Jesus Christ Show | Hour 1 [11/05]

Jesus Christ Show | Hour 1 [11/05]

Episode Transcript

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You're listening to KFI A six fortyon demand, you know. Driving.
Recently saw a bumper sticker as bumpersticker said I can fix anything with the
right hammer, and it got methinking about how as people of faith,

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there are times when you want theconfirmation of God. And listen to me
that you want the confirmation of Godeven if you don't have the confirmation of
God, that you'll do anything toget that. You'll twist, you'll contort

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scripture, you will press push,yes, sometimes even get out that big
hammer to get the job done.And the word of God is something yes,
breathing, absolutely, But is itsomething that you are to twist or

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contort to your particular view to proveyourself right. Absolutely not. You are
supposed to receive from scripture, notput your views into scripture. This mindset
will save you a lot of painand anguish and frustration with God. I

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have met many a person's who haverejected truth, trying to pull from scripture
something that they want because it's easier. And I don't want you to be
there, not today, not anyday. I don't want you to ever

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get to a place where you feelthat it's okay for you to place your
will into scripture rather letting. Ratherthan letting Scripture breathe its will towards you.
And this bumper sticker, if Ican fix anything with any hammer,

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with the right size hammer, hasthat same mentality that it's not truly about
fixing it. It's about banging intoyour will. And I don't want you
to do that with scripture in theBible. As Paul writes to Timothy,

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a young man going into leadership atthe in the Fhesian Church, he writes
about scripture, he writes about care, he writes about scripture. Two Timothy

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two fifteen says, be diligent topresent yourself approved to God as a workman
who does not need to be ashamed, first and foremost, setting yourself apart.
Paul has talked about the difference inScripture between being ashamed in front of
man and being ashamed in front ofGod. Obviously being ashamed in front of

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God greater concern. And in sometranslations, I want you to hear the
words that are used. The sentimentis in every single one, but the
verbiage is interesting. It says notto be a shamed that goes on rightly
dividing the Word of truth. Rightlydividing the Word of truth. Now,

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this is not a phrase that showsup a lot in scripture. And there
are those that go back and forthas to what this might mean, because
it really translate. Rightly dividing translatesinto cutting straight the Word of God.
And there are those that go backand forth as to you know what this

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might mean. Many scholars believe thatthis this term to cut straight or rightly
divide, that Paul had in mindthe stonemasons that had to cut every stone

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precisely in order for the building tobe erected properly, to stand properly,
to have the fortress like qualities thatyou want in a structure. But think
about that precision. Think about whatthat means. To divide rightly the Word

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of God. That means to setapart when you sit and read scripture,
to know that when you proceed withreading and learning and taking from Scripture,
that you do it in a prayerfulmanner, in a manner which rightly divides

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the Word of Truth, that isn'tjust hammering your thoughts into it. That
the words there imply specific division anda delicate touch, not the big hammer

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method I'm reminded of that play schooltoy. It looks similar to a globe,
but it's a geometric shape that hastwo sides. It has handles.
One side of it is red,one side blue. The handles are yellow.
You pull it apart and all theshapes come out, and then you

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put the shapes back through each holeof the same shape. So you have
hearts, you have moons, halfmoons, you have stars, circles,
squares. Now, some kids thatyou give it to, they will look
at the shape, the shape theyhold in their hand, they will look
at the cutout and they'll put itin the proper location. There are other

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kids that will take the palm oftheir hand and push the circle through the
square slot because their goal is merelyto get it inside the container. And
I see people do this with scripture. They'll take a verse and they will
push, and they will push,and they will pull, and they'll yank,

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and they'll twist, and they'll tryand cram it to mean what they
want it to mean. Do youdo this? Do you try and get
scripture to say to mean what youwanted to say or mean, or do
you let it breathe and speak toyou? Rightly dividing the meaning and the

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truth of the Word of God.It's interesting that this term is not used
throughout Scripture, that Paul used aspecific way of saying to divide the truth
the Word of God. That thisimagery of a stonemason, or some say

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it might even be a surgeon orsomething. But the importance here is that
Paul saw the need to specifically usethese words to rightly divide, to cut
straight the word of truth. SometimesI feel like there are those that go

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through Scripture with scissors, taking outwhat they want or don't want, and
leaving what they do, sort ofmaking their own version, kind of the
Thomasonian Thomas Jefferson with his Jeffersonian.Rather, his Bible is a Bible of

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removal. It's basically removing the thingsthat Thomas Jefferson didn't want to deal with,
leaving what he did what he referredto as the teachings of Christ.
But my teachings were not just those. My teachings go throughout the entirety of

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Scripture. And so to segment orpartition or take away, or to cram
and twist the Word of God isto lose the truth about Scripture. Is
to lose the value because really,instead of you imposing your view on scripture,

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instead of you imposing your thoughts,your wants, your desires on scripture,
on the contrary, scripture should beimposing its views on you. So
interpretation scripture receiving from scripture what ithas to teach you. The important thing

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is to use scripture itself to interpretitself so that you don't get lost in
your own interpretations or trying to squeezeout of scripture what you want. Continue
to read everything in its context.There are times where to get a huge

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and important truth out quickly, youneed to condense it. And I know
that this is very common, andso is scripture memorization and uh, taking
certain scripture and you know, puttingthem on notepads or a bumper sticker or

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a T shirt. And there aredefinitely scriptures that are concise and to the
point, and you will remove itand you'll go, okay, this really,
you know, says what I'm tryingto get across. But everything in
scripture is seated in its context forreason, and where it sits is important

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to how you understand it when youdive into scripture, when you open it
up. I know you want itto speak to you, Well, hear
it out. Hear it out inits entirety, read and understand the context,

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what was taking place, and thenit will speak to you truly,
rather than you feeling the need toonly cut a little peace out and say,
okay, this is what I'm goingto remember. Now, you may

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read an entire chapter and find thatone verse in that chapter seems to sum
it up. That's okay, butread it in its entirety. Know that
scripture, those that you come acrossthat are difficult, those verses to come
across that are difficult, should beinterpreted by the rest of scripture. So

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you go through and you read,You see things in their proper context and
let them come to life. Youcan compare and contrast against other parts of
scripture, and then you can knowwhat God wants you to know. I

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see people take very difficult scriptures outby themselves and try and make something that
contradicts the entirety of the Bible andtries to make some sort of doctrine or
belief out of it. You haveto look at them and say, well,
that's contorting or I hear people makecomments oftentimes antagonists against God or God's

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words, taking things complete completely outof context, and trying to make them
say something ugly or awful without knowingwhat their purpose was to begin with.
If it's wrong when they do it, it's wrong when you do it.

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Ed. Welcome to the Jesus ChristShow. Thank you, Hello Jesus.
I want to tell you that Ihave never craved a bag like they end
this morning. And whether it's onionor raisin, that's the dilemma. But
cream cheese is just a given.Oh well, goodness, is that's your
only problem or dilemma today? You'redoing all right, my friend. I

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wanted to ask you, you hearthat argument will prove to me that God
exists without using the Bible. Now, the Bible is the foundation of my
belief in Christ, but can thatbe done well? The Bible is the
foundation of the practice of your belief, but often there's something that precedes that.

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Something has to precede it, otherwiseyou wouldn't have gotten to the Bible.
So it's not like in some casessome people have the Bible put in
their face as young kid and theyjust kind of okay, well, this
is what I do. But asyou know, children tend to grow up
and become rebellious. And the simpletruth is you either believe what your parents
believe, or you believe the exactopposite. I mean, that's usually where

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people go. They usually rebel oraccept. But outside of that, and
I'll explain why the Bible is okayto use, even though I wouldn't always
recommend it, but intellectually why it'sokay to use. But outside of that,
you have to start at the basics. You have to start at if
there is a God at all,and before you get into the specifics of

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the nature of God, which iswhat the Bible kind of reveals and focuses
on. So there are certain thingsand arguments, and all of them break
down in one form or another,but they do paint a picture that points
to the necessity for a trans beingsomething that is outside of creation. And
you can do that by saying bylooking around. Some call it the law

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of contingency. If you look around, there is nothing in the universe,
nothing that you can point to thatdoesn't have to point outside itself to explain
its existence. The tree has topoint to the acorn, which points to
the tree, which points to theacorn. You, to your parents,
to their parents, to their parentsand everything. You know, the table

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you're sitting at has to point backto the tree that it came from,
which came from the acorn, Soif you see, everything has to point
back somewhere. And the law ofcontingency would argue that if everything in the
universe is contingent, then the universeitself is contingent, meaning that it's dependent
upon something, and that points tothat something being possibly a god. So

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it's the equivalent of saying, youknow, if the legs of the chain
are wood and the seat of thechair is wood, and the back of
the chair is would, then what'sthe chair made of? Ed what exactly?
So if everything in the universe iscontingent, dependent upon something to prove

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its existence or to explain its existence, then the universe itself has to point
outside itself to explain its existence.So that's one form. And all of
these have fancy names, the cosmologicalargument, the teleological argument, the deontological
argument, and things like that,but when it comes to these arguments,

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a lot of them are just lookingat logic and understanding. You can get
into science, you can get intothermodynamics and how things are winding down and
becoming simpler, which implies they werewound up and they're not getting greater,
which points to evolution becoming more complex. Nothing in science gets more complex.
It always gets simpler. Thermodynamics,things are breaking down. If you put

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an apple in the cupboard, itdoesn't become a greater apple. It breaks
down in rocks. It gets simplerin nature, not greater in nature.
You can point to design. Youcan point to the fact that there's nobody
in their right mind that would bedriving through the Dakotas and look at Mount
Rushmore and saying say that, oh, look that is, you know,

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because of erosion and rain. Wouldn'tthat seems silly that someone would look at
Mount Rushmore and think that it camejust out of happenstance because of erosion.
Oh absolutely, that would be silly, because your mind knows that when it
sees complexity, that it has design, and design comes from a designer.
Yet when you look at humanity,people look at humanity and go, oh,

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well, that's just an accident.I'm often floored by the the atheistic
evolutionist who sits there and chuckles aboutthe well these guys believe and this magic
guy named Jesus that came down andkind of threw his faery dust around,
and now everybody gets lived for forever. Reductionism, you know, you can

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reduce it to sound silly, justlike I could say that the evolutionist believes
you come from a magic bowl ofsoup. So if you look at the
complexity of humanity, if you lookat the complexity of the universe and the
necessity of the universe, meaning everylittle star has a purpose and every grain
of sand has a purpose and abalance to this life, that that shows

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design. That points to a designerand doesn't just point to randomness and the
actual mathematical laws that you'd have touse and stew mathematically to say that humanity
just happened out of chaos. Itruns on the other side of impossible mathematically.

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So there's a lot of different areasyou can run down and point to
and use his arguments, But altimate, there's going to be a point of
faith because you're dealing with a pastsingular like the creation of time and the
universe and the world as you knowit. And even the evolutionary scientist has

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to do the same thing because forensicsis the only science you can use,
which is the science of basically lookingbackwards through that which is left. So
no one could go back to thatmoment and create that moment and say,
okay, this is how the worldcame to be, because the world's already
here and you can't recreate it.Somewhere there was some some years ago there

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was a scientists that created a simpleand which is essentially like a life,
and threw their arms up in theair and said, whoao, we created
life. See we did it.We finally in a petri dish, we
created life. This is it.We've showed everybody that we can do it.
And the theis looked up and said, let me get the straight You
did what well? We created life? I said, well, what kind

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of environment? Oh it was itwas a specific environment, a lab excellent
and who monitored well, our greatestscientists. So you're saying that intelligence in
a created environment brought forth life,which is what the theist has been saying
since day one. All that provesis that you need intelligence to create intelligence

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and science. The law is thatthe law of causing effects says that the
effect is never going to be greaterthan the cause. If I can push
something, it's because my strength leveragethe viscosity of the ground that the item
sitting on, whatever it is,is going to be in my favor.
I'm stronger than whatever it is.If I can pick it up or throw

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it, I'm stronger. My causeis greater than the effect of the ball
being thrown or whatever I'm tossing.Right, Well, they have to kind
of reverse that when it comes tocreation and evolution, because in the evolutionary
model, the effect evolution is greaterthan the cause because it's getting more complex.

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It's getting bigger, better, stronger, faster, smarter, and not
smaller simpler. There's a lot ofproblems with it. And I know that
a lot of folks will roll theireyes at this because they say, oh,
well, the cosmological has problems thisway, the deontological has problems this
way. Tellia, they start pickingapart, and all arguments do break down

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in certain areas, but as awhole, you bring them to a place
where you can look at it andsay, wow, there actually is great
argumentation. It's not illogical to believein God. It's not just fantasy or
faith. Faith is great and important, but ed faith is that which comes
after that which you can know.I like that. It's not illogical,

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No, absolutely not. If you'regoing to serve a god, do you
want to serve a whacked out illogicalGod. No? And I find it
silly. And you'll find that thecults or the occult at times, other
belief systems heretical systems. Within theChurch, they're often very nonsensical and usually
teetered towards manm uh, this isyou know, you look at people and

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say, let me get this straight. You think we made up scripture.
You think that I wrote a booktelling me not to do the very things
that is in my nature to wantto do, and that I'm going to
live by it. Why? Well, because the early man did it so
that they could build a structure oflaw and so people would abide. No,

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humans don't want to abide by anything, no matter who says it.
People have been rebelling against me andthe Father since day one. Written or
unwritten, oral tradition or not oraltradition. Man wants to rebel, why
would that same man write a bookthat he's going to rebel against. It's

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not a book that a man wouldwrite if he could or could write if
he would. So there's many,many, many, many different ways of
going about it. But lastly,Ed, I want to give you some
comfort about scripture itself. Scripture isnot one book. That's the mistake.

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People always think it's one book.Scripture is over sixty five books, written
by approximately forty authors on three differentcontinents, in three different languages, by
priests and peasants, at times ofpeace at times of war. It's voluminous.

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It's not one book. Now,if I brought thirty books to somebody
throughout the centuries that were written bydifferent people that all pointed to the same
thing, that's not circular reasoning orgoing back and arguing your point from your
point. That's building the case ifyou ask me, John, Welcome to

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the Jesus Christ Show. Hello,Jesus, Hi John, what's up?
Jesus. I decided to call youtoday because I'm having a lot of problems
in my life. Aside from thefact that I'm going through a lot of
financial difficulties, I've also recently foundout that my wife has been having an

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extramural affair. It's been about threemonths give or take since I've found out,
and not by any admission, butjust my own general knowledge. Oh
so you're saying that she hasn't confessedto this in any way, shape or
form. Well, she confessed afterI presented her with the proof, So

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she got caught pretty much. Okay, Well, John, I'm going to
ask you a hold on a second, as we're up against the clock,
I want to talk to you moreand hear more of the story. We've
been married for seventeen years, findout, in addition to having financial woes
right now, that your wife ishaving an affair. When we come back,
I want to talk to you alittle bit more about that and see

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what scripture has to say. Wewere talking with John, been married for
seventeen years, found out his wifewas having an affair. Now, John,
you called her on this right?Oh yes, okay, so you
saw signs or whatever it was youfinally called her. How did you respond

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to you calling her out on thecarpet on that? She was very upset,
very upset, and come to findout that it was a coworker of
hers. And quite honestly, youknow, I'm doing a little bit more
research. I found that I confrontedthis person, okay, and you know

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I told them what my intentions were. And you know, he says there
was just a strong friendship and soforth. But in reading emails and things
of that nature, you know,there was it seemed like there was more
more of a bond there between them. Jesus, I know, I know

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you didn't quit on us when youwere preaching your word the non believers,
and I'm trying to follow that inspirationand not not trying to quit on my
marriage. There are children involved,and I'm trying to be the better person.

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But it just seems so differ togout. You know, sometimes you
don't you wish for the response,a certain response, and you're not getting
that certain response back. And allyou hear is I need time. I
need time one day at a time. Is that is that the response that
she's giving you or is this thisyou working through it? Uh? No,

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this is this is her responses.She needs time for what I I
don't know because she won't reveal thatto me personally. You know, there
was you know, I was verynaive. There were a lot of text
messagings and and things of that nature. You know, technology unfortunately has made

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it even easier for someone to havean affair or to keep contact and kind
of ruminate and build those emotions.And about six months ago, you know,
without knowing anything, I asked her, I said, you know,
are you having an affair? Isthere someone else? And she both denied
it. Come to find out thatthis uh was going on for about a

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year or so. Wow. Okay, Well here's the rules. This is
what it means to you. Doyou have you know, biblical right to
save the marriage? Yes, ofcourse you do. Yeah. This is
a debate that goes on throughout Christendom. But the most Christians would believe that

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in context on you know, somebodywho is unchased or in this say this
case, an adulter, that youcould save the marriage. However, that
isn't that's not my standard. Mystandard and on Corinthians seventy ten is really
about reconciliation. Reconciliation should always beat the forefront. But these are the
rules that I want you to know. One, John, you can only

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be fifty percent of the relationship.You can't go over and be her part
as well. She has to participatein this. You have to give the
ultimatum that this is where we're at. I would like to reconcile. This
relationship. But it's going to takework. None of this. I'm not
ready now. If you're not innow, then you're not in. If
you're not going to be a partof the marriage now, then you're not

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going to be a part of themarriage. And we'll go our separate ways.
That stinks because for the children,most importantly, you both should be
together. However, in this particularcase, if she's going to be bringing
other men into the relationship in oneway or another, or these types of
things, and that's equally if notworse for the children. So for the
protection of the family or what's leftof it, you have to put the

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ultimatum down on the table and saythis is what I want, this is
what I need. She has tobe all in and you have to be
all in. You can't continue tobeat her over the head with it.
She can't continue to make excuses orrun around or be secretive. You have
to know where she is. Shehas to know where you are. You
guys have to have an equal amountof trust in this, and then from

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that point it can move forward.K f I A M six forty on demand M