Ever feel misunderstood or mistreated?
I suppose we all feel this way sometimes, but some of us really feel like we don’t fit or like oddballs or, worse, outcasts who have been “voted off the island.” Okay, we can act badly at times, but this may often just be a reaction to something that has triggered deep fear, pain or anger that comes from the bumping, bruising, breaking road we have been on. We react and sometimes we’re as surprised at everyone else at our own bad behavior.
The scars written on my heart have formed a message from my life to me, and I think it is very hopeful and will be encouraging to you if you have experienced trauma, calamity or hardship. For a long time, my life looked like a wall hanging of tangled, purposeless yarn, ugly and randomly knotted. A lot of people saw me and may still see me that way. But that is just the back-side. Every coin has two sides, and no one is just one thing. We are all complex, “beautifully and wonderfully made,” says the Good Book. If you turn over the wall hanging of my life and see it from a more lofty, infinite reference point, you seen a beautiful design crafted and woven by the Divine Artist whose specialty is taken broken peaces and making precious and intricate designs from them.
If someone like me can heal from these wounds, walk again with this brokenness, forgive those hurts and people, change a bit and find some contentment and peace, then you surely can too. That is what this book-that-is-a-website is about. I started writing it when I “quit” writing books 20 years ago, but in a very real way–not without some pain–this book has been being written for 60 years.
Right now (9/2020) reading this book is like watching me put wet clay on a potter’s wheel as it spins around, and inviting others to get their hands dirty too. You can actually help me by commenting in detail to whatever you read. Your comments become and will inspire more wet clay on the wheel. And you can throw your own pottery and connect with and encourage others by joining and interacting with the living book on the Facebook Group “The Long Hard Road of Recovery from Trauma, Calamity, Hardship & Pain” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/817482809012740).
If you click on READ BOOK HERE (In menu on the left on a computer or in the three stacked lines “hamburger” on your smart phone) or on the picture of Walker the street dog at the top, you will see the most recent part of the book posted on the right. The oldest (first post) is at the bottom, and if you want to read in order read from the bottom up. Each entry is designed to be a self-contained paragraph or section of the book, but the structure of the pot will emerge a bit later after enough wet clay is added and we begin to press it all into shape.
Eventually, the OVERVIEW / TABLE OF CONTENTS will shape up on the left menu if you want to pick and choose by topics, or see a road map of the overall book. And categories will start to emerge—if you click on a category like STRESS, you’ll see all the entries there and can graze as you choose on “PTSD,” “RSD,” “Our Bodies Read Traumatic and Repetitive Stress The Same,” “The Five Senses Drill for Taming Traumatic Stress,” “Beer, Prescriptions and Stress—Better Living Through Modern Chemistry or Medications for Which There Is No Disease Except the One They Create for Themselves?,” “The Most Stressful Events in Life Add Up (What’s your current stress score?),” etc.
If you want to understand why I am publishing this (and the other listed coming books) for free and why I “quit” the traditional publishing industry’s pay-for-writing and, go to my blog (click here:) brianjdodd.blogspot.com and read from the bottom up. That blog also chronicles why I left “Church, Inc.,” quit being a religious professional, stopped teaching at “Christian” graduate school and became the non-christian follower of Jesus that I am today, totally committed to and trusting in my friend and boss, Jesus, and a total and dedicated unbeliever in churchianity, the many false religions and replacement jesuses all around us that people have made up, follow and often call “my church” or “my pastor.”
Brian Joseph Dodd, Ph.D. (September 20, 2020)
Born in Sacramento, California, I have lived in North Orlando, Florida for the last 20 years, coming by way of Washington then California again, England, then California once more, through Kentucky and eventually landing in Sanford, Florida (where the “Black Lives Matter” social justice cry was launched a few blocks from home at the wrongful death of Trayvon Martin in 2012). I have been married to Ingrid for almost 40 years, my partner in work and life, my dearest friend and co-follower of Jesus. We share two daughters and 1.5 grandchildren (#2 due April 2021). We own and manages several real estate related businesses in Central Florida, but we are never too busy to help individual buyers, sellers, investors or landlords (www.TheSparrow.biz). The secret to my success? Jesus, and I married well.