A Voice of Hope

Mark 5 - Shedding the Mantle of (my) Shame

A woman in the crowd had suffered for twelve years with constant bleeding. She had suffered a great deal from many doctors, and over the years she had spent everything she had to pay them, but she had gotten no better. In fact, she had gotten worse. She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe. For she thought to herself, “If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.” Immediately the bleeding stopped, and she could feel in her body that she had been healed of her terrible condition.

Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked,“Who touched my robe?”

His disciples said to him, “Look at this crowd pressing around you. How can you ask, ‘Who touched me?’”

But he kept on looking around to see who had done it.

Then the frightened woman, trembling at the realization of what had happened to her, came and fell to her knees in front of him and told him what she had done.

And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. Your suffering is over.” -- vs 25 - 34

There's a saying: "act your way into feeling." For the longest time I didn't understand that phrase. I thought it encouraged deceit. Over the last year I've begun to truly apprehend what it means; I think I get it now.

I may not always feel forgiven; I may not always feel free from shame. But that doesn't change the fact that I am. I touched the hem of His garment and I have been made whole. That is the Truth that God speaks. I am free. So in those times that the feeling isn't there, when my emotions belie the Truth of who God says I am, I still need to act "as if" -- as if I felt it, as if I am convinced in the depths of my soul it is True. Because the fact is, it is.

I can choose whose voice I listen to; I can choose what I will believe. I never knew that before this year. I don't have to remain covered, buried, in the shame that has so enveloped me all my life just because I feel shame at this moment. I can choose to believe something different; choose to do something different.

So today I am. Right now I will. I will believe the Truth even though I don't feel it. I will act my way into feeling.

These Nicole C. Mullins songs have been on my iPod since I got back from Women of Faith last month. God used them to speak His love and infinite grace to me. They truly tell the story of my life; my shame-filled yet blessed-beyond-measure Life. And God continues to use them as reminders of the Truth of who I am in His eyes; and encourage me to keep acting my way into feeling. I thought I'd pass them along to you today, in case you need encouragement too.

One Touch

I Know My Redeemer Lives 

Call On Jesus

Let There Be Light!

I just got home from an incredible weekend at Women of Faith in Atlanta. This year's theme was Infinite Grace. We cannot go anywhere or through anything in this life that His grace does not cover us and give us strength to endure. He gives us exactly what we need when we need it.

Patsy Clairmont told this story about how God's grace breathed courage into a friend of her's. As I listened I thought about a dear friend of mine who is courageously waging her own war with breast cancer right now. I pray that God speaks these words over her life as well. Let there be Light!

Stalled, But Not

I haven't been very good at posting lately, have I?

I'm struggling with all the things blowing around in my mind, heart, soul. It's difficult enough to wrap my mind around them all, but to try to put them into words; well, that's nearly impossible.

I feel stalled at the moment. Stalled in my schoolwork, stalled in my inner life, and stalled here on the blog. An incredible tiredness has overtaken me and I find myself napping a lot.

I've been doing this intense work for a long time on my soul, my spirit, my heart.... whatever you may want to call that inner thing that determines our character, our point of view, our convictions, makes up who we are -- but that work got even more intense and laser focused about a year ago. I guess you can tell that a few months ago it really got difficult. So my life right now feels quite unsettled, confusing. I have a lot more questions than answers.

Yet I don't feel like I'm going in circles. At least not yet. I keep having dreams of driving up a steep hill fearful I'm not going to make it to the top ---- and while I know sometimes dreams don't mean anything, this is a definite metaphor for how I'm feeling in my waking life. I am going up a steep hill emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, and I'm afraid I won't make it to the top. But in the dream I always do, somehow, and that brings me hope for my waking soul. Some day I will make it; it's just a long, hard climb right now.

Part of why I've been silent here is because of all the questions and noise in my soul. I haven't been able to sort through my thoughts enough to put together a coherent post. But perhaps I'll try just posting the chaos and questions; perhaps that will help me sort through it all and find my way to the top of the hill.

So here's the first question: what do you do, how do you cope, when you seem to be perpetually exhausted no matter how much rest or sleep you get?

One Day at a Time

"If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don't you think he'll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I'm trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God's giving. People who don't know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out. You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.

"Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes." -- Matt 6:30-34

Sometimes life just gets away from me. Some of those times I feel like I'm trying to catch a bus that's already pulling away from the curb. But other times, like this week, I feel like I'm on a roller-coaster. I'm on the ride -- not running beside trying to get on -- which is good, but the thing is going so fast and looping around so much I can't focus on anything. Not so good. And even though I'm securely strapped in, I feel very much like I'm going to fall out. Or at least lose everything in my pockets.

Know what I mean?

I used to think the phrase from which I pulled the title of this post was trite and irrelevant. How wrong I was! It's in times like this week, with work and school and church and my own emotional and spiritual healing and recovery  all clamoring for attention -- all needing my focus, my time, my energy -- that I learn that the only way I can get through and still maintain my sanity is to live one day at a time. And sometimes it's one hour at a time; one minute at a time; one second at a time----trusting God to take care of the minutes, hours, days, even months, to come because I just cannot think that far ahead without going crazy with fear.

It's hard to surrender control of my future to God. I want to be the Master of My Own Destiny! The Queen of my own Domain! Yet when I look back over my life, I realize that I'm not such a good Master, and an even worse queen (unless we're talking Drama!); and the Destiny and Domains I chose just aren't all that. Even so, I struggle with letting go.

I know it's illusion. I know I can't really control my destiny or my domain. Oh sure, I can make my plans, and spin my webs, and work-work-work like a dog to make it all work out the way I want. But in then end, it's all for naught. I cannot control the world, the economy, the government, my church, my friends, my bosses, my co-workers or the dorks on the road. I cannot control anything but me: my responses, my actions, my words, and my thoughts. I cannot control the wind or which way it blows. I can only adjust my sails to catch as much of it as I can and point my boat in the general direction I want to go.

Yet I try. So hard sometimes.

How do I steep my life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions? How to I surrender control of things I'm so used to blindly insisting I have control over? How do I give my entire attention to what God is doing right now when so many other things are clamoring for my attention? The only way I know how is to surrender one thing at a time and live one day at a time, one minute at a time.

How are you?

TrueFaced

I just started reading a new book and already I'm all verklempt. So talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: True or False...

God wants to reveal himself to us in authenticity. Because one of God's dreams is that we would influence others far more out of who we are than out of what we do.

Discuss.

This One's For All the Girls Like Me

It's no secret I struggle, or that I struggle a lot and deeply. I wish I could be one of those amazingly together women who are calm in crisis, joyful in suffering and wake up singing with the birds like Snow White.---But then, none of you who are my friends would find me as endearing as you do right now, right? ;)

Truth is, I'm more like Lily Tomlin in "9 to 5" or Josie Grossy in "Never Been Kissed" than any of my Disney princess heroines. I once told someone I was about as feminine and at home in a dress as Whoopi Goldberg. I was thinking of her character in Ghost and in my mind seeing her walking down the street looking more like a drag queen than a real woman. That's how I feel when I try to play dress up and look all "sexy."

Recently I saw Whoopi in a comedy special on Bravo. She didn't look at all awkward in her own skin. Rather she looked completely comfortable with herself, her body, her femininity, her womanness. I Googled her image and came across this photo. She looks decidedly vulnerable and feminine to me, beautiful. I realized I've completely misjudged her as a woman.

Maybe I've misjudged myself too.

Tonight I came across  this post by Emily McGowin. She's a new discovery for me, and a blessing that I was in desperate need of tonight. My sexuality (apparently) took quite a beating at a very young age. It cowers in the corner most days and other days beats the living crap out of itself for merely existing. No, I'm not at all one of those amazing women who has it all together. I need to be reminded often that I don't have to be, that God loves me just the way and how I am, that, as Emily says,

"there is nothing in you that is inherently un-feminine or un-womanly. Being female, being feminine, is something very personal."

I needed to hear that tonight. I needed someone to celebrate my womanness for me because I just couldn't do it myself. Now I think I can, at least for tonight. Come celebrate with me, won't you?

This is for all you girls about 42
Tossin' pennies into the fountain of youth
Every laugh, laugh line on your face
Made you who you are today
This one's for the girls
Who've ever had a broken heart
Who've wished upon a shooting star
You're beautiful the way you are
This one's for the girls
Who love without holdin' back
Who dream with everything they have
All around the world
This One's for the girls

Ya-Ya Mothers & Daughters

UPDATE 11:50am: I'm more awake now that it's nearly noon, and I realized upon re-reading that I wasn't always clear, so I've added a few things. However, I left the weirdness just for kicks.

I ought to be in bed asleep at this hour, so if this seems ramble-y and weird, take that into account. I have to be a church semi-early to serve before first service, but I cannot sleep. I'm concerned about someone I love who is very sick. And I'm missing my mom pretty bad right now. "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" is on television. It isn't helping my state of mind, except maybe to give me another reason to cry.

Warning! Side note here that has nothing to do with the rest of the post. Read at your own discretion, or skip the next three paragraphs: I first saw this movie in the theatre near MLC in one of my many I-must-escape-the-pressure-cooker-called-"orientation" moments. I saw it with a friend who was debriefing a hellish three years overseas and also needed an escape. The irony that she came home from a team embroiled in conflict similar to the team I stepped into (unknowingly)and gave me strong warnings about teaming issues in the IMB, and then that I came home around the same time she was finally feeling better about the IMB and was headed back overseas (to the same island where I had lived, no less, but fortunately to a different team) after spending over a year struggling through similar anger and depression which I was just on my way into, AND (yes there's more and I can make this sentence much, much longer) that I moved into her old room in her sister's home for six months and discovered through conversations with her sister that we reacted in pretty much the same ways to our situations overseas---none of that has never been lost on me. ----Hey, you were duly warned....

I don't know why, but I have never been able to to watch "Divine Secrets" and not remember all of the above. It all just befuddles me that God had Catricia's and my paths cross at such key and similar points for both of us. In a way, it's our own form of the Ya-Yas; the single-women missionaries who've been wounded in battle by friendly fire and lived to serve again.

At any rate, the theatre where we saw "Divine Secrets" was absolutely packed with that wonderful brand of women found only in the South who, much to our California-girls amusement, howled and cackled their way through the whole thing. I think we laughed more because of the laughter from all the Southern Steele Magnolias in the theatre than from the movie itself. At certain points, however, I know there was not a dry eye in the house. ---End of random-y weirdness.

As women we spend waste so much time fighting with and about our mothers, blaming them for all our woes, for "ruining our lives" and leaving us with scars so deep that we fear commitment, love, abandonment, even life itself. Why do we do that? Its not like we'll get our childhood back, change the history of our family or give her a sudden epiphany of the pain she wreaked upon us. Nor does it do us much good to dwell too long on the negative and it certainly doesn't keep us from repeating all the mistakes she made. We may learn from some of them, but we only replace those with new ones of our own. It is so rare to meet a woman who doesn't have a sense of schizophrenia when it comes to her mother. I'm always amazed when I run across a woman who says she loves only adores her mom and thinks she's the greatest. I alternately wonder what she's been smoking and how long she will remain in denial, and seriously envy her for having such a glorious mom and wish I'd been born into her family. All of us, if we are honest, have a love-hate relationship with our mom, perhaps not as extreme or neurotic as Siddalee and Vivi but just as prone to wide swings of emotion. We fluctuate between wanting to be just like our moms and feeling disgusted when we hear her voice emanating from our lips (even those of us without children end up sounding just like our mothers at times and are always just as horrified as our maternal counterparts).

Don't get me wrong; I understand full well that our moms leave scars on us women that sometimes take a lifetime to heal. We are a product of our family of origin (whether biological or otherwise) and that family can leave us limping into adulthood with missing pieces and parts as well as huge scars that hang like ugly appendages around our hearts. But the truth of the matter is that while they may have affected who we were when we entered adulthood, we are the ones responsible for who we are now as adults. I can no more blame my mom for my adult choices to hide from love and to cultivate an extremely unhealthy fear of man (as in humankind) than I can  blame  George W for the price of the iPhone. But that doesn't stop me from trying.

I have alternately blamed and idolized my mom throughout my life, depending on where I was at the time. Neither image is truthful or fair to her. She was just a broken woman like me, doing the best she could and loving me the only way she knew how. Yes, I bear scars from when she missed the mark, but I am also the heiress of a vast fortune of blessings only my mom could bestow; a passionate love for people, an intimate and unique relationship with God and a deep conviction that God really does talk to me and that prayer really does change the world, among many others. I cannot blame her for who I have become; I can only understand how her own struggles impacted me as a child and choose to become someone no longer controlled by the past.

For all my blaming and idolizing and struggling with the scars left by her brokenness, I am who I am today in large part because of my mother. Because I both aspire to be like her and at the same time fight like hell to be anything but; because, for better or worse, the sins and the blessings of a mother are visited upon her daughters, to the fourth and fifth generations; because she was so determined to be different than her own mom and to right the wrongs she saw in her own childhood, and because God saw fit to bless me with this amazing woman as my mom and this woman with me as her "baby" daughter, I am, in all respects that matter most to God, my mother's daughter.

And I miss her. Sometimes, like today, desperately.

I miss her smile. I miss how she would sing certain instructions because she thought perhaps they'd be more palatable that way (they never were, but she always was). I miss her cold hand and creative use of them on my bare legs or tummy to get me out of bed in the mornings. I miss her Kleenexes stuck in her bra because "you never know when you might need one and these pants don't have pockets." I miss her calling me "Pau-Vic-Nee-Mary Lu!" (the complete, if abbreviated, list of her children). I deeply miss her laughter. She could light up a room just by walking in but she lit up the whole world every time she laughed. It was the most beautiful sound in the universe to me. I remember laying in bed at night and hearing her and dad's muffled voices through the walls as they talked on and on --their conversations were always peppered with mom's laughter and that was the thing that helped me let the stress of the day go more than anything else.

But what I am missing most right now is my mom's huge heart and wide open arms. Whenever anything was bothering, frightening or hurting me I could always run to her and she would hold me, letting me cry until all my tears were spent as she caressed my head and rubbed my back. Eventually I would find the energy to get up and step back into life, but until then, mom held me together.

Without my mom, my life seems diminished. I have to be a grown up now; I have to be the "strong" one, strong for myself and strong for others, even though I don't feel strong at all. I know my mom herself would be crying and hurting right now were she here, but it doesn't stop me from missing her and wishing with all my might that I could run back into her arms and cry till all my tears are spent. I wonder if she felt the same way at times.

Whisper My Name

I know God is always present, but sometimes I just really need to hear His voice whispering my name and feel His breath on my face. It becomes my cry.

Whisper my name
For I want to hear You
Whisper my name!
For I want to know You
For your sweet breath I need to listen
speak to me now
whisper my name, oh Lord

Humbled we stand in Your presence
So happy to stay close by Your throne
Walking each day in the glow of your mercy
So happy to gaze upon your face forevermore

Speak to me, Jesus! Press in on my spirit and make Yourself known. I need You now.

Whisper My Name written & performed by Jennifer Knapp To hear the song and see a cool video, go here.

 

Mirror, Mirror

There are times when what's going on inside me cannot be described or even understood. Times when emotions bubble up suddenly and then disappear just as fast, when my spirit seems to be chewing on something I cannot see, or remember, when everything in my neat little paradigm is tilted, shaken, demolished. The last couple of weeks have been one of those times.

I'm reading a book called, "Abba's Child" by Brennan Manning. A friend of mine read another of Manning's books, "Ragamuffin Gospel," and kept throwing the book against the wall every few pages. It profoundly challenged much of her paradigm of God, and is still today reshaping it.

I understand what she went through. I have yet to throw the book against the wall, but that's only from emotional paralysis. I predict sometime soon that will pass and the book will regularly sail across the room and slam into whatever wall is closest. It is challenging the core beliefs convictions I hold about myself and about God.

I've had a copy of this Norman Rockwell painting hanging in my room since I was about thirteen. The first time I saw it I recognized myself in it. I am, have always felt I was, that awkward little girl whose gaze drifts between the movie star in the magazine and my own  clumsy, decidedly unfeminine image in the mirror; dreaming, hoping, wishing, praying that I will one day look in the mirror and see the beautiful movie star woman staring back at me.

My mother looked like a 40s pin-up sweater-girl, complete with the large, pointy bosoms and curvaceous hips. Even with the gray hair and extra lumps of age she was stunning. I spent my childhood eager to grow up into what would surely be a body and face as radiant as my mom's. It never happened. My sisters are as fabulously beautiful and talented as our mom but somehow those genes skipped me. Perhaps there just wasn't enough left over. I am, after all, The Baby.

And there's another part of me I cannot escape: The Baby. Who made everyone's life difficult; spoiled, lazy, petulant, demanding, moody... the list goes on, but I won't bore you.

Yes, yes, yes, of course over two years of intense counseling have given me new "thoughts" to think about myself, new paradigms to try on. But none of them seem to fit. None of them seem real or truthful.To say I even want to believe them would be a lie. They are dangerous, frightening. I'd prefer to stay in my safe corner where I know; where my paradigms have stood the test of time and at least produce predictable results.

Which begs the question, why am I reading this book? This book that is driving me a little nuts, that I regularly want to throw against a brick wall or over a steep cliff. And now we are back to the beginning of this post, the bubbling emotions and internal stuff that cannot be described. The closest I can come - and it sounds schlocky to be sure - is that God's Spirit in me keeps prodding me, pulling me, and pushing me this direction. I could say no and push Him away, but the thing is, I don't want to. I like being with Him.

I've gotten glimpses of God's passion for me, His overwhelming, devastatingly wild mad love for me. I can't sit with it for long. It's too intense. It reveals every crack and deformity I have (and I have a lot!), and I have to run and hide. It's too unbearable. Its not that I don't want to be so close to Him; its that I cannot stand the intense heat of His gaze. He sees right through me and I find myself lacking. Severely lacking.

But I keep coming back. That kind of love is too compelling to stay away for long.

His love, which called us into existence, calls us to come out of self-hatred and to step into His truth. "Come to me now," Jesus says. "Acknowledge and accept who I want to be for you: a Savior of boundless compassion, infinite patience, unbearable forgiveness, and love that keeps no score of wrongs. Quite projecting onto Me your own feelings about yourself. At this moment your life is a bruised reed and I will not crush it, a smoldering wick and I will not quench it. You are in a safe place." -- Brennan Manning, Abba's Child

DNFTEC

Years ago, long before the creation of the World Wide Web, when the Internets was still an idea stirring in Al Gore's brain, I belonged to an online community established using General Electric's company mainframe.  GEnie had bulletin boards and chat rooms dedicated to people crazy enough to use a modem in their computer, dial in to a local node, and converse with people they didn't know in person about a vast array of topics. I used to hang out in the SFRT (Science Fiction/Fantasy Round Table) boards, mainly in the Star Trek topics.  Yes, I am a geek. This is not news.

At any rate, I learned an important principle during my time on GEnie, called DNFTEC. "Do Not Feed The Energy Creature." The principle is borne from the reality that there are certain people in the virtual world who feed off the negative energy of others. They are strengthened and invigorated through other's anger or frustration and through choleric exchanges with people even if they don't personally engage every stormy response. As long as they can invoke outrage and vexation to the point that someone responds in kind they are happy. To that end they intentionally "flame" a thread (create conflict) by bringing up hot-button topics or just plain picking a fight.

It works incredibly well. You'd think we humans would be smart enough to stay out of pointless arguments and debates, but you'd be surprised (or not) how quickly you can get sucked in by an Energy Creature. All they have to do is find the right button in your head -- or heart -- and, boom!, you are screaming mad and using words you thought your mom had expunged from your vocabulary way back in grammar school when she made you spend two hours with a lovely bar of Lava soap in your mouth.

It took me a while to get what it really means to "not feed the energy creature" but finally I understood. The only way to "win" with ECs is to just not play. Don't answer. Don't respond. Don't take the bait. Just let their comments hang out there alone where everyone can see their futility, their ugliness and even their cruelty.

It's taking me a lot longer to understand that perhaps the same principle applies to dealing with the ECs out here in the real world. But out here it's simply called "Healthy Boundaries."

I have just said a word that tends to set the Christian world on end. Boundaries, healthy or not, are so often vilified by Christians because they can appear to others, especially those prone to co-dependency, to be quite selfish, self-serving, and even unfeeling, mean-spirited and unChrist-like. We Christians are supposed to be open and loving, allowing others into our hearts, not closed and holding others at a distance. Boundaries too often sound much more like an electric fence or concrete wall than the God-honoring self-defining borders healthy ones really are. And indeed, unhealthy boundaries, often are electric fences and concrete walls that hold people at a distance. Or they are floppy, wet-noodle sort of things that move all over the place, never providing any real protection or consistency. I have friends who's boundaries are so large that you have to scale six huge stone walls, cross three very deep crocodile-infested moats separated by miles of tall-grass fields and remember on which side of the rickety drawbridge it's safe to step ("walk on the left side!") just to get to know them. But then they turn around and let the skankiest, cruelest people of the opposite sex right in to the center of their heart and let them rule.

Healthy boundaries aren't floppy or nearly that big (think more suburban neighborhood than kingdom). They are like picket fences with gates or backyard wooden slat fences just tall enough to protect but not too tall for neighborly conversation (think Wilson from "Home Improvement"). There's room for interaction  over the fence, and others can come and go into both my yard and my home. Yet who I am and what I allow/how I expect you to treat me are clearly defined and immovable. My gates can be shut and locked should you refuse to treat me with the kindness and respect I deserve. We can still have good conversation and friendship over the fence, you're just not allowed in to my private sanctuary places because you've proved I cannot trust you.

I'm still working on this whole concept of healthy boundaries and making it a reality in my life. I didn't grow up with them. I grew up in a boundary-less family where I learned that everyone but me has a "right" to define me. It's taking me a while to understand that's not at all the way God intended. I'm also discovering that until I define and build my healthy boundaries, I have a hard time respecting yours. I think this is why I have always had such a hard time not feeding the Energy Creatures.

Some people just need chaos/drama in their life. Have you noticed that? I don't get that - because I hate chaos. But there are some people I've run across in my life that just seem drawn to it and if they go very long without encountering it, they'll create it themselves. They love to suck you into their vortex of chaos/drama, tie you up in some argument and guilt you into apologizing and "reconciling." If it's not you this time, then it's someone else in their life, but you're still sucked into the drama through their constant recounting of their emotional stress and trauma.

What's wild is they seem to be at their thriving best through it all; as if all that chaos and drama brings out their strengths... or that the only time they can be who they truly are and feel good about themselves is when they are embroiled in chaos, drama or conflict. So they continuously sabotage and destroy the relationships and successes in their own lives to feed that need.

For years my co-dependent tendencies kept me from seeing that the chaos/drama/conflict in some friends lives was in fact created by that very person, and not just life getting out of control. Several years of intense counseling (at least it feels intense to me) and working to understand and change my own hurtful/harmful patterns has made me a lot more sensitive to the harmful ones in others. For this I both thank God and cry out to Him, "why???" Because now I can clearly see how some friends sabotage themselves on a regular basis. I desperately want them to stop but I cannot do anything about it.

I cannot just run from these people either -- though perhaps prudence would strongly advise it -- because I love them dearly. But I also cannot let their chaos continue to wreak havoc in my own life. So the only thing I know to do is develop healthy, durable boundaries that lets them continue on in their cycles of chaos as long as they so desire, but keeps the chaos off my lawn and out of my house. It sounds so simple. Doing it, however, has been the hardest thing in my life.

Online Energy Creatures can be ignored when they spew their drama, but EC friends cannot be. They get in your face and demand attention. Learning to walk away from arguments, to not perpetuate their drama by responding in kind; learning to say, "I'm sorry you feel that way" and mean it -- to truly be sad that they feel the way they do and not just angry that they refuse to listen; learning to state clearly how I expect to be treated and not treated, saying "this is unacceptable"; learning to guard my heart, holding these people at  an arm's length, even though I love them deeply, so that my heart and soul are protected from getting tangled up in their chaos and drama --- these tools are helping me. They are some of the pieces of re-setting boundaries and holding those boundaries as sacred, even in the face of hurtful accusations of selfishness. This, I think, is the real-life way to "not feed the Energy Creatures."