Reading Old Messages Quotes

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

Keep that red-haired girl of yours in the open air all summer and don't let her read books until she gets more spring into her step." This message frightened Marilla wholesomely. She read Anne's death warrant by consumption in it unless it was scrupulously obeyed. As a result, Anne had the golden summer of her life as far as freedom and frolic went. She walked, rowed, berried, and dreamed to her heart's content; and when September came she was bright-eyed and alert, with a step that would have satisfied the Spencervale doctor and a heart full of ambition and zest once more. "I just feel like studying with might and main," she declared as she brought her books down from the attic. "Oh, you good old friends, I'm glad to see your honest face once more - yes, even you, geometry.

If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

A retired rabbi—the friend of a friend—writes me an email out of the blue about how he lost his mother when he was nine years old. In the message, he lists all the things he remembers about his mom and all the ways she remains in his life: her favorite flower, the books she read him, her sense of humor. “She is far from a hole in my life. She is an enormous presence that can never be replaced.” His words are a gift that I pull out some nights and let swirl through the room, brush over my skin like a tincture.

A 22-year-old woman who spends six months backpacking across Asia sends a powerful message about her curiosity, open-mindedness, and even courage. Similar (if weaker) signals can be bought for less time and money simply by eating strange foods, watching foreign films, and reading widely.

Dear Jim." The writing grew suddenly blurred and misty. And she had lost him again--had lost him again! At the sight of the familiar childish nickname all the hopelessness of her bereavement came over her afresh, and she put out her hands in blind desperation, as though the weight of the earth-clods that lay above him were pressing on her heart. Presently she took up the paper again and went on reading: "I am to be shot at sunrise to-morrow. So if I am to keep at all my promise to tell you everything, I must keep it now. But, after all, there is not much need of explanations between you and me. We always understood each other without many words, even when we were little things. "And so, you see, my dear, you had no need to break your heart over that old story of the blow. It was a hard hit, of course; but I have had plenty of others as hard, and yet I have managed to get over them,--even to pay back a few of them,--and here I am still, like the mackerel in our nursery-book (I forget its name), 'Alive and kicking, oh!' This is my last kick, though; and then, tomorrow morning, and--'Finita la Commedia!' You and I will translate that: 'The variety show is over'; and will give thanks to the gods that they have had, at least, so much mercy on us. It is not much, but it is something; and for this and all other blessings may we be truly thankful! "About that same tomorrow morning, I want both you and Martini to understand clearly that I am quite happy and satisfied, and could ask no better thing of Fate. Tell that to Martini as a message from me; he is a good fellow and a good comrade, and he will understand. You see, dear, I know that the stick-in-the-mud people are doing us a good turn and themselves a bad one by going back to secret trials and executions so soon, and I know that if you who are left stand together steadily and hit hard, you will see great things. As for me, I shall go out into the courtyard with as light a heart as any child starting home for the holidays. I have done my share of the work, and this death-sentence is the proof that I have done it thoroughly. They kill me because they are afraid of me; and what more can any man's heart desire? "It desires just one thing more, though. A man who is going to die has a right to a personal fancy, and mine is that you should see why I have always been such a sulky brute to you, and so slow to forget old scores. Of course, though, you understand why, and I tell you only for the pleasure of writing the words. I loved you, Gemma, when you were an ugly little girl in a gingham frock, with a scratchy tucker and your hair in a pig-tail down your back; and I love you still. Do you remember that day when I kissed your hand, and when you so piteously begged me 'never to do that again'? It was a scoundrelly trick to play, I know; but you must forgive that; and now I kiss the paper where I have written your name. So I have kissed you twice, and both times without your consent. "That is all. Good-bye, my dear" Then am I A happy fly, If I live Or if I die

Ancient Gnostic sects held that the god of the Old Testament was the Devil, and the Bible his evil message to corrupt humanity. Can anyone doubt that they were right? Read the Bible for yourself. Learn the horrific truth. The Abrahamic faiths are Satanic.

Look, old monk. You can’t ruin this. It’s my Alphatech, too. Ren. The next text-message comes. Manage. I’m busy—Yuan thinks the reply. The CRAB in his wrist reads his thoughts and sends it to Ren, adding the signature YY at the end. YY—everyone knows it’s the signature of the founder of Alphatech, the signature of the monk war hero.

I want to wash your hair with a shampoo that smells like fruit - mango, or strawberries. I want to walk on a beach with you, dragging a big stick behind us, making a message in the sand that we try to believe an airplane will really see. I want to kiss saltwater from your lips. I want us to listen to music with our eyes closed; I want to read musty books while lying next to you - books about fascinating things like mummies and eccentric artists and old shipwrecks in the Pacific. I want to have picnics on our bed and crawl into cotton sheets that smell like summer because we left the windows open when we were gone. I want to wake in the night with you and marvel at the stars and try to find the moon through the trees. I want all the sweet things in life. But only by your side.

He read the message again. He sat down on the bed, breathing and staring; thinking first the old selfish child’s thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will it affect me now that the earliest and strongest of protections is gone?

The word spread. It began with the techno-literates: young summoners who couldn’t quite get their containment circles right and who had fallen back on Facebook to keep themselves occupied while the sacred incense was cooked in their mum’s microwaves; eager diviners who scoured the internet for clues as to the future of tomorrow, and who read the truth of things in the static at the corners of the screen; bored vampires who knew that it was too early to go out and hunt, too late still to be in the coffin. The message was tweeted and texted onwards, sent out through the busy wires of the city, from laptop to PC, PC to Mac, from mobile phones the size of old breeze blocks through to palm-held devices that not only received your mail, but regarded it as their privilege to sort it into colour-coordinated categories for your consideration. The word was whispered between the statues that sat on the imperial buildings of Kingsway, carried in the scuttling of the rats beneath the city streets, flashed from TV screen to TV screen in the flickering windows of the shuttered electronics stores, watched over by beggars and security cameras, and the message said: We are Magicals Anonymous. We are going to save the city.

As a volunteer reader to the blind, Babette had some reservations about the old gent's appetite for the unspeakable and seamy, believing that the handicapped were morally bound to higher types of entertainment. If we couldn't look to them for victories of the human spirit, who could we look to? They had an example to set just as she did as a reader and morale-booster. But she was professional in her duty, reading to him with high earnestness, as to a child, about dead men who leave messages on answering machines.

This is an age-old fantasy. I remember reading a quote from the apologist Edward John Carnell in Ian Murray’s biography of the Welsh preacher David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. During the formative years of Fuller Theological Seminary, Carnell said regarding evangelicalism, “We need prestige desperately.” Christians have worked hard to position themselves in places of power within the culture. They seek influence academically, politically, economically, athletically, socially, theatrically, religiously, and every other way, in hopes of gaining mass media exposure. But then when they get that exposure—sometimes through mass media, sometimes in a very broad-minded church environment—they present a reinvented designer pop gospel that subtly removes all of the offense of the gospel and beckons people into the kingdom along an easy path. They do away with all that hard-to-believe stuff about self-sacrifice, hating your family, and so forth. The illusion is that we can preach our message more effectively from lofty perches of cultural power and influence, and once we’ve got everybody’s attention, we can lead more people to Christ by taking out the sting of the gospel and nurturing a user-friendly message. But to get to these lofty perches, “Christian” public figures water down and compromise the truth; then, to stay up there, they cave in to pressure to perpetuate false teaching so their audience will stay loyal.

If you have read many adventure novels, you'll know that spies spend about half of their time in the sewers. They run along sewer tunnels, shooting. They find secret hideaways in sewers. They take weird funeral barges through sewers, poled along by old men in hoods. In fact, if a spy's kid wants to get a message to their mom or dad, the easiest way to do it is just to flush it down the toilet.

Revelation 12:11 "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death ". I would like you to read this message with rapt attention, so that you can key in to what God intends to do through this miracle power. The verse above is a very interesting part of the Bible; it gives us weapons and it would be good, if you could memorise it and appropriate it to yourself. There is a weapon that has never lost its power, but people have not learnt to use it; whereas, it is highly effective. Even the enemy is afraid, when you start to talk about it. That old serpent, the dragon, that the Bible talks about, saying: "Woe unto the earth and the sea ... " There is a weapon that can overcome it. There is nothing that God created, that He cannot rearrange; there is no enemy that God cannot defeat. A two-year old girl learnt this song and was always singing it: "There is power, there is power, there is power in the Blood of Jesus." Her mother noticed that she never took ill. One day, the mother washed the girl's clothes and hung them outside. There was a high wind, which blew her small panty to the compound next to theirs and it landed in the sitting room of a neighbour, who was a herbalist. Immediately the panty landed, there was pandemonium in the room; everything turned upside down. Everything he knew how to do failed; nothing could avail for him. He did his consultation and he found out that there

This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.

The humiliation and the sleepless nights. When I couldn’t breathe, because he didn’t reply. How I cried when I typed. I wrote to him when my puppy died, about the bully and the stalker. It was like a storm that took away January, February, and March. And when months were gone, I was all alone, trying to fix new and old scars. I was trying so hard to hide the stains, but they just got blue and dark. The letters I wrote and the messages I sent. I’m glad his reply never came. I wish he loses me without even having me. I wish he loses all of me, the clingy me, the needy me, the broken me, and also the happy me…and I suppose when he’ll lose all of me, I’ll forget him too. There’s one thing that is sadder than losing someone you’ve been waiting for all your life…it’s losing them, and not even realizing you had them. I wish, Siddhartha never reads the book and the songs and the letters…he doesn’t deserve them.

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.

Their avatars all sat motionless, with their eyes closed. This was a signal that they were “engaged,” meaning they were currently on phone calls, browsing the Web, or logged into chat rooms. It was poor OASIS etiquette to try to talk to an engaged avatar. They usually just ignored you, and you’d get an automated message telling you to piss off. I took a seat at my desk and tapped the Engage icon at the edge of my display. My own avatar’s eyes slid shut, but I could still see my surroundings. I tapped another icon, and a large two-dimensional Web browser window appeared, suspended in space directly in front of me. Windows like this one were visible to only my avatar, so no one could read over my shoulder (unless I selected the option to allow it). My homepage was set to the Hatchery, one of the more popular gunter message forums. The Hatchery’s site interface was designed to look and operate like an old pre-Internet dial-up bulletin

Contemporary literature is a world I know little of. My father has taken me to task on this topic many times during our daily talks about books. He reads as much as I do, but more widely, and I have great respect for his opinions. He has described in precise, measured words the beautiful desolation he feels at the close of novels where the message is that there is no end to human suffering, only endurance. He has spoken of endings that are muted, but which echo longer in the memory than louder, more explosive denouements. He has explained why it is that ambiguity touches his heart more nearly than the death and marriage style of finish I prefer. During these talks, I listen with the gravest attention and nod my head, but I always continue in my old habits. Not that he blames me for it. There is one thing on which we are agreed: there are far too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

The areas of the cortex responsible for attention and self-regulation develop in response to the emotional interaction with the person whom we may call the mothering figure. Usually this is the birth mother, but it may be another person, male or female, depending on circumstances. The right hemisphere of the mother’s brain, the side where our unconscious emotions reside, programs the infant’s right hemisphere. In the early months, the most important communications between mother and infant are unconscious ones. Incapable of deciphering the meaning of words, the infant receives messages that are purely emotional. They are conveyed by the mother’s gaze, her tone of voice and her body language, all of which reflect her unconscious internal emotional environment. Anything that threatens the mother’s emotional security may disrupt the developing electrical wiring and chemical supplies of the infant brain’s emotion-regulating and attention-allocating systems. Within minutes following birth, the mother’s odors stimulate the branching of millions of nerve cells in the newborn’s brain. A six-day-old infant can already distinguish the scent of his mother from that of other women. Later on, visual inputs associated with emotions gradually take over as the major influences. By two to seven weeks, the infant will orient toward the mother’s face in preference to a stranger‘s — and also in preference to the father’s, unless the father is the mothering adult. At seventeen weeks, the infant’s gaze follows the mother’s eyes more closely than her mouth movements, thus fixating on what has been called “the visible portion of the mother’s central nervous system.” The infant’s right brain reads the mother’s right brain during intense eye-to-eye mutual gaze interactions. As an article in Scientific American expressed it, “Embryologically and anatomically the eye is an extension of the brain; it is almost as if a portion of the brain were in plain sight.” The eyes communicate eloquently the mother’s unconscious emotional states.

It is not enough to live here and now. Not enough for me, anyway. I need those imaginative leaps out of my own time frame and into other places - places where things were done differently. Reading has provided me with that, for the most part, but it is objects, things like these scraps of pottery, that have most keenly conjured up all those elsewheres - inaccessible but eerily available to the imagination. The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalizing messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle. Two leaping fish from twelfth-century Cairo. I can't begin to understand what that time was like, or how the men who made them lived, but I can know that it all happened - that old Cairo existed, and a particular potter. To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece - and all those other sherds in the cake tin - expands my concept of time. There is a further dimension to memory; it is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant. And all because fragments of detritus survive, and I can consider them.

There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general, and Sunday school in particular, kids today are losing their innocence before they should, that because of cartoons and Ken Starr and curricula about their classmates who have two mommies, youth learn too soon about sex and death. Well, like practically everyone else in the Western world who came of age since Gutenberg, I lost my innocence the old-time-religion way, by reading the nursery rhyme of fornication that is the Old Testament and the fairy tale bloodbath that is the New. Job taught me Hey! Life's not fair! Lot's wife taught me that I'm probably going to come across a few weird sleazy things I won't be able to resist looking into. And the book of Revelation taught me to live in the moment, if only because the future's so grim. Being a fundamentalist means going straight to the source. I was asked to not only read the Bible, but to memorize Bible verses. If it wasn't for the easy access to the sordid Word of God I might have had an innocent childhood. Instead, I was a worrywart before my time, shivering in constant fear of a god who, from what I could tell, huffed and puffed around the cosmos looking like my dad did when my sister refused to take her vitamins that one time. God wasn't exactly a children's rights advocate. The first thing a child reading the Bible notices is that you're supposed to honor your mother and father but they're not necessarily required to reciprocate. This was a god who told Abraham to knife his boy Isaac and then at the last minute, when the dagger's poised above Isaac's heart, God tells Abraham that He's just kidding. This was a god who let a child lose his birthright because of some screwball mix-up involving fake fur hands and a bowl of soup. This was a god who saw to it that his own son had his hands and feet nailed onto pieces of wood. God, for me, was not in the details. I still set store by the big Judeo-Christian messages. Who can argue with the Ten Commandments? Don't kill anybody: don't mess around with other people's spouses: be nice to your mom and dad. Fine advice. It was the minutiae that nagged me.

Turning, she smiled with genuine affection at Lord Marchman and offered him her hand through the open window of the coach. “Thank you,” she said shyly but with great sincerity, “for being all the things you are, my lord.” His face scarlet with pleasure at her compliment, John Marchman stepped back and watched her coach pull out of his drive. He watched it until the horses turned onto the road, then he slowly walked back toward the house and went into his study. Sitting down at his desk, he looked at the note he’d written her uncle and idly drummed his fingers upon his desk, recalling her disturbing answer when he asked if she’d dissuaded old Belhaven from pressing his suit. “I think I have,” she’d said. And then John made his decision. Feeling rather like an absurd knight in shining armor rushing to save an unwilling damsel in the event of future distress, he took out a fresh sheet of paper and wrote out a new message to her uncle. As it always happened the moment courtship was involved, Lord Marchman lost his ability to be articulate. His note read: If Belhaven asks for her, please advise me of it. I think I want her first.

Eeh, but whah’s the use, the fuckin’ use?” Dixon resting his head briefly tho’ audibly upon the Table. “It’s over . . . ? Nought left to us but Paper-work . . . ?” Their task has shifted, from Direct Traverse upon the Line to Pen-and-Paper Representation of it, in the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia, strain’d thro’ twelve-by-twelve Sash-work, as in the spectreless Light of the Candles in their Rooms, suffering but the fretful Shadows of Dixon at the Drafting Table, and Mason, seconding now, reading from Entries in the Field-Book, as Dixon once minded the Clock for him. Finally, one day, Dixon announces, “Well,— won’t thee at least have a look . . . ?” Mason eagerly rushes to inspect the Map of the Boundaries, almost instantly boggling, for there bold as a Pirate’s Flag is an eight-pointed Star, surmounted by a Fleur-de-Lis. “What’s this thing here? pointing North? Wasn’t the l’Grand flying one of these? Doth it not signify, England’s most inveterately hated Rival? France?” “All respect, Mason,— among Brother and Sister Needle-folk in ev’ry Land, ’tis known universally, as the ‘Flower-de-Luce.’ A Magnetickal Term.” “ ‘Flower of Light’? Light, hey? Sounds Encyclopedistick to me, perhaps even Masonick,” says Mason. A Surveyor’s North-Point, Dixon explains, by long Tradition, is his own, which he may draw, and embellish, in any way he pleases, so it point where North be. It becomes his Hall-Mark, personal as a Silver-Smith’s, representative of his Honesty and Good Name. Further, as with many Glyphs, ’tis important ever to keep Faith with it,— for an often enormous Investment of Faith, and Will, lies condens’d within, giving it a Potency in the World that the Agents of Reason care little for. “ ’Tis an ancient Shape, said to go back to the earliest Italian Wind-Roses,” says Dixon, “— originally, at the North, they put the Letter T, for Tramontane, the Wind that blew down from the Alps . . . ? Over the years, as ever befalls such frail Bric-a-Brack as Letters of the Alphabet, it was beaten into a kind of Spear-head,— tho’ the kinder-hearted will aver it a Lily, and clash thy Face, do tha deny it.” “Yet some, finding it upon a new Map, might also take it as a reassertion of French claims to Ohio,” Mason pretends to remind him. “Aye, tha’ve found me out, I confess,— ’tis a secret Message to all who conspire in the Dark! Eeh! The old Jesuit Canard again!

Where is everyone?" Alec shrugged, striding across the hall as if he owned the place, which Magnus supposed he sort of did. "I expect everyone's off gathering gear and weapons. We should just go find my mother." "How do you propose to find her?" Magnus said. "Ah," said Alec, "the Institute has a very old magic woven into its walls. I shall now use it to commune with my mother, wherever she might be found." He put his hands around his mouth and bellowed at the top of his lungs. "MOOOOOOOOOM!" Alec's voice reverberated impressively against the stone walls. Max giggled and yelled, "Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" alongside Alec. The sound faded away and Magnus waited. "Well?" he said, and Alec held up a finger. After a moment, there was a flare, and a fire-message appeared in front of him. He plucked it from the air and opened it, giving Magnus a superior look. "'She's in the library,'" he read. A second fire-message appeared, in the same spot as the first. Alec opened it. "'Did you know you can send fire-messages within the Institute?'" he read. "'I just found out.'" He looked at Magnus in bewilderment. "Of course I knew that." "To the library, then?" said Magnus. A third fire-message appeared. Max lunged to try to grab it, but it was too far above his head. Magnus grabbed that one and read, "'I love fire-messages, have a great day, your friend, Simon Lovelace, Shadowhunter.' Can we go?" They heard a fourth one burst behind them as they left by the hall door, but neither of them looked back at it.

Somewhere Across the Universe, This Intergalactic Fairytale Is Being Told In the far corner of the Virgo supercluster, a small galaxy called the Milky Way exists, and in one of the further spirals of that galaxy there is said to be a tiny planet called Earth. At a cursory glance, there is nothing seemingly unique about this planet, even though it is simply beautiful, cloaked in calypso blue with an oscillating belt of green. It is, in fact, one of millions like it that live in just this universe.   The extraordinary thing about this planet though, are the beings that exist on it. They have been through war after war. Empires that promised to burn brighter than their resident star, the sun, and disappeared in the blink of an eye. Savage rulers, dictators have destroyed entire portions of it, and yet … they simply refuse to stop existing, it is like they have this treasured thing within them to keep them surviving, and to keep knowing.   Look closer now, oh passer-by, look closer at these beings. They are survivors with a sense of awe and curiosity at everything around them. Sometimes they have lost their way, but this is a thing they never seem to lose, because they are so full of potential.   Promise. This planet may be called Earth, but it should have been called Promise.   If you do not believe this little story, and dismiss it as a silly old wives’ tale, a thing which cannot possibly exist, then I hope you come upon their legendary message. You see, 40 years ago, these beings sent out a message on a space probe that has travelled 20.5 billion kilometres, hoping to meet one of us in space. In it lies a message, the definition of this entire species, and it reads simply:   ‘This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.’   The Voyager is still out there, waiting for someone to come upon it. Maybe that someone is you. Maybe you will remind that species of the greatness that lies in their potential, their promise. Maybe you will be the being that turns that fairytale planet of promise into an intergalactic legend of green and blue.

After the Grand Perhaps” After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorexics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid & sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has been packed with tins & other tangibles, after the barn boys have woken, startled by foxes & fire, warm in their hay, every part of them blithe & smooth & touchable, after the little vandals have tilted toward the impossible seduction to smash glass in the dark, getting away with the most lethal pieces, leaving the shards which travel most easily through flesh as message on the bathroom floor, the parking lots, the irresistible debris of the neighbor’s yard where he’s been constructing all winter long. After the pain has become an old known friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it. The power of fright, I think, is as much as magnetic heat or gravity. After what is boundless: wind chimes, fertile patches of the land, the ochre symmetry of fields in fall, the end of breath, the beginning of shadow, the shadow of heat as it moves the way the night heads west, I take this road to arrive at its end where the toll taker passes the night, reading. I feel the cupped heat of his left hand as he inherits change; on the road that is not his road anymore I belong to whatever it is which will happen to me. When I left this city I gave back the metallic waking in the night, the signals of barges moving coal up a slow river north, the movement of trains, each whistle like a woodwind song of another age passing, each ambulance would split a night in two, lying in bed as a little girl, a fear of being taken with the sirens as they lit the neighborhood in neon, quick as the fire as it takes fire & our house goes up in night. After what is arbitrary: the hand grazing something too sharp or fine, the word spoken out of sleep, the buckling of the knees to cold, the melting of the parts to want, the design of the moon to cast unfriendly light, the dazed shadow of the self as it follows the self, the toll taker’s sorrow that we couldn’t have been more intimate. Which leads me back to the land, the old wolves which used to roam on it, the one light left on the small far hill where someone must be living still. After life there must be life.

Sorrow walked in my clothes before I did. Flocks of shadows followed me. One night I looked at the stars I thought were gods until they disappeared. Some say I smashed my father’s idols and walked away. Or walked towards a desert of barren promises. Or promises that are hummingbirds hovering for a moment then drifting away. Even now, walking towards that mountain, sometimes I will watch my shadow sitting beneath a plane tree, casting dice, ignoring my steps. Some of you made me a founder but it was only that shadow. Some of you made me your father, but it was yourselves you were describing. You plant a tree, you dig a well, and it brings life, that’s all. Everything else is the heart’s mirage. Except what begins inside you. Except Sarah. When she stepped inside my dream the curtains shivered, whole mountains entered the room. It always seemed a question of which love to honor. The land I loved fills with fire. Who should we listen to? It’s true, He offered the world and I offered only myself. But I thought His words were coffins. I was frantic for any scrap of shade. Now everything is shade. Your old newspapers are taken up by the wind like pairs of broken wings. Each window, each door is a wound. One track erases another track. One bomb. One rock, one rubber bullet. What can I tell you? Where have you left your own morning of promises? You remember Isaac, maybe Ishmael, but not the love that led me there. Not Sarah. Just to hear the sound of her eyelids opening, or her plants pushing the air aside as they reach for the sun, twilight filling her fingers like fruit. This afternoon a flock of doves settled on my porch. Their silence took the shape of all I ever wanted to say. Today, the miracle you want aches inside the trees. Why believe anything except what is unbelievable? I never thought of it as a trial, not any of it. Now the leaves turn into messages that are simply impossible to read. The roots turn into roads as they break through the surface. How can I even know what I mean? Beneath the hem of night the rain falls asleep on the grass. We have to turn into each other. One heart inside the other’s heart. One love. One word. Inside us, our shadows will walk into water, the water will walk into the sky. Blind. Faithful. Inside us the music turns into a flock of birds. Theirs is a song whose promise we must believe the way the moon believes the earth, the fire believes the wood, that is, for no reason, for no reason at all.

The little sneak caught me one day, coming around the car when I was outside puffing away. “I was wondering what you were doing,” he said, spying me squatting behind the truck. He’d nailed me, but the look on his face made it seem as if our roles were reversed--he looked as if he were in shock, as if I’d just slapped him. When I went back inside, I found he’d taped signs to the walls: DON’T SMOKE! I laugh about it now, but not then. “Why are you so devastated that I’m smoking?” I asked when I found him. “Because. I already lost one parent. I don’t want to lose you, too.” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m going to stop.” But of course it wasn’t nearly that easy. As horrible as I felt, I was deep into the habit. I would quit for a while--a day, an hour--then somehow a cigarette would find its way to my mouth. I continued to rationalize, continued to struggle--and Bubba continued to call me out. “I’m trying,” I told him. “I’m trying.” He’d come up and give me a hug--and smell the cigarette still on me. “Did you have one?” “Yes.” “Hmmmm…” Instant tears. “I’m trying, I’m trying.” One day I went out to the patio to take what turned out to be a super stressful call--and I started to smoke, almost unconsciously. In the middle of the conversation, Bubba came out and threw a paper airplane at me. What!!! My son scrambled back inside. I was furious, but the call was too important to cut short. Wait until I get you, mister! Just as I hung up, Bubba appeared at the window and pointed at the airplane at my feet. I opened it up and read his message. YOU SUCK AT TRYING. That hurt, not least of all because it was true. I tried harder. I switched to organic cigarettes--those can’t be that bad for you, right? They’re organic! Turns out organic tars and nicotine are still tars and nicotine. I quit for day, then started again. I resolved not to go to the store so I couldn’t be tempted…then found myself hunting through my jacket for an old packet, rifling around in my hiding places for a cigarette I’d forgotten. Was that a half-smoked butt I saw on the ground? Finally, I remembered one of the sayings SEALs live by: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Not exactly the conventional advice one uses to stop smoking, but the conventional advice had failed me. For some reason I took the words and tried applying them to my heartbeat, slowing my pulse as it ramped up. It was a kind of mini-meditation, meant to take the place of a cigarette. The mantra helped me take control. I focused on the thoughts that were making me panic, or at least getting my heart racing. Slow is smooth. Slow down, heart. Slow down--and don’t smoke. I worked on my breathing. Slow is smooth. Slow is smooth. And don’t smoke.

I have a friend—she is the kind of friend that all of us have—who is a true believer in astrology and psychic phenomenon, a devotee of reiki, a collector of crystals, a woman who occasionally sends me emails with cryptic titles and a single line of text asking, for example, the time of day that I was born or whether I have any mental associations with moths. None that come immediately to mind, I write back. But then of course moths are suddenly everywhere: on watercolor prints in the windows of art shops, in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, on the pages of the illustrated children’s book I read to my nieces. This woman, whom I have known since I was very young, also experiences strange echoes and patterns, but for her they are not the result of confirmation bias or the brain’s inclination toward narrative. She believes that the patterns are part of the very fabric of reality, that they refer to universal archetypes that express themselves in our individual minds. Transcendent truths, she has told me many times, cannot be articulated intellectually because higher thought is limited by the confines of language. These larger messages from the universe speak through our intuitions, and we modern people have become so completely dominated by reason that we have lost this connection to instinct. She claims to receive many of these messages through images and dreams. In a few cases she has predicted major global events simply by heeding some inchoate sensation—an aching knee, the throbbing of an old wound, a general feeling of unease. This woman is a poet, and I tend to grant her theories some measure of poetic license. It seems to me that beneath all the New Agey jargon, she is speaking of the power of the unconscious mind, a realm that is no doubt elusive enough to be considered a mystical force in its own right. I have felt its power most often in my writing, where I’ve learned that intuition can solve problems more efficiently than logical inference. This was especially true when I wrote fiction. I would often put an image in a story purely by instinct, not knowing why it was there, and then the image would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for some conflict that emerged between the characters—again, something that was not planned deliberately—as though my subconscious were making the connections a step or two ahead of my rational mind. But these experiences always took place within the context of language, and I couldn’t understand what it would mean to perceive knowledge outside that context. I’ve said to my friend many times that I believe in the connection between language and reason, that I don’t believe thought is possible without it. But like many faith systems, her beliefs are completely self-contained and defensible by their own logic. Once, when I made this point, she smiled and said, “Of course, you’re an Aquarius.

How lonely am I ? I am 21 year old. I wake up get ready for college. I go to the Car stop where I have a bunch of accquaintances whom I go to college with. If I'm unfortunately late to the stop, I miss the Car . But the accquaintances rarely halt the car for me. I have to phone and ask them to halt the car. In the car I don't sit beside anyone because the people I like don't like me and vice versa. I get down at college. Attend all the boring classes. I want to skip a class and enjoy with friends but I rarely do so because I don't have friends and the ones I have don't hang out with me. I often look at people around and wonder how everyone has friends and are cared for. And also wonder why I am never cared for and why I am not a priority to anyone. I reach home and rest for few minutes before my mom knocks on my door. I expect her to ask about my day. But she never does. Sometimes I blurt it out because I want to talk to people. I have a different relationship with my dad. He thinks I don't respect him and that I am an arrogant and self centered brat. I am tired of explaining him that I'm not. I am just opinionated. I gave up. Neither my parents nor my sis or bro ask me about my life and rarely share theirs. I do have a best friend who always messages and phones when she has something to say. That would mostly be about his girlfriend . But at times even though I try not to message him of my life. I do. I message him about how lonely I am. I always wanted a guy or a girl best friend. But he or she rarely talk to me. The girl who talk are extremely repulsive or very creepy. And I have a girl who made me believe that I was special for her.She was the only person who made me feel that way. I knew and still know that she is just toying with me. Yet I hope that's not true. I want to be happy and experience things like every normal person. But it seems impossible. And I am tired of being lonely. I once messaged a popular quoran. I complimented him answers and he replied. When I asked him if I can message him and asked him to be my friend he saw the message and chose not to reply. A reply, even a rejection is better than getting ignored. A humble request to people on Quora. For those who advertise to message them regarding any issue should stop doing that if they can't even reply. And for those who follow them. Don't blindly believe people on Quora or IRL Everyone has a mask. I feel very depressed at times and I want to consult a doctor. But I am not financially independent. My family doesn't take me seriously when I tell them I want to visit a doctor. And this is my lonely life. I just wish I had some body who cared for me and to stand by me. I don't know if that is possible. I stared to hate myself. If this continues on maybe I'll be drowning in the river of self hate and depreciation. Still I have hope. Hope is the only thing I have. I want my life to change. If you read the complete answer then, THANKS for your patience. People don't have that these days.

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

He was but three-and-twenty, and had only just learned what it is to love—­to love with that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself. Love of this sort is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling. What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery. And this blessed gift of venerating love has been given to too many humble craftsmen since the world began for us to feel any surprise that it should have existed in the soul of a Methodist carpenter half a century ago, while there was yet a lingering after-glow from the time when Wesley and his fellow-labourer fed on the hips and haws of the Cornwall hedges, after exhausting limbs and lungs in carrying a divine message to the poor. That afterglow has long faded away; and the picture we are apt to make of Methodism in our imagination is not an amphitheatre of green hills, or the deep shade of broad-leaved sycamores, where a crowd of rough men and weary-hearted women drank in a faith which was a rudimentary culture, which linked their thoughts with the past, lifted their imagination above the sordid details of their own narrow lives, and suffused their souls with the sense of a pitying, loving, infinite Presence, sweet as summer to the houseless needy. It is too possible that to some of my readers Methodism may mean nothing more than low-pitched gables up dingy streets, sleek grocers, sponging preachers, and hypocritical jargon—­elements which are regarded as an exhaustive analysis of Methodism in many fashionable quarters. That would be a pity; for I cannot pretend that Seth and Dinah were anything else than Methodists—­not indeed of that modern type which reads quarterly reviews and attends in chapels with pillared porticoes, but of a very old-fashioned kind. They believed in present miracles, in instantaneous conversions, in revelations by dreams and visions; they drew lots, and sought for Divine guidance by opening the Bible at hazard; having a literal way of interpreting the Scriptures, which is not at all sanctioned by approved commentators; and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—­if I have read religious history aright—­faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—­thank Heaven!—­to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour’s child to “stop the fits,” may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost. Considering these things, we can hardly think Dinah and Seth beneath our sympathy, accustomed as we may be to weep over the loftier sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions.

{Excerpt from a message from one of the Cherokee chiefs - Onitositaii, commonly known as Old Tassle} ... 'If, therefore, a bare march, or reconnoitering a country is sufficient reason to ground a claim to it, we shall insist upon transposing the demand, and your relinquishing your settlements on the western waters and removing one hundred miles back towards the east, whither some of our warriors advanced against you in the course of last year's campaign. Let us examine the facts of your present eruption into our country, and we shall discover your pretentions on that ground. What did you do? You marched into our territories with a superior force; our vigilance gave us no timely notice of your manouvres [sic]; your numbers far exceeded us, and we fled to the stronghold of our extensive woods, there to secure our women and children. Thus, you marched into our towns; they were left to your mercy; you killed a few scattered and defenseless individuals, spread fire and desolation wherever you pleased, and returned again to your own habitations. If you meant this, indeed, as a conquest you omitted the most essential point; you should have fortified the junction of the Holstein and Tennessee rivers, and have thereby conquered all the waters above you. But, as all are fair advantages during the existence of a state of war, it is now too late for us to suffer for your mishap of generalship! Again, were we to inquire by what law or authority you set up a claim, I answer, none! Your laws extend not into our country, nor ever did. You talk of the law of nature and the law of nations, and they are both against you. Indeed, much has been advanced on the want of what you term civilization among the Indians; and many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners, and your customs. But, we confess that we do not yet see the propriety, or practicability of such a reformation, and should be better pleased with beholding the good effect of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them, or reading your papers to us upon such subjects. You say: Why do not the Indians till the ground and live as we do? May we not, with equal propriety, ask, Why the white people do not hunt and live as we do? You profess to think it no injustice to warn us not to kill our deer and other game for the mere love of waste; but it is very criminal in our young men if they chance to kill a cow or a hog for their sustenance when they happen to be in your lands. We wish, however, to be at peace with you, and to do as we would be done by. We do not quarrel with you for killing an occasional buffalo, bear or deer on our lands when you need one to eat; but you go much farther; your people hunt to gain a livelihood by it; they kill all our game; our young men resent the injury, and it is followed by bloodshed and war. This is not a mere affected injury; it is a grievance which we equitably complain of and it demands a permanent redress. The Great God of Nature has placed us in different situations. It is true that he has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us to be your slaves. We are a separate people! He has given each their lands, under distinct considerations and circumstances: he has stocked yours with cows, ours with buffaloe; yours with hogs, ours with bear; yours with sheep, ours with deer. He has indeed given you an advantage in this, that your cattle are tame and domestic while ours are wild and demand not only a larger space for range, but art to hunt and kill them; they are, nevertheless, as much our property as other animals are yours, and ought not to be taken away without consent, or for something equivalent.' Those were the words of the Indians. But they were no binding on these whites, who were living beyond words, claims ...

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Adventists urged to study women’s ordination for themselves Adventist Church President Ted N. C. Wilson appealed to members to study the Bible regarding the theology of ordination as the Church continues to examine the matter at Annual Council next month and at General Conference Session next year. Above, Wilson delivers the Sabbath sermon at Annual Council last year. [ANN file photo] President Wilson and TOSC chair Stele also ask for prayers for Holy Spirit to guide proceedings September 24, 2014 | Silver Spring, Maryland, United States | Andrew McChesney/Adventist Review Ted N. C. Wilson, president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, appealed to church members worldwide to earnestly read what the Bible says about women’s ordination and to pray that he and other church leaders humbly follow the Holy Spirit’s guidance on the matter. Church members wishing to understand what the Bible teaches on women’s ordination have no reason to worry about where to start, said Artur A. Stele, who oversaw an unprecedented, two-year study on women’s ordination as chair of the church-commissioned Theology of Ordination Study Committee. Stele, who echoed Wilson’s call for church members to read the Bible and pray on the issue, recommended reading the study’s three brief “Way Forward Statements,” which cite Bible texts and Adventist Church co-founder Ellen G. White to support each of the three positions on women’s ordination that emerged during the committee’s research. The results of the study will be discussed in October at the Annual Council, a major business meeting of church leaders. The Annual Council will then decide whether to ask the nearly 2,600 delegates of the world church to make a final call on women’s ordination in a vote at the General Conference Session next July. Wilson, speaking in an interview, urged each of the church’s 18 million members to prayerfully read the study materials, available on the website of the church’s Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research. "Look to see how the papers and presentations were based on an understanding of a clear reading of Scripture,” Wilson said in his office at General Conference headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. “The Spirit of Prophecy tells us that we are to take the Bible just as it reads,” he said. “And I would encourage each church member, and certainly each representative at the Annual Council and those who will be delegates to the General Conference Session, to prayerfully review those presentations and then ask the Holy Spirit to help them know God’s will.” The Spirit of Prophecy refers to the writings of White, who among her statements on how to read the Bible wrote in The Great Controversy (p. 598), “The language of the Bible should be explained according to its obvious meaning, unless a symbol or figure is employed.” “We don’t have the luxury of having the Urim and the Thummim,” Wilson said, in a nod to the stones that the Israelite high priest used in Old Testament times to learn God’s will. “Nor do we have a living prophet with us. So we must rely upon the Holy Spirit’s leading in our own Bible study as we review the plain teachings of Scripture.” He said world church leadership was committed to “a very open, fair, and careful process” on the issue of women’s ordination. Wilson added that the crucial question facing the church wasn’t whether women should be ordained but whether church members who disagreed with the final decision on ordination, whatever it might be, would be willing to set aside their differences to focus on the church’s 151-year mission: proclaiming Revelation 14 and the three angels’ messages that Jesus is coming soon. 3 Views on Women’s Ordination In an effort to better understand the Bible’s teaching on ordination, the church established the Theology of Ordination Study Committee, a group of 106 members commonly referred to by church leaders as TOSC. It was not organized

MY DAILY WALK How well do you know your Old Testament?     That may seem like an unusual question to ask as you begin reading the New Testament. But you’ll quickly discover that the key to unlocking the New is a foundational knowledge of the Old. In order to persuade his fellow Jews to believe in Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah and King, Matthew used the Old Testament as proof. When Jesus faced the triple temptation by Satan in the wilderness, he quoted Deuteronomy as his basis of defense.     Underline each Old Testament quotation you find in today’s reading. (Hint: watch for such phrases as “this occurred to fulfill the Lord’s message through his prophet.”) Then spend a few extra minutes looking up those Old Testament prophecies that became New Testament realities. Wouldn’t it be fitting to close your time in God’s Word today by thanking God that his centuries-old promises are trustworthy?

Christianity and Judaism place great emphasis on a God of love, although some verses of the Bible appear to really jumble this message. What are we to think of a God who allows – or even orders – some of His holy men to commit mass murder? In Elijah’s slaughter of the Baal priests, he does not even say this was commanded by the Lord as is the justification in some other Old Testament atrocities. Should any serious Bible student just ignore such mayhem? Or should one accept that this is God’s way of punishing the wicked and no man has the right to question His methods? I say this is totally contrary to the action of love. Honesty demands that we recognize that much of the Bible was not inspired by a God of love. A God that commands or disregards mass murder by his holiest people is not a God most people would like to spend eternity with. I think the better view is that God did not inspire the writings of the Bible to any more of a degree than He inspired the writing of this book or any other book. What we read in the Bible came from the thoughts of the biblical authors. Many penned their best understanding of God within the cultural and social fabric of their day and age.

A study of advertising found that the average person in Shanghai saw three times as many advertisements in a typical day as a consumer in London. The market was flooded with new brands seeking to distinguish themselves, and Chinese consumers were relatively comfortable with bold efforts to get their attention. Ads were so abundant that fashion magazines ran up against physical constraints: editors of the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan once had to split an issue into two volumes because a single magazine was too thick to handle. My cell phone was barraged by spam offering a vast range of consumption choices. “Attention aspiring horseback riders,” read a message from Beijing’s “largest indoor equestrian arena.” In a single morning, I received word of a “giant hundred-year-old building made with English craftsmanship” and a “palace-level baroque villa with fifty-four thousand square meters of private gardens.” Most of the messages sold counterfeit receipts to help people file false expense reports. I liked to imagine the archetypal Chinese man of the moment, waking each morning in a giant English building and mounting his horse to cross his private garden, on the way to buy some fake receipts.

Now if we turn to the Book of Revelation—which we saw as a cause of offense in its apparent celebration of a God of violence—we have to say in all honesty that it is in fact a nonviolent New Testament writing, and profoundly so. ‘The Lamb’ is the general symbolic name given to Jesus in the book, mentioned 29 times, an image of nonviolence and the book’s undisputed hero. The essence of the Lamb is not to use violence. When we first hear of it is ‘standing as if it had been slaughtered’ (5:6): it does not fight, it is slaughtered, and it continues exactly ‘as if it were something slaughtered (i.e. it does not lose this identity). Furthermore its followers do not fight, they also are killed. We learn that the Lamb holds the key to human history, opening its seals to reveal its purpose and meaning, including its intense inner violence. The Lamb is able to do this because it represents a completely different human / divine way of responding, other than that of violence. At the same time, precisely because of this revelation, all hell (literally) breaks out around the Lamb. The old world system—the Beast—does not remain indifferent to the introduction of a new way and the absolute challenge it makes, but reacts with continually redoubled violence. At the end of the book there is a final battle when the Beast and the kings of the earth with their armies are all slain by a figure called the Word of God, by the sword which comes from his mouth. But directly afterwards the new earth and the city of the Lamb welcome and heal these very kings and nations which have just been slain! The only figures not to be restored are the Beast and its prophet which represent the system of violence, the imperial order with its ideological apparatus of cult and worship. No doubt there is a powerful tonality of anger running through the book, against the oppression and murder that the Christian communities were then experiencing at the hands of the Roman Empire. And there is pretty clearly a sense of emotional release offered by the images of destruction and vengeance unleashed against the forces of oppression. But the final structure of the book is redemptive and life-giving, and that has to be admitted in any honest assessment. The duality then is not between a vengeful God and a gentle Jesus, or an initially gentle Jesus and then a violent one, but between an actual world and culture of violence and a core message of forgiveness and nonviolence. The early Christians were sorely oppressed by the former and seeking desperately to hang on to the latter. If they use language and symbolism derived from the former to restore hope in the substance of the latter then the tension is literary and poetic, rather than two moods or identities of God. The book of Revelation was intended to have a cathartic effect on emotion, in order that the Christians who read or heard it could arrive, in their minds and hearts, at the transformed perspective where they welcomed and blessed their enemies. In other words it was and is intended to be therapeutic.3 In contrast the split between Jesus and a God of punishment—which came to full growth in the Middle Ages—is ontological, and can only lead to a fundamental division in the Christian soul, with eternal love on the one hand, and eternal violence on the other. In other words, a spiritual schizophrenia. This

First of all I will confess quite simply—I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer. One cannot simply read the Bible, like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only if we seek him, will he answer us. Of course it is also possible to read the Bible like any other book, that is to say from the point of view of textual criticism, etc.; there is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, “pondering them in our heart,” so it will be with the words of the Bible. Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as though in them this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not will to leave us along with our questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible. . . . If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all, it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament. . . .

This was a media beat-up at its very worst. All those officials reacting to what the media labeled “The Baby Bob Incident” failed to understand the Irwin family. This is what we did--teach our children about wildlife, from a very early age. It wasn’t unnatural and it wasn’t a stunt. It was, on the contrary, an old and valued family tradition, and one that I embraced wholeheartedly. It was who we were. To have the press fasten on the practice as irresponsible made us feel that our very ability as parents was being attacked. It didn’t make any sense. This is why Steve never publicly apologized. For him to say “I’m sorry” would mean that he was sorry that Bob and Lyn raised him the way they did, and that was simply impossible. The best he could do was to sincerely apologize if he had worried anyone. The reality was that he would have been remiss as a parent if he didn’t teach his kids how to coexist with wildlife. After all, his kids didn’t just have busy roads and hot stoves to contend with. They literally had to learn how to live with crocodiles and venomous snakes in their backyard. Through it all, the plight of the Tibetan nuns was completely and totally ignored. The world media had not a word to spare about a dry well that hundreds of people depended on. For months, any time Steve encountered the press, Tibetan nuns were about the furthest thing from the reporter’s mind. The questions would always be the same: “Hey, Stevo, what about the Baby Bob Incident?” “If I could relive Friday, mate, I’d go surfing,” Steve said on a hugely publicized national television appearance in the United States. “I can’t go back to Friday, but you know what, mate? Don’t think for one second I would ever endanger my children, mate, because they’re the most important thing in my life, just like I was with my mum and dad.” Steve and I struggled to get back to a point where we felt normal again. Sponsors spoke about terminating contracts. Members of our own documentary crew sought to distance themselves from us, and our relationship with Discovery was on shaky ground. But gradually we were able to tune out the static and hear what people were saying. Not the press, but the people. We read the e-mails that had been pouring in, as well as faxes, letters, and phone messages. Real people helped to get us back on track. Their kids were growing up with them on cattle ranches and could already drive tractors, or lived on horse farms and helped handle skittish stallions. Other children were learning to be gymnasts, a sport which was physically rigorous and held out the chance of injury. The parents had sent us messages of support. “Don’t feel bad, Steve,” wrote one eleven-year-old from Sydney. “It’s not the wildlife that’s dangerous.” A mother wrote us, “I have a new little baby, and if you want to take him in on the croc show it is okay with me.” So many parents employed the same phrase: “I’d trust my kids with Steve any day.

For a long time I didn’t have a defined Dana doctrine to describe this approach; it was more a ball of string. Then one morning at a hotel I came back to my room for bed after a speaking event, and the hotel staff had placed a Zen card with a Buddhist saying on my pillow (this will make Gutfeld roll his eyes). It read, “Say little. But when you speak, utter gentle words that touch the heart. Be truthful. Express kindness. Abstain from vanity. This is the way.” I had an “Aha!” moment when I read those words, because it captured how I was trying to live my life most productively and happily. I carried the card with me for months until I tacked it in my medicine cabinet, and I still see it every morning and night when I brush my teeth. The card is a little worn, but its message never gets old. In the morning it helps set my intention for the day, and at night it reminds me to forgive myself if I haven’t lived up to it (usually because I’ve let Bob Beckel push my buttons).

Marcel, I know I’m an old woman and as you say a bit of an actress. But please go on pretending. As long as we pretend we escape. Pretend that I love you like a mistress. Pretend that you love me like a lover. Pretend that I would die for you and that you would die for me.’ I read the message again now; I thought it movingly phrased . . . And he had died for her, so perhaps he was no comédien after all. Death is a proof of sincerity.

I read that office workers spend a staggering 28 percent of their office time on email, but I bet I spend more time than that. To make my email habit more convenient, I decided to cut out salutations and closings. I’d fallen into the habit of writing an email like an old-fashioned letter, instead of using the casualness and brevity now appropriate to email. An email that says: Hi Peter—Thanks so much for the link. I’m off to read the article right now. Warmly, Gretchen takes a lot more work than an email that says: Thanks! Off to read the article right now. The first version is more formal and polite, but the second version conveys the same tone and information, and is much quicker to write. It took a surprising amount of discipline to change my response habits. It can be hard to make things easier. I had to push myself to erase the “Hi” and to hit “send” without typing a closing. But before long, it became automatic. Not long after I’d instituted my new convenient email habits, however, I responded to a reader with an email that omitted a salutation and closing, and received a pointed email in return: “I find it really interesting that you don’t say ‘Hi Lisa’ or end your email in any kind of salutation, or say ‘if I have any more questions to drop you a line.’ Please excuse me if this is rude, I am truly just curious. Is this because you are super busy (understandably) or just not your style? I had this preconceived notion after reading your book that your dialogue would be so much more friendly/ happy and personal.” Sheesh. This was nicely put, but clearly the message was “You don’t sound very friendly.” I was taken aback. Should I go back to using more elaborate courtesy? Then I decided—no. I was sorry if I didn’t sound friendly to her, but I wanted to be able to answer emails from readers, and to keep up, I needed to make this work as convenient as possible. My habits had to reflect my values. I wrote her back, very nicely, and without a salutation or closing, to explain.

As the next page loaded with another set of 25 emails, his eyes were drawn to the bottom of the screen, where for the first time previously-read messages stood out beneath the bold-type unread ones.  There was something powerfully sentimental, almost tangible, about the realization that his dad had sat before a computer somewhere ten years earlier and had clicked on these same messages.  The most recent one, received just hours before his parents’ death, was from his mom with the subject line, “re: Li’l Ryan’s Bday”. With a lump developing in his throat, he clicked on the message.  His mom had written: “That’s something dads should talk to their sons about ;)”  Hmm.  Didn’t make sense without context. Below the end of the message he found the option to “show quoted text,”  which he clicked on to reveal the entire exchange in reverse chronological order.  She had been responding to his dad’s message: “I’m sure he’ll get it.  I like the idea, but you better be prepared to have a discussion about the birds and bees.  You know how his mind works.  He’ll want to know how that baby got in there.” Ryan’s palms grew sweaty as he began to infer what was coming next.  Not entirely sure he wanted to continue, but certain he couldn’t stop, he scrolled to the end. The thread had started with his mother’s message, “I’m already showing big-time.  Sweaters only get so baggy, and it’s going to be warming up soon.  I think tonight would be the perfect time to tell Ryan.  I wrapped up a T-shirt for him in one of his presents that says ‘Big Brother’ on it.  A birthday surprise!  You think he’ll get it?” Having trouble taking in a deep breath, he rose to a stand and slowly backed away from his computer.  It wasn’t his nature to ask fate “Why?” or to dwell on whether or not something was “fair.”  But this was utterly overwhelming – a knife wound on top of an old scar that had never sufficiently healed. ~~~ Corbett Hermanson peered around the edge of Bradford’s half-open door and knocked gently on the frame.  Bradford was sitting at his desk, leafing through a thick binder.  He had to have heard the knock, Corbett thought, peeking in, but his attention to the material in the binder remained unbroken. Now regretting his timid first knock, Corbett anxiously debated whether he should knock again, which could be perceived as rude, or try something else to get Bradford’s attention.  Ultimately he decided to clear his throat loudly, while standing more prominently in the doorway. Still, Bradford kept his nose buried in the files in front of him. Finally, Corbett knocked more confidently on the door itself. “What!” Bradford demanded.  “If you’ve got something to say, just say it!” “Sorry, sir.  Wasn’t sure you heard me,” Corbett said, with a nervous chuckle. “Do you think I’m deaf and blind?” Bradford sneered.  “Just get on with it already.” “Well sir, I’m sure you recall our conversation a few days back about the potential unauthorized user in our system?  It turns out...” “Close the door!” Bradford whispered emphatically, waving his arms wildly for Corbett to stop talking and come all the way into his office. “Sorry, sir,” Corbett said, his cheeks glowing an orange-red hue to match his hair.  After self-consciously closing the door behind him, he picked up where he’d left off.  “It turns out, he’s quite good at keeping himself hidden.  I was right about his not being in Indiana, but behind that location, his IP address bounces

Spirits that piggyback may not have been connected here in the physical world, but because they are connected to you, they’re connected on the Other Side when preparing for a group reading. I don’t believe a message has to be from just one soul, especially since they’ve shown me that they work really well as a cluster. Spirit can also come forward, recede, and play off each other’s energy. They channel together like old pros. In my largest venue readings, it’s amazing how organized your family’s souls have been! I also believe Spirit will help orchestrate who comes to the readings and sometimes where they sit. You can’t miss how certain types of deaths—which is how I initially validate your loved ones to you—are seated together, which makes piggybacking easier. In one section of a theater, there will be multiple women who’ve lost children, families whose loved ones had Alzheimer’s, or even friends who’ve died from similar freak accidents like a falling object. It sounds wild, because it is. And Spirit’s behind all of it. What I love most about group readings is that you get to hear so many incredible, compelling messages that you can’t help but feel touched by all of it. I also find that Spirit is a little more fun during group readings, especially during the private, smaller groups. In a room of ten to fifteen people, I can channel anywhere between twenty to forty souls in a two-hour period. But there are so many different, lively, and dynamic personalities around that souls with stronger energy can help those with less to communicate better by letting them use their energy. Sometimes I have souls that channel for an entire hour, and nobody else comes through; other times, a soul might stay for a short time, go away, and then come back and talk a mile a minute! It’s like the soul recharged its batteries. When a reading is over, I can hardly remember what I’ve said, seen, or felt for too long after, because again, they’re not my feelings, thoughts, or emotions. Unless the message is part of a really mind-blowing or emotionally gripping session, whatever information Spirit sends me isn’t something that’s stuck in my head forever. Know too that you take your dead friends and family with you when you leave a session, show, or my house. For some reason, it’s always the husbands who remind me to take all the Spirits with me, and I’m always like, “Listen, pal, they’re not my Spirits. They’re your dead relatives. They’re staying with you. I got my own problems.

#2 Don’t doubt when your loved ones are trying to connect. Everyone connects to their loves ones differently, and you don’t have to be a medium to know that some signs like flickering lights or apparitions in your bedroom are easier to recognize than others. But as you know, seeing a soul in a dream can be a means of connecting that you’re not so sure about the next day. Is it your dead sister’s soul if she was dressed as Cleopatra? Did your son’s spirit visit you in a dream, even if he was babbling about the Red Sox and not giving you a heartfelt message? The whole debate reminds me of that old saying: If a soul appears in a dream, and there’s no medium around to validate it, did it really happen? But I did the best reading where Spirit told me that random dream appearances can be a way of connecting, and the soul is with you at that moment.

When we connect the death of Christ to the Old Testament, as Paul tells us we should,45 we can see the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC as a portent of the cross (both of them acts of human wickedness that were simultaneously the outpouring of God’s judgment), and the return from exile as a portent of the resurrection (and ultimately, in longer prophetic vision, of the new creation). And as we read Lamentations again in the light of that connection, the experiences of Lady Zion (especially in Lam. 1), and the Man (in 3:1–18) find multiple echoes in the passion of Christ.

stamp or where they sealed the envelope?” I asked. “Sure, we’ll check those too. That’s common procedure, but we have nothing to compare it to.” Jack added his two cents. “The message itself sounds kind of like the hell-and-damnation type of speech. Somebody in the clergy or even a religious zealot could have written it.” Clayton slowly read the message out loud again. “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from, Jack. It does sound kind of preachy.” “Yes it does,” I said, “but we still don’t know if it’s a serious threat or just someone blowing smoke.” Clark stood. “Okay, guys, check out whatever you can as far as forensic evidence. Make ten copies of that letter before you get started. The rest of you, keep your eyes and ears peeled for somebody with an ax to grind. That’s all we can do for now.” Chapter 2 The long driveway beyond the dead-end road led to the small, faded clapboard house. The walls inside the home held family secrets that were as dead and buried as the family dog. Nobody spoke of Alice’s incident anymore—it was neatly tucked away, hopefully forgotten, and life carried on. Forced smiles and the cautious daily routine filled the family’s waking hours. Alice’s eyes darted toward Mandy and then at the clock. She watched as her twenty-year-old daughter crossed the living room, barefoot and still wearing her green flannel bathrobe. Mandy took a seat on the old floral couch, as she did every day at eleven o’clock. The dark-paneled living room in that house held the sofa, a rocker, two end tables, and two velvet wall hangings of horses. The sofa had seen better days—sun fading had taken a toll on it after being in front of windows year after year. What used to be vibrant colors on that threadbare couch now appeared as pastel hues at best. Two flattened cushions looked as though somebody had let the air out of them; they held permanent indentions from years of use.

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

Max felt like he was floating on his back in the middle of the ocean without a care in the world as he reached toward Molly and brushed the sea spray from her lips with a tender touch of his thumb. He wanted to bottle this moment, like a handwritten message cast out to see=a, so he could come back to it again and again- the delicious burn of anticipation, the promise of what came next. He remembered an old sea myth he'd read once in one of the duty hardbound books in his uncle's study: a kiss from a mermaid would protect a sailer from drowning. Some even said such a kiss could grant the ability to breathe underwater. Ridiculous, really. A myth wasm by its very nature, false. But the pounding of Max's heart told him he just might be a believer and his mouth lowered toward hers.

On January 30, 1750, Mayhew stood in the pulpit of Boston’s Old West Church and preached on the occasion of the 101st anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. His message from Romans 13, titled “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the High Powers,” became “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America.”2 When published, Mayhew’s sermon spread like electricity through the Colonies. John Adams, fourteen at the time, read it over and over “till the Substance of it, was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”3 Adams later called Mayhew’s sermon “the catechism” for the American Revolution.4 Others have called it “the first volley of the American Revolution, setting forth the intellectual and scriptural justification for rebellion against the crown.”5 In

Dick delves in subsequent letters into the possible Jungian meaning of all this, the significance of ancient Rome in his mystical experiences, and the sibyl as representing his “anima,” the inner source of his own prophetic capacity. Recall here Morgan Robertson’s belief that his own muse was likewise a feminine spirit of some sort. We can observe Dick here beginning to weave these dream images into his evolving self-mythology and what became a major metaphysical strand in his Exegesis, as well as the novel VALIS that was based on his experiences. In his search for a meaning behind all these coincidences—an answer to the question “why me?”—Dick understandably gropes in many different directions for an explanation and attaches great, mostly Jungian significance to the symbols. Yet he does not go down the path of thinking he is simply accessing archetypes in the collective unconscious. Rather, he is drawn to the conclusion that somehow the ancient world is still present, only camouflaged—or indeed, that we are still in it. It all seems to confirm a dream remembered from his youth that was much like the “B___ Grove” dreams, in which he had searched for a story in Astounding Stories called “The Empire Never Ended.” That story, he had felt certain, contained all the mysteries of existence. As a result of some of his visions and experiences in 1974, Dick came to believe he was possibly a reincarnated Christian from ancient Rome.38 We are rewarded best by bracketing the various interpretations, the Exegesis per se, and looking at Dick’s project as a making of something, a creation of meaningful narratives to be read by other people, a reaching out. The term “cry for help” may sound a bit extreme, but it is not. It was during this black period of his life, most specifically in February 1976, when Tessa left him and took their son, that he attempted suicide via drug overdose, slitting his wrists, and carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage, all at the same time. Fortunately, all three plans failed. Setting aside the metaphysics and cosmology, what was Dick trying to say in his writing during this period—to Claudia, to Tessa, to his readers, and to posterity? And what whispered message was he straining to hear from his own precognitive unconscious? Arguably, he wanted to hear the same thing Morgan Robertson managed to hear, loud and clear, when news of the Titanic’s fatal collision with an iceberg splashed across the front page of The New York Times on April 15, 1912. Both in his Exegesis and in his private correspondence with friends like Claudia, Dick flickered between two basic stances on his experience: the secret persistence of the ancient world underneath the veneer of mid-1970s Orange County, and the idea that he was haunting himself from his own future. These are not incompatible ideas in the sense that they both point to our old friend Mister Block Universe, where the past still exists and the future already exists—and by implication, nothing is subject to alteration.

Perfume is to smells what eroticism is to sex: an aesthetic, cultural, emotional elaboration of the raw materials provided by nature. The ladies of the court, led by Marie-Antoinette, resorted to the only thing that could keep them one step ahead of the commoners, however wealthy they were: fashion. In fact, this is how fashion as we know it came into existence: the latest trend adopted by a happy few for a season before trickling down to the middle classes. Just a touch of the negligence etudiee that distinguishes chic Parisian women from their fiercely put-together New Yorker or Milanese counterparts. Perfume needs to be supported by image. You're not just doing it to smell good: you're perpetuating a ritual of erotic magic that's been scaring and enticing men in equal measure for millennia. Perfumes are our subconscious. They read us more revealingly than any other choice of adornment, perhaps because their very invisibility deludes us into thinking we can get away with the message they carry. These scents severed fragrance from its function as an extension of a female or male persona - the rugged guy, the innocent waif or the femme fatale - to turn it into a thing that was beautiful, interesting and evocative in and of itself. Perfume's advertising relies on the 3 aspiration S: stars, sex and seduction, with a side helping of dreams or exoticism. Descriptions, impressions, analogies, short stories, snippets or real-life testing, bits of history, parallels with music or literature. Connecting a scent with emotions, impressions, atmospheres, isn't that why we wear it? Isn't it all subjective? Just because you don't want it in your life doesn't make it bad. And it's not entirely impossible to consider perfumes beyond their "like/don't like" status. What intent does t set out to fulfill? How does it achieve its effects? How does it fit in with the history of the brand or its identity? How does it compare to the current season's offerings? Does it bring something new? The story told by the perfumer blends with the ones we tell ourselves about it; with our feelings, our moods, our references, our understanding of it. Once it is released from the bottle, it becomes a new entity. We make it ours: we are the performers of our perfume. Both lust and luxury are coupled in the same Latin word: luxuria is one of the 7 deadly sins. The age-old fear of female sexuality. The lure of beauty, set off by costly and deceitful adornments, could lead men to material and moral ruin but, more frighteningly, suck them into a vortex of erotic voracity. A man's desire waxes and wanes. But how can a woman, whose pleasure is never certain and whose receptive capacity is potentially infinite, ever be controlled?

As William Bouwsma pointed out, the late medieval and early Renaissance crises of representation did not stall out at their skepticism of the old systems but rather progressed to an even more urgent defense of objective boundaries and quantifiable truths. In “The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century,” Margreta de Grazia has shown how this pursuit of certainty led to a skepticism about language itself that dissociated words from God and deverbalized God’s message, prompting thinkers from Thomas Sprat of the Royal Society to Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Galileo, and Newton to seek certainty in mathematical knowledge; quantifiable, identifiable substances; and trial, experiment, and experience. As Puritan propagandist Vavasor Powell put it in the middle of the seventeenth century, “Experience is like steel to an edged tool, or like salt to fresh meat, it seasons brain- knowledge, and settles a shaking unsetled soule.” Paralleling more secular quests for certainty, the Puritan quest for grounding religious knowledge in a literalist reading of Scripture focused ever more intensely on manifest, genuine experience confirming salvation and the personal application of scriptural truth. The spontaneous “pouring out of the heart” in prayer was just such an evidentiary experience.

As William Bouwsma pointed out, the late medieval and early Renaissance crises of representation did not stall out at their skepticism of the old systems but rather progressed to an even more urgent defense of objective boundaries and quantifiable truths.27 In “The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century,” Margreta de Grazia has shown how this pursuit of certainty led to a skepticism about language itself that dissociated words from God and deverbalized God’s message, prompting thinkers from Thomas Sprat of the Royal Society to Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Galileo, and Newton to seek cer- tainty in mathematical knowledge; quantifiable, identifiable substances; and trial, experiment, and experience.28 As Puritan propagandist Vavasor Powell put it in the middle of the seventeenth century, “Experience is like 42 Rituals of Spontaneity steel to an edged tool, or like salt to fresh meat, it seasons brain- knowledge, and settles a shaking unsetled soule.” Paralleling more sec- ular quests for certainty, the Puritan quest for grounding religious knowledge in a literalist reading of Scripture focused ever more intensely on manifest, genuine experience confirming salvation and the personal application of scriptural truth. The spontaneous “pouring out of the heart” in prayer was just such an evidentiary experience.

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.

The answer is no, they are not all the same. Yes, they have sixty-six books divided into the Old and New Testament, but the King James, the New King James, the New American Standard, and the New International Version are translations. This means the words are translated from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages the Bible was written in. The others, such as the Living Bible, The Message, the New English Version, and all the others out there are someone’s interpretation of an existing translation. In other words, these versions are written from the perspective of what the writer or group of writers thinks is meant rather than what the original words of the text were.

Coming out of the smoking room that evening just before dinner, he again met Captain Smith. The Captain asked if Ismay still had the message, explaining that he wanted to post it for his officers to read. Ismay fished it out of his pocket and returned it without any further conversation. Then the two men continued down to the Á la Carte Restaurant—Ismay to dine alone with the ship’s surgeon, old Dr. O’Laughlin; Smith to join the small party the Wideners were giving in his honor. There’s no evidence that the Baltic’s information was ever noted on the bridge before the whole affair became academic. As for the four other ice messages received on the 14th—those from the Noordam, Amerika, Californian, and Mesaba—none of them were remembered by any of the surviving officers. The Noordam’s warning was acknowledged by Captain Smith, but what he did with it nobody knows. The Californian’s message was received by Second Wireless Operator Harold Bride, who testified that he took it to the bridge but didn’t know whom he gave it to. The Amerika and Mesaba warnings were received by First Wireless Operator John Phillips, but what happened to them remains a mystery.

But Silicon Valley was filling up newspapers with dozens of pages of employment ads. One Atari ad in 1974 read simply, “Have Fun, Make Money.” The day the ad ran, an unkempt eighteen-year-old who had grown up in nearby Cupertino showed up at the front desk of the game maker. He refused to leave without a job. The receptionist relayed the message to a senior engineer and asked whether she should call the cops. Instead the engineer, Al Alcorn, engaged with the “hippie-looking kid,” learning that he was a dropout from the literary Reed College with no formal engineering background but deep enthusiasm for technology. Despite the negatives, Alcorn hired Steve Jobs as a technician at $5 an hour. Atari’s unconventional hiring practices didn’t dissuade Sequoia Capital from making an investment. Neither did Atari’s manufacturing floor: “You go on the factory tour and the marijuana in the air would knock you to your knees—where they were manufacturing the product!” Sequoia’s Don Valentine would note later. Japanese quality control it wasn’t. Still, the venture capitalist took the big picture view to his board duties, suggesting that prudishness would have been futile: “What would I say, get a higher brand of marijuana?” This too was a fundamental shift, the counterculture of San Francisco and Berkeley permeating south. The

But Silicon Valley was filling up newspapers with dozens of pages of employment ads. One Atari ad in 1974 read simply, “Have Fun, Make Money.” The day the ad ran, an unkempt eighteen-year-old who had grown up in nearby Cupertino showed up at the front desk of the game maker. He refused to leave without a job. The receptionist relayed the message to a senior engineer and asked whether she should call the cops. Instead the engineer, Al Alcorn, engaged with the “hippie-looking kid,” learning that he was a dropout from the literary Reed College with no formal engineering background but deep enthusiasm for technology. Despite the negatives, Alcorn hired Steve Jobs as a technician at $5 an hour. Atari’s unconventional hiring practices didn’t dissuade Sequoia Capital from making an investment. Neither did Atari’s manufacturing floor: “You go on the factory tour and the marijuana in the air would knock you to your knees—where they were manufacturing the product!” Sequoia’s Don Valentine would note later. Japanese quality control it wasn’t. Still, the venture capitalist took the big picture view to his board duties, suggesting that prudishness would have been futile: “What would I say, get a higher brand of marijuana?” This too was a fundamental shift, the counterculture of San Francisco and Berkeley permeating south.

I am only offering to my reader an opportunity to expand their thoughts and maybe reach a deeper understanding of a particular word used in our English Bible. To build in you the same desire that this dusty old biblical language teacher has of reaching a deeper understanding of God’s Word through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I do admit to being speculative in many of my conclusions and ask the reader to keep this in mind as they read this book. However, my speculations are based upon my biased personal experience with a God that I believe with all my heart loves me and that I love in return and hold dear as life itself. It would do well for orthodox Christians, those who embrace the Word of God as truly inspired and God-breathed, to follow the ongoing research and latest discoveries from archeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many scholars do this research for academic reasons, and hence the subtle “I love you” message from God may go totally unnoticed to them, but not to one whose heart is seeking those words for the God that they also love.

front-page headline in The New York Times read “SEC Says Teenager Had After-School Hobby: Online Stock Fraud.” The fifteen-year-old New Jersey high school student collected $273,000 in eleven trades. He would first buy a block of stock in a thinly traded company, then flood Internet chat rooms with messages that, say, a $2 stock would be trading at $20 “very soon.” The text here was about as valuable as the message in a fortune cookie. Dr. EMH’s rational all-knowing investors promptly bid up the price, at which point young Mr. Lebed sold. He had opened his brokerage accounts in his father’s name. Lebed settled with the SEC, repaying $273,000 in profits plus $12,000 in interest. It’s not apparent from the stories that any of this money was used to compensate the defrauded investors, whose identity or degree of injury may in any case be impossible to determine. The father’s comment? “So they pick on a kid.

It's not a quote if you want to read but some of it can one understand, and some of can one feels, anyway.. I've always felt like i was one drop in your ocean, like a second choice always, a spare you can use if you bored or not busy.. you never act in disrespectful way but you can do it without let the one you are dealing with know that, they not important but important at the time, you make me feel I'm not worth it but worth it in some positions then when it comes to feelings you run and run, you ignore, you make others your priority, and when it comes to me there is one time i felt i was special to you, the freaking moment i thought i meant something to you, but when your addiction is a specific gender, you will always look for more, and then when one free trial ends.. it's when the time you will be mean and ignorant as everybody do with real feelings.. i saw everything and everything you respond to that gender was the opposite of what you were talk to me, they told they loved you, they told you everything i wanted to tell and you respond to them like there was nothing.. I'm just tired being the second choice for anyone, tired of making relationships with anyone and then they leave what do you except sir when you know someone like me? what do you know even about me? they let you know everything about them in two or three month and i'm letting you know that in a life time.. i think it's the mystery, or as you told me without any thought what that would do to my heart "stop being dramatic", yeah i know when someone is going into a fresh relationship with someone else he try to get rid of that "one who always cared about" in the most ugly phrase, to obvisually make them stop. I've been totally a lollipop person who is "wanty more than needy" but i was never a person who will say bad thing to you face or behind, more than blame myself of everything i thought from the beginning, our first tequila "ah yeah i feel euphoria every time i rewind to that time" I loved you until it filled me and drops out of me, you were never and you never be just a friend as you think, it's my feeling and you gonna be out of it if that oppose my will to love you, i know you liked me but you were to afraid to say that "bfff maybe you have a lot of the gender that you like them too, that you've been afraid to lose, right? but that kind of gender, sir, destroyed this thing i am talking about, they can burn the hell out everything in one night, in one word, in one voice message, they can and they will win" i never wanted to be the kind that play easy you know, i will burn the bridges, i will act as a shitty person, yeah, you replaced me, i put up on the top over myself, you put me last under your ego yourself. But, you will never know the whole puzzle, the missing piece of the "drama" (i hated this word as much as i never say "the hate word" for anything, but i really do, maybe i told you i hate Arial font once, yeah i remember). Your tall hair, your gaze, your angry mean face when you look at your friend, i never saw you but i wish you were here so i can confirm my vision and illusions and the nights i spend alone imaging you, and confirming to my endless dreams hugging you and endlessly speaking with you about everything. I don't want the bitches to see this but f that, and if you a one of his and saw that, please grab your teeth more on him, please you gonna win, work a bit more hard on that, and you sir.. i'll just stop and see what will happens, even though i'm a very pessimistic person who will already know that nothing will happen and like every ???? relationship it will be dead at the end and you going to love others and forget about me, years are all shit number so i don't care about number, maybe i was too old for you and they were young and ripe.. i don't know what go around that head, the head i really wanted.. maybe i'm going to know more heads in my life, but for now, i'm done.

One study demonstrated the impacts of touch and voice on stressed and upset children. The study was focused on seven-and-a-half-year-old children and their mothers. The experiment required the children to complete extremely difficult exams, exams that they could not pass. After failing the exam the child was randomised to one of four conditions: be comforted by their mother in person, be comforted by their mother over the phone, be comforted by their mother via text message, or be left alone. When the mothers comforted their child they had all been told to say the same thing. The study measured the child's comfort in those four conditions by measuring reductions in cortisol and releases in oxytocin. What the study found was remarkable: when the child was able to be with their mother in person or speak to their mother over the phone, cortisol significantly reduced, and oxytocin was released. Text messaging their mother and reading her text response did nothing. The impact was the same as when they were just left alone. Striking. Our bodies are simply designed to respond to touch, smells and vocal tones. Text messages have none of that.

The Chinese Revolution—they wanted land. They threw the British out, along with the Uncle Tom Chinese. Yes, they did. They set a good example. When I was in prison, I read an article—don't be shocked when I say that I was in prison. You're still in prison. That's what America means: prison. When I was in prison, I read an article in Life magazine showing a little Chinese girl, nine years old, her father was on his hands and knees and she was pulling the trigger because he was an Uncle Tom Chinaman. When they had the revolution over there, they took a whole generation of Uncle Toms and just wiped them out. And within ten years that little girl became a full-grown woman. No more Toms in China. And today it's one of the toughest, roughest, most feared countries on this earth—by the white man. Because there are no Uncle Toms over there.

Professional communications had always been about the attempt to generate memes, to make a message viral; abnorms just took that to a higher level. Back when he’d been a DAR agent, Cooper had read a brief arguing memetics was the most dangerous gift. As politicians had long known, people preferred short, catchy answers to complex ones, even if the short answers were oversimplified to the point of ridiculousness. Phrases like “old-world thinking” could be as devastating as a bomb, and much farther ranging.

The reason why we find comfort and hope in the Old Testament is plainly revealed by Christ when, in His reply to the Jews, He gave the Divine sanction to it, and especially to the writings of Moses, saying, “Ye search the Scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life; and these are they which bear witness of Me.” “For if ye believed Moses, ye would believe Me; for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?” John 5.39,46,47, R.V. We may find comfort and hope in the Scriptures, because Christ is in them. The spirit of the Old Testament is the Spirit of Christ. We read of the ancient prophets that they searched “what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.” 1Peter 1.11. Not only so, but the Old Testament contains the Gospel. In the verse following the one last quoted we read, “Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the Gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven.” That is, the prophets, Moses among them, ministered the very same things that were preached by the apostles, namely, the Gospel. Since the Gospel of God is “concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord,” Romans 1.1-3 and the Jews would necessarily have believed in Jesus if they had believed Moses, because Moss wrote of Christ, it follows that what Moses wrote was the Gospel. The first thing that Moses wrote, through the inspiration of the Spirit of God, was the story of creation. That, therefore, is one of the things through which we are to receive hope and comfort. We can receive hope and comfort through the story of the creation because it contains the Gospel. A few words will serve to establish this fact before we proceed to study the lesson in detail. The declaration of the apostle, that the Gospel “is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth,” Romans 1.16 is familiar to all who have ever heard the Gospel preached. The Gospel is the manifestation of God’s power put forth to save men. The Apostle Peter states the same thing in substance when he speaks of the inheritance reserved in heaven for those “who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.” 1 Peter 1.5 But what is the measure of the power of God? Wherein is it seen in a tangible form? Read Romans 1.20, where we are told that ever since the creation of the world the invisible things of God, even His eternal power and Godhead, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. It is in creation, therefore, that the power of God is to be seen by everybody. But the power of God in the line of salvation is the Gospel. Therefore the works of creation teach the Gospel. This is declared in Psalm 19, where we read, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech or language; without these their voice is heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” I have given the rendering of the margin, as conforming more closely to the original. The idea is, that no matter what language a people speaks, all can understand the language of the heavens. Their message can be read much more easily than if they uttered an audible sound; for all people on earth cannot understand the same articulate speech, but all who have reason can read the simple language of the works of God.

I drifted over to the bulletin board and read '"Don't think there are no crocodiles just because the water is calm" - Malayan Proverb.' Just beside that was, "' If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles," - Sun Tzu." It made me a little sad. In the good old days, Rachel would have had a bunch of quotes about being a good person or whatever. It just showed how much our lives had changed. In a very short time we had all grown accustomed to a world of fear and danger. We had arrived at Rachel's house separately. We had each checked to make sure we weren't being followed. We had planed the afternoon in advance to be sure that Rachel's mom and her two sisters would be out. We had even had Tobias fly over the area looking for anything unusual. That's what our lives had become. That and quotations full of paranoia and battle. -Animorphs #4, The Message page 10

tough message of Lolly Willowes is that women turn witch to show their ‘scorn of pretending life’s a safe business’. Laura comes to feel part of a community of angry, outsider women: ‘When I think of witches,’ she says, ‘I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded … Nothing for them except subjugation and plaiting their hair … But they must be active.’ Yes we must.

When the company had passed on, Rising Hawk laid the deer carcass on the ground at her feet. “This is for Polly,” he said shyly. “It is unthinkable for a bridegroom to claim his bride without proof of his hunting skill. The deer around here are not well. Your winter must have been bad, like ours. This was the best I could find.” His eyes finally met hers. He was the same, a little haggard. She was older. Neither of them was sure that they read anything in the looks they gave each other. “Gideon gave you my message? I was afraid it would not get here before I did.” “He told me yesterday,” she said, “but he didn’t tell me you were bringing a wedding party.” She was cool, without anger, very polite--as if she were addressing an acquaintance, and a distant one at that. Rising Hawk felt his confidence melting away. “Why didn’t you send word sooner?” she asked, her voice accusing. “I tried, but there was no one to take my message, once I had the courage to try. Anyway, there seemed to be no words for my sorrow that you had not heard before.” “Oh.” He was beginning to think he had made a mistake. This was shaping up as a refusal. And after all the persuading he had wasted on his uncle and grandmother. He glanced down at the deer. It was humiliating, but he hadn’t come all this way to stand here dumb, like a chastened twelve-year-old. Without raising his eyes he said, “I missed you so much my soul was sick. My only dreams were of you. On the winter hunt my aim was terrible, like an old man with fading sight. My friends pitied me. I could listen to stories in the longhouse, but I could not tell any afterward because my heart held no memory of them.” He paused, ashamed to admit it. “I tried drinking for a while.” He saw her start slightly and she said, less harshly, “Me too.” “What happened between us was my fault.” “No, it wasn’t. I said I wouldn’t marry you. What else could I expect? Your only fault was in leaving without saying good-bye. That made it terrible.” “I’m sorry, Livy. I behaved like a spiteful boy.” “Yes, you did.” She agreed much too easily, he thought. She might be more gracious about it.

There was this new minister who went to the cemetery sorry, cemetery and he got his PhD and his DD and he’s got assign to his first church. I’ll never forget this. When he got there the church was a little lively but he was dead and he told the people now that am your new pastor we gonna do things a little different around here. He said, no more shouting, we’re going to do things in order. And theres going to be a quietness. He said I want you to follow my lead. He said I’ve graduated from the seminary and I’ve been educated and we’re going to do things in order and we’re going to take away this noise. It took him about 6 months to get things all tone down, he thought. He never even bothered to write his sermons out because some of the people were still shouting. But after 6 months he had everything under control and everything was dead. Dead quite. I mean quite. And finally he worked on his message all week long, had it all type written out on 15 pages, double space. Had everything perfect and now he is going to demonstrate his educational powers. Ready to wax eloquent and have them know they have an educated preacher/minister. He got into his message that he was reading. And he got to page 5, there was an ooooooooooooold fashion deacon in the back and let out one of them big old weeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll gloryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !!!!!. that was like an atom bomb that struck. And he became frustrated and all 15 pages of notes fell on the ground and he lost his place. He was never been so humiliated in all of his life. He could not finish his sermon. The only thing he could do is stop and pray and put the benediction on. He became so aggravated at the brother at the back. He said I did not know what I said to make him shout but he said am going to visit him in the morning and am going to found out what I said. And whatever I said am going to cut it out of my mind and I’ll never say it again so he won’t shout. Monday morning he headed out and he went to this brother who was a farmer. He didn’t even bother to go to the house. He wanted to handle this man to man. The brother offered a cup of coffee but the pastor refused it. He said I came out here to talk man to man sir. Do you remember when I first came to the church I said we were going to do things differently. He said yes sir I do remember. You remember I said nobody was going to make some noice. He said yes sir I remember that. He said yesterday you embarrassed me. I only got half way through my sermon. He said I want you to be honest with me brother. What was it that I said that made you shout because whatever it is am not going to say it no more. The brother breathed and said let get one thing straight pastor, you’ve been here six months. aint nothing you ever said made me shout. Nothing at all. But when I get to thinking how deep I was in sin and Jesus brought me out and cleaned me and wrote my name the book of life. How so good He’s been to me. When I was thinking of what He done for me, I couldn’t help but shoouuuuuuuuuuuuuuut to His gloryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. I don’t just shout in church, here with my mules thinking of Jesus, I feel another shouuuuuuuuuuuuut coming up.

God’s message in the Bible never gets old. It has the power to transform and touch every generation. People write books for specific audiences, but no one can stay indifferent after reading the Bible with an open heart. It either convinces or provokes you.

Wisdom does not stand opposed, therefore, to the teachings of the Pentateuch or the lessons of the prophets. It serves to unite teaching and reality, and to integrate the ideals of faith into the practical experience of everyday doubt and uncertainty. And above all, Wisdom helped Israel to understand that their faith in Yahweh spoke to the concerns of everyone in the world and had a universal message that was not to be kept hidden only in Judah.