A Priest passing through his church in the middle of the day, decided to pause by the altar to see who come to pray.  Just then the back door opened, and a man came down the aisle, the Priest frowned as he saw the man hadn't shaved in a while.  His shirt was torn and shabby, and his coat was worn and frayed, the man knelt down and bowed his head, then rose and walked away.  In the days that followed at precisely noon, the Priest saw this man, each time he knelt just for a moment, a lunch box in his lap.  Well, the Priest’s suspicions grew, with robbery a main fear.  He decided to stop and ask the man, 'What are you doing here?'

The old man said he was a factory worker and lunch was half an hour lunchtime was his prayer time, for finding strength and power.  "I stay only a moment because the factory's far away; As I kneel here talking to the Lord, This is kinda what I say: 'I JUST CAME BY TO TELL YOU, LORD, HOW HAPPY I HAVE BEEN, SINCE WE FOUND EACH OTHERS FRIENDSHIP AND YOU TOOK AWAY MY SIN.  DON'T KNOW MUCH OF HOW TO PRAY, BUT I THINK ABOUT YOU EVERYDAY.  SO, JESUS, THIS IS BEN, JUST CHECKING IN TODAY.'"

The Priest was feeling foolish, told Ben that it was fine.  He told the man that he was welcome to pray there anytime.  'It's time to go, and thanks,' Ben said

As he hurried to the door.  Then the Priest knelt there at the altar, which he'd never done before.  His cold heart melted, warmed with love, as he met with Jesus there.  As the tears flowed down his cheeks, he repeated old Ben's prayer:  'I JUST CAME by TO TELL YOU, LORD, HOW HAPPY I'VE BEEN, SINCE WE FOUND EACH OTHERS FRIENDSHIP AND YOU TOOK AWAY MY SIN.  I DON'T KNOW MUCH OF HOW TO PRAY, BUT I THINK ABOUT YOU EVERYDAY.  SO, JESUS, THIS IS ME, JUST CHECKING IN TODAY.'

Past noon one day, the Priest noticed that old Ben hadn't come.  As more days passed and still no Ben, he began to worry some.  At the factory, he asked about him, learning he was ill.  The hospital staff was worried, but he'd given them a thrill.  The week that Ben was with them, brought changes in the ward.  His smiles and joy contagious.  Changed people were his reward.  The head nurse couldn't understand why Ben could be so glad, when no flowers, calls or cards came, not a visitor he had.  The Priest stayed by his bed, he voiced the nurse's concern: 'No friends had come to show they cared.  He had nowhere to turn.' 

Looking surprised, old Ben spoke up and with a winsome smile; "The nurse is wrong, she couldn't know, He's been here all the while.  Everyday at noon He comes here, a dear friend of mine, you see, He sits right down and takes my hand, leans over and says to me:  'I JUST CAME BY TO TELL YOU, BEN, HOW HAPPY I HAVE BEEN, SINCE WE FOUND THIS FRIENDSHIP, AND I TOOK AWAY YOUR SIN.  I THINK ABOUT YOU ALWAYS AND I LOVE TO HEAR YOU PRAY, AND SO BEN, THIS IS JESUS, JUST CHECKING IN TODAY .'"

If this blesses you, pass it on. Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.  May God hold you in the palm of His hand And Angels watch over you.  Please pass this page on to your friends & loved ones. If you aren't ashamed.  Jesus said, ' If you are ashamed of me, I will be ashamed Of you before my Father.'

If you are not ashamed, pass this on.  So, FRIEND, this is ME "Just Checking In Today"

QUIZ: Reading them slowly may help.

1. Johnny's mother had three children. The first child was named April. The second child was named May. What was the third child's name?

Answer: Johnny, of course

2. There is a clerk at the butcher shop, he is five feet ten inches tall, and he wears size 13 sneakers. What does he weigh?

Answer: Meat.

3. Before Mt. Everest was discovered, what was the highest mountain in the world?

Answer: Mt. Everest

4. How much dirt is there in a hole that measures two feet by three feet by four feet?

Answer: There is no dirt in a hole.

5. What word in the English language is always spelled incorrectly?

Answer: Incorrectly

6. Billy was born on December 28th, yet her birthday is always in the summer. How is this possible?

Answer: Billy lives in the Southern Hemisphere

7. In California, you cannot take a picture of a man with a wooden leg. Why not?

Answer: You can't take pictures with a wooden leg. You need a camera to take pictures.

8. If you were running a race and you passed the person in 2nd place, what place would you be in now?

Answer: You would be in 2nd.

10. Which is correct to say, "The yolk of the egg are white" or "The yolk of the egg is white"?

Answer: Neither, the yolk of the egg is yellow.

11. If a farmer has 5 haystacks in one field and 4 haystacks in the other field, how many haystacks would he have if he combined them all in another field?

Answer: One. If he combines all of his haystacks, they all become one big stack.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/luke-ryan-hart-father-murder-mother-sister-spalding-a8928471.html

Online hate spurred on our father to kill our mother and sister, say his sons

'He believed that just because he was a man he was entitled to having a wife to serve him who met his every wish. He never believed what he was doing was wrong even murdering mum and Charlotte,' says Ryan Hart

Maya Oppenheim
Women's Correspondent @mayaoppenheim ,
Maya Yagoda
@mayayagoda
Saturday 25 May 2019 17:12

Online networks where misogynistic hate are routinely shared spurred on a domestic abuser to murder his wife and daughter with a sawn-off shotgun, his two sons have said.  Lance Hart, 57, killed his 50-year-old wife and 19-year-old daughter before turning the weapon on himself in a swimming pool car park in Spalding in Lincolnshire in 2016.  Mr Hart, who was described as a “cold, calculated, scheming man” by a coroner but as a “nice guy” who was “always caring” and “good at DIY” by the media after the murders, subjected his wife to a campaign of domestic abuse and coercive control for 27 years before carrying out the killing.  The murders happened five days after the brothers had helped their mother Claire and sister Charlotte escape their father after saving up their own money to do so for years.  Luke and Ryan Hart say that it was their father’s gendered view of the world which ultimately led him to murder his daughter and wife of 25 years.  The brothers, who describe their father as a “domestic terrorist” and their situation of abuse as a “domestic hostage”, say their father’s patriarchal views were linked to the fact his own mother was a “typical 1950s housewife” and was “very submissive” to her husband.  “She did all the cleaning, all the cooking and did not drive and just served her husband,” 28-year-old Ryan said. “Our father saw that growing up and he tried to replicate it in our family. It was not that he had been through anything difficult. He just grew up with an expectation of women and families from five or six decades ago. He did not really inherit any trauma. He just inherited the belief system.”

He added: “Despite society changing, he refused to change his beliefs. Our father believed that his birthright as a man was power over women and children so he believed that just because he was a man he was entitled to having a wife to serve him, who met his every wish. He never believed what he was doing was wrong even murdering mum and Charlotte.  In his murder note, he justified his actions because he believed that we had destroyed his world view that we were going against what he was entitled to. In his view of the world, us disobeying him was punishable by death. He had no ability for introspection at all. There was not a single point in his life that he doubted what he was choosing to do.”

Mr Hart’s control included financial abuse, isolating his family, accusing his wife of being gay or having an affair if she met friends after work, stopping her from applying for promotions at work, refusing to let her go on holidays, including going to watch her son Ryan’s triathlon in Turkey, and banning his sons from talking to their aunt and uncle for ten years. Their mother’s revolved around a “rigid schedule” he created for her which involved doing chores and being home at a certain time.  “Growing up, our father created numerous trivial rules, like filling the kettle up. If it was not full he would go absolutely mental for hours. He was always trying to find better ways to have control over us,” Luke, his 29-year-old brother, added.

He said his father looked at conspiracy theories on the internet and spent a great deal of time on “misogynistic” closed forums which did not have a specific agenda but attracted people who were anti-government.  “They were self-pity parties,” he said. “Online hidden closed forums of men who think they are subverting the government. But they are pathetic. They just complain about women, complain about power, complain about the world they did not succeed in because of supposed problems with the world not them”.

He said his father subjected his mother to financial abuse throughout their relationship and after the murders, they found out he had given away over £10,000 to friends from the internet in an attempt to control the family by keeping them “cash poor”.  “At the time it made no sense why he was giving money away,” he added. “Not to charities but to random men. When we found out afterwards it was like ‘why the f**k would you do that’ but actually it is very clear that our father valued control over anything in the world and what he was effectively doing was paying for control of our mother. By giving money away, it made sure there were no collective assets in the relationship, so our mother could never leave because she was only earning five or six grand a year. He was a low-status male in the public world but he was a high-status male in the private world because he had domination of his family.”

Mr Hart had sole control over the family’s bank accounts and all of his wife’s spending was scrutinised, with her having to provide receipts for everything, his brother Ryan added. He said his father saw him and his brother’s earnings as a threat to “the chains he had around our mother” and wanted to minimise their money too.

The brothers, who are both engineers, said they were left deeply disturbed by the media’s coverage of their father’s murders. They said the letter, a 12-page note found on a USB stick in his car, their father left behind was a byproduct of months of researching online actual family murders and “taking the media justifications”.  Luke said: “The media call it a suicide note. We call it a murder note. but really it is a manifesto a political manifesto these men write when they kill their families. It was a manifesto about a gendered view of the world that the media was very happy to echo and give coverage. Whereas if someone creates a racially abusive manifesto and goes on to commit a crime, the media says ‘oh should we not publish it’. But when domestic abusers do it they just publish it willy nilly. Mum and Charlotte were the ones who were questioned in the media coverage, our father was given justifications, not a single question was asked of his behaviour.” 

He said that neither he or his brother had a proper relationship with their father saying that he believed Mr Hart had simply seen children as vehicles through which one can establish control over women.  Neither of the brothers saw their father’s behaviour as domestic abuse at the time with Ryan explaining his father was so calculating that he eventually started thinking that he himself was the problem.  “You start to normalise yourself to the abuse and actually start to believe it is not abuse and it is just me unable to satisfy the rules that are in place in the world,” he said. “I guess by the time you are able to really comprehend what is going on you are so intertwined in the abuse that you start to believe that you are the one that needs to change.”

Society needs to shift the focus onto controlling behaviour, he said, rather than violence when tackling domestic abuse, because control is the ultimate aim of abusers.  “We just thought domestic abuse was something that was miserable but not lethal and actually we found out in research afterwards that domestic abuse is hugely dangerous in our society,” Luke added. “Nearly a quarter of all murders are domestic homicides and women and children are at most danger of being killed in their own homes. One thing that really struck us was the fact 100 women every year are killed by partners or ex-partners which is almost ten times terrorist-related deaths. The key thing to identify is that this is deadly. We are always following the abuser but a third of domestic homicides have no history of violence. They all have a history of control but a third of them don’t have a history of violence like ours.”

The brothers, who have gone on to become prominent campaigners on the issue of domestic abuse, said that it was their mother and sister who had helped them learn how to be a force for good in the world.  “From mum and Charlotte, we learnt that even in an environment of hate and suffering, you can apply yourself and you do not have to give in and just be an excuse which our father was,” Luke added. “He was just an excuse. That is all he ever was. But mum and Charlotte created themselves, in spite of that environment, into incredible people and we use them as examples.”

My mum died on the 1st April 2011 and I can't say I have really grieved over her.  We didn't have the greatest of relationships which didn't get better with time.  The only time I cried was on the day of the funeral which is sad really but there are times I really miss her.

My dad died on the 27th February 2017 and that was much different even though he died exactly how he wanted - at home and going about his life normally.  It was harder for my sister as she was the one who found him and it was soon after he died.  Even though my dad had health problems and was 87 years old it was still classed as a sudden death because he died at home.  The funeral was over a month later due to the coroners office taking its time.  What has helped my sister and me has been being able to talk about happy memories.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/15/bereaved-families-denied-benefit-despite-supreme-court-ruling

Bereaved families denied benefit despite supreme court ruling

‘Blatant discrimination’ unmarried couples denied support if one of them dies

Bereaved families are being denied benefits worth up to £7,700 because the government will only make payments to married couples 10 months after the supreme court ruled that its stance was unlawful.  Bereavement support payment can be claimed by people who are widowed when their husband, wife or civil partner dies, with parents eligible for a higher payment than those without children.  But unmarried couples are locked out of the benefit something that has been described by campaigners as blatant discrimination.  Dean Spencer lost his partner Julie suddenly in 2015, leaving him and his son, who was three at the time. The couple had been together for five years, and he was thinking about proposing when she died.  “I rang the number on the government website and was told I wasn’t eligible for any benefits,” he says. “They said ‘that’s the law.’ All because of a piece of paper.”

Bereavement support payment, which was introduced in April 2017 to replace three separate payments (widowed parent’s allowance, bereavement payment and bereavement allowance), is paid as a lump sum of up to £3,500 and then at a rate of up to £350 a month for the first 18 months after the death.  Those who lost a partner before the rule change can continue to claim the older benefits until their children leave full-time education or they move in with a new partner.  However, anyone who loses a partner who they were not married to is not entitled to make a claim. There are 3.3 million cohabiting couples in the UK, and of these about 1.2 million have children.  Last summer, the supreme court ruled that denying Siobhan McLaughlin a widow’s pension following the death of her partner breached the human rights of her and the couple’s four children. Her partner John Adams, a former groundsman, died in January 2014.  The decision was expected to trigger changes in the rules, but there has been no announcement, or even a consultation on extending who qualifies for the benefits.  Georgia Elms, a spokeswoman for the group Widowed & Young (WAY), says: “I understand that we’ve got Brexit paralysis, but I’m really shocked that nothing has been done about it.”

McLaughin’s case involved the widowed parent’s allowance, which was worth up to £119 a week and paid until the youngest child was no longer eligible for child benefit.  Before the rules were changed, campaigners had lobbied for a rethink, and for any new system to include unmarried couples. Both calls were ignored, they say.  Elms says families are suffering as a result. “There are two sides to this: the financial and the personal,” she says. “These people are grieving they’ve lost the parent of their child, and then they are suddenly told that in the eyes of the government, because they’re not married, they don’t matter.”

She adds: “This really affects their confidence, their grieving process, their ability to build their own life.”

Elms says many parents who are entitled to the benefit spend the money on childcare, allowing them to continue in work.  Spencer had to leave his job of 13 years because the shifts were not compatible with nursery hours, and now his son is at school he works on the minimum wage during school hours. He would have been entitled to up to £119 a week if he had been married. “The person who is suffering is my son,” he says. “Holidays, days out he doesn’t get those things. We could have saved the money and used it for holidays you get quite angry when you think about it.”

Vicki Wollerton from Warrington, Cheshire, lost her partner Nick in May 2017. He had been looking after their son while she worked full time as a civil servant, and the family had been entitled to a small child tax credit payment.  The couple, who had been together for 18 years, had never married. “We never even thought about getting married it just wasn’t us,” she says.

Wollerton had set up insurance for her income, but says she had never considered what would happen if Nick died. After his death, the child tax credit payment was stopped and she discovered she would have to apply for universal credit to replace it, and that she was not entitled to any bereavement payments.  She says the payment would have made a difference she has used up all of her savings, most of it on childcare, and because of her working hours she now has to pay for breakfast club every morning.  “I thought I was savvy but obviously I wasn’t. I had no idea my son would be treated differently,” she says. “It was quite a shock.”

MPs on the Commons work and pensions select committee have launched an inquiry looking into the support on offer for the bereaved, and say they will press the government on what has been done since the supreme court ruling.  The committee recommended in 2016 that bereavement payments should be extended to parents who were not married because “not doing so unjustly penalises innocent children, who have no say in the matter of whether their parents were married but who are equally affected by the death of one of them”.

The committee’s chair, Frank Field, has described the policy as archaic and said it was a “profound injustice” that parents were being denied support. It meant, he said, that every day the government was telling another five bereaved parents that because they were not married, their children would be penalised. 

Last week the committee heard evidence from several parents: some who were eligible for bereavement support, and some who were not. The latter group included Joana Niemeyer, who was eight months pregnant when her partner David died. Their children are now three-and-a-half and seven. She said her partner had probably earned 70% of the income for the household, and they had bought a house a year earlier and had a “huge” mortgage.  She told MPs: “I think I found out just before the funeral that we were not eligible for anything David worked for 20 years. He was always a believer in the system the NHS, national insurance and all that. I think he would be mortified to know that we did not get anything.”

Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow in north-east London, says: “The courts were clear that children who had already suffered the trauma of losing a parent early in life did not deserve to pay the price for such an outdated view of family life, and the government had a responsibility to change that.”

It’s now been some time since the introduction of bereavement support payment, she says, yet “still this government has done nothing to help address this blatant discrimination, leaving many facing poverty at the same time as the loss of a loved one”.

Spencer says he does not expect the government to go back and repay parents like him who have missed out. “But for other people, hopefully it could change in the future.”

The Department for Work and Pensions says the qualifying criteria for bereavement support were debated in parliament before the new benefit was introduced, and that it is not taxed or included when other means-tested payments are calculated.  “We are committed to supporting people during bereavement and have widened the support available. This is in addition to help provided for cohabiting couples through the wider welfare system,” a spokesman for the DWP added.

Fear Has a Really Big Mouth
Mar 07, 2019 | Gwen Smith

Today's Truth

Friend to Friend

I often try to quiet fear by pretending it doesn’t exist. Clever  I know. But alas, it does exist and that’s not always a bad thing. To the contrary, it can actually keep us safe in proper context. When my house was struck  by lightning and lit with fire, fear sounded an emotional alarm, insisting that I escape and fast. In this instance, fear was good. It kept me safe.  In many instances, however, fear is not good. I’ve found that while it’s natural to be afraid at times human, even it’s best to not allow feelings of fear to consume and control large spaces of real estate in my heart. In Psalm 56, David handles the intersection of his fear and faith nicely.  In Psalm 56, captured by the Philistines in Gath, and in Psalm 57, hiding in a cave to escape the pursuit of Saul, David sifted through honest feelings of vulnerability and desperation. I imagine his reality was one of shaky hands, pulse raging wild and brows soaked in sweat. Yet fear was silenced as he made the powerful decision to redirect his emotions toward a more productive, more faith-filled response when David chose to trust God.  By choosing to trust God in the hiding and in the chains, David’s fear shifted to faith.  Faith shuts the mouth of fear. 

“When I am afraid, I will trust you.” (Psalm 56:3, CSB)

“You yourself have recorded my wanderings. Put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book? Then my enemies will retreat on the day when I call. This I know: God is for me.” (Psalm 56:8-9, CSB)

These weren’t just flippant statements or memorized verses. These were sturdy declarations. Deliberate choices made by a deeply determined worshiper. The kind of choices that change and calm a frantic heart. The kind of choices that speak peace to anxiousness. The kind of choices we can make when we’re afraid. The kind of choice we can make when fear screams loud within.  Bring it. Fear is a liar. We can choose faith, knowing God is for us. Decision made.