Hello, thanks for joining me today for Give Him 15. I'm glad to be back in the saddle,

writing the post for today. I hope you enjoyed hearing from some of our friends. I know you did.

Cece is recovering nicely from last week's hip replacement surgery.

It's a slow process, but she looks forward to being

on the other side of it, and I'm doing a wonderful job

as the nurse or one of them.

The title of today's post is the snare of denial. According to the dictionary,

denial is an unconscious defense mechanism used to reduce anxiety by denying thoughts, feelings, or facts that are consciously intolerable.

This can be very detrimental to a person's well-being. However, I contend that there's good denial

and bad denial.

For example, a desert nomad awakened from hunger one night and decided he'd have a midnight snack.

Lighting a candle, he grabbed a date and took a bite.

Holding the date to the candle, he saw a worm, whereupon he threw the date out of the tent.

Biting into the second date, he found another worm and threw it away. Then the nomad paused to consider the situation.

Deciding he might not get anything to eat if this continued,

he blew out the candle and ate the dates.

That's good denial.

Just pretend there are no worms and eat the dates.

The fear is all in your head anyway.

Eating worms won't hurt you.

I learned that from watching the TV series alone.

Then there's the story of a stubborn, never say died general who was taken captive and thrown

...