10 Deployment

The success I experienced in my thirties in the three areas of management, materials and methods—or the 3M as I call them, made the preliminary years of my campaign full of new understandings, important books, and outstanding methods of discovery and readied me for deployment. Armed with these resources and practices, I learned about the importance of learning, dear reader. And I learned and learned and learned and then learned more, and still practice active learning today as I continue my walk with God. LEARN is a HUGE Christian word. Ask the Apostle Paul. If he used it once, he used it a thousand times (as the saying goes). There is no substitute for ongoing learning.

But let’s recap. These 3M were essential preparations, make-no-mistake, and I realize now that they served brilliantly to propel me rapidly forward and into a personal and intimate relationship with God and away from my airhead debutante ways. Further, they both legitimized and anchored the spiritual growth coming in my forties and flourishing to this very day. And . . . they launched the great deployment that accomplished all these feats! My campaign began in earnest. I embarked upon a sixteen year deployment—action in the trenches, you might say.

How time does fly! Those were some really active 16 years and I just kept moving. I started with my vague generalities about God and looked for specifics. From there on, the Judeo-Christian God became the center of my life, filling me so the brim with knowledge, experience and love of Him that you, valued reader, now find me here at my computer having to sort it all out and glad to do so.

I read the whole Bible over and over again, (with Kathleen and on my own) and Richard read the whole Bible with Apochrypha aloud to the three of us over a three year period, too. I studied Christian history (Christian History of the World and The History of the Kings of England, a chronological study of the popes of the Vatican and read the occasional biography of the saints) and joined Bible Study Classes (rejecting various courses steeped in modern criticism (I call it believing lies.), and finally settling upon Kay Arthur’s Precept Upon Precept Studies and “Lord” series.

At the 16-year end point, my picture of the Judeo-Christian God had grown huge, too huge to wrap my mind around (In the words of Luanne, a fellow pilgrim and classmate. Her great grandfather was a Baptist rider, too!). But, in retrospect, every day of those sixteen years was precious! No despair there, just powerful, nurturing answers and a blooming relationship with God.

And it was in the summer of the 16^th year that I sat down and wrote a précis on what was happening to me and why. In the pursuit of this writing, the Holy Spirit consolidated all I had learned with a whole new category of verses and words, radically reshaping my thinking. So I am going to use those new and old words to walk us through the emergence of this new thinking.

To be continued . . .