Revival Starts With Me Quotes

And once it's reached that point, I'm left as alone as I've always known is the safest I could ever be. Except that I have the worst pain I've ever felt, and I feel it all. It's all of mine to feel. The only thing I'm sure is absolutely real. It keeps me company. The same way it would be trapped somewhere with someone that you hate. Wishing they weren't there, but needing them to be there. This is where the old survival skills start coming back, not quite as at my command as they used to be. They tell me to keep my right amount of distance, the only real way to be strong. But then I realize those parts of me that have been pieced together and have come back, to different degrees. Their revival works against survival. I know how to make myself untouchable. But when I tell myself how to, something answers me by telling me it's too late for that.

I would rarely be in conformity with the Divine's huge, crazy love so I just prayed, "Help me start walking in your general direction," and the greatest prayer, "Help me not be such an asshole.

Haute couture and getting hauter. Fire inches down the foyer wallpaper. Me, for added set dressing I started the fire. Special effects can go a long way to heighten a mood, and it's not as if this is a real house. What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

Fear of the Dark I’ve always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I’d picture something terrible happening; I’d picture losing everything in a flash. At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that “my too good to be true” was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability. Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her. You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I’m crazy and now they’re all sitting there like, “She’s a nut. How do we get out of here?” Then all of the sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, “Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?” The auditorium erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone.

In the next chapters I will deal with factors that have helped make this happen, including better leaders, a revival of African entrepreneurship, the return of the great diaspora and a hungry, innovative young population—the largest demographic of young people in the world. But I will start with what I believe has been the most important factor of all. Despite Africa’s size and the great drama of her story—colonialism, war, famine, disease, dictatorship, corruption, hundreds of billions of dollars in wasted aid—it is astonishing to me that the thing that has probably helped us more than anything else is a tiny little device that can fit in your pocket. It’s called a cell phone—and it’s been a game changer.

I thought of kissing Astrid under the fire escape. I thought of Norm’s rusty microbus and of his father, Cicero, sitting on the busted-down sofa in his old trailer, rolling dope in Zig-Zag papers and telling me if I wanted to get my license first crack out of the basket, I’d better cut my fucking hair. I thought of playing teen dances at the Auburn RolloDrome, and how we never stopped when the inevitable fights broke out between the kids from Edward Little and Lisbon High, or those from Lewiston High and St. Dom’s; we just turned it up louder. I thought of how life had been before I realized I was a frog in a pot. I shouted: “One, two, you-know-what-to-do!” We kicked it in. Key of E. All that shit starts in E.

Suddenly, lots of things of my own life occurred to me for the first time as stories: my great-granddaddy's 'other family' in West Virginia; Hardware Breeding, who married his wife Beulah, four times; how my Uncle Vern taught my daddy to drink good liquor in a Richmond hotel; how I got saved at the tent revival; John Hardin's hanging in the courthouse square; how Petey Chaney rode the flood; the time Mike Holland and I went to the serpent handling-church in Jolo; the murder Daddy saw when he was a boy, out riding his little pony - and never told... I started to write these stories down. Many years later, I'm still at it. And it's a funny thing: Though I have spent my most of my working life in universities, though I live in piedmont North Carolina now and eat pasta and drive a Subaru, the stories that present themselves to me as worth the telling are often those somehow connected to that place and those people. The mountains that used to imprison me have become my chosen stalking ground.

In 2012, I turned fifty-six. Hugh and his longtime girlfriend took me out to dinner. On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore—probably you’ve heard it—about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old. When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o’clock news. But—like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health—I didn’t mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn’t age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there’s a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. (I was spared that, at least, because most of my so-called good old days had been spent as a full-bore, straight-on-for-Texas drug addict.) I think for most people, life’s deceptive deliriums begin to fall away after fifty. The days speed up, the aches multiply, and your gait slows down, but there are compensations. In calmness comes appreciation, and—in my case—a determination to be as much of a do-right-daddy as possible in the time I had left. That meant ladling out soup once a week at a homeless shelter in Boulder, and working for three or four political candidates with the radical idea that Colorado should not be paved over.

Johann had told me once that he had heard Himmler say on the radio that, after the war, all the Gypsies would be relocated to a reservation where they could live according to their ancestral customs without interference. It all sounded like castles in the air, but that day I could at least start dreaming. I had now been given the sacred mission of saving the Gypsy children at Birkenau, which would start by reviving their will to live in the midst of all that death

My Dear Mrs Winter. (I had half a mind when I dipped my pen in the ink, to address you by your old natural Christian name.) The snow lies so deep on the Northern Railway, and the Posts have been so interrupted in consequence, that your charming note arrived here only this morning... I get the heartache again when I read your commission, written in the hand which I find now to be not in the least changed, and yet it is a great pleasure to be entrusted with it, and to have that share in your gentler remembrances which I cannot find it still my privilege to have, without a stirring of the old fancies. ... I am very very sorry you mistrusted me in not writing before your little girl was born; but I hope now you know me better you will teach her, one day, to tell her children, in times to come when they have some interest in wondering about it, that I loved her mother with the most extraordinary earnestness when I was a boy. I have always believed since, and always shall to the last, that there never was such a faithful and devoted poor fellow as I was. Whatever of fancy, romance, energy, passion, aspiration and determination belong to me, I never have separated and never shall separate from the hard hearted little woman - you - whom it is nothing to say I would have died for, with the greatest alacrity! I never can think, and I never seem to observe, that other young people are in such desperate earnest, or set so much, so long, upon one absorbing hope. It is a matter of perfect certainty to me that I began to fight my way out of poverty and obscurity, with one perpetual idea of you. This is so fixed in my knowledge that to the hour when I opened your letter last Friday night, I have never heard anybody addressed by your name or spoken of by your name, without a start. The sound of it has always filled me with a kind of pity and respect for the deep truth that I had, in my silly hobbledehoyhood, to bestow upon one creature who represented the whole world to me. I have never been so good a man since, as I was when you made me wretchedly happy. I shall never be half so good a fellow any more. This is all so strange now, both to think of, and to say, after every change that has come about; but I think, when you ask me to write to you, you are not unprepared for what it is so natural to me to recall, and will not be displeased to read it. I fancy, - though you may not have thought in the old time how manfully I loved you - that you may have seen in one of my books a faithful reflection of the passion I had for you, and may have thought that it was something to have been loved so well, and may have seen in little bits of "Dora" touches of your old self sometimes, and a grace here and there that may be revived in your little girls, years hence, for the bewilderment of some other young lover - though he will never be as terribly in earnest as I and David Copperfield were. People used to say to me how pretty all that was, and how fanciful it was, and how elevated it was above the little foolish loves of very young men and women. But they little thought what reason I had to know it was true and nothing more nor less. These are things that I have locked up in my own breast, and that I never thought to bring out any more. But when I find myself writing to you again "all to your self", how can I forbear to let as much light in upon them as will shew you that they are there still! If the most innocent, the most ardent, and the most disinterested days of my life had you for their Sun - as indeed they had - and if I know that the Dream I lived in did me good, refined my heart, and made me patient and persevering, and if the Dream were all of you - as God knows it was - how can I receive a confidence from you, and return it, and make a feint of blotting all this out! ...

voice. I’d seen for myself how God’s power was released after a time of cleansing, and I remembered that in every great historical move of the Spirit I had studied, every revival had experienced times of confession and deep repentance. I could see why, too. The cleansing season had set me free—the devil had none of my secret resentments and sins to hold over me anymore. I’d never wanted to press confession with YWAMers, but I wondered if someday others would experience it, too. So what happened with my friend Don Stephens as we were getting started was no surprise. It began December 27, 1969, six months

E-9 This is not a easy subject to speak on. I could think of many things that were easier to speak on. But, brother, if somebody don't stand out in this sinful, adulternous day that we live in and call the colors, what's going to happen? Somebody has got to speak the thing. Somebody's got to place it before the people. Perhaps Ezra didn't want to do it. But it was in his heart. And when you see a servant of God get so sincere till he's on his face with his hands in the air, praying to God, and blushing because the iniquity of the people, then you're going to see a revival start. A man cannot lay in the Presence of God, a church cannot stay in the Presence of God under repentance unless the Holy Spirit comes down and gives unction and power to start a move of God in there among those people. Just got to be. Show me a man. Show me another Calvin, Knox, Finney, Sankey, or any of those who feels the burden of the people, that'll lay on their face and cry and pray before God. Send us a John Smith of the Baptist Church again, who prayed all night for the iniquity of the people until his eyes would be swelled shut the next morning from weeping, till his wife would lead him to the table and feed him his breakfast out of a spoon. Show me a John Wesley again, a firebrand snatched from the fire. I'll show you a revival. ( "A Blushing Prophet" Preached on Sunday evening, 25th November 1956 at the Branham Tabernacle in Jeffersonville, Indiana, U.S.A - See Paragraph E -9 ).

Oh, what a world, what a world", Abby said. "How's that, honey?" "That's what the wicked witch says in The Wizard of Oz. Did you know that? They're showing a revival downtown and I went to see it last night with Dane. The witch says 'I'm melting! Melting! Oh, what a world. what a world', she says." "I remember the part about 'I'm melting'," Mrs. Whitshank said. "I took Red and Merrick to see that movie when they were little bitty things." "Yes, well, and then she talks about 'what a world'. I told Dane afterward, I said, 'I never heard that before! I had no idea she said that!'" "Me neither," Mrs. Whitshank said. "In a way, it sounds kind of pitiful." "Exactly," Abby said. "All at once I started feeling sorry for her, you know? I really believe that most people who seem scary are just sad.

When their brother-in-law turned toward them at the sound,Lisa breathed with horror, "But you're dead." Her head swiveled to Christiana. "Wasn't he dead, Chrissy? We packed ice around him and everything." "The ice must have revived his cold dead heart," Suzette said, anger helping her recover quickly from her shock. Glaring at the man, she added a dry but heartfelt, "More's the pity." If Dicky looked surprised by her comments, Christiana looked absolutely horrified. "Suzette!" she gasped, shuffling a little closer as if to phsyically silence her if Suzette tried to make another such comment. "Perhaps we should go out for some air. Lisa looks ready to faint and you, Suzie, obviously need some time to cool yourself. Perhaps so much dancing has overheated you." Suzette was about to snort at the suggestion that dancing had brought about her bitter words when her arm was suddenly taken in a firm grip and the words "Allow me" rang in her ears. Glancing around with a start, she frowned at the man who had suddenly appeared out of seemingly thin air and stepped between her and Lisa, taking both of them in hand like recalcitrant children. He was already turning them firmly away from Christiana and Dicky as he added, "I shall see the ladies outside so the two of you might talk.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

Don’t Let Feelings Rule This is my comfort and consolation in my affliction: that Your word has revived me and given me life. PSALM 119:50 God showed me that we are always going to have feelings, and that denying the existence of them is not godly. We do have to learn how to manage them, so they don’t manage us. If we live by our feelings, we will be destroyed, because our feelings aren’t always in line with God’s truth. We are to walk by faith in His promises, and not by sight or how things appear or the way we feel (see 2 Corinthians 5:7). Ask God to keep your feelings balanced with the truth of His Word today.

Papa, what is it?” Alice in her humble Cinderella costume—a costume close enough to her mother’s all those years ago to revive fond memories in Lyle—ran lightly down the stairs at the side of the stage. “Travelers in need, chicken,” he said, smiling at her. “Mr. Black, Mr. Plum, this is my family. My wife, Lady Lyle. You’ve met Michael. These are my older sons Angus and Hamish. And this ragamuffin is my daughter Alice.” “You’ve caught us in the middle of putting on a play, Mr. Black,” Charlotte said. “I apologize for our odd appearance.” Lyle waited for some response, then caught the dazed expression on young Black’s face as he stared at Alice. “Mr. Black?” he prompted. “I’m…I’m sorry, my lord,” Black said without shifting his gaze from Alice. “Please don’t let us inconvenience you.” “We’re used to taking in travelers in trouble,” Lyle said, not sure what he thought about his daughter making such a fast conquest. Except it was worse than that, damn it. “I’ll…I’ll show you back to the house. You’ll want dry clothes,” Alice said, returning Black’s interest with a readiness that made every hair on Lyle’s neck bristle with warning. He caught his wife’s eye and stifled his immediate veto of Alice’s offer. “The play’s about to start, Alice,” Angus said. “A short delay won’t matter,” she said, without looking at her brother. Her attention was all for the tall young man with the burning gray eyes and wet blond hair. “You’re too kind, Lady Alice,” Black said. “Come with me.” A brilliant smile curled Alice’s lips. “To the ends of the earth,” the young man said, smiling back with untrammeled delight. They turned toward the door, and Lyle instinctively started to follow until his wife’s hand curled around his arm. “Let them go.” She drew Lyle away from the crowd. “I don’t like the way he was looking at her,” he grumbled, shooting the oblivious Julian Black a glower over his shoulder. Charlotte

We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants, and yet when we start to do it, there comes to us something equivalent to Moses’ forty years in the wilderness. It’s as if God had ignored the entire thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged, God comes back and revives His call to us. And then we begin to tremble and say, “Who am I that I should go . . . ?” We must learn that God’s great stride is summed up in these words—“I AM WHO I AM . . . has sent me to you

That's when I decided it was time for me to start cooking up some luck - meeting that miracle halfway.

I chugged a recovery “Endurance Elixir” that I’d brought—a concoction conceived specifically for me by my friend Compton Rom, a PhD in microbiology who had been using me as a guinea pig to test out various nutritional formulae for his wellness start-up Ascended Health. An entirely plant-based formula loaded with high-caliber nutrients sourced from the four corners of the globe—fermented greens, adaptogens, probiotics, Cordyceps mushroom extracts, marine phytoplankton, and exotic antioxidants, like nattokinase, resveratrol, and quercetin—it’s the furthest thing from flavorful (to say the least) but always revives me like nature’s Red Bull.

I’ve been reading a lot lately, too. Something that caught my attention the other day was revival,” I started, petting Oreo so I didn’t have to hold Althea’s eyes when I spoke. “Bringing people back from the dead.” “Where did you read that?” she said, and I immediately tensed. “No idea,” I blurted. “But it just made me curious. Surely there’s no such thing, right?” I turned to look at her casually. “You can’t just bring people back from the dead. Once they die, they die.

Fully convinced that I’d been spared the burden of walking the long, harrowing road of paralyzing grief, and gifted with the opportunity to start at the end, where the ache was there but bearable.

The night of the theatrical, Jane and Mr. Nobley secreted themselves behind the house for the final brush-up. The mood of late had let a bit of Bohemia into Regency England, the usual strict social observances bending, the rehearsals allowing the couples to slip away alone and enjoy the exhilarating intimacy of the unobserved. Mr. Nobley sat on the gravel path, leaning back on his elbow in a reluctant recline. “Oh, to die here, alone and unloved…” “That was pretty good,” Jane said. “You genuinely sounded in pain as you said it, but I think you could add a groan or two.” Mr. Nobley groaned, though perhaps not as part of the theatrical. “Perfect!” said Jane. Mr. Nobley rested his head on his knee and laughed. “I cannot believe I let you railroad me into this. I have always avoided doing a theatrical.” “Oh, you don’t seem that sorry. I mean, you certainly are sorry, just not regretful…” “Just do your part, please, Miss Erstwhile.” “Oh, yes, of course, forgive me. I can’t imagine why I’m taking so long, it’s just that there’s something so appealing about you there on the ground, at my feet--” He tackled her. He actually leaped up, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her to the ground. She screeched as she thudded down on top of him. His hands stiffened. “Whoops,” he said. “You did not just do that.” He looked around for witnesses. “You are right, I did not just do that. But if I had, I was driven to it; no jury in the world would convict me. We had better keep rehearsing, someone might come by.” “I would, but you’re still holding me.” His hands were on her waist. They were gorgeous, thick-fingered, large. She liked them there. “So they are,” he said. Then he looked at her. He breathed in. His forehead tensed as if he were trying to think of words for his thoughts, as if he were engaged in some gorgeous inner battle that was provoked by how perfectly beautiful she was. (That last part was purely Jane’s romantic speculation and can’t be taken as literal.) Nevertheless, they were on the ground, touching, frozen, staring at each other, and even the trees were holding their breath. “I--” Jane started to say, but Mr. Nobley shook his head. He apologized and helped her to her feet, then plopped back onto the ground, as his character was still in the throes of death. “Shall we resume?” “Right, okay,” she said, shaking gravel from her skirt, “we were near the end…Oh, Antonio!” She knelt carefully beside him to keep her skirt from wrinkling and patted his chest. “You are gravely wounded. And groaning so impressively! Let me hold you and you can die in my arms, because traditionally, death and unrequited love are a romantic pairing.” “Those aren’t the lines,” he said through his teeth, as though an actual audience might overhear their practice. “They’re better than. It’s hardly Shakespeare.” “Right. So, your love revives my soul, my wounds heal…etcetera, etcetera, and I stand up and we exclaim our love dramatically. I cherish you more than farms love rain, than night loves the moon, and so on…” He pulled her upright and they stood facing each other, her hands in his. Again with the held breaths, the locked gazes. Twice in a row. It was almost too much! And Jane wanted to stay in that moment with him so much, her belly ached with the desire. “Your hands are cold,” he said, looking at her fingers. She waited. They had never practiced this part and the flimsy play gave no directions, such as, Kiss the girl, you fool. She leaned in a tiny bit. He warmed her hands. “So…” she said. “I suppose we know our scene, more or less,” he said. Was he going to kiss her? No, it seemed nobody ever kissed in Regency England. So what was happening? And what did it mean to fall in love in Austenland anyway? Jane stepped back, the weird anxiety of his nearness suddenly making her heart beat so hard it hurt.

Revivals at Edwards’s Massachusetts church in Northampton jump-started the First Great Awakening around 1733. In awakening souls, passionate evangelicals like Edwards spoke about human equality (in soul) and the capability of everyone for conversion. “I am God’s servant as they are mine, and much more inferior to God than my servant is to me,” the slaveholding Edwards explained in 1741. But the proslavery Great Awakening did not extend to the South Carolina plantation of Hugh Bryan, who was awakened into antislavery thought. Bryan proclaimed “sundry enthusiastic Prophecies of the Destruction of Charles Town and Deliverance of the Negroes from servitude” in 1740. His praying captives stopped laboring. One woman was overheard “singing a spiritual at the water’s edge,” like so many other unidentified antiracist, antislavery Christian women and men who started singing in those years. South Carolina authorities reprimanded Bryan. They wanted evangelists preaching a racist Christianity for submission, not an antiracist Christianity for liberation.20 Hugh Bryan was an exception in the missionary days of the First Great Awakening, days Cotton Mather would not live to see. Though

Three days before Christmas, Tony Dungy’s phone rang in the middle of the night. His wife answered and handed him the receiver, thinking it was one of his players. There was a nurse on the line. Dungy’s son Jamie had been brought into the hospital earlier in the evening, she said, with compression injuries on his throat. His girlfriend had found him hanging in his apartment, a belt around his neck. Paramedics had rushed him to the hospital, but efforts at revival were unsuccessful.3.34 He was gone. A chaplain flew to spend Christmas with the family. “Life will never be the same again,” the chaplain told them, “but you won’t always feel like you do right now.” A few days after the funeral, Dungy returned to the sidelines. He needed something to distract himself, and his wife and team encouraged him to go back to work. “I was overwhelmed by their love and support,” he later wrote. “As a group, we had always leaned on each other in difficult times; I needed them now more than ever.” The team lost their first play-off game, concluding their season. But in the aftermath of watching Dungy during this tragedy, “something changed,” one of his players from that period told me. “We had seen Coach through this terrible thing and all of us wanted to help him somehow.” It is simplistic, even cavalier, to suggest that a young man’s death can have an impact on football games. Dungy has always said that nothing is more important to him than his family. But in the wake of Jamie’s passing, as the Colts started preparing for the next season, something shifted, his players say. The team gave in to Dungy’s vision of how football should be played in a way they hadn’t before. They started to believe.

The first step in personal revival is to get God in His rightful place. When God is recognized as being above me, beyond me, highly exalted, over me, and totally separate from me, I am getting in position for a downpour. When I embrace God for who He is and I understand who I am—when I know God's place, I can know my place—then things start to fall into place. That's what God's holiness does for us—it puts everything and everyone in their rightful place.

My promises shall be known. Come, come, come, come to Me. Sit and worship as I fill you up to send you forth in 2015. Revival starts in you and only can occur from intimacy. Await My promises...await My Mercy.

The horses are terribly puzzled. A manager said to me, “The haulers are some of the very lowest. They have driven their horses by obscenity and kicks. Now they can hardly persuade the horses to start working, because there is no obscenity and no kicks.” The movement is characterized by the most remarkable confessions of sin, confessions that must be costly.

Then, once again, he started moving. He slid out and eased in again and hit something, some region of fire. Suddenly there was sensation, a flaring pleasure that seemed to radiate out in waves, that seemed initially to exist alongside the pain I was feeling, and then, miraculously, seemed part of the pain, and then swallowed the pain up. My eyes bulged out, my mouth opened into an uncontrollable shout. I understood, suddenly, what had driven Edward so mad those times I’d done it to him; it was this, this quadrant of pleasure hidden deep up inside. And Josep thrust harder, and with each thrust the radiating pleasure revived, flailing my limbs and rolling my head and twitching the length of my cock until it seemed I might come from it, from this thrusting, I might not even have to touch myself or be touched by him, but I did not want to come, I wanted this to last, I wanted to say things, filthy things, utter words I’d never uttered, and I did, I said, “Fuck me,” I said, “Come inside me,” and with a loud shout Josep thrust one final time and the warm flood of his semen was pouring down my legs like tears.

My heart starts beating as if it’s overcome with the impossible and been revived in anticipation. And just to be showy, it races. That’s what she does to me. She brings me to life.

At the start of something new and old at the same time. A collision of past and present, hopes and heartache. The first beginning we’ve had in a while that doesn’t have a designated end.

When I lived in Manhattan, I went to a lot of AA meetings in the city, in Connecticut, and in New Jersey. I won’t say I was unhappy in my sobriety—it saved my life and my career—but I didn’t find the meetings that fulfilling. After three years of sobriety and recovery, the Twelve Step meetings started seeming familiar and repetitive. To me they were like trips to the dentist—necessary and healthy, but not anything I enjoyed or looked forward to. I was kind of puzzled by how, in meetings, some people would glow like they were at a religious revival. At that point in my recovery, I’d never felt anything like that. The Twelve Steps made sense to me, and they’d made a big difference in my life, but they never revved me up or made energy rush up my spine. I assumed I must have had a spiritual awakening somewhere along the way, because I was sober, I hadn’t relapsed in almost two years, and I was feeling okay.

We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants, and yet when we start to do it, there comes to us something equivalent to Moses’ forty years in the wilderness. It’s as if God had ignored the entire thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged, God comes back and revives His call to us. And then we begin to tremble and say, “Who am I that I should go . . . ?” We must learn that God’s great stride is summed up in these words—“I AM WHO I AM . . . has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14). We must also learn that our individual effort for God shows nothing but disrespect for Him—our individuality is to be rendered radiant through a personal relationship with God, so that He may be “well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). We are focused on the right individual perspective of things; we have the vision and can say, “I know this is what God wants me to do.” But we have not yet learned to get into God’s stride. If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a time of great personal growth ahead.

P3 - ten minutes of that movie, or indeed of any movie whose message is similarly dystopian about a post-aging world (Blade Runner), you will see that they set it up by insinuating, with exactly no justification and also no attempt at discussion (which is how they get away with not justifying it), that the defeat of aging will self-evidently bring about some new problem that we will be unable to solve without doing more harm than good. The most common such problem, of course, is overpopulation - and I refer you to literally about 1000 interviews and hundreds of talks I have given on stage and camera over the past 20 years, of which several dozen are online, for why such a concern is misplaced. The reason there are 1000, of course, is that most people WANT to believe that aging is a blessing in disguise - they find it expedient to put aging out of their minds and get on with their miserably short lives, however irrational must be the rationalizations by which they achieve that. Aubrey has been asked on numerous occasions whether humans should use future tech to extend their lifespans. Aubrey opines, "I believe that humans should (and will) use (and, as a prerequisite, develop) future technologies to extend their healthspan, i.e. their healthy lifespan. But before fearing that I have lost my mind, let me stress that that is no more nor less than I have always believed. The reason people call me an “immortalist” and such like is only that I recognize, and am not scared to say, two other things: one, that extended lifespan is a totally certain side-effect of extended healthspan, and two, that the desire (and the legitimacy of the desire) to further extend healthspan will not suddenly cease once we achieve such-and-such a number of years." On what people can do to advance longevity research, my answer to this question has radically changed in the past year. For the previous 20 years, my answer would have been “make a lot of money and give it to the best research”, as it was indisputable that the most important research could go at least 2 or 3x times faster if not funding-limited. But in the past year, with the influx of at least a few $B, much of it non-profit (and much of it coming from tech types who did exactly the above), the calculus has changed: the rate-limiter now is personnel. It’s more or less the case now that money is no longer the main rate-limiter, talent is: we desperately need more young scientists to see longevity as the best career choice. As for how much current cryopreservation technology will advance in the next 10-20 years, and whether it enough for future reanimation? No question about the timeframe for a given amount of progress in any pioneering tech can be answered other than probabilistically. Or, to put it more simply, I don’t know - but I think there's a very good chance that within five years we will have cryo technology that inflicts only very little damage on biological tissue, such that yes, other advances in rejuvenation medicine that will repair the damage that caused the cryonaut to be pronounced dead in the first place will not be overwhelmed by cryopreservation damage, hence reanimation will indeed be possible. As of now, the people who have been cryopreserved(frozen) the best (i.e. w/ vitrification, starting very shortly immediately after cardiac arrest) may, just possibly, be capable of revival by rewarming and repair of damage - but only just possibly. Thus, the priority needs to be to improve the quality of cryopreservation - in terms of the reliability of getting people the best preservation that is technologically possible, which means all manner of things like getting hospitals more comfortable with cryonics practice and getting people to wear alarms that will alert people if they undergo cardiac arrest when alone, but even more importantly in terms of the tech itself, to reduce (greatly) the damage that is done to cells and tissues by the cryopreservation process.

She is my purpose! Wandering along the pavement, Trying to find an agreement, Between my pragmatic mind and a romantic heart, And sometimes knowing not where to end and when to start, I let the wanderings continue, maybe forever, Because I am yet to reach a place called, nowhere, That infact is somewhere, But not in the vicinities of places known by me as here and there, So, I let myself love her for now, think of her for now, And believe in our love and its vow, And this revives my peace, maybe it does, Just for a moment, just for a while it does, Maybe it is in this moment I become oblivious to this place called nowhere, Because when I am with her, I just wish to be here, just here, And when she leaves, forever turns into never, and somewhere into nowhere, Then, though I am somewhere, I am still nowhere, still nowhere, So before seeking this place of bliss, Let me seek her and her kiss, Because it is then that everything assumes meaning and purpose, And it is then that my heart in the curiosity of my mind does find a worthwhile purpose!

It was when I was in just such deep misery that I felt my energies revive, and I said to myself: In spite of everything I shall rise again; I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. And from that moment everything has seemed transformed for me; and now I have started, and my pencil has become a little more docile with every day.' In this way, with a dramatic flourish and a hinted resurrection simile, Van Gogh announced his new vocation to Theo.

My Feather Weight Heart! It wasn’t this way clean and lightweight before, It all started when I met the spiritual surgeon after, It was filled with jealousy, greed, lust, stinginess and envy before, It got cleaned when I started to meditate on the name of beloved after, It was all dark filled with all black spots before, It got lighter when the name of God entered after, It was filled with hate towards oneself and others before, It’s now filled with love towards oneself and others after, It was disconnected from the truth of reality, It’s now connected with reality of truth after, It was once ignorant and arrogant before, It is now awakened and mindful after, It was out of the side of the truth of oneself before, It is now in truth with insights of oneself after, It was oppressive, aggressive, and transgressive before, It is now submissive, merciful and compassionate after, It was racist, filled with malice and hateful before, It is now united, filled with love and acceptance after, It was searching for the truth outside in the mosque, church, synagogues and temples before, It is now in awareness of the temple inside me after, It was not aware of God, temple of God (heart) and the soul before, It is now when I met beloved reviving my dead heart after!

He started to explain his position, trying to get me to engage. I secretly shut my heart to him completely. I forgot that this hurts only me.

Rather than simply praying, each minyan tries to help each other with real action. We help each other get jobs, find apartments, start businesses, and so on. Everyone helps everyone else.” It reminded me of the quote “Pray like work won’t help, and then work like prayer won’t help.” Or as Shane Claiborne says, maybe it’s time to become the answer to our own prayers.

Retired missionaries taught us Arts & Crafts each July at Bible Camp: how to glue the kidney, navy, and pinto bean into mosaics, and how to tool the stenciled butterfly on copper sheets they'd cut for us. At night, after hymns, they'd cut the lights and show us slides: wide-spread trees, studded with corsage; saved women tucking T-shirts into wrap-around batiks; a thatched church whitewashed in the equator's light. Above the hum of the projector I could hear the insects flick their heads against the wind screens, aiming for the brightness of that Africa. If Jesus knocks on your heart, be ready to say, "Send me, O Lord, send me," a teacher told us confidentially, doling out her baggies of dried corn. I bent my head, concentrating hard on my tweezers as I glued each colored kernel into a rooster for Mother's kitchen wall. But Jesus noticed me and started to knock. Already saved, I looked for signs to show me what else He would require. At rest hour, I closed my eyes and flipped my Bible open, slid my finger, ouija-like, down the page, and there was His command: Go and do ye likewise— Let the earth and all it contains hear— Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire—. Thursday night, at revival service, I held out through Trust and Obey, Standing on the Promises, Nothing But the Blood, but crumpled on Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling, promising God, cross my heart, I'd witness to Rhodesia. Down the makeshift aisle I walked with the other weeping girls and stood before the little bit of congregation left singing in their metal chairs. The bathhouse that night was silent, young Baptists moving from shower to sink with the stricken look of nuns. Inside a stall, I stripped, slipped my clothes outside the curtain, and turned for the faucet— but there, splayed on the shower's wall, was a luna moth, the eye of its wings fixed on me. It shimmered against the cement block: sherbet-green, plumed, a flamboyant verse lodged in a page of drab ink. I waved my hands to scare it out, but, blinkless, it stayed latched on. It let me move so close my breath stroked the fur on its animal back. One by one the showers cranked dry. The bathhouse door slammed a final time. I pulled my clothes back over my sweat, drew the curtain shut, and walked into a dark pricked by the lightening bugs' inscrutable morse.