They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord.
Working in the garden is good for your mental health and soul.
My Father is the gardener. I am the Vine, you are the branches
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as finely as these lilies of the field
His eye is on the sparrow
You are worth much more than sparrows
How much more will your Father clothe and feed and take care of you
Possible topics
1. Rage - I am absolutely enraged when asked to be creative on demand - why is this?
2. Sex - what is it and how does it work
3. Nature conservation - is it even possible?
4. Recycling - seriously?
5. How to sail a boat
5 a. hobycats
b. windsurfing
6. Creative writing - what's the point?
7. Why do 90% of startups fail?
8. Corruption - how do we get rid of it?
9. Urban decay and renewal
10. Mental health
11. Communication in relationships
12. Prayer - what is it?
13. Miracles - what are they?
14. Scuba diving
15. How to make money from plants
16. How to be happy every day
17. What is death and how to prepare yourself and others for it
18. Art- what's the big deal
19. Music - what's it for?
20. Food - do we eat too much of it?
The Monologue
Finally found a pen! Hope the ink lasts. I am writing a comic speech because I have no sense of humor and I can't express myself. It is going to take a miracle to get this right.
Oh look my pen is playing up. This is a joke - pen with intermittent ink. Scattered thunder showers of expression in various random parts of the country. I guess the ink tank is low or there is a grease ball on the ink ball or some foreign body of grit hitching a ride just to impeded my creative process like a demon sloth.
Cleaning out scribbles and notes and digitizing them into a blog - for use on radio
1. My cool Italian-designed dustbin lid - it doesn't break, it just falls back into place after being upset
2. C# computer language has the "partial class" concept. Part of the class is written in one file and the other part in another file. You do not need access to both to be able to add to the class because it is partial.
Partial knowledge is ok. "We know in part. but we are fully known"
Partial completion is ok.
Perhaps the full class is known in heaven, and we flesh part of it out here during our lifetime?
3. Affirmations to my wife:
These answers express a vibrant possession of freedom and joie-de-vivre!
They ring true and authentic to your lifestyle, character and hard work.
3.a. Agitatiing - yes ! - this is what is required for reactivating a settled can of paint, for getting chemicals to react and generate heat / useful compounds. Agitating cause the dust to rise, the fog to clear, the fruit to fall, the demons to be exposed.
3.b. Stoking embers and adding fuel gets the fires going again: home fires, heart fires, warning fires like the signals in Lord of the Rings calling for aid from the armies of deliverance.
3.c. You can get paid for existing because you pray to a living GOD and surrender your existence and challenge him by faith concerning your existence.
3.d. you are very good at hosting - emphasizing an atmosphere where God is in charge and present, where the weakest individual in the group is welcomed, strengthened and empowered with love and truth.
3.e. In one-on-one or more conversations you lead with spirit-led discernment involving active listening followed by prophetic reflecting and inspired reframing.
3.f. you facilitate and accommodate growth in other with diligence and the daily failthfulness of a mother, wife like a gardener
3.g. you live out, believe in and work for personal and interpersonal integrity which bring integration. The resulting collaboration agreement and unity bring peace and joy the world so desperately needs.
3.h. you are the most empathetic parent and wife and friend I have ever seen
3.i. you are grounded by a clear, biblical mandate to see the next generation freer and stronger, honed, joyful, the head and not the tail in their God-given lives - maintaining and expanding their God-given territory and being a blessing to others by helping them to do the same.
3.j. You have profoundly sound values which give substance and compass direction to your thoughts, decisions and undertakings. It is a privilege to be someone who gets to hear you speak. ~thank you, Dan.
Holy laughter also occurred in early evangelical and holiness circles. Jonathan Edwards describes the reaction of some who were converted in the Great Awakening revival: “Their joyful surprise has caused their hearts as it were to leap, so that they have been ready to break forth into laughter, tearing often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping.”E. M. Bounds records Wesley saying, “The power of God came mightily upon us, so that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground.”Jessie Penn-Lewis recounts manifestations of holy laughter and being drunk in the Spirit taking place during the Australian Keswick Convention of 1891: The Convention was marked by clean-cut surrender to God for all His will to be done at all costs, and by an overflowing joy which followed in hundreds of hearts, so that, asMr. George Soltau wrote, “Literally ‘our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with singing’… . It was impossible to restrain one’s heart, the Lord giving us such a foretaste of heaven. Talk of “fleshly excitement,” I wish to bear my testimony that it was nothing less than the fulness of the Spirit. We were verily drunk with the joy of the Lord, and with the vistas of the possibilities of faith opening up to the fully surrendered life of the believer. But it was equally manifest to us all that this joy and blessing is only to be received and retained and increased by the death to self and of self and the most painful crucifixion of self.In 1897 A.B. Simpson wrote that one of the effects of being filled with the Spirit is “fullness of Joy so that the heart is constantly radiant. This does not depend on circumstances, but fills the spirit with holy laughter in the midst of the most trying surroundings.” Simpson himself records in his diary on September 12, 1907, that he experienced holy laughter for more than an hour.Oswald Chambers also recorded in his diary on April 19, 1907: “Last night we had a blessed time. I was called down by the teachers to pray and anoint a lady who wanted healing, and as we were doing it God came so near that upon my word we were laughing as well as praying! How utterly stilted we are in our approach to God. Oh that we lived more up to the light of all our glorious privileges.” Chambers evidently believed that laughter could be a sign of revival and, like Simpson, a result of the baptism in the Spirit.Praying John Hyde, the great intercessor and missionary to China also experienced holy laughter in the summer of the same year. His companion relates of a low castePunjabi intercessor: How often has G_____, after most awful crying seemed to break through the hosts of evil and soar up into the presence of the Father! You could see the smile of God reflected in his face. Then he would laugh aloud in the midst of his prayer. It was the joy of a son reveling in the delight of his father’s smile. God has been teaching John [Hyde] and me that his name is the God of Isaac—laughter… . Rejoicing, laughing, the same word as Isaac. This holy laughter seemed to relieve the tension and give Heaven’s own refreshment to wrestling spirits.”Even C&MA leader A. W. Tozer also spoke positively of holy laughter: Now I say that worship is subject to degrees of perfection and intensity. There have been those who worshiped God to the place where they were in ecstasies of worship. I once saw a man kneel at an altar, taking Communion. Suddenly he broke into holy laughter. This man laughed until he wrapped his arms around himself as if he was afraid he would bust just out of sheer delight in the presence of Almighty God… . So worship is capable of running from the very simple to the most intense and sublime.
