https://youtu.be/xsJJJMGuf2c?si=-yMhQNX7OgYiDvXh

English For Ethiopia:

Confidentiality is not about confidence. It is about keeping secrets.

But:

Confidentiality is actually about the confidence you have of the information not being passed on to a third person.

Claudia had hoped that Christian visitors would comfort her by bringing some perspective on what she was going through. But their voices proved confusing, not consoling.

A deacon from her church solemnly advised her to reflect on what God was trying to teach her. “Surely something in your life must displease God,” he said. “Somewhere, you must have stepped out of his will. These things don’t just happen. God uses circumstances to warn us, and to punish us.What is he telling you?”

A few days later Claudia was surprised to see a woman from church whom she barely knew. Evidently, this plump, scatterbrained widow had adopted the role of professional cheerleader to the sick. She brought flowers, sang hymns, and stayed long enough to read some happy psalms about brooks running and mountains clapping their hands. Whenever Claudia tried to talk about her illness or prognosis, the woman quickly changed the subject, trying to combat the suffering with cheer and goodwill. But she only visited once, and after a while the flowers faded, the hymns seemed dissonant, and Claudia was left to face a new day of pain.
Another woman dropped by, a faithful follower of television faith healers. Exuding confidence, she assured Claudia that healing was her only escape. When Claudia told her about the deacon’s advice, this woman nearly exploded. “Sickness is never God’s will!” she exclaimed. “Haven’t you read the Bible? The Devil stalks us like a roaring lion, but God will deliver you if you can muster up enough faith to believe you’ll be healed. Remember, Claudia, faith can move mountains, and that includes Hodgkin’s disease. Simply name your promise, in faith, and then claim the victory.”
The next few mornings, as Claudia lay in the sterile cobalt treatment room, she tried to “muster up” faith. She wondered if she even understood the procedure. She did not question God’s supernatural power, but how to go about convincing God of her sincerity? Faith wasn’t like a muscle that could be enlarged through rehabilitation exercises. It was slippery, intangible, impossible to grasp. The whole notion of mustering up faith seemed awfully exhausting, and she could never decide what it really meant.

Perhaps the most “spiritual” woman in Claudia’s church brought along some books about praising God for everything that happens. “Claudia, you need to come to the place where you can say, ‘God, I love you for making me suffer like this. It is your will, and you know what’s best for me. And I praise you for loving me enough to allow me to experience this. In all things, including this, I give thanks.’”

As Claudia pondered the words, her mind filled with rather grotesque images of God. She envisioned a figure in the shape of a troll, big as the universe, who took delight in squeezing helpless humans between his fingernails, pulverizing them with his fists, dashing them against sharp
stones. The figure would torture these humans until they cried out, “God, I love you for doing this to me!” The idea repulsed Claudia, and she decided she could not worship or love such a God. Yet another visitor, Claudia’s pastor, made her feel she was on a select mission. He said, “Claudia, you have been appointed to suffer for Christ, and he will reward you. God chose you because of your great strength and integrity, just as he chose Job, and he is using you as an example to others. Their faith may increase because of your response.You should feel privileged, not bitter. What we see as adversity, God sees as opportunity.” He told her to think of herself as a track star, and to view adversity as the series of hurdles she would need to leap over on the way to the victory circle.

Philip Yancey, Where is God When It Hurts (1990), p15

#books

Abusive relationship alert: I love you so much that if you don't love me back, I have a dark room downstairs that I prepared just to torture you with electricity.

Girls, don't marry such a guy if you find one. 😊

A MOTHER LEARNS EMPATHY

A mother took her five-year-old son shopping at a large department store during the Christmas season. She knew it would be fun for him to see all the decorations, window displays, toys, and Santa Claus. As she dragged him by the hand, twice as fast as his little legs could move, he began to fuss and cry, clinging to his mother’s coat. ‘Good heavens, what on earth is the matter with you?’ she scolded impatiently. ‘I brought you with me to get in the Christmas spirit. Santa doesn’t bring toys to little cry-babies!’
His fussing continued as she tried to find some bargains
during the last-minute rush on 23 December. ‘I’m not going to take you shopping with me, ever again, if you don’t stop that whimpering,’ she admonished.

'Oh well, maybe it’s because your shoes are untied and you are tripping over your own laces,’ she said, kneeling down in the aisle to tie his shoes.
As she knelt down beside him, she happened to look up. For the first time, she viewed a large department store through the eyes of a five-year-old. From that position there were no baubles, bangles, beads, presents, gaily decorated display tables, or animated toys. All that could be seen was a maze of corridors too high to see above, full of giants moving about on legs as large as trees. These mountainous strangers, with feet as big as skateboards, were pushing and shoving, bumping and thumping, rushing and crushing!
She took her child home and vowed to herself never to impose her version of a good time on him again.

(Source Unknown)

#books

Jan Sutton & William Stewart , Learning to Counsel (3rd ed.), p35

HELPLESSNESS AND HAVING NOTHING TO DO

Dr. Curt Richter, A psychologist from Johns Hopkins University, used two wild rats in a rather perverse experiment. He dropped Rat One, the “control” animal, into a tank of warm water and timed the reaction. Since rats are good swimmers, the creature paddled and thrashed around for sixty hours before it finally succumbed to exhaustion and drowned. Richter added a step with Rat Two, holding the animal tightly in his hands for a few minutes until it ceased struggling. When he dropped it in the water, it reacted very differently. After splashing around for a few minutes, Rat Two passively sank to the bottom of the tank and died. Richter theorizes that it simply “gave up.” The futility of the struggle in his hands had convinced the rat that its fate was hopeless even before it hit the water. In effect, Rat Two died of resigned helplessness.
Other experiments demonstrate that the feeling of helplessness, like fear, can actually change physiology.Two different groups of rats are subjected to the same electrical shocks. The animals in Group One, which have a measure of control, soon learn to turn off the current by manipulating a lever. Group Two, however, has no lever.After a while, simply because of stress—the voltage is harmless—the immune system carried by their blood undergoes radical changes, and rats in the second group become much more vulnerable to disease.
Experiments on humans, not quite so perverse, likewise show that the feeling of helplessness alters not merely a person’s psychological attitude but the actual perception of pain itself. The threshold of pain can be raised as much as forty-five percent by simple diversion tactics.
In one series of experiments, researchers tried to divert the subject’s attention by ringing bells, repeatedly touching his hand, reading an adventure story aloud, and having the subject read a column of numbers. When the scientists used such tactics during a test of heat tolerance, they had to apply forty-five percent more heat for the preoccupied subject to notice the pain. The researchers were startled to see blisters swelling up unnoticed on their subjects’ arms as those subjects concentrated on counting from fifty to one, backwards. On the other hand, if the subject had nothing to do but think about his pain (as is true in many hospitals and nursing homes), he showed much greater sensitivity.

Philip Yancey, Where is God When It Hurts (1990), p153

Modern society greatly compounds this problem of a sense of place, for it has no natural “place” for sick people. We put them out of sight, behind the institutional walls of hospitals and nursing homes. We make them lie in beds, with nothing to occupy them but the remote control devices that operate the television sets. They live according to other people’s schedules, not their own: a nurse wakes them up, the hospital decides when to feed them, visitors drop by, a nurse turns out the light at night. (For this reason,many patients who welcome visitors prefer that they call first before dropping by—it gives them more a feeling of control over their schedule.)

I have made a kind of study of card racks, sometimes visiting new drug stores and card shops just to browse. The cards for sick people fall into distinct categories: schmaltzy cards with pictures of flowers and treacly poems, racy cards with messages about all the wild parties the recipient is missing, sincere cards with a solemn expression of sympathy, clever cards illustrated by New Yorker cartoonists. All have the same implicit message, expressed in their title: “get-well cards.”
One card has on the cover, “Get well soon,” and then inside, “otherwise somebody might steal your job.” Another says, “Everybody hopes you feel better soon, except me,” and inside, “I hope you feel better right now!” “This is no time to be sick,” says one of Boynton’s hippos from a hospital bed, “the weekend’s coming up.” What complaint could I have against these clever expressions of sympathy? The subtle, underlying message: You are out of commission, useless.You don’t fit, at work, at parties. You are missing out. You are not OK. Only get well, and then you can rejoin life. My friends in the Make Today Count group, none of whom will likely get well, impressed upon me that something as innocuous as a greeting card can deepen the devastating sense of feeling out of place, with no valid role in life. I sometimes dream of producing my own line of get-well cards. I already have an idea for the first one. The cover would have huge letters, perhaps with fireworks in the background, spelling out CONGRATULATIONS!!! Inside, this message: “. . . to the 98 trillion cells in your body that are still working smoothly and efficiently.”
I would look for ways to communicate the message that a sick person is not a sick person, but rather a person of worth and value who happens to have some bodily parts that are not functioning well.

Philip Yancey, Where is God When It Hurts (1990), p155

#bookquotes

I know I'm not the only one
Who regrets the things they've done
Sometimes I just feel it's only me
Who never became who they thought they'd be
I wish I could live a little more
Look up to the sky not just the floor
I feel like my life is flashing by
And all I can do is watch and cry
I miss the air, I miss my friends
I miss my mother, I miss it when
Life was a party to be thrown
But that was a million years ago

_ adele, million years ago 🖤