Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, February 26, 2022
We are meant to know God like an intimate conversation—we’re invited to the table (Psalm 23), and we get to sit and eat with God. That’s one of the patterns of the scriptures celebrated and experienced week by week as we eat the Lord’s Supper. God has made all the first moves, and we’re invited to an ever deepening knowing. We will know God and be known by him.

How does someone know that you love them? My wife knows that I love her. She can remember that I swore vows to do so, she can remember all the times that I’ve said so before, she can watch my behaviour both past and present and see that it must be true. She knows that I love her. But, if that was it, she knew because she could figure it out, I imagine she wouldn’t feel loved.
Feeling loved is more than knowing it’s true, it’s experiencing something that demonstrates it. It’s one thing to logically deduce that you’re loved, another to receive gifts, or words, or affection, or time, or help that shows that someone loves you, cares for you, and takes the time to think about what makes you happy.
Only knowing you’re loved would make sustaining a marriage through all the buffets of life a real challenge.
It’s the same with God. We can know he loves us because we can deduce it, but it’s quite something else to feel loved. For that we need to experience something that demonstrates it. To be sustained by the love of God through all the buffets of life, we need to move from knowing to feeling.
Which sounds backwards, we all know that knowing would be better than feeling—of course if we take a step back, both are kinds of knowledge and could both be called knowing. By ‘feeling’ here I mean the difference between deduction and direct experience.
When life knocks us for six, how do you find the strength to stand up again? A theological knowledge that there is hope beyond the veil? That’s a great start, but we need both a knowing of hope and a feeling of joy. The feeling lets us know, deep down in our bones, that the knowing of hope is a true knowing. Joy lets us know that hope isn’t abstract and alien, but familial. Joy lets me know that hope is for me.
I could learn something about you by looking at you, and I could probably learn a lot more about you by asking other people who do know you about you. Then I would be in the (I’m sure) pleasant position of knowing lots about you. I might even have a reasonable idea what knowing you would be like, but I wouldn’t actually know you.
The only way I can know you is by speaking to you, and even then I can only know you as much as you allow.
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Can it be said that our freedoms have blinded us and are holding us hostage, preventing us from bringing every thought captive to the word of God and keeping us from seeing the threat at our doorsteps? Some say that only time will tell, but I believe time is already telling! Let’s open our eyes and be accountable to truth. 
“M. I. C. K. E. Y, M. O. U. S. E! Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck! Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck! …” Many of us remember this sing-along song that opened the Mickey Mouse Club program when as children we were enjoying the biggest name in entertainment. That, of course, was the wonderful world of DISNEY. At one time, Walt Disney’s family-oriented programming was enjoyed by almost everyone, adults and children alike. However, times have changed and so has Disney, so much so that ole Walt is probably “turning over in his grave”. Disney now promotes the progressive anti-family and anti-Christian LGBTQ woke culture that the founders of BLM intended for the destruction of the nuclear family.
Chances are that if you want to watch a good movie, sporting event, or have your child watch an animated cartoon program, more than likely it will be connected to the vast empire that Disney has become, owning a good portion of the television and entertainment world. Just three years ago Disney, for $73.1 billion, bought the film and TV assets that were held by 21st Century Fox, marking the transaction one of the largest media mergers in history.
The above is just for starters. Add to that the list of Disney-owned companies and you begin to get a sense of just how big Disney really is. That list includes ABC, ESPN, Touchstone Pictures, Marvel, Lucasfilm, A&E, The History Channel, Lifetime, Pixar, Hollywood Records, Vice Media, and Core Publishing among many others.
Included are recognizable brands and film franchises as the following: Star Wars, The Muppets, The Marvel Cinematic Universe (but not the X-Men – yet!), Disney Princesses/Princes (such as characters from Cinderella, Mulan, Frozen, Aladdin, and The Lion King), The Chronicles of Narnia Franchise, The Pirates of the Caribbean Franchise, Pixar Films, (such as Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Cars), The Winnie the Pooh Franchise, The Indiana Jones Franchise, Grey’s Anatomy and other popular ABC shows. See here.
The LGBT culture is alive and flourishing within Disney. During a recent virtual meeting, a group of Disney filmmakers together with employees said they have been given the freedom to add “queerness” and LGBT characters to children’s programming, but they believe a lot more needs to be done. Such was expressed during an “all-hands” meeting following controversy regarding Florida’s parental rights bill that prohibits classroom teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has signed the bill into law. See here.
In a series of videos released by journalist Christopher F. Rufo, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Disney executive Karey Burke told attendees of the meeting that she is the “mother of two queer children – one transgender child, and one pangender child”. Wanting to see more LGBT characters in Disney programs, she states, “We have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories, and yet we don’t have enough leads and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters and not have to be about gay stories.” Rufo, in a tweet, said that Burke added in the video that she wanted a minimum of 50 percent of characters to be LGBTQIA and racial minorities. See here and here.
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The 22-month discipleship program at Harvest USA helped me in several ways. Each week we learned to become more and more vulnerable with each other, sharing personal failings, past wounds, and current struggles and calling one another to live more obedient to God’s will. We built transparency and trust and prayed for each other knowing we were dependent on God’s strength in our battle with sin. We also encouraged each other to develop a support network at our churches, recognizing how important it was to have others help us when the program was over.

Charles Dickens fans may wince at my blog title. His iconic first line of A Tale of Two Cities says, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and I purposely misquoted it because it aptly describes the inner-wrestling I experienced for almost 40 years.
In all that time, I lived a double life—caught in a cycle of sin and shame, full of self-inflicted guilt, stuck in a rut that I thought was never going to end. But—praise the Lord! —God was working behind the scenes to bring something beautiful from it all.
The Poison of Hidden Sin
For 35 years, most people would have described me as a gregarious and friendly guy. My wife and I seemed to have a happy marriage. We were blessed with a big family. I had a good job. I was a homeschooling father, a leader in my church, lived in a nice home in a beautiful neighborhood, and was always quick with a funny story at social gatherings.
But what most people didn’t know was that I was fighting—and regularly losing—a battle with pornography.
I feared being exposed. I became good at lying to hide my activities. Protecting my secret became all encompassing, and after years of failure, it seemed impossible to overcome. I prayed time and again for forgiveness as well as for strength to win this battle over sin. But at other times I was apathetic, and placated my guilt by telling myself that my small personal sin wasn’t really hurting anyone.
But that was an illusion. My sin wasn’t private. My family—and especially my wife—were affected by my “secret sin.” We kept up appearances of a well-ordered family life, but the reality was that our marriage was in trouble. Despite my wife’s many requests for us to get marriage counseling (which I deflected or ignored) we simply settled into a fairly soulless relationship.
God Steps In
Then, in a matter of months, God stepped in—in a way that was overwhelmingly confusing and disorienting, but which later became evident as his particular care for us. I lost my job, and less than a year later we had to radically downsize and move out of our spacious home of 17 years to a new city 300 miles away. Our new place was a compact church apartment, and my new job was the church custodian. I had been a busy traveling marketing manager, but now I opened and locked the church, mopped floors, changed light bulbs, scrubbed bathrooms, cut grass, trimmed hedges, shoveled snow, moved chairs and tables—and even dug graves!
We slowly began to realize that this devastating “subtraction” was God’s way of removing the things in my life that were holding me back from submitting myself more fully to his will.
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