Landscaping Tips Put my Worries to Rest

I had an interesting morning. A lady from the university extension came out and told me what to do about my landscaping.

When I moved here, I was very reluctant to second-guess the previous owners. They had been very sharp about designing, constructing, and maintaining the house. Their landscaping, on the other hand, looked crazy to me, but I assumed they knew more than I did, so I didn’t want to cause problems by trying to correct them.

I have three citrus trees. They looked bad to me when I moved here, and citrus is disappearing all over America because of an unstoppable blight, but I gave the sellers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was possible to grow citrus in this isolated area, and I just needed the right chemicals. Guess what? My impression was correct. All three trees have citrus greening. There is no cure, and if I plant new trees, they’ll get it, too. It’s time to cut them and drag them away.

The extension agent agrees that some of the hedge choices were dumb, and lots of the plants are so old it’s time to pull them and get new ones. Now I can quit blaming myself for having crazy hedges. I’m going to rip a bunch of plants out with the tractor and replace them with things like podocarpus, which always look great and don’t get woody and hard to trim.

My irrigation system really is stupid; it’s not my imagination. In Miami, lawn sprinklers sprinkle…lawns. They water everything else, too. My system waters shrubs near the house, a small driveway island, and my front gate. The bulk of the yard gets no water. The agent said I should turn the system off, and there is no point in fixing it so it waters the grass. My grass isn’t thin because it’s dry; it’s thin because it’s a crummy type of grass, growing on sandy soil. My hedges don’t need watering.

This is all great news, because my system runs off the same pump that supplies my house. I don’t want to wear it out, and I don’t want to put so much demand on it that it sucks dirt and gravel into my pipes.

The grass is supposed to look bad, so what I thought was a terrible mess is only a moderate mess.

Areas I thought looked bad because of leaf accumulation actually look bad because of shade. The grass here needs a lot of sun. I can fix the rough areas by planting something called crown grass. It’s not real grass, if you ask me. It doesn’t spread. You get big, discrete clumps of three-foot-high grass that cover up your dirt. You can’t kill it, so it’s perfect for me.

She agreed that I had killed a lot of grass. I put ammonium sulfate on it, and she says it does not like that particular chemical. In more positive news, it will grow back.

I have a bare area among some trees in the front yard. She says I need something called “cast iron plants,” so named because they thrive no matter what. They’ll cover the area so I won’t have to go in with the mower and mow the dirt and few little bits of grass.

She confirmed that a mulberry tree will work here. That would be nice. I have a big area with nothing but grass, and a shade tree with edible fruit would be a big plus.

She didn’t like my idea of putting a bamboo wall between my neighbors and me, but under pressure, she admitted it would work. She recommends against it because some people get stuck with bamboo varieties that spread and ruin everything. If I’m confident that the variety I get is non-spreading, bamboo will be a big enhancement to the property.

I have an irritating horse lady across the fence, and she had the gall to suggest I should not shoot in my backyard because it upset her pets. Like would be better if she were invisible.

Now I have to find the plants the agent recommended and put them in my yard. Of course, Home Depot and Lowe’s don’t have them, so I have to look for nurseries. Once I find the plants, I can get to work, and my yard will be much less bother than it is now.

Tooling up for Buffing

Today I’ve been getting up to speed on bench buffers. I bought an old Baldor yesterday, and I need to get it working correctly. I also need things like wheels and compounds.

I learned a lot this morning. I watched a Youtube video from Eastwood. They’ve carved out a place in the market by selling car enthusiasts pretty good tools for very good prices. If you buy Eastwood stuff, you may not get the very best performance and reliability, but you will also get into the game a lot faster and cheaper.

Eastwood has a lot of educational videos. I’ll embed their buffing lecture here.

Here is what I learned:

1. I should get one spiral-sewn cloth wheel for every abrasive I use, except for emery and polishing. Otherwise, I’ll have to use a device known as a rake to clean the compound of of the wheel every time I change abrasives. That isn’t happening. The video guy says you should store your compound and matching wheels together to prevent mixups.

2. I need a hard sisal wheel, several spiral wheels, a loose cloth wheel, and a canton flannel wheel. Sisal is for emery, which is very coarse. Spiral wheels are for tripoli, stainless steel, plastic compound, and red rouge. The other wheels are for polishing with diamond rouge. I may have this wrong, but I should be close.

3. The basic abrasive compounds are emery (coarse), stainless compound, tripoli, plastic compound, red rouge, and white rouge.

I hope I got this right.

My buffer has 3/4″ arbors. Chinese buffers typically have 1/2″ or 5/8″ arbors. That means it’s not easy for me to find wheels. The answer is Caswell Plating. This is a company that sells plating, polishing, anodizing, and oxide-finishing products. I found what I needed (or thought I needed) on their site. I also bought assorted abrasives.

My buffer does not run as smoothly as I would like. It doesn’t screech, but it rumbles a little. I don’t think it should do that. I looked up the bearings for it, and I have a pair on the way. I don’t know if they’ll improve things, but for $14, it’s worth a shot. I suppose there could be something out of balance inside the buffer, but that seems unlikely. It had to get past Baldor QC.

I checked the runout with an indicator, and it’s well under 0.001″. The bearings make a little noise when I rotate the wheels by hand.

To get the bearings off and back on, I’ll have to use my hydraulic press. That may be awkward. I’ll have to hold a long armature and shaft vertically on steel plates. Ordinarily, you could use a bearing puller to remove a bearing, but I would need one with an 8″ reach and a 2.5″ capacity (diameter), and they don’t pop up when I search for them online. Some guys use hammers to remove old bearings and beat new ones on. That seems stupid. I don’t think hitting a new bearing with a hammer can improve it any.

I found out why the buffer has a magnetic switch. It’s a safety thing. If the power goes out while the buffer is running, the magnetic switch prevents it from turning back on when the power returns. It also has some kind of thermal protection, which I didn’t bother reading about.

I don’t really need the switch, but it’s not hurting anything, and it could frustrate a kid who walked by the buffer and tried to turn it on. You can pull the skin off your hand, like a pink, bloody glove, with one of these machines. I suppose it’s nice to know that will be harder for kids to do.

I am trying to figure out what to do about stabilizing the buffer. I’m resisting drilling my floor as hard as I can. Every time I moved the buffer, I would have to drill new holes. Ugly. But buffers are dangerous, and they need to be secured. I could secure it to a heavy bench or something, but then I wouldn’t have that cool Baldor pedestal under it. I could put the pedestal on my bench grinder, however.

The main thing, when you use a buffer, is not to be an idiot. You have to study up on safety and avoid doing stupid things. Not long ago, a well-known knifemaker was buffing a knife, and his buffer took it out of his hands and threw it back to him, right into his heart. Naturally, he died. Sounds like he was standing in the wrong place and holding a small object in his bare hands while buffing. Those are things everyone knows they shouldn’t do. I read stories like that, and I try to plan ahead.

I don’t know if a buffer can hurt you when you stand to the side. I know it’s a lot safer than standing in front of it, waiting to catch whatever it throws. Before I put solid metal wheels on my bench grinder, I always stood to the side when I used it. I try to stay out of the plane of my chainsaws. When I use a table say, I try not to stand directly behind the wood. You do what you can.

Most people, including professionals, bring tools home and flail away with no training and no common sense. It’s awfully unusual to hear about an accident that didn’t involve stupid behavior.

I believe I’ve watched every episode of Forged in Fire. I’ve seen people hold things under a drill press with their bare hands instead of clamping them. I’ve seen people lean over a container of warm, combustible oil while shoving a red-hot knife into it. It’s startling what people who claim to be experienced will do.

When my bearings arrive, I’ll pop them in and see if the buffer sounds better. It pretty much has to, unless something is unbalanced, and that’s unlikely. I could fix something like that if I could find places to remove metal inside the buffer. I don’t expect a problem, however.

I expect to be fully operational within a week.

I forgot to order a wire wheel! I better get on that.

Hope your Sunday is going well. Mine sure is.

Buffer!

I’ve wanted a buffer for a long time. They’re very useful. You can shine things with them. You can also use abrasive flap wheels and wire wheels with them. Great tools. But I was too cheap to spring for a used American buffer, and I had doubts about Asian. The most promising thing I found was a Taiwan Jet buffer for $400 or so.

The Jet would probably have been excellent, but I couldn’t get past my stinginess, so I waited. Recently, I found a used Baldor (American) online. They still make this model. It’s a 332B, with a 3/4-HP motor. It runs at 1800 RPM, and it takes 8″ wheels. It already had a sturdy steel pedestal on it, with shelves.

I offered $250 for it. I think I could have done better, but these days, I try not to be ruthless when I negotiate. Even if I could have gotten it for $150 or so, the $270 asking price was very modest, and $250 was a great deal.

I drove to Orange City today and picked it up. Here are some photos.

It appears it came from a school in Seminole County. A school won’t run a buffer 24 hours a day, and that’s good. On the other hand, a school will let Beavis and Butt-head impersonators run wild with quality tools, and that’s bad. It’s hard to hurt a buffer or bench grinder, though. Basically, three things can happen. The shaft can be bent. The capacitors can die. The bearings can die. If the shaft is okay, the other stuff is chicken…is easy to fix.

I was surprised to find that the person who was selling it online was actually a business. In fact, he was a pawn shop. Had I known that, I probably would have offered less. I pictured some guy selling his precious tools in order to pay bills. In reality, that guy had already sold the tool to the guy I was buying it from.

No matter. Still a good deal.

The buffer had two wheels on it. One was an abrasive flap wheel, and it looks very good. The other was a 4″ cloth wheel with red rouge on it. I don’t know if an 8″ wheel can be eaten down to 4″. I didn’t look closely. Maybe the previous owner had a practice of using 4″ wheels on an 8″ machine.

Took the wheels off and ran the buffer. I can feel a tiny amount of movement when it runs. It feels okay, but when I turn on my Dayton grinder, I can barely feel anything. I don’t know if the Baldor is running normally or whether it needs bearings. I’m working on finding out. It’s silent, so that’s good.

The pedestal has a base about one foot square. It will not be stable enough for buffing. I think I’m going to get two rectangles of plywood and glue them together to get a platform about 1.75″ thick. Then I can put casters under it, far enough apart to make the buffer stable. I don’t want to screw it to the floor. It would be a big problem, having a tool that big stuck in one location.

The buffer has a starter box. I don’t know why a 3.4-HP 115V tool would have a starter box. I’m trying to find out.

I don’t know exactly what I want to do, regarding default accessories. I was thinking I’d put a wire wheel on one side and a cloth wheel on the other. I suppose I’ll need several wheels and several types of abrasive. It’s very easy to change accessories, now that I’ve knocked the nuts off with an impact driver, so it’s not an important decision.

I would like to clean up and restore the buffer, but it’s pretty cool the way it is. It has an inscription on it, indicating it came from a school system down here.

I think I’ll really enjoy this thing. Buffing and wire-brushing are important parts of shop life. Without proper tools to do these things, life is glum.

It turned out the pawnshop was near the home of my goddaughter, so I went for a visit and took everyone for ice cream. She’s 6 now. Her oldest sister is making plans for college. Time just zips by.

I talked with her dad about prayer and so on. He and his wife are doing very well these days. They had some rough times a while back, but they’ve ramped up their prayer efforts, and it’s paying off. I’m hoping they’ll come up in July so we can pray.

Good tools, good friends, and a very pleasant drive. Hard to think of a better way to spend a Saturday.

Fixed Wireless Transports me Forward to 2005

I must say that this is an exciting day. I now have something resembling real Internet capability.

When I moved here with my dad, all we could get was DSL. If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t remember what life was like in 1995.

I probably exaggerate, but DSL is a primitive type of Internet connection that works over a phone wire. At peak speeds, it’s terrible. When your neighbors’ kids are all trying to download porn and free MP3’s at the same time, it slows to a crawl, or whatever is beneath a crawl. My top speeds were something like 1.5 MBPS.

Rural Internet providers don’t have a lot of customers per square mile, so there is no money in running serious cables to every house. This is why the Internet is so slow. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky the phone companies are willing to run wires out here.

A somewhat new alternative has become available: fixed wireless. All it means is “cell phone connectivity for your house.” You get a router which is really a cell phone with no screen. It communicates with a local cell phone tower, and you get whatever speed the tower can provide.

For some reason, the big players don’t sell fixed wireless directly here, even though they provide cell service. You can’t call Verizon and tell them you want an Internet connection. Nonetheless, the towers that provide the service belong to real wireless companies. Small companies buy bandwidth from them and resell it. I can choose among towers operated by or for Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Verizon has a fantastic signal here, but their data cap is pathetic. I would run through it in three days of Youtube. The other companies have true unlimited data. I had to guess which one would give me the best speed when I ordered my plan.

I knew T-Mobile was hopeless here, and I also knew AT&T had a tower down the road, so I rolled the dice with AT&T. Now I have an Internet connection worthy of 2005. It’s not great, but for people who don’t stream porn all day, it’s fast enough. I may look into Sprint.

There used to be some websites I simply could not use except on my phone. They were written badly or something. They took so long to load, they would simply quit. Very annoying. Now I should be able to connect.

The wireless company sent me a router plus a funny-looking directional antenna. I’m supposed to mount it outdoors. I have to figure out where to put it. I know where the tower is. I assume I need to put the antenna as high up as I can, on the side of the house facing the antenna.

It’s very nice to know that if I absolutely had to, I could upload a video to Youtube. Maybe I could even fix things so my security cameras could send me real-time video with a useful level of quality.

I guess I can finally get rid of Centurylink and DSL. That will be great. In addition to the low speed, Centurylink gave me a router which disconnects from my computer for no reason, so when I sit down at the PC every day, I have to go through a routine to make it connect. I look forward to bypassing that mess.

Wow. I may go watch HD cat videos just because I can.

I Rest

Months ago, I had a strange dream. I was on a university campus, looking for a young woman I know. While I was walking around, a strong, warm wind hit me from the front. It lifted me off the ground, and I started flying forward. I got about 25 feet up, and I came to a water oak tree. I held onto the leaves and branches. It felt great.

The wind wasn’t just warm in the physical sense. It was full of emotional warmth, peace, and love. Very much like the feelings I experienced back in the Eighties, when Jesus came to me.

I felt wonderful, resting on the wind. I woke up, and I was face-down in bed, with my chest pressed against the mattress and my hands up and my palms against the sheets.

I’ve been praying for God to help me experience it again. The comfort was wonderful.

On March 1, the day I had the dream, God gave me this word:”Please keep lifting me up on your love.”

I have started having this same sensation while I’m awake. When it comes, I do everything I can to make it last. No matter what position I’m in, I feel as though something soft, firm, and warm is pressing against my upper chest.

For years, I’ve been saying we use drugs and alcohol to simulate the sensation of God’s presence. It’s true. The feeling I get when the warmth and pressure come to me is very much like the feeling you get from a strong opioid painkiller.

It appears that, like drugs, God’s presence is also addictive. I want to hold onto it all day. I don’t want to do anything to make it depart.

Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was like a pearl of great price. A man saw a pearl, and he decided he had to have it no matter what, so he sold all he had and bought it. That’s a great description of habit, which we call “addiction.” A junkie will throw everything away for one more dose. To a junkie, the next does is a pearl of great price. There is symmetry in the supernatural. It makes sense that a person who can get into God’s presence would crave it and give up a lot to hold onto it.

Sometimes it hits me while I’m praying. I’ll be going through my daily list, doing something I consider very important, and I’ll just stop, because something better has arrived. I’ll go quiet inside and just wait and rest.

I can understand why Mary abandoned Martha to look after guests so she could sit at the foot of Jesus and do nothing. There will always be people to mop floors and wash dishes, but how many get to sit with God and be bathed and permeated with his love, peace, and joy?

Jesus said what Mary did was better than what Martha did.

I go through Psalm 91 every day, taking advantage of the promises. Today I looked up the last verse in an interlinear Bible. It says, “With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.” Because I’ve been watching Derek Prince talk about the real meaning of “salvation,” I wanted to know what word the author used. It turns out it’s a variation of the word “yeshuah,” which is closely related to Yeshua, the name of God the Son.

That’s remarkable. God did show me Yeshua, twice.

I feel like I’m stuck here while this lingers. I don’t want to get up and do anything. We’ll see what happens.

The King has Good Credit

I feel like I’ve seen every Derek Prince Youtube in existence. Maybe I have. I know I’ve seen some more than once. It’s helpful to hear them multiple times.

Today and yesterday, I heard him talk about the meaning of “salvation.” This is something that interests me, as I suppose it should. For a long time, I’ve had the idea that “salvation” means more than avoiding hell and going to heaven. Now I know Derek Prince believes the same thing.

It distresses me that the church is so weak. Jesus and his followers did all sorts of wonders, but after he left, things dried up. I don’t know exactly when the church fell into unbelief, but it looks like it may have been during the second or third century A.D.

Ever since the power left us, preachers have been telling us miracles have ceased. What they really mean is, “We are not competent to get miracles, so our answer to the problem is to pretend God has chosen not to provide them any more.” It’s very obvious that God’s supernatural power is still available, and that the cessation story is a lie, because even now, many people receive miracles and visions and so on, but stubborn preachers and their followers continue to deny that God will help us.

One of the weird characteristics of human beings is that we marry ourselves to absurd beliefs. We love telling people this or that can’t happen, even after they’ve seen it happen.

People tell us tongues are “gibberish.” They tell us we imagine our healings. The Jews think there have only been 7 gentile prophets in the history of the world, and they teach that the reason prophecy dried up for them is that in the absence of supernatural activity among idolaters, it wasn’t needed. Supernatural activity among idolaters is rampant today, but there hasn’t been a wave of new Jewish prophets.

When there is no prophecy, it’s not because God took it away because it wasn’t needed; it’s because we’re doing something wrong.

Prince says something which may sound familiar to people who have been conned by prosperity preachers. He says we limit God with our low expectations. Prosperity pimps say this because they want people to think God will give them great wealth in exchange for buying them ridiculous jet airplanes, so talk of limiting God tends to turn smart Christians off, but Prince is right. God wants to do a lot more for us than we think.

God tells the truth, and his word is full of wonderful promises. “There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.” “The Lord is your pastor, and you shall not lack.” “They that seek the Lord shall not lack ANY good thing.” “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.” Psalm 103 says God heals ALL our diseases. Not some. ALL.

Surely promises like these must be true. If we are not experiencing them, God can’t be the problem. He isn’t lying, and he is fully capable of doing what he says he’ll do. No one can stop him.

The New Testament talks about problems believers will have, but it doesn’t contradict God’s promises of help. Here is what I believe: if we have problems here on earth, they must fall into one of two categories: rejection (including persecution) and the baptism with fire.

Rejection is guaranteed. There is no possibility that the world will accept an effective Christian. If everyone you know thinks you’re cool, you’re a spiritual mess, like the boy-band-worthy kid preachers who go on Instagram wearing $7000 basketball shoes.

I don’t think God will require you to go through life being tortured and imprisoned, however. I believe heavy-duty persecution which doesn’t take place at the end of life results from our opening doors to the enemy. We don’t have any record of Jesus being beaten or imprisoned or otherwise abused until it came time for him to be killed, and his killing was something he, not the world, initiated. Paul had a lot of problems, including flogging and stoning, but Paul had problems with pride, and he made mistakes.

We have the idea that all of the apostles and prophets were perfect, but it’s not true. Moses failed to circumcise his son in a timely manner, and God himself tried to kill him. Elijah made the mistake of ridiculing the prophets of Baal, and afterward, God gave Jezebel, a true low-life and loser, power to chase him into the wilderness. I think Paul could have avoided a lot of problems by listening to the Holy Spirit.

John seems to have come out very well, as apostles go. He was exiled to Patmos, where he taught and probably had a wonderful time. He was called back by the emperor Domitian, to be boiled in oil. We are told that John went into the oil and came out unharmed, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. If God wanted to spare John, he surely wants to spare us, too. We just need to let him.

It’s dangerous to assume that doing whatever a Biblical figure did is correct. They did a lot of dumb things. Jesus and, possibly, Enoch and John are the only exceptions I know of. I would not assume that I should suffer a lot here on earth just because some Biblical person did.

Rejection is unavoidable, but it’s not that painful if you’re a man about it. You shouldn’t cry because you feel ostracized by the lost. It’s childish to feel like you have to be invited to attend every party and join every club. The Bible says, “God sets him that is godly apart for himself.” You should accept it and be grateful instead of fighting God.

Outright persecution can be rough, but you can probably minimize it by obeying God. After all, the Bible says, “When a man’s ways please God, even his enemies will be at peace with him.” True, or not true?

The baptism with fire is not like rejection and persecution. You have a great deal of control over it. Many of the bad things that happen to you happen because you’re not listening to God as he tries to purify you. You hold onto people, possessions, activities, and attitudes he hates, and when you do, it’s as if you’re putting a banner outside your house that says, “Welcome, Satan. Give me Diseases and Kill my Children.”

If you keep using tobacco after you get saved, and you get COPD, cancer, strokes, or heart attacks, it’s the baptism with fire. You invited it. If you continue fornicating, and you end up diseased, burdened with kids you don’t want, or shackled to a family court judge, you invited it. If you hold onto yoga, astrology, meditation, channeling, Halloween celebrations, or other forms of idolatry, and you have bad mental health, you invited it. If you’re a feminist, and you’re determined to prove women are supposed to be just as prominent in the church as men, expect problems. You’re trying to tell God how to do things, just like Eve and Lilith.

You need to get cursed objects out of your house. You need to forgive. You need to stop gossiping. You need to repent of worry. You should be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and you should pray in tongues every day. Women should stop fighting and submit to their husbands. Men should pour themselves out for their families and submit to the Holy Spirit. Children should honor their parents. You should seek God’s help in ridding yourself of the demons you’ve been petting and feeding for decades. If you don’t repent instead of just begging God for things, expect to have a much harder life than you should.

Jesus is the pattern for all of us. When, prior to the cross, did he have a major problem? His loved ones had problems, but they weren’t Jesus, so their problems were not his. As far as we know, he, personally, never had a physical illness. He never had mental problems. He was never harmed by anyone. He was never controlled by anyone. He never lacked food, clothing, or shelter. He never lost a battle.

A thousand fell at his side, and ten thousand at his right hand, but it didn’t come near him; only with his eyes did he behold and see the reward of the wicked.

Prince talked about the earthly salvation the Hebrews experienced in the desert. They were surrounded by rocks and sand, in a place where there were no streams. The nights were cold and the days were very hot and dry. Still, look how things went for them. They walked into this area through the Red Sea, but no water got on their shoes. They always had abundant food and water. Their possessions never wore out. Everyone who followed Moses left Egypt in perfect health. They didn’t have a single enemy in the wilderness. They never fought a battle.

It sure looks like God is willing to do a lot for us here on earth.

It appears that we can do a great deal to end our problems by confessing and repenting. When you throw out your old disco albums, for example, you’re not just improving the cultural climate of your house; you’re evicting demons that hurt you and your family.

The natural human tendency is to try to improve life by accumulating things and people. I find I get results from getting rid of things and cutting people off.

Lately, I’ve been praying for God to cut my ties to Eastern Kentucky. I used to be proud I came from that place. I was out of my mind. The culture there is childish. People celebrate juvenile emotionalism. They love violence, ignorance, and drunkenness. They’re stingy as can be. They love verbal cruelty. They have an intense and irrational hatred of black people. They’re very proud, which is amazing, considering they are among the nation’s leaders in areas like toothlessness, financial failure, dependency on welfare, and illiteracy. The hills of Eastern Kentucky are a ghetto.

I loved Kentucky when I was a kid. I thought it was heaven. I loved going to Kentucky, living with my grandparents, and spending time with my mother’s family. It’s a big deal for me to ask God to cut my ties, but I am happy to do it, because he has opened my eyes. Eastern Kentucky is not going to be saved. The people there love immaturity more than God.

Your culture may be just as poisonous. Are you willing to abandon it for God? Maybe you should go ahead and start rejecting, instead of waiting to be rejected.

I hope to move to Appalachia soon, but I think God wants me to go to Tennessee, not Kentucky. Kentucky is not an option. I abandoned the idea of returning many years ago.

I continue practicing prophecy. The Bible tells us to covet prophecy, and God would not tell us to covet it if he didn’t intend to give it to us. He clearly wants us to have it, just as the army wants soldiers to have radios. I can’t refuse him. Imagine how much trouble a soldier would get into for dropping his radio in a ditch. It’s not my decision to make.

I keep hearing remarkable things when I try to prophesy. I hear about promotion and blessings that are coming to me. Startling things. Not easy to accept. The blessings are tremendous, I know I don’t deserve them, and like almost everyone on earth, I am used to living under curses, so it’s hard to think of myself as someone who is surrounded by good. In view of Prince’s sermon and the promises of scripture, however, the things I hear line up with God’s way of doing things. It looks like extraordinary salvation has come to me.

I don’t doubt God, but I do wonder about myself. I have a vivid imagination, and I am capable of making things up and thinking God said them. I won’t publish all the things God seems to have said yet. I hope I’ll eventually be secure enough to know what I hear is right.

A year or two back, God told me this: “There are no limits.” I wonder if he was referring to what I’m discussing now.

When God says he will bring me promotion, I don’t think he’s talking about fame. I certainly hope not. I don’t think he means he’s going to have me speak in front of big congregations or work in a church. The Bible says he gives us the desires of our hearts, and these are things I desire to avoid, pretty intensely. I think he just means he’ll make me effective with regard to the people I’m supposed to reach. That’s all I want. If I had to run a church or fly around speaking at conferences, I’d feel like I had been sent to prison.

I’d like to have a pleasant, quiet life and reach a few people for God. I’d prefer that to the wealth of Croesus.

Goodbye, Billie Holiday

Yesterday was a good day. I got rid of most of my jazz albums.

A year or two ago, I put all my blues CD’s in bags and took them to the dump. It was somewhat unpleasant, but I also felt unburdened. I knew God didn’t like them, and that they opened doors to spirits that hated me. At that time, I didn’t feel compelled to get rid of my jazz, but a while back, I started to feel it was time.

I talked to my young friend Travis about it. He’s a jazz musician. The thought of getting rid of jazz recordings disturbed him, but he took notice of something. Many jazz musicians have had filthy, ungodly lives. I agree.

Chet Baker was a junkie and a sociopath, and he killed himself by jumping or falling out of a window. Billie Holiday was a junkie. Louis Armstrong was a marijuana addict who destroyed his talent with drugs. Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death. Thelonious Monk was mentally ill. Miles Davis was a wife beater who had drug problems. John Coltrane was a zealous Buddhist; so was Maynard Ferguson.

Heroin addiction has been so common among jazz musicians, it almost seems mandatory.

If you want to make it in jazz, what do you have to do? Play in bars. There is no way to avoid it. You can’t start out at Carnegie Hall. Bars, other than male-only establishments, were created to facilitate fornication. We don’t say that out loud, but it’s true. The secret to making a bar succeed is to attract women, not men. When women come, men follow in hopes of fornicating with them, and men pay the checks. You can look this up.

Centuries after Eden, women still lead men to perdition. We are supposed to lead. Without God, men are followers.

Jazz is not godly music. That’s obvious. You may cite exceptions. Dave Brubeck tried to create Christian jazz; he was a Catholic. But he wasn’t listening to the Holy Spirit. It was a carnal idea.

I don’t know how much jazz I had. When I cleaned out a USB drive containing all the albums I had ripped, Windows said I had gotten rid of 680 items, and I know I didn’t have all my albums on the drive.

I had two huge Art Tatum box sets. I had Billie Holiday. I had Dinah Washington. I had a set of Lionel Hampton LP’s in great condition. I haven’t located the Art Tatum sets, but when I do, they’re gone. The other things are already in the landfill where no one will ever see them again.

While I was at it, I came across Etta James, and I got rid of her albums, too.

I was allowed to keep a few things. I had some Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. I have an Ella Fitzgerald box set. There is very little left, though.

You can’t have objects that displease God. He has helped me to understand that having such an object is like painting a sign on your wall, welcoming demons to toy with you and dominate you.

We hold onto things like pornography, astrological paraphernalia, playing cards, dope, items related to yoga, and idols we think of as art, and when problems come, we pray to God for help, while holding onto the things that hold the door open for Satan. It doesn’t make much sense.

I’ve thrown many things out. I threw out my dad’s Masonic stuff (freemasonry is an occult religion). I threw out a treasured souvenir figurine he and my mother got on a trip to Italy. I threw out expensive porcelain because the shapes represented evil things. I threw out thousands of dollars’ worth of Cuban cigars. I’m glad it’s all gone. I’m glad no one else will ever have it; it would just poison them as it did me.

I have an expensive Muslim prayer rug in Miami. I told my house-sitter to get rid of it.

When the apostles taught in Ephesus, converts made a big pile of religious books worth a great deal of money, and they burned it. Paul didn’t say, “Let’s keep them as investments.” He didn’t say, “They have important historical value.” He didn’t make the excuses we would make today.

Here’s a good thing to know about spending time, money, and effort on ungodly things: the more you invest, the more you will lose when you finally repent and have to get rid of what you’ve built. It’s best not to invest much.

Derek Prince told an interesting story. He inherited some Chinese art from his grandfather. It consisted of two depictions of dragons. They were worth a lot of money, and they had great sentimental value. God asked him what a dragon represented in the Bible. Knowing the answer, Prince got rid of the artwork.

At the time, Prince was having a problem with inherited property. I can relate. Like me, he had irresponsible relatives who kept delaying the distribution of some of his wealth. When he got rid of the dragons, the wealth was released. I believe I have delayed God’s help by holding onto counterproductive music. Things are going great for me, but I have some nagging problems that resist resolution. I want to see what happens now that I’ve cleared away some supernatural obstacles.

God hates carnality. Anything you create, without being told to do so by God, is a carnal work. All carnal works will eventually be burned, and it won’t just be things like jazz compositions. Many Christians have done carnal works in God’s name. They’ve written Christian books God will burn in front of them. They’ve built churches and orphanages God didn’t want them to build. When the world is judged, all that stuff will be destroyed. People will come to God full of confidence, thinking he’s impressed by their works, but he will destroy what they’ve created and tell them it was the result of iniquity.

Might as well start the destruction while you’re alive, instead of waiting until it’s too late to do anything to purify your life.

No one in heaven listens to Lionel Hampton or Dizzy Gillespie. No one listens to rock, the blues, disco, or rap. It’s wrong to try to hold onto these things here on earth.

It may well be that all of the jazz giants I enjoyed are in hell right now, never to be heard from again.

The Lord’s Prayer says, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We’re supposed to bring a little bit of heaven into the earth. We’re not supposed to bring worldly things into our godly lives. It’s perversion. We can’t live here without getting a little soiled, but there is no excuse for increasing the problem unnecessarily.

I suppose people say I’m a fanatic, but so was Jesus. He was, and is, much more fanatical than I am. Enoch was a fanatic. Noah was a fanatic. Moses, the other prophets, John, Paul, Peter, Stephen…all fanatics. We’re supposed to be fanatics. The Bible says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Nothing ambiguous there. I may seem fanatical, but I don’t begin to approach that standard.

I wonder what else I have that I should destroy. I don’t want any more signs on my walls, inviting my enemies and granting them permission to harm me.

Do More With Dumore

Yesterday was productive. Spiritual progress began while I was still in bed; God helped me to be very effective in my time with him. Natural progress started before I left the bedroom. I had some problems with the recorder’s office in Dade County, as well as the Florida Revenue Department. People from both organizations called, and their errors were corrected. It’s not easy to call them yourself. You have to wait forever on hold. Much better when they call you.

I also fixed my TV before starting the day. I have a 55″ TV in my bedroom. In the past, I chose not to have a bedroom TV because it seemed inappropriate, but now that I use TV’s to listen to Julie True and watch Christian videos, it’s a different story. I got a Roku TV a few months ago. Unfortunately, it had started to make buzzing sounds when I played music.

I found that when I pressed my finger against the back of the TV in a certain area, the buzzing stopped. That meant something was touching the inside of the panel. I put the TV on my bed and opened it up. I found that a lot of wires and cables were stabilized with cheap vinyl tape, and one data ribbon was twisted unnecessarily, bringing it closer to the rear panel. I removed the cable, took the twist out, and reinserted it. Then I added a couple of pieces of Gorilla Tape. I put them on things that looked like they could vibrate against the cabinet. Bang. Problem solved.

I believe I would have gotten more done yesterday, but I had some issues with a weed eater and rotary tool I ordered. The weed eater’s box had been torn open, and things were missing. I contacted the manufacturer and the company that sold it to me. I ordered a new weed eater. Today the one I received goes back.

The rotary tool didn’t work out at all.

I have a Dremel I got in about 1995, and it has had a number of problems. It pooped out while I was using it to burnish the edge of a holster, so I Googled around to see who made good new rotary tools. I figured Proxxon was the answer. I already have one, and it seems okay. I learned that people often complain about the electronics failing, so I gave up on Proxxon.

I decided to go with the reviewers, and I bought a Dremel 4300 kit. I paid $100, and when the tool arrived, it turned out to be useless. I put my leather burnisher in it, and as soon as I turned the tool past 15000 RPM, it went nuts. It started screeching, and the tool wobbled in the chuck. There was no way to make it work. I tried a collet, and I got the same result. The same burnishing tool works fine in my Proxxon, and it worked fine in the old Dremel, so my best guess is that the one I bought is defective. If not, the design is incompetent. I’m sending it back. I started looking for options again.

It appears that no one on earth makes a good corded consumer-grade rotary tool. There are Dremel and Proxxon, and then there are the Chinese clones. I looked for tools made by real companies like Makita and Dewalt, but there was nothing. Milwaukee makes a cordless job which is probably good, but I’m tired of chargers.

I decided to check out Dumore. This is a company that makes industrial tools like tool post grinders. Their products are extremely expensive. A simple Dremel-like tool will run you over $300, and it won’t work with all of Dremel’s gadgets. On the other hand, they run for lifetimes, not weeks.

You can get a used Dumore inexpensively on Ebay. Oddly, the same tools that sell for over $300 new routinely sell for between $50 and $100 in fairly good condition. I checked the Dumore parts site, and things like bearings are not expensive. The highest price I saw was somewhere over $30, and most bearings I saw cost $4.41 each. Bearings and switches are the only things in a Dumore than can be expected to fail with any frequency (I think), so I don’t see any reason to be afraid to buy used. I would guess it’s unusual for the windings to fail.

Most or all of the Dumores I’ve seen don’t have variable speed, but this can be fixed with a simple, cheap external controller, so it doesn’t matter. A foot pedal is a nice addition to a rotary tool. You can put it down without handling the switch.

The Dremel is going back to Amazon, and my next rotary tool will be a Dumore. No more playing around.

Dremel prices keep going up, but the quality doesn’t keep pace. It’s strange that companies like Makita and Milwaukee haven’t gone into competition and exterminated Dremel.

I got the rotary tool mess fixed yesterday, and I also succeeded in burnishing the edge of my latest knife sheath, so it’s finished, but for improvements I may make later. I used the Proxxon.

I keep thinking I should get a Foredom eventually. This is a quality rotary tool with a flex shaft. I have a Chinese clone which works very well, but I know I’ll eventually want a second flex tool.

It appears that today will be productive, too. I already re-worked a lease with the lady who helps me rent properties, and I had a very powerful prayer session before I left the bedroom.

God willing, it won’t rain today, and I’ll be able to mow the yard.

I love it when God helps me get things done.

The Democrats Booed God; Trump’s People Pray in the Name of Jesus

Here is something I didn’t expect to see. Torben Sondergaard and his friends from The Last Reformation attended a Trump rally in Orlando yesterday. These are the people who baptized me in December.

Apparently, the rally started with a long prayer in the name of Jesus, in which numerous scriptures were cited.

Remarkable. I hope God rewards Donald Trump and his family by helping them to be saved and filled with the Holy Spirit.

Heinous Retaliation Soon to Commence

The excitement here never lets up. Today I expect my new weed eater to arrive.

I know people call them “trimmers” because “Weed Eater” is a trademark, not a description, and Wikipedia says Weed Eater was swallowed by another company and turned into Husqvarna AB. I don’t care. I call them weed eaters.

Why am I buying a weed eater when I already have one? Simple. I bought the wrong one because of a lack of confidence.

I hate dealing with ethanol-tainted gas. Ethanol is a scam which hurts everyone except a few greedy farmers and politicians, and it ruins carburetors and other machine parts. I bought an electric weed eater in order to avoid dealing with carb varnish. I got an EGO trimmer, which uses a huge lithium battery.

The trimmer works well, but let’s face it: it’s not a 30-cc gas trimmer. Also, the batteries only run something like 20 minutes, and I have a big property. I can replace the battery as needed, but then what if I want to use the EGO hedge trimmer and the edger on the same day?

I decided to write off my loss and get an Echo trimmer. I ordered a monster. It’s the second-biggest one they make. It’s crazy powerful, and it weighs two pounds less than the EGO.

I also ordered blades for it. String trimmers are great, but once woody weeds get over 3/8″ thick, you have problems. The answer is to mount a circular saw blade on your trimmer. You can zip through limbs 3″ thick with a blade. It’s amazing. You can see people do it on Youtube.

The blades will fill a gap in my yard-machine armory. I have a hedge trimmer, and it’s okay for light trimming, but if you want to cut a hedge back one or two feet, it’s not good. When you drop down into a hedge’s lower regions, you run into thick limbs, and they don’t cooperate with hedge trimmers.

I have a number of hedges which I think are too high. I want to take some of them down two feet. I want to take others down a foot. This would be a nightmare with a hedge trimmer. I’m hoping the weed eater and blades will massacre the thick stems without much effort.

The people who used to own this place let the hedges rise up over the lower panes of the windows. That seems wrong to me. If you told your builder to put your windows at a certain height, presumably, you didn’t plan to block the panes and stare at the backs of your hedges all day. I want to see some of the land I paid for. My plan is to cut the hedges six inches below the window sills.

The blades should also be nice for getting rid of grapevines in the woods near the house. They’re so thick it’s hard to walk in some areas, and they also provide great cover for rattlesnakes to hide while you approach them.

Thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to buy a series of blades until I find the one that works. There are a number of people who have tested blades on Youtube. One guy actually put together a chart showing which blades did what best. What you want is a pair of Renegade blades. You want a 32-tooth blade and an 80-tooth blade.

I guess you could buy circular saw blades at Home Depot, but the ones modified for weed eaters have holes drilled in them to make them lighter.

Once I have the new weed eater set up, I’ll be able to use it for everything except trimming near things I don’t want to cut. They would destroy things a string would bounce off of. Because I still have the lithium weed eater, I suppose I can use it for string trimming and leave a blade on the new one.

I wondered if I should get the very meanest trimmer Echo made, but it was considerably more expensive, and it seemed like overkill, based on what I had gleaned from the web. People are getting very good results with trimmers smaller than the one I ordered.

I hear UPS outside. That guy must think I’m nuts. He’s here like 4 days a week. He’ll have to deal with it. I’m not going to drive half an hour so I can spend more in a real store and not get the exact product I need.

It will be nice having my hedges under control. I don’t want my house to look like the Addams mansion.

Now if I can Just Get it to Cast Itself into the Sea

God has given me another productive day. The trick is to pray, curse your problems, and bless your efforts, in the name of Jesus Christ, BEFORE the problems pop up.

I’ve been working on three stubborn stumps in my front yard. I got one out this weekend, and then yesterday, I went after another one, and I got a bonus. I located a huge rock near a stump, and I managed to get it out of the ground and move it out of the area. I also succeeded in removing the second stump.

Today I went after the third stump. I prayed for help. I spoke the Lord’s opposition to the difficulty of removing it, and I spoke his help to me. After maybe 90 minutes’ work with the subsoiler, drill, sawzall, and Root Assassin, the stump surprised me by surrendering suddenly. It popped out of the ground for no obvious reason.

Here it is. I may have it bronzed.

I bent the tabs that connect the subsoiler to my hitch. I don’t know how I did that. My tractor is not big, so you would think it wouldn’t be able to bend what appears to be 7/16″ plate. I don’t care, however, because the subsoiler still works, and even if it didn’t, the amount I paid for it is a lot lower than the cost of having people come in and remove stumps and rocks. I don’t care if I break three of these a year.

Now there are no stumps in the area where I was working, and a big rock which would have caused problems is gone. I have three little blackberry plants ready to go in the ground. I just have to get more soil. When I began this project, I didn’t know I’d have four huge holes to fill.

I’m wondering if I should put clay or some kind of waterproof material in the bottoms of the holes, to retain water. The dirt here drains way too fast.

The Internet, which never lies, says blackberry roots don’t go deeper than 10″. I could put pieces of tarp down about 15″ and then put soil and plants over them. I wonder if anyone has tried this.

I also finished sewing my second knife sheath. I bought a Lionsteel M4 with olive wood handles, and the sheath that came with it wasn’t right for my jeans. This sheath was harder to sew than the first one. I don’t know why. Anyway, here’s a photo.

I still have to finish up the edges. Right now, the sheath is drying. I wet it down and molded it around the knife’s handle so it would hold the knife in place without a strap. I may have to add a strap later, though. That’s okay. The stitching is not great, and I may redo it. If I do that, I’ll have a good opportunity to add a strap with a snap.

I sharpened several knives. I bought a Cold Steel Swift with CTS-XHP steel. Cold Steel doesn’t use CTS-XHP any more because they can’t get a reliable supply, so it’s getting hard to find these knives. I found one on Ebay for something like $20 below the street price, so I had to buy it. Yesterday, I used it to trim a piece of leather, and it went dull right away. I had to do something.

My understanding is that manufacturers supply defective edges on knives. They sharpen them with belts, and they do it too quickly, softening the steel on the edges. This gives you a very sharp knife which gets dull fast. I think this is what happened to the Swift. Cutting the leather shouldn’t have affected it at all.

I got out my diamond hones and a weird ceramic hone, and I touched it up. Did I get rid of the soft steel? I don’t know. I’ll keep using it. If it gets dull fast, I’ll know the answer.

It’s so sharp now, it’s creepy. The fact that it sharpened up so fast may indicate that the edge is still soft.

The Swift is a very, very nice knife, but it’s an assisted-opening design. You open it part of the way with a little button on the blade, and then a spring slams it open the rest of the way. I don’t like that. I can open a knife just fine by flicking my wrist. Using a spring seems dangerous.

The whole point of buying a steel like CTS-XHP is to avoid frequent sharpening, so I hope the knife isn’t a dud. I have a Gerber Gator II with cheap steel, and it’s a great knife, but for the fast dulling. I paid $15 for it. If I’m going to get cheap-steel performance, I might as well pay cheap-steel prices. The Gator II is indestructible, and it has a very comfortable handle.

I also sharpened my Entrek sheath knife. I have seen the way Ray Ennis sharpens these knives when he makes them, and I don’t think it’s their best feature. Apart from the heating issue, the knife, as it came from the factory, didn’t seem to want to bite into things.

I have DMT diamond stones, but I didn’t use them. I like kitchen-style hones. I have them in two diamond grits, plus the ceramic one and two steels. They seem to work just as well as stones, and they’re easier to use. Also, you don’t have to use liquid.

On top of all this, got a lot of business done. Leases for rental properties and so on. And I stocked up on groceries. Breakfast was sub-optimal this morning because I was running low on things. I had three fried eggs with cheddar cheese, plus whole wheat toast. I had been planning to eat fresh vegetables, boiled eggs, pita, and so on.

Tomorrow, the sheath for the Lion Steel knife should be dry, and after a little finishing, I should be able to use it. I want to get used to going out in public with a sheath knife. I feel conspicuous, but open carry is 100% legal, and I prefer sheath knives to folding knives.

Time to shower up and spend time with the birds. Hope your day was as good as mine.

Stump Removal isn’t for Sissies

Today I would have to say the smug-o-meter is pretty much pinned. I just used the Kubota to yank a stump and a very big rock from my front yard.

My yard is full of oaks and large rocks. I believe it was last year that it occurred to me that I could remove them using a subsoiler attached to the tractor. A subsoiler is the same thing as a middle buster, but it has a narrow blade. I figured I could hook things from below and use the hydraulics to pull them up. It works a good percentage of the time.

I have some blackberry plants that have to be transplanted, and as of last Friday, there were three stubborn stumps in the area where I wanted to put them. Friends came to visit, and as city people often do when they visit farms, they got excited about outdoor work, and they volunteered to help me out.

Here’s a photo of my friend and his 13-year-old son working on the stump’s roots with a maul. Notice who is doing the work. I know it seems harsh to make a kid swing a maul in the sun, but we had to, because my friend’s wife was in the house.

We used the tractor, a maul, a drill with a 1″ bit, a sawzall, and a tool called a Root Assassin. This is a short shovel with weird features intended to make it useful for digging up roots. The tip is forked and sharpened to catch roots and cut them, and the sides of the shovel are serrated so they cut whatever they slide past. The blade is long and skinny so it goes deep without a lot of resistance.

It’s a pretty decent tool. It’s expensive, but I think it was a good buy. Obviously, it wasn’t going to cut 3″-thick oak roots, but it was a dandy tool for finding them and moving dirt away from them so they could be cut with other tools.

We worked for quite a while. Finally, I remembered an important step. I told everyone we had to use our supernatural tools. We prayed, and I spoke defeat to the difficulty of removing the stump. A little while later, it surprised me by yielding to the subsoiler. I was amazed. I had been expecting it to continue resisting for at least another day.

Today I decided to go out alone and work on the stumps. It has been raining a lot, so the dirt is wet. I figured that would give me a big advantage. Dry dirt holds onto things much better. This time, I was smart. I remembered to invoke God’s power before I started, and it paid off.

I took the tractor to a fresh stump and made passes beside it at various distances, figuring I would sever the roots where they were thinner. Right beside a stump, roots are thick and strong, but they taper off quickly as you move farther out. They’re easier to cut, and if you can pull them with the tractor, you get good leverage, and you may twist the stump loose.

The first stump I worked on today surprised me. I made a few passes beside it, and then I yanked on the stump itself. Up it came. I was thrilled. Nothing is more frustrating than a stump you can’t get rid of.

The second stump is still out there. It was a lot more determined to stay where it was. I kept moving around it, finding and popping roots. I moved so much dirt, I couldn’t see the stump clearly. Toward the end, I realized I had moved away from the stump, and I was actually pulling on a huge rock. It was coming loose from the ground. I would say it was a little smaller than a typical ottoman. Very heavy.

This was pretty exciting. I hadn’t realized there was a rock there. I hate underground rocks, and I was planning to put blackberries where this one was, so getting rid of it would be a major coup. I was surprised to see such a big rock coming loose. It dwarfed the biggest one I had already pulled.

The rock was too big to pull out of the hole with the subsoiler. When I really tried, I broke the shear pin. I decided to use a rope. I got myself some 5/8″ rope and tied it around the rock, which, fortunately for me, was peanut-shaped. The small waist allowed me to attach the rope so it wouldn’t slide off.

I put a loop in the other end of the rope and put it over one of my tractor’s forks. The tractor picked the rock right up. It wasn’t happy about it, but it did the job. The loader is rated for 1500 pounds, and the forks probably weigh 300, so I had 1200 pounds of capacity to play with.

I was ecstatic when the rock came off the ground. Just before it left the ground, I thought about the fact that it was going to be swinging on a rope. I tried to prevent it from swinging toward me, but it was too late. It whacked the tractor. The people at Kubota were way ahead of me, however. The heavy bumper took the hit with no damage at all.

Moving the rock to my rock collection area was interesting. I had to sort of roll it onto the forks, and then I tilted the forks back so it rolled toward the bucket. As I drove to the dumping area, the tractor pitched and rocked every time I hit a bump.

The rock is now resting safely among my other trophies. I need to start selling them to landscapers.

The stump is still in the yard, but I think it will yield readily now that it can’t rely on its friend the boulder for support. I may fill the voids with pricey potting soil instead of relocating dirt from the pasture. Might as well give the blackberries every advantage.

Man, it’s nice when tools do what they should.

I don’t know why the rock looks so small in the pictures. It’s a good three feet long. More, really. It must look small in the first picture because most of it is in a hole.

Maybe tomorrow I can get rid of the last stump, and then I can get the blackberry plants off my patio. That would be nice.

Paul Exposed Crooked Preachers, and so Should You

I hope your weekend was as good as mine. I couldn’t ask for a better one.

I have a long list of prayers I repeat every day. It includes a prayer for God to make my property a place where people gather to serve him. I ask him to make it a place where the sick are healed, the dead are raised, demons are driven out, and good doctrine is taught. I ask him to make it a place where people spend time with him. He’s making it come true. I’ve baptized three people here, and this weekend, friends from Miami came up for prayer.

My friends have been planning to come since May. I wrote about them then. I referred to them as Archie and Edith, and I called their kids Mike and Gloria. Archie was an armorbearer at Trinity Church in Miami, and he then served in some capacity or other at New Dawn Ministries. Edith was involved in both churches. They were at New Dawn when the pastor confessed to molesting a young girl over and over.

It’s bad to dwell on the past for no constructive reason. I emphasize “for no constructive reason.” There are good reasons to talk about people’s bad deeds, even after you’ve forgiven them. One good reason is to undo the harm those people continue to do.

Corrupt preachers tend to gaslight. When people correct them and expose their misdeeds, they will say they’ve been attacked by Satan. They’ll say the people who exposed them are liars. They’ll say the whistle-blowers are persecuting God’s prophets. Brainwashed and/or dishonest people who support them will attack the messengers, too. It can take years to refute the lies and undo the division lying preachers cause. This weekend, we talked a lot about the pastors at Trinity Church and New Dawn.

Many times, I have felt bad about discussing these people. I’ve wondered if I was gossiping. I’ve wondered if I was unforgiving. I’ve wondered if I was too hard on them. The amazing thing is that it always turns out I’ve gone way too easy on them. Also, I continually learn that they still have victims who need to have the truth put in front of them. It appears that what I do is correct.

The pastor at New Dawn started molesting a girl when she was 6. Perhaps it was earlier, but 6 is the lowest number which has been revealed publicly. One of the girl’s friends learned about it when the victim was in her teens. She told the victim’s mother. The mother blew up and told the pastor she would not have him prosecuted, provided he quit preaching. The pastor confessed to the church and stepped down. Then a few weeks later, he insisted on returning to the pulpit, and he also collected offerings. The victim’s mother had him charged, and now he’s doing three years.

It’s a remarkable example of supernatural pride destroying a person. The pedophilia didn’t do him in; he had a way to avoid prosecution. He was brought down by pride. He refused to humble himself and accept the kindness of the victim’s mother.

Imagine yourself in the same situation. Is there anything you would refuse to do, in order to stay out of prison? He could have been put away until he was in his seventies.

I’ve written about this before, but now I’ve learned that the pastors were even worse than I believed. After the crimes were revealed, distressed people talked to the pastor’s wife, who has since died, and she told them to “get over it.”

This was a woman who had two children of her own, as well as two grandchildren. The victim herself was a close relative.

What can you say about an attitude like that? It’s inhuman. It goes far beyond what you would think a rational person could be capable of.

In many charismatic churches, all of a head pastor’s relatives are automatically pastors. This goes against God’s will, but it’s true. At New Dawn, the pastor and his wife were called “Pastor” and “Pastora.” Pastora was very brassy and forceful. She wore the pants. Pastor was lazy. A close relative said he did nothing but sit on the couch. The church was only open maybe 7 hours a week. Like many lazy men, Pastor took off his pants and gave them to his wife, and she wore them with great zeal and a complete sense of entitlement.

A married woman should not confront men and scold them publicly. This should be obvious to any Christian. Pastora had a husband to deal with other men, but because she was so pushy, she did it herself. She used to chide and “correct” me on social media, where everyone in the church, including children, could read it. She had no idea how a woman was supposed to behave.

She was in charge of their social media presence. In all likelihood, it was she who blocked me on Facebook, without notice or explanation. I doubt Pastor knew how to work Facebook.

She got very full of herself. She started criticizing Edith’s clothing, which was perfectly normal. You can tell your 12-year-old daughter how to dress, but you don’t go up to a married woman with children and tell her she what to wear, just because she and her husband attend a church your husband pastors. Edith had to send her an email, putting her in her place.

I also learned that someone in the church officialdom (which consisted of 6 people) approached Archie and told him he needed to stop communicating with me. Archie won’t say who it was, but it obviously wasn’t the pastors, and two of the former bigwigs are my friends, so it’s not hard to figure out.

New Dawn was a cult, and cults have to be exposed. Pushing members to ostracize people who disagree with a church’s leadership is classic cult behavior. Mormonism is a cult, and the Mormons are famous for choking people off socially and economically.

The pastor had a brother-in-law I will call Walter. I will call his wife Maude. Walter was a new Christian. He came to the USA illegally from Honduras, a country known for terrible morals and a very high murder rate. Before Walter and Maude came along, the pastor’s brother George and his wife Weezy handled the church’s business. George left because he was afraid someone would be prosecuted over the way the church mishandled money. That left an opportunity for Walter. He was a relative of the pastors, so he was automatically a prophet and trusted advisor.

Walter used to go off on me on Facebook, telling me I spoke like “the voice of God” and so on. He got very angry over some revelations I posted. God showed me that illegal immigration was a curse based on a nation’s disobedience, and I wrote about it, and Walter, having zero humility, started arguing with me online. He was very angry; he said I was calling his family a curse. He couldn’t step back and look at the situation or consider the possibility that he was trying to refute knowledge that had come to be from God.

If your family’s presence in a country is a curse, you should be a man about it and accept the truth. The Bible makes it very clear that porous borders and invasions come from disobedience.

Walter didn’t understand what revelation was. As a recent convert to Christianity, with an inadequate prayer life, he didn’t hear from God much. He would say things like, “My personal revelation is…” He thought opinions were revelation. There are no opinions in heaven. There is only the truth. God tells others the truth, and that’s that. When someone gets a revelation from God, it’s not their subjective view. Walter didn’t get that.

Walter scolded the people who left New Dawn after Pastor was arrested. They were completely correct to stop supporting a pedophile pastor; I shouldn’t have to point that out. Walter put something on Facebook that said something like, “What do the sheep do when the shepherd is struck? Run?” He was way out of line a lot of the time.

I don’t know if Walter told people to shun me, but he and his wife are the only possibilities among the inner circle.

Carnal people ruin churches. The Holy Spirit tells everyone the same things, and when we listen, he prevents conflict. When one person is listening to God and another is listening to his own pride, conflict is inevitable. Walter was very proud, and he had a short fuse. He believed in hard work and forcing things to happen through effort. Naturally, the church he was trying to force to survive collapsed in disgrace, along with the pastor’s family.

I’ve learned new things about the leadership at Trinity Church as well. A friend of mine was hit by a car while sitting on a bus bench. A lady who was also on the bench was killed, and I believe one victim lost both legs. The accident made the news in Miami, so naturally, the pastors rushed to my friend’s bedside, where there might be cameras. Rich Wilkerson sent my friend to an attorney, but he never sued. I believe the idea was to sue the city for failing to protect bus stops.

My friend’s brother told me about it. When the family talked to the attorney about what his fee was going to be, it was more than they expected. When they asked why, he said he had to give part of the money to Wilkerson. This is what I was told, anyway. Knowing the Wilkerson family, I believe it.

In Florida, a lawyer can’t split a fee with a non-lawyer; it’s illegal and unethical. Also, what kind of pastor would take money from a young man with a broken pelvis?

Archie said he was present to see another well-known Wilkerson gaffe. A car thief named Alex Nicolas drowned while fleeing the police, and Alex went to Trinity. He as a big part of the music team. He had a lot of wealthy Jewish friends. Trinity hosted the funeral, and Wilkerson asked for an offering, which did not go to help the family. This is what more than one source tells me.

Archie said he and Edith got up and left the funeral.

What else have my former pastors done? How much worse can the revelations get? And how did people like this end up running churches? No wonder God is bringing an end to the church age and moving people to small groups. It can’t happen fast enough. We don’t need big churches at all. They cause problems.

The things we talked about this weekend were awful, but it was nice to have the clouds of lies and secrecy dispersed. I suppose this is the fate of liars and scoundrels everywhere. If you never come clean, people will have God’s go-ahead to rehash your sorry history forever, and it will not count as gossip.

Look at the Bible. It’s full of unflattering stories about people, and those stories are not gossip.

When you come clean and repent, people forgive you, and everyone heals. Then if anyone talks about what happened, it’s so they can give a testimony of what God did to help everyone after the offenders did the right thing. If you continue to defend yourself and lie, it’s as if you’re pushing a splinter deeper into your flesh. The infection will persist, and pieces of the splinter may keep coming out for the rest of your life.

My former pastors deserve to be exposed over and over, and the people they’ve hurt need to keep talking about them in public.

We had a wonderful prayer session. Archie and Edith go to a church the belongs to Calvary Chapel, which is a pretty dry organization. Calvary discourages the manifestations of the Holy Spirit, which are vital to the health of a church. Archie and Edith had let their prayer lives go, and things were not going well for them. They missed God because they weren’t encountering him at Calvary Chapel. I told them everything I had learned which could help them, and before you know it, we were praying in tongues and worshiping in the living room.

I could see how thirsty they were for God’s presence. I get that thirst, too, every day. It’s much worse after months without rain.

To top things off, someone who was present got baptized with the Holy Spirit and prayed in tongues for the first time. That made my day. You will only get so far without the gifts of the Spirit. You have to get over the hump and speak in tongues if you ever want to get past the baptism with fire and live in peace.

While my friends were here, God showed me I was under the influence of spirits of strife and opposition, not to mention cowardice, which caused me to worry. I now fight these spirits by name. It brings tremendous peace.

It’s as though I got a reward for hosting my friends.

Don’t be concerned if your church is poisonous. Just leave. God doesn’t require you to belong to a church; he requires you to know him, spend time with him, hear from him, and obey him. If you can find 4 people to worship with, you have plenty. The main thing is for everyone to be equally yoked. One egomaniac can ruin everything for the whole group, and it’s important to cut people off when they come between you and God.

If a person with authority in the church is using you, or they used you in the past and have never come clean, go ahead and tell people about him or her. Don’t let the cockroaches hide in the dark. Expose them so they can’t hurt anyone else.

At Least I’m not Talking to the Wallpaper

My painful (as always) trip to Miami and the sale of a house disrupted my life over the last two weeks, so now I’m trying to regain balance. I’m cleaning up the house and taking care of bills and so on. Both robot vacuums (Kim and Kourtney) are currently prowling the residence.

A fun item arrived via UPS today. I now have a Lionsteel (Or is it “Lion Steel? They send mixed signals.) M4 sheath knife in M390 steel, with olive wood scales.

I wanted a small sheath knife for everyday carry, so I bought a Lionsteel M1. It turned out to be the size of a small paring knife, and that’s a little too small. I don’t know if I’ll send it back, but I’m not going to carry it every day.

I could have gotten indestructible G10 scales on the new knife, but olive wood appealed to me because of its Biblical connection to the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t look as nice as darker woods, but I want it anyway. If I change my mind, I’ll look into getting new scales.

Here it is.

I will have to make a sheath for it. I look forward to that. The practice will help me. By the time I’m finished with my third sheath, I should be fully competent, if not highly skilled.

People brag on Lionsteel sheaths, maybe because they’re Italian. I don’t get it. The seem perfectly nice, but if you showed me one without a stamp on it and told me it was from China, I would believe you.

I’m not worried about the steel. A reader says Lionsteel’s M390 is suspect, but in at least one cutting test, Lionsteel M390 has stomped some pretty impressive steels, so I am willing to give it a shot.

I can’t let the knife-nerd culture get me. I am nothing like that. Oh, no. Not me. Although I do name all my knives “Mike.”

I can’t help liking the Lionsteel name. Reminds me of someone I used to know. Back when I was lawyering, I worked with a client named Giancarlo. Gian-something, anyway. Little Italian guy with a beard. Probably weighed 130 pounds. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he always made a fist and said, “STRONG, like a LION!”

This weekend should be fun. My friend Eric is bringing his family for a visit. He and his wife are not happy at their Calvary Chapel church. They miss the Holy Spirit. They called me to see if I could help, so we’re going to see what I can do. More accurately, of course, we will see what God does through me and through them.

This will be the second time someone has come here just to get closer to God. That’s tremendous. This is what I want my home to be.

Guess I should get to work on the toilets. I get tired of explaining how the stains are caused by well water, not filth.

Tiny Sheath Knife for Sneaky People

It’s official. I am finally free of a house I was trying to sell. Today I can relax and think about trivial things. More than usual.

Selling the house wasn’t the only exciting thing that happened yesterday. I also received a new knife: a Lionsteel M1. This is a small sheath knife made from M390 steel. I’ve already written about it. I am trying to transition to sheath knives because they’re just, well, better. I have a couple of sheath knives in the 9″ range (overall length), and they’re a little bigger than I need them to be for general use. The M1 is under 7″ long, so I thought it would be a good choice.

It’s a very nice knife. Apart from the M390 steel, it has G10 scales. G10 is more or less the same thing as micarta. It’s fabric inside plastic. G10 uses glass fabric (fiberglass), and micarta uses other materials. G10 is stronger, but since micarta is way stronger than it needs to be, it doesn’t really matter.

I may send the knife back. It’s smaller than I thought it would be. The blade is somewhat thin, too. I would say it’s about 0.10″ thick. Actually, I can check. Okay, it’s 0.13″, so I’m off by 30 thousandths. To give context, I’ll add that my Entrek knife is about 0.1875″ thick. It’s a monster, and it’s not unusual these days.

That’s a $150 knife, believe it or not. A lot of money for not much knife.

I’m going to get a Lionsteel M4, which is 8″ long. It’s shorter than the Entrek, so it should be handier. The blade is 0.15″ thick, which is somewhat better than 0.13″. I want a knife I can use every day without fear of snapping it.

Micarta and G10 are probably the best handle materials there are, but I decided to get an M4 with olive wood scales. It won’t be as tough, but olive wood appeals to me because olive oil is important in the Bible. It symbolizes the Holy Spirit, more or less. I believe it should be possible to put G10 scales on it if I don’t like the wood. Lionsteel knife handles aren’t ground flush with the tangs, so new scales should fit as well as the old ones.

Lionsteel also makes a knife called the DPX HEST, which is a 7″ survival knife. I don’t think my survival will ever depend on a knife, but survival knives seem very practical. They’re supposed to be tough and versatile. I might try one eventually. They’re pretty ugly, but so are Glocks, and we all know how well Glocks work. Well, most of us do. Colt, Sig, and Springfield fanbois, among others, have their fingers in their ears.

The HEST has a super-thick blade, plus a pointy thing for prying and wire-stripping notches. It has a built-in wrench which only works for 1/4″ fasteners IF you can fit the knife over them.

The DPX line contains models with names containing the word “assault.” I don’t really see myself assaulting in the near future. It’s funny how many products have macho names that have no relationship to the ways in which they will actually be used. TRY NEW KELLOGG’S ASSAULT POP TARTS! ASSAULT YOUR TASTE BUDS WITH EXTRA FILLING!

You can get the HEST in Sleipner and Niolox steels, both of which are supposed to be really good. I don’t know if I want Sleipner. It’s named after a mythical 8-legged horse that belonged to the false god Odin. Creepy thing for a Christian to own. Also, Sleipner steel rusts badly enough to generate complaints.

It would be nice to have a real knife collection, meaning maybe 30 or 40 knives. I probably have 10 right now. When I was a kid, I used to trade pocket knives with my grandfather’s older brother, so fooling with knives brings back nice memories, just as shooting brings back memories of my grandfather.

If my life sounds unexciting, good. That’s exactly how I want it.