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.

I Hate the Term “Easter Egg,” but…

I haven’t written all that much about the challenges I face over the last 10 days or so, but it has been a stressful time. As of today, everything has been resolved completely in my favor. While I was prophesying to myself, God said this would happen, so I got two blessings, not one. The blessing of seeing that prophesy was true is much greater than the nice things God said would happen. Pleasant events are great, but the knowledge that God tells you things is priceless. Isn’t it something we all wish we had?

God gives me little indications that the things I say are from him. For example, he said he would lift me up on his love to accomplish good works.

That sounds like meaningless flowery language to the cynical ear of the flesh, but God chooses his words with precision. They always have meaning.

Twice, I have had dreams about flying on love as though it were a wind. I was not thinking about that when I prophesied, but God reminded me afterward.

Maybe 6 years ago, I had a dream in which a warm, invisible force carried me through the air, down a sidewalk, between trees that were very dense with healthy leaves. More recently, I dreamed a headwind lifted me up and carried me into the leaves of a tree. The wind came toward me from the front, but it propelled me forward.

After I had those dreams, I interpreted them, and I believed leaves represented good works. Both times, God lifted me on love to good works.

We tend to think of Christianity as a lifetime of obeying commands because of guilt or a feeling of obligation. That’s a very low form of Christianity. In reality, love is supposed to be our motivation.

The Bible says love, not obligation, is what led God to permit the crucifixion. It would be very hard to submit to torture and execution because of duty, but God did it because the alternative was to see much worse things happen to children he loved. Nearly anyone will jump in front of a car for his own child.

Love is what motivates you to do things that please God. He worked this into the words he gave me, and I saw it later.

Satan (or “Stan,” as I sometimes type his name by mistake) has done a great job of blocking love in us. He sends us bullies and tormentors. He sends lovers that pretend to want us and then discard us. He gives us entertainment in which violence in the service of vengeance is satisfying to the point of being delicious. He exalts aggression and verbal cruelty. He makes us afraid to love, and he encourages us to hate.

It’s a strong strategy. Love is one of the roots of the kingdom of heaven. Isolate people from it, and you prevent them from knowing and pleasing God.

Satan also uses fear to cut off our love. It’s hard to love when you’re afraid, and the Bible says completed love casts out fear.

The Bible says Satan is a ROARING lion, not just a lion. He roams the streets seeking people he MAY devour. The Bible doesn’t say he can have whoever he wants. He roars to put us in fear, and fear cuts off love and faith and drives us to do things that land us in snares.

Love is a big deal. It’s not just a pleasant feeling. It’s protection.

Love is also the glue that binds the members of the kingdom together. Duty can’t do that. God gives his children favor and help because of love, and we help each other and serve him because of love.

Our culture is full of popular spectacles and pursuits that work against love.

I quit watching superhero movies. The writers depict violence and cruelty as satisfying. I also quit watching revenge porn. The John Wick films are good examples. Someone kicks John’s puppy to death, so John mutilates and kills dozens of people, and the writers make you feel great about every incident. That’s not healthy, even as a fantasy.

Superhero movies are also unhealthy because they create false messiahs who do the kinds of things the disciples originally wanted Jesus to do. They wanted him to come and annihilate their enemies and start an earthly kingdom. They wanted to see the Romans humiliated. Jesus won’t be doing things like that until he returns, but Robert Downey and Ryan Reynolds pretend to do them right now, like little kids tying towels to their necks and jumping off their garage roofs.

The desires the disciples had for revenge and supremacy were carnal, and so are the longings you feed when you watch actors pretend to cut people up, burn them, and so on.

Superheroes are proud. No one helps them do what they do. They don’t pray. They don’t bless and curse. They’re better than other people, and they get all the glory for what they do. They sound a lot like fallen angels and the nephilim. I believe this is where their inspiration came from.

It’s great to hear from God. I plan to do it as much as I can. As long as it keeps working, I will pursue it. Anyone can make a mistake, but prophesy keeps paying off and conforming to scripture, so I have no reason to stop at this time.

Don’t Drown in it; Make it the Pavement You Walk On

I feel like writing something else about God.

The Bible compares the world to a sea, and it compares voices (words) to waters. The Bible uses fish and the Sea of Galilee to symbolize human beings and the world. The Bible says God has a voice like many waters. The Bible says the words of the Holy Spirit that come up inside us are “living water.”

One of the things I don’t like about the world is that we are born submerged in filthy water. We are generally surrounded by voices that push us to destruction. Fallen angels and demons tempt us and lie to us, and so do people. So does our own flesh. We are besieged around the clock, by innumerable voices. Unfortunately, we don’t necessarily hear from God as much. Generally, we don’t. I was an adult before I heard from God, but I heard from the rest all the time, dating back at least to my birth. I probably heard spirits before that.

We need something to tilt the scales in our favor. We aren’t strong enough to fight continuously with our own words, which lack power anyway.

We’re like accused dissidents or terrorists being interrogated and abused by a series of inquisitors. When we capture terrorists, we don’t send a man in to talk and let him work until he’s worn out. We send one man in, and when he starts to fade, we send another in. We don’t let the terrorist sleep. Everyone is fresh and rested except for the terrorist, who becomes exhausted and gives up because he’s alone. We are not supposed to fight alone. We are part of a team, and the strongest member, who never sleeps, is God.

The word says faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. It makes sense, then, that bad things also come by hearing, and that they come by the word of other spirits, other people, and the flesh.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

Prayer in tongues is the word of God. When you pray in tongues, your mind may not understand while you pray, but gradually, things penetrate, and you start understanding things you haven’t learned with your natural mind. This is why prayer in tongues builds faith and brings revelation.

God also speaks through prophecy, the word of knowledge, the word of wisdom, and discernment of spirits. God has told us to covet prophecy. He wants us to have it. Failing to pursue it and expect it is disobedience. It’s available, and you should have it.

For a while, I’ve been praying for God to talk me constantly, to overcome the other voices. “Coincidentally,” I saw a Derek Prince video this year in which he showed people how to prophesy. I started doing it. I can’t tell you who will win the Kentucky Derby next year, because that’s now how prophesy works, but God tells me about the future all the time, and he tells me who I am in Christ.

It’s really good. It’s more direct than prayer in tongues. I can understand it as I hear it.

Satan, who is creation’s premiere loser and worst coach, tells me I’m just a random person. He says God has discarded me because of my evil nature and sins. He says God won’t do anything for me because I don’t deserve it. He says I’m crazy to follow God instead of common sense, and that it will blow up on me soon. He says I imagine everything I believe about God. He never says that about the things I used to believe about his own power! He never says my enemies are weak.

God says I am literally his son. He says I am a royal. He says I have great authority. He says I am exactly the kind of person he wants to do things for. He says I don’t need to deserve, because Jesus deserved, and I inherited what Jesus had. He says things are going to get better and better.

When I started doing this, I did it in fits and starts because I was afraid I would say stupid things. When I said something that sounded good, I wanted to quit, because I didn’t want to go on and say something insane which would prove the first thing I said was not from God.

I quit worrying about that. I started prophesying more and more. I haven’t had any letdowns yet. On rare occasions I’ve felt that I was going off course, so I stopped and started over, and things went fine.

When Peter tried to walk to Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, he sank whenever he considered the water and not Jesus. He rose when he focused on the Lord. That’s how life works.

We are stuck in this world for a while, and we have to make certain concessions. We have to eat, sleep, and bathe. We have to have money and things. We have to put up with all sorts of hostile beings. We are pulled away from God a lot. We are his feet, and the filth of this world that gets on us because of our connection to it is like the dust the disciples were told to shake off their shoes.

Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. He was showing how the Holy Spirit would counteract the “dust” our association with the world would cause to adhere to us. The flow of the Holy Spirit washes it off. If the Holy Spirit isn’t speaking in you, you’re like a person who has no access to a shower. You need help.

I am spending a great deal of time letting the Holy Spirit speak through me. I don’t know how I would get by without it now. Satan tells me ridiculous things about the future, and the Holy Spirit refutes all of it and gives me peace.

Satan will never quit, so I can’t quit. He has a real problem now that I have God’s weight on the scales with me. In the past, he and his kids could bully me and torment me, and I had no power to fight back. Now he’s the quadriplegic and I’m the heavyweight champion.

Christians need to know these things. The defeat most of us live in was never intended for us.

What Unimportant Thing can we Fight About Today?

Are we supposed to be baptized in the name of Jesus only, or in the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

I thought I knew the answer, but then I thought I didn’t. Now I know I know.

Traditionally, churches have baptized in the name of the Trinity. There is scriptural support for this. In Matthew 28, Jesus commanded the disciples to baptize in all three names.

Question answered, right?

No.

Throughout the New Testament, scripture says people were baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, without mentioning the Father and Holy Spirit. It doesn’t say the Father and Holy Spirit were not named, but it doesn’t say they were.

We pray in Jesus’ name, not the name of the Father or Holy Spirit. We cast out demons in his name. We say we are the body of Christ, not the body of Yahweh. We say we are “in Christ.” This is strong support for baptizing in the name of Jesus Christ. It seems like pretty good authority.

It seems very clear that we should baptize in the name of Jesus Christ. It’s less clear that we should not mention the Father or Holy Spirit.

The question is interesting to me, because I was baptized by the Last Reformation, and they teach that you should be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, not the Trinity. I assumed they knew what they were doing, but then I read Matthew 28. I decided they were wrong. Now I think they’re right.

In addition to the numerous citations in the New Testament, they rely on Eusebius, an early Christian, to support their view. Eusebius is presumed to have seen very authentic versions of the gospels, and he has said that Jesus commanded his followers to make disciples in his name. Baptism is not mentioned. There is also a Hebrew translation of Matthew that omits the reference to the Trinity.

Problem: Eusebius quoted the version with the Trinitarian reference in at least one other work, so he clearly approved of it, unless his work was altered.

Problem: the Hebrew translation anti-Trinitarians rely on can’t be dated to anything close to the first centuries A.D.

TLR isn’t the only organization quibbling with the conventional text. The Black Hebrew Israelites and the Muslims object to it.

What’s the answer?

First of all, it’s a big mistake to fight over things like this. Obviously, God is not going to invalidate your baptism for mentioning the Father and Holy Spirit, and since Jesus Christ is one with them, and since we do all other things in his name, it certainly should be sufficient to name him only.

Poring over old books is a major error when it comes to interpreting the will of God. You may have to give them a certain amount of consideration, but if we believe the Holy Spirit speaks to us today and tells us things like where to live and which pair of socks to buy, surely we should expect him to resolve theological questions for us.

When you get too attached to books and opinions, it shows you’re getting distant from the Holy Spirit. God does not have opinions. He does not think argument is “healthy” or useful. God has the truth, and he delivers it to everyone with no inconsistencies.

Worshiping the opinions of men has destroyed the power of God’s people over and over. The Talmud damaged the Jews tremendously, and so has Catholic gossip and pantheism masquerading as revelation.

If study were the answer, Judaism and the church would never have fallen apart, right? There have been a tremendous number of able scholars, and they generally get essential things completely wrong.

Here’s something God just showed me. When we say someone has been baptized “in the name of Jesus Christ,” we’re not describing the type of baptism or what has happened to the person. We are describing the motivation and authority of the person PERFORMING the baptism.

If you heal in Jesus’ name, it means you are doing it with his authority. It doesn’t mean Jesus is doing it, or that only Jesus is God, or anything else. We have no problem accepting the idea that the Holy Spirit and angels heal when we lay hands on people. We don’t require Jesus to show up in person. We’re just using his authority, and the means is up to the Father.

If you pray in Jesus’ name, it doesn’t mean you pray to Jesus or that you pray only to Jesus. Jesus told us to approach the Father in prayer.

It follows, then, that when you say, “in the name of Jesus Christ” when you baptize, you’re just showing that you have his authority to baptize. You’re not relying on your authority, or the authority of angels, or the authority of the federal government, or the authority of the Rotary Club. You’re using inherited authority that was the property of Jesus Christ while he was on earth and now belongs to you.

The threshold question God would ask is, “Who authorized you to do this?” The answer is, “You did. You authorized Jesus Christ, and I inherited his authority.” This endorsement makes the transaction go through.

These things are clearly true, so it must be that when we baptize, we do it in the name of Jesus, just as we pray in his name and cast out spirits in his name. The cooperation of the Father and Holy Spirit are guaranteed because they are united in purpose with Jesus, so you don’t need to mention them expressly. They respect and honor his name.

“Jesus Christ” is shorthand for “Yehoshuah the Messiah,” and “messiah” means “anointed one.” “Anointed” means “given authority.” We have inherited his anointing, so we use his authority. Baptize in his name, and you baptize as though you were Jesus himself. You’re of the body, and you can join others to the body.

It’s not like “being baptized WITH the Holy Spirit,” which means having the Holy Spirit surround you and live inside you. When you’re baptized with the Holy Spirit, you’re not receiving his authority. You’re being baptized WITH or IN him. You become immersed in him and filled with him, as though he were water. You’re giving him authority in you. Not the same thing as being baptized (with water) into the royal family in the name of Jesus.

I hope TLR supporters and other Spirit-led Christians won’t get into a big stink over this issue. It’s a colossal pit we don’t need to fall into.

I’m very confident in the answer I have received.

Yes, he Does Have a Right to It

The further along in Christianity I get, the more I realize Christians are in a special class of privileged people.

When I was a kid, I thought I had to suffer in church for an hour a week to get to heaven. That was about all I knew. Later on, I learned about faith. I didn’t know I was supposed to give myself completely to Jesus, however, and I didn’t know God would work miracles for me as a matter of routine. Eventually, I realized God would do a lot of things for me. It took me a while to understand that it was important to get his help doing what he wanted, not in fulfilling tawdry desires.

At some point, God showed me that I had to be sanctified. I couldn’t do what everyone else did. I had to repent. I had to get cleansed of demons and iniquities. I realized that there was a connection between the things I did and the way my life went. I started getting cleaned up, and it certainly helped, but when I stumbled, I overestimated how much it hurt my relationship with God. I felt that it set me back much more than it actually did.

I started noticing that God’s presence, and the sense that I was approved, were very strong right after I sinned and repented. I felt like I should be in the doghouse for a while, but there he was, unmistakably. It was hard to accept. It was as if he had forgotten all about what I had done.

I punished myself, but he was moving ahead as if nothing had happened.

I should have realized he wanted to move on. When I have a problem with a person, and that person repents and apologizes, I don’t want to hear about it any more. I just want to resume the relationship. If I’m that good, then surely God has to be better.

My dad and my sister were very different. You could tell my dad you were sorry 50 times, and he would continue yelling as if you had told him to kiss your rear end. He changed toward the end of his life, when God reached him. My sister is still angry at me for things I did when I was in elementary school.

I’m finally starting to understand that it’s about who I am, not what I do, say, or think. As long as I don’t deny God and quit, he lets offenses go pretty much instantly. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t punish me.

I watch teachers who talk about sonship. They keep saying we’re sons and daughters of God. We’re not just servants. I know these things, but lately they’ve been penetrating deeper.

Back in April, God gave me a sentence: “Thank you for making me nobility.”

That sounds proud, doesn’t it? But it also sounded proud when Jesus told old priests and rabbis he was the son of God.

Nobles are generally heirs. Real nobles, I mean. I don’t mean rock stars who get phony knighthoods from the queen of England. In the old days, a person who did something for a monarch would be made a noble, and after that, his descendants would be nobles by inheritance, no matter how stupid or obnoxious they were. Those people went on to rule over individuals who, in many cases, were much smarter and more capable than they were. It was not a meritocracy.

God was telling me I was in line to receive all sorts of good things as a birthright, whether I deserved them or not. I was born a second time, into his family. After that, I was an heir, and I was destined to receive things I had not earned.

The other side of the coin is obligation. A noble is supposed to keep high standards and take care of the people he lives among.

God wasn’t telling me I got to brag and push other people around. He was just telling me I would be more blessed than other people, and that I should maintain higher standards than others.

The other day, I was thinking about this, and I used Google to read about employees who had problems with their boss’s children. It was fascinating. All over the web, there are people fuming because their bosses put up with bad workplace behavior from their kids. They actually go to forums and ask other people what can be done about it. The answer, almost always, is “nothing.”

Of course you can’t do anything about it. The boss built his business so he could make his kids rich. The business isn’t yours. You just work there. You’re actually an instrument the boss uses to give his kids things you seem to deserve more than they do.

If you hate the boss’s son for getting better treatment than you do, you’re as wrong as you can be. You’re working in the boss’s son’s business. It already belongs to him, even if he doesn’t own it legally yet. You need to learn your place.

Jesus was the ultimate boss’s son. People think he knew everything God knew and had all of God’s power as soon as he was born, but that’s not true. He was a man who had to live by faith. Jesus the man didn’t earn God’s power while he was in human form, and he wasn’t born with it. It just dropped on him. God helped him all the time. He couldn’t fail. God didn’t let him.

The book of Job says the sons of God were gathered, and Satan was among them. It doesn’t say he was a son of God, however. Just that he was “also” there. He’s not a son of God. He belongs to a lower class of being. He’s an angel. I’m sure God loves angels, but they’re employees, not sons. God created the world for Jesus and his other children to rule. There was no path to that promotion for any angel, no matter how beautiful, wise, hard-working, or faithful.

The Bible says Christians will judge the angels. That means we are above them. Psalm 82 says we are “elohim.” That means we are gods.

In the Bible, “family” and “nation” mean nearly the same thing, and men are like nations because they can give rise to families. When Abel was killed, God said Abel’s “bloods,” plural, cried out to him from the earth. Some believe this means that in God’s eyes, Cain had killed a nation in Abel.

Abraham paid a tithe to Melchizedek. Hebrews says Levi, a descendant of Abraham, tithed through Abraham, because he was a seed in Abraham’s loins when the tithe was paid. You can see how strongly God views the connection between ancestor and descendant.

We are literally God’s children, and that’s why we get away with so much. It’s why we are spared so many things that happen to other people. The big calamities of the world are for them, not us. No wonder the world hates us.

I have come to understand two things: I have to agree that the good things that happen to me in spite of myself are completely appropriate and good, and I have to agree that the bad things that happen to people who reject Jesus are also completely appropriate and good. I will certainly feel compassion for the cursed, but I can’t criticize God for what befalls them. He is right to let it happen and even to make it happen. He sees everything, and only he knows what’s right. If he were to explain it, we would all agree.

God’s favoritism makes perfect sense. If you build a fortune for your son, you will bend over backwards to see that he gets it. You will be more patient with him than anyone else. You will forgive more. You will give him bigger rewards for the same work. It’s not evil. It’s the way things are supposed to be. We are supposed to look after our offspring and give them preference.

If you were living in the Warsaw Ghetto, and you knew the Germans were coming to liquidate it, would you build a hiding place, drag your neighbor’s children into it with you, and let your kids die? Of course not. You’d take your own children.

Consider the passover. Every Jew who put blood on his house was spared, along with his entire family. Every firstborn Egyptian died. The mean ones died. The nice ones died. The babies died. It was right. God was looking after Abraham’s seed, who were privileged because of who they were.

When God flooded the world, Noah was spared because he pleased God, but his family was spared simply because they were Noah’s seed. His wife wasn’t his seed, but she was his flesh. It didn’t matter whether his sons were upright people. They were privileged because of their name.

God drowned old people and babies. It was right. He knew what he was doing.

I can’t say why God chooses his children. There are some very, very nice non-Christians out there. The natural thing is to assume God would spare people like that. But that’s wrong. They die and burn forever, and it’s right. When we know all the facts, we’ll understand this.

People always ask why God saves Christians and sends “good people” to hell. There are no good people. No one wants to admit that, but it’s true. God treats Christians as though they were good because they’re his children. He shed his blood giving birth to them so he could preserve them and keep them. Heaven is his house, and he built it for his family, not strangers.

The world is full of envy. The children of failure are building up a white-hot rage toward anyone who seems privileged. White people, Americans, Jews, males, heterosexuals, conservatives, people who are financially comfortable, anyone wearing a red hat…we’re all treated like criminals now.

Satan’s children beat drums in the street and sing and chant about taking what we have (so they can waste it and lose it). They don’t realize two important things: they can’t be blessed, and God’s children can’t be cursed. Take what we have and kill us, and we will live again with better things than you can dream of. Meanwhile, what you took will make you suffer, and you will lose it.

To a child of God, all suffering and loss is short-term, and the same is true of the victories of the children of darkness. Victory can’t stick to them. They repel it.

This stuff is very interesting to me. Churches should teach it, but Satan runs the church, so you have to hear it from the Holy Spirit or catch someone talking about it on Youtube.

Jesus said the end would come when the gospel of the kingdom had been preached everywhere. Kingdoms are transferred through inheritance. They go from fathers to children, not to strangers. The real power of Christianity comes to people who understand that they are sons of God. Obeying rules, doing nice things, and giving preachers money won’t get you anywhere.

I’m not saying it’s not important to do good. I’m saying it’s not what gets you into the family. Doing bad things won’t get you into hell, either. Not if you’re a son.

The only way to make it is to join the family.

The story of creation is the story of a war between races that are also families. One race is the family of God, and the other is the family of Satan. That’s what’s going on. It’s why Cain killed Abel. It’s why there was a flood. It’s why Hitler killed something like half of the Jews. It’s why Haman tried to kill them. It’s why Pharaoh killed Jewish babies. It’s why Herod killed the children in Bethlehem.

It’s why Muslims kill Christians all over the world, and it’s why people who hate us will be killing us in America, with no repercussions, before long.

You can find more proof in the Bible. The destruction of Sodom, the massacres under Joshua…go look.

I never give anything to charities that aren’t related to Christianity in some way. Why should I? God isn’t behind that stuff. It’s just Satan’s children doing PR, to make the world think righteousness is unrelated to God. I don’t mean they don’t want to do good. They’re just deluded.

I don’t support scouting. I walk right by the cookies. I don’t care how cute the kids are. The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts thumbed their noses at God. I’m not going to support that. Let their organizations rot. Life will go on without them.

I am privileged. I am supposed to be privileged. It’s God’s plan. He gives his children help and power, and I do not have the authority or the desire to go against his plan.

God really will do things for you, and he’ll tell you things. He will bless you silly. You just have to join the family and let him to it his way.

I believe things are going to get very bad in America, and I expect to be subjected to very little of it. I hope God helps people draw close to him and learn who they are. I hope he keeps helping me to accept my identity instead of struggling to help myself.