We Are Made To Love

A number of years ago my daughter was diagnosed as anorexic. There was a lot to learn about what being anorexic actually meant but essentially it meant my daughter did not desire to eat or if she did, she would cause herself to throw up so that eventually should would die of starvation. 

In the hospital they would trick her into eating by threatening to force feed her and after she ate she would be restrained from going to the bathroom to throw up the food for at least an hour after which she was allowed to go to the bathroom and if she threw up it did not matter since the food had done its job.

At home it was an agonizing process of trying to convince the her to eat, through threatening of forced feeding at the hospital, and watching her that hour; cajoling her to eat but watching her for an hour.  If she were on her own she would be required to go to the doctor regularly to be weighed (a frightening thing for an anorexic) with the threat of hospitalization if her weight was dangerously low.

It’s strange to recall that I was eating some lunch at McDonald’s when I thought to myself that if my daughter could not be cured of her anorexia I just couldn’t live anymore so much was my love for her. I decided then that for me to survive the struggle of assisting her that I needed psychological help for myself and also, as a Christian, spiritual help for myself to get through this crisis which I realized could be a long and agonizing time. I secured the help of a good psychologist and a Christian  spiritual director.

Not only did I attend frequent appointments with these helpers but I arranged help for my daughter by arranging numerous appointments with psychologists for her through the years until finally after 6 agonizing years an appointment with two Christian psychologists, a man and his wife, were able to help her in a six week program so that she was able to eat on her own an adequate amount of food and not throw it up.

I learned several very important things as a result of six years of agony; it was only through these Christian psychologists that she was cured because only God could cure her ailment; the despair I had felt of not wanting to live if she were to die was not my love for her but a feeling that she was my possession and that if I lost my possession I would die. I came to an understanding that treating my daughter as a possession made me feel this terrible way.  I learned to think of her in a normal way of being my daughter whom I had to help through a genuine love of her not as my possession but as His! I realized that God, through his love for me, was asking me to love her not as my possession but as a person who needed God’s love through my love for her.

I had learned one of the most important things in my life: that God had given me many gifts, including my daughter, which were not to be seen as my possessions, which would be a denial of God’s loving gifts, leading me to a destruction of my happiness as intended by God.  Decades have passed since my daughter’s cure; she has gone through the effects of a horrible divorce from a narcissistic man who is trying to ruin her life through possession of their daughter who is now 11. But she is happily remarried to a Christian who is kind and supportive in her continuing ordeal of her ex-husband trying to destroy my daughter’s life through harm to their daughter. 

We communicate by phone frequently and I simply give her my love and advice to help her out of a moment of depression. But through it all she has not relapsed to her anorexia, so great is God’s love for her; she has become my friend, sometimes helping me with my troubles. She is happy with her new husband; she is the primary custodian of her daughter. We have no fear but that things will come out right in God’s way.

We are made to love; to love others, and through that love we pass to them God’s love; trusting in God to accomplish his will no matter what his will brings about, whether or not his will is in conformity with what our will might be; to realize that God’s will, through his love for my daughter has done the best thing for her through my love for her. This is God’s mission in life for each of us to love others and wish the best for them but trust in God that he will do the best for them.

Edith Stein, a Jewish woman, a brilliant philosopher and writer who had stopped believing in God at 14, had a Christian friend whose husband had been killed in the First World War; she went to visit her friend to commiserate with her for her terrible loss. But her friend, through her Christian faith, did not despair and had trust in the Lord that his death amounted to God’s desire to bring him home to Himself; Edith was amazed; as a result of reading her friend’s copy of the autobiography of St Theresa of Avila, Edith declared “This is Truth” and was baptized a Christian, ultimately giving her life as a martyr for Christ, for the Jewish people, in Auschwitz in 1942; she is now known as St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross.

The Real War on Women

The video shown below gives a very good overview of the so-called "War on Women" first used by Democrats to label Republicans as being anti-women.  Quite the contrary, Republicans express their public displeasure about any Republican leader who behaves in a manner that displays any kind of harassment of women or immorality such as cheating on a spouse.  

In the case of the mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner, a Democrat, who has been accused by many women of his sexual harassment of them, there has been utter silence from leading Democrats about his flagrant abuse of women over many years.

Nancy Pelosi, minority leader in the House, is now being asked why there has been this silence about "The Real War on Women"  perpetrated by this and other Democrats.

Matthew Ridgeway, one of three American Savior Generals

History, especially American History, is one of my favorite past-times; would that more Americans, especially the young, be likewise interested.  Unfortunately, for decades, our young in particular, and older Americans in general, have been brainwashed by elites in education, government and the press who have bought into the godless principles of progressivism and have deprive the American people of the knowledge of leaders who have espoused the true history and spirit of America. 

In Victor Davis Hanson’s The Savior Generals -  How Five Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost, we are introduced to one of three unique American generals who had the ability and foresight to turn defeat into victory.

North Korean Communist Forces had invaded South Korea in June of 1950 in a surprise attack, driving scant American and South Korean forces to a region around the city of Pusan in Southeastern South Korea.  Now started the “police action” under a United Nations resolution to drive the communists from South Korea, under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur.  MacArthur’s famous landing of new american forces at Inchon near Seoul, the South Korean capitol, hundreds of miles in the rear of the communist North Koreans, led to their massive defeat and a consequent furious drive of UN forces up into North Korea, reaching the Yalu river, the northern boundary of all Korea, in a short few months.  

During this drive northward, Chinese Communist forces had been infiltrating into North Korea and building up strength across the Yalu for a massive attack.  Inadequate intelligence never detected this buildup; when the Chinese moved, the resulting rout of Allied forces was a military embarrassment and disgrace.

Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgeway was appointed in late 1950 to replace the commanding general of all United Nations forces in Korea, who had been killed in an auto accident.  At this point in time American, UN and South Korean forces were in a chaotic condition.  They had lost confidence in themselves and their commanders, having been ill equipped to fight in bitter cold and attacked without warning; given no plans for coping with this new enemy, who fought by stealth and night tactics.  At home, thousands of miles away, the people, military leaders, politicians and journalists and General MacArthur himself in his post in Tokyo, all assumed a defeatist attitude and were contemplating withdrawing American troops.

The war was lost.

General Ridgeway alone was confident that his forces could turn things around and drive Communist forces out of South Korea while not risking disaster by going back into North Korea.  He saw that americans had control of the air and could hammer the communists if he slowly moved South along defensive lines already in place.  Each such move lengthened the supply lines of the communists which were then subjected to destruction by air power.  He moved his headquarters up to the front lines and led from the front with his men.  

He made sure his men had adequate clothing to bear the cold; adequate food and supplies.  Most of all he responded to the doubts of his men about fighting in a war far away from home with no justification for sacrificing their lives; he assured them they were fighting to restore the freedom of those subjected to tyranny for decades.  He re-instilled in them the principles of the American fighting man: fighting for the restoration of freedom and liberty under God for all men and women.

He fought with his men and sent mediocre generals packing, replacing them with new generals promoted from colonels who would fight.  He retreated slowly,  turning air power on clusters of the enemy; in a matter of weeks, communist forces were so weakened that he counterattacked and kept up an offense.  Within 100 days in the Spring of 1951, he pushed the communists back across the 38^th  parallel.  The war was no longer lost.  The war was won even though it took two more years of stalemate around the 38^th before a peace treaty was signed.

An interesting note is that Ridgeway did not believe in a volunteer army because those without military training would not experience a sense of duty to their country; instead they would be soft and subject to the pleasures of life without commitment to the values of american culture.  That is precisely what is happening to our youth today under the Progressives.

Another notable action of Ridgeway's was to integrate the American forces; blacks and non-blacks were no longer to fight in separate units but to fight together.  He was a commander of unique vision and quality.

2013 marks 60 years of the end of the Korean War with 60 years of  peace and freedom for South Korea.  

Modernism

Modernism, Humanism, Progressivism are all terms for philosophies born in the 19^th century starting with the French Revolution, which have abandoned centuries of Christianity, replacing God with the rationality of human beings. In these philosophies humans are looked upon as being able to control everything in their lives without dependence upon any moral concepts of Christianity (1)

Europe by now has been thoroughly de-Christianized; America is on its way.(2)  Along with replacing God by human intelligence and reason, government was seen to be the vehicle through which humans can make progress in the world. This means big government. Education is taken over by the state. Without God, however, human beings are prone to all kinds of mischief;  one has only to look at the two great World wars of unbelievable destruction and the nature of “progress” of communism all over the world which has dehumanized multiple societies.

In the United States, modernism was introduced in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Starting with the election of the progressive democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the Democratic Party starting aligning itself with progressivism. Had it not been for Wilson’s mental illness in the last years of his tenure he would have successfully transformed the United States into a statist nation in which government had complete control over the lives of its citizens. (3)

In the 1920’s, Margaret Sanger, one of the 50 most influential progressives of the first part of the Twentieth Century, was one of the foremost promoters of eugenics, the “purification” of society by eliminating its weak strains such as, Sanger believed, people of African decent (4). She founded Planned Parenthood, in great part to hide her eugenics intent by promoting abortion as a way of dealing with the so-called overpopulation problem (5); it is not accidental that most Planned Parent clinics came to be in areas of economic depression where blacks predominated. (6)

It seems that the author of “How Children Learn”, reviewed in a previous post, believes in the exclusive power of Science and Modernism because of his inability to identify an “external” source so necessary for successful learning.  The external source is in fact present because it is one of many of God’s gifts to humanity; freely given to all who recognize God’s existence as a Person totally separate from the universe he created, including human beings; in opposition to the pantheistic idea of humanists who believe only that God is the World and the World is God. (7)

Today we cannot even mention the name of God in so many venues; the so-called separation of church and state is a faulty interpretation of the first amendment (8) and cripples the idea of God as a Person who has created us and desires to help his human creatures in their course through life. This crippling effect has led to a view of life where anything goes; in addition, we are responsible to no-one nor any law of nature. This is all a result of modernistic ideas that we don’t need God.

References:

(1) http://truthinhistory.org/historical-heresies-19th-century-humanistic-philosophies-and-americas-cultural-corruption-2.html

(2) http://www.thankgodforevolution.com/node/2043

(3) http://www.examiner.com/article/the-progressives-sordid-history-of-internment-camps  Article by Anthony Martin on history of Progressivism during President Wilson’s terms and now.

(4) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/peterson.html   Abortion, A Liberal Cause? Paragraph 2

(5) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/peterson.html   Abortion, A Liberal Cause? Paragraph 8

(6) http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/aug/25/planned-parenthood-targets-blacks/

(7) Pantheism is the belief that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent God, or that the universe (or nature) is identical with divinity.  Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal or anthropomorphic god.  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(8) http://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/12/ron-paul/the-war-on-religion/

http://truthinhistory.org/historical-heresies-19th-century-humanistic-philosophies-and-americas-cultural-corruption-2.html

A Nagging Wife

Some time ago I read an account of a policeman, on the force for four years, who was well respected by his fellow officers and had recently been promoted to a position reflecting the conscientiousness with which he had been performing his duties.  He was well liked by all who knew him; he was a very outgoing and happy man, always greeting everyone with a smile and a genuine hello.  He was married with two young children, a daughter in pre-school and a son in kindergarten.

One day, while at home, this young officer, who seemed to have everything going for him, shot himself in the head with his service revolver.  All who knew him were stunned because there seemed to be no good reason for his suicide.  But at his funeral all present listened to the wife express a litany of unwarranted complaints about her husband; she had daily expressed her dissatisfaction while her husband tried everything to assuage her nagging, to no avail.  His depression grew to a point where he saw no other way out but suicide.

How many people are there who nag and are unable to see the damage they do while at the same time are reluctant to seek help from others?  How many people are unwilling to talk to others about depression due to some conflict they fail to understand?

It seems that too many of us fail to recognize that we do not have the innate ability to evaluate our own faults and need the wisdom of others to point them out without them making damaging judgements about those faults.  But what is it that keeps us from seeking help?  Is it shame?  Or is it for the most part pride?  A false pride that makes us feel we can handle ourselves and or problems without help from anyone?

That is why I believe that faith in God is so important.  Faith in a Person who is all Love, Understanding, Wisdom, Mercy, Truth, Justice and Forgiveness leads us to understand that we cannot, by ourselves alone, do anything; God wants our love and He promises to help us if we understand our need for Him.  Once we understand this need, it is not hard to understand that we need to seek help from others whose faith in God can in turn help us recognize our faults.