I Hate Live Oaks

God keeps straightening me out. It’s wonderful.

It’s funny that I used the term “straighten,” because the Bible uses a Hebrew word meaning “crooked” to describe iniquity, or the habits that make us sin. A person who has an iniquity is like a spring. You can pull a spring straight, but it will try to go back to its original shape, and people with iniquities are the same way. Once you’re bent and sealed, you lose the ability to straighten yourself without help. I suppose this is why Jesus healed a woman who was bent over. It was his way of showing us he was not only willing to forgive our sins, but to take away the demonic habits that force us to continue sinning.

When I pray these days, the main thing I ask for is correction. That has been true for a long time. I’m not going to search my blog for “correction” to find out how long, but it has been my main concern for quite some time. It’s one of the best things to pray for. All the other good things in your life are like branches. Correction is the root and trunk.

I feel like I got some correction yesterday. I set my pasture on fire, and I learned something from it.

I was burning debris. I had a big pile of live oak leaves, and I put branches and twigs on it. I had a permit from the forestry people. The weather looked safe. I got it going, and after a while, I took the tractor about 200 yards away to pick up more stuff. I would guess I was gone a couple of minutes. On the return trip, I saw smoke coming from a new place.

I was not happy. I drove over to the pile, grabbed the hose, and ran. Somehow the fire had jumped a hundred feet and set the grass on fire. During the few minutes I was involved with getting the additional debris, I would say 3000 square feet had gone up.

The hose is 150 feet long, and the farthest extent of the new burn was about 170 feet away. You can imagine my state of mind. I was able to spray a little over 20 feet, so the flames were just within reach. When I got to the burn, the wind was blowing toward an area with a lot of dry grass. I remembered what God had taught me. I spoke defeat to the difficulty of putting out the fire, and I asked for help. Instantly, the wind changed direction.

The fire spread much more slowly after I arrived than it had at first.

I got the fire put out, and I definitely got some exercise.

You can imagine the possibilities that were going through my head. “Am I going to burn my neighbors’ houses down? Am I going to prison?” I have no idea what the legal consequences of a burning accident involving a legal fire would be. I had tried to do things right, but I know lawyers. They would make lists of things I could have done, and they would ask why I hasn’t done them, and to a Monday morning quarterback with the benefit of hindsight, sitting on a jury, those things would have looked obvious.

The adrenaline was going pretty good at first, but when the flames were out and I was just hosing the ground to keep them down, I felt very peaceful. I don’t understand that.

When it was all over with, I asked God if I had done something against his will, to cause the problem. My feeling was that I needed to revisit the blog post I had written earlier that day, to examine it and take out anything that looked suspect from a spiritual point of view. Back at the house, I did that.

It was a very strange accident. You’re not supposed to burn things on windy days, and the weather looked good when I started. The forestry people didn’t have anything to say when I called for the permit; they monitor the weather. I did my homework, but after I started the fire, the winds increased very suddenly.

How can anything travel 100 feet through the air and set a new fire? I’ve had the wind kick up during debris burns before, and nothing like that happened. I assume it was the live oak leaves. Those things are a curse.

I have probably put more than a ton of leaves on the pile since I got my lawn sweeper a couple of months back, and I have a lot more leaves to go. I have to get rid of them because they kill the lawn. They’re unbelievable. When I started burning them, I expected them to burn fast, but a live oak leaf pile will burn for three days, and if you put 200 gallons of cold water on it and stir it with a shovel, it will start burning again after you leave.

I am genuinely surprised that no one has harnessed the potential of live oak leaves. As kindling, they have no equals. Easy to start. Long burning. Impossible to put out. There must be some use for them.

Once things were calm, I went to Tractor Supply and bought a lawn sprinkler. I aimed it at the burn pile. It has been going all night. I am taking no chances. After it had been going for over an hour, the leaves were still smoking.

I prefer to receive correction during prayer. Alarming problems are not my preferred type of lesson. But they work really well.

I don’t think God burned the grass, but we open doors to spirits that hate us, and God gives them permission to do bad things. From the Bible, it’s clear that he uses these things to teach us. Look at Job.

Charismatic churches don’t teach much about accountability or the connection between our errors and our earthly problems. They’re afraid it will impact their income. The Bible is different. Over and over, we see Biblical figures who have problems and are then told what they did wrong to cause them. It’s not just an old covenant thing, because it happened in the New Testament. Somehow the feel-good preachers think God has made a rule change, and as a result, we miss out on valuable lessons.

I suppose this is why we keep stepping in the same piles of poo over and over, and it must be why the new piles get bigger as we age.

Correction is sometimes unpleasant, but it’s priceless. Ten seconds of correction can save you from a lifetime of misery. Correction is a key that opens prison doors and lets Christians out. When God gives me correction, I try to see it as a gigantic gift, because that’s what it is.

I don’t whine any more. I don’t say, “Why me?” I’ve done so many bad things in my life, any bad thing that happens to me is justified and fair. Regardless of what book covers may tell you, bad things don’t happen to good people. There are no good people. Good things do happen to bad people, however.

Trees symbolize people, and leaves are works. Wonder if that means anything.

In related news, I’ve been thinking a lot about internal healing.

As a male, I do my best to ignore problems I think I can’t fix. If you go long enough without letting yourself think about a problem, you forget you have it.

I won’t apologize for putting my problems away. I didn’t know God until I was in my twenties, and I was raised with cruelty and darkness. I knew Satan very well. I dreamed of him every night until I was at least seven. I felt his presence. I woke up at night and saw reptiles and two-foot-long bugs crawling all over the walls and bed. I had a lot of problems, and I didn’t have God’s solutions, so I used the flawed tools I had. I sucked it up and kept living.

I was completely powerless when I was a kid. I couldn’t fight demons. I couldn’t fight or even get away from abusive people. If someone wanted to mistreat me or someone close to me, I had to sit and wait for it to be over. Best I could do. What a way to live.

It was so unnecessary; God fixes such problems easily. But I had no one to introduce me to God, so a situation like mine was to be expected. It was normal. Satan’s world is like a coop full of chickens; some chickens are on top, and some are on the bottom, being pecked incessantly. I was on the bottom.

While you’re away from God, you collect demons, like a rock growing mildew. They become your constant companions. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nice person or you try to do what’s right. Everyone who is away from God lives in a degenerate state. When you’re in that state, demons exert control over you. They whisper to you all day. You take on their thoughts and emotions. It’s as though they were part of you. The real you, disentangled from the mildew and its deep, winding roots, would be hard for you to recognize. Meeting him would be like meeting a stranger.

That person would be much cleaner and healthier than the demon-encrusted version of himself.

As time passes, God keeps showing me internal damage and corruption that need to be fixed in order to increase his power and peace inside me. It’s as if I’m vomiting things I had forgotten I’d eaten.

After I started seeking God, he told me that getting rid of the wrong people in my life was much more important than adding the right people. That’s a harsh testimony against humanity, but it’s true.

I was cursed. I attracted bullies and users. Maybe 10 years ago, I started cutting people off. There were also people I didn’t have the good sense to cut off. They stopped talking to me. I think their demons didn’t want me to interfere with their sick parasitic relationships with these people. Eventually, I recognized the toxicity of these individuals, and I chose not to go after them. In fact, I worked proactively to get rid of them. I cut them off.

Being alone is not great, but it’s infinitely better than being with children of darkness who reinforce Satan’s work inside you. And if you’re a Christian who knows God, you can’t truly be alone. You can be isolated from human beings but God will always be within and around you.

I made a lot of progress cutting out the dead wood after I turned back to God, but I still got involved with some very oppressive people. The pastors at Trinity Church were dangerous, like quicksand. They were human traffickers pretending to be shepherds. They snared people with false warmth and the lies of the prosperity gospel. Then they squeezed money, free work, and man-worship out of them. Anyone who spoke up for God was scolded or marginalized.

There was a nice old man named Pastor O.A. at Trinity. He was completely serious about God. He had been there long before the Wilkersons took over. I saw him talk in the pastor’s prayer group once. He piped up unprompted and said some very sincere things about God. The pastor waited until he stopped, and then he moved on. It was like watching a father deal with a mentally ill son having an outburst at the dinner table. No respect.

Pastor O.A. was not ambitious. He cared about human beings. He ended up teaching a sparsely attended Bible study on Saturday mornings. I don’t recall ever seeing him speak at a service in the church he served for decades.

Even the serious people at Trinity got stunted by the pastors. They trusted the leadership to help them grow, and because they put too much trust in them, they ended up trapped.

There was a wonderful lady who worked making costumes for Trinity. She was also an armorbearer and dancer. It seemed like she was always at the church. Nothing they asked was too much. She passed her prime, single, at Trinity. This was a very attractive lady with a lot to offer. They got her.

The pastors at my next church were a lot better in some regards, but pride got them.

I involved myself with church “ministries,” which means volunteer teams. I encountered considerable oppression from the people on these teams, as well as the people who ran them. Some of the most oppressive people meant well. They were just ignorant. They didn’t pray in tongues much, and they swallowed every lie that came down to them from venal preachers who worked for Satan. They didn’t believe in questioning any preacher who worked in front of a TV camera.

I think a lot about the “house prophet” at my last church. He promised people all sorts of things. He gave us candy instead of meat. “You’re going to have twins.” “The church is about to explode with prosperity.” I don’t know of any prophecies that came true.

It took me a while to realize he was not hearing from God. At first, I thought he was the real thing.

Eventually, the church set the “prophet,” who was younger than I was, over me as a mentor, and he was always saying things to suppress and discourage me. It was like Satan saw a spring bubbling up and sent him over to cap it.

I don’t know what he’s up to today. The church is gone. It imploded in disgrace, taking his prophecies with it. I wonder if he ever discussed that with anyone. He never contacted me to retract the things he said to me in God’s name. He is probably still in spiritual trouble.

I have prayed for him, but I don’t call him. It’s hard to offer correction while talking to a person who sees himself as a sort of dad and has a doctrinal bias against self-criticism. The leadership of the church, which included him, saw me as a loose cannon. They asked a friend of mine to keep tabs on me and report. Hearing about that was disturbing. It reminds me of the secret meetings Pastor Wilkerson had after I left Trinity. I’m not a person the house prophet would listen to.

I didn’t push for promotion anywhere. I did what I was told to do, and I didn’t worry about getting an opportunity to share what God had told me. I felt frustration, but I figured something would happen eventually. It never did. I was able to help a number of people privately, but I accomplished little as a church agent.

I used to try to help people by asking them to come to church. I stopped doing that at Trinity, and I stopped doing it at the other church. So did another person I know. We felt frustrated because we knew we were offering them tainted goods. We should have invited them to private prayer with us.

These churches were just like ordinary businesses. The best way to get promoted was to be a relative of the boss, even if you were ignorant and completely carnal. The second-best way was to be one of the boss’s pals. The third-best way was to be aggressive and to flatter the boss. People in these three categories got platforms. I only got to speak in private, or during times when open testimony was allowed.

The world is an amazing place. You flee to the church because you’re used and bullied, and what do you get? Christian users and bullies.

And we feel good about our churches! “We’re the ones with the answers. We are the righteous. I mean our church, not that stupid church across the street.”

Jesus said Satan was the god of this world. He’s also the god of many churches.

Churches used me more than the helped me, and when I tried to help others, they got in the way.

I used to respond to negative people by becoming like them. They had mantles of darkness over them, and I let them give me a little mantle of my own. It gave demons power over me. Now it’s important to do deep cleaning. I have to get God’s help in recognizing all of my iniquities, not just some of them. I have to go after the ones I kind of enjoy.

I have to give up a lot of what I think of as my own personality.

God takes up the slack when the human traffickers fail. He instructs. Last night, he told me something interesting: I have to quit thinking of sin in terms of degree. For example, as regards transgression, there is no difference between looking at a woman in a lustful way and going to a strip club for a nude lap dance. Staring at a woman at the grocery store is the same sin as looking at pornography. It’s not harmless.

This reminds me of the time I saw preacher Steve Munsey, on the stage at Trinity, making squeezing motions with his hands at chest level, saying, “You can look, but you can’t touch.” This is what he taught the congregation, including kids.

No; you can’t look.

I try not to look at women the way I used to. I cut myself off and repent and apologize to God. But I have been laboring under the delusion that when I fail, it’s not a real sin. I thought of it as an almost-sin, or a miniature sin, because the women were clothed, and the slips were brief. That’s wrong. If it’s anything beyond a couple of seconds of fruitless temptation, it’s a sin.

The same must be true of other things, like cruelty and covetousness and so on.

In this world, avoiding lust is not a simple task, especially with the epidemic of whorish behavior we’re seeing now. exhibitionism is in style, and we treat people who are against it the way we should treat people who are for it. We treat them like pedophiles.

If I sin, it’s my fault, but it’s certainly not helpful to see whorish women naked or in skimpy attire every time I turn on the TV or the computer. I don’t need to see female exhibitionists displaying their wares in stores or at church.

Satan was very smart to fill modern women with rebellion and exhibitionism. It makes every attractive woman dangerous to male believers, merely by sight. It’s a hard thing to fight. You can’t go up to a stranger and throw a beach towel over her, and you can’t sit in your house with the blinds drawn all the time.

I wonder if the danger of minimizing sin is why I felt compelled to give up even small amounts of caffeine. Drugs are drugs, even in small quantities.

I no longer believe all salvation is permanent. Supposed witnesses say hell is full of Christians, and I believe it. I believe that when I become aware that I’ve sinned, I need to repent and ask for forgiveness right away, even when I commit “small” sins. I need the presence of God all the time, and sin interferes with it.

Getting away from Miami was crucial. I was mistreated there every day. It’s hard to heal when people keep reopening your wounds. Up here, I’m around people who don’t go after me like crows on a dead rabbit. Their presence is generally positive. It still feels very strange. It’s hard to believe it’s real. It’s hard to trust.

Life should be a series of ascents. You ascend from godlessness to holiness. You ascend from unbelief to belief. You also ascend out of the presence of vicious people, into solitude or the presence of better ones. You ascend out of the presence of evil spirits and into the presence of God. You should always be moving up. If you’re not, something is wrong, and you need to find out what it is.

God says there are no misfortunes for the saved; only lessons. When something goes wrong, there has to be a lesson in it. If that’s wrong, we don’t really have the victorious lifestyle God promises.

One thing is for sure. God has to rule inside me, and he has to be unopposed.

I let the sprinkler run for 21 hours. I think I’m finally safe!