The Thing we Greatly Ignored is Come Upon Us

Now that Mike knows I’m storing up grub, he calls me with his “hoarding” questions all the time. Today he was a hippie grocery, and he wanted advice on the right kimchi to buy, in order to use the bacteria for sourdough.

As I have noted before Perry Stone says he had a vision which suggested we will have flood-related food shortages in 2011. I have never known him to make anything up or exaggerate, and he didn’t use his vision as a way to squeeze monetary “seed gifts” out of his viewers, the way about 75% of Spirit-filled TV preachers would have.

Yesterday I saw some interesting news.

1. Russia is cutting off wheat exports because of drought.

2. China now imports wheat because of drought, and they expect the situation to continue through the year.

3. There is a severe corn shortage in the United States, largely due to the idiotic ethanal program, which values politics over human beings. We all knew there was a corn shortage, but it’s getting worse. And of course, animals eat corn, so there go dairy products and meat.

I guess it looks a little funny, talking about floods when crops are failing for lack of rain, but floods have already destroyed much of Australia’s crops, and we are a month or so away from our own planting season, so the opportune time for US flood damage isn’t here yet.

Hey, guess who is the world’s biggest wheat importer. Egypt! Traders expect that country to buy heavily because of the political instability. Uh oh!

I continue to study food storage. It turns out white flour goes funny after 6 months. Even if you freeze it, you only get 8 months. That’s what I’ve read, anyway. Hard to believe. And you can’t freeze it in paper bags. Funny flavors will get inside it.

I guess you can still eat it, however, and beggars can’t be choosers.

I think I’ll vacuum-seal 50 pounds of flour and freeze it. Can’t hurt. It will cost 20 bucks. That’s cheap insurance.

Maybe you can do better if you bake bread and freeze it. Search me.

I have a nice new Kentucky ham in the dining room, along with a big jar of sorghum, some cracklings, and a jar of blackberry jam. I’ll bet I could make excellent biscuits with canned milk. Geez, if there’s a famine, I may put on a ton of weight.

In other end time news, the US suddenly has piles and piles of oil. Sounds crazy, but it appears to be true. A new drilling method has drastically increased production, to the point where it could halve imports by 2015. And North Dakota (home of the Bakken Formation) is producing too much oil to ship.

What? Weren’t we supposed to run out of oil? Someone send Al Gore flowers. He is turning out to be the Salieri of economic and climatic forecasting. And by “Salieri,” I mean the Amadeus version, not the real Salieri, who was supposedly a great guy.

If I recall correctly, we can produce all the Bakken Formation oil we want at a cost of $70 per barrel, which is affordable. So in the United States, oil problems should be self-limiting, regardless of all the hysterical squawking. I wish oil were at $70 now. I could live with $2.75 diesel.

I can’t believe I’m saying that. We used to tremble at the thought of fuel prices that high.

What this all shows me is that God can yank the rug out from under you at any second, without breaking a sweat. We think we know what the future will bring, at least in the short term, but the last decade showed us that sudden changes can be extreme and unexpected, even when they should be obvious.

Consider the Fannie Mae mess. Nobody with any common sense thought real estate values were justified, yet most people were stunned when Barney Frank’s house (or houses) of socialist cards collapsed and threw our economy into turmoil. One month we were all counting our chickens, and the next month, they were on the barbecue.

I think the same thing is happening with our debt situation. We have marched to the edge of the precipice, and there is nothing to prevent us from going over the side in a big hurry.

We’re also seeing strange plagues hitting important crops. The worldwide citrus industry is expected to shrivel because of citrus greening, and that’s just one example. Did you know bananas are in trouble? A fungus is hitting them, and they lack the genetic diversity to develop resistance to it. May not sound like a big deal, but these things add up.

Speaking of God, the Bible says, “Thou Lord, only, makest me dwell in safety.” That’s important to learn and believe. The stuff you have can disappear in a day, regardless of how it looks to you now. Tomorrow you could get a cancer diagnosis. You could be gone in two months. A sinkhole could eat your house. Your spouse could run off with a Craigslist find. Look at Job. Things like that really happen.

I suspect that the problems Perry Stone foresaw will go away for a time. I think we’ll have some problems, and then things will seem to get better. Why? Because I think God is shaking the world. You can’t shake something by pushing it in the same direction all the time. It has to go back and forth. I think he is slapping us with crises and letting us rebound, so that tractable people will wake up and get right with him. Sooner or later, the trend will go much more negative, and by then, the bulk of the people who can be reached will be on solid ground.

Makes sense to me, anyhow.

I think we’ll have food problems this year, but I don’t think it will be necessary to pile up enough food to get us through 2012. I think we are still too early in the birth-pang sequence. I don’t think God is going to leave me here in this godless city with no land around me when the real mess starts raining down. I may deserve that, but I don’t see it happening.

You don’t get what you deserve, according to your deeds. Not if your heart is right. You get what your faith, willingness, and repentance allow. I hope.

If the food predictions turn out to be wrong, at least I’ll be better able to take care of myself, and I’ll know not to pay attention to Perry Stone’s visions. In the end, it’s all good.

Plus Surprising $17 Brandy

I made a Costco mission. I needed Granny Smiths for drying. I also got some phenomenal Costco mozzarella to freeze in pizza-sized portions.

I still haven’t found another mozzarella that compares, for New York style pizza.

Sadly, the impulse buy bug bit me. I saw a huge jug of Korbel brandy for $17. Korbel champagne is excellent, and it runs $9 per bottle, so I had to see what the brandy was like. I assumed it would be pretty bad, but still useful for cooking.

I know I’m going to get comments about the champagne. If you drank Korbel many years ago, you probably got a bad impression of it, but I swear, it’s good now. I was very surprised when I tasted the improved version. It’s crisp and dry, with enough sweetness to keep it from tasting acrid, and it doesn’t seem to have the green “sappy” taste wines like Cordon Rouge have.

Anyway, the brandy is startling. I like the full flavor of Remy Martin VSOP a little better, but this stuff is very, very smooth, and the flavor, apart from a slight lack of intensity, is exactly what I look for in a brandy.

I checked out the flour while I was there. They beat Gordon Food Service to death. They charge about $17 for 50 pounds of flour. It’s Conagra bread flour. I don’t know how good it is, but fortunately, my pizza comes out great regardless of the flour. Might be problematic in rolls, however. Still, this is survival food, not party food. It will be good enough.

Edit: I checked around, and I found some info posted by a respected pizza guru. He calls Costco Conagra flour “excellent,” so it must be pretty good. Not bromated, but he seems to like the performance anyway.

Depending on the type of pizza, one bag will produce something like 40 pies. The two bags of mozzarella will produce roughly the same number of pies. I have two giant cans of sauce, which is enough for at least 60 pies. A ballpark approximation gives me a price of roughly one dollar per pie, before toppings. Ridiculous. If they were merely good, it would be a stellar bargain. For some of the best pizza in South Florida, it’s so cheap it’s insane.

The strange thing about my survival supplies is that they’ll make such fantastic food. I’m saving stuff like ham hocks, beans, pizza makings, dried apples, country ham, and pasta. That’s good chow, people. I don’t eat that well NOW.

The older I get, the more I convinced I am that you have to be an idiot to think good food is expensive. Some good things, like prime beef, cost money. But think about ham hocks, cornbread, greens, pork butts, ribs, choice rib eyes, whole chickens (for smoking or making dumplings), whole pigs, dried beans, salt pork, and rice. It’s all cheap, and it makes for very special meals.

Vegetables and fruit will take some effort. Maybe I should learn how to grow calabasas. I already have cooking bananas, which are probably high in some nutrient or other. I have some dragonfruit plants, but they haven’t produced yet. I’ve grown beans in the past, but it’s tough to keep the rust from eating them.

I should either start canning greens or look for a good price on a few cases of canned collards.

Fish…I got that covered. I’ll go to the marina where my dad docks his boat. They hate it when you fish there, because they have a bizarre attachment to the huge clouds of snapper that live under the boats, but you can fill a bucket with foot-long mangroves (grey snapper) in an hour. If things really get rough, I can cast a net for mullet. They taste great smoked, although they aren’t much fried.

Anyway, things are looking good. With this good stuff waiting to be eaten, it will almost be sad if the floods don’t come.

La Niña Knows Who’s the Man

The Holy Spirit is God’s Internet. He arranges us in order and coordinates what we do, even when one of us has no idea what the other is up to. The more Spirit-filled the church gets, the stronger and more obvious the coordination gets.

For a long time, I’ve been hearing about “preparation.” Christians all over the place are looking for rural land. They’re buying guns, tools, and nonperishable food. They’re learning how to take care of themselves. It’s spreading to people, even before they know what’s happening. It has already hit me pretty hard.

I live in a suburb where the fungi and bugs and viruses are so thick, it’s almost impossible to grow things. Citrus is dying (not just here, but worldwide). Tomatoes can’t escape the leaf wilt virus. Nonetheless, I have banana trees now, bearing like crazy. I have one magnificent mango tree and another one which is improving all the time. I have all the hot peppers I could possibly want. I have a strong, healthy lychee tree.

I also have unbelievable tools, plenty of ammunition, a good variety of weapons, and a diesel pickup. Plus two freezers.

Today I got a call from Mike. He has moved back to the DC area, near the remarkable church I wrote about last year. Now he lives in a home that has half an acre of ground. While we were talking about God, I suggested he watch Perry Stone. I mentioned Perry Stone’s vision about future crop failures due to flooding. He cut me off and started telling me how he had been buying bulk food. Mind you, he’s not even tuned into the movement yet. He just felt like it was something he needed to do.

He bought a lot of flour. He’s getting containers. He’s starting seeds for the yard. He just feels like bad times are ahead.

There has to be something to it.

I’m going to be sitting pretty, provided the food shortages aren’t prolonged. I’m stocking up. I ordered a tasty Kentucky ham, plus some sorghum and blackberry jam. I have boxes from Gordon Food Service; I’m putting away pizza sauce, pasta, flour, yeast, and other things. I plan to freeze mozzarella, so while other people are paying out the nose for bad food, I’ll be able to pop out $2 pizzas that beat anything you can buy locally. If there are problems with the power grid, I’m in trouble, but other than that, I’m cool.

I’m Googling “La Niña.” I know we’re having a La Niña year, so I wondered if La Niña causes flooding. Sure enough, it does. At least in some places. Look it up. In October, FEMA warned people in the Pacific Northwest to buy flood insurance.

They ought to quit with “La Niña” and “El Niño” and call the whole business “El Padre.” He’s the one pulling the strings.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to buy. Surely rain won’t hurt every type of food. For example, fish don’t mind rain. On the other hand, when one type of food gets scarce, people move to the others, so they get pressured, too.

God is shaking the world. He’s slapping us awake. Those who will listen will get into gear and start conforming to his principles. They’ll line themselves up with his will and get in the blessing and protection pipeline. Everyone else will have problems. They built their houses on sand, and when things shake, well, look at California. Only things built in accordance with God’s wishes will remain.

What will the result be? Persecution, probably. “My Christian wingnut neighbor bought all the meat and froze it! My Christian wingnut neighbor has a bunch of guns! Look how these hoarding parasites are living while we’re suffering!” It will be like post-Versailles Germany. And Jews are eventually going to get it, too. They are part of God’s plan, so the spirit of Antichrist will keep trying to kill them off, as it did in Germany and Austria (as it does in Gaza). Jewish names like “Madoff” and “Stearns” and “Geithner” and “Bernanke” will be persecution code words. There is a reason Jews are figuring so heavily in our economic disasters.

Some people think the Rapture will be a magical event so sudden and inexplicable, it will essentially force people to believe. They’ll see that millions of Christians are missing, and they’ll have no earthly explanation. Does that make sense to you? I have to wonder. I don’t think God would make it that easy. It would be unlike him. I think we may leave the earth in a wave of executions. I don’t know. I’m not a prophecy expert. Maybe the Bible makes it clear that we’ll just zoom up out of ourselves, instantly, but I don’t recall reading anything like that.

My guess is that the enemy’s people will eventually get the upper hand, and we’ll be murdered in large groups, just like the Jews were. After all, we’ll be “the problem.” This is how the political left will see us. It will be like Cambodia and Cuba. At least I suspect it will.

Christians like to talk about claiming victory and defeating every enemy and so on, but the Bible makes it clear that we do not always win. The spirits that hate us are extremely powerful, and God has not chosen to give us an instant or complete victory over all of them. The battle is still going on. Peter was tortured to death, and Paul was beheaded. I think a solid Christian will live in victory for the majority of his life, but that doesn’t mean you won’t die at the point of a sword somewhere down the line.

The Revelation says that even the two witnesses who are full of God’s power will by martyred. The Antichrist will succeed in murdering them. They’ll be resurrected and assumed into heaven, but no matter how you slice it, they will be killed. If they can’t hold off defeat indefinitely, why should the rest of us expect to do better?

I’ll bet the unsaved start rounding us up and slaughtering us, possibly in the name of their gay, non-judgmental, abortion-loving “god,” and they’ll celebrate over our dead bodies, using our stolen wealth. And then comes the Tribulation, and God’s wrath will make them all want to die.

I don’t know if it will happen in the US. Perry Stone talks of a prophecy about an army of interceders (“intercessors” sounds vulgar to me) who will succeed in getting God to restore America. That would be nice, but my guess is that it would come with a serving of chastisement dwarfing what we’ve seen so far.

People generally don’t turn to God out of gratitude. They don’t get everything they want and then show up in church to pass it out and praise the Lord. We turn back to the Lord after severe beatings caused by our stupidity. That’s my situation, and it’s the most common pattern for Christians. So if suffering is ahead, it will surely bring a good harvest.

I read something interesting in Perry Stone’s magazine this month. He’s a buddy of many of the prominent prosperity preachers, and while he’s not in the same category, he does teach that God will give us “shalom,” which includes having our needs met abundantly. In his magazine, he said something that flies in the face of the over-the-top prosperity gospel. He said that if God didn’t reward our offerings here on earth, it meant we were getting heavenly rewards instead. Not “as well,” mind you. Instead.

I don’t think his friends would be happy to read that. There are still a lot of people out there telling Christians they should all be rich, and that “sowing seed gifts” into the “good soil” of their embarrassing ministries will make it happen. I’m glad to see a popular minister shooting that filth down. The mindless prosperity nuts will be the Christian Madoffs, justifying our persecution in the future.

I’m here to tell you, God will not instantly reward financial gifts with “hundredfold” returns in kind. It has never happened to me. Not once. My needs are met, and I’m fine, but if the TV-evangelist, moneycentric gospel were true, I’d be as rich as…a TV evangelist. God is not an enabler, so I think he resists giving you stuff you will use to destroy yourself, and money can be as bad a poison as arsenic. If you want it so you can have a third helipad in front of your orange mansion, it’s probably not good for you. If you want it so you will have the means and the freedom to complete your mission, there is probably no limit to what will come.

I think money is like food. It’s supposed to serve its purpose and pass through you. If you hold onto too much of it, you just end up full of fat and poop. Constipation and obesity are powerful symbols of the things that go wrong with immature Christians.

Not that I know what it’s like to be one of those. Oh, no. But I have heard about them.

I’m going to run to Costco and get some apples for drying. The Bible says that in the days of famine, I will be satisfied, and I think I will be even more satisfied if I have dried apples for pie.

Hands Off my MREs

Perry Stone says he had some prophetic dreams about the food supply being damaged by excess rain. Since then, floods have caused a food shortage in Australia. He thinks the problem will become global in nature.

Accordingly, I’m refreshing my knowledge of nonperishable foods. After all, Perry Stone hasn’t been wrong yet. He went up to George Bush when he was the governor of Texas and told him the Holy Spirit said Bush would be the next President.

Let’s see what I’ve found (omitting garbage like tofu and rice cakes):

Oatmeal
Canned fish
Canned meat
Rice
Beans (only last about a year)
Dried fruit
White flour (whole wheat flour goes funny)
Corn meal
Pasta
Almonds (24 months in sealed package)
Peanut butter (18 months)
Corn oil
Sugar

I should also freeze more pork, beef, and chicken. But how can you prepare for a shortage of dairy products and eggs? I don’t think much of that stuff freezes well.

More

You can freeze butter for 8 months in the original packaging. You can preserve fresh eggs for months by storing them in a weak salt and lime solution. You can find it on the Internet.

Sunday Lunch

Made me some greens today. And bacon-grease cornbread, ham hocks, and a sliced raw Vidalia. Look:

Those are collard greens. Sometimes I get hocks that are so salty they mess up the greens, so today I started boiling the hocks separately, figuring I would get some of the salt out of them before adding them to the greens. Turned out they weren’t salty at all, so this was a total waste of time. I tossed them in with the greens and let them boil down.

I followed Paula Deen’s advice and snuck a little butter into the greens. Butter has a magical quality, as I have often said, mixing and accentuating flavors like no other fat I know.

I replaced a small amount of the bacon grease in the cornbread with butter. In retrospect, I think this was a mistake. Probably better to keep all the bacon grease and add butter anyway.

This was a magnificent lunch. It would have been better if the hocks had had some meat in them. They were almost all fat. This is not a bad thing, when you’ve learned to eat the fat, but the meat is also good.

If you’re planning to do this, it’s simple. Just boil the hocks and greens together. I add salt, a small amount of pepper, and a clove of garlic. Simmer until the hocks are soft, and make sure there isn’t much liquid left in the greens. You want it thick and tasty, especially when you sop it with the cornbread.

Very nice.

I have a nice food-related testimony.

A while back, I had to quit working at my church’s cafe. I didn’t make trouble. I just left and prayed. And I felt like something was telling me, “____ and ____ won’t be around long,” referring to a couple of people who had gotten in my way. I kept praying for God to provide a godly, humble, capable MALE servant to run the cafe.

A week or so ago I learned that a highly talented guitarist who volunteers at church was running the kitchen! This guy plays flamenco like you wouldn’t believe, and he also has some experience working in a restaurant. I finally went in and talked to him today, and he told me how he was going to get the place in line, and how he was putting and end to the slack, unprofessional things that drove me nuts. It was wonderful. I had to let him know about my prayers. I had to share my testimony, so he would know he didn’t end up there accidentally.

I’m going to help him any way I can. It looks like praying for his success is a good start.

The people who made things difficult for me no longer work there full-time. So that “voice” I thought I heard was real.

I am getting great answers to prayer these days. Our church promotes 40 days of fasting at the beginning of each year, and during this time, people who don’t fast can take up other productive things. This year I’m praying in the Spirit for 30 minutes a day, and I’m also spending 30 minutes praying and exerting faith for one particular goal. That goal changes from day to day. I find I run out of stuff to pray for, so I ask people if they have anything for me to send up.

Eight days ago, my friend Alonzo said his wife needed work. She had been out of work for 2 years. Yesterday they said she had two job offers! How about that?

I believe faith is a thing, like heat or charge or mass. The author of Hebrews called it a “substance,” using the Greek work “hupostasis,” which can mean a literal foundation, like the foundation of a house. I believe it’s the fundamental substance of which the universe, natural and supernatural, is built. I think God provides it to those who pray in the Spirit, charging them up like batteries, and I believe we release it when we pray. I think it goes back to God, and he shapes it into the things for which we pray. I feel it leaving me when I pray, like water gushing out of a fire hose. I think this is what Jesus felt leaving him when the lady with the hemorrhage touched his garment.

I also believe that the longer you pray about a thing, the more of this substance you release. Seriously. Think about the blind man Jesus healed. He didn’t just point his finger and yell, “SEE!” He had to give it several tries. God himself, in human form, had to pray for a considerable time to get this miracle done. I believe it works the same way for us. I think that’s why God included that story in the gospels. There has to be some sound reason for including a story which seems to go against the concept of a messiah so powerful he could get anything done instantly. I don’t think Jesus deliberately wasted his time. That would have been foolish and misleading.

He also prayed for a very long time in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he criticized the disciples for being too weak to pray for a solid hour. Think about it. If they had obeyed, would they have been able to go a whole hour without repeating themselves? No way. They had a very simple crisis facing them, not a long list of varying problems. I believe they were supposed to go up there and beg and thank God repeatedly, releasing faith all the while.

So I’m going half an hour at a pop.

So far, the results are consistent with my suspicions. I think the ideas I have are being given to me by God, and that he is leading me into a powerful way of praying. The correct way, probably. I sure hope so. In my own right, I am not fit to judge.

Jesus told us not to repeat ourselves like the heathens. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask for the same thing over and over for 30 minutes. In fact, he told us to ask for the same things over and over, when he told the parable of the widow and the judge. I believe the repetition ban applied to mumbling prayers that aren’t heartfelt, such as canned prayers from prayer books.

There is no magic in a set of words. You don’t need to use church-sanctioned prayers written by super-holy priests that died decades ago. The faith that backs words up is what gets the job done. I believe that’s what Jesus was pointing out when he told us to avoid vain repetitions. So I think you can pray for the same thing repeatedly and get results. If I’m wrong, God has been remarkably consistent in reinforcing my error. If he keeps that up for the rest of my life, and I’m wrong, I’ll be better off than someone who was right. That would be odd.

I had an interesting conversation with another church member today. He came to me while I was standing in a dark area of the church, alone. He didn’t want to be heard. He started asking me my opinion of a preacher who visited recently. I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I was honest. I said I thought the guy was off course, and that a lot of his spiel was about himself and his own glory. I thought the guy was off into some totally unscriptural Copelandian stuff. “I rebuke this, and I command that, and I release angels.” That kind of weirdness. And my friend agreed completely.

We get preachers who seem completely nutty. They claim they “speak things into existence” and so on. They always talk a great deal about how a bunch of us are going to become millionaires. When they talk about Christians they consider models for us, those Christians are always wealthy people. The congregation laps it up. I think it’s wrong; I believe we’re supposed to be prosperous, but prosperity should be a side effect, not a cure. Jesus said to seek God’s kingdom and his righteousness first.

On the other hand, my friend has a negative view of preachers who talk about supernatural power a lot. I can’t agree. I’ve seen and experienced power, and I see it backed up in the Bible. I think we’re supposed to be a little bit like wizards, except that we’re under God’s authority, and we do our supernatural deeds in humility and awe, and we only do them to please and glorify God, and only at his direction. The Apostles had incredible power. Like John Bevere says, they were mistaken for gods. I think God wants us to wield his power, and I think the power is coming back into the church.

Still, it was great to learn that someone I respected had concerns similar to mine. We have both learned that churches aren’t perfect. Crooks and frauds and egomaniacs are going to show up, and often they’re going to fool people. That doesn’t mean we should leave or make trouble. We should stick around and try to fix things, unless it gets intolerable.

It seems like there are a few people in the church who are scattered around like pillars, holding the place up in maturity and faith. We run into each other by chance, and we come to recognize each other. It’s kind of disturbing that a person with my character limitations would be significantly less wacky and gullible than the bulk of the congregation, but then, God doesn’t have a lot to work with.

When my sister and I used to go to this church together, I told her that some of the best people in churches are in the pews, and now I am taking my own advice. Our pastor never says anything insane, so I think we’re on a fairly good course, and I meet a lot of phenomenal, solid people who work to keep the place running. It won’t kill me if an occasional charlatan drops by and fleeces the congregation. What am I going to do? Die? That’s the only way I’ll join a group of people who worship and serve perfectly.

I always tell people I’ll settle for an 85% church. If I think 85% of what the church teaches is right, that will do.

Stuff is definitely happening at that church and in my life. I keep meeting food people and music people. Now I’m meeting food people who are also professional musicians. What’s THAT all about? I can’t even guess. And we now have three top-flight musicians in the Armorbearers. Something is going on. This is not all coincidence. And I think Mike is going to be moving to South Florida. Another food person.

I still have 50 minutes of stuff left to do today. I’ll keep posting testimonies as they occur.

Ignorance is Always on the Menu

I keep watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. I can’t stop.

I don’t watch much TV, but there are usually one or two programs on the DVR. I like Breaking Bad, Pawn Stars, and Perry Stone. Now Ramsay has made the list.

Here is how the show works. A restaurant flops. Ramsay goes in and spends one week trying to turn it around. After he leaves, it almost always goes out of business, but that appears to have more to do with lack of capital than Ramsay’s advice. Once you’re in the hole deep enough, you can’t get out even if your business becomes profitable.

The show started in England (I can’t make myself type “in the UK”), on the BBC. I tape it on BBC America. It’s also on Fox now. They say the Fox version is much dumber and more sensational and less honest than the BBC original.

I’ve learned a lot from watching it. I’ve learned that there is no curse on the restaurant business. People always say 90% of restaurants go out of business, and that this makes it a bad idea to invest in a restaurant, but lots of people get filthy rich running restaurants. The people who go out of business do so because they do things wrong, and often, those mistakes should have been extremely obvious. The mistakes I’ve seen on Kitchen Nightmares are incredible. Let’s see if I can think of a few.

1. Filthy premises and spoiled food. I can’t believe anyone would sink his net worth into a business and then disgust his customers, make them ill, and risk fines and forced closures. I used to love the roast beef subs at Miami Subs, but I learned that every time I ate one, I got so sick Imodiums might as well have been Tic Tacs. My cousin, a restaurant manager, told me it was because Miami Subs cross-contaminated all their meats by slicing different things on the same machines without cleaning them in between. Whatever the reason was, I quit going, and all the local franchises are gone now, so I guess I wasn’t the only one. And who can go back to a restaurant after seeing roaches or rat poop? I can’t. I don’t care if they clean up and get five stars from Mr. Clean himself. The mental image of the former filth will prevent me from enjoying the food.

2. Poor service. There used to be a place called Jake’s Gastropub (what an unappetizing word) in South Miami. “Used to be.” The food was okay, and the location was very good, but it took forever to get served. People hate that, especially when they’re on their lunch hours. If you take half an hour to serve someone, you pretty much guarantee they’ll be late getting back to work. And it’s disrespectful. Aside from that, the wait staff seemed confused about priorities. Once while I was ordering, a waitress ran off–as I was speaking–to wait on the restaurant’s owner, who was at a nearby table. And he let her do it. I guess he showed me who was important. Now he has no restaurant. He should have known better.

3. Bad food. There is no excuse for this. People who run restaurants probably tend to think they cook better than everyone else. If so, they’re smoking crack. If you’re truly honest when you taste restaurant food, usually, you’ll realize you can do better at home. Convenience and atmosphere make restaurant food seem better than it is, and there are some dishes that are difficult to make at home, so a restaurant can get away with ordinary food. But once the food gets significantly worse than food cooked at home, no one wants it.

Ramsay has also reminded me that culinary school graduates often can’t cook. I knew this already, and so do you, if you think about it. A big percentage of restaurants have degreed chefs, and many of those restaurants serve bad food, because the chefs are poor cooks. How can that be?

I don’t know how they grade at cooking schools. You would think the taste of the food would count, but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe they only care about teaching technique. And as they say, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Maybe cooking school chef-instructors aren’t qualified to teach. If they were, they’d be doing something else, right? Nearly all law school professors are incompetent lawyers. I don’t see why CIA and Le Cordon Bleu wouldn’t have the same syndrome.

I envy people who’ve been to cooking school, because they don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time, which is what I do when I cook something new. They are more likely to know which machines to use and which tricks work and which ingredients are best, so they probably don’t flounder and waste time like I do. Nonetheless, the ability to write a new recipe is a God-given talent, and if you don’t have it, cooking school will not impart it to you, and knowledge and technique won’t fill the void. You would think that trained chefs would at least be able to follow proven recipes, but judging from what I’ve seen on TV, many chefs literally can’t tell good food from bad, so when they try to cook, it’s like Stevie Wonder trying to pitch at the World Series. They can’t tell when they’ve got it right. Or wrong.

I suspect that cooking school has less to do with good food than it does with running a business and getting food plopped on plates. I know some chefs who can get edible stuff on the table in an institutional setting, yet whom I would consider unfit to cook for guests in my home. They can prep stuff in advance, and they know how to feed a lot of people, and they have a number of unoriginal, safe recipes they know will work, but on the whole, I’d rather eat at Wendy’s.

Another interesting thing: the show confirms that some people who have never gone to cooking school make fantastic chefs. One of the owners Ramsay tried to help was a self-taught cook who ended up working as the head chef at Gallagher’s, in New York. He quit to run his own place, and his business methods were bad, but he knew how to cook.

Talking about bad cooks reminds me of a sad episode involving a Mexican place. A lady who was a successful caterer built a gorgeous restaurant and served her trademark dishes, and the business failed. Ramsay went in and found she had freezers loaded with entrees cooked days or years in advance. Naturally, the food was no good. And she was amazed! How is that possible? She was like a person whose breath drives people out of the room, yet who can’t smell it herself. How can you serve food every day and never try it yourself, especially when you’re about to lose your business, home, and savings?

Ramsay told her catering was not like running a restaurant, and I guess he’s right. I’ve had a lot of catered food, and almost all of it was substandard. People think caterers are brilliant if they show up on time, get the food out, and clean up when they leave. No one really expects the food to be good. This lady probably became successful because she ran a tight ship and got things done, not because she was any kind of cook. Seriously, have you ever had really good food at a wedding or catered event? I haven’t.

This lady’s head chef was a timid little friend who had no idea what she was doing. Ramsay challenged her to come up with an original recipe, and she said she couldn’t think. She ended up serving chicken breast with salt and garlic. She should have been making salads and slicing lemons. The owner had to fire her.

Ramsay gave this lady a lot of sound advice, but her restaurant tanked anyway. On her Facebook page, she blames her location. Maybe she’s partly right, but I know this: when the food is good enough, people will climb a mountain in the snow to get to your restaurant. So ultimately, her lack of talent is probably what did her in.

It seems like you have to have two types of people to run a restaurant. You need someone who knows what good food is, and you need someone who can manage a business. If you can’t tell whether your food is good, it will be bad, because good food doesn’t happen accidentally, and word will get around. If you can’t run a business, your food will probably be bad in spite of your talent, so your talent will be nullified. And you’ll have all sorts of problems in other areas. You’ll have a staff that doesn’t get things done. You’ll waste money. Your standards will be nonexistent. You’ll anger your customers.

It’s easy to see why people prefer practicing law or medicine. You charm your customers, you do things they don’t understand well enough to criticize, and if you lose in court or fail to cure them, hopefully they’ll like you so much they’ll take your side anyway. If you’re good at customer relations, people will say you’re a great lawyer or doctor, even though they can’t possibly know what they’re talking about. In a restaurant, you have to produce something that tastes good, and you have to serve it correctly and provide a nice atmosphere. Those are things anyone can judge competently.

I disagree with Ramsay’s obsession with things that are “fresh” and “new.” Many highly successful restaurants avoid change and innovation at all costs, and it works. I find nouvelle cuisine and weird ingredients and cutesy presentations tiresome. Give me a nice steak or a great slice of pizza, any day. What you cook is less important than that you cook it correctly, and creativity is no substitute for time-tested flavors and textures. When I go to a restaurant I like, I’m always hoping it will still have the same great things it had in the past. I don’t go to restaurants to be amazed. It’s not Cirque du Soleil. It’s food.

The show may be contrived and less than totally honest, but it’s still a good way to learn how not to run a business.

Funny thing: supposedly Ramsay’s own empire is on the ropes. Maybe he needs to go on Emeril’s Kitchen Nightmares or Mario Batali’s Kitchen Nightmares. I don’t think either of those guys can cook, but their restaurants seem to make money.

Christmas Grub

This was amazing. I added this and that to the crust and topping, and it was even better than usual. I can’t believe I put this recipe in my book. The general public does not deserve this.

And here’s the prime rib. The horseradish sauce was glorious. Much better than the whipped cream version I tried last time.

Work Hard to Make Ordinary Food, or Take it Easy and be a Star

If you want a good Christmas dinner and you don’t want to work, do what I do: prime rib, baked potatoes, cheesecake.

I admit, the cheesecake takes some doing, but the other stuff is so easy, you’ll have time for it.

Right now I have a juicy prime rib roasting at 200°. I bought it about nine days ago. I salted it down and stuck it in the fridge to improve. Yesterday I greased it heavily with strong garlic butter. Today I stuck in on a roasting pan, covered it with foil, put a thermometer in it, and put it in an oven timed to crank up on its own, at the appropriate time. When the roast gets close to being done, I’ll max out the temperature and remove the foil to brown it. Very simple.

I bought some nice potatoes, washed them, salted them while they were still wet, and let them dry. Ordinarily I’d bake them at 450 for an hour, but that won’t be possible today because of the roast. I’m going to bake them at 200 for two hours and then leave them in while the roast browns. I think that ought to do it. If not, there is no law against touching them up with the microwave.

That’s the whole dinner. No pointless salad. No other sides. This is all you need. I guess shucky beans would have been a nice side dish, but the truth about steak and roasts is that almost anything you put beside the potato is a distraction.

It’s funny; it seems like every cook I respect makes prime rib in nearly the same way. Low and slow, finished off with high heat.

I don’t agree with people who say the meat should be pink all the way out to the edge. I like the contrasting flavors you get from differing degrees of doneness, so it’s fine with me if the outer inch is medium-well. That’s the juiciest, softest piece of the roast anyway. It won’t get tough if it cooks through.

I also disagree with those who cut their roasts off the bone and tie them back on. I’ve done it, but I think it’s probably better to keep the meat and bones together, for flavor. Maybe I’m wrong. Separating the meat and bones makes for easier carving, but you can separate them after the roast cooks, and then you don’t have to go through the horror of attaching twine and praying it stays on. The advantage of separating the meat early is that you can get extra seasoning close to the center of the roast.

I think I have a good system here. The kitchen is clean. The dessert is ready. The roast is taking care of itself. I have nothing to do for the next hour and a half. Sweet.

I got a funny compliment on Facebook this week. A girl I go to church with referred to my “unnatural cooking ability.” I thought that was interesting, because she’s probably right. There is nothing natural about writing down amazing recipes on the first try. I seriously believe God speaks this stuff into my ear.

Stuff is Happening

I made my pineapple upside-down banana nut cake, and I wasn’t that happy with it. A lot of the pineapple sauce leaked out, so it needed more, and I was out of pineapple stuff, so I was stuck. Also, I was not totally pleased with the way it went with rum raisin ice cream.

I thought it would be fantastic served hot, and when it wasn’t quite fantastic, I figured the sauce was the problem. Then I stuck it in the fridge, and later, I tried a cold slice. It was magnificent! Very odd. You would think hot would be better, but this cake definitely has to be served cold.

I didn’t get a chance to try it cold with ice cream. It was too good to keep. I had to throw it out. I could have given it to friends at church (in fact, I got hollered at for failing to do so), but I don’t know if I could have avoided eating it before I got a chance to deliver it.

I used a 9″ springform pan. That was a mistake. I can’t remember why I used a springform pan in the past. It’s not a bad idea, but the cake is too tall, and 9″ is the wrong diameter, because you can only fit 4 pineapple slices in it. And you have to have extra-wide foil to keep the sauce in the pan. Next time I think I’ll go to 10″ and use wider foil.

In other news, I changed my oil today. “Big deal,” right? Well, it IS. First of all, it looks like vehicle dealers have universally adopted a strategy of jamming oil plugs so they’re impossible to remove. I think they do it to force you to come back for help. I had this problem with the Harley, and today I had a tough time getting the plug out of the Dodge. An impact driver had no effect. I finally put a half-inch socket wrench on it and basically military-pressed it open. I would guess I put over a hundred pounds of force on the wrench. There is no reason for an oil plug to be that tight.

I had a lot of fun dealing with almost 3 gallons of dirty oil and removing the air inlet hose to get to the filter. The truck is so tall, I have to stand on a box to work under the hood. On the up side, there’s tons of room under it.

Anyway, by the time I was done, my arms were pretty much black from the fingers halfway to my elbow, and I had blood on my shirt from a cut I still haven’t found. It ought to be worth it, however, because I can go 37,500 miles before my next oil change.

I used Amsoil and an Amsoil filter, for the best possible performance. That meant changing the oil myself, because I couldn’t find anyone around here who would do the change and just charge for labor.

I also had fun moving my spare tire back to the storage doodad under the truck bed. I got up on the side of the truck and started to shove the tire toward the back, and I felt a horrible sensation in my side. I still don’t know what it was. Now I have a sore spot between my ribs. And to make things even more pleasant, this happened before I did the oil change, so I got to enjoy feeling the soreness increase while I was struggling to drag myself around under the truck.

Once you get past a certain age, you can hurt yourself badly enough to justify an ER visit, just by breaking wind without warming up.

I’m trying to get the garage fixed up. I threw out some of my beloved scrap items. A big box of Cat 5 wire, spools of copper wire, the steel frame from a desk, and so on. I know I’ll need all of it ten minutes after the garbage truck comes by, but I have to de-clutter. If only I had a shed…no, TWO sheds…and a barn…with a lean-to…and a blimp hangar…

I have been going nuts trying to build a Telecaster-type guitar from six slabs of walnut, and I finally decided to accept reality and order a jointer. I got my planing sled to work, and I even put feed tables on my wonderful DeWalt planer, but you know what? It still sucks. I pretty much solved the planer jointing problem, but I just don’t care. It sucks.

I watched a woodworking video last night, and the old guy doing the work grabbed a piece of wood and tossed it on the jointer, and BANG, he was done. In about seven seconds. I wanted to strangle him.

I started thinking about the horror of mounting wood on the planing sled, lifting the planer onto a table, using duct tape to cobble together a dust collection scheme, and then fighting snipe, and for a time, I went insane. I found out it was possible to use credit card points to get the price of a jointer down so low they almost paid me to take it, so I gave up and pulled the trigger.

This is one reason I need room.

I decided on a Rikon 10″ jointer/planer combo. Wait! Shut up! Don’t lecture me! I know it’s not a classic 8″ Powermatic, and I will even admit that some nutcase just sold a like-new Powermatic for $500 on the local Craigslist. But I needed something small, and I wanted to be able to joint wide stuff. The Rikon is a blatant copy of an old machine made by Inca, and people still love the Inca machines and pay high prices for them. I feel sure it will work for my needs, and it has a neat stand with wheels, and it doesn’t weigh three tons or whatever the Powermatic weighs, and it doesn’t have a forty-foot wingspan.

Sometimes you have to compromise.

Jet makes combo machines for much less, but nearly everyone who reviews them says leprosy is more fun than getting a Jet to work, so I couldn’t make myself face the risk. Seriously, the reviews are like little treatments for brief horror films.

I made myself a router fence so I could do edge-jointing on the router, but I started thinking of the geometry-based ramifications my project would involve, and I realized it would be a torment straight from hell’s pit, so there’s another reason to throw in the towel.

Making the router fence was surprisingly hard. The table saw is the tool from paradise. It does everything with microscopic precision and drug-fantasy ease, and it made the parts in no time at all. But putting them together…not fun. It turns out you can’t screw into the side of 1/2″ MDF, even with pilot holes. I had to go with all-glue construction, and I had to make the fence parts perfectly square. I don’t know if glue is strong enough to hold this thing together under stress, but there is no other way to do it. We will see.

I have an idea for combining angle iron and scrap wood to make a dynamite router fence that will slide on my Biesemeyer rails. That would be beautiful. I could just order a short Biesemeyer fence, but that would cost a pile. It’s impossible to buy a pro fence, by itself, used.

I now have a spiffy restored vintage Stanley No. 6 plane (cheap!), but I have to learn how to use it, and I don’t think I’ll regret getting the jointer. It has become clear to me that I need to learn to use a bench plane and a shoulder or rabbet plane, in order to have any type of respect for myself as a man. There are too many problems they solve quickly. You can’t witness them in action and then not lust for them mindlessly.

I may still be inept, but I continue to strive. Success, or at least the comforting illusion of success, comes incrementally. It’s sort of like socialism in the USSR before it all went down the toilet and the whole country got a reality check from the back of Reagan’s hand.

Now if I could only find my tape measure…

Best Viewed Through Smoked Glass

Got a sick project in the oven. I’m making banana nut bread with my homegrown Orinoco banans. But there’s MORE! I got a tip from Mike, and I replaced a lot of the eggs with mayonnaise. And it’s not a loaf. It’s a BANANA NUT BREAD PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE. Made with fresh pineapple.

Even worse: a side of Haagen-Dazs rum raisin. I plan to serve the cake hot, with ice cream beside it.

I can’t wait to see what this is like.

Delicacy

I got my cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, and pumpkin pies made. I stuck a new ingredient in the relish, and it made a huge difference. I think it’s new, although knowing me, I may have done the same thing last year.

I have two pones of cornbread mashed up in a pot with sage, salt, pepper, fried onions, too much butter, and some other stuff. It’s so good I could eat it right now, cold and wet though it is.

I decided to use some of my precious shucky beans. I grew these a few years back and dried them myself.

These will be incredible. If you’ve never had them, go get some fresh green beans, remove the strings, dry them strung on threads, and cook them in a few months. These will soak overnight, and then tomorrow I’ll toss the water, replace it, add salt pork, and simmer them.

What a joy it is to have shucky beans on hand! I probably have the only shucky beans within 800 miles.

I thought Thanksgiving would be boring, but it’s starting to look like it will be a fantastic meal.

Youthful Stupidity is Not Cheap

This week I got depressed. That’s interesting, because it’s something that almost never happens to me.

I spent the first thirty years of my life depressed. My family was dysfunctional, and my childhood was pure misery, and it took me decades to outgrow the habit of depression. I still think of childhood as a prison; if I had to choose one thing for which I’m most grateful, other than my relationship with God, it would be my adult status. I have never gotten over the thrill of adulthood’s freedoms. I don’t have to ask people for money. I can get in my truck or on a plane and go anywhere I want. I don’t have to worry about older adults threatening to beat me up. I don’t have to deal with sadistic teachers any more. If someone makes my life unpleasant, I cut them off and never speak to them again. There is nothing like being an adult.

Maybe we feel the same way when we leave the earth behind.

I think my status as a perennially depressed person ended when I started law school. A career in law wasn’t exciting, and law school was fairly dull, but I had a lot of friends, and I had something to do with my time, and things went reasonably well. Since then, I have never been depressed for more than a day or two.

I got depressed this week because my father invited me out for a drink and then started nagging me about getting married.

You have to understand the history. My mother was a wonderful woman, and when she met my dad, she decided he was IT. He may think he caught her, but the truth is, she caught him. I believe this is usually the case in marriages. Men don’t like to admit it, because it ruins their reputations as ladies’ men, but we are much less picky than women, and women usually end up deciding whether a marriage is going to take place. Men like to think they set their romantic goals and achieve them, and that’s probably true when it comes to casual sex, but when it comes to marriage, women make the decisions. I know there are exceptions, and pride will drive men to dispute it, but the rule seems solid.

My dad was in his twenties, and God dropped a great wife on him without requiring any diligence on his part. As a result, he does not understand that life is not like that for all of us. Asking him about romance is like asking Lindsay Lohan about making money. He landed a great lady early without any real effort, so he thinks it works that way for the whole world.

The Bible says a good wife comes from God, not from your own effort. And it will not always happen on your schedule. According to the Jews, even Isaac, who was highly blessed, did not find a wife until he was middle-aged. Some fine people never marry, and it’s not because they didn’t try. There are some things in this life you can’t control completely, and finding a mate is one of them. You can play the field and then settle; to that extent, you have control. But if you’re hoping for a real blessing, it’s like waiting for rain. God supplies it when he feels like it. And the biggest factor in his timing is your progress as a Christian.

If I had stayed close to God back in the 1980s, when I started attending church and changing my life, I would surely have found a wife long ago. But I stepped outside the flow of blessings and into the domain of the enemy, and I got the kind of wages enemies pay. I accept that. Like all human beings, I was born an idiot, and idiots suffer until they recover from idiocy.

God is repairing my life now, but it is not an instantaneous process, and I am not going to saddle myself with an awful woman just because I’m getting old. I enjoy life tremendously, and there is nothing that can match a woman’s potential to cause misery. I am not going to try to force a blessing.

I didn’t enjoy being reminded that I had frittered away my youth. Ordinarily, I don’t think much about it, but parents have a way of pushing buttons. So I was down for a couple of days. I wasn’t looking for a bridge to jump off of, but I’m ordinarily very happy, so two or three mildy gloomy days have a big impact on my perception of my life.

It’s particularly upsetting to get this kind of speech, given the choices my dad would make for me. He means well, but he tries to fix me up with cocktail waitresses and cashiers. He used to try to fix me up with his paralegals. Anyone he thinks is good looking will do.

This highlights the magnitude of the blessing he received when he found my mother. He could have married some sleazy woman who saw him purely as a meal ticket. God blessed him, pure and simple. I could have a wife next week, if a cocktail waitress was what I wanted. And before you start lecturing me, I’m not referring to a nice Christian girl who had no choice but to serve drinks for a living. That should be obvious to any intelligent person.

My church is full of nice women, but most of them are black, and only a small percentage of black women are willing to marry outside their race. A lot of the women at my church are young, and while a woman should be no older than her husband, I feel a little odd talking to women in their twenties. Quite honestly, I always think, “This girl would be cheating herself.” Some of the women in my church are too old to have kids. That rules them out; I don’t care how nice they are in other ways. I’m not closing that door. It may seem unfair, since it means I won’t date a woman my own age, but then I didn’t make the rules of biology, and I won’t be held accountable for them. God put Ruth and Boaz together, after all. I don’t know of any Biblical stories of young men marrying old women. Feminism is a modern conceit; it has nothing to do with reality.

There are also women who already have kids. There are a couple of problems with this. First, I am not a kid person. I know I would love children of my own, but I don’t like being around other people’s kids all that much, except for really good kids, for short periods of time. And women with kids tend to be overly eager to get remarried, partly for financial reasons, and that causes problems. Second problem: being injected into a prefab family complete with a family court judge, a hostile adult male, and two sets of in-laws does not appeal to me.

Psalm 37:4 says God will give us the desires of our hearts. I have seen that happening to me, and I know it applies to all aspects of life. I’m not going to wreck it by making a desperate lifeboat-style grab for a wife. I have a wonderful life as a single man. Why would I trade that for a miserable life with a woman who was unattractive or unpleasant or lacking in faith? God will provide, or he won’t. I keep my eyes open, and I will make the effort, but I know the difference between carnality and spirituality, and I am not going to let my flesh run the show.

I don’t know if my church will provide a solution. I’ve only met one woman who seemed to have potential, and she’s young, and there are other issues.

I’ll say this for my church: for young people, it’s a marriage factory. I’ve seen a number of great young people get hitched there, and some are also developing good careers. They’re so lucky. They have stayed within God’s protection, and they are getting blessed early in life. Hopefully they won’t have to go through the chastisement and droughts people like me go through.

In other news, I’m planning to build a guitar. I found out how easy it is to build Telecaster clones. A factory neck is a necessity, unless you’re a skilled woodworker, but anyone who can run a router can make a body, and you can get perfect results and great control, without spending much. A Fender American Standard sells for $1000; for that kind of money, you could build the finest Telecaster known to man.

I’d like to make a guitar with a bookmatched walnut top. I already have the wood. I want humbucker-sized pickups and a Bigsby. Truthfully, it would be a Les Paul in a Telecaster shape. It’s very hard to build a Les Paul, and a Telecaster-type guitar would do the same things.

Telecasters are amazing. A Telecaster is a stick and a board, and it only has two pots, but it can still have an incredible action, great responsiveness, and all sorts of wonderful tones.

I’d like to play slide blues, and you need a guitar with a fairly high action for that, and I don’t want to dedicate any of my existing guitars to it, so building seems like a good way to go. For $500, I can make something wonderful. We’ll see what happens.

Last night I had a playing breakthrough. I keep studying theory and scales and whatever, and so far it has led nowhere. I had some ideas for “Sweet Home Chicago,” so I started working on it with no real plan, and before I knew it, I had a complete solo.

This tells me I may be able to do what “natural musicians” do. That would sure be a nice shortcut. Some people play and compose beautifully without getting into theory, and if I could do that, it would make life a lot more satisfying while the theory studies progress.

I know of several ways to approach the guitar. One is to sit around studying theory and scales. Another is to memorize other people’s arrangements note for note and go from there. Another is to hear arrangements in my head and try to write them down in tablature form. Last night I realized there’s a simpler way: just pick the guitar up and play. This is probably how B.B. King did it. I think I can guarantee you it’s how John Lee Hooker did it, because he played whatever he wanted, all the time, and he complained that he had no freedom when he worked with bands.

While I was working with the guitar, I realized I was getting to know the fretboard instinctively: which notes worked and which didn’t. I was finding positions to use. That stuff could be very useful. So from now on I plan to spend a certain amount of time every day, just PLAYING. I think it will work. One of the things I hated about the piano was that I practiced and practiced, but I never played.

I have to go make cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, and two pumpkin pies now. Happy Thanksgiving.

Tragedy

I can’t believe this. I can’t find my recipe for blueberry cornbread.

Or be Buried Under It

Sometimes God teaches us in the weirdest ways.

What is God’s work like? It’s like this: he makes great plans for us. He prepares big blessings for us. He brings them to us. And we turn them down. Then he withdraws while we fumble around and waste our lives. He remains with us, but he limits what he does for us, because to endorse what we do would adversely affect his own perfect nature.

Okay. That’s the background.

I joined a church. I started working as an armorbearer. I started working on books with the pastor. I started working in the kitchen.

The book projects disappeared after a new PR exec was hired. I was driven out of the kitchen after a new kitchen manager was hired. I still work as an armorbearer, but I have learned that the good things I want to do in that capacity will be very limited, so I am maintaining a reduced role.

It’s a little crazy. I’m a published author with a literary agent and a lot of ability, and I work fast, and I was willing to work for nothing. As to the kitchen, I was making the church $200 per week, and I could have earned them a lot more, and my food got raves. But I could not get permission to do the good things I wanted to do.

Yesterday I realized God was showing me what his life is like.

God has all sorts of blessings in store for us, waiting like fleets of shrink-wrapped Rolls-Royces in hidden warehouses. He wants to shower us with them. He wants to give us great careers, wonderful spouses, healthy families, and intimate relationships with him. He wants to turn us into powerful warriors who are able to harness the same might that built the galaxies. He wants us to see our prayers answered. He wants to work miracles through us. He wants to make tumors vanish. He wants to raise our dead.

And we say, “No, thanks! We have a better idea!”

I tried to bless my church, but I hit resistance, and now I have to sit back and do nothing, even though I still want to be a blessing.

Blessing a Christian, even for another Christian, is like trying to feed an angry baby. Even if you get the spoon in, they spit the food all over the kitchen. You can only succeed where God has chosen and prepared the field of battle in advance. You can only succeed when he has given you flesh and spirit allies. And you can only succeed where people are willing to shut up and accept the blessing.

You see this demonstrated over and over in the Bible. God had a great idea, but Eve thought she had a better one, and the result was a long-lasting curse on all mankind. God had a great idea, but the rebellious angels thought they had a better one, so they interbred with humans and gave us forbidden technology, and the result was the flood. God had a great idea, but the ten spies thought they had a better one, and the result was that hundreds of thousands of people died in the desert, a few miles from the Promised Land. The prophets brought the Jews great ideas from God, and the Jews thought they had better ideas, so they murdered them. God gave the great idea of undeserved power and help to the Christian church, and we decided we had a better idea: we would get God’s help by being good, without the baptism with the Holy Spirit. The result was two thousand years of impotence before Satan, who has ruled as a god even though he lost his title at the crucifixion.

We were supposed to raise the dead and cast out demons and heal the sick. By and large, we have failed. Miracles became so rare in the early centuries of Christianity that people began traveling to places like Lourdes because they could not get help in their own churches. We now have a Catholic church that gives the official title of “saint” to a person who performs three measly miracles! That’s ridiculous! Every Christian should see more miracles than that, every year!

We are weak and blind and poor and lame, as supernatural beings, because we preferred our own brilliant notions to God’s tired old plans.

Before the Jews existed, men rejected Yahweh. The Jews came along, and they rejected Jesus. Christians came along, and we rejected the Holy Spirit. We are no better than the people we gloat over. We are pathetic. We have no humility. We think we’re superior to our predecessors, but we’re as blind as everyone who came before us. It’s like I always say: if Jesus came back today, we would trample each other trying to be first in line to crucify him.

If Jesus came back right now, he would tell us (as he did two thousand years ago) that he came to baptize us with the Holy Spirit. He would tell us it was essential to our growth and success. He would tell us to pray in tongues, worship, pray with our understanding, praise God, fast, and study. He would tell us to quit worrying so much about doing good and worry about BECOMING good, through the Holy Spirit’s transforming power. And we would tell him he was crazy, because we like to think we can earn our blessings. Jesus was crucified two thousand years ago so he could give us power and help through our faith, and we still want him to give us what we earn by our own effort, and we think that’s more righteous than being given things we don’t deserve. We think God helps those who helps themselves, but that’s not in the Bible. That’s pure pride. That’s Satan talking. God helps those who believe and obey in their hearts.

Did Lazarus earn his resurrection? Did the lame man at the Pool of Bethesda earn his legs back? Find me a person in the New Testament who received a healing because he or she obeyed the law. The most blessed person in the New Testament was Cornelius, and he got God’s attention by praying, giving to the poor, and fearing God, not by approaching perfection under his own power. He was a Roman soldier! He made a living ordering people to kill other people! God saved him and all his house, and he poured the Holy Spirit into them. Meanwhile, many of the religious Jews studied the scriptures all day and tithed on the worthless crap they grew in their herb gardens, and God blew right by them.

Jesus burns with desire to give us power and blessings we can’t deserve, and we are determined to get by with the garbage (Paul called it “dung”) we get by our own strength.

Read the Bible. I’m not making it up. See what Paul said about earning salvation and blessings. It can’t be done.

One of the things I wrestle with as a Christian is the issue of giving up on other people. I’ve heard all sorts of testimonies about Christians who struggled for decades with sinners, trying to get them to change. After years of abuse, they finally saw results. Glory to God. But are we supposed to behave that way? I don’t think so. God doesn’t behave that way.

God told the disciples that when they were rejected in a town, they should shake the dust off their shoes and leave. God removed Lot’s family from Sodom and Gomorrah and drowned those cities in burning sulphur. God killed Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts. God destroyed the temple in Jerusalem twice. The doctrine of unlimited patience seems inconsistent with the Bible. If God himself doesn’t abide by it, why should we?

I think you show patience until you realize you’re wasting your time (which belongs to God), and then you move on. You continue to pray, but you reduce your earthly involvement. Otherwise, you end up endorsing stubbornness and rebellion, and your own character becomes corrupted. Repeated failure leads to learned helplessness, and after that, backsliding is inevitable.

Paul said more or less the same thing. He mentioned a man who slept with his father’s concubine. Paul didn’t just abandon this man; he turned him over to Satan so his body could be destroyed and the punishment would drive him to repent. What if Paul came back and did that today? Christians would shriek at him. You’re supposed to embrace EVERYBODY, ALL THE TIME! INCLUDE, INCLUDE, INCLUDE! Turn the other cheek! Imagine a multimillionaire TV evangelist telling Satan to come get somebody! It will never happen.

I’m sorry, but I side with Paul. You give people a reasonable amount of time and effort, and then you cut them off and let them fail. Otherwise, you’re an enabler. You’re helping Satan prevent them from growing up.

There is a dangerous idea spreading in churches: you are not supposed to say anything negative. Find that in the Bible for me. Read the prophets. Their writings were corrective, not laudatory. God didn’t raise prophets up to say, “Way to GO, Jews!” He raised them up to let people know they were headed off cliffs. Jesus himself was very, very negative much of the time. He whipped the moneychangers. He called the Judaism of the Pharisees “the synagogue of Satan.” He ridiculed the rabbis publicly. He even called Peter “Satan.”

Without criticism, there is no growth. The inexpressible value of criticism is the sole reason God wants us to be humble. A humble person will accept criticism and improve. A proud person will be like a clay jar that has been fired with flaws uncorrected. His neck, like the neck of the finished jar, will be stiff, and he will only be fit for the garbage dump. Hell is full of positive thinkers.

Find me a happy prophet who doesn’t criticize. I don’t mean a lying weasel who travels from church to church receiving big offerings for telling pastors what they want to hear. I mean a prophet in the Bible. There isn’t a single example. It’s even reflected in our language. Look up the word “jeremiad,” which was named for Jeremiah. It doesn’t mean “pep talk.” And you might be aware that one of the Bible’s prophetic books is called “Lamentations.” Find me the book of Congratulations. I must have overlooked it.

Gossip is wrong. Complaining with no godly purpose is wrong. But warning people isn’t merely right; it’s a commandment. God himself told us we would bear the sins of people we did not correct. Whom should I listen to? God, or itinerant Pastor Happy McFeelgood?

It’s right to offer constructive criticism, and it’s right to avoid getting overly entangled in situations you can’t fix. Imagine if Moses had stayed in Egypt and tried to reform the Pharaohs. He would have died there in obscurity, and his mission would have gone unfulfilled.

I believe God is telling me to respect my mortality and my limitations. Even with God behind me, there is a limit to what I will accomplish in this world, and I have to be a good steward of my time and effort. I am supposed to be helpful and patient and hardworking. I am supposed to pray for people (although sometimes that means praying God will discipline them). I am not supposed to get sucked into black holes that consume my valuable days and waste my faith and wreck my morale.

I am going to die. I’m pretty old already, and I don’t have that much time left to do God’s will. I have to allot my time and effort correctly, as led by the Holy Spirit. Stewardship principles apply to everything; it’s not just about money. The world is full of needy people who will listen to me and let me help them. Should I ignore them while I spin my tires with the stubborn? How will I explain that at the judgment seat?

If it annoys people that I say what I say, so be it. Find me a prophet who didn’t annoy people. Man-pleasing is one of the worst sins. We are told to take up our crosses, and that we will be persecuted (largely by other Christians). That tells me that it’s inevitable that plain-speaking Christians will anger other people. Big deal. Other people are puny, and they will die. The one I am trying to please will live forever, and he has infinite power to defend and reward.

I think I understand this lesson correctly, and I am grateful for it. I wish I were not so slow to learn, but there it is.

Now, if anyone wants to scourge me or put me in a cistern, I would appreciate it if they would call and make an appointment.

Who Says Math Won’t Help You as an Adult?

I got a comment today after I wrote about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and how learning about it gave me new interest in selling pizza. Look at one of the first comments I got! I think it’s intended as advice for me, and that’s how I’m reacting to it. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just a general observation.

“Running a restaurant is not fun. I have seen wonderful restaurants fail and lousy restaurants fail.”

He makes it sound as if it’s all totally random! It doesn’t matter whether you know what you’re doing! You have no control, therefore no reasonable hope of success! Of course, that’s not how it is. If life were like that, there would be no point in trying to do anything, ever.

He may have seen wonderful restaurants fail, but he has never seen well-run restaurants in good markets fail. Businesses don’t fail for no reason. Somewhere down the line, someone has to make a mistake.

It’s an interesting comment. It shows why Dunning-Kruger happens! It’s a generalization, from the experiences of a lot of people who may be completely different from me. I shouldn’t see it as applicable to me and let it discourage me.

Let’s face it. Most restaurateurs can’t cook, have no idea how to manage money, have no starting capital, and know nothing about pleasing customers. That eliminates 80% of the competition right from the start.

Making a blanket statement about the misery and likelihood of failure in the food business is like saying motorcycles are dangerous. Start with the injury figures from cars and motorcycles, and things look pretty bad. Then eliminate the idiots who ride like maniacs and have no training. Suddenly, the disparity is WAY smaller. Motorcycle riding, like restaurant operation, draws risk-takers who ride aggressively and don’t plan, and those people suffer a higher number of casualties. Sift them out, and you get a more realistic picture of the inherent dangers of the machinery. Motorcycles will always be more dangerous than cars, but idiots skew the statistics, and the nature of the sport draws idiots like flies.

If I sold pizza, I would be up against a lot of people who are just as lost as Mr. Trobiani (the guy Gordon Ramsay couldn’t help). If I were in that demographic, I would already have started a restaurant and lost it. I would have picked a bad location, paid too much rent, cooked a wide variety of bad dishes, provided very poor service, tried to do too much, and failed to research the market. Those people don’t agonize about starting businesses. They rush in and, like Mr. Trobiani and his girlfriend’s parents, lose their homes and retirement money. Do I seem remotely like that? If so, why am I not selling pizza already?

I make pretty amazing food. I can afford to start a place. I have a basic understanding of customer relations. I know how to cook in an institutional setting. I live in an area where the pizza situation is a seller’s market, because there are almost no good pizzerias. And I’m smart enough to figure out Quickbooks and get help from the SBA and CORE and the Chamber of Commerce. I would not be competing against Mr. Trobiani. He competed against (and destroyed) himself; the restaurateurs in his area never harmed him at all. He never reached the point where the effects of external competitors rose anywhere near the level of his own self-destructive behavior. I would not be fighting people like him. I would be competing with people who have a real product and at least a little bit of common sense. That’s a much smaller segment of the population.

People love to tell me [secondhand] stories about the difficulties of running a restaurant. It’s inapposite, because I have no interest in that. You have to be crazy to run a restaurant; three fourths of it is expensive, time-consuming theater. I want to run a pizzeria, which is more like a convenience store with an oven. It’s basically catering, except that people come to you to get the food.

I worked at a Domino’s. Believe me, it’s not the same as running a restaurant. You have no wait staff, no linens, a very short menu, no dishwashing, limited equipment…it’s nothing like a real restaurant. My idea is pizza, rolls, and cheesecake, with no expensive alcohol license. You can’t compare that to employing ten waiters plus bus staff, bartenders, and so on, with a long menu and linens and china. I really don’t know how true restaurants survive. It seems like a very stupid business model, when you can cut out a huge percentage of the expenses and work and sell just as much food.

It reminds me of the difference between the shows American Pickers and Pawn Stars.

On American Pickers, two guys drive a van all over the US. They pay hotels and restaurants. They root through barns and attics, buying junk they haul back to a showroom. They have a full-time employee who works the showroom. Sometimes they go hours without finding anything good. Very often, they spend two hours at a “find,” and they end up spending $500 on a pile of junk they hope to sell for maybe $1000. A lawyer who had to divide $500 per day with a partner would starve. It seems highly unlikely that they make decent money purely from the business we see them do on the show.

On Pawn Stars, two principals have a fixed location. They have a large base of customers in the city where they work. People burn their own gas bringing them things that have already been selected for their value. The pawnbrokers offer them only as much as they think will allow them to make a profit. Then they resell.

The pawnbrokers have a big staff, which is expensive. On the other hand, they have dozens of people who come in every hour, and the shop is open around the clock. They’re constantly buying and selling. Their business appears to do very well. They drive nice vehicles. They pay their staff. They have no problem coming up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash.

Who would you rather be? I think the pickers are insane. The pawnbrokers have a base of thousands of people who do for them what the pickers do for themselves. They sit and wait, and money comes to them, and it comes from foolish people who are already motivated to sell at or below wholesale. It’s amazing. People will come in and take half price for things instead of putting them on Ebay, and sometimes the discounts run into the thousands of dollars, and no one complains! It’s legal! No wonder the business thrives and supports a lot of people.

It seems to me that a pizzeria compares to a restaurant the way the pawnbrokers compare to the pickers. The math is better. More money in, less time and money out. This is probably why there are so many fast food millionaires.

The only thing that prevents me from selling pizza, really, is the knowledge that marketing is a huge part of the job. Some pizzerias get successful because of word of mouth, but pizzeria owners tell me promotion is the most important thing. Apparently, even if your pizza is excellent, you have to sell it the same way the bad pizzerias do. As if it were a commodity, no different from Domino’s garbage.

I cook well. I am willing to work. My judgment is reasonably good. But I am not a marketer.

Nonetheless, I think reading about Dunning-Kruger has been very beneficial. I’m glad I found out about it.