Re: The Living Word Fellowship, The Walk, John Robert Stevens
Date: March 16, 2019 12:00PM
hi merries,
hope all is well about your campfires. to richard m., your posts are so illuminating and i cannot but imagine how curious and perhaps, painful, to read all these posts about your former wife, one you much loved and failed to rescue with your insights and rationality. to readers like myself, it seems we have to understand that there were 2 marilyns; the one you were married to and the other, married to the bizarre world of lw orthodoxy to which you lost her to. i do not know how you were able to move from that point in your life without an extreme degree of bitterness, and maybe for a time you were, but were eventually able to do so. i applaud you - in today's crazy world, an aggrieved would grab multiple firearms and just blow people away.
richard you stated some things i wish to address. "mistakes are the learning blocks to a better life". i would add that embracing and understanding our own mistakes and vicariously, mistakes of others are those blocks. i say this only because there are many present lw congregants who are not learning from mistakes, whether their own or others. i believe that one of the foremost intentions of this forum is to provide a guide to present lw congregants and churches a road map to allow those a historical perspective, via multiple testaments, from a plethora and varied perspectives of a simple truth - the lw/shiloh organization is an immoral, predatory (leadership and those ardently associated with it) and essentially self-serving material needs of leadership. i am sorry (not really), i get so pissed off knowing that there are hanger-ons who have no material gains vested or anticipated who still hang on. a continued allegiance to a despot/s (hargrave and minions) clearly whose principal interest is simply their own welfare? certainly not yours. it may not be jonestown where the faithful are required to ingest a poisonous brew and quick death - sometimes poisons to the soul are incremental and doses are administered slowly but effectively over a period of time. the primary antidote to this poison is the truth, but the truth is inadequate, i posit, to the task required unless accompanied by courage. this forum, through its many posters have brought the truth but they are incable of providing courage. everyone of us has made mistakes; in action, in inaction, false testament whether it be about ourselves or others, etc. ad infinitum, i.e., none is without sin, none of us have failed "to miss the mark". the courage, in the face of multiple and corroborating evidence, regardless of all of the yesterdays' investments (emotional, financial, etc.) to lw allegiance, to embark on a new day as i think kboy long ago asserted - a day of courage and the embracing of the obvious truths. i do not know if it is this simple but maybe it is - have the courage and moral fiber to embrace these truths that the present presents or retain cowardice and the comfort of yesterday's illusions.