Feliz Navidad

Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope your holiday is safe and full of cheer.

New Problem

The doctor had ordered mom to be released this evening, but when the nurses tried walking her, she started having bloody diarrhea.
So tomorrow afternoon, her GI doctor will be doing a colonoscopy. Please pray that there is nothing wrong with her and this blood is just something minor.
Her heart is doing well, as is the bladder infection. Your prayers and the Lord have brought her so far. I really feel like she would not have made it with them. Please keep praying.
Thanks so much & God Bless,
Heather Page

Real Talk from Fake Santa

Don’t even tell me I don’t go to the weirdest church in America.

I hope Pastor Terrance’s mother doesn’t see that video. I remember her talking about her disciplinary style. She said, “My hand is QUICK.”

Also Much More Likely to Work

I thought I would report on the woodworking efforts. Sadly I am too lazy to take photos.

I decided to make a Telecaster clone, using a router and some templates. A template is like a router stencil. You fasten it to the wood, and the router cuts away everything that doesn’t look like the template. Hopefully.

I put six pieces of walnut together to make a bookmatched slab, and then I succeeded in routing out the guitar body. But I still had to rout out the neck pocket and some other stuff.

A Telecaster has a bolt-on neck. “Bolt-in” is more like it. Okay, “screw-in.” It doesn’t actually have bolts. You make a rectangular pocket in the front of the guitar, and you put the end of the neck in there, and you use four big screws to hold it in place.

I received a neat Dewalt 611 router for Christmas, and I decided to give it a whirl. This is a very small hand-held router similar to a Bosch Colt, only better. It has a sweet plunge base.

I clamped the template to the front of the guitar body, using Irwin Quick-Grip 12″ clamps. These are newfangled one-hand clamps with silicone pads on the gripping surfaces. They’re great for quick clamping.

The router worked fine, and walnut seems to like being routed. But I had a major FAIL. As I was routing, I noticed that the template was a tiny bit off the centerline of the guitar. I assumed I had screwed up when I was attaching the clamps. I kept routing, figuring I would finish and see what the damage was. Then things went completely weird, and I ended up with a pocket that extended about 1/4″ to the left of its proper location. The clamps caused the problem. They’re so weak, you can’t use them for template routing. They let stuff move.

I had been using double-sided tape for routing, but I got this crazy idea that clamps would be less trouble. Wow, was I wrong. So if you decide to make yourself a guitar, take it from me: you don’t want Irwin Quick-Grip clamps. They’re too weak for gluing slabs together, and you can’t trust them when you’re using a template.

Now I have to figure out how to fill in the giant neck pocket and start over. I could just trash the body and make a new neck, but this body was intended to be a learning instrument, and now it’s giving me a chance to learn how to do inlays, so throwing it out would be stupid.

Yesterday I practiced using templates with the small router and my nifty new glue gun. I made a straightedge template from a piece of plexiglass, and I made two more from hardboard, and I used hot glue to fasten them to a scrap board in a way that formed a shape like a neck pocket. Then I went to town on it. I noticed a few things.

1. Pine is actually harder to rout than walnut, even though it’s soft. Sometimes it just refuses to let the bit go through.

2. If you use separate pieces to make a template, they have to be the exact same thickness in order to give you the best results. Otherwise, the router jerks when you move from a lower surface to a higher one, and I suppose it can tilt, too. You want the router base to be absolutely parallel to the workpiece.

3. Hot glue tears up hardboard templates and is not easy to remove from the workpiece. I had been cautioned that two-sided tape might tear up the wood, but the glue is worse. I suppose I have to learn how to heat it and soften it without messing up the work. But you can’t do that to glue that’s between a template and the work. I don’t think so, anyway. It’s easy to use heat to get the glue off the wood once the template is off, but by then, you’ve already torn up your hardboard template. Plexiglass, on the other hand, is stronger than glue and won’t be harmed. I have a heat gun, but it gets the work very hot very fast, so I was hoping I would not have to use it.

4. Small templates are just plain bad. You want the template to be as big as possible so it supports the router and prevents tipping.

5. When using a template, it’s probably best to use a bushing before you use your flush-cut bit. The bushing will give the template and workpiece complete protection while you use the router to remove over 90% of the material. Then you have a much easier job left for the flush-cut bit. It will also allow you to use the template when cutting at a very shallow depth. You can’t do that with a flush-cut bit, because you have to sink the bit all the way in to get the bearing in contact with the template, unless the template is very thick. I wonder if the rings on my router table will accept bearings. That would be cool.

I think I’m going to go back to the table router. It requires a lot less skill. I was concerned that the dubious flatness of my router table would cause problems, and maybe that’s true, but that will only matter at the bottom of the neck cavity. I should be able to get 90% of the way there using the table, and then move to a handheld router to finish it off.

Woodwork is great, but I hate the dust. Every time I use the router or sander for more than a minute, I have to take a shower. I’ve learned that router dust control is a fantasy. You can limit it sometimes, but even the professionals use the shop-vac for most of their sawdust.

Anything you do with tools has a price. With woodworking, it’s the danger of the machines and the unmanageable dust. With metalworking, the machines are much safer, and there is no dust, but you get splinters, and fluid goes all over the place.

I managed to machine a guitar bridge from 360 brass. I wanted a gold- or brass-colored half-ashtray bridge, and no such product exists. I had a round brass bar I bought to make bathroom drawer knobs, so I cut a length of it out and turned it into a rectangular chunk, and then I hollowed that out, giving me a box with one side missing. If you Google “ashtray bridge” and imagine what you see with the pickup part cut off, that’s what I have, except that I still have to put a few holes in it for screws.

I can’t believe how beautifully brass machines. The feeds and speeds are just like 6061 aluminum, and you can omit cutting fluid if you’re brave. It polishes up in a hurry, and when you work it, it almost seems to want to cooperate. It’s no wonder brass has been so popular throughout history.

I’ve decided I need an offset wrench for my router table, so I can remove the collet nut without scraping the table. But no one makes a 24mm wrench for a Bosch. They used to make them, but not any more. I think I’ll try to machine one out of steel. I have a bar that might work, but it may be too narrow to make the working end of the wrench. If that’s so, maybe the answer is to cut it out of a piece of scrap angle iron. With the bar, I could machine a couple of 90° angles into it for a very sharp offset. That would be nice.

I may also get a Jawhorse. I’ve been watching router videos, including one made by router expert Pat Warner, and I noticed he uses a special bench for a lot of his work. Most of it is what appears to be a two-by-eight, at waist height, parallel to the ground, with wide sides horizontal. He has a big C-clamp welded to it, to hold workpieces on it while he routs. If I had a Jawhorse, I could make a jig that would work about the same way and put it in the Jawhorse’s clamp. If you don’t know what a Jawhorse is, look it up. It appears to be an incredible tool. It’s a three-legged steel sawhorse type of thing with a giant clamp at one end. It does all sorts of stuff, and it has a workholding welding attachment that looks like a godsend.

Last night, I realized something about tools. I’ve always said tools end frustration and remedy helplessness. Last night I realized that working with tools is great for your character. Much better than sports, which teach you to crave attention and sex, and that women are disposable toys, and that you’re so wonderful, no one will ever make you pay for the bad things you do.

When you use tools and begin to see success, you will develop a sense that you are able to cope with problems. You will learn that creativity, perseverance, and prayer pay off. It will help you to realize that the failures you’ve experienced in the past are not predictive of your future, because you can defeat your challenges if you use your brain and refuse to give up.

It costs a lot of money, but then so do worthless pursuits like golf. And in the end, you (and your descendants) will have things you can touch and handle, to remind you how you overcame, and how to overcome in the future. To me, a nice handmade guitar would have a lot more gut impact than a trophy or a newspaper clipping or a diploma. It’s even better than cooking food that makes people’s eyes roll back in their heads. Food disappears in a matter of minutes.

Any effort you make to develop skills and accomplish things will help your character, but there is something special about tools. Perhaps it’s because the concept of tools is so fundamentally, inextricably intertwined with the concept of ability. A tool is an extension of your body and mind, intended to enhance you in the most direct way possible. It’s almost a prosthetic. When you have a tool you know how to use, you are augmented. You are more than you were without it. To acquire and learn to use tools is to redesign and improve yourself, and it will improve your confidence in other areas of life.

Get Out and Push

From Heather:

I had to bring Penny to Baptist Corbin this morning. The tests are showing that she has had a mild heart attack yesterday and that she has a bad bladder infection and her blood is low. Also her core temperature was 94 degrees. They will be moving her to the ICU shortly.
Please pray-
-for the Lord to drive this infection from her body
-bring her temp, kidney, and bladder functions back to normal.
-that any blood products that have to be used are safe.
-for her heart to be healthy and strong
-for the cancer to be driven from her body.
We love her and we need her.
Thank you and God Bless,
Heather

More

My friend Celeste passes this on, via Facebook:

The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing. Zephaniah 3:17

Follow-Up Glory

I know your prayers are working. They have been able to get Penny’s heart calmed with medications. Her body temp is coming up. Please keep praying, be sure to ask that the infection is controlled and she doesn’t get sepsis.
Love to all of you and God Bless!
Heather

Simple Woodworking Project Threatens to Penetrate 2011

With the good Lord’s help, this will be a Telecaster soon. The bookmatching is not all that great, but I think once the bridge, neck, electronics panel, vibrato, and pickguard are on the guitar, the lack of perfect symmetry will not matter much.

It looks bent, and it looks like the joint is big and sloppy. Those are illusions due to the shapes of the slabs I joined and the mysterious effects of digital photography. It’s like flat glass, and the joint is as tight as a liberal’s purse during a charity drive.

Don’t even ask how hard it was to get this far.

I decided to cancel the jointer/planer I ordered. I have to think about that decision, now that I have a relatively easy way to edge-joint boards.

Some day I’ll have a drum sander. But I have not gone that crazy just yet.

Help Out

From a reader:

Hi Steve. XXXX here, longtime reader, occasional commenter. I’ve noticed that you take prayer requests from time to time. I started to detail what it is I wish you would join me (and others around me) in praying for…. but it’s so long and convoluted that I think I’ll just say this: my mother is in danger from my father. Last week, in a fit of rage, he had her by the throat and pointed a gun at her head. Now they both behave as if nothing happened. (he doesn’t know that I know about this – I got details from my aunt, his sister, but this is not out of keeping with his behavior since my childhood) My mother refuses to leave, and he refuses to get help. And so the cycle goes as it has for decades, but the involvement of a gun strikes me as a critical escalation of his behavior. I love my mother and my father, but this situation is untenable as it stands. I would like you to pray for safety for my mom and for peace for my dad. Right now, there is nothing I can do if neither of them will ask for or accept help. I feel helpless and afraid. I have told them about your blog in the past; I don’t know if they read it, but if you do put a prayer request out, please keep the details vague for everyone’s safety. I don’t mean to put a caveat on how you choose or do not choose to pray – it’s just a safety consideration. I have been wanting to send this to you for a week now, but have hesitated because its difficult stuff to talk about, and I don’t know if you would want to be involved or not.

“But I’m With the Band!”

I got some interesting insights into God’s mind this week. I hope they came from him and not me.

I feel like God uses my dealings with other people to teach me what his life is like. This is a fairly obvious thing. For example, God gives us children and makes us participate in creation so we can understand what it’s like to try to teach and improve people, and what it means to love someone more than you love yourself.

I’ve noticed that there are times when people do things for me, in a way that is not a blessing. They come up with ideas that seem good to them, and they go forward with them, even if I discourage them. They may put in a lot of time or money or effort, and then I get the result, and they expect me to be thrilled and to reciprocate, and of course, I am not thrilled, and I do not reciprocate. What they’re doing is not generous. It’s manipulation. They do it for themselves, not me. There is a certain amount of love in it, but it’s buried in selfishness and stubbornness.

I don’t feel guilty about refusing to get sucked into the game, or about hurting their feelings. Sometimes you need to have your feelings hurt, and if it doesn’t happen, you’re actually cheated. Christianity is not about being nice. It never was.

Seems like God uses these people to teach me how he feels when we do what we want, in his name. I believe this is what “taking the Lord’s name in vain” means.

Jesus said people would come to him–probably at the Rapture–and point to the things they had done for him, and he would tell them to get lost, because he had never “known” them. They would not be permitted to attend the wedding feast in heaven; instead, they would have to suffer the Tribulation.

The word “know” means “know” the way men know their wives in the Bible. Presumably, he meant the wedding rejects had never become joined to him as parts of the Body of Christ, executing his will instead of their own. A man and woman are supposed to be one flesh. Christians are supposed to be united with Jesus, as his flesh on earth. If you’re off doing things he didn’t tell you to do, you’re like Dr. Strangelove’s arm, doing things the owner does not intend.

Jesus made it clear it was possible to do amazing things, using supernatural power, without pleasing him. He said people would point to worthless miracles they had done in his name. Apparently, you can get divine power before you get divine righteousness. Isn’t that always the way life goes? The legal driving age in most states is 16. Enough said.

We’re supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and we’re supposed to be cleansed of demons and filled with supernatural righteousness. I think that’s how it works. Jesus got baptized with the Holy Spirit, and he immediately went out and fasted to clear the demons out. Satan himself showed up to tempt him, and Jesus persevered and overcame, and Satan fled. After that, Jesus began using God’s power and doing great things.

It may sound crazy to suggest Jesus had demons assigned to influence him, but of course, it must be true. The Bible says he was tempted as we are, in all ways, and we know demons are assigned to tempt us. They give us addictions and bad attitudes. They drive us to act impulsively. They whisper corrupt thoughts into our minds. Surely Jesus had the same problem. In fact, this is proven conclusively by the appearance of Satan during the fast. Presumably, after 40 days, all of his underlings had given up, and Satan had to go in person to hit Jesus with the heaviest artillery he had.

The prison-like habits and tendencies demons get us to take up are called “iniquities” in the Bible. A sin is an act. An iniquity is a chronic thing. You can prevent a discrete sin by an act of will, but getting rid of iniquities requires supernatural power, which is why we have to fast and pray.

What did Jesus call the people who did false works in his name? “Workers of iniquity.” They were not clean. They were under the influences of demons and the flesh, and they obeyed those influences. An evil influence may tell you to build an orphanage for Jesus, when you’re really supposed to write a book. It may tell you to work a flashy miracle when you’re supposed to stand back and pray. It may tell you to give money to a bum who actually needs to starve until he agrees to go to rehab and repent. It may tell you to build a giant, shiny church and ordain homosexuals and write books about self-esteem and positive thinking, and you may become a millionaire many times over, and when you meet up with Jesus, you may learn that you might as well have been running a brothel.

This is why the church has done so many evil things. People serve demons and the flesh, thinking they serve Jesus. They work iniquity. If Jesus accepted their works, he would be serving Satan. The workers of iniquity are led by Satan, and they do works that please him, so if Jesus goes along with it, he himself serves Satan. That is not possible, so he rejects them.

It makes perfect sense. We are supposed to be the Bride of Christ, and those who are faithful (not all Christians) are to be spared the Tribulation so they can attend the holy wedding feast in heaven. If you serve iniquity, you are unfaithful, like a cheating fiancee. Over and over, even in the Old Testament, those who turn from God’s voice are compared to unfaithful wives. Look at Hosea’s wife. We are supposed to be one with Jesus, as a man and woman are one. Three’s a crowd. You can’t marry Satan and Jesus.

It’s a sobering concept. If it’s correct, most Christians are wasting their time (that part seems indisputable), and they will be left behind in the Rapture. Then they will have to suffer unspeakable persecution, as well as martyrdom. Probably at the hands of Muslims and “progressive” Christians.

I truly believe this is correct. It’s a natural extension of things I’ve learned from Perry Stone and Robert Morris, and it makes sense of scripture, and I didn’t sit down and figure it out. It came to me. Had it been the result of study and conjecture, I would have much less reason to think it was sound. Revelation does not come from the puny human mind. The Bible itself says only the Holy Spirit explains scripture.

In other news, I already received the router templates I ordered, so today I am going to try to work on building a Telecaster clone. I have to joint and plane some walnut and put it together with Titebond and clamps. I think I’ll get a crummy piece of pine for router practice, to use while the walnut sets up.

Yesterday I realized I have already found uses for the upper part of the 24-fret neck on my Telecaster, and I will not be able to reach that area when I play my Les Paul and 335 clones. That’s important knowledge. I didn’t realize upper neck access would be so important to me. I thought those extra frets were a novelty. Now I’m wondering if I can build a double cutaway Telecaster, to make neck access even better. If you look at the design of the Telecaster, you will see why some people think a DC design lacks solidity. Maybe glue would solve the problem. I know of no reason why you can’t combine screws and glue. Matsumoku did it when they made Gibson clones.

Hope this works. It should be tremendous fun, and I think it’s fairly easy, as woodworking projects go.

Youthful Stupidity is Not Cheap

This week I got depressed. That’s interesting, because it’s something that almost never happens to me.

I spent the first thirty years of my life depressed. My family was dysfunctional, and my childhood was pure misery, and it took me decades to outgrow the habit of depression. I still think of childhood as a prison; if I had to choose one thing for which I’m most grateful, other than my relationship with God, it would be my adult status. I have never gotten over the thrill of adulthood’s freedoms. I don’t have to ask people for money. I can get in my truck or on a plane and go anywhere I want. I don’t have to worry about older adults threatening to beat me up. I don’t have to deal with sadistic teachers any more. If someone makes my life unpleasant, I cut them off and never speak to them again. There is nothing like being an adult.

Maybe we feel the same way when we leave the earth behind.

I think my status as a perennially depressed person ended when I started law school. A career in law wasn’t exciting, and law school was fairly dull, but I had a lot of friends, and I had something to do with my time, and things went reasonably well. Since then, I have never been depressed for more than a day or two.

I got depressed this week because my father invited me out for a drink and then started nagging me about getting married.

You have to understand the history. My mother was a wonderful woman, and when she met my dad, she decided he was IT. He may think he caught her, but the truth is, she caught him. I believe this is usually the case in marriages. Men don’t like to admit it, because it ruins their reputations as ladies’ men, but we are much less picky than women, and women usually end up deciding whether a marriage is going to take place. Men like to think they set their romantic goals and achieve them, and that’s probably true when it comes to casual sex, but when it comes to marriage, women make the decisions. I know there are exceptions, and pride will drive men to dispute it, but the rule seems solid.

My dad was in his twenties, and God dropped a great wife on him without requiring any diligence on his part. As a result, he does not understand that life is not like that for all of us. Asking him about romance is like asking Lindsay Lohan about making money. He landed a great lady early without any real effort, so he thinks it works that way for the whole world.

The Bible says a good wife comes from God, not from your own effort. And it will not always happen on your schedule. According to the Jews, even Isaac, who was highly blessed, did not find a wife until he was middle-aged. Some fine people never marry, and it’s not because they didn’t try. There are some things in this life you can’t control completely, and finding a mate is one of them. You can play the field and then settle; to that extent, you have control. But if you’re hoping for a real blessing, it’s like waiting for rain. God supplies it when he feels like it. And the biggest factor in his timing is your progress as a Christian.

If I had stayed close to God back in the 1980s, when I started attending church and changing my life, I would surely have found a wife long ago. But I stepped outside the flow of blessings and into the domain of the enemy, and I got the kind of wages enemies pay. I accept that. Like all human beings, I was born an idiot, and idiots suffer until they recover from idiocy.

God is repairing my life now, but it is not an instantaneous process, and I am not going to saddle myself with an awful woman just because I’m getting old. I enjoy life tremendously, and there is nothing that can match a woman’s potential to cause misery. I am not going to try to force a blessing.

I didn’t enjoy being reminded that I had frittered away my youth. Ordinarily, I don’t think much about it, but parents have a way of pushing buttons. So I was down for a couple of days. I wasn’t looking for a bridge to jump off of, but I’m ordinarily very happy, so two or three mildy gloomy days have a big impact on my perception of my life.

It’s particularly upsetting to get this kind of speech, given the choices my dad would make for me. He means well, but he tries to fix me up with cocktail waitresses and cashiers. He used to try to fix me up with his paralegals. Anyone he thinks is good looking will do.

This highlights the magnitude of the blessing he received when he found my mother. He could have married some sleazy woman who saw him purely as a meal ticket. God blessed him, pure and simple. I could have a wife next week, if a cocktail waitress was what I wanted. And before you start lecturing me, I’m not referring to a nice Christian girl who had no choice but to serve drinks for a living. That should be obvious to any intelligent person.

My church is full of nice women, but most of them are black, and only a small percentage of black women are willing to marry outside their race. A lot of the women at my church are young, and while a woman should be no older than her husband, I feel a little odd talking to women in their twenties. Quite honestly, I always think, “This girl would be cheating herself.” Some of the women in my church are too old to have kids. That rules them out; I don’t care how nice they are in other ways. I’m not closing that door. It may seem unfair, since it means I won’t date a woman my own age, but then I didn’t make the rules of biology, and I won’t be held accountable for them. God put Ruth and Boaz together, after all. I don’t know of any Biblical stories of young men marrying old women. Feminism is a modern conceit; it has nothing to do with reality.

There are also women who already have kids. There are a couple of problems with this. First, I am not a kid person. I know I would love children of my own, but I don’t like being around other people’s kids all that much, except for really good kids, for short periods of time. And women with kids tend to be overly eager to get remarried, partly for financial reasons, and that causes problems. Second problem: being injected into a prefab family complete with a family court judge, a hostile adult male, and two sets of in-laws does not appeal to me.

Psalm 37:4 says God will give us the desires of our hearts. I have seen that happening to me, and I know it applies to all aspects of life. I’m not going to wreck it by making a desperate lifeboat-style grab for a wife. I have a wonderful life as a single man. Why would I trade that for a miserable life with a woman who was unattractive or unpleasant or lacking in faith? God will provide, or he won’t. I keep my eyes open, and I will make the effort, but I know the difference between carnality and spirituality, and I am not going to let my flesh run the show.

I don’t know if my church will provide a solution. I’ve only met one woman who seemed to have potential, and she’s young, and there are other issues.

I’ll say this for my church: for young people, it’s a marriage factory. I’ve seen a number of great young people get hitched there, and some are also developing good careers. They’re so lucky. They have stayed within God’s protection, and they are getting blessed early in life. Hopefully they won’t have to go through the chastisement and droughts people like me go through.

In other news, I’m planning to build a guitar. I found out how easy it is to build Telecaster clones. A factory neck is a necessity, unless you’re a skilled woodworker, but anyone who can run a router can make a body, and you can get perfect results and great control, without spending much. A Fender American Standard sells for $1000; for that kind of money, you could build the finest Telecaster known to man.

I’d like to make a guitar with a bookmatched walnut top. I already have the wood. I want humbucker-sized pickups and a Bigsby. Truthfully, it would be a Les Paul in a Telecaster shape. It’s very hard to build a Les Paul, and a Telecaster-type guitar would do the same things.

Telecasters are amazing. A Telecaster is a stick and a board, and it only has two pots, but it can still have an incredible action, great responsiveness, and all sorts of wonderful tones.

I’d like to play slide blues, and you need a guitar with a fairly high action for that, and I don’t want to dedicate any of my existing guitars to it, so building seems like a good way to go. For $500, I can make something wonderful. We’ll see what happens.

Last night I had a playing breakthrough. I keep studying theory and scales and whatever, and so far it has led nowhere. I had some ideas for “Sweet Home Chicago,” so I started working on it with no real plan, and before I knew it, I had a complete solo.

This tells me I may be able to do what “natural musicians” do. That would sure be a nice shortcut. Some people play and compose beautifully without getting into theory, and if I could do that, it would make life a lot more satisfying while the theory studies progress.

I know of several ways to approach the guitar. One is to sit around studying theory and scales. Another is to memorize other people’s arrangements note for note and go from there. Another is to hear arrangements in my head and try to write them down in tablature form. Last night I realized there’s a simpler way: just pick the guitar up and play. This is probably how B.B. King did it. I think I can guarantee you it’s how John Lee Hooker did it, because he played whatever he wanted, all the time, and he complained that he had no freedom when he worked with bands.

While I was working with the guitar, I realized I was getting to know the fretboard instinctively: which notes worked and which didn’t. I was finding positions to use. That stuff could be very useful. So from now on I plan to spend a certain amount of time every day, just PLAYING. I think it will work. One of the things I hated about the piano was that I practiced and practiced, but I never played.

I have to go make cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, and two pumpkin pies now. Happy Thanksgiving.

Or be Buried Under It

Sometimes God teaches us in the weirdest ways.

What is God’s work like? It’s like this: he makes great plans for us. He prepares big blessings for us. He brings them to us. And we turn them down. Then he withdraws while we fumble around and waste our lives. He remains with us, but he limits what he does for us, because to endorse what we do would adversely affect his own perfect nature.

Okay. That’s the background.

I joined a church. I started working as an armorbearer. I started working on books with the pastor. I started working in the kitchen.

The book projects disappeared after a new PR exec was hired. I was driven out of the kitchen after a new kitchen manager was hired. I still work as an armorbearer, but I have learned that the good things I want to do in that capacity will be very limited, so I am maintaining a reduced role.

It’s a little crazy. I’m a published author with a literary agent and a lot of ability, and I work fast, and I was willing to work for nothing. As to the kitchen, I was making the church $200 per week, and I could have earned them a lot more, and my food got raves. But I could not get permission to do the good things I wanted to do.

Yesterday I realized God was showing me what his life is like.

God has all sorts of blessings in store for us, waiting like fleets of shrink-wrapped Rolls-Royces in hidden warehouses. He wants to shower us with them. He wants to give us great careers, wonderful spouses, healthy families, and intimate relationships with him. He wants to turn us into powerful warriors who are able to harness the same might that built the galaxies. He wants us to see our prayers answered. He wants to work miracles through us. He wants to make tumors vanish. He wants to raise our dead.

And we say, “No, thanks! We have a better idea!”

I tried to bless my church, but I hit resistance, and now I have to sit back and do nothing, even though I still want to be a blessing.

Blessing a Christian, even for another Christian, is like trying to feed an angry baby. Even if you get the spoon in, they spit the food all over the kitchen. You can only succeed where God has chosen and prepared the field of battle in advance. You can only succeed when he has given you flesh and spirit allies. And you can only succeed where people are willing to shut up and accept the blessing.

You see this demonstrated over and over in the Bible. God had a great idea, but Eve thought she had a better one, and the result was a long-lasting curse on all mankind. God had a great idea, but the rebellious angels thought they had a better one, so they interbred with humans and gave us forbidden technology, and the result was the flood. God had a great idea, but the ten spies thought they had a better one, and the result was that hundreds of thousands of people died in the desert, a few miles from the Promised Land. The prophets brought the Jews great ideas from God, and the Jews thought they had better ideas, so they murdered them. God gave the great idea of undeserved power and help to the Christian church, and we decided we had a better idea: we would get God’s help by being good, without the baptism with the Holy Spirit. The result was two thousand years of impotence before Satan, who has ruled as a god even though he lost his title at the crucifixion.

We were supposed to raise the dead and cast out demons and heal the sick. By and large, we have failed. Miracles became so rare in the early centuries of Christianity that people began traveling to places like Lourdes because they could not get help in their own churches. We now have a Catholic church that gives the official title of “saint” to a person who performs three measly miracles! That’s ridiculous! Every Christian should see more miracles than that, every year!

We are weak and blind and poor and lame, as supernatural beings, because we preferred our own brilliant notions to God’s tired old plans.

Before the Jews existed, men rejected Yahweh. The Jews came along, and they rejected Jesus. Christians came along, and we rejected the Holy Spirit. We are no better than the people we gloat over. We are pathetic. We have no humility. We think we’re superior to our predecessors, but we’re as blind as everyone who came before us. It’s like I always say: if Jesus came back today, we would trample each other trying to be first in line to crucify him.

If Jesus came back right now, he would tell us (as he did two thousand years ago) that he came to baptize us with the Holy Spirit. He would tell us it was essential to our growth and success. He would tell us to pray in tongues, worship, pray with our understanding, praise God, fast, and study. He would tell us to quit worrying so much about doing good and worry about BECOMING good, through the Holy Spirit’s transforming power. And we would tell him he was crazy, because we like to think we can earn our blessings. Jesus was crucified two thousand years ago so he could give us power and help through our faith, and we still want him to give us what we earn by our own effort, and we think that’s more righteous than being given things we don’t deserve. We think God helps those who helps themselves, but that’s not in the Bible. That’s pure pride. That’s Satan talking. God helps those who believe and obey in their hearts.

Did Lazarus earn his resurrection? Did the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda earn his legs back? Find me a person in the New Testament who received a healing because he or she obeyed the law. The most blessed person in the New Testament was Cornelius, and he got God’s attention by praying, giving to the poor, and fearing God, not by approaching perfection under his own power. He was a Roman soldier! He made a living ordering people to kill other people! God saved him and all his house, and he poured the Holy Spirit into them. Meanwhile, many of the religious Jews studied the scriptures all day and tithed on the worthless crap they grew in their herb gardens, and God blew right by them.

Jesus burns with desire to give us power and blessings we can’t deserve, and we are determined to get by with the garbage (Paul called it “dung”) we get by our own strength.

Read the Bible. I’m not making it up. See what Paul said about earning salvation and blessings. It can’t be done.

One of the things I wrestle with as a Christian is the issue of giving up on other people. I’ve heard all sorts of testimonies about Christians who struggled for decades with sinners, trying to get them to change. After years of abuse, they finally saw results. Glory to God. But are we supposed to behave that way? I don’t think so. God doesn’t behave that way.

God told the disciples that when they were rejected in a town, they should shake the dust off their shoes and leave. God removed Lot’s family from Sodom and Gomorrah and drowned those cities in burning sulphur. God killed Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts. God destroyed the temple in Jerusalem twice. The doctrine of unlimited patience seems inconsistent with the Bible. If God himself doesn’t abide by it, why should we?

I think you show patience until you realize you’re wasting your time (which belongs to God), and then you move on. You continue to pray, but you reduce your earthly involvement. Otherwise, you end up endorsing stubbornness and rebellion, and your own character becomes corrupted. Repeated failure leads to learned helplessness, and after that, backsliding is inevitable.

Paul said more or less the same thing. He mentioned a man who slept with his father’s concubine. Paul didn’t just abandon this man; he turned him over to Satan so his body could be destroyed and the punishment would drive him to repent. What if Paul came back and did that today? Christians would shriek at him. You’re supposed to embrace EVERYBODY, ALL THE TIME! INCLUDE, INCLUDE, INCLUDE! Turn the other cheek! Imagine a multimillionaire TV evangelist telling Satan to come get somebody! It will never happen.

I’m sorry, but I side with Paul. You give people a reasonable amount of time and effort, and then you cut them off and let them fail. Otherwise, you’re an enabler. You’re helping Satan prevent them from growing up.

There is a dangerous idea spreading in churches: you are not supposed to say anything negative. Find that in the Bible for me. Read the prophets. Their writings were corrective, not laudatory. God didn’t raise prophets up to say, “Way to GO, Jews!” He raised them up to let people know they were headed off cliffs. Jesus himself was very, very negative much of the time. He whipped the moneychangers. He called the Judaism of the Pharisees “the synagogue of Satan.” He ridiculed the rabbis publicly. He even called Peter “Satan.”

Without criticism, there is no growth. The inexpressible value of criticism is the sole reason God wants us to be humble. A humble person will accept criticism and improve. A proud person will be like a clay jar that has been fired with flaws uncorrected. His neck, like the neck of the finished jar, will be stiff, and he will only be fit for the garbage dump. Hell is full of positive thinkers.

Find me a happy prophet who doesn’t criticize. I don’t mean a lying weasel who travels from church to church receiving big offerings for telling pastors what they want to hear. I mean a prophet in the Bible. There isn’t a single example. It’s even reflected in our language. Look up the word “jeremiad,” which was named for Jeremiah. It doesn’t mean “pep talk.” And you might be aware that one of the Bible’s prophetic books is called “Lamentations.” Find me the book of Congratulations. I must have overlooked it.

Gossip is wrong. Complaining with no godly purpose is wrong. But warning people isn’t merely right; it’s a commandment. God himself told us we would bear the sins of people we did not correct. Whom should I listen to? God, or itinerant Pastor Happy McFeelgood?

It’s right to offer constructive criticism, and it’s right to avoid getting overly entangled in situations you can’t fix. Imagine if Moses had stayed in Egypt and tried to reform the Pharaohs. He would have died there in obscurity, and his mission would have gone unfulfilled.

I believe God is telling me to respect my mortality and my limitations. Even with God behind me, there is a limit to what I will accomplish in this world, and I have to be a good steward of my time and effort. I am supposed to be helpful and patient and hardworking. I am supposed to pray for people (although sometimes that means praying God will discipline them). I am not supposed to get sucked into black holes that consume my valuable days and waste my faith and wreck my morale.

I am going to die. I’m pretty old already, and I don’t have that much time left to do God’s will. I have to allot my time and effort correctly, as led by the Holy Spirit. Stewardship principles apply to everything; it’s not just about money. The world is full of needy people who will listen to me and let me help them. Should I ignore them while I spin my tires with the stubborn? How will I explain that at the judgment seat?

If it annoys people that I say what I say, so be it. Find me a prophet who didn’t annoy people. Man-pleasing is one of the worst sins. We are told to take up our crosses, and that we will be persecuted (largely by other Christians). That tells me that it’s inevitable that plain-speaking Christians will anger other people. Big deal. Other people are puny, and they will die. The one I am trying to please will live forever, and he has infinite power to defend and reward.

I think I understand this lesson correctly, and I am grateful for it. I wish I were not so slow to learn, but there it is.

Now, if anyone wants to scourge me or put me in a cistern, I would appreciate it if they would call and make an appointment.

No One Else Can Help

Today a family friend is taking my father and me to lunch. This guy’s family has been devastated by one tragedy after another. I hope you will join me in praying that God uses this occasion to bring him into the kingdom where he can get some help.

His Marks are in the Wrong Places!

I had a funny thought this week.

What if the Antichrist has already been born and died, and his name was Mohammed?

Sound crazy? Think about it.

The Antichrist is a warped copy of the actual Christ. That means there should be similarities. Here’s a big one: the fundamental purpose served by Jesus Christ was to save people and baptize them with the Holy Spirit so they would become like him and do as he did, “infecting” the world and undermining Satan’s kingdom. Sort of like Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded.

What did Mohammed do? He created a Satanic religion, and then, like Jesus, he left the earth. Like the followers of Jesus, the followers of Mohammed slowly increased in numbers, and they came to control more and more of the world’s population.

In some ways, Islam is the opposite or negation of Christianity. Accepting Mohammed prevents you from receiving salvation. It prevents you from being baptized with the Holy Spirit. It assures that you will not become like Jesus or serve him. In fact, it is likely to cause you to persecute Christians and Christianity, as well as Jews and Judaism. True Islam requires the persecution of all unbelievers.

As you progress as a Christian, you become less fleshly. Your character improves. You shed things like selfishness and greed and gluttony. Your final reward is to go to a place where you are free from fleshly drives and you can live an enlightened life in true righteousness.

What happens when you progress as a Muslim? Okay, you go to hell. I guess I should be clearer. What are you told will happen as you progress as a Muslim? If you manage to win salvation (killing Jews and Christians is the surest method, according to Islam), you go to a place where all of your fleshly, crass desires are sated continually. You get 72 virgins, all the food you can eat, beautiful young boys, and lots of wine. Basically, you spend eternity living a lot like a hog. If you want to see a good imitation of Islamic paradise, read up on Hugh Hefner’s private life.

Islam promises to cause people to become degenerate, sort of the way Christianity causes them to improve.

A modern clergyman who calls himself a prophet claims the Antichrist will not be a single individual. He says the term actually refers to a people. Maybe it works like this:

1. Jesus was the Christ.

2. Mohammed was the Antichrist.

3. Christians are the body of Christ.

4. Muslims are the body of the Antichrist.

Jesus has always identified with his people. The Old Testament called him Israel. Jesus said that when we do certain things to others, we do them to him. Maybe the Antichrist is the same way. Maybe the term “Antichrist” can refer to Mohammed and also to the body of people who follow him.

Perry Stone suspects that the Catholic Church will eventually venerate Mary so excessively that she will replace Jesus, and the Muslims will get on board, and in the end, they’ll form a religion that serves the Beast. It’s an interesting idea. There are already Catholics who consider Mary a sort of co-savior.

Prophecy is a funny thing. It’s full of metaphors, so you have to be careful not to take things literally when it’s not appropriate. It’s even worse than that. Sometimes a Bible verse is true literally and also metaphorically. The Jews recognize three levels of meaning in the Bible. Anyway, the fact that the Bible calls the Antichrist a man may not necessarily mean he’s only one individual. The Bible calls Israel a fig tree. It calls Satan the Prince of Tyre. God deliberately made the Bible confusing so Satan and ungodly people would not be able to understand it. You can’t hope to understand it until you’re baptized with the Holy Spirit, and even then, you only get as much understanding as God thinks you need.

The term “Antichrist” may apply to more things than we know. There is a great spirit–Satan–for whom the term is probably most apt. Then there are the host of spirits who constantly persecute and work to exterminate Christians and Jews. They are an antichrist force. And then there is the human being we all expect to see one day, and there are lesser antichrists, like Hitler. I don’t know if I’d get all hung up, trying to drop the label on a single individual. But it may be that Mohammed is the best fit.

Muslims are turning out to be good at Antichrist-like accomplishments. We all wonder how the Antichrist will make people put marks on their hands or foreheads so they will be able to buy or sell. You would expect people to resist that. But look what they’ve done at our airports. They’ve manipulated us into posing publicly for nude pictures and allowing strangers to feel our genitals. That’s pretty impressive. If they can do that, maybe Islam can find a way to put the infamous marks on us. Over sixty years ago, the antichrist effort got Jews and other Nazi prisoners to strip naked in large mixed-gender groups, as if it were perfectly normal, and it managed to get Jews to get tattooed, which is forbidden by halacha. Getting us to mark ourselves should not be hard. Maybe it will have something to do with computer hackers making the money supply unsafe.

Maybe Muslims will bring the rapture about. Maybe it will be a wave of executions. The Bible says we’ll meet Christ in the air, but does it say how we’ll get there? Somehow I can’t see millions of people disappearing without explanation. A sign that powerful seems unlike God; he likes to leave room for faith, and an event that spectacular might make his existence extremely obvious. But I can imagine an epidemic of beheadings, poisonings, and shootings, performed by a new religion that has the world convinced that Christians and Jews are all that stand between the human race and peace and progress. We are already a stench in the nostrils of Europeans and American liberals. I could see them rejecting boring traditional religions, joining a trendy new cult, and marching us to the killing fields. People who don’t have the Holy Spirit inside them are wide open to crazy influences. Look at the Germans and Austrians. They were highly cultured, accomplished people, yet they tried to exterminate the Jews and gypsies.

Maybe the rapture will be the result of a new Kristallnacht.

It’s probably a mistake to sit around scanning the horizon for a flashy new worldwide celebrity with “The Antichrist” tattooed on his forehead. The antichrist process is already at work. It was at work in Eden, when Cain killed Abel. It was at work in Egypt, when Ramses tried to kill off the Jewish messiah (small M) Moses. The battle is already taking place. If we wait for the appearance of the Antichrist to slap us in the face, we’ll probably fail to notice a lot of his work.

I suppose I should leave this kind of speculation to people who are willing to study the Bible very closely, but I can’t help thinking about it.

Take up Arms

Mike got a weight loss miracle from God, and now his body is under a mysterious attack his doctors can’t understand. I am trying to get him to find a church and get serious about fighting back. Please pray for him.

Somebody Talk me Down

The other day I realized I had lots of homemade pork sausage in the freezer, and I needed to start eating it. It’s over a year old.

Here’s what I had for dinner tonight. It’s BISCUITS AND GRAVY AND HOMEMADE PORK SAUSAGE! It was incredible. I finished like an hour ago, and about every five minutes I hear myself say, “MAN, that was good.”

I do not understand my own cooking. Some of it is over the top, and some of it, like the biscuits and gravy, is very understated. What could be more understated than a biscuit? Sometimes I do something insane, like the whole stuffed pig covered in sage and apricot sauce, and other times I try to make something very ordinary, so well that it’s still exciting. You would think I would go one way or the other.

MAN, that was good.

Sorry.

This batch of sausage isn’t all that high in fat, so I had to add a spoonful of lard to the grease in order make the gravy. And I made the biscuits with a mix of bacon grease and butter, just to see what would happen. I also messed with the leavening and added a teaspoon of sugar, figuring there is almost nothing a teaspoon of sugar won’t help.

MAN…never mind.

I guess I’ll be reliving that meal until I go to bed. To me, there are two things that tell me when I’ve got a good recipe. First, I can’t quit eating it. Second, after it’s gone, I sit and think about it for at least two hours.

Why did this happen to me? Obviously, God has dropped a gift on me. What am I supposed to do with it?

Drowning in Food Ideas

Today I’m making spicy fried chicken with homemade sourdough batter, plus mashed red potatoes and cream gravy, with bacon grease biscuits. Inspiration is falling like rain. I hope this works. A lot of this stuff is coming to me as I work on the food.

More

The chicken was excellent, but I think I’m frying too much chicken in a small pan, because it’s not crisp on the outside the way it should be. The recipe is a keeper, although I have to increase the peppers.