*pokes you guys with a stick* heyo, just dropping in to see if you guys are still around? -🪶

we're dying, squirtle -🦷

Also general school, lack of motivation to write, mental illness, and getting into other misc fandoms have been kicking our collective asses :’) -🍡

01/19/2018 DAB Transcript

Genesis 39:1-41:16, Matthew 12:46-13:23, Psalms 17:1-15, Proverbs 3:33-35

Today is January 19th. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is wonderful to be here with you today from the rolling hills of Tennessee. The global campfire is roaring as always. Nice steamy cup of Wind Farm coffee to my left, all the preflight checks are done, and we are ready to launch into the next day. So, we will pick up where we left off. We’re reading from the New Living Translation this week and that we have begun to follow the story of Joseph in our Old Testament reading from the book of Genesis. And the story of Joseph imitates our lives on so many levels, especially when we feel like we are experiencing some sort of injustice or hardship. And, so we will track with that story as we move through it over the next few days. Today, Genesis chapter 39 verse 1 through 41 verse 16.

Commentary:

Alright, let’s talk about Joseph for a minute. So, Joseph is Jacob's son by his beloved wife Rachel. Of course, Jacob's name was changed to Israel. So, Joseph is one of the first children of Israel. And Joseph has a brother, a younger brother, named Benjamin, and this is his only full brother. His other brothers are from different mothers. So, they’re his half-brothers. But Jacob, or Israel, is the father of all of them, all 12 of them. So, Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin. And, so, Joseph and Benjamin are all that Jacob has to remember the wife that he loved. So, he loved Joseph, and he favored Joseph, which made a bunch of jealousy among the other brothers. So, we know how the story goes. Joseph has these dreams that just inflames the matter. And, finally, Joseph is coming to see his brothers to report back to his father how they're doing. And they human traffic their own brother into slavery. Okay. So, terribly unjust. An injustice has been done to Joseph. And on his trip down to Egypt he has every reason to be bitter, angry, angry at his family, angry at God, angry at everything. When he gets to Egypt he's sold as a slave. So, Joseph becomes the slave of Potiphar. And, so, rather than brooding and being angry and being divisive and trying to escape, Joseph simply trusts God and does his best where he's at, which, fairly, quickly, puts Joseph in charge of everything that Potiphar owns. So, not a life of freedom, definitely he's a slave, but he has a lot of freedom, and he’s in charge of a lot, and he has a lot of influence. So, maybe he can make that work, except Potiphar's wife wants Joseph. So, he's a young, good-looking, well-built man. She sees this opportunity and she wants him, but he won't sleep with her. So, he's subsequently, falsely accused, and he goes from being a slave to being a prisoner in a dungeon. So, Joseph is doing everything right and things are only getting worse and that might sound familiar. You may have walked through seasons that felt like that. So, we have to ask ourselves, what is our response more in a season like that? Are we yelling at God and shaking our fists and jumping up and down and flailing around and trying to figure out in our own strength how were going to make this work out in our favor? That’s just not what Joseph…that’s just not how he responded. He kept a cool head in all of these circumstances that were pretty dire and completely unfair and he did not waver in his trust for God. Even in the injustice, his allegiance to God was unwavering and it gives us some things to think about. This story isn’t over. We have plenty to read in it and there's plenty of drama out in front of us. But right now, we can see that Joseph's response to complete injustice, like over the top injustice, is that his faith in God is unwavering and we’ll see where that road leads over the coming days.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word. And we thank You how every day, it brings up something in us. It gives us plenty to think about, plenty to learn, and we are. We are we are learning, we are drinking it up, and we invite Your Holy Spirit to continue just to till the soil of our hearts and plant Your word in it so that a vast crop of the fruit of the Spirit comes spilling out of our lives. And may what You are planting inside of us yield a hundredfold return for Your kingdom. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi. This is God’s Precious Gem in New Jersey. I’m just reaching out. This is the first time. I’ve been listening to the Daily Audio Bible about four months now. And I feel like it was time to reach out for prayer for my daughter. She’s been battling mental illness for a few years and she…my brother passed earlier last year…and she’s been spiraling down since that time and going as far as walking into the woods and falling asleep, then being picked up by the police with hypothermia. Anyway, she’s been having these really bad episodes. Finally, I had to do an intervention and have her picked up. And she was taken for an assessment and put on medication, but it’s having a weird effect on her. I pray for her every day but she started stealing from me, she said she cannot go outside because there’s too many people. She grew up in church but no longer goes. She says she’s __ or psychic and has all these weird beliefs, and that she hears all the voices in the world, people’s minds and thoughts. So, I’m asking for prayer for her because I feel like I can’t do this alone. Like I said, she started stealing from me now and she said she can eat regular food, just like boxed frozen foods. The medication is having a weird effect on her. I appreciate all of you and I pray along with you in the mornings after listening to the…you know…the readings and then the requests. I love the teaching. Thank you so much Brian. May God bless you. May He multiply all that you have and bless your family and children. I love you and just want to thank you. God bless you all. Bye.

Hey everybody. This is Pelham in Birmingham or Addicted to Christ. I was just calling to catch everybody up. The food truck suddenly closed and just blessed with finding a job quickly. The pay is much less. Not going to be able…no going…the budgets not working for the bills as the way they were when I was on a successful…a very successful business, but I been given a good position and things are going well but I’m…it’s a struggle…and you know...I’m calling in because the Scripture I was reading, ‘be alert in your sober mind because your enemy, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him standing firm in the faith because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of suffering.’ And as soon as I heard those words, all of you all came into my mind, like points of light across the world, and the sudden need to call and tell you all that I need help, that the Morris family needs prayer, that I need strength and wisdom and I need…I just need prayer…we need prayer here. My coworker Mary needs prayer. Her sister passed and she’s been having a hard time, her name, I can’t remember her name, and my other coworker, Lori, has a girlfriend, Amy. Amy needs prayer. So, anyway, I was just calling to catch you all about how things are going. I love you all and stay in the word. And I’m listening. I’m out here.

Hi beautiful DAB family this is Sonja from Tampa. I guess some calling a little bit more, well, I very seldom call, actually, but I wanted to thank all the beautiful people that are praying for my son Nathan whose 30 and is quite depressed. The response was unbelievable and I was so moved by my family, my extended family, that I just needed to call and just thank you so much for your kindness and your prayers. May God continue to bless this ministry. And I’m so glad that I finally took the time to give to this ministry and for those that haven’t, I beg of you to please give. It’s amazing what this community is doing. Thank you, Brian, and Jill, and China and everyone else. Love you and God bless you.

Father God, thank You for this new day. Thank You for what You’ve laid out for us. I pray Lord, that You’d be guiding our feet and guarding our footsteps where You’d want us to go. Father God there are many things in our lives that stress us out that are sources of anxiety and panic to us Lord. To some of us Lord it’s our workplace and what goes on at work and I pray. I lift up, Lord, I lift up our places of work to You and I commit those places to You. Thank You for those that are in employment Lord we thank You for what we have there. Also Lord, thank You for the opportunities we have to be shining lights in these places Lord. Father God, I pray that You would go before us each and every day into our workplace and just prepare that day for us, that would be able to be a blessing to our work colleagues, and allow them to be a blessing to us in turn. Father God, help us fix our eyes on You so when were faced with that daunting task or that daunting situation that we are really not looking forward to, we can see You in it, and You can guide us through it and break it down into something more manageable. Father God, You are so Sovereign, You are Lord, You love us, and You don’t give us anything that we can’t do. I pray Lord that You give us what we need to face this day and that we will be able to trust and rely on You. In Jesus name. Amen. Beloved by Him. __ . It’s Monday, 15th of January and, thank you guys you are all awesome, thank you so much for your prayers and your comments. It’s awesome being part of this community. Hope you have a blessed day wherever you are. Bye.

Yes. This is Sue calling from Kansas. I have a prayer request and a thankfulness. I have just started listening since the new year and so appreciate Brian’s strength and sensitivity in reading the Bible to us all. I love to listen and I appreciate the comments Brian gives at the end. I think they are excellent. I look forward, enjoy, and benefit a lot from the reading each day. The prayer request I have is from me and my ex-husband. I had to get away from my husband a year ago because he was always getting destroyed emotionally due to verbal battering. He divorced me and now I live in his old house that was awarded in the divorce. Please pray for me that my focus would be on Jesus and His life instead of my ex-husband in the memory of the hurtful destructive things he said and did. I forgive with my will every time I think of him and gradually the pain and disappointment is getting less and less. I’m beginning to understand why God allowed him in my life. I’ve had a bad habit in the past of resenting and not forgiving people. God has shown me where that was taking me. I realize my ex-husband nursed his resentment and hatred of people and God in the past to the point that his heart was full of hatred and meanness. He was a very unhappy person. That is where I was headed. Now I’m trying, every day without the Scripture, to not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of my mind. So, I with the help of the Holy Spirit in Scripture will prove how good, acceptable, and perfect the word of God is. Please pray for me that God will do a wonderful work in my heart and mind so instead of having defeated thinking I can see in the years to come an eternity that no good thing will He withhold from me as I walk uprightly. Please pray for my ex-husband too, that he will listen to the Daily Audio Bible and will realize his error and get sick and tired of having a hateful meaning heart.

Moving blogs + a reflection essay

tl;dr -- I’m moving my main blog. Because lots of my views on life have changed, my life has changed, and obviously my tastes in fandoms have changed. I’ll put the URL here later once I’ve made it. To see how I got to this position and where I am now, keep reading ^w^

Note: This is just my own opinion as to how I’ve seen Tumblr over the past few years. 

Well, it’s the start of a New Year. I haven’t been active much in 2017 but I’ll try and be active this year. Thanks to all the people who’ve helped and supported me this year and the following people who have made my life on Tumblr : *a list of people I rarely talk to anymore*

....Is what I would have said perhaps a year or two ago. I’m still glad I’ve joined this site and had conversations with some KnB fanatics like I was. However, I haven’t talked to them in a year. The only people I usually talk to on this site are basically nonexistent. I mean my friends from high school technically, but I talk to them irl during classes and lunch. The truth is that I have not been active on Tumblr for the past year. And my activity on the site was starting to wane in 2016 as well when I accidentally deleted my main blog last year when I was actually trying to delete a side blog I was working on. But that’s besides the fact as to why I’m moving. I’ve changed quite a bit since 2014 when I first joined Tumblr. My views of the world have changed, my life has changed, even the tiniest things such as my fandom tastes have changed. Because of this change, I’m moving to a new blog. Since you’ve decided to keep reading, I’m going to write a long detailed essay about the three things that have changed with me: my taste, my views on the world, and my life in 2014. You have the complete freedom to click out anytime ^w^

The fourteen-year-old me has a different shit taste in anime than the shit taste I have in anime now. Obviously, no one person can stay the same. If you’ve reblogged the little posts I’ve reblogged from other blogs (try saying that five times lol) notice how there’s barely any Hetalia or Kuroko no Basket or Haikyuu for that matter. Even when I’ve been active for the past few days, it’s been more positive posts, memes, and occasional anime of Hero Aca and such. So really if you want to know what I’m into at the moment, it’s Honeyworks, Hero Aca, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso (Your Lie in April), food, study things, any Makoto Shinkai film (doesn’t have to be Your Name but it can be) and always memes. And getting off from the high of finishing Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, I’ll be looking for that too. Also, notice the decline in squealing yaoi fangirl that used to squeal in the tags section about two dudes cross-dressing. Ah, yes. The Hetalia days of where I’d ship APH America with everyone and just had a huge obsession with APH America. The title of my blog (on mobile anyway) is still a quote from the dub haha.  To be fair, that squealing, yaoi fangirl did have a brief revival when Yuri on Ice was still airing. I still have a soft spot for the anime as it was very good (and still is, Phichit will forever be an angel) and I absolutely LOVE Makkachin still. But for the most part, I have mostly lost the whole yaoi fangirl that I once was in Freshman year of high school who still loved shipping countries together. Why I deviated from Hetalia is another post unto itself.

I mentioned how I haven’t been posting a lot of kurobas lately. Yes my interest has waned in the show, but I still appreciate what it’s done for me in my high school years. I still have a quote from Aida Riko back in the earlier chapters of the manga hanging on my wall as I work on homework: “I want you to have a big concrete objective and the will to achieve it.” I won’t deny, KnB really helped me set the mentality I needed to tackle high school -- to keep pushing myself to become a better person. Whether I fulfilled that expectation or not is debatable. But as always, the inspirational quotes of KnB will undoubtedly carry me onto college too.

Now don’t get triggered when I say that Tumblr can really take leftist ideology to the extreme. It’s definitely right to treat everybody equally no matter their skin color, gender, sexuality, shape, size, disability, etc. Basically, everyone deserves to be treated equally. That’d definitely fine and it’s the right way to live life after all. However, it first hit me in Junior year that Tumblr was getting annoying. The whole “the straights are terrible” and “white men should burn in hell” preaching gave Tumblr the black and white views of the world without any grays (or greys however you spell it) in between. Now I’m a straight CIS female. I’ve got good friends who are asexual, bi, lesbian, etc. I will say this, but I doubt it will be heard by the screams of hate against a straight CIS gender like myself: I DON’T CARE WHAT YOUR DAMN SEXUALITY OR GENDER OR COLOR OR WHATEVER IS AS LONG AS YOU ARE A NICE PERSON! If you are a trans, gay Hispanic (an example, not pointing you out) who treats other people terribly, that means I will flip you off and beat your ass (to some extent of this statement). Not all straight people are bad and not all gays are good and it goes for every demographic that exists ever.

Though it may seem that I am blaming all of Tumblr for acting this way, I am. But I can’t forget that I too, once had a black and white view of the world. As a fourteen-year-old who was very much shielded from the world because of a private Catholic school with conservative parents who are very well off, I had an inkling of what the rest of the world was like. And I feel like the people on Tumblr were just as uneducated about the world as I was. By no means do I know everything about the world now. A seventeen-year-old who hasn’t even finished high school will never know how the me from four years from now feels. I am just saying that my opinion from leaning so far left a damn tree would break has become more moderate. This website made me think: gosh being straight and CIS is uncool and being a normal functional being with no anxiety or depression isn’t normal too. I need to be bi and genderfluid! That was stupid thinking. Right now, I’m completely fine with being a straight, CIS female with no mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety who will gladly respect your pronouns.

Now life is really crazy. It was crazy in 2016, and it was crazy in 2017 too. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that I’m from Las Vegas, Nevada now did I? Times have changed man. I don’t think I would have said that when I was 10 on a website lol. But yeah if you’ve somehow been scrolling this far down I commend your efforts. And I’m sure you’re getting really strained rn. So get some water, take a break, I’m sorry if you can’t get to a laptop or computer right now. Don’t read this in one go. If you’ve returned or decided to read straight on through welcome back or good for you respectively. Now I’ll repeat that again. Yes, I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. Right where Stephen Paddock decided to shoot from the 37th floor of Mandalay Bay onto the Route 91 Harvest Festival where over 500 people were wounded and 50 people were killed and where three students from my school were at on Sunday night (they were unharmed physically I believe). I found this out when I was tucked in bed at home, far from the strip checking my friend’s snapchats before I fell asleep. For the largest mass shooting in modern US history to take place in an area where my family would take our extended family to dinner or where we once had a New Years Eve celebration at the Vdara, is sickening. My cousins and I used to go to Mandalay Bay and hang out at the pool and stay the night because it was Spring break back when we were in middle school. My mom’s 40th birthday was at the Mandalay Bay. It’s terrible. I know how those people in Orlando and Colorado and everywhere else in the world feel when a mass shooting happens and completely disrupts your life. I’ve barely even been to the strip this year. The fact that a terror attack happened in my own backyard is beyond words. It makes me angry that some bastard decided to fuck up the lives of everyone in my city by ruining a good time at a concert. It makes me sad when I read a Washington Post later about a group of girls who went to a Lutheran school were affected by this event mentally and some even physically by this event. And that in turns makes me pissed off that some dude ruined the lives of teenage girls exactly like me, who were worried about the SAT and ACT and AP Classes and college. Fuck him.

So that’s my feelings on the shooting a few months late. But remember that I live in Las Vegas. You can’t just forget a mass shooting that happened in the city you live in. I’d mention how people would disagree with me that other events on the strip have happened such as a robbing at the Bellagio (it’s always the Bellagio man! That’s my fave part of the strip with the dancing waters and the seasonal garden inside like man they don’t deserve that) and etc. but feel free to disagree with me when you submit an ask dear anon.

Now on a somewhat lighter note, high school will forever be stressful. Going to the best high school in the state is stressful when all your friends have a nonstop grind to be one of the valedictorians (apparently you can have more than one?? I had no idea until I went to high school). Though I am nowhere near becoming a valedictorian, I still have plans to graduate with high honors ( wearing white for graduation) because half of the people graduating will wear white because it’s a magnet school dammit we’re kinda smart. AP classes have been part of my workload since Sophomore year which is right when I deleted my blog, but I managed to keep my activity up somewhat. Junior year slumped in my activity big time. APUSH is hard you guys. That’s it. I believe I posted a reflection at the start of 2017 detailing a bit more of this. But the difference this year is that I’m a senior in high school. That means college and scholarships. As I’ve mentioned before, I live in Nevada. I either stay in Las Vegas and attend the university there or I head up to Reno, which is like a 6-hour drive from home or just an hour flight. That means living in a dorm away from everything I’ve known. And that includes my boyfriend.

The biggest change in my life between Freshman year and now is that I’m taken! And honestly, it was the biggest fucking plot twist of 2016 (and the largest failed segway of 2018 thus far). I’m dating the largest weeb at my school ever and I’m happy dammit. Most of the time. I’ve learned a lot from being in a relationship like how to shut the fuck up and listen and appreciate more in life. By no means was my relationship perfect either. We’ve had a lot of fights. I’ve mentioned this in my reflection of 2016 at the start of last year so the rundown is that we’ve been together a year and a half now. I’m in a healthy relationship. Then college comes in and says hi. Now my boyfriend has decided to go to the university here in Las Vegas. I’m still very unsure as to where I want to go next. After all, the decision as to where to continue my education lies with me and I’m running out of time (I’m procrastinating on the decision right now lol). Four years ago, I had dreams of going out of state to either a UC school or the United States Airforce Academy in Colorado, until I learned that school outside of my state is expensive so I decided to stay within the confines of Nevada. 

And honestly, that’s where I’m at right now. Thanks for reading this long ass rant. I spent an hour or two typing this up. I just have a lot of feelings haha. I hope everyone has the best year ever. If this is after I’ve posted my new URL, go follow me there. But for now, thanks for all the support thus far and especially for reading this long ass rant. See you!