Back Where it All Started

I have returned from The Last Reformation’s event in Dunedin, Florida, which is pretty much the same place as Clearwater. It’s part of the Greater Tampa complex.

I have a lot to write about. Maybe I should list some important points.

* I was baptized in water again.

* I came away with a good impression of The Last Reformation, although I am not interested in joining.

* I found myself in a small group with a super-enthusiastic Christian lady who was clearly crawling with demons.

* I learned some bad things about the Ocala area.

* I had a nightmare the night after I was baptized, and I feel it was connected to the fact that I was back in the area controlled by the principality that tormented me during my early childhood.

My dad is in assisted living today. As I predicted (Satan is always predictable), A lot of things went wrong while I was trying to get him installed at the facility and get on the road. The doctor who was supposed to fax a crucial document to the facility screwed up. I could not get my dad moving to save my life. My dad had to use the toilet twice in about half an hour while I was trying to get him to the ALF. I got some kind of chemical on the soles of my boots, and they smelled the whole way to Dunedin. I still don’t know what it is. I thought it was me. When I was packing, I told myself it was neurotic to take another pair of boots.

I think I’ll get up right now and change them.

I saw all this coming, and I prayed for help days before it happened. Things worked out okay. I was about 10 minutes late for the first portion of the event, and it didn’t matter at all.

When I got on the road, friends asked me if I was feeling free. I told them I had started to feel free at the ALF. A couple of minutes out, my dad announced that he needed to get to a bathroom. When we walked in, instead of asking them to show me where the bathroom was so I could fix things myself, I told the receptionist about the problem and had her page someone. The second she complied is when I started to feel free. Someone materialized and whisked him off, and it was not my problem any more.

Free, free, free. If you want to know what freedom feels like, wait till someone else has to take your elderly parent to the toilet and deal with whatever happens.

The drive to Greater Tampa was very unpleasant. Florida is getting very crowded, and I-75, which used to be used fairly sparsely, was loaded with vehicles. The trip took over two hours, and about an hour of that was dedicated to traveling the last 25 miles. Do the math, and you can see that I moved very slowly. There is no quick way to get to Dunedin from the north. You have to make turn after turn, on little surface roads jammed up with commuters. Not fun at all, especially when you know you’re late for something.

The first event was a meeting where Torben Sondergaard discussed TLR and the things we were going to do. I don’t recall all that much of it. Eventually, he had those of us who wanted prayer get up and stand in the aisles. People came to pray for us. I was kind of a wallflower; no one wanted to dance with me! Two guys finally made it.

Some people had demons cast out of them. I wasn’t getting a lot of action, so I eventually wandered around and joined with the people who were helping people get delivered. I stayed in the background, though.

That was very nice. Deliverance is one of the things Jesus said we would do, but most churches want nothing to do with it. They’re like emergency rooms that offer free coffee and donuts but no medical help.

The next day, he taught us about water baptism and the baptism with the Holy Spirit. He taught that we should all speak in tongues. I agreed with all that. If memory serves, the next session was about “kickstarting,” which was the main purpose of the event. They intended to send us out in small groups, to evangelize and pray for people to be healed.

While he was preaching, I kept hearing a hard, metallic, female voice, saying things like, “Come on!,” and “YES.” It was annoying. In charismatic churches, you will often find people who wish they were doing the talking, and they will add little interjections. It’s as if Satan sponsored hecklers. Some preachers like it. I find it distracting. I believe spirits use people to screw up sermons.

From time to time, I looked around, trying to figure out who was making the racket. Eventually, I saw a white-haired lady barking from the back wall. I knew we were going to break up into small groups later for evangelizing, and I decided to make absolutely sure I was not in her group. I knew she would talk too much and cause problems. People who had useful things to say would not be able to get a word in edgewise, because we would be in the path of her torrential preaching and holiness signaling.

I just made that last term up.

On this trip, I realized why Paul said women should be quiet in church. If you’ve been a churchgoer for a long time, you know this to be true: women are the most disruptive people at charismatic services. Children take second place. When someone screams like a banshee during songs or, even worse, makes horrible noises on a shofar or some other noisemaking device, it’s almost always a woman. When someone decides the Holy Spirit is forcing them to shriek at top volume, shake, cry, and roll on the floor, it’s almost always a woman. When someone has to issue a loud, verbal agreement with everything the pastor says, it’s almost always a woman.

When someone refuses to take a wailing kid out of the room, it’s almost always a woman. Thanks to our weird new breastfeeding laws, we now have topless women who refuse to cover up in church. Men do not have that issue. Also, what gender are the people who come to church in short skirts and sit in the front row with their knees a foot apart?

I never thought about Paul’s ideas this way until this week. America is in the grip of woman-worship and the persecution of men and boys. We have the audacity to say Paul, an apostle who wrote scripture, was wrong about women making a nuisance of themselves in churches, but I have seen him proven right hundreds of times.

Last night, we had three false messages in tongues, and they came from two women. One woman’s husband gave an interpretation, but it was fake: “Trust me, my children, I want to come in and talk things out with you,” and so on.

The second woman started crying, and she screamed to God in a 120-decibel voice that could bleach dirty laundry.

I’m sorry to say this, but Torben let his wife sing at the end, and her voice was so hard and piercing, it pretty much killed any semblance of peace, and it drove off God’s presence. It made my head hurt, it reminded me how tired I was, and it made me want to get back to the hotel ASAP (which I did).

We humor women a lot in church, and it causes big problems.

I’m not going to qualify what I’m saying or try to defend it. I see Paul’s point, and I defer to his superior knowledge and revelation. If that offends anyone, I don’t care at all. I now live in a world where everything I believe offends people, and pretending to believe otherwise is not the solution. There is no solution. People will be offended, and I’m fine with that. There is nothing I can,or should, do about it.

The program called for us to break into small groups, as I have said. I was not looking forward to it. TLR goes to malls and so on, and they accost people and ask if they need prayer. I love street evangelism, but I don’t believe in bothering people unless the Holy Spirit gives the order. I like what Cardboard Box Church does. They set their small box church up, and people are drawn to it. People who have to be chased down are like unripe fruit. They’re not ready.

Mormons chase people. They have to do time as evangelists when they’re in their twenties. They can be very rude and aggressive. They are often obnoxious. I don’t think Christians should behave like Mormons. Jesus made it clear that he will tell us where to cast our nets. We don’t have to go out and try to make things happen without his help.

Torben called for people who had been to other Kickstart events to stand up, and he said we should to them and form groups. I was startled, because maybe a fourth of the assembly stood up. I was not happy. This told me that the outreach was not as strong as I had hoped. Instead of being drowned in a tide of new people who needed instruction, they attracted a moderate number of new people and a lot of old hands who could, in some cases, be termed “groupies.”

It’s great to be among Christians you know well, but there isn’t much purpose in seeing the same people over and over and preaching to each other.

I went to a guy who was a good distance from the white-haired lady, and sure enough, she trotted over and asked to go with us. I knew it was going to happen, because it was the perfect Satanic annoyance bomb. I should have gone to another group. I did not. It turned out my group had four veterans, including the lady.

People who are demonized are drawn to me like Bill Clinton to a bag of chili-cheese-slaw dogs. They always have been. I don’t know why. It’s really something to see. Sometimes they’re nasty to me, and sometimes they behave like complete lickspittles, kowtowing and serving for no apparent reason. It’s hard to miss them, because they act so weird.

Maybe someone somewhere will figure out who I’m talking about, and she’ll find out, and then I’ll be condemned as a heretic or whatever. I thought about that, but I decided I don’t care.

Generally, the people who get mad at me for telling the truth are people I should not have been close to in the first place.

There are certain people who are holier and more connected to God than absolutely everyone they know, and they work very hard to make these things clear. They are part of the group I call “Jesus buffs.” Being on fire for Jesus is a hobby for them, just like seeing every Grateful Dead concert and owning every bootleg tape was a hobby for Deadheads. When you’re with these people, the message you get is, “I have been doing this since the dawn of time, I know every minister on earth, I hear more from God than you do, I touch more black people than you do, and I know absolutely everything, so whatever your testimony is, it is insignificant, and I will talk way too much until you run away.”

This lady had real problems. Her name tag said something like, “Loyal to the Lord” on it (I won’t say what it really said), and when we asked what her real name was, she said, “Loyal to the Lord.”

Of course, I mean she said what was on her name tag.

Yes, she had changed her name. She asked if we wanted to see her driver’s license, and no one said yes, and out it came.

Imagine how strange it would be to work in the legal system, dealing with a person like this. “We have an execution tomorrow.” “Who is it?” “We’re executing On Fire for King Jesus.”

She was proud of having joined the body of Christ (so she believes) in 1971. Someone said something about how that made her part of a historic movement, and she said, “I AM the movement.”

We ate lunch as a group. As soon as we walked in, she walked to every table, introduced herself, and bothered and touched people.

For some reason, I was not able to eat at all; I had no appetite.

Loyal to the Lord told us her spectacular testimony. She also told us about the street people she had reached. Then she took out her phone and showed us videos of them, talking about the wonderful things she had helped them experience. Yes, she took videos of people she preached to. I don’t mean helpful teaching videos, like the ones we see on Youtube. I mean documentation, created to show to people she met.

While she talked, she would sometimes close her eyes, nod, and say, “Okay,” or, “Mm-hmm” while smiling a hard smile. She gritted her teeth, really. After one of these events, she said, “Got it.” Then she looked at us and said, “I get downloads.”

At one point, she told us doctors had told us she was bipolar and schizophrenic, “but WHATEVER.” I think the idea was that those crazy doctors didn’t “get” her.

It’s very sad, really, but I didn’t see what I could do.

The weird thing about it is that she knew a lot of things that were correct. She knew the prosperity gospel and the feel-good gospel were crocks. She knew the purpose of baptism. She spoke a lot of deep truths and things that only sounded like deep truths.

I kept wondering what disinformation was on the way; I assumed that if Satan was letting her say all these things that were true, there had to be a gigantic stink bomb coming. Sure enough, out it came. She told me I could not have a demon. She said it was impossible for the Holy Spirit to live in someone who had demons.

Bang. That was the message Satan sent her to deliver. If you tell people they don’t have demons, and they believe it, they don’t get the demons cast out. “Nothing to see here. Move along.” It gives demons job security.

It’s no wonder it’s so hard to get rid of demons. Satan is the god of this world, so demons are civil servants.

I knew she was wrong. I was baptized with the Holy Spirit over 30 years ago, but at my last church, I went to the altar twice to get demons cast out, and I am positive I was not imagining them. On one occasion, I felt my insides turning over as I walked up, and my hands turned to ice. Whatever was in there was scared to death. No one can tell me you can’t have the Holy Spirit and a demon.

She had a ring, but no husband was in sight. Not surprising. Living with her would be like living with a bulldozer that had no “off” switch. You would look for opportunities to get away and rest. She had no home. She just lived with people here and there. We didn’t learn where her income came from. She made it sound like she was a great deal like a Deadhead, except she did it for God.

If you’re not familiar with Deadheads, they used to follow the Grateful Dead everywhere. They probably kept them solvent, since the band was not all that successful after maybe 1972. They traveled in a big caravan and slept in VW buses and so on.

One nice thing about having her with us is that our lunch conversation was so long, we completely skipped chasing people at the mall. In fact, I deliberately sat and said nothing, when I thought it would prolong lunch, hoping we would run long. Sometimes I asked questions I knew would call for long answers. From time to time, I sneaked looks at my phone to see how I was doing.

Her remarks made me think about what Jesus said about the difficulty of avoiding deception: “For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand.” I was sitting at a table with two fairly knowledgeable believers and a lady who was teaching doctrines of demons, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who saw her problem. Disturbing. I’m convinced prayer in tongues makes the difference. When you pray in tongues a lot, God brings you out of deception. Unfortunately, you may still fall into it from time to time, and you may linger in it for a while before you get out.

When we got back to church, I saw her walk to her car, and I realized it was right beside mine. I made a mental note, and the next time I parked, I drove to the other side of the complex. I avoided her for the rest of the event, and we never spoke again. She disappeared before the final session.

The men in the group were very nice. One was a Ukrainian, so he didn’t get to give much input. The other two were guys from Florida, and they were a bit on the Jesus buff side. They were not annoying or attention-hungry, but they seemed to know just about everything about every hot charismatic-counterculture preacher. They knew a lot about Torben.

I will never be like them, because I am never going to another Kickstart. I’m not going to follow TLR around. I will never stand in the back with my buddies, saying, “Remember the time in Dallas when Torben slipped and dropped his new Ipad in the tank?”

I pried a bit, and I got some answers.

I talked about the TLR healing videos. I said I was impressed with all the quick healings, and I asked if they posted videos of the people they failed to help. They both smiled suddenly, and one of them said, “NO ONE does that.” So TLR has failures and secrets, just like everyone else, but you don’t see them on Youtube.

That’s bad. If you conceal your failures, you give other people unrealistic expectations regarding what they will be like if they listen to you. Also, if people don’t know you’re doing things wrong, they won’t ask God to help you find the correction you need.

I asked about the mall-chasing angle, and they said they didn’t like it, pretty much for the same reasons I don’t.

One reason I like TLR is that I believe God told me the age of the big church is ending. I believe individuals will spread the gospel in the future. Torben has said things like this, more or less. The guys in my group told me he used to be against big churches, but he has changed somewhat. That’s an alarm bell. Big churches with big money and big audiences have a long history of seducing and messing up preachers who are doing God’s work just fine without them.

I told them I was not going to join TLR and that I was never going to join another church. I said these things flat out. No one at the table had a problem with that.

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Jesus buff. When you become a Trekkie or Juggalo for God, as it were, you focus on the Trekkie/Juggalo experience instead of God. You buy the T-shirts with big crosses on them, you listen to Third Day even if the songs aren’t very good, you go on mission trips even when God doesn’t send you, and you put a fish on every vehicle you own. The more of these people I met this week, the worse I felt about decorating vehicles with Jesus paraphernalia. It seems like a really bad idea.

Having escaped the full-contact evangelism experience, I changed into swim trunks for the baptism session. They divided us into two groups. One group was people who had spoken in tongues, and the other was everyone else. A young man who appears in the videos was put in charge of me and a lady. He took off with the lady and returned to me later.

They had three horse-watering tanks in the church, full of warmish water. I was determined to try to be the first or second person into my tank, because I knew I would be submerged, essentially, in a stranger’s bath water, with nothing to cover my mouth. I was probably one of the first three in my tank. Not what I wanted, but it could have been worse. I thought about asking them to put a little bleach in each tank.

I am told that the phrase “living water” comes from a Greek phrase meaning “moving water,” as contrasted with stagnant water. We think it means the water is alive or holy, but in reality, if what I have been told is correct, a Greek would call any river or stream “living water.” English is not that different. We call wine without bubbles “still,” and “still” can be used to mean “dead,” as in “stillborn.”

Baptism is supposed to be a cleansing. You can’t cleanse yourself with a bath. When you take a bath, you just dilute the filth, and then you let the diluted filth solution dry on you. When you shower, the filth goes down the drain. A shower is living water. A bath isn’t. Given the choice, I would prefer to be baptized in a river, the ocean, or even a swimming pool with the pump running.

Baptism is a Christian continuation of the Jewish mikveh procedure. A mikveh is a purifying ritual bath. Here is what Wikipedia says: “a mikveh must be connected to a natural spring or well of naturally occurring water.” I don’t think Jews would want to jump into a horse trough other people had just used.

A young woman who was also dressed for baptism started talking to me. Like me, she had no one with her. We smiled in a moment of shared anticipation.

Before I went in, I had a conversation with the young man, and he seemed determined to prevent me from being baptized. He kept asking about my first immersion baptism, which I had received in a state of ignorance. I was honest with him, but I pushed, because I had driven a hundred miles and spent a thousand dollars, and I was not going home without getting wet. I had to see what it was all about. I knew my previous baptism was not right, regardless of what he thought.

TLR has a policy of not repeating baptism unless it has to. I don’t understand that. You can take communion three times a day if you want, and God will be fine with it. What’s the problem with being baptized twice? Many people who have had a hard time praying in tongues have had people baptize them over and over with the Holy Spirit, just to be sure, and no one has a problem with it.

As I said above, a mikveh is a ritual bath. Jews don’t confine themselves to one ritual bath per life. A Jewish woman has to do it once every 28 days. They do it for various purposes, including conversion. Somehow the TLR people have become concerned that twice may be too much. I don’t know why that is. I may be baptized a third time if I feel like it. God isn’t going to send me to hell for it.

If there is no limit to the number of times you can make yourself unclean, which is true, I don’t see why we should limit the number of times you can be cleansed again.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t see the down side.

Some of the people who got baptized made awful sounds, and there was some crying and so on. Lots of casting out. I wondered what would happen when I went under. I had some groaning, but that’s not unusual for me when I’m in the presence of God. I didn’t feel demons flying out of me. I didn’t have a vision. Nonetheless, I was very, very glad to have it over with. I wanted things to be done in proper order, and after I was baptized, I felt I had done what was right.

I don’t want to treat baptism like an amulet. Orthodox Jews still use amulets to run spirits off. I don’t want to assume that if I jump into a tank of water, every spirit in the room will have to run away. Nonetheless, I did want to mark myself as God’s property so they would know they were trespassing.

They told us we could request that they not film us. I did not do that. Jesus requires that we acknowledge him before men, and I thought refusing to be filmed would offend him. It goes against my nature to be filmed in a baptism tank and put on Youtube, but I didn’t object. I don’t think anyone filmed me, however.

After I got dry and dressed, I heard a voice behind me. The young woman who had talked to me beforehand was sitting on a chair with her feet on the cushion and her legs crossed. She wanted to know how it was going.

She seemed to be shining. Her whole face glowed with the presence of the Holy Spirit. We talked a little, and I gave her the best advice I could. I told her she needed to pray in tongues a lot every day. I told her what had happened to me when I stopped. It was very strange, talking to her, because everything soaked in without resistance. It was like talking to an angel.

Women have a way of grading men, like teachers, when they talk. Or they feel they have to interrupt and show that they have important input, too. This girl just grinned and said things like, “Thanks.” She was so happy to get the advice; it didn’t occur to her to try to correct me or question what I said.

Men could be better men if women were easier to talk to. Anyway, I tried to say helpful things, and then I went and sat down. I didn’t want to be the annoying old Jesus buff who can’t shut up.

As I walked away, she said she would see me in heaven, and I told her she really would, and when she did, I would remind her she had predicted it.

At the end of the session, Torben encouraged us to form little groups based on where we lived, and he said we should stay in touch. I found myself in a group with one of the guys I had lunch with. Loyal to the Lord was not there. There was also a nice couple from somewhere not too far away. We talked a lot, and I gave them my number. I warned them not to count on me.

While they talked, I realized they were real Jesus buffs. They kept bringing up obscure teachers–people even I had never heard of–and when one person brought one up, the rest would say they already knew him or they used to work for him or something.

One guy is from Ocala. We talked about Ocala churches, and he said he had found that people here do “pretend church.” He said it’s very common. That surprised me, but it’s consistent with what happened to me at Meadowbrook Church. People who are used to Christianity get complacent, especially if they live in a nice area where life is pleasant. It’s easy for people like that to begin maintaining a safe distance from God, while pretending to serve him.

Eventually, we broke for dinner, and when I returned, Torben passed out free copies of his movie, to which he gave the title The Last Reformation (Surprise!). He showed us 20 minutes of the film.

I’ll tell you what we saw. He went to Jerusalem and healed people. Proselytizing is illegal in Israel, so I wondered how he got away with it. He went to Bethlehem, which is now part of what the Antichrist has dubbed “the West Bank.” It’s all Arab. He healed and evangelized Muslims. At one point, he was forced to move in order to avoid being attacked.

The video was wonderful. I didn’t get a copy, because it’s on Youtube. It showed a man having a classic walk with God. He got lost in Jerusalem. While he was “lost,” all sorts of “coincidences” happened, and he ended up doing many wonderful works he did not see coming. This is how God works in people who are Spirit-led.

He also gave us more of his testimony. I can’t recall all of it, but it was one “coincidence” after another. If you’re a Christian, and funny “coincidences” don’t happen to you a lot, something is wrong.

I only met him briefly, and I think that’s okay, because he isn’t God, and man-worship is a big problem. If I need Torben Sondergaard personally, then everything Torben Sondergaard teaches doesn’t work. Like every good teacher, he wants people to function without him. He says that himself. I may be taking him more literally than he wants, since I am not joining the movement or going to Denmark for his school.

The experience of going to the Tampa area was very disturbing to me. When I got near Tampa, I felt powerful supernatural pressure. I couldn’t tell whether it was the Holy Spirit alone, or some kind of battle, or what.

I started thinking about memories of my horrible childhood in Tampa. I kept passing signs with forgotten names on them. “Dale Mabry.” “Ybor City.” I thought about the waking nightmares I had had, in which I saw giant insects, centipedes, snakes, and lizards crawling all over the walls, bed, and floors. I thought about the way demons had made their presence obvious to me every day. I thought about the violence I used to see in my house on San Miguel Street.

I wondered if the pressure came from demons of my childhood, showing up to greet me on my return. Demons can be associated with places.

I felt oppressed. Nothing is worse than escaping the evil influence of a bully and then having to return to it.

Last night, having been baptized, I hoped to have a peaceful sleep. Instead, I woke up over and over. I had a nightmare about a miserable person from my past, returning to cast her filthy shadow over me again. Very disturbing.

This person and Loyal to the Lord seem to serve the same spirit. People call it Jezebel. It’s feminine and emasculating. You see it in brassy women with hard voices. It’s a spirit of witchcraft. Sometimes a woman with this spirit will be openly vicious. That’s how they act when they think you have no power. When they know you’re stronger than they are, they pretend to help and nurture, like the mother-in-law in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When you have problems, they’re full of answers. They can’t be helpful enough. They’ve got you. All the while, they’re bleeding your strength and controlling you.

They can also be slutty and seductive, seeming to make all your fantasies come true while striving to enslave you.

I made an effort to get to know people, but I was leery of the whole Jesus buff thing. I felt great about the young lady I talked to, because I thought she really had it, and by “it,” I mean what God was trying to give people. Still, overall, I did not fit in.

As I drove away, I talked to God. I told Jesus I felt shut out. I asked him if that was how he felt, and I felt a powerful rush inside me, as if he were shouting, “YES.”

When I woke up today, I planned to have breakfast in Dunedin and then leave, driving past my old house on the way. I decided I could not do it. I had to get out immediately, so I got in the car and drove. You would think I would have been in the clear, but in order to go from Dunedin to Ocala, GPS takes you through Tampa, so I actually went south. I had to run the gauntlet again.

I saw old names again. “Lowry Park,” where my mother used to take me in order to escape from the pain of her marriage. “Gandy Bridge.” She used to take me there for the same reason. I would walk around on the rip-rap, and we would make little paper boats and put them in the water.

I drove across the bay and saw whitecaps. I remembered that my mother loved to look at the whitecaps. She grew up at the base of a hill in Eastern Kentucky. Troubled salt water was a novelty to mountain girl only in her late twenties.

The memories would have been easier to stomach had her life gotten better after Tampa, but it got worse, and then she died young. Those things happened, and I failed to help her. Her daughter became a vicious drug addict who tormented her mother until she prayed for God to take her child. Her husband made her miserable continuously until the last year of her life. She died in Miami, but she never left Tampa.

It rained all last night, and it rained the whole way from Dunedin to Ocala. In Florida, hard rain usually doesn’t last more than a few minutes. It it goes half an hour, it’s unusual. I had hard rain for two hours. Sometimes I could barely see, but I did my best to keep it over 70. I didn’t feel any better until I stopped seeing suburbs and started seeing fields.

Do I recommend TLR? Sure, as long as you get baptized and pray in tongues every day. No human being is infallible, and every movement develops issues eventually. TLR will help you get baptized with water and the Holy Spirit, and they will teach you that you need to die to the flesh and serve God. They will teach you that the sinner’s prayer is not enough. This is all extremely valuable. Just don’t get the idea that you can join TLR, follow the program like all the other Jesus buffs, and live a perfect life that makes God completely happy.

God told me some things. He told me that authority comes from time spent in the presence of God. He also told me peace comes from authority. If you want to walk with God, you have to spend time with him in order to hear from him and get authority, and that means regular prayer in tongues. Without it, you’re doing your own thing.

The Catholic church was probably great when it started. Now it’s deadly. Same goes for the charismatic denominations. If you get satisfied with a denomination, and you never let God critique their doctrine, you become stagnant and infected.

Every denomination brews Kool-Aid eventually, so try not to drink it.

While I was getting baptized, I had to make myself to commit to living for God, so I did it. I told him I was afraid to trust him and obey him, and I told him I could not to it without his help. I hope it pays off. Right now, I’m just tired.

I don’t feel good at all. I feel that I’m under attack. Nonetheless, I think I did the correct thing, and I don’t consider new resistance to be an indication that there is a problem.

My dad is still in the ALF. I have not called him, because it would defeat the purpose of respite care. The word “respite” applies to me, not him. If you’re a caregiver, you need to understand how that works. A dying person does not need rest; people wait on them all day. The rest is for the people who look after them and become prisoners.

I don’t know if he’ll be angry that I didn’t call. There is a good chance he won’t remember. Even if he remembers until I pick him up, he will forget by next week. It doesn’t matter. Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t matter if he stayed angry. Some things have to be done, regardless if they make people unhappy.

I’ll see him day after tomorrow. Until then, I plan to get well and restore order.