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.

Many are the Afflictions of the Righteous…

From Heather:

Penelope will be having surgery sometime this afternoon. They will be removing all of the grafts and putting in a drain. Once the infection is cleared, then she will have to have another surgery. Please pray for success.

Bad Breath a Small Price to Pay

These are pretty sick.

Here’s some rolls without sauce.

Here’s some rolls with sauce.

Here’s the bottom of a roll, so you can see how they brown up. Crunchy and full of flavor.

Here’s how they pull apart. Beautiful.

The flavor and texture are excellent, but strangely, they seem a little sweet. Next time I’ll use more starter and make sure they’re sour. In any case, I have never had a roll this good in a restaurant. Very nice.

Baked up a small loaf, too, and it was also good, although you don’t get the pull-apart strips.

Thank you, Lord. These are tasty.

SHOO!

Sourdough is changing my life.

I started out by making sourdough garlic rolls. Then I branched out and made a loaf of bread. Then while I was pouring some excess starter down the sink, it hit me: “This looks a lot like fried chicken batter.”

Oh, yes.

I plan to try it, as soon as I can get a milk-based batter to ferment. I have another idea for improving it, but it will have to wait until next time. I should be able to fry some drumsticks tomorrow.

Again, I credit God with these ideas. The other day I sat down to write recipes, and a team of yard guys was making a huge racket near me, and I came up with nearly nothing. The next day a pile of ideas landed on me the way Plymouth Rock didn’t really land on Malcolm X.

Nothing like reaching too far for a metaphor.

Last year I fasted and then found I had improved self-control, especially in the area of eating. I lost lots of weight without much effort. This week I repeated the fast. I was starting to feel like gluttony was creeping back toward me. Now I feel great again. This morning I had oatmeal with water and salt, period. Can you imagine anything more disgusting? But I had no problem with it.

Mike has dropped something like 40 pounds since he accompanied me on my second fast, a few months back.

In a related matter, today I learned something interesting while Googling the origins of the swastika. As you may know, people claim the Nazi swastika was a reversed form of an old Buddhist symbol used in Tibet and India. That’s not true. It turns out the Tibetans use both forms of the symbol. Perry Stone claims that when Hitler was elected, the Tibetan monks said that a thousand of their “gods” left Tibet for Germany. Maybe they were right. There is a big occult link between Tibetan Buddhism and Nazism. Fun stuff to look up.

That’s not the thing I plan to write about, though. While I was reading, I came across the concept of “hungry ghosts.” The Tibetans believe there are dead people out there, roaming around trying to satisfy their earthly desires through us. I think I have that right; you can check. These beings have withered arms, tiny mouths, extremely slender necks, and huge bellies. If they try to eat, they feel intense pain.

This idea is also found in Christianity, but we call them demons. The Book of Enoch suggests they are the dead spirits of the giants spawned by rebellious angels who had sex with women. I believe the Book of Enoch is correct, and I have seen plenty of evidence to back it up. If you start with the premise that God is working to exterminate the seed of the fallen angels, many things in the Bible that are hard to understand suddenly make sense.

It’s interesting to me that false religions like Buddhism acknowledge what we know. They have the wrong explanations, but they see many of the same phenomena.

It’s also funny that proud Americans turn to Buddhism because they think it isn’t a religion. They think belief in supernatural beings is primitive. Buddhism is full of supernatural beings and concepts. Buddha as a Hindu, after all. When you go from Christianity to Buddhism, you’re not moving from superstition to enlightened philosophy. You’re abandoning one set of supernatural beliefs for another. Might as well be voodoo.

I think I drove one or more of these things off when I fasted, and that’s why I don’t have a problem with gluttony any more. I think fasting makes them miserable, and it teaches them they’re not welcome, and that more suffering is coming if they remain. It’s sort of like a deportation procedure for illegal aliens. In fact, I think aliens symbolize demons in the Old Testament. One of the big curses is to have aliens come into your land and have power over you. In the Old Testament, the Holy Land symbolized a human body, and the enemies of the Hebrews symbolized hostile spirits, so it only makes sense that demons would be represented by hostile aliens.

I know some Christians will jump up and claim you just have to tell them to leave in the name of Jesus. Unfortunately, Jesus himself said otherwise. Some will go easily, but others require prayer and fasting before they will pay attention.

On Thursday (second day of my fast), I found myself feeling compelled to watch food shows. Seems like a crazy thing to do, but I enjoyed it. Looking back, I think it may have been the Holy Spirit’s way of making my personal spirits suffer and leave. Call me crazy if you want. My size 30 shorts don’t lie. What do you have to put up against them? I know the answer already: nothing. It’s impossible to successfully contradict the things another person has witnessed.

I saw Jentezen Franklin on the tube last night. Ordinarily I have serious doubts about him, but he said some useful things. He expressed impatience with people who say they believe in Jesus, yet who don’t believe in Satan or demons. His question: how can you believe in someone who believes things you don’t? Jesus dealt with evil spirits all the time. If you’re a Christian, you have to believe they exist.

Fasting is incredibly powerful, and that’s why Jesus fasted after receiving the baptism with the Holy Spirit and before doing miracles and embarking on a ministry. If he had not fasted, the demons assigned to him would have remained and clouded his judgment, and he might have ended up using his great power to serve them, inadvertently. God does not like giving power to evil spirits. That’s why he doesn’t give us all the money and power and success we want, right away. Satan stuffs people with “blessings” they can’t handle, and it destroys them. God waits until it’s safe to bless us. That’s why he told us we had to put his kingdom and his righteousness first, and that our blessings would arrive later.

You wouldn’t let your kids eat dessert before the meat and vegetables. There is a proper order to things.

I’m glad I’m not fasting today. I have rolls and a loaf of bread rising, and I have to be able to sample them. Lunch will be a crummy chicken sandwich, though.

I’m pretty sure what I believe is true. It lines up with the word, and it makes sense. Try it yourself and see if you get the same results I did.

I Pity the Fool

The weather is glorious today. In Miami, fall is spring, and we are finally getting temperatures that make outdoor life bearable. I may actually DO something, like painting the soffit that was repaired months ago.

No, surely not.

I had a great experience last night. I went on a fast this week, and the end point was 6 p.m. yesterday. I was planning to make sourdough garlic rolls and pizza (in moderate portions, since I was fasting partly to keep gluttony out of my life), but my father offered to buy me dinner. He took me to Randazzo’s Little Italy, a restaurant run by a former boxer. I love this place. They play The Godfather nearly all the time, on big screens, and the food is pretty much what I would cook if I were Italian. Giant portions of red and white food, and it’s all tasty.

Last time I was there, I had rigatoni with neckbones and sausage, and I told the maitre d’ they needed to brine the neckbones in baking soda to kill the boar taint. I don’t know if they’re doing it or what, but last night, the neckbones were totally stench-free. Delicious. And the waiter grated a big pile of extra romano on a side plate, just because I asked for a heavy dose. That’s how you run a restaurant, baby. A lot of places cook pansy food that looks healthy but isn’t and tastes like silk flowers, to satisfy people who can’t get real about what they want. Randazzo’s puts a feed on, and you’re expected to take it like a man. The menu tells people that if they have high cholesterol, they should go eat Chinese food.

I enjoyed my dad’s company, and the food was fantastic, and I even had the sneaky pleasure of knowing my own food is a little bit better. On the way home, my dad made a special cell call to Mike to torment him with a description of the food we ate. All in all, I give the event a 9.

I am the opposite of a food snob. I completely understand beer snobbery and whisky snobbery, since good beer and whisky are a thousand times better than bad. But I do not understand frou-frou girly food. Give me twenty bucks, and I can make a dinner for four that will bring my guests to their knees. A great biscuit is better than boring pate. I guess Mr. Randazzo feels the same way. His ingredients seem very ordinary, but the food rocks. Good cooking isn’t about innovation or cleverness or expensive ingredients. It’s about knowing what tastes good, pure and simple. It reminds me of what Glenn Gould said: “You don’t play the piano with your fingers. You play it with your mind.” Good pianists say you can play anything you can hear. I think a determined cook can cook any dish he is capable of conceiving and appreciating. If you can imagine the taste, and your instincts are good, you will eventually be a great cook.

I can’t find the exact wording of the Gould quotation, but I think it’s right.

I’m fooling with sourdough today. I’m not sure how to work it. The first batch I made fermented for one day, and then I added yeast and let it rise. Last week, I made a batch to store in the freezer, and I let it ferment for two days, and it rose without yeast. This is interesting, because I’m sure sourdough without yeast has its own great qualities, but I don’t know how to manage it.

I will explain.

When I made the first batch, it fermented enough to taste good and have a great texture, but it didn’t rise until I added yeast. I put the yeast in and then formed rolls, and then it rose. This took around two hours, so the dough stayed in the shapes I created. If I use bacteria alone, I believe the rise will take a lot longer. This will probably cause the dough knots to melt back together overnight, and that would mess up the rolls. You want them to come apart in pieces.

I decided to take some dough out of the freezer, form it into a loaf and some rolls, and see what happened. I suspect the bacteria ate so much of the sugar in the dough that the dough will not poof up again, but you never know.

I’ve noticed that the fermentation makes the dough very sticky, as though it had extra water. So I guess next time I’ll have to cut the water back by maybe 5%. Maybe it’s just the gluten, absorbing water overnight. I don’t know. I am not a real baker.

I’d like to learn to make breakfast rolls with this stuff. If you’ve traveled to Europe, you may have had fresh-baked hard rolls with a continental breakfast. The ones I’m thinking of have a shiny crust, and they’re chewy. I’d like to make something similar with sourdough. I think it would be one of the greatest breakfasts possible. I already make croissant-type deals full of chocolate or strawberry and cheesecake filling, and if you put hard sourdough rolls next to them, along with strong, sweet hot chocolate, you’d have the makings of paradise.

My two favorite breakfasts are a Kentucky breakfast (country ham, biscuits, et cetera) and McDonald’s with ketchup on the side. After that, continental breakfast with butter and really good preserves. After that, eggs Benedict. So the rolls are clearly a priority.

I wanted to do sourdough biscuits, but I wasn’t sure how. I think the fermentation would kill the baking soda, and the biscuits wouldn’t rise. And the texture would be funny, because the gluten would activate. It occurred to me this morning that maybe the answer is to sour the milk, not the dough. Of course, that would be a lot like buttermilk biscuits, wouldn’t it? But as I understand it, the buttermilk we buy in stores is fake and doesn’t taste like the real thing. I wouldn’t know; my mom used to get the real thing when she was a kid, but she is no longer around to tell me what it was like. I suspect the sourdough bacteria would give a different result. Can’t hurt to find out. I can set some milk out with sourdough culture in it and see what happens. Ohhhh….hey! What if I gave up on the biscuits and made sourdough GRAVY? Oh, man. THAT’S an idea.

If I could make it with cultured milk, I could freeze the milk in advance. What convenience.

Now I’m thinking about croissants. Some day if I love someone enough to do it, I should make a big continental breakfast with pain au chocolat, strawberry cheesecake croissants, and sourdough rolls. That would KILL.

I wish I had a source for real butter. The expensive stuff they sell in stores (Plugra, and so on) is no good. If you’ve ever had fresh (churned) butter from an actual cow, you know what I mean. Maybe the crud in the churn gives it flavor.

I made the mistake of watching The Food Network while fasting. I watched Man Versus Food. It’s a show in which a guy goes around trying to eat challenging objects.

I respected some of the things he ate. There was a greasy roast beef sandwich that looked good, and the same place also served roast beef combined with a cheeseburger and sauteed onions. But for the most part, it seemed like the restaurateurs simply took ordinary food and made it larger. That’s not cooking. That’s engineering. Boring. I make a lot of big food, but generally, there is more to it than size. For example, I make chicken-fried steak on a Frisbee-sized biscuit, but I use a home-aged rib eye instead of a nasty chunk of cube steak with varicose veins, so it’s not like I just added weight. Anyone can make food bigger. I can’t get excited about that.

The show is good, even if the food is not always interesting.

I also enjoyed a show about cheap restaurants. The title is “Something, Drive-Ins, and Dives.” I forget. A guy with bleached hair traveled from place to place, checking out great cheap food. I particularly liked a Mexican place he found. They operate out of a Shell station. Seriously. A Mexican family put a restaurant kitchen in there, and the food is supposedly really good.

I keep thinking of my dream of opening a pizza place. I won’t rule it out. I’ve learned so much at my church, I can crank out six dozen garlic rolls in twenty minutes, starting from zero. Pizza is also pretty fast, and if I used sourdough, it would be even faster, because I could do prep days in advance. And I still haven’t had a cheesecake that compares to mine (Randazzo’s has a very good one, though).

Maybe some day. God has to open the door and show me a way. Restaurants are really bad investments, because they almost always fail, so you don’t want to start one without a higher power stacking the cards.

Randazzo’s was inspiring. It shows how well one good cook can do, if things work out.

Progress Never Stops

Last night I had the best Italian (maybe “Italian-style”) meal of my entire life.

Since I stopped working in my church’s cafe, I’ve been getting lots of food ideas. I got some wonderful ideas for improving my garlic rolls.

One big change involves the structure of the rolls. As you may know, many people make garlic rolls by tying strips of dough in knots, which improves the texture immensely. I like to cut the strips lengthwise before tying them. This way you get two strips, which are better than one. This week I decided to divide them one more time, into four strips, and I took steps to prevent the strips from re-joining during the rising process. I also twist the strip assemblies like candy canes before tying the knots.

I’m also using sourdough now. I made my own starter using bacteria from a very unlikely source, and I made a big batch of dough without yeast. The idea is to keep portions of this stuff frozen. When you need one, you put it in the fridge. It can sit there all week (maybe longer), and whenever you want to make rolls, you mix it with fresh dough, and in a fairly short time, you have excellent sourdough with a beautiful texture.

If it gets old, throw it out and thaw a new portion. They probably cost fifteen cents to make.

Yesterday I decided to make three rolls. One with all the improvements, and two the way I was making them last week. I bought the cheapest grating cheese (mystery-brand romano) I could find, since I was only doing a test. I also made spaghetti rigati (spaghetti with longitudinal ridges) with sauce based on tomato paste and Cento cherry tomatoes. I had a can lying around (bought it so I could try it in pizza sauce), and I figured it was time to use it.

The cheap cheese turned out to be the best grated cheese I had ever eaten. It didn’t have a lot of weird, funky flavors, the way many expensive cheeses do, but the taste and texture were perfect by my standards. The sauce was a thing of beauty; I think I know of better tomato products to use, but the cherry tomatoes were very good, and I left the skins in for fiber.

I made the spaghetti, buttered it, dumped half of it in a bowl, piled a lot of thawed-out mozzarella (still cleaning out the deep freeze) on it, added the rest of the spaghetti, tossed it slightly, added sauce, and grated cheese over the result.

The roll…I can’t describe it. I would almost describe my response to it as reverence. I covered the rolls with garlic sauce and grated cheese, and I ate them one at a time, and while all of them were excellent, the one I did the new way was on its own plane of existence. It fell apart beautifully. The mix of textures was a joy to behold. The sourdough flavor and aroma transported me. And that cheap cheese complemented it perfectly.

I think I have a way to improve the dough even more, but I would lose a little bit of the convenience. I can’t wait to use it in pizza.

There is no doubt about it. God guides my cooking. The ideas fall like rain. They land on my head when I least expect it. What is the purpose? I can’t even guess. I thought I was supposed to be making this stuff in church, but I was not able to do that.

I would love to open a pizzeria and sell nothing but pizza, rolls, and cheesecake. I honestly think people would faint in the parking lot. But people keep telling me quality doesn’t count in the pizza business. It certainly hasn’t counted for much in other business ventures I’ve been involved in, except for law. Oddly, law practice seems to be a purer than average meritocracy. Gladhanding and office politics count for something, but if you’re good, work will come to you, because the people who aren’t good are afraid to stand on their own feet; they will want you to do their work for them and hold their hands.

It would be great to do things for my church, but it’s extremely difficult to bless Christians. It seems like they mess up every good idea you give them. Buy your church a new chapel, and they’ll use it to store fertilizer. Buy them chef’s knives, and they’ll use them as screwdrivers and chisels. I suppose this is what God has to deal with every day. “Here’s a pillar of fire and a cloud to guide you through the wilderness and defeat all your enemies, and WAIT! Get away from that golden calf! What are you DOING? Get back here! Stop burning your babies for Molech this INSTANT! Are you listening to me?”

I assume God will not help a church make good use of things, unless the people in the church are on the right spiritual wavelength. If there isn’t enough prayer and enough determination to walk by faith instead of jumping into projects that seem right to our limited minds, God takes his hand off what we do, and the enemy wrecks it. Maybe. There has to be some explanation. Maybe I am pushing my church to accept things God wants me to keep, or maybe God is teaching me to have realistic expectations when I deal with churches (my pick for likeliest explanation). Anyway, it looks like my only hope of accomplishing anything with the good things God gives me is to hold onto them, do my best with them, and support God’s work from whatever profits I receive.

I am really enjoying the ideas I get, even if they don’t bless anyone except me and my family and friends.

This week I’m repeating the fast that delivered me from overeating. I do that once in a while. I felt it was time. It seemed like gluttony was trying to creep back into my life, which is to be expected periodically.

I couldn’t get anyone to join me on this fast. Oh, well. I’ll get my blessings, and I tried to help other people get theirs. What more can I do? When you’re a Christian, you have to accept the fact that very often, you are going to have to step out on your own, because other people will not want to go forward with you.

The armorbearer team at my church fasts every Monday, but it’s not much of a fast. It’s surprisingly hard to get people to go a day without calories. We fast on Mondays until 6 p.m., which amounts to less than 24 hours when you count sleep time, and we are allowed to have any liquids we want. You could have ten milkshakes on this fast. I think it’s better than nothing, but I don’t think it achieves nearly as much as a zero-calorie fast, and I was starting to accept it as my standard fast. So I needed to upgrade. I’m back to zero calories, and I’m doing this two-day deal, which is called the Armorbearer Freedom Fast.

Mike has lost over 35 pounds since he went on the last Freedom Fast. That’s a good result and a great testimony to God’s power and kindness.