Final Approaches Don’t Have to be Turbulent

My dad just slipped a notch. His dementia had plateaued for a few weeks, but plateaus always crumble.

I saw something different in him when I visited yesterday evening. He got sleepy while I was there. That usually doesn’t happen. Day before yesterday, I had to take him to the doctor, and while we waited in the exam room, he fell asleep in his chair, with his head leaned back.

He did something completely new yesterday. He dismissed me. Before yesterday, he had always tried to get me to stay, or he at least expressed disappointment that I was leaving. Yesterday, he decided it was time for him to go back to his room, so he said something to that effect. He let me go.

He also talked about his dementia. He said he was suffering from senility.

Today when I arrived, he was in his room in his wheelchair. He was facing away from the door. He was not wearing a shirt. Usually, he jumps to life when he sees me, but this time, I had to nudge him to get his attention. He turned and said things that didn’t make sense. He said, “Where are you?”

When I’m not there, he wonders where I am, and he forgets that I come every day. I suppose that when he asked me where I was, he was taking a minute to come out of his daily puzzle.

He was not able to put his shirt on without my help.

I rolled him to the courtyard where we always sit. I had to remind him to pick up his feet. His chair doesn’t have footrests. Prior to today, he had picked up his feet without being told.

Tonight he had a strange delusion on his mind. He thought his roommate, Gregory, was trying to stir up trouble. For all I know, this could be true. It’s impossible to enter their little world.

He kept saying we had to come up with a plan to deal with Gregory. He had the idea that we owned the ALF, and Gregory was living in his room without paying rent. His ideas were inconsistent. Sometimes he thought Gregory owned the ALF. He was afraid Gregory was going to sue us.

I kept telling him Gregory wasn’t the boss and that he didn’t have to pay any attention to him. Over and over, I told him we didn’t own the ALF. We traveled in tight circles. I would straighten everything out, and then he would say we needed to go in and outline everything to Gregory. Then I would tell him Gregory was fine and that we didn’t need to talk to him. Then my dad would say we couldn’t just let him live there without paying rent, and the whole process would start over.

He said something very strange. He said the Kardashians were in charge of the ALF. He saw them as dark powers in high places. I can understand that. He thought they would come after us and side with Gregory.

Who knows what’s happening? Maybe I provoked one of the filthy spirits that empower the Kardashians earlier today, when I referred to their television empire as a “TV slut academy.” I asked God if I was wrong to say that, but as far as I can tell, God is in favor of it. In the Bible, people use words like “whore” without flinching, so I suppose it’s fine to say “slut academy” when the shoe fits.

Late last year, I started getting the impression that God was saying my dad would not survive the spring of 2019. Lately, I’ve been feeling that he will pass before April 1st. I’m not certain, because it’s possible to fool myself. Watching my dad today, I felt that it looked more like I was right. The way things are right now, it’s not hard to believe he’ll be gone very soon.

He talked about getting up tomorrow and going to high school in Whitesburg, Kentucky, where he grew up. I had to help him understand that he was all done with school. He went back to this notion several times. He feels he has loose ends that need to be tied up, but there aren’t any. High school is a place of assignments and deadlines, so it’s easy to see how one would associate it with tasks that need to be completed.

Last night, I dreamed of my mother’s father, the man I always felt in my heart was my own father. I was staying at his house. I walked through the living room on my way to my bedroom, and he was on the couch with my grandmother. He had his head in his hand, and he was telling my grandmother he was getting too old. He said he couldn’t go on. He was supposed to get in the car and drive to the courthouse. He was a circuit judge.

He would never have said anything like that. He was as tough as they come, and his self-confidence was unlimited. He thought he would live forever.

I went in the bedroom and read the Bible for a while. Then I came out and walked past my grandparents. I went out to the carport, because I was concerned that there might be ice he could fall on. When I looked at the thermometer (which is now in my workshop here in Florida), it said something like 50 degrees. The weather was nice. He had nothing to worry about.

He asked my grandmother if I was going to go to court with him. I used to do that when I was a kid.

I didn’t know what to make of it, but it may be that God gave me this dream to let me know what was going to happen to my dad. He is suddenly aware he has dementia, and he seems to be shutting down in preparation for death.

I can’t go with him to God’s court, but he doesn’t have to worry. In the dream, my grandfather didn’t have to be concerned about bad weather or falling on ice when he left the house for court, and my dad doesn’t have to be concerned about slipping and falling, or about the cold of God’s absence, when he leaves his house of flesh.

While we were talking about Gregory, I told my dad we had God’s authority on our side. He said, “I wouldn’t push that angle. It won’t hold up in court.” I said God’s court was the only court that mattered.

I prayed with him while I was there. Just in case, I spoke God’s opposition to any spirits related to the Kardashians. You never know.

I told him he was a great dad. I realized I needed to say that. I told him he had no worries because he had plenty of money, and people were looking after him. I said he had nothing to worry about in the next life, either, because if something happened, he would go to be with my mother. He said that was a beautiful thought.

It may be that I have had my last conversation with my dad. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to reach him. Thank God we’ve had so much time to reconcile and pray together. We’re ready, no matter what happens now.

I’m writing this blog entry to have a record. For all I know, he’ll live another year. I don’t mind being wrong, but if God truly has chosen to take my dad by April 1st, and he has been telling me about it, it’s best to say so publicly now, instead of waiting until he passes and then trying to convince people God warned me.

It would really be something if it turned out God had given me that date.

It may be that my dad is simply displaying evening behavior I haven’t seen before. He wasn’t doing this stuff in January, when he was living with me, but I haven’t seen him much in the evenings since then, so I don’t know what his evenings are like now.

Tomorrow I’ll see him at around noon, after a meeting with the ALF and hospice people, so I’ll see if he seems any sharper.

I can’t thank God enough for changing my dad, giving him salvation, and making things go so smoothly. We all have to die, and death often involves panic and turmoil because people are not prepared. We will not have to deal with that.

My sister will get a completely different view of his passing. She will not get closure. She will probably do her best to blame me for that, if she shows up at all. She could have shared in this. She chose not to. She may try to tell people I kept her away from my dad, but that never happened. She hasn’t tried to see him or talk to him in years.

She always tries to take center stage when someone dies. It’s never about the deceased; it’s always about her. No matter who has died, my sister was the deceased’s favorite person. She has a history of offending people deeply during these difficult times. My relatives have said remarkably harsh things about her at viewings and funerals, and no one has ever defended her.

It would be better for her not to come at all than to come and put on another show. It will be too late for her to ruin things, though. She might be able to mess up another funeral, but she won’t be able to touch my dad.

I have a will, and it says she is not permitted to have any part whatsoever in my final arrangements. She is not to speak before the mourners or write my obituary. She can attend if she behaves, but that’s all. I knew I had to spell it out, in order to protect my personal representative and everyone else.

When I think of my dad now, I see him as he is today. Weak and confused, but full of love, faith, and support. It’s hard to remember my old dad, even though I spent decades with him. That’s strange, but under the circumstances, it’s okay with me.

I’ll try to shoot video tomorrow. Whatever remains of him after today, I would like to save a little bit for the future.

Escaping the Pull of Planet Gilligan

Do people get bored when I write about my TV problems? I hope not, but…no, I don’t care. I write what I want.

I killed DirecTV a while back. It was very expensive. The interface was torture. I could not download new programs. The channels were so bad, it was worse than parody. I made a great decision. I will never have another cable or satellite provider. I hope.

I tried the upgraded Youtube. It wasn’t worth the money. I killed it before the auto-renew kicked in.

I tried Hulu with live TV added. It seemed great at first, but after I had been watching a while, I started running into blocks of ads that seemed to take up about half of my time, and they could not be dodged, even with their “ad-free” add-on, which is a farce.

I complained on Hulu’s forum, and they deleted my complaint and lied, saying they had “merged” it with another thread. I asked about the complaint, and they refused to answer.

That wraps it up for Hulu. I killed it today. Actually, I left the cheaper part of it, without live TV (never used it), but I think I’m going to go back and kill that, too.

I have been watching Youtube and Amazon Prime exclusively for a while. I never felt tempted to look at Hulu, so I now realize Hulu is a waste of money.

Why does Hulu treat customers this way? No idea. Youtube’s management of ads is far superior; you can click away from them so you don’t have to hear about Grammarly or resources for AIDS patients 300 times a week. Also, the targeted ads Youtube provides are actually interesting sometimes. My guess is that Hulu’s few advertisers are aware that people hate their ads, so they force Hulu to shove them down our throats.

I don’t know if Hulu can compete with Youtube’s ad system. It may be an unprofitable. Perhaps Youtube loses money because of its ad policy, but Google pumps cash in to keep things working. Hulu wouldn’t be able to compete with a subsidized competitor. I doubt it works this way, because Youtube is paying creators a fortune. There are people who make millions of dollars every year. I don’t think Google would fund that without some kind of return.

There is an alternate explanation, which, of course, is Hulu incompetence. This is the one I’m betting on. When your guess is that someone else’s bizarre actions are caused by incompetence or dishonesty, you will be right maybe 95% of the time.

Youtube gets better all the time, which serves to prove my point, in a way. Youtube now has content which is far superior to the stuff big companies have been feeding us for decades. If the pros were not incompetent, how could little guys making videos in their basements with cell phones stomp them so easily?

When you have cable (let’s lump satellite into “cable”), here is what happens. You sit down and turn on the TV. You find 900 channels. You can’t find anything good to watch. You settle for garbage. There are PPV channels. There are shopping channels. There is an abundance of porn. There are Spanish channels. There are endless sports channels. There are pay channels featuring silly movies and creepy shows. There are Kardashians and Jenners, with their horrifying, incomprehensible TV slut academy. If you’re intelligent and even a little bit moral, there isn’t much out there.

Let’s say you have Youtube, and you want to learn about, oh, the history of Russia. It’s there, trust me. I won’t even check, but it’s there. Shakespeare? It’s there. Sewing? Plumbing? Computer programming? You name it; it’s there somewhere.

If it’s not there today, it will be in a year. Content and creators continually accumulate.

When TV was created, people floated a lot of BS about how it would be a conduit for education. TV was going to make ignorance a thing of the past. Look how that worked out! “Now sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale…” But now that TV has merged with computers, the prediction is coming true, in spite of the strenuous efforts of the hacks who used to control the system. We are also receiving more garbage than ever, but at least now there is some relief.

One nice thing about Youtube is that it’s helping decent people connect. Christians who post videos on Youtube network outside the system now. Also, the people I watch (tool and gun people) are networking. It’s turning out that many of us share a conservative Christian outlook. Sometimes when I’m watching a guy do machining or something, he’ll let the cat out of the bag. He’ll say something that confirms his status as a deplorable. That’s nice.

Leftists don’t seem very interested in tools, although they’re big in IT. Leftists are about taking, not making.

One of the bad things about Youtube is that it’s encouraging good people to rely on it for money. If a famous slut starts a channel and makes money, she can count on getting paid for as long as Youtube exists. Satan runs the Internet, and he is fine with sexual sin and female rebellion. If a Christian or conservative starts a channel, it’s another story. They will eventually ban us. A bunch of guys who thought they had careers will find out they were suckered by Satan. Wait and see.

Youtube recently had an event called “Adpocalypse 2.” It’s very strange. In today’s world, sexual perversion is rampant. It’s like the days of Noah. Perverts who want to have sex with little kids are EVERYWHERE. A bunch of them roam Youtube, making sexual comments on videos. If you post videos, and your young son often appears in the frame, these future inhabitants of hell will gather to make smutty remarks about him. Youtube decided to fight back. They found channels that occasionally featured kids, and they demonetized them. They took away the money. One day, your video is bringing money into your house, and the next day, it’s dead, and Youtube doesn’t answer questions. There is nothing you can do.

Meanwhile, your old job is gone, and you still have to pay for cameras, editing software, and whatever else.

It shows how quickly Youtube can change a person’s life, and with how little accountability.

No one seems to be talking about the risk. Everyone wants to become a full-time Youtuber, but no one asks whether the job will exist in 6 months. It will hurt, crawling back to Tractor Supply to talk to your former boss after giving him the finger and doing doughnuts in his parking lot.

The government has to abide by a constitution and statutes. The tech kiddies are much freer than the government. They can discriminate very freely without having to answer for it.

I’m on a tangent. I don’t know where Youtube is going, but for now, it’s the best source of video entertainment and education, and it’s free with your Internet service. Hulu, on the other hand, is shady and disappointing. It seemed good at first, but I seriously suspect they suppressed their horrible ads until I started paying for the service.

It’s remarkable, how little I miss cable. When I say I don’t miss it at all, I’m not exaggerating. I never feel myself wishing I could turn it back on.

Movies and network TV seem very stupid to me now. When I watch movies and non-reality shows, I think about what’s really in front of me: maladjusted adults playing make-believe, following scripts written by mercenary, cynical fringe nuts whose parents wish they had gotten real jobs.

Harrison Ford has never been on a starship because there is no such thing; he’s just an old man who carries a plastic gun. Robert Downey would be among the most useless people to have with you in a terrorist attack, and his suit is plastic, too (when it’s not 100% CGI). Hugh Laurie isn’t qualified to freeze a wart, let alone cure mysterious diseases, and he isn’t a genius. If Gal Gadot got in a serious fight with a random middle-aged man on the street, she would lose in two minutes or less, and she would need to be hospitalized afterward.

Historically, actors have generally been shiftless, unaccomplished, unscrupulous people the rest of society shunned for good reason. Nothing has changed, except for the way we see them.

Acting talent is extremely common, and it has no relationship to intelligence. There are very unintelligent people who can play smart people convincingly. It’s just mimicry. Birds do it. Many of our actors are of below-average intelligence, yet we esteem them as though they were the sharp, invincible fantasy characters they play.

When you watch a show and see characters living out adventures, it’s entertaining. When you see neurotic, narcissistic ignoramuses playing make-believe, it’s different.

I don’t know how long Youtube will continue to provide good content, but until it poops out, I’m going to stick with it. George Clooney and Chadwick Boseman (“Yes, daddy dresses like a cat for a living”) will have to make ends meet without my help.

I might conceivably go back to upgraded Youtube to kill ads, but that’s as fancy as I plan to get.

Sun Tzu Should have Written Another Book

Today I got an interesting call about my dad.

He lives in a memory care facility, and he also has a hospice that sends people to look after him. The hospice has assigned a doctor to him. The hospice has also given him a social worker who looks in on him. On top of all this, he has a primary care doctor who is still seeing him occasionally and sending him to specialists.

The providers do not communicate as well as they could. The ALF people communicate very well with me, but the hospice people are doing their own thing. They change his prescriptions without telling me, for example.

The hospice social worker called me today, and she wanted to set up a meeting for the ALF staff and the hospice people, to discuss my dad’s care. She wanted to do it on a day when my dad was scheduled for a CAT scan to see if he had normal pressure hydrocephalus, and I told her about the conflict.

When she heard about the scan, she started telling me we might not be appropriate for hospice, because they did not support care intended to improve my dad’s health. They assume he’s going to die soon, so all they do is keep him clean and comfortable and manage his symptoms. Her position was that having him scanned conflicted with their mission.

My dad has dementia, but he was admitted to hospice because of congestive heart failure. If he can be treated for normal pressure hydrocephalus, there is some possibility that it might improve his mobility. For all I know, it could improve his mind. It will not fix his heart, so the notion that hydrocephalus treatment is intended to extend his life is not sound. His heart problems will still take him out before long, so he should still be appropriate for hospice. I explained that to her.

I also told her one of my problems was that I had no prognosis from anyone. No one has said, “We think your dad will be gone in x months.” Obviously, if they think he has two years, the treatment he should receive is different from what he should receive if they think he’ll die in a week. I said I needed to know what was happening in order to cooperate with her.

When I said this, I finally got some information. She said that in her experience, the way my dad’s skin is breaking down is consistent with imminent death. By “imminent,” I mean months, not days. She said it suggested his body was shutting down. She also said they had accepted my dad because they thought it was likely he would go in 6 months or less, and that was about three and a half months ago.

Now I know what the professionals think. Maybe.

It’s hard to know the truth. The problem is that professionals are biased. They make money from my dad, so of course, they have motivation to hold onto him. They can’t do that unless they defend the conclusion that he is likely to be dead soon. Also, in modern America, providers have a pro-death bias when it comes to the terminally ill.

It seems like a conflict. If they’re motivated to keep him and make money, why would they be motivated to usher him out of this life? I think the answer is partly cultural and partly mercenary. Contemporary medical culture is pro-death to a great extent, and I don’t think anyone who works for a hospice has not been exposed to that. Also, even if they will not help him stay alive longer, they know they will make more money if he stays with them than if he drops them.

A muffler shop doesn’t expect to work on your car forever, but they still want you to bring it in.

This is all guesswork based on experience and an old man’s knowledge of human nature.

If the social worker is giving it to me straight, they think my dad is going soon.

The Internet is not all that helpful. Two providers, including a close friend, have told me my dad’s skin weeping and edema are end stage problems, but it’s hard to find corroboration online. Instead, I find symptoms he doesn’t have. Fatigue. Loss of appetite. Shortness of breath. Mottled skin from lack of oxygen.

I think the social worker is right. For one thing, God seems to tell me that my dad is leaving this month. For another, he lost something like 30 pounds between December and March, while eating normally. His cardiologist said his heart problem and “comorbidities” were likely causing him to lose weight, indicating that the end is near.

You can’t lose 10 to 15 pounds per month forever. Even if I’m wrong about what God says, my dad is deteriorating very quickly. He has had a pleasant mental plateau for a couple of weeks, and that has been wonderful, but his body keeps getting worse.

What’s the real purpose of the meeting? If I were an optimist (or young and stupid) I’d say they wanted to confer and come up with a solid plan for the remainder of my dad’s decline, using input from everyone involved and treating every party with respect. Because I am old and smart, I fear the hospice people may simply be planning a smackdown session so they can assert dominance over the ALF people.

When everyone is happy and united, irksome meetings serve no purpose. The hospice must have a reason for bringing us together. With all these things in mind, I think there is a good chance someone wants to put their foot down.

Do they want to assert dominance so my dad can get the best care possible, or is it because they have been inconvenienced or overruled? My old man gut suspects the worst.

I’m happy with the hospice and the ALF. They’re not perfect, but all of our problems have been minor, at least from my perspective. As long as my dad is clean and comfortable and they treat him well, I don’t care who gets to be the top dog. If there is friction, it doesn’t appear to be causing any real problems for my dad or me.

If anyone on either side is hoping for me to side with them and make the other side submit, they will be disappointed. I’m not dumb enough to get involved in a war among a bunch of women. Women are much more quarrelsome and petty than men. Women will kill each other over a parking space.

I’m the customer. Problems are not my area. My job is to be presented with solutions.

It may well be that everyone involved is trying to do the right thing, with little self-interest. I hope so, but I’m not going to assume that.

Whatever. I’m just glad someone finally mentioned death and a time frame. After all, death is what we’re all preparing for. We can’t prepare intelligently if we never mention the problem.

I have to make sure my dad gets whatever treatment is correct, medically and morally. That’s my mission. How the providers go about making that happen is up to them.

I don’t know what the meeting will be like. They must be used to emotional people insisting that their loved ones are going to live forever. They must be used to tears and yelling. They must have seen a lot of people who knotted themselves up and refused to listen when death was mentioned. I’m not going to be a problem. I have been grieving for about three years, so it’s not like they’re going to burst my bubble and throw me into the grieving process for the first time. I am not in denial. When my dad goes, it will not be the beginning of grief. It will be the beginning of the end of grief. It will be very hard, but then the last three years have been very hard.

I’m ready for the end. I don’t want to see my dad live so long he falls completely apart. Things are bad enough already. The approach to death can be very ugly. They amputated my grandmother’s legs, and she died anyway. My hope is that he goes in his sleep, before things get really unpleasant. We are completely reconciled, and he is ready to go live with God. There isn’t much left for us to accomplish here that would justify the horrors of a grotesque and lengthy exit.

I’ll Take It

I learned something interesting from a Derek Prince video today.

I do not trust preachers and teachers. To see crooks and fools, all you have to do is turn on Christian TV or visit local churches. The situation is so bad, it’s a wonder Christianity has survived. Nonetheless, a lot of people are maybe 90% right, and as long as you have the Bible and the Holy Spirit to use as references, you can learn a lot from other people. Derek Prince is very good.

I’ve been watching Derek Prince every morning for a while. Lately, I’ve heard him mention the problem of guilt several times. I heard it while watching different videos, so I started to think God was trying to tell me something.

Here is what Prince says: Satan accuses us all the time. We know this from reading the Bible. He makes us feel guilty and unworthy, and it interferes with our relationship with God. Prince says we should not go around feeling guilty.

I had to think about that. Correction is EXTREMELY important. Confession is INDISPENSABLE. Without repentance, even a Christian can go to hell. At the same time, is it really necessary for us to feel bad all the time? Sure, we deserve it, but then we also deserve hell, and God is eager to save us from that.

I’ve gotten tremendous mileage out of self-examination, correction, and so on. I beg God for these things every day. You can’t grow if you don’t love correction. Still, there is no reason why you can’t have your faults addressed without feeling like dirt all the time.

Prince says the Holy Spirit “convicts” us of sin. That’s from the Bible. He says there is a difference between Holy Spirit conviction and unhealthy guilt. When the Holy Spirit convicts you, he addresses something that needs to be looked at, and when you repent and move on, everything is fine. When Satan condemns you, or you condemn yourself, the feeling of guilt never goes away. It’s with you 24 hours a day, every day.

That’s gold. I had been wondering how to tell the difference.

In Luke 18, Jesus talked about a dirty tax collector who went to the temple and cried and hit himself and begged God for mercy. He said a pharisee also went to the temple, and the pharisee thanked God because he, the pharisee, was so righteous. Jesus said the tax collector, not the pharisee, was justified.

That story makes it seem like self-condemnation makes God happy, but I don’t think that’s the message. The believers in the New Testament weren’t miserable people. Paul had rounded Christians up to be murdered, for the priests who ran the temple, but he wasn’t downbeat. I don’t think the tax collector in the story was supposed to leave the temple and spend the rest of his life groveling and wearing a hair shirt.

God has told me there is nothing good about worry; not one thing. He has said it’s the voice of Satan. It looks like self-condemnation is in the same category.

Christians are supposed to be ruled by their minds, not their hearts. That probably sounds funny to many people, given that we’ve turned the faith into a sobfest dominated by women, but it’s true. Where do most emotions come from? The flesh. Hello? Is that who you want ruling you? Your flesh is an utter idiot. Using emotion to manipulate other people, or yourself, is wrong.

I grew up with a habit of condemning and pitying myself.

My parents were good at making me feel ashamed so I wanted to hide from the world, but they were no good at all at helping me change. They barely tried. If I procrastinated and ended up working on a school assignment all night (happened every time), they could make me feel bad about it, but they never showed me how to create a schedule or organize tasks.

The way they raised me was very strange. They were educated people, and my mother’s parents were educated. My dad’s father had a little education, which he got on his own, and my dad’s maternal grandfather was a very responsible man with excellent habits. Nonetheless, my parents didn’t do the normal things parents do. They didn’t teach me how to do much of anything.

A few years ago, I learned that my dad’s father had paid my dad for getting good grades. That astounded me, because my dad paid absolutely no attention to my schooling, and I had always assumed it was because he didn’t know any better.

My sister condemned and ridiculed me all the time because there was something wrong with her. She was, and is, very sick. She was sadistic and jealous, for no reason at all. She made up nasty names for me and got other people use them. She looked for ways to exclude me from activities.

It’s easy to see how I could grow up with a persistent feeling that I should feel guilty!

I truly do not want to blame my family for my problems. If I had done things right, I would be free of whatever damage they managed to inflict. I have to talk about the past in order to understand things, however.

My mother and father did well in school, but they taught me nothing at all about how to do the same. They didn’t teach my sister, either. How is that possible? Often, Christians suffer from curses that plagued their parents and grandparents, but my sister and I were the first generation of untaught slackers in our family.

An irrational habit of self-condemnation is a big problem. It ruins your social life. It makes you likely to marry badly or to fail to marry (as I did). It ruins your professional life. It will cause big problems for you in school. It may also lead to things like suicide.

I believe Derek Prince is right. A long time ago, God told me two things. He said, “I don’t have to punish myself,” and “I don’t have to condemn myself.” I knew these things were true, and I wrote them down and repeated them to myself, but it was still easy to slide into self-condemnation. It’s nice to see another person emphasize these points and expound on them.

Leftists are big on shaming people these days. Shame may be their biggest weapon; when you have no carrot, you need a big stick. They try to shame people for owning guns, eating meat, admitting that there is no such thing as changing your gender, standing up for God’s position on sexual sin, doubting that a tiny change in levels of a harmless gas which makes up 1/800 of our atmosphere will destroy all life, being male, being white, and wearing red hats.

Satan is their father, and he has taught them well. We ought to recognize the source and name it. We should also refuse to accept the false guilt.

Manipulation is witchcraft, and guilt trips are manipulation. The Democratic Party is the party of virtually all witches. You don’t see witches gathering to curse Nancy Pelosi. They always curse Donald Trump. We should be aware that their manipulation comes from Satan.

Want to be lonely? Become a Republican witch.

Derek Prince made a list of things that are hallmarks of witchcraft. It’s short: manipulation, intimidation, and domination. It’s a good list to know about. It’s hard to find fault with it.

Leftists are passionate about all three items on the list. So are Islamists. The church used to use witchcraft all the time. The Catholic church was the biggest terrorist organization on earth, before it lost its power and had to resort to other forms of manipulation. They tortured. They imprisoned. They murdered. They threatened. It should be easy to tell when Satan controls an organization or movement.

I don’t have to condemn myself. There isn’t a single righteous person on earth. No one anywhere is one bit better than I am. Some have thicker coats of whitewash, but there isn’t one person on earth who has a right to be proud or to look down on me. I work to acknowledge my faults and repent. That’s sufficient. It’s all God asks of me, and every single person who disagrees is just as evil as I am.

Someone Check his ID

I haven’t blogged for a few days. Seems like whatever I had to say was not ripe yet. I will update the world on my progress.

My dad keeps improving. It’s astonishing. All of my life, I had to cope with the knowledge that I could not respect my father as much as I wanted to. I could honor him, but I could never look at him and be satisfied that he was doing what he should. That’s over now. He is a new person.

He is physically weak. He is in a wheelchair. He can’t remember things from one hour to the next. Nonetheless, he is as good a father as a man could ever want, and I am very, very grateful for him.

I tell him what a good father he is, and I mean it.

God used to tell me my dad would be saved, and I was happy about that, but I thought it would be a wrestling match right up to the end. I expected limited satisfaction. I figured he would lie on his deathbed and accept God out of fear, and that when he went, things between us would be unresolved. I expected to have to finish the work of resolution on my own. It hasn’t worked out that way. God has removed bitterness and resentment, and my dad and I are finally in unity.

How many people get this blessing? I know people who have forgiven their parents, and I know people whose relationships with difficult parents have been improved, but I don’t know anyone else who has been truly healed. It shows what is available to us, if we will persist in our relationships with God.

When I show up at the ALF where my dad lives, he is always thrilled to see me. He says one nice thing after another about me. He expresses complete confidence in me. He keeps saying he wants me to have everything he has. We haven’t had a harsh exchange in weeks.

Leaving the ALF used to be difficult because he would tell me how miserable it made him to see me go. Now he says he doesn’t want to keep me if I have things to do. What a difference that makes. He still expresses concern about how he’ll feel when I’m gone, but he isn’t manipulative.

Derek Prince teaches a lot about witchcraft, and he breaks it down into types. Some types involve calling on evil spirits, but one type isn’t overtly supernatural. If you exert excessive pressure on people to do your will, for selfish reasons, it’s a form of witchcraft.

I lived under this type of witchcraft all my life. When I was a kid, my dad ruled the house through fear. Later on, he used money. He broke down our ability to trust ourselves. He made us feel incompetent. He also coerced us to say he was right and we were wrong; maybe that was the worst thing he did.

Guilt trips are witchcraft. My dad used guilt to get obedience a great deal, even when it was clear that he was in the wrong.

My dad doesn’t manipulate me now. He doesn’t belittle me. He doesn’t try to worry me. He doesn’t attack my competence. He doesn’t try to make me feel guilty. He doesn’t try to intimidate me. He doesn’t threaten.

I feel the way I used to feel when he left for business trips. When I was a kid, we counted the days until he left, and while he was gone, we felt like we were on vacation. I feel that way now. My dad is still here, but the black presence that accompanied him is gone.

I don’t like bringing the past up. I used to get relief from it. I needed to vent because I felt pressured to believe lies. Venting helps you resist gaslighting and other forms of manipulation. Now I don’t feel pressured, so talking about the past doesn’t make me feel better. Now it’s an unpleasant duty. My dad is wonderful; I don’t want to say bad things about him.

It’s too bad I’m not married, because there is no one to witness what’s happening with my dad. I wish someone else could see it. I may shoot some more video.

A bad relationship with a parent is a hard thing to overcome. When you mistreat your kids, it’s as if you tie weights to their legs. Life is tough even with parents who bless you, and when you have to fight your parents every day, it’s much tougher. Getting away from a toxic parent is helpful, but you will still carry the parent’s voice inside you, and their curses will still rest on you. The best cure is true reconciliation through submission to God.

I believe many suicides can be traced to selfish parents. When your parents don’t bless you, you will feel that there is an impregnable wall between you and fruitfulness, and even when you’re alone, you will hear your parents’ voices, increasing the weight of your burdens. Young people kill themselves to end the frustration and get away from the voices.

Many of us work to overcome the voices or to drown them out, but I have something better than that. The voices are gone. My dad is a builder, not a destroyer.

My dad keeps talking about God. Sometimes I take notes in my phone. Yesterday, out of the blue, he said, “Peace of mind could be had if only people would listen to the word of God.” I was stunned. Where did that come from? It had to be the Holy Spirit. I haven’t been lecturing him on the word of God.

He’s not doing well physically. The swelling in his ankles keeps increasing, and now they keep him bandaged because fluid weeps out. The decline hasn’t stopped. At the same time, God is tapering off the difficulties that typically surround the death of a parent. He has helped us to be reconciled. He has helped me prepare for cremation and burial. He has helped me avoid probate. On the one hand, I value my time with my dad more than I used to, but on the other, I have much more peace with the prospect of his departure.

It’s painful when someone dies suddenly or without peace. I knew a lady whose husband walked into the kitchen one day and found her body on the floor. One of my high school friends shot himself in the head. At my last church, we used to pray all the time for a man who had breast cancer, and he was held out as a triumphant recipient of divine healing. Then the cancer spread to his brain, and they say he shouted and ranted at the end. It’s unusual for a person’s death to go smoothly, like a wedding planned months in advance. It’s happening to my dad, and none of it is my work.

I’m glad the estate won’t be a problem. I’m going to write my own will so my own estate passes with as little suffering as possible. Sometimes I don’t care what happens to my wealth, but then I think about the waste that would occur if I died intestate. Much of what I have would go to a person who does nothing but consume and destroy. Surely it would be better to direct it to more productive channels.

I would love to make some provisions for my sister, but to include her in a will at all would be to inflict tremendous, lingering suffering on the personal representative and other beneficiaries, so I can’t do it. There is just no way.

I don’t know how much better my testimony could get. If you’re reading this, be encouraged. God is a very good father.

Repetitive Ads You Can’t Skip Rival Waterboarding

I am now weeks into the cable-free lifestyle, so I guess I’ll report.

I do not miss cable (in my case, actually satellite) at all. I have Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Youtube. I watch Youtube for the most part. I watch Hulu maybe 5 days per week. I watch Amazon Prime rarely, but since the video portion of Amazon Prime comes with the free shipping at no extra charge, I plan to keep it.

Here is the breakdown.

Youtube is far and away the best source of video entertainment and education, and the price is right. I can learn about absolutely anything on Youtube. I could become a very credible engineer or mathematician using only Youtube and used textbooks. Youtube is packed with tool videos. If you want to do any type of metalworking or woodworking, Youtube should be your second stop, after joining an online forum. Youtube is also the best source for religious material. No contest.

Hulu is not as good as DirecTV for my purposes, but on the other hand, it doesn’t cost $200 per month. I have no use for nudie channels or network TV. I don’t watch sports. I like Motor Trend, TCM, History, and Discovery, and that’s about it. For a person like me, Hulu fills in all the non-Youtube blanks.

There are problems with Hulu. First, the ads are a horror. They charge you something like $50 per month for the basic service, and then they nail you for a few more dollars to get rid of ads. Then they give you ads anyway.

Hulu is EXTREMELY DISHONEST about ads. When you watch a Hulu show, you can bring up a bar at the bottom of the screen. The bar will contain long unbroken stretches which represent programming. The breaks represent ads. The breaks look very small compared to the unbroken stretches, giving you the idea that ads don’t take up a lot of time. In reality, a typical stretch of programming runs maybe 7 minutes, and ads will often go three minutes. I haven’t timed programs with a stopwatch, but it appears that maybe a third of a typical program’s running time is ads.

You can’t fast-forward past Hulu ads. If Hulu says you have 170 seconds of ads to sit through, you will darned well sit through them. Also, because Hulu isn’t a highly successful company, the ads lack variety. They don’t have a lot of advertisers. This means you will generally see the same ad several times during a show. It’s a form of torture.

Hulu has a DVR feature. You can record shows and watch them later. You only get 50 hours of cloud time, which is not much. If you record a show, you also record the ads. Then when you replay it, you get the recorded ads PLUS the Hulu-inserted ads. You can blow through the recorded ads, but you are still stuck with the inserted ads.

How do I know Hulu needs to fix its ad problem? Simple. When I watch a Hulu show that really tortures me with ads, I switch to Youtube or Amazon in frustration. Hulu is conditioning me to watch other services which beat them on price, so clearly, their methods are not smart.

It seemed like I didn’t get many ads when I first started using Hulu. Maybe they ramp them up once you’re hooked. I think Hulu is a crooked company, so it would not surprise me.

Other companies have better ways of handling ads. Cable and satellite companies let you fast-forward through recorded ads. Youtube generally allows you to opt out of ads after the first 5 seconds, which is brilliant. You may conceivably see an ad you like, and you are free to watch it in its entirety. On the other hand, you don’t have to watch the same ad about living with AIDS 900 times in one week.

Youtube is convinced I have AIDS. I keep seeing the same two AIDS ads.

I think you can pay for ad-free Youtube, but the ads on Youtube are so painless, I see no point in it.

Amazon doesn’t have ads, unless ads for Amazon shows count. Those ads play before your chosen programs, so your programs don’t get interrupted.

Hulu has a forum where you can complain and make suggestions. If they don’t like your posts, they delete them. When you ask why your posts were deleted, they pretend they can’t hear you.

I may dump Hulu. Nearly all of my TV shows are Motor Trend shows, and I can get the Motor Trend channel, ad-free, for $5 per month. I watch a couple of shows from other channels, but there are honest ways to get those programs without Hulu. I still have an Xfinity account, for reasons too boring to go into, and I can use that to get online access to some of the stuff I watch. I like Turner Classic Movies, which Hulu offers. Guess what? TCM movies are available online, free of charge.

Amazon Prime has a lot of mediocre shows I don’t want to watch. It also has The Grand Tour, which is nice, but you can go through a whole season in 4 days, and I’m already done with season three. There are some good “free” things on Amazon Prime, but generally, you have to pay if you want quality.

I like Better Call Saul, which is an AMC product. AMC puts all of the episodes on the Internet. There goes that problem.

I think shedding Hulu is a good idea. I may kill it and see how it goes. I can start again whenever I want. I could put part of the saved money into killing Youtube ads.

Final thing…I may be about to get fixed wireless Internet. I have DSL right now. Wireless speeds are much better. I have been waiting for unlimited wireless data, and it has finally become available. It’s not cheap; I would pay around $100 per month. I think it would be worth it. Life on 1.5 MBps is not normal.

The company that would sell me wireless access would use towers provided by Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile. Verizon would be optimal, because they give me 35 MPps on my phone on this property. Problem: Verizon is greedy. They throttle data after a certain point. After three days of TV, I would be cut off. That means I need to find out what the other towers can do for me.

The phone rep for the reseller said I might get 8 MBps. Hey, that’s four times what I get now. Hard to complain.

The more I think about it, the less I feel I can recommend Hulu. Their practices seem shady, and their ad policies sometimes make watching TV very unpleasant.

To sum up, Youtube is great, Amazon is okay, TCM is free, and the Hulu honeymoon is over. DSL is a horror. Fixed wireless is in my future, once I find a good way to get it.

Anything, including most diseases, is better than DirecTV.

Go to the Source

Today I watched a video by a man associated with The Last Reformation. His name is Peter Ahlman, and he’s from Sweden. He was in Israel talking to a Messianic Jew named Ariel Hyde. Hyde has a hard job, which may be a crime in Israel. He tries to get Jews to accept Jesus.

It’s not easy to figure out whether proselytizing is truly a crime in Israel. The official government position is that it’s legal, but if Wikipedia is correct, the government is not quite honest about it. They arrest and detain people deemed to be missionaries, and they forbid them to enter the country. They also force people to pledge not to proselytize. Also, it is illegal to try to convert a minor unless the minor has a parent belonging to the faith in question.

It looks like the issue is not really settled. I don’t know the answer. I suppose the government of Israel is like many secular governments. It probably makes a lot of compromises when dealing with religion, leaving everyone concerned feeling cheated.

Ariel Hyde tells Jews about Isaiah 53, which is a Bible passage that describes the Messiah. I am not saying this is the Jewish position on the matter; it’s what Christians believe. It describes the life of Jesus very accurately. The video describes Isaiah 53 as a “forbidden” passage which Jews have tried to play down. It is not read in synagogues.

Isaiah 53 says the Messiah will be rejected and put to death. It clearly says he will be punished for the sins of others.

Hyde says Jewish scholars used to say Isaiah 53 was about the Messiah, and he mentions Maimonides as an authority who held this belief. Is that true? It appears to be. Maimonides referred to part of Isaiah 53 in connection with the Messiah. On the other hand, in another work, he said that if a candidate was killed, he was not the Messiah promised by the Bible. Isaiah 53 expressly states that the person it describes was “cut off from the land of the living.”

My best guess is that Maimonides simply made a mistake. He had many things to study, and it may well be that he took inconsistent positions because something slipped his mind. Alternatively, maybe his beliefs concerning Isaiah 53 changed. Maybe he believed it was about the Messiah at one time, and then he changed his mind. Maybe that’s not the answer; maybe he thought part of Isaiah 53 was about the Messiah and part was not.

It does appear clear that he thought part of it was a Messianic prophecy.

If the figure in Isaiah 53 isn’t the Messiah, who could it be? Who else was put to death for our sins? Nobody. No human being.

It has to be about SOMEONE.

As for the censorship issue, I don’t think you can call a passage “forbidden” when it’s still included in Torah scrolls and printed versions of Isaiah. Religious Jews say less than 5% of the prophets’ writings are read in synagogues, and they claim Isaiah 53 has never been included. They say they can debunk sources that claim otherwise.

It was interesting to watch Hyde talk to Jews. He spoke to several in the video, and at least three were religious. Two wore yarmulkes, and one appeared to be some type of Orthodox Jew. He wore a black suit and a black hat, and he had a full beard. None of the people Hyde spoke to seemed familiar with Isaiah 53. When he showed it to them, they expressed surprise. That’s very strange. I can understand why random Israelis would be ignorant; most Jews are atheists. I would expect religious Jews to know more than that.

Given the high level of scholarship among religious Jews–some of them, at least–the natural assumption is that a typical religious Jew will be familiar with the entire Old Testament, just as many, many Christians are. Perhaps this is not the case. Maybe their devotion to the Talmud and other extrascriptural works is so great, scripture takes a backseat.

There are Christian sects which tend to produce Biblically ignorant people. Catholics are amazing in this regard. It seems like very few of them read the Bible. To become a Catholic, you have to study a work called the catechism, and you have to show that you are familiar with certain points. It seems that the catechism has become a sort of Christian Talmud. The implication appears to be that if you read what certain men have written about God, you don’t need to know what God himself says through the Bible.

Catholics are so notorious for their laxity, our language contains the familiar phrase “practicing Catholic.” We needed a way to set serious Catholics apart from the majority. Catholics themselves use the term “hatch, match, and dispatch Catholics.” It refers to people who only show up in church to be christened, married, and buried.

I am not a Catholic, so I can’t say for a fact that Catholics prefer rituals and extrascriptural works to the Bible, but I have seen a number of Catholics say this is the way things are.

The Catholic church used to have a rule making it illegal for laymen to own Bibles, so I guess no one should be surprised if an anti-scriptural, pro-scholarship bias still impacts their methods.

I don’t understand why anyone who wants to know God would permit himself to be ignorant of scripture. Short of God himself, it’s the most authoritative source we have. The farther you get from God, the more corrupt sources become. Knowledge gives way to gossip, fables, and propaganda. You can end up with very bad doctrine. The Catholic Church used to be the biggest terrorist organization on earth, while purporting to represent the Prince of Peace. They burned many, many people alive in the name of a gentle man who gave his life to save his persecutors. It shows how dangerous it is to rely on human beings for teaching.

It’s no wonder Catholics worship Mary as a goddess. There is no limit to how wrong you can be when you listen to the wrong teacher.

The Bible makes it clear that Jesus had younger brothers, so the notion that Mary died a virgin is untenable. Jesus himself slapped down a person who tried to exalt Mary. He did it publicly and instantly, knowing what was going to happen in future centuries. You can’t be familiar with the Bible and not know these things. The Bible even criticizes the error of forbidding people to marry.

As for the Jews in the video, I can’t understand how they would be familiar with Isaiah 53. Regardless of how they interpret it, how can they hold themselves out as observant and not know the Old Testament? If you’re going to wear special clothes, go to yeshivas, and live by very difficult rules, supposedly because God is the center of your life, how can you fail to read the Bible regularly? It makes sense for reformed Jews, who, I think, mainly go to the synagogue to practice yoga, but how can the Orthodox end up like this?

Mysterious.

This kind of thing is easier to understand in Christians and Muslims. Christians are not known for their scholarship, and Muslims are on a considerably lower tier. They have a very high illiteracy rate. A big percentage of fanatical Muslims have no idea what they believe, because they don’t study. Many have not read the Koran. Jews, on the other hand, have the single most impressive record of scholarship and learning of all peoples. No one else comes close. They should know the Old Testament better than anyone.

I’m a bad Bible scholar, but I have read it and read it. I have memorized a bunch of psalms. I can recite many verses. I understand the meaning of thousands more, even if I can’t recite them correctly. I’m not unusual among charismatics in America. How did we end up with this advantage, and why would those who oppose us let it happen?

I read both testaments of the Bible. This is normal for people who share my beliefs. None of the Bible has been superceded or repealed, and all of it supports the divinity of Jesus. Pick a book, and you can find him there, starting with the first words of Genesis, which use a plural word to describe God. I don’t know where I would be if I didn’t read the Bible.

The rejection of the suffering Messiah of Isaiah 53 seems strange to me. It’s a classic picture, even outside of Judaism and Christianity. Human beings love to kill people who tell the truth. It’s a recurring theme in history. The Greeks killed Socrates. Greek literature is full of prophets who were contemned. Cain killed Able. Jacob’s sons sold Joseph into slavery. The Hebrews rejected Moses and worshiped a golden calf. David’s family rejected him. Religious Jews killed and abused prophet after prophet, their modern counterparts admit it, and yet somehow, they can’t believe they would oppose the greatest prophet of all.

It’s not bizarre to kill a Messiah. What’s out of character for humanity is accepting one.

Even if you assume Jesus isn’t the Messiah, wouldn’t you expect the Messiah to face terrible opposition? If I rejected Jesus, I would still expect the Messiah to be treated the way he treated his messengers. After all, the message is the same.

The notion of an iron-fisted Messiah who appears and forces everyone to kneel and obey is incompatible with the Bible. Free will is clearly a top priority with God. Our loving God throws people into burning torment every day because he considers it better than making them slaves or robots. If a Messiah came and forced everyone to obey right off the bat, he wouldn’t change many people. Most of us would hate him and wait for an opportunity to dethrone him. A real Messiah would want to change our hearts. Jesus gave us 2000 years of patience so we could come to him on our own and be transformed supernaturally.

God wants our hearts, not merely dutiful adherence to rules. In Psalm 32, he says, “Do not be like the horse or like the mule, Which have no understanding, Which must be harnessed with bit and bridle, Else they will not come near you.”

Here is what Psalm 40 says:

Sacrifice and offering You did not desire;
My ears You have opened.
Burnt offering and sin offering You did not require.
Then I said, “Behold, I come;
In the scroll of the book it is written of me.
I delight to do Your will, O my God,
And Your law is within my heart.”

Any strong person can have slaves. Parenting is harder and takes patience.

I should never be surprised when people turn out to be less impressive than I thought. I don’t know when I’ll finally absorb this lesson.

Free Will Limits Potential to be Blessed

My testimony continues to develop, not always in ways that flatter me.

It has been impossible for me to steady myself and take firm positions during my dad’s illness and transformation. I take certain positions, and then circumstances change, and I realize I have to adapt.

He became a new person this year. He went from calling the Bible a book of fairy tales to urging me enthusiastically to pray with him. He lost his anger. He quit saying things that created anxiety for me. He stopped accusing me and criticizing me. He started blessing me verbally and exclaiming that he loved me. I have marveled at the transformation.

Several years ago, God told me he had cut my dad off. He had also told me my dad would be saved, so when he said he was cut off, I knew he didn’t mean my dad was going to hell. God had decided to cut off some of his mercy here on earth.

The Bible says God’s mercy endures forever, but people misunderstand. His mercy endures forever in heaven, for those who are saved. Here on earth, his patience is limited, regardless of what ignorant people say in order to justify continuing to sin. A God with infinite patience would not have flooded the world or created hell. God shows us great forbearance, but even he requires closure and justice. He’s not going to remain in labor forever just so we can do as we please.

After God told me he had cut my dad off, my dad sank into dementia. I took care of him at home for several years, and during that time, he retained his bitterness, anger, sense of entitlement, and so on. He continued to reject God. After he went to assisted living, the transformation took place.

I pray for people every day. I have a list. My dad has not been on the list for a very long time. I would guess he came off the list something like 5 years ago. I prayed for certain things for people I knew to be Christians, and I included their families. I prayed for my dad separately, because I felt he needed something different.

When I first started to think my dad had memory issues, I began praying regularly for God to take them away, but nothing happened. My dad didn’t develop what I would call full-blown dementia until around 2015, but he was forgetting things a few years before that. After I took my dad off my list, I stopped praying for God to fix his memory. I continued to pray for God to save him, however.

In recent years, I have not prayed for God to take the dementia away. When God told me he had cut my dad off, I knew praying for a cure was pointless, and I also felt that it was enmity toward God. I got used to this stance.

The problem with my position was this: it was a little too convenient for my flesh. I am not the kind of person who would push a parent down the stairs in order to get an inheritance or relief from abuse, but I am a human being, and even though my dad’s problems were disturbing to me, I felt a selfish motivation to refrain from attacking them supernaturally. What if he recovered fully, resented everything I had done since taking over for him, resumed insulting God, and made my life miserable for 5 more years? The prospect was not pleasant.

After my dad changed for the better, I asked myself if it made sense to limit my prayers for him. He was not the same person who had rejected God in the past. He was my new brother. Shouldn’t I pray for him, just as I prayed for other people?

I didn’t feel right about things. I felt like I was committing the sin of Onan, who refused to sow seed in his brother’s widow because he wanted his brother’s inheritance.

Day before yesterday, I decided to pray for him to be healed of dementia and his physical problems. I did it sincerely. I felt God wanted me to do it, if not for my dad, for the health of my own soul. Afterward, I felt peace come to me.

Yesterday, when I went to see my dad, his mind was clearer. He was also angry. When I arrived at the ALF, he was arguing with his roommate. They were having a disagreement about the window blinds. My dad called him a filthy name.

I took my dad to the place where we usually talk, and when God came up, my dad said the Bible was a story book. He said he had only prayed with me in order to make me happy.

What he said wasn’t true. My dad would not pray just to make me happy. That’s not him. He believed. He was sincerely concerned about his future when we prayed.

I had prayed for my dad to be healed, and the very thing I had feared had happened, overnight. He had started to reject God. He was regressing.

While I sat with my dad, I went back over my testimony with him. I reminded him of various things we had discussed. I didn’t push him, but I did preach a little. He started to revert to believing, as though his sudden backsliding had never happened. I asked God, silently, what I should do. Then I got an idea.

I asked my dad if he would agree that arranging for one’s welfare in the afterlife was the most important thing a person could do. He agreed strongly. I asked him if I could pray that God would help him do whatever was necessary to assure his future. I said he could agree with me in prayer. He consented with enthusiasm.

Aloud, I prayed that God would help him to do whatever had to be done, giving up whatever was necessary, in order to make it to heaven. I asked God to take away anything that had to be taken away. My dad agreed, and that was that. Afterward, God’s peace came back to me.

Here’s what I think. I believe God does not want to take away my dad’s dementia, because my dad is proud. If he is completely healed, he will deny God, and the result will be catastrophic. My dad is going to stay demented, and he will not live long. On the other hand, I should not have refrained from prayer out of carnal motives. I needed to drop the barrier and do the right thing, even though God didn’t intend to give me what I asked for.

My dad has made the right choice, so God will help him to get to heaven. I have done the right thing. Things will go well now.

In the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar went mad. God had given him the greatest kingdom on earth, and he had refused to acknowledge God, so his mind was taken away from him. He crawled around like an animal and ate grass for seven years. In the end, Nebuchadnezzar was restored, and he glorified God. My dad is apparently more stubborn than Nebuchadnezzar. I think he is getting the same basic treatment, however.

God wants perfect health and sanity for all of us. He wants us to be financially sound. He wants life to go well for us. Nonetheless, there are people who can’t receive certain blessings without turning against God. If I had received the success I wanted early in life, I would not know God now.

My dad is better off as he is than he would be as a sane, healthy man who rejected salvation. That’s just how it is. The problem isn’t God’s will. My dad’s will is the issue. If he gets certain blessings, he will choose damnation again.

My new dad is a wonderful person (apart from last night’s aberration). I love going to see him. I love praying with him. I love doing things for him. I don’t want him to go. At the same time, I believe that his will has put firm limitations on what God can do for him. Also, no matter how much I love my dad, I know it’s not God’s will that I be burdened with his willful problem child much longer.

My dad is experiencing the gentlest takeoff his own will permits. God is helping me get his estate ready. He is ending the father-son conflicts that poisoned my life. He has put my dad in an excellent facility where he will get good care until he goes. I can’t ask for anything more.

I don’t plan to ask God to heal him any more. Of course, that may change. This is a turbulent time for us. I never know what’s going to happen next.

I am content. I do not intend to run to God and beg when my dad’s end draws near. There are worse things than dementia and death, and God has been extremely patient and generous. It’s very hard to see health problems growing on my dad like moss, but I am not God, and I have limited power and responsibility. I can’t make everything perfect for a man who won’t cooperate.

Things are going extremely well, given what God has to work with.

Plus Life on One Wheel

I had another interesting dream last night.

A while back, I dreamed about a woman I know. She showed up at my house. She was adrift in life. She had nowhere to go. I gave her a place to sleep and looked after her. Instead of accepting food, she fed herself on leftovers she carried. She did not seem to realize we were supposed to be together as man and wife. Last night, I dreamed about her again.

Before she began to figure in the dream, I found myself riding around on a unicycle with a wheel maybe 5 feet in diameter. It was very unsteady. I was trying to use a GPS while I rode. I had to ride over to a telephone pole and hold on while I tried to look up my destination. A younger man near me was riding a shorter unicycle. We almost collided. Maybe he’s someone I mentor. I hope his unicycle never gets as tall and awkward as mine was.

Eventually, I found myself at a university for people in show business. It was as if Disney had built a university. I knew the woman was there somewhere, but I didn’t see her. She was getting a busload of students together. Her intention was to take them somewhere and teach them something. She felt that doing this would please God, but it was actually a carnal idea. A lot of the things we do to please God are based on bad ideas that come from the flesh. We overwork ourselves, and God doesn’t help, and then we get frustrated and discouraged.

While I was looking for her, I felt a strong, warm wind blowing toward me from the front. It felt nice; it seemed to embrace me. I lifted my hands up so I could catch the wind, and I left the ground. I moved forward even though the wind blew the opposite way.

People marveled at me while I flew. I suppose I got around 25 feet off the ground. I found myself approaching a water oak tree, and I grabbed the leaves and branches to hold me in place.

I didn’t catch up with the woman, but she wasn’t far off.

My interpretation was that the woman was single because she was chasing her tail, pursuing carnal ideas in order to please God. Instead of allowing God to put her in front of a Spirit-led husband who could help her, she was doing things on her own. She had been hurt by men, and her answer was to reject them and buy into feminism, which has a tendency to produce bitter spinsters who end up buying DNA from strangers. I was riding around on a unicycle because my second wheel was off somewhere organizing a pointless field trip. The college kids the woman was chasing weren’t much younger than she was, so she didn’t really have a lot to teach them.

You don’t have to travel to meet God. Wherever you are, he is present and waiting. You don’t have to go see him in a group. He is a father, and fathers communicate with their children one-on-one.

GPS represents the Holy Spirit. He guides us and keeps putting us back on course. I was trying to get guidance, but I was busy struggling with the ridiculous unicycle because my second wheel wasn’t there to help me look after earthly problems that kept me off balance.

The wind was the love of God, complete with the peace it brings. Love casts out fear, according to the word. The wind lifted me above the ground. Fear is a thing of the earth, and we are supposed to keep our eyes on God in order to rise above it.

I’m not sure what the oak was. In the Bible, trees are people, and leaves are their works. The first psalm says a righteous man is like a tree planted by the rivers of water; his leaf shall not wither, and whatsoever he does shall prosper. It may be that the tree–a “water” oak–represented righteous people who will serve to steady me and help me in the future. If so, we will be brought together by love, which is a lot better than duty.

While I was feeling the wind, I was not myself. I was a Jewish man in his 60’s. I was wearing a sportcoat. In the Bible, Jews seem to represent people who rebel in their youth and repent when they’re old. I could see how that would fit.

Business clothes (a sportcoat and slacks) would represent authority and purpose. I was not wearing a tie, so perhaps the clothes represented authority without legalism or excessive formality. I had a reason to be at the university. I was going to speak and tell people helpful things to get them back on track. I was going to troubleshoot. I was very assured, without being proud or angry.

I was not a university employee. I was a guest. That was nice. As employers, universities are insane pits of unbearable leftist coercion.

Why would the university be dedicated to show business? Maybe because so much of modern American charismatic Christianity is superficial. It’s a big show. The bigger the show you put on, the easier it is to convince yourself you’re serving God while you deliberately withhold your best. You can feel pretty good about yourself while holding onto things like pride and unforgiveness.

For some reason, my law school was on the campus. Superficial charismatic preachers are very legalistic, so maybe that’s the explanation. They push tithing, unscriptural cash offerings, and observance of the Jewish feasts. They leave people in ignorance when it comes to confessing, defeating iniquity, casting out demons, and being led by the Spirit. In the dream, I saw the law school as a place I had left behind. I was no longer a student or subject to its authority.

I can’t say whether the woman represented herself or even a wife. A woman can represent a church. A church wouldn’t function as my helper or second wheel, however. She’s very attractive, so that’s encouraging. I have always dreaded marrying someone unappealing simply because I felt obligated. When you buy a mule, you don’t worry about chemistry. Being with a woman you aren’t attracted to is very different. A woman is not just a helper. Let’s face it; if I only wanted help, I’d look to men. Much less troublesome, and they have tools and big muscles.

Generally, when people call for help in this life, they call for men, not women. I never thought about that until just now.

I can think of many times when I’ve seen men enter people’s lives and solve major problems. I can’t think of any examples of women doing that.

The woman in the dream is someone who seems like a highly unlikely match, so it may be that she represents someone else.

I was very happy to feel the wind. When Jesus visits you and then leaves, the things you will miss most are the peace and love that radiate from him. I believe I’m supposed to feel those things all the time. The strongholds I’ve built in myself block them, and it takes time to open things up.

The most exciting thing about the dream was the prospect of having God’s love flow through me. That would be nice to have on a permanent basis. Lots of men have wives, but how many men have God’s love pouring through them?

Was the dream from God? I make no promises. I hope it was, because living in God’s love would be fantastic.

I Got the Horse Right Here…

I’m not sure how to grade today’s visit with my dad. On the up side, he was fascinated by the things I told him about God and the supernatural. On the down side, he seems to think he’s living at a horse track.

I got to the ALF and caught up with him, and he told me he had had a crazy day. He said he had had a delusion. He used the word “delusion.”

He said he had had a conversation with a few people about horse racing. He said he had had a hard time making them understand the meaning of the word “parimutuel.” Then he started talking about his time working as a ticket clerk at Keeneland. He worked there part-time when he was in law school. He remembered the names of other law students who worked there. He thought it was strange that he remembered them.

From there, he somehow got off on the topic of Flagler, one of Miami’s dog tracks. I’m not sure, but I think the track’s owner, a man named Izzy Hecht, had been part of the imaginary conversation. I looked Hecht up. He died in 1977.

My dad may have represented the dog track at one time. He had a tremendous number of clients.

My friend Mike called during our talk. My dad usually has a hard time remembering Mike, but this time, he knew who he was, and he remembered his father, who was the attorney for all the horse tracks in Florida. My dad thought it was amazing that Mike had called while we were discussing the horse track delusion, but then Mike and I talk often.

We started talking about God, and I told my dad a lot of things. I told him how the fallen angels had descended on Mount Hermon and bound each other with mutual curses before taking human wives and having half-breed children. I told him we were surrounded by spirits that wanted to rule us, and that this was the reason we needed to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I told him that in the Bible, hair represented glory. I said that when Samson was shorn, it symbolized the loss of the glory of God.

He was very interested. It has always bothered me that my dad could not share my interest in Christianity and the supernatural. I doubt we’ll ever recapture much of what was lost, but today, it was nice that we talked about these things a little.

One of the problems with going to the ALF every day is that the other patients recognize me and sometimes want to talk to me. As I was walking in today, a lady in a wheelchair looked up at me with a very serious expression and said, “You’re a very good-looking man!” My dad says this all the time. Maybe she overheard him. I thanked her.

I’m very attractive. To people I do not want to attract. I’m used to it. When I was young, I got lots of attention from the mothers of girls who wanted nothing to do with me.

Another lady had a man with her, and she asked me for help with him because he refused to go home. Of course, they can’t leave. Dementia patients have quirks and back stories. I did not know hers. I got a staffer to talk to her.

I also heard from Frank. He’s a nice old man who is very serious. He stands and talks as though he’s trying to explain something very important, and all the sentences make sense, but when you add them up, you get nothing. “They had the big glasses there. Like a big bowl, about this big. The guys on my crew, I have complete faith in. Anyway, this is the problem. All of the doors are locked.” Frank came up to me several times and started expressing his concerns, and I had to extricate myself without offending him.

It would be very relaxing to listen to Frank before bed. If you could get him to talk for half an hour and record it, you would have a useful thing to replay on nights when sleep won’t come. He’s very polite, and he has a pleasant, comforting voice, but nothing he says goes anywhere.

If you’ve dealt with mentally ill people, you may know what it’s like to talk to irrational people who sound completely logical for the first 30 seconds. They can really suck you in. Now that I think about it, Lyndon Larouche was like that. “How do you know George Bush and Lawrence Eagleburger are astrally projected spies from a planet in the Crab Nebula?” “Oh, there’s plenty of documentation on that, up at the compound. Unfortunately, it can’t be unsealed until the judge rules in the Ferguson matter. Meetings have been held. Contacts have been made. Arrangements scuttled. Of course, we can’t ignore the agitprop from the Somali contingent. We can’t even discuss the matter until that has been debunked. Colonel Lamberson has kept me quite up to date on that operation. I guess there’s no need to even mention Bermuda.” Nutty as a fruitcake, but he had the ability to make people take him seriously for surprisingly long stretches.

Things went well, but when I got ready to leave, my dad could not remember the ALF. He acted like he had never seen his room before. He said I couldn’t leave him there. He said, “This is a gambling joint.”

I spent maybe 10 minutes reassuring him. A staffer tried to put him together with Frank–an inspired tactic–but it didn’t work.

While I was talking to him, I had to make myself give the problem the importance it deserved. It’s a little funny when a demented person has a crazy idea, but to my dad, the situation wasn’t amusing. He really thought I was leaving him in a gambling establishment he had never seen before. I tried to imagine how he felt as I talked to him. It was frustrating. I could not make him remember the ALF or feel comfortable about it. I could only try to help him resign himself to sleeping in a strange place without me. I kept reminding him that I would be back the next day.

The experience serves to remind me of one of the big problems with mental illness. You can’t explain things to people who suffer from it. You can explain injuries and diseases to patients, but when a patient’s problem is mental, the doorway through which explanation enters is closed.

If you manage to explain something to such a person, your explanation may evaporate from his mind in a day or 10 minutes.

I tried to say comforting things instead of things that made sense. I kept telling him his bills were paid and that he had nothing to worry about. Things like that. I tried to use a tone of voice that made it sound like I was completely sure he would be all right.

I know he’ll be fine eventually, but I wonder what he’s going through in the meantime. Is he over there now, exploring a strange new world with trepidation and dread? I hope not. The staff is very nice, and I know they’ll work with him. Maybe the delusion has already passed.

I can’t do anything to help. Not in the natural. I can’t stay there all night, every night, holding his hand. I’m doing the best I can. There are things I can’t fix. There are problems people have to face by themselves or with God alone.

This is why I pray with him.

Things could be worse. America is full of demented people who never get visits.

I don’t know how much longer we have. They called today and said his ankle was weeping. The swelling from heart failure caused it. Is it an important sign? Can you live with swollen, weeping ankles for a decade? I don’t know.

I always feel like God is telling me he will be gone by April 1. I’m so glad I get to have pleasant conversations with him while I wait.

If You Think You’ve Seen it Before, You Probably Have

I have been listening to Derek Prince every day for some time. I put my faith in no man, and every man makes mistakes, but I’ve picked up a lot of useful information from Prince’s videos.

Prince used to live in Fort Lauderdale, forty minutes away from me. I was listening to frauds and fabulists at that time. I was trying to find the truth, but the custodians of the truth turned out to be ignorant and, often, dishonest. It’s a shame I didn’t know about Prince.

When you want to find an honest, knowledgeable preacher, it’s like wandering the desert looking for one particular grain of sand, but it seems like there’s a Benny Hinn or a T.D. Jakes on every street corner.

Prince did a series of sermons on the end of the age. Interesting stuff. It’s impossible to be certain about prophecy, but it looks like prophecy says Jesus will find a very strong church when he returns. If that’s true, a lot of reformation is in store.

The church is falling apart right now. We have homosexual clergy (admitted homosexuals, not the closeted ones we’re so used to), homosexual marriages, churches that teach yoga and meditation, and churches that tell us the Bible isn’t true. If the church is disintegrating, how can Jesus come back for a pure bride?

The answer is this: the church isn’t his bride. That’s not accurate, really. I mean the big, global body we think of as the church. It’s not really the church at all. The real church is a small remnant hidden within the big false church. While the false church whores itself out and sends people to hell, the real church can be built up and prepared for Jesus.

Most people and spirits are afterbirth. That’s a harsh statement, but it’s true. When a baby is born, a lot of useless flesh comes out with it, and that flesh is discarded. In this world, people destined for salvation have always been in the minority, and like afterbirth, the rest are not going to survive. We should be accustomed to the understanding that most people will be destroyed, even if we don’t like it.

It’s not that hard for Christians to accept the damnation of unbelievers. We tend to be self-righteous, and often we actually look forward to seeing others condemned. What’s harder is admitting that religious people are going to go to hell in droves. Most of us don’t believe it, but we ignore history. Most Jews (according to Jewish history) denied God and did not make it out of Egypt, even after the daily miracles God performed for them. Most religious Jews in the time of Jesus rejected salvation. It should not be hard for us to believe that most Christians don’t belong to God or that most will go to hell.

We are not better than the Jews. We think we are, but we make all the same mistakes. I grant you, it appears that our problems are less severe. God himself–an authority who cannot be questioned–calls the Jews a stiff-necked people, and he predicted that the Gentiles would be more accepting, but we still blow it all the time.

Religious people who keep others out of the kingdom have always been a problem. Jesus told his fellow Pharisees (the unbelieving ones) this: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.”

The men he was talking to honored the prophets their fathers had killed, yet they were about to kill the greatest prophet. They were just like us! Jesus criticized them for saying, “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.” We think we’re better than the people who came before us, but we also hate people who tell us the truth about God. I never got in trouble with a pastor because of sin, and my pastors were very easy on sinners; I was always mistreated because I told the truth. That’s normal.

Most of us are doing our best to avoid changing while convincing ourselves we’re saved. We love the whitewash.

I was thinking about the cleansing of the church today, and it occurred to me that it was probably a necessary prelude to the wave of imprisonment and execution we’re going to experience. There aren’t that many powerful Christians now, but as the remnant gets stronger, we will be a bigger threat to the Beast, and he will want to react. Always look for symmetry in the supernatural.

Prophecy tells us the Beast is going to win. That’s very clear. We will have to leave the earth because most people will prefer killing us to serving God. A democratic vote against God (presaged by the weird anti-God voice votes at a recent Democratic convention) will seal our fate here on earth. Satan can’t win on earth if the church gets so powerful it upends his kingdom. If the church really shapes up, it will have to be removed from the earth in order for prophecy to be fulfilled.

When I look at it this way, I see that the decay of Christianity, the strengthening of the real church, the Beast’s victory on earth, and the rapture can be reconciled.

While I was listening to Prince talk about the end of the age, I thought about the bad clergymen who help keep people away from God. They’re like hockey goalies. Many enemies of God hang out in brothels, bars, abortion clinics, and universities, but the goalies stay close to the door to the kingdom. It’s a choke point the faithful have to use, so it’s efficient for Satan to position people there to pick seekers off.

Jesus called the goalies of his time “whitewashed tombs,” and he said they were full of dead men’s bones. He meant they were full of demons. In the Bible, bones are spirits. Demons are the spirits of dead human beings and demi-humans fathered by rebellious spirits. Jesus was speaking almost literally. The men he accused were full of religious demons instead of the unique Spirit that saves: the Spirit of Holiness.

In Hebrew, the Holy Spirit is actually called “the Spirit of Holiness,” which makes sense, because when he lives in you, he tends to make you more holy.

Whitewashing makes a thing appear clean and sound without changing its nature. It’s thinner than paper. The men Jesus accused wore fancy getups and made a big show of serving God, but inside, they were full of iniquity.

I’ll tell you about a revelation God gave me.

Islam is an evil religion spawned by a spirit that hates God. It’s a big problem. After Islam was established, Muslims came to rule a large part of the world, including Jerusalem. A Muslim ruler named Suleiman took advantage of his power to try to prevent the Jewish Messiah from coming.

Prophecy said the Messiah would enter Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate (also called the Golden Gate), which was an opening in Jerusalem’s wall. It used to be the gate people used to get to the temple. Right now, this gate is sealed with stone. Suleiman had it sealed (two other Muslim rulers had sealed it before him), and guess what he put outside it? Tombs full of dead men’s bones.

Prophecy said Elijah would announce the coming of the Messiah. He would precede him. Elijah was a descendent of Aaron, making him a member of the priestly tribe. Jewish priests have to be careful about their dealings with dead bodies (some believe this is why the priests on the way to Jerusalem refused to help the injured man in the story of the Good Samaritan). Suleiman and his minions hoped Elijah would not be able to pass through a Muslim cemetery and enter the Eastern Gate. No Elijah, no Messiah.

Jerusalem represents the kingdom of heaven in the Bible. The Messiah is God’s firstfruit. He has to enter the kingdom first. Jesus entered the Eastern Gate on a donkey, fulfilling prophecy. Suleiman didn’t believe Jesus was the Messiah, however, so he built his cemetery.

Can this be coincidence? In a world ruled by the vagaries of quantum mechanics, it’s hard to rule anything out, but look what Suleiman did. He repeated Satan’s pattern. He tried to block the entrance to heaven, using tombs containing dead men’s bones. Without realizing it, Suleiman gave us a picture of the Pharisees who opposed Jesus and the modern Christians who fight the Holy Spirit.

Prophecy doesn’t say Jesus will return through the gate. It says his coming will be seen in the heavens, from one end of the earth to the other. Suleiman closed the barn door after the colt got in.

Donkeys represent the flesh. We’re supposed to ride the flesh and steer it, but generally, it works the other way around. Jesus rode a donkey to show that a man living in a flesh body could rule the flesh and enter the kingdom of heaven.

Incidentally, Jesus said he would return after “the gospel of the kingdom” (not the gospel of “raise your hand and you will go to heaven”) was preached to all people. Guess which religion is most effective at keeping people from hearing the gospel? Islam. Look it up. It’s still blocking gates.

We need to get on top of self-righteousness. We drive people away with it. Oddly, we also lure people with licentiousness, which is the wrong bait. Error is an easy thing to commit. No matter the direction in which you miss, every miss counts. The laws of probability favor error.

Think of homosexuality, which is a huge problem for the church. The world beats us with it every day, very successfully. We criticize homosexuals because they insist we accept their sin and call it righteous. At the same time, we insist that God accept other sins. Churches are full of heterosexuals who fornicate and have no plans to quit. Living in sin is very common among Christians. How is forcing fornication on God any better than forcing homosexuality on him? We also accept sins like gluttony, materialism, anger, lying, laziness, and gossip.

We have to condemn homosexuality, but we also have to confront and condemn our own sins.

I have a Christian friend who lives with a boyfriend and has two children by him. She has a stash of Harry Potter material which she refuses to give up. You can’t do things like that and do well in the kingdom. I don’t want to offend her, so I don’t harangue her, but I am very concerned.

I watched a video featuring a person who claimed to have been sent to hell in a near-death experience. She said she asked God why she was damned, and the response was that she lived with her boyfriend. It made me think of my friend. I don’t know whether the story in the video was true, but I do know that salvation can be lost through deliberate rebellion. The Bible says so.

There are Christians who defend smoking weed, which clearly fits the Biblical definition of witchcraft. Christians practice yoga, which is part of a Satanic religion. Many, many Christians practice astrology, which is also a Satanic religion. We go to fortune tellers. We keep good luck charms and idols. We do all these things and expect God to accept them, while we go after other people whose sins seem more obvious.

We have to warn people about sin, but we also have to confront our own sins. I think we look pretty stupid to God when we defend astrology and condemn sodomy. How can you leave a yoga session, wearing a necklace with an astrological symbol on it, while living with a girlfriend and several illegitimate babies, and then pray for a homosexual to be delivered, as though you have something he doesn’t? You’re playing for one team and praying to the other team’s coach.

Pride is a huge Christian sin. Most of us think it’s a great thing. We say, “Don’t you have any pride?” Every good Christian is a charity case, just like a wino begging on a sidewalk in urine-soaked pants. None of us should have pride about anything. We should realize that every one of us is like a grown man who lives by taking money from his mother’s purse. Every good thing we get is charity, paid for by the torture of an innocent man. The phrase “self-made” should make us gag.

You may think you earn things through hard work. The world is full of people who work hard and play it smart but don’t succeed. How can you answer them?

If you have more than one god, you don’t have Jesus. It’s that simple. It always has been. You can worship as many “gods” as you like without offending Satan, but as soon as you pick up your second “god,” you give up Jesus.

Sometimes I feel like Jesus is coming back very soon, but other times, I think of the sad state of even charismatic Christians, and I feel like he must be a thousand years off.

God’s Presence is my Quantum of Solace

If you use the email address on my blog to get in touch with me, you may be disappointed. For some reason, it likes to put people in the junk folder, and it marks messages read, so I have no idea they’re in there. Last night I happened to check the folder, and I found a message from a college buddy. I think we last communicated in the 90’s, but I’m not sure.

We were classmates at Columbia College, back before the internal combustion engine, cell phones under 20 pounds, and lolcats. He’s a successful radiologist, which is a little funny, because he used to despair of getting into medical school. He came up with some kind of improvement in the bone marrow transplant procedure, and he was then accepted by Columbia’s medical school. I believe his invention was a very big deal, because he used to appear in TV interviews. If I recall correctly, he went to Australia to talk about it.

I don’t know why anyone worries about getting into medical school. I have high school classmates I wouldn’t trust to take a splinter out of a rat’s butt, yet who are now successful physicians. One is the son of a former mayor. I remember him as kind of a goof. Nice guy, but not someone you would bet on if he appeared on Jeopardy.

One day while I was walking around drunk during a free period, I saw him leaning against a classroom door. I had no idea what was going on. I figured he was playing a joke on a girl. He told me to hold the door for him, so I did. After he ran off, I let go, and Mr. Bond burst into the hallway. Mr. Bond was a teacher, which is why I call him “Mr.” He wasn’t all that interested in my explanation, so I soon found myself sitting in the headmaster’s office. I guess the headmaster didn’t respect Mr. Bond any more than my classmate did, because we never got past the waiting room. Mr. Bond gave me a lecture, and off I went.

Later on, he caught me in a school parking lot, riding drunk on the trunk of a friend’s car. That, I want to stress, was not my fault. Being drunk was my fault, but my friend decided to hit the gas on his own. I had no control over that.

I feel like I got framed both times. I couldn’t tell who was behind the door. It certainly felt like a girl.

My college friend is considerably smarter than the mayor’s son. Generally, doctors aren’t all that smart, so my friend should have realized he was better than the competition.

My friend gets most of the credit for getting me interested in science and math. I had entered college as a verbal person.

When I took the SAT’s, the chairman of Columbia’s English department sent me a letter, asking me to apply. I can’t understand that at all. Yes, I had a high verbal score, but how does that translate to an aptitude for studying literature? A high verbal aptitude makes you really good at crossword puzzles. It doesn’t mean you automatically want to become a leading authority on Chaucer.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that extreme verbal aptitude is useless. Maybe it’s good for cryptography? I don’t know. Nobody pays anyone to do crossword puzzles, and most English professors are middle-of-the-road intellects. You don’t need to be smart to teach people about J.D. Salinger. I don’t think brains would even be helpful.

At some point, I got the idea that I would rather be a doctor than a useless English major, and my friend…I will call him “Stan,” since I need a pseudonym…was the perfect resource. His dad was a podiatrist, and he was taking really neat classes. He told me about vertebrate anatomy, and we both signed up. Each of us got a dead cat and a dogfish, and we worked side by side at a dissection table. Stan’s dad generously supplied real scalpels so we didn’t have to use the junk most students used.

Sadly, I had no study habits, and I was clinically depressed because my disintegrating family drove me nuts. I was a real mess. I ended up bailing out and taking the class a second time. I bailed on a number of classes. I didn’t finish the class the second time around, and then I dropped out of college.

I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t end up in medical school. Doctors tend to be unhappy, like lawyers, and they used to suffer a lot on the way up. I don’t know if I could have survived the long shifts and systematic abuse that characterized the system back then.

I couldn’t survive the pre-med experience, so I think it’s silly to even suggest that I could have made it through a residency.

Law school was a joke. Drink all you want, hang out with your friends, and then work hard for one week at the end of every semester. I quit taking notes during my third year. It was a good fit for me.

When you get out of law school, you don’t work 36-hour shifts. You go to work at 9, and you leave by 6. On the weekends, you stay home. If you work harder than that, you’re working for the wrong firm. Truthfully, I think the hardest workers are people who should not have gone to law school. If you’re not talented enough to get a good job, you would be better off doing something else.

Stan also helped me get hooked on tools. In his room in our suite, he had a special drawer with lots of fascinating items in it. Stuff from Brookstone and so on. Weird little hand tools I had not realized I needed. He may deserve a lot of the credit or blame for the fact that I own several tons of tools. He would probably like the little tool station I’ve set up in my man room.

I had a sort of family of 5 friends. Four of us shared a suite. Stan was the resident leftist, although he wasn’t very good at it. He didn’t chain himself to anything or take part in marches. He was just farther to the left than the group average. He used to have long political discussions with my friend (and fellow blogger) Aaron, who was also part of the group. We used to call Aaron “Point” and Stan “Counterpoint.” Or maybe it was the other way around.

When Stan got in touch with me, he did it through this blog, so I knew he had seen some of my writing. I wondered how a person like me could fit into his world. I’m a far-right religious nut.

Stan surprised me. He apparently has a carry permit, and he’s a fanatical bird hunter. He says he’s upset because Californian invaders are ruining Colorado, the state where he lives. My take on this is that he’s a closeted conservative. Maybe he’ll have a Dennis Miller moment and come out one of these days.

It was nice to learn he wasn’t a transsexual vegan in a micro house with hemp walls.

I think Stan and Aaron had more influence on me than my other college friends. Stan helped me rediscover my STEM roots, and Aaron got me into blogging. He also got me interested in Israel, which is why I spent four life-changing months on a kibbutz.

I don’t communicate with a couple of the guys these days. One, a Jew who went through college with a very low opinion of Arabs, became a hard core anti-Israel activist, and he seems to be an extreme leftist. Another simply wore me down. I eventually realized I was not satisfied with the way he treated me or his influence on me, and there were some things about his character that made me uncomfortable, so I let him go.

I haven’t heard from the fifth guy in some time. He was always different. I always knew he was gay, but when we were in college, he was trying to make heterosexuality work. Years later, I found out his mother had died, and I called to express my sympathy. I heard another man’s voice on his answering machine, saying “we” were not home. I knew what had happened. I had always expected him to come out once his mother was gone.

I eventually wrote him. I told him I was a Christian, and that I couldn’t exactly congratulate him. I said I still considered him a friend, and I probably said I hoped he understood. He did not. He thought I was rejecting him or putting him down. I don’t recall, exactly. Anyway, we didn’t communicate for a while after that.

We eventually reestablished contact, and we got along fine once we cleared things up. I don’t know what he’s up to now, though. I pray for him sometimes. No matter how much you care about someone in that lifestyle, as a Christian, there is a limit to how close you can get. I’m very open about my concerns about the way homosexuality and sexual confusion are being used to as tools of persecution, and I would guess that my positions would not go over well with him.

Friends are friends, but God is God. When there is a conflict, you don’t have to weigh things and make a decision. There is only one choice.

The anti-Israel guy called me after I sent the letter to my gay friend, and while ostensibly trying to catch up with me and rekindle our friendship, he told me my letter was “evil.” That killed the relationship for me. It wasn’t his disagreement that bothered me. It was the arrogance and rudeness, combined with his incomprehensible belief that the matter was any of his business. It was startling to be confronted with such nonchalant condescension and close-mindedness.

Also, it showed how much he had changed. In college, he had been interested in learning more about his Jewish faith, and when he told me my letter was evil, I knew he had given up on the God of Leviticus. It seemed to me that he had allowed politics to become an excuse for venting rage that came from other sources.

That’s how political rage and other types of activist rage usually work. You can’t resolve things with your parents, so you join Greenpeace and go around ramming whaling ships. Activism is a wonderful, classic cover for cruelty and inability to forgive. If you dream of sending people mail bombs, but you’re having a hard time justifying it, come up with a cause, and you’ll be putting tacks and dynamite in boxes in no time.

Columbia was a terrible choice for me. The people were nuts. I have blamed myself more than anyone for my problems there, but the truth is that the atmosphere was sick.

I guess things would have been different if my parents had been helpful. Many people take their kids to colleges to look them over. Most educated people discuss college and career choices with their kids. They look to see what their kids are good at when they’re young, and they spend money on their interests and help them progress. My parents didn’t do any of those things. When I filled out college applications, I only did it because I knew I needed to have something to do the following year. I only got two applications in on time: Columbia and Dartmouth. Dartmouth waitlisted me, so I went to Columbia.

I didn’t do well with girls at Columbia. I used to think that was because I was a maladjusted kid, and there is a lot of truth to that, but I have looked up some of the women I knew, and they’re a mess. I wasn’t wrong about them. Some ended up in extreme-leftist academia or activism. None I checked up on had husbands. They were poisonous. Imagine being married to someone like that and being “corrected” 24 hours a day.

I remember a beautiful young engineer named June. She used to come to my dorm and hang out in the TV lounge on my floor. She talked about rape a lot. She would pop off with gems like, “Rape isn’t a crime of sex! It’s a crime of violence!” Out of nowhere.

Okay, fine, but what does that have to do with General Hospital? Am I supposed to ask you out now, or should I just jump out the window? Very strange. And she wasn’t odd by Columbia/Barnard standards. She was well within a standard deviation of normal.

Then there was Angela. I think she was an engineer. She was a gorgeous (by Columbia standards) Italian girl. She used to hang out with my friend Sam and his pack. She seemed like an airhead when I first met her. I remember watching her stand and grin while Sam slapped her buttocks to make them jiggle. He marveled at the motion. A year or two later, she was a feminist avenger with no sense of humor at all. It was as though an emasculating spirit had entered her body and taken control.

The previous version of Angela had been disappointing because she seemed unaware that she was selling herself cheap. The newer version was a pure horror.

I recall talking to her about a couple of people we knew. I had been speaking to them while they tried to cram for exams. I told Angela the woman’s “pre-med boyfriend” wanted to study. She said, “I find it interesting that you call him ‘pre-med’ but you don’t say what she was studying.” Ouch. Where did that come from? There go all my reasons for ever talking to you again.

She ended up working for one of the networks, helping make soap operas. She made a lot of money, but I don’t think she advanced the cause of feminism. I haven’t change the world, but I’m glad I don’t have to say I spent my life making soap operas.

Anyway, most of the women were highly maladjusted and completely unacceptable, and their nature said a lot about the institution itself.

As for the academics, there was no way I could have made it in the liberal arts, even if I had studied. To make it among liberal intellectuals (a tragic misnomer), you have to join the club, and I would not have done that. I would have been blackballed right and left for years before figuring out what was wrong.

The chairman of the English department should have added this sentence to his letter: “If you’re not a leftist nut, you are still welcome to study here, but you should forget about the possibility of making a living in academia or the arts afterward.”

Who wants to teach English or literature anyway? Could anything be more boring?

If I had had a sharp person to mentor me (instead of no one at all), I would have gone into a STEM field from day one. I would still have been in a hostile environment, but I could have gotten my degree and gotten out.

My parents didn’t introduce me to God. They didn’t prepare a path for me with prayer. I was not sharp enough to get connected on my own. Things went pretty well for me, considering. I didn’t end up dead or in prison.

I should have taken up STEM pursuits in high school and forgotten all about things like writing. Then I could have gone to a relatively normal technical college and minimized the friction with the more corrosive elements of the left.

When I look back on the opportunity I had, I can’t believe I dropped the ball. Columbia, for all its problems, was the equal of Harvard or Stanford. I could have been a mechanical engineer, an EE, or a physicist. I could have done medicine, had I chosen and prepared correctly. I had a horrible attitude, and I was not prepared at all. I wish I hadn’t gone to Columbia, but once I was there, blew a gigantic opportunity. What percentage of American 18-year-olds get four years at a top-10 university, with no student loans?

I busted my butt when I went back to school for physics. I was a different person. It’s too bad it happened so late, at the wrong school. I’m glad I got my degree, and I will always be grateful to the University of Miami for giving me a chance, but it would have been great to study at Caltech or MIT instead. Or Georgia Tech. A somewhat normal place.

Interesting stuff, at least to me.

It was good to hear from Stan, and it’s great to know he did well in life. He really got me thinking, too. Maybe now I’ll have more useful input the next time a young person who is not a leftist asks me for advice.

Visitors Remind me What Farms are For

This weekend I had a pleasant experience. Friends from my Miami days called and came by for a visit, bringing their 5 kids. My friend Amanda also came by, along with two of her sons. I think everyone had a good time. You can judge by the photo.

I think the one in the middle of the seat is my goddaughter, Gabriella. Can’t tell for sure.

The man driving the cart is Alonzo. I met him in about 2007, at Trinity Church. We were armorbearers. We both got disgusted with the leadership’s bad behavior. Alonzo moved to another church. I ended up at the same church, as readers of this blog know. Then the pastors at the second church imploded. They did what they pleased, answering to no one, and they rejected not only good advice, but the people who provided it. The husband is in prison now, and the wife is dead.

Alonzo and his wife Teri moved to Orlando. They had a hard time prospering in Miami, which is a Latin-dominated town. Cubans have serious problems with racism, and no one confronts them, because it’s only fashionable to confront white racism. Alonzo applied for 27 jobs in Miami and didn’t land a single one, but when he applied for three jobs in Orlando, he got three offers. They have never looked back. Like me, Alonzo hates Miami so much it makes him miserable when he has to go back for visits.

They live in Sanford now, which is not all that far from me. It’s near Orlando. As happy as they are to be away from Miami, they are thinking of moving to the Macon area. Disney World pretty much ruined Orlando, so it gets more like Miami all the time.

I may go to Tennessee. They may go to Macon. It may be that Florida is turning out to be a dubious area for Christians. Maybe God is moving people north.

Alonzo and Teri should hire themselves out as parent counselors. Their kids are about as close to perfect as kids get. They have great personalities, they don’t break things (much) when they show up. They treat adults with respect. They don’t whine.

Their oldest is 16, and she already has a college scholarship.

While they were here, I got a surprise call from my friend Tina. She’s a young woman who attended the second church I mentioned above. She got a scholarship from the University of Miami, so she had to leave her sister and brother-in-law in Coral Springs to go to school. They asked me if I could provide transportation to church, so I drove her for a couple of years.

Tina’s mother disappeared from her life, and she was raised by her sister. She competed in beauty pageants to support herself, and she got more than one scholarship. Once she made it to college, she worked very hard, doing very well in calculus and computer classes. She has a job know, but she’s also in grad school. She plans to develop software applications. I don’t know where she’s headed in life, but she is going to come out on top.

She’s still competing. She’s currently a “Miss” on the state level.

We used to talk while I drove her, and I gave her such advice as I could. She was very serious about Christianity. I don’t think college corrupted her. I mentioned the problems at New Dawn, and she started talking about the lack of accountability in the leadership. She was right on the money. How many kids fresh out of college even know what accountability is?

I thought she had forgotten all about me, but Teri posted a photo on Facebook, and Tina saw it, and she decided to call. She had lost my contact information.

I made a mess of my life when I was young. I can’t fix that, but it’s wonderful to see younger people I have had the opportunity to talk to. My revenge on the devil and the flesh is to help other people avoid what I went through.

I don’t know where I’ll be a year from now. I hope I’ll still be able to have a positive influence on someone here and there.

I spend a lot of time alone these days. It was nice to have people show up and remind me that I’ve made some investments. Investing in material wealth is a good idea, but the investments you make in people are more rewarding.

That poor cart. I don’t know how it survived the ride.

It’s Amazing What we Take for Granted

Today’s exciting event: installing a new toilet seat.

The neatest toilet seat I ever saw was in France. I was on a train. It was 1984. The restroom in my car had a seat with a spring in it. The spring kept the seat in the up position unless someone was sitting on it.

That was brilliant. No one likes to touch a public toilet seat, so men usually leave them down, and bad things happen. I am told that women like to hover over them, which also causes marksmanship errors. When the seat has a spring in it, both problems are eliminated.

Women probably hated the seat, but then women have a real entitlement issue in this regard. If one woman shares a house with 10 males, she will insist that everyone leave the seat down so she can sit down without looking. It’s a bad policy, but it seems to be universal. Anyway, I thought the seat was wonderful. I know what it’s like to share a bathroom with a man who doesn’t raise the seat.

The second-neatest toilet seat I ever saw was on a Japanese Toto brand toilet. The Japanese make the best toilets in the world. It’s actually a little sick, if you ask me. They go way overboard. They have seats that wash and dry you and do God knows what else. Anyway, the Toto seat did not bang into position when it was released. It fell slowly. The hinges were built so they applied friction on the way down. Genius.

I had to put a special seat and bars in my dad’s bathroom a few months ago. It was very recent. I signed him up for hospice service late in 2018, and they made suggestions. Now that he’s gone, the special equipment makes no sense, and it was hard to clean around. I replaced the seat with a slow-close job from Amazon. Apparently, the Japanese no longer have a monopoly. The manufacturer is not Toto. It’s Bath Royale.

I feel like there should be competing manufacturers named Journey, Foreigner, and Cheap Trick.

I give the Bath Royale people credit. They came up with a doozy. When you install the seat, it essentially aligns itself. When you want to clean, you push a button, and the seat pops right off.

It’s important for me to get the bathroom in order so I can fully accept what’s happening to my dad. If I left the handicap accessories there “just in case,” I would be fooling myself, and I would feel stuck emotionally, unable to inhabit my new role in life.

I suppose there is some possibility that his health might take a turn that would make it desirable to bring him home for his last few days, but I’m not going to leave things as they are just because of that. If it happens, I can restore the equipment in a day.

I use the master shower now, just to make myself move forward. I ripped out the flow restrictor, but it didn’t improve things enough, so I got a better shower handle from an upstairs bath and moved it to the master. I ordered a new handle which is supposed to be very good.

I don’t care about water flow. I have two wells and dozens of acres. My toilets and showers are going to have no impact on the local water supply no matter what I do.

It’s bad enough that my hipster washing machine doesn’t get clothes clean. I’m not putting up with substandard showers.

The people who like “high-efficiency” machines (deluded hippies at Consumer Reports) claim they get clothes cleaner. That’s far from true. It may be that they remove stains better, but that’s not the same thing as getting clothes clean. If you take a pair of poopy drawers and put them in a machine, and it smears the poo around really well and then leaves the diluted poo in the fabric, the stains will be gone, but the poo and bacteria will remain. If you wash a pair in an old-fashioned machine that uses a ton of water, you may end up with a tiny amount of poo pigment in a stain, but the generous rinsing will assure that there is virtually no poo anywhere else in the garment. Which pair would you rather wear?

Greenie washing machines don’t even get big loads wet all the way through. Try one and see. Put 6 bath sheets in the washer and turn it on. Chances are, the load will be dry in the middle when you’re done. If you’re washing things that are really offensive, it’s very bad when they don’t get wet. You’re just sending filth on a carnival ride, and then you’re putting it in your dryer, so it can coat the inside.

I found out how to defeat the problem with greenie washers. You use the “bulky” cycle. It’s typical leftist hypocrisy. You make a “green” product which doesn’t work, and then you add a feature that defeats the purpose yet makes the product function. It’s like low-flow toilets. You buy a toilet which uses half as much water, and then when you use it, you flush twice.

When you use the bulky cycle, the machine gives up and uses more water. Then it punishes you by refusing to spin it well, so you have to leave it in the dryer twice as long. Which consumes…more energy.

Greenies never seem to get anything right, yet their smugness and self-righteousness continue unabated.

I replaced 11 compact fluorescent bulbs in my ceiling recently. These are the curly bulbs Al Gore forced on us prematurely. They’re full of mercury, and they take around two minutes to start working. You go in a dark room, turn on the lights, stumble around in the dark, walk out, and turn off the lights. They’re worthless. My ceilings are at least 10 feet high, and my CFL’s were starting to crap out, so I had to get a big ladder and drag it from room to room. I only needed two new bulbs, but I was not about to get that ladder out 9 more times, so I threw all the others out, too. I replaced all the bulbs with LED’s. The LED bulb is the product Al Gore should have been patient enough to wait for.

The CFL’s have to be disposed of carefully because of the mercury. That means you have to make sure they’re hidden deep in a bag when you put them out with the regular trash. Virtually everyone puts them in the regular trash, so there is no point in making a drive to the special place where they take in scary garbage. If most people were disposing of CFL’s properly, I would, too, but since they’re not, my rigid observance of the law would accomplish nothing except to inconvenience me.

In the distant past, we waited for technology to improve before we abandoned tried and true ways of doing things. Not any more. We gave up incandescent bulbs and killed thousands of American jobs before we had a decent alternative, just so hippies could feel superior. LED’s were coming with or without input from greenies; the free market loves superior technology.

Imagine what it would have been like had we banned horses in 1895. Horses were considered unsanitary, and cars were the new green option. If greenies had been around back then, Americans would have been forced to buy a lot of really terrible cars or just walk.

To leftists, government coercion is always the first resort. They never wait for people to do the intelligent thing on their own.

I get cranky when I have problems caused by bad green technology. I acknowledge that. It’s exasperating, having a $1000 washer which is vastly inferior to a $400 washer made 20 years ago. It’s even more exasperating, knowing there are no good new washers. There is nothing I can do to get around the problem of the bulky cycle and moldy clothes, until engineers find a way to create an effective washing machine hippies can’t ban.

Anyway, the toilet seat is installed, and my high-flow shower handle is coming. It’s only a matter of time before I use that bathroom for everything. Eventually, I’ll use the bedroom as well.

I better get on the road. My dad will be finishing his dinner in about 35 minutes, and I haven’t seen him yet today. It’s best to see him an hour before a meal, so he will have something to do when I leave, or immediately after he eats, so he won’t be hungry and I won’t have to sit in the dining room while he finishes. It seems like they’re always eating. They have three meals a day, and bedtime comes early.

Sudden Weight Loss Helps me Prepare

Yesterday, I fired up my action camera and filmed my dad during our daily visit. I’m glad I did, because I don’t know how many more conversations I’ll have with him.

My family is dysfunctional, so we have very few photos, movies, and videos compared to normal American families. I believe the last time my dad appeared in a home video was in about 1991. He was steering his yacht, and his sister was filming. He gave her the finger.

His sister’s family was also dysfunctional, but they were high-functioning, so none of them are felons or drug addicts, and they all married. My aunt beat her stepdaughter regularly, but she shot a lot of family photos and videos.

My camera is a 4K model. I don’t see the point. If I shot a 30-minute video in 4K, I would have to buy a new hard drive just to hold it. I filmed my dad in 1080p, and it was still way more detailed than it needed to be. You don’t really want to capture everything when you film old people. I think I’m going to shoot in 480p from now on. It’s more than adequate.

I asked him a few things about his family. I will never get to know these people the way I should have when I was young, and I have no one to pass the information on to, but I figured I might as well learn a few things while there was still time. Because dementia erases older memories last, he can still recall a lot about his relatives.

I wanted to prove my dad had changed. That’s the main reason why I filmed him. No one who knows him will believe the things I say about him unless they see video. He kept telling me how great I was and so forth, and he talked about Christianity and heaven. He is a new person. I had to document it.

Today, two interesting things happened. First, his cremation urn arrived via UPS. Second, I found out he had lost 28 pounds.

I ordered the urn from Amazon a couple of days ago. I did not want to find myself struggling to tie up loose ends after his death. I knew it would be smart to have it on hand in advance. Imagine having someone cremated and having to wait several days for the urn.

The Amazon ad calls it an urn, but it’s really a box. It’s nearly cubic, and the sides are cherry veneer. It looks perfect. I’m surprised to see how nice it is, given the low cost. It certainly looks better than the one my aunt got in 2014. It looked exactly like a beer cooler. That’s kind of appropriate, since my uncle used to make her get up to get him beer. She tore her finger open on a rocking boat in a heavy sea, and while we were headed for shore to get it stitched up, he told her to get him a Coors Light.

The urn makes me a little uncomfortable. I’ll have to decide where to store it. I don’t want to see it every day.

Now for the weight loss. My dad has been losing weight slowly for the past several years. Between our move in 2017 and December of 2018, he went from a pretty consistent 217 to 210. To most people, that wouldn’t mean much, but he was more sedentary than ever, and he ate a lot of ice cream, so he should have gained weight.

Today he weighed 182 pounds. Prior to this, I had never known him to be under 185. Back in the Seventies, he went on a diet and got down to 185. I remember, because it was a big deal to him.

Oddly, until he was weighed today, I didn’t realize he had lost weight. He still looks fairly heavy. He still has a spare tire. I don’t know what’s happening. I think he dropped a lot of muscle.

The cardiologist told me the weight loss could be an end-of-life phenomenon resulting from multiple illnesses, which she called “co-morbidities.” He has congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation as well as dementia.

I did some Googling, and I came up with this term: “cachexia.” It means unintentional weight loss coupled with disease, more or less. It can be caused by a lack of appetite, but it also describes a condition in which you eat normally and still waste. It means your body doesn’t process food correctly any more; it stops rebuilding itself.

My dad’s appetite is fine. It’s not what it was 10 years ago (excessive), but he eats whatever they put on his plate. That means something else is happening.

It’s not cancer. When cancer patients lose weight, it’s because they can’t stand to eat.

The Internet says there is a cachexia variant called “cardiac cachexia.” People with congestive heart failure get it. Heart failure causes fluid to accumulate in the body, and this prevents nutrients from being absorbed. The fluid can cause swelling which masks the wasting.

Maybe that’s what’s happening.

This part of my dad’s life has been very turbulent for me. Things are changing quickly all the time. It’s not possible to assume a stance and hold it.

God has changed my dad’s personality tremendously over a period of a couple of weeks. My dad is giving me things I have been wishing for all my life. How can I want this new person to leave? On the other hand, my grief renews itself many times every day. I get reminders all the time, telling me he’s nearly gone. I take down the little notes I put up to help him remember things. I find and clean up little messes he made, for the very last time. I throw out things I know he’ll never use again.

Today I ordered a normal toilet seat for the master bath, to replace the elevated seat I installed a few weeks ago. I refuse to call it “my father’s bathroom.” I can’t allow myself to hold on like that.

I love my father, and I don’t want him to go, especially when we’re praying together and we’ve been delivered from frustration and anger, but I can’t live in this state for the rest of my life.

If my dad is in the final weeks, it’s all right. It’s not a crisis to be confronted and defeated. I feel like I should find him new doctors and come up with a strategy to make him gain weight and regain clarity, but then after my mother died, I kept feeling we should go get the body, revive her, and try something new. I didn’t seriously believe we should do that, but I had the feeling. It kept coming back for months after she was gone. I have an irrational resistance to giving up, and I know it’s irrational. There is nothing anyone can do.

It’s astounding to get so much help from God during this time. This could have gone much worse. I thought my dad would straight-arm God until the last minute, and I expected to suffer the whole time. I thought he would wait until he was breathing his last to repent. It has been nothing like that. We get together and talk about our love for each other, and we pray as a family. When my dad goes, I won’t have any lingering resentment to subdue. I will be as satisfied as a man with a father like mine can be.

My dad could have continued casting his burdens on me instead of God, but that has not happened. He has become gracious. How many adults can say that about their difficult parents? What a gift I’ve been given.

After he goes, I’ll have video to prove my story is true. Oral testimony is fine, but video is much more powerful.

I hope the end isn’t needlessly protracted. I don’t want to sit by his bed for three weeks, waiting for the familiar sound that says it’s over. He would be better off going in his sleep. I don’t have to be there to see it. I’ll catch up with him later.

My mother must be even happier than I am about his salvation. He’s leaving me in a cursed world, but she’s about to meet him again in heaven, and boy, is he improved.

I wish I could explain these things to him now, so he could have some understanding of what’s going on. It doesn’t matter, though. When I catch up with him, we will know everything we need to know, without saying a word.