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Ms_Neophyte
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Name: Christina
Location: Parkersburg, West Virginia, United States
Birthday: 11/7/1962
Gender: Female
Interests: I'm interested in learning all of the collected knowledge of the human race before I die, experience everything there is to experience in this wonderful gift of life that God has given us, and spend the rest of my life praising God.
Expertise: I'm a Jacquelyn of all trades and mistress to none.
Occupation: Liver Transplant Guinea Pig
Industry: Lab Rats 'R Us
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  chrissykWV
Member Since:
8/13/2005
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| I generally try to stay positive when I blog and try to say something helpful concerning my faith and perseverance.  However, today I write in massive emotional grief.
For more than two years I have endured the physical pain and emotional impatience of waiting for the doctors to call with word that a liver was available for me. I've watched as my physical endurance has waned to the point that even getting up to go to the bathroom is often more than I can handle without help. I can no longer go to mass and have bedside Holy Communion. My friends, bored by my lack of mobility, have disappeared. Friends from church who at first sent cards and pick-me-up gifts to brighten my day and remind me that I am not forgotten, seem to have cut off all contact. My family cannot stand to talk about my illness or the realities of the likelihood of death etc. They are emotionally drained. In a way I understand all this, but it doesn't diminish the intensity of hurt that I feel.
A little over two years ago, needing the unconditional love of a pet, I saw an ad for puppies in the local trade magazine. They were Border Collie/Australian Shepherd mixes for $50. I drove out to the sticks and was appalled at what I saw. Five pups and the mother fenced into about 4 X 5 space, all dirt, no water and when they fed them, they just threw a couple of handfuls of dry dog food into the dirt and they all had to fight for it. There was no shelter from the sun or rain and the mother was so weak she couldn't even get up. The dogs were covered with fleas, had little hair left from scratching and sores all over their bodies. They were scrawny and weak. The "breeder" said that if I wanted one I better get it as he was gonna put them in a sack and drown them in two days if no one took them. The only female pup crawled to me and looked up at me with a pleading look in her eyes and I took her home. As soon as I got home I called the Humane Society and had them rescue the dogs. All were eventually adopted out to good homes, including the mother. The breeders were charged with animal cruelty and while they only got 30 days in jail, they were each fined $1000 per dog, which they didn't have. The court seized their trailer and they moved out of state.
 The puppy I rescued, with regular vet treatment and several flea dips and salves finally was healthy and happy. I named her Shadow and she was my shadow. She followed me everywhere, in the house and out. She rode with me in the passenger seat of my SUV and we walked through the State Parks and learned to play with a frisbee. She would jump six feet in the air to catch them... anything to please me. She was so intelligent. I rarely had to teach her something more than once. She picked it up the first time. Most of all, she really loved me. She would sleep cuddled up next to me every night or all day if I was sick. The whole time I had her, she never left my side. She looked up at me like Nancy Reagan used to look at Ronnie. She was the light of my life.
When she began going into estrous (heat), she didn't understand why she couldn't be with me, but the stains , were too much. I planned to have her spayed, but money was tight. Finally, I found a dog health insurance that would cover everything and after consulting with the vet, I scheduled her for Friday surgery. I took her in and she was so happy, meeting the other dogs there. She wasn't just healthy, she was a canine athlete, in prime shape.
At 2PM, they called to let me know I could pick her up at three. I was pulling into the parking lot at three when they called to tell me that everything was ok, but she was taking a little longer to wake up than most and I could pick her up at 6PM. Since I was there, I went in and paid the bill. The vet came in and asked if I wanted to go back to the kennels and say hi and I said sure! I walked back and as soon as she saw me, she got up and wagged her tail and wanted out to be with me. The vet said that was plenty awake and she suggested I go ahead and take her home. After she consulted with another vet, she was sure it was a good idea.
I took her home, but seemed to not be able to get comfortable. She kept getting up and down, up and down. Then she started panting. I called the vet clinic and they said they were closing. They said it sounded pretty normal for shaking off the general anesthetic and not to worry. They said if I really wanted, I could call the Emergency Animal Hospital and see what they said. I talked to them and they concurred. No worries. Five minutes later she crawled/drug herself to me, licked my foot, looked up at me one last time with those loving eyes and laid her head on my foot and died.
I have been crying since Friday. The vet did an autopsy and she said that she had a layer of fat around her uterus that hadn't been bleeding when she was spayed, that did not clot. All the tie offs were good, but she had something wrong with her blood that refused to allow it to clot. When her blood pressure returned to normal, she bled out.
I am completely crushed. I loved that dog more than my own life. I would have thrown myself in front of a truck to save her, if I could. She treated me better and loved me more than any human ever has. I know this may sound strange to some, but she was all that I had left in my life. The only thing good left in my life.
I sacrifice myself daily, offering myself upon the cross with our Lord for priests, the ill, those suffering in a myriad of ways. I live in agony that nearly makes me lose my mind. I pray for hours every day, in my sick bed for others. I read and study God's word. My life is about sacrifice for our risen Christ. Yet like Job, all I get in return is misery. My faith is shaken and I'm not sure if I can go on. I ask for nothing from God, yet he can't find it in His "great compassion" to give me this one tiny thing. I'm angry at God. My vision of Him as a loving, compassionate, caring father, has changed. I now see Him as a pretentious prepubescent, spoiled child, pulling the wings off of flies for amusement. Quite honestly, I don't like Him very much right now. This fly is tired of being tortured and swatted at his whim.
I need to cry... for the loss of my Shadow and the loss of my faith.
Chrissy | | |
|  Another night of pain and loneliness. Funny how the two go together. When you are in pain, the rest of the world seems to evaporate around you. Some are simply caught up in their own lives, much as I was, with kids, causes, family, work and friends. Others pull away as if your condition is contagious, but more likely simply at a loss for words. Occasionally, their disappearance is caused by the fact that I have become rather boring. What do you talk about when you have no life.
Thinking back, I recall that people like me had a distinct look about them. Withdrawn, haunted, preoccupied, yet hopeful for at least one person who would want to talk to them. Not out of a sense of liberal guilt, religious fervor, or a desire to play the "My Disease is Worse than Yours" game, but a simple, ordinary human connection. Friendship.
I remember years ago, when I worked the midnight police blotter beat in Rochester, New York. It was the first real reporting job most new reporters were assigned out of Journalism school after the obits. The seasoned old pros on the paper always laughed that a reporter's competence as a writer coincided with how far from death the subject of their stories were. Write the obits, you were both six feet under, in the dirt. Write the blotter, and you reported on people freshly killed, or on the fast track to death. On top of the newspaper food chain, you wrote about the people who directly or indirectly caused other's deaths... murderers and politicians.
I worked the bottom of the chain, writing paragraph summaries to be followed up on by the "real" reporters when they came in for the morning shift. After every shift, all of us bottom feeders met at a little all night diner downtown for coffee, doughnuts or Jo-Jo's famous Spanish omelet, to rehash the shift, trash our bosses, and explain how "WE" would have written the piece from two nights ago. After a while, you become calloused and oblivious to the death and mayhem around you. You've seen one MG flip over and decapitate the driver, you've seen'em all. I knew I was changing one night when after a particularly gruesome suicide, the cops, EMT's, forensic guys, a few photographers and I, were all laughing when one of the cops accidentally kicked an eyeball under the bed and he spent more than twenty minutes trying to fish it out, his big Polish butt swaying back and forth in the breeze.
Back at Jo-Jo's, I would drink my coffee, pretend to smoke a cigarette, and squint as I tried to look jaded and all knowing to the shiny daytime people, off to the their shiny daytime jobs, in their shiny daytime office buildings, a few blocks away. As I looked around, I noticed how horribly unhappy everyone looked.
A man in an expensive suit, his mind completely preoccupied by numbers, quarterly sales projections, and cost over runs. A woman, clutching at the neckline of her Dress Barn business suit, probably wondering if her overweight, balding boss, would fondle her again as he leaned over her inappropriately, his Old Spice burning her eyes and making them tear up from chemicals and shame. An old man talking to an empty booth across from him, about whether they should retire in Florida or the Jersey shore.
 All with the empty stare, the haunted eyes and the furtive glance around the diner. 
"Does anyone want to be my friend?" their eyes seemed to say.
"I'm so alone," they pleaded.
Back then, I called them losers, the dregs of society, and silently told them to take control of their lives. If I met them today, I like to think I would sit down in the booth across from them and offer them my friendship and the friendship of our precious Lord. They all had a scar on their hearts, an emptiness that can only be filled by Jesus.
I felt superior back then, but I wasn't, because when they looked at me, in my booth, acting so tough, I had the same haunted look on my face, the same scars and an empty tabernacle waiting for the peace of Christ.
See Christ in everyone. Love everyone like Jesus is watching on judgement day, and take up your cross and follow Him. And don't just write a check. Giving is important, but it's more important to find ways to give yourself.
When someone is drowning, don't write a check to help train lifeguards. Jump in!
Love each other as God loves you.
Chrissy | | |
| When I was a child, delivering newspapers to my neighbors in the hours before the rest of the world awoke to conquer the day, I would often day dream about what kind of people lived behind the doors of their comfortable suburban homes. I knew a few of them, but I knew from the illusory nature of my own home life, how different real life could be from the slick, glossy false happiness that was passed along at neighborhood barbecues and childhood sleep-overs to actually believe the smiling faces that regaled their friends with talk of promotions, vacations, honor rolls at ivy league schools and the seeming joy of their lives.
Is that one skimming money at the savings and loan? Is the real reason their busy son, Charles, never seems to come home anymore because he is doing time in Moundsville for dealing drugs? Is Susan having problems conceiving not because of a medical problem, but because her husband's name is Sharon?
Why do we always seem to think the worst about others? Perhaps it makes us feel better to think that others have it just as bad, or even worse than we do? Or, maybe it is that the evil one plants weeds among our seeds. Sharp briars of thorns, placing a wall between the children of God and those who we could offer the hope of Christ and a way to a better life. Those thorns provide us with excuses for not stopping by their house for a cup of tea and some conversation. They fill us with fear and we don't offer to pray with them or hand them a rosary.
But the devil offers only false fear.
A few days ago, I was outside looking at the tulips and daffodils around our house, when I saw an old woman walking down the street. She was obviously having difficulty and I took the opportunity to give her a break. She had just gotten out of the hospital and her doctor had told her she needed to walk every day. She said she used to love to go on walks but her husband had passed away in the Fall and he had always gone with her. It just wasn't the same anymore. I offered to walk with her, telling her of my own health problems, but she "didn't want to impose." Nothing I could say would change her mind, so I bent down and cut a few flowers and handed them to her.
She oohed and ahhed over their beauty and thanked me heartily.
I told her not to thank me. I said to her that God loved her so much that he made those flowers just for her. That before she was born, He was warmed by the thought that one day when she felt sad, His created beauty would be there to put a smile on her face.
A genuine warmth glowed within her that I had yet to see and she asked me if I could be ready to walk with her every other day.
We walk together as much as we can now and I'm thinking of telling her about roses and the mother of God soon.
When I went in the house and excitedly told my mother about what had happened, the first thing she thought of was fear.
"What will the neighbors think?" she complained. "They're going to think you are some kind of religious nut case!"
"I sure hope so," I said. "That way they won't be alarmed when I pull out a rosary and give it to them."
The fear the devil sews as thorns among the beautiful flowers of God's grace seem so daunting at first until you realize that prayer is the most powerful weed whacker ever made.
Don't fear the person next to you. Don't expect to convert anyone. That's up to God. Just show kindness, compassion, love of your neighbor and do the little things. Offer to carry an old woman's groceries to her car. Give someone a ride home from the bus stop. Mow someone's yard for them or just listen to an old man's stories. Offer a smile to a scowl, a kind word to an insult or buy someone's coffee some morning.
Be Christlike.
Love everyone,
and fear not.
Chrissy
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| I've always been a mystic at heart... even before entering the church. The perceived veil has been paper thin in my eyes. Having a mystical view of existence does not make one automatically a saint, or even a good person, for that matter. It is merely the belief in a hands-on God who continues to speak to us in a physical way. Either directly or through His mother and the saints, he delivers messages to us when we seem to need them the most. Often He speaks to us through His beautiful creation. Everywhere that you look is proof that God exists and that He loves us.
We often look at heaven as this far away place where you go, in exile, after your days on earth are done. Both lovely places in their own ways, but never the twain shall meet. Instead, the mystic sees heaven in his or her dreams or perhaps, in extreme cases, in visions or near-death experiences, often changing the person in a fundamental way that words or vague concepts could never do.
On the other hand, we must remember that travel is reciprocal. With their heavenly Visas, Jesus, Mary, the saints and the angels appear to mystics to convey to them words of encouragement, direction and prophecy.
Why they choose to appear to some and not others is a matter for conjecture. On one hand, the object of the message is often seemingly holy, but just as often, they are spiritually weak and in dire need of reinforcement.
Perhaps it is both. Their outward appearance of holiness displays their great desire for goodness, purity and love of God. True holiness is the understanding that we are nothing without God. Our holiness is as rags without Him.
Even the greatest of saints were aware of their inadequacies and spiritual weakness.
The difference is that saints and mystics have learned that heaven and earth can be traveled to and from.
They know that our life here is but a breath, a trial and in the scheme of things, very small. Not in an abstract way, but in a way that makes material objects, personal relationships and physical well being unimportant.
Living a Christlike life is paramount. Nothing else matters.
When Jesus told the rich young man that he must give up all of his wealth to follow Him, he went away grieving. Of course for everyone, this is not literally true. We do not have to give all of our material possessions, but we do need to give up, or give away, all of those things in our lives that interfere with our service to our Lord.
Think about it. Is there something that you simply cannot even imagine your life without? If there is, and it does not hurt others if you give it up, you should think about sacrificing it for the furtherance of our lives for God.
When you can do this without a thought or regret, you go a long way towards becoming a saint and/or living a mystical life for our Lord.
May the Lord bless you and guide you,
with love,
Chrissy
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| Hello everybody! (Like there is still anyone left who remembers me or cares... lol)
I just wanted to let y'all know that I'm still alive, by the grace of God, and kicking. It's been a rough couple of months. My health has deteriorated somewhat and I can rarely get out to mass or anywhere else, other than doctor's appointments and treks to the store so that my mother can buy our needed groceries for the month. I generally sit in my SUV and say my prayers in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart as puckered faced protestants frown in disgust at my 'displays'.
"All that blamed criss crossin' of herself - looks like a danged old secret handshake or some kind of gang thing.... I seened them Puerto Rican ballplayers do it before they bat the ball on the TBS on cable down to the VFW with my husband Orville and he says it cain't be nothin' good what with all them illegal aliens doin' it all the time!"
"Whatever happened to her? She used to be such a sweet God fearin' young lady and now she's wearin some kinda net on her head on Sunday mornings, like she's just gonna get up and start a dancin' around a hat on the floor."
"I hear tell she's done gone crazy from that liver thing that ails her..."
"Liver?!! Well maybe she's drunker'n a skunk then? I hear tell them Catholics drink a lot! Why I seened a movie one time where this here Irish priest was a drinkin' whiskey right out in public!"
"... Sin juice is what it is!!"
"Naw... now that's because he was Irish not Catholic!"
"My brother bought a Catholic one time..."
"Bought a Catholic! You can't buy a Catholic!"
"Can so!"
"You're just about as plum silly as dog with glasses on!"
 "No! He bought him one of them there Catholic El Dorados when he was sellin' aluminum sidin' over in Calhoun County! Used to come over on Sunday afternoons and give us kids a ride down to the Dairy Queen for 'Nanner Splits"
"Well I heard she was on the welfare now so I don't think she can afford a Catholic car! Probably just drunk in the Wal-Mart parkin' lot! You gots to use yer head Imogene..."
"I reckon yer right... We ought to have the ladies temperance and knittin' club from the Antioch Baptist Church come over and pray the devil out'n her..."
"Yes we should, Imogene... she'd'a done it fer us, if'n we was in danger of hellfire and the devil's pitchfork..."
"I'll call'em up tomorrow..."
"Good... Now why don't Wal-Mart ever have Blue Light Specials when I'm here?!!"
"I heared they're runned by the communists!"
"Well no wonder then!"
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Miss you all,
love and God Bless you,
Chrissy
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