Chris' Christian Blog

August 12,2020

We had a party onboard last night and some of us got a little carried away. The ship's doctor said she found a terrific hangover cure from star 1)

Recipe For the Morning After  (18+) Surprise your taste buds. #2228349 by ദƖυҽყҽʐ 🤍

and sounds like it would either cure you or kill you. What do you do if you wake up sick?

If any of my crew ever catch me drinking anything stronger than a soft drink, do me a favor and shoot me. Have me committed to a mental institution or a detox center for my own good. I am a recovered addict and alcohol was one of my drugs of choice. I am also a dependency disorders specialist and can tell you just about anything you want to know about alcohol. I can tell you for example that if you want to avoid a hangover just stay drunk. Aside from that you are not going to avoid a hangover. I have tried a thousand hangover cures and the best one I ever found was not to get drunk to begin with. I find that it is not the last drink that does the damage. It is the first one. The first one sets of a mechanism in the body that causes me to crave more and more. The first thing you know I am out of control. I have not put alcohol or any other non-prescribed drug into my body in almost twelve years. The result of quitting is that I graduated from Marshall University and am now attending seminary at Regent University where I am an honors student. I am one week short of officially making the Dean's List at Regent. My current GPA after having completed two of three classes in graduate school is 3.67 and the class I am finishing I have an A in so far. I have two more assignments to get back and then I am done with it as well. So far on eight similar assignments I have made straight As. I do not anticipate any problems making the same on the last two. The fact is that if I had ever drank a single drop of alcohol or taken one illicit drug I never could have made As. I'd be lucky to get Cs or Ds. More than likely I would have pulled Ds and Fs. I know because I've gone to classes high before. I learned, but not as much. I didn't care about my performance and it affected my grades. So if you ever find me using just do me a favor and put me out of my misery.

When I came upon this piece last night it reminded me of some of the desperate things I did to try to cure a hangover. I tried eating before I drank, which only slowed down the digestion of the alcohol. Alcohol is a poison so the very first the body does when we ingest it is try to get rid of it. The liver works solely on the alcohol and anything else in our systems is put on hold. That's why they say never to drink when taking anything else. Whatever else you are taking is pushed aside by the liver and begins to build up in the system until we are overdosed on it. Even then the body will ignore the overdosed medication and try to process the alcohol. Food becomes nothing but fat as the liver won't process anything from the food. The food just passes through. The alcohol takes priority. The liver processes about one shot per hour. If you drink two shots you're drunk for two hours. Two shots for me leads to about eighteen more though. The last time I drank my wife was driving me home from the bar. It was late at night. A deputy pulled her over for a tail light being out. He smelled the booze and she told him I had been drinking. He talked me into letting him test my blood alcohol concentration with a breathalyzer because he could tell I'd had way too much. Since I knew him from high school and had his word he was not going to arrest me I allowed him to breathalyze me. I blew a .459 which for all intents and purposes is fatal. He told my wife I was going to die if I did not get treated. He told her that since he had given his word he was not going to arrest me, but for her to get me to the hospital and keep me there until I passed out and they could treat me without consent. (You can treat an unconscious person by "implied consent". I surprised both the deputy and my wife by not passing out. However several hours later I sobered up enough to check myself into rehab. I have not drank or used since. I have since worked with others to help them quit using drugs. And yes, when I say drugs I include alcohol. I usually try not to say "drugs and alcohol" because alcohol is a drug. I know that now and I avoid it.

Promppt: "Taken from Faith Connections Leader's Guide Copyright 2020 Foundry Press

In what ways have you experienced God as a shelter, shadow, refuge, or fortress?"

I love questions like this when I find them in the Faith Connections Leader's Guide. Some of the questions it asks seem a bit redundant or even ludicrous but I try to remember that Sunday school classes can have Christians of all spiritual maturity levels and even some who are not Christians at all in them. So I take the questions that seem too easy along with the ones with meat on them like this one. You will find that I will be sharing both types of questions in this forum.

For today's prompt the book asks in what ways have I experienced God as a shelter, shadow, refuge, or fortress? If you read my entry above for another blog, you know that I am a recovered addict. I don't know how many times God has protected me from myself in my addiction. There have been plenty of times that I have woke up to find myself in a strange place only to discover that in a blackout I have traveled over 100 miles from home and lost an entire week. I have no memory of those periods of time and cannot tell you what I did. I do know that God knows what I did and He kept me from getting myself killed or getting into serious trouble. Usually, I just went to sleep somewhere but I have woken up in bed with women I never saw before and never wanted to see again. I have never contracted any diseases which is a miracle in itself. I was arrested a few times, but that was usually for public intoxication. I was fined and released. The fines were usually suspended because the judge knew I was too drunk or hungover to remember to pay them and they did not want the paper work required in suspending my license if I even had one. I don't know how many times I drove drunk. I never had a DUI, which was the grace of God. The closest I ever came to serious crime was when I was cold one night in Washington DC and started sleepwalking. I apparently tried to get into a senator's vehicle, with the senator sitting in it with his family. He could not get me to wake up and refused to drive away with me holding onto the door handle for fear he would run over me. So he used his mobile phone to call the police, who got me awake and sent me to the hospital for hypothermia. The senator said that I had done no harm except frighten his children so he pressed no charges. I guess I had taken hold of his door handle and refused to let go. I was asleep. Fortunately, I had not been drinking but I'm sure I was on something. God was watching over me. This is just one of many times God kept me safe.

Prompt: "30 day Halong Bay, we're going for an up-close look at its amazing limestone islands, rock formations and caves. Whittled away over centuries by wind and water, they’re breathtaking.

Today we're going to see Sung Sot Cave (Surprised Cave) and Titop island

https://www.tripadvisor.com/AttractionProductReview-g293923-d17475877-Halong_Bay...

https://indochinatravelblog.com/tag/sung-sot-cave-wikipedia

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g293923-Activities-c57-t54-Halong_Bay_Qu...

Discuss what you've learned and what you felt seeing the pictures."

I loved the look of those caves and would love to go explore them. I love caves. I'm always a little leary in them because I have claustrophobia. If they get too tight I leave them or refuse to go further. However these look tame enough. I have even slept in a cave or two in my life time.

I also loved the pristine look of the bay. It was beautiful. I enjoyed the kayaking and the tour we took. I even picked up a beautiful companion while we there. He's a little golden monkey that took a shine to me when I was at the zoo. I asked about adopting him but of course they refused. Go figure!

"Prompt: What does a perfect day look like to you?"

A perfect day to me is a day when I can be productive. It doesn't matter what kind of productive. I just want to keep busy. I am in hog heaven when I have a big assignment to research and write. I've gotten comfortable with Turabian format so I can write a paper in just a few hours now. It usually takes about a day because I will form a hypothess and then look for documentation that supports that hypothesis. It's often hard to narrow down or find something closely resembling my thoughts because I try to be innovative. I love a good challenge and it is usually when somebody tells me something cannot be done that I am at my best proving them wrong.