Michele Gyselinck

 My sympathies to you, Mark, as you mourn the passing of a friend at this time of the year.  Losing touch with friends or loved ones is never easy, but around the holidays it's even harder.  Praying for God' comfort to you and his family.

I didn't answer that question right away because I wanted to think about it.  Inasmuch as I can I avoid posting outrageous comments on my page, and most of my FB friends avoid it also.  Instead, we tend to stick to reliable sources of information to share.

Since I joined Facebook I've been unfriended by one person who told me I was too judgmental for her taste, and I was shocked because I try hard not to pass judgment on people.  And I unfriended one guy, not because he wrote anything outrageous, but because he was too needy for me emotionally, and I felt unable to give him what he wanted after he scared me.  I had expressed empathy and he was all over me in love when I was nowhere near that.  So I both unfriended and blocked him when he failed to respect my wishes.

As far as truth is concerned, I take my cue from a book by the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, who wrote that just because you think something doesn't make it true.  There are objective standards for truth such as God's Word.  We are sinners, and our motives are not always the most noble. so to claim that what we say or post on FB is true and that those who don't like it don't want to hear the truth is debatable to say the least.  A bit of soul searching would also not hurt before we write some stuff on there.  

Of course, one needs to proceed with caution on Facebook since many don't reveal their true identity on there, so you don't really know who you're dealing with to begin with.  That's why they feel safe to write nasty stuff because they think they can get away with it.  But I would not dream of confronting them about it.  Confronting real friends is dicey, let alone strangers.  I leave that to God.

 Wounded healer rather that walking wounded ? Of course! I needed no explanation for that one.  The walking wounded are in such bad shape they can't help anyone else.  This fate may await caregivers who don't or can't take time off to attend to their own needs and become so drained that they eventually fall apart.  Relatives of people afflicted with degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's often experience that because private nursing care is expensive, and governments often cut costs at their expense, so they shoulder most of the care themselves unless they can--and are willing to--place the loved one in a nursing home.  Caregivers of psychiatric patients can suffer this also, and maybe even more than the caregivers of Alzheimer's because it is acknowledged whereas many Christians still harbor the ill-conceived notion that mental illnesses are merely a spiritual problem that goes away if people confess their sins.  At the outset of my illness I confessed all the sins i could think of, both real and imagined, and the illness never went away.  I hope that those who still hold this notion will snap out of it because they're being a burden for those who suffer as well as their caregivers.

 Well if that is his experience, so be it, but I don't see why this has to be an either/or proposition.  God may not have protected me from schizophrenia, but He certainly has protected me from other ills.  I find this to be a very selective reading of the Bible because there are plenty of passages that allude to God's protection of His people, especially in the wilderness where His presence as a pillar of fire at night protected them from the cold and predators like lions, and as a pillar of cloud during the day He protected them from the burning heat of the sun. 

In the times of the kings God also protected His people from invading armies as when King Hezekiah went to the temple to pray about threats from the Assyrian king.  

While it is true that God didn't protect his people all the time, especially when they had been unfaithful, we don't have to choose between believing in a God of protection or a God of presence.  I don't know why God allowed him to be sexually abused other than that the Lord didn't stop the Nazis from perpetrating their abominations.  I guess evil is part of the reality in this world, even in the church. Shame on the abusers.

 As I re-read the blog I realized I'd missed something when I replied initially.  God did not protect me from bullying or schizophrenia, and when I was contemplating suicide by drowning on the river bank a five-minute walk away from where I lived at the time because I was so tired, depressed and confused as to what was happening to me, He convinced me not to go ahead with the plan but to go home and stick through life even though it was a miserable affair at the time, and after MANY years I did find relief through medications and meaning through helping others.  It may not be appropriate to tell victims of abuse that their suffering will help others, but from personal experience I can tell you it is often helping others that gives meaning to what we endured.  I believe that the one thing that's worse than suffering is pointless suffering, and if you can use what you've learned to help others in any way whatsoever then you haven't endured hell for nothing.  But maybe it's best if it's someone who has actually been through hell on earth who says so.

As a practicing Christian I attended two different universities and neither weakened my faith. But before I got there I had attended Bible studies at church for quite a few years and read extensively.  So attending university or college is not necessarily a grave-digger for Christian faith as long as people prepare for it spiritually. Especially institutions that are not Christians.  Because unbelieving faculty and classmates will challenge you, and kids who don't prepare for it are foolish.  I only attended a religious private school for one year after which I was switched to the public sector because I was too slow to keep up with the others, so I never experienced the sort of greenhouse environment that kids who get all their primary and high school education in Christian schools do, and I suspect those kids tend to rest on their spiritual laurels. Or they try to ride on their parents' coattails.  The problem with that is when you're away from home--and possibly a significant distance away--for a long time, the landing can be quite rough.

That would explain why some kids lose their faith at universities, but such a tragic event is entirely preventable if parents ask their kids why they believe what they believe if the kids don't know enough to do the work of preparing for those challenges themselves.  It is a fairly spread out belief now based on research that people's brains don't reach their full maturity until age 25, and the last part of the brain to reach that maturity is the part that can visualize the consequences of one's choices and plan ahead.  Since most kids that go to college leave home around age 18, that means most of them have not yet reached that maturity....By the way, when I started my first B.A. I was 26.

 That's nice but I doubt that my fellow congregation members would go along gladly with this proposal.  Most of them already find the Sunday morning service too long.  On the other hand I had heard of this practice in Presbyterian circles, and if it appeals to people of Scottish descent, it might carry with those of Dutch descent since some of the latter like to brag about being cheaper than Jews or Scots.

One important "side effect" of illness whether it's a mental illness or physical is poverty.  For some reason, those who manage disability pensions consider that sick people should live below the poverty level.  As though it were our fault that we can't earn our own living.  Now, here in Québec people on disability get their meds free as well as some dental coverage and some subsidies for buying a pair of glasses once every so many years, but when we complain about being financially tight in addition to being sick some people point out that our meds are free.  Good thing too. If people had to choose between their meds or eating, I don't know many who'd go hungry so they could take their pills.  While the author's suggestions are helpful in the case of people in hospitals or at death's door, he could also add sickness to the list of social justice issues for the impacts that being ill has on a family's budget.

People who say we should eradicate the word disability from the language supposedly because everybody is limited in some way trivialize real illnesses, especially severe mental illnesses like bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, and other forms of psychoses.  Il's one thing to have to admit that you can't run as fast as an Olympic athlete, and shrug it off by assuming those same athletes have other limitations and quite another to be stigmatized because you hear voices and reply to them loudly in public spaces causing people around you to look at you oddly or fearfully as though you were going to assault them in the next minute.  Although psychotic people have been known to do that, most people with mental illnesses are not violent and are more often the victims of assaults by so-called normal people than the other way around.  In fact, in an issue of Schizophrenia Digest, as it was called back then, a columnist quoted a friend of his who referred to mentally non-sick--to put it that way since health is more than the absence of illness--as the "chronically normal".  I like that phrase because too many people who look askance at mentally ill people are chronically normal themselves.

In our congregation ALL the ladies get a flower on Mother's Day, usually a carnation, whether they actually had kids or not.  The leadership figures that women who didn't marry and have kids shouldn't be penalized.  I don't remember what we decided to do for Fathers's Day.

 As a rule I avoid fiction altogether.  there is one series I watch only in the day time, and so far I have not seen any rapes taking place in it.  It is a series about a police precinct and mostly about the detectives, their investigations and their private lives, but being an impressionable soul, I have to be careful about what I watch before going to bed, and I would definitely avoid anything that showed a rape in progress.  Even reading about that will upset me enough to keep me awake for hours past my bedtime.