Blog 3817 – 05.05.2026

Strange Voices

A couple of quotes from Jesus to start off with:

First to bad boys James and John whom he renamed “sons of thunder” because they had ask his permission to call down fire on a town that had rejected their preaching. Jesus said to them, “You know not what spirit you are of” or in other words, you are listening to strange voices. And second a reference to his Good Shepherd role, “My sheep recognize my voice” meaning they are not deceiving by strange voices.

My boyhood friend Phyllis, who finds no joy in housework, posted today’s picture quote and funny as it is, I think it supports an underlying truth regarding “critical thinking.” Our institutions of higher learning, our colleges and universities used to teach this skill to students, even our high schools taught rhetoric and debate in English  classes to challenge students to question those strange voices in their heads.

My dear wife of almost thirty-seven years has for several years been tormented by strange voices. Sometimes she thinks that I or even her mother, who spends a couple of days with us each week, are saying these terrible things to her. And she will give us a hard look and say, “I can’t believe you you said that to me.” Linda Lee was a career banker and like my friend Phyllis, herself a career teacher, never cared much house work. But, I did not marry Linda for housekeeping skills, not cooking, or banking skills. I founder her to be a wonderful lover and I knew she would make a wonderful mother. And she proved herself expert in both of those skills.

I believe that those negative strange voices, and we all hear them, not just my wife, emanate from the only true enemy of our souls, a lying snake in the grass that some call Satan (accuser of the brethren) but I like to call ego, that false god that we created in our own minds so we would have another voice to listen to besides that of our higher and best self. Lincoln called that higher voice “our better angels” and said he prayed that we as a country would listen to those better angels before our nation, a divided house, was torn apart. We did not listen then and I fear we are listening to strange voices now. Hateful voices calling for war, voices that consider honest differences of opinion to be flash points, red lines. 

Criticizing public policies one believes to be incorrect or wrong is not being unpatriotic, on the contrary a certain amount of skepticism, critical thinking regarding government policy was the intent of our founding fathers who knew all too well that government powers need to be kept in check by the governed, that in Lincoln’s words again, “that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perished from the earth.”

My Linda can no longer tell the difference and those strange voices have become so familiar that they seem real to her. They threaten her with all kinds of things if she does not sweep and mop the whole house far more often than she ever did in the past and more even than most “cleanliness nuts” in my opinion would think adequate. They tell her that the food she is about to eat is not hers, but belongs to someone else. By far the biggest most hateful lie of all these strange voices yell at my Linda Lee, we have all at one time or another heard whispered, that she is unloved, unwanted, hateful, and unlovely. I have it on the highest authority, my higher power, my highest and best self, the one true voice that she, we are each and everyone – loved, wanted, loving, and altogether lovely.

Don’t listen to strangers, trust the one voice you know to be true, your higher best self, your better angels.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

One last critical thinking quote: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is probably a duck.”