Bike Soon

Posted on August 4, 2016 by ehurst

Boy, that was a boondoggle. I’m not blaming anyone; this is simply the way it works in real life.

So the actual replacement for my crunched mountain bike is no longer available; GT no longer makes that model (Ricochet 29″ wheel). Like most things in this world, it was good but not perfect in the first place, so having to choose something else is just a chance to go back and try again. Dick’s Sporting Goods has worked hard trying to help me and made a couple of suggestions, but they weren’t thinking in the same direction as I am. Finally, I went to the local store and looked over their current stock.

I found something I like well enough — Diamondback Axis (27.5″ wheel). It’s not as expensive and that’s okay, because it’s also not a Walmart toy. It will do what I want a bike to do and I’m familiar with the manufacturer’s products. That Edgewood hybrid was from the same company and it carried me an awful lot of miles and still had life in it when I gave it away. The main problem with the Edgewood was that it was a hybrid; the form factor is a flawed concept.

I’ll have to offer pictures tomorrow probably. The store manager is paying the technician to come in outside his work schedule just so he can pull off the after-market parts I added to the Ricochet and put them on the Axis. I’m not going to tell you that Dick’s is like this at every store, but I can recommend the company on the general principle that they went along with the idea of helping me out of a bind.

We give thanks to Our Father for His blessings.

Posted in personal | Tagged , | Comments Off on Bike Soon

Random Photos 02

Posted on August 3, 2016 by ehurst

Always: click any photo to enlarge view; use CTRL+click to open the image in a browser tab.

PurpleCarpetOn my walk today I headed south along Maple and cut west along the out-of-service tracks that divides the housing from our local VoTech, and a couple of businesses farther down. Turning right on Air Depot, since there’s no sidewalk on the eastern side, I tramped through parking lots and grass that fronts various commercial buildings. Near Jarman Drive is a trio of restaurants, but two are vacant now. Behind one of them — once a Long John Silver fish place, then something else that failed — was a low spot that has collected topsoil carried by rain run-off. In it grows this marvelous carpet of purple flowers. They look rather like something similar to Rose Moss.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Random Photos 02

Taste the Wind

Posted on August 3, 2016 by ehurst

The heavens record the glory of God;
And the firmament declares His handiwork.
Day unto day gushes with speech,
And night unto night reveals awareness.
There is no speech, and there are no words;
Their voice is not heard. (Psalm 19:1-3)

(Translation note: The final line cited above, in most English translation, sees “where” inserted at the beginning because translators are seldom mystics who understand Hebrew thought patterns. The above is my own effort to be more literal so that it stands on its own.)

Notice what the quoted passage from Psalms says. Any translation of Hebrew mystical poetry will be rough, but we can see where it’s going: The sky talks, but it doesn’t. Creation as a whole exudes the sense of God’s glorious Presence. There is a powerful sense of knowing and moral content, yet you cannot put it into words.

There was a time some years ago when it drove me nuts. It came through my mind like a sense of expectation, as if something was going to happen. That was as much as my brain could make of it.

Over the past few years I’ve spent time with the concept of wordlessness, or what theologians refer to as things ineffable — it can’t be told. It points to a state of awareness above the intellect, a sort of moral communion directly with the Holy Spirit. This is what people seek with private prayer languages (a form of speaking in tongues). It’s not meant to communicate with others; you couldn’t tell them. It’s a private experience of God’s power overshadowing our fallen nature.

This is the context in the New Testament referred to as being “in the Spirit” (Revelation 1:9 for example). It’s an overpowering sense of living in God’s favor. It may not result in any particular revelation from God, but it often signals a reason to expect something special. This intensity varies with the purpose of the Spirit in the context.

On the day of my bicycle collision, it was earthshaking. I knew something was at hand. Did I have any options for escaping that tragic event? Only at the expense of departing from the state of spiritual communion. Just as surely as I knew something was at hand, I also knew I had to carry on the path I was taking. I stopped on that bike path bridge to taste the wind, to confirm and to enjoy how that powerful state of awareness changed everything around me.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Taste the Wind

It’s Always the Right Time

Posted on August 2, 2016 by ehurst

All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:6 NKJV)

This is an ancient protocol, something missing from our culture entirely — confessing the sin for one’s whole nation. The point is taking responsibility for your part and stop passing the buck. This is often used as manipulation in church meetings to whip up a little End Times fervor, but it’s purpose is to refresh something that never changes. We live in the Land of Penitence. It’s always a good time to sincerely contemplate the awful things we do against God’s moral character. However, with the recognition that this is a genuine time of tribulation, it’s all the more appropriate.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged , , | Comments Off on It’s Always the Right Time

Wordless Truth

Posted on August 1, 2016 by ehurst

(This is the instructional portion of today’s message. The prophetic portion is in another blog post.)

Of course, I used the word “instructional” advisedly because it can’t be taught, only caught. Nobody can tell you much about how the heart rules the intellect; we simply assert that it does. If the heart does not rule, then it tells the mind almost nothing. Your mind has to be ready to accept a lot of things it cannot verify any other way.

Moral reality is like some invisible parallel universe; it’s the fundamental truth of our existence. What our minds can perceive and process is essentially a deception. This world is all shadows and smoke. I can’t recall how far back it goes, but I knew a lot of moral reality long before I was aware of my heart as the internal source. For the most part, the teaching of heart-led awareness is like any other moral truth: You either recognize it instantly as the truth or you don’t get it at all.

That has nothing to do with whether you will ever get it. The revelation of God indicates heart-mind awareness is universal by design, but there have always been at any given time folks alive destined to die without it. The rare exceptions prove the rule.

We cannot explain the mechanism, but there is a moral awareness that we all have burned into us by birth in this realm. You can appreciate the basic Christian teaching that God has not left us with no witness, but that Creation itself cries out to us that God is and that we are fallen. We are taught in Scripture to assume that everyone comes into that time in their existence when they become aware of their sin (we call it “coming under conviction”) and the need for divine redemption. Because this whole process is buried under false religious mythology in Western culture, it seldom bears the fruit of a conscious awareness of the heart-mind as the highest faculty of the soul.

So even before age 30 I was teaching that faith was not mere belief in orthodoxy, but a distinctly higher sense of awareness, like a sixth sense. Once I encountered the notion of the heart as a sensory organ of its own, the implications were painfully obvious. It aligned with my sense of conviction already in place. Among all the other amazing things your heart can sense independently of your five senses, your heart can discern that parallel universe of the moral realm.

Our toughest job as Westerners is discerning the subtle difference between the heart and the emotions. I won’t take up space here warning you how Western mythology is all wrong about emotions, just remind you that it is so. Emotions have their place, but it requires the primacy of the heart-mind to understand that place. So we struggle with a double whammy, having a false image of emotions even as we strive to sort out what is emotion versus that subtle voice of the Spirit of God in your heart.

What surprises many is that this struggle is at the center of why we continue living in this world. It’s not as if I could set up an academy of the heart-mind and teach some esoteric secrets and graduate a bunch of adepts. Graduation is when you die, for that matter. It’s not some thing we pursue as a concrete goal, but a lifelong mission that we enter into. The focus of all our spiritual warfare is internal; it’s how we engage other humans that manifests our faith. The issue is that we exercise our faith to keep us faithful.

So feel encouraged to explore this Land of Repentance, which is the moral realm of existence, but don’t expect to discover its far reaches. Don’t let that business of having a goal slip in like a lie from Hell. Get lost; you don’t need to know where you are going, only keep going. Take time to experience whatever you run across. Chances are, when you glance back at where you’ve been, you realize that there were numerous manifestations of faith already at work in your soul before you could verbalize it.

The best I can do in writing like this is break up the concrete reasoning so that your mind is receptive to living wordless truth.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Wordless Truth

Just a Little Closer

Posted on August 1, 2016 by ehurst

(This is the prophetic portion of today’s message. The instructional background is on the other blog.)

Standard caveat: Never treat my prophetic messages on par with divine revelation. It’s nothing more than my attempt to share something beyond words that I experience as divine moral reality. I am wholly likely to fail at any given point; God uses whomever is available. I’ve made myself available, and if you can do a better job, what the heck are you waiting for? Meanwhile, I cannot be silent.

You can’t see this with your rational senses, but another increment of wrath has been set loose on the world. In fact, the normal sources for news can’t cover this because they don’t have a heart sense about the moral truth of things. What it means is that the next echelon of demonic power is on the march.

Whatever bad stuff you can recall has happened in the past few weeks will get worse. What demons do is deceive people who have rejected revelation. The level of deception gets uglier; the resulting choices people make will get uglier. It makes not a dime’s worth of difference whether any of the actors are conscious of their moral evil, because the deception envelopes all things like a fog.

We expected this, so why am I telling you about it?

Do you recall in Acts how many times Paul was warned about going to Jerusalem? Yet he went because of a divine moral necessity. The idea is not that I’m trying to stop anything, or get you folks to organize and stop things, but that God has always offered some element of informed consent. It’s His nature to reveal, not hide things. He always gives us just a little more than we can handle, though we might imagine ourselves wishing for more detailed data. Rather, He always gives us full moral content — that heart-mind awareness beyond words — so that we can approach things in mature faith.

I’m fully confident this not The Apocalypse, but John’s visions do foretell how tribulation works when it comes. So this thing we see before is apocalyptic in nature; it follows a revealed progression. It comes in waves with short pauses between them. It hardly matters whether the folks who believe they make the decisions are trying to make us miserable; they still don’t have a clue what’s really going on here. Their wish to harm is still shaped by demonic deception.

And that deception is about to get nastier. Don’t stop what you are doing, just be aware that the fire is getting hotter. You won’t get burned, not really. The Devil cannot touch those who cling to heart-led faith. He is bound by the same moral laws that govern everything in Creation. His reach toward you is shortened by your obedient intent. But it’s almost guaranteed that some things you were counting on will fail, because we can’t possibly understand it well enough to pass through this with no surprises.

So my point here is that my prophetic senses touching the moral realm tell me that today stuff shifted into a higher gear of moral wrath. Brace yourself. The crazy shit is going to get a little closer than before.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Just a Little Closer

Sunday Evening Chatter

Posted on July 31, 2016 by ehurst

We went out in the car yesterday to see some countryside. I took my camera, of course, but all my shots turned out lifeless. And plenty of stuff I missed because there simply was no place to stop the car safely. And when we found places to stop, other impediments prevented capturing the soul of what was calling me. That car is not the right transport. It doesn’t really want to be involved because it has some other mission.

Yes, cars have personalities. Ours is great for most of the other stuff we do, but it has no part to play in my photography mission. Oh, and the bike has not yet arrived at the sports store. I’m still not sure I’ll be able to ride it, either.

My netbook quit working, so I spend a lot of time with the server. I’m still convinced it’s going to be a server in the future, but for now I cannot imagine what it will be serving. I’m sure it will be obvious when the time comes, but it’s a puzzle for now, and just a high-powered workstation.

Has anyone noticed how CUFI has been lying low the last couple of years? A while back Hagee published that awful book and got a lot of bad press because he defied the orthodoxy that insists we should evangelize Jews. His book said that Jesus never came to save Jews because they have some special mission and don’t need that kind of blood redemption. After all the heat he took for that, he’s been vary careful about controlling the narrative more tightly and keeping CUFI out of the news. They still do what they do, but they want to influence things behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, every week we see modern Israel upping the chutzpah on official declarations. Right now she is demanding a major increase in plunder from the American taxpayers. God only knows what crazy action they’ll take next.

I’m still convinced that the pro-Zionist Churches are going to do something incredibly stupid in support of Israel. It’s part of the madness of Israel herself. How in the world do their representatives look us in the eye and with all gravity make such outrageous claims? Zionists feel insulted if you are insufficiently enthusiastic about celebrating their superiority. Israel claims to feel threatened because the whole human race is not yet their slaves. And Zionist Christians are secretly discussing forming militias to fight in support of that madness — here in the US.

These are the folks convinced we have to attack Iran, or any other country that stands in Israel’s way. These are the folks who drape the cross in their American flags, while wearing Israeli flag pins on their suit lapels.

Posted in personal | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Sunday Evening Chatter

Psalm 111

Posted on July 30, 2016 by ehurst

This and the next psalm are short acrostics in Hebrew. This would make them easier to memorize. Reading this in most English translations, it seems little more than a collection of stock ritual phrases, perhaps just a little contrived or formulaic. But the language is not poetically forced; it’s very simple. Precisely for this reason, in Hebrew it would be one of those grand old favorites that no one forgets. It fits any occasion because it hits all the high points and provides a comfortable setting for awakening the mind to hear the song of the heart.

The first word is hallelujah — praise Jehovah. It’s meant to be shouted. Following that is a declaration that we will throw up our hands at the name of the Lord, but doing so from the heart, and shamelessly in front of all God’s people.

The imagery is condensed, and merely translating the words weakens the effects. The products of God’s hands are extravagant and anyone with good sense strives to stand in His favor to receive them. We are greeted by a parallelism declaring that God’s actions are unforgettable, and those actions mark Him as the ideal sovereign. His household never lacks because He always walks by His own covenant; it’s His nature to do so.

Indeed, under that covenant He demonstrates to His tribe the power to carve out their inheritance from the riches of other nations. He plays favorites for those who cling to Him. What He does defines truth and justice. His revelation changes everything; it’s more trustworthy than all human wisdom and knowledge put together. What He promises will surely come true. He elevates His own family above all the rest of humanity and stands behind His promises. His very name is awesome beyond words.

The first fruit of wisdom is learning to take Him seriously. People who walk in His revelation are the very image of prudence. The ultimate wisdom is to acknowledge Him as Creator.

Posted in bible | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Psalm 111

The Communion of Tribulation

Posted on July 30, 2016 by ehurst

In some ways, there is no going back. This is why I warn readers that, while we do have an obligation to understand the Ancient Near Eastern culture so that we can understand the Bible, we cannot go back and reclaim that world as our own. God’s Word warns about this, that things will get farther and farther from Eden until His Son returns. On the one hand, we strive to grasp the nature of what we have lost. On the other hand, we take responsibility for the hard work of making the most of what’s left against things that will only go forward.

No one can provide you with some universal answer as to what mixture of things ancient and modern is appropriate. Each of us must push ahead within our own calling from God and trust Him for things we need to swallow versus things we should fight. And even the fighting has nothing to do with some expectation of victory, but we fight because it’s our duty. Failure is an option because our driver is obedience, not some human vision of success.

So, for example, I hate the influence of EMF from all of this electronic gear, but it is my calling to sit in front this computer every day. This keyboard is my sword. The Internet is my theater of operations. This networking stuff is not going to go away, and for me to obey faithfully means enduring the EMF and praying God will keep me safe from anything that could threaten the mission. It’s not good for me, but my flesh is nailed to the Cross for His glory. This is the paradox of faith.

We operate on multiple levels of moral awareness. Things are not black versus white; that’s an old lie of binary logic that seeks to put our minds on the throne. Nor is it gray, but this world is a rainbow of wild moral coloration. It’s not morally evil to juggle competing valuations of any particular thing, because the heart-mind does not reason in binary linear logic. Your faith and obedience to your calling will be the key to what you decide in any given context about anything God places before you. Today’s sin is tomorrow’s righteousness, and vice-versa, on a wide range of things because contexts vary. The experience of human tension is a necessity in our fallen existence.

We know that this world is trapped in materialism. We can understand that the only difference between socialism and fascism (and any other “ism”) is who gets the loot. Fascism is just socialism with a nationalist flair. In the US, we are up against globalist socialism, versus neocon dreams of global hegemony, and versus nationalist fascism as the major competing forces in politics right now. The latter is going to dominate in the near future, never mind who holds what office. That is equally likely in several other Western nations, as well. Despite our sure awareness that fascism is evil, we had better understand it well enough to exploit the loopholes for our Father’s glory.

We had better understand some measure of technocracy and cyber warfare, because most of us will have no other means of fellowship in this heart-led faith. The US is extremely vulnerable to cyber warfare, should someone take an interest in harming us. Given how much we have provoked just about every other nation state in this world, it’s just a matter of time before someone figures out how to use it to their advantage. Be ready for that kind of tribulation.

One of the strangest ways of blending ancient and modern that I’ve faced lately is a fresh emphasis on wordless communication. In ancient times, wordless consideration was provoked through parables. Words were used to paint a dramatic moment, a sort of “you were there” kind of experience. But that required being there in the flesh with the narrator; the language and the proximity with the speaker were essential elements we no longer have. This is why movies and TV are so captivating, even as the technology works against our heart-minds. English writing does not lend itself to that very well. Against this, we know that the ancients did not have our powerful imaging technology. Our society today is highly visual compared to the ancients.

How would they have used it? I’m sure there is no one answer to that. Indeed, I’m not sure my mind will ever understand how it works. On the one hand, moving pictures are dangerous to our awareness in their current form, and I prefer still images. But I am determined to explore this avenue and see what happens. This is behind my promise to prepare myself for a strong emphasis on photography here on this blog. It was a growing emphasis before the bicycle collision, and now it’s a very conscious effort. Somewhere between mere artsy expression and a genuine miracle of faith reaching across the network, I’m hoping to find ways to keep this fellowship alive through that medium.

God has called us together for a reason; that’s how His Kingdom works. We each contribute something to heart-led growth of this body. We will need that kind of comfort and support during this time of tribulation.

Posted in sanity | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Communion of Tribulation

Warfare and Tribal Nature

Posted on July 29, 2016 by ehurst

Jack Perry gets it.

Even here in our virtual parish I’ve had visitors who should know better simply never grasp the hard-wired tribal nature of humanity. Just because Western minds can imagine something they like better doesn’t mean it will work. What Perry didn’t say is that Creation itself is wired with the consciousness of blood price. You can’t fight Father Nature, who happens to be our Creator. That business of blood price is fundamental to understanding justice in the Old Testament, and it’s fundamental to our universe.

Your heart knows.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Warfare and Tribal Nature