Blessed Am I, For I Deserve It

The original post:

https://mobile.twitter.com/kelssseyharmon/status/710257327031451648

One girl’s Tweet about having dinner with her grandfather is going viral and breaking hearts around the world because of its gut-wrenching backstory.

Kelsey Harmon, from Oklahoma, posted this photo of dinner with “Papaw”, saying that he’d invited his six grandchildren over but Kelsey was the only one to show up.
dinner with papaw tonight...❤️ he made 12 burgers for all 6 grandkids and I'm the only one who showed. 😢 love him

My response: I feel your pain, papaw, literally. Four of my grandchildren do this to me every holiday and every day because I wouldn't disown the rest of my children and grandkids in favor of them and their mom. In fairness to my beloved Lost Lambs, their mother, Four square copastor that she is, says I should obey her, my "true daughter". (The family she wanted me to disown may not be genetically mine, but ALL my children and grandchildren are mine; they are totally mine now and forever.)
Two of those 'not true' grandkids are spending the weekend and driving me crazy. They are real grandkids to me and I cherish every precious moment with them, their siblings, their cousins, their parents, their aunts, and all those my Prodigal Daughter wanted me to disown. And, yes, in spite of years of emotional neglect and abuse, I love my Prodigal Daughter and my neglectful Lost Lambs just as much.
No amount of neglect or hurtfulness will ever tarnish my love for all of my children and all of my grandchildren. I choose every single one, even when that choice brings suffering from the Pharisee branch of my family.

1 Col 13:4,13. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Please pray for my Prodigals. Their judgement and rejection of the family that loves them is a sickness that eats at their souls, even as they puff up with pride at their self declared piety.

Updated Comments:

I love you Poppy ! I'll always be your daughter

Dad I want to say that you are one of the strongest men I know your my hero ...you have been cast aside because of you loving us kids as your own ....even though we're not fruit of your loins we are fruit of your heart ... I'm appalled at the way you are being treated and how your lambs are lost ...I wish that they would wake up and find out what a wonderful father papa and poppy you could be if they would allow you too! I will promises you this ...I will never wonder ...I will never not be there for you as you have been as I when was a child and now ...I will never disrespect you forsake you or stay away ...I may not be your real daughter but I am your daughter .... Enough said Poppy ....I love you! I choose you all them years ago ....I knew you would be my perfect dad !


Me: The best love is love returned. Real family is the family that stands beside you and delights in your joys and carries you through your pain. Whatever the hurt caused by those who have abandoned us, the rest of us stand together and love together. You all keep me going, whatever strength I have, it is rooted in all of you.

Bless Me, Lord, For I Deserve It

In response to a Facebook post advising people who have been "church hurt" not to walk away from God and to believe that, in time, they who have offended will pay the price. 

If I understand the term "church hurt" correctly, this meme hits home.  Today's sanctimonious and hypocritical Pharisees are as full of their own holiness and as empty of love as the original Pharisees who so irritated Christ.  Some of the best and too many of the worst people I have known are deeply committed and loudly self proclaimed good Christians.  In some cases, methinks they dost proclaim too much.

Come to think about it, the best ones were actually quite quiet about their beliefs, it was their fellow congregants who made the noise.  It seems that at least some Christians have read Matthew 6.  “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.  And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you."

As it happens, I do not blame God for the excesses of His hypocritical followers.  They are so busy blessing themselves, they have neither time nor room for His. 

Ego Sum Omnes -- Primus Iteration

I am the blood upon the altar
The stain upon the stone
Flies cluster thick to feed on me
I feed them with myself,

I brown and darken on the rock
I spread my way across the stair
My gift of life is to the sun
And to his mother, time

Atop the empty temple steps
Lie the masks of breath and heart
In the jungle green with life
infested with genetic code

Peace and comfort that I sought
Were cut from me without consent
You the knife to make me bleed
Then the knapper of the flint

I am the rock that will endure
Only I can cut myself
Bits of me shaped into wedge
To make the stone to bleed

I cannot hate myself reborn
Resurrected in the time to come
I can only lie and die
Bled out by my own love

But I cannot die and then be dead
I am Prometheus renewed
I am the altar,  I am the stone
I am the knife, and you the knapper

Temple, altar, blood am I
The victim and the stage
Knife, knapper, priestess, You
Serving strange and thirsty gods

I am support and I am base
I lift you up above the earth
I hold you down below the sky
This is what I do, this is what I am

I am the blood upon the altar
The stain upon the stone
I brown and darken on the rock
I spread my way across the stair

Little Help?

I really don't know how to jump into this so I guess I just will. I try not to bother people with my problems, but sometimes even I need a little help.  I made a decision which has potentially good or negative ramifications I now I'm committed to a course of action. I have been asked to post about it since word has spread, so here goes:

Father's Day is coming this Sunday and I have decided to go to church services where my prodigal daughter is the copastor. I told her about this last Saturday but she hasn't responded so I don't know if she's aware that I'm coming or not. My religious beliefs are complicated but I do have some that I share with her. One is that "whenever two or more if you were gathered there I am".  So we will see if her anger will melt when we are face-to-face in His presence.

What I'm asking is something I dislike to ask for,  some assistance.  I vent and whine and grumble from time time about my broken health, but that's just fussing and fuming. I did ask for prayers for my son-in-law when we discovered he had cancer. By the way, he has  finished radiation therapy and been tested to see how effective the results were. We'll know more tomorrow.

So once again I ask you all for prayers if you believe in prayer and good thoughts if you don't. Not for me. But for my daughter. Pray that your heart will let go of her anger and resentments of her stepfamily and will open up the love I have for her and my grandchildren.

And while I'm at it, I just learned today that my grandson is going on his first deployment. To Afghanistan.  

It seems a strange to me the two of my grandsons have chosen to enter professions which put them in harm's way as a matter of course for their jobs.  So please don't hesitate to include them in your prayers and good wishes.

Good thoughts only please!  There's already too much hurt and suffering involved.

Do I Know You?

A long delayed response from Facebook to a friend who was concerned about a rather sharp remark I made. It was aimed at the person she was quoting, not at her, and I've made that clear. However,  the question still needs answering, just exactly where do I stand?

 Where to start? Well, as I have so so many times, I despise liberals and conservatives both. I refuse to consider myself a liberal. A progressive, yes, but not a liberal.  

Today in many school districts it is so horrible a violation of school rules for a boy to make a gun shape out of his finger that the child is likely to be  suspended or even expelled. In some cases it is apparently against the law because police have been called into the "incident".  This attitude is a direct gift from the liberals to all of America. Criminalizing little boys for acting like normal healthy little boys is the product of diseased minds.  America's war on children is a liberal war on children.  I have no doubt of that.

On the other hand, the conservatives have declared war on just about everyone and everything except the narrow, tiny minority who completely agree with them.

In the 60s and 70s I put most of my effort into condemning the liberal extremists. The Students for a Democratic Society, the protesters who  burned American flags and praised Ho Chi Minh, and all their supporters. I was disgusted by every symbol of Che Guevara I ever saw. Back before my prodigal daughter decided to shun me, I was driving with her and saw Che's face painted on the building. I expressed my disgust. Her response was, "Who?"  That pleased me. This once ubiquitous symbol of left-wing insanity wasn't even recognized by the next generation. That was years ago. His popularity has continued its resurgent rise. That's sad. The only bad thing about Che's death is that it came years too late to save many of his victims.

If you are interested, my political attitude is well expressed by my blog post: http://el-naranjal-del-desierto.blogspot.com/2014/03/heil-stalin-aka-vodka-vs-bourbon.html.

As far as Obamacare or the ACA, it's just about the worst imaginable law possible. It has only one good thing going for it -- It is a big improvement over the way things were before it was passed. That is not to say is a good law. Is a rotten, bad law. But again, it's better than what we had before it passed.  This nation can do much better. We can join every other industrialized, every other wealthy, every other civilized nation, in the world and pass a proper single-payer system. We are the only wealthy, powerful, industrialized, nation that has not done so.

I think of the ACA in terms like this: if a starving man is granted access to all the garbage cans in town, his condition has improved very much. It is certainly better that he has access to all that fresh, not yet rotten garbage, than if he died of starvation. On the other hand, it really could be a lot better than that. Couldn't it?

And  my reference?  Let's just say that while I considerate it harsh, but accurate, I am certain that there are probably millions who, if they heard it, would say it was inflammatory.  To put it another way, this particular man is one of what ever brassy Ann Coulter refers to as "our blacks".

He is a brilliant and gifted neurosurgeon...well, here's a link that expresses my feelings: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/16/ben-carson-was-a-role-model-for-black-teens-until-he-sold-out-to-the-right.html

For anyone who happens to read this and has encountered my ideas before you will find a lot of repetition contained in this statement. But that's because while I may have said it to you, I haven't said them to everyone.

Anyone interested my positions can take a look at:  http://el-naranjal-del-desierto.blogspot.com.  Just use the taglines philosophy and politics to get my views in those areas.

So I'm accustomed to liberals considering me a conservative and conservatives considering me a liberal. But I am neither. And I never will be. Both are ideologies. Both require you to have certain shared convictions. If I share convictions with you, is because we happen to agree, not because I know what I'm supposed to believe.  I work very hard to look at the facts. I believe that reality is real. I believe that only a fool refuses to face the facts.  Over the years I've had to give up many a cherished position; positions that were emotionally deeply satisfying to me, but which conflicted with reality. It hurt. But I was true to my beliefs and my philosophy. That was more than adequate compensation for what I lost.

People think I'm crazy when I say that you can be a progressive and be a liberal, or be a progressive and be a moderate, or even be a progressive and be a conservative.  A conservative progressive is someone who believes we should continue moving forward not go back into the past. They just want to go carefully and thoughtfully forward and make sure that what we are doing is the right thing. One example of a person I would regard as a conservative progressive is Pres. Eisenhower.

The reason people are shocked by this concept is that ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has been driving everyone out of the party who did not agree with their rigid doctrinal declarations. To be a conservative was not sufficient. You had to be a particular kind of extremist conservative, otherwise you were declared a RINO and expelled from the party.  This is made Republican Party more and more a religious organization and less and less a purely political one.

This from the party that considers the left to be "politically correct"!

So that's a summation of who I am. You can't assume anything about where I stand on a position unless you have a good grip on the facts. You can be fairly certain that wherever they lead, I will be there. Other than that? I can only repeat that when I navigate I navigate with the stars which are actually there in the sky. I consider one of the most awful statements the entire history of philosophy to be the comment made by Plato, "If we are to discuss the cosmos we must not look at the stars."

PS,

I can't even begin to get into religion. It's enough to say that I am a deeply religious, but--surprise surprise -- a very independent thinker who prefers my God like I prefer my whiskey, straight.

The Dancing Bear

          The Dancing Bear

I sang to you

when you were small

When you fit yourself

within  the crook 

of a single arm

I sang to you

each day and night

of frogs and dogs

and magic sheep

Of, oh, so many things

But most of all

I sang to you

of a dancing bear

The magic song

that worked it's way

It always soothed 

and calmed you down

It brought you peace

And almost every single time

you fell asleep

just before the end

But dancing bears grow up

it seems

They turn back 

unto the wild

If you meet them 

then and there

they may not dance

but rend and tear

They are not bad

nor evil things

They're simply bears

It is their nature

It's how they're made

It is what it is

and they are 

what they are

So you must love them 

as they are

Or love them 

not at all

If I Were Dead on Decoration Day -- revised 2

If I Were Dead on Decoration Day

Would you come and visit me?
Would you plant the ground with paper flags?
Would you sprinkle down confetti
Like paper tears of paper grief?

Would you cry and moan and say,
Behind your paper mask of grief
"Oh how I wish...if I only could...
But now is too late"

Do not come on Decoration Day
Do not plant your paper flags on me,
Nor shed your paper tears
If you cannot love me now
Do not pretend to love me then

I am here, so where are you?
Far from me in heart and mind.
So far away you cannot feel
The love I bear for you

Safe from loving, safe from care
Safe from me or from yourself?
Love suffers and endures
It does not run and hide

If I am not good enough for you in life
Do not moan for me in death
Paper grief is but a show
That insults the tears of those who care

I am not angry, only sad
My love is real and it endures
And when it suffers
It cries wet tears
The tears of living hearts

Third draft, rewriting of a poem written in high school.
.

If I Were Dead on Decoration Day -- revised

If I Were Dead on Decoration Day 

Would you come and visit me?

Would you plant the ground with paper flags?

Would you sprinkle down confetti 

Like paper tears of paper grief?

Would you cry and moan and say,

Behind your paper mask of grief

"Oh how I wish...if I only could...

But now is too late"

Do not come on decoration day

Do not plant your flags on me, 

Nor shed your paper tears

If you cannot love me now

Do not pretend to love me then

I am here, so where are you?

Far from me in heart and mind.

So far away you cannot feel

The love I bear for you

Safe from loving, safe from care

Safe from me or from yourself?

Love suffers and endures

It does not run and hide

If I am not good enough for you in life

Do not moan for me in death

Paper grief is but a show

That insults the tears of those who care

I am not angry, only sad

My love is real and it endures

And when it suffers

 It cries wet tears

The tears of living hearts

Second draft, rewriting of a poem written in high school.

If I Were Dead on Decoration Day

If I Were Dead on Decoration Day

Would you come and visit me?

Would you plant the ground with paper flags?

Would you sprinkle confetti down upon me

Like paper tears of paper grief?

Would you cry and moan and say,

"Oh how I wish...if I only could...

But now is too late"

So now it's safe to grieve

Do not come on decoration day

Do not plant your flags on me, nor shed your paper tears

If you cannot love me now

Do not pretend to love me then

I am here, so where are you?

Far from me in heart and mind.

So far away you cannot feel

The love I bear for you

Safe from loving, safe from care

Safe from me or from yourself?

Love suffers and endures

It does not run and hide

If I am not good enough for you in life

Do not moan for me in death

Paper grief is but a show

That insults the tears of those who care

I am not angry, only sad

My love is real and it endures

And when it suffers, it cries wet tears

The tears of living hearts

First draft, rewriting of a poem written in high school.

.

A Letter to My Prodigal Daughter 9-9-12

This Sunday, let me speak of love.  Love is not a zero sum game in which there is a limited quantity of a resource which must be allocated on the basis of one person's gains constitute another's loss.  The more love which is given out, the more there is to distribute. 

This sounds like one of the magical  devices of myth and legend.  I recall a story of a salt mill which would produce upon command until halted by another magic word.  Salt being of immense value in the ancient world, someone stole the device and set it to grinding out his fortune.  Unfortunately for him, he did not know the command to turn the mill off.  Soon he was in danger of suffocating in salt.  In desperation he threw the mill into the sea, where it still grinds away, making the fresh water which flows into the oclean into brine.

I have a never empty mug of Coke.  It may drain down, but it always refills itself. OK, so I give it some assistance, but it is never dry.

If I were the kind of father who would stop loving any of his children on command, my love would be false and worthless. Love which lasts, love which is worth having, is deep and enduring.  It is boundless and flows out for all the family. 

If my love was something I could turn on and off, it would not be worth having.  It would not be love, but some sort of self interested business arrangement.  If you could make me stop loving the rest of my children and grandchildren, so that my devotion was be all yours, you would find it to be a sterile and pointless thing which would have neither depth nor endurance.  You would no longer want it.  Do not seek to kill the goose that laid the golden egg if it lays for more than just you.  Share the wealth, share the love.

I will do anything I can for you.  And I will do anything I can for all my children.  One of the things which I cannot do, and still remain who and what I am, is abandon any one of you.  

The day I turn my back on any of my children or grandchildren is the day I have been transformed into a stranger, into a monster.  Nothing short of a major brain injury could cause that.  An injury so great would be so catastrophic that I could truly be declared dead, and a new person would inhabit my body.

All the love I have to give is yours, as it is all my children's.  I will never reject any of you, no matter how you hurt me.  Unconditional is unconditional.  

Did you know it's Grandparents' Day?  I miss my Lost Lambs.  I know they miss me.  Let them call me.  Tell me I may call them.  At least let them write me a thank you card for the gifts I send. Please don't bring more suffering into the world.  There is already too much here.

This mill grinds out love. It must, for that is its nature.  The day it stops 
loving is the day it is no longer a mill.  If you succeeded in changing me, I would no longer have any value.  Not to you, not to anyone.  Love and family are all I have that is of worth.  The rest of me is so much organic tissue.  

Accept my love.  Let your children, my Little Ones, have my love.  There is enough for all.  You do need to take any away from anyone else.
Call me.  Let my Lambs call me.  Tell me I may call.  Take back your command that I be silent.

Don't be like the dwarfs in The Last Battle.  Surrounded by love and plenty, they insist, no, demand, that they are being treated badly.  A feast is interpreted as animal fodder, fine wine as dirty water from an old trough.  These things are pure and wholesome and wonderful, but their fear and bitterness make them seem polluted and foul.  

Here is the same love I give to all my family.  Why won't you take it with joy?  You are loved.  Why isn't that enough?

Join the feast.  

Love, always, love.

My Prodigal Daughter -- An Explanation

I am posting letters to my prodigal daughter.  As you probably know, she gave me an ultimatum 3 years ago.  She demanded that I disown my other children, or lose her and her children.  I refused to choose between my children, telling her I chose everyone.  She said that was not good enough and cut me off from her and my beloved grandchildren.

Since she is the wife of a Christian minister and very vocal in her faith, I am hoping that she will feel less free to attack the father and family who love her if she must do so publicly.

I love her, and ask for believers to pray for her redemption and nonbelievers to meditate upon the weaknesses of humanity.  If you have anything negative to say about her, keep silent.  I will not tolerate it.

A Letter to My Prodigal Daughter 8-19-12

A Letter to My Prodigal Daughter.              8-19-12

Sorry I missed last Sunday.  The heat wave has been very hard on me.  I struggle every day to get through and to accomplish something that justifies my existence.  I have had some good times with family, but I have been unable to do enough even In this most basic area.  

As you know, I have been in a very slowly, but very steadily deteriorating state of health since I was 6.  This pattern was spread over years when I was younger, but accelerated as I matured.  Then something strange and hopeful happened.  Starting about 6 years ago, I began to very slowly suffer less.  It has  been 6 years since I totally lost days from my life.  I still lose them, but now I know the time has passed, though it seems to pass at an incredible rate.

Not in 6 years have I thought I had one bad night on Monday, only to discover that it was now Thursday, not Tuesday.  Neither have I been forced in those 6 years to crawl to the toilet, carefully watching my hands reach out and touch the floor, because if I even glance away from them, I fall over.  

But the trend toward improvement only lasted a few  years.  The progress froze and then  I began to deteriorate again.  This reversal began when you tried to force me to choose between you and my other children.  I am losing the gains I made.  From the age of 6 to the age of 57, I deteriorated.  Then I amazingly began to improve, reversing a pattern which had held constant for 51 years.  Then you began to wound and injure me.  You have made a good job of it.  I am again on the old path downward into more and more suffering.  

You make a great show of your faith.  So I must ask,  is this what a Christian does?  When did Christ say, "Blessed are the vengeful."?  Where does the Bible, Old or New Testament, allow a daughter to injure her father so harshly?  Did He not say that a good tree cannot bear bad fruit?  Yet the fruit of your actions is suffering and injury.  How is it that such a devout Christian daughter is so cruel?

I love you, and I always will.  I want only peace and joy for you.  I most definitely do not want justice for you.  You have sown the wind, but I pray that you will never reap the whirlwind.  Why do you do harm to me?  Does it please you to know how much you have injured me?  If you have a sense of shame, if you regret your rage, then put it out of your house. Say what you will, put on a fine Christian costume, but your actions are what matters.  Be not a whited sepulcher, but a living testament to love, forgiveness, and obedience.

It is too late to undo the suffering you have already inflicted, but you can stop inflicting more.  You can turn away from harming and turn to healing. You can stop looking like a Christian and start living like one.

I love you.  Please stop hurtling me.  My body already makes my life painful and hard enough you do not need to make things worse.  

Please stop hurting me.

Love,

Daddy

A Letter to My Prodigal Daughter. 8-5-12

A Letter to My Prodigal Daughter.                                                       8-5-12

Since you have not responded to my pleas for you to stop hurting me by trying to force me to choose between you and my other children, between my grandchildren;  I will try a new path.  Every Sunday, I will write a letter to you.  Each will always bear the same message.  It is that I have never deliberately hurt you or caused you suffering. It is that it is wrong for you to try to force me to make a choice between my children and between my grandchildren.  It is that the only choice I can make is to choose all of you.  It is that you have no right to continue to hurt me and that you should stop doing so.

Since you have not responded to my private pleas, I will publish each letter on my blog in hopes that you will forebear from a public act, where you refuse to do so behind closed doors.

This Sabbath, I send you a poem.  

This is the fruit your actions have borne.  It is not sweet.

Ego sum omnes -- primus

I am the blood upon the altar
The stain upon the stone
Flies cluster thick to feed on me
I feed them with myself

I brown and darken on the rock
I spread my way across the stair
My gift of life is to the sun
And to his mother, time

Atop the empty temple steps
Lie the masks of breath and heart
In the jungle green with life
infested with genetic code

Peace and comfort that I sought
Were cut from me without consent
You the knife to make me bleed
Then the knapper of the flint

I am the rock that will endure
Only I can cut myself
Bits of me shaped into wedge
To make the stone to bleed

I cannot hate myself reborn
Resurrected in the time to come
I can only lie and die
Bled out by my own love

But I cannot die and then be dead
I am Prometheus renewed
I am the altar,  I am the stone
I am the knife, and you the knapper

Temple, altar, blood am I
The victim and the stage
Knife, knapper, priestess, You
Serving strange and thirsty gods

I am support and I am base
I lift you up above the earth
I hold you down below the sky
This is what I do, this is what I am

I am the blood upon the altar
The stain upon the stone
I brown and darken on the rock
I spread my way across the stair


--I remind everyone that the contents of this blog are protected under the 
laws of copyright.  They are the property of the author.--