Historically I've been the sort of penultimate multi-tasker; but now when too much is going on at one time I end out messing up somewhere or the other.
Last night before going to bed I got the hiccups. I haven't had them in a long time, since 2005-2006 when I got them occasionally. So I laid in bed last night waiting for the hiccups to stop before putting the CPAP mask on, and I evidently fell asleep with it on my lap. So I guess the fatigue overpowered the hiccups or something.
I ended out getting a bit later start today because of the disrupted sleep, and then I had an 11:00 physical therapy appointment. But about half and hour before I had to leave for that appointment Mom called. She's back in her own apartment again. I was going to send her a phone card so that she could call me from the rehab center, but I kept dragging my feet about it because I didn't know what to say to her considering some of our rocky conversations over the past 6 months or so. I told her I couldn't talk long, which was true. I had just finished my morning 45-minute stimulator and was sitting down to breakfast when she called. I still had to wash up to go too. At least it was a pleasant conversation, if a short one. I just can't deal with extra stress right now.
Then someone must have turned off the water, which I had trickling on my two best artichoke plants. They seem to like a lot of water and it's been hot and dry this week. I think everything's doing okay, but one of my young Canterbury bell plants really wilted pretty badly, so I tried to take care of them - my plants - when I got home.
At P/T I generally have been ending with laying on my back on hot pads and doing some stretches while laying there enjoying the heat. But today I started sweating, so I didn't stay on as long. I just took my temperature and it's only 99.1 though. I've been taking Aleve after it gets up to about 99.3 or so.
Anyway, I wanted to talk about something else, actually. I've had a little bit of education in Christian apologetics, which is ways to present arguments for the faith. One of the lines of logic in this process involves who we think Jesus Christ was. The theory is that there are basically three ways we can understand Him. He was either...
1) a liar
2) a lunatic
3) or who He said He was.
If He was a liar, that meant that He really knew that He wasn't God the Son, the Savior and the Jewish Messiah (etc.). If this was the case he was a great con artist, maybe akin to the band leader in the musical Music Man.
Being a lunatic would be like an insane person saying they were a poached egg or something. It would mean He really thought He was God and all those other things, but he wasn't.
If the last option is true, however, then we really have to take Him seriously and decide whether we are, individually, going to accept Him or reject Him as our personal Savior, which is, in brief, what He asked of people.
Before I move on in my discussion, I'd like to say that this might be a good time for you to consider which choice you think is right (and why, perhaps, too) and what you are going to do about it, if anything. As far as apologetics goes, there are a lot of other approaches to this, including historical evidences, archeology and other lines of logical thinking, but this is just one approach that I want to focus on here. So if you are inclined to not take Jesus Christ seriously, you might want to look at some other evidence. Here's one place to check this out more (I hope you can click directly to the link, but the last one I put here you had to copy and paste into the URL on your browser): http://www.apologeticspress.org/modules.php?name=Search&Terms=jesus+christ&x=9&y=3
So now we're taking this in another direction. I want to look especially at the second option above, about making claims out of lunacy. You may or may not remember that the Soviet Union misused psychiatry for it's political ends. Dissidents were declared "insane" and sent to and treated at psychiatric hospitals. Here are some links about this:
http://www.apologeticspress.org/modules.php?name=Search&Terms=jesus+christ&x=9&y=3
www.jaapl.org/cgi/reprint/30/1/136.pdf
http://www.sakharov-center.ru/museum/expositions/english/resistance-unfreedom-ussr/
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union
That should be enough to give you the idea of what I mean. In these instances, authorities wanted to control unwanted elements of society by subjecting such people to psychiatric treatment and thereby trying to re-educate them or keep them out of society and also malign them, saying these people were really crazy.
I researched Christianity in Communist countries with some (well, two, to be specific) of the leading organizations specializing in this field, and even published a couple things, either alone or jointly, so I have a little idea of what I'm talking about, even though I might be a bit rusty on it now as it's been a while.
This idea of insanity is quite powerful, and how it's used can have a significant impact for the good or for the bad. Would Jesus Christ have been considered insane by modern standards? I don't think so, but I think the Soviet Union would likely have classified Him as such.
One time when I was in Russia (by that time it was after the break up of the USSR) I was on a tram with a student of mine who happened to be a psychiatrist. I don't remember why we were on the tram together; maybe we just met up by coincidence or something. But I remember we were both standing on the tram holding on to the straps and he asked me point blank if I was homosexual, to which he quickly added that homosexuals were not classified as insane in Russia. I'm not homosexual, but I thought that was interesting about how he asked it and even that it was an issue that needed asking. I assume, from how he asked me that somewhere (or maybe earlier in the USSR) homosexuals are/were considered insane. Hmmmm.
I need to leave off for now, but this topic will come up again later, undoubtedly sooner than later.
Ciao,
Meg
