Table Saw Yields to my Might

The problem with having a lot of tools is that you spend way too much time building, preparing, modifying, and fixing tools.

Today, I fixed the table saw and the buffer.

A long time ago, I bought a Shark Guard for my table saw. This is a neat clear guard with a fitting on top for a vacuum hose. I like it a lot. It came with splitters in several heights, including a tiny splitter maybe half an inch high.

The guard attaches to the splitter. When you use the tiny splitter, there is nothing to attach the guard to. It’s for those times when you can’t use a guard.

I misplaced my small splitter when I moved away from Miami. Of course, I have needed it since then. I thought about ordering another one, but it looked like it would be pretty costly for a tiny scrap of metal, so I put it off. After all, I’m a tool guy! I can make my own stuff!

I can also procrastinate for two years, but that’s another subject.

Today I made myself a new splitter around 3/4″ high. I had steel plate lying around the shop, I had a belt grinder, yada yada yada. I had no excuse to put it off any longer.

I held one of my tall splitters against the steel and traced the outline with a Sharpie. This gave me something to shoot for. I cut the end with the tracing off the plate, using the dry saw.

Once the sawing was over, I took the workpiece to the belt grinder and cranked it up to 120 Hz. The metal was around 1/8″ thick, so it was not a problem for the grinder. I would guess I put in 15 minutes.

I had to cut a long slot in the metal. This is not something you can do with a belt grinder. It can enlarge slots, but it can’t start them, except in human beings.

I got out my crazy 6″ angle grinder and Walter Zip Wheel and cut the slot. You would be surprised how well a big angle grinder can do delicate work. I roughed the slot out, and then I finished it, for the most part, on the belt grinder.

When that was done, I wanted to round out the bottom of the slot so it looked more like a milled feature than something made with an axe. I got out the Dumore hand grinder and a carbide burr. I mounted the splitter in my vise and rounded the slot.

I then wanted to clean and deburr the splitter using my pedestal buffer, but it wouldn’t turn on. It has an overload protector on it to kill the power when the shaft can’t turn, and the protector had pooped out. I could not get anywhere with it. I decided to use an angle grinder and knot wheel, and the results were excellent.

When I was all done, I had a nice splitter. I installed it in the table saw, and I was happy. Except for having no buffer.

I was advised to open the motor protector up and see if there was something I could fix, like a relay with a bent contact. When I got into it, I saw that it was not very repair-friendly.

I didn’t feel like sacrificing the evening to fix it, so I took the hot wires off of the protector and connected them with a wire nut. Now I can use the switch on the buffer instead of the one on the motor protector.

You don’t really have to have a motor protector on a 3/4-HP buffer. I have a grinder which is essentially the same type of machine, and all it has is a toggle switch. Motors at and above a certain power level need motor starters in order to avoid ruining switches, but my buffer does not. I suppose the protector was there to protect the motor from abuse. Maybe it also tames power surges. I don’t know.

The buffer would cost around $1000 to replace with a new one. I suppose the school system that originally bought it felt the protector would be a good way to keep an expensive machine safe from bored kids in shop class.

I might try to get the protector working, or maybe I’ll buy a used one on Ebay some day. Right now, I can live without it. The buffer, on the other hand, is vital to my sanity. I have to have a running buffer. I have only had it a few months, and I can’t live without it.

When I talk about my reasons for owning tools, I like to say I want to buy whatever it takes so that when I walk out into the shop with a job in mind, there is at least a tiny sliver of hope that I will be able to get it done with the tools I have on hand. That sums it up very well. Today, I got what I wanted. I had two jobs to do, and I was able to get them done without too much straining and improvising. Granted, I didn’t really fix the buffer, but I found out what was wrong, and I got it running.

The saw splitter is installed, and it looks really nice. I may grind it a little smaller.

Yesterday, I got my Jonsered chainsaw running again. Socialism, in the form of ethanol, keeps destroying my small engine carbs, and the Jonsered’s original carb was terminally congested. I bought a Chinese carb and replaced it, but the Chinese carb had a defective spring. I got myself a second Chinese carb, installed it, and got the saw going. It still needs a little tuning, but it will work perfectly.

I haven’t received the sonic cleaner I ordered. I plan to throw the Jonsered carb in it. It might revive it, and if it does, then maybe I’ll be able to use it on future ethanol-defiled carbs in the future and avoid buying an endless succession of new ones.

My little Husqvarna blower is acting anemic. It has never suffocated due to ethanol, unlike the other tools, and I have used additives and so on to keep it healthy, but it looks like its day of reckoning is nearly here. I can try the cleaning machine out on it and find out if I wasted my money.

I’ve been contacting machinery riggers to get quotes on moving my big machines here. Once that’s done, life should be nearly perfect.

Until something breaks.

Helping the Environment by Buying Big, Electricity-Sucking Carb Cleaners from China

I have sprung for an ultrasonic parts cleaner.

My Jonsered chainsaw pooped out due to the destructive and hard-to-reverse effects of toxic ethanol-polluted fuel. I spend a few bucks on a Chinese carb for it, but I was never able to get the carb adjusted so the saw would run well enough to use.

It was very frustrating. I downloaded official instructions from the manufacturer. If you have a Jonsered with a Zama carb, you may find them useful. They’re very simple.

1. Open the idle screw all the way (turning clockwise).

2. Start the saw.

3. Adjust the L screw until you get maximum speed.

4. Adjust the H screw until you get smooth operation at all speeds.

5. Adjust the idle screw until the saw stops trying to turn the chain at idle.

It’s best to remove the chain before you do these things. The instructions I downloaded said to adjust the idle with the chain in place. Not very smart. You have to hold onto a saw with one hand and turn a screw with the other, while the chain is zipping around at high speed. I don’t know who wrote the instructions. Probably not the smartest engineer the company has.

The saw has a drum that turns the chain, so you can observe the drum instead of the chain while you adjust the idle. Just make the drum stop turning.

That’s all there is to it, but I could not make it work. I tried over and over. I resisted taking it to a repairman, because they would have kept it a month and charged a hundred bucks or more.

A tree fell over in my yard, and I left it there for weeks because I was stubborn. I didn’t want to cut it with my heavy felling saw. I was determined to get the small Jonsered working. I eventually gave up and used the big saw.

Two days ago, I resolved to get the small saw working. I took the carb out, which is a very unpleasant job on the poorly engineered Husqvarna-made Jonsered. I found that a spring on the throttle was in the wrong place. I bent it back into position, but when I reinstalled the carb, it popped back out.

I was not going to spend half a day fighting to get a Chinese spring to behave. I ordered a new carb. This will bring me up to three Jonsered carbs. I should be able to take them and make one that works.

This is the second time I’ve had a problem with a new Chinese carb, but I still recommend them because they’re so cheap and repairmen are so expensive, slow, and inept. You’re actually better off buying a used saw on Craigslist than going to a shop.

Now that I’ve had this issue, I have decided to grit my teeth and get a cleaning machine so there will be some hope of reviving old carbs in the future.

I resisted getting a machine in the past because they cost over a hundred bucks, and they are known to die. I found out they die mainly because people don’t fill the tanks all the way. The transducers expect to work against fluid, and they do something bad–I don’t know what–when you run them without enough liquid. I’m smart enough to put liquid in a tank. I think I can overcome this problem.

I was also reluctant because I didn’t want to deal with the disgusting liquids people use to fill these things. They use all sorts of petroleum products. I didn’t want to have to empty many liters of black, greasy solvent every time I put the machine away.

I learned you don’t have to put solvent in direct contact with the tank. You can put a small amount of solvent in a plastic jar, along with your part, and the machine will clean it through the jar just fine. You put ordinary water in the tank. It never gets dirty, and you never have to pour a huge amount of nasty solvent into a storage container.

Sonic cleaners come from China these days, like everything except air and water. They’re all the same. I bought the least-expensive brand I could find. I hope I don’t have to use it a lot.

I’m going to clean my original Jonsered carb, just to see if it works. I have a couple of other carbs to toss in there. When ethanol inevitably ruins another carb, I’ll try one of my cleaned carbs before I buy Chinese again.

Sonic cleaners are good for lots of things. You can clean jewelry and ammunition cases. It will be nice to have this capability. If it works.

Here’s a tip from someone who has suffered a lot: if your small engine carb dies, and you don’t want to give up on it, take a look at the metering diaphragm. This is a black rubbery looking thing you will find clamped between two plates on the carb. It’s supposed to flex back and forth. Flex it a few times. If you hear any noise at all, throw it out and replace it. They get hard and stop working. A good diaphragm should be so soft it flexes silently.

The Walbro company, a Japanese concern which makes carburetors, has come out with a weird type of metering diaphragm which lasts longer than fabric. They have little spirals of metal in them. Might be worth looking into, if you have a Walbro carb. Your black old-fashioned diaphragm will definitely die, so you might as well look into replacements early.

It’s hard to believe how difficult it is to keep a chainsaw running from one month to the next. They’re as frail and unreliable as racehorses or inbred European royals, so of course, Congress made things worse by forcing us to use debased fuel which can kill the toughest motor ever made.

They should come with two carbs. In fact, it’s a great idea to buy an extra carb when you buy a small-engine tool such as a chainsaw or pressure washer. Why wait for it to break down, when $20 or much less buys you insurance?

Maybe when cars run on 100% ethanol fuel, we can just buy spare engines for them and put them on pallets in our garages. The small $8000 investment will be a small sacrifice in order to appease Mother Gaia.

How much did the ethanol I burned in my small engines help the environment or extend the life of our oil reserves? How much did it hurt the environment and deplete our reserves to manufacture, sell, and deliver the new carbs I’ve bought? Hmm.

The new carbs didn’t just require burning diesel, coal, and gasoline. They required mining and processing ore. They required casting and metalworking. They were made in a country where carburetor factories are about as green as Chernobyl.

Just a little info I feel like passing along.

The ethanol scam needs to end. The only people who like it are deluded environmentalists and spoiled corn farmers.

I think the ultrasonic cleaner will be very handy. If only it ran on coal.

Gallant Apparently had a Vasectomy

I am completely out of touch with American values.

Months ago, I read that Kim Kardashian charges millions of dollars–“millions,” plural–to make one Instagram post. I think about that a lot.

To me, Kim Kardashian is a lewd, crass, self-destructive, highly toxic person, very like the sort of inexpensive prostitute you might see if you drove through a bad area of your city at 3 a.m. I see her for what she is. She is not very bright. She has no talents. She does nothing productive with her life, except for one typical leftist cause which will probably be destructive in the end. She has nothing interesting to say. If I knew her, I would avoid her, the same way I would avoid a female meth addict who propositioned me in a parking lot. There is nothing good to be gained by interacting with her, and she has an air of dirtiness about her.

Many of our celebrities are like that. If you went to an area where whores and drug dealers congregate, and you gave each one of them ten million dollars and put them on TV, they would fit right in with our current crop of media idols.

Kardashian’s popularity proves that a big percentage of Americans see her completely differently from the way I do. They crave Kardashian news. They want to be like her. They want to wear what she wears. They think her TV show is top-notch entertainment. They truly admire her. How can that be true?

I can’t absorb this. I can’t make my mind assimilate it. It’s like living in a country where people think horse manure makes a good corsage.

Instinctively, I have the incorrect feeling that everyone thinks Kim Kardashian is gross and trashy.

I am writing about her to illustrate my point, which is that my heart and the heart of the general public are completely different.

America is like a country of children without fathers. We reject the beautiful, protective lessons of the past, and we do as we please. We are making ourselves silly and weak.

Yesterday I found some neat videos on Youtube. I don’t know why they popped up. There were made over half a century ago. They were videos that used to be shown in schools.

The purpose of the videos was to help kids get it together and live like advanced human beings instead of savages. One video was about neatness and personal grooming. Another helped girls understand that promiscuity was self-destructive.

I decided to watch the video about neatness. I figured it couldn’t hurt. I had ample reason to feel that way.

I have often told people a story about my youth. My mother took me to a department store at the 163rd Street mall in North Miami Beach, to buy clothes. I would guess that I was about 11. A nice old Jewish lady waited on us. The lady tried to explain something to me. I can’t recall what it was. She decided to use an analogy, which I recall. She said, “When you take a shower, you don’t just stand there. You soap yourself up and clean yourself off.” She may have added more information. I don’t know.

Years later, I realized what she was trying to do. She saw that I was a dirty kid, so she was trying to give me a hint about hygiene. I will probably never remember what we were talking about. Maybe she was saying I should stand up straight while my pants were being measured, instead of slouching passively. She saw that I was in trouble, and she wanted to help without offending my mother, so she came up with something to say.

She could tell (or maybe smell) what I was doing in the shower. I used to get in, stand around, and get out. I didn’t use a washcloth. I was probably in junior high before I started shampooing my own hair. Before that, I didn’t think about it. Every so often, my mother would make he hold still while she did it for me, and the rest of the time, I didn’t concern myself with it. I didn’t realize I was dirtier than other people, and I thought my situation was normal.

Kids don’t automatically know how to bathe. Someone has to tell them.

My parents didn’t teach me much of anything. It’s shocking, when I think about it. They expected me to succeed, and they held me accountable, but they didn’t help. They didn’t show me how to do it. They expected me to figure it out all by myself.

Unbelievably, I learned something from the hygiene video, at my advanced age. The announcer said it was important to wash between your toes. I don’t do that. I haven’t thought about it, to tell you the truth. I just figured all that soapy water running down there would get the job done. I scrub my feet with a soapy cloth, but that’s all. This says something about my upbringing. Even at my age, it continues to affect me negatively.

I watched a few more videos. I thought they were fantastic. I felt sick, thinking how much they would have helped me when I was a kid. I felt cheated.

In truth, I was cheated. We owe kids our help. They can’t make it without it.

I also saw some videos in which people discussed life in the mid-20th century.

I assumed they would say they longed for a time when people had it more together. I fully expected them to say America was a kinder, more orderly, more peaceful place back then. Boy, was I wrong. All they could talk about was the “oppressive” atmosphere and the harsh rules. They truly thought things had gotten better.

Yes, things have gotten better, if “better” means a boy who has decided he’s a girl can go into a girls’ locker room and shower naked with actual females who have no say in the matter. Things are better, if having filthy language on billboards is good. If smoking dope in a park where kids can see you and smell the smoke is good, then things have gotten a lot better.

If self-discipline and honoring your elders are bad things, then life is much better than it used to be. If having babies out of wedlock is good, things are fantastic.

I have a thirst to see myself improved. It looks like most Americans are thirsting for the same things monkeys want.

My parents should have told me things. They should have explained Christianity to me and seen to it that I participated whether I wanted to or not. They should have given me a desk, a chair, and a lamp and said, “This is where you work in the evening. This is when you work. This is how you keep a schedule so you don’t fall behind. On this day every week, we will check and make sure things are going smoothly.”

I was very, very smart, so I was able to do well in school without self-discipline for many years. There were obvious problems, though. I always did long-term projects the nights before they were due, because I couldn’t plan. I started to do badly in math, because you have to study math continuously; you can’t cram.

I can’t tell you how many times I saw the sun come up because I was working on a paper or project that was due that day. If your son is doing this, you are failing him.

My dad used to come home from work, take off his shirt and pants, lie on the couch in the den, and watch TV in his underwear. My mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen and living room. My sister and I lived outside the house and in our bedrooms. That was our family life. My sister and I filled our time however we saw fit, within very loose rules.

When my sister was 14, she started stealing my mother’s car, driving to a bar on 79th Street, and sitting with men. She had a friend who lived a block north of us, and she would go, too. I wonder what the people who made the videos would have thought about that. They probably could not have imagined it happening. One of their videos cautioned girls about parking in cars with boys. It didn’t say anything about sitting in bars with grown men!

The Seventies were different. It was not that hard for a young girl to get a drink at a bar without getting carded. Back then, they sold cigarettes from unattended vending machines, too.

Youth is when you learn good habits. They become like servants to you. They poke and prod you to do the right thing. If you don’t have good habits, you have bad ones, and they prod you to do wrong. If you wait until you’re old to strive for good habits, you will have a much, much harder time, and you will probably fail.

I don’t know why I didn’t become a criminal or a beggar. It’s amazing that I did as well as I did.

My sister eventually became a criminal and a beggar.

It’s remarkable that my teachers were of no help. Even the best of them were useless. My schools could have taught kids responsibility and basic life skills, but they didn’t. Maybe liberal educators got rid of the lifestyle videos because they found them judgmental and old-fashioned. Liberals always work to destroy the character of young people.

My teachers weren’t afraid of teaching values. They can’t use that excuse. No one can say they felt the teaching of good values was the exclusive province of our parents.

They taught us nature was sacred, and that we had to be environmental extremists. They taught feminism and socialism. They told us the horrible, hedonistic self-immolation of the Sixties was very good. They only had scruples when it came to things like belief in God, honoring our elders, sexual purity, good manners, and self-discipline.

They were dupes and tools. I don’t know how else to say it. Most of them weren’t even good at teaching.

Maybe other people don’t hate America’s new ways as much as I do because they were raised better than I was. Maybe they didn’t have the problems I had, so they don’t appreciate the good things they got from self-discipline and solid values.

I feel very foreign when I think about these things. I never feel at home on this planet, but the sensation of being different is much stronger when my nose is rubbed in the distinctions.

One of the purposes of the rapture is to put us in a place where we are in sync with the beings around us. We won’t feel foreign in heaven, or even on earth if we return here to rule after the tribulation. We’ll be normal, and those who are not in our family will be the wallflowers and outsiders. That will be nice, at least for us.

If I could go back and change my childhood, I would want two things. I would want to be raised by people who were led by the Holy Spirit and full of knowledge about God, and I would want them to teach me how to live correctly. If I had those things, any other problems I had would take care of themselves.

One of the wonderful things about God is that he gives us a new beginning. You can’t go back and be eight years old again. You can’t grow up in a proper Christian home, marry your childhood sweetheart, raise a Christian family in your youth, and head into middle age with all that behind you. But you can become the kind of person you would have been had you started life correctly.

Sometimes I think about the disgusting and disgraceful things I’ve done, said, and felt, and I wonder how I would survive the shame if they were exposed. Then a thought comes to me: if, when those things are exposed, I can say I’m not that person any more, and I don’t do, say, or feel those things, then I won’t be so ashamed.

Because of God, I can have that.

I wish I could go live in a secure fortress with other Christians and only come out to get groceries. I really do. I wish I could live in heaven and only come down here during the day to work. America is extremely filthy, and it’s not going to change. We’re just seeing the beginning.

At least I don’t have to be part of it. I’ll be able to say I got off the field before it was too late.

Kids have absolutely no idea what to do with their lives. Your kids are extremely unlikely to figure everything out for themselves. If you don’t get in there and help them, you will surely be held accountable. You probably won’t like the results of your parenting efforts either.

Bells & Whistles v. Skill

Now that I’m an expert welder who can occasionally create a viable stick bead, I am clearly too high and mighty for my portable Harbor Freight welding table.

I probably paid around $50 for the table. It’s the same one other companies sell for…more. I’m not looking it up to see how much they charge. It’s a fairly thick piece of slotted sheet steel on a folding table with plastic feet that come off over and over until you get mad and put Liquid Nails in them.

Are you a beginning welder? Buy the Harbor Freight table. It works. The price is great, too. It’s portable, unlike a real welding table. It’s a great product. You can’t do better on your own for the price. It will be useful even after you get a big table, because you may want the portability. But know that you will want something better eventually.

The table supposedly supports an ungodly amount of weight. The ads say that, anyway. I would not trust it beyond maybe 60 pounds. The slope of the table is adjustable, and the adjustments use clamps that are basically just screws with plastic handles. My table is not level at the moment, even though I set it up in the level position and tightened the clamps, and I have never put anything heavy on it. It has moved, and it would probably move even more if I put a big weight on it.

What I’m saying is that it’s not ideal for heavy work.

The top is also small. It’s only 30″ long. I feel like you really need two feet by 4 feet, or 3 feet square, minimum, to have any kind of versatility.

Is the top flat? No. It can twist. The clamp on one side can be adjusted differently from the one on the other, so the slope will be different at each ends, and that means twist. You can get it flat enough to do most things, but it’s not exactly a reference surface.

It’s a very nice portable table. I mean truly portable. I’m sure there are other “portable” tables out there that weigh 300 pounds. This one, you can pick up with one hand, and it’s collapsible. It’s not a substitute for a real table.

Once you decide to get a real table, you have more horrible decisions in front of you.

You can get a table with no holes in it. A lot of people do this. Lots and lots. Solid tables are good because they’re awfully easy to make. You just put a slab of steel or cast iron on legs.

You can get a table with holes or slats. Holes and slats are good because they allow you to attach bolts and clamps all over the place. This is extremely helpful when you’re making a complex project, which I may never do. They make tables more expensive (or harder to make for yourself), however, and if you have slats, things will fall through them all the time. Some of those things will be globs of molten metal, and this can be a problem.

You can get a really flat table or just accept relatively flat. Flatness costs money. You may have to pay for grinding. If you flatten it yourself, you may have to add a complicated leveling system, or you may have to machine one piece of the top at a time.

My head hurts just from writing this.

Some guy on a forum (I always read forums) says a big industrial company had one huge fab table, and it was solid. He said they ground it with angle grinders once in a while to maintain the surface. That makes it sound like a solid table is okay, but he didn’t say anything about the aggravation they endured, trying to fasten things down for welding.

I am thinking I may make my own table. It seems to me that a man with a milling machine ought to be able to take 6 slabs of steel, mill them flat, drill a few holes, and attach them to a frame. I don’t see what the problem is.

Why do you need a flat table? To make things line up correctly. I welded an arbor press stand on my garage floor, and I wish I hadn’t. The floor was so crooked (ignoring the quality of my welding) that the stand came out higher on one side than the other. You need to line things up precisely when you weld, and it’s best to clamp them to discourage warping.

Here’s the obvious question: how do you make a table, which is your principle tool for keeping work flat and square, without a table?

There are some tools for that, and they are endorsed by some other guy on a forum, so they must work.

A company called Fireball Tool (I think it’s just one guy who printed up T-shirts) makes heavy welding squares from cast iron and cast aluminum. You clamp your stuff to them, and they hold it straight. They have little tabs on them, projecting out from the square surfaces, and you can rest your work on them so the work is square and also in a plane.

If you don’t have a flat table, you can use these squares to hold the parts of your table frame while you weld them together. This will give you a square, straight frame to put your table on.

I looked around, trying to find something cheaper, and the alternatives were not good. The worst one was a jig made from scrap…on a table which wasn’t flat. It would make things square, but not flat.

A lot of the competing products I looked at were in the same expense ballpark as the Fireball squares, so I quit surfing and ordered two. I chose aluminum, not cast iron. A lot of guys are in love with cast iron. That’s because they’ve never paid good money for a cast iron item and then dropped it on a concrete floor. I’m not spending over 100 bucks on a square just so I can destroy it the day I get it.

Both aluminum and cast iron shed welding spatter well, but aluminum can’t shatter. If I drop an aluminum square and bend part of it, I can machine the problem out. I may even be able to replace missing metal with weld. If I break cast iron, school’s out. Time to buy another one or just live with one that is no longer quite right.

Aluminum also weighs a lot less.

Will I use the squares to make a table? I do not know. I can get a nice manufactured table for around a grand, and I’ll have a warranty and much less work to do. It’s a lot of money, but it would be the headache-free path, and it would probably be the last table I would ever want. If I make my own table, it will be a lot more work, and it won’t be quite as versatile, but I’ll save a ton of cash.

Internet BS a Formidable Hindrance to DIY Electricians

I didn’t have much time to work on the workshop today, but I got some good things done.

I want to get my remaining machinery moved in, so I need to have 250V outlets in various locations. When I moved here, there wasn’t a one. I slapped a couple together, along with a new subpanel, right before Hurricane Dorian passed by, and since then I have replaced that subpanel with a better one and added a number of outlets.

Today I put 50-amp and 20-amp outlets up, just below the subpanel. These replace two outlets that were attached to the old subpanel. They will give me more flexibility in tool placement.

I now have one 50-amp outlet by the west garage door and one about halfway down the north wall. I expect to move my welding operations all the way down the wall, so I don’t think I’ll have much use for the new 50-amp outlet once all the wiring is done, but I will need it until I get the ones farther down installed, and I may drill through the wall and connect it to a new outdoor outlet, to connect to a generator. Besides, it never hurts to have another outlet.

I’ve decided what do to about the south wall of the shop. I’m going to run 6/2 Romex across the trusses and down the wall to a junction box. From that box, I will make one run to my table saw, which will get 50 amps, and another run to the general vicinity of the band saw, which gets 20 amps. If I need more 20-amp outlets, I can connect them to the band saw’s outlet. That type of outlet permits you to connect several in parallel.

The last circuit will be 50 amps to the southwest corner, for a compressor. I could get by with 20 right now, but I may want a bigger compressor later, with a 7.5-HP motor. I don’t think a 7.5-HP compressor really needs 50 amps, but it’s usually a good idea to run big wire when you have the choice. I can always add new outlets to the same circuit if I want.

I may run heavy wire to a 20-amp receptacle for the compressor and connect it to a 20-amp breaker instead of using a 50-amp breaker. The compressor already has a 20-amp plug on it. If I move to a bigger compressor later, I can just change the breaker and receptacle.

It’s funny, but people say two things which are very inconsistent. They say you should always go with a big circuit breaker and heavy wire, and they also say you shouldn’t plug a machine into a socket that supplies way more current than it needs. Obviously, you can’t have it both ways.

People like to say that if you put, say, a 20-amp machine on a 50-amp circuit, you risk having a fire downstream if there is a short in the cord or machine, so you should use a smaller breaker. Well, then…if that’s true, why would you have a practice of using large breakers to play it safe? It makes no sense. A large breaker will permit more current to flow. If the breaker is supposed to protect the machine and cord as well as the wiring, you want the smallest breaker that will run the machine.

The purpose of circuit breakers is to protect wiring, not electrical devices. If you’re worried about your machine burning up, you should put a breaker on the machine. This is why many products come with breakers and fuses built in.

There is nothing safe about a big breaker. The bigger a breaker is, the less safe it is.

The purpose of heavy wiring is to reduce heat due to resistance caused by high current draw. The purpose of a breaker is to limit current draw and, therefore, heat in the wiring. The machine is on its own. Our houses are full of stuff that can fry at 125V on 20 amps or even 15, yet we don’t run around unplugging everything at night. If I had to think about a machine’s size every time I moved it down the wall to a different outlet, I’d be redoing circuits all the time. No one does that. Maybe OSHA or the electrical code people require it in commercial shops. I don’t know. But it’s impractical in a home workshop.

Sometimes I think I should never ask anyone for advice on the Internet. They come up with a lot of bad ideas.

You have to have a big enough breaker to supply your machines, with wire so heavy it won’t overheat at the breaker’s operating limit. You don’t need giant breakers and wires like garden hoses for all your 250V outlets.

Here is how I see it: big wires are never a bad idea, unless they’re too thick to install. Big breakers can be a problem if the wire isn’t matched to them. If you’re worried your machines will burn up, you should have some kind of protection built into each one instead of relying on your building wiring to do a job it was never designed to do.

I think this is right, and I plan to govern myself accordingly until someone gives me a good reason to change my mind.

I think the best protection I can have is to shut off the juice to the machinery circuits when I leave the shop. I don’t think I’ll do it, though. I don’t really see my band saw, for example, bursting into flame at 2 a.m. for no reason.

Tonight I bought 125 feet of 60/2 Romex. I’m sure 8/2 would have been fine, and I wasn’t planning on using more than 65-70 feet right away, but I decided to err on the side of safety, and 125 feet of prepackaged wire was about the same price as 70 feet of cut-to-order. I feel like I got 60 or so feet for nearly nothing. I was only planning to do the run in the table saw area this week, but now I have enough wire to do the compressor run as well.

Maybe I’ll hang the Romex tomorrow. That will tell me how much conduit to get. I don’t look forward to using the ladder, which is heavy, but it will be nice not having to run much conduit. Going over the trusses with bare Romex will be a lot less aggravation.

This is where things stand tonight. I think I deserve a couple of hours of Youtube.

I Hate the Term “Easter Egg,” but…

I haven’t written all that much about the challenges I face over the last 10 days or so, but it has been a stressful time. As of today, everything has been resolved completely in my favor. While I was prophesying to myself, God said this would happen, so I got two blessings, not one. The blessing of seeing that prophesy was true is much greater than the nice things God said would happen. Pleasant events are great, but the knowledge that God tells you things is priceless. Isn’t it something we all wish we had?

God gives me little indications that the things I say are from him. For example, he said he would lift me up on his love to accomplish good works.

That sounds like meaningless flowery language to the cynical ear of the flesh, but God chooses his words with precision. They always have meaning.

Twice, I have had dreams about flying on love as though it were a wind. I was not thinking about that when I prophesied, but God reminded me afterward.

Maybe 6 years ago, I had a dream in which a warm, invisible force carried me through the air, down a sidewalk, between trees that were very dense with healthy leaves. More recently, I dreamed a headwind lifted me up and carried me into the leaves of a tree. The wind came toward me from the front, but it propelled me forward.

After I had those dreams, I interpreted them, and I believed leaves represented good works. Both times, God lifted me on love to good works.

We tend to think of Christianity as a lifetime of obeying commands because of guilt or a feeling of obligation. That’s a very low form of Christianity. In reality, love is supposed to be our motivation.

The Bible says love, not obligation, is what led God to permit the crucifixion. It would be very hard to submit to torture and execution because of duty, but God did it because the alternative was to see much worse things happen to children he loved. Nearly anyone will jump in front of a car for his own child.

Love is what motivates you to do things that please God. He worked this into the words he gave me, and I saw it later.

Satan (or “Stan,” as I sometimes type his name by mistake) has done a great job of blocking love in us. He sends us bullies and tormentors. He sends lovers that pretend to want us and then discard us. He gives us entertainment in which violence in the service of vengeance is satisfying to the point of being delicious. He exalts aggression and verbal cruelty. He makes us afraid to love, and he encourages us to hate.

It’s a strong strategy. Love is one of the roots of the kingdom of heaven. Isolate people from it, and you prevent them from knowing and pleasing God.

Satan also uses fear to cut off our love. It’s hard to love when you’re afraid, and the Bible says completed love casts out fear.

The Bible says Satan is a ROARING lion, not just a lion. He roams the streets seeking people he MAY devour. The Bible doesn’t say he can have whoever he wants. He roars to put us in fear, and fear cuts off love and faith and drives us to do things that land us in snares.

Love is a big deal. It’s not just a pleasant feeling. It’s protection.

Love is also the glue that binds the members of the kingdom together. Duty can’t do that. God gives his children favor and help because of love, and we help each other and serve him because of love.

Our culture is full of popular spectacles and pursuits that work against love.

I quit watching superhero movies. The writers depict violence and cruelty as satisfying. I also quit watching revenge porn. The John Wick films are good examples. Someone kicks John’s puppy to death, so John mutilates and kills dozens of people, and the writers make you feel great about every incident. That’s not healthy, even as a fantasy.

Superhero movies are also unhealthy because they create false messiahs who do the kinds of things the disciples originally wanted Jesus to do. They wanted him to come and annihilate their enemies and start an earthly kingdom. They wanted to see the Romans humiliated. Jesus won’t be doing things like that until he returns, but Robert Downey and Ryan Reynolds pretend to do them right now, like little kids tying towels to their necks and jumping off their garage roofs.

The desires the disciples had for revenge and supremacy were carnal, and so are the longings you feed when you watch actors pretend to cut people up, burn them, and so on.

Superheroes are proud. No one helps them do what they do. They don’t pray. They don’t bless and curse. They’re better than other people, and they get all the glory for what they do. They sound a lot like fallen angels and the nephilim. I believe this is where their inspiration came from.

It’s great to hear from God. I plan to do it as much as I can. As long as it keeps working, I will pursue it. Anyone can make a mistake, but prophesy keeps paying off and conforming to scripture, so I have no reason to stop at this time.

Big White Box Installed on Wall

Today I hung my phase converter on the workshop wall. This is one of the last major steps on the way to getting my machinery moved here.

My lathe has a 7.5-HP 3-phase motor, so it has to have a phase converter or variable frequency drive (VFD). A VFD that will run a motor that big is very expensive, and I don’t trust VFD’s all that much. I’m willing to spend $250 on one, with the knowledge that it may go nuts in a few years, but a VFD for a 7.5-HP motor costs a lot more than that. It’s not something I want to replace.

How do I know the phase converter won’t go nuts? I really don’t, but it’s from a well-known company, and I have not heard anything about phase converters flipping out and dying.

The phase converter probably weighs 50 pounds. Could be more. I had to lift it and slip two eyes on the back over two screws about 6 feet off the ground. It’s surprising how hard it is to do that with 50 pounds.

I must correct myself. I looked it up. It weighs 75 pounds. No wonder lifting it was no fun. I took the door off, so that killed a few pounds.

Now I feel better about my physical condition. I try not to lift anything that could hurt me, and this thing, while not pleasant to lift, didn’t seem to reach that threshold.

The phase converter mission was delayed because I needed to figure out where I was putting my machines. It’s difficult organizing a shop, especially when you don’t want to spend $150 on wire for each new outlet you install. Copper got really expensive when China rose out of poverty. They did a lot of building, and buildings need wire. If I were to redo the run to my workshop in really heavy wire for 200-amp service, the wire–four pieces–would cost over $1300, and that’s from a discount place. I checked out of curiosity.

There are a lot of ways to organize a shop. You can lie down and try to picture things where you want to put them. That’s not very reliable. Grizzly.com has a neat tool that allows you to create a virtual shop and put little machine icons in it. It’s clunky to use, however, and you find yourself trying to make up shapes because Grizzly’s available shapes don’t cut it. You might find yourself making a 3′ by 2′ box and calling it a welder.

The little shapes are not labeled, so that’s another knock on Grizzly’s software. The shapes don’t look all that much like tools.

I read that the Navy uses little paper cutouts to arrange carrier decks. The explanation was that it was faster and easier than using CAD. I decided to try it. I moved little cutouts around on graph paper, and it seemed to work. When I came up with arrangements I liked, I took pictures. I’m pretty advanced.

I want to put two more 20-amp outlets on the wall where the phase converter is hanging, along with two 50-amp circuits. I want to put two 20-amp outlets and one 50-amp circuit on the opposite wall. I want to run a 40-amp circuit to the area where the air compressor will be. After that, I should be all set.

It appears I can get away with using Romex. People told me you couldn’t put it in conduit, and I’ll need conduit to install wires on my concrete walls, but they were wrong. Short runs of indoor conduit are fine for Romex. I plan to run conduit up to the trusses and then send Romex over them. This will allow me to do a lot less conduit work.

The preexisting wiring was done this way, so I should have known it was kosher.

I figure it will be one more week before the outlets are in, and maybe I’ll be able to put my machines in early next month. Maybe sooner. I don’t really need to wait for the wiring.

I’m very eager to get the mill, lathe, and compressor back. You really have to have these tools if you want to get anything done.

Don’t Drown in it; Make it the Pavement You Walk On

I feel like writing something else about God.

The Bible compares the world to a sea, and it compares voices (words) to waters. The Bible uses fish and the Sea of Galilee to symbolize human beings and the world. The Bible says God has a voice like many waters. The Bible says the words of the Holy Spirit that come up inside us are “living water.”

One of the things I don’t like about the world is that we are born submerged in filthy water. We are generally surrounded by voices that push us to destruction. Fallen angels and demons tempt us and lie to us, and so do people. So does our own flesh. We are besieged around the clock, by innumerable voices. Unfortunately, we don’t necessarily hear from God as much. Generally, we don’t. I was an adult before I heard from God, but I heard from the rest all the time, dating back at least to my birth. I probably heard spirits before that.

We need something to tilt the scales in our favor. We aren’t strong enough to fight continuously with our own words, which lack power anyway.

We’re like accused dissidents or terrorists being interrogated and abused by a series of inquisitors. When we capture terrorists, we don’t send a man in to talk and let him work until he’s worn out. We send one man in, and when he starts to fade, we send another in. We don’t let the terrorist sleep. Everyone is fresh and rested except for the terrorist, who becomes exhausted and gives up because he’s alone. We are not supposed to fight alone. We are part of a team, and the strongest member, who never sleeps, is God.

The word says faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. It makes sense, then, that bad things also come by hearing, and that they come by the word of other spirits, other people, and the flesh.

There is always symmetry in the supernatural.

Prayer in tongues is the word of God. When you pray in tongues, your mind may not understand while you pray, but gradually, things penetrate, and you start understanding things you haven’t learned with your natural mind. This is why prayer in tongues builds faith and brings revelation.

God also speaks through prophecy, the word of knowledge, the word of wisdom, and discernment of spirits. God has told us to covet prophecy. He wants us to have it. Failing to pursue it and expect it is disobedience. It’s available, and you should have it.

For a while, I’ve been praying for God to talk me constantly, to overcome the other voices. “Coincidentally,” I saw a Derek Prince video this year in which he showed people how to prophesy. I started doing it. I can’t tell you who will win the Kentucky Derby next year, because that’s now how prophesy works, but God tells me about the future all the time, and he tells me who I am in Christ.

It’s really good. It’s more direct than prayer in tongues. I can understand it as I hear it.

Satan, who is creation’s premiere loser and worst coach, tells me I’m just a random person. He says God has discarded me because of my evil nature and sins. He says God won’t do anything for me because I don’t deserve it. He says I’m crazy to follow God instead of common sense, and that it will blow up on me soon. He says I imagine everything I believe about God. He never says that about the things I used to believe about his own power! He never says my enemies are weak.

God says I am literally his son. He says I am a royal. He says I have great authority. He says I am exactly the kind of person he wants to do things for. He says I don’t need to deserve, because Jesus deserved, and I inherited what Jesus had. He says things are going to get better and better.

When I started doing this, I did it in fits and starts because I was afraid I would say stupid things. When I said something that sounded good, I wanted to quit, because I didn’t want to go on and say something insane which would prove the first thing I said was not from God.

I quit worrying about that. I started prophesying more and more. I haven’t had any letdowns yet. On rare occasions I’ve felt that I was going off course, so I stopped and started over, and things went fine.

When Peter tried to walk to Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, he sank whenever he considered the water and not Jesus. He rose when he focused on the Lord. That’s how life works.

We are stuck in this world for a while, and we have to make certain concessions. We have to eat, sleep, and bathe. We have to have money and things. We have to put up with all sorts of hostile beings. We are pulled away from God a lot. We are his feet, and the filth of this world that gets on us because of our connection to it is like the dust the disciples were told to shake off their shoes.

Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. He was showing how the Holy Spirit would counteract the “dust” our association with the world would cause to adhere to us. The flow of the Holy Spirit washes it off. If the Holy Spirit isn’t speaking in you, you’re like a person who has no access to a shower. You need help.

I am spending a great deal of time letting the Holy Spirit speak through me. I don’t know how I would get by without it now. Satan tells me ridiculous things about the future, and the Holy Spirit refutes all of it and gives me peace.

Satan will never quit, so I can’t quit. He has a real problem now that I have God’s weight on the scales with me. In the past, he and his kids could bully me and torment me, and I had no power to fight back. Now he’s the quadriplegic and I’m the heavyweight champion.

Christians need to know these things. The defeat most of us live in was never intended for us.

What Unimportant Thing can we Fight About Today?

Are we supposed to be baptized in the name of Jesus only, or in the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

I thought I knew the answer, but then I thought I didn’t. Now I know I know.

Traditionally, churches have baptized in the name of the Trinity. There is scriptural support for this. In Matthew 28, Jesus commanded the disciples to baptize in all three names.

Question answered, right?

No.

Throughout the New Testament, scripture says people were baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, without mentioning the Father and Holy Spirit. It doesn’t say the Father and Holy Spirit were not named, but it doesn’t say they were.

We pray in Jesus’ name, not the name of the Father or Holy Spirit. We cast out demons in his name. We say we are the body of Christ, not the body of Yahweh. We say we are “in Christ.” This is strong support for baptizing in the name of Jesus Christ. It seems like pretty good authority.

It seems very clear that we should baptize in the name of Jesus Christ. It’s less clear that we should not mention the Father or Holy Spirit.

The question is interesting to me, because I was baptized by the Last Reformation, and they teach that you should be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, not the Trinity. I assumed they knew what they were doing, but then I read Matthew 28. I decided they were wrong. Now I think they’re right.

In addition to the numerous citations in the New Testament, they rely on Eusebius, an early Christian, to support their view. Eusebius is presumed to have seen very authentic versions of the gospels, and he has said that Jesus commanded his followers to make disciples in his name. Baptism is not mentioned. There is also a Hebrew translation of Matthew that omits the reference to the Trinity.

Problem: Eusebius quoted the version with the Trinitarian reference in at least one other work, so he clearly approved of it, unless his work was altered.

Problem: the Hebrew translation anti-Trinitarians rely on can’t be dated to anything close to the first centuries A.D.

TLR isn’t the only organization quibbling with the conventional text. The Black Hebrew Israelites and the Muslims object to it.

What’s the answer?

First of all, it’s a big mistake to fight over things like this. Obviously, God is not going to invalidate your baptism for mentioning the Father and Holy Spirit, and since Jesus Christ is one with them, and since we do all other things in his name, it certainly should be sufficient to name him only.

Poring over old books is a major error when it comes to interpreting the will of God. You may have to give them a certain amount of consideration, but if we believe the Holy Spirit speaks to us today and tells us things like where to live and which pair of socks to buy, surely we should expect him to resolve theological questions for us.

When you get too attached to books and opinions, it shows you’re getting distant from the Holy Spirit. God does not have opinions. He does not think argument is “healthy” or useful. God has the truth, and he delivers it to everyone with no inconsistencies.

Worshiping the opinions of men has destroyed the power of God’s people over and over. The Talmud damaged the Jews tremendously, and so has Catholic gossip and pantheism masquerading as revelation.

If study were the answer, Judaism and the church would never have fallen apart, right? There have been a tremendous number of able scholars, and they generally get essential things completely wrong.

Here’s something God just showed me. When we say someone has been baptized “in the name of Jesus Christ,” we’re not describing the type of baptism or what has happened to the person. We are describing the motivation and authority of the person PERFORMING the baptism.

If you heal in Jesus’ name, it means you are doing it with his authority. It doesn’t mean Jesus is doing it, or that only Jesus is God, or anything else. We have no problem accepting the idea that the Holy Spirit and angels heal when we lay hands on people. We don’t require Jesus to show up in person. We’re just using his authority, and the means is up to the Father.

If you pray in Jesus’ name, it doesn’t mean you pray to Jesus or that you pray only to Jesus. Jesus told us to approach the Father in prayer.

It follows, then, that when you say, “in the name of Jesus Christ” when you baptize, you’re just showing that you have his authority to baptize. You’re not relying on your authority, or the authority of angels, or the authority of the federal government, or the authority of the Rotary Club. You’re using inherited authority that was the property of Jesus Christ while he was on earth and now belongs to you.

The threshold question God would ask is, “Who authorized you to do this?” The answer is, “You did. You authorized Jesus Christ, and I inherited his authority.” This endorsement makes the transaction go through.

These things are clearly true, so it must be that when we baptize, we do it in the name of Jesus, just as we pray in his name and cast out spirits in his name. The cooperation of the Father and Holy Spirit are guaranteed because they are united in purpose with Jesus, so you don’t need to mention them expressly. They respect and honor his name.

“Jesus Christ” is shorthand for “Yehoshuah the Messiah,” and “messiah” means “anointed one.” “Anointed” means “given authority.” We have inherited his anointing, so we use his authority. Baptize in his name, and you baptize as though you were Jesus himself. You’re of the body, and you can join others to the body.

It’s not like “being baptized WITH the Holy Spirit,” which means having the Holy Spirit surround you and live inside you. When you’re baptized with the Holy Spirit, you’re not receiving his authority. You’re being baptized WITH or IN him. You become immersed in him and filled with him, as though he were water. You’re giving him authority in you. Not the same thing as being baptized (with water) into the royal family in the name of Jesus.

I hope TLR supporters and other Spirit-led Christians won’t get into a big stink over this issue. It’s a colossal pit we don’t need to fall into.

I’m very confident in the answer I have received.

Yes, he Does Have a Right to It

The further along in Christianity I get, the more I realize Christians are in a special class of privileged people.

When I was a kid, I thought I had to suffer in church for an hour a week to get to heaven. That was about all I knew. Later on, I learned about faith. I didn’t know I was supposed to give myself completely to Jesus, however, and I didn’t know God would work miracles for me as a matter of routine. Eventually, I realized God would do a lot of things for me. It took me a while to understand that it was important to get his help doing what he wanted, not in fulfilling tawdry desires.

At some point, God showed me that I had to be sanctified. I couldn’t do what everyone else did. I had to repent. I had to get cleansed of demons and iniquities. I realized that there was a connection between the things I did and the way my life went. I started getting cleaned up, and it certainly helped, but when I stumbled, I overestimated how much it hurt my relationship with God. I felt that it set me back much more than it actually did.

I started noticing that God’s presence, and the sense that I was approved, were very strong right after I sinned and repented. I felt like I should be in the doghouse for a while, but there he was, unmistakably. It was hard to accept. It was as if he had forgotten all about what I had done.

I punished myself, but he was moving ahead as if nothing had happened.

I should have realized he wanted to move on. When I have a problem with a person, and that person repents and apologizes, I don’t want to hear about it any more. I just want to resume the relationship. If I’m that good, then surely God has to be better.

My dad and my sister were very different. You could tell my dad you were sorry 50 times, and he would continue yelling as if you had told him to kiss your rear end. He changed toward the end of his life, when God reached him. My sister is still angry at me for things I did when I was in elementary school.

I’m finally starting to understand that it’s about who I am, not what I do, say, or think. As long as I don’t deny God and quit, he lets offenses go pretty much instantly. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t punish me.

I watch teachers who talk about sonship. They keep saying we’re sons and daughters of God. We’re not just servants. I know these things, but lately they’ve been penetrating deeper.

Back in April, God gave me a sentence: “Thank you for making me nobility.”

That sounds proud, doesn’t it? But it also sounded proud when Jesus told old priests and rabbis he was the son of God.

Nobles are generally heirs. Real nobles, I mean. I don’t mean rock stars who get phony knighthoods from the queen of England. In the old days, a person who did something for a monarch would be made a noble, and after that, his descendants would be nobles by inheritance, no matter how stupid or obnoxious they were. Those people went on to rule over individuals who, in many cases, were much smarter and more capable than they were. It was not a meritocracy.

God was telling me I was in line to receive all sorts of good things as a birthright, whether I deserved them or not. I was born a second time, into his family. After that, I was an heir, and I was destined to receive things I had not earned.

The other side of the coin is obligation. A noble is supposed to keep high standards and take care of the people he lives among.

God wasn’t telling me I got to brag and push other people around. He was just telling me I would be more blessed than other people, and that I should maintain higher standards than others.

The other day, I was thinking about this, and I used Google to read about employees who had problems with their boss’s children. It was fascinating. All over the web, there are people fuming because their bosses put up with bad workplace behavior from their kids. They actually go to forums and ask other people what can be done about it. The answer, almost always, is “nothing.”

Of course you can’t do anything about it. The boss built his business so he could make his kids rich. The business isn’t yours. You just work there. You’re actually an instrument the boss uses to give his kids things you seem to deserve more than they do.

If you hate the boss’s son for getting better treatment than you do, you’re as wrong as you can be. You’re working in the boss’s son’s business. It already belongs to him, even if he doesn’t own it legally yet. You need to learn your place.

Jesus was the ultimate boss’s son. People think he knew everything God knew and had all of God’s power as soon as he was born, but that’s not true. He was a man who had to live by faith. Jesus the man didn’t earn God’s power while he was in human form, and he wasn’t born with it. It just dropped on him. God helped him all the time. He couldn’t fail. God didn’t let him.

The book of Job says the sons of God were gathered, and Satan was among them. It doesn’t say he was a son of God, however. Just that he was “also” there. He’s not a son of God. He belongs to a lower class of being. He’s an angel. I’m sure God loves angels, but they’re employees, not sons. God created the world for Jesus and his other children to rule. There was no path to that promotion for any angel, no matter how beautiful, wise, hard-working, or faithful.

The Bible says Christians will judge the angels. That means we are above them. Psalm 82 says we are “elohim.” That means we are gods.

In the Bible, “family” and “nation” mean nearly the same thing, and men are like nations because they can give rise to families. When Abel was killed, God said Abel’s “bloods,” plural, cried out to him from the earth. Some believe this means that in God’s eyes, Cain had killed a nation in Abel.

Abraham paid a tithe to Melchizedek. Hebrews says Levi, a descendant of Abraham, tithed through Abraham, because he was a seed in Abraham’s loins when the tithe was paid. You can see how strongly God views the connection between ancestor and descendant.

We are literally God’s children, and that’s why we get away with so much. It’s why we are spared so many things that happen to other people. The big calamities of the world are for them, not us. No wonder the world hates us.

I have come to understand two things: I have to agree that the good things that happen to me in spite of myself are completely appropriate and good, and I have to agree that the bad things that happen to people who reject Jesus are also completely appropriate and good. I will certainly feel compassion for the cursed, but I can’t criticize God for what befalls them. He is right to let it happen and even to make it happen. He sees everything, and only he knows what’s right. If he were to explain it, we would all agree.

God’s favoritism makes perfect sense. If you build a fortune for your son, you will bend over backwards to see that he gets it. You will be more patient with him than anyone else. You will forgive more. You will give him bigger rewards for the same work. It’s not evil. It’s the way things are supposed to be. We are supposed to look after our offspring and give them preference.

If you were living in the Warsaw Ghetto, and you knew the Germans were coming to liquidate it, would you build a hiding place, drag your neighbor’s children into it with you, and let your kids die? Of course not. You’d take your own children.

Consider the passover. Every Jew who put blood on his house was spared, along with his entire family. Every firstborn Egyptian died. The mean ones died. The nice ones died. The babies died. It was right. God was looking after Abraham’s seed, who were privileged because of who they were.

When God flooded the world, Noah was spared because he pleased God, but his family was spared simply because they were Noah’s seed. His wife wasn’t his seed, but she was his flesh. It didn’t matter whether his sons were upright people. They were privileged because of their name.

God drowned old people and babies. It was right. He knew what he was doing.

I can’t say why God chooses his children. There are some very, very nice non-Christians out there. The natural thing is to assume God would spare people like that. But that’s wrong. They die and burn forever, and it’s right. When we know all the facts, we’ll understand this.

People always ask why God saves Christians and sends “good people” to hell. There are no good people. No one wants to admit that, but it’s true. God treats Christians as though they were good because they’re his children. He shed his blood giving birth to them so he could preserve them and keep them. Heaven is his house, and he built it for his family, not strangers.

The world is full of envy. The children of failure are building up a white-hot rage toward anyone who seems privileged. White people, Americans, Jews, males, heterosexuals, conservatives, people who are financially comfortable, anyone wearing a red hat…we’re all treated like criminals now.

Satan’s children beat drums in the street and sing and chant about taking what we have (so they can waste it and lose it). They don’t realize two important things: they can’t be blessed, and God’s children can’t be cursed. Take what we have and kill us, and we will live again with better things than you can dream of. Meanwhile, what you took will make you suffer, and you will lose it.

To a child of God, all suffering and loss is short-term, and the same is true of the victories of the children of darkness. Victory can’t stick to them. They repel it.

This stuff is very interesting to me. Churches should teach it, but Satan runs the church, so you have to hear it from the Holy Spirit or catch someone talking about it on Youtube.

Jesus said the end would come when the gospel of the kingdom had been preached everywhere. Kingdoms are transferred through inheritance. They go from fathers to children, not to strangers. The real power of Christianity comes to people who understand that they are sons of God. Obeying rules, doing nice things, and giving preachers money won’t get you anywhere.

I’m not saying it’s not important to do good. I’m saying it’s not what gets you into the family. Doing bad things won’t get you into hell, either. Not if you’re a son.

The only way to make it is to join the family.

The story of creation is the story of a war between races that are also families. One race is the family of God, and the other is the family of Satan. That’s what’s going on. It’s why Cain killed Abel. It’s why there was a flood. It’s why Hitler killed something like half of the Jews. It’s why Haman tried to kill them. It’s why Pharaoh killed Jewish babies. It’s why Herod killed the children in Bethlehem.

It’s why Muslims kill Christians all over the world, and it’s why people who hate us will be killing us in America, with no repercussions, before long.

You can find more proof in the Bible. The destruction of Sodom, the massacres under Joshua…go look.

I never give anything to charities that aren’t related to Christianity in some way. Why should I? God isn’t behind that stuff. It’s just Satan’s children doing PR, to make the world think righteousness is unrelated to God. I don’t mean they don’t want to do good. They’re just deluded.

I don’t support scouting. I walk right by the cookies. I don’t care how cute the kids are. The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts thumbed their noses at God. I’m not going to support that. Let their organizations rot. Life will go on without them.

I am privileged. I am supposed to be privileged. It’s God’s plan. He gives his children help and power, and I do not have the authority or the desire to go against his plan.

God really will do things for you, and he’ll tell you things. He will bless you silly. You just have to join the family and let him to it his way.

I believe things are going to get very bad in America, and I expect to be subjected to very little of it. I hope God helps people draw close to him and learn who they are. I hope he keeps helping me to accept my identity instead of struggling to help myself.

Widely Publicized yet Little Known

I learned something interesting this morning during prayer. I finally got a good definition for the Greek word “agape,” and, like all revelation from God, it was simple and obvious even though it took me a long time to get it.

Agape is tossed around a lot by Christians, and my feeling is that they use it to manipulate and discourage believers. They say it’s an incredible form of love human beings can’t really understand. If you have it, you will do absolutely anything for others. You will give away everything you have. You will kiss people’s feet while they beat you. You will do whatever other people tell you to do and give them anything they ask for. It sounds more like spinelessness and neediness than love, to tell you the truth.

If you buy into the weird teachings about agape, you’ll naturally feel that you could never have it. You’ll probably want nothing to do with it. It sounds like a person with agape would have a horrible life.

Catholics, in particular, make Christianity sound terrible. They have a strange obsession with “saints” who were tortured to death or who mutilated themselves or voluntarily lived in misery and poverty. St. Lucy, for example, supposedly cut her own eyes out to discourage a persistent suitor. St. Lawrence was supposedly roasted on a grill. You can go Google the others.

It’s not helpful to exaggerate the suffering of Christians. Kids hear that kind of thing, and of course, it turns them off. Life is hard enough without making up fables about torture and so on.

Many clergymen are more interested in telling people they’re too dirty and weak to succeed than in telling them how to become God’s successful, powerful children. It’s a bizarre quirk of human nature. We should be building each other, but instead, we tell others Christianity is a demanding, painful ordeal they clearly can’t endure.

Agape doesn’t mean you give up all your dignity and basically become a human spittoon. God loves his children, and although he permits persecution, we are supposed to live in victory and abundance. Mindless submission to cruel, wicked people who will never come around and repent is not agape. It’s probably a manifestation of an unhealthy guilt complex. It can also be pride. “Look how I suffer for God. God is impressed with me because I’m better than you but I let you abuse me.” I’ll bet everyone reading this is familiar with that act.

Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden was light, and I have no problem with that. I have no problem with being pampered and sheltered. Bring it on. I can’t get enough of it. This world is awful. I want all the help I can get, and I prefer not to earn it. Earning is for the wicked, as in, “The wages of sin is death.” I’m an heir. I inherit.

Here is the definition of agape: affection.

That’s it. That’s what it means. It means a warm, tender, compassionate feeling for another being. It’s something you’re capable of having, especially with the Holy Spirit’s help. It’s not beyond you. God doesn’t ask us to do things and then make them impossible.

Inheritance is all about helping you do things you could not do on your own.

Just about everyone feels affection. The Christian version is different because it’s supernaturally imparted, and it is less dependent on the way the object behaves. You can feel it for truly nasty creatures who do great evil.

That makes sense. God feels affection for us, and even the best of us are pretty bad.

I keep watching videos of healers on Youtube, and while I love what they do, I am aware that something very big is missing: affection.

I don’t mean that they have no affection. Clearly, they do. But it’s not like God’s affection, and I don’t think it’s their primary motivation. Love is the reason God created the universe. It wasn’t duty or a desire for harmony or a need for justice. He wanted other beings to shower and perfuse with love, and he wanted them to feel great affection for each other. If we go out and heal people, we should also be so full of supernatural love, they can feel it.

Jesus visited me twice. The primary thing I felt was the heat of his love. It was like radiation. I literally felt it, like the heat of the sun hitting my skin, except that it passed through me and surrounded me.

I don’t have that. I’m a nice guy for the most part, but if you meet me, you won’t feel waves of love making your knees weak.

John said that perfect affection cast out fear. He said that if you don’t love your brother, you are not of God. That’s scary. He said that he who hates his brother is a murderer, and we know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him!

Jesus said some people would be cast into hell after saying, “‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?” It seems clear that you can heal people and still be way out of line.

There are preachers who have made themselves very rich by healing, or pretending to heal, sick people. There are preachers who make a big show of what they do, not so people can learn from it, but so they will be admired and supported with donations. I would like to heal people, but it’s pointless if I don’t have the right motivation.

This world is a tough place. Life begins with pain, and then people mistreat and abuse you. Satan and his children show up in most people’s lives long before they hear from God. We learn to be angry, defensive, and cruel, in self defense. Later, we go on offense, and we feel that the evil we have been subjected to makes it justified. We develop poisonous habits that go against God’s nature. Then, when we become Christians, we may remain snared in these strongholds.

People who are supposed to teach us fill us with lies that make things worse. They say Christianity is a set of rules, with a God who keeps score, like the College Board, and then decides whether you have enough points to get into heaven. They say we have to earn what we get. Contradicting Jesus very directly, they say Christianity is hard, and that you have to be a very special, very good person to make it. They tell us we have to change ourselves, which is completely ridiculous. They teach us nonsense, and as a result, most of us don’t get far.

Christianity is a supernatural way of life. It’s about spirits and supernatural power, not human effort and WWJD bracelets. God transforms us supernaturally. He is the only path to supernatural affection. He is the only one who frees us from hostility. He can drop affection in you like a bagboy dropping oranges into a sack. Through authority inherited from him, you can silence the hostility of your flesh instantly. We should be pursuing these things instead of trying to see how good we can be without his help. He isn’t looking for competition.

Love and fear are enemies. I want love–affection–to flow from me, and I don’t want fear in me, except for fear of the Lord.

I believe the church is still half-baked, even though we are seeing a lot of miracles. Without an atmosphere of supernatural affection, we are not complete. We’re supposed to be the representatives of Jesus, and love radiates from him with great power. If it’s not radiating from us, we are still not who we should be.

Found a Great New Guy to do my Wiring

The workshop is really coming together. Unfortunately, I am the main force making that happen. They say that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I keep telling myself that isn’t true and that I should go ahead and pay people to do things, but it seems like they never do things as well as I would have, regardless of their credentials.

I paid an electrician about half a Lamborghini to increase the current to my workshop from 50 to 100 amps. You would think I would have had a perfect installation ready for whatever upgrades the future would bring. Not so. Today I had to install a frame size breaker in the workshop main panel, and the electrician didn’t leave enough slack in the feed wires, so I had to lengthen them.

Leaving excess wire is a fundamental thing for electricians, like not grabbing a wire to see if it’s still hot. It’s very basic. You never know what kind of work a customer will want in the future, and if you don’t leave extra wire behind, you may cause him a lot of problems.

I don’t want to run the electrician down. Most of what he did was great, and he was wonderful to deal with. It’s just that there were little things I would have done better.

I paid for #2 copper wire all the way across the yard. Not cheap. I could have gotten aluminum, but sometimes it has problems, so I paid a lot more than I had to. I also made sure they used a large conduit in case the #2 wires had to be upgraded in the future. I did all that and still had to splice the wires to make the frame size breaker work.

The main panel has 4 spaces for 250V breakers, plus a big space at the top for a frame size breaker. This is a breaker that feeds an entire panel, like a main switch. It’s not for receptacles and so on; it just feeds the panel.

My workshop panel has to have a way of shutting the power off with one switch, for safety reasons. You can do that in more than one way. You can run the power for the shop to a breaker on the panel, and you can also get a frame size breaker. My electrician opted to save a hundred bucks by running the juice to an ordinary 100-amp breaker which took up 25% of the panel’s spaces. He used just enough wire to reach that breaker, plus about 6″. To use a frame size breaker, I needed another 6″.

The company saved the cost of 6″ of wire, which would be about two dollars, and as a result, I had to drive to Lowe’s, spend like twelve bucks, and waste maybe three hours of my time.

I tried yanking the wires to see if there was any slack available, but there wasn’t, and I was in danger of damaging the insulation, so I stopped. I got on the web and found the answer: split bolts.

A split bolt is a hex bolt made from copper. It has a big cavity running down the middle, so it’s forked. You put two wire ends in the cavity and tighten the nut. It smooshes the wires together firmly. Then you put about a pound of various types of electrical tape on it, and you have a code-approved splice.

You can also grease the wire ends. This will supposedly prevent electrolysis which can mess up the connection. Some dude on the web says you can get electrolysis even when everything is made from the same metal.

I got two huge split bolts and two feet of #2 wire. I greased the wire ends with Super Lube grease, which apparently does everything. The text on the tube lists an endless number of uses, including use as dielectric grease.

I put two extensions on the hot wires, cranked the nuts down, and buried the assemblies in two kinds of tape. The connections should last forever. I crammed them back in the panel box, put it back together, and fired everything up. It works. Now I’m sitting pretty. I have a 50-amp plug and two 20-amp plugs coming from the main panel right now. The subpanel will have a 60-amp connection for my phase converter, plus a whole bunch of 250V receptacles.

The frame size breaker is installed, and the work I did looks really good. That’s because I actually thought about it. I didn’t get permits, and I am not getting inspected, because Florida law exempts this type of building from these requirements, but in the end, I’ll have a setup which exceeds code and looks and works better than whatever an electrician would have installed.

I’m using #3 90°C copper wire to connect the 100-amp breaker that feeds the subpanel. It’s rated for 110 amps, which it will never see. I could have used aluminum, but I wanted to do a good job. It’s all going to be in steel conduit, sized correctly. I got myself a new conduit bender so the conduit will be bent around anything that’s already on the walls. You don’t really have to do that; you can lay conduit over, say, a garage door control wire and just let it rest on it, but it’s more workmanlike to put a couple of little bends in your conduit so it goes over the old wire like an overpass.

I have another frame size breaker coming, and it will go in the subpanel. It’s overkill, really. I’m installing a subpanel with room for 6 full-size 250V breakers, and I could have given up one of them to connect the subpanel to the main panel, but I want to be ready for the future. The subpanel will actually be bigger than the main panel, now that I think about it, and it’s close to the center of a wall, so wire runs from the subpanel won’t be nearly as long as they would have been had I chosen to run things from the main panel.

All the hard stuff is done. Running wire from the house to the workshop was a big job for two men. What I’m doing now is comparatively easy, and since I spliced the feed wires, there are now no electrician-caused problems in the shop. Once you get to the main panel, everything is ship-shape.

I have all my woodworking tools in one area now, where the old Corian counter used to be. I painted the inside of my woodworking tool cabinet white so I can see what’s in it instead of staring into blackness, and I fastened the cabinet to the wall by the table saw so it can’t go wandering off. Everything is on wheels, so I can move things over by the roll-up door when I use them. I can open the door and blow the sawdust out.

I made an improvement in my lathe cart. It was a steal at $30, but the casters were unbelievably bad. They have brakes, and the brakes are always on no matter what you do. I worked on them a little and made them work better, but one of the casters is missing a ball bearing and will never be right. They’re made from cheap materials, and the tolerances are crazy, so there was never much hope for them.

I could probably have gotten Home Depot to do something for me, but even if they replaced the caster, I would have 4 awful casters. I decided to get a set of China casters from Amazon. I got the same ones I used on my tall cabinet. The cabinets are made by Husky, and they take the same casters, so all I have to do is screw them in. When I went to look for them online, Amazon had a returned set on sale, so I jumped on it. All told, the cart will now have something like $52 invested in it, plus tax. Not bad, given that the regular price is $70, with bad casters.

I finished up my spray boom mount. I was not able to get the materials I really wanted. I had hoped to have two square tubes, with the one holding the boom telescoping into the other one. I could have attached the boom with a pin, and the mount would have taken up less room when stored. I could not get two tubes in appropriate sizes. I decided to put a flange on the lower mount, with two screw holes in it. When I use the mount, I’ll run two screws through the flange and the boom. It will work fine.

I’m not happy with the paint I chose. I used Rust-Oleum hammer finish paint, which looks great. The problem with it is that it stays soft forever. When I work on the mount, the paint gets marred up. Next time, I’ll use farm implement paint. The part itself is very nice, though.

I need new projects now. I have a shop, so I have to do things. I want to start making wooden bird toys. Store toys cost $18 each, which is insane, and the birds can’t tell the difference. I want to build a battery-charger shelf. I really need that. I’m looking around for things to improve.

I should have the new outlets up by Thursday. After that, there will be no reason to put off moving my big machines up here. Can’t wait for that. Once I have machine tools, welders, a belt grinder, a finger brake, and woodworking tools, I should be hard to stop.

The Power is Yours

If you read this blog, it’s easy to get the idea that I become attached to one preacher after another, and that I abandon them quickly so I can run to to new people. This is not at all true, but most Christians and Jews are used to thinking in terms of following human leaders, so it’s easy for them to assume I’m looking for one and that I’m not faithful to the ones I find.

I gave too much of myself to Rich Wilkerson and the pedophile who ran my last church. This is true. But I did not turn them into gurus or idols. If I had, I would still be at Wilkerson’s disgraceful church, driving people’s luggage around and making pizza. Either that, or I would be visiting Albert Santiago in prison, trying to help him start a new ministry. I kept listening to the Holy Spirit and any man I thought was relaying information from him. This is why I got pushed out of two churches in a row. I challenged the cults, so I no longer fit in.

There is no man out there I can follow without reservation. There isn’t supposed to be. I am not looking for one. Occasionally, though, I come across people who relay solid information from God, so I listen to them for a while, and I recommend them to others. Most of the time, these people don’t teach me much that is new. They merely confirm what the Holy Spirit has already told me, and they may expand on it.

I spent a lot of time listening to Derek Prince. He gives people a nice, solid foundation to build on. He’s not perfect, though. He said some things that were not quite right, and he had a serious pride problem.

I watched a lot of Tom Fischer (Cardboard Box Church) videos. He was also very good, but his ministry cooled down when he got married, and he started talking about essential oils in his videos. He got into a multi-level marketing company that sells these things, and he created a second Youtube channel to promote them. If there is a reputable, sound multi-level marketing company out there, I have yet to hear of it. They tend to be snares for people who have financial issues and who may be naive.

When you join an MMA, you may find yourself pushing your wares to friends and relatives, driving them away in exchange for small commissions. The general rule is that you can’t sell enough to make a real profit, and only the company makes money.

To me, preaching is preaching, and business is business. They should not be connected at all. I never saw Paul offer a sale on new tents in the Bible. I think Fischer is great, but I feel like I know a few things that haven’t been revealed to him yet.

I went to a Last Reformation event and got baptized after listening to Torben Sondergaard. I think TLR is doing wonderful things, but it’s starting to look like a denomination with a strong flesh-based structure, and denominations are not good. I will never join another church or denomination, because I know that as soon as a ministry becomes a human organization, Satan starts finding ways to take over.

Yesterday I found out that TLR told me something that was just plain false. They only baptize in the name of Jesus. They say that this is how all baptisms in the New Testament were done. It’s not true. Jesus said his followers were to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I don’t know how TLR could have been wrong about it.

I don’t know how important the error is, but it shows you have to test everyone.

By the way, I compared the Acts 2 School to a cult the other day, because they charged for seminars, made people share quarters, and subjected them to obnoxious rules. Since then (if I understand things correctly), I have learned that they got these ideas from TLR, and they have changed their minds about them. I don’t know whether their ministry is worth anything, however.

When I went to my TLR event, I stayed in a hotel, there was no charge, and I came and went as I pleased, so it’s hard to know what the truth is.

I’m not going to go sleep in a bunk bed in a room full of strangers unless an angel wakes me up in the middle of the night and hands me a signed note from God. I can tell you that much. Not when I can have a queen-size bed and my own toilet.

It may be that TLR gave them these ideas because TLR is from Denmark, where people are used to being told what to do.

The search for sages and under-messiahs is a big problem. It wrecked Judaism and Catholicism. People get the idea that they have to find a man they can rely on, so they can give themselves completely to his teaching. That doesn’t work. Every man makes mistakes. The Jews rely on the Talmud, which is full of guesses, contradictions, and lies. The Catholics rely on a lot of weird quasi-pagan doctrine they stole from the Greek pantheists. All of this nonsense came from fallen angels, men, and men’s wild guesses. It’s extremely destructive.

Moses wished all of God’s people were prophets. He didn’t want to hog the glory. He knew it wasn’t his.

I almost feel hesitant to bring up new preachers I’ve listened to, because most Christians are determined to find one preacher or denomination and cling like barnacles.

I’ll say what I think, though. I’m not responsible for the way people take what I write. It’s 100% on them. If you’re listening to the Holy Spirit every day, he will help you understand, and if you’re not, nothing I can do can clear up your misconceptions.

You’re never responsible for how other people take things. Never.

I’ve been writing about Tom Loud and Pete Cabrera lately. I even emailed Loud to ask about visiting and doing street healing with him. Doesn’t mean I think he’s the solution to all my problems, however.

He said something I loved. He said we’re not supposed to depend on healers. He said he can’t be on call all the time for everyone because, for example, he might want to take a vacation with his wife. If you’re constantly asking strong Christians to pray for you, grow up. You should be as strong as anyone. You should be praying to God, not to Pete Cabrera. It’s not someone else’s job to be your on-call nurse. We are supposed to help other people, but we are also supposed to have our own lives. You can’t carry a grown Christian around on your back like a papoose.

Pete Cabrera begs people to go to the Bible and the Holy Spirit to check what he says. He tells them they’re not supposed to rely on him. He’s right.

Last night I watched a very good video Loud made. It was about authority. The main thing I took away from it is that God is not running the world, except perhaps in a very general way related to major events. I knew that already. God put man in charge down here, and all the evil that happens here is our fault.

Loud expanded on the question of who has what authority, and helped me learn more about it.

Very often, we ask God to do things we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to bless and curse. We have the power to drive out demons. The apostles didn’t beg God the way we do. They just spoke his power into the earth.

Loud said something that had never occurred to me. The Bible says God doesn’t do anything without telling his servants the prophets. Loud says he does this because men have authority down here. He says God himself has restricted his own authority by turning the world over to us. He says God actually needs a prophet to say something will happen before God has the authority to get it done. He says Noah preached about the flood in order to give God the authority to cause it.

That was new to me.

I think he’s right. We seem to be more in charge than we realize, and our words are more powerful than we understand.

My life has gotten much, much better over the last few years, and I think it’s because I started speaking. I have been blessing and cursing like crazy. I speak defeat to my enemies. I speak God’s help to people. I tell my mind, body, and spirit what to do. Things keep improving for me. The Bible says, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”

It’s working for me, consistently. Using words, I’ve been planting good seeds for years, and the longer I keep doing it, the more good things grow. I also planted a lot of evil seeds in the past, and I’ve had to wait for the resulting thorns and weeds to wilt.

Christians are always wondering why they don’t see God’s many promises come true. It’s probably largely because they don’t bless and curse. In many cases, God’s word is like human law. When you go into a courtroom, you don’t get any help if you remain silent. The judge agrees with your enemy, and you lose. If you win, it’s because you claimed something the law promised you. This may be why Jesus was so quiet while he was being tried. If he had spoken too much, he might have been delivered, and the whole plan would have been ruined.

He argued with hostile Jews, and they were never able to touch him. He was nearly silent when he was kidnapped, beaten, interrogated, and tortured to death, and he was not protected.

Words are extremely important. They were the tools that created the planet we sit on. A diploma is words. A contract is words. A death sentence is words. Jesus called himself the word of God.

Words are at the root of everything. Control the root, and you control everything that comes from it.

I’ll post the video here. Maybe it will help you.

Over the last two days, something very odd happened. I lost my Bluetooth earpiece. I searched the house, workshop, and car. I looked through my laundry. I searched the washer and dryer. I went over the same places over and over. I looked at clean clothes I had put away. It was nowhere to be found.

I was expecting an important call, and I didn’t want to hold the phone up the whole time. I started practicing what Tom Loud taught in a video I wrote about a day or two back. I got my carnal mind out of the way. I spoke God’s defeat to the difficulty of finding the earpiece, as well as his victory to me in finding it. I asked him to bring it to me. I commanded my carnal mind to shut up, and I told it to submit to my spirit.

I thanked God over and over for returning the earpiece to me.

Yesterday I finally ordered a new earpiece. I was not giving up, but I wanted to have a second one in case this happened again.

Last night I showered and got dressed for bed. I put on a pair of shorts I had laid out on the dresser. Later, I felt something in my pocket. I reached in, and there was the earpiece.

You can’t tell me I hadn’t looked there before. I had made a point of searching all the shorts I wear at night. And it showed up before the call arrived.

Make of it what you will.

The carnal mind is a problem. I’m not saying it hasn’t done anything for us. It gives us inventions. It helps us think so we can get through the day. Unfortunately, it also fights with God. It thinks miracles don’t happen and that anything that seems impossible is, in fact, impossible. It’s wrong about the important things.

The mind of the flesh prevents us from raising the dead and making legs grow back. Medicine can fix a lot of things, but it can’t cure a cold, make a dwarf grow, create a new eye, grow a new tooth, or do any of a number of things that would alleviate terrible suffering. Medicine is also expensive, and not everyone can get treatment. It doesn’t help humanity much when a new medical treatment pops up and only a ten-thousandth of the world’s population can get it. The carnal mind cuts us off from a world of free help our human efforts can’t begin to compare to.

I’ve had blisters healed over a period of minutes. I know it sounds insignificant, but think about it. You can go to the Mayo Clinic, offer them a billion dollars to make a blister go away, and have them tell you it can’t be done. They’ll say you have to wait. I didn’t. Didn’t cost me a penny, either. They were just blisters, but they might as well have been tumors or amputations. The same principles apply.

Carnality relies on hard work. As Adam could tell you, hard work is what happens when you give up access to divine help. Divine help is better. When you get God’s power working for you, you don’t need a medical or engineering degree. You don’t need an MBA. You don’t need an army or a fortune or any other source of earthly power. You take a shortcut around all that mess. That’s how life was before the curse.

Jesus was an uneducated handyman, and he made a withered arm grow back.

Tom Loud and some of the others aren’t teaching what we think of as “the gospel.” To nearly all Christians, “the gospel” means the gospel of salvation. We think that if we teach someone he can avoid going to hell by asking for salvation, we’ve taught the gospel. Jesus said the age would end when the gospel OF THE KINGDOM was taught all over the world. That’s what Loud is teaching. He’s talking about our authority as princes. There is more to Christianity than going to heaven.

How long can the world last, now that these ideas are spreading?

Loud said something that amazed me. He said Christians would eventually “infect” people, like sick patients spreading disease. I’ve been saying that for years. We’ve been relying on popes and preachers and big buildings, thinking we needed these tools to spread God’s kingdom. We were totally wrong. God doesn’t need a TV preacher’s cameras. He needs a bunch of anonymous believers, going around doing miracles and helping people to feel his love. It was wonderful to hear someone else use the infection analogy. It was the first time I had heard anyone else say it. It proves it came from God, not me.

This stuff will take off, and there will be a harvest. Then it will die down due to market saturation, and the end will come, because people will have heard God’s case and made their choice.

Market saturation is one of the main things that fills hell.

Technology is putting an end to free will, so we should be aware that the end is finally coming close. Without free will, there is no purpose for mankind to continue to exist. Once the earthly powers know where we are all the time, control our movements, and have the ability to decide who can buy and sell, it will be time for us to leave.

How long will that take? Based on current technology and the rate at which technology grows, I would be surprised if it takes 10 more years. Right now, the government or Google–Satan’s intelligence and control network–knows exactly where I am. It knows where I go when I take anything resembling a major road. It knows what I buy. It can record and transcribe every phone call I make, and it can have computers search the transcripts to find out if I’m saying anything it doesn’t like. I live way out in the country, and this is how little privacy I have. If you live in a city, you might as well live naked in a giant fishtank on national television.

There is no free will without privacy. When people know they’re being watched, they don’t do what they want to do, so they can’t be judged.

I hope we start seeing more miracles and, more importantly, more supernatural faith and love. We really need to go out on a high note.

You have to be the Bouncer

I watched a Tom Loud video last night with dinner, and he did something pretty neat. He explained exactly how he heals people. He didn’t have a creepy seminar and charge people $300. He didn’t ask for money. He didn’t hold anything back. Very nice.

It turns out he got his start after watching another Youtube healer, Pete Cabrera. Cabrera is not a trained preacher. He was illiterate until he was in his late twenties. Somehow or other, he started hearing from God and healing people.

Loud contacted him and asked what he was doing, and he said he didn’t know.

Eventually, Loud started healing. He realized his carnal mind was in the way. It kept telling him he wasn’t going to heal anyone. He succeeded when he got rid of the blockage.

That’s interesting to me, because God showed me something a long time ago. When God cursed humanity in Eden, he gave us curses that reflected the curses we had put on him. One of them was difficulty in childbirth. The reason human beings have such difficult births is that we have large brains. Our heads are so big they stretch women’s genitals and cause tremendous pain. God showed me that our minds make it hard for us to enter his kingdom. We insist on relying on logic and proof, so entering the kingdom of heaven is like taking a camel through the eye of a needle.

Loud says we have two minds, and I know that is true. The body has a mind, and the spirit has a mind. We literally have two minds, and they fight.

He says he accepted the fact that his carnal mind would never really get with the program, so he ignores it now.

At the end of the video, he gives people a great way to silence the carnal mind and get into God’s presence. You say, “Mind, submit to my spirit. Spirit, take me to the father.”

I know this works. I have been commanding my mind and spirit for a long time. For example, say it’s time to pray, and I can’t quit thinking about something I want to do in the workshop. I’ll say, “I command my flesh, my mind, and my spirit not to think about tools until tomorrow at 10 a.m.” The tool thoughts go away. They may come back, but they do go away.

In the psalms, there are similar commands. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name.” That’s not just flowery talk. It’s literally a command. It’s an example for us to follow.

We need to silence useless voices in order to communicate with God, so this information is important. Christianity is not a game with a set of rules. You don’t try to behave and then see if God likes your score enough to let you into heaven. Christianity is a relationship with a father who talks to you every day.

You should be praying in tongues every day, because God will communicate with you through tongues. You will find you know things no human being told you. You should be prophesying to yourself and others for the same reason. If your flesh won’t stop yammering or telling you it won’t work, you’ll be isolated and uninformed.

You’ll feel better if you silence your flesh. Your flesh brings worry, anger, shame, fear, unbelief, lust, covetousness, and all sorts of other things that are unpleasant to experience. Your flesh can be manipulated into feeling certain ways by circumstances. Your spirit can’t. You can literally be walking up the steps to the hangman’s noose and not be worried or even upset, as long as your flesh is muzzled. Remember Jesus, sleeping in the boat during the storm. He wasn’t just composed. He was ASLEEP.

You can tell your mind and spirit to believe this or that. Whatever you need. If you’re worried, command them to stop. If you’re angry, command them to stop. Command them to believe, love, forgive, or whatever else you need.

Your circumstances can’t control your emotions and state of mind if you use the authority God has already given you, but if you don’t try, you can be as miserable as the lowest, most defiled unbeliever.

Loud says he heals something like 80% of the people he works on. That’s pretty good. It certainly beats the typical Christian average of 0%. Healing is important, because it shows people God is real and knocks the lies out of their heads. Paul, who was highly educated and very smart, said he didn’t win people with men’s wisdom but with God’s power. He said, “And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”

I think the video is very powerful, and I recommend you take a look. At the very least, watch the last 5 minutes.

I Just Came to Meet Your Boss

I am considering going to another Last Reformation event.

The Last Reformation’s founder, Torben Sondergaard, got driven out of Denmark in January. He invited a documentary crew to film his ministry, and of course, they twisted the truth and made his organization look like a sick cult. The Danes rose up in arms and threatened to pass laws to ban what he was doing. People said doing his type of ministry in front of kids was abuse, which is completely untrue. He feared losing his children and going to prison.

Over the last month, he has been provided with a big, beautiful property in North Carolina. I believe he said it has 90 rooms. About 75% of the cost has already been paid, and the Last Reformation is leasing to buy the rest. No loans. They’re already planning their first event.

My friend Mike needs to be baptized, and I would like to complete what I started when I went to their event in Clearwater in December. I would like to pray for the sick and see results.

I have also considered flying to Seattle to see Tom Loud, who does street ministry and healing. I really want to get going.

I found an outfit in Florida. It’s called the Acts 2 School. It’s in Vero Beach, which is a couple of hours away. I thought it might work out because Tom Loud has worked with them. I assume he has some clue about the people he deals with.

When I looked at their website, I noticed two things. First, they charge $300 for their events, and second, you have to live on the premises for several days.

Oh, boy. Charging a hundred bucks a day, up front, for teaching? That can’t be God’s will.

They have a student handbook, which I examined. If you attend an event, you have to live in a common bedroom with strangers. You have to sleep in a bunk. You have to eat with everyone else, when the leadership chooses. You have to help prepare food, wash dishes, and clean the facility. You can’t talk to a person of the opposite sex in the room where he or she sleeps. At 10:30, they turn off the lights. YOU don’t. They do.

“CULT.” This is the word that comes to mind.

1. If you really have faith in God, you should be able to get by on freewill offerings and whatever other resources he provides. If you have to charge people hefty fees up front, God is not blessing you. The people you charge are. They are not merely brothers and sisters; they are also customers.

2. Sleeping in a common room is fine for people who have no choice. It’s not fine for married people, older people who have money and status and are tired of being nannied, or people who snore. There are hotels around Vero Beach. There is no good reason to tell people they can’t use them. Charging a hundred bucks a day for self-prepared food and a self-cleaned bedroom and bathroom is way out of line. I grant you, a Holiday Inn would cost just as much without food and drink, but you would have privacy, you would not have to clean anything, and you would not have people telling you what to do and when.

3. If a grown person feels like staying up until 10:45 or whenever, it’s up to him. This is America, not socialist Cambodia. Turning off the lights for free adults is insulting and somewhat crazy.

I guess what I’m saying is that I decided not to go.

I’ve seen a lot of video about Scientology. They practice slavery, right here in America. They tell people where to live and what to do. They tell them who to associate with. They make them do unpleasant work for nothing. They put people who misbehave in buildings with doors that lock from the outside. They forbid people to communicate with others. This is not what religion is supposed to be like, and it’s very dangerous for a Christian leader to go down the same path.

It’s very hard to prosecute Scientology leaders because the people they hurt are afraid of them. They fear for themselves as well as their friends and families (especially children). It’s remarkable that such things happen in America, but they do. We have many Muslims here practicing slavery. Pimps practice slavery, too.

Who would join a ministry that reminds him of Scientology? It’s like paying to be punched in the face.

Cults don’t honor people. God just showed me that. They humiliate them. The Bible tells us to honor other people. If you put a 65-year-old man in a room full of strangers, make him clean toilets, and tell him when to go to bed, are you honoring him? No. You’re dishonoring him. God hates dishonor and emasculation. He gets buried in it every day, so he knows what it’s like.

Elisha was dishonored by a bunch of kids, and God sent two bears to maul them. That’s harsh. God’s law said that if a son was nasty to his parents, they could have him stoned to death. It said that if a woman tried to stop a fight by squeezing a man’s genitals, her hand had to be cut off. It said that people who did not honor their parents would be cursed.

Dishonor is bad. Unfortunate for me, because I used to excel at it.

I don’t know if Tom Loud endorses these people. The video he made with them is several years old, and they rarely update their own Youtube channel.

I think he has an issue with the Last Reformation. He said his friend Doug Collins is involved with a ministry, and he gave the impression that he’s not enthusiastic about it. Doug Collins is a Last Reformation member.

Tom Loud got Doug Collins started doing miracles. Collins called him and asked to be taught. Loud was not involved with the Last Reformation. Collins found them later.

My only concern with the Last Reformation is that they may be getting too structured and man-based. If it turns into the Torben Sondergaard religion, it will fail just like Catholicism did.

I’m not a joiner. I don’t care if you line up hundreds of dead bodies every morning and raise them with a wave of your hand. I’m a child of God, not a child of Perry Stone or Benny Hinn or Tom Loud or anyone else. If I have to know your secret handshake and let you tell me and my family what to do, I’m out. Psalm 23 says, “The Lord is my pastor.” Deal with it.

Loud says God told him he ended the healing revival of the 1950’s because it glorified men. He says God showed up he would bring it back, however. I don’t doubt that God said these things.

It’s crazy to have a movement that glorifies men and turns them into celebrities who supposedly have powers the rest of us don’t have. Preachers are supposed to help us meet and get to know and obey God, not themselves. You know what the Bible says: “Call no man ‘father’.”

Christianity is reproduction. That’s very important to understand. God is reproducing. When you have kids, you don’t hope to have one normal kid and 9 kids without arms and legs. All your children should be like you in their capabilities. God isn’t looking to produce three or 4 Reinhard Bonnkes and Todd Whites and leave the rest of us in iron lungs and wheelchairs.

I guess we’re weak because we are the spiritual children of men, not God. We take after our fathers.

Remember what Moses said? “Enviest thou for my sake? Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!” Moses was always in danger of being worshiped for being special, and he wanted no part of it.

Lust for attention and worship is what caused Satan to be blasted out of heaven. He wanted to dress up like Liberace and stand in front of everyone, being admired, praised, and obeyed. He said he would sit on the throne of heaven. Preachers who glorify themselves and don’t replicate themselves are just like he was.

I don’t know if the Last Reformation is going to become a carnal, failed denomination or not, but it’s something to be wary of. The Last Reformation has never saved anyone, and there is no guarantee that it will exist a month from now. You have to keep your eyes on the source, no matter who fails around you.

God said, “A thousand shall fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand, but it shall not come near thee.” No matter who fails, you have to focus on the one who never can. No one can carry you or walk your path for you.

It’s all very interesting.

I like the Last Reformation, and they do reproduce. They teach people how to heal and so on. I just don’t want to be obligated to their leadership. Men in leadership make mistakes. Often, they disagree with God and with people to whom God has been speaking. That happens to me a lot. I don’t need any more of it.

It’s one thing to have some random person with no power criticize the things God says through you and to have him tell you to do things God doesn’t want you to do. It’s another when it comes from someone to whom you have given your loyalty.

My last pastor told me I wasn’t allowed to lay hands on people, and I was a deacon. He said demons could leave me and go into others that way. Meanwhile, he was laying hands on people, and he was involved in a sexual relationship with his young niece, which started when she was 6.

Rich Wilkerson at Trinity Church in Miami had a rule that he was the only one who was allowed to receive or interpret a message in tongues. I wonder how he expected to get God to obey that rule.

I think he’s an atheist. I don’t think a person who believes in divine judgment could do the things he does.

The further you go with God, the fewer people you can listen to without being dragged downward. The more aligned you are with God, the more people will disagree with you, and you will find that as time passes, you get into conflict with people who are higher and higher on the Christian food chain. I suppose the status of your persecutors varies with your status with God. After all, ordinary Christians fight demons, but when Jesus was tempted, Satan himself showed up.

When Paul became the chief voice in the church, Peter, who was very close to God himself, rose against him and had to be corrected.

It’s interesting. When Israel was threatened by Goliath, who was the greatest warrior among the Philistines, God sent his anointed king to kill him. He sent his best. I suppose Satan does the same thing, when he has to, although he likes to send human beings who are low and unworthy of respect.

It’s a form of dishonor to send a lackey or a child or someone else of low regard to fight a worthy enemy. In the play Cyrano de Bergerac, a noble hires flunkies to drop a log on Cyrano, who laments this disgrace as he dies. Liberals love sending kids to bait and insult conservatives. It’s a filthy tactic intended to humiliate. Witness David Hogg and the Thunberg girl, whose unfortunate mental illness is being used to shame people who resist the climate hysteria industry.

It’s astounding how much power Satan has in the church. He owns it. He’s not an invader who comes in quickly to make raids and then leaves. He sits on a throne of authority. He is at home in the church. He built it.

I’m not going to Vero Beach to pay some character $300 to turn the lights out on me. If you can’t treat me like a man and teach me while I’m staying at a hotel, there is something seriously wrong with what you’re doing.

I would like to be able to do the things the apostles did, and, most importantly, I would like to be able to do it because of God’s love flowing through me, not because I want an achievement, because I’m angry at Satan, or because I feel obligated to do things for God. Love is the big thing that’s missing from every ministry I’ve seen. They’re starting to get the gifts of the Spirit right, but when you’re around God, you feel his love the way you would feel heat while standing in front of a searchlight. We have to get that, or what we do will be weak and half-baked.

I think a trip to North Carolina would be nice. We’ll see what happens.