Such as is common to man or . . .

I am operating today with no sense of smell or taste! I can’t smell strong coffee, strong perfume, canned tuna fish, etc. This is on top of having a plugged nose. I ate my homemade minestrone-ish soup for lunch today without being able to taste a single item, including the ground hamburger, the freshly cooked green beans and asparagus, the potatoes, the garlic, etc., etc.

All day I've been reminded, as with many times through the years, of my former co-worker who I adored, Wanda, who had such bad allergies from keeping cats, on top of her many years of smoking cigarettes, that she seemed to have permanent loss of smell and taste.

I asked her, "What keeps you interested in food?" to which she responded, "I go on texture and memory."

I came down with a cold last Friday night after not having a cold for over a year and it’s going through an unpredicted process.

When I arrived at work this morning, really zoned out from the unpleasant sleep, waking up constantly from a dried-out mouth and then coughing fits, my 28-year-old boss said, “You still got that?! You told me about that Saturday."

I said, “Yeah, I told you I came down with it Friday evening. I’m not someone who just recovers from a cold on a dime.”

*****

My symptoms today make me wonder if it’s really just the “common cold,” or maybe I’ve got the latest COVID iteration!

I can tell you with certainty that if I lose my taste for food, I’m going to be real unhappy, because I am someone who lives to eat rather than eats to live.

I honestly don’t know whether I ever had COVID or not. The same is true for my 87-year-old mother who I live with. We just assume we never got it!

We both got the first one-two shots of the vaccination, and then the first booster without going any further.

I knew from the outset that I wanted to do what was comfortable for my elderly mother since she was so generous to let me move in with her when I suddenly found out I had “no certain dwellingplace,” as Paul puts it, during the initial months of the big “lockdown” in 2020.

Basically, my landlord told me in a phone call during the initial lockdown (while I was staying with my mom) that he was going to sell the house I lived in, and since I was working for a school district and didn’t know when they would ever return to classes, I felt I had no other options.

I would have never dreamed that I would move to southern Ohio with just my mother as my steady companion, but that’s my reality going on five years now!

*****

Here’s a New Year’s Eve message from 2014 and will have a new article tomorrow for certain:

“If you’re willing to ‘spend and be spent,’ you’re willing to say then, ‘I’m willing to love you and I’m willing for you to take advantage of that because that’s my commitment,’ ” explains Jordan.

“And if you’re not willing to get there, you’re always going to live at a level that’s real shallow because it’s intimacy that ‘opens’ you. 

“David, when he was confessing his sin, said, ‘Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.’

“Paul writes in Colossians, ‘Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.’

“Give your loved ones permission to tell you the truth no matter what. You teach each other to lie when you identify areas that when you tell the truth, you get whacked.

“If you’ve taught someone to lie to you because they know there are areas where they can’t tell you the truth because of fear of punishment. . . . I don’t just mean physical; I mean psychological punishment; the shame, the rejection, the demeaning, the ridicule, the anger. They’d rather not tell you the truth, and then brood over it, than be open to you because of the reaction.

“Tell yourself, ‘It’s more important for me to minister to them than it is to be ministered to.’ Grace allows acceptance; it’s the only thing that does. With performance systems you’re always going to fail.

*****

“There are four negative interactions that will poison your relationship if you let them run rampant. I call them the Four Horsemen in reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who, in Revelation 6, go out and bring destruction in the earth.

“I can list them for you because they’re so common. It has nothing to do with anything unique about you. They’re common to your old sin nature and they’re typical strategies that NEVER work. They destroy; they don’t build up. And yet they are a part of our arsenal; almost instinctively by nature because our ‘taker rule’ expresses itself with them.

“They are: 1.) Selfish demands. 2.) Disrespectful judgments. 3.) Angry outbursts and 4.) Independent behavior. You’ll see them in any person; any Believer who’s in reversion.

“They’ll be making selfish demands. They want it their way. When they don’t get it, they make disrespectful judgments, blaming someone else. It will escalate into anger. And then it will seemingly resolve itself. It doesn’t resolve itself, but it brings a modicum of peace and withdrawal. 

“Instead of searching for mutually acceptable solutions, abuse wants to impose a solution to the other person’s disadvantage so we can have our advantage. And, friend, the only issue there is control. You just want to be in control—behavior, attitudes, opinions.

“Again, a perpetrator rarely acknowledges it. You hear all kind of excuses, all kind of justifications. But when you hear them, something that’s justifying one of those Four Horsemen—your ‘taker’ self starts talking you into believing that you have a right for it, you’re looking out for the interest of the other. You think, ‘Really they’re to blame anyway; I’m innocent.'

“If you’re the other person, just don’t believe that stuff. Just say, ‘By faith, I know that ain’t true!’ and don’t buy into them.

“Put off selfish demands. I mean, who wants to live with a dictator anyway?! Bossing you around?! Here’s a definition: ‘Commanding someone else to do things that would benefit you at their expense with the implied threat of punishment if refused.’ Do you do that?

*****

“As a way to solve problems, selfish demands sure make sense to your ‘taker rule.’ And if your (friend or loved one) is in ‘the giver mode,’ you know what they’re going to do? They’ll reward you because their rule is, ‘Make you happy even if it makes me unhappy.’

“So if you’re in ‘taker mode’ and the other one’s in ‘giver mode,’ WHEW! You’re going to get what you want, so demands look like they work. That’s WHY they seem to work so often! And they’ll work often enough that they’ll become a habit. And it’s a habit that’s almost impossible to break.

“So think about how do you ask others for favors? Do you just tell the other what you want them to do? Do you just order them? ‘You should do this!’ or do you say, ‘Could you do that?’ See the difference between ‘should’ and ‘could’? You’re just changing one word in your vocabulary. You think about how you do it.

******

“The instinct of making demands when you’re frustrated, and the habit of making demands even when you’re not frustrated, makes them real difficult to break. Now if your (friend or loved one) is in the ‘giver mode’. . . but what happens if they’re in the ‘taker mode’? Whoa! World War VI breaks out because your (loved one) isn’t ready to quit.

“They say, ‘You want what you want; I want what I want,’ and you go to war. But you know the fight that results won’t stop your ‘taker mode’ from making demands the next time. Why? Because your ‘taker mode’ lives by the rule, ‘I need to be happy, and if I’m not happy, make (the other person) make me happy,’ and you take whatever you need to take to be happy.

“So if I got to fight someone else’s ‘taker mode,’ well, then, ‘I just need to be a better fighter than they are,’ so I develop skills—not at solving problems, but at winning wars. You think that’s gonna work?! When it comes to fairness, you can never trust your ‘taker mode,’ so what do you trust?

******

“I suggest that in Philippians 2 there’s what I call a ‘Grace Policy of Joint Agreement.’ I’m going to tell you, you need rules to force yourself into confronting these things and making choices.

“Faith is an action you take out of a positive volition. It’s a positive choice and there’s time in your life when you need to have situations that force you to make choices so that when you come to that, you’ve caught yourself; you’ve checked yourself.

“The habits aren’t just mindlessly flowing through your life. ‘Boom, here’s a choice!’ and you can consciously bring yourself back under control. It’s called ‘a belt of truth.’ That girdle of truth Paul talks about where you take truth…the soldier’s robe would flow out but he put that belt on and got it all under control. But you can’t just carry the belt; you got to put it on and cinch it up.

“Philippians 2 says, ‘Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.’ WHOAH.’

“Proverbs 13:10 says, ‘Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is wisdom.’ So don’t let anything be done by strife or vain glory just to get your way. That is lowliness of mind.

*****

“Where’s your mind work? In your emotions or . . . ? What are you doing? You’re esteeming. You’re developing a value system that tells you how you think and how you make decisions. And what is it? ‘I’m going to esteem others better than myself.’ Now does that sound like the taker or the giver? Who is it really? It’s the new creature!

“But see how close the giver can be to that? But when the giver does it, why is the giver doing it? So he can feel good about doing good? When the new man does it, why does he do it? Verse 5: ‘Let this mind be in you which is Christ Jesus.’

“You see why it’s so much of a catch thing there? And the reason why that is, is when you fail, what does your new nature do? It doesn’t cast you into psychological guilt and shame and rejection. It says, ‘Wait a minute.’ You get objective guilt. You say, ‘I made a mistake; it was wrong and now I can fix it because the Cross has equipped me to.’

“You can successfully deal with failures under grace, where with the ‘giver mode,’ all the ‘giver mode’ does is what it did with Adam and Eve. It sends you into all the psychological guilt. Things that paralyze you and make you unable so now your ‘taker mode’ takes over because the ‘giver mode’—he comes to his/her rescue to say, ‘Come on, I’ll take care of you. I’ll make you happy.’

“And when you put off all that thinking process, it becomes, ‘I’m going to esteem others better than myself because that’s what Christ teaches me to think.’