It is not a universal affliction of those who knew their savior from a very young age, “saved as children”, choose your words for it. But so many are so incredibly naive as to be utterly ineffectual. In speaking, in writing, in weighing situations, in seeing cause in time to intervene in effect. Don’t get me wrong, being naive isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. But to call it a good thing necessarily means you need to further qualify that claim.
I didn’t settle on my faith until I was 32. In the preceding 17 years from losing virginity at 15 to a woman who was old enough to drive (16!) I must have lived a hundred years. I’m not naive enough. Far from it.
When I read things like this, therefore, I just cringe. The writer is celebrating women’s intuition about parenting, while offering an example that demonstrates anything but. A daughter, on the way to the moves, called her mother and said that because there were no movies they wanted to see, the girls were going to hang out at Dory’s. The girl rung off before mom could quibble.
Mom’s spidey sense started tingling. She used technology (This is the first hint that the story is made up or the mom in the example is thick) to reverse directory a caller ID number then a mapping site to find Dory’s house. She went there.
When she arrived at the door she saw a boy looking out the window and holding a beer. he was yelling, “Someone’s mom is here”.
Mom got someone to the door and asked her daughter to come out. Here is the part where the wrapping paper gets folded inward at the ends and the bows and ribbons get affixed:
After a minute, Kristin appeared, an ashen look on her face. Sharon feared they were in for a long ride home. But as they walked to the car, Kristin asked, “Mom, how did you know? How did you know I needed you?”
It turned out that some guys from a different school had arrived at the party, talking trash and getting aggressive. It looked like there might be a fight.
Even when your children are resisting your efforts at care and protection, they still need you more than ever. When they get stubborn, keep coming. When they become unlovable, keep loving
If mom didn’t know Dory, how did she use a “combination of caller ID and a mapping site? The girl texted her mother. It is clear that the text came from the girls own phone. The ministry peddling this is naive or plays loose with real truth, sacrificing it for a buttoned up anecdote. Sweet. The readers who have seen this since it was published, many of them must be naive as well or there would have been enough feedback to have it taken down or at least edited. It makes the readers, mostly Moms, feel good, so it is not really read.
Finally, if we ignore all of that, the mom in this story is the most naive of all if this is a true tale. And the girl has shown that she can think on her feet.
If this story really happened, with those pesky CSI type details fixed so that it was plausible, would you have fallen for that story? If somehow you were able to satisfy yourself that the story is 100% true, that the girls were just there playing Mystery Date, and some hooligans with unfiltered Camels and cans of Pabst showed up, would you repeat it without even considering that in this neo-post-snopes age people are skeptical?
Keep it up folks. With this level of focus, I feel a major culture shift coming. The wrong way.
Empathologism 
You have the wrong link, Empath; I see nothing relating to the anecdote you describe.
Empath:
I think the story would have been more fun if the girl’s father and brother got an intuition about things and this happened next to Dory and his friends:
Mack Truck Turner. He’s the man.
Find My Friends if it was the daughter’s cellphone. There is, by law (although you won’t find the law published), no publically available “reverse directory” if it was Dory’s cellphone. But maybe Dory had called the daughter from the landline at some point earlier.
Empath, what’s Bill Gross of Pimco got to do with this story? That’s where your link points.
The story you repeat seems pretty “just-so” like, no offense to Kipling. Is it from some Churchian source?
I was in the air and lag addled past 2 days. Pleasure of sitting along a street in Prague now with 6 AM coffee and my connectivity isn’t allowing me to fix my botched link. I’m trying I’m tryin.
Empath:
From what I’ve seen of Czech girls, I understand why it would be hard to concentrate:
The link is now fixed. Czech yahoo access was broken. I’m in Bratislava now and its working. Girls are girls. If I am not fixated at home I am not fixated here or there. Czech Republic is not the only place where the pretty girls are really really pretty. Nor where seeing them flutter down the street is as off putting as it should be.
I am not Waldo this trip. Only Vienna next for a few days then home.
Empath:
LOL—is that some of the ‘peevishness’ you mentioned the other day?
That was more like a helpful ‘Public Service’ post. Remember not all of us here are married. Prague’s not a bad place to find a wife, neither is Bratislava!
I love Prague and chicks from the Czech Republic. They very well may have the market on babes
Sfcton:
http://theantifeminist.com/the-top-10-reasons-to-visit-slovakia/
The vet I take my dogs to is from Slovakia. Man is she a wonder of the world. Beautiful, feminine and a world expert with K9’s and skin issues….. and this last bit will make all the beats hearts warm, married to a dork ( with a lot of money)
“A mother knows”. I find the platitudes about mothering very irritating. Mothers are so busy, mothers have a sixth sense. Baloney. Even if the story did add up, there’s no procedure, no plan, just assumptions and stupidity. But let’s be honest–The US and Canada don’t like smart. Culturally we prefer dumb. The Church here nicely mirrors that.
re: k9s and skin. Most issues seem solvable by rubbing in original Listerine three times a day; the difficult ones can need Vicks Vaporub.
I’ve used water down bleach before but in this case one of the Hell Hounds was severely allergic to fleas, and what solved it was giving him the flea dip every two weeks instead of every month
Tailor made for you to parse:
http://lorialexander.blogspot.com/2014/10/heartbreak-at-divorce-hotel.html
The link at the bottom is to the show she is referring to. Made me sad, if not in the least surprised.
re: Always Learning article. It’s a shame. Or rather, the wife should be ashamed. And, as always, her failure to submit, her failure to be embarrassed at her willfulness, her lack of shamefacedness, is not at all caused by anything her husband did or did not do.
”her failure to be embarrassed at her willfulness”
That willfulness could be employed in submission to her husband making her a great crown on his head. Instead it is used to rebel. Sin is willfulness against God. It isn’t any different than any other sins in that regard.
A bit long…still adjusting and waking extremely early so why not write what Im thinking….
It isn’t so much the sin of one running amok vs the sin of the other. its about the proclivities more than the sin. And it should be, as Christians, for Christian teachers and apologists and leaders and laymen, knowing one has a proclivity and taking that proclivity under the tutelage of the spirit in us is where the action is……on a time line the next thing is the sins that result from said proclivity….finally repentance and reconciliation. We likely have all of those going an all the time.
Knowing the nature of gender proclivities as it is revealed in scripture and even by our own lyin’ eyes daily, we can form up bodies of believers who are self aware and try and live this thing in community with some other believers. To understate….I am pretty sure male sin proclivity specifics are not handled in weasel words and deflections, using barely brushed against mentions. No….its in our face…and that’s kool by me because I own that crap. The problem is the women of the church have taken ownership of male sin proclivity too. Not they they are prone to the sin, but that they are self appointed managers of male sin proclivity. The twisted messed up thing about that is that for women to do that is the very heart of their own sin proclivity hence their own sin which, because it is shrouded in the perceived virtue of “helping my brother in Christ/my husband or other men”…..its like hooking up one of those 1970’s Marantz pre-amplifiers to women’s sin nature literally boosting the efficacy of the resulting sin and crying out that this squealing squawking noise we’ve just boosted to 5 gazillion watts per channel is actually the beautiful music of the helpmeet in adagio. PRAISE the Lord for these sisters, men!
A sports analogy, kind of, to help explain something. The comparison is, I play a decent game of tennis, only sport I play and have played with any skill at all. Im an average suburban league type player. BUT, I do know HOW to play way beyond the level I am able to. In other words, I can teach someone else how to correct things and do new things because I know the way its to be done even if I am unable to pull that knowledge into my own game as well as I’d like. Similarly I fight the things I come against here, inside myself as well.
There were many points made above that I felt the urge to rebut one by one. Im weary of doing that. Its how the early days of blogging or forum participation went, cut paste, react, cut paste, react. Better I find something more general.So here it is.
Being conciliatory is not a universal good. In a certain sense, being known as a peace maker doesn’t mean something pure necessarily. I think women fight this fact. And conciliatory uber alles leads to very bad things and wrong thinking. I can give an example of horrific consequences of conciliatory urges. where I live , recently, we’ve had two major incidents where marauding mobs of black teen boys have, once run rampage through a Kroger, nearly mortally wounding a teen employee after taking him to the ground and smashing 40 lb pumpkins on his head. A teen girl, recording it by cell phone is heard saying “look, they got’em a white boy down”. There is a point here having zip to do with what the obvious emotional trigger points are, so bear with me.
The major and police chief suffer peace maker disease and have mentioned anything and everything but accountability. “We gotta build more after school gymnasiums, we gotta set up parent training centers, and in the worst display of pathological conciliatory behavior, the father of the victim when interviewed spent his time nearly weeping about the fact that while his son, in hospital, would recover, the poor youths who did the deed will not, and therefore they need our help more than any victim of their crimes.
See how that works? See how they find a place to put accountability other than on a 16 or 17 year old criminal? See how there is no increase in disincentive discussed? Separate the incident, its racial make up and all those attendant pitfalls and emotions, and look purely at the mechanics. X does Y, and the people react with Z.
So when I read in the present context, remarks that are conciliatory, I see intentional or conditioned response, attempts at assuaging guilt be assigned anyone. To say “men and women do x” is guilt assuaged by dilution. There are other subtle forms, all conditioned responses to avoid the blunt instrument of accountability. Even well studied and steeped Christians go all wobbly when it comes to subsets of behaviors and those perpetrating them. And soft conciliatory comments with pure intent are coming from a place of subtle insidious deception. No, i am not saying we need to react like an old west posse. I am saying maybe its better to not react at all than to dilute hard truths by avoiding taking a real, targeted, position.
That history has a cycle of genders gone wild, one then the other, is something with which i cannot agree. I understand the point, its a version of, women were held down and men were brutish and spilled blood wantonly and etc etc on and on. Then we started swinging this other way now and its gone off the track. The theory, I suppose, is that there was a nice balance along there somewhere. Nope. Don’t think so. Men and woman have had the same proclivities since we were created. and we have acted out on them within the constraints of the society that existed, only tempered by , in the best case pious effort, and the worst case the disincentives of the age, law and/or lawlessness, and stigma. Those were all present in some form and degree in every age for every proclivity become sin. Never before have we had what we have now among the churched people. Where compromise and conciliatory urges define SOME proclivities and sins, while laws and stigma impact others, all wrapped in an undercurrent of do what you feel like doing, really, regardless of which gender you are.
And that is no surprise, and while we men fuss and complain, well, we know that the whole thing is end capped anyway and in the main the trajectory will not change. I refuse the complacency that prophecy can cause, however, while cold, it is some comfort.
That was a mindful, but I see myself in the charge and also agree with the parts I was able to clearly decipher upon first read. Perhaps on Monday I’ll decipher the rest.
I think we sometimes take “blessed are the peacemakers” to the extreme point of failure to confront truth. I actually have a post in the works about whether women sin, LOL.
Still not sure what happened to your comment on my blog but if this is a sample, I’m sorry it got eaten.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend, Empath.
This is the comment I tried to make at your blog. I cannot get it to post there, Ive pasted it from here, from word, and the original writing of it…..nuttin’. I forgot to delete it here.