#WeekendCoffeeShare

If we were having coffee I would tell you that this week for me has contained ups and down even during  24 hours of the same day.

#WeekendCoffeShare

As a Christian, I know that I shouldn’t be so affected by outer circumstances but I am who I am and I am and not yet able to say that I am not affected. At school, I had a teacher who meant everything to me. What I have been taught of things of interest goes back directly to his teaching on languages, Danish, Latin, History, Art. At the time he said to me that I was very sensitive and my twin brother was the rational one.  I believed he was right, but the word sensitive was new to me and I didn’t know myself so well at the age of fourteen to really understand it.

The old photo I should have used and my photo from 2015

Polfoto “The Dragon Fountain”

The removed dragons put on a wall and now gone

Last Sunday I posted a question with a picture at a group of Historical Copenhagen. I  remembered that new pictures were not accepted, but I felt that my picture illustrated my question. Where had the dragons gone at the Dragon Fountain in Copenhagen, where my grandparents secretly had met soon after WWI had ended? To me, a very important question and I knew that within five minutes some expert would have told me and I could have taken down the photo. Soon some other member wrote that the picture was too new and the admins wouldn’t like it. I repeated that I would soon remove it. He was kind to send me an old picture with the big dragons still on the fountain. I was just going to change the picture when I couldn’t find the group anymore. What came up was a picture of a handyman with his tools saying that I could have no admittance to the group. I found it whole and sound at my husband’s devices and started to feel heavy in my stomach. That meant that I was blocked! How could they do that to me? I had not bothered anybody just wanted to know something important. With difficulties, I found the names of the admins, but I was not sure to get through with a message. I wrote to a friend who is very active in the group but he had severe pains and could not help. The next day I got in contact with an admin who tried to help me, but he couldn’t find me. He contacted the head admin who said he had punished me. I told him that

I suffered from the consequences of my act and wanted to be taken in again.

After a long pause, I was unblocked and I could seek membership once more. Again I had to wait for hours to be accepted. Since then I still haven’t asked about the disappearing dragons.

The day I was taken into the group again I found a post from a fellow blogger and author Stephen Bentley with his blog expatinbacolod.com. He had commented on a post I wrote last week on being inspired by fellow bloggers when you find somebody with similar interests. In this case, it was the interest about the impact of the WWII on people who lived at the time in different countries.  The counterpoint to the blocking incident mentioned above came when I realised that Stephen Bentley decided to start writing a book on his paternal grandfather who was saved from drowning as the battleship “Prince of Wales” was targeted and torpedoed by Japanese pilots in the Pacific  Ocean during WWII. See the historic and impressive You Tube video here.

Stephen writes in his post linked above

There was a history there that led to father and son (Dad and Granddad) becoming estranged…..

This is what really interests me the relationships between generations and how and why emotional scars make it difficult to talk about life and keep a normal contact and how this could be healed. My relationship with my father was tense due to things from the wartime too.

I had urged him to write his family stories heard as a child about bombings of Manchester and Liverpool. Our paths have crossed each other in another way too. My family and I visited Manchester and Liverpool when I was fifteen years old. In my whole childhood letters were read aloud by my mother when she got a letter from Josey, her friend from Manchester. They had met just after the war and kept in contact their whole life. I learnt the special Northern accent which my English teacher disliked. (A vague remembrance of the heavy feeling comes up again.)

I remember the smoky air from coal heating at that time in these big cities. After I finished school at nineteen of age, we call it “Gymnasium”, I went to stay there and worked in the Danish Food Center in Manchester. This was the first attempt from my side to try to be independent. I sometimes make sentimental journeys to Manchester but I will never find the restaurant as the inner city was bombed by the IRA’s in 1993.  Josey once told me of a Norwegian who used to live in Manchester in his youth before the war. He came back after the war and wanted to show his family where he had lived and worked. It was all changed and he couldn’t believe that it was gone. I remember I felt his sadness hearing about this in my youth.

If life never gives you any stumble stones like being blocked etc. you will never find out about what you contain yourself. I felt like a schoolboy being thrown out of high school for having crossed some boundaries and I couldn’t help seeing God’s comfort and sense of humour in letting me be the catalyst for Stephen to start on his book on his grandfather’s fate during the war. His plan had been to write more on the criminal genre as a former police officer and undercover agent.  I know that I have put Stephen into a great work. Much will have to be dug up as the witnesses are all dead.

Many verses in the Bible urge me to keep my life in balance. They can’t keep bad incidences away but they help me to regain control when I feel embarrassed, sad or frightened over a collision between myself and other people.

Colossians 3:14-15 And above all these put on love and enfold yourselves with the bond of perfectness  which binds everything together completely in ideal harmony.

And let the peace (soul harmony which comes) from Christ rule in your hearts (deciding and settling with finality all questions that arise in your minds, in that peaceful state) to which as members of Christ’s one body you were also called to live. And be thankful, appreciative, giving praise to God always.

 

If we were having coffee I would tell you that to find my own posts on my family story I have made a list under the headline with the category “Family Stories”. Little by little I will go through the posts on this and categorize them so they will be easily found.