No Roast Beast This Year

Christmas has not been bad. It’s just me and my dad now, but life is peaceful, and my relationship with God is rewarding.

I don’t hear from my other relatives much. My sister is not really part of the picture now, and the others just don’t contact me often. It’s always about business when they do. I guess I offended them in some way, but I don’t know what I did. My grandfather left a screwed-up estate, and that tends to create alienation among relatives, but I have never taken a dime or a single article I wasn’t entitled to, and the only time I offered to work for the estate, I refused to charge. Oddly, they chose a cousin who took 33 percent of the proceeds of his work.

Could have saved each one of them thousands of dollars. Whatever their reason for turning me down was, it must have been compelling. Or maybe they just didn’t think it through.

I did hear from one aunt. Her relationship with the others is not great, but I don’t have any problems with her. She was upset because Obama jabbed Israel in the eye, refusing to oppose an anti-Israel UN resolution. She believes God will punish the US because of it, and history appears to show that she had good reason to be concerned.

For years, Democrats ridiculed people who said Obama had problems with Israel, but at some point during his administration, the gloves came off, and now people admit he’s Israel’s enemy. No apologies from the apologists, however. No admission of error.

The Bible predicts that God will start defending God personally when all the nations of the world turn against it. Has that happened, with the UN resolution? I’m not sure. We elected Trump, and he appears to be a rabid Israel fan. Ordinarily, you would think that would count for something. But he got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, an enemy of God from the word “go.” That counts for something, too.

I am not worried, because worry is wrong. Besides, my relationship with God is going very well, so I don’t expect to suffer as badly as other Americans. I’m not all over the web calling the Israelis Nazis and comparing the Jewish state to South Africa. I hope as many people as possible get it together and stop provoking God, but I’m glad I’m withdrawing from the mass of ignorant people who are doing their best to bring on disaster.

The day was productive for me, by my standards. I spent a lot of time organizing and moving useless items into places where they will not be in the way as much. I spent some time reading an old quantum mechanics text, and I watched a quantum mechanics lecture on Youtube. I did a couple of simple problems. I am trying to pick up bits of the knowledge that leaked out of my head after I quit graduate school.

I also spent time with my handy-dandy Radio Shack Electronics Learning Lab. I have been going through the projects and writing up lab reports, because reports help you learn things, but the more I got into it, the more I felt it was counterproductive to write things up. The material in the workbook does not lend itself all that well to report writing, and writing slows the process down by a factor of maybe ten. I started going through the book assembling and dismantling the projects one after the other, without writing anything. It seems to be the right way to do it. If I really feel the need, I can write about certain subjects, but I believe writing about everything will keep me busy until I’m 70.

It’s nice to do things right, but if you overthink and do them TOO right, you fall behind and never get anywhere. I wish I had understood that when I was in grad school. I felt like I had to understand everything, backward and forward.

I’ve been fiddling with the test equipment I own. I found out I don’t have a cord for my ancient HP signal generator. The resulting kerfuffle is really something. A thousand years ago, when it was made, they used a connector called the PH-163 or Belkin 17952. It’s sort of like a modern computer power cord connector, but it has oval pins. In 2016, a PH-163 cord will run you thirty bucks, not including shipping. Forget that. I ordered a male PC connector, and I’m going to rip the old connector out of the box, carve up the sheet metal, and put the new one in. I don’t even know if the signal generator works, so I’m not going to Sotheby’s to bid on a priceless antique cord for it.

My old Hitachi oscilloscope has a messed-up volts/division knob on one channel. It’s very hard to turn, as if someone put glue in it. I tried running Kroil into it, but it didn’t loosen it up completely, so I guess I’ll have to dismantle the scope and take a look at the pot/rotary switch/whatever behind the panel. I have no idea whether it can be fixed.

I’m also getting a funny display when I check the square-wave calibration function, and from what I’ve read, that means parts on the PCB have to be replaced. Fun, fun, fun. I don’t know how much effort I want to put into a scope that cost 50 bucks, but I plan to see what I can do.

It’s time to get a real scope. That means digital. I thought I might try to get an old Tektronix or HP, but people seem to agree that you’re better off getting a new Chinese job. I may splurge for a Rigol DS1054Z. They get raves. It would be nice to work WITH a scope instead of working ON it.

When people talk about the old scopes, they say they do most of what the new ones do, and the quality is better, but they also say this part burns out and that part quits working, and then you either have to become an oscilloscope technician or buy another one.

I don’t know much about it, but it looks like you can hit Ebay and pick up a 20-year-old scope that does what a modern Chinese one does, for maybe 40% less than Chinese. But is that a good idea? I saw a technical guy tear down the Rigol, and it’s no Alibaba toy. It’s built like Kim Jong-Un’s armor-plated underground end-game outhouse.

The Hitachi was fine when I was basically using it to see if I was getting any AC signal at all, without worrying whether the display was correct. I was working on tube amps, and that doesn’t require a lot of precision. I can’t get by with grossly distorted waveforms for the rest of my life. Sooner or later I’ll need to know what a signal really looks like.

I dread opening the box up and looking for problems. I’ll probably have to remove and store thirty knobs to get the front panel off, and they’re attached with microscopic set screws.

One of the big down sides to fooling with electronics is that you have to join forums frequented by guys who have never, ever, for very solid reasons, gotten a date. Some of the people are nice and helpful, but others think that because they’ve spent their entire lives staring at circuit boards and watching Japanese cartoons instead of engaging with human beings, the rest of us should crawl to them on our faces and shower them with offerings of Jolt cola and Skittles before begging their forgiveness for existing.

You really have to finesse them to get what you want without falling into the mud-wrestling pit. You have to know when to say, “Great. Thanks for the information,” when you have received no useful information at all and simply want to end the interaction.

I guess it’s insulting to humor and cajole people you could never respect, in order to get answers out of them, but you can only treat people as well as they let you.

Anyway, it was a pleasant, peaceful day. It would be nice if I woke up tomorrow and the half of my family that died from old age and cancer was still here, and we were all in Kentucky sitting around a Christmas tree, but things are good, and they’re getting better.

If You Paid for it, it’s not a Gift

I wrote about the help God has been giving me with love. The process has not stopped, so I felt like I should keep writing.

Someone asked me how I go about loving certain people. Many human beings are venomous and obnoxious. That’s reality. A commenter wanted to know if I tried to think about the good parts of people.

That gave me pause, because the answer surprised me: I don’t.

That proves what’s happening to me is supernatural. I can’t do what I’m doing. It’s not me.

Sometimes when God makes an improvement in you, you forget what it was like before he fixed you. That’s the situation I’m in now. A couple of weeks ago, I would have had to grit my teeth and focus in order to try to love certain people. That’s not what’s happening now. It’s more like turning on a flashlight and letting the beam shine. I have the power to turn it on or shut it off, but I didn’t put it in myself. There is something inside me that wasn’t there before, and it doesn’t depend on the person toward whom I direct it.

That’s part of the beauty of it. If other people’s bad qualities prevent you from loving them, then they control you, right? They can always take away your love. How can you be the head and not the tail if other people can take your love at will?

We love saying other people can’t steal our joy, but we don’t say that about love very much. Love is more fundamental than joy. Love gives rise to joy, so if you can get ahold of love and hang onto it, joy will follow.

Saying, “You can’t steal my joy,” is a little selfish, because it leaves love out of the equation. It’s sort of like saying, “You can’t keep my paycheck,” when you haven’t been going to work. Not that love is work. I just mean love comes before joy, like work comes before a paycheck.

Maybe I shouldn’t have used work in the analogy. Hopefully, you get the idea. Sunshine comes before photosynthesis. Investing comes before interest. Planting comes before reaping. Wind comes before waves.

I don’t care how rotten people are; they can’t take this from me. I won’t have it. I’m not their slave.

I may not like everyone. There are many people I refuse to associate with, because associating with them is a nasty and unprofitable experience. There are a lot of people I can’t help but contemn. But I don’t have to hate them or live with anger because of them.

I feel a lot better now. Often in the past, I felt bad because anger was still in place. The root of anger will keep bearing fruit as long as it’s not pulled up. Whatever I tried to do with the root of anger in place was sabotaged by the root’s presence. It’s like trying to build a house right next to a tree. The roots will grow under the house and break the foundation, over and over. If you kill the tree, the house can be built. Now I have more power to cut the roots whenever they try to spread.

Christians in the US need to get ahold of this right now, because we’re very busy humiliating people who are against God, and anger is breaking up our foundations. We are crowing about Trump’s win, as if it proved we were the master race. That’s kind of crazy. If you’re going to be nasty and cruel, wouldn’t it make more sense to do it when you lose, not when you win? Anyway, it will bring a backlash of defeat. A certain number of people here have to deal with our win correctly in order to motivate God to keep helping us.

I believe an increased flow of love will improve my health and enable God to bless me more. I think that when your love is constipated, it’s like having obstructions in your lymph system and urinary system and so on. Things that should be cleansed get blocked and encrusted with filth. Destructive pressure builds up. Your body and mind will attack themselves. Seems that way, based on what I’m experiencing now.

It’s highly disturbing that famous preachers keep lying to us about money and keeping us convinced that God’s big priority is making us rich. Look at what we could be getting, if we weren’t deceived. We are chasing things we can’t get. We are chasing blessings that don’t exist, and when you do that, you’re really chasing curses. We’re offending God with our covetousness, and we are not chasing the good things he actually wants us to have.

People like T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, Paula White, and Benny Hinn are poisoning us. It’s as if we’re all swimming in a septic tank, and these people are holding our heads under the surface. The evil they do is astounding, but we deserve it, because our desires give them opportunity.

The Pope…I don’t even know what to say about him. How can any Christian over the age of 12 love socialism? Who has killed more Christians than the socialists? Who has burned more churches? Who has touted man’s nonexistent power to change and help himself more? No one. The Pope is toxic and ignorant.

Cold, intellectual preachers are killing us,too. God doesn’t want engineers. He wants people with hearts like his.

The sad thing is that we have no leadership. Where are we supposed to turn? No one on earth–no one prominent–is teaching the things God has shown me directly. People say no church is perfect, but the truth is, no church is even adequate. Churches are poisonous. If you want to benefit from a church, go and get yourself saved and baptized with the Spirit, start praying in tongues as much as you can, and beg God every day for correction and knowledge. Then learn to ignore the garbage your church teaches you. This is your only hope of making real progress.

Be extremely careful about accepting any type of promotion from a church. It’s almost always a trap. When you’re part of the team, you have to parrot the party line, even if the party line is killing people. Don’t get attached to anything but God. Don’t owe anyone but God. You don’t need to be a youth pastor or deacon in order to serve him. You don’t need a “platform.” You can do just fine on your own, once you’re able to hear from God.

You don’t need a license from a man or an organization.

Jesus had no position in the religious hierarchy. Neither did John the Baptist or any of the apostles. Look at the prophets. They were rejected. Amos was a vinedresser. Elijah and Elisha were solitary. Elisha was a farmer. Moses was a shepherd. David was a shepherd whose brothers hated him. Meanwhile, the vast majority of priests amounted to absolutely nothing. Try and name a priest from the Bible who is honored today, to the degree that Stephen or Moses is honored.

The Jews killed Isaiah. They tormented and imprisoned Jeremiah. They stoned Stephen. If men love you and honor you, look out! It’s the devil, trying to put you to sleep on his lap so he can shave your head and put out your eyes. God help you if someone tries to point a TV camera at you. It takes God-given strength to endure that without being corrupted.

The Bible clearly says that God sets the godly apart for himself. That doesn’t mean he sets them apart in churches. It means he sets them apart, with him. In his presence. When you’re in church, be careful. Think like a person in a hospital ward during a plague. Avoid being infected. Avoid indiscriminate intimacy with the infected. This is part of what it means to be the head and not the tail.

To be holy, you have to have flexibility. Men will bind you with chains and straps so they can control you and tell you what to say. If you accept the chains, the Holy Spirit will go somewhere else. He is not going to be dishonored and compete with men for your loyalty. He is humble and patient, but he is still God, and he requires a certain amount of honor. Every day God gives up on people he loves, and he, personally, has them thrown into hell. If you tax him long enough, he will give up on you, too.

You can do what you want. Never forget that. It should scare you.

Don’t worry about the difficulty of doing what God wants. He does not want you to do it with your own strength. It offends and grieves him when you do that. He expects and demands that you accept his help. Don’t be discouraged. Look for his help.

We are heirs, not employees. How would you feel if you tried to give your son a fortune, and he insisted on getting a job at 7-Eleven and living in an efficiency?

Remember all those times in the Bible when Jesus worked really hard and got blisters? Neither do I! Never happened! God isn’t impressed or pleased with your hard work. He created hard work as a reward for the cursed. Learn to receive charity. Jesus himself was not too good to do that. Who are we to insist on deserving good things?

Imagine how terrible life would be if we got what we deserved.

Love is available. Faith is available. Victory is available. It has already been paid for, by someone else.

I don’t know if I’m doing a good job of testifying, since I’m not making many people angry. I guess I’m being spared their participation here. If what you say pleases everyone, it’s wrong. Real testimony gives rise to hate and murder.

If I can get good things from God, anyone can. Keep banging on the door.

Don’t Air Your Grievances; Give Them the Air

God keeps showing me good stuff and cleaning me up.

One of the needs I have been concerned about for the last few years is the need to love. A while back, God told me he created the universe for love, and that is consistent with my concerns. Love is important. Apparently, it’s one of the most important things there is. Also, on the occasions when Jesus visited me, the single sensation that impressed me the most was the warmth of the love that radiated from him. I also felt peace, protection, relief, and faith, but love stood out.

God can project his love through you, and that’s the kind of love he wants you to have. It’s hard to make yourself love without his help. We are fully of emotional scars. We feel cheated and wounded, because that’s what we are. Other people and malicious spirits prey on us, starting before we’re born. They get great pleasure from our suffering and humiliation. It’s as if they love bathing in our blood.

Years ago, while I was on my way to a church service, God’s love fell on me, and while it rested on me, I felt new love for other people. It didn’t matter who they were. I didn’t have to push it. The strength came from God. It was a great thing, but I wasn’t able to hold onto it. Ever since then, I’ve been aware that I needed it, and I wanted it back. Many times, I’ve asked God for this.

We live in a society of self-proclaimed victims, and I have been one of them. A person who thinks he’s a victim doesn’t feel obligated to love. On the contrary; victims feel entitled (their favorite word) to harm others. It’s not sin to them. It’s payback, karma, reparations, justice…there is always a name attached to it that makes it sound holy.

I had a warm personality when I was born, but according to my mother, that dried up during my first year of life. She thought it was because of an illness I contracted, but it may have had more to do with the presence of two abusive people in the house. My mother used to find my sister next to my crib, pinching me to make me scream.

In this world, we are taught to hold things against people and to feel cheated. I fell for it. Also, I got tired of opening up to people, only to have them mistreat me in return. People are truly sadistic. Many of them see openness as a welcome opportunity to violate and torment another person. It’s like a windfall to them. They pleasure of harming others is so pleasing to them, they can’t believe their good fortune when they get a chance to cause suffering. I found that I could protect myself by closing up and by using words to hurt back or to attack preemptively. I was rewarded for it, too, because I was funny. People admired me for it. They paid me with attention.

I became like the people from whom I wanted protection. I thought I was a good person because I wasn’t actively looking for opportunities to hurt people, but I was contributing to the atmosphere of defensiveness and malice. In Miami, everyone is familiar with this atmosphere, because people here are very antagonistic to each other. Everyone you see is a threat that has to be scared off or defeated. I believe this is largely due to the ways of the people who have made big cultural contributions here. Before Cubans arrived, the dominant culture was from New York, and after that, the aggressive ways of Cubans dominated our interactions.

I don’t want to be like that any more. I don’t care how other people treat me. I don’t want whatever petty victories they get to be augmented by the larger victory of depriving me of the ability to love.

Over the last few days, I’ve finally gotten relief. I feel like a passage inside me has reopened, and I’m able to let God’s love flow toward people. It’s extremely helpful. It cuts off tension and ugly thoughts before they get a chance to bloom. It’s relaxing. It’s healing to me.

I write about this because people need to know it’s available, and they need to know it’s essential. The Holy Spirit will give you a lot of great things, but without love, they’re very incomplete and ineffective. The propagation of love is the purpose of the universe, so if love doesn’t flow through you, whatever you’re doing in life is a waste of time and a failure.

One of the great things about this is that it helps you forgive nasty people. That’s important, because we swim in a sea of uncleanness and sadism these days. The Internet seems to be growing these things in us. Christians, especially, are subjected to constant provocation. We can’t sit back in self-righteousness, remain angry at unbelievers, and feel like we’re superior. We have to actively, deliberately focus love on them, even if we only do it internally. God is giving me the habit of doing this, and I can feel the pressure and tension inside me abating.

Love is not just a gift we give to others. It’s a gift we give ourselves. I say we give it, but in reality, we just let God run it through us. Love is power and internal healing. It will bring you victory, because God favors people who love, and he opposes people who are bitter and angry all the time.

It doesn’t matter what other people have done to you. To put it bluntly, whatever it is, they probably haven’t beaten you with a scourge and nailed you to a cross. You have to get over it and let it go, and only God can give you the ability to do these things.

I strongly suspect that a lack of love causes physical problems. In particular, I think it causes illnesses in which the body and mind attack themselves. Arthritis. Allergies. Psoriasis. Ulcers. High blood pressure. Heart disease. If you’re full of a desire to harm others all the time, and that desire can’t be fulfilled, surely you will end up harming yourself, simply because you’re available as a target.

My advice is to make love a priority. Quit thinking about what you “deserve.” Quit obsessing on “justice.” If we really got what we deserved, and if God gave us justice, it would be a lot worse than what we actually experience. We belong in hell, so maybe we should stop complaining about slights.

Think it over. I know it will help you.

Paranoid, Vicious, and Irrational are the New and Future Normal

People think America is forever. I think they’re taking the little notations on the stamps seriously.

America is not stable. America is temporary. America can fail, and it already has. This country is like a weed that has been sprayed with Roundup. When you spray a weed, it looks green and healthy for quite some time before it yellows and dies. You can’t judge things by their current appearance. You have to be aware of what’s in the pipeline.

Empires develop, mature, rot, and die, just like people. Americans don’t understand that. We think we’re the master race, and that we’re just too darn smart to end up like the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Jews, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, the English, and all the other people whose empires disappeared. We’re myopic. We can’t see things in perspective because we’re too conceited to think straight.

Christians are some of the worst offenders. Ever since Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, we have had it pretty good. God has given us half of the world. By and large, we have been more powerful than idolaters. We showed up in countries they occupied, and God drove them out before us. Now we seem to think God is going to conquer the entire world for us, and that we will usher in an age of peace and joy.

We’re insane.

The Bible makes it clear: we will fail, Satan’s people will conquer us, and we will have to be removed from the earth so Jesus can return and defeat Satan and his children. Robert Schuller and Rick Warren can’t change that. We are not merely likely to fail; it’s guaranteed.

Persecution is already here, and it will get worse. People who think we can’t be put in camps and executed live in a dream world. Among many Americans, the desire is already there, and the only thing holding them back is the knowledge that they don’t have sufficient numbers yet.

I saw something really disturbing yesterday, and it got me thinking about this.

A man named Kurt Eichenwald appeared on a show with conservative personality Tucker Carlson, and Carlson asked him about some explosive things he had said about Donald Trump. For one thing, Eichenwald said he believed Trump had been confined to a mental institution in the 1990’s. Carlson kept challenging him to discuss his remarks, and Eichenwald responded like a lunatic forced to defend his delusions.

Eichenwald refused to answer Carlson’s questions and tried to filibuster until time ran out. All the while, he kept trying to put Carlson on the defensive so the discussion would turn away from his own deeds. He held up a notebook that said “Tucker Carlson Falsehoods” on the front, and he threatened to start talking about its contents.

Obviously, this strange man had prepared himself carefully so he would be able to deflect attention from his own actions. What does that mean? It means he was frightened of Tucker Carlson. You don’t create a crazy notebook like that and wave it like Van Helsing waving a cross unless you’re afraid.

Why, then, did he choose to be interviewed? I suspect the answer is egotism. Many people have a bizarre, inexplicable desire to be on television, even when the attention is unfavorable. Even accused and convicted criminals will agree to interviews. Charles Manson loves to be interviewed. He is apparently so insane and so conceited, he thinks he can defeat any interviewer and convince the world he’s as wonderful as he thinks he is. I suspect Eichenwald is in the same boat. He probably adores attention and felt he was getting a chance to slay a conservative dragon and come away with hundreds of thousands of fervent admirers.

Just guessing, but that’s consistent with my knowledge of human nature.

Here is something scary: Eichenwald isn’t an isolated fringe nut. I think “fringe nut” is apt, but he’s a prizewinning journalist and a senior editor at Newsweek. This man is accepted and admired by his peers. They approve of him. He’s a leader. He’s not some crank who works in the mailroom.

Talk about having your worst fantasies confirmed. It’s shocking how the right’s negative perceptions about leftist journalists are proven true over and over.

Carlson never got a straight answer from Eichenwald. He clearly thought the man was mentally ill, and that was my impression, too.

After the interview, Eichenwald did what defeated political operatives often do these days. He tried to win, on Twitter, a battle in which he had been crushed in a serious national forum. He put out a flurry of disturbing tweets about the CIA and not being able to find his notes. He then deleted a bunch of it. Of course, conservatives screenshotted his ravings, so the coverup makes him look worse than the Tweets did.

Here’s something even scarier than the respect Eichenwald gets from his peers: I went to liberal websites to read about his self-immolation, and liberals were crowing about the way he “shut down” Carlson. I’m not kidding.

Tucker Carlson isn’t much of a pundit. He reminds me of Mary Katharine Ham; someone who gets attention without demonstrating any discernible gift. But next to Kurt Eichenwald, he looked like Winston Churchill. There was not much dignity in the interview, but what little there was belonged entirely to Carlson.

I don’t write much about politics, so why write about this? Because the comments reminded me of something: there is no limit to the absurdity of the things people can believe when they don’t have the Holy Spirit. The Germans and Austrians were nice, orderly people, but in a generation, it was possible to convince them it was a good idea to murder the Jewish race. The beliefs and intentions of a nation can change very quickly when people are detached from the anchor of God’s instruction. In four or five years, most Americans–think about this–have become convinced Bruce Jenner is a woman.

The wacky commentary I saw regarding Eichenwald reminded me just how much American leftists hate the rest of us, and how impervious they are to reason and common sense. You think they wouldn’t murder us if they could? That’s probably what Cubans thought of their neighbors in 1955. It’s what Cambodians thought before communists started rounding people up and shooting them.

Persecution isn’t “coming.” It’s here. Now. Today. We may win some battles here and there, as we did in the presidential election, but the tide is going out, and we are going to lose. We’re not preparing for that.

The hatred of the left is like a slingshot that has been drawn back. Once the restraint is removed, it will fire. There won’t be any hesitation or remorse.

We can’t beat the problem politically. We can’t beat it by moving to the country, storing canned goods, and buying guns. Those are stopgap solutions. The answer is to draw close to God and get his favor. You will still be on the losing side, but you will live in victory until the end. Whatever suffering will come will come, but you will be spared any suffering that isn’t necessary.

The devil and his people are throwing tantrums right now. They thought we were done. The polls looked good for them. They could almost taste our blood. Then their prize was pulled away. No wonder they use words like “grief” to describe their reaction. They thought they already owned us. Slavery was almost legalized, and we were the slaves.

Our defeat was postponed, and many of us are acting like we won the future (to steal a gaffe from Obama). We didn’t get a mandate. We didn’t even get a plurality. We got four to eight years of space, in which to prepare for harder times. The idiots who are strutting and ridiculing leftists are going to regret it when Trump’s socialist successor takes office. This is the age of the Internet. Names have been provided and recorded. Offenses have been recorded. Even trivial things like memes have been noted. Think you won’t be punished for things like that? Thailand jails people for insulting their king. Castro had bloggers beaten. You think Lawrence O’Donnell and Keith Ellison wouldn’t do things like that? Who are you trying to kid? What planet do you live on?

Trump’s election was a miraculous gift from God. It wasn’t proof the country had rejected liberalism. It was a brief reprieve. It’s shocking that conservatives are so stupid they can think otherwise. Clinton came out two million votes ahead! Wake up.

Buy guns. Get out of the cities. Can’t hurt. But if you want real help, you’re going to have to know how to get it from God. You’re not going to develop that ability overnight. You should have gotten started already. It may be too late. You should do whatever you can, starting now.

Our battles are supernatural, and you need supernatural weapons and armor. You can’t say you didn’t know. Excuses are not acceptable currency. They won’t buy you help.

I hope someone out there listens and puts this information to use. As for me, I plan to be on the ark even if everyone else on earth drowns.

Support Comes When You Need It

Here is my report on the latest supernatural events in my life.

Last night I woke up between 4 and 5 a.m. I assumed the construction crew across the street had started early again, but when I saw the clock, I realized they weren’t there.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, I always start to pray. Very often, I’m aware that I didn’t pray enough the previous day, and besides, what else is there to do?

I felt rested, as though I had already slept all night.

As I was praying, I got a very strange sensation. I felt very strongly that I had been accepted by God. I don’t know if I can explain that. I felt like my application to join the team had been approved, and I was now part of the army or strike force or whatever.

I felt like I was part of something.

This is a feeling I haven’t had in a while. Maybe ever. I have always been an outsider, wherever I went. Maybe I reject people because of the way I was mistreated when I was a kid. I don’t know the answer. I’ve never been a real part of an inner circle anywhere. These days, my relatives in Kentucky don’t invite me or my dad to holiday meals. His relatives (we aren’t close enough for me to think of them as my family) have never included me in anything.

When I was a political blogger, I had some blogging friends, and I was on the right-wing side, sort of. But even then I was rejected. I told the truth about Pajamas Media, and I said Ann Coulter was a liability. I said Ted Nugent was an embarrassment. I was completely right, as time has proven, but no one ever came back and said they were wrong to shut me out. No one likes to admit fault, and besides, who knows what I might say in the future to alienate people?

At my last two churches, I had titles. I was an armorbearer at both churches, and I was a deacon at the second church. The first church came to see me as a threat to their disgraceful lies, and the pastors at the second church saw me as a loose cannon. I woke up one morning and found out the pastor’s wife had put on his pants and blocked me on Facebook.

One of the things I look forward to when I get to heaven is being part of an organization I can sink into. I want to have complete faith in my leader. I don’t want to be ruled by idiots and predators. I want to be able to trust my friends. I want to belong. You can’t get that here on earth. Even the church is screwed up. At best, you can have the sort of status prophets had. You can show up once in a while, say things that make everyone mad, and then go back home to be at God’s side.

Since last night, I’ve felt enrolled or enlisted. Whatever you want to call it.

It’s crucial to be part of God’s organization. For a long time, I’ve known that benefits are connected to membership. I remember the analogy I used to repeat. If a random person goes into a Fedex office and demands a jet to take him to another city, they’ll throw him out. If a Fedex executive does the same thing, they’ll click their heels, promise to get him a jet, make him coffee, and apologize for taking so long. Why? Because he’s united with the organization. He speaks with its authority.

Charismatic preachers teach people to beg God for nice things, but they don’t teach us to give ourselves to him completely. We want the jet, but we don’t want the job. Of course, God doesn’t listen. Why would he?

We don’t get much because we’re beggars. God gives us a lot of charity, but that’s because he’s kind. It’s not because he approves of us. We get table scraps. Sons sit at the table with the father and eat full meals.

It’s very unusual for me to give something to a bum. I know what they are. Almost all of them are rebellious addicts and criminals. The press doesn’t like to talk about that. They call them “homeless,” as if homelessness were something like earthquakes. As if people’s homes just disappeared for no reason. They don’t talk about the felonies, the drugs, and the alcohol. They don’t talk about the pride and stubbornness that put people on the street. To God, most of us are just like these people. If he blesses us too much, it’s enablement.

To enable someone is to push them into hell. It feels nice and makes you think you’re holy; it makes you think you’re better than everyone else, and it gives you grounds for insufferable self-righteousness. But it’s evil.

I used to try to get the help without offering myself in return. That’s insane. I was like a dirty bum who walked onto a military base, stood in a chow line, and demanded the same food the soldiers got. I was like an illegal alien, showing up to vote in an American election or demanding welfare. I had no standing. I couldn’t produce the correct ID, issued by the right authority.

If I want real help, I need to be enlisted. Soldiers get a salary, plus food, clothing, health care, and retirement benefits. Surely God is a better father and employer than Uncle Sam. Surely I can count on him when everyone else lets me down.

What we are eligible to receive is better than a salary. Salaries, like death (the wages of sin) are earned. We receive an inheritance. That’s something someone else worked for and built up. We don’t have to earn. In fact, trying to earn will cut off your blessings in God’s kingdom. It’s pride.

I feel like I moved up a level this morning. No, like I was moved up by another power.

It seems to me that while God works through miraculous ways, his help doesn’t necessarily arrive all at once. You can limit it through rebellion or unfaithfulness. Also, the crap you’ve piled on yourself before coming to him may take a long time to grind off. I stuck with God for years, and that was necessary because of the mess I had made of myself. He didn’t exactly reward me for long service. It just took a long time to prepare me for promotion.

It appears that a job in God’s kingdom is like a job anywhere else. Seniority matters. You will probably have to stick with him for quite some time to get things working right.

The unfortunate thing about this is that the people who need him most are the kind of people who hate waiting. They’re spoiled. They are screeching, entitlement-minded brats. Black Lives Matter. Occupy Wall Street. Bernie Sanders and his Bernout Army. The news that they will have to be patient and wait for God’s favor is exactly the kind of thing that will drive them away. They would rather live in their dirty diapers and take things by force.

You’re not entitled to anything except punishment and damnation. Who wants to admit that? People hate it when you say, “You’re not a victim.” They get very angry. Victimhood is like a pacifier they suck on all day. Pull it out and hear them scream.

I used to have the entitlement mindset. Meanwhile, the God who owed it to the universe to destroy me was working to save me. He had already allowed himself to be tortured to death for me, and I was blaming him for not doing better by me. I was blaming him for problems I had caused, and I was busy causing new ones!

I feel wonderful today. I am full of optimism for myself. I can’t say I feel it with regard to most people I know. That’s very sad, but I can’t go back to what I was. I won’t let their backward hearts draw me away from the only good path there is. I’m not going to give up “holy privilege” so I can avoid Christian guilt. The up side to getting on the ark is that you are lifted above the flood. The down side is that you watch your friends drown.

Keep moving forward. There is nothing behind you but death and torment, and what’s in front of you is better than you can imagine. That’s my advice for this Sunday.

Time to Commence Deportations

I had a good experience this morning, and I figured I should share it.

For a long time, I have been obsessed with getting correction from God. He showed me that he wasn’t my genie or butler. His primary job isn’t to fix all my problems and make me rich, contrary to what I had heard from every single prominent charismatic preacher I had listened to. God helped me understand that the earth is like a uterus, and we are supposed to develop here before entering a superior world. That only happens when we accept correction. If you reject correction, you reject growth.

God also showed me that Christians–even Spirit-filled Christians–have resident demons. We give them power through our backward actions and beliefs. Youth is a particularly dangerous time, because young people don’t know anything. Their doors are wide open. By the time you get saved, you may have done a gigantic number of damaging things that opened you to demonic influence.

Let’s see if I can think of some dangerous things we do. Drugs, erotic entertainment, fornication, cultivating self-confidence, gossiping, hurting people unnecessarily with our words, violence, covetousness, cruelty, cowardice, gluttony, and idolatry spring to mind.

This morning I felt a horrible sensation inside me while I was praying. I felt that something foreign was there, and it was disgusting. Whatever it was, it was full of anxiety that radiated outward into me. I hated it. I wanted it out. I started asking God to tell me what it was and to help me get rid of it.

I started thinking about my experiences with drugs. You probably think I’m going to say I was a stoner in high school. No, I’m thinking mainly about stimulants and prescription drugs, and I’m including caffeine.

A year or two back, God told me this: “Caffeine destroys peace.” That’s clearly true, as anyone who has used a lot of caffeine knows. It makes you feel cheerful and energetic at first, and then you metabolize it, and you feel grumpy, anxious, and irritable. You may get headaches. If you quit for several days, you may get what doctors describe as “flu-like symptoms.”

I’ve used caffeine a lot. When I was in law school, I drank a quart of coffee during my first class of the day in order to help me deal with the boredom. Law isn’t all that boring, but it’s not exciting, either. It’s not physics or math. I needed help to make it palatable.

I’ve also used caffeine to get rid of headaches. Stimulants are great for headaches.

After I started praying in tongues daily, my caffeine tolerance disappeared. The other day I drank a glass of iced tea, and nine hours later, it kept me awake. I never had that problem when I was young.

I used several drugs in college. I never liked dope, but I did smoke it a few times just to be sociable. I tried a couple of weird drugs just because friends showed up with something new, and we tried them together. I also used cocaine, a stimulant, on a number of occasions. I liked it a lot, but when you come down from cocaine, you feel tremendous anxiety and guilt. I used nitrous oxide a few times. For some reason, it was popular at Columbia.

I don’t think the recreational drugs I used in college caused terrible problems, although I’m sure they generated some negative results. I think prescription drugs and caffeine were more harmful.

When I was being treated for ADD, they put me on Ritalin, which is a type of speed similar to amphetamines. Ritalin was great. It killed my headaches. It made me feel extremely relaxed. It helped me concentrate. But I developed such a tolerance I could take over a hundred milligrams a day. The pills kicked in in five minutes (not the expected half-hour), and they sometimes quit working after an hour or two, very suddenly. When that happened, I had to chew one or two 20-mg. pills to get back on my feet. It happened during my Advanced Mechanics exam during grad school, and also during the LSAT.

They put me on some other drugs which were horrible. They gave me an oil-soluble stimulant that stayed in my body for days. It made me angry and assertive, and it gave me a sex drive that would shame Bill Clinton. They also gave me some antidepressants which were supposedly helpful with ADD. I hated them. They filled me with anxiety and caused other problems.

Anyway, I didn’t use these things occasionally or sparingly, like recreational drugs. I used them daily, and I used some in huge amounts. I had to tell my doctor I was done with them. I quit. I never got addicted, so when it was time to quit, it was just a matter of throwing them out.

The time I spent on those drugs was the most miserable time of my life. No sleep. Very little food. Constant anxiety. Anger. Crazy sexual desire I could not get rid of. The last drug they gave me kept affecting me for weeks after I quit. It was bad.

I feel like I let some things in, and maybe some are still here! I believe I have to shut some doors.

I’ve been avoiding caffeine, but every so often I’ll have a Coke or some tea because I’m tired of water, and I’ve been having hot chocolate with breakfast because I want to add calcium to my diet. Chocolate has small amounts of caffeine, plus a milder stimulant called theobromine. Today I drank a boring glass of cold milk before breakfast. I just bought two bags of little dark Hershey bars to make hot chocolate, and I guess I’ll have to throw them out.

I wonder if the problem with drugs is that they take the place of God and deny him his glory. If I had had the presence of God and a good prayer life, I wouldn’t have gone to doctors to help me study. God would have helped me.

I know that the presence of God is like the effect of a drug. He emanates peace, joy, love, and a sense of complete relief and safety. Those are the things we try to get from drugs. Even things like beer and coffee. Living close to God is like being on a pleasant drug most of the time. There is a sort of buzz to it.

All over the US, doctors are pumping kids full of stimulants and antidepressants. It’s a wonder they’re not all insane.

I don’t have much faith in psychiatric drugs. People develop tolerances. Their responses change. If you know anyone who is bipolar, you know that every so often they flip out, and sometimes it’s because the medicine doesn’t work any more. We do what we can to help ourselves because we can’t find God’s help, and our own help isn’t very good.

We call people who drink and smoke weed “self-medicating,” but really, the whole human race is self-medicating instead of finding God’s cures.

It reminds me of what the Bible says about money. If you get it the wrong way, it causes remorse. God brings blessings without remorse. There is no crash after a dose of God’s presence.

Chocolate is great, but if it’s opening the door to illegal immigrants in my heart and mind, I can live without it.

Communion is essential. It’s mandatory. Christianity does not work without it. We have to examine ourselves with God’s help and get his correction. When we don’t do this, we continue damaging ourselves. This is why Paul said poorly performed communion causes disease and death. This is why God has made correction so important to me. It’s a cure. It’s a key that opens prison doors.

If you don’t have wine and crackers, do whatever you can. Pray for correction. Be as honest as you can with God. Pray for honesty! You can do that. God doesn’t want you to do it on your own.

I’m sick of certain parts of my personality, and I don’t think they’re completely mine. I have unwanted supernatural guests that influence me. That has to change. I feel like I live in a house with pigs that run around defecating on everything. That must be what it’s like for the Holy Spirit, who has to inhabit this mess.

Keep asking God what you’re doing wrong. Keep praying in tongues. Never forget that you’re surrounded by spirits, or that you have to address this problem. That’s what I take away from this.

Christians don’t want to hear this. They’re too arrogant. They think they’re perfect, and that no spirit other than God has any claim to them. People like that will be stuck here when God’s servants are taken from the world. Then maybe they’ll learn.

The other day God gave me this: “Thank you for giving us redemption instead of denial.”

I look forward to improving, and I definitely look forward to feeling more of God’s presence.

Plus Boring Political Commentary

Today I got up and looked at the news, and I learned that Fidel Castro was dead.

This is not a huge story to me, personally. I’m not Cuban, and I’m not a political blogger. I don’t even have a significant number of Cuban friends. The closer I got to God, the less I heard from the Cubans I knew. They lost interest in me. Now I know Haitians and Puerto Ricans.

Nonetheless, it’s a major event, and here in Miami, people are blocking traffic and celebrating in the streets. It should be acknowledged.

The needless suffering this man inflicted is incalculable. He was not a freedom fighter or a friend of the oppressed. He was a mass murderer who had countless people imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Barack Obama probably thinks Castro was a great man, and there are a lot of people in the US–many of them Cuban–who share the same delusion. That’s disgraceful. It’s no better than admiring Hitler.

Miami is full of old people who were beaten, incarcerated, tortured, and deprived of their property. For their sake, I’m glad they don’t have to open the newspaper every day and read that Castro is still in charge of the island he stole from them.

All those things being said, this is not the return of Jesus. It’s probably not even a sea change. Castro won, at least from a secular perspective. He died in bed, a billionaire, at the age of 90, with his enemies still exiled, silenced, or in prison. His successors will be no better than he is. I see Ileana Ros-Lehtinen agrees with me; she is on TV, saying basically the same thing.

People shouldn’t be celebrating his death. That’s an invitation to supernatural repercussions. They should be asking why Satan was able to take over Cuba. It’s a place of demon worship and darkness. If you want real change, you have to seek the only one who sets people free. I’m watching America slip away just as Cuba did. I hate to see history repeated, and it’s sad that we don’t learn from it.

Castro is almost certainly in agony right now, regretting every time his arrogance and cruelty led him to turn away from God. I don’t think it’s smart to celebrate that. If you’re still alive, you, too, have time to fail and be destroyed.

That’s all I have to say about Castro.

As for me, I have had an interesting week. I had a crisis of faith, and instead of hiding it, I aired it publicly. I aired my successes, so it seemed to me I should talk about my failures as well. I always hate it when someone who claims to be a Christian has a severe setback and pretends it never happened.

I feel that God is helping me understand what happened so I will realize things are okay. As he told me months ago, with regard to people who belong to him, “There is no misfortune; there are only lessons.” I’m just getting a lesson.

I thought God told me something was going to happen, and it did not happen. It wasn’t something I spent hours on my face praying for. It was unexpected. I felt what I thought was faith, rushing through me when I talked to him about it. It was the same thing I felt when I talked to him about Trump’s election chances. The things I believed about Trump were confirmed by history. Then I felt faith for something, and it didn’t come to pass. I had to look for reconciliation. Life does make sense. You shouldn’t accept cognitive dissonance.

On Monday, I broke a tooth while I was eating a Snickers bar. It was completely unexpected; my teeth are very good. I felt something funny in the back of my mouth, and I thought maybe a nut had gotten stuck in a crack, but it turned out a big piece of a molar was gone. I had no pain, but I was in need of serious dental work.

My dentist saw me the next day, and he ground down the remains of the tooth and put a temporary cap on it. He has a computerized gadget for making crowns, and it was down, so I have to return in a couple of weeks for a zirconia crown.

I see a strange relationship between this and what happened in my relationship with God.

If you look at the Bible, you will see patterns. Similar things happen over and over. Here’s an example: a person who is not aligned with God’s will will have good fortune for a long time, and he’ll be very confident that his future is secured. Then something bad will pop up and do him considerable harm, because he didn’t rely on God.

The Bible tells us we have to build our houses–ourselves–on rock, not sand. Sand represents the thoughts and ideas of human beings. It’s not stable. You can’t rely on it to support you. If you don’t listen to God, you are likely to come up with bad ideas of your own, or to adopt the bad ideas of others, and then when trouble comes, the sand will wash out from under you. The things you believed will not help you, and you will be defeated. Then you have to start over and build things correctly.

The pattern is very evident in the story of the temple. Jesus showed up in around 30 A.D., and he predicted the temple’s destruction. The temple was a disgrace. The hereditary priesthood was gone, and the temple was run by greedy political toadies who were appointed by the Romans. The reforms of Nehemiah had been undone. People were using the temple grounds as a strip mall. They had businesses set up there.

Jesus said this: “Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” He said that, but when Titus razed the temple, he left many stones in place. Why? Because Jesus wasn’t referring to the foundation. He was referring to the junk man had piled on top of it.

In the Bible, teeth symbolize weapons and tools. The psalms ask for God to break the teeth or jaws of the wicked. That means the righteous have teeth, too; there is always symmetry in the supernatural. The temple itself was something like a tooth. It was built up to tear God’s enemies.

What God did to the temple is a lot like what happened to my tooth. The weak upper parts were wiped out, but the foundation remained. My tooth wasn’t destroyed, but it will have to be rebuilt properly. Oddly, the thing that will fix it is called a “crown,” which is the name for one of the rewards of the righteous. The crown my dentist will make will be made from a material usually seen in jewels, which is even weirder.

I believe I took something real and unwittingly added some embellishments of my own, and now God is showing me that the embellishments were in his way. I think the dental issue is just part of the lesson.

I have a friend named Leah, and she used to visit the church I left last year. Sometimes she shared a word with them. On one occasion, she told them not to manufacture anything. The presence of God was in the place, and he was doing things in people. It was sufficient to acknowledge it and wait for more; it wasn’t necessary to dance and scream and pretend things were happening when they weren’t. I think I’m receiving that same lesson this week.

There are some things about dealing with the Holy Spirit which you can’t explain to other people; they have to be experienced. You can’t tell people what something tastes like and expect them to taste it. That’s the best analogy I have. I experienced things while I was talking to God, and some of them were unquestionably real, but there were other things that happened, which were apparently the result of emotion. I was trying to be honest. I was trying not to be deceived by my own desires. But I think I was fooled.

Now when I pray, I don’t accept the things which appear to have been proven false. I don’t give in. I think that’s what I was supposed to learn.

Look at it like this. Imagine Moses and the burning bush. What if he had thrown kerosene on the bush to make it burn brighter? It wouldn’t have pleased God. The bush was sufficient, and to let man augment it would have taken glory from God. Think of the story of strange fire. Think of the story of Saul sacrificing when the priests were late. You can get in a lot of trouble trying to do God’s work for him.

Yesterday was a rough day. I felt disconnected from God. Fortunately for me, that always drives me to pray more. I got back in the saddle, and I continued to say that God was always right. I looked back at my experiences and asked God what was real and what was not. Things are now improving. I feel like God ground down the things that were offending him, and now we can have a fresh start.

I suppose this is hard to relate to. If you haven’t been where I have (yet), you won’t be able to understand. Every Christian has to go through the same basic process, though, so presumably what I write will be useful to someone at some point in time.

The vast majority of the things I think I heard from God are still sound. That’s a relief.

Keep praying in tongues. Keep asking for correction. Ask God to help you prepare for the Rapture. The earth will be like hell during the Tribulation. Every second spent here will be a horror. We shouldn’t take it lightly just because we will still have the ability to repent.

I might as well throw this out: a few weeks back, I was in prayer, and my eyes were closed, and I saw “Nov. 28” in front of me. I literally saw it. I don’t mean I saw it in my imagination. When your eyes are closed, you still see things. You may see lights and patterns. I saw a little white patch appear, with “Nov. 28” on it in black lettering. Then it disappeared. It was a little bit like the answers that pop in in a Magic 8-Ball. They roll up out of the darkness.

I’m not saying it means anything. I don’t know why it happened. I figured I might as well reveal it, because if something does happen, no one will believe me if I don’t mention anything until November 29. If nothing happens, well, I was honest.

Tactical Retreat

Here’s a blog post I didn’t expect to be writing today.

I had a crisis of faith this week, and it’s still unfolding. I could do what preachers train us to do; I could pretend it didn’t happen, and I could keep grinning and staring straight ahead while using one foot to kick the fallout under the rug. I refuse to do those things. I’m going to tell the truth.

A few weeks back, I thought God told me he was bringing me a wife. I thought that was good news. Sex is not that big a deal, and having another responsibility is not exciting, but companionship (from the right person) is very helpful. Every Christian needs someone loyal to observe and assist. We all stumble. We all make mistakes. No Christian is on guard every minute of his life. It’s good to have someone close to you who can fill in the gaps and provide a second pair of eyes.

I thought God was telling me I would have Thanksgiving dinner with my wife. I had no other reason to think a woman was on the way. I didn’t have my eye on anyone. I saw no opportunities. I was making no effort whatsoever. All I had was this strange feeling that seemed to be from God.

When I prayed, I felt what I thought was faith, telling me, “Yes, this is really going to happen.” I got that over and over. I decided to go with it. I didn’t go on a diet or work out. I didn’t shop for a ring. But I decided not to reject it, and I also decided not to tell anyone or do anything at all to bring it about. If it was going to happen, it was going to have to be God’s project, not mine. I don’t want to talk about the specimens I’ve dredged up on my own. I didn’t want another one of those.

I asked God to send confirmation, and that never happened. The only confirmation I got was the faith I felt when I was in prayer.

I didn’t beg; I’m too old to be desperate or to get giddy over something like this.

During this time, I was awaiting the results of the presidential election. When I prayed about Trump and Hillary, I kept feeling faith that Trump would win. I’ve written about it. It seemed highly unlikely, but the faith kept coming. I got up on November 9 and saw the election results, and I believed it was confirmation that my faith was of God. It gave me strength to keep relying on it.

Yesterday I had Thanksgiving dinner with my dad. And no one else.

There is no way to rehabilitate the “prophetic” feeling I had. Christians have a long history of revising predictions after the fact. Some nut will say, “Jesus is coming back on Groundhog Day,” and then Groundhog Day will pass, and he’ll say, “Oops, I meant Valentine’s Day.” Then Valentine’s Day passes, and another revision issues. I am not getting onto that treadmill of denial. I’m telling you what happened.

I had a big boost on November 9, and I took a major hit on November 25. Now I have to reconcile them.

What’s happening here is like breaking a tooth, which, perhaps coincidentally, I did last Sunday. When a tooth breaks, you don’t put Mighty Putty on it and pretend it’s fine. It will fail you again, in a way that will bring you a lot more suffering. You have to have all the bad parts ground away, until you have a foundation which is completely reliable. Then you build it back up again with stronger material. I have to find the foundation. What’s true? What isn’t?

Certain things are unquestionably true. I had two visits from Jesus. I saw a demon very clearly. I saw another demon less clearly while receiving a miraculous healing. I’ve had other miraculous healings. I’ve had one vision (visions happen while you’re awake) that I can recall. I pray in tongues, and it brings me faith, understanding, inner change, and peace. I have had demons cast out of me. I have had countless prayers answered. I have learned a great deal about God, straight from the Holy Spirit.

That’s the foundation, on the good side. There is also an evil side.

“The world,” as we Christians call it, is disgusting and unacceptable. It is ruled by evil. I can’t go back to it. It will never accept me. It will never do anything but try to destroy me. Even if it accepted me, it would lead to my permanent destruction.

No one is more pitiable than someone who served God and then quit. When you serve God, you provoke the daylights out of a whole bunch of very powerful spirits. The spirits do not forget. When you stop serving God, you strip your armor off, drop all your weapons, jab nails in your eyes and ears, and walk naked into a torture chamber where you will be destroyed by your gloating enemies.

That’s not for me. I may be bad, but I’m not that stupid.

I have God’s help, whatever form it may take. I have nowhere else to turn. There are no other options; none. Turning away is not even on the table. Outside of God’s path, I can expect absolutely nothing except pain, defeat, and humiliation.

During my years of prayer in tongues, I started feeling a sensation when faith moved in me. It was a physical sensation in my head. I came to associate it with God. I thought it was from him. I didn’t always like it; it was distracting, and it made prayer a little laborious. Still, I thought it was the real thing. It’s what I felt when I prayed about Trump and asked God about the Thanksgiving presentiment. Now it looks like I have to get help distinguishing it from real faith.

No human being can help me with that.

As of now, I’m not indulging that sensation. I don’t give in to it and let it happen. I still feel things inside me when I pray, but the physical part is suppressed. I’m going to see how that plays out. I’m concerned, because I had gotten used to relying on what I felt, and now that’s gone. I’m not sure what to stand on. When I find out, I’ll let you know.

Sorry I don’t have more encouraging news, but I do have the truth, and that’s something. Hanging onto deception would be disastrous. The truth is a doorway to help and relief. Always.

Hope I have some positive things to say in the coming days.

Drink from Your Well

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of hearing from God personally instead of worshiping other human beings.

We do worship other human beings. We may not get on our knees and call them God, but we give them respect and praise only God deserves. We trust them in ways in which we should only trust God. We give them a degree of obedience and service no man should receive.

One of the main reasons God was willing to come to earth and allow human beings to torture him to death was to give us the ability to connect with him directly, without the need for priests and so on. We obsess on salvation and, if we’re charismatics, wealth, but almost all Christians ignore the changes the Holy Spirit wants to make in us right here on earth.

We don’t like God’s plan. We don’t want to hear from a spirit. We always want a god we can see. It’s human nature. Human beings chose Saul, a venal and unsuccessful king, over the word of God that came to prophets and priests. We have a long history of worshiping rocks, statues, trees, the dirt, deformed children, animals…anything we can see or touch.

What happens when someone hears from God and opens his mouth? If he’s lucky, most people will reject him. If he’s very unlucky, people will exalt him and try to turn him into a god. They did this to Paul and Barnabas, calling them Mercury and Jupiter. Here, we do it by telling the Pope, “You can’t go around dressed like everyone else. Let me make you a crazy hat that makes you look seven feet tall. Let us give you bizarre robes that make you look like a comic book character. We’re going to build a mansion for you so you don’t have to be contaminated by contact with people who aren’t worthy. We’re going to give you armed guards and middlemen to protect your privacy.” We do it to televangelists by driving hundreds of miles to hear their nonsense, and by giving them our retirement money. Somehow we confuse white trash with the Lord.

Preachers love this system. If you can charm people with your words, you will never have to do anything productive as long as you live. You’ll die rich no matter how bad your advice is. You’ll have an endless stream of income, because whenever you go bust, people will blame the devil. They’ll keep giving. People will think you’re so valuable, nothing you do justifies cutting you off.

Exalted preachers don’t teach us how to do God’s will, because they have no idea what it is, and because it would interfere with their supply of free money. What they do is a business, not a calling. They’re not anointed.

Preachers are supposed to show us how to be taught by God, directly. Then they’re supposed to step out of the way and give God the primary role in your development. If you’re still sitting under a preacher after five years, listening to his every word without questioning it, you’re a failure. A year or two into it, you should be hearing from God on your own, and if the preacher screws up, you should know, because the Holy Spirit will tell you.

Preachers do screw up. None of them are reliable. When they screw up, it hurts people’s faith. People feel as if God has failed, because they conflate God and preachers.

When you develop a real prayer life, you will hear from God all day. Listening to preachers will become tiresome, because most of the time, they’ll be telling you something you already know or something you know is wrong. You end up trying to sift through the confusion, and it takes time away from you so you can’t dwell on the pure information you get from the original source.

Here’s an illustration God gave me. Imagine there is only one well. Somebody somewhere gets a bucket to bring you water from the well. He carries it a hundred feet, and then he pours the water into someone else’s bucket, and that person carries it a while.

By the time it gets to you, it has been in a hundred buckets, and every bucket had some dirt in it. You get filthy water with all sorts of adulterants in it. That’s what life is like when you depend on preachers. One hears from God, another copies him, another copies that one, and every preacher in the chain of custody adds more dirt to the message.

Eventually you end up worshiping saints or telling people they’re not allowed to eat shellfish.

The crucifixion gave you access to the well. Forget the guys with the buckets.

Preachers have no shame about copying nonsense and passing it on. I remember Richie Wilkerson at Trinity Church, talking about the ordeal of coming up with sermons. He said preachers use “microwave sermons.” You call your prosperity-gospel buddy and ask him what worked well on the marks in his church, and he emails you a Word file.

Microsoft Word, not THE word.

He thought this was a perfectly okay way to do his job, but the truth is that if you don’t have a word that came to you personally, you don’t know God. There is a kink in the hose. You need to shut up until you get it fixed.

Today God gave me a sentence. He said, “We make things up.” He wasn’t referring to himself. He was referring to human beings. We make things up. Augustine made things up (and plagiarized from people who made things up). The Pharisees made things up, and they still do. T.D. Jakes makes things up. Joel Osteen makes things up. Why are you listening to people who make things up? It breeds dissension. One person believes one liar, and another believes another liar. Then they fight. The Holy Spirit always tells people the exact same thing, so they always, always, always agree when they’re aligned with him.

It makes me nervous when someone gives me an unctuous compliment about how holy I am or how wise I am. Respectfully, who are they kidding? Where were they when I was getting a lap dance? Where were they when I was cruel to animals or when I used cocaine? I’ve said things that make Trump’s Billy Bush video sound like a Sunday school lesson. People need to watch what they say and avoid going overboard. It’s not encouragement. It’s enablement. It will kill my growth.

If I let anyone exalt me, sooner or later I will be exposed for what I really am. No thanks! I’m not having that. Better not to get up on the high horse to begin with. I am not a good person. I’m just a bad man who repeats good things someone else tells him.

John met an angel. This was an immortal being who saw God’s face every day and heard his audible voice. It wasn’t a blogger who managed to absorb some correction after a lifetime of stupidity. Look what John wrote:

And I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, “See that you do not do that! I am your fellow servant, and of your brethren who have the testimony of Jesus. Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”

The angels are afraid of exaltation. They don’t just politely decline. It scares them. They knew another angel who accepted it, and he’s going to burn forever. Human beings are much less impressive than angels. It’s beyond crazy to exalt us as gods.

I used to be afraid God would try to get me to start a church. I’m so glad that never happened. Who wants to stand in front of a bunch of gullible people who depend on you and think you have no flaws? A crazy egotist, maybe. A sociopath. I don’t need that pressure in my life.

Preachers love to convince people they have special anointings, and that no one else around them is fit to teach. That’s a Satanic idea. God wants to spread power, not hoard it. Remember what happened to Moses? Men came and told him people were prophesying outside the camp, and they asked if they should put a stop to it. Can you believe that? Moses said, ““Are you zealous for my sake? Oh, that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them!”

When everyone relies on a few people, it makes Satan’s job easier. He just has to corrupt the small number of individuals who teach. It’s an information choke point. Everything has to come through a small number of openings. That’s a cinch. He invariably succeeds in corrupting churches this way. Corrupting the entire church directly would be impossible for him; he doesn’t have the resources. He blocks the Holy Spirit so we don’t hear from him, and then he convinces exalted fools to lie to us.

I’m pretty much done with church. It would be nice to have a church where I could go and sit in the back and give ten dollars a week, just so I could be around Christians, but I have never known anyone who did an acceptable job of running a church, so I do not want to get deeply involved any more. No more deacon jobs. No more armor-bearing. Forget it. I am tired of getting caught in a power struggle between God and random characters who have grown way too big for their britches.

The exalters discourage people. They convince people that only the holy and just are fit to be among Christians. They put a facade in front of the lost. If the lost buy into it, they’re discouraged from joining us. If they see through it…they’re discouraged from joining us.

There is almost no sin or pattern of sin that can make God reject you. If you’re full of filth, you are a prime recruit. You’re just like the rest of us. Do you seriously think the Pope doesn’t sin? Do you think you wouldn’t be floored if you could read the mind of T.D. Jakes or Joyce Meyer at certain times? Come on. Think of the things you’ve thought and felt. We’re all people. Whitewash doesn’t kill the smell.

A certain amount of input from preachers is useful, and we need to interact from other Christians so we have sources of correction when we get disconnected, but I’m not going to stand by the well and wait for someone to bring me water, and I’m not going to wait until Sunday to drink. I’m definitely not going to pay someone 10% of my income or spend fifteen hours a week serving him unless God tells me to. That’s just how it is.

Pray in tongues. Beg God for correction. Stop asking him to enable you by giving you everything you dream of, before you’re fit to receive it. He’s not Santa Claus. He’s your father. A father corrects and trains. You may be looking for a sugar daddy.

I know this will be useful to you if you put it to work. Work on getting to know God; don’t give your life to an organization. Listen to preachers as long as you have to, and then get yourself weaned so you don’t become a stillbirth. Like Charlie Parker said, “Learn the changes. Then forget them.”

I know it will work. It wasn’t my plan.

Get Ready to be Weighed

I got some useful revelation last night, so here I am.

I left the church I was attending because it was run by rockheads who could not get past their pride. I got off social media because God did not want me to spend any more time trying to reason with arrogant people who would not listen. Eventually, I came to call what happened to me “the Little Rapture,” because it was like being lifted up out of a crowd of unbelievers. I was tired of scuffling and being insulted, and God took me out of it. I missed people I knew online, but the peace was worth the loss.

Three weeks ago I had a dream about the Rapture. I was sitting in my grandparents’ living room with my mother, and we began to rise. It was as if the room had instantly filled with invisible water, and everything that was buoyant ascended. We went right through the ceiling. Human strongholds mean nothing to God.

Last night, God showed me that people who are going to be raptured externally–in the worldwide event known as the Rapture–will have to be raptured internally first.

God isn’t going to come to the strip club or the casino (or the prosperity church) on that day to try to clean you up so you can go. Either you’ll have your boots on or you won’t. It will be too late to start preparing. No boarding pass, no Rapture.

Your internal condition will determine whether you sink or float. A bag of rocks will sink in water. Put ping pong balls in the same bag, and it will float. If you’re walking in willful sin, listening the the world instead of God, you’re a bag of rocks. You will be weighed down. If God finds you serving him, you will be a bag full of ping pong balls. Nothing will be able to hold you here when the water comes.

TV preachers don’t care if you make it. You’re just another sheep to butcher and eat. When all your blood has been drunk and your flesh has been eaten, they’ll find another sheep to kill. That’s how they work. They’re not teaching you how to survive the end of the world. They’re not going to survive it, themselves. A lot of them will miss the Rapture and then go to hell. If you can’t make yourself turn to God now, when things are relatively calm, think how hard it will be when the whole world belongs to Satan and you are constantly pressed to deny Christ. Most TV preachers won’t succeed. They don’t have it in them. They have no practice.

God pulled me out of a couple of failed churches because it was time to go. They had their chance to listen to me. Maybe he gave up on them. Maybe he just felt like rotating someone else in, to take the abuse and argument. In any case, it was God who removed me.

God removed me from social media. It has been wonderful.

Now I feel like God is telling me to get rid of cable TV. I rarely watch it. When I do, I am bombarded with temptation and peer pressure. Even the news is irksome. People are fighting about things that don’t matter. Conservatives and liberals keep misstating the causes of our problems, and they come up with useless secular solutions. It’s a bore. Tedious.

Jesus said the disciples were to leave cities that wouldn’t receive them and shake the dust off of their feet as a testimony. Dust is flesh. When God raptures you internally, he loosens the flesh’s hold on you. He is shaking the dust off his feet.

I suspect that many Christians know they won’t be raptured, but they think it’s okay, because they can repent afterward. Judging from the Bible, they’re wrong. They will suffer so much, they will do nothing but cry and wish they had listened. The Tribulation is not a joke. It’s not a tourist destination. It will be full of violence, rape, disease, natural catastrophes, and war. You won’t be able to sit back and watch it on TV, like the wars in Iraq. It will be in your living room every day, if you still have a living room. It will be in your body.

The Bible says, “The Lord has set him that is godly apart for himself.” How many charismatics are truly set apart? Think of the young preachers who crave approval and dream of convincing the world preachers are cool. Do you think they’re set apart? Of course they aren’t. They’re following the world, rolling on their backs and showing Satan their bellies in hopes he’ll rub them. That’s what the Wilkerson family has been doing ever since I met them. No wonder they kiss up to Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. They know God won’t promote them, so they’re trying to get help from Satan’s nobility.

God isn’t cool. He never will be. God isn’t insecure. He doesn’t need your approval.

We can see pictures of the Rapture in the Bible. Noah was lifted on the ark. Peter was lifted on the Sea of Galilee. The waters parted for Moses and Joshua. The Jordan parted for Elijah and Elisha. Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus rose to heaven.

When Peter looked down, he sank. When he focused on Jesus, he floated. Jesus never sank. He wasn’t capable of sinking. There was no evil in him to weigh him down.

If you want a ticket to the Rapture, you need to know that it must happen first inside you. If you attend to that, you’ll have nothing to worry about. If not, no amount of dog-paddling will lift you up.

Wish someone had taught me this when I was six, but no one knew it, because the human race had abandoned the Holy Spirit.

I know it now, and so do you. I hope we both make use of it.

Psalm 127:1

I had a dream about Donald Trump last night. I asked God what it meant.

I was behaving like an investigative reporter. This is not something I would want to do for a living, but in retrospect, I think the pastors of my last two churches probably see me as a muckraker. I exposed a lot of nonsense in their churches.

I was beside a big highway, and Trump had a property next to it. Trump’s land was about 40 feet lower than the highway. His land had a perimeter road going around it.

Trump was there, and he had his youngest son with him. He was looking over the property. His son was there because he was raising him to know about business and responsibility. He cared about him and didn’t want him to flounder when he grew up.

Somehow I made it down to the property. At that point, Trump was up at the highway level. He was looking down. He knew I was poking around, and he wanted me off. He couldn’t see me.

I drove around the perimeter road. It wasn’t a great road. It was a dirt road covered with fine limestone gravel. It was wet and full of potholes. Surprising, from a man who loves opulence.

I ran into a man who lived on the property. Maybe he had bought a condo from Trump. He was affluent. He was mad because Trump’s dog, Bonehead, was running loose, barking at people. Bonehead was a big orange dog, like a cross between a golden retriever and an Irish setter. Like Trump, Bonehead was a redhead.

Bonehead was not a mean dog, but he was annoying. When the man complained about him, Trump paid no attention.

I dodged Trump by going into hallways and doorways. I went into a big skyscraper he had built on the property. The lobby was surprising. It wasn’t finished. It was just concrete and the beginnings of walls. There was torn plastic sheeting on the concrete floor. There was construction debris. There were no lights. There were no interior doors. The place smelled like fresh concrete.

Here’s what I took away from it.

Trump represented himself, his underlings, and his supporters. The building represented his administration. It’s not built yet, because we’re still in construction.

Right now, Trump is choosing subordinates. He’s picking cabinet members. If God doesn’t guide him, he will pick fools and God-haters. That will be bad for Christians and Israel.

Many of Trump’s supporters don’t hear from God. Even those who call themselves evangelicals generally don’t have the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and they try to do things in their own strength, by carnal means such as voting and blogging.

There is a big difference between “evangelical” and “charismatic,” and most charismatics don’t pray in tongues, even though they can. It’s not a good situation. No wonder the power in Trump’s building was off.

I hope you will join me in praying for a solid administration led by God, and for American Christians to be humbled and drawn closer to God while there is still time. That’s about it.

Right now, most of us are just running around barking.

It Starts with “P”

Yesterday, I realized something about the conservative gloating we are seeing, and I think it was a revelation from God. Many of the gloaters will be sorry they posted their memes and abusive comments, because eventually, the children of darkness are going to control everything. When they do, they will use smug Youtube videos, Facebook posts, and tweets as evidence at our trials.

At some point in the future, they’re going to have the power to round us up and kill us. They’ll be able to come into our homes and do as they please, and it won’t be pretty, because they love cruelty. People will be beaten, shot, cut, and tortured. Christian women and girls will be raped. Now that I think about it, that goes for men and boys, too. They’ll be looking for individuals who made fun of the snowflakes when Hillary lost.

It sounds like hysteria, I know. We’ve heard similar things from the left, and their squawking was unfounded. For all our faults, Christians and conservatives aren’t inclined to riot or pull people out of cars so we can stomp them. Leftists do that kind of thing every day, but we behave somewhat better. The fear leftists claim to feel is baseless, but when conservatives say they expect to suffer, we’re on solid ground. Unfortunately.

For the past week, liberals have been vandalizing property, rioting, and beating people up all across the US. After six days, they’re still “protesting.” We’ve seen many death threats on Twitter, from people who can reasonably expect to be identified. They’re so confident in the righteousness of their cause, they’re not afraid of being caught. There’s a well-known video of a Hispanic lady marching in a protest, saying people on both sides are going to have to die.

She’s not kidding. It’s not hyperbole. Americans have lived in relative safety for a long time, and we have gotten so used to it, we can’t believe Nazi-style oppression can exist here. The Germans and Austrians were much more civilized than we are when they started sliding into insanity. If it could happen to them, it can happen to us.

It already happened to us once. Remember slavery? A big percentage of Americans thought buying and selling people was okay. If you had to execute or castrate an unruly slave, well, that was your business. They had to be kept in line, right? We’ve already experienced a long period in which we adopted cruelty as a way of life. There is no reason why we can’t do it again. Leftists who seem funny when they threaten us now will show up on our doorsteps with government-supplied weapons, and then they won’t seem funny at all.

We’ve already lost the war. We keep forgetting that. Trump gives us a little time to get it together, but we’re preparing for retreat, not a new advance. It may not be strictly true that Hillary won the popular vote, because there was a great deal of fraud, and many absentee votes will never be counted, but at worst, she came very close. Our numbers are not that great, and our enemies have renewed determination to beat us the next time around.

Trump isn’t even a real conservative. We elected the less-liberal liberal. Some victory.

We need to try to be a little less obnoxious. The Bible says we are “more than conquerors,” and I take that to mean that unlike conquerors, we hope to make brothers and sisters of the people we defeat. Cruel memes will not help. I say that as a person who used to delight in posting them.

The children of darkness are going to try to exterminate us no matter what, but we don’t have to go out of our way to provoke them and make them feel justified.

It’s astonishing how cruel they are. Today I saw a video of a little boy crying, because his Hillary-supporting single mom told him he had to leave. He had voted for Trump in a mock election. He’s probably seven years old. She packed his suitcase and put it by the front door. She made him leave her home (her mother’s home) and stand on the sidewalk with his belongings. He was screaming for mercy, and she kept cursing at him.

She was proud of what she did. She made the video herself, and she uploaded it to Facebook.

I know how that kid feels. I was raised in an abusive environment. When you’re a kid, your parents are your whole world. That boy really believed he was going to have to live on the streets.

A woman who would throw her little boy out is lower than an animal. Animals love their young.

She sounds like the perfect Hillary supporter. The news stories say she has two kids, two fathers, and no husband. They say she has an online handle that basically describes her sexual apparatus. She allegedly calls herself “So’Juicii.” What a nickname for a mother of two. How proud her sons will be when they’re old enough to understand it.

That boy is messed up already. This event will stick with him forever. It will color his opinion of women and families. God only knows what other atrocities he has experienced. Suddenly I understand why so many people want to adopt kids. The last thing I want is someone else’s kid to raise, but I don’t think I could do any worse than she has.

She’s not exceptional. That’s the point that has to be remembered. Her son isn’t the only victim. He’s part of a worldwide wave.

I’ll post the video. Don’t watch it unless you have a strong constitution.

The gloating will be worst among conservatives who aren’t religious. The fiscally conservative/socially liberal “big tent” people don’t have any understanding. They think the struggle for America is a secular fight, and that the way to win is to promote our superior ideas while giving up on God. That’s insane. No one cares what’s right or wrong. Argument won’t help. Human beings are irrational. It’s all about the supernatural realm. That’s where the conflict has its roots.

Incidentally, this spectacle has been weird for me on a personal level. I lived across the hall from George Stephanopoulos at Columbia. We were both in Obama’s class. Reince Priebus was in my law school class. I’m starting to feel like everyone I know is eligible to become a news story.

Not that I knew Obama. He was a complete nothing in college. No one remembers him.

My advice is to knock off the gloating and be grateful and humble. It’s bad to have the leftists mad at you. If you gloat, God will be against you, too.

Tapping Out

I feel like I should write about my Literature Humanities project. I am still working my way through the syllabus for Columbia University’s Literature Humanities syllabus, and I am somewhere in The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

This book is entertaining, and I’ve enjoyed it, but I’m thinking it’s time to move on. I’m a third of the way through it, and I feel like I’m not getting much out of it now.

The book is about a group of young Italians who flee the plague. They decide to tour their country homes as a group and entertain each other telling stories. The stories make up the bulk of the book. As far as I know. I haven’t finished it.

At the beginning, I found the descriptions of plague-era Florence interesting, and the stories themselves weren’t bad. Now that I’m a couple of hundred pages in, it’s dragging. The stories all seem the same. Venal medieval nobles have problems, and they solve them in venal ways. A man’s title and wealth are taken, he and his family endure various ordeals, and then Boccaccio ties everything up with a nice resolution. Things like that happen over and over. It’s starting to be like watching Scooby-Doo. The variety of the plots is way thin.

The book is just too long for the concept.

Boccaccio lived in an age when people were short on entertainment, so I can see why he would want to prolong his book. I don’t live in that age, so I’m not desperate enough to keep clinging to this mammoth anthology.

The syllabus doesn’t call for students to read the entire book, but when I started reading and enjoying it, I felt I should finish it. I didn’t want to have to spend the rest of my life telling people I had read part of The Decameron. Now I regret that decision.

I may get back to the syllabus and stick to the assigned portions of the book. Life is too short to read six hundred pages of very similar stories about the problems of medieval Europeans.

Boccaccio has failed where Matt Groening succeeded. The Simpsons is the longest-running sitcom on TV, and it’s still fresh enough to enjoy. Boccaccio got boring after two hundred pages.

Boccaccio’s characters provide a disappointing picture of medieval Catholics. They are completely lacking in grace and spirituality. They have sex whenever they get the chance. They equate money with happiness. They kill and steal without remorse or self-examination.

One story features a man whose reliance on a saint is vindicated when the saint gets God to provide a wealthy prostitute to take care of him (in every way) and become his wife. Seriously? We’re supposed to believe God rewards people with fornication? Boccaccio apparently believed it.

Boccaccio reminds me that people don’t change that much. We are much more openly rebellious to God than we were back then, but his characters, like us, sin without hesitation. It doesn’t faze them. Like us, they don’t take God seriously.

The Revelation says that when the Tribulation gets into gear, people will refuse to repent. They’ll see death and supernatural phenomena all around them, but they’ll continue sinning. Boccaccio shows us that this shouldn’t surprise us. The people of his time watched something like half of the population of Europe die, and many used it as an excuse to sin with abandon. That’s crazy. You would think people would want to hold onto salvation when they knew death could come at any time. They don’t react that way.

Human behavior has never made sense.

When I get done with this, I move on to Montaigne, who supposedly invented the essay (French essai, meaning “attempt”). I’m not sure that’s true, since people have been writing short bits of nonfiction since the dawn of literacy, but it’s on his resume.

I can’t recommend the full book to anyone, but I can see why every educated person should have a basic familiarity with it. That’s the heartiest recommendation I can summon at this time.

The Election is Manure That Fertilizes my Future

Donald Trump’s victory is like a time-release pill that releases different ingredients at different times. Yesterday I was overcome by relief. Today I’m getting other benefits.

To recap, I spent months praying for Trump (after he was nominated) and cursing Hillary’s campaign. I kept feeling faith rising up in me, telling me God was going to defeat Hillary. The polls looked bad, the pundits crowed incessantly over Hillary’s impending victory and the subjugation of the Bible-thumpers and hayseeds. My trust in God waivered, and I wondered if what I had perceived as faith was actually my imagination or a deceiving spirit.

I was very concerned, because I knew that if Trump lost, I would have to give up a body of beliefs I had built up over a number of years. My beliefs were the foundation of my life, and I could not go back to secular living. I didn’t know where I would turn.

Trump won, and it turned out that what I had perceived as the faith of the Holy Spirit was, in fact, the faith of the Holy Spirit.

Yesterday, the main thing on my mind was the knowledge that I wasn’t wrong. I was not going to have to give up a huge portion of the beliefs I relied on every day to survive. If you haven’t lived by faith, you can’t imagine what that’s like. The ground beneath my feet threatened to betray me. I would have been lost.

I was very focused on relief from negative consequences, so I didn’t think that much about the positive. It wasn’t until later in the day that I began thinking intently about the positive.

Here is the positive: I’m all set. My success is locked in. Once again, even though he should never be required to defend himself, God has proven himself faithful. The beliefs and knowledge he has given me are sound. I can rest my weight on my revelation, not just for today and not just for the rest of my life, but for all eternity.

How about that?

I feel like I graduated to a new level yesterday, and it couldn’t come too soon. I am increasingly disgusted with this life. I enjoy it, but I understand how filthy it is, and I want to get away from it when my job is done. I’m tired of living in a fragile meat sack full of nerves with the potential to bring me pain. I’m tired of injuries and disease. I’m tired of vulnerability. I want to be away from filthy people and spirits who will never, ever, listen or repent. I want to be away from beings who hate me because of who I am.

Christianity is supernatural. It’s not a contest to see who can be the best good boy. It’s not a contest to see who can do the best job of obeying rules. It’s not a test of willpower and discipline, contrary to what people in the “dead” or non-charismatic churches teach. We are supposed to do most of our work by supernatural means, such as prayer, cursing, and blessing. God is teaching me to fight supernaturally. That’s why I’m winning, and that’s why I’m going to keep winning forever.

Christians hate to hear this stuff. They sneer and call it “word of faith,” as if a word of faith is a bad thing. They’ve been offended by greedy TV preachers who talk about blessings (which don’t come) while denying accountability. Supernatural Christianity is not popular among proud Christians who want to impress God with their dedication and obedience, but it was a big hit with the apostles.

Here’s Paul, the well-known TV prosperity preacher:

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Notice, it says the armor of God, not the armor of Steve. Also, “armor” doesn’t just mean protection. It means offensive weapons. It includes a sword, which is not what most of us think of when we think of armor.

Hard work is not the armor of God. It’s the armor of Adam. It’s a curse.

Adam lost the armor of God. He had to do his best without God’s help. It doesn’t work. I am not going to live like that. My enemies and my problems are much bigger than I am. To God, they are barely big enough to be called microscopic.

According to Paul, our main focus should be fighting supernaturally, and we should be directing our efforts primarily at the evil spirits that surround us. Human beings are just puppets. We attack the puppets, and the hand reaches for new ones. That doesn’t work.

I’m doing what Paul told us to do. It’s working. It’s not going to stop working. The only person who can defeat me is me. As long as I don’t turn away, I’m going to win. This is how life is supposed to work.

It doesn’t mean I’m going to live like a pimp (like a TV preacher), surrounded by opulence and bathed in admiration. It just means I’ll win. I’ll be okay. God will fix my problems, just as he improves and remodels my mind and heart.

Incidentally, my teeth are set on edge as I watch the pundits today. I rarely watch the news, but today I’m making an exception. Trump is about to stomp into the White House and tread down the snowflakes. People who think they’re experts are making up various wrong explanations for Trump’s victory. They can’t see the obvious. It was supernatural.

I asked God to give Trump the White House, but I asked him to take the glory for himself. People are glorifying Trump. They’re also crediting conservatives and Christians. Some Christians are out of control; they have a “We’re number one” attitude which is offensive. I’m hoping God will make it obvious that Trump was elected as a reprieve, not a reward. We don’t deserve the help. We deserve Obama (or worse). We deserve Hillary. We didn’t do things right. God is not giving us Trump to show the unbelieving world how great we are. He is just limiting America’s evil for the sake of the few that serve him.

For a long time, I’ve been asking God to destroy the big false ministries. The earth doesn’t have time to wait for the liars and thieves to come around. I ask him to defeat people like the Pope, T.D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, and Joel Osteen. I believe God is against the TV churches.

TV takes glory away from God. He doesn’t need it. He never did. He converted the known world to Christianity using people who traveled on foot and spoke without microphones. Christians hate hearing that. They love talking about what God “needs.” He “needs” our ridiculous, cave man technology. We need to “help” him. That’s not how it works.

I believe God has shown me that the successful church that receives the Rapture will be a grassroots church. It won’t be bloated, disgusting white trash TV pimps selling the gospel via satellite. The gospel will spread like the flu, from person to person.

That’s how Trump won. God didn’t go through the pundits and TV cameras. He went to individuals all over the US. That’s why the pundits got it wrong. Like the TV preachers, they were not part of the process. They were out of the loop.

God can promote Trump. He can certainly promote himself.

The election proves God doesn’t need conventional tools.

Look who voted for Satan’s candidate: people in cities. Why is that? It’s because Satan needs cities. Satan has limited capabilities. He only has so many spirits to work with. In order to be efficient, he needs to concentrate people, either physically or electronically. In cities, he does well. He can contact a lot of people at once; they’re all in one place. Out in the rural areas, his power is spread out. He doesn’t do as well.

Satan loves cities, and he loves electronic mass communication. He is small and weak, so he needs crutches and prosthetics. God is not like that. He doesn’t need cameras. He doesn’t need Creflo Dollar. He has unlimited resources, so he can contact people wherever they are, even when there is no electricity.

We have a grassroots president. We also have a grassroots God. We just don’t realize it.

It will be nice to see the fat, poisonous ministries discredited. They work for the devil. They keep us sick and weak. They bleed us financially and cause God to curse our ability to get wealth. I look forward to seeing them go.

Today is a good day for me. It’s very good. I never thought something this good could come from an election.

Keep going to the horse’s mouth. Stop looking for teachers on TV. God will teach you directly, just as John said.

I guess now I’ll brace myself and wait for Trump to start doing crazy things. He is not my God. Don’t come back to me and tell me I was wrong to put my trust in him, because I never did that.

Trump “Protesters” Already Scaring People Off Streets

I feel like writing a little more about the election.

I am not really a political person now. I’m a Christian who sees politicians as problems, and I am against those who do God’s kingdom the most harm. That makes me a conservative. God is a conservative, and the closer I get to him, the more my opinions conform to his truth.

If you want proof God is conservative (by modern American standards), look at his positions. He is against sexual sin. He is against abortion. He calls taxes a curse. He calls secular government a curse. He believes in justice, not just forgiveness. He is fanatical about accountability.

That’s not a liberal.

Anyway, I joined a minority-dominated church eight years ago, and at first, I just assumed everyone there was conservative. The general rule with charismatic Christians is that we’re conservative. I didn’t realize my church–Trinity Church of Miami–was run by gutless hypocrites who only cared about money. They didn’t teach people to pray in tongues. The white pastors pretended to admire Barack Obama. They didn’t help people understand that abortion was wrong or that homosexuality would one day be a big threat to Christians.

It was depressing to feel isolated among people who called themselves Christians. They were walking in circles, doing unproductive things and celebrating an unproductive culture, and the church’s pastors didn’t do anything to help them. The pastors kept their snouts buried in the money trough, and as long as they got their slop, they didn’t want to rock the boat.

During this time, I talked to many people about repentance and prayer in tongues. Generally, no one respected me enough to listen. I got through to a few, though, and yesterday I heard from a couple.

One is a young Haitian lady who has a two-year old son and no husband. The other is a young man who is attending the University of Miami on a music scholarship. Both are black. Both are surrounded by friends and relatives who hate Republicans and love the government.

They listened to me about prayer in tongues, and they started doing it. Over time, the inevitable happened. They started to realize the values they saw around them were wrong, and they became politically conservative.

The young lady was upset because she was working long shifts to make money, while people she knew lied to the government in order to get welfare. They had a higher standard of living than she did, and they weren’t working. They had things she didn’t have. They went on cruises while she wiped old people’s rear ends in hospice care to make ends meet. They told her to fill out forms and lie for money, and she wouldn’t do it.

The young man was upset because he saw unsuccessful, unhappy people all around him, doing things that were obviously counterproductive. He wanted black people to do better, but he couldn’t break through the entitlement mentality. The more he prayed in tongues, the more disturbed he became.

Both of my friends voted for Trump. The young man despises Hillary Clinton, and I use the word “despise” in its correct sense: he finds her contemptible. He realizes she will perpetuate failure among black people, and that she is against Christian principles. The young lady wants to be successful and erudite. She doesn’t want to sink to the level of the unsuccessful people she knows. She wants to take accountability for her problems and get past them.

You should hear them now. They’re very hard on the people they know. They’re much harder on them than a typical white Christian conservative. They don’t pull punches.

At the same time, God has shown them that politics isn’t the answer to man’s problems. It’s just something that has to be dealt with.

Does this give me hope for segments of our society that have traditionally lived in defeat? No way. Of course not. People are what they are, and they hate correction. But it does show me that here and there, if you let God use you, you can show one or two people things that will save them.

Heaven is not a restricted community in the racial sense. It’s not limited to white people. Salvation has no regard for race. You don’t have to belong to a race; you have to belong to a family. Anyone can join.

Today I texted the young man, and I said he should let me know if he needed a place to lie low. I was kidding. He has been telling me how isolated he feels. Today he said he was concerned. He was afraid violence would break out.

That’s sad. There are plenty of white racists who support Trump for the wrong reasons, but in spite of that, the Trump crowd is not violent as a whole. The Hillary people, on the other hand, have been beating Trump supporters up all year. Right now they’re rioting, and this is something I’ve been predicting.

I’m wondering how bad it will get.

It’s strange, because many of the people who hate Trump the most are black, and Trump doesn’t engage black people. He’s not threatening to take away entitlements. He doesn’t talk about affirmative action. He got into it with Mexicans, but let’s face it: illegal immigrants from Mexico are a big problem for black people, because they displace them in the workplace. Somehow the press has convinced black people Trump hates them, and he has barely mentioned them.

If Mexicans or Muslims riot, it will make sense to me. Trump has provoked them. Black people are another story.

What about the future? My best guesses are not pleasant. Obama and Bill Clinton sowed seeds of economic disaster, and the Fed and the banks have been holding the flood back by keeping interest rates low, printing fake money, and keeping foreclosed houses off the market. I think the house of cards will collapse under Trump, and we’ll have a cataclysmic recession or depression. Trump will be blamed, and so will white people and Christians. Somehow Jews will be blamed, too. They’re always blamed.

If this happens, it will set us up for a solidification of leftist power, followed by state-sanctioned violence and other types of persecution. It will set the stage for the Rapture.

These are only guesses, but they make sense to me.

Enjoy the next four years and use them to get close to God. Don’t expect a long-term conservative revolution.

Keep watching the news, and remember, “protest” means “riot.”