Good Marriages are Only Made in Heaven

The process of trying to get together with my Zambian sweetheart “Rebecca” has not been without stress. There was the concern of determining whether our relationship was from God. We also had to find out about the hurdles of travel and immigration.

Last night, I had a very comforting phone call. I talked to my buddy Mike. Recently, he has been spending time with a lady I’ll call Esther. She’s very conservative. They seem to agree about everything. She does things for him instead of expecting him to be her unrewarded mechanic, handyman, gardener, cook, therapist, and social worker. Women have taken from him in the past and given nothing back. I was shocked the first time I heard a woman had done something for him, and that says a lot about male-female relations in the United States. My reaction was conditioned by American culture.

A lot of American women are only concerned with what they can get from a man. They seem to see themselves as entitled princesses whose job is to force men to prove, over and over, why they’re worthy of consideration. It’s a little startling when a woman in feminist America does things for you, especially when they fall into taboo categories like cooking and cleaning.

American feminists love to say cooking and cleaning are degrading jobs. They must have no respect for people who make their living doing those things.

I have cooked and cleaned for people a lot. I never thought I should be ashamed of it.

To get back to Mike’s situation, it’s a drag when you realize a woman will let you fix her car, mow her yard, cook her meals, and help her rotten kids with no awareness that she should ever contribute to your happiness. A man knows when a woman sees him as a genie and substitute dad with a built-in ATM.

It’s also not attractive when a woman plays the damsel on the railroad tracks every day. Every man wants to be helpful, but a lot of women don’t want to be helped. They just maintain the victim pose in order to trap men in a constant cycle of white knight rescue errands. The constant appeals for pity make it seem like they never got over it when daddy didn’t show up to see them try out for the pep squad.

We want to hear about your problems when you a) want us to fix them and b) plan to cooperate. We don’t want to sit by your side agreeing that you’re a victim for the rest of your life. Help is better than sympathy, but many women genuinely prefer the latter. Pride, unforgiveness, and dishonesty often win out over a desire to be blessed.

A man wants to think he can make a difference. He doesn’t want to spend 50 years listening to you whine about problems you insist can’t be fixed. If you can’t be helped, why would you want to drag a man down with you, and where is your faith in God? You can’t be a good partner to a Christian man if you insist God won’t change your life.

To digress, I’ll mention a get-together that took place at my house this weekend. I was talking to my friends about the chore of cleaning up my neglected house for their arrival. I mentioned tidying up the bedroom Mike–a frequent visitor–has claimed as his own. I said that when I talked to Rebecca about it, her response was to say, “I should be doing that!” She was disturbed that I was cleaning my own house. She thought she should be cleaning up the bedroom, even though my friend is the one who left Atkins bars on the windowsill and some really interesting hair products on the counter.

Imagine how that would go over with the majority of American women. “You want a sex slave who cleans your house!” No, girls. I do not want a sex slave. If I were that kind of person, I’d find two or three good reliable prostitutes and visit them periodically. I’m just in love with a generous woman who isn’t brainwashed. Some women still take pleasure in things like maintaining a home and raising kids. Some aren’t so insecure they find a supporting role degrading.

Everyone submits to someone. Everyone is supposed to submit to the Holy Spirit. Every man who works for someone else submits to a boss who may or many not be male. We all have to submit to the police and the rest of the government. Male children submit to female teachers and their mothers. Submission is only degrading if you have a bad attitude or the people you submit to abuse you.

Before I was spoken for, I never expected to have a woman who would do the cleaning, and I fully expected anyone I met to be unable to cook well. That being said, I have no problem with assuming a traditional male role for the first time in my life. If she dreams of a traditional female role, fantastic. It’s Biblical, and it makes for an orderly, peaceful relationship in which both spouses are comfortable in their positions. If she changes her mind, we can always adapt.

It’s touching to think a wife would do my laundry and mop floors for me. Even my mother didn’t do those things.

It’s funny, in a world full of military cemeteries full of male bodies and partial male bodies, how everyone thinks men are takers and women are givers.

When the movie Titanic came out, there was no outrage over the scenes in which women and kids got preference when boarding lifeboats. No one ever says males should get reparations because hundreds of thousands of us have died, been wounded, lost their sanity, or suffered economic and social losses while defending America in an all-male military. I didn’t complain when I had to register for the draft and my sister didn’t. No one expects a wife to tackle a burglar while her husband hides under the bed. Traditional sex roles are correct, and they work. That’s why they’re traditional.

Getting back to Mike, I told him my position was that in the event of an engagement, he should put Esther above everyone else in his life. He shouldn’t accommodate people who think their ears might be bruised by her political remarks or that they might not be able to digest their quinoa after hearing about her willingness to do things for him. If conflicts arise, he should generally throw other people, including me, under the bus. This is my policy with Rebecca. I’m fortunate because I have no children and no parents, but if I did, I would happily tell them to get out of my house before I would let them stay and cause marital problems.

I told him Rebecca had ruined me for other women. I said that if she disappeared for some reason, I would be very hard to match up again. I’ve never known anyone like her. We agree about nearly everything. She isn’t high-maintenance. She doesn’t manipulate. She’s not a bridezilla. She has no interest in social climbing or status. She is hard to offend. She’s thoughtful. She is very attached to me. She’s very smart. She’s the strongest, most informed Christian I’ve ever known. It also doesn’t hurt that she has the face of an angel. I don’t know anyone else like that.

Here is what comforted me about our conversation: Mike asked if I had been listening to his conversations with Esther. He said he had been saying the same things about her.

I see God’s hand in all this. It can’t be a coincidence that we are having such similar conversations with two different women at the same time.

I’ve known lots of women in my extremely long life, and many times, I’ve felt I should compromise. People have criticized me a lot because I wouldn’t date this or that person.

I’ve wondered if I should try to work with women who were easily offended, and that includes perhaps 75% of the female population. I’ve felt a lot of pressure to get involved with women who were unattractive to me; these days, men are constantly told they have to be attracted to women who are obese, older than they are, disfigured, not really women, or unappealing for some other reason. Sports Illustrated has started featuring fat ladies, old women, and transvestites, and we’re supposed to lap it up. Why would I buy a soft-porn magazine to look at that?

I completely understand why men paid to see a young Tyra Banks in a bikini. Why should I pay to see unappealing and even repulsive spectacles? I could see it all for nothing at Walmart, on Rupaul’s Drag Race, or at the nearest retirement home.

Are men’s advocates shaming women for not swooning over old, obese, and disabled men? Are they shaming women for their near-universal distaste for short men and Asian men? If so, I haven’t noticed. Maybe Danny DeVito should pose for a special shaming issue of Playgirl. Which is actually aimed at male homosexuals, but I am digressing again.

I compromised and dated an atheist in law school. The relationship had some good points. We enjoyed each other’s company tremendously, for the most part. She was very loyal. I was highly attracted to her. We had intense chemistry. She was deeply in love with me.

It was a stupid idea, doomed to failure. If we had married, the gulf between us would have grown bigger every year. On top of that, she had personality issues that drove me to let her go. I should never have gone near her. It was a bad idea for me, and it was unfair to her. Too bad I didn’t have my older self (or anyone else) to give me good advice.

When you find the right person, you don’t sit around weighing pluses and minuses. You don’t wonder if you can make it work. You know you have what you want. It only happens when God is your matchmaker.

Hearing Mike say he was having the same experiences I was gave me a powerful feeling of peace. It showed me what’s happening in our lives. We didn’t ordain these relationships in our own foolishness. God is with Rebecca and me. I don’t have to worry. He will make it work.

I was right to stay single until I met Rebecca. I was RIGHT, in capital letters. I’m very, very glad I did it. It disturbs me to think what could have happened, had I succeeded in abandoning my principles.

All the people who thought I was too picky were speaking for Satan. As the Bible says, it’s better to live in the corner of a rooftop than in a wide house with a quarrelsome woman. It is LITERALLY better. God wasn’t exaggerating to demonstrate a principle. It’s also very bad to marry a woman who is unsuitable for other reasons.

I would have married a suitable woman a long time ago, had I not turned from God 30 years back. It took God a long time to get me cleaned up for marriage, because I hindered him. I could not have complained had he let me die alone, because I deserved it. Bringing me a beautiful, godly, intelligent, thoughtful woman now is much more than any reasonable man could ask.

My dad drove me crazy, pushing me to get married. A cousin said my relatives, nearly all of whom have had bad marriages, considered the scarcity of women in my life and wondered if I was light in my loafers. No, I was just mistrustful because of a dysfunctional upbringing, and I very rarely saw anyone I was willing to be shackled to. I rarely dated. I made some effort to pursue women who were wrong for me, but my efforts were never all-out, and they didn’t succeed in producing a marriage. God looked out for me.

Rebecca’s case was different. I was on board from day one. I was very clear about my intentions. I pursued her enthusiastically. That was because I had so few reservations. She seemed tailor-made for me. This is what happens when you find someone who meets your criteria.

I’m sorry I was bitter when I was younger. I remember being angry at girls and women for not wanting me. I thought they were shallow. That was pride and self-delusion. I was a terrible marriage prospect. Much less fit for marriage than men who were chosen over me.

Nobody owes it to you to be attracted to you. You know what kind of people get angry at people who reject them? Stalkers. Rapists. If you’re not married, it’s your fault. Your prayer life is inadequate, and you’re too proud to let God correct you. When you blame other people for not being attracted to you, you wrong innocent people. Admitting I lost respect for women simply because they didn’t want me is embarrassing. It proves I had a problem.

There were times when I had legitimate grievances. Sometimes women led me on even though they had no interest in me, and that was wrong, but I forgive them. Everybody sins. I’m no exception.

I’m glad I never played that kind of game with anyone. I’ve been very honest with women who barked up the wrong tree. It didn’t always work, because some women will look you in the face and argue with you when you say things like, “There is no possibility we will ever date,” but I did the right thing.

Rebecca and I are working on visas and travel plans now. Things are moving right along.

It’s good we’re both introverts, and it’s good that I live in an area full of Christians and conservatives. Think how we would be persecuted in a big city, surrounded by ungodly fair-weather friends. I’m an older white American, and she’s a much younger black African. She believes in submission. She insists on doing housework. This weekend, she called me her king in front of my friends. Modern leftist Americans would spontaneously combust around us. I include nominal conservatives who are much more leftist than they think.

We joke about our racial differences. That’s not allowed in America. Sometimes when it’s dark where she is, she jokes about how I can only see her when she smiles, which is actually true. It’s like talking to the Cheshire Cat. How would that go over at a cocktail party in Manhattan? The sword cuts both ways. In Africa, you’re never supposed to let a guest pay for anything, so when she hears I let people go to the grocery without me, she says, “How white of you!”

It’s good we won’t be out and about all that much, drawing fire from insolent, dictatorial, self-righteous ignoramuses who think they have the authority over us. It’s amazing how deluded people with zero authority feel entitled to boss.

In Boston or Berkeley, there are probably paid public servants who do interventions on couples like us.

It’s wonderful how things seem to be taking care of themselves. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster. God is steering and providing the propulsion. I don’t have to do all that much.

This weekend, I thought about how our relationship is turning out. I used to be concerned that I would let my desires for sex and companionship take precedence over my desire for someone to be a partner in my walk with God. Now that we’ve gotten used to each other, I have no concerns. If Rebecca vanished tomorrow, my first thought would be that I had lost my ministry partner. The things I love most about our relationship are the things we do for God. Prayer, prophecy, interpretation, discussion, and supernatural warfare are what matter most to me. That tells me we have a solid foundation. Marriages built on attraction and loneliness are built on sand.

I hope soon I’ll be able to say I just got back from Egypt. Pray for us.

All Things are Possible With God

Today my Zambian inamorata “Rebecca” told me about a dream she had. She was in her grandmother’s bedroom, and there was a woman there with a small car. Rebecca found herself in the backseat, and the woman drove her out of the house. The doorways were small, and the walls were close together, but the car turned and moved without touching anything, and soon it was outside.

To me, it seemed that the house represented Zambia, which is full of demon worship. Rebecca has witches in her own family. People in Africa curse each other all the time out of envy or for other reasons, even if they attend church and work as pastors and deacons. She needs to be in a cleaner place. As bad as modern America is, it beats living in a place where your sisters and aunts put curses on you.

The tightness of the house, and the turns involved, seem to represent the obstacles to moving her. The woman driving the car was an angel.

This seems consistent with what Jesus said. He said, “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth to life, and few there are that find it.” The word translated “strait” simply means narrow, like a tight hallway. The word translated “narrow” means something like “squeezed.” It refers to the gauntlet of persecution and temptation we all have to pass. It’s like the birth canal through which we enter this world.

You may not live in Africa or Haiti, but you are still surrounded by people and spirits who belong to Satan, and they work against you every minute of your life. To get out, you need God’s help. You need him to transform you and shelter you so you don’t prevent your own escape.

It’s a message of humility, and it underscores the need to be a charismatic who is intimate with the Holy Spirit. You can’t make it by trying to be good. You have to have deliverance from demons, power over your flesh, and God’s goodness inside you. You don’t get those things in a denomination that denies the Holy Spirit, meaning the type of denomination most Christians belong to. You can’t get it by asking Mary to pray for you, worshiping statues, or obeying rules.

The difficulty of getting out of Zambia is like the difficulty of escaping the earth, for the same reasons.

Edging Toward the Door

Today I am thinking about Youtube’s decision to take away the voice of T.B. Joshua, Youtube’s most prominent evangelist. As people who read my last blog post know, he was sentenced to persecution for doing exactly what Jesus did and what he said his disciples would do: casting out demons.

Let’s put our cards on the table and quit pretending Christians and unbelievers aren’t at war. What Youtube did was an affirmative assertion that Jesus is not God. That kind of assertion has traditionally been off-limits to the godless people who control the media. They have been reluctant to censor normal, Bible-based Christian activity, until now.

I don’t think any modern American seriously thinks the people at CBS, The New York Times, Salon, or any Hollywood studio believe in Jesus. We know atheists and other anti-Christians control our information and entertainment. That being said, we are used to being humored. Newspapers cover the pope without calling him the figurehead of a cult based on superstition. TV stations allow paid Christian programming. Mel Gibson made a popular movie about the crucifixion. We expect the gatekeepers to pretend to be tolerant, in order to prevent offending viewers. The Google kids just told us that’s not going to happen any more. They are finally baring their teeth, and other gatekeepers will follow suit.

Youtube is telling us it’s had enough. It was okay when we worshiped Jesus while they were weak and needed our eyeballs and content. We helped build the monster. Now they’re tired of indulging our belief in what they see as an ancient psychotic who talked to imaginary ghosts and somehow gave rise to Donald Trump.

A small number of tormented individuals believe spirits affect them, and they come to us for help. They make informed decisions regarding their own religious beliefs, and we accommodate them. Many get deliverance, physical healing, and relief from curses. Youtube has decided they don’t have the right to express their beliefs. A minor who wants to be drugged so his penis never develops, and then to be castrated, should be allowed to follow his beliefs, but a grown man who wants to have demons of homosexuality and effeminacy cast out, in a church, by people who believe as he does, in accordance with an ancient, globally popular religion which very clearly condemns homosexual relations, has to be stopped. He must not be allowed to choose or to know he has a choice.

If Youtube viewers are only allowed to see Satan’s churches at work, how will they know what real Christianity looks like? They’ll have to encounter Christians in the real world, outside of whored-out churches. This is what I’ve been predicting will happen in the future. Churches will lose their power over us, and the Internet will silence us, so God will have to use ordinary people wherever they are.

I feel I should delete my own Youtube channels. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m praying for guidance. I see Joshua’s persecution as a sign that it’s time to stop trying to reach people via a service controlled by deluded, enraged leftists who hate God. Almost no one watches, but the videos are time-consuming to make, and they have the potential to draw torches and pitchforks to my door.

I have a rapture mentality. The rapture will come when Christian outreach ceases to be profitable. When the suffering of Christians becomes sufficiently great, and the number of people we succeed in helping becomes sufficiently small, there will be no point in keeping us on earth. The Bible expressly states that the only reason we are here in this miserable place is to reach others.

As a general rule on this planet, in times of persecution, early adaptors fare best. The people who can’t read the writing on the wall are the ones who suffer. Many Jews believed in the sanity and humanity of the German government, and they waited too long to try to get out. Armenians suffered a similar fate. Capitalists in Cuba and other countries ruled by mass-murdering socialists were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. I feel that it’s best to think about the rapture every day, as though it were coming tomorrow. I keep asking God to rapture me and my lady friend internally, right now. If you want to be raptured physically, you need to be raptured in your heart and mind first. God isn’t going to rapture women off stripper poles. He’s not going to rapture TV preachers who impoverish old people with lies about God rewarding us for giving ministries money. He’s going to take the people he finds “serving meat” in his house. That’s what the Bible says.

Meat is the advanced word of God. It goes beyond, “Judge not.” Meat is something a baby can’t chew or digest. It includes things people don’t want to hear. It includes criticizing popular things like homosexuality, fornication, astrology, and yoga. It includes promoting prayer in tongues, healing, and casting out demons. It’s the gospel of the kingdom, which can better be translated as the gospel of power and authority.

We have a lot of preachers who crawl on their bellies, trying to get people to go to church. They serve milk day after day, until they die of old age. “You’re wonderful.” “God loves you just the way you are.” “Judge not.” Jesus taught about them. He said, “Woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!” Weak preachers will be surrounded by grown babies when the time comes to leave. They won’t be able to walk.

If you think Christianity is just a belief that you should be nice, with no supernatural significance, you’re not a Christian. God is a spirit. Satan is a spirit. Demons are spirits. We have our own spirits. We are supposed to operate in the spirit realm. We are supposed to believe there is a place called heaven, with a throne and a great being who sits on it. We’re supposed to believe hell exists and that every person who rejects Jesus ends up there. If you think it’s all about being nice and refusing to confront anyone, you don’t worship Jesus. You worship Richard Simmons.

The key to adapting and being ready is to eat meat and share it with others. Jesus said we had to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Blood is salvation, and meat is his advanced word. God told the Jews they had to eat the entire Passover lamb. He was telling us we have to accept every part of his teaching, as well as accepting the consequences.

The danger of too much exposure to the ignorant, hostile, unlistening masses is that we will become like them. Proverbs 26:4 says, “Answer not a fool according to his folly, Lest thou also be like unto him.” If we get caught up in argument and anger, we will lose our salvation. God says we have to forgive if we want to be saved. Hanging around on social media subjects us to needless temptation. People will insult and persecute us, and we may sink to their level.

Every Christian is saved by God’s charity, not his own goodness. It’s easy to get mad at persecutors and feel as though we’re superior. It’s very dangerous. We have to be the head, not the tail. We have to lead instead of following. Too much time with the others tempts us to follow.

Everyone, Christian or not, is an evangelist. Christians recruit people into God’s family, and the others recruit people for deportation to hell. You don’t want to spend too much time with the other side’s recruiters.

It seems like some of the best people in the Bible left their environments willingly, before they could be forced out. Abraham, Enoch, Noah, Elijah, and Jesus didn’t wait around to be driven out. Abraham left Ur, Enoch was translated, Noah boarded the ark, and Elijah and Jesus were translated. It seems to me that a person who is really close to God should not be taken by surprise or defeated.

I don’t know if I’ll take the channels down or not. Maybe I’ll just remove the Christian content. Maybe I’ll leave the videos up in case people in the future come across them and find help.

If I do take the videos down, maybe the blog will follow. I’m not sure. I think it will be a while before hosting companies come after Christians. Maybe I should wait.

Casting Out Demons is Now a Hate Crime

Something I have been expecting has just happened. The Ewokes and Wokiees have taken a bold leap and declared that Christian deliverance is therapy and therefore subject to social media banning.

In the past, the Ewokes were afraid to mount an existential attack on the church. They criticized it, but generally, they expressed admiration for Jesus–a false leftist Jesus–and even tried to claim Christianity by sending homosexuals to push their way into positions as pastors and priests. Now they’re moving to a new phase of Antichrist “cancellation.” They just banned Youtube’s most prominent preacher for casting homosexual demons out.

The preacher in question is T.B. Joshua, Africa’s most prominent clergyman. A charismatic, Joshua practices healing and deliverance, as well as giving words of knowledge and prophecy.

As a prophet, he is hit and miss. His prophecy for the year 2020 contained a lot of misses. On the other hand, he has a steady flood of people emerging from his church with what they claim to be miraculous healings, and they often supply medical documentation which is shown on camera in his videos.

He has cast demons out of numerous people. This is why his channel is gone. He cast a spirit of lesbianism out of a woman on camera. An anti-Christian hate group run by homosexuals reported him to the Google kids, and they behaved predictably.

The libels coming out now are amazing. The Ewokes removed his channel so people can’t see it, and then “journalists” said things about his video that aren’t true. They said his methods are violent, for one thing. This is a baldfaced lie. I’ve seen them. He taps people and puts his hands on them, but it’s about as violent as a massage. He doesn’t injure anyone or cause them pain.

It’s a great strategy. You say, “T.B. Joshua did THIS.” First, though, you destroy the evidence so people can’t see that you’re lying.

Other people are uploading his videos on their own channels, so the Wokandan Truth Squad is going to have a hard time erasing him completely. Maybe this will open the door to making Youtube a members-only site where you have to agree with their political beliefs in order to be registered.

My Zambian sweetheart texted me today and told me about Joshua’s virtual execution. She said I was right. She said, “They are silencing God’s children.” She said, “The world is ending.”

She is a young woman, and she doesn’t like talk of the end of the world. She wants marriage, a home, and kids. I told her what she wanted was what we call “the American Dream.” But that dream is no longer on the menu because all the things God told me would happen are happening. We will be driven off the Internet. We will be prevented from working. The government will land in the hands of leftists as extreme as the murderers who killed the czar’s children. Our property will be taken. We will not be allowed to buy or sell. Eventually, we will be summarily executed.

The madness will not stop increasing. Satan won the worldwide election.

Only two types of Christians will be spared: those who die before things get really bad, and those who are raptured.

Jesus told us only one of the seven churches would be spared “the hour of temptation” that would come upon the entire world. He was referring to the tribulation. He said the church of Philadelphia would be removed from the earth, but he didn’t promise this to the other churches.

Philadelphia is a city in Asia, but he was referring to part of the modern church. He was referring to Spirit-led Christians who are full of love. In other words, a minority of Christians.

We like to argue about whether the rapture will come before, after, or during the tribulation. We should be more concerned about whether we will make it, although a post-tribulation rapture would be completely pointless. It would be like being sentenced to flogging and being pardoned after the act.

I thought a huge financial decline would follow the mess of 2007, and I was wrong. Other than that, the things I’ve expected have been coming. I said homosexuality would be the club Satan used to beat the church, and I was right. I said we would be excluded from society, and I was right. The other things I foresee will come to pass. They’re in the Bible. It’s not necessary to trust me.

At first, I was angry when I saw that T.B. Joshua had been crucified, but that was my flesh talking. Now I feel a sense of foreboding. The persecution of an African preacher may not seem like a big thing in America, but America is not the center of the universe. It is not mentioned in the Bible, and God has never promised us this nation won’t collapse. Joshua is a huge figure, worldwide, and the moment when Youtube took away his voice was a pivotal moment. As of a few days ago, the entire church is an underground church. Every person who speaks or writes the truth about demons and homosexuality is marked for deletion from the marketplace of ideas. The “hate” label hangs around our necks with the world’s approval.

We are going to lose. Ignorant Christians love to say God will give us victory and we will change the world, but the Bible doesn’t say that. We are going to lose because the world changed so many of us. The man of perdition will be revealed, some Christians will be raptured, others will be tormented and murdered, and the rest will join the Antichrist and burn with him forever.

Long ago, I had several dreams in which I was in a car headed off an overpass hundreds of feet high. I was in Miami, which is a disgusting city of idolatry and trashy morals. The car fell toward the ground, and I saw it through the windshield. I wasn’t afraid, but I felt the same foreboding I feel now. I knew I was going to die. I looked forward to the adventure of going to heaven. These dreams must have been about the time I’m living in now. The world is hurtling toward the end of the age, and I am hoping to be removed instantaneously instead of lingering and suffering.

I was angry to hear that Joshua had been libeled and censored, but now I see what happened as sad. A soundproof wall is being built between real Christians and people we want to reach. It’s fine to create our own Christian-friendly social media sites, but nearly everyone who will join them will be Christians, so what good will they do? Unsaved people are unfertilized eggs, and the gospel is semen. The only reason saved people aren’t taken at the moment of salvation is that we are supposed to reach the unsaved. If we can’t talk to the general public using the Internet, our reach is drastically curtailed, and our ability to serve our purpose is reduced. It’s a move toward the moment when God decides it’s no longer worth it to keep us here.

Years ago, God told me the age of the church was ending. He meant the church dependent on pastors and big buildings. He showed me that Christianity would spread like a virus, outside of church, the way it was always intended to spread. The Ewokes can kick us off Youtube, but they can’t keep us from talking to our friends and relatives.

They have shut down churches. They are taking us off the Internet. They’re pushing the church underground. Eventually, they will have to address the underground church, too. They’ll have to do something about the people who spread the gospel at work, in their homes, in schools, and so on. In order to do that, they’ll have to kill us. It’s coming, and the people who kill us will say they’re doing God’s work.

Think of the gospel as coronavirus and the persecution as lockdowns and masks.

Like any person who is too proud, dishonest, and full of hate to be saved, the body of leftists is showing us we are not wanted on earth. God is going to grant their wish, and they will be destroyed by his cooperation. We will not be able to help them, no matter how much we want to.

I disconnected from most forms of social media a long time ago, and in my Youtube videos, I tell people, “Don’t watch. Don’t ‘like.’ Don’t subscribe. I could not care less.” I’m not going to cultivate popularity by weaseling and pretending. I hope I helped some people. A popular channel full of lies wouldn’t help anyone.

As for my blog, if they take it down tomorrow, I’ll be fine. I won’t grab a rifle and shoot up my hosting company’s offices. I will miss communicating with people, but in another way, I’ll be glad to let the burden drop.

I assume I’ll eventually be disbarred, if I live long enough. Good thing I don’t practice law. I hope I’m not here when they start confiscating wealth and impoverishing believers, but if I am, I’ll ask God to help me not to tap out. I just have to hold onto him until I’m free of the earth, and after that, I will never see the people who hate me again. No spirit that hates me will ever see me again.

I feel like telling my girlfriend “Rebecca” to quit school immediately. I feel like I should buy tickets to any country that will accept us so we can fulfill the in-person meeting requirement of a fiancee visa. If the world is going to get even crazier, it’s best to unite while we can still travel.

We Were all Dogs Once

It looks like I had some prophetic dreams last night.

In one dream, I was in my front yard. I saw a black dual-rotor helicopter flying above my back yard. It was moving around a lot. It even did a vertical loop. It traveled to the left and right, so it was not clear whether it was going to land on my property or just continue moving around the area.

The sides of the helicopter were open, so I could see inside it.

I kept hoping it would not land in my yard. I felt it belonged to the government, and unannounced visits from black government helicopters are not good things.

Of course, it landed there.

I walked through the house into the backyard. A military man who was part of the helicopter’s crew walked part of the way toward me from the helicopter. He was yelling at me as though he had authority. I was yelling at him, too. I was not happy his machine had landed in my yard.

People streamed toward me from the helicopter, and dogs came with them. There were all sorts of dogs. The biggest ones were very large, and the smallest would have weighed around two pounds. The people seemed happy to be there, as though they had just arrived in a place where they looked forward to doing things that were important to them. The dogs also looked happy. They seemed ready to serve.

I moved to the right side of my house and put myself in a position to block people and dogs who were walking through it to the front yard. I blocked a couple of women. One was a tall, flatchested lady with short, curly reddish hair. She wore a man’s shirt and khaki pants. She was walking a big dog. I demanded she tell me who the people were and what they were doing on my land. She smiled and said, “It’s difficult to say.”

No one paid any attention to my efforts to get them to leave. I could not tell anyone what to do. Someone else was commanding them.

I looked behind the house, and there were dozens of colorful tents set up. They were there for some kind of festival. In the front yard, people were milling around, doing this and that. A band plugged instruments in and started making sounds. I thought they were going to play rock music, so I looked for their power cords so I could unplug them.

I told Rebecca about the dream, and she reminded me that I had prayed for God to make my home like Bethel, where the angels traveled to and from heaven on Jesus Christ.

It seems to me that the people were angels sent by God. They refused to listen to me because we don’t have authority over angels. They listen only to God. Demons have to obey us, but angels don’t. The people were cheerful and friendly. They were just completely uncooperative.

A lot of Christians like to wave their hands and say they command angels to do this or that. It’s idolatry. Even Jesus did not command angels. He said he could ask God to send them.

The dogs were unbelievers they were bringing here, to serve me and to become children of God. The Bible uses dogs to symbolize unbelievers.

A Samaritan woman asked Jesus to heal her daughter, and he referred to them as dogs. He said he had come to the children first, and that it was not appropriate to give the children’s bread to dogs. She said dogs were allowed to eat crumbs that fell from the table, and he healed her daughter.

Goliath asked David if he was a dog before David killed him. God told the Jews they couldn’t eat meat from animals “torn to pieces in the field.” The meat was to be given to dogs. This was a picture of the dietary laws, which didn’t bind Gentiles.

The psalms refer to the people who cruficied Jesus as dogs: “For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.”

I recall Meir Kahane referring to Palestinians as dogs on camera.

I also dreamed my friend Mike came to visit me, bringing his son. This is something which is actually going to happen in May, God willing. For some reason, I was in a hotel room instead of my house. I found myself on a bed, rubbing and kissing a dog. The dog was beside itself with happiness. I noticed someone had thrown their underwear in the sink, and I complained, saying we had to have rules if we were going to share quarters. A red-haired European man was also there. He and Mike’s son had brought the dog. Mike’s son has red hair.

Somehow we ended up at my house, and Mike disappeared. I found him out back. This was before the festival dream. By the time I got outside, which took a few seconds, he had done a bunch of work on the house and landscaping. A lot of dirt had been dug up, and he had removed some rows of stone from the outer wall near the roof. My house isn’t made of stones.

I always ask God to send people and spirits to take care of me and all that I have, and to help me spend my time serving him. It looks like he heard me.

The dog seems to be a person brought by people and spirits so I could introduce him to God’s love. The underwear in the sink refers to the way Christians who don’t know a lot tend to drag other Christians backward by bringing their worldly ways into our lives. For example, they may push you to watch movies that hinder you by opening your house to demons. The sink is the source of God’s cleansing living water.

I always say too many Christians treat church like a washing machine. Many times, I’ve said they throw their dirty underwear in the machine, put it back on after church, and then spend the rest of the week soiling it again.

In the Bible, clothing represents the things we do in self-righteousness, and it also represents the flesh.

I also dreamed I bought a pornographic magazine. While I was in the shower, which represents prayer in tongues, I opened it and looked at it halfheartedly. I didn’t see anything. The pages that weren’t covered in pornography fell across the others. I quit and put it down.

Later, I saw my cell phone. The screen was blank except for huge capital letters reading, “BEWARE, HUMAN!”

I took all this to be a warning about sexual sin, although in the Bible, sexual sin represents idolatry, including putting the secular and political world before Jesus.

It may be that God is saying he is sending help to prepare me and what I have for marriage and to give me and Rebecca success in reaching people for him. In the Bible, marriages were big festivals, and Jesus said the angels celebrate over every sinner who repents.

This is certainly better than the nightmares that filled my childhood. It beats dreaming the devil comes up a tube through a manhole under your bed and chases you.

Why would angels use a black vehicle? I think it shows that most people can’t see God coming. To most people, the rapture will come like a thief in the night, but the Bible says it will not come that way to his children. Painting a helicopter black may conceal it at night, but not when it arrives on a sunny day, doing flips and turns in your yard.

The first time Jesus came, he criticized Jews who didn’t believe him, saying they could predict the next day’s weather by looking at the sky at night, but they couldn’t understand the time they were living in. Clearly, we are expected to know what’s happening during this age.

It’s wonderful to hear from God. I expect it to increase.

Get With the Program While There is Time

Today during prayer, “Rebecca” told me about a vision she had while she was studying yesterday. I hope I get all the facts right.

The sky opened. She saw the Lion of Judah appear in the sky, followed by an eagle. Flames surrounded his feet and his mane. A dove appeared and put a crown on his head. Several other doves were flying around.

The eagle carried a flag. The doves put flags on poles on his tail. She was able to make out two American flags. She saw another flag containing the colors red, white, and blue, as well as what looked like swords. She went to a website to see if she could find out which country the flag belonged to. I know a number of Haitians, and I wondered if the flag could represent one of them. I said I wondered if it was a Haitian flag. She looked up the Haitian flag and said it was what she had seen. Here it is:

As you can see, the flag features a picture of 6 smaller flags mounted on poles with spearheads. Very much like swords. She had described the flag before I suggested it might be Haitian, so there was no way for her to cheat. I didn’t realize the Haitian flag had so much red, white, and blue in it. I thought it was mostly white and yellow, and I didn’t know whether it had swords in it. I had seen it in the past, but what American remembers the overly ornate flags of little island countries?

Haiti’s motto is on the flag, and in French, it means, “Union makes strength.” We’re always quoting the scripture that says two are better than one, as well as the scripture that says one will put a thousand to flight and two will put ten thousand to flight.

In actuality, the scripture about putting thousands to flight goes like this, and it was spoken against the Hebrews: “How should one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, except their Rock had sold them, and the LORD had shut them up?” It refers to the position of weakness the Hebrews suffered as a result of rebellion. As God has told me, though, there is always symmetry in the supernatural, so if two heathens can put ten thousand Jewish idolaters to flight, then two of God’s servants can put ten thousand of their enemies to flight.

Joshua 23:10 confirms it: “One man of you shall chase a thousand: for the LORD your God, he it is that fighteth for you, as he hath promised you.” Then there is the story of Samson, who killed a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, showing that the servants of God would speak defeat to the servants of Satan by the Holy Spirit. An ass represents the flesh, as seen in the story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on an ass, and the jawbone represents speech.

She looked down, and things were unveiled to her. She saw my bed, and she thought she was going to see me, so she was happy. She then saw a white man whose flesh was rotting. He grabbed her and tried to pull her to him. He said his name, which we’ll pretend was Ralph. She thought it was a spirit associated with my ancestors. She knew she would have to fight, and the scene changed to another place. He turned into a strong young black man, and she knew she would need help.

Rebecca called on the lion, who was now far off on the ground, to save her, but he didn’t pay attention at first. Then she remembered the scripture that says God’s sheep know the sound of his voice, and she reasoned he must know the sound of our voices. She called on him as one of his flock, and he directed his attention to her area.

She recalled the scripture that says God inhabits the praises of his people, and she praised him to bring him to her. Then he descended from the sky and landed between her and the man and separated them. He held her and also locked her out of the area where the black man was, and he also did other things elsewhere, showing that he was omnipresent. He walked away with her, he stayed with the black man, and he remained on the ground far away.

The whole thing is very interesting.

The Lion of Judah is God. It’s a name for Jesus Christ. The name “Judah” means “praise.” Jesus was our high priest, but he was not a Levite. He was from the tribe of Judah.

God showed me that his children on earth are like his feet. We are the parts of his body that touch the earth, and this is why Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. Living in the earth subjects us to constant contamination, and only the water of the Holy Spirit, administered by Jesus, can keep us clean.

The word says God makes his ministers a flame of fire, and that explains the fire on the lion’s feet and mane. A mane is a type of beard, and a beard represents the glory of God which comes from a history of prayer (especially prayer in tongues). God has told me authority only comes from time spent in the presence of God, and praying in tongues is a very easy way to enter his presence.

Why did I think the Haitian flag was a person? Last year, I heard God saying I was his ensign, and he also said I was his signet. These terms are similar. An ensign is a flag you put on a ship to show the nation to whom it belongs to. It’s a token of authority. A signet is a small symbol of authority, and signets have been used for things like signing documents to show they were written by kings.

I had the sense that the two American flags were Rebecca and me. She said this was the impression she had gotten, and to her, it showed she was right to move here.

The flags belonged in the tail, because we know beings who follow a spirit are caught up in his tail. The angels who followed Satan were swept down by his tail.

As for the eagle, it made me think of what Jesus said to help us know when he returned in the flesh, so we would not be fooled by impostors: “For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.”

When Jesus was resurrected, who were the first witnesses? People like to say Mary Magdalene was first, but the first witnesses were two male angels who can also be seen in the two golden cherubs on the ark of the covenant. The slab where Jesus lay in the tomb represents the mercy seat, where God sits to judge. The lid of the ark is the mercy seat, and the presence of God sat between the cherubs.

When Jesus returns in the flesh (and a carcass is flesh), he will be accompanied by cherubs, whom he refers to as eagles.

The eagle that accompanied the Lion of Judah was a cherub.

Maybe the cherub was Gabriel. Some believe the cherubs over the throne of heaven are Michael, the guardian of Israel, and Gabriel, God’s herald. The word says Jesus will return after the seventh trumpet sounds (Revelation 11:15). It also calls the angel who sounds the trumpet the seventh angel, so I’m not clear on how many cherubs there are or whether the same two always stand by God.

Maybe the eagle was Michael, and he was alone with God because Gabriel was sounding the trumpet.

The dove that crowned the lion is the Spirit of Holiness, who is the only authority a living man can have. He crowns us with authority. He crowned the lion in the vision just as he descended on Jesus when he was baptized in the Jordan.

Why did Rebecca see a zombie named Ralph in the bed? Right now we are fasting in order to defeat our flesh and get power. I believe the zombie represented the flesh. Two married people are one flesh, so there was no need to put two zombies in the vision. The fact that he became black suggests African witchcraft is trying to work in our flesh. That’s a fact we already know. Rebecca has relatives who practice witchcraft, and they curse her.

The name of the zombie is my grandfather’s first name. He is the ancestor of my flesh, but not my spirit.

It’s a remarkable vision.

Rebecca is on a 30-day fast. I take it day by day. I don’t know when I’ll stop. We’re not fasting all day.

If you don’t think God is real, or you think Jesus was just a magician who did his works through demons, maybe this vision will wake you up.

Thank God I Don’t Have a Bridezilla

What a day I’m having. I woke up before the sun was out, the only practical obligations I’ve attended to were feeding my pets and putting a pork roast in the oven, and I’ve been busy the rest of the time with ministry. I didn’t get to shower until after 1:00.

A friend is having terrible problems within his household. He spent several days in the hospital with coronavirus, and before he got home, someone in the family was tormenting him and threatening to tear the family apart.

I got some very disturbing calls before 8:00, and I did what I could. Afterward, I prayed that God would give the problem person whatever he had to give, and take away whatever had to be taken away, in order for that person’s mischief to end, and, if possible, to cause that person to change.

The next call I got was about that person. The individual had had a sudden coronavirus relapse and was bedridden with a fever. Suddenly, the bedridden person no longer had nearly as much power to beat down my friend, who is still not completely over his own illness.

I spent time praying and calling in others for prayer. I spent a good deal of time praying in tongues. I also had a prayer session with my friend, via phone.

These things ate up hours, and I also devoted time to “Rebecca,” my Zambian sweetheart. We shared testimony and prayed a lot.

While we were talking today, she abruptly announced that she wanted to quit school. She is right. There is no conceivable benefit to staying, and it interferes with our relationship and our prayer time. I said I would support her in her choice, whatever it turned out to be. Nothing is final yet.

She’s not really in “school.” She already has a law degree. She is studying for the bar exam, outside of the university.

My sense is that God wants us to move quickly, and I can see why that might be true. The world gets nuttier by the second. The Democrats are about to pack the Supreme Court, and all hell will break loose before long.

BREAK

We have had another video chat. We did our daily period of prayer, including intercession. While we were at work, Rebecca got a revelation about her plans. It’s official: we are going to get together as soon as we can, regardless of what school demands of her. If we can do it before her first round of tests ends, we will do it, and she will not take the tests.

This is a relief. Now we know where we stand.

We should get everything over with, quickly. I can’t even guess how weird the world will be in the fall. The Pentagon just admitted UFO’s are real, gun-grabbing is heating up, and Joe Rogan is in trouble for implying he doesn’t want to see nude pictures of a transsexual whose true sex I can’t even guess. It’s like the second half of Ghostbusters. How long will it be before we see dogs and cats living together?

Maybe I shouldn’t joke, but did you ever think it would be this crazy? It wouldn’t surprise me if Godzilla attacked tomorrow.

Israel is only allowing tourists in for guided tours now. Maybe we could join one and get into the country this summer, but it seems like a painful waste of about $12,000. A guided tour would drag us around to places we don’t want to visit. We would have to eat at restaurants that give them kickbacks instead of eating good food. I would rather rent a car and go where we want, saving a ton of money in the process.

I really don’t want to go to Dubai, but it’s the only alternative we have, short of a horrific trip to Zambia, three days of which would be spent in transit. Rebecca is all done with Zambia, and she doesn’t want me to visit. It appears to be a peaceful and prosperous country, but it also sounds dull. Not worth 72 hours of coach seats. She says she has no plans to go back for visits.

Dubai. Whatever. Let’s just make it Dubai. We’ll have falafel. I like falafel.

I am learning about engagement rings. Part of me resents a system that manipulates men to overspend on things that depreciate instantly. Another part reminds me that even if the system is sick, it’s a good thing to give a woman jewelry. I can’t complain if I’m being manipulated to do something I would want to do even if I were not being manipulated.

I have no idea what the markup on rings is, but I would be amazed if I didn’t get taken to the cleaner’s. There is no way around it. There are two times in life when you will be shamed into paying full retail on things that aren’t worth what they cost: when you get married, and when you die. Actually, you have to overpay when someone else dies. If it’s you, you won’t let the undertaker pressure you, but if it’s your wife, you’ll feel like you have to buy the $20,000 walnut coffin with gold-plated handles.

In 1994, my mother’s coffin cost $7000. I guess that model costs twice as much now.

In case anyone is interested, the average price for an engagement ring in my state is about $8900. I guess I sound cheap, or just male, but that figure surprised me. I mean, it’s not a motorcycle or a milling machine. And this is the AVERAGE figure, which means young people with very little money are spending this much. The typical American wedding starts with hiring prostitutes for a bachelor party, then you spend $25,000 on a one-day celebration of a narcissistic woman, then you have a $5,000 honeymoon, and then you spend two years paying off the debt instead of buying a home. If you have bridesmaids, they end up blowing maybe $2000 each. Piling on $8900 for a ring, plus whatever a wedding band costs, does not seem intelligent for the average couple.

I’m not poor. Am I supposed to spend $25,000? Expensive rings don’t look better; just bigger. It’s like putting a disco ball on a woman’s finger. A normal ring is tasteful and unostentatious. Princess Diana’s oversized, gaudy ring shouted, “BOW DOWN, PEASANT!”

A setting, which is just a ring without a stone, can easily run over $900. There might be $100 worth of gold in the ring, so where is the rest of the money going? It’s not going into skilled labor. The same skill and time go into making rings that sell for $50. Hmm.

Rebecca doesn’t like the idea of wearing two rings on one finger, so we will be doing things the traditional way, without a band.

I don’t want a wedding band for myself. I would lose it, I hate rings, and rings are very dangerous for people who like to use tools. Women don’t chase me–not women I would want–so it’s not like I need a ring to prevent adultery. If I were going to cheat, I would just take the ring off anyway. It’s silly for women to think rings keep their men safe. In reality, a wedding ring makes a man more attractive to sluts.

Aside from all that, rings on men are generally effeminate, except for class rings and perhaps Super Bowl rings. Necklaces raise a rebuttable presumption of homosexuality.

I was thinking I might buy a wedding band just so I could say I had one, but after that, I would put it in a drawer. I’ve never had a class ring, and I haven’t worn a watch in so long, I can’t remember the last time I left the house wearing one.

I have to be honest. I think a man of average means who spends more than a grand on a ring is a fool. He’s going to have to buy a home, feed a wife, pay to have kids…an extra $7900 would help a lot.

I wish I knew what people do in Dubai for fun. I looked at a site describing activities, and all I saw were Arabs in long robes, riding quads in the sand, driving four-by-fours in the sand…you can imagine. “Come to our modern new water park…in the sand!” “Come see our new skyscraper…in the sand!”

It must be better than it sounds.

Newlyweds wouldn’t need activities, but single Christian people do.

Spending money on a trip doesn’t bother me, because it doesn’t seem like a colossal waste. I’m fine with the ring, I’m fine with the trip, and I’m fine with the cost of the cows I have to use to buy the bride. I wouldn’t like spending the price of a new car on the wedding, but because Rebecca and I are both introverted, practical people, our wedding will not cost a lot.

Are we supposed to have a honeymoon, after going to Dubai? I guess so. I wouldn’t want to go overseas again during the same year. Where are people supposed to go in America? Vegas is out. It’s a focal point of sin and depravity.

I’m looking at suggested destinations. Beach, beach, beach, beach…really? I grew up in Florida, and Rebecca can’t swim. Forget beaches. Forget Hawaii. Forget the Bahamas; I’ve done the Bahamas to death. The other big option is ski vacations. Why do normal, unathletic people want to ski? My knees are in perfect condition, and I want to keep them. My dad’s former partner skied into a tree, and it slammed him right in the crotch, just like in the cartoons. His private parts were the crumple zone, and then the tree shattered his pelvis. No, thank you.

I think what honeymooners need is a really good hotel and some top-notch restaurants, but then I’m a Christian. A typical honeymooner got tired of having sex with his wife three years before they were married, so it’s no wonder they want to ski and go hang-gliding. It must be a real drag, arriving in the hotel and thinking the most exciting thing to do is to see what’s on cable. “Oh, honey! They have ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm!'”

This reminds me of a great story which is supposedly true. It comes from historian Stephen Ambrose. A flyer was being interviewed by an Army Air Corps psychiatrist. The shrink asked him how many times he had sex with his wife on their wedding night. The man was offended, but he mentioned a low figure. The shrink smiled and said, “I got my wife six times.” The flyer said, “Yes, but my wife was inexperienced.”

Hope I got the wording right.

If things go well, we will be together next month, and after that, it’s just a matter of getting a visa. Biden just responded to shaming by speeding up fiancee visas, so maybe we will be together this year in the United States instead of Dubai. I certainly hope so.

HBO has What You Need

As regular readers know, I have been “dating” a beautiful Zambian lady since March 5. We found each other on a dating site, we hit it off instantly, we fell in love, and we started making plans. We have been trying to find a way to get together in person. I didn’t have a valid passport when we got started, and getting foreigners into the US is hard with the coronavirus hysteria. I applied for a passport, and I was told to expect a wait of between 8 to 12 weeks, even with expedited processing.

Last night, I learned that my application was approved. My new passport will be here roughly 5 weeks after I applied. God willing, barring unforeseen obstacles, I should be free to travel in a few days.

Now, where should I go?

As always, I call my girlfriend “Rebecca” here because she hasn’t told me to use her real name. Rebecca suggested getting together in Israel. I thought this would be perfect. Travel between my location and Zambia takes a day and a half, with no hotel stops. It is something to be avoided. Israel is reasonably close for both of us, and it’s not expensive.

I learned that Israel was not accepting visitors, and Rebecca suggested Dubai. It’s a popular tourist destination, the cost is not bad, it’s open for business, and the location is practical.

I have to go back over the options now. Israel appears to be changing its policies, but the government websites are rudimentary, slow, and inconsistent with each other, so I don’t actually know what the current rules are. I suppose I could call the embassy today.

If things go well wherever we end up, we can make things official during the trip, and then I can find out how to get a fiancee visa from the State Department.

I was concerned that my passport might not get her until mid-May, complicating our plans. I’m very glad it moved faster.

What happened is very typical of Christians’ interactions with earthly authorities. A government says no, you pray, and then the government says yes. Satan has a lot of power in governments. He likes to use them to put up strongholds. No prayer in schools. No church during a pandemic. God has no respect for his strongholds. They might as well be made of fog.

Things are going very well between us. We have had problems with her school obligations interfering with our prayer sessions, but that will come to an end soon enough.

We are working on the process of crucifying the flesh and driving out demons. We both felt motivated to do it at the same time. Derek Prince said many people try to crucify demons and cast out the flesh, meaning they mistake one for the other. Sometimes we have compulsions and failings that come from the flesh instead of foreign spirits, and we have to use the right tools to win. We’re using prayer and fasting in order to overcome. One thing we’re hoping to beat is coronavirus fat. Rebecca looks great, but she wants to look better.

I keep getting new revelations and impartations. I’m happy about that. I suddenly have the ability to quiet my mind by pushing foreign spirits out. I was having some problems with worry, but now I am able to silence it. I know it doesn’t come from me.

The word says completed love casts out fear, and I take it seriously. I fight fear and unbelief, and I work to release love. The ability to silence worry appears to be connected to fear and anger.

Yesterday, I made a big mistake. I felt sorry for myself because I ate something that didn’t agree with me, so I sat in the living room and watched the last Jurassic Park movie. I don’t have to tell you the plot, but I will. People try to profit from fake dinosaurs made through cloning, the dinosaurs get loose, and lots of people die. Startling; I know. You can’t believe a Jurassic Park movie would go like that.

Sometimes I think Ridley Scott should sue Steven Spielberg.

I avoid entertainment featuring vengefulness and cruelty, but the movie I watched yesterday got by me. When you watch, say, Steven Seagal, you know you’re going to see cruel vengeance, but it’s not exactly what you think of when you think of dinosaur movies. Nonetheless, I saw it. A mean old white military-looking guy got his arm bitten off, and then he was eaten by a new kind of dinosaur created to please the evil military/industrial complex. The arts are what destroyed America, but we blame the army and General Foods.

There was a fair amount of cruelty in the movie, and there was also a lot of fear. After I watched it, I marveled at my lack of common sense. Here I was, asking God to keep fear out of me, yet I was also watching a movie what was designed to instill fear. It seems ridiculous when you look at it that way. Why would you want to scare yourself or watch other people put in fear when you’re trying to get fear out of your system?

It was a bad idea, to say the least.

Now I’m going to be more careful. No more movies or TV shows involving fear.

Last night, I thought about the way American movies had changed. Before I was born, movies didn’t show extreme physical injury or suffering. If someone got run over by a train or eaten by a bear, the camera turned to something else. In the Sixties, things got more graphic. During the next decade, they got more disgusting. Andy Warhol made a movie in which a man was decapitated and a woman was disemboweled. Eventually, extreme representations of gore and agony became commonplace, and in many movies, these things are presented approvingly, in order to satisfy us, not to scare us. Hollywood has taught us to savor horrific cruelty. It even turned Hannibal Lecter into a sort of hero. That’s weird.

It’s like we want to see what happens in hell.

This all comes as a big revelation to me. I seem to have slept through the change.

If you watch pornography, you give power to sexual demons and invite them to live in you. What, then, are you doing when you watch movies about violence, cruelty, and fear?

I was fighting God, and I didn’t know it.

I’m all done with that mess. I am hoping God will honor my change of course and help me get clear of the bad things I’ve packed inside myself.

Maybe you’re fighting God without realizing it. I hope this blog post will help you.

Dead Criminal Now a Hero

Welcome back to 2020.

I guess everyone knows there are new anti-police riots taking place. A young criminal named Daunte Wright was pulled over by the police. They tried to arrest him because he had a warrant. He fought with them and drove off. A female cop shot him by accident, thinking she was holding a taser.

The shooting was very obviously an error, and of course, many leftists are saying it was deliberate. Everything is on video. There is no room for doubt. Unfortunately, there is always room for deliberate lies.

The shooting took place near Minneapolis, so there is rioting there. There are also riots in Portland and God knows where else. All over a young man who would never have been in a position to be shot, had he simply done what everyone else does during traffic stops.

People are claiming he ran because he was afraid he would be shot simply for being black. No. Completely wrong. When someone is pointing a pistol at you from two feet away, and you don’t want to be shot, you comply. He ran because he was defiant, plain and simple.

A discouraging thing happened at a press conference. The then-chief of police was talking to reporters. Remember, a reporter’s only job is to gather and disseminate information. A reporter doesn’t tell sources what to say. The chief correctly described the riots as riots, and two reporters scolded him. One said, “Don’t do that.”

This is not what actual reporters do. It shows how arrogant and deluded the left has become. They know they won’t be held accountable, so they pervert the First Amendment on camera, for public consumption.

It’s a symptom of the Antichrist disease. Spirits of delusion rule Satan’s children. Not only do they contemn the truth; they can no longer perceive it.

The best way to defeat an enemy is to convince him to love and believe lies. You can make him fight and destroy himself for you. You can screw his mind up to the point where he will celebrate his own destruction louder than you will. You won’t have to do the work. You won’t have to mount a defense, because he will defend you as well as attacking himself. No wonder Satan loves lies so much.

We already knew that “protest” was the code word for “leftist riot.” Now they’re coming out and admitting it.

The police chief has since been forced out of office by a newly-empowered black mayor. Technically, he resigned, but his summary dismissal was in the works.

The city manager called for due process to be applied before firing the officer who fired the shot, and the manager has been fired.

Leftists have a long history of hatred of due process. The Romanovs had no trial. The legions of innocent people murdered in Cambodia had no trials. Cuban revolutionaries have arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered countless people without trials; Che Guevara took particular pleasure in overseeing firing squads. The Russians and Chinese had no interest in trials.

Anyone who knows anything about our Constitution knows that due process is a fundamental right. It is mentioned in two different amendments. Without it, there would be no hope of justice for anyone. Leftists can’t understand this. Satan has blinded them.

Many leftists are saying, “Rioting works.” They are openly saying rioting is necessary. What is rioting? Most fundamentally, it’s a denial of due process. Ignorant, unprincipled, impulsive people sidestep the government, and they punish and inflict what they see as revenge, with no guidelines or restraint.

A lynch mob is a type of riot. America is now in the hands of lynchers. What happened to Kyle Rittenhouse was an unsuccessful lynching, literally, and the prosecutor who charged him is now part of the mob. The leftist terrorist rioters who are destroying our cities are moving toward a general policy of lynching. It will increase. We have a gutless, amoral, demented, unintelligent, self-worshiping president, and his vain vice president is only better in that her reason is intact. There is no one at the top to resist the lynchers and terrorists.

This is all self-inflicted. It sounds like I’m putting all the blame on leftists, but nearly all of us made this happen. Christians rejected the Holy Spirit. We didn’t intercede. We became followers of depraved people, especially entertainers. We took up false religions. When you do these things, you give your enemies power. They incubate below the horizon, feeding on your pride and disobedience, and they eventually jump into view and conquer you. You put the power to rule and humiliate you in their hands. God didn’t do it. Satan didn’t do it. The left didn’t do it all by itself. America and the rest of humanity are primarily responsible.

We face a future of increased racism from every quarter. We face a future of increased factionalism of all types. People will identify with nations, races, and political groups, and they will hate each other with a fire that can’t be put out, even with blood. Minorities are already full of hatred for whites, Jews, and Asians in the US, and white people are starting to respond in kind. This is how the red horseman of the apocalypse–the spirit of murder–works. It won’t get better, because the only remedy is the one most of us hate: the Holy Spirit.

This morning I watched a Mark Hemans video. He’s an Australian apostle who heals people and dispenses correction. He can’t go to people in person now, so he uses Zoom. He has a big TV with a screen divided into little squares. Each square contains the image of a meeting participant. Typically, there will be multiple pages of screens.

I’ll post a photo of his TV. You’ll see that the faces and names are extremely diverse. His meetings draw black Americans and Africans. British blacks. Asians of every kind. White Americans. White Europeans. Citizens of Muslim countries. There are probably Messianic Jews in the mix. How does this picture differ from the world at large? It differs because it’s a picture of peace. The people in the squares consider each other siblings. They are on each others’ sides. They pray for each other. They love each other. They love being together.

It shows what the world would be like if we all submitted to the Holy Spirit. The Bible calls Jesus the Prince of Peace, and you can see why. No one else can bring peace. No one else can take a Palestinian terrorist and an Arab-hating Orthodox Jew and turn them into brothers. It’s completely normal in charismatic churches that serve the Holy Spirit. Everywhere else, there is enmity and division.

God fills people with love for each other, and it’s better than human love.

I am bored with talk of politicians fixing the world; especially the Middle East. It’s nice that they try, but they’re just polishing the leaves of a tree instead of medicating the roots. The leaves will continue to rot because the roots are infected with the spirit of Antichrist.

God always tells his children the same things. He doesn’t suffer from the inane delusion that debate is healthy. Debate is a curse. He unites people. Satan is different. He tells you one thing and me another. He wants the children of Adam to kill each other and send each other to hell.

BLM and Antifa have no human leadership and no articulated goals. Without an articulated goal, there is no way for a combatant to know when the battle is over. This is why they will never stop fighting. Their true goal, which their father knows very well, is to remove Christians and Jews from the earth, making them endure as much suffering and humiliation as possible in the process. This goal can’t be attained, so the war will never end. It will continue until the rapture.

Most Christians either support the leftists or plan to fight them with ridiculous weapons like rifles. Either way, they support Satan. They are against the leadership of the Holy Spirit, and they are headed for catastrophe. The only weapons and defenses that work are supernatural, and they are not available to people who do things their own way. The word says everyone who trusts in the strength of man is cursed.

You can join God’s family at any time. What you’ve done is irrelevant. It can all be wiped out by the blood of Jesus. All that matters is your willingness to change course. Every intelligent saved person above the age of accountability is filthy and disgusting, but for God’s help. Your mother. Your kids. Your pastor. The nicest people you know. To God, there is no important difference between them and a Satanist who curses God every day. Sin is sin. You can be repaired. Thinking you can’t be fixed is no excuse for remaining as you are.

Preachers generally don’t have the guts, the honesty, or the knowledge to say these things. They want butts in seats and checks in collection plates. They’re like the dogs who started following men centuries ago, in order to eat their table scraps and their feces. They are useless.

Expect new riots with every report of a controversial interracial shooting. The enemy can never be appeased. He’s not after peace. He wants your annihilation.

America will continue to try to appease, as will the rest of the nations, and things will get worse and worse until the end comes. There may be pauses, but the process will not stop for good because people will continue choosing Satan. They will continue to endorse fornication and homosexuality. They will keep punishing and ostracizing God’s children. They will never stop looking for Satan’s solutions, because behaving and submitting are so abominable to them. We have had over a year of coronavirus, and there is almost no move to repent or take responsibility. That’s a pattern that will continue.

It would be nice to be wrong.

Osteen Never Surprises

Back when I was a deacon at New Dawn Ministries in Miami, before the pastors drove me out and the church disintegrated in scandal, I had the nerve to criticize Joel Osteen on Facebook. The pastor’s brother-in-law, who was a new Christian, responded very angrily, as he tended to do whenever I had a revelation that conflicted with bad doctrine. Basically, he questioned my right to criticize a TV pastor, as though Osteen somehow outranked other Christians.

Today I learned something every Christian needs to know: Osteen and his wife attended a homosexual pride event in 2019. It was sponsored by Sirius and Pandora, and the featured act was Stephanie Germanotta, AKA Lady Gaga.

I am not a good person, and whenever I’m right, it only proves God got me to listen, but I wonder how different the brother-in-law’s life would have been, had he listened to me a few times instead of assuming a brand-new Christian with a weak prayer life knew better.

Osteen is one of Sirius’ performers. Perhaps he was contractually obligated to be at the event. A real pastor would have breached the contract instead.

Osteen has always come across as a coward and lickspittle to me. He behaves like a dog that shows you its belly whenever you come in the room. He grins and squirms when he talks about tough issues. He weasels and dodges. It’s disgusting. Imagine Billy Graham or Lester Sumrall doing that. Imagine Smith Wigglesworth wriggling in his chair and saying, “Well, Whoopi, I don’t want to OFFEND anyone!” Such things could never happen.

The Revelation says cowards can’t enter the kingdom of heaven, and prophets have generally been rude people. Try and name a prophet who wasn’t rude. Samuel, Nathan, Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha, Jeremiah, Amos, Joel, John the Baptist, Jesus…they were all rude. They spoke the truth even when it offended people, and that is something everyone agrees is rude. Daniel may not have been rude, but he openly disobeyed Darius, knowing the penalty was death.

John called the hypocritical Jews of his time a brood of vipers, and Jesus called them sons of Satan. You can’t get much ruder than that, and these people were much more powerful than Joel Osteen. They imprisoned and murdered people who confronted them. If John spoke the truth to Herod, who had the power to behead him, why should anyone be afraid to criticize Joel Osteen, who crawls on his belly for people like Joy Behar?

Think how much money and approval must mean to Osteen, for him to show up and lick the feet of sexual degenerates and to help pro-perversion activists succeed.

I know exactly what this type of preacher would say: “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. If you’re blunt, people won’t come to church and be saved, so you’re fighting God.” Thing is, Satan, not God, is the lord of flies. The point is to catch sheep, not flies. Jesus said we were the salt of the earth, not the sugar.

Bringing people to church indiscriminately is destructive. The word says few are chosen. You can’t undo the word by filling your church with hypocrites who have no desire to change. They’ll still go to hell, and they’ll ruin the church in the process. I know. I attended a church where an ignorant pastor named Linda Freeman taught yoga on the premises. I went to a church where an ignorant pastor named Tim Gilligan taught about “mindfulness,” which is New Age meditation.

Imagine Jesus saying he didn’t want to say something important because it would offend people! It’s a picture that makes no sense. It’s true, he paid Roman taxes in order to avoid offending and involving himself in a prosecution, but when he spoke, he said whatever God told him to. He did not pull punches.

Persecution is going to ramp up like crazy. It’s already happening. It won’t be a problem for many American Christians, however, because they don’t have the guts to accept it. They’ll snivel and kowtow, and they’ll bow to the persecutors. This is what Osteen is doing.

Fake Christians who abandon God entirely will avoid persecution. People like Osteen, who keep one foot in the church and the other in the bath house, will be persecuted for failing to go all the way. God is a jealous god, and so is Satan. People like Osteen will taste the persecution, but they won’t have much divine protection.

How many homosexuals have decided their problem is really a blessing, thanks to Joel Osteen? How many people who could have been helped are going to die defeated, in ignorance?

This morning while I was praying with “Rebecca,” I started feeling I needed to be more open about my membership in God’s family, not just on the web and with other Christians, but in face-to-face encounters with strangers. Maybe I need a couple of hats and shirts with Christian symbols on them. Maybe a bumper sticker. Just so no one will ever be able to say I let the lost lead me.

The Revelation says the people who will get the most protection will be in the church of Philadelphia. It’s not referring to an ancient church in the city of Philadelphia. It’s about the remnant that will exist when the rapture comes. It’s about Christians who function in God-given love, with zeal and faithfulness. God says they will be spared the hour of temptation that comes on the whole world, and that hour is the tribulation.

You’re not going to get a rapture ticket by enabling sexual rebels who are the church’s biggest enemies.

“Love” doesn’t mean “telling people what they want to hear.” Jesus WAS love, and he was highly critical and never apologized.

Prophecy is Being Fulfilled

Today I saw another interesting video from Zev Porat, the rabbi’s son who accepted Yeshua and ended up facing terrible abuse from rabbis and his own family. His grandfather responded to the news by throwing a dish at his head and lacerating his forehead, and a group of rabbis invaded a tent he was living in and spat on him and his wife.

Porat goes around Israel, speaking to Jewish people and Arabs. Some listen. He posts Youtube videos.

Yesterday he put up a video about a couple of yeshiva students. He ran into them by the Sea of Galilee. He showed them some Bible verses which challenged what they believed.

One of the big Jewish objections to Yeshua is the rabbinical stance that the Messiah can’t be God. They say he will just be a man. Today, Porat showed the students this:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

That’s Isaiah 9:6. Porat doesn’t teach from the New Testament, but often, Jews get angry at him when they hear Old Testament verses. They’re not familiar with the Bible, so they think they’re hearing the New Testament. He has to show them the Tanakh, in Hebrew, to prove he’s using the Bible they believe is true.

There is no translation issue. The word translated “God” is “el,” which is also means “God” in the rest of the Old Testament.

He showed them this verse and asked whom it referred to:

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.

That’s Micah 5:2. According to Porat, in Hebrew, it says the person described existed before the foundation of the world. The students agreed.

He asked the students whom it referred to, and one of them said it was David. He asked him if David existed before the foundation of the world, and of course, the student had to say no. So the student himself agreed that it was not David.

They asked him who this Messiah was, and Porat showed them Proverbs 30:4:

Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth? what is his name, and what is his son’s name, if thou canst tell?

I’ve seen him use this verse before. It sometimes upsets people, because they already know the answer, but they’re afraid to say it. They’re terrified of persecution. They don’t want to lose their jobs, their families, and every other good thing they have.

Here in the US, no one has any excuse to be afraid to say the answer. Thank God for that.

They asked him where the Bible said Yeshua was the Messiah. There are many places, but he showed them this:

Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation.

The words translated as “salvation” are “yeshua” and a variant of the same word. “Yeshua” means “salvation.”

They agreed to communicate further, so there is some hope they will make it.

Jesus made it clear that if we were more afraid of people than we were of God, he would disown us. If we deny him in front of people, he will deny us before the Father. It’s a shame so many people are afraid to come out and say they believe. They may think they can make it as hypocrites, but they’re courting damnation. To be a Christian, you have to drink from the same cup as Jesus, and his cup was persecution and notoriety.

Psalm 56:22 says, “In God have I put my trust: I will not be afraid what man can do unto me.” It’s remarkable that we often fear men more than God. After all, he is God. If you’re afraid of men, you must not actually know God, regardless of how much you’ve studied.

The Revelation says cowards will burn in the lake of fire. It’s a serious thing.

Anyway, I enjoyed the video. I prayed for Porat’s success.

I have not prayed with “Rebecca” today. She is busy with classes. We are hoping to get together in a short time.

It’s frustrating, waiting for her to get her studies finished. We decided she should get through her first tests, in May, and then we can decide whether she should take the second round.

I feel like telling her to drop everything and come on over, but we want to be responsible. Maybe I shouldn’t be writing this paragraph. She reads this blog!

I hope to keep bringing better and better news about us and our relationship with God. Hope other people who have been following the story will be helped.

MORE

One year after my friend and prayer partner Travis Quinn was shot, in an accident that eventually ended his life, our mutual friend Alonzo has been taken to the hospital with coronavirus and pneumonia. Please intercede for his recovery and his relationship with God, if you will.

Yukon Keep These Potatoes

Things are still going great with my Zambian sweetheart, “Rebecca.” We are still struggling with the question of whether she should continue studying for the Zambian bar exam. We keep getting what seem to be indications that it’s not God’s will. Prayers for his guidance would be appreciated.

There are only two reasons for her to continue. First, there is the possibility that we won’t work out, which seems highly unlikely, and second, it’s generally not a good idea to quit big projects you’ve started. If she quits and something miraculous happens that splits us up, I can easily fund a return trip to Zambia and a new period of study, but she would lose some time.

In other news, I bought a deep fryer. I’m not sure it was a good idea. I am tired of having problems frying things. My chicken has been performing poorly.

In the old days, the portable fryer market was gloomy. They had things like the Fry Baby, and not much more. The Fry Baby is a small electrified bucket that holds oil. They now make a Fry Pappy. It’s bigger, and the reviews are not good. One problem: you have to fry everything at 375 degrees.

Now you can get a machine that will sit on your countertop and fry 2.5 pounds of food per batch. You can get models that have preset modes for various foods. One model, made by Breville, has a special two-part mode for twice-fried fries. Do you trust a stranger to tell your fryer how to make fries? I don’t. My Instant Pot does a great job with rice, however.

The Breville gets a lot of bad reviews because of build quality, so I don’t want it.

I decided to try a T-Fal. Their machine comes apart so you can put various pieces in the dishwasher. It has a big basket which is easy to handle. It also has a filtering mode. After you fry, it filters the fat and stores it in a container which is part of the fryer.

Today I watched some videos about fryers, and I also caught an America’s Test Kitchen video about frying chicken “like the pros.” I thought they did a surprisingly bad job. They used a Dutch oven with a clip-on thermometer, and they fried the chicken right on the bottom of the pot. It came out with dark areas in the areas that hit bottom. I don’t need a fancy kitchen and a staff of professionals to tell me how to burn chicken.

Usually, the people at ATK give great advice. Not sure what happened this time.

T-Fal’s machine looked good on Youtube, and the ATK video made me despair of frying chicken well in a plain old pot. That’s why I ordered the T-Fal. Now I’m not so sure. Since placing the order, I’ve learned some things.

I decided to make fries to see if I could do better than ATK. I looked for recipes online. I wanted to fry twice, the way you’re supposed to. Okay, technically, I wanted to blanch once and fry once. I kept seeing recipes calling for Yukon gold potatoes, which were all I had. I sliced some thin and blanched them in a pot with a thermometer, and then I chilled them.

For some reason, I have a stainless basket which can be used for frying. It has little bumps on the bottom to lift it off the bottom of the pot. I used it for blanching, and it worked very well.

It wasn’t much trouble at all, and I didn’t have to take a fancy machine apart for cleaning. Also, because I now have a dedicated grease-filtering storage canister, handling the oil was easy.

Sadly, the fries were not good. They tasted great, but Yukon Golds are not frying potatoes. Not as far as I can tell, anyway. The fries looked perfect, but they were limp, probably because they were low on starch compared to russets.

It looks like I got snookered by the Internet again. It’s full of recipes written by people who can’t cook at all.

I have made wonderful fries in the past. I always used russet potatoes. I have never had good results frying red potatoes or Yukons. I should have known better than to try Yukons today.

Sources on the web say the Russet Burbank is the top fry potato. I don’t know if the russets I can buy are Russet Burbanks, but I’m sure they will beat Yukon Golds.

To get back to equipment, I’m wondering why I should keep the fryer when I have a pretty good solution on hand already.

ATK’s chicken video got me thinking about Dutch ovens. Le Creuset makes the best, if reviewers are to be believed, but boy, are they expensive. Like $380 expensive for a big one. I’ve been resisting getting one. Today I learned they’re on sale for $250. It’s a manufacturer’s promotion. The big model is over $100 cheaper than the next size down.

I tried finding used Dutch ovens a while back, but it was a waste of time. If you want a Le Creuset cheap, you pretty much have to find it at a thrift shop or inherit it.

I just told Amazon to cancel the fryer, as I was writing this. There is no point in spending $120 on something you may not need. Making my bad fries gave me confidence in my frying ability, even if the potatoes let me down. Had I had russets, I would have had excellent fries, and the basket would have made them very easy to handle.

I think I should buy a Dutch oven and invest in some russet potatoes. I don’t actually need a Dutch oven for potatoes, but it will be useful for other things, and I don’t expect Le Creuset to keep the sale going forever.

Not too much is going on, apart from the above. Still waiting for the side effects from my Johnson & Johnson vaccine. I almost had a headache last night, and I felt sleepy, but then I had eaten a big bowl of garlic rolls, so what was I supposed to expect? I feel a little sleepy right now, but I just ate too many fries.

Great things are happening in my relationship with God, but I can’t talk about them here. I am willing to say I am being much more critical of (i.e. “realistic about”) about myself these days, and I am really trying to dedicate myself to God and get his blessings, starting with transformation, to flow. I still think the apocalypse is about to dawn. This is no time to be lukewarm or proud, and I have been both.

Is it “Pandemic” or “Dem Panic”?

I prayed a lot about the bizarre array of coronavirus vaccines we have available, and as of yesterday, I felt peace about the Johnson & Johnson shot. Yes, it’s made using a cell line that came from the murder of an unborn baby. My take on that is not simple, and my decision took a long time to congeal. I would not accept a transplanted part from an unborn baby, but this individual died in 1985, the cells used came from cultures propagated since then, the pharmaceutical companies didn’t give us any appealing options, and for all I know, all the other vaccines I’ve received were made the same way.

Getting the shot I wanted was a big blessing. Florida is vaccinating like crazy, and most private providers, like pharmacies, are booked up for days. All of the providers that use the J&J vaccine were booked up as of yesterday, and J&J’s production was recently set back by an error that ruined 15 million doses, but today an obscure local pharmacy received a shipment, and I found out about it early on.

A lady in the waiting area wanted to know if the vaccine was a good choice for her. She said she got very ill for up to two weeks every time she took the flu shot. Two things popped into my mind: 1) hypochondria, and 2) the pointlessness of a shot that gives you a condition which is completely identical to the illness it’s supposed to prevent.

I can’t believe her story, because the flu itself usually isn’t severe, and it doesn’t last two weeks for most people. Why would anyone guarantee herself a two-week illness requiring bed rest in order to prevent a disease that only lasts a week? After a couple of bad experiences, most people would opt for the flu itself.

You rarely hear a man say flu shots make him sick. You rarely hear a man say, “Whenever I take the flu shot, I get the flu.” Seems like it’s always a woman. But the web says men are just as likely as women to be hypochondriacs. In my family, it’s a big problem among women but not the men. My aunt, my mother, and my sister have made lots of grave predictions and announcements about their health as well as other people’s.

Maybe the lady from the pharmacy was telling the truth, and her flu episodes have been worse than her vaccine reactions.

I hope I did the right thing, choosing to be vaccinated. I felt strongly that God was telling me to go ahead, but I could be wrong.

Now I’m wondering if I’ll have side effects. I think it’s extremely likely I had coronavirus a year ago. I had a fairly lengthy illness with symptoms consistent with coronavirus, after being exposed to international travelers. Here’s the question: will coronavirus itself give me any immunity to the vaccine?

I would think things would work both ways, but I’m no doctor. The vaccine uses an adenovirus. Maybe people react to the adenovirus as well as the covid material. If that’s true, I guess having covid will not block all of the shot’s side effects.

I don’t care. I’ve never had a noticeable reaction to any vaccine, as far as I can recall. I’m not all that snowflaky about my health. I’m just curious about what will happen.

I feel fantastic today. In fact, that’s how I generally feel. Lots of energy. I suppose it comes from prayer. I don’t know if my friends have noticed, but I’m never the one to say it’s time to stop what we’re doing because I’m tired or sore or whatever. It’s always someone younger than I am. I just realized that. If I started feeling bad, it would be very obvious because of the contrast.

The stats for the J&J vaccine are confusing and not simple. Some make it look inferior to the other shots, but there is additional information out there suggesting it’s better than the drive-by media’s typical presentations imply. It’s supposed to be a near-guarantee you won’t die from covid, so that’s good.

As I always say, if I can’t be raptured, I want to have my head taken off by a meteor. Failing those options, I definitely don’t want to go from covid.

The “guarantee” also includes severe illness and ICU treatment.

There is evidence the J&J vaccine may actually be superior to the other shots because it was developed later, so as usual when it comes to coronavirus, the correct conclusion is that no one really knows the truth. We don’t know why people hoarded toilet paper. We don’t know why states with lockdowns sometimes did much worse than states that respected people’s freedom. We don’t know why we all got fat in 2020. We don’t know why the flu disappeared this season. We just guess and guess and guess.

Whatever. I got the shot. Now I’m going to make pizza.

Who are we Really Serving?

“Rebecca” the Zambian, well, Rebecca and I are still enjoying life and hoping for a bright future together.

We continue to pray together at least a couple of times every day, although her bar study obligations are cutting into our schedule. We pray about general things early in the day, and later on, we intercede. Sometimes we intercede for people we care about, and sometimes we intercede for people who are annoying.

We talked about something we have been avoiding discussing. We want to know whether there is any point in having her complete her bar exam, which will take several months, when the process delays our getting together and also interferes with what we do.

The obvious concern is this: is studying for the bar exam a responsible thing to do, which will bring Rebecca closure and help her to leave Zambia as a success, or is it a worthless time sink which will only hinder us in what we’re supposed to do for God? Also, is our desire to be together coloring our judgment?

She just texted me, sending a crying emoji and this: “Class 6 hours straight.”

One of the hallmarks of controlling men is that they interfere with women’s educational and career opportunities. You persuade a woman to let you provide all her support, you tell her she doesn’t need to go to school or work, and then if she complies, she is trapped if the relationship doesn’t turn out to be what she wanted.

I am not a controlling person, but I’m leery of looking like one, and what if I drop dead before things work out? What if she changes her mind about me? She would have invested a lot of time in bar study, and she would have to do it all again.

But does it make sense to look at things that way? Doesn’t it go against faith? God has aligned us extremely quickly, in a very short time, and we are both Spirit-led believers who insist on living by faith instead of relying on our own judgment.

During the last few days, we asked God to help us make sure nothing we give him is defective. This turned out to be relevant to the discussion of Rebecca’s plans.

God criticized the ancient Jews for taking defective animals to the temple to be sacrificed. Some of them took animals that were crippled or blind. They didn’t give God what he wanted. Also, a number of people in the Bible got in very serious trouble for performing sacrifices their own way instead of God’s.

Under the new covenant, we do the same thing when we try to plan our own lives and do what we want for God. Most Christians don’t hear from the Holy Spirit because of bad doctrine that separates them from him, so how do they serve him? In self-righteousness. They do things that look good superficially, but God is not involved, so the results stink like rotten meat.

The world is full of churches and ministries God never wanted to exist. People build orphanges God doesn’t approve of. They go on missionary trips he didn’t sanction. They think God approves because they’re being nice and working hard, but they displease God and spread rot through the church. They make Christianity look bad. They fill our ranks with people who just want to show off.

Doing things God never asked you to do, and then claiming you do them for him, is taking God’s name in vain. It’s a major sin. It’s like putting a three-legged lamb on the altar.

Yesterday, during our first prayer session, Rebecca told me she had dreamed about a nun who ran the Catholic school she attended. She is not Catholic; she just attended the school. If I recall correctly, in the dream she needed money for something, and the nun provided her with a few coins.

To me, it sounded like God was showing her church people walking in the flesh were not able to do much for her.

I think money usually represents faith and power.

After we prayed, I watched Youtube. First, I saw a video by an obscure man I like listening to. He has a tiny audience. He died from a drug overdose, and he was revived. While he was gone, he was in hell. In the video, which is only a few days old, he said he felt he had to talk about something he realized in hell. He said he realized nearly all of what we do is worthless because God is not in it.

After that, I watched a recent Mark Hemans video, and he preached about the same basic thing. He said human beings who are not led by the Spirit do what seems right in their own minds, offending God in the process. For example, he cast spirits out of a woman, and she began sobbing and shaking. A misguided person tried to cheer her up and help her stop, and Hemans put a stop to it. She needed to go through the pain of deliverance. He said the person who interfered was showing human love, but it was actually detrimental. God’s love required the woman to experience deliverance properly.

I didn’t seek out videos about human self-righteousness. They just appeared while I was looking at recommended videos.

From a human perspective, it appears that the right thing is for Rebecca to take the bar exam. Is that how God sees it?

Today and yesterday, Rebecca has been swamped. You would think Resurrection Sunday would be a day of rest in a Christian country, but both days have been filled with scholastic obligations. In Zambia, Resurrection Sunday and the day after are official holidays, so the people who hold classes take advantage of the time to pack extra work in. It’s frustrating, and it’s also a great illustration of the tension between worldliness and devotion to God.

We would like to get together for the first time sooner than June, which is when she expects to have her first period of free time, and we would like to get together permanently sooner than September, which is the month when she finishes her school obligations. The thing is, God isn’t the only one who might want this. Our flesh wants it. We are tired of connecting by phone when we could be sitting in the same room.

Sometimes God and the flesh agree. Sometimes we just think they do.

This is where we are.

I won’t worry. God will show us the right thing to do, and he will keep us on course. It will be wonderful if we can accelerate things.

If anything changes, I will show up here to write about it.

Nuptial Decisions Prove to be Above my Pay Grade

Day 26 of my online courtship has gone well. I made some excellent homemade bread. That’s unrelated to the courtship. It’s just one reason why the day has gone well.

INGREDIENTS

520 g bread flour
1.5 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. bread machine yeast
3 tbsp. sugar
4 tbsp. butter
310 g warm water

Throw the dry stuff in your food processor and blend until mixed. Add the water and blend until you get a coherent ball. After 10 minutes, blend the butter in. Add some salt to melted butter and grease a bread pan. Shape the dough into a loaf. Put the loaf in a pan and butter it. Allow to rise until it looks like a loaf should. Bake at 450 until the internal temperature hits about 195.

I also had a very good time interceding via video chat with my Zambian sweetheart. I have learned that intercession carries an unexpected benefit. You really need to tell people after you intercede, so they can agree with you and look for God’s answer. Because of this, intercession keeps you in touch with people.

We prayed for our relationship, and while I was speaking, I made a misstep. She suggested I pray for our children, and I was kind of stuck. It seems highly presumptuous for me to pray for our children as though they were definitely coming, because it’s like I’m assuming she will say yes if I propose. Also, I think a man is supposed to try to protect a woman from hasty decisions. Or at least he should pretend to.

Anyway, she was not all that happy with the disclaimers I inserted in my prayers, so I had to smooth all that over. She thought I sounded like I didn’t want to marry her or have children when, in fact, I was simply trying not to be an idiot.

Four weeks ago, I was completely prepared to get old and die with my tools and my smoker. Now I find myself plunged into a courtship process I know almost nothing about, so it’s not a huge surprise if there are occasional bumps in the road.

My feeling was that you shouldn’t play around with a woman by talking about marriage as though it were a done deal, prior to handing over the ring or at least proposing. Evidently, I was totally wrong about this, as men often are about nearly everything. Evidently the best course is to talk as though the church were already rented.

I don’t know how this works. It’s all trial and error.

I have written about my friends Diamond and Silk; two young Haitian ladies I got to know back when I was attending Trinity Church. I had a long conversation with Diamond today, and she provided a lot of helpful information concerning decisions she had made. A) I am, in fact, going to marry Rebecca. B) Diamond and Silk will be bridesmaids. C) They will wear pink dresses. D) Diamond’s daughter Carat will be the flower girl, at the age of three.

Thank goodness I don’t have to make any of those tough decisions. I’m not qualified.

I told Diamond to let me know the date of the ceremony so I could arrange to be there. Until then, all I have to do is hand over a grocery bag full of cash.

In case people still think I’m kidding about buying my wife, I will provide a link to Wikipedia’s article on the subject: LINK.

Here’s the annoying thing about the article: there is nothing in it about consumer protection. In the US, under the Uniform Commercial Code, goods sold typically carry an implied warranty of fitness for their purpose. It looks like I’m not getting one of those. What if Rebecca fails to serve her purpose? I don’t even get a partial refund.

I don’t get free repairs, either. She already had to have a cavity fixed. Shouldn’t I be able to bill that to the family?

Seems to me that Africa is behind the times. Here in America, every tool at Harbor Freight can be returned up to 90 days after purchase, but if my wife suffers some kind of mechanical failure, I will be left holding the bag. My understanding is that the price I pay for her will be consumed in riotous living in a matter of days, so even if the family wanted to compensate me, they would have nothing to offer except maybe some celebratory selfies.

I guess I’ll just have to bear the risk. Unless there is a Zambian firm that offers aftermarket wife warranties.

This is where it stands right now. It’s a touching story. Part true love. Part human trafficking.

I can’t wait to get her over here. I want to secure her within our borders before the next wave of coronavirus insanity reduces us all to traveling on foot.

I’ll be back with updates as Diamond provides them.