by Vyckie

Angel’s boyfriend, Aaron, is in the evil jester costume.  Next to him is Hazelle ~ looking rather witchy.  Angel … I’m not sure what that costume is, but I think it’s pretty awesome.  Chassé was a cowgirl ~ no gun, but she still looks like she could hurt you, huh? LOL  In the front are Lydia Jean ~ a.k.a. “Sharpay” ~ and Wesley the Vampire. (Not pictured are: Andrew who was with his friends ~ and Berea ~ I think she was working.)

“Oooh, creepy” ~ we actually did Halloween this year for the first time in 20+ years.

Well, I should say that the kids “did Halloween” while I was busy working on preparations for the upcoming NLQ Carnival Days ~ I’m desperately scrambling to have everything ready before I leave for New York to be on the Joy Behar Show.

So, while Angel & Aaron took the kids out Trick or Treating, I stayed at home ~ with the porch light on and the front door open ~ which meant that I was interrupted every few minutes by little princesses, Hannah Montanas, clowns, a grim reaper and half a dozen unindentifiable somethings ~ all smiles and happiness.

In years past, we would either cower in the basement with all the upstairs lights off so that trick or treaters would think nobody was home ~ or else I’d take the kids to a church-related “Harvest Party” to protect them from all the evil we imagined was out in force on the devil’s night.

We celebrated Halloween tonite ~ and it was really not such a big deal.  Well ~ except for the little kids who couldn’t believe all the candy they collected.  What fun!

Angel told me afterwards that on the drive back home, Lydia Jean was showing off her heavy bag of sweets to Hazelle and Wesley ~ who hadn’t collected quite so much.  In her typical “Miss Merry Heart” fashion, Lydia exclaimed, “I think Halloween is my new favorite holiday!”

Honestly, I can’t remember what we were all so afraid of.

We’re talking about the “evils” of Halloween over on the NLQ forums.

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Beginning Sunday evening, Nov. 1st until we collapse sometime before midnight on Wednesday the 4th ~ we’re creating a party-like atmosphere here at No Longer Quivering and on the NLQ forums which includes fun & games ~ and even some cool prizes!

 
We’ll be setting up a “Carnival Midway” on the NLQ forums which will be open to all visitors ~ no need to register.  On the “Midway” visitors will find carnival booths with games and activities ~ plus plenty of excellent company!
 
NLQ Carnival Days will be a fun way of supporting and promoting No Longer Quivering ~ we’re asking for your help to make it happen. ‹(ô¿ô)›

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by Erika

Me and my youngest brother, 1991

After being made to quit the basketball team and the FHA group, I was trying to find any way that I possibly could to stay close to my friends. I called them when I could, I would wait outside on my porch after school ended so that I could talk to my classmates that lived on my street as they walked home each afternoon, I would try to get down to the school or a friend’s house when the chance came available. In the meantime, my parents were withdrawing us from as much as they could to be able to cut off as much outside influence and friendship as possible.

I remember Mr. Thompson feeding my father the line, “Take away everything that is important to your children and eventually, you’ll be the only thing left that’s important to them and they’ll cling to you.” My father gobbled up every bite that Mr. Thompson fed him, as Mr. Thompson supposedly had a perfect family. As my father and mother were being “fed” by Mr. Thompson’s horrid beliefs, I felt like I was dying a starvation of the soul.

As I look back at myself as a soon-to-be 15 year old girl, I see now that the depression that was to rear its ugly head at the age of 19 had taken seed in me when my life started to unravel at 14 years old. I only realized the climax of that depression when it hit later on, but in hindsight, I can see so clearly that it was a long process of eating away at my spirit over those long years.

I wrote in Part 3 about the first boy I had kissed. It wasn’t long until he was my boyfriend. I kept it from my family because I knew I would be under a sort of “house arrest” if I were to be found out. I tried to be around him as much as I could, but with an older sister who found it her duty to always be watching me, simply so that she could tattle on me, I had to become evasive, elusive and secretive. It was quickly an art that I had mastered…..for a while.

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This letter which I wrote to Jonathan Lindvall via his “Bold Christian Living” email discussion list fits into the time period of the latest installment of my story.  This one is total crap ~ I was trying so desperately to figure a way to get Angel to accept and embrace the godly, quiverfull lifestyle which we’d chosen for our family ~ I think that my desperation is quite apparent in this rather pathetic letter:

Dear Mr. Lindvall,

Thank you so much for your ministry — you have been a great encouragement to my husband & me.  I have a concern that I thought you might be able to address as you come from a godly Christian background.  You may have already dealt with this subject and if so, could you please direct us to the appropriate tapes?

My husband & I both come from very ungodly families and grew up amidst drugs, alcohol, violence, perversion, occultism, etc.  As  a young man, my husband, Warren, was serving time in jail for possession & sale of drugs when he turned his life over to the Lord and experienced deliverance from drugs and alcohol.  As for myself, at age 18, I knew that I was a hopeless sinner who deserved Hell — I lived with that miserable conviction for quite some time before the Lord revealed to me His grace & I was saved through faith.  When I surrendered my life to Jesus, it was a dramatic conversion experience  and I knew beyond all doubt that I was a new creature, a child of God and eternally secure.

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Baby makers

Preaching patriarchy and procreation, Quiverfull and like-minded groups live by the (good) book

West Sacramento resident Theron Johnson has a vision for an ideal society. In it, racism is eliminated. The United States disbands its large standing army and refrains from engaging in unjust wars. People live within their means and accrue no debt. The weak are protected, taxes lowered and inflation is considered theft. Government agencies stop encroaching on our daily lives, doing little more than protecting homes and property from fire or theft. Personal liberty and freedom reign supreme.

In his ideal society, women do not have the right to vote.

Male politicians fill government posts, as women seek higher personal meaning through submission to their husbands. Parents raise little girls not to attend college but to marry godly men and bear as many children as the lord gives them. Abortion, same-sex marriage and divorce: illegal.

This, to Johnson, is a Christian society.  Read the full story here.

From the article:

Breakaway blogging

For a long time, Vyckie Garrison, 43, lived out the Quiverfull image of a good Christian wife, with seven beautiful children and a popular newsletter run out of their Nebraska home. But two years ago, that all changed. Garrison, who lived in Sacramento as a child, now runs a blog called No Longer Quivering, writing about what she calls her escape from the Quiverfull movement.

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by Sierra

When we went to visit the house in Pennsylvania, it seemed remote, dark and expansive. At the inquisitive yet reticent age of seven, I hovered behind my mother’s leg as we looked around the basement of the long ranch house. It wasn’t quite a finished basement, but there was a bar installed with Heineken cans lining the ceiling. A child about my age was sitting on the floor playing with some ugly 1990s toys. We shared a mutual glance of childhood understanding: we were not agents in this business of buying, selling and leasing real estate (I couldn’t yet wrap my mind around what “real estate” meant in the first place). We were the dolls in our parents’ dollhouses, and I was displacing this other child. I felt the distinct urge to leave, as though I had stepped unbidden into this little boy’s territory and threatened to take away his home.

My parents and I had already moved about fifty miles west, an unheard of stretch from the perspective of my extended family. Now, a year later, we were moving just a few more miles, into a house where my father wouldn’t feel the landlord’s constant presence; after all, in our current house, he and his wife lived right next door. Since they’d invited me over for tea once or twice and had been perfectly agreeable to me, I couldn’t really relate to my father’s sentiment. All I really knew, or cared to know, was that moving was terribly exciting. I loved the way the teetering towers of packed goods transformed our living room into an alien landscape of artificial mountains, trails and caverns. I rescued a few stuffed animals from being boxed, and we escaped together to explore the cardboard jungle.

The forest of boxes had taken root in the plains of sorrow, however. Not long before we began touring the insides of other people’s houses, a fateful night had shaken our reality. It was the middle of a warm May night when I was roused by hands shaking me gently and then picking me up. I sleepily clutched a stuffed cat as my father loaded me into the front passenger seat of our Chevy sedan without shoes on. I contemplated how weird it was not to be wearing shoes in the car. And then we were following the ambulance.

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Dear Frank,

I am a former Christian homeschooling mother of seven who finally walked away from fundamentalism after our radical extremism drove my oldest daughter to attempt suicide ~ and I would like to help you spread your message and sell your books.

In bible college, your father was my absolute hero ~ I read all of his books and was determined to study Christian apologetics until I could defend my faith as skillfully as Francis Schaeffer!

However, as the years went by, fundamentalist “family values” put me in my place as a woman ~ and so I shifted my focus and that’s when your mother, Edith became my role model as I devoted myself to homemaking and motherhood.

I dutifully birthed seven “foot soldiers for Jesus” ~ nearly losing my life on more than one occasion. I was totally sold out ~ and as a homeschooler, I was exposed to the most extreme aspects of Dominionism. I felt that James Dobson, Tony Perkins, even Don Wildmon were lightweights ~ I much preferred the uncompromising Randall Terry ~ and Paul dePairie was better yet.

When Flip Benham came to Nebraska, I baked chicken-pot pies for him and we packed all our friends and associates into our livingroom to hear Flip speak about what it really means to be radically “pro-life.”

I was married to a blind man and in order to create a way for him to support our growing “quiverfull” family, I started a “pro-life, pro-family” newspaper in Northeast Nebraska. I followed all the major right-wing leaders in the “culture wars” and used my newspaper to challenge Christians to join the fight to restore America’s godly heritage. My articles advocating no-birth-control-for-Christians and heralding the Old Testament patriarchal family structure were carried by all the major home school publications ~ I even wrote for AFA’s Agape Press News.

Now, my newspaper, which I published for 16 years, had a circulation of around 5,000 ~ so I was totally a small-bit player compared to what you were doing on the national level, but that is not for lack of talent and ambition ~ it was only because, as a woman, I was too busy fulfilling my high calling of producing and raising up an army for God within my own home.

Cutting to the chase here ~ the extremist lifestyle was a total set-up for burn-out for me ~ and psychosis for my oldest daughter.

I met a long-lost uncle who is an atheist ~ and for some reason we hit it off and began a year-long email correspondence. At the very beginning, I wrote to my Uncle Ron this quote which I picked up from one of Francis Schaeffer’s books: Atheists have both feet firmly planted in mid-air. There’s no way that I would ever give up my certainty ~ my absolute “Blessed Assurance” for Ron’s worldview which he described as a “dissonant world of emergence and transition.”

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by Tapati

My 18th birthday came and went in December. We didn’t celebrate birthdays, although I’d made a cake for Mike’s birthday in September. I was disappointed that he did nothing for mine. I was used to celebrating it every year in some way.

I began to talk about having a baby. It seemed like many of the women were having babies in New Dwaraka and the more time I spent with moms, the more I wanted a baby of my own. While there was no expectation that we would have lots of children, having children was the point of being householders. We were supposed to raise good devotee children, children who would be even more devoted than we were because they wanted to take birth as devotees while we were born karmis. These children would help change the world and bring about the Golden Age predicted by scriptures, an age where peace and devotion to Krishna would sweep the earth.

I wanted to conceive a child in the right way, by chanting 50 rounds of the Hare Krishna mahamantra–thereby calling a Krishna Conscious soul to take birth as our child. I was babysitting on Sunday mornings for Srilekha while she taught Sunday school to Indian children. Her little girl Kishori was conceived in this way. Kishori was a delightful little girl and spending time with her only increased my desire to have a child.

The Hare Krishna maha-mantra

Mike didn’t want to plan a child and so he wouldn’t agree to chanting 50 rounds. On the other hand, he didn’t want to use condoms or other birth control. I figured we’d end up having a baby anyway, though not the way I preferred to. We discussed this a few times but when he became frustrated and a little angry, I backed off. I didn’t want to inspire his anger because I was never sure where it would lead.

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