Musings from Patmos

It’s nice when I find out I’ve gotten a harvest from a seed I’ve sown (or unsown). It happened today. I got rid of Facebook a while ago, and today I’m very glad I did. Winnie Mandela just died, and I’m glad I’m not seeing mournful, respectful Facebook posts from people I know.

Winnie Mandela was a sadistic woman who ran a murder gang. She openly endorsed “necklacing.” In South Africa, a “necklace” is a tire with gasoline poured over it. You force it down over a person’s trunk and arms, and then you light it. The victim can’t use his arms, so he is trapped while the tire burns.

Tires burn for a very long time, and they are hard to put out, especially when a gang of people prevents anyone from trying. A person trapped in a burning tire roasts alive, thrashing and screaming in agony. Winnie Mandela was in favor of this. In 1986, she said, “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.”

Winnie Mandela ran a mob that lynched black people, but many black people admire her.

If I still had a Facebook account, I would be tempted to log in and see what my old friends were saying. I know a lot of people who don’t hear from the Holy Spirit. They accept the BLM line without reservation. Some supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. The rest supported Hillary Clinton. They like to go to church and dance and sing, but it’s all make-believe. Church is just a nightclub to them. A place to socialize and be seen and admired.

I don’t care what your political opponents do to your country; if you believe in burning them alive, you serve Satan. Civilized people don’t do things like that. The worst offenders among the men who created and ran the Nazi death camps got trials and humane hangings which caused death instantly. John Gacy was executed painlessly with drugs. Human beings were created in the image of God. There are certain things you just don’t do to them. Not if you have a choice.

Imagine the torments Satan has thought up for this lady. People who claim to have seen hell say Satan tailors the punishment to fit the crime, so the damned experience magnified versions of the things they did to others here on earth.

I am glad I don’t have to deal with the disheartening spectacle of rebellious people praising Winnie Mandela.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking about the kindness God showed me when he got me out of toxic churches and away from Miami.

Charismatics in South Florida are completely out of line with the Holy Spirit. They’re caught up in leftist identity politics. As for Miamians in general, they are generally very weak Christians, atheists, or demon worshipers. Cubans and other island people sacrifice goats and chickens to demons in Miami. There are “churches” where these sacrifices are performed legally. They got the United States Supreme Court to side with them when local officials tried to ban their practices.

I have seen some crazy things in Miami. I volunteered at a church where voodoo practitioners showed up at night uninvited, to light candles and speak curses. We found a voodoo doll on the property, with a big red hole where its heart should have been.

The doll worked. The people who formed the believing heart of the church were driven out by the pastors.

I used to have a photo of that doll stored in a phone. It disappeared.

People say you can’t curse a Christian, so how can I claim a voodoo doll worked? Think of the things that have happened to Christians and ask yourself if they’re really immune to curses. You can’t curse someone who walks with God, but how many Christians fit that description? The voodoo buffs beat the Wilkerson family (the people whose corporation owns Trinity Church). Real devil worshipers will beat insincere Christians every time. That also goes for ignorant Christians. It’s hard to think of a charismatic pastor who has served as long and learned less than Rich Wilkerson.

I looked over a series of blog posts I wrote during the final weeks of my relationship with New Dawn Ministries, the extinct church I belonged to until 2015. I saw that I had misremembered a few things. For example, I thought I was a deacon and armorbearer when I left. That’s not exactly true. A few weeks before I was given notice that I was unwelcome, I quit serving. Officially, I was “taking a break,” not quitting, but I never served again.

The day I stopped serving is when I started healing. It was as if breath returned to my lungs.

Before I quit, I had been coming to church at around 8:00 a.m. I helped get things ready. I participated in the volunteer prayer session, which the pastors and “house prophet” often skipped. I sat around a lot. The pastors and “prophet” often showed up late, but we were required to arrive too early. In order to accommodate my morning prayer routine, I had to get up between 5 and 6 a.m. The services usually ran until early afternoon. Sometimes they were longer. On some occasions, they kept going because God was moving. A lot of the time, it was because the pastor wanted to talk.

It was a burden, and burdens are what Jesus said he would take away from us.

The time of the volunteers was wasted, as though it had no value. We had to spend too much time at church, and on top of that, we were serving a man and woman who were undermining everything we did. The pastors were killing the church with painfully loud music and services that went on forever. We were on a treadmill. In fact, one day while I was sitting in church, I heard God say, “Stay on the treadmill.” I wrote it down. He wasn’t giving an order. He was summarizing the sermon. He was telling me we were going nowhere, and that the pastor was commanding us to continue doing things that did not work. The river was supposed to be carrying us forward, but we were trapped in an eddy.

When I quit serving, I felt like I had put down a huge barbell. I started coming to church at 10:30 and leaving when I thought it was appropriate. I didn’t have to stand outside and open the door for people. I didn’t have to go to early-morning volunteer meetings and be chastised for not giving the pastor enough money for his birthday, or for not honoring his marijuana-promoting, disrespectful son. I didn’t have to listen to his out-of-order wife. I didn’t have to put up with her writing things like “PLEASE DELETE THIS POST!!!” when I said things on Facebook.

The Jezebel spirit is real. A friend of mine thinks Satan is effeminate, and I think he’s right. Satan acts like a jilted first wife or a bitter ex-girlfriend, and he does marvelous things through overbearing, masculine women and effeminate or lazy men. God cursed Adam with curses that reflected Adam’s behavior toward him. One of the curses was that his wife would seek to control him.

When you reject a controlling woman, she doesn’t just seek to reconstruct her own life. She devotes her time to making you suffer. Satan is like that. He lived close to the throne, clothed in glory that came from God, like an arrogant wife wearing clothes her husband paid for. God has a new “wife” now. He has the body of Christ. No ex can stand a new wife who is prettier and more supportive. No ex can stand to see a doting ex-husband giving beautiful things to his new wife or raising kids with her. No wonder Satan’s only pleasure comes from making us suffer.

There is no way I could go back to that kind of life. Some ex-convicts say they would rather die than go back to prison. I know the feeling. That’s how I feel about fake churches and South Florida. When God frees you from a slave master who destroys your dignity, the thought of going back is too vile to contemplate.

I loved the freedom I had after I quit. If the pastors felt this way or that about something, it wasn’t my problem. I didn’t have to listen to them. If they came up with a hopeless project God clearly wasn’t behind, I didn’t have to get involved.

I remember the pastor saying we had to give more money, because he wanted a new building. I had started giving LESS money, and I was very happy about it. I didn’t do as he asked.

His brother-in-law started an orphanage in Haiti. This was a guy with a history of failed church projects, and he was involving desperate kids in this one. Suddenly his tendency to fail was dangerous.

I didn’t touch it. There were better people running orphanages already, and sending money to proven winners seemed like the way to go. God doesn’t back failure. He takes from those who lack and gives to those who already have. Remember him saying that? He blesses people who are capable of receiving blessings.

The pastor’s brother-in-law couldn’t raise money to get a new building. He failed. He also failed when he tried to increase church membership. He failed when he tried to get a men’s ministry off the ground. With the creation of the orphanage campaign, we were supposed to trust him with the welfare of fragile children.

Not possible.

He also failed when he tried to rally the troops after the pastor was arrested. He accused them of “running.” There was no way they could continue to follow the pastor, and it should have been obvious.

They had some kind of fundraising banquet which was disastrous. People said the food was extremely bad. I didn’t go. I wasn’t A victim any more. Also nice: I no longer had to contribute to birthday collections for the pastors or the many “pastor appreciation day” collections the church demanded. It was beautiful.

I was tired of photos of the pastors being massaged and pampered at our expense. I can understand doing something nice occasionally for tired servants who work hard, but our pastors were very lazy. They only opened the church for services. The rest of the week, it was closed, and they had lives of leisure.

The best thing about the change was that I didn’t answer to the pastors or “prophet” any more. If I felt like saying this or that about God, I said it. I said it, publicly or privately, as I felt moved by the Spirit. There was nothing they could do. I could take down the prosperity gospel. I could debunk the feel-good gospel.

They were conspiring about me behind my back, and they gave a close friend the assignment of spying on me (for which she later apologized), but I was unaware and unconcerned.

After I cut the cord, I took the gloves off. The pastor’s brother-in-law butted in on a Facebook entry I wrote, because he thought I was commenting negatively on his orphanage project. I was actually talking about something else.

At New Dawn Ministries, like Trinity, negativity was worse than blasphemy. Once they committed to a mistake, they did not want to hear any back talk. They would point the ship toward the rocks, and everyone had to cheer until they ran it up on the rocks.

The pastors at New Dawn didn’t even accept negativity from prophets. Their official doctrine was that a prophet only said encouraging things.

The brother-in-law was mistaken about me criticizing his orphanage, but since he brought it up I decided to treat him like a man and not a porcelain doll. I stated my misgivings about it, and he blew up. He wrote a long outburst accusing me of speaking as though I were “the voice of God.” He ended it with some incongruous Christianese boilerplate about loving me and wanting to help me and so on.

When Christians are furious at you, they will often tell you they love you and want to help you.

We have all experienced this. “You lying backslider and wolf in sheep’s clothing: Satan has prepared a special place in hell for people like you. Get ready to burn for all eternity. You will pay for your heresy unless you repent. I say this with love, my Christian brother, so call me if you want prayer.”

Who accepts an offer like that?

When you don’t take up their very attractive offers of help, you’re the one who looks like a heathen. At least they hope so.

In what must was a tremendous affront to a member of the pampered inner circle, I flatly stated that I didn’t think the stuff about love and good wishes was sincere, given the things that immediately preceded it.

I committed other offenses. I reached out to people about lazy pastors who let their wives abuse churchgoers. When I found out the pastors were urging members to shun people who left the church, I called them and their church out by name and told people they were welcome to remain in my life. I had a public discussion with three other people who had been shunned, and we held nothing back, because we wanted others to wake up and be protected. The freedom was very pleasant.

You can’t imagine what a sensation this was. The pastors of this failed one-room church were extremely proud and very quick to anger, and so were their relatives and associates. That anyone would contradict them publicly was unthinkable. You just couldn’t do it. It could not happen. Yet it was happening.

I can see why John the Baptist taught in the wilderness, far from the rabbis.

It’s not surprising that the head pastor got charged with felonies. God uses progressive punishment: hints, then strong warnings, then little problems, and then very big problems, with hell the biggest problem of all. The pastors were incapable of self-examination. They closed their ears, so the consequences kept building. A friend of mine says God would have spared him, had he listened. I believe that’s true.

I have rejected correction myself, so I know how it works. I am grateful to God because he got through to me before I exhausted his patience.

Recently I realized God had put me in northern Florida to heal me of the wounds I received in the snakepit of South Florida. Now I understand that he is also keeping me away from church so I can be healed of the wounds I received from backward Christians.

I doubt I’ll ever go to church regularly again. God showed me that almost everyone who has mistreated me or held me back in recent years was a Christian, going after me because I was open about sick doctrine. That’s quite a testimony. I have to be concerned about unequal yoking, not just when I associate with heathens, but even when I walk through the doors of a church. That’s a little too much opposition to put up with consistently.

Church should be like a wife. It should give you support and rest. It should back you up and help you succeed. My churches were like hookers. They only wanted me for what I could do for them. I sincerely wanted to help them do well, but they didn’t care about me at all. I was just a john.

My churches’ leaders provoked me to anger with consistent abuse. Provocation is temptation. I have enough temptation in my life without finding it at church. I know I have to forgive people, but I don’t want to subject myself to unrepentant, self-righteous people who require forgiveness over and over.

Jesus said you should forgive a brother seventy times seven times, but he didn’t say you should be grafted to such a person at the hip. Hanging around with abusive people is like remaining on a beach after the topless girls come out. The first time a person tempts you to be angry, it’s his fault. Every time you allow him to do it after that, it’s your fault.

None of this should be controversial. There is nothing unusual or surprising about receiving bad treatment from Christians. It’s what’s supposed to happen, in this world of deaf and blind believers. It’s normal. God told us it would happen.

Jesus and the prophets were killed or sent to be killed by Jews who believed in God and thought their persecution was pleasing to him. Jesus never had a problem with a pagan until the rabbis gave him to the Romans, and even then, the Romans did their best to turn him loose. The Jews insisted he be killed.

The Jews, not the Romans, stoned Stephen to death because he admitted he saw Jesus in heaven at the right hand of God. Paul sat by and approved. Before his conversion, Paul was a pious Jew whose job was to round up Christians and have them imprisoned by other pious Jews. He wasn’t a pagan.

Through a psalm, Jesus said he was wounded in the house of his friends. He said his own friend had lifted up his heel against him. If I draw close to God and then experience abuse from Christians, it’s not an anomaly. It’s confirmation of God’s word.

Life is so strange.

I’m not concerned about church any more. I will focus on healing, and if God sends me to a church later on, I will go. It’s a good arrangement. I don’t want my Sundays screwed up any more. Somewhere, there are people who can be blessed, and God will put me among them, church or no church.

Maybe you’re enslaved, like I was. Are your pastors proud? Do they listen to correction? Do they have a bunch of corrupt, inept relatives and friends who get cushy jobs and lots of unquestionable authority? Do they hide their finances the way my pastors did? Is your church languishing and failing to grow? Are you expected to donate excessive amounts of money, time, and work? Do you feel like you’re being restrained? Have you been persecuted for telling the truth? If you have had these problems, you may be in a cult.

It’s okay, and it’s important, to ask God to help you understand your situation. He didn’t create you to serve a self-anointed pharaoh, and he will be happy to set you free.