Psalm 99

Posted on May 7, 2016 by ehurst

While this is another coronation song, it’s not something you read and them meditate. You should jump up, shout and sing, run around in circles and do cartwheels. We poorly grasp the kind of genuine enthusiasm that saw people do things just like that during coronation celebrations. The refrain sounds thrice here: “He is holy!”

The words for “tremble” and “quake” are intentionally ambiguous: You can shiver in fear or tremble with joy. It really depends on your sense of faith and commitment. He is described as the true sovereign over Israel, so trouble her at your own peril. Let everyone tremble for His name is holy!

His limitless power is wedded to boundless compassion. The image of divine justice is hardly limited to what is implied by the English translation. His divine justice is entirely consistent with His design for Creation; it brings people to a sense of peace. It is in their best interest; nothing could possibly be sweeter, so learn to love it. And so dance around His throne, for He is holy!

While Moses and Aaron were not technically from the priestly clan, they did serve as appointed priests unto the Lord. God’s Law reflects His character; a written expression of His Law cannot restrain His choices. The Law of Moses binds the people, not God; it tells them what to expect from Him. You’ll notice that no one argued against their priestly service and lived. And of course, none doubts the priesthood of Samuel, much less his prophetic calling. People truly committed to pleasing God will find themselves in august company. You, too, can call on His name and get the same level of response they saw. It’s not about the men, but about the God they served and their devotion.

However, God is not some noisy and doting ruler. Those who fail His expectations will surely suffer His wrath, but it always comes packaged with forgiveness. Don’t hesitate to come into His Presence wherever it is He calls to you. Our God is holy!

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Logical Odds and Ends

Posted on May 7, 2016 by ehurst

A couple of recent comments and some offline conversation seem to call for a fresh attempt to explain a couple of items.

Ancient Near East (ANE) — We are not ANE. We harken back to that collection of civilizations because it appears to be the last time humans consistently used a frame of reference that enabled understanding God’s revelation. We could be just as happy without any reference to the ANE if folks would stop confining themselves to Western epistemology.

So instead of trying to imagine ourselves somehow as a revival the grand ANE traditions, we are content to make the most of our limited knowledge of that time in human history and extract some workable form of logic that seems to account properly for what Scripture says. We already know Western intellectual assumptions are utterly incompetent at analyzing Scripture. That’s so patently obvious we refuse to debate it. But we use the image of ANE as the source of Scripture, and as such, it cannot be ignored.

We are not, and cannot be, ANE ourselves. Instead, we seek some common ground of logic that escapes the prison of Western thinking. This brings us to the other issue that keeps popping up. I wish there was a sharp marketing blurb that would cover it, but the best I have right now is the intentionally ambiguous: Reality is fungible.

Western culture asserts a model of reality that seems to work. That’s reality as far as Western minds are concerned. I don’t argue that point. I simply deny that reality is objective and concrete. Whatever you perceive as reality is de facto reality for you. Conflicts between different folks over particulars in the model have to do with efforts to account for things that don’t quite match the fundamental model in the first place. But to a large degree, your model of reality has a massive influence over what reality seems to do. Reality flexes to meet perception.

In the process of meeting you half way, reality will cease providing certain options. It’s not merely that you won’t see it, but it will frankly be impossible to get it. You’ll be standing next to someone with a different view of reality and they will not only see things you don’t see, but they’ll frankly receive into their existence things you can’t have. Reality is a living thing and it can read your mind, in a manner of speaking. It will respond to you in a personal way. I could as easily say: Perception is reality. But that’s already pretty popular and loaded with false baggage.

For those of you who feel drawn by what we teach here, we are creating a new reality. We are striving to see those options precluded by Western intellectual intransigence. We take reality personally. Don’t confuse that with subjectivism or solipsism; those two are both Western afflictions based on arrogance. We remain humble and penitent or we make no progress. We believe this approach is inherent in ANE thinking, so it’s utterly consistent with Scripture.

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A Bit of Cultural Mythology

Posted on May 6, 2016 by ehurst

Brother Ed is a dirt-grubbing peasant.

That’s my social background. Not blue-collar, but brown-collar, at best. Yes, I managed to get a really great education, because I went to college back in the days when state and federal government was passing out big grants. All you had to do was make the grade, and I didn’t suffer from any goofball sense of entitlement.

America doesn’t have a genuine upper class. We have some insufferably snotty rich folks with massive educations, but they remain some version of cultural bourgeois. We do have a strong element of DIY cowboy ethic in there, but most of the wealthy and powerful remain elitist petty snobs. They like to imagine themselves as upper class. And maybe the European upper class is no cultural marvel today, but it takes a special blindness to ignore the difference between upper class culture and that of the merely wealthy.

The current massive SJW whining about micro-aggression is hardly mainstream. However, it is also little more than a caricature of how most “respectable Americans” tend to think. In other words, the whining is over-the-top, but essentially the same culture. Americans have a very poor tolerance for sarcasm directed at them personally. If you can find acceptance into some in-group, you’ll get away with it more, but whining about offense is simply the essence of what we are.

And it’s just crazy how easy it is to get over that. Most people who become aware of the virtues of social resilience — not taking yourself too seriously — have little trouble moving down that path. It’s too obvious. But it seems increasingly rare that you’ll find someone with the good sense to simply laugh when another party says something preposterous about him.

Sometimes you just wanna growl at someone: “Grow a pair!”

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Update from the Bureaucratic Swamps

Posted on May 6, 2016 by ehurst

The bike is the easy part of this whole thing. My buddy at the local Dick’s Sports Store looked the bike over and got with the manufacturer. I get the impression this is a custom deal for this vendor, because he made it sound like some of the parts were unique to the bike. At any rate, parts alone ring up at near replacement cost for the whole bike. In tort liability terms, this means the bike is “totalled” (total loss).

I’ll get that on paper either today or Monday.

EMSA, as previously noted, is more difficult to handle. I contacted a municipal lawyer today and she didn’t seem impressed with what the EMSA folks had told me about their procedures. So she told me how they could file a claim with the City, but the City is self-insured. EMSA acts like they had never heard of such a thing. The City subsidizes EMSA, but they had no idea how to file a claim against the City’s “insurance.” You know, this strikes me as dereliction of duty. This is something that should have been in place decades ago. The City isn’t raising any roadblocks; EMSA is just being irresponsible.

At any rate, I offended the guy at EMSA, so he called the City Attorney’s Office and they got it all worked out. Why did it require that kind of poking and prodding? Because EMSA is a soulless bureaucracy. Funny how the City is so much more sensible about such things.

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Progress in Pieces

Posted on May 6, 2016 by ehurst

Not in the sense of broken apart, I’m just tossing in a bunch of little things here.

I kept the post-op cushioned leg immobilizer because that hinged brace is good only for walking around, and absolutely painful for resting. So I can spend plenty of time comfortably sitting at my desktop system with the immobilizer and sleep rather well in it, and I wear that hinged brace very little — only when my body says we need to work on recovery.

This morning’s notable reading is: ‘I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer’. It’s posted at The Register, an old UK tech site. I’m looking at the abusive treatment of Windows users, where only the sharpest techies watching MS like a hawk can stave off this forced Win10 upgrade business. If it works for you, fine, but for a truly substantial number of people this meets all the definitions of hacking and malware. MS is hijacking their customers’ systems. Every day, I come to love Mint Linux even more.

(Addenda: Does this Win10 upgrade fiasco remind anyone of this?)

I’ve hit a wall trying to negotiate the path to adding my ambulance ride to my claim against the City. From what I’ve learned so far, the two operate conflicting policies and EMSA is especially abusive. I’ve had a conversation with their billing department, and it boils down to this: either they bill an insurance company directly, or it goes immediately to collections. When I see an invoice in the mail, it’s too late; the invoice is actually a notice of collections action with no grace period. I can’t tell them it’s part of a tort claim after that. You would think that EMSA, with a long history of City government involvement in keeping their operation viable, has never actually billed the city directly. I don’t need a lawyer to deal with the City, but to deal with EMSA (sarcasm there). Pray that I get this worked out.

Have you ever noticed how close these two English words are? tort > torture

Back when I was stationed in the Netherlands, in support of what was then AFCENT HQ (under NATO and SHAPE), my wife and I were active in the NATO Protestant Chapel. The ladies had their rather substantial auxiliary, mostly as a community morale and spiritual support activity, striving to keep themselves sane and helping others. One little project involved a game where someone came around to the various husbands of these ladies to ask them for a comment about their wife. These comments were collected and mixed randomly. The ladies in group meeting would then pull these anonymous comments out and try to guess who said what about his wife. When faced with the question, I noted that my wife was the single most reliable supporter of my calling and that I could always count on her to make serious sacrifices when it was necessary. The gal said, “As if this one won’t be painfully obvious to everyone in Chapel…” She meant that my answer ruined the fun, because everyone already knew that my wife fit that description better than any woman in the whole community.

It’s true, and I sit here this morning with tears of joy in my eyes at how Veloyce has jumped in and returned the pampering on me when I need it most.

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Progress 6

Posted on May 5, 2016 by ehurst

For the moment I’m sitting in front of my desktop computer.

The whole objective of post-operative care, DIY or otherwise, is returning to as near normal as possible. So we make adjustments for the injuries but try to set our minds on resumption of previous life activities (AKA, the mission). I consider the advice from the doctors, nurses and various technicians, but my heart-mind is the master. The only reason anyone blathers about this is to offer a resource for others. In this case, we reiterate the message in Sister Christine’s recent post: “I could spend a fortune buying imitations of. No batteries required. Nothing is more pure than the twig, the leaf, the light glittering off the river.” This is a marvelous parable for addressing the massive smothering hive-mind of Western consumer health advice.

Don’t be passive; don’t be cerebral — because that means you stand before God already condemned. Not that we suggest any kind of goofy activism, but that you are accountable to God for His Temple, which is your flesh. You are accountable to Him through your heart-mind, not to some self-declared oracle of God that wears the princely robes of mainstream medicine. Maybe God doesn’t require you individually to wander outside and nibble leaves and twigs in your environment, but if you never ask the right questions, you can’t possibly get the right answers as to what God has actually provided for you, nor what God actually requires of you.

In the original plan, the orthopedic surgeons had expected me to return to the VA today and replace that big leg-lock padded brace with a hinged brace with graduated angle of motion settings. Physical Therapy jumped the gun and got the hinged brace on me before I left. So the surgeons canceled today’s appointment, leaving me with instructions about starting today with some limited swing motion in my knee while up and moving. I looked over the brace, corrected the placement of the padding and set the hinges to the limited swing of 30° motion — that’s the minimum option. I put it on and tested things a bit. I had already started wearing my slip-on shoes, so I was able to hobble around and I am near the point of simply ignoring so-called stability aids. This feels okay.

I do get tired, largely in the sense of having an injured leg down where the blood collects and isn’t easily pumped back up because normal muscular action is hindered. So to let the blood pooled around my ankle to recirculate properly, I have to sit down frequently with the leg up. So I found something that feels just about right to rest it on under my computer table and here I am. But the angle isn’t quite right, nor can it be made so with the materials on hand, so I’ll have to move back to the recliner soon enough.

The mission comes first, always. But the mission includes a heart-led consideration of the context. I wrote some time back wondering aloud why I felt such a driving necessity for riding and taking pictures. I’m starting to get some inkling of where that’s going, as you probably noted if you read my open letter to the City of OKC.

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The Heart of Politics

Posted on May 5, 2016 by ehurst

This is not political commentary, per se, but heart-led moral commentary about politics. God has granted far more insight than I ever dreamed possible, in the sense that it all fits into a discernible pattern for me. I know what to do with it. And it persists as an organic living thing that responds to queries much the same as bouncing choices off the moral convictions. I’ve been called to consider human political shenanigans as a part of some larger driving necessity to help people face the suffering and sorrow of this world with grace.

When I heard that Cruz bailed out of his campaign, I wondered who put a gun to his head. My heart answered that he had a gun to his head a long time ago. Someone finally released him from the charade and he’s being reassigned to other duties. He serves the established shadow government, but I think he would have bailed long ago had the hive-mind allowed it. When you analyze the preposterous things he has been saying recently, you realize he never believed a word of it, but was trying to fulfill a role that really did not fit him. So he bumbled under pressure. I don’t think he ever really wanted it that bad, but he was the best hope of the hive-mind.

Trump doesn’t actually want it either, but what he does want requires the office. He’s more transparent because he can afford it. It’s integral to the mission and to the man-as-product. He’s the merchandise and his business ethics are just good enough that he succeeds and his customers tend to come back for more. That “just good enough” is vastly better than most politicians. He doesn’t want to rule the lives of others; he wants to make the biggest deals he can because that’s the real payoff; that’s what drives him. Viewed from this angle, he stands to play in the biggest, most wide-open market of all. That’s how you’ll need to understand his presidency if things turn out that way.

I struggle for words to indicate just how serious the war between him and bureaucratic hive-mind will be. All the standard handles and levers are missing for both sides. There will be no definitive victory. And even if Trump is assassinated soon, some major element of the shadow government bureaucracy has been stripped of their secrecy cover. In the end, I’m guessing it’s damage control on that front that ended Cruz’s campaign, because his public presence constituted a massive hemorrhage that aggravated the “national security” paranoia of the bureaucracy. The bureaucratic dread of accountability is the foundation of its existence. Without that, there is no hive-mind. Trump may not have a handle on that, but they know he understands its value to them.

But once in office, he can do nothing unless he finds ways to bypass them, and that would require some serious creativity and plain old espionage and dirty tricks. And the hive-mind has some really brilliant minds, too; true believers who follow The Cult. At some point, there will be open warfare between Trump and the bureaucrats.

That’s what I see. Don’t buy my content; see how I use moral heart-reasoning to arrive at some useful and practical conclusions. The real issue is not what actually happens so much as how God wants you to handle such things in your own individual calling. You have to stand where He wants you to stand when the moment comes to shine His glory.

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Progress 5

Posted on May 4, 2016 by ehurst

SuturesDon’t click to enlarge if you can’t handle gore.

This is for tough DIY care. I called several different times and spoke to different offices in the VA system before I finally got a straight answer. I told them I was alarmed by the smell of my bandages and if they didn’t want to clean it, I would myself. At first they had me with an afternoon appointment, but then called back and said go with DIY.

Sitting on the toilet, I rested my heel on the side of the tub. We took off all those cheap elastic wrappings. Then I used Apple Cider Vinegar in an atomizer spray bottle to dissolve the blood caked on the cheap bandages. Give it a little time and those things will pull free from sutures. Then I washed the whole thing with warm soapy water, put on a single stick-free pad and wrapped it with just one elastic holder. Then I covered my leg with a soft, thinning leg from an ancient pair of sweat pants. I’ll change it when it stinks again, which is often enough since I sweat a lot right now. No other anti-biotic was use this time around.

What you see is a horizontal suture which was the original laceration from the impact. The vertical cut was to access stuff they had to stitch back together. I’m already walking with a walker and that’s only for stability across large spaces, but I don’t get up that often yet.

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Open Letter to Oklahoma City

Posted on May 4, 2016 by ehurst

(This is a copy of an email message I sent to the OKC Parks and Rec offices. It is in reference to the tragic accident noted in previous posts on this blog. There are minor differences in content based on administrative trivia.)

I am fully aware that this message will be propagated among various offices and city agencies. As far as I’m concerned, it’s public anyway. Further, I know that it is unlikely anyone will respond substantively until somewhere down the line in this process. I’m seeking a clear conscience with my God and will let Him take charge of the consequences.

Further, I am fully cognizant of how bureaucracies work. I spent several years in the US Army Military Police, mostly as a back-office guy, and sometimes in PR. With that experience, I’ve spent several decades learning to understand social psychology, organizational theory, and I can give lectures on what to expect from the bureaucratic hive-mind (I refer to Glennon’s National Security and Double Government as a good source on how I view such things). I know that the system can’t wait to see what I’ll do because it has no idea how to define me, except to suspect that I am a some kind of threat.

We are not enemies. I am a client of Parks and Rec services; I firmly support the job you folks have done with the bike trails. Anyone can rant about how it’s less than their personal nirvana, but I’m too cynical to expect that much. So I’m pleased and quite willing to keep supporting what comes out the program. It’s not bad, all things considered.

Indeed, if you check the blog linked in my signature, you can scroll back, or simply use the search function on the blog using the term “cycling” and you’ll see that I have been quite some years cycling around the county and taking lots of pictures to show all my friends (~800 subscribers) the lovely country side and things to see, from Draper Lake to Arcadia, to Overholser and Hefner, and beyond. I have good reason to believe I’ll get back to that mission in about six weeks or so. Any of you could join me, if you like.

Yes, dozens of folks have pressured me to get a lawyer, but they are not me. This is my life to direct. I am not a materialistic man, but I do use material stuff to get my otherworldly mission done. My boasting of OKC’s beauty is a part of that mission, though I would be hard put to explain it without referring to my religion. Take my word for it — we are not enemies. I just need restoration of certain material goods that other folks paid for; the bike was bought with a donation from my blog readers. In a moral sense, you owe them, not me. But I’m the legal focus so I’ll make it easy. Hiring a lawyer is more like a last resort (OSHA violations and all that stuff).

I have no experience with filing claims and your lawyers are likely hoping to take advantage of that. But for the other folks who are not totally absorbed into the bureaucracy, let me point out two things that occupy my attention right now.

1. EMSA — I don’t want to hear from them about paying for ambulance services.
2. The bike — the vendor is repairing it now. I want the City to pay for it.

Two other things: The VA has my medical needs covered. However much physical function I’m going to recover, they will get the job done working with me. They’ve never billed me because I’m 50% service-connected disabled. With that rating, I have long since retired from work, so I’m not suffering lost wages. My paycheck will be the same as long as the banking system can pretend that the US federal government is solvent. So those two common issues are not your problem, so far as I can tell. And while there may be a bunch of other tort liability issues, my life is too simple to make much of them.

I’ve shown you my cards. I’m waiting for some really smart official to realize that this tragedy can be turned into an advantage for the City. I’m still interested in working with you, and it seems events beyond my control have made it necessary that I decide now is the time tell you that I have been interested in gathering more accurate information about the stuff I write. Instead of speculation, how about someone get with me and give me a better picture of what Parks and Rec are doing in OKC?

(I’m posting this on my blog as an open letter to the City as a whole. Again, the link is below in my signature block.)

Ed Hurst

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We Need

Posted on May 4, 2016 by ehurst

(With an imperious air) We don’t need you.

And you don’t need us. On the other hand, we are altogether glad you took a moment to read this. Our motives are radically different from other religious groups. It’s not propaganda to say that we are trying to get you free from bondage to sin. The difference is that we know better than to think your spiritual liberty depends on us. It depends on you and God. Our mission is to help you become aware of the lies and blinders that prevent you taking His path to liberty.

We don’t see your path; we simply know of a certainty it’s there. God said so — wanna argue with Him? But you do argue with Him. All sin is rooted in disputing what God has revealed. Our mission isn’t to bring His revelation to you, but to show you how we found His revelation for each of us. Because the only way you’re going to get a personal encounter with God — a direct revelation — is come down that path He made for you.

Our payoff is the blessings of His glory shining in our souls when we see how He uses our fallible human response to His divine call to bring other folks into that glory. We are just along for the ride and entirely disposable. But what a heavenly thrilling ride it is! So we gladly encourage you to hang out with us as long it serves His glory in your life. As soon as that changes, you need to move on. You’ll know; if we have to tell you, there’s something wrong already.

Meanwhile, just a few of you will sense that this mission here at Kiln of the Soul is a longer term destination for you. Welcome. We are still figuring this out, so don’t be afraid to jump in whatever you got going. Still, don’t pretend you can just take over. If that’s your urging, there’s something very wrong with your understanding of how this works. We have a pretty clear idea what God has put into our hands, and we’ll guard that trust He has given us. But in this virtual space, that guarding is mostly a matter of sharp words to call your attention to something.

I noted that some of you will hang out and find an important job in this parish. Sister Christine is my partner in this mission. She lives out around Ottawa, Canada and I live near Oklahoma City; we’ve never come any closer geographically. God can work that way. We’ve developed a strong bond of friendship and fellowship and helped save each other massive amounts of moral misery. She’s the Mama Elder in my parish. That’s a role, not a “position.” The label is meant to form an image in your mind of what her presence is like on this blog. She’s about as good as any mama I’ve ever known, and better than a great many I’ve known. The point is that God uses her in my life and I can’t imagine how you could hang out with me here and not be blessed by her involvement.

She posted something on her blog yesterday, then thought better of it, I suppose. That’s her business, but I loved it and was going to discuss it here. The gist of it is simple: Your freedom is right there burned into your heart. Whatever excuse you use for ignoring it won’t matter, because it still works out to sin. Remember what I wrote in my “Our Crazy Religion” series? It’s a moral failure in God’s eyes — a sin against Him as Creator — if you do not strive to unite your moral awareness into a big holistic picture that includes how your body is an integral part of Creation. God takes His Creation seriously; He sent His Son to die on the Cross so Creation could be free from bondage. Creation is a living and active member in all of this stuff. Creation is one big thing made up of countless little things, each with their own kind of personal awareness and a form of sentience, and each one eagerly participates in your personal redemption if you will just take the time to learn something about how it all works. Nature isn’t fallen; we are. We can take advantage of that and use Creation as our strong and trustworthy ally.

But at some point you simply must assert your moral boundaries and stop listening so very slavishly to folks who don’t get that picture. Nobody says you have to become an activist and culture warrior to force the world to get right. You can’t possibly know what’s right for the next person. You’ll do all you possibly can do just getting yourself right. When Christine and I offer specifics, those are technically examples that may or may not jive with what your own heart can tell you. We know from experience that your heart will guide you in both the nature and timing of every decision that brings you into greater communion with Creation. We also know that making the occasional concrete suggestion tends to trigger a shift in thinking so that your mind becomes more comfortable with obeying and implementing what the heart commands, instead of trying to run everything. The intellect is a terrifying master, wholly inept and implacable. It’s an amazing good servant once it knows the heart rules.

We can’t possibly stop talking about this stuff. It won’t let us be quiet. We aren’t building a church; we participate in one that forms around us because we would like to share in the joy of God’s Kingdom growing in human souls. We don’t need money and names and stats. We need the glory of God. Wanna shine that light over here?

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