Where the Cows Lick Pillars of Salt

Sorry I did not come by to weep with everyone on Tuesday night. On Monday, I had a 2-phone-battery conversation with somone who thinks going into drug rehab is somehow a service that benefits ME, and I decided to get up the next day and get out of Miami.

Ocala. That’s what it’s all about.

To recap, I went to Winter Haven to help launch a new church, and I felt like a runaway slave. Afterward, I started thinking about moving north. Then my buddy Mike started talking about Ocala. Either that, or I came up with the idea myself. Can’t remember. I started looking at Ocala real estate on the computer, with the intensity of an Obama campaign staffer researching Romney’s overdue library books. I found out that you can get a magnificent farm up there for the cost of a little-bitty house in Coral Gables. I’ve been making lists and looking at Google Earth a lot.

Originally, I thought I would go alone, because I didn’t think my father would ever leave this place. Then he started coming around. That was great, because I refuse to have a mortgage, and if we both go, we can have a much nicer property.

I checked out fourteen places, from two acres to forty, if I recall correctly. If I had to describe this area, I’d say it looks a great deal like the area outside Lexington, Kentucky, only without the backwardness and bigotry. I hope. Mike says everyone got along great at the racially mixed school he went to in Ocala.

I had read that the dirt up there was too sandy for growing things, but that’s not true. I saw all sorts of hay, and people were growing stuff in their yards. It may not be the finest dirt on earth, but clearly, it works. We don’t really have dirt in Miami. A lot of this area has a few inches of white sand over oolite (coral rock), and when they build houses, sometimes they add a little muck from the Everglades, so you end up with grey sand. To plant a tree in my yard, you have to use a mattock and cut a hole in the rock. I’ve pretty much had it with our dirt.

I was able to move between properties ten miles apart in about as many minutes. As a victim of Miami, I can’t even express my joy. The traffic here is nearly unbearable, and the worst part about it is that when you finally get out of the car, you’re still in Miami.

There are actual hills up there. At one point, while driving, I felt pressure in my ears. I didn’t think that was possible in Florida.

I also enjoyed hearing English. Diversity is swell, but I get very, very, very tired of playing charades to make myself understood in the United States of America, by individuals who have been here since Carter.

People get mad at me because I can’t understand their bad English. One of the biggest night school subjects here is ESOL, or English for Speakers of Other Languages. That’s great, but they haven’t gotten around to adding UESOL, or Understanding English for Speakers of Other Languages. Funny thing, I find it easier to talk to relatively new Haitians than Cubans who have been here 20 years. The Haitians learn English very quickly, and when their English isn’t good (very rare), I can talk to them in French.

Anyway, I do look forward to saying everything ONCE.

The Romney signs…they were everywhere. I saw a few Obamas, but not enough to matter. Mike says a politician who runs as a Democrat in Marion County has no shot. I love that.

I would say the Ocala area looks, well, not hectic. I suppose it could get dull. But I don’t do much anyway, in terms of going out on the town. I don’t like movies because my feet stick to the floor and people yap in Spanish. I don’t like restaurants because I cook better than they do. Clubs…don’t even joke. I can generally be found at home, at church, or running errands. My assumption is that if I join a good church up there, I’ll have a social circle within two to three months, and after that, life will be much as it is here, only without the unpleasant sensation of being in Miami.

I saw a lot of wonderful things. Barbecue restaurants, plural. All sorts of businesses related to farming. They would be helpful to a tool-oriented person hoping to get into things like canning food and maintaining a workshop. There’s a Krystal restaurant in town. They don’t have a Costco, and that will smart, but you can’t have everything. There’s a Gordon Food Service 60 miles away. I wanted to be remote, so I shouldn’t complain.

It may be hard to find a place that doesn’t have horse paraphernalia. I am not going to have much use for a barn. I know people will say I can put a workshop in it, but horse barns are cut up into little stalls. I think it would be pretty hard to convert one. Mike says we can rent stalls to people. Basically, they would be paying to give me handy manure.

I don’t know much about maintaining rural property, even though I’ve owned a ton of it in common with family. As far as I know, you don’t have to do much with barns and land. We did virtually nothing to the farms we sold, and they held their value. I don’t want to end up bush-hogging thirty or forty acres once a month, or mowing a giant yard.

I’m going to try to put together a plan and get this done. Things are probably going to get very bad now that we have chosen Obama a second time, and if a depression hits the cities, the entitlement flash mobs will be invading houses en masse, raping, killing, and stealing. Or “stealing BACK,” as they would say. Places like Ocala will be very dangerous for that crowd. Up there, a guy with scoped rifles (and friends with scoped rifles) might have a real advantage over liberal dentists and accountants in Coral Gables. I guess it sounds like I’m planning to move so I can shoot a bunch of people. No, but I don’t want to be an easy target when the anti-Christian, anti-conservative Kristallnacht comes.

I guess I should write about the election.

Many conservatives are questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s victory. Let me give you a bitter pill. It’s completely legitimate. Unless they turn up an extremely unlikely election-rigging scam which spans many states, no reasonable person will ever be able to deny that we chose this man. We know what he is, and we want it.

People are saying he won because the media didn’t go after him. I’m sure that helped him, but his screwups have been covered fairly well. Everyone who owns a PC or TV should be aware of his failures and negative traits. People claim he won because the public has drifted left. I very much doubt it. I don’t think the public is smart enough to know what left is.

Obama won because a big percentage of the electorate is ignorant and/or not very bright. Grab a typical college graduate and ask him if he has any idea why entitlements lead to unemployment and low productivity, and chances are, he won’t have a clue. The people who decided the election were not favoring leftism. They went for the guy they liked best. They saw the debates, and they thought about things like hair and suits, and at the end, they decided Obama made them feel better.

People who are obsessed with politics think everyone worries about things like the proper level of taxation and the size of our military. In reality, the average voter votes based on instinct, which is something that exists to help creatures who lack the ability or inclination to reason.

Ronald Reagan ran against Carter. He projected confidence and charm, so he won twice. Bush I ran against Dukakis, who looked short, dumpy, and timid, so he won once. Clinton charmed female voters, so he beat Bush I. Bush II seemed less crazy than Gore and less snotty than Kerry, so he got eight years.

I know it’s not really that simple. Policies matter a little. But it’s very obvious that we are as willing to vote for extreme leftists as right-of-center conservatives, so I don’t believe substance means much.

Anyway, Obama is the President, and he is the true choice of the people, so get over it.

As to why Obama won people’s hearts, I believe the answer is supernatural. We have killed tens of millions of unborn babies (and quite a few that were born), we have turned against Israel, a huge percentage of us support perversion, we think fornication is a God-given right, and we are becoming cruel and extremely proud. We pray less than ever, and church attendance is dropping. We are becoming God’s enemies. In my opinion, our reward is national decline. God has blinded us to Obama’s revolting shortcomings, so we did something no reasonable nation would do. We chose Obama not once, but twice.

I was highly disturbed when I saw the election results. I was in a hotel room, trying to sleep, and I stupidly forgot to turn off my phone. People woke me up more than once, calling to express their horror. At some point in the wee hours, I gave up and looked at Drudge. Arrgh.

Before the election, I spent a great deal of time in prayer. I felt great faith pushing through me. I thought a Romney victory was very likely. When I saw that I was wrong, the thing that disturbed me most was not the Obama victory, but the fact that I had believed he would lose. It’s very unusual for me to have strong faith for a result and then to see something different happen. It affects my relationship with God. I will never doubt him or criticize him, but a failure like this makes me reevaluate the things I do in my walk of faith. Am I praying correctly? Am I interpreting what I feel correctly? Is there something else I should be doing? If I’m wrong about this, what else am I wrong about?

I believe God sometimes sets his seal on things. By that, I mean he decrees that a thing will be done, with complete finality. He doesn’t say “if” or “maybe.” It’s done. Period. I believe he reveals this to some people during prayer. Sometimes the rush of faith that follows a request is so powerful, it’s overwhelming. There’s no way to deny it.

This happened to me back when an ex-girlfriend was filing nutty lawsuits against me. One day I was praying in my truck, and a wave of faith hit me, and I grabbed the console between the seats because I felt I would be pushed over if I didn’t have something to hold. After that, I knew I was going to win, and I was right. On top of that, I asked for very specific things in the last two hearings, and I got them.

I’ve also had it happen with regard to other things I’ve asked for. I asked God to do everything within his power to get my father and sister to accept Christ, be baptized with the Spirit, pray in tongues, be freed from their iniquities, and live in power and blessings, and my faith told me it would be done. God didn’t say they would change; he just said he would do everything possible. They still have free will.

I have found that usually, a strong rush of faith that doesn’t reach the threshold of a sealed answer will still get the job done. But sometimes–I think–a small amount of doubt is enough to sink the ship. I think that’s what happened with the election. I felt great faith, but I also felt something pushing back, and I wasn’t able to get to the point where doubt was completely destroyed. It may sound like I’m giving a lot of importance to my prayers, but my religion tells me the prayer of one man held the sun still in the sky, and I am not willing to limit God.

I think that in the future, I’ll have to be careful not to conclude that something is sealed when it isn’t. I also think that when I’m not sure a thing is sealed, and it’s an important matter, I should continue in prayer until I get resolution. That’s my take for now, anyway.

For a long time, I’ve prayed for God to bless and empower Christians, not America in general. I won’t pray for America’s success because America has been harmed by false prosperity. When things go well, we do what the ancient Jews did. We turn away from God, credit ourselves, and sink into sin. I see that happening around me, so I have prayed that God would bring down ungodly people who are in power and strengthen believers. I believe this will help people turn back to God, where they will work to achieve his ends. They will work as they were intended, with his authority, to increase his kingdom in the earth. I think the Obama disaster is God granting prayers like mine. Like the Hebrews who feasted on quail till they puked, we’re going to feast on our own conceit. God will give us the incompetent, dangerous leaders our egos tell us we need, and they will lead us over cliffs until we repent. That’s my best guess.

God is taking away the things we believe in. He is taking away every stable investment. Stocks are shaky, and Obama’s tax changes will kill them. Gold is volatile. Real estate could plummet again at any time. Even cash is sinking. Thanks to Bernanke’s backdoor socialism, if you sell your risky stocks and put the money in the bank, you still lose value. It looks as though a time is coming when everything we cling to will turn on us, and unless we have a good grip on God, we will sink.

This is why I like the rural-compound-with-no-mortgage idea. Little properties in places like Manhattan and Coral Gables are only valuable in good times. They have no real value. A Park Avenue condo, for example, is a tiny box with no soil, even if it costs ten million dollars. Right now it’s valuable because there are a lot of people who have money. When things go bad, people won’t want little boxes. They’ll want acreage, so they can grow things and defend themselves. Bernanke can wreck the dollar, but he can’t dry up your well or prevent potatoes from growing in your yard.

I keep meeting people who have Ocala connections. Mike was the first. I went to church and mentioned it, and I found out that one of the armorbearers already owns 20 acres there and wants to move, but his wife won’t let him. He has a carry permit, and he’s learning to can! One of my best friends, a former armorbearer, is married to a woman who has family in Marion County. She has wanted to move there for a while now. The other day, I mentioned the idea to a friend who used to be part of my prayer group at Trinity. He goes to New Dawn now. He says he went to high school in Ocala. To me, these things seem like confirmation.

I think God is probably going to protect Christians in the years ahead. I think we will do better than ever, while the country sinks. I think Israel will also prosper. America is abandoning Israel, and God never will, so he will find other ways to bless his nation. If Christians and Israel do well, it will serve to ground persecution. No surprise there. We’ve been told to expect it.

When I say “Christians,” I mean charismatics who really know God. I don’t think he’s going to do much for people who don’t have the Holy Spirit, because they don’t hear his guidance as well. They say 20 million confused people who claim to be evangelicals voted for Obama. I think that should tell you how lost a so-called Christian can be.

If I learn anything new, I’ll let you know.