For Getting us Through this Tiresome Secular Holiday

I hope my 12 remaining readers had a good Thanksgiving.

I was hoping to blow it off. Weeks ago, I asked God to help me narrow my interests, and since then I have lost the drive to cook. I am very happy about that. Cooking is fun (or was), but it’s time-consuming. It’s a lot of work. Doing it right often costs a lot of money. And I am SINGLE. That means all the stuff a normal family of five or six does together lands on me.

The only person I have left to cook for is my dad, so I don’t think huge holiday meals should be considered compulsory. No one flies in from around the country for an emotional reunion. In fact, my relatives had a big Thanksgiving get-together a few years back and didn’t tell us. I have no idea what that was all about. I have never done any of them wrong, and I don’t think my dad has either. My sister is another story, but including me and my dad doesn’t really require including her. They are used to visiting us and not telling her they’re in town.

I got the news during a post-Thanksgiving call that had to do with business. My aunt said something about the holiday, and she mentioned the big gathering. She is having issues with her memory and thinking due to an illness, so she probably didn’t realize she was letting the cat out of the bag. After she said it, the conversation got awkward, but it was helpful in that it let me know where I stood.

Sometimes I have local friends over for a holiday meal. As I have mentioned in other blog entries, a young friend of mine has a music scholarship at the University of Miami, so we see each other a lot. I will not run his family down, but they have a way of leaving him on his own on important occasions. This year they took off for South Carolina. I invited him to join us, so it was nice that the meal served a purpose beyond derailing my daily routine.

I am determined to get out of cooking future holiday meals singlehanded. I hate the idea of going to a restaurant on Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve, but I also hate doing dishes for nine hours so two or three people can stuff themselves.

I’m not interested in cooking any more, and that’s a blessing, but I can still do it when I need to. Also a blessing. I no longer care about getting a serious kitchen or a huge gas range, but I’m glad I can produce good food when I have to.

I fixed a boneless turkey this year, full of cornbread stuffing and andouille sausage. It was wonderful. You remove every bone except for the drumsticks, and then you stuff the bird and sew it up. When the bones are out, you have a flat piece of meat like a doormat, and you can marinate or season it very effectively. I put mine in a pot overnight with salt and champagne.

At this time of year, people start pushing fried turkey. It’s not for me. I’ve only had it once, and it was tough and dangerous. Burns can cripple you.

Years ago, before my sister’s issues blew up, she got a fryer and hosted Thanksgiving dinner. I had to do the frying. I think I did it wrong; I don’t recall turning the gas off when I lowered the turkey. The oil didn’t burst into flame or pour all over the yard; that was nice. But some escaped from the pot.

That made me realize how perilous turkey frying is. There are all sorts of issues with it. Once oil gets hot, it’s very flammable, so if you have the flame going, oil that goes over the side can start burning. The flames from the oil on the ground can light the oil in the pot. Then you have real trouble.

If you put the lid on the pot, it warps, letting oxygen in. The fire keeps burning. If you throw water in the pot, it blows up, sending more oil out, and the oil may be flying. The fire keeps burning. If you use a fire extinguisher, you will probably just blow oil out of the pot, increasing the size of the problem. The fire keeps burning.

If the oil spills on a flat surface, and you’re standing on it, the oil can flow onto your feet. That’s bad. If your fryer is near your house, the flames can set fire to your eave or wall. God help you if you put the fryer in your house, on your deck, or in your garage.

The fried turkey was not good. I don’t know if the seasoning was weak or if frying just makes it fall off, but the turkey didn’t have a lot of flavor. The texture was like rubber.

I don’t have any confidence in frying, but a lot of people swear you can get a great result if you do it right. I guess they must know something. Personally, I’m not going to waste three gallons of oil on a process that scares me and gives me a bird that contains no stuffing and produces no gravy.

As far as I know, the ultimate turkey is one that has been boned, marinated, stuffed, and smoked. I’m too lazy to do that, but I’ve done it once or twice, and it was incredible. Without the smoking, it’s still magnificent. It’s more tender that a roasted bird. It’s just as juicy. It cooks much faster. You can carve it without wasting anything; it slices like salami. You can store the leftover bird without the aggravation of dealing with a dried-up, picked-over skeleton that resists going into the fridge.

Boning and sewing up the bird will probably add an hour to an hour and a half to the job, but you will also cut the baking time down. I used a 12-pound bird this time. I put it in the oven at around 9:50 a.m., and in two hours, it had cooked so fast I had to cut the temperature to 170 in order to avoid getting ahead of the sides. I could have had it on the table in under three hours, easily. As it was, the bird cooked so fast it was at 165 degrees when it came out. Considerably higher than optimal.

When you stuff a bird that isn’t boned, cooking takes forever. And you can’t get much stuffing into it. I would guess that you can get three times as much into a boned bird.

It was spectacular. No doubt about it. Not my best work, but considering the halfheartedness of the effort, a bona fide home run.

I did a major cheat with the mashed potatoes. I baked them, refrigerated them, and then nuked and mashed them on the day of the meal. They were a little overcooked, but that added some browning which made them taste better. It’s really hard to go wrong with mashed potatoes. They will forgive almost anything except using a food processor.

If you ever feel like boning a turkey, get yourself a $5 Forschner bird’s beak paring knife and a small, sharp chef’s knife. Learn how to use a diamond hone so you can keep them super sharp. Get a cut-proof glove for your left hand. Your left hand will get cold and relatively numb while you work, and it will be wet and greasy, so a trip to the ER is a distinct possibility for anyone who doesn’t wear a glove.

The actual boning is not complicated. Cut the turkey’s skin all the way through, straight down the back, from one end to the other. Then start peeling it off the bones and carefully cutting the meat loose. You will want to cut the wings off at the elbow, because boning a wing flat is impossible. Flex the thigh bones so the stuff that holds the hip joints is accessible and cut the tenons and ligaments so you can free the inner end of the bone from the pelvis. Then cut the meat away from the thigh bone until you get to the knee. Cut that joint open, remove the thigh bone, and get back to work on the rest of the bird. Remove the wing bones the same way you took out the thighs.

You will actually be able to stuff the upper wings, since they won’t have bones in them. That’s really nice.

You will always be working from inside the bird so you don’t cut through the skin. You want the skin intact.

You’ll lose maybe half a pound of meat, but think how much goes in the trash when you throw the desiccated skeleton out.

When you get done, you’ll be able to salt and/or marinate the bird overnight. You can season it again right before you stuff it.

When it’s time to stuff it, get a big needle and some dental floss. Sew up the torn-up area down around the bird’s former anus. You will want to restore the original pouch shape of the skin. Then start packing stuffing in.

Start sewing, pulling the edges of the skin together as you go. Shove the stuffing around to make it fit where it should. Pack it in there good. You can use a lot.

When you have the bird closed up, put it in your roasting pan on its back, season the skin however you want, and cook it normally. I like 200-250 degrees, covered with foil, with a 425 finish (no foil) to brown it. My roasting pan has a rack that holds the bird up out of the grease so it doesn’t soak.

There are Youtube videos which probably explain the boning process better than I do.

When you serve the turkey, put it on a cutting board and twist the legs off. The slice it like a cheese log. When you find the floss, pull it. The skin won’t be strong enough to hold onto it, so the floss will come out without breaking.

Obviously, this also works with chickens. I guess it would work with anything that has bones, although you would lose precious rib meat if you boned a pig.

Today I realized Thanksgiving has nothing to do with God or thanks. There is no way you can cook and eat and still have time for God.

I lost a lot of prayer time. I had to go start working early and keep at it until bedtime, two days in a row (usually, it’s three). You can’t work God into that in any meaningful way. You just do it out of obligation and accept the fact that your Christian walk will resume the next day.

When I got up today and knew I didn’t have to wrestle with turkey or side dishes, it was wonderful. I took as much time as I wanted for prayer.

I guess I sound like a downer, but people have been chasing their tails all week. They struggled to prepare during the days when they still had to go to work. They scrambled and toiled on the day itself. Then half of them went to the mall after dinner. The other half went today, to beat other people senseless in order to get three dollars off on a Chia Rihanna or whatever the big gift for 2015 is.

Next time, there will be help, or there will be a drastically abbreviated menu. And I’m not going to harbor any delusions about honoring God. This holiday is all about gluttony, shopping, and drunkenness. Get it done and get back on track. That’s my plan.

I hope all of you had a nice Thanksgiving. Maybe the turkey tips will help you. I strongly suggest avoiding fried turkey, although I did come across one good reason for doing it: it gives the men an excuse to go outside and get some peace. Maybe it’s worth it.

I only took one photo, and it’s not that great, but I’ll post it. It will help you understand what I’m talking about.

The Tuition has Been Paid

Today I’m not in church. This will not be news to anyone who reads the blog.

I have friends who have suggested churches, and I can tell some of them feel that a person who doesn’t have a church is in danger.

I would have said the same thing a few years ago. It’s true for most people. My situation is different, though.

I’ve known people who felt they were too holy to go to church. They got mad at the other congregants, usually. They stayed home and criticized, and sooner or later, they got way off the path. I have advised people to stay in churches that are 85% good and 15% bad, because that’s about the best ratio you can hope for.

Am I a hypocrite, then, for staying home?

Short answer: no.

I used to have much more respect for Christian leaders than I do now. I thought Kenneth Copeland was a genius (there may be some truth to that, if it means he has a natural talent which is used to damage people’s lives). I probably thought Benny Hinn was an apostle; I don’t recall.

When I started going to Trinity Church in Miami Gardens, I thought I had found the real thing because I felt the presence of God. I thought Rich Wilkerson was doing a great job. I didn’t know very much. I hadn’t heard about the things that went on behind the scenes, and I didn’t have a great prayer life, so I didn’t have as much discernment as I should have. I was not that hard to fool.

I didn’t know that God’s presence is unrelated to his approval! God will show up and let believers feel his presence in places where people are in the process of failing.

I started praying in tongues three minutes a day, and when I got up to 15 minutes, I felt like I had accomplished something. I didn’t know I was only scratching the surface.

God started showing me things. I got up to thirty minutes, and he continued showing me things. One of the things he showed me was that Trinity was very screwed up. He showed me that the leaders were only interested in money and fame, that they used people, that people didn’t grow much under their care, and that the main purpose of the church was to promote the Wilkersons. I also realized Wilkerson was using the deranged theological fantasies of his pal Steve Munsey to collect money, even though he probably knew it was a scam.

I started to see through the TV idiots. If Kenneth Copeland came into my house today and used a glass, afterward, I would soak it in bleach to kill the cooties.

Trinity started to wear on me. I couldn’t tell the pastors anything, and it was almost impossible for me to tell other members anything. They wouldn’t listen. Only a few paid attention. The rest assumed that anyone who disagreed with a pastor was “out of submission” and headed for some kind of divine punishment.

After a long period of prayer for a new church, I ended up at New Dawn Ministries. The pastors there were better, but as my prayer time increased, I started to understand that they were proud and ignorant. They were like the character Jade Fox in the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, who stole a martial arts manual, became powerful by looking at the drawings, and then hit a plateau because she couldn’t read.

They were able to make a certain amount of progress in the kingdom because they were open to the Holy Spirit, and they really did want to see people do well. But their arrogance made further progress impossible.

Like the Wilkersons, they had the attitude that anyone who disagreed was out of line. That’s not a bad attitude, if you have the revelation to back it up. But they didn’t. Revelation doesn’t soak into hardened bricks. The ground has to be ready to receive it.

They seemed lazy. The church was not open except during services, and they traveled and vacationed a lot. I don’t think they had serious prayer lives, because if they had, they would have learned.

The church is still tiny, forty-three months after I first showed up. They talk about “breakthrough” and so on, but they are going to be in their little rented room until someone new takes over or the church collapses.

As for famous preachers, I liked Perry Stone and Fred Stone. I still like Fred, but he died a few years ago. Perry receives all sorts of wonderful information from God, but it’s not very helpful with changing your heart. It’s about prophecy and the hidden meanings of things in the Bible. You can only get so far with that.

He has pride and anger problems. He has a very haughty way of talking about unbelievers and Christians who don’t know as much as he does. Sometimes he seems excited about the possibility that they will suffer for their unwillingness to listen.

I used to receive Perry’s monthly CDs, but they got repetitious. Any time a preacher seems to be going in circles, there is a problem. Circling is symptomatic of a loss of anointing. The Hebrews circled in the desert because they wouldn’t listen.

I like John Bevere a lot, but he doesn’t seem all that excited about prayer in tongues, which is the most important thing in our arsenal. He does encourage it, but I remember him complaining about a time when the church was too caught up in it. He has also said things that show he doesn’t have the kind of prayer life I need to see in a teacher.

Andrew Wommack is pretty good, but he clearly has a discernment problem, because he is palling around with prosperity preachers. That’s a major issue. If you’re sitting down and dining with the wolves, and you see nothing wrong with it, what other deceptions have you swallowed?

I don’t listen to anyone now. I don’t know anyone who is teaching the whole package in a way that makes it worth it for me to sit down and listen. I hear error most of the time, and when I hear the truth, I don’t hear anything new. They’re talking about things they consider major revelations. I heard the same things years ago, directly from God, and could not get anyone to listen to me.

I put in several hours of prayer every day, so I hear a lot of things from God without man’s help. I don’t want to learn something and then have to sit for an hour and listen to someone else repeat it. Usually, it’s not a profitable use of my time, and it’s boring.

It can be nice to get confirmation, but it’s not so nice I want to go on Youtube and listen to every John Bevere sermon.

Is it a bad thing to have no teacher? Yes. But I do have a teacher. I have the only good teacher.

John taught that we would learn directly from the Holy Spirit, and he made it clear that this teaching was an antidote to the false teachings of men. Here is a passage from 1 John:

Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.

But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things. I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth.

Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either; he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also.

Therefore let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that He has promised us—eternal life.

These things I have written to you concerning those who try to deceive you. But the anointing which you have received from Him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you; but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you will abide in Him.

Ask yourself this: was John serious? Surely. This is the Bible. If we can’t rely on this, then nothing we believe is trustworthy. If John was serious, then a Spirit-led believer does not need a human teacher.

This sounds horrific to the institutionalized Christian mind. The Bible says we should not neglect the assembling of ourselves together! But consider this: the Spirit-led are not under the law.

It’s a good idea to assemble. For some of us, it’s necessary. But it’s not law. For some Christians, it’s inappropriate and a waste of time.

Jesus cautioned us not to linger where our peace was not received. He was not kidding. If you’re hearing directly from God, and churches keep mistreating you, the best thing is to stay home.

This is not a new idea.

Adam walked with God and learned from him. Enoch was set apart for God, and he was eventually taken to heaven without the intermediate step of physical death. Moses got away from people so he could learn from God. At least some of the prophets were solitary. Elijah ran off and hid by a brook, where the ravens fed him. We have no record of him living among people. After Paul was converted, he went to Arabia and Damascus and learned from God. John was living in exile on Patmos when he wrote the Revelation.

Here is a passage from the fourth psalm: “But know that the Lord has set apart for Himself him who is godly; The Lord will hear when I call to Him.”

Every humble person who prays in tongues a lot learns the same things from God. When two people hear from the same Spirit, the things they hear will always agree. This knowledge will not agree with what carnal people believe, and most Christians are very carnal. So the closer you get to God, the further you will get from humanity. You will get further from other Christians. People who have a huge amount of knowledge will be separated from people who only have a great deal. That means they will infuriate pastors and teachers.

Enoch and Elijah probably couldn’t stand life on earth. That’s probably why they were removed. They had so little in common with humanity, they didn’t belong here.

Why write about it? Because it should give everyone hope. It’s hard to find a decent church. It’s hard to find good teaching. But anyone can find the Holy Spirit.

The availability of the Holy Spirit neutralizes the danger of bad teaching. You can compare what other people say with what the Spirit says. What they leave out, he will fill in. What they don’t know, he knows.

That’s a big deal. As the Bible says, people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Through the Spirit, knowledge is available, right now, wherever you are.

You may think this was only for special people, like Paul and John. If that’s true, why did John tell us otherwise? “You do not need that anyone teach you.”

When did God become a respecter of persons?

If you’re starting at square one, by all means, find a church. But once you get the ball rolling, if you do it right, you will find that you need church less and less, and that it needs you more.

This stuff is important, because persecution is really ramping up. You will need power and knowledge.

The gay marriage surrender was a disaster. We didn’t get earthquakes and plagues, and no one set off an H-bomb in Times Square, but America lost its protection. Doors are now open that used to be closed. Fallen angels and their children the demons now have authority and access they didn’t have in the past.

Christians who don’t hear from God think our mission is to spread peace and love. They think we’re supposed to be super nice, and that this will correct the world.

That’s not how it works.

We are supposed to bring people to repentance, help them get to know the Holy Spirit, and help them to throw off the spirits that rule them so they can serve God. To get this job done, sometimes we have to say things that don’t sound nice. We have to criticize. We have to be willing to be excluded.

By obsessing on making people love us, we are giving up real power. We’ve turned Christianity into a popularity contest. Paradoxically, this will make our enemies confident, bring more hatred out into the open, and enable them to destroy us.

We get power by turning from the world and leading it in righteousness. By kowtowing to confused perverts and letting them lead us, we opened our gates. Now America is becoming more and more corrupt. Trashy, cruel people who used to lose now defeat us, and they will continue to do so. Their triumphs will increase.

Look around you and ask yourself if this is the America you knew eighteen months ago. People who are controlled by demons are bold now; they are oozing out of the woodwork and assuming command over us.

Right now, it’s hard for a Christian to own a bakery. A few years from now, you may not be able to have a credit card or a bank account.

To understand the way the enemy works, think of the Muslims and Israel. The Israelis gave up one piece of land after another, thinking their enemies would be satisfied and make peace. The problem is that their enemies don’t want peace or small bits of land. They want everything, and they want Israel to disappear from the earth. They will never stop attacking. This is how people who hate God see Christians.

They aren’t going to stop when we give up bakeries and academic jobs. They’ll take everything. Wait and see.

They don’t even know they want it. Not yet. But they will. The masks will fall off, and people will treat us the way the Nazis treated the Jews. There will be no shame. They will be proud of it. The things they’re doing to us right now are very much like the things the Nazis did in the 1930s. Read up and see.

If you know the Holy Spirit, and you continue listening to him, you will receive a certain amount of power to protect yourself. You will be able to defeat persecutors and the loser spirits they’ve given their souls to. That’s very important. Many of us will have to suffer and die, but there is no law that says every Christian has to be a punching bag.

Satan owns America. Christians hate hearing that, but it’s true. We gave it to him. God is not going to swoop down and fix things. America is going to continue to rot. You are not going to be able to set the kingdom of heaven up around you. That’s a fantasy. The thing to do is to set it up inside yourself.

Now that we’ve dropped our pants for the devil, things are accelerating. It’s not clear how much time is left. How crazy will God let us get? Will he let us design babies the way we design fantastic CGI creatures for movies? That technology is not far off. Will he let computers become so powerful our governments can have us under complete surveillance at all times? Will he let us destroy every church building and every book and recording? Things like this are rapidly becoming possible.

Today God told me something. Many Christians have done well without churches, but every Christian who has no prayer life is a failure. Every single one. So don’t get your priorities screwed up.

I hope this is useful to you. Things are going sour fast, and I hope you have the time and the inclination to prepare as well as possible.

Sober up and Ride Off

The enemy is funny. If you say you don’t need to be changed or informed, and that you can do it all by yanking on your own bootstraps, he says you’re proud. If you say you hear from God daily, and that God changes you and makes you stronger and smarter, he still says you’re proud. He says you’re proud of your relationship with God. And that it’s imaginary.

Okay, whatever. I can’t even make human beings happy, so getting Satan to lay off me is not a priority.

I have a strong prayer life. It is not perfect; I don’t pray enough in the middle of the day. But compared to the prayer life of your average Christian (or to me three years ago), it’s very good. I pray in tongues maybe two and a half hours a day, on average. I spend a lot of time blessing and cursing. I pray with my understanding. I have lists so I don’t forget things.

Why tell you this? So you will know I am not talking out of my rear end when I say I hear from God.

As far as I can tell, almost no well-known Christian leaders have good prayer lives. They love to brag about the things they do for God, so if they were praying several hours every day, we would have heard about it over and over. They’re not doing it.

One of my favorite teachers, John Bevere, recently spoke of a time early in his ministry, when he was so gung-ho he prayed a couple of hours per day. Something like that. I don’t recall the exact figure. While encouraging people to pray in tongues daily, Perry Stone spoke admiringly of old people who sometimes prayed as long as twenty minutes at a crack.

If I only prayed in tongues twenty minutes per day, I would expect to collapse in a month. If I thought praying a couple of hours every day was a burden so large I needed to mention it publicly, I would consider myself lost and in need of revival.

I’m not doing enough, but I’m doing a lot. I have the authority and the standing to say a few things.

Feel-good pulpit pimps like Joel Osteen are telling people to relax. They’re telling people things are going to be fine. They don’t want to offend anyone, they don’t hear from God, and they don’t really care about us, so they say anything that will increase the size of their audiences and their income.

We have developed the habit of going to church in order to feel better. We are not all that interested in why we feel bad. People like Osteen and Jakes realize that, so they make us feel confident and inspired. Then we give them our money, which is all they really wanted, and we go home and continue to live in defeat.

I am hearing from God, and he is not telling me to relax or that everything is going to be fine. He makes me very agitated. He urges me to change. Something bad is coming, and if I’m not ready, I’ll be in the wrong line when we go through the pride detector.

Last night I had a disturbing dream, and I woke up. In the dream, I was Christopher Reeve, but I could walk, and I wasn’t rich. I had an idiot younger sister who had borrowed my bicycle. She had been thrown out of a place she was renting, and she had left the bicycle there. She led me to the place, and I went to the front to talk to the landlord. The area around the door was enclosed by a chain-link fence. The owner was a centaur. He came out and talked through the fence, but he wouldn’t let me in.

I was something like seven feet tall, and he was about five feet tall. I could have reached over the fence, lifted him out, tossed him aside, and gone in for the bike, but I didn’t have authority to do that, so I didn’t do it. He blew me off and went back inside.

I felt uneasy and started to pray. I spent a long time praying. The Holy Spirit made odd noises come out of me. When I say “made,” I don’t mean I had no self-control. I was submitted, so I did what he moved me to do.

I felt that I was being shaken and twisted, the way you would wring out a dishrag.

I started thinking about my iniquities and sins. I focused a lot on things I usually try to think of as inconsequential. If you have the urge to sin, it’s never inconsequential. The sin itself may not be a big deal, but the fact that you have the compulsion should alarm you.

I became very uncomfortable as this stuff rose to the surface. I didn’t like it at all. No one likes to think of himself as having qualities he considers trashy or disgusting. But I told God to keep pouring it on. I told him I didn’t care about feeling good. I wanted to know myself as I really was, and I wanted to change.

At my old church, they would have told me I was condemning myself. They would have told me to swallow the poison instead of throwing it up and being healed.

Until now, I didn’t really know what the dream meant, but suddenly it seems clear.

The little sister is the influence of people controlled by weak, feminine spirits that rule the church. She was silly. She was poor. She was a person no one respected. She did not own the land she lived on.

Christopher Reeve played Superman, but he wasn’t super. He was just a man. He had no skills, talents, or knowledge anyone would consider impressive.

In the dream, he had grey hair. Superman is immortal; his hair stays black. In the movies, he wears a costume made from indestructible Kryptonian cloth. It represents authority, power, and invulnerability. In the dream, he wore jeans and a button-down shirt, with loafers.

In the dream, he was strong by human standards, but it wasn’t helpful when the law was against him. He didn’t have the authority to take back what was his.

A centaur is a man supported by the body of a beast. It’s a man with a carnal foundation. It represents an unbeliever. In the dream, a little centaur was able to defy a large, strong man and take what was his. In a way, it had been given to him, because the man entrusted it to his stupid sister, just as we entrust Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn with our money and time.

The thing I wanted wasn’t even a car; it was a bicycle. To a grown man, a bicycle is a symbol of defeat and shame. It’s what you ride to work when you have a DWI, or when you don’t earn much. Most churches ride bicycles. They don’t have the power of the Holy Spirit, which is like a hot-rodded car engine.

I was not myself in the dream. I was a carnal Christian who walked in defeat because he tried to do things in his own strength.

This is what happens to people who don’t pray in tongues. They will usually lose to people who don’t believe in God at all. They won’t get to ride in cars, and they can even be cut off from their puny bicycles.

Eventually, the praying and groaning wound down, and I had to reset my alarm because I had missed so much sleep. The alarm interrupted another dream.

I dreamed I saw my father. He appeared to be over 100. He had no hair, and he was skinny, like a cancer patient. His body was just about gone, but his mind was absolutely clear, and he was energetic and at peace. In real life, he is dealing with dementia, he has a terrible weight problem, and he has no peace.

He had just cleaned a bathroom that had been filthy. I was amazed. In the he dream I had been trying and trying to get him to understand how nasty it was, and to clean it up. It stank up the whole house, and he couldn’t smell it.

I was relieved to see it clean. It was like winning the lottery.

I tried to say things that didn’t sound like backhanded criticism. I didn’t want to say “Finally!” I told him I would be happy to help him keep it clean.

Then we were driving. We were north of Miami. We drove through a little planned neighborhood that was very neat and peaceful. There was a Chick-Fil-A just inside the entrance.

We decided to have lunch. When we went in, the waiters stood in a group and started singing to us. They were that happy to see my dad.

It’s not surprising that it was a Chick-Fil-A. That’s what the atmosphere is like at their restaurants. They don’t sing to you, but they treat you like an honored guest. Also, Chick-Fil-A has become a symbol of Christianity.

When my dad expressed interest in tables, people rushed to get out of the way, even if they had been there first.

Christians have made themselves toilets for demons, which are our dead half-brothers. They are the children of angels. They express themselves in illness, mental problems, and iniquity. They take the place of the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to listen to God’s prophets and clean them out of ourselves.

Preachers aren’t teaching us how to be cleaned up and sanctified. They serve demons. They just want our money, so they don’t tell us we have become dirty bathrooms. They say we smell like roses, but in reality, we stink inside.

We can’t smell the stink because we lack discernment, which comes from praying in tongues. Often we think a horrible stench is a delightful aroma.

Sometimes the church has to go through terrible, wasting persecution, which is like cancer, in order to be put right.

When we are raptured, we will be taken to God’s wedding feast, in the planned community of heaven, where every one of us has a home, and the angels will be so glad they sing over us.

The sooner a person repents and develops a real prayer left, the less chastisement he will have to face before he straightens up.

You don’t have to look like a cancer patient when you leave the earth. You can be fit and strong, with all your hair.

Hair represents the glory of God, which accumulates around people who commune with the Holy Spirit on a daily basis. Prayer in tongues is the primary method for communing with him.

The conclusion I drew is that just before the rapture comes, God will succeed in changing a lot of Christians. They won’t have much time to get to know him or to make great progress in becoming like him, but he will manage to change their direction enough to get them in the door.

They will change during a time of affliction. That’s the reason for the weight loss and the sickly look. The baldness represents the fact that the change and the rapture came too close together to permit them to accumulate much in the kingdom.

The bathroom is the heart. It’s a place where you should meet with the Holy Spirit and get rid of the demons that inhabit it. You should be bleaching the walls and floor to get rid of their excrement. You should be flushing the residue away.

I represented people God sent to warn others.

Judging by the dream, they won’t listen any time soon. They will wait as long as possible, and it will cost them, both here and in heaven.

At least they’ll make it.

According to the book of Jubilees, Noah got 120 years to warn his neighbors. He didn’t do well at all. He saved his wife, three sons, and their daughters. A legend says he saved a giant named Og; even if that were true, it would be a pretty poor harvest.

In the Flood, God destroyed the world with water. We know that he’s going to destroy it again, with fire. We know that it will happen in a time of pride and perversion, like the times of Noah and Lot. Here we are, stoking the flames and laughing at the one who is holding them back.

The end of this age will not come on a day when we expect it. We know that for a fact. We have been informed of that, expressly. When it comes, we will be hit like Ronda Rousey, flatfooted, wondering where our confidence came from.

It’s interesting that her most painful and damaging injury was to the mouth she used to say nasty things.

Persecution is increasing very quickly all over the world. Even in “Christian” America, you’re in danger. If you’re a Christian, and you plan a career or business, you have to ask yourself whether it’s safe from gays.

Do you design websites? You may have to design some promoting bathhouses and depraved gay organizations. Do you have a restaurant? You may have to rent the banquet room out for gay weddings. Are you a professor? You may have to endorse homosexuality in order to be allowed to work, and you may have to endorse it off the job, not just on campus.

Satan is squeezing the world like a boil, and we are the pus he is trying to expel. God is letting him do it, because we evicted God from our lives.

God is not an enabler. God is doing what addiction counselors call “raising the bottom.” If you let an addict hit bottom, it means you don’t help him. You let him go broke and live on the streets so he’ll go to rehab. If you raise the bottom, you do things that accelerate the process so it will move faster.

Things are going to get bad much faster than we expected. You can’t change yourself overnight. It may already be too late to pray in tongues and be rehabilitated. You need to start so you can preserve as much as possible.

I’m very glad God isn’t stuffing me with cotton candy and root beer. That’s what televangelists do. They fill us with morphine and vodka so they can see our nakedness. They don’t care if we go to hell or if we are Satan’s slaves here on earth. God cares, so he tells me the truth. He’ll tell you the truth, too, but you have to turn on your radio. He’s not going to come down on a hang glider, shouting through a bullhorn. He will let you go to hell before he will let you change his ways.

He has thrown thousands of people into hell today, and you and your children are no better than they are.

My advice is to get started. Set time aside each day. Keep asking God for correction. Keep begging him to spare you the black harvest you sowed. That’s what I do.

Get to know him yourself, so you won’t have to rely on lies from imaginative preachers.

I can’t even imagine what he is going to be showing me in the months ahead. I do know that things are as good as they’ll ever get.

Warnings from Enoch

It’s unusual for me to have a sad day. Well…”unusual” is not a strong enough term. It’s rare. But today I feel a little down.

America is clearly in the grip of a spiritual seizure very much like the one we underwent in the Sixties, and I see little hope that we will come out of it. I think we will end up under the thumbs of exactly the kind of sleazy, grasping, cruel, trashy, stupid people who took over Cuba and North Korea. Decent people with common sense will be abused with increasing intensity, with the consent, support, and participation of the state. Filthy, irrational cretins will have power over us. The only way to be relatively safe will be to sell out and become a tool of oppression.

I remember how things were a few short years ago, before the latest eruption of political “correctness” and sexual perversion really got going.

I told people homosexuality would be the stick the enemy’s people used to beat Christians. It sounded crazy to hardheaded people who don’t listen, but I was correct. History proved me right. I knew the people who favored sexual deviation and sin would never be satisfied with tolerance and coexistence. I knew they would use their new power to label the rest of us as haters (a new word I can’t stand), and that it would give them a pretext to persecute us.

Look how right I was. In 2015 America, you don’t have to do anything affirmative in order to lose your job or have your business taken away. All you have to do is refuse to participate in the celebration of what God calls abomination. It’s not enough to say, “Do as you wish, but I would like to be left out of it.” You have to choose a side, and there is only one side the left will let you choose.

Recently two day care workers in Katy, Texas were fired because they refused to call a boy a girl. A six-year-old boy has either decided or been convinced that he’s a girl, and the gay men who are raising him have insisted that day care workers call him “she” and “her.” Because they refused to lie–a very reasonable position prior to the new era of thoughtcrime–they were forced out of their jobs.

This didn’t happen in San Francisco. It happened in Texas. Possibly the state liberals hate, and wish to conquer, the most. If the pink tide has swept over Texas, there is nowhere you can consider yourself or your family safe.

The boy is six. Think about that. His “parents” have made a life-altering decision for him involving concepts he can’t possibly understand yet, and they are projecting their soul-destroying motivations and sensibilities onto him, exactly the way gays tell us we project heterosexual drives onto normal children. If this boy shows up in your school, and you have to interact with him, you will have to lie to him and be an accomplice in the assassination of his masculinity. Or you can change careers. You will have a very hard time finding work that involves kids once “progressive” childcare employers find out you refuse to involve yourself in the destruction of children.

Changing careers will not be an option forever. The LGBT[insert new letters here as they are invented] army knows you’re looking for a rock to hide under, and they want to take it away from you before you get there. They will find ways to blackball you eventually, even if you’re satisfied with digging ditches. You will be allowed to believe whatever you want, as long as you don’t mind living like a hobo.

They believe they can change the world by crushing entire generations of dissidents. They think that if children grow up in a world in which everyone who agrees with the Bible suffers economic and social hardship, the children will, universally, deny God and embrace perversion.

Then Biblical morals will be gone. It’s like killing a generation of sick plants and starting a new crop with healthy seed. Future generations will not be “infected” with the Christian disease. Hitler and the socialists had the same idea, with regard to ideas they saw as threatening.

I was right before, and I’m right now, because I was repeating what God said. But not enough people will listen to turn the tide. A few here and there will get it. Overall, though, people are a lot like monkeys. They have no internal compasses. They just do whatever makes their cages most comfortable in the short run. Those of us who refuse to play along will be sacrificed, and those who refused to help us will rationalize.

Conservatives think they have the answers. They think that if we all go out and vote, things will change. They believe the problem is that we don’t educate, contribute, or vote enough. That’s completely wrong. What’s happening to America has supernatural roots, and we can’t fix it with natural tools. Relying on natural tools is what got us into this mess. We were supposed to be a prayer army that obeys God and receives his help. Instead, we glorified, and relied on, ourselves. So God quit helping us.

God wants us to be defeated by sexual sinners, aliens, criminals, other nations, and so on. He WANTS it. We are against him, so he is against us. We can’t beat God. We can’t even hide from him. We think we’re fighting deluded counterculture eccentrics, or that we’re fighting the devil. No; God is helping those people defeat us. We’re fighting God himself.

The church is almost useless.

The old churches aren’t even Christian. They preach salvation, but that’s about it. They’re wrong about almost everything else. They’re against the baptism with the Spirit, prayer in tongues, and being Spirit-led. They have never had much supernatural power. They teach us to work hard or to be really nice; things that don’t work without God’s help.

Newer churches are whorehouses. They love the supernatural. They toss out a few phrases in tongues once in a while. They tell us God will do miracles. But they teach us God’s plan is to satisfy our flesh. He wants to give us money and spectacular healings. They don’t teach correction, confession, and submission. They teach moronic, legalistic schemes to help us get rich by giving God money.

In the new churches, we worship TV stars. We don’t have prophets. We have Joel Osteen, who curries favor and seems to cringe. We think that anyone who has a camera pointed at him has to be an apostle.

Charismatic evangelists like Osteen and T.D. Jakes are blood drinkers. They don’t care much about us. They want our money. They’re deluded by greed, and they use our own greed to get at us. They tell us God will give us wealth, because he wants us to be rich. They don’t teach much about the internal riches God actually wants us to receive. They don’t know about those things, because they’re ignorant. They do know how to manipulate, so that’s what they stick to.

These characters bleed us and drink our blood to make themselves and their spoiled children fat. They don’t teach anyone anything powerful or helpful. They fill our hungry ears with fakery, and because we’re too blind to recognize it for what it is, we think we’re being fed. We stop looking for the truth, so we remain undeveloped, like unfertilized eggs.

Today I’ve been reading the book of Enoch. There is a long prophecy in it, in which God shows Enoch the history of the world, from Abraham to the time after the Messianic Age. In the prophecy, God shows how he has sent us his representatives time and time again, to open our eyes and help us get back on track. It tells how we ignored them and even killed them. It says we are going to continue doing those things until Jesus comes back.

It’s not a rosy picture. It describes the people who should be following God as sheep, and it says they are blind. It says foul spirits tear the meat off of them because they don’t submit to God.

The prophecy describes the Babylonian exile. It says Enoch begged God to help, but God folded his hands and took pleasure in what happened to the Jews. We’re no better than the Jews. He will treat us the same way.

Here is, perhaps, the worst part: according to the prophecy, the blind sheep will be cast into hell. Sounds unfair, doesn’t it? They identify as Jews and Christians, and you would think that would please God. The reason they don’t please God is that they’re blind. Is it fair to burn them?

Yes, of course it’s fair. They made the choices that led to their blindness.

In the American justice system, you can’t avoid a conviction by saying you were drunk or high when you committed a crime. The rationale is that you chose to drink or take drugs, so you’re responsible for what you did when you were out of your mind. The same principle applies to sin. If you turned away when you had the chance to do the right thing, and later you became unable to tell right from wrong, too bad.

One more time, God is going to raise up a man like Elijah. That man will speak the truth, and he will help other people who are capable of hearing and changing. The vast majority of human beings will be against that man, and all the spirits that serve Satan will be behind them. But he will prevail. Jesus will return to help him, and then the real suffering will begin. Jesus will be angry.

If you’ve disagreed with the Satanic agenda, people know about it. Things you said fifteen or twenty years ago will come back to you. God help you if you blog, because it will make gathering evidence that much easier. You are slated for destruction already. It’s probably impossible for you to fix things unless you sell your soul and recant falsely. Think about that. A choice is in your future. It is already scheduled. It will come sooner than you expected.

My advice is to start praying in tongues every day. You’re going to need the ability to hear from God, and you’re not going to develop it in a day. It may be too late to start, but at least you can try. Put in as much time as you can every day, and ask God for correction. Ask him for the supernatural ability to change. It looks like America is descending into the toilet pretty rapidly, so you need to get to work. I don’t think we can fix America. Don’t worry about that. But you may be able to build an ark around yourself.

It may not be long before you lose your job. You may lose whatever licenses and accreditations you have. You may have to kiss your profession goodbye. Sooner or later, they won’t be satisfied with taking your earning potential. They’ll want what you already have. Anything that enables you to be a “hater,” they will want to take away, even if it’s your life. It will be best for you, because hitting rock bottom will help you convert, and if you die because you refuse to change, that will be good for society. Either result will satisfy the enemy.

God provides protection to people who are truly close to him. He went so far as to carry Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus away. He is stronger than the people who hate you for living. You need to give him a reason to be on your side.

Martyrdom is a likely end for strong believers, but I believe we will lead victorious lives until they come for us, and even when we are killed, it will be because we chose to surrender.

Grumpy Christians Make it to Heaven

John Bevere is currently the best teacher I know of. He is telling people something that sounds very original, yet which we should have known for 2000 years: being nice is not the same thing as serving God.

He doesn’t put it quite that way. He has written a book called Good or God?, and the basic idea is that we don’t please God by being “good” by our own standards. We have to identify his standards and be good according to them.

I just read something on the Internet. A Mormon injected himself into a Christian comment thread. As Mormons often do, he kept his religion to himself until after he had been exposed by someone else. Then, as Mormons often do, he started claiming his religion was Christian, and that the people who were rejecting it were cruel and mean and probably climate change deniers who don’t even eat organic. Or something like that. He took on a shameless victim stance, which is a familiar Mormon tactic. I assume this is a strategy they have been taught, because I have seen it a number of times.

He said something about how caring and loving Mormons are. I’ll go farther than that. They do a lot of charitable works. They work hard. They don’t commit a lot of crime. They promote kindness and traditional Christian morality.

That’s great, BUT it’s not good in God’s eyes.

It’s hard–no, it’s impossible–to make most people accept this, but here is what’s truly good: hearing from the Holy Spirit and doing what he tells you to do, even if it conflicts with the Jewish law or traditional Christian morality.

Mormons can’t do that. They are not Holy-Spirit-led. They venerate spirits such as “Moroni,” the messenger that supposedly spoke to Joseph Smith before he found his magic golden plates and read off of them as they sat in his hat. Mormons are out of alignment with God’s authority because they reject grace and humility, so they can’t advance far as God’s empowered servants. In this respect, they are like gays and Buddhists and all the other characters who try to “correct” Christianity.

We are supposed to receive salvation, which comes purely as a gift, through faith. We do not have to perform any works in order to go to heaven (contrary to Mormon teaching). Then we’re supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Then we’re supposed to pray in tongues daily, ask God for correction, fight our pride and the spirits that controlled us before we were saved, and become Spirit-led.

Then you do what the Spirit tells you to do, not what Christian law says to do. Yes, I said “Christian law.” We treat the Ten Commandments as though they bind us. We take the things Jesus taught and turn them into rigid laws. We have law, even though we are not supposed to.

The Holy Spirit will usually tell you to do nice things, but sometimes he won’t. He told the ancient Jews to kill babies and old people. Was that good? This may be hard to acccept, but yes, it was good. It was good, because it was God’s command. That’s what made it good. Niceness does not make an action good. God–not Satan–throws nice people into hell every day. He’s doing it right now. That’s not nice. But it’s good.

Do I expect God to tell me to kill babies? No, of course not. That’s exactly the kind of ridiculous question a carnal person would ask in order to “debunk” Spirit-led Christianity. But I do expect God to tell me to go against Jewish law and Christian law.

The “Jesus only wanted us to be nice” crowd is heavily pro-homosexuality. They see nice gays, and they think they must be okay with God. After all, Jesus was very hard on people who were self-righteous and unforgiving. And many Christians are not as nice as random gays.

The strange thing about people who believe this is that they think they’re fighting legalism, but they actually promote it.

If you think you’re going to heaven because you’re nice, then you think you’re being rewarded for good works. That’s legalism. Under legalism, you are rewarded for what you do, not what you are or what you believe.

Real Christians do not believe that. They believe that they will enter paradise when they die even if they commit a substantial number of sins during their post-salvation lives. Many of us take it too far and do as we please, treating salvation as though it cost God nothing, but this is how it works. So a rude Christian who believes in forgiveness by faith will enter heaven, and a really nice Mormon, homosexual atheist, Buddhist, or Hindu will not be able to escape hell.

Going further, a Christian who is not friendly, warm, or relentlessly nurturing may please God much more than an unbeliever who is nice all the time. If the Christian does what the Holy Spirit tells him to do, then he’s doing what is right.

It’s nice to be nice, but what counts is obedience, and you can’t be obedient if you can’t hear the Holy Spirit, because you don’t know what he’s telling you to do.

If we’re saved by grace, why does obedience count? Because we’re supposed to go past salvation. God has things he wants us to do in this life. If we obey, we will be improved, we will help others to be improved, and we will build strong, Spirit-led people who can help others receive salvation, serve God, and humiliate Satan.

Jesus talked about this when he discussed people who would come up to him at judgment and tell him what they had done for him. People will approach him and say, “I built an orphanage. I gave money to the poor. I never criticized anyone else’s sins. I accepted homosexuality because I refuse to judge. I worked in my church for nothing.” Essentially, they will tell him what he owes them because of their works. They will say, “I was good. I did what I thought was good.” But what you think is good is not necessarily good. Only God knows what is good. Jesus said he will tell the people who try to collect on the debt to depart from him. He will say he never knew them.

When you decide what’s good, not only do you fail to discern God’s will; you try to correct God. You substitute your judgment for his. Doesn’t matter whether you have what you call “good intentions.” Even your intentions have to be judged by God. If you intend to do what you think is good, instead of listening to the Holy Spirit, then your intentions are bad.

Mormons are not Christians. They belong to a faith that involves Jesus, and they believe faith is PART of salvation, but they don’t believe faith alone saves us. If you believe that anything other than faith is essential to salvation, then you’re not saved. You’re under the law, and no one can fulfill the law.

The doctrine of following the Holy Spirit sounds very harsh to self-righteous people. They think their man-made doctrine is better, because it tells them to be so nice. Consistently nice. They think they’re better than Spirit-led Christians who are not always nice, and they will use their own niceness to condemn us. When they use it to put us in chains, take our homes, and kill us, this will be part of their justification. Expect it.

If you want more of what God has for you, give up the Christian law. Get to know the Holy Spirit. Ask for correction, and ask God to make you crave correction. He will answer these prayers, and the blessings you receive will be greater than anything you will ever get for being nice.

Creepy Pastors do the Opposite

Today I had another remarkable revelation concerning the last two churches I belonged to. They are ruining people’s relationships in a manner not unlike the damage done by the Nazis and by Americans who owned slaves.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this sooner. I suppose I didn’t care enough about being rejected to think about it.

After World War Two, many people found themselves isolated from family and friends. The Nazis tore relationships apart. It’s obvious that they murdered people, but there was more to it than that. They destroyed neighborhoods so people had to leave as refugees. They imprisoned people and moved them around. When the war was over, the Nazi infrastructure was gone, and there was no one capable of determining where people were.

Many people got back together shortly after the war. Others stayed apart for years. Some never found each other again. Slaveholders also tore families apart, and many were never restored.

I’ve known for a long time that Rich Wilkerson and the crew at Trinity Church discouraged people from talking to those who leave the church. A friend told me she had been sat down for “the conversation.” I know there were secret meetings about me. Big deal. I’m not the kind of person who suffers a lot when people drop me.

I knew about Trinity, but it was only recently that people started telling me that the pastors at New Dawn discourage people from communicating from people who leave.

If what I’m told is correct, they’re not always relatively subtle about it, as in the recent situation where a pastor preached about people like me without using my name. I am told they mentioned people by name and told others to shun them.

Here’s the interesting part: these things are generally done in secret, because many church pastors are gutless and sneaky. The problem with that is that the people who are shunned don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know the pastors are behind it. They may assume their friends don’t want to be around them.

They can’t take away true friends who are close to you, because you will communicate with those people in spite of the pastors. But they can cut you off from people who had the potential to become friends.

They can also cause people who leave to cut off the people who stay. When you leave, you may assume the pastors have turned everyone against you, so you may stop maintaining relationships.

So now I wonder: how many ruined relationships are these people responsible for?

This is really something. Many people are very dependent on their churches for help and comfort. I’m not one of those people, but not everyone is like me. What happens when such people lose their church circles?

It’s not a small problem. Even a little church can interfere with dozens or hundreds of friendships.

Thinking about this, I realize how important it is to expose this nonsense. It has to be exposed because its power comes from the fact that it was done in secret. I feel like someone should start a Facebook group or website for victims, so they can come in and announce their feelings toward people and possibly reclaim them.

I’m so mad right now. How can anyone do something this vile and cowardly and pretend to be a man or woman of God? It’s all done from a desire to get money and/or power. It’s dishonest, because it’s secretive. It’s cruel. And what benefit does it bring? Spoiled idiots with delusions of grandeur get to preserve their little empires and avoid honest work. People who would otherwise have very limited access to wealth and power–people who would be doing blue-collar jobs–get to ride around in German cars and go on expensive vacations. That’s about it.

I don’t know what to do, except for talking about it openly so that people’s eyes will be opened.

Let the Bedbugs Starve

This morning during prayer I got more revelation about churches.

My prayer life keeps improving. These days I will often get up in the morning, go to the den, put on worship music (not Christian dance music), and pray while walking around. I am getting very aggressive, and I expect it to increase.

Today while I was praying, I thought about the way my life had changed since getting out from under a pastor.

When I was serving at churches, I had to deal with a lot of immature, ignorant people who were in authority. They did not pray much. They did not get revelation from God. They just repeated what other people told them. Nonetheless, for one reason or another, they were put in charge of ministries.

If you’re a pastor’s brother in law in a charismatic, money-centered church, you can pretty much count on running a ministry, unless he doesn’t like you. The wife will automatically be a pastor. Buddies and people who agree with everything the pastor says are likely to be promoted. Sometimes these people belong in their positions, and sometimes they don’t. The rest of us have to deal with them.

When the people in the Bible needed guidance, they went to men who were in contact with God. That’s what they did when they were doing things right, I mean. They went to Moses or Samuel or Jesus. They didn’t go to the high priest’s uncle or wife.

We are different now. We go to whichever crony or sycophant is available.

You can tell church leaders are useless when they have to brainstorm in order to come up with things to say or do. People who are anointed always have something on the stove. God doesn’t put a real servant in charge of something and then sit back to see the wonderful ideas the servant’s tiny, unaided brain can come up with.

When I was serving at Trinity Church, they used to come up with nutty projects. One was called “the 2020 Vision.” Rich Wilkerson said they were going to save a certain number of people by 2020.

I looked it up on the web, and it turned out about a billion churches had also had the 2020 vision, but it meant totally different things to them. And they had had the vision long before Wilkerson did, and you probably know how preachers love to steal hot ideas.

The 2020 vision lasted a few months, I think. It’s only 2015, so something is not quite right.

Wilkerson’s son Richie once preached about “microwave sermons.” The day you’re supposed to preach approaches, and you realize you have nothing to say, so you call a buddy and have him email you a sermon. You then serve his moldy garbage to your congregation, like a microwaved burrito.

He thought he was telling us about the problems preachers have, but he was really telling us God had not chosen him to teach us. If God had chosen him, he would have had something to say.

Rich Wilkerson manipulated people with Steve Munsey’s “Seven Blessings of Passover” nonsense, telling them God would give them a great year if they gave him lots of money. Then I exposed that lie, and he reinvented it as the “Heart for the House” offering, meaning the people were supposed to devote themselves to building his corporation.

In the Bible, “house” means something different. It refers to a human being God is trying to build. This is not something Rich Wilkerson has a heart for.

My last church put the pastor’s brother in law in charge of various things. It seemed like they were impressed because he had a career that involved IT. He put the church on Indiegogo (yes, I know) and tried to raise money. He led the men’s ministry and made us do silly team exercises which almost certainly came from corporate training. We were asked to participate in a tug of war to demonstrate how important it is for everyone to pull. I refused. A tug of war is a great way to put yourself in the hospital, especially if you’re over 40. You can’t make uneducated people understand the forces involved when several tons of men pull in different directions on a rope.

We also went bowling once, at a really dirty facility that served rotten food. That was pretty bad.

People who don’t pray have bad ideas, or they take bad ideas from other people. They have no business running anything. Even if you do pray, you need some time to mature. If you were stealing cars last year, you probably aren’t ready to be a youth pastor.

I’m not really comfortable with the whole “youth pastor” idea. We should learn from older people, because they’re the ones who know things.

This morning I realized how free I am. I don’t have to give big donations to wasteful people now. I don’t have to be on the prayer line for several hours a week. I don’t have to come to seven a.m. volunteer meetings and then serve until mid-afternoon, for pastors who show up late for church and then prolong the services by showing boring slides of their grandchildren.

I talk directly to God every day. He teaches me things that are true and useful. He isn’t repeating nonsense he heard on TBN.

Once nice thing about God is that he tries to improve me. He doesn’t try to convince me that Christianity is about money and miracles. He shows me the infected places on my heart. He shows me what I’m wrong about. He gives me motivation to admit fault and change.

The pastor at New Dawn was obsessed with grace. He rejected the idea that our own corruption causes problems. He believes that once you’re saved, God thinks you’re wonderful, and he does not expect you to show a lot of interest in repentance or improvement. He thinks our problems are caused by lack of faith, not iniquity or lack of obedience. He sees talk of repentance and correction as legalism.

If you tell him fat type 2 diabetics who eat everything in sight are sick because they’re gluttons, he won’t want to hear it. If you tell him we give evil spirits authority over our bodies, to cause disease, by hardening our hearts toward God’s correction, he will think you’re self-righteous.

It’s remarkable, really. He thinks talking about repentance and obedience is legalism, but he says God rewards tithes and offerings with wealth because of grace.

In the Old Testament, God told Malachi he would reward the Jews financially for giving to the priests. The people who got this promise were under the law. They had financial problems because they disobeyed the law. Restoring the offerings was a legalistic move. Obvious?

If you’re tithing, you’re obeying the law, not the Spirit. It shouldn’t be necessary to point that out.

He tries to get around this by saying Abraham tithed, but as far as we know, Abraham only tithed once. And the Jewish law of the tithe was never applied to non-Jews. Abraham was circumcised. Do we have to do that too?

I made myself unwelcome by telling people God expected us to fight our iniquities and obey the Holy Spirit. I said the prosperity gospel was a crock. That was helpful information people needed to have.

Now I don’t have to sit in the sanctuary wondering if I should say something because Albert or Rich wouldn’t like it. Or worse, because their wives, who are out of control, wouldn’t like it.

I don’t have to sit through an endless series of pastor appreciation events. I don’t have to watch the church give money to the pastor’s son, who treats older people like children and needs a boot in the rear.

It’s very good.

In the past, when I got away from church, I lost my relationship with God, but I have reached a point where churches interfere with that relationship. America’s churches are extremely screwed up. I’m sure there are good ones out there, but I don’t know of any. Definitely not around here.

The people who run our churches are doing tremendous harm. The prosperity nuts may be the worst. They fill people’s heads with promises that do not come true. They treat them disrespectfully. They use churches as their personal mad money funds. They promote their idiot relatives and give them money taken from poor people’s tithes. They even try to make churches cut people off socially for correcting them.

They do things people in the secular world go to jail for.

These swine on two legs are poisoning people against church and against God. I would hate to be in their shoes when it comes time to face him.

How can we expect people to trust God if the preachers who claim to represent him hurt us and lie to us? Is it really worth it, so you and your wife can quit working and buy things your skills and knowledge could never bring you in a secular setting? Many of the people you hurt have very little. Many were holding on by the skin of their teeth when they came to you, and you kicked them in the mouth.

I’m not sure when I’ll set foot in a church again. It seems like God has to work some positive changes in me, and he knows that every preacher within driving distance will only hinder him.

If a church has hurt you, and you don’t know where to turn, the best advice I can give you is to spend a lot of time praying every day. Ask God to correct you. Ask him to fill you with the Holy Spirit and the gift of prayer in tongues. Then use the gift as much as you can, and listen.

I don’t know what to think about the blood-drinkers in the pulpits. I assume their piglike behavior will be used to justify violent persecution eventually.

Don’t be too absorbed about serving at church. Be absorbed in knowing God and correcting yourself. The other stuff is much less important.

Do my Sideshow Barkers no Harm

I would say the drama continues, but it’s only drama if it makes you suffer, so I guess I can’t say that.

You will recall how I lost my old Facebook account, and the pastor of my old church, New Dawn Ministries, went on Facebook and said God cancels the accounts of people who go after men of God.

I thought I was done with the whole circus for a while, but this weekend I had lunch with friends who go to the church, and they told me that another pastor gave a sermon in which he told people they shouldn’t “like” things “haters” put up on Facebook.

You have to realize, this church meets in a room twice the size of a two-car garage. If you think they’re talking about you, they probably are. There aren’t a lot of targets to choose from.

My friends thought the sermon was ridiculous, and of course, so do I.

A young lady who used to be very close to them started chiming in on things I wrote. Her husband actually lived with the pastors for a while, and they helped him get his life together. It looks like the relationship has soured a bit.

She and her husband left the church a long time ago. I assumed they were just cooling off, but it looks like that is not so. The pastors pulled her out of a position she had held for four years, and somehow or another, things went south.

Now she has a lot to say. She doesn’t care who hears it. She said they mismanage the building fund and use it as a piggy bank. She complained about greed. She also said they had told people not to associate with her. She asked if they had done that to me, and I said they hadn’t.

Then I thought about the sermon. That was an effort to discourage people from communicating with me. So my answer to her question was wrong. They’re trying to get people to shun me.

She even thinks they got my Facebook account closed, which is possible, but they probably don’t know how to do things like that.

She referred to the pastor’s wife as the Facebook police. I thought I was the only one who had dealt with that.

It’s true that there are some people I don’t hear from now. But those people weren’t actual friends. Had they been friends, they would not have paid any attention to social pressure from people who run the church. The pastors can’t take friends away from me, but they were able to unmask people who only pretended to be friends. That’s a plus for me. I can’t always tell who is with me and who isn’t, so they gave me a hand with that.

I also found out that some people who appeared to be against me or neutral were actually for me.

So far, I haven’t gotten into the real purpose of this blog post, which isn’t about the microscopic details of a petty disagreement. The real topic is openness among Christians.

Long before I left New Dawn, I had two dreams that warned me about the upcoming problems. Rich Wilkerson, the pastor of Trinity Church, figured in both of them.

As far as I can tell, Wilkerson is totally useless as a man of God. I don’t think he ever thinks about helping anyone except himself or his family. I think his driving motivation in life is to accumulate money and become more famous. He’s like Mammon, wearing a flesh suit that used to be a man.

This explains his function in my dreams.

In the first dream, I went into New Dawn, and the whole church was dark. It was night, which is the time that belongs to the devil. There was only one light on in the church, and it was in the office. Rich Wilkerson was in there alone, counting money.

I told the pastors at New Dawn about the dream. Obviously, it was a warning that the same greedy spirit that ran Trinity was going to try to take over.

In the second dream, Rich Wilkerson followed me when I moved from Trinity to New Dawn. Again, it was night. I went into the church’s kitchen and saw him giving the volunteers orders, telling them what to do even though he didn’t run the place.

The meaning of this dream was that Satan would take people who volunteered at the church and use them to twist the pastors’ minds. They would come up with carnal plans that looked good to the pastors, and through these plans, the spirit would control the church. The kitchen is not the sanctuary; it’s a place where worldly tasks predominate.

I told the pastors about this dream, too.

I’m not the only one who warned them. A friend of mine stood up and told them they had to stay on the right course. I don’t recall everything they said. Another friend talked to them on the phone and told them they needed to listen to me, because I would help guide them.

The ironic thing about these dreams is that they could have helped the pastors, but in the end, they only helped me. The information God gave them through my two friends helped the friends. The pastors didn’t get anything out of it.

I’m still digressing.

I used to be somewhat cautious about what I said about preachers publicly. I had been brainwashed by the warped teachings on authority and submission, and by people who discouraged gossip without knowing what it actually was.

Now I will say just about anything, anywhere, as long as I believe God wants me to say it.

The Bible says we’re not supposed to touch God’s anointed. Crooks and frauds love to stand in the pulpit and repeat this, because it makes people afraid to expose them.

There are a couple of problems with the way people interpret the verse.

First of all, “anointed” means “authorized.” It applies to people who are doing what God authorized them to do. God never authorized anyone to teach the poor to give the church all their money. He never authorized anyone to teach the positive-thinking gospel. The characters who teach this nonsense aren’t anointed. They’re in rebellion. They’re wolves in sheep’s clothing. A number of them aren’t even Christians. They just like easy money.

Second, what does “touch” mean? If I disagree with you publicly, have I “touched” you in the meaning of the verse? Of course not. There’s nothing wrong with speaking honestly to a man of God. When the Bible was written, prophets were beaten and murdered. They had real problems, not Facebook posts.

If you look up the Hebrew word translated “touch,” it also means things like “afflict” and “strike.” So it’s kind of a stretch to apply it to someone who says maybe the pastors shouldn’t go on vacation four times a year at the congregation’s expense.

There is more to the subject, though. Almost no one considers this: if I spend more time with God than you do, and you’re wandering around doing your own thing, I have the right to correct you as God sees fit. Publicly or privately. Usually it’s best to correct people privately, but we are not under the law, so it’s not mandatory, and aside from that, when people repeatedly reject private correction, it becomes pointless.

Virtually nobody who fought with me has the kind of prayer habits I do. I am not bragging. It’s just a fact. God addicted me to prayer, and now I spend a great deal of time with him. The people who try to correct me pray very little. They have no right to open their mouths, because they’re not prepared.

It’s amazing how our confidence in our standing contrasts with our qualifications.

Every lukewarm hypocrite who goes to church once a year and only prays when he buys a lottery ticket feels entitled to air his opinions about God. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. If you don’t know anything, you should shut up. You may have an opinion, but it’s worthless, and you should realize that.

I have the right to speak openly about the bad things preachers do. If you want to challenge me, develop a prayer life and ask God what you should do about me. Otherwise, be quiet. You’re in over your head.

I’ll go beyond that. Even if your prayer life is weak, if you know for a fact that a preacher is crooked or incompetent, you should say so, with reasonable discretion.

I used to think the pastors at New Dawn were great. I still believe they were much better than they are now. Anyway, other people left the church because they knew things I didn’t know. If they had spoken up sooner, maybe I would have awakened sooner.

The spirits that corrupt churches love the “speak no evil” mantra, because it protects them. Termites, roaches, and fungi love the dark. When the light comes in, it ruins everything for them. It will disarm evil spirits, and if a preacher isn’t totally corrupted by pride, it will wake him up and correct him.

If you’re sure something is badly wrong with your pastors, why would you keep it quiet? Malfunctioning pastors ruin lives. They hurt our friends. Yet we help them by adhering to a code of silence.

How are you a friend if you let someone like Benny Hinn take your friend’s money?

I am now beyond blunt when I talk about preachers. I don’t care about them or their jobs. If you hurt people for a living, your job should be taken away. Why should I help you drink the blood of innocent people?

I don’t know if I’ll ever go to church again. How am I supposed to find one that isn’t crazy? There must be a few out there, but I don’t know of any. I’ll wait, and if God sends me somewhere, I’ll go. Until then, I won’t worry. Worrying leads to carnal decisions.

My advice is to be honest but not vindictive or cruel. Say what will promote a positive result, and sleep soundly afterward.

I’ve been involved with preachers that had problems, and I have been fooled, but looking back, I can say that I never supported them in anything I knew to be wrong. I put up with a certain amount of error, because it’s inevitable, but I never pretended I thought something was right when I knew it was wrong.

If you want to argue with me, that’s fine. Just make sure you spend a few years praying several hours a day first. After that we can talk.

Your World is Upside-Down

I had a couple of interesting experiences this weekend. I watched two really bad movies and got some great revelations afterward.

Revelation is a funny thing. Sometimes it’s something you already know or could have figured out had someone asked you, yet somehow, after God points it out to you, it becomes part of you in a new way.

The first movie I watched was Lucy. This is a film about a girl who overdoses on a miracle drug and suddenly develops the ability to use more of the brain than the rest of us.

There is a persistent myth that people only use 5% or 10% of their brains. That may be true in certain parts of California, but people with common sense realize it’s a made-up “fact.” The brain sucks up a lot of energy, and it’s bulky to carry around. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to equip people with a big expensive organ that doesn’t do much.

In Lucy, Scarlett Johannson is drafted as a drug mule. A mean Taiwanese drug kingpin sews a bag into her belly so she can smuggle it to another country. The bag contains a chemical pregnant women produce to make their embryos develop. It breaks, and she starts developing super powers.

At 20%, she has the ability to understand Chinese instantly. I wish I had that ability while trying to get new Chinese tools to work. I would be able to download manuals I could actually understand.

The movie is awful, but I needed something to kill time while the birds were out of their cages, so I sat through it. Any fourth-grader who gets Bs in science will realize the fake science in the movie is stupid even by movie standards, and the plot is also crazy.

Lately, God has been showing me how important it is to quit getting new things and to make the most of what I already have. Sometimes your problem is that you need new stuff, but how can you be sure if you haven’t given your old stuff a chance? Covetousness is all about abandoning what you have in favor of something new, and it’s not just bad because it puts you in debt or causes friction with the people who already have what you want. It’s bad because it prevents you from developing. The most important part of the old stuff you need to make the most of is you, yourself.

In the movie, Lucy got really smart. She figured out the secrets of quantum mechanics and so on. She became so smart everything was easy for her. She shot all sorts of bad guys. She outwitted everyone she encountered. You can probably guess. But she didn’t get new stuff. She didn’t build new tools. She didn’t need to, because there was so much new power in her.

When the movie was over, I got a sudden revelation: people fixate on fixing the world around them when they should be working on themselves.

Obvious, but I felt it take root in me, and that was new.

As the movie unfolded, this fictional character was in the process of filling a flash drive with knowledge that would help humanity with its technical problems, but she, herself, proved that what she was doing was a waste of time. Because she had been improved, she didn’t need more tools. The rest of humanity didn’t need her flash drive and the new knowledge. They needed a way to become like her.

Technology exists largely to help us with problems caused by our inner shortcomings. If we were truly connected to God and living in faith and submission, we wouldn’t need gadgets and cures. We wouldn’t have most of the problems those things are intended to fix.

When Jesus met people who had diseases, he didn’t hold telethons to raise money for research. He told them to be healed, and that was it. He didn’t need microscopes, centrifuges, imaging machines, drugs…not even an exam table. That’s what life is supposed to be like. We have to come up with complicated solutions to our problems because we lost contact with the simple solution.

That may not sound deep, but it’s very important. The more you work on yourself, the better your life will be. It’s easy to take away your toys and money. It’s very hard to take away the inner qualities and assets that make you powerful and successful. They will save you no matter what happens in the world around you.

Last night, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past.

I can’t help it. I like the Wolverine. And nothing else was on. Believe me, I looked.

The X-Men movies center on a paranoid fantasy: humanity’s war on mutants.

In the X-Men world, genetic mutations are giving rise to a race of beings with magical powers. They can do all sorts of impossible things. Some can shoot fire out of their bodies. Some have unlimited healing power, so you can’t kill them. There was one that was able to disappear in one place and instantly appear in another, yards away. Just silly stuff. The Marvel people don’t even try to make it sound reasonable.

The humans in the movies are scared of the mutants, probably because this is Marvel’s way of lecturing the world about our evil deeds, such as making a responsible effort to watch our borders and refusing to bake cakes for gays. I’m not sure. Anyway, the idea is that the mutants have so much power, we can’t hope to fight them once they get it together, so mean humans decide the smart thing is to round them up and kill them. Or “cure” them of their mutations.

In last night’s movie, a midget named Trask manufactured evil robots called…you won’t believe this…”sentinels.” Yes, I know. This is the same name the Matrix people used for evil robots that killed rebels. The X-Men sentinels had qualities that came from research done on a murdered mutant. Trask took her DNA and used it to give the robots all sorts of mutant powers. So when they attacked mutants, the mutants were totally outgunned. Any given robot could duplicate any mutant power, and that’s bad if you’re a mutant and all you can do is turn everything you touch into pudding.

In the movie, some of the mutants hid their powers. A couple took a serum to suppress them. They were willing to stunt themselves in order to fit in and avoid trouble. What the mutants really needed to do was to get together, organize, make the most of their powers, and fight. The head good mutant, Dr. Xavier, had a special school dedicated to teaching mutant kids how to use their powers and survive.

Again, as if I need to repeat it, the movie was stupid. Even by Marvel standards. It was not good. But I watched it, because almost any movie with superheroes and explosions in it is at least mildly entertaining.

Afterward, I got the revelation. It was so strong, I stopped walking, stood in a doorframe, held on, and stamped my foot.

In this natural world, a developed Christian is a real-life superhero. A person who has built himself up in the Holy Spirit and aligned himself with God’s will can do absolutely anything God tells him to do. Jesus walked on water and turned water into wine. Those are things a comic book superhero might do. It sounds like a silly comparison, but it’s true. He cured diseases. He ran supernatural beings off just by talking to them. We are supposed to do greater things than he did, but we don’t.

Working to develop your power is well worth it, and you don’t have to part the Red Sea in order to accomplish amazing, helpful feats. Long before you find yourself walking on water and doing similarly spectacular things, you will find that you can defeat people and situations simply by praying or by speaking certain words in faith. Those are wonderful abilities no unaided human being has.

We are supposed to be a powerful family of invincible beings, but we’re not, because we are too busy focusing on fitting in and getting God to give us external blessings like money. To God, those things are like prosthetics. We are like cripples who turn down healing because we prefer Air Jordan wheelchairs.

The prosperity gospel has never worked. It’s a total waste of time and money. But it’s worse than that. It succeeds at the thing it was actually designed to do: it keeps us powerless. Meanwhile, the spirits around us, and the carnal people who serve them, walk all over us. We should be ruling over them, but they do with us as they please, because we don’t know who we are. And we are few in number because we don’t try.

It’s an odd way to look at Christianity, but it’s completely consistent with the Bible.

Satan created a race of superhuman beings called the nephilim; the giants. From a natural standpoint, they were better than we are. They were bigger and stronger. They were dominant. But God killed them off because while they were big in the natural world, they were spiritual midgets. They didn’t have the Holy Spirit. They had no love or compassion. They were not submitted to God. They killed his people day after day.

We are supposed to be supernatural giants. Instead, we focus on natural stilts like wealth and power, to make us look like giants in this corrupt world. Then we die, and we lose those things. All we have left then is what we have made of ourselves.

So we have nephilim hearts and human bodies. That’s a horrible combination. No wonder everyone pushes us around. We have the worst of both races.

We need to be building ourselves up in the Spirit. If we were doing that, we would be strong, and we would multiply. We would be dominant, as the Hebrews were dominant when they took over Israel. As it is, we now run from gays and illegal aliens. We even run from animals. We are reintroducing large predators into areas our ancestors had the good sense to run them out of, and we can get in big trouble for bothering them when they come into our yards, where our children play. It’s funny; one of the plagues of Egypt was a flood of wild animals that terrorized people.

This blog post will sound nutty to people, but if you’re a Christian, you already believe the first human being was made from mud, and you believe God made the sun stand still so Joshua could fight. It’s not a question of whether you believe strange things. It’s a question of which strange things you’re willing to believe.

Keep praying in tongues. Keep asking God for correction and humility. Keep listening. Keep admitting you can’t help yourself. Confess everything to God. Confess your negative feelings about him. He already knows about them, he knows you want to get rid of them, and he wants to help.

The future is assured, but if you want your place in it, you’re going to have to submit. Not just on Sunday, but all day, every day. Your whole life has to belong to God. I’m not saying you can’t survive without making mistakes. I’m saying you have to side with God against everyone, including yourself, all the time.

This will help you, if you can hear it. Time is getting short and patience is running dry, so get on board while you can.

We have Artificial Intelligence but no Artificial Empathy

A fascinating thing happened last night. Facebook killed my account.

I don’t pay much attention to the terms of service when I use message boards and Twitter and so on. I figure that if I behave, everything will be fine. I didn’t know, or I forgot, that Facebook has an unusual requirement: they insist that you use your real name.

Using your real name on the Internet is not a bright idea. If you have enough of a presence, determined people will be able to find out who you are and what your address is, but most people are not determined, so if you use an alias, they will leave you alone. I generally use aliases.

I used my real name on Facebook for quite some time, but one day I decided to change that. I altered the last name. Then last night Facebook told me I would have to send them a scan of an ID in order to get back in. And the name on the ID had to match my Facebook name.

This adds up to abrupt, permanent obliteration. I can’t produce an ID with a fake name on it, so I’m all done. I can’t get back in. Everything I posted on Facebook will disappear, and so will my photos.

Am I mad at Facebook? Yes, but only because they gave me no warning. They should say, “If you don’t give us your real name within x days, we will kill your account.” That would give you time to tell people your time was short, so they would realize you hadn’t blocked them. Other than that, I’m not mad at all. Facebook can do anything it wants with its own service.

Now that I think about it, it’s a form of social extortion. If they gave you time to leave gracefully, you would be in control of the situation. Because they slam the door with no warning, you end up in a position where you have to do what they want. To me, this isn’t important, but to many people, it’s a big deal. They use Facebook for business, or they have big networks of people they need to stay in touch with for one reason or another. Also, there are things on the web you can sign into using Facebook, and they may be more important to you than Facebook itself.

My guess is that the nerds at Facebook thought this over carefully and did it on purpose in order to coerce us. Maybe the NSA gave them the idea, or maybe it’s just typical nerd behavior. Nerds tend to have stunted hearts, and they like controlling other people. They are very dangerous because of their power, lack of maturity, and lack of empathy. Maybe the wedgies and red bellies they get when they’re young are society taking revenge in advance.

I lost like 1300 uploaded photos. That’s a relief. I saw the exact figure the other day, and the size of it bothered me. I didn’t realize I had uploaded so many things. I didn’t want them to have that much stuff. Now they don’t, in a way. It’s still on their servers, but they can’t publish it any more. They can still give it to Obama, I guess, but the Fourth Amendment is dead, so he can get his hands on just about anything he wants with or without Facebook, and as far as I know, he has no reason to bother me anyway.

I didn’t actually lose the photos. I just lost the online collection. I still have them. After all, I had to have them in order to upload them.

Facebook was a handy way to put things on the Internet. If I wanted to post a photo on a forum or my blog, I could upload it to Facebook from my phone. That’s very quick. Then I could copy it to my PC and upload it again, wherever I wanted. I will miss that. Now I’ll have to use email.

What’s really interesting is not the effect on my online presence, though. It’s the way it affects my offline life.

I was using Facebook too much. I’m a writer, and for me, writing is about as hard as breathing. I can produce huge amounts of content with almost no effort, and I enjoy it. Facebook was an outlet for me, and it was easy to use, so I filled it up.

I got in the habit of looking at my phone a lot. Once I caught myself turning away from Facebook on the PC to check Facebook on my phone.

Habits can be pretty crazy. Obviously, I knew what I did was irrational, but I was very used to looking at Facebook when I took a break from things, and I had just taken a break from…Facebook.

To a great extent, I let Facebook replace offline interaction with people. I am solitary by nature, and I got pushed out of my church–my biggest social outlet–earlier this year. I used Facebook to stay close to people I knew. This is a legitimate, possibly healthy use of Facebook, but only as an adjunct. Not when it becomes a substitute.

When I saw I was exiled, I felt like I was in withdrawal. I didn’t like the sensation. But I was glad, because getting rid of things you depend on too much is always good.

I had a long prayer session last night. God showed me some things.

He showed me my prayers are answered with much greater consistency these days. He showed me that he is restoring things. He showed me that he is changing my heart so I side with him, even against myself. He showed me how I had sided against him for most of my life.

You don’t just side against God by committing obvious sins like fornication and stealing. You side against him by believing lies about him and criticizing him in your heart. If you think, even for an instant, that he isn’t doing the best job possible, and that his intentions toward you aren’t perfect, you’re siding against him. You’re believing the devil and the spoiled people who think God doesn’t do enough for them. If you think he is slow to answer, or that he is withholding good things for no sound reason, you’re siding against him. If you feel resentment toward him when something unpleasant happens, even if your mind hates the feeling and admits it’s wrong, your heart is siding against him.

You have to side with God, because he IS right, and you have to do one more thing: you have to hate Satan and have utter contempt for him. He is nothing. He is the excrement of creation. The lake of fire is creation’s septic tank. That’s harsh, but it’s true. He is totally worthless. You have to despise him as well as his ways and his promises.

The supernatural is full of symmetry. If we are supposed to praise God, of course we are supposed to contemn the ridiculous loser spirits that are against him, just as law-abiding citizens contemn the sleazy, defeated, stupid individuals who populate the underworld.

Somehow or another, this was related to the Facebook problem, but I can’t recall how.

God reminded me of something I realized recently: my days of defeat are over. Because I have been asking for correction, I have been turned around so I am headed in the right direction. I have not received every good thing life has to offer, but I am now headed toward them, and I can’t be stopped. I can be deterred temporarily, but it is no longer possible to overcome me permanently. I will win. No one who is against me has the power to prevent it. They are all losers. They don’t have the capacity to win.

I will win because I am becoming aligned with the will of the only real power there is: the permanent alpha male of all creation. If I am for him in my heart, and I keep turning back to him, no one else matters. They are lower than bugs before his power.

That’s really something. Crazy things may happen, but I’ve already won. Things will never stop getting better for me. Never. I’m like a leper who just received a dose of a cure. I may have scabs and sores today, but tomorrow I will have fewer of them, and a month from now, even more will have fallen off. Meanwhile, new scabs and sores will continue to appear on my enemies.

I can’t ask for instantaneous victory in all areas, but life is now a continuous and perpetual series of victories, so I will live my way into blessings day by day as long as I’m alive, like a product on an assembly line, receiving new parts as it progresses.

The one big change I would like to see is this: I would like to lose the habit of anticipating defeat that doesn’t come.

God gives me victory, over and over. “Victory” pretty much implies “battle,” though. Things that seem like problems arise, and I do supernatural warfare, and my faith tells me I’ve won. Then I win. But often I still worry, and that prevents me from enjoying victory until my eyes see it.

I’ve been bitten in the rear end a lot in life. Many times, I’ve been in positions where victory was natural and seemed inevitable, and in spite of everything, I’ve experienced sudden, unexpected attacks followed by defeat. That got me in the habit of expecting to lose. The habit of losing creates the habit of expecting loss. I’m much better about this than I used to be, but I look forward to a time when the habit of worry is totally destroyed. That way, instead of enjoying victory when I see it, I’ll start enjoying it as soon as God tells me it’s mine. That’s how life is supposed to be.

I don’t know if I’ll join Facebook again. It’s nice to be away from it. It’s also nice to use it to communicate.

I am concerned about the controlling nature of the people who design technology, as well as the controlling nature of technology itself. People tend to pass their traits on to their children, and technology has many warped, cruel, amoral, unempathetic fathers.

When you use Facebook now, it sends you ads based on things you’ve seen on the web, even if you try to opt out. If you look at something on Amazon, it will pop up over and over on Facebook. If it’s doing that with wrenches and T-shirts, what happens when you go to political and religious sites? What happens if you look at pornography or you have cybersex? Are the warm, loving, forgiving nerds disposing of all that powerful information, because they respect your privacy?

If God lets the world persist, technology is going to become extremely oppressive. They already have enough cheap storage to contain all of our emails and cell calls. The power of technology will continue to increase. And because technology never forgets and always analyzes, weird things will happen.

The Internet will know when you’re sick, before your doctor does. It will know if you use drugs, just by correlating things about your web use with known information about drug users, even if you never mention drugs on the Internet. It will know things about your relationships, before you and the people in your relationships suspect them. It will start to predict the future with surprising accuracy, and eventually, lawmakers will decide that we have to defer to its conclusions. America will be like a giant, self-driven Google car.

We already have “pre-crime” interventions. Blogger Michele Catalano got a surprise visit from armed feds because someone in her home Googled “pressure cooker.” It won’t be all that long before the feds have the power to bring a van to your house, put you and your family in it, and whisk you away to indefinite incarceration without trial, simply because the Internet says you’re going to cause problems. This will happen to people before they even think about rocking the boat. The Internet will know their intentions before they form them. It will be wrong sometimes, but how will you prove that? If Mama Internet says you’re going to shoot the president, and they put you away before you can do it, and you never get the chance, how do you prove she was wrong?

Facebook may be the tool that turns into Big Brother, or it may be Google Hangouts, or it may be something we haven’t seen yet, but we are all being turned into cells in one big, diseased brain. Loss of liberty is inevitable. Privacy, like private property, is an essential part of liberty. We don’t think about that much. I’ve never seen anyone mention the connection publicly.

I wonder if the ability to post memes and look at cat pictures is so valuable it justifies jumping back into the cage. Maybe it does. Maybe resistance IS futile, so I might as well make hay while the sun shines.

The devil has a long history of constructing seemingly impregnable structures, which God crushes with surprising speed. He and the other angels had huge children who were much more powerful than humans, and God drowned them all in a few days. Satan condemned the entire human race to hell and won the earth as a prize, and God reversed it with the crucifixion. The huge artificial brain that surrounds the earth appears to be Satan’s latest stronghold. Do we run from it in terror, or should we just enjoy technology and rest in the realization that this stronghold, like every one that came before it, will be humbled and rendered harmless?

I don’t know the answer yet.

I may sign up again. I may not. I’m not sure staying out will help me. On the other hand, I’m sure that going back in will not hurt me. Not in any meaningful, lasting way.

My State is Solidifying

What interesting times I’m having.

I keep getting deeper into physics and electronics. It’s not something I expected, and it’s not going the way I would have predicted.

For years I’ve had dreams about my time as a physics grad student at the University of Texas. I hated these dreams, but I couldn’t stop them. I would find myself returning to my apartment north of the city. My things were still there. The apartment was different in the dreams. It was gigantic. It was disorderly, too. The kitchen was a mess. Not dirty, but stuff was out on the table and counters. There were messy rooms with all sorts of tools in them.

I would wonder why the company that owned the apartment complex hadn’t thrown me out, since I hadn’t been paying rent.

I would find myself walking around campus, attending August meetings in preparation for the new school year. I wasn’t really part of it, though. I was like a ghost, observing but not really joining.

I did not like the dreams. I knew things weren’t right. I wasn’t ready to go back to work. I hadn’t planned or made arrangements. I was just there, with no warning or preparation. I didn’t feel that I could make it work. I was on my own.

I prayed for God to take away the dreams.

Losing physics was the most painful thing that ever happened to me. I spent three years in Texas, and I didn’t make a single friend, except for a girlfriend. The students in the department were very disagreeable. They were cold. Many were arrogant and snotty, as you would expect boys to be after a twenty-odd years of having their mothers show their brains off to their relatives and friends. The instructors didn’t care at all about the students. The administration was like a machine in a far-off country that transmitted its decisions over a cable. Completely impersonal.

I arrived in Austin in 1994, about three years after returning to college. I had gotten tired of trying to sell houses, and I had tried to enroll at the University of Miami. Because of my problems at Columbia University, they made me go to Florida International University, a local school, to prove I was serious.

When I first decided to go back to school, I figured I would be a lawyer, because it was an easy job that paid well. Then I saw the horrible classes pre-law students took. Boredom epitomized. I decided to become an avian vet, so I signed up for calculus, chemistry, and physics.

I had problems in calculus, and then I remembered that I had failed math in high school. I didn’t really know algebra. I started studying algebra and calculus at the same time, and I went from a 40 on the first test to a 100 and an 97 3/4 on the last two.

UM admitted me, and I started taking courses very quickly. I took courses at the same time as their prerequisites. A guy who taught my second physics lab course ended up sitting next to me in classes, because I progressed to the point where I could study with grad students.

I got burned out in the last year, not surprisingly, and they put me on Ritalin. By the time I got to UT, I had adjusted to the drug, and it didn’t work as well. I was taking huge doses. Up to 120 mg a day. They put me on other drugs which drove me crazy, and I could not make myself study. I had to drop a class.

The department wanted me gone. I guess they were used to seeing people wash out. They didn’t care at all. They did almost nothing for me. They made some small accommodations, and the impression I got was that they were just trying to avoid an ADA suit. They had already been in trouble over that.

I was more alone than I had ever been, and I was losing the thing I thought would save me. A couple of infantile grad students gave me a hard time. I put up posters advertising my services as a tutor, and one of them got in the computer, changed the posters to make me look like a fool, and put them up all over the physics building.

I lost to people I should have beaten, and there was nowhere to turn. The drugs kept me awake for days on end, even after I quit taking them. I had thought I had found my place in society. I thought physics would save me. I was really good at it, and I had every reasonable expectation that I would get much better, but I wasn’t going to get the chance, no matter what I did.

I had test anxiety. I remember taking a test in graduate quantum mechanics. There was a simple problem I could not solve to save my life. After the test, I walked back to the T.A. office, which was shared by various students. I wrote the problem on the board and solved it, just like writing a grocery list. It took a couple of minutes. It was simple. I could do it in the office, but not during the test. Imagine the frustration.

When I prayed, I felt as if the prayers bounced off the ceiling and reverberated around the room. God refused to help me. Or rather, he helped me by turning away from me.

I was trying to do my own thing, with virtually no prayer life. Without submission or confession. In pride.

I never walked in the door of a church in Texas. I only prayed because I was miserable and wanted help, and I did it rarely.

When I returned to Florida and went to law school, it was failure. Anyone can be a lawyer. My family is full of lawyers. It was the dreadful default option, like hell. Other people were proud to be in law school. I was ashamed of it, but there was nothing I could do.

Law turned out to be pretty pleasant, but that didn’t erase the pain of losing physics. I never cared about law. I never wanted to do it.

Over the last few weeks, strange things have been happening. I’ve written about it already. I’ve been watching solid state physics lectures. That’s the class that killed me in Texas. For a long time, I’ve wished I could beat that class, even on my own, just to know I didn’t lose permanently.

I’ve been watching Sandro Scandolo’s lectures for ICTP, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. I ordered a gray-market copy of the Ashcroft-Mermin book, Solid State Physics. The worldwide standard is a terse book by a guy named Kittel. Ashcroft is easier to understand. Yesterday I found a book of solved problems. It’s not easy to find solved-problem books for graduate-level physics. If you Google “Mihaly,” you’ll find it.

Suddenly, I feel different. I feel like a scientist again. I have the same feeling I used to have when I walked the halls of RLM, the physics building at UT. I can’t explain it. I feel as though I’m there, doing what I used to do. I feel like I can pick up a few things and regain my competence.

UT made me feel as though I were incapable of doing physics. I know that’s not true. No one can start as a math illiterate and end up in a top-tier graduate school in three years without the ability to handle the material. But you know what the Bible says: “A crushed spirit, who can bear?”

Law is easy. I’m sorry if that offends lawyers, but it’s true. If you have an IQ of 110, you can be a lawyer. If you have an IQ of 120, you can be a good lawyer. Those are not high scores. As my evidence professor used to say, to pour water on the burning egos, “You’re just smarter than the average bear.”

Law was just something to do to bring checks in the door. There was not a lot of dignity in it, given the way it entered my life.

I hope I can get through one semester’s worth of solid state. I think that will stop the dreams.

I feel like God has taken his foot off my neck.

Before I go, something I machined. My dad broke a tripod he bought for his laptop, and he asked me if I could fix it. I checked, and they don’t sell the part he broke. I had to make it from aluminum. It’s not beautiful; making it pretty would have increased the time expenditure from half a day to a day and a half. But I had no problems making it, and it’s much better than the plastic it replaced.

You Probably are, Too

My interest in politics keeps shrinking.

I used to come here and write about politics all the time, like a greyhound chasing the devil’s useless electric rabbit. I had a lot of fun, but it was a poisonous waste of time. I wish I could take it back.

The truth is that our problems are not caused by poor voting habits. Our poor voting habits are symptoms of a greater evil: lack of submission to God.

Most of us have no prayer lives, and that is true in far-out, tongue-speaking churches as well as among the general population. We don’t know God. We have no interest in his correction or in being commanded by him. Some of us show up on Sundays, checking in like weekend dads, but generally, not much happens during the week.

Here’s a downer for you: Republicans elected Obama.

We elected Obama by voting with our lack of prayer. If we prayed, we would be changing ourselves as well as whatever other individuals are susceptible to change. God would see us as his children, and he would have an incentive to protect us and bless us. Because we don’t pray, he has a strong incentive to punish us and make us suffer. If we don’t suffer, we are not likely to turn to him and pay attention to him.

You can blame illegals and vacuous welfare-minded professional victims, but those people would have no power had we not given it to them.

I have felt pleased with myself about not voting for Obama and his kind. That was dumb. I did vote for them. I lived for myself, wandering in futility and self-deceit. My supernatural vote was much more powerful than showing up in a booth and checking off boxes.

I am an Obama voter. And unless you had a strong prayer life before 2008, so are you.

I don’t watch the news any more. I pick things up on the web, but that’s about it. I don’t contribute money to campaigns. I’m not even sure I’ll stay in the NRA. But I will contribute where it counts: in private with God. I’ve been doing that for a number of years now, and I plan to continue.

My suggestion is that you quit deluding yourselves and start praying. Don’t start out by asking God to drop the boot on Obama. Start out by asking God very sincerely for correction. Repent. Beg him to show you what’s wrong with you. Ask him for his help in changing. Ask him to connect you with the Holy Spirit and to help you obey him. Ask him to cut off the spirits that rule you now.

If you don’t have a prayer life, you’re ruled by spirits that work for Satan. You may not realize it, and things may seem to be going well, but that just means Satan is leaving you to coast because you’re ineffective in God’s kingdom. Whenever he sees the need, he will take what you have and destroy you, and you will not be able to fix it.

This will be very helpful to you if you aren’t too arrogant to listen. If you’re arrogant, forget I wrote it and let the rest of us discuss it without interference.

I am Lathe to Complain

I feel like I need to put up a picture. I am finally almost done with the lathe shelf. Here it is.

Don’t ask me why, but the camera picks up imperfections that are barely visible to the naked eye and makes them look huge. If you were here in person, you would think the shelf looked pretty good. Or at least you would say that, while backing away from me slowly. If you were smart.

Someone suggested there would be a problem changing chucks, because the key that turns the cams is obstructed. This is the one thing I didn’t think about. The one thing I didn’t think about that I know about as of today. But it turns out the key has enough freedom to open and close the pins, so I’m good. I can’t change the headstock oil without removing the shelf, but I knew that going in.

Fitting the floor tile was interesting. I learned that the upright parts of the shelf are not totally straight. Or the sides of the tiles were not totally straight. One or the other. I trimmed the tiles using a #4 hand plane. It works great.

Another interesting thing to be aware of, if you ever try to lay tile or anything else in a corner: you have to round off the corner of whatever you’re installing. The inside corners on the shelf are not sharp, but outside corners of things can be very sharp indeed, and they protrude and cause problems. In this case they would have lifted the corners of the tile up.

I am not totally happy with the adhesive that came stuck to the tiles. The wood under the tile is bare, so you would expect a good hold, but in some places it seems to want to rise up. I may have to look into an additional glue.

This will be great. It will get a lot of crap off of the floor and the table saw extension, and it will keep things where I can find them in a hurry. Notice the Allen wrenches. I drilled deep holes into the side of the shelf, just big enough for the two wrenches I use most. I may add new doodads to hold tools such as chuck keys. That would be helpful.

Some day I may sand the shelf down and improve the finish, but right now I have to get on with my life. I can’t dedicate another week to this thing. I still hate painting. I don’t know how anyone manages to do it right. I can sort of handle a spray gun, but brushes are beyond my comprehension.

Home Depot never has fasteners stocked or sorted correctly, so I could not get M8-1.25 x 65mm bolts to hold the shelf down. I had to buy 70mm bolts and grind them down with the bench grinder. Annoying. I had to modify fender washers for the bolts on the left side so they would not bang against the side cover. I made them D-shaped using the belt grinder, which is one of the three or four greatest tools in the universe.

Now I have to make a rolling cabinet for the CNC lathe. After that, I may pick up a few items and try woodturning.

I leave you with a clip from Tiny Trailer Workshop. If you don’t love this, you must not have a Y-chromosome.

Painting Isn’t for Everyone

I am sitting here waiting for paint to dry.

I have been struggling to get the garage workshop working, as you know if you keep up with the blog. I believe it’s a metaphor for my own inner transformation.

When you get involved with tools, you have to accept a bitter truth: before you can use the tools to do stuff to other things, you have to use tools to work on your tools to get them ready.

I guess it sounds discouraging, but there is no way around it.

There are a number of things you can buy at the hardware store and then use without preparation, but it’s surprising how many things don’t work until you fix them up.

Consider chisels. You can buy a set of perfectly good ones today at Home Depot, but they won’t be sharp enough to use. Also, Home Depot doesn’t sell the tools you will need to sharpen them. Can you believe that? What could be simpler than a chisel? You would think they would be plug-and-play.

To sharpen a chisel, you need some kind of abrasive tool, and you need at least three levels of grit. You can use a bench grinder to do the rough sharpening, if you’re highly skilled. Then you have to go to a water stone or a diamond stone. Then you have to go to a stone with a grit rating somewhere above 4000.

In order for a Home Depot chisel to be considered ready to use, it has to be able to pop tiny hairs off of you, just like a razor.

I don’t know why Home Depot doesn’t sell decent sharpening tools. Probably because the average chisel user does very crude work.

I have lots of tools, but I haven’t been able to use them as much as I wanted to, because I didn’t prepare them or myself. So now I’m working on it.

On a spiritual level, I’m doing the same thing to myself.

People love to say that Jesus said, “Judge not,” meaning, “Never criticize anything anyone else does.” That’s not true. What he really said was that we should judge ourselves first, and he made it clear that once we did that, we were supposed to judge others so they could benefit from our advice. He didn’t say we should take the logs out of our own eyes and then go home. He said that when we took the logs out of our own eyes, we would then be able to help others take the splinters out of their eyes.

When you beg God for correction and humility, you’re taking the logs out of your eyes.

You shouldn’t expect things to go all that well until you begin accepting correction. Before God straightens you out, you will be led by the flesh, not the Spirit. You will not want to do God’s will. You’ll want to do whatever Satan tells your flesh to do. You will not have the spiritual fruit of self-control. So God will not have much interest in helping you. It would be enablement.

As you accept correction, the spirits that have controlled you your entire life will lose their power, and the Holy Spirit will gain ground inside you. Then you’ll start to have strength and success, because you’ll be doing things God supports.

Prayer in tongues is a constant flow of correction, so it’s vital. We are surrounded by stupid voices all day, every day. Prayer in tongues is God’s answer to that.

One of my shop problems is a lack of provision for lathe tool storage. I have a bunch of heavy lathe tool holders, plus two huge chucks. I also have Allen wrenches and other junk. I need to have this stuff near the lathe, and I need it to be handy, but tossing it on top of the headstock and dumping it on the table saw extension have turned out to be poor solutions to the problem.

I knew that other people had created extended wooden shelves to enlarge the tops of their headstocks. I decided to create a box with a shelf on top. The box would hold whichever chuck I was not using, and tools would go on the top shelf.

You can’t imagine the nightmare that began when I started work on this.

First of all, the thing needed to be about 17″ long in the shortest dimension. Trees are very skinny these days, so you can’t just walk into a store and ask for a board 3/4″ thick and 17″ or more wide. You have to use plywood, which looks crappy, or you have to make your own boards. Like an idiot, I chose the latter route.

To make a wide board, you have to take two narrow boards and glue them together side by side. This is more complicated than it sounds. You have to use a jointer on the edges that mate. Then you have to use a hand plane to put slight indentations on those edges, to create a spring joint.

A spring joint is what you get when you put glue on two concave surfaces and clamp them together forcefully so they touch. You remove a few thousandths of an inch from the edges of two boards before you glue them up. You can’t even see the concavity.

When I made my first board, I did not understand the purpose of spring joints, but now I get it. If you have two boards that aren’t concave, when you push them together, you may get a gap at one or both ends. It will be a tiny gap, but it will show up when you sand and paint the wood. If you make a spring joint, the boards will touch at the ends, so you won’t get gaps there.

It took me days to make enough boards for the shelf thing. I guess the reason is that I don’t have a lot of clamps. I would use three long clamps to make a board, and while it set up, I would be idle, because I couldn’t clamp a second board together.

Once the boards were made, I had to use planes and a scraper to get rid of the microscopic lines where the boards came together. I learned a great deal about plane marks.

When the boards were made, I had to use the table saw to cut them to size, and then I had to use a shooting board and a plane to make them truly square. In the process, I found out that my Incra table saw miter gauge was not square, so I had to fix that.

After all of that, I had to do some routing. I needed tongues and dadoes to fasten the boards together. My mistakes drove me nuts.

For one thing, a router bit in a router table will push wood away from your router fence if you push the wood from left to right. I did not know that. I thought that if I used a little force to hold the wood against the fence, I would be fine. That was totally wrong. The boards would move away from the fence a sixteenth or so, opening up the dadoes. It was infuriating.

Thank God, I was making the dadoes narrower than the boards that went in them. This makes the joints harder to see. That meant the big router gouges were covered when the boards went into the dadoes. But it was still annoying.

I also learned that you have to plan the way the grain of your boards runs when you design your piece. If you have end grain against long grain, you can’t glue it, because the end grain will suck up all the glue. It’s okay for joints that don’t receive stress, but other joints will require some sort of joinery, such as dadoes, to provide new gluing surfaces where long grain meets long grain.

I learned that soft wood is horrible. It’s harder to work than hardwood.

If you use a chisel on hardwood, it will cut it cleanly. If you use a chisel on softwood, going across the grain, the wood may compress and tear instead of cutting. It’s like using a bread knife to cut a stack of Kleenex.

If you use a router bit in hardwood, it leaves a clean edge behind. In softwood, you may get a furry edge that needs to be sanded a lot.

Scrapers, which are incredibly useful, don’t work very well on softwood. That’s annoying, because they’re great for cleaning up glue lines and erasing plane scratches.

You also have to be careful about making grooves, slots, and dadoes in softwood, because if you get too close to the edge of a board, you will have a very thin wall of softwood on the outboard side, and it won’t support your tongue very well. Also, the router may kick the wood completely out when you’re making the dado.

I learned that poplar is stupid.

Poplar is a hardwood, but it’s not hard. It’s not a softwood, but it’s a soft wood. It’s about like pine in its consistency. I used some in the shelf because I thought it was the cheapest hard wood available, but it turned out to be a bad buy. It’s more expensive than pine, and it’s actually softer than the better pine grades. It’s very ugly, so it has to be painted. And it has all the problems pine has when you start trying to shape it.

I’m not sure what poplar is good for, but you can get clear pine for the same price, and it looks better.

It took me forever to get the shelf together, and then I had to deal with painting it. That’s where I am right now.

I wanted to use a tough blue paint that would shed oil. I decided to go with oil-based Rust-Oleum. I really wanted to do it right. But it looks pretty bad right now.

First of all, even though the primer I used is supposed to work fine with oil-based paint, there are little places where the paint just does not want to stick. I’m going to have to give it like 10 coats in those areas. Second, this paint is the farthest thing from self-leveling. It leaves huge ripples behind, and sanding doesn’t seem to budge them. Third, it drips like crazy.

I’ve also had problems trying to get up to speed with the art of painting, itself.

I’ve never been able to get a grip on cleaning brushes. I’ve generally thrown them out. The paint always goes way up under the ferrule, and you can never get all of it out. It takes a huge amount of thinner to clean a brush, and it’s a pain to deal with.

I got some instruction. It turns out you’re supposed to prepare a brush for painting by soaking it in mineral spirits. This goes up under the ferrule and takes the space paint would otherwise occupy. It will keep the paint from going up there and hardening. I can’t believe I got this old and didn’t know that. No one told me! And you can look at websites all day and never see this information.

I found a video that explained it, but the guy in the video took the brush straight from the mineral spirits to a container of varnish and started painting. I had to ask about that. Obviously, it’s wrong, because the thinner on the brush will thin the paint you’re trying to apply. So you have to get the excess thinner off the bristles. Something he should have mentioned, right?

No wonder people consider brushes disposable.

I have been working on the paint for days, and it’s still not done. I finally decided to settle for a garage-grade finish. Maybe once the shop is working properly, I can make a new shelf. But I have to get this thing done and use it, or I will lose my mind.

I would really like to do things right, but I’m going to have to start accepting my limitations. Once in a while, “okay” will have to be an acceptable substitute for “perfect but unattainable.”

In other news, my new old church is getting weirder.

They have a prayer line. I used to be part of the prayer team. They’re supposed to call a conference line three times a week and pray for the church and so on.

I quit the team months ago. I felt like they were praying in an ineffective way, without solid guidance from the Holy Spirit. You’re not supposed to pray for two seconds for everyone on earth. You’re supposed to let the Holy Spirit choose your battles. You pray for the things he tells you to pray for, the way he wants you to do it. They were taking kind of a shotgun approach. Also, most people weren’t showing up. Usually there were only three people on the line. The pastors and the “house prophet” didn’t participate regularly, which makes you wonder what the pastors were being paid to do.

A lot of people wonder what the pastors are being paid to do. The impression many people have is that during the week they do absolutely nothing but go to the spa, travel, and visit restaurants.

I didn’t say anything critical when I left the prayer line. I just quit and said I felt like I should be doing something else.

I have a friend from the Panhandle, and she has been very good to the church. Although she wasn’t a member, she helped them financially and drove down to visit from time to time, and she was a hard core prayer line warrior.

Last week, the pastor’s wife changed the prayer line number and didn’t give it to her. Something about wanting to confine participation to church members. To be clear, she was deliberately cut out.

You have to realize, this woman was not my puppet. She wasn’t calling the prayer line and telling them how bad the pastors were for rejecting me. She was just praying. But now she’s out.

They cut another person out. She’s a young woman with some type of mental retardation. I don’t know what the proper name is. It’s not Down Syndrome. She’s very sweet, and she is a very sincere Christian. She has visions. She sees angels. She wanted to be on the church’s dance team, but they wouldn’t allow her to perform. I don’t know why. It’s not the Bolshoi Ballet. It should not be hard to qualify. If you’re not good enough to dance for God, at a tiny church which is currently failing, where, exactly, can you expect to be accepted? You can’t shoot any lower.

She and her mother eventually left the church. But the young woman continued with the prayer team. Sometimes she was one of only two people who called in. Now she’s out!

How a preacher can want FEWER people to pray for a church is beyond me. That’s a new one in my experience. The church is sinking. They are losing dedicated people. Their planned moves to bigger buildings got squashed. The air conditioning in the tiny room where they meet is out, and knowing the landlords, it may be another two weeks before it works again. It appears that their orphanage in Haiti has gone nowhere. The prayer team is nearly gone. Is this really the time to ramp up the ostracism?

I don’t know what to think about it, but I’m glad I got pulled out.

My plan for my own life is to keep asking for correction. It’s working beautifully. It makes life easier, except for painting. It’s what we all need. It’s what Jesus died for.

I can’t do anything for people who are convinced they’re already perfect. If God’s methods of improving people involved grabbing them against their will, opening them up, and replacing parts, it would be easy to help others, but unfortunately, most of it relies on their willingness to listen.

As for me and the people close to me, we keep getting new revelation, and things keep improving. I feel better. I have more success. I worry less. Doors are opening so I can get out of Miami.

I have learned that when there is an area where I fail consistently, God is trying to teach me a lesson, and when I finally learn it, he will let me move forward and succeed. This is what happened to the Hebrews under Moses. They walked in circles and died in the desert, but the ones who had not rejected God’s counsel were allowed into the Promised Land.

I still have no interest in joining a new church. Maybe some day.

If I get this crazy shelf put together, I’ll put up a photo. I can’t wait to see it on top of the lathe, with all my junk stuffed into it.

This May Start to Get Old in a Few Years

It has been 2 weeks since I learned I was not welcome at the church I belonged to. It has been an interesting time.

There is now no doubt that I was not wanted. I haven’t heard a peep from any of the pastors. I still can’t see the head pastor’s Facebook page.

I got a call from a buddy who is a minister (a level or two below pastors), but I would have heard from him anyway. He was a friend before I started attending that church, and I’ll still hear from him when he’s attached to a new organization.

I tried sending the pastors an electronic message a while back. I believe that was after I quit as a volunteer but before they blocked me on Facebook. I am not sure. Anyway, I could not get it to go through.

Later on, I realized it wasn’t my job to chase them. I’m older than they are, and they were very disrespectful to me several times in public. Older people are generally not supposed to run around after younger people, trying to get their forgiveness. It sets a poor example. It may be okay to do that once or twice, but eventually you start sending a message that it’s okay to be nasty to older people.

The Bible says to go to people who have something against you, but that is not a law. The Spirit-led do not have laws to follow. It’s a general guideline which will usually line up with the Holy Spirit. I was pulled out of the church by the hand of God, and I am not supposed to screw that up by going back in a carnal way and trying to fix something that should stay broken. This was a rescue.

I have a young friend who comes by for prayer sessions, and apparently there was a shocking verbal altercation between him and the head pastor. It happened in the parking lot. Someone actually called me so I could intervene. She was concerned the police might show up. She said she became aware there was a serious problem because the pastor started screaming. He’s about 20 years older than the young man he was talking to.

He drew inappropriately close, and my friend threatened to defend himself, in no uncertain terms.

When things calmed down, there was forgiveness and love and prayer and the whole nine yards, but you can’t unring a bell. There will be consequences.

My friend says he regrets using bad language and losing his temper. He takes responsibility for that and says it was wrong.

Is this gossip? Well…can you say something was private after you chose to do it in the open air in front of a large group of people? If you go to church to speak to the public, and you’re happy when they know about the things you say that make you look good, you probably shouldn’t complain if the crazy things you say are also heard.

This friend had a great revelation the other day, and he shared it with me. Whether a bad experience is a test or a punishment depends on your attitude. If you’re proud and you refuse to learn whatever it is God is teaching you, then it’s just punishment, and it won’t do you any good.

This is a problem for a preacher who is too proud to admit fault.

The argument could be a big blessing to him. He could tell the church, “I lost my temper and behaved childishly. I have a problem with self-control and pride, and if you have the same problem, you need to work on it. We need to get God to help us fix ourselves.” That would please God and get him involved in recovery.

On the other hand, if he and his wife decide the problem is with my young friend, God won’t help them. He will fight them. Word of what happened is surely moving through the church, and while it won’t affect the sycophants, it will poison other people against the leadership. If people who have a little discernment or common sense don’t see proper steps taken, they will probably take steps of their own, through the doors of other churches.

I don’t expect them to bend. I get no indication of that from God. The little I know about their response to the situation is not encouraging.

I think this whole mess was from God. I don’t think he tells people to get in silly fights, but he definitely uses them. He did that in the Bible.

I wasn’t going to get into all of that today. What I started to say was that I was disappointed to hear that the argument was partly about me; the person the pastors don’t talk to.

I am not their problem. I’m a symptom.

If you have time to make a fool of yourself over me in a parking lot, you should have time to involve me in the matter at some point. If you have time to bother other people or send other people to talk to me, you should have time to deal with me personally. Or you should move on and let it go.

This happened at Trinity Church, too. They had secret meetings about me, and of course I was told later, because you can’t keep things quiet in a church. I will give Rich Wilkerson credit; for all his shortcomings, he did communicate with me before I left. But he should not have bothered other people about me once I was gone.

The application to my own life is that I am aware that my problems are messages from God. Whether or not he is directly causing the evil I experience, he at least consents to it. It’s not random. He limits and steers things to achieve a purpose. I can’t complain about my suffering if I cause it by refusing to listen.

You can say it’s not my fault. You can say human beings don’t know what God is saying. That’s an excuse. For almost thirty years, I’ve known I was supposed to be praying in tongues every day. That would have helped me hear his voice and fix my problems. There is no way to evade responsibility.

The curses in our lives often reflect curses we put on God. This was true in Eden, and it’s true now. Adam and Eve made God’s life difficult, so he did the same thing to them. Adam refused to submit, so God made wives rebellious. Adam made it hard for God to give birth to new children, so God made childbirth difficult. Adam gave rise to a race of rebels, so God made the earth bring forth weeds and briars.

The things I hate about my life, and which I have still not overcome, must be connected to my failings in some way.

That’s wonderful information to have. It can help me receive healing, deliverance, victory, and peace. It can help me become like God in my heart.

If I’m blessed, as the grinning TV preachers say, why do I still have problems? How can I be overweight, lazy, lustful, fearful, impulsive, disorderly and so on? Maybe I don’t have major problems in all these areas, but I am not what I should be. I’m not even remarkable by ordinary human standards. Is this really how God wants me to be?

I should have more self-control. I should be cleaner inside. It’s not much to ask of me.

It’s very bad that people I know are failing. It’s unfortunate that I have to back off because I can’t help them. But it’s very good that I can learn from their failures.

I keep finding that I have more and more authority over myself. That’s powerful, because most of our problems are self-inflicted. We can’t control ourselves, and control over yourself is where power over everything else starts.

If I am willing to continue confronting my flaws and attacking them with God’s help, I can become stronger and better inside. That will cause my outward circumstances to improve, and it will humiliate those who seek to harm me.

As for my friend, his time at the church is over. He and the pastor have forgiven each other, but you know how that works. There are some breaks you can’t fix, even with genuine forgiveness. Sometimes a person’s behavior tells you that even if you forgive that person, he is not someone you can tolerate in your inner circle.

I am enjoying the rest from church. God is showing me I need to examine pastors carefully and brutally in the future. I should ask them provocative questions and walk away if they bristle or close up. “How much is your salary?” “How much money does the church take in every week?” “Is your wife well-behaved?” “Do you pray in tongues every day?” If they’re offended, they’re too big for their britches. I don’t accept that kind of people any more.

If you would not want a pastor as a friend, do not accept him as a pastor. If he is a pain in the behind, if he is childish, if he has to be babied, if he is spoiled, if he is selfish…stay away. I don’t care if he raises the dead. He will mess you up.

I don’t know what I’ll do on Sunday. I am not worried about it. Maybe God will extend my rest another month. That would be wonderful.