Plus Boring Political Commentary

Today I got up and looked at the news, and I learned that Fidel Castro was dead.

This is not a huge story to me, personally. I’m not Cuban, and I’m not a political blogger. I don’t even have a significant number of Cuban friends. The closer I got to God, the less I heard from the Cubans I knew. They lost interest in me. Now I know Haitians and Puerto Ricans.

Nonetheless, it’s a major event, and here in Miami, people are blocking traffic and celebrating in the streets. It should be acknowledged.

The needless suffering this man inflicted is incalculable. He was not a freedom fighter or a friend of the oppressed. He was a mass murderer who had countless people imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Barack Obama probably thinks Castro was a great man, and there are a lot of people in the US–many of them Cuban–who share the same delusion. That’s disgraceful. It’s no better than admiring Hitler.

Miami is full of old people who were beaten, incarcerated, tortured, and deprived of their property. For their sake, I’m glad they don’t have to open the newspaper every day and read that Castro is still in charge of the island he stole from them.

All those things being said, this is not the return of Jesus. It’s probably not even a sea change. Castro won, at least from a secular perspective. He died in bed, a billionaire, at the age of 90, with his enemies still exiled, silenced, or in prison. His successors will be no better than he is. I see Ileana Ros-Lehtinen agrees with me; she is on TV, saying basically the same thing.

People shouldn’t be celebrating his death. That’s an invitation to supernatural repercussions. They should be asking why Satan was able to take over Cuba. It’s a place of demon worship and darkness. If you want real change, you have to seek the only one who sets people free. I’m watching America slip away just as Cuba did. I hate to see history repeated, and it’s sad that we don’t learn from it.

Castro is almost certainly in agony right now, regretting every time his arrogance and cruelty led him to turn away from God. I don’t think it’s smart to celebrate that. If you’re still alive, you, too, have time to fail and be destroyed.

That’s all I have to say about Castro.

As for me, I have had an interesting week. I had a crisis of faith, and instead of hiding it, I aired it publicly. I aired my successes, so it seemed to me I should talk about my failures as well. I always hate it when someone who claims to be a Christian has a severe setback and pretends it never happened.

I feel that God is helping me understand what happened so I will realize things are okay. As he told me months ago, with regard to people who belong to him, “There is no misfortune; there are only lessons.” I’m just getting a lesson.

I thought God told me something was going to happen, and it did not happen. It wasn’t something I spent hours on my face praying for. It was unexpected. I felt what I thought was faith, rushing through me when I talked to him about it. It was the same thing I felt when I talked to him about Trump’s election chances. The things I believed about Trump were confirmed by history. Then I felt faith for something, and it didn’t come to pass. I had to look for reconciliation. Life does make sense. You shouldn’t accept cognitive dissonance.

On Monday, I broke a tooth while I was eating a Snickers bar. It was completely unexpected; my teeth are very good. I felt something funny in the back of my mouth, and I thought maybe a nut had gotten stuck in a crack, but it turned out a big piece of a molar was gone. I had no pain, but I was in need of serious dental work.

My dentist saw me the next day, and he ground down the remains of the tooth and put a temporary cap on it. He has a computerized gadget for making crowns, and it was down, so I have to return in a couple of weeks for a zirconia crown.

I see a strange relationship between this and what happened in my relationship with God.

If you look at the Bible, you will see patterns. Similar things happen over and over. Here’s an example: a person who is not aligned with God’s will will have good fortune for a long time, and he’ll be very confident that his future is secured. Then something bad will pop up and do him considerable harm, because he didn’t rely on God.

The Bible tells us we have to build our houses–ourselves–on rock, not sand. Sand represents the thoughts and ideas of human beings. It’s not stable. You can’t rely on it to support you. If you don’t listen to God, you are likely to come up with bad ideas of your own, or to adopt the bad ideas of others, and then when trouble comes, the sand will wash out from under you. The things you believed will not help you, and you will be defeated. Then you have to start over and build things correctly.

The pattern is very evident in the story of the temple. Jesus showed up in around 30 A.D., and he predicted the temple’s destruction. The temple was a disgrace. The hereditary priesthood was gone, and the temple was run by greedy political toadies who were appointed by the Romans. The reforms of Nehemiah had been undone. People were using the temple grounds as a strip mall. They had businesses set up there.

Jesus said this: “Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” He said that, but when Titus razed the temple, he left many stones in place. Why? Because Jesus wasn’t referring to the foundation. He was referring to the junk man had piled on top of it.

In the Bible, teeth symbolize weapons and tools. The psalms ask for God to break the teeth or jaws of the wicked. That means the righteous have teeth, too; there is always symmetry in the supernatural. The temple itself was something like a tooth. It was built up to tear God’s enemies.

What God did to the temple is a lot like what happened to my tooth. The weak upper parts were wiped out, but the foundation remained. My tooth wasn’t destroyed, but it will have to be rebuilt properly. Oddly, the thing that will fix it is called a “crown,” which is the name for one of the rewards of the righteous. The crown my dentist will make will be made from a material usually seen in jewels, which is even weirder.

I believe I took something real and unwittingly added some embellishments of my own, and now God is showing me that the embellishments were in his way. I think the dental issue is just part of the lesson.

I have a friend named Leah, and she used to visit the church I left last year. Sometimes she shared a word with them. On one occasion, she told them not to manufacture anything. The presence of God was in the place, and he was doing things in people. It was sufficient to acknowledge it and wait for more; it wasn’t necessary to dance and scream and pretend things were happening when they weren’t. I think I’m receiving that same lesson this week.

There are some things about dealing with the Holy Spirit which you can’t explain to other people; they have to be experienced. You can’t tell people what something tastes like and expect them to taste it. That’s the best analogy I have. I experienced things while I was talking to God, and some of them were unquestionably real, but there were other things that happened, which were apparently the result of emotion. I was trying to be honest. I was trying not to be deceived by my own desires. But I think I was fooled.

Now when I pray, I don’t accept the things which appear to have been proven false. I don’t give in. I think that’s what I was supposed to learn.

Look at it like this. Imagine Moses and the burning bush. What if he had thrown kerosene on the bush to make it burn brighter? It wouldn’t have pleased God. The bush was sufficient, and to let man augment it would have taken glory from God. Think of the story of strange fire. Think of the story of Saul sacrificing when the priests were late. You can get in a lot of trouble trying to do God’s work for him.

Yesterday was a rough day. I felt disconnected from God. Fortunately for me, that always drives me to pray more. I got back in the saddle, and I continued to say that God was always right. I looked back at my experiences and asked God what was real and what was not. Things are now improving. I feel like God ground down the things that were offending him, and now we can have a fresh start.

I suppose this is hard to relate to. If you haven’t been where I have (yet), you won’t be able to understand. Every Christian has to go through the same basic process, though, so presumably what I write will be useful to someone at some point in time.

The vast majority of the things I think I heard from God are still sound. That’s a relief.

Keep praying in tongues. Keep asking for correction. Ask God to help you prepare for the Rapture. The earth will be like hell during the Tribulation. Every second spent here will be a horror. We shouldn’t take it lightly just because we will still have the ability to repent.

I might as well throw this out: a few weeks back, I was in prayer, and my eyes were closed, and I saw “Nov. 28” in front of me. I literally saw it. I don’t mean I saw it in my imagination. When your eyes are closed, you still see things. You may see lights and patterns. I saw a little white patch appear, with “Nov. 28” on it in black lettering. Then it disappeared. It was a little bit like the answers that pop in in a Magic 8-Ball. They roll up out of the darkness.

I’m not saying it means anything. I don’t know why it happened. I figured I might as well reveal it, because if something does happen, no one will believe me if I don’t mention anything until November 29. If nothing happens, well, I was honest.