I Have Been Processed

If you read my last post, you know I’ve been installing new smoke detectors. I installed three, liked what I saw, and bought 5 more. I just tried to install the three remaining upstairs detectors, and I discovered two of the new ones I bought were missing parts. Now I’m stuck until tomorrow, because I’m not going to Home Depot three times in one day.

I finally found out why people like hardwired smoke detectors. They can communicate with each other, so if an alarm goes off in one end of your house, the detector in your end may also go off. This prevents you from sleeping through a fire in a distant room.

I’m not all that worried. I sleep in a room at one end of the house. I can clearly hear the alarms in the upstairs hall, my bedroom, and the bedroom next to mine. I would surely be awakened by the alarms in the other two upstairs bedrooms, even though they’re farther away. Besides, I don’t know whether my old detectors communicated. I can’t even find out how they’re wired up. They don’t have a circuit breaker. That’s ridiculous.

They’re intolerable. They have no UPS and no way to hook one up, and they seem to go off every night because they’re sensitive to power outages, so I’m going to take my chances with 11 battery-operated detectors, including three that are connected to a blaring whole-house alarm.

I can’t understand the purpose of the hardwiring. Hardwired detectors still need batteries. I can get battery-powered detectors that communicate. Seems like the only feature hardwiring provides is an endless stream of late-night false alarms caused by AC power failures.

What’s the purpose of the alarms? The batteries will keep the detectors working, so what do we care if the power goes out for an hour?

The detectors I’m removing were made in late 2016, so they shouldn’t be obsolete, but they clearly are.

In other news, my dad went to church today. I took him to Middlebrook, the slick charismatic megachurch I visited last week. I’ve already written about it. It’s a big, efficient church that runs three quick, impersonal services every Sunday. It’s sort of a drive-by experience, but it’s good enough for now.

We sat in the back, and Pastor Tim Gilligan started talking with about 35 minutes left on the big countdown clock on the rear wall.

Right away, I knew what I was dealing with. He started his sermon by mentioning Rick Warren.

If you don’t know who Rick Warren is, you must have forgotten the 2008 fiasco in which he moderated a “forum” featuring Barack Obama and John McCain. He sat and smiled and asked softball questions, pretending to be a Christian authority while giving equal dignity to a Republican and a leftist extremist who favors abortion so strongly he refused to vote for a law requiring doctors to give care to babies who survive the procedure.

If you can’t figure out that God is against the murder of the unborn, you have no business standing behind a pulpit. It’s not a hard question.

Warren gave the invocation at Obama’s 2009 inauguration. It was a good deal. Obama got to pretend he respected God and Christians, and Warren got promotion.

I can’t read Warren’s mind, but he seems to run on attention. He is a huge networker and self-promoter. People say he’s noble and unselfish because he’s a “reverse tither.” He makes a gigantic amount of money, and he lives on 10% and gives the rest to the church. There are a lot of problems with that logic.

First, as Jesus noted, if you want to be considered generous, look at what you have left, not what you give away. Warren is not poor. Second, as any informed Christian knows, we are discouraged from talking about what we give to others, yet Warren makes sure people know. Jesus said people who do that get their reward here on earth. Third, again, tithing is from the Jewish law, so if you’re tithing in any manner, reverse or otherwise, you’re showing your ignorance. Fourth, not all greed applies to wealth. Some people are greedy for admiration and attention, and it’s just as bad.

Pastor Gilligan quoted Warren’s appalling book, The Purpose-Driven Life. I probably sighed. This book is a carnal attempt to replace the Holy Spirit with human effort. When I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church in Miami, the leader of our team told us to buy the book. I read a few pages, and then I threw the book out. Before I threw it out, I tore it in half so no one else could read it. I didn’t want to be responsible for the harm it could do.

Warren is not a charismatic. He knows nothing whatsoever about the Holy Spirit. He believes the gifts of the Spirit are optional, and he magnanimously chooses to tolerate them in his church, but it seems clear he doesn’t believe they’re real. If he thought they were real, they would be hugely important to him. People are dying all around us. If healing is real, it’s a big deal. It would certainly be more important to him than his pathetic, ineffective, God-negating, third-tier motivational drivel.

Warren thinks Christianity is about working hard and being nice. Be nice all the time. He thinks our job is to make the world a nicer place. Jesus, on the other hand, was intolerant of other religions and said the world would end in catastrophe. He says he will return and kill so many people his robe will be red with blood.

I’m not saying we’re supposed to go out and kill people. Just that the notion of reforming the world with niceness is Satanic, not Christian. The world is going to fail, just as it did before Noah. We’re not going to fix it, and anyone who tries is fighting God and denying prophecy.

Warren is a proud and condescending man who likes being nice and working really hard. Jesus, on the other hand, never worked in the Bible. Paul chose to work, but he didn’t have to. The Bible doesn’t say God wants us to work hard. It says work is a curse that fell on us because of disobedience. Hard work did not exist until Adam and Eve sinned and lied to God. Jesus didn’t reward anyone for hard work. He rewarded them for faith, compassion, and sincerity.

Remember Mary and Martha? Jesus and his boys were eating in their house, and Martha was working herself to death, trying to serve everyone. She told Jesus to yell at Mary, who was sitting and listening to him instead of helping. Jesus said Mary, not Martha, had the better part. Rick Warren would have sided with Martha.

Here’s something God told me: “We become arrogant through striving in the flesh.” When we work hard and succeed, we credit ourselves, not God. God wants the glory, and God is not a cheat. If he wants the glory, it means he expects to do most of the work. He’s not going to let you bust your hump so he can take the credit. Who could worship a God who makes people give him glory for their own achievements?

It’s disturbing to see any Christian support Warren. It proves they don’t know much. Gilligan is a wonderful speaker, but he isn’t worth listening to when it comes to God.

He also promoted tithing. That’s an error which is to be expected in charismatic churches. Charismatics like money a little too much; more than they like the Holy Spirit. Tithing brings a lot of money in. Pastors are afraid to rely on freewill offerings motivated by the Holy Spirit, probably because they don’t know the Holy Spirit and have not taught their flocks how to hear from him. Tithing is not scriptural. Gentiles have never been required or even allowed to tithe. It’s an Old Testament thing. Also, the tithe wasn’t composed of cash. It was things like sheep and grain.

The Bible says were are not under the Jewish law, and we quote that scripture all the time. We can eat pork. We can eat shrimp. We can work on Saturday, which is still the sabbath. We do not have to observe the Jewish feasts. Somehow, though, pastors think the law of the tithe, which didn’t apply to us in Paul’s time, applies now.

Okay. Middlebrook is a feel-good church with no depth. Maybe that’s fine. My dad doesn’t need to study at Paul’s feet right now, and neither do I. As a dementia sufferer who just accepted salvation, he just needs to be among Christians and know God’s presence. Pastors are generally useless, but powerful Christians can be found in great churches, and you have to attend and tolerate the prattling of pastors in order to meet them. My hope is that my dad will pick up a few basic things, that he will sense God’s presence, and that he will meet other Christians.

A friend of mine also attended today, and when we texted later, she mentioned her negative feelings about Warren and tithing. I didn’t prompt her. It’s not easy to slide that stuff past intelligent people.

She has kids. They need to know Christians. Maybe Middlebrook will get them through Christian preschool, and then the Holy Spirit can take over.

I’m just happy my dad went to church. That’s a huge milestone.

He didn’t like the sermon. He may be demented, but a highly intelligent person who becomes demented will still see things ordinary people do not. My dad didn’t hear prophecy or see anyone healed. God didn’t speak to him (or anyone else) through Gilligan. He never sat up in his chair, and said, “That word was for ME!” On the other hand, he only had to sit still for 35 minutes, the music was done well, and getting on the road back to the house was easy.

The musicians at Meadowbrook were beyond reproach in their proficiency. Very, very impressive. Everyone sang on key. They were good looking, too. The songs were very bad, however. I am guessing it’s new stuff Hillsong put out after I quit going to church. Listening to Hillsong is like having a paste of Wonder Bread and mayonnaise jammed in your ears. It’s completely uninspired because the motivation is money and attention, not the glorification of God.

I don’t know where the songs came from, but they were really bad. It’s unfortunate that such talented musicians had to play this material. I couldn’t pick out the melodies because they were so flat and monotonous. The opposite of catchy. I sang in the Spirit instead.

Lionel Richie is one of the most successful songwriters in history. He has said that when he writes a song, he starts with a hook and writes the song around it. The hook of a song is the catchy part that sticks in your memory and makes you want to hear it again. The songs I heard today didn’t have any features like that. They droned and meandered pointlessly. The musicians at Meadowbrook were fishing for men without hooks.

I noticed one other thing about Meadowbrook. There were a number of pretty women. That’s an oddity in Ocala. I can’t explain it, but while the men here look pretty much like the men everywhere else, good looking women are as rare as hen’s teeth. Whenever I see one, it makes an impression on me, because it doesn’t happen most days.

I can’t understand the lack of beautiful women here. Somehow, though, Meadowbrook has attracted a relatively high percentage of beauties.

I don’t think it means anything, but it’s weird.

I plan to keep going back until something better pops up. Maybe this as as good as we can do. That’s okay. I don’t need or depend on a church, and I don’t think my dad is going to get so far in his devotion that he requires top-notch instruction.

As annoying as the fakery and grandstanding in ethnic churches are, I do miss the moves of God. I have heard a lot of inspired words in ethnic churches, and I have had healings and so on. I don’t those things will ever happen at Meadowbrook. They don’t have time for it. Maybe it’s because the people aren’t poor. When you go to a Puerto Rican church, you sit with people who are on parole, on drugs, suffering from diet-induced diseases, and so on. You’ll sit with prostitutes and former pimps. Most people around you will be poor. They aren’t like the successful, corn-fed Christians of Middlebrook, who show up in nice shiny cars and clean, pressed clothes. Maybe desperation adds something Middlebrook lacks.

The lack of God’s participation makes for a boring sermon. When you’re used to hearing God speak through preachers, a speaker who relies on his own ability is pretty dull. Gilligan is very, very good at what he does, like Dave Chappelle or Fidel Castro, but 35 minutes of human effort, when you came expecting to hear from God, are way too much. I like a good speaker, but a plain old orator can’t compete with someone through whom God speaks. Not even close.

I’m not looking for perfection any more, except in my own relationship with God. A weak and superficial church will do, as long as they don’t cause me a lot of problems.

The services I’ve seen have been so backward and uneventful compared to my own daily prayers, I have no hope that Meadowbrook will ever be important to me. Maybe it’s time for me to sit back and rest. I was hoping to find a church where I could rest instead of being used and slandered, so maybe I got what I wanted.