Cycling Draper Again

Posted on August 18, 2015 by ehurst

Nothing remarkable except that for late August it was refreshingly cool and cloudy today. I rode out on Henney to SE 59th just for the fun of climbing one long hill west-bound where the road humps over I-40. I headed south on Hiwasee to SE 89th and stayed on that all the way to the lake. I stopped to take this shot of West Hog Creek Branch, but I find the Coolpix has just a little trouble showing the full perspective. That valley is pretty deep and far ridge is steeper than the image indicates.WestHogCreekValley It’s really quite appealing visually and sufficient reason for me to climb the two razor-backed ridges to see this view.

Just a quarter-mile farther I encountered a dog that actually gave me trouble. While there are no words to explain how different people use their sensory heart, mine comes with a facility for handling animals. I really don’t like the idea of domesticating anything, but that’s no reason to be an ass about it. It’s been more than a year since I’ve felt the need to use the dog spray. Barking dogs are not an interruption to me, but a moment to exploit for divine justice. Most of them seem to sense that I am not a threat once they get close enough. I generally talk to them as best I can, but I find that domestication confuses their instincts, and some can act inconsistently. At this one spot, the house is fenced with a double-paneled swinging drive gate. The edge of one gate has been bumped by a vehicle and bent inward just a bit. This allows one of the two dogs to squeeze through. It’s big enough to be a threat, but the past two times has calmed when coming out to bark at me — just doing his job, you see.

Today he was in a foul mood and was going to bite. But as he drew near, I raised my hand and he seemed genuinely surprised that I would defend myself. He backed up a few feet, continuing the aggressive barking and posture. I yelled at him to back off and he actually turned to comply, stopping a few more feet away and turning back to bark some more. I dismounted and dropped my kickstand, and he looked genuinely worried. I stepped forward, pointed back at the gate and ordered him to get back inside the yard. He did so, still hanging around the gate and barking. Then I took another step and ordered him to stay there or he would get hurt. I wasn’t bluffing; I carry a knife for things like this and I do know how to fight attack dogs. He moved away from the gate and around the corner into the yard, growling but compliant.

Hint: Be firm and insistent, but with no real emotion. They know when you fear them and nothing can make you fearless except genuine experience and training, if then. It makes a huge difference if you learn how your own sensory heart works and use it to empower your faith in God’s Laws. This dog knew I was not fearful. That business of “smelling fear” is bunk; animals can sense your heart-mind even if you don’t.

I took Draper Drive counterclockwise. Today I stopped off at the boat ramp on Point 1, which was deserted except for a single vehicle behind me.DraperPoint1 The various lakes I’ve visited on my bike all have the same basic hardware around these ramps, but the ones here were in the best shape I’ve seen. They are probably the newest in the sense of the having the most recent modifications according to whatever they consider the standard pattern these days.

I’ve noticed there is a tremendous amount of dirt work around Draper the past couple of years. Some of it has intensified, with a constant rotation of dump trucks of all sizes streaming back and forth between two places. They are loading out from somewhere near where the massive pipe ends are kept, not far from a water treatment facility below the dam. They take it around to the east side of the lake near SE 104th and dump it. Both locations are screened by heavy forest and there’s no way to look without violating the warning signs or getting eaten alive by ticks and chiggers. Up on the north end not far from the Midwest Boulevard entrance there is a very large space being carved out of a hillside, looking for all the world like a construction site in preparation. As usual, I can’t seem to find any information published about all of this.

I came home via Post Road and SE 29th.

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Neither Product Nor Process

Posted on August 18, 2015 by ehurst

It’s environment, not outcomes.

The entire focus of revelation is the character of God. Because of our fallen nature, we can know only what He demands of us in terms of what our minds can handle. Thus, His revelation is a collection of narratives that focus on Law Covenants and divine initiative. From that narrative we are obliged to form an image of God as a Person. We aren’t merely learning His Laws, but learning Him through His requirements.

Stop and think: At what point does revelation emphasize outcomes? If your orientation is to think in terms of outcomes, your mind will supply all sorts of examples. But if you make an effort to understand the orientation of the people who lived and wrote this narrative, you’ll realize that the focus on outcomes is tied directly to the fallen nature. The call to a higher moral understanding means forsaking outcomes and operating in terms of the moral environment.

More pointedly, we are called to build a working environment that allows God to reveal His compassion.

He will most certainly reveal Himself, and it will be entirely on His own terms. If you ignore those terms, then what applies to your life is His wrath. In other words, you’ll be pounded into a pile of impotent insignificance. Thus, all that talk in the Bible of futility and how we all end up in the same place — the grave. That sort of language is aimed at folks who struggle to embrace reality in its fullness. Among rodeo folks around here, the expression goes like this: It’s you and the bull in that ring. You can try to ride the bull and hang on for dear life wherever it takes you, or you can let the bull chase you until it gores and tramples you. Ignoring the bull is not an option. God speaks through the bull in this case.

The options we have for building an environment are limited. The Law Covenants allow us to see God’s intent for how we should live. Rodeo bull-riders don’t get it right the first time, so it does take some training to gain a working knowledge of how to ride. But try to imagine that God is bull who wants you to learn how to ride. The environment is rooted in yourself. The biggest task is changing your expectations and habits so that they match reality as God created it. It’s not just an 8-second trial run with a quick escape, but a lifetime commitment.

However, a conscious choice to commit means we can take away the image of bull-riding and it becomes any number of more sane contexts. You can color it any way you like, so long as you strive to match up with reality as God defines it. You have choices; they are seldom what fallen nature tells you. A large part of what I write here is aimed at correcting the myths humanity generates in pursuit of fallen lusts. This is not Burger King and you can’t have it your way. You have to discover God’s way, and it won’t be precisely the same for any two of us. God knows each of us as unique individuals and delivers to us a uniquely individual set of parameters for the environment He calls us to shape inside our hearts. You have a limited dominion over certain features of your existence.

And one of the biggest myths in our Western society is that specific outcomes matter. It’s not the results of what you do, but the discovery of what God has granted. Every time you uncover the next mystery in your life, there’s always more. You are obliged to organize as best you can, but your reason is the servant whose job is never finished. You can never stop and tell yourself you have it all worked out (Luke 12:16-21). You don’t lose everything you gain, but you don’t get hung up on what’s measurable to human senses. You wake up every day in a new world in terms of potential. You are called to bring His justice to a whole new range of moral failures.

It’s never finished until you leave this world.

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Shepherd’s Complaint

Posted on August 17, 2015 by ehurst

Going back to the scattered fragments and passing references from the most ancient sources, we gain a rough outline of the primordial shepherd. Not so much as the one who owns and herds sheep, but as the head of household we see something we really need today.

It’s not about ownership, but duty to God. The divine moral imperative was raising an extended family on behalf of some higher sovereign. It’s that business of Ancient Near Eastern feudalism, where the whole of a sheikh’s wealth was the people in his clan. They remained free souls as far as the shepherd is concerned because they are God’s family first. If something drives them out of the immediate household, they could leave with blessings if they cared. Otherwise, they were asked to avoid going out of their way to provoke the chief shepherd. The protocols were radically different from what Westerners would expect. The whole point in clinging to the image of shepherd as head of household is that he leads by moral authority, exercising a very limited range of physical force. Even that little was aimed more at protecting the sheep from threats.

The constraints resulted from a focus on daily existence, not results. The shepherd was accountable first and foremost for personal commitment. If his ability was limited, he was apprenticed to someone else, but the necessity of networking with peers was always there, regardless. And while privacy was one thing, the ideal of openness was ever present. A leader was accountable on all sides, though primarily to the sovereign first. He never forgot that this was all about people and their lives in this world.

All of this blather remains idealistic and idyllic until people try to manifest it into reality. By the time it runs through the meat-grinder of Western church traditions, you can no longer recognize it. Orwell’s dystopian nightmares pale in comparison to ecclesiastical doublespeak. Having worked as professional clergyman, I know what I’m talking about.

When was the last time you saw a church open their records to their harshest critics? Even then, the written record may not reflect actual practice. The closest I’ve seen any religious organization come to total openness is when they chained an interviewer to the chair metaphorically until the representative managed to lay out their whole propaganda presentation. If I tell you there has to be a balance point between the bias of the questioner and that of the church authorities, I can assure you most of what I’ve seen in public presentations looks more like combative debate (think of the entertainment value), when it wasn’t slavish softballing of the investigation. But the moral burden is on the churches to reach out to their critics and let them make of things what they will.

Very early in the history of organized Christian religion, leaders began to envy worldly respectability. They brought into the church all their unredeemed social expectations and prejudices and failed to actually leave them at the foot of the Cross. Today we have this upside-down assumption that somehow the churches created some portion of the mainstream social expectations.

This is patently false; the church bears little resemblance to the ancient pastoral family structure that Jesus demanded His followers embrace. Can you imagine? Almost any church you ask will assert with all sincerity that their particular organizational structure and system of internal government is precisely what Jesus taught, regardless how they all differ across the spectrum. Each takes so very much from a wide range of competing secular organizational theories that none of them have a clue what Jesus taught on the matter.

It’s bad enough our actual families are so very far away from God’s revealed expectations. If there was ever a time when people needed the Lord’s family atmosphere for healing and redemption, it’s now. If you happen to find such a thing, it will likely be in spite of the official church organizational policies.

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The Popular Legend of Democracy

Posted on August 16, 2015 by ehurst

I dread it.

Perhaps you understand how our Western cultural heritage equates “rule of law” with civilization and all that is obviously good and right in human existence. It carries this basic assumption that you simply cannot live any other way without diving off into barbarity, so that the resulting chaos just begs for some civilized nation to come in and conquer you. There was a time when just about everyone on earth you were likely to encounter would bow the knee to this notion.

But it was always a lie told by some elite plutocrats intent on ruling things as they pleased. It wasn’t a bad mirage to keep the serfs distracted, but it was hardly fitting for the entitled class. Thus, we have had several generations of increasing separation between the two groups — voters and government officials. Whatever amounts to sophistication has been hidden farther and farther from the masses.

Perhaps you’ve met someone who was sophisticated, possessed of a genuinely noble education such as was more common a century ago. It’s not that he was an entitled snob, but the very opposite. He really didn’t expect much of his world, but held the guy in the mirror to a high standard. It’s also the opposite of hypocrisy. He was able to find himself a place almost anywhere, but most assuredly preferred the company of those who were similarly mature and cultured. He didn’t demand the world conform, but enticed others to rise to his urbanity.

Such people don’t take themselves too seriously, but believe that they are part of something far greater.

Instead, we have several generations of folks who somehow insist that if they could just get the laws right, and get the judges to rule accordingly, all would be well. They equate the system with God. Whenever anything fails to meet their presumptions in this world, they throw a big fuss and demand that somebody make it right. It’s that same sense of entitlement but utterly impotent. It’s even more ridiculous when you hear them talking about the way the Internet works, but we’ve covered that enough here. The point is we have an awful lot of activists running around promoting some kind of legal and social agenda that is so completely out of touch with reality, it makes you wonder if you’ve stumbled onto a movie set.

At some point that mirage will fade away, blown into oblivion by the storms of general economic and social instability. It will come about the same time all the governments and banks have to outright admit they are financially insolvent. Okay, so maybe they’ll wait until after they cut all the social welfare stuff from the budget in favor of military spending and full-time pointless warfare. The elite who never believed in the rule of law will openly admit that much, anyway. I don’t dread that.

What I dread is dealing with all the children of social conformity-at-the-bottom. These folks will be chaotically disoriented. They’ll keep pushing the automatic pedestrian crossing button long after the streets are awash in rivers of blood. Maybe you’ve seen that bewildered crying of the child who has been told there is no Santa Claus. This is the same folks who keep voting every election.

I’m not looking forward to it.

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Cycling Odds and Ends

Posted on August 16, 2015 by ehurst

Yesterday’s ride was unremarkable for the most part. I was still very tired from the long ride to Shawnee Twin Lakes, so I didn’t push. I headed north on Henney up to Jones and then wandered around the North Canadian Valley a bit.

WilshireFix The repair on Wilshire Boulevard between Peebly and Triple X Roads is not totally finished. All that’s missing is a few concrete fills around the upright posts supporting a portion of the guardrail. Otherwise, it’s one of the better jobs I’ve seen. On the left here I took a shot of the splash wall showing where the road side run off comes around the side of the buttress. WilshireFixDetail But the whole area has been cleaned up nicely. They spent a very long time smoothing all the soil and rolling out turf on top of it. So long as we don’t have any more torrential floods, that stuff should stay in place and grow some really fine tall weeds (heh).

Down on NE 23rd on the SE corner at Peebly Road is this old car dealership. The building and lot are quite large. It was vacant for awhile, but there is now some evidence of occupancy. Rumor has it multi-million dollar medical lab bought the place and is moving their entire operation here from California. Someone said their bigshot is a very successful molecular biochemist. We shall see. Harrah’s municipal government isn’t necessarily corrupt, but they aren’t known for being friendly. It’s funny how stuff like this is kept so tightly veiled from the public, then they brag about it among their personal friends. So instead of a straight story, we have rumors that get inflated with retelling. FutureLabChoctaw They also keeping shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to courting big businesses. I think most of the ones that move in do so despite the idiocy simply because it’s a good location. (Edit: I had first thought it was Choctaw, but Peebly Road is the boundary with Harrah, so the property is technically in Harrah. Oddly, both city governments are about the same in regards to such things.)

It’s a good thing that nice road repair job on Wilshire didn’t fall under their purview.

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Psalm 63

Posted on August 15, 2015 by ehurst

Written during a time away from home and in the wilderness area west of the Dead Sea, this is another psalm that has found it’s way into many contemporary songs. Even in translation, the words are powerful and moving. This is a mixture of lyrical images and profound, simple confession.

Jehovah is my only deity, says David. As soon as his eyes open, his heart cries out to renew the awareness of God’s Presence. The figure of speech for starting early implies an earnestness that runs throughout his waking hours. It is not possible to sate this burning desire; one would think God was water to a man lost in the desert. Keep in mind that this was well before any Temple was built, so David longs to present himself formally in the Tent of Meeting where the Ark of Covenant rests. If only he could simply stay there all day, as a mere retainer in the divine courts! God’s glory alone is all the reward he seeks.

God’s merciful favor in allowing David to enter His Presence is worth more than staying alive on this earth, for it comes from an ineffable heavenly level of existence. David could hardly restrain himself from offering up his voice in praise to the Lord for so long as his soul remains in his body. Assignment to God’s praise choir is far richer than the choicest things David could offer to God in return.

In the middle of the night, whatever it is that awakens him, his consciousness first turns to God. So precious are these quiet moments that David eagerly stays awake while the world sleeps just to enjoy this undistracted time of celebration. Every good thing in David’s life bears the fingerprints of God’s blessing. This is what it feels like to be a child of royalty who fears nothing because his royal Father is so powerful. Human boredom is a million miles away, even when God seems to pay him no mind as David shadows Him about His business.

With such an otherworldly orientation, it’s no surprise that David has worldly enemies. It’s also no surprise they have to be replaced so often, because God sees to it that they cannot long oppose him. Fortunate are the ones who have a proper burial, for many are those left for the carrion eaters. Yet we should not imagine that David wastes much time crowing over their demise. He’s too busy expressing his joy in Jehovah’s divine favor. David would much rather find folks interested in sharing this worship, instead of watching so many of them silenced for opposing God’s revelation.

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Quick Note: Geek or Surrender

Posted on August 15, 2015 by ehurst

We are reaching a saturation point of sorts in computer technology again. Don’t worry; it’s cyclical. What it means is that we are on the verge of a sudden jump that, in popular vernacular, is termed “a paradigm shift.” The underlying technology as we know it now is about to collapse under too many conflicting threats and there is no way to escape without digging into it deep enough to become a computer geek. Otherwise you just grab the best protection you know about, cross your fingers and mentally prepare for the worst.

I don’t have room in a regular post to address the full catalog of stuff in the technology news just for this week.

For example, I don’t use any mainstream browser because all of them have compromised too thoroughly with marketers, which leaves the door wide open to crackers. On my Linux system, I replace Firefox (Iceweasel) with Pale Moon and I install extensions like NoScript and uBlock. When I need a browser that acts like Google Chrome, I use Slimjet. Both are tricky on Debian 8 but I simply install the most generic version (matching either 32-bit or 64-bit as applicable) in my user Home directory because it’s easier to upgrade. Slimjet still requires the root password each time, but only once to activate the “sandbox” that protects the system.

Most of the time I use Links2 (they have a version for Windows) because it’s the most crippled browser available that still shows graphics and manages to render most common websites for reading. If I know I don’t want even the graphics, I use either Elinks or Lynx.

Yep, those are all pretty geeky options. The Net is dangerously close to unusable, even as the world becomes more dependent on it. I’m placing my bets on some brand of Linux remaining more viable than the other options for awhile. I’m not choosing that for you, but giving you proper notice about how to pray. You must obey your own conscience before the Lord.

Addenda: This looks like a very interesting project for Windows geeks: TT Livescan from an outfit calling itself “Temple of Transgression.” I note that the site doesn’t do cookies or JScript, so that alone makes it seem trustworthy.

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Divine Infiltration

Posted on August 14, 2015 by ehurst

We serve Christ, whose kingdom is not rooted in this world. At the same time, He has all authority in heaven and earth. Even when there was a nation under covenant to His Father, that nation refused to obey consistently. How much more should we consider all other human governing agencies to have rejected His authority? Human authority recognizes no covenant. We cannot work with any human government because they are all fundamentally hostile.

We are required by Our Lord to work within any standing human agency that makes a claim over us. That could include fleeing to another jurisdiction, if so the Lord leads, but only so we can work within some other human government. It is highly unlikely we could ever explain to officials our position, because precious few of them would have the necessary level of awareness. So for the most part, we don’t make much effort to explain it to them. We simply pretend to play along with their imaginary authority for the sole purpose of being where God wants us to reflect His glory into this world.

This presumes we would find some way to be useful in human eyes. Time and time again we have seen believers get lost in this task, as if being useful is itself the god we serve. Career is not God, nor do we compartmentalize as if God has no real place in the secular affairs of life. That’s a peculiarly worldly approach to things that we dare not embrace. A successful career is not the objective in itself. Rather, being there as a living witness to His glory until He moves us elsewhere is why we bother. That business of moving us could come dressed in any robe Our Lord chooses, including any shape and size of professional failure. God seldom asks how we would like it to come because there’s too good a chance we would mess it up and obscure His glory.

We are face down at His feet, not barging into His courts with a list of demands. There is no union with the leverage to force His hand. He could conduct His divine business without any of us. Rather, He graciously grants us the privilege of being involved and tasting His glory.

So we seek from His hand a calling that amounts to infiltrating this world. There will come a time when He very openly asserts His authority in some final way, but for now, it’s almost a game of sorts. He sends us into a world the denies Him and we shine His glory. All Creation is just a tool for exploitation. That includes our very existence in this world. Our lives are just a means to some higher end, with results that hardly register in the consciousness of humanity as a whole. The world has no clue, and precious few individual humans ever catch on. Those who do are touched by fire from Heaven, not by any collection of talents from our hands. God allows us to be present using our human talents as the human excuse for tolerating us.

We operate on multiple levels. On one level, we do our best to serve human need. We make ourselves aware of what fallen minds consider worthwhile and offer something that responds to that. Not because it really matters, but it’s a way of infiltrating this fallen realm and bring His glory to bear. Personify His divine justice; that is His glory. Somebody somewhere is going to see that glory, and that’s why God puts us there. Sometimes we might never know, but faithfulness is to the divine task of being holy, not measuring results as humans do. What we might accomplish in human terms is strictly secondary.

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Cycling: Twin Lakes

Posted on August 13, 2015 by ehurst

Just a few photos today, the only thing that made this worthy of a post was the distance — a new record for me at 37 miles (59.5 km). This began pretty much like the Casino Loop. I headed out on SE 44th but at Harrah Road, I could see in the distance the washouts there were still unrepaired. Downslope less than a mile away, in the low spot before the next rise, I could make out a substantial high berm of road fill material completely blocking the road. So they had the materials but no crews had gotten there yet to do the work.

That meant a couple of miles south on Harrah to SE 74th, eastward to McLoud Road and over the hump onto WesTech Road. StevensRoad This time, instead of staying on it all the way to Dale, I turned south on Stevens Road. So after a mile of caliche on WesTech Road, I had two more miles of something even lower grade — just plain old gravel dumped on top of native soil. Stevens crosses over the Interstate and I could see the Casino Hotel tower gleaming in the mid-morning sun a mile away.

I crossed SE 89th and headed south on something most folks wouldn’t notice. The gravel here was crushed much finer and the source was clearly from southeast of there. Somewhere between Shawnee and Seminole the surface soil of Oklahoma turns from red to yellow-brown. This was crushed river bottom dredge sand and gravel, so the color was extra yellowish and really stands out as an import in this area. A road grader was working it. The stuff packs down quite nicely, but it does tend to drift and grader was pushing the excess back into the center to form a rain-shedding peak. For me, that meant trying to dodge the grader by riding through the loose sand now piled in the center — tricky on a hybrid bike.

Stevens dead ends at what would have been SE 104th if it went all the way through. This was brand new asphalt and very well done, running east-west alongside lake #2.

Channel between the Shawnee Twin Lakes.

Channel between the Shawnee Twin Lakes.

Just a short distance up to the dam and I turned back south. The dam is nearly a mile long, and sits at 90° to dam #1. There really is no way to capture the two together because the ridgeline between is about a quarter-mile long. Still, the water level balancing channel looks really nice right now with a good high water level. When I was last out this way six years ago it was covered in rushes growing in damp muck with an inch or two of water here and there.

This is a swimming lake, but only in designated areas. However, I’ve seen kids splashing around in the channel and I could hardly blame them. It’s a really nice place for diving and such. I stopped for lunch at a small park area on lake #2. The picture should indicate how long it has been since the water was up this high. TwinLake2 There’s a wooden lamp post out a ways from the current dry shore, visible out beyond the picnic table. I sat up on the table because this is still tick season. The grass was freshly cut and it’s the kind you often encounter in this part of the state. When cut, for at least the next two days you can smell the sugar content, almost like candy.

From there I took the main road between the lakes back west. It’s called Homer Lane, but for some reason the map services add “road” to the end. At any rate, Homer Lane turns into SE 119th. It was a quiet ride that grew humpier as I went until Harrah Road. It really doesn’t go anywhere beyond that, so I turned north and grabbed SE 104th back, covering in the opposite direction the same leg as part of another previous ride. This time I decided to go north on an orphaned section of Indian Meridian. It was pretty hilly, but when I got to SE 89th and turned west toward Choctaw Road, it was almost too steep for asphalt. It was a razor-back ridged that dropped down steeply into a creek that flooded badly when an upstream dam broke about a month ago. The ponds behind the dam were huge. So the water marks were still somewhat visible to my eye, and it was another brutal climb up in front of the super house on the corner of SE 89th and Choctaw Road.

HorseRanchSE89thChoctawIn the pictures I took a while back it looks yellow from the south face, but it’s actually a natural stone color, made entirely of large blocks. The fellow who built this got tired after having lost two previous mansions. Being insanely wealthy for this part of the country, he paid for solid stone and poured concrete, with a heavy steel roof. The place is massive, big enough to be a hotel. The whole place is ringed with high painted steel fencing and rock-faced pillars, many with statues on top. The front drive is all sorts of statuary and massive stoneworks. It was this fellow’s ponds that overflowed when the flood hit on the low side of his property, washing over his pond walls and into Hog Creek.

The only reason I took Choctaw Road home was to see the progress on the preliminary work before widening. Right now there are tons of trees to remove, and many of them are substantial hardwoods around a meter in diameter. Then they grade the surface down, followed by trenching and burying the utilities. Finally the grading will begin in earnest, and that usually means flattening the road somewhat — cutting the hills and filling the low spots. Given what I’ve seen in the past, it will easily take a full year before it’s released from contract.

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Yet Another Warning

Posted on August 13, 2015 by ehurst

Welcome home.

A church is first and foremost the people. It’s not even the organization, but at the fundamental level, it’s just the souls of humans who share a commitment to the message of Jesus Christ. In that sense, it’s a group of people called together by God, and they have responded.

It’s a family. The shared DNA is a drive to please the Father; that’s the only bond. That bond can be enhanced and used to bring Him glory, or it can confused and frittered away on things that don’t really matter. The objective is His glory, day after day, night after night. Nothing else that happens matters very much, except as it serves that purpose.

By the time you’ve read any three consecutive posts on this blog, you know that I have a bone to pick with almost every entity that calls itself a “church” in this world. I’m not interested in attacking them, in the sense that I would hinder their work and try to make them look bad, to make any attempt to persuade folks they cannot be a part of that. Rather, I offer to warnings. First, to my readers a warning of what they are getting into. Go ahead and join any church to which you honestly believe the Lord has led you. It will bless me to see you engaging His calling in your life one way or another. I’m not your boss and you owe me nothing but the compassion Christ commands of all of us.

Second, I warn the churches that they are facing some serious testing very, very soon. No, I have no dates, only some rather vague expectations of events as a type, not in specific form. The fire of tribulation will fall, and we shall see if your stuff is wood, hay and straw, or if your stuff is gold and silver. Even steel can lose its temper and strength, and stones weaken from heat, but gold and silver only melt and purify in the fire.

Churches, you will be tested financially. However much of your existence depends on money and budgeting, that much is likely to evaporate. However much of your church’s existence depends on real estate and buildings, so much of your church will be taken away. However much of your church exists on human talent and activities, that much will be shaken loose and begin to crumble. However much of your church’s functions depend on government permit and protection, so much will the betrayal of misplaced trust hurt you. Can your church stay together and glorify God with nothing but the bodies containing faithful souls?

Can your church just be a family of God’s people, a local tribe of His Divine Nation? You’ll get a chance to find out.

Or, I suppose you can compromise further with political pressures and become something totally not “church” by any meaningful definition. You’ll have to pay taxes and submit to regulation you cannot now imagine. You’ll be used as a government resource to satisfy political necessities. The State will be your god and you will betray the Cross. Oh wait — some churches are already up to their armpits in political activism, to the point you serve as an alternative party headquarters. Some of you actually believe Jesus Christ is a registered member of your secular political party. That’s the kind of church that tends to believe the Apocalypse must be near anytime the opposition starts winning the elections.

Well, you won’t get to celebrate that it’s the end of world. It’s the birth of a whole new civilization. I’ll stop now, because it’s likely you’ve already quit listening, church leaders.

To my readers: God help you in the days to come. You don’t have to stand in the open as He pours out His wrath on sin. As previously stated, I don’t have anything more precise than to tell you it has already started. Surely you know that. In our virtual parish here I’ve done everything I can to help you prepare. Those of us who have shaken off our dependence on the trappings of this life will be ready to exploit this unspeakable tragedy, not for our personal material profit, but for God’s glory. In that sense, there’s nothing that could bless you more. His glory is your best interest.

If you need some kind of pointer, I suppose I could suggest some of the posts of the last two weeks. I thought it could turn into a book, but the Foul Winds Project didn’t go that way, at least not yet. Scroll down and see what I’ve written and don’t forget to see the comments. It’s the nature of revelation that good questions are a powerful agent to exposing truth. Go ahead and post questions in the comment section yourself, or by email — jhurst18 at cox dot net. Bug me — I dare you. Or ask for a referral to someone else; it’s not about me.

Let’s be as much family of God as He permits.

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