The fast to which I am referring is the fast from borrowed expression, officially launched on March 15. I realized I was not following traditional fast protocol by announcing it, so I didn’t write anything further about it until now.
I had some interesting experiences while undertaking this fast. For example, I was having a conversation with my 19-year-old son:
Me: My poetry blog is blocked in China.
Son: Why is that?
Me: Because I have a poem by dissident poet Li Bifeng there.
Son: Maybe if you took it down, you could get them to unblock you.
Me: The prophets were reviled, the prophets were persecuted, the prophets had all manner of evil spoken against them falsely.
Son: *silence*
You may think I was breaking the fast by sorta-kinda quoting Matthew 5:11-12. But left to my own devices, I would have said, “Jesus told his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.'” I would have been completely oblivious to my son tuning out to Yet Another Bible Quote. I would like to believe he didn’t tune out as much this time.
I seem to be putting a little distance between me and the person I quote when I quote someone. It’s as if I was saying “my little pud opinion is relatively irrelevant, but this Great Person said Something Important.” It has taken me quite a while to figure out that people in my world want to know more about what I know, and how I came to know it.
Mary Sagar is the person who challenged me to this fast. She challenged me to a fast of Twitter and online news before I attended the 2012 Encampment of the New Message from God in September 2012. This makes her 2 for 2 in terms of making successful fast recommendations to me.
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I am always fascinated by your statements and work. You have a brilliant mind Douglas and Mary S is an Angel. x
Mary Sagar here cringing (not really but ten years ago? Oh yeah). Laughing to know that in those days he did give us a clue how to get through to him: disable his “snappy comeback,” as in the way he used to say, “I don’t have a snappy comeback for that.
He shared this post with me lately, when I let him know he was free to let his brain auto-respond all it wanted, as far as I was concerned (I’m fasting from being so hard on that line).
I’m thinking quite a bit about what we are listening for when we pick up the voices of the culture, whatever our culture is, to broadcast, however far or wide our audience .