Widely Publicized yet Little Known

I learned something interesting this morning during prayer. I finally got a good definition for the Greek word “agape,” and, like all revelation from God, it was simple and obvious even though it took me a long time to get it.

Agape is tossed around a lot by Christians, and my feeling is that they use it to manipulate and discourage believers. They say it’s an incredible form of love human beings can’t really understand. If you have it, you will do absolutely anything for others. You will give away everything you have. You will kiss people’s feet while they beat you. You will do whatever other people tell you to do and give them anything they ask for. It sounds more like spinelessness and neediness than love, to tell you the truth.

If you buy into the weird teachings about agape, you’ll naturally feel that you could never have it. You’ll probably want nothing to do with it. It sounds like a person with agape would have a horrible life.

Catholics, in particular, make Christianity sound terrible. They have a strange obsession with “saints” who were tortured to death or who mutilated themselves or voluntarily lived in misery and poverty. St. Lucy, for example, supposedly cut her own eyes out to discourage a persistent suitor. St. Lawrence was supposedly roasted on a grill. You can go Google the others.

It’s not helpful to exaggerate the suffering of Christians. Kids hear that kind of thing, and of course, it turns them off. Life is hard enough without making up fables about torture and so on.

Many clergymen are more interested in telling people they’re too dirty and weak to succeed than in telling them how to become God’s successful, powerful children. It’s a bizarre quirk of human nature. We should be building each other, but instead, we tell others Christianity is a demanding, painful ordeal they clearly can’t endure.

Agape doesn’t mean you give up all your dignity and basically become a human spittoon. God loves his children, and although he permits persecution, we are supposed to live in victory and abundance. Mindless submission to cruel, wicked people who will never come around and repent is not agape. It’s probably a manifestation of an unhealthy guilt complex. It can also be pride. “Look how I suffer for God. God is impressed with me because I’m better than you but I let you abuse me.” I’ll bet everyone reading this is familiar with that act.

Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden was light, and I have no problem with that. I have no problem with being pampered and sheltered. Bring it on. I can’t get enough of it. This world is awful. I want all the help I can get, and I prefer not to earn it. Earning is for the wicked, as in, “The wages of sin is death.” I’m an heir. I inherit.

Here is the definition of agape: affection.

That’s it. That’s what it means. It means a warm, tender, compassionate feeling for another being. It’s something you’re capable of having, especially with the Holy Spirit’s help. It’s not beyond you. God doesn’t ask us to do things and then make them impossible.

Inheritance is all about helping you do things you could not do on your own.

Just about everyone feels affection. The Christian version is different because it’s supernaturally imparted, and it is less dependent on the way the object behaves. You can feel it for truly nasty creatures who do great evil.

That makes sense. God feels affection for us, and even the best of us are pretty bad.

I keep watching videos of healers on Youtube, and while I love what they do, I am aware that something very big is missing: affection.

I don’t mean that they have no affection. Clearly, they do. But it’s not like God’s affection, and I don’t think it’s their primary motivation. Love is the reason God created the universe. It wasn’t duty or a desire for harmony or a need for justice. He wanted other beings to shower and perfuse with love, and he wanted them to feel great affection for each other. If we go out and heal people, we should also be so full of supernatural love, they can feel it.

Jesus visited me twice. The primary thing I felt was the heat of his love. It was like radiation. I literally felt it, like the heat of the sun hitting my skin, except that it passed through me and surrounded me.

I don’t have that. I’m a nice guy for the most part, but if you meet me, you won’t feel waves of love making your knees weak.

John said that perfect affection cast out fear. He said that if you don’t love your brother, you are not of God. That’s scary. He said that he who hates his brother is a murderer, and we know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him!

Jesus said some people would be cast into hell after saying, “‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?” It seems clear that you can heal people and still be way out of line.

There are preachers who have made themselves very rich by healing, or pretending to heal, sick people. There are preachers who make a big show of what they do, not so people can learn from it, but so they will be admired and supported with donations. I would like to heal people, but it’s pointless if I don’t have the right motivation.

This world is a tough place. Life begins with pain, and then people mistreat and abuse you. Satan and his children show up in most people’s lives long before they hear from God. We learn to be angry, defensive, and cruel, in self defense. Later, we go on offense, and we feel that the evil we have been subjected to makes it justified. We develop poisonous habits that go against God’s nature. Then, when we become Christians, we may remain snared in these strongholds.

People who are supposed to teach us fill us with lies that make things worse. They say Christianity is a set of rules, with a God who keeps score, like the College Board, and then decides whether you have enough points to get into heaven. They say we have to earn what we get. Contradicting Jesus very directly, they say Christianity is hard, and that you have to be a very special, very good person to make it. They tell us we have to change ourselves, which is completely ridiculous. They teach us nonsense, and as a result, most of us don’t get far.

Christianity is a supernatural way of life. It’s about spirits and supernatural power, not human effort and WWJD bracelets. God transforms us supernaturally. He is the only path to supernatural affection. He is the only one who frees us from hostility. He can drop affection in you like a bagboy dropping oranges into a sack. Through authority inherited from him, you can silence the hostility of your flesh instantly. We should be pursuing these things instead of trying to see how good we can be without his help. He isn’t looking for competition.

Love and fear are enemies. I want love–affection–to flow from me, and I don’t want fear in me, except for fear of the Lord.

I believe the church is still half-baked, even though we are seeing a lot of miracles. Without an atmosphere of supernatural affection, we are not complete. We’re supposed to be the representatives of Jesus, and love radiates from him with great power. If it’s not radiating from us, we are still not who we should be.

The Power is Yours

If you read this blog, it’s easy to get the idea that I become attached to one preacher after another, and that I abandon them quickly so I can run to to new people. This is not at all true, but most Christians and Jews are used to thinking in terms of following human leaders, so it’s easy for them to assume I’m looking for one and that I’m not faithful to the ones I find.

I gave too much of myself to Rich Wilkerson and the pedophile who ran my last church. This is true. But I did not turn them into gurus or idols. If I had, I would still be at Wilkerson’s disgraceful church, driving people’s luggage around and making pizza. Either that, or I would be visiting Albert Santiago in prison, trying to help him start a new ministry. I kept listening to the Holy Spirit and any man I thought was relaying information from him. This is why I got pushed out of two churches in a row. I challenged the cults, so I no longer fit in.

There is no man out there I can follow without reservation. There isn’t supposed to be. I am not looking for one. Occasionally, though, I come across people who relay solid information from God, so I listen to them for a while, and I recommend them to others. Most of the time, these people don’t teach me much that is new. They merely confirm what the Holy Spirit has already told me, and they may expand on it.

I spent a lot of time listening to Derek Prince. He gives people a nice, solid foundation to build on. He’s not perfect, though. He said some things that were not quite right, and he had a serious pride problem.

I watched a lot of Tom Fischer (Cardboard Box Church) videos. He was also very good, but his ministry cooled down when he got married, and he started talking about essential oils in his videos. He got into a multi-level marketing company that sells these things, and he created a second Youtube channel to promote them. If there is a reputable, sound multi-level marketing company out there, I have yet to hear of it. They tend to be snares for people who have financial issues and who may be naive.

When you join an MMA, you may find yourself pushing your wares to friends and relatives, driving them away in exchange for small commissions. The general rule is that you can’t sell enough to make a real profit, and only the company makes money.

To me, preaching is preaching, and business is business. They should not be connected at all. I never saw Paul offer a sale on new tents in the Bible. I think Fischer is great, but I feel like I know a few things that haven’t been revealed to him yet.

I went to a Last Reformation event and got baptized after listening to Torben Sondergaard. I think TLR is doing wonderful things, but it’s starting to look like a denomination with a strong flesh-based structure, and denominations are not good. I will never join another church or denomination, because I know that as soon as a ministry becomes a human organization, Satan starts finding ways to take over.

Yesterday I found out that TLR told me something that was just plain false. They only baptize in the name of Jesus. They say that this is how all baptisms in the New Testament were done. It’s not true. Jesus said his followers were to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I don’t know how TLR could have been wrong about it.

I don’t know how important the error is, but it shows you have to test everyone.

By the way, I compared the Acts 2 School to a cult the other day, because they charged for seminars, made people share quarters, and subjected them to obnoxious rules. Since then (if I understand things correctly), I have learned that they got these ideas from TLR, and they have changed their minds about them. I don’t know whether their ministry is worth anything, however.

When I went to my TLR event, I stayed in a hotel, there was no charge, and I came and went as I pleased, so it’s hard to know what the truth is.

I’m not going to go sleep in a bunk bed in a room full of strangers unless an angel wakes me up in the middle of the night and hands me a signed note from God. I can tell you that much. Not when I can have a queen-size bed and my own toilet.

It may be that TLR gave them these ideas because TLR is from Denmark, where people are used to being told what to do.

The search for sages and under-messiahs is a big problem. It wrecked Judaism and Catholicism. People get the idea that they have to find a man they can rely on, so they can give themselves completely to his teaching. That doesn’t work. Every man makes mistakes. The Jews rely on the Talmud, which is full of guesses, contradictions, and lies. The Catholics rely on a lot of weird quasi-pagan doctrine they stole from the Greek pantheists. All of this nonsense came from fallen angels, men, and men’s wild guesses. It’s extremely destructive.

Moses wished all of God’s people were prophets. He didn’t want to hog the glory. He knew it wasn’t his.

I almost feel hesitant to bring up new preachers I’ve listened to, because most Christians are determined to find one preacher or denomination and cling like barnacles.

I’ll say what I think, though. I’m not responsible for the way people take what I write. It’s 100% on them. If you’re listening to the Holy Spirit every day, he will help you understand, and if you’re not, nothing I can do can clear up your misconceptions.

You’re never responsible for how other people take things. Never.

I’ve been writing about Tom Loud and Pete Cabrera lately. I even emailed Loud to ask about visiting and doing street healing with him. Doesn’t mean I think he’s the solution to all my problems, however.

He said something I loved. He said we’re not supposed to depend on healers. He said he can’t be on call all the time for everyone because, for example, he might want to take a vacation with his wife. If you’re constantly asking strong Christians to pray for you, grow up. You should be as strong as anyone. You should be praying to God, not to Pete Cabrera. It’s not someone else’s job to be your on-call nurse. We are supposed to help other people, but we are also supposed to have our own lives. You can’t carry a grown Christian around on your back like a papoose.

Pete Cabrera begs people to go to the Bible and the Holy Spirit to check what he says. He tells them they’re not supposed to rely on him. He’s right.

Last night I watched a very good video Loud made. It was about authority. The main thing I took away from it is that God is not running the world, except perhaps in a very general way related to major events. I knew that already. God put man in charge down here, and all the evil that happens here is our fault.

Loud expanded on the question of who has what authority, and helped me learn more about it.

Very often, we ask God to do things we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to bless and curse. We have the power to drive out demons. The apostles didn’t beg God the way we do. They just spoke his power into the earth.

Loud said something that had never occurred to me. The Bible says God doesn’t do anything without telling his servants the prophets. Loud says he does this because men have authority down here. He says God himself has restricted his own authority by turning the world over to us. He says God actually needs a prophet to say something will happen before God has the authority to get it done. He says Noah preached about the flood in order to give God the authority to cause it.

That was new to me.

I think he’s right. We seem to be more in charge than we realize, and our words are more powerful than we understand.

My life has gotten much, much better over the last few years, and I think it’s because I started speaking. I have been blessing and cursing like crazy. I speak defeat to my enemies. I speak God’s help to people. I tell my mind, body, and spirit what to do. Things keep improving for me. The Bible says, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”

It’s working for me, consistently. Using words, I’ve been planting good seeds for years, and the longer I keep doing it, the more good things grow. I also planted a lot of evil seeds in the past, and I’ve had to wait for the resulting thorns and weeds to wilt.

Christians are always wondering why they don’t see God’s many promises come true. It’s probably largely because they don’t bless and curse. In many cases, God’s word is like human law. When you go into a courtroom, you don’t get any help if you remain silent. The judge agrees with your enemy, and you lose. If you win, it’s because you claimed something the law promised you. This may be why Jesus was so quiet while he was being tried. If he had spoken too much, he might have been delivered, and the whole plan would have been ruined.

He argued with hostile Jews, and they were never able to touch him. He was nearly silent when he was kidnapped, beaten, interrogated, and tortured to death, and he was not protected.

Words are extremely important. They were the tools that created the planet we sit on. A diploma is words. A contract is words. A death sentence is words. Jesus called himself the word of God.

Words are at the root of everything. Control the root, and you control everything that comes from it.

I’ll post the video here. Maybe it will help you.

Over the last two days, something very odd happened. I lost my Bluetooth earpiece. I searched the house, workshop, and car. I looked through my laundry. I searched the washer and dryer. I went over the same places over and over. I looked at clean clothes I had put away. It was nowhere to be found.

I was expecting an important call, and I didn’t want to hold the phone up the whole time. I started practicing what Tom Loud taught in a video I wrote about a day or two back. I got my carnal mind out of the way. I spoke God’s defeat to the difficulty of finding the earpiece, as well as his victory to me in finding it. I asked him to bring it to me. I commanded my carnal mind to shut up, and I told it to submit to my spirit.

I thanked God over and over for returning the earpiece to me.

Yesterday I finally ordered a new earpiece. I was not giving up, but I wanted to have a second one in case this happened again.

Last night I showered and got dressed for bed. I put on a pair of shorts I had laid out on the dresser. Later, I felt something in my pocket. I reached in, and there was the earpiece.

You can’t tell me I hadn’t looked there before. I had made a point of searching all the shorts I wear at night. And it showed up before the call arrived.

Make of it what you will.

The carnal mind is a problem. I’m not saying it hasn’t done anything for us. It gives us inventions. It helps us think so we can get through the day. Unfortunately, it also fights with God. It thinks miracles don’t happen and that anything that seems impossible is, in fact, impossible. It’s wrong about the important things.

The mind of the flesh prevents us from raising the dead and making legs grow back. Medicine can fix a lot of things, but it can’t cure a cold, make a dwarf grow, create a new eye, grow a new tooth, or do any of a number of things that would alleviate terrible suffering. Medicine is also expensive, and not everyone can get treatment. It doesn’t help humanity much when a new medical treatment pops up and only a ten-thousandth of the world’s population can get it. The carnal mind cuts us off from a world of free help our human efforts can’t begin to compare to.

I’ve had blisters healed over a period of minutes. I know it sounds insignificant, but think about it. You can go to the Mayo Clinic, offer them a billion dollars to make a blister go away, and have them tell you it can’t be done. They’ll say you have to wait. I didn’t. Didn’t cost me a penny, either. They were just blisters, but they might as well have been tumors or amputations. The same principles apply.

Carnality relies on hard work. As Adam could tell you, hard work is what happens when you give up access to divine help. Divine help is better. When you get God’s power working for you, you don’t need a medical or engineering degree. You don’t need an MBA. You don’t need an army or a fortune or any other source of earthly power. You take a shortcut around all that mess. That’s how life was before the curse.

Jesus was an uneducated handyman, and he made a withered arm grow back.

Tom Loud and some of the others aren’t teaching what we think of as “the gospel.” To nearly all Christians, “the gospel” means the gospel of salvation. We think that if we teach someone he can avoid going to hell by asking for salvation, we’ve taught the gospel. Jesus said the age would end when the gospel OF THE KINGDOM was taught all over the world. That’s what Loud is teaching. He’s talking about our authority as princes. There is more to Christianity than going to heaven.

How long can the world last, now that these ideas are spreading?

Loud said something that amazed me. He said Christians would eventually “infect” people, like sick patients spreading disease. I’ve been saying that for years. We’ve been relying on popes and preachers and big buildings, thinking we needed these tools to spread God’s kingdom. We were totally wrong. God doesn’t need a TV preacher’s cameras. He needs a bunch of anonymous believers, going around doing miracles and helping people to feel his love. It was wonderful to hear someone else use the infection analogy. It was the first time I had heard anyone else say it. It proves it came from God, not me.

This stuff will take off, and there will be a harvest. Then it will die down due to market saturation, and the end will come, because people will have heard God’s case and made their choice.

Market saturation is one of the main things that fills hell.

Technology is putting an end to free will, so we should be aware that the end is finally coming close. Without free will, there is no purpose for mankind to continue to exist. Once the earthly powers know where we are all the time, control our movements, and have the ability to decide who can buy and sell, it will be time for us to leave.

How long will that take? Based on current technology and the rate at which technology grows, I would be surprised if it takes 10 more years. Right now, the government or Google–Satan’s intelligence and control network–knows exactly where I am. It knows where I go when I take anything resembling a major road. It knows what I buy. It can record and transcribe every phone call I make, and it can have computers search the transcripts to find out if I’m saying anything it doesn’t like. I live way out in the country, and this is how little privacy I have. If you live in a city, you might as well live naked in a giant fishtank on national television.

There is no free will without privacy. When people know they’re being watched, they don’t do what they want to do, so they can’t be judged.

I hope we start seeing more miracles and, more importantly, more supernatural faith and love. We really need to go out on a high note.

You have to be the Bouncer

I watched a Tom Loud video last night with dinner, and he did something pretty neat. He explained exactly how he heals people. He didn’t have a creepy seminar and charge people $300. He didn’t ask for money. He didn’t hold anything back. Very nice.

It turns out he got his start after watching another Youtube healer, Pete Cabrera. Cabrera is not a trained preacher. He was illiterate until he was in his late twenties. Somehow or other, he started hearing from God and healing people.

Loud contacted him and asked what he was doing, and he said he didn’t know.

Eventually, Loud started healing. He realized his carnal mind was in the way. It kept telling him he wasn’t going to heal anyone. He succeeded when he got rid of the blockage.

That’s interesting to me, because God showed me something a long time ago. When God cursed humanity in Eden, he gave us curses that reflected the curses we had put on him. One of them was difficulty in childbirth. The reason human beings have such difficult births is that we have large brains. Our heads are so big they stretch women’s genitals and cause tremendous pain. God showed me that our minds make it hard for us to enter his kingdom. We insist on relying on logic and proof, so entering the kingdom of heaven is like taking a camel through the eye of a needle.

Loud says we have two minds, and I know that is true. The body has a mind, and the spirit has a mind. We literally have two minds, and they fight.

He says he accepted the fact that his carnal mind would never really get with the program, so he ignores it now.

At the end of the video, he gives people a great way to silence the carnal mind and get into God’s presence. You say, “Mind, submit to my spirit. Spirit, take me to the father.”

I know this works. I have been commanding my mind and spirit for a long time. For example, say it’s time to pray, and I can’t quit thinking about something I want to do in the workshop. I’ll say, “I command my flesh, my mind, and my spirit not to think about tools until tomorrow at 10 a.m.” The tool thoughts go away. They may come back, but they do go away.

In the psalms, there are similar commands. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.” That’s not just flowery talk. It’s literally a command. It’s an example for us to follow.

We need to silence useless voices in order to communicate with God, so this information is important. Christianity is not a game with a set of rules. You don’t try to behave and then see if God likes your score enough to let you into heaven. Christianity is a relationship with a father who talks to you every day.

You should be praying in tongues every day, because God will communicate with you through tongues. You will find you know things no human being told you. You should be prophesying to yourself and others for the same reason. If your flesh won’t stop yammering or telling you it won’t work, you’ll be isolated and uninformed.

You’ll feel better if you silence your flesh. Your flesh brings worry, anger, shame, fear, unbelief, lust, covetousness, and all sorts of other things that are unpleasant to experience. Your flesh can be manipulated into feeling certain ways by circumstances. Your spirit can’t. You can literally be walking up the steps to the hangman’s noose and not be worried or even upset, as long as your flesh is muzzled. Remember Jesus, sleeping in the boat during the storm. He wasn’t just composed. He was ASLEEP.

You can tell your mind and spirit to believe this or that. Whatever you need. If you’re worried, command them to stop. If you’re angry, command them to stop. Command them to believe, love, forgive, or whatever else you need.

Your circumstances can’t control your emotions and state of mind if you use the authority God has already given you, but if you don’t try, you can be as miserable as the lowest, most defiled unbeliever.

Loud says he heals something like 80% of the people he works on. That’s pretty good. It certainly beats the typical Christian average of 0%. Healing is important, because it shows people God is real and knocks the lies out of their heads. Paul, who was highly educated and very smart, said he didn’t win people with men’s wisdom but with God’s power. He said, “And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”

I think the video is very powerful, and I recommend you take a look. At the very least, watch the last 5 minutes.

I Just Came to Meet Your Boss

I am considering going to another Last Reformation event.

The Last Reformation’s founder, Torben Sondergaard, got driven out of Denmark in January. He invited a documentary crew to film his ministry, and of course, they twisted the truth and made his organization look like a sick cult. The Danes rose up in arms and threatened to pass laws to ban what he was doing. People said doing his type of ministry in front of kids was abuse, which is completely untrue. He feared losing his children and going to prison.

Over the last month, he has been provided with a big, beautiful property in North Carolina. I believe he said it has 90 rooms. About 75% of the cost has already been paid, and the Last Reformation is leasing to buy the rest. No loans. They’re already planning their first event.

My friend Mike needs to be baptized, and I would like to complete what I started when I went to their event in Clearwater in December. I would like to pray for the sick and see results.

I have also considered flying to Seattle to see Tom Loud, who does street ministry and healing. I really want to get going.

I found an outfit in Florida. It’s called the Acts 2 School. It’s in Vero Beach, which is a couple of hours away. I thought it might work out because Tom Loud has worked with them. I assume he has some clue about the people he deals with.

When I looked at their website, I noticed two things. First, they charge $300 for their events, and second, you have to live on the premises for several days.

Oh, boy. Charging a hundred bucks a day, up front, for teaching? That can’t be God’s will.

They have a student handbook, which I examined. If you attend an event, you have to live in a common bedroom with strangers. You have to sleep in a bunk. You have to eat with everyone else, when the leadership chooses. You have to help prepare food, wash dishes, and clean the facility. You can’t talk to a person of the opposite sex in the room where he or she sleeps. At 10:30, they turn off the lights. YOU don’t. They do.

“CULT.” This is the word that comes to mind.

1. If you really have faith in God, you should be able to get by on freewill offerings and whatever other resources he provides. If you have to charge people hefty fees up front, God is not blessing you. The people you charge are. They are not merely brothers and sisters; they are also customers.

2. Sleeping in a common room is fine for people who have no choice. It’s not fine for married people, older people who have money and status and are tired of being nannied, or people who snore. There are hotels around Vero Beach. There is no good reason to tell people they can’t use them. Charging a hundred bucks a day for self-prepared food and a self-cleaned bedroom and bathroom is way out of line. I grant you, a Holiday Inn would cost just as much without food and drink, but you would have privacy, you would not have to clean anything, and you would not have people telling you what to do and when.

3. If a grown person feels like staying up until 10:45 or whenever, it’s up to him. This is America, not socialist Cambodia. Turning off the lights for free adults is insulting and somewhat crazy.

I guess what I’m saying is that I decided not to go.

I’ve seen a lot of video about Scientology. They practice slavery, right here in America. They tell people where to live and what to do. They tell them who to associate with. They make them do unpleasant work for nothing. They put people who misbehave in buildings with doors that lock from the outside. They forbid people to communicate with others. This is not what religion is supposed to be like, and it’s very dangerous for a Christian leader to go down the same path.

It’s very hard to prosecute Scientology leaders because the people they hurt are afraid of them. They fear for themselves as well as their friends and families (especially children). It’s remarkable that such things happen in America, but they do. We have many Muslims here practicing slavery. Pimps practice slavery, too.

Who would join a ministry that reminds him of Scientology? It’s like paying to be punched in the face.

Cults don’t honor people. God just showed me that. They humiliate them. The Bible tells us to honor other people. If you put a 65-year-old man in a room full of strangers, make him clean toilets, and tell him when to go to bed, are you honoring him? No. You’re dishonoring him. God hates dishonor and emasculation. He gets buried in it every day, so he knows what it’s like.

Elisha was dishonored by a bunch of kids, and God sent two bears to maul them. That’s harsh. God’s law said that if a son was nasty to his parents, they could have him stoned to death. It said that if a woman tried to stop a fight by squeezing a man’s genitals, her hand had to be cut off. It said that people who did not honor their parents would be cursed.

Dishonor is bad. Unfortunate for me, because I used to excel at it.

I don’t know if Tom Loud endorses these people. The video he made with them is several years old, and they rarely update their own Youtube channel.

I think he has an issue with the Last Reformation. He said his friend Doug Collins is involved with a ministry, and he gave the impression that he’s not enthusiastic about it. Doug Collins is a Last Reformation member.

Tom Loud got Doug Collins started doing miracles. Collins called him and asked to be taught. Loud was not involved with the Last Reformation. Collins found them later.

My only concern with the Last Reformation is that they may be getting too structured and man-based. If it turns into the Torben Sondergaard religion, it will fail just like Catholicism did.

I’m not a joiner. I don’t care if you line up hundreds of dead bodies every morning and raise them with a wave of your hand. I’m a child of God, not a child of Perry Stone or Benny Hinn or Tom Loud or anyone else. If I have to know your secret handshake and let you tell me and my family what to do, I’m out. Psalm 23 says, “The Lord is my pastor.” Deal with it.

Loud says God told him he ended the healing revival of the 1950’s because it glorified men. He says God showed up he would bring it back, however. I don’t doubt that God said these things.

It’s crazy to have a movement that glorifies men and turns them into celebrities who supposedly have powers the rest of us don’t have. Preachers are supposed to help us meet and get to know and obey God, not themselves. You know what the Bible says: “Call no man ‘father’.”

Christianity is reproduction. That’s very important to understand. God is reproducing. When you have kids, you don’t hope to have one normal kid and 9 kids without arms and legs. All your children should be like you in their capabilities. God isn’t looking to produce three or 4 Reinhard Bonnkes and Todd Whites and leave the rest of us in iron lungs and wheelchairs.

I guess we’re weak because we are the spiritual children of men, not God. We take after our fathers.

Remember what Moses said? “Enviest thou for my sake? Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!” Moses was always in danger of being worshiped for being special, and he wanted no part of it.

Lust for attention and worship is what caused Satan to be blasted out of heaven. He wanted to dress up like Liberace and stand in front of everyone, being admired, praised, and obeyed. He said he would sit on the throne of heaven. Preachers who glorify themselves and don’t replicate themselves are just like he was.

I don’t know if the Last Reformation is going to become a carnal, failed denomination or not, but it’s something to be wary of. The Last Reformation has never saved anyone, and there is no guarantee that it will exist a month from now. You have to keep your eyes on the source, no matter who fails around you.

God said, “A thousand shall fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand, but it shall not come near thee.” No matter who fails, you have to focus on the one who never can. No one can carry you or walk your path for you.

It’s all very interesting.

I like the Last Reformation, and they do reproduce. They teach people how to heal and so on. I just don’t want to be obligated to their leadership. Men in leadership make mistakes. Often, they disagree with God and with people to whom God has been speaking. That happens to me a lot. I don’t need any more of it.

It’s one thing to have some random person with no power criticize the things God says through you and to have him tell you to do things God doesn’t want you to do. It’s another when it comes from someone to whom you have given your loyalty.

My last pastor told me I wasn’t allowed to lay hands on people, and I was a deacon. He said demons could leave me and go into others that way. Meanwhile, he was laying hands on people, and he was involved in a sexual relationship with his young niece, which started when she was 6.

Rich Wilkerson at Trinity Church in Miami had a rule that he was the only one who was allowed to receive or interpret a message in tongues. I wonder how he expected to get God to obey that rule.

I think he’s an atheist. I don’t think a person who believes in divine judgment could do the things he does.

The further you go with God, the fewer people you can listen to without being dragged downward. The more aligned you are with God, the more people will disagree with you, and you will find that as time passes, you get into conflict with people who are higher and higher on the Christian food chain. I suppose the status of your persecutors varies with your status with God. After all, ordinary Christians fight demons, but when Jesus was tempted, Satan himself showed up.

When Paul became the chief voice in the church, Peter, who was very close to God himself, rose against him and had to be corrected.

It’s interesting. When Israel was threatened by Goliath, who was the greatest warrior among the Philistines, God sent his anointed king to kill him. He sent his best. I suppose Satan does the same thing, when he has to, although he likes to send human beings who are low and unworthy of respect.

It’s a form of dishonor to send a lackey or a child or someone else of low regard to fight a worthy enemy. In the play Cyrano de Bergerac, a noble hires flunkies to drop a log on Cyrano, who laments this disgrace as he dies. Liberals love sending kids to bait and insult conservatives. It’s a filthy tactic intended to humiliate. Witness David Hogg and the Thunberg girl, whose unfortunate mental illness is being used to shame people who resist the climate hysteria industry.

It’s astounding how much power Satan has in the church. He owns it. He’s not an invader who comes in quickly to make raids and then leaves. He sits on a throne of authority. He is at home in the church. He built it.

I’m not going to Vero Beach to pay some character $300 to turn the lights out on me. If you can’t treat me like a man and teach me while I’m staying at a hotel, there is something seriously wrong with what you’re doing.

I would like to be able to do the things the apostles did, and, most importantly, I would like to be able to do it because of God’s love flowing through me, not because I want an achievement, because I’m angry at Satan, or because I feel obligated to do things for God. Love is the big thing that’s missing from every ministry I’ve seen. They’re starting to get the gifts of the Spirit right, but when you’re around God, you feel his love the way you would feel heat while standing in front of a searchlight. We have to get that, or what we do will be weak and half-baked.

I think a trip to North Carolina would be nice. We’ll see what happens.

“This Variety Always has Black Bark”

I’m back to writing about my workshop again. Or am I?

Today I wrote about the favor God was showing me. I said it seemed like I couldn’t go to Home Depot without them giving me something for nothing. After I wrote that, I visited the store to get 30 feet of 10/3 power cord for my band saw. The guy who cut the wire made a measuring mistake. I got 31 feet for the price of 30.

Okay, I give up. I surreptitiously returned the last two things they gave me, because I was pretty sure the employees who gave them to me did not have the authority to give things away. This time, I let it go. You can’t give Home Depot back a foot of wire. It was going home with me, or they were going to cut it off and put it in a dumpster. There was no way they were going to go back to the wire area and cut it off. I had to take it.

It was almost as though God were joking with me.

I went to the metal dealer today to get some things I needed. I have a sprayer boom for my golf cart, and I’ve been attaching it to the back of the cart with clamps. That’s no good. I need a support that goes in the cart’s 2″ receiver. I bought three pieces of square tubing to make one.

I also bought several pieces of angle iron in different widths. My Offroad Swag finger brake is a wonderful tool, but in order to make it work, you need accessories. Little pieces of narrow angle iron serve as bottom die adaptors. The press’s bottom die is a huge piece of angle iron which is too wide to work with some things, so you rest small pieces in it to fill up space.

I bought three feet of 1″ steel strip for no good reason at all. I thought I might need some for a plate for the sprayer mount. Screws would go through it to attach it to the boom. I would only need maybe 4 inches for that. I bought three feet because 1″ steel strip is a handy thing to have when you weld. You never know when you’ll find a place where a little strip of steel will save the day.

Scrap is very important. You can’t make anything without scrap unless you drive to the store every time an idea pops into your head. I try to buy more materials, fasteners, paint, glue, and other things than I need, because I know they’ll be useful later.

Yesterday I took some goat wire and stretched it between two shelves on my monster shelf thing. I put it there to prevent long metal objects from falling off the side. I’m using a shelf as a material storage area. The old system of piling it in the corner of the room is no longer in vogue.

Scrap is already piling up on the shelf, making me feel more secure.

I bought 20″ of 2-1/2″ square tube. I made a front end loader support for my Kubota the other day, and it came out great, but it was too short to put the loader as high as I wanted it. The tubing I bought today will become a new support. I could have cut the old support and welded more metal in to make it longer, but I didn’t think about it until I had the new metal, and I don’t know if I trust my welds for a job like that.

When I got home, I cleaned my new steel with window cleaner and paper towels because new steel is always covered with black grime. I deburred the steel using the belt grinder, and I also ground an angle into one of the pieces for the sprayer support so it would project backward from the golf cart when the finished support was in use.

I put 5/8″ holes in the tube that will go into the receiver. There are matching holes in the receiver, and a pin will go through them to hold the support in place. The Silver & Deming bit left huge burrs inside the tubing where I couldn’t hit them with the belt grinder. Enter the Dumore hand grinder.

This is a tool that falls between a Dremel and a die grinder. It’s small enough to use with one hand, but it won’t poop out as badly as a Dremel, and it’s a real industrial tool, so it will last longer than a year. I put a carbide burr on it, reached into the tubing, and ground the burrs out in a hurry.

Nice.

There’s a reason why new Dumores cost hundreds of dollars. Thank God I bought one that was new old stock.

I used a Walter flap wheel to clean up the tubes, and then I used my Harbor Freight MIG to weld them together. It was great. The welds, though imperfect, look better than most professionally done welds. Most pros make ugly welds. Most pros aren’t that good, if you want the truth. It’s a wonder things don’t fall apart and kill people all the time. I was very happy with my work.

The Titanium welder is a joy to use. I don’t know how it will stand the test of time, but for now, I’m thrilled with it. It’s light. It’s easy to use. The Harbor Freight Vulcan welding cart is ergonomically perfect. Zero complaints.

I cleaned the newly made support with a wire brush, and then I sprayed it with black hammer finish Rust-Oleum, using the tried-and-true “hang it from a magnolia tree you don’t mind painting” method. It looks wonderful. There are worse-looking welded products on store shelves across the world.

I’m not totally happy with the tubing I got for the upper part of the support, so I didn’t make that part. I’m going back to the metal place to see if they have something a little wider.

I enjoyed my visit today. The lady who runs the place started talking to me about guns and politics and so on. Of course, she has a carry permit. So nice to live among sane people.

While the paint on the sprayer mount was drying, I started on the front end loader support. I used the dry cut saw to cut one end at a 47-degree angle, which was the biggest angle I could manage with that tool. I then took the plasma cutter and started turning the 2-1/2″ tubing into a C-channel. It has to slip over the tractor’s hydraulic rod, so one side has to be open.

The first time I did this, it took a very long time, because I relied on bad information and didn’t give the plasma cutter enough air. It didn’t cut all the way through the part, so I had to finish the cutting with an angle grinder. This time, I left a few spots that weren’t cut, but severing them only took a couple of minutes.

When I was done cutting one side out of the tubing, I was left with a lot of rough metal on the inside of it. I tried smoothing it with a flap disk, but it wouldn’t really get in there, so I used the Dumore again. It’s terrific. It smoothed and debored everything so a person handling the support can’t get hurt.

I cleaned up the shop and put everything away. The support is waiting for me to come back and weld end plates on it.

I got a great deal done in a very short time. That’s rewarding. So much better than fumbling around and wasting time because I don’t have the right tools or the needed skills.

Welding is a huge blessing. I can make things other people have to buy, really quickly and cheaply. I can customize them. I don’t have to make do with things that aren’t quite right.

I’m planning to build my own welding table. A manufactured table will cost over a thousand dollars, and I just don’t think it’s justified. My milling machine will be here soon, and with it, I’ll be able to make a precision top for the table without paying some company my life savings.

I’ll bet I can build an excellent three foot by two foot table with casters and a fold-out plasma area for $250.

The little Harbor Freight portable table I use now is fantastic for the money, and if you want to weld when you’re away from your shop, it can’t be beat, but it’s flimsy for a main welding table, and it’s small, so it gets crowded.

Maybe if I go to Home Depot tomorrow, they’ll give me a table.

Things are coming together nicely. I almost look forward to spraying the yard.

Christian Content Ahead

I write a lot about relatively trivial things these days. I say “relatively” because they’re not completely trivial. I write about good things that are happening to me because God is blessing me. These things happen because God has taught me important things, and I am putting them to use. That’s not really trivial at all. But I still need to tell other people about the root causes of my blessings, which are much more important than the blessings themselves.

I’ve learned a number of things recently. Perhaps the most momentous thing I’ve learned: I am a god.

I think most Christians would be angry to read that, and that should surprise no one, because the Jewish religious authorities of the time of Jesus, who (like most of our Christian authorities) were servants of Satan, got very angry at Jesus when he said the same thing, which he found in their scriptures, which they supposedly revered.

What do I mean by “god”? Do I mean I get to sit on the throne of heaven and tell everyone else what to do? Do I mean I can create a galaxy if I feel like it? Obviously not. Whatever authority I have comes from the father, and I will always be under his command. I can’t create my own reality. There are kooks in places like California who teach that every human being can create his own experience, without deferring to any higher authority. Celebrities, who tend to think of themselves as higher beings simply because people point cameras at them, have fallen for this nonsense. It’s a lie. Everyone serves someone. Everyone is accountable.

When the Bible says we are gods (“elohim”), it means we are children of Yahweh and that we are above all the creatures that are not. Most people, to put it mildly, are not children of God. They are his creations but not his children. God’s children are those who are truly saved. That excludes many people who think they are Christians. Ideally, a child of God is led by the Holy Spirit. The Bible says, “As many as are led by the Holy Spirit, they are the sons of God.”

In the hierarchy of the universe, we are above demons, fallen angels, objects, unsaved human beings, every inanimate thing, and nonhuman earthly creatures. Jesus died on the cross, and we are heirs to his authority.

Jesus did a number of things religious authorities did not like. He violated the man-made, unscriptural Jewish laws, and he encouraged his followers to do so. He healed people on the sabbath. He also called himself the son of God.

In John 10, Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” Some Jews who heard him picked up rocks to stone him. This passage follows.

Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you from my Father; for which of those works do ye stone me?

The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.

Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?

If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;

Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?

Jesus referred to Psalm 82, which says, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.”

They continued to try to kill him, but he walked off under God’s protection, as he did every time he was threatened, until he finally allowed himself to be taken. He walked away unharmed because he was God’s son. He was a god, and he was favored above those who were not.

Psalm 82 says God is addressing those to whom the word of God came. Jesus is the word of God, according to his own declaration. The Bible says prophets spoke when the word of God came to them. Jesus speaks to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit repeats things to men. That’s what prophecy is.

It all makes sense. God created the earth for the purpose of reproduction, and he calls us his children. What do a giraffe’s “children” grow up to be? Giraffes. What do a trout’s “children” grow up to be? Trout. A child of God grows up to be a god. Like God himself, we will live in the highest realm of creation, totally invulnerable to all harm, with all our enemies permanently defeated and confined far away from us. We will have no flaws or weaknesses. We will have no fear of anything. We will never sin or want to sin. We will be gods. We just won’t receive worship.

When Paul and Barnabas showed up in Rome, they demonstrated so much power, people called them Mercury and Zeus. They had to humble themselves and make people understand that the power came from the throne of heaven, not themselves.

The earth is a dirty place (made from dirt), but God, who is completely clean, has chosen to have contact with it for the purpose of reproduction. He uses people in flesh bodies. Our bodies are like the feet of God. In the Bible, feet symbolize human beings who, though citizens of heaven, are here on earth completing missions for God.

When God cursed the earth, he told Satan the seed of Eve would bruise his head, and Satan would bruise his heel. He was referring to us. We are above Satan. Our feet are above the highest part of him, so when there is contact, he can only bruise our feet. It’s as though the faces of the spirits that are against us are our cobblestones. We walk on them.

Psalm 91 mentions this. It says, “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder; the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.”

It’s amazing when you see how various parts of the Bible fit together.

Psalm 91 says God’s angels will bear his children up in their hands lest we dash our feet against stones. It refers to the stones of Satan’s temple. We are the stones of Jesus’ temple, and people who are not saved are the stones of Satan’s. Psalm 91 says we will not have our flesh driven into conflict with carnal people.

We’re supposed to have lives of authority and success. We are elite. We are nobility. We are the 1% of the universe, to steal a phrase the envious and murderous children of darkness like to use to describe people who are blessed. The Bible mentions problems Christians will have on the earth, but that’s about persecution, not things like disease and poverty.

There were people in the early church who were not successful in life. They were doing Christianity wrong. The early church was strong and full of knowledge, but it wasn’t perfect. It failed because people still did things wrong. You shouldn’t assume that your life won’t be any better than theirs. You shouldn’t get the idea that they were perfect or that you can’t do Christianity as well as they did.

Jesus said his followers would do greater things than he had. We haven’t seen that yet. The early church didn’t accomplish it. That means it’s still in the future. We should hope to exceed the deeds of early Christians.

Moses did things that were much more impressive than anything Jesus did, and that was under the old covenant, so how can we think we’ve seen all that new-covenant people will be allowed to do?

The apostles made mistakes. People don’t like to hear it, but it’s true. Paul corrected Peter publicly when he tried to Judaize new believers and make them obey the law instead of the Spirit. Paul and Barnabas had a major argument. Obviously, one of them was wrong. We shouldn’t think we can’t do better, and be more blessed here on earth, than the early church.

We are gods already, even if we are stuck to uncooperative bags of deteriorating meat at the moment. We have authority now. We have God’s character and mind now. The Bible says God gave us the Holy Spirit as a down payment here on earth. We have to use supernatural weapons to defeat our flesh, other people, and spirits in order to manifest the power and virtue of sons of God.

Churches don’t teach this stuff. They have turned Christianity into a game show. “Do this for God and get this many points.” “Refrain from that and get that many points.” Add up the points, and maybe you get to heaven. Christianity is not a game or a set of rules. It’s supernatural. A great spirit comes to live in you, and you communicate with him all the time and submit to him, and he gives you assignments and the power to complete them. He gives you a new heart and mind and kills the old ones. He relieves you of the obligation to work hard and fight for everything. That stuff is carnal, and it honors the flesh and insults God.

It’s very important to understand these things, because Satan runs the church, and he has created a system which sets you up for failure and eternal damnation.

I had a very disturbing dream last night. I was in this house, and my dad was still alive. It was dark. I got myself a ham and cheese sandwich. When I picked up the mustard jar, it was empty. One of my dad’s faults was that he would eat things he liked and leave nothing for anyone else. I knew he had done it; he had eaten all of the mustard, like ice cream, with a spoon. I went to my own private fridge for another jar, and that fridge contained an empty, dirty jar with no lid.

I took the jar to his bedroom to confront him and try to help him remember not to eat all the mustard. I was going to tell him it wasn’t pudding. I went into his bedroom and started to talk to him about the mustard, and he interrupted me and said, “To me, it’s like pudding.”

After this, I heard a voice. It was my sister, calling my name. She was in my house. Immediately, I felt my stomach twist into a knot. I have never told her where I live, and I will not permit her to be on this property for any reason. I refuse to go back and be subjected to the presence of someone who abused me and everyone else in the family for years.

The first words out of my mouth, before I even started walking to find her, were, “GET OUT.”

I found her in the kitchen, and I told her to get off my property that instant. I told her she was not allowed to set foot here. She said I had already lost, and for some reason, I said, “I have never lost.”

I noticed a bunch of people were with her. Cops, mostly. They had come to help her move in. One had a cast on his right hand, and he was holding an M16 rifle in front of him, looking around as though he expected someone to pop up and shoot him.

I told them they were all trespassing. I told them to leave. I saw a wall of disorderly cardboard boxes full of my sister’s belongings. I told her I was going to put them off the property and leave them in the open. I told her she knew me and that she knew I would do it.

I started asking who was in charge. I saw a woman at the back. I went to talk to her. I said, “Social worker, right?” I told her my sister’s history of being ejected from rehab facilities. I told her how exceptional she was and how she had repeatedly fooled people like the social worker.

A bearded man with glasses was staring at the house and my things. He marveled because it was such a wonderful house. I agreed. I said, “It’s the greatest house in creation.”

They didn’t seem to be inclined to obey me, so I shouted, “I am a LAWYER, and I am telling you to leave NOW.”

They left, and my sister and the boxes were gone.

I woke up immediately. I felt terrible. I felt as though she were coming back to make my life miserable.

I prayed. I asked God what the dream was about.

My sister represents false siblings who are heavily controlled by fallen angels and demons. These are people who claim to be Christians yet have no knowledge. They think they know better than I do, even though I listen to the Holy Spirit and they don’t. I know a lot of people like this. My word for them is “boneheads.” You can’t tell them anything. You can spend your whole life trying to bless them with useful knowledge, and all they will do is torment you. They persecute, and they waste your time. When you fail to go along with their carnal plans, they start accusing you. You’re heartless. You’re selfish. You think you’re “a little bit special,” as one said to me a few years ago.

My dad represents the leadership of the church. My dad was demented, and most church leaders are inept and very ignorant. They know almost nothing, and what they think they know is toxic and wrong.

My dad was extremely carnal. He loved to stuff himself in front of the TV. Many preachers are just fat sacks that gluttonize on things like money and food. They’re like babies. Everything is about the mouth and the blanket.

Mustard represents the kingdom of God, as it did in a parable. Ham represents gentile flesh (mine). Cheese represents the milk of the Bible. Bread represents God’s word. Ignorant, gluttonous preachers who serve their bellies destroy the kingdom of God for other people. They can’t benefit from it, and they keep us from going in. They eat the mustard, which doesn’t help them, and they keep us from getting it.

The cops and the social worker represent well-meaning people of earthly authority whom demons and failed Christians manipulate to get them to control the Spirit-led.

The other day God showed me something. In Genesis, Satan was represented as a serpent because a serpent has no arms or legs. It controls other animals with its mouth. Even a constrictor begins by grabbing prey with its mouth. Satan has no power of his own. He uses the power of others. He threatens them. He makes deals with them. He offers them bait. He lies to them.

A good Christian controls his own strength and God’s power to get things done. A child of Satan controls other people. Always remember that. Anyone who uses threats, guilt trips, juicy bait, or lies to make you obey is serving Satan. When you obey such people, you obey Satan, too.

To get everyone to leave, I had to use the authority of the law. I had to tell them I was a lawyer. It’s funny that Christianity was not part of the dream. I didn’t pray or speak in God’s name. It makes sense, though, because Jesus spoke parables that had no overtly religious or supernatural content.

God is reminding me not to join a church. I’m not sure why he did it, because the idea of joining a church is repulsive to me. Maybe he did it so I would tell others.

The sense that I was slipping back under the power of evil people and spirits left me feeling very traumatized. After several hours, I am still not over it.

The word says, “The Lord is my pastor; I shall not lack.” That’s Psalm 23. When I was under human pastors, I lacked. They used me. They taught me toxic things that weren’t true, along with a number of helpful things that were true. God is the perfect pastor. He only teaches truth. He doesn’t hurt; he always builds you up.

False Christians will be very prominent in the persecution movement as it ramps up. They already are. They always have been. I have had very few problems with non-Christians. The people who made me most miserable in my walk over the years were preachers, church officials, and volunteers.

I think it’s hard for most Christians to accept the fact that Satan runs the church, but then the Jews didn’t like it when Jesus called them “the synagogue of Satan,” and he was right.

I have much, much less anxiety and stress than I did even a year ago. The closer I get to God, the better things go and the more I succeed. God told me this: “Success brings joy, and joy brings success.” It’s true.

Joy isn’t ordinary happiness. It’s associated with victories and breakthroughs. This is why the Bible says, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” It’s why people in the Bible reJOIced when good things finally happened.

These days, I prophesy and interpret tongues a lot. I have been reluctant to to it, because I was afraid I would say crazy things that were wrong, but that is changing. God’s word says he’ll back me up, so I leave that to him. I can’t tell you how comforting it is to hear what he has to say to me. I need to spend more time doing it. After all, the Bible says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing, by the word of God.”

He keeps telling me I have nothing to worry about. Worry is something he really hates. He talks about it all the time. He keeps saying he will never drop me. He says he has never left me, and he never will. He says he will lift me above the world. These things are all consistent with the Bible.

Worry is his main issue with me. Not lust. Not pride. Not anger. Not covetousness. Not dishonesty. He barely mentions those things. He talks about worry every time he speaks. It’s very important to cooperate with him and to continue to diminish worry.

Favor is a big deal with God. He really wants to help you, believe it or not. He keeps showing me favor in funny ways.

I have a list of people I pray for, and I ask God to send people to help us. I ask him to cause them to pay us money we haven’t earned, to give us things we haven’t earned, to give us free counsel, to take care of us and all we have so we can spend our time serving him, and so on.

My prayers have been working in an amusing way. I can’t seem to go to Home Depot without getting something for nothing. I tried to buy a circuit breaker. The cashier couldn’t look it up, so she insisted I take it and not worry about it. I went to Home Depot to buy a cabinet, and when I arrived, the exact model I wanted was by the door, selling for half price, and I got it for $5 less. I bought a few things the other day, including a vacuum nozzle, and the cashier was not able to look it up, so she told me it was mine. It’s making me nervous.

I went back later and sneaked the circuit breaker and nozzle back onto the shelves, but I’m not sure God wanted me to. After all, he told the disciples to take a stranger’s donkey without permission.

I couldn’t go to customer service, because the cashiers might have gotten in trouble.

It’s strange, but I never think about the morality of what they’re doing until it’s too late and I’m in the parking lot. That’s when it hits me. I don’t know why.

I went to a metal dealer, and when I told the people there I was learning to weld, they gave me maybe $25 worth of free metal to practice on. I didn’t spend that much on what I bought.

I hired an electrician to improve my shop’s wiring, and his company said they would trace and fix a problem with a socket for nothing. They’re coming tomorrow. It’s not a small job.

I wanted dust collection for the cabinet I bought, which holds a wood lathe. I picked a product from Rockler.com. When I went to order it, it was on sale, and they were offering free shipping.

I’ll tell you about the weirdest example of favor I’ve seen.

I’ve been stretching briefly every night. I want my back to be healthy. I first started a month or so ago, and I was startled to see how stiff I was. I could only get my fingertips to within maybe 6″ of the floor. I kept at it, and over a few weeks, I improved to the point where I could put two fingertips down.

The other day, before stretching, I commanded my flesh to be healed, strong, lean, and flexible. Then I stretched. I put three fingertips on each hand on the floor. I didn’t know what to think. It was astonishing.

I can now put all five fingers on the floor, with a slight bend in each knee. Explain it if you can.

I’m not a prosperity-gospel Christian, and I don’t believe prosperity and other earthly blessings prove you’re doing things right, but I know God’s supernatural favor when I see it. Besides, I don’t give money to preachers, so I know what I get has nothing to do with the prosperity lie.

You need to work on the gifts of the Spirit, and you need to hear from God many times every day. You’re not going to get anywhere by sending preachers money, going to Africa on missionary trips God didn’t order you to take, hitting yourself with a flagellum after you sin, saying Hail Marys, building an unnecessary orphanage, or being the extra-best church volunteer who ever lived. You need to know God personally. That’s what he likes, and it brings results.

What did Jesus say? People would come to him and tell him about all the great things they had done in his name, and he would send them to hell, saying, “I never KNEW you.”

Hell is full of Christians. Accept it. I would be surprised if any of the dead popes are absent.

When I was a kid, my grandfather used to give me money. I didn’t ask for it or earn it. We spent a great deal of time together, and every so often, he would just hand me some cash. That’s how God is. He’s not waiting for you to present a bill for building a cathedral. He loves his children, and he enjoys giving them things just because it makes them happy.

I have no idea how many words I’ve written. Many, I suppose. I will close, and when I come back, maybe I’ll have a new wrench to write about.

Two Days of Favor

I didn’t blog yesterday. I started to, but I did not publish what I wrote. I will paste it here now and add today’s news.

09-25-19

I’m getting a ton of things done today. I had to quit and have some food so I didn’t get burned out.

I had to get rid of the L-shaped Corian counter in my workshop so I could have my machine tools moved here. Today was the day.

I didn’t know how to deal with Corian. I decided to try the sawzall. I cut several holes in the counter with a drill to make it easier to start a cut.

When I finally got the saw in there, I was surprised. Corian cuts very quickly even though it’s hard. I zipped through the counter in around 20 seconds. I had been under the impression that the counter was an inch and a half thick, but I learned that only the edges were that size. The rest of it was around half an inch.

While I was tearing the whole structure apart, I also took down the weird boards the previous owner had screwed into the shop walls. He put boards up, and he added strange horizontal strips of galvanized steel. There were little tabs that were bent outward into the shop, presumably for hanging tools. I never found them useful, and the boards were in the way.

Once I had the Corian out, I didn’t know what to do with it. It was too big to cut on the table saw with a miter gauge. I decided to fire up the band saw and eyeball it. I cut the ends off sort of square.

In the end, I made a sled from scrap, to force the Corian to go by the table saw blade in a straight line. I made a piece 18″ by 36″ in size, and I plan to turn it into a top for a wood lathe cart. The wood lathe used to be on the counter, so now I need a place to put it.

I may make a cutting board out of the third large piece of Corian. It seems like a good use for it, and cutting boards are ridiculously overpriced.

I got tired of woodworking, if you can call it that, so I decided to take on another project.

Long ago, I made a temporary extension table for my table saw, and of course, it worked so well I never replaced it. There was a problem with it, however. The legs on the end were not supported well. I used two small pieces of wood for struts, but they weren’t fastened reliably. I was concerned that one day someone might put something heavy on the table and the legs would kick out from under it.

I got myself a couple of strips of metal for additional struts. Today I bent them on the finger brake, drilled holes in them, and attached them to the saw table extension. I tried to arrange it so they were in tension, pulling the legs toward the saw.

The brake is not that easy to use. I made one bend that wasn’t right. There were two struts with four bent tabs, and one tab was longer than the others.

I tried to straighten it using the vise. I didn’t expect to do too well, and I was right. It had little bends in it when I was done.

I’ve been considering trying forging, and I’ve been anvil-shopping. I have a big piece of 1018 steel, and my plan has been to use it as an anvil until I get a real one I can trust. The steel is 4″ on a side and around 15″ long. Very heavy. Today I stuck it on a stump and used it to straighten the crooked steel.

I was pleasantly surprised. The hammer didn’t dent the 1018 block at all, and the bends came out of the steel in a hurry. I got everything bent the way I wanted it, and I used the “anvil” to fine-tune it.

I put some holes in the tabs, deburred them, and attached the struts. Now I know the table saw can’t collapse. I really will redo it some day, but this will prevent a disaster while I’m getting around to it.

09 26 19

I’ll tell you about my day, and you can decide whether I have God’s favor or not. I believe we are supposed to live in favor. The Bible says so in many places, so anyone who disagrees is wrong.

After I dismantled my Corian counter, I had a wood lathe sitting on the floor. I had to find something to put it on. I had been planning to make something out of the scrap lumber I removed from my workshop shelves, but I felt like it would take more time than I wanted to invest. I have a lot of things that need to get done before the shop will really function, and that makes it hard to justify spending two or three days on a lathe project. I considered getting a cart instead.

For quite a while, I’ve wanted a one-drawer Husky rolling cabinet from Home Depot. It’s an amazing bargain. For $69, you get a good-quality cabinet with casters, a locking ball-bearing drawer, locking doors, a pegboard back, and a power strip that has USB ports. You can’t beat that deal. I am on a crusade to put everything I own on wheels, and I thought this cabinet would be perfect for my 8″ bench grinder.

Yesterday I thought of the cabinet when I considered the lathe situation. I decided to go to Home Depot and see if the cabinet looked right. The lathe probably weighs 80 pounds, and the feet are about 30″ apart from side to side, so I didn’t know if the cabinet, which is 27″ wide, would work.

I walked in the store, looked to my left, and saw a product sitting by the customer service counter. It was the cabinet I wanted, with a $35 price tag on it. Someone had returned it.

I got a few things I needed. I bought casters for my heavy pedestal fan, along with some washers and nuts to use for installation. I bought a new hot glue gun. Something–I don’t recall what–had reminded me that I needed one.

A hot glue gun is a phenomenal tool. Imagine glue that sets in 5 seconds, provides a lasting hold, and can be loosened and removed from most things later with little or no damage. That’s hot glue. Now that I think about it, woodturners use it a lot. They fasten blanks to lathe plates with it so they don’t have to use screws.

I got my stuff and went to the customer service area to ask about the cart. The lady who helped me said the buyer had brought it back because there were no keys to the lock. She saw that I was not happy about that, so she added that they could take a little more off the price because of it. I thought about it. There had to be someone on Ebay selling replacement locks for $5. I decided to take a chance.

When I got home, I opened the cabinet and checked it over. Everything looked fine, except something was hanging from the rear of the drawer, inside the cabinet. It looked like fishing line. That looked familiar. The last time I had seen that in a tool cabinet, it had been attached to something. It had been attached to a set of keys.

I pulled the line loose, and a set of keys fell into my hand.

Not bad.

On the way home, I stopped by the grocery. I needed vegetables for breakfast. They had Ben & Jerry’s on sale for 50% off. Last time they did this, my favorite favor got cleaned out before I got there. Not this time! I bought two pints.

I went home to work on the lathe project.

The cabinet had to have a new, wider top in order to support the lathe, and I already had it. The 36″ slab of Corian was waiting for me.

I fired up the router table and put a 1/4″ radius on every upper edge of the Corian so it would be pleasant to lean on and so on. Then I tried to figure out how to attach it to the cabinet.

My big table saw is working now, because I have 250V power. I also had scrap wood. I decided to make several strips of wood of just the right thickness and attach them to the underside of the Corian. The upper surface of the cabinet is like a tray with a lip on three sides, so my plan was to situate three strips so they anchored the top against the tray and kept it exactly where it should be. I also intended to put a fourth strip on it under the front, where there was no metal lip.

How do you attach things to Corian? I got on the web and looked around. I considered wood screws, but Corian is brittle, so it sounded like a bad idea. I considered tapping it for metal screws, but that also sounded risky. Then I remembered something.

I had a brand-new hot glue gun.

I situated the top on the cabinet very accurately and sprayed the underside with Dykem metal blue. This showed me where the top touched the cabinet. When I took the top off and rolled it over, I had Dykem lines to use for measurements.

Using a caliper and the table saw, I cut four strips of wood very precisely, and I stuck them to the Corian. It worked great. I rolled it over, put it on the cabinet, and verified that it was correct. I used denatured alcohol to take the Dykem off the cart, and I was done.

The top and lathe are not attached to the cart. They just rest on it. They are confined on three sides by the cart’s upper lip, and I have faith that the lathe will not suddenly violate the laws of physics and jump in the 4th direction and into my lap. I can always glue or bolt the top in later.

Here is the cart. Not bad for $30. It holds the lathe and all my chisels. The big area in the bottom is large enough to hold a shop vacuum converted to collect dust. You can imagine what I’m thinking. Run a hose out of the cabinet to a dust scoop over the lathe. I already found the product. Rockler sells them.

I guess I’ll also put a cheap LED light on the lathe. I already have one. It’s a sewing light with a magnetic base. I used to use it for welding, but I got a better one. The cabinet’s power strip gives me a good place to plug it in.

Some people criticize little Chinese lathes, but the truth is that they’re very good tools. They’re just small. You can make a lot of very useful things on one. If you want a giant salad bowl, a baseball bat, or a bedpost, you need something bigger, but what percentage of your projects are that long?

I can make tool handles, mallets, and many other useful and ornamental things on this lathe. If I need more length, I can use my big metal lathe. I made a woodturning tool rest for it.

There are woodturners out there bragging about their $7000 lathes with 2-HP motors. Well, my metal lathe weighs 4000 pounds and has a 7.5-HP motor, and in terms of rigidity, it makes an expensive wood lathe look like a limp noodle.

I think I have the bases covered, if I ever decide to turn anything. Which I might, now that I don’t have to huddle in a filthy corner of the shop.

I’m very close to moving my machine tools here. I just need to clear out one side of the shop I might be able to finish by the end of the week. After that, all I need are a couple more outlets. That’s a quick job.

I might pour a little slab and put my compressor in its own tiny shed, just outside the workshop. That would kill most of the noise and save me some floor space.

I think I’ve had a remarkable day and that God is behind it. It’s not his job to be my genie and make everything cushy for me, but he is good to his children because that’s how good fathers are.

I expect to be back at the job of establishing my workshop tomorrow.

Crew Arrives Soon

I’m waiting for the electrical crew to arrive to double the amperage to my workshop. Today they’re going to tear up the yard, drill a hole in the side of my house, and give me a big bill. I can’t wait.

This morning, I went out and locked all my tool cabinets. I took photos of everything that was out in the open that a person might want to steal. I went through the garage, where the electrical panel is, and took pictures. I moved several thousand rounds of ammunition indoors. I guess I shouldn’t have had it out there!

I have no reason to think the electricians will steal, but good fences make good neighbors. There is no point in tempting people. Also, if I don’t take measures in advance, there will be problems in the future. Every time I can’t find something, I’ll think they stole it until I locate it.

A relatively expensive fishing rod vanished from my dad’s garage, and I noticed it after electricians did some work. I still suspect them. I didn’t eat it, and it didn’t evaporate.

I think I hear a truck.

False alarm. It was Federal Express.

After the wiring is finished, I’ll get some conduit and wire and fix the workshop up for my machine tools. Then I have to rearrange everything and decide where to put the big guns.

I have an L-shaped Corian counter in one corner, mounted to a wall. The previous owner left it. It has to go. I’ve been wondering if I could cut it and reuse the Corian. This morning I hit it with a sawzall, and it cut just fine. That means I can break it into two big pieces, and then I can trim them on the table saw.

My panel is on the north side of the shop, so in order to avoid running conduit and expensive wire long distances, I may put the lathe, the mill, the compressor, and the phase converter on or by the north wall. That will mean moving…actually, not that much stuff. I’ve been fervent about putting stuff on wheels, so the only thing I’ll have to drag is my workbench.

I’m hoping to put my wood stuff toward the east and south. I want a woodworking bench in that area. It doesn’t have to be fancy. There is a real fever out there for fancy woodworking benches, but I am determined to resist, because they’re unnecessary. Thousands of woodworking factories have come and gone in this country, and what did they use for the most part? Simple plywood tables. I plan to go fancier than that. I’ll want a vise and some dog holes. I’m not joining the fancy-bench religion, however.

I suppose I could make my bench top from Corian. Why not? Better than wood, and I won’t have to plane it flat.

I hate to do it, but I may sacrifice some tools. I have a jobsite table saw and a 12″ sliding miter saw on a stand. Nice tools, but I have a Powermatic 66 table saw with a 5-HP motor and an extension as long as a couch. I don’t see myself using the small tools in the future.

I’m really making this place my own. I used to use my dad’s initials for the name of this PC, because it belonged to him. I gave it that name for him when he bought it. Today I got rid of that. Totally new name. His influence is disappearing. The influence of the people who sold us the house is disappearing. Mine is increasing, along with God’s. It’s wonderful.

I can’t wait to get this over with. I can’t do anything until the electricians finish. Can’t even leave the house. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Money Out, New Wires in

Things continue to go well.

I had an electrician come out and look at my workshop. He gave me an estimate, and I’m having the wiring upgraded. I’ll be able to run a 7.5-HP compressor and a welder at the same time. I’ll be able to install my 10-HP phase converter. I’ll be able to move my machine tools up here at last.

I considered doing the work myself, and I suppose I could have, but I want it over with. I compromised. The pros will run the wires from the main panel to the workshop, and after they’re gone, I’ll wire up the receptacles on my own.

The people who built this house did a lot of great things, but they were not “tool queers,” as Youtube tool guru Keith Fenner likes to put it. They did not live for tools. Their biggest tools were things like a farm jack. Clearly, there was something wrong with them.

I’m going to have a mill, a lathe, a big compressor, a bunch of welders, and a plasma cutter, not to mention some 250V saws. Just a few things a guy needs in order to get by.

It’s hard to believe what it costs to put two wires in a hole and attach them to a couple of panels. It has to be done, however. I’m not going to continue to live without machine tools. It’s barbaric.

They should have the job done by tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll be able to get the tools moved up here next week. Between the completion of the wiring and the tool move, I’ll have to rearrange the shop. I need 8 or 9 feet of linear space for the lathe, about 7 feet for the mill, and a square yard for the compressor. Which I should leave in Miami. I should bite the bullet and get a bigger compressor.

I’ll have to run air lines up in the trusses. I’m not going to mess around with one air line I drag around the shop. I have to mount my big hose reel on the wall.

The shop has a big L-shaped Corian countertop which sits on a two-by-four frame screwed to the wall. It has to go. It’s a neat feature, but I don’t need it. It sucks up a lot of space, and it’s not flexible. You can’t move it. Maybe someone will buy it and take it away.

I could cut it up and save the Corian for other things. It’s a dynamite work surface. I just happen to have Corian blades for my table saw. I bought it from a guy who cut Corian.

Things are happening fast. It looks like God is preparing me for a pleasant time during the cool months.

Plus Hot Metal

Yesterday was eventful and profitable.

I have moved my tractors out of the workshop. I put tarps on them to protect such parts as would react badly to rain. Now I have more room for important things, like plasma-cutting and watching Youtube.

Speaking of Youtube, I tried to come up with a plan to hardwire the shop for the Internet. I don’t want to dig up the yard. I was thinking about it when I remembered that there was a jack on the wall out there. Phone? Ethernet? I had always assumed it was a phone jack, but I had never checked.

I went out and looked. It was a phone jack. That didn’t stop me. I wanted to find out what kind of wire was behind it. I had a couple of things in mind. If it was skinny phone wire, it could act as a fish line to pull Cat 6 wire through for the Internet. If it was something better, maybe I could connect it directly.

It turned out to be Cat 5, which, while inferior to Cat 6 (or Cat 11), is far better than I need. Pretty exciting. I came up with a plan. I would put a Cat 5 port in the garage, and I would find the phone port nearest to the router and turn it into a Cat 5 port. I would disconnect the land line stuff, which is obsolete, and I would have the Internet, wired, in every room where I had a phone jack.

I got myself some tools and went to work. I changed two phone jacks. I went to the computer. I turned it on. No service.

I traced all the wires, and I learned a couple of things. I found out where all the wiring in my house is. I learned that all the Cat 5 wiring was only partially wired up. Cat 5 has 8 wires, and the phone jacks use 4. Even if the wires from the garage had gone straight to the phone box by the garage, only 4 wires would have connected that box to the jacks in the house.

While I was working on all this, I decided to trace the Cat 5 workshop wires as far as I could. I opened a little box outside the workshop. Guess what I found? Cut wires. The jack in the garage was connected to approximately 5 feet of wire which dead-ended right outside.

Now I have two ethernet jacks that go nowhere.

I’m not sure what to do, but it can be dealt with. I just have to decide whether I care enough to do it. It will mean working in the attic, where the fiberglass insulation and wiring are, and I don’t really want to do that until the temperature drops into the low sixties.

I can use the Internet out there already, by using my phone as a mobile hotspot. It’s just annoying.

I also did some welding. I cut some flat steel bar into short pieces and made T-welds (fillets) with TIG and stick.

My TIG welding still needs a lot of work. After I welded, I went inside and watched some videos, and I took note of some fundamentals I had forgotten. I am hoping to do better today.

Welding is not like other tool-related pursuits. You have to keep practicing. People who have welded for 30 years practice. You don’t have to do this with other tools. No one practices using a wrench.

Because the weather is so much better now, welding isn’t a chore. I don’t sit and drip sweat into my helmet now. That means I can practice as long as I want, provided I observe the duty cycles of the machines and I don’t overheat the TIG torch.

Welding is easier with the cat gone. Before he left, I christened him “Heisenberg.” He now resides with my friend Amanda. I think it was a big mistake for her to take him, but apart from the obvious problems of taking in an unneeded pet in a crowded household, he will do an exceptional job of whatever it is that cats do. I’m just glad I can back out of the driveway at full speed again. And when I want to weld, I don’t have to put any animals in cages.

She took him to the vet to see if he had an ID chip, and of course, he did not. I predicted it, because I knew it was very unlikely that anyone around here would buy a cat chip and then throw away the cat and not look for it.

People treat cats as though they’re disposable. No sane person has ever paid for a cat. They’re always free, so a lot of people feel that that makes it okay to dump them beside the road. That is surely what happened to Heisenberg. He has a wonderful personality, but he’s a cat, so he’s an at-will family member who can be discarded at any moment for any reason.

Whoever abandoned him should have either given him away or had him put down, but it was easier to have no spine and toss him out of a car.

If you want to irritate a cat person, say this: “Dogs cost money, but cats are free.” By and large, it’s true.

His picture is on the Internet on sites where people look for lost pets, but no one will ever claim him. If anyone cared about him, I would have received a response by now.

I wonder if his neediness, which I saw as a plus, is what got him fired. It’s unusual for a cat to be bursting with affection. Maybe someone didn’t want to be pestered. Before he left, he was doing things like jumping on me and wrapping all 4 legs around me. That could get old. In fact, it did. He interrupted me repeatedly while I was trying to work.

I talked to my friend Mike about it. He understands completely. He has two cats, and he keeps hoping they’ll die. He feels obligated to take care of them because no one will take them and he’s not willing to take them to a shelter, but they’re not real pets, like dogs. They don’t care about him. I would have taken them to the pound a long time ago. People are more important than animals. You shouldn’t disrupt your life so an unwanted cat can have food and shelter until it croaks. You have more value than that.

God showed me something interesting and very important. There is a correct order of authority in people’s lives, and if you’re not in God’s will, that order will be inverted. When an animal’s desires come before your needs, you have an inversion of authority. We’re supposed to be above animals. They live for us, not the other way around.

My sister is a sociopath and a sadist, but she loves animals. She used to cry and make loud moaning noises every time she saw a horse through a car window. She has a long history of spoiling aggravating little dogs and using them to control other people. She has never housetrained a dog. She forced her dogs’ company on people who hated them. She will sing songs to a dog after it poops on the floor, so it knows it’s a good idea to keep doing it. She has an inversion of authority.

Satan rules demons. Demons rule her pets. Her pets rule her. Through her, they rule other people. To deal with my sister is to accommodate her awful pets. This is why every other person in the family has killed at least one of her dogs. My dad turned one loose. My mother took two to be gassed. I took one to be gassed. I prayed for God to kill the last one because she claimed it was the reason she wouldn’t go to drug rehab.

I don’t know if she has pets now, or even if she’s alive. I’m glad I no longer have to be around animals that are so spoiled they climb on the furniture for the purpose of urinating on it. I’m glad I no longer have to be around my sister. Her main function in life is to take away the dignity of other human beings and destroy their joy. I keep praying for God to keep her out of my life forever. He told me I should not think about her, so I try not to.

When I was a kid, I had a dog. I saw him climb onto a couch and push my sister off so he could stretch out. He did this to an abusive, extremely aggressive person who pushed other human beings around and made them miserable. He knew her proper place. She was below him in the supernatural hierarchy. I didn’t understand this until long after he was gone.

Satan promotes something I call “the alternative righteousness.” It’s a pretend righteousness that has nothing to do with serving God. Sick devotion to animals is part of it. People who are obsessed with animals are not Spirit-led Christians. If you have pets, you will be exposed to these people when you need help, and you will see certain things often. Liberalism. Vegetarianism. Witchcraft. Feminism. These things are abnormal, but on the surface, they look nice. Leftists claim they love the poor because they give them things and reinforce their pathological flaws. Vegetarians think they’re better than the rest of us because they don’t kill their food, even though Jesus ate meat and created the sacrificial system of Judaism; the Torah HAD to be written on the skins of slaughtered animals. Witches always claim they only do good. Feminists…don’t get me started.

A warped adoration of animals is part of the alternative righteousness. It’s probably why Hitler loved dogs and gave up meat. The Nazis were heavily into vegetarianism, environmentalism, and nature worship. You can look it up.

I love my pets, but I bought them in ignorance, and I would not do it again. I wouldn’t buy another animal or accept one unless I had a good reason, such as that it was corn-fed, cut in thick slices, and on sale. I would let a barn cat live here (and stay here after I moved) in order to keep pests down. I would buy a protection dog if I had to. I’m not going to have any more pure pets if I can help it. I won’t even have fish.

Drudge likes to link to stories about people who are pulled out of trailers full of sick animals and feces. “HOUSE OF FILTH” is one of his favorite headlines. Those people are demonized. Demons run them, and the demons tell them to hoard animals. It doesn’t help the animals, who should be euthanized, and it certainly doesn’t help the hoarders or the people they cause to suffer.

The Bible says one person is worth more than many sparrows. That’s just how it is.

Have you noticed how nutcases are filling our stores, restaurants, and airplanes with “support animal” pets? That’s a sign that demons are increasing their power over us. People who are controlled by animals have a demonic desire to extend that control over others. Satan is a conqueror; he never stops looking for more territory.

It’s not enough to carry a pig in a bag and sing songs to it. You have to make other people sit next to it in restaurants while it breaks wind and eats off a plate you might get next week. Like the increasing power of illegal aliens, it’s a sign that America is losing God’s support.

If you’re not full of the Holy Spirit, you won’t understand these things. It’s all true, though.

It’s a smart system, in the short run. Not only do you get to coerce admiration out of other people through your virtue-signaling; you get to put them down and control them by saying they’re less righteous than you are. Most people are so simple, they will buy it. Satan is an extremely accomplished manipulator. He has done his homework.

The point of the alternative righteousness is to convince you that you can be a good person and have a fine afterlife while continuing to enjoy sin and reject God. It works really well. Many people you know are burning in agony and humiliation right now because they fell for it.

It’s remarkable how Satan can degrade you with animals, once God stops backing you up. There is a lady in Florida who forces other people to share airplanes with a horse. Those people don’t even know they’re supernaturally defeated. It’s not just a horse on a plane. It’s Satan, saying, “This is how low you are now, because you reject God. A horse is more important than you are.”

My sister, who is basically a demon apartment building with feet, was always ahead of the curve. She forced her dog into restaurants years before the other children of darkness got the idea. While she lived in filth in a house with walls that were caked with mold and floors that were varnished with urine and feces, the dog ate rib eye steak from Whole Foods. That’s the gospel truth. I am a witness.

If you have God’s favor, you should live like it. A man should have authority over his wife, his kids, and whatever animals live on their property. The wife should have authority over everyone except him. The kids should have authority over the animals. If an animal is running your life, you have a demon problem, and you’re not living up to the potential God REQUIRES you to fulfill. It’s a sign, and you need to take notice and repent.

Now that I think about it, Jewish legend says God withheld the flood until human beings began marrying animals. That suddenly makes more sense to me. It’s about as severe as an authority inversion can get. When you’re having sex with your dog and calling him your husband, you can’t get much lower. You’re signalling your true value, which is nil. If you declare yourself worthless, God may respect your assessment.

He has prepared a place for the worthless.

Fascinating stuff. It’s remarkable that this wisdom isn’t commonly held. After thousands of years, we should all know these things. One generation should teach the next.

I’m repeating myself, but God told me these things: “All strength comes from inheritance. There is no strength without inheritance. Satan hates inheritance.” We are so bad at giving new generations their inheritance of wisdom, we are re-learning things people knew 5000 years ago. Satan has done a great job of keeping us poor. We did all the work for him. He just lied and made us think it was the right thing to do.

Why fight your enemy when you can make him fight himself while you watch? When you kill an enemy, you gain nothing. When you make an enemy destroy himself, you gain a servant and a soldier.

If animals or worthless people are above you in life, you need to get some authority. Your situation is not normal, and it’s not permanent unless you want it to be.

I wish I had had someone to tell me these things when I was young, but my parents didn’t know anything. Maybe this material will help you, though. I certainly hope so.

Time is Getting Short

Today’s blog post ought to be pretty interesting to Christians.

I believe God told me to leave Miami. I ended up near Ocala, and it has been a dream come true in most respects. I have dozens of acres. I have a big workshop. I’m far away from the coarse, ignorant, obnoxious people of Miami. I’m surrounded by southerners and Christians. Hard to beat.

At some point, I started to feel that God was telling me to move to Tennessee, even though I had not been in northern Florida long. I had no problem with this. As great as my present situation is, there are some down sides. There are basically only two kinds of trees here, and both are trash trees. You can’t have normal grass here. The soil here is just sand, so you can’t grow anything. It’s very hot in the summer, which wasn’t a big deal in Miami, where there was no incentive to go outside anyway. Here, outdoor life is very important, so it’s difficult when it’s 95 degrees every single day for three months. Also, I want more acreage, and I miss Appalachia.

Recently, I learned about a 2015 prophecy that came from Perry Stone. He said God was calling his children to the mountains. That startled me. Persecution of Christians is going to get worse and worse as Americans become more and more vile (and less American), so people like me will be better off in remote areas among their own kind.

In 2018, I felt driven to go to a meeting of the Last Reformation in Clearwater, where I was re-baptized correctly. I had started watching their videos. They are part of a wave of revival in the church. People who are caught up in it go around healing strangers and so on. They’re against the filthy money doctrine we are so used to seeing from Trinity Broadcasting. Their leader is a Dane named Torben Sondergaard. He was at the meeting in Clearwater.

I was baptized in December. In January, Torben and his family were driven out of Denmark by the Danish government. He was accused of abusing children and practicing quackery. In Denmark, where the government licenses churches, casting demons out of children is considered abuse.

Since January, Torben has been looking for a new home. The Sondergaards applied for asylum here. They started out in South Florida, which seemed like a big mistake to me, because of the unpleasant, arrogant, boneheaded ways of the people there.

Yesterday, he posted a Youtube video. He has a new headquarters in North Carolina. The sellers wanted $2.2 million, but because they believed God was with Torben, they cut the price to $1.2 million. Another $800,000 came to them suddenly from another source. Now they only need between $400,000 and $500,000 to pay the place off.

This all happened extremely quickly. They haven’t bought the place yet, but they have been allowed to move in and begin work anyway. I watched the video, and I thought, “Loans aren’t for Christians.” Instantly, Torben started saying he didn’t want a loan. He doesn’t believe in borrowing to glorify God, any more than I do!

I felt a little pain while I watched. I have not found a place in Tennessee yet. Big properties with houses are not that easy to find. North Carolina is less challenging, and it’s beautiful there. I have asked God repeatedly if he is sure it has to be Tennessee and not North Carolina, and I feel he is insisting on Tennessee.

Anyway, something is happening. If you’re among the individuals who think God wants you to live among the depraved because you’re going to save your community, you need to think again. It’s not going to happen. You can help a few people, but you can’t save a neighborhood. Eventually, they will turn on you. You need to ask God to move you.

Torben compares the new facility to Noah’s ark. That’s not just him being clever. It’s from God. The ark was provided to protect God’s loved ones from the children of darkness and their punishment. God is putting people who are especially close to him in safer areas. You need to get situated before it’s too late. You won’t be able to move in with people who listened to God while you were stubbornly clinging to places like Los Angeles and Baltimore. It won’t be that easy.

The video doesn’t show much of the property, but the words are what matter.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Projects Yield to God’s Favor

I feel like I can’t go about my business at the end of the day without blogging because I have an obligation to let people know how well life is going. If you’ve learned a few things about God, and they start to work for you, it can be hard to make people understand that they need to seek the same things. If people see how well you’re doing, they might start asking themselves if they need to try to do what you’re doing.

That being said, today was a great day.

I got up and finished mowing the yard, and the John Deere didn’t have a fit or anything. That was pleasing to me. When I was done, I found myself sitting in the shop, looking at the Kubota brace I’ve been working on. I had intended to go in and take a shower (because I don’t bathe before doing yard work), but the steel was there, the welder was there, I was there…I did some welding.

Last night, I got the metal ready to be welded. Today I had to do the welding. I had a bunch of new welding magnets from Strong Hand Tools, and I was eager to use them. I took them out of their packaging and found that they didn’t work for the parts I was welding.

The shield I was welding was supposed to be joined to a piece of tubing cut at a 44-degree angle (yes, 44). The magnets weren’t right for that. I had to think.

I went in the house, where I had a stack of Chinese rare earth magnets stuck to the fridge. I brought 4 out and used them to hold the shield on the tubing. They worked perfectly. Tacking the shield was a breeze.

Welds always pull on the base metal. A gap opened up before I placed the last tack. I had to come up with a way to close it. I decided to use an Irwin woodworking clamp with rubber pads. One tack wasn’t going to heat the metal enough to melt the rubber.

When I was done, I got out the Dumore hand grinder and a carbide burr and cut the tacks down a little to prevent them from sticking up through the final welds. Then I welded. I didn’t do too bad. My welds were professional quality. Of course, most professionals don’t weld all that well. Like theirs, mine were good enough to do the job but not good enough to be on the cover of a welding magazine.

I own manufactured products with factory welds which are worse than my welds, so I can live with the welds I produce now. They’re going to get better. I’m learning the importance of 1) being able to see the puddle clearly, 2) being comfortable before I start welding, and 3) concentrating intensely while I weld.

I cleaned and primed the brace. The primer sagged in some places, so I had to do some of the priming over, but I got it done, and tomorrow I’ll pick up some new Kubota-orange paint (my old can dried up), and I’ll finish the painting. Then I’ll form leather around the ends, glue the leather to the brace, and see if it works.

I also fixed the small-wheel attachment for the belt grinder. It wasn’t tracking right. This attachment comes by itself, or you can get it with an additional attachment that adds two wheels to it to force the belt into a sharper bend. I bought the second attachment. When I installed everything, the belt tracked way off to one side.

I finally realized it did this because the additional attachment was attached beside the first one, pushing the first one out and forcing me to adjust the belt outward. The second attachment is around 0.400″ wide, so I needed to take that much metal off the side of the tooling arm it was mounted on. And I had no milling machine.

I used the table saw. You can cut aluminum just fine on a table saw, as long as you go slow and use WD-40 to lubricate it. I made about 48 parallel cuts on the tooling arm. The cuts joined each other, creating a 6″-long rabbet. I then used the router table to smooth off the surface the table saw had left. Then I deburred with the belt grinder and a file. The product was less refined than a machined part, but it will work just as well.

Cutting aluminum with the table saw is always an adventure. The blade threw hot, sharp pieces of aluminum at me the whole time. I got several cuts on my arms. Hey, that’s metalworking for you. It’s not for snowflakes. If you’re afraid of getting aluminum in your man bun or having hot metal burn little holes in the pink tights your mom borrows sometimes, find another hobby. And go get some testosterone shots.

I found something else wrong with the grinder’s alignment. It had been off for years. I fixed it today. The belt tracks perfectly now, and because I got a bunch of top-quality belts, I should be able to do great things.

I’ve been watching metalworking videos. Some featured Jesse James. This is the guy who may be remembered forever mainly as the man who cheated on Sandra Bullock. That’s unfortunate, because he makes magnificent vehicles. There are builders who do things that are more startling and perhaps more creative, but Jesse James vehicles are classics. His taste is impeccable. Everything he makes will look just as good 25 years from now as it does today.

He has a bunch of incredible machines. He likes to buy old metalworking tools. I’m not sure he really needs them, because there are people who do equally good work without them, but I can understand the attraction.

He has one machine that came from an aircraft carrier. He says a lot of them were shoved over the side after World War Two because they weren’t needed any more. He has a machine he got from an Air Force base. Airplanes that fly in combat need a lot of aluminum panels.

He’s an interesting guy. He has made a lot of bad decisions in life, and he has suffered because of it. He always talks about how much he has suffered and how hard he fights life’s obstacles. He seems happy about it. I don’t think he understands that we’re supposed to have blessed lives in which things don’t go wrong all the time. I saw him talking to some pastor about his life, and the pastor seemed equally in love with the drama and hard knocks. That’s crazy. I can understand why a bike builder would think life was supposed to be hard, but a pastor has no excuse for believing that. They’re supposed to know God’s word, and his word says his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

We love drama because of pride. Drama and suffering make us feel important, and they bring us attention.

Today I watched an old show featuring Indian Larry. He was also a bike builder. I had seen the show before. He died not long after it came out. I wrote about him on my old blog.

Like Jesse James, Indian Larry’s taste in machinery was faultless. He didn’t want to build slick-looking bikes that would have looked at home in front of a mansion in Dubai or in a pimp’s driveway. He built classic V-twin machines with all sorts of mechanical parts proudly displayed. He used laced wheels, not weird billet wheels that looked like they came from show cars.

In the show, Larry was up against a guy named Paul Yaffee, who was building the kind of bikes you would expect to see characters in Marvel movies ride. Way over the top. No soul.

Indian Larry died in an accident. He used to do motorcycle tricks. He would stand on his motorcycle’s seat while riding at high speed. The odds caught up with him while he was doing tricks for a crowd, and he fell and died from a head injury.

I wrote about him on my old blog, and strangers showed up to post comments. It was as though I had created a monument. Hundreds of comments appeared. Unfortunately, they came down when I started the new blog.

It was neat to watch Jesse James and Indian Larry shape metal to fit their visions. Woodworking is great, but there is something special about working metal. Metal is hard and unnatural. It doesn’t occur in nature. It resists being shaped. When you start working it, you find yourself dealing with a very stubborn material, but when you’re done, you’ve created things you could never create from wood. You can’t create a new wooden object. All you can do is join and bend existing shapes. You can distort metal. You can twist it. You can add to it. You can melt it, cast it, and forge it into something different. The main limit to what you can do with it is your patience.

I feel that I should get farther into metalworking. Wood is nice, but it’s limited. I’m not a worldly person, and I could never consider a person like Jesse James or Indian Larry a role model. Working with tools is never going to give me purpose. I have God for that. But it’s nice to have interesting things to do here on earth while you serve God.

I’m thinking I might get a tubing bender. That’s the main thing I’ll lack after I get the finger press brake working. I also want a lift table big enough for my John Deere garden tractor. I want to be able to lift big projects up where I can work on them without straining my back. I’m looking at products now. I may buy one. They’re not cheap, but it’s not like what I want is going to pop up on Craigslist. I need 1500 pounds of capacity, with removable panels so I can work on wide objects as well as narrow ones. Most people who buy lift tables get narrow ones that can only hold motorcycles. A wide one will hold anything short of a car.

I don’t have much interest in working on cars, which is good, because a good general work lift is no good for cars, and a car lift is no good for other projects.

I’m going to clear out the garage this week and see if I can get my lathe and mill moved up here. I think I’m going to sell my compressor and get a bigger one I’ll never need to upgrade. After I get these things done, along with the lift table, everything else should be small strokes. I’ll have machining, grinding, TIG, MIG, stick, a lift, lots of air, a finger brake…everything except talent, knowledge, and skill.

Now you know what happened today, so you can relax.

Getting Ahead by Copying Other People’s Work

I think I have the answer to my latest welding puzzle.

To complete my Offroad Swag finger brake kit, I have to weld a big angle iron into a channel. The angle iron will open upward, and the outer edges will be welded to the upper edges of the channel. Other people who have done this have gotten warped projects.

I now have a copy of Design of Weldments, which is a useful book a Youtuber recommended. You don’t have to be a welder to find it useful. I don’t think the Youtuber welds. It’s useful for anyone who builds stuff. This morning I checked the book to see if it could help me, and I found the answer in chapter 6.

The correct procedure for my welds is to preset. This means I need to clamp the work down so it can’t bend during or after welding. I can clamp it down as it is, or I can put a slight bend in it, away from the anticipated warp. Presetting is what the pros do.

I thought about peening the welds. This means beating them with a hammer to flatten and lengthen them while they’re still hot. The book says this is a waste of time.

It says I should do the welds in small segments, and I should wait for each set of segments to cool before welding the next set. I say “set” because I plan to do one segment on each side of the project at a time, so they will balance each other. The project can warp back-to-front as well as vertically, so you can’t just weld the front and then turn it around and weld the back. Funny how no one on Youtube has checked to see if he has warpage in the horizontal plane! It’s surprising that I figured that out and they didn’t.

I can clamp the project to my table saw, with sheet metal on the saw table to keep spatter off, or I can put it in the press and weld it. The press would be better, but it may be hard to do, because I’ll need something longer than arbor plates to support the project.

I can use the table saw easily because I now have a 25-foot extension cord for my welders and plasma cutter. I won’t have to shove the 700-pound saw across the shop.

Incidentally, Harbor Freight provides good arbor plates with its presses. They used to use cast iron, which is brittle and snaps suddenly. Now they’re steel. Good thing to know. If you have cast iron, you should get new plates. It’s dangerous when a plate snaps.

Right now, I have two jobs on my mind. One is to practice MIG until I feel good about doing the welding, and the other is to rearrange the workshop so I can make a final decision about where to put my machine tools. Right now, I’m leaning toward putting them out there instead of in the garage. I would need some serious electrical work.

If you think your shop is too small, spend a whole day rearranging it. It will expand by at least a third. Trust me.

I should be able to finish my tractor front end loader brace today, except for the paint, which takes a while to cure. Then I have to decide what to do with the tractor. I intended to park it inside with the loader up, but maybe it’s okay to park it outside with a sturdy cover over the seat. It is, after all, a tractor, and I will probably have another solution in a year or so, so it would not be out there long.

I’ll bet someone sells tractor seat covers. I’ll check.

I can’t find temporary covers, like grill covers, for tractor seats. There are a lot of permanent covers which would probably be a hassle to take off when I mow. You can’t sit in a wet seat cover.

A small tarp will work fine. That’s what I should get.

I’m still making the brace. I want to be able to walk under the loader and work on the tractor.

God told me three great things the other day.

1. All strength comes from inheritance.

2. There is no strength without inheritance.

3. Satan hates inheritance.

When you inherit, you don’t earn. You just receive. Other people do the work for you. This works with knowledge as well as wealth. When you inherit knowledge, other people make the mistakes and suffer the resulting problems. You come along later and get the knowledge that works, so you don’t suffer or waste time.

When you get knowledge from other people by any method, it’s like inheriting. They do the work, and you get the benefit.

I could sit around and theorize about how to weld things, and that would be my natural inclination, but it’s a lot better to open a book and get the truth–BAM–like that.

Think how rich and informed you would be if your all of your ancestors had understood and applied the principles of inheritance. Every generation would have made the next one stronger. You would have been born into a life of privilege and power. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. People forget and waste, and their kids have to start with little or nothing.

Fred Trump was rich. Donald Trump is rich. Eric Trump is rich. His kids are too young to have jobs, but they’re rich, too. This is how life is supposed to be. The Trump patriarchs pass on wealth and knowledge so their kids hit the ground running. Making your children grovel and toil like mules in order to get where you are is stupid and often based in a sick desire to see them fail.

I could never figure out all the things in the book on my own. I like coming up with my own solutions to problems, but it’s smarter to find out what other people have done.

You can see why physicists are so useless compared to engineers. When a physicist has a problem involving building something, his skills will only help him to write equations and work from scratch. An engineer will pick up a book, look at a table, and copy the answer. Or he’ll stand up and ask the guy in the next cubicle. Some engineers complain that they never get to do math or design anything at work. Everything is laid out for them. That’s a good problem to have.

Engineers inherit things physicists have to build.

Interesting stuff.

If You Can’t Move it, You Won’t Use it

I’m thinking about more shop upgrades.

Yesterday, I had to press two steel rods into tight holes, and then I had to adjust them. I used my wooden workbench and Wilton mechanic’s vise. The vise was stretched nearly to its full opening capacity, so I didn’t use it. It’s not a top-quality vise, and I don’t want to put more stress on it than it can take. My workbench is very heavy, but it bounced a lot when I hit the parts with a 3-pound rawhide hammer.

This tells me I could stand to make three improvements. A better vise would be helpful. A sturdier workbench is needed. Finally, an anvil would be nice to have.

People love overpriced Wilton bullet vises, but they’re not really that exceptional. There are other vises which are just as good. The really old bullets–I am told–may not have been made from the same strong iron as the new ones, so it may be a waste of time to buy a bullet made before they changed the metal.

I’m thinking I might get a Chinese Yost vise made from super-strong ductile iron. For a small fraction of the outrageous, Snap-On-like price of a 6″ Wilton, I can get a 7″ Yost which is much, much stronger. It will open to 9.5″, which is very impressive; right now I get 5.25″. It would also weigh much less than a bullet.

You don’t really need a heavy vise. You need a strong vise which is very securely fastened to something which is also very strong. Added mass is sometimes an engineer’s way of compensating for bad materials and/or bad design. The iron Wilton uses can’t compare to Yost’s, at least in terms of breaking strength. I don’t know about rigidity, but since the Yost can clamp with 11000 pounds of force, it must be at least somewhat rigid.

The lighter weight of the Yost would make it easier to deal with.

I don’t know what to do about the workbench. I could make one by laminating 4″ (nominal) lumber side by side. That would be twice as thick as what I have now.

If I had a big anvil, I could use it instead of a bench when I needed to beat on something. I’m not sure you’re supposed to beat cold mild steel objects on an anvil’s face, though. I need to look into that. Even if it’s a bad idea, the problem could be solved with a small piece of steel plate that goes over the anvil.

I’m also going to invest in a patient lift. This is basically the same thing as an engine hoist, except it’s made for invalids and overweight people. It has wheels and an arm powered by hydraulics. You attach it to a patient who needs to be moved, and you pump it up. A basic lift will raise anything up to 400 pounds.

I want to use the lift to move things around the shop. Many people use gantry cranes and forklifts. I don’t have room for a forklift, and a gantry crane is not as maneuverable. I can remove the doodads that attach to human beings and replace them with nylon straps or something.

Patient lifts are expensive…unless you live in northern or central Florida. This area is full of invalids, and, I’m sorry to say, a lot of them pass away every week. This leaves their caregivers with expensive lifts they are sick of looking at. Today I replied to an ad. Someone is selling one for $50. Can’t beat that. If I don’t get this one, another one will pop up. Some people try to charge $400 or more, to get their investment back, but it’s a lost cause. There are too many of them on the market.

I could have used a patient lift when I was trying to get the upper pan off my John Deere garden tractor. I’m going to have to do that again, and I don’t plan to lift the pan this time. Not when $50 can buy me a patient lift.

The weather here is beastly hot right now, but the humidity is way down, and it warms up later and cools off earlier than it did in August. This all adds up to a much more suitable working climate. I’m taking advantage of it. Back when my dad was dying, I wanted to get things done during the pleasant months, but I didn’t. I spent way too much time huddling indoors, waiting for the difficult time to pass. Now there is nothing holding me back.

As long as I’m writing about new tools, I should talk about the improvements in my Christian walk. God has been giving me a new revelation of the power he has given me.

The Bible promises us a lot of things, but there are many we don’t receive. Sometimes it’s because of lack of knowledge, but it can also be because of lack of faith. Your mind knows you’re supposed to have something, but you’re not convinced in your heart, so you don’t receive.

It’s pretty obvious from the New Testament that we are supposed to have everything Jesus had. We’re not supposed to wait for it. It’s supposed to be ours right now. But you can’t fully believe that unless you have faith.

The Bible says our faith comes from God. It’s not something you can generate by trying to believe. When God gives you faith, which is a kind of revelation, things start moving.

When we speak, other beings, including God, are supposed to receive it as though Jesus were talking. When God looks at you, he doesn’t see the old man who died during baptism. He sees a replica of Jesus, and that person has the authority of Jesus.

When demons flee us, it’s because they feel as though Jesus were talking to them.

Where does faith come from? Praying in tongues is crucial. It builds up your faith. The Bible says faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God, but it doesn’t mean you get adequate supernatural faith just by listening to someone quote the Bible or by reading the Bible. People believe that, but it isn’t true. It means the supernatural word of God comes to you from inside, and you listen and believe. This happens when you pray in tongues.

If something shouldn’t have happened to Jesus, it shouldn’t happen to you. If Jesus, while in the form of a man, should have been able to do something, you should be able to do it now. This is what God was working to bring about through the crucifixion. It was an act of reproduction, and to reproduce means to make copies.

God’s new covenant way is much better than the old way, which involved a great deal of work and defeat. Daniel, for example, got God’s help with spirits that opposed him. We fight and defeat them directly, as though we were Jesus. We don’t have to wait for God to send angels to defeat the Princes of Persia and Greece and so on.

The Bible says we “clothe ourselves” with Jesus and “put on” the new man. That makes sense. It’s like putting on a military uniform. When others see the uniform, they give it the obedience it is due, regardless of who is inside it.

You know what they say in the military: “Salute the rank, not the man.” Satan says, “You’re the guy who fornicated, lied, and stole. Why should I listen to you?” He says that because he knows he can’t fight the uniform. He wants you to forget you’re wearing it.

I think I know why Satan continues to fight God. It’s because he has no hope. If you want to see someone do great evil without hesitation, take his hope away. Satan is going to be burned for eternity, in what will probably be the greatest humiliation of all time. He knows that. He fights in order to delay it. He doesn’t care about offending God, because he knows his end will be horrible no matter what he does.

He continues lying to us after we become new people, in order to prevent our power and righteousness from manifesting. I suppose I would do the same thing, even if it only delayed the onset of the burning for 10 seconds.

Certain things have to happen before Jesus can return, and they depend greatly on us. Satan is doing his best to slow us down. He has done a fine job for 2000 years, and he is not done having temporary victories, but he doesn’t have to have any victory at all in your life. He may keep knocking mankind to the canvas, but you don’t have to fall with everyone else. The word says, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.” This is because you’re God’s favorite, if you’re his Christian child. Expect favoritism and accept it, no matter what happens to the people you know.

The bad things that happen to other people are justified, and they are not your responsibility. You’re not supposed to sink with them.

I hope I get that patient lift. Right now I have to go buy more steel for the tractor brace.

Videos from the Assisted Living Facility

I have been considering using my action camera for some projects, so today I had to find it and clean it out.

While my dad was dying, I shot a few videos of him for the future. We would sit outside at the assisted living facility, and he talked about whatever he wanted.

I didn’t really want to see these videos, but I had to look at them to see what I was dealing with, so I am watching all of them before moving them to the PC.

I thought it would be worse than it is. It’s sad to see him in that condition again, but there are good things about the videos. He said all sorts of nice things about me, and he affirmed his new faith in God repeatedly.

It’s good to see that I was pleasant to him and that I asked him a lot of things about his care and so on. I’m glad I didn’t just sit there and stare at the clock. I wish I could have done more for him, but eventually you have to accept the past as it is and live in the future.

The videos end 11 days before his death. I recall that he had several days when he was not up to visiting, and I probably forgot the camera once or twice.

The videos are short because the camera works off of an app on my cell phone. Various things can cause the phone to interrupt the video. I had to keep turning the camera back on. I have an old phone I plan to use as a remote in the future. No one will call me on that one to interrupt.

I think I did okay. I had no help, and I have enough video to give a good picture of his condition and our relationship.

Once I get the files moved from the camera and deleted from the card, I’ll think about what I want to film. I don’t know whether I’ll go through with it or not, but at least I preserved the videos of my dad.

I’m very glad I shot these videos. I won’t get to see him again until the marriage of the lamb in heaven. It’s good to have video of the good times you’ve shared with older people. They will give you peace later on. They will help you to think less about the bad times.