Draper Bikeway 19

Posted on August 22, 2019 by ehurst

It’s all about the gaps. In this case, we see the first layer of asphalt freshly laid at the northeast corner of the bikeway, near where SE 89th and Stanley Draper Drive meet. This was part of the final drive to get the entire loop paved and finished. I shot this about a week ago.

Below is the section of the bikeway right at the main north entrance to the Draper recreational area. It was one of the last gaps closed, in part because it still has some heavy equipment parked in the staging area. Also, down in the bottom where it crosses the actual East Elm Creek itself (for which the reservoir is named), there was a lot of unfinished dirt work until just the past week or so.

But here is a gap that opened up after it was given it’s initial layer of blacktop, near SE 119th Street. There was a large crew working along the southern half of the eastern shore, putting in open culverts because heavy rains would move tons of dirt over the bikeway when they were just regular ditches. This was something I warned about a couple of years ago, and I don’t think it was in the original plans to resort to such extravagant measures. I’m pretty sure this represents an add-on. At any rate, the heavy equipment involved in creating these culverts tore up the single, rather thin layer of asphalt, in part because the lack of good drainage had weakened the soil under the pavement. I rode over it several times in a bad state until they pulled it up and rebuilt the bed. This will have to be repaved from scratch.

These last two photos show the East Elm Creek crossing below the dam in various stages of preparation. This represents the last unfinished gap to be closed. The first shot of it above is from last week. There was an ancient open culvert they finally broke up right where the previous work dead ended. In the second shot, that has been removed and the drainage is now routed out around the whole area. This was shot today, showing a bulldozer making the last surface shaping, showing that it will be a rather sharp zigzag curve. Notice that the curbs have already been laid down to the edge of this unfinished section. Just about 100 meters left here.

The other item of note is that the second layer for the north and east section was begun this morning. When I rode past the asphalt crew was starting right where the previous finished surface ended just a little shy of the northern end of the western shore. There was fresh tack on the section ahead of them, running off east and over the ridge, so they plan on slapping down a lot of asphalt today. There were four dump trucks already lined up ahead of the asphalt machine, waiting with their hot loads to dump into the mouth of that thing.

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Most Government Is Inherently Evil

Posted on August 21, 2019 by ehurst

If we can embrace by faith the doctrine of the Fall, then our hearts can lead our minds to a more realistic philosophical frame of reference. Mankind is broken and cannot be fixed in reference to this world. The only fix is personal and individual, something spiritual, not social or political. It requires an individual commitment to another world beyond; Christ warned this was simply not possible via any human structure. The old national covenant was an experiment, a proof that it was not possible to redeem mankind en masse.

At the same time, the Old Covenant was very clearly a revelation of how things actually work in this world, if only humans could be made to listen. And the Old Covenant tells that truth so forcefully that it doesn’t bother to explicitly state some points that should be painfully obvious. Not just humanity, but all of Creation itself is hard-wired for eastern feudalism expressed in a tribal social and government system.

This is quite contrary to human reason, but that’s the whole point of the narrative on the Garden of Eden: human reason is not capable of discerning how things actually do work. Only revelation can answer that question. So we can justly say that virtually all of our world today is enslaved to a hideous lie.

The biggest factor in that lie is the brevity of human life itself. It’s a vicious circle that feeds on itself, as moral blindness makes life even shorter. The power to see beyond our limited human range of awareness is possible only in the heart, not in the intellect. The mind can see it in theory, but cannot actually touch it, so it remains an abstract nothing. The only way to see moral truth is with a much longer range viewpoint. We can see shalom only in terms of multiple generations.

Here’s a divine paradox for you: It is exceedingly hard to get good moral people into government. Good moral people do not want that kind of power over others. Revelation warns of that, but the message has apparently been too subtle for most to grasp. The best rulers in human history were those who came to power while pursuing other plans. They accepted the necessity of being rulers as the only means of helping those they loved. The greatest high moral examples of conquering heroes were those who crushed only those who threatened even worse than they got.

Whatever it is that you might invest into the meaning of the word “democracy,” it cannot possibly work. It never has, and it never will. It appears to some to be a rational and effective way to do things, but it never has actually worked in the long run. Instead of granting the masses power over themselves, it simply changes how they are enslaved. It demands they be deceived with materialism so that the worst people can rule over them.

There will always be a ruling elite. Everyone serves someone — that is a fundamental fact of human existence. It is not part of the Curse of the Fall; it is the nature of being human itself, even in Heaven. We are not deities with our own powers, though our intellects (without the constraints of the heart) will certainly believe there are no limits to what we can dream up and accomplish. But a system of choosing one’s government via any rational system will invariably fail, because it demands that government authorities have the ambition to rule. That ambition comes only with an evil heart.

So the only hope for occasionally having a good government is to have a system that, at the very least, inhibits ambition. It’s a system that makes expanding power very costly and impossible to maintain, so that the norm is small government close to you. It’s the system we call tribal feudalism. Hereditary tribal chiefs are the only hope for any decent government, even if it comes only sporadically. There is no better system.

Since there is no way we can expect to see anything like that in our world today, beyond a tiny handful of blessed tiny kingdoms, you and I should recognize our best hope is simply staying out of the way of bad “democratic” government. It’s a Beast. Sure, we can attempt in various ways to recreate that feudal dominion on a much smaller scale, a partial application that brings a measure of peace and harmony. It’s exceptionally hard in a Western society because our mythology of western feudalism is ass-backward from the eastern version. It requires some careful reshaping of personal expectations, and most people have no patience for that.

My point is that you learn to see the situation from the heart. Recognize with your intellect that the heart-mind is superior. Just sharing this idea should cause your heart to rejoice in the truth. If you can compel your brain to bow the knee to the heart, you’ll understand the logic of such things.

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Predestination Is Not Election

Posted on August 20, 2019 by ehurst

The Doctrine of Election isn’t really in the Bible, but Sovereign Grace is.

Keep in mind that the Scriptures were written mostly by Hebrew people. God designed their language and culture as the means to reveal Himself to fallen humanity. The Hebrew language itself is inherently symbolic; most common expressions were parables. This language arose from the Ancient Near East, a range of people, places and cultures that were utterly convinced that there was a Spirit Realm, but that you could not possibly describe it in human language. So virtually all ANE languages were indicative, not descriptive. Ultimate truth is beyond actual knowing, yet that ultimate reality made serious demands on human existence.

And while the Hebrew people were notorious for falling away from their Covenant, the firm assertion of Scripture is that there is only one God — their God Jehovah. The whole of Hebrew Scripture points to a very personal reality, animated with the life force of Jehovah. Everything in reality was seen in light of relations with Him. He is depicted as an imperial eastern potentate, a tribal feudal ruler. His nation was His family, adopted by covenant. He was ever-present in all of Creation. The whole of human existence was a matter of how devoted one was to His dominion and authority.

If you read Romans 9, Paul’s clearest statement on predestination, you realize that the term he used (Greek: proorizo — a horizon established in advance) applies to God’s mercy on people in this life. That is, it’s predestination in the sense of your lot in life. While it most certainly implies eternal destiny, there is really very little said about that directly.

This is a very Hebrew approach to the question. Don’t focus on your eternal destiny because there is no way we can talk about it. However, be aware that there is an eternal Spirit Realm where the consequences of things in this life are played out. In Hebrew revelation, death means the end of your opportunities to seek Jehovah’s favor, to bring Him glory. Seek His glory in this life because no one can explain what happens afterward. In other words, there is precious little about us going there, and an awful lot about how that other realm affects life here.

Backing up to the previous chapter in Romans, Paul encourages his readers to seek the power and glory of eternity in the here and now — “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:4). Even when he says something about what lies beyond death (8:18), he then goes on to talk about how that demands we manifest divine glory here and now. When we talk about eternity, the only way to hold that discussion is to talk about what it demands of us in this world. The word “saved” (8:24) falls in the context of redemption of our current existence. We need that expectation of eternity to cope with this life.

Thus, the whole discussion of predestination is focused on conforming to the image of Christ (8:29). Predestination is all about choosing us before we even enter this life (sovereign grace), but seeks to shape what this life will be for us. We are then required to make appropriate choices about our lot in life. Get your priorities straight in this world and eternity will take care of itself.

In that sense, we see that the classical systematic theology statement about divine election misses the point. It tries to settle a question about something we cannot possibly know in this life. Sure, you can become quite secure and convinced in your own eternal destiny, but it comes in the personal awareness of God’s favor, not some declared official status. Election cannot be objectified; it is inherently personal in nature.

When Paul addresses the issue of works, it is invariably in the context of dealing with Jewish legalism. Even Greek and Roman folks knew better than that nonsense. And the Epistle of James castigates Hellenized Jews for trying to separate works from faith. Thus, when Paul says legalistic performance won’t serve any purpose, he’s on the same sheet of music with James. The key to God’s favor is seeking it through revelation. Revelation is inherently mystical, symbolic, full of parables, because there is simply no way human language can capture the essence of the Spirit Realm where God and His throne reside. Jesus taught in parables to indicate truth in a way that would unite heart and mind in service to the Father, but could not carry the mind there alone.

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What’s Wrong with Augustine?

Posted on August 19, 2019 by ehurst

(This is being cross-posted on both blogs.)

A fundamental element in my personal sense of calling is putting the gospel message in reach of everyone. There are plenty of good servants of God who helped me along the way; most of them were academics in one sense or another. My job has been to bring that high brow stuff down, largely by seeing the foundation clearly, but emphasizing the implications. I am okay with high-brow stuff, but it’s not my mission to operate on that level very much, especially in what I write.

So when someone asks me about Augustine of Hippo, it requires warning you that if you want a high browed discussion from me, you are asking the wrong guy. Still, my summary is likely to answer the basic questions.

The man himself was a Berber, but born long after the overpowering Roman influence had changed his native land in North Africa. Thus, his family spoke Latin at home and prided themselves on upholding the best of Roman civilization. He passed through a very strong academic background, which included a hefty admiration for Hellenism, as well. Eventually he became a Christian and embraced a very romanized brand of Christian religion. His high intellect and solid classical education produced a body of work that remains influential in Western Christianity today.

On the one hand, his writings could be considered the foundation of Western Christianity in a certain sense. Not in the sense that he is the whole thing, but he represents a major turning point in pulling things back together after they had begun to fragment and scatter intellectually. He was a big-picture thinker. There’s nothing wrong with reading modern translations of his stuff if you have the time and inclination; you can find free copies on the Net.

Here’s the fundamental issue: He represents the turning point away from heart-led faith. He brought faith down into the realm of the intellect in a way that changed the shape of Western Christian religion forever. In his own thinking, he was trying to make faith reasonable, to show that faith and reason were not enemies. But he was already deeply infected by the notion of the heart as something far less than the way the Bible depicts it. In his writing, the heart is crippled compared to the biblical image. He still sees the heart as ruling, but with serious limiations.

He had no notion of the heart with its own “mind” superior to the intellect. He moved that function into the brain, and sets up the idea that the mind is not completely fallen. His work prepares the way for the Roman Church to declare that the intellect can be more-or-less morally perfected, that it can be fully redeemed while in this life. That perception is the foundation for how the Roman Church has turned out.

I’m not claiming credit for originating this criticism. Granted, I have yet to find anyone else who says it like this, but I’m sure others have grasped this before me. I learned heart-led as a conscious notion from non-Christian sources. It’s inherent in the traditions of the Ancient Near East, and very obviously consistent with the ancient Hebrew traditions, though seldom directly explained in studies on that. Even standard commentaries you find in Christian homes will tell you the Bible sees the heart as the seat of the will, in the sense of commitment and faith. But it is also consistent with some of the pagan philosophical stuff you can find in more recent writings. There are some very bright non-Christians who picked up on this as they struggled to find something deeper than Western Christian theology. But even among pagans, the heart-led way tends to be a minority view.

Still, we can be sure that the whole concept of the heart as a sensory organ and a distinctly separate “mind” that can process what it senses, and as a superior source of understanding of philosophical issues is nothing new. It is the best explanation so far for what I have lived with most of my life, and answered all my questions about faith. It soothed all my soul’s wounds from the abuse at the hands of a world that prefers Augustine’s approach. I won’t tell you this is God’s answer to all humanity; it’s the answer that works for me.

Standing on Augustine is an excellent start down the path of criticism for the Enlightenment and everything that follows it. But all that does is drag things back as far as Augustine. We still need to be aware of Augustine’s major failure. Not that he consciously rejected the truth of the heart-led way, but that it was lost and buried by the time he came along. We can find glimmers of that higher path of the heart throughout Church History, but it was almost always the view that was rejected and squelched by the mainstream. We can thank Augustine for that.

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Driven by Calling

Posted on August 18, 2019 by ehurst

There’s a very driven man with a YouTube channel who fought with Tesla for quite some time over the right to restore wrecked Tesla cars using salvaged parts. It doesn’t matter that I really believe electric vehicles — using current technology — are a complete waste of resources. What matters is how driven this man has been over the years, learning all there is to know about how Teslas are put together and how to diagnose and repair anything and everything on them. He did so all the while facing Tesla’s hostile attitude and outright interference in his efforts. He acknowledged that his persistence sounded like an obsession, but he’s a true believer in the technological concepts, as well as the basic right to actually own a physical object he can buy, and no one telling him what he can do with it. He now runs a business based on this whole idea. Yet you would be hard put to find any trace of arrogance in his demeanor; he just wants to help people.

In an interview, the legendary rock guitarist Eddie van Halen revealed how he was driven to experiment with guitars and amplifiers, learning how they worked and making some very early improvements in the actual design of the equipment. I honestly don’t like some of his songs, but I recognize his genius. Regarding his pioneering playing techniques, he openly credits a higher power that gave him his talent. He says he was driven by a sense of calling and remains humble about it to this day.

You can easily find more examples like these two. The world is full of such people, and the vast majority of them aren’t so talented, just driven. We keep coming back to this same point over and over: Seek a sense of calling from God. Don’t seek it because you want to achieve what the two men above have accomplished. They weren’t looking for fame and fortune. They were simply trying to scratch an itch; it was a matter of who they were as humans.

Isn’t it a little odd that we find paragons of faith outside of religion?

I am by no means a computer genius, nor any kind of Internet guru. I know only what I’m driven to learn about those things. Some of you have zero interest in my choice to use Linux and BSD, but I believe you understand how God uses my interest to draw people to His message. Maybe you know that I’ve also been obsessed with rediscovering the ancient Hebrew traditions, even to the point of rejecting my own cultural heritage for the most part. Every now and then I get a comment on one of the blogs from someone wanting me to go back and debate my choices. Those issues are settled in my heart and I’m not going to revisit them at the behest of someone who bristles at my faith.

I’m driven; I’m not looking back. There is no particular goal, only the sense of calling every day to go where God drives me. Yes, it tends to limit opportunities to have a better life, as most people measure such things. It tends to cut me off from friendships and even some of my earthly family. I often feel rather isolated and lonely, but I refuse to turn back. This is who I am.

This is the key to understand the ministry attached to Radix Fidem. This is who we are.

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Teachings of Jesus — John 14:18-24

Posted on August 17, 2019 by ehurst

Jesus is still talking along the lines of returning home to His Father’s heavenly court to take up His co-regency. The disciples are still expecting a restoration of the literal Davidic Kingdom of Israel. Their blindness here is almost painful.

Having just told them of the Comforter to come, Jesus reaffirms that they will not have to proceed alone. He will be back. He says this knowing they don’t get what He means, but will understand later when it actually happens as a historical event. When it happens, the world will no longer see Him because He will not take a human physical form. But He will be alive, something that they need to remember once the Crucifixion and burial comes. In that same sense, they will also live — it will be an accession of eternal life, a gift that comes to them because He will raise from the dead.

When that day comes, they will finally understand how they can be united with Him in the Holy Spirit. Up to now, the Holy Spirit did not typically enter the hearts of men, but drove them via proximity. As men drew near to Jehovah with their hearts, it was like the wind filling the sails of their souls. After the Ascension, the Holy Spirit would enter the soul and unite with them, more like a ship with a motor. The Spirit that comes will be a manifestation of both the Father and the Son, indistinguishable in the human experience.

But it will still require faith. Jesus builds the image based on the Old Testament parable of Himself as feudal master. One who truly embraces the covenant that Jesus offers becomes family; their familial passion will be obvious. And it will be considered the same commitment to the Father, because the Father and Son will be indistinguishable in human experience. Such people will get to know God as a Person, the Father closer than any human father could be.

The other Judas (Jude, AKA Thaddeus or Lebbeus) was just as lost as the others when he asked how it was possible that they would see Him and the world would not. How could this Messiah-King reign over Israel if only a handful could see Him?

If you were on the same track as Jude, you would think Jesus had ignored the question. Instead, Jesus was explaining why the question was missing the point. Anyone who is committed in faith to Jesus as Lord will embrace His message. This would amount to moving into the shadow of God’s divine favor, which has been standing there waiting for us since the beginning. When someone stands in God’s favor, both Father and Son will invade that person’s being in the form of the Holy Spirit. They will know that they are not alone.

This is not so with anyone who rejects that same message. Without that message, it is impossible to stand in God’s favor. No one can find it without a heart of faith, because the message itself is structured for the heart alone. This message did not originate from Jesus; it is the same ancient message of Jehovah from the Garden of Eden. Jesus merely came to make that message so obvious no one can pretend they can’t get it if they but wanted it.

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Fussing about Churchianity

Posted on August 16, 2019 by ehurst

I spent a little time recently reading specifically Christian news sites. Aside from one that holds a Catholic slant, most of them collect stories regarding American evangelical politics. There’s a lot of stuff aimed at pressuring US government entities to do things favorable to conservative evangelicals.

That would include some lawsuits I would consider totally frivolous, like the guy in Idaho who wants to be an independent construction contractor, but refuses to give the state his SSN because of his peculiar religious beliefs. We are convinced the Word says this man should simply accept the obvious, that for him to follow his peculiar religious rules will result in persecution. Persecution comes with following Christ, and we should consider it normal.

Sometimes the content of stories seek to hide something more sinister than trying to force government to make peculiar exemptions. You perhaps have noticed a number of evangelical influencers who have renounced their allegiance to cultural Churchianity — Marty Sampson of Hillsong and Joshua Harris of Covenant Life Church — along with several who are dragging their religion through the mud of public scandals. Most of these are associated with a peculiar thread in Western evangelical religion: Dominionism.

We’ve discussed that before. In broad terms, it is the religion of conquering the world politically in the name of Christ. This view is espoused by Hillsong and a handful of Calvinist organizations that have proliferated in the past decade. But the actual attempt to assert such political influence has been around since before WW2 in the US. Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family, while motivated by the panic of the left against even the slightest shred of conservative religious influence in society, is nonetheless an accurate warning about a very secretive program.

While many groups are ostensibly Dispensationalist/Zionist in belief, the broader Dominion Theology is quite often teamed up with the non-Zionist Covenant Theology of the more recent Calvinist revival. It is probably the single greatest political threat to globalism. Ever since the globalists and Zionists split some time ago, the latter has built a potent imperialist network intent on forcing Western evangelical cultural Christianity down everyone’s throat. They have infiltrated the ostensibly globalist intelligence community well enough to keep the Deep State from becoming even more blatantly partisan.

The single greatest threat to genuine faith is embracing traditional organizational models. What you see paraded as “new” church formation is merely the same old entrepreneurial model commonly used in niche entertainment businesses. I call them “entrepreneurial churches” because the model bears little resemblance to traditional churches, except perhaps in the most superficial ways. But it remains trapped in the single greatest lie the Devil has ever promoted: that churches should work to be taken seriously by the world. It’s part and parcel of head-centered religion. It goes all the way back to the reign of Roman Emperor Constantine.

Still, we are not hostile to all organized Christian religion. We have been called to a very narrow and difficult path, and the mainstream churches don’t want us. Our ministry is aimed at giving a sense of fellowship and identity to folks who cannot fit themselves into the mainstream religious organizations. We serve those church’s interests, if not their concrete objectives. We most certainly aren’t trying to compete with, displace them or be like them in any way.

Not all of the news is bad. In case you have grown weary of the propaganda against Christian faith itself, here’s something to counter the lies. Someone who actually studied the situation tells us the numbers reveal a different story. People are still hearing the call, and trying to find a religious setting that answers to that sense of calling. We sincerely hope they find what they seek, because we know that the Lord works in churches, often despite the humans running the show.

Meanwhile, please note that I turned off JScript to visit these sites because they are among the very worst offenders about hounding visitors with the most atrocious and annoying advertising.

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Fellowship Is His Glory

Posted on August 15, 2019 by ehurst

The key to shalom is fellowship.

During my time serving with the US Army in the Netherlands, I became fully conscious of the power of Christian fellowship that reaches across sectarian boundaries. It was like stumbling into the light and opening my eyes. This was the key to meaningful faith. Those who hid out, seeking the fellowship of only their own brand of religion were missing out. Sadly, they gained the upper hand of chapel politics before I left. We were very close to the biblical model until the iron walls of human tradition rose up to block us off.

At the time, I was still struggling to overcome my own brand of human traditions. With few exceptions, all my efforts to recreate that sense of fellowship were crushed by the system to which I thought I belonged. After a decade of abuse trying to break me, that system finally spat me out.

Meanwhile, the primacy of fellowship as the mark of holiness had blossomed within my teaching. Once I renewed my philosophical understanding of Hebrew intellectual traditions, I realized that our single most powerful witness in this fallen world is how we love each other as fellow believers. Purity of doctrine means nothing if it doesn’t reap the harvest of shalom. There are boundaries, of course; otherwise there is no sense of covenant belonging. We are hard wired to seek a tribal identity. It means we must include these and exclude those. Those will have to form their own tribe because their faith demands things that won’t work in other tribes, where the demands of faith are yet different.

There is no place for hurt feelings if the context of fellowship changes. That’s just God’s signal for you to move on and take up a different ministry, encouraging and supporting the faith of yet a new tribe. So a critical component of divine obedience is learning the ways of fellowship and it’s necessary boundaries. And for those who stick around, it means learning how to keep compassion warm and alive, despite all the variations we bring to the covenant fellowship. It’s process, not product.

This is nothing new to any of you, I’m sure. It’s inherent in the heart-led way. But what most of you may struggle with is some misplaced instinct to leave your covenant brothers and sisters alone too much. Under ideal conditions, we wouldn’t be able to avoid each other. We would know what each other smelled like fresh out of bed and late at night. Because we fellowship through the means of the Internet, it means we must fill in the blanks of virtual fellowship by bugging each other, as it were. Even as an introvert, I long for the human connection with all of you.

There’s no sin in staying quiet when you have something God commands that takes up lots of time and attention. However, this should not be your standard M.O. Don’t deprive each other of the lifeblood of fellowship. Our shalom together is His glory.

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Gamma Culture

Posted on August 13, 2019 by ehurst

Before my brother died, he tried at one point to get me to listen to one of his favorite bands, Linkin Park. I agreed those boys had some talent, but I didn’t care for what they were saying. I didn’t remember much about it, so I listened to one of their songs on YouTube yesterday: “Numb.” Then I remembered why I didn’t like them. Whining about teen angst does not impress me. And yes, my brother wasn’t a really well adjusted happy camper, either. Substance abuse played a major role in his early demise.

He was 15 years younger than me, and had been very early to embrace the likes of Linkin Park and similar bands. He was on the leading edge of the generation behind me. I’ve noticed over the years that a significant portion of them were much more nerdy, in the sense of clustering around the Gamma Male scale of social development. Gammas tend to be sensitive, seeing abuse when it isn’t there, and refusing to let things go when they are offended. If Linkin Park’s guys were real men, they wouldn’t waste much time complaining about maltreatment. Instead, they would sing about their victories, or at the very least how noble it was to face difficult odds and not give up. The songs wouldn’t end in angst, but on some note of triumph.

What it tells me is that there is now a very high Gamma Male factor in the US. Not that nobody has noticed before, but this is particularly offensive to our brand of faith. It leads to a kind of blaming God for not making things better than they are, so that we have at best a bad view of Him, and at worst a nearly uniform rejection of divine revelation. It is the epitome of abusing human reason as an excuse to reject religion itself. It’s one more way the Devil seeks to keep souls captive through delusion.

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Dig the Bunker

Posted on August 12, 2019 by ehurst

Just so you’ll know ahead of time, it’s unlikely there will be any new insights to share in the near future. That is, I’m quite certain we’ll be granted fresh clarity that more tightly weaves together our understanding of revelation. There may even be some fresh implications explored now and then, but nothing really new. You already have it all in your heart somewhere, and it’s just a matter of getting you head to grasp it and run with it.

You already have what it takes to ask and perform miracles appropriate for God’s glory. You already have the faith it takes to lay down your lives, if you just exercise it. You have already seen grand visions of what God can do with our covenant and teaching. The trick now is to practice the discipline of staying with it, and not letting anything important slip away.

And just in time — any day now something is going to break. We need a consistent testimony of the Lord’s glory in the midst of the coming plagues. Just keep doing what you already know you should do. When the next level of tribulation hits, it will be too late to panic. If you aren’t already prepared to face it, there’s not much I can do to help you now.

So it may get quiet on this blog especially, and only the occasional technology noise on the other blog. I don’t want you to think I’ve dropped off the face of the earth. I am used to having something to say every day; that’s the way it has been for more than a decade. But now is the time to dig in and simply do what we know already. If you need a little fresh inspiration, it might help if I had some questions to ponder. If not, just get used to the silence. Don’t depend on me, but on the Lord.

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