MONOPOLY!

Job 40:20 "Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play."

MONOPOLY

Deut. 33:27 “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.”

This was going to be one of my Gateway to Health continuing series on STRENGTH. I got sidetracked because of my Google browser.

Gateway to Health: Strength
Through all of this soul searching, I realized another thing that makes me different from a lot of people. It isn’t just my intense love of the Holy Spirit within me, it is my strength to get through trials. Since I found out I have this disease my strength has grown to immeasurable heights. I know when I was younger my sister always deemed me ‘the strong one’. I never felt strong but she said I handled things differently than everyone else.

When I looked at this disease and the statistics in getting it, supposedly 90% was caused by stress. I don’t know how accurate that statistic is because it seems Google is waging a war against the holistic healing facts that I found one year ago. Genetics only make up three percent, and a chronic growing fungus like my psoriasis is another percentage. Add them all together and you have the Big C! Now do people with none of these ‘symptoms’ get the C? I don’t know, they’ve had to get these statistics from somewhere.

It wasn’t until about fifteen years ago when I started taking my writing to new heights with my first computer did I decide to get my story out to the world via the intranet. I didn’t care if it was in book format and no one read my words or a blog or another format, I was working on cleaning out the impervious closet.

I literally had access to thousands of outlets to post the heartfelt pain that I had suffered over my lifetime. My poetry writings in my notebooks made the long journey with me when I left home. I transferred some of my favorite poems to the newfound Word documents and the world now became mine to conquer; the new avenue was full of traffic.

Poetry was my healing outlet as a child. I could write my pain in journals and no one would be the wiser. No one would know that the walls of my closet were black because they assumed it was yellow and sunshiny bright inside my head; that is how God protected me. He allowed me to barrel over the waterfalls of life, with the sunbeams in front of me and rainbows behind me. I didn’t feel I was hiding my pain but apparently, I hid traumatic events in my writing.

As a matter of fact, I didn’t feel I was hiding the trauma. Through my writing, I was healing myself and when looked at, it appeared I was strong because I showed no sign of weakness but here I am with an illness that was awakened by the dark closet I had closed to the outside world all those years. How this transferred into the disease of a lifetime I may never know the true facts of the matter. I’m not here dissecting my pain I’m here to show you that strength wins out in the end.

Strength momentarily halted. Read on…

Since January first the ever-popular search engine Google has shifted. For a year I’ve been searching through page after page on cancer, the healing protocols, the holistic avenues I need to take. It was my understanding that your search engine ‘follows you’ and will then send like-minded pages to the front end of your searching. Holistic healing, natural herbal remedies being my most searched have now turned a sour negative note. I don’t know why but I won’t let it stress me as it is trying to do just that. Example? This link is just one example. Last year I found numerous pages that pointed to stress as the cause of this disease, but this morning as in recent weeks, I had to dig through numerous Psych central and the like pages! Page 1 listed pages that contradicted everything I saw last year pointing TO stress being the cause. This year stress is basically laughed at on page 1.

The Truth About Cancer and similar pages used to be the first pages that showed up, but it has mysteriously gone from my page one searches on EVERYTHING. It’s not doing a good job of following me, and now everything is from science this, scientific that. Where in the world did these pages come from? Now Google has its own agenda??? And people wonder why I don’t trust this superhighway? It is becoming like the rest of the outside world, unpredictable and untrustworthy with its own politically governed agenda.

Strength and monopoly merge…

I think there lay one of my biggest strengths that I was never a part of this mega mind of technology. I had a washing machine but clothes were always line dried. I cooked in an oven, reheated on the stovetop. I had no desire to be a part of the threads of the web. I got snared and tangled in it fifteen years ago and life has never been the same. Some say technology is for the better, and granted in some aspects it is, I like being able to dry my clothes in a dryer now. Life is now about speeding down the highway, closed are the bookstores and shining high are fast food joints, coffee shops, and toxicity! That’s the new world! Even the medical world has quick fixes; drugs, slice dice and radiate. Great!  Life for me has changed forever.

So if you see fewer links to my alternative holistic healing process it is because I need to find a new search engine that isn’t politically motivated or monetarily funded by the pharmaceutical corporations or the richest search engine in the world. Like cancer, the internet is one big business. I thought I was being over paranoid but no, here it is in black and white. 

My strength continues in LISTENING and OBEYING my Lord before any other entity on the planet! What a tangled web the earthlings have woven is an understatement! This is not a democracy or a republic, this is a manipulative game of Monopoly and some of us were sent to jail without a trial.

2 John 1:8 “Look to yourselves, that we lose not those things which we have wrought, but that we receive a full reward.”

Don't Worry

Acts 2: 24 Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.

Don’t Worry

Last week, I knew something was wrong, we had missed a Sunday service and Adam came to me mid week saying, “Mom, you’ll probably never hear me say this again, but I think we need to go to church.”

Sunday came and no whining about the early wake-up call to Adam, we went to a wonderful service. He came home and said, “I got my answer.”

What answer, I thought. But then I remembered that the service was about not worrying and I thought he might be worrying about something needlessly. I won’t go into details out of respect for his privacy, but needless to say, he had been worrying about something and he felt the only answer would be in a church sermon, and ironically, Sunday’s service was catered just for him. What an awesome God.

We all tend to worry. Am I doing enough? Can I do more? How will I pay my bills? Is God leading me? All of these are natural worries but Pastor Dave says that they’re not LEGITIMATE worries.  Legitimate concern is when your son or daughter is having a medical issue. THAT is legitimate concern, but worrying about bills? If you can do more than you’re already doing? They are needless worries.

You see, if we have truly given ourselves to God, He’s already handling everything. Worrying is NOT from God! God has you where you are at this very moment and knows and understands your concerns. He’s walking with you. Get it?

Now it was my time to worry. Adam came home with a clean bill of health after the doctor sent him on his way saying he could find nothing wrong. Adam and I were relieved. To celebrate I came home and made some chili-dogs. You know, the kind where the hot dog is oozing with chili? I paid for it, dearly.

The burn came almost immediately. Something like indigestion only stronger and more painful. No Rolaid, no Maalox, no nothing was relieving the burn. I almost felt like I was having a heart attack and my hours were numbered. I’d die right here on the sofa. With no worry, I just lay with my heating pad close to where the pain was coming from, passing on dinner.

The pain was so bad I just lay for hours and didn’t even go to bed. Oh, I tried but returned to the sofa so I could whine without waking everyone. My arthritis in my back doesn’t like me immobile for long periods so when I went to get up the next day, my legs were like jell-o. I stayed on the sofa going in and out of sleep the entire day, not even getting up to shower. Steven was home that day and he made me some toast and butter that I had requested and all was okay.

I felt weak the entire day, and I did make it to bed but still, although the burn was gone I was in pain. Thursday came and I was so hungry. I wanted something light in fear the burn would return. I had a peanut butter and jelly on toast and it came back, lightly this time, so I passed on dinner AGAIN! No morning coffee, no dinner meal, I should be tearing my hair out at this point, right? Well, no, I wasn’t, instead I was remembering Sunday’s sermon, ‘Don’t worry’.

Friday I woke, made some coffee but only had one cup. Yeah, coffee isn’t all THAT good for you. With scarce internet (that’s a whole different story) I tried to Google my problem. What else is one to do when a doctor is not affordable? I had warned Adam of Googling his symptoms because he’d find out he’s dying! And here I was, Google my friend.

The good news is, I’m not dying, I think I may have GERD, a gastro esophagus reflux disease. Yeah, self-diagnosis via Google, not a good idea but it gives you a round-about idea of what’s wrong. It did give me some things that I could safely eat and oatmeal, which I had, was one of them. Time to boil some water and eat me some oatmeal. By this time I was starving so a bowl of oatmeal hit my stomach like a ton of bricks! And guess what? No burn!!! Woohoo! Look out dinner! I’m having oatmeal.

Right now I’m attempting to eat a ham sandwich. I’m only having a half of a sandwich because I don’t want to make myself sick from over-indulging because I’m starving. Whatever the case may be, I’m not worrying. I’m taking the blows as they come, going to change some eating habits like spicy foods and tomatoes and such and maybe I, with the power of God, might nip this thing in the bum!

Moral to the story? Sometimes things in life make an abrupt appearance like sicknesses, or chronic illnesses that surface after only being mildly hidden. The first thing you do is worry which is quite normal, but take a stand back, evaluate the situation calmly and collectively, Google it if you must, but don’t allow it to hold weight with what your instincts are telling you, in other words? Let go and let God handle the worry while YOU make a plan to change the outcome!

My New Toy

For a couple of days now I’ve tried to upload pics to my blog, to no avail. I’ve sought help but nothing came that was of any value and no help was found. I’m not tech savvy and anyone who knows me knows, I HATE computers, the net, hypocrites and negativity.

Adam told me it was in the server (he’s becoming tech savvy! That’s his plans for his future, Graphic Design.)

Anyway, I wrote to google and as many have said, they never get any kind of response, but I took a shot at submitting my problem to them. (LOL! I submitted, Ben!)

Well I woke this morning and went to see if my ‘scheduled’ blog was posted. Sure enough it was, no pic mind you, but it made it. This is the new toy I speak of. Scheduling post and pic arrangement!

I’ve always posted pics at the top of my blog, but never on the side or within the posting. With a little help from another tech savvy person, I figured it out and got it done! As you can see in a few previous posts, the pic is within the words to the left? Woohoo! Yay me!

I can move them around to the left, to the right, to the top! This is a great accomplishment for me as you can imagine. Not being technologically adept, you can see how something this small can excite me. It’s my new toy to ‘play’ with as I prioritize my time on FB and other social networks.

It has come to my attention that I WOULD be missed if I ‘cut off’ the social scene, sorry for the poor choice of words. (I’m a writer, I should know better!) What I meant to say was, I need to prioritize my time, so that I’m spending more time with my writing dream than I am playing in the playground with my friends. You know what I mean? When your child is spending too much time in his room gaming, don’t you just want to say, get out there and play in the real world?

Well living out here in the middle of nowhere and his school friends being at least 17 miles away, it’s just not an option for him. As for me, my only time to get out IS on FB to meet up with my friends. (Thanks Stena for the reminder!) They are such an inspiration to my writing life, cutting them off would be like severing a finger or something! A gruesome thought!

My other new toy is scheduling posts. I always schedule my poetry Sunday because on Sunday mornings my time is better spent getting ready for church, not worrying about the shenanigans going on at FB. But recently, since the writing bug has bitten me again, I’ve been writing post after post, for two weeks straight now. This is a good sign to me!

I’ve been scheduling them in advance! That is so cool! If the weather knocks out my net, my posts will still arrive. If I lose things because I didn’t back up my files, the post will have a home.

And today as I checked to see if I could post a pic yet, voila! I can! Adam was right (he loved hearing that) maybe it WAS within the server. Well wouldn’t ya know, google has served me well, thank you GOOGLE AND friends!!!

Google: Your Friend

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." 

E.L. Doctorow

Are you a writer? Do you call yourself a writer? Then you, my friend, need GOOGLE as a friend. I read so many times people asking simple questions to something that they themselves, had they asked google first, would already know the answer to.
 
Often when I’m looking for a blog topic for the day all I have to do is google anything about writing. It hands me over to numerous pages and that is when I click something and lo and behold, something clicks for me. Then I go on to write for about an hour and sometimes it often leads to yet another possibility for a blog post.

I’m often surprised when someone, say a journalist, who sits and writes and gets paid for their work, often times doesn’t even do ample research in bringing you a story. They just write what they gather as information and thats that, no fact finding mission involved. The bad thing in delivering non-factual evidence to the public, we as readers believe it to be truth and judge a person as such.  Lives get tarnished because of misinformation, but often as is the case, the newspaper never retracts the false data, and if they do, it is found buried underneath where no one is bound to read. Me, I like to go on a fact finding mission so I can bring you as close to the truth that you need to be without second guessing what I’m writing.

I read a funny quote. I’m sure you seen this one going around the social scene a gazillion times:

“ Don’t believe every thing you read on the internet.” Abraham Lincoln

Why is that funny? Because you’re reading it from the internet, and the author is Abe Lincoln, whom you know was not around when the internet surfaced. So you are to surmise, that this is either truth or fiction. In writing, even fiction needs to hold some truth to it, or your readers will scratch their heads and wonder what nail your driving into plastic. I say plastic because it is easy to drive home a nail in wood, but not so easy into plastic. Meaning, the reader is not buying what you’re selling.

There are many search engines if you just do the research. Go ahead, google search engines. Google is nice enough to give you them too! So on your journey as a budding writer, do not hesitate in having google as your friend. Get to know it intimately and use the settings, a lot of times they work but don’t get all the gunk that you really don’t need. Anything after page one, you’re chancing what comes up on the screen when you click the offering.

With google as my witness, the things I speak of are true to the best of my knowledge. But please, don’t just trust me on that, google what you’re not understanding. Research and dig, until you come upon the truth. It’s out there, just waiting for you.
 
“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet” ~ Joni ~  Now THAT is a name you can trust!