So Send I You

So send I you to labor unrewarded,
To serve unpaid, unloved, unsought, unknown,
To bear rebuke, to suffer scorn and scoffing,
So send I you to toil for me alone.

So send I you - to loneliness and longing,
With heart a-hungering for the loved and known;
Forsaking home and kindred, friend and dear one,
So send I you - to know my love alone.

So send I you - to leave your life’s ambitions,
To die to dear desire, self-will resign,
To labor long and love where men revile you,
So send I you - to lose your life in mine.

And in a revision later on in her life:

So send I you-by grace made strong to triumph
O'er hosts of hell, o'er darkness, death, and sin,
My name to bear, and in that name to conquer-
So send I you, my victory to win.

So send I you-to take to souls in bondage
The word or truth that sets the captive free,
To break the bonds of sin, to lost death's fetters-
So send I you, to bring the lost to me.

So send I you-my strength to know in weakness,
My joy in grief, my perfect peace in pain,
To prove My power, My grace, My promised presence-
So send I you, eternal fruit to gain.

So send I you-to bear My cross with patience,
And then one day with joy to lay it down,
To hear My voice, "well done, My faithful servant-
Come, share My throne, My kingdom, and My crown!"
"As the Father hath sent Me, so send I you."

So Send I You(Ye)- Margaret Clarkson

There are some other verses that I am memorizing as well, but I don't have time. >(

My dog

Or..shall we say what I want for a future dog. It is a Spitz breed animal that the Japanese have cultivated, and expanded. My puppy.... the Akita-Inu

"Apres nous...."

We had un deluge the 16th. It was raining rather hard all morning, and despite being on the highest point in all this precinct (across from us is the water tower), we got a good-sized wet.

We elder ones were recruited to soak towels, wring them out in the sink, bathtub, and soak them again. The hallway to our room reeks of mold. I left a candle on in my room all night, and the hallway still makes it stink (the girls room escaped the water). I was on a stool almost the whole morning yesterday with a wet-vac sucking water from the carpet, and the living room. I also tiptoe and hop in the hallway holding my breath, trying to get out quickly and do it dry.

All things considered...it has been a great week. (changed quotation from Roughing It)

Nov. 14-Old song on the radio

"We have our hopes, and we have our dreams,
But we cannot go where you will not lead. "

Don Moen- May Your Precense Go With Us, from the CD Let Your Glory Fall

November 10 & 11- Ladies Conference

Or, Deep thoughts during the expensive sleepover

That is about all it was. An expensive sleepover with 2,500 giddy, shallow, peer-defined girls.

I actually learned a couple things!! :0

Femmininity-
Having seen mostly 'ladys' for most of my sojourn here (well, the people my family is friends with, socialises with) (in quotation depending on how one defines the word) I was rather surprised by what I discovered was mainstream, and suddenly I realised that all these modesty/femmininity books were not "all these". In 2,500 people I counted about two score that wore skirts (though there were more on the second day), and about 30 who had hair even longer than shoulder length. I many times (in the building less that outside of it) had to look more than twice to determine the exact gender (there were a passel of guys doing the techi stuff and in the group singing).
I realised how MUCH I stuck out, and how little they probbably had of femminine influence growing up, and what 'normal' women's presuppasitions were.
It was saddening, and it made me feel better the responsibility of women to act like women and get the message out that femmininity is not next to becoming a third-world country again.

On a radio program the other day, I heard a guy say about feminists-" To try to be something, to hold something above another thing is to say that one is better than the other. For women to try to be like man, get treated like men, get the jobs of men...they are saying that being a man is better." It was just too true....to them there is no glory in long hair. No pride in being what God created them to be- Women.

Also, since they had no pride in being what they were, they had no pride in what men were. A pair of ladies who do shows, acting, and think up 'creative' ideas were talking about the types of women. The first type left casseroles with dates of when to eat them, and what temp. to heat the oven. The second type left the pizza cupons out. The third said 'They can fend for themselves!!' Then, they talked about packages to leave for thier husbands and my stomach curdled....I whispered to my mom "Did they put a bottle in too?" Listening to them one would believe that men were spinless little imps that crawled on the floor wimpering praying that their wonderful marvelous angelic wives would come home and take care of them.

Strangely, I believe thier husbands just might be. Though, except for the groveling on the floor part...they would sit in front of the latest football game. Thier children are probbably already fending for themselves in the eat-or-everyone-else-will-eat-you school/world/peer scene.

Pity and frustration welled up in me....along with a good bit of disgust. I felt like taking the whole kit and caboodle of them to a REAL ghetto in India where people are refused education, food, and water merely for thier social class, merely because they were living. They sit on the streets and pick trash for pennies (literally) (see late GFA updates). Let these women off to face REAL life, bring thier children to gang-infested cities where it is not merely the way one looks or dresses, but how one handles one's gun, and future survival is not in jepordy of one's parents taking away $10 from thier $100 allowance, but weather the opposite gang should catch you off guard and......and make your tomorrow the paralitic ward.

I guess this is a campain against selfishness.....pure selfishness about how one looks, weather one's tan is expensively done or cheap, weather one's kitchen counter is granite and weather one's children have ipods.

*sigh*....come quickly, Lord Jesus, come quickly!!

November 4- Book Review

This could also be called a book rave, because that is what I'm doing. C.S. Lewis was an amazing person. Today, at the craft fair that I was a vendor at I found a book of his short stories and fragments of stories he never finished.
The book was a posthumous compilation on convicting, scary, and deep ideas. It is called The Dark Tower & Other Stories.

The Dark Tower- a ghastly story!! (my word was 'freaky' but dearest older sister said I needed a new adjective) The idea of time travel and "other worlds" continued from the Space series, with Ransome as one of the 5 main characters. The idea of other life and "seeing" the future, or past makes it intriguing.
What struck me was how he was able to incorporate humor with horror and break into mental prejudices. One line went somewhat like this: "No matter what you say man is rushing into the future at the rate of 60 minutes an hour", and Macphee's sarcasm with "I shall drop by ----(some college) and tell them that Cambridge has made the amazing discovery that a man in 1938 cannot get to 1939 in less that a year..." Then, of course, there was the dry comment about the particles in Lewis' nose that made me giggle

The Man Born Blind-this one is sad. It has a confusing ending, and describing it doesn't work. It is about a search for light, a hunger for one's eyes to behold what no one can explain. A man born blind who regains his sight....and how he thinks.

The Shoddy Lands- Grabe!! This one is an enquirey into the mind, and how one thinks, (or how a girl thinks), about the world, and oneself. How perception, and one's imagination look to another.

"....or if I were the one investigated!!"

The other stories were confusing, and (should I warn tender readers) rather not what is pure, lovely and of good repute- not to say that the above were very much that.

C. S. Lewis was an amazing person...I whish I had had the honor of knowing him.

November 3- The TCK film that wasn't

Tonight we watched a TCK film that wasn't. It was called Mighty Joe Young. It was about how a 15ft. gorilla is misunderstood, and provoked into seeming like a second Godzilla. His only friend was the girl he grew up with in the jungles. Poachers killed both their mothers when they were young.
I watched the last 30 min. in tears. The sweet African song that Jill's mother sang to her surfaced haunting memories.

The movie wasn't about her being a TCK. It was a documentary about a TCK, but it wasn't.

October 29- Nicole Isabelle?

Tonight I found out that our family was once again in the 'irresponsible' stage of family life.

I am proud to say that the third ninth-Patterson-to-be is growing well. I don't really wanted another sib....I really would like to be out and about and changing the world like some other people I know. I know very well that this little growing one is a blessing from God....but sometimes it fells so much like drudgery.

I have spent 6 years watching 5 children, (two especially, I haven't been apart from for more than about a week, or one for about a month) and frankly I'm not very exited about what first appears to be another hampering to "my priorities".

What are my priorities? What is GOD'S plan for my life, on the other hand!

Nicole Isabelle might be my third blessing in total disguise!!!

Then again.... I want a Walter!! ;)

(after my mom's uncle....he is my favorite of all my mom's....colorful....extended family. We do not know the gender of the baby, and have always waited until thier birth to be surprised.)

October 17- A Day with Descartes

A day with Descartes:
A day well spent.

I am sure that all of you have heard of the famous words of his. But do you know how they were meant? I have heard his ‘catchphrase’ many a time used in defense of some humanist raving or another, but I never checked their source.

“I think, therefore I am”

Do you know how he went on from there? He began to wonder

‘about the many other things outside of him’, and came to the conclusion that “To derive (perfection) from nothingness was manifestly impossible, and it is no less repugnant to good sense to assume that what is more perfect comes from and depends upon the less perfect than it is to assume that something comes from nothing.”

He continues,

“…it followed of necessity that there was someone else more perfect upon whom I depended and from whom I had acquired all that I possessed. For had I been all alone and independent of anything else, so that I had bestowed upon myself all that limited quantity of value which I shared with the perfect Being, I would have been able to get from myself, in the same way all the surplus which I recognizes lacking in me, and so would have been myself infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and, in sum I would possess all the perfections that I could discover in God.” He also notes “…I saw that doubt, inconsistency, sorrow and similar things could not be part of God’s nature since I was happy to be without them myself.” “….I considered that composition is an evidence of dependency and that dependency is manifestly a defect. From this I judged that it could not be a perfection in God to be composed of these two natures, and that consequently He was not so composed. But if there were in the world bodies, or even intelligences or other natures that were not wholly perfect, their being must depend on God’s power in such a way that they could not subsist without Him for a single moment.”

He decided to consider mathematics through his new method of thinking and decided

“…there was nothing in that to assure me that there was a single triangle in the world. But when I turned back to my idea of a perfect Being, on the other hand, I discovered that existence was included in the idea in the same way that the idea of a triangle contains the equality of it’s angles to two right angles, or that the idea of a sphere includes the equidistance of all it’s parts from it’s center. Perhaps, in fact, the idea of a perfect Being is even more evident. Consequently, it is at least certain that God, who is this perfect Being, exists, as any theorem of geometry could possibly be.”

He then turns to those who rely only on the material things, and dis-soppose anything spiritual, and asks them about dreams.
In dreams you can hear, see, feel, and even smell, yet they aren’t real. He concludes saying

“…I do not believe they can find any reason good enough to remove this doubt (of weather real life is just a dream too) unless they presuppose the existence of God. The very principle I took as a rule to start with….is know to be true only because God exists and because He is a perfect Being, and because everything in us comes from Him.”

I was rather surprised by this ‘progenitor of humanism’ with his philosophy “I think, therefore I am” proclaiming man as the supreme over everything because he has reason.
Or was he saying that?

No...he wasn't.
He was saying that it was not enough to reason. He was trying to tell us of the One who gave us reason. Of a Creator....of a God...in fact.....of THE God.

I spent a day with him, and I consider it a day well spent.