Posted on 12/09/2007 12:49:26 PM PST by aomagrat
Edited on 12/09/2007 12:59:09 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
[I waited 45 seconds and actually posted something substantial--Ed.]
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — At least four people were shot outside of a Colorado Springs church on Sunday, but it was not immediately known whether the shootings were related to an earlier shooting about 70 miles away, authorities said.
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
I have found some of the blog items I was looking for but not all, by any means.
I want to reiterate . . . my goal is prevention and learning.
I have no desire to bash the parents. In virtually all respects . . . it’s not a critical issue to me at all whether the
PATTERN THAT the son reported/alleged and that APPEARS to be the case in this situation proves out in all details or not.
The EVIDENT, APPARENT PATTERN is instructional with great potential for preventing unnecessary other such family traumas. It is so crucial on that score, that I risk ire and offense in the interest of PREVENTION of further such cases.
We could talk about the pattern being hypothetical from any combination of several to a fair number of data points provided by the son—regardless of whatever degree of “objective reality” the son’s assertions later prove out as.
I personally believe there’s a lot more substance to some of his allegations than some of you seem to believe. But that’s just a hunch, a belief born of a lot of experience in such matters. It doesn’t really matter that much, to me.
The essential thing is to do EVERYTHING WE CAN to help prevent other families from having to go through such trauma—INCLUDING THE PARENTS.
I happen to believe that’s worth a few bruised egos, embarrassments and humiliations . . . and I know a LOT about all that from personal experience. I’m not the calloused unempathetic dork some hereon seem hell-bent to construe me as.
I don’t know when I’ll be done with my search and commentary. I have several pages of excerpts from his blogging so far. I’m searching for 3-4 more specific tidbits I remember but haven’t yet found.
Cheers.
The second statement came after the Murray's released an initial statement on Wednesday morning. That statement is listed in full below:
[FIRST]STATEMENT FROM RONALD & LORETTA MURRAY PARENTS OF MATTHEW MURRAY
Out of respect for the grieving families of the victims of this unthinkable tragedy, our family will not be making any statements to the press until funeral services for all the victims have concluded. Our thoughts and constant prayers are with the families of Stephanie and Rachel Works, Phillip Crouse and Tiffany Johnson as well as those who were injured in the shootings. We also are praying for the congregations at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, home of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), and all of the dedicated young people at YWAM.
We are lost in grief as we prepare to bury our beloved son, Matthew. We loved Matthew with all our hearts, and we are groping for answers as we try in vain to understand the events of last Sunday. We pray that God will be with our family through the days and weeks ahead and that He will also be with the families of those who have died and those who were injured.
Our deepest gratitude goes out to those who have offered their love and support through this very difficult time, particularly our fellow parishioners at His Love Fellowship Church and the leadership at New Life Church and YWAM. The congregation at His Love Fellowship Church held a prayer service for all the victims last night. We were deeply moved by that. More than 100 people gathered to pray for the victims. We asked that the service be opened with the following scripture passage and it was read by Philip Abeyta, pastor at His Love Fellowship Church and Loretta's brother-in-law:
First Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 1-13:
If I can speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but am destitute of Love, I have but become a loud-sounding trumpet or a clanging cymbal.
If I possess the gift of prophecy and am versed in all mysteries and all knowledge, and have such absolute faith that I can remove mountains, but am destitute of Love, I am nothing.
And if I distribute all my possessions to the poor, and give up my body to be burned, but am destitute of Love, it profits me nothing.
Love is patient and kind. Love knows neither envy nor jealousy. Love is not forward and self-assertive, nor boastful and conceited.
She does not behave unbecomingly, nor seek to aggrandize herself, nor blaze out in passionate anger, nor brood over wrongs.
She finds no pleasure in injustice done to others, but sides with the truth.
She knows how to be silent. She is full of trust, full of hope, full of patient endurance. Love never fails.
But if there are prophecies, they will be done away with; if there are languages, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be brought to an end.
For our knowledge is imperfect, and so is our prophesying;
But when the perfect state of things is come, all that is imperfect will be brought to an end.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, felt like a child, reasoned like a child: when I became a man, I put from me childish ways.
For the present we see things as if in a mirror, and are puzzled; but then we shall see them face to face. For the present the knowledge I gain is imperfect; but then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And so there remain Faith, Hope, Love--these three; and of these the greatest is Love.
Services for our son, Matthew, will be held later this week and will be private services for family and close friends.
Thanks.
I just read that via a Denver Post set of links.
Beautiful. As it should be.
Thank you for that post and the link. You were right about needing tissues. But even though it's tragic, I just know that somehow God can use this incident for something good... From listening to one of the tributes (for Tiffany Johnson, from her friend) it sounds like maybe her parents aren't believers (I don't know ) and maybe the words from the friend, about how Tiffany always prayed for them will have an effect on them, and Tiffany's prayers for her family will be answered.
It was also good to see the love and forgiveness displayed, towards the Murray family and that the families and injured victims already forgave Matthew Murray.
Like I said, I hope that somehow some good can come out of it, and I know that that is something God does.
And . . . sadly . . . some very good, very well intentioned Christians . . . didn’t do all they might have done. And, no doubt, some of them did dreadfully in handling him.
As more news comes out, your assertion looks less and less true. Earlier this evening, I posted a link to a new story today that told how a family tried hard to help MM, even offering to intercede with YWAM on his behalf, but were turned down flat. They told how they tried hard to love this self-tortured, mentally ill young man, but were rejected.
And now, yet more stories are coming out, of people trying hard to help him, but getting rejected as well. This time the story is of a psychologist connected to the ex-Pentecostal forum who did her part to help, to no avail. This is the news article: FBI got tip warning them about gunman
But before I give the excerpt, I just want to say that I am starting to see a pattern here.
What I see is a young man drowning in an icy pond, screaming for someone to save him. Passerby after passerby throw him life preservers. But he rejects each life preserver, and continues screaming for someone to help him.
After he finally drowns, a new crowd comes along, carrying a giant finger - the finger of blame - and point it at all the people who threw him life preservers.
Here now is the excerpt:
Seven months before the shootings, Marlene Winell, a former psychologist, heard of Murray's postings on an anti-Pentecostal Web site. She posted a message publicly to him writing, "I can see that you are in a great deal of pain and I'd like to invite you to contact me."
"One of your readers has contacted me to express concern, and I'd like to be helpful if I can. People do care about you and there is hope."
Winell, who spoke to 9Wants to Know Tuesday afternoon from San Francisco, says she wishes she could have helped Murray.
"This was a person who was definitely in a lot of pain," she said. "I simply invited him to contact me because I can understand when someone is experiencing these feelings they are very intense feelings."
Murray responded to Winell's postings saying, "I've already been working with counselors." He also wrote, "It's so funny how many people want to help you and love you and counsel you... when there is money involved."
! ! ! ! Notice he didn't just connect "money" with "counsel". He also connected "money" with "love". He seems to be saying that he actually thought people who were trying to love him were somehow expecting money out of it! It's like he had some kind of magic eyeglasses on that depicted every person in the world as a prostitute.
I am confident there will be more stories like this coming out in the near future, for as long as the story is still getting airtime, and until the next major news story makes this "yesterday's news" and it disappears. I hope before that happens, there will still be time for more examples to reach the public eye of Christians who tried their best to help him, but failed. Not because they didn't try. But rather because their best, no matter HOW good their "best" might be, would never and could never be good enough for this young man.
It appears I’m not communicating very effectively.
I’ll try again.
1. I believe that his parents . . . more or less . . . especially as he got older but probably to a large degree all along the way . . . did the best they knew how to do—both parents . . . consistent with the priorities they saw fit to devote themselves to.
2. I believe that a host of friends, associates, pastors, Christian workers, leaders did more or less all they knew how to do to help this young man.
3. I believe SOME of the Christians in his path were more hypocritical than his sensistivities, perceptiveness, brightness well tolerated and that his rearing left him with few to no intellectual or emotional coping strategies to handle such, to him, glaring contradictions.
4. I believe his parents also, from his perspective, delivered to his daily life SOME glaring contradictions that he was ill prepared and unwilling to deal with constructively.
5. It MAY WELL BE—hard to say at this point—but it MAY WELL BE IF 10% OF HIS BLOG ASSERTIONS have objective reality, validity . . . that SOME of the Christian leaders/workers in his network were exposing him to extremely glaring contradictionis that at some point increasingly ENRAGED him.
6. It MAY WELL BE—hard to say 100% emphatically—that if 10% of his blog assertions have objective reality, validity, that SOME of his parents’ ways of handling him similarly exposed him to extremely glaring contradictions that primarily served to enrage him AND leave him FEELING UTTERLY HOPELESS.
7. The first 18 years or so of my life was maybe 40-60% as rough on those scores as his and in somewhat similar ways though not as intense or comprehensively so. But many of his statements about such things, I could have made and did make—to God . . . rarely to people as there was no one who knew what to do with me; no one who seemed to understand.
8. Thankfully, God was my only hope. I slept often with the Bible as a teddy bear. I had clear demonic assaults against me that I had to wrestle through more or less alone.
9. My mother was an expert at D*MNED IF YOU DID AND D*MNED IF YOU DIDN’T DOUBLE BINDS. The exasperations that kind of crazy-making causes are off the scale extreme. I understand his feelings. Reading his blogs—it is very easy to get inside his skin.
10. YES he was immature. Yes he was awash in a sea of deliberately delicious self-pity. Yes he was clearly demonized. Yes he wallowed in intensely thick waves of RAGE.
11. Yes, he was caught in many catch-22 Gordian knots. I know what those are like. I used to be awash in more than a few myself. I desperately sought anyone who could offer a ray of hope. I tended to get virtually only spiritual platitudes that I’d already been over backwards and forwards 100’s of times myself.
12. Like him, I read voraciously seeking any ray of hope, any path, any trail out of the myriad of seemingly hopless double binds and catch-22’s. The isolation and emotional pain was absolutely excruciating day in and day out for virtually all of my first 18 years. My step-dad later told my double cousin that one of his deep regrets was that he did not provide for me a safe place.
13. When I didn’t cut my toast one breakfast, dad took his belt to me resulting in my ending up at trampoline in Jr High—the only thing I dared go out for given a host of insecurities—the coach asked me where the whelts had come from. I told him. He looked very angry. I assumed it was at me for my disobedience. I learned 10-15 years later he was angry at my dad. Just knowing that would have been a tremendously big log in a very painful hurricane. I dropped trampoline the next week or two.
14. My Jr High Principal told me I would be in prison before I was 18 or 21. I forget which. He told me that rather inexplicably after an English teacher took me to his office after a bully, out of the blue, threatened to beat me up with his buddies. In those days I was afraid of my own shadow.
15. I have found for at least 50 of my 61 years that most honest, earnest Christians are well meaning and caring to a point. But few have the courage, the spiritual stature, the tenacity, the energy, the time, the understanding, the discernment and persistence to go the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 10th, 25th mile when necessary. I would guesstimate that those rare Christians are one in 100,000 or so. It is very easy for someone like Murray to fall through even caring Christian cracks.
16. Once even in my adult years, in the midst of another long dark night of the soul, I found THE GOD OF ALL COMFORT by Hannah Whitall Smith. I seized on it and started reading eagerly. I sure needed some of God’s comfort instead of seemingly so much harsh discipline. Hannah relates how in her youth/young adult years, she had gone in great excruciating despair to a grandmotherly wise old saint. Hannah had poured out her tale of woe and despair and the grandmotherly saint had only said “Ah, yes. AND THERE IS GOD.” Then changed the subject. This happened several times. Hannah was MORE despairing, exaperated and a bit angry. She slowly learned that the fact that GOD IS, makes all the difference. But she not no emotional comfort from the saint. I ended up furious with the book and for a time, a bit more furious with God.
17. SOME SPIRITUAL TRUTHS are not well or easily apprehended intellectually. THEY SEEM TO BE TRANSMITTED ONLY AND CERTAINLY ONLY EFFECTIVELY IN THE CONTEXT OF A CARING, BONDED, DURABLE ONGOING, LONG TERM—GOD-WITH-SKIN-ON (as the little boy said) RELATIONSHIP.
I’m going to post this before my computer crashes again.
CONTINUING . . .
18. Even after being ‘forcably’ hauled back across the Pacific to help dad care for my mother with Alzheimers . . . more than a few times, she, in her typical teeth gritted, locked jaw expression seethingly declared that she wished she could [literally] kill me right then and there for daring to speak to her in a tone of voice she construed as disrespectful. Sometimes it was because I’d said no to some outrageous Alzheimer’s demand of hers. But what a flood of emotions that could sometimes trigger. What memories. Even after all the group work, individual work, prayer, deliverance . . . what buttons mothers can still sometimes at least tingle a little.
18. Thankfully, my mother was EVIDENTLY, REPORTEDLY not AS comprehensively driven to censuring so much of my waking moments. I was given quite a wide range of latitude within some basic sensible limits. My trauma was more the extreme existential, emotional, intellectual, spiritual isolation—coupled with a LOT of emotional abuse and no small amount of physical abuse. NO, I do NOT think all spanking is abuse. In spite of all the intense Christianity around him, Murray also felt extreme isolation—and trapped in it.
19. MATTHEW MURRAY DID NOT come out of the womb with his rage, feeling caught in impossible double-binds etc.
20. Someone has a super quote from C.S. Lewis. Have noted it on one of these threads. Won’t try and track it down now. But essentially it says that the woe is greatly multiplied when the watchers and conformers are doing limiting things to us for our own good. That sure seems to be the case. Shrillery comes to mind.
21. Certainly Shrillery is 180 degrees from the values of Matthew’s family. But the CRUSADER mentality is, SEEMINGLY, EVIDENTLY, APPARENTLY there. The idea is EVIDENTLY there that one can coerce, demand, force, batter, seduce someone into perfection. Doesn’t work that way.
22. LOVE IS SEEDED, INFECTED-INJECTED by wonderful little drops of sacrificial caring . . . occasionally by throwing someone into the deep end of a pool of thick sacrificial caring.
23. I wonder how many of those Matthew experienced. Probably some.
24. But EVIDENTLY, REPORTEDLY, APPARENTLY, the screaming DEMANDS to CONFORM TO IMPOSSIBLY PERFECTIONISTIC CRITERIA were much more pervasive; always present; always excruciatingly requiring hoop jumping by him that had long ago ceased to be meaningful; ceased to make ANY sense, TO HIM.
25. And, EVIDENTLY, REPORTEDLY, APPARENTLY, the freedom to fail and still be/feel cherished, treasured, understood, valued, close . . . was nonexistent . . . AT LEAST FROM HIS PERSPECTIVE, HIS REALITY.
26. And all this amidst folks who are more or less constantly preaching and teaching about the LOVE OF JESUS. While behaving at least at some level to some degrees unlovingly in glaringly contradictory ways.
27. Given his sensitivities, he’d have felt each lack as a direct deliberate stab regardless of whether there was the slightest truth to it being so, or not.
28. Someone has mentioned a mentor. I think had Matthew had a powerful but powerfully gentle Walter Brennen grandfatherly healthily affectionate saint of a figure to take him off to a farm some where at a critical age . . . and keep the boy by his side day in and day out . . . teaching him painstakingly the priorities of the Christian life and how a walk with Jesus really works in the nitty gritty of the real world . . . he might have made it. But what a saint and what an incredible intellectual and SPIRITUALLY POTENT person the grandfather figure would have HAD to have been.
29. When EVERYTHING is a heaven/hell issue, NOTHING IS. Instinctively, Matthew seemed to sense that. That probably contributed to utter despair early on in his life. Kids are not designed to be perfect at any age and certainly not at an early age and certainly not hyper-sensitive, hyper-perceptive kids.
30. When one is relentlessly, ???RUTHLESSLY??? pressed 24/7 to conform to a hopelessly high standard of perfectionism
AND IN THE MIDST OF SUCH CATCH-22 PRESSURES
one also observes the dispensers of spiritual truth and grace falling so chronically short of that same standard in a long list of ways . . . it’s not a prescription for wonderfully enlightened and comfortable spiritual growth. Rather the opposite, as his life demonstrates.
enough, for now.
BTW, am still having trouble finding the 3-5 lines of Matthew’s blogging text that talk about his mother . . . and walking out the door of his bedroom . . . if anyone knows where that can be found, please let me know.
I’m a bit weary at reading all his dreary stuff at the moment. Not sure when I’ll finish the task. Hopefully within 48-72 hours.
Sorry!)
= = =
LOL.
And you want me to think of you as believable?
SPUNKETS HAD THE CS LEWIS QUOTE on his home page:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C. S. Lewis
That may be true under normal aspects, but just like in the case that you spotchecked/tried to analyze..the 'troubled one' has to be honest with himself, others etc., in order to receive help. Flat out lies etc., in her case, burned every bridge she had with friends and family. So I have to disagree with some of the assumptions here. Human beings will never be perfect in this lifetime, so therefore, parents, family members, and children will have flaws. That is why we have the bible in the first place--a guide for living for sinners. The mental health community would prefer to not utilize religious resources in helping kids because of its biases etc.. So, IMHO ...(and this is not meant to offend those who work in that field), mental health manuals etc, are more of a humanist response to spiritual problems. To leave God out of ones healing process....is not a good thing.
The norm is sin, and the reaction to either teen and/or his/her parent depends on genetics, upbringing, common sense, desire to succeed/better oneself, and learning from mistakes among other factors. There is no way anyone can automatically assume that a troubled teen/young adult is 'messed up' because of the father. There are way too many factors involved.
Admitting/acknowledging/accepting that sin plays a huge (or even the main) role in the human psyche/self (aka soul), will help understand that some people (sinners as the common denominator) need spiritual help in conjuction with counseling etc.. to make the spirit stronger than the soul(let alone medical investigations...automatically assuming that psychiatric drugs is the answer is a terrible thing) If a person needs a drug to help maintain a sense of normalcy at the same time he/she is being medically investigated..meaning, searching for health issues that cause bizarre behaviur...I don't see anything wrong with that. But just declaing someone "mentally disturbed", throwing pills at them, and sending them on their way...is IMHO, is the improper way to treat, analyze and investigate the causations.
But, sinners being as they are..and the clear fact that spirituality and medical issues are ignored in the mental health field, tells me that we still have a long way to go before the "right" tretaments are available.
Sadly, secular meditation, secular or even eastern yoga is more of a treatment suggestion than say, praying, reading the bible etc.. In the secular treatment the girl had that we discussed before.... guess what was discouraged; Christian based treatment ideas/plans/help.
I think you make many good points.
Thank you so much for posting that..I haven’t seen the statement. Aside from tears that it brought, it provided a perspective about love that we needed to hear.
Thanks for the ping!
What would have happened if there were not uniformed Police Officers I just received an email from a good friend of mine who attends
Baruch HaShem
"New Life Church" She said she noticed uniformed Police Officers
in the parking lot while entering the 11 AM service and leaving afterwards.
directing traffic before and after the services?
GOOD QUESTION.
He may have entered when there was 7000 people in the church.
yup. much more horor possibly.
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