Cactus Cooler Cans Under the Cushions

I hate strongholds. Unless they’re good strongholds.

A stronghold is anything that’s hard to change. If you can’t quit overeating, it’s a stronghold. Cancer that won’t yield to prayer is a stronghold. Unassailable faith in God is also a stronghold; it’s just a positive stronghold.

I have rocks and stumps in my yard. I don’t know if they have anything to do with the supernatural, but they are stubborn obstacles to my enjoyment and improvement of the lot. Remember Joe Starrett in Shane? He had a big stump in a field he worked, and he never quit striving to get the stump out, because it drove him nuts. The novelist had the same feeling about stumps that I do.

I got myself a subsoiler for my tractor. It’s a big hook that goes down in the ground. You can hook it to stumps and use the hydraulics to lift them. It works well on small stumps and fairly big rocks, but there is a limit to what you can do with it. There are some big stumps on my land, and I have seen rocks half the size of cars.

I had three stumps and several rocks jutting out of the ground in an area where I wanted to put blackberry briars. I already have the plants. I managed to get the stumps out this spring, but the rocks would not yield. I started digging around them to find out where the edges were.

Today I dug around a couple of really annoying rocks, trying to find where they ended. The rocks were up against each other, and I figured that if I could find a way to move one, the other would then have less to anchor it, and I would be able to extract it, too. I unearthed a sort of horn on one rock. I decided to loop a tow strap over it, put the tractor in low, and pull.

When I took off, I was surprised to see a patch of ground the size of a yoga mat lift up. The two rocks were actually one.

I pulled the rock up halfway out of the ground. Then I propped it up with a piece of 4×4. With the rock in that position, I was able to loop the strap under it. The rock had a waist to it, so once the strap was around it, it could not come off.

The big danger was that if I reached under the rock with the strap, it might fall back on me, and then there I would be, waiting for death with a large rock on top of what used to be an arm. I avoided the problem by using a Johnson bar to shove the end of the strap under the rock. I then pulled it through from the other side.

I am painfully aware that many people die every day from doing stupid things. It’s very important to try not to be stupid when you use tools. That sounds simplistic, but it’s the truth. Most people who go to emergency rooms with horrible tool-related injuries did something stupid. Reaching under a half-ton rock held up by sand and a small piece of wood is very stupid.

When I took off with the tractor, the rock came right out, and I dragged it easily. That surprised me. It makes me rethink everything I knew about stumps and rocks. Maybe the strap is a better tool than the subsoiler.

Now I have a six-foot-long rock sitting in my hard. I’m considering using it for landscaping. I could probably sell it, but it doesn’t look too bad in the yard, and it’s a conversation piece.

The shovel in the photo is 44.5″ long, so that gives you an idea how big the rock is.

I feel fantastic. It’s great when an annoying problem suddenly gives way.

There are still two rocks I really want to uproot. Maybe it can be done. I hate getting in there with a shovel and doing all that exploratory work, when I have a tractor. Sometimes you have to do things the hard way.

If you need a thousand-pound rock, let me know. I am always open to offers.

Where Were You When the Wave Hit the Beach?

Last week I started watching a Youtube creator whose channel is called “Tsunami Dream.” He has an extraordinary testimony. He was hooked on dextromethorphan cough syrup, and he became homeless. He started hearing God’s voice, and he went through some remarkable experiences on his way to recovery.

I have been wondering why he called his channel Tsunami Dream. Today I decided to see if he had any videos I wanted to watch, so I searched Youtube for “Tsunami Dream.” A lot of things popped up, from a bunch of channels. They were videos about dreams of the rapture. People saw giant waves in their dreams, and they realized the waves symbolized our extraction from this world.

He has a video which is about his channel’s name, but I didn’t go to that first. I haven’t seen it yet.

When I saw that people were comparing the rapture to a tsunami, I realized something: I had had my own tsunami dream. It happened on October 24, 2016. My dad’s father’s birthday, not that I think that means anything.

In the dream, I was in my grandparents’ home. I mean my mother’s parents. My dad’s father died before I was born, and his mother was a big nothing in my life. She had no interest in me or my sister.

We were in the living room. I was sitting on the floor. My mother was sitting up in a recliner. She wore work jeans and a work shirt; I don’t think she owned jeans or a work shirt in real life. Her hair was very long; she never had long hair here on earth.

I had a dish of pesticide granules in front of me. Bait granules with poison in them.

I heard a very loud horn blow. It was loud, but not painful to the ears. I could tell it was making the entire earth rumble, and that everyone on earth was hearing it. I had the impression that whoever was blowing it was somewhere west of California, over the Pacific. It was a single note which went on and on.

The sound would have been pleasant, but the pleasing vibration was overshadowed by a powerful sense of dread and finality. I don’t mean I felt dread for myself, personally. I just knew this was a moment of judgment for many people, and that there was no longer any way for them to avoid suffering through repentance.

We started to rise into the air, as though the room were filling slowly with invisible water. The poison rose out of the dish, and I tried to cover it with my hands in order to keep it where it was. We rose up to the ceiling of the room, and we were about to pass through it when I woke up. Some things in the room rose with us.

I wasn’t afraid, but I felt very sober. This was a very serious moment for the world.

I knew we were experiencing the rapture. I couldn’t wait to see Jesus. I was very relieved to know I would never have to touch the burdens of this world again. I didn’t think much about the suffering other people were going to face in the tribulation. There wasn’t much time to think, and I had other things on my mind.

I’ll be honest. I hope that when I leave this earth, I no longer think about the people who are still here. I have had to put up with them for a long time. They are responsible for themselves, and I am not God, so my entanglement with them should not be prolonged in heaven. How can it be heaven if we still suffer because of things that happen on earth?

Until today, I never thought about the similarity between the rapture and a tidal wave.

The Bible is full of events which involve water and resemble the rapture. The Hebrews under Moses walked across the floor of the Dead Sea, between walls of water, with dry shoes. The Egyptian army took the same path and drowned when the water returned to its place. Noah and his family were lifted up on water that came suddenly and drowned the rest of humanity. Peter was able to stand on water and walk on it when Jesus took his hand. Jews were told to purify themselves with ritual immersion. Christians do this and call it “baptism.”

Water is a cleaning agent. It separates filth from things that are worth preserving.

The Bible says we will meet Jesus in the air. That’s exactly what would happen if we rose as though lifted by rising water.

To see how many Christians are having tsunami dreams, click on this link: Google Search for “Tsunami Dream.”.

Here’s an interesting thing about the dreams: they’re not old. Youtube has been around for 14 years, but the tsunami of tsunami dreams appears to have begun about two years ago. Some took place earlier, but the bulk of the dreams are more recent.

God has a pattern of moving people to higher ground. He moved me from Miami to Ocala, and I feel he is telling me Tennessee is next.

Here’s a passage of Psalm 32, which is a psalm about the importance of confession and repentance:

For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him.

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah.

Many Christians–most–will be left behind when the rapture takes place, and they’ll have to endure the tribulation. They think of salvation as a license to sin, so they don’t confess or change. They love saying, “God knows my heart,” and, “Judge not,” but they get angry when people talk about repentance and the importance of being holy (set apart for God). When the rapture comes, it will be like a flood of great water, and most of us will sink, pulled down by the weight of carnality.

If you haven’t set yourself apart for God, why would he set you apart for him when the rapture comes? You’ve chosen your side.

Jesus described carnality as a millstone tied to one’s neck. He said that if a preacher caused someone to be offended by the gospel, it would be better to have a millstone tied around his neck and to be thrown into the sea.

The sea represents this world, full of voices and words that don’t come from God. When you’re complying with God and led by the Holy Spirit instead of your flesh, you float above the world, like Peter on the Sea of Galilee. When you’re carnal, and you rely on your own strength or the strength of any created being, you sink into the water, and that’s where you live, at the mercy of every wave.

I had a very carnal pastor at Trinity Church in Miami. His name was Rich Wilkerson. His testimony was always borrowed. This happened to this person. That happened to that person. He, himself, had no testimony, and he bore no fruit. He was a physical wreck. His church was, and is, a financial wreck. He taught lies in order to get poor people to donate more money.

He never took the stage and said he got a miraculous healing. He never had a revelation to share. He believed in hard work and positive thinking, which are not Biblical concepts. In the Bible, hard work is a curse. It’s one of the first curses God pronounced on people. When Samson fell, one of his punishments was hard work. He walked in a circle, turning a millstone, grinding grain for other people to eat. He never went anywhere. He just circled, like the Hebrews in the wilderness after they defied God. Wilkerson and his church walk in circle after circle.

It makes sense that Wilkerson ended up in Miami, because it’s a carnal city full of people who are a lot like him. It’s a terrible place to live.

Miami is lower, in every way, than Ocala. Tennessee is higher than Ocala. I don’t think you can beat Tennessee without going to heaven. I suspect it’s as good as earthly locations get.

People who are getting rapture dreams and visions are telling us the world is out of time. They speak with great urgency. Naturally, I wonder: will I get to Tennessee before the rapture? It seems pointless to start preparing for a move when I can’t possibly make it in time.

I believe God is telling me I’ll make it. If that’s true, then the rapture must be at least, say, 9 months off. It takes time to sell two houses, buy one, and move.

I need to get rid of my dad’s house in Miami, and I will also have to sell this one. I refuse to get a mortgage, and I don’t want to be short on cash when I leave.

Maybe I won’t make it. The rapture will come at a time when we think not, according to Jesus. People in Noah’s time were carrying on their normal lives when the flood took place, and God told the Jews in Babylon to build houses and plant things even though their stay was temporary.

It seems to me that things have not gotten bad enough, or good enough, to bring about the rapture. I think technology will destroy free will before Jesus comes for us. Surveillance and data collection will be so pervasive, you won’t need to be righteous to behave well, because Uncle Sam will be staring over your shoulder all the time, coercing you. Also, the church is very weak and ignorant. Even the people who seem to be in the remnant that will go in the rapture don’t seem ready. The world isn’t quite bad enough, and the church isn’t quite good enough.

I would guess, and it’s only guessing, that we have several years left. It will take a while to reach the point where freedom is completely dead. It won’t take decades, but I think it will take years. I can’t see God returning until leftists get their way and America is a socialist authoritarian (I repeat myself) state.

The existence of humanity is pointless without free will. God can’t judge us if we have no freedom to choose. God loves free will so much, he prefers putting people in hell and burning them forever to taking free will away. Once it’s gone, his business here on earth will cease to be profitable, and he will end it. God’s profit is saved souls–children–who go on to live with him forever. The saving of souls necessarily involves temptation and freedom.

It’s remarkable how God shows all of his children the same things.

More Toxic Items for the Trash Heap

When you’re a Christian, you’re supposed to have testimony. God is supposed to do supernatural things for you and around you all the time. If that’s what’s happening to you, be of good cheer, because it means your life has the potential to get much, much better. Once you get hooked up to the power source, good things will happen.

I had an interesting experience night before last.

I’ve been cleaning up my home, getting rid of objects which give evil spirits power. This is an extremely important thing to do. Praying for help with your problems while living in a house full of demon doors is like bailing out a boat without plugging the giant hole in the hull.

If you don’t cleanse your house, expect problems, and don’t be surprised if God refuses to help you with them. That’s the bottom line.

Recently, I threw out a bunch of literature I considered problematic. I threw out works by Plato and Homer, as well as some other Greek idolaters and/or sexual degenerates. Night before last, I realized I had two items which might be just as bad.

A couple of years ago, before my dad became so demented he could not drive, I got him a gift certificate from Barnes & Noble. I don’t recall the occasion. Maybe Father’s Day. He complained that he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to read, but he decided to drive to the store anyway. He came home with some neat bookends: heavy plaster casts of Homer and Socrates. He liked them a lot.

The bookends came with us to Ocala. I put them in my storage room along with a lot of other things I didn’t know what to do with.

Here is what occurred to me: if Homer’s pantheist works aren’t fit to be in a Christian house, and Plato’s praises of homosexual predation shouldn’t be here, why should I keep images of Homer and Socrates?

It bothered me to think of throwing the bookends out. I pitied my dad. He was once a big, strong, forceful man with a high IQ and power over other people, but in his last years, he was confused, and he needed help. He seemed to shrink. He used to walk around with his pants rolled up, just as the poem says.

I remember when he showed the bookends to me. He was very pleased with what he had done, and he seemed to want me to approve and share in his pleasure.

My dad doesn’t deserve pity. He is an immortal being with a perfect mind and eternal youth. He is invulnerable. He lives in a realm of joy and love. I forget this, and I feel sorry for him. I felt like throwing the bookends out would be like throwing my dad out and forgetting him.

I decided to get rid of them anyway. I didn’t hesitate for a minute. God has a problem with hellenism, and that means taking part in it, even in small ways, creates serious, annoying problems for me. It creates obstacles for God. That’s the last thing I want to do. I want the channel to be wide open.

I can’t take garbage to the dump on Thursdays, so I got out of bed and put the bookends in the garage with things I intended to take later. I have found that God will honor this just as well as taking things to the dump or destroying them.

I went to sleep, and hours later, I woke up suddenly. I heard a male voice yell, “BOH!”, as if someone had been kicked very suddenly and very hard from behind. I don’t know if “boh” means anything. It means “where” in Hebrew, but that may not have any significance. It may just have been an exclamation of surprise or pain.

Anyway, right after this happened, I felt a very powerful change.

I have a problem with my nose clogging up at night. It’s nowhere near as bad as it once was, but it happens. Right after I heard the sound, I realized my head was wide open. Not only was I not congested; I felt completely open and empty, as though someone had gone in with a tool and enlarged the passages in my head.

It was so extreme, it made a great impression on me.

It’s as if the bookends had been giving power to a spirit that wanted to take away my air.

I’ve had a little congestion since then, so I can’t say I was permanently delivered, but it was very, very odd.

Today the bookends go to the dump. My dad won’t care. They’re not his, and he doesn’t care about them in heaven. If he could come back, he would throw them out, himself.

I don’t want to suffer needlessly all my life and then get to heaven and find there were painful problems that dogged me to the end when I could have gotten victory simply by throwing unimportant things out.

My ideas must sound crazy to lukewarm Christians. Most Christians have convinced themselves of some very stupid notions. They think Satan and evil spirits aren’t real and shouldn’t be discussed, which is remarkable, since Jesus is a spirit, and he cast out evil spirits here on earth. They think they can melt into the world’s culture and still please God. They see nothing wrong with exposing themselves to poisonous entertainment created by people who hate Christianity. They use drugs and fornicate and expect God to give them every blessing in the Bible.

The earth is a battleground, we are at war, and we live behind enemy lines. We’re surrounded. It’s very serious. A lax attitude brings greatly diminished results, and it can result in damnation, even if you think you’re a Christian and you’ve been baptized.

We sleep with our eyes open, every day, like Samson on the lap of Delilah. We cuddle up to our enemies and expect them and God to treat us well.

God is throwing many, many people into hell every day, and we act like everything is fine. Most people go to hell, and things are not fine.

I keep asking God what else I should get rid of. I look forward to more protection and help, as well as a closer relationship with him. I don’t care about the things I lose. They’re snares and stumbling blocks. I want the pearl of great price.

I find I don’t miss the things I discard. For example, I don’t miss my blues or jazz CD’s at all. I am very slightly unhappy about throwing out a collection that took so long and cost so much to put together, but it’s not a big deal. I wasn’t listening to the disks anyway, so what have I lost?

Getting rid of things can be very empowering. This week I took the tractor and ripped out a bunch of shrubs beside my house. They were old and tough and hard to deal with. I took ownership instead of continuing to defer to former owners who have zero authority here. I’ve installed smaller shrubs that will look better and be much easier to care for. I should have done it sooner. This is my house. It’s not their house. It’s not my dad’s house. I own 100% of it.

I’m strongly inclined to get rid of my mother’s crystal. She liked Waterford. As a heterosexual man, I don’t see much appeal in expensive crystal, and even if I did, Waterford is heavy and lacking in elegance. I feel like selling every piece, just so I won’t have to carry or wash it again.

I want to get rid of my mother’s china. She had two sets. My sister got the newer, nicer set, and I got the old set. It’s very tasteful, but when am I going to use china? She had two sets of silverware, and I got the Fifties-looking set that looks dated and a little tacky. I think it clashes with the china. I’d like to get rid of the silverware, too. I don’t like silver flatware. Polishing it is a nightmare.

My mother was a wonderful lady, but her taste was not everything it could have been. She grew up in Eastern Kentucky, and she never got completely past it. There were a lot of hits, but there were also a lot of misses.

I have a huge fruitwood china cabinet. It’s about 6 feet long, and it’s extremely heavy. I do not like it. It’s in a room–my unused dining room–where I should really put some tools and a bench. I’m contemplating putting it in a consignment store.

My grandmother had a lot of nice stuff, because she and my grandfather never divorced, and my grandfather, who was very well off, let her spend money on her house. My dad was extremely cheap with my mother. She bought things from estates and outlets, and it showed. Their marital problems led to losses. The only items of any quality that remain are the crystal, the china, some silver, a filthy Chippendale chair, and the china cabinet. It’s not worth curating, to put it mildly.

Dysfunctional families start over, again and again. They don’t build. Often, the things they pass on are not worth keeping. It’s better to dump this depressing stuff and start from scratch.

I don’t think spirits have attached themselves to my mother’s paltry collection of feminine treasures, but bad memories have. Also, I really believe I’m going to be living in Tennessee before very long, and I can’t stand the thought of paying movers to haul junk I don’t want.

You probably have toxic objects in your home. There are plenty of Christians out there who have testified to the importance of getting rid of them. I hope you’ll consider it. It’s not our imagination. The things you possess can ruin your life.

Quit Whining About Enemies You Feed and Arm

I’m enjoying my adventures with the propane grill and my new Coleman propane burner.

The first rib eye I prepared using the grill was very good, but I felt it needed more heat, and I also wanted to see if I could fry with the grill. I have been experimenting.

I bought myself a cast iron griddle from Walmart. I have cast iron skillets, but I prefer to have a dedicated piece of cookware for frying steaks, because they leave residue behind. I figured I would lay the griddle on the grill, turn the grill up, and see what happened.

The short version is this: the grill will not get hot enough to fry a steak. When you fry steak in butter, you need to be on the verge of burning the meat. When you get the heat right, it puts a dark brown crust on the steak, without ruining the inside. By “ruining,” I mean medium-well or better. Anything past medium is a catastrophe. The griddle I bought fits the grill like it was made for it, and it would do a bang-up job on a huge mess of eggs, but for meat, it won’t work, even when you remove the heat deflectors from above the burners.

It may be possible to lower the griddle farther if I remove the rack, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I also tried making the burners hotter.

My grill came with a propane regulator that’s not adjustable. You get the pressure you get. I looked around on the web, and I learned that there are adjustable regulators that improve grill performance in some cases. I went to Lowe’s and bought one. It’s a Loco-brand regulator, and you have to admit, that sounds promising. It’s for a turkey fryer. When I tried to use it on the grill, I found that the flames went out when I turned it up. I don’t know if leftists have somehow managed to rig grills up so they can’t be hacked, or what. It’s the kind of thing they love to do. Anyway, I haven’t managed to get more heat yet.

I also got a Coleman butane stove. This is a single burner the size of a phone book. You insert a tiny can of butane in it, and you get 7200 BTU’s. It’s very light. Maybe they realize people will put them in backpacks.

I had a hard time getting fuel. For some reason, Walmarts run out. I got around this by ordering it for pickup at a local Walmart. That way, they had to hold it for me. Today I tried it on a porterhouse. I couldn’t find a good deal on a rib eye.

Summary: it’s fantastic. It’s more than hot enough to put a good crust on a steak. Zero complaints. I need a small griddle so I can stop using my Griswold skillet, but other than that, I’m ready to go. The stove is a blast to use. You can carry it (and its fuel) in one hand. You can put it on any flat surface while you cook, because it won’t heat anything under it. It’s stupendous. Now I can fix steaks without cleaning the kitchen.

If you love frying meat on the stove, but you hate the mess, check the Coleman stove out. You won’t be sorry.

For under $150, I can barbecue as well as anyone, and I will never have to touch charcoal.

In other news, I threw some books out today. Nice segue, I know. God keeps showing me that I have opened doors for Satan, and one way I do this is by holding onto objects Satan likes. I threw out my blues CD’s a while back. I have since thrown out most of my jazz. Today I got rid of books that were unsavory.

Satan has a really neat way of getting us to approve filth. He tells us it’s culture. Example: the incredible obsession with nudity during the Renaissance. Most parents would have a problem with a son who put photographs of naked men on the wall in his room, but how many would complain about a picture of Michelangelo’s David? Right now, you can walk into a chapel in the Vatican–a Christian church–and see a vast array of naked figures on the walls and ceiling. Imagine going in there and trying to hold up a Playboy centerfold. They’d throw you in the street. Imagine trying to go in naked. The cognitive dissonance is thunderous, but no one seems to notice.

The word “renaissance” means “rebirth.” Europeans idolized the ancient Greeks, and they copied them slavishly. The Greeks loved dirty art, and Europeans revived their trashy passion. While rediscovering science and math, Europeans gave a new birth to some things that were better left dead.

Europeans revered Plato and Socrates, even though they were, by any reasonable standard, perverts and sexual predators. They revered Homer even though his work glorified paganism and kept its false gods before the public eye.

A couple of years ago, I decided to go back over some books I avoided reading in college. I took a course called Literature Humanities at Columbia University, and I didn’t do much of the reading. My professor thought I was an eccentric genius, so he didn’t fail me, but I did very little work, and I didn’t go to class. Another reason I didn’t fail: along with a huge percentage of my peers, I cheated on the final exam. Some of the instructors released the questions in advance, and naturally, people got together in groups and worked on the answers before taking the test.

I used to feel bad about cheating. I only recall one definite instance of cheating on tests in my life. I may also have cheated somewhat on Columbia’s Contemporary Civilazation final. I can’t recall. Through the irresponsibility of the instructors, many people had the test questions, so things happened.

I never cheated in order to do better than other people. I only cheated to avoid failing a course. Maybe that’s not as bad.

Anyway, I bought horrible books by people like Homer and Aeschylus, and I forced myself to read them. I bought Plato’s Symposium, which is about a bunch of homosexual predators getting together to see who can be the most pedantic. I bought a number of things. I bought Vergil.

God has been telling me not to expose myself to occult materials. He even told me to quit watching Marvel movies, because–let’s face it–characters that defy physics are using occult power, even if Stan Lee blamed gamma rays. I shouldn’t watch movies about occult phenomena. I should stay away from entertainment involving witchcraft, curses, and so on. A day or two ago, God asked me something: how are works by pantheists any different from movies about witches and vampires? They’re not. They celebrate false gods and magic.

I decided to get rid of Homer, Vergil, Aeschylus, Ovid, Euripides, and whatever else seemed problematic.

I have my dad’s old Great Books of the Western World set. This is a bunch of classic works, in a collection like an encyclopedia. I hated to pull Homer and Vergil out of it and put them in a trash bag and ruin the set, which had been preserved for 50 years, but I did it.

I felt some small twinges of misgiving about discarding the works themselves. It seemed strange for an educated, cultured person to throw out Homer and Plato. Satan had part of me convinced that it was somehow wrong for a person with a proper respect for humanity’s accumulated knowledge to throw out ancient books. I was right to throw them out, though. The fact that trash is thousands of years old doesn’t turn it into treasure.

Plato and his pals used to adopt kids and sodomize them repeatedly until they got too old to be attractive. The compensation was tutoring. This was considered okay in ancient Greece. I’m sure parents were ecstatic when they learned that great men wanted to use their sons like women. It must have been a tremendous honor. How can centuries of tradition turn such perverted, Satanic notions into things we should keep on our bookshelves in Christian homes in 2019?

It’s all at the dump now. No going back.

It’s very strange that we’re so comfortable with nude art. I’ll tell you something that may amaze you: it’s possible to create great art without nudity. It’s okay to paint a woman with her clothes on. It doesn’t make you less of an artist.

I’ve taken a number of figure-drawing classes. We used naked models. It wasn’t actually helpful for people to be naked before us. It’s not like clothing on a model will prevent you from learning. The body is very simple. Clothing is complex. We would have learned more from drawing clothed models. Drawing clothing takes skill. Leonardo used to do studies of fabrics so he would be prepared to paint clothed people. This type of art is called “drapery.” You can look it up.

Arty people sometimes claim nude art is somehow pure, and that it’s abnormal to be stimulated by it. Yeah, okay. And if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

I recall reading Chuck Jones’s autobiography. He told a huge lie in it. He wrote about going to art school. He said he was very excited when he accidentally saw part of a girl’s upper leg outside of class, but he didn’t feel anything when he saw totally nude models. What a crock! Regardless of what men who have taken art classes may have told you, a naked woman is just as exciting to look at in a class as she would be in a bedroom. I’m pretty sure I was never late to a figure-drawing class, and it wasn’t because I was naturally punctual. I wanted to see who was going to show up naked for us. Whenever the model turned out to be a man, I was very unhappy.

The earth is a dirty place, and we are very used to uncleanness. Much of the time, we don’t even notice it until someone points it out to us.

Yesterday, I found a new Youtube creator. He’s a guy who was homeless for a long time. He was addicted to cough syrup, of all things. The active ingredient, dextromethorphan, causes hallucinations. That’s kind of sad, because it was supposed to be a harmless alternative to codeine. Anyway, he had a very, very hard time getting free, even though demons were cast out of him more than once.

He mentioned a problem he had with a poster. He was living in a Christian shelter by choice, to avoid temptation. One day he bought a Beatles poster in order to decorate his wall. He said his peace disappeared. He had to get rid of the poster.

He talked about a famous exorcist named Bob Larson. You can see this man on Youtube. I don’t endorse him, because he’s a showman and he makes money from exorcism, but he may still know a few things. According to the former cough syrup addict, Larson says demons draw power from objects. He says a man who was being exorcised kept looking at an object, and the demon told Larson it was because the object gave him power.

Whether Larson is generally sound or not, I can’t tell you, but he is probably right much of the time. Even the worst preachers are mostly right.

The man who made the video says you need to do an inventory of your house and get rid of anything that isn’t godly. How about that?

I had never thought of objects giving demons power. I think of them as things that stink and draw flies (as in “lord of the flies”), or as signs that advertise openings to demons, or as doors. I suppose it makes sense to see evil objects as sources of power for demons. A lease gives a tenant power to stay in an apartment, so if an object gives a demon the right to stay in you, it gives him a kind of power. Authority is power.

The Beatles, in case you didn’t know, were very evil. They promoted drugs and heathen religions while fighting Christianity and Christian morality. Rock and roll really is the devil’s music. It’s not just something ignorant people say.

You can’t have it. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Not unless you’re okay with very serious problems God refuses to solve for you. Grow up and get rid of it. Stop holding onto a dead lifestyle that won’t even exist in heaven. You’re never going to hear a Beatles song up there, so why hold onto them now?

I don’t want demons in my life. I don’t even like roaches, and roaches are much nicer than demons.

I expect to see an improvement in my life now that I’ve discarded the writings of perverts and pantheists. There has always been a conflict between Hellenism and Christianity. Christians are supposed to be holy, and “holy” means “belonging to God.” We can’t have everything defeated and lost people have. They can watch TV shows we can’t watch. They can smoke things we can’t smoke. They can go places we can’t go. That’s just how it is. They get to do these things because they’re going to hell.

To keep one foot in the world is to give your enemies power over you. We do this, and then we cry to God when things go wrong. “I’m a good person. Why did this happen to me?” Often, it happened because you invited it.

You may wonder why God doesn’t tell us about the dangers of forbidden objects, explicitly and repeatedly. That’s simple. We were supposed to be full of the Holy Spirit. Two thousand years ago, people knew this. They were supposed to pass it on. Each generation of Christians was supposed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and pray in tongues every day, and God was supposed to teach every one of us through tongues and other gifts of the Spirit. Our forebears gave the Holy Spirit up, so we weren’t taught. This is why we’re ignorant. God held up his end of the bargain. He gave us the Holy Spirit, and he promised–look it up–that he would teach us all things. Human beings are the reason it didn’t pan out.

God doesn’t automatically fix everything we ruin. He has done enough for us already. He is 0% responsible for our problems. That’s something we really need to learn. No one is even a tiny bit responsible for what other beings choose to do. God is not obligated to run around behind us, saying, “You dropped this.” He already allowed himself to be tortured to death for us. That ought to be enough. It’s a wonder he does anything at all for us.

Look how most American Christians live. They listen to evil music. They fornicate. They watch filthy entertainment. They get drunk and high. They participate in astrology. They worship athletes and entertainers. They celebrate Halloween, which is tantamount to begging Satan to hurt your children. We put idols in our houses because we think they’re art. We carry good luck charms. We amass big collections of recordings by musicians who belong to Satan. Then we wonder why we get cancer. We wonder why our kids become addicts.

My sister is a drug addict, and she is as full of hate as anyone I have ever known. She has no impulse control. She is sadistic. She abuses other people. She is the worst liar I have ever known. Being around her is torture. Nonetheless, when bad things happen to her, such as losing her home or winding up in a homeless shelter, she feels like a victim and tries to find someone else to blame. Here’s what I say: “What’s happening is normal and right and to be expected. This is exactly what’s supposed to happen when you do these things.”

The other day I realized I would much rather see her die than be subjected to her abuse ever again. That’s really something. The family is unanimous. My mother, who was very kind, asked God to take my sister if she wouldn’t change, and my dad said it would be better for her to die than to go on as she was.

To some extent, virtually everyone is like my sister. We cause our own problems, and then we tell everyone we’re victims.

I am not a victim. I’m a bad person who has done stupid things, and I have suffered the natural and correct repercussions. I may have been a victim when I was very young, but that was a very long time ago, and it has no bearing on my guilt or innocence today.

Even if other beings have sinned against me, and they will be judged for those sins, I still deserved what they did. It doesn’t mean they didn’t sin. It just means I should have expected to be sinned against.

I should not say, “Why me?”, when things go wrong. I say it when things go well.

Anyhow, the Greek rapists of boys are no longer featured prominently in my library.

Maybe this will be helpful to you. If you have a curse you can’t get rid of, maybe you’re the one doing the cursing.

Pawn Shop Beauty Purrs Like a Kitten

Today has gone well.

A while back, I bought a Baldor 332B buffer with a Baldor G14 stand. I paid $250. You could probably buy this combination new for $1100, not including the safety switch that was bolted to the one I bought. I felt $250 was a very good deal.

When I got the buffer home and turned it on, it rumbled. It didn’t squeal, which is what I would have expected from bad bearings. It just seemed unbalanced, like it wanted to move in a circle in the plane of the wheels’ rotation.

I put a dial indicator on it and turned the shaft, and it showed less than a thousandth of runout. When I turned the motor on, the indicator went nuts, suggesting something was seriously wrong. A bearing that causes problems at 1800 RPM may work very nicely at 20.

I ordered myself some stuff from Caswell Plating, which is a magnificent website for anyone who wants to buff or plate things. I now have assorted good-quality compounds plus enough wheels to allow me to avoid mixing compounds on the same wheel. I also ordered some sealed NSK bearings.

Today I put the bearings in. As usual, I made mistakes which taught me new things.

Grinder and buffer bearings are pressed onto armature shafts. They aren’t held on by collars. Baldor will make a grinder shaft a certain size, and then they will install bearings, the internal diameters of which are actually smaller than the diameter of the shaft. The use presses to shove the bearings onto the shaft, and the inner races of the bearings have to stretch to get over it. This creates a tight fit.

I had to push the old bearings off and push the new ones on. I should have used my arbor press, which is a fairly sensitive tool, but it’s not on a stand right now, so I used a hydraulic press. It’s easier to put up a photo than explain.

The first time I tried to press a bearing off, I didn’t clean the shaft first, so the bearing got hung up on the rust and crud. That was a dumb mistake. I put it back in place and reinstalled the armature. Then I ran the buffer and used an old grinding belt to remove the rust. After that, I polished it with emery cloth.

I put the shiny new armature in the hydraulic press and put 3-in-One oil on the armature and let it run into the bearings. They came off with no problems. The reverse procedure shoved them right back on.

Everyone should have a hydraulic press. At $160 from Harbor Freight, they are too cheap NOT to buy.

By the way, that red thing is a plastic case for Taiwanese impact sockets. It’s what all top buffer mechanics use to hold their armatures. The dust is imported from Austria, and it has special protective qualities.

Putting the buffer back together was no problem, and now it runs very smoothly, without rumbling. The bearings were definitely bad.

I stuck a couple of wheels on the buffer for a photo op. Still trying to decide whether I should clean it up. I could remove the pins holding the nameplate on, give it a neat paint job, and put the plate back on.

Now I have to figure out what to do with it. The Baldor stand is not good by itself. I can use it as it is, and I’ll probably be fine, but it’s not a brilliant move. Buffers are extremely dangerous. Unbelievably dangerous, considering how tame they look. I need to have a stand that will provide some resistance to movement.

I am not willing to screw the stand to the shop floor. I don’t have a floor plan together, so I know I’ll be moving the buffer, and I don’t want a workshop floor full of holes. My plan is to make a heavy wheeled base from plywood. I also plan to put a foot switch on it so I can turn the buffer off in a big hurry without reaching toward the wheels. The current safety switch requires you to fumble around with your hand not far from the wheels.

I’m thinking I may also throw a rope over a truss and attach it to the buffer. That will keep it from going anywhere if it decides to ramble. Not ideal, but much better than nothing.

You educate yourself, you do what appears to be reasonable, and you live with the risk. That’s how life works when you have tools.

I read a fascinating safety analysis written by two engineers, and they focused entirely on things like guards. Apparently, buffer movement is way down on the list of dangers. They concluded that guards make buffers more dangerous, which is amazing. They did tests and found that an object tangled in a buffer wheel can go around the buffer several times in spite of guards. It can also reach a linear speed over 10 times that of the wheel, so 420+ miles per hour. The possibility that a buffer might fall over doesn’t seem nearly as scary.

While I was learning about buffers, I learned something disconcerting: it’s unsafe to buff the insides of things with bench buffers. It’s much easier for a buffer to catch something when you buff the inside. If you were to buff a metal hoop, for example, the buffer might take it out of your hands and start spinning it. Bench buffers speed up buffing certain things, but they’re not for every job. When you have things that aren’t safe for bench buffers, you have to look to handheld tools, even though they’re slower.

I only have one really good handheld buffing tool. It’s an air buffer, which is like a die grinder that holds buffing tools. When I say “really good,” I’m not telling the truth. My 17-CFM compressor, which is enormous by home shop standards, can’t keep up with it. You buff and stop and buff and stop. It looks like I need to get an electric die grinder. They’re actually superior. They don’t quit over and over, and they have more torque.

So. New tool. More wheels or buffs or whatever. It never stops.

In other news, something very exciting happened today. I performed a healing. I was alone, so I didn’t get to heal someone else, but still, it was great. I woke up, and my shoulder was sore. It’s a chronic thing. It doesn’t prevent me from doing anything, but it’s annoying. I think it’s referred pain from my gallbladder, which has had minor problems. I don’t think my shoulder has had a physical problem of its own. Gallbladder issues often cause shoulder and back pain.

Anyway, I have been watching all sorts of healing videos. This morning I told the pain to leave, and I put my hand on myself and so on. I felt my shoulder a few seconds later, and the pain was almost gone. I kept working at it. Sometimes when you get a divine healing, you only get part of it at first, and you have to go on. This happened to Jesus, so it’s not a sign of failure. Anyway, I can’t find the soreness now.

The Bible says God will perfect (complete) that which concerns me. That’s in a psalm. It’s true, so there is no reason to stop when a prayer is partially answered or a curse or blessing doesn’t come to pass in its entirety.

I’ve healed myself (sloppy language, since I’m just a conduit) many times, but this time, it was very dramatic and fast.

I keep hoping God will use me to heal other people. I really hate spirits that cause problems that seem incurable, and I hate the fact that most Christians think doctors are better than God.

Maybe tomorrow or Sunday I’ll work on a buffer stand base. I have some ideas.

Six or Seven Impossible Things After Breakfast

I got another breakthrough today.

I was praying this morning, and I felt something moving around inside me. I felt tension and worry, and I knew they weren’t mine.

Years ago, I was afraid to tell people I had seen or felt demons, but now I’m pretty open about it, because I don’t have much respect for the unfounded opinions of ignorant people who think demons don’t exist. This morning, I experienced feelings I knew did not come from me, and that always means a demon is present.

As I have said before, we all have demons, unless there is someone somewhere who has managed to get so completely delivered he never has to battle them. You may not know you have demons, but they are there. Maybe you have an addiction. Maybe you have a disease caused by a demon. Maybe you’re mentally ill. You’re not special; demons are like ticks on dogs, and they are in your life no matter how holy you think you are.

I started asking God to tell me what kind of spirit was churning my insides, and after a while, I started thinking about envy. I didn’t expect that.

It’s embarrassing to talk about envy. Some iniquities are not embarrassing to talk about. It’s easy to admit you’re stubborn or that you have a bad temper, but no one wants to own up to envy. I hate envy. I don’t just hate it in others; I hate it in myself. I would never knowingly let it influence me. I consider it disgusting and contemptible. Still, there is a difference between hating an iniquity and not having it. You can have an iniquity you control, caused by a demon that won’t leave in spite of its inability to rule you. For example, there are bisexual Christian men who have not been delivered yet are faithful to their wives.

“Envy” is a word that isn’t defined well. Many of us think it’s the same thing as jealousy. I’m not talking about jealousy. I’m talking about something hostile. A jealous person will want what you have. An envious person will feel malice toward you because you have it. An envious person is less concerned about having blessings like yours than in seeing you lose what you have.

Leftism is inherently envious. Leftists love the idea of taking good things away from people who are more successful than they are, even if they, themselves, don’t prosper from the taking.

My high school French teacher said there was a difference between a Frenchman and an American. He said an American who saw someone driving a nice car would think, “I’d love to have a car like that some day.” A Frenchman would think, “I’d love to pull him out of that car and make him walk.”

I don’t know if that’s a fair generalization, but it shows what “envy” means.

I felt that God had spoken to me, so I used my supernatural weapons and cursed envy with defeat and told it to leave. Afterward, I felt like a balloon that had been partially deflated. Except for one brief period during which someone tried to provoke me, I have felt very good since doing battle with the demon. I feel somewhat drained, as though I had been expecting a jail sentence and received an acquittal.

The primary thing I felt because of the spirit’s presence wasn’t envy. It was tension. It felt like my insides were being twisted. I couldn’t rest. After the spirit was defeated, that all left me.

After I went through this, a surprising number of good things happened. I got started on some important work involving cleaning up files. I got proof my alarm was monitored, for my home insurer. I went through a ledger for a condominium association, called their management company, resolved a longstanding problem, and put a check in the mail. I made arrangements with my fixed wireless company so I could try a new Internet cell tower. I called Florida’s revenue department and got rid of a $15,000 invoice they sent me because of an error. I contacted the probate division of the clerk of the court and got advice on proceeding with the administration of my dad’s estate. I researched some legal points to help me with the work.

My dad and I worked things out so he had virtually nothing in his estate when he died, and when you have that type of estate, you can avoid formal probate. There was one account, however, that threatened to cause a problem. My dad was in charge of it, and I needed to get him replaced in order to be able to avoid probate. I could not find the papers for the account anywhere. I didn’t think they existed.

I went through his awful files for quite a while, and I couldn’t find anything. I still got a blessing, because I threw out pounds of papers that were just taking up space. I don’t need his correspondence with his old college writing professor, for example. I didn’t need files regarding a union contract he negotiated for a crane and rigging company.

I found emails from a couple of women who tried to hook him after he was past 80. Surprising and disgraceful. I can understand why an old man with dementia would want companionship, but the women have no excuse. Clearly, God protected me from them and saved my dad’s estate for me.

I researched the law in order to find out what to do about the account. I contacted the institution that holds the account. I saw that I really needed the papers.

I took another look in the files, and suddenly, the papers appeared. I found a document naming my dad’s successor, in case he died. I was hoping he named me, because it would make things simpler. His first choice was an aunt of mine. Not a problem. She passed years ago, so she was no longer eligible. The document named her successor. Another aunt. She died this year, a month after my dad. Then I saw the third name: mine!

I’m amazed that he named me. He never told me at the time. This was over 30 years ago, and as far as I know, at the time, he thought I was an idiot. He put two housewives on the list in front of me, which is not flattering, but at least I was in there somewhere.

I was all set. I filled out the proper forms, gathered the required documents, and emailed the financial institution. Within a few days or weeks, the account will be out of my dad’s name, and I’ll be controlling it. As soon as I get notification, I can file for administration without probate, and my dad’s estate will close in a hurry.

If I had gotten the probate mess rolling right after my dad died, my aunt, who was demented, would have been alive, and there would have been problems. She has been gone for two months. The delays I experienced with other estate-related matters took me past the date of her death, and now I won’t have to involve her or her family.

It’s as if a dam broke. So many things that needed to be done got done today.

Here’s something they don’t teach you in church: there are reasons why you have problems you can’t defeat, and usually, you’re to blame. No one likes to hear that. We all want to hear that God will bless us silly no matter what we do, as long as we have faith. We don’t want to repent or confess. The Bible says a curse does not alight without a cause, and the Bible is the word of God.

You may be doing things you shouldn’t be doing, like adultery, yoga, or astrology. Maybe you celebrate Halloween. You may own things that should not be in your house, like occult movie disks, games of chance, erotic materials, good luck charms, or idols. You may be associating too closely with people who are children of darkness; you may be sleeping with one every night and telling yourself you’re going to save that person for God through shacking up. I don’t know what your situation is, but you are definitely blocking God’s blessings in your life, and you are holding doors open for Satan so he can afflict your family.

Unless you’re exceptional, you surely harbor spirits that need to be cast out.

When you fail to clean up your life, curses linger on you. Blockages stand between you and things like health, financial prosperity, peace, marriage, and reproduction. Other people will oppress you. They will control or take what you own. You will have enemies who win all the time, even though you pray.

Every time you cast out a demon or throw out something God hates, you will get a breakthrough. The more you work at cleaning your life up, the more strongholds will fall.

You’re like a ridge of snow, holding back your own avalanche of blessings.

This stuff works. People don’t know about it because most preachers are ignorant and weak.

The other day, I was reading Jude. It describes modern pastors perfectly. It calls leaders who spew fables “clouds without water.” In the Bible, the Hebrew children followed a cloud during the day. Water represents the Holy Spirit, who guides people through prophecy and prayer in tongues. Most preachers aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit, and almost none of those who are speak in tongues enough to get guidance.

Jude also said such people were “carried about of winds.” We are supposed to be the head, not the tail. The head leads; it doesn’t follow. Most preachers blow with the wind. They let the untutored crowds lead, because the crowds pay their salaries. In the Bible, winds represent spirits.

Jude called such people “trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots.” In the Bible, trees are people. Psalm 1 says a righteous man is like a tree planted by the rivers of water (tongues and prophecy) which brings forth its fruit in its time. Jesus said, “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” You may have heard that “fruit” means “works,” but it actually means people. Bad preachers bring forth bad fruit. “Twice dead” means bad preachers were dead before they were saved and that they gave up their new lives by going back to sin.

Jude uses the phrase “reefs at your feasts” to describe corrupt leaders. The King James Bible says they are “spots,” but it’s a mistranslation. The actual Greek word means “reefs.” It’s perfect. Think of the way a reef works. They don’t stand up out of the water and scare you into steering around them. When you approach a reef, you think everything is fine until it rips the hull out from under you. That’s how preachers like Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland are. They make people feel secure, and then those people crash on the rocks because their Christianity is a farce.

My old pastor, Rich Wilkerson, was a major reef. He would pat you on the back and tell you how great you were, while he knew you were destroying yourself. Useless. Worse than useless. A merely useless pastor can’t lead you to ruin.

You have to let the Holy Spirit clean you out. Faith is useless without obedience and holiness. You need real knowledge. You need to learn about demons and get free of them. You need to go through your house and throw a lot of things out. You need to think of all the people you associate with and start cutting people off.

I am very tired. I did a lot of things that were not enjoyable today, but it was a wonderful day of victory, nonetheless.

Today I was thinking about people I used to interact with as a political blogger. Almost none continue to be part of my life. I wonder how many laugh at me and think I’ve gone nuts. I also wonder how many of them are posting the kinds of things I post, saying their lives are beautiful and that things keep getting better. Precious few, I promise you. They’re still chasing their tails, calling liberals “asshats” and thinking posting memes and linking to diatribes will fix America. They’re going nowhere. America won’t be fixed, and the squabbling and vitriol will never cease.

Some people who say they’ve seen hell say the people there never stop fighting. It reminds me of the political fray. It never slows down, and there is never any real progress.

Thanks to God and his patience, I finally live in peace. I don’t punch a clock or go to an office. I don’t drive in traffic. I don’t get acid indigestion from reading the news, because I don’t read it. My financial needs are met, better than I expected them to be. I don’t have a single person in my life who has the power to make me miserable. I spend time in God’s presence every day, and he keeps making my life better.

You tell me who’s nuts.

I was insane to get caught up in politics and online verbal abuse. I was piling hot coals on myself. America is great, but it’s not where my joy, safety, or prosperity come from, and it’s definitely going to go down the toilet regardless of what we do. I depend on a source that never runs dry. I wish I had been smart enough to come around 25 years ago.

The people who are blogging about politics or taking sticks to rallies and having urine thrown on them by murderous Antifa punks aren’t doing anything worthwhile. They’re making things worse. They’re wasting their lives. None of that stuff has has any value. On the list of ways to waste your life doing something you think is important, it may even surpass working as an actor or professional athlete.

Conservatives and Christians come home from fights with Antifa bleeding and in pain. Seems like they always lose. It appears to me that the conservatives who are really defeating Antifa are at home enjoying God’s presence and his help. The best way to beat Antifa is to be a person they can’t touch, who continues to live a blessed life no matter what they’re throwing at people this week.

I expect to keep coming back and posting more stories of progress and increased blessing. You can get on the same track, any time you want.

Don’t wait as long as I did.

Buffer!

I’ve wanted a buffer for a long time. They’re very useful. You can shine things with them. You can also use abrasive flap wheels and wire wheels with them. Great tools. But I was too cheap to spring for a used American buffer, and I had doubts about Asian. The most promising thing I found was a Taiwan Jet buffer for $400 or so.

The Jet would probably have been excellent, but I couldn’t get past my stinginess, so I waited. Recently, I found a used Baldor (American) online. They still make this model. It’s a 332B, with a 3/4-HP motor. It runs at 1800 RPM, and it takes 8″ wheels. It already had a sturdy steel pedestal on it, with shelves.

I offered $250 for it. I think I could have done better, but these days, I try not to be ruthless when I negotiate. Even if I could have gotten it for $150 or so, the $270 asking price was very modest, and $250 was a great deal.

I drove to Orange City today and picked it up. Here are some photos.

It appears it came from a school in Seminole County. A school won’t run a buffer 24 hours a day, and that’s good. On the other hand, a school will let Beavis and Butt-head impersonators run wild with quality tools, and that’s bad. It’s hard to hurt a buffer or bench grinder, though. Basically, three things can happen. The shaft can be bent. The capacitors can die. The bearings can die. If the shaft is okay, the other stuff is chicken…is easy to fix.

I was surprised to find that the person who was selling it online was actually a business. In fact, he was a pawn shop. Had I known that, I probably would have offered less. I pictured some guy selling his precious tools in order to pay bills. In reality, that guy had already sold the tool to the guy I was buying it from.

No matter. Still a good deal.

The buffer had two wheels on it. One was an abrasive flap wheel, and it looks very good. The other was a 4″ cloth wheel with red rouge on it. I don’t know if an 8″ wheel can be eaten down to 4″. I didn’t look closely. Maybe the previous owner had a practice of using 4″ wheels on an 8″ machine.

Took the wheels off and ran the buffer. I can feel a tiny amount of movement when it runs. It feels okay, but when I turn on my Dayton grinder, I can barely feel anything. I don’t know if the Baldor is running normally or whether it needs bearings. I’m working on finding out. It’s silent, so that’s good.

The pedestal has a base about one foot square. It will not be stable enough for buffing. I think I’m going to get two rectangles of plywood and glue them together to get a platform about 1.75″ thick. Then I can put casters under it, far enough apart to make the buffer stable. I don’t want to screw it to the floor. It would be a big problem, having a tool that big stuck in one location.

The buffer has a starter box. I don’t know why a 3.4-HP 115V tool would have a starter box. I’m trying to find out.

I don’t know exactly what I want to do, regarding default accessories. I was thinking I’d put a wire wheel on one side and a cloth wheel on the other. I suppose I’ll need several wheels and several types of abrasive. It’s very easy to change accessories, now that I’ve knocked the nuts off with an impact driver, so it’s not an important decision.

I would like to clean up and restore the buffer, but it’s pretty cool the way it is. It has an inscription on it, indicating it came from a school system down here.

I think I’ll really enjoy this thing. Buffing and wire-brushing are important parts of shop life. Without proper tools to do these things, life is glum.

It turned out the pawnshop was near the home of my goddaughter, so I went for a visit and took everyone for ice cream. She’s 6 now. Her oldest sister is making plans for college. Time just zips by.

I talked with her dad about prayer and so on. He and his wife are doing very well these days. They had some rough times a while back, but they’ve ramped up their prayer efforts, and it’s paying off. I’m hoping they’ll come up in July so we can pray.

Good tools, good friends, and a very pleasant drive. Hard to think of a better way to spend a Saturday.

I Rest

Months ago, I had a strange dream. I was on a university campus, looking for a young woman I know. While I was walking around, a strong, warm wind hit me from the front. It lifted me off the ground, and I started flying forward. I got about 25 feet up, and I came to a water oak tree. I held onto the leaves and branches. It felt great.

The wind wasn’t just warm in the physical sense. It was full of emotional warmth, peace, and love. Very much like the feelings I experienced back in the Eighties, when Jesus came to me.

I felt wonderful, resting on the wind. I woke up, and I was face-down in bed, with my chest pressed against the mattress and my hands up and my palms against the sheets.

I’ve been praying for God to help me experience it again. The comfort was wonderful.

On March 1, the day I had the dream, God gave me this word:”Please keep lifting me up on your love.”

I have started having this same sensation while I’m awake. When it comes, I do everything I can to make it last. No matter what position I’m in, I feel as though something soft, firm, and warm is pressing against my upper chest.

For years, I’ve been saying we use drugs and alcohol to simulate the sensation of God’s presence. It’s true. The feeling I get when the warmth and pressure come to me is very much like the feeling you get from a strong opioid painkiller.

It appears that, like drugs, God’s presence is also addictive. I want to hold onto it all day. I don’t want to do anything to make it depart.

Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was like a pearl of great price. A man saw a pearl, and he decided he had to have it no matter what, so he sold all he had and bought it. That’s a great description of habit, which we call “addiction.” A junkie will throw everything away for one more dose. To a junkie, the next does is a pearl of great price. There is symmetry in the supernatural. It makes sense that a person who can get into God’s presence would crave it and give up a lot to hold onto it.

Sometimes it hits me while I’m praying. I’ll be going through my daily list, doing something I consider very important, and I’ll just stop, because something better has arrived. I’ll go quiet inside and just wait and rest.

I can understand why Mary abandoned Martha to look after guests so she could sit at the foot of Jesus and do nothing. There will always be people to mop floors and wash dishes, but how many get to sit with God and be bathed and permeated with his love, peace, and joy?

Jesus said what Mary did was better than what Martha did.

I go through Psalm 91 every day, taking advantage of the promises. Today I looked up the last verse in an interlinear Bible. It says, “With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.” Because I’ve been watching Derek Prince talk about the real meaning of “salvation,” I wanted to know what word the author used. It turns out it’s a variation of the word “yeshuah,” which is closely related to Yeshua, the name of God the Son.

That’s remarkable. God did show me Yeshua, twice.

I feel like I’m stuck here while this lingers. I don’t want to get up and do anything. We’ll see what happens.

The King has Good Credit

I feel like I’ve seen every Derek Prince Youtube in existence. Maybe I have. I know I’ve seen some more than once. It’s helpful to hear them multiple times.

Today and yesterday, I heard him talk about the meaning of “salvation.” This is something that interests me, as I suppose it should. For a long time, I’ve had the idea that “salvation” means more than avoiding hell and going to heaven. Now I know Derek Prince believes the same thing.

It distresses me that the church is so weak. Jesus and his followers did all sorts of wonders, but after he left, things dried up. I don’t know exactly when the church fell into unbelief, but it looks like it may have been during the second or third century A.D.

Ever since the power left us, preachers have been telling us miracles have ceased. What they really mean is, “We are not competent to get miracles, so our answer to the problem is to pretend God has chosen not to provide them any more.” It’s very obvious that God’s supernatural power is still available, and that the cessation story is a lie, because even now, many people receive miracles and visions and so on, but stubborn preachers and their followers continue to deny that God will help us.

One of the weird characteristics of human beings is that we marry ourselves to absurd beliefs. We love telling people this or that can’t happen, even after they’ve seen it happen.

People tell us tongues are “gibberish.” They tell us we imagine our healings. The Jews think there have only been 7 gentile prophets in the history of the world, and they teach that the reason prophecy dried up for them is that in the absence of supernatural activity among idolaters, it wasn’t needed. Supernatural activity among idolaters is rampant today, but there hasn’t been a wave of new Jewish prophets.

When there is no prophecy, it’s not because God took it away because it wasn’t needed; it’s because we’re doing something wrong.

Prince says something which may sound familiar to people who have been conned by prosperity preachers. He says we limit God with our low expectations. Prosperity pimps say this because they want people to think God will give them great wealth in exchange for buying them ridiculous jet airplanes, so talk of limiting God tends to turn smart Christians off, but Prince is right. God wants to do a lot more for us than we think.

God tells the truth, and his word is full of wonderful promises. “There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.” “The Lord is your pastor, and you shall not lack.” “They that seek the Lord shall not lack ANY good thing.” “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.” Psalm 103 says God heals ALL our diseases. Not some. ALL.

Surely promises like these must be true. If we are not experiencing them, God can’t be the problem. He isn’t lying, and he is fully capable of doing what he says he’ll do. No one can stop him.

The New Testament talks about problems believers will have, but it doesn’t contradict God’s promises of help. Here is what I believe: if we have problems here on earth, they must fall into one of two categories: rejection (including persecution) and the baptism with fire.

Rejection is guaranteed. There is no possibility that the world will accept an effective Christian. If everyone you know thinks you’re cool, you’re a spiritual mess, like the boy-band-worthy kid preachers who go on Instagram wearing $7000 basketball shoes.

I don’t think God will require you to go through life being tortured and imprisoned, however. I believe heavy-duty persecution which doesn’t take place at the end of life results from our opening doors to the enemy. We don’t have any record of Jesus being beaten or imprisoned or otherwise abused until it came time for him to be killed, and his killing was something he, not the world, initiated. Paul had a lot of problems, including flogging and stoning, but Paul had problems with pride, and he made mistakes.

We have the idea that all of the apostles and prophets were perfect, but it’s not true. Moses failed to circumcise his son in a timely manner, and God himself tried to kill him. Elijah made the mistake of ridiculing the prophets of Baal, and afterward, God gave Jezebel, a true low-life and loser, power to chase him into the wilderness. I think Paul could have avoided a lot of problems by listening to the Holy Spirit.

John seems to have come out very well, as apostles go. He was exiled to Patmos, where he taught and probably had a wonderful time. He was called back by the emperor Domitian, to be boiled in oil. We are told that John went into the oil and came out unharmed, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. If God wanted to spare John, he surely wants to spare us, too. We just need to let him.

It’s dangerous to assume that doing whatever a Biblical figure did is correct. They did a lot of dumb things. Jesus and, possibly, Enoch and John are the only exceptions I know of. I would not assume that I should suffer a lot here on earth just because some Biblical person did.

Rejection is unavoidable, but it’s not that painful if you’re a man about it. You shouldn’t cry because you feel ostracized by the lost. It’s childish to feel like you have to be invited to attend every party and join every club. The Bible says, “God sets him that is godly apart for himself.” You should accept it and be grateful instead of fighting God.

Outright persecution can be rough, but you can probably minimize it by obeying God. After all, the Bible says, “When a man’s ways please God, even his enemies will be at peace with him.” True, or not true?

The baptism with fire is not like rejection and persecution. You have a great deal of control over it. Many of the bad things that happen to you happen because you’re not listening to God as he tries to purify you. You hold onto people, possessions, activities, and attitudes he hates, and when you do, it’s as if you’re putting a banner outside your house that says, “Welcome, Satan. Give me Diseases and Kill my Children.”

If you keep using tobacco after you get saved, and you get COPD, cancer, strokes, or heart attacks, it’s the baptism with fire. You invited it. If you continue fornicating, and you end up diseased, burdened with kids you don’t want, or shackled to a family court judge, you invited it. If you hold onto yoga, astrology, meditation, channeling, Halloween celebrations, or other forms of idolatry, and you have bad mental health, you invited it. If you’re a feminist, and you’re determined to prove women are supposed to be just as prominent in the church as men, expect problems. You’re trying to tell God how to do things, just like Eve and Lilith.

You need to get cursed objects out of your house. You need to forgive. You need to stop gossiping. You need to repent of worry. You should be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and you should pray in tongues every day. Women should stop fighting and submit to their husbands. Men should pour themselves out for their families and submit to the Holy Spirit. Children should honor their parents. You should seek God’s help in ridding yourself of the demons you’ve been petting and feeding for decades. If you don’t repent instead of just begging God for things, expect to have a much harder life than you should.

Jesus is the pattern for all of us. When, prior to the cross, did he have a major problem? His loved ones had problems, but they weren’t Jesus, so their problems were not his. As far as we know, he, personally, never had a physical illness. He never had mental problems. He was never harmed by anyone. He was never controlled by anyone. He never lacked food, clothing, or shelter. He never lost a battle.

A thousand fell at his side, and ten thousand at his right hand, but it didn’t come near him; only with his eyes did he behold and see the reward of the wicked.

Prince talked about the earthly salvation the Hebrews experienced in the desert. They were surrounded by rocks and sand, in a place where there were no streams. The nights were cold and the days were very hot and dry. Still, look how things went for them. They walked into this area through the Red Sea, but no water got on their shoes. They always had abundant food and water. Their possessions never wore out. Everyone who followed Moses left Egypt in perfect health. They didn’t have a single enemy in the wilderness. They never fought a battle.

It sure looks like God is willing to do a lot for us here on earth.

It appears that we can do a great deal to end our problems by confessing and repenting. When you throw out your old disco albums, for example, you’re not just improving the cultural climate of your house; you’re evicting demons that hurt you and your family.

The natural human tendency is to try to improve life by accumulating things and people. I find I get results from getting rid of things and cutting people off.

Lately, I’ve been praying for God to cut my ties to Eastern Kentucky. I used to be proud I came from that place. I was out of my mind. The culture there is childish. People celebrate juvenile emotionalism. They love violence, ignorance, and drunkenness. They’re stingy as can be. They love verbal cruelty. They have an intense and irrational hatred of black people. They’re very proud, which is amazing, considering they are among the nation’s leaders in areas like toothlessness, financial failure, dependency on welfare, and illiteracy. The hills of Eastern Kentucky are a ghetto.

I loved Kentucky when I was a kid. I thought it was heaven. I loved going to Kentucky, living with my grandparents, and spending time with my mother’s family. It’s a big deal for me to ask God to cut my ties, but I am happy to do it, because he has opened my eyes. Eastern Kentucky is not going to be saved. The people there love immaturity more than God.

Your culture may be just as poisonous. Are you willing to abandon it for God? Maybe you should go ahead and start rejecting, instead of waiting to be rejected.

I hope to move to Appalachia soon, but I think God wants me to go to Tennessee, not Kentucky. Kentucky is not an option. I abandoned the idea of returning many years ago.

I continue practicing prophecy. The Bible tells us to covet prophecy, and God would not tell us to covet it if he didn’t intend to give it to us. He clearly wants us to have it, just as the army wants soldiers to have radios. I can’t refuse him. Imagine how much trouble a soldier would get into for dropping his radio in a ditch. It’s not my decision to make.

I keep hearing remarkable things when I try to prophesy. I hear about promotion and blessings that are coming to me. Startling things. Not easy to accept. The blessings are tremendous, I know I don’t deserve them, and like almost everyone on earth, I am used to living under curses, so it’s hard to think of myself as someone who is surrounded by good. In view of Prince’s sermon and the promises of scripture, however, the things I hear line up with God’s way of doing things. It looks like extraordinary salvation has come to me.

I don’t doubt God, but I do wonder about myself. I have a vivid imagination, and I am capable of making things up and thinking God said them. I won’t publish all the things God seems to have said yet. I hope I’ll eventually be secure enough to know what I hear is right.

A year or two back, God told me this: “There are no limits.” I wonder if he was referring to what I’m discussing now.

When God says he will bring me promotion, I don’t think he’s talking about fame. I certainly hope not. I don’t think he means he’s going to have me speak in front of big congregations or work in a church. The Bible says he gives us the desires of our hearts, and these are things I desire to avoid, pretty intensely. I think he just means he’ll make me effective with regard to the people I’m supposed to reach. That’s all I want. If I had to run a church or fly around speaking at conferences, I’d feel like I had been sent to prison.

I’d like to have a pleasant, quiet life and reach a few people for God. I’d prefer that to the wealth of Croesus.

Goodbye, Billie Holiday

Yesterday was a good day. I got rid of most of my jazz albums.

A year or two ago, I put all my blues CD’s in bags and took them to the dump. It was somewhat unpleasant, but I also felt unburdened. I knew God didn’t like them, and that they opened doors to spirits that hated me. At that time, I didn’t feel compelled to get rid of my jazz, but a while back, I started to feel it was time.

I talked to my young friend Travis about it. He’s a jazz musician. The thought of getting rid of jazz recordings disturbed him, but he took notice of something. Many jazz musicians have had filthy, ungodly lives. I agree.

Chet Baker was a junkie and a sociopath, and he killed himself by jumping or falling out of a window. Billie Holiday was a junkie. Louis Armstrong was a marijuana addict who destroyed his talent with drugs. Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death. Thelonious Monk was mentally ill. Miles Davis was a wife beater who had drug problems. John Coltrane was a zealous Buddhist; so was Maynard Ferguson.

Heroin addiction has been so common among jazz musicians, it almost seems mandatory.

If you want to make it in jazz, what do you have to do? Play in bars. There is no way to avoid it. You can’t start out at Carnegie Hall. Bars, other than male-only establishments, were created to facilitate fornication. We don’t say that out loud, but it’s true. The secret to making a bar succeed is to attract women, not men. When women come, men follow in hopes of fornicating with them, and men pay the checks. You can look this up.

Centuries after Eden, women still lead men to perdition. We are supposed to lead. Without God, men are followers.

Jazz is not godly music. That’s obvious. You may cite exceptions. Dave Brubeck tried to create Christian jazz; he was a Catholic. But he wasn’t listening to the Holy Spirit. It was a carnal idea.

I don’t know how much jazz I had. When I cleaned out a USB drive containing all the albums I had ripped, Windows said I had gotten rid of 680 items, and I know I didn’t have all my albums on the drive.

I had two huge Art Tatum box sets. I had Billie Holiday. I had Dinah Washington. I had a set of Lionel Hampton LP’s in great condition. I haven’t located the Art Tatum sets, but when I do, they’re gone. The other things are already in the landfill where no one will ever see them again.

While I was at it, I came across Etta James, and I got rid of her albums, too.

I was allowed to keep a few things. I had some Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. I have an Ella Fitzgerald box set. There is very little left, though.

You can’t have objects that displease God. He has helped me to understand that having such an object is like painting a sign on your wall, welcoming demons to toy with you and dominate you.

We hold onto things like pornography, astrological paraphernalia, playing cards, dope, items related to yoga, and idols we think of as art, and when problems come, we pray to God for help, while holding onto the things that hold the door open for Satan. It doesn’t make much sense.

I’ve thrown many things out. I threw out my dad’s Masonic stuff (freemasonry is an occult religion). I threw out a treasured souvenir figurine he and my mother got on a trip to Italy. I threw out expensive porcelain because the shapes represented evil things. I threw out thousands of dollars’ worth of Cuban cigars. I’m glad it’s all gone. I’m glad no one else will ever have it; it would just poison them as it did me.

I have an expensive Muslim prayer rug in Miami. I told my house-sitter to get rid of it.

When the apostles taught in Ephesus, converts made a big pile of religious books worth a great deal of money, and they burned it. Paul didn’t say, “Let’s keep them as investments.” He didn’t say, “They have important historical value.” He didn’t make the excuses we would make today.

Here’s a good thing to know about spending time, money, and effort on ungodly things: the more you invest, the more you will lose when you finally repent and have to get rid of what you’ve built. It’s best not to invest much.

Derek Prince told an interesting story. He inherited some Chinese art from his grandfather. It consisted of two depictions of dragons. They were worth a lot of money, and they had great sentimental value. God asked him what a dragon represented in the Bible. Knowing the answer, Prince got rid of the artwork.

At the time, Prince was having a problem with inherited property. I can relate. Like me, he had irresponsible relatives who kept delaying the distribution of some of his wealth. When he got rid of the dragons, the wealth was released. I believe I have delayed God’s help by holding onto counterproductive music. Things are going great for me, but I have some nagging problems that resist resolution. I want to see what happens now that I’ve cleared away some supernatural obstacles.

God hates carnality. Anything you create, without being told to do so by God, is a carnal work. All carnal works will eventually be burned, and it won’t just be things like jazz compositions. Many Christians have done carnal works in God’s name. They’ve written Christian books God will burn in front of them. They’ve built churches and orphanages God didn’t want them to build. When the world is judged, all that stuff will be destroyed. People will come to God full of confidence, thinking he’s impressed by their works, but he will destroy what they’ve created and tell them it was the result of iniquity.

Might as well start the destruction while you’re alive, instead of waiting until it’s too late to do anything to purify your life.

No one in heaven listens to Lionel Hampton or Dizzy Gillespie. No one listens to rock, the blues, disco, or rap. It’s wrong to try to hold onto these things here on earth.

It may well be that all of the jazz giants I enjoyed are in hell right now, never to be heard from again.

The Lord’s Prayer says, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We’re supposed to bring a little bit of heaven into the earth. We’re not supposed to bring worldly things into our godly lives. It’s perversion. We can’t live here without getting a little soiled, but there is no excuse for increasing the problem unnecessarily.

I suppose people say I’m a fanatic, but so was Jesus. He was, and is, much more fanatical than I am. Enoch was a fanatic. Noah was a fanatic. Moses, the other prophets, John, Paul, Peter, Stephen…all fanatics. We’re supposed to be fanatics. The Bible says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Nothing ambiguous there. I may seem fanatical, but I don’t begin to approach that standard.

I wonder what else I have that I should destroy. I don’t want any more signs on my walls, inviting my enemies and granting them permission to harm me.

Do More With Dumore

Yesterday was productive. Spiritual progress began while I was still in bed; God helped me to be very effective in my time with him. Natural progress started before I left the bedroom. I had some problems with the recorder’s office in Dade County, as well as the Florida Revenue Department. People from both organizations called, and their errors were corrected. It’s not easy to call them yourself. You have to wait forever on hold. Much better when they call you.

I also fixed my TV before starting the day. I have a 55″ TV in my bedroom. In the past, I chose not to have a bedroom TV because it seemed inappropriate, but now that I use TV’s to listen to Julie True and watch Christian videos, it’s a different story. I got a Roku TV a few months ago. Unfortunately, it had started to make buzzing sounds when I played music.

I found that when I pressed my finger against the back of the TV in a certain area, the buzzing stopped. That meant something was touching the inside of the panel. I put the TV on my bed and opened it up. I found that a lot of wires and cables were stabilized with cheap vinyl tape, and one data ribbon was twisted unnecessarily, bringing it closer to the rear panel. I removed the cable, took the twist out, and reinserted it. Then I added a couple of pieces of Gorilla Tape. I put them on things that looked like they could vibrate against the cabinet. Bang. Problem solved.

I believe I would have gotten more done yesterday, but I had some issues with a weed eater and rotary tool I ordered. The weed eater’s box had been torn open, and things were missing. I contacted the manufacturer and the company that sold it to me. I ordered a new weed eater. Today the one I received goes back.

The rotary tool didn’t work out at all.

I have a Dremel I got in about 1995, and it has had a number of problems. It pooped out while I was using it to burnish the edge of a holster, so I Googled around to see who made good new rotary tools. I figured Proxxon was the answer. I already have one, and it seems okay. I learned that people often complain about the electronics failing, so I gave up on Proxxon.

I decided to go with the reviewers, and I bought a Dremel 4300 kit. I paid $100, and when the tool arrived, it turned out to be useless. I put my leather burnisher in it, and as soon as I turned the tool past 15000 RPM, it went nuts. It started screeching, and the tool wobbled in the chuck. There was no way to make it work. I tried a collet, and I got the same result. The same burnishing tool works fine in my Proxxon, and it worked fine in the old Dremel, so my best guess is that the one I bought is defective. If not, the design is incompetent. I’m sending it back. I started looking for options again.

It appears that no one on earth makes a good corded consumer-grade rotary tool. There are Dremel and Proxxon, and then there are the Chinese clones. I looked for tools made by real companies like Makita and Dewalt, but there was nothing. Milwaukee makes a cordless job which is probably good, but I’m tired of chargers.

I decided to check out Dumore. This is a company that makes industrial tools like tool post grinders. Their products are extremely expensive. A simple Dremel-like tool will run you over $300, and it won’t work with all of Dremel’s gadgets. On the other hand, they run for lifetimes, not weeks.

You can get a used Dumore inexpensively on Ebay. Oddly, the same tools that sell for over $300 new routinely sell for between $50 and $100 in fairly good condition. I checked the Dumore parts site, and things like bearings are not expensive. The highest price I saw was somewhere over $30, and most bearings I saw cost $4.41 each. Bearings and switches are the only things in a Dumore than can be expected to fail with any frequency (I think), so I don’t see any reason to be afraid to buy used. I would guess it’s unusual for the windings to fail.

Most or all of the Dumores I’ve seen don’t have variable speed, but this can be fixed with a simple, cheap external controller, so it doesn’t matter. A foot pedal is a nice addition to a rotary tool. You can put it down without handling the switch.

The Dremel is going back to Amazon, and my next rotary tool will be a Dumore. No more playing around.

Dremel prices keep going up, but the quality doesn’t keep pace. It’s strange that companies like Makita and Milwaukee haven’t gone into competition and exterminated Dremel.

I got the rotary tool mess fixed yesterday, and I also succeeded in burnishing the edge of my latest knife sheath, so it’s finished, but for improvements I may make later. I used the Proxxon.

I keep thinking I should get a Foredom eventually. This is a quality rotary tool with a flex shaft. I have a Chinese clone which works very well, but I know I’ll eventually want a second flex tool.

It appears that today will be productive, too. I already re-worked a lease with the lady who helps me rent properties, and I had a very powerful prayer session before I left the bedroom.

God willing, it won’t rain today, and I’ll be able to mow the yard.

I love it when God helps me get things done.

The Democrats Booed God; Trump’s People Pray in the Name of Jesus

Here is something I didn’t expect to see. Torben Sondergaard and his friends from The Last Reformation attended a Trump rally in Orlando yesterday. These are the people who baptized me in December.

Apparently, the rally started with a long prayer in the name of Jesus, in which numerous scriptures were cited.

Remarkable. I hope God rewards Donald Trump and his family by helping them to be saved and filled with the Holy Spirit.

Now if I can Just Get it to Cast Itself into the Sea

God has given me another productive day. The trick is to pray, curse your problems, and bless your efforts, in the name of Jesus Christ, BEFORE the problems pop up.

I’ve been working on three stubborn stumps in my front yard. I got one out this weekend, and then yesterday, I went after another one, and I got a bonus. I located a huge rock near a stump, and I managed to get it out of the ground and move it out of the area. I also succeeded in removing the second stump.

Today I went after the third stump. I prayed for help. I spoke the Lord’s opposition to the difficulty of removing it, and I spoke his help to me. After maybe 90 minutes’ work with the subsoiler, drill, sawzall, and Root Assassin, the stump surprised me by surrendering suddenly. It popped out of the ground for no obvious reason.

Here it is. I may have it bronzed.

I bent the tabs that connect the subsoiler to my hitch. I don’t know how I did that. My tractor is not big, so you would think it wouldn’t be able to bend what appears to be 7/16″ plate. I don’t care, however, because the subsoiler still works, and even if it didn’t, the amount I paid for it is a lot lower than the cost of having people come in and remove stumps and rocks. I don’t care if I break three of these a year.

Now there are no stumps in the area where I was working, and a big rock which would have caused problems is gone. I have three little blackberry plants ready to go in the ground. I just have to get more soil. When I began this project, I didn’t know I’d have four huge holes to fill.

I’m wondering if I should put clay or some kind of waterproof material in the bottoms of the holes, to retain water. The dirt here drains way too fast.

The Internet, which never lies, says blackberry roots don’t go deeper than 10″. I could put pieces of tarp down about 15″ and then put soil and plants over them. I wonder if anyone has tried this.

I also finished sewing my second knife sheath. I bought a Lionsteel M4 with olive wood handles, and the sheath that came with it wasn’t right for my jeans. This sheath was harder to sew than the first one. I don’t know why. Anyway, here’s a photo.

I still have to finish up the edges. Right now, the sheath is drying. I wet it down and molded it around the knife’s handle so it would hold the knife in place without a strap. I may have to add a strap later, though. That’s okay. The stitching is not great, and I may redo it. If I do that, I’ll have a good opportunity to add a strap with a snap.

I sharpened several knives. I bought a Cold Steel Swift with CTS-XHP steel. Cold Steel doesn’t use CTS-XHP any more because they can’t get a reliable supply, so it’s getting hard to find these knives. I found one on Ebay for something like $20 below the street price, so I had to buy it. Yesterday, I used it to trim a piece of leather, and it went dull right away. I had to do something.

My understanding is that manufacturers supply defective edges on knives. They sharpen them with belts, and they do it too quickly, softening the steel on the edges. This gives you a very sharp knife which gets dull fast. I think this is what happened to the Swift. Cutting the leather shouldn’t have affected it at all.

I got out my diamond hones and a weird ceramic hone, and I touched it up. Did I get rid of the soft steel? I don’t know. I’ll keep using it. If it gets dull fast, I’ll know the answer.

It’s so sharp now, it’s creepy. The fact that it sharpened up so fast may indicate that the edge is still soft.

The Swift is a very, very nice knife, but it’s an assisted-opening design. You open it part of the way with a little button on the blade, and then a spring slams it open the rest of the way. I don’t like that. I can open a knife just fine by flicking my wrist. Using a spring seems dangerous.

The whole point of buying a steel like CTS-XHP is to avoid frequent sharpening, so I hope the knife isn’t a dud. I have a Gerber Gator II with cheap steel, and it’s a great knife, but for the fast dulling. I paid $15 for it. If I’m going to get cheap-steel performance, I might as well pay cheap-steel prices. The Gator II is indestructible, and it has a very comfortable handle.

I also sharpened my Entrek sheath knife. I have seen the way Ray Ennis sharpens these knives when he makes them, and I don’t think it’s their best feature. Apart from the heating issue, the knife, as it came from the factory, didn’t seem to want to bite into things.

I have DMT diamond stones, but I didn’t use them. I like kitchen-style hones. I have them in two diamond grits, plus the ceramic one and two steels. They seem to work just as well as stones, and they’re easier to use. Also, you don’t have to use liquid.

On top of all this, got a lot of business done. Leases for rental properties and so on. And I stocked up on groceries. Breakfast was sub-optimal this morning because I was running low on things. I had three fried eggs with cheddar cheese, plus whole wheat toast. I had been planning to eat fresh vegetables, boiled eggs, pita, and so on.

Tomorrow, the sheath for the Lion Steel knife should be dry, and after a little finishing, I should be able to use it. I want to get used to going out in public with a sheath knife. I feel conspicuous, but open carry is 100% legal, and I prefer sheath knives to folding knives.

Time to shower up and spend time with the birds. Hope your day was as good as mine.

Stump Removal isn’t for Sissies

Today I would have to say the smug-o-meter is pretty much pinned. I just used the Kubota to yank a stump and a very big rock from my front yard.

My yard is full of oaks and large rocks. I believe it was last year that it occurred to me that I could remove them using a subsoiler attached to the tractor. A subsoiler is the same thing as a middle buster, but it has a narrow blade. I figured I could hook things from below and use the hydraulics to pull them up. It works a good percentage of the time.

I have some blackberry plants that have to be transplanted, and as of last Friday, there were three stubborn stumps in the area where I wanted to put them. Friends came to visit, and as city people often do when they visit farms, they got excited about outdoor work, and they volunteered to help me out.

Here’s a photo of my friend and his 13-year-old son working on the stump’s roots with a maul. Notice who is doing the work. I know it seems harsh to make a kid swing a maul in the sun, but we had to, because my friend’s wife was in the house.

We used the tractor, a maul, a drill with a 1″ bit, a sawzall, and a tool called a Root Assassin. This is a short shovel with weird features intended to make it useful for digging up roots. The tip is forked and sharpened to catch roots and cut them, and the sides of the shovel are serrated so they cut whatever they slide past. The blade is long and skinny so it goes deep without a lot of resistance.

It’s a pretty decent tool. It’s expensive, but I think it was a good buy. Obviously, it wasn’t going to cut 3″-thick oak roots, but it was a dandy tool for finding them and moving dirt away from them so they could be cut with other tools.

We worked for quite a while. Finally, I remembered an important step. I told everyone we had to use our supernatural tools. We prayed, and I spoke defeat to the difficulty of removing the stump. A little while later, it surprised me by yielding to the subsoiler. I was amazed. I had been expecting it to continue resisting for at least another day.

Today I decided to go out alone and work on the stumps. It has been raining a lot, so the dirt is wet. I figured that would give me a big advantage. Dry dirt holds onto things much better. This time, I was smart. I remembered to invoke God’s power before I started, and it paid off.

I took the tractor to a fresh stump and made passes beside it at various distances, figuring I would sever the roots where they were thinner. Right beside a stump, roots are thick and strong, but they taper off quickly as you move farther out. They’re easier to cut, and if you can pull them with the tractor, you get good leverage, and you may twist the stump loose.

The first stump I worked on today surprised me. I made a few passes beside it, and then I yanked on the stump itself. Up it came. I was thrilled. Nothing is more frustrating than a stump you can’t get rid of.

The second stump is still out there. It was a lot more determined to stay where it was. I kept moving around it, finding and popping roots. I moved so much dirt, I couldn’t see the stump clearly. Toward the end, I realized I had moved away from the stump, and I was actually pulling on a huge rock. It was coming loose from the ground. I would say it was a little smaller than a typical ottoman. Very heavy.

This was pretty exciting. I hadn’t realized there was a rock there. I hate underground rocks, and I was planning to put blackberries where this one was, so getting rid of it would be a major coup. I was surprised to see such a big rock coming loose. It dwarfed the biggest one I had already pulled.

The rock was too big to pull out of the hole with the subsoiler. When I really tried, I broke the shear pin. I decided to use a rope. I got myself some 5/8″ rope and tied it around the rock, which, fortunately for me, was peanut-shaped. The small waist allowed me to attach the rope so it wouldn’t slide off.

I put a loop in the other end of the rope and put it over one of my tractor’s forks. The tractor picked the rock right up. It wasn’t happy about it, but it did the job. The loader is rated for 1500 pounds, and the forks probably weigh 300, so I had 1200 pounds of capacity to play with.

I was ecstatic when the rock came off the ground. Just before it left the ground, I thought about the fact that it was going to be swinging on a rope. I tried to prevent it from swinging toward me, but it was too late. It whacked the tractor. The people at Kubota were way ahead of me, however. The heavy bumper took the hit with no damage at all.

Moving the rock to my rock collection area was interesting. I had to sort of roll it onto the forks, and then I tilted the forks back so it rolled toward the bucket. As I drove to the dumping area, the tractor pitched and rocked every time I hit a bump.

The rock is now resting safely among my other trophies. I need to start selling them to landscapers.

The stump is still in the yard, but I think it will yield readily now that it can’t rely on its friend the boulder for support. I may fill the voids with pricey potting soil instead of relocating dirt from the pasture. Might as well give the blackberries every advantage.

Man, it’s nice when tools do what they should.

I don’t know why the rock looks so small in the pictures. It’s a good three feet long. More, really. It must look small in the first picture because most of it is in a hole.

Maybe tomorrow I can get rid of the last stump, and then I can get the blackberry plants off my patio. That would be nice.

Paul Exposed Crooked Preachers, and so Should You

I hope your weekend was as good as mine. I couldn’t ask for a better one.

I have a long list of prayers I repeat every day. It includes a prayer for God to make my property a place where people gather to serve him. I ask him to make it a place where the sick are healed, the dead are raised, demons are driven out, and good doctrine is taught. I ask him to make it a place where people spend time with him. He’s making it come true. I’ve baptized three people here, and this weekend, friends from Miami came up for prayer.

My friends have been planning to come since May. I wrote about them then. I referred to them as Archie and Edith, and I called their kids Mike and Gloria. Archie was an armorbearer at Trinity Church in Miami, and he then served in some capacity or other at New Dawn Ministries. Edith was involved in both churches. They were at New Dawn when the pastor confessed to molesting a young girl over and over.

It’s bad to dwell on the past for no constructive reason. I emphasize “for no constructive reason.” There are good reasons to talk about people’s bad deeds, even after you’ve forgiven them. One good reason is to undo the harm those people continue to do.

Corrupt preachers tend to gaslight. When people correct them and expose their misdeeds, they will say they’ve been attacked by Satan. They’ll say the people who exposed them are liars. They’ll say the whistle-blowers are persecuting God’s prophets. Brainwashed and/or dishonest people who support them will attack the messengers, too. It can take years to refute the lies and undo the division lying preachers cause. This weekend, we talked a lot about the pastors at Trinity Church and New Dawn.

Many times, I have felt bad about discussing these people. I’ve wondered if I was gossiping. I’ve wondered if I was unforgiving. I’ve wondered if I was too hard on them. The amazing thing is that it always turns out I’ve gone way too easy on them. Also, I continually learn that they still have victims who need to have the truth put in front of them. It appears that what I do is correct.

The pastor at New Dawn started molesting a girl when she was 6. Perhaps it was earlier, but 6 is the lowest number which has been revealed publicly. One of the girl’s friends learned about it when the victim was in her teens. She told the victim’s mother. The mother blew up and told the pastor she would not have him prosecuted, provided he quit preaching. The pastor confessed to the church and stepped down. Then a few weeks later, he insisted on returning to the pulpit, and he also collected offerings. The victim’s mother had him charged, and now he’s doing three years.

It’s a remarkable example of supernatural pride destroying a person. The pedophilia didn’t do him in; he had a way to avoid prosecution. He was brought down by pride. He refused to humble himself and accept the kindness of the victim’s mother.

Imagine yourself in the same situation. Is there anything you would refuse to do, in order to stay out of prison? He could have been put away until he was in his seventies.

I’ve written about this before, but now I’ve learned that the pastors were even worse than I believed. After the crimes were revealed, distressed people talked to the pastor’s wife, who has since died, and she told them to “get over it.”

This was a woman who had two children of her own, as well as two grandchildren. The victim herself was a close relative.

What can you say about an attitude like that? It’s inhuman. It goes far beyond what you would think a rational person could be capable of.

In many charismatic churches, all of a head pastor’s relatives are automatically pastors. This goes against God’s will, but it’s true. At New Dawn, the pastor and his wife were called “Pastor” and “Pastora.” Pastora was very brassy and forceful. She wore the pants. Pastor was lazy. A close relative said he did nothing but sit on the couch. The church was only open maybe 7 hours a week. Like many lazy men, Pastor took off his pants and gave them to his wife, and she wore them with great zeal and a complete sense of entitlement.

A married woman should not confront men and scold them publicly. This should be obvious to any Christian. Pastora had a husband to deal with other men, but because she was so pushy, she did it herself. She used to chide and “correct” me on social media, where everyone in the church, including children, could read it. She had no idea how a woman was supposed to behave.

She was in charge of their social media presence. In all likelihood, it was she who blocked me on Facebook, without notice or explanation. I doubt Pastor knew how to work Facebook.

She got very full of herself. She started criticizing Edith’s clothing, which was perfectly normal. You can tell your 12-year-old daughter how to dress, but you don’t go up to a married woman with children and tell her she what to wear, just because she and her husband attend a church your husband pastors. Edith had to send her an email, putting her in her place.

I also learned that someone in the church officialdom (which consisted of 6 people) approached Archie and told him he needed to stop communicating with me. Archie won’t say who it was, but it obviously wasn’t the pastors, and two of the former bigwigs are my friends, so it’s not hard to figure out.

New Dawn was a cult, and cults have to be exposed. Pushing members to ostracize people who disagree with a church’s leadership is classic cult behavior. Mormonism is a cult, and the Mormons are famous for choking people off socially and economically.

The pastor had a brother-in-law I will call Walter. I will call his wife Maude. Walter was a new Christian. He came to the USA illegally from Honduras, a country known for terrible morals and a very high murder rate. Before Walter and Maude came along, the pastor’s brother George and his wife Weezy handled the church’s business. George left because he was afraid someone would be prosecuted over the way the church mishandled money. That left an opportunity for Walter. He was a relative of the pastors, so he was automatically a prophet and trusted advisor.

Walter used to go off on me on Facebook, telling me I spoke like “the voice of God” and so on. He got very angry over some revelations I posted. God showed me that illegal immigration was a curse based on a nation’s disobedience, and I wrote about it, and Walter, having zero humility, started arguing with me online. He was very angry; he said I was calling his family a curse. He couldn’t step back and look at the situation or consider the possibility that he was trying to refute knowledge that had come to be from God.

If your family’s presence in a country is a curse, you should be a man about it and accept the truth. The Bible makes it very clear that porous borders and invasions come from disobedience.

Walter didn’t understand what revelation was. As a recent convert to Christianity, with an inadequate prayer life, he didn’t hear from God much. He would say things like, “My personal revelation is…” He thought opinions were revelation. There are no opinions in heaven. There is only the truth. God tells others the truth, and that’s that. When someone gets a revelation from God, it’s not their subjective view. Walter didn’t get that.

Walter scolded the people who left New Dawn after Pastor was arrested. They were completely correct to stop supporting a pedophile pastor; I shouldn’t have to point that out. Walter put something on Facebook that said something like, “What do the sheep do when the shepherd is struck? Run?” He was way out of line a lot of the time.

I don’t know if Walter told people to shun me, but he and his wife are the only possibilities among the inner circle.

Carnal people ruin churches. The Holy Spirit tells everyone the same things, and when we listen, he prevents conflict. When one person is listening to God and another is listening to his own pride, conflict is inevitable. Walter was very proud, and he had a short fuse. He believed in hard work and forcing things to happen through effort. Naturally, the church he was trying to force to survive collapsed in disgrace, along with the pastor’s family.

I’ve learned new things about the leadership at Trinity Church as well. A friend of mine was hit by a car while sitting on a bus bench. A lady who was also on the bench was killed, and I believe one victim lost both legs. The accident made the news in Miami, so naturally, the pastors rushed to my friend’s bedside, where there might be cameras. Rich Wilkerson sent my friend to an attorney, but he never sued. I believe the idea was to sue the city for failing to protect bus stops.

My friend’s brother told me about it. When the family talked to the attorney about what his fee was going to be, it was more than they expected. When they asked why, he said he had to give part of the money to Wilkerson. This is what I was told, anyway. Knowing the Wilkerson family, I believe it.

In Florida, a lawyer can’t split a fee with a non-lawyer; it’s illegal and unethical. Also, what kind of pastor would take money from a young man with a broken pelvis?

Archie said he was present to see another well-known Wilkerson gaffe. A car thief named Alex Nicolas drowned while fleeing the police, and Alex went to Trinity. He as a big part of the music team. He had a lot of wealthy Jewish friends. Trinity hosted the funeral, and Wilkerson asked for an offering, which did not go to help the family. This is what more than one source tells me.

Archie said he and Edith got up and left the funeral.

What else have my former pastors done? How much worse can the revelations get? And how did people like this end up running churches? No wonder God is bringing an end to the church age and moving people to small groups. It can’t happen fast enough. We don’t need big churches at all. They cause problems.

The things we talked about this weekend were awful, but it was nice to have the clouds of lies and secrecy dispersed. I suppose this is the fate of liars and scoundrels everywhere. If you never come clean, people will have God’s go-ahead to rehash your sorry history forever, and it will not count as gossip.

Look at the Bible. It’s full of unflattering stories about people, and those stories are not gossip.

When you come clean and repent, people forgive you, and everyone heals. Then if anyone talks about what happened, it’s so they can give a testimony of what God did to help everyone after the offenders did the right thing. If you continue to defend yourself and lie, it’s as if you’re pushing a splinter deeper into your flesh. The infection will persist, and pieces of the splinter may keep coming out for the rest of your life.

My former pastors deserve to be exposed over and over, and the people they’ve hurt need to keep talking about them in public.

We had a wonderful prayer session. Archie and Edith go to a church the belongs to Calvary Chapel, which is a pretty dry organization. Calvary discourages the manifestations of the Holy Spirit, which are vital to the health of a church. Archie and Edith had let their prayer lives go, and things were not going well for them. They missed God because they weren’t encountering him at Calvary Chapel. I told them everything I had learned which could help them, and before you know it, we were praying in tongues and worshiping in the living room.

I could see how thirsty they were for God’s presence. I get that thirst, too, every day. It’s much worse after months without rain.

To top things off, someone who was present got baptized with the Holy Spirit and prayed in tongues for the first time. That made my day. You will only get so far without the gifts of the Spirit. You have to get over the hump and speak in tongues if you ever want to get past the baptism with fire and live in peace.

While my friends were here, God showed me I was under the influence of spirits of strife and opposition, not to mention cowardice, which caused me to worry. I now fight these spirits by name. It brings tremendous peace.

It’s as though I got a reward for hosting my friends.

Don’t be concerned if your church is poisonous. Just leave. God doesn’t require you to belong to a church; he requires you to know him, spend time with him, hear from him, and obey him. If you can find 4 people to worship with, you have plenty. The main thing is for everyone to be equally yoked. One egomaniac can ruin everything for the whole group, and it’s important to cut people off when they come between you and God.

If a person with authority in the church is using you, or they used you in the past and have never come clean, go ahead and tell people about him or her. Don’t let the cockroaches hide in the dark. Expose them so they can’t hurt anyone else.