DIY Glory Shine

Do it yourself; don’t trust outsiders.

This is the watchword for our time. If you need to do a certain thing, make darned sure you cannot do it before you contract it out. Even if it’s actually cheaper and better coming from outside sources, make sure you have at least some idea of what it takes in case that outside source fails. That’s because there is a growing likelihood that your outside source will fail.

We are already in the early stages of an economic failure. I’d rather not waste the space here giving too many examples of how the system is breaking down. Here’s one: Because college graduates cannot discharge their student loan debts through bankruptcy filings, they are doing bankruptcy for every other debt they incur just trying to stay alive. This has created a massive rise in bankruptcy rates in general. As I’ve said in the past, the general debt burden is globally overburdened, and liquidity is insufficient to sustain the previous prosperity. There is virtually nothing left to borrow unless you simply print more money and dilute the value of current existing debt. That simply moves the failure into other areas of the economy.

Somebody is going to pay for all the failed loans, so the battle will be over who gets stuck with the bill. Because there remains a human element in all of this, nobody can predict how the collapse will effect individual actors, and consequently individual sectors of the economy. Some people are resilient and creative, and will stay afloat by sheer genius and will. Others will cave at the first sign of trouble and allow their business to collapse. And some are so totally compromised already that they will have no choices when the crunch comes.

This is the primary threat to you and I. This is the wrong time to be in debt. Pay cash and learn how to do things yourself. If you can’t do it, make sure you find a provider that is not in a position to hurt you.

This is one of the reasons I push so hard for folks to learn how to make the most of Open Source software. By its nature, Open Source cannot harm you. It may limit you by what the developers choose to emphasize, but there is simply no way they can penalize you for doing things they don’t like, unlike all the software and services provided by Big Tech. So, for example, while I am using the WordPress commercial services to run this blog, it wouldn’t take two days to switch over to the Open Source version of WordPress and run it on a private server. Then again, this blog is just my current virtual pulpit; it would be quite easy to write the same stuff and post it elsewhere. I have several backups of virtually everything I’ve posted going back several years.

And you’ll notice that most of what I’ve written encourages doing religion the same way. There might be some barriers to joining our community, but nothing prevents you taking my ideas and running off in any direction that you feel led by God. This is Open Source religion. It doesn’t provide the same massive infrastructure as the mainstream, and it gets pretty lonely at times, but you aren’t bound by anybody’s personal ideas about what religion should look like. Institutional religion is going to suffer badly as the economic failure worsens.

My point is that you cannot know what will fail and what will continue working. All I can tell you there is that not everything is going to disappear. The market will shrink and the vendors, buyers and available goods and services will change, but it will not simply go away. The idea is that you learn to trust God and move ahead in your calling and mission, but that means being aware that God’s wrath is most certainly falling on the system.

But don’t buy my answers; get the attitude for yourself. You can certainly trust God, but don’t depend on me. Take whatever you can use from my suggestions, but be aware that I don’t fully trust myself. I’ve seen me fail and I’m trying to avoid things I know I cannot do. I’ve got a long list of things I can no longer set right, and I’ll have to apologize when I can find my victims in Heaven. So I’m living with a certain amount of scar tissue from cuts I’ve made on others’ lives. Still, I have a mission and I’m determined to give God room to train me for things I didn’t know I could do.

Even if my promotion of Linux means nothing to you, learn from the attitude. I won’t fling a challenge in the Father’s face by being lazy about learning stuff I should do for myself. My mission requires using computers a lot, so I need to make sure I understand what’s the best tool for the job, likely points of failure and how to deal with them.

The disaster is already here; we have to shine the light of glory in how we handle it.