Odds and Ends 11

1. I’m still riding my bike; I’m keeping up the maintenance. I recently replaced the drive chain and the rear tire. If nothing else, the economic troubles will require it as a primary means of transportation from time to time. However, the long pleasure rides across the countryside are gone. Over the past two weeks the Lord has dealt with me about this, saying that He will no longer protect me from the knee wear-n-tear that arises from taking long hilly rides.

On the other hand, He does require me to keep up with the physical therapy exercises and the other stuff I do in connection with that. So three days each week I’m going to invest a couple of hours in that long workout. It includes riding a few miles as part of that.

2. As previously noted, the core of the Radix Fidem path is your convictions. The whole point of Radix Fidem is to provide a frame of reference for normalizing the heart-led way of faith. That’s part of what “meta-religion” means. Upon that foundation, we also strive to research ways to turn that into a community of faith. There are no Lone Rangers in Christ, not by design. You may be stuck following this path in isolation for a time, but inevitably the Spirit works to turn this into a community. That’s also part of our path.

A fundamental element in the Radix Fidem path is a high degree of separation from the society at large. Unless you live in a society that is very close to the Covenant of Biblical Law, it is your duty to seek a strong measure of withdrawal from the world around you. We are obliged to do things quite differently, because our entire outlook is radically different.

Christ made it plain that following Him brings persecution. It will ebb and flow based on historical currents that God controls, so we have no grounds for trying to regulate it in any way. The last thing we want, though, is to compromise with the world on the grounds of seeking their approval as the means to a reduction in persecution. That’s what has brought us where we are today with the mainstream church so very far from Scripture.

This separation is the foundation of our outreach. We need to seek divine wisdom on what measures of separation are consistent with the Covenant. Obviously I’m not going to call for a uniform, such as we see with Orthodox Jews, stuck in some particular time or place. But I will call for a measure of cloistering, of seeking to generate an atmosphere that limits exposure to the defiling influences of our damned world. We want as much Covenant atmosphere as we can get, so as to claim as much shalom as the Lord will grant.

We need to pray about ways to build an independent community: an independent social structure, an independent economy, an independent food supply, etc. We need to think in terms of keeping it all at home, so to speak, as much as possible. Yes, it needs to be as exclusive as we can make it.

3. I just spent the last two or three days struggling with my wife’s laptop running Win10. It would update, but then refuse to register it. The registry got corrupted, and I’m finding that there are numerous complaints on the Net about just how easily and frequently that happens. It’s gotten quite fragile. The solution was to reinstall in place using the ISO creation tool. It took hours.

For me, this in itself fulfills the prediction that Microsoft will jump the shark. The whole process of updating is taking over the use of the system itself. You have no viable choice; the system will invest all its resources in updating when MS says so. You don’t get to use it unless you have a very expensive machine with lots of resources. For most users who can’t afford $2000+ machines, it’s not your computer any more.

This is only going to get worse. It’s a bad time to be hostage to Windows.