Beliefnet

I am 58 years old and was raised in the Church of the Nazarene. About 3 years ago I started attending a Baptist church with my daughter and her husband. They have been called to the mission field and I have been spiritually wrestling with her going so far away from me. Their going to seminary in Texas nearly broke my heart as now I'm lucky to see her twice a year. We were never more than a block away from each other, even after her marriage. I am very strong in my Christian values and even though I don't want her to go, I know she must answer God's call. You just don't say NO to God.

I have nerve damage that has affected my speech and causes involuntary muscle spasms in my face and neck. Once in a while, I have a "bobble head" but the spasms usually aren't visible. They can be very painful, though.

I am joyful in my salvation and love my church and my church family. My best Friend is Jesus and I will be with Him some day. That makes it worth it all!

Gender: Female

Occupation: homeschool teacher

Relationship Status: Single

Faiths: Christian, Born-Again Christian
Faith Description: Baptist

31 March 2008

Posted: Mar 31, 2008 4:06 PM

I have gotten started back in physical therapy. My therapist has a student who is awesome. He finally got the kink out of my neck... (more)

March 26, 2008

Posted: Mar 26, 2008 10:23 AM

I got the second evaluation out of the way. I think it went well and the SS Dr. agreed with all of my neurologist's findings. Now I... (more)

05March2008

Posted: Mar 5, 2008 2:25 PM

I am so blessed. I have many new and old friends who will be praying for me when I go for my "second opinion" neurological... (more)

Joyce57

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Watch Trailer: 'The Tale of Despereaux' - December 2, 2008 at 7:09 AM

In this trailer, a fearless mouse named Despereaux explores the limits of his village – and himself.

Religious Joke of the Day

Joke of the Day for May 7, 2008 - May 7, 2008 at 1:00 PM

A Twist on 'Oy Vey!' Q: Have you heard the new Jews for Jesus prayer? A: Oy vey, Maria!

Conversations with God

Is negativity unavoidable? - December 4, 2008 at 12:35 PM

When people feel "made wrong," or when they feel themselves to somehow be "not good enough" in any given moment, they often react with anger. This may simply be the nature of being human - until it...

Living with Grander Vision

Bill Hybels Day 16: Where You Play - December 4, 2008 at 12:00 AM

Welcome back to Beliefnet's exclusive Bill Hybels devotional, "Living with Grander Vision." This feed will appear in your profile every day for three full weeks. Did you miss any entries? Just...

Jesus Mean & Wild: Discovering the Untamable God

Submitting to Suffering - December 4, 2008 at 12:00 AM

[Jesus] rebuked Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. (Mark 8:33). When Peter refuses to acknowledge that Jesus must suffer and...

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Rainbowhope

God's Rainbows to you. - November 5, 2008 - 08:56 AM

May God fill you with His wondrous spirit and help you see your family in your mind when they are thinking of you. Peace, Rainbowhope

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3595marc

Trained in ministry work and fired because of it. - September 4, 2008 - 09:40 PM

Hello, Christianity talks about compassion for human life. I believe that. Also I believe Christ lead by example . He loved humanity so much that he gave his life for the sake of humanity. Martin Luther spoke out against the Roman Catholic Church and put his life on the line thus he lead by example. He protested the abuses of the church in his time. In fact the word Protestant which means I protest came about because others believed in what Martin Luther stated and were willing also to lead by example. When one protest something one is not doing the popular thing. Christ and Martin Luther were unpopular in their times to large numbers of people yet today billions of people believe that they did the right thing. This tradition is carried over in the Southern Baptist tradition. As a Southern Baptist I had a pastor named Bryan Harris who gave sermons on doing the right thing which did not mean doing the popular thing. Well I spoke out for the sake of humanity on perjury in a cancer case and on how the health information given out by a company can cause child abuse as defined under the law and now I no longer have a job. I am looking for a job and have written to various places such as Wal Mart (to ask if it has a position to write or speak out against the UFCW since that union covered up things so that I cannot get unemployment (I was fired and never before applied in all my years of working (25 + years))). I hope that Wal Mart has that position because I will let out everything I know about how the UFCW conspired to have me fired plus other things about the UFCW that people should know and the facts that Safeway believes in perjury and child abuse by way of court cases. The UFCW could have a long time ago had a public news statement that the food companies committed perjury in the Ca. methylmercury court case and that methylmercury which is found in various food items causes cancer by way of a simple chemical reaction. Please pray for me on finding a job because I have to take care of an abused child (law case and police reports to prove that). Also I ask that you read what I have written below and pray on how to get the state of Ca. to file perjury charges in a law case if you believe perjury was done after reading what I have written below. May Christ lead you in what to do here. By the way I should also state I have been trained to do ministry work (minor in religious studies from San Jose State University 1989) so one should expect me to speak out on human life and when Safeway hired me the company knew what my minor was and that Safeway has a policy of not telling the truth on food items. Safeway has before been taken to court due to unsafe items in its food. For example Safeway soft drinks had an organic solvent (benzene) which destroys tissues and has been linked to cancer in them and it took consumer lawsuits to get Safeway to get the benzene out of the soft drinks. So when praying after reading this ask yourself what would Christ want you to do. Various members of my extended family had cancer thus I do not like companies perjuring themselves on what causes cancer. Would you not also have negative views about a company holding back cancer research and stating in court something that causes cancer does not thus committing perjury which is a crime? I turned the following information over to the Monterey County DA's office (in its Salinas office) concerning perjury in a cancer case but have not heard from them probably because of interference of my former union (Local 5 of UFCW). I heard my former shop steward and former manager talking as to how to stop this information from getting out to large numbers of people because a Congressional investigation into Safeway could happen. Other people told me that management and others were trying to figure out how to stop me from telling others about what is written below. All I am asking you to do is read what I gave to some newspapers and stated on the Jack Blood radio show on 3-3-2008 and after reading it write to the Monterey County DA's office and ask them what they are doing about it if you agree with contents of this letter and let other people know what is written in this letter. The company that committed perjury is Safeway which goes by the following names depending on where you live: Vons, Dominick's, Randalls, Tom Thumb, Genuardi's, Pavilions and Carrs. Dear editor, The Bush administration places money over the lives of the American people it has the duty to defend under the U S constitution. It will even practice perjury in order for members of its administration to make money. Steve Burd was one of the Bush administration Home Land Security advisors and has donated large amounts of money to the Bush campaigns in the past. The company he is CEO of is Safeway and the state of Ca. wanted to put warning labels on some of its food products so it went to court because Safeway refused to do so. The food companies being sued by the state of Ca. in Safeway's court case asked the federal government to step in. The federal government wrote a letter to defend Safeway and in it Dr. Lester Crawford, Commissioner Of The US Food And Drug Administration, stated that what the state of Ca. claimed had no scientific basis to it and also that the federal government did not want fish sells to go down. Judge Robert Dondero ruled in favor of Safeway and stated he did so based upon Dr. Lester Crawford's letter. The claim that there is no scientific basis is not true and Safeway knew it because it had its own experts on methylmercury in the court case. The International Agency For Research On Cancer stated in 1993 that there is sufficient evidence in experimental animals for the carcinogenicity of methylmercury chloride and thus methylmercury items are possibly carcinogenic to humans. Even the federal government stated years before the court case that methylmercury items are possibly carcinogenic to humans. The EPA in 1995 listed methylmercury items as being class C for human carciogenicity. What is interesting here is that in Dr. Crawford's letter he stated that the FDA and the EPA had a series of talks on the subject of human health risks of the consumption of methylmercury items . The Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry stated in 1999 in its TOXFAQs that methylmercury items are possible human carcinogens. Well since I was once a biology major I pulled down the research that was not mentioned in those reports and what research was done after those reports up to the court case. After reading what I put together you will see that we knew that methylmercury causes human cancer and the chemical reason why years before the court case. We have known for a long time that methylmercury and mercury binds to DNA. We have various scientific methods to show that this occurs. For example in circular dichroism studies one uses how items absorb beams of polarized light in order to determine the structure of an item. Different items absorb light in different ways and at different wave lenghts. Another way is to use DNA sedimentation rates. Different items have different rates of moving through sediments and that is the reason for using this way to look at things. The next one I will mention is nuclear magnetic spectroscopy (nmr). Nmr spectroscopy looks at how items absorb radio waves in a strong magnetic field. The last one I will mention is thermal analyses. Heat is used to look at things because things behave differently at different temperatures. The point I want to make here is that all these different ways of looking at things show that mercury binds to the DNA and anything that binds to the DNA can potentially cause problems to the DNA. We have known that mercury and methylmercury mutate genes years before the court case. Safeway and the Bush administration do not care if your DNA gets messed up due to methylmercury and mercury. If you do not believe what I state look up the Ca. court case the People of the State of California v Tr-Union Seafoods, LLC, et al. (case no. CGC-04-432394) since Safeway was in that court case and claimed that DNA damage does not happen by methylmercury. Over two hundred years ago we knew that mercury reacted with oxygen. Studies by two of the most famous scientists in the history of science found this to be important in their studies of oxygen. J. Priestley who is best known for the discoverer of oxygen and doing some of the first studies of photosynthesis used this fact in his studies of oxygen. A. L. Lavoisier who is known for his work in animal respiration also found mercury's ability to react with oxygen useful in his studies. One can find these people's names in high school science textbooks. The reason I state this is the fact that this reaction is one of the reasons why mercury causes birth defects, cancer and miscarriages. Lets look at the periodic table because things are grouped together by the fact they have common traits. Mercury is found in the transitional metal group. A common reaction to this group is the Fenton reaction. It is the name for the reaction of these metals with oxygen and it creates reactive oxygen species. Reactive oxygen species is what causes the destruction of DNA and thus causes what the state of Ca. claimed in court. Right next to mercury is cadmium which is a known cancer agent and it causes cancer by doing this reaction. Mercury does the Fenton reaction at the temperature which living things live at but at a slow rate according to a chemistry book. Also various science papers that I have read state reactive oxygen species levels go up due to methylmercury. Some of them state that it happens due to other reasons (The writers seem to forget chemical reactions just slow down instead of not happening so they over look the fact that other things happen at the same time when looking for something else thus they left out one of the various reasons as to why the reactive oxygen species goes up in the cell when methylmercury is present. You can have more than one reason for something to happen). Mercury mutates various genes found mutated in cancer patients. Some of these genes are p53, Fos, Jun and L1. P53 gene problems result in an increase accumulation of gene mutations and problems in the cell cycle. The mutation of either Fos or Jun genes can cause tumor growth. Increase levels of reactive oxygen species also cause the same type of results with p53, Fos and Jun. L1 mutaions are due to retrotransposition of DNA which causes lots of problems to the DNA due to the misreading of DNA and this can be found in breast and blood cancers. We have population studies out of Japan that show areas in Japan that had methylmercury problems have a higher rate of cancer and prebirth deaths. I have listed a couple of them below in the listing of science papers to back up my statements. Now I should state some textbooks state that a change in a single gene is not important but that is not true. The last time I checked there was around six thousand human diseases caused by a single bases change of a gene. For example there are osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease) and sickle cell anemia diseases caused by a single base changed Mercury also causes nondisjunction of the chromosomes. This has been known for decades and it is because it impairs spindle function thus the cell cannot divide correctly. Methylmercury does this by more than one method. Methylmercury binds to the spindle microtubules thus interfering with the spindle microtubules and it also causes reactive oxygen species to go in the cell. What is important about the increase level of reactive oxygen species is that reactive oxygen species alone can cause nondisjunction of the chromosomes. This causes incorrect number of chromosomes in a cell which is seem in cancer. Various human diseases are also caused by the nondisjunction of the chromosomes such as Down's syndrome, Edward's syndrome and Patau's syndrome. There are two theories as to how cancer begins. One of them involves the mutation of specific genes and the other is that a large numbers of genes have problems. Well methylmercury does both. It reacts with genes associated with cancer and causes havoc not only with a large number of genes but also with chromosomes. Another thing that Dr. Lester Crawford stated in his letter that upsets me has to do with U S Constitution. He stated that the Food and Drug Administration "believes that it is uniquely qualified to determine how to handle the public health concerns related to methylmercury in fish." He just stated that you or me or anyone else is not able to judge what the government does. Well under U S Constitutional law anyone who is a U S citizen and has not had his/her U S Constitutional rights taken away by due process of law can not only criticize the government but also can cause changes in what the government does. This right does not depend on how qualified you are or your intelligence. The person with the lowest intelligence or the least qualifications has the same right to judge the actions of the federal government that the person with highest intelligence or the most qualifications does. The right to judge the actions of the federal government is base upon being a U S citizen and nothing more. My fellow Americans I am asking you to ask for a Congressional investigation into this matter. Marcus Horton P O Box 84 . Salinas, Ca 93902 This is for the paper in order if anyone asks about the above. I should also state that methylmercury loses its methyl functional group in the human body and becomes just mercury so one has to look at studies that have to do with both when looking at this issue. Also mercury also binds to other functional groups once inside the human body. List of some studies to back up the statements in the above article. I have a longer list of studies showing what I stated is true. One paper showing that cadmium causes reactive oxygen species to go up in a cell and also showing that Fos and Jun genes have problems. P. Joseph, T. K. Muchnok and others. Cadmium-induced cell transformation and tumorigenesis are associated with transcriptional activation of c-fos, c-jun and c-myc proto-oncogenes: role of cellular calcium and reactive oxygen species. 2001 Toxiclolgical Sciences Jun; 61(2):295-303. One paper done after the case which shows large number of genes are affected by mercury. W. K. Ayensu, P. B. Tchounwou Microarry analysis of mercury-induced changes in gene expression in human liver carcinoma (HepG2) cells: importance in immune responses. 2006 Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health Jun; 3(2):141-73. Mercury binding to DNA A. Casadevall and L. A. Day Silver and mercury probing of deoxyribonucleic acid structures in the filamentous viruses fd, If1, IKe, Xf, Pf1, and Pf3. 1983 Biochemistry Sep 27;22(20):4831-42. D. Ding and F. S. Allen A circular dichroism study on the structure of DNA and the nucleosomal core particle using Hg (ll) and Ag (l) 1980 Biochim. Biophys. Acta. Nov 14; 610(1):72-80. D. Ding and F. S. Allen Electric dichroism and sedimentation velocity studies of DNA-Hg(II) and DNA-Ag(I) complexes. 1980 Biochim. Biophys. Acta. Nov.14;610(1):64-71. H. Torigoe, A. Ono and K. Kawahashi Thermodynamic analyses of the specific interaction between T:T mismatch base pair and mercury (II) cation: toward the efficient detection of single nucleotide polymorphism (1). 2004 Nucleic Acids Symp. Ser. (Oxf.) (48):275-6. P. R. Young, U. S. Nandi and N. R. Kallenbach Binding of mercury(II) to poly (dA-dT) studied by proton nuclear magnetic resonance. 1982 Biochemistry Jan. 5;21(1):62-6. Early studies showing mercury causes nondisjunction of the chromosomes. J. Magnusson and C. Ramel Genetic variation in the susceptibility to mercury and other metal compounds in Drosophila melanogaster. 1986 Teratog. Carcinog. Mutagen 6(4);289-305. C. Ramel and J. Magnusson Chemical induction of nondisjunction in drosopila. 1979 Environ. Health Perspect. Aug.;31:59-66. Some studies showing chromosome problems due to mercury. H. C. Wulf and others. Sister chromatid exchange (SCE) in Greenlandic Eskimos. Dose-response relationship between SCE and seal diet, smoking and blood cadmium and mercury concentrations. 1986 Sci. Total Environ. Jan; 48(1-2):81-94. L. Verschaeve, M. Kirsch-Volders and C. Susanne Mercury-induced segregational errors of chromosomes in human lymphocytes and in Indian muntjac cells. 1984 Toxicol. Lett. Jun;21(3):247-53. A. Renzoni, F. Zino and E. Franchi Mercury levels along the food chain and risk for exposed populations. 1998 Environ. Res. May;77(2):68-72. J. R. Lazutka and others. Chromosomal aberrations and sister-chromatid exchanges in Lithuanian populations: effects of occupational and environmental exposures. 1999 Mutat. Res. Sep. 30;445(2):225-39. One of the population cancer studies we have dealing with methylmercury. Since methylmercury goes after microtubles and causes microtubular damage one should find chronic liver damage as well and this study also shows that. H. Tamashiro, M. Arakaki, M. Futatsuka and E. S. Lee Methylmercury exposure and mortality in southern Japan: a close look at causes of death. 1986 J. Epidemiol. Community Health Jun:40(2):181-5. One of the population studies showing methylmercury causes fetuses to die before being born. M. Sakamoto, A. Nakano and H. Akagi Declining Minamata Male Birth Ratio Associated With Increased Male Fetal Death Due To Heavy Methylmercury Pollution. 2001 Environmental Research. A few of studies showing that methylmercury causes an increase in the reactive oxygen species in the cell. It does this by various ways. T. Sarafian and M. A. Verity Oxidative mechanisms underlying methyl mercury neurotoxicity. 1991 Int. J. Dev. Neurosci. 9(2) :147-53. S. Gasso and others. Antioxidant compounds and Ca(2+) pathway blockers differentially protect against methylmercury and mercuric chloride neurotoxicity. 2001 J. Neurosci. Res. Oct 1:66(1):135-45 G. Shanker and M. Aschner Methylmercury-induced reactive oxygen species formation in neonatal cerebral astrocytic cultures is attenuated by antioxidants. 2003 Brain Res. Mol. Brain Res. Jan 31;110(1):85-91 Showing that mercury and cadmium bind to p53 and thus cause p53 not to work right. P. Hainaut and J. Milner A structural role for metal ions in the "wild-type" conformation of the tumor suppressor protein p53. 1993 Cancer Res. Apr 15; 53(8):1739-42. Studies showing that we knew that mercury items turn on the proto-oncogenes c-jun and c-fos genes. M. Matsuoka, B. Wispriyono and H. Igisu Induction of c-fos gene by mercury chloride in LLC-PK1 cells. 1997 Chem. Biol. Interact. Dec 12;108(1-2):95-106 M. Matsuoka, B. Wispriyono, Y.Iryo and H. Igisu Mercury chloride activates c-Jun N-terminal kinase and induces c-jun expression in LLC-PK1 cells. 2000 Toxicol. Sci. Feb;53(2):361-8

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Wisdom

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! - July 6, 2008 - 04:21 PM

I pray today the windows of heaven will be open for you and shower down blessings upon you and your loved ones. May you have honor and a vision of peace in spite of human failure, faith to trust God's goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Knowledge that will enable you to continue to pray with a understanding heart and to do what each day requires you to do.

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Theophilus Nicholson

July 5, 2008 - 02:40 PM

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Bevastated1

Greetings : ) - March 5, 2008 - 02:58 PM

Thanks for accepting my friend request. It's nice to meet you... Bev

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