The News from Home is not Good

A few years back, I watched a Derek Prince video in which he claimed a Spirit-baptized person should have the ability to prophesy at will. The idea seemed to be that it was like speaking in tongues, but you do it in English.

I gave it a try, and it seemed to work. It still seems to work.

Unfortunately, these days, I hear very bad things when I do it. I keep hearing that God will remove my enemies and their seed from the earth. He will destroy them. I hear he is angry over the way they’ve treated me and the rest of his children, and his patience is at an end. I hear these things over and over.

I have asked myself if I was projecting some sort of deep-seated resentment on God. Maybe I was saying things I wished would happen to people who wronged me. But that isn’t the case. I’m not the kind of person who sits and stews about somebody blackballing me from the chess team 50 years ago. I am not happy about the mistreatment I’ve received in life, but I like to think about the present and the future. Truthfully, they are just more interesting. They’re also much more pleasant.

I think being male helps. Women seem to be very bad at letting things go. Many times, during conversations with women, I’ve been startled to hear them bring up their continuing resentment over trivial things that happened decades ago. Things no one else cares about.

Women are more manipulative than men, and unforgiveness is a tool of manipulation. You can keep presenting the same bill over and over, no matter how many times it has been paid. Even if it’s imaginary.

Men use their own tools to get what they want. Women are more likely to use people.

I also hear myself saying something else, but it doesn’t come from God. I keep saying, “I hate this place.” It happens right after I think about some horrible aspect of life. Maybe I’ll see a crippled person at the grocery store, or someone who is falling apart from old age. I’ll think, “I hate this place. Look what happens to people here.” Or I’ll see irredeemable, incorrigible punks online, libeling Christians or Jews or white people or conservatives. Punks who can’t possibly be saved because they love lies and can’t be forced to admit the truth. “I hate this place. Look who is taking over.” I think about the things they’re going to do when they have a free hand. I think about the pointlessness of engaging them.

I’ll think, “I hate this place,” and then I’ll tell God, “You were right about everything.” All the horrors of this world come from our rejection of Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. They come from our hatred of correction. If we had done things right, the world would be a peaceful place full of healthy, prosperous people.

I hate this place even though my life and my wife’s life are wonderful. We pray all the time. We know God. We live among fantastic people. We are healthy. We have a son on the way. We get along. We don’t have to work. It’s not that our lives are hard. It’s just that this place is disgusting and beyond fixing. I always say it’s like we went to Mexico for a vacation and got stuck there.

Today I asked God if he was displeased because I say I hate this world, and instantly, I thought of Lot. Look at 2 Peter:

And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked:

(For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;)

Lot was wealthy, and he had a family, but he was vexed anyway, because he lived in the San Francisco of the Middle East. Lot did not fit in. People like to live among their own kind.

That’s not totally true. Good people like to live among good people, and so do rotten people. Good people try to get away from rotten people, and rotten people pursue them and stay close to them so they can prey on them.

This explains a lot of the tension we have with immigrants. It explains socialism. What good is a tick without a dog?

I think God is pleased when we hate this place and look forward to growing up and moving on. Jesus said, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

Holding onto this life is sick. Fearing death is sick. Who feels that way? Terrible people. Look at Hollywood. A lot of people there would eat live babies in order to get 5 more years. We now have sick billionaires funding life extension research to save themselves. So they can be wrinkly and weak forever, getting coronavirus over and over.

What if they stop aging and then go broke? They don’t think about that. Being Jeff Bezos on a huge yacht is all right. Being centenarian Jeff Bezos working at Five Guys is not. How about being poor, paralyzed Jeff Bezos in a motorized wheelchair because he took a fall on his yacht? How about being weak, old Jeff Bezos with a crooked younger wife who has a power of attorney?

If Bezos is around when the kids with the multicolored hair take over, he will not be rich for long. Has he thought about that?

One of the great things about death is that you get to leave this place. Why would you throw that away? It’s like being 40 and preferring diapers to the toilet.

After praying, I read a Buzzfeed article. It was a collection of things people had written about events that made them realize their families were messed up. It was long, but I couldn’t stop until I read the whole thing

One person wrote about telling her friends a funny story about how her dad hit himself while trying to beat her with a belt. They didn’t get it. Another said it was weird to go to the homes of kids whose parents weren’t hoarders. One wrote about being surprised to find that other people’s parents helped them with school and homework and so on.

It really took me back. It made me realize what bad parents I had.

I hate saying that, because my mother loved me more than she loved herself, and my dad changed completely during his last months on Earth. But it’s true. You can love your child and still be a terrible parent.

Looking back, I wonder what our neighbors thought of the times the cops came to our house and had long conversations with my dad, who was standing in the front doorway in his underwear, drunk. They would try to get him to come out so they could arrest him, but he knew they couldn’t touch him in his house. My sister used to call them when he hit my mother. Eventually, we quit calling.

I also remember the little trips we took with my mother. She would put us in the car and take us to motels in places like St. Petersburg or Key Biscayne. She didn’t tell us why. She took me all the way to Kentucky once.

One day we got home from a trip to the Thunderbird Motel in St. Petersburg, and I ran into the living room to tell my dad all about it. He was sleeping face-down on the couch with no shirt. He opened one eye and stared at me in silence. When my mother came in, he got up and choked her in front of us. Here I was, expecting him to want to hear about our trip.

We lived in several neighborhoods while I was growing up, and while we had plenty of dysfunctional neighbors, none of the other men hit their wives.

I remember going to jail with my mother to pick my dad up. This was in Tampa when I was about 5 years old. I don’t know what he had done. The walls were white. We sat on a wooden bench and waited until they released him.

An elderly black man sat next to us. He started talking to me. He took out a nickel and gave it to me. I guess he felt sorry for me. I tried to give it back, and he said, “That’s your nickel.”

He must have been waiting for someone, too.

I never felt right taking things from people when I was a kid. I always
tried to give them back.

I went to the Coke machine and got myself a drink.

We did almost nothing together as a family. My dad would come home from work, take off his pants, get a drink, and lie on the couch watching TV until he went to bed. I don’t really remember what my mother did. I think she was idle when she wasn’t cooking or cleaning.

On the weekends, my dad went to the golf course.

My mother took some interest in my education. She endured all-night abuse sessions to get my dad to put me in private school so I wouldn’t be a victim of racist violence at our local public schools, and she spoke to a couple of my teachers, but that was it.

My dad never knew my teachers. He did show up for a school play, though. That was strange.

My friends told me their fathers gave them money for good grades. My dad never did anything like that. When I got a bad grade, I heard about it. I never worked to get good grades. I just tried to avoid failing.

I used to give my dad a partial pass on this, because I thought his dad had been trashy. I had heard about his dad getting drunk and beating my grandmother. I figured my dad never got any encouragement when he was young, because his dad was Eastern Kentucky white trash. When my dad was past 80, he told me his dad gave him money for every A he received. There went that excuse.

My dad and his sisters had music lessons. He played high school football. His sisters went to college. I don’t know why my dad didn’t raise his kids. his father died when he was young, but it looks like he taught him some things he didn’t pass on.

I got a degree in physics, and decades later, my dad was still calling me an engineer.

My mother definitely loved me, but she ignored me a lot of the time. She told me to shut up so many times, I started to feel self-concious about joining conversations. She wasn’t a violent person, but I got a fair number of slaps I didn’t see coming, over trivial things.

Here’s something odd: I got slapped when I broke things. If I dropped a plate or a dish, I was likely to be slapped. That never made any sense. My parents could break whatever they wanted, and it was understood that it was no one’s fault. Accidents were unavoidable. At some point in my teens, the standards changed. Somehow, breaking a dish was no longer a slapping offense.

I rarely got spanked. I can remember two spankings. But my dad kicked me in the stomach once, and he used to punch me in the back when he thought I wasn’t walking fast enough.

I would have been a lot better off if I had had defined rules and received a few predictable spankings. It would have given me self-discipline.

My wife’s life was worse. Her parents died when she was young. She was raised by her dad’s family, and they mistreated her. She had relatives who cast spells on her to destroy her. This is a popular pastime in Zambia. Everyone was poor.

Thinking about these things, and how they were caused unnecessarily by other human beings, I started to understand why God would be fed up with our enemies. My own parents, and my wife’s relatives, did us a great deal of damage they didn’t have to do.

I started thinking about how I had inherited my dad’s entire estate. On two separate occasions, he had wills drawn up to cut my sister out, and she did nothing at all to try to get back into his good graces. She got nothing whatsoever, even though she had spent time in shelters.

Recalling my dad’s behavior, and all the abuse my mother and I got from my sister, I realized something: my inheritance was no gift. Unlike most heirs, I was owed every cent. I didn’t work for it, but I was mistreated. What I received was compensation. There was a debt. And the payment was insufficient. It can never make me whole. Any intelligent person would choose a good upbringing over an inheritance.

I have a son on the way, and my biggest concern is for his safety. I am afraid I’ll love him too much. I’m afraid I’ll be overprotective. I’m concerned about all the creatures that will try to destroy him. Spirits, people, and every other type of hostile creation. I’m concerned I won’t do a good job of equipping him.

Now that I have to think about my son’s welfare, I can’t figure out what was going on in my parents’ heads. Where was their dedication? Where was their plan? How could they not feel this way? Isn’t this normal and natural? Even cats teach their young.

I can’t imagine raising a child and not teaching him every day. I can’t imagine not praying with him. How can a parent skip that? Why not just kill your child and get it over with?

How can a parent have no involvement with a child’s education? If you don’t care about your child’s future, you shouldn’t have him. I’m already planning to do homeschooling. I’m not letting the state teach my son it’s wrong to be male or that he should support perversion and hate God. If my son ever has a teacher with rainbow hair and a rainbow flag in the classroom, it will mean I’m dead.

Aside from not introducing me to God, my parents taught me nearly nothing. Did they have something better to do?

I had Jewish friends. Their parents taught them constantly. Take this course. Apply to this college. Save money. Invest. Don’t trust the government. Hide cash.

I was in a carpool with some Jewish kids, and one day while we were on our way to school, the dad who was driving us turned the radio down. He had been listening to the news, and he had heard something he thought was important. He gave us a lecture about the importance of the two-party system. I thought that was crazy. My parents never did anything like that.

Granted, one of his kids grew up to be a real mess, but at least he tried.

I should check. Well, the web says he’s a partner at a law firm in Cleveland. Hope things worked out for him.

The Buzzfeed article brought something home to me in a new and powerful way: not everything is my fault. I try to take responsibility for all the bad things that happen to me so I can have power over them, but the truth is that I have received a great deal of mistreatment in this world. Parents, my sibling, my friends, institutions, teachers, employers, strangers…they have done a lot of rotten things to me. People who should have been helpful were detrimental. Satan worked in them to give me disfavor in order to destroy me, and because I didn’t know God, I was defenseless.

When I got to know God, everything started turning around. I began living a victorious life. I received correction. I was cleaned up. These things are still happening. God keeps improving me. When I prophesy, I hear that he is helping me partly in order to torment my enemies.

Nonetheless, the world is still against me. As Yeshua predicted, it hates my wife and me. Hates us. Wants us to fail. And it also wants us to think it’s fair to us. It wants us to keep trying, playing by its rules, like gambling addicts playing rigged games. That jackpot could come on the next pull of the handle.

I’m right to hate this place and to maintain my distance from the herd. Most of them will be obliterated in the tribulation, and most will burn in hell. God can use me to pull a few aside, but that’s about it. Humanity is not going to change.

What if Kamala Harris gets elected? In that case, Christians can forget about help from their country. Our country will do its best to destroy us. America will be better for us than Indonesia or England, but it will be very hostile.

What if you’re not prepared? What if you don’t pray in tongues and you don’t have God’s full protection? You’ll be in real trouble. Just being a Christian is not enough. A whole lot of Christians just died in floods.

We need to be close to God so he, and not this twisted nation, is our protection and our provider. If you’re with him, you’re in the ark. It doesn’t matter what governments do. He is stronger than governments, and he knows more than they do.

I think God really is about to destroy the enemies of those who are close to him. I don’t think I imagined it.