Sudden Weight Loss Helps me Prepare

Yesterday, I fired up my action camera and filmed my dad during our daily visit. I’m glad I did, because I don’t know how many more conversations I’ll have with him.

My family is dysfunctional, so we have very few photos, movies, and videos compared to normal American families. I believe the last time my dad appeared in a home video was in about 1991. He was steering his yacht, and his sister was filming. He gave her the finger.

His sister’s family was also dysfunctional, but they were high-functioning, so none of them are felons or drug addicts, and they all married. My aunt beat her stepdaughter regularly, but she shot a lot of family photos and videos.

My camera is a 4K model. I don’t see the point. If I shot a 30-minute video in 4K, I would have to buy a new hard drive just to hold it. I filmed my dad in 1080p, and it was still way more detailed than it needed to be. You don’t really want to capture everything when you film old people. I think I’m going to shoot in 480p from now on. It’s more than adequate.

I asked him a few things about his family. I will never get to know these people the way I should have when I was young, and I have no one to pass the information on to, but I figured I might as well learn a few things while there was still time. Because dementia erases older memories last, he can still recall a lot about his relatives.

I wanted to prove my dad had changed. That’s the main reason why I filmed him. No one who knows him will believe the things I say about him unless they see video. He kept telling me how great I was and so forth, and he talked about Christianity and heaven. He is a new person. I had to document it.

Today, two interesting things happened. First, his cremation urn arrived via UPS. Second, I found out he had lost 28 pounds.

I ordered the urn from Amazon a couple of days ago. I did not want to find myself struggling to tie up loose ends after his death. I knew it would be smart to have it on hand in advance. Imagine having someone cremated and having to wait several days for the urn.

The Amazon ad calls it an urn, but it’s really a box. It’s nearly cubic, and the sides are cherry veneer. It looks perfect. I’m surprised to see how nice it is, given the low cost. It certainly looks better than the one my aunt got in 2014. It looked exactly like a beer cooler. That’s kind of appropriate, since my uncle used to make her get up to get him beer. She tore her finger open on a rocking boat in a heavy sea, and while we were headed for shore to get it stitched up, he told her to get him a Coors Light.

The urn makes me a little uncomfortable. I’ll have to decide where to store it. I don’t want to see it every day.

Now for the weight loss. My dad has been losing weight slowly for the past several years. Between our move in 2017 and December of 2018, he went from a pretty consistent 217 to 210. To most people, that wouldn’t mean much, but he was more sedentary than ever, and he ate a lot of ice cream, so he should have gained weight.

Today he weighed 182 pounds. Prior to this, I had never known him to be under 185. Back in the Seventies, he went on a diet and got down to 185. I remember, because it was a big deal to him.

Oddly, until he was weighed today, I didn’t realize he had lost weight. He still looks fairly heavy. He still has a spare tire. I don’t know what’s happening. I think he dropped a lot of muscle.

The cardiologist told me the weight loss could be an end-of-life phenomenon resulting from multiple illnesses, which she called “co-morbidities.” He has congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation as well as dementia.

I did some Googling, and I came up with this term: “cachexia.” It means unintentional weight loss coupled with disease, more or less. It can be caused by a lack of appetite, but it also describes a condition in which you eat normally and still waste. It means your body doesn’t process food correctly any more; it stops rebuilding itself.

My dad’s appetite is fine. It’s not what it was 10 years ago (excessive), but he eats whatever they put on his plate. That means something else is happening.

It’s not cancer. When cancer patients lose weight, it’s because they can’t stand to eat.

The Internet says there is a cachexia variant called “cardiac cachexia.” People with congestive heart failure get it. Heart failure causes fluid to accumulate in the body, and this prevents nutrients from being absorbed. The fluid can cause swelling which masks the wasting.

Maybe that’s what’s happening.

This part of my dad’s life has been very turbulent for me. Things are changing quickly all the time. It’s not possible to assume a stance and hold it.

God has changed my dad’s personality tremendously over a period of a couple of weeks. My dad is giving me things I have been wishing for all my life. How can I want this new person to leave? On the other hand, my grief renews itself many times every day. I get reminders all the time, telling me he’s nearly gone. I take down the little notes I put up to help him remember things. I find and clean up little messes he made, for the very last time. I throw out things I know he’ll never use again.

Today I ordered a normal toilet seat for the master bath, to replace the elevated seat I installed a few weeks ago. I refuse to call it “my father’s bathroom.” I can’t allow myself to hold on like that.

I love my father, and I don’t want him to go, especially when we’re praying together and we’ve been delivered from frustration and anger, but I can’t live in this state for the rest of my life.

If my dad is in the final weeks, it’s all right. It’s not a crisis to be confronted and defeated. I feel like I should find him new doctors and come up with a strategy to make him gain weight and regain clarity, but then after my mother died, I kept feeling we should go get the body, revive her, and try something new. I didn’t seriously believe we should do that, but I had the feeling. It kept coming back for months after she was gone. I have an irrational resistance to giving up, and I know it’s irrational. There is nothing anyone can do.

It’s astounding to get so much help from God during this time. This could have gone much worse. I thought my dad would straight-arm God until the last minute, and I expected to suffer the whole time. I thought he would wait until he was breathing his last to repent. It has been nothing like that. We get together and talk about our love for each other, and we pray as a family. When my dad goes, I won’t have any lingering resentment to subdue. I will be as satisfied as a man with a father like mine can be.

My dad could have continued casting his burdens on me instead of God, but that has not happened. He has become gracious. How many adults can say that about their difficult parents? What a gift I’ve been given.

After he goes, I’ll have video to prove my story is true. Oral testimony is fine, but video is much more powerful.

I hope the end isn’t needlessly protracted. I don’t want to sit by his bed for three weeks, waiting for the familiar sound that says it’s over. He would be better off going in his sleep. I don’t have to be there to see it. I’ll catch up with him later.

My mother must be even happier than I am about his salvation. He’s leaving me in a cursed world, but she’s about to meet him again in heaven, and boy, is he improved.

I wish I could explain these things to him now, so he could have some understanding of what’s going on. It doesn’t matter, though. When I catch up with him, we will know everything we need to know, without saying a word.

Testimony of Restoration

My dad the former atheist is now so enthusiastic about God, you could almost call him a Jesus freak.

I can’t get over the way God came through. For years he had been telling me my dad was going to be saved, but when I finally saw it, I was still amazed.

Every day, I go to the ALF with my Bluetooth speaker, and we spend an hour or so talking. Most of the time, we just go in circles. Occasionally, we stumble on a topic that leads to something resembling a conversation. He is aware that he repeats himself. I tell him not to worry about it. It’s a privilege to be in his company these days. I don’t care if our conversations aren’t structured.

I don’t know why it took him so long to realize he had dementia. I assume spirits blinded him to it. He used to say he was fine. Now he asks why he can’t remember certain things. For example, we’ll talk about someone, and he’ll say, “Why can’t I remember how she looks?”

He keeps telling me how wonderful I am. Yesterday he said he wanted to pour out everything he had for me. Because you don’t know him, you will never understand how strange it is for me to hear that. He was never a person who spoke that way. He was very selfish. He had a sense of complete entitlement. It was hard for him to say nice things to people, even when he felt like doing so.

I remind him that God is his real help and that I’m not that wonderful. Glory is a dangerous thing.

I believe God is blessing me through him. Parents are supposed to speak blessings over their children, in God’s name. Obviously, I never had that when I was young. Suddenly, my dad seems determined to make up for it. He probably blesses me 50 times during every session.

It’s a good thing I understand how blessings work, so I know what’s happening. I know it’s important, so I take it seriously and benefit from it.

Many, many people are cursed by their parents. I could sit here and make a list of friends whose parents have systematically poisoned them. Generally, people can’t fix this problem. We tolerate it and compensate for it as well as we can, and when our parents die, we feel relief, not just grief. I know that having my dad turn around and bless me before dying is a rare gift. Many people would give a great deal to have the same experience, but few will ever get it.

Last night while we talked, I thought about how good it was to have him bless me at last. I started to think about my age, though, and I thought about how much had been wasted. If I had to sum up my thoughts, I would write something like, “Sure, he’s blessing me now, but I’m so old I’m practically dead. What about all the decades of my life that have already been destroyed?”

I repented. God doesn’t change the past, and he doesn’t owe us anything anyway. Most of the problems I have had were self-inflicted, even if other people were against me. Anything good I receive is undeserved. What I am getting now is the best possible result given the way I lived my life.

My emotional state and my circumstances keep improving, and I believe my dad’s new personality is a big part of it.

I believe having a Christian home has changed my life a great deal. I get up early now and fire up the TV. I spend a long time praying in tongues in the living room, not upstairs in a remote family room. I sing hymns. I study the Bible. I watch people like Derek Prince. I believe that when your home is a church, as it should be, blessings follow, and that belief is consistent with my experience.

I also pray in the evenings. That’s very important. The second prayer session of the day is always much more powerful than the first. I have missed many evening prayer sessions, but now it’s much easier to sit down and do it, because there is no one here to interfere.

Yesterday I did something I had been dreaming of doing. I called the people at DirecTV and told them we were through. DirecTV is a nightmare, and my bill for bad TV, a bad phone, and slow Internet service was about $260 per month. I cut it down to slow Internet service. Maybe I should get rid of that and go with fixed wireless.

One of the reasons I’m glad DirecTV is gone is that it was full of porn. I don’t just mean the relatively weak porn we receive through networks like HBO. There were channels on the guide screen that featured titles like “Bad Dads Punish Naughty Meter Maids.” I’m making that title up, so don’t go looking for it. I did not like having those options appear on my TV, even though I did not use them. I suppose I can find dirty material on Hulu and Amazon Prime, but if so, I have not seen it yet, and I don’t plan to look.

Bringing wicked things into your home causes bad things to happen to the people who live there. It gives demons the right to move in with you. Try to cast them out, and God will side with them against you.

When I make changes like this, I feel like I’m standing on a pier, watching my dad’s boat pull out, but these things have to be done.

I also ordered a box for his ashes. I was thinking about it, and I realized I did not want to be stuck here waiting for an urn if he died unexpectedly. It will be disturbing to have it in the house, but it’s a necessity, so I’m taking care of it.

The box cost $48. His will suggests a simple wooden box, so that’s what I ordered. I don’t have the typical desire to spend big money on funerals, so I’m fine with his choice. My mother is not in the $7000 coffin we bought for her. My dad will never be in a box. Blowing money on funerals is something we do in order to feel good about ourselves. The dead could not care less, and neither could God.

Now I know I won’t be scrambling around looking for an urn. As Forrest Gump said, “One less thing to worry about.”

My dad has always been terrified of death, but that seems to be a thing of the past. Yesterday he asked me what I would do when he was gone. His middle-aged self would not have wanted to discuss that. He appears to know the end is coming soon, and he doesn’t worry about it. He keeps saying how wonderful it is to know he’ll be with my mother and me in heaven.

He worries about things happening to me, however. He does not want to face life without me.

His physical condition does not seem good. He seems yellowish and maybe a bit shrunken. On the other hand, he looks very peaceful. He hasn’t taken to the wheelchair the hospice people suggested. He can still walk with me to the place where we talk.

Whenever I bring up God, I can’t help bracing myself. I worry that he’s about to respond the way he used to, telling me Christianity is all fairy tales. It never happens. He is always receptive and in agreement.

The ALF has a courtyard, which is a sort of garden. It’s not much of a garden. It’s a rectangle of grass with shrubs and a few trees. It’s very peaceful, because almost no one uses it. We sit in rocking chairs in the shade.

This morning I thought about that. In Genesis, Adam spent the evenings in a garden, talking to his father. Then things went haywire. In my case, things started out badly, but now my dad and I sit and talk in a garden.

Like the Bible says, the end of a thing is better than the beginning.

I told my dad something I never thought I would tell him. I said he was a good father. That’s true. I didn’t say, “You WERE a good father.” That would be a lie. I was talking about his current status. Regardless of what he used to be, he’s a good father now. He prays with me. He encourages me. He wants to help me.

I have to stop thinking of him as a bad father. When people change for the better, you don’t get the benefit unless you start to see them for the improved beings they are. He’s a good father. What he used to be no longer means anything.

Christianity is all about redemption and change. It’s not just about forgiveness and putting up with people. When we change, we expect God to treat us like righteous people instead of dwelling on our former natures. I can’t expect that from him if I’m not willing to give others the same benefit.

I’m thinking of shooting video of my dad. He won’t be able to communicate forever. I want his testimony to be preserved, and I want people to be able to see what he was like before he died. Hearing about it is not the same as seeing it.

Our situation is far better than I had expected. I figured my dad would have a crisis which would put him on his deathbed, and he would repent right before he died. I expected him to be proud and difficult until that moment, and I expected the strain on me to continue until he passed. I never dreamed his whole personality would change, and that I would have time to benefit from it.

I take pictures of him. I don’t plan on posting them here. I think that’s an invasion of his privacy. I just want a record. I want to be able to look at the pictures later and remember the changed man he became. If I marry, or by some miracle I have kids, I want to be able to tell my wife and kids about him and prove what I say.

I wish I could be writing these things in 1980. That’s on us. There is no point in looking backward.

Christianity works. God really will help you. You just have to do things his way. You should be looking for knowledge all the time. The sooner you get started, the less you will have to regret.

God Never Asks us to do the Impossible

I love the way God tells all of his children the same things.

At some point after the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the church started splitting into denominations. Christians began disagreeing about doctrine. It proved we had already failed God. Jesus chose to be crucified so we could receive the Holy Spirit and learn directly from him, and we blew it. We went back to learning from men and evil spirits, and they sowed confusion.

The New Testament clearly teaches that we are supposed to learn from the Holy Spirit, not men. God uses people to steer us to him, and they help us with advice until we get up and running, but we were never supposed to rely on men heavily for doctrine. Men make mistakes, and mistakes accumulate over time. You start out with Abraham or Jesus, and years later, you end up enslaved by Satanic gossip like the Talmud or the catechism.

If we all learned from the Holy Spirit, we would never disagree for long. He would tell all of us the same things, and he would resolve any disputes. Instead, we go around saying we respect each other’s opinions. We have reached a state where we think tolerating other opinions is somehow equivalent to believing all opinions are valid. Of course, that’s stupidity. When two disagree, only one can be right.

God told me this: “Only the uninformed have opinions.”

God doesn’t have opinions. He has the truth, and the rest of us have opinions.

When you start praying in tongues for long periods every day, the Holy Spirit will teach you things, and you’ll find you disagree with your pastors from time to time. This is what happened to me. I was proven right every time, so I know it works. It didn’t happen because I was smart or righteous; it happened because God’s word flowed through me. God could have done it to a chicken or even a rock, so anyone who thinks they can’t have the same experience because I’m special is just making an excuse.

Back when my pastors at Trinity Church and then New Dawn Ministries were telling me all God wanted were my money and free labor, God told me something different. He told me I was full of demons and iniquities. He said I had to be cleansed so the Holy Spirit could rule. He told me to love correction and to get the demons cast out of me. The pastors labeled me an enemy and rejected me. Trinity continued to stumble along in failure, and New Dawn went bust. I kept getting new help from God.

Today I watched a Derek Prince video. It was probably filmed in the mid-1990’s, which was before I turned back to God. Derek Prince confirmed things God had told me independently.

It was actually a little funny. I’ll explain why.

The subject of his sermon was spiritual warfare on earth, and it was about demons. I can sum up his message. Demons are spirits (“persons without bodies,” according to Prince) that want to live in bodies. They want to indulge their cravings and promote poisonous ideas through us. Through sin, we invite them in, and then we have to cast them out. In order to cast them out, we need to turn against them, confess, and renounce and hate what they try to make us do.

Here’s why it was funny. He was teaching in John Hagee’s church, and Hagee was sitting near him while he taught, helpless to interrupt. While Hagee sat there before his church, Prince gave a long teaching about gluttony.

If you know who John Hagee is, you know he’s gluttonous. He probably weighs 300 pounds. He is also proud and angry, so he has a number of things he needs to work on. Prince essentially informed his whole church that he was serving demons. In fact, he said spirits of self-indulgence were the biggest demonic problem in the United States.

The Bible says people who are lovers of pleasure can’t enter the kingdom of God. This is one reason why I am no longer an enthusiastic cook.

I hope I don’t sound self-righteous when I criticize Hagee, but I have to deliver the truth. I am qualified to talk about other people’s pride, anger, and gluttony because I have openly discussed and confronted these problems in myself. I continue to confront them. Jesus told us to take the logs out of our own eyes SO WE COULD THEN TAKE THE DUST MOTES OUT OF OUR BROTHERS’ EYES. He didn’t say, “Take the log out of your own eye and then be silent when someone else has a dust mote. Just let him go blind.” Read it for yourself.

I am not perfected. I have plenty to work on. I’m just saying I am not a person who criticizes gluttony and pride while ignoring them in myself. I use God’s tools to defeat them every day.

Some people defend the obese and say you don’t have to be gluttonous to be one of them. That’s simply not true. If you have a one-in-a-billion genetic disorder that makes you gain weight on 1500 calories per day, you get a pass, but YOU DON’T HAVE THAT DISORDER, now do you? No. Why talk about it? According to God, excuses are lies, and liars don’t inherit the kingdom of heaven.

One of the clues that demons are at work is an inability to control a behavior. If you want to weigh 300 pounds, perhaps because you’re a professional sumo wrestler, and you can stop stuffing yourself whenever you want, you may not have a demon. If you hate yourself for overeating and wish you could stop, and you hate being unattractive, unhealthy, uncomfortable, and annoying because of your weight, but you can’t do anything to change, you probably have a demon, and you are definitely a glutton.

If you’re significantly heavier than you want to be, and your desired weight is reasonable, you are a glutton. If you truly had self-control, you would not be defeated, would you? Of course not. Not unless you desire to be defeated.

As Derek Prince said in his sermon, the Bible tells us the man who will not confess his sin will not prosper. If you can’t confess because of your pride, get used to your situation, because it will never change. You can try bariatric surgery, but it only works for about a year.

Prince mentioned the spirit of self-pity, which is something God told me about independently a while back. I learned I was gluttonous because I fed myself out of self-pity. I would say, “Today was a hard day, so I’m having ice cream.” The Bible says the Holy Spirit is our comforter, but I relied on food instead. Also, self-pity partners with self-condemnation, because both involve telling yourself you can never do any better.

I have been delivered from gluttony in the past, but it started to creep back to me, and self-pity and self-condemnation were the doors it used.

Right now, I’m 14 pounds above my desired weight. I am not happy about it. I do not accept it, and I do not defend it. These days, I take supernatural steps to defeat self-pity, along with gluttony, and I also try to think about what I eat. Having self-control only works when you remember to use it. Sometimes I’ll consider eating or drinking something, and then I’ll think, “I won’t lose weight if I do that.” Then I’ll pass it up. I’ll use God’s tools, and I won’t have cravings. If I forget, though, I’m likely to go ahead and overdo it a little. Modern America shoves things in front of you all the time, and if you lack presence of mind, you may eat before you think.

I don’t know if I seem harsh. How zealous you are depends on how much help you want. If you’re content to rot and live in weakness, you won’t confess much. If you want to improve a great deal, you will confess a great deal, and you will be unsparing when you talk about similar problems in other people, because you will also want the best for them.

I really want to improve, so I dig pretty deep. That offends people who prefer the sleep of denial. I can understand that, because I have loved that sleep myself.

Prince said someone had told him that if he ever needed to find out about the best restaurants in a city, he should ask a preacher. Wow! He didn’t even look back at Hagee. He made the crowd uncomfortable. They knew exactly who he was talking about.

You can imagine the problems that could exist in a church pastored by an obese man. Most of the fat people in the congregation would come in, take one look at him, and breathe a sigh of relief. They’d think, “He weighs twice what I do, so I must be okay.” It’s not okay. If you’re obese, you are probably ruled by a demon, and I guarantee you, it’s working on things other than making you fat. It has other projects which are even worse. It has demon friends, too, and God only knows that they’re doing to you.

While I’m discussing Hagee’s faults, I might as well talk about Prince. Today I realized he talked very little about his own failings. That’s a mistake. When you teach correction without discussing your own sins and recovery, you end up in pride, and God fights the proud.

I know he wasn’t afraid of discussing people’s sins per se, because he was perfectly willing to talk about the problems other people had. He was just harder on other people than he was on himself.

Prince said something else that bothered the crowd. He discussed coffee and said it was a drug. He said people should give it up for a day and see if they could stand it. If not, they were addicts.

Ouch.

Maybe 9 years ago, God told me this: “Caffeine destroys peace.” I then lost my ability to tolerate caffeine. I have to be very careful about drinking coffee, tea, and caffeine sodas like Coke. I have to limit the amount of chocolate I eat, because it contains stimulants.

God got on me about gluttony, and he got on me about the drug abuse of heavy caffeine consumption. Years later, I found out he had told Derek Prince the same things. If I had stuck with God 29 years ago, when I began to drift off, maybe I would have seen Prince speak, and I would have learned what I needed to know sooner. Prince used to live about 30 miles from me.

Maybe God himself would have told me sooner.

Prince showed me something else. He showed that a very popular (and familiar) scripture had been mistranslated. Here is the KJV: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love, power, and a sound mind.” Guess what it really says? “Love, power, and SELF-CONTROL.” Look up the Greek. It’s true.

Self-control and a sound mind are very different things.

The flesh is a stupid bag of unrefrigerated meat, and it has no more class than a goat or a hog. There is no limit to the filthiness of its desires. You can see this in the weird fetishes that flourish today among homosexuals. Once they give in to homosexuality, they open the door to things like sadism and playing with feces. These things are not rare, even though leftists like to cover them up. They are mainstream activities among homosexuals. When the flesh takes over, you might as well be a highly aroused cannibalistic rodent that rolls in its own manure all day.

The flesh is supposed to serve each of us as a beast of burden, like a horse. We are supposed to command it, and God is supposed to command us. Instead, the flesh commands us, and demons command the flesh. They must love watching us do the nutty things they come up with. They must laugh themselves sore when they see aroused people eating excrement or fornicating with animals.

Fornicating with animals is not a rare thing, especially (for some reason) among Latins. In some Latin American countries, sex with pigs and donkeys is considered normal. It’s big in Cuba; Cubans don’t like to talk about it, but it’s true. People will do amazing things once depravity sets in.

I recently saw an episode of The Grand Tour, the de facto continuation of the BBC’s Top Gear. The team was in Colombia, photographing animals for laughs, and they inadvertently got video of a normal-looking young man engaging with a donkey outdoors, in broad daylight. They asked the locals about it, and they weren’t ashamed of him at all. They said animals served as their first girlfriends. It was accepted in their culture.

People need to know what happens around them.

Either you control your flesh, or it controls you. There is no middle ground. If your flesh controls you, Satan controls you. The flesh can’t be independent.

Christians don’t think about these things. They’re too busy obeying rules, trying to get God to give them money, or trying to get quick forgiveness so they can run home and resume sinning.

Satan controls the flesh through demons, and demons often come in through things we think are innocent, such as astrology, yoga, fortune-telling, games of chance, gluttony, shacking up, gossip, body modification, and feminism. Avoiding sin and casting out demons are supposed to be cornerstones of the Christian walk, but how many of us are working at these things? If someone shows up at your church during a service and asks to have demons cast out, what will the pastor do? Most will have such a person escorted out so they can be informed that demons aren’t real.

We don’t pray in tongues, so we don’t have any idea what we’re supposed to believe. We are too busy fighting over bogus doctrines made up by ignorant men who dress like Liberace. If we were hearing from the Holy Spirit, we would understand the need to be cleansed and to empower the Holy Spirit to rule us unopposed.

It’s wonderful to get confirmation. The more correction I get, the better my life will be. It would have been better to receive it sooner, but I made my choice, so I have to live with it.

If you’re wondering how to exercise self-control, I can give you a helpful tip. First, you need to be baptized in water, properly. You can watch videos from The Last Reformation to find out how, and you can have another Christian do it. You don’t need a priest. Also, you should be praying in tongues every day. If you have been baptized with the Holy Spirit but can’t speak in tongues, you may have an unconfessed iniquity that allows spirits to block it, so ask God to help you confess and repent.

Once you get in touch with the Holy Spirit and receive faith, whenever you find yourself falling prey to a sinful urge, you can say, “I forbid my flesh, mind and spirit to think about [whatever it is] in the name of Jesus Christ the Lord. I am a son (or daughter) of God, and this is how things are supposed to work. May Jesus be glorified.” If you have faith, it will work.

There was a famous person (maybe Bertrand Russell) who used to play a game with his sister. They played the game when they were kids. It was simple. You see how long you can avoid thinking of a big white bear. I guess they didn’t have a lot of toys. It’s very hard to do for more than a second or two, because we do not naturally have that kind of self-control. If you use the authority of Jesus, however, you really can stop thinking about women’s bodies, things you wish you owned, anger, tempting food, or other things that are problematic. It works all the time. It’s amazing, because it’s completely impossible to do it on your own.

In 2 Timothy 1:7, we are told that God gives us a Spirit of love, power, and self-control. Now you know what it means. Run with it, and you can start conquering lust, gluttony, pride, anger, covetousness, and other things that rule you today. God doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean. It works. You just have to know how to do it.

Would it work for things like homosexuality and drug addiction? I don’t know, but if I had those problems, I would be trying it right now. I know I can’t fix iniquities with my own unaided mind.

God really is up there (and inside the Spirit-filled), and he is eager to tell us what we need to know. He is eager to give us power and deliverance. You just have to do things his way, instead of relying on people whose theological notions are really crippling gossip that flowed from Satan.

I hope this helps you even more than it has helped me. If you try it and get results, I would like to hear about it.

Police Name Al Jolson as Person of Interest

Who is surprised by this story? I’ve been expecting it for several days: Empire cast member “attackers” say he paid them to stage hate crime.

If you don’t know what happened, I’ll summarize. A gay black actor named Jussie Smollett called the cops and said he had been attacked by two white men yelling something about “MAGA.” He said they had placed a noose around his neck and thrown something which may have been bleach on him. When the cops showed up, he was still wearing the noose, because this is what you do when someone puts a repugnant, demeaning symbol around your neck.

He claimed he was attacked at 2 a.m. while buying a Subway sandwich on a night when the temperature was 20 below zero. Completely typical errand. Exactly the kind of weather that draws racists out for fresh air and mischief.

I read this story and knew immediately that there would be a follow-up revealing that the attack had been staged. Now two brothers from Nigeria have told police Smollett gave them money to put a noose on him and whitesplain gay slurs at him. You can see them in a photo, below.

Whitesplain…isn’t that a town in New York? In the name of Nathan Phillips, I demand that it be renamed Nativeamericansplain.

I assume posting the picture is fair use, since marveling at someone’s weirdness is legitimate journalistic practice. They totally look like they know what they’re doing.

“We are professional agitprop performance artists. Do not try this at home.”

Here is my tip for black SJW’s who want to slander white conservatives with false accusations: lay off the nooses. Real white racists don’t use nooses now. The noose preoccupation is a black thing. When you see a noose, you can pretty well count on the story turning out to be a hoax.

Real white racists don’t put nooses on people unless they intend to hang them, and hanging is long out of style. If they decide to target you, they will simply beat you up, run over you with their monster trucks, or shoot you. If you really want to frame Trump supporters, the best way is to shoot yourself with an AR-15 from 20 yards away while threatening to impose higher tariffs on Chinese goods.

Smollett makes me wonder if there is any need for white racists to exist. He and his black accomplices seem to be doing the work of white racists very well on their own. In fact, they shamed white racists by committing a hate crime white racists hadn’t even thought of yet.

Maybe white racists who read the story will feel unwanted, and they’ll be motivated to take up other hobbies.

Maybe Smollett could open a business committing hate crimes for pay. They could have a phone app, like Uber; in fact, it’s too bad that name is taken.

Say a white supremacist who is too lazy or afraid to drive to a black neighborhood wants to commit a hate crime. He could use the app to hire Smollett and his friends to do it for him, and he could even pay for it with Paypal. What a time saver. And it would be green, since it would save the racist the trouble of driving.

Green white hate crime by proxy. I can’t believe I published this idea without patenting it first. Someone else will be all over this, and I won’t get a dime. A coin which has a white man’s face on it, by the way. Down with white coin privilege.

George Washington had slaves, and he’s on the quarter. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and he’s on the penny. Am I getting too woke for you honkies?

Oh, yes. I can say the H-word. I own my whiteness. I used to lease, but I decided to own so I could deduct the depreciation.

What point is there in behaving well when your enemies will accuse you of crimes anyway? Okay, I suppose the point is to avoid being an evil loser, but still. One of the fundamental principles of human interaction is that you have to reward people for good behavior, and a corollary is that you don’t punish them for bad things they haven’t done. Smollett isn’t fighting racist crime. He’s encouraging it by punishing an entire class of people who haven’t done anything to him. When you frame people, you reduce their motivation for refraining from doing the types of things of which you have accused them.

There was definitely a racist crime committed on the fateful night of the Subway noose. It was committed by Jussie Smollett and two Nigerians. Will leftists be angry at him? Probably not. They will probably continue to insist he’s telling the truth, because MAGA.

“We also do Milli Vanilli covers at bar mitzvahs.”

The whole affair is ridiculous, but it serves to remind Christians that persecution is increasing in America. “MAGA” is associated with white people, conservatism, and Christianity, in a loose and probably irrational way. Somewhere deep in his soul, Smollett probably felt he was striking a blow at the white Christian machine, which stirs rage within the leftist soul but doesn’t actually exist.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re guilty. We are approved targets because of who we are, not what we do.

I had a killer caption for this photo, but I forgot it.

Maybe Smollett’s friends are guilty of cultural appropriation. I’m not sure. If you pretend to be a white racist while black, is it a form of blackface? Also, is there a Rachel Dolezal joke in here which I’m too tired to discern? Hey…Rachel…”racial”…WOKE!

What if Smollett had paid Racial Dolezal to attack him, and the public fell for it, but he did it before she got exposed as a Caucasian? Would it have become a legitimate hate crime after the reveal? I’m not sure. And could she have been charged with blackface retroactively?

I know what we need. We need a white man who made a career of pretending to be black to answer the question. I assume Shaun King will pipe up. If not him, then maybe Pat Boone.

Or Bryant Gumbel.

Pat Boone

It’s late. This world is too crazy for me.

“We’ll Put the Bendpak Over by the Breakfast Nook”

I am having a man moment. I am asking myself if there is any reason why I should not move my TIG welder to the living room.

I got a TIG early in 2017, and then we moved north. I was terrible at TIGing when we left. I didn’t get a lot of time to practice. My welder has been in my workshop ever since. It has been idle.

I planned to get 240V service installed, and I figured I would TIG once I got it hooked up. The electrician I contacted for an estimate flaked out repeatedly, so nothing has been done.

The other day, I was surfing and learning about TIG, and I realized my welder doesn’t require 240V service.

One of the welder’s selling points is its ability to work on 120V power. I discounted that, because I assumed it would only weld very thin metal. I looked into it, and I was wrong. I can weld 1/8″ metal, which is what I was welding back in 2017. Now that I think about it, welding very thin metal would be a good strategy, because it would be easier to prepare for welding, it would be cheaper, and it would require more skill. If I can weld thin metal, I can weld thick metal. If I learn on thick metal, I will still struggle with thin metal until I get used to it.

I thought about this, and then I made the next jump of logic. If I can weld on 120 in the workshop, I can also do it in the living room. With air conditioning and a big TV. Close to the fridge.

I have some concerns about damaging the hardwood floors, but TIG is not very messy. MIG throws crap around, but TIG is neater. I have never had molten metal leave a workpiece.

This could work. I’d have to move the birds to another room when I welded, in order to protect their eyes, but I could make it happen.

You know what? I’m a single man. I could move LOTS of my tools into the main living area. Maybe my ideas about getting real furniture were stupid. I have no woman to stomp around, giving me a hard time. What am I waiting for?

In other news, my dad and I shared a great experience today. The Veterans of Foreign Wars like to go around pinning medals on veterans in assisted living, and my dad’s hospice works with them. Today three people showed up at my dad’s ALF and held a pinning ceremony. They played the national anthem and God Bless America. We recited the pledge of allegiance. They gave him a certificate and a stand with three flags (American, Florida, Army).

The guy who ran things is a marine. He served in the 1960’s. His wife came too, but she forgot some things, so we had to wait while she went to get them. That gave us time to talk. My dad had a surprising conversation during that time. He and the marine had been to a lot of the same places, and because my dad’s military experience took place so long ago, he still remembered a lot of it well enough to be able to discuss it. They talked about Nevada and San Francisco. My dad was in the army band, and he served in San Francisco with Tony Bennett and Chet Baker.

It was shocking to see my dad speak so lucidly. He wasn’t completely on top of things, but he didn’t sound completely demented, the way he usually does. I didn’t know what to make of it.

My dad is not the same man he was a year ago. He got very emotional during the ceremony. He kept saying he didn’t deserve it. He talked about how moved he was. He kept telling us how much he loved America. I wondered what our visitors would have thought, had they known him when he was young. God has done wonders in my dad over the last couple of months. I hardly know him.

They’re going to have a bigger ceremony with more honorees soon, and my dad will get to enjoy being honored all over again.

The marine told us this county has the nation’s biggest military population, apart from counties that contain military installations. So apparently, Marion County is one of the world’s great military powers. We should invade somebody.

I have to think about the welder idea. It would be pretty hilarious, TIG welding in front of the TV.

Raconteur, Bon Vivant, Lover of Whale Bacon

I made a little joke yesterday, and it did not work out well.

I was writing about the way deaths seem to surround me right now. My dad is dying a little bit at a time. I just learned of the deaths of my second cousin and his mother. To make things worse, I found out a guy I knew from an Internet forum had died. I wrote this: “If most people I know could just remain alive through the end of this week, I would consider it a big favor.”

A comment then appeared, informing me that Steve Krodman, AKA Elisson, had died. It happened on January 11.

I think that’s sufficient for now. I will be just fine if I don’t get any more news of death during the coming week.

Elisson had several blogs. One was called Blog d’Elisson. Another was called Lost in the Cheese Aisle. He wrote well. He was funny. He was a very likable guy.

Back when I had an Internet radio show, Elisson appeared as a guest. He told me about the time he ate whale bacon. He was visiting Japan, and he found out they made bacon from whale meat, so he tried it. That was classic Elisson. It’s hard to think of another blogger who would come up with that story.

I looked at Lost in the Cheese Aisle (are there really stores with cheese aisles?), and I learned that Elisson had ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a fast-acting variant. In his last entry (dictated), dated December 31, 2018, he said he got his diagnosis in March of last year, so he only lasted something like 9 months. He said he was unable to walk. He spent his time in a wheelchair and in bed, and he required oxygen.

I am not on his blogroll now. I don’t know if that means anything. I don’t recall any flaps between us. Of course, I have become a big proponent of Spirit-led Christianity, and he was Jewish, so maybe he felt I had gone off the deep end. It doesn’t matter to me; I thought he was a great guy. I can certainly understand how my new outlook on life would turn people off. I expect it.

I see he quoted me in his sidebar, with a link. Maybe he had not given up on me.

I wish I could say I think he’s in a happier place, but I can’t. I am very disturbed when I think about it.

I feel like I should hang a sign, like those workplace accident signs. “Nobody I know has died in __ days.”

Life gets serious after you get deep into middle age. When you’re young, you count on people in your age group being around if you want to contact them. Once you hit 50, every time you look someone up, you know you might get an unpleasant surprise.

I have a friend in Miami who is a little older than I am. Smokes like a stove. Smoking doesn’t just cause cancer. It causes COPD, heart attacks, and strokes. It can cause dementia. When I think about him, I get a little concerned. He is determined not to quit, though.

I know of three people from my law school who have died already, and there are probably more. Most people I went to school with were younger than I am.

Death is real, and it’s not far off at all. It’s always waiting to dash out and retrieve, like a ball boy at a tennis match. Or a turkey buzzard beside a busy highway.

When I think about mortality, it helps me adjust to giving my life to Jesus. I’m not giving him much. Barring a surprising outcome, I am much closer to death than I am to my high school graduation, which seems recent in my mind. The persecution I put up with here won’t last long, even if it starts in earnest today. People who are against God can attack me while I live, but they can’t keep me alive past my appointed date. Science has not reached the point where we can put death off indefinitely in order to torment people.

Hell is different, however. The people who end up there will be tormented forever because they won’t be able to die.

On a related note, I think we are working way too hard to extend life. The more I visit my dad in memory care, the more convinced I am. The place is full of people who simply lived too long. Pumping people full of statins, blood thinners, and insulin after their brains stop working is not a kindness. It’s like embalming the living so we can have viewings that last decades.

If we had real confidence in the afterlife and salvation, we would not claw and scratch to stay in this disappointing, unfulfilling world.

These days my dad talks a lot about how nice it will be to be with my mother again.

Steve Krodman was only 66. I wish he had been able to remain here considerably longer, and of course, I wish he had managed to get to know his Messiah. I wish I had known what was going on. At least I could have prayed for him.

For I am Sick of Love

I visited my dad at the ALF again yesterday. Things went very well. He keeps surprising me.

When he first moved out, he was very insistent on trying to find ways to work it out so he could come home to live. On one occasion, at his first ALF, I had to walk off and leave while he was trying to chase me out. It was disturbing. I had tried to find a place where he would be content, and it didn’t seem to be working out.

He used to get upset when I said I was leaving. He would start up again, trying to convince me we should live together.

As of this week, he no longer becomes agitated when I talk of leaving. He says things like, “I completely understand that you have things to do.” That’s a tremendous blessing. I don’t want to have to leave while he’s still fighting it.

Speaking of blessings, he keeps saying good things about me. He tells me I’m a success. He says I’m the best son imaginable. He even tells me I’m good-looking. I used to let this stuff blow by me, but I started thinking about the power of a father’s blessing, and now I try to receive it as such. I watched Derek Prince teach about the power of the things fathers say to their kids, and it reminded me that I shouldn’t turn my nose up. When I was a kid, both of my parents said a lot of things that were not blessings. They said I was lazy, selfish, fat, and so on, and they sometimes despaired of my prospects to amount to anything. If I had to take that, I might as well accept the blessings.

Occasionally, my dad will exclaim, “I love you!” He says it as if he can’t contain it. He says it as if he is concerned that I might not believe it.

I have thought a lot about the difference between 2019 Dad and, say, 1970 Dad, who was so unpleasant my sister and I used to urge my mother to get a divorce. Yesterday I realized I hadn’t thought enough about how different he is from 2018 Dad. I have been feeling guilty because I used to get mad at him and even avoid spending time with him. To be angry with 2019 Dad would not make sense because he is so much nicer to be around, and I look forward to visiting him. Last year, however, he was not like this. He was often selfish. He thought very little about my welfare and the very serious problems I endured because I had to care for him. He made things difficult when my friends visited. Sometimes he cursed at me when I was trying to help him or explain things to him. In retrospect, I can’t feel too bad about limiting my exposure to him. No one could tolerate it without long breaks.

I got angry at him from time to time, but I also used my supernatural tools to fight and get rid of anger. I never accepted it or approved of it. I was not that ignorant.

Maybe I didn’t do so bad. I didn’t have the benefit of a real baptism, and I was dealing with someone who was controlled by spirits that devoted a great deal of their time to pushing my buttons and trying to make me miserable. I had no help from other people, apart from prayer.

Now I wonder…what would he do if I brought him home and hired a CNA? Would his new self persist, or, with the threat of assisted living removed, would he revert? It seems like idle speculation, though, because I can’t make it work. Even now, with him 7 miles away, looking after him is a pretty big burden, and if he were here, I would not be able to cope with my other obligations.

I wish I could make it work.

I believe the staff at the ALF likes him. That’s a good thing. They don’t like all of their charges. There is a lady named Emma who wanders around making trouble. She takes food from other people’s plates, for example. She offends the other patients, and there are quarrels. I saw one of the attendants grab her and drag her away from another resident. The attendant was very angry. Not appropriate, but I suppose she has dealt with this dozens of times. She had to wrestle her across the room, and while she was doing it, she started yelling, “DON’T START TO FALL, EMMA!” Emma slowly dropped to the floor and refused to move. The attendant asked for help picking her up. Emma let out loud, strident shrieks, like a toddler throwing a tantrum at Walmart. She had to be dragged a few feet, or at least the attendant saw it that way.

I thought the attendant was a little rough with her, but I can’t solve everyone’s problems, so I did not insert myself in the situation. I am also reluctant to offend people who will have power over my dad when I’m not around. I did pray for them later.

My dad could have been an Emma. God spared him that.

A friend of mine put his mother in an ALF, and she fights the attendants. She’s obese, and when they lower her to the toilet, she drops suddenly in order to frustrate them. Of course, this makes it more likely that she’ll break a hip, but that apparently doesn’t matter to her. The remainder of her life will be harder than it has to be, because of her personality.

I continue to rearrange the house, and every change I make feels like an execution. I have a special refrigerator I got to keep my food free of contamination, and this morning I took everything out of it, moved it to the kitchen fridge, turned it off, and left the doors open.

I have frozen food I bought for my dad. He used to eat it every day. Maybe I should be ashamed, but I just did not want to spend an extra two hours every day, cooking and doing dishes. I got him Jimmy Dean biscuits, which are actually very good, and I also got him things like frozen Italian food, which I will never eat. I want to throw the Italian food out, but I will feel like I’m throwing my dad out with it.

I will keep it a little longer.

It feels as though I have been surrounded by death this week. A couple of days back, I checked my dad’s Facebook account to see if anything important was going on, and I learned that his Aunt Gladys had died during the first week of February; she was nearly 103 years old. I wrote about Gladys a long time ago. I met her in 2007, I believe. She was an incredible person. She got out of Eastern Kentucky and made something of herself. She spent her life teaching school. She also hunted and made her own furniture. I knew she had started to fail, but it was a surprise to learn she had died. Toward the end, dementia set in, so she had to move to a nursing home.

The next day, I found out her son Wade had died. He died roughly a year ago. Because my dad lost the ability to use computers, he didn’t keep up with emails and social media, and I suppose no one tried to contact him. Wade was a writer. He sold one book. He was a leftist, unlike his mother, and I believe he was also an atheist. He was about 8 years younger than my dad, and the last time I saw him, he looked very good, so learning of his death knocked me off balance.

I belong to a machining forum. Yesterday, I read that a guy I used to interact with had died suddenly. He had fluid around his heart, and when he went in to have it removed, his heart stopped, and he was placed on a ventilator. His doctors concluded that he had very little chance of recovering, so his wife let him go.

Ordinarily, I would not be all that moved by the death of an Internet forum member, but this week, it was just icing on the cake.

I prayed last night, and I let God know I was not feeling very good. I felt a lot of grief, and I was not interested in having it increased in the near future. Because God has given me a lot of supernatural weaponry, I am usually able to bounce back from things quickly, so I blame myself when bad feelings persist. I talked to God about that, and suddenly, I felt the grief abate. I felt as though Jesus were inside me, shining out love and peace like a lantern.

That was very nice, and I accepted it, but I wasn’t completely on board with it. Part of me wanted to be upset. When I was a kid, I learned that if I were upset, and people knew about it, they might give me things I wanted. I learned to manipulate. Last night, I realized I had pulled this trick on God a lot.

Part of me wanted God to fix things and make them perfect, instead of fixing me.

God has the power to make you feel peaceful and happy regardless of your circumstances. Human beings tend to set goals for themselves with the idea that once they get what they want, they’ll be happy. Life doesn’t really work that way. It feels good to get what you want or need, but in reality, you should not let your circumstances determine how you feel.

I mentioned that to my dad yesterday, and he said it was a deep truth. It made a big impression on him. I have him on my side.

Many times, I’ve asked God for things, believing they would alleviate my suffering. I should have asked him to help me not to tie my emotional state to my circumstances. God wants to give us things, but it’s more important that we become impervious to distress. Remember the story of Jesus, sleeping in the boat during the storm? He got up and calmed the storm, but while the storm was still raging and threatening to kill everyone on the boat, he slept in peace. He did not worry. We should be like that, and it’s possible to get there.

If God gives you peace without changing your circumstances, you can feel cheated or disappointed. I can, anyway. That’s childish. Something for me to think about in the future.

Covetousness comes from linking your happiness to your circumstances. “If I have my best friend’s girlfriend, I’ll be happy.” “If I have my boss’s job, I’ll be happy.” “If I have this year’s Iphone, I’ll be happy.” Satan puts bait in front of us, and we chase it. Then we find out the happiness it brings is shallow, fleeting, or nonexistent.

Speaking of circumstances, I had a weird dream last night. A woman I know showed up at my house. She was sort of adrift, like a homeless person. She needed rest and a place to get it together. I gave her a bed here. Oddly, she had her own food. She had saved a drink and half a sandwich from meal earlier in the day. She went and got it, and she ate it while lying in bed. We felt very close to each other, in a way that was romantic, which is not how our relationship works in real life. I haven’t heard from her in a long time. It seemed as if I had been given to her to provide shelter, rest, and comfort, and she had been sent to me for comfort and for the simple benefit of having someone to care for.

Someone who is not demented or close to death, I mean. A Christian, not a missionary case.

She leans to the left politically, because she grew up among self-pitiers and social justice warriors (redundant). We talked about that in the dream. I asked her if she prayed in tongues, because people who pray in tongues become more conservative (more appalled by leftism) over time, and she said she did it for 90 minutes a day. I wondered why she hadn’t experienced a shift. She’s a proud lady, though, and pride kills growth.

Since I woke up, I have been experiencing odd feelings of warmth and attachment for this woman.

Strange dream. Did it come from God? Did it come from another spirit? Time will tell.

It was not the kind of dream I would have asked for. When there is a lot of grief in your life, you don’t particularly want to be reminded of the things you have failed at. I am old and single. When I want to move heavy furniture, I have to wait until someone visits. When I have work done on the car, I have to sit in the waiting area because I have no one to drive me home. I am thinking of buying a back scratcher. I don’t want to have my face rubbed in that while I sleep. On the morning of Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day is a phony holiday, like Mothers’ Day, made up to sell jewelry and flowers. For that matter, the “saints” are not legitimate; they were elevated and worshiped to please Christians who didn’t want to give up pagan deities. The day has never meant anything to me. But still.

To make things worse, the woman in the dream is very, very attractive. I would feel better if she looked like Captain Lou Albano in drag.

Next month should be more cheerful. Let me think. What’s coming up? St. Patrick’s Day (useless for sober people) and the anniversary of my mother’s death, not to mention her birthday.

Okay, April will be easier. I am sure of it. Let’s just plan on that.

If most people I know could just remain alive through the end of this week, I would consider it a big favor.

Anyway, I will pursue the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit instead of grasping at temporary fixes. If I can get the solution that works, the mirages and mermaids won’t cause me problems.

If You Want to Fit in, You’d Better be a Nonconformist

I watch a lot of car shows. I don’t care that much about cars, but I like watching people use tools. I love metalworking. Car shows are full of that kind of thing.

The other day I sat down to watch, and I made a remark to myself about how it was time to watch more guys with black T-shirts and creepy beards. Then I thought about what I had said.

The people who customize and restore cars on TV tend to fall into a certain demographic. They really do wear black T-shirts, and many of them have very creepy beards, like convicts. Many are covered with vulgar tattoos (redundant). Quite a few have fallen prey to the fad of body mutilation modification. They are neck-deep in modern hipster culture. Most are not what you would call devout Christians, although there are exceptions. There was a show called Fat & Furious which featured Christian car builders.

I’ve noticed something else. Many of them like to preach. They talk a lot about family, warmth, and doing the right thing. At least a couple of the shows (The Ride That Got Away and Overhaulin’) make a pretense of building cars out of altruism. They find people they claim are especially deserving, and they build cars for them (oddly, one free-car recipient was wealthy then-Depp-wife Amber Heard). One show modified a car so a disabled vet could use it. Another fixed up a car so it would lift a cancer patient up to the seat.

These shows feature what I call “the alternative righteousness.”

Christians are demonized in today’s American culture. We are seen as bullies and haters. Non-Christians love using homosexuality and sexual confusion to beat us up. When we offer correction, intending to help people get out of the clutches of Satan, we are characterized as vicious bigots.

Non-Christians love giving us Bible lessons. They have decided they own Jesus. They have learned one phrase from the Bible: “Judge not.” They have discarded everything else, including the verses condemning perversion and fornication, as well as the verses obligating us to warn people who are in sin. They tell us they’re more like Jesus than we are. They think Jesus’ entire message was this: “Be nice and never criticize anyone.” They aren’t interested in the Bible passages that say the lustful will not enter the kingdom of heaven and that Jesus will return and make his robe wet with the blood of sinners. He is returning, and what he will do will not be nice at all.

Many non-Christians have decided they’re better than we are, because (in their minds) they’re nicer than we are. To them, this is righteousness. They’re not interested in God’s righteousness, which includes justice and obedience. Whether they realize it or not, they think they’re better than God.

Satan has lots of gimmicks, which he recycles. If you don’t fall for one, he brings out another. The alternative righteousness is one of his current projects. He intends to convince unbelievers they don’t need Jesus, because they’re so good without him.

Today God showed me what’s behind all this. It’s the spirit of Antichrist.

“Antichrist” doesn’t just mean “against Christ.” It refers to spirits and ideas that are intended to REPLACE Christ. People who are caught up in the alternative righteousness aren’t just rejecting Jesus; they’re trying to prove they can do a better job than he would. They think they can give the world love, compassion, and kindness, plus homosexuality, fornication, drug abuse, and pride.

It doesn’t work, of course. First of all, they’re not really all that loving. They pretend to be, but it’s superficial. God wants us to have invincible love that comes from the Holy Spirit living within us. He wants us to have supernatural love. You can’t get that by wearing cause ribbons or getting tattoos featuring the faces of your dead relatives. Second, they’re working against themselves. You can’t indulge your flesh with sexual sin and pride without inviting things like anger and cruelty. Sexual sin and pride are selfish; there is nothing good or altruistic about them. You can’t give yourself to selfishness and self-sacrifice simultaneously.

If you insist on doing a thing your own way, on your own terms, you’re not doing it for anyone but yourself.

The alternative righteousness people are working to create a world in which man creates righteousness without Jesus. They will invite us to participate, while making it impossible for us to do so in good conscience. When we turn them down, we will be condemned for it. This already happened in Rome. The Romans had many false “gods,” and they were perfectly willing to include God himself, but Christians refused to acknowledge the fakes, and for that reason, they were considered divisive and dangerous.

A whole lot of “nice” people are going to try to drive us off the planet. They won’t all wear scary uniforms like the Gestapo. They’ll wear yoga pants and torn jeans and black T-shirts. They’ll be covered in tattoos that say things like, “In Loving Memory of Tito.”

It makes sense. The Antichrist himself is supposed to be a man who brings peace and prosperity to the world. He’ll suck people in by making their problems go away. He’ll be the nicest man who ever lived. When we criticize, people will think we’re against a shiny, happy world with single-payer healthcare, no wars, and no homeless people.

My guess is that the alternative righteousness will morph into open wickedness, including cruelty and murder, once the ball really gets rolling. Think of Islam. In places where Muslims are in the minority, Islam is called the Religion of Peace. In places where Muslims are powerful, they bomb churches and pass discriminatory laws. When the black T-shirts are too powerful to oppose, they won’t have to pretend to be nice any more, and their boss won’t want them to. Satan may pretend to be nice in order to get the upper hand, but he won’t be able to stomach it for long. He loves making human beings, who resemble their creator, suffer. He will want to fly his true colors as soon as the act becomes unnecessary.

People who think Jesus was always nice, or that he only cared about being nice, will make excellent dupes for the Antichrist. They already do, and churches are full of them. They don’t want to hear about God drowning the human race. They don’t want to hear about the time Jesus beat strangers with a whip, or the time Peter fatally cursed a man and his wife. They want us all to be pro-gay vegan Buddhist pacifist Christians who practice mindfulness. They’ve converted most American churches already.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this. It’s going to happen regardless of what Christians do. I suppose it’s good to see it coming, though.

I still like watching the shows, but now I remember to pray for the people who appear in them.

Tooling up for the Days Ahead

My dad now prays with me, with enthusiasm. During this strange new time, I am trying to make the most of our visits. Had we had a healthy Christian family, we would have prayed together so many times by now, we wouldn’t be able to count them, and praying together wouldn’t seem like a big deal. As it is, I know we will not have many opportunities, so I can’t squander them.

Two days ago, my dad said something so amazing, I transcribed it into my phone so I could put it on my blog. I told him we should pray together while I was there, and he said, “Will you make sure we do? Aw, good.”

Imagine the pope saying, “We need to get rid of all these statues and figurines, because they’re idols.” Imagine an Orthodox rabbi announcing that it’s okay to eat pork. That’s how strange it is for my dad to ask me to make sure we pray.

Whenever I start talking to my dad about God, I tense up, wondering if he’s going to tell me the Bible is all fairy tales. It never happens. He says it’s very interesting. He says getting right with God is the most important thing in the world. Sometimes he asks me if I really believe certain things, but he doesn’t do it in order to be argumentative. He asks with hope. He wants me to confirm things.

Yesterday I dug up some old CD’s of Wayne Cochran reciting helpful Bible verses. I have ripped two disks, and now they’re in my phone. I got a Bluetooth speaker, and the next time I see my dad, I’m going to play one of the recordings. I don’t know if he’ll be able to understand, but it’s worth a shot. I can also play worship music for him.

Today, a lamination machine will arrive at my house. I’m going to create at least one sheet of helpful scriptures for my dad, and I’ll leave it with him at the ALF. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect him to read the Bible, but he can get through a sheet without drifting off. He may forget what he read, but he will always have the sheets handy, so he’ll be able to read them again.

I don’t know what else to do.

I emailed The Last Reformation, asking if they had any advice on baptizing a dementia patient. They did not. That’s bizarre. It’s a need that should be filled. Many people turn to God when they become ill or disabled and have to let go of pride, and many of them are not easy to baptize. You would think every city would have mobile baptism trucks. It wouldn’t be expensive.

I wonder if anyone makes plastic Bibles. I’m checking. Amazon has waterproof Bibles, but it’s not clear if they contain the entire text. It would be nice if my dad had a Bible which could be cleaned.

I don’t believe baptism is essential to salvation, but it’s essential to a fully developed walk with God. Maybe it’s too much to ask for. Hell has been my big concern. I’m not going to complain if I can’t get anything better for my dad than salvation, because salvation is the most important thing there is.

The problems I have today are much better than the problems I used to have. As recently as a month ago, I was wondering if I had merely imagined that God had told me my dad would be saved.

There is nothing like hearing from God. He told me my dad would be saved, and he told me my sister and my former pastors were time-wasters. He said to quit praying for them. I continued working on my dad, which went against my own impression of his susceptibility to salvation, and I stopped wasting effort on tar babies who had no intention of changing.

Jesus told the disciples where to cast their nets. He still does that. Most preachers use dubious, manipulative bait instead of nets, and they fish wherever their limited minds tell them to. Many preachers don’t catch many fish, and some who have big catches are fooling themselves. There are big churches full of people who aren’t real Christians and are headed for hell.

I don’t know how long we’ll have together. Yesterday I checked Amazon for boxes suitable for cremation remains. I don’t want to have to shop at the last minute. They have a wide selection, and you can get something acceptable for around fifty bucks. My dad’s will says he wants a simple box.

I feel uncomfortable about ordering it, but I might as well go ahead. I don’t have to put it where I can see it. I can stick it in my storage room.

My dad is saved, and I know what to do when he passes. I don’t think things could be going any better, considering what we gave God to work with.

Black Thumb Can’t Stand up to God

Yesterday I got a very encouraging call from my friend Travis, whom I baptized a couple of weeks ago.

As has been discussed here earlier, I was re-baptized in December. I had been baptized before, in 1988, but the people who ran the show didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t understand that baptism was supposed to have supernatural effects. They didn’t know how to prepare me for it with confession and repentance. They didn’t explain that I was to go forward as a person who had died to the flesh, giving myself completely to God.

After I was baptized, I found I had much more self-control. I needed that.

Without baptism, people (even Spirit-filled Christians) are controlled largely by demons. Most people don’t know that, but it’s true. You don’t have to be a serial killer or a mad bomber to have demons. We all have them, and if you don’t have God’s help, they rule you. Their influence manifests in physical problems, and it also gives us bad habits we can’t control. Examples are drug addiction, anger (emotions and attitudes can be habits), depression, overeating, laziness, self-pity, lust, fetishes (including homosexuality), and so on. They can cause mental illness.

Travis was trying to get improvement from God, and he needed more help. Like me, he had already been baptized, but the people who had performed his baptisms (more than one) had been incompetent.

Last night he called about something, and I asked him if he had received any benefit.

He told me he had found that he was able to control himself much better than he had in the past. He said he was getting a lot of help with humility. He’s a music student, and when he got to college, his instructors told him a lot of what he had learned was wrong. It was hard for him to accept it and change. Lately, he has been able to overcome his pride and make use of the correction he was receiving, and his playing has improved a great deal. He has also gotten help with other negative behaviors.

In short, like me, he has experienced greater self-control.

He told me something I didn’t expect. He said he is more accountable now. Because he can prevent himself from doing wrong, he can’t blame demons or other people when he gives in to temptation.

It was interesting to hear him say that. I suppose I knew baptism had made me more accountable, but I hadn’t thought about it.

His revelation was very helpful to me. I don’t want to profane the gift of Holy-Spirit-powered self-control. Jesus said that if you blaspheme the Holy Spirit, there is no forgiveness. The Holy Spirit is the last gift God has to offer us on this earth. He’s not going to send another Messiah with more gifts, so if you blow your chance with the Holy Spirit, you are in trouble.

I don’t think a person will automatically go to hell for opposing or insulting the Holy Spirit one time. If that were true, who would survive? I think Jesus meant that if we continued in it, we would be lost. The world is full of reformed pagans who used to blaspheme the Holy Spirit regularly as part of their religions. I don’t think God has made it impossible for such people to escape judgment.

If you have Holy-Spirit-given self-control, and you choose not to use it, there is no hope for you, because God has no more gifts for us to receive. The only thing left for him to do would be to override your free will, and he will never do that. He throws people into hell every day because he prefers it to taking away their free will.

It’s always good to learn something from a person I’ve taught. I am not Jesus. I am not right about everything. I am not the source of the useful knowledge I spread. I just pass on what I hear from God. If I do a good job, the people I communicate with will eventually hear from God, too (hopefully better than I do), and at some point, each of them should be able to teach me something.

If the people you teach never come back and teach you, you have failed.

Preachers tend to glorify themselves and set themselves up as little gods, especially when they have TV shows. They try to give themselves franchises; they convince their flocks that anyone who wants to hear from God in their churches has to go to them. It’s sick. Jesus is in the reproduction business. He wants to multiply himself. He doesn’t want us to worship popes and pastors. Each of us is supposed to communicate with the Father directly.

When I think about this, I always think about what I was told about the Iraqi army, which was the 4th-largest army at one time, yet which could not stand for more than a day or two against other armies.

When Iraqi commanders received fancy new equipment, they confiscated most of the manuals. If an officer was in charge of 50 tankers, for example, only he would have all the tank manuals, and when there were problems, people had to go to him. It was a bureaucratic strategy; the essence of bureaucracy is to put your own job security above the welfare of the organization. An officer who is the only source of vital information is automatically indispensable. You can’t demote him.

Because of this policy, the Iraqis were much weaker than they should have been. They had equipment they couldn’t run, maintain, or repair properly.

That’s the story, anyway.

When “men of God” convince their followers no one else is qualified to lead, they make themselves seem godlike and indispensable. Unfortunately, they keep their followers undeveloped, deformed, and vulnerable.

The Catholic Church has always been a huge offender in this area. They used to have a policy of punishing common people for owning Bibles, and of course, they tended to burn people who heard from God. They also conducted services in Latin, which few people understood.

The only reason God leaves saved people on the earth is to help other people get to know him and receive salvation. The Bible says so.

Moses was the humblest man on earth. Some of his followers tried to make him the exclusive representative of God; they complained that other people were prophesying. Moses said, “Are you jealous for my sake? Oh, that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them!”

Preachers are extremely disappointing, but we continue to insist on idolizing them. We love to worship things we can see.

I asked if anyone had shown interest in having Travis baptize them, and he said two people had. He is taking his time, however. He says he wants to be ready to do it. He wants to be improved to the point where he can do a competent job. I’m not sure he’s right to wait, but it’s wonderful to know that he’s aware that pride and rushing could cause problems. I can understand his hesitation. Before last month, he had been baptized at least 4 times, and the people who did it failed because they weren’t prepared.

Like Torben Sondergaard says, if you don’t do it right, it’s just a pool party.

It’s very rewarding to see that I have been of some use. I hope I see more fruit in the future. If the things you tell people are true, sooner or later, they will bring you a harvest, and after that, you will be blessed through the people you blessed.

Some People Carry Bad Weather With Them

I visited my dad again yesterday in the ALF, and things went pretty well. We prayed together again. He is now very enthusiastic about it. People who know him would have to see him to believe it.

He continues to complain that he wants me to be with him all the time. I have had to explain that almost nobody can be with their grown children all the time. It doesn’t seem to help.

Yesterday he told me that when I leave, it’s as though a dark cloud settles around him until he sees me again.

That remark hit home. For years, I’ve told people my dad seemed to have a dark cloud around him, because of the darkness of his heart and his distance from God. One of the benefits I hoped to receive when he moved was the removal of his cloud from this house.

The atmosphere around people who don’t know God is different from the atmosphere around Spirit-filled Christians. It has a cheap, dirty, tawdry feel about it. There is an air of denial around them as they try to convince themselves life without God is bright and sunny. It reminds me of Disney; the Disney combine strives very hard to replace the warmth of Christianity with a broadly marketable fake, but deep down, there is a very cold, dirty core.

Unbelievers can’t perceive the ambience of stress and dissipation that surrounds them. They haven’t been in God’s presence, or they’ve worked to forget it, so they think their situations are fine.

If you enter my home now, you will probably hear Christian music, if you hear music at all. If the TV is on, you will not see dirty or cynical movies or shows. You will see Christian videos or relatively harmless programming about things like technology. What do you encounter in non-Christian homes? HBO and Showtime. Marvel movies. Movies like the Jack Reacher and Equalizer films, which are essentially revenge porn. Rap music. Rock. Vapid dance music or sappy singers, if females are choosing the material. News shows featuring leftist extremists. You may smell weed.

When my dad was here, he watched a lot of garbage, and he kept the volume high. The area where he sat was dirty. He satisfied his flesh with ice cream and cookies. He was angry a lot of the time. The door to his bedroom suite was usually open, and when it was, you could smell it from the living room.

His cloud was with him. It sat in the central part of the house, demanding attention. It destroyed peace whenever it could.

Now that he says he feels that a cloud settles on him when I’m gone, I’m wondering if he misses me partly because my presence dulled the sensations his rebellion called down on him. It may very well be that his cloud was a cloud of demons, and now he has the cloud, but he doesn’t have me to offset its influence.

I wish we could live together, but I don’t want that cloud to be with me all day any more. There is no practical way to overcome the difficulties of caring for a dementia patient here, but even if there were, I would feel like I were spitting on God’s help if I brought my dad’s cloud back.

Many people who are rebellious go to church. They smoke dope and fornicate all week, and they like to say, “Only God can judge me.” They like to tattoo it on their bodies. They go to church the same way pairs of heavily soiled underwear go to washing machines. They’re looking for temporary relief, not lasting change. Church makes them feel clean, and it dulls their fear and the torment of guilt. Then they go home, fully intending to resume sinning.

People who are committed to rebellion are capable of drawing comfort from the presence of committed Christians.

When Saul was in rebellion, God sent him a tormenting spirit. The only thing that made him feel better was the presence of David, who went to him and played the harp. Saul didn’t repent, but he was still comforted while David was with him. I wonder if this is a picture of what has been going on between my dad and me. I’m not saying I’m as pleasing to God as David, but I know God personally, and I spend time in his presence. Many of the good things I’ve done for my dad were done because of my desire to please God. That also goes for harsh things I’ve refrained from doing and saying.

I keep telling my dad he needs to pray and draw comfort from God, not me. It’s very hard for him to learn, though, and I’m sure his entourage of demons makes it even harder.

I made him a laminated sheet of information, to bring him comfort. It has my phone number and address on it, among other things. I included some information about God and an admonition to pray. It has helped him. I’m going to make him a few more sheets with helpful Bible verses. I ordered a laminating machine. They’re cheap, and I won’t have to drive 15 miles to get sheets made.

He can’t read a book any more, because as soon as he puts it down, he’ll forget what he read. In order to read a long work, you have to be able to remember things from one day to the next.

I’m thinking about playing Bible verse MP3’s for him when I visit. I have a little MP3 speaker thing somewhere. I also have some recordings of Wayne Cochran (“the King of Blue-Eyed Soul”) reciting Biblical verses promising protection. Maybe it would help.

The Bible is full of promises, and most people don’t realize it. You can take the promises to God and call on him to fulfill them. Barring a miracle, my dad will never be highly knowledgeable about Christianity, but maybe I can help him access a few important things.

I know he uses the sheet I made, because last night, he called me. I was amazed. I had told him the ALF staff could help him call, using the information on the sheet, but I didn’t expect him to remember to use it. I don’t want him to monopolize my time from the ALF, but I was very glad to hear from him. It gave me a chance to offer him comfort and pray for him again. I wish I could do more. There are some things we have to do for ourselves.

God Doesn’t Hide his Face Forever

It’s time for an update on my dad’s situation.

I continue to be very impressed with the ALF where he lives. Every time I mention it to a professional involved with elder care, I am told how exceptional it is. This week, I talked to an attorney about getting VA money for my dad, and when she found out where he was, she told me it was the only ALF in the county with an ECC license. I don’t know what that stands for, but you can Google it and then pretend to be smart in a comment.

The basic idea is that this type of license will allow the ALF to provide care for my dad longer than other ALF’s. ALF licenses mandate that patients be moved to other facilities when they deteriorate past certain points, and all the other ALF’s here would have to ship my dad out much sooner, costing us money and causing disruption.

The lawyer was impressed, and that says a lot, because she was recommended by a friend of hers who runs a competing ALF.

God really looked out for me. I had no idea what I was doing. There are dozens of ALF’s around here. What are the odds I would find the best choice on my own?

Another bonus: just from a free consultation with the lawyer, I found out how to push everything my dad has out of the probate loop, and that saved us a great deal of money plus a prolonged hassle you would not believe. I didn’t know how much trouble we were in, but it’s all fixed now. So far, this has cost me nothing, and when I get together with the attorney again, I don’t expect our remaining loose-end fixes to cost much.

My dad has been stable for the last couple of days. He actually seems somewhat better. Yesterday, he remembered that I had a sister.

He still wastes a lot of our time together trying to work out a way to go home, and that’s unfortunate. By God’s grace, I learned that he changes channels when I talk about people who don’t have his advantages. Many ALF residents don’t get visits from loved ones. Many don’t have relatives looking after them at all. Many are in cheap, dirty, impersonal ALF’s that are essentially warehouses. When I tell him how good he has it, he begins to focus on that, and he regrets complaining. He starts talking about how blessed we are.

He keeps telling me what a wonderful son I am and how much he loves me. It sounds so strange; I haven’t forgotten how the family saw him when I was a kid. He was a scourge. How can that same person be so effusive now? I’m very grateful for the change, however. He could be telling me he hates me and that I’m a terrible son. In other words, he could be like my sister, who has assured me I’m going to hell.

I make sure we pray together every time I sit down with him. It’s something I used to dream about. I am going to do everything I can to make sure he goes to be with Jesus when he dies. That would more than redeem the time and suffering involved in caring for him during his decline.

I’m somewhat less sad about the process of fixing up the house in the wake of his permanent departure. I still don’t like it when I make changes that reflect the fact that he is never going to come home, but I’m getting used to it, and I am comforted by his sudden enthusiasm for prayer. Every parent dies, but not all of them turn their lives around before they go. One day I’ll see him again, in perfect health, with all his faculties.

Because he’s not here, I’m getting on top of things I allowed to slide. I finally got new tires yesterday. I would say the whole effort took over three hours. I had to sit at Walmart and do nothing for much of that time. When he was living here, I would have had to take an Uber to get back to him, and then I would have had to take another one to go get the car.

The first floor of the house is getting cleaner and neater. I can finally say my dad’s laundry is clean. I had to wash all the bedclothes twice, and I kept finding other things, like his bedroom slippers, that needed to be washed. I had to remove the cover from his mattress and wash and dry it over three days.

The living room has been dusted and re-dusted, and I cleaned all the furniture. I shampooed the rugs. Today I opened the fireplace flue to see if I could find out why I kept seeing wasps in the room. A bunch of wasps fell out and landed on me. Thank God they’re not aggressive. I sprayed some poison up the chimney, and I used my new cordless stick vacuum to suck up dozens of confused and possibly stoned wasps. I’m going to make a fire as soon as this hot spell ends. That ought to discourage anybody who is still squatting in there.

Back when I thought my dad’s mattress was hopeless, I ordered a new one from Walmart. When I found I could save his mattress, I thought about sending the new one back, but I decided to keep it for myself. My old mattress is from 1994. Last night I moved the old one to another room, and I put the new one in its place. Very nice.

It must be okay, because as soon as I lie down, I start to fall asleep. I don’t understand that. It may make prayer difficult.

I’m paying more attention to our investments, and things are shaping up. It shouldn’t be long before they become a source of peace as well as income.

I wonder how much of this can be traced back to my baptism on December 19 of last year. Things have continually improved since then. The road has been bumpy, but the upward trend has been consistent. I wonder how many good things Christians have missed out on by settling for false baptisms.

I would still like to get my dad baptized. I do not believe it’s essential for salvation, but it’s clearly essential if you want everything God wants to give you. It would be very hard to baptize him in his current state, especially in the winter.

I watched Derek Prince talk about baptism today. He was a Greek scholar at Cambridge. He said “baptism” meant full immersion or having water poured (not sprinkled) over you. I don’t know if he was correct, but “baptism” is a Greek word, so he may have known something. I can certainly get my dad into a shower and pour a bucket of warm water on him. I don’t want to do it if it’s the wrong procedure. Also, I don’t know if it matters when he’s so close to the end. Maybe we should settle for salvation.

I pray about it. The answer will come.

It’s always sad to think about what has been wasted, and that can’t be fixed, but apart from that, I am very satisfied with the way life is going. I believe it will continue to improve, and whenever I learn something new about God which may help with the process, I will make good use of it.

I think about people who don’t have God to help them. Many people have their lives spin out of control and crash, and they don’t know God will put things right if given a chance. It could have happened to me; I worked very hard to assure that I would be cursed. I’m very glad I received correction. I wish everyone had it.

I’m getting so confident, I may conceivably try to vacuum the pool today, and I may even fix the chainsaw. I can’t wait to be completely ahead of my responsibilities.

If you have problems you can’t get on top of, give God a chance, and don’t quit early. Keep looking for things you’re doing wrong. Keep asking for correction. Don’t mistake obstacles and diversions for permanent defeats; sometimes they mean you’re doing the right thing. God didn’t put you down here to flounder and die. If things aren’t going right, it just means there are things you still need to do.

God’s Provision is not Always Obvious

Today, once more, I got up and use the giant new living room TV for worship. I enjoyed the freedom. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.

I made a change in what I do.

For years, God has been giving me phrases and sentences. Isaiah got chapters; I get phrases and sentences. I suppose no one will ever call me a prophet! It’s very good, though, and if you think about it, the book of Proverbs is made up, for the most part, of discrete sentences. I may not be up there with Jeremiah, but Solomon would be very good company. Before he fell into idolatry and died in disgrace, I mean.

I created Word documents (it just occurred to me how funny it is that I used a program with that name) to preserve the phrases in a convenient way. I take these documents out and recite the things God told me. I claim them and ask God to make them come to pass, when appropriate. Not all of the phrases involve things that can come to pass. Some just contain information.

When things aren’t going well, God always tells me the same thing: “If you’re not doing what I’ve already taught you to do, why are you bothering me? Go back and do what I told you.” My practice of going over my lists is something he told me to do. When I do it, he gives me peace. Often, I start to fall asleep while I’m doing it.

Yesterday, I felt a lot of grief. On the one hand, I wish my dad could live longer so I would not have to part with him. On the other, I don’t want to spend another 5 years watching him die. Normally, grief is a short-term thing. Most people take less than a year to die. Their loved ones then experience a short spell of intense grief, and then they move on, unless they’re trapped in the past or desperate for attention. With a dementia patient, death can take decades, and loved ones may grieve the whole time.

I started wondering if I should join a support group. I’m reluctant to do things like that. I feel like it would be an unequal yoking. First thing you know, I’d be sitting in a circle of people led by a 23-year-old transsexual lesbian teaching them to do yoga breathing and advising them to smoke dope. Perhaps I exaggerate, but I would expect to receive non-Christian solutions or incorrect Christian solutions. I am also reluctant to give up on God’s one-on-one help. I always tell people about the great things God does for me. How can I take myself seriously if I say things like that and then run to shrinks and witch doctors for help? If I can’t get through this with God’s help, something must be wrong.

When I went to bed, I knew I was going to pray, as always. I thought about God’s advice, which was like a “sticky” in an Internet forum: “Before you give up on me, do what I told you to do.”

I started going through my lists, and I used other tools God had given men. Before long, I fell asleep.

This morning, I made sure I took my lists to the living room with me, and I went over them.

Before I did that, I watched part of a Derek Prince video. He talked about “the word of God.” He said something I already knew: “the word of God” doesn’t just mean the Bible. Abraham had no Bible, but he had the word of God, because God spoke to him. Early Christians had no New Testament, but they had the word of God because they were baptized with the Holy Spirit and able to receive knowledge from God.

When the Old Testament says, “the word of God,” it’s not referring to the Bible. I think reading that would set a lot of wigs on fire, but it has to be true. If the Bible doesn’t exist yet, and you mention “the word of God,” you can’t be talking about the Bible.

If “the word of God” isn’t scripture in the Old Testament, then it can’t always mean scripture in the New Testament. Think about that.

Prince said the word of God may be scripture, but it includes things that haven’t been written down (“scripture” is a word that means written language).

I’m always amazed to hear Derek Prince confirm things God has shown me privately. Derek Prince died in 2003, and many of the messages I’ve watched date back well over 20 years, yet he confirms the “new” things God has told me since 2007. I always wonder why his teachings didn’t catch on. Charismatics have been frantically wasting their lives on the prosperity gospel and the feel-good gospel, and they have listened to utter fools, but they let Derek Prince blow right by them, and he said things that could have saved them.

It reminds me of something Rabelais said about Parisians:

Some days after they had finished their refreshments, Gargantua went to see the sights of the town, and everyone stared at him in great wonder. For the Parisians are such simpletons, such gapers, and such feckless idiots that a buffoon, a peddler of indulgences, a mule with bells on its collar, or a fiddler at a crossroad will draw a greater crowd than a good preacher of the Gospel.

TBN has a lot of mules with bells on their collars, and they certainly have peddlers of indulgences. Give God your tax refund, and he’ll help you buy a new bass boat.

Prince pointed out that the Bible calls Jesus himself “the Word.”

I’m a big proponent of prayer in tongues. Yahweh speaks things, Jesus speaks them to the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit speaks them to us, and they come out as tongues. I always say that tongues are the word of God. It’s axiomatic. If the Holy Spirit says something, and the Holy Spirit is God, then what he says is the word of God.

It must also be true that the phrases God gives me are the word of God. Prince gave me confirmation that I was right to add them to my morning activities.

Prince said some things that surprised me. He mentioned these words of Jesus:

Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father’s who sent Me.”

This confirms that Jesus repeats what Yahweh says. It also tells me this: if the Holy Spirit tells me something, I’m supposed to write it down or at least memorize it. The Greek word translated “keep” means “guard,” “maintain,” or “preserve.” By writing down my lists, I have been keeping God’s word! That means Jesus and the Father will come to me and make their home with me.

If you’re not hearing things from God on your own, you still have the Bible. You should be very familiar with it. You should have many, many important bits of it in your memory. If not, how are you “keeping” God’s word?

I’ve failed to record things God has said to me. That’s horrifying. I have to stop being wasteful if I want to keep receiving things.

If you’re not keeping God’s word, how can you love God? Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” You will take care of anything you really care about.

I’ve let myself become spoiled. I figured the words kept coming, so it wasn’t that big a deal if I let some of them slip by me. But the vast majority of people, including tongue-talking Christians, don’t receive anything at all. Remember what our parents used to say when we wouldn’t eat liver: “There are kids in China who would do anything for a nice piece of liver.” You have to appreciate what you have.

I still hate liver. I want to make that clear before I go on. I’ll bet Chinese kids hate it, too.

It’s remarkable how the Bible starts to make sense when you spend time with the Holy Spirit. It’s also remarkable how wrong traditional carnal interpretations are. Men’s wild guesses have always caused problems after being transformed into doctrine.

I’m glad there is more room in my house for God now. Things keep improving. Today I bathed the birds (imagine their gratitude), did a lot of dusting, and laundered some of my dad’s bedclothes over again. I feel that the Holy Spirit is bringing order.

Dusting is surprisingly important. Even if you have superficial order, if you don’t dust, your house will start to feel smaller and less peaceful.

I told a friend of mine how things were getting ordered, and she sent me a Damon Thompson MP3. He said something about how each of us needed a place where we could host the Holy Spirit. If I understood him, he meant that a Christian should have a chair or a room or something, set apart for God. I can’t quite go along with that.

If you’re Spirit-led, your entire house should belong to God, and you should be able to spend time with him there. On the other hand, you should be able to be in God’s presence ANYWHERE. As happy as I am to be able to worship in the living room, I don’t depend on it. God is kind enough to show me his presence wherever I am. I would be in trouble if I literally had a prayer closet I had to sit in when I wanted to be with God. You can’t carry a prayer closet around with you.

I like having the new TV and the nice room in which it sits, but I can’t say I NEED them.

I’m not a huge Damon Thompson fan. It always seems like he’s trying to show off his intellect. Christianity is not like rabbinic Judaism. It’s not a faith where only the brilliant can excel. Your native intelligence means nothing to God. You can be a powerful Christian no matter what your IQ is. We’re supposed to have the mind of Christ on tap, and I can tell you that it works. I’ve seen very simple people teach perfectly, from revelation they received on their own.

The reason God created the universe is love. We get very proud of our revelations, as though we came up with them ourselves, and we forget about love. God used ignorant people to shame the arrogant teachers who disagreed with Jesus. There was a reason why he chose fishermen and a beggar instead of priests. He wanted to embarrass the proud in public.

When we finally understand the entire Bible, we are going to see that many things we were sure were true are nonsense. If you can hear from God on your own, he will help you find the truth and detect error. Then you won’t have to rely on human beings. That’s the state to which we are supposed to aspire. We should be so connected with God, it wouldn’t matter if every Bible on earth were burned or deleted. Abraham and Enoch got by with God himself, so we know it can be done.

New Prayer Partner: my Dad

I spent time with my dad today at the ALF. He was very worried. He said he was unhappy. He asked me if I had any sisters.

It was a very good visit.

Doesn’t sound like a good visit, does it? It was, though. Several good things happened. I got to spend time with someone who is likely to forget he knows me pretty soon. I got to pray with my dad, the former atheist, and I was able to talk to him about developing a relationship with God. Those things are worth a lot.

The problems would be there no matter what, but we could have ended up with a situation in which he hadn’t asked for salvation and refused to pray. Because we did not, I am grateful.

I think I understand why he keeps paying me compliments and telling me how important I am to him. I’m the only person he knows. He interacts with the ALF staff, but he can’t get to know them. He has forgotten my sister. My mother is dead. He has no friends left to come see him. One of his sisters is dead, his other sister has dementia, and none of his relatives are going to drop by. That leaves me. I can see why he has become more attached to me.

I’m not saying he never loved me or that selfishness is the only reason he craves my company now, but when you only know one person, that person will necessarily be important to you.

He finally knows he has dementia. He should have realized it a long time ago. Maybe a spirit helped him stay in denial. He wants to know certain things, in order to feel secure, but he knows that if I tell him, he won’t remember them after I’m gone. It drives him crazy.

He says that when I’m gone, he doesn’t know whether I’m ever coming back. He knows he can’t remember where I live. He knows he can’t recall my phone number. I said I would put some facts on a sheet of paper, have it laminated, and bring it to him. He can keep it by the bed. Maybe it will make him feel more secure. We have written things down already, but he misplaces the papers.

I told him he needed to start talking to God. Only God is available 24 hours a day. I told him God knew who he was, that he cared about him, and that he would help. I told him God was just waiting to hear from him.

When we prayed, I asked God to visit him and help him to be free from worry. I don’t recall my exact words, but I’m sure I prayed for God to help him to be close to him and to pray often. My dad agreed in prayer, and he was serious.

His problem is that he gave in to God after he became demented. He was not in the habit of praying, and now he can’t form that habit unless God gives him supernatural help.

For some reason, security is a huge issue for him. He has the idea that if we don’t live together, something could happen to me, and then he would have no one to look after him and see that he gets care. I had to tell him our living together wouldn’t protect me from things like that.

When I was a little boy, sometimes I thought about the possibility that my mother would die, and I couldn’t stand it. It seemed to me that the world would end if she were gone. Maybe that’s how my dad feels about me.

We talked in circles for a long time. “Why can’t we stay together?” “Taking care of you is too much work for one person.” “I can look after myself.” “I wish you could, but you’re not able.” “Try me.” “We tried it for several years, and it got so hard we had to give up.” “There has to be a solution.” “This is best solution I could come up with.” When we got far enough from the original question, he would go back to it, and we would start over.

I lost count of the number of times he asked me where he lived.

We got to pray together. I got to have another session with the man who raised me, before he forgets me. I have hope that we’ll be together forever. These are the things that matter. They’re why I’ll look forward to seeing him from now on.

God told me my dad would be saved. He has been telling me for years. Sometimes I doubted. Now he has pulled it off. That’s our God for you. Never say a word against him. He cares about every one of us, and he is completely faithful. I wish I could say he had told me every person I had prayed about would be saved. I can’t. I’m very glad he got through to this one, however.

Information I was Not Eager to Acquire

I think the master bedroom in my house is finally clean.

I am trying not to call it “my dad’s bedroom.” I’m very tired of grief. My belief is that the more I try to move forward, the better I’ll feel.

Since the beginning of the year, I have shampooed the bedroom carpet four times. I put bleach in the machine. It didn’t hurt the carpet. I thought the carpet was hopeless, but now it’s so clean I’m not afraid to walk barefoot on it or to put objects on it which I intend to pick up later with my bare hands.

Later this year, I’ll get a new carpet, but getting my dad started in the ALF was costly, and I don’t want to blow too much money in one month.

I put Murphy’s Oil Soap in warm water and used a rag to clean the wood furniture. I plan to get rid of the furniture because it got abused over the last year and because it reminds me of my dysfunctional family. Right now, though, the furniture is not hurting anything, and it will be of some use until I choose something else.

A few days back, I discovered a zipper on the cover of my dad’s mattress. I had been planning to discard the mattress (less than two years old), but when I found I could remove the cover, I decided to see if I could save it. The innards of the mattress were as fresh as the day it was made, so I filled the master bath with water, added laundry detergent and bleach, and soaked it for a long time. It did the trick. I rinsed it out and drapped it over some patio furniture for two days. I put it under a ceiling fan to dry it out.

Shoving a 14″ memory foam mattress into a damp cover is a real adventure, but I got it done, and now I don’t have to take the mattress to the dump. Unfortunately, back when I thought the cover could not be removed, I ordered a replacement, so now I have two memory foam mattresses. I guess this is a good opportunity to get rid of my own 1994 mattress!

His pillows already went to the dump. I think I’m going to give his sheets and pillowcases away. I don’t think anyone would want to use them, but my understanding is that Goodwill likes fabrics regardless of condition. There is a market for the fiber. I could keep a few things for use as dropcloths and so on.

When I go in his…the master bedroom now, all I smell is pine oil, Murphy’s Oil Soap, and bleach. I can’t even smell my dad. People’s bedrooms have a smell even when they’re not demented and being cared for by others. Their clothes, if nothing else, smell like them. I won’t smell that fragrance any more. I won’t smell the familiar odor of soap and shaving cream after he gets up.

He spent most of his time in the living room, so I shampooed the rugs in there. I mopped the floor. I’ve already dusted and cleaned the furniture. I’ll have to go back over it. I was somewhat lazy about cleaning his living area while he lived here. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time cleaning up areas that were somewhat gross to deal with. I should have done better. When you let your cleaning standards go, you generally have to clean things more than once to get things back up to snuff.

Yesterday I took everything out of the kitchen refrigerator and washed all the shelves. I don’t know how he managed to get refrigerators so dirty, but he did it all his life. It wasn’t terribly dirty, but it wasn’t satisfactory, either. It hadn’t been long since the last time it was cleaned out. He overcame that cleaning pretty quickly.

I have a second refrigerator which I bought to hold my own food; the clean food. I should empty it now and put everything in the kitchen. It’s a little weird running to the laundry room every time I want a beer or a soda.

I have to credit God with helping me clean up the house. I use the supernatural tools he gave me. I keep finding that I can’t rest after breakfast. I have to get up and clean. That’s not me, believe me. That’s the Holy Spirit.

I got up at 6:30 today and used the new living room TV for worship again. I played my Christian music Youtube playlist and prayed and sang. It was beautiful. My house is dedicated to God now; every room. I could not have that while my dad was here.

I thought about the fact that he couldn’t share Christianity with me. I used to tell him I was sad that we couldn’t share the most important thing in my life, but it didn’t make an impact on him. He used to complain that we had grown distant, but he wasn’t willing to put up with God in order to get closer. He wanted me the way I used to be. That was not an order I could fill. It was too much to ask.

He can’t share Christianity with me in the house now. I can’t bring him back. I can go to the ALF and pray with him and teach him, though.

It’s hard to make lasting decisions, because my outlook keeps changing. Before the ALF, when life with him was so unpleasant, I thought a lot about how pleasant things would be once I didn’t have to wrestle with him and his problems every day. I felt tremendous relief after he left, even though there was also some pain. I didn’t want to spend too much time with him at the ALF, because it would have undone a lot of the good of moving him. You put people in ALF’s because you can’t sustain the effort you’re putting into caring for them. I figured I would try to see him no more than three times a week.

Yesterday, he asked me my sister’s name, and it showed that he had deteriorated significantly since the week before. That, combined with his recent prayer for salvation, made me rethink things. I can talk to him about God now, and that’s important. That’s worth a drive and some of my time. Also, because he appears to be declining very fast, I now realize I may not have many more opportunities to talk with him. If that’s true, even if it cuts into time I need to spend on other responsibilities, I need to take advantage.

It’s like playing dodgeball. I can’t relax and settle on a course of action. I don’t know where the next throw is coming from.

If your dad has cancer, and you expect him to live a year, you can go on vacation for a week without missing much. If your dad is losing his mind, it’s another story.

Dementia is a black parody of childhood. When you raise kids, you treasure the stages they go through, and you love watching them develop. With dementia, you should treasure the lucid times and the early stages, because dementia patients develop in reverse. If you have a son, you want to be there to hear him say his first words. If you have a demented parent, you want to be there to hear him speak his last ones.

I don’t know if I could have done a better job. I think I could have, but sometimes I criticize myself and then reconsider when I look at the facts.

I didn’t have a coach. There are no coaches. I suppose I could coach someone else now. I’m all out of parents, so I don’t think my knowledge will help me much.

I knocked off one more problem today. I found out what cremation costs: $795. If you go with The Neptune Society, it’s more like $2800. Not sure what you get for that. I also learned you don’t need paperwork to move cremated remains by car. This new information makes things simple. When he goes, I’ll just call a cremation company. Three days later, I’ll be able to get in the car and drive to Kentucky. Boom. Done. During the time it takes to get him ready, I’ll be able to arrange for a service and whatever passes for a viewing. I’ll need to have my mother’s tombstone altered, too.

I suppose you can fly with cremated remains and no paperwork, if you don’t tell the airline what’s in your carry-on. That would be risky these days. They might think ashes were gunpowder.

In Florida, it takes two days for the legal requirements of the cremation process, and I figure an additional day for phone calls. This is how I arrive at the conclusion that I will need three days.

Because my dad has accepted Jesus, and because he seems likely to forget who I am in the very near future, I can see that my caregiving obligations are not going to taper off as quickly as I had expected. I’ll have to be patient a little longer. That’s fine. I will go ahead and spend more time with him. I plan to enjoy it. I will squeeze whatever benefit I can out of it. I am receiving good things I didn’t expect, so I shouldn’t complain.

This is my plan as of 1:15 p.m. Ask me tomorrow, and who knows what I’ll say? I hope I can go a whole day without any more plot twists.