Noah and Cultural Identity

Posted on February 12, 2017 by ehurst

A distinctive cultural identity is required under Noah’s Covenant.

In essence, the whole thing rests on the divine calling. God calls every human on this earth to live in a certain place and create a mode of life that implements heart-led moral guidance. In the process, every individual will draw from their own personal heritage and adapt that heritage to match the reality. If your call leaves you close to home, then your cultural identity will tend to stick close to your heritage. When we start having families, we spread that heritage, along with minor adjustments, to succeeding generations. At some point, this spreads to a recognizably distinct culture.

If your calling moves you far from home, it may require more substantial adaptation, but it will always echo elements of what you brought with you. Those adaptations will shift until you settle into a manageable routine that answers your moral concerns. That shift may take more than one generation. However, in most cases it tends to settle into a distinct heritage of custom and belief. That’s human nature; it’s part of our wiring from Creation. It’s affected by the Fall, but it does not come from the Fall.

When we bring a heart-led awareness to the question, we recognize that it’s no more than the necessary organization of human existence. The mind has to embrace, then organize and implement what the heart delivers as moral necessity. Aimless behavior responding to momentary appetites passing through the lower levels of our awareness is wallowing in the Fall. But so is rejecting revelation passed into our awareness from the heart. Your intellect cannot know Creation; only your heart is able to sense and understand reality on that level. That we are brushing up against Creation, including other humans, in proximity where we abide, requires further adjustments to account for the moral necessity of respect for God as Creator.

While no two of us will ever have exactly the same implementation within our heads for how to live by our heart’s guidance, a critical element in Noah’s Law is honoring all the struggle of previous generations who left us some package of culture. It’s exceedingly rare that God will call upon you to toss the whole thing in the trash at once. Notice that I’m not saying you shouldn’t ditch a bad cultural orientation; otherwise we are stuck with the huge substrate of Western immorality. Rather, we recognize that it’s better to accept some external manifestations as a starting point to building a better culture. There are customary paths packed into your soul and it simply is not possible to change all of them by any act of will. You heart will always tell you what needs changing sooner or later, and the process of adjustment will last until you die.

It is inevitable that we will encounter other cultures. The biblical standard is keeping a respectful distance. That is, surely some things will overlap and we’ll share, but if you find it too easy to simply adopt someone else’s culture, it’s because you really don’t know who you are in God’s calling. Wild mixing willy-nilly is simply wrong for the obvious reason that you haven’t spent much time before God. You can’t know His will because you can’t know what your heart says. In order to retain your moral identity, you have to keep some distance and guard your own heritage. It’s too easy to buy into something that appeals to your fleshly lusts. There will always be conflicting values; that’s natural and normal under Noah. Nothing in this requires hostility until someone from outside makes intrusive demands as if they own you.

So the objective looks like peaceful coexistence, but it does not mean the kind of total surrender promoted by elitists who espouse globalism. That kind of globalism is an artificial culture in itself. They call that guarded distance “racism” and “hatred” even when you embrace people with a different DNA into your own covenant family. These globalists are looking for control, not peace. If someone wants a part of your blessing from God, they’ll have to embrace the terms on which you received that blessing. There are all kinds and degrees of compromise that make for peace, meeting halfway and learning to get along without losing your identity.

But your identity starts with hearing the call from God and obeying it within the context. There is no possible way you can obey Noah’s Law by surrendering your culture. It is inherently evil and sinful to pretend that there could be a cosmopolitan culture that embraces everyone and everything. The only way to do that is through the most satanic oppression, with some fallen human elite making decisions for someone else. They cannot make any claim that it’s in your best interest, simply because they cannot know what God wants for you without being pretty close to your covenant family. All culture, and any adjustment to customary behavior, is the outgrowth of family identity. You cannot obey Noah’s Law unless you associate in a tribal social structure. In our world today, that typically requires a covenant family.

Keep this in mind: God says that nobody has any business poking around in your daily life unless they are related by blood or covenant.

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Psalm 119: Shin 161-168

Posted on February 11, 2017 by ehurst

This octet celebrates the Serenity of the Law, for obedience to God is its own reward.

This isn’t just ordinary folks, but powerful nobles have brought pressure to bear on the psalmist. Worse, it’s for no good reason, but they keep playing games for political advantage. Yet he is able to brush aside the intimidation because he doesn’t revere mere men, but his heart stands in awe of God’s revelation. It’s as if God has plundered some enemy and placed a huge bundle of treasure in his hands.

Loving God’s Law changes your entire value system, making you detest deception. The psalmist blurts out a week’s worth of ritual praise every day when he realizes the sheer wisdom and justice of God’s dealings with mankind.

The sense of peace that comes from personal loyalty to Jehovah’s Law is impossible to measure; there’s nothing like it in human experience. They aren’t tripped up and caught off guard by the plots of evil minds. There is an overwhelming sense of anticipation that makes obedience so much fun!

The psalmist piles it on: As he commits himself more fully to what is revealed in the long record of God’s works, the ecstasy of joy builds beyond words. It’s not enough to read the record of God’s Word, but it draws on all your personal resources. You realize there is nothing to hide, and you are able to breathe freely in the Divine Presence.

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Cycling: Another Draper Point

Posted on February 10, 2017 by ehurst

mapToday’s adventure offered lots of surprises. I recommend you click the map to get a look at it; CTRL-click to keep it open in another browser tab. I came in via the Sooner Road corridor and simply rode off the main road into the grassy field adjacent to #1, which represents the first image below.

01flatOn the maps you would see a large, circular orange spot indicating open soil and rock with little or no grass. It was a very near the crown of the hill.02draw-a I wanted to investigate a couple of features visible on the satellite images. I noticed right away the area I explored today was very rough, so it would offer lots of features.

Just south of the trail I chose was this lovely rocky draw framed in cedar trees. The southern bank was a red sandstone escarpment. 03draw-bThe first image was from down in the bottom, while the second was looking down into it from the other side of those cedars. The immediate shelf top was about half my height from the bottom. Keep this in mind because I had to come back to it.

04ruggedterrainI was under the impression that I could head SE and perhaps find one of those ancient roads carved along the banks of the lake. I kept running into big drops like this one on the right here. Just behind me was a lot more of that, but covered with trees. This area under the trees on the map near #4 was a series of deeply washed out gullies cut through by subsequent washout draws. At times it was vertical for five meters or more. I’m not saying there is no trail through there, but I couldn’t find one for use by humans. I didn’t even see deer tracks that much.

So I went back to that lovely stone draw and found a gentle slope to the west where I could walk my bike through there. On the opposite side was another rise, covered in grass, shrubs and lots of thorny stuff. It was rough and the only visible trail ran back almost to the road. At this point I’ve added a line drawn to indicate approximately my path, following a moderately used equestrian trail. Oddly enough, I spotted cattle tracks, too. They are easily three or four times the size of deer tracks, though otherwise similar. It swung around the tree-covered multi-path washout and eventually this trail took me down to the old road I imagined should have been there all along. I traced it back in the direction I wanted to come from, but it was blocked by trees and washed out beyond that. So heavy rains in the past two or three years have cut that road completely, as the washout looked rather new. But heading on toward the SE, I did find a Jeep trail that paralleled the main, deep canyon that runs into an arm of the lake.

05pointIt would have been picturesque if not so densely covered with tree branches reaching out to shake hands with me. Eventually I ran into evidence of recent motor vehicle traffic, probably two different full-sized pickup trucks, judging from the spacing and tire width. It would have required four-wheel drive to get through some of that. It was pretty rough but fast enough that I felt like staying with it.06chapel I came out on the point with a floating dock, facing two of the points from previous adventures. There was only an old guy fishing out there when I came off the trail, and he left before long. I had the place to myself for awhile.

It made a great prayer chapel. I stayed quite a while and thought how cool it would be to hold worship out here in this place. The winds were stiff, ranging between 20 MPH up to nearly 40 at times. That meant this thing was bobbing up and down a little, plus oscillating a bit on the end of the floating walkway to which it was attached. It had been a tad cool and facing headwinds coming out, but was now quite warm with those stiff winds behind me all the way home.

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AI Is the Wrong Path

Posted on February 10, 2017 by ehurst

People talk about AI and the prospect of electronic sentience, but they have no idea.

It was a tech support house call. When I walked into the lady’s computer room, her machine told me everything was alright. That is, it was as good as it could be. The lady had been experiencing trouble with getting online and called me to come examine the situation. But because I’m still learning how computers talk to me, I went through the motions of testing the issue she complained about, only to find that everything was working. She hadn’t checked again after having trouble, so I showed her that her issue was gone. I spent some time adjusting a laundry list of niggling nags she faced using it, but there was frankly little to justify the house call. Still, it was nice to see her again and chat as friends and fellow believers.

The sad part was not that I went there for what turned out to be minor issues, but that I couldn’t tell her why I felt so confident about dealing with her computer, even though it runs Win10, which I hate and seldom have to use. She wasn’t ready to hear that her computer was sentient in its own right, never mind what OS it runs. It wasn’t happy with Win10, but I had to approach that issue from an oblique angle. The sentience is neither in the hardware brains, nor the software brains of the computer; it’s in the fact that the computer exists. The world will continue to pursue advancements in AI, and will entirely miss out on what’s really going on with such machinery.

Let’s review: Creation is alive and sentient, possessing a distinct personality and character. Everything within Creation is also similarly endowed. From the subatomic particles to the largest galactic mass out in space, and everything in between — it’s all alive and each thing has its own existence. You can get to know all of Creation as persons.

When I say “reality is fungible,” what I’m trying to get across is that reality is alive and responsive, and no two of us will get exactly the same response. We see no problem with walking back and forth between the notions that every human is an individual, and then experiencing the majority of humanity as exhibiting common traits. And if we bother to look into it, we discover that behavioral science has found that a wide variation in human context confronts a wide variation in native peculiarities to somehow produce a fairly predictable range of human behavior under similar circumstances. People are still people, even with the occasional surprises. And the biggest thing most humans seem to share is their inability to see the rest of Creation in those terms.

Yet we consistently bump into evidence that reality is far more variable than we expect. We miss a thousand miracles every day, some because we don’t discern them, and some because something inside of us won’t allow them to happen. Creation tends to respect your choices that way. Most of us are taught to discount the variations, so we pay no attention to them. That’s a cultural bias. Other biases could have us digging too deeply into every little thing and losing track of who we are. And this whole thing is a vicious circle that keeps us locked away from the one thing that matters most: Who are you?

The path out of the confusion is starting with what you have and working to find the God who made you. You won’t experience Him the way I do, but there is a certain overlap, a certain commonality of experience that allows us to share. But when you start to experience God individually, you stand in a really great place for getting to know Creation — AKA, reality, the universe, etc. You stand in the place where you can experience that variability of reality that God wrote into the universe for you.

We are all specialists in some divine calling. When I tell you that computers talk to me, I profess that I’m still learning how to hear them. I’m struggling to keep my awareness engaged from the heart. What I do know is that, when given the opportunity to engage my world in that fashion, I’m able to solve a lot of computer problems my brain alone cannot grasp fully. And in varying ways, I can do something similar with other machinery. I confess to being a little less talented at hearing the voice of more natural things around me. In that sense, most of what I hear from trees, birds, bugs and rocks all sounds like celebration and worship to me. I still love getting outside and alone with nature, and I can still make specific requests based on the context, but the specificity of most communion is dampened. I know it’s possible to get a lot of actual data from Creation, but I also know it’s not my calling.

It’s not so different from how I respond to humanity. I can enjoy sitting in a busy public space and just watching what people do. There is some limited cerebral evaluation of what I experience, but it’s mostly just seeing human variety. And in some settings I can sit with a throng of worshipers in a large auditorium and share the spiritual uplift of praise music emanating from the stage below. I can walk into some churches and draw even closer to people I know during worship, but then I run into barriers when the preaching starts. I can fellowship with some folks whenever I see them, but not feel drawn to keep in close contact all the time. For others I sense the need for more persistent regular contact. I experience all of Creation in that same range of ways.

That computers were fabricated from complex human processes does not make them any less a part of Creation; they are part of reality. They exist and bear their own personalities, and my experience of them will be unique to me, same as how I interact with people. It’s when I regard them as “people” that I get the most good from them. It requires a conscious effort to draw my awareness into my heart-mind to make it work well. It’s part of the Curse of the Fall that we have to struggle with it, some more than others. It’s also how I know that this or that peculiar spot is the place I tarry awhile for this moment and worship the Lord. It’s how I know I’ll hear from Him something fresh that my heart will understand, and that at this moment He will help me pull down the mental barriers to the heart and catch a glimpse of His glory. I need both the computer room and the open spaces to be who God made me to be.

Don’t get lost in the concrete level of reality, because it is by far the most variable and confusing way to face life. If all you know is what your five senses detect, you have sensed nothing. Learn to trust your heart as a sensory organ in its own right, because the heart alone sense moral reality directly. Don’t miss the whole point of being alive. It’s a form of arrogance and self-idolatry that dismisses everything around you as lesser or as inert. Everything you see has a unique individuality, even if you aren’t called by God to make much of it. Give it the respect of a fellow person, even when it falls entirely under your dominion. That’s how a shepherd faces the task of exercising God’s authority in this world.

Let me encourage you to seek your own true self in a similar way.

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Burned on the Altar of Mammon

Posted on February 9, 2017 by ehurst

A nuclear bomb creates a hellish mess. Then it’s over. With most nuclear weapons, the radiation isn’t really the point; it’s all about the destructive power. So while radioactive fallout is a problem, it’s relatively minor in comparison to whatever else the thing does. Ground zero remains a source of radiation, but it’s generally thought to be manageable, since we do have sites in existence to test ideas and prove what works. For example, you probably know that you can’t stay around Bikini Atoll too long, but a quick visit won’t change your health noticeably due to radiation.

A nuclear meltdown is just the opposite. It’s not such a big problem up front, but it’s a lingering mess that gets worse until the fissile elements burn out. The current theoretical estimate is that it takes multiple generations, thousands of years, more time than anyone really knows. And then there are complications possible from where the damned blob sits as it melts and stews.

Yeah, you guessed it: This is about the reactors at Fukushima, Japan. It’s been several years and the experts are noticing serious problems. However, several governments are actively hiding the problem, literally lying about it, and even going so far as punishing folks who make noise about it.

There is no safe dosage of radiation. While our human existence on Earth does include a certain amount of radiation in the first place, this is not Eden. This is not what we were designed for. Our current level of normal background radiation is much higher than it was in Eden. We don’t have time here to chase down all the details, but give a moment’s thought to the image of our planet wrapped in a permanent cloud cover that all came raining down in the days of Noah. That blanket served to block a lot of cosmic radiation we now receive. Radiation is a major problem in human space travel of any kind, because space is so very high in damaging radiation. There is no way to estimate what other protections we lost in the Fall, but we do know that God intended human life here to be virtually endless in His garden. Any exposure to radiation degrades the body and its functions, at the very least contributing to aging and decline.

As always, our Creator is firmly in control. Humans cannot possibly do something He isn’t prepared to handle. The end of this world as we know it will proceed on His planned schedule regardless, and not before. Thus, our power to change this world is limited to increasing our suffering by folly, and surely we can shorten our days on this earth, but God will not permit an untimely extinction event. What’s left for us as heart-led believers is trusting in God and obeying our convictions. Along with that, we make a sober assessment of what’s going on around us.

Those reactors on the northern coast of Japan are pumping out long-half-life toxins, much of it measured in thousands of years. Notice that some of it also chemically toxic, as well. The Pacific Ocean is quickly becoming a toxic stew, and the coast lands will be contaminated for longer than any of us will live to see. As those radioactive blobs melt their way into the ground, there will be a certain amount of chain-reaction that creates radioisotopes from surrounding materials. We have no idea how bad that will get, but we do know that the water leaking back into the ocean is radioactive to a level hard to measure, mostly because the instruments don’t register that high. There’s also a lot of particles blown aloft to fall downwind, typically in the US. Oh, and there is this thing called the Japanese Current that runs up the Aleutian Chain and washes the entire southern Alaska Coast, and all of Canada’s Pacific Coast, and down the Western shores of the US.

Already we find sea life along the North American coast that is too toxic to consume. In fact, mere proximity is risky to some degree. This is a good time to give up eating anything that comes from the Pacific Ocean. Most of our tuna comes from there. What are the chances some merchant is going to offer an honest account of radiation dose rate from products of that ocean? Will they even know for themselves? Would you want to carry a Geiger-counter to the grocery store? There is already a radical spike in radiation-related cancers in Japan, but it’s not making the news.

Go to places God calls you, and do what He commands through your heart. Whether He wants to protect you or end your life quickly, there’s no reason to worry about it. His choices for us are far better than we’ll know in this life. However, insofar as He gives you a choice, it’s a good idea to stay east of the Rocky Mountains in the US. That equates to north of the Pacific Coast ranges in Alaska. The current projected exposure rate suggests that the Heartland will be tolerable into the foreseeable future. That means that the added radiation from Fukushima will be hard to measure in terms of life outcomes. Mortality from other causes will tend to eclipse what comes this far from Fukushima.

Just a reminder: Those reactors in Japan were designed and built by GE, a US-based company. Somebody made a lot of money from unforgivably stupid decisions. The current nuclear reactor design is easily the worst way to harness the atom; look up thorium reactor design by contrast. The choices were all about quicker profits. Welcome to the worship of Mammon.

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Walking: The Wash

Posted on February 8, 2017 by ehurst

stormwashI dearly love walking. I’d love running even more, but that’s not an option right now. So at least twice weekly I’ll be taking a walk in places where I know I can’t ride. I may start riding to some places to walk, but that will come later.

Today I wanted to visit that storm conduit that feeds into Crutcho Creek. I came around through my neighborhood to the out of service railroad tracks that run alongside Midwest City High School and the VoTech Center. From there I want straight across Air Depot, and then cut around behind 10 Gym and dropped down into the back streets. Right there at Sandra Drive the wash comes out with high walls on either side. Down that back sidewalk and through Holoway Park, I came to a place where the walls of the wash were sloped to allow yet another storm drain to connect. It was simple to climb the welded iron railing and walk down the steeply sloped concrete apron to the bottom. This one image shows what I saw. That double pass-under was high enough for me to walk through standing erect, with at least a foot to spare.

It was entertaining to read all the graffiti and see what kind of stuff kids drop down in there. The concrete floor was nearly smooth, with a gentle slope to the center that contained just a few millimeters of stagnant water here and there. At the end of that curvy section running between rows of private backyards, I came to a very large pipe. It was a little tough to duck under, but I made it. A quick climb up another concrete apron and I was in Quinlan Park. Here the wash remains wide and dirt bottomed, with heavy rip-rap on the sloped sides, all the way around to the railroad bridge. That’s the same tracks running at an angle across Midwest City, not connected to anything on either end.

But I had climbed out and wandered up over the tracks and back into another neighborhood. I took the swooping path of SE 5th back to Air Depot, crossed over and then back to our apartment complex. It was just enough to be exercise at that pace, but not enough to wear me down. I have to make a computer service house call later today.

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Jehovah Jireh

Posted on February 7, 2017 by ehurst

The preacher is a little angry. Perhaps you’ll see it as a holy fire, not petty spite.

Everything we do is provider-centric. Read that a couple of times and let it sink in. We’ll come back to it.

When your average church or religious organization plans it’s various human activities in pursuit of the gospel message, chances are that the whole thing is deeply infected with human reason. Granted, reason is how we get things organized, but reason has to follow the heart. And how many churches do you know about that teach the heart-led way?

Stop and think about that. In my personal journey, long before I stumbled across the concept of heart-led living, I was already trying to implement it using terminology I had been taught in religious college. Back then, I referred to it as “conviction” and spoke of how it’s something implanted in your soul by God. The image I used was a bedrock of our existence, and how that was the bedrock of commitment to Christ. It comes from God, not from anything we can do. And I taught that God wrote with His finger in that bedrock something unique to us as individuals He Created for His glory. Our first duty was to discern what was written there, in part by pulling away the rubble that God didn’t put there. I suggested that, for most of us, it was several layers deep.

You should have seen how much Hell I caught from religious leaders for that. While the particulars they picked over varied, I could tell there was something fundamental about it that they rejected. At some point, I began to understand that it was a threat to religious leadership itself. These people had a vested interest in maintaining a system that was forced to deny that teaching. It happened in several different Protestant denominations.

When I discovered that the heart was quite literally a sensory organ in itself, something measurable with scientific instruments, a lot of things fell into place. Slowly I realized that the scientific works was misguided, but served to illustrate something that science could never understand, anyway. Never mind the physical realities of the heart; the heart is a symbol with deep traditions in the Ancient Near East, and particularly appears in the Bible. I already knew from biblical scholarship that Hebrew people regarded the heart as the metaphorical seat of the “will” — a term that roughly equates to conviction. At that point, I understand a lot of Hebrew imagery that never made sense before.

For all their talk of the “priesthood of the believer,” the American Protestant religion remains deeply centralized. Sure, you are free believe what drives you, but you can’t hang around with your church family in any meaningful way unless you toe the line of orthodoxy. I’ve had enough of religious leaders enjoying my talents while putting chains on me within “their ministry” so I didn’t weaken their authority.

So if someone tells me that this or that expert on something is “Spirit led,” it really tells me more about the one saying it than it does about the expert. Have you noticed how that works? “So-n-so is a deeply spiritual, man of God” — whose teaching just happens to keep the speaker in power. Whatever happened to the man of God wholly willing to surrender his position at any moment? Whatever happened to the kind of moral leadership that demands you work through all the questions yourself before you try to join up and follow him? And that you keep working through them and keep reaffirming that it’s good to follow for now?

I’m not interested in what some organizational leader tells me is the right way to go about doing the work of God, regardless whom he cites as the expert, nor how many experts he lines up to back his ideas. Since when does anyone have the mandate from God to decide what my calling and ministry should be? Give me your opinion, but don’t stand in the way if God leads me in a different direction. As the DeGarmo and Key song says in reference to religious debates:

Will you still love me after I choose?
Doesn’t the issue stand upon this truth?
Up on a cross he died for sinners!
Up on a cross between two thieves!
Up on a cross he died for you and me!

(DeGarmo and Key, “Up on a Cross,” Streetlight 1986)

Suddenly all those resources that they insist belong to God were denied me and they loved me gone.

The ministry of the gospel is donor-centric: It centers on God. God decides what talents and calling I shall have; He decides how it shall be carried out. The results are measured in terms of His glory, not my personal success as humans measure such things. Don’t tell me my talents are better off under your control, doing something that pumps your prestige. Don’t tell me that I have to meet the people where they are, when what you really mean is you want me to bring them into your shadow.

Nor does it matter what any human on this earth thinks that people out there really need. I can’t give them what I don’t have from God. God is the One who knows what they need, and if He can’t tell me Himself, it’s likely because of all the crap someone else put into my head that gets in the way of His direction.

And what they need is the heart-led life. That’s what this parish is all about. Not because I say so, but because each of you discovers for yourself that it’s true. That’s what I’ve discovered for myself, and that’s what I’m trying to share. I already know that this means there won’t be very many takers, at least not at any one time. I already know this means that I can’t invest much effort and interest in what most of humanity imagines is a good idea for making the world a better place. Sure, I’m a trained and experienced logistics and management guy; I bring order out of chaos. But I keep that in its proper place. It’s quite likely that such skills will get me into some place where I can help a lot of folks with material needs, but the real issue will be those few who see my faith in my work and are moved to ask about it. Those few are the real issue, the real reason God put me in that position.

The Hebrew word for “my provider” is jireh. Our ministry here together is centered on the ultimate Provider of all things; His name is Jehovah Jireh.

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VA Trip: Adventure

Posted on February 7, 2017 by ehurst

The unseasonably warm weather encouraged me to ride my bike to the VA this morning. When I left home at around 6:30 it was about 45°F (7C) and felt even warmer. The only thing I did differently was add a small headlight I keep just for that purpose. The taillight has long been mounted, so it was just a matter of turning it on. I arrived in about 45 minutes. The tough part is that I can’t eat anything until after the initial blood draw in the lab. I opted to eat in the cafeteria and it was just like old times with typical military food — tolerable but not memorable. Still, it was slightly better than schlepping food up there with me on the bike.

So my primary care doctor basically said the lab report looked good, better than most he sees. He understands my distaste for medication and works with me. For all the testing the cardiology clinic did, there was nothing in their records to indicate any particular cause the tachycardia. It’s just something I have to live with. For some inscrutable reason, the trauma to my body in the bike crash gave me a new sensitivity to caffeine. So the best the doctor could tell me was to be ready with the Valsalva Maneuver whenever the pulse racing starts.

He believes I’m well ahead of the curve on the knee healing up. When I mentioned riding 50 miles yesterday, he looked a me with envy, saying, “I wish I had time for that sort of thing.” He’s a very conscientious physician, always taking it upon himself to carry the background load of paperwork and coordination to ensure patient records are complete and up-to-date. Otherwise, it’s unlikely to happen. You should never doubt the power of large bureaucracy to screw things up; the more people involved, the worse it gets. Everyone feels the urge to justify their job by meddling and complicating simple processes.

The one part of my visit that went quite well was the bicycle parking. It’s an enclosed courtyard off the main entrance and few of the bikes there were even locked, yet nothing ever happens to them. It was quite entertaining to see the variety of chain-driven machinery people can find. I got back home about mid-morning and for some crazy reason felt exhausted, falling asleep as soon as I sat down. I never seem to notice how much work it is spending time at a big government-run hospital. Of course, it’s the only time I see any significant amount of stair-climbing — I don’t like using elevators with that much pedestrian traffic. The stairwells are generally quiet and empty. It’s not that I don’t like people; I love them. What drags me down is having to hang around that much human misery when so much of it is self-inflicted.

It’s bad enough when things happen to harm us; that’s just the way it goes. But I see hundreds on every visit who don’t take the minimum of self-care. I realize I don’t know much of what goes on in their lives, but when I do sit and listen to them talk, it’s highly consistent in revealing how silly people can be. And then, on top of that, some of these folks are just desperately lonely, even as they commit themselves to choices that isolate them. My experience has taught me that it’s quite rare when something I can say might actually do them any good. They are too busy telling their woes to listen. They aren’t bad people, just horribly lost and misguided.

It’s a visit to Hell, in a sense, but without the chance to free anyone. It doesn’t harm me, but it wears me out.

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Fitness Test: Giant Loop

Posted on February 6, 2017 by ehurst

My pictures didn’t turn out at all, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Tomorrow is my annual checkup at the VA. I wasn’t too worried about the doctor yapping at me about much of anything. Still, but I was personally unhappy with how that brief period of taking beta-blockers just about killed my metabolism. My waist sized swelled just a bit and kept swelling even after I discontinued them. So finally I got tired of it and dropped all sweets. Keep in mind that I had no trouble eating them before the collision last year and right up until I had so much trouble with tachycardia that they gave me those nasty pills. Suddenly sweets were a problem, but it wasn’t obvious for a while. So I dropped them last week and started into a different exercise regimen to kick up the metabolism from wake-up throughout the day.

In the process, I discovered that my knee is better than I thought. I took a 2-mile hike, wearing a compression brace, of course. With the brace I was able to keep up a fast road-march pace. And when I got back, there was none of the usual pain down inside the joint. I was tired and had ordinary workout soreness, but none of that dull ache that nags for two or three days.

It gave me confidence to try something really big: Today I saddled up and rode the Giant Loop. That’s the Katy Trail to Persimmon Hill, up to Wilshire and all the way in to Nichols Hills. I zig-zagged back down to Grand Boulevard and rolled all the way out to Hefner Lake. I stayed on the south edge, noticing that the lake was down by at least six feet (almost 2m). Boats in the mini-docks were suspended a good bit above the water. By the time I got to the canal, I could see it was flowing into Hefner Lake, which is backward from typical. Then I followed the canal to Lake Overholser. It was quite a drag facing the stiff breeze head-on for two miles straight on the stretch alongside Wiley Post Airport. When I crossed the pump house at the gates over that end of the canals, I could hear the electric pumps just humming away. Overholser has a good water level. I also spotted a car nose down into a tree on the bank of the dam, but it was pretty well hidden from my camera by foliage. I guess whichever agency is responsible just didn’t think it was worth removing the wreck.

There was another two miles of headwinds along Overholser and a little beyond on the West River Trail. Eventually I got around to facing east and it was very quiet and solitary riding the curvy trail to Meridian Avenue. Just before I got to that point I spotted a whole flock of solid white pelicans huddling on a sandbar out in the river, at least two dozen of them. But taking that shot would mean shooting into the sun and I had the wrong camera for that. The crossover at Meridian is just about done, and already quite usable. From there I began to encounter more traffic, mostly pedestrians. I started making much better time, and was zipping pretty well all the way to the Eagle Lake Trail, but stopped at the bridge again. Then I climbed up out of the riverbed area and onto Reno, but dove into the back streets to avoid the heavier traffic. By the time I got home it was about 5.5 hours — really slow, but the fact that I made it was cause for rejoicing.

Addenda: After a quick attempt to calculate the distance, I found it comes close to 50 miles (80 km).

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How Bad Will It Be?

Posted on February 5, 2017 by ehurst

If you examine the record of Scripture, you can discern a thread of moral propriety in dealing with other nations. The starting point is to leave folks alone. In truth, this is the broad instinct of the Children of Israel. They weren’t very war-like. Indeed, coming out of their Egyptian bondage, they were pretty whiny about having to relearn their ancient nomadic ways. It required a firm resolve to defend their people and what God said He entrusted into their stewardship, and they were consistently reluctant to fight back when attacked.

So they spent forty years in nomad boot camp until the whiner generation was dead. They were tougher then, though still reluctant to execute God’s judgment. The consistent testimony of Scripture is that the Land was theirs by divine grant, and the folks living there were the most despicable creatures God ever confronted in His lordship over Creation. Indeed, every pagan culture that encountered them agreed that the Canaanites were so depraved that it defied description.

God said quite emphatically that He would deliver them into the hands of His People. Even then, Israel simply didn’t have the toughness to carry it through, and ended up having an infestation of depraved people in their lands. But even when all of that was settled and in place, the issue of foreign relations remained a matter of letting folks keep what they had until they tried to take something God gave Israel. And it wasn’t so much a matter of the land borders as it was the borders of shalom, the essential social stability that rested on trusting God to provide reasonable prosperity, safety and health, and a generally peaceful existence. Obey the Covenant Law and these things are yours, said the Lord.

The only time it went wrong was when some portion of the nation began to lust for things God said they didn’t need, and which He had not given them. Their sin broke the covenant security, and it gave the demons permission to stir up neighboring nations over any number of false grievances to come and prey on Israel. The whole idea was for Israel to prove the power of the Covenant by living it and remaining in shalom regardless of what troubles existed in other nations. An obedient Israel could defeat overwhelming numbers of massed troops simply by sending out their Temple Choir to battle.

But when Israel was disobedient, their overwhelming numbers couldn’t defeat an old lady throwing rocks. They had no power, and all of Creation was against them.

At some point, Israel’s penchant for unfaithfulness to God’s revelation crossed a critical line and it was all over with. The record of the Covenant of Moses remains an inspiring source of how God operates in this fallen world. It helps to explain the much more sparsely recorded Covenant of Noah. By comparing the notes within Scripture, we come to understand what Noah means by using Moses as a subset, a particular instance of Noah — that people, that place, that time. Noah applies to all humanity, wherever they go, until there are no more rainbows anywhere on earth.

We know that Biblical Law is winsome in practice, winning however many hearts are capable of seeing how beautifully it brings shalom. But the Bible was not our culture; it was added into a preexisting heathen culture, first of the aging Roman Empire, and then the Germanic hordes that overran Europe. The Bible was pulled in and its message perverted through a raft of false assumptions brought to the Scripture.

What we in America have inherited is the heathen cultural spite of the Anglo-Saxons. The religious mythology has deeply infected our churches to the point that Christianity bears little resemblance to the teachings of a Hebrew Christ. The USA was founded on a form of “trade” that insists the other party must swallow wholly the entire Anglo-Saxon way of civilization. Otherwise, trade consists of the US invading in various ways and simply taking whatever it is we want from the other parties. If they resist, we wipe them out. If they can’t change their ways, we make them slaves. If they choose to buy into our culture, we treat them with some grudging respect and just do business.

As General Butler once said, our entire military history is massing troops against everyone who won’t play by our rules. Even our Christian missions were tainted with a cultural message that overpowered the true gospel. The missionaries were often little more than agents for espionage, or even invading troops. Thus, while the troops we send are motivated by that ancient Anglo-Saxon cultural arrogance, the real issue is seizing all assets for our Big Business elite to exploit at their profit.

This is the substance of everything we’ve done with our military — everything. The only difference it makes in where we fight is which particular crop of industrial oligarchs are pulling the levers in government at the moment. Up until recently, it was a matter of Hollywood and Big Technology, and their leftist allies. Now it’s Big Oil and Military Industries pulling the levers. On top of that we’ve got a very take-charge President such as we have not seen since Jackson, but this one happens to be a businessman himself. Whatever it is masquerading as “Democratic Party” is essentially serving Hollywood and Technology, while the faux “Republican Party” serves Oil and Weapons. It’s a fight over whose business interests will prevail and control the profits of national trade and production.

Meanwhile, the only friends the US has in this world is a scattering of countries that bought into that Anglo-Saxon culture, plus the one country that donated said culture to us. Everyone else is either a conditional trading partner, always looking for a better deal, or one of our many enemies, whom we have provoked endlessly. US foreign policy will slowly shift over to serve the interests of the new status quo, but it’s the same spiteful abuse it ever was.

I submit that, if you can see it from this angle, all the political posturing and grandstanding is a lot easier to understand. Indeed, it becomes fairly predictable. Granted, there are some details I’ve left out in this painting with a broad brush, but if you already know about them, you are smart enough to get what I’m saying.

The US has defied God pretty consistently. Not once have we stood up for His Word and we have never really had much shalom, just some poor substitutes that never satisfy. We can see that much as a mere matter of Noah’s Covenant. God’s wrath is upon us; we were never in compliance and His patience is gone. The only question is who gets to knock us down and how badly we will hurt when we fall.

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