Complication to Progress (Updated)

Posted on May 9, 2016 by ehurst

Went to bed last night and fell asleep without painkiller. Sometime within two hours I awoke to tachycardia. This time it was persistent. After a half-hour of this, my wife drove me to the VA emergency room.

This was the first time they actually saw it for themselves. In times past, it had always been too brief and too inconsistent to show up on their instruments. It did begin to slow just a bit — tapering was an entirely new experience for me. In times past, it was some 10-15 minutes, and then suddenly stopped and went back to normal.

I was shuffled through EKG and CT scan for the heart and lungs. They found no blood clots, so could take no action. By this time my pulse remained in a somewhat elevated rate in 80-90 BPM. They sent me home and I have more appointments coming on this issue alone, but as I type this the heart rate remains elevated. I’m not a happy camper.

For now, my wife and I theorize that the cause is likely food-related. We are pulling back to a known safe diet and praying this thing gets flushed out or we can find some way to get my heart back into its previous normal state.

Pray with us.

Update: Review of the CT scan indicates I have a gall stone. Currently I have no symptoms, so I suppose I’ll need to keep from making things worse.

Update 2: Shortly after that last paragraph above, I was hit with another episode of tachycardia. According to our instructions, we returned to the ER and this time the Cardiology folks decided to fit me with a heart monitor. Those used to be big bulky affairs with a short operating time. I have this nifty little chip stuck to my chest up near the shoulder and it will record for 14 days. I don’t hope for another episode, but if if comes, we can capture it.

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Your Theology Is Your Problem

Posted on May 8, 2016 by ehurst

Let me say this with as much clarity as I can marshal: Theology is a human activity in response to divine calling. Theology is religion, a mere expression of faith. Theology is not wisely discerning objective truth about God, because there is no such thing as objective truth about God. Truth is God’s personal moral character, an element of His living Presence. Theology is just a tool, one that can be modified as needed and discarded when it wears out. Your theology is not eternal; it will remain here in this world when you go home to be with God in Heaven.

My theology is just a part of me. Your theology cannot be mine, nor vice versa. If we overlap, the common ground says more about us than it does about God. That we have a common ground says something about God and how He intends to work in us.

Human intellect cannot be made un-fallen. Intellect is redeemed only in surrendering to something eternal in you — your heart-mind. Theology can never be more than a human effort to organize and implement faith. You cannot trust your theology to answer all the questions; treat your theology as a mere tool, a provisional set of handles for grabbing hold of reality. Reality itself is fungible, so theology cannot possible be any less ephemeral.

People who take their theology too seriously are actually taking themselves too seriously. Idolizing your own intellect is called “sin.”

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Picture This

Posted on May 8, 2016 by ehurst

Let me propose a working model for this.

My wife and I often discuss the sense of calling that drives me out on those long rides with a camera. At a fundamental level, Scripture says that all of Creation speaks non-stop of the glory of God. The people who wrote the Bible would take that more literally than our culture does. The Hebrew people were natively comfortable with the heart as a sensory organ that took substantial cues from Creation as a whole. It fed back into their conscious minds a broad grasp of God’s moral character, which itself is woven into Creation. We’ve learned something from that, so that Veloyce and I experience the sun glinting off the grass and birds trilling in the shrubs with a far deeper meaning than mere aesthetics.

There is no good way to summarize how cycling in solitude fills my soul. It started as just basic exercise that distracted my ego so that my convictions had a more direct path to my conscious awareness. All those nagging questions in my soul started coming untangled. One day I get a distinct answer to how I should think and write about some issue of faith. Another day I find a sense of peace and resolve about some troubling moral issue latched onto my life. Yet another day I simply find the soil of my heart plowed and ready for something not yet seen that God wanted to plant later. Riding a bike answered endless needs; it was very much where God wanted to meet with me.

When we add in the relatively new habit of taking pictures, my awareness of this whole process shifted to a higher level. It took awhile to parse out the meaning for my own satisfaction, but it became a new means of sharing my faith. I firmly believe that Creation is far wiser than any of us will know, and seeks a jillion different ways to help guide us into the shalom of God’s truth. When I go out for a ride, Creation itself summons my eyes in different ways. Sometimes it’s a moment of power that grabs me before I get there, and I know I’m going to see something of God’s hand. At other times, I barely notice out of the corner of my eye, and have to stop and circle around to see what it was that just flashed in glory at my awareness. Creation knows what a camera is for, and uses it far better than I could without that assistance. Creation grants me visions of things it wants me to share from it’s vast wealth.

And it’s not just “nature,” but humans are an integral part of Creation, knowingly or not. It’s not so much that what humans might do in Creation is precisely proper; it’s that humans do stuff. We rightly notice what they do against the living background of Creation. Sometimes the message is unhindered, perhaps in ways even enhanced, by what someone built or destroyed. Failure itself speaks volumes. The natural world is designed for our use in seeking God’s glory; most humans are blind to that, but we cannot waste all our waking hours seeking to measure and assess the moral good or bad in what they do as a whole. The lens of my heart isn’t measuring whether that barn belongs out there on the river banks, or that asphalt bike path there along the man-made lake, or the gravel road running across the hills and plains. I’m not trying to morally interpret those images, only record them because they speak so very loudly.

What I now realize is that those images, taken by the guidance of God’s voice in Creation, can in turn speak to heart-aware readers of this blog. To most of humanity, those are just pictures. To some of you who participate in this oddball approach to faith, those images speak back to you the same ineffable message of God that it spoke to me. The images are prophetic utterances of God for some of you. They speak of things without words, and it calls to us seeking to open that ancient part of our awareness where words can’t exist.

I confess sometimes I don’t quite get the picture, as my heart will tell me later when I try to process the images. Or sometimes the camera can’t quite capture it due to design and technology limitations. Yeah, the PayPal fund isn’t that far from a decent replacement camera, but it will be awhile before I can do anything with a camera anyway. I’m trusting God for His rich supply at His timing. But even if there are few comments on the pictures, this would hardly slow my efforts once I’m able to get out there again. I have the powerful assurance that God is speaking through this work and I’m determined to give Him all He can take from me.

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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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