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Health and Healing by The Strange Preacher

The Strange Preacher — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 21:49:14 +0000

Health and Healing

My interest in mental health was inspired by my mother’s awful struggles with mental health. She used to say that with a heart attack or cancer you might die, but depression was like a living death. Over the years I’ve come to realise that it is hard to overstate just how dangerous and damaging mental health problems can be. A heart attack can end one life but chronic mental illness can poison the lives of all those that love the one so afflicted. Alas, moments of profound mental darkness can bring doom to entire families, even whole communities can be left devastated by a mind that has unravelled.

It is the most natural thing in the world to want to end the suffering of a loved one, to usher them into a phase of healing, recovery, and restoration, to vanquish the darkness and tears and bring light and laughter back into our home. Years of watching my mother suffer, and seeing the indirect effect poor mental health had on my family, made me want to find a cure. I didn’t know if there was a cure, but I was open to finding one.

After studying and reflecting for years, on the conditions and the various treatments offered, after watching so-called mental health professionals treat my mother like a lab rat, testing/inflicting all kinds of drugs and alleged treatments on her, I finally came to realise these people were dangerous quacks. I came to see that that whole institution was dangerous and dark and woe betide you if you had the misfortune of getting entangled with it. They were not healers, they were destroyers – they destroy families, children, parents, health, lives and, in the last couple of decades, even whole communities.

I have concluded that the sooner the whole rotten edifice is destroyed the better.

They enslave the unwary, and entrap the vulnerable. The whole industry is based on lies and supported by deception. A moment of critical reflection, the application of simple scientific principles, exposes the whole enterprise and all who profit from the evil practice as Snake Oil merchants.

Being depressed is not an illness. It is one of many natural reactions to the challenges of life. Sometimes we encounter things that are hard to swallow. Sometimes we nearly choke, but choking is a natural reaction to an obstruction. The best thing we can do under such circumstances is not inject our necks with tranquilisers to make the obstruction bother us less but remove the obstruction itself, only then can our bodies return to stasis.

There are many ways in which we can restore ourselves to balance but they all involve dealing with the obstacle, not medicating ourselves so much that we are no longer conscious of the obstacle. The Snake Oil Merchants are only interested in selling Snake Oil, in treating the symptom not the cause. Once they have you in their web, once they’ve administered the first dose – their answer to every problem after that involves another dose, a different dose, more oil or less oil, a or different type of oil. They have no financial incentive in helping you to actually get better, in helping you find a cure. A cured patient is a lost customer.

In the immortal words of Captain Jack Sparrow, “The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude to the problem!”

The problem is the obstacle is all too often very painful, and dealing with it means dealing with pain and we, being animals, can be highly sensitive and unbelievably irrational when it comes to pain. It is this fear of pain, more than anything else, that traps people into lives of despair and darkness – not the pain itself, not the actual trauma, but the fear of it. The antidote to fear is faith, which is why religion [especially that faith inspired by Jesus] is so often instrumental in bringing about tremendous personal transformations in people long afflicted with emotional and psychic trauma.

Fear is the dragon that must be overcome if we are to have the treasures of restoration: peace, joy, and hope. And when at last we do summon the courage to face our fears, when we finally dare to run at the monster before which we have for so long cowered, it very often vanishes before our thrust. We discover that it was the fear of the thing and not the thing itself that was preventing us from moving forward. It’s not that dealing with the thing is easy, it is going to be painful, it is still going to be a challenge, but dealing with it is a heck of a lot easier than dealing with the monster our imaginings all too often make of it.

The Water of Life

Strange Preacher — Sat, 04 May 2024 03:21:56 +0000

The Water of Life

The roots of truth in our hearts are nourished by the living waters. These spiritual waters are created by combining two essential elements: the hydrogen of spiritual communion and the oxygen of social service. These two elements form the essence of the gospel: the supreme joy of the faith realization of sonship with God coupled with the supreme desire to do the Father's will. If we commit to keeping the roots of spiritual truth nourished and alive in our hearts then the fruits of this will be measured in our loving spiritual ministry, enlightening intellectual communion, and uplifting social service.

There are distinctions between the children of this world and the children of Heaven in their fundamental beliefs

The Strange Preacher — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 22:58:14 +0000

There are distinctions between the children of this world and the children of Heaven in their fundamental beliefs

There are distinctions between the children of this world and the children of Heaven in their fundamental beliefs, ideals, values, and the methods they are willing to use to advance their respective causes. The children of God believe in righteousness, and through faith believe that the final fruit of righteousness is ultimate victory over the deceptive ways of the wicked. The children of this world believe in the power of lies, while the children of God believe in the power of truth. The children of this world use deception to enslave, while the Almighty Father liberates His children through the revelation of truth to those who seek it with earnest hearts; and those whom the Father makes free no one can enslave. Hence the almost endless animosity between the children of light who fight the good fight of faith for liberty, justice, peace, and truth, and the children of darkness who seek to foist fear upon the unsuspecting human race and through their villainous lies cause wickedness, slavery, and despair to proliferate.

The Master understood and taught that, for the children of time, imperfection is our starting point and as such offers us certain challenges which are ultimately beneficial for our character development both in time and eternity and is, therefore, not inherently sinful. Indeed, He joined us in our imperfections so that he could more clearly reveal the way to perfection. He humbled himself to live and know our imperfections that we might aspire to the life of divine perfection through loving service that is the way of Heaven. In so doing, he hallowed life’s humble beginnings and blew open the doors to the glory of divine attainment even while living life in the flesh.

However, while imperfection is an estate accommodated within Heaven’s plan - Corruption is not an activity sponsored by Heaven. Corruption, especially corruption in high places, makes an imperfect circumstance worse in every way. It impoverishes and diminishes every quarter of life, and those that defend and enable the corrupt are party to this treacherous thievery of life’s precious portion. Few sins are so grim than that treachery which wilfully impoverishes one's fellows for personal profit. Few sins so squander human dignity than the craven desire to possess through unfair means what others have earned fairly.

Some inequalities are born of nature and are not to be abhorred - they are instead opportunities to be learned from. However, some are born of wickedness and their roots are not only deserving of our utter contempt but need to be exterminated. The forward march of civilization is enhanced when it is unburdened of this parasitic cancer. Indeed, if the host is to survive, let alone prosper, it must be excised wherever and whenever it is found and the sooner the better. The long term health and prosperity of any civilisation depends on the prompt recognition and elimination of this disease before it becomes terminal.

This truth is self-evident. Only thieves and liars would dare deny it. Worse, the infamy of their sin is compounded by the fact that they say: “that which is good but do it not.” And it is truly sin, because they know what they are doing. Alas, they have succumbed to the delusion that not only will they not be caught but that they cannot be caught; that there will be no consequence, no price to pay, no reckoning, but the wages of sin are death – even eternal extinction, what’s more, there is no rest for the wicked.

What hope do we have, what can we possibly expect, if we persist in handing the reins of power over to the most venal of men? Could we expect to reap anything other than poverty, tragedy, and destruction? If we know this, should we not – for the sake of our children, and our children’s children, do all in our power to ensure that only the most noble of men are entrusted with the sacred duty of tending to the needs of the community and the nation?

Have we not evidence enough to clearly see that every single institution is now afflicted with virtually terminal corruption? How long can this be maintained? Of one thing I am sure, violent revolution is not the answer. The wholesale destruction of what is, is not the solution. Even if we simply replaced every major department head with a half decent administrator of whose character we could be assured and whose loyalties were beyond question, we would see an immediate improvement in practically every facet of life. There are peaceful ways to achieve these laudable goals but, alas, the wicked parasites will not be removed without a fight. They would rather kill the host than suffer the indignity of knowing the host could live without them.

Why Jesus Loved Friendship by Peter Wehner

Paul Kemp Administrator — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 23:52:33 +0000

Why Jesus Loved Friendship

Why Jesus Loved Friendship Peter Wehner

The enduring significance of Christmas is that it represents perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Christian faith — the concept of the incarnation, the belief that God took human form in Jesus. Theologians refer to the “hypostatic union” of Jesus, meaning the mysterious fusion of his divinity and his humanity.

The humanity of Jesus manifests itself in his moments of grief, agony, anger, frustration, joy and compassion. But one particular aspect of that humanity that has long intrigued me is his professed friendship with the rest of us.

In the New Testament, this point is made emphatically in the 15th chapter of the Gospel of John. The context is Jesus’ discourse with his disciples, in which he tells them that as God the father has loved him, so he loves them. His command to his disciples is that they love one another. Jesus then says this: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my father I have made known to you.”

John Swinton, an ordained minister of the Church of Scotland and a professor at the University of Aberdeen, calls this shift from servant to friend a “profound act of renaming.”

I understand why the relationship between an all-powerful deity and less than all-powerful human beings — between the creator and the created, the perfect and the imperfect — would be defined by the latter’s awe, reverence and obedience. But a relationship between God and us — between God and me, between God and you — that is defined by true friendship is startling. Why would a divine, transcendent entity, referred to in the Scriptures as the everlasting God, the Lord Most High, not only condescend to become human but also initiate a relationship with us that is defined by mutual affection, intimacy and self-revelation? So I reached out to ministers and theologians to ask: What does it mean for Jesus to call us his friends?

The thread of friendship can be traced back to the Old Testament, to the book of Isaiah, where the prophet conveys God’s description of Abraham as “my friend.” The concept of God as a friend is not foreign to the Hebrew Scripture, then, though it seems to have been limited to Abraham and, in a somewhat different way, to Moses, “as if they have an especially intimate relationship with God in distinction from others,” in the words of the Old Testament scholar Tremper Longman III. “But there is an intensification and expansion of intimacy as we move to John 15.”

Several people I heard from mentioned how revolutionary this concept of friendship was, pointing out that it would have been almost unheard-of for an ancient king, let alone God, to refer to his subjects as friends in the way Jesus did. An earthly king would certainly not have walked and lived among them in the way Jesus did. In ancient times people of unequal wealth and status were very unlikely to be friends. But Jesus shattered those expectations and the hierarchical relationship between God and human beings.

“Jesus is elevating his listeners,” the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff told me, “treating them as on a level with him.” Jesus is recognizing the intrinsic worth of human beings, who are not only made in the divine image but also are his confidants and companions.

Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., pointed out to me that the exchange in John revealed God’s radical love and grace. “You would expect God to befriend worthy people, educated people, brave people, or, at bare minimum, moral people,” he told me. But instead, Jesus chose to be his followers the uneducated (several fishermen), the reviled (Matthew, a tax collector for the hated Roman regime), a person who would deny him (Peter) and even betray him (Judas). Access to the divine is no longer the province of a special caste of influential, privileged people. And what Jesus did in the process is profoundly alter the understanding of the power dynamic between God and mortals.

“Power cannot generate love,” Pastor Dudley told me. “Power can generate obedience, fear, awe, grudging submission — but not love. The God who comes to us in Jesus doesn’t want grudging submission; he wants us to love him and be loved by him. He wants relationship, including friendship, and so he came in vulnerability, not in power.”

The concept of a vulnerable God, meek and lowly in heart, was almost unfathomable to many at the time, and for many people it still is. But a vulnerable God is an essential part of the Christian story. We see it in Jesus’ life, from his birth in a manger to his weeping over the death of his friend Lazarus to the anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he was betrayed on the night before his crucifixion. Jesus was accompanied by three of his closest friends — Peter, John and James — whom he asked to stay awake and pray with him. (They failed, with Jesus finding them sleeping, “exhausted from sorrow.”)

Renée Notkin, a co-pastor of Union Church in Seattle, in explaining the friendship verses in John, told me that Jesus’ words “Love one another as I have loved you” are essential to understanding what Jesus meant. Among other things, a proper understanding of friendship radically changes our perspective on how we are to live in community.

“Our witness is not right doctrine; it is our relational orientation,” Pastor Notkin told me. “As friends of Jesus, we love one another — and that includes people different from us. In fact, no one can be an ‘other’, because in Christ we belong to one another.” We are called to love one another, honor one another, welcome one another, encourage one another and bear one another’s burdens. “Instead of being people who stink with judgment and criticism,” she told me, “we are to be an aroma of blessing, hope, joy, peace and love.”

John Swinton contrasts friendship as understood in contemporary Western society with what Jesus had in mind: “The friendship modeled by Jesus is for ‘the outsider,’ the socially marginalized, the stigmatized, the outcast, the prostitute, the sinner.”

“If the church claims to be the community of the friends of Jesus,” he adds, “it must engage in Christ-like friendships toward all people, particularly those who have been and are marginalized. The gift of friendship shows and reminds people that they are valued and indeed valuable individuals. That is a gift the church must offer all people.”

The theologian Curtis Chang told me that in the lives of Christians, friendship with Jesus doesn’t replace the call to be obedient to him or his authority. Mr. Chang compared it to an employer-employee relationship that has moved to a deeper level of trust and shared knowledge. In this reading, we must still submit to the authority of our employer, but the relationship has expanded to include much more than just that. Jesus does not relinquish his role as Lord and teacher; he has added new dimensions to it.

“In true friendship, there is mutuality,” Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, told me. “When Jesus called his disciples his friends, he both elevated them and brought them closer.” Their worlds merged.

When Jesus told his disciples he would call them friends rather than servants, he was expressing in words what he showed during his life, which is that God is seeking above all else to be in a meaningful relationship with us. Jesus modeled what it means to take us into his confidence, to self-disclose, to encourage and correct us, to weep with us, to love us, even to die for us.

Those are the qualities — more than God’s power, more than his perfection — that ultimately won the affections of my heart as a person of the Christian faith. It is the knowledge that we can be seen and known by God, and that we can see and know God. That we need him, but that also, in some essential way, he needs us.

But the friendship Jesus speaks of comes with a condition attached. In articulating what Gail R. O’Day calls his “theology of friendship,” Jesus says if we are his friends, we will do what he commands, and several times in John 15 he is specific about what that means: Love each other as I have loved you. There are countless ways to love others, based on our talents and life circumstances, but the command is clear enough. We are not only to experience love; we are to extend it to others.

So often throughout history, and certainly in the present day, Christians have fallen short, far short, of Jesus’ command; in so many cases the Christian faith has been shorn of love. When that happens, Christianity becomes a religion characterized by hard edges and judgmentalism, by brittleness and moral arrogance, by mercilessness and gracelessness. Those who claim to be followers of Jesus but behave in this way become not his friends but his enemies.

For 2,000 years, despite the failures, there has always been at least a remnant who patterned their lives in the way Jesus asked them to — men and women whose lives have been touched and transformed by the grace and love of God. I know such people. For me, when my own faith was jumbled, uncertain and abstract, when I had more questions than answers, when God seemed a million miles away, they have been reflections of the divine.

These people have shared in the joys of my life and helped sustain me through times of grief and loss. They have loved me, as Jesus loved them. They are friends of Jesus; they are also, friends of mine. And that has made all the difference.

Have you Read The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran?

Paul Kemp Administrator — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 04:12:11 +0000

The voices of the Prophets in a modern age.

Have you Read the Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. It is now on a ON LINE READER at Spiritual Family Network. A must read.

Voices of the Prophets on Quora

Paul Kemp Administrator — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 04:52:40 +0000

Voices of the Prophets on Quora

Paul Kemp , True Religion - The Religion of the Spirit - Personal Religious Experience.

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What do the new Urantia Revelations and teachings offer to the sincere truth seeker ?

Paul Kemp

Paul Kemp, True Religion - The Religion of the Spirit - Personal Religious Experience.

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Q● What do the new Urantia Revelations and Teachings offer to the sincere Truth Seeker ?

A● in order to understand the significance of the Urantia Revelations one must fi...

SpiritualFamily.Net: Discussion topics

Health and Healing by The Strange Preacher

The Water of Life

There are distinctions between the children of this world and the children of Heaven in their fundamental beliefs

Why Jesus Loved Friendship by Peter Wehner

Have you Read The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran?

Voices of the Prophets on Quora

Voices of the Prophets on Quora

How can I communicate with angels?

A Calling to the Sons and Daughters of God!