Quinlan Park

Posted on July 28, 2016 by ehurst

A little more testing of how the new camera performs. If you want to see it on the map, you can use these coordinates for most mapping services: 35.460474, -97.415054

QuinlanPark1Coming in from Sandra Drive, if you look to your left, you’ll see this playground pit. The surface of the pit is a thick layer of shredded tire rubber. That’s the standard these days, unless you can afford those expensive outdoor rubber mats. Some places around the county still have plain old sand, but a few lawsuits will change that soon enough in our litigious society.

QuinlanPark2There’s a park here because this is a flood zone where you can’t build anything else. This is shot looking northward from the bridge; the stream bed here is choked with native weeds that you could mistake for hemp without a closer look. Those tracks are out of service.

QuinlanPark3I wanted a shot of the rail bridge with less clutter. Somehow the bridge came out a lot darker as the new camera compensated for the bright sun from the right, while I’m standing in the shade of a black walnut tree. I’m still testing with the default automatic settings. It’s actually a little challenging to shoot in the Oklahoma sun during the summer. It was already pretty warm by midmorning and I sweltered on my return track up on Reno Boulevard.

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Just Waiting

Posted on July 27, 2016 by ehurst

The latest wild delicacy around our apartment is purslane (Portulaca Oleracea). The taste is hard to describe, but it’s mild. The only problem is that something gets on it and turns the leaves purple and shriveled. I’m going to guess it’s the “weed spray” the lawn care contractor uses. At any rate, it grows close to the door and all around the complex.

I mentioned previously that I was working through my archive of posts here and collecting the teaching posts into monthly bundles and turning them into big HTML files. So far I’ve gotten back as far as September last year. They look okay from my cellphone, so I think you can read them using any device. At any rate, they are collected on my FTP server in a “blog” folder. I can’t save the ones with the photos, but I have all those photos still backed up.

My, what nostalgia it provokes seeing those pictures. I pulled up a couple and changed my header images on both blogs. I can’t wait to get back out on the road. The voices of a thousand creatures call to me, and inspiring views are just waiting for my camera.

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Random Photos 01

Posted on July 26, 2016 by ehurst

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

AaronsPoolPumpOutRemember that flooded docking pit I shot after a big rain sometime back? Here’s a second look at it on the left. I kept wondering how they got the water out and today I got the answer. In this second image on the right, I captured their sump pump in action. If you follow the white PVC pipe out the wall facing onto the dock, you can see it drop down into the water. The pump is down in the bottom below a grating. It pumps back out into the back drive way behind the building and runs off toward the southern end of the strip mall (flows left in the image) where it drops into a municipal storm drain.

CrutchCrkTribA few days ago, during the worst of the recent heat, I got ambitious and tried to hike more than a mile. It was a bit much, but I headed west on Reno Avenue to the unnamed tributary to Crutch Creek that runs out of some neighborhood a couple of miles south of here. For an unnamed creek, this thing is huge. I’ve never seen it with much water in it. I guess I need to catch it after a hard rain. You can see the haze provoked by the intense heat, with temperatures running over 100°F (38C).

At any rate, the city constructed a sidewalk all the way along this thing, and the image is viewing toward the out of service rail line that provides a covered entrance into the Quinlan Park. It’s a pitiful little play ground buried behind a bunch of houses along this unnamed flow. The city crew was mowing and trimming and it ruined my chance to get any pictures of the park. I was testing my iPhone again as a camera.

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Released from Ortho

Posted on July 26, 2016 by ehurst

Today I had what turned out to be my last Orthopedics appointment at the VA (we hope). The x-ray showed the patella was all healed up. Apparently they don’t plan to remove the screws and I can understand that. There were two doctors and they checked to make sure stuff was normal. That means that the remaining swelling under and around the top of my kneecap is normal for this stage of the game. As a consequence of that, I still can’t sit normally without blood pooling around my ankle. But again, this is all typical for the type of injury, and it should return to normal in the months ahead.

I’ve tried it out and I can drive again, and I should be able to check on cycling later this week. The sports store says the bike should be in any day now and the tech will get all my stuff swapped over to the replacement within a day or so.

So I’ve been released from close care and they won’t see me again unless I want it.

In two weeks I get my echo-cardiogram and another EKG. I don’t see the cardio doctor until this time next month. Thanks for all your prayers.

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Out in the Social Wilderness

Posted on July 25, 2016 by ehurst

Your heart knows when you don’t belong.

There was a time I was still sensitive to the opinions of others, in the sense that I felt a need for affirmation from my associates. It was the nightmare world of my childhood, but with a somewhat more subtle socialized face on it.

Early in my ministry, church folks were polite, and I suppose they genuinely appreciated some of my talents. God provoked me very early to serve in the ministry, and it was obvious to most that I was equipped. But my personal calling included a certain brash and clowning prophetic element that most people couldn’t take. Within any given organization, I typically found some portion able to bear with me, but seldom anyone in leadership. I seldom conformed to their subcultural expectations, and they seldom gave consideration to anything outside those narrow boundaries. I got more affirmation outside of church. And, no — their criticisms were nearly always very obviously from false motives.

In one particular church, people wanted my scholarship in biblical studies. Their standard educational fare was pretty weak, loaded with too much of their own narrow denominational focus, and it simply wasn’t commonly encouraged that folks actually know anything about the deeper biblical context. And it was plain that I could persuade others to follow my lead, because they kept following and liked it. But when I began a more active participation with the youth program, I kept running into that look from the more seasoned youth workers. I’d say something that was typically me, challenging their prejudices, and this mask would fall over their face, suggesting that they just didn’t know how to take me.

And sometimes their actions betrayed a silent rebuke. That was the worst part, because they seemed almost afraid to discuss with me what was going on behind that mask. Once or twice I pointedly asked, and the answers were dismissive. But that look, and sometimes the whispered discussions in my presence, was too much after a couple of weeks. I didn’t belong and it was obvious they weren’t going to tame me.

That was then. Somewhere along the path I realized I didn’t belong in any part of the mainstream, and that I needed to start rejoicing in the fringe identity of my ministry. I’m way out there somewhere on the very edge, sometimes even farther out on another planet, and that’s where I belong. Kiln of the Soul is very much a fringe ministry. I’m really not even a leader, just someone who stands out in the edge of the social wilderness, calling folks to come out if they don’t feel at home. Once you come out away from all the social strictures about faith and religion, you find yourself free to follow your own path. I can tell you about my path, but that’s only so you grasp the nature of searching. I’ll teach you about path-finding and how to handle the wilderness; you’re on your own after that. And so you should be.

While I appreciate genuine fellowship, I no longer need any significant human affirmation. I’m largely invulnerable to censure. So if any of those places where I felt out of place were to call me back, they’d find me so assertively alien that they would be the ones feeling out of place. Trust me; it’s happened a couple of times. I no longer burden them with my weirdness.

While I seek God’s face to know what comes next here at Kiln of the Soul, I think you’ll be seeing more prophetic stuff. Instead of a subtle prophetic temperament behind my writing, I’ll be more pointedly prophesying of things we could do better. And if not for us, then things the world could do better so that we’ll understand the moral truth against which it fails. So in a certain sense I’m taking up the mantel of prophet again, though I doubt I’ll need to make much noise about that.

I believe in you; your heart will know what to make of it.

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Eldership Notes

Posted on July 24, 2016 by ehurst

You really don’t need me to tell you. Most of you know that God is at work and bringing truly substantial changes in our world. And while the mainstream media is trumpeting one kind of change, what really matters morally will not be reported in the news. Many of us are seeing the hand of God make big changes in our own lives all at the same time, and that’s what really matters.

Regular readers know all about some of my big changes, with the bicycle collision and then my cardiac problems. I’ve told you that long bike rides are out, but that heart-led photography is even more in, so it means I’ll be roaming the countryside some other way. Lord willing, I’ll have some other means of travel in the near future and I’ll be ranging much farther out. I’d love to take pictures of stuff all over this state because it’s mostly rural and geography varies greatly. Further, there are some fascinating archaeological puzzles, many left behind by the prehistoric native tribes. Ancient religion goes deep here. A few discoveries are utterly inexplicable. You’d have to see them to understand what I mean, and I want to bring them to you in photos. (And I would love to go camping!)

But have you noticed that some of my teaching is starting to get repetitive? Yeah. While I fully expect to keep learning and discovering to my last breath, it doesn’t mean I can dish up new and fresh teaching on all of it. As noted in the last post of that series on My Father’s World, there is simply far too much that requires you get it without words. It’s caught, not taught. I could easily keep writing the same old stuff day after day, but I sense God has other plans.

I’m not sure what to expect for blogging in the future. I’ve already warned that the Internet use is changing dramatically, but I cannot predict much of that. I know what I’m supposed to do with networking technology in some ways, but I can’t help you with any kind of detailed analysis of what you’ll experience. But it will change, and I want you to contemplate what we share here together, and consider taking a light grip on things. This virtual parish is unlikely to disappear, but it will most certainly take some surprising turns. We can’t pretend the current routine will continue endlessly. I’m doing what I can to preserve what we’ve accomplished, but if what we shared here means anything, we should have already absorbed most of that beyond mere intellectual learning. So I’m preparing my mind to respond and identify ways to exploit any sudden changes for the glory of the Lord.

Why doesn’t He tell us in advance? Because it’s not a question of efficiency and getting things done. It’s a question of each of us experiencing the right thing at the right moment to understand Him better. We are the battlefield, and telling us too much too early would not work out right for His glory. God’s sense of timing is more like the ripening of fruit rather than meeting a production schedule.

Any way, this is a really good time to ask questions, because the writing may slow down otherwise. You should expect a lot more frivolous stuff and less of the heavy teaching, unless there’s something you need to ask.

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Psalm 110

Posted on July 23, 2016 by ehurst

This prophetic psalm is quoted extensively in the New Testament — Matthew 22:44; Luke 22:69; Acts 2:34-35; Hebrews 1:13, 5:6 and 10:12-13. Well before Jesus’ birth, rabbis had recognized this as a wholly Messianic prophecy. Jesus claimed this as His own. However, we know from more ancient Hebrew culture that this kind of thing bore echoes throughout the history of Israel until that final moment on the Cross when the New Covenant was instituted. Several major figures between David and Christ manifested elements of what is promised here, as God’s way of showing He had not forgotten the core of the promise.

That core promise is cast in terms of Ancient Near Eastern feudal terms, that God the Father would pour out His wrath against sin until no one was left to resist when His Son inherits the domain of Creation. It is the image of an imperial declaration upon the Son’s completion of a grand quest that earned His vestment as heir to the throne.

As you might expect, the Hebrew language in this psalm has been parsed to death, yet often poorly translated. In the first line, David declares that the Lord Jehovah spoke an oracle to His Son, whom David calls his Lord. The oracle was that the Son could take His rightful place of honor until the final completion of the Father’s plans in preparing a worthy inheritance. The standard protocol is to insist that the realm would be pacified first. In the ears of Israelis hearing this psalm, that signifies breaking down even the smallest flicker of resistance to their divine mission of revealing Jehovah. It also carries the subtle warning that if any in the nation resists that mission and calling, they will perish, as well.

That’s because the mission to is the Flaming Sword of Eden. A part of the ancient image of that Sword is that the one who wields it must first fall on its blade himself. He must purge himself with the same fire of truth before he can turn it against the darkness of this world. So the mission and calling of revelation on Israel is also the mission to go out in battle formation with that truth and revelation into all Creation. Jehovah will use His Covenant Army to complete this pacification for His Son’s inheritance.

So David declares that God’s people will most certainly be eager to carry out this pacification. David uses such beautiful language to describe an army of holy warriors assembled in the wee hours of the morning, ready to march at the Lord’s command.

In the meantime, Jehovah declares His Son a priest according to the Order of Melchizedek. The writer of Hebrews expounds on this, imbuing the title with meaning that is not obvious. Jesus would serve as High Priest according to something more ancient than the Covenant of Moses, a timeless primordial covenant that rests on the foundation of Creation itself, a priesthood that stood before Moses and would stand after Moses is closed out.

No human agency has sufficient power or authority to resist this divine commission. No ruler or combination of rulers, or even all the combined political power of the entire human race could resist His sovereign majesty. Who resists will die, plain and simple. And God will not cease this mission. He’ll camp out in the field and drink from His own provision of wild streams in the wilderness as He pursues His enemies. He will “lift up His head” — the image is someone who is altogether content with harsh conditions in the field so long as there is a single soul unconquered. His resolve will never waver.

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My Father’s World, Part 6

Posted on July 23, 2016 by ehurst

We must live in the Land Without Words.

In our English translations of the Bible, we have this expression: “someone’s word.” It shows up in our phrase, “the Word of God.” Our culture offers no good translation of the Hebrew concept. Indeed, it’s difficult to explain in English because we place boundaries around the meanings of words, something Hebrew language doesn’t do.

As the final installment of this series, I struggle to erase the false boundaries that our world has drawn around all kinds of things that defy explanation. Western Civilization turns a lot of things upside down and inside out. In some ways, it allows glimpses of truth, but not for actual use in shaping our decisions without driving it into some imaginary layer of pure subjective sentiment. There truly is no place in Western thinking for the Spirit Realm; the West blocks out the Spirit Realm as an intrusion, instead of acknowledging it as ultimate reality.

In Hebrew thinking, one’s word is their commitment. What tumbles out of your mouth should first pass through your heart, and as the heart directs, so your mind formulates and expresses. Your breath is your spirit. No, read that again. What comes out of you cannot be separated from your moral character. Only in the curse of the Fall do we recognize that words and actions get separated. We should not celebrate this and enshrine it as a cultural icon, as some fundamental fact of reality the way Western thought does. It’s not that Hebrew people had no concept for lying, but they didn’t rely on mere fact to verify, because fact itself is deceptive. What the West calls “reality” is shadow and mist. Only with an active heart-mind awareness can one discern the meaning and value of words.

This cancerous false image of words and facts as the substance of reality is what traps us and makes genuine faith so very hard. The antidote is a very hard teaching about a world without words. Have you ever tried to think in terms of moral reality and not use words? Yes, I realize the intellect is trapped in facts and words, but can you convince your intellect that the heart does not transmit truth verbally? Moral truth defies description because it is wordless.

For those of us who have gotten used to communing directly with nature, we find there is so very much that simply cannot be captured in words. It’s not as if we can’t indicate something about those interactions using words, but that words could never possibly convey the fullness of what we experience. This is why we make so much of parables and parabolic language. We emphatically deny that literal and propositional statements can mean anything important. This is why we say things that are so assertively shocking. The only way we can jar you out of concrete thinking is to shatter the concrete. Set your mind free to the mystical truth of personal interaction with God in Person. You won’t be able to tell us about that when it really happens, but you can use parables to indicate something we will recognize from our own encounters with God.

So now you recognize that the expression “The Word of God” is just a parable. Depending on the context, maybe I’m indicating the Bible, or maybe something the Bible itself only hints at. If I tell you I have a prophetic message, you realize that the message can’t be taken literally for the most part. Sure, some statements are factual in nature: “God won’t let US military successfully attack Iran.” But I haven’t told you what will happen in concrete terms, only indicated that there is a line drawn in moral space. It indicates you should pray the US never tries it, because it’s no different than making a blood sacrifice to demons. Maybe I should say that God has commissioned a very major angelic power to protect Iran from the US and her various organizations (like NATO) and other instruments of war.

Don’t draw too many “logical” conclusions from that; they’ll miss the point. It’s not that God loves Iran so much — we have much to say of her sins — but that God has set a boundary against the sins of the US. It’s too late to redeem the US, so it’s not as if observing that prophetic injunction will save the country. But we can be sure that if the US tries to attack Iran, it will precipitate an immediate end to US military power.

Do you believe that? I do. And even without that pointed prophetic message, I’m sure your heart would tell you that the US is doomed for all kinds of reasons. And if you pay attention to military news, you probably have heard about all the military boondoggles on which the US has wasted vast amounts of wealth. How do you feel about our future air superiority resting on the winged piece of crap known as the F-35? And our latest high-tech aircraft carrier is not even close to battle ready. Look it up if you need facts, but anyone with moral discernment could have predicted it long ago.

Nor can you mark this down to subjective spite against the US and her military institutions. I wore the uniform, and would give anything to go back and experience that fertile field of ministry. I haven’t forgotten the many dear souls I met there or the opportunities to establish a worthy witness of faith in the eyes of many. Don’t tie your moral thinking to binary choices and linear logic. Moral truth is not confined to such limitations. Turn your brain around and kneel before the superior logic of the heart. The heart knows.

And the heart knows without words.

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My Father’s World, Part 5

Posted on July 22, 2016 by ehurst

Aside from Acts and Paul’s letters, we know very little about early spiritual gifts. In Corinth it’s all about glossolalia. Outside of Corinth, we hear most about prophecy and healing miracles. The historical records of church history since that time offer even less information until the late 19th Century. Suddenly they seem to burst on the scene again. A whole new body of teaching arises from the birth of the Pentecostal movement in the US.

You can read a lot about the movement from different angles, ranging all the way from hostile to servile propaganda. I’ve done that myself; start with the name Charles Fox Parham. So far, nobody has examined it from the heart-led perspective. I can share what I’ve experienced directly from working among Charismatics.

Two things stand out. First, most of it is fake. Hang out with these folks and your heart will tell you. They are deeply pickled in the Western mythology about anything supernatural, and you can easily detect a lack of genuine commitment. It’s all about the thrills and protecting their franchise; it’s exceedingly partisan and they take themselves too seriously. Second, when you encounter the real deal, it includes an awful lot of stuff the fakers won’t touch, and it usually occurs outside the officially approved Charismatic umbrella.

That includes an awful lot of manifestations of the Holy Spirit that don’t fit neatly into the orthodox list of stuff. It’s as if Paul presents a closed list, when it’s nothing of the sort. Where would you place automatic writing, singing hymns you haven’t learned, or any number of other forms of output glorifying God that clearly doesn’t come from the intellect? Why can we not call them spiritual gifts? Why do we need a discrete list of approved manifestation attempting to bind God from His typical creativity?

And of course, the most disturbing part is the ubiquitous materialism that comes with the Prosperity Gospel. It’s the false doctrine of the Pharisees all over again, insisting that material wealth is the primary evidence of God’s favor. Who hasn’t faced the sickening implication that poverty indicates your faith is weak?

Finally, it’s all tightly related to the bogus “spiritual warfare” teaching that borders on Manichean heresy (the belief that the Devil is in some ways an equal combatant with Christ). “Gotta watch what you say, because words have power!” That’s another lie of the Pharisees, reflected most clearly in Kabbalistic mythology. The Devil is not bound by magic words and written symbols used in rituals. The Devil is bound by your personal desire for the Creator’s moral character.

How did Adam and Eve manage the Garden of God before the Fall? They used a whole range of heart-led interaction with the creatures, sometimes rather mundane with hands and a little sweat, and sometimes by the power of the Holy Spirit in miracles. For Cain, the curse was that the sweat of his brow was no longer a part of the wider experience of interactions, but it was all he had left. He no longer communed with the soil and what it produced; he was forced to use the intellect he chose against a heart-led dominion.

We need to recover the full range of heart-led interaction with Creation, because we were made to be a part of it. Miracles all take place under God’s Law, under His moral character, so why can’t we just endeavor to seize back that divine gift of the Spirit? No two of us will act just alike, but it’s utter folly to rank the gifts based on how entertaining they are. Keep the intellect off the throne; keep the heart ascendant. Let’s normalize the direct interaction with the Spirit Realm in every detail of how we live our lives.

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My Father’s World, Part 4

Posted on July 21, 2016 by ehurst

In the moral realm, the supernatural is natural; the paranormal is normal. Creation is loaded with manifestations of God’s glory and power. Why stop with spooky stuff? Human existence is filled with things that man’s intellect could never understand. If we only knew all the ways our Father has worked through His Creation to care for us!

One of the most contentious and poorly understood issues falls under the label of “spiritual gifts.” Our first problem is the ambiguity of English translations of the New Testament. For example, in Romans 12 Paul refers to various temperaments as spiritual gifts, but the translations seldom make that clear. There is a prophetic temperament, for example, which is not the same as a serving temperament. In Ephesians 4 Paul refers to actual people as gifts of God, rather like the plunder a conquering Roman general might toss to the cheering crowds as he rides triumphant into Rome. Of course, it refers to various roles in the church family structure.

However, most people tend to think of Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 12. First, notice that early on Paul warns that there are different categories of “gifts,” using Greek terms not easily translated into English. Starting in verse 4 he uses the word charismata — what most people call “Charismatic gifts.” Then he mentions diakonia in a form that means particular services some folks perform in the church body. Next, he refers to energema as a reference to how the Lord works through people to produce certain effects. Finally, he sums it up with the word phanerosis to indicate that the Holy Spirit manifests Himself in many different ways, so stop trying to be so didactic and precise about the terminology.

Paul was warning the Corinthian Christians to avoid thinking in the binary and linear logic that characterized their materialistic orientation. You can’t pin God down to what your senses detect and your reason can analyze. This tendency of theirs naturally results in strife because they overly analyzed the stuff they experienced and reduced God to a source of entertainment. Then they began ranking themselves according to things God did through them. As you might expect, the biggest thrill was speaking in tongues — the precise theological term is “glossolalia.”

We know from Acts 2 what glossolalia meant the first time it popped up. These mostly uneducated hicks from Galilee were able to preach in a variety of languages they could not have learned. The effect was a solid outreach to all those Disapora Jews who grew up in various locations throughout that part of the world speaking different local languages. So it stands to reason God would manifest a similar gift in Corinth, where sailors from all over would pass through with all their native languages. We don’t hear too much about this kind of stuff taking place in the other churches Paul planted around the Mediterranean Basin because it wasn’t that useful. It’s a good place to start if you have a high density of foreign ears to reach in a short time, but glossolalia is not a long term strategy.

The Corinthian Christians easily forgot the obvious reason for such a manifestation of God. There were other side effects from this miraculous gift and that was the focus of Corinthian obsession. As we might expect, it was a moment of ecstasy to have divine power coursing through your tongue like that. It was emotionally addictive, and the Corinthians knew a thing or two about addictive experiences. What they didn’t know so well was the heart-mind that ordered all things properly, and the Corinthians made too much of the experience itself, forgetting why God used them that way. Further, a false sense of what was important produced a false sense of who was important in moral terms. They were like children jockeying for attention and refusing to grow up.

Thus, they were abusing a gift of God to create a very worldly atmosphere that turned things upside down. In moral terms, they had become a monstrosity of perversion. They were making the work of God spooky instead of normative.

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