Still Feeling My Way Along

I’m flawed; I’m a fallen creature subject to any number of failures. The Lord has a lot of work on His hands with me, and I often wonder why He chose to use me in the first place.

But He did. Deluded or not, I’m absolutely convinced that He has anointed me to serve His purpose in revelation. That revelation is the thing; all the rest is just a tool for that. That includes me. My life is just a resource for His revelation. Here in the US, we refer to that colloquially as “the gospel ministry.”

That’s the focus of my being. I have to clarify and spread the gospel message. That’s two different things, and they are done differently. I’ve already noted that I believe the Internet is the wrong place to try spreading the message, at least in terms of emphasis. Because of how God has appointed the propagation of the gospel to happen via personal encounters with real people, very few can be reached through the impersonal medium of the Internet.

But that leaves the question of clarification, and that most certainly can be done on the Internet. That’s a big chore, and it’s one that we need to do, because the human race has traveled far away from the time and place when Jesus walked on this earth.

Most of you who read this blog came to join our little online community because of the clarification you found, not because you didn’t have the gospel already. We still need that. I need it from you, too.

I need your prayers, as well. Over the past couple of months, the Lord has moved in ways that caught me off-guard. He’s caused me to eat some of the words I posted here. That’s why I try to make them easy to swallow; I try to leave room for you to doubt anything I write. That way you remain self-reliant in your faith. I keep saying that you shouldn’t buy into everything I say, because it may be changed somewhere down the road. Rather, let my writing be something that provokes your own introspection and prayer.

One of the things that has been refined in prayer is my understanding of where I need to go in the near term. I was ready to drop the whole computer and Internet thing, if the Lord required that of me. But He was trying to shake me loose from a false apprehension about certain things, and in His wisdom, He knew what it would take to get my attention. This is the “clue-by-four” some of us require now and then.

So there was a need for dividing my ministry into two domains. On the one hand, we need very much a renewal of face-to-face ministry, and lots of prayer behind it. We must break a thousand bad habits churches have accumulated over the centuries. We need a better way to share the gospel with people who don’t have it, or don’t have enough of it. On the other hand, this business of clarification has to keep going out into the lives of fellow believers.

It was a little confusing for me at first. I’ve had to take the time to absorb the message from the Lord about how to do these things. I confess the methods and means are still confusing to me in some measure. After all I’ve done to attack Google as an institution on this earth, I wasn’t prepared to hear the Lord tell me to commit a major portion of my work into Google’s care. But I can understand how sometimes the best way to face a huge enemy is to be too close and too small for them to swipe at you. I’m not trying to become a major figure on the Internet, just a little nobody slipping in and out.

And I’ve long known that my ministry is aimed at a very small audience. I’m called to help the nonconformists, the oddballs who don’t benefit much from the mainstream. The mainstream isn’t necessarily an enemy, except by accident at times, but they aren’t a target of anything I do. It’s just a matter of tactics, not strategy, when I address the ways they are different from me. I have to be careful sometimes to distinguish myself from them, so that the oddballs can pick me out as one of them.

Have you ever wondered about the paradox of being united in our variableness?

So here’s what you can expect: Once I finish with the revision of my books and committed them to print-on-demand, I’ll be through with Microsoft stuff. Future documents will be offered in either Open Document format (LibreOffice, et al) or Google Docs, or PDF for convenience’s sake. I have no doubt I’ll keep cranking out the verbiage in excessive amounts as I have in the past, but I’m changing the packaging. No more ebooks. I’m not sure why the Lord is telling me not use MS Office in the future, but that’s for Him to worry about. I’ll keep my copy of MS Office 2000 simply because I like the grammar tools, but the file format is off the table. The primary issue here is backing away from the current existing corporation and it’s products.

I suspect whatever future is left for the Internet includes Google winning some of the battles and Microsoft fading away. That’s not a word from God, just my current human impression of things.

I’ve converted my desktop machine to Linux Mint. It’s less hassle than anything else I might use, but that’s not meant to influence your choices. All our home LAN stuff is served up via SSH; I’ve installed FileZilla on my wife’s computers and made an account for her on my machine for file sharing. That way she can log in and I can keep it all quite secure compared to something like Samba. The folks who develop Samba have decided to make it as arcane and Byzantine as possible, so that only highly experienced systems admins can do anything with it. You have to read a book-length manual to use it, and it’s written so ordinary users cannot possibly comprehend. SSH is a simple matter of installing it, and it works fine by default, and it’s more secure.

I’m still trying to learn the Tao of Chromebooks. Eventually I’ll see what the Lord had in mind when He moved me to get one. When it comes time to spend the money, I’ll pay for a basic account with Google instead of Microsoft. The applicable email address for my Chromebook is jehurst at gmail.