Well everyone, I hope you are having a nice day. I am doing okay and my apartment is about to be inspected at my supported housing program for mental illness. I have been busy for a few days and attended a prayer conference this past weekend. I always see visions when I participate in programs and classes from the seminary that hosted the event, and sure enough, I saw several days of prophecy and hallucinations and experiences of the Bible seeming lit up for me. It was great and the people were really nice to include me. I think some bad things got wrangled and my prayers will continue to be powerful despite some mental decline.
I am signed up for another conference that is much different this weekend at the same place. There has been some possibility of not being able to handle it but I think I will be fine and it has a good overlap with art in the world so it is not just pure monk power that will send me off the deep end. Here is an article that I think describes my conditions well, though at the core of it I feel like I have been confronting the war against my soul and all souls as described in the whole book of 1 Peter. I like Peter and associated him with Catholicism but his opening paragraph in that book is very Presbyterian. The article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5613459/
This blog has a lot of posts written while being gutwrenched to the point of organ damage and irreversible mental deterioration, and I have to say that when I see the heart of it in religious settings, I agree with myself that some of it is from injustice that is not my fault. There is opportunity in it to worship and be blessed without dependence on exterior affirmation from a failing and falling world, but really, there is no excuse for me to be catapulted into super saint status without bringing the millions of people with me who could have benefited from my normal life and work. I can feel the truth of it when I say that it is wrong, that there is now a ten year crime against me that hurts my whole society and world, and it will only get worse without some kind of reversal and acknowledgement. I keep trying to guess what my next steps are, and it seems that for some reason, there are hundreds of people partaking in the suffering instead of millions of people benefiting from our work. So that is where I will have some trust of a will behind a will, and God’s patience with so much more disrespect than I have felt myself. The affront to God needs to be understood before people aspire to reach the nations with his love. Some of his mercy is in the fact that he would care enough to feel the great offense, and I think that learning about this was what took me from a parkinson’s dementia problem to renewal of a deeper understanding of God’s forgiveness and patience.
