Wandering Thoughts

It’s not as if nothing out there is happening, but there’s not much that requires a reaction right this moment. There is nothing we can do for people who reject the Covenant. So long as they remain outside the Covenant, they aren’t our problem. Then again, those who attack the Covenant do come to our attention, but only if God has placed in our hands the means to respond, and a calling/mission to do so.

I have a mission to point things out from time to time. For example, from what I can see, TikTok is, at least in part, a gateway for young ladies to enter the porn market. The TikTok app doesn’t exclude porn, even though the primary user base is juveniles. It doesn’t matter what the young ladies imagine their audience to be; it’s one step away from the infamous Only Fans, a DIY porn site for pay. Look for that market to expand.

That we can do nothing about this kind of problem doesn’t keep us from praying. But when we pray about it, it helps to keep a clear eye on the larger move behind it. The more modern manifestations of the Tower of Babel always include a major push to degrade the little people. The best way to do this is not by force, but by provoking an appetite for dissipation. More the point, it makes degradation normal. TikTok is all good clean fun, no? Just a generation ago, it would have been shocking and scandalous.

We can dispute generational value systems, but that would be missing the point. The Bible distinctly prohibits that kind of exhibitionism. In our fallen state, nudity belongs only in a very private context. All the human reasoning about that means nothing; God says what He says. It’s part of my mission to point out these things.

There are plenty of issues over which other people expend a lot of emotion, but that don’t matter to me, things that do not represent a fundamentally moral choice. There is no one righteous computer operating system; they are all born in sin. There is no Christian car brand, etc. A Jesus Frisbee isn’t going to fly better than the others. The market is loaded with nonsense branding.

Sometimes I think I understand where God is leading me on something, only to find myself obliged to reverse course. But I don’t represent my choices as any kind of indicator for you to follow. I’m consciously trying to avoid the “look at me” impulse. On the other hand, I realize that God has touched my life, and everywhere I’ve ever gone on the face of this planet, people decide to follow me, even when I deny that I’m trying to lead. This is simply the way humans are. There are just a handful of people who forge ahead in the assurance they have a mission to fulfill. The rest tend to follow one or another of those driven individuals. If you follow me, you may end up wondering if I actually do know where I’m going.

But those things on which I waver are not critical to the mission itself. Despite my efforts to back myself out of the Internet, I still have things to write and the Net is the only place I can publish. I need the tools to simplify the job. So when I ran Windows on both my computers, I actually had some trouble keeping track of the stuff I write. Windows no longer offers easy networking on a home LAN. It has gotten very convoluted and Byzantine. I had to revert my desktop to running Linux so I could run the network services I needed for all the other machines in the house. It’s not a statement about the superiority of one OS over another, just a matter of choosing the best tool for the job.

Unless you have peculiar needs, don’t follow my lead on this. There are plenty of things I thought I had figured out for the the coming persecution, but I was blindsided by plans God wasn’t going to tell me about in advance. It’s easy for my flesh to imagine that it has things under control.

So now my planning needs to include wheelchair usage, not bikepacking. Did that kill my photography? Not yet, but it has certainly changed the kind of subjects at which I point my camera. I can assure you there’s a lot of subtle stuff I’m not going to see alongside the road because I can’t drive like I used to ride. On the one hand, I’m constrained to spend more time in places where humans have changed things a lot. It’s a more art and less natural stuff, more urban and less rural. On the other hand, the natural stuff I’ll shoot will be more a matter of grand landscape vistas, not the little delights I used to run across all the time.

I don’t anticipate knee surgery any time soon. What the medical staff have told me so far indicates I’m still quite a ways from meeting the threshold the system requires. This is not where I wanted to go with the photography. The limitations on my cycling are not at all what I hoped to see, and I’ll definitely miss the hiking. I’m still trying to process what this signals about God’s changes in my mission. There’s a lot of stuff He lets me figure out on my own.