Maybe It’s Just Me

There’s a battle going on in my soul. From where my conscious awareness stands, it’s impossible to identify all the elements in the battle, particularly in terms of which is the good guys and the bad guys. Maybe it’s neither, but a matter of choosing from two or more equally difficult paths.

I know where my convictions are steering me. Sometimes I’d like to know more of the why, and that’s what makes it slow going. Not some impetuous child demanding a reason for something unpleasant, but in order to make my flesh obedient, I need to know a little more about the context.

Here’s what I have so far: God is pushing me to get off the Net. Not today, but somewhere out there in the future. I’ve been moving that direction for quite some time. Yes, my flesh has a heavy investment of 30 years messing with computers and networking, and it’s not really happy about all the wasted investment. But my heart knows that I got involved in obedience to the Lord, and now I’m getting out of it in obedience to the Lord. It doesn’t have to make sense to my human mind.

I’m certainly going to miss the communications. Both passive and active engagement in the wider world seems like a good thing to do. There’s something beneficial about it. Still, I have to wonder how it was for the ancient Hebrew peasant who knew only what he experienced first-hand, and maybe had some inkling of things in the wider world that he heard about. Yet, he was able to focus on what God required of him, if he was so inclined, and nothing else really mattered.

So, if you have had time enough to waste reading my blogging, you can surely see I’m tapering off the active engagement first. I honestly do not understand why God wants me to abandon the audience I built up through blogging, but I do understand that the Lord gives and takes away what suits His purpose. There’s a conflict here: I have a mission and message, and the Net has been the best way to express it. Apparently, that’s no longer true.

I have no idea why. I could speculate that it’s because the Lord is going to make it hard for everyone else to be on the Net, but that’s not certain in my mind. There are gaps between the things my convictions declare about this whole story, and my brain is eager to fill in those gaps for it’s own use. It’s not a sinful thing; it’s just human nature. It’s what we live with in this fallen world as we pursue the path out of it.

I’ve done some more research on CMEs and electronics. I’m not an engineer, but I’ve tried to find out what engineers know about such things. So far, I don’t think anybody really knows. What they do know has wide gaps, and so far all they have is speculation to fill in the blanks. Most of them seem to think that a major solar flare/CME would not fry electronic devices, but would do more damage to the electric power grid than anything else. They suggest that the most vulnerable thing is what I’ve already identified: the transformers. The wiring might survive okay, but the transformers appear to be vulnerable to what a CME does to the grid.

And everyone who claims to know says we don’t have very many transformers in stock. So if the CME heats up the wires and overloads the transformers, it will be a loooong time replacing them. Maybe some are shielded, but those little gray cans mounted on utility poles all over the US are what’s almost guaranteed to explode in vast numbers. And everyone is pretty sure if that happens, there won’t be much power to keep the cellphone towers and Internet switching centers working. So it won’t matter if you still have a working device, there won’t be any service to which it can connect.

But then, a few other folks claiming to be engineers and astrophysicists say a CME like that is not what everyone thinks it would be. They say it would include a lot of stuff not often accounted for — not just plasma and particles, but various energy fields. We haven’t had any big CMEs in a long time, and when we did, nobody knew what to look for back then. And they suggest that everything that can conduct electricity will be overloaded, frying the lightweight stuff first. That would mean electronic devices.

I don’t know what to make of it all.

What I do know is that I’m supposed to get off the Net as much as possible. For now, it looks like there is some transition time left. That could disappear without notice, but my heart says we have time. I have no idea if it’s something that applies to you, but it certainly applies to me. I need to get comfortable doing things the way I did back in the 1970s and earlier, in terms of getting the message out.

Whom the new audience will be is still shrouded in mist for me. For those of you who read this blog, if you want to hear from me past that final cut-off, you’ll have to send me a snail-mail address. I may still have use of phones, but I wouldn’t count on that. For now, this blog will keep running. For some of you, I know that you are concerned about the ongoing series of Bible studies, and rest assured, that’s the core element of my ministry. I’ll do what I can to share that stuff until circumstances force my hand.

But it’s the same thing I’ve been saying for at least a couple of years: You need to be ready to proceed in your religion and faith without me. It’s about time to graduate. Whatever God is doing with the Radix Fidem virtual community is about to enter the next phase. I have no way to estimate at this point how much I’ll be involved in the Internet and the cellphone net at any point in the future, but I am convinced that I will have no presence on the Net. In terms of the virtual realm, I’ll be dead.

I have no idea why, beyond vague visions of a fellowship here in the real world. Whether that means a cataclysm that kills it for everyone else is more than I know right now, but I believe it includes something like that. So I can tell you what God is doing with me, and some of what I am doing to prepare for the changes, but you’ll have to follow your own convictions.