If Spiritual Gifts are Biscuits, Love is the Gravy

I had an exciting morning. Maybe it’s strange to type that at 10:15 a.m., but I will stick with it.

Around 8 months ago, I dreamed about a woman I know. She was on a university campus, trying to get students onto a bus for some kind of outing she thought was related to serving God. I never saw her or the bus, but I knew they were nearby.

The university was dedicated to show business, which is ironic, considering how little education you need in order to be a performer. It was as thought Disney had built a college.

I was a Jewish man, and I didn’t look like myself. I appeared to be about 65. I was wearing a sportcoat and nice pants. I was walking briskly to a place where I was expected to speak.

A warm wind arose and started blowing toward me from the front. It lifted me like a kite. It felt wonderful. Very comforting. Although it was a headwind, I was propelled forward, as though I were falling in that direction. I was moving higher, however.

Eventually I came to a cluster of water oak trees with thick, shiny foliage. I reached out and grabbed the branches to steady myself.

I wasn’t upset or scared. I was enjoying myself.

The wind felt great against the front of my body. It was like a loving, supportive caress.

I woke up, and I was lying on my stomach. My hands were up as though I were holding onto branches. I still felt the love and warmth. It was as though the mattress loved me.

Ever since I turned back to God and started thinking about the two visits Jesus paid me in the Eighties, I have been trying to get a good grip on the sensation of supernatural love. During his visits, I physically felt his love radiating toward me and through me. Sometimes I get that feeling these days. I felt it this morning. I believe we’re supposed to feel that way most of the time. Love is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, like joy and peace. If we’re supposed to feel peace and joy that come from God and flow through us to others, surely we’re supposed to feel love, too.

It’s not morning now. A friend of mine came into town, so I interrupted my writing. I’ll continue.

This morning I woke up before the alarm went off. While I was lying in bed, I felt the same sensation I felt in the flying dream. It felt as if God was somehow caressing me with the mattress. I felt the sensation on and off through breakfast. I tried to focus on it and hold onto it.

My friend showed up, and we spent a few hours together. During that time, the feeling decreased somewhat.

You would think that love would increase when you’re around human beings, but it appears that that’s not always true. There is something about the presence of other people that pushes love into the background. We have other things to talk about. We aren’t known for putting our affairs on hold so we can sit and talk about how much we love each other. Also, if you’re with someone who is not used to a warm, fuzzy version of you, it can be hard to let that version appear in front of them.

People tend to pull you backward. Their presence can pressure you to behave as they’re used to seeing you behave. The longer you’ve known them, the more likely this is to be true. I suppose this is why Jesus surrounded himself with new people instead of starting a ministry with his mother and brothers.

I can see why Jesus spent so much time alone. The purpose of love is to be shared with human beings, but human beings themselves, by their very nature, tend to make it hard for your love to flow. After you’ve been around them for a while, it makes sense that you would want to go off into the desert and recover. I guess you need to sit with God and remind yourself why you love them!

Funny, but true.

I keep getting the impression that there is going to be a love revolution in the church. We have the Holy Spirit back. We use his gifts. Lots of knowledge is being restored. It seems like supernatural love is the component which is obviously missing.

In my flying dream, God showed me that his love lifts us up to do good works. Doing good works out of obligation is not what makes him happy, and it’s tiresome, too. Yesterday I saw Mark Hemans quote a passage in which the Bible said something about faith and love working together. I just found it. Galatians 5:6: ” For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.”

There are a lot of relatively cold and even cranky people out there displaying (or pretending to display) the gifts of the Spirit. There are certainly a lot of greedy and narcissistic people doing these things. We don’t see love pouring out of many self-styled prophets and apostles, unless the love of cameras and money counts.

I think something big is happening. I certainly hope so. The church has to be cleaned up before the rapture, and it seems obvious to me that the restoration of supernatural love is a necessary part of the process.

Don’t be too Quick to Approve of Glamorous Conversions

It looks like Kanye West is promoting Christianity now, and he is holding church services. People are trying to decide what to think about it.

West is interesting to me, because Richie Wilkerson, the son of my former pastor, married him to Kim Kardashian. Richie is all about money and fame. He is in very deep trouble. He is toxic, just like his dad. There is no possibility that he gave the Wests good advice while he was counseling them. When you see Kanye West claiming to belong to Jesus, you can’t just swallow it at face value. You have to ask God what’s happening, and you have to use common sense.

West supposedly turned to God several years ago, and Richie was his mentor. Kim Kardashian visited Trinity Church, and the armorbearers were forced to treat her like a VIP and give her a special seat. Rich Wilkerson made himself look ridiculous on Twitter, calling West, whom he barely knew, “a special friend.”

He always treated famous and wealthy people like that. They would show up briefly, and he would take them into the green room behind the stage and try to buddy up to them. It didn’t have anything to do with God. Famous people can help you raise your own profile, and if a millionaire comes to your church and tithes, you will receive a tremendous amount of money.

It was disgusting when the armorbearers had to honor Kardashian. She had a sex tape out, and she posed in Playboy. She is America’s leading proponent of sexual sin. She teaches girls to be sluts, plain and simple. She has never stopped. When Wilkerson kowtowed to her, it was as though he were bowing to the Whore of Babylon.

He also made the team honor Luther Campbell, AKA Luke Skyywalker, one of the filthiest rappers of the last century.

God is not a respecter of persons. This means he does not like it when you give special treatment to someone who is socially prominent. God wants you to honor everyone who can receive it, and he is especially concerned about the way we treat people who are on the bottom. At Wilkerson’s church, those people were pretty much kept away from the pastors, who had no interest in them at all.

Preachers who want to justify whoring out to the world and associating with prominent sinners like to point out that Jesus spent time with tax collectors and drunks. The difference is that Jesus was a leader, not a follower. He showed up to change sinners. Rich Wilkerson chases unrepentant sinners and lets them mold him.

The words says a believer is to be the head and not the tail. Shallow Christians think that means we get to be on top all the time and push other people around. It’s true that it implies dominance, but it also implies obligation. We are required to lead, even when it means giving up popularity. Wilkerson and his crew are not leaders. They look to see what sinners want them to be and do, and they obey.

As pastors, his bunch doesn’t have an inch of guts among them. They can’t bear to say anything that might drive a person to leave the church and take his money with him. They are incapable of leading.

If you can’t say no, you are a follower.

Jesus reached out to sinners, obviously, but he did it so they could repent, not so they could invade churches, take over, and turn them into nightclubs.

People used to make fun of Trinity and call it “Club Trinity” because the leaders worked so hard at putting on a great show. They spent $72,000 on four spinning lights for the band, and they used smoke machines.

These things are on my mind when I think about the Kanye West story.

I don’t know what famous preachers are saying about Kanye, but here is my guess: they’re shaming Christians who are skeptical, saying, “Don’t judge!” In fact, one of my Youtube favorites has put out a video to that effect. I have been worrying about his ministry, because it seemed to be declining, and now I see confirmation that there are problems.

He also changed the name of his channel. It used to be called Cardboard Box Church, after the little box structure he puts up in public to draw people. Now it’s named after him: Thomas Fischer. I am always leery of ministries named after the people who run them. It’s a way of honoring yourself.

Preachers love, love, love money, and they love virtue-signaling as well as accusing others falsely in order to make themselves look good. Most of them know nearly nothing about God and do not hear from him, so they say whatever benefits their bottom lines. It should not shock anyone if they try to shame Holy-Spirit-led Christians who speak wisdom. They’re led by Satan, not the Holy Spirit, and they say what he tells them to say.

The phrase “don’t judge” has caused the charismatic church more trouble than anything over the last 20 years or so. Jesus never said, “Don’t judge,” all by itself. He spoke a longer message which contained the phrase. Preachers and sin-loving Christians don’t quote the whole message because it shows they’re wrong.

We are supposed to warn other people about sin. We’re not supposed to be self-righteous about it, but we have to do it. It’s in the same passage as the bit about not judging hypocritically.

Think of all the people Jesus criticized. John the Baptist did the same thing. So did Paul. So did Jude. Come on. Think.

Judging isn’t just permissible; it’s mandatory. What matters is why you judge and whether you judge correctly.

I think Kanye West is sincere. I think he is a tormented person because he hears from spirits, and while he has listened to evil spirits for most of his life, he also hears from God, and God is waking him up. That being said, he appears to be a long way from anything resembling powerful, correct Christianity.

The shows West puts on are very much like the kid-pleasing shows Trinity relies on. Lots of flash. Lots of good music. The problem is that there seems to be no substance. I haven’t watched an entire show, but what I’ve seen so far has been very shallow.

People may hear the excellent music and see the spectacular presentation and say, “The Holy Spirit has to be in this.” Come on. Wake up. Liberace put on a better show than Billy Graham ever thought about putting on. If you think a good show proves God is behind things, you should pick up your Bible and go see Beyonce, who is corrupting people like a typhoon of sin.

Are people repenting at West’s services? Are speakers telling people they have to stop sinning? Is there prophecy? Are they casting out demons? Are their healings? Are people being baptized properly and speaking in tongues? I haven’t seen any of this yet. If these things aren’t happening, then Kanye’s services are just man-glorifying backslapping sessions.

It’s not enough to cry and sing and yell that you love Jesus, in front of a crowd, so people will be impressed. The word says that if you love Jesus, you obey him.

It’s disturbing that West is trying to make Jesus hip. Jesus is not, and never will be, hip. The world hates Jesus, as he said, and it always will. The world hates his children, as he said it would. That will never change. Whenever someone preaches a “cool” Jesus, he preaches a lie. He is telling people they can stay in the world of the flesh and still please God. The Bible makes it very clear that the flesh can’t please God.

People may say God is using West and his big services to reach a lot of people, because God “needs” famous people and their ability to reach millions. That’s a complete lie. The age of famous preachers and huge churches is ending, not beginning. That whole business was a failure. Satan ran it. The real church is going to be driven underground, and God is preparing us for that. We won’t be able to have big fancy churches. Christianity will spread from person to person, in small groups. That’s how it has always spread. The successes of the big churches were illusions.

Satan has never needed famous people or big gatherings to work effectively. Sin and iniquity spread like the flu, from one individual to another. It works just fine, and Satan got the idea from God, who thought the idea up first.

I think there is a lot of hope for Kanye West, but he is a baby right now. No one should be following him. He doesn’t know anything.

If you see his secular career flop, and famous people start shunning him, then you should be aware that God may really be working in him. If God gets anywhere with Kanye West, his associates will flee, and his wife is likely to follow.

Popularity is a mark of a failed Christian. Jesus assured us that the world would hate and persecute us. You can be popular within a limited circle, but that’s about it.

The other day I told someone I saw more hope for Kanye West than for his wife and Richie Wilkerson. West is a strange guy, but he is willing to go against the crowd, and that may save him.

In other news, God has emphasized something he told me long ago.

The other day I saw a Mark Hemans video, and he told someone demons had entered her when she got tattooed. He says demons like to enter with tattoos, and he is against tattooing. In that respect, he is aligned with God, who forbade the Jews to do body modification, other than circumcision.

In ancient times, body modifications were used to glorify false gods and to honor the dead. In fact, the dead were often worshiped as gods. For a long, long time, tattoos were rightly considered disgraceful among Christians. A tattoo was something you got when you were 18, in the navy, and very drunk. It was something you later regretted. Now many Christians are obsessed with tattoos. You go to churches and see them covered up with them.

The “judge not” obsessives have a field day with people who are against tattooing. They love to point to tattooed people who are supposedly leading wonderful lives. They used to circulate memes featuring a very prominent young man who was highly successful and covered with tattoos.

His name was Aaron Hernandez.

The murderer. Who killed himself in prison.

The memes dried up after he was arrested.

Some people actually claim God told them to get tattooed. I’m not saying it could not happen, but it probably does not. God hates tattoos. A tattoo is a mockery of the Torah, which was made by marking animal skin. It also defaces the body, which was created in God’s image.

There are Christians who say tattoos are fine because we’re not under the law. Here’s something people need to know: we are still under a law. We are not under the law of the written word, but we are under the law of the Holy Spirit. I know this is terrible news to many people. What the Holy Spirit commands, we must do, just as the Jews had to obey the dietary laws and keep the sabbath. The Holy Spirit is still against tattooing, and by the way, he doesn’t like marijuana, either. He doesn’t like a lot of things that are suddenly permissible in our declining culture.

People still use tattoos to honor false gods and the dead, in case you have not noticed. I don’t just mean Maoris and Africans. I mean your American neighbors.

I’ve been against tattooing for a long time. The fad came to us not just from idolaters but from criminals, just like chin beards, head-shaving, and sagging pants. Prison is an earthly picture of hell. It’s a foretaste of hell, and it mainly traps people who are hellbound.

Prisoners are the biggest losers in society. They are the tail, not the head. They have no rights. They receive no honor. They have no liberty. They can’t even control their persons. When you’re a prisoner, your handlers, who may be of the opposite sex, can strip you naked and look up your rear end pretty much whenever they feel like it. Then can put you in restraints. They can blast you with hoses.

At some point around 1990, Americans began changing their appearance so they would look like convicts. That was a very bad thing. You become what you imitate. By imitating convicts, we prove we love evil, and if we love evil, we hate good.

Why does Satan love body modification? Because it allows the demons that control you to turn you into a replica of themselves.

God killed the physical bodies of demons in the flood. Now they want bodies very badly. We supply those bodies by inviting them in. When a demon makes a home in you, it wants to redecorate. It’s like taking over a church and turning it into a mosque. It marks territory. It allows demons to express themselves through us.

Does this remind you of anyone else?

What does the Holy Spirit do when he comes to live in you?

He cleans you up. He will tell you to get rid of offensive clothing. He is likely to tell you to get your tattoos lasered. He changes your speech. He changes your posture and your facial expressions.

I started thinking about tattooing while I watched Mark Hemans deliver people, and God put things into words for me. God told me demons want to create man in their image.

That’s the essence of body modification.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. To learn about God, look at Satan. To learn about Satan, look at God. God creates people in his image, and evil spirits want the same power. They want nice filthy vessels to live in. Vessels whose very appearance, without words, thoughts, or actions added to it, is an insult to God.

I know there are lots of preachers out there who have gaudy, trashy tattoo “sleeves,” and maybe these people do some very good things. I don’t care. God never changes, and I’m not here to make excuses for people who don’t want to admit fault. Accept it, or go ahead and be angry with me. Doesn’t matter to me, because I will still say the truth.

I assure you, there are a lot of tattooed preachers who hate their tattoos and would back up everything I’m saying. The fact that a person has a tattoo doesn’t mean he likes it or approves of it.

The body-modification craze has gone off the rails, which proves it has a supernatural foundation. When things don’t make sense in the natural, they make sense in the supernatural, because there is always a supernatural cause for things that do not make sense.

People are cutting their noses off. They are cutting fingers off. They are castrating themselves. That’s not self-expression. It’s self-destruction and the expression of the selves of demons that live in us.

Sex-change surgery is body modification. Giving anti-puberty hormones to demon-controlled kids is body modification. Huge, creepy, breast implants, which are extremely popular, are body modifications.

This is fascinating stuff, but anyone who gets it and talks about it will be dismissed as crazy. Satan always attacks and falsely accuses anyone who turns the light on and exposes the roaches.

On the positive side, God gave me a more pleasant revelation. He thinks we’re cute.

The other day, I found out what agape, the Greek word used to describe God’s love, means. It means warm, affectionate love. It doesn’t mean a sense of duty that makes you so determined to help people that you become a permanent doormat and punching bag. It doesn’t mean you have to give both of your kidneys away to strangers. It doesn’t mean you levitate and glow, or that you always have a silly, pretentious grin on your face.

I learned about love from my mother. She adored me. When I was a little kid and my sister was at school, she used to take me places and spend time with me. We used to make paper boats and put them in the waters of Tampa Bay. We used to go to the zoo at Lowry Park. Sometimes she would put me on a bed and just lie next to me and look at me.

I think a lot of kids don’t have experiences like that. Many mothers don’t love their kids, and many who do can’t show it.

It’s natural to love small, helpless things that need your care, especially if they’re your children. This is why abortion is so sick. We attack and murder the smallest, most defenseless, and most in need of our love.

Parents don’t love their kids out of duty. They love them because they’re cute. Something about the smallness of children and their dependence on parents touches the heart in a special way. It’s not rational, and it doesn’t take work. You don’t have to struggle to love your kids. Not unless something very odd is going on.

Today, I felt that I could see myself as my mother did. I thought about the little things she bought me and the things she did for me. I took those things for granted, but she did them out of unstoppable love, and I’m sure she wished I understood that. She wanted me to understand the love she felt as she was doing things for me. I really didn’t.

I can’t go back and be good to my late mother, and my dad is also dead, but I still have one parent I can appreciate, and I can let his love for others flow through me.

Compared to God we are very small and defenseless. When he sees a person struggling alone with problems, it’s like seeing a lonely kid no one wants to adopt and help.

When God saves you, it’s not unlike stopping to pick up a puppy you see sitting beside a busy road. That’s what motivates him.

We can’t be controlled by love all the time, because there is also justice. We can’t always be nice. God doesn’t want us all to be weepy vegetarians who run animal shelters. Not during this age. The age of total peace and love won’t arrive until after the tribulation, and trying to force it to come now is sin. In this age, sometimes we have to be very hard. The world can’t receive perfect peace yet. But when we restrain ourselves and hold back, it should be for a good reason.

Very interesting.

I am not an exemplary Christian, but he certainly tells me a lot of things. That’s because of prayer in tongues. If you want to hear things yourself, instead of just imagining that what you already believe and want to hear came from God, you can go to the same source.

You Aren’t Called to Drag People into the Kingdom

I’ve been watching more Mark Hemans videos. Hemans is a healer and teacher from Australia. He travels the world doing speaking engagements.

So far, I’m favorably impressed. I think God does heal people through him. I believe his teaching is generally sound. I do see some issues, though. He seems proud, he doesn’t seem to teach anyone else to do what he does, and I don’t sense a lot of love coming from him.

If you heal people and don’t teach them to be like Jesus, you accomplish nearly nothing. Everyone dies, so all physical healings are temporary and relatively unimportant. God created the world so he could reproduce, and our primary purpose here is to be instruments of reproduction. If you exhibit all sorts of godlike characteristics, but you don’t have disciples, you are a failure.

For all I know, he has hundreds of disciples who are just as powerful as he is, but I doubt it, because if they existed, they would be in his videos. Tom Loud, an American healer I follow, creates all sorts of disciples, and he films them. If Tom Loud heals you, he is very likely to make you heal the next person who needs help. Loud gets it. I don’t think Mark Hemans is doing what Tom does, and if that’s true, when he dies, people who depend on him instead of God will be left without help.

I am not that thrilled with Loud’s approach to sanctification. He seems very content when strangers tell him they’ve met Jesus. I’m sure very few of them are doing well in their walks. Salvation is the most important thing in life, but you can’t stop there.

I like Hemans’ teaching. I like the way he receives words of knowledge. I like watching him heal and cast out demons. I like it when he flat-out tells people tattoos are not okay and that they need to get rid of their rock music. I just wish he would get other people involved.

There is a big danger for Christians who do great things with the gifts of the Spirit. If they go it alone, without peers or disciples, they can turn into celebrities, and it’s not a big step from there to receiving worship. Most famous healing preachers fall into this trap. They convince people they’re necessary, so people end up treating them the way they should treat Jesus.

When I think about this, I always think about something I heard about the Iraqi army. When an American unit gets a new piece of equipment, they hand out manuals and teach everyone how to use whatever it is they’ve been given. In the Iraqi army, an officer in charge of such a unit would confiscate the manuals so no one else could read them. This would assure that he, alone, knew how to keep the equipment working, and it assured his continued value to the army.

Christians have always been like the Iraqi army. Clergymen like to keep people dependent. The Catholic Church once banned the Bible in order to prevent lay people from reading it, interpreting it on their own, and introducing doctrine which conflicted with the church’s Satanic notions. At Trinity Church in Miami, Rich Wilkerson Sr. had a rule that only he could receive a message in tongues. At my last church, we were forbidden to lay hands on people until the pastor, an active pedophile and rapist, cleared us to be sure we were as qualified as he was.

We are called the children of God, and children are supposed to become adults. If you’re tying your son’s shoes when he’s 7, or he’s wearing a diaper when he’s 4, something is wrong. Most preachers don’t teach us how to tie our shoes. They want us to keep coming back to hear their nonsense and pay tithes every week.

Mark Hemans seems stronger on prophecy and the word of knowledge than Tom Loud, and I think he takes a better approach regarding cleaning up your life and becoming sanctified, but Loud (and The Last Reformation) generates disciples, and that’s crucial.

Hemans speaks very honestly, without fear of offending. That’s a wonderful thing to watch.

I saw Hemans warning people to cut certain individuals out of their lives. He said the Holy Spirit was behind it. I liked that. One of the strangest things God ever showed me was that cutting the toxic people out of my life was much more important than bringing beneficial people in. You can get by with only God for a companion, but you can’t thrive if you mulch yourself with parasites.

I call this revelation strange, but it isn’t. It’s exactly what Jesus and Paul taught. It seems strange because modern Christianity is so phobic of disapproval. Our man-pleasing, money-loving leaders teach us to be doormats who waste our lives praying for stubborn friends and relatives who are most assuredly going to hell no matter what we do. Jesus and Paul said to cut them loose, except in the case of marriage, and in that case, Paul said not to stop them if they left.

I’ve been thinking about this over the last day or two. Sometimes it surprises me to find out who turns out to be a good investment of my time and who doesn’t. Often, a person who seems very humble and receptive–even desperate–at the start turns all high and mighty later on, and once the wall is up, I can’t do anything for them. Sometimes people who seem totally useless at first end up very serious and committed later.

Maybe desperate people are more inclined to end up this way, because a desperate person will clutch at any lifeline, even if it’s something he or she would not ordinarily want. They say there are no atheists in foxholes.

This is something for men to think about when they marry. The last thing you want is a woman who pretends to be excited about God because she’s actually just excited about you and desperate to be taken care of.

Women are known for molding themselves to men in order to hook them. You like truck pulls? She loves them. Can’t get enough. You like riding motorcycles? She thinks it’s really sexy, and she totally supports it. You like eating meat? She’s all about steak. She wouldn’t dream of trying to make you a vegan. You want sex almost every day? Wow, so does she. She’s so glad she found a guy who doesn’t think it’s weird.

You marry a woman like that, and the first thing you know, your bikes are on Craigslist, you’re eating soy, you only get sex when you’re obedient, and her most absorbing hobby, apart from decorating the nursery and ridiculing you to her girlfriends, is throwing out things you love.

A lot of women convince themselves they’re not like this even though they are. A manipulative and dishonest person will lie to herself as much as anyone.

Feminism is a real problem. It has convinced most women they’re supposed to run their households and “correct” the males. They’re not. The New Testament makes it very clear. The burden of leading families falls on men. The other approach is evil. This is why matriarchal cultures are represented so well in prison.

I’m not going to cite scripture. If you don’t know the scriptures, you should read more often. There is a spirit in America that tells us masculinity is a bad thing, when in reality, it is part of the nature of God, and it’s essential to our protection and development. Prisons aren’t full of the children of single dads. There’s a reason for that.

Women are much more likely to be corrupted by the occult, and to spread the infection to their families. How many male fortune-tellers have you seen? How many male witches have you seen? The term “witch” is gender-neutral, but witchcraft is so full of women, we think it refers to a woman. We even use the term “male witch” because we know anyone who hears the word “witch” will assume it refers to a woman.

I saw this dynamic at work in my family. My own mother, a Christian, brought the occult into our home. She went to palm readers, and she tried to read my palm. She had my astrological chart done. My dad, whatever his faults were, never had the slightest interest in the occult.

The first practitioner of the occult in the Bible was a woman. Eve practiced witchcraft with Satan, because she thought she knew better than Adam and God. She was going to “correct” things. She took a dangerous, forbidden drug and then convinced her husband to take it. We all know where that led.

Statistics say over 80% of yoga practitioners are women. Most early Mormons were women; this is why they resorted to polygamy. More women than men believe in astrology. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are mostly women. The vast majority of American pagans are women.

All of the prophets and apostles were men. Moses was a man. Joshua was a man. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were men. The tribes of Israel were named for men. Israel itself is named for a man. Jesus was a man. All of the priests were men. Paul would not permit a woman to teach publicly. There is a reason for these things. Men were created to stand guard.

A husband and father is supposed to be the priest of his house. If you get stuck with someone who sits back and clucks her tongue and disagrees while you share Holy Spirit revelation with her, your house will be a mess. This is why the Bible says–twice–that it’s better to live in the corner of a rooftop than in a big house with a quarrelsome woman.

A lot of women resent the notion that God is masculine, but he is. The scriptures call him “Father” and “Son.” We never see “Mother” or “Daughter.” Mary was inseminated by the Holy Spirit, according to scripture. Females can’t inseminate. God did not appear as a woman and let Joseph inseminate her. The Bible calls the church “the bride of Christ,” not the husband. Jesus is called “the sower.” Sowing is a masculine activity. Males sow their seed in females.

Who was God’s big enemy in Israel? I don’t know which false god did the most damage, but I can tell you this: the only one that had a second altar in the synagogues was “the queen of heaven.” These altars still exist today.

It could not be more obvious.

The unfortunate thing is that Satan has convinced women that their position is degrading, that they are victims, and that they are naturally superior to men. This is why so many men have wives who act like mothers. I don’t know how men like that keep from killing themselves. Often they resort to adultery to make themselves feel whole again. I know a guy who is doing that right now; he is a prolific, committed, determined serial adulterer. His wife is like Chrissy Teigen, Hillary Clinton, and Angela Davis, rolled into one. She is completely unbearable. She’s like a little sun of compressed hate. I can’t even guess how many demons she carries around with her.

I can’t tell you how I pity him. He married her because she gave him extraordinary sexual pleasure. Ironic.

Sometimes I wish I had found a wife when I was young, and then I think about this guy. If God gave me the choice between dying right now and marrying his wife, I would beg for death.

Anyway, if you hook up with a woman who can’t listen, and you think it’s cute that she’s so spicy and spirited, or you think you “need” a hard-headed, “strong” woman because she’ll make you a better man, you’re going to suffer like you can’t imagine, and it’s all your fault. You will never please her, and she will never stop crushing your spirit.

Women who listen and who don’t have chips on their shoulders are very refreshing, and it’s always a shock to find out you know one. It’s not always the ones you think will turn out that way. If you find a wife like that, she will be a source of strength all your life.

To get back on track, I know some people who seem to be at, or past, the end of their teachability. If that’s the case, we will probably grow somewhat distant until and unless they get over it. I feel God is letting me know that. I’m fine with it, because dealing with such people is like trying to push a car in the mud while the driver stands on the brake. I am only too happy to quit pushing, and I love meeting new people who cooperate and provide me with some reward for my effort. There is nothing like seeing someone run with what you tell them and then come back to bless you.

There are some people who are never going to improve, but I’m sure there are also people who are simply ready to be allowed to ferment until they decide to listen to God, and it’s not necessary for me to pester them and cajole them until they do. Someone else can help them when they come around. I’m not God, and I’m not the whole church.

Listening to Hemans, I felt a lot better about excluding my biological sister from my life permanently. He told folks they needed to let certain people go. He didn’t say they should fast or beg God to fix them. There are some people you just can’t tolerate. I rarely wonder what’s happening to my sister. I have no desire to contact her. I consider every day without contact to be a beautiful gift, and I have prayed many times for God to keep her away from me.

I see why God won’t let me join a church. I find a teacher, learn a great deal, find out what his ministry is missing, and move on to someone who has something else to show me. If I stuck with one guy, I’d be held back. Almost all pastors are seriously stunted.

Don’t put any man on a pedestal, and don’t marry your mom. That’s my advice for today.

Prophesy, or Wishful Thinking Gone Overboard?

I may not be the best Christian on earth, but I always have a fresh testimony. Surely that’s worth something.

I wouldn’t be saying this if I weren’t leading up to an example. Here goes.

I believe God tells me things, and I have also stepped out in faith, based on some teaching from Derek Prince, and started prophesying. If you’re wondering how to prophesy, and you already speak in tongues, the best way I can explain what I do is this: do the same thing you do when you speak in tongues, but speak English.

That’s probably not much help.

When you speak in tongues, you open your mouth and start moving the necessary parts, and as long as you provide the motion, the Holy Spirit gives you things to say. You can do it as fast as you can move your mouth. You will never run out of new syllables. You probably won’t have any idea what you’re saying, and it may even sound like gibberish, but it works.

I had tried prophesying before listening to Derek Prince, and I had not managed to say anything that didn’t sound crazy, so I stopped. After listening to Prince, I figured I had to try again. He was not an idiot, so if he told people they could prophesy, he had to be right.

I prayed for God’s help, and I started doing it. Now I do it as much as I can bear. It’s somewhat stressful, because my carnal mind keeps saying, “Your mouth is going to write a check God won’t cash.” It says I’m making things up.

I can think of a few things I thought God told me (not prophesies) that didn’t pan out. VERY few. Generally, they come to pass. This is one reason (along with not having a giant ego and zero ability to perceive how others see me) I don’t call myself a prophet. The Old Testament says, “when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.” That’s not quite the same thing as saying such a person was a false prophet, but it’s not praise, either. You wouldn’t want to jump into the Red Sea and try to outrun the Egyptians based on advice from a prophet who made mistakes.

Maybe there is such a thing as a student prophet.

I can’t think of anything I have said in prophesy that hasn’t turned out to be right. Maybe I’ve forgotten something. Generally, though, the things I say are somewhat vague. “My heart is with you, and it can never be taken from you.” Things like that.

Prophesying and having God tell me things are not the same thing. When you prophesy, you, yourself, say things by God’s inspiration. When God tells you things, it may happen in other ways. You may ask God a question and feel you know his answer, for example.

Anyway, I had a spot on my hand. This is where the testimony starts. A few weeks back, I saw a little spot, and I froze it to get rid of it. I don’t want to get into details, but I have had many little things pop up on my skin over the years, and I have very solid medical reasons not to assume they’re cancerous, so I freeze them off in order to avoid the hassle of going to a dermatologist.

A few days back, it seemed like something was still going on in the area of the spot, and there was an area of discoloration about the size of a shirt button. It wasn’t a big black melanoma, if that’s what you’re thinking. Anyway, it disturbed me, and I was not sure what to do.

I believe God told me I could not have cancer. I can’t recall when I heard this. It was not in prophesy. I don’t worry much about spots for this reason. But here this thing was, on my hand. Little voices kept telling me it was very serious and that I was doomed.

If you’re wondering why I have concerns about skin blemishes, or why I don’t freak out and demand surgery every time I have one, it’s because I grew up in Florida. If you live in Iowa or some other place where people get limited sun, you probably know nothing at all about skin cancer. Floridians know skin cancer is a)100% curable, and b) extremely unlikely to cause serious harm unless left untreated for a very long time, unless it’s melanoma, which is not hard to distinguish from the other types. In Florida, skin cancers and precancerous lesions are about as exciting as warts. It’s hard to make people from up north understand that. They hear the word “cancer,” and they think it’s extremely serious. It’s not serious. Not at all. Unless you let it go until it takes over.

It’s very hard to make people from up north accept that, but it’s true.

I was about to call a dermatologist, but I really wanted to continue relying on God for healing. He has given me all sorts of little miracles, and his healing is perfect, free, and painless, unlike the kind of healing doctors give. I also thought about what I believed he had told me. I thought he had said I could not have cancer. Should I ignore that and treat it like a lie? Was I wrong to think he told it to me? If I was wrong, what about all the other little things I think he said, which I have been relying on every day? Had I been building a life inside a house of cards?

God’s word doesn’t say he may heal some of our diseases once in a while, when he feels like it. It very clearly says “all” our diseases. It’s not ambiguous. I don’t want to make God out to be a liar. On the other hand, is it wrong to question my own ability to get healed, or my ability to hear him?

You can imagine the things I was thinking. Little demons must have been flying in circles around my head, yelling at me through megaphones.

I decided to rely on God as long as I felt I safely could. I cursed the spot and the spirits behind it. I commanded my body to be healed. I fasted. I did all the things I knew to do. I’m still doing them.

I did take one carnal step. I put hot sauce on the spot. Skin cancers and precancerous lesions don’t like it. The capsaicin in hot peppers can make them dry up and peel off. I had a couple of big spots on my face around 12 years ago, and I used capsaicin, green tea, and curcumin powder to make them go away.

I believed God had given me the okay to use the sauce.

Last night, I was determined to keep prophesying, even if I felt I might be wrong. I kept telling God I needed to know the truth, though. I have had my strongest Christian friend pray twice for God to help me not to prophesy falsely.

While I was prophesying, I said the spot was going to go away. I said it would be smaller in the morning.

I really painted myself into a corner there. If God was speaking through me, the spot had to be smaller in the morning, so if it wasn’t smaller by noon, I was prophesying falsely.

I was stuck.

This morning, I woke up and started praying. I kept thinking about what I had said. The spot didn’t look any smaller than it had the night before. I figured “smaller” meant “smaller in diameter,” because it seemed that the spot had been getting smaller in diameter for several days. I told God I believed “morning” meant “no later than noon.”

Part of me felt I was telling God how long I felt I could honestly wait, but another part felt I was giving God extra time in order to help him, because the spot didn’t seem smaller yet. I was not happy about the feeling that I was assisting God so he would not fail. We should never make an excuse for God or try to help him in any way. That’s all carnality. If you’re expecting God to do something, and he doesn’t do it, don’t make up a reason or try to come up with an explanation that lets God off the hook. If it doesn’t happen, he didn’t actually say it would. Period. Just admit it and pray you don’t make similar mistakes in the future.

If God tells you to build an altar, get some rocks and build it. If he says he’s going to build it, don’t you dare lift a hand.

I got up to use the bathroom, and I washed my hands. I noticed the spot felt funny, like it had a little projection on it. I poked it with a fingernail, and a piece fell off. I got back in bed to continue my prayers, and I poked it again. Another piece fell off.

Then it occurred to me that the spot had gotten smaller. The diameter was the same, but two flakes of abnormal skin had come off, so the mass of the spot was significantly reduced.

The thing I prophesied had come true–completely–and God, being God, had managed to throw me a curve ball by giving me what he had promised, in a way I didn’t immediately recognize.

So…if this came true, what about the other things God seemingly said, which were also very good?

You see the position I’m in now. If one prophesy was true, the others must be true, and because they’re so positive, it’s hard to believe. Fortunately, you don’t have to have faith in a prophesy. It’s not like a prayer. Once God says something will happen, it will happen whether anyone believes it or not. I don’t have to have faith. I just have to sit here and find out whether I was really prophesying.

Prophesies are so unconnected to faith, their fulfillment often brings anguish and death to people who don’t believe them. God has a history of saying bad things were going to happen to the very people who did not believe what he said. They didn’t have faith, and the prophesies still came true.

God has actually used prophesy to foretell bad things that were sent to punish people for not believing prophesy.

I’m not going to scrape and pick at myself to make the prophesy come true. If it’s a prophesy, it does not require my involvement, and my involvement would merely obscure God’s activity and cast it into doubt. It would cost him his glory. He has to have the glory so other people can benefit from what happens to me. If it’s clear he did the work, it will build other people’s faith.

I’m walking by faith here. I’m writing about this before the story ends. I’ll have to follow up honestly no matter how things go.

In other news, I found another Youtube healer. His name is Mark Hemans. He appears to be Australian. Interesting guy. Very serious. He looks like the real thing. I don’t see him teaching other people to heal, though, and that’s a major concern. Judge for yourself.

Addendum

I’m amazed that I forgot to mention this. The night before the skin on my hand started flaking off, I felt a very mild stinging sensation in the area three times in succession. Then I felt something like pressure. I wasn’t touching my hand. There was no physical object making contact with it.

“Stinging” is the best way I can describe it, although it was so mild, it could not be called pain. “Tingling” might be a better word.

I was startled when it happened. Sometimes people feel tingling when God touches them to perform miracles. I felt God touching my knees 6 or 7 years ago when he healed them permanently during a church service. It felt sort of like a jacuzzi jet. If you’ve ever put your leg maybe a foot away from a jacuzzi jet in your bathtub, you know what I mean. It was a warm, soft, pulsating sensation.

Sorry I didn’t mention this yesterday.

Smoke Signals from a Kindred Spirit

I feel like writing something that isn’t about Christianity or tools.

I have never completely given up my interest in math and physics. I quit graduate school in 1996 because the University of Texas and ADD drugs had pretty much crushed my soul, but I have kept all my texts, other than the ones ants ate in Miami, and I still do problems from time to time. I remember about 5% of what I learned. I can’t understand a lot of my old homework papers. Still, I am way ahead of a typical college graduate, and I like to use what remains of my old skills.

If you told me I had to take the midterm and final for a calculus class, I could be ready to nail them in a month. Same should go for what is known as “University Physics.” That’s about the best I can say for myself. I wouldn’t even be able to read a graduate-level quantum exam.

Sometimes I watch science videos on Youtube. There are some excellent lectures available. It’s no exaggeration to say that a smart person could use Youtube and Amazon to get the equivalent of a Ph.D. without ever applying to graduate school. A really disciplined person could copy down the curricula from a couple of good institutions, go through the courses online, and end up just as able as someone who studied at a university.

Because I occasionally watch this stuff, Youtube suggests STEM videos from time to time. The other day, it suggested videos by Andrew Dotson, a man who is currently in graduate school. His videos are about the physics grad school experience, which, I hope, is like no other. I hope medical students and math students and so on are not as miserable as physics students. Law students aren’t; I can tell you that. I did virtually nothing in law school, had a great time, and graduated cum laude.

A high percentage of physicists are incredibly bad teachers. There is no way to make you understand how bad they are unless you’ve been there. There are some wonderful instructors out there, but many professors, especially those who write textbooks, are really obstacles to your success. They hurt more than they help.

Here’s a story I like to tell people about my experience. I took Quantum Mechanics at UT. The undergrad version is very hard. The graduate version is exponentially worse. My professor gave us a set of homework problems one week. One of the problems was so hard, I refused to try to write out the endless pages of vector mathematics that gushed out of it. I knew it would be so cumbersome it would be nearly impossible to write or read. I got so desperate, I splurged on Mathematica, a math program which, I hoped, would spew out and print the math for me.

It was a nightmare.

At some point, I talked to my professor about it. He said, “I couldn’t solve that one. How did you do with it?”

This is not an exceptional physics story. It’s totally normal.

Physics is very hard even when you have good teachers. At the University of Miami, my undergrad teachers were generally good. Some were fantastic. I had one guy, Harry Robertson, who was so bad he actually caused a riot in the 1950’s. He gave an exam and failed most of an undergrad class, and they drove their cars around campus, honking their horns to protest. This was long before protesting was cool. I always thought he was sadistic. He never showed any sympathy when people complained. I took his Mechanics class (because I didn’t know about him), and nearly everyone, including grad students, pretty much died on the first exam. We talked to him as a group. He actually laughed at my entire class as if we were complaining about a pea under a mattress. Our futures were on the line, and he truly thought our distress was amusing. Strange guy.

You would think that once a professor causes a riot, his university would take some sort of action to improve his teaching methods, but I took his class around 35 years after the riot, and he hadn’t changed. He just smirked at us. Smirking was just about the only facial expression we saw from him. He was in his seventies and looked ten years older, so it was strange to see such apparent immaturity.

Here’s a fact: when most of a class fails a test, the professor is the problem. You can lose 10% of your class because they’re lazy or simply not smart enough. You can’t lose most of them. In order to get into the class, they had to prove they were qualified, and they were not failing all of their other classes.

He used a book written by a couple of guys named Fetter and Walecka. There are lots of great mechanics books out there, notably Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics, but he picked the worst one in existence. It was not much better than having no book at all. My wild guess is that either Fetter or Walecka was one of his buddies. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered to read it because he cared so little about his students. The book was total garbage, so between the instructor and the book, we were really up against it.

When my Mechanics class bombed on the first test, Robertson’s defense was that one Chinese guy got a good grade. He didn’t ask himself how much help this student got from the Chinese government, which was paying his tuition and expenses. For all he knew, this student was faxing his homework to China so government employees could help him do well. Or maybe he was a true genius. But you don’t flunk most of a class simply because Norbert Wiener strolls in and aces your test.

There is no such thing as an independent Chinese exchange student. They are government projects from a collectivist culture. They don’t just send them over here and let them flounder, or rebel, on their own.

Regarding Robertson’s demeanor and behavior, it’s not exactly rare for STEM people to have no social skills, and sadism is not unusual, either. My undergrad advisor had a touch of it. Most people don’t get a brain with two big halves. If you’re a mathematical genius, you probably won’t break the 60th percentile on the verbal SAT, and you will probably have trouble forming normal relationships. Of course, there are many exceptions. I was one of them. I’m not saying I was a math genius, but I was capable of doing physics well, and I also had a very high verbal aptitude. In physics, I got to know (or at least be acquainted with) a lot of guys who were missing some important psychological components.

You may need to click the gif to make it work.

It’s disturbing to realize that technology, which rules our lives, is in the hands of people who are generally somewhat maladjusted and often extremely hostile. Nothing can be done about it, though.

I quit physics, and it hurt a lot, because I knew I could succeed with a little time and rest. It’s a good thing I quit, because physicists are generally unhappy in their careers, not just in graduate school. But no one likes to fly close to the sun and then plummet to the sidewalk.

I had a legitimate medical problem which made studying very difficult. I was full of drugs that made sleep impossible and had all sorts of powerful emotional effects. UT was not helpful. Their main concern was getting sued. A professor named David Gavenda had had some kind of run-in with an undergrad who was being treated for ADD, and when I went to the department for help, they mentioned Gavenda more than once. They processed students the way a Perdue plant processes chickens, and they did not want any grit in the machinery. If students dedicated years of undergrad study to physics and then moved across the country to study at UT, and if the school’s unwillingness to provide any assistance when they were in need caused them great hardship, it was not important. It wasn’t that UT wanted to hurt them. It was just the inconvenience to the list, as the Nazi officer in Schindler’s List said concerning his unwillingness to help Itzhak Stern get off the train to Auschwitz.

The professor who was supposed to be helping me was Tom Griffy. He was an avuncular Oklahoman who seemed like a great guy at first, but the impression I got whenever I probed for signs of support was that his only concern was to do the least he could do for me in order to prevent an ADA lawsuit. It was extremely obvious that he was being advised by attorneys, not educators.

I was sleeping one or two hours per day at best, and I was under tremendous stress. I asked to be allowed to drop a course and concentrate on another course I felt I could do well in. His response was to force me to take a D in the course I wanted to drop. In the end, after I had to take a medical leave because a misguided doctor tried to treat my ADD with Prozac, he took away my teaching job and said I could only stay if I agreed to settle for a master’s degree.

He did do me one favor. He gave his E&M class a take-home exam, and my computer crashed while I was working on it, so I had to start over by hand. After I submitted the result, my computer functioned again, and I printed out the answer I had originally intended to give him. I put it in his faculty mail box just so he would realize I was not a moron. To my amazement, he accepted it even though it was late. That was a grand gesture by UT standards, and I did appreciate it.

Dealing with the school showed me, repeatedly, exactly how I measured up in the ecosystem. I was getting $15 per hour to tutor students privately. UT contacted the grad students and asked us if we wanted to tutor their athletes for less than half of that. Bag boys at the grocery a few blocks from my apartment made more. Kaplan was paying $12.

When I went to the student pharmacy to get my Ritalin prescription filled, a lady who worked there told me they had it, but I couldn’t have it. She said it was discrimination. That’s the word she used. She said they had a female athlete who was taking huge doses, and she got all the Ritalin. You know how that works. The athlete probably didn’t graduate, and if she did, she’s probably stocking shelves at a store somewhere. She was still important, because UT was all about sports.

It was truly bizarre. Like any university, UT had a socialist mindset, so they provided inexpensive medical insurance which was supposed to cover just about any need I had. And I could not use it. I had to go to pharmacies and pay full retail for drugs. They never tried to explain this. Good thing I didn’t have cancer. Maybe Bevo, UT’s mascot, might have come down with bovine leukemia, and he would have gotten my chemotherapy drugs.

UT had a reputation for treating students like worthless and fungible objects, so I could not say I had not been warned.

There is no way to make other people understand how miserable I was after things went sour at UT. I did not have a single friend, which is not unusual for grad students in physics. I couldn’t even get away from my stress by sleeping, because the pills would not permit it. I actually found myself lying in bed making a sort of rocking motion to distract myself, like a zoo animal that had been kept isolated for 20 years. It was the best I could do.

I had pinned all my hopes on physics, so I had no other plan for my life. Law school wasn’t a tantalizing, prestigious alternative. To me, it was like running home and flipping burgers.

I was away from God, so when I prayed, I felt as though I were in a concrete cistern and the prayers bounced off the ceiling.

When you don’t even have God to talk to, you have serious problems.

Since leaving UT, I have had no one to talk to about my experience. I can tell people about it, but they can’t understand.

Youtube surprised me with promoting Andrew Dotson’s videos, and I’ve watched several. It’s crazy to see how right I was about grad school. People have gaslighted me, trying to make me feel I wasn’t physics material, and some have said the teaching and books weren’t the problem. Now I have someone who confirms what I’ve said. I’ve never really had that before. For some reason, many people defend the physics education apparatus, and that’s completely nuts.

The other day, I saw a thumbnail for one of his videos, and I saw that it was supposedly about the most infamous graduate text. I knew instantly what he had to be talking about! Classical Electrodynamics, by J.D. Jackson. This was the book Tom Griffy used. Behind the scenes, the graduate students advised each other to read books by people like Leonard Eyges.

I don’t know where to start criticizing Jackson.

Jackson had a hard act to follow. My undergrad E&M book was written by a man named Griffiths. His book was extraordinary. It started with pages of mathematical preparation. Then he explained physics pretty well. His problems were chosen wisely, too. Someone must not have told him the proper way to write a physics book.

Jackson abandoned mks units for cgs (centimeter-gram-second). Why? I had been using mks (meter-kilogram-second) for several years. Every other class I took used mks. There is nothing wrong with mks. Griffiths used it. Someone tried to tell me it was because centimeters were more useful for the small measurements in E&M. Seriously? Can you really “see” a light wavelength in your mind’s eye? They’re measured in nanometers. Is it really helpful to measure them in nanometers times a hundred? You can’t imagine either measurement, so why not stick to the system every other course uses?

The big issue was that Jackson didn’t explain anything. Also, his problems were diabolically hard.

If you’re not going to explain anything, what is the purpose of your textbook?

There is no satisfactory answer to that question.

Here are some snippets from glowing reviews on the book’s Amazon page:

“[A]lmost no exposition is given for the concepts presented in the book.”

“Pedagogically, the book is about as bad as it gets.”

“[I]t doesn’t teach it at all, it just holds you accountable for it.”

“Sometimes he skips about 20 steps and tells you it’s obvious how he got to the next equation. Even my professor and TA could not explain how Jackson arrived at some of his equations.”

“Folks, find something else to use for education! This book is for someone who knows EM and needs a reference. It has no place in a classroom.”

“wtf some one write a new book.”

“There’s got to be a better way. But I’m told this is the best out there. Very depressing.”

“This is without a doubt the absolute worst textbook I have ever used. The material is presented is a random illogical order, as if it were written with the sole purpose to confuse readers.”

“The only reason this stinking rotting pile of crap is used in American universities is because the professors themselves were forced to use this book.”

Perhaps the best comment, from a physics professor:

“As a course text it is a bad choice and the tradition of using it is akin to hazing. Those who continue to teach lecture courses using Jackson are lazy.”

I always say math is much easier than physics. That’s not really true, of course. Math seems much easier than physics when you’re studying it. Why? Several reasons.

First, when you study an area of math, and you get homework problems, you know what kind of math you’re going to be using. If you’re studying calculus I, you know you’re not going to have to do a contour integral. Physics…not the same. You can’t even guess what kind of math you’re going to need until you see the problem.

Second, physics requires you to understand how the physical world works. If you can’t draw a picture and come up with a physical model that makes sense, you can’t even define the problem. Math doesn’t work like that. They just give you an expression or two and tell you what to do to them. It’s all handed to you.

Third, math problems generally have answers. I’ve never had a math professor give me a problem he knew had no answer. Physics professors do that all the time. Not helpful, when you’re already doing 30 hours of homework a week. You start in on a problem at 5 p.m., assuming it will take 45 minutes, and at 3 a.m., you’re still banging away at it, ignoring other problems you can actually solve, because you think that if it was assigned to you, there has to be an answer.

I had a professor assign a problem with an integral that diverged, and he didn’t tell us the answer was nonsense. What’s the point?

Fourth, math professors and their books explain things. I can’t understand why physics people are different. A math book will give you a long derivation to study. Someone like Jackson will omit it and tell you to figure it out yourself as an exercise.

Fifth, physics professors think it’s perfectly fine to give an exam on which a 30 is an A. Everyone in the class walks out thinking they’ve failed, they feel depressed until the grades come in, and then they find out the only guy who got a high score is the Chinese guy who never leaves his Chinese-government-subsidized dorm room.

Here’s something funny about physics: when a math instructor teaches a subject, he gives it a week or a month or a semester. If a physics professor knows you need to have a certain skill AND he condescends to show it to you, he will slap it on the board and devote maybe 20 minutes to it. What a math student learns over a period of days, you have to absorb in a few minutes.

Math isn’t always easier than physics. It’s as hard as you want to make it, and…you don’t have to make it hard. You can get an undergrad degree in math, taking courses that are much easier than physics courses, but if you deliberately look for hard subjects, you can torment yourself pretty badly.

I have a math minor, which means I have all the credits for a math degree, except that I was advised to take a certain course instead of another course that would have made me a math major. I don’t know how many credits I have, but if a math major was required to have 45, for example, that’s how many I have. I used to do maybe 4 hours of math homework per week, and I never had a problem. Undergrad physics took up at least three times that long.

I’m sure there were math courses that would have been more challenging. Graduate-level course, I would imagine. I didn’t take them.

I never took one hard math course, and I did complex variables, real analysis, partial differential equations…the works. Physics made everything seem easy.

To get back to the videos, here is Andrew Dotson’s video on J.D. Jackson. If you’re still reading, you may find it amusing. For me, it was vindication. There may be profanity; I can’t remember.

Here’s his video on the difference between undergrad and graduate courses in physics. It’s 100% true.

I was a little intimidated when I heard him talking about his work. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said. Then I looked him up. He got his degree from Old Dominion, which is not quite Harvard, and he’s studying at New Mexico State University. I looked the school up, and it’s ranked 124 by US News and World Report. When I studied at UT, it was ranked 22. He got rejected by lots of places. He can’t be any better than I was. I guess I just don’t remember all the things he talks about in his videos, so I feel as though I’ve never studied them.

I cannot remember anything about Bessel functions. Not for the life of me. I assume I must have encountered them.

Why am I writing this? I suppose it’s because it’s so rare for anyone to touch these particular nerves.

I’m going to try to quit watching his videos, but I did break down and buy a new copy of Mathews and Walker, to replace the one the ants ate. I don’t know if I’ll use it. I’m just mad at the ants. RE the ants, I want closure.

I hope this young man does well. He has chosen a very hard road which pays very poorly considering how long it takes to become qualified and how extreme the qualifications are.

The Impossible Requires 5 Weeks

Yesterday I wrote about a couple of healings I received. It seems obvious to me that if you have a positive testimony about God, and you share it, you are then obligated to post any corrections that come later. God doesn’t want help from fraudulent testimony.

Here is my follow-up.

I had some pain in my left hand. I commanded it to be gone and so on, and it left immediately. I then noticed I had slight pain in my right hand, and it responded to supernatural healing, too.

Later in the day, I felt some pain in my left hand again, so I repeated the healing process, and the pain left again. I did this a number of times.

My hand never got back to the original pain level, but I have had to fight whatever is trying to take the healing away.

What’s the conclusion? Here it is: I got a miracle healing. Pain doesn’t just leave randomly. My pain responded instantly to supernatural healing. If it then tried to come back, it doesn’t prove I was not healed.

If you had an amputated leg, and it grew back instantly and then went back to being amputated later in the day, could you then say you didn’t get healed? Of course not. The miracle still took place.

I don’t know if there is something in my life that gives hand pain power to resist me, or if I just need to persist until I overcome. But pain doesn’t just leave when you tell it to, unless a miracle takes place.

I’ve been honest about what happened, so now it’s not my problem.

In other news, I’m starting to wonder if painting is the hardest thing a human being can do. Yesterday I wrote about the problems I was having, getting my grinder’s mobile base painted. I learned that environmentalist meddling had made paints harder to apply successfully. I had problems with persistent brush marks.

I had the stand sitting on its top, which already had several coats of dry paint on it. I turned it over last night to finish the top, and I found that paint had mysteriously flowed over the edge of the top and onto the surface. The top was resting on a garbage bag I used to cover the floor, and I found big areas where the new paint had glued the top to the bag.

I applied the paint very sparingly, so you can imagine how surprised I was to see that it had found its way around the edge of the top and up to two inches into it.

I removed the damaged paint, applied primer, and quit. Today I painted the top again. Will it work? I don’t know. The paint will stick, but I don’t know if I can get the new paint to level with the old. I may have to strip the entire top.

I’m wondering if I can wet-sand it. It would be less aggravation. I could get some 300-grit paper, sand the paint, paint it again, and then repeat a couple of times. Maybe it would work. It works on car paint.

I also found that the tops of the bottom forks of the base didn’t look as good as the bottoms, which no one will ever see. Frustrating. If you’re going to have a really nice area on a painted project, you want it to be an area everyone sees.

I really dislike painting. Things keep going wrong. Even when the paint seems okay, tiny bits of stuff fall on it while its drying, just to mess with me. I have the base indoors where there should be very little material falling through the air, but it still happens.

It makes me wonder how anyone paints anything successfully without a special clean room no consumer can afford.

I should go get some truck bed coating, strip the top of the base, apply the coating, and tell people I planned to do it that way from the start. Yes…I wanted a green base with a black top. That was my plan. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

In any case, to recap, it works like this: time to cut and weld mobile base nearly perfectly: 8 hours. Time to paint mobile base very badly: two weeks, not including the time it actually takes hardware store paint to harden fully, which is another three weeks.

Something is wrong there.

I should find a powder-coating place and let them coat my next project. If it costs 50 bucks, it will be well worth it. I had crazy ideas about making my own projects cheaply. Now I doubt that’s possible, except for people who have been painting for 20 years. I can make projects inexpensively, but only if I don’t mind terrible, blobby paint.

I’m going to move my painting projects to the garage. I think the air there is better than it is in the shop, and my projects will be far from my other tools, so I will be able to use them while I wait for paint to dry. Right now, I’m afraid to do anything in the workshop. I might send crud flying onto my perpetually wet paint.

If I ever figure this out, I will blog it. There must be an answer out there somewhere.

You Don’t Have to be on a List Made by Men

Last week I went out with a group from The Last Reformation and did street healing. I only got to pray for one person during our outing, and her infirmity was not very glamorous. She had a sore neck. I commanded the pain to leave, and she was healed. Other people with the group also performed healings.

This stuff is unquestionably real, and it definitely comes from God. There are people out there claiming there is a “kundalini” spirit that actually performs Christian healing, and their “proof” is that sometimes problems come back. Look…if Spirit-baptized Christian can go out and heal in the name of Jesus, exactly as the apostles did, and it’s really a yoga demon doing the work…we have no chance. God isn’t going to treat us like that. He expects us to do things correctly, and Christians can be deceived, but he’s not going to set the bar so high there is no possibility of success.

One of the things I hate about movies featuring Satan is that he is depicted as all-powerful, and people who fight him are shown as weak and abandoned. Movie Satan can work all sorts of miracles, but Movie Catholic God sits in heaven and does absolutely nothing to stop him or help believers.

This is not how real life works. In real life, Satan is like a scorched dust speck compared to God, and believers are infinitely more powerful than Satan. Christians who lack information can have a lot of trouble dealing with hostile spirits, but God has not abandoned us, and there are many Christians out there exercising dominion in the name of Jesus and working genuine miracles.

People who claim we are healing by the power of demons are buying into the Movie Satan myth. Satan is not that powerful. He’s a fallen angel, and angels are a dime a dozen. He’s not ubiquitous. He’s far from omnipotent. He’s not omniscient. He doesn’t know the future. He can’t read your thoughts. When God is on your side, Satan might as well be a fly, and you’re the swatter.

As for problems coming back, well, that’s classic evil-spirit behavior. Spirits do not like being cast out. The Bible says they walk around in dry places, gather allies to help them, and try to return. Jesus said this would happen, and he certainly did not heal people by the power of a kundalini spirit.

I don’t even know what “kundalini” means. I just know it’s a term associated with Hinduism and yoga, which are things no Christian should go near.

The miracles Satan performed in the Bible were not very impressive compared to the things God did. God parted the Red Sea and made the sun stand still in the sky. The notion of an all-powerful Satan is ridiculous.

Anyway, I was thinking about miracles this morning, and it made me think about the terrible problems with Catholicism.

Catholics believe miracles are rare, and they promote the notion that only super-virtuous people can perform them. This is a great thing for Satan, because it keeps Christians weak. If you’re convinced you could never perform a miracle, you will never be a threat to Satan. He doesn’t have to fight you, because you refuse to step into the ring.

In the Catholic church, there are special people called “saints.” The Bible calls all believers saints, but the pope disagrees. To be a Catholic saint, you have to work at least two miracles, and you have to be incredibly virtuous.

Two miracles. Not two thousand. You only have to perform two miracles, and you’re in. And in spite of this very minimal requirement, only a few thousand people have made the grade in 2000 years! There should have been billions.

Satan must be giddy about this.

To make things worse, Catholics pray to saints. Praying to dead people is idolatry and necromancy. The notion of worshiping human beings came into the church back when the man-pleasers running things decided the best way to bring pagans in was to let them keep their false gods. They got to keep Zeus and Odin and whomever else they wanted to worship. They just had to call them by new names.

There is a spring in a French town called Lourdes. Catholics believe SOME people who bathe in the water there get healed. Imagine that. The Bible mentions a pool where sick people flocked. They waited for an angel to stir the water, and then whoever clambered into the water first got healed. Jesus found a man there awaiting healing, and he short-circuited the whole process. He healed him without the need for immersion. The apostles went on to heal people so powerfully that even the touch of their shadows got the job done.

So Jesus died 2000 years ago, he and his disciples proved it was no longer necessary to wait at a special spot for healing, and Catholicism has taken people back to the bad old days of waiting in line!

That is not progress.

Should I nominate myself for sainthood? I’ve had many miracle healings. The student I prayed for in North Carolina got healed, and I have gotten myself healed many times.

Last night, I realized my left thumb was bothering me, as if I had arthritis. I commanded the pain to go and so on, and I was better, instantly. This morning, I noticed a lesser problem with my right thumb, and I healed it, too. Let’s see. That’s two miracles. That’s as many as “Saint” John Paul II had, and I’m not counting the student or the many other times I’ve healed myself. Why am I not a card-carrying saint? How come I’m not on Wikipedia?

I am not a person of superhuman virtue. God still works through me, and he will work through you, too. It’s normal. Anyone who tells you you have to be super-righteous is speaking for Satan in order to keep you on the bench.

I have a friend who gets healed over and over. Should I contact the Vatican and nominate her, too?

It makes sense that God would heal through people who are clearly imperfect. His mission is to publicize himself, not you. If he only worked through extremely virtuous people, those they helped would come to worship the people, not God. This describes what happened in the Catholic Church.

Judaism has a worse problem than Catholicism. They believe there have been only 6 gentile prophets, and they believe there have been no Jewish prophets since Malachi. If God sent them a prophet tomorrow, what chance would he have?

It’s amazing how hostile human beings are to everyone God sends. When Jesus stood up in the synagogue and said he was the Messiah, his friends and neighbors, who had known him for years, promptly tried to throw him off a cliff. How would you feel if the people in your neighborhood were suddenly comfortable with the idea of throwing you off a cliff and watching your brains and viscera splatter on the rocks below?

The Jews had already killed other prophets. Christians have a long tradition of burning, slandering, and ostracizing people who are Spirit-led.

On the whole, people never change, and religious people are the most dangerous to God’s vessels!

The strangest thing about persecution of God’s servants and children is that the same people who do it end up venerating them posthumously, and they all think they wouldn’t do it again! Of course, they WOULD do it again, because they’re blind. If Jesus came back today and appeared to be a man, as he did before, Christians, Jews, and Muslims would trample each other, trying to get to him to kill him. Pagans and atheists would probably be much less of a problem, at least at first.

I’ve been persecuted by two head pastors and a number of lesser church figures, all of whom claimed to be full of the Holy Spirit! All the things I said that got me in trouble were true, and yet this happened, and NOBODY has apologized or admitted fault, even after it was obvious that they were wrong. I would be amazed if even one of them changed his mind about me.

I’m nearly nothing, what I said was clearly right, and this still happened to me. It would be much worse for Jesus.

It’s interesting when I think about it. What if my pastors had admitted I was right? They could have put me on the stage, and I could have told people some extremely helpful things. Many people might have been saved, healed, or at least spared the great financial harm of excessive offerings. By suppressing and opposing me, Rich Wilkerson Sr., Rich Wilkerson Jr., Albert Santiago, and Albert’s late wife Aleida managed to prevent a lot of people from receiving very great benefits. See Mark 9:42.

Back when I was serving at Trinity Church, Richie (Rich Jr.) actually preached against things I said. That’s how much I annoyed the family the church was designed to promote.

I remember him saying, “It’s not about how much you pray in tongues. It’s about RELATIONSHIP.” Then he ended up palling around with Kim Kardashian, who continued posing for nude photos which were published on the web.

Richie’s church is called “The Vous Church.” “‘Vous” is short for “Rendezvous,” which is what he called his Tuesday services at Trinity. I don’t think he realizes no one who hasn’t been to Trinity knows what “Vous Church” means, and he doesn’t know it should start with an apostrophe.

Anyway, here is a snippet from an Esquire article about the church:

I’ve been reporting on American religion for years. I’ve been to megachurches and tiny chapels and compounds and covens and strange temples. I’ve met believers who say Christ was a cowboy and believers who think Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was divine revelation; strippers who consider their nakedness a testimony and soldiers who etched Scripture onto their rifles. I have seen the silly and the sublime. And what always make me marvel are the layers of stories beneath even the glossiest surface, followers who bring to their faith depths averred by even the most callow leaders. Maybe that’s so at Vous, too. But never before Vous had I encountered a church that seemed so completely empty.

Another passage which didn’t shock me in the least:

When I explained that my visit to Vous’s three services was more about the church’s guests than it was about Rich himself, Rich smiled and tilted his head quizzically. I said I’d just wander around and talk with the crowd. Chris looked pained. Rich was concerned. “I don’t really know who these people are,” he said. He meant he didn’t know what they’d say. No problem, though. They’d already lined up Vous insiders for me to interview. “Bro,” Rich said, “let’s just stage it, all right?”

Vintage Richie.

You wouldn’t expect a leftist publication to be kind to a Christian pastor, but I know the Wilkersons, and these passages are exactly what I would expect an honest and perceptive unbelieving journalist to write.

It’s sad, because good things used to happen at the Rendezvous. Richie had a lot of potential.

Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe good things happened because of other people who were there.

At Trinity, the best things happened when the pastors were not around to put a stop to them.

Do I seem too critical? Go read Paul and see how he named names. I’m a teddy bear compared to him.

Look…you can heal people, including yourself. You can preach solid doctrine that will change lives. You can prophesy. You don’t need the pope or Joel Osteen or even Torben Sondergaard. You just need to get started. You’re as important as anyone who ever lived, so stop thinking you have to sit in a church and throw money at a man who will spend it on exotic cars, plastic surgery, tacky designer clothes, and trips to Maui.

One more thing. You don’t owe God anything. Does that sound awful? It’s not. Your past debts have been paid, and if you stumble in the future, you will be forgiven as long as you repent. If you’re saved and you confess and repent as you should, God is not blocking the good things you ask for. He wants to give them to you. You don’t have to earn them. Someone else already did that. The bills are all paid, without exception.

You don’t have to sit and wait for a saint to drag you into the spring at Lourdes. You can have a better spring that flows inside you every day. In fact, you’re supposed to BE the spring.

I am Here to Beat You With the Truth

God is showing me interesting things.

I wrote about Torben Sondergaard, the man who started The Last Reformation. The Danish press and government ran him out of Denmark. They passed a new law against “mental violence,” in response to the things his ministry did. The theory is that “mental violence” should be punished as though it were physical violence. Under the new law, casting a demon out of a person, in front of a minor or someone who has a disabiity, is mental violence.

It sounds very silly to sane Americans. In America, one of the marks of ignorant, unsuccessful cultures is that their members believe it’s okay to respond to words with physical force, equating words with violence. For example, many people think it’s okay to respond to a racial slur with a punch to the face. Of course, it’s not okay, nor is it legal. No matter how offensive you find words, you can’t touch another person simply because you object to what they say.

We know that words can’t be violence, in the traditional sense of our laws. People here who are still sane are amazed to see grown millennials whimpering and running to college deans and town councils, trying to get them to silence people who say things that challenge them. It’s an extremely pathetic spectacle. Today’s pampered, effeminate babies are nothing like the young men who swarmed recruiting centers on December 8, 1941, begging to be sent overseas to face Japanese bombs and machine guns.

These things are true, but still, God showed me that the speech-phobics have a plausible reason for trying to muzzle the rest of us.

Jesus said we were not defiled by what we ate. The Jews of his time were very serious about the dietary laws God had given them, but Jesus pointed something out: the things that defile a man are the things that come out of him. Forbidden foods didn’t actually defile people.

Somewhere deep inside each of us, there is a greatest depth, and the things we do and say start at this depth. Words and acts begin as urges from very far inside us. What you do and say depends on, and reveals, what you’re like at your greatest depth.

If you have a pure heart, you don’t just refrain from evil. It doesn’t even occur to you to do it or say it. Down deep, there is no seed that can grow into an evil word or deed. This is why God can’t be tempted. He has no desire to do evil.

Jesus said people who hated their brothers were murderers. You can be silent and choose not to act and still be counted among murderers, simply because you have the urge.

In Judaism, harming people with words is equated with murder. To God, “murderer” doesn’t just mean “person who has committed murder.” It describes a class of people by their intentions and desires, regardless of what they have actually done.

How is this relevant to the mental violence law and the astounding fragility of millennials? God showed me.

Americans are falling away from God, and most millennials don’t know him. That means they’re ruled by demons. When a spirit has great influence in you, it tries to express itself through you. This is why young people are obsessed with tattoos, self-mutilation, and the strange fashions we see today. It’s no coincidence that they tend to look like Nazis or prison inmates. Those people were heavily influenced by demons before hipsters and millennials came along. As demonic influence spreads, more and more people start to look the way demons want them to look.

Splitting your tongue and having painful hardware rammed through your genitals isn’t self-expression. It’s demon expression. You’re expressing the desires and passions of a dead person who has come to live in you.

It’s interesting. Demons are dead people who were sired by fallen angels (Matthew 23:27), and God removed them from the physical world. Now, through us, they have a chance to be born into bodies again. There is always symmetry in the supernatural, even when it comes to being born again.

In the physical world, casting a demon out is not violence. Here, language and violence are two different things. In the supernatural world, that’s not true. Exposing a demon and casting it out is similar to slandering someone or hating your brother. It expresses an intent to destroy. In the depths of your heart, if you cast out demons, you are similar to a murderer of demons. That’s how they see it. They fear you the way early Christians feared Saul of Tarsus.

The story of creation is a story of genocide. God and Satan are trying to rid the world of each other’s children. We really want demons to be gone for good, and they want a world where people like us don’t exist and can’t obstruct their plans. As far as demons are concerned, what we do to them is violence.

We’re going to lose. The word makes that clear. More and more laws will be passed. Physical violence toward us will be sanctioned by governments. We will have less and less success in reaching people. When things get so bad the return on God’s investment no longer justifies keeping us here, he will remove us. Then he’ll return and destroy the world so he can rebuild it and give it back to us. We will rule in the physical world as well as the supernatural world.

Torben refers to his ministry’s new property as an ark. You don’t need an ark if you’re going to win. An ark is a shelter for people who need protection. If we were going to win, Satan would be the one providing arks. He’s not doing that. He’s taking over cities and making a show of himself.

Speaking in obedience to the Holy Spirit should not be considered violence under our laws. The only forms of speech that have traditionally been restricted are very dangerous forms, like threatening to hurt people while you’re close enough to do it. It’s legal to say very nasty things. You can call someone’s mother a whore, legally, and if the response is violence, you can have the person you insulted arrested. No one should say things like that, but our laws shouldn’t equate it with violence. We live in a physical world, and laws that make sense in the supernatural realm don’t always make sense here.

Demons are very afraid of us, and they know we’re infinitely more powerful than they are. They really need to silence us in order to make their lives less miserable. They won a big battle in Denmark. Now you know what it was all about.

Remember what Jesus said to demons? He didn’t just tell them to leave. He said, “Be muzzled!” He didn’t let them say much. He knew how dangerous words could be. After all, he is the word of God, and look how dangerous he is. He is the most terrifying enemy imaginable. There is absolutely no way to protect yourself from him.

To the demon-infested, the Holy Spirit is a demon (John 10:20; John 7:20). It’s only natural that they should try to muzzle him by passing laws against us, as the ancient Jews tried (John 9:22; Acts 4:18). None of this should surprise us at all. It’s actually a great honor to endure this. If we were doing things completely wrong, people in power would be giving us honorary doctorates, putting us on corporate boards, and presenting us with Oscars.

We Use the Wrong Bait

This weekend, I visited North Carolina State University (which I thought was the University of North Carolina) and did street healing with a group of Christians. Our outing was a success. No one we worked on failed to receive a healing.

This morning, I was thinking about our experience, and I drifted off and imagined myself talking to a young university student about God. I didn’t really get to speak this weekend. This morning, I heard myself telling her the things I wish young people knew about God.

Jesus visited me twice. On the first occasion, the thing that made the biggest impression on me was the way it felt to be near him. I knew everything was going to be all right, no matter what. I felt his love radiating toward me. The second time, I felt these things again. I felt his love in my heart, mind, and body. My body felt a warm sensation, as though Jesus were a fireplace and I were sitting in front of him.

I imagined myself telling a college student this, and I started thinking it was too bad Jesus wasn’t there so she could feel it firsthand.

When I had that thought, something occurred to me. I’m supposed to be like Jesus. I should not have to get him to come down and visit in order for someone to feel his love physically. They should feel it emanating from me.

That was sobering. Christians always say we’re supposed to be little replicas of Jesus, and we do what we think he would do, including working miracles, but who is out there pouring supernatural love out so strongly other people can feel it in their bodies? Nobody. Maybe someone is doing it, but I have never heard anything about it.

For years, I’ve believed I was supposed to radiate love other people could feel, and I prayed for it, but somehow this morning I started to feel much more serious about it.

The secular world loves to accuse us. They love saying we’re full of hate. It’s not hard to find angry Christians (or to torment us until we become angry so we can be used as visual aids), so unbelievers look for Christians who are not exactly radiating love, and they give them a lot of publicity.

Christians are doing wonderful things all over the world, but unbelievers don’t like to let the news get out. We heal people. Many have raised the dead. I just met a lady who has adopted 15 kids and given them a home and a family. These things are not unusual, but they’re not what you see when you turn on the news. You’re more likely to see the Westboro Baptist Church, which is so small it can fit in three vans, waving signs that say, “God hates fags.”

Worldly people can find all sorts of angry Christians to publicize, and they avoid shining a light on Christians who do good. Many unbelievers think of us as rage-filled potential terrorists who need to be stamped out. Maybe it would be different if it were common for a Christian to get on a bus and overwhelm everyone he walked past with the sensation of radiant love. Maybe it would never make the TV news, but at least it would impact the people we met and show them they were wrong about us and about God.

God can drop supernatural love into you. It has happened to me on a number of occasions. It’s a strange thing. It makes your face feel warm. You stop thinking about the ways other people provoke you. You feel affection for them. It happens, but in my case, it has been a fleeting thing.

It has happened to me a few times during the last few weeks. It happened while I was driving home from North Carolina. I try to hold onto it. I try not to let anything that works against it enter my mind.

These days, I tell God I love him. I tell him over and over. I do love him, but sometimes other things occupy my mind, and I don’t feel it. I have learned to think about and remember my feelings for him. It seems to help a great deal.

When it comes to other people, I say I love them. I make a point of doing this with people who are annoying and hateful. I don’t say it out loud, and I don’t go see them so I can say it in their presence, but I say it, even when I don’t feel it at first.

I suppose these are tools God has given me to get unblocked and get the love flowing.

Is it a lie to say you love someone who gets on your nerves, when you don’t feel it at first? Not if it changes the way you feel and becomes true.

A big benefit of supernatural love is that it kills worry and fear. I do not like worry and fear. Dropping my petty grievances seems like a small price to pay for freedom.

I don’t know if I’ll ever have the kind of love strangers can feel just because I’m nearby, but I want anything I can get.

I cringe when I see Christians promoting debate. I hate the very idea of little cards and pamphlets that help you “win” arguments with unbelievers. No one comes to God because he lost an argument! Christianity is supernatural, and people are won over supernaturally. They need to see supernatural power, and they need to feel supernatural love. Take away someone’s physical illness and make him feel the heat of God’s love, and he will know his arguments are garbage and that he has been missing out.

Argument is carnal and ineffective. There will always be a way to use logic against belief. There will always be an anti-faith argument that looks really good. On top of that, human beings believe what they want, not what the facts tell them. You have to present them with something they want.

This was on my mind this morning, and I thought it was important enough to write about.

TLR Kickstart in Raleigh

To say I had an interesting weekend would be an understatement.

When I travel, I don’t blog it until I get home. Blogging your trips is like asking people to rob your house. I was away for 5 days, and now I’m back. I went to a Last Reformation “kickstart” event in Raleigh, North Carolina.

I only have one friend from childhood, and that’s my choice. I don’t have anything in common with any friends I had when I was a kid, except for my buddy Mike. We met when I was in the third grade, if memory serves. I lived in house on a northeast corner, and his family moved into the house on the southwest corner.

We haven’t always kept in touch, and I guess I would have drifted off, but Mike dug me up and contacted me every so often, and that kept the friendship alive.

I went to the kickstart for two reasons: I wanted to participate in street healing, and I wanted to help Mike get a proper baptism, including the baptism with the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues.

The original plan was to have a baptism here at the house, but then I learned about the kickstart. It was in Appalachia, sort of, and I feel drawn there. I thought it might give me a chance to visit Tennessee and look at properties. I also thought, wrongly, that it would enable me to get a look at the new Last Reformation center near Charlotte, which is actually over a hundred miles from the location where the kickstart was held.

I felt it would be good for Mike to meet other Spirit-led Christians, and I thought he would learn some important things from the teaching, so off we went. He flew to Charlotte from New Hampshire, and I drove from Ocala, picked him up, and took him to Raleigh.

I have to say that I didn’t like Raleigh at all. The traffic is terrible, and drivers are pretty rude. The city seems invisible. I found myself putting in a lot of car miles on tree-insulated highways that all looked the same. It wasn’t possible to see anything that looked like a city. I just saw highways and malls, except for a visit to the University of North Carolina.

The people there aren’t particularly nice, and that surprised me. I suppose it’s because it’s a college town. It’s full of people who came from other places, and it draws leftists, who are not the nicest people there are. It’s nothing like Ocala. Living here is like getting a hot oil massage all day. The people are wonderful.

I really dislike cities now. In spite of all the good things that happened in Raleigh, I was very happy to leave and return to my farm. I hope I never have to visit Raleigh again.

The trip did not start well. I slept poorly the night before I left. I don’t recall the reason. The next day, after picking Mike up, I made the mistake of drinking an Arnold Palmer, which is tea mixed with lemonade. We shared a room in order to save Mike money, and between the effects of the caffeine and the difficulty of sleeping near someone who snores, I barely slept. This was after driving 600 miles at one crack, so when we got to the event the next morning, I was eager to go but not feeling my best.

The two most prominent figures in the Last Reformation are Torben Sondergaard and his friend Jon Bjarnastein. They are not essential to the success of events, but they showed up. Torben drove from Charlotte, where he now lives.

Torben spoke a lot. We heard more of his testimony concerning his expulsion from Denmark and the way God provided his new headquarters near Charlotte. I wish I could recall it all.

He made the mistake of allowing a Danish TV crew to film him for a “documentary,” and of course, it turned out to be an anti-Christian hit piece. They followed his group as well as some corrupt ministries, including one headed by someone accused of molesting girls. When the edited footage was shown on Danish television, Torben became a pariah. People sent him emails accusing him of pedophilia because they confused him with the other preacher. Politicians said the Last Reformation abused children and the disabled by casting demons out in front of them.

The Danish legislature passed a law against “mental violence” because of Torben. They declared that mental violence should be punished the same way real violence was punished.

Sound familiar? Remember the pampered, faint-hearted millennials who had to cuddle puppies and use coloring books because Trump got elected?

I probably disagree with you about something. This makes you a victim of mental violence. I hope you won’t have me arrested.

Since mental violence is just as bad as physical violence, I assume it’s okay to respond with physical force. I would think the law would permit you to punch people who talk about Jesus, in order to protect yourself from harm.

One day someone called Torben and told him he needed to leave Denmark. The authorities were preparing something for him, and he needed to go. He and his family filled 8 suitcases and left their home in the middle of the night. They came here and applied for asylum.

They ended up in South Florida at first. Torben was concerned about money. A man called him and said that if he ever needed money for rent and so on, he could help. Torben thought he was responding to the stories about the flight from Denmark, but it turned out the man knew nothing about it.

Torben was staying in Palm Beach, and he was about to travel, flying out of the Fort Lauderdale airport. The man told him he lived near the airport. They agreed to meet. The man met him at the terminal and gave him an envelope. When he left, Torben found that he had been given $50,000.

TLR started looking for a new center. They believed they were going to take a property in New Jersey. Someone told them about the North Carolina property, and they decided to visit, thinking it might be a good idea to buy it in a few years.

For some reason, they visited the Ark Encounter first, in Kentucky. This is a tourist attraction. It’s a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark. While they were visiting, Torben’s daughter asked him how Noah got the animals to go into the ark. He told her God, not Noah, brought them.

When they arrived at the property, the owner came out to greet them. He told them he was Noah and that they were the first animals to enter the ark.

They hadn’t been in communication. Torben was using a realtor.

The property is a 50-acre resort with dozens of rooms and an RV park. The owner was a Christian. He said God had told him to buy the place. He hadn’t used it for anything. He had kept the grass mowed, and that was about it.

The owner wanted $2.2 million, but after talking to Torben, he dropped the price to $1.2 million. Torben didn’t have it. Another man contacted him. He was in the process of selling a home in another state. He said he wanted to donate the proceeds, expected to be in the area of $800,000. Torben didn’t want to borrow money. The sellers agreed to lease it with an option to buy.

In a very short period, Torben went from having nowhere to live to having a huge property, with the prospect of having a huge amount of equity right from the start.

It gets weirder. Their air conditioners needed work. They were going to hire someone. A man from Canada said he wanted to visit. They asked him about himself. He said he was a retired air conditioning repairman. Problem solved. One day, Torben’s wife said the property needed a fence. Before they could buy one, a man who owned a fence company said he wasn’t busy, and he wanted to give them a fence for nothing.

Torben said some other amazing things. You have to remember that he’s Danish. He hasn’t been watching CNN every day for the last 10 years. He can’t be expected to fully understand what American Christians deal with. Nonetheless, he described our political problem perfectly. He said things were going well now because we had a friend in the White House. He said things would eventually change. Rage was building up on what he called “the other side,” and when that side regained power, we would have the kind of problems Christians now have in Denmark and other countries.

How long have I been saying that?

He said there was a “Satanic lullabye” in America that had put the church to sleep. We’re obsessed with money and our own desires, so we are prosperous but fat and weak.

I enjoyed hearing this, because I knew there were Christians there who were Democrats. It’s surprising how many charismatics don’t pray in the Spirit, don’t hear from God, and don’t understand how evil the Democratic Party and leftism are. The people at the kickstart had a lot of respect for Torben, and now they were hearing about politics from him. It was a good correction for them.

He mentioned Chick-fil-A. It’s funny how a fast food chain has become such a big deal to Christians. He had an encounter at a Chick-fil-A, and he told about it. He loves the food there. I don’t know if he’s aware of the persecution from homosexuality activists.

I’m conflating things he said over several days.

They put us in groups, and we went out to heal. Our group had two little girls in it. I would say they were around 6 years old. They healed people. Nothing spectactular; we didn’t see legs grow back. But they took away pain.

I only got to pray for one person. We were across the street from UNC, and I prayed for a girl named Beatrice. She was having neck pain. Sure enough, it went away.

At lunch, we talked a lot and saw how similar our views were. The Holy Spirit is binding people together. That was nice. We also discussed problems and errors. We talked about the Sozo/Bethel movement, which is something a lot of people are concerned about. None of us thought Bethel was a sound movement.

The Sozo people will tell you to imagine a traumatic event in your life and ask Jesus to show you where he was when it happened. People who go through it will say things like, “He said he was by the door, and this is what he felt.” I gave it a sincere try once out of consideration for a close friend who is involved in it, and nothing whatsoever happened. I haven’t seen anything like their approach in the Bible.

Our group was late leaving the church where the kickstart was held. Our leader, a guy named Ash, had a lot of responsibilities to handle. A lady with demonic issues was on the floor while other groups left, with members of our group praying for her and casting spirits out.

I joined the group and sat a few feet away. The lady writhed and foamed at the mouth. She made sounds like an angry animal. A woman named Jen was at her head, and Jen does not do well with spit, so she had to leave the room. She asked me to take her place, so I sat down behind the demonized lady, who I will call Sally, and put my hands on her shoulders. I resumed telling the spirits they had to leave.

She started to convulse, and we had to get a wastebasket in case she was sick. The spirits left her, and peace filled her.

Afterward, she said that while she was on the ground, it hurt to look at the people trying to deliver her. She said they shined with a very bright light. She wanted to look at them, but it was too hard.

We had to repeat the process the next day. That’s normal. Spirits like to try to come back. They are probably ordered to do it.

Had it not been for Sally’s need, we would have been able to pray for more people on the street.

On Sunday, we were prepared for baptism. Mike kept saying he wanted me to do it. They had kiddie pools out back, but he wanted to do it at our hotel. I told him we would do whatever he wanted. He listened to the lecture, and he talked to Ash for a while. Then he decided he could not be baptized at the event.

We left and drove 8 miles to the hotel.

Mike was concerned because I couldn’t sleep, so he decided to get a room for himself. He picked the worst possible time. He did it while we were supposed to be getting him baptized and running back to the event. It took a very long time. Instead of waiting until later, he packed all of his things and tried to move them to the new room. Obviously, this could have waited.

This is normal. When evil spirits know you’re about to do something good, they will do their best to obstruct. They may come up with “urgent” things you absolutely have to do first.

He checked into a hotel 350 feet away, and there were delays. He couldn’t actually go into his room until they cleaned it, so he had to bring all of his things back to my room.

He put on shorts, and we went to the pool. There were three boys splashing and yelling. We couldn’t wait any more. We had to do it.

I put him under, baptizing him with water and the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus, and he got back out. We started walking out. One of the boys asked Mike if he liked McDonald’s. He said he did. I told them Chick-fil-A ruled!

Back at the room, Mike was highly disturbed. I don’t want to into it, but baptism was overwhelming for him. You expect to see this kind of thing with women, but men tend to be harder to upset. I was shocked to see how profoundly he was affected. It took quite a while for him to recover.

He then took a surprisingly long shower and took quite a while to get dressed. We were absent from the event for a couple of hours. I was afraid we would miss everything. I wanted to be sure someone other than me got to help him release the gift of tongues.

The lady with the demon problem was on the ground again, so I joined the group and got to work. Mike sat by himself and talked with God. When we beat the demons again, a young man needed help praying in tongues. I kept telling him he needed to start moving his mouth on his own. People tend to demand that God make them speak. It was taking him quite a while to get going, and it didn’t look like I was needed, so I went and talked to Mike.

When the young man started speaking in tongues, Ash and I took Mike inside, and Ash counseled him. We prayed for him and stuck by him, and after a while, the gift was released.

Mission accomplished.

After things wound down, Mike wanted to rest. He was very drained. I drove him to his hotel, and then I returned to the kickstart. I was wiped out from lack of sleep and driving, but I was not going to miss out.

The next day was a day of prayer and testimony and so on, and thank God, we didn’t start until 2 p.m.

Mike had to go to Cancun for dental work, so I had to pick him up at 7:30 the next morning, drop him at the airport, and drive home alone. I stopped at a Chick-fil-A for breakfast, and I got out my laptop and looked at maps and routes. I wanted to go Tennessee very badly.

I prayed and surfed, and eventually, I felt that God was telling me to go home, so I got in the car, and I finally arrived at my gate at 6:30 p.m.

I am surprised to see how much I had to do for Mike. I think of him as a sturdy, resilient guy who is anything but needy, but he needed a lot of help and patience this weekend. It reminded me of looking after my dad, and that’s very strange. I wonder how much of it was due to supernatural opposition.

I highly recommend TLR kickstarts. I am never going to join TLR, Bethel, the Royal Family, or any other denomination, and I am not suggesting they don’t make mistakes, but what they do is generally right, and it’s very powerful.

If you want to hear about TLR errors, I can mention a few things.

First, Tom Loud, a Royal Family/Identity preacher disagrees with some TLR doctrines. His belief is that they think you can’t be saved unless you get water-baptized and you speak in tongues. I don’t know if this is what they believe or not; I’m just relating what his secretary told me. I don’t think omitting these things will land you in hell. I could not baptize my dad before he died, and I saw no indication that he spoke in tongues, but I’m very confident he made it.

Second, Torben says he got driven out of Denmark because he didn’t listen when God spoke softly. He says he was comfortable with what he was doing in Denmark, so he didn’t pay attention when God started telling him to leave, and then he had to leave in the middle of the night, under threat of imprisonment and losing his kids.

That sounds like a mistake.

I have had concerns because I am so comfortable here. I have a magnificent house and farm. I love the people here. There is very little traffic. I keep feeling that God wants me in Tennessee, but I like it here, and I can’t seem to find a property that resembles what my heart tells me he wants for me.

I don’t want to leave at the point of a gun! I want to go early, when I’m not rushed.

Ash and I talked. He said he used to have a big house with a music studio. He sold it and started renting. Now he thinks God is telling him to get something he can move around in, like an RV or trailer.

Together with Mike, we prayed that God would show both of us where to go and that he would help us make whatever moves needed to be made.

Yesterday, I had the strangest sensation. I started driving home, and I realized I didn’t want to go back to Florida! This house is a treasure, but I didn’t want to go. I believe God is answering our prayers.

TLR is doing good work, and you can find information about their events on their website. If you’re tired of boring Christianity in which nothing ever seems to happen, you might want to give them a try.

Movie Hate Feeds your Demons

I had an interesting experience yesterday.

I watch Youtube a lot. It’s full of good Christian material, it has many valuable educational videos, and it gives me something to do when I’m spending time with my pets. Yesterday on a whim, I clicked on a couple of thumbnails for videos taken from the movie Heartbreak Ridge.

If you haven’t seen this movie, I can sum it up. Clint Eastwood (who actually spent the Korean War as an Army lifeguard in North Carolina) is a tough Marine sergeant with lots of combat medals. He takes over a platoon of spoiled punks. In the process, he beats a lot of people up and turns his platoon into a top-notch fighting machine.

Clint’s character says lots of crude things during the film. He makes fun of homosexuals and suggests other men have done perverted things with housecats.

It’s a funny movie. Not the gentlest kind of humor, though.

I watched a couple of fight scenes from the movie, but I quit because I felt it wasn’t healthy to keep watching people vent their rage. Christians are supposed to be full of warm, affectionate love, so I stopped watching.

I talked to God about it, and he gave me this: watching actors do cruel and vengeful things is just as bad as pornography!

This pretty much kills about 60% of screen entertainment for me. James Bond, John Wick, every superhero, most Clint Eastwood characters, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris…what’s left? Chick flicks? No way! I’m not going to sit through two hours of cancer, adultery, shattered dreams, self-pity, veganism, blind self-righteousness, and man-bashing.

I don’t know why women enjoy films about misery. Strangest thing. Maybe it feeds the victim complex many women wallow in. Women are more manipulative than men, and wallowing in self-pity is a great strategy for manipulators. It has worked for moms and wives throughout history.

Watching cruelty and revenge is a lot like watching porn (so I hear…*cough*). It’s highly stimulating. You get drawn in emotionally. Many of us are subjected to abuse and injustice in this life, and when we see actors beating their bullies, we get some of the pleasure of fighting back and making abusers taste their own medicine. It can be very satisfying to see an actor blown up, crushed, mutilated, or whatever.

It should be obvious that the pleasure is in our flesh, not our spirits. When we enjoy this stuff, we give power to the flesh, and the flesh is the enemy of God. It has to be subjugated so the spirit can rule.

I gave up what I call “revenge porn” some time ago, but I didn’t realize how bad it was for me until last night. I have to avoid watching even short clips, the same way I avoid watching erotic videos.

To be close to God, you have to be distant from the world. This has become obvious to me. I can see why John the Baptist moved to the wilderness and why Jesus spent so much time alone. If you immerse yourself in the culture of the world, one of two things will happen. You will be corrupted, or you will simply feel fatigued and disgusted, as though you were being forced to share an apartment with pedophiles and pimps.

I’ve noticed that the closer I get to God, the more people I lose and the less contact I have with corrupt cultures. This is why God moved me out of Miami. It’s a sick, twisted place. God recognized me as a son, and he doesn’t want his sons stuck in places like Miami. Going there briefly to minister is okay. Living there is not.

He moved me to a better place. I have improved considerably since I’ve been here, and I think this is why I feel like moving to an even cleaner area.

This is why the rapture will take place. The world will be extremely filthy, and God’s remnant will be too clean to stay here and be subjected to it.

I love the area where I live, but I have suffered a lot here. I thought about it yesterday. I went back and read things I wrote while I was taking care of my dad and after his death. Looking after him was very, very hard, even though I didn’t understand it at the time.

I witnessed a lot of things that were painful to see. He deteriorated the whole time he lived up here. He lost his dignity. He became a weak little old man who walked like a toddler. He had to start using a walker. He then ended up in a wheelchair. Strangers came to the house to bathe him. He lost the power to control his life. We reached the point where he had to ask me for things, like a child asking a parent. “Can we do this?” “Can we go there?”

I had to go and sit with him in an assisted living facility every day. I made him cookies so he would have some sense that someone cared about him.

There were financial issues that were extremely stressful. It took me a long time to get them under control.

While he lived in this house, it became filthy. He developed a habit of rubbing spit on things, which was too much for me to take. He defiled the food in the kitchen. I had to clean up messes of types that shouldn’t exist in a first world house.

It was tough, and now, even though I love this property, when I look around, I think about the difficult times a lot. I also miss my dad. I feel as though he should be out walking on the private road I live on, as he used to. Sometimes I feel as though I should drive to the ALF to see him, because it’s that time of day.

I don’t want to go back to dealing with the negative parts of his personality. They were oppressive. I don’t miss that. I wouldn’t want the pre-salvation Dad to come back to life and return to me. But I still miss him sometimes.

If I go somewhere else, I won’t have to see the place where he sat every afternoon or the area of the front porch where he used to read his newspapers. I will never catch myself calling a new place “our house.”

I suffered tremendously in Miami. So did my mother. My dad and my sister were abusers, so they weren’t as unhappy. Abuse is all about putting your unhappiness in other people; you use them as emotional toilets. They were causing most of the suffering. When I left Miami, I was thrilled to escape a place where so many painful things had happened. I may have a similar feeling if I leave Ocala, even if this area is a much, much nicer place to live.

Here’s what I think: if you want God to move you away from a place where you’re unhappy because of the nature of the people around you, you need to be sanctified to the point where you won’t be a liability in a better place. God takes pains to move his people to areas where they fit in better. Why would he ruin that by inviting you, if you’re not ready? If you insist on hanging onto the world’s culture, you’ll just defile your new surroundings and make his other children unhappy.

Sometimes I’m afraid that if I move, I’ll never have another home I love as much as this one. But isn’t that typical of people who refuse to grow? If you take that attitude in life, you will resist leaving the womb. You have to be willing to let go of the old in order to receive new things that are better.

I plan to continue the sanctification process. I don’t want to be submerged in a sick culture any more than I have to. To insist on hanging onto unproductive things is to fight God.

The Faint Smell of Competence is in the Air

Yesterday I finished building my new bench grinder pedestal. I exaggerate somewhat. It still needs to be painted, and I’m thinking of grinding some metal down to make it look better.

It was a big job. Took two sessions over two days. I used aluminum welding squares made by Fireball Tool.

For a long time, I only had one welder. I had a Lincoln PowerMIG 180C, on a Lincoln cart. The cart was not good. It didn’t really fit the welder. I upgraded to a bigger two-tier cart from Eastwood. The Eastwood cart had a defective part, so I complained. They sent me a second cart for nothing. I fixed the defective cart, and I used it to hold my plasma cutter and bench grinder.

The cart was okay, but it was very low to the ground, and it was bulky and hard to maneuver. This is why I built a grinder pedestal. I wanted something higher and more nimble.

I didn’t want a heavy pedestal. One of the pitfalls amateur fabricators fall into is the belief that heavier is always better. In reality, one of the big goals of competent engineering is to reduce material waste. If you’re building, say, metal shelves, you don’t want to spend $50 per unit on steel when you can spend $15. I could have gone with heavy tubing, but I decided to use rectangular tubing with 1/8″ walls.

The pedestal only has one column. I used 3″ x 3″ square tubing. This stuff will support thousands of pounds, so the 90 or so pounds it will carry won’t challenge it at all. The only thing to be concerned about was rigidity, and it’s pretty hard to flex a 3″-square tube by pushing a piece of metal into a grinding wheel. By “hard,” I mean, “clearly impossible.”

You can buy cast iron pedestals that probably have walls 1/4″ thick. It sounds good when you’re telling your buddies about your cool new “beefy” pedestal, but if you make a pedestal that way, you’ve added weight and cost without realizing any benefit. You’ll regret it the first time you have to move it.

Speaking of moving, I was determined to have casters. The more things you put on wheels, the bigger your shop will seem. I had a set of casters on hand already, so I was ready to go.

For the top, I planned to use a 10″ square of 1/8″ plate. The metal dealer was not able to provide that when I showed up late on Friday, but they sold me a 16″ square that was a drop, so I saved some money, and I decided not to cut it down, because I could use the extra area for things if the need arose. Some people like to clamp fixtures in front of their grinding pedestals.

I have been afraid to weld complicated objects like this because of an experience I had with my arbor press. I made a stand for it, using scrap taken from a door at my dad’s old house. I lined the parts up well when I welded them, but when I stood the stand up, it wobbled. It was warped. I didn’t know metal would warp that badly when welded, and I didn’t know how to prevent it.

When you weld little things, warpage usually doesn’t matter. If you put a 5° bend in a part 8″ long, you probably won’t even see it. In a part three feet long, it’s different.

I want to create a welding table, or at least a set of legs and a frame for one. One of the purposes of a welding table is to provide a flat reference surface for projects. A lot of people use their garage floors, but concrete floors aren’t really flat. I had a problem. I wanted a welding table in order to allow me to weld things flat and square, but I needed a welding table in order to create a flat and square base…for the welding table.

There are various ways to get around this problem. You can make your own jigs, which may or may not work. I chose the easy way. I bought myself two welding squares.

A little company named Fireball Tool produces a lot of innovative items for tool users. They make welding squares cast from thick iron and aluminum. They machine the castings to get flat surfaces and correct angles. You can clamp things to the squares before you weld them, and the squares will help them remain aligned until they cool.

Because the squares are cast iron and aluminum, welding spatter doesn’t stick to them very well. This is a plus.

I didn’t see why anyone would want cast iron. It’s heavy, it rusts, and it shatters. Sooner or later, I’ll drop any tool you give me. I don’t want to spend a lot of money on a square and then destroy it. An aluminum square may deform, but I have a milling machine and welders, so I can repair aluminum. Welding cast iron is not easy.

They make two main types of squares. One is an L-shape with a sharp outer corner. The problem with this is that the outer corner fits in the inner corner of whatever you’re clamping. You can’t get in there to weld. Their other product, the Mega Square, has another side, cut at 45° to the others, where the L-shaped square has a corner. You’ll understand when you see the photos. When you clamp steel to two sides of the Mega Square at 90° to each other, you can reach into the inside corner to weld.

I ordered two different sizes, figuring one would always be too small and the other would always be too big.

I chose to use my Harbor Freight Titanium Unlimited 200 multi-process welder. It’s extremely handy. I picked MIG because it’s the type of welding I do best.

First, I laid the metal out without welding it to see if everything looked right. It seemed okay.

After that, I took an angle grinder and knot wheel and cleaned most of the rust off the steel. I then cleaned the parts with window cleaner. Raw steel is always covered with rust and black dust, so if you clean it before you work with it, you can avoid a lot of hand-washing and laundry problems.

I followed the angle grinder with the belt grinder, deburring everything to get rid of sharp edges. I beveled things so the weld beads would fit in better. I wasn’t because I was worried about penetration. This project will never see significant stress. It doesn’t need perfect welds. The bevels will help assure that the welds are deep and strong, but that wasn’t the purpose.

After the metal was cleaned up, I drilled holes for the casters. If I had waited until the pedestal was assembled, I would not have been able to get the parts onto the drill press, so I had to do it early. I used a machinist’s square, a carbide scribe, and a center punch to locate the holes. I started them with a center drill and finished them with a unibit. These things are great. It cut through both walls cleanly and accurately, and it even beveled and deburred the holes.

With all this done, I was ready to weld. I clamped two pieces of steel onto the big Mega Square and let fly. It worked perfectly. No distortion at all after the parts cooled.

It looks like there is hope I can build a table frame after all.

I followed the same process with the other side of the base, and then I put the whole mess on the table, clamped it as well as I could, and welded the column in place.

Everything went well, but I ended up bowing the piece the column attached to. I welded it pretty quickly, I didn’t let it cool between segments, and I didn’t clamp it straight.

The bow didn’t really matter. It was maybe 1/4″ over two feet. The bowed part was not going to be on the floor, so it could not make the pedestal rock. The pedestal was going to have a caster at each corner with the bowed part centered between them about 4″ off the floor. Still, I wanted to see if I could fix it.

I had heard about acetylene straightening. This is not the same thing as heating a piece of metal so you can bend it. When you do acetylene straightening, you heat a small area of a part just until it begins to melt. This expands the metal in thickness. When it contracts, it stays thicker than the surrounding metal, but it contracts in the plane of the wall you heated. This means it bends the part in the direction of the side you heated.

If you think you’ve done flame straightening with a propane or MAPP torch, you don’t know what flame straightening is. Read up on it. You can’t do it with propane or MAPP alone.

I have an acetylene outfit, but I don’t have tanks yet because I’m waiting for a good deal. It occurred to me that a TIG torch ought to work. I turned the pedestal upside-down, drew lines where I wanted to apply heat, and gave it a whirl. It worked great. The bottom tube is now straight. There is a tiny bit of bend between the center tube and a tube that has casters in it, but it’s so small, I felt that trying to fix it would be obsessive.

The TIG torch left some lumps on the steel, so I used a flap disk to make them less lumpy. They’re on the underside of the pedestal, so no one will see them.

Attaching the top plate was hard. I could not use a square. I had to grind the top of the column carefully to make sure it was absolutely level. Then I attached it to the plate with a magnet, and I tacked the plate in place while sitting on the floor underneath it.

The top plate now has a slight bow. I decided not to try to prevent it, because I knew it would be forced straight when I bolted the grinder to it.

Now I had a pedestal, but I was not satisfied with the open ends on the bottom tubes. I made little plates and welded them in there.

This was scary, because I have had serious problems with weld control. For years, it has been hard for me to see anything but the arc when I welded.

A few weeks back, it occurred to me that I might have a vitamin A deficiency. I have had some gallbladder issues, and the gallbladder is what allows you to digest fat. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble, so if you don’t absorb fat, you can become deficient. I got myself some vitamin A and some lecithin, which emulsifies fat. I started talking both every day.

When I welded yesterday, I was able to see what I was doing. The difference was tremendous. Was it the vitamin A? I don’t know. I just know I’m not afraid to weld things I would not have touched a year ago. I had no problems welding the little plates in, apart from basic lack of skill.

I held the plates in with little magnets when I tacked them. I can’t tell you how useful these are for welding.

I may take the grinder and grind the ends of the tubes smooth, so it looks like they were never open.

I attached the casters and the grinder. Of course, I found that two of my screw holes were in the wrong places. This kind of thing always happens. I’m going to have to put two new holes in the top plate. I may weld the old ones closed, just because I can.

The pedestal is fantastic. You can jump on it without flexing it. It rolls very easily. The brakes hold it very firmly when you need to use the grinder. The platform is around 40″ off the floor, so the grinder is at a very convenient height. I love it.

I may add features. I would like to have a steel loop that holds a water bowl.

I bought primer and paint. I’m going to paint it forest green. This will take several days because the paint takes forever to cure. When I’m done, I’ll be sitting pretty. I’ll have a very nice stand I can move with ease, and I’ll be one step closer to getting rid of my extra Eastwood cart. My plasma cutter is sitting on it now, and it works, but I want something less bulky. Maybe another Harbor Freight Vulcan cart. They’re wonderful.

I should have my machine tools here in two weeks. I still have some wiring to do.

I think I’m going to buy a welding table top and forget about making one. The premade ones are just too good. I’ll be satisfied with fabricating a frame to hold it.

Things are looking good in the shop.

In other news, I had a pain in my wrist and hand this morning, and after watching some healing videos, I prayed for healing and commanded myself to be healed. The pain is almost totally gone. Really neat.

Conclusion: Yes, Miami Really Does Stink

I still do not have a quote on moving my machine tools here, but I am closer. A guy from a rigging company just came by and looked the place over to see how hard it would be to get trucks in here.

I said something about being eager to cut all ties with Miami, and we started talking. The poor guy was born in Hialeah.

HIALEAH.

Cubans have a word: “chusma.” It’s sort of like “redneck.” When a southerner calls you a redneck, he means you’re the kind of person he doesn’t want marrying into his family. It’s not a compliment. It’s okay if people like you show up to lay sod or fix the roof, but you better not be on the property after sundown. A chusma is very similar. A chusma is a person with no class whatsoever.

Hialeah is the hub of chusma activity in North America. Cubans make fun of Hialeah all the time. Cuban women make fun of the way Hialeah women do their nails and hair. It’s a running joke in Miami.

This poor guy was BORN there.

Miami is bad enough. Hialeah…unthinkable.

He said he left after an incident at his home. He was working on his truck, and some kid in a Japanese car tore through his lawn, like he wasn’t even there.

I have seen these kids many times. It’s the weirdest thing. I can’t explain it, but they’re very common. It’s always a scrawny kid with a very small, very round head, shaved or nearly so. Their heads look like little coconuts. They drive tiny Japanese cars which are very slow, but the cars always have aftermarket tailpipes as big around as coffee cans. They make a terrible noise as they accelerate incredibly slowly.

Because they’re so slow, you get to enjoy the noise for a long time. It takes them forever to pull away.

I don’t know where these kids come from. It’s like there’s a factory somewhere. Their heads are always round and tiny. They never have much hair. They always have that crazy tailpipe. Their cars are always unbelievably slow. They rig them up to make noise to compensate.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these kids on foot. Just in Japanese cars. They don’t even look like other Cubans. It’s like they materialize briefly while visiting from a hell dimension full of Honda Preludes with 300,000 miles.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure the machine-moving guy got a visit from the mysterious coconut clan.

He told me something interesting. He said the heavy-hauling business was more active than he had ever seen it. I had to ask him: was it because businesses were being torn apart, or was it because they were being started?

During the Obama years, you could go on Ebay and find dozens of bench grinders, lathes, saws, and so on for very good prices. The economy was not that great, so people were selling tools. It got better toward the end, except for people like me, who like cheap tools.

News heads like to tell us Trump is destroying the world. If Trump mailed every person in America a gold bar, they would say he was trying to poison us with heavy metal. I asked the machine-moving guy my questions because I wanted to find out the truth about the economy.

He said construction was keeping truckers busy. It’s moving frantically right now. He also pointed out that construction moves in booms and busts, so he expects a bust.

Have you noticed that a huge percentage of tractor trailers have signs on them saying, “WE’RE HIRING”? I don’t recall seeing that before Trump.

Anyway, whatever may be in store at the end of the boom, things appear to be going pretty well under Trump at the moment.

He told me he can get stuff moved in 48 hours, from the time the order is placed. That’s wonderful. I want the machines here NOW NOW NOW.

Actually, I want them here in 2017. No, 1975.

I probably won’t be able to do anything until week after next, but as soon as I can, I will get the ball rolling. Can’t wait.

In even better news, I now have a contract to sell my last bit of Miami real estate which isn’t income-producing. God willing, it will be gone by the new year. Maybe considerably sooner.

Once this property is gone, I will think about moving north and getting rid of everything else I have in South Florida.

It amazes me that people told me I would miss Miami. I hate Miami more every day. The longer I live in Ocala, the more I love Ocala and hate Miami. I haven’t missed Miami for one second. It would be like missing dysentery.

No one here misses Miami. I’m not the only refugee here. The others don’t miss Miami. I have friends who moved to Kissimmee and Orlando. They don’t miss Miami. My friends who moved to Pompano Beach don’t miss Miami.

My friend in Orlando says he feels sick when he visits Miami. He can’t stand it.

No one who moves ANYWHERE misses Miami. Maybe Cubans do, but I’ll bet they don’t. They pump Miami up when they live there, but they probably change their tune when they’ve lived anywhere else.

It will be so beautiful, watching the remaining cords snap. The big ones were houses that produced no income, sucked up money, and presented problems all year round. The little cords aren’t that bad, but I still want to cut them.

Today I bought steel for a bench grinder stand. That’s my big weekend project. I’m really looking forward to doing some metalworking. It will be even better when I have a lathe and mill so I can do more stuff.

The next time you hear from me, my bench grinder may be riding in style.

I feel like God put me here to heal. I’m getting over my family, Miami, the putrefaction of American culture…I was going to make a long list, but that’s about it.

If things are this good only two years into the process, how good will they be in 2025?

Return of the Machines

Woody Allen once said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” How true that is.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve contacted someone with a business proposition and received no response or a response so late it didn’t matter. Also, I know a lot of working-class people, and I’ve noticed they don’t respond to texts, answer the phone, or show up when they say they will. I believe this is one of the main reasons they live from hand to mouth.

This week I started calling rigging companies to see if I could find someone to move my lathe and milling machine to my home in Ocala. So far, out of four companies, one has responded. They don’t sound too good, but at least they proved they’re conscious, so they may end up with the job.

Another company just called. I’m up to two!

Before I started calling these companies, I talked to a big outfit in Miami. My dad used to be their labor attorney. Very nice people. They moved my lathe into my shop in Miami for nothing. They want $4000 to move my machines here, so I feel like there is probably someone out there who will do it cheaper. Some companies don’t have locations near both Miami and Ocala, so they would have to charge to send more things longer distances. For example, one company said they would have to send two trucks from Tampa to Miami to pick up the machinery. I found a company that has locations in Miami and Ocala, so I’m hoping they will be able to use different crews on both ends and save me cash.

It will be wonderful having machine tools again. It will be wonderful having one more tie to Miami severed permanently. I’m in the process of selling a house there, and once it goes, I will have no place to lay my head in Dade County. I truly look forward to having to rent a hotel room if I ever have to visit again. I hope I never have to visit, though. That would be even better.

One of the things I’ve really missed is drilling holes accurately. I have an industrial drill press which cost a fortune new in the 1960’s or 70’s, but once you’ve used a mill, it’s hard to take any drill press seriously. A mill does everything a drill press does, much, much better. I’m sick of using punches to mark holes and doing my best and still having holes a millimeter away from where I want them.

I am considering building a welding table. I would want to mill the top flat. I can do that easily with a milling machine. Without one, it would be like using a teaspoon to plant a tree.

I considered buying a trailer and moving the machines myself, but it seems like a bad idea. I would have to spend $2500 on the trailer, and I would have to rent a forklift on both ends of the jobs. I say “jobs” because I would have to make two trips.

I don’t think I’m a good choice to secure a top-heavy 4000-pound machine to a trailer and then drive it around curves. A boat or tractor, sure. Random household junk, no problem. A lathe is another story. It should not be my first or second hauling job.

If I did it myself, I would spend maybe $900 on forklifts, so the total cost, with everything included (fuel, whatever), would approach or top $4000. I would have a nice trailer when it was over, so I figure I would come out $2500 ahead, but I might also have a lathe lying on its side beside the road somewhere.

Getting this stuff moved and dumping the house will put me much closer to feeling free of Miami. I will still have investments there, but they don’t require travel.

What a poisonous place Miami is. It leaves a mark. The other day, I found myself standing behind two Cubans at a store here in Ocala, and I couldn’t wait to get away from them. They’re probably wonderful guys. I don’t care. That’s not the point. They remind me of a place where my family endured decades of defeat and misery. I don’t even like to drive by Cuban restaurants. I haven’t had any type of Cuban food since 2017, and I don’t plan to fix any in the foreseeable future.

The mental association is unpleasant, whether or not it’s rational. If Miami were full of Norwegians, I wouldn’t want to be reminded of them, either.

Every decent person I know in the Dade County area agrees with me. They can’t wait to get out. None of them ever ask me why I don’t like Miami. It’s almost a litmus test. If you like Miami, you’re probably shallow or blind.

My young friend Travis is stuck at the University of Miami until May, and he may have to stay on in Miami for some time after that. He hates the city. He keeps telling me about people he knows who got out. It’s like he’s talking about runaway slaves. They all tell him how much better life is.

Cubans are the only people who like Miami. They moved there from a worse place, and they turned it into a very Cuban-friendly place. They give each other preferential treatment. They don’t have to learn our language or adopt American manners. Many of them don’t know about the rest of the country. They tend to stay put, and they make their kids stay, too. They live in a strange state of blindness. Everyone else wants out, out, out.

By the middle of the last century, southern whites were pretty much gone from Miami. Northerners took their place, but they eventually began following them. Now even some Cubans are fleeing. They don’t like the South Americans who are moving in.

Black people really hate Miami. They’re right. They are treated very, very badly by the dominant Hispanics. Anti-black racism is thick there, and it’s very hard for blacks to find decent work. In a lot of places, black people make racism out to be a much bigger problem than it is, and they are held back by a victim complex, but Miami gives them ample reason to complain.

It’s so nice to be away from voodoo, car horns, traffic, pervasive Spanish, and rudeness. I can’t describe it.

Can’t wait to see those machines sitting in my shop and to receive a closing statement via email. It will be like bathing after simmering in a heated septic tank.

Gallant Apparently had a Vasectomy

I am completely out of touch with American values.

Months ago, I read that Kim Kardashian charges millions of dollars–“millions,” plural–to make one Instagram post. I think about that a lot.

To me, Kim Kardashian is a lewd, crass, self-destructive, highly toxic person, very like the sort of inexpensive prostitute you might see if you drove through a bad area of your city at 3 a.m. I see her for what she is. She is not very bright. She has no talents. She does nothing productive with her life, except for one typical leftist cause which will probably be destructive in the end. She has nothing interesting to say. If I knew her, I would avoid her, the same way I would avoid a female meth addict who propositioned me in a parking lot. There is nothing good to be gained by interacting with her, and she has an air of dirtiness about her.

Many of our celebrities are like that. If you went to an area where whores and drug dealers congregate, and you gave each one of them ten million dollars and put them on TV, they would fit right in with our current crop of media idols.

Kardashian’s popularity proves that a big percentage of Americans see her completely differently from the way I do. They crave Kardashian news. They want to be like her. They want to wear what she wears. They think her TV show is top-notch entertainment. They truly admire her. How can that be true?

I can’t absorb this. I can’t make my mind assimilate it. It’s like living in a country where people think horse manure makes a good corsage.

Instinctively, I have the incorrect feeling that everyone thinks Kim Kardashian is gross and trashy.

I am writing about her to illustrate my point, which is that my heart and the heart of the general public are completely different.

America is like a country of children without fathers. We reject the beautiful, protective lessons of the past, and we do as we please. We are making ourselves silly and weak.

Yesterday I found some neat videos on Youtube. I don’t know why they popped up. There were made over half a century ago. They were videos that used to be shown in schools.

The purpose of the videos was to help kids get it together and live like advanced human beings instead of savages. One video was about neatness and personal grooming. Another helped girls understand that promiscuity was self-destructive.

I decided to watch the video about neatness. I figured it couldn’t hurt. I had ample reason to feel that way.

I have often told people a story about my youth. My mother took me to a department store at the 163rd Street mall in North Miami Beach, to buy clothes. I would guess that I was about 11. A nice old Jewish lady waited on us. The lady tried to explain something to me. I can’t recall what it was. She decided to use an analogy, which I recall. She said, “When you take a shower, you don’t just stand there. You soap yourself up and clean yourself off.” She may have added more information. I don’t know.

Years later, I realized what she was trying to do. She saw that I was a dirty kid, so she was trying to give me a hint about hygiene. I will probably never remember what we were talking about. Maybe she was saying I should stand up straight while my pants were being measured, instead of slouching passively. She saw that I was in trouble, and she wanted to help without offending my mother, so she came up with something to say.

She could tell (or maybe smell) what I was doing in the shower. I used to get in, stand around, and get out. I didn’t use a washcloth. I was probably in junior high before I started shampooing my own hair. Before that, I didn’t think about it. Every so often, my mother would make he hold still while she did it for me, and the rest of the time, I didn’t concern myself with it. I didn’t realize I was dirtier than other people, and I thought my situation was normal.

Kids don’t automatically know how to bathe. Someone has to tell them.

My parents didn’t teach me much of anything. It’s shocking, when I think about it. They expected me to succeed, and they held me accountable, but they didn’t help. They didn’t show me how to do it. They expected me to figure it out all by myself.

Unbelievably, I learned something from the hygiene video, at my advanced age. The announcer said it was important to wash between your toes. I don’t do that. I haven’t thought about it, to tell you the truth. I just figured all that soapy water running down there would get the job done. I scrub my feet with a soapy cloth, but that’s all. This says something about my upbringing. Even at my age, it continues to affect me negatively.

I watched a few more videos. I thought they were fantastic. I felt sick, thinking how much they would have helped me when I was a kid. I felt cheated.

In truth, I was cheated. We owe kids our help. They can’t make it without it.

I also saw some videos in which people discussed life in the mid-20th century.

I assumed they would say they longed for a time when people had it more together. I fully expected them to say America was a kinder, more orderly, more peaceful place back then. Boy, was I wrong. All they could talk about was the “oppressive” atmosphere and the harsh rules. They truly thought things had gotten better.

Yes, things have gotten better, if “better” means a boy who has decided he’s a girl can go into a girls’ locker room and shower naked with actual females who have no say in the matter. Things are better, if having filthy language on billboards is good. If smoking dope in a park where kids can see you and smell the smoke is good, then things have gotten a lot better.

If self-discipline and honoring your elders are bad things, then life is much better than it used to be. If having babies out of wedlock is good, things are fantastic.

I have a thirst to see myself improved. It looks like most Americans are thirsting for the same things monkeys want.

My parents should have told me things. They should have explained Christianity to me and seen to it that I participated whether I wanted to or not. They should have given me a desk, a chair, and a lamp and said, “This is where you work in the evening. This is when you work. This is how you keep a schedule so you don’t fall behind. On this day every week, we will check and make sure things are going smoothly.”

I was very, very smart, so I was able to do well in school without self-discipline for many years. There were obvious problems, though. I always did long-term projects the nights before they were due, because I couldn’t plan. I started to do badly in math, because you have to study math continuously; you can’t cram.

I can’t tell you how many times I saw the sun come up because I was working on a paper or project that was due that day. If your son is doing this, you are failing him.

My dad used to come home from work, take off his shirt and pants, lie on the couch in the den, and watch TV in his underwear. My mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen and living room. My sister and I lived outside the house and in our bedrooms. That was our family life. My sister and I filled our time however we saw fit, within very loose rules.

When my sister was 14, she started stealing my mother’s car, driving to a bar on 79th Street, and sitting with men. She had a friend who lived a block north of us, and she would go, too. I wonder what the people who made the videos would have thought about that. They probably could not have imagined it happening. One of their videos cautioned girls about parking in cars with boys. It didn’t say anything about sitting in bars with grown men!

The Seventies were different. It was not that hard for a young girl to get a drink at a bar without getting carded. Back then, they sold cigarettes from unattended vending machines, too.

Youth is when you learn good habits. They become like servants to you. They poke and prod you to do the right thing. If you don’t have good habits, you have bad ones, and they prod you to do wrong. If you wait until you’re old to strive for good habits, you will have a much, much harder time, and you will probably fail.

I don’t know why I didn’t become a criminal or a beggar. It’s amazing that I did as well as I did.

My sister eventually became a criminal and a beggar.

It’s remarkable that my teachers were of no help. Even the best of them were useless. My schools could have taught kids responsibility and basic life skills, but they didn’t. Maybe liberal educators got rid of the lifestyle videos because they found them judgmental and old-fashioned. Liberals always work to destroy the character of young people.

My teachers weren’t afraid of teaching values. They can’t use that excuse. No one can say they felt the teaching of good values was the exclusive province of our parents.

They taught us nature was sacred, and that we had to be environmental extremists. They taught feminism and socialism. They told us the horrible, hedonistic self-immolation of the Sixties was very good. They only had scruples when it came to things like belief in God, honoring our elders, sexual purity, good manners, and self-discipline.

They were dupes and tools. I don’t know how else to say it. Most of them weren’t even good at teaching.

Maybe other people don’t hate America’s new ways as much as I do because they were raised better than I was. Maybe they didn’t have the problems I had, so they don’t appreciate the good things they got from self-discipline and solid values.

I feel very foreign when I think about these things. I never feel at home on this planet, but the sensation of being different is much stronger when my nose is rubbed in the distinctions.

One of the purposes of the rapture is to put us in a place where we are in sync with the beings around us. We won’t feel foreign in heaven, or even on earth if we return here to rule after the tribulation. We’ll be normal, and those who are not in our family will be the wallflowers and outsiders. That will be nice, at least for us.

If I could go back and change my childhood, I would want two things. I would want to be raised by people who were led by the Holy Spirit and full of knowledge about God, and I would want them to teach me how to live correctly. If I had those things, any other problems I had would take care of themselves.

One of the wonderful things about God is that he gives us a new beginning. You can’t go back and be eight years old again. You can’t grow up in a proper Christian home, marry your childhood sweetheart, raise a Christian family in your youth, and head into middle age with all that behind you. But you can become the kind of person you would have been had you started life correctly.

Sometimes I think about the disgusting and disgraceful things I’ve done, said, and felt, and I wonder how I would survive the shame if they were exposed. Then a thought comes to me: if, when those things are exposed, I can say I’m not that person any more, and I don’t do, say, or feel those things, then I won’t be so ashamed.

Because of God, I can have that.

I wish I could go live in a secure fortress with other Christians and only come out to get groceries. I really do. I wish I could live in heaven and only come down here during the day to work. America is extremely filthy, and it’s not going to change. We’re just seeing the beginning.

At least I don’t have to be part of it. I’ll be able to say I got off the field before it was too late.

Kids have absolutely no idea what to do with their lives. Your kids are extremely unlikely to figure everything out for themselves. If you don’t get in there and help them, you will surely be held accountable. You probably won’t like the results of your parenting efforts either.