losing my religion
31 Tuesday Oct 2006
Posted my life
in31 Tuesday Oct 2006
Posted my life
in28 Saturday Oct 2006
Posted holidays
in27 Friday Oct 2006
Posted doors in the room, faith, Work
inyesterday was a good day. i was blessed (blessed means empowered) in an unexpected way.
it began with me arriving at work ready to do a couple of small tasks i had left on my desk the day before, when i was too tired and short on time to get them done. of the three of us that make up the front office, H leaves before me and M leaves about an hour after me. M seems to need to meddle with other people’s work. she has a big heart, and knows her stuff, but often doesnt seem to trust the rest of us to do our job right. she can be down right bossy. this has caused some resentment amongst the flock.
well i looked for my small stack of ‘to dos’ i had left for myself, and it was gone. this really angered me, because it throws me off considerably. if i am going to be responsible for certain things, i need to be able to keep track of my own items, so i know where i am with any one process. we work as a team on these things, and communication is important. so is trust. taking things off my desk to do them her way after i leave violates trust, and breaks down communication. i had to track down what she did, undo it because i had already taken care of the thing except for one little detail, and also take back another thing from her stack that i wasnt ready to give her.
when she came in, we had a confrontation. it got a bit heated, but i remained calm, and stood my ground. in the end i won out, and gained the respect of the others in the office that overheard the dispute. we ended on a positive note as well. i was quite pleased with the outcome.
the best part, however, came after i got home. during the drive, i proceeded to describe this encounter to the beau, explaining what i felt, what i said, what she said, what the others thought…the whole episode. he listened closely, and with interest. later that evening, when i asked him what he was chuckling about, he said, ‘oh, that whole thing with you and M. i was just thinking about it, and i am really impressed with how you handled it with grace and control. it reminded me of gloria copeland.’
i want you to know, glria copeland is someone i truly admire, and respect, and am inspired by. she is a real woman of God in my opinion. for the beau to tell me he was thinking about my experiences of the day, was impressed with my handling of the thing, and was comparing me to gloria…..this was the icing on the cake. this was the gift. this was my honor.
24 Tuesday Oct 2006
Posted doors in the room
inwhat would you dress up as for a costume party? personally, im not into halloween. i never have liked the decorations, the festivities, or the commercialization of it. but i do like doing costumes kind of. as long as they have imagination, and show a little effort. guess thats why i like movies, theatre, and adventure type video games. i like the costumes.
i think if i were going to go to a costume part, id go as the snow queen of the hans christian andersen story, or the ice queen of the chronicles of narnia. its not that i like the coldness of her heart, or the evil of her plans… its just that i love the clothes, the white hair, the sparkle…
i love winter. i love the snow and the ice. i love the cold air. i love the surreal way things look after a fog has rolled thru and all the trees have turned to crystal. i love to watch it snow at night.
of course, i wouldnt want to live in constant whiteness. i crave color. deep, intense color. all the blues and grays and whites can over un the senses and leave one feeling so very bleak.
so to be the snow queen for a while would be ok, but eventually she must yield to her sisters. after all, shes not a queen…she’s only winter.
22 Sunday Oct 2006
Posted my life
in21 Saturday Oct 2006
Posted doors in the room, faith
ini love the “but God”s in the bible. they turn a dismal or hopeless situation into a victorious celebration. one of my favorite “but God”s comes after describing the kind of invalidated person i feel to be in l Cor 1:26 “for ye see your calling. brethren, how that not many wise men, not many mighty, not many noble are called:”
then vs 27-28 says…
“but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty,
and the base things of the world, and the things which are despised, hath God chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to naught the things that are.”
this is my Glory Scripture! this is my salvation Scripture! this is my hope in the face of a world that has always rejected me!
in grade school i was the target of all the teasing and name calling for my class. i was called possum, because my last name was paulson. i was scorned at recess games, no one wanted me on their game teams. i was laughed at. i was told nobody wanted to be my friend. all the way to 7th grade in this pious catholic school. funny thing is, my mother had been chased home with rocks as a girl because she was a catholic.
in junior high and high school i was similarly taunted by some of the girls who thought they were special. but i did have one best friend, so it wasnt as bad. we both quit after finishing our sophomore year.
my family life wasnt much better. mom was often stricken with sever depression, and when she was home she stayed in her room alot. the girl next door was an on again off again friend, whose mother thought i was a spoiled brat, even though it was her daughter that went to tap dance and baton lessons, and was in so many other activities and clubs. i had no other friends. only a room full of toys and nobody to share them with.
when mom remarried, i had a whole new set of problems. my step sister hated me. really hated me. she stole money and clothes from me, was rude to me every chance she had, told me to my face that her dad wouldnt give me a red penny. that kind of came out of the blue one day. and she was aloud to go horse back riding when she stayed home sick from school. i was not aloud out of my room when i did. still hates me to this day. life with her was hell. it wasnt my fault her father divorced her mother and later met and married mine. but she took all her venomous rage out on me in insidious little ways all the time.
i ran away eight times. during one of those times i met my son’s father, who i married a few years later. that didnt go well either. i seem to have had a magnet for people who liked to play hard core mind games with me.
still, i got a wonderful son out of the deal. i just wasnt able to handle the emotional stress of a baby, and was already cracked too much to be stable. i couldnt take the crying. i should have known better, since i had fallen apart so badly before when i tried to baby sit my sister, and her crying rocked me so badly i tied her into her little baby chair so she wouldnt fall out, and sat her in the middle of the floor, and sat there in the recliner shaking so hard i couldnt talk, till mom and dad came home. i was shown great disapproval for that, ‘well we just wont have you baby sit anymore, since you obviously cant do it.’ i was 13 then, but years later at 21 my son’s crying had the same effect on me. worse.
i lost custody of him to the state, and then after praying decided he would be safer in a home with a family, and chose to give him up for adoption.
two other husbands came and left after that. but i never had another child.
i actually gave my life to the Lord shortly after my son’s adoption, before i remarried. that has been my salvation in so many more ways than simply knowing i will go to heaven. God has kept me with His Word all these years. the struggle, as it is for any one, is to really believe it. to acknowledge it isnt enough. you have to be convinced, and settled in your mind that what He says is true, even though it may sound too good to be true. it is true. its just that the world is so pathetically perverse and full of death and disappointments, that people are trained from birth to doubt anything good. but the writer of the letters in the new testament tells us over and over that thought our spirit is born again when we receive Christ, we still need to renew our minds in order to put on the new life we have been given. it isnt easy to go against the flow like that at first, but it does become more natural after time. if it were easy, every one would be doing it.
so l Cor 1:27-28 has become my cornerstone over the years. my armour against a hostile world. and Heb 13:5 “…I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” has become my central pillar.
19 Thursday Oct 2006
Posted doors in the room
inhow many times have i started this post, only to run out of time i didnt have anyway?
the thing i struggle with most is validation. being taken as one of the rest.
how can i best explain? every one questions themselves occasionally. but i do frequently. not because i doubt my own mind, either. but because i find so often i am questioned and doubted.
once when i was a small child (and oh so often there after), when riding in a car up to washington state for my aunt’s funeral, i saw some deer. the were grown deer, one had antlers, and the other didnt. they also had spots. i was the only one who saw them on the side of the road grazing, up by the trees.
no one believed me. they didnt even pretend to believe me. ‘adult deer dont have spots. you imagined it.’ period.
well, for white tail deer, this is true. but there are a kind of deer that as adults are a small deer with spots. but since the adults didnt know about this small deer, they simply told me i was wrong.
not so wounding, you say? as an isolated event, maybe. but as a moment in time that i remember, that repeated itself over and over again in my life, till i learned that nothing i said was going to be taken as real or valid or trustworthy by anyone, well….
maybe i just need to act like im never wrong…
15 Sunday Oct 2006
Posted my life
in13 Friday Oct 2006
Posted my life
in08 Sunday Oct 2006
Posted observations
inafter i turned four, we moved to portland, oregon. grandma sold the old house with its evil clown, its flowers that lined the driveway that were all taller than me, and it irrigation system for watering the yard. we hired movers, who loaded our belongings on their van, and all set out together for the long drive.
i don’t recall much of the house buying process. i do remember getting aquatinted with a few of the neighbors. to the left of us was a family with a girl my age. across the street were two elderly residents, a couple and a very tiny, wrinkly old widow who would let us play in her foyer where she kept many toys, or on her back porch where she kept a sand box on a table.
to the right was a woman whose grown son lived with her. his name was gene, and i had been told he was in a mental hospital for a time. but we didn’t treat him or his mother any differently that anyone else. until they gave us cause to. my mother’s sister had a son who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and i was his favorite cousin. so we were cool with gene and his mother. grandma even gave him a canary. i guess he liked birds like she did.
my mother had recently moved all my toys into the bedroom we shared on the side of the house that was away from gene’s house, and moved her things into my former play den, thus giving us each our own room. the den, now her bedroom, was on the side of the house that faced his house. it was great having my own room at last.
one night changed everything.
it was late. i was asleep. grandma was asleep. mom was the only one still up, sitting in bed reading before she went to sleep, as she did most nights. but her story was interrupted by the sounds of rocks hitting the side of the house below the window.
she slipped out of bed, careful not to let her shadow fall on the curtained window, and tiptoed into the bathroom right next to her room. she slid the window open just a crack, and watched from the dark room. just then gene came out from behind some bushes in his yard, and began tossing rocks at the house again, and calling my name.
my mother transformed into mama bear. she flung the window the rest of the way open, yelling ‘gene! what the hell are you doing!’
she scared the shite out of him, and he started stammering something about throwing rocks at a cat. we didn’t have any cats with my name.
she came into my room the next morning and told me what had happened. she didn’t want me to be afraid, but she did want me to know about it. sadly, i was scared every night after that, that some one was lurking at my bedroom window trying to watch me. i would lay in my bed frozen and unable to move, thinking this made me invisible to who ever was out there looking in. it was awful.
gene never did anything else like that with us. since there was only a chain link fence between our yards, i would see him when ever he was out in his back yard. i don’t remember seeing him after that.
i guess they sent him away again.