Drowning in Food Ideas

Today I’m making spicy fried chicken with homemade sourdough batter, plus mashed red potatoes and cream gravy, with bacon grease biscuits. Inspiration is falling like rain. I hope this works. A lot of this stuff is coming to me as I work on the food.

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The chicken was excellent, but I think I’m frying too much chicken in a small pan, because it’s not crisp on the outside the way it should be. The recipe is a keeper, although I have to increase the peppers.

Many are the Afflictions of the Righteous…

From Heather:

Penelope will be having surgery sometime this afternoon. They will be removing all of the grafts and putting in a drain. Once the infection is cleared, then she will have to have another surgery. Please pray for success.

Bad Breath a Small Price to Pay

These are pretty sick.

Here’s some rolls without sauce.

Here’s some rolls with sauce.

Here’s the bottom of a roll, so you can see how they brown up. Crunchy and full of flavor.

Here’s how they pull apart. Beautiful.

The flavor and texture are excellent, but strangely, they seem a little sweet. Next time I’ll use more starter and make sure they’re sour. In any case, I have never had a roll this good in a restaurant. Very nice.

Baked up a small loaf, too, and it was also good, although you don’t get the pull-apart strips.

Thank you, Lord. These are tasty.

SHOO!

Sourdough is changing my life.

I started out by making sourdough garlic rolls. Then I branched out and made a loaf of bread. Then while I was pouring some excess starter down the sink, it hit me: “This looks a lot like fried chicken batter.”

Oh, yes.

I plan to try it, as soon as I can get a milk-based batter to ferment. I have another idea for improving it, but it will have to wait until next time. I should be able to fry some drumsticks tomorrow.

Again, I credit God with these ideas. The other day I sat down to write recipes, and a team of yard guys was making a huge racket near me, and I came up with nearly nothing. The next day a pile of ideas landed on me the way Plymouth Rock didn’t really land on Malcolm X.

Nothing like reaching too far for a metaphor.

Last year I fasted and then found I had improved self-control, especially in the area of eating. I lost lots of weight without much effort. This week I repeated the fast. I was starting to feel like gluttony was creeping back toward me. Now I feel great again. This morning I had oatmeal with water and salt, period. Can you imagine anything more disgusting? But I had no problem with it.

Mike has dropped something like 40 pounds since he accompanied me on my second fast, a few months back.

In a related matter, today I learned something interesting while Googling the origins of the swastika. As you may know, people claim the Nazi swastika was a reversed form of an old Buddhist symbol used in Tibet and India. That’s not true. It turns out the Tibetans use both forms of the symbol. Perry Stone claims that when Hitler was elected, the Tibetan monks said that a thousand of their “gods” left Tibet for Germany. Maybe they were right. There is a big occult link between Tibetan Buddhism and Nazism. Fun stuff to look up.

That’s not the thing I plan to write about, though. While I was reading, I came across the concept of “hungry ghosts.” The Tibetans believe there are dead people out there, roaming around trying to satisfy their earthly desires through us. I think I have that right; you can check. These beings have withered arms, tiny mouths, extremely slender necks, and huge bellies. If they try to eat, they feel intense pain.

This idea is also found in Christianity, but we call them demons. The Book of Enoch suggests they are the dead spirits of the giants spawned by rebellious angels who had sex with women. I believe the Book of Enoch is correct, and I have seen plenty of evidence to back it up. If you start with the premise that God is working to exterminate the seed of the fallen angels, many things in the Bible that are hard to understand suddenly make sense.

It’s interesting to me that false religions like Buddhism acknowledge what we know. They have the wrong explanations, but they see many of the same phenomena.

It’s also funny that proud Americans turn to Buddhism because they think it isn’t a religion. They think belief in supernatural beings is primitive. Buddhism is full of supernatural beings and concepts. Buddha as a Hindu, after all. When you go from Christianity to Buddhism, you’re not moving from superstition to enlightened philosophy. You’re abandoning one set of supernatural beliefs for another. Might as well be voodoo.

I think I drove one or more of these things off when I fasted, and that’s why I don’t have a problem with gluttony any more. I think fasting makes them miserable, and it teaches them they’re not welcome, and that more suffering is coming if they remain. It’s sort of like a deportation procedure for illegal aliens. In fact, I think aliens symbolize demons in the Old Testament. One of the big curses is to have aliens come into your land and have power over you. In the Old Testament, the Holy Land symbolized a human body, and the enemies of the Hebrews symbolized hostile spirits, so it only makes sense that demons would be represented by hostile aliens.

I know some Christians will jump up and claim you just have to tell them to leave in the name of Jesus. Unfortunately, Jesus himself said otherwise. Some will go easily, but others require prayer and fasting before they will pay attention.

On Thursday (second day of my fast), I found myself feeling compelled to watch food shows. Seems like a crazy thing to do, but I enjoyed it. Looking back, I think it may have been the Holy Spirit’s way of making my personal spirits suffer and leave. Call me crazy if you want. My size 30 shorts don’t lie. What do you have to put up against them? I know the answer already: nothing. It’s impossible to successfully contradict the things another person has witnessed.

I saw Jentezen Franklin on the tube last night. Ordinarily I have serious doubts about him, but he said some useful things. He expressed impatience with people who say they believe in Jesus, yet who don’t believe in Satan or demons. His question: how can you believe in someone who believes things you don’t? Jesus dealt with evil spirits all the time. If you’re a Christian, you have to believe they exist.

Fasting is incredibly powerful, and that’s why Jesus fasted after receiving the baptism with the Holy Spirit and before doing miracles and embarking on a ministry. If he had not fasted, the demons assigned to him would have remained and clouded his judgment, and he might have ended up using his great power to serve them, inadvertently. God does not like giving power to evil spirits. That’s why he doesn’t give us all the money and power and success we want, right away. Satan stuffs people with “blessings” they can’t handle, and it destroys them. God waits until it’s safe to bless us. That’s why he told us we had to put his kingdom and his righteousness first, and that our blessings would arrive later.

You wouldn’t let your kids eat dessert before the meat and vegetables. There is a proper order to things.

I’m glad I’m not fasting today. I have rolls and a loaf of bread rising, and I have to be able to sample them. Lunch will be a crummy chicken sandwich, though.

I’m pretty sure what I believe is true. It lines up with the word, and it makes sense. Try it yourself and see if you get the same results I did.

I Pity the Fool

The weather is glorious today. In Miami, fall is spring, and we are finally getting temperatures that make outdoor life bearable. I may actually DO something, like painting the soffit that was repaired months ago.

No, surely not.

I had a great experience last night. I went on a fast this week, and the end point was 6 p.m. yesterday. I was planning to make sourdough garlic rolls and pizza (in moderate portions, since I was fasting partly to keep gluttony out of my life), but my father offered to buy me dinner. He took me to Randazzo’s Little Italy, a restaurant run by a former boxer. I love this place. They play The Godfather nearly all the time, on big screens, and the food is pretty much what I would cook if I were Italian. Giant portions of red and white food, and it’s all tasty.

Last time I was there, I had rigatoni with neckbones and sausage, and I told the maitre d’ they needed to brine the neckbones in baking soda to kill the boar taint. I don’t know if they’re doing it or what, but last night, the neckbones were totally stench-free. Delicious. And the waiter grated a big pile of extra romano on a side plate, just because I asked for a heavy dose. That’s how you run a restaurant, baby. A lot of places cook pansy food that looks healthy but isn’t and tastes like silk flowers, to satisfy people who can’t get real about what they want. Randazzo’s puts a feed on, and you’re expected to take it like a man. The menu tells people that if they have high cholesterol, they should go eat Chinese food.

I enjoyed my dad’s company, and the food was fantastic, and I even had the sneaky pleasure of knowing my own food is a little bit better. On the way home, my dad made a special cell call to Mike to torment him with a description of the food we ate. All in all, I give the event a 9.

I am the opposite of a food snob. I completely understand beer snobbery and whisky snobbery, since good beer and whisky are a thousand times better than bad. But I do not understand frou-frou girly food. Give me twenty bucks, and I can make a dinner for four that will bring my guests to their knees. A great biscuit is better than boring pate. I guess Mr. Randazzo feels the same way. His ingredients seem very ordinary, but the food rocks. Good cooking isn’t about innovation or cleverness or expensive ingredients. It’s about knowing what tastes good, pure and simple. It reminds me of what Glenn Gould said: “You don’t play the piano with your fingers. You play it with your mind.” Good pianists say you can play anything you can hear. I think a determined cook can cook any dish he is capable of conceiving and appreciating. If you can imagine the taste, and your instincts are good, you will eventually be a great cook.

I can’t find the exact wording of the Gould quotation, but I think it’s right.

I’m fooling with sourdough today. I’m not sure how to work it. The first batch I made fermented for one day, and then I added yeast and let it rise. Last week, I made a batch to store in the freezer, and I let it ferment for two days, and it rose without yeast. This is interesting, because I’m sure sourdough without yeast has its own great qualities, but I don’t know how to manage it.

I will explain.

When I made the first batch, it fermented enough to taste good and have a great texture, but it didn’t rise until I added yeast. I put the yeast in and then formed rolls, and then it rose. This took around two hours, so the dough stayed in the shapes I created. If I use bacteria alone, I believe the rise will take a lot longer. This will probably cause the dough knots to melt back together overnight, and that would mess up the rolls. You want them to come apart in pieces.

I decided to take some dough out of the freezer, form it into a loaf and some rolls, and see what happened. I suspect the bacteria ate so much of the sugar in the dough that the dough will not poof up again, but you never know.

I’ve noticed that the fermentation makes the dough very sticky, as though it had extra water. So I guess next time I’ll have to cut the water back by maybe 5%. Maybe it’s just the gluten, absorbing water overnight. I don’t know. I am not a real baker.

I’d like to learn to make breakfast rolls with this stuff. If you’ve traveled to Europe, you may have had fresh-baked hard rolls with a continental breakfast. The ones I’m thinking of have a shiny crust, and they’re chewy. I’d like to make something similar with sourdough. I think it would be one of the greatest breakfasts possible. I already make croissant-type deals full of chocolate or strawberry and cheesecake filling, and if you put hard sourdough rolls next to them, along with strong, sweet hot chocolate, you’d have the makings of paradise.

My two favorite breakfasts are a Kentucky breakfast (country ham, biscuits, et cetera) and McDonald’s with ketchup on the side. After that, continental breakfast with butter and really good preserves. After that, eggs Benedict. So the rolls are clearly a priority.

I wanted to do sourdough biscuits, but I wasn’t sure how. I think the fermentation would kill the baking soda, and the biscuits wouldn’t rise. And the texture would be funny, because the gluten would activate. It occurred to me this morning that maybe the answer is to sour the milk, not the dough. Of course, that would be a lot like buttermilk biscuits, wouldn’t it? But as I understand it, the buttermilk we buy in stores is fake and doesn’t taste like the real thing. I wouldn’t know; my mom used to get the real thing when she was a kid, but she is no longer around to tell me what it was like. I suspect the sourdough bacteria would give a different result. Can’t hurt to find out. I can set some milk out with sourdough culture in it and see what happens. Ohhhh….hey! What if I gave up on the biscuits and made sourdough GRAVY? Oh, man. THAT’S an idea.

If I could make it with cultured milk, I could freeze the milk in advance. What convenience.

Now I’m thinking about croissants. Some day if I love someone enough to do it, I should make a big continental breakfast with pain au chocolat, strawberry cheesecake croissants, and sourdough rolls. That would KILL.

I wish I had a source for real butter. The expensive stuff they sell in stores (Plugra, and so on) is no good. If you’ve ever had fresh (churned) butter from an actual cow, you know what I mean. Maybe the crud in the churn gives it flavor.

I made the mistake of watching The Food Network while fasting. I watched Man Versus Food. It’s a show in which a guy goes around trying to eat challenging objects.

I respected some of the things he ate. There was a greasy roast beef sandwich that looked good, and the same place also served roast beef combined with a cheeseburger and sauteed onions. But for the most part, it seemed like the restaurateurs simply took ordinary food and made it larger. That’s not cooking. That’s engineering. Boring. I make a lot of big food, but generally, there is more to it than size. For example, I make chicken-fried steak on a Frisbee-sized biscuit, but I use a home-aged rib eye instead of a nasty chunk of cube steak with varicose veins, so it’s not like I just added weight. Anyone can make food bigger. I can’t get excited about that.

The show is good, even if the food is not always interesting.

I also enjoyed a show about cheap restaurants. The title is “Something, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” I forget. A guy with bleached hair traveled from place to place, checking out great cheap food. I particularly liked a Mexican place he found. They operate out of a Shell station. Seriously. A Mexican family put a restaurant kitchen in there, and the food is supposedly really good.

I keep thinking of my dream of opening a pizza place. I won’t rule it out. I’ve learned so much at my church, I can crank out six dozen garlic rolls in twenty minutes, starting from zero. Pizza is also pretty fast, and if I used sourdough, it would be even faster, because I could do prep days in advance. And I still haven’t had a cheesecake that compares to mine (Randazzo’s has a very good one, though).

Maybe some day. God has to open the door and show me a way. Restaurants are really bad investments, because they almost always fail, so you don’t want to start one without a higher power stacking the cards.

Randazzo’s was inspiring. It shows how well one good cook can do, if things work out.

Plus New Advancements in the Treatment of Terminal Hemorrhoids

I got involved in an Internet discussion with some guy who called Andrew Breitbart a “race baiter” for his attack on Shirley Sherrod. If you recall, Ms. Sherrod worked for the government, and she told a story about her intentional discrimination against a white farmer. Breitbart released the video, but later, it turned out that we hadn’t seen the whole thing. In reality, the discrimination story was about an act Ms. Sherrod later came to regret and disavow. The Obama administration, in a move which would have been to its credit, but for the incompetence, fired Ms. Sherrod without checking the facts. Then they reinstated her. I guess they voted against her before they voted for her.

The guy I dealt with insisted that the attack on Sherrod was deliberately deceptive and racist. I argued:

1) Breitbart has a history of incompetence, and it might explain the deceptive nature of the video. The most credible explanation is deliberate dishonesty, because it’s hard to screw up this badly without knowing exactly what you’re doing, but Breitbart is probably capable of that level of carelessness, as the Acorn mess suggests.

2) It is not racist to criticize a black person (Ms. Sherrod is black). Breitbart was almost certainly motivated by his desire to expose the shortcomings of progressives. He and James O’Keefe have gone after plenty of white leftists, and Breitbart would definitely have published the Sherrod video, had Sherrod (and Obama) been white.

The reason the Internet discussion arose is that my opponent was trying to get ABC to remove Breitbart from a televised election discussion. It was a sort of petition drive. My opponent said Breitbart should not be allowed to appear on ABC, because he was a racist and liar. I said ABC had a right to do anything it wanted, and that there were plenty of good reasons not to put Breitbart on the air, but that I was against pressuring networks to prevent people from speaking. They do enough of that as it is. Let’s be real. They put Al Sharpton on the air and even tried to give him a sitcom. How can Breitbart be any worse? Surely he deserves as much respect as Al Sharpton.

Now ABC has canned Breitbart’s appearance, and the petition guy is claiming victory. However, the letter ABC published reveals that their impetus had nothing to do with lying or racism. In fact, Breitbart was canned simply because he annoyed them:

Dear Mr. Breitbart,

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABCNews.com and Facebook. The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News. We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall. Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage. As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

Sincerely,

Andrew Morse

My conclusion is that ABC’s actions are more in line with my views than those of my opponent. Grossly exaggerating your role in a telecast falls under the broad penumbra of incompetence. It’s not something a professional would do.

Actually, I suppose dishonesty was a factor, since ABC’s letter says it based its decision on untrue claims made by Breitbart.

For a long time, I’ve held that Jews and blacks make terrible, self-destructive political decisions. They support the Sharptons and Jacksons and Obamas and Franks. They get behind foolish, silly people who ultimately harm those who back them. These days, it seems like conservatives are in the same boat. We’re so used to being pushed to the back of the media bus, when a semi-credible conservative gets a voice, we clamber up his or her legs like drowning victims trying to get to air. This is how we ended up with Ann Coulter (“camel jockeys”), Glenn Beck (hemorrhoid video and constant crying), Roger Simon (near annihilation of the right-wing blogosphere), Arnold Schwarzenegger (don’t get me started), and now, Andrew Breitbart.

We need to get over our desperation. We have the Internet and Fox News now. We are not completely shut out. We can afford to wait for legitimate voices to arise. How about Zo? I haven’t seen him say anything insane or despicable yet. If he’s out there swinging, surely we can find others. Why seed your own house with termite eggs?

I know some of the people I named have done some good work. On the other hand, a cake with a piece of cat poop on one corner is mostly cake. Based on that logic, would you serve it at a party? And remember, it’s not like there is a shortage of cakes. Pundits, I mean.

Or cat poop.

We will continue supporting people who embarrass us. I know that. We circle the wagons and shoot the messenger, time after time. The appearance of solidarity is more important than ethics. We’re terrified that if one of our idols falls, we’ll be transported instantly, back to the 1970s. The conservative press will cease to exist without [insert name of pundit/ette here], and the people who criticized will be to blame, and the earth’s tectonic plates will split apart, and we’ll all fall into hot magma while paying excessive capital gains taxes.

You have to love mob thinking. A mob never does anything right. A mob would still be stupid even if every person in it were a theoretical physicist. When it comes to supporting kooks and amateurs, conservatives are a mob. We boil the baby in the bathwater and then drink it.

I guess the lemmings will head my way now, to charge off the cliff I created. I should be glad my blog gets no traffic.

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I guess I should point out that I used the term “camel jockeys” as a pejorative allusion to Ann Coulter’s use of the same slur. I am not advocating the use of this ridiculous and offensive term to describe Arabs.

Progress Never Stops

Last night I had the best Italian (maybe “Italian-style”) meal of my entire life.

Since I stopped working in my church’s cafe, I’ve been getting lots of food ideas. I got some wonderful ideas for improving my garlic rolls.

One big change involves the structure of the rolls. As you may know, many people make garlic rolls by tying strips of dough in knots, which improves the texture immensely. I like to cut the strips lengthwise before tying them. This way you get two strips, which are better than one. This week I decided to divide them one more time, into four strips, and I took steps to prevent the strips from re-joining during the rising process. I also twist the strip assemblies like candy canes before tying the knots.

I’m also using sourdough now. I made my own starter using bacteria from a very unlikely source, and I made a big batch of dough without yeast. The idea is to keep portions of this stuff frozen. When you need one, you put it in the fridge. It can sit there all week (maybe longer), and whenever you want to make rolls, you mix it with fresh dough, and in a fairly short time, you have excellent sourdough with a beautiful texture.

If it gets old, throw it out and thaw a new portion. They probably cost fifteen cents to make.

Yesterday I decided to make three rolls. One with all the improvements, and two the way I was making them last week. I bought the cheapest grating cheese (mystery-brand romano) I could find, since I was only doing a test. I also made spaghetti rigati (spaghetti with longitudinal ridges) with sauce based on tomato paste and Cento cherry tomatoes. I had a can lying around (bought it so I could try it in pizza sauce), and I figured it was time to use it.

The cheap cheese turned out to be the best grated cheese I had ever eaten. It didn’t have a lot of weird, funky flavors, the way many expensive cheeses do, but the taste and texture were perfect by my standards. The sauce was a thing of beauty; I think I know of better tomato products to use, but the cherry tomatoes were very good, and I left the skins in for fiber.

I made the spaghetti, buttered it, dumped half of it in a bowl, piled a lot of thawed-out mozzarella (still cleaning out the deep freeze) on it, added the rest of the spaghetti, tossed it slightly, added sauce, and grated cheese over the result.

The roll…I can’t describe it. I would almost describe my response to it as reverence. I covered the rolls with garlic sauce and grated cheese, and I ate them one at a time, and while all of them were excellent, the one I did the new way was on its own plane of existence. It fell apart beautifully. The mix of textures was a joy to behold. The sourdough flavor and aroma transported me. And that cheap cheese complemented it perfectly.

I think I have a way to improve the dough even more, but I would lose a little bit of the convenience. I can’t wait to use it in pizza.

There is no doubt about it. God guides my cooking. The ideas fall like rain. They land on my head when I least expect it. What is the purpose? I can’t even guess. I thought I was supposed to be making this stuff in church, but I was not able to do that.

I would love to open a pizzeria and sell nothing but pizza, rolls, and cheesecake. I honestly think people would faint in the parking lot. But people keep telling me quality doesn’t count in the pizza business. It certainly hasn’t counted for much in other business ventures I’ve been involved in, except for law. Oddly, law practice seems to be a purer than average meritocracy. Gladhanding and office politics count for something, but if you’re good, work will come to you, because the people who aren’t good are afraid to stand on their own feet; they will want you to do their work for them and hold their hands.

It would be great to do things for my church, but it’s extremely difficult to bless Christians. It seems like they mess up every good idea you give them. Buy your church a new chapel, and they’ll use it to store fertilizer. Buy them chef’s knives, and they’ll use them as screwdrivers and chisels. I suppose this is what God has to deal with every day. “Here’s a pillar of fire and a cloud to guide you through the wilderness and defeat all your enemies, and WAIT! Get away from that golden calf! What are you DOING? Get back here! Stop burning your babies for Molech this INSTANT! Are you listening to me?”

I assume God will not help a church make good use of things, unless the people in the church are on the right spiritual wavelength. If there isn’t enough prayer and enough determination to walk by faith instead of jumping into projects that seem right to our limited minds, God takes his hand off what we do, and the enemy wrecks it. Maybe. There has to be some explanation. Maybe I am pushing my church to accept things God wants me to keep, or maybe God is teaching me to have realistic expectations when I deal with churches (my pick for likeliest explanation). Anyway, it looks like my only hope of accomplishing anything with the good things God gives me is to hold onto them, do my best with them, and support God’s work from whatever profits I receive.

I am really enjoying the ideas I get, even if they don’t bless anyone except me and my family and friends.

This week I’m repeating the fast that delivered me from overeating. I do that once in a while. I felt it was time. It seemed like gluttony was trying to creep back into my life, which is to be expected periodically.

I couldn’t get anyone to join me on this fast. Oh, well. I’ll get my blessings, and I tried to help other people get theirs. What more can I do? When you’re a Christian, you have to accept the fact that very often, you are going to have to step out on your own, because other people will not want to go forward with you.

The armorbearer team at my church fasts every Monday, but it’s not much of a fast. It’s surprisingly hard to get people to go a day without calories. We fast on Mondays until 6 p.m., which amounts to less than 24 hours when you count sleep time, and we are allowed to have any liquids we want. You could have ten milkshakes on this fast. I think it’s better than nothing, but I don’t think it achieves nearly as much as a zero-calorie fast, and I was starting to accept it as my standard fast. So I needed to upgrade. I’m back to zero calories, and I’m doing this two-day deal, which is called the Armorbearer Freedom Fast.

Mike has lost over 35 pounds since he went on the last Freedom Fast. That’s a good result and a great testimony to God’s power and kindness.

The Rain May Never Fall Till After Sundown…

In case it isn’t clear to everyone, this is how everyone but the extreme left sees Obama, and it is the reason for what’s happening at the polls today.

Prayer Team Issues

I started working with my church’s prayer team last week, and there were some excellent things about it.

First of all, NO RAP MUSIC. My church reaches out to kids, and that means a lot of blaring music, including rap. The kids who run the sound and lights come from a generation that has no understanding of the importance of conversation, so they keep the music blasting even after services, and it’s really annoying. I know it brings kids in, but I have always hated loud music, and it’s very hard to sense God’s presence when all you can think about is the pain in your ears.

The prayer team uses proper worship music, which is much gentler.

Second thing: the attitude is very serious. One of the pastors teaches straight from the word, and he doesn’t tell us we’re good enough and smart enough and people like us. He doesn’t tell us we’re wonderful just as we are. He tells us we have to know the word and remember God’s promises, and he expects us to work at our walks with God.

Third thing: tons of prayer in the Spirit. The Bible teaches that this is perfect prayer, and it charges believers like batteries, filling them with the fruit and gifts of the Spirit.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep going. The reason is this: I’m afraid we’re picking fights we can’t handle. I don’t want any part of that.

Perry Stone has written a lot about spiritual warfare, and one of the hazards he mentions is taking on gigantic spirits without God’s prompting and without the right preparation. Christians don’t like to hear it, but Satan is extremely powerful, and so are many of his underlings. You can say “Greater is he that is within me than he that is in the world” all day, but if you attack a big principality without authorization, you are going to get hammered into the dirt, and your family may get hammered right along with you.

If we had the kind of unlimited power some Christians think we have, I could walk outside right now and order every evil spirit to leave Florida, and they would have to go. Thousands and thousands of people would be healed of diseases and mental illnesses and addictions. It would be the greatest story in the history of journalism. But I can’t do it. Let’s just be honest. Satan is the god of this world, and God has not given us the power to deal death blows to his kingdom on a daily basis. Satan is going to rule until the return of Jesus, so let’s get used to it. A war is made up of battles; you don’t win in a day. Every day you face what your commanding officer tells you to face, and you don’t run around like a chicken with its head cut off, firing random shots behind enemy lines.

We see this in the Bible. In Daniel, a great angel said he had been restrained by one of Satan’s helpers for 21 days. Jude says Michael himself had to fight with Satan in order to hold onto the body of Moses. Paul says the Holy Spirit ordered him to stay out of Asia Minor, even though he wanted to go there and win souls. The Bible also says the Holy Spirit warned him to avoid Jerusalem. If no weapon formed against us will prosper, why didn’t he dash up there, order Satan out, and do his thing? Obviously, there are some battles we can’t win at the times of our choosing.

The pastor who leads our prayer team battles out loud with the spirits that rule Miami and the area of the church. He battles the spirits of idolatry, which is very widespread and intense in Miami. Voodoo, including Cuban voodoo, is no joke here. He addresses Satan personally. I just don’t believe what he’s doing is a good idea, and I don’t think we have the supernatural support to prevent it from hurting the church and the members of the prayer team.

On top of that, there is the subject of “binding and loosing.” Jesus told Peter that what Peter bound on earth would be bound in heaven, and that what he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven. At least, that’s what the King James Version says. Messianic Jews see it differently. They prefer terms that mean “forbid” and “allow.” The Jews have always believed that God gave them the authority to make rulings on religious questions here on earth. When Jesus told Peter he could “bind” and “loose,” he was probably telling him God would support his decisions regarding spiritual matters.

Somehow, modern Christians got the idea that they could “bind” Satan. So we run around yelling things like, “I bind the spirit of pornography over my city in the name of Jesus!” Question: is there any evidence that this has ever worked? We still have pornography, drugs, prostitution, alcoholism, violence, and every other sin in every American city. I think we’re wasting our air or provoking retaliation. So it makes me nervous when the pastor starts “binding” and “coming against.” I see no examples of these behaviors in the Bible. I know we have the power to bless and curse things, but that seems very different.

The pastor also also said something about “loosing angels of our provision.” Again, I have never seen this in the Bible, including the New Testament. And I believe giving an order to an angel is idolatry, just like praying to a saint. I ask God to send spirits to help me all the time, but I would never give one an order.

I thought my family and I needed corporate prayer, and I suppose that is true, but I don’t want the kind of prayer that will make things worse.

Personally, I think prayer–the type where you ask for things, not the type where you search yourself or converse with God about other things–should be specific. Instead of “binding and loosing,” ask for the things you need. Ask God to rebuke the spirits that work against you. Fast and pray. And cast the spirits out, if you think you have the authority. Jesus ordered us to do that. But don’t make up doctrine.

You wouldn’t walk out onto a battlefield, shoot your rifle in random directions, and yell, “I COME AGAINST THE NORTH VIETNAMESE.” That would be what military historians call “a real bad idea.” But you might locate a tank and radio your commander for air support to take it out, or you might ask for permission to blow it up. I think the supernatural world is a lot like the natural world, and common sense should apply there, the same way it does here.

The conclusion I come to is that I am probably causing more problems than I am solving by getting behind rash spiritual warfare, so I better stay out of it.

Perry Stone says he knows of ministers who have tried to fight the big spirits ruling their cities, and he says the enemy mashed them like bugs, ruining their churches and causing all sorts of problems for their congregations. That’s good enough for me. He knows more about this stuff than I do.

Another thing that worries me: ministers insult Satan. Jude tells us not to do this. Satan has rights, and God generally does not support trash talk. Every time I hear a minister use words like “stinking” or “lousy” when referring to Satan or an evil spirit, I cringe. I believe Satan has the right to take these things before God and ask for permission to retaliate. Why open the door? What is the point?

I think you fight at your own level of power. Overcome the spirits that manipulate your body; that’s a good start. If you can’t control your body, how can you hope to de-pornographize your city? After that, get your home and family in order. THEN maybe you can start thinking about bigger targets. That’s my guess. The Bible says we are not even supposed to be deacons unless our houses are under control, so I think I have the right idea.

I think Jesus began by fighting small battles. His first move after being baptized with the Holy Spirit was to fast. Why do you fast? To drive off the spirits that corrupt your behavior. It’s self-improvement. He was cleansing himself before taking on the task of cleansing the world.

I’m disappointed, but there is no way I can change the way things are done in the prayer meetings, so I see no option except withdrawal. Maybe the answer is to start my own group. The church likes that. Right now, I AM my own group.