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.

At Least I’m not Talking to the Wallpaper

My painful (as always) trip to Miami and the sale of a house disrupted my life over the last two weeks, so now I’m trying to regain balance. I’m cleaning up the house and taking care of bills and so on. Both robot vacuums (Kim and Kourtney) are currently prowling the residence.

A fun item arrived via UPS today. I now have a Lionsteel (Or is it “Lion Steel? They send mixed signals.) M4 sheath knife in M390 steel, with olive wood scales.

I wanted a small sheath knife for everyday carry, so I bought a Lionsteel M1. It turned out to be the size of a small paring knife, and that’s a little too small. I don’t know if I’ll send it back, but I’m not going to carry it every day.

I could have gotten indestructible G10 scales on the new knife, but olive wood appealed to me because of its Biblical connection to the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t look as nice as darker woods, but I want it anyway. If I change my mind, I’ll look into getting new scales.

Here it is.

I will have to make a sheath for it. I look forward to that. The practice will help me. By the time I’m finished with my third sheath, I should be fully competent, if not highly skilled.

People brag on Lionsteel sheaths, maybe because they’re Italian. I don’t get it. The seem perfectly nice, but if you showed me one without a stamp on it and told me it was from China, I would believe you.

I’m not worried about the steel. A reader says Lionsteel’s M390 is suspect, but in at least one cutting test, Lionsteel M390 has stomped some pretty impressive steels, so I am willing to give it a shot.

I can’t let the knife-nerd culture get me. I am nothing like that. Oh, no. Not me. Although I do name all my knives “Mike.”

I can’t help liking the Lionsteel name. Reminds me of someone I used to know. Back when I was lawyering, I worked with a client named Giancarlo. Gian-something, anyway. Little Italian guy with a beard. Probably weighed 130 pounds. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he always made a fist and said, “STRONG, like a LION!”

This weekend should be fun. My friend Eric is bringing his family for a visit. He and his wife are not happy at their Calvary Chapel church. They miss the Holy Spirit. They called me to see if I could help, so we’re going to see what I can do. More accurately, of course, we will see what God does through me and through them.

This will be the second time someone has come here just to get closer to God. That’s tremendous. This is what I want my home to be.

Guess I should get to work on the toilets. I get tired of explaining how the stains are caused by well water, not filth.

Please Let it Happen

The other day, I returned from Miami, and I wrote about my joy. As inexpressibly wonderful it is whenever one departs from Dade County, I think today’s joy may be even greater. I’m finally selling a house I’ve been stuck with for 5 years. And it’s in MIAMI, so losing it means one less tie to America’s rudest, least cultured, most voodooed-up city. With all the Cubans, Haitians, island people, and Mexicans, I would guess that at least 60% of Miamians participate in some kind of voodoo.

My dad bought my sister a house some years ago. When my mother died, I let my sister take all the jewelry, and it was very valuable. There was no talk of compensation. On the other hand, my mother gave me her security accounts because she wanted to make up for the huge amount of money she had spent on my sister. She initially wanted to disinherit my sister entirely, but I talked her out of it, and that was a big mistake (which I did not repeat when my dad brought up the same idea).

My sister told my dad she was owed, basically. Not true, but he took the bait. He asked me if I had any objections, and I told him what he did with his money was his business.

He originally wanted her to put her own money in the house instead of renting. She found the house, and then when it came time to pay, either she didn’t want to contribute, or she could not, because she had not saved much. Much later, she chipped in, but he ended up paying for around 5/8 of the house. Then she didn’t maintain it. A water connection broke under the floor, and she paid what she said was over $300 per month for water, instead of fixing the leak. The living room floor rotted and caved in. Trees grew in the roof gutters. Mold coated the walls until they were black. Rats roamed freely in the kitchen. A dog with no housetraining at all roamed freely, and the floors were not cleaned much.

They owned the house as tenants in common with a right of survivorship, which meant that if my dad died, she would get the whole thing. She would not have to pay him back. It was a very good deal for her.

As the place fell to ruins, the city got on my dad. They said they were going to demolish the house. They were also going to fine him $150 per day. He had to buy the place and fix it. There was no way to take care of it with my sister living there.

As he deteriorated, I had to take over the expensive renovation. Then I found the place was impossible to rent profitably, so I put it on the market.

My dad was never a good home shopper. My mother said he would always buy the second place a realtor showed him. My sister was worse. The house was a bad choice. It was poorly built. The layout was bad. The location was great, but location will only get you so far. People didn’t want the place. On top of all this, when I priced the house, I relied on an overly optimistic appraisal, and that cost me at least a year.

I kept dropping the price, and finally, a South American showed up to take it.

Doing business with South Americans is not always pleasant. American conventions of integrity and good manners are not quite the same as those of our friends south of the Panama Canal. The buyer signed a contract, but he only signed part of it, which means there was no contract. He said he needed longer than expected to get the money. Then when it was time to finalize things, he offered me $15,000.00 less than the price we had agreed upon. I countered at $20,000.00 more than the original price. If he could go down, I could go up. He agreed to the original price, and we had a contract.

We had problems with the documents. Things had to be translated by experts. Surprising, but true. Even in Miami, a Spanish-speaking person may need certified translators in order to buy a house.

The date was moved back two more times. I wondered if it would ever happen.

As of now, I am waiting for the final documents to come back to me via email. When that happens, money will be wired, and I will be free of this horrendous burden.

I feel bad, calling the house a burden. I was never supposed to have it at all, and the whole business made me a lot of money. Property values went nuts after my dad bought the place from my sister, so I’m being compensated for my misery. I suffered a lot, though. I got ripped off by contractors. My dad made me miserable when things didn’t go well. I had to pay high taxes on a house no one was using. Lots of stress.

On the one hand, I’m grateful to God for giving me the house, but on the other, I haven’t enjoyed it. The enjoyment won’t come until the money is wired and I know I will never have to set foot in that house, or pay any bills related to it, ever again.

I used to pray for God to help my sister hold onto her inheritance. That didn’t work out. In order for that prayer to be answered, she had to cooperate with him. No dice. My dad and I did our best to get her to move out so we could fix the place and give it back to her, but she refused until it was far too late. Then when she sold out to my dad, who had no choice, she said he was stealing her house.

It’s unpleasant, having someone accuse you of dishonesty while you’re trying to help her.

My dad’s house is next. It appears that the value went up a great deal after he moved out, so it was worth it to hold onto it until he died. When that place sells, it’s completely possible that I will be arrested for dancing in the middle of a busy highway and throwing hundred-dollar bills at strangers.

Later today, I should buy myself a celebratory present. Like a new Corvette. Well…no. But maybe a nice knife.

I am praying this deal winds up today. I could really use another knife.

Deportation Requires Identification

I learned some new stuff about demons.

For years, I’ve been telling people demons are for everyone. You don’t have to be epileptic or clairvoyant; we all have them. Demons infect our flesh, and they manifest in things like unbelief, hatred of Jesus, sexual perversion, gluttony, anger, and addiction. Name a character fault, and there are demons associated with it. Greed, cowardice…anything.

The book of Enoch says demons are the spirits of bastard creatures killed in the flood. Angels camed down, assumed flesh, allowed themselves to be seduced by women, and spawned giants. God killed the giants, and now they’re stuck on earth, working in people. They want bodies so they can satisfy their carnal desires through them, and so they can hurt human beings, make us Satan’s soldiers, and lure us to hell.

I don’t know if all demons come from this source. After all, demons are extremely numerous. They seem to outnumber people by a wide margin. Derek Prince has opined that a pre-Adamic race may have ended up like the giants. Genesis mentions a lot of events, and there is no clear mention of a pre-Adamic race, but we know Genesis doesn’t mention everything that ever happened in the early days. The fact that something doesn’t appear in Genesis doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Prince cast a lot of demons out of people. He said one demon protested over and over. Prince described it a certain way, and the demon kept saying, “That’s not my name.” It resisted for a while. It eventually left because Prince persisted.

Jesus asked demons who they were. We don’t know that he did it every time he cast demons out, but he may have. In one case, he asked what a demon’s name was, and the demoniac said, “Legion, for we are many.” This shows that there is precedent for asking a demon to tell you its name.

It makes sense that we would need to use demon’s names. The supernatural is full of symmetry. When we serve God, we can’t just refer to him as “God” all the time. We have to be specific. We have to use the name of Jesus. The world is full of false religions in which people address “God” yet are actually speaking to other spirits.

You can see evidence of this truth in the way modern people respond to the name of Jesus. Most people don’t complain when you praise or invoke “God” in public, but try saying “Jesus,” and you bring a hailstorm of persecution on yourself. When you say Jesus, you’re supposedly discriminating against non-Christians. In truth, you are discriminating against them, and it’s right to do so. Jesus was completely intolerant of other religions. He is the only way to God. It’s Jesus or hell. No third possibility.

If God requires us to use his name in our walks, then it makes sense that we would need to use the names of other spirits when we humble and defeat them.

God gave me the names of a couple of spirits during the last 24 hours. One was “sexual defilement,” and the other was, “reviling.”

You may say those aren’t names. They’re descriptions. Well, what is “Yehoshua,” which is the full name of Jesus? It’s a description. It means, “Yahweh is salvation,” more or less.

It may be that a demon’s descriptive name is like a last name. Maybe a demon has a more specific name, like Barney, but his description, like a last name, covers him and his whole family. In the military, people give valid orders using ranks and last names. You don’t have to say, “Forward March, WILBUR,” in order to have authority.

A few months ago, God told me there was such a thing as sex without defilement. That’s interesting, because society teaches us to love a very defiled type of sex. In God’s plan, sex is supposed to be an event filled up with intimacy, love, and surrender. The world’s version of sex isn’t like that. It’s about body parts which are shaped just the right way, or weird actions that heighten selfish animal arousal. It’s about choking yourself by hanging yourself in a closet while you pursue solitary sexual activity. It’s about aggression and humiliation. It’s about physical pain.

You can’t have intimacy, love, and surrender while you’re beating someone with a whip or cutting off their air to get them excited. San Francisco sex, as I would call it, isn’t loving or unselfish. You can’t have intimate, loving bondage.

It shouldn’t surprise me to find out I’ve been dealing with a spirit called sexual defilement, after all I’ve been exposed to.

Anyway, I spoke defeat to it and cast it out. I renounced involvement with it. I could feel it filling with dread as I spoke, and I could tell when it left. Now I have to keep it out.

As for “reviling,” it refers to verbal abuse. I got tons of this when I was young. Most of it came from my dad and my sister, but even my mother fell into it. I internalized it, verbally abusing myself silently every day, and I also abused others.

The Bible says you can’t inherit the kingdom of heaven if you’re a reviler. If I want the kingdom of heaven inside me, I can’t give rulership to a reviling spirit.

Today I fought it just as I fought sexual defilement, with the same basic result.

The Bible lists a bunch of things that will keep you from inheriting the kingdom of heaven. Covetousness, for example. Cowardice and unbelief are also named. If your flesh rules you, Satan rules you, because demons serve Satan, and your flesh will generally choose to be ruled by demons, not the Holy Spirit.

I knew I had to get rid of demons, but I didn’t understand that I needed to ask God to tell me their names. Now I have more power to fight.

It may be that a demon is more likely to return if you didn’t use its name when you cast it out. You have to repent if you want to stay free, and you can’t repent unless you know what you’re repenting of.

I just learned that Catholic exorcists have rules they follow, and one rule is that they have to ask demons what their names are.

There is so much wisdom out there, and our ancestors threw it away. Life would be so much better had they preserved it and passed it on. As it is, I have to get a great deal of it directly from the Holy Spirit, because preachers are ignorant and/or dishonest.

The Real Criminal is Barbara Cartland

Really interesting day today. Interesting and also boring, if that makes sense.

I got called for jury duty. This is not a good week for me, to put it mildly, but I figured I should show up and see if there was any chance I could be of use in a short trial. I have been called a number of times, but I have never been part of a jury because lawyers almost always strike other lawyers.

I showed up at the courthouse before eight today, and a judge came to the assembly room and started working with us. He asked people to come up so they could be excused. He gave various reasons. Felons can’t serve. Pregnant women and seniors don’t have to serve. He also gave a reason that surprised me: doctors and lawyers don’t have to serve. That’s new. I guess they have given up trying to get lawyers to accept doctors and lawyers as jurors.

I could have weaseled out by telling him I was an attorney, but I decided to go with an approach I thought was less selfish. I told him about some very important business I have to attend to this week, and I said I could serve for a day, but that was about the best I could do. He said I would have to talk to whatever judge interviewed me when I was made part of a group of potential jurors.

The assembly room was pretty bad. In Miami, they play bad movies on overhead TV’s, and as awful as that sounds, it beats the Marion County system. Here, they have the TV’s, but they don’t turn them on. They also have some horrendous magazines and books.

I must have been in there for almost two hours before I was called to a courtroom.

The defendant was Jose Manuel Martinez. He’s a celebrity. I didn’t know that. The jurors still don’t know it. We were told we were forbidden to look him up on the Internet to find out about the case. Of course, I have looked him up, because I didn’t end up on the jury.

Jose Manuel Martinez claims he was a cocaine cartel hitman, which means he was a failed human being who was willing to kill people in order make a living. In the movies, hitmen are sophisticated, highly trained killers. In real life, anyone who has no conscience and no valuable skills can be a hitman. The valuable commodity isn’t good marksmanship or Hollywood-style spy skills; it’s a willingness to shoot people without hesitation. That’s really all you need. If you can dig a ditch, you can be a top-notch hitman.

Martinez is already imprisoned, and he is never going to get out. He claims to have killed at least 30 people. I suppose the death penalty is on the table in the present case, so he is probably motivated to seek an acquittal in spite of his existing sentences.

According to the indictments, Javier Huerta and some guy named Oliveira were found in a black Nissan pickup truck on highway 19, next to the northbound lanes, near highway 40. They had been shot to death. This happened in November of 2006, and the trial just started today. I don’t know if Martinez confessed or what. There has to be some reason why it took 13 years to get started. Surely the authorities didn’t find out about these deaths 13 years ago. Defense attorneys can do a lot of things, but I don’t think they can delay trial until an offense reaches bar mitzvah age.

CORRECTION: apparently, the judge couldn’t pronounce “Olivares” correctly. Martinez is accused of killing a man named Olivares-Rivas, not Oliveira. Also, it turns out Martinez bragged about the murders, and that’s why he’s on trial in 2019.

It’s kind of nice living in a county where a judge can’t pronounce “Olivares.” Refreshing.

When I showed up in the courtroom, I didn’t know what kind of trial to expect. I thought there might be some kind of simple felony, and I could serve and go home today. When the judge started talking about dead bodies, firearms, and premeditation, I knew that was not going to happen. He said the trial, including sentencing, could run through June 28th. No; can’t do it. Too many irons in the fire.

When the judge asked if any of the potential jurors couldn’t serve because of scheduling conflicts or prior knowledge of the case, I stood up. Later, he interviewed me, and I told him about my business problems. For good measure, I said I was an attorney. I knew it would come up in voir dire anyway. I was working on my second chance to be excused, and I didn’t want to have the judge hold onto me and then have the attorneys find out about my background. I thought it would annoy everyone involved. They would ask me why I hadn’t told them sooner.

The judge cut me loose, but I still had to return to the assembly room. There was still a chance another trial would work for me. Back to SELF Magazine and Barbara Cartland novels.

Maybe 30 minutes later, lunch rolled around. I did two things. I bought a book of crossword puzzles, and I bought the Kindle version of The Bourne Identity. I don’t like pulp fiction all that much, but I knew I needed a page-turner to keep me from losing my mind. Why, why, why didn’t I think to bring a book of differential equation problems?

They finally turned me loose at around 3:45. I resolved never to offer to serve on a jury again. It’s a waste of my time. They’re not going to take me, so why show up?

There are two unselfish acts I now refuse to get involved with: jury duty and giving blood. Every time I have given blood, they have torn up my arms, so my feeling is that blood donation is not for me. Also, it’s unnatural for a lawyer to GIVE blood.

The earth will still turn if I let other people hear cases and donate blood. It’s not necessary for me to do every nice thing there is.

When I learned who Martinez was, I almost wished I had been allowed to serve. How often do you get to sit on a jury for a celebrity killer? But it was not to be, and also, do I really want to be one of the people who sentenced a cartel hitman to death?

Relax, my Mexican amigos. I’m not the guy you’re looking for. And you might have problems getting past my neighbors.

For all I know, his friends have already hit the jurors with a volley of dead-chicken-and-black-candle curses.

Yes, they do things like that.

Before Martinez came in, I thought another guy was the defendant. I saw an old white guy at the defense table, and I knew he wasn’t on trial. Old, white, and might as well have had “lawyer” stitched on the back of his coat. Next to him, however, there was a young Latin man. He had kind of a smug look on his face, which is not unusual for criminals. He also appeared to be something of a bodybuilder, and prisoners have a lot of time for exercise. Being Latin also contributed to my impression of him; there is no point in denying it. Mexicans really do commit a lot of crime. Look it up.

I assumed he was the alleged perp. I actually prayed for him and his family. It looks like he was another attorney or a paralegal.

Oh, well. Prayer won’t hurt him any.

An older Latin man came in and sat at the defense table. I thought he was a lawyer. Now that I’ve seen Martinez on the web, I know who the older man was.

I prayed for Martinez and his family, too. My guess is that not a lot of people who actually have the status to pray effectively (without voodoo chickens and peyote, I mean) have taken the time to do this.

I feel pretty great about choosing to attempt to serve. I learned how the juror selection process works here, and I realized trying to do it again was not a good idea. I have peace about my choice to quit serving.

I did a number of crossword puzzles, and I got to the point where Jason Bourne’s kidnapping victim has realized the people who saved her from Bourne are not cops. The book is not great. I don’t know if I’ll finish it.

Thank God I was excused. I really need to be available for business this week.

Priests are Buffers for People who Prefer to Keep Sinning

As is often the case, today I am freaked out by God’s confirmation.

I generally watch Derek Prince while fixing and eating breakfast. I can’t think of a better way to redeem the time. Today I listened to him talking about the headship of Jesus. It was like listening to myself, talking about the things God had told me.

God tells everyone the exact same things. God does not have opinions. His view is fact. It is correct, which is what “righteous” means. Christians who hear from God never disagree. There is no such thing as “healthy debate.” Opinions are for the ungodly and the uninformed. No one debates in heaven. Everyone knows the truth.

For a long time, God has been telling me the Holy Spirit functioned as a sort of nervous system for the body of Christ. Yahweh (or “Yah”) does the thinking and deciding. Jesus talks to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit talks to Christians who can hear him. Jesus is the head of the body. We are the other parts. This is why the Bible calls us “the body of Christ.”

God told me this: “The head sees things, and reaches them, first.”

Look at Jesus. He was the first to receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit. He was the first to have the Holy Spirit live in him on a permanent basis, unlike the prophets, who only got visits. He also preceded us in persecution and martyrdom. He expects us to go through certain experiences, but he went through them first, so we can’t say he doesn’t know what it’s like to suffer what we do.

In the teaching I saw today, Derek Prince confirmed a lot of this. He also made it clear that you can’t really be part of the body unless you hear and obey the Holy Spirit (not the Holy List of Rules). How long have I been saying that? The Bible says it, but not many people pay attention. It says, “As many as are led by the Spirit, they are the sons of God.”

It’s not enough to be baptized and claim salvation.

He also said things I know to be wrong. He isn’t right about everything, and that underscores the importance of getting to know God personally. You have to have the Holy Spirit available, if you want to avoid following in other men’s mistakes.

He cited the appointment of Matthias as an example of obeying the Holy Spirit.

Matthias was the disciple who replaced Judas Iscariot. The other disciples didn’t know what to do. The Holy Spirit didn’t tell them who should be appointed. They gave up and cast lots, which is essentially the same thing as rolling dice. The lot fell to Matthias, and he went on to be a very undistinguished disciple. You can look that up.

Not long after Matthias was chosen through gambling, Paul fell down on the road to Damascus, and the rest is history. Paul was the greatest of the disciples, and he was not numbered among the 12.

Perry Stone says the disciples blew it when they used gambling to pick a replacement. He points to the weak record of Matthias.

Prince says God was glorified because the disciples used lots, allowing God to choose Judas’ replacement. That’s clearly not right. Think of the glory God would have gotten had they waited for Paul–possibly their worst human enemy–to join the group. God says we are to be more than conquerors, meaning we are supposed to bring people into the body instead of just defeating them. Paul’s conversion exemplifies going beyond conquering.

Prince has said other things that I know are wrong. He said we should never ask God to help us to be humble, because God would then humiliate us. Way off track. Take a look at Psalm 19:

Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.

Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression.

What about Galatians 5:22? It says humility is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, imparted to us supernaturally.

The Bible tells us to humble ourselves, and Prince thinks that proves it isn’t God’s job, but clearly, if humility is a fruit of the Spirit, God fully intends to help. Galatians 5:22 says God will give us love, faith, and joy supernaturally. Why should humility be different? We are heirs, not galley slaves. God wants to give us things. If we generate them ourselves, the glory is ours, not his. God wants glory, and God is not a thief. If he wants glory for something, it means he intends to do it himself.

What could be more perverse than generating your own humility? If you could make yourself humble, you would have something to be proud of! It makes no sense.

As for Matthias, it should be obvious from his lack of achievement and the ascension of Paul that gambling was the wrong solution. In the Old Testament, God directed the Jews to cast lots a few times, but generally, gambling is a totally unnecessary vice that leads to addiction, covetousness, idolatry, violence, and the destruction of human beings and families.

When I was a kid, I thought it was funny that my great-grandfather wouldn’t allow playing cards in his house, but now I understand that he was right. You shouldn’t gamble in any way unless you have a very clear command from God. I won’t even play Monopoly now.

Matthias was chosen BEFORE the Holy Spirit fell on the church. They weren’t ready to hear from God. They had little authority and little guidance. Jesus told them to wait for power, but they got ahead of God and chose Matthias by carnal means.

Look at the story of Stephen, who was also chosen to build up the church. The 12 disciples told the church to send them 7 Holy Spirit-filled men of good report, and before these men, including Stephen, were appointed, the disciples prayed. They did not roll dice. Stephen went on to glorify God in his life and death, and his story in the book of Acts still reaches people today.

It’s funny, but in teaching about the role of the Holy Spirit, Derek Prince helped me with the things he got right and also with his mistakes. The things he got right confirm that God has spoken to both of us, and God’s correction of the things he got wrong confirms some of what God said: rely on the Holy Spirit, personally, not on men.

There is a limit on what you can teach people about God. He’s like strawberry ice cream. You can go to someone who has never had strawberry ice cream, and you can tell him things about it. You can say it’s sweet and cold and that it has a wonderful texture. You can compare it to ice cream made from other berries. In the end, he’s going to have to try it himself. There are many, many things about the Christian life that can’t be explained through words. Maybe this is why the Bible says, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”

We depend way too much on human beings, many of them powerless old men in satin dresses. No preacher can save you. Every person is like a man alone in a tiny boat. You can yell encouragement and correction to other people as you sail in the right direction, but you can’t bring them aboard. They have to know God for themselves. Churches tend to discourage personal relationships with God. They turn men into little false gods, and gratefully, we let them handle our Christianity for us, so we don’t have to make sacrifices.

They’re supposed to bring us closer to God, but they act like goalkeepers, keeping us away from him, and we’re grateful for it, because we like keeping our distance.

People make mistakes. They fall from grace. Even if a man does everything right, he eventually dies. If you depend on a man, and then he drops dead, you’re in trouble.

In the sermon I heard today, Derek Prince said we had to become more and more dependent on God. That amazed me, because it was only a few weeks ago that God told me to pray to become as dependent on him as possible.

Things are changing fast for me, and I think it reflects the fact that the world is in deep trouble. I believe God is equipping people like me quickly because bad things are on the way. I don’t believe America is going to recover this time. We are getting very corrupt. We are becoming a nation of angry, arrogant, tattooed, pierced, mutilated, sexually depraved, self-righteous, murderous children who hate good and love evil. We decorate ourselves to look like convicts, witches, and sorcerers. I think we passed a critical point some time ago.

Perry Stone gave a prophecy in 2015, in which he said we would get another chance, and he mentioned pockets of revival, but that was 4 years back, and I think we have blown it since then. That’s what the Spirit seems to say.

Maybe I sound like certain Christians who are obsessed with external events and who can’t wait to see God’s judgment…on other people. I hope not. I focus on myself and on the individuals God uses me to reach. There is no hope for the world or for nations while Jesus remains a spiritual and not political leader. We are not here to build nations. We are here to be used to save individuals. Talk of saving races, nations, cities, and neighborhoods is silly and misguided. That time hasn’t come yet.

Ike Turner had Nothing on Kenneth Copeland

Just when I think I can’t get any more disgusted with preachers, I find there is still potential for more disapproval. Today while searching the web, I saw photos of people like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer spread across the bottom of the page as suggestions, and I felt slight physical nausea. No exaggeration. These people are poisonous. This must be how a former prostitute feels when she sees her pimp.

The nausea must have come from the Holy Spirit, because I am not that good.

Why am I upset today? Very simple. God has given me a revelation about the baptism with fire.

John the Baptist said Jesus would baptize us with the Holy Spirit and with fire, but the New Testament contains no explicit information about the baptism with fire. People have come up with guesses as to what it is, but most are wrong. The baptism with fire is this: God allows you to go through afflictions and trials in order to free you of things that keep you out of his kingdom. It’s that simple.

People wonder why Christianity doesn’t “work.” Christians don’t live in victory or peace. They don’t have prosperity or health, even though God promises us these things. There are some individuals out there who get miracles and healings and so on, but I would guess that more than 99% of Christians are not in that group. Most Christians don’t think God will heal them or work miracles for them. Many preachers tell their flocks these things can’t happen now, as if God had decided to shut off his help and his love. In truth, Christianity still works, but Christians suffer because they hold onto things God is trying to burn.

At my last church, we had a man who had breast cancer. His name was Ozzie. The pastors called him “Ozzie, healed of the Lord.” We fasted and prayed for him. We thought he would be okay. Then he got brain tumors and died.

While he was alive, I kept telling him it was important to confess and repent in order to get help from God. He was too proud to pay attention. I made people angry. People said I blamed the sick for their problems, which is true. We do cause our problems. Ozzie never took responsibility for anything, and he died, unhealed.

Ozzie was baptized with fire, but he didn’t let go. His pride blocked God’s help.

God does all sorts of remarkable things for me. He defeats people who threaten to cause problems for me. He helps me get difficult things done. He tells me things. He gives me miracle healings. Nonetheless, my life is not perfect. There are some nagging things I still deal with. They started to fall away when my dad went into assisted living, but not all are gone. I know it’s because there are things I need to identify and give up.

God told me to get rid of my blues and rock CD’s, so I did. He told me to get rid of other offensive objects, such as my dad’s masonry garbage and my questionable movie and TV DVD’s. He had me give up cigars. I’ve had to renounce certain behaviors and ways of thinking. Every time I give something up, things get better.

How many Christians are doing what God has me doing? A small fraction. When I used to belong to Trinity Church in Miami, most people around me didn’t even try. The Wilkersons, who own the church, don’t teach about repentance in a serious way, because they love money and flattery. They don’t care about people. They make them slaves and beg them for money, devouring people’s houses, as the Bible puts it. Their followers smoke dope, fornicate, work in strip clubs, and so on, because no one has told them their sins and iniquities block God’s help.

Trinity is not unusual. Many charismatic churches run by prosperity preachers work the same way.

Here’s something God taught me today: the word “pure” means “burned.” It comes from the Greek word for fire. Consider the familiar word “pyromaniac.” The root “pyro” is Greek, and it refers to fire. “Pure” comes from this root.

Greeks pronounce their Y (upsilon) the way we pronounce U. The word “dunamis,” which means “power,” contains a U, but the English word “dynamite,” which comes from the same root, contains a Y. It’s not uncommon for an English word containing a U to come from a Greek word containing a Y.

Burning is still used for purifying metal. We heat it so impurities burn off or rise to the top where they can be removed. In the Bible, God talks about refining us like gold. The parallel is obvious.

It makes me angry that no one showed me this when I sat in church and gave money and did free work. Trinity is a ghetto church. It’s full of cripples, addicts, financial basket cases, and criminals. Most people who attend are poor. Kids who go to Trinity get shot from time to time. There are a lot of sick people there.

Christianity doesn’t work at Trinity, because no one understands the baptism with fire.

The pastors themselves don’t understand it, and they don’t care. Rich Wilkerson, who claims to believe in God’s healing, is sickly and frail. He has new knees. He has a blood disorder. He’s diabetic. He has a disease that makes stones appear in his chest. How can those things be true, when Psalm 103 clearly states that God heals all our diseases? Wilkerson is holding onto greed and false doctrine (which he knows is false), so God’s power isn’t helping him.

Never listen to anyone who has no testimony. If your church’s doctrine is not working for your pastor, it won’t work for you. Rich Wilkerson has no testimony. He’s sick, and his church is in debt. His son has a bloated ego and runs around with Kim Kardashian. He can’t help anyone.

Wilkerson had a young underpastor named Terrance. Terrance is very concerned with appearances. Like many young prosperity preachers, he always dresses like he’s about to make a music video. Very proud guy. Older people can’t tell him anything. He broke off and started his own church. It’s called “COOL Church.” This is the kind of fruit Wilkerson produces.

Predictably, based on Wilkerson’s penchant for appropriating other people’s dubious ideas, COOL Church has a name that was already in use elsewhere. There is a C.O.O.L. Church in Houston. There is also a “Cool Church” in Cool, California. The domain for COOL Church isn’t coolchurch.com, because they couldn’t get it. Someone else took it more than 20 years ago. So much for inspiration, creativity, and originality. God gives Spirit-led people fresh material.

Years ago, Wilkerson came up with a membership-building campaign called “2020 Vision.” It was about saving a certain number of souls by 2020. Go online and Google “2020 vision” and “church.” You will see many references predating Trinity’s scheme. To put it nicely, it was not Wilkerson’s idea.

It rotted on the vine, like many of Trinity’s “long-term” projects.

I don’t think COOL Church will make it. The location is bad, the preaching isn’t exciting, and the response seems weak. No one is watching their Youtubes, and they don’t have a single Yelp review. That’s amazing, since Trinity always hammers away at people, trying to get social media support.

I forgive the people who taught me nonsense, but I have to be open about what they did, because they’re still doing it to other people.

When you give yourself to God, you have to be separated from the world. You can’t keep your pride, your self-reliance, your worry, or your record collection. You can’t keep your friends. You can’t hold onto astrology or yoga, which is demon worship. When you turn to God, you enter a gauntlet, and the way to get through it quickly is to admit fault and give things up.

I have often said that Satan’s world is like a gang. Gangs jump people in, and they jump them out. “Jumping” means “beating.” When you join a gang, they give you a beating. When you leave, they give you a beating to “jump you out.” The baptism with fire is Satan’s way of jumping you out, and God permits it because you have given Satan access.

Remember what Paul said? He said he delivered a sinner to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, that his spirit might be saved. I’m right. Satan is allowed to touch many Christians who need correction.

I think it’s time for me to dump my jazz CD collection. I thought it was harmless, but maybe it’s not. I don’t listen to it any more. I have no desire to. I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s a problem. It’s the music of addicts and losers. Louis Armstrong smoked dope every day. Bix Beiderbeck drank himself to death. Miles Davis was a wife beater and drug abuser. Thelonious Monk was mentally ill. Chet Baker killed himself. Billie Holiday was a hopeless junkie. It’s not a happy fraternity.

I wonder if classical music is also on God’s hit list. Whatever. Anything he wants, he can have, because he loves me and wants the best for me.

God told me some things. He said I had been raised by demons, which is true. He also said my mother and father had abandoned me. That’s correct. My mother loved me, but she didn’t teach me much about God, and she was a weak and inconsistent parent. God also says this, in a psalm: “When my father and mother abandon me, the Lord will gather me up.” He put “father” before “mother” in that verse because mothers are supposed to submit to fathers.

God told me bad things about my past so I would know he was adopting me.

I am not embarrassed to say I was raised by demons. I welcome the knowledge. You can’t expect treatment and recovery without diagnosis, and diagnosis is not pleasant.

No good father raises a child without correction. Not one. If you’ve never said a harsh word to your child, you are not a good parent. God allows us to be afflicted, but on the other hand, he also fully intends to heal us or otherwise compensate and relieve us, once we’re back on track. No good parent would give a child punishment and then continue it after the child repented.

I asked God to tell me what the baptism with fire was, and now I know. Unfortunately, I am part of the charismatic church, and most charismatics teach that God is their fairy godmother. Very few people will want to hear what God told me. Anyone who talks about the harsh side of Christianity will be attacked and slandered by fools. Persecution is a big part of the church.

Feel-good Christians persecute because correction isn’t COOL.

God told me one more thing today. Psalm 23 is true. It says, “The Lord is my shepherd.” The word “pastor” literally means “shepherd.” When you are in touch with the Holy Spirit, you don’t need a carnal man in a funny suit to tell you what’s what. Listen to men until you get connected with God, and then make him your teacher.

Don’t Let the Monkeys Get You Down

During my recent trip to the pit of ugliness known as South Florida, I spent a great deal of time in prayer. There wasn’t much else to do, because the stereo in my truck doesn’t work, and there were no human beings to talk to. It was convenient and helpful.

God showed me something interesting, so I will pass it on.

The Bible says faith is accounted unto us as righteousness. We find that remarkable, because faith and righteousness seem like two different things. Our understanding seems to be that faith is not righteousness, but God decided to credit it to us as righteousness for reasons of his own.

The truth is that faith is righteousness.

One of the unfortunate things about Christianity is that in our minds, we turn righteous people into bizarre, ghostly, sexless, pusillanimous creatures that float around with addled smiles on their faces. We see them as though they’re not human, as though they belonged to a different species, like angels.

Churches have shoved this notion down our throats for centuries. Look at the ridiculous things clergymen wear. The pope and many priests dress like women, wearing cassocks and robes other men wouldn’t dream of wearing. Many clergymen wear crazy getups with giant hats and satin bibs and so on. When the pope really gets his rig together, he resembles Liberace. Huge miter and so on.

Clergymen who dress up remind me of fictional superheroes. They work too hard to impress, and they don’t fit in with the rest of us. Imagine the Green Lantern trying to go to work at, say, Morgan Stanley, wearing his weird green suit.

Righteousness isn’t a bizarre theatrical act. It just means the state of being correct. If you are correct, you are righteous, even if you’re wearing coveralls and Red Wing boots. It’s amazing that we went from “correct” to full-throttle Elvis mode.

The phrase “politically correct” comes from the Antichrist. It means “politically righteous.” Politics is a thing of the flesh. To be politically correct is to be righteous through the flesh. The Bible makes it clear that we can’t please God through the flesh. Here is Romans 8:8, in case you think I’m mistaken: “So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”

The flesh is an animal–a “beast” in KJV terms–which is attached to us while we are stuck here on earth. This is why the Antichrist is called the Beast. He convinces people to try to attain righteousness without God, through their tiny, gullible minds.

Leftism comes from the spirit of antichrist. Leftists want to get God out of the way so they can create a righteous, civilized, harmonious world without God, using the power of the flesh.

It’s surprising that so many Christians think it’s okay to be a leftist, or even that Jesus was a leftist. The abolition of religion has been a top priority of the left, at least since the time of Karl Marx.

Think of the positions leftists take. They’re against the unborn. They’re against Israel. They’re against male leadership, which is a pillar of Judaism and Christianity. They’re against masculinity itself. They favor rebellion. They promote covetousness in the form of forced redistribution of wealth. You don’t have to be a genius to see it. They’re against God himself.

People continue to deny it, but one day soon, it will be admitted openly, not just by Christians but by leftists themselves. People will campaign openly against Jesus, naming him in the process. They will tell us we can have a world of love, peace and prosperity without God, and Satan will help them by giving them temporary success.

It was never about creating a peaceful, harmonious, prosperous world. The purpose of our existence is to please God. Look it up. The other things are by-products. Jesus himself said it. They will be added to us if we seek his kingdom and his righteousness–his correctness–first.

Even if we managed to create a seemingly perfect world without God, Jesus would return and destroy it, because it would separate people from him.

This world is like a courtoom, and human beings are the jury. Satan makes his case, and so does Jesus. What’s our primary job? To decide who is right. When we choose to believe Jesus is correct, we show faith. Faith is therefore correct. It is righteousness. It may not be all of righteousness, but it is righteousness.

I have never heard a preacher say these things, but now that God has shown them to me, I see that they’re very obvious.

When Biblical figures praise God, what do they say? A lot of the time, they tell God he’s righteous. They say it over and over. They’re showing their faith, which is righteousness. This is why God likes to be praised. It isn’t because he likes flattery. He has no pride. He can’t be flattered.

If you look at the Bible, you will see that it’s full of passages claiming God is right about this or that. “Lean not unto thine own understanding.” “There is a way that seems right to man, BUT…” “He will direct thy paths.” Look for it, and you’ll see it. Believing that God is right is very important.

Last month, God told me this: “Pride is incorrect.” Three days ago, he said, “Faith is correct.” In April, he said, “Worry is not correct.” Correctness matters.

Recently, he told me something that startled me. I asked him to tell me what my biggest problem was in my relationship with him, and the answer was “worry.” Not pride, lust, anger, covetousness, gluttony, laziness, or any of the usual suspects. I didn’t see it coming. My other iniquities are problems, but to God, worry is the primary issue right now. He told me it blocks his power in me!

If faith is righteous, worry is unrighteous. Worry tells you God is a liar.

He also told me he would show me how to defeat worry and get rid of it, so I am extremely thankful. Knowledge of my problems is a burden and a sentence unless I also receive solutions.

Faith is a big deal. It’s more important than working at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving or buying your church new pews. People often do things like that out of pride. Christians tend to be extremely proud of “good” works they do through the flesh.

You need to give faith priority, and worry needs to be on your hit list, just like pornography and greed. If you get rid of worry, it will cut the root of other iniquities that seem unconnected with it.

This is all surprising to me, but it’s true.

I’ve learned something else: I have to stop reviling myself.

I grew up with abuse. My dad was cruel, my sister was a narcissistic sociopath who lived to make me suffer, and even my mother tended to snap at me and make me feel rejected. Over time, I learned to internalize the abuse I received, so that even when I was alone, I heard it in my heart. Lacking any other abuser, I stood in for them and abused myself. I did their work for them so they could rest.

I knew this when I was of college age. It’s not a new revelation. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop the internalized abuse. I was rejected, and I rejected myself, over and over, every day. I knew about it, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop.

I also reviled other people. I got very good at crafting insults designed to cut deep. I thought it was okay. I thought I only went after the deserving. I didn’t question my right to do it.

Lately, I’ve been catching myself insulting myself. For example, I’ll put a pen down, and I’ll be unable to find it. Then I’ll ask God to show me where it is in spite of the fact that I’m “an idiot.” You can’t say things like that about yourself, even if you say them inwardly and you think you don’t really mean them.

How does God feel about me, calling his son an idiot? I’m extremely valuable. God allowed himself to be tortured to death so he could have me with him. Did he do all that so he could enjoy the company of an idiot?

Derek Prince taught me that shame is not part of God’s plan. It’s okay to feel ashamed briefly when a problem is exposed, but to live in a constant state of shame and rejection is sick and wrong. You should not shame yourself (or anyone else) chronically.

Here’s what I tell myself now: “I am no worse and no better than anyone else. I don’t care what they’ve done or what I’ve done. No one on earth is in a position to make me feel ashamed.” That’s true. You’re all filthy. Sorry to inform you. Some people have flaws or sins that are more obvious or disturbing that those others have, but it doesn’t matter. Jesus isn’t here in the flesh, and you’re just a forgiven spirit strapped to a dirty monkey, so get off your high horse. You poop just like the rest of us.

God is perfect. He is extremely good. In comparison to his righteousness, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the moral states of Jeff Dahmer and Billy Graham. However low you are, God is waiting to lift you up, and no matter how much you think you’ve done for God, you are not significantly better than a pedophile.

Who is the world’s tallest midget? Who cares? Still a midget. The NBA won’t be contacting him any time soon.

I don’t call myself an idiot any more, even when I’m joking. I try not to let any human being make me feel ashamed. What a monkey thinks–even a respected monkey with many Twitter followers and lots of bananas–is not important.

You can see this concept reflected in the Bible. In a parable in Matthew 18, a ruler forgave a man who owed him billions of dollars. The man then imprisoned someone who owed him 100 days’ wages. The ruler withdrew his forgiveness. It shows that our debts to God are gigantic, but our sins toward each other down here are tiny in comparison.

Shaming ourselves and others excessively repels prospective Christians, and God will hold us accountable for that. Our purpose isn’t to screen out applicants for the kingdom of heaven.

I love receiving information from God. I would never figure it out on my own. As God has told me, it’s better to inherit than to earn.

Miami Visit OVER! OVER! OVER! OVER!

If there is any man on earth who is happier than I am right now, I pity him, because I doubt his body and mind can stand the joy. I had to visit Miami, and now I am HOME.

I can’t describe my hatred of Miami. I don’t mean I hate the people, although I don’t want to live around people like them. I hate being there. I hate the thought of being there. Miami is disgusting. Every visit is an ordeal. Every departure is like being lifted out of a septic tank.

I had to go to Miami for business reasons. My dad died in March, and his real estate belonged to a corporation. For this reason, the estate was not supposed to go through formal probate, which is even worse than a visit to Miami. In order to prove the property belonged to a corporation, I needed recorded deeds. The recorder’s office rejected one deed over and over, incorrectly. I had to drive 600 miles, drive to the recorder’s office, and record the deed in person.

The lady who recorded it gave me no trouble at all, and the reason is that there was nothing wrong with the deed. I had submitted it multiple times electronically, and whoever looked at it had rejected it every time. Bureaucracy is always frustrating.

His estate now contains some used furniture worth approximately $200. I think it’s safe to say formal probate will not be needed.

I stayed in my dad’s old house. I don’t think I should do that next time. While I was in town, I picked up my vertical band saw and my Rockwell drill press, plus a bunch of other junk the movers left. I have been giving away and selling things worth considerable money, just to cut the stubborn cord. I would say there is still a pickup load left, plus my machine tools.

I prayed all the way down and all the way back. I asked God if he could arrange it so I only had to go to Miami one more time IN MY LIFE. I believe he granted that request.

My strategy for Miami visits is to go on Sundays. That way, I am less likely to face unbearable traffic on the way in. It’s terrible to get stuck in traffic while visiting Miami, because when you’re done, you don’t get a reward for your suffering. You’re punished…by arriving in Miami. I don’t mind traffic on the way out, because it feels so nice when I cross the Dade County line into Broward.

The drive down was very unpleasant. There was a traffic jam up here, on I-75. It added maybe 45 minutes to the trip. Then I discovered that my electronic toll pass had been stolen. I took my truck to a Firestone location for an alignment on Saturday, and since then, I’ve found that I no longer have the toll transponder or my phone charger, and 4 lug nuts are gone. I live alone in the woods, and no one would dare come to my house to steal a phone charger. No one else drives the car. Naturally, I suspect Firestone.

I stopped at a service plaza and bought a new transponder, and I tried to use their kiosk to activate it and kill the old one. That didn’t work out. Government computers aren’t set up by the best bidders. The jobs go to minority businesses or companies owned by transsexuals or companies that belong to political donors. It’s always social engineering or corruption, not meritocracy. The kiosk was, for practical purposes, useless, so my long visit to the service plaza was a waste of time.

It was dark when I hit town. What an experience. I felt as if I were in a simulation, like the Matrix. It didn’t seem real. It also felt repulsive. I felt the way a former convict would feel, visiting his old prison. Also, and I don’t know why, I felt as though I were driving through my sister’s heart.

My sister is full of hate. She lives in the past, embracing and caressing imagined offenses other people have committed. She is constantly embroiled in drama. When I write these things, I’m assuming she’s still alive. Anyway, I seemed to feel her energy all around me as I drove through the city.

Traffic is worse than ever. The city seems to be significantly more crowded every time I visit. It must be illegals and South American immigrants. I don’t call illegals “immigrants.” Immigration is something you can only do legally. Someone is filling up Miami, and it’s not people of American ancestry. We have been leaving since the Sixties.

While I drove, I rooted for the people who were moving to Miami and building things there. They’re increasing the value of my real estate. “Turn it into Hong Kong!”, I said, aloud. I don’t care if it’s a bad place to live. I don’t have to reside there. I just want to sell at high prices.

Miami is changing, but it’s looking more like Rio de Janeiro or some other South American pit of urban misery than Hong Kong. Very tall buildings with tacky architecture, jammed up against each other. It’s a very Latin thing. That’s fine. Keep it up, my friends. Build it to the sky. Then buy my properties. Cash me out!

My friend Travis is house-sitting for me. The house is peaceful because the only person there is a Christian. It’s not peaceful like Ocala, but it’s an oasis in Miami. Travis helped me load things up.

There are a few big photos and pictures in the house. I was thinking I would grab them on the next trip, but increasingly, I feel like putting them on the trash pile. Sentimental value is a funny thing when your family is highly dysfunctional. The china that reminds you of your mom may also remind you of the time your dad chased her with a butcher knife (fictional example).

Those pictures make me think of the times when I hid behind the bedroom door and listened to my dad abusing my mother. They make me think of the times my sister and I had to check into motels with her. They make me think of the many times my sister got other kids to exclude me from things and call me names she had made up. They even remind me of the times when she got very upset because I was allowed to ride in the front seat of the car. That kept happening well into my forties. Can you imagine a grown woman getting upset because her brother wouldn’t get in the backseat?

When I was about 6, my mom paid a photographer to take a couple of big pictures of my sister and me. I feel obligated to retrieve them, but in all honesty, they disgust me, and I have a strong desire to throw them out.

There are a couple of professional shots of my sister. She would love to have them, I’m sure. She and my dad had a break in their estrangement, and she used that opportunity to comb his house for family photos (and silver). The photos she wanted were all pictures of her. She talked of one particular photo she missed. She said, “I looked so beautiful in that picture.” No sign of awareness that this was an odd thing to say.

This is the person who let junk removers take her college and law school diplomas to the dump, even though they were set out for her so she would not forget them.

While I was loading the truck, part of her inheritance was destroyed. My dad’s mother was a very cold lady who had no interest in my sister and me, and when she died, my dad’s sisters and their families cleaned out her house. We received two objects they chose for us without consultation: a Baccara angel and a porcelain horse. My dad had bought them for her. I threw out the angel not long ago, because it’s wrong to have an idol in your house. In Miami, I set the horse aside so I could save it, but Travis knocked it over and broke it. I was upset for a minute, but then I remembered that it wasn’t mine anyway. And I didn’t really want it. I just felt obligated to take it.

The horse and the angel are all my sister and I inherited from my dad’s mother.

She sent us a couple of afghans long ago. One was a sort of olive drab green. It was depressing to look at. I threw it out before I moved to Ocala. I found the other one on this visit. Olive drab, dark green, and ivory white. Synthetic yarn. Probably flammable. I brought it with me, thinking I might offer it to my cousins, but it’s going to the dump. I don’t want it around me.

I don’t hate my dead grandmother, because I don’t know her well enough to be angry at her, but she had an air about her which was disturbing. Dismal. Empty. It seems to stick to things she owned. Can’t have that. Won’t.

I don’t think there was much to her. She was polite, and she didn’t cause problems for us, but I don’t think it would have meant anything to her if my family had disappeared into a crack in the earth.

The things I recall about her aren’t heartwarming. On one occasion, she called my dad and said she needed money. He sent her $3000. Someone asked her what was wrong, and she said, “He’s got all that money, and I love spending it.” She just called because she wanted to shop.

My dad’s older sister was cruel and sick. I found a framed family photo she sent my dad. It was very small and therefore not expensive. The sister, the husband, one daughter, the son-in-law, and I forget who else. I didn’t recognize my cousins, because I don’t know them well. I picked the picture up. I put it down. I thought. I wanted to take it because it’s natural to preserve things like that, but then I imagined this unwanted picture, sitting in my house on display, full of faces I will never see again. People who might as well be strangers.

I don’t know if I’ll retrieve it on my final visit.

I found a folder full of documents related to a car lease. A letter congratulated my mother on “buying” a Honda. I couldn’t figure it out. Did she have a car I didn’t know about? Not possible. Then I remembered: she got my sister a car to drive to law school. My sister used to park in the school’s handicapped spot, and my mother paid $250 each for the tickets. She paid a lot of money to keep my sister in an apartment, which my mother cleaned, including copious dog poop that littered the carpet.

Sometimes throwing something out can bring you more pleasure than getting something new.

My dad’s other sister died in April, one month and four days after he did. She was okay. I knew her a little bit. I don’t know what her surviving child looks like. She was a math major, so we had that inclination in common. She also created some artwork. I suppose she was a little like me. My dad used to have one of her pictures in his bedroom, on a desk across from the foot of his bed.

I hated that picture. It was a sort of silhouette. It was a young girl sitting on the ground with one knee up. It wasn’t badly done, but the girl was looking down, and the drawing was all black shapes. I thought it was like a demon that stared at my dad while he slept; a succubus. Lilith. I always told myself I would throw it out after my dad died.

I retrieved it on an earlier trip to Miami, and a week or so ago, I found it here in a box. I took a look at it. The only thing I had from her, other than some pictures. I took it to the dump. It was just too creepy.

I tried to pull it out of the frame, but it was glued in, so the frame is also in the landfill.

My aunt seemed to have a darkness inside her. Maybe she did. My dad said that when he was a kid, he and his older sister would fight, and the one who did the drawing would cry.

In the weeks before he died, he started asking about her, over and over. He called her by a nickname his father had made up. “Palsy.” He called her “Palsy-walsy Cat’s Paw.” Very odd. Before he became demented, he didn’t talk about his family much at all.

I found a porcelain owl my dad bought for my mother. I was very glad to find it. I had had a dream in which demons that looked like owls were dancing in my dad’s bedroom. I threw the owl out.

I didn’t know my aunt well enough to grieve when she died. I was a little sad, but it was about like finding out a neighbor had died. This is why I didn’t write about it.

I like her husband. He’s a former NASA engineer, so we’re both STEM guys. I always enjoyed his company. But I could only get so close to my dad’s people. I texted him after she passed, indicating I didn’t want to intrude with a call. He called a few days later. He said things making it clear that he understood that we probably would not see each other again.

I felt genuine sorrow and compassion for him, but that’s not the same thing as grieving for my aunt.

In addition to taking things from the house and recording the deed, I closed my safe deposit box in Miami. Glad to have that over with. One less reason to be there. When it’s time to get rid of the remaining bank accounts, which contain nearly nothing, I can do it from here.

On Monday night, Travis and I got together with a young lady we knew from our old churches, Trinity and New Dawn. That was great. It was nice to be with two young people who are doing things right. I’ll call her Condi. I hope she doesn’t read that. I may get an earful.

Condi is some sort of therapist. I can never get it straight. She’s a professional. Takes care of herself. Isn’t part of the BET/BLM/Kanye West culture. Loves God. Enjoys spending time with the Holy Spirit. She’s also fun to be around, even though she’s a vegetarian.

I know a number of women like Condi. Young, attractive, successful, connected to God, and still single. South Florida seems to be a terrible place for a young black woman to find a husband, especially if she’s a Christian. The culture is just too gross.

I was thinking about it this morning, and I felt like God told me the problem was that the best men had left South Florida. Men have to be leaders. It makes sense that good men would leave a hellhole like Miami before women, in order to set up their lives elsewhere. God can move men out to create Christian homes in other places, and women who are blessed enough to be delivered can then follow them.

Lots of men who love God have left the area. Look at me.

Maybe God wants Christian men to pull women out of cities. It makes sense, because he pulls men out of cities. A man’s behavior toward his wife is supposed to be like God’s behavior toward the man.

It’s very strange, seeing so many extremely eligible women becoming spinsters. It’s like a plague. It’s even worse when they settle and try to turn sows’ ears into silk purses. Missionary dating is like welding yourself to a sinking ship. One of my best friends has two kids now, and the father still hasn’t married her. That’s a terrible situation. Continuing in a sin can send you to hell, and it’s also a recipe for dysfunction.

Trinity Church had a lady who gave up a great deal to serve the pastors. She was a former Alvin Ailey dancer. She was very good-looking. She took care of herself. She was always impeccably groomed. She was pleasant. She was a hard worker. She was pleasant. She loved God. No suitable men in sight. She spent long hours creating costumes for Trinity’s plays. She was an armorbearer and unpaid assistant to the pastor’s son’s wife, whose ministry amounted to nothing. It was as if she had married the church.

She’s in her 50’s now.

It would have been nice if a husband had come along and led her into God’s blessed life. He could have freed her from the Wilkersons and their manipulation.

A man needs a woman to be a helper, and to have someone to practice God’s love on. A woman needs a man to be a leader.

Making it back to Ocala and my home…I can’t make you understand how wonderful it was. My beautiful farm. My beautiful Christian home. Cleanliness. Order. Peace. No traffic. My own shower. My big, clean bed. My tractor! My tools! My wonderful neighbors.

English!

I feel like going to Chick-fil-A for lunch, just to intensify the experience. If you don’t understand that, you haven’t been to Chick-fil-A.

I want to lie here and bask in the relief. I feel like I’m drinking cool water after a month drifting in a lifeboat in the burning sun, surrounded by salt water. But I have to get up and do things.

Ocala is phenomenal. If I move to Tennessee, it will be even better.

I’ll tell you what I think is happening. John the Baptist said Jesus would baptize us with fire and the Holy Spirit, but churches have failed to tell us what baptism with fire is. I believe I know how. Fire burns away impurity. It represents God’s anger. The fire of hell is God’s anger. Sacrifices were burned as though they were guilty people. I believe the baptism with fire is the gauntlet of bad experiences you have to go through in order to become like God.

Receiving salvation isn’t enough. You have to be filled with the Holy Spirit. You have to get rid of iniquity and give up sin. You have to set yourself apart from the world and be changed. Before you turn to God, you burrow into trouble and sin. Afterward, you have to dig out. God will tell you to give things up. He will tell you to take up new things. Do it quickly, or else he’ll bring chastisement.

I believe I have suffered because I was so deep in the world. Chastisement helped me burrow back out. I think my life is more pleasant now that it used to be, because there is much less burrowing left to do.

Miami was in the depths of filth. Ocala is much better. If God sends me to Tennessee, it will be because Tennessee is better than Ocala.

Workshop Floor no Longer Bathed in Oil

It’s time to update the world on the things God is helping me get done.

I will probably repeat myself a little.

When I moved to the farm, I bought the seller’s machinery very cheaply. I got a Kubota tractor, a John Deere garden tractor, and an E-Z-GO gas cart with a dump bed. The mechanic who checked the machines out said the John Deere had a leak “around the rear PTO,” and he also said the Kubota was leaking from a hydraulic coupler. He felt both problems were easy and cheap to fix, and he seemed confident that I could do it myself.

After nearly two years of refilling the tractors with fluid and watching oil accumulate on the workshop floor, I tackled the jobs of fixing the leaks.

It turned out the garden tractor did not have a PTO leak. It has a hydraulic cylinder at the rear, and that cylinder raises and lowers the mower. It will also move a 3-point hitch. The rear seal was gone, and John Deere’s cylinder did not have removable end caps, so there was no way to change the seal. The ends of the cylinder were welded on. This is why I will avoid buying John Deere products in the future. There is no good reason for putting a welded cylinder on a $9200 tractor (1992 dollars). The only conceivable reason is to force customers to buy new cylinders.

I paid $180 for a new cylinder, and last week, I put it in. It was not a quick or easy job. Even if I had known what I was doing, and I had had help and proper tools, it would have been unpleasant.

The tractor has a steel pan that makes up the fenders, footboards, and seat area. The seat bolts to it. You have to remove it from the tractor in order to get at the front fitting on the cylinder. Of course, I found some guy on Youtube who removed his in 5 minutes. That always happens. Unfortunately, his tractor was not quite like mine.

To get his pan off, the Youtube guy undid 4 nuts, disconnected the seat kill switch (easily), popped the tail lamps out (easily), removed a shift lever (easily), and lifted the pan off. My seat kill switch had a fat cable that had to be fed through a hole in the pan. There was no way to part the cable with connectors. There was another panel on the side of the tractor that had to be removed in order to allow the pan to come off.

The shift lever was not fun to remove. It goes through a hole in the pan. The hole is way too small to admit a wrench, including a crowfoot wrench. The lever has a hex nut built into it at the bottom, so you can remove the upper part of the lever. The hex is below the steel pan, out of easy reach.

The Youtube guy had a lever which was already loose, so he twirled it off with his fingers. Mine was seized with rust.

Obviously, John Deere had no business putting a hex in a location where a wrench won’t go. The hex should have been near the top of the lever, or the lever should have had a T-handle to allow me to twist it. Stupid, stupid engineering.

I had to hold the pan up with one hand and turn the hex–literally–one tenth of a turn at a time. I was amazed. When I finally got it off, I coated it liberally with anti-seize. My plan is to weld a T-handle or a nut to the upper part, so it will come off quickly in the future. Alternatively, I can store the upper part of the lever in a drawer and go get it when I need to shift. I never really need to shift it. There are only two settings, and once you’re on the right one for your property, you can leave it there nearly all the time.

The seat kill switch is a very bad idea. The hope is that if you fall off the tractor, it will stop running. Problem: if you’re doing a job that requires you to get on and off a lot, you have to start the tractor over and over. It’s unbearable, and it can’t be good for the starter or battery.

The obvious solution is a pop-out kill switch on a lanyard. Boaters use these. The lanyard attaches to your wrist. When you fall off your boat, the lanyard pulls a stopper out of the switch, and the motor dies.

Right now, I have the kill switch disabled. I may add a switch to the tractor to bypass it on demand. I definitely need a quick disconnect in the cable.

My switch has a fat cable with a fat connector on the end, and to remove the pan, you have to stuff the connector through a grommeted hole in the steel. This is not bad when you’re doing it from above and have lots of room to work. When you have to shove it back in from below, you have to hold the pan up with one hand and shove with the other. The pan is very heavy. Very unpleasant.

I don’t know why my tractor has taillights. I know some people work around DWI’s by driving their lawnmowers on the road to get beer, but I have no reason to do that, and I’m pretty sure it would not be street legal anyway. The lamps on my tractor sit in rubber sockets that have to be jammed through holes in the seat pan. Very, very difficult. An intelligent engineer would have used twist-lock sockets, but this is John Deere we are talking about, so brute force is required.

I had to wrestle with each lamp for about 10 minutes to get it back in, and I used grease. Hello, John Deere! Have you heard of couplers? Put one on each wire, and you don’t have to pull the lamps. A 20-minute job becomes a 15-second job.

I apologize for bringing intelligence into the discussion.

The seat and pan must weigh 60 pounds. Lifting the assembly is like lifting an ironing board with a fat kid sitting on the far end. I really need to install my hoist in the workshop. I can’t blame John Deere for my lack of preparation. But I want to.

Very long story short: I got it done. Now I need to install the hoist and fix the tractor so it’s easier to take apart.

As for the Kubota, I was intimidated. I didn’t even know which fitting was leaking, and I knew it was coming from a block of fittings situated too close together for the application of wrenches. I figured I would have to take everything apart.

I will not say I got some ideas. I will say they came to me, presumably from God. I realized I needed to clean the block so I could see where the oil was coming out. I blasted it with a hose and wiped off as much oil and crud as I could, and then I parked the tractor over a sheet of newspaper. The next day, there was maybe an ounce of oil on the paper. I couldn’t tell where it had landed, but I could see oil under one fitting, so I figured I knew where the problem was. I had a female coupler facing up, and it was leaking from below, where it threaded into the tractor.

Of course, the fitting did not have a hex on it that would allow the use of a flare crowfoot wrench. It was round, with two flats. Incredibly stupid. I could not use a crowfoot wrench, and if I managed to get an open-end wrench on the flats, I would have fewer opportunities to get a grip on it. When you have a hex, there is a workable wrench position every 60 degrees. With two flats, not so much.

Looking at the fitting, I saw that someone from the MIT/NASA tractor team had already gouged it up with a pipe wrench or something, so I realized it didn’t matter what I did to it. I put Vise Grips on it, and it came out. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I applied Ace Hardware pipe dope to the threads, and I put it back in. I put paper under the tractor and waited a day. When I checked, it appeared that maybe one drop of oil had come out. That was an improvement.

For the heck of it, I tried to get a wrench on it, and it turned out to be in just the right position for me to do so. I was able to tighten it considerably. The leaking decreased even more. I’m not sure it’s leaking at all. I could be seeing drops from oil I was not able to clean off the tractor at the beginning.

I am told that there is a limit to how much you can improve such a leak by tightening the coupler. The answer, if there is one, is to apply more dope. I plan to try that, but in any case, I am done refilling my tractors with oil every week.

Whew.

The E-Z-GO needs work. It burns oil. The answer is a rebuild kit. Looks like I’m going to spend about $400, but I can do the work myself. That will be a relief.

The tractor problems hung over my head for a long time. I’m very grateful to get them over with.

Every day, I’m knocking off nagging jobs that stole my peace. I’m getting my business in order. It’s wonderful to have so much success in my life.

God gave me promises a few years back. He said things like, “I am ending frustration in your life.” I also got words saying the curses on my life were gone. I wondered why things weren’t perfect, after hearing those things.

I have realized that a life is like an oil tanker. When you make a steering correction on a huge ship, it doesn’t turn instantly. It takes a while to correct. If God tells you you have a blessing, or that a curse is gone, don’t be discouraged because it takes a while for you to see the result.

When you put fertilizer on a plant, you don’t stand over it waiting for it to turn green and grow.

I moved a lot of junk in the workshop. I also took the leaf blowers and cleaned it out. I realized I needed more tool storage. My woodworking stuff is everywhere. I looked around and prayed for guidance, and I bought a Husky vertical cabinet. It’s very nice. I looked at a lot of options, and Husky turned out to be the best. It’s almost 6 feet tall. It has 4 shelves, and each one holds 150 pounds. It has pegboard on the insides of the doors. The base is threaded so you can put wheels on it (ordered).

People say not to put wheels on tall cabinets, and I get it. Here is my response: I refuse to lift this thing every time I need to move it or clean behind it, and believe it or not, cabinets with feet can also fall when you move them. I don’t know what kind of final shop configuration I’m going to have, and I insist on being able to move the cabinet. It has a safety strap to fasten it to walls, so it will only be free to fall when I’m moving it, and I’m intelligent enough to roll it a few feet without killing anyone.

The vertical configuration is a blessing because it takes up so little floor space.

I’m planning on getting a big pedestal fan. I already have one picked out. The shop has a tiny ceiling fan, but its only real effect is to amuse. It’s like 12 feet up. You might be able to feel something if you stood directly under it, but basically, it’s useless. A pedestal fan will be very helpful when I’m trying to get things done in hot weather.

Last night, I came up with a plan for a wooden cart. I want to put my belt grinders on one, but I don’t want to spend a fortune on a storebought cart. I have them on a Northern Tool structural foam cart which will supposedly hold over 250 pounds per shelf, and the cart is slowly bending. Northern’s specs are way off.

I’ve seen people build plywood carts on Youtube. Not impressed. Lots of splinters, hard to cut on table saws, and plywood is expensive. For some reason, people here use hardwood (maybe oak) for fencing, and I have a bunch of boards lying around. I have a jointer, a planer, and some saws. I plan to clean up some boards and put a cart together using glue. As long as you glue long grain to long grain, glue joints are at least as strong as wood itself, so there is nothing to be afraid of. You can add a few screws as backup, in case a joint pops, but it shouldn’t happen. I don’t know why people are so afraid to use glue. Ignorance, probably.

I also ordered parts for my table saw’s base. When I moved, the moving company damaged some things, and the base was one of them. Of course, being a Miami businessman, the owner of the company failed to comply when I asked for help in filing a claim.

I believe they dragged the saw on concrete and asphalt. The base has 4 plastic feet, and they were all ruined. They also managed to break a spring in a part called a floor lock assembly. Because of this, the saw has been very hard to move, so I’ve used it as a place to pile junk (which will soon be in the new cabinet). In a few days, the new parts will arrive, and I’ll be able to use the saw again. If I get my generator fixed. I still don’t have 220 in the shop, and my generator is surging because of ethanol-scam gas. Thanks to God, I have the correct tools and knowledge to fix the carburetor.

Lots of good things are happening. My world is opening up, and stress is going away.

I keep trying to prophesy and interpret tongues, and I keep getting the same basic messages: “Don’t worry.” “I will never leave you.” “I am beside you.” I also got, “Your enemies will be cut down before you like wheat before the scythe.” If I understand him correctly, God has said he will teach me how to stop worrying. I need that. I can’t do it all by myself.

I have been troubled because of the overwhelmingly positive tone of the things I’ve heard. False prophets are known for being overly positive and refusing to correct. My last church had a “house prophet” (whom I will call Ernesto) who always told us it would rain puppies and silver dollars, and he was wrong, wrong, wrong over and over. No one ever called him on it, so the church loved lies and invited more deception.

He was honored with a permanent front row seat, even though he was often late to church, and the pastor used to hand him the mike and let him go off for 20 minutes. He would yell as hard as he could, predicting great things, and his predictions failed. Having Ernesto was much worse than having no prophet at all, because he led us into problems.

Actually, we had no prophet at all. At least no recognized prophet people listened to.

I don’t want to have the same problem.

Ernesto lost his job, and his family has serious financial problems. I found that out recently. I don’t know if he ever dropped his defenses and admitted he was not a prophet. Surely that would help.

Telling him would not have helped. I guarantee you that.

A false prophet is like a guy who goes around pulling stop signs out of the ground. Very dangerous. Not to be taken lightly. False prophets destroy lives. What they do is not okay, and it’s not something to be ignored or tolerated. It has to be exposed. The fact that a false prophet means well doesn’t matter.

Ernesto was a problem, because he had pride. He spoke to people with a sort of paternal tone, as though he had authority and knowledge, but he was making things up, and he didn’t hear from God. He didn’t have in-your-face, abrasive pride, but that doesn’t matter. Lots of nice, likable guys are proud and deluded.

Today God finally gave me something negative. He said something bad was going to happen, and I wouldn’t like it. I was highly disturbed. Suddenly the positive words looked a lot better to me. I kept questioning him, and if I have things right, I’m not the person the bad thing will happen to. I know a couple of people who have some spiritual kinks in their relationship, and I believe they are going to have a problem. They already are: medical issues that haven’t responded to treatment.

I am relieved because I’m not headed for a problem, but I don’t want people I care about to have problems, either. But I can see why it’s happening. They haven’t been listening as well as they should have. People worthy of respect have commented on it. When you stop your ears, you invite harder lessons. The more you know about God, the more dangerous it is to reject correction.

Part of me hopes I’m mistaken, but on the other hand, I don’t want to learn that my efforts to hear from God have failed.

It’s not like I’m causing the problem. I have to remember that. I hear what I hear. If I pick up the paper, and it says there was a nuclear accident in Burma, and I repeat the story, I’m not the one who caused the accident.

It has to be a good thing. The purpose of chastisement is to help and correct. God told a friend of mine that whether something was a punishment or a lesson depended on how it was received.

I have prayed for God to give them every possible help to come around and avoid the chastisement.

We will see what happens. Future events and other types of confirmation (or refutation) will tell me whether I heard from God. I’m not going to buy myself a T-shirt that says “Prophet of God,” and I’m not going to do Youtube videos where I go around telling fortunes, like some “prophets” do.

Jesus said to take the worst seat at the feast and wait to be called to a better one. I know a lot of people who took the best seats and defended their right to them and then got pitched into the street. I’m lucky I’ve never had a position of honor in a church. I was an armorbearer, which is one step up from a janitor, and I was a deacon, which meant absolutely nothing and gave me no authority at all, so I don’t have to worry about being flattered and put to sleep by pastors. It’s hard to fall when no one has ever lifted you up.

I have a lot of concerns about pride. I often feel like I have figured out things about the kingdom of heaven, even though it’s very obvious that I could not figure them out alone. It’s very obvious that God handed me whatever I know. I have to be careful not to be scornful of other people who are wrong about various things. I’m no better than any of them.

I should go buy that fan. October is a long way off.

Avenatti Spectacle Still Waxing

I don’t read or watch the news any more, but I can’t seem to avoid seeing little bits of it. The most amazing phenomenon I am currently aware of: the self-inflicted implosion of Michael Avenatti.

I used to think he was just brash and obnoxious. Now I think he’s mentally ill and probably controlled by demons. No human being could be stupid enough to do the things he has done, without supernatural help.

Today I read that he is accused of stealing $300,000 from Stormy Daniels. People call her a porn star; I consider her a prostitute. I don’t think you can be a star and be in porn; porn is for people who didn’t make it when they set out to be real stars. To me, she’s a prostitute, because she has sex for money. The fact that she does it on camera doesn’t make a difference to me. It’s strange that the law doesn’t see porn actors as prostitutes. If you robbed a bank while making a movie, in the eyes of the law, you’d be guilty of robbery.

Anyway, the prosecutor who is handling the case says Avenatti took $300,000 that belonged to Daniels and spent it on his own expenses, including personal expenses.

Bar associations blow off a lot of complaints, but there are some things they take very seriously, and messing with a client’s money is at the top of the list. If Avenatti is found guilty, he can forget about practicing law anywhere, ever again. He’ll probably do prison time.

I know a lawyer who was convicted of stealing about $100,000 from clients. He got 10 years, and in Florida, “10 years” means at least 8.5. He was hoping for some kind of deal to keep him out of prison. No dice. Judges don’t like crooked lawyers. You can kill someone in a bar fight and get less time.

It didn’t help that he didn’t seem to take the case seriously. At a hearing, the judge asked him how far he had gotten in school, and he said, “nineteenth grade.” When a judge holds your future in his hands, you want him to understand that you are deeply ashamed and that there is nothing you will not do to make him happy.

I decided to look at Avenatti’s famous, blustery Twitter account, to see if he had toned his act down after being charged with so many crimes. I learned that he had made his account private. More irrational behavior. Avenatti is a rabid self-promoter, and that’s why he uses Twitter, so why limit the audience? Some of his crazy tweets still leak out, and it appears that a high risk of prison time has done nothing to abate his rage.

What happened to this guy? He was first in his class at a top law school, and now he acts like he’s on bath salts.

I think he’s going to be put away. He has been charged with multiple crimes, and he is not acting like a defendant who feels remorse. Prosecutors don’t file charges they don’t think they can prove, and given the sheer volume of Avenatti’s alleged offenses, something is likely to stick.

I understand self-destruction, because I’ve been guilty of it, but I don’t understand pouring gas on the fire after it starts.

One of my former pastors was exposed as a molester. The victim’s mother told him that if he quit preaching, she wouldn’t try to have him prosecuted. He confessed to the church (after being exposed on Facebook) and stepped down. Then he changed his mind and went back to work. Not long after that, the cops showed up, and now he’s doing three years. Ordinarily, the thing that would amaze me most was that he would do what he did, to a six-year-old. Under the circumstances, however, the thing that stands out to me is that he remained defiant when he knew what would happen.

Avenatti reminds me of him.

When things don’t make sense, look for a supernatural cause. People are getting crazier. We’re just seeing the sharp end of the nail. It’s going to get much, much worse.

I wonder what insane things I would have done, and how much trouble I would have gotten in, had I not decided to let God change me.

I am trying to avoid pride and self-righteousness, so I will pray for Avenatti (again). One has to wonder if prison will sober him up. My guess is that it won’t. Some people are so pride, they are immune to correction.