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"You'll be a grease spot by midnight"


Twinky
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Okay, we've all heard this. But when and where did it start?

LCM used the expression a lot. Usually in conjunction with, "If you walk out of here, you won't have God's hedge of protection around you and you'll be a grease spot by midnight."

(which overlooks, of course, that God promises He will never leave us nor forsake us - a pretty fundamental contradiction, it seems!)

Who coined this expression, LCM himself? Or VPW, did he say this (maybe, I can't remember)? And who remembers its first context? What was it in relation to, people leaving voluntarily, or being thrown out, or was it something else? When did you first hear it? Did anything else merit God "not spitting" at you?

I've heard LCM holler it out on more than a few occasions. That would be early 90s. When? Corps night, perhaps? But it clearly made its way out - SNS?

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Interesting, Shellon, but not quite what I was after.

When did - whoever - first start using this expression? Clearly it was around early 90s; was it around late 80s? ("Cop out" and "tricked out" were; but "grease spot"?)

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Do not know the when,Just as was said before about roadkill,All the person that left the way,would not even be roadkill just a "greasespot".

Hope that helps....It was a fear tactic,plain and simple,stay "in" and endure,or there will be nothing left of you or your family.

Sheesh...How could I have fall for that crap? :asdf::asdf::asdf:

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I had heard it before and so it had to be part of way speak before 1982. Since I left early in 83.

And hubby used it to describe his fear when we were on the road leaving the Corps

edited to add detail.

I am guessing it came into being in the mid to late 70's as that is the time when many people were in CB(citizens BAnd) Radios and thus would have heard it... Think Smokey and the Bandit movies and also that song on the radio

Oh gosh I can not remember the name of it just the most famous line "Hey rubber Ducky you got your ears ON.

That's a big Ten Four Good Buddy"

And I probably have it mixed up...

Any way it brought a lot of the CB terms into the main stream language

Bears For interstate Sheriffs patrols and such.

Ears on (Are you listening on your Radio) and others.

I agree the Midnight thing was probably added as a time element and it was used to scare people... SO loving a leader >> Blargh!!!

Edited by leafytwiglet
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Huh, this expression has a longer life than I expected. Shoulda known it wasn't original. Didn't know about Trucker-speak. What a terrifying expression to put into someone's mind as they were driving away in disgrace from TWI! Roadkill, this didn't "translate" for me.

Linda and Leafy, you're both talking about days when VPW was alive and huffing. Was it his expression?

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i was in from 92-97 and heard the greasespot warning a number times from lcm

i also recall a later qualifier for the statement

(perhaps once someone pointed to lives that improved after leaving)

now this is not a quote...but merely the gist, sum and substance of what i recall (and tried to believe)

"..."by midnight" means that spiritual blessings (magic powers manifestations) will be gone by midnight,

but the adversary will still allow false physical blessings in order to deceptively reinforce the decision to leave the protection of the one true housegold of God"

...yada yada yada

again...another sign of the gnostic-like dualistic split between the spiritual and material

further exaggerated and amplified by the superstitious mythological christian assumptions of lcm and ilk

...and big contributor to overall disfunction caused by such half-a$s divisive "rules" of the sub-culture cult

Edited by sirguessalot
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I don't remember VPW saying it, Twinky. LCM said it often. He was big on figurative expressions. Come to think of it, I remember when he was pushing the book A Hog on Ice and Other Curious Expressions. I hadn't thought about that in years.

lcm BEGAN by using it to refer to something that was a major failure.

Around 1980, SNT 1055 was him teaching "Believing Images of Victory."

He was explaining that when he tried playing football in college, it was a LOT more involved

than high school football. In college, techniques were taught and expected to be used,

but in high school, he was used to just relying on brute force. So, when he first tried to

adapt to college football, he would get creamed in the first scrimmage.

"Greasespot by midnight. They'd pick me up with a whisk-broom and a dust-pan."

Where vpw ripped off learned Christians, wise Christian, or anyone he thought would impress,

lcm ripped off folksy expressions.

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I heard it in 78 in Oklahoma. It is slang truck stop talk for road kill.

Thats how "some" okies talk...was his dad a truck driver or something?

No his dad worked for Phillips Petroleum Co. in Bartlesville, OK... and executive or accountant or something like that. I met his parents one year when they were out here for spring training baseball... that was also when Tony Phillips played for the Oakland A's. Loy's parents were nice people... not the driven nut bag that their son turned into.

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Huh, so we have trucker expressions filtered through footballers'/jocks' comprehension and turned out as a spiritual statement? And used to terrify believers?

Sirguessalot: hadn't heard that later qualifier, must have come along some time after I was already a grease spot (M&A'd).

WW: before my time. If he stated this on a 1980 SNT, he probably practiced on the Corps before that. Any offers, anyone?

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Huh, so we have trucker expressions filtered through footballers'/jocks' comprehension and turned out as a spiritual statement? And used to terrify believers?

Sirguessalot: hadn't heard that later qualifier, must have come along some time after I was already a grease spot (M&A'd).

WW: before my time. If he stated this on a 1980 SNT, he probably practiced on the Corps before that. Any offers, anyone?

The 9th corps was in residence before 1980 and I believe I had heard it from Loy's mouth before 1980... but can't be sure.

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I agree, I never heard VPW use this expression, only LCM. I'm guessing he used it early on, but it probably only became known ministry-wide when he was promoted to mog-in-waiting, which would be 1981. And by the late 1980's and into the 1990's (ie - postPOP) is when he became so paranoid that he was constantly warning about what would happen to you if you left the group and he also took on more of the teaching duties because he didn't trust anyone else to do it right. I doubt there were many times he was up at the podium that this piece of crap didn't come out of his mouth.

Oh, and the trucker song was called "Convoy" and was done by C.W. McCall. (good stuff, maynard!)

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Yes, I believe that martindale did get "greasespot by midnight" from a comic book. In fact, it was the "Fantastic Four" by Marvel comics. Ben Grimm, "The Thing"...used the phrase quite often, along with other such noteables as "It's clobberin' time" and "You couldn't scare a second hand Barbie doll". It was written for the mentality of a 12 year old boy. Apparently, martindale related to this "mindset" in his "spiritual athletic endeavors".
Uncle Hairy, you've shaken loose a mem cell there - the first time I saw the reference to "greasespot by midnight!" I had a quick blip of a comic book, like Spiderman or the Hulk, something, can't place it. Funny though!!
sorry Radar... I was done with comic books by the 70's (unless you count 'Fritz the Cat' and 'Yellow Submarine'... movies)...<BR><BR>but lcm was using that phrase back then... where it came from I don't know... we used to use that phrase as a kid... only it was "you'll be a greasespot"... we didn't know to put a time frame on it...

Us heavier-weight comic mavens couldn't confirm this specifically to Ben Grimm.

Possibly calling someone "greasespots" but not the "midnight" part at all.

I conducted years of indepth research (actually about 5 minutes, but I'm bored at work)into this term, and found that Loyboytoy misquoted a commonly used phrase (what else is new) - the common varient, and no doubt the ancestor is<BR>a GREASE SPOT ON THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE - once again, the boys from Brazil couldn't even plagerize them correctly!!!!

Now, THAT phrase I can find references to, at least in conversation.

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Surmissing what others would have reported, Craig proably would have gone ballastic and likely would have killed said person on the spot. Most likely why everone was terrified. Chris Geer would have done similar. VP was smarter than that.

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I don't remember hearing Greasespot by Midnight until LCM started getting extremely irritated by the fact that his prophecy wasn't seeming real or true. He had announced that Father told him the Word was over the world. Then he declared we were going in to the Promised Land of the Prevailing Word. Yet it seemed many in the household were being killed in car wrecks, and some were afflicted with cancer. He was more and more irritated.

I remember one lunch he was speaking about people asking him what it meant our lives would be like in the Prevailing Word. It seemed to be a very exciting time to be in The Way, and people thought we'd be living the high life. But he said he didn't know what to expect and seemed agitated that people had such high expectations. I think he must have realized he couldn't always lead in that capacity because it was such an untouchable idea.

The deaths of some believers which occured during this time made him extremely mad. I guess he thought the believing wasn't there according to his revelations. Of course the blame went to the people for their lack of believing.

Then those who left because there were such stringent rules were spoken badly of especially if they were Way Corps with positions out in the field. That's where I heard the phrase "If you leave God's household, you will be a greasespot by midnight." It instilled fear in to those of us still there. We didn't want to give the adversary a chance to kill us.

It was a serious subject at the time. I laugh my arse off thinking about it now. That was a perfect example of koolaid drinking.

Surmissing what others would have reported, Craig proably would have gone ballastic and likely would have killed said person on the spot. Most likely why everone was terrified. Chris Geer would have done similar. VP was smarter than that.

I did hear him ranting about an overweight fellowship coordinator who died for weight-related illnesses. Craig was ballistic and ranting like crazy. Then he said something to the effect: I should go there, raise him from the dead, and then tell him to die again!!!

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I did hear him ranting about an overweight fellowship coordinator who died for weight-related illnesses. Craig was ballistic and ranting like crazy. Then he said something to the effect: I should go there, raise him from the dead, and then tell him to die again!!!

OMG. I remember hearing things like that from him and other WC leaders. It makes me sick to think about it. He also hated handicapped people. He ranted and raved about being "forced" to have to comply with handicapped accessible issues. (Maybe he was raging about the Americans w/ disability act) He also flipped out when a deaf Miss America won the crown. He called her retarded. (She wasn't) He screamed about that during lunch one day, deeply resenting that a hearing impared person was being admired. I remember being really mad about it, but of course I didn't dare say anything. If people in the ministry were dying it's probably because they were so stressed out with all the death threats from leadership. OMG!

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yeah, I remember that, too. he really went on about how miss america was supposed to be an example of human perfection, and here we had a perversion of what god intended holding the title, because she was deaf. he was really ....ed off that people would settle for second rate goods and ranted about how the devil was getting us to accept handicaps as "normal".

god, what a nut job. it seems like I was living a different life, to even stay in the room and listen to that crap.

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