Photography: Red Rock Canyon

Posted on May 9, 2018 by ehurst

I got a late start and this took a lot longer than I expected. However, I really did enjoy the drive cross-country through Mustang, Union City, Cogar, Binger and up to Red Rock Canyon from the south. It was a gorgeous view of wildflowers all along the highway and not a few sandstone cliffs near the highway as I got closer. Red Rock Canyon is no anomaly, just a special case of cliff walls converging on a narrow valley floor. This was an ancient oasis on the California Road, which basically followed the Canadian River through Oklahoma. The south end of the canyon offers pretty gentle slopes hidden behind foliage.

I tried to follow the red trail markers, which led me up a set of steep switchbacks onto the east ridge. This part was relatively nice, but then it hits a section that has seen a grass fire. This causes all the cedars to flare up, killing the tree but leaving the dead trunk and most of the limbs. So it was a lot of dead cedar trunks now mostly fallen over with younger cedars and other trees sprouting up through the ruins.

Once I got near this high rocky peak, the nice trail stuff was gone. I was pointing my camera upslope; this is pretty steep. In fact, it got increasingly difficult to find the trail across wide stretches of undulating red sandstone. These sloped pitches end at the rim of the canyon, and it’s very easy to fall off without realizing you are at the cliff. I got somewhere on the other side of this peak before I lost the trail completely.

This is one of the side pockets in the canyon. This particular spot is set aside for reserved group camping. The competition is fierce and some groups have kept their annual reservation every year since before I was born.

It was like this image for over a mile continuing northward and I was about ready to come down, but there was no safe escape. I kept checking the places where runoff had carved out a channel, but it always ended in a drop too high for me to consider risking a jump. It kind of ruined my hike that the trail was so poorly marked.

Eventually a found a deeper than usual channel at the head of a camping pocked. Part of it is in shadow, but I traversed the wall from left to right in the image, using hand holds and some footholds until I was close enough to drop down without injury.

By this point I was up close to the entrance to the canyon. This is the view as I left that pocket. This park has its own water system and spigots are scattered generously throughout the park. The water is free, tasty and comes out of the ground cold. I took advantage of it to refill my water bottle. Then it was a long slow walk back to my car at the other end.

There are two or three rappelling walls and this is the biggest. If you could get up close enough, you’d see rope marks worn through the lip of the wall at the top. Because school isn’t out and it’s a Wednesday, there weren’t any climbers. In fact, there weren’t many tents or RVs, and the only other pedestrians was a group of kids from a private school on an outing. They were audible throughout most of the park.

This was the last I saw of the canyon walls as they got softer and lower toward the southern end. I’m going to see if I can look up some topo maps with the official trails drawn on them. I may try to come back again some time and explore the rest of the trails. This place is worth seeing more than once.

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Learn to Flock

Posted on May 9, 2018 by ehurst

In the Bible, feudalism always means family.

The biblical image is more inclusive, versus the exclusive privilege associated with Western feudalism. The Eastern potentate held forth an open invitation to adopt the right people into his household as family. And then Scripture goes on to elaborate at length that the invitation is based on moral commitment, not some luck of the draw having the right talents. The issue was always a matter of moral orientation. And then the Scripture generously demonstrates how moral temperament is subject to your moral will.

In other words, there’s no excuse for anyone to exclude themselves. You miss out only because you reject the moral obligations. It is feudalism, after all, but most humans fail to understand that if you don’t consciously serve the Creator, you’ll serve the Devil by default. Just because you can imagine a world where you are free of any such obligations is no excuse for resisting. The reality is that God made things a certain way, and the only hope we have is understanding what He has done.

That’s what divine revelation is all about. God says He has done enough to speak to your moral consciousness; the ball is in your court. You can family or you can be a fool.

The problem we face today, particularly in America, is that we have a deeply perverted mythology about family itself. I’ve written whole books on the subject of how very far we are from the biblical ideal on male and female relations, but sufficient it is here just to remind ourselves that our culture is inherently hostile to biblical marriage. And because we get that wrong, we get everything else about family wrong.

But for now, I want to emphasize how it distorts our understanding of what church should be. If you attend a mainstream church, you may be aware that all you really have is a big organized group of associates, and your conscience may be afflicted over how it fails to be the family of God. And because there is so very much basic understanding missing, the means to satisfying that burning sense of unfinished work will never come within reach. You’ll see churches come up with all kinds of efforts and studies on how to do fellowship, but it will never be enough.

This is where I sincerely wish I knew how to make a movie that could portray a better image of how an ancient Hebrew family did things. We need to demonstrate this against the common cultural context in which we live. Not that I am by any means perfect, all the more so because I’m having to research and reclaim that territory without having ever lived in it before. I’m a trailblazer exploring the ruins of a lost world. And I’ve been struggling for years to understand what I see, while also trying to entice a few other folks to join me.

This is not about the rules and customs, but the very habit itself of relying on convictions in the heart to guide. More to the point, it’s a matter of your convictions in your heart guiding your choices. There’s a critical element of learning how to negotiate amongst a household of people with sometimes widely varying convictions. This is the key to restoring the ancient Hebrew way of doing family, and it’s not something I can simply spell out in writing.

This is where we turn again to assert the necessity of heart-led adherence to the living Biblical Law of God’s divine character. This is where we restore the Eastern feudalism of the shepherd guiding his flock by his voice, to reflect how our Creator is the ultimate Good Shepherd and we are the sheep of His pasture.

We get church wrong because we don’t know how to flock.

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It Has to Find You

Posted on May 8, 2018 by ehurst

A life worth living is the one you’ll sacrifice.

I’ll refer you to this article. You need to understand it for yourself, on your own terms. In my case, I’m perfectly willing to let society continue on its path to destruction because I know beyond all doubt that it cannot be changed. What can be changed is the atmosphere in which it happens.

This world is broken and cannot be fixed. But we know that a few individuals within this world can be saved as individuals. Saving them involves a shift in awareness, a different consciousness. That’s about as close as we can come to having a worldly purpose: to take people out of this world. That is, we don’t seek to end their lives, but to breathe Life into their existence.

The very most we can hope for is a grant of space, a sort of nodding acceptance that we as freaks can’t be changed back into the standard social mold for the majority. If we can just get them to leave us alone, we have won as much as we are going to win. But even that isn’t really a goal, just a hope. The whole idea behind the image of Armageddon is that they can’t just let us be; they have to vanquish our difference.

This thing we do with faith has to be big enough that we will die for it. It has to be more important than our lives. It has to burn inside each of us or it’s not real. This is why “organizing” means helping each other get used to the radical difference this cultivates in our souls. That’s the whole game — getting used to the otherworldly norm. We come together to reinforce our separateness, or what the Bible calls “holiness.”

This is why I avoid anything that smacks of “leadership.” If this isn’t an organic shift in you as individuals, then there’s nothing I can do to make it work for you. You have to find it on your own terms; it has to find you. It has to come from your heart.

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Heavenly Consolation

Posted on May 7, 2018 by ehurst

Paul and his companions followed one solid rule during those missionary journeys: Go only where the Lord opens a door. It didn’t matter what made the most sense, or where he was yearning and burning to go.

You have to read between the lines, but a couple of times Paul avoided jurisdictions where he already knew he would face prosecution for preaching the gospel. There were times he took a circuitous route to avoid those places. Otherwise, his only threat was any number of Jewish activists who wanted him dead. Without them, he would have seldom faced trouble with authorities. He chose his battles carefully based on his calling, not his fears nor his reason.

I’ve had preachers literally yell at me for espousing that attitude. They took the management approach. If they could imagine a way to do it, I was wrong for not being willing to face it their way. They did not permit a sense of mission; If I had any calling at all, I had to go where missions management needed me. And the Holy Spirit was not in charge. To them, talk of the Holy Spirit was just an excuse to dodge responsibilities at which they arrived purely by reason.

So I was accused of lacking commitment, but that meant commitment to their convenience. I was accused of being lazy because I didn’t want to perform their work for them. I was accused of being unprofessional because I wasn’t willing to follow their exact path through life.

To this day a very wide swath of evangelical ministry insists that the only proper guide is management and efficiency studies, as if the gospel were a product being marketed. It is all about the sales pitch and numerical growth. Anything else is simply not taking your calling seriously, if you listen to them.

Missionaries who travel to countries where things go against them should have known this was possible. Shoot, it’s altogether possible here in the US. Claiming justice and human rights is not a part of the gospel message, so trying to call home and have the US government bully the local government about persecuting an American missionary is simply not right.

Paul did use the protections of Roman Law, and was careful to avoid leaving the Roman Empire. That was his calling. Other apostles went outside the Roman Empire because that was their calling. That has nothing to do with American missionaries who travel under the presumption of the US government projecting its power, as if the American way of life was the gospel itself.

Real missionaries called of God will rejoice in persecution and sorrow (2 Corinthians 1). Suffering in that sense is a blessing, a mark of divine favor.

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Pulling Back the Hedge

Posted on May 6, 2018 by ehurst

Most of you are probably familiar with the parabolic image of the hedge (Isaiah 5:4-6). It’s a figure of speech for moral covering, a part of what elders and priests offer to those they serve. It requires a good understanding of Eastern feudalism, the idea of limited dominion.

I am where the Lord wants me in terms of residence. When we first moved here a couple of years ago, very early I began extending my covering over the people living around me. Some were more receptive than others. A part of my covering was to pick up the trash. By obeying the Lord in that small way, I was seeking His covering over my household and anyone who wanted to share in that moral dominion.

Try to understand that anyone who leases an apartment here has to read a bunch of rules that include prohibitions against littering, to include dropping cigarette butts on the ground. Nobody here is unaware of that rule. More to the point, it’s part of Biblical Law. Respect for God’s Creation includes refraining from polluting as much as it’s within your power, and to clean up pollution when you can. I was doing that, and it generated a limited moral hedge around the area I cleaned.

Recently a family has moved into our apartment block who are profligate trash droppers. Their kids are bad enough, but at least one adult smokes and drops the butts on the ground all around the far end of the breezeway. We are talking a pack or two every day. And along with that, several other families have moved into adjacent buildings who are just as bad.

I gave up. The task was simply too burdensome. I had been using those t-shirt bags you get from most stores, saving them for just that purpose. I can’t afford bags big enough to contain the trash scattered around this place overnight. So I’ve pulled in my hedge; I’ve stopped picking it up in such a large area as before. I’m at peace with that decision. In a sense, I’ve turned them over the Satan for God’s wrath. They have rejected my limited moral dominion, and certainly rejected the Lord’s will.

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Teachings of Jesus — Matthew 13:1-23

Posted on May 5, 2018 by ehurst

There is no clinical description possible; that’s the whole point of this passage. If you choose to invest your awareness into your convictions, you become sensitive to what those convictions have to say. In that sense, you are breathing life into them. They become important to you, taking up a strong position in your awareness. Because we lack a cultural basis for this, it is very difficult to do. The Bible refers to the heart as the seat of our convictions. We have a false imagine in its place, of the heart as merely a repository of sentiment.

For the people in Jesus’ day, there was a cultural background for understanding this, but a couple of centuries during which it was pushed aside, even as the terminology persisted. The heart was the symbol for the part of you where convictions reside, where faith can discern God’s will for you. The problem for Jesus’ audience was not like ours — a complete absence of the heart as a separate faculty — but it was more a problem with insensitivity of the heart. We need to destroy our false image and build the entire reference from scratch; they needed to renew the one they already had.

Thus, the Parable of the Sower addresses the different ways the heart can become hardened. In the first instance, the issue was hardness due to the sheer volume of exposure to conventional worldly concerns. This represents someone who is entirely consumed with pragmatism and efficiency, of conforming to norms. The Word of moral truth is too quickly brushed aside because it’s dropped into some preexisting mental category. It’s not received as a fresh calling from the Lord; it’s dismissed as something already dealt with. “We have this under control already.”

In the second instance, the heart is hardened by shallowness. This is someone who has no clue who he is, always looking for the next new thing to entertain and fill the void. Thus, a fresh Word from God is seized as just another fashion of the moment. It is seized fully, but there’s no space to take root. It withers and dies like everything else in this person’s life, and is pushed aside by the next new obsession. A little taste of the tribulation that always comes from obeying God and resisting the world, and it’s over.

In the final instance, the issue is compromise. This heart is already owned by some other deity, and there is no room for Jehovah. The Word is okay until there’s a conflict with previous commitments — and there’s always a conflict. This is the moral adulterer who simply cannot stop sinning, driven as they are like an addict who can’t break the bad habits.

But the Lord always reserves a few open souls for Himself. These are people who receive His Word and are ready to make the next level of commitment. Their fresh convictions eventually bear fruit in more fresh revelations from God (more seeds). This is what Jesus meant by saying those who have a receptive heart will receive even more. Those who are not receptive will become even more alienated. The Word of God polarizes humanity.

Thus, Jesus doesn’t hesitate to break it down for His disciples. Their hearts are sensitive to the Word of revelation. Simplifying it will bear more fruit. All He’s doing is refreshing their Hebrew cultural orientation to think in parables. But notice that the unexplained parable still had the power to draw; it was intriguing. Something inside of them wanted to chase this down because it signaled deep importance. This was no mere curiosity of mind, but a sense of calling. Without that, parables mean nothing, as they did to most Jews of that day.

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Towering CLI

Posted on May 5, 2018 by ehurst

My tower is now a CLI machine. I thought it was an easy update from Xubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, but all I did was expose a problem with the hardware. I tested several other things, and while the sensitivity varied, every Linux distro experienced lock-ups on the GUI. So I installed Debian 9. The lock-ups were less frequent, so I was able to get everything installed and my files restored from backup. Then I switched away from the X session and I’m using the commandline interface.

This will be a good way to reacquaint myself with the CLI. As we say, I’ll be renewing my membership in the Brotherhood of the Commandline. The computer works perfectly fine otherwise, and I have no trouble at all logging in from the laptop via SSH or Filezilla (SFTP protocol). It makes a good file server so I can keep the laptop uncluttered. It’s like having my own cloud at home.

My testing indicates it’s something wrong with the motherboard. As long as it keeps running, I’m not worried about replacing it for now. I can get everything done on my laptop.

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Photography: Yukon and El Reno

Posted on May 4, 2018 by ehurst

My car is working much better now, so I tested it by driving west on US 66. Once you get past Lake Overholser, the next landmark is Yukon, one of the biggest Czech cities in Oklahoma. By the way, it’s also got lots of old money, so the city has a pretty big budget for its size. This first shot is what you’ll see approaching Yukon from the east.

The local high school mascot is “The Millers” — maybe you can guess why. This landmark remains standing mostly empty. The even bigger grain elevator across the street (behind me) is also mostly empty. Grain isn’t such a major crop in this area any more.

The big historical thing about Yukon is the Chisolm Trail; it runs north/south through the town. In fact, Jesse Chisolm’s grave is not too far away, north and west of here near the town of Geary. About forty years ago I hunted his grave down; folks living two miles from it didn’t know it was there, hidden out on some dirt road and barely accessible to visitors. I haven’t been there lately, but they tell me it’s a little better now. This park had almost nothing of historical interest, just a pretty park and a huge artificial mound, on which I stood to take this picture.

The countryside is mostly flat out this way. It was just a 12 mile drive to El Reno from Yukon. This is the southern entrance on Route 66. This is a pretty big town built from the same agribusiness as most towns in Oklahoma. West and north from OKC is mostly flat plains for a very long distance.

This is a sample of the old buildings downtown. That “haynes” sign has been there forever; it’s a photo and bridal shop. It was hard to find parking because there was some kind of festival preparations blocking some of the streets.

El Reno’s best stuff isn’t even on Route 66, but a few blocks west along the railroad tracks. There’s a whole museum, and while generally neglected, it’s open and worth a visit. I didn’t have time to go inside and try to setup for flash, and some of the buildings didn’t turn out well. This is the original HQ from Ft. Reno. The stone monument talks about General Sherman using this thing; it was moved here from the Ft. Reno site west of town.

This is the old hotel next to the train station, still standing and serving as part of the larger museum exhibits. You can find the original Red Cross canteen that served the US Cavalry out in these parts, the original train station, a petrified tree trunk from some tiny village nearby, and all kinds of neat stuff.

This is one of the better examples of the old homes still standing in El Reno. This one is for sale, by the way. It stands in a rather historic district near the old rail station, loaded with older architecture like this. One thing distinguishing El Reno is that the agribusiness is still very much alive. At least half the grain elevators are still in operation as grain storage.

In fact, the huge federal prison out here is known as “the Ranch” because it hosts a large cattle operation as a means to inmate rehabilitation. This view is from across El Reno Lake. The lake is unremarkable, except that it smells clean. There’s no sewage leaking into it anywhere, so it smells better than most of the lakes, creeks and rivers I usually visit.

The total round trip was almost a hundred miles.

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Photography: Draper and Etc.

Posted on May 3, 2018 by ehurst

These are some random shots collected so far this week on my rides. First is the trees screening the river, now almost fully greened up.

This is a sample of the clearing they are doing at Draper Lake in preparation for the new bike trail. Keep in mind that a bike trail can be more variable than is allowed for road building. However, you can be sure the crews will eventually fill this in some and install drainage pipes under the trail surface.

Farther around on the north side of the lake is this sharp drop. I took this shot for the sake of comparison later on when they get the trail more developed. There is a lot of other spots like this where you have to wonder how they will handle it. I can report that the preparatory work runs from the western end of the dam and northward just beyond the marina. That much is pretty well ready for the lime and such that gets mixed into the soil to make it firmer. That’s already started down near the dam. Much past the marina and it quickly ends so that all they have is the bear first clearing of trees and maybe some initial landscaping with a bulldozer.

Meanwhile this is wildflower season. Those tiny lavender flowers grow along the River Trails. These bright yellow blooms I spotted around Draper Lake. There were others, but they were too far off the road in the tick-infested deep grass. I’ll wait for more to sprout close to the road.

Tomorrow I’m planning a road trip to test some fixes I made on the car. It seems to be running better now.

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A Toothless Lion’s Roar

Posted on May 3, 2018 by ehurst

Were you aware that megachurches were suffering the same political turmoil as the rest of America? From time to time I’m asked to comment on this or that big scandal.

First and foremost: The first churches in the New Testament had them, too. Granted, the scandals were of a different nature, covering a different range of problems, but they were there nonetheless. This is part of our fallen human existence. To pretend that churches are immune to the same political manipulation as the rest of society is inexcusably stupid.

Satan is like an old toothless roaring lion, seeking to frighten the game out of the bushes and into the waiting jaws of younger stealthy lions (1 Peter 5:6-9). That parable suggests that if you aren’t standing in the power of the Spirit, his roar will frighten you out of your safety in obedience, and into places where you aren’t protected. Let him roar; that’s just the background noise of our existence.

Which brings up the second answer: The problem is not with religion, but with religion that stands too close to the secular society. Here in the US, our social structure is the symbol of all that’s wrong with Western Civilization in the first place. The Christian religion here in the US is nothing more than an echo of that same abomination. Every mainstream church is vulnerable to Satan’s attacks because they do not stand in the center of Biblical Law; they do not abide by the Covenant of Christ.

Let’s look at just one of the major failures — a biblical church is ruled by elders and guided by a priesthood. Why do you think the Apostles were so adamant about not getting involved in the politics of feeding widows (Acts 6:1-7)? It was an organizational matter and the pastors have no business getting bogged down in such matters. This reflects the ancient pattern of dividing the task of moral shepherding between king and priest, the Two Witnesses of Zechariah 4 and Revelation 11. And throughout the New Testament we are reminded that pastors are appointed, but elders arise organically from the body of heart-led people seeking God’s way. That’s how the Spirit works in the church.

A religious body that is not organized like an ancient Hebrew extended household is not a church. Creation itself is feudal; humans are hard-wired to live in a feudal social structure as family within a single household. This Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) feudal structure was God’s original design. Any other organizational structure is inherently sinful. We don’t expect societies and governments to understand this, much less embrace it, but believers have no excuse.

The magisterial organization of some churches was stolen from Germanic tribal heathens. The presbyterial council is a perversion of Roman politics. The democratic church structure was derived from pagan Greek culture. The only thing God will bless is His own design: ANE feudalism.

So American Christian religion will continue to flounder and embarrass Christ until believers start from scratch and get it right. What we see in the confusion and chaos of scandals is what we should expect as long as people reject the Covenant of Christ. Getting it right won’t stop scandals, but it will reduce them to just background noise while we stand secure in the Word of the Lord.

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