why do important people scare me…

“What comes into our minds when we think about God
is the most important thing about us.”
A.W. Tozer

No one should really scare me, right?
If I am God’s and He is mine, then no one should scare me, right?

Well, I will confess that maybe psychopaths scare me.
They scare me because they don’t care what type of evil acts they unleash…
Think chainsaw killers…killing, torturing, maiming all for fun.

Yeah, scary.

But like I say…if I am God’s and He is mine, think
“do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” sort of thinking…

But what about important people?
What about the people out there who wield power because of their money,
their positions, their roles within society…?

And so I have now decided that important people, or people who think they are important,
kind of scare me…as well as the nuts with chainsaws.

They scare me because they believe they have the world’s best interest at heart
and in turn, they like playing puppeteer.

They think they know what is best for both you and me and will flex their mindset
regardless of us little people.

I’ve always heard tell of that little conspiracy that there are just a handful of powerful folks
in the world who actually control pretty much all of the world–
the rest of us are just the victims of their whims, thoughts, and often selfish intentions.

I think of those secretive, elitist and highly protected meetings—
Think Davos in Switzerland.
The World Economic Forum

This year’s meeting was held in early February prior to the world pandemic outbreak.

The focus was to be “The World Economic Forum’s 50th Annual Meeting in Davos will focus on
how stakeholder capitalism can solve the world’s urgent challenges.”

It is a yearly meeting of the world’s rich and powerful…the leaders, movers, and shakers.

Invited attendees range from presidents, EU leaders to the likes of rich folks
like Oprah and Bill Gates—folks who like to use their wealth and positions to “influence”
the masses.
Even the more controversial figures such as George Soros and
the teen environmentalist activist Greta Thunberg are those invited to Davos.

We average folks usually don’t care much about such meetings.
We don’t much care because that’s just what world leaders and rich folks do…
they go to meetings and talk about the state of the world…
or more like the economic health of the world–
while we, the small folks of the world, do the true work of the world…
the making, buying, selling, and trading for the world.

So yesterday I caught another interesting post over on
Smoke of Satan and the Open Windows of Vatican II.

Well, it wasn’t so much a post as it was an offering of two links.

The second of the two links was to an article found on the blog ‘Barnhardt’,
regarding a member of the Italian parliament addressing her fellow MPs regarding Bill Gates.

Yep, Bill Gates.
The brain behind of all things PC and Microsoft now turned global activist, Bill Gates.
Gates’ ears should have been burning this past week thanks to the Italian Parliament.

May 16,2020
Bomb dropped in Italian Parliament: Gates should be arrested for crimes against humanity

A speech offered in the Italian Parliament by Italian MP Sara Cunial:

We all know it, now.
Bill Gates, already in 2018, predicted a pandemic, simulated in October 2019 at the “Event 201”,
together with Davos (Switzerland).
For decades, Gates has been working on Depopulation policy and dictatorial control plans
on global politics,
aiming to obtain the primacy on agriculture, technology and energy.

Gates said, I quote exactly from his speech:

“If we do a good job on vaccines, health and reproduction,
we can reduce the world population by 10-15%.
Only a genocide can save the world”.

With his vaccines, Gates managed to sterilize millions of women in Africa.
Gates caused a polio epidemic that paralyzed 500,000 children in India and still today with DTP,
Gates causes more deaths than the disease itself.
And he does the same with GMOs designed by Monsanto and “generously donated” to needy populations.
All this while he is already thinking about distributing the quantum tattoo for vaccination recognition
and mRNA vaccines as tools for reprogramming our immune system.
In addition, Gates also does business with several multinationals that own 5G facilities in the USA.

see the full article on the following link

Interesting Links: 1) 1968-69 Hong Kong Flu 2) speech from Italian MP that impugns Bill Gates

Bomb dropped in Italian Parliament: Gates should be arrested for crimes against humanity

So yes, the rich and powerful scare me especially when they have ideas of controlling
world populations by global sterilizations.

I will admit that I have not followed up on the speech by Gates.
But I have heard him in various interviews address third-world concerns…
perhaps that concern is depopulation.

The second link is to an article by the NYP of all things newsy.

It is an article about another pandemic during a different time.
A pandemic that, as far as the US was concerned, was trumped by the ‘summer of love’—
all despite the fact that the Hong Kong flu was raging worldwide.

Funny how three days of communal music, love and living surpass a global pandemic.

Maybe we need another Woodstock, a part deux…or on second thought, maybe not…

Here’s that link:

Why American life went on as normal during the killer pandemic of 1969
https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/why-life-went-on-as-normal-during-the-killer-pandemic-of-1969/

https://smokeofsatan.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/interesting-links-1-1968-69-hong-kong-flu-2-speech-from-italian-mp-that-impugns-bill-gates/

A void and the Junk Guys

“We become aware of the void as we fill it.”
Antonio Porchia

Mephistopheles: Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortured and remain forever.
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven.”
Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

(circa 1985 readers / Julie Cook / 2018)

What you see here is a pair of very dated readers…a pair of reading glasses that date
back to, oh say, about 1985 or thereabouts.

I found them yesterday in an equally dated Etienne Aigner cordovan leather purse.

Etienne Aigner was just one of “the” purses to own back in the late 70’s and 80’s.
It was a designer purse that didn’t totally blow the whole wad such as say a Louis Vuitton
or Gucci bag would have…

It was the type of bag middle American ladies could afford and still feel fashionable
without sinking a small fortune into a bag whose staying power would end by the following
fashion season.
Aigner bags were a bit timeless at this particular time.

It was the type of bag a woman like my mom would have had.

In fact, it was the bag my mom had.

I had something similar as well.
Mine, however, has long since vanished…Mom’s…not so much.

This past week, while I was up in Atlanta keeping a sickly Mayor, who by the way
has graciously shared her sickness with me–her chief aide, I arranged for
The Junk Guys to come to empty out, as much as they could in one day, the basement
to the house, the Mayor calls home.

A house and home that became my house and home in 1962.
I was almost 3 years old when my parents bought the 4-year-old 1958 stately
ranch house on a quiet cul-de-sac in the boomtime of America’s urban sprawl.

Up until then, we had lived in an apartment.
An old-school sort of apartment complex that still stands to this day in Buckhead…
a word that is now synonymous with all that equates to being uber chic and trendy
in Atlanta…a once upon a time simple place that was just merely a junction of a couple
of divergent roadways with a buck’s head mounted on a local watering hole.

It’s an apartment complex that is probably on the National Registry of Historic Places
as the complex has been around a very long time…

Whereas I can vaguely remember the apartment I can, however, remember almost every
nook and cranny of the house.
Recollections of the house that was…not so much of the house that is now.

In 1967, my grandfather died suddenly from an artery surgery gone wrong.
The company he started in the early 1930’s…a business he owned and operated
until his death, was then quickly sold by my dad, the company’s lone salesman.

On a hot humid June day in 1967, a huge Mayflower moving tractor-trailer truck
pulled up outside of our house as men quickly worked moving the contents of a nearly
40-year-old company to our basement.

When they were finished and the basement door was shut behind them,
time immediately stood still in that large section of our basement.
A visible physical reminder of death.

Large wooden desks, metal filing cabinets, metal chairs, leather rolling chairs,
wooden cabinets… all still chocked full of file folders, Rolodexes, business cards,
staplers, gem clips, tacks, hand stamps, mailers, postage stamps, pencils, writing pads,
office signs…all sat still and quiet, in the back half of a dimly lit basement,
collecting dust and cobwebs.

That was until this past Saturday.

Along with that collection of office equipment, a plethora of dinged up and dilapidated
antique chairs, one formal victorian sofa, a couple of vintage dining room tables,
a vast array of rusting tools, circa 1960 metal cabinets filled with
glassware and figurines in various conditions, stacks of vinyl albums dating to the 1940’s,
various beds, Dad’s childhood wormwood bedroom suit, boxes filled with musty books of all
sizes and subject matter, photos and pictures, early computer equipment with heavy monitors and
dial-up modems, cameras, jackets, boxes galore filled with a variety of junk and unsundries,
complete with two giant plywood model train sets had all come to call this basement home.

One family had slowly faded…two by death and one by choice as the lone owner remained…
eventually bringing in a new wife, a new life and new junk to this precarious keeper
of time.

Years, lives and the leftovers of family’s…families who had come and gone,
and all of their forgotten stuff…stuff stuffed down into a dark cavernous basement
left to sit…
But for what reason?

Sentimentality?
Hoarding?
Identity?
Moving?
Life?
Death?

Well, that was until Saturday.

With a new baby on the way…the much-needed purging of previous lives had finally arrived.

When one shuts a door to such a basement…what is in that basement is usually quickly forgotten.
The shutting of a door closes away that which is… as the ‘it’ suddenly becomes what was…
as in the proverbial ‘out of sight, out of mind’ sort of mentality.

Unused space being a prime example of a law found in physics…
a void will eventually be filled…or so it seems.

Before the Junk Guys arrived, I needed to look through a few things…actually a lot of things.
Yet time, this past week, was not my friend as I was needed to tend to a sick baby.
No time to rummage in a cobweb infested musty overflowing time capsule.

On one quick trip down the rickety steep stairway, down just long enough to find a somewhat
hidden away Lord & Taylor box, sitting out of sight in a long since sealed cabinet.
Lifting off that signature colorful box top, I found a box filled with letters.
Letters still in their original envelopes, all addressed to two parents,
who each now seems long gone, were written by their eldest child.
Letters that were written home from college…
written from me to them.

I quickly put the top back on the box.

Mother had saved those letters, yet I wasn’t ready to read over a bunch of trite angst-filled
letters that were written by a shallow self-absorbed younger and more foolish self.
Not yet.

In another cabinet, I pulled out a small box filled full of “do-dads”…
small trinkets that Mother had gathered over the years which had filled her ‘what-not’ shelf
that graced a wall in the kitchen.
Trinkets that were once considered tiny treasures.

As the cleaning committee arrived complete with heavy-duty gloves and boots,
I found the pocket-book.
That same cordovan Aigner bag that I immediately recalled seeing on her shoulder.

It was shoved back on a top shelf of one of those metal cabinets.
Dad had obviously brought it down here to the place where things came to stay,
not necessarily die, but to stay… caught in an odd passage of time and space.
A purgatory of such.
All being oddly caught in a sad surreal stoppage of time.

Everything remained inside, albeit for a wallet— untouched, just as it was on the day dad
rushed her to the hospital that 25th day of July 1986—

And yet she never came home to claim her purse.

I quickly brought the bag upstairs to the light of day, leaving behind the small army
of purgers in that overflowing basement.
I wanted to dump the contents out onto a table where I could actually look at what
a life stopped in time looked like.

Yellowed and faded bank statements, tuition notices for my brother, grocery lists and receipts,
a sterling silver tortoiseshell comb which was a wedding present from dad back in 1953 along
with a couple of pennies, two tubes of lipsticks and a small bottle of Tylenol
all came tumbling out…along with that pair of reading glasses.

Funny, I never remember Mother wearing glasses…only sunglasses.

Quickly I pushed aside the glasses, the comb, a couple of the bank statements and one
grocery receipt before throwing away everything else while carrying the bag back downstairs
to join the host of junk being hauled out to the two moving trucks that were eagerly
ready and waiting to carry away the remnants of the various previous lives that had all
called this house theirs, leaving open space for new lives taking shape.

It would behoove each of us to remember that our lives here on this earth are finite.
Lives that may be painfully short or generously long…
yet each life, regardless of allocated time, is limited…meaning that each of our lives
will be eventually ending…whether we like it or not.

We hold onto things in an odd twisted attempt to keep that which was.
All the stuff becomes the tangible to that which we have lost…
of which is simply fleeting and finite.

Dad’s basement is and was testament of that.
It was the filling of the void.
The proof of resting in purgatory.
Be it good…
Be it bad…
Be it sad…
Be it happy…
or…
Be it simply bittersweet…

All that we have and all that we are will pass away or perhaps worse, simply be discarded…

(a mere portion of the purging basement / Julie Cook / 2018)

Left to being eventually thrown away by The Junk Guys…

What, therefore, you ask, lasts… as we are a people who yearn to last…

Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
C.S. Lewis

transitional nesting

If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
or cool one pain,
or help one fainting Robin unto his nest again…
I shall not live in vain
Emily Dickinson

(a quickly snapped photo while mom was out worming / Julie Cook / 2017)

We live in a continuum of both space and time.

As in….
according to Wikipedia for those of us dummies in anything having to do with physics…
as well as in keeping things in a nice simple nutshell:
Space-time is a mathematical model that joins space and time into a single idea
called a continuum.
This four-dimensional continuum is known as Minkowski space.

Combining these two ideas helped cosmology to understand how the universe
works on the big level (e.g. galaxies) and small level (e.g. atoms).

However in my little corner of the world….
this continuum business simply means that there is a constant forward motion of
ever quickening momentum moving hurdling toward some yet unforeseen future…

Take for example the above image of bug eyed baby robins.

On April 14th, I shared a photograph of a nest with 4 beautiful blue robin eggs
looking ever so hopeful as one had the makings of what looked to be a bit of cracking.

Next on April 23rd I shared the shot of a mom robin’s head peering out over the top of
the same nest as she sat intently vigilant.

Today on April 29th I’m sharing an image of the same nest,
the same blue eggs which are now buggy eyed,
downy tufted little robins to be.

My husband and I were a bit fearful that this particular Mrs. Robin may have had a
bum batch of eggs as she has been sitting for quite sometime…
longer then the bluebirds sat.

He had surmised that she looked to be young robin whose time
of motherhood was maybe a bit overstretched, with this being her first clutch of eggs…
but she fooled us, proving she did know what she was doing…as we now have 4
alienesque little heads bobbing up and down in anticipation of a juicy worm.

And as my thoughts are now focused on nests and the comings and goings from such…
I am thinking of my own family’s current revolving door of a nest.

There has been a frantic frenzy taking place at Dad’s this past week.
There have been nurses, caregivers, security system guys, Xfinity guys, phone guys,
me, my son, Gloria’s two children and two grandchildren, her daughter-n-law,
with boxes, bubble wrap, moving blankets, newspaper…
as Gloria, and her time in the house, is currently being purged.

She moves today to North Carolina to be with her daughter.
However…all of that being said, they are known to butt heads…
so we shall see how long NC lasts.

My son already has gallons of paint at the ready.
One of the caregivers is coming next week for the refrigerator and couch.
The Kidney foundation will be coming for some remaining things.
My cousin is coming tomorrow to look over my brother’s old train set down
in the basement.
As Dad had told me, just before he died, to look in the attic for some things that were Mom’s.
All the while as I bundle up books, videos, DVDs, glasses, clothes, sheets, towels….
all for the Goodwill….

For 55 years Dad called this house home.
As the time has now come to pass occupancy over to a new generation…
As we soon look for a different set of movers to be bringing in
my son and his wife’s possessions…

And so with everyone coming and going, I thought it appropriate to add a link to a
previous post written in 2013…
a post which was the harbinger for the transition that has lead us to today…

That being…if a door could talk…

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/if-a-door-could-talk/

to be heartbreakingly humble

Humility is not thinking less of yourself,
but thinking of yourself less.
C.S. Lewis

(the dried faded viburnum blooms / Julie Cook / 2016)

“Amid the sparkle and the color and music of the day’s celebration
we do well to remember that God’s insertion of himself into human history
was achieved with an almost frightening quietness and humility.
There was no advertisement,
no publicity,
no special privilege;
in fact the entry of God into his own world was almost
heartbreakingly humble”
J. B. Phillips

Recently reading a blog post by a Scottish minister regarding the ever growing saga
in the UK over Brexit…the UK’s vote for departure from the EU and the UK’s
courts latest counter order to halt all proceedings…
as it is a continuing sickening rollercoaster ride of will it or won’t it stay….
I was struck by the deep similarities of all things political and Governmental in the UK
compared with our own fracas over this Election…
The haves and the have nots of power elites who toil to establish their will,
the movers and shakers who forget who they are actually shaking,
the liberal biased media outlets determined to bend the will of the people,
the votes that don’t seem to count unless they favor the favored one, so revote until it’s right…

More often than not, the average citizen,
make that the average Christian citizen,
who is currently feeling lost in this political melee and
who is actually fearful of what the future might hold in either country,
now needs to hold fast to the one true Sovereign who is indeed sovereign over all…
despite what others would wish for us all to believe….

“We don’t trust in politicians or in judges who think they are sovereign.
The real sovereignty is with the only real Sovereign.
When the result of this court case came out I felt a wee bit depressed –
not so much because of it, but rather because I thought – oh no, here we go again.
But I was speaking at Abertay University that night on Daniel 5
The Writing on the Wall and was greatly struck by the phrase
“he acknowledged that the Most High God is sovereign over all
kingdoms on earth and sets over them anyone he wishes” (v.21).
This trust in the sovereignty of God does not mean that we are political pietists
who don’t care about what happens.
It just means that we have such trust in the Sovereign Lord that we
recognize that we don’t rule and neither
does Trump/Clinton/Blair/Farage/Corbyn/May/Sturgeon or any of the elites.
And so we can respect those in authority and those not in authority.
We can have peace, even when we see things that disturb, anger and perplex us.

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7 NIV)
David Robertson
Pastor of St Peters Free Church
Dundee, Scotland

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,
but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Philippians 2:3