#disordered love

[alostlittleriverlotus]

I have an hour with my gf before the movie. Better make it mandatory love me or I will literally cry and be a sad boi and be upset about it time.

[alostlittleriverlotus]

Me: *writes a sweet love post for my darling*

My darling: *doing dishes and then crying over a bug*

I love this girl so much. I gotta go give her all the hugs and kisses. God she's so fucking sweet. I never wanna fucking stop loving her. Not like I can. My love never fucking ends and it's too fucking intense. I'm basically obsessed with her and she fucking loves it.

[alostlittleriverlotus]

There's just something so genuinely about that one person that truly fucking loves you. No matter how fucked up it gets. Even with your twisted history and how fucking rotten you feel. And I just. I am so lucky to have my wifey. I know she's the one I want forever. I tell her everything and she's one person that never EVER fucking judges me. I wouldn't understand myself so well and be trying my best to stay clean if not for her. Even with shit going wrong and us fighting and us both being traumatized shits. I always feel lucky to fall asleep on call together. I'm always dreaming of when we live together. Someone that truly fucking supports me. I can be honest about even the worst parts of me that I have feared uttering a word about. I've been rejected for far less than what I tell him. And yet he hears about my worst parts and loves me. I'll be there crying and terrified, apologizing and begging them not to leave me. And they'll just...want to hug me and tell me they love me and he's happy that I could tell him. It's the love I've wanted since I was young. And I'm so fucking happy with it genuinely. No one else has ever come close to being this safe for me. And I'll give her my all in return cause I adore every single bit of her. I'm glad there's at least one person I don't have to hide anything from.

[madewithonerib]

4.] Miraculously Healed of Addiction

But I was delighted, & then came the HOLY SPIRIT to bring people off drugs miraculously. [38:30] 

The first one was somebody who had been sent to guard me because my youth cup got smashed up & I won't tell you that long story.

   But he was sent to guard me after it had been    smashed up; it's a very small room — just big    enough for ping-pong table. [38:54] 

And they painted sewage on the walls & broke the windows & these were the people that I loved.

You know I'd spent by this time six years with them & I'd got their sisters into school — I had paid their gambling debts.

I'd looked after their grandmothers, you know doing what what I call normal Gospel. That's what you do, anyway. [39:32] 

Then they smashed the place up.

Anyway there was a man sent to guard me on that first night after I cleaned up, & he stood, he didn't come in to the room.

The street is just two or three feet wide.

You understand it's dark & he stood there & he said “You got any problems?” & I said you know I'm fine, thanks who are you?

And he said, “Well KauKau has sent me.”

And Coco was the name of the gang leader, & there were two main gangs in the Walled City 14K another one called Gaing-Gee.

So he was in charge of about 20,000 people which is part of the opium dens & gambling dens & women, & protection rackets.

     Not just in world city, outside as well.

But they could hide in there because they couldn't be arrested & so he said KauKau sent me & KauKau says if anyone touches you or touches your place

     We're going to do him

……………………………………………………………………….……. And I said “Thank you it's really that's very kind of you, but please will you go back and tell him I don't accept his offer because JESUS is looking after me.” [40:51]  ……………………………………………………………………….…….

And he said, “Lay chee-shin!”

You know she's cracked because his job in the gang was to fix fights, & he chose whether it was knives or choppers or bottles or whatever.

So although I refused his offer, I got his protection anyway—& every time I came in/out of the Walled City, there were about 16 entrances.

—just you wouldn't know it was the entrance to a city, it just looked like a little passage you had to squeeze into because they wouldn't let outsiders or people they didn't want inside.

So every time I came in, I got this man's protection

……………………………………………………………………….……. And I knew he was an opium addict, but he didn't know I knew—and he started to tell me about his friend & could I help his friend off opium. [41:58]  ……………………………………………………………………….…….

And I said, "Oh that's really easy you know, we will just find a house in the countryside where nobody will hear him screaming, & we will prep.

—preferably we'll pad it, so he won't kill himself when he goes crazy. We'll lock him in & after three days, we'll let him out, because after three days he will be off drugs.

4.1] Problem of the Heart

It just takes 72 hours for the stuff to get out of the bloodstream—of course the problem is once you have opened the door, he will go straight back to drugs because drugs is not a problem of the body — it's a problem of the heart. [42:34] 

Testing of Your Faith 1,2,3,4,5,6 | Jackie Pullinger [Hebrews 12:1-3]

[lqb2writes]

disordered loves in america

"And so I go to Augustine’s concept of “disordered loves” which is we all love a lot of things, and we all know some loves are higher than others. Our love of truth should be higher than our love of money, but because of some screw-up in our nature, we get our loves out of order all the time. So if a friend blabs to you a secret and you tell it at a dinner party, you’re putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship, and that’s a sin. And I think, in this world, which doesn’t like to peer darkly into brokenness, it’s easier to swallow the concept of two positive things that are out of order." — david brooks, on being: sinfulness, hopefulness, and the possibility of politics

unsurprisingly (because i love st. augustine and was once torn between an augustinian and franciscan monk), i love this idea of "disordered loves." i grew up in a religious household and the idea of sin was everywhere. but because of how the american progressives (older white people and younger poc & white people alike) have, by and large, rejected religion, sin isn't really a useful construct.

however, disordered love seems very useful. it's a concept that helps explain why things are broken. examples brooks gave: love for money over love for people. love of popularity over love of friendship. another one i see often is love of comfort over love of planet.

this concept is easier to understand in our society because we struggle to think of things we like as bad. it makes us feel bad. and, unfortunately, feeling bad is a trigger for shutdown of engagement for most of us. of course, that is a problem all its own that needs change, but let's take it as a given for now.

if "putting our loves in order" is a useful frame for making things better, i'm into it. i really like that idea. it even allows for tough love as a mechanism for helping each other put our loves in better order. when we allow tough love or "fierce compassion" as buddhists might say (mentioned by robert thurman in the on being episode called meeting our enemies and our suffering), we get new opportunities for engagement. loving fiercely (in that cornell west "just is what love looks like in public" sort of way) gives us new ways of bringing different people into our work. because as a call to action, who  doesn't want to love more?

and this isn't the watered down version of love fed to us by destructive media sources. this is the type of love that makes us understand and hold each other as we open our eyes and have our world views shattered. this is the type of love that makes us put some skin in the game for each other. this is the type of love that makes us really understand that our liberation is bound up with people different from us.

maybe that'll be my frame for 2017: getting these loves in order...

writing: 21:22 ​spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 11:12

[asbigaslifeblog]

Self-medication & Happiness

I had a friend in Atlanta who self-medicated. His drugs of choice were caffeine and sugar. I would not be surprised if his use of these stimulants managed ADHD —this was before ADHD was fully recognized — a method he had discovered by a kind of experiential scientific method. He knew somehow that he was “better” and coffee and sugar were simply his thing. There are, of course, types of…

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[daretobeholy-blog]

This first part is very personal, but I felt that God needed me to make this video.  I uploaded it yesterday. Woke up today and deleted it because I thought it'd seem immature to talk about what I've been through.

Then I received a message from a fellow Catholic about the vid, and so I decided to upload it again. 

I don't really know how to convey my thoughts, feelings, and my experiences, but I hope this is helps people who are going through what I'm going through !