Blot it Out and Find Rest

I’m red-hot this month. I used to blog several times a day. Then I went away for weeks at a time. Then I came back and blogged a couple of times per month. Yesterday I blogged twice.

It’s an eruption. I’m a juggernaut of Internet bombast.

I do not know how long it will last.

A few days back I dumped Twitter and Instagram. I thought they were boring, and Twitter was also tawdry. I rarely participated in either service. Today I woke up and prayed, and I started to feel like it was time to cut back on Facebook.

How will my 61 “friends” live? I’m sure it will be rough on them.

When I went back to church in 2008 (is that the right year?), I started making new friends. I found myself faced with a new experience. For the first time, I had to deal with Christians who were complete hypocrites.

That’s harsh, isn’t it? But it’s true.

I went to Miami’s Trinity Church, which is something like 80% black. The pastors there (white) only cared about fame and money, so they were extremely reluctant to correct anyone. They were terrified that people might leave and take their credit cards with them. The people were generally on board with this. Correction wasn’t their favorite thing, either.

As a result, the parking lot was full of Obama stickers. How can you have Obama stickers on cars in a charismatic church? It’s like swastikas on BMW’s parked at a synagogue. But there they were.

I couldn’t tell anyone anything. That’s an exaggeration, but it was nearly true. The people were used to being told they were victims. They were never held accountable, except for not giving the pastors enough money or free work. They didn’t want to hear that it was hypocritical to vote for convenience abortion, or that socialism is covetousness. They just wanted the false monetary promises of trashy preachers who dressed like rodeo clowns.

If you read this blog post to them today, 90% would have no idea what I was talking about. That’s how ignorant people at Trinity are.

I was not the greatest Christian on earth, but I was not completely dim, either. God told me more and more about the problems with the church, and as I wised up, I went from ardent supporter to supporter with reservations to happy refugee.

I knew more than they did when I got there, and by the time I left, God had shown me so much, I felt like I might as well have been attending a Hindu temple.

I moved on to New Dawn Ministries, and they were a lot better, but they had horrendous problems with pride and anger, and the pastors were very lazy. They grew a certain point and then got hung up, like breech-birth babies digging their heels into the side of the birth canal.

The pastors were rude to me publicly, even though I was a deacon, so I took the hint and stopped going. But I continued writing stuff about God on Facebook, as I felt moved. I would get up and pray every morning, and God would show me great things, and I would pass them on. I figured God had a purpose in it.

Now I feel like letting Facebook go. Anyone there who is willing to listen has already listened, and the rest are a waste of time. It’s a bummer, looking at the same people posting the same garbage over and over, proving their development is arrested. It affects my own morale; that’s not a small thing. I have a right to consider that and protect myself.

Apart from that, Facebook is a plantation, like The Huffington Post. It runs on unpaid labor.

Arianna Huffington managed to convince dozens of people she was doing them a favor when she allowed them to write for her for nothing. Jeff Zuckerberg has done more or less the same thing. Every day millions of people fill his site with free content, and they surveill themselves continuously, which is a big help to the government. In exchange we get almost nothing, and when we have issues with Facebook, they treat us like the unimportant, powerless, fungible creatures they perceive us to be.

That’s how life is, when you’re the tail and Jeff Zuckerberg is the head.

People are getting strongly addicted to the Internet plantations. Sooner or later, people like Zuckerberg will have a lot more power over us than they do now. There will be a price for the free advertising and networking.

If you’re not dependent on it, you won’t care.

A blog is more like a ranch than a plantation. A blogger owns his medium. Until persecution gets really bad, I’ll be able to say anything I want here. No one can report me to a gang of pimply genderless twerps who have the power to censor me. That’s nice.

There is a dark side to all this. I definitely get divine revelation, and I have been sharing it. If I feel that I should stop doing that, then it’s likely that God is giving up on some people.

Hunter Thompson, the immature, miserable humorist who died in disgrace and defeat, once wrote about going to a doctor. He complained that he was sweating a lot. He was taking a lot of drugs and drinking a great deal. He said the doctor told him he shouldn’t be worried unless the sweating stopped, because the sweat was his body’s way of flushing out the poisons Thompson ingested.

People who tell others about God are like Thompson’s sweat glands. While we maintain the flow, there is hope. If we stop, it means God is giving up on people who wouldn’t listen. It’s a bad sign.

If you serve God, you’re supposed to have a life of victory and peace. That can’t be true if you spend the entire thing pleading with people who waste your time and refuse to listen. There is a limit to what God will require you to do. He will take you aside when needed and give you rest. I believe that’s what’s happening to me. It doesn’t mean I’m a great person. It just means I’m not the world’s toilet paper. I have certain rights as an heir, and they can’t be entirely nullified, with no respite.

Just as you have to approach God with gratitude, thanks, and humility, you are limited in what you can do to his people. God can’t be God if you treat him like a churlish servant who owes you, and a Spirit-led person can’t function correctly if he is perpetually frustrated and disrespected.

I feel that things are getting worse faster than I expected. Jesus said he would return at a time when we didn’t expect him, and he was not a liar. We’re waiting for God to count to three, but he’s actually going to say, “One, two,” and then drop the boom on us.

My emotions are mixed. I am tired of this world. It has a stink that rises to heaven. Americans have no gratitude or humility. They have no sincerity. This is one of the better places on earth, and we have made ourselves disgusting. I would love to see the world reformed.

On the other hand, I am one of the reasons the world stinks. I didn’t get pulled aside as a reward. I was helped in spite of what I was. How can I be happy to see other people like me miss the boat? “Reform” also means the destruction of a whole lot of people.

You can’t question God’s choices, though. He chooses whom he will, and he is right.

I have been thinking about Enoch. I envy him. If what old books say about him is true, he spent less and less time with people as he aged. Eventually, he appeared once a year. Other men showed up to hear what he had to say (not to argue and spew), and then he would leave again. He didn’t have to mud-wrestle every day and stain himself with the manure of the pigs he tried to feed.

Paul, on the other hand, spent a lot of time in the mosh pit. During his ministry, he was beaten and stoned. He appears to have been very engaged with humanity. I don’t find that appealing at all.

The more you understand the world, the more you want to put a buffer between the world and yourself. I suppose this is why God’s throne is in heaven, not Las Vegas.

You don’t actually have to wade into the throng every day to serve God. There are different ministries. Maybe God will have the extraordinary kindness to limit my dealings with people who are sources of frustration. That means nearly everyone!

I can’t make demands, though.

I hope I will not have to fool with Facebook any more. I would love to delete my account completely. That would require some help, because I have the habit of looking at it throughout the day. I deleted the application from my phone, but that just makes getting to Facebook a little harder. It’s not the same thing as quitting.

Look around and see if other people are shutting down. If so, God’s patience is probably just about out. If not, maybe I’m just tired of banging my head against the same stones.