Not Good, Just Useful

Posted on March 3, 2024 by ehurst

Do you really understand what “tithe” in the Bible really means? It is restricted to food items, agricultural products. You cannot tithe any other kind of thing. Food is the only thing you can offer to God that He alone “consumes” in the altar fires. All other offerings are used to support various ritual activities and the priests.

Biblical Law commanded that we bring offerings of all kinds of human activities that can be used for His glory, but the word “tithe” specifically means only food. While it could include the products of hunting and gathering, the emphasis was on domesticated agricultural production. Everything else was just an offering, not a tithe.

God does not tax any other human output. Try to understand the levels: individual, community and cosmic. The individual truth is that your whole existence belongs to God in feudal submission. On the cosmic level, no one can really offer anything to God that He doesn’t already own. But on a community level, God taxes the community through tithing. God requires a consciousness of community. The fundamental shift in God’s dealings with humanity with the Flood was to end individualism; the essence of the Code of Noah is that mankind is required to form communities.

And those communities are based on tribal identity. Modern western “democracy” attempts to suppress the very thing God requires, by reducing all tribes into a single empire. This is defiance of the edict at the Tower of Babel. Western governments encourage a kind of faux tribalism that is dissolved in every kind of human interest other than a genuine decentralized tribal existence. That includes left/right and urban/rural. As is often noted, those two are close parallels.

Matt Taibbi raises a very long-standing feud between rural and urban folks. It’s not a question of which side is righteous, but that the rural folks can survive without the urbans, but the urbans cannot live without the rurals. The urbans forget that they are not at all essential, that if things collapsed, they would starve, but the rural folks would keep right on living.

Agriculture will happen as long as humans are alive. Every other human activity is rooted in that. The urbanites produce nothing. They do not create wealth; they collect it. This can benefit the rural folks if done right, but it’s all too easy to abuse them. And that’s what is happening in the West, simply because the essence of western culture is predatory in that fashion. The shepherd is God’s primary symbol of godly manhood, but that image is entirely absent from western culture.

The whole AI/transhumanism thing (an urban mythology) is based on the notion that human labor in agriculture can be replaced with machines. This permeates our western mythology; it’s part of every futuristic fiction — food production can be fully automated and humans can live just fine without natural foodstuffs. Whether or not it’s materially possible is not the right question; God will not let it happen. If you don’t grasp that, then you don’t understand Him at all.

By definition, urbanite = leftist and rural = conservative in general terms here in America today. The divergence and conflict between left and right is artificial nonsense. There’s nothing sacred and holy about rural folks and agricultural pursuits. Rather, this is a fundamental issue of reality itself, reality as God made it. Trying to rewrite Creation is the sin here. Every time some urbanite government official comes down on a reasonable exercise of agricultural pursuits, God is offended. Creation itself has been violated. While God’s patience is beyond the horizon of any individual human, it does have limits.

We have already been warned in God’s Word, if we have the heart to obey. Be aware that God’s wrath will crush the arrogance of the western lefties, not because they are lefties, but because they defy His will. The righties are not righteous, but most of them are rural, and they will be useful for what God has in mind after His wrath is complete.

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NT Doctrine — Ephesians 3

Posted on March 2, 2024 by ehurst

This is by necessity a rather short lesson. The primary subject of this chapter is some of Paul’s personal background and a prayer on the readers’ behalf, but very little doctrine. The doctrinal issue here is very difficult for most people to understand, much less to embrace. Please note that I must refer to the work of Michael S. Heiser, particularly in his book, The Unseen Realm (Lexham Press, 2015).

In the midst of Paul relating his position as a prisoner and Rome, and as an Apostle of Jesus Christ, he twice refers to the mystery or secret of Jesus the Messiah. While he clearly states that the secret was that Christ’s death would open the Covenant to Gentiles, most readers don’t quite get the full significance of that.

Most people do understand how the Jews of Jesus’ time were so hostile to the idea of the Gentiles receiving the gospel. When Paul said that to the mob at the foot of the stairs outside the Fortress of Antonia, the mob was suddenly ready to kill him with their bare hands. The Sanhedrin turned it into a major case and it took two years before Paul was finally sent to Rome in custody, from whence he writes this letter. That’s only half of it. It wasn’t really a secret from the Jews, but it was something the Jewish authorities desperately tried to censor. It was clearly stated in their own prophets that Gentiles would be someday redeemed.

Paul refers also to “rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms” (v. 10). After untold ages passed, these rulers and authorities were finally seeing this secret God kept from them. It’s not as if they were unaware of the message from Israel’s prophets about redeeming Gentiles. However, the meaning was opaque to them.

Heiser tells us that those powers in the heavenly realm were like councilors in God’s heavenly courts. At the tower of Babel, the nations were divvied up between these heavenly beings. At some later point, God took them to task for misleading the nations in their care, in contrast to how He had taken care of the nation He built for Himself, Israel. The image we get is that these heavenly councilors had deceived the nations into believe they were deities, seeking to embezzle the glory that should have been given to God alone as Creator.

Because of their intransigence in this, God never told them His real plans. They knew about the coming Messiah; they didn’t know He was going to send His own Son to play that roll. Whatever it was He accomplished in His time on earth, it was above the councilors’ authority. Thus, His death on the Cross nullified the Old Covenant, particularly the restrictions that separate Jews and Gentiles. As Paul notes, now all Gentiles are accepted in the Covenant of the Messiah.

That means that the nations assigned to the management of those heavenly councilors were wide open to God picking out people to join His new “nation” of people. They hadn’t expected this, did not see it coming. There is nothing they can do to inhibit Christ raiding their populations for the Elect of every nation.

This is what Paul refers to in this chapter. In the mere existence of the church as a symbolic “nation”, the councilors learned what God had hidden from them since the Tower of Babel. Heiser shows us how this is all well established in the teachings of rabbinical schools ever since the time of the Second Temple built after the Exile. That means Paul would have learned it, and this is what he refers to here and in several other passages already noted in this study.

Because God went to so much trouble, and because Christ was faithful in accepting such an awful death, Paul’s readers should be celebrating every day they live in His grace and election, that they are no longer subject to the incomprehensible power of the false gods of the nations. We are all safe in Christ. Both Jews and Gentiles are one in Him. We should be living for His glory as one covenant nation.

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Free Header Images

Posted on March 1, 2024 by ehurst

Here are a few images cropped more or less for blog headers. Feel free to copy and use as you see fit. Depending on your blog theme, you may have to crop them further, but they are about the right size for most. They are displayed here in thumbnail; click on each image to see it full size.








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Evil Fighting Evil

Posted on February 28, 2024 by ehurst

According to the Word of God, the single biggest problem for life after the Fall is too much human organization and leadership. If you want to suggest that a simplified tribal existence in a dispersed and decentralized structure isn’t “working” as you think it should, the problem is you and your expectations. Whatever it is you may try to implement will only make things worse.

There is no better plan than the one God declared in His Word. And while He did mandate the necessity of human government, in the same breath He also demanded that it be very simple and low-keyed. The only person God ordained to execute judgment is someone in your family, all the way up to capital punishment. If your extended family cannot carry out an execution on its own criminals, then there is far too much human authority in foreign hands.

As noted in comments on yesterday’s post, God warned Israel not to seek a king as the focus of human authority under the Covenant of Moses. Despite all the warnings, they insisted. It didn’t go well; it was a key element in the slow destruction of Israel’s covenant existence.

That said, we should fully expect humanity today to get it all completely wrong. There will be a right-wing backlash, a civil war in the US that sees bloodshed. And it will be done for all the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way. It will be wholly unjust in God’s eyes, and the results will not be any kind of relief from human problems. All it will do is trade one flavor of evil for another.

By no means do I suggest that bloodshed is not called for; it is. There are people attacking others in all kinds of ways, and it should result in the aggressors’ death. There should be more self-defense and defense of family households from evil government. Indeed, there are no governments that can be called “good”, so a lot of bloodshed is in order.

Unfortunately, precious few people want to think about how God wants that done. There’s a lot of missing ingredients as we’ve discussed over the years. The just cause is not what’s inside someone’s head, but their willingness to force their ways on others. The US has never been one nation; it has always been a place where some ruling elite has forced everyone to comply with things that the people found evil. Our rulers today despise us, and they should die for their hateful actions.

But virtually no one has standing to execute God’s justice on them. The vast majority of people in this country have their own brand of evil plaguing them, calling for the same just wrath on themselves. The people with a divine calling to carry out that wrath are so few that they are statistically insignificant. Thus, it cannot be done properly in the current context.

We must prepare ourselves to see evil fighting evil and try to stay out of the way.

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Working for the Devil?

Posted on February 27, 2024 by ehurst

I guess I need to explain this again. I keep getting chatter from people who promote planning ways to change the human situation. The human situation cannot be changed at our level. Get that through your thick heads, folks.

There’s a reason we have embraced the basic thesis of writers like Heiser (Unseen Realm): Our hearts have seized upon the truth of what they write. It may not have been fully conscious in our minds, but as soon as we read their explanations, the awareness became conscious. Finally, someone is tell the story that our hearts always knew. Here it is again.

The vast majority of human behavior at large is under Satan’s dominion. Even the vast majority of Christians labor under his authority. The only way you can break from that authority is through the Covenant. Not just “getting saved” or becoming compliant with some official religious leaders; that’s not going to get it. And it’s not our leading either. Rather, it is a powerful mixture of genuine biblical teaching, as understood through Hebrew mental processes, and the convictions of your heart as revealed to you by the Holy Spirit. Whatever most churches are doing, it is not Hebraic enough.

Yes, as always, Judaism is not Hebraic. It’s some kind of perverted mess of Hellenism disguised in fake Hebrew clothing. Jesus made that pretty clear when He criticized the Jewish leadership of His day. Today’s Judaism is simply the latter end of the course set by Pharisees. The Jews became “Jews” — derived from the term “Judean” — primarily when they rejected the ancient Hebrew model of thinking. That change took a long time, as Israel drifted farther and farther away starting right after Solomon’s reign. But it took a giant leap when the Greek influence came in on the coattails of Alexander’s conquest of Palestine.

No, we must have the ancient Hebraic philosophical outlook, because it is the outlook God built and gave to Moses on the Mountain of God. It is the only setting in which we can hope to understand our Creator. It’s what Jesus taught, calling for His nation come home to it. And they refused.

It turns out the Heiser, Pageau and others have struggled to reclaim a distinctly Hebraic outlook. And Heiser in particular paints a totally different cosmology than is common among church folks today. Heiser describes a vast conspiracy in Heaven against the ruling Lord, commonly referred to in English as Jehovah. The Lord revealed to us a parable of what it’s like in His courts, and that parable is a nomad desert sheikh. God has in His courts a huge staff, creatures we cannot comprehend. Using the term “angels” is somewhat accurate, but misleading in the English language, which language is laden with pagan baggage. The Hebrews preferred the vague term “sons of God” of elohim (grammatically plural in Hebrew), which means simply “not normal humans, eternal beings”.

Heiser tells us that, in Hebrew cosmology and history, God had to deal with a dispute from at least one of them, the one we today call “the Devil” — whose apparent duties were roughly equivalent to chief of the divine bodyguard. He was placed under temporary suspension. As part of the entire procedure, rather like a court case, he raised the issue of humans and their privileged status. God decided that the best way to handle this was to confine the Devil to the natural world (“garden”) He had made, and over which He had placed humans as stewards.

Because the Devil was in this garden, he was in a position to tempt the humans. This was wholly consistent with the Devil’s new duties, and the humans failed the test. They were confined under the Devil’s authority, losing their own privileged position. In the ongoing argument, some of God’s other staff, some advisors we refer to as the Elhoim Council took sides with the Devil. God decided to make our humans lives as mere natural creatures a test case to prove His point.

At the Tower of Babel, God handed over the administration of human nations to these council members. That they were allied with the Devil simply means the humans were mismanaged, in accordance with the Devil’s agenda. So God picked out a man to start a nation of His own. Again, it was to prove a point, but secretly it involved plotting to bypass the opposition members of His Council. He sent His own Son as the promised Messiah, who then ended the human-based national covenant with Israel and transferred everything into a new covenant that ignored national boundaries.

The net result is that human government remains in the hands of the Elohim Council, who tend to cooperate with the Devil. God left it that way, while instituting a “nation” that was not subject to human government, and therefore not subject to the Elohim Council. Further, the Devil was restricted in what he could do about all of this, because it’s for sure the Son outranks him. This is the Son’s nation, not subject to the manipulations of the Elohim Council.

We are granted some limited vision of all this, and some revelation about how things could work out better for humans. That’s because the revelation is for our own guidance, the gospel of how to live in our fallen condition in this world. But the rest of the world that is not in our Covenant cannot comprehend the privileges of obeying God’s way, cannot see that they are divine, cannot even want what they represent.

There is nothing we can do for them. That is, nothing we can do except to live the truth we have been given in the Covenant gospel. A critical element in that gospel is to reject any significant concern for things that humans generally believe are important. This life is just a big lie, and it will remain a lie, even getting worse, until it ends. This world is slated for destruction, and there’s nothing of value here except opportunities to glorify God. God Himself does not want us messing with human government. Jesus made that pretty obvious, as did the Apostles later.

We have no mandate to conquer this world, whether figurative or literal. We are to pull away from it and let it crash and burn. The only thing we can conquer is the Devil’s lies in our own individual lives. As long as you keep trying to figure out ways to make things better in this world, you are working for the Devil and his allies.

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The Turning Point

Posted on February 26, 2024 by ehurst

You won’t see it in this photo, but this was the place where my life changed dramatically.

With my wife and kids, I rented half of a house down at the end of this street on the left. The house itself wasn’t that memorable. The owner had divided a nice old home into a duplex, and we got the bigger portion. I was working a job that saw me report to work sometime between midnight and 4AM, depending on the day of the week. I was a freight handler for a trucking company. I had been struck by a sense of mission at the little church we attended and kept seeking ways to make it happen. But the thing that most haunted me was returning to military service as a mission field.

Administratively, the deck was stacked against me. I had served before and took an early exit for family problems. The details don’t matter much; there was a large barrier I had to cross and did lots of work putting together a pile of papers to support my application for return. But I knew I just had to do it.

So, every night before I headed off to work, I would finish my preparations and take a stroll along this street and the quiet darkened store fronts of the main drag here in Capital Hill District of Oklahoma City (off camera to my right). It was always deserted, which was perfect, because I would walk slowly praying out loud, sometimes with my hands lifted. I kept it up for about three months while the paperwork made its way through the system. I called on the Lord to work a miracle on something that really had poor prospects when reviewed by several people who knew the process.

The focus, the devotion and making room for the burning desire to serve the Lord changed me by itself, never mind the results of the process.

Of course, my request was granted and I returned to uniform for several years. It was a major high point in my ministry life, as the assignment was a place that was, at that time, wide open for the work I knew I had to do. The right people were there and the situation was just perfect. Not everything was wonderful, but the power of the Spirit working in me was off the scale of everything I had experienced before that.

In the Old Testament, it was a called a breakthrough moment. What would you be willing to do for a breakthrough?

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NT Doctrine — Ephesians 2

Posted on February 24, 2024 by ehurst

The theme continues to be uniting Hebrew and Gentile Christians. The previous chapter emphasized our unity as a single nation rooted in Heaven, pointing out how the Lord designed it on three levels: cosmic, global and individual. Here, the emphasis begins again with the global, recalling the former distinction made between Israel and Gentile nations.

Before Christ, the Gentile nations were all captives of the Devil. He was demoted and confined to this world, and this became his domain under God’s authority. The elohim for the most part aligned with the Devil and his agenda, so all the nations assigned to them were by default captives of the Devil. Paul says it was a form of spiritual death; no connection or awareness of Eternity. All we had was the flesh and what it could perceive, and it was wide open to the influence and temptations of the Devil. We were born children of God’s wrath. Paul intentionally writes those first few verses as a single incomplete sentence, leaving us all hanging.

And then, in verse 4 begins the resolution. God was fabulously wealthy and generous in terms of mercy and love. Despite our being dead to Him, He chose us to be resurrected with His Son. That is, when Christ rose from the grave, He was the center of a new realm, and we were in raised up into that new realm. It was all by grace; there is nothing we could have done, nor could be even have known to want it. We now have an eternal identity. The whole point is that we are the proof of God’s case against the Devil and the rebellious elohim council members. He will use us to prove that He was right in demanding all glory for Himself. Again, it was all by grace — the initiative was His alone. There is not a thing we could have done; we were utterly hopeless. Giving Him glory should be our reflex.

And not just that, but with that citizenship comes a vast wealth of gifts in this life. You see, the works of obedience are His gift to us, a very high privilege that marks us eternal beings. He plucked us from our graves, gave us life, clothed us, taught us manners and sent us back into the world as His own elite ambassadors. Our rich vestments are obedience to Him. He had this all worked out before He even got around to creating us.

Before the Messiah came, Gentiles were not permitted any of that high privilege, nor even the awareness of it. Israel by law was not allowed to be friends with Gentiles. They had to remain aloof and avoid unnecessary contact in the flesh. They were granted the high privilege of ambassadorship among the Gentile nations. But Jesus opened up the Covenant citizenship. His blood covers us and makes us fit to become citizens of His domain. And He welcomed some Jews, as well! Now, we who were formerly two distinct groups on the earth are now joined in His Covenant as a new kind of human, something never seen before. We all have His Spirit inside of us, not something He had previously offered.

He is building us into a massive edifice for His living Temple. Christ is the cornerstone, the foundation is the prophets and apostles, and we will be the stones to make His home. It’s a massive building project, the likes of which no man or men could ever dream, much less have they seen it before. There is no Jew or Gentile in Him, only Christians.

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Random Photos 17

Posted on February 23, 2024 by ehurst

Yesterday’s ride took me past some places that caught my eye. To be more exact, the views called my name and I tried to capture them. One of the things I do is look for scenes that can be used as blog headers or banners. This building is the old Santa Fe Railroad Station in OKC. There are no longer any tracks near this thing, but the building was worth preservation and is now a museum, so it gets some love and remains quite lovely.

You’ll see this again, but from different angles, because one of the things that my mind searches for is scenery that can be cropped as blog headers or banners. I share them with anyone who asks. The only trick is to be able to envision what the scene would look like in a narrow horizontal tableau.

Any of these images could be cropped that way, but sometimes you have to get the angle just right. This is the Scissortail Bridge over Interstate 40 in Oklahoma City. The Scissortail Flycatcher is our state bird, so it naturally shows up in art across the state, though here it’s highly abstracted. The intent was to catch drivers’ imagination as they pass through the city on the highway system.

The city is learning; every art installation has been vandalized to some degree, and the department in charge of this stuff has to recognize ways to reduce the temptation, to make the target harder for vandals. This bridge had already been modified from its original design. Some public works are more vulnerable than others.

The honest truth is that public art fixtures like this one could be vandalized some and you’d never know it. I suppose someone could set fire to it, but that’s risky, since the thing is lit up all night long and police do patrol this area. It’s highly visible from long distance in most directions.

Otherwise, it’s the kind of quirky stuff that has grown popular around here. It’s been a very long time since Oklahoma City has seen an investment in classical style artwork. These days the taxpayers are getting oddball stuff that, in the balance, is probably about right for the tastes of younger generations.

Playground equipment is also touched by this trend. Gone are the old standards of previous generations; most newer playground look like this one in Manuel Perez Park, along the south bank of the Oklahoma River Recreation Area. This time, I did what I could to hide the vandalism, but this scene served up another banner shot by moving to a different angle.

If you take enough pictures and look them over, learn about cropping and so forth, you start to get a feel for what will turn out and what won’t. I still make mistakes and have to toss pictures, but I feel like I’m getting better at capturing. And the honest truth is that cellphones and tablets have made it so much easier for me. I’m not that interested in shots that require very much zoom. That’s not my thing. I’m much more interested in stuff that simply decorates, something that speaks wordlessly, without out specific impressions being generated.

This is the same playground from a different angle. If you wanted to use this in a banner image, it would be relatively easy to use the cropping function built into most blogging software to capture a fine color spread. It would capture that kind of decoration that doesn’t have any particular meaning, just something that generally pleases the eye.

As always, my photographs are offered under the Creative Commons Share Alike license; no attribution is required.

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iPad Camera Test

Posted on February 22, 2024 by ehurst

Despite the fact it was still winter and very little was green, it was a great day to get out and test the iPad as a camera. I didn’t like lugging it around in an Amazon bubble envelope, so I’ll need a new slipcase for that purpose. Still, I thought it did a good job for the most part. It was easier to see what I was getting on the larger screen. This is the central plaza park-like spot in the middle of the Atkinson Plaza shopping area across from Tinker AFB.

Farther back in the first photo is the actual park honoring WP “Bill” Atkinson, the guy who pushed so hard to build up this area and then eventually sold a bunch of houses. The statue shows him with a pony; everyone who bought one of his houses was offered a free pony, and he would keep it for free at a large facility he had a couple miles away, back when Midwest City was still a couple of small neighborhoods built to house the workers and servicemen at Tinker AFB (previously the Douglas Aircraft factory).

Here we have a section of the Palmer Loop bikeway that runs from close to Atkinson Park over to Barnes Regional Park. The grass and trees will take awhile to turn green, but the henbit and a few weeds have gotten a head start on it. Inside that high security fence on the right stands the overgrown remains of a neighborhood that the government bought out (Glenwood). It’s just off the north end of Tinker’s main runway, and a couple of plane crashes in the 1970s caused a little hysteria. The Rex86 conspiracy nuts claimed this is supposed to be a site prepped for mass civilian arrests. It’s heavily wooded across the entire square mile, with just a few open spots.

Much closer to Barnes Park is this old rail bridge; the tracks are long out of service. They used to have a branch that ran around that neighborhood I discussed in the previous paragraph, and then onto the airbase, but the Air Force quit moving freight that way, and the entire rail line went out of service. The farther end of it ran all the way to Shawnee, OK, but very large sections were pulled up in the late 1970s, I believe.

Yeah, an awful lot of stuff happened in the 1970s in Central Oklahoma, in terms of infrastructure changes.

Farther along the same bikeway is this shot in Barnes Park. Back just before the harsh cold hit here, I went along both sides of this trail cutting off all the intruding greenery, trimming it back about 3 feet from the pavement. I’m hoping that hard freeze will discourage a quick regrowth. Some of that stuff grows like weeds, sprouting multiple new branches at the site of each cutting. To my amusement, an awful lot of people walking by were thanking me, remarking how hard it was to get Parks and Rec to come out and trim it back.

In the far background of this shot are the main facilities for Barnes Park. There’s a very large open pavilion with picnic tables and a substantial playground with all kinds of climbing fixtures for the kids. I’m standing on a hill, but the slope isn’t that discernible in this image. The place has a mixture of very old style cast concrete picnic tables and here and there are some of the newer plastic coated welded steel ones. Our native tribes host a major powwow down in the open grassy area every summer.

The main feature that provoked the city government into buying up this area is Soldier Creek. It’s not marked, of course, but the banks of the creek here offered a very large amount of ancient native artifacts buried in spots. This park strip of several parks runs two miles along the creek and this was a particularly dense area for archaeology some decades ago. Surviving tribes have records of this place and their own names for it, most considering it a medicine area.

All of these images are free to use under the Creative Commons Share Alike terms for non-commercial use; it’s not necessary to give me credit.

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Workouts 2024

Posted on February 21, 2024 by ehurst

My current apartment complex has a real gym. It’s not as extensive as I would like, but it’s far, far better than the previous place. If you stand near the door, this is what you see looking back toward the far end. The dumbbells range up to 50 pounds each.

When things got brutally cold here in central Oklahoma, I spent a lot of time in here. This was the only way I could workout without risking frostbite. I can’t use the treadmills, but if I wear a brace I can use the ski machine, and certainly the recumbent bike. But I’ve been lifting the dumbbells a lot and discovered my arthritic joints tolerated more now than in the past. Indeed, lifting weights is doing a lot more for me than riding did in the past.

If you stand in the middle of the gym and look back toward the door, you can see some more equipment, much of which I don’t use. The big Smith rack (the weight machine in the corner) I use primarily for pull-ups and to work my calves. I don’t use the weights built into it for anything; the machine is not well designed for someone like me.

My low-sodium and low-sugar diet is working. At first I lost a bit of water weight, maybe 5 pounds or so. But that was a couple of weeks ago. Now I’m slowly losing actual lard, and I’m down 10 pounds total. If this keeps going, I’ll have some nice abs to show off.

I hit the gym Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Mon/Fri is the weight room, but Wed is this outdoor gym. I do my best to emulate most of the same moves I do with weights, and I bring along a couple of elastic exercise bands to supplement what this outdoor gym can accommodate. The idea with the outdoor gym is a circuit workout with very little rest between events. I don’t try to hit my max on anything, just doing enough repetitions to stress my body. I’ll take a short rest and rehydrate, then hit it again. In a couple of weeks I should be able to finish three circuits.

My hydration drink is home brewed: 2 table spoons of lemon or lime juice and just a pinch of regular salt in a 20 ounce bottle with water. The whole thing with a sodium sensitivity is that you still need some sodium, just not very much. I’m also drinking an herbal tea in the mornings of hibiscus and hawthorne, both known to lower blood pressure. Lately I’m hitting 110s or 120s on the top number, and under 70 on the bottom. Finally, to keep my joints from complaining too much, I’m using an herbal cream that is mostly arnica, but includes a few other supportive herbs. It works.

I still ride a bit, but it’s no longer the emphasis. It’s more for getting out to places where I can pray and take pictures, etc. I also do some shopping with my folding bike. However, I seriously doubt I could do any more bikepacking. But, we’ll see when I lose some more weight.

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