The Only Constant Is Change

Try to relax. Very little of the Lord’s work is done in panic. It might require vigor and creative surprises at time, but even those elements work better if you approach your divine mission with confidence and serenity.

In the final analysis, we all stand alone before the Lord. Any comfort and joy we have in fellowship is a bonus in the sense that sometimes we have to face our demons without human support. The seeds of full spiritual communion are planted in the fertile soil of commitment to Christ, and most of the fruit will not come in this life. Our virtual fellowship here on this blog is just a taste, the fragrance of blossoms just barely peeking out of the husk. Be encouraged because the best is yet to come.

I got one comment on yesterday’s post and a couple of private emails. That doesn’t mean only one person cares; it means the rest of you aren’t worried about it. But I had to ask.

There are several schools of thought about how to handle the rising turmoil in terms of virtual ministry. Did you know that other ministries were talking about it? There’s some lively debate about this. On the one hand, it would be easy for me to withdraw, pulling everything possible into this little netbook I’m using and prepare for high mobility in physical terms. That comes with a certain amount of baggage, such a trusting a lot of virtual services to respond consistently so we can keep this ministry alive in the clouds. The other extreme is trying to pull it all together somewhere else, hosting everything from my apartment with very little reliance on the cloud and near zero mobility. And there are places in between where we could take our stand, as it were. No choice is morally superior in itself.

I have no strong personal inclinations for any spot on this imaginary scale. Whatever works for our fellowship is fine with me. The mission and calling come first; we have to shape ourselves to match. We strive to identify the meeting point between the size-n-shape of faith (conviction in the heart) and what seems actually available. It also means some measure of readiness for the intersection to move at times, if only in terms of our awareness. God is merciful and patient with us because our awareness is essential for a great deal of our service. I’m at the point where I believe I know how to proceed.

For now the goal is getting our hands on something that I can use as a home server. However, this thing will be a “shadow server” — the originating machine for all the other stuff. It’s the place where I’ll learn and test ideas, store the work I do, and then launch the results onto some Net-facing service over which I can assert more control than I have now. Indeed, I’m trying to identify a local webhost here in the OKC Metro that will tolerate our low budget and the experimental nature of things at first.

As much as possible, I’ll try to migrate this entire blog to that service without disrupting anything you experience as my virtual congregation. That’s the goal. I’m starting to run into issues with the free service here and I already know the folks who run this thing aren’t interested in my concerns. Not brutal, mind you, it’s just that they have way too many other users for my voice to be significant. And I don’t want to disrupt those who are happy with things by playing the crank who diverts too much attention and resources to himself. But I can’t keep doing things their way, either, so I’m trying to move the actual physical home of this blog to some place much closer and under my direct control. But it depends on too many unknowns at this point as to whether you’ll notice any difference. At the least, I’ll bet the URL will change.

I’m content with Gmail and Outlook.com for what they do. I’m not happy with my ISP’s email service and I sense it won’t get better, so let’s avoid my Cox email account, please. Maybe I’ll need to run my own mail service someday, but not yet. I’m putting a higher priority on things like making it easier to download my books and pamphlets. If more serious challenges arise and I have to make substantial changes in those plans, I suspect I’ll be addressing a different audience, anyway. That is, whatever makes sharing my stuff more difficult will also mean I’m going to lose a lot of my current readers regardless of my efforts.

I’ll have to assume that issue is in the hands of God. For each of us, we have to maintain a continual assessment of what we believe we see coming at us. Right now, official censorship of any sort isn’t likely here in the US. I can’t guess how things might change for some of you out there on your end. Snooping from various government and private agencies is a given, though. I’m not planning on rolling out encryption on anything — at least, not yet. While I can imagine situations where I should, we aren’t even close to that. What my affiliates and I teach attracts depth of attention, but precious little in width. Jesus said the gospel was polarizing in that sense. I remain wide open and will gladly answer to any genuine inquiries, but the message itself tends to draw only a few who are ready for it.

My assertive anti-activist position on most popular subjects is genuine, but it’s also our primary buffer against the wrong kind of attention. Indeed, I get more harassment from mainstream Christians than anyone else, and I don’t foresee any of them using US law as a silencer. Given where God has led me during my life, handling them is no big deal. The only other likely threat might be Zionists, and our teaching offers precious little provocation to them, in the sense that they could use it in their propaganda war.

So our biggest area of concern is so-called cyber threats. The technology by which we commune here is trouble enough for anyone. In my estimation, economic shrinkage will bring down some very popular services. You would be surprised how many tech companies are already zombies, and that includes some of the biggest and most popular services. This rubs against the current very substantial efforts to make Internet access even more ubiquitous. But that ubiquity comes at the price of sandboxing: Most of the newer and cheaper access comes with more crippled devices (if only by means of a more crippled OS).

While there are a relative few predatory souls salivating at the power that comes from such restrictions, the sandbox arises as a side effect, not some evil plot. The objective is amassing data on users — tracking, profiling, indexing certain habits, etc. While the government is thrilled by this, of course, the tracking is driven by the market. The oligarchs of business don’t want your body, only your soul, as it were. The goal is nothing less than full behavioral control in terms of enticing your self-enslavement with borrowing and buying. Along with that is market consolidation, or what we call oligopoly.

A feature of this drift is squeezing the middle to polarize the market. The great mass of computer literate folks is aging, and everything works to dumb them down. Just recently there was a powerful pitch to make everyone some portion of computer geek. Visionaries were talking about kids learning to write software code instead of grammar. But that was a ruse, because by the time we moved into that territory, it was actually some layers removed from actual computer expertise. Kids can code trendy apps using highly abstracted developer kits without a clue to how the device actually works, not to mention the networking protocols. We were sold fine art schools and received coloring books.

But TPTB don’t always succeed. The community of determined geeks is growing, in part because the cultural shift is creating more geeks. But that’s another story. What I’m getting at is that my sense of calling is to invest more effort in the hard-core computer geek stuff. Whatever future ministry I have includes a heavy measure of running a server. I’m not sure what part it plays in the bigger picture, but the path before me runs through Linux system administration, not just the desktop stuff I’ve been doing for two decades. I seriously doubt I can keep that away from this parish blog, but that’s nothing new. I’m still focused on what is implied by the title: Do What’s Right — the theory and practice of morality.