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Thunder

Posted onAuthorBenjamin Moore

It is with a heavy heart that I write these words: Mary Elizabeth Thunder has gone home. A true Saint has left us. I met Thunder back in 2007 when I was managing Woodside Trails. What had formerly been a school for mostly young men in the foster care system, had now become a place where many young men and women came to regroup and see what was next for them in their lives. My friend Bebe Gaines brought Thunder over to meet Melissa, my wife at the time, and me. We hit it off immediately. We talked about the 15 or so young men who were living on the property at the time, most of them she knew better than I. They had been out to Thunder Ranch, a spiritual community founded by Thunder some twenty years before, out in the brush between Smithville and La Grange, Texas, to practice Ceremony. As we talked about “the boys” and the issues we were dealing with, I mentioned Jesus. Thunder exclaimed, with her beautiful childlike enthusiasm: “Oh, I love Jesus.” There was something different about the way she said it from the way I had heard others say it before. She said it as if she were talking about someone she was friends with, and knew intimately, and indeed she did. Jesus for her was not merely a faraway deity she believed in, He was someone she walked and talked with daily. Thunder and I became instant friends. We talked all afternoon, and as I retold her about my recent re-dedication to the life of a Minister, I told her my story of how I grew up, the things I had gone through, and how, for decades, I had run away from my prior ordination as a minister. I told her about the long journey of forgiveness of those who had hurt me as a child, and especially of my father, who had put us kids through an arduous upbringing. I explained that I had forgiven every single person who had harmed me over the years, but I had still held on to a resentment toward God for the things I had endured growing up. I explained that at some point in the recent past I had made up an empowering story, and in that story I was still in the Spirit World, before I was born, and God and I agreed that I would be born into that exact family and experience those exact experiences so I could more effectively be of service to those I would minister to, in the future, who had also gone through hell in their childhood. Thunder said: “Oh, that wasn’t a story you made up. That was a Vision.” Thunder told me much of her story as well, and I had a sense that I had finally met someone who “got” me. I had a spiritual sister who knew who I was. And so began my friendship with Mary Elizabeth Thunder. A couple of Read More …

Keep seeking Him…

Posted onAuthor4BAdmin

Recently, a very good friend passed away—somewhat unexpectedly. She was a part of a community I love and participate in, and we are all a bit shocked and saddened. God has pressed upon my heart to write a few things I have learned about the nature of God, us, and His relationship with us, and share it with you. Jesus taught us that God is Love. He didn’t say God has love. He didn’t say God is love sometimes. He simply said: God is Love. Jesus was a master teacher, and He often used analogies to make His points. One analogy He used was our relationship with our children to bring understanding to God’s relationship to us. Since God is love, it stands to reason that He loves us, and His primary teaching is to teach us how to love. In fact, Jesus taught that the two great commandments were for us to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The only way for God to teach us to love is to create an environment where we can love—or not—because without choice, love is not love. If I force my children to love me, they are not free to love me, and any expression of love that is forced is not love at all. So for love to exist at all, it must have freedom as an environment. We live on the planet of free choice. That freedom of choice also extends to our freedom to make mistakes and to fail. Often, when someone suffers a misfortune, we might say, “If God was a loving God, He wouldn’t have allowed such and such to happen.” But because He loves us, and because He wants us to learn to love, He allows us to make mistakes and to suffer injuries to our earthly bodies. To not allow us to make our choices and to suffer the consequences of those choices would not be love at all! Have you ever had a well-intentioned friend tell you, uninvited, how to solve a problem you might have? I have, and I don’t like it. It feels like they think I’m not smart or mature enough to handle my own life. To further the analogy, imagine that, as a parent, you decided your child would never get bullied, mugged, suffer humiliation at school, fail a class, get run over, or any number of other calamities that happen to people as they go through life. “I know,” you might say, “I’ll just lock them in the basement. I will feed them on a regular basis. I will require them to exercise the appropriate amount each day. I will make them tell me they love me. I will never let them leave the house so bad things will never happen to them.” This would be the worse form of parenting imaginable. It would be child abuse, and children raised in such an environment would be freaks. Likewise, Read More …

2015: My best year ever.

Posted onAuthor4BAdmin

Ok, people, listen up. I’m gonna tell you about 2015. On the one hand, it was the toughest year I’ve had in a long time. Maybe ever. In April, I lost my mom, followed by my good friend Justin a week later. (Justin, one of my dearest friends, as gentle as a man could be when he was sober, had gone back out and gotten himself killed.) The next week, my car got struck by lightning, and that weekend I had to evacuate due to flooding. In June, I had soreness and redness on my abdomen, went to the doctor who took one look at it and practically pushed me out the door, telling me to get to the ER ASAP. She didn’t even take the time to charge me. What followed was a surgery, which didn’t fix the problem, five more trips to the ER followed by two more surgeries and two events that I call cut-opens, where the surgeon reopened the wound that he had already sewed up. Right there in his office, with me watching. In September, I finally went home for good, followed by six weeks where my injury was not healing. These were the darkest days, during which time I had one episode where a green fluid started leaking out of my wound. About a pint of it. And another midnight episode where I started shooting blood out of the injury. I also experienced dark, frightening hallucinations caused by the medication I was on. This was the period where I was re-opened twice. I was evacuated a second time due to flooding. Finally, I had had enough. I asked God to please either heal me or take me home. The next day, I began to heal. After getting back to work four days a week, our company had a cut-back and I went back to working two days a week. Two weeks ago, we lost another dear friend in my Twelve Step community. On the Spiritual growth side, Mom’s passing was a miracle. Her funeral was a celebration of her and her life. As I grieved her passing, I reexamined my own life. I measured it against what she taught and showed me about love and life. I acquired a new sense of who I wanted to be. During my illness and recovery, I experienced waves of love and support from my Twelve Step community, my family, the company I work for, my friends and my community at Landmark Education. Way more than I ever deserved. Way more than I ever imagined could come my way. I was unable to do the minutest things for myself, and you helped me in every way possible. It took me being completely helpless to understand how much you love me. You blessed me financially when I had no income. You gave me rides to the doctor and to my Twelve Step meetings when I couldn’t drive. You did my laundry, bought me groceries, picked up my medication, cleaned Read More …

How this all began…

Posted onAuthor4BAdmin

After serving in WWII, my father came home, married my mother, and settled down to work the dairy farm carved out of a larger parcel of land owned by my grandfather—land that had been passed down through my family all the way back to the Revolutionary War when it was awarded to my direct ancestor, Nathaniel Moore, for his service to our new nation. This is where my parents had five of their children, and this is where I was born. But all was not well on the home front. Apparently, Dad had returned from the war a troubled man—a man looking for answers. He turned to the Bible; and one night, he had a dream. He found himself in heaven. The next night and the three nights following, he had the same dream—and each night, he discovered new wonders. On the fifth night, he asked, “God, this is really beautiful, but what does it have to do with me?” The dream abruptly ended, and Dad was left longing for the peace he had experienced in his dreams. So Dad decided to go to seminary school in a place called the Texas Soul Clinic, a dry, dusty boot camp for future missionaries in the West Texas scrub. He sold the farm for about a third of its value and built out a 1939 IH Metro step van (complete with teardrop headlights). He added a living area replete with bunk beds and a five-gallon grease can we called “The Pot” and used as a bathroom. Then Dad loaded my mom, us five children, and our dog Pepper into our new home, and off to Texas we went so that he could become a missionary. Dad was not well received at the Soul Clinic; he was brilliant and arrogant and loved to argue, and soon he was asked to leave―before he could get his diploma. Stubborn and not given to conceding defeat, Dad decided he had learned enough doctrine and understood “the truth” better than anyone, so with no financial support other than what my grandmother and two uncles could give him―about $175 a month―Dad struck out on his own with our family in tow. We went to Mexico….