Somehow 18 Quotes

It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who lives in us goes along for the ride.

Death. The only thing inevitable in life. People don't like to talk about death because it makes them sad. They don't want to imagine how life will go on without them, all the people they love will briefly grieve but continue to breathe. They don't want to imagine how life will go on without them, Their children will still grow Get married Get old.. They don't want to imagine how life will continue to go on without them Their material things will be sold Their medical files stamped "closed" Their name becoming a memory to everyone they know. They don't want to imagine how life will go on without them, so instead of accepting it head on, they avoid the subject all together, hoping and praying it will somehow... pass them by. Forget about them, moving on to the next one in line. no, they didn't want to imagine how life would continue to go on.... without them. But death didn't forget. Instead they were met head-on by death, disguised as an 18-wheeler behind a cloud of fog. No. Death didn't forget about them. If only they had been prepared, accepted the inevitable, laid out their plans, understood that it wasn't just their lives at hand. I may have legally been considered an adult at the age of nineteen, but still i felt very much all of just nineteen. Unprepared and overwhelmed to suddenly have the entire life of a seven-year-old in my realm. Death. The only thing inevitable in life. -Will

This recognition of the truth we get in the artist’s work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, “Yes, yes, very good, very true—that’s just what I’m always saying.” I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.

If, one day, I am able to find the fortitude to stare January 18, 2012 directly in the face, and then hand it to you as I see it, then you will know that I somehow began to emerge from this black hole reborn, with a renewed spirit.

AN INCOMPLETE LIST: THINGS I LOVE ABOUT HRH PRINCE HENRY OF WALES 1. The sound of your laugh when I piss you off. 2. The way you smell underneath your fancy cologne, like clean linens but somehow also fresh grass (what kind of magic is this?) 3. That thing you do where you stick out your chin to try to look tough. 4. How your hands look when you play piano. 5. All he things I understand about myself now because of you. 6. How you think Return of the Jedi is the best Star Wars (wrong) because deep down you're a gigantic, sappy, embarrassing romantic who just wants the happily ever after. 7. Your ability to recite Keats. 8. Your ability to recite Bernadette's "Don't let it drag you down" monologue from Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. 9. How hard you try. 10. How hard you've always tried. 11. How determined you are to keep trying. 12. That when your shoulders cover mine, nothing else in the entire stupid world matters. 13. The goddamn issue of Le Monde you brought back to London with you and kept and have on your nightstand (yes, I saw it). 14. The way you look when you first wake up. 15. Your shoulder-to-waist ratio. 16. Your huge, generous, ridiculous, indestructible heart. 17. Your equally huge dick. 18. The face you just made when you read that last one. 19. The way you look when you first wake up (I know I already said this, but I really, really love it). 20. The fact that you loved me all along.

Funny how losses were as much of a currency as happiness in life. Somehow, they were noticed more, though.

My dear Lord Krishna, you are so kind upon this useless soul, but I do not know why you have brought me here. Now you can do whatever you like with me. But I guess you have some business here, otherwise why would you bring me to this place? Somehow or other, O Lord, You have brought me here to speak about you. Now, my Lord, it is up to you to make me a success or failure as you like. O spiritual master of all the worlds. I can simply repeat your message; so if you like you can make my power of speaking suitable for their understanding. Only by Your causeless mercy will my words become pure. I am sure that when this transcendental message penetrates their hearts they will certainly feel engladdened and thus become liberated from all unhappy conditions of life. O Lord, I am just like a puppet in your hands. So if you have brought me here to dance, then make me dance, make me dance, O Lord, make me dance as you like. I have no devotion, nor do I have any knowledge, but I have strong faith in the holy name of Krishna. I have been designated as Bhaktivedanta, one who possesses devotion and knowledge, and now, if you like, you can fulfill the real purport of Bhaktivedanta. Signed, the most unfortunate, insignificant beggar, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, On board the ship Jaladuta, Commonwealth Pier, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 18th of September, 1965

Humanistic propaganda screams at us everywhere we go. “You deserve better.” “There’s no one like you.” “Stand up for yourself.” And after a while we start believing the mantra. The most influential culture-shaping document in American history is the Declaration of Independence. And built into the ethos of American society are three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I think the wording is ironic: the pursuit of happiness. It’s almost like the architects of modern democracy said, “We guarantee you life, and we promise you liberty. But happiness? Good luck.” America is a social experiment founded on the pursuit of happiness. Hundreds of millions of Americans are chasing down happiness. Money, materialism, sex, romance, religion, family, and fame are all pursuits of the same human craving—joy. But apart from Jesus, we never get there. People spend decades searching high and low for happiness and never land at joy. In an odd twist of fate, America, for all her life and liberty, is one of the most depressed nations in the world. And many of us are mad at God. Somehow we think God owes us. We deserve happiness. We deserve a good, comfortable life, free from pain and suffering. We have rights! Right? The scriptures present a totally different worldview that stands against the humanism of Western Europe. It is written, “By grace you have been saved.”[17] The word grace is (charis) in the Greek, which can be translated as “gift.” All of life is grace. All of life is a gift. Humans have no rights. Everything is a gift. Food, shelter, the clothes on our backs, the oxygen in our lungs—it’s all grace. The entire planet, the sky above us and the ground beneath our feet, is all on loan from the Creator God. We live under his roof, eat his food, and drink his water. We are guests. And we are blessed. A reporter once asked Bob Dylan if he was happy. Dylan’s response was, “These are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It’s not happiness or unhappiness. It’s either blessed or unblessed.”[18] I like that. We are blessed. When you reorient yourself to a biblical worldview, the only posture left to take is gratitude. If all of life is a gift, how could we help but thank God?

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.18

April 18 Dear Ryan, I'm considering writing to one of those advice columnists about us. That's how confused I still am. When we started this, I thought that I just needed some time away from you. I just needed time to breathe. I needed a chance to live on my own and appreciate you again by missing you. Those first few months were torture. I felt so lonely. I felt exactly what I wanted myself to feel, which was that I couldn't live without you. I felt it all day. I felt it when I slept in an empty bed. I felt it when I came home to an empty house. But somehow, one day, it sort of became OK. I don't know when that happened. I thought at one point that maybe if I learned who you truly are, then I could love you again. Then I thought maybe if I learn who I really am, what I really want, then I could love you again. I have been grasping at things for months, trying to learn a lesson big enough, important enough, all-encompassing enough that it would bring us back together. But mostly, I'm just learning lessons about how to live my life. I'm learning how to be a better sister. I'm learning just how strong my mother has always been. That I should take my grandmother's advice more often. That sex can be healing. That Charlie isn't such a little kid anymore. I guess what I'm saying is that I've started focusing on other things. I don't feel all that desperate to figure us out and fix this. I feel sort of OK that it's not fixed. That's not the direction this is supposed to go, is it? Love, Lauren

Black as an 8 year old kid all the way til we were 18 was beaten in the place that was supposed to be "home". He never complained or fought to stop it because it somehow... made things better for the rest of his family. I can never understand his tolerance to all that he's been through. He keeps trying and fighting without realising it himself when he opened up to me when I put myself in his shoes... and actually felt what he was feeling, I almost became scarred forever because of it. And even then he was the one who pulled me back from that dark place. I can say the best thing there is to say I am able to make him see things from a different point of voice but he's always been the one... that makes us smile in the end. He's been this strong at heart for both of us for so long.

This angered him so badly, that he turned against everything he cared about: learning, foster parents, and hopes to make it into college; he dropped out of school. He ran away from the foster family that was caring for him at the time and eventually found Adrian, and then we somehow found each other and we happily formed our little group of outcasts. James is 18; he is smarter than Nathan, but not as technologically inclined as him. James looks out for me. He keeps accounts in order, pays receipts, and calculates risks-benefits for different jobs we decide to take. He’s like the vice-president of our “little robbers’ band”, while Adrian is the president. James and Adrian argue quite often about all sorts of things - James is very critical of Adrian and Adrian can’t stand to be contradicted;

August 18, 2006 It was so nice to talk to you tonight. I always wind up in a better mood after talking to you. Somehow you always manage to brighten my life even when in a hell hole like this. You are the greatest woman ever, and I will never understand how I got so lucky to have been blessed with you. I appreciate all you do. You are the strongest person I know, and I admire you, and respect you. I am always extremely proud of you. I know with all that has happened with Marc and Biggles, you have gone out of your way to try to make everyone feel better. Even though I know that is your worst nightmare. I don’t know many people who could be there, and put themselves through the pain just to make someone you don’t even know more comfortable. You are an angel sent by God. Now you have given me two more angels. Remember Satan was once an angel of God, so Bubba is an angel, but just which side is sometimes debatable. Just joking. I know he can be very trying sometimes, and you have kept your cool way better than I ever could have. Our kids are so lucky to have you as their mother. So am I. I cannot wait to get back into your arms. Talking about it tonight felt so good. Knowing that this whole thing is coming to an end. I dream about the day I step off that plane to see you. Hope you have no plans for the rest of your life, because you’re gonna be a little busy. I miss you so much!!! I loved talking to Bubba tonight. I love hearing him tell me he loves me, but I also don’t want to force him to say it. I know inside that he loves me. He just gets a little busy with everything going on around him. I can’t wait to play with him and chase him around the house. I was also thinking, all this time I’ve been wanting to talk to Bubba because he can talk back to me, but I want Angel to hear my voice, too. I want her to be a little familiar with me if at least my voice. Anyway, I love you with all my heart, and can’t wait to see you again. I am gonna smother you like crazy. You’ll be begging me to go on another deployment so you can get a little break. Too bad. You’re stuck with me now. I love you, sexy! XOXOXOXOXOXOOX

God’s renown is our first concern. Our task is to be an expert in “hallowed be your name” and “your kingdom come.” “Hallowed” means to be known and declared as holy. Our first desire is that God would be known as he truly is, the Holy One. Implicit in his name being hallowed is that his glory or fame would cover the earth. This takes us out of ourselves immediately. Somehow, we want God’s glory to be increasingly apparent through the church today. If you need specifics, keep your eyes peeled for the names God reveals to us. For example, we can pray that he would be known as the Mighty God, the Burden-Bearer, and the God who cares. “Your kingdom come” overlaps with our desire for his fame and renown. It is not so much that we are praying that Jesus would return quickly, though such a prayer is certainly one of the ways we pray. Instead, it is for God’s kingdom to continue its progress toward world dominion. The kingdom has already come and, as stewards of the kingdom for this generation, we want it to grow and flourish. The kingdom of heaven is about everything Jesus taught: love for neighbors and even enemies, humility in judgment, not coveting, blessing rather than cursing, meekness, peacemaking, and trusting instead of worrying. It is a matter of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17). Edward T. Welch February 1 Matthew 18:21–35 People mistreat us, sometimes in horrific ways. Spouses cheat. Children rebel. Bosses fire. Friends lie. Pastors fail. Parents abuse. Hurts are real. But how do all these one hundred denarii (about $6,000) offenses against us compare to the ten thousand talent (multimillion-dollar) debt we owed God, which he mercifully canceled? Since birth, and for all our lives, we have failed to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39). But in one fell swoop—by the death and resurrection of Jesus—God wiped our records clean. Through the cross of Jesus and our faith in him, God removed our transgressions from us “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12); he hurled “all our iniquities into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19). Could it be that one reason you find it so hard to forgive is because you have never received God’s forgiveness by repenting of your sins and believing in Jesus as your Savior? Or maybe you have yet to grasp the enormity of God’s forgiveness of all your many sins. If you dwell on your offender’s $6,000 debt against you, you will be trapped in bitterness until you die. But if you dwell on God’s forgiveness of your multimillion-dollar debt, you will find release and liberty. Robert D. Jones

DANCING ANGELS During October 2001, the Lord began to speak to me about traveling to Newfoundland, Canada. I had no desire to go there, especially in the middle of the winter! At this time I was still concerned about my inability to “feel the Lord” and began to press into God all the more. At times I locked myself into the little house and fasted and prayed for up to seven days, or until the presence of God fell. After many confirmations in the spirit, I pooled all of my earthly wealth and made the trip to the great white North. The night before I was to depart, the Lord instructed me to “pray in tongues all the way to Newfoundland.” Somehow through the grace of God I succeeded in praying in the Spirit for about 18 hours until I touched down in Canada. In Springdale, Newfoundland, Canada, the Lord began instructing me to complete a series of prophetic actions. I attended an intercessory prayer meeting on Wednesday, November 21. We were interceding for an upcoming series of healing meetings. During this meeting, I began to “see” into the spirit. As the Lord opened my spiritual eyes, I incrementally saw the heavens open over Living Waters Ministries Church. In addition to this, I also began to hear angelic voices singing along with the worship team. At one point during the meeting, I saw a stream of golden oil pour out from Heaven and land on a certain spot in the sanctuary. At the leading of the Lord, I knelt upon that spot. The glory and anointing began to flow into and over my body. The sensation and anointing was very similar to what I experienced when the angel put his hands upon me the night of August 22, 2001. As I knelt under the spot where the golden oil was beginning to pour onto the altar, I was praying earnestly. I could feel the liquid oil raining down on my body. I could sense and smell this heavenly oil as it rolled off my head. The Holy Spirit began to talk to me in a very clear and direct way that I had never experienced before. I collapsed onto the carpet in a pool of golden oil and laid there in the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Then I sensed angels dancing all around the pool and me. I felt an angel as it brushed its wings across my face. I had a “knowing” that the angel was asking me to raise my hands into the air. When I raised my hands up to about two feet, the angel would push my hands back down with its strong, warm hands. I tried again, and when my hands were almost totally up, the angel tickled my nose with the feathers of its wings. I laughed, and my hands fell. The angel and I continued to interact in this fashion for nearly an hour. I did not actually see this angel, but the force and reality of its touch was very tangible. There was no doubt that I was interacting with a heavenly being. This experience was both refreshing and real. SEEING IS BELIEVING On Thursday, November 22, the healing meetings started; they would last through Sunday, the 25th. In these meetings God began to open my spiritual eyes beyond anything I could have ever imagined. On the first night of these meetings, I began to see an “open heaven” forming in the sanctuary. I could also hear and sense the activity of angels as the heavens continued to open up to a greater degree. On Friday, I began to see “bolts of light” shoot through the church, and again the stream of golden oil was flowing from the open heaven in a greater volume. On Saturday night during the worship service, I began to see feathers falling around the church and

What do successful people (athletes, entrepreneurs, singers, actors, the wealthy, etcetera) all have in common? They never bought into the illusion that they were limited in some way. They believed that somehow, someway, they could achieve whatever it was they set their mind to.

In addition, as we learned from the infamous “twenty-eight pages” (really, twenty-nine) of the Congressional report on 9/11, Saudi Arabia provided substantial backing for the 9/11 attacks themselves.18 This backing included financial support to some of the 9/11 hijackers from members of the Saudi royal family and intelligence services. FBI documents even show that the Saudi Embassy in Washington provided financial support for a “dry run” of the 9/11 operation.19 Indeed, “Six years after the [9/11] attack, at the height of the military conflict in Iraq in 2007, Stuart Levey, the undersecretary of the US Treasury in charge of monitoring and impeding terror financing, told ABC News that, when it came to al-Qaeda, ‘if I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding of one country, it would be Saudi Arabia.’ ”20 And so, it stands to reason, the United States is a fierce ally of Saudi Arabia in its feud against Iran?!

I cannot explain love, he said. I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or forth. But I remember the first moment I looked at you walking toward me and realized that somehow the rest of the world seemed to vanish when I was with you. That you were the center of everything I did and felt and thought.

I am 18 years old, that's for sure, OFFICIALLY... no need to hide anymore my age or to try to fake it for one reason or another... but still somehow I miss 16,17 being years old. Somehow feeling like trash now... doesn't makes anything better.

Somehow, this dark Breed warrior who was so formidable, so expertly lethal, had become her safe harbor. Her haven.

It seems so awful somehow that it should be such a lovely day.

hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time.24 May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them.25 Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance—aroused in people by signs of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified, is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant.26 The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy.

Chapter 18: The Power of Negative Thinking (page 254) Somehow people are trained—some more than others— into unknowingly taking care of other people's emotional needs and minimizing their own. They hide their pain and sadness, even from themselves.

In general, we taught that love and action were more important than intellect or speculative truth. Love is the highest category for the Franciscan School (the goal), and we believe that authentic love is not possible without true inner freedom of conscience,18 nor will love be real or tested unless we somehow live close to the disadvantaged (its method), who remind us about what is important.

The sky had changed again; a reddish glow was spreading up beyond the housetops. As dusk set in, the street grew more crowded. People were returning from their walks, and I noticed the dapper little man with the fat wife amongst the passers-by. Children were whimpering and trailing wearily after their parents. After some minutes the local picture houses disgorged their audiences. I noticed that the young fellows coming from them were taking longer strides and gesturing more vigorously than at ordinary times; doubtless the picture they‟d been seeing was of the wild-West variety. Those who had been to the picture houses in the middle of the town came a little later, and looked more sedate, though a few were still laughing. On the whole, however, they seemed languid and exhausted. Some of them remained loitering in the street under my window. A group of girls came by, walking arm in arm. The young men under my window swerved so as to brush against them, and shouted humorous remarks, which made the girls turn their heads and giggle. I recognized them as girls from my part of the town, and two or three of them, whom I knew, looked up and waved to me. Just then the street lamps came on, all together, and they made the stars that were beginning to glimmer in the night sky paler still. I felt my eyes getting tired, what with the lights and all the movement I‟d been watching in the street. There were little pools of brightness under the lamps, and now and then a streetcar passed, lighting up a girl‟s hair, or a smile, or a silver bangle. Soon after this, as the streetcars became fewer and the sky showed velvety black above the trees and lamps, the street grew emptier, almost imperceptibly, until a time came when there was nobody to be seen and a cat, the first of the evening, crossed, unhurrying, the deserted street. It struck me that I‟d better see about some dinner. I had been leaning so long on the back of my chair, looking down, that my neck hurt when I straightened myself up. I went down, bought some bread and spaghetti, did my cooking, and ate my meal standing.I‟d intended to smoke another cigarette at my window, but the night had turned rather chilly and I decided against it. As I was coming back, after shutting the window, I glanced at the mirror and saw reflected in it a corner of my table with my spirit lamp and some bits of bread beside it. It occurred to me that somehow I‟d got through another Sunday, that Mother now was buried, and tomorrow I‟d be going back to work as usual.Really, nothing in my life had changed18

rubble of his own castle.” Tom felt a wave of relief surge through him as he embraced Aduro, but this was quickly replaced with panic. Where was Arcta? Had the giant somehow been pulled back into Gorgonia? “Arcta has returned to his rightful place – in the mountains,” said King Hugo, sensing his worry. He rose from his throne. “Well done, Tom. You are truly Avantia’s greatest champion.” Tom bowed his head. While the King thanked Elenna for all her help, Tom looked out of one of the throne-room windows. The sky was sapphire-blue, and the sun shone gently down on the green land that surrounded the castle. Brightly coloured flags and pennants fluttered on the houses in the distance. They had escaped the swirling red fog of evil Gorgonia for ever. “We are holding a feast in your honour in the Great Hall today,” King Hugo announced, as he stroked Storm and Silver in turn. “Avantia is impatient to welcome home her heroes.” A liveried servant walked in and draped a soft woollen blanket over Storm’s back, before leading the stallion away for food and a warm stable full of fresh bedding. Tom looked down at the purple jewel that still lay in his hand. He slipped it into his belt. The row of six jewels glowed fiercely, filling the throne room with a rainbow of light and power. The others looked on in wonder. Then King Hugo clapped an arm around Tom’s shoulder, and Aduro walked between Elenna and Silver. Together,

Prayer is spending time with God. ~ Sharon Espeseth         Covered     “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Ephesians 6:18).     Looking back, I recall the many times that I had done stupid things, yet somehow I didn’t get hurt. Specifically, I remember my university days as being full of stupidity. For instance, one cold November evening I decided to leave a house party and walk home. This wouldn’t have been so bad, however, it was 2:00 in the morning, I hadn’t told anyone I was going, and I had to walk 45 minutes to get home. When I think back, I shudder. Any number of bad things could have happened to me.   I made some poor choices, and although I suffered the consequences I sometimes felt as if the consequences were not as bad as they could have been. It recently occurred to me that I was being watched over and protected. I now know that my family frequently prayed for me.   Although I wasn’t serving God at the time, I was being covered in prayer by those who were. I am now led to believe that people I didn’t even know were praying for me. I make this assumption, not because I now know these people, but because I witnessed people praying for complete strangers.   In church and at Bible studies, prayer requests are often made for those we do not know. As part of a Christian writer’s group, I receive prayer requests via email for people I may never meet in my lifetime. Listening to Christian radio stations, prayer requests are voiced for others throughout the country and the world. As a member of many Christian associations, I receive newsletters and phone calls requesting prayer for strangers.   More recently, I witnessed first hand the outpouring of love for strangers through prayer. I was traveling east with a van full of women. We were excited about the conference we were going to together. However, on our drive we saw a slowdown of traffic on the opposite highway. There were police cars, ambulance, and fire truck lights flashing. In the centre of it all was a car, overturned on its roof. Another car was near with a smashed front end. The accident scene looked horrible. We automatically stopped our chatter and took a moment to pray aloud for the victims in the accident. We prayed for complete strangers. Although we may never know who they were, we followed Jesus’ directive to love our neighbours.   It’s comforting to know that my family and I are being prayed for. And I will continue to pray for people I don’t even know.       Prayer is my "alone" time with God. ~ Ruth Smith Meyer        

Another federal law makes it a felony for any person “knowingly to deliver or cause to be delivered for transmission through the mails or interstate commerce by telegraph, telephone, wireless, or other means of communication false or misleading or knowingly inaccurate reports concerning crop or market information or conditions that affect or tend to affect the price of any commodity in interstate commerce.”21 For this “crime,” you can be fined up to one million dollars and imprisoned for up to ten years. If you are ever prosecuted for a violation of this law, the way it is written, all the government needs to do to put you behind bars is to prove that you sent anybody a single bit of inaccurate information that somehow concerned crop or commodity market information or conditions. It does not matter whether you sent that message by telephone or mail or telegraph. It does not matter who you sent that letter to. It does not matter whether the information was actually false, or merely misleading. It does not matter whether your note actually had any effect on market prices anywhere, or even whether you intended for it to have that effect. The way this law was written by the morons in Congress, you are guilty of a felony if you send a postcard to your grandmother in a nursing home, trying to make her feel better by lying about how nice the weather has been in Florida, or how low the gas prices have been. And you will not find this law in Title 18 either; this one is buried in the bowels of Title 7 (sec. 13), which lists the laws supposedly regulating “Agriculture”.

To repeat, all poker starts as a struggle for the ante. This struggle for the antes is what determines all future action. It is a struggle that increases and builds up, but it should never be forgotten that the initial struggle for the antes is what started the war. Players who do forget this, no matter how well they play otherwise, frequently find themselves in trouble. Most often they play too many hands in relation to the size of the ante; sometimes they play too few. The best way to evaluate the size of the ante is to think about it in terms of pot odds and expectation. Let’s say you sit down in an eight-handed $10-$20 game, and everybody antes $1. That creates an $8 pot. Starting with that $8, you should play your hand in terms of the odds you’re getting for each bet in relation to your expectation of winning. If you bet $10, you are laying $10 to win $8. If someone calls you, he is getting $18-to-$10. The fact that $1 or one-eighth of that ante money was originally yours is of no consequence. In truth, it is no longer yours. The moment you place your $1 ante in the pot, it belongs to the pot, not to you, and eventually to the winner of the hand. It is a common fallacy for players to think in terms of the money they have already put in the pot. They make a bad call because they called one or two bets on earlier rounds. However, it is absolutely irrelevant whether you put the money in there or someone else did. It is the total amount, no part of which belongs to you any longer, that should determine how you play your hand. In home games the dealer often antes for everybody. Some players play much more loosely when they are dealing, thinking that the ante is somehow theirs. But to play differently just because you anted, rather than someone else, is absurd. It is the same amount of money out there, no matter from whose stack of chips it came. On the other hand, when you have the blind in hold ’em, for example, you can and should play a little looser, not because that blind is yours, but because you’re getting better pot odds.

PRAYER “Everything exposed to the light itself becomes light” (Ephesians 5:13). In prayer, we merely keep returning the divine gaze and we become its reflection, almost in spite of ourselves (2 Corinthians 3:18). The word prayer has often been trivialized by making it into a way of getting what we want. But I use prayer as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow us to experience faith, hope, and love within ourselves. It is not a technique for getting things, a pious exercise that somehow makes God happy, or a requirement for entry into heaven. It is much more like practicing heaven now. +Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, pp. 22–23.

Dave didn’t know how, but somehow he had fallen back to sleep, and when he woke the sunlight was streaming through the windows. “Right,” mumbled Carl, sliding out from his bed and climbing up into his diamond golem armor, which had been sat in the corner of the room, “let’s go and check this island out.” “Just a few more minutes, Mummy,” Captain Nitwit muttered. “I don’t want to get up yet.” “Um, your mummy isn’t here,” said Carl. Captain Nitwit opened his eyes and looked about the room with a confused expression.

Death. The only thing inevitable in life. People don’t like to talk about death because it makes them sad. They don’t want to imagine how life will go on without them, all the people they love will briefly grieve but continue to breathe. They don’t want to imagine how life will go on without them, Their children will still grow Get married Get old… They don’t want to imagine how life will continue to go on without them, Their material things will be sold Their medical files stamped “closed” Their name becoming a memory to everyone they know. They don’t want to imagine how life will go on without them, so instead of accepting it head on, they avoid the subject altogether, hoping and praying it will somehow… pass them by. Forget about them, moving on to the next one in line. No, they didn’t want to imagine how life would continue to go on… without them. But death didn’t forget. Instead they were met head-on by death, disguised as an 18-wheeler behind a cloud of fog. No. Death didn’t forget about them. If only they had been prepared, accepted the inevitable, laid out their plans, understood that it wasn’t just their lives at hand. I may have legally been considered an adult at the age of nineteen, but I still felt very much all of just nineteen. Unprepared and overwhelmed to suddenly have the entire life of a seven-year-old In my realm. Death. The only thing inevitable in life.

Gell-Mann Amnesia” effect: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business . . . In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.18

When Kim Jong-Il first played golf, he somehow managed to hit 11 holes in one on an 18-hole course.

Why, Anne, how you’ve grown!” she said, almost unbelievingly. A sigh followed on the words. Marilla felt a queer regret over Anne’s inches. The child she had learned to love had vanished somehow and here was this tall, serious-eyed girl of fifteen, with the thoughtful brows and the proudly poised little head, in her place. Marilla loved the girl as much as she had loved the child, but she was conscious of a queer sorrowful sense of loss. And that night, when Anne had gone to prayer meeting with Diana, Marilla sat alone in the wintry twilight and indulged in the weakness of a cry. Matthew, coming in with a lantern, caught her at it and gazed at her in such consternation that Marilla had to laugh through her tears.

...the idea that Smith can somehow be seen as representative of modern capitalism is a stretch. He was a man of his time, in the very particular society of oligarchic, 18th century Scotland. It was a world in which he thrived precisely by not fighting the status quo, but rather by making a proposal for harnessing greed, while keeping merchants in their social place and celebrating the ruling class of the time, and trying to envision a way in which it could play a part in a modernizing economy. In many ways, he got it right. While capitalism flourished in 18th century Scotland, the landed elite remained firmly in place and has managed to do so to this very day. In that aspect, Smith was quite visionary.

The mellow cheese melds together seamlessly with the chicken in the pâté... And by serving it warm instead of chilled, far from ruining the firmness of the meat, the moistness of the chicken has instead come alive! Not only that, the flavor of the porcini sauce is hardly overwhelmed. In fact, it now has a complex and intriguing taste to it! This is still a rough idea with plenty of room for improvement, but the promise is there. By deliberately matching powerful taste with powerful taste... ... they are actually magnifying each other!" "Well? Whaddaya think, Erina-chi? Is it good? Hm? Hm?" "Nope, the greasiness of the pork came out too strong. It's made the whole thing taste too heavy." "Yeah, but I'd still like to retain the pork's richness somehow!" "Are you all experimenting with another dish? Oh! Both chicken and pork? That combination won't do at all. You can't simply add more and more things, you know. Remember, less is more." "Hang on. How about we add some kind of tartness to it? Isn't there something that can keep both the chicken's umami and the pork's richness while zapping the greasiness of it all?

34:6-7. merciful, gracious, slow to anger, kindness, faithfulness, bearing crime and offense and sin. This is possibly the most repeated and quoted formula in the Tanak (Num 14:18-19; Jon 4:2; Joel 2:13; Mic 7:18; Pss 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; 2 Chr 30:9; Neh 9:17,31). The Torah never says what the essence of God is, in contrast to the pagan gods. Baal is the storm wind, Dagon is grain, Shamash is the sun. But what is YHWH? This formula, expressed in the moment of the closest revelation any human has of God in the Bible, is the closest the Torah comes to describing the nature of God. Although humans are not to know what the essence is, they can know what are the marks of the divine personality: mercy, grace. In eight (or nine) different ways we are told of God's compassion. The last line of the formula ("though not making one innocent") conveys that this does not mean that one can just get away with anything; there is still justice. But the formula clearly places the weight on divine mercy over divine justice, and it never mentions divine anger. Those who speak of the "Old Testament God of wrath" focus disproportionately on the episodes of anger in the Bible and somehow lose this crucial passage and the hundreds of times that the divine mercy functions in the Hebrew Bible.

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others. The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven, too.18 He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish.

Summing Up • An analysis of the form of moral logic underlying most traditionalist positions shows that what traditionalists find most fundamentally wrong with same-sex intimate relationships is that they violate divinely intended gender complementarity. • But “gender complementarity” is really more like a category under which a variety of forms of moral logic may appear. Some of these more specific forms, such as hierarchy, are not universally embraced among traditionalists as the deep meaning of gender complementarity. • The most widely embraced form of gender complementarity among traditionalists focuses on the anatomical or biological complementarity of male and female. The physical union of male and female in this view represents the overcoming of the incompleteness of the male on his own or the female on her own. • But this hypothesis raises a deeper question: Is anatomical or biological gender complementarity what Scripture assumes and teaches? The central issue here is the interpretation of the creation of woman in Genesis 2. • In response to a variety of traditionalist readings of Genesis 2, this chapter has argued the following countertheses: ° The original ʿadam of Genesis 1: 26–2: 18 is not a binary or sexually undifferentiated being that is divided into male and female in Genesis 2: 21. ° The focus in Genesis 2 is not on the complementarity of male and female but on the similarity of male and female. ° The fact that male and female are both created in the divine image (Gen. 1: 27) is intended to convey the value, dominion, and relationality that is shared by both men and women, but not the idea that the complementarity of the genders is somehow necessary to fully express or embody the divine image. ° The one-flesh union spoken of in Genesis 2: 24 connotes not physical complementarity but a kinship bond. • These countertheses demonstrate that Genesis 2 does not teach a normative form of gender complementarity, based on the biological differences between male and female. Therefore, this form of moral logic cannot be assumed as the basis for the negative treatment of same-sex relationships in biblical texts. Hence we need to look further to discern why Scripture says what it does about same-sex intimate relationships.

I was autographing books at one of those little rattan tables in the bookstore when I found myself looking into the saddest eyes I had ever seen. “The doctor wanted me to buy something that would make me laugh,” she said. I hesitated about signing the book. It would have taken corrective surgery to make that woman laugh. “Is it a big problem?” I asked. The whole line of people was eavesdropping. “Yes. My daughter is getting married.” The line cheered. “Is she twelve or something?” “She’s twenty-four,” said the woman, biting her lip. “And he’s a wonderful man. It’s just that she could have stayed home a few more years.” The woman behind her looked wistful. “We’ve moved three times, and our son keeps finding us. Some women have all the luck.” Isn’t it curious how some mothers don’t know when they’ve done a good job or when it’s basically finished? They figure the longer the kids hang around, the better parents they are. I guess it all depends on how you regard children in the first place. How do you regard yours? Are they like an appliance? The more you have, the more status you command? They’re under warranty to perform at your whim for the first 18 years; then, when they start costing money, you get rid of them? Are they like a used car? You maintain it for years, and when you’re ready to sell it to someone else, you feel a great responsibility to keep it running or it reflects on you? (That’s why some parents never let their children marry good friends.) Are they like an endowment policy? You invest in them for 18 or 20 years, and then for the next 20 years they return dividends that support you in your declining years or they suffer from terminal guilt? Are they like a finely gilded mirror that reflects the image of its owner in every way? On the day the owner looks in and sees a flaw, a crack, a distortion, one tiny idea or attitude that is different from his own, he casts it aside and declares himself a failure? I see children as kites. You spend a lifetime trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you’re both breathless...they crash...you add a longer tail...they hit the rooftop...you pluck them out of the spout. You patch and comfort, adjust and teach. You watch them lifted by the wind and assure them that someday they’ll fly. Finally they are airborne, but they need more string so you keep letting it out. With each twist of the ball of twine there is a sadness that goes with the joy, because the kite becomes more distant, and somehow you know it won’t be long before that beautiful creature will snap the lifeline that bound you together and soar as it was meant to soar—free and alone. Only then do you know that you did your job.

Cream of mushroom. Come and taste." When Gemma came to stand beside her, Viv dipped some soup into a tasting spoon and handed it to her. "We've a local farmer growing mushrooms for the markets, so I buy whatever he has on hand. This has brown mushrooms, shiitake, and some dried porcini, for depth of flavor." Gemma took a little sip from the spoon. "Oh, I see what you mean," she said in surprise. "It's delicious, but it's somehow more- mushroomy." "It's not balanced yet. It needs more salt." Viv added a generous palmful from a dish by the hob and stirred the pot thoroughly. Grabbing two more spoons, she tasted it herself, then handed a spoonful to Gemma. "Now try." Obediently, Gemma tasted. This time the flavors seemed to pop on her tongue. "Oh, my goodness. It's not salty- it just tastes... I don't know... brighter?" "That's what salt does. It's a flavor enhancer. You have a good palate.

Once it happened: a young boy and girl in a local college fell in love. They had really become very passionate and intense. Then, of course, coming from traditional families, the parents came in the way because of caste distinctions. They said, ‘No way. Over our dead bodies.’ Usually, this is a common proclamation the parents make. It is just a threat; they will not die. If the families do not oppose, most love affairs will fall apart. But the moment they resist it, it becomes like a cause. It is like they are fighting an injustice and people will rally behind them. So it went on and a big social scandal happened. When this happened, the lovers thought all this trouble is because of themselves, so they decided that they will end their lives. So they went up the Velliangiri Mountains. On top of these mountains, there is a place where you can leave your body. From there, you have a clear 700–800-feet drop which will give you a free fall without touching anything before you are splattered on the rocks. Some people have discarded their bodies consciously,18 others fall and do it. So the boy and girl reached the top and stood there, hand in hand. They were just about to jump, when the girl said, ‘Raju, I am so scared. You jump first.’ (Somehow the name of the idiot in all the romantic movies is always Raju!) The boy was in full form, so he said, ‘Come, hold my hand and jump.’ She said, ‘No, you do it first, then I will come. I will be right behind you.’ The boy had seen too many Hindi movies, and he jumped. The girl stood at the edge of the cliff and screamed, ‘Oh, Raju, I love you.’ Then she started thinking very pragmatically. ‘Now, Raju is gone. My love is gone. All of the problem is gone. When the problem itself is over, why waste one more life.’ So she walked down, and because she could not go back home, she came and settled down at the Isha Yoga Center.

Otto captured this sacred sixth sense, at once subject and object, in a famous Latin sound bite: the sacred is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, the mystical (mysterium) as both fucking scary (tremendum) and utterly fascinating (fascinans).80 (page 9) With the sacred viewed within this gripping, emotionally charged sense, it is hardly surprising that these topics are too disturbing to be studied either by religious scholarship or by science. The presence of real siddhis, real psychic effects lurking in the dark boundaries between mind and matter, are so frightening and disorienting that defense mechanisms immediately snap into place to protect our psyches from these disturbing thoughts. We become blind to personal psychic episodes and to the supportive scientific evidence, we conveniently forget mind-shattering synchronicities, and if the intensity of the mysterium tremendum becomes too hot, we angrily deny any interest in the topic while backing away and vigorously making the sign of the cross. Within science this sort of behavior is understandable; science doesn’t like what it can’t explain because it makes scientists feel stupid. But the same resistance is also endemic in comparative religion scholarship, which is supposed to be the discipline that studies the sacred. As Kripal says, scholars of religion “simply ignore … or brush their data aside as ‘primitive,’ ‘mistaken,’ and so on. Now the dismissing word in vogue is ‘anecdotal’ ” (pp. 17–18).80 One reason for this odd state of affairs is that real psi and real siddhis powerfully refute Descartes’s dualism, the very idea that led to the split between science, which deals with matter, and the humanities, which deal with mind. This distinction has carved up the world so successfully that when phenomena appear that harshly illuminate the artificial nature of the split, the resulting glare, says Kripal, “can only violate and offend our present order of knowledge and possibility” (page 24).80 From this analysis, Kripal arrives at his central argument: Psychic phenomena may be thought of as symbols that indicate “the irruption [a bursting in] of meaning in the physical world via the radical collapse of the subject-object structure itself. They are not simply physical events. They are also meaning events” (page 25).80 In other words, where objective and subjective meet, the fabric of reality itself blurs. This is a place that is not quite physical, and not quite mental, but a limbo that somehow contains and creates both.

I see,” said Mma Ramotswe. Somehow, she could not find the energy to say much more than that; this man was just too exhausting to contradict.

Somehow, I was missing that feeling of I’m doing the right things with the right people in the right way to make the most of who I am.

And practically everybody everywhere has heard about the infamous number at the end of the chapter (13v18). Careful, creative “analysis” of this number (666) has “conclusively shown” an amazing number of people to be The Antichrist. Every century has their candidate. People from all over the world that you would never suspect: from countless popes to Martin Luther, from JFK to Adolf Hitler, from Barack Obama to Ronald Wilson Reagan.171 If you manage to get famous enough, perhaps you’ll discover on YouTube that somehow 666 means that you too are the Antichrist.

Somehow, someway, it will happen. Because anything is a possible (The Law of Pure Potential) and there is plenty to go around (The Law of Abundance).

Paul tried to go in the room anyway, but Maman started to shut the door. Ellie managed to whoosh in just before she closed it tight. Paul’s whole body was shaking. Somehow, he made it back to the radio room. Mrs. Bernard took Paul gently by the hand. “Your mother has helped wounded soldiers before,” she said quietly. “Our group has helped rescue nearly fifty Allied pilots who crashed around Le Roc over the years. She knows what to do.” Paul sat down at the table, where Pierre was telling Mr. Leon what happened. “There were two guards in front of the barn, just as we expected,” Pierre said. He had his boot off. His ankle was swollen like a melon. It looked broken, or at least very badly sprained.