More of What’s Going On

Posted on December 22, 2016 by ehurst

oldhousese44thdouglasI had planned to hit the Draper Lake loop today. I had some stuff to do before I left and it was pretty cold, anyway. Along about noon it was just warm enough not to be a struggle riding the bike. I knew there was virga (precipitation falling that doesn’t reach the ground) but the forecast indicated it wasn’t going to actually rain. It still felt pretty cold but I was suited up for it.

While it’s true of most places, I’ve noticed here in Oklahoma that the actual sense of whether it’s cold or not is highly dependent on multiple factors. The thermometer said it was about 40°F (4C) but it was overcast with a northerly breeze. Here the direction of the wind makes a lot of difference in how it feels. It was also kind of dampish in the air. So I remembered to wear the boots and some light sweat pants, and over my t-shirt was a heavy sweatshirt and light wind vest. It was about right, though I knew I would eventually sweat.

But as I rolled down the Post Road corridor, I hit a few sprinkles crossing over I-40. By the time I reached SE 44th, it was substantial light rain. So I ditched my plans and road back west toward Douglas Boulevard. Then I turned north and braved all the traffic until I got back to SE 15th and headed back through the neighborhoods toward home. It wasn’t a long ride, but it was enough.

I’m planning to upgrade the hard drive in my laptop. Before I do, I will be forced to restore Vista on the old hard drive. Somehow my Bluetooth adapter got turned off and it won’t come back to life without a proper Windows driver to switch it back on. I’ve done the research and there are no Linux drivers that can awaken it. Then I’ll keep that old drive in case stuff like that happens again.

Somehow I managed to bork my Linux Mint installation on the workstation. It has to do with how Mint handles some updates. Mint is derived from Ubuntu and has a different attitude about what constitutes a “security update,” which includes kernel updates. Though Mint recommended against it, I accepted the update that was supplied from Ubuntu upstream, but it broke everything. The system refused to boot and there is no simply way of recovery, no restoring it from backup. Most users would not have tried that update, but I did the research and disagreed with the Mint folks.

At any rate, I moved over to Xubuntu to avoid a repeat of that issue. I still recommend Mint for the average refugee from Windows, but when I’m there to help and train the user, it will be Xubuntu. As a side note, Ubuntu has a server edition (CLI only, but you can add a desktop environment later) that would make it much easier to help folks migrate over to Linux for that, as well. I found a nifty free book online for the current version of Ubuntu Server. Along with what I already know about typical desktop stuff, that book will help me be ready to assist just about everyone who decides it’s a good idea to migrate.

I had some goodies left over from what I gave to my neighbors’ kids, so I’ve been passing them out to random kids in the neighborhood whenever I see them outside.

We are supposed to see something above 60°F (16C) and rain on Christmas Day. Oklahoma’s weather meets the definition of “volatile.”

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Cycling: Test Ride

Posted on December 21, 2016 by ehurst

01re-tiredIt’s re-tired now. I received the second tire last night and left them both to stand slack overnight. Foldable tires, when stretched out normal, will tend to hold the beads fully expanded outward. Unfortunately they didn’t relax much, which made them very tricky to mount properly. Once again, these are Schwalbe Marathon Mondial HS 428 Double Defense tires. They contain at couple of puncture resistant layers built into the tread, so it makes the tread very stiff already, so once these tires get squeezed into some shape, they tend to keep it and resist reshaping.

02eastsideIt was warm enough for a decent ride. The trick is to use a very familiar route with familiar conditions so you can pay more attention to how the bike performs with different equipment. I took the old ride north up Midwest Boulevard, across the North Canadian River and up to Wilshire and the gravel stub west to the river bank again. Shaded areas of the river are still frozen over, despite ambient air temperatures above 40°F (4.4C) and rising to 60°F (15.5C).

03westsideThe first thing you notice is that they are both slightly narrower and lower profile than the big knobbies. They are still wide enough to give good handling on rough surfaces, but harder and smoother. So the second thing I noticed was the lack of road noise. The knobbies would buzz and hum loudly; these things are almost sneaky. There is still enough tread to feel a subtle vibration transmitted through the frame, but the stiff tread face also meant feeling a lot more of the little variations in the road surface. Yet it rode just fine on the gravel road where I took the picture of the bike.

04widesandbankThe real matter of interest is roll resistance while riding. While you can be sure that a the smaller total diameter of the tires made for a slight change in effective gear ratio for pedaling, all that means is riding in a somewhat higher gear most of the time. The real issue is whether it reduced the energy required to keep it going. Riding long distance against a high rolling resistance means having to stop more often on top of already taking longer to get anywhere. So the real test is riding uphill and with a headwind, and I got that today. I can assure you that I was able to face all of that in a higher gear, but once I got to the top I wasn’t nearly so tired. That means I’m creating less of a deficit in climbing and can maintain a stronger pace over longer rides.

05cedarframeAt any rate, it was a very pleasant ride. The river off the end of Wilshire shows the effects of extended drought with a very wide sand bank inside the curve. OKC municipal work crews were out moving dirt along the margins of the road and I stopped at their digging site. The cedars along the fence called out, inviting me to use them for framing a look at the exposed red soil.

I’ll be making that ride to Hefner Lake soon.

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Photography: Hither and Yon

Posted on December 20, 2016 by ehurst

01vetmemorialI really didn’t want to ride all that far, just enough to break the cabin fever. The first image is from last week when I spent time at my father-in-law’s grave. I believe that is an old M42 “Duster” anti-aircraft gun; you can’t see both of the twin barrels (40mm) from this angle. It was fully equipped with replacement barrels and everything. The rest are today’s shots from Barnes Park and Soldier Creek.

02formerlytargetOn my way there, I stopped to look at the site clearing where the old Target store once stood. I came up on the backside, not too far from where the loading dock once stood. Now it’s all dirt, some ten acres of asphalt removed completely. I still have no idea what the new owner plans to build there.

03seniorcenterWe are out of the deep freeze. Soldier Creek froze hard, and it looks like it might have been about an inch thick in places. Not enough to walk on, but enough to frustrate the water fowl. I passed the Senior Center and felt drawn to the shadows of tall pines out by the pavilion. There were very few people, and no kids at all, despite schools being closed for the holidays.

04thawingfallsThe little waterfall in Tom Poore Park was partly frozen, but I doubt it ever completely stopped flowing. It just didn’t freeze that hard or that long and the water level is decent. I just wish they had pushed those utility pipes a little deeper under the creek bed.

05bathingducksThe ducks don’t seem to mix much with the Canadian Geese, but other types don’t seem to mind them. There was a spot where the ice had opened up near the bridge on Reno Avenue and it was crowded with everything except the Canada Geese. The latter were hanging out upstream with what I believe is the peak population this time of year.

06canadageeseHere I also saw slightly more people, too. I could hear kids playing on the fenced playground in the distance, so it felt more normal. I continued riding out the south end of the trail and headed back home.

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What’s Going On?

Posted on December 19, 2016 by ehurst

While the general weather trend here in Oklahoma under the influence of La Niña means we expect a slightly warmer and drier winter than average, that doesn’t hinder the occasional cold snap. Along with everyone else in the US Heartland, we’ve had bitter cold, but very little precipitation. The past two nights were at or below 10°F (-12C). I had already taken some precautions over the past year living here to minimize air leaks for both hot and cold weather, so it wasn’t that bad in terms of energy use.

Shortly before it all hit, I was digging through my coat closet and found an old military parka that no longer fits. I mentioned it to our apartment maintenance guys and one jumped at the chance. This is one of those Gortex-lined parkas with all those exterior and interior pockets and the very functional wind and rain hood. I wore it a lot in Europe, but having kept up the fitness training over the years, I went from extra-large to 2X. No, it’s not my belly; the coat constricts my rib cage and shoulders. Being a little smaller fellow, he was so happy to get that.

And we thank God that our car has remained reliable. Once we got all the neglected maintenance done, this battered Volvo has performed admirably — better than anything we’ve ever owned. It seems everything on it can be fixed with the resources I have and the DIY community behind it is brilliant. So to make sure, I went out both of the coldest days and started it, letting it idle around 15 minutes to make sure it would start again when needed.

A few months back there was a high turnover in our apartment building. We now have lots of children here, and at least two apartments contain single mothers, one with four girls, the other with three. There are two trios of boys in other apartments, but their families are a little more reticent. I still try to interact positively with them on every encounter. However, both groups of girls have really taken an shine to me. I don’t see them often, but it’s a real delight. So we bought some Christmas cheer for the kiddos: some granola bars and fruit gummies. For the one trio I also threw in a box of sidewalk chalk. Both groups are prone to express their artistry on the concrete breezeway and stairs, but the quad has their own supply. I’ve gotten back a very warm response from the little ladies, of course.

I took advantage of the time huddling inside to investigate some of the stuff on the bike. I downloaded whatever user instruction sheets the manufacturers offered. I was able to get the disc brakes a little more accurately adjusted to the placement of things. The rear wheel was a particular problem. I finally had to pull them off the frame, make sure the wheel was mounted properly first, then take loose everything on the brake and mount it while carefully checking alignments and such. Now there’s no drag and it stops okay. I expect to get that second road tire any day now; stuff moves slowly near Christmas, of course.

The various weather services predict we won’t see any more cold weather once we climb back out of the freezer this week. Here in Oklahoma there is always a blessing from bitter cold: It reduces the biting insect population, of which we have an ample supply during warmer weather. Every hard freeze reduces their prevalence. A solid two weeks below freezing wipes them out for a few years, but every little bit helps. So with the current warming trend I should have a chance to give those new tires a proper test right away. Hmmm; Hefner Lake? Better give them a couple of shorter test runs first.

I hope you are all still praying about finding or building a local meat space community of faith. It doesn’t require a formal organization for gratifying fellowship. I’m trying to let people see me as the generous and friendly shepherd the Lord called me to be. Seeing someone who remains cheerful and serene in our current turmoil speaks very loudly.

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The Greatest Threat Is Always Inside

Posted on December 18, 2016 by ehurst

The single greatest threat to Americans is the CIA.

This is a difficult subject because it’s so tightly woven into the very fabric of human existence. On the one hand, spying is essential to human government in our fallen world. On the other hand, the secular state cannot help but do it wrong. The key element is loyalty. Making someone a spy vests them with an awful power to do harm, though indirectly for the most part. A great leader commissions spies from among those who would rather do something else. People who like the job can’t be trusted. If that spy’s loyalty is based on a commission from a specific individual in authority, and their sworn loyalty is to that one person, the risk can just barely be managed. Making that person loyal to an agency guarantees they will become a traitor their nation.

That’s because the agency itself absolutely requires a paranoid schizophrenia. There are precious few genuine born psychopaths in the world, and many would be drawn to professional spying. However, a spying agency in a secular state would never be that big of a draw to psychopaths unless they could start near the top. Meanwhile, the very nature of paranoid access control to the information held by such an agency demands fairly normal people who are willing to be made schizoid. That is, they will take an oath to compartmentalize their existence and keep secrets within secrets and all sorts of mind-twisting perversions of normal human morality, even while otherwise living a normal life. And these people have to believe meanwhile that they are patriotic.

In the case of the CIA, the whole thing was shaped by the Dulles Brothers and their psychopathic tendencies arising from their elitist loyalties. They were globalists from the start. The result for their work is an agency that offers the ultimate manifestation of The Cult and all the evil it represents. It is utterly essential to the operation of a secular state, yet is by design the single greatest threat to that state, because it cannot possibly ever be accountable to the state. Accountability removes their power to act. So the problem is really inherent in the nature of the secular state, not in the job of spying. The secular state corrupts everything it touches.

I take the position that the CIA has consistently violated our nation’s interests since day one. This is not something we can debate; it’s a conviction in my soul. It’s not a question of things the CIA has done specifically, but that it has consistently and spitefully fought the popular will every single time. We can debate whether the popular will is all that morally good, but the point here is that the CIA exists within a state that claims to serve the interests of the people. If there is anything that justifies our cynicism about such official pronouncements as “the government is the people,” the CIA makes it more the lie than it would otherwise be. It’s not just a facade; the CIA makes it a God damned lie in the literal sense.

So if you imagine the CIA murdered JFK, you are most likely correct. And the same with RFK, and a lot of other folks whose initials aren’t so widely known. (No, MLK was murdered by the FBI.) The necessity of assassinating leaders who threaten the CIA’s self-directed mission flatly ignores laws against domestic espionage. And the CIA alone knows why they haven’t assassinated Trump, but give it time. They aren’t at all partisan; they are entirely criminal by any definition.

Indeed, one of the reasons Trump would have a lot of trouble reforming the CIA is that it gets so very much funding from criminal enterprise around the world. And with the multiple layers of paranoid secrecy within the agency itself, there simply is no way to hold them accountable. No one would be able to dig into the CIA and find out what’s actually going on or who did what unless they volunteer the information. But when they do seem to open up, you can bet it’s at least partly false, an attempt misdirect. In other words, the task of reforming them is impossible by its nature and the nature of the CIA. I suppose if we were to simply execute them all at once, we might stand some small chance of starting with a clean slate, but don’t count on it. There are too many of CIA people only they know about. The only thing holding them back right now is the recent loss of institutional allies and support. Their position has never been weaker in a very long time, and that’s only because insiders are in revolt. Look for dead bodies to quietly appear in odd places with uncertain causes of death.

I expect the CIA to pull back for awhile. They’ll probably make noises that sound somewhat penitent. They will probably go through the motions of mending fences. Meanwhile, under a redoubled paranoid secrecy they’ll plot revenge. Only the most persistent pressure from a large team of powerful people who can’t be compromised will prevent this. That brings us back to my previous comment that good moral spycraft requires that spies be loyal to a person, not some disembodied bureaucratic hive mind.

Yes, some of this comes from my personal experience with a couple of CIA folks. The ones you know about are bad enough; those under cover are far worse. Morality has no meaning to them in their compartmentalized souls.

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Psalm 119: Mem 97-104

Posted on December 17, 2016 by ehurst

(Kiln blog is still not working for posting, so here’s the next installment of our study.)

Here is the Path of Enlightenment, and what a joyous path it is! The psalmist waxes rhapsodic in celebration of the power of revelation to enlighten.

He leads off with a genuine declaration of fondness for the Law. It’s not just some static record of requirements, but a living person throbbing in his heart. The closest we as humans can come to God’s Person without leaving this world is through knowing His heart as He chose to reveal it in the covenants. While the writer notes with some amusement that the enlightenment available in the Law has kept him always one step ahead of his enemies, there is some ambiguity in the final phrase of the couplet. It may well be intentional, for we note sagely that when standing for God’s truth we never lack for enemies. Then again, we never lack for victory when the laws are burned into our very hearts, as well, because they stand ever ready to make us understand what really matters.

In the next couplet he continues this theme. The power of revelation can grant more wisdom than any mere human can teach us, if we but invest the time and energy to meditate on it. The discernment he gains from consistently walking by the law justifies his position of authority over the elders.

So he has no trouble recognizing paths that lead to destruction; the siren song to his feet is but a whisper. Instead of testing new ways to appease his fallen appetites, he stays alert to the business of maintaining the moral defenses provided by God’s Word. He pays close attention to what God’s wrath on past sins teaches him. It’s like staying close to a fresh stream while wandering through the desert; shortcuts only get you in trouble.

Is there any human experience of pleasure that matches the sweetness of God’s truth? The wisdom of God is like honey; anything less will taste rather flat and unappetizing. It makes it easier to recognize lies and liars as threats to your soul.

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Junkyard Mechanics

Posted on December 17, 2016 by ehurst

Re: this and this post, with the comments, on Sister Christine’s blog. I’m not sure I can do this, but it’s worth trying to explain it.

As a child, since my Dad often held jobs involving automotive maintenance and repair, I naturally had the common boyhood interest in hot rodding. That’s a hobby that involves understanding how to make cars perform better than they do coming from the factory. It was largely smart tinkering in my childhood days, not advanced technology as with today’s automobiles. And like many boys my age I would go and buy hot rodding comics and get lost in them, rereading them several times before squirreling them away somewhere.

One of the particular stories from those old comic books that sticks in my mind involved a bunch of not-so-brilliant students at a mechanic’s school going out into a semi-desert area where a massive and ancient salvage yard lay spread across a remote valley. In this story, as a project they cobbled together a mixed bag of components and created a running hot rod. My Dad saw me reading this and warned me it was fiction, explaining the concept of metal fatigue, plus the notion of careful engineering. His lesson was hard to swallow at the time because it shot holes in my childish reverence for “fine automobiles.”

By the time an automobile hits that kind of junkyard, it’s usually badly worn already. Most of them was pretty junky coming new from the factory, mass produced death machines. Add to that years of exposure to the elements and it would make them fit for little more than a smelter. A lot of critical parts aren’t metal in the first place. There might be a few items still usable to replace something damaged on an otherwise decent auto, but not enough to build an entire vehicle. You might know how to re-engineer things to fit, but it’s highly improbable that critical elements would be in working order.

Here we are at the end of Western Civilization and there is no end of amateurish efforts to reconstruct what “ought to be” from the worthless junk of a deeply shattered social order. Nothing in the junkyard of Western ideas was ever more than a bucket of loose and ill-fitting bolts in the first place; there never were any carefully engineered and refined norms. The whole thing has been from the beginning slapped together from disparate sources and wobbled off the assembly line barely held together by nothing but the shiny paint. And when did any one car with all the available factory options actually fit perfectly your needs? It was always a matter of choosing the least impractical pile of junk. The retail value plummets as soon as you drive it off the dealer’s lot.

When your average Western man or woman wants to discuss what constitutes masculine or feminine ideals, they are picking from a few brands and models of mass produced junk notions. Every now and then someone trumpets a new approach cobbled together from mismatched salvaged pieces in the junk yard of worn out failures. The stuff was crap when it first came out, so it’s not possible to come up with something good if you’re still digging around the same sources. The whole society was built from a materialist approach to life. There was no golden age, no good ol’ days when things were grand. There was no point in Western history when things weren’t any less materialistic and soul-sucking. You cannot build a human existence worthy of the effort until you rise above that level. You have to source your ideals from the Creator of all things.

Doing so puts you so far out of mainstream tolerance that you should hardly be surprised when folks attack you. Their criticisms will arise from that same materialistic approach to life, so those arrows won’t stick. You can’t shoot an arrow into Heaven no matter how high it flies. Instead of getting bogged down into the details and specifics, the image of what-ought-to-be will take on all kinds of shapes and flavors that reflect the specific needs of the person and the context. A different day and you will manifest different features. Outwardly visible traits cannot suffice to explain what’s going on behind the scenes. The norming does not rest on what you can see with your eyes, but upon faculties that Western Civilization denies exist. Any one still wallowing in the Western materialistic approach will never understand what you are doing.

Build your own brand and rebuild it as needed. You’ll have to decide as you go how much shock you are willing to offer the world around you, and how much crap you’ll have to face. Sometimes it’s your true purpose to pass through the crowd unnoticed. Even when you wear a facade that minimizes your different nature, that choice remains a manifestation of something truly unique. It shows you know how to fit the real need of the moment and stay on track with your true identity in Christ and your true mission calling. God’s ideal for manhood and femininity cannot be confined to a collection of observable traits.

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Admin: New Project

Posted on December 17, 2016 by ehurst

While waiting for Tim to get his leased server space moved to another machine, and then to setup my blog with SAFARI, I felt compelled to start a new project. I’m hoping to reach a different audience that might be put off by mention of religion. So the name of the project is Nationalist Insurgency. I’m aiming to capture some of the activist crowd. It’s still a blog format, so you’ll want to start at the bottom and work you way up to see where I’m going with this. For now I’m posting semi-anonymously to avoid detracting from the content; it should stand on its own. I suppose I’ll eventually publish it in book form.

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Discerning Paths

Posted on December 16, 2016 by ehurst

We are healers.

We who live by the heart of moral consciousness bring our faith and convictions to bear in a fallen world. We have found that path of the Flaming Sword back to Eden, and it is our mandate and natural desire to help others find the same for themselves. For our brains, there are two primary considerations to help organize how we go about that mission. First, we have to gain some understanding of Eden as the norm, the nature our created design. Second, we have to understand fallen nature so we can provide directions to the Flaming Sword.

Our minds, true to their nature, will experience a curiosity about all the various expressions of fallen nature. We will be tempted to taste every perversion, but our hearts know better than that. Our hearts can discern the whole range of perversion vicariously; our hearts can directly sense the misery in the hearts of those who wallow in the Fall. Yet there is something there our minds do properly seek to understand: What path takes the victims out of sorrow? For most folks, it’s a subtle difference between tasting specific evils versus directly sensing the moral nature of it. Simply calling it “evil” offers no help at all to the wandering souls. They need a map out of the wilderness; we have to get involved in their lives.

One of the biggest obsessions that blinds our world today is all this noise about political activism and what constitutes proper government policy. Their distraction is a part of the blindness and perversion itself. We know that Scripture explains it quite well. In previous posts I offered the parable of God’s household and three different levels of involvement: there are God’s children of covenant adoption who are permitted to see from His perspective; there are servants who don’t accept the terms of covenant but do have some idea what’s going on; there are also domestic herds who have no clue. In our day and time, virtually all of human political activity falls in that last level of domestic herds. God directs the affairs of humanity from a distance and those involved have no clue.

They imagine that they are running the show. They imagine that political activism makes a difference; it does not. It appears to make some difference, but none of the changes really matter. It’s all completely superficial. If you apply your heart-mind wisdom, you can see this clearly.

Our mission is two-fold. First, we raise the standard of God’s truth. We need to study with our minds how to indicate something of the nature of what things should be like. Thus, I offer my own attempts to translate God’s moral law about human life here. My hope is that it provokes your consideration so you can flesh out your own way of telling it. Second, we help others by discerning their moral condition, maybe some of how they got there, so we can help them struggle back out to the truth. It’s not so much the specifics as the moral vision. We don’t need all the mechanical details of their sickness; we need to see the cause in moral terms hidden behind the symptoms. I am often surprised at the wide variety of twists and turns people take getting lost, the numerous layers of neurosis in maladaptive choices.

The heart-mind has a natural capacity for empathy. Some of you have a very strong native empathy on top of that, but we all have the basic gift from God in our hearts. If your heart doesn’t provide some direct sense of individual human misery, you are still missing something. Pray for God’s guidance. But at the same time, our Creator is a very complex personality, because Scripture also says He laughs at the arrogance of men who think they know so much. He asks very sarcastic questions about how much they know of Creation along the lines of, “Where were you when I laid out the tectonic plates of this planet? Can you determine the time when earthquakes should happen?” In the same breath He offers deep empathy for helping them climb out of their sins. He knows what it takes to move the hearts of people; He also gives us a clue in our own hearts.

So on the one hand we can snicker about arrogance of political poseurs, while another part of us weeps at the destruction their pitiful solutions bring. We pay attention to the foibles of humanity in accordance to our divine calling. Each of us has our own peculiar vocation within human affairs, to grasp the nature of moral failure and the way to escape into healing. For me, it encompasses social sciences (which includes politics) and computers, so I comment on those two things here often. Were it my wife writing a blog, it would be cooking and how to bless children; but then, she’s not a writer. God grants each of us at least one means of expression, a way to share His glory. Each of you reading this has your own collection of natural interests and talents with which God has equipped you to answer some segment of human moral need.

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Prayer: Community

Posted on December 15, 2016 by ehurst

It’s time.

We know to pray when something just won’t leave us alone. My faith has risen up to claim the heritage of faith in meat space, too.

Just so you’ll know the context, I need to explain the background. Since age nine I’ve been a creature of faith. From the time of my earliest awareness of God’s Presence in my life, I knew that I was cut out for something different. It wasn’t until seven years later that I got some inkling that the gospel ministry, as conceived by most folks I knew, was an approximation of that something different. So I began taking seriously whatever it was folks thought such a ministry calling included. Right away there were issues, in that folks kept nudging me toward things I knew weren’t for me. So they didn’t take me seriously. And so it went. I persisted in pursuing that calling in a series of compromises between where I was supposed to go and the various paths available to me. I got a college degree in Religion at Oklahoma Baptist University, but couldn’t arrange to get to seminary without violating my sense of calling, so I pursued other forms of employment and kept volunteering in churches. I also kept studying using the tools I had gained in college.

At times a few folks in a few places were open-minded enough to take me seriously about my calling, but it was seldom the leadership of the organizations in which I was involved. I knew I was onto something, but it became clear I would never enter the ranks of professional clergy. And believe me, I tried a lot of different brands of churches. A last few attempts over the past decade confirmed that I could not take the mainstream path of organized Christianity. So I turned to the Internet while testing a few ideas in meat space, but nothing jelled except this virtual community of faith.

The fruit was not ripe. It took those ten years or so to bring the kind of storms and rain to wash away more of the unneeded expectations, and the activity of some other natural processes to add the right fertilizer and fill up what was missing. Another applicable parable has been the assurance that I was an arrow in the quiver for the day of battle, and the battle had not yet come. So here I am 60 years old and I believe the battle has come; this particular fruit has ripened on the tree.

Further, I sense prophetically that this is the time for all of us here in this virtual parish. Maybe not something so specific as that for each of you, but in a broad general sense our world has shifted onto a different track and God is making our kind of religious communion possible, even essential, in meat space. His hand is already moving, touching souls and turning them to seek what we have. Be ready to see a community of faith coalesce where you are, people who sense a hunger for the manna we share here.

As always, don’t get hung up on a human sense of timing. Wait for it to show itself. Just be aware that God is opening up the windows of Heaven to touch some number of souls only He knows and the conditions are upon us for a response. I have no idea what to expect in concrete terms and I am loath to hinder your own possibilities by suggesting any specifics. What I do know is that what I’m waiting for won’t happen on my initiative. It will form naturally and take a shape and direction I cannot predict. What I can see is something that should surprise no one: The first harvest will ripen during the frosts of human sorrow. Until it hurts, people are unlikely to reach out to the Healer. In many ways, our heart-led religion is the healing for what ails the world today; it’s the deliverance of captives.

It’s not for everyone, so a little reticence and caution is a natural trait of our faith in this world as it now is. But our actions will shout from the rooftops, so stir up your faith and wait for surprises. Let us pray together that we be ready, all of us wherever we are scattered.

Yep, it’s that time.

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