Living in the shadowlands, of course God wins….and I won’t keep silent…

We live in the Shadowlands.
David Robertson

(Scottish Pastor David Robertson of The Wee Flea fame)

I don’t think David will mind, but I’d like to share an overview from a recent post
offered from his Wee Flea blog…

Well, it’s actually a revisiting of sorts…an offering of a re-visit to an older post offered
when recently posting a video for SOLAS (Solas Centre for Public Christianity based in Scotland)
answering the question “Where is God When It Hurts?”

It’s been about 5 years since I started this little blog of mine and in turn,
it’s been just a few short years now that I “found” David Roberston.
When I started following David’s blog, The Wee Flea.

I can’t actually remember how I found David or his blog, but I think it most likely came
from one of the ‘random’ Word Press crossmatching of like-minded words picked out from
one of my posts.
Of which probably had something to do with Evolution vs Creationism since David wrote the
popular book refuting Richard Dawkin’s and his atheistic approach to evolution with the book
The Dawkins Letters: Challenging Atheist Myths

Curious I obviously clicked, read, liked and followed…and I’ve never looked back.

A born and bred Episcopalian /Anglican who sounds the praises of a Scottish Free Chruch Presbyterian.

Given the fact that I often share what I glean from David’s writings,
it might seem a bit odd that I would offer a disclaimer before sharing again…
but this posting of David’s is very personal.
It’s a story that I did not know and it is a powerful testimony to life, death, and faith.

So I’ve decided that this post is really going to be a Part 1.
In part, because David’s words reminded me of something I needed to do…
something I need to ask all of you…but my asking will wait…it will be Part 2…
but it is about a concentrated time for a joint prayer

But for now, we will concentrate on
Shadowlands…

David stated that we are living in the Shadowlands.

One of my all-time favorite movies is Shadowlands…the 1993 movie starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as
C.S. Lewis and his relationship with American poet Joy Davidman (played by Debra Winger)—
a story about their friendship, eventual marriage of convenience, a belated courtship, a budding love
all of which was crushed by her untimely death from cancer…
all of which sent Lewis on a spiral of faith.

Shadowlands…according to Merriam Webster, “the realm peopled by shadows or submerged in shadow:
such as
a : the abode of spirits or phantoms”

A place that rests between dark and light.
The place we, the children of God, currently live…
a place in between both Heaven and Hell.

A place our friend the Wee Flea journeyed through more closely than most…

In a post offered on January 1, 2015, David shared the story of a major health scare
suffered in 2011.

His story began a bit backward…he was sitting in an airport preparing to fly to
Kuala Lumpur, then off to Australia.
He recalled the lost Air Asia flight lost in the waters off the coast of Malaysia–
a thought that reminded him of his fear of flying.

A fear of both life and death…a fear most of us share.

David’s thoughts raced to another time, a time when he was attending a conference in the
northern British town of Thurso. A time when a scientist attending the same conference told
David, just before David was to deliver a talk, that he did not believe in God…in part
because he had never met a person who was ever healed by prayer.

David relates that when that statement was uttered, he actually tore up his prewritten speech
and decided to share his own true life to death story.

I’ve linked the full post at the bottom of this post…

David’s tale begins one October in 2011 just following a wedding he had officiated.
Following the wedding, he was not feeling particularly well so he asked his
wife to drive him home.
Yet annoyingly his son had realized he’d left his phone back at the church so….
they turned around and went back to the church.
David, upon getting out of the car, suddenly collapsed in a pool of blood.

It was later discovered that David had two bleeding ulcers with one right over a major artery.
In other words, David was quickly bleeding out.

By Divine Providence, having returned back to the Chruch had placed David right near the hospital.
Had this happened by the time they’d gotten home…David would have bled out and died.

His tale is lengthy as it is a harrowing time of balancing a tight rope between both life and death.

Several times the doctors told his wife that David may or may not make it…
with a disclaimer that if he did survive, he might be severely brain damaged or permanently
physically impaired.
He had but a 50 / 50 chance of survival.
50% chance to live or 50% chance to die—
Ottimista vs Pessimista

He was in a medically induced coma.
He incurred e-coli of the lungs.
He incurred a deadly strain of pneumonia.
In an attempt to protect the brain from extreme blood loss, David was given heavy psychotic drugs.
He was delusional.
He often trudged through the dark night of the soul,
days where he found himself unable to pray.
Each time they thought a ray of light was beginning to shine, David’s health fell drastically backward.

Things did not look good for David’s survival.

And so David shares that his church sent out a request…

The Free Church clerk of Assembly then sent out this e-mail to all our churches –
In the light of the most recent posts regarding the serious and worsening physical condition
of Rev. David Robertson, a request has been made that the whole church pray earnestly to God
on David’s behalf at the same time on this coming Lord’s Day at 10.30am or 12 noon
(this would embrace churches that start at 10.30am, 11am and at 12 noon).
Along with him being a family man, our brother in Christ and a loyal servant of the Free Church,
we also appreciate the intense role he has been fulfilling as an effective defender of the
Christian faith in our secular society.
Please pray for David, for his healing,
his family and his church.
Pray that God will be glorified in and through this dark experience that
we are facing as a church.

The churches responded.

You can call it coincidence.
But from that weekend on I began to get better.
How one interprets that will depends on your pre-suppositions.
The non-theist will just simply state it was the doctors and the science
(perhaps with a bit of luck) which healed you.
At least some of the professionals involved disagree.
After getting out of hospital when I phoned my surgeon [*a Muslim]
to ask him if he would be willing to come to a thanksgiving service,
his wife said ‘of course’.
I told her that she had made my day because her husband had saved my life.
Her reply?
“That’s not what he says.
He says there was nothing he could do and that it was God who intervened”.

One of the major problems that so many people have,
Christians and non-Christians alike, is that they do not grasp what faith is.
I’m sure there are people who think my story is that I, or others,
had enough faith and therefore God rewarded that and healed me.
X hours of prayer equals Y healings.
That is not how the God of the Bible works.
And that is not faith. It’s also why prayer is not open to laboratory experiments.

The best example of what real biblical faith is came from my son, Andrew.
One day he came home from the hospital and wrote the following Facebook post:
An update on Dad:
There hasn’t been much said in the past few days because things haven’t been going well.
His sedation was increased on Sunday and they’ve had him asleep since then.
The damage to his lungs is still severe and today mum was told by the doctors that it’s 50/50
whether he’ll live or die.
I write this with great anguish and a heavy heart but not without hope.
There is still a hope that he’ll make it through this,
but there is a better hope he has and we have. A hope that does not waver and is 100% certain.
That is the hope of eternal salvation through Jesus Christ.
Jesus has already removed Dad’s biggest problem,
it’s not the deterioration of his lungs but something more deadly… his sin.
Christ has saved him from that. Tomorrow I go down with Becky to Dundee,
knowing that this may be the last time I see my Dad…
till Christ returns and “everything sad is made untrue.”
1 Thessalonians 4:13-14

At the Thurso conference mentioned above I finished off my story by telling them of my son’s words.
The scientist responded “but that’s not fair.
If God heals you that is an answer to prayer and if he did not heal you that is an answer too.
That means God wins every time”.
He was so right.
Of course God wins.

Before I knew it in my mind, now I KNOW it in my heart.

David continues about his life and his mission following this brush with death…
The Word of God is my meat, drink and medicine.
That by the way is why I am so strong in defending it –
especially from those Christians who thinking that they are making it more palatable,
water it down and distort it, in order to ‘reach’ the modern generation.
No. Just as I fight the ‘traditionalists’ who want to imprison Christ in an idealised box of
their own making, so I will fight to the end those who distort the Word of God and thus
take away from the beauty and glory of Christ.
Whether it is ‘conservatives’ adding to the Word of God, or ‘liberals’ taking away from it,
to me makes no difference. They are both poisoners of the pure word.
And I plead with the Lord that he will never allow me to use deception or distort the Word of God.

I am also determined to continue my battle against the increasing secularisation of our society.
Not because the secularists attack the Word of God and mock Jesus –
what else can you expect non-believers to do? ‘Liberal’ Christians damage the Word of God.
Atheist and secularist philosophies damage those made in the image of God – all human beings.
As GK Chesterton pointed out, once you cease to believe in God, you also cease to believe in humanity.
I am a committed anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian and I believe that no matter the ‘nice’ words said,
if our society moves away from its traditional Christian roots,
then we will end up with an increasingly illiberal, confused and authoritarian society.
I won’t keep silent.

Please read the full harrowing and triumphant tale here:

https://theweeflea.com/2015/01/01/the-shelter-of-the-most-high-new-year-old-hope-a-personal-testimony/

Tomorrow I will offer Part 2—my part..the part that David’s story proved to be an
exclamation point reminding me of something most important we need to be doing.

blog lice

Critical lice are like body lice, which desert corpses to seek the living.
Theophile Gautier

(head lice—yuck)

I was fortunate as a child and then later when I was the mother of a young child…
we escaped the dreaded head lice outbreaks…
despite our enduring first daycare–then later, the joining of preschool.

I counted that as one small victory despite our son having had every other childhood illness
known to man–
even some that were more or less unknown—-
like 5th disease.
Who gets things like 5th’s disease other than my child??

Such was our lot.

I feared the Mayor would not fair much better than that of her dad when we found ourselves in
Scottish Rite Children’s hospital when she came down with salmonella at the ripe old age
of 2 months old.

By the time her dad had turned 1 year old, we celebrated that milestone in the outpatient wing at the
local hospital by having tubes put in his ears.

Luckily, however, The Mayor has so far been fortunate with her ears…having had only one
ear infection thus far….knock on wood!

So the notion of a lice exposure creeping back into our world leaves me nonplused.
I am not a fan of infestations.

And so I think of that commercial where the grandmother is on the phone with her daughter.
The mother is delicately explaining that the grandson has come down with a case of head lice.
We then see the grandson proudly extolling that there are thousands of lice in his hair…
this as he drags his head across the couch and proudly exclaims that now the couch has lice…
The grandmother quickly tells her daughter that she’ll just mail them their Christmas gifts.

Lice has that kind of effect.

Any poor person affected becomes persona non grata…

We avoid such like we do the plague…
and whereas it’s a lot like the plague, it’s just not nearly as deadly.

It’s more of a terrible nuisance and great inconvenience versus that of a promising death.

However, those infested may actually prefer death before it’s all said and done…
or maybe that would be the mother’s wish after tending to the cares of the infected children.

This is one malady that I do not wish to experience.

I don’t want to have to burn the sheets, the brushes, the pillows, the couch, etc….
while acting like some sort of rhesus monkey picking bugs from a child’s head.

And yet all this talk of lice has reminded me that we actually have a lice problem here in the blogosphere.
And boy can it spread.

I think most folks call what I’m thinking about as a problem with trolls…
But I like the analogy of trolls being more like an infestation of lice.

Trolls are ugly things that live under bridges and demand payment when folks want to cross
the said bridge.

Lice, on the other hand, are tiny yet irritating things.
They multiply rapidly.
They aren’t necessarily deadly but they are more or less irritating and near incapacitating.

Plus they are most difficult to rid oneself of.

So there I was innocently playing catch up…
trying desperately to read the latest from our dear friend the Wee Flea,
the Scottish Pastor David Roberston, when I saw that he had posted an ‘end of year’ post…a sort of year
end assessment.

In the post, he nodded to a previous post in which he had announced that he would be stepping down from
the post he’s held at his church there in Dundee, Scotland, St Peter’s Free Chruch Presbyterian—
a post as senior pastor for the past 27 years.
He and his wife will most likely move to Australia to help head up a ministry team down under.

As I had obviously missed this little announcement, I felt the need to offer my gratitude.

For you see that’s what being the chief aid to the Mayor has done to me…
I am now chronically a day late and a dollar short!

The Mayor is such the taskmaster they I have had to forgo much of what I once did—
that being reading for one thing…in particular, reading the postings of our friends The Wee Flea and
Bishop Gavin Ashenden being first and foremost.

And so as I scrolled down to leave a comment of gratitude to David for his diligence in fighting the good
fight, I saw a familiar face….a face of one who had left a myriad of comments…a myriad of tits for tats.
It was a dreaded “troll”…or what I am now dubbing a lice…or is that louse??
I think both words are most fitting in this case.

A lice, or louse, is one who visits the blog of a Christian and proceeds to engage the tit for tat
with said host.
Aka arguing.
Empty arguing.

For the lice, louse, is a nonbleiver…an atheist by trade.

A person who is so blinded by disdain, they can’t see the forest for the trees.

However, no one is really wanting to argue, fuss or cuss but the louse.

They are wearing blinders to everything and anything that they believe runs counter to their own limited
and angry empty vision.

They poke and prod…daring the host to engage in an endless back of forth of nowhere.
Some call it falling down into the proverbial rabbit hole.

The lice, or louse, becomes irritating and they don’t dare ease off….not when they know
they are becoming maddening.
Maddening is the only point they know…forget making sense or civil discourse.
Round and round they run…like a poor dog tethered to a chain on a pole.

Their next move is to go out and call all their kith and kin to come join in the fun.
They will also go back to their own blogs where they feature the victimized host that they’ve been “visiting”
while touting them as a grand old host worthy for others to come suck the lifeblood from…

They want you to forget blogging, forget intelligent sharing or dialogue, forget your original post…
you are now itching like a mad person, desperately trying to rid yourself of an infestation.

Then you hit the “block” button and suddenly you are happily cured and free.

But here’s the thing, they see where you’ve been, who your friends and family are and they
quickly head that way.

It’s an infestation by association.

I saw that on David’s blog.

There in plain sight was one of my former lice, louse, trying desperately to irritate
David.
But David is a smart man.
He nixed the lice.

They will none the less resurface where they are not blocked.

Maybe we’ll one day develop an anti-lice vaccine…
I think we call that the Blood of the lamb!

Here is David’s year-end post:
https://theweeflea.com/2018/12/28/quantum-22-2018-end-of-year-review/

For this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
Matthew 26:28

being defined by the writing on the wall

“It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall,
man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.”
Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments With Truth

(as seen on the blog Writing’s From The Raven’s Desk)

Yesterday I offered a post more or less from an observational standpoint.

I had read an email post by the Presbyterian Free Chruch Scottish Pastor David Robertson
on his take on the Episcopal Chruch of Australia versus the Scottish Episcopal Chruch.
An email posting that oddly was MIA from his blog.

Obviously, it’s an odd Juxtaposition but he’s on sabbatical in Australia and has spoken to
and with a good many Episcopal groups while traveling about.
He’s learning a thing or two about a splintering church.
It is becoming apparent that the writing is clearly on the wall.

Other’s have seen it.
Bishop Gavin Ashenden for one.
David has also seen the writing on the wall for the SEC back home in Dundee.

I saw the writing on the wall years ago here in the US.

Yet it was two comments I received yesterday from two different friends and sisters in
Christ that really brought all of this into focus.

It can be a most dismal story when one is sounding the clarion call…
That whole ‘woe to you’ clanging coming from the mouths of the likes of the Jeremiahs and Johns
amongst us…

The world is not receptive.

Nobody seems to like hearing, nor being reminded of, the seemingly negative and killjoy
mantra to “repent, the end is near” nonsense.

And yet is that not what we are actually seeing and hearing from those lone
voices out there?
Voices that the majority shun but voices we so desperately need to hear?

Voices like David’s and Gavin’s…
Men who are now being threatened, set apart and scorned…?

Both Kathy and Shara brought this point home with steely percision.

Firstly Kathy (atimetoshare.me) said:

Homosexuality, same-sex marriage, gender alteration,
believing only certain parts of the Bible are true,
looking at the ten commandments as the ten suggestions, chastity,
waiting until marriage to have sex, sex outside of marriage,
the sanctity of life on both ends of the spectrum, altering the Bible to fit the times,
not looking at sin as a problem – all parts of what’s going on in the church today.
We have taken tolerance to a whole new level and it has infiltrated our churches as
well as our lives.
The devil must be jumping for joy.
His insidious nature has weaseled its way into every aspect of society,
gnawing away at it bit by bit until it becomes unrecognizable.
I pray that the end is coming soon.

Then Shara (https://scasefamily.com/) polished it off with exquisite clarity:

Fascinating and sad…was reading yesterday that people say
Christianity is shrinking, but it’s actually being more clearly defined.
Interesting post friend!

And it has been that very fact that…the fact that we aren’t necessarily seeing
some sort of death knell for Christianity…
though denominations are beginning to morph into the unrecognizable as they depart
and fall from God’s word…
but rather we are seeing Christianity being polished and honed
a Christianity that is simply being refined and more sharply keenly defined…

The furnace is heating up as God works on the faithful, refining and preparing us for what
is to come…

“The glory of a good person is the evidence of a good conscience.
Have a good conscience and you will always be happy.
A good conscience can bear a great deal and still remain serene in the midst of adversity,
while a bad conscience is fearful and easily ruffled.
Only be glad when you have done well.
Evil persons are never really happy, nor do they feel peace within them;
for ‘there is no peace for the wicked, says the Lord’ (Isa. 48:22).
Even though the wicked may protest that peace is theirs and that no evil shall harm them,
do not believe them. For God’s wrath will suddenly overtake them,
and all they have done will be brought to nothing and their plans destroyed.”
Thomas á Kempis,
The Imitation of Christ p.76