We Are the Packaging

I can’t tell you this is a prophetic word, but let me urge you to consider this: Our covenant community must close the door on Internet outreach.

It’s not that people won’t be moved through the virtual medium, but that’s not the emphasis. Here’s the thing: God will certainly grant us a limited safe passage on the Internet. I still believe that the dark clouds will smother the majority of our public expressions of faith on the Net, but the Lord will leave us enough room to conduct His business on the fringe of things. And that’s where we will be — on the fringe.

The wokies are simply the latest manifestation of totalitarian spirit. They already own the bulk of the Internet that people see and with which most people interact, and will continue to cement their control. For the time being, it’s noteworthy that this wokie agenda includes a very pro-vax threat to the rest of us. It’s a primary issue right now because the MSM are keeping it in the front. However, the wider wokie agenda continues moving unabated in the background.

And most of their work will be felt on the Internet. That remains the primary battlefield; this is fundamentally an information war. They don’t own the wires. They will strive to take control of them, but I don’t think that will turn out too well for them. Still, they already own the primary manifestations of the Internet as the population experiences it. The trick for us is not to engage directly those manifestations any more than is necessary for the mission. We must find a place on the fringes of the Net.

Meanwhile, the bulk of what we do should take advantage of how humans naturally communicate without the Net. You see, God is going to preserve that face-to-face “network” for His own use. It will last through the coming CME, and will certainly remain after the micro-nova destroys most of civilization. What I’m trying to do here is plant the seed for believers to realize that the Net is just a tool, not the real world. Much as the elite want to make the Net our world, it won’t happen. Thus, it’s our divine duty to make sure we keep alive the business of touching others offline. We need to be a people of the human touch.

It’s not just the words we use. That’s actually a very small part. The witness of truth has always been the physical manifestation of faith. It’s always been a matter of face-to-face contact, and it will always be that way.

My effort to put things on paper is just a small manifestation of that. When the online world becomes the primary means of oppression and persecution, our insistence on investing ourselves into the offline world will be the primary advantage. I’m praying that people catch this vision.

So I’ve been praying and contemplating these things, and I know that, for me at least, the Lord has granted some clarity, even some changes in the details. For example, instead of dumping my desktop machine, it will eventually become the “home cloud” — a storage server. Having books on paper is a good thing, but this is a small apartment where I live. Some of the stuff I need will have to remain virtual, but I’ll need my own copy here where I don’t have to trust the wider Internet.

My writing needs to be on paper, but given the current state of things, I can’t gain access to a full print shop in the flesh. I trained at one time on how to run all the equipment (offset press, print camera, plate burner, etc.), but I’ve not seen that older machinery in decades. And unless someone wants to fund a shop and all that equipment, in good working order, things can’t happen that way. Without that kind of print shop, almost all of the machinery someone else has relies on some kind of computerized file source. I’ll have to keep a copy of everything in printable format, meaning on a computer with all the instructions for a printer to pump out the desirable end product on paper.

And what I, or anyone else, can write is not the end of the matter. You see, there is virtually no way we can reduce to teaching the actual doing of our gospel witness. Biblical Law is a living and active thing in the human soul, and each of us must grow our own witness. All the books in the world can’t answer the essential questions about that. You just have to get on with the mission. Screwing things up is built into it, because it’s how we recover from mistakes that speaks so very loudly.

It’s not taught, but caught. You have to see it and experience it yourself. That’s how Our Lord works.

So, we won’t be cut off from the Net so much as we must consciously back away in order to have more energy and resources for the real-world effort. I’ll even go so far as to say this is a word from the Lord: Prepare to witness offline, even as the society around us gets more online. A critical element in how God moves is through that real-world interaction. If people can’t come to Him that way, they can’t come at all, because that’s how God does things. Once more: The packaging is part of the message.

You and I are the chosen packaging.