Impassioned News

Posted on November 28, 2016 by ehurst

News that builds from passion isn’t journalism; it’s just propaganda. I take very seriously my assertion that this world is mere shadows, the reality is far more flexible than Western minds can grasp. And I take seriously that perception is reality, something that affects human existence in more ways than even we can imagine. We don’t just report events; we who manage to attract attention are also shaping perception and reality at the same time. Let’s be responsible about this and not embarrass our Creator.

I’d like to offer this article from Bill Sardi. Not because I’m a big fan; he’s a libertarian activist. But he does help us with asking the right questions on a lot of issues, particularly involving public health propaganda. In this particular article, he reminds us not to fall prey to our own human biases. Remember what I said about the pillars of Christian Mysticism? One of them includes: Don’t trust yourself too much. Let your mind learn holy cynicism about everything, including the person in the mirror. The best you can do at any moment is accept something as provisionally accurate. Your heart knows, but your mind is full of confusion and needs a lot of unlearning.

We read and engage journalism on that level of distrust. If you realize that the primary purpose of most journalism, including all the various independent individual keyboard commandos across the Internet, is to stir feeling and perhaps some particular concerted action, what you actually perceive from them is where they are trying to herd us next. Don’t listen; learn to recognize the voice of the Divine Shepherd of Souls. He speaks first through the heart.

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A Little More Moral Economics

Posted on November 27, 2016 by ehurst

Trust your heart-mind for a proper moral analysis.

The whole end of mankind living on this earth is to seek the glory of God. Just so you understand completely, it’s “seek” in both ways: We seek to bring Him glory, but we also seek where His glory shines brightest in our world. It’s a question of drive and purpose.

And after the Fall, we have His revelation to provide the structure of His glory for our understanding. He has told us all we need to know about how to find and reflect back His glory in this world. One of the things I harp on is contextual discernment as a way of guiding our thinking. Sense the moral shape of the moment; don’t let your mind exclude possibilities. Standing in a deeply moving spiritual moment on that isolated hilltop today might find the same hilltop tomorrow an alien place. Don’t be surprised; it works that way. Seeking His glory includes sensing from whence it calls to you. Obedience and holiness includes letting our hearts tell us where to be and when.

Our hearts also tell us how to handle the resources He grants for our service in His glory. I’ve tried to explain repeatedly that, though I studied economics enough to teach the subject, that’s just mechanics. No academic pursuit of the intellect can ever assign moral value to one choice over another. What I’m about to say will shock most Western economists.

Resources exist for His glory; He made and owns all things. The objective of our academic study is to understand the mechanics of human activity as best we can so that we know how to execute His moral demands. Another thing I harp on is the primacy of social stability, but that assumes you live by the Covenant of Christ. Jesus defined what it means to have social stability when He told us the first two commandments of Divine Law: Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself. Just to make sure, He also defined at length what a “neighbor” is, by defining it as someone who obeys the same Divine Law from their hearts, never mind what their human identity might be otherwise (see The Good Samaritan). If it looks like faith, smells like faith and quacks like faith, you should assume it’s faith. Faith is rooted in the heart.

And while God knows for sure whether someone really belongs to Him, the question for you and I in this life is whether someone is walking in faith at any given moment. We can hope for the best, but if we aren’t paying attention and sensitive to this, we can end up feeding failure. Don’t get lost in tangents here. Your first loyalty is Christ; love does not grant your brother or sister a claim over you and your resources granted from God. Your heart knows the boundaries.

If you really have made Christ the Lord of your life and you live by your heart, then you cannot avoid a sense of duty to your fellow heart-led folks. We do have around us those who aren’t heart-led, but we can’t treat them the same. That should be obvious. You can toss in the trash all that nonsense about “everyone is equal.” That’s a heathen concept; Our Father specifically said He plays favorites. He said that everyone has potential, but some are not your concern in any given context because we are finite. There are people of the Covenant and there is everyone else. People of the Covenant get our priority, and a part of that priority is building up their existence on this earth to help reinforce the blessings of the Covenant. Those blessings are summed as shalom, which includes reasonable prosperity, peaceful relations, safety from threats, and a vivid powerful life. (That last one might mean a long life, but that’s not the point.) How we gain those blessings is standing in the context of where God calls us and seeking to bring stability to your fellow covenant members. If you can’t do that, you have no business doing anything at all.

That means that the sole purpose of economic activity is to bless your covenant family. We do not maximize profits and minimize costs. We maximize material blessings to the domain God placed within your hands — that is the biblical definition of “our economy.” We are trying to fatten the community, not the banks. So we would naturally seek to stuff the staffing from within our communion to the maximum we can afford and still operate. Nepotism is godly. We don’t measure profit as money in the bank after paying expenses; we measure profit as the number of people whose lives we have enabled. Our greatest treasure is people, not stuff. And yes, we expect a certain measure of loss, since the Bible hardly distinguishes between a loan and a gift within the Covenant family.

Now, it’s not as if we can’t allow this to spill over into the lives of those outside the Covenant. By all means, slosh it around if you can. It’s part of how we show them God’s glory. However, if you start letting them advise you as to how things ought to be, back away and remind them we are not of this world. Use whatever words or actions you sense will best help them see, but don’t be sucked into their games. Their needs and “claims” are not a part of our calculus; we act on a heart-led prompting for His glory.

Yeah, that’s part of what the biblical Eastern feudalism is all about. God hard-wired us to live by that social structure. Without it we cannot glimpse His glory and His holiness.

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Psalm 119: Yod 73-80

Posted on November 26, 2016 by ehurst

The psalmist shows us the Path of Justice. It could also be seen as retribution if we understand the justice of being rescued from those who deny God’s revelation. We learn to be patient as God corrects us and makes us stronger through the evils other people commit, but in due time, His wrath falls on the unjust while His servants harvest blessings because God’s truth is how this world actually works.

God has made each of us; our place in this world is wholly His doing. If there is any source of wisdom about how we should live here, it is the One who made us and all things. This is the kind of life that cheers others seeking His truth. They rejoice in the confirmation of God’s promises coming true by example.

The psalmist claims to know — using a Hebrew word that covers awareness in all aspects — without any doubt that God’s justice is the very definition of righteousness. He presses upon us His discipline according to His promises to keep us in His mercy. It’s a genuine blessing He does not lightly allow us to escape His love. So he prays to be driven out sin into the place where God’s shalom stands waiting and he can breathe a sigh of relief.

And when he is too weak, the psalmist prays that God will permit His compassion to come find him wherever he has wandered. The God who bears the shepherd’s rod is a delightful sight to a lost lamb, even when the rod corrects, for the same rod defends us as well. All the more so when we came into that sorrow because of arrogant men who deny God’s Word. God’s Presence shames them, but brings the psalmist to peaceful meditation on that Word.

So if any others have lost their way and cannot see God clearly, let them turn to the freshly resolved psalmist who now has a clear vision. They’ll recognize him because they already know at least something about God’s revelation. And while the fleshly mind will surely fail him at times, he knows that God will speak consistently through his heart. He knows that giving heed to his conscience will never leave him ashamed.

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Cycling: Road Time

Posted on November 26, 2016 by ehurst

openroadIt’s time to invest more effort riding on the road. Part of my decision is recognizing that my trail excursions are causing me more pain in my right knee than I really need. I can take long hard rides on the road and not suffer nearly as much. Of course, the real reason is that my heart tells me it’s time for a switch.

Try to understand that mountain bikes are what I prefer to ride regardless of the actual type of terrain. The frame on this Diamondback Axis is just the perfect fit for my body and my condition. But I’m sensing a call to spend more time doing tour-style riding so I’m going to order touring tires (double defense, of course). The good ones like that cost a bit and I had enough in PayPal to start with one I found on eBay ($63). Once I have both, I’ll switch over.

I’m not sure yet how it will affect the photography. Most of the time the iPhone is good enough, but I’ll carry the big one when I anticipate the need. Thanks for riding along with me!

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Unlearning

Posted on November 26, 2016 by ehurst

I want to reinforce something Sister Christine said on her blog the other day:

The heart does not have to be taught how to sense the world.

The mind does not have to be taught to acquiesce to the heart, to cede control.

They both know what to do, innately.

The link between heart and brain is there; we are all born with it. It requires you be taught to ignore it, and even then most people experience a good bit of moral demand intruding into their minds. The problem is the false barriers erected by our intellectual heritage, which in turn was one of Satan’s greatest accomplishments. Western culture supremely enforces the Fall by elevating the intellect to the throne of decision. It is quintessentially eating the Forbidden Fruit, the Fruit of Judging Good and Evil. Not discerning good and evil, the fruit is the narcotic temptation to usurp the heart’s instinctive reliance on God’s revelation woven into reality itself. It’s the false thrill that comes from using one’s own intellectual reasoning processes to displace God, to be one’s own God.

Merely telling someone that the heart is there with a higher mind and awareness typically brings the whole thing into sharp focus. It’s really that easy in many cases. The difficulty is a matter of discipline, which in the Hebrew thinking of the Bible is another kind of learning — “learning is suffering” (an ancient Eastern image that shows up in Hebrews 5:7-8). You are a child of God, an adopted sibling of Jesus, but you have to unlearn in your intellect all the bad habits of cultural false teaching and remove the barriers. Don’t you imagine Jesus as a boy faced a lot of bad teaching in the synagogues of His day? Granted, this is where things can become difficult. Jesus’ parents must have struggled with the obvious truth of what He said even as it went against the grain of what they were taught to revere. Rejecting your cultural identity is often painful, but you’d be surprised at the large number of people who walked most of their life in some awareness of this conflict between what they were compelled to think grinding against their own conscience.

I cannot neatly package this for you. It’s already there. The burden is upon you to push aside the barriers. Ideally you and I could meet together and you could be persuaded by the sheer power of God’s Presence in my soul, not to mention in the meeting itself. However, Our Lord seems have no trouble working through the medium of mere writing, particularly when the writing is specifically aimed at revealing the person behind it. There again, we have to break all kinds of rules we learn in school about what is proper “voice” when writing. It is a conscious effort on my part to draw you into my world so your heart will see my heart. If my writing here doesn’t call out to you, then there’s nothing I can do to make any of this work.

I’m hoping you can get your minds used to the mystical approach. Yesterday’s unpleasant ride for me wasn’t awful in the broad sense. I enjoyed the presence of my Creator in His Creation, the natural world around me. I never lost that sense of His comfort, but I did realize I was in the wrong place. Nor did I sin in choosing to ride that trail; it was for me to discover while under His care that there’s nothing there calling my name. He designated that place for others. The flat tire? Just an annoyance on the route; I was prepared for it by carrying a fresh inner tube in my toolkit. Mysticism includes being patient with my own foibles and realizing that God works in ways that I’ll never be able to explain.

But the basic moral truth remains: Once you are exposed to moral teaching, it sticks because your heart tells your mind to embrace it. The vast majority of what I write here is merely removing the cultural garbage so you can see clearly the light of glory reflecting off reality itself. My particular choice of words may not meet your needs, so I keep telling folks not to hang around out of any sense of duty. You owe me nothing. Stay because God says herein is something He has for you. I know how to see past a bad day and a drop in readership because it’s all about His glory.

The task is to unlearn what hinders His glory.

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Cycling: Unhappy Trails

Posted on November 25, 2016 by ehurst

This was not one of my more pleasant and uplifting rides. All the way out, taking the Post Road route to Draper Lake, I kept having to fiddle with the rear disc brake. Then, as soon as I entered the Draper Recreational Area, I realized my rear tire was going flat. It’s salvageable, but I didn’t want to use the temporary patches I carry, so I swapped out the tube and saved the old one. While I have an itty-bitty hand pump to inflate, there is no way to get a decent pressure level from that thing.

01roughtrailsI should have known it would not be a fun trail today. A few years ago I rode some of the “better” dirt roads around the east side of the lake and it was not fun. Today I headed west along what would have been SE 104th, one of those survey section lines cut through the country side in early statehood days. As you can see, it was awfully rough. After cresting the rise, it became downright dangerous. Lots of exposed bedrock with hard drops punctuated with washouts that were very tough to pick my way across.

02swampycoveAt the shore, I took the old shore trail northward around a swampy cove. There the trail was mostly solid from improvements (rubble and gravel) but very thoroughly overgrown. That was the best part of the ride. Following this thing around I came back to the continuation of the surveyor cut I came in on. It took me back to the last trail I rode, and I took that one back out because it was safer and more familiar.

There were no hidden treasures, not rewards from this workout except the exercise itself. I won’t be visiting eastern Draper Lake trails again.

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Hacking Me?

Posted on November 24, 2016 by ehurst

A few days ago Microsoft notified me that someone tried to hack into my Outlook.com account from a bogus IP address. (I don’t use the Outlook email program; I use the email address.) The source IP address is reserved space owned by UK’s MOD and isn’t facing the Internet. MOD are wholly unlikely culprits, so it was almost certainly spoofing — sending false information in their traffic headers. That’s pretty hard to pull off because of what’s involved in how the DNS servers handle such things. Just to make sure, I changed my password, but that’s the account I use least.

This incident by itself means nothing; for now it’s just a random thing. But any more of it would represent targeting. Right now, I’m without a clue what could possibly be behind it. In fact, getting a free account for Outlook.com is so easy that I can’t imagine what use anyone would have for trying to hijack mine — unless they plan on using it to impersonate me and fool someone who knows me. I’m not sure I can cook up a scheme by which you would be warned it’s not me unless every one us all agrees together to start using the exact same kind of encryption software. That’s a bit much to ask with nearly 800 subscribers to this blog.

At any rate, I’m just letting you know in case this becomes an issue.

Update: Turns out this was something that hit a large number of users, so it’s unlikely a targeted attack.

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Thanksgiving Message 2016

Posted on November 24, 2016 by ehurst

Today is Thanksgiving in America.

God said that we should celebrate holidays that help establish a rhythm of work and rest. There’s an awful lot more behind all that, of course. By absorbing the example of Moses’ Covenant, we learn that it has to represent at least two things: (1) the rhythm of seasons and God’s provision, but also (2) it should celebrate signal moments when God acted to establish and preserve the community. If you think about it just a little bit, you would understand the so-called “Puritan Work Ethic” is neither precisely Puritan nor an ethic, but an excuse for brutal exploitation. That mythical beast permits holidays only begrudgingly, and would ignore the sabbatical cycle of human existence. The whole thing reduces humanity to mere economic units, a pure manifestation of Western materialism. Let us cease serving Mammon.

America is in deep doo-doo for ignoring all the rhythms and cycles God revealed in His Word, among a host of other heathen devotions the earn His wrath. But God has, for reasons only He understands, turned away His full wrath for moment. What we know is that His decision coincided with our discovery of a conscious revival of walking by the heart and not the head. In my own heart, which sometimes catches prophetic glimpses of God’s ways because He simply feels like telling us things, I sense that this sparing (a kind of Passover) has to do with a restoration of the Covenant of Heart. Don’t get all silly thinking that’s a sacred name just because I put it in caps. It’s just a provisional label; a personal name for the Covenant of Christ’s Blood and you need not buy into. But I am convinced that because there are people serving Him who openly talk about this heart-led life, He’s ready to take things in a different direction and offer a larger space for repentance.

So today I give thanks first and foremost for being alive and aware in this special moment in human history. We have this treasure in our battered and cracked earthen vessels seeking to share the one thing that makes life in this realm tolerable. It’s not so much the vessels but the treasure that matters. We keep trying to show it to empty folks in hopes something inside their souls will awaken and open to receive their own share of treasure. But only God does the awakening; it’s His hand alone. If all we do is provoke human reason, we’ve accomplished nothing.

So if you are caught in the American rhythm of things, as I am, I hope that today you have devoted just a little bit of time giving thanks for a sense of heart-led calling, or praying that you can hear that calling soon. It’s there. Every one of you who reads this stuff and walks in the heart of faith and conviction have a calling. He fully intends to use each of us to help redeem just a few other folks chosen for a heart-mind awareness. Some of you are already up to your elbows in the work, and some are waiting for something to shift in the context before it becomes more obvious. Some of you are somewhere in between, moving toward a realization.

Wherever you are on this path, give thanks for His mighty gifts, and prepare your heart for a clarity of commitment.

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Cycling: New River Loop

Posted on November 23, 2016 by ehurst

Source: Google Earth

Source: Google Earth

As always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab. Having taken this route twice, I christen it the Riverside Loop. So long as it’s relatively dry, this thing should be passable. Basically I ride up past the hospital and onto Midwest Boulevard, north to the river where they did all that work with new dikes and such, then onto that trail the follows the south/east bank of the North Canadian River all the way around to Cherry Creek. From there it’s real easy to take Vickie to Reno and back home. Riding the river bank trails is excellent exercise.

riverThat northern part of the loop along the river was what I once called the “muddy trial.” Lately the recreational riders have come back out because the efforts to save the river banks from washing away created a large parking area just west off the bridge. And with easy access, there’s been a little illegal dumping already. However, the ATVs have been out, and at least a few trucks (based on the size and type of tire print), and even a bulldozer at one point. So that swampy, muddy trail has been beaten back into a pretty decent jeep trail. It’s an easy ride right now.

cherrycreekSo I stayed on the bank and followed a beaten path all the way down to Cherry Creek. Again, because of the semi-drought conditions, you can see where vehicles have been fording the creek. I could have; it was pretty shallow, but I knew that by taking the trail along the edge of the creek back to NE 10th, I’d be right next to Vickie Drive and that’s a good quiet route back to Reno Ave. I spotted a new cement plant — just a mobile belt loading rig next to a cement hopper, vast piles of sand and gravel, a bunch of cement mixer trucks and a sign inviting job seekers to become drivers. It’s right next to the massive permanent UniCem plant, offering competition most likely on price per load.

A really good workout when I don’t feel like riding too awful far.

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The Fear of Fools

Posted on November 22, 2016 by ehurst

Think about it for a moment. Contemplate and clear out the old garbage.

God’s Word tells us about Creation. Right there in blunt terms in Genesis 1:31 tells us that God saw all that He had made and it was very good. It still is. Notice the way the Curse of the Fall is explained: the ground is cursed by our fallen nature (Genesis 3:17-19). Paul goes on to explain how Creation was not directly cursed, but subjected to futility because of the curse on our fallen nature (Romans 8:20-21). Creation did not choose that path; God did. God is the one who subjected His Creation to the management of humans back in the Garden. Under the Curse, it was no longer manageable in the same way, but He planned to redeem us so that we could regain that lost communion with our best ally.

Creation itself is our ally, and we are supposed to be managers. Satan didn’t steal control from us in the Garden; he does not own Creation and has not usurped our management role. All he has is some limited authority to seduce us the way he did in the Garden. If we return to God and His ways — if we pass through the Flaming Sword of Truth — then we can return to something we lost in Eden. Stop eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and go back to eat the Tree of Life. We who are redeemed are not threatened by Creation.

Granted, there are things in nature that will still hurt us. When we begin to cultivate the heart-mind as the anchor for our decision-making in this world, we are led to study that nature is a blessing and how it is a blessing. Some things we find in nature aren’t for us directly, but are there as a part of the larger whole. So we don’t hang out where biting insects will swarm us; we don’t go into places with too many thorns and contact toxins; we don’t typically approach animals who think of us as food. We leave them to play their part and go where nature welcomes us.

Yes, there are times when God will show His glory by having us do things we wouldn’t normally do. So Elijah called fire down from heaven and didn’t have to actually die, but rode Home in a chariot with angels. Jonah was eaten but no digested. Daniel was not eaten by the lions, and his pals were not burned by the fiery furnace. And Jesus walked on the water and healed thousands. The heart knows when those moments come; it’s all about God’s glory.

From what I’ve seen, there aren’t many places in the universe we can go safely outside Earth. This planet was designed to protect and provide. We have gone to the moon and some are planning to visit Mars, but it’s terribly expensive in resources and there’s been precious little direct payoff from it. But that’s not a reason in itself to stop trying; it’s just something we have to keep in mind as we evaluate our priorities. And one of the biggest issues we face is the massive torrent of deadly radiation out there. Recent efforts to sample what’s out there farther indicates the radiation levels climb radically. Space faring requires we bring with us just about every element of what nature provides here on Earth, and we are still learning what that includes every time we bring people back from a trip.

There is some hope we can find ways to move across large distances in space without directly traveling through it. Yep, folks are poking around at ways to cut through the space-time limitations that are part of the Curse. Let’s presume for a moment that God allows people to keep poking until they discover a way to move something by stepping into, say, another dimension of existence, and then coming back out somewhere else. There is only one way to escape time-space constraints: You have to enter the Spirit Realm. There is no other “dimension” of existence. And if you aren’t welcome in the Spirit Realm as a citizen, then it will be Hell for you. You cannot enter God’s house without His invitation and expect things to go well. It’s a case of going somewhere you don’t belong, only it’s a lot worse than being hurt or eaten alive. It will destroy your soul, yet leave you in full awareness of it for eternity.

We deduce this from a large collection of hints in the Bible. You can dispute the specifics, and I’m not going to list a ton of references. The Bible wasn’t written like that, so you can’t read it like that. Only when something is directly addressed can we try to make sense of some topic. The Scriptures provide a bunch of historic contextual incidents, and in most cases something in the text indicates the proper moral discernment of what matters. You are supposed to absorb the broader awareness of God as a Person and how He does things. Not with your head, but you learn to understand with your heart. And it’s pretty clear that there are no shortcuts in redemption and no shortcuts against the Curse of the Fall. If you read the Bible with your heart in the lead, I am confident we won’t dispute much.

But one thing becomes obvious to all of us: Virtually the whole genre of horror fiction conjures nightmares based on suppositions contrary to revelation. It presumes on a fundamental level that nature is full of unknown threats. It’s rather schizophrenic: You are warned against poking around in some things, then taught to fear not poking around because you might miss some moment of personal glory. You gotta be special to get away with it; you gotta have special talents and/or pay your dues, etc. The entire approach to understanding reality is twisted and perverted. Nature is not like that, and there aren’t any special domains where Satan rules. The horrific evil is inside each of us already, so we need redemption to escape the false understanding and false desires that take us places where we’ll get hurt.

If God calls you to poke around, do so with the knowledge it could end your life. But the only way anything can destroy your soul is if you fail to get into redemption where you can know His calling. You can’t answer His call if don’t make Him Lord. Horror fiction reflects the world of people who reject redemption. It reflects man asserting his mastery against the instinctive assurance that he is not master. Mankind rejects the humility of repentance arising from revelation, but cannot gain any peace and assurance without it. The only reason horror fiction sells is because it reflects and freaking insanity that mankind carries in the soul. It’s a morbid fascination that knows instinctively we are fallen, but refuses to accept the one path back to Eden — we must embrace the Sword cutting into our own souls.

Don’t fear nature; understand God’s will and share in His glory through proper communion with nature.

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