Lifted Up

Hey, it's TODAY!!!!! Happy Birthday!!!

How about a smile for each year.

Lemme guess...

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Close???????

Sure you didn't mean wrong? Because you can sharply disagree with someone...believe they are totally wrong...and still have respect for them and their opinions. I go through it a lot each spring and summer in an example I will spare you..for now.

But to consider someone's opinion worthless is to toss any small measure of respect IMO...and hardly goes with "nothing personal".

Pretty much; but it wont hurt to pray for the reasons I mentioned in the previous post. Okay, so it never hurts to pray I guess.

The pain she was feeling turned out to be from a pinched or damaged nerve in her jaw...not cardiac problems. She was out pretty quickly but since I don't have contact with her that often, I didn't know until now (but this time my info is from direct contact). The stress is still there,plus the fibromyalgia flareups.

Maybe we can simply, as Shell does, pray anyway.

My info came from a posting from someone else on another forum (not GS). That person posted a note from Robi herself that detailed the situation. That is all I know, although I have no reason to suspect that the note is a hoax.

I heard from someone else that she went into the hospital with symptoms which COULD be consistent with cardiac problems, or which may just be related to a lot of stress she has been going through lately. Some others here may already know, but since I haven't seen anything I am posting so that her friends who don't know will know to pray.

I gues what Hope was trying to say is that through the TWI experience many want to be committed to something. That can be dangerous, as we see from her PTA experience.

Garth, I actually see consistency in Hope's original post. She seems to define a cult in terms of what it was like in her life...whether it be TWI, or PTA. She defines it in terms of HER experience and not someone else's. It leaves open the possibility that either the TWI or the PTA experience may not be a cult in someone else's life.

Anyway, I see a lot fewer problems with that definition than with the one that imposes the definition for someone else's life...that is, "you were in a cult and under mind control and if you believe you are/were not, you are just being waybrained"...or "PTAbrained."

Knowing some of the posters here, what exactly is sooo wrong with not throwing away a lot of good things I have learned, when I've ended up healthier by doing so?

I certainly have seen it on other threads recently; one in particular I am thinking of. Rather than give respect to someone's decision that something learned in TWI is right; someone basically said, well that's all right, it is each one's decision, but they are "waybrained". That, I think, accoring to the way the phrase is usually meant, is saying that someone had not made their own decision.

Garth, regarding your "catch phrase" post...the mutual admiration society it is related to is as alive and well as ever...you should take a look at the other end.

sigh....yes, don't we all need someone to trust in.

I think you are making a good choice...trying to build that trust in God. Maybe I, as you perhaps, am finding out the hard way.

Maybe I have trusted in people too much. But maybe that is not the best way to put it, as it may imply the primary problem is my friends not living up to God's standards. More like, my standards...that I am expecting from people what I should be expecting from God.

The just dropping out of what had been a very close friend, or so I thought. The change in another who said, "I'll always be there for you", followed later by "my table is full". Or the preparation to writing a couple friends on an important matter, only to lose the hear when I discover that one is involved in frequent ridicule, which I dont like, even when it is of others.

It is hard, though, to think lowly of them when I look at the ways I get off base. I will spare you the list for now.

What has this to do with this thread? Well, the reason I don't like the "cult" label, for TWI or anything, has nothing to do with bad things happening. Let the testimonies be given and stand on their own. I will not deny those testimonies. But suddenly in "cult" mode, everything good becomes an accident; everything done is because of "mind control" or "waybrain". Such as recently when one poster described someone in the past doing a rather unlikeable thing; this poster had to describe her attempt to help this person as "the waybrain kicked in". Since when is it waybrain to love the unlovable, to try to help the seemingly unhelpable? But evidently , the cult mentality will not allow a person to have had real heart in TWI, or at best it has to be "in spite of" TWI, lest someone admit we really learned something about the heart of God.

One of the above mentioned friends once wrote to me that "TWI taught me how to live" while at the same time "recognized the evil that evolved in TWI". That remains a valuable testimony to me.

I guess instead of counting friends, it may help, as Rottie is trying, to "try to build that trsut in God". Or perhaps...to "Turn your eyes upon Jesus"...but that is a song that VPW liked to sing in the last '70s, such as at PFAL77, so it must be waybrain, huh?

In short, despite what was thrown at me later by the deprogrammers, I am quite sure that the Trinity issue was the reason my deprogramming got started.

The independent "anti=cult" groups, including the deprogrammers in my experience, would always insist that a group was a cult not because of its beliefs, but because of its practices (i.e. the Lifton "bible" of mind control). However, in practice, churches and church groups were, and I guess still are, big in the Trinity issue.

I knew it was the day...happy birthday! I posted on that other list first, then came here. Have a good one!.

Maure...thinking of you.

Yes, I would ike to know about Digi and Maure myself. They both had real battles to fight.

Good idea. When things go well we can stop praying. oh, no...uh-uh....keep it going!

Had an accident that resulted from a blown tire on making a turn...that caused me to veer onto the curb and into the only brick mailbox around.

Maybe it would have been hard to avoid by my driving, but a couple of "poor" decisions are involved regarding the tires I had on...and the insurance which I got, having acquired the van a month and a half ago.

I'll spare the further details but some prayer would be appreciated.

I should hasten to add ONE detail...no one was hurt.

I may as well wish you for this one too!

Yes...Happy Birthday...

Do you have more than one??????

I have seen some of those "streling character" people picked apart too. Sometimes it seems amazing what you can find with some simple web searches...not to mention some indirect personal experience. The point is, as for example I was trying to say on the Billy Graham thread, they (BG in this case), gain respect for what they speak and preach and teach about God, even if I do not agree with everything they do or understand.

Dunno whether this forum or friend tracker is better. I vaguely remember someone telling me a former WOW roomie of mine...John White...going into the corps and I think it was the 11th...but my memory is uncertain on this. Anyone here know that name?

Rafael wrote...

"It didn't snow. The weather reports from that day in that region prove it did not snow that day."

What weather reports? I have been staying out of this for some reasons, but I can't help being curious about that statement.

Just from a weather reporting point of view, a snow shower such as that in question would be unlikely to show up (or proof that it didn't happen) in any old weather reports, unless the point in question is precisely at an observing and reporting point for weather data. General conditions...the high and low temperature for that given day and whether or not there was precipitation...at even a very a nearby point...just will not tell you either way.

I experienced a very brief and local but intense snow shower one day back in 1979 when I was running near HQ. One minute it was not snowing, the next minute the snow was almost blinding, and fell hard enough to whiten the ground; five minutes later it was gone. Just a couple miles away, it evidently did not snow at all. I have actually seen that kind of thing a number of times; most noteably in the mountains of central PA, but here it was happening in fairly flat country.

The same idea of extreme local weather variations happens in warm weather. I sometimes have a fun time explaining to insurance people, or their clients, that I cannot tell them for sure that there was or was not a storm causing damaging winds at their precise location, because we had no reports either way at the particular time and date they are interested in. (It is easy to be out in the boonies around where I live and work). Sometimes of course I can tell them for sure there was nothing around...of course these calls are not for weather from sixty years ago, either.

Of course, if there were evidence that the temperature was close to, say eighty degrees at the time in question, then the occurrence of a snow shower at that time might be deemed implausible...just like the creation of a dry area across the red Sea by a strong east wind.

Anyway, that proves you could actually LAUGH while in the corps...at least in the "70s.