The Road to Hell is Paved With Happy Thoughts

It is an interesting week.

Our President is hostile to Israel. No fair-minded person could deny that. But now his hostility is becoming overt. This week, the United States agreed to join in a Security Council vote rebuking Israel for putting settlements in “occupied” land. The land God gave Abraham and his descendants, FOREVER.

Most Christians don’t understand how much God cares about Israel. Here’s some scriptural stuff to consider. Speaking through one of the prophets, God identified Jesus himself with Israel. And the Bible says the Jews are the apple of God’s eye.

Perry Stone made a somewhat sensational claim in one of his recent messages. He said someone had written a book showing that American betrayals of Israel were closely followed by American disasters. Floods and hurricanes and so on. Naturally, I want to see if this is correct. So I’m going to keep my eyes open for the next ten days or so, to see if anything unfortunate happens.

You have to test people who make claims about God, or else you never learn the truth. Luke commended the Berean Christians for tearing into the Bible to compare teachings with scripture. I’m stocking up on food because Perry Stone says he had a vision of floods, and I don’t want to waste my time if he says things that are just nutty and wrong. If we have a good crop year, I will think less of his predictions in the future. If what he said about the book turns out to be wrong, again, I will have reason to doubt him.

So far, I have never had any reason to break with Perry Stone. He gets carried away every once in a while and says something a little silly, but I can’t think of an example that had any bearing on the central issues of his messages.

It’s frustrating dealing with charlatans. I once saw a traveling “prophet” touch people, claiming God had given him an “anointing” to take 21 years off of people’s lives. People went up and got the touch. If God made them younger, he did it in a clever way that left them looking exactly the same. People will say just about anything to get a dollar; they may even make themselves believe their nonsense first (lawyers do that all the time). Christians are conditioned to believe, and they are conditioned to trust their pastors and leaders to refrain from putting dubious characters before them, so they are easy marks. I believe the only real defense is direct guidance from the Holy Spirit, and I think the Holy Spirit is with me on the 21-year guy. Call me an apostate.

Hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe one day all of these people will show up looking like teenagers. I would be a LITTLE surprised.

Christianity is in a bad state. The old churches bar the Holy Spirit at the door, they deny the power of God, they endorse all sorts of sin, they persecute Israel, and they have major problems with idolatry. Many new churches try to turn God into our fairy godmother, are obsessed with wealth and earthly success, and imply that nothing bad should ever happen to us. What can you do? I go where the Holy Spirit is welcome, and I persevere.

And I try not to offend anyone, but I guess I still do.

Speaking of offense, the new churches have an insidious weakness these days. There is a phobia of criticism. We keep hearing the word “positive” all the time, as if Christianity had more to do with Tony Robbins than Jesus. When we criticize, we risk being compared to the ten spies who told Moses going into Israel was a bad idea.

The problem, obviously, is that without criticism, there is no growth. Correction cannot happen without negativity. It’s impossible. Jesus was extremely negative. So was Paul. So were most of the prophets. John the Baptist…don’t get me started. Read the stuff he said. In the Revelation, Jesus started out by criticizing seven churches. Much of what he said was not positive. It was vital and helpful, but it wasn’t positive.

One of the terrible aspects of totalitarianism is the prohibition of criticism. Totalitarian regimes always limit it. The Nazis and Communists made it a crime. So do the Islamists. The British crown made it a crime, and this is the sole reason we have the First Amendment. It was drafted in order to permit criticism.

In Soviet Russia, people used to come forward all the time and point out the horrible, dangerous problems with the state. And they got shipped off to gulags, and things in Russia got worse and worse. This is the direction in which the church is headed, if we don’t wake up and learn to take a punch. One of the distinguishing characteristics of cults is the suppression of honest criticism. Look at what happens to mouthy Scientologists.

When I hear people complain about criticism, I often think of Ahab. He was about to go to war alongside Jehosaphat, and Jehosaphat insisted on hearing from a prophet. So they rounded up a bunch of lying Baal-worshiping goofballs, and the goofballs all prophesied victory. I guarantee you, these guys were very popular, Ahab paid them well, and people thought they would be remembered as saints.

Jehosaphat made an insane suggestion: how about bringing a prophet of Jehovah in? This must be where Ahab called for his Maalox. The only real prophet available was Micaiah. They dragged him in, and he made a sarcastic prophecy of victory. When Ahab threatened him, he admitted God planned to crush Ahab like a bug.

And of course, Micaiah was beaten and put in jail.

This is another fine consequence of the negativity phobia: we punish people who criticize, and we make them less likely to tell us the truth, so we lack vital information, and the result is chastisement and defeat.

I guess Satan is using the positivity craze to set the church up to persecute its prophets. Christians think they’re immune to that kind of thing, and that only the narrow-minded, non-holy Jews are susceptible, and of course, we are wrong. Human nature is universal, and so is Satan’s influence. Christians torment God’s messengers all the time.

At some point in the future, brave souls will start standing up in Spirit-filled churches and saying disturbing things. God doesn’t want every Christian to be a millionaire. God will not let us win every single battle, all the time. God still gives some people diseases. God still kills people. Some of our biggest Christian stars are revolting fakes. And if the positivity fad is still red hot, the people saying these things will be driven out into the street, with God’s inspired words still on their lips.

It’s a balancing act, and it’s easy to screw up. You have to be subject to authority, and you should not spread division without good reason. You should not complain just for the sake of complaining. You should believe God’s promises. You should try to build up the people above you. But you shouldn’t swallow every bit of nonsense every itinerant idiot pours in your congregation’s ear, and you should not be afraid to warn people when there are serious problems.

I’ve seen Tony Robbins and other positivity gurus at work. They are just plain better at it than the Christian imitators. They make many times the money the imitators make. They have polished, proven methods. They won’t tell you the Holy Spirit told them you need to give them your savings. If you want positivity, go to the pros. Buy a set of Tony Robbins CDs. Why settle for an imitation?

God’s punishment is better than Satan’s kindness. The Bible says, “Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness, and let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil which shall not break my head.” I would rather have healthy criticism than poisonous positivity, any time.

It’s too Bad Blessings Can’t be Delivered Using Restraints and an IV

Today I had a couple of experiences. One was encouraging, and the other was discouraging.

I am too tired to write much about the first. Just that I found new fire and enthusiasm for prayer and supernatural warfare, and I unleashed it here and at my sister’s house.

The other thing happened at church. I was there for a prayer meeting and to help a friend with a baby shower.

While helping with the baby shower, I had to do some work in the kitchen, where I used to make pizza. Background: I was driven out out of the kitchen by mismanagement and antagonism from coworkers, as readers may recall. I made the church a lot of money with pizza, but when I tried to increase the professionalism and the spirituality in the kitchen (as instructed by church leaders), I provoked a backlash from people who preferred the status quo, and out I went.

Since I quit cooking, a strong Christian man has taken over the cafe, and the kitchen and the serving area are doing well. But he has limited authority, because of the twisted, amorphous chain of command at the church. He has to share a back room with a bunch of other ministries, and this is the area where I used to make pizza.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at the back room today. The kitchen and serving area looked very good, so I had high hopes. But I was amazed at the chaos and filth.

Flour and sugar I left at the church when I quit were still on the counters, in plain paper bags. Near the bags, I saw a stack of unopened boxes containing glue traps for mice. I opened a couple of drawers. For some reason, the church keeps hundreds of sets of unused stainless flatware, along with unused china, and all this stuff is in cabinets and drawers. It should have been disposed of years ago.

The drawers contained so much mouse and roach poop, I was amazed. But it made sense, given the presence of the unused flour and sugar. Why they thought glue traps were the answer is a mystery, given that they put the traps next to the food supply the vermin were using, leaving the food in place.

The church serves free hot dogs and popcorn on Saturday afternoons. That’s great. But they store the cooking and service equipment in the back room, out in the open. Where the mice and roaches play. I was horrified. This is not a trivial health hazard. It’s extremely serious. Rodent feces kill people in a number of ways.

When I worked in the kitchen, I donated some Japanese cutlery I didn’t use. I didn’t like it much, but it’s very expensive, and most chefs love it. I also donated a diamond hone. I checked today, and all of this stuff was gone. Was it stolen or just put away for safety? I don’t know, but I noticed they left the cheap Chinese cleaver I donated, so whoever moved this stuff knew which pieces were valuable.

The drawer where I left the cutlery was full of poop. I had sterilized it, but the mice had returned.

The obvious conclusion is that the place is still a mess, and I would be losing my mind if I had to work there. So I had to thank my superior in the Armorbearer organization, who strongly advised me to get out of the cafe.

It’s so hard to bless people. They treat good things like trash. They show no gratitude for the good things you do. They fight improvement as though it were a fatal disease. This must be how God feels every day. And it reaffirms my conservatism. Liberals give people what they want, regardless of what they deserve, and it destroys them. Conservatives know that the best way to keep a person poor is to give him money.

I guess I better alert the pastor before someone dies.

Son of Man, Can These Dry Bananas Live?

I have given up. I hate blowing money on things I should be able to make, but drying apples in my dad’s SUV is too slow, so I bought a dehydrator. I got a refurb Excalibur. It ought to do the job.

I put a dozen sliced apples in the SUV on a sliding door screen and gave it two days, but the apples just were not dry enough. Maybe it would work in the summer, but I can’t keep fooling around, trying to get it right.

I was looking at dehydrators online, and I felt stupid, but then I thought about all the stuff I throw out. Most of my peppers and bananas end up rotting because I don’t have any place to put them. I never eat my papayas, because they smell funny, but if they were dried, I think that problem would go away.

Bananas are fantastic. They keep you regular and they taste good. But what do you do when twenty pounds of them get ripe over three days?

Ooooh…pineapples. I wonder how hard those are to grow. Dried pineapples are great, and I have a special culinary use for the fresh stuff.

I guess now I can look into jerky. I don’t even know what cuts to use. It would sure beat paying tons of money for the protein bars I eat when I work at church.

The Thing we Greatly Ignored is Come Upon Us

Now that Mike knows I’m storing up grub, he calls me with his “hoarding” questions all the time. Today he was a hippie grocery, and he wanted advice on the right kimchi to buy, in order to use the bacteria for sourdough.

As I have noted before Perry Stone says he had a vision which suggested we will have flood-related food shortages in 2011. I have never known him to make anything up or exaggerate, and he didn’t use his vision as a way to squeeze monetary “seed gifts” out of his viewers, the way about 75% of Spirit-filled TV preachers would have.

Yesterday I saw some interesting news.

1. Russia is cutting off wheat exports because of drought.

2. China now imports wheat because of drought, and they expect the situation to continue through the year.

3. There is a severe corn shortage in the United States, largely due to the idiotic ethanal program, which values politics over human beings. We all knew there was a corn shortage, but it’s getting worse. And of course, animals eat corn, so there go dairy products and meat.

I guess it looks a little funny, talking about floods when crops are failing for lack of rain, but floods have already destroyed much of Australia’s crops, and we are a month or so away from our own planting season, so the opportune time for US flood damage isn’t here yet.

Hey, guess who is the world’s biggest wheat importer. Egypt! Traders expect that country to buy heavily because of the political instability. Uh oh!

I continue to study food storage. It turns out white flour goes funny after 6 months. Even if you freeze it, you only get 8 months. That’s what I’ve read, anyway. Hard to believe. And you can’t freeze it in paper bags. Funny flavors will get inside it.

I guess you can still eat it, however, and beggars can’t be choosers.

I think I’ll vacuum-seal 50 pounds of flour and freeze it. Can’t hurt. It will cost 20 bucks. That’s cheap insurance.

Maybe you can do better if you bake bread and freeze it. Search me.

I have a nice new Kentucky ham in the dining room, along with a big jar of sorghum, some cracklings, and a jar of blackberry jam. I’ll bet I could make excellent biscuits with canned milk. Geez, if there’s a famine, I may put on a ton of weight.

In other end time news, the US suddenly has piles and piles of oil. Sounds crazy, but it appears to be true. A new drilling method has drastically increased production, to the point where it could halve imports by 2015. And North Dakota (home of the Bakken Formation) is producing too much oil to ship.

What? Weren’t we supposed to run out of oil? Someone send Al Gore flowers. He is turning out to be the Salieri of economic and climatic forecasting. And by “Salieri,” I mean the Amadeus version, not the real Salieri, who was supposedly a great guy.

If I recall correctly, we can produce all the Bakken Formation oil we want at a cost of $70 per barrel, which is affordable. So in the United States, oil problems should be self-limiting, regardless of all the hysterical squawking. I wish oil were at $70 now. I could live with $2.75 diesel.

I can’t believe I’m saying that. We used to tremble at the thought of fuel prices that high.

What this all shows me is that God can yank the rug out from under you at any second, without breaking a sweat. We think we know what the future will bring, at least in the short term, but the last decade showed us that sudden changes can be extreme and unexpected, even when they should be obvious.

Consider the Fannie Mae mess. Nobody with any common sense thought real estate values were justified, yet most people were stunned when Barney Frank’s house (or houses) of socialist cards collapsed and threw our economy into turmoil. One month we were all counting our chickens, and the next month, they were on the barbecue.

I think the same thing is happening with our debt situation. We have marched to the edge of the precipice, and there is nothing to prevent us from going over the side in a big hurry.

We’re also seeing strange plagues hitting important crops. The worldwide citrus industry is expected to shrivel because of citrus greening, and that’s just one example. Did you know bananas are in trouble? A fungus is hitting them, and they lack the genetic diversity to develop resistance to it. May not sound like a big deal, but these things add up.

Speaking of God, the Bible says, “Thou Lord, only, makest me dwell in safety.” That’s important to learn and believe. The stuff you have can disappear in a day, regardless of how it looks to you now. Tomorrow you could get a cancer diagnosis. You could be gone in two months. A sinkhole could eat your house. Your spouse could run off with a Craigslist find. Look at Job. Things like that really happen.

I suspect that the problems Perry Stone foresaw will go away for a time. I think we’ll have some problems, and then things will seem to get better. Why? Because I think God is shaking the world. You can’t shake something by pushing it in the same direction all the time. It has to go back and forth. I think he is slapping us with crises and letting us rebound, so that tractable people will wake up and get right with him. Sooner or later, the trend will go much more negative, and by then, the bulk of the people who can be reached will be on solid ground.

Makes sense to me, anyhow.

I think we’ll have food problems this year, but I don’t think it will be necessary to pile up enough food to get us through 2012. I think we are still too early in the birth-pang sequence. I don’t think God is going to leave me here in this godless city with no land around me when the real mess starts raining down. I may deserve that, but I don’t see it happening.

You don’t get what you deserve, according to your deeds. Not if your heart is right. You get what your faith, willingness, and repentance allow. I hope.

If the food predictions turn out to be wrong, at least I’ll be better able to take care of myself, and I’ll know not to pay attention to Perry Stone’s visions. In the end, it’s all good.

Plus Surprising $17 Brandy

I made a Costco mission. I needed Granny Smiths for drying. I also got some phenomenal Costco mozzarella to freeze in pizza-sized portions.

I still haven’t found another mozzarella that compares, for New York style pizza.

Sadly, the impulse buy bug bit me. I saw a huge jug of Korbel brandy for $17. Korbel champagne is excellent, and it runs $9 per bottle, so I had to see what the brandy was like. I assumed it would be pretty bad, but still useful for cooking.

I know I’m going to get comments about the champagne. If you drank Korbel many years ago, you probably got a bad impression of it, but I swear, it’s good now. I was very surprised when I tasted the improved version. It’s crisp and dry, with enough sweetness to keep it from tasting acrid, and it doesn’t seem to have the green “sappy” taste wines like Cordon Rouge have.

Anyway, the brandy is startling. I like the full flavor of Remy Martin VSOP a little better, but this stuff is very, very smooth, and the flavor, apart from a slight lack of intensity, is exactly what I look for in a brandy.

I checked out the flour while I was there. They beat Gordon Food Service to death. They charge about $17 for 50 pounds of flour. It’s Conagra bread flour. I don’t know how good it is, but fortunately, my pizza comes out great regardless of the flour. Might be problematic in rolls, however. Still, this is survival food, not party food. It will be good enough.

Edit: I checked around, and I found some info posted by a respected pizza guru. He calls Costco Conagra flour “excellent,” so it must be pretty good. Not bromated, but he seems to like the performance anyway.

Depending on the type of pizza, one bag will produce something like 40 pies. The two bags of mozzarella will produce roughly the same number of pies. I have two giant cans of sauce, which is enough for at least 60 pies. A ballpark approximation gives me a price of roughly one dollar per pie, before toppings. Ridiculous. If they were merely good, it would be a stellar bargain. For some of the best pizza in South Florida, it’s so cheap it’s insane.

The strange thing about my survival supplies is that they’ll make such fantastic food. I’m saving stuff like ham hocks, beans, pizza makings, dried apples, country ham, and pasta. That’s good chow, people. I don’t eat that well NOW.

The older I get, the more I convinced I am that you have to be an idiot to think good food is expensive. Some good things, like prime beef, cost money. But think about ham hocks, cornbread, greens, pork butts, ribs, choice rib eyes, whole chickens (for smoking or making dumplings), whole pigs, dried beans, salt pork, and rice. It’s all cheap, and it makes for very special meals.

Vegetables and fruit will take some effort. Maybe I should learn how to grow calabasas. I already have cooking bananas, which are probably high in some nutrient or other. I have some dragonfruit plants, but they haven’t produced yet. I’ve grown beans in the past, but it’s tough to keep the rust from eating them.

I should either start canning greens or look for a good price on a few cases of canned collards.

Fish…I got that covered. I’ll go to the marina where my dad docks his boat. They hate it when you fish there, because they have a bizarre attachment to the huge clouds of snapper that live under the boats, but you can fill a bucket with foot-long mangroves (grey snapper) in an hour. If things really get rough, I can cast a net for mullet. They taste great smoked, although they aren’t much fried.

Anyway, things are looking good. With this good stuff waiting to be eaten, it will almost be sad if the floods don’t come.

La Niña Knows Who’s the Man

The Holy Spirit is God’s Internet. He arranges us in order and coordinates what we do, even when one of us has no idea what the other is up to. The more Spirit-filled the church gets, the stronger and more obvious the coordination gets.

For a long time, I’ve been hearing about “preparation.” Christians all over the place are looking for rural land. They’re buying guns, tools, and nonperishable food. They’re learning how to take care of themselves. It’s spreading to people, even before they know what’s happening. It has already hit me pretty hard.

I live in a suburb where the fungi and bugs and viruses are so thick, it’s almost impossible to grow things. Citrus is dying (not just here, but worldwide). Tomatoes can’t escape the leaf wilt virus. Nonetheless, I have banana trees now, bearing like crazy. I have one magnificent mango tree and another one which is improving all the time. I have all the hot peppers I could possibly want. I have a strong, healthy lychee tree.

I also have unbelievable tools, plenty of ammunition, a good variety of weapons, and a diesel pickup. Plus two freezers.

Today I got a call from Mike. He has moved back to the DC area, near the remarkable church I wrote about last year. Now he lives in a home that has half an acre of ground. While we were talking about God, I suggested he watch Perry Stone. I mentioned Perry Stone’s vision about future crop failures due to flooding. He cut me off and started telling me how he had been buying bulk food. Mind you, he’s not even tuned into the movement yet. He just felt like it was something he needed to do.

He bought a lot of flour. He’s getting containers. He’s starting seeds for the yard. He just feels like bad times are ahead.

There has to be something to it.

I’m going to be sitting pretty, provided the food shortages aren’t prolonged. I’m stocking up. I ordered a tasty Kentucky ham, plus some sorghum and blackberry jam. I have boxes from Gordon Food Service; I’m putting away pizza sauce, pasta, flour, yeast, and other things. I plan to freeze mozzarella, so while other people are paying out the nose for bad food, I’ll be able to pop out $2 pizzas that beat anything you can buy locally. If there are problems with the power grid, I’m in trouble, but other than that, I’m cool.

I’m Googling “La Niña.” I know we’re having a La Niña year, so I wondered if La Niña causes flooding. Sure enough, it does. At least in some places. Look it up. In October, FEMA warned people in the Pacific Northwest to buy flood insurance.

They ought to quit with “La Niña” and “El Niño” and call the whole business “El Padre.” He’s the one pulling the strings.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to buy. Surely rain won’t hurt every type of food. For example, fish don’t mind rain. On the other hand, when one type of food gets scarce, people move to the others, so they get pressured, too.

God is shaking the world. He’s slapping us awake. Those who will listen will get into gear and start conforming to his principles. They’ll line themselves up with his will and get in the blessing and protection pipeline. Everyone else will have problems. They built their houses on sand, and when things shake, well, look at California. Only things built in accordance with God’s wishes will remain.

What will the result be? Persecution, probably. “My Christian wingnut neighbor bought all the meat and froze it! My Christian wingnut neighbor has a bunch of guns! Look how these hoarding parasites are living while we’re suffering!” It will be like post-Versailles Germany. And Jews are eventually going to get it, too. They are part of God’s plan, so the spirit of Antichrist will keep trying to kill them off, as it did in Germany and Austria (as it does in Gaza). Jewish names like “Madoff” and “Stearns” and “Geithner” and “Bernanke” will be persecution code words. There is a reason Jews are figuring so heavily in our economic disasters.

Some people think the Rapture will be a magical event so sudden and inexplicable, it will essentially force people to believe. They’ll see that millions of Christians are missing, and they’ll have no earthly explanation. Does that make sense to you? I have to wonder. I don’t think God would make it that easy. It would be unlike him. I think we may leave the earth in a wave of executions. I don’t know. I’m not a prophecy expert. Maybe the Bible makes it clear that we’ll just zoom up out of ourselves, instantly, but I don’t recall reading anything like that.

My guess is that the enemy’s people will eventually get the upper hand, and we’ll be murdered in large groups, just like the Jews were. After all, we’ll be “the problem.” This is how the political left will see us. It will be like Cambodia and Cuba. At least I suspect it will.

Christians like to talk about claiming victory and defeating every enemy and so on, but the Bible makes it clear that we do not always win. The spirits that hate us are extremely powerful, and God has not chosen to give us an instant or complete victory over all of them. The battle is still going on. Peter was tortured to death, and Paul was beheaded. I think a solid Christian will live in victory for the majority of his life, but that doesn’t mean you won’t die at the point of a sword somewhere down the line.

The Revelation says that even the two witnesses who are full of God’s power will by martyred. The Antichrist will succeed in murdering them. They’ll be resurrected and assumed into heaven, but no matter how you slice it, they will be killed. If they can’t hold off defeat indefinitely, why should the rest of us expect to do better?

I’ll bet the unsaved start rounding us up and slaughtering us, possibly in the name of their gay, non-judgmental, abortion-loving “god,” and they’ll celebrate over our dead bodies, using our stolen wealth. And then comes the Tribulation, and God’s wrath will make them all want to die.

I don’t know if it will happen in the US. Perry Stone talks of a prophecy about an army of interceders (“intercessors” sounds vulgar to me) who will succeed in getting God to restore America. That would be nice, but my guess is that it would come with a serving of chastisement dwarfing what we’ve seen so far.

People generally don’t turn to God out of gratitude. They don’t get everything they want and then show up in church to pass it out and praise the Lord. We turn back to the Lord after severe beatings caused by our stupidity. That’s my situation, and it’s the most common pattern for Christians. So if suffering is ahead, it will surely bring a good harvest.

I read something interesting in Perry Stone’s magazine this month. He’s a buddy of many of the prominent prosperity preachers, and while he’s not in the same category, he does teach that God will give us “shalom,” which includes having our needs met abundantly. In his magazine, he said something that flies in the face of the over-the-top prosperity gospel. He said that if God didn’t reward our offerings here on earth, it meant we were getting heavenly rewards instead. Not “as well,” mind you. Instead.

I don’t think his friends would be happy to read that. There are still a lot of people out there telling Christians they should all be rich, and that “sowing seed gifts” into the “good soil” of their embarrassing ministries will make it happen. I’m glad to see a popular minister shooting that filth down. The mindless prosperity nuts will be the Christian Madoffs, justifying our persecution in the future.

I’m here to tell you, God will not instantly reward financial gifts with “hundredfold” returns in kind. It has never happened to me. Not once. My needs are met, and I’m fine, but if the TV-evangelist, moneycentric gospel were true, I’d be as rich as…a TV evangelist. God is not an enabler, so I think he resists giving you stuff you will use to destroy yourself, and money can be as bad a poison as arsenic. If you want it so you can have a third helipad in front of your orange mansion, it’s probably not good for you. If you want it so you will have the means and the freedom to complete your mission, there is probably no limit to what will come.

I think money is like food. It’s supposed to serve its purpose and pass through you. If you hold onto too much of it, you just end up full of fat and poop. Constipation and obesity are powerful symbols of the things that go wrong with immature Christians.

Not that I know what it’s like to be one of those. Oh, no. But I have heard about them.

I’m going to run to Costco and get some apples for drying. The Bible says that in the days of famine, I will be satisfied, and I think I will be even more satisfied if I have dried apples for pie.

Hands Off my MREs

Perry Stone says he had some prophetic dreams about the food supply being damaged by excess rain. Since then, floods have caused a food shortage in Australia. He thinks the problem will become global in nature.

Accordingly, I’m refreshing my knowledge of nonperishable foods. After all, Perry Stone hasn’t been wrong yet. He went up to George Bush when he was the governor of Texas and told him the Holy Spirit said Bush would be the next President.

Let’s see what I’ve found (omitting garbage like tofu and rice cakes):

Oatmeal
Canned fish
Canned meat
Rice
Beans (only last about a year)
Dried fruit
White flour (whole wheat flour goes funny)
Corn meal
Pasta
Almonds (24 months in sealed package)
Peanut butter (18 months)
Corn oil
Sugar

I should also freeze more pork, beef, and chicken. But how can you prepare for a shortage of dairy products and eggs? I don’t think much of that stuff freezes well.

More

You can freeze butter for 8 months in the original packaging. You can preserve fresh eggs for months by storing them in a weak salt and lime solution. You can find it on the Internet.

GO!

It’s better to be stupid than absent-minded, because people forgive the stupid.

Reader and fellow blogger Ruth sent this prayer request several days ago, and I just remembered to post it.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of you first. I just read your greens for lunch and the prayer parts made me think WHY DIDN’T you write Steve first. So here is the request. My grandson’s wife gave birth to twins, a boy and girl on Friday. She was anemic to start with and lost a lot of blood during the birth. Yesterday she had to have 1 unit, today she had to have 2 units. The doctors say it is common with twins, a twin stretched uterus doesn’t retract as well
as a single birth. My grandson was scheduled to return to his base in NC tomorrow. The Air Force has said he can stay till this is all cleared up. Please pray she stops the excessive bleeding, begins the healing and is soon able to go home. She will be staying in Louisiana where her parents and his live, so they will be able to help her with the babies and the 16 month old baby boy they already have. Also pray the stresses on the families do not become too great to bear. She had post partum depression with the first baby, pray that does not happen this time.
Thanks, I realize most bachelors do not like to do birth, labor and beyond stories. ;D
Ruth

Back to the Mire or Forward to Power?

I’ll tell you what. I am suffering this month.

Every year, our church does a 40-day program of spiritual improvement. A lot of people fast during this time (generally not real fasting, but I guess they give up Butterfingers or something), and you can also do other stuff. Last year I prayed in tongues for an hour a day. This year, I’m going half an hour in the morning and then praying for one specific thing for half an hour, later in the day.

When I decided what I was going to do, I thought I was all set, but I found myself obligated to do one other thing. I had to agree to read The Purpose-Driven Life, by Rick Warren.

I tried to get out of it. Pastor Warren is a Baptist, and he does not believe in a separate baptism with the Holy Spirit, as charismatics do. He thinks you get the whole deal all at once, at salvation, which is very clearly not what we see in the gospels or Acts. Some people get the whole enchilada, and others (I am referring to saved Christians) undergo a second event.

This is important, because there are only two really important things that happen to a Christian. First, you get salvation. Second, you pray in tongues regularly over the course of your life, and God gradually makes you like him, changing your character and giving you power. If you don’t believe in the second process, you’re like a demolition expert who refuses to buy dynamite, choosing instead to claw buildings down with his toenails. Hopeless. You will never have the kind of faith the Apostles had. You will never do the “greater” things Jesus said we would do. You will be stillborn, spiritually. The crucifixion was an act of insemination, and the seed was the Holy Spirit.

I’m seeing a lot of renewed talk about this. I’ve been harping on it for over 20 years, and nobody cared. Now Robert Morris teaches it. So does Perry Stone. And the other day I decided to clean out the accumulated “It’s Supernatural” episodes on my DVR, and I found that Sid Roth had featured several guests teaching the same message.

Sid Roth is a Messianic (I left the “Jew” off to avoid exacerbating Aaron’s ulcers), and his show is about people who have tapped into the supernatural power of God. Frankly, I suspect some of his guests are frauds or just plain wrong, but some are definitely right, and the show is worth watching. Just remember, if some nut goes on the show and claims God made him a jet pack and told him to sky-write the Revelation of St. John the Divine over San Francisco, it MAY not be true.

What can I tell you? Christians see supernatural events all the time, and we are predisposed to believe in the power of God, so we are going to swallow a certain amount of garbage along with the truth. That’s how life is. If you go to enough good restaurants, sooner or later you are going to eat a booger.

Here’s a great episode you might like, if you’re wondering what tongues are all about. Click this link.

Anyway, the Holy Spirit helps individuals understand the metaphors and word plays in the Bible. The Bible is written in code, so Satan and evil men won’t get it, and it’s stirred up, so related passages may be hundreds of pages apart, and only the Holy Spirit (after the baptism with same) can unravel it for you. I’m sorry to say that Rick Warren does not have this edge, and therefore, a lot of what he says is totally wrong.

So I’m reading this awful, backward book, because I was pretty much forced to, while looking forward to the day I can throw it out. I don’t want anyone else to be misled by it, so I can’t give it away.

Jesus called certain Pharisees and Sadducees “blind guides.” He was referring to their lack of Spirit-powered revelation. They had no idea what the scriptures meant, yet they still taught. It wasn’t their fault; no one bothers to mention that. They had no hope of understanding, without God’s help. They were no worse than we are, and in many ways, they were surely superior. Still, they were blind. Modern Christians who reject the baptism with the Spirit and the power of tongues are in the same boat. They are not even slightly better off. Well, they’re better off than Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection. But other than that, no difference at all.

Pastor Warren talks a lot about goodness and hard spiritual and intellectual work. Great. That’s not what Spirit-powered Christianity–the type practiced by Jesus and the Apostles–is about. That’s what pre-Christian belief was about. Jews and Gentile believers had to rely on their own effort, by and large. Paul referred to this kind of walk as “dung.” It was great in its day, but that day is past. Our ride is here. It’s time to open the door, get in, and turn on the AC.

Dung, dung, dung. I’ll say it again. Look it up. That’s the word used in the King James Version. I didn’t make it up to be disrespectful. See for yourself. If you have a problem with it, you have a problem with Paul and with the one who sent him. The Greek word he used means “excrement” or discarded table garbage.

Rick Warren’s approach is retrogressive. Jesus died to give us power tools, and people who fight the message and power of the Spirit haven’t picked their tools up yet. There is nothing noble or admirable about wanting to do God’s work without help. The admirable thing is to give up your pride and ask for help. Don’t be like a man who drives in circles all day because he won’t open the window and ask for directions. If you insist on doing it without help, you are proud. End of story.

What if Joshua had insisted on attacking Jericho with swords instead of marching around it, glorifying God? There would be a big pile in the desert near Jericho, with thousands of Jewish skeletons under it.

Look, you can have what Spirit-unfriendly Christians have, if you want. You can get salvation and then work your behind off trying to please God, and you can remain weak and unenlightened. Then at judgment, Jesus will discount the things you thought you were doing for him, and he will call you “lawless” and a “worker of iniquity,” and he will say he never “knew” you as a husband knows a wife. You don’t need a book to get that. You already have it, if you’ve received salvation. But what if you want to receive information directly from God? What if you want to KNOW–not just believe–that you’re getting what you pray for? What if you want to physically and emotionally feel God’s presence, not just during worship, but at random moments when you’re all by yourself? What if you want all your illnesses healed? What if you want to be able to get God to send powerful spirits and human beings to help your lost loved ones enter the kingdom? If you want those things, you’re going to need to grab the plug and insert it in the receptacle. The power doesn’t flow where there is no circuit!

God’s power truly does work like electricity. You have to give it a destination, or it doesn’t move. This is why he tells us he prunes unfruitful branches. The power is supposed to flow from us into the world, generating fruit in the lives of others. If you’re not hooked up on both ends–to God and people–you’re an open circuit. A limb with a tourniquet. What happens when you put a tourniquet around a limb? It stops feeling, it becomes paralyzed, and it eventually rots and falls off. As it is on earth, so it is in the kingdom of heaven.

I’ve read up on Pastor Warren’s efforts, and it’s not pleasant news. He teams up with New Age people and unspiritual Christians, in an “inclusive” and “seeker-friendly” theology. Was Jesus “seeker-friendly”? Was he inclusive? Did he invite Buddhists to help him preach? Of course not. He welcomed SINNERS, but only on the condition that they repented. He associated with the lost, but he did not have any interest in their “wisdom”.

I believe preachers who rely on unbelievers to help their flocks are trying to simulate God’s power and blessings. The juice isn’t flowing from God, so they get counterfeit power from secular or idolatrous sources and present it and say, “Look what God has for us. All good stuff is from God, so don’t worry that we’re listening to Dr. Phil or Mehmet Oz or Oprah or whoever.” When people aren’t blessed, they like to pretend they’re blessed, or they make excuses for God, saying he doesn’t really want to bless them (so unnecessary defeat and suffering are actually righteous and productive!). If you can’t get God to heal your flock and give them peace and help them succeed in life, get Dale Carnegie and CLAIM God sent him! No, sorry, I want what the Apostles had. Keep your dung. I’ve had plenty.

I keep trying to push my way through this book, so I can put it in the trash and say, truthfully, that I read it. But it’s very tedious. It reminds me of the lifeless churches my mother used to drag me to a hundred years ago. I have been where this message leads, and God dragged me past it, over my brilliant objections. There is no possibility that I could go back, and I don’t want other people taking this path.

There’s plenty of useful stuff in the book. You should try to determine your purpose in life. You should give. You should pray. You should return your library books on time, always floss once a day, and eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. Okay, I made that last bit up. What I’m trying to say is, the good parts are obvious to anyone who has ever opened a Bible. And they’re not valuable enough to justify drinking the rest of the brew.

What I’m presenting here is the argument that got Jesus and Stephen martyred. The ancient Jews believed they had to earn their righteousness, and Jesus came along and said they were wrong: God wanted to put us on welfare. Faith was more important than actions. Inner change would occur supernaturally, not through our effort. And we were to receive an inner Torah that superseded the animal-hide version, because it was even more alive and relevant. I would never say the written word of God is not alive, but as wonderful, as astounding, as it is, it can’t compare to having God inside you, telling you things and changing you in real time.

Christians hate this message, because they are no better than the ancient Jews. Think about it. The ancient Jews went to heaven. What? You don’t believe that? Then how did Moses and Elijah manage to appear with Jesus? What was Yom Kippur all about? Of course they went to heaven. Just like Christians. What, then, was the benefit of accepting the sacrifice of Jesus? For one thing, it enabled Gentiles to enter heaven without learning the Jewish law. For another, it paved the way for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, who had the power to make every one of us as powerful as Jesus.

Jesus said he–personally–would baptize us “with” the Holy Spirit. Look it up. He said we would get power. Look it up. I don’t make these things up.

Spirit-rejecting Christians don’t want to hear it. It sounds lazy. It sounds like we want to be spoiled, instead of working hard and proving we are worthy of God’s power and help. Well, I DO want to be spoiled. Just like Adam, before the fall. This is our natural state, when we are in God’s will. God never intended for us to be self-sufficient. How can you honestly glorify God, when you earn what you receive? If you claim you worked for it, you make God a liar.

Does it seem unfair for God to give you an inherited leg up? What about the unfairness of being pitted against billions of ancient, powerful spirits we can’t even see? Don’t you think God wants to balance that? Our enemies and their attacks come freely and in abundance. Are we, in our tiny spans and with our dim minds and weak characters, supposed to fight that on our own? Are you serious? Make me a Holy Spirit trust-fund baby, PLEASE. Doesn’t the Bible call us the “heirs” of righteousness? What do you think that means? What does an heir do to get his money? Seriously.

“Coincidentally,” I met John Bevere during the same month I was ordered to read the Warren book. John Bevere’s message is the direct opposite of Pastor Warren’s. He says it’s about GRACE, which simply means things we do not earn or deserve. He says one manifestation of grace is POWER, like the power to raise the dead. Look at the New Testament.

Who is right, Rick Warren or John Bevere? Name an Apostle who received the power to work miracles because he did lots of good stuff. Show me someone who was healed because God felt he owed it to him. On the other hand, look at Cornelius, the Roman centurion who was the first Gentile to receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit. What did he do to please God? Acts of faith. He prayed and gave alms. If you think giving to the poor is an ordinary “work,” you couldn’t be more wrong. It has much more to do with faith than human effort. When you give generously, unless you’re a fan of poverty, you have to believe God will take care of you and not let you regret it. Furthermore, godly giving is done at the urging of the Holy Spirit. If you give money to bums, without God’s urging, and they blow it on malt liquor and whores, you’ve actually sinned.

The sad thing is that I spend so much time with the backward book, I don’t have time to read John’s book, Extraordinary: The Life You’re Meant to Live. This is one reason I’m trying to get The Purpose-Driven Life behind me. My days are full. I don’t have time to do what I need to do AND read things I know are wrong.

Wow, what a glaring contrast. I just noticed it. I can have a life which is merely purpose-driven, just like the lives of ambitious unbelievers, or I can have the extraordinary life I was meant to live. I’m sure God had nothing to do with THAT juxtaposition. And Buddha is secretly Jesus, and socialism is a great idea that hasn’t been given a fair chance. And three is two, and trout live in trees.

The power message is very simple, when you boil it down. Get the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Pray in tongues three minutes a day, using a timer. Never stop. Eventually, you will find power in your life. Because three minutes of tongues will make all the difference? No. Because if you start with three minutes and you don’t stop, you’ll grow until you find yourself doing much, much more. It’s kind of a bait and switch, but I admit it up front. Jesus said he came in through the front door, not the window. Give him a little of what he really wants, and he will eventually take your whole life, but unlike Satan, who tempts you with addictive and destructive things, he won’t make you regret it.

Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a mustard tree. It starts with a seed, and you water it, and it grows. A growing plant between two rocks will break the rocks open and push them aside. Prayer in tongues is the “living water” (look it up). This is the water with which you feed the kingdom, which is inside you (look it up), not in the world. Supply the water consistently, and the rocks that sit on top of you will crumble, and your righteousness will come forth as the light and your judgment (justice and restitution) as the noonday.

Or do it your way and be satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the table.

It works. It works. It works. A tree does not grow overnight, but it does grow.

In conclusion, I disrecommend The Purpose-Driven Life. Call me divisive; I don’t care. The ratio of harm to good is just too great for me to sit by idly and say nothing.

No, Really

A while back, I gave up and ordered a small planer/jointer. I had had problems face-jointing wood with my planer sled. You have to use hot glue to shim the wood in place, and it’s very easy to make mistakes, and you get problems. With a jointer, you just slap the wood onto the infeed table and push.

I cancelled the order later, after I got better at using the planer. Then I placed the order again. Aggravation is cumulative.

Today it arrives. I can’t wait to see if it works. This is the last major tool purchase I will need to make in order to have what I consider to be an adequate home shop.

For woodworking, you need a drill press, a table saw, a router in a table, a handheld router, a planer, a jointer, and some sanding equipment. Otherwise, you’re feeble. Without a planer, you can’t create parallel sides on boards. Without a jointer, it’s a pain to create flat sides and perpendicular edges. Without a drill press, your holes will be all over the place. If you don’t have a router in a table, you will go insane building jigs to do precision routing. If you don’t have a handheld router, you will go insane trying to rout things you can’t see. If you don’t have sanding equipment, you might as well kill yourself. Imagine sanding things by hand.

A drum sander would be a nice thing to have, but it’s not as important as a jointer. I can create a nearly finish-ready surface with my planer in a few seconds, and the final sanding is easy with my current tools, so I can do most of the things a drum sander does, without too much grief.

A band saw is also very important, unless you never plan to resaw anything or make a curved cut. Band saws are extremely useful, even though the level of precision is pretty bad.

I don’t know if I made a good choice. I could have gotten a great used 8″ jointer on Craigslist, but I wanted to be able to joint 10″ boards without resorting to some kind of pathetic jury-rigged jig. And a conventional jointer would have been huge. Oddly, the machine I got is very compact and has a mobile base. You would think a 10″ jointer would be enormous, but I guess there’s a lot of leeway in the design process.

I hate to say it, but Europeans are way ahead of us when it comes to woodworking. For example, their table saws are just plain superior. And they love small jointer/planers. A Swiss company named Inca used to make one that was very, very popular and highly respected. They quit, but now many companies sell machines based on the Inca. Mine is an example. If you go to Amazon UK, you’ll see lots of jointer/planers made by well-known companies including DeWalt. It’s a proven concept, but Americans haven’t caught on.

I don’t know why Americans are losing the woodworking race. We can’t even find the right names for machines. An American planer is really a thicknesser. An American jointer is really a planer. If you search for jointer/planers on European sites, they won’t turn up, because Europeans know the difference between planing and thicknessing.

“Planing” means to create a flat plane. A planer won’t do that! Crazy. A planer creates a board with a uniform thickness, using the bottom side as a reference. If the bottom of the board is bowed, the “planed” board will be bowed. Crooked in, crooked out.

A jointer will put a flat plane on one side of a board, but it won’t get it ready for making a joint, because the thickness won’t necessarily be uniform.

To make a usable piece of wood, you have to plane one side using the jointer and then use the planer to make the other side parallel to it. Then you have something flat to hold against the jointer fence while you plane (or joint or whatever) the edges of the board. How do you get the edges parallel? I have no idea. The jointer only does one edge, and when you flip the board and do the other edge, there is no reason to expect the two edges to come out parallel. I guess I’d use the table saw, with the jointed edge against the fence.

Anyway, I look forward to getting the new machine. Sometimes buying a tool can turn 4-hour jobs into 2-hour jobs, and this is a good example of such a tool.

By the way, the milling machine has turned out to be indispensable for woodworking. It automatically does things that otherwise require jigs, rulers, clamps, glue, and prayer, not to mention considerable skill. If you do precision joinery with small parts, a small mill will be a godsend.

I’m so grateful to God for giving me the stuff I need to make use of the creativity he gave me. Creativity without tools is torment.

I hope to hear that truck pulling up shortly.

Sunday Lunch

Made me some greens today. And bacon-grease cornbread, ham hocks, and a sliced raw Vidalia. Look:

Those are collard greens. Sometimes I get hocks that are so salty they mess up the greens, so today I started boiling the hocks separately, figuring I would get some of the salt out of them before adding them to the greens. Turned out they weren’t salty at all, so this was a total waste of time. I tossed them in with the greens and let them boil down.

I followed Paula Deen’s advice and snuck a little butter into the greens. Butter has a magical quality, as I have often said, mixing and accentuating flavors like no other fat I know.

I replaced a small amount of the bacon grease in the cornbread with butter. In retrospect, I think this was a mistake. Probably better to keep all the bacon grease and add butter anyway.

This was a magnificent lunch. It would have been better if the hocks had had some meat in them. They were almost all fat. This is not a bad thing, when you’ve learned to eat the fat, but the meat is also good.

If you’re planning to do this, it’s simple. Just boil the hocks and greens together. I add salt, a small amount of pepper, and a clove of garlic. Simmer until the hocks are soft, and make sure there isn’t much liquid left in the greens. You want it thick and tasty, especially when you sop it with the cornbread.

Very nice.

I have a nice food-related testimony.

A while back, I had to quit working at my church’s cafe. I didn’t make trouble. I just left and prayed. And I felt like something was telling me, “____ and ____ won’t be around long,” referring to a couple of people who had gotten in my way. I kept praying for God to provide a godly, humble, capable MALE servant to run the cafe.

A week or so ago I learned that a highly talented guitarist who volunteers at church was running the kitchen! This guy plays flamenco like you wouldn’t believe, and he also has some experience working in a restaurant. I finally went in and talked to him today, and he told me how he was going to get the place in line, and how he was putting and end to the slack, unprofessional things that drove me nuts. It was wonderful. I had to let him know about my prayers. I had to share my testimony, so he would know he didn’t end up there accidentally.

I’m going to help him any way I can. It looks like praying for his success is a good start.

The people who made things difficult for me no longer work there full-time. So that “voice” I thought I heard was real.

I am getting great answers to prayer these days. Our church promotes 40 days of fasting at the beginning of each year, and during this time, people who don’t fast can take up other productive things. This year I’m praying in the Spirit for 30 minutes a day, and I’m also spending 30 minutes praying and exerting faith for one particular goal. That goal changes from day to day. I find I run out of stuff to pray for, so I ask people if they have anything for me to send up.

Eight days ago, my friend Alonzo said his wife needed work. She had been out of work for 2 years. Yesterday they said she had two job offers! How about that?

I believe faith is a thing, like heat or charge or mass. The author of Hebrews called it a “substance,” using the Greek work “hupostasis,” which can mean a literal foundation, like the foundation of a house. I believe it’s the fundamental substance of which the universe, natural and supernatural, is built. I think God provides it to those who pray in the Spirit, charging them up like batteries, and I believe we release it when we pray. I think it goes back to God, and he shapes it into the things for which we pray. I feel it leaving me when I pray, like water gushing out of a fire hose. I think this is what Jesus felt leaving him when the lady with the hemorrhage touched his garment.

I also believe that the longer you pray about a thing, the more of this substance you release. Seriously. Think about the blind man Jesus healed. He didn’t just point his finger and yell, “SEE!” He had to give it several tries. God himself, in human form, had to pray for a considerable time to get this miracle done. I believe it works the same way for us. I think that’s why God included that story in the gospels. There has to be some sound reason for including a story which seems to go against the concept of a messiah so powerful he could get anything done instantly. I don’t think Jesus deliberately wasted his time. That would have been foolish and misleading.

He also prayed for a very long time in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he criticized the disciples for being too weak to pray for a solid hour. Think about it. If they had obeyed, would they have been able to go a whole hour without repeating themselves? No way. They had a very simple crisis facing them, not a long list of varying problems. I believe they were supposed to go up there and beg and thank God repeatedly, releasing faith all the while.

So I’m going half an hour at a pop.

So far, the results are consistent with my suspicions. I think the ideas I have are being given to me by God, and that he is leading me into a powerful way of praying. The correct way, probably. I sure hope so. In my own right, I am not fit to judge.

Jesus told us not to repeat ourselves like the heathens. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask for the same thing over and over for 30 minutes. In fact, he told us to ask for the same things over and over, when he told the parable of the widow and the judge. I believe the repetition ban applied to mumbling prayers that aren’t heartfelt, such as canned prayers from prayer books.

There is no magic in a set of words. You don’t need to use church-sanctioned prayers written by super-holy priests that died decades ago. The faith that backs words up is what gets the job done. I believe that’s what Jesus was pointing out when he told us to avoid vain repetitions. So I think you can pray for the same thing repeatedly and get results. If I’m wrong, God has been remarkably consistent in reinforcing my error. If he keeps that up for the rest of my life, and I’m wrong, I’ll be better off than someone who was right. That would be odd.

I had an interesting conversation with another church member today. He came to me while I was standing in a dark area of the church, alone. He didn’t want to be heard. He started asking me my opinion of a preacher who visited recently. I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I was honest. I said I thought the guy was off course, and that a lot of his spiel was about himself and his own glory. I thought the guy was off into some totally unscriptural Copelandian stuff. “I rebuke this, and I command that, and I release angels.” That kind of weirdness. And my friend agreed completely.

We get preachers who seem completely nutty. They claim they “speak things into existence” and so on. They always talk a great deal about how a bunch of us are going to become millionaires. When they talk about Christians they consider models for us, those Christians are always wealthy people. The congregation laps it up. I think it’s wrong; I believe we’re supposed to be prosperous, but prosperity should be a side effect, not a cure. Jesus said to seek God’s kingdom and his righteousness first.

On the other hand, my friend has a negative view of preachers who talk about supernatural power a lot. I can’t agree. I’ve seen and experienced power, and I see it backed up in the Bible. I think we’re supposed to be a little bit like wizards, except that we’re under God’s authority, and we do our supernatural deeds in humility and awe, and we only do them to please and glorify God, and only at his direction. The Apostles had incredible power. Like John Bevere says, they were mistaken for gods. I think God wants us to wield his power, and I think the power is coming back into the church.

Still, it was great to learn that someone I respected had concerns similar to mine. We have both learned that churches aren’t perfect. Crooks and frauds and egomaniacs are going to show up, and often they’re going to fool people. That doesn’t mean we should leave or make trouble. We should stick around and try to fix things, unless it gets intolerable.

It seems like there are a few people in the church who are scattered around like pillars, holding the place up in maturity and faith. We run into each other by chance, and we come to recognize each other. It’s kind of disturbing that a person with my character limitations would be significantly less wacky and gullible than the bulk of the congregation, but then, God doesn’t have a lot to work with.

When my sister and I used to go to this church together, I told her that some of the best people in churches are in the pews, and now I am taking my own advice. Our pastor never says anything insane, so I think we’re on a fairly good course, and I meet a lot of phenomenal, solid people who work to keep the place running. It won’t kill me if an occasional charlatan drops by and fleeces the congregation. What am I going to do? Die? That’s the only way I’ll join a group of people who worship and serve perfectly.

I always tell people I’ll settle for an 85% church. If I think 85% of what the church teaches is right, that will do.

Stuff is definitely happening at that church and in my life. I keep meeting food people and music people. Now I’m meeting food people who are also professional musicians. What’s THAT all about? I can’t even guess. And we now have three top-flight musicians in the Armorbearers. Something is going on. This is not all coincidence. And I think Mike is going to be moving to South Florida. Another food person.

I still have 50 minutes of stuff left to do today. I’ll keep posting testimonies as they occur.

Holes

Here is the guitar body. I put a rout in it for the neck pickup, I routed out the control cavity, and I drilled passages that will connect both pickup cavities and the control cavity.

I just learned that the “correct” thing is to drill slantwise from the bridge pickup hole into the control area. Thank God I didn’t know that. I might have tried it and gone right through the back of the guitar. Instead I drilled down the centerline of the guitar from the neck pocket, all the way to the future location of the bridge pickup. This connects the pickup holes. Then I drilled a 7/8″ jack hole and inserted a 1/4″ bit and continued on to the bridge pickup area. That will connect the control cavity to the pickups. I’ll run the neck pickup wire through the bridge rout and into the control area, and the bridge pickup wire will go straight into the control rout.

Using routers is a nightmare. They jump and bite and act crazy. It’s just barely conceivable that their poor behavior may have some tenuous relationship to my complete lack of skill. But I doubt it.

I think I’m going to make a couple of tiny bowtie inlays from maple and stick them in the border between the light walnut inlay and the guitar body, above the neck pocket. This will make the pocket inlays look like something I did on purpose, instead of a massive screwup. Once it’s done, I’ll delete all Internet references to my mistakes and claim everything went perfectly. No one will ever know. Shhh.

For some reason, I inherited a bag of silver coins. I might inlay a couple of liberty dimes into the guitar, if I can find two from the years my parents were born.

Every choice I made added a new level of complexity to the project. Because of the rear control rout, I have to drill potentiometer and switch holes, and I have to create a walnut cover for the rout, and I have to cut a rabbet into the guitar to receive the cover. Ordinarily, you just make the hole in the front of the instrument and slap in a prefab metal cover that holds the controls.

Here is my conclusion: if you choose to make a clear-coated bookmatched Telecaster with a rear rout, you will multiply the woodworking time by about five. Seriously, I could make a solid-color body in two days.

The TV Jones pickups also added work. I had to figure out where to put them, and I had to use a special routing template. The templates I bought have holes for Fender-style pickups, but they’re useless for TV Jones jobs, which don’t even fit standard humbucker holes.

I’m hoping I won’t have to recess the Bigsby into the top, but after all the crap I’ve routed, it probably would not be a challenge. Maybe I should do it just to be a wise guy.

Sad news: I’ve learned that you can make a guitar neck using a router and a jig. This is sad, because it means I will probably go crazy and make a neck eventually. I’ve realized that fat necks work very well with electric guitars, even though they’re a horror on acoustics. I ordered a big neck from Warmoth, but I don’t think it’s as fat as the one on my amazing Burny LP clone, so I’m not totally happy.

I went nuts and ordered a jointer/planer. Then I came to my senses and cancelled the order. I improved my planer-jointing technique, and I decided to keep my money. Then I went nuts again. The planer/jointer is once again on the way. I face-jointed a couple of really squirrelly mahogany boards I stole from someone’s trash, and it was a nightmare, so the new machine started looking good again.

I got the planer working really well, apart from the problems with twisted wood. I learned how to completely eliminate snipe. I knew it was a good idea to pull up “a little” on boards as they entered and exited, but by experimenting, I have found that snipe disappears if you pull up a WHOLE LOT. You’re trying to simulate the action of the powerful rollers that hold the wood down, so you really have to apply yourself. I had been afraid that pulling up hard would drive the wood into the blades, but that doesn’t happen, because the roller closest to your hand prevents it. I guess if you have a three-foot-long board with increased leverage, you can apply too much force, but on a twenty-inch workpiece, you can pull like crazy.

I’m going to try to get the routing done today. Time to go out and buy even more piles of double-side tape, to hold stuff in place while I work.

If I can make my own necks, I may make a new guitar with headstock and body shapes that are completely original. Probably similar to a Telecaster, but with better fret access from above. I hate the Telecaster control plate. It’s inconvenient and jams the selector switch up against the volume knob. I’d probably rout from the rear again.

Wish me luck. More accurately, pray I don’t screw this up any more than I already have.

Don’t Blame me; it was the Boss’s Idea

Over the weekend, my job was to drive the evangelist John Bevere around. He was speaking at my church.

Usually I don’t like hauling VIPs around. It’s boring, and they don’t pay much attention to you. You find yourself standing around at the mall while they look at shoes, or you drive their luggage places while they’re having dinner with church bigwigs. Stuff like that. But I enjoyed meeting Mr. Bevere. He was very humble, and he spoke and acknowledged my existence, even though he was busy the whole time.

Unfortunately, I got pulled over while he was in my truck. There was some kind of bizarre screwup with my registration. I had no idea it was messed up. We ended up sitting in a parking lot for fifteen minutes while a cop sorted things out and gave me a reduced fine. John was kind enough to pray.

He gave a wonderful sermon. The best guest sermon I’ve heard. It was basically the same thing I keep telling people: God wants to do it for you. He came at it from a different angle, but it’s really the same thing. Christians get saved, and then they go home and look at porn and cheat on their spouses and take drugs, and they never have any power in their lives, and they can’t change their behavior. It’s not supposed to be like that. We are supposed to have power. Eternal life is swell, but if that’s all you get, you should literally live like a psychopath until ten minutes before you die and then ask for forgiveness. The power is supposed to flow here on earth, not just in heaven.

I bought his book. I have to be honest; I think we get some preachers who are utterly full of it, and I almost never buy their stuff. I think some of them are just DVD salesmen. I don’t know if they’re unrepentant con artists who have learned to speak Christianese, or whether they’ve just got themselves fooled.

We have a recurrent guest who is supposed to be a prophet, and I don’t even want to say what my impression of him is. I got a free book by a guest, for donating to one of our church’s ministries, and it’s somewhere at the bottom of my closet, under a bunch of crap. But I bought John Bevere’s book, because I felt sure what he said came from God, and I thought he probably knew more about this message than I did.

I haven’t looked at the book yet. Watch me endorse it without reading it and then open it and find out it’s full of new age gobbledygook. I don’t think that will happen, though.

The Holy Spirit works. If you pray in tongues a lot, you will start to get revelation. The Bible will start to make sense to you. The missing pieces will show up. God never created a human being smart enough to understand it with the unaided mind. If you have a consistent habit of praying in the Spirit for long periods, God’s power and wisdom will grow in you like a tree you water and fertilize every day. Like a mustard tree, as one very smart person put it. God doesn’t want you to do it on your own. He wants to do all the heavy lifting. You just have to drop your pride and admit you’re a charity case.

When you get revelation coming to you regularly, you will find that when “brilliant” evangelists tell you things, very often, you already know them. And it helps you judge what’s worth receiving and what is just plain puke.

Revelation is part of the power God gives people here on earth. Because I had revelation, which comes by grace, I was able to judge John’s message, the subject of which was grace. That worked out pretty good.

Satan hates this message. We are conceived–literally–as potentially godlike beings when we receive salvation and the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Satan wants us to be stillborn, so we will die weak, without taking the world back from him. He tells us tongues are nonsense. He tells us Christianity is about discipline and hard work, and that we have to earn it all. He tells us it’s trashy and immature to ask God for things we don’t deserve. The truth is that God wants us to have things we don’t deserve, without earning them. Hello? That’s why he allowed himself to be nailed to a cross. Why would he buy us salvation and then refuse to buy us anything else?

God has a whole shop full of power tools waiting for each of us. How would you feel if you ran a garage and the mechanics refused to touch the air tools? Imagine it. They come to you and they say, “We’ll turn the nuts by hand because we’re not worthy of air tools.” You’d want to strangle them. They’d put your shop out of business.

People always wonder why God doesn’t fix the world. He never said he would. He created humanity to fix the world. Look it up. Read the Bible. Adam was the world’s manager. God expects us to be proactive. He doesn’t look down and see bad things happening and think, “Wow, I better fix that.” He thinks, “Someone should be praying for me to fix that. Someone should be trying to fix that and praying for my help. Someone should be using the gifts of the Spirit to fix that.”

He wants us to be in charge. He wants us to do mighty things. He wants us to have supernatural power. And he wants us to get that power by faith, not works.

The world is never going to work right until the Messianic Age. The kingdom of God is inside us. It’s not a political kingdom that will spread and rule the globe. We are not going to become a super church that cleans up the world until it’s so perfect, it’s as if Adam never sinned. But each of us is supposed to do powerful things and change as much of the world as we can. Think of the police. They don’t eradicate crime, but they don’t quit, either. They tackle the jobs they have the power to tackle, and the results, though imperfect, justify the effort. God doesn’t want the world to be perfect right now, but for reasons of his own, he wants us to battle to improve it, by putting his power inside as many people as possible.

We will never make the world right in this age, and neither will God, but we are supposed to clean it up as much as we can, and we are supposed to play offense. We can’t do it with our pathetic minds and flimsy meat bodies.

I’m still not crazy about driving evangelists around, but I’m glad I met this one. I hope his book lives up to my expectations.

Church Adopting Arab Propaganda as Policy?

Today in The Jerusalem Post Christian Edition, I read something infuriating. A Catholic bigwig, with the approval of the Vatican, has declared that there is no chosen people.

Yes, you read that correctly. And in case you think this guy is an isolated nut, let me quote an October 23 Jerusalem Post article about Vatican-sponsored gathering at which this announcement was made:

Bishops from the Middle East who were summoned to Rome by the pope demanded on Saturday that Israel accept UN resolutions calling for an end to its “occupation” of Arab lands.

More, from the same guy:

We Christians cannot speak of the ‘promised land’ as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people. This promise was nullified by Christ. There is no longer a chosen people – all men and women of all countries have become the chosen people.

So evidently (given the conspicuous absence of a repudiation from the Pope) anti-Semitism may still be official church policy. Here’s some more info about this disgusting, evil pronouncement:

“The Holy Scriptures cannot be used to justify the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians, to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestinian lands,” Monsignor Cyril Salim Bustros, [Lebanese-American] Greek Melkite archbishop of Our Lady of the Annunciation in Boston, Massachusetts, and president of the “Commission for the Message,” said at Saturday’s Vatican press conference.

All I can say is, may God correct you quickly and mercifully. May he lead you to repudiate your own words publicly, so you will not have to suffer his chastisement.

What greater attack could you make on the Jewish people than to claim they are no longer chosen? That isn’t just anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Semitism per se. It is a denial of the sole valid justification for the existence of Jews as a people.

It is also a rebellious, insolent, arrogant denial of God’s many express acknowledgements, in both testaments, of the special status of the Jews. Nowhere in the Bible does it say or imply that God’s covenant with the Jews has been “nullified.” In fact, the still-unfulfilled prophecies of the Revelation cannot come to fruition without 144,000 undefiled Jewish males who refuse to serve the Antichrist. Where is the passage about 144,000 displaced Palestinians or 144,000 Catholics? I must have overlooked it.

The Bible says that he who harms the Jews touches the apple of God’s eye. That means the pupil. Can you imagine anything that makes God angrier?

And denying the right of the Jews to reenter their given land…how do you respond to a position so ridiculous? It has supporters. Unfortunately, Satan is foremost among them. Evidently, Bustros has never read Exodus, Joshua, or 1 Kings.

From a practical standpoint, where does Bustros expect the Jews to go, if they can’t have Israel? The alternatives are forced conversion and death.

Diaspora nations always turn on the Jews sooner or later, because the spirit of Antichrist works in the minds of those who are not baptized with the Holy Spirit and fans the flames of anti-Semitism. Assimilation is not a realistic alternative. Even the United States, which has a pretty good record when it comes to asylum for immigrants, allowed Jews to go to the gas chambers instead of welcoming them. The Germans and Austrians slaughtered valuable Jewish citizens, including distinguished World War I heroes. Man–in the form of Gentile host nations–is not going to save the Jews the next time the tide (to use God’s own metaphor) rises against them. God and a defensible homeland are their only hopes. And if they are not given preferential treatment in that land, their enemies will outpopulate them, and Israel itself will be like a Diaspora nation.

If the Pope doesn’t loudly disavow the vile things Bustros said at the press conference, we will be back where we were at the end of the Holocaust. The Catholic Church will be anti-Jewish again. Not just “anti-Judaism,” which could be rationalized as an extension of the desire to win souls, but quite literally opposed to the existence of the Jewish people and their state. The church will also be endorsing replacement theology, which has always been a convenient cover for a desire to see Jews disappear.

The worst thing about this is that uneducated Catholics the world over will see Bustros’s words as code for “It’s okay to get the Jews.” God is all for it now! It’s the convenient thing to do here on earth, and you’ll be rewarded in heaven. They’ll see Jews the way the Philistines (literally synonymous with “Palestinians”) saw Samson after he was shorn. If God isn’t on their side, and they’re driving up oil prices and causing terrorism, why not persecute them?

It’s typical of Satan to put this kind of rhetoric out. It’s a different spin on the 72-virgins myth. Act on your hate, and God will either ignore it or reward you.

How can anyone oppose prophecy and the wellbeing of Jews while claiming to speak for God? This is a textbook example of taking the Lord’s name in vain. Jesus never denied the Jews (or his Jewishness), nor did Paul, nor did any of the New Testament authors, all of whom were Jewish. Nowhere does the Bible say we are to replace the Jews. The very notion reeks of ignorance.

The Bible tells us the temple will be restored, as will sacrifices. Who does Bustros expect to do that work? Who will make the incense? Who will inspect and slaughter the animals? Who will recite the proper prayers and blessings? Catholic priests? Jew-hating Muslims? Assemblies of God preachers from places like Georgia and Texas? Jews, and only Jews, can do that work. There are no Gentile Levites, and there never will be.

God says Israel, including areas currently under Muslim control, belongs to the Jews. Forever. Cyril Bustros says part of it is “Arab land.” You can believe Bustros if you want. I believe God.

It’s good that Bustros said this, because he was clarifying a very vague message the bishops had issued. Few would bother reading the message itself (it’s online), and if they did, they would not see in it the anti-Semitism from which it sprang. In fact, it affirms God’s covenant with Abraham, in direct contradiction of the remarks Bustros made (see bold text):

8. The same Scriptures unite us; the Old Testament, the Word of God is for both you and us. We believe all that God revealed there, since he called Abraham, our common father in the faith, Father of Jews, of Christians and of Muslims. We believe in the promises of God and his covenant given to Abraham and to you. We believe that the Word of God is eternal.

The Second Vatican Council published the document Nostra aetate which treats interreligious dialogue with Judaism, Islam and the other religions. Other documents have subsequently clarified and developed the relationship with Judaism. On-going dialogue is taking place between the Church and the representatives of Judaism. We hope that this dialogue can bring us to work together to press those in authority to put and end to the political conflict which results in separating us and disrupting everyday life in our countries.

It is time for us to commit ourselves together to a sincere, just and permanent peace. Both Christians and Jews are called to this task by the Word of God. In his Word, we are invited us to listen to the voice of God “who speaks of peace”: “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his holy ones” (Ps 85:9). Recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable. On the contrary, recourse to religion must lead every person to see the face of God in others and to treat them according to their God-given prerogatives and God’s commandments, namely, according to God’s bountiful goodness, mercy, justice and love for us.

Without Bustros around to say what was really on the bishops’ minds, that would be seen as a meaningless, toothless, platitudinous, feel-good ramble put together by harmless old men. With his words added, it becomes ominous and menacing.

There will be no political or church-driven solution to the conflict in the Middle East. Those solutions would be carnal, and no church should put any faith in them. The conflict is based in the supernatural. The physical overlays the supernatural like a Band-Aid on a festering sore. Apply all the patches you want; the disease will not die until Satan is bound. We have to work for peace with our physical tools, but we have to realize that all we can do is minimize the pain. It will never go away while Jesus tarries, and we should not try to accelerate the healing process by doing things that infuriate God and contradict his word.

Thank God the Catholic Church has no army these days. Thank God Israel has a good one.

None of this will affect Israel in a macroscopic way. God watches over her continuously, and a few mistaken, bigoted men can’t oppose him. They will make fools of themselves and fail, and Israel will prosper. But these foolish words could cause suffering or death for many individual Jews, and they could also cause many Christians to commit atrocious sins and bring God’s judgment on themselves, their families, their churches, and their nations.

I hope people will pray that Catholic leadership (and the leadership of other liberalized mainstream churches that do not support Israel) will have a change of heart, and that the Holy Spirit will protect them from causing their followers to offend.

Work Hard to Make Ordinary Food, or Take it Easy and be a Star

If you want a good Christmas dinner and you don’t want to work, do what I do: prime rib, baked potatoes, cheesecake.

I admit, the cheesecake takes some doing, but the other stuff is so easy, you’ll have time for it.

Right now I have a juicy prime rib roasting at 200°. I bought it about nine days ago. I salted it down and stuck it in the fridge to improve. Yesterday I greased it heavily with strong garlic butter. Today I stuck in on a roasting pan, covered it with foil, put a thermometer in it, and put it in an oven timed to crank up on its own, at the appropriate time. When the roast gets close to being done, I’ll max out the temperature and remove the foil to brown it. Very simple.

I bought some nice potatoes, washed them, salted them while they were still wet, and let them dry. Ordinarily I’d bake them at 450 for an hour, but that won’t be possible today because of the roast. I’m going to bake them at 200 for two hours and then leave them in while the roast browns. I think that ought to do it. If not, there is no law against touching them up with the microwave.

That’s the whole dinner. No pointless salad. No other sides. This is all you need. I guess shucky beans would have been a nice side dish, but the truth about steak and roasts is that almost anything you put beside the potato is a distraction.

It’s funny; it seems like every cook I respect makes prime rib in nearly the same way. Low and slow, finished off with high heat.

I don’t agree with people who say the meat should be pink all the way out to the edge. I like the contrasting flavors you get from differing degrees of doneness, so it’s fine with me if the outer inch is medium-well. That’s the juiciest, softest piece of the roast anyway. It won’t get tough if it cooks through.

I also disagree with those who cut their roasts off the bone and tie them back on. I’ve done it, but I think it’s probably better to keep the meat and bones together, for flavor. Maybe I’m wrong. Separating the meat and bones makes for easier carving, but you can separate them after the roast cooks, and then you don’t have to go through the horror of attaching twine and praying it stays on. The advantage of separating the meat early is that you can get extra seasoning close to the center of the roast.

I think I have a good system here. The kitchen is clean. The dessert is ready. The roast is taking care of itself. I have nothing to do for the next hour and a half. Sweet.

I got a funny compliment on Facebook this week. A girl I go to church with referred to my “unnatural cooking ability.” I thought that was interesting, because she’s probably right. There is nothing natural about writing down amazing recipes on the first try. I seriously believe God speaks this stuff into my ear.