DeeDee Armstrong

just a gal who loves her kids, her chickens, but above all Jesus.

[Deputy Skaggs @DeputySkaggs]

NOW SEARCHING: 17-year-old Leighanna Roze Marie Cree missing from Bemidji, Minnesota.

Do the right thing for her — start here: https://t.co/dQbetkFsrs.

Get off your butt!

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@gospel4grace I’m reading through all of this, and I’m left with a heavy heart. Mostly heavy because nothing in this thread would make an unbeliever want to associate with believers. Nothing sounds like following Christ is any different than following the world. It’s just more tit for tats.

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@gratiadeo @naomirwolf Thank you so much for sharing this!! Smart to sub applesauce!

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@gratiadeo @naomirwolf Cathy- can you share this recipe? I’d be grateful!

[Brother Rachid الأخ رشيد @BrotherRasheed]

The Persecution That Doesn’t Make the Headlines

I am a Muslim convert to Christianity. I lived for 15 years as a Christian believer in Morocco, much of that time in what we called the underground church.

Listen carefully, because this is what “moderate Islam” looked like for us:

Morocco is considered one of the most moderate Muslim countries. That is true compared with Mauritania and Libya, where converts from Islam face the death penalty, or Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Pakistan, where converts face imprisonment, torture, intimidation, or severe persecution.

But here is the reality of “moderate” Morocco.

We gathered secretly in homes every Sunday because churches were for foreign Christians, not Moroccan converts. We sang in low voices so the neighbors would not hear us. We arrived two at a time to avoid suspicion. If anyone asked, we pretended it was simply a gathering of family and friends.

We baptized converts in bathtubs.

I was baptized in a bathtub myself. A missionary and a few Moroccan Christians were the only people present.

We kept our house churches small, usually fewer than twenty people. When they became too large, we split them. Christmas and a few special occasions were exceptions.

Police raided Christian gatherings, confiscated Christian materials, dragged believers to police stations, interrogated them, threatened them, and humiliated them with vulgar language.

Our children had to go to school and study Islam and memorize the Quran even though their parents were Christians.

We could not freely give our children Christian names. The government did not need to write “Christian names are forbidden” in bold letters. The authorities simply refused to register them.

Our marriages were treated as Islamic marriages under Sharia because the Moroccan state refused to recognize us for what we actually were: Moroccan Christians.

A Moroccan Christian woman could not simply marry a foreign Christian man as a Christian. He had to establish before the authorities that he was Muslim because, according to the government, she was still a Muslim.

The state decided our religion for us.

Even death did not end it.

When a Moroccan Christian died, he was buried in a Muslim cemetery under Islamic rituals because the government still considered him Muslim. I remember one Moroccan Christian who died in Tangier. We had to do the impossible to get his body to Ceuta so he could receive a Christian funeral.

Imagine having to smuggle your religious identity across a border just to be buried according to your own faith.

We could not establish our own legal Moroccan churches. We could not get permission to build even one church for Moroccan converts. Our house churches were illegal gatherings. We lived at the mercy of the police. Any meeting could be raided. Any neighbor could report us.

Foreign Christians had churches.

Moroccan Christians had secrecy, whispers, living rooms, bathtubs, police interrogations, and fear.

And then Muslims lecture the West about “Islamophobia.”

Spare me.

1/2

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@BrotherRasheed This was an excellent reminder to pray for the underground church! Many blessings to you.

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@jmadisonswife @DaveEDanna Go gettem!

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@Ravenphoenix78 @SReillyid @ThrillaRilla369 Public school kids end up socializing with a group all the same age. Homeschool kids socialize with every age group possible- from the elderly to tiny babies.

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@AuntHat_47 @ThrillaRilla369 I’m concerned that you think this is one of the “greatest lessons”— if that’s the greatest, public schools have lost their way.
There’s nasty folks and nice folks out in public. Homeschool doesn’t mean sit at home in isolation.

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@VerizonSupport @nahszn11 Hey, Christy… seems like you are posting garbage responses and are not an actual person who knows there’s a major outage…. Do better, @VerizonSupport

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@NaturallyFTW Oh no! I have been loyal to Thorne for years!! What’s an alternative??

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@DaveEDanna Fantasy- try the Stormlight series.
Historical Fiction- War of the Roses or America’s First Daughter or The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (potato peel is the best of these- excellent)
Thriller- Vertical Run

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@BkashJosi @awscloud The anomaly email isn’t an invoice- it shows that in the past 48 hours you’ve racked up a ridiculous volume on certain instances. THAT’s when we panicked that we were hacked or had something gone VERY sideways. That’s the thing- not the invoice- the “somethings wrong” msg.

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@insigdev @akinkunmi I didn’t get for a quadrillion. Far less. But previously our bill hit an anomaly (double running instances)… and that bill was terrible. This one was scary as well. I think the quadrillion was ALL the accounts added together that were affected. Poor response by AWS.

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@ngriffin_uk @awscloud So- did you, or did you not, get the anomaly detected email from AWS yesterday?

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@MrPunyapal @SantoshYadavDev Original joke still posted… no correction email to the email we got yesterday evening.

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@jeremy_87110 Heck- I even send apology notes if I had bad punctuation in an official email!

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@jeremy_87110 I’m so sorry that happened. Terrible experience.
I didn’t have any interviews- just the panic. Agree this response is terrible. I would never respond like this if my company messed up on this scale.

[DeeDee Armstrong @deedeeafton]

@microcap_maniac @awscloud SAME!!!