Clap your hands if you believe in faeries

Yes, I'm clapping.

About a year ago my husband lost his keys...to the car (complete with the little remote thingie that you have to have in order to use your key,) to the truck, to the front and back doors. He looked the yard over, tore his room apart while I searched the rest of the house. Never found them. He prayed, of course, to God (Yahweh) and I probably prayed as well (to the same God, not having left Christianity at that stage yet) considering how much it would cost to replace that remote thingie. Never found them.

So yesterday Zach and I were coming home from a night of Wendy's salads where we had discussed many things Pagan, vegetarian, and general game/computer stuff and I mentioned the faery garden and the need to get it in shape because the faeries have been known to do weird and wacky things when you don't pay attention to them. I mentioned various things that have gone mysteriously missing, including Tom's keys. I told Zach I was convinced the faeries had done something with them because we had gone over the yard with a fine toothed comb in addition to tearing the house apart and they just couldn't be found. I said I was going to have to be better at keeping my promises to them in the future.

During the course of our conversation, Zach said he felt Druidry was his path as well and wanted to set an offering out to Gaia on the rock altar I have outside in the faery garden and asked if he could use it. I told him most certainly, that it wasn't "my" altar; it was the family altar or whoever saw it and felt a need to use it. But I mentioned that I needed to get rid of the weeds surrounding it (Zach had mowed earlier in the day) and clean it up a bit. After I finished that up, he brought me the solar lights that we set on the hill behind the faery garden and I set about putting them in the ground. While placing the third one in the ground, I saw something in the grass and had to move the light over just a fraction of an inch to avoid it.

You guessed it. Tom's keys.

I've been working on the hill planning my echinacea garden, mowed it several times, attended the maple tree that Tom has been nurturing from seedling (the keys were right next to the tree) and have never seen those keys.

Yay, Faeries!

So tonight when it cools off, I plan on setting out an offering for them in gratitude for the return of the keys. I'm going to dig through my jewelry box because I feel like it should be a return of like for like. They gave me back metal so I'll give them back metal. Something shiny, I think.

For Chibicat: The book I'm reading is The Modern-Day Druidess by Cassandra Eason. I really like it because there is so much I don't know about Druidry and she's setting the record straight (for me...not having know any difference between them) on the differences between Wiccan and Druidry. Not in a this is right and this is wrong kind of way. More along the lines of how the different paths run next to each other...as sister religions. Although I do love the night, lately I have been drawn to the Sun, not knowing that Druidry is more a Sun religion that draws on the Moon while Wicca is a Moon religion that sometimes draws on the Sun. Terminology is a bit different between the two, also. It's not terribly comprehensive but does touch on various things, like herbs, animals, sacred spaces, rituals, etc.

I could probably write a whole 'nother post on this subject, but I called my parents yesterday. I hadn't talked to them since I went down there although I did call on Father's Day but got their voice mail. Of course, they didn't get my message and I'm sure they didn't believe that I called. They are the kind of people who choose to believe badly of me before they will believe the good things.

But the conversation went well until my Mother started in on God non-stop. I wouldn't complain if this was normal for her but of late she's been preaching a lot to me so I wonder if my older sister has said something to her. Anyway, she told me this long, drawn-out story of a friend of her younger sister's youngest stepson and his wife whose behavior changed over the course of a year resulting in her leaving her job (and insurance,) spending outrageous amounts of money, not cleaning, etc. Long story short, she had a brain tumor in her frontal lobe. Costs of surgery, tests, hospitalization, etc were outrageous but somehow God intervened and provided them with $600, which is all the hospital required for them to forgive the entire debt.

So the moral of this story is that God is good and faithful.

Except...when we first moved here and were within less than a month of having insurance again, I had to have emergency gall bladder surgery or I would have died. The doctor put me in the hospital for 3 days before operating, and when he did charged me for emergency surgery at overtime prices, botched the surgery, closed me back up and told my husband I would die if I didn't have the specialized, very expensive surgery at Madison where I had to go by ambulance. I was in serious agony for 24 hours before the second surgery could be performed.

Total cost: $22,000. And this was 13 years ago so you can imagine what the costs would have been today. In spite of my doctor being a find Christian, he wouldn't forgive one penny of his services and we ended up paying all parties involved the last penny.

So...where was God then? Why didn't God intervene for us? Because we're still behind because of that expense. Thirteen years later we still haven't caught up. Especially with all the cancer treatment I had to undergo for about a year. And all the follow up visits for the rest of my life. Sure, we paid every penny but that money could have gone into fixing up our home which is falling down around us and we can't afford to repair. Or putting the money into savings. So now, facing our retirement with nothing and little coming in the way of Social Security and pension...yeah...where was God then? Why didn't he love me as much as he loves those people he intervenes with?

It's one of the reasons I left Christianity. The notion that God intervenes because either a) he loves you best or b) enough people prayed for you.

ACK! I had more written but blogger lost it and rather than try to recapture it, I'll leave it for another post.