#jesustalk

[leezlelatch]

Jesus Talk With Father Jim Defroque

Jesus Talk With Father Jim Defroque

Call the number. Confess your sins. You won’t regret it!

[ismanalo]

Follow me on Spotify!!! #jesustalk (at Sydney, Australia) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6m9-AYhIfp/?igshid=1rjl534qsaqo9

[amycat1010-blog1]

[getup-getfit]

Day #3 Characteristic- Obey 🙏🏾 As believers, we are sinners saved by God’s grace through Jesus Christ. We all fall short, but as believers we have a duty to obey God’s word📖.  Whether we want to or not it is what we signed up for.  It’s a process to die to ourselves, but we must be intentional in the decisions we make.  This goes for both men and women.  We were given much, hence much is required of us in being doers of the Word. #Obey #GodsWord #MenofGod #WomanofGod #dobetter #pickaside #Jesuswalk #Jesustalk #God #JesusChrist #instainspire #GetUpGetFit #Wednesdaypost #goodmorningtoyou

[dreamlogic]

it's hard being a christian bc when you try to find decent covers of your favorite hymns they're all Like That(TM)

[dreamlogic]

"I've met a few angels" Really? That's so neat! Would you elaborate on that? 🌱🎶

aaaahhhh lmao perhaps “met” is the wrong word. it’s more like “happened to be in the way while they were doing their jobs and caught a glimpse of them, then spent a week not sleeping about it.” angels are intimidating af. even my guardian angel, who’s kind of a punk, carries himself with an incredible amount of power and authority. they’re incredibly graceful– so graceful that it’s a bit eerie how smooth and confident their movements are. i’ve encountered five angels over the course of my life (that i know of) and i don’t think i could ever forget any of them. and bc you caught me in a chatty mood, i’ll ramble a little about them under the cut:

the first angels i met were watchkeepers over the house i grew up in. it was a dinky little trailer in a quiet, well-maintained little park populated mostly by retirees and the occasional meth cook. nothing remarkable in itself, but i’m pretty sure our trailer was situated over some sort of spiritual continental divide or a rift in spacetime or something. weird shit always went down there, and i never realized how much weird shit went down till i moved out. my mom (who is also v sensitive to the supernatural) and i used to joke that it was a “halfway house for wayward demons and lost ghosts.”one night, i was going for a walk around the neighborhood, and when i returned to my house i saw two enormous shadowy figures crouched at each end of the trailer: one east, one west. the way they were perched reminded me of the ark of the covenant. they weren’t humanoid, per se, just shapes of dark cobalt and gold that almost disappeared in the night, with giant gold-laced wings outstretched to cover the majority of the house. one carried a spear, and one a staff with a lantern on the end, and they were crossed in the middle. neither acknowledged my presence, and although i glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye and in dreams several times over the years there, neither ever showed any signs of movement. their presence was grave and heavy, but overall comforting because after they took up post on our roof, the nastier demons tended to stay outside and leave us alone for the most part.

then there’s my guardian angel, for lack of a better word. i nicknamed him marlboro, because during the summer i first met him, i kept finding marlboro cigarette butts under my windowsill, which he eventually confessed to leaving there. did he smoke them? eat them? harvest them just to confuse me? i dunno, but for a while i was convinced it was a peeping tom who was really bad at covering their tracks.voyeurism aside, i also mistook him for a demon the first time i met him. at the time, i was still living in the trailer, and was still near constantly plagued with supernatural bullshit. demons tend to flock in threes for strength (imo trying to mimic the holy trinity), and i had a triumvirate in my room wrecking havoc on my mental health. i usually don’t have anxiety, but they were giving me anxiety attacks that felt like i’d been sliced in half with a blade of PURE RAW FEAR. i was chilling in my room one afternoon trying to calm down from one of these anxiety attacks when i thought i saw a shimmering blade out of the corner of my eye, emerging from thin air like an invisible curtain covering it had been briefly blown aside. thinking it was the demon, i whipped out my fuckin holy water and incense and tried to FITE TF OUT OF IT, but it didn’t budge. instead, it started laughing, this beautiful, but incredibly stressful sound like being stuck inside a giant brass bell while it rang.“are you really trying to exorcise me?” a voice asked, and i felt a bit nauseous. “get the fuck out, demon,” i replied. the laughter got louder and the blade burst into flames, sending light dancing around the room. “bro, seriously? i’m your angel,” it said. “here, watch this.” the point of the blade cut into the floor, opening up a little slice of darkness, and the point hooked around some screaming, squirming thing that it pulled up from the floor. i recognized it instantly as the demon that had been fucking with me: this vile thing dripping rotting blood and green bile, parts one two and three being a rusty spike, a moldering cloth wrapping it up, and a ribbon covered in eyes tying the bundle together. clawed hands reached out from behind the curtain shielding me from the brightness of the flaming blade and unwrapped the demon piece by piece, shredding it while it shrieked and blubbered. then the hands lifted the sword, twisted the blade into the demon’s “heart” and cut it in two easy as cutting air.the laughter stopped, and i felt a gentle weight on my knees and shoulders, pushing me to the floor. “you’re welcome,” the laughing voice said. the sword had disappeared behind the curtain again, and i felt a soft presence slip across my eyes before vanishing. i was so overwhelmed and stressed out by the encounter i took a nap on the floor and woke up four hours later.since then, i’ve gotten to know marlboro better and he doesn’t scare me anymore. his is a welcome presence, soft and humorous (if obnoxiously sarcastic for an angel), but still fiercely intense and a little careless with that intensity. i think he forgets my puny human brain can’t fully conceptualize his existence and sometimes he’s so intense it’s almost smothering. for the most part, he keeps his distance unless i call on him. lately, he’s been hovering over my bed while i sleep to guard my dreams, but for the most part he does his own thing elsewhere and doesn’t pay me much attention. i’ve also gotten a more accurate picture of his physical appearance over the years, but i still have trouble articulating. the ‘curtain’ i first saw turned out to be a garment he wears to shield himself from sight, like an invisibility cloak made of dark matter or some shit. if i had to compare his form to anything, it would be a barn owl, but even that doesn’t do him justice at all. i can’t tell if he carries many flaming blades under his cloak, or if those are feathers, or what, but occasionally i’ll catch a glint of sharp things in the soft, heavy, star-laden darkness under the garment. he exudes a dense rust-grey smoke that obscures everything but his face, and i think it’s another layer of protection he offers me, but i’m not sure. it smells like a bizarre blend of incense, rancid meat, and river water.

unlike my wandering truant angel, my mom’s guardian angel never leaves her side. it stands behind her with a vice grip on her left shoulder, and its presence scares the shit out of my cats. she has to ask it to loosen its grip and back off a bit, otherwise her shoulder aches and she can’t sleep with its overbearing weight on her. i haven’t seen much of its physical appearance, and i really don’t want to. it’s enormous, and tbh kinda terrifying. it wears full-body armor, but i only know what its head/shoulders looks like bc it noticed i was watching it and vanished with a sound like a flock of pigeons taking flight. its helmet is a featureless visor of tarnished golden-y color with plates like a snake’s scutes that slope gently into broad, rounded shoulders. tbh it looked a little bit like these fuckers, the druids from voltron. when they first made an appearance i was like “noooooooo fuckinnn wayyyyyy” lmao art imitates life or w/e.

this last angel came to me when i was visiting a catholic shrine in the rocky mountains. i’d been considering buying a rosary there, but the lil gift shop was closed. i was musing on this in one of the prayer gardens when something abruptly called my attention between two spruce trees on the opposite end of the garden. i felt magnetically drawn to that spot, even though i had to hop two fences and a rock wall to get there. “there” was a statue of an angel dedicated to some long-dead benefactor of the shrine, and to my eyes it seemed to be coated in a layer of glistening, fuzzy white down, like some sort of fungus, or dew-coated wool. from the angel’s outstretched hand was dangling a rosary, which wasn’t exactly uncommon. “i can’t take this, someone left it here for a reason,” i thought to myself. the shrine was littered with trinkets and offerings and it felt wrong to disturb them, but a voice that sounded like wind through a bottle rose from the fluff coating the statue and asked me “why do you think i compelled her to leave it? it’s yours.” after some deliberation (but not much cause you don’t just disregard authoritative talking statues), i unlooped the rosary from the angel’s hand. the second i did, the white down scattered like this [video link, arachnophobia cw]. here’s a pic of the angel statue, but it doesn’t look nearly as awe-inspiring as it did when covered with angel dust, or whatever that was (i’m p sure it was angelic, but i’m not sure if it was a single entity or a flock/hivemind of little luminous beings). the rosary now lives in a bag with my tarot deck bc i’m an awful blasphemous christian.

[dreamlogic]

You're pretty Christian right? How do you feel about angelkin? And like, deitykin?

“pretty christian” is one way of putting it, yeah! in practice, my faith is a weird syncretism of all sorts of influences, but christianity is the spiritual framework i build everything else off of. it’s sort of an anchor point for me. and by a lot of christian’s standards i’d be considered a heretic sinner bc i don’t subscribe to a lot of christian dogma or follow any set denomination’s practices, however, i wholeheartedly believe in the holy trinity. that’s my god, and i have a v personal and intimate relationship with them. but i recognize that my god isn’t everyone else’s god, and my understanding of universal truth is in no way The Ineffable Universal Truth™. there’s a whole damn lot about life that i don’t understand, and a whole lot about even my own religion that goes way over my head, so to presume any grand insight about other faiths and deities just seems arrogant to me?? everyone conceptualizes the infinite in their own ways and one of my biggest issues with the christian church is the widespread mentality that our god is somehow superior or more authentic than any others. fuck evangelism tbh, i’d rather bask in the glorious multiplicity of human faith than try and convert the world to one manifestation of the divine. ultimately imo faith just boils down to what makes individuals feel happy and fulfilled, and what grand cosmic stories resonate most with where different people are at in their lives. i’ve found my story and my god, but i love hearing about others’.

as far as divinekin go, i don’t really have any strong opinions. my faith dictates that i hold no other gods above the christian god, but that doesn’t negate the existence of other deities. some of my dearest loved ones are divinekin and i feel incredibly #blessed to know such incredible beings. i don’t doubt their divinity, because if there is some omniscient authority somewhere that can determine who the Real Gods are, i’m sure as fuck not it. i won’t worship them, but i have nothing but respect for divinekin in the same way that i have nothing but respect for other deities from non-christian religions. my policy when ppl, divine or otherwise, open up to me about their faith is basically just to listen and learn. at the very least, i’ll have gained a bit more perspective on life and gotten to know them better, at most they’ve helped me figure out another facet of my own personal truth that i can reflect upon and weave into my own faith!

same logic applies to angelkin. i’ve met a few angels, and they come in all shapes and sizes, humanoid and otherwise. they’re beings i’m incredibly in awe of, but they also intimidate the fuck out of me and their presence is just a tad overwhelming. that i know of, i haven’t met any angelkin, but i’d be super curious to listen to them talk about their kin and get their insight on angelic nature, and sort of compare notes? i also feel like an angel in a human vessel would be a lot more approachable and less…. burn the sanity from your synapses intense.

tldr; i think all otherkin are super cool and since it’s not my place to dictate how others should experience reality, as long as no one’s being hurt i’d rather sit back and let folks be what they wanna be.

[dreamlogic]

well that conversation went well. it didn't accomplish as much as i'd hoped, but i'm gonna be patient and trust the process. we did agree that the church is ready for and needs to have more conversations about reconciling with the queer community, and that vulnerability, grace, and dignity need to set the tone for those dialogues. i am truly blessed to have a church that is willing to work on becoming a more active safe space.