Jimmy D revisited
Jimmy D. Revisited
After some time I remembered the main portion of what the last post was to be about. Systematic life, kinda. You see I read Proverbs everyday. Now when I say that I don’t mean that I read the entire book of Proverbs everyday but I do read an entire chapter. And unless I have miscounted my days I read the chapter that corresponds to the present date. I have been doing this for the last six years and have found it continually poignant in my day to day life. So on this particular date I was reading chapter 29 and when I read verse 11 my thoughts took me back to when I worked with troubled teens. Proverbs is great and I used them often when I worked with the kids and those teens are still a constant source of examples for me. Primarily where it says something about being slothful or foolish.
“A fool vents all his feelings, but a wise man holds them back.”
The place I worked at was declared a Christian based troubled teen place, but I think it was only Christian in the sense that Christians worked there. The counsel that was given by the state certified counselors was completely unbiblical. In my judgment if you are not using the words of the Wonderful Counselor then you are using the words of a terrible counselor. Therefore, if you are not speaking the words of Christ then you are speaking the words of antiChrist.
Our culture is just saturated with pop-psychology and we fool ourselves with the notion that there is this hybrid, transitional form, animal called “Christian Psychology”. Like in biology we think that if we can find these transitional forms then we can prove that evolution is true so too in the Christian culture if we can find our prooftext we think we can christianize a pagan mode of counseling. We think psychology is good counsel that can be just tweaked if we can put Christ in there somewhere. Or we acknowledge that psychology has a antiChrist foundation but we think there is still some good stuff in it. But we fail to realize that this is just the chicken who is scratching in and around the manure patch to find that one kernel of corn. Sure he finds some corn but look what he has to find it in. If we found some poo in our salad we wouldn’t exclaim, “Wow this salad is really good, just don’t eat that poo there. Treat it as garnish.” I feel we shouldn’t treat psychology in the same manner. Flee from the poo filled food and cling to the counsel of Christ. And for all that is righteous don’t dabble in psychology and just say, “well all truth is God’s truth”, because that statement has more holes in it than a sieve.
John Calvin is and was a great man, but I disagree with him on his view of who the antiChrist was. He thought the antiChrist was the Pope. I think the antiChrist is James Dobson. And Larry Crab would have to be an antiChrist as well. The stuff that that these men put out into the Christian world as coming ‘straight from the horses mouth’ have their ends turned around. The junk that they claim as having any validity and gospel truth generally has more in common with what Anton LeVay puts out than what God has declared. (For those who don’t know Mr. LeVay wrote the Satanic Bible).
We don’t eat rat poison and for good reason. . . it isn’t good for you, but if you coat it in chocolate and color it to look like M&M’s you can fool many people into eating them. And they will often like it and point out how much they like that candy coated shell. This is Dobson and his ilk. They operate with a foundation of poison which is psychology, yet people like his tripe so much because he will lace his teachings with just enough prooftexts and spiritual sounding words to make people think his stuff is good for you. Our Christian culture is so hungry for truth that we have been living out the proverb “A satisfied soul loathes the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” Pro. 27.7
At Doulos Ministries, the place where I worked with troubled teens, the counselors would teach these kids to “vent their feelings”, because if they “bottled” them up then they would explode at any time. Uncontrollably. The thought was to give these kids the opportunity to unload their feelings at a “controlled” time then those same kids wouldn’t display their lack of self-control at inappropriate times. There were two homes at Doulos which were separated into a girls house and a boys house and the houses were separated by about 50 yards of grass, concrete and a gazebo. (I loathe that gazebo [said with a clinched fist raised to head level and shaken a couple times]). And being that it is in the Ozarks there were more than enough cedars dotting the landscape. So, these girls, given an endorsement by their counselors and their ‘big’s’ unwillingness to challenge the “priests” decision, took hold of aluminum baseball bats and unloaded their feelings upon helpless cedars. Mind you these feelings were not feelings of love and compassion for their fellow man or feelings of warmth and affection for the beauty of God’s creation. These feelings were those coming from the deep recesses of man’s original nature, and they were set on fire from Hell. (Let me give you a little background information: a ‘big’ is a person who voluntarily [like myself] came to live with these kids and essentially became their parent for the course of a year. A big would generally have three kids living in their room and the house would have 4 rooms. My year lasted for three years. I was never that good at math.)
These uncontrolled “whack a cedar” instances were true hate crimes against anything civil or sane, muchless things that was Godly. Several of these troubled girls would destroy the bark off a few trees just after a bad call with their folks or after being told that they were disobedient at some point in the course of the day or when they found out that the girl across the hall, whom they despise, despises them. All things petty, trite and ridiculous generated the response of, “let’s kill some cedars”. And the funny thing was that none of these girls came from families that had a history in the logging industry.
Not only were these out-of-control girls putting the life of many cedars in danger they were also disfiguring a perfectly good bat. These girls did not play baseball or softball and so I guess it didn’t matter to them that the boys house did. But through a logistics error one of our big brothers lent a bat to the girls house without knowing that the bat would be abused in such a way. Bark was flying every where, bats were slowly becoming metal boomerangs, girls were learning the fine art of being a contentious and dripping faucet type of woman, and the boys were growing frustrated at not being able to destroy something without getting into trouble. The men in the boy’s house finally got the women to stop letting their girls ‘vent their feelings’ after the girls successfully bent one bat to an unusable fashion and when the director of Doulos realized that the esthetics of the property was being compromised. Apparently, ‘good’ counseling is good in so far as it still looks good. Who cares what is actually being taught just so it looks good, right?
If these girls could have gained anything useful from this experience you would think that they would have learned how to swing a bat better. But, no, again there was not Godly instruction. They were just let loose to vent their feelings and the cedars had to pay the ultimate price. Since, I have not been gifted with tact and since the Lord has been busy changing other areas of my life I quickly and often mocked the behavior of these ‘troubled’ girls when this type of action was being displayed in my presence. This verbal slap in the face had an effect. Sometimes it would give the girls more fuel to keep destroying trees, which I would have to ask the trees for forgiveness, but more times than not the girls would quit their uncontrolled foolish behavior. When making remarks to these girls I would not let the boy’s I was walking with make any mocking remarks, unless they were good at it. Some of those boys were pretty good with their tongues. Those who weren’t were allowed to laugh which usually caused the girls to realize their own foolishness quite nicely. These times never failed to provide opportunities for me to teach these young men the value of self-control.
I feel that the lessons you learn in handling your emotions, ie. displaying self-control will not only help you to not look foolish, or in displaying that you are in fact foolish, but it will help you in all aspects of life. Learning and practicing self-control in one area of life will give you the tools necessary to display self-control in other areas. Because I have learned the tools of being self-controlled in where I put my clothes, either on the floor wherever I want (no self-control) or in putting them where they belong either in the dresser or in a hamper (self-control) I am able to use this training of my flesh to resist other temptations that will come my way. If you can be trusted in the little things, such as keeping an orderly house, then you can be trusted with the big things like shepherding a family or loving a wife. Everything in life is preparation for something bigger, something more glorious than what you are currently doing. Luke 16.10 “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.”
A kid learning geometry may ask, “why do I need to know this. I’m never going to use it. I’m going to be a Marine and knowing what an isosceles triangle is will not help me kill that guy over there” and he will be partly right. Knowing how to figure out the angles for a bisected angle may not be necessary in your life (although you never know what God will have you do 10 years from now) but the discipline that it will teach you will pay dividends in areas of your life that you can not fully comprehend now. The conscious effort of making your body obedient to the Lord in obeying the one teaching you math will also help you be obedient to the Lord when you are tempted to not discipline your child, or to cheat on your wife. I don’t buy the tired cliché that ‘boys will be boys’ and therefore we accept as natural that a boys room will be messy to the extent of not even being able to see the floor. I think this is a result if we allow the boys flesh to have dominion over his actions, but if we take the gifts of the Holy Spirit into all areas of life than it can’t help but have an effect on a boys room.
Someone may say, “but I don’t think this kid has the Holy Spirit so how can I apply this last statement?”. To this I would say, “Why then do you teach that kid anything?” My Dad had a fairly good rule that my brother and I lived under which was, “My house, my rules”. With this rule my Dad taught us to obey him in everything. We didn’t set the standard for what was clean, dirty, or correct behavior he did, and we obeyed him or we faced a pretty good spanking. Since we are Christians we are led by the standard of God and God is not a God of disorder but one of order. Therefore, how does living in chaos equate to living according to a Godly standard.
These girls who whacked on a number of trees were being taught how to be fools and as Proverbs says, “a wise man holds [their feelings] back”. Thus the wise person is he who bottles their feelings and not the one who displays them. Psychology generally teaches us to be fools and that is why there are so many of them out there. More specifically that is why we notice them more. The fools were always there but they just never had the “scientists” in the lab coats give them authorization to show their faces. God, in His wisdom and humor, allowed me to major in heresy. . . I mean psychology and it is just a reminder to me that not only is God a good God but that He has fun with His children.
After some time I remembered the main portion of what the last post was to be about. Systematic life, kinda. You see I read Proverbs everyday. Now when I say that I don’t mean that I read the entire book of Proverbs everyday but I do read an entire chapter. And unless I have miscounted my days I read the chapter that corresponds to the present date. I have been doing this for the last six years and have found it continually poignant in my day to day life. So on this particular date I was reading chapter 29 and when I read verse 11 my thoughts took me back to when I worked with troubled teens. Proverbs is great and I used them often when I worked with the kids and those teens are still a constant source of examples for me. Primarily where it says something about being slothful or foolish.
“A fool vents all his feelings, but a wise man holds them back.”
The place I worked at was declared a Christian based troubled teen place, but I think it was only Christian in the sense that Christians worked there. The counsel that was given by the state certified counselors was completely unbiblical. In my judgment if you are not using the words of the Wonderful Counselor then you are using the words of a terrible counselor. Therefore, if you are not speaking the words of Christ then you are speaking the words of antiChrist.
Our culture is just saturated with pop-psychology and we fool ourselves with the notion that there is this hybrid, transitional form, animal called “Christian Psychology”. Like in biology we think that if we can find these transitional forms then we can prove that evolution is true so too in the Christian culture if we can find our prooftext we think we can christianize a pagan mode of counseling. We think psychology is good counsel that can be just tweaked if we can put Christ in there somewhere. Or we acknowledge that psychology has a antiChrist foundation but we think there is still some good stuff in it. But we fail to realize that this is just the chicken who is scratching in and around the manure patch to find that one kernel of corn. Sure he finds some corn but look what he has to find it in. If we found some poo in our salad we wouldn’t exclaim, “Wow this salad is really good, just don’t eat that poo there. Treat it as garnish.” I feel we shouldn’t treat psychology in the same manner. Flee from the poo filled food and cling to the counsel of Christ. And for all that is righteous don’t dabble in psychology and just say, “well all truth is God’s truth”, because that statement has more holes in it than a sieve.
John Calvin is and was a great man, but I disagree with him on his view of who the antiChrist was. He thought the antiChrist was the Pope. I think the antiChrist is James Dobson. And Larry Crab would have to be an antiChrist as well. The stuff that that these men put out into the Christian world as coming ‘straight from the horses mouth’ have their ends turned around. The junk that they claim as having any validity and gospel truth generally has more in common with what Anton LeVay puts out than what God has declared. (For those who don’t know Mr. LeVay wrote the Satanic Bible).
We don’t eat rat poison and for good reason. . . it isn’t good for you, but if you coat it in chocolate and color it to look like M&M’s you can fool many people into eating them. And they will often like it and point out how much they like that candy coated shell. This is Dobson and his ilk. They operate with a foundation of poison which is psychology, yet people like his tripe so much because he will lace his teachings with just enough prooftexts and spiritual sounding words to make people think his stuff is good for you. Our Christian culture is so hungry for truth that we have been living out the proverb “A satisfied soul loathes the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” Pro. 27.7
At Doulos Ministries, the place where I worked with troubled teens, the counselors would teach these kids to “vent their feelings”, because if they “bottled” them up then they would explode at any time. Uncontrollably. The thought was to give these kids the opportunity to unload their feelings at a “controlled” time then those same kids wouldn’t display their lack of self-control at inappropriate times. There were two homes at Doulos which were separated into a girls house and a boys house and the houses were separated by about 50 yards of grass, concrete and a gazebo. (I loathe that gazebo [said with a clinched fist raised to head level and shaken a couple times]). And being that it is in the Ozarks there were more than enough cedars dotting the landscape. So, these girls, given an endorsement by their counselors and their ‘big’s’ unwillingness to challenge the “priests” decision, took hold of aluminum baseball bats and unloaded their feelings upon helpless cedars. Mind you these feelings were not feelings of love and compassion for their fellow man or feelings of warmth and affection for the beauty of God’s creation. These feelings were those coming from the deep recesses of man’s original nature, and they were set on fire from Hell. (Let me give you a little background information: a ‘big’ is a person who voluntarily [like myself] came to live with these kids and essentially became their parent for the course of a year. A big would generally have three kids living in their room and the house would have 4 rooms. My year lasted for three years. I was never that good at math.)
These uncontrolled “whack a cedar” instances were true hate crimes against anything civil or sane, muchless things that was Godly. Several of these troubled girls would destroy the bark off a few trees just after a bad call with their folks or after being told that they were disobedient at some point in the course of the day or when they found out that the girl across the hall, whom they despise, despises them. All things petty, trite and ridiculous generated the response of, “let’s kill some cedars”. And the funny thing was that none of these girls came from families that had a history in the logging industry.
Not only were these out-of-control girls putting the life of many cedars in danger they were also disfiguring a perfectly good bat. These girls did not play baseball or softball and so I guess it didn’t matter to them that the boys house did. But through a logistics error one of our big brothers lent a bat to the girls house without knowing that the bat would be abused in such a way. Bark was flying every where, bats were slowly becoming metal boomerangs, girls were learning the fine art of being a contentious and dripping faucet type of woman, and the boys were growing frustrated at not being able to destroy something without getting into trouble. The men in the boy’s house finally got the women to stop letting their girls ‘vent their feelings’ after the girls successfully bent one bat to an unusable fashion and when the director of Doulos realized that the esthetics of the property was being compromised. Apparently, ‘good’ counseling is good in so far as it still looks good. Who cares what is actually being taught just so it looks good, right?
If these girls could have gained anything useful from this experience you would think that they would have learned how to swing a bat better. But, no, again there was not Godly instruction. They were just let loose to vent their feelings and the cedars had to pay the ultimate price. Since, I have not been gifted with tact and since the Lord has been busy changing other areas of my life I quickly and often mocked the behavior of these ‘troubled’ girls when this type of action was being displayed in my presence. This verbal slap in the face had an effect. Sometimes it would give the girls more fuel to keep destroying trees, which I would have to ask the trees for forgiveness, but more times than not the girls would quit their uncontrolled foolish behavior. When making remarks to these girls I would not let the boy’s I was walking with make any mocking remarks, unless they were good at it. Some of those boys were pretty good with their tongues. Those who weren’t were allowed to laugh which usually caused the girls to realize their own foolishness quite nicely. These times never failed to provide opportunities for me to teach these young men the value of self-control.
I feel that the lessons you learn in handling your emotions, ie. displaying self-control will not only help you to not look foolish, or in displaying that you are in fact foolish, but it will help you in all aspects of life. Learning and practicing self-control in one area of life will give you the tools necessary to display self-control in other areas. Because I have learned the tools of being self-controlled in where I put my clothes, either on the floor wherever I want (no self-control) or in putting them where they belong either in the dresser or in a hamper (self-control) I am able to use this training of my flesh to resist other temptations that will come my way. If you can be trusted in the little things, such as keeping an orderly house, then you can be trusted with the big things like shepherding a family or loving a wife. Everything in life is preparation for something bigger, something more glorious than what you are currently doing. Luke 16.10 “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.”
A kid learning geometry may ask, “why do I need to know this. I’m never going to use it. I’m going to be a Marine and knowing what an isosceles triangle is will not help me kill that guy over there” and he will be partly right. Knowing how to figure out the angles for a bisected angle may not be necessary in your life (although you never know what God will have you do 10 years from now) but the discipline that it will teach you will pay dividends in areas of your life that you can not fully comprehend now. The conscious effort of making your body obedient to the Lord in obeying the one teaching you math will also help you be obedient to the Lord when you are tempted to not discipline your child, or to cheat on your wife. I don’t buy the tired cliché that ‘boys will be boys’ and therefore we accept as natural that a boys room will be messy to the extent of not even being able to see the floor. I think this is a result if we allow the boys flesh to have dominion over his actions, but if we take the gifts of the Holy Spirit into all areas of life than it can’t help but have an effect on a boys room.
Someone may say, “but I don’t think this kid has the Holy Spirit so how can I apply this last statement?”. To this I would say, “Why then do you teach that kid anything?” My Dad had a fairly good rule that my brother and I lived under which was, “My house, my rules”. With this rule my Dad taught us to obey him in everything. We didn’t set the standard for what was clean, dirty, or correct behavior he did, and we obeyed him or we faced a pretty good spanking. Since we are Christians we are led by the standard of God and God is not a God of disorder but one of order. Therefore, how does living in chaos equate to living according to a Godly standard.
These girls who whacked on a number of trees were being taught how to be fools and as Proverbs says, “a wise man holds [their feelings] back”. Thus the wise person is he who bottles their feelings and not the one who displays them. Psychology generally teaches us to be fools and that is why there are so many of them out there. More specifically that is why we notice them more. The fools were always there but they just never had the “scientists” in the lab coats give them authorization to show their faces. God, in His wisdom and humor, allowed me to major in heresy. . . I mean psychology and it is just a reminder to me that not only is God a good God but that He has fun with His children.
posted by T A Lucas | 1/06/2006
9 Comments:
I wouldn't go so far as to call Jimmy or Larry anti-Christ's, because they (at least Jimmy) have made a lot of the right enemies. But you are right that psycho-babble is a sub-Christian form of counsel.
JFC
Okay, I'll admit that antiChrist is a little strong. And I would agree that Jimmy D has made some good enemies but I still think that he is poison and therefore I stick to my antiChrist statement. Afterall, Calvin called the Pope AntiChrist and the Pope was still trinitarian.
hmmm, good thought. On Friday night, when I was explaining to you why I stopped doing Algebra, I didn't realize you had just posted this : A kid learning geometry may ask, “why do I need to know this. I’m never going to use it."..... but the discipline that it will teach you will pay dividends in areas of your life that you can not fully comprehend now.
You must have been really disagreeing with my reasoning ;-)
-k
To not do something (assuming it has value) is to choose to limit your options.
And though time constraints and priorities cause us all to limit our options, adolescent (or otherwise) stubbornness and laziness should not have that prerogative.
(no criticism of -k intended!)
Blogger help's how to turn on word verification
should take care of comment spam like the one above.
If you are signed into blogger and visit your own blog, you can delete comments as well.
Thanks Natalie.
No problem. :-)
Also, because I meant to say it in my first comment but didn't, good post.
quote from post, "I feel that the lessons you learn in handling your emotions, ie. displaying self-control will not only help you to not look foolish, or in displaying that you are in fact foolish, but it will help you in all aspects of life. Learning and practicing self-control in one area of life will give you the tools necessary to display self-control in other areas. Because I have learned the tools of being self-controlled in where I put my clothes, either on the floor wherever I want (no self-control) or in putting them where they belong either in the dresser or in a hamper (self-control) I am able to use this training of my flesh to resist other temptations that will come my way. If you can be trusted in the little things, such as keeping an orderly house, then you can be trusted with the big things like shepherding a family or loving a wife. Everything in life is preparation for something bigger, something more glorious than what you are currently doing. Luke 16.10 “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.”
Very good post, and great point there. Quite applicable.
I know it's been awhile since you posted this, but I've not been online in a while, so I'm starting to catch up on what you have been saying. *grin*
That's it for now.
JR- that's alright. As you can see I've been away for quite some time too.
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