[Trapped]

I spent a little time scrolling through the other memorial videos for Benson.

-Ron Kangas is back, clearly having lost weight. He managed to get a nice slap down on all the saints by saying something like, "I have to be frank, but very few brothers and sisters in the church life are actually mature".

So......whose fault is that exactly? How much more "in the central lane" can they get at this point?

I was thinking about the overall common thread of the subjects in the TLRU YouTube channel, and it's as if the local church is Satan's way of keeping believers immature. If discerning good from evil is something mature believers do, if having knowledge keeps you from being stumbled in some cases, if having distinctions is what allows you and your gifts to flourish, if dropping the LSM false God's economy can make you more open to other Christians who do not follow God's economy, if the church is stunted because everyone "gets out of their mind" .... all these things are barriers to growth, maturity, wisdom, etc...

So if the co-workers want to tell all the saints that very few are mature, the co-workers can circle that blame back to themselves for keeping the saints immature. But they probably know that already.

-Ed Marks spoke of Benson "just wanting to repeat whatever brother Lee said" as some kind of laudable attribute.

-the ministry of the age and the minister of the age was repeatedly uplifted

-Ben said that Benson felt that those who leave the church "never saw the vision in the first place", because if they had actually seen the vision, they would never leave. (thanks for the blame game rather than much needed introspection!)

-Bob Danker spoke of Benson meeting with "dissenters" who were asking what about this, what about that, who were obviously "on the line of knowledge", and that Benson stayed so steadfast to remain "on the line of life". Well, having watched the Two Trees YT videos a time or two now, I have never been more assured that these two "lines" do not exist in the way they apply them.

-Dennis Higashi got up and praised the full-time training, and spoke of how special it was that Witness Lee's granddaughter was in the FTT and how he wished he could tell brother Lee that. He then turned to what must have been Benson's grandkids in the audience and basically publicly told them they should go to the FTT, if the Lord wills of course. I felt so bad for the kids to be publicly pressured like that.

-Barbara was the only sister to speak at the indoor Anaheim meeting, and her stories of Benson were again some of the strangest ones I've heard. The pain of a silenced woman, basically. Although mixed in with some endearing comments about getting to go to "the uttermost parts of the earth" with Benson.

-one of the co-workers called Benson "a bonafide apostle".

-at the outdoor graveside service, Hank Hanegraaff said that when Benson first saw him, "Benson reproved me by walking over to me and saying, 'Brother Hank, I testify to you, we are not modalists, we are thoroughly Trinitarian. Brother Hank, I testify to you that we do not believe that we can be as God is in the Godhead. We do not share His sovereignty or His persons and we cannot be worshipped as God. Brother Hank, I testify that we are not the only church, we are only the church.' And then he sat down. Those words are yet emblazoned on the canvas of my consciousness. They were few, they were eloquent, and 20 years later I still remember everyone of those words, and that changed the disposition between CRI and LSM, the LC, etc...."

Yeah...so many problems with what Benson said there, but we've dissected them all already, so I won't get into it again.

Anyway, it mostly made me glad I'm not there anymore. They are truly stuck in a time capsule, and I could STILL finish many of the sentences before they did because so much of what is said is just rote repetition of the same old phrases.

Trapped