthday kiss, but I didn't get one. I suppose it just would not have looked right and he would have been expected to kiss everyone else too. Oh well. He did bring me a free ice cream sundae as a consolation prize.

I also wondered if there was supposed to be some subliminal joke buried in taking me to a place called the Big Steer, but I do tend to overthink things, so probably not. I got a Caribou gift card which is good since I live on a fixed income now. I also got a 'first alert' type device in case I fall and can't get up. I was looking at it this morning and debating if I really needed to activate the thing yet. I think the yellow jacket incident made them all think I might die on accident. I do stumble quite a bit. I would not want to be setting it off accidently; even so, it would be nice to have in case the lawn mower ends up on top of me or it chops off my arm or something. Whatever. I love the gift and I will wear it with pride and a sense of security.

Back to taking inventory, I have of late been reviewing my life from a spiritual perspective and I was dissappointed with the results I was coming up with. I think this is because of a number of issues, the first one being that, as I said, I tend to overthink things. I have gone from having way too much responsibility to having none in a very short period of time. Too much time to think.

I also have much unresolved guilt and anger over my relationship with my dead father. There is a forgiveness problem there that I have never properly dealt with that I finally discussed with the Angels last night. It was sort of a breakthrough for me. It's going to require some healing time. I blamed God for much of this because it was easier than blaming myself and much easier than looking at it and saying it is what it is. We are all bent in different ways. My Dad had his own demons and I'm sure he dealt with them the best he could. In my life, I have never been able to see this properly until now. Yes, it was always about me.

The whole thing has been blinding me to the love my heavenly Father has for me. I think sometimes we see Him through the lens of who our own earthly fathers were and this can jade the relationship with our God. He is not like a man...any man. I have always known this intellectually. I need to make this a spiritual realization.

I complained awhile back that God had not changed me as I had expected, but in review, that really was not a fair charge. I see much that has changed when I take off my blinders and look honestly at what He has done for me. Materially, I have NEVER known need. Even when I was poor and had to work two jobs, I never missed a meal. I always had a place to live and tranportation. I have NEVER been unemployed. Even now in retirement, I do not believe it will be possible for me to exhaust my resources before death. I am set.

It's in the spiritual realm that I have always felt a deficit. My knowledge of allgedly spiritual things is great. I am wise in the meaning of the Scriptures and skilled in relating that knowledge to others. It is a gift for which I am grateful. Had I been more extroverted, I might have been a good pastor. But having always seen God through the lens of my father, I never thought I was good enough to do much of anything. When I coupled that with my SSA, I thought I was just cursed by God for not being a good son or good enough. It all worked together to make me too up tight to fall in love with my heavenly father or His other children.

At 60, I'm beginning finally to see that I can create my own reality with Him. I can see that He has made me more patient - a kinder and gentler Christian than I ever was before. He had showed me the limits of my own willpower and made me aware of how my bluntness has hurt others. He got me through almost 6 years of trying to care for my father - a man I did not like very much. He has showed me how I am like Dad in good ways and especially the bad ways.

The time has come now to complete the process and seal my relationship with Him. Prayer has been hard for me. Three independent sources in my life have suggested I take up a Christian form of meditation. This I will most likely do. I want desperately to feel the presence of God in my life as part of who I am and not just some impersonal outside force that sees to my needs. I do not want to die as a Pharisee and rule keeper. I want to know change inside and out and to realy understand what is meant in the Serenity Prayer.

I have the rest of my life to do this Please pray that the Lord and I can make this happen.  Thanks for being patient with me. I don't think He's done with me yet.

I love you.

They Walk Among Us

As many of you know, I am an old school conspiracy theorist, part of the original batch that came of age in the late 60's. My natural paranoia seems to feed the whole thing and so my psychosis feeds my neurosis.

I guess it's just a gift.

So with that in mind, I would like to offer you my latest theory about aliens which I am sure will captivate and innervate all of you to the point of belief.

For years, there have been jokes about people who shop at Walmart. I'm sure you've seen the viral emails. Pictures of weird looking folks in all manor of garb, with missing teeth, varicose veins and magenta colored hair. The really bizarre part of this is that's it's not just a joke. As we all know, there are people like that at Walmart all the time. I would like to think it's just trailer trash and working class white folks, but it seems like they are always in there, always shopping, always milling about the store and sometimes in the same clothes from one day to the next. So, I got to thinking about it.

I believe that Walmart stores are portals and perhaps even hatcheries for aliens from other worlds or dimensions. They incubate in the bowels of the stores, hatch, and are then assigned a shopping cart to mill about the store until they fully pupate and then they are released from the "hive" where a car awaits them and they go to work in the community. Those that do not reach full maturity after hatching are made into employees and allowed to stay in the store to help them assimalate for release at a later date. It all starts when the aliens deposit their eggs at Walmart distribution centers. From there, they are packaged and trucked to the store hives in all parts of the nation. They are cultivated in massive underground caverns that lie beneath every Walmart store until they hatch.

So the next time you are at Walmart and you see a short, fat woman wrapped heavily in yellow spandex with navy blue hair, a see-thru blouse and a buttocks wider than her cart, you will know you've seen an alien, probably fresh out of the hive. Sometimes they will have smaller aliens with them that appear to be out of control, dirty and noisy. These smaller ones are what is called prehatches. They left the hive too early and get assigned to the larger more mature variety. I know you're thinking these are just unruly children. Don't be tricked.

I know too, that you thought Walmart was just a thrift store started by Sam Walton years ago with hard work and tenacity. The truth is that Sam Walton and his family have been the beneficiaries of an agreement between the alien worlds and the US government to replace the population of our planet with these Walmartians. It's only a matter of time before all of us real humans will be gone. It's also why North Korea has worked so hard to keep Walmart out of the hermit kingdom.

It's really too late to do anything about this. FEMA is just waiting for the next national crisis. In an emergency, they will send us all to Walmart under the notion that we will all receive supplies and instructions. Instead, we will be encapsulated in hibernation chambers, trucked to Walmart distribution centers and transferred by aliens to their home planets to be used as a food supply.

One might ask why our government would do this. I can only say that they wanted a more compliant work force that they could tax more heavily without objection. This has also been the dream of the class of elite humans that will be left after the process is complete - you know - those folks that would never shop at Walmart!

When it happens, just remember, you heard it here first. September 23rd is coming up. That might be the day.   Do Not go to Walmart that day. Just a thought.

So, do you think I'm onto something? Ya, you know I'm right.

Nothing Measures Up

Have you enjoyed times in your life where you thought everything was perfect?

I have had a couple of times like that in my nearly 60 years of life. The earliest one goes back to when I was between 3 and 4 years old. We lived in Bondurant in a small rented house. Kelly Dean Jones lived across the street and he was my best friend. We spent hours together getting into trouble, fighting and playing in his sand pile that his cat thought was a litter box.

My parents were young. Dad worked at a Dairy. And Mom stayed home to take care of me. We would go places together. Mom would take me shopping for goldfish. I was fascinated even then by fish. At night Dad would come home. We would go for rides in the car and I would fall asleep, miraculously waking up in my bed the next morning. We went to Dairy Queen, the A&W drive in and Millie's. We went to church on Sundays and Grandpa and Grandma's on weekends. I had a beagle named Buppy...(don't ask) and my world was good....perfect. I had everything a kid could want in 1960 and we were not rich, not by a long shot.

And then something happened. I can't say what it was (won't), but our relationships changed. We moved to Des Moines, I went to school, Mom went to work part time and Dad seemed to stay at work as much as possible. Everything seemed like it was ruined. Dad did not like me anymore, Mom was too tired to do stuff, and Kelly Dean was far away in Bondurant. On weekends, I got farmed out to Grandpa and Grandma. That was not bad. It really was a farm and a farm is an education for a city kid and I had a good time. Only child types tend to create worlds in their heads and that's what I did. I talked to myself a lot.

You do that when you spend most of your life alone. And now at 60, I'm doing it again. Everyone of them has left me. I should have expected it. They were always doing that. They always came back before though.  

All those people are dead now. They weren't perfect, but I loved them. Now I truly am an orphan. My imagination does not work nearly as well as it once did, so imaginary friends are hard to come by. I guess I never thought there would be a time when I could not talk to them. And that's odd, because I have seen death take many people that I have been close to. Nothing is forever I guess except God. Not even perfect moments. I'm glad I had some. Heaven is supposed to be like that. We will see if that's true soon enough. Will there be anymore perfect moments? I guess that's up to me isn't it...and the grace of God.      

How Are You Feeling?

That's a normal question that normal people ask each other. Me? Not so much. I'm not feeling much of anything besides paranoia, emptiness and a vague sense of meaninglessness. Certainly these are not markers of a man within whom the Holy Spirit resides.

I touched on this several weeks ago. The symptoms do not seem to be improving.

I was reminded of the whole thing on Sunday while teaching class at church. We are studying Peter's letters to the churches in Asia Minor and somewhere midway through chapter 4 of First Peter he writes that we should be clear minded and self controlled so that we can pray. It struck me that I am never clear minded and I have way too much self control.

Seriously, my mind will not be still. It wanders all over the place all the time constantly overthinking everything and questioning everything, even the motivations of people that want to be my friends or even help me stay out of the depths of my mental Mordor.

Add to this the fact that I crush every feeling that comes through my mental doors to greet me because I CAN'T DEAL WITH IT ANYMORE! I just want it all nailed down so it's not flying up and hitting me in the face all the time with demands at inconvenient times of the day. This is not new behavior for me. I have been doing it all my life simply to deal with the SSA. I box it all up by categories and file them away in my brain where I won't find the feelings, but apparently the packing tape is getting old because all those thoughts and feelings have been escaping to torture me anew.  

I've spent much time in my life trying to create this Stoic exterior and it is crumbling.

If this continues, I will be a weeping mass of protoplasm, crying every ten minutes over something that I thought I had dealt with years ago.

There is just no middle ground with me. If I am to function in the real world, I need the mental acuity to be self controlled, but not at the expense of my mental or spiritual health. My spiritual side seems to be in a coma right now. Maybe something is trying to wake it up. Is that a good thing? I don't know. It scares me and at the same time I seem to want it.

I need to go fishing now. It will prevent me from thinking further about this.

Education

Most education, even the Christian variety, is propaganda and indoctrination. There are right answers approved by the experts and their are wrong answers, that while correct, may not be acceptable to the general population or the experts and must be supressed. And so, I offer this guide to you, knowing that you will use it in the spirit intended.  

If life is tough for you, refer to the rules above. It should lighten your load considerably.