“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8)
Seeing God is its own reward; basking in His glory trumps every other human desire. While this does correlate with things going pretty well for us in our mundane human pursuits, touching the divine truth is an interest we should hold in the ultimate sense. This is a critical element in Christian Mysticism: We have little real interest in this world, only so much as it takes to keep our lines open to the otherworld.
A decade ago I was under federal surveillance. I wrote about why (linked article now gone) but didn’t address the mechanics of living under that baleful gaze of the state. The technology has changed dramatically since then, so there’s not much to gain by explaining how I knew it wasn’t some wild personal paranoia. My phone was tapped for awhile but I’m pretty sure it was more routine than any real intent. By the time this stuff got rolling, the people involved would have had little enthusiasm because they had already contacted me and knew it was a mistake. Still, there was a lot of pressure from the top to catch Mr. Thompson and the subordinates went through the motions.
By the time I left Texas that had pretty much folded. I’m quite sure there remains some tiny sliver of automated tracking that is renewed briefly from time to time, as is the standard procedure for such things. Once you have a dossier, the system never forgets you.
At one point a few years ago, it seemed a more purposeful watch was reinstated. Most of it was the sort of interference with my online activities that can’t be written off as mere technical glitches. It was too many of them in too many ways all at the same time. After eliminating all the possibilities on my end, I was left with things like large numbers of hits on my static website from a very narrow selection of IP addresses that were very hard to trace, really oddball comments from folks not so hard to trace back to federal employment, and so forth. During that time I suggested on my blog here that I might have to make myself a little harder to reach and even tested alternative blogging opportunities.
Then it suddenly faded again.
Let’s put this all into proper perspective. First of all, the crazy thugs who think this high level of snooping is necessary are truly bent minds. They are crafty about human behavior, but their moral compass has been crushed and is totally non-functional. They have no concept for what is normal human behavior, and view everything with deep suspicion. They are wacko, and giving them the power to snoop and file reports to other kinds of legal authority, authorities which are equally wacko and lacking in moral sensibility, means you and I will suffer oppression for no just reason at all. Innocence in no defense from a psychopath government.
Second, there’s not a darn thing we can do to stop the snooping. When I contemplated “going underground” it wasn’t about avoiding the snooping, but avoiding the interference. I run Linux on most of my computers, and keep track of even more obscure alternative OSes, because I want to retain sufficient control to do what I’m utterly certain God demands of me. I know that I can’t really stop the likes of the NSA if they really decide to plant malware on my computer. Do you know that there are viruses now that can rewrite your system BIOS from a single use of any USB device? It won’t matter what OS you run, either. So the point is not to avoid snooping, but to maintain sufficient control to do what I have to do. Windows tends to hide things from the system owner, and weakens the level of control I feel I need.
Your biggest struggle in life is learning what you can and cannot control, and then what you should try to control. Barring radical changes in the technology landscape and how our government operates, I fully expect life to get difficult now and again from that awful attention of the state. The power of transparency is not in our innocence, as if there really were such a thing. Rather, it’s in the obedience of a higher standard, trusting a much higher power to keep things where they belong. If I am faithful to my God’s moral character, I can rest assured I won’t face anything outside His glory. That doesn’t mean I’ll like everything that happens. It means everything will most certainly be in my best interest, because His glory is my best interest.
We have enough trouble without resisting the Spirit of God and giving the demons room to operate in our lives.
