You Need an Edge

Since I spent a grand on being re-baptized (or baptized for the first time, if the original effort doesn’t count), I feel I should follow up here and write about what has happened since.

Before I got baptized, I hoped demons would leave me during the process, ridding me of compulsions and unwanted thoughts. I’m not saying I have institution-grade compulsions or that I hear voices, but like everyone reading this post, I have had drives I could not control, and I have had thoughts I didn’t like.

If you don’t think you have compulsions, ask yourself two questions. 1. Am I fat? 2. Do I want to be fat? If the answers are “yes” and “no,” you have a compulsion. Do you smoke? Do you bite your nails? Do you snap at people even though you try not to? If you look at yourself honestly, you will find your compulsions.

If you don’t find them, then you have a problem with lying.

I know a woman who brought a lot of ridicule on herself by saying, “I don’t have any bad habits.” Everyone who heard it knew how absurd it was, and they were still talking about it years later, laughing at her. You may have denied your bad habits. You may not have been perceptive enough to see your bad habits. You have still had them. I don’t care who you are.

You don’t have to be a serial killer, a junkie, or an anorexic to have bad habits. If your bad habits haven’t ruined your life, it just means you’re high-functioning.

When I was in the tank, I felt things moving around in me, but then I’m a charismatic Christian who prays in tongues for hours every day, so that was normal for me. I feel supernatural things all the time. While they were baptizing me, I couldn’t say I felt an abrupt change. I didn’t see goblins fly off through the air. I didn’t scream or start tossing the people who were helping me.

Honestly, it would have been neat had things like that happened. I’m like everyone else. I love a good supernatural experience.

As I have written previously, I did not feel good at all after the baptism. I felt oppressed, and I had a nightmare later. I woke up many times during the night. I still felt that I had done the right thing, and I knew that unpleasant experiences did not always add up to error. I knew Satan was petty, and I knew he liked to torment people who got breakthroughs, hoping to convince them nothing had changed.

Think about boxers. Sometimes when a boxer lands a nice-looking shot, his opponent will shake his head, trying to say it didn’t hurt. Like my dad once told me, that’s just a way of saying, “You hurt me.” It’s a bluff. Satan is the same way. When you score a goal, he may deny it in hopes you lose faith and give up the progress you’ve made.

I didn’t get an instantaneous improvement from baptism, but I hoped things would improve in the days that followed. That’s exactly what has happened.

I got delivered from the love of food in 2009, and for a long time, I didn’t eat much, and I lost weight. Then I screwed it up by going to an all-you-can-eat rib place, and since then, it has been on and off. The day I was baptized, I found I wanted to avoid food. This happened at lunch, which was before the baptism. I can’t explain that.

I have been very good since then, and it hasn’t taken much effort. Mainly, I have to remember how important it is to hold onto this. I have to value it. I can’t let myself sink into thoughts of cooking and good food. Sooner or later, something bad would happen. If I don’t appreciate what I have, I will lose it again.

I’m also much less angry, and I want to stay away from anger. I was looking forward to watching The Equalizer 2, which is basically an orgy of cruel revenge. I don’t want to go near it now. I don’t want to hear about other people’s suffering. Morbid curiosity, which is actually vicarious cruelty, is leaving me.

I am less worried than I was before. I woke up last night and started worrying about some things, but I shut it off quickly and went back to sleep.

I’m doing better with responsibility than I was last week. I’m very glad of that, because the weight of dealing with my dad has driven me to escape responsibility a lot, and it has caused problems. Much of the anxiety we feel in life is the consequence of letting responsibilities go.

When I think about the difference between being ruled by iniquity–by unhealthy, carnal compulsions–and being ruled by the Holy Spirit, I think about casinos. To run a successful casino, you don’t need to rig the games so people always lose. All you need is a slight edge which is permanent. People think casinos are honest, but that depends on what “honest” means to you. They will tell you the truth about the odds, but the games are all set up so they aren’t quite fair, and this is legal, because it would be impossible to run a casino that didn’t win more often than its customers.

A tiny advantage in the odds of a game adds up to millions over time. The Internet says casinos only have a 52-56% chance of winning at blackjack, for example, but blackjack makes them a great deal of money.

To overcome iniquity and avoid sin, you don’t need to be completely free from carnal desires. You just need to be a little bit less inclined to sin than to do the right thing. Without the Holy Spirit, when temptation comes, you will fight until something tips you over the edge, just barely, and then you sin. When the Holy Spirit helps you, you may get close to the edge, but you don’t go over. That’s good enough. It describes what is happening to me now, most of the time.

Is what is happening to me real? Yes. I can tell you that for a fact. I don’t have the willpower to control myself without help from God. If I did, I would not concern myself so much with things like baptism and casting out demons.

You can’t manufacture willpower. Sometimes people develop it suddenly in response to traumatic experiences. A person who has an extremely unpleasant experience after doing something stupid may be able to give it up afterward out of fear, but an average person can’t choose to become self-disciplined and do it without help. Even if there were a program to help you do it, you would need willpower to make the program work.

Is what is happening to me permanent? I don’t know the answer, since I haven’t lived my whole life yet.

If what is happening to me is related to baptism, why did it start at lunch, before I was baptized? I don’t know. Maybe a spirit that was compelling me saw that it was about to be put out of business, and it gave up. I don’t think demons always wait until they’re cast out to react. A demoniac approached Jesus, yelling and so on, because the demons were upset by Jesus’ presence, and Jesus had not yet done anything to them.

Is there anything disappointing about my post-baptism life? Yes. I want to be free of compulsions and spirits, but I know God wants to give us more than freedom. He wants to fill us with love and peace. I don’t have that yet. Sometimes God’s love flows through me for a while, but it’s not constant. I hope I get there, because the presence of love inside a person is like a healing medicine and a vaccine. It doesn’t just make you nice; it repairs you and protects you. Besides, it’s very pleasant. Much more pleasant than anger and resentment, which go hand-in-hand with fear and worry, not to mention illness.

God himself is love, so if I don’t have love flowing through me all the time, I must not have the full presence of God.

Day after tomorrow, I have to cook Christmas Eve dinner. It’s a concern, because I cook amazing food which is hard to turn down. I’m being conservative. I’m making a rib roast, potatoes, and Caesar salad with anchovies and homemade croutons. My friend Amanda is bringing a dessert; I don’t even care what it is, because I want to avoid pushing for perfection. When I suggested she bring dessert, I didn’t try to think of the best-tasting choice possible.

In addition to this simple meal, I might conceivably make Texas trash. That’s all. I thought about making cheesecake, but my cheesecake is the best I have ever had, and I think I would be pushing my luck. I don’t need that level of temptation.

Today I went to the store, and rib roasts were on sale for $4.99 per pound. Is that God blessing me or Satan tempting me?

I bought a big one and cut it off the bones. I salted it heavily, put it back together, and wrapped it in a clean towel. Tomorrow I’ll coat it with garlic butter. The garlic will sink in while it sits in the fridge. Should be great.

Breakfast today and yesterday: two slices of buttered toast and decaf. Today at lunch, I had tuna salad on a baguette, with water. Later I ate some grape tomatoes. I kept feeling I needed to stay away from the Coke and Powerade.

I don’t know what will happen in the future. I’m not going to claim baptism has changed my life permanently, until I have some evidence that this is the case. I’m just telling you what’s going on right now. If it all falls apart, I will say so.

Fake News is Real

I just read about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She has lung cancer, if that’s what you call pancreatic cancer that has spread to a lung. It’s illuminating to look at the way the press is treating the news.

Stories say she had “malignant growths” removed from her left lung. That’s not correct. She had a lobectomy, which means they removed at least one lobe of the lung. When you have lung cancer, they don’t go in and take tiny pieces out. They remove the affected lobes, including healthy tissue around the tumors or lesions or whatever you want to call them.

The procedure Ginsburg underwent is like a mastectomy, not a lumpectomy. That’s what I’m trying to say. They took out a lot of flesh, hoping they removed as much of the cancer as possible.

To read the stories, you would think she had a couple of miniscule spots which were easy to isolate and remove. That illustrates the bias of the people who are covering the story. By and large, journalists live in terror of Donald Trump’s third Supreme Court justice, so they want to believe Ruth Ginsburg is going to be fine.

The stories also say doctors could not find any signs of additional cancer in her body.

My mother had the same procedure in the summer of 1996, soon after she discovered she had lung cancer. Doctors removed part of her right lung, and they told her they couldn’t find any more cancer. Roughly half a year later, she was dead, after receiving the best possible treatment at Sloan-Kettering and M.D. Anderson.

It’s not unusual for terminal cancer patients to be told they are “cancer-free” or in “total remission.” Those terms are deceptive. Cancer commonly exists in forms that are too small to detect in tests, and if your doctor says you’re in remission or cancer-free, he just means he can’t find whatever remains in your body. It does not mean you’re healed.

If you are healed, a fortiori, you will be cancer-free and in total remission. If you are declared cancer-free and in total remission, you may not be healed, and you may be gone in a few months.

The news says no new treatment is planned at this time. That doesn’t mean she’s fine. It may mean they’ve decided new treatment would be pointless. It may mean she is not strong enough for new treatment. It may mean they simply haven’t decided what to do yet.

We all know what the likely choices are: chemotherapy and/or radiation. If they decide treatment is worthwhile, those are the things that will be done. Sometimes they work, but that’s unusual.

If what I’m saying is wrong, forgive me, but it’s what I learned from a lot of reading when someone I knew had cancer. I am not making it up.

I remember talking to my dad when my mother got out of surgery. He said they thought they had gotten it all. Neither of us understood what that meant. It’s what surgeons say to make cancer patients feel good. They routinely remove all detectable cancer from patients who go on to die in short order.

Ginsburg is not a miracle patient who beat cancer twice, or at least that’s not what the evidence suggests. She’s a normal cancer patient whose cancer has metastasized, as expected. She still has the pancreatic cancer she supposedly beat a few years back. Pancreatic cancer has three sites it most likes to move to: the liver, peritoneum, and lung, in that order. What has happened to Ginsburg is the normal progression of an incurable disease.

Leftists have turned Ginsburg into a heroine because of her health problems. They have made a big mistake. In 2009, under Obama, she was diagnosed with a type of cancer that has a 93% 7-year mortality rate, and she was about 76 at the time. She could have retired and allowed Obama to choose a 45-year-old socialist in good health, but she chose not to. By choosing to hold on, she made it a near-certainty that Obama’s successor would get to choose a justice to replace her, and she chose to bet that the next president would be a leftist. She rolled the dice, and the Democrats lost. It wasn’t a generous thing to do.

You can argue that she is above partisan politics, and that she didn’t think about the political complexion of her successor when she made her decision. That’s silly. Everyone knows judges are highly partisan. A while back we had a kerfuffle because Trump acknowledged this, and people said a lot of absurd, dishonest things, pretending judges were lofty creatures that hovered above the fray at all times. Of course, Trump was right.

It’s not a coincidence that justices appointed by conservatives routinely join in votes against justices appointed by leftists. It’s not random chance.

Ginsburg is a political creature, and she wants a hard-left America. She doesn’t want to see a conservative replace her. The fact that she refused to do anything to prevent it shows that she was selfish or her judgment was clouded. It’s easy to let emotion do your thinking when you’re faced with a choice like hers.

I will be surprised if she finishes this year, but I’ll bet she tries.

The election is almost two years off. President Trump should have plenty of time to nominate a third justice. What a food fight that will be. Leftists will be beside themselves. We think they’re unhinged now; wait till Ginsburg officially retires. I don’t look forward to the spectacle.

Leftists no longer believe in democracy, if they ever did. Trump was elected fairly and legally, and they are not only opposing him; they are still trying to undo the election. They even talk about revolution, which is an act which is inherently treasonous. You have to wonder what kind of antics we will witness when they see Ginsburg slipping away.

They can’t fix this by getting rid of Trump. Even if they pulled it off, Pence would have appointment power. We will also have the Senate, which is the body that approves justices. The only hope for the left is a prolonged illness which keeps Ginsburg on the bench until a leftist succeeds Trump. It could happen, but it’s not looking good.

It will be nice if we get another conservative justice. We need that. Persecution is getting worse here in America, and while justices are neither God nor men and women of God, it’s nicer to have them working for us than against us. If Trump is a big Cyrus figure, we can certainly use some little Cyruses.

In other news, I have been cleaning up all day. I’m writing during a break. My dad is still in respite care. I’m sorry to say that four days have not been sufficient to get things back on an even keel. His bedroom and bathroom were so gross, I’ve had to put in around three hours already. I haven’t even put on clean clothes today, because I didn’t want to put them on and then expose myself to filth. I’m going to shower and change shortly.

This respite was supposed to give me rest, but it hasn’t worked out that way yet. It has been a big help, but I’m going to send him again ASAP. Medicare will pay for 5 respite days per month. I plan to send him again in a couple of weeks. He may not like it, but something has to be done.

This day has not been what I had hoped for, but at least I’m not caring for him AND cleaning up his mess. If he were here, he would be making the process much harder. I go into his bedroom and do whatever I want. I throw out things he shouldn’t have, for example. If he were here, I would have to listen to him yell about it, or I would have to sneak around and strive to keep what I was doing from him. Because he isn’t here, I can get it over with, without opposition.

His furniture will have to be thrown out or given away when he passes. I gave him my bedroom furniture, which belonged to my mother. He is doing things to it that defy description. Oh, well. I never liked it anyway.

Having him out of the house has helped me solidify my conclusion that he has no business here. No one should live the way he lives now. Filth doesn’t bother him at all, and he would happily live in it from now on, but it’s not acceptable. The stress of having two big rooms I can’t possibly keep clean is a weight on me. No one can live in a house with two rooms that stink and not feel oppressed.

Having filth and assorted stenches in your face every day is very taxing. It’s surprising. It’s not like caring for livestock every day. Human waste is very nasty, and human beings live indoors, on your furniture and floors. Pig manure stinks like crazy, but you can raise pigs half a mile from your house, and you never have to let them in the front door. Pig manure is also predictable. You know when and where you will find it. A dementia patient’s various types of dirt and foulness will constantly surprise you. And you don’t have to do laundry for a pig.

I’ve been thinking about the changes I’ve seen in him, so I can have a proper understanding of what’s happening. When we came to Ocala last summer, I took him to a mattress store and had him lie down on some mattresses. He could walk into the store just fine. He could lie down and get up without help. He could talk about what we were doing in a productive way. He could get out his cards and pay. If I took him to a mattress store today, he would have to use a walker. He would have a very hard time trying out mattresses. Talking to him about them would be difficult. I pay for everything now because he doesn’t carry a wallet. That’s the change, over about 17 months.

I think he will pass away in 2019. I feel that God is telling me that. It would be nice to have my dad set up well, and to have everything in this house in order, when it happens. If that comes to pass, and my dad accepts salvation for real, I will be more than content.

Back Where it All Started

I have returned from The Last Reformation’s event in Dunedin, Florida, which is pretty much the same place as Clearwater. It’s part of the Greater Tampa complex.

I have a lot to write about. Maybe I should list some important points.

* I was baptized in water again.

* I came away with a good impression of The Last Reformation, although I am not interested in joining.

* I found myself in a small group with a super-enthusiastic Christian lady who was clearly crawling with demons.

* I learned some bad things about the Ocala area.

* I had a nightmare the night after I was baptized, and I feel it was connected to the fact that I was back in the area controlled by the principality that tormented me during my early childhood.

My dad is in assisted living today. As I predicted (Satan is always predictable), A lot of things went wrong while I was trying to get him installed at the facility and get on the road. The doctor who was supposed to fax a crucial document to the facility screwed up. I could not get my dad moving to save my life. My dad had to use the toilet twice in about half an hour while I was trying to get him to the ALF. I got some kind of chemical on the soles of my boots, and they smelled the whole way to Dunedin. I still don’t know what it is. I thought it was me. When I was packing, I told myself it was neurotic to take another pair of boots.

I think I’ll get up right now and change them.

I saw all this coming, and I prayed for help days before it happened. Things worked out okay. I was about 10 minutes late for the first portion of the event, and it didn’t matter at all.

When I got on the road, friends asked me if I was feeling free. I told them I had started to feel free at the ALF. A couple of minutes out, my dad announced that he needed to get to a bathroom. When we walked in, instead of asking them to show me where the bathroom was so I could fix things myself, I told the receptionist about the problem and had her page someone. The second she complied is when I started to feel free. Someone materialized and whisked him off, and it was not my problem any more.

Free, free, free. If you want to know what freedom feels like, wait till someone else has to take your elderly parent to the toilet and deal with whatever happens.

The drive to Greater Tampa was very unpleasant. Florida is getting very crowded, and I-75, which used to be used fairly sparsely, was loaded with vehicles. The trip took over two hours, and about an hour of that was dedicated to traveling the last 25 miles. Do the math, and you can see that I moved very slowly. There is no quick way to get to Dunedin from the north. You have to make turn after turn, on little surface roads jammed up with commuters. Not fun at all, especially when you know you’re late for something.

The first event was a meeting where Torben Sondergaard discussed TLR and the things we were going to do. I don’t recall all that much of it. Eventually, he had those of us who wanted prayer get up and stand in the aisles. People came to pray for us. I was kind of a wallflower; no one wanted to dance with me! Two guys finally made it.

Some people had demons cast out of them. I wasn’t getting a lot of action, so I eventually wandered around and joined with the people who were helping people get delivered. I stayed in the background, though.

That was very nice. Deliverance is one of the things Jesus said we would do, but most churches want nothing to do with it. They’re like emergency rooms that offer free coffee and donuts but no medical help.

The next day, he taught us about water baptism and the baptism with the Holy Spirit. He taught that we should all speak in tongues. I agreed with all that. If memory serves, the next session was about “kickstarting,” which was the main purpose of the event. They intended to send us out in small groups, to evangelize and pray for people to be healed.

While he was preaching, I kept hearing a hard, metallic, female voice, saying things like, “Come on!,” and “YES.” It was annoying. In charismatic churches, you will often find people who wish they were doing the talking, and they will add little interjections. It’s as if Satan sponsored hecklers. Some preachers like it. I find it distracting. I believe spirits use people to screw up sermons.

From time to time, I looked around, trying to figure out who was making the racket. Eventually, I saw a white-haired lady barking from the back wall. I knew we were going to break up into small groups later for evangelizing, and I decided to make absolutely sure I was not in her group. I knew she would talk too much and cause problems. People who had useful things to say would not be able to get a word in edgewise, because we would be in the path of her torrential preaching and holiness signaling.

I just made that last term up.

On this trip, I realized why Paul said women should be quiet in church. If you’ve been a churchgoer for a long time, you know this to be true: women are the most disruptive people at charismatic services. Children take second place. When someone screams like a banshee during songs or, even worse, makes horrible noises on a shofar or some other noisemaking device, it’s almost always a woman. When someone decides the Holy Spirit is forcing them to shriek at top volume, shake, cry, and roll on the floor, it’s almost always a woman. When someone has to issue a loud, verbal agreement with everything the pastor says, it’s almost always a woman.

When someone refuses to take a wailing kid out of the room, it’s almost always a woman. Thanks to our weird new breastfeeding laws, we now have topless women who refuse to cover up in church. Men do not have that issue. Also, what gender are the people who come to church in short skirts and sit in the front row with their knees a foot apart?

I never thought about Paul’s ideas this way until this week. America is in the grip of woman-worship and the persecution of men and boys. We have the audacity to say Paul, an apostle who wrote scripture, was wrong about women making a nuisance of themselves in churches, but I have seen him proven right hundreds of times.

Last night, we had three false messages in tongues, and they came from two women. One woman’s husband gave an interpretation, but it was fake: “Trust me, my children, I want to come in and talk things out with you,” and so on.

The second woman started crying, and she screamed to God in a 120-decibel voice that could bleach dirty laundry.

I’m sorry to say this, but Torben let his wife sing at the end, and her voice was so hard and piercing, it pretty much killed any semblance of peace, and it drove off God’s presence. It made my head hurt, it reminded me how tired I was, and it made me want to get back to the hotel ASAP (which I did).

We humor women a lot in church, and it causes big problems.

I’m not going to qualify what I’m saying or try to defend it. I see Paul’s point, and I defer to his superior knowledge and revelation. If that offends anyone, I don’t care at all. I now live in a world where everything I believe offends people, and pretending to believe otherwise is not the solution. There is no solution. People will be offended, and I’m fine with that. There is nothing I can,or should, do about it.

The program called for us to break into small groups, as I have said. I was not looking forward to it. TLR goes to malls and so on, and they accost people and ask if they need prayer. I love street evangelism, but I don’t believe in bothering people unless the Holy Spirit gives the order. I like what Cardboard Box Church does. They set their small box church up, and people are drawn to it. People who have to be chased down are like unripe fruit. They’re not ready.

Mormons chase people. They have to do time as evangelists when they’re in their twenties. They can be very rude and aggressive. They are often obnoxious. I don’t think Christians should behave like Mormons. Jesus made it clear that he will tell us where to cast our nets. We don’t have to go out and try to make things happen without his help.

Torben called for people who had been to other Kickstart events to stand up, and he said we should to them and form groups. I was startled, because maybe a fourth of the assembly stood up. I was not happy. This told me that the outreach was not as strong as I had hoped. Instead of being drowned in a tide of new people who needed instruction, they attracted a moderate number of new people and a lot of old hands who could, in some cases, be termed “groupies.”

It’s great to be among Christians you know well, but there isn’t much purpose in seeing the same people over and over and preaching to each other.

I went to a guy who was a good distance from the white-haired lady, and sure enough, she trotted over and asked to go with us. I knew it was going to happen, because it was the perfect Satanic annoyance bomb. I should have gone to another group. I did not. It turned out my group had four veterans, including the lady.

People who are demonized are drawn to me like Bill Clinton to a bag of chili-cheese-slaw dogs. They always have been. I don’t know why. It’s really something to see. Sometimes they’re nasty to me, and sometimes they behave like complete lickspittles, kowtowing and serving for no apparent reason. It’s hard to miss them, because they act so weird.

Maybe someone somewhere will figure out who I’m talking about, and she’ll find out, and then I’ll be condemned as a heretic or whatever. I thought about that, but I decided I don’t care.

Generally, the people who get mad at me for telling the truth are people I should not have been close to in the first place.

There are certain people who are holier and more connected to God than absolutely everyone they know, and they work very hard to make these things clear. They are part of the group I call “Jesus buffs.” Being on fire for Jesus is a hobby for them, just like seeing every Grateful Dead concert and owning every bootleg tape was a hobby for Deadheads. When you’re with these people, the message you get is, “I have been doing this since the dawn of time, I know every minister on earth, I hear more from God than you do, I touch more black people than you do, and I know absolutely everything, so whatever your testimony is, it is insignificant, and I will talk way too much until you run away.”

This lady had real problems. Her name tag said something like, “Loyal to the Lord” on it (I won’t say what it really said), and when we asked what her real name was, she said, “Loyal to the Lord.”

Of course, I mean she said what was on her name tag.

Yes, she had changed her name. She asked if we wanted to see her driver’s license, and no one said yes, and out it came.

Imagine how strange it would be to work in the legal system, dealing with a person like this. “We have an execution tomorrow.” “Who is it?” “We’re executing On Fire for King Jesus.”

She was proud of having joined the body of Christ (so she believes) in 1971. Someone said something about how that made her part of a historic movement, and she said, “I AM the movement.”

We ate lunch as a group. As soon as we walked in, she walked to every table, introduced herself, and bothered and touched people.

For some reason, I was not able to eat at all; I had no appetite.

Loyal to the Lord told us her spectacular testimony. She also told us about the street people she had reached. Then she took out her phone and showed us videos of them, talking about the wonderful things she had helped them experience. Yes, she took videos of people she preached to. I don’t mean helpful teaching videos, like the ones we see on Youtube. I mean documentation, created to show to people she met.

While she talked, she would sometimes close her eyes, nod, and say, “Okay,” or, “Mm-hmm” while smiling a hard smile. She gritted her teeth, really. After one of these events, she said, “Got it.” Then she looked at us and said, “I get downloads.”

At one point, she told us doctors had told us she was bipolar and schizophrenic, “but WHATEVER.” I think the idea was that those crazy doctors didn’t “get” her.

It’s very sad, really, but I didn’t see what I could do.

The weird thing about it is that she knew a lot of things that were correct. She knew the prosperity gospel and the feel-good gospel were crocks. She knew the purpose of baptism. She spoke a lot of deep truths and things that only sounded like deep truths.

I kept wondering what disinformation was on the way; I assumed that if Satan was letting her say all these things that were true, there had to be a gigantic stink bomb coming. Sure enough, out it came. She told me I could not have a demon. She said it was impossible for the Holy Spirit to live in someone who had demons.

Bang. That was the message Satan sent her to deliver. If you tell people they don’t have demons, and they believe it, they don’t get the demons cast out. “Nothing to see here. Move along.” It gives demons job security.

It’s no wonder it’s so hard to get rid of demons. Satan is the god of this world, so demons are civil servants.

I knew she was wrong. I was baptized with the Holy Spirit over 30 years ago, but at my last church, I went to the altar twice to get demons cast out, and I am positive I was not imagining them. On one occasion, I felt my insides turning over as I walked up, and my hands turned to ice. Whatever was in there was scared to death. No one can tell me you can’t have the Holy Spirit and a demon.

She had a ring, but no husband was in sight. Not surprising. Living with her would be like living with a bulldozer that had no “off” switch. You would look for opportunities to get away and rest. She had no home. She just lived with people here and there. We didn’t learn where her income came from. She made it sound like she was a great deal like a Deadhead, except she did it for God.

If you’re not familiar with Deadheads, they used to follow the Grateful Dead everywhere. They probably kept them solvent, since the band was not all that successful after maybe 1972. They traveled in a big caravan and slept in VW buses and so on.

One nice thing about having her with us is that our lunch conversation was so long, we completely skipped chasing people at the mall. In fact, I deliberately sat and said nothing, when I thought it would prolong lunch, hoping we would run long. Sometimes I asked questions I knew would call for long answers. From time to time, I sneaked looks at my phone to see how I was doing.

Her remarks made me think about what Jesus said about the difficulty of avoiding deception: “For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand.” I was sitting at a table with two fairly knowledgeable believers and a lady who was teaching doctrines of demons, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who saw her problem. Disturbing. I’m convinced prayer in tongues makes the difference. When you pray in tongues a lot, God brings you out of deception. Unfortunately, you may still fall into it from time to time, and you may linger in it for a while before you get out.

When we got back to church, I saw her walk to her car, and I realized it was right beside mine. I made a mental note, and the next time I parked, I drove to the other side of the complex. I avoided her for the rest of the event, and we never spoke again. She disappeared before the final session.

The men in the group were very nice. One was a Ukrainian, so he didn’t get to give much input. The other two were guys from Florida, and they were a bit on the Jesus buff side. They were not annoying or attention-hungry, but they seemed to know just about everything about every hot charismatic-counterculture preacher. They knew a lot about Torben.

I will never be like them, because I am never going to another Kickstart. I’m not going to follow TLR around. I will never stand in the back with my buddies, saying, “Remember the time in Dallas when Torben slipped and dropped his new Ipad in the tank?”

I pried a bit, and I got some answers.

I talked about the TLR healing videos. I said I was impressed with all the quick healings, and I asked if they posted videos of the people they failed to help. They both smiled suddenly, and one of them said, “NO ONE does that.” So TLR has failures and secrets, just like everyone else, but you don’t see them on Youtube.

That’s bad. If you conceal your failures, you give other people unrealistic expectations regarding what they will be like if they listen to you. Also, if people don’t know you’re doing things wrong, they won’t ask God to help you find the correction you need.

I asked about the mall-chasing angle, and they said they didn’t like it, pretty much for the same reasons I don’t.

One reason I like TLR is that I believe God told me the age of the big church is ending. I believe individuals will spread the gospel in the future. Torben has said things like this, more or less. The guys in my group told me he used to be against big churches, but he has changed somewhat. That’s an alarm bell. Big churches with big money and big audiences have a long history of seducing and messing up preachers who are doing God’s work just fine without them.

I told them I was not going to join TLR and that I was never going to join another church. I said these things flat out. No one at the table had a problem with that.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Jesus buff. When you become a Trekkie or Juggalo for God, as it were, you focus on the Trekkie/Juggalo experience instead of God. You buy the T-shirts with big crosses on them, you listen to Third Day even if the songs aren’t very good, you go on mission trips even when God doesn’t send you, and you put a fish on every vehicle you own. The more of these people I met this week, the worse I felt about decorating vehicles with Jesus paraphernalia. It seems like a really bad idea.

Having escaped the full-contact evangelism experience, I changed into swim trunks for the baptism session. They divided us into two groups. One group was people who had spoken in tongues, and the other was everyone else. A young man who appears in the videos was put in charge of me and a lady. He took off with the lady and returned to me later.

They had three horse-watering tanks in the church, full of warmish water. I was determined to try to be the first or second person into my tank, because I knew I would be submerged, essentially, in a stranger’s bath water, with nothing to cover my mouth. I was probably one of the first three in my tank. Not what I wanted, but it could have been worse. I thought about asking them to put a little bleach in each tank.

I am told that the phrase “living water” comes from a Greek phrase meaning “moving water,” as contrasted with stagnant water. We think it means the water is alive or holy, but in reality, if what I have been told is correct, a Greek would call any river or stream “living water.” English is not that different. We call wine without bubbles “still,” and “still” can be used to mean “dead,” as in “stillborn.”

Baptism is supposed to be a cleansing. You can’t cleanse yourself with a bath. When you take a bath, you just dilute the filth, and then you let the diluted filth solution dry on you. When you shower, the filth goes down the drain. A shower is living water. A bath isn’t. Given the choice, I would prefer to be baptized in a river, the ocean, or even a swimming pool with the pump running.

Baptism is a Christian continuation of the Jewish mikveh procedure. A mikveh is a purifying ritual bath. Here is what Wikipedia says: “a mikveh must be connected to a natural spring or well of naturally occurring water.” I don’t think Jews would want to jump into a horse trough other people had just used.

A young woman who was also dressed for baptism started talking to me. Like me, she had no one with her. We smiled in a moment of shared anticipation.

Before I went in, I had a conversation with the young man, and he seemed determined to prevent me from being baptized. He kept asking about my first immersion baptism, which I had received in a state of ignorance. I was honest with him, but I pushed, because I had driven a hundred miles and spent a thousand dollars, and I was not going home without getting wet. I had to see what it was all about. I knew my previous baptism was not right, regardless of what he thought.

TLR has a policy of not repeating baptism unless it has to. I don’t understand that. You can take communion three times a day if you want, and God will be fine with it. What’s the problem with being baptized twice? Many people who have had a hard time praying in tongues have had people baptize them over and over with the Holy Spirit, just to be sure, and no one has a problem with it.

As I said above, a mikveh is a ritual bath. Jews don’t confine themselves to one ritual bath per life. A Jewish woman has to do it once every 28 days. They do it for various purposes, including conversion. Somehow the TLR people have become concerned that twice may be too much. I don’t know why that is. I may be baptized a third time if I feel like it. God isn’t going to send me to hell for it.

If there is no limit to the number of times you can make yourself unclean, which is true, I don’t see why we should limit the number of times you can be cleansed again.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t see the down side.

Some of the people who got baptized made awful sounds, and there was some crying and so on. Lots of casting out. I wondered what would happen when I went under. I had some groaning, but that’s not unusual for me when I’m in the presence of God. I didn’t feel demons flying out of me. I didn’t have a vision. Nonetheless, I was very, very glad to have it over with. I wanted things to be done in proper order, and after I was baptized, I felt I had done what was right.

I don’t want to treat baptism like an amulet. Orthodox Jews still use amulets to run spirits off. I don’t want to assume that if I jump into a tank of water, every spirit in the room will have to run away. Nonetheless, I did want to mark myself as God’s property so they would know they were trespassing.

They told us we could request that they not film us. I did not do that. Jesus requires that we acknowledge him before men, and I thought refusing to be filmed would offend him. It goes against my nature to be filmed in a baptism tank and put on Youtube, but I didn’t object. I don’t think anyone filmed me, however.

After I got dry and dressed, I heard a voice behind me. The young woman who had talked to me beforehand was sitting on a chair with her feet on the cushion and her legs crossed. She wanted to know how it was going.

She seemed to be shining. Her whole face glowed with the presence of the Holy Spirit. We talked a little, and I gave her the best advice I could. I told her she needed to pray in tongues a lot every day. I told her what had happened to me when I stopped. It was very strange, talking to her, because everything soaked in without resistance. It was like talking to an angel.

Women have a way of grading men, like teachers, when they talk. Or they feel they have to interrupt and show that they have important input, too. This girl just grinned and said things like, “Thanks.” She was so happy to get the advice; it didn’t occur to her to try to correct me or question what I said.

Men could be better men if women were easier to talk to. Anyway, I tried to say helpful things, and then I went and sat down. I didn’t want to be the annoying old Jesus buff who can’t shut up.

As I walked away, she said she would see me in heaven, and I told her she really would, and when she did, I would remind her she had predicted it.

At the end of the session, Torben encouraged us to form little groups based on where we lived, and he said we should stay in touch. I found myself in a group with one of the guys I had lunch with. Loyal to the Lord was not there. There was also a nice couple from somewhere not too far away. We talked a lot, and I gave them my number. I warned them not to count on me.

While they talked, I realized they were real Jesus buffs. They kept bringing up obscure teachers–people even I had never heard of–and when one person brought one up, the rest would say they already knew him or they used to work for him or something.

One guy is from Ocala. We talked about Ocala churches, and he said he had found that people here do “pretend church.” He said it’s very common. That surprised me, but it’s consistent with what happened to me at Meadowbrook Church. People who are used to Christianity get complacent, especially if they live in a nice area where life is pleasant. It’s easy for people like that to begin maintaining a safe distance from God, while pretending to serve him.

Eventually, we broke for dinner, and when I returned, Torben passed out free copies of his movie, to which he gave the title The Last Reformation (Surprise!). He showed us 20 minutes of the film.

I’ll tell you what we saw. He went to Jerusalem and healed people. Proselytizing is illegal in Israel, so I wondered how he got away with it. He went to Bethlehem, which is now part of what the Antichrist has dubbed “the West Bank.” It’s all Arab. He healed and evangelized Muslims. At one point, he was forced to move in order to avoid being attacked.

The video was wonderful. I didn’t get a copy, because it’s on Youtube. It showed a man having a classic walk with God. He got lost in Jerusalem. While he was “lost,” all sorts of “coincidences” happened, and he ended up doing many wonderful works he did not see coming. This is how God works in people who are Spirit-led.

He also gave us more of his testimony. I can’t recall all of it, but it was one “coincidence” after another. If you’re a Christian, and funny “coincidences” don’t happen to you a lot, something is wrong.

I only met him briefly, and I think that’s okay, because he isn’t God, and man-worship is a big problem. If I need Torben Sondergaard personally, then everything Torben Sondergaard teaches doesn’t work. Like every good teacher, he wants people to function without him. He says that himself. I may be taking him more literally than he wants, since I am not joining the movement or going to Denmark for his school.

The experience of going to the Tampa area was very disturbing to me. When I got near Tampa, I felt powerful supernatural pressure. I couldn’t tell whether it was the Holy Spirit alone, or some kind of battle, or what.

I started thinking about memories of my horrible childhood in Tampa. I kept passing signs with forgotten names on them. “Dale Mabry.” “Ybor City.” I thought about the waking nightmares I had had, in which I saw giant insects, centipedes, snakes, and lizards crawling all over the walls, bed, and floors. I thought about the way demons had made their presence obvious to me every day. I thought about the violence I used to see in my house on San Miguel Street.

I wondered if the pressure came from demons of my childhood, showing up to greet me on my return. Demons can be associated with places.

I felt oppressed. Nothing is worse than escaping the evil influence of a bully and then having to return to it.

Last night, having been baptized, I hoped to have a peaceful sleep. Instead, I woke up over and over. I had a nightmare about a miserable person from my past, returning to cast her filthy shadow over me again. Very disturbing.

This person and Loyal to the Lord seem to serve the same spirit. People call it Jezebel. It’s feminine and emasculating. You see it in brassy women with hard voices. It’s a spirit of witchcraft. Sometimes a woman with this spirit will be openly vicious. That’s how they act when they think you have no power. When they know you’re stronger than they are, they pretend to help and nurture, like the mother-in-law in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When you have problems, they’re full of answers. They can’t be helpful enough. They’ve got you. All the while, they’re bleeding your strength and controlling you.

They can also be slutty and seductive, seeming to make all your fantasies come true while striving to enslave you.

I made an effort to get to know people, but I was leery of the whole Jesus buff thing. I felt great about the young lady I talked to, because I thought she really had it, and by “it,” I mean what God was trying to give people. Still, overall, I did not fit in.

As I drove away, I talked to God. I told Jesus I felt shut out. I asked him if that was how he felt, and I felt a powerful rush inside me, as if he were shouting, “YES.”

When I woke up today, I planned to have breakfast in Dunedin and then leave, driving past my old house on the way. I decided I could not do it. I had to get out immediately, so I got in the car and drove. You would think I would have been in the clear, but in order to go from Dunedin to Ocala, GPS takes you through Tampa, so I actually went south. I had to run the gauntlet again.

I saw old names again. “Lowry Park,” where my mother used to take me in order to escape from the pain of her marriage. “Gandy Bridge.” She used to take me there for the same reason. I would walk around on the rip-rap, and we would make little paper boats and put them in the water.

I drove across the bay and saw whitecaps. I remembered that my mother loved to look at the whitecaps. She grew up at the base of a hill in Eastern Kentucky. Troubled salt water was a novelty to mountain girl only in her late twenties.

The memories would have been easier to stomach had her life gotten better after Tampa, but it got worse, and then she died young. Those things happened, and I failed to help her. Her daughter became a vicious drug addict who tormented her mother until she prayed for God to take her child. Her husband made her miserable continuously until the last year of her life. She died in Miami, but she never left Tampa.

It rained all last night, and it rained the whole way from Dunedin to Ocala. In Florida, hard rain usually doesn’t last more than a few minutes. It it goes half an hour, it’s unusual. I had hard rain for two hours. Sometimes I could barely see, but I did my best to keep it over 70. I didn’t feel any better until I stopped seeing suburbs and started seeing fields.

Do I recommend TLR? Sure, as long as you get baptized and pray in tongues every day. No human being is infallible, and every movement develops issues eventually. TLR will help you get baptized with water and the Holy Spirit, and they will teach you that you need to die to the flesh and serve God. They will teach you that the sinner’s prayer is not enough. This is all extremely valuable. Just don’t get the idea that you can join TLR, follow the program like all the other Jesus buffs, and live a perfect life that makes God completely happy.

God told me some things. He told me that authority comes from time spent in the presence of God. He also told me peace comes from authority. If you want to walk with God, you have to spend time with him in order to hear from him and get authority, and that means regular prayer in tongues. Without it, you’re doing your own thing.

The Catholic church was probably great when it started. Now it’s deadly. Same goes for the charismatic denominations. If you get satisfied with a denomination, and you never let God critique their doctrine, you become stagnant and infected.

Every denomination brews Kool-Aid eventually, so try not to drink it.

While I was getting baptized, I had to make myself to commit to living for God, so I did it. I told him I was afraid to trust him and obey him, and I told him I could not to it without his help. I hope it pays off. Right now, I’m just tired.

I don’t feel good at all. I feel that I’m under attack. Nonetheless, I think I did the correct thing, and I don’t consider new resistance to be an indication that there is a problem.

My dad is still in the ALF. I have not called him, because it would defeat the purpose of respite care. The word “respite” applies to me, not him. If you’re a caregiver, you need to understand how that works. A dying person does not need rest; people wait on them all day. The rest is for the people who look after them and become prisoners.

I don’t know if he’ll be angry that I didn’t call. There is a good chance he won’t remember. Even if he remembers until I pick him up, he will forget by next week. It doesn’t matter. Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t matter if he stayed angry. Some things have to be done, regardless if they make people unhappy.

I’ll see him day after tomorrow. Until then, I plan to get well and restore order.

There is a Wide Selection

People who don’t believe in God or in healing are always coming up with excuses for their unbelief. I say “excuses” because many people who have ample reason to believe choose not to in spite of the evidence. Human beings notice evidence, but it’s not what determines whether they believe or not. In the end, desire is what counts. We believe what we want to believe.

Skeptics say, “Why are there no documented miracles?” There are, but when you show them the documentation, they say it’s bogus. They ask why Christians don’t go into hospitals and heal everyone there. First of all, we’re not allowed to. You can’t barge into hospitals and do what you want. Second, many people will refuse prayer. Third, even strong healers don’t succeed with everyone. Fourth, not many Christians have reached the point where they can heal people. Fifth, quite honestly, some people are ill because God has given up on them; he will let you go eventually if you are determined not to be reached.

You can always find a lie to help you believe what you want. Remember the story of Lazarus the beggar. He was in heaven, and a rich man he knew was in hell. The rich man asked Abraham to send Lazarus to put water on his tongue, and Abraham said he couldn’t. He then asked if he would send Lazarus back to earth to warn his brothers about hell, and Abraham told him that if they wouldn’t believe Moses and the prophets, they wouldn’t believe one who returned from the dead.

Some people have returned from the dead in recent years, and they tell their stories on TV and Youtube. Doctors confirm that their hearts stopped for long periods. People don’t believe them, proving the parable of Lazarus was right.

Yesterday I saw a neat video from The Last Restoration. A young woman had a broken foot; she had injured it three days earlier. Obviously, a broken foot doesn’t heal in three days. It takes 6 weeks just to get to the point where the cast can come off.

Someone prayed for her, and she started dancing and jumping on her foot, which was still in a cast. Is that good evidence? If it’s not, then you have to come up with another explanation. Did all the people in the video conspire to propagate a lie? Did they buy medical supplies and put a cast on her leg? Why would she go along with that, and what’s the point? They don’t charge, so why would they go to the trouble?

Maybe your lie is this: “She wasn’t really healed. The cast supported her while she jumped.”

Later in the video, she removed the cast herself, on the same day, and jumped and danced some more. How’s that? Can you imagine the pain of jumping on a foot that had been broken three days earlier and which had just begun to knit?

Here’s another lie you may want to try: “Later on, the delusion faded, and she collapsed in pain and had to get another cast.”

Here’s your problem: the video shows her later in the same week, still walking without a cast, and she is still testifying. She talks about healing other people.

Now what lie will you reach for?

Some guy in the comments credited her mind with the miracle. I’ve heard this before. If the mind heals people, why do we still have medical science? Human civilization is thousands of years old, yet no one has been able to create a mind-healing industry. I have never been able to heal myself with my mind, but I have received a number of divine healings, some miraculous, through prayer. Why can’t my mind do what prayer does?

If you’ve seen good evidence, and you’re still not a believer, here’s the real reason: you just don’t want to believe. Maybe you like sin too much. Maybe you already have another religion. Maybe you’re a pro-homosexuality warrior. Maybe a Christian hurt your feelings. Maybe you hate God because one of your parents died young. Maybe you think Christians aren’t cool; it’s very important to be cool.

It really doesn’t matter what God does. If he appeared to you in person and let you look at his face and performed several miracles for you, later on, you would say you had been hallucinating.

Unbelievers keep moving the goalposts on God. They set the bar higher and higher so he can’t clear it. That’s why God doesn’t put on a constant supernatural circus for us. It wouldn’t help.

Here is the video. I think it’s genuine. I really enjoyed it, and I hope you will, too.

Self-Pity is a Root of Many Problems

I continue to look forward to getting a proper water baptism. I keep watching videos of people who have wonderful testimonies of freedom from demons and relief from iniquity. I can’t wait to get it over with. I am convinced the people who baptized me didn’t know what they were doing, and my understanding was completely inadequate.

Protestants who refuse to baptize babies are quick to criticize other churches. We say baby baptisms are worthless because the recipients can’t possibly understand what’s happening. In the Bible, it’s very clear that baptism was something people chose to do. We don’t see people dragging each other into the Jordan against their will so John can force them under, and we don’t see anyone baptized in ignorance.

We like to point these things out, but at the same time, we baptize people who don’t really understand what’s happening. How is that different from baptizing a baby? The same fundamental problem exists. If you don’t know what baptism means, it can’t do what it’s supposed to do.

I feel that baptism functions as a sort of flea dip, to rid us of demons. It certainly seems that way. Peter compared it to the flood, which rid the world of people who later became demons, and people who are baptized at The Last Reformation events routinely testify that demons leave them and iniquities (compulsions to sin) go away.

Baptism comes from Jewish ritual immersion, which is intended to be a cleansing experience to take away impurity. People are full of demons. It would be a little strange if God gave us a cleansing ritual that only cleaned the body while leaving filthy spirits free to run us.

Jesus criticized the Pharisees because they only cleaned the outside of the vessel. You can see this idea in various places in scripture. It’s what he was referring to when he said the Pharisees were whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones. In the Bible, bones can represent spirits. A whitewashed tomb full of dead mean’s bones is a man full of the spirits of angel-sired half-breeds.

I’m hoping for good results. We will see what happens. It won’t be long.

I keep praying for God to derail the predictable Satanic efforts to keep me from going.

This morning God showed me something interesting. I was thinking about self-pity and the way it feeds other iniquities. If you pity yourself and feel cheated, you will look for ways to offset the damages. You will view certain foods as treats to make yourself feel better. You may feel entitled to a certain amount of sexual sin. You may decide it’s okay to damage or steal from businesses owned by Whites and Asians. You may choose to attack Jews.

You may think forced redistribution of wealth is okay.

Self-pity turns you into a mother figure for yourself. You will tend to spoil yourself and tell yourself everything you do is okay. That’s pretty gross. Nothing is more disgusting than a grown man who wants to be mothered, and few things are more annoying than being mothered.

I was thinking about these things, and God showed me that my problem, as far as self-pity goes, was the sin of Sarah.

When God told Abraham he was going to have a son in spite of his age, Sarah laughed. She did not have faith. Then she lied to God and said she didn’t laugh. Because it took a long time for the promise to come true, Sarah decided to force it to come true. She pushed Abraham to sleep with a servant woman of dubious character, and Ishmael was born. The Jews and the world would have been a lot better off without Ishmael. He gave rise to troublesome nations that still make the rest of us suffer.

Sarah didn’t think God was doing enough for her, and she didn’t believe he would ever come through, so she decided to spoil herself and Abraham. She decided to provide her own blessing. What a mistake. What a sin.

We do what Sarah did all the time. If God doesn’t bring you a wife soon enough, you fornicate and look at porn. If God doesn’t bring you a husband soon enough, you buy 7 cats and eat ice cream every night. If God doesn’t prosper your business, you cut corners and cheat. We bless ourselves as well as we can, because we’re not willing to wait for God. The fake blessings we create cause lots of problems for us.

It’s interesting stuff.

Of course, Sarah was not the only one who acted this way. Aaron’s sons put strange fire on the altar instead of waiting for God’s fire. Saul performed a sacrifice instead of waiting for a priest, and he consulted a witch instead of waiting for a prophet. It’s a common pattern.

When you turn to God without being freed from iniquity, you find yourself straining every day. You still want to sin, but you force yourself to refrain. Something inside you tells you, “It’s okay to let go today; God doesn’t mind if you take a break.” Iniquity makes us want cheat days, like bodybuilders who eat revolting food 6 days a week and have to give in on the 7th. If God changes your heart and drives out your demons, you shouldn’t want or feel entitled to breaks from holiness.

In other news, I learned something interesting about Andrew Wommack. He is a popular charismatic preacher. I met him when he came to Miami. He has a lot of sound teaching, but he is not totally trustworthy (Who is?). When I saw him speak, he praised Joyce Meyer, who is way out there in the prosperity gospel wilderness.

I just learned that he endorses Kenneth Copeland, who is extremely, extremely messed up. Copeland is angry and nasty, he has made a number of false prophecies, he has made himself extremely rich on offerings, he owns several jets, he teaches the vilest version of the prosperity gospel this side of Robert Tilton, and he is taking part in the bizarre one-world religion drive. He is spiritually radioactive.

On a website, Wommack endorses him as a person who brings people to maturity in Christ. That’s way off. In reality, Copeland keeps people from maturing. He makes them focus on money instead of becoming new creations.

Copeland was one of my sister’s favorites. She sent him money. His ministry called her often and expressed concern about her. WHEN SHE STOPPED GIVING! Not before.

That was pretty transparent. It showed where their hearts were. When she lost her house and went into a rehab facility and then a homeless shelter, neither he nor any of the other money preachers offered her a refund or any other type of help.

I have been off Wommack for a few years, and I would suggest that other people be careful with him, too.

Any preacher who focuses on blessings that are primarily selfish is dangerous. I’m hoping to be blessed at the TLR event I’m attending, but look what they offer: freedom from iniquity, freedom from demons, help in dedicating myself completely to God…these are things that relate to seeking first God’s kingdom and his righteousness (as Jesus commanded). It’s not like going to Creflo Dollar’s church and paying God a bribe so he will bring you a new Mercedes.

Every blessing appeals to self-interest to some degree; if that weren’t true, we would not call them blessings. But we should put God’s desires first.

I’m concerned about getting too connected to misguided preachers. Some serve demons in a big way, and I believe that joining forces with them opens the door to demons, the same way owning a Ouija board or an idol would.

My mother discovered a preacher named Roland Buck. He wrote a book in which he claimed angels visited him and told him things. I used to think it was pretty good, because so much of it rang true. I was not smart enough to ask why he had to rely on angels in the age of Holy Spirit baptism.

Angels are very dangerous, because, hello, a third of them serve Satan, who is also an angel. The Muslims claim their cult was started by an angel. The Mormons claim their cult was also started by an angel. The Bible warns against worshiping “the host of heaven.” It warns about listening to unscriptural doctrine, even when it comes from angels.

We should not be going to angels for doctrine, because they lie. God gave us the Holy Spirit to teach us. He’s not going to send angels to second-guess the Holy Spirit. When you hear directly from God, it makes no sense to send angels to teach you.

I threw Buck’s book out. The Bible says you can be destroyed along with the cursed objects you possess. I don’t want to be in the line of fire.

Incidentally, Buck endorsed the prosperity gospel. He said people who gave his church money got richer and richer. For all I know, Satan made this happen in his church. On the other hand, maybe Buck lied or simply didn’t look carefully at the facts. Giving money to churches generally does not lead to financial help from God, and if you give wrongly, it leads to poverty and the removal of blessings.

I don’t know if I’ll start a kerfuffle by saying this, but someone gave me a book about a new movement, and I threw it out, too. They have a new doctrine that involves visualizing past experiences and asking Jesus to show up and tell you where he was at the time. I gave it a sincere effort, in order to be open-minded, and nothing at all happened. I had bad feelings about the players in the ministry when I watched their videos. I think they’re in trouble, so while it was very thoughtful to provide me with the book, I got rid of it. I don’t want to have a problem with God because of it.

After I wrote that, I felt a weight lift off me.

The things TLR does seem safe. They are scriptural. They baptize for the remission of sin, with repentance and prayer beforehand. They baptize with the Holy Spirit. They cast out demons. They teach discipleship, not just ways to be blessed. They heal the sick. It’s hard to find fault.

I believe I’m on solid ground, going to TLR’s event, but I’m not stupid enough to think they know everything. I will trust them as long as they don’t go off on a tangent, and if they do, I’ll listen to God instead.

As far as I know, there is no good denomination, and there is no perfect ministry. There are very bad denominations and ministries, and there are those that are healthier, but ultimately, you have to be able to receive doctrine from God, because no one else will always get it right. Even Peter (whom the Catholics believe to be infallible with regard to doctrine) made major mistakes.

Every denomination eventually comes up with traditions of men that cause people to live in bondage and pride.

I’m always safe when I pray in tongues and ask God to teach me. I have the only reliable source, so I don’t worry about whether this man or that woman has the answers. I have very low expectations of ministers.

That’s what’s happening today. I hope to see some real improvement in the near future.

Popular Minister Takes the Wrong Road

It’s amazing how you can count on the prosperity/feel-good gospel to corrupt ministries and render them poisonous.

Today I read that a preacher named John Gray is in hot water with Internet users because he bought his wife a Lamborghini. Maybe there is something fitting about it. His wife’s name is Aventer, and Lamborghini makes a car called the Aventador.

You know what? I’m going to check that.

It appears that be bought her a Urus, which is a Lamborghini Cayenne. It’s an SUV. It costs $200,000. The car does 0-60 in 3.6 seconds, it has over 600 horsepower, and it will do 190 mph, in case Aventer needs to get to a prayer meeting in a real hurry. The Grays live in South Carolina, where the maximum speed limit is 70 mph.

He is defending the buy. That is not surprising.

I know John. We are not buddies; I just mean I know him. I was his driver on one occasion when he appeared at Trinity Church in Miami. We talked a few times, and he knew me on sight. That’s about it.

John is a very, very gifted speaker. That’s probably not a good thing. Gifted people tend to think, “Wow! God must have given me this rare gift because he NEEDED someone like me to do something for him!” Then they may get the idea that they’re special, and that causes problems.

God doesn’t need any of your gifts. Not one. He chose Moses to speak for him, and Moses had a speech impediment. He chose ignorant Galileans to represent him to the world, including sophisticated Jewish scholars (who were not chosen). He picked a very small group of left-handed men to overcome a large Midianite force. Your gift does not make you special at all. It doesn’t mean you’re God’s favorite or that you have special authority. It’s not an anointing.

I don’t know if John has the “I am special” problem.

He is a very warm person, in his encounters with others. I think it’s real. And when he used to visit Trinity, he remembered insignificant people he had met on prior occasions. He remembered his interactions with them.

Unfortunately, he also gave a false prophecy to one of these people. He told some girl she would become a famous designer and that she would be very rich. He said she would be flown around the world for her job. If this has happened, no one at Trinity has noticed. Believe me, the Wilkersons would be chasing her all day, trying to get tithes and offerings, and she would also be treated like a VIP whenever she came to a service. There would be videos and so on. “Here is sister Shontelle, to tell us how her ‘Seven Blessings of Passover’ offering turned into a billion-dollar company!”

I doubt it bothered her when the prophecy turned out to be false. In charismatic churches, no one really expects prophecies to come true, and no one checks. It’s like going to a palm reader. You listen just so you can feel good for a while.

John was very bold. He was known for talking about his status as a virgin, and he was in his mid-thirties. You have to admire that.

I assume he was being truthful, of course. I can’t tell when people are lying, and neither can you or anyone else.

He spoke a lot about money and promotion. He was very impressed by Kari Jobe, who had just blown the Christian music world apart with her monster first CD. He talked a lot about networking.

It must have been years ago, but it seems like only yesterday that I found out that John had joined Joel Osteen’s church as some kind of sub-pastor. I was disappointed. Osteen is the king of feel-good pastors. He is as watery as skim milk. His ministry is about money and attendance. God has very little to do with it. I had hoped John would do better, because he seemed to hear from the Holy Spirit.

It wasn’t until the Lamborghini story broke that I knew he had his own megachurch. He must have left Osteen some time ago, because it takes some time to build up attendance to the point where you can pay yourself enough to buy a $200,000 second car.

Let’s check.

His church’s Facebook page says the business was launched in May. If so, John has done extremely well for himself in a short time. The church is called “Relentless Church.” There is a “Relentless Church” family of churches which started in Africa. Not sure if John’s church is part of it. If so, that would have helped. And I’m sure he didn’t work for nothing when he was with Osteen.

I’m unhappy to see his ministry turn out this way. He is a very, very charismatic man, and if he goes down the wrong path, he can take a lot of people with him.

Is it wrong to buy an expensive car? That depends, doesn’t it? If a Lamborghini Urus has some special quality the Grays actually need, then fine, let them have it. If they just want it because it’s a high-status luxury car, then it can’t possibly be God’s will, and it will serve to reinforce the covetousness of people who look to the Grays for guidance.

The Bible says covetousness is idolatry.

Idolatry is not a small obstacle to holiness. It’s a violation of the first commandment. God killed a lot of Hebrews over it in Exodus, even after they had been delivered out of Egypt.

The stories about the Grays say his wife bought him an $8000 Rolex. Should I complain? I have a Rolex. Of course, mine only cost $800, and I didn’t buy it for myself. I don’t wear it. I don’t like it. It keeps poor time and bangs into things. My dad got it used, in exchange for releasing a sports-betting debt. It was a high school graduation gift. His law partner owed him, and it used to be the partner’s watch. The partner stretched out the band, so the watch has never been right. A new band would run something like $3000. I keep the watch in my closet.

The partner is a pretty nasty guy. When I wore the watch, sometimes I felt closer to him than I wanted.

I would not buy a Rolex today. Mechanical watches are inferior and expensive. You can get a waterproof watch on Amazon for under $20.

I could see getting a decent dress watch for occasions when I have to put on a suit, but I think it should be possible to find a nice stainless model for a reasonable price.

I think the Grays could have gotten along just great with a Ford Explorer. I got one for my dad in 2017, and it’s fantastic. We bought it used. You could get nearly seven of them for the price of a Urus.

Is it “a Urus” or “an Urus”? Terrible name. Sounds like part of the anatomy related to the kidneys.

You shouldn’t buy things just for the thrill of possessing them, and you shouldn’t buy them to teach the world a lesson. You can buy a $20 million property for a good reason, and you can buy a $100 bottle of wine for a bad reason. There is probably no good reason to buy a new Lamborghini. There is absolutely nothing it will do that a Ford Explorer can’t, unless you count breaking the sound barrier.

Christianity is about becoming like Jesus in your heart and mind. It’s about helping others to do the same thing. It’s about receiving salvation and obtaining relief from earthly problems with obedience. That’s it. Anything beyond that is probably from Satan. The prosperity gospel is from Satan. The feel-good gospel is from Satan. The gospel of hard work and pride is from Satan. The “God accepts absolutely everyone no matter what they do” gospel is from Satan.

People will say, “He baptizes people with the Holy Spirit!” “My grandma got saved in his church!” “My kids love the children’s ministry!” “He cried when my cat died!” They will look at superficial blessings and condemn anyone who picks at the infected root. I’ve seen this over and over. If you call out a popular preacher like T.D. Jakes or Joyce Meyer, put your Nomex drawers and Kevlar hat on first, because the people they have fooled will do their best to crucify you for God.

Satan gives us toxic leaders, and then he stirs up hordes of angry supporters to persecute those who expose them. Look at the crucifixion.

Gifts are dangerous, because people mistake them for God’s approval and authority. John can really sweep people off his feet with his preaching. Ignorant people who don’t pray in tongues every day will swallow the whole message, and they will be diverted. Instead of continuing toward God’s heart, they will be spun off into eddies of self-pampering and pride, and they will suffer for it.

Very sad.

Any time you see Joel Osteen put his stamp of approval on someone, you should consider it the kiss of death. He has probably never been right about anyone.

Back when John was a regular guest at Trinity, I bought a copy of his DVD, “Laughter in Black and White,” and he autographed it. A few weeks ago, I purged my house of things I thought were spiritually problematic, and that DVD was one of the things that went to the dump.

I am very glad God got me away from the prosperity movement, and I’m grateful for his help in telling gifted preachers from anointed children of God. Without his help, I am easily fooled, and I could be right there with the lost today if I did not hear from him.

John is defending the purchase. He says none of the money came from “the church.” That’s not a great defense. Even if he found a giant diamond in his yard and used it to pay for the car, a Lamborghini SUV is not a good thing to spend money on.

If he didn’t get the money from the church, where did it come from? He still works for Osteen while he works at the new church, and presumably, both churches pay him. He has some books and other products which haven’t set the world on fire. He also has a new reality show on Oprah’s network. All of these projects derive from his ministry, so it’s not honest to give people the impression that he’s not profiting from it. There is more to his ministry than his church.

It’s disturbing that he is associated with Oprah. The devil loves to buy hungry people off. She is not a Christian; she admits it. She supports homosexuality. She sponsors a non-Christian cult. Oprah works for the devil, so if you work for her, you probably work for him. When the devil does you a favor, there is always a hook in it.

The show is not doing great. It has a 0.07 rating, which puts it below Hugh Hewitt, whom most people have never heard of. In all likelihood, John is doing exactly what Richie Wilkerson did with the show “Rich in Faith.” He is whiffing at a spitball pitched by Satan. Jumping at this kind of bait does a lot of damage to a preacher’s credibility. The show will probably collapse, and then he’ll be remembered as just another preacher who let a false promise of fortune and fame blow his skirt up. It takes years to recover from that.

“Rich in Faith” got canceled.

This all goes to show why God is taking his show out of churches and putting it into the personal lives of obscure people. I hope he continues. I would like to see every megachurch in the world dry up. They do nothing but cause problems.

Hoping for Competent Baptism

I booked a hotel room for an event run by The Last Reformation. Everything is set, and I am ready to go.

I’m looking forward to it. I’ve been extremely disappointed in the activities I’ve been involved with in churches. I am wondering if it’s really true that TLR is onto something better. I can’t help being reluctant to let myself hope.

When I belonged to Trinity Church in Miami, there was no street outreach. None. Zero. There was no outreach of any kind, except for nagging people to come to church. We had buses for bringing the poor to church, but the church refused to fund them. We had a prison ministry, but the church refused to support it. Not much happened.

At New Dawn Ministries, we occasionally (rarely) went to a poor neighborhood and distributed food and prayed for people. That was better than nothing, but the results were not impressive. How many demons did we cast out? Zero. How many people got healed? Zero. How many accepted Christ? Zero. How many decided to come to church? Almost none.

The church had a “health fair.” They passed out free stuff and helped people connect to free services. If it was evangelism at all, it was barely so.

It’s too bad we didn’t have as many outreach days as we had pastor appreciation days. We would have been very busy.

TLR’s people claim they cast out demons, heal the sick, and start people out as disciples. If that’s true, they are wildly exceeding the performance of any church I have ever been a part of (or known of).

I am wondering if I’ll finally make new Christian friends. It would be nice to have more people I can relate to. At the moment, I have ONE person I can really discuss God with. One. And he lives 300 miles away. I know other Christians, but they don’t have the same level of revelation at the moment. When I talk to him, we’re always finding that God is showing us the same things. That’s what happens when people hear from the Holy Spirit instead of men. Oddly, a group of young men we both know are getting the same revelations.

I know people who have just gotten started with God. I know people who went a certain distance with God, decided it was far enough, and got off the bus a little bit early; I don’t mean they quit Christianity, but they decided not to get in too deep. I know people who seem to be involved in unproductive doctrine. I know all sorts of Christians in various situations, but right now I’m only hearing about personal revelation from one.

The farther you go with God, the lonelier you will be. Maybe “lonely” is the wrong word; it has a negative smell to it. I’ll put it this way: the fewer peers you will have. You may know hundreds of people who go to church, but you won’t know many who want to go all the way with God. The more things God shows you, the fewer people you will know who will understand and accept them.

You can see this principle in the design of the temple. It had an outer court where just about anyone could go. It had an inner court for people who were closer to God. It had a holy of holies where only one person could go, once a year. I don’t think it’s rare for Christians to make this analogy. Things people in the inner court knew were hard to discuss with people in the outer court. It must also have been difficult for the high priest who entered the holy of holies to share with those who only made it to the inner court.

The closer you get to God, the closer the people who don’t understand you will be to God. That sounds weird, but it’s true. There must be a lot of advanced people to whom I would come across as a complete spiritual swine, barely worth talking to.

I don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to buddy up to Christians who don’t believe in casting out demons or healing. I don’t want to sit on my beliefs so I can get close to people who pray to statues or think Mohammed was God’s messenger. Christians are supposed to live in unity, but you’re not supposed to give up unity with God to get close to people.

Unequal yokings are very burdensome. All of us need people who are in alignment with us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, you spend your whole life changing other people’s diapers and listening to their angry, misguided accusations.

One of the most tiring things about unequal yokings is the repetition. A person who is out of line with the Holy Spirit will never stop challenging you. They are likely to feel resentment. They are likely to gaslight you and put stumbling blocks in front of you. They may tempt you with coarse pleasures, to prove you’re really just “a regular guy.” They are likely to betray you repeatedly. You don’t need that in your life. The Bible says God sets the godly apart for himself, and it’s important to let him do it. Otherwise you live weighed down like a pack mule.

It’s funny; we are supposed to cast our burdens on Jesus, but Christians who are out of line with God cast their burdens on us.

We’re supposed to be holy, and that means our friends should be holy. It’s not optional; there is no other path. It’s true that Jesus associated with unbelieving Jews, drunks and prostitutes, but he was visiting, not cohabitating. He didn’t open businesses in partnership with them. He didn’t marry prostitutes. He went to them as a leader, to offer them a better way, and then he backed off and went back to people who had already accepted him. He left the outer court and went back to the inner court.

Maybe I’ll meet a couple of people to expand my social circle.

People are talking about a one-world religion now. It looks like Kenneth Copeland may be part of it. That would not be a surprise, because he is a nasty person and a fountain of evil doctrine. He has hosted events where he tries to bring conflicting denominations together without correction. It’s not right. You can’t make Catholicism work. You can’t reconcile Islam or Mormonism with God. Unity with misguided religions is disunity with God.

Satan loves to tell people there are many paths to God. He has been doing it since the days of pantheism. It’s a wonderfully seductive message, because it’s much easier than trying to sell one particular religion. You want Krishna? You can have him. You want the angel Moroni? You want Zeus? You want saints to pray to? Fine! It doesn’t matter which path you choose, as long as it takes you to hell.

Jesus made it very clear that there is only one way. If you deny that in order to increase church attendance, you are helping people on their way to damnation.

The Bible mentions a one-world religion, and it’s called the worship of the Beast. You can look it up in the Revelation. Lots of unity there. There will be so much unity and dedication, they will execute you if you refuse to join.

That’s what I call unity. It’s not going to be a good thing, however.

Christianity is all about separation from the world. It’s about holiness, sanctification, and repentance. You can’t have the old wine and the new wine. You have to let the old wine go. It will cost you friends and relatives. So be it. There is no point in starting relationships you can’t finish. You need friends who won’t be in hell when you’re in heaven.

I don’t believe anyone has a lot of real friends, but I hope I can get to know a few people I can relax with. I want to know people who will pull me forward instead of backward.

People will read this and think I’m a snob. Maybe so, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t want to reject anyone or feel that I’m better than anyone. I just need rest. I need spiritual support around me. I can’t get it from everyone I know. If you’re not giving to me, you’re taking from me. I have to have a few people who give. I’m not God. I can’t sustain my own strength.

It has occurred to me that some Internet nut might figure out where I am and try to meet me at the event and force a friendship. I hope no one tries, because it would be a waste of time. Stalking is not friendship.

I also hope I won’t run into old women who think every single man they meet was sent by God! That happens a lot as men get older. “I had a dream that we were married!” “I’ll let you know when God gives ME that dream. Until then, wait for my call. At a large and comfortable distance.”

God gives those who delight in him the desires of their hearts, according to his own promise. I do not desire a 65-year-old woman who is looking for a meal ticket who rubs her feet every night and doesn’t mind sharing a house with 7 cats, so if such a woman has dreams about me, they came from a source other than God.

I’ve done my time as a caregiver for the elderly. I think one stretch is enough!

I can’t wait to get baptized correctly. I have to find out what it’s like. It’s amazing to me that I got this old without understanding how important it was. I hope it brings me improvement.

I know Satan has a plan to prevent me from going to the event. He also has a plan to screw the event up for me. He probably has a plan to prevent me from walking in whatever progress I make at the event. He is predictable; I’ll say that for him. I am praying for defense and help.

Whatever happens, you will read about it here. Pray it works out well.

No Brakes

My dad has only been enrolled in a hospice for one day, and I am already thinking I may have made the wrong choice.

My friend Mike is a hospice executive. He has been advising me to get hospice services for a long time. I have been trying to decide among a CNA, an ALF, and hospice care. I wanted to save money, get better care for my dad, and put some order back in my own life. Those were my goals.

Yesterday, the hospice sent a nurse around to evaluate my dad and see if he was an appropriate candidate for hospice care. He got the go-ahead from a doctor via telephone, so we signed up. I was told we could get equipment and a number of helpful services, all on Medicare’s dime. What’s not to love? Even if he goes to an ALF, they can care for him. The ALF will let them come in.

Hospice care is for people who are dying, and my dad is in that group. His dementia will kill him before long, no matter what anyone does for him. If he lasts two more years, he’ll be doing great. He could have more strokes and go next month, however.

It seemed like a no-brainer. Who turns down free government health care? I saw no down side, so I signed him up during the first visit.

There were a couple of things that confused me, however. The doctor talked about cutting off some of his medications. Blood pressure pills and a statin. When she said we should stop giving him the statin, the nurse agreed, saying there was no point in it any more.

I told them he had a cardiologist, and I said we would have to run things by her. They agreed. I thought maybe the hospice doctor had different ideas about statins and blood pressure medications for elderly patients.

Today I talked to Mike, and he explained something to me. They want to cut off the circulatory medicines because they may be keeping my dad alive.

When he said that, I realized I had misunderstood how hospice care works. They aren’t just interested in providing care. They want to pull out the stops so he declines and dies faster.

This is not the kind of thing you ordinarily expect to hear from medical professionals.

Apparently, once you put someone in hospice care, they are supposed to cut off all treatment which is intended to cure the patient or prolong life. I did not understand that. I thought they just provided care for terminally ill people, without getting involved in decisions about treatment.

For quite some time now, I have been against taking heroic measures to keep my dad alive. I have been afraid his cardiologist would try to get him a heart bypass, for example. You can imagine the difficulty of caring for a dementia patient who wakes up every day unaware that he is recovering from major surgery. It would be very hard, and then he would still die from dementia in a fairly short time.

I don’t want doctors to do backflips to extend my dad’s life, because it will just make everyone involved miserable. On the other hand, I never dreamed they would want to take him off his prescriptions. Prescribing a few pills is not a heroic measure. He’s going to fade and go pretty soon whether he takes them or not. I don’t see the harm in giving them to him while he is still able to walk, talk, and exercise a certain amount of reason.

My aunt started speaking gibberish when vascular dementia got her, and she became bedridden. Fair enough. When that happens, I won’t even want to give him aspirin. It’s pointless to turn a strong body into a life support system for a brain that doesn’t work. I do not like the idea of cutting his medication off now, however. I would not have supported measures to make my aunt speak gibberish sooner.

If we deprive him now, I feel we will be attacking both mind and body. His mental problems are caused by circulatory issues, and it may be that his pills retard the progress. The mind isn’t the villain here. As long as it works to some degree, it should be defended. When the mind is gone, the body becomes, in a way, the enemy. You can keep a body pumping blood for a very long time after someone’s natural lifetime has passed.

I’m a very smart guy, so there are distinctions that are concealed from other people yet which are very obvious to me.

For one thing, I understand the big difference between proactive measures and passive measures. Putting a pillow over someone’s face is proactive. So is assisted suicide. I’m against those things, because they exceed the authority God has given man. On the other hand, allowing someone to die naturally without extraordinary intervention is often morally correct.

Major surgery would be proactive and an extraordinary effort, in the case of an 87-year-old man with rapidly progressing dementia. So would hooking hooking him up to pumps and tubes. These things would be true even if he still recognized people and was able to enjoy life to some extent. The benefits, if any, would be outweighed by the additional suffering, and they would be fleeting. Giving him three or four pills a day, while his mind is still firing on a few cylinders, would be proactive but not extraordinary.

Taking away a dementia patient’s heart pills seems a little like kicking at his cane while he shuffles by. He will go in his own good time, and he won’t inconvenience the rest of us by holding on for a decade like an Alzheimer’s patient. There is no need to grease the chute.

Suddenly I feel, in my heart and not just my mind, how serious this situation is. He’s really going. His problems are so bad, I can legally withhold medication from him in order to hasten his death, and then I can inherit from him with the full consent of the local state’s attorney. How wrong that feels. Think what the Menendez brothers would have given to be in my shoes.

Society isn’t just willing to help my dad pass without turmoil; it wants him to get it over with, and it assumes I’m on the same page.

I can’t believe there is no one to advise me. What a strange system we have.

Mike has been more helpful than anyone, but I still misunderstood him, and there is no one else to answer my questions. Because my dad has Medicare and a supplemental plan, he is well-funded, and everyone is eager to sell him tests, therapy, and treatment, but no one wants to sit down with me and tell me what’s what. I am learning things as I go, when I should at least have a pamphlet to tell me what to do.

I’ll admit something. I have prayed, telling God that if my dad isn’t going to change inside, I would like him to go sooner rather than later. Does that make me a bad person? I don’t want to have to deal with abuse and selfish behavior for the next ten years, toward no constructive end. I don’t want to be trapped in caregiving forever, and I don’t want to keep pumping time into an unequal yoking. Still, I don’t want to get involved in carnal efforts to end his life.

How different things would be, with a different patient. If my dad were 6, I’d be pushing for every conceivable treatment. If he were his current age and sound of mind, I’d be taking every reasonable measure to keep him alive as long as he wanted. Because he is very old and afflicted with incurable, progressive, fatal dementia, I can’t think that way. As far as his needs go, I can only think of two things: his comfort and his salvation.

I wonder what my mother would do if she were here. I think she would do exactly what I’m doing. She would work to keep him going as long as practical, and then she would let go out of fatigue and resignation.

We will see the cardiologist tomorrow, and I will do my best to pin her down and get some real input concerning his medications. I will let her know about the hospice doctor’s recommendations. As of right now, I plan to insist he continue to receive his pills, even if it means taking him out of the hospice program. If he becomes incoherent later, we’ll start over, and I’ll probably let them make the changes.

I believe God told me he had cut my dad off. I think he told me my dad was going to decline and go away, because he had held onto the hardness of his heart into old age. I accept that, even though I still work on his salvation, which is a separate matter. I believe God has told me my dad will be saved.

If he were a Christian, I’d be doing my best to get him healed of his dementia. As it is, I think it’s too much to ask for. His attitude toward God is not good. I can’t tell you how many times I prayed about his dementia in the past. It didn’t work, and I finally quit. If, by some work of God, his heart changes in the future, I’ll do my best for him, but right now, I’ll be satisfied if he gets a firm grip on salvation.

I thought I had accepted my dad’s mortality, but now that they want to take him off his prescriptions, I feel that I have been in denial. It’s strange; had I awakened yesterday and found him dead, I would have been okay with it because I am prepared, but the thought of depriving him of medical treatment and watching him fail is sobering and somewhat repugnant.

I feel I have a plan now, so tomorrow we’ll put it into effect. If we have to give up the hospice benefits for now, so be it. I can’t push my dad into the grave just because he’s rude and hard to care for. An ALF will take the weight off my shoulders without involving me in something morally dubious. There is more than one way to deal with verbal abuse and horrifying hygiene problems.

If you’re in the same position I’m in, you should think about what I write. It can help you avoid the mistakes I make.

Look at the Hand, not the Puppet

I have been thinking about Michael Avenatti. As expressed in earlier blog posts, I have been asking myself how a law school valedictorian could do so many stupid things. I forgot something important: when reality doesn’t make sense, you should look for a supernatural cause.

Avenatti went to a top law school and graduated first in his class, but consider the bad moves he has made. His most prominent client says he filed a defamation suit without her consent; that’s highly unethical. He filed the suit without researching it; the suit was dismissed before it got anywhere because it was based on remarks that were clearly not defamation. He then went to Twitter and committed a glaring ethical infraction, calling President Trump’s lawyer dishonest.

In addition to these errors, it appears that he struck a woman and threw her out of his apartment. According to the police, he said, “She hit me first,” which is about as close as you can get to a confession without confessing. It’s not something a good lawyer would say. A good lawyer would refuse to speak at all, and he would call an attorney friend from jail. This is very basic stuff.

He also went after the alleged victim on Twitter, questioning her honesty. This is something a rapper might do. No competent attorney would even think about it. If he is found guilty, it will be used to show he has no remorse, and that will be considered when he is punished. It could make the difference between piddling community service and time in jail.

He said the Democratic Party needed a white man to run for President in 2020, because white men get more respect. He said this to Time Magazine, not to a friend in a dark restaurant booth.

Let’s not even consider his other legal problems. Child support issues. Eviction attempts. A huge judgment in a case filed by a former business associate. The IRS is after him. His life is utter chaos.

How did this happen?

I believe it’s simple. God is looking after Donald Trump.

Back when it started to look like Trump was going to win, I began to see the parallels between Trump and Cyrus the Great, the heathen king God anointed to help the Jews and restore the temple.

The prophet Isaiah operated during the 700’s, B.C. This was long before Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and sacked the temple; these events took place between 605 and 580 B.C., more or less. Long before Jerusalem fell, Isaiah said this:

Who says of Cyrus, ‘He is My shepherd,
And he shall perform all My pleasure,
Saying to Jerusalem, “You shall be built,”
And to the temple, “Your foundation shall be laid.” ’

“Thus says the Lord to His anointed,
To Cyrus, whose right hand I have held—
To subdue nations before him
And loose the armor of kings,
To open before him the double doors,
So that the gates will not be shut:

‘I will go before you
And make the crooked places straight;
I will break in pieces the gates of bronze
And cut the bars of iron.

I will give you the treasures of darkness
And hidden riches of secret places,
That you may know that I, the Lord,
Who call you by your name,
Am the God of Israel.

For Jacob My servant’s sake,
And Israel My elect,
I have even called you by your name;
I have named you, though you have not known Me.

Isaiah predicted the restoration of the temple decades before the temple was sacked.

Please note: this happened before Cyrus the Great was born. There was a Cyrus before him, but that Cyrus was also born after Isaiah wrote his prophecy. We know of no natural reason why Isaiah would have expected a person named Cyrus to show up and help the Jews.

Cyrus got the restoration of Jerusalem started, even though he did not belong to the Jewish religion.

Here is what the book of Ezra says; it’s the announcement Cyrus made in his first year of rule:

All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord God of heaven has given me. And He has commanded me to build Him a house at Jerusalem which is in Judah. Who is among you of all His people? May his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel (He is God), which is in Jerusalem. And whoever is left in any place where he dwells, let the men of his place help him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, besides the freewill offerings for the house of God which is in Jerusalem.

Cyrus was not supposed to be the emperor. He overthrew his grandfather, Astyages, and took the throne. God’s anointed ones have a way of receiving power unexpectedly.

Herodotus has a remarkable story about Cyrus. He claims his rise was prophesied to Astyages, and he says Astyages ordered him to be killed. A shepherd passed his stillborn son off as Cyrus, and he raised Cyrus in secret.

Historians don’t like this story, but it is very consistent with Satan’s treatment of other prophesied deliverers. Consider Joseph, Moses, Jesus, and the early church. Joseph was sold, Moses was saved from Pharaoh’s command to slay the firstborn of the Jews, Jesus was saved from Herod’s command to slay the male infants in Bethlehem, and people like Paul did their best to murder the first Christians.

Satan is big on murdering the young. He loves abortion. The Revelation portrays him as a dragon, waiting to consume the messiah as soon as he is born.

Digression: some people say the plagues of Egypt, including the killing of the firstborn males, were designed to humiliate Egypt’s false “gods.” For example, the plague of darkness humiliated Ra, the sun god. The other day, I heard someone say the Egyptians communicated with their gods through firstborn sons. If this is true, then when God killed the firstborn, he cut the Egyptians off from the spirits they served.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural. Jesus is the firstborn of the church, and he intercedes with the father for us.

Digression over.

Trump has been supportive to Christians, Jews, and Israel. He hasn’t been ideal, but he has done many helpful things, including a real Cyrus move: he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Leftists went ballistic over that. Barack Obama was an enemy of Israel and the church, and people who hate Trump say he is destroying Obama’s legacy.

Before Trump was elected, I started to think he was a Cyrus figure, and I said so here. Later on, I saw other people saying the same thing. I think it’s true. If it is true, then naturally, Satan wants Trump gone. That would certainly explain the explosion of Trump and Trump-supporter persecution that has come from people on the left, millions of whom are so far gone they speak and behave as though they were mentally ill.

They ARE mentally ill. Demons are driving them to say and do nutty things. This is how Avenatti ended up where he is today.

God has his anointed, and so does Satan. God anointed people like Moses and Jesus. He also anointed Trump. Satan has anointed people like Pharaoh, Haman, Eichmann, Hitler, the Beatles, Louis Farrakhan, Ellen Degeneres, J.K. Rowling, Beyonce Knowles, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, and Michael Avenatti.

Christians have done a very bad job. We have lost a lot of our knowledge. We have made up bad doctrine. We fell asleep in Delilah’s lap, and Satan shaved our heads. We are weak. We are very selfish. We try to get salvation and favors from God, but we don’t do the other thing he asks: we don’t give our lives to him. As a result, we have evangelized very poorly, there isn’t enough prayer in the world, America has turned to idolatry, and people like Michael Avenatti have been empowered to harass us.

Avenatti never hears from God. He can’t hear the Holy Spirit, telling him he is ruining his own life by fighting God. He thinks he’s doing great things, and Satan has helped him a lot. His problem is that Trump’s anointing is greater than his. Trump’s supernatural sponsor is God, not a defeated angel who built a kingdom on libel and disinformation.

Things could be worse for him. He could be like Oprah or Beyonce. They serve Satan without much opposition. When that happens, it often means God has given up on a person. If God his opposing Avenatti, it may be that he still wants to get through to him.

I don’t think Avenatti is going to have a comeback. His spiritual backing seems to be too weak. Satan has limited resources, and he can’t give his complete support to every person who does his will. Also, a lot of Christians are praying for Avenatti to fail in his efforts to destroy Trump. I certainly am.

I don’t think many people pray for Beyonce Knowles to be defeated. A lot of Christians think she’s a fine role model. Same goes for Oprah, who actively opposes Christianity and supports a cult.

If Trump really is anointed after the pattern of Cyrus, he will be invincible until he achieves his purpose. That doesn’t necessarily mean he will complete the projects he has started. Cyrus didn’t. It just means that whatever work God has anointed him to do will be done. If that means God chose him to do something that requires 8 years in office, 2020 is in the bag. If Trump’s part of the job is already finished, maybe someone will take him down soon.

We should be praying for Trump and his family to become Spirit-led. Trump is not a highly developed Christian, to put it gently. The closer he is to God’s will, the better we can expect him to do. We should also pray for God to correct Avenatti and help him join the body of Christ.

Trump has his issues, but history shows that he is capable of change. That’s more important than starting life with good character. God can only help people who can change. I don’t know if Avenatti is capable of it.

Hell is not full of sinners. It’s full of people who don’t listen. If you can listen and change, it doesn’t matter what you are when you begin your walk with God. You can make it.

It will be interesting to see what happens between Trump and Avenatti. It’s like watching the angels fight. I hope both of them come around, but whatever happens, I hope Christians will understand that this is a supernatural battle, and I hope we will learn from it.

Related: Boy Named Trump Forced to Change Last Name

Mother of All Witches

The other day, a friend called me about a girl he likes. He is looking for a Christian wife who will be aligned with him spiritually, so he won’t have to fight his wife as well as the world.

He seems to feel the girl has him on probation. She has been hurt before, so she is always evaluating him. He also said things indicating that she was manipulative. For example, she bought him some shoes, and while they were having some conversational friction, she took out the receipt and showed it to him. Who buys gifts and keeps receipts to show the recipients? If you do that, it’s not a gift. It’s a leash.

You never, ever remind people of the things you’ve done for them. If they can’t figure it out, you probably need to let them go, and if you feel entitled to remind them, you are not generous at all, no matter what you give. You are simply using false generosity to bend other people to your will. You are trying to get them to do things out of guilt, without changing their hearts. That guilt will eventually become resentment.

My mother always told me that if you lend people money, they will come to resent it. I never understood that until this minute.

I told my friend what I had been taught about witchcraft. Just as Christians see slander as murder, we also see manipulation as witchcraft. You may not have a crystal ball and a charge account at the local botanica, and you may pray to God every day and orally renounce other spirits, but if you’re trying to enslave other people, you might as well be a full-blown witch.

I told him it might be time for this girl to go, but I also told him she might be unaware of her problem. I said he should speak directly to her about it, including the witchcraft angle.

I have been listening to Derek Prince’s teachings, and he has videos on witchcraft. He spoke about a Christian woman who brought her son-in-law to him so he could be advised and cleansed. Right away, if you’re a man, you see the issue here. This is not a mother-in-law’s place. It’s demeaning and emasculating for a mother-in-law to behave this way, even if she has good intentions. Anyway, Prince told her she was the problem, and he ended up casting demons out of her.

She did not resist; she had been unaware of the issue, and once she was informed, she wanted to be free.

My friend spoke to the young lady, and she did not take offense, so maybe all is well. Thank God they are not living together or sleeping with each other. That would make things a lot worse, and there could be a pregnancy which would put a hook in his nose for 18 years.

At some point while I was thinking about this, I realized something: Eve was a witch. I assume this is a revelation that came from God.

In the Bible, drug abuse is considered witchcraft. New Testament translations translate the Greek word “pharmakeia,” which means mixing drugs or poisons, as “witchcraft.” Drugs have always been associated with witchcraft.

If you don’t think drugs and witchcraft go together, it’s easy to provide examples. Tobacco use came from American Indian occult rites. Central American witch doctors use peyote. In Siberia, witch doctors ate mushrooms containing psychedelics, and their followers drank their urine in order to get high with them. Mexican witch doctors use salvia divinorum to enter trance states. Wiccans and worshipers of false Norse “gods” use mandrakes.

Anyone who lives in the post-Sixties era knows that people who use drugs are often trying to get in touch with God or the supernatural realm. If you haven’t noticed, you must live in a mine shaft.

What are drugs? The word itself comes from a word referring to the storage of medicinal plants. In modern times, many drugs don’t come from plants, but many do. Cocaine, opiates, LSD, various mushroom drugs, and weed are examples. That covers the majority of the world’s commonly abused drugs.

A plant substance that alters the mind is a drug. What did Eve eat? A plant substance that altered her mind. The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil expanded Eve’s consciousness. This was what Satan promised her, and he delivered. He was the first drug pusher.

The presence of Satan is another indication of witchcraft. Witches consort with evil spirits.

Final thing: the Bible says, “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.” Eve is the first human rebel named in the Bible.

To sum up, Eve ate a drug while consorting with an evil spirit, in a state of rebellion. She was a witch, plain and simple. She also demonstrated typical behaviors for a female witch. She rejected male authority, and she controlled her husband.

Jewish legend says Eve was not the first. It says Adam had a wife named Lilith, who was even worse. It says she defied God and used his name to fly away. Then she bore children who were abominations. God promised to kill many of her children every day. This story must be the reason for the name of the Lilith Fair, which was a recurring event in which godless female performers got together.

I can check.

Here you go; I have Sarah McLachlan’s explanation for the name:

I was talking to a friend about the concept and said, “I need a name.” She goes, “Have you heard the story of Lilith?” In Hebrew mythology Lilith is Adam’s first wife, before Eve. He asked her to lie beneath him, and she said, “No, we’re equal.” She left, and she was made into a cautionary tale. I thought, Perfect protagonist! Obviously words are important to me, and Lilith on its own didn’t seem like enough. I loved the play on words of fair being the sort of old-fashioned fair, and fair being equal.

Legend says Lilith had sex with Samael, and “Samael” is believed to be another name for Satan. Samael was the leader of the fallen angels who came down on Mount Hermon in The Book of Enoch and had sex with women, creating the race of half-breeds (Nephilim) which was largely exterminated in the flood.

It makes sense that Satan would go after women, because he and his friends could not have had children through men.

Satan uses women very effectively in the establishment of false religions. Women are usually the first ones to run to cults. The Mormons approved polygamy because they had a woman surplus.

Derek Prince said that he had traveled far and wide, and he believed that America was the most female-dominated nation on earth. Scary. Whatever women’s virtues may be, they were never supposed to rule men. When God cursed humanity in Genesis, one of the curses was that wives would desire to rule over their husbands. That curse is still with us.

The new culture of offense is feminine in origin. Men judge other people by their actions; women get extremely wound up over their words. If you speak to a woman with flattery but treat her badly, she will stick with you, but a woman is likely to leave a man who treats her well and doesn’t butter her up with words on a regular basis. American culture is busy crucifying people based on trivial words, many of which the speakers didn’t even mean.

American women are setting themselves up as society’s “moms,” snapping at our heels and suppressing us as though we were naughty children under their authority, and men are getting caught up in it, too. Men are more feminine than ever.

Women do not get along as well with other people as men do. Their influence brings division over trivial things. This is one reason why America is breaking into venomous factions. Under the influence of toxic femininity, we are acting like spoiled girls in a sorority house. “You said this.” “You said that.” We no longer care about proportion or good intentions. It’s as if America were a junior high school, and we were all 13-year-old girls fighting over who gets to be on the pep squad.

It’s interesting stuff.

Satan is effeminate, he spreads effeminacy and homosexuality, and the Bible says a spirit called “wickedness” is female.

It makes a certain amount of sense. In relation to God, all creation is feminine, and only God is good. Evil only exists within that which is created. From God’s perspective, that makes evil a somewhat feminine phenomenon.

It’s fascinating to see how ancient, important and damaging witchcraft, drug use, associating with evil spirits, and female rebellion are. It’s not something most preachers will talk about. They don’t see it, and if they did, well, most of them are caught up in feminism. They want butts in seats, so they say what makes women happy. After all, men have given up their leadership roles in families, and women are the ones who go to church, take their children to church, and choose churches. It was never supposed to be this way.

There are millions of women who drive their kids to church while their worthless husbands and sperm donors sleep. It’s not very common to see a man take his kids to church while mom sleeps off a hangover.

I see Eve very differently now. Perhaps you will, too.

High Hopes for December

I am still looking forward to seeing The Last Restoration in action at an upcoming event. In case you haven’t been following my blog, TLR is a charismatic group that provides people with proper baptisms and helps them to operate in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They don’t just pray for you and give you advice; they expect you to do the same things for others. If you get healed at a TLR event, they will expect you to turn around and get someone else healed.

One of the big problems with modern charismatic Christianity is selfishness. We don’t go to church to serve God. We go to help ourselves. We want to be forgiven. We want to be healed physically. We want God to give us money, spouses, and houses. We want to feel better. We want to be saved from hell.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

The other day, I saw a link to a TLR video criticizing the sinner’s prayer. I was amazed. I wondered what they could possibly have found wrong with it. It’s the prayer people say in order to receive salvation.

I took a look, and it turned out they had a point. The sinner’s prayer is about salvation. You confess, forgive, say you believe, and ask for forgiveness and salvation. You do not beg God to help him give your life to him. If you don’t ask Jesus to help you follow him, praying the sinner’s prayer is selfish!

We don’t want people to go to hell, so we run around making them say the prayer. We think this is the most important thing we can do, but is it? Jesus said he would return after the gospel of the kingdom was preached to all peoples, but we are focusing way too much on the gospel of salvation, which is not the same thing. A pimp can pray the sinner’s prayer and get back in his fancy car and go back to work. We’re supposed to repent and have the Holy Spirit put the kingdom of God inside us.

I felt selfish when I thought about the video, but then I remembered something. When I turned back to God in 2007 and started going to Trinity Church in Miami, I wanted to serve.

Twice in my life, I have decided to start attending church. Both times, I expected to be helped and guided by people who knew what they were doing and could put me on the right path. Both times, I was wrong.

When I joined Trinity, I became an armorbearer. I joined the prison ministry. I joined the prayer team. I drove buses to homeless shelters to bring people to services. I cooked. I showed up to help them build a set for a drama production. I did lots of stuff.

As an armorbearer, I was walled off, the way an oyster walls off an irritating piece of sand in its shell. The prison ministry went nowhere and did nothing at all, and the supervising pastor ran off because he realized the church was jerking him around. The church quit supporting the buses. They drove me out of the kitchen. I gave up on the drama team because they dropped part of a set on me and nearly killed me. They were unsafe and inept, and they would not listen to correction.

When I moved to New Dawn Ministries, things went well at first, and then I got walled off again.

I have also made outreaches in other very significant ways.

I had some selfish desires when I was at Trinity; no doubt about it. On the other hand, I tried very hard to serve. Sometimes they made it impossible, and other times, they merely made it unpleasant and pointless. Same goes for New Dawn.

After I left New Dawn, I felt that God did not want me to join any more churches or serve any more pastors. I still believe these things. Pastors do a tremendous amount of harm. They are very effective obstacles.

I have been somewhat too hard on myself, remembering the selfish desires very well and forgetting my sincere efforts to serve.

I feel that over the last couple of years, I have forgotten about service, or at least I have put it on the back burner. Jesus didn’t go to the cross so I could have a big house and hide from the world every day. He wanted me to help him reach others. The Bible says this is the reason why we don’t drop dead and go to heaven as soon as we ask for salvation. It makes sense. What other reason could God have for leaving us in this filthy place, surrounded by hate?

The driving reason that makes me want to see TLR at work is a desire to get my baptism done correctly and obtain whatever supernatural freedom and power I was supposed to get the first time around. That’s fine, but without more, it’s selfish. The video about the sinner’s prayer reminded me that there was a price. I’m going to have to have some involvement in evangelism.

I don’t look forward to standing on the sidewalk with grinning Danish people, trying to get random individuals to submit to prayer. I am way too shy to accost strangers, and in Florida, there is always the possibility of a shooting. Still, I have to reach people in some way or other, or I am wasting my time here on earth.

God’s power is like electricity, and electricity won’t flow well without a completed circuit to ground. The people we help are the ground.

I think TLR is the real deal. I don’t think they have every piece of the puzzle, but they seem to be right about what they’re right about, and they appear to heal people.

I saw an interesting video the other day. They were in an airport in Russia. A young man had a disgusting hand problem. A bone in his hand was loose, and it could be seen pushing up the skin when he manipulated it. Torben Sondergaard prayed for him briefly, and the bone stopped moving. That was really something.

TLR coaches Christians who have already spent a lot of time praying for the sick. Their disciples say they generally failed to get healings in the past, but after the TLR training, they get them quickly and often. That interests me. I find I have to push a lot to get healed. I have to pray and then spend a lot of time praising and thanking. It seems I’m doing something wrong. I’m working too hard.

I don’t know how well their methods work on longtime Christians. Another healer reports that it’s easier to get unbelievers healed than Christians. He says we stay in our sins, and it blocks our healing. You can see this in Isaiah 59. He believes God gives unbelievers more slack, because they don’t know what they’re doing wrong. Does TLR have the same problem? I’ll bet they do. We’ll find out.

I’m the world’s worst evangelist. Unless you count my dad’s questionable request for salvation, I have never gotten a single person to accept Jesus. I’m tired of having a terrible sales presentation.

One of my oldest friends is homosexual and solicits masochist partners on perverted websites, and I can’t tell him for a fact that I can set him free. I know other people who need help, and I can’t promise fast relief. It would be nice to have something stronger and faster to offer.

We have to give our whole lives to Jesus. That’s a fact. We have the idea that if we move a few inches closer to him, our lives will go smoothly. In truth, it invites attack without preparing us to deal with it. A lot of our defeats are caused by our refusal to jump into the deep end.

Derek Prince said something interesting in one of his books. People think the baptism with the Holy Spirit will end their problems, but he said you don’t how what spiritual warfare is until you get the baptism. It’s a provocation. Unless you follow up, it’s like putting on an army uniform, insisting on living behind enemy lines, and turning down weapons.

I’ve learned there are additional things I have to get rid of. I call it “anger porn.”

Ever watch a Steven Seagal movie? How about Jack Reacher? How about violent Marvel movies? Ever watch people shoot criminals on Youtube? This stuff feeds self-pity and anger.

Anger porn movies often follow a common plot. A very, very bad person does something extremely cruel to someone the hero cares about, like John Wick’s ridiculous puppy. The hero finds out, and then he spends the rest of the movie working up to the scene where he doles out incredible cruelty to the villain. How many times have you seen it? The villain gets burned alive, crushed to death, slowly torn in half…something that would be a horror to watch, but for the earlier scenes in which he provoked extreme anger.

Moviemakers and TV people set us up to enjoy cruelty. They even make torture acceptable. How many times have you seen someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger torture someone? Americans are supposedly kind people who find torture repugnant, but at the movies, we root for it, and it makes us feel satisfied.

I have a self-pity problem. I know it. Without realizing it, I have used it to excuse all sorts of things. I overeat in order to comfort myself, because somewhere in my heart, I feel that life has been unfair to me. I say harsh things in order to punish people. I have cruel thoughts. I do things I should not, because I feel that past mistreatment makes them justified.

If you knew me, you wouldn’t think I was like that. I try to be nice to people and treat them fairly. These negative things are all very muted, and I fight them. Nonetheless, the drives are still there.

Self-pity and cruelty are siblings. If you pity yourself, you feel that cruelty is not only permissible but virtuous. You tell yourself rage is “righteous anger.” You make lots of excuses for yourself. BLM and Antifa are self-pity movements, and the small number of conservatives who are reacting with racism and hate are also motivated by self-pity.

Self-pity leads to jealousy. It leads to taking pleasure in the suffering of people who have things you think you have been cheated out of. It leads to stealing and vandalism. It’s a big deal. Rioters riot because of self-pity. They want to “get even” with far-off, faceless Caucasians or Jews or Asian storeowners who keep them down and seem to own everything.

Self-pity interferes with confession and repentance, which are gateways to peace, love, and freedom. Self-pity walls demons in and gives them job security. It’s like tenure.

I am all done with superhero movies, which are stuffed to bursting with egregious cruelty. I don’t care what Thanos or Lex Luthor has done. It’s not helpful to me to applaud while either of them is dismembered or boiled or whatever.

If you keep a door open, you can’t complain about the rats in your house.

I just threw out the only remaining DVDs I considered problematic, from the standpoint of cruelty and anger. One was an old James Caan movie called Thief. I also found a The Family Guy DVD set hiding in a box. I believe I bought it while my cable was out due to a hurricane. Sick stuff. I found a The Twilight Zone box set, which I also threw out. Too much occult content.

Derek Prince pointed out something interesting. God told the Jews to get rid of cursed objects in order to avoid being destroyed along with them. Fine with me. Anything is better than being on God’s bad side. God himself tried to kill Moses for failing to circumcise his son, and I don’t think I’m a bigger favorite than Moses.

I’m glad I don’t have tattoos God hates! You can’t just throw those out.

Christianity doesn’t work very well for most of us, but on the other hand, we do so many things wrong, there is no way we can blame the faith itself. It reminds me of what I say about recipes. If I give you a recipe, and you make changes when you cook it, you have no business coming back to me later and complaining about it. You didn’t really use my recipe, so you don’t know what it’s actually like. If you make up your own recipe for Christianity, you can’t comment on the validity of the faith.

I would like to continue getting rid of the things I mixed into Christianity, and I would like to keep gathering things I’m leaving out. I believe getting rid of cursed objects and practices is powerful, and I expect to get good results from outreach, too.

Maybe one day we’ll start doing Christianity nearly right, and then Jesus will be able to return for a spotless bride, as the Bible predicts.

If you read Ephesians 5, I think you will find confirmation that what I’m saying is right.

Fresh Threshold Crossed

This is an interesting day. My dad has forgotten how to make breakfast, and he has also forgotten what he usually eats.

For years, he has been getting up and making himself scrambled fake eggs, turkey “bacon,” and toast. He has a special stainless skillet. He can’t use Teflon because if he burns it accidentally, the fumes can kill my pets. He has been handling his own breakfast needs one way or another ever since I was a kid, and now, at least for today, he can’t do it. Maybe tomorrow he’ll remember again.

I have to adjust. Cooking real food for him would be time-consuming, and I have other things I have to deal with in the mornings. For example, I now have to go in the bathroom while he showers and prevent certain problems from arising. I am also wiping kitchen surfaces with a weak bleach solution and bringing him the clothes he is supposed to wear every day. If I simply hang clothes in his closet, he will wear them multiple times without putting them in the laundry.

I’m going to get some sort of prepared frozen stuff we can throw in the microwave. It will do for now. Maybe I can come up with something better later.

Another problem with cooking for him is that he would expect me to eat with him, and that’s something I want to limit. His manners have never been great, and things have gotten worse. It may seem like a little thing to a person who has never looked after a demented person, but looking at chewed food and enduring other unmentionable issues during meals takes a toll on you if you do it every day.

I can imagine indignant people telling me I need to get up at 5 a.m. and make him fresh, healthy, delicious food every day. Here’s the thing: his diet is not going to be great from now on, and I’m okay with it. His diet has never been good, it was his own choice, and the damage is already done. As long as he enjoys what he eats, his diet is fine. He will be gone in a couple of years no matter what he eats.

You have to ration out the time you spend working with demented people unless you want to end up in a mental home, and all time spent with a demented person is work. The repetition, the insults, the gaslighting, and the mess and filth wear you down, and human beings can only take so much without rest.

Other people will try to make you feel bad about refusing to turn yourself into a slave, and your patient is likely to be chief among them, but you can’t pay any attention. Your life is more important than an aging parent’s. The natural and divine orders agree: the old are supposed to sacrifice themselves for the young, and doing it the other way around is a malignant aberration.

Imagine what would have happened had Isaac Newton given up his career to look after his mother. No, I’m not Isaac Newton, but everyone has a life and a purpose.

In more encouraging news, my dad is suddenly taking a better attitude toward assisted living.

While we were discussing his breakfast problem, he asked me if he was senile. He realized being unable to fix breakfast was not normal. I discussed his dementia with him again, and I brought up assisted living. I told him his care was starting to put demands on me which I could not meet. He tried to tell me I didn’t do much for him, so I reminded him of the things I do. I said the ALF I was considering was a short distance away, and that I could take him out for lunch several times a week. I reminded him that we had an appointment to visit the place tomorrow.

He was surprisingly agreeable. He said he would do what I thought was best. Of course, he won’t remember that later today. His behavior tomorrow will depend on how he feels then. We’ll have to take up the subject all over again, de novo, as appellate courts put it.

What made the difference? I think it was prayer. The last few days were very hard, and yesterday I did what God always tells me to do. He says, “Do what you already know to do, before complaining and asking for more.” I used the power of blessing and cursing, and I prayed for God to do specific things. After I prayed, I thanked and praised God for a very long time. This is a very strong tactic, and most of us don’t do it.

I was so weary, I was thinking of fasting until tomorrow morning. No food or water. I asked God about it, and he seemed to be against it, so I had breakfast. I got good results, so I think I did the right thing.

Nothing is worse than being tied to someone who is against God. That’s the big lesson I’ve learned. I didn’t choose my parents, but I chose to stay close to my dad after I knew what he was, and after that, every bad thing that happened between us was my fault. I know people who turned to God after marrying awful spouses. They suffer like crazy. Many people have abusive friends and bosses. We’re not supposed to start down these roads. It can be extremely costly.

Tomorrow we will visit the ALF, and we will see what happens. He will be staying there temporarily week after next, so that will give him another chance to get used to it.

I was thinking of putting him in a ritzier place farther away, but the people at the closer facility seem nicer, and it will be more convenient if I have to go get him for errands and outings. If it turns out to be a bad fit, I can move him to the other one.

If I had to choose, I would prefer to drop dead at 70 instead of putting my child through what I go through. Of course, I don’t have a child, so I don’t have to worry about that. My nonexistent wife and kids have been spared, so I will have to carry my own weight if something goes wrong.

I can say this: if anyone ends up caring for me, they won’t have to worry about being abused or gaslighted. I don’t have a perfect record, but basically, I am not like that. I don’t think I would compound the fun of changing diapers and mopping walls with insults and guilt trips. I hope not.

After several years of caregiving, I can’t imagine what it will be like to be free. I’ll be able to travel. I’ll have a clean house. I won’t have to hide upstairs when I eat. I will miss my dad sometimes, even though I will see him often, but on the whole, it will be like getting out of jail.

Looking into Respite Care

I have resumed looking into assisted living options for my dad.

We have started having hygiene issues which are too hard for me to cope with. There are some things a person can’t tolerate. I no longer believe in-home care will work. I can’t predict when he will have another problem, and he will not tell me when one occurs. By the time I find out about the next event, I’ll have a Herculean cleaning and disposal job ahead of me. Kiss a day and a half goodbye. I can’t afford that kind of time drain, and I haven’t mentioned the health risk to me or the misery of living with filth.

It’s very hard to figure out what to do with a person who has vascular dementia. The disease progresses quickly compared to Alzheimer’s, so what works one month may not work the next. I have been trying to choose among in-home options as well as assisted living.

My dad doesn’t have a temporary or trivial problem. My dad is dying. His condition is fatal, incurable, and irreversible. That has to be a fundamental premise all his care providers have to acknowledge. Doctors have a tendency to avoid talk of death until a patient burdens them, personally. Up until that time, they treat, treat, treat, wasting money, wearing down caregivers, and putting off important decisions until everyone involved is rushed.

Doctors like money, and they don’t like helping people make decisions. A friend of mine interned in a hospital when I was in college, on his way to becoming a very unhappy radiologist. He said he listened to the doctors when he rode the elevators. The young doctors talked about medicine, and the older doctors talked about money.

When I talk to a doctor about my dad’s care, I’m thinking about doing the right thing. I’m sure the doctor thinks about that, too, but he also thinks about the money he will make by ordering additional treatments which he knows have no potential to help. I have to be willing to be assertive with doctors.

If you’re in denial about death, you may find that a doctor will take advantage and agree to charge you for treatments you don’t need. You have to be aware of this unless you want to be milked like a cow before you die.

It’s not just the money. Medical treatment brings other problems. Say my dad gets a back operation and can’t move for six weeks. I’ll have to hire someone to come and deal with him every day. I’ll have to be in charge of whatever regimen he is given while he recuperates. I’ll have to go out and buy new things he needs. I’ll have to wrestle with him every day and make him cooperate with measures the purpose of which he does not remember. That’s not acceptable.

What if his cardiologist tries to give him a quadruple bypass? Guess who will be looking after him while he heals. I’ll get even more behind in my other responsibilities, which are very important. Then he’ll still die in a year or two, from dementia. The doctors would make money. The drug companies would make money. My dad and I would be left holding the bag.

You can’t just accept every treatment doctors offer you. Treatment often makes things much worse. Look at Kanye West’s mother.

My dad is dying, dying, dying. I refuse to pretend it’s not happening, and I hate it when people other people soft-soap me about it. It’s not helpful. He probably has less than two years left. During his remaining time, he will get worse in sudden steps. He will forget more and more people, including me. He may lose the ability to talk. He is already losing the ability to walk, and he will probably become unable to get out of bed. Someone else will have to bathe him and change his diapers while he waits for the end.

I can’t slap him in a facility and expect things to be fine and dandy until he dies. He is losing the capacity to live in his home without major problems, and he will also reach a point where the slight demands of assisted living will be too much for him.

If he deteriorates over a long period, I will have to make a lot of difficult adjustments. If he dies suddenly, whatever arrangements I have made up to that point will suffice, and I will be spared further confusion and effort. I don’t know which of these two alternatives I’m facing.

Last week, he was open to assisted living. He now says he will kill himself if he has to go. Not helpful. It’s not true, either. He would never harm himself. Some people are incapable of that kind of thing, and my dad is one of them. Still, it means he will not do the mature thing, and it means he will make me suffer until he adjusts to his fate.

My current plan is to put him in assisted living for a few days. It’s called respite care. I’ll take him to a nearby facility, which I have already called, and I’ll leave him there while I visit a Christian conference in another city. I don’t know if he’ll like it or not, but that’s not something that has to be considered. Fate doesn’t always give you choices. He has to do this.

I think once he’s there, he’ll realize it’s better than living at home. He’ll have people to talk to and boss around. He won’t have as many challenges as he has here. He’ll be overfed, which he likes.

As always, the resources available to me are very poor. When I Google, I get thinly disguised ads. When I contact people, I get mobbed with sales calls and spam. My dad’s doctors are probably good at treating the sick, but they are not helpful in dealing with patients who will soon be dead from dementia.

I joined an online support forum, but the people there were so obnoxious and self-righteous, I quit.

Even Yelp and Angie’s List don’t help.

On Friday, we will be visiting the place where my dad will be staying while I’m gone. I hope the visit isn’t a circus, but I won’t let his selfishness deter me. I’m going to that conference, and he is going to submit to respite care whether he likes it or not.

I hate to say it, but I look forward to the days when I no longer have to do this. The hardest things to take are the abuse, the lack of gratitude, and the filth, in that order. He called on God for salvation back in September, and things got very peaceful for a while, but since then he has denied his faith, and tension has returned. I think the cause is supernatural. Satan wants me to be angry and forget about love.

Christians are supposed to flee temptation. A person who has had problems with gluttony shouldn’t keep bowls of candy in his house. Abusive people are just like bowls of candy. They tempt. My dad tempts me to be angry. Even if it’s my fault when I give in, it’s still a bad idea for me to be exposed to such a person more than is necessary.

It shows why we’re not supposed to have unequal yokings. I will never have another one unless it is forced on me.

Restoration Threatens the God of This World

I have been watching videos from The Last Reformation during breakfast.

I have written about The Last Reformation already. It’s a movement that started in Denmark, of all places. Europe gave up on God a long time ago, and the Scandinavians are generally not interested in him. They are known for arrogance, hard work, socialism, and sexual sin. It’s strange to see Scandinavians being used to do a major work for God.

TLR promotes proper water baptism. That’s interesting to me, because in today’s Christian church, almost no one knows the purpose of baptism. The Catholic-penumbra churches are especially ignorant. They don’t baptize at all. They sprinkle babies with water. Baptism means complete immersion; it comes from Jewish ritual immersion, and the Jews go under. You can’t baptize a baby, because baptism requires a conscious decision to serve God.

If you were sprinkled when you were a baby, and that’s all you have, you have not been baptized.

Most churches that immerse are wrong, too. They think baptism is a sort of initiation rite, like a college graduation. They think it means you acknowledge Jesus before men, and that’s it.

Torben Sondergaard, the big figure in TLR, says baptism isn’t just a symbol or a way to become a member of a church. It’s for remission of sin.

Why is that interesting? Because it’s what John the Baptist (the Complete Jewish Bible calls him “John the Immerser”) said. He called people to be baptized in repentance. Once his ministry got going, Jesus came for the first time.

Now we have a group pushing baptism combined with real repentance. If they’re doing things correctly, aren’t they doing the work of John the Baptist? If that’s true, then could it be that they are preparing the world for the return of Jesus? Perhaps this is their purpose.

The Bible says Jesus will return after the “gospel of the kingdom” has been taught to all peoples. Most churches aren’t teaching the gospel of the kingdom. They teach the gospels of salvation, hard work, positive thinking, licentiousness, greed, anger, and so on. Some of the gospels they teach are true, and many are wrong. In any case, most churches aren’t teaching people about establishing the kingdom of God inside themselves.

Remember, Jesus said the kingdom of God was within us. The disciples expected him to conquer the Romans and establish the kingdom on earth, but he left the Romans in charge and focused on changing people internally.

There is a difference between teaching about Jesus and teaching the gospel of the kingdom of God.

TLR is teaching total repentance. They are teaching the baptism with the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues. They expect the people they minister to to become ministers themselves, immediately. If that isn’t the kingdom of God in operation, it’s certainly much closer to it that what you will see on TBN and Daystar, and it’s light years ahead of what the Pope teaches.

In Acts 2, at Pentecost, Peter told the Jews they needed to be baptized for the forgiveness of sin, and that if they did, they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself was baptized with the Holy Spirit when he was immersed. The Holy Spirit manifests at TLR baptisms all the time. People begin speaking in tongues while they’re still in the tanks, and demons leave them.

I received things out of order. I got the baptism with the Holy Spirit before I was (badly) baptized with water. I want to get everything corrected. I still have problems with demons, and I want them to end.

Generally, we don’t teach people to become ministers. We aren’t really interested in becoming pro-active and serving God wholeheartedly. We go to church as a matter of duty and fear, hoping to be protected and helped without giving too much of ourselves to God in return. We are satisfied with treading water when we should be walking on it.

Peter taught that the flood, which drowned beings that later became demons, was a shadow of New Testament baptism. That can’t be a coincidence.

When you watch TLR at work, you have to ask: is Elijah finally here?

In the Old Testament, Elijah was one man. In the New Testament, John, who continued his ministry, was only one man. Elijah and John lived under the old covenant. Under the new covenant, things are different. It’s about reproduction and multiplication. Just as Israel was a man and a nation of men, Jesus is God and a nation of men. He has a body made of of many people. One of the main purposes of his coming was to allow him to generate countless powerful replicas of himself to carry on his work. If Jesus has a body, can’t the work of Elijah also be carried out by many people?

It’s as if Jesus were Ulysses and the church were Penelope, beset by crass, selfish suitors while her husband makes his way back to her. The important components of Christianity are like axe heads that have to be lined up before Jesus can shoot his arrow through them and take his authority back. Proper baptism is an axe head.

I hope TLR is evidence that the Elijah anointing is back, because it would mean this tawdry, cruel world was coming to a permanent end, to be replaced by something much better.

God has taught me a great deal, but there are still a lot of holes in my knowledge. They should not be there. I let myself down by giving up on prayer many years ago, and churches let me down by replacing sound knowledge with paganism and self-help nonsense. I suppose churches have been useless since the beginning of the Middle Ages. It’s very sad. But how can I condemn when I made myself useless? God would have taught me a lot more by now, had I held onto what he showed me and put it to use consistently.

I am looking forward to seeing TLR in person. I fully expect Satan to come up with all sorts of obstacles to keep me away, so I am praying for a clear path. My young friend Travis is trying to get free to go. I hope he makes it. He has the same concerns I do. I’ve told a bunch of friends about it, but only one really seems motivated.

Unexpected Present Arrives

If you don’t want to hear about moderately gross medical stuff, this would be a good time to head on over to Youtube and watch some cat videos.

I have had kidney stone issues this fall. I thought I had only been having them for a couple of weeks, but my memory failed me. I just checked, and I started having trouble in September.

I went to doctors for my first two stones (over a decade ago), but after that, I got used to receiving sudden healings after prayer, so I quit relying on doctors. I believe I passed two stones at one church and a couple at another. I no longer remember for sure. When I had problems this fall, I figured I would rely on God again.

I drank a lot of water and beer, and a stone came out in late September. I figured I was done. Hooray! Then last month, more stones came out. I passed several in one day. I did not know what to make of it.

I have felt a little weird since then, and I had some more symptoms. I didn’t think I still had stones. I figured I might have a lingering infection caused by the stones.

This morning I was surprised by the unexpected launch of yet another stone, and it was a lulu. I think it’s a personal best. I’m going to say it’s 4 millimeters long, although I haven’t measured it. I did save it, just so I could marvel at it. Also, if I have more problems, a doctor may want it. And it makes a nice paperweight.

I’ll tell you something weird. When a stone which has been driving you nuts for a long time comes out of your body, it will somehow seem precious to you. I feel like having mine set in a ring.

Here’s something weirder. Now that it’s out, things in that general area are working better than they have in years, not weeks. What’s up with that? I’m wondering if I had bladder stones for years and didn’t know it.

A small kidney stone can become a bladder stone if you don’t blow it out of your bladder. Then it can grow and cause annoying symptoms. When I was dealing with my long parade of stones over the years, it never occurred to me that they could end up my bladder. I’m not a doctor. What do I know? I knew I was getting old, so if the system didn’t run quite as smoothly as it did when I was in high school, I chalked it up to age and did not worry about it.

I have been reading about bladder stones today. Usually–not occasionally–they have to be removed by some horrible mechanical process. They use a device made by the same people who make those crane arcade machines that pick up stuffed animals. I’m pretty sure.

I’m not saying it’s EXACTLY like the crane machines. I believe they put a little oil on it before they use it. If the Obamacare death panel agrees to spring for it.

Evidently, if I were not among the blessed, I would have been in for a very unpleasant and, probably, expensive procedure.

I must have had a bunch of stones for quite a while. I thought I was drinking tea (causes kidney stones) and getting away with it, but I was mistaken.

If things really are as they seem, then not only am I healed of various stones; other common problems I had assumed were developing are not. That would be nice. My dad is a prostate cancer survivor, and I do not wish to have any problems with that particular bit of the anatomy. Some men do, and some men don’t, and I want to be in the latter group.

Man, I hope I’m right. It would be like Christmas in December.

Okay, EARLY December.

Sometimes I’ve wondered what I would do if I had this or that disease. In the case of prostate cancer, I have always felt like I should go for palliative care without trying to cure the cancer. Take dilaudid, watch TV, arrange my estate, and wait for the end.

I’m a Christian, and I don’t believe in suicide, but I’ve never heard anyone say it’s a sin to decline treatment. That loophole has helped a lot of people who could not find divine healing.

Prostate cancer treatment is unbelievably humiliating. You end up in diapers, perhaps permanently, and you lose all sexual function. It’s like my Great Aunt Berthy once said about being hooked up to machines and tubes to stay alive: “It’s not worth it. Not to stay here.”

She made it to 98, and she kept a big garden well into her eighties. I mean like half an acre, with hand implements. She had a root cellar sort of a structure behind her house, built into a hill. She kept it full of things she canned, plus her famous liniment, which burned like lye. She also kept bees. Big lady. Looked like she was 6 feet tall to me. She once shot a guy for bothering her chickens.

I am not overly attached to this life. The more I learn about God and heaven, the more horrified I am to be here at all. This is a very rough place. Injuries. Aging. Disease. Death. Income tax preparation. Jury duty. Killer bees. Paper cuts. Liver. The worst.

When I realize there is a place like heaven, I can’t believe I live on hell’s roof in a body which is nothing but a sack of vulnerable, malfunctioning, unrefrigerated meat.

I suppose that almost sounds pessimistic.

I’ve seen movies about angels and divine beings that have decided to become human for some unbelievably stupid reason or other. The second Superman movie! Remember that? Christopher Reeve gave up his superpowers. What a moron. What was the first thing that happened to him afterward? A middle-aged truck driver who was smaller than he was beat him bloody with one cheap shot. He bled all over the floor at a diner. First time he ever felt pain.

He brought that on himself. At least he was smart enough not to stick it out. Think how he would have felt, buying reading glasses at 40 or rupturing a disk at 70 while lifting a grocery bag full of prune juice.

He would have loved Obamacare. Shelling out $800 per month to be treated like a lab specimen.

Think how he would have felt, 30 years after Lois ran off with Jimmy Olson and took the Fortress of Solitude with her, lying in a doctor’s office with a bulky camera on a greased stalk invading his formerly immortal person. Imagine the regret. DOH!

No, no, no. If you have a choice, inside a flesh body is not the place to be.

I am extremely happy about the way things turned out. I did not expect to come out of this better off than I was before I got sick.

In what may be related news, I got a serious blessing last night.

For some time, I have been trying to get more love to flow through me. I had health issues that involved blockages, and I felt that they were God’s way of showing me how I blocked the fruit of the Spirit from flowing through me. I knew from past experience that God was able to open me up and make love flow normally, so I prayed for it a lot. I was tired of being provoked. I was tired of hostile emotions, including things like envy and malice.

Last night during prayer I started focusing on loving God and people. I sort of pushed from the inside and tried to hold the channel open. I know that sounds weird. I made myself think of the most infuriating people I knew of, and I forced myself to feel warmth toward them.

Since then, I’ve been doing pretty well with it. I have been choking the negative things off before they can get a grip. I know God is helping me, because I have tried this before, and it didn’t work.

I have had problems with worry. The Bible says, “Completed love casts out fear.” Jesus has visited me twice, and I felt love radiating from him like heat from a fire. While his love was bathing me, I could not feel fear. The desire to be rid of worry was one of my main motivations for trying to open up to love. I don’t know why love erases fear. It’s not intuitive. It’s true, however.

I do not want worry or fear. I don’t want their sibling, doubt. I do want love. We’re supposed to be little replicas of Jesus, and when people interact with me, God’s love should flow through me toward them.

God once told me he created the universe for love. That’s really something. Who else would create a universe for love? Others might create it for power or entertainment or fun. God made love the top priority. In heaven, we are going to be irradiated with each other’s love all the time. How strange that will be. Down here, we’re so busy putting out fires, being reactive, we don’t have that much time to think about love. That’s even true in churches, where we focus a lot on duty or the things we hope God will do for us.

If God’s love flows through you, your circumstances won’t be able to make you worried or afraid. That’s something very few preachers teach, and it’s not something we commonly think of as a goal.

It must have been love that enabled Jesus to face the cross. It seems that way, based on John 3:16. A parent will fight a tiger to save a child, and God is no different, except in degree.

I had a spiritual breakthrough last night, a kidney stone I didn’t know I had flew out the next morning, and afterward, I was in better shape than I had been in years. Is it a coincidence? It doesn’t look like it.

I plan to keep at it. I am determined not to be an angry or worried person for the rest of my life. I can’t make God happy and succeed for him if I’m nothing like him in my heart and mind.

I hope this is helpful to people, and I hope they get to read it. A hacker screwed up my site last night, and I had to do some work to fix it. I don’t know what other tricks he has up his sleeve, and I’m not willing to put a huge amount of work or money into making the site totally secure. If it goes down, it goes down. I’ll get over it.

I’m not sure why I attracted the attack. Maybe it was random, or maybe someone out there has a problem with Jesus.

I believe I’ll go drink more water now. I want EVERYTHING to flow.