Attention Deficit

Prov. 20:27 "The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly."

Attention Deficit

I was sitting here this morning thinking, and like a dam bursting open my thoughts steered toward the attention span of human beings. It seems these days, this era is an attention deficit era where everyone is so wrapped up in themselves they can only see off in the distance. If someone were drowning, they'd have to let them and just watch the struggle from afar because of the distance between the two.

Basically, the only relationships that stay alive are the daily face-to-face ones because eventually everyone bores of any empathetic behavior unless it's going to benefit them. An email the other morning exclaimed, America's Loneliness Epidemic; how should we respond? I wasn't surprised at what the solutions were and being a Christian email I, a Christian knew where they were going to go with their line of thinking. 

With the rise of the 'me generation' loneliness is inevitable because everyone is focused on the 'me' of the equation and not the 'them'. From the email by Michael E. Stallard, Crosswalk:  "...loneliness triggers a host of negative effects, including a decline in physical and emotional health, greater incivility and violence, and a rise in addiction and suicide."

While the email went on with solutions, solutions I thought were pretty good but just one-sided and Bible Christian based. We don't live in a society of believers so I don't think any of these suggestions would rest well with a person contemplating suicide or a person so lonely they isolate themselves from the daily rush of traffic of ignorant negative people; being alone is a safer option.

It's very easy for me to say just trust in Jesus, but to a non-believer that might not go over well. It might be easy to say build lasting relationships with people who earnestly care but honestly, they are hard to find in an emotional deficit world of the 'me' generation. While the churches are catering to the generation by making their programs more alive and active with life, there is a depressed generation that is not turning to the church for moral support.

I totally get where these folk are coming from. The church sometimes is a big letdown. It shouldn't be that way but it is a fact to the people who need more than the church can give. The church that is supposed to 'accept all' winds up shunning the very people they need to reach. I personally think the church could benefit these lost souls if they helped anonymously. All of the programs I see where I live come with a nametag of "brought to you by the--name of the church". The lost and lonely want no part of the church so they miss out on the extension of help. Why does the church need to be seen as the one giving assistance/aid/love/compassion?

I know you'll say that God is the only way and spew all the scripture pointing to "no one enters but through me" scripture, I know, I get it! But the lost souls, the suicidal, the ones who NEED help don't understand at that point. They're lost, they're lonely and all we're worried about is having them know the bible? In time maybe spring the Word on them but right off the bat? They need compassion, an ear, a friend, not someone who is only there because Jesus called them to be there to spring the Word on them. Yes, they need to hear the Word but initially, they just need to be HEARD.

Community support groups, community activities brought to you anonymously by the church could reach the people without a nametag, reach them by not boasting of 'we helped you', reach them by opening a door of communication with the very society that has let them down. Lead them in a way that they should go. There ARE ways to help but again, the attention deficit society can only focus on the prize, not the race.

There has to be a starting point. Communities need to be willing to accept the church's help anonymously, the church needs to be willing to help anonymously, we the people need to be FOR the people in every sense of the word.

Non-coincidentally I stumbled upon one of my followers' blog posts this morning: 
I was already writing my post so when I was led to this one, it made me see I'm not alone in my thinking. He was writing basically the same line of thought as I was writing. It is so mysterious the way that God collectively links the Christian minds to universal thought processes. 

I believe Christians can aid the lost and the lonely. I believe showing people love, compassion, caring and understanding can all be attributed to our Christian faith without a bible-thumping mentality of connecting to the lost. People need to be listened to, they need to feel as if they matter. Tied up in the 'me' generation are people seeking help and not finding it because as I said, everyone is so wrapped up in their own thing, giving time to another person who might be on the brink is too much of an effort and cuts into your precious time of caring for YOU.

Yes, I understand that everybody has a life and their own struggles to deal with on a regular basis but is it too hard to reach out to someone who has seemingly become distant all of a sudden? Not asking the question of 'are you okay' leaves the window of help closed as you back off because you don't think they want to talk about something. Usually taking time to think can cost someone his or her life. 

You might be wondering how I know about this; I'll tell you I know because I've been there on the suicidal end and no one reached out. I know what loneliness feels like and I know that the blanket of inner struggle one deals with when no one is around to lift even one finger or an ear of compassion. And yes, Christians let people down more than you ever know. 

Why are so many kids on drugs for attention deficit disorder? Why are kids deprived of attention? I'll tell you why but you're not going to like what I say. Parents neglect children because they NEED an outlet too and in finding their 'outlet' the child gets left behind. We're not raising kids in a two-parent household. We're tossing kids in pre-school at an earlier and earlier age and sending them off to school to allow teachers to bear the burden of raising the children of the 'me generation'. We put kids on the ADD drugs (which by the way have the same suicidal side effects that you hear about from the drugs/medication YOU take) thinking the drug will help but the kid grows, can't afford to keep up the 'meds' and more times than not, the suicidal tendencies of the drug kick in while no one is looking.

While you were worried about you, someone died that you couldn't say, 'Hi' to or 'how are you' in a meaningful banter of words. I'm tired of talking about me and my disease, I'll live or die but somewhere out in the world as I'm writing this, someone is taking their life because YOU were too busy worrying about YOU. 

I reach out through words but slowly my words are not enough, the extent of my reach is not far enough, I'm alone in trying to convey a message that people are tired of hearing. Why are they tired of hearing it? Because they are busy with other things. 

Prov. 25:27 "It is not good to eat much honey: so for men to search their own glory is not glory."

Eccl. 1:13 "And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith."

Quotation Saturday ~ Loneliness

Job 13:13 "Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak, and let come on me what will."

SILENCE

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing 
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.” 
― Jalaluddin Rumi

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.” 
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.” 
― Chaim Potok

“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”
~ Henry Miller

LONELINESS

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” 
― Jodi Picoult

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.” 
― Maya Angelou

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.” 
― Tahereh Mafi

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” 
― Mother Teresa

ISOLATION

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
~ Haruki Murakami

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.” 
― David Foster Wallace

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” 
― Rudyard Kipling

“When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.” 
― Criss Jami

SOLITUDE

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” 
― Charlotte Brontë

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” 
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more” 

― George Gordon Byron

Poetry Sunday ~ Alone Am I

Pss. 102:7 I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

Alone Am I

Alone am I in the confines of my mind

Left for no one but me to see

Running along in these empty halls

As an echo sounds as sanity calls.

Forsaken am I can anyone bear

The care and love of life

Amnesty airs forgiveness of lies

Solitude speaks silence of eyes.

I dared to go where lightning glared

Its fingertip on my soul

Searing a hole in loneliness cold

Breaking the mold if truth be told.

Seclusion aims an arrow set free

On me it callously claims.

Alone am I in the confines of free

Left for no one but me to see.

 

 

~~ * ~~ * ~~

A Brush with Death

Job 15:30  He shall not depart out of darkness; the flame shall dry up his branches, and by the breath of his mouth shall he go away.

A Brush with Death

I kissed the lips of death

The taste of blood sublime

A doorway opened up to me

I feared my end of time.

Clutching with my fingers

The beating of my heart

Pounding out the echoes

The pain in me to part.

Embrace the taste of death

Like lovers on the grass

Pray for God’s own mercy

As the pain will surely pass.

I look to a second chance

One that I won’t blow

I’ll take the time allotted me

And soon you’ll see me grow.

No more darkened journey

Behold my Light-filled path.

Taking tiny steps by day

No longer filled with wrath.

I heard the angels calling

I kissed the lips of death.

I’ll heed the Word of my Lord

As I take just one last breath.

Job 12:10 In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.

Quotation Saturday

"The heart knows its own bitterness and a stranger does not share its joy" ~ Proverbs 14:10

I have chosen these quotes in light of the death of a beloved man who always made everyone else smile but was really crying on the onside. I know too many suffering with depression and maybe now is the time to bring this illness to the light of day. No more hiding!

SUICIDE

“…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.”
~ Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come

“If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.”
~ Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
~ David Foster Wallace

“A lot of you cared, just not enough.”
~ Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“Did you really want to die?"
"No one commits suicide because they want to die."
"Then why do they do it?"
"Because they want to stop the pain.”
~ Tiffanie DeBartolo, How to Kill a Rock Star

DEPRESSION

“As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide.”
~ Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.”
~ Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral's Kiss

“Some friends don't understand this. They don't understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you're wonderful just the way you are. They don't understand that I can't remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would.”
~ Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”
~ Sylvia Plath

LONELINESS

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”
~ Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”
~ Maya Angelou

“All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.”
~ Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.”
~ Mother Teresa

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
~ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

JUDGMENT

“We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.”
~ Henry Ward Beecher

For in the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man. Besides, the modern observations deprive all former writers of any authority, since if they had seen what we see, they would have judged as we judge.”
~ Galileo Galilei, Frammenti e lettere

“You are constantly told in depression that your judgment is compromised, but a part of depression is that it touches cognition. That you are having a breakdown does not mean that your life isn't a mess. If there are issues you have successfully skirted or avoided for years, they come cropping back up and stare you full in the face, and one aspect of depression is a deep knowledge that the comforting doctors who assure you that your judgment is bad are wrong. You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it. When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better.”
~ Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.”
~ Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

Standing my Ground

I have always been the type of writer to stand my ground on my beliefs. Sure, I know for a lot of you it is hard, but for me it is more a moral stance. I will not jump outside my domain and watch or write something I think to be immoral.

Often I am shunned for being a ‘snob’ because I set my standards so high, these are standards that I choose to live by and don’t judge you as a person for not living by. This is MY moral compass and as a woman who isn’t getting any younger, I feel it necessary to stand my ground the closer I get to being PUT in the ground.

I watch as some claim a moral compass, some claim to be a Christian but their behavior and actions speak something totally opposite. Why is that? Sometimes I sit and watch, sometimes I try to comprehend, often times I’m scratching my head wondering why I am so different. Why do I see wrongs where there are wrongs and others see wrongs as right? Am I missing something? Are you going to tell me that God DOESN’T see you betraying Him? Or do you think He’ll just overlook the tiny things?

I started this writing blog with the right intentions but watched as it flopped. Slowly being here for no one to read and even less to comment. I didn’t write to get comments, but I did write to be read. What good is writing for yourself if no one is going to read you? I think that is why I lost interest in writing. As I wrote and posted (here or other places) no one was reading me. One person to LIKE everything I write does not encourage me to continue writing.

I went from 200+ posts a year to 60 if I’m lucky 80 by years end. This isn’t the successful journey I envisioned for myself. I persevered…persisted…plowed on and in many dark tunnels I crawled out to see the light, but when I got to the end of the dark and musty tunnel, no one was there.

Sure, I’ll hear, “God is there.” I know this! “God’s on your side.” I know this too. I have so encapsulated myself with God that it has scared people off leaving me alone (not totally because I KNOW God is there) in my writing journey. Sometimes I wished the computer and internet had never come into my life and that I would have stayed the type woman that I was molded into. I left that world for the virtual world and have to wonder if I took a wrong turn somewhere on the path. Granted, it was a path to meeting new friends but I wonder…

I know God has something planned for me and it’s not in the virtual social world of facebook or the extremely weird social format of Twits, I mean Twitter. It’s out here in the real world of beauty, nature and reality.

I WILL revive my writing blog perhaps come September. I WILL use my God-given talent of writing to further my goals. I WILL, I WILL, I WILL!  For now, I’ll await the season’s change so I can feel alive again. I’ll wait for the tapping of marbles rolling on the tin roof in the form of rain. The sound and the new season will revive in me what I’ve been waiting for to breathe the life of writing once again. 

I will stand my ground and firmly plant my feet in the Light of truth. My writing will soar as the eagles! I’ll do it with or without you, I have God, that’s all I need!

Poetry Sunday ~ Isolation

Isolation

***

The house echoes of the emptiness found inside

like an unending tunnel where light is obscure.

The noise erupts with no one to confide

My lips are parched, as my heart lay pure.

Loneliness wraps my body in its outstretched arms;

nestles me in the warmth of a longing embrace.

I am alone in the silence that bears down and harms

the fullness of my being in this comely place.

The violence erupts but it is far from me

and all I can do is bow my head in prayer

as the isolation swallows my sanity

I seek to find you but you’re not there.

My only friend in sorrowful times of longing

is the empty space of my voice unheard;

Isolation traps me in the field of belonging

Left unattended with the pain I’ve incurred.

The solitude has me in its restless clutch

as no one is here to hold my hand.

I long for someone; anyone’s touch;

so alone in seclusion our beating hearts stand.

Contagious Disease...WARNING!

Matt. 10: 16 Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.
***

I have read where writers have this disease that they give to other writers. It’s called the writing bug. They go around encouraging them to write, helps them along in their WIP (that’s Work In Progress for those not in the know) and sees  their friends through the tough times.

I have many writing friends in various communities. I’ve had friends die, move on in their own lives, and some who’ve walked forward without ever looking back to see where it was that they came from. I’ve also watched successful writers hang onto those who've helped them get to where it was they were going.

We’re a strong breed, us writers. When we’re slapped in the face with diversity, we rise to the challenge and slap it back with words. When we’re clobbered by more people taking out money (just because legally they can), and no one putting anything IN to your bank, when people run away from you instead of run TO you, because they are afraid that this freaky evil gnome that has you by the hair, might see them and try taking them down, also.

What they don’t realize is that the gnome has spread across the gardens of the world because people have relished their adorable idealistic seeds for centuries.  Cute little harmless evil gnomes? When have you ever known evil to be cute and harmless??? NEVER!

I’m researching Writers Who’ve Committed Suicide and I’m finding that in some instances the evil gnome has won the fight. I was taken to a Wikipedia page and it listed over 275 writers, whether literary, poets, columnists, or historians, that have committed suicide, because the sword was mightier than the pen.

Just what is it that drives a writer to do the deed? I can bet it is loneliness. They’ve cornered themselves into isolation. All their ‘so-called’ friends abandoned them at their time of pivotal need, and they lay there and slowly sliced their veins, throats; cut out their hearts with a single blade; jumped from a cliff, bridge or overpass, all just to be rid of the nothingness that they felt.

Writer’s don’t carry diseases around and disperse of them. They have a pen in their hand and way too much love in their heart. As I sit here and tears stream down my face causing the puddles to form into a pond of hurt, I find solace in my writing, my isolation, my pain, because with of this clobbering me in the face and no one to hear the sobs, I find pieces of myself strewn all about, and it is up to me to put all the pieces back together, alone.

I watch as the hypocrites use the Lord for their own gain. I watch as they lurk around corners with smiles and pleasantries trying to attack that one little lonely isolated unsuspecting lamb who chose this fork in the road instead of the other. I watch as they become something deviant and I watch as I go, down the right path, into the Lords arms. 




I'm NEVER alone as long as I have Him!

Luke 10: 3 Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves.