Category: Religious

Food For Thought · Judeo-Christian Perspective · observations · Opinions · Religious · Supernatural

Sometimes it’s hard to write. (Part 1)

Tori LennoxLeave a comment

I’m in that place where it’s hard to think about a novel much less write or edit one. Between book submissions, taking care of Mom, and nurturing our dachshund through four months of surgeries (she’s doing well now) my creativity is nil. It’s not writer’s block or any such silliness. Emotional and physical stress have temporarily sucked the life out of me. That happens sometimes. Usually during the summer months when it’s too hot to enjoy the long walks that keep me emotionally grounded.

Right now, I take Mir for short walks in the morning and at night supplemented with outside potty breaks throughout the day. That’s a poor substitute for long prayer walks surrounded by nature. That’s my God time when I talk to my Father about random thoughts, praise Him for the life I live now, and thank Him for the lessons I’ve learned over the past few years. Right now, I’m eagerly anticipating next month when temperatures drop enough in Florida to start walking again. Hopefully, when that happens, my desire to write will return.

In the meantime, my headspace is introspective. My mind is more on my faith than on imaginary settings, situations, and characters. My next two or three posts will be more spiritual in nature. Please consider yourself forewarned that you may not want to read further posts for a while. However, if faith isn’t your thing, you still might enjoy reading about subjects you probably won’t hear in Sunday service or anywhere else for that matter. You may decide I’m totally nuts or a heretic, or you may decide there’s more to this world God created and Jesus saved than the “I’m okay, you’re okay, your sins are forgiven, so welcome to Heaven.” feel good sermons so many pastors preach today.

If you’ve read any of my past blogs where I talk about my life or my journey to believing again, the next couple of paragraphs may bore you. If you don’t know me, I took a long, painful, destructive road to get to a place where I talk with God every day because I want to, not because I’m supposed to. By talk, I don’t mean prayer although I do that every day, too. I mean casual conversations like I’d have with you. The gentle, reassuring awareness I’m in the presence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that I feel deep inside tells me that He listens.

Looking back, this isn’t a place the old me ever thought I’d be. It just didn’t fit with my perception of an angry God and an all but nonexistent Jesus. I didn’t get a relationship with my Heavenly Father at all. In fact, I would have believed you were crazy if you told me intimacy with God was even possible a few years ago. However, I’ve been walking and talking with the Lord long enough now to know anyone who says that isn’t crazy. They’ve just spent long enough seeking the Lord to have the kind of deep relationship with their Creator most of us never have.

Moving on, I spent many years seriously involved with occult studies like astrology and tarot cards. Truthfully, I’ve spent more of my life co-mingling my Christian beliefs with New Age beliefs and practices than I have as a believing believer. Like many of us, I desperately searched for identity, purpose, and an end to the depression and worthlessness that plagued me for most of my life. It was a long, difficult journey filled with bad choices and damaging consequences. The downside, I spent a lot of miserable years. The upside, I’m in a good place with a solid spiritual and emotional foundation that isn’t easily shaken. While I’m still working on the purpose, my faith and my relationship with God pull me through the occasional bumps in the road.

The only reason I’ve reiterated things I’ve said in the past is to underscore the fact, while I’ve always believed in God and Jesus and considered myself “Christian” (I was not), I wasn’t raised in the Church or educated in Christian schools. I attended church sporadically the first fifteen years of my life. I spent the next thirty as a worldly believer not practicing my faith. While there were belief systems I wouldn’t touch like overt witchcraft or satanism, I skirted as close to the occultic edge as I could with my spiritual poisons of choice in my quest to understand the human condition, world history, and why we believe the things we believe. I was, and still am, driven by a deep desire to know. To understand. To pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It’s a passion that’s been a curse at times. I just didn’t know it.

I think you’re starting to get the picture I’m trying to paint. I’m a more introverted, scholarly woman. I’ve devoted most of my life to studying history with side interests in everything from medicinal herbs to forensics to art to psychology to physics and so on. In other words, you can’t study history without venturing into the overlapping fields that impact history and I’ve done that.

To my credit, I’ve always attempted to temper my understanding of the past within the context of the culture and time period I’m investigating. To keep my personal moral judgements out of it as much as humanly possible. To understand what seems horrific to me today was a part of everyday life in the Ancient Near East or Dark Age Europe. That’s part of being a serious scholar – not trying to revise history to fit some predetermined narrative – but being open to interpreting the raw information that’s really there.

I also believe in doing your due diligence and I use a lot of sources including articles/books that don’t necessarily agree with my current scholarly or religious beliefs. In other words, all of my sources aren’t Christian, they’re secular, too. I also understand new discoveries are made every day – that doesn’t include the unsubstantiated revisionist or ancient alien theory of the week – and I believe those solid, substantiated discoveries like the DNA results on the skeleton of King Richard III should be taken into consideration. Now that I’ve exhausted that rabbit trail, I’ll segue back to the subject at hand with apologies for my ramblings.

As I’ve started spending more time with God, I decided to start rereading my Bible a few months ago. It’s been a few years since I’ve done that. I made it to Leviticus before I abandoned the Old Testament and read through the New Testament instead. Once I finished the NT, I moved back to the Old Testament and realized I was reading it with a different understanding than I had before. Verses that had always seemed so harsh and violent to me, I suddenly understood in the context of the ancient cultures involved. I suddenly understood what I was reading through the eyes of a loving God who cared about his people in a way that I’d never seen before.

Yes, I know a lot about ancient history from my studies and I know what the biblical atlases, etc. say; but I’d never viewed what I was reading with the clarity I did now. If I was more “religious” and less scholarly, I don’t believe I would have understood why. But I am more scholarly, so it didn’t take me long to realize what had changed: I’d read and/or reread several books that gave me a deeper understanding of the cultures and society my faith was birthed in than I’ve ever gotten from any church sermon, encyclopedia, or biblical commentary.

While I don’t embrace every idea or belief the authors put forth in any book that I may mention, these sources have given me food for thought and ideas to pray about and dig deeper into using RELIABLE, peer reviewed sources. Any author I mention uses footnotes in their books so you can verify where they get their information. Or, at the least, they will tell you where their information comes from. While not infallible, I prefer using actual nonfiction books and scholarly magazines and articles over random sites on the internet or Wikipedia and the like in my research.

Thanks to a book I read recently and the clarity I received as a result, my understanding of so many events in the Bible clicked into place in ways they never have before. I discovered missing pieces of the puzzle that have mystified me for years. While not a plug for The Rabbi, the Secret Message, and the Identity of Messiah by Carl Gallups, this is me admitting this book made me embrace a process I’d started but hadn’t fully completed.

That process is learning to approach my faith more through the eyes of a Messianic Jew from the Second Temple Period than a modern Christian living in America. When I finished that book, I knew despite my best efforts to understand history within the context of the time and culture I’m studying, I’ve predominantly viewed my Bible through twenty-first century gentile eyes.

That’s a surprising confession for me to make since I’ve read a lot of books over the past seven or eight years that have influenced me to have a more “supernatural” world view than most American Christians do. Dr. Michael Heiser’s Supernatural and his Reversing Hermon are two easy to read books that helped strengthen my faith and opened my eyes to the cultural context of the Bible. His The Unseen Realm is both more scholarly, and much harder to read along with his books Angels and Demons. I own all of these books and I can honestly say they’ve helped me understand my Bible better.

However, just reading Supernatural and Reversing Hermon opened my eyes so much and they are my picks for anyone who doesn’t want to wade through his more complex scholarly works. Again, while I don’t agree with everything Dr. Heiser says in every book and that’s how it should be when we examine the evidence and think for ourselves, I’m not the expert in his fields. He is. The bottom line is I respect his research and what he has to say. If I had to sum up Dr. Heiser’s most impactful point, it’s the reality that we can’t believe what we don’t understand, and we can’t fully understand the Bible if we only see it through modern eyes. I don’t remember if those are Dr. Heiser’s exact words, but they are definitely my takeaway from what he has to say so he gets the credit for those words and that idea, not me.

I’ll leave you with that thought.

Until next time,

Calla

Judeo-Christian Perspective · Religious · Supernatural

I’ve Struggled With This One…Part III

Tori LennoxLeave a comment

Sorry for the delay. The past few weeks have been nuts from a novel perspective. I’ve edited two novels with two more to go. While I can flip between writing and/or editing a couple of novels at the same time, I can’t add the blog to the mix. That’s too many different balls to juggle.

Anyways, I’m here now and I’m ready to dive into the matter. I’ll start by saying while I was so deeply involved with astrology, I was obsessed with hauntings. I wanted to believe in ghosts, orbs, crop circles, aliens, tormented spirits, any manner of things that go bump in the night. I never fully got there; but I tried for decades to get convinced. The whole idea is funny to me now because I never liked spooky things like horror movies or anything gory like zombies. But give me a good poltergeist, ghost, or demonic activity story and I wanted to know everything possible about what happened and why. I wanted to understand.

My poison of choice was Hans Holzer’s books and any haunting show/story I could find on television or the internet. Not surprising, I loved the historical hauntings best. I flirted with becoming a paranormal investigator for a couple of years. What stopped me was an innate feeling I was already in too deep. Some part of me balked at the thought that might be the step there was no backtracking from. I also realized I wanted to know about these things – not interact with them. As wide open as I was to the paranormal, I had enough common sense left to know I had far more to lose than I had to gain if I jumped into that lifestyle with both feet, so I didn’t. I chose to pursue my love of hauntings from a safer distance until I stopped believing about twelve years ago.

That’s about the time I started attending church with the intent to find a better life than I’d had for the last thirty years. While I’d like to say when I rededicated my life to Christ, I saw that my past pursuits were evil. That’s a lie. I already knew they went against the faith I still believed in but felt had betrayed me. I still believed in God and Jesus. I didn’t believe the organized church was right for me. I was perfectly happy mixing my Christian and pagan beliefs together with a generous dollop of morality and religion. So, no, returning to my faith didn’t suddenly open eyes that were already open to the error of my ways. The truth is far less exciting. As my mental and emotional health improved, my self perception improved as well. When that happened, I realized how convoluted and detrimental my interests were and walked away. I just didn’t want to dabble any more.

Before that happened, I visited a lot of crazy places never realizing all the insanity I was studying was opening doors to everything I was trying to escape. Whether you believe it or not, dark attracts dark, negative attracts negative, pathetic attracts pathetic, and desperate attracts desperate. You hear that over and over again; but I don’t think it really sinks in for most of us. It didn’t for me.

I was so desperate to find some degree of happiness and self-worth, I didn’t make a move in my romantic life without consulting astrology books, that astrology chart I’d ordered, and monthly horoscopes. That sounds ludicrous to me now; but it made sense back then. With hindsight, if I hadn’t believed so strongly in the reliability of astrology, I would have avoided so many disasters in my life. I can’t say the outcome would have been any better. I was too mentally and emotionally screwed up from abuse and self-hate. However, I know my life would have been different. I like to hope I would have been open to more positive influences.

However, I was married to my beliefs. To illustrate my point, I would have run as far and as fast as possible in the opposite direction the first time I met my brilliant, abusive, white-collar ex-husband when I was twenty-four. Even though I sensed something about him that I didn’t like, I ignored the same internal warning I would have followed before I became so embroiled in my New Age beliefs.

In my defense, this man passed the smell test. He looked good on paper. He had manners. He said and did the right things to lure me in. My family liked him and his family adored me. Added to that, he fit the profile of who I was supposed to marry according to that astrological chart I mentioned in a prior post. He was successful, professional, from a good family, and five years older than me. Everything my future husband was supposed to be. It didn’t hurt he treated me well while we were dating. Six months into the marriage I discovered I’d married an abusive monster it would take me three-and-a-half years to escape. I won’t go into the lurid details since I’ve already done that in prior posts. I will admit it was my cockroach I’ll-be-here-when-you’re-gone survivor attitude that pulled me through that nightmare. The best thing I can say about “Mr. White Collar Monster” is he didn’t let me play around with my New Age crutches. His life was about math, science, and sex. Superstition had no place in his universe. It did in mine both before and after him.

If it seems like I’m flipping back and forth between subjects like astrology, I am. I toyed with different interests at different times in my life. There were a lot of “beliefs” I tried on for size and abandoned. They didn’t work for me. Astrology, ghosts, and the unexplained like aliens and crop circles were fields of study I pursued for most of my life. Tarot cards and psychics were more sporadic studies. Neither lasted very long for specific reasons I’m happy to share.

My first contact with psychics happened when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. My Mom dragged me to a “Christian” psychic because she was having a weird dream over and over again. She saw this woman was coming to town in the local paper and made an appointment. I tagged along for the ride. This woman seemed pleasant and normal. She had strict rules about only doing one reading a year for her clients. The appointment was more like a friendly get together than a consultation. She “saw” a couple of things she shouldn’t have seen like the fact she saw my mother putting out packages and there was something wrong in her chest area. She was right in her abstract way.

My Mom was a rural mail carrier and she eventually died from the breast cancer that hadn’t been diagnosed yet. Added to that, she eventually interpreted my Mom’s dream as a message from her late sister-in-law who’d died from a brain aneurysm in the middle of the night slumped over her baby’s crib years before I was born. Apparently, my aunt wanted my mother to tell her family she was okay and she loved them. This woman not only interpreted my mom’s dream in a plausible manner, she told us my aunt’s name knowing she was off by one letter. According to her “Spirit Guides” my aunt’s name was Ila Mae. Her name was Ida Mae. She was one letter off. I won’t lie to you, I found the whole thing creepy at the time. I don’t think my Mom really knew what to think.

Before she was done, this woman tried to give me a “Spirit Guide.” I didn’t want one. Even back then I wasn’t sure what those were. I was inclined to think they were demons masquerading as angels. That was before she scared the hell out of me with her version of a Spirit Guide who was supposedly a Grand Prix driver who died in a race in France in the 1950’s. I wasn’t comfortable with that idea from the start. I didn’t care if this “guy” came forward in the spiritual realm to offer to be my guide. I didn’t want a guide. When she started telling me things he supposedly said from the other side starting with his admiration for my “golden pillow hair” and escalating to remarks that would have been overt come-ons from a living man, I went from “uncomfortable” to scared witless. To this day, I’m grateful I reacted that way without knowing why. I can honestly tell you if I’d been the bright-eyed, popular girl I was before I was molested, I might have been enticed by something telling me how beautiful I was. As it was, I rebuked that entity and never looked back. I never consulted another psychic until after my mom and my grandmother died when I was wallowing in grief. My advice, based on personal experience, is don’t go there. At best, you’ll be manipulated by well-meaning people being influence by things they don’t understand. At worst, by unscrupulous cons who know exactly what they’re doing.

The last thing I’m going to share is my brush with Tarot Cards. I had a teacher friend I met on my first teaching job. Susan was a talented artist as well as an art teacher. She not only read Tarot cards; but she collected various Tarot sets for their artistic beauty. When my friend taught me how to read Tarot cards, she warned me the more I read them the more I would want to read them. Her answer to that hunger was to put the cards away for a few weeks and not touch them. Instead of scaring me off, that intrigued me. I took to reading Tarots like a fish to water and I was good at it. I did a reading every chance I got until I realized Susan’s warning was true. The more readings I did, the more I wanted to do. I put the cards in a drawer for a while like she advised only to take them out again when I felt it was “safe.” After that situation happened three or four times and I realized the desire to do readings got stronger each time, I decided I was messing with something bigger than I was. I threw the cards away. Truthfully, I threw the cards away twice before I was done with them.

This is the point where I’m going to end this subject. There are a lot more experiences I could recount, some of them a lot more disturbing; but I won’t. I don’t want to relive the experiences. While I never practiced Satanism or any form of witchcraft or dark magic or any of the belief systems many of us consider “bad,” what I did was detrimental enough to my mental, spiritual, and emotional health. I couldn’t see that while I was involved in that lifestyle. Fifteen years out of it, I see clearly now what I didn’t then.

Whether you believe me or not, is up to you. Whether you get anything out of what I write, again, that’s up to you. I can honestly tell you that I don’t believe I would have met, much less married, the “White-Collar Monster” if I hadn’t so immersed in occult practices. I believe what I was doing attracted him to me – dark attracts dark. I also believe I would never have gazed into those flat, black snake-eyes every time he choked or beat me because I resisted him giving me to other men or because I didn’t want to dress trashy in public. Those were his usual reasons; but, honestly, because he felt like it was as good a reason as any to knock me around.

Bluntly, if you’re repeating my mistakes, the best advice I can give you is to walk away. If you’re dabbling with any of the things I did and you’re depressed or suicidal, I can tell you from experience that what you’re doing may not be the cause – but it’s not helping you. It didn’t help me. While returning to my faith is what ultimately straightened my life out, walking away from all the garbage I’d devoured for years is what opened the door to restoration.

Until next time,

Calla

emotional healing · Food For Thought · Opinions · Religious · Supernatural · Uncategorized

I’ve struggled with this one…Part II

Tori LennoxLeave a comment

In more ways than I expected. No, not with what you’ll think of me if I write some of this. I burned that bridge a long time ago with prior posts. The most trying aspect of this piece is finding the right words to say what needs to be said with integrity. To bear my soul. It’s humbling to admit I was desperate for the acceptance I could never have. Not because there was anything wrong with me. There wasn’t. Nothing beyond my perception I was “damaged goods.” Not because others weren’t willing to accept me. They were. But I never saw that because of my self-perception.

Sharing my experiences as honestly as possible entails revisiting traumatic memories and ripping old wounds open. It’s a necessary evil. Otherwise, I’m just another born-again telling people occult practices are evil because the Bible says so. Nope, not me. While that’s true, that’s not my angle. Knowing that reality didn’t deter me, so why should I expect it to deter you. Most of us are attracted to things we shouldn’t be. I was.

So, if you’ll stick with me through the opinions and backstory, I’ll get to the personal experiences that taught me the error of my ways. They aren’t pretty; but they are real. I have a sneaky suspicion a lot of you are experiencing or have experienced the same kind of things. While I don’t post trigger warnings, I will warn you that I may be fairly graphic in my recollections. Not vulgar, but real. The time for relying on allusion has long passed. We’re so desensitized as a culture that alluding to anything doesn’t get the point across. Sometimes it’s necessary to cozy up to vivid memories that aren’t remotely comfortable. Unfortunately, I can’t “show” you how my involvement with astrology and a so-called “Christian” psychic led me to make decisions that catapulted me into the worst period of my life any other way.

That being said, let’s get back to the story I’ve already started. In this day it’s not usual to have a kid in the fifth or sixth grade (or much younger) reading and comprehending on a college level. Back in my day, it was rare and it wasn’t nurtured. I was one of only two kids in my whole school who were significantly accelerated in every subject and Jonathan’s scores were higher than mine. The funny thing, you’d never know it by our grades. We weren’t the straight A students largely, I think, because we were bored and we didn’t have guidance. Nobody really knew what to do with us, so they did nothing. Why am I telling you this? Merely to illustrate intelligence and comprehension aren’t good indicators of maturity. I was a baby when I started grazing through New Age topics. Ten or eleven years old if that. I had no clue what I was messing with. I couldn’t begin to understand how any of that fit in the real world. I just thought what I was learning was interesting and I was a sponge soaking up everything I was exposed to.

More important than my fascination with dipping my toe in murky waters was my belief anything my Mom read was a must read and, around this time, she was reading astrology books. She read them and shrugged them off as entertainment as most people did in the ’70’s. She bought into the “characteristics” aspect of astrology more than the “prophetic” aspect and took it all with a big grain of salt. Over time, I bought it all. Astrology was more than a passing interest. It was my crutch.

While my Mom knew I was more interested than she was, I don’t think she realized how deep my involvement went. She should have because I didn’t hide what I was doing. But, she didn’t for a lot of reasons. For one thing, by the time she pushed through her busy day, she wasn’t interested in micromanaging my life. For another, she didn’t know my Dad had molested so she thought the reason her once popular, self-confident kid became withdrawn was because Junior High was hard. I’d gone from an Elementary School where we were taught to be respectful and well-mannered to a Junior High filled with mean-spirited, disrespectful hyenas. Not being into sex, drugs, profanity, and mouthing off to teachers made me a moving target for all the kids who were. Yep, bullying existed in the dark ages. I experienced more than my share of it.

While none of that was pleasant, I was tough enough to have navigated the teen-aged angst just fine if I’d still been that same bright-eyed, innocent little girl I was just a year before. Instead, I was a tormented kid looking for something to take the guilt, fear, and shame away. Something that could give me some degree of control over my life was what I was looking for. By the time I was in High School and into college, I’d taught myself to cast astrology charts. I could look at someone and predict their Sun Sign with a fair degree of accuracy based on physical characteristics. My little hobby had become obsessive and I loved it. I felt powerful.

When I was in ninth grade, I ordered a detailed Astrology chart that predicted the rest of my life. With hindsight, ordering that forecast was the worst thing I’ve ever done. My life became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I became addicted to reading every horoscope I could get my hands on in an effort to keep all the bad stuff that chart predicted from happening to me. While my “planetary alignments” were overall negative, that chart promised I still had the power to change these things and it told me a lot of specifics I clung to for most of my life. Concrete specifics like my perfect husband would be five years older than me. I’ve put that one to the test a couple of times and it’s crap like everything in that chart with the exception of the projected pain and misery. While I can’t say my life would have been any different if I’d never bought that chart – it wouldn’t if I’d made the same choices – I can say expecting my life to be unhappy pretty much ensured it was until 2008 when I finally found my way back to Church and healing.

At this point, I wish I could say this was the end of the matter. It was just the beginning. I was like the person who’s first drink initiates their dive into the bottle. My grazing in the “New Age” section of the library vault opened doors I’d never really thought about before. My next big interest was ghosts, hauntings, poltergeists, cryptids, preternaturals, E.T.’s, and eventually Tarot Cards. Actually, all of those were parallel interests going on at the same time I was mired in astrology.

As I’ve already said, this piece has several parts. I’m guessing there will be two more posts in this vein. Definitely one. I apologize for so much backstory; but the experience part of the blog doesn’t make sense without the set up.

Until Part IIl ~ Experiences,

Calla

emotional healing · General Quirkiness · Judeo-Christian Perspective · Life in general · observations · Opinions · Religious · Supernatural

I’ve struggled with this one…

Tori LennoxLeave a comment

In the, “Do I or don’t I” write this piece sense. It took me a few days to finally decide that, Yep, this one’s kind of out there, but it’s true so I’m going for it. I’ve been honest about my life and my journey from self-loathing to self-respect in so many ways. But, I’ve never shared this part largely because it’s easier to speak about abuse than it is to speak about “Spiritual” or “Supernatural” beliefs some of which seem foolish with hindsight. Not foolish that I believed certain things on my spiritual journey. That’s what a “Seeker” does. Foolish because I let my beliefs control me when I believed I was controlling my beliefs.

I’ve also debated opening up about this aspect of my life because it’s not only out there; but incredibly long. More than one blog long. Probably a two or three-parter. However, I’ve made allusions to “my journey” in terms of my spirituality and stated outright that I came by my Christian beliefs the hard way. However, I’ve never shared that much about how I went from practicing a form of “Christopaganism” to my current belief system. I think it’s time to weave that story with the same candor I’ve tried to exhibit in all of my posts.

The sad part of my story is I considered myself a Christian while I dabbled in Occult practices. I didn’t comprehend it’s one or the other. The two don’t mix. Like it or not, when you try to have it both ways, you’re going to favor one side over the other. I’ll let you guess which one. I’m not saying these statements because I’ve heard or read them somewhere. I’ve lived the events I’m writing about so I’m not just sharing beliefs. I’m sharing experiences. I can assure you the lure of Astrology, or psychics, or Tarot Cards or whatever soul poisoning dabble you choose isn’t worth the price you’ll pay down the road. It wasn’t for me.

My dance with the dark side started in elementary school as a smart kid with a fearless mind and a thirst for knowledge that continued for most of my life. The dark, musty downstairs “Vault” of my small town library was a treasure trove of resource books that entertained me for years. There were tomes on everything from gardening to true crime to history to travel to the 19th century Spiritualist Movement and everything in between. I grazed through all of them; but I was drawn most to the books about hauntings, the preternatural, and the Spiritualists. I devoured every ghost hunting book Hans Holzer wrote. I read about Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu as well as the Order of the Golden Dawn. I digested the writings of Edgar Cayce. I became fascinated with UFO’s, crop circles, and ley line theories. Don’t get me wrong, I pursued other interests like medicine, history, quantum theory, FBI profiling, forensic facial reconstruction, and history among other things. As I’ve already said, I liked knowing a little bit about some things and a lot about others. Unfortunately, for the most part, the “lot” wasn’t the right stuff. My favorite dance was with Astrology, Tarot Cards, ghosts, ET’s, and things that go bump in the night all under the guise of knowledge.

Despite all that, I considered myself a Christian. I would have corrected anyone for suggesting otherwise. I believed in Jesus. There were things I didn’t do because they were “wrong.” I had the guilt, the condemnation, the rules and regulations without ever having the relationship with the Father or the Son. Forget the Holy Spirit. He was just a word. I believed I was right. The occult interests I dabbled in weren’t my “religion.” They were just passing fancies I found interesting and I had “rules” in place to protect me.

Those rules were laughable. For one thing, I was already in a dark place from the time I was molested the first time. To even think I could wallow deeper in the dark without being affected takes a serious disconnect from reality. You can’t. I believed I could read about witchcraft as long as I didn’t read the spells or chants. I could read about other religions if I didn’t read the rituals. In fact, I could read anything I wanted to read as long as I kept the wrong words out of my head. Right. I was playing with things I didn’t fully understand although I knew enough to know words have power. Looking back, there was something in me that drew a line in the sand I couldn’t cross. One that said I was willing to dabble this far; but not cross the line. While I’m grateful for that restraint, I went too far.

Far enough I didn’t like the dark and I didn’t like to sleep. I was born an insomniac. My mind was always churning. The fear of the dark came later. About the time I learned there might be things to fear in the dark like that cold, malevolent presence I encountered at the top of the stairs one night in my family home. It should have clued me in when the “whatever” departed and let me pass when I cried out to Jesus. It didn’t. Not really, I brushed it off as “one of those things.” Not my brightest moment. I don’t claim to know what that was or why it happened. It just did. I don’t even claim to know what it’s intent was beyond the fact I felt like I was being pushed down to a kneeling position and I didn’t like that even more than I didn’t like it.

For one thing, I was standing on the top step of a second floor staircase, not the landing, and that wasn’t safe. For another, the whole experience was terrifying. For the third, I don’t like being forced to do anything so there was a degree of anger in the fear. While I’m grateful the story ended with me walking safely to my bedroom, I wish I’d had enough sense to be scared back in the right direction. I wasn’t. Not beyond putting my Bible by my bed and reading it. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time and already too damaged for that degree of common sense to bleed through the youthful arrogance. Added to that, the hamster was already galloping around the “if I can control my life, I can control the pain” wheel in my brain and had been for several years by then.

As my occult interests expanded, my boundaries became more defined. I had enough sense to know I was flitting where I shouldn’t go and I needed to do more than just not read certain words. So, I decided what I would and wouldn’t do; but, I didn’t give up my quest. Knowledge is seductive and I wanted to know. That mindset is dangerous. It can take you places you’re not meant to go. But, as I said, I had boundaries. Right. I thought I knew everything when I knew nothing.

I understood I wasn’t going to play with Ouija Boards. I’d heard enough spooky stuff about that to steer clear. Crystals didn’t interest me. The idea of channeling or automatic writing scared the hell out of me. Literally. The idea of something overtly having control of me that wasn’t me wasn’t anything I wanted to tangle with. I wasn’t interested in astral projection. I didn’t know what would crawl in when I crawled out. I wouldn’t dabble with anything involving Satanism, grimoires, spells, or blood sacrifices. None of the yuck stuff that ended up in horror stories. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t joyfully prance around in shadowy areas I considered “safe.” I did and it all started innocently enough with imitating my Mother’s interest in magazine horoscopes.

While my goal isn’t to freak you out, real life is messy. Most of us drift into things without realizing we’re doing it. I dabbled in things we consider mainstream now like astrology and tarot cards. I consulted psychics a few times in my life. I did more than that as I’ll share more in depth in the next post. In closing, I wasn’t that stereotypical weird Goth kid everyone knew something was wrong with or the woman who cut herself in private. I wasn’t an addict or an alcoholic. None of that. I was a very normal, very average woman with a love for learning. Or so I thought. In reality, I think subconsciously I was a woman searching for some way to end the pain and find a degree of peace and happiness anyway I could find it

Until Part II,

Calla

A Story for Another Blog or How a Not-So-Good Southern Baptist Became a True Blue Charismatic (Part I)…
Been There, Done That · emotional healing · Food For Thought · Judeo-Christian Perspective · observations · Opinions · Religious

A Story for Another Blog or How a Not-So-Good Southern Baptist Became a True Blue Charismatic (Part I)…

Tori LennoxLeave a comment

It wasn’t an easy journey and I’m not going to recap the whole sordid tale. You’ve read bits and pieces in past posts. (For anyone interested in the whole story, Been There, Done That…Had the Smashed Up Face to Prove It by Calla MacKenna is on Amazon.) Instead, I will say by the time I ended up in Florida thirteen years ago, I was a tired, bitter woman. My ex-husband’s bad business practices had cost me everything from my house to my savings three years before. I say “my” because this man had nothing to do with the accumulation of those assets and everything to do with losing them. However, that being said, it was my decision to allow this man into my life so I’m equally at fault for my financial losses.

Since I’ve admitted that, I might as well admit my ex-husband wasn’t my husband when all this happened. We were “engaged” when we went into business together and we were successful at first. About six months into the business I started seeing signs of what I later learned was mental illness well-hidden beneath charm, charisma, and well-documented past successes. Unfortunately, I eventually learned that while he had been wildly successful in the past, he’d tanked every one of those past endeavors the same way he tanked our business. None of that came to light until many years later when his family set his cons straight.

While losing everything was bad enough, my ex added insult to injury by cheating on me almost from the start. That’s the reason I didn’t marry him. By the time I suspected he was doing this it was too late to kick him out of my life. The business was thriving and I had too much to lose if I rocked the boat including my pride. None of that mattered in the end. The business failed and I was trapped with no way out or so I thought.

Reality was far different.

In life that’s often the case. Our perception a.k.a. “our reality” often differs greatly from the truth of the situation. I actually wasn’t trapped in anything; but, I lacked the life experience to realize this. I could have kicked this abuser out of my life, ridden the storm out where I was, and started over exactly when the dust settled. It wouldn’t have been pleasant; but, it was doable. I didn’t do that. I chose the “easy” way instead. Right. Nothing about the past sixteen years has been easy. Thanks to my ex I eventually ended up in Florida exactly as God intended instead.

If you’re wondering why, the answer is simple. I had nothing, no-one, and nowhere to go. Or, more accurately, that was my perception of my reality. For a person who’d always paid my debts in full on time, this mess was devastating . I didn’t know what to do or how to handle the nightmare I’d stepped into. In those first desperate moments I decided it was better the devil I knew than the hell I didn’t. Fear will make you do stupid things and I was terrified. Scared enough to stay with a man I practically hated. That’s how I thought things were playing out for several years.

I now know God was slowly turning what was meant for evil to good. He had me even when I didn’t have Him. In the end He was steering me where He wanted me to go even if it took a roundabout journey through eight different states. Near the end of the journey I tried to return home to South Carolina. I had a good job lined up and I was a third of the way home when I felt compelled to turn around and return back to the place I’d just left.

My ex had become deathly ill a couple of months earlier. He’d spent two weeks on life support and he still wasn’t fully functional. However, he was still able to harm me physically and he had which was what led me to finally leave in the first place. The only problem with my bid for freedom is there was no-one but me left to care for him since he’d alienated everyone else. I knew he’d die if I left him. Or I felt that way. Whether it was true or not, I couldn’t take that risk even though I wanted to. I tried to. However, I couldn’t live with myself if I left and something horrible happened to him. So, I did what I had to do. I turned around and changed the course of my life forever.

A few months later, we found ourselves in Florida living with my ex’s stepmother. A few months later, we got married even though we didn’t have any real relationship left by that time. As stupid as this sounds, I agreed to make his stepmother “happy” largely because I’d never lived with anyone and I’d never wanted to. To my crazy way of thinking at the time, getting married would somehow legitimize the nightmare of the last few years and erase the shame of failure. It didn’t do any of that. In fact, all it did was add another divorce to my tally and reinforce the fact otherwise intelligent, sane people do insane things for stupid reasons.

Moving on, my ex’s stepmother finally cracked my hard emotional shell enough to become my “Mom.” My real mother died from cancer back in 1996 so I was more than willing to accept love from anywhere I could get it. I gradually started watching the religious stations with her every chance I got. While I was still in a dark place, I was on my way to rediscovering the faith I’d once abandoned. A few months later I started visiting the Charismatic church Mom attended even though it wasn’t my kind of place. In fact, I found the whole experience unsettling and freaky.

I’d heard my real Mom talk about visiting Charismatic churches back in the ’60’s; but, I’d never visited one myself. The only reassurance I had in those early days that I wasn’t taking the high road to hell was the fact I loved, respected, and trusted my second Mom and I knew she felt the same. I also knew she’d been raised Southern Baptist like me. If she thought the nuttiness was okay, then it had to be. Besides, I was desperate for healing and redemption. Again, any way I could get it. This Church seemed a likely place to accomplish that. You see, I’d been embraced with love and acceptance from the moment I walked through the door. But. I wasn’t comfortable.

Reading this, you might wonder what my problem was. That’s simple. Those people said and did things totally foreign to my background. Things most good Southern Baptists would never do like prophesying, laying on hands, shouting, dancing, and speaking in tongues! I wasn’t sure whether to bolt or make the sign of the cross. I didn’t do either. I stayed instead. Every time I entered that sanctuary, I was saturated in the presence of the Holy Spirit and I knew that was where I belonged. I could feel it in my soul. Besides, I might as well give this whole Word of Faith thing a shot. I’d already tried everything I was willing try and I hadn’t ended up where I wanted to go. At that point, I was as close to rock bottom as I could get so I had nothing left to lose. But, I had everything to gain even if I didn’t know it.

However, it took me quite a few years to get from there to here…

Until Part 2, I remain,

Calla

Been There, Done That · emotional healing · Judeo-Christian Perspective · observations · Religious

Life is an ever evolving journey meant to be embraced with joy…

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Even when your reality is anything but. For most of my life I’d read something so saccharine with a cynical snort and a tragic dose of wistfulness. I think a lot of us have that attitude. I just couldn’t find a whole lot of joy in my life. If you’ve read some of my past posts, you know my story isn’t pretty.

I lived forty-four of my fifty-six years on the cusp of suicide. I wanted my life to end; but, I wouldn’t end it. The only thing that stayed my hand was the possibility of being eternally separated from God. Even though I wasn’t remotely Christian during most of that time, I did believe in God. He was enmeshed in the very fiber of my being whether I wanted Him there or not. I didn’t. Not really. You see, my God was a God who punished my every transgression. He wasn’t a merciful Jesus who forgave my sins and loved me anyway. I was wrong.

For most of my life.

Please don’t miss the significance of what I’m about to say: how I viewed God wasn’t His fault. It was mine. However, He was still my Father and I loved Him. I now know I identified with the vengeful aspect of God the most because I viewed myself through a similar lens. Without mercy. My concept of right and wrong was absolute. There weren’t any shades of gray in my black and white. Under the right circumstance, that’s a good thing. It keeps you resolute to your moral convictions in a world of every changing values. In this instance, it was a bad thing. My rigid self-perception meant that since I couldn’t forgive myself, my God couldn’t forgive me either. Even for the things I had no control over. I believe a lot of you are in a similar boat.

We’re both wrong.

God’s capacity for forgiveness is far greater than we can fathom. While I know that’s true now, I didn’t back in the day. What I did know, as screwed up as I was, is that I couldn’t imagine a life without my Creator in it. I knew that was possible if I took my own life. Whether my belief was true or not, I can’t answer. Opinions go both ways. All that really matters is that fear was enough to stay my hand when I had the pills in hand. It’s a question I still can’t answer with any certainty. Ultimately, I think only God can answer that one since only He is privy to the influences operating on and in a person’s life in those desperate moments.

Moving on, like my past couple of blogs, this one isn’t for everyone. If you’ve made it this far, you can see this piece is overtly religious. I struggled with whether to start a separate blog for my “spiritual” pieces since I’ve tried to straddle the fence between generalities and my personal beliefs as much as possible in the majority of my posts. In the end, I decided I’m not two different people so I won’t write two different blogs. Instead, I’ll tag my future pieces with strong religious overtones as “Judeo-Christian/Religious” instead.

This is one of those blogs.

While I had a clearly defined purpose when I started this a few days ago, that original intent has fallen by the wayside. I don’t work from an outline. I write from the heart. From where I am mentally, spiritually, and emotionally in the moment I’m writing. Honestly, in this moment, I’m struggling to survive the past ten months and come out on the other side. If you’ve read my past posts, you know I’m the primary caretaker for my 91 year old Mom who’s been through a lot since she took a bad fall in October of last year. She’s had a stroke and battled several serious infections since February of this year. Fortunately, she’s doing well and has been for a couple of months.

Now it’s my turn to push through my own physical battles. On June 11th, I twisted wrong and sent myself into a very painful inflammatory flare from hell. I couldn’t walk two feet for almost three weeks. It took five weeks total get the flare under control enough I could return to work. We’re still trying to figure out what caused this. If that’s not enough, I had to put my beloved five year old dachshund to sleep this Wednesday due to a rare illness she couldn’t overcome. Today is August 1st, 2020, four days later, and my world is still crazy. On Friday, I developed a speech disorder that has scared the heck out of everyone. I haven’t had a stroke. I’ve had all that checked out. But, again, we don’t know what’s causing it beyond stress. Between Allie and myself, I have medical bills I will only be able to pay with divine intervention which I fully expect to have.

You might wonder why I’m writing all of this.

Honestly, it isn’t what I started out writing or intended to write. The truth is, I’m writing this to strengthen myself in my faith. I don’t have a choice. Not if I remain true to my beliefs. God doesn’t promise me I won’t have pain or bad things won’t happen. He only promises He will get me through them. He also promises, if I’ll let Him, He will take these bad events and use them for my good. That’s the promise I’m holding on to as I struggle through the pain of ending Allie’s suffering and my own physical, mental, and spiritual pain. Something good is coming from this.

I’ll let you know what it is as soon as it manifests.

There’s a lot more I’d like to say about how a Southern Baptist girl from South Carolina suddenly found herself a full-blown Charismatic Christian. But, that’s a story for another blog. Honestly, my conversion wasn’t sudden. It took me about a year to get over being spooked by certain aspects of the faith I’d grown to love. It took me a full ten years to get the gift of tongues so it hasn’t been an easy journey. But, it’s been the most meaningful journey of my life.

I’m going to end this blog with the Bible Scriptures I’m standing on to get me through this moment. Whether you’re a believer or not, I think they’ll help you. Oh, and if you’re a believer who thinks the Old Testament isn’t for us or it doesn’t apply – you need to rethink your stance! These verses apply to any believer…

“When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.” Psalm 56:3 (NIV)

“Cast your cares on the Lord and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous be shaken.” Psalm 55:22 (NIV)

“Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him music and song.” Psalm 95:2 (NIV)

“Your love, Lord, reaches to the Heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.” Psalm 36:5 (NIV)

This is just a handful of the scriptures I’m standing on right now. A couple of the others are Isaiah 53:5-7 and 1 Peter 2:24 for my healing. Pull out your Bible and look them up or do the Google thing. They’re powerful promises we all need. As for that debt that will be paid, I’m looking at Matthew 11:23 since I’m casting that debt into the sea.

However, the looking is the easy part.

To stand and stand again is a little harder; but, it must be done.

Until next time,

Calla.

Been There, Done That · Religious

Life Flows On….

Tori Lennox1 Comment

The nightmare is finally over. My Mom came home from Tennessee on Sunday night. She’s doing well. She went to see her doctor today and received a good report. Her blood pressure meds need to be adjusted since she’s lost twenty pounds since her accident; but, considering what she’s been through, that’s wonderful news.

While we’ve completed the renovations on Mom’s bedroom and bathroom, I still have to finish moving her personal belongings from her old room to her new room. After that’s done, I’ll cobble together my room from the “bomb” that hit the two rooms housing my belongings at the moment. Honestly, while it’s organized chaos, there are boxes and belongings everywhere! The living room looks pretty good all things considered. Mom’s old bedroom soon to become my new bedroom looks like a war zone. It wasn’t that bad until I was hit unexpectedly with yet another move that had to take place immediately. What would have taken me all day to do right had to be done in less than two hours! Life happens, you roll with it, and organized chaos degenerates to a nuclear blast.

However, that being said, I’ve had five weeks of fifteen to eighteen hour work days between my full time job, shifting rooms, and completing my part of the renovations. I’m done with that for now. I’ve decided to take my time and complete the rest of the job over the next couple of months. It just makes more sense now that the urgency is gone. Besides, my body’s cried, “Uncle” and I need to listen. The crazy pace can’t go on.

In the meantime, I’m going to relax a little, take my Mom to the gym, and resume writing these blogs. I’ve missed both the introspection and the sharing. While I’ve been gone for much too long; I never abandoned Calla’s Comments. Not really. I have too many things to say. I did choose to take a break at a time I wasn’t being read when life was totally overwhelming. I started a couple of blogs that were never finished so, my thoughts were with you if my pen wasn’t.

Now that I’m back, I’d like to thank everyone reading this. I hope my life helps you. That’s the whole point of the writing. The second thing I want to do is give credit where credit is due. I wouldn’t have made it through this traumatic period without my faith. I was largely alone and struggling to deal everything that happened. It was touch and go there with my Mom for a couple of weeks. She could have died at any time while I was over two hours away getting garbled information about what was happening to her. Fortunately, family was there; but, it wasn’t me since I had to work. That was the horrible part of it all. That I couldn’t be there.

When I felt I couldn’t take anymore, I handed the fear, exhaustion, and Rheumatoid off to God. That was the only way I could make it through the day. What I couldn’t handle, He could, and did. Every day throughout the day. No matter how I felt, I knew I wasn’t alone. God was with me. I felt His presence when I needed it most. When I cried out for answers, He gave them to me. When I faltered, He was with me. He gave me the strength to do what had to be done.

While I try to write these blogs so anyone embracing any belief system can get something out of them, every now and then I’m compelled to write with an overtly Christian slant. I won’t apologize for that. The personal relationship I have with God/Jesus/the Holy Spirit is the most valuable “possession” I own. I’ve worked hard to reach the point I am now. To believe I’m worthy to have God’s love. To have anyone’s love. That wasn’t His fault as I’ve already said in other places.

My self-perception was a result of my life up to the point I wrote Been There, Done That…Had The Smashed-Up Face To Prove It. That was the point where I chose to redefine myself to myself and I chose to do that as God sees me and not as I’ve always seen myself. That decision was the major turning point I’ve been building on ever since and maintaining that healthy self-image takes a close walking/talking relationship with my Creator. The one who loves me no matter who I am, what I think, and what’s been done to me.

I’ve said enough for today. Until next time,

Calla

Been There, Done That · Religious

A rough couple of weeks….

Tori LennoxLeave a comment

It’s been a rough couple of weeks as I’ve already shared. A rough couple of weeks after a rough month of trying to get that book up. However, life has taken a turn for the better. My Mom is making a miraculous comeback largely because she’s surrounded by love and prayers. While she won’t be home for a while yet since she still has Rehab to finish and other children to visit; at least I know she’s coming home better than she was when she left. We both are.

When bad things happen your world tilts on its axis and God starts talking to you. He sure started talking to me over the last couple of weeks. I was convinced I was going to lose my Mom from that fall. Everyone else was, too. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. In talking to her over the last couple of days, she told me that she told God that He could take her if He wanted her although she wasn’t ready to go. The situation was that bad. Obviously, God wasn’t done with her yet and she got a new lease on life instead. That’s truly a wonderful thing. My Mom is 90; but, she still has a lot to offer the world. Don’t ever write anyone off because they’re old. Our elders have so much to teach us if we’d only listen to their wisdom.

To give you the quick backstory, my “Mom” is my second mom. My birth mother died from cancer in 1996 when she was 51 and I was 31. It devastated me to lose my anchor and my best friend. This Mom is actually my ex-mother-in-law I’ve lived with for the past twelve years. We have a Naomi and Ruth relationship. In fact, for the first four years or so no one at church knew she wasn’t my real Mom.

Anyways, this woman took a very bitter young woman under her wing and healed a lot of hurts. She was my sounding board for Been There, Done That. To be honest, it was scary sharing my crappy life with her. I didn’t think she’d love me any more; but, she did. God has blessed me into a family of terrific people who love and appreciate me being here for their mother. I love them dearly in return. It’s something I’ll never take for granted because most of us don’t get that second chance.

Back to the present, I had a nice long visit with my Mom yesterday at Rehab (physical – not drugs or alcohol in case I need to clarify) which is a good two hours away from where we live. (She was visiting family out of town when she had her accident.) We talked, laughed, made plans for the future, and had a fun time in general. This experience has changed both of us for the better. We also had a serious talk or two.

While she was in the hospital, God worked on me in a whole lot of ways. Like letting me know writing Been There, Done That wasn’t the cure-all we thought it was. It helped a lot, yes; but, it didn’t heal every ding in my psyche even if I thought it had. Father God, in his infinite wisdom showed me an emotional wound I’d never seen before. He showed it to me and gave me the means to purge it. I just had to talk the ugly through with my Mom. As amazing as it seemed, that was all it really took.

You see, it hit me while my Mom was in that precarious moment where she could live or die, that I would be totally lost without her. That I depended more on her than I did on God and that was a problem. A bigger problem than that was I realized part of why that was. While I won’t deny my Mom loves me like one of her birth kids, she also needs me due to some Rheumatoid related issues. Not that she wouldn’t figure out a way to make it without me; she would. It’s just easier because I’m here.

When that hit me in a vulnerable moment, I suddenly realized almost everyone who’d ever been in my life before I met my Mom was in my life because they needed something I had to offer. Not because they loved me. That realization hit me pretty hard. No one wants to realize they wasted their “best years” on people who weren’t worth it. However, I suspect many of us wake up to find that’s true.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying my birth mother didn’t love me. She did and she showed me in so many ways. But, I also know she developed severe Rheumatoid right after she gave birth to me. Even though you couldn’t see any physical manifestations, her pain was so bad some days I was rolling her hair and helping her dress by the time I was three. While she loved me, she needed me just as desperately and it showed. I learned very early on what it meant to be needed and that was how I eventually grew to define my self worth.

By how much I was needed.

It disturbed me a couple of days ago to realize those feelings still lurked deep within my psyche. When I shared that realization with my Mom at Rehab it yesterday, it was more to thank her for being the first person in my life to just love me for me. Even when I wasn’t very lovable. Yes, she’s come to need me more as the years have passed and her hands have deteriorated from the Rheumatoid. But, she didn’t start loving me because she wanted anything I had to offer. I’m not sure I had anything to offer at that time anyone would want. I was an angry, unhappy woman and it showed.

In spite of my prickly attitude, she loved me because she could.

Until next time,

Calla