[Trapped]

First and foremost, the word. The word is pure milk. It is also bread. It is also solid food.

Witness Lee's footnotes and commentaries can be helpful and enlightening, but they should not be considered the substantial "meat" over the insubstantial "milk" of the word. This is an error.

However, at this point I personally cannot discount WL's footnotes and comments entirely. He did get some things correct, and there is some light there. In one meeting we had a new one ask about WL and the use of his materials in the LCs. Another new one who had more experience in life answered according to his own experience which was that he treated WN/WL's books as meat and bones (metaphorically, and in no relation to the "meat" I used earlier in this post). Whatever he received helpful he treated as meat and took in, and the rest that didn't help him or he didn't quite agree with, he simply discarded as bones, not something he should swallow, and moved on.

Similarly, he treated many other Bible commentaries in the same way, and was thus able to receive much more encouragement and light than if he had restricted himself to just the exposition of one man.

Witness Lee especially, his style of expounding does very little for me personally. It is very hard for me to relate to it, but that does not mean that I am lacking somehow or unwilling or in darkness or whatever. I have always mostly hit my head against it my whole life, no matter how much I read or tried.

For example, I've been struggling hard with forgiving some saints recently who really gutted me and then lied to me, and then continued to do so knowing what they were doing and not caring ONE BIT how they were affecting me. From WL I would get, "The root of our unwillingness to forgive others lies in our dispositional anger. Every man has a disposition that makes it easy for him to be offended, especially by his wife. The reason there are so many separations and divorces is that the women complain and that the men find it difficult to forgive. I advise the sisters not to complain and the brothers not to be offended." "Seventy times seven means that we must forgive others an unlimited number of times."

Well, that's nice, Witness. Thanks for your inspired advice not to be offended. I'm still struggling.

Then I was listening to Christian radio today......non-WL inspired songs! Tenth Avenue North's song "Losing" came on and nailed it. Spoke right to me. Said exactly what I was feeling, exactly how worn out my heart was by their months upon months of disregard, exactly the despair that I was the one losing and I was wrestling so hard with being in that position when I never thought these saints would be the ones to put me there. It didn't blame my disposition, it didn't tell me "I must" do something. It met me right where I was, on the floor really grasping to forgive these ones.

"I can't believe what she said
I can't believe what he did
Oh, don't they know it's wrong
Don't they know it's wrong

Maybe there's something I missed
How could they treat me like this?
It's wearing out my heart
The way they disregard

This is love or this is hate
We all have the choice to make

Oh, Father won't you forgive them
They don't know what they've been doing
Oh, Father give me grace to forgive them
'Cause I feel like the one losing

Well it's only the dead that can live
But still I wrestle with this
To lose the pain that's mine
Seventy times seven times
'Cause Lord it doesn't feel right
For me to turn a blind eye
Though I guess it's not that much
When I think of what You've done"