The Cross and the Switchblade (David Wilkerson)

My brain's on overdrive. My soul is wilting. Oh God, it takes far more energy than I have to follow you, and to do it right. Here's how I honestly feel right now. (I wouldn't suggest reading this all at once. or even at all. I'm not writing here, I'm spitting it raw, processing phase one.)

Here are some of my notes from this book I just finished...it's intense.

What it's about: The story of God's using David Wilkerson (who eventually started Times Square church) to begin ministry to gang-member boys on the streets in New York. He PRAYED, trusted God, stepped out again and again, and God acted (again and again) in miraculous ways. The ministry is massive today. This, my self, this is what life on earth is meant to be spent for.

Almost a rule that the touch of God is marked by tears. "You must be born again" Jesus said. And the paradox is this: at the heart of this newborn personality is joy; yet the joy is ushered in by tears.

"You're going at this backwards. You're trying to raise your money first, and then buy your home. If you're doing this in faith, you should commit yourself to your Center first, then raise your money for it. " (Man always has to act first before God performs mighty miracles. that's a concept repeated in any missionary story.)

Moral problem: all the boys had broken the law at some point. What should they do about that? Need to be strong in the new life before going to jail, and that takes time - many crisis' to pass, dry periods to ride out, much to learn about the art of being a Christian. If a boy confesses to the police too early and is put in jail, isn't there a risk of losing him? On the other hand, he has offended society's law and it will also hold him back spiritually if he harbors guilt.//I have come to feel that there is no answer that will cover all cases.

Amazed that the workers (who came to be in the inner city) could have this desire to "burn out for God" without themselves becoming taut, intense personalities.

Prayer - at the center it tends to be a bit loud. wonderful freedom in the spirit that sometimes frightens people the first time. may think it's uncouth, w/o realizeing that we are just expressing our true feelings before God. if we feel concerned, we say so not onnly with our lips but with the tone of our prayer.

Often I've yearned for a finantial situation that would allow us to breathe a little more easily. But just as often, I come back to the conviction that the Lord wants us to live this way. It is one of the most demandin requirements on our faih to depend totally on God for the needs of His work. Just as soon as we have a balance in the bank, we'll stop depending on Him in the day-by-day, hour-by-hour way that we now do, not only for our spiritual needs, but for our physical needs as well. *star *star *

While his grandfather was preaching against penecost, he got baptized in the holy spirit!!! It overcame him! Wow! God promises (and I must pray for myself):

- you'll have power: Acts 1:8
- you'll have a comforter - John 14:26
- you'll have protection Acts 16:6
- no longer be hounded by mind of the flesh, but have spiritual values Eph 2:3-6
- will have life; now headed to death but w/ HS 2 Corinthians 3:5-6, have new life
- living with the Spirit of Truth. release. fulfilled promise - John 16:13
- access to the Father will be yours Eph 2:18
- Hope - Romans 15:13
- Liberty 2 Cor 3:17
- how happen? dramatic, sudden, overpowering experience. Acts 10:44

Let's not just talk about it, we want to do it!!

Living in spirit is as necessary as receiving the spirit

The holy spirit captures with intent of liberating. wowz -

weed addicts the mind but not the body
heroine addicts both - and freeing from the body's the easy part

"drilling session" - getting shot up
"I've got problems" - i need to make contact and get shot up - soon
"bugging me" - getting to my heart
"debs" - girl parallel gangs. (Dragons - Dragonettes)

Wow - is it easier for them to take beatings/getting knives stuck in them since they're used to it and live on the street? I guess I like my body too much. I even hate giving blood plasma, a "little" needle in the arm...ahhh... Oh God if this is following you I'm scared. Interesting, or normal, I guess - that God uses mostly the people being ministered to, when they come out, to go back into that ministry. Someone from outside may come in to get it going and back it up, but street people to do street work , a few missionaries but mainly natives to minister on "foreign fields" ... even, or especially, anyone afflicted likes to bless others - women with IBC (inflammatory breast cancer) will spend money and time spreading the life-saving information; those with retarded siblings spend their lives on other retarded people; my cousin's working with autistic kids; ... God uses people whose lives are changed to change those of others. That someone being ministered to often wants to turn around and minister right away again.

That seems to be the drawback of those of us who weren't ever particularly deeply ministered to. I had no great visible need, oh no, but I have intense, immense need. So i am expected without having a mentor to have desire to and know how to move on... but - i'm still needy, even if i don't suffer from the obvious, drugs and alcohol and sex addictions. isn't it only fair that i, too, get spiritual help??

It's always a question: "did i expect too much from God without doing enough myself?" It's like you have to go through this phase of doubting and mistrust, conquer it, and step in faith, believing - then God acts. Why does He ALWAYS have to wait till the last minute? Couldn't I just trust him and he'd do it in time anyway? no...

Thanking Him ahead of time is key - it shows trust. Thanking him during trouble too - Hans -Peter Royer. HAHAHA it's so funny - oter people's response to his confidence and prayers of thanks tho there wasn't a cent of the $15,000 to speak of yet. hahahaha. i note that after the extension, he worked his butt off, phoning constantly and others praying. (ach, I don't ever in me have the potential even for the dedication to do this!!! I am too small - too small to care, or even know the shame i ought to feel at not caring.) as though indeed the first time around he hadn't tried hard enough, but now God gave him another chance to.

I just don't get this business of helping people ... it's so slow, reaching into lives one by one. i never could do it, i think. my own life has set up before it too many irksome issues that i'd have to wade through, i don't know how to jump across. it's too much.

"God promised me that if i would accept the challenge, he would give us..." He seems to work that way when He's working greatly. "you have the choice to accept." and of course it's much a harder life if you do accept, but of course it's the only, the absolute best way. You pay far more dearly for saying no.

I honestly have a very hard time thinking of spending my life in the service of this God, directly at his bid and calling. I didn't realize that before- but now i see up front what it means and I just couldn't do it.

What's wrong? I may not be saved...oh i know i said the words, and have the intent, at least outward. But God. maybe i'm not supposed to be like them - yet maybe i am and that's why ahhhh i don't know. i'm not sad anymore, or empty - but i'm not full, either, or happy. i'm expectant, or apprehensive. this feels better than the constant dull throbbing pain...but joy would be so blessed. i don't want to mold to the society around me. i want to be alive... i want to be so alive. teach me your way, teach me radicalness.

Is it really particularly the poor and brokenhearted God loves, and he loves you most if you reach out to them? b/c i don't want to. maybe for a little. but i'm addicted to learning righ tnow, mainly b/c i don't feel like i have enough, and it's a good thing... maybe though God's calling me to something and i'm not realizing that i'm fighting it. i can't see what's best for me so i pick what looks wonderful...
i just can't picture living for God being wonderful. it would't feel wonderful, anyway.

i don't like to do things i don't like to do for very long. (being dirty, pollinating, not reading/expanding my knowledge, many jobs, living in .....)

i'm still having a hard time seeing any way better to live life than missions.

but also a hard time seeing how to live this schoolyear knowing God deeper and deeper yet pursuing academia or anything else, for that matter. this is bad. i don't want it to be true. i want to be able to "better myself". but i can't focus on much more than one thing. i can't intermesh/overtwine them. lap.

Will God oneday break me of my sin, X - even though it's not physical - whatever it is that's a hangup to finding Life? Oh painful...i'll cling tightly, and pray that it goes fast. it'll be like getting over a drug, a (mental? physical?) habit.

Oh he started times square church!!! - 7,000 God-hungry people and no debt...sweet.

Where does the 10% of tithing supposed to go? coming out of the church budget, is it specifically for the poor around the world, and coming from teh individual, to go straight to the church to use and to send out?

Why are people in prison so much more often perversely homosexual ?? it's a trend.

"We have to suffer ourselves to help people who are hurting" - she says after it relates their intense history. no no no no no!!! ouch ouch ouch ouch !! I can't!!!

In conclusion, I think I no longer sound like the goody-goody perfect girl I apparently was in high school.



"Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like drunken men, know not the road home." - Boethius

Proof of God

If we can fully explain God, he ceases to exist.

Currently reading: Gilead. I quote, where my ideas are put into word i couldn't yet expect to achieve:

"In the matter of belief, i have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are menat to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, b/c there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding "existence," which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known adn nameable things (and which woudl yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would have accomplished a wonderful thing, stilll too partial in an infinite degree to have any meaning, however.

"I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert existence of something - Being - having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at the greater remove altogether - if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. That is clearly a source of confusino. Another term would be needed to describe a state or quality of which we can ave no experience whatever, to which existence as we know it can bear only the slightest likeness or affinity. So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.

"So my advice is this- don't look for proofs. Don't bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they're always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them. That is very unsettling over the long term. "Let your works shine before men," etc. It was Coleridge who said Christianity is a life, not a octrine, words to that effect. I'm not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I'm saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, themustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion at any particular moment.

- "My heart is greatly disquieted. It is a strange thing to feel illness and grief in the same organ. there is no telling one from the other. My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. that old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must well on, b/c i know more than I know and must learn it from myself - that same good wieght worries me these days.

But the fact is, I have never found another way to be as honest with myself as I can be by consulting with these miseries of mine, these accusers and rebukers, God bless them all. So long as they do not kill me outright. I do hope to die with a quiet heart. I know that may not be realistic."

"Miscellanies"

Jonathan Edwards has this book called "Miscellanies" - of random thoughts his mind churned out, but not in a publishable order. This is how my mind seems to work; extremely so. Sometimes things have been mulching for awhile, and suddenly, they CLICK - but you can't see the background, just the final statement. He also apparently went out for walks in the woods with notes pinned to his shirt, and would go about arranging and rearranging them, figuring out what went where.

I imagine that lack of mental organization ability made for a hard time writing essays in school.

At any rate, my miscel for today:

- The immutability of death simultaneously adds to and subtracts from the value of (human) life.

Am thinking about destiny...watched "Unbreakable" and read "Domain" - Steve Alten sci fi. Questions that remain:

Is it necessary for it to be fulfilled for destiny to exist?

Is it individualized, or for the whole - or both? Linked to others, entwined?

Can yours be qualified greater or lesser, depending on what role of destiny you play?

Is a destiny physical, mental, combined?

"A" or "The" destiny?

Does everyone have one? Do you have it whether you "feel" it or not?

Is destiny always for the cause of the "Good"?

Is there both a good and a bad

Does God use horrible evil people for his purposes, for purposes such as revealing a good person his/her destiny - I think definitely so.

Note the sense of unfulfillment - the guy was always a little sad in the morning when he got up, tho he had a great wife, kid, job...

Evil. ?

I haven't used that word (destiny) much. I bet there're other connections stored with other words somewhere in my harddrive.

Humans. They're so much like computers. That is, vice versa... One can load lots of programs on - including viruses, accidentally: effected through contact with others. Note that the harddrive carries all that information that's in there, but not as quickly accessible. That ram can be made larger, and if yours is small, you get real frustrated. Etc. (Just watch out when someone asks you for an upgrade...)

I don't think it's best to have big secrets all your life, like in Unbreakable (his fake-injury) and The Bridges of Madison County (her affair) but it sure makes good movies, and the people's lives are more interesting. Some might call it cowardly, I think in cases they have to be almost stronger.


I bought a bonsai tree, or what I perceived to be one. They all originate from bushes, but apparently have to be trimmed/trained just so, or they're fake. They lady who sold it to me had a big white van, was stationed at boarded up gas station on a sweltering Memphis street corner, and spoke about one word of english per three sentences of what one would take to be japanese.

Kinda want it to be a symbol of "rootedness" - a GKC idea, that the rolling stone gathers no moss, and it's good in ways to not be rolling. Tumbleweeds, for example, burn quite easily. Madeleine L'Engle has her F......? thingies that, as they grow older, have to "deepen" - take root, not romp around anymore. It's part of life. And life is good. At any rate, I am willing to settle down, mentally physically spiritually psychologically. Maybe.

However. I thought, or didn't think twice, "this is a bonsai" - the real thing. But, ah, after reading about it online...it looks an awful lot like the bush-not-art kind - inauthentic. Had my dearheart friend not pointed that out, I'd've been in bliss enjoying my little mindi. Isn't it interesting how our minds are not disconcerted with the fake thing until they know there's a true?


Sometimes I wonder if I it would be okay to take an alternate route to existence - just opt out of life. A plausible escape route - doing somethign that seems more possible and less overwhelming than living. Not suicide, but some option that lets me chance over the looking back at my time on earth and all that I've faced and what I might regret... that brings me to something else I've wondered about lately.

Does knowledge of your choice to the right or wrong path lead to less regret, or having not known the options in the first place?

...I don't remember what I was thinking...

I guess the Bible talks about the dealing with of unconscious sins. But I mean more the feeling. If I can choose, I have/had power to make a difference - free will, of sorts -