Creepy Pastors do the Opposite

Today I had another remarkable revelation concerning the last two churches I belonged to. They are ruining people’s relationships in a manner not unlike the damage done by the Nazis and by Americans who owned slaves.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this sooner. I suppose I didn’t care enough about being rejected to think about it.

After World War Two, many people found themselves isolated from family and friends. The Nazis tore relationships apart. It’s obvious that they murdered people, but there was more to it than that. They destroyed neighborhoods so people had to leave as refugees. They imprisoned people and moved them around. When the war was over, the Nazi infrastructure was gone, and there was no one capable of determining where people were.

Many people got back together shortly after the war. Others stayed apart for years. Some never found each other again. Slaveholders also tore families apart, and many were never restored.

I’ve known for a long time that Rich Wilkerson and the crew at Trinity Church discouraged people from talking to those who leave the church. A friend told me she had been sat down for “the conversation.” I know there were secret meetings about me. Big deal. I’m not the kind of person who suffers a lot when people drop me.

I knew about Trinity, but it was only recently that people started telling me that the pastors at New Dawn discourage people from communicating from people who leave.

If what I’m told is correct, they’re not always relatively subtle about it, as in the recent situation where a pastor preached about people like me without using my name. I am told they mentioned people by name and told others to shun them.

Here’s the interesting part: these things are generally done in secret, because many church pastors are gutless and sneaky. The problem with that is that the people who are shunned don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know the pastors are behind it. They may assume their friends don’t want to be around them.

They can’t take away true friends who are close to you, because you will communicate with those people in spite of the pastors. But they can cut you off from people who had the potential to become friends.

They can also cause people who leave to cut off the people who stay. When you leave, you may assume the pastors have turned everyone against you, so you may stop maintaining relationships.

So now I wonder: how many ruined relationships are these people responsible for?

This is really something. Many people are very dependent on their churches for help and comfort. I’m not one of those people, but not everyone is like me. What happens when such people lose their church circles?

It’s not a small problem. Even a little church can interfere with dozens or hundreds of friendships.

Thinking about this, I realize how important it is to expose this nonsense. It has to be exposed because its power comes from the fact that it was done in secret. I feel like someone should start a Facebook group or website for victims, so they can come in and announce their feelings toward people and possibly reclaim them.

I’m so mad right now. How can anyone do something this vile and cowardly and pretend to be a man or woman of God? It’s all done from a desire to get money and/or power. It’s dishonest, because it’s secretive. It’s cruel. And what benefit does it bring? Spoiled idiots with delusions of grandeur get to preserve their little empires and avoid honest work. People who would otherwise have very limited access to wealth and power–people who would be doing blue-collar jobs–get to ride around in German cars and go on expensive vacations. That’s about it.

I don’t know what to do, except for talking about it openly so that people’s eyes will be opened.

Let the Bedbugs Starve

This morning during prayer I got more revelation about churches.

My prayer life keeps improving. These days I will often get up in the morning, go to the den, put on worship music (not Christian dance music), and pray while walking around. I am getting very aggressive, and I expect it to increase.

Today while I was praying, I thought about the way my life had changed since getting out from under a pastor.

When I was serving at churches, I had to deal with a lot of immature, ignorant people who were in authority. They did not pray much. They did not get revelation from God. They just repeated what other people told them. Nonetheless, for one reason or another, they were put in charge of ministries.

If you’re a pastor’s brother in law in a charismatic, money-centered church, you can pretty much count on running a ministry, unless he doesn’t like you. The wife will automatically be a pastor. Buddies and people who agree with everything the pastor says are likely to be promoted. Sometimes these people belong in their positions, and sometimes they don’t. The rest of us have to deal with them.

When the people in the Bible needed guidance, they went to men who were in contact with God. That’s what they did when they were doing things right, I mean. They went to Moses or Samuel or Jesus. They didn’t go to the high priest’s uncle or wife.

We are different now. We go to whichever crony or sycophant is available.

You can tell church leaders are useless when they have to brainstorm in order to come up with things to say or do. People who are anointed always have something on the stove. God doesn’t put a real servant in charge of something and then sit back to see the wonderful ideas the servant’s tiny, unaided brain can come up with.

When I was serving at Trinity Church, they used to come up with nutty projects. One was called “the 2020 Vision.” Rich Wilkerson said they were going to save a certain number of people by 2020.

I looked it up on the web, and it turned out about a billion churches had also had the 2020 vision, but it meant totally different things to them. And they had had the vision long before Wilkerson did, and you probably know how preachers love to steal hot ideas.

The 2020 vision lasted a few months, I think. It’s only 2015, so something is not quite right.

Wilkerson’s son Richie once preached about “microwave sermons.” The day you’re supposed to preach approaches, and you realize you have nothing to say, so you call a buddy and have him email you a sermon. You then serve his moldy garbage to your congregation, like a microwaved burrito.

He thought he was telling us about the problems preachers have, but he was really telling us God had not chosen him to teach us. If God had chosen him, he would have had something to say.

Rich Wilkerson manipulated people with Steve Munsey’s “Seven Blessings of Passover” nonsense, telling them God would give them a great year if they gave him lots of money. Then I exposed that lie, and he reinvented it as the “Heart for the House” offering, meaning the people were supposed to devote themselves to building his corporation.

In the Bible, “house” means something different. It refers to a human being God is trying to build. This is not something Rich Wilkerson has a heart for.

My last church put the pastor’s brother in law in charge of various things. It seemed like they were impressed because he had a career that involved IT. He put the church on Indiegogo (yes, I know) and tried to raise money. He led the men’s ministry and made us do silly team exercises which almost certainly came from corporate training. We were asked to participate in a tug of war to demonstrate how important it is for everyone to pull. I refused. A tug of war is a great way to put yourself in the hospital, especially if you’re over 40. You can’t make uneducated people understand the forces involved when several tons of men pull in different directions on a rope.

We also went bowling once, at a really dirty facility that served rotten food. That was pretty bad.

People who don’t pray have bad ideas, or they take bad ideas from other people. They have no business running anything. Even if you do pray, you need some time to mature. If you were stealing cars last year, you probably aren’t ready to be a youth pastor.

I’m not really comfortable with the whole “youth pastor” idea. We should learn from older people, because they’re the ones who know things.

This morning I realized how free I am. I don’t have to give big donations to wasteful people now. I don’t have to be on the prayer line for several hours a week. I don’t have to come to seven a.m. volunteer meetings and then serve until mid-afternoon, for pastors who show up late for church and then prolong the services by showing boring slides of their grandchildren.

I talk directly to God every day. He teaches me things that are true and useful. He isn’t repeating nonsense he heard on TBN.

Once nice thing about God is that he tries to improve me. He doesn’t try to convince me that Christianity is about money and miracles. He shows me the infected places on my heart. He shows me what I’m wrong about. He gives me motivation to admit fault and change.

The pastor at New Dawn was obsessed with grace. He rejected the idea that our own corruption causes problems. He believes that once you’re saved, God thinks you’re wonderful, and he does not expect you to show a lot of interest in repentance or improvement. He thinks our problems are caused by lack of faith, not iniquity or lack of obedience. He sees talk of repentance and correction as legalism.

If you tell him fat type 2 diabetics who eat everything in sight are sick because they’re gluttons, he won’t want to hear it. If you tell him we give evil spirits authority over our bodies, to cause disease, by hardening our hearts toward God’s correction, he will think you’re self-righteous.

It’s remarkable, really. He thinks talking about repentance and obedience is legalism, but he says God rewards tithes and offerings with wealth because of grace.

In the Old Testament, God told Malachi he would reward the Jews financially for giving to the priests. The people who got this promise were under the law. They had financial problems because they disobeyed the law. Restoring the offerings was a legalistic move. Obvious?

If you’re tithing, you’re obeying the law, not the Spirit. It shouldn’t be necessary to point that out.

He tries to get around this by saying Abraham tithed, but as far as we know, Abraham only tithed once. And the Jewish law of the tithe was never applied to non-Jews. Abraham was circumcised. Do we have to do that too?

I made myself unwelcome by telling people God expected us to fight our iniquities and obey the Holy Spirit. I said the prosperity gospel was a crock. That was helpful information people needed to have.

Now I don’t have to sit in the sanctuary wondering if I should say something because Albert or Rich wouldn’t like it. Or worse, because their wives, who are out of control, wouldn’t like it.

I don’t have to sit through an endless series of pastor appreciation events. I don’t have to watch the church give money to the pastor’s son, who treats older people like children and needs a boot in the rear.

It’s very good.

In the past, when I got away from church, I lost my relationship with God, but I have reached a point where churches interfere with that relationship. America’s churches are extremely screwed up. I’m sure there are good ones out there, but I don’t know of any. Definitely not around here.

The people who run our churches are doing tremendous harm. The prosperity nuts may be the worst. They fill people’s heads with promises that do not come true. They treat them disrespectfully. They use churches as their personal mad money funds. They promote their idiot relatives and give them money taken from poor people’s tithes. They even try to make churches cut people off socially for correcting them.

They do things people in the secular world go to jail for.

These swine on two legs are poisoning people against church and against God. I would hate to be in their shoes when it comes time to face him.

How can we expect people to trust God if the preachers who claim to represent him hurt us and lie to us? Is it really worth it, so you and your wife can quit working and buy things your skills and knowledge could never bring you in a secular setting? Many of the people you hurt have very little. Many were holding on by the skin of their teeth when they came to you, and you kicked them in the mouth.

I’m not sure when I’ll set foot in a church again. It seems like God has to work some positive changes in me, and he knows that every preacher within driving distance will only hinder him.

If a church has hurt you, and you don’t know where to turn, the best advice I can give you is to spend a lot of time praying every day. Ask God to correct you. Ask him to fill you with the Holy Spirit and the gift of prayer in tongues. Then use the gift as much as you can, and listen.

I don’t know what to think about the blood-drinkers in the pulpits. I assume their piglike behavior will be used to justify violent persecution eventually.

Don’t be too absorbed about serving at church. Be absorbed in knowing God and correcting yourself. The other stuff is much less important.

Do my Sideshow Barkers no Harm

I would say the drama continues, but it’s only drama if it makes you suffer, so I guess I can’t say that.

You will recall how I lost my old Facebook account, and the pastor of my old church, New Dawn Ministries, went on Facebook and said God cancels the accounts of people who go after men of God.

I thought I was done with the whole circus for a while, but this weekend I had lunch with friends who go to the church, and they told me that another pastor gave a sermon in which he told people they shouldn’t “like” things “haters” put up on Facebook.

You have to realize, this church meets in a room twice the size of a two-car garage. If you think they’re talking about you, they probably are. There aren’t a lot of targets to choose from.

My friends thought the sermon was ridiculous, and of course, so do I.

A young lady who used to be very close to them started chiming in on things I wrote. Her husband actually lived with the pastors for a while, and they helped him get his life together. It looks like the relationship has soured a bit.

She and her husband left the church a long time ago. I assumed they were just cooling off, but it looks like that is not so. The pastors pulled her out of a position she had held for four years, and somehow or another, things went south.

Now she has a lot to say. She doesn’t care who hears it. She said they mismanage the building fund and use it as a piggy bank. She complained about greed. She also said they had told people not to associate with her. She asked if they had done that to me, and I said they hadn’t.

Then I thought about the sermon. That was an effort to discourage people from communicating with me. So my answer to her question was wrong. They’re trying to get people to shun me.

She even thinks they got my Facebook account closed, which is possible, but they probably don’t know how to do things like that.

She referred to the pastor’s wife as the Facebook police. I thought I was the only one who had dealt with that.

It’s true that there are some people I don’t hear from now. But those people weren’t actual friends. Had they been friends, they would not have paid any attention to social pressure from people who run the church. The pastors can’t take friends away from me, but they were able to unmask people who only pretended to be friends. That’s a plus for me. I can’t always tell who is with me and who isn’t, so they gave me a hand with that.

I also found out that some people who appeared to be against me or neutral were actually for me.

So far, I haven’t gotten into the real purpose of this blog post, which isn’t about the microscopic details of a petty disagreement. The real topic is openness among Christians.

Long before I left New Dawn, I had two dreams that warned me about the upcoming problems. Rich Wilkerson, the pastor of Trinity Church, figured in both of them.

As far as I can tell, Wilkerson is totally useless as a man of God. I don’t think he ever thinks about helping anyone except himself or his family. I think his driving motivation in life is to accumulate money and become more famous. He’s like Mammon, wearing a flesh suit that used to be a man.

This explains his function in my dreams.

In the first dream, I went into New Dawn, and the whole church was dark. It was night, which is the time that belongs to the devil. There was only one light on in the church, and it was in the office. Rich Wilkerson was in there alone, counting money.

I told the pastors at New Dawn about the dream. Obviously, it was a warning that the same greedy spirit that ran Trinity was going to try to take over.

In the second dream, Rich Wilkerson followed me when I moved from Trinity to New Dawn. Again, it was night. I went into the church’s kitchen and saw him giving the volunteers orders, telling them what to do even though he didn’t run the place.

The meaning of this dream was that Satan would take people who volunteered at the church and use them to twist the pastors’ minds. They would come up with carnal plans that looked good to the pastors, and through these plans, the spirit would control the church. The kitchen is not the sanctuary; it’s a place where worldly tasks predominate.

I told the pastors about this dream, too.

I’m not the only one who warned them. A friend of mine stood up and told them they had to stay on the right course. I don’t recall everything they said. Another friend talked to them on the phone and told them they needed to listen to me, because I would help guide them.

The ironic thing about these dreams is that they could have helped the pastors, but in the end, they only helped me. The information God gave them through my two friends helped the friends. The pastors didn’t get anything out of it.

I’m still digressing.

I used to be somewhat cautious about what I said about preachers publicly. I had been brainwashed by the warped teachings on authority and submission, and by people who discouraged gossip without knowing what it actually was.

Now I will say just about anything, anywhere, as long as I believe God wants me to say it.

The Bible says we’re not supposed to touch God’s anointed. Crooks and frauds love to stand in the pulpit and repeat this, because it makes people afraid to expose them.

There are a couple of problems with the way people interpret the verse.

First of all, “anointed” means “authorized.” It applies to people who are doing what God authorized them to do. God never authorized anyone to teach the poor to give the church all their money. He never authorized anyone to teach the positive-thinking gospel. The characters who teach this nonsense aren’t anointed. They’re in rebellion. They’re wolves in sheep’s clothing. A number of them aren’t even Christians. They just like easy money.

Second, what does “touch” mean? If I disagree with you publicly, have I “touched” you in the meaning of the verse? Of course not. There’s nothing wrong with speaking honestly to a man of God. When the Bible was written, prophets were beaten and murdered. They had real problems, not Facebook posts.

If you look up the Hebrew word translated “touch,” it also means things like “afflict” and “strike.” So it’s kind of a stretch to apply it to someone who says maybe the pastors shouldn’t go on vacation four times a year at the congregation’s expense.

There is more to the subject, though. Almost no one considers this: if I spend more time with God than you do, and you’re wandering around doing your own thing, I have the right to correct you as God sees fit. Publicly or privately. Usually it’s best to correct people privately, but we are not under the law, so it’s not mandatory, and aside from that, when people repeatedly reject private correction, it becomes pointless.

Virtually nobody who fought with me has the kind of prayer habits I do. I am not bragging. It’s just a fact. God addicted me to prayer, and now I spend a great deal of time with him. The people who try to correct me pray very little. They have no right to open their mouths, because they’re not prepared.

It’s amazing how our confidence in our standing contrasts with our qualifications.

Every lukewarm hypocrite who goes to church once a year and only prays when he buys a lottery ticket feels entitled to air his opinions about God. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. If you don’t know anything, you should shut up. You may have an opinion, but it’s worthless, and you should realize that.

I have the right to speak openly about the bad things preachers do. If you want to challenge me, develop a prayer life and ask God what you should do about me. Otherwise, be quiet. You’re in over your head.

I’ll go beyond that. Even if your prayer life is weak, if you know for a fact that a preacher is crooked or incompetent, you should say so, with reasonable discretion.

I used to think the pastors at New Dawn were great. I still believe they were much better than they are now. Anyway, other people left the church because they knew things I didn’t know. If they had spoken up sooner, maybe I would have awakened sooner.

The spirits that corrupt churches love the “speak no evil” mantra, because it protects them. Termites, roaches, and fungi love the dark. When the light comes in, it ruins everything for them. It will disarm evil spirits, and if a preacher isn’t totally corrupted by pride, it will wake him up and correct him.

If you’re sure something is badly wrong with your pastors, why would you keep it quiet? Malfunctioning pastors ruin lives. They hurt our friends. Yet we help them by adhering to a code of silence.

How are you a friend if you let someone like Benny Hinn take your friend’s money?

I am now beyond blunt when I talk about preachers. I don’t care about them or their jobs. If you hurt people for a living, your job should be taken away. Why should I help you drink the blood of innocent people?

I don’t know if I’ll ever go to church again. How am I supposed to find one that isn’t crazy? There must be a few out there, but I don’t know of any. I’ll wait, and if God sends me somewhere, I’ll go. Until then, I won’t worry. Worrying leads to carnal decisions.

My advice is to be honest but not vindictive or cruel. Say what will promote a positive result, and sleep soundly afterward.

I’ve been involved with preachers that had problems, and I have been fooled, but looking back, I can say that I never supported them in anything I knew to be wrong. I put up with a certain amount of error, because it’s inevitable, but I never pretended I thought something was right when I knew it was wrong.

If you want to argue with me, that’s fine. Just make sure you spend a few years praying several hours a day first. After that we can talk.

Your World is Upside-Down

I had a couple of interesting experiences this weekend. I watched two really bad movies and got some great revelations afterward.

Revelation is a funny thing. Sometimes it’s something you already know or could have figured out had someone asked you, yet somehow, after God points it out to you, it becomes part of you in a new way.

The first movie I watched was Lucy. This is a film about a girl who overdoses on a miracle drug and suddenly develops the ability to use more of the brain than the rest of us.

There is a persistent myth that people only use 5% or 10% of their brains. That may be true in certain parts of California, but people with common sense realize it’s a made-up “fact.” The brain sucks up a lot of energy, and it’s bulky to carry around. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to equip people with a big expensive organ that doesn’t do much.

In Lucy, Scarlett Johannson is drafted as a drug mule. A mean Taiwanese drug kingpin sews a bag into her belly so she can smuggle it to another country. The bag contains a chemical pregnant women produce to make their embryos develop. It breaks, and she starts developing super powers.

At 20%, she has the ability to understand Chinese instantly. I wish I had that ability while trying to get new Chinese tools to work. I would be able to download manuals I could actually understand.

The movie is awful, but I needed something to kill time while the birds were out of their cages, so I sat through it. Any fourth-grader who gets Bs in science will realize the fake science in the movie is stupid even by movie standards, and the plot is also crazy.

Lately, God has been showing me how important it is to quit getting new things and to make the most of what I already have. Sometimes your problem is that you need new stuff, but how can you be sure if you haven’t given your old stuff a chance? Covetousness is all about abandoning what you have in favor of something new, and it’s not just bad because it puts you in debt or causes friction with the people who already have what you want. It’s bad because it prevents you from developing. The most important part of the old stuff you need to make the most of is you, yourself.

In the movie, Lucy got really smart. She figured out the secrets of quantum mechanics and so on. She became so smart everything was easy for her. She shot all sorts of bad guys. She outwitted everyone she encountered. You can probably guess. But she didn’t get new stuff. She didn’t build new tools. She didn’t need to, because there was so much new power in her.

When the movie was over, I got a sudden revelation: people fixate on fixing the world around them when they should be working on themselves.

Obvious, but I felt it take root in me, and that was new.

As the movie unfolded, this fictional character was in the process of filling a flash drive with knowledge that would help humanity with its technical problems, but she, herself, proved that what she was doing was a waste of time. Because she had been improved, she didn’t need more tools. The rest of humanity didn’t need her flash drive and the new knowledge. They needed a way to become like her.

Technology exists largely to help us with problems caused by our inner shortcomings. If we were truly connected to God and living in faith and submission, we wouldn’t need gadgets and cures. We wouldn’t have most of the problems those things are intended to fix.

When Jesus met people who had diseases, he didn’t hold telethons to raise money for research. He told them to be healed, and that was it. He didn’t need microscopes, centrifuges, imaging machines, drugs…not even an exam table. That’s what life is supposed to be like. We have to come up with complicated solutions to our problems because we lost contact with the simple solution.

That may not sound deep, but it’s very important. The more you work on yourself, the better your life will be. It’s easy to take away your toys and money. It’s very hard to take away the inner qualities and assets that make you powerful and successful. They will save you no matter what happens in the world around you.

Last night, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past.

I can’t help it. I like the Wolverine. And nothing else was on. Believe me, I looked.

The X-Men movies center on a paranoid fantasy: humanity’s war on mutants.

In the X-Men world, genetic mutations are giving rise to a race of beings with magical powers. They can do all sorts of impossible things. Some can shoot fire out of their bodies. Some have unlimited healing power, so you can’t kill them. There was one that was able to disappear in one place and instantly appear in another, yards away. Just silly stuff. The Marvel people don’t even try to make it sound reasonable.

The humans in the movies are scared of the mutants, probably because this is Marvel’s way of lecturing the world about our evil deeds, such as making a responsible effort to watch our borders and refusing to bake cakes for gays. I’m not sure. Anyway, the idea is that the mutants have so much power, we can’t hope to fight them once they get it together, so mean humans decide the smart thing is to round them up and kill them. Or “cure” them of their mutations.

In last night’s movie, a midget named Trask manufactured evil robots called…you won’t believe this…”sentinels.” Yes, I know. This is the same name the Matrix people used for evil robots that killed rebels. The X-Men sentinels had qualities that came from research done on a murdered mutant. Trask took her DNA and used it to give the robots all sorts of mutant powers. So when they attacked mutants, the mutants were totally outgunned. Any given robot could duplicate any mutant power, and that’s bad if you’re a mutant and all you can do is turn everything you touch into pudding.

In the movie, some of the mutants hid their powers. A couple took a serum to suppress them. They were willing to stunt themselves in order to fit in and avoid trouble. What the mutants really needed to do was to get together, organize, make the most of their powers, and fight. The head good mutant, Dr. Xavier, had a special school dedicated to teaching mutant kids how to use their powers and survive.

Again, as if I need to repeat it, the movie was stupid. Even by Marvel standards. It was not good. But I watched it, because almost any movie with superheroes and explosions in it is at least mildly entertaining.

Afterward, I got the revelation. It was so strong, I stopped walking, stood in a doorframe, held on, and stamped my foot.

In this natural world, a developed Christian is a real-life superhero. A person who has built himself up in the Holy Spirit and aligned himself with God’s will can do absolutely anything God tells him to do. Jesus walked on water and turned water into wine. Those are things a comic book superhero might do. It sounds like a silly comparison, but it’s true. He cured diseases. He ran supernatural beings off just by talking to them. We are supposed to do greater things than he did, but we don’t.

Working to develop your power is well worth it, and you don’t have to part the Red Sea in order to accomplish amazing, helpful feats. Long before you find yourself walking on water and doing similarly spectacular things, you will find that you can defeat people and situations simply by praying or by speaking certain words in faith. Those are wonderful abilities no unaided human being has.

We are supposed to be a powerful family of invincible beings, but we’re not, because we are too busy focusing on fitting in and getting God to give us external blessings like money. To God, those things are like prosthetics. We are like cripples who turn down healing because we prefer Air Jordan wheelchairs.

The prosperity gospel has never worked. It’s a total waste of time and money. But it’s worse than that. It succeeds at the thing it was actually designed to do: it keeps us powerless. Meanwhile, the spirits around us, and the carnal people who serve them, walk all over us. We should be ruling over them, but they do with us as they please, because we don’t know who we are. And we are few in number because we don’t try.

It’s an odd way to look at Christianity, but it’s completely consistent with the Bible.

Satan created a race of superhuman beings called the nephilim; the giants. From a natural standpoint, they were better than we are. They were bigger and stronger. They were dominant. But God killed them off because while they were big in the natural world, they were spiritual midgets. They didn’t have the Holy Spirit. They had no love or compassion. They were not submitted to God. They killed his people day after day.

We are supposed to be supernatural giants. Instead, we focus on natural stilts like wealth and power, to make us look like giants in this corrupt world. Then we die, and we lose those things. All we have left then is what we have made of ourselves.

So we have nephilim hearts and human bodies. That’s a horrible combination. No wonder everyone pushes us around. We have the worst of both races.

We need to be building ourselves up in the Spirit. If we were doing that, we would be strong, and we would multiply. We would be dominant, as the Hebrews were dominant when they took over Israel. As it is, we now run from gays and illegal aliens. We even run from animals. We are reintroducing large predators into areas our ancestors had the good sense to run them out of, and we can get in big trouble for bothering them when they come into our yards, where our children play. It’s funny; one of the plagues of Egypt was a flood of wild animals that terrorized people.

This blog post will sound nutty to people, but if you’re a Christian, you already believe the first human being was made from mud, and you believe God made the sun stand still so Joshua could fight. It’s not a question of whether you believe strange things. It’s a question of which strange things you’re willing to believe.

Keep praying in tongues. Keep asking God for correction and humility. Keep listening. Keep admitting you can’t help yourself. Confess everything to God. Confess your negative feelings about him. He already knows about them, he knows you want to get rid of them, and he wants to help.

The future is assured, but if you want your place in it, you’re going to have to submit. Not just on Sunday, but all day, every day. Your whole life has to belong to God. I’m not saying you can’t survive without making mistakes. I’m saying you have to side with God against everyone, including yourself, all the time.

This will help you, if you can hear it. Time is getting short and patience is running dry, so get on board while you can.

We have Artificial Intelligence but no Artificial Empathy

A fascinating thing happened last night. Facebook killed my account.

I don’t pay much attention to the terms of service when I use message boards and Twitter and so on. I figure that if I behave, everything will be fine. I didn’t know, or I forgot, that Facebook has an unusual requirement: they insist that you use your real name.

Using your real name on the Internet is not a bright idea. If you have enough of a presence, determined people will be able to find out who you are and what your address is, but most people are not determined, so if you use an alias, they will leave you alone. I generally use aliases.

I used my real name on Facebook for quite some time, but one day I decided to change that. I altered the last name. Then last night Facebook told me I would have to send them a scan of an ID in order to get back in. And the name on the ID had to match my Facebook name.

This adds up to abrupt, permanent obliteration. I can’t produce an ID with a fake name on it, so I’m all done. I can’t get back in. Everything I posted on Facebook will disappear, and so will my photos.

Am I mad at Facebook? Yes, but only because they gave me no warning. They should say, “If you don’t give us your real name within x days, we will kill your account.” That would give you time to tell people your time was short, so they would realize you hadn’t blocked them. Other than that, I’m not mad at all. Facebook can do anything it wants with its own service.

Now that I think about it, it’s a form of social extortion. If they gave you time to leave gracefully, you would be in control of the situation. Because they slam the door with no warning, you end up in a position where you have to do what they want. To me, this isn’t important, but to many people, it’s a big deal. They use Facebook for business, or they have big networks of people they need to stay in touch with for one reason or another. Also, there are things on the web you can sign into using Facebook, and they may be more important to you than Facebook itself.

My guess is that the nerds at Facebook thought this over carefully and did it on purpose in order to coerce us. Maybe the NSA gave them the idea, or maybe it’s just typical nerd behavior. Nerds tend to have stunted hearts, and they like controlling other people. They are very dangerous because of their power, lack of maturity, and lack of empathy. Maybe the wedgies and red bellies they get when they’re young are society taking revenge in advance.

I lost like 1300 uploaded photos. That’s a relief. I saw the exact figure the other day, and the size of it bothered me. I didn’t realize I had uploaded so many things. I didn’t want them to have that much stuff. Now they don’t, in a way. It’s still on their servers, but they can’t publish it any more. They can still give it to Obama, I guess, but the Fourth Amendment is dead, so he can get his hands on just about anything he wants with or without Facebook, and as far as I know, he has no reason to bother me anyway.

I didn’t actually lose the photos. I just lost the online collection. I still have them. After all, I had to have them in order to upload them.

Facebook was a handy way to put things on the Internet. If I wanted to post a photo on a forum or my blog, I could upload it to Facebook from my phone. That’s very quick. Then I could copy it to my PC and upload it again, wherever I wanted. I will miss that. Now I’ll have to use email.

What’s really interesting is not the effect on my online presence, though. It’s the way it affects my offline life.

I was using Facebook too much. I’m a writer, and for me, writing is about as hard as breathing. I can produce huge amounts of content with almost no effort, and I enjoy it. Facebook was an outlet for me, and it was easy to use, so I filled it up.

I got in the habit of looking at my phone a lot. Once I caught myself turning away from Facebook on the PC to check Facebook on my phone.

Habits can be pretty crazy. Obviously, I knew what I did was irrational, but I was very used to looking at Facebook when I took a break from things, and I had just taken a break from…Facebook.

To a great extent, I let Facebook replace offline interaction with people. I am solitary by nature, and I got pushed out of my church–my biggest social outlet–earlier this year. I used Facebook to stay close to people I knew. This is a legitimate, possibly healthy use of Facebook, but only as an adjunct. Not when it becomes a substitute.

When I saw I was exiled, I felt like I was in withdrawal. I didn’t like the sensation. But I was glad, because getting rid of things you depend on too much is always good.

I had a long prayer session last night. God showed me some things.

He showed me my prayers are answered with much greater consistency these days. He showed me that he is restoring things. He showed me that he is changing my heart so I side with him, even against myself. He showed me how I had sided against him for most of my life.

You don’t just side against God by committing obvious sins like fornication and stealing. You side against him by believing lies about him and criticizing him in your heart. If you think, even for an instant, that he isn’t doing the best job possible, and that his intentions toward you aren’t perfect, you’re siding against him. You’re believing the devil and the spoiled people who think God doesn’t do enough for them. If you think he is slow to answer, or that he is withholding good things for no sound reason, you’re siding against him. If you feel resentment toward him when something unpleasant happens, even if your mind hates the feeling and admits it’s wrong, your heart is siding against him.

You have to side with God, because he IS right, and you have to do one more thing: you have to hate Satan and have utter contempt for him. He is nothing. He is the excrement of creation. The lake of fire is creation’s septic tank. That’s harsh, but it’s true. He is totally worthless. You have to despise him as well as his ways and his promises.

The supernatural is full of symmetry. If we are supposed to praise God, of course we are supposed to contemn the ridiculous loser spirits that are against him, just as law-abiding citizens contemn the sleazy, defeated, stupid individuals who populate the underworld.

Somehow or another, this was related to the Facebook problem, but I can’t recall how.

God reminded me of something I realized recently: my days of defeat are over. Because I have been asking for correction, I have been turned around so I am headed in the right direction. I have not received every good thing life has to offer, but I am now headed toward them, and I can’t be stopped. I can be deterred temporarily, but it is no longer possible to overcome me permanently. I will win. No one who is against me has the power to prevent it. They are all losers. They don’t have the capacity to win.

I will win because I am becoming aligned with the will of the only real power there is: the permanent alpha male of all creation. If I am for him in my heart, and I keep turning back to him, no one else matters. They are lower than bugs before his power.

That’s really something. Crazy things may happen, but I’ve already won. Things will never stop getting better for me. Never. I’m like a leper who just received a dose of a cure. I may have scabs and sores today, but tomorrow I will have fewer of them, and a month from now, even more will have fallen off. Meanwhile, new scabs and sores will continue to appear on my enemies.

I can’t ask for instantaneous victory in all areas, but life is now a continuous and perpetual series of victories, so I will live my way into blessings day by day as long as I’m alive, like a product on an assembly line, receiving new parts as it progresses.

The one big change I would like to see is this: I would like to lose the habit of anticipating defeat that doesn’t come.

God gives me victory, over and over. “Victory” pretty much implies “battle,” though. Things that seem like problems arise, and I do supernatural warfare, and my faith tells me I’ve won. Then I win. But often I still worry, and that prevents me from enjoying victory until my eyes see it.

I’ve been bitten in the rear end a lot in life. Many times, I’ve been in positions where victory was natural and seemed inevitable, and in spite of everything, I’ve experienced sudden, unexpected attacks followed by defeat. That got me in the habit of expecting to lose. The habit of losing creates the habit of expecting loss. I’m much better about this than I used to be, but I look forward to a time when the habit of worry is totally destroyed. That way, instead of enjoying victory when I see it, I’ll start enjoying it as soon as God tells me it’s mine. That’s how life is supposed to be.

I don’t know if I’ll join Facebook again. It’s nice to be away from it. It’s also nice to use it to communicate.

I am concerned about the controlling nature of the people who design technology, as well as the controlling nature of technology itself. People tend to pass their traits on to their children, and technology has many warped, cruel, amoral, unempathetic fathers.

When you use Facebook now, it sends you ads based on things you’ve seen on the web, even if you try to opt out. If you look at something on Amazon, it will pop up over and over on Facebook. If it’s doing that with wrenches and T-shirts, what happens when you go to political and religious sites? What happens if you look at pornography or you have cybersex? Are the warm, loving, forgiving nerds disposing of all that powerful information, because they respect your privacy?

If God lets the world persist, technology is going to become extremely oppressive. They already have enough cheap storage to contain all of our emails and cell calls. The power of technology will continue to increase. And because technology never forgets and always analyzes, weird things will happen.

The Internet will know when you’re sick, before your doctor does. It will know if you use drugs, just by correlating things about your web use with known information about drug users, even if you never mention drugs on the Internet. It will know things about your relationships, before you and the people in your relationships suspect them. It will start to predict the future with surprising accuracy, and eventually, lawmakers will decide that we have to defer to its conclusions. America will be like a giant, self-driven Google car.

We already have “pre-crime” interventions. Blogger Michele Catalano got a surprise visit from armed feds because someone in her home Googled “pressure cooker.” It won’t be all that long before the feds have the power to bring a van to your house, put you and your family in it, and whisk you away to indefinite incarceration without trial, simply because the Internet says you’re going to cause problems. This will happen to people before they even think about rocking the boat. The Internet will know their intentions before they form them. It will be wrong sometimes, but how will you prove that? If Mama Internet says you’re going to shoot the president, and they put you away before you can do it, and you never get the chance, how do you prove she was wrong?

Facebook may be the tool that turns into Big Brother, or it may be Google Hangouts, or it may be something we haven’t seen yet, but we are all being turned into cells in one big, diseased brain. Loss of liberty is inevitable. Privacy, like private property, is an essential part of liberty. We don’t think about that much. I’ve never seen anyone mention the connection publicly.

I wonder if the ability to post memes and look at cat pictures is so valuable it justifies jumping back into the cage. Maybe it does. Maybe resistance IS futile, so I might as well make hay while the sun shines.

The devil has a long history of constructing seemingly impregnable structures, which God crushes with surprising speed. He and the other angels had huge children who were much more powerful than humans, and God drowned them all in a few days. Satan condemned the entire human race to hell and won the earth as a prize, and God reversed it with the crucifixion. The huge artificial brain that surrounds the earth appears to be Satan’s latest stronghold. Do we run from it in terror, or should we just enjoy technology and rest in the realization that this stronghold, like every one that came before it, will be humbled and rendered harmless?

I don’t know the answer yet.

I may sign up again. I may not. I’m not sure staying out will help me. On the other hand, I’m sure that going back in will not hurt me. Not in any meaningful, lasting way.

The Billy Mays of Advanced Math?

Still fiddling with math and physics.

I’ve had the strangest sensation lately. I feel like I’m inside RLM, the math/physics/astronomy building at the University of Texas. This is the building where I worked and went to classes when I was hoping to get a doctorate. I guess I spent 20 hours a week there.

The people were really dreary. I’m not the most outgoing person on earth, but I could not make friends there. Could not do it. Everywhere I go, I manage to make friends with at least one person within a month. Not the physics department.

The guy who shared my desk in the TA office was okay, and there was a Navy guy who became an experimental physicist. He had a harder time with the work than I did, and I thought he was going to wash out, but he made it and I didn’t. There was also a guy I sort of talked to occasionally. He had a thing for Asian girls So much so that he planned to move to Japan to teach English.

Oh, my God. I just Googled him, and he’s a physics professor. In Tokyo. He has been busy.

I never made a dent socially while I was there, and I suffered pretty badly, but I miss certain things. I miss teaching. The kids I taught were not as odd as the grad students, and it was nice to know that I was good at something.

RLM is named for Robert Lee Moore, a famous mathematician from Texas. I Googled him the other day and found out. I’m sure I saw his name on a plaque whenever I entered the building, but I don’t recall.

Moore is famous for math, and also for racism. He refused to teach black students back when UT was forced to accept them. They still named a building after him. If you wear a Dukes of Hazzard T-shirt to your quantum mechanics class, you’ll probably be told to turn it inside-out, but you will still be expected to sit in a building named after a maladjusted, hateful, racist crank.

I looked around on Youtube for some complex analysis lectures, to help me remember what I used to know so well. I found Herbert Gross. If you’re a student, you have to check this guy out.

He appears in old black and white videos published by MIT Open Courseware. The video quality is about like old Andy Griffith shows, so I figured he was filmed in about 1960, but the videos are from the early 1970s.

He’s a magnificent teacher.

I don’t know for sure, but the impression I have from all my years of study is that teaching pedigree means a lot.

There are certain things people who study a given subject should know; things they will be expected to know, even though you don’t have to know them in order to be good at the subject. You can make up a series of lectures and teach a subject well without referring to other people’s lectures, but you are likely to miss various characteristic anecdotes and examples that are commonly taught.

I think this is because many instructors can trace their roots back to instructors who were seminal, just as piano teachers claim they can trace their roots back to Liszt. Wolfgang Pauli, or whoever, included this or that bit of information in his lectures, so his students went on to include it in theirs, and so on.

Studying under people whose lectures conform to common standards is helpful, because you will run into instructors who expect you to know things that are commonly taught, and they may put these things in assignments on on tests.

I guess that was a long digression, but the feel I get from watching Herbert Gross is that he developed right in the thick of the math/physics/engineering community in the northeast. He seems to know exactly what’s important and useful, as though he has heard it himself via a long practiced tradition.

He’s apparently still alive. Either that, or he died and no one remembered to remove his website. He was still around last year.

I don’t know if my guess about him is right, but I think it’s definitely smart to try to learn from people at places like MIT or Harvard or the University of Chicago when possible, before taking a chance on people whose pedigrees are unknown.

His videos are wonderful. He really flies, but he is exquisitely prepared, so everything he says is clear. If your instructors stink, check him out. I wish to God I had had Youtube back in my day, when I was watching my Japanese professor point at different expressions and say things like, “Jees one, jees one, all same.”

If you don’t understand what that means, we are in the same boat.

One nice surprise is that I don’t struggle. I guess that makes sense. After all, this material used to be easy for me, and it should be in my brain somewhere, waiting to be reactivated. I fast-forward a lot. But I do have to do problems, because understanding is not the same as remembering with the kind of familiarity required for actual work.

I don’t know why math was easy and physics was hard. Maybe it’s because math is easy, and physics is hard.

He refers to vector analysis (multivariable calculus) in his complex analysis lectures, so I am checking that out, too. Luckily, he has lectures on both topics.

I don’t know where this is going. If I can just get back to the point where I can look at a graduate physics text and have some understanding of what it says, it will be a huge relief. I feel much better about my brain. I am starting to feel smart again.

Life isn’t about self-confidence, but you shouldn’t doubt yourself wrongly, especially in your heart.

I hope the videos are useful to people. Forty years’ worth of MIT students can’t be wrong. Totally. Not about everything.

My State is Solidifying

What interesting times I’m having.

I keep getting deeper into physics and electronics. It’s not something I expected, and it’s not going the way I would have predicted.

For years I’ve had dreams about my time as a physics grad student at the University of Texas. I hated these dreams, but I couldn’t stop them. I would find myself returning to my apartment north of the city. My things were still there. The apartment was different in the dreams. It was gigantic. It was disorderly, too. The kitchen was a mess. Not dirty, but stuff was out on the table and counters. There were messy rooms with all sorts of tools in them.

I would wonder why the company that owned the apartment complex hadn’t thrown me out, since I hadn’t been paying rent.

I would find myself walking around campus, attending August meetings in preparation for the new school year. I wasn’t really part of it, though. I was like a ghost, observing but not really joining.

I did not like the dreams. I knew things weren’t right. I wasn’t ready to go back to work. I hadn’t planned or made arrangements. I was just there, with no warning or preparation. I didn’t feel that I could make it work. I was on my own.

I prayed for God to take away the dreams.

Losing physics was the most painful thing that ever happened to me. I spent three years in Texas, and I didn’t make a single friend, except for a girlfriend. The students in the department were very disagreeable. They were cold. Many were arrogant and snotty, as you would expect boys to be after a twenty-odd years of having their mothers show their brains off to their relatives and friends. The instructors didn’t care at all about the students. The administration was like a machine in a far-off country that transmitted its decisions over a cable. Completely impersonal.

I arrived in Austin in 1994, about three years after returning to college. I had gotten tired of trying to sell houses, and I had tried to enroll at the University of Miami. Because of my problems at Columbia University, they made me go to Florida International University, a local school, to prove I was serious.

When I first decided to go back to school, I figured I would be a lawyer, because it was an easy job that paid well. Then I saw the horrible classes pre-law students took. Boredom epitomized. I decided to become an avian vet, so I signed up for calculus, chemistry, and physics.

I had problems in calculus, and then I remembered that I had failed math in high school. I didn’t really know algebra. I started studying algebra and calculus at the same time, and I went from a 40 on the first test to a 100 and an 97 3/4 on the last two.

UM admitted me, and I started taking courses very quickly. I took courses at the same time as their prerequisites. A guy who taught my second physics lab course ended up sitting next to me in classes, because I progressed to the point where I could study with grad students.

I got burned out in the last year, not surprisingly, and they put me on Ritalin. By the time I got to UT, I had adjusted to the drug, and it didn’t work as well. I was taking huge doses. Up to 120 mg a day. They put me on other drugs which drove me crazy, and I could not make myself study. I had to drop a class.

The department wanted me gone. I guess they were used to seeing people wash out. They didn’t care at all. They did almost nothing for me. They made some small accommodations, and the impression I got was that they were just trying to avoid an ADA suit. They had already been in trouble over that.

I was more alone than I had ever been, and I was losing the thing I thought would save me. A couple of infantile grad students gave me a hard time. I put up posters advertising my services as a tutor, and one of them got in the computer, changed the posters to make me look like a fool, and put them up all over the physics building.

I lost to people I should have beaten, and there was nowhere to turn. The drugs kept me awake for days on end, even after I quit taking them. I had thought I had found my place in society. I thought physics would save me. I was really good at it, and I had every reasonable expectation that I would get much better, but I wasn’t going to get the chance, no matter what I did.

I had test anxiety. I remember taking a test in graduate quantum mechanics. There was a simple problem I could not solve to save my life. After the test, I walked back to the T.A. office, which was shared by various students. I wrote the problem on the board and solved it, just like writing a grocery list. It took a couple of minutes. It was simple. I could do it in the office, but not during the test. Imagine the frustration.

When I prayed, I felt as if the prayers bounced off the ceiling and reverberated around the room. God refused to help me. Or rather, he helped me by turning away from me.

I was trying to do my own thing, with virtually no prayer life. Without submission or confession. In pride.

I never walked in the door of a church in Texas. I only prayed because I was miserable and wanted help, and I did it rarely.

When I returned to Florida and went to law school, it was failure. Anyone can be a lawyer. My family is full of lawyers. It was the dreadful default option, like hell. Other people were proud to be in law school. I was ashamed of it, but there was nothing I could do.

Law turned out to be pretty pleasant, but that didn’t erase the pain of losing physics. I never cared about law. I never wanted to do it.

Over the last few weeks, strange things have been happening. I’ve written about it already. I’ve been watching solid state physics lectures. That’s the class that killed me in Texas. For a long time, I’ve wished I could beat that class, even on my own, just to know I didn’t lose permanently.

I’ve been watching Sandro Scandolo’s lectures for ICTP, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. I ordered a gray-market copy of the Ashcroft-Mermin book, Solid State Physics. The worldwide standard is a terse book by a guy named Kittel. Ashcroft is easier to understand. Yesterday I found a book of solved problems. It’s not easy to find solved-problem books for graduate-level physics. If you Google “Mihaly,” you’ll find it.

Suddenly, I feel different. I feel like a scientist again. I have the same feeling I used to have when I walked the halls of RLM, the physics building at UT. I can’t explain it. I feel as though I’m there, doing what I used to do. I feel like I can pick up a few things and regain my competence.

UT made me feel as though I were incapable of doing physics. I know that’s not true. No one can start as a math illiterate and end up in a top-tier graduate school in three years without the ability to handle the material. But you know what the Bible says: “A crushed spirit, who can bear?”

Law is easy. I’m sorry if that offends lawyers, but it’s true. If you have an IQ of 110, you can be a lawyer. If you have an IQ of 120, you can be a good lawyer. Those are not high scores. As my evidence professor used to say, to pour water on the burning egos, “You’re just smarter than the average bear.”

Law was just something to do to bring checks in the door. There was not a lot of dignity in it, given the way it entered my life.

I hope I can get through one semester’s worth of solid state. I think that will stop the dreams.

I feel like God has taken his foot off my neck.

Before I go, something I machined. My dad broke a tripod he bought for his laptop, and he asked me if I could fix it. I checked, and they don’t sell the part he broke. I had to make it from aluminum. It’s not beautiful; making it pretty would have increased the time expenditure from half a day to a day and a half. But I had no problems making it, and it’s much better than the plastic it replaced.

If You Can’t Learn in 2015, You are Beyond Hope

Today a few things about my progress in various areas.

First off, I found an incredible circuit analysis video.

As I have mentioned before, I have been trying to get back into (“back” is a kind exaggeration) electronics. I started watching MIT’s free online course, 6.002.

I found the book pedantic and tedious, and the professor didn’t explain things all that well. I started using other sources and compiling a notebook.

I came to realize that the MIT guy was not doing a good job. He taught things that were not useful, and he omitted things that were very useful. He may have a brain the size of a Subaru, but he is not the perfect teacher.

When you study electronics, you want to know what people who work with circuits actually do. You don’t need to learn a bunch of crap that only manifests in the real world in the homework problems of students.

Over the last week, I started writing my own method, and yesterday I checked Youtube for resources. I found this video:

You won’t believe it until you watch it, but this guy sums up six weeks’ worth of college lectures in 90 minutes, and he does it slowly.

The MIT guy taught me things that I can’t use. He told me about the “lumped matter discipline” and…other stuff I don’t remember. You don’t need to know all that. It’s filler for pedants. If you take out the junk he incorporated and you add some great things he left out, you get the video above.

Take a look. If you learn the material in the video, it will make any other class you might take make sense.

I’m sure there are huge benefits to the MIT course, once you have your legs under you, but you have to start with a solid foundation.

The video guy recommends LTSpice, which is a free program that lets you draw circuits and then run them in a virtual…space or whatever. Easier than breadboarding. I have the program, and the learning curve seems pretty flat. I was able to turn it on and draw a circuit without studying. You can find it by Googling.

I’m also enjoying a graduate-level solid state physics course. This is the course that killed me as a physicist. Well, this and quantum. I got burned out, and they had me on ADD drugs that made me nearly crazy, and I got a D in solid state.

The professor who taught the course was awful, and the department at UT Austin was not helpful at all. It was a horrible experience, losing physics. A slow-motion trainwreck on a locomotive with the brake lever welded open. Of course, even though UT was not exactly nurturing, it’s my fault. I was out of God’s favor because I chose to be.

It would be wonderful to master this course and do problems successfully. Just a closure thing.

I found this guy on Youtube. It’s easy to find undergrad physics on the web, but graduate stuff is less available. Someone uploaded his videos, and they came up in a Youtube search.

His name is Sandro Scandolo, and he teaches at an instution called ICTP, in Italy. Even if you don’t know physics well at all, if you’re technically inclined, you will enjoy the first lecture. His style is wonderful. Patient, conversational, and very organized.

ICTP has a website, and if you burrow around in it, you can find other graduate courses. You can download them as flash or Apple movies. I leave finding them to you.

I plan to watch the whole course, even if I don’t do problems. I am smart enough to understand this stuff even if I don’t take the time to put it to work. Simply understanding it will make me feel better.

If you want technical texts for home study, I can recommend two resources. First, Scrib’d. You may have moral qualms about it, so caveat emptor. It’s a site with zillions of PDF uploads. You pay nine bucks a month. Much of the material is not copyrighted, so you can read it without feeling bad. Another resource is Amazon Marketplace. When you look for a hardcover text that costs $200 in the US (they have gone up that much, believe it or not), you will often find links to people who sell gray-market paperbacks for under twenty bucks. Same books. No infringement. I have two of them, and a third is on the way.

If you go crazy and decide to study solid state, get Ashcroft. I also found a book by a guy named McKelvey. Very nice. Kittel is a torture device. Naturally, it’s the book UT used. I still have my copy. I should waterboard it.

People say Kittel was a genius, but that doesn’t mean he could write books people could actually learn from.

CAD is going well. I have no complaints about Fusion 360. I’m sorry I paid so much for Alibre and Dolphin, but I did my best to find good programs, and that’s what I came up with in my first attempts. I’ll post a jpg of a part I’m making.

I’ve always sneered at 3D printers. Now that I can do CAD and send files to a printer, I sort of wish I had one. I checked into them last week, and I found that I was right to sneer. They’re still toys, and they make rough parts made of weak materials. If you have $500,000 you can get a really nice one that makes things you can use, but I think I’ll pass.

Maybe I should get a crummy one now just so I’ll get to know the technology.

The Autodesk Fusion 360 forum is a lifesaver. That, alone, makes it worth downloading and using. I tried CNCZone when I was struggling with Alibre and Dolphin, but the kids on that forum tend to be nonhelpful and self-absorbed, and they can also be rude.

I am back to music study. I returned to Sightreading.com. I recommend it. It produces random pages of music for practice. They’re not tunes. Just notes. It’s helpful because you will involuntarily memorize tunes as you work on them, and once that happens, it’s not sightreading. You can’t memorize random junk, so it keeps the proper area of the brain working.

That’s all I have right now. I hope it will be useful to someone.

You Probably are, Too

My interest in politics keeps shrinking.

I used to come here and write about politics all the time, like a greyhound chasing the devil’s useless electric rabbit. I had a lot of fun, but it was a poisonous waste of time. I wish I could take it back.

The truth is that our problems are not caused by poor voting habits. Our poor voting habits are symptoms of a greater evil: lack of submission to God.

Most of us have no prayer lives, and that is true in far-out, tongue-speaking churches as well as among the general population. We don’t know God. We have no interest in his correction or in being commanded by him. Some of us show up on Sundays, checking in like weekend dads, but generally, not much happens during the week.

Here’s a downer for you: Republicans elected Obama.

We elected Obama by voting with our lack of prayer. If we prayed, we would be changing ourselves as well as whatever other individuals are susceptible to change. God would see us as his children, and he would have an incentive to protect us and bless us. Because we don’t pray, he has a strong incentive to punish us and make us suffer. If we don’t suffer, we are not likely to turn to him and pay attention to him.

You can blame illegals and vacuous welfare-minded professional victims, but those people would have no power had we not given it to them.

I have felt pleased with myself about not voting for Obama and his kind. That was dumb. I did vote for them. I lived for myself, wandering in futility and self-deceit. My supernatural vote was much more powerful than showing up in a booth and checking off boxes.

I am an Obama voter. And unless you had a strong prayer life before 2008, so are you.

I don’t watch the news any more. I pick things up on the web, but that’s about it. I don’t contribute money to campaigns. I’m not even sure I’ll stay in the NRA. But I will contribute where it counts: in private with God. I’ve been doing that for a number of years now, and I plan to continue.

My suggestion is that you quit deluding yourselves and start praying. Don’t start out by asking God to drop the boot on Obama. Start out by asking God very sincerely for correction. Repent. Beg him to show you what’s wrong with you. Ask him for his help in changing. Ask him to connect you with the Holy Spirit and to help you obey him. Ask him to cut off the spirits that rule you now.

If you don’t have a prayer life, you’re ruled by spirits that work for Satan. You may not realize it, and things may seem to be going well, but that just means Satan is leaving you to coast because you’re ineffective in God’s kingdom. Whenever he sees the need, he will take what you have and destroy you, and you will not be able to fix it.

This will be very helpful to you if you aren’t too arrogant to listen. If you’re arrogant, forget I wrote it and let the rest of us discuss it without interference.

Exploring the Habits of the Chinese Woodchuck

I know I am a renowned CAD/CNC genius, so you probably think that’s all I do. WRONG. I’m still working on my plan to become a woodturner.

I used to look at guys who had lathes and think they were mentally ill. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but I thought they were kind of silly compared to men who did regular woodworking. Whatever you call woodworking that isn’t turning.

I thought, “These are eccentric old coots who drive around stealing stumps out of people’s garbage so they can make bowls you can’t actually use and Christmas ornaments their relatives throw out.”

That was actually correct.

Nonetheless, I had to use my metal lathe to make an oak bench dog the other day, and I realized I was wasting half of the machine’s potential. And woodturning produces useful things as well as strange crap. Often people who don’t turn wood use flat or rectangular parts in places where round parts will work better.

I started looking around and asking for advice on forums. The forums where I haven’t been preemptively banned yet for asking stupid questions.

I found out that a metal lathe will work quite well for wood. In some ways, it’s vastly superior to a wood lathe. It’s a billion times more ridgid. You can use the carriage to make precise parts. You can make threads with it.

I think I’m out of things it can do better.

Anyway, the pluses outweigh the minuses, so it’s definitely worth doing.

In order to make it work, I needed a tool rest. This is a thing that clamps on the lathe’s ways. A T-shaped “T rest” sits on it, and you rest your turning tool (“chisel”) on the T rest when you cut wood.

On a metal lathe, you use a heavy steel or iron tool post to hold tools for you, and the carriage moves the tool. On a wood lathe, you slide the chisel back and forth on top of the T.

There are chintzy ways of using a metal lathe tool post for a rest, but they’re stupid, so I decided to make a banjo.

Now you wonder what that means.

A banjo is the actual base of the tool rest. I’m pretty sure. It’s the part that sits on the ways.

Don’t ask me why they call it a banjo. Maybe it gets on people’s nerves and repels women.

I had some live oak trash lying around, and I decided to try to make the base of the banjo out of it. I sliced open a fairly green log and cut some pieces out on the table saw and band saw. Then I turned some pegs on the lathe and stuck them in one of the big parts. They go through two holes in the other parts, and they line the base up with the clampy thing that goes under the ways.

Some photos may help.

That last photo is a piece of angle iron I worked on today. I will fix an upright tube to it, with a set screw in it. The T rest, which I don’t have, will sit in the tube. I will run a 1/2″ bolt through the wooden base, and when I want to move the metal bit, I’ll loosen the bolt. Then I’ll clamp it down to fix it.

The live oak surprised me. It’s supposed to be garbage. They say it cracks and warps, but it hasn’t split since I cut it, and it doesn’t appear to be moving. It’s like titanium. I have to wonder if it’s stronger than aluminum.

I think the pegs are red oak. Not sure. I needed dowels, and Home Depot was out, so instead of a 36″ dowel that cost five bucks, I bought a 72″ roller handle for six bucks. The wood in the roller handle is really nice. Do they have red oak in China? I don’t know.

I’m planning to rig up a base for the T rest tube tomorrow, and then I’ll install the tube and start thinking about a rest. Maybe I should just buy one.

Chisels are not expensive. I learned a few things about them.

First, there are two main types of chisels. The first are carbon steel, also known as “crap.” That’s not exactly true, but carbon steel dulls fast. It will give you a nice finish, but you have to sharpen it a lot. The second type of chisel is high speed steel (“HSS”), which is what metal lathe tools are made of. It’s a lot harder, so it holds an edge better.

Second, there are two types of HSS chisels: Chinese and not Chinese.

You can get fairly good Chinese HSS chisels at Harbor Freight, or you can buy a brand called Benjamin’s Best, which is probably the same thing. People say they work okay.

I read some disturbing things about Chinese chisels, so I decided to look for some old Murican jobs. I found that old HSS Craftsmans were not hard to find, and they didn’t bring much money, so I sniped a set of 12 on Ebay. They will do unless and until I decide I need something else.

I also ordered a Supernova chuck. This is the biggest expenditure, by far. It was $175. That hurts a little, but consider the cost of a good metal lathe chuck that isn’t a Chinese compromise.

The wood chuck (woodchuck?) is probably Chinese, too, but I’m pretty sure that, unlike the Chinese metal lathe chuck, it’s not a compromise. It’s what a real lathe guy would use.

Anyway, for maybe $400, I should be totally tooled up, apart from minor elective doodads. That’s not bad at all.

I don’t plan to get heavily into this. I just want enough junk to do whatever little jobs come up. And I might do a little artistic turning. I may join the herd of eccentric garbage pile thieves. I already scoped out a pile of sea grape wood in front of a vacant house.

You can use a wood lathe to turn stone. How cool is that?

Here’s a guy whose work I really like. Don’t watch the video if you are a man, unless you’re immune to temptation. You might find yourself on Ebay in a day or two.

Wood lathes sell cheap on Craigslist all the time. Not trying to pressure you or anything. You know you want one.

I’ll post an update if I ever get this working. Something might happen as early as tomorrow.

Behold my Box

I got some comments on the post about CAD problems, so I am here to tell about my progress.

The basic problem was that I had a good CAD program, a good CAM program, and no way to move files from one to the other. Alibre Design 2012, my CAD program, has a built-in upgrade incentive: you can’t use the files for anything. The formats will not export to CAM. My other CAD/CAM program, Dolphin, apparently has a CAD module which people consider nearly worthless. This is like having a jet with a blind pilot and a navigator with no tongue.

I went to the forums and got two suggestions: Onshape and Fusion 360. These programs are free.

When I checked the programs out, I learned some things, and I ruled Onshape out pretty quickly. Both programs have cloud storage. I do not like “the cloud.” There is no cloud. There are only servers, and if your stuff is in “the cloud,” that means it’s on someone else’s server, and that person, not you, controls it.

If you want to work on your own, without involving the cloud, you are working “offline.” Onshape does not support offline work.

If you work for a big company, and you have a T1 connection at work, or whatever kind of connection it is that they have now, and your Internet connection never goes down, AND you don’t mind having no privacy and no control over your data, then Onshare is probably great. On the other hand, if you live in South Florida, and the Internet goes out every time it rains, and you might want to design things without effectively submitting them to DHS for approval every time you work, then maybe Onshare is not for you.

I’m sure DHS can see anything it wants in my PC right now, but the idea of simply giving up all pretense of privacy is unsettling. And what if they decide my new pressure cooker design is a bomb, and they decide to confiscate it? What if I decide to design gun parts for 3D printing? What if they decide I’m not allowed to use the Internet because I refuse to eat new Gay Pride Rainbow-Colored Doritos (a real product)?

I just don’t like it. I don’t like the cloud.

I downloaded Fusion 360 and tried it out. It appears to be pretty good. So far it’s more intuitive than Alibre, and at $0, it’s cheaper by $400. It supposedly has CAM as well as CAD, but all I’ve done is draw a box with a hole in it, so I couldn’t tell you anything about that.

Fusion 360 is made by Autodesk, and it’s absolutely free, with all the bells and whistles, unless you start making money with it. Even then, you have to make $100,000 before they start charging you. I think I’m safe.

When you make a design, you can export it and put it on your PC, and you can use the program without an Internet connection. The files you create can be used by other programs, so you’re not an orphan if you somehow lose the use of Fusion 360.

I hate to show off and make people feel inferior, but here is the box I made. That only took like 3 hours.

A couple of commenters suggesting Draftsight. I’m sure it’s wonderful. I can only master one CAD/CAM program per day, but I will try to look it over.

The people at Dolphin seem very nice, but I am not yet seeing the value of their program. Perhaps I’m wrong.

I will update if I get anywhere with this. Right now I have to go arm the pressure cooker and smoke some Cuban cigars.

Oh, wait. Those are legal now, right?

I Should Have Taken up Knitting

I’m having fun today. And by “having fun,” I mean, “pulling my hair out and fantasizing about beating software engineers with a two-by-six.”

I have been trying to get up to speed on CAD and CAM, and it has not gone well.

A long time back, I bought Alibre Design, which is a modest CAD program. The interface is nice, and the learning curve is not terrible. They offered it for a low price, like a hundred bucks. I forget.

I learned how to draw parts, and then later I made a CNC lathe. And I found out that Alibre Design does not produce drawings that can be used for CNC.

You can imagine how crazy that is. We are in the midst of a CNC/”Making” revolution, and the primary reason for the existence of CAD is to tell machines how to make stuff. Creating a CAD program which doesn’t work with CNC is like creating a bladder with no openings in it. It is a recipe for suffering.

Last year I went crazy and bought Dolphin CAD and CAM. This is a set of programs that will take you all the way to the lathe or mill, pretty much. And because they have a special module for lathes, I figured it was the way to go. And the price was merely exorbitant, not astronomical. A lot of CAD and CAM programs have four-digit price tags, which is why people torture themselves with open source crap that takes ten years to learn. Dolphin was three digits.

I did not realize how annoying Dolphin’s CAD interface was. Alibre has 2D and 3D in the same window. You draw a part in 2D, and then you view it and rotate it, easily, in 3D. Dolphin is just 2D, unless I missed something. It’s not that easy, looking at a 2D drawing and visualizing a 3D product, especially if you can’t draw more than one side of the part.

As far as I can tell–and I may be wrong–Dolphin forces you to make a different drawing for each side of a part. Imagine doing that for a complex part. Highly aggravating.

Alibre only exports drawings in AD_PRT and STL format, and these formats are dead ends. I found a way to convert STL to DXF using a program called Blender, and you can import DXF into Dolphin. I’ll show you why that was a waste of time.

First, an Alibre part I drew.

Now the drawing that came out when I exported to Dolphin.

That’s all you get. That side. The other dimensions are gone.

I had to call Geomagic (the Alibre people) today about a licensing problem, and–this will shock you–they wanted to sell me new software! Yes, I was amazed, too. I asked them about the crazy format problem, and the lady said they used to have a program add-on that allowed file conversion, but it was “no longer available,” meaning, “We do not want to give it to you.” Great. I never heard about it.

She said the latest Geomagic Design (successor to my program) was only $400. Yes, because to me, $400 is like three cents is to ordinary mortals. It means nothing to me. I scoff at it. But I let her send me a download link so I could look at it.

I fired it up, converted the drawing to a format Dolphin likes, and imported it into Dolphin Partmaster 3D.

Again, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I think PM3D is useless for CAD. I could not find any CAD tools in the program. I believe all it does is import files, let you view them, and export them. I opened the part file, and PM3D allowed me to export 2D drawings from it. I chose a view that would work for a lathe, and I sent it to Partmaster CAD, which is the 2D program. Here is what I got:

That is actually useful. I would have to trim it a little, because you’re not supposed to use both sides of a lathe profile in a CNC program. After all, the lathe only makes one cut, and it affects the entire surface of the round part. But it would work. I think.

Now I’m highly annoyed, but at least I can see a way out of this mess.

I don’t know what to do, but one thing is for sure: for the 15-day duration of the trial period, I will be using Geomagic to export everything in sight. Maybe I can find a cheaper solution before the time runs out. That would be nice.

If I can get this working, I’ll put the CNC lathe on its own cart and see if I can actually use it once in a while. That would be great.

After I give in and buy the new program–probably 10 minutes later–someone will tell me about a free program which does the same thing.

That can’t be helped.

I am Lathe to Complain

I feel like I need to put up a picture. I am finally almost done with the lathe shelf. Here it is.

Don’t ask me why, but the camera picks up imperfections that are barely visible to the naked eye and makes them look huge. If you were here in person, you would think the shelf looked pretty good. Or at least you would say that, while backing away from me slowly. If you were smart.

Someone suggested there would be a problem changing chucks, because the key that turns the cams is obstructed. This is the one thing I didn’t think about. The one thing I didn’t think about that I know about as of today. But it turns out the key has enough freedom to open and close the pins, so I’m good. I can’t change the headstock oil without removing the shelf, but I knew that going in.

Fitting the floor tile was interesting. I learned that the upright parts of the shelf are not totally straight. Or the sides of the tiles were not totally straight. One or the other. I trimmed the tiles using a #4 hand plane. It works great.

Another interesting thing to be aware of, if you ever try to lay tile or anything else in a corner: you have to round off the corner of whatever you’re installing. The inside corners on the shelf are not sharp, but outside corners of things can be very sharp indeed, and they protrude and cause problems. In this case they would have lifted the corners of the tile up.

I am not totally happy with the adhesive that came stuck to the tiles. The wood under the tile is bare, so you would expect a good hold, but in some places it seems to want to rise up. I may have to look into an additional glue.

This will be great. It will get a lot of crap off of the floor and the table saw extension, and it will keep things where I can find them in a hurry. Notice the Allen wrenches. I drilled deep holes into the side of the shelf, just big enough for the two wrenches I use most. I may add new doodads to hold tools such as chuck keys. That would be helpful.

Some day I may sand the shelf down and improve the finish, but right now I have to get on with my life. I can’t dedicate another week to this thing. I still hate painting. I don’t know how anyone manages to do it right. I can sort of handle a spray gun, but brushes are beyond my comprehension.

Home Depot never has fasteners stocked or sorted correctly, so I could not get M8-1.25 x 65mm bolts to hold the shelf down. I had to buy 70mm bolts and grind them down with the bench grinder. Annoying. I had to modify fender washers for the bolts on the left side so they would not bang against the side cover. I made them D-shaped using the belt grinder, which is one of the three or four greatest tools in the universe.

Now I have to make a rolling cabinet for the CNC lathe. After that, I may pick up a few items and try woodturning.

I leave you with a clip from Tiny Trailer Workshop. If you don’t love this, you must not have a Y-chromosome.

Painting Isn’t for Everyone

I am sitting here waiting for paint to dry.

I have been struggling to get the garage workshop working, as you know if you keep up with the blog. I believe it’s a metaphor for my own inner transformation.

When you get involved with tools, you have to accept a bitter truth: before you can use the tools to do stuff to other things, you have to use tools to work on your tools to get them ready.

I guess it sounds discouraging, but there is no way around it.

There are a number of things you can buy at the hardware store and then use without preparation, but it’s surprising how many things don’t work until you fix them up.

Consider chisels. You can buy a set of perfectly good ones today at Home Depot, but they won’t be sharp enough to use. Also, Home Depot doesn’t sell the tools you will need to sharpen them. Can you believe that? What could be simpler than a chisel? You would think they would be plug-and-play.

To sharpen a chisel, you need some kind of abrasive tool, and you need at least three levels of grit. You can use a bench grinder to do the rough sharpening, if you’re highly skilled. Then you have to go to a water stone or a diamond stone. Then you have to go to a stone with a grit rating somewhere above 4000.

In order for a Home Depot chisel to be considered ready to use, it has to be able to pop tiny hairs off of you, just like a razor.

I don’t know why Home Depot doesn’t sell decent sharpening tools. Probably because the average chisel user does very crude work.

I have lots of tools, but I haven’t been able to use them as much as I wanted to, because I didn’t prepare them or myself. So now I’m working on it.

On a spiritual level, I’m doing the same thing to myself.

People love to say that Jesus said, “Judge not,” meaning, “Never criticize anything anyone else does.” That’s not true. What he really said was that we should judge ourselves first, and he made it clear that once we did that, we were supposed to judge others so they could benefit from our advice. He didn’t say we should take the logs out of our own eyes and then go home. He said that when we took the logs out of our own eyes, we would then be able to help others take the splinters out of their eyes.

When you beg God for correction and humility, you’re taking the logs out of your eyes.

You shouldn’t expect things to go all that well until you begin accepting correction. Before God straightens you out, you will be led by the flesh, not the Spirit. You will not want to do God’s will. You’ll want to do whatever Satan tells your flesh to do. You will not have the spiritual fruit of self-control. So God will not have much interest in helping you. It would be enablement.

As you accept correction, the spirits that have controlled you your entire life will lose their power, and the Holy Spirit will gain ground inside you. Then you’ll start to have strength and success, because you’ll be doing things God supports.

Prayer in tongues is a constant flow of correction, so it’s vital. We are surrounded by stupid voices all day, every day. Prayer in tongues is God’s answer to that.

One of my shop problems is a lack of provision for lathe tool storage. I have a bunch of heavy lathe tool holders, plus two huge chucks. I also have Allen wrenches and other junk. I need to have this stuff near the lathe, and I need it to be handy, but tossing it on top of the headstock and dumping it on the table saw extension have turned out to be poor solutions to the problem.

I knew that other people had created extended wooden shelves to enlarge the tops of their headstocks. I decided to create a box with a shelf on top. The box would hold whichever chuck I was not using, and tools would go on the top shelf.

You can’t imagine the nightmare that began when I started work on this.

First of all, the thing needed to be about 17″ long in the shortest dimension. Trees are very skinny these days, so you can’t just walk into a store and ask for a board 3/4″ thick and 17″ or more wide. You have to use plywood, which looks crappy, or you have to make your own boards. Like an idiot, I chose the latter route.

To make a wide board, you have to take two narrow boards and glue them together side by side. This is more complicated than it sounds. You have to use a jointer on the edges that mate. Then you have to use a hand plane to put slight indentations on those edges, to create a spring joint.

A spring joint is what you get when you put glue on two concave surfaces and clamp them together forcefully so they touch. You remove a few thousandths of an inch from the edges of two boards before you glue them up. You can’t even see the concavity.

When I made my first board, I did not understand the purpose of spring joints, but now I get it. If you have two boards that aren’t concave, when you push them together, you may get a gap at one or both ends. It will be a tiny gap, but it will show up when you sand and paint the wood. If you make a spring joint, the boards will touch at the ends, so you won’t get gaps there.

It took me days to make enough boards for the shelf thing. I guess the reason is that I don’t have a lot of clamps. I would use three long clamps to make a board, and while it set up, I would be idle, because I couldn’t clamp a second board together.

Once the boards were made, I had to use planes and a scraper to get rid of the microscopic lines where the boards came together. I learned a great deal about plane marks.

When the boards were made, I had to use the table saw to cut them to size, and then I had to use a shooting board and a plane to make them truly square. In the process, I found out that my Incra table saw miter gauge was not square, so I had to fix that.

After all of that, I had to do some routing. I needed tongues and dadoes to fasten the boards together. My mistakes drove me nuts.

For one thing, a router bit in a router table will push wood away from your router fence if you push the wood from left to right. I did not know that. I thought that if I used a little force to hold the wood against the fence, I would be fine. That was totally wrong. The boards would move away from the fence a sixteenth or so, opening up the dadoes. It was infuriating.

Thank God, I was making the dadoes narrower than the boards that went in them. This makes the joints harder to see. That meant the big router gouges were covered when the boards went into the dadoes. But it was still annoying.

I also learned that you have to plan the way the grain of your boards runs when you design your piece. If you have end grain against long grain, you can’t glue it, because the end grain will suck up all the glue. It’s okay for joints that don’t receive stress, but other joints will require some sort of joinery, such as dadoes, to provide new gluing surfaces where long grain meets long grain.

I learned that soft wood is horrible. It’s harder to work than hardwood.

If you use a chisel on hardwood, it will cut it cleanly. If you use a chisel on softwood, going across the grain, the wood may compress and tear instead of cutting. It’s like using a bread knife to cut a stack of Kleenex.

If you use a router bit in hardwood, it leaves a clean edge behind. In softwood, you may get a furry edge that needs to be sanded a lot.

Scrapers, which are incredibly useful, don’t work very well on softwood. That’s annoying, because they’re great for cleaning up glue lines and erasing plane scratches.

You also have to be careful about making grooves, slots, and dadoes in softwood, because if you get too close to the edge of a board, you will have a very thin wall of softwood on the outboard side, and it won’t support your tongue very well. Also, the router may kick the wood completely out when you’re making the dado.

I learned that poplar is stupid.

Poplar is a hardwood, but it’s not hard. It’s not a softwood, but it’s a soft wood. It’s about like pine in its consistency. I used some in the shelf because I thought it was the cheapest hard wood available, but it turned out to be a bad buy. It’s more expensive than pine, and it’s actually softer than the better pine grades. It’s very ugly, so it has to be painted. And it has all the problems pine has when you start trying to shape it.

I’m not sure what poplar is good for, but you can get clear pine for the same price, and it looks better.

It took me forever to get the shelf together, and then I had to deal with painting it. That’s where I am right now.

I wanted to use a tough blue paint that would shed oil. I decided to go with oil-based Rust-Oleum. I really wanted to do it right. But it looks pretty bad right now.

First of all, even though the primer I used is supposed to work fine with oil-based paint, there are little places where the paint just does not want to stick. I’m going to have to give it like 10 coats in those areas. Second, this paint is the farthest thing from self-leveling. It leaves huge ripples behind, and sanding doesn’t seem to budge them. Third, it drips like crazy.

I’ve also had problems trying to get up to speed with the art of painting, itself.

I’ve never been able to get a grip on cleaning brushes. I’ve generally thrown them out. The paint always goes way up under the ferrule, and you can never get all of it out. It takes a huge amount of thinner to clean a brush, and it’s a pain to deal with.

I got some instruction. It turns out you’re supposed to prepare a brush for painting by soaking it in mineral spirits. This goes up under the ferrule and takes the space paint would otherwise occupy. It will keep the paint from going up there and hardening. I can’t believe I got this old and didn’t know that. No one told me! And you can look at websites all day and never see this information.

I found a video that explained it, but the guy in the video took the brush straight from the mineral spirits to a container of varnish and started painting. I had to ask about that. Obviously, it’s wrong, because the thinner on the brush will thin the paint you’re trying to apply. So you have to get the excess thinner off the bristles. Something he should have mentioned, right?

No wonder people consider brushes disposable.

I have been working on the paint for days, and it’s still not done. I finally decided to settle for a garage-grade finish. Maybe once the shop is working properly, I can make a new shelf. But I have to get this thing done and use it, or I will lose my mind.

I would really like to do things right, but I’m going to have to start accepting my limitations. Once in a while, “okay” will have to be an acceptable substitute for “perfect but unattainable.”

In other news, my new old church is getting weirder.

They have a prayer line. I used to be part of the prayer team. They’re supposed to call a conference line three times a week and pray for the church and so on.

I quit the team months ago. I felt like they were praying in an ineffective way, without solid guidance from the Holy Spirit. You’re not supposed to pray for two seconds for everyone on earth. You’re supposed to let the Holy Spirit choose your battles. You pray for the things he tells you to pray for, the way he wants you to do it. They were taking kind of a shotgun approach. Also, most people weren’t showing up. Usually there were only three people on the line. The pastors and the “house prophet” didn’t participate regularly, which makes you wonder what the pastors were being paid to do.

A lot of people wonder what the pastors are being paid to do. The impression many people have is that during the week they do absolutely nothing but go to the spa, travel, and visit restaurants.

I didn’t say anything critical when I left the prayer line. I just quit and said I felt like I should be doing something else.

I have a friend from the Panhandle, and she has been very good to the church. Although she wasn’t a member, she helped them financially and drove down to visit from time to time, and she was a hard core prayer line warrior.

Last week, the pastor’s wife changed the prayer line number and didn’t give it to her. Something about wanting to confine participation to church members. To be clear, she was deliberately cut out.

You have to realize, this woman was not my puppet. She wasn’t calling the prayer line and telling them how bad the pastors were for rejecting me. She was just praying. But now she’s out.

They cut another person out. She’s a young woman with some type of mental retardation. I don’t know what the proper name is. It’s not Down Syndrome. She’s very sweet, and she is a very sincere Christian. She has visions. She sees angels. She wanted to be on the church’s dance team, but they wouldn’t allow her to perform. I don’t know why. It’s not the Bolshoi Ballet. It should not be hard to qualify. If you’re not good enough to dance for God, at a tiny church which is currently failing, where, exactly, can you expect to be accepted? You can’t shoot any lower.

She and her mother eventually left the church. But the young woman continued with the prayer team. Sometimes she was one of only two people who called in. Now she’s out!

How a preacher can want FEWER people to pray for a church is beyond me. That’s a new one in my experience. The church is sinking. They are losing dedicated people. Their planned moves to bigger buildings got squashed. The air conditioning in the tiny room where they meet is out, and knowing the landlords, it may be another two weeks before it works again. It appears that their orphanage in Haiti has gone nowhere. The prayer team is nearly gone. Is this really the time to ramp up the ostracism?

I don’t know what to think about it, but I’m glad I got pulled out.

My plan for my own life is to keep asking for correction. It’s working beautifully. It makes life easier, except for painting. It’s what we all need. It’s what Jesus died for.

I can’t do anything for people who are convinced they’re already perfect. If God’s methods of improving people involved grabbing them against their will, opening them up, and replacing parts, it would be easy to help others, but unfortunately, most of it relies on their willingness to listen.

As for me and the people close to me, we keep getting new revelation, and things keep improving. I feel better. I have more success. I worry less. Doors are opening so I can get out of Miami.

I have learned that when there is an area where I fail consistently, God is trying to teach me a lesson, and when I finally learn it, he will let me move forward and succeed. This is what happened to the Hebrews under Moses. They walked in circles and died in the desert, but the ones who had not rejected God’s counsel were allowed into the Promised Land.

I still have no interest in joining a new church. Maybe some day.

If I get this crazy shelf put together, I’ll put up a photo. I can’t wait to see it on top of the lathe, with all my junk stuffed into it.

This May Start to Get Old in a Few Years

It has been 2 weeks since I learned I was not welcome at the church I belonged to. It has been an interesting time.

There is now no doubt that I was not wanted. I haven’t heard a peep from any of the pastors. I still can’t see the head pastor’s Facebook page.

I got a call from a buddy who is a minister (a level or two below pastors), but I would have heard from him anyway. He was a friend before I started attending that church, and I’ll still hear from him when he’s attached to a new organization.

I tried sending the pastors an electronic message a while back. I believe that was after I quit as a volunteer but before they blocked me on Facebook. I am not sure. Anyway, I could not get it to go through.

Later on, I realized it wasn’t my job to chase them. I’m older than they are, and they were very disrespectful to me several times in public. Older people are generally not supposed to run around after younger people, trying to get their forgiveness. It sets a poor example. It may be okay to do that once or twice, but eventually you start sending a message that it’s okay to be nasty to older people.

The Bible says to go to people who have something against you, but that is not a law. The Spirit-led do not have laws to follow. It’s a general guideline which will usually line up with the Holy Spirit. I was pulled out of the church by the hand of God, and I am not supposed to screw that up by going back in a carnal way and trying to fix something that should stay broken. This was a rescue.

I have a young friend who comes by for prayer sessions, and apparently there was a shocking verbal altercation between him and the head pastor. It happened in the parking lot. Someone actually called me so I could intervene. She was concerned the police might show up. She said she became aware there was a serious problem because the pastor started screaming. He’s about 20 years older than the young man he was talking to.

He drew inappropriately close, and my friend threatened to defend himself, in no uncertain terms.

When things calmed down, there was forgiveness and love and prayer and the whole nine yards, but you can’t unring a bell. There will be consequences.

My friend says he regrets using bad language and losing his temper. He takes responsibility for that and says it was wrong.

Is this gossip? Well…can you say something was private after you chose to do it in the open air in front of a large group of people? If you go to church to speak to the public, and you’re happy when they know about the things you say that make you look good, you probably shouldn’t complain if the crazy things you say are also heard.

This friend had a great revelation the other day, and he shared it with me. Whether a bad experience is a test or a punishment depends on your attitude. If you’re proud and you refuse to learn whatever it is God is teaching you, then it’s just punishment, and it won’t do you any good.

This is a problem for a preacher who is too proud to admit fault.

The argument could be a big blessing to him. He could tell the church, “I lost my temper and behaved childishly. I have a problem with self-control and pride, and if you have the same problem, you need to work on it. We need to get God to help us fix ourselves.” That would please God and get him involved in recovery.

On the other hand, if he and his wife decide the problem is with my young friend, God won’t help them. He will fight them. Word of what happened is surely moving through the church, and while it won’t affect the sycophants, it will poison other people against the leadership. If people who have a little discernment or common sense don’t see proper steps taken, they will probably take steps of their own, through the doors of other churches.

I don’t expect them to bend. I get no indication of that from God. The little I know about their response to the situation is not encouraging.

I think this whole mess was from God. I don’t think he tells people to get in silly fights, but he definitely uses them. He did that in the Bible.

I wasn’t going to get into all of that today. What I started to say was that I was disappointed to hear that the argument was partly about me; the person the pastors don’t talk to.

I am not their problem. I’m a symptom.

If you have time to make a fool of yourself over me in a parking lot, you should have time to involve me in the matter at some point. If you have time to bother other people or send other people to talk to me, you should have time to deal with me personally. Or you should move on and let it go.

This happened at Trinity Church, too. They had secret meetings about me, and of course I was told later, because you can’t keep things quiet in a church. I will give Rich Wilkerson credit; for all his shortcomings, he did communicate with me before I left. But he should not have bothered other people about me once I was gone.

The application to my own life is that I am aware that my problems are messages from God. Whether or not he is directly causing the evil I experience, he at least consents to it. It’s not random. He limits and steers things to achieve a purpose. I can’t complain about my suffering if I cause it by refusing to listen.

You can say it’s not my fault. You can say human beings don’t know what God is saying. That’s an excuse. For almost thirty years, I’ve known I was supposed to be praying in tongues every day. That would have helped me hear his voice and fix my problems. There is no way to evade responsibility.

The curses in our lives often reflect curses we put on God. This was true in Eden, and it’s true now. Adam and Eve made God’s life difficult, so he did the same thing to them. Adam refused to submit, so God made wives rebellious. Adam made it hard for God to give birth to new children, so God made childbirth difficult. Adam gave rise to a race of rebels, so God made the earth bring forth weeds and briars.

The things I hate about my life, and which I have still not overcome, must be connected to my failings in some way.

That’s wonderful information to have. It can help me receive healing, deliverance, victory, and peace. It can help me become like God in my heart.

If I’m blessed, as the grinning TV preachers say, why do I still have problems? How can I be overweight, lazy, lustful, fearful, impulsive, disorderly and so on? Maybe I don’t have major problems in all these areas, but I am not what I should be. I’m not even remarkable by ordinary human standards. Is this really how God wants me to be?

I should have more self-control. I should be cleaner inside. It’s not much to ask of me.

It’s very bad that people I know are failing. It’s unfortunate that I have to back off because I can’t help them. But it’s very good that I can learn from their failures.

I keep finding that I have more and more authority over myself. That’s powerful, because most of our problems are self-inflicted. We can’t control ourselves, and control over yourself is where power over everything else starts.

If I am willing to continue confronting my flaws and attacking them with God’s help, I can become stronger and better inside. That will cause my outward circumstances to improve, and it will humiliate those who seek to harm me.

As for my friend, his time at the church is over. He and the pastor have forgiven each other, but you know how that works. There are some breaks you can’t fix, even with genuine forgiveness. Sometimes a person’s behavior tells you that even if you forgive that person, he is not someone you can tolerate in your inner circle.

I am enjoying the rest from church. God is showing me I need to examine pastors carefully and brutally in the future. I should ask them provocative questions and walk away if they bristle or close up. “How much is your salary?” “How much money does the church take in every week?” “Is your wife well-behaved?” “Do you pray in tongues every day?” If they’re offended, they’re too big for their britches. I don’t accept that kind of people any more.

If you would not want a pastor as a friend, do not accept him as a pastor. If he is a pain in the behind, if he is childish, if he has to be babied, if he is spoiled, if he is selfish…stay away. I don’t care if he raises the dead. He will mess you up.

I don’t know what I’ll do on Sunday. I am not worried about it. Maybe God will extend my rest another month. That would be wonderful.