The Feudal Nature of Existence

Posted on June 29, 2017 by ehurst

Steven asked me, “How do you manage to reconcile Predestination with free will and the idea that God is NOT the cause of evil?”

Short answer: I don’t have to. Long answer:

Predestination affects your eternal destiny, not your life here on the earth. Human free will encompasses a whole range of human choice throughout life; it’s the freedom to decide a lot of things, not just that one eternal choice. Nor do I imagine predestination as something cold and hard, reduced to that one single question of eternal destiny, but it’s a question of where God has placed us in His realm. I find the typical debate about free will versus predestination full of false assumptions in itself. The question itself presumes to know things that cannot be known until after we depart the flesh. The whole thing is impossible to grasp from this side of eternity, so it’s a bogus preoccupation. The question stands on Aristotelian epistemology, and I find such an epistemology is presumptuous at best — it asks all the wrong questions.

A mystical epistemology of the heart presumes that all questions are relational, not logical; they are first moral, and only secondarily analytical. The concept of objective truth is a myth. It’s a question of knowing the Person who Created all things. Human reason and logic is a chimera, a thing that doesn’t really exist. It’s a part of the fallen nature, wholly unable to grasp reality in fullness. It’s the wrong approach to every question that really matters, and is good only for the mechanics of how we might implement moral decisions. And both West and East have moved quite a ways from the Ancient Hebrew way of reasoning. Hebrew thinking first and foremost presumes a feudal existence with God up at the top of the chain. Existence itself is personal and relational, so it leaves no room for the great debates of theology; they all arose after the churches lost contact with the Hebrew roots of faith.

I’m fully aware of those historical debates, and I use the terminology that arose from them, but I find that almost the whole range of debate is bogus. I don’t have to reconcile free will and predestination, because the terms themselves carry baggage I don’t own.

Just as a reminder: The curriculum for my religion degree from Oklahoma Baptist University (BA 1978) included the Early Church Fathers and what they wrote in debating each other on theological questions, and it included classes in philosophy from multiple cultures and civilizations along with our own. Finally, that curriculum included a very heavy dose of literature and history of the Western Civilization itself. Not to set myself up as some expert, but to indicate that I am at least familiar with all the questions involved in this stuff. In proper academic terms, I am acquainted with the mythology of our Western heritage as a body of academic pursuit.

We can do a lot better than Western mythology and heritage. Here’s a very abbreviated narrative to institute what I believe is a more biblical approach.

We are born slaves, the property of God our Creator. What makes us slaves is our instinct to believe we are free. God has saddled Himself with a whole world of slaves who reject His lordship by instinct. He alone truly understands how things got that way, and in our slavish nature we cannot comprehend it, so He settles on simply trying to explain how it is now. We weren’t supposed to be slaves, but His children. We have to bridge that gap, though with an awful lot of help from Him. And His help is abundantly generous, because it’s in accordance with His intimate knowledge of what it should take to move us back into our proper place as children of His household. We cannot even want that without His help. True liberty begins by recognizing His ownership and mastery.

It’s all very personal. Indeed, the fundamental nature of all Creation is that feudal relationship. The fundamental question in all things is not, “What is real?” It’s “What is right?” “Right” is whatever God wants for you. Our slavish imagination wants to treat the question as objective, but it never was. There is no “truth” outside of God’s Person. You either begin to know Him or you are trying to avoid Him. Of course, He can read the most intimate thoughts of your mind, so there’s no privacy and nothing you can start with outside of God. You only imagine an objective truth; you posit this thing as a means of childish assertion that you are “free.” So God tolerates us for a while in that state of rebellion.

Some people manage to come to terms with a part of this feudal reality, and they become valued servants. They actually do useful stuff in His household. They still haven’t claimed their full rights as family, but they are tolerable and can gain some of His divine privileges. Some people go all the way, and reclaim their divine heritage here on this earth. They realize that their whole existence, as perceived with their own faculties, is one big lie. While they no doubt struggle with their human perceptions always getting in the way, some part of them perceives that it’s one big lie, and they know they can’t do things based on those lies. It’s all made worse by a whole world that still wallows in those lies, so that it creates an atmosphere that makes the lies all but inescapable.

We who know that we are family are caught in a very tough place. It’s tough because we have to live as His children and manifest His claims and His character in a world that makes no room for it. We have to break a lot of the rules by which everyone else tries to live, not so much in specific acts, but in the very basic assumptions about reality. It’s so bad that most of His children are deeply confused about it. But He is patient and kind; it’s a living and on-going thing, not a static relationship with locks and barriers. It’s all a question of love and moral restraints built into our very existence. It’s vivid and organic, dynamic the whole way through until we die. There is no clear line of departure between “your will” and “God’s will.” There is only the interaction between two persons.

Stop worrying about Heaven! Stop worrying about your “eternal salvation”! It’s all the wrong questions. Worry about your personal individual response to His call to reclaim your divine heritage as His child. Seek to restore all that privilege in the here and now. You are hard-wired already to understand this stuff, but it requires fighting off the persistent arrogance of our cursed human nature. Don’t trust your own mind to answer any important questions up front; it’s all a matter of pleasing the Father. When you deeply and fully embrace His ownership, all of the moral implications will settle themselves out. Your brain is not so mighty as to resist the Flaming Sword at the gate back into Eden; it will humble itself when it’s skewered on that blade. But it will attempt to flee that blade at every opportunity, so let your heart be the real “you” and keep chasing down the brain with that sword.

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A Two-Edged Sword

Posted on June 28, 2017 by ehurst

I share this for the sake of accountability; it’s not intended to convince you so much as to provoke your own contemplation. My conclusion rests not on some powerful prophetic impression, but rather a passive sense of moral justice.

Several times I’ve shared some of my experience in military law enforcement, and how my security clearance, and my personal friendship with people inside the intelligence operations, exposed me to a very broad awareness. To be honest, I can’t recall any of the stuff that I promised not to reveal; that would be the mass of detailed stuff that we can’t remember unless we use it all the time. Aside from installation security, our primary mission was battlefield traffic control under Cold War assumptions, so you can guess what kind of crap I was supposed to know. And it changed every year, so it was just more boring crap every time we turned around, only the particular flavor of stink changed.

What I cannot forget is the larger moral picture that arose from all that exposure, and from those friends who were just as eager as I to leave and get away from it. God called us to be there and be aware; our mission from God was to share moral insights into why the wrath of God falls on American government.

The CIA is all about the money. Granted, the CIA is not all one thing, but there has always been a group of people who were united in their commitment to a secret agenda that allowed them to profit at the expense of just about everyone else. So when the CIA was officially created, it gave these people a bureaucratic army with special authority to carry out their agenda, all paid for by someone else. But you need to understand that the net effects of their work is exploiting other countries and their resources for their own profit.

Recently there was a TV series that offered a more or less accurate portrayal of the CIA’s involvement in cocaine smuggling into the US. And some of you may be aware of how our involvement in Afghanistan is largely to protect the heroin trade. It’s one of the worst kept secrets about our activities there. And all the other stuff the CIA does usually involves suckering foreign governments into taking on massive debt that forces them into a form of slavery without any real benefit to the people who live there.

The Pentagon doesn’t want to get involved in Syria, but the CIA already is. While it’s obvious that the CIA has agreed to serve Israel’s interests on Syria’s fate, their motivation is how Israel has their own plundering agenda, and is willing to let the CIA share in the loot. So despite the vast bureaucratic inertia about getting entangled in Syria, the CIA is all in on the deal. It was the CIA who created ISIS, equipping and training and keeping their agents involved even to this day. Every time some batch of ISIS escapes their combat fate somewhere, it’s because the CIA used various assets to evacuate their agents. Some of the US attacks on Syrian troops were to prevent the capture of those CIA-ISIS agents.

This is not a question of absolutes, but a measured gamble taken by those who actually decide what the CIA does. They will serve the interests of Israel’s government in trying to create a Salafist entity straddling Upper Mesopotamia. That’s because such an entity would serve as a massive opportunity for plunder. Thus, whether Assad stays in power or is removed may not make a whole lot of difference, since having such a bellicose agency as ISIS there will keep him busy. Thus, the impending collapse of ISIS means they will be reduced to a terrorist force, not a physical occupying presence. The lack of Pentagon interest has nothing to do with it; there will be an American war in Syria one way or another.

I cannot say how steadfast Russia will be in supporting Syria’s government. I cannot pretend to know what kind of long-term chess game is at work. What I can know is that there is a strong probability that this more recent plot by the Whitehouse to gin up an excuse to attack Syria’s troops more widely will result in a huge military disaster for the US. It’s not a simple matter of military capability, though I suspect Russia is awfully tough with better equipment, if less of it. What I see here is that this may well be the geographic location where God allows our military to lose.

Such a loss is inevitable. It’s part of the prophetic warning of which I am most utterly certain. That certainty doesn’t include a specific time and location, nor a specific means, but I suspect that this may well be it. My suspicion is based on a broad sense of what seems morally appropriate for the context.

Again, I’m not grinning about the necessity of human suffering from such a thing, but I’m ready to celebrate the revelation of God, whether it be by wrath or blessing. His Flaming Sword of moral truth has two edges and I’m eager to feel the cut of that blade in my own heart.

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We Have It

Posted on June 27, 2017 by ehurst

It started so nicely. I managed to wake up bright and early, got a light breakfast and started on the reading routine I follow. Went out and picked up the litter around my building, then headed out for an early start on my workout.

And what a dynamite workout I had! I managed to bump up a rep on most things. When I got home for the last few exercises, I was whipped — just how it should be.

But somewhere during the day I exposed myself to some very nasty allergens, and by mid-afternoon my head was about to explode. It sneaked up on me. Keep in mind that I cannot take any decongestant or over-the-counter allergy medications, because all of them provoke my tachycardia. So I used our vibrator to get things loosened, and then a full sinus flush. I’m feeling better now, but it put me in mind of what’s happening around us.

You see, we are headed for a crisis; I remain utterly certain of that. But it will almost surely sneak up on us. That is, while we can see all sorts of things going in a bad direction, no one of them will bring a full crisis by itself.

Maybe you’ve read that we are under siege by yet another Windows computer virus (a worm, actually) named Petya. And there will be another and another and another coming over the summer. Antifa still has plans to riot in a week or so. Despite everything the Syrian military does at avoid conflict with the US, our government is determined to find an excuse to mobilize against them, yet it’s supposed to be all about Iran and Russia. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party keeps eating itself and the MSM are transparently attacking the majority of the population with disinformation. The banking system continues to crumble, the dollar will collapse any day, and we have any number of natural disasters just biding their time. All of this stuff is going to get worse.

You get the idea. I’m not expecting any single point of departure. It’s going to build up layer upon layer, because God is quite thorough with His wrath. Don’t forget that God does things in such a way as to allow people to deny the obvious, and that people can refuse to see the moral truth wired into Creation. It’s what we call “plausible deniability” — If you don’t want to see it, you won’t. Still, God always offers an escape from His wrath. But at any give time, the majority of humanity has no clue what’s going on in the moral realm.

This is a time of change. We who walk by the heart of conviction have been saved up like arrows for the day of battle. Our targets will be relatively few in number, though. We’ll be shot in all directions, and most of the time we’ll be surprised by who will respond when the time comes. Keep your eyes open for people who sense that everything they’ve trusted and relied upon folds up on them. Not all of them will panic, but folks will be looking for something stronger. And we have it.

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A Little More about the Trails

Posted on June 26, 2017 by ehurst

This was the view from the White Trail on the way down to the creek. It’s a little tough to shoot pictures while zipping around out there. However, this view was a high spot above the initial open field near the trail head and parking lot. The other side of the White loop is out there near the trees. Because it’s rather close to a flood plain for Crutcho Creek, the trail is mostly built up a few inches above the surrounding elevation, plus a few drain pipes covered with dirt to facilitate run-off. Trust me; this place is pretty muddy after just a little bit of rain. Now if only we could get just a little bit of rain, I’d gladly find some other form of exercise.

I apologize for the glare, but this is the best shot of the official map that I could get. Today I decided to see the Black Trail. This branches off the Blue Trail, and both are marked one-way. That means I got to repeat part of the Blue Trail because the Black runs back down toward the creek bed. It offers much deeper gullies and the man-made obstacles are mostly squared-off dirt humps that you can by-pass if you want. The idea is to pretty much force you to have one or more wheels leave the ground if you take the harder track. Still, I found it easy enough to make it a regular feature of future rides.

On my way back, I was held up by a train. Not just a passing train, but one that went back and forth several times because they were pushing parts of the train off on multiple siding tracks at the automotive depot a couple of miles down the track. That place is packed; the plants are still pumping out the new autos but no one is buying. All the dealers are making outrageous offers with credit terms that guarantee they’ll have to repossess most of them. Speaking of that: The repo wreckers have been cruising our area pretty regularly. You can always spot them easily — single color paint job, shorter than usual frame, a quick-pick lift on the rear and usually nothing but “Not for hire” on the side next to the state wrecker operator’s license number.

At any rate, I found a shady spot alongside the tracks where I could wait the quarter-hour or so that it took for this train to finish and clear the tracks. The only problem was keeping the aggressive giant red ants from climbing on my shoes.

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Conspiracy Theory: the Illuminati

Posted on June 25, 2017 by ehurst

Reminder: All human government is a conspiracy to rule. That there are genuine conspiracies is painfully obvious to anyone with basic awareness. That there are also a boatload of crazy wild tales to distract us from the real conspiracies is perhaps a little less obvious, but certainly it stands to reason. A real conspiracy would naturally protect itself by sponsoring all kinds of conspiracy theories.

The biggest conspiracy of all is the deception that we are not fallen. In our Western cultural mythology, we have a veneer of doctrine that says we are fallen, but the underlying assumptions about our human existence run counter to that doctrine. So when a scholar suggests that Western culture says we are fallen, he’s believing yet another lie. Everything we do from within Western cultural assumptions says that, whatever we might be now, we are perfectible. In other words, everyone can see we have problems, but the entire ground on which the West stands presumes that it can all be fixed.

And that presumption turns to human reason for the path to perfection. To the degree there ever was a historical entity that went by the name “Illuminati,” it rested firmly on the doctrine of perfectibility. I realize that we all tend to use that label — Illuminati — in a highly variable and popular sense that makes it something it never was. There is a vast lore of bogus literature and fake research on just what the Illuminati was (it no longer exists), but there is also a rather quiet solid basis in historical study that reveals they were sinister enough in their own right. It starts with that awful doctrine that men can morally perfect themselves.

Notice a clear distinction here: I am utterly certain that we can grasp enough divine moral truth to see clearly the nature of our sins and sinful constitution. We can catch a vision of leaving behind our fallen natural self and rising into a different realm of existence. We can see that Creation around us is not fallen and we can come face to face with God’s Person. But we cannot encounter Him in our fallen faculties. It has to be done on a different level with a different faculty. That fallen nature cannot be perfected; our fleshly existence cannot be redeemed fully. We can be blessed and made more otherworldly and more holy, but our clear vision of revelation makes it painfully obvious that we must first rid ourselves of this fallen nature. That means dying.

The founder of the Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt doggedly asserted that this fallen fleshly nature itself could be morally perfected. He denied the existence of a higher nature. In other words, he was a sucker for the Aristotelian notion that this universe is all there is.

We also know Weishaupt taught that men striving toward moral perfection didn’t need government or religion. To him, religion and government had conspired to keep men from discovering their own perfectibility. Now again, we grant that the religion and government of his day was deeply morally flawed, but that was no excuse for taking a fundamentally anti-government and anti-religion stance. From the ancient Hebrew mystical approach that served as the foundation of Jesus’ teaching, we know that there is no hope for this world as we experience it. And all the holiness in the world does not exempt us from having to deal with government and religion. They will always be with us because it’s part of fallen human existence. Christ taught that the natural world was held captive by the fallen nature of mankind, so it could not be released until there was no one left in a fallen state. Weishaupt was so blind as to believe Jesus taught quite the opposite, and he believed that his wild theories were consistent with Christ.

It was anti-Christian, but in the sense of secularism. Weishaupt was not consciously Luciferian; that was a wild tale told by someone named Taxil. And the Freemasons were already in existence, so that group didn’t come from the Illuminati. I don’t have space here to explain the relationship between the Illuminati and Freemasons, but they did overlap a lot back in those days. You can do your own research, but don’t believe the Freemasons. Your average Mason is pretty harmless, but the organization has always spawned crime and political corruption.

A worthwhile point here is that Weishaupt’s doctrine had consequences. After being exiled from Bavaria, he and his buds moved to France and helped to provoke the French Revolution. However, not long after that the label “Illuminati” became rather meaningless, in the sense that it entered the English lexicon adorned with a lot baggage that Weishaupt did not carry. It would be exceedingly difficult to point to any group today that can claim descent from the original, but it’s quite easy to see their influence.

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Psalm 137

Posted on June 24, 2017 by ehurst

Western Christianity, with its odd mixture of pagan and secular moral values, struggles to understand the moral content of this psalm. This psalm is a good test of whether one can grasp the Ancient Hebrew outlook that is at the core of Christ’s teachings. This psalm is very much like a brief skit or play.

The Judean exiles would have gathered along the riverbanks as part of their normal grieving rituals. It would include baptism, a symbolic washing away of sins. They were there because of God’s wrath and they understood all too clearly that they had sinned against Jehovah. It’s not that any particular patch of dirt on this planet is so much better than another, but that God had removed their status as a sovereign nation. They were now dependent on the tolerance of their hosts. They could grow fine crops and keep large herds, do business and even engage in banking, but it wasn’t their homeland where God had allowed them to build the Temple to bear His name proudly.

So as a symbol of their sorrows, they hung their musical instruments on the willow trees growing there along the river’s edge. It’s hard to be certain of the exact symbolism, but from where we stand today, it’s obvious they had no intention of using those instruments to celebrate anything. Mourning and lament was properly a capella in their culture.

When the local rulers came to visit, seeing the instruments in the trees, they would have naturally asked for some of the worship songs for which Judeans were famous. We cannot ignore the likelihood that those local masters knew it would have been sacrilege; Babylonians had cataloged the world’s religions and knew plenty about the worship of Jehovah. So there was a bit of mocking here, along with genuine curiosity to hear an authentic rendition of such music, since such music was always passed on by tradition, never in any written notation.

The depth of lament is moving even for us today. There is only one purpose for such music, and without the Temple, it was simply impossible to perform. It’s not a mere matter of nostalgia for the homeland, but the symbol of Zion as the Holy City of God. Thus, this was a sense of sorrow and loss writ across the land and sky for the Hebrews. They would rather cease knowing who they were and die where they stood, than to make a game out of working through their repentance at this point. They knew God was merciful; they knew the captivity had a time limit.

They also knew that God promised He would not treat them the same as He did the rest of the world. It was already well established in Hebrew theology that the Devil was a figure for the demonic adversary that served as God’s punishing hand. There were some people in this world who were fully the property of Satan; if one is going to hate Satan, one must hate his children. If the Nation of Israel was going to be a political entity on this earth, then there had to be political outcomes to their moral battles. Real politics meant real bloodshed. Israel was the literal reality expressing a very deeply mystical truth.

Israel had a mission to give life to the revelation of God. For reasons Israel well understood, He had unleashed the Adversary on Israel until recompense was made, and it was time to restore His witness on the earth. His witness included His wrath against sin. Wrath on His witnesses — His own adopted family — was one thing. Wrath on those who rejected His witness was another thing.

So the psalmist makes mention of their cousins, the Edomites, children of Esau. He understates the case; Edom did more than just celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem. They actively supported the Babylonian siege, helped plunder Judah, and generally did everything possible to offend Jehovah personally by attacking His people. Even when Babylon later turned on Edom and plundered them, as well, the Edomites were still crowing about the removal of Judah. They were a living manifestation of deep and ceaseless violence against God’s moral character written into Creation itself, and they were very proud of it.

The psalmist also prays a blessing on whomever God was preparing to raise up against Babylon. Judeans had no doubt an enemy of Babylon was out there, that God was at work on that future day of conquest. His prophets made clear that His favor on Babylon was rather like a man for any good tool that would same day wear out. He had never planned on making them family. Given the Babylonian troops dashed Judean children against stones and sliced open pregnant women, it was mere justice that something similar would happen to them when the day of recompense came.

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Testing Mint 18.2

Posted on June 24, 2017 by ehurst

I’m not a professional reviewer; I know exactly what I want for myself and know generally what most clueless home users will tolerate. I have some vague ideas about what business users like.

Mostly this is a matter of testing it on my Dell Precision M4400 laptop, which has been a little cranky up to now. It runs Vista okay, for which it was designed; it does Win7 less tolerably as some of the drivers are wonky. In terms of what an OS is supposed to do, Windows has been the most troublesome that I’ve tested. The suspend and hibernate work well enough, but the touchpad was an abomination no matter which of a half-dozen drivers I tried. It’s behavior is inconsistent and somewhat unpredictable. There were other issues, but that’s a sample.

Under Linux the touchpad is at least consistent. However, up to now, nothing I’ve tested works properly with suspend and hibernate. The fans are less active under Linux and the instructions for tuning are not easy to follow. Everyone expects you to know what you need in the first place, and that is highly unlikely with most users. However, I believe it tends to run cooler with Linux in the first place, so it may be working better than I know. It has never overheated on me, but it runs pretty hot compared to other laptops I’ve owned, so it requires bottom space for good ventilation, drawing fresh air through the bottom of the case.

With Mint 18.2 XFCE edition, we now have a fully functioning suspend and hibernate out-of-the-box. For the first time it has needed no tweaking to work properly. That’s a real plus for me. Little else has changed in terms of the hardware interaction. The nicest part was that Mint was very smart about default options, including good driver support without interaction; it was all installed by default. This is actually easier than installing Windows.

Side note: As part the user setup, Mint asks you if you would like to test other software repository mirrors to see if they are faster than the default. Once you click on the repository name, another window opens and tests each of the mirrors for response rate. I suggest that, if at any time, you see it offering the servers connected with Oklahoma University, you might want to bypass because that has been by far the most unreliable source I’ve used. Not only is it down too often, but it’s response can make the updater act a little nutty. I live geographically close to OU and it gives me trouble.

Mint also shines with things like WINE. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a backup copy of MS Office 2003, my favorite version. It didn’t install on Debian 9, but works just dandy with Mint 18.2. And I can now use the latest version of Notepad++ without any problems, aside from spiking the CPU just a little. Still, I use it for writing and editing posts and all my other stuff. The only problem is that you have to install Notepad++ plugins manually, but I’ve not had any real trouble finding the source for those and simply installing them by moving the file into the right folder.

It would be very easy to add a VM for more complicated needs. And for those who sense a need for network security, the firewall is very easy to setup and use. For now, I can’t see any reason a user would balk at choosing Mint if migrating to Linux seems like a good idea. Overall, I’m quite pleased with Mint and I can recommend this to Linux newbies with very little hand-holding.

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Neither Technology nor Magic

Posted on June 23, 2017 by ehurst

I think I managed to save my laptop.

Folks, nobody has to tell me I’m not the greatest tech support guy ever. However, I’ve done it long enough to realize that if you have one kind of failure, you can usually figure it out. If you have two overlapping failures, you may never figure it out.

So while testing Debian 9 on the laptop, I suddenly found that Opera refused to run because I no longer had proper access to my own profile. This came after using it several times. Something changing permissions inside your own Home directory is virtually always a matter above my head. That is, I know that it happens, and I’ve tried to understand why, but I admit that it involves stuff over my head. At any rate, I had enough complaints with other issues to feel that Debian 9 wasn’t ready for prime time.

I note in passing that the release managers found some issues with the ISO files and have already pushed out another set, so I was justified in my assessment.

I tried to reinstall Xubuntu, but it failed to write some files to the disk. That smells like a hard drive failure, so I swapped out the drive with the old one. Same error again. That caused me to believe that either the RAM was bad or something else that controls how the installer writes to the disk. I gave up at that point, and posted it on the blog.

Over the next 24 hours or so, it began to trickle into my consciousness that I should at least run the onboard diagnostics and see if it tells me anything. Last night I did that, to include that hour-long RAM testing. It found no problems; even the hard drive was found healthy.

Maybe I should test Linux Mint? Then I remembered that my USB disk burner had fallen on the floor at least once in the past and decided not to trust it again. I burned the latest ISO on another machine and decided to give it one last shot. Lo and behold it installed just fine. So I’m running it through the paces and trying to see if this will work.

My point here is that you can’t fail trusting your heart. I’ve already admitted that I couldn’t be half so useful at tech support if I didn’t first test with my convictions what I should or shouldn’t do. Computers, like anything else in Creation, will talk to us on the heart’s wavelength, though it won’t be the same as natural wild life. At least, they talk to me. At the very minimum, we should test our convictions to see if it’s worth the trouble in the first place. This time, it seems it was.

Granted, your calling from God may not have anything to do with computers. However, everyone whose heart is awakened does have a mission, and your heart knows that mission. You’ll be the heart-led servant of God in that calling.

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Damned Acquisitiveness

Posted on June 22, 2017 by ehurst

We need a different culture altogether.

During my time in the military, I labored under several conflicting moral influences. I knew I was bound to Christ and high moral standards. But I was falsely led to believe that such high morals should lead to concrete advantages, when the system insured they would not.

Do you understand what drove the Puritans to leave England, first to live in the Netherlands, and then to colonize America? They held to a powerful belief that their high moral purity must result in worldly prosperity. But it didn’t work in England because of the feudal corruption, so they rejected their home country as hopelessly damned. Finding some refuge in the Netherlands, they were harassed for trying to keep their kids out of the secularized education system. So when the chance came to start from scratch as “Pilgrims,” it seemed like the only way out for them. But of course, any prosperity they gained once settled in America was at the cost of disease and abuse against the natives.

It was a common Western cultural flaw going all the way back to the Judaizers and their attack on the otherworldly mindset of the first generation of Christians. The Puritans were a powerful influence on the ensuing birth of America. I grew up under a religious worldview that took much from the Puritan influence. And when it failed me in the the US Army, that was in spite of the promises from leaders who insisted it was all true.

Those were the very same leaders who frustrated me by giving the exact same rewards to me (leading to promotions) that they gave to the useless slugs who did all they could simply staying out of trouble. It’s not that there were no advantages in high moral standards, but no one was able to verbalize to me what those advantages were.

I didn’t leave the military broken in spirit, but in body. Still, it was frustrating and it took some years to explore the realms of moral truth more carefully and with a teachable spirit before I realized it: Walking by conviction is its own reward.

I can’t recall anyone in my youth who represented that idea. That’s because it is fundamentally foreign to the whole range of Western thinking. There were times it was hinted at by the religious teaching I received, but it was never fully explored.

You cannot convince me that children are inherently materialistic. Too often I’ve seen evidence quite the opposite in dealing with children myself. A primary need of childhood is security. Children taught to seek security from caring kinfolks typically evince a lack of selfishness with material objects. Those who grow up in a materialistic environment rarely go that way. It’s very hard to break that grasping mindset. I can recall weeping bitterly when someone took my favorite pencil and the teacher refused to make them give it back. My deep sense of loss meant I gained far too much security from a cheap object that just happened to be unique in the class. I didn’t have much internal security.

We have to break that bondage. It’s a part of our mission in heart-led faith. I know how hard it is in a lustful world that hates true faith, but this is our calling from God. We have to build that dominion that stakes out a different approach to reality.

Teach your kids how to be secure in something above this world.

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Catching up on Cycling

Posted on June 22, 2017 by ehurst

I need to catch up on some random shots worth sharing. This first is a prayer chapel I adopted on my last ride along the Oklahoma River. It was a cool shady spot with a strong breeze that day, perched above the middle dam on the Oklahoma River. Notice the bike is still decked out in commuter gear.

The last trip I took out to Draper, I spotted these sand plums. They are about the size of the end of my thumb, which is typical for this wild fruit. The crop is really very sparse this year; it’s the same with the blackberries. That bright red one is very nearly ripe — you look for translucence after it turns red. I found one that had dropped off and caught between two limbs, quite tasty but poor quality of flesh.

At the little park on the very south end of Draper I stopped and noticed that the large flat sandstone area is completely under water. All you can see of it is the faint coloration under the surface. The shelf runs way out and off to the right. That was my last ride out to Draper.

I noted the other day about riding around the new Trails Park up on NE 23rd, just east of Air Depot Boulevard. This is what the parking lot looks like. Notice that my bike is now stripped down. I had just finished taking all but the “black trail” because I wasn’t in the mood to explore it yet. The trail head is just to the left of the kiosk where you can look at a map of the trails. They run off to the right, but part of it is hidden by the tall grass in the background.

On this areal image, I outlined the parking area with a colored rectangle, and that curvy red loop shows the approximate area of where the trails run. It’s all single-track, just a few small and fairly shallow sand pits. The “white loop” is the easiest, running mostly through the grassy area on the north side. There’s a “green loop” which is all out-n-back that runs along the banks of Soldier Creek. The link between the green and back loops takes you across the creek on the bridge built for the oil well access road in the center of the image. The “blue loop” is mostly a long and wide one on the southern end. What makes it slightly more challenging is a lot of artificial humps and a few banked turns. I was able to ride the whole thing at a fairly quick pace, keeping it in the same B-4 gear the whole way except a brief shallow climb on as the back loop runs southward upslope toward the railroad tracks.

My whole point in riding is simply playing. It’s the joy of being in the midst of natural foliage and hearing the greetings and chatter of the trees. I want to get my workout without noticing, because I’m too busy focused on having a fun ride. It works quite well for that. It’s only 2.5 miles north from where I live, and after the ride I was pumped enough to ride across the empty grassy fields west of Crutcho Creek as I worked my way back to Air Depot Boulevard. I’m doing my best to shift over to shorter and more intense rides, and this was a great way to do it.

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