Not on This Earth

While my dad was living out his last days, I prayed for him to receive salvation. I also prayed for God to help him bear whatever fruit he could. I was amazed at the way my dad turned to Jesus and escaped damnation. Seeing him bear fruit has been even more surprising.

My friend Mike runs a hospice company. He was so moved by my dad’s story, he made employees read my blog. Mike himself says he wants to be baptized here. When I went to Kentucky to bury my dad, I got to spend hours talking to my aunt and cousin, who needed help with their walks. I got to pray for my cousin’s salvation with her. At the viewing, I shared my dad’s testimony with a number of people, and I was able to counsel a second cousin who apparently knows little about God.

On top of all this, my friend Amanda has a couple of sons who now want to be baptized. She is bringing one of them today. His name is Sean. He has been under attack for years, so he really needs this.

A tormented, demanding relative of Amanda’s erupted last night and insisted she and her sons do a number of menial chores today. Expected. Satan always hates it when someone threatens to make progress in the kingdom of heaven.

I have been fighting the problem in the supernatural, and our power is greater than the power of the children of darkness, so we will win. I believe Sean will be here today.

I would appreciate it if people would pray in support.

Whenever it appears that something good is about to happen, Satan will try to derail the train. It’s such a standard part of his procedure, we should be ashamed when we fail to counterattack in advance. We know it’s coming, yet we usually act surprised. We react instead of attacking first.

I forget to counterattack all the time. I will try to be more responsible in the future. I suggest you do the same. It’s silly to have the same problem over and over and fail to adapt.

I’m wondering what’s going to become of me. As much as I love living where I am, I keep feeling like I won’t be here at the end of 2020. It may be that God put me here to help my dad, Mike, and Amanda. Mike has Ocala connections, and he loves to visit.

If God moves me north, it may mean Florida is in trouble. I think that’s the case, regardless of whether I move. A hurricane moved hundreds of thousands of liberal Puerto Ricans into the state, and we are in the process of restoring voting rights to felons, virtually none of whom are Republicans. We may see disturbing changes in upcoming elections, and after that, Florida may look more like Massachusetts than Florida.

Tennessee appears to be the Idaho of the East. It’s extremely conservative, and it’s full of Christians. One would expect sanity to retain its influence there considerably longer than in other eastern states.

When I left Miami, I knew I would get more land for my money in Ocala. If I leave Ocala, I know I will get more land–and much, much nicer land–in Tennessee for my money. That’s a pleasant thought. I like having 34 acres of sandy land that isn’t totally flat. Having 300 acres of fertile land, in a place where hurricanes don’t hit, with real hills and creeks, would be tremendous.

I know absolutely no one in Tennessee. I don’t know what I could do for God there. I just have a feeling.

A couple of days ago, I saw something neat. I had just returned from Kentucky, via Tennessee. I had veered into the Smokies on the way down, even though it added a lot of time to the trip. I could not resist. I turned on Youtube after I got down here, and I decided to look at the Cardboard Box Church channel, which is my favorite.

The man who runs the channel, Tom Fischer, started out in New Jersey. A year or two ago, he and his wife moved to South Florida. This week, he was teaching in the Smokies! How about that? He would have been very near me, at the same time I was there. Made me wonder if God was telling me something.

I replaced my copies of the first three Foxfire books this week. These are books about Appalachian life. A teacher tried to engage students in Rabun Gap, in northern Georgia, and he couldn’t get anywhere, so he started a magazine. The students did the work. At first, it was a relatively useless poetry magazine, but later, it focused on the heritage of Appalachian heritage. They interviewed old people. They wrote about things like killing hogs and building log cabins.

When I was a kid, my mother loved the first Foxfire book, and I ended up owning several volumes. They were eaten by ants (long story), so I don’t have my old copies. Now that I have new ones, I’m enjoying them. They can be helpful with things I don’t remember fully. Georgia is not Kentucky, but the similarities outweigh the differences.

Am I training for my return “home”? I don’t know.

Last night I searched Youtube for videos about Appalachia. I found a video featuring Charles Kuralt. It was shot in 1965. It was about Christmas in a poor area in Kentucky.

Kuralt showed a shot of the local post office. It said “Roxana.” My second cousin used to run that post office. My grandfather is buried near Roxana. I was startled. I hadn’t realized the area where my dad’s people lived was that poor.

Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t that poor. Kuralt focused on some shacks belonging to people who couldn’t get it together. I remember visiting nearby Whitesburg when I was a kid, and while it wasn’t Monaco, people had real houses and cars and so on. It wasn’t terrible.

Could it be that a liberal journalist twisted the truth? That would be incredible. Kuralt was a very deceitful person, so I guess I shouldn’t be shocked.

Maybe the area wasn’t totally hopeless, but there were plenty of people there who didn’t do well.

There was a kid in the video whose clothes were so bad he couldn’t go to school. There was a man who lived in a shed behind his ex-wife’s house because he couldn’t afford to move. Another man dug coal in a mine behind his house, not for money, but to heat his family’s home.

It was distressing. Everyone in the neighborhood was on welfare. They lived on “commodity” food, which is what people in Kentucky call surplus products provided as handouts. “Government cheese” and so on. That cheese is really good, by the way.

I felt bad for them, and I felt very grateful for what I have. I wondered what God would have done for them, had they known him better. Poverty is not normal; it’s a curse, like cancer or autism. We’re not supposed to be poor.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought the people were to blame. You don’t have to stay in a poor area if you don’t want to. My dad moved to Florida. My great uncle moved to Indiana. His son worked in Detroit, designing giant machine tools for making car engines. Eastern Kentucky has poured migrants into a number of states, and those people have done well. You can’t expect Uncle Sam to support you forever because you refuse to move from a blighted region.

My dad always said he thought the geography was what doomed Eastern Kentucky. It’s largely vertical. Building isn’t easy. Making roads is hard. Large-scale farming is not practical. There are lots of places where making money is easier.

Another problem is that the people resist learning. There is no excuse for illiteracy in America, and there hasn’t been for at least a hundred years. If you know how to read and do math, you can teach your kids by writing in the dirt. It’s not that hard. My mother taught me to read in her spare time.

Fundamentally, every problem boils down to a poor relationship with God. I shouldn’t get caught up in the physical manifestations.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have tremendous confidence in God’s willingness to put me in a good place.

I suppose I should clean bird cages and get the house ready for my guests. I am eager to see Sean get to know God and find out what it is to live in victory and peace. If you’re praying for us, thank you. It’s very important. Prayer isn’t just a gesture. It has more power than anything else we do.