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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Proverbs 16 (Part 2)

Posted on August 12, 2015 by ehurst

(Divided into two posts because it’s long.)

17. The way of the upright is to turn away from evil; he who keeps his way guards his way. This is simply a flawed translation, rendering three different words as “way.” It draws the image of moral wisdom as a highway, and as good maintenance on an important road. The third “way” is probably a typo, because the Hebrew term is closer to “soul.” Highways were all about making commerce and defense possible. If those things matter to social stability, even more so does a commitment to divine justice make life worth living.

18. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. This is a very popular quote in Western literature. In typical Hebrew fashion, it addresses both the individual and society. Your stupid arrogance can hurt a lot of other people, not just yourself.

19. It is better to be of an humble spirit with the lowly than to divide the spoil with the proud. Almost as popular as the previous verse, this one continues the same thought. Divine justice seldom operates on the same time scale as human awareness. It serves well to remind people that humility might not make you rich, but it will help you avoid most calamities in the long run. Arrogance carries a high risk, and even if you win, you can’t keep it forever.

20. He who handles a matter wisely shall find good, and whoever trusts in the LORD, happy is he. This restates the theme of this whole chapter. You really cannot understand the Law Covenants until you adopt the higher moral value system behind them. It’s not mechanistic and the rewards cannot be measured with human senses. However, it is what we are designed for, so if you want to really enjoy this life, you’ll have to address it from the realm of moral justice.

21. The wise in heart shall be called prudent, and the sweetness of the lips increases learning. More of the same, the emphasis here is on what you are able to speak. Whether you say little or much, people will have a much greater respect for you if your words reflect moral justice. The only way to get that is to let your heart-mind rule over your intellect. The heart retains a vivid awareness of things the mind could easily forget.

22. Understanding is a fountain of life to him who has it, but the instruction of fools is folly. English translations often lose the full flavor of this verse. In a land where water can be scarce, digging a well counts as a very heavy investment of resources. If it results in a supply of water, it’s worth fighting over, but also morally incumbent to share generously with anyone who isn’t a threat. Moral prudence is like that, in contrast to the polluted ooze of someone who can’t be bothered to see past his own lusts.

23. The heart of the wise teaches his mouth, and adds learning to his lips. This is a quintessential eastern notion of wisdom. Your heart is a separate faculty above your intellect, and far superior in grasping moral reality. Let your heart rule your mouth, and by implication, your conduct.

24. Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones. This continues the theme of bringing moral justice into your social intercourse. People who truly see what God intended in Creation have a tendency to reveal that insight, and regardless of initial or surface reactions from others, it’s a blessing to them.

25. There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end of it is the ways of death. Echoing verse 2 above, this is often quoted improperly by Westerners. They get the English words right, but fail to grasp what Solomon was saying. It’s not a question of how smart you are in your individual choices, but a cynicism about human nature itself. If all you have are common human faculties, it won’t get you where you need to go in this world. And if all you have are common human faculties, you’ll probably die without a clue because you’ll be morally dead long before.

26. He who labors works for himself, for his mouth craves it from him. A weak translation at best, this is one of those statements meant to apply differently on different levels. In the Hebrew, “he who” is the word for soul, and “himself” is actually the same root word as “mouth.” The words for labor and work both carry the flavor of discomfort. Thus, the soul that toils in sorrow serves the “blow hole.” Depending on the context, it may be simply noting that this life is inherently sorrowful in some ways. You could use this to emphasize the sorrow of slavish devotion to mere human appetite, which would be more to the point of this chapter.

27. An ungodly man plots evil, and his lips are like a burning fire. This echoes the thoughts of the previous verse. Your character determines where you expend your energies because they are bound together in what you value most.

28. A perverse man causes fighting, and a whisperer separates chief friends. Again, more of the previous verses in the sense of a specific example that calls us back to the awareness of social stability. In your social awareness, avoid people who have a knack for stirring up strife without seeming to get caught in the middle.

29. A violent man lures his neighbor and makes him go in a way not good. In the same theme still as the previous verses, this is calling something what is because of its effects. If you lure people into things that get them killed, you have blood on your hands.

30. The gray head is a crown of glory, if it is found in the way of righteousness. The reverse of the previous verses, this uses a Hebrew figure of speech. Gray hair implies you’ve been there, wherever “there” was. If you got your gray hairs by living a morally good life, they serve as a crown of glory. Chances are you had to put up with a lot of crap along the way so wear them proudly.

31. He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit is better than he who takes a city. Still on the same theme of social interaction, this also restates the previous verse from a different angle. You can be a vigorous man of action and conquer whole cities single-handedly, but someone else can come along and take it all away from you. If you can simply restrain your own emotional urges by moral wisdom, then you have a greatness that whole armies cannot assail.

32. The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing of it is from the LORD. Right back where the chapter started, this parable relies on a common Hebrew symbolic image. So far as we can determine, casting lots is a reference to having several pebbles of the same size and shape but different colors. They were tossed into a fold of the garment, and one was fished out blindly, with the decision being based on whatever choice was associated with the color. In Western culture it randomizes choosing one among more-or-less equal options, but for Hebrews it was consciously deferring to God. Even if the matter itself seems inconsequential, it’s best to trust in God over your human abilities.

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Proverbs 16 (Part 1)

Posted on August 12, 2015 by ehurst

(Divided into two posts because it’s long.)

This chapter addresses divine sovereignty from the unique worldview of a mystical Hebrew mind, fully aware of the complexity of human nature.

1. The ordering of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the LORD. The intent here is to make you ponder the ambiguities of human awareness. We tend to believe that we can make various kinds of choices, but the heart does only what God designed it to do. The mind is somewhat untrustworthy. Thus, by the time your thoughts reach your lips, God can still intervene and you’ll end up saying something you didn’t intend. Whether or not your words reveal the truth of your heart is for the listener to decide.

2. All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the spirits. You can rationalize almost any course of action, and most people tell themselves that their choices are the best for everyone. However, God sees things that we tend to hide from ourselves and His personal evaluation is what matters in the end.

3. Roll your works upon the LORD, and your thoughts shall be established. Green chose here a more literal rendering of the Hebrew concept often translated as “commit” with the image of rolling things up in a bundle for storage. If you maintain a conscious awareness that your Sovereign will call you to account for your actions, it helps to clarify the direction of your thinking. On the one hand, God is watching every moment; on the other hand, our human awareness of His wrath tends to be periodic.

4. The LORD has made all for His purpose; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. This continues the thought in the previous verse about periodic awareness. Just because someone else seems to get away with evil doesn’t mean God won’t call him to account sooner or later. Some of our human experience will remain inexplicable in this lifetime because of the limits of our awareness. In your mind, let human evil be God’s problem, and mind your own business. Give God credit for wisdom, insight and power beyond your own.

5. Everyone proud in heart is hateful to the LORD; though hand join in hand, he shall not be unpunished. This is more along the same line of thought about the limits of human awareness. Human evil is bad enough, but sometimes it can feel as if our whole world has conspired against us. Give God time to work out His divine justice for His own glory while you pay attention to the domain He placed in your hands.

6. By mercy and truth, iniquity is purged, and by the fear of the LORD men turn away from evil. The word translated “purged” comes from the Hebrew concept of covered, as something that has been dealt with and is no longer an issue. It comes from the image of daubing pitch on a surface to stop leaking, halting any further trouble. Whatever the problem, now the healing and restoration can begin. In the typical Hebrew parallelism, reverence and respect for God’s reputation prevents all kinds of trouble.

7. When a man’s ways please the LORD, He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him. This assumes a covenant community where “enemies” are folks who make life difficult and you aren’t in a position to simply eliminate them. As before, just pay attention to your own duty toward God and let Him handle things, because walking in His character will fill your whole existence with His power.

8. Better is a little with righteousness than great gain without right. The apparent material substance of our human existence is deceptive. Drag your awareness up into your heart and see all things from a moral perspective of divine justice. You should expect to pay a material price for moral riches.

9. A man’s heart plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps. This restates verse 1 above in different terms. You are fortunate, indeed, if you can subject your conscious awareness to what your heart can perceive in the moral sphere. The image of “plans” is weaving or plaiting loose ends into a unity of sorts, getting your disparate human elements together behind a single purpose in life. That’s as much as anyone can do, so let God take care of how it turns out.

10. A divine sentence is in the lips of the king; his mouth does not transgress in judgment. This is hardly calling for blind obedience to your superiors, a concept wholly foreign to the Hebrew culture. It continues under the assumptions previously stated, that you understand God will work in you and through you when you embrace His character. Thus, when you come before a king, God will use his mouth as an oracle (“divine sentence”) even without the king’s conscious awareness. The king’s intent may not matter if you pay attention to God first, because He won’t allow human fallibility to hide His justice.

11. A just weight and balance are the LORD’s; all the weights of the bag are His work. This continues the same thought as the previous verse. Trust God for the things you cannot control. Walk in personal holiness and know that God is at work in ways you may not see. In the final analysis, He will ensure the scales of justice balance out because His weights are the standard.

12. It is a hateful thing for kings to commit wickedness; for the throne is established by righteousness. God finds government misconduct disgusting, and won’t protect an evil government. This is the other edge of the same blade of truth in the previous verses. It’s not as if God demands blind support for bad government, but it is our duty to trust Him for things we cannot change.

13. Righteous lips are the delight of kings, and they love him who speaks right. This hearkens back to the definition of royalty. A truly regal man will prefer servants who are morally upright. Even evil kings find such people useful, and God will use your presence on His staff as leverage to expose sin.

14. The wrath of a king is as messengers of death, but a wise man will quiet it. In general, it’s pointless to provoke rulers. This serves as a warning to smart-alecks who think they know everything and try to act like Truth Police. Righteousness is not found in objective facts, but in understanding that the primary mission of moral righteousness is social stability. Causing trouble can hurt innocent bystanders.

15. In the light of the king’s face is life, and his favor is like a cloud of the latter rain. This continues the previous verse. Not in the sense of playing yes-man, you should honestly seek the king’s welfare within the limits of your abilities. Chances are people are going to know if you genuinely care. In dealing with rulers, peace is good for everyone else, too.

16. How much better it is to get wisdom than gold! And to get understanding is rather to be chosen than silver! This echoes verse 8 above. Wisdom and understanding are synonymous with moral insight, so let your heart lead with moral vision and don’t worry about how well it seems to pay in material terms.

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Photolog 16: Thunderbird Lake

Posted on August 11, 2015 by ehurst

This time I wasn’t going to accept failure. After using Google Street View as a sort of recon, I decided to take a different approach in case the washouts weren’t all fixed. Today’s ride began like the Brutal Loop, heading south on Hiwasee toward Stella, just a mile east to Norman’s 108th Avenue NE (AKA Henney Road) and south the six miles to Alameda Drive. Alameda is the east-west route that runs along the north side of the main body of Lake Thunderbird. From there, it was just two miles to the drive that drops down to Fisherman’s Point. The return route would be taking 120th Avenue NE (AKA Choctaw Road) if the washouts were fixed.

They were fixed. In fact, lots of washouts are finally seeing repairs, though some are less thorough than others. For example, here we see that the Hog Creek washout on Hiwasee is now complete and resurfaced nicely. HiwaseeHogCreekFixed The rest of the way south to Stella saw some half-assed efforts to resurface some of the roads. Maybe you’ve seen it before: A layer of asphalt is dropped but it’s the cheap stuff with lots of big rocks. This stuff is poured sparingly on the surface, scraped and rolled quickly. It leaves lots of linear striations where the bigger rocks squeegee the thin asphalt as the scraper drags them. The whole thing gets a final coat of tack sprayed on top and whatever lines they might decide to place is painted on top of that.

It would be easy to miss the entrance to the 108th Avenue corridor from Stella Road. It looks like all the other side roads. Unlike the more widely used 120th Avenue route to the lake, this one doesn’t feel so oddly alien. While I still had the sense something natural was missing, as if eradicated, it lacked whatever invasive species were added on 120th. I passed a young woman walking with two toddler boys. They stopped and stared. As I approached, I queried whether it was so uncommon to see bicycles out there, but the woman replied it was simply the matter that her sons loved bicycles. A short time later I spotted another cyclist ahead on the road quickly leaving me behind.

While it doesn’t stink, I could smell the lake before I saw it, despite contrary winds. Today we had the highly unusual northeasterly breezes. Alameda Drive approaching the lake facilities is very heavily forested and entirely natural. It was two miles to the visitor’s center and a short lane south to Fisherman’s Point. TBirdLake The image shows the boarding dock, while the boat ramp is out of view to the left. The actual fishing wharf is a couple hundred yards farther left, but this dock was deserted. I went out and looked it over, then sat on the gently rocking platform just off the walkway. By facing to the right in the picture, I had the breeze at my back and it was very peaceful. Then I went to find some shade and sat on the edge of the parking area for lunch.

One of the things visible from the dock was the monitoring facility run by an odd agency. ConservDistFac Up on Alameda you pass this massive double iron fence, automatic gates and a cryptic sign. The largest letters say simply, “Headquarters.” In smaller print ringing a peculiar logo you discover that this is the Central Oklahoma Master Conservancy District. Basically it’s a multi-city thing — Moore, Norman, OKC, Del City and Midwest City along with Tinker AFB. It is parallel to the better known conservation districts in the state, and amounts to a political lobby that cooperates with federal and state water agencies. At any rate, I am told the signs off of that massive structure on the lake warn you to stay back some distance, but it’s about the only part that you can actually see from public areas.

There is a dumpster next to the small public restrooms, so the facilities are at least decent. After lunch I headed home. It was just a mile back to 120th Avenue and I had noticed on my way past earlier that there were no barriers or “road closed” signs. 120thAveNEatGander So I proceeded north. I crossed a rather small patch in the road covering a fresh repair that expanded the previous water passage from a small single and made it two large tinhorns. Farther north I ran into the washout that blocked my previous excursion to the lake. While it was drivable, the county had opted not to pave it just yet. They did put down some extensive rip-rap and concrete buttresses on both sides and did an awful lot of dirt work for quite some distance uphill. What’s left is a raised patch of caliche. 120thGanderFix Cleveland County had almost as many washouts as Oklahoma County, but nowhere near as much money for repairs.

I rode past a fellow who was putting down that new bagged asphalt by hand on his driveway. In my usual jocular demeanor, I yelled, “Howdy, neighbor!” My Edgewood is a very quiet bike and he was startled by my voice. He looked up and asked how I was doing. My answer to that is always, “Life is good!” He grinned and asked if I was “good on water.” I thanked him and affirmed I was. I think he will end up buying quite a few of those bags of cold asphalt, but he was doing it right, moving loose debris before applying it.

There are quite a number of private roads that the county can’t even afford to deliver dirt and gravel. Most of the time you can get the county to take care of the aprons to private drives, but they must have been really swamped (pun intended) by the massive number of washouts this past spring. LagoVistaRoad This is Lago Vista Road, part of a loop that runs up the hill and back out on another road. At the edge of 120th was a massive sandbar where all that loose soil had washed down. It stopped only because there had been a very large pool already standing, as was obvious by the evidence of water marks and debris. So I was standing in deep, soft sand to take this picture, and it stretched along both sides of the main road about a hundred yards. That’s an awful lot of lost sand, but sand is about all there is in this area. Where the vegetation holds it in place, everything’s fine, but it seems in retrospect a silly place to build without a lot more work to prevent sand drift.

Parts of Choctaw Road north of Stella had seen the same cheap layer of asphalt, so while it was fresh and black, it was still a tad rough. After crossing under Interstate 40, I could see evidence of serious preparations for widening. I have heard, but cannot seem to find official confirmation, that much of Choctaw Road is being widened from 1-40 all the way to NE 23rd. The stretch between SE 44th and SE 59th got it first, and now they are working on the stretch south of there to I-40. That should be a glorious fine mess and traffic boondoggle once the surface work gets started.

It took 3.5 hours for a distance of 35 miles plus stopping for lunch and pictures.

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Peace versus Absolutism

Posted on August 11, 2015 by ehurst

If this life is all you have, then absolutism makes perfect sense.

Just over two years ago I wrote Contextual Justice and it’s been getting a lot of hits lately. I’d like to restate the message in different terms: You can’t have peace if you keep seeing things in terms of absolutes.

You can reach for God’s peace — shalom as a Hebrew term implies all the things God promised He would do for people who embrace His revelation. It certainly applies to this world, for the simple reason that all Creation is wired with God’s character. If your orientation in life is focused on Him, you will have a tendency to understand the demands of reality. But instead of the Western mechanistic view of an inanimate universe, you’ll see the universe as a living thing populated with life on multiple levels. All Creation hums with the personal attention of the Creator.

That viewpoint is necessary for divine justice.

God’s revelation comes mostly via parables, or parabolic language, symbolism. Revelation is couched in a world of assumptions totally foreign to Western thinking. God’s Word assumes you realize that all of the most important stuff can only be characterized. If you characterize reality as dead and largely inert, then you find yourself in a world where absolutes are an obvious necessity. If you characterize reality as a vivid expression of God as a living being, with His hand constantly involved in every particle, then absolutes become little more than a conscious abstraction. You can talk about absolutes without taking absolutism seriously because some part of you knows there will always be contextual limits, even if you never experience those limits.

And while I may get you to learn all of that intellectually, chances are you’ll spend many years afterward struggling to retrain all those unconscious mental reflexes to keep expecting hard absolutes in a literal sense. A Western mind has no room for Eternity; the entire matrix of mental operations is wired to exclude it. Western consciousness ends at the boundaries of what we can observe and analyze physically. That sort of thing reduces God to a mere abstraction.

Thus, it’s no surprise that very few Western Christian believers experience God as a Person. Even the one human manifestation of God — Jesus Christ — becomes an abstract figure, a body of facts and analytical product. Spiritual birth seems to change that very little. A genuine encounter with God finds very little space to plant roots in their consciousness. It can be so confusing and this causes me to bear a sense of pity for Western Christians. The bondage of absolutism is very hard to bear, and very painful to watch. Once you get free of that, you can vividly see the battle in their eyes.

For those of us who have escaped the chains of absolutism, let us pray fervently that others can be set free to grasp the multiple layers of reality. You and I are able to sense all the layers of divine justice in most contexts. Something in us calls out to what is appropriate for the context. Westerners tend to dismiss this as relativism because they don’t understand it. They don’t understand the active tension of life itself, and so cannot see that tension in the moral necessities of human existence.

My joking comments in yesterday’s post has a serious point: My eventual practical choice in each situation rests on the divine calling of God and the unpredictable results of interaction with other humans. If someone were to ask my advice on something, my response depends on what I perceive to be my duty to that person at the moment. My duty to God contains multiple layers of divine justice, but what I eventually tell that person cannot be codified in mere proposition, as if God can be confined to one concrete answer in all contexts. The question depends on my grasp of how God wants to use me for His glory at that moment. Demanding rational principle flushes you out of the moral realm altogether, and blinds you to reality as God revealed it.

There is no room for simplistic absolutism in the Kingdom of Heaven.

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More Asylum Visit

Posted on August 10, 2015 by ehurst

Oh, you’re still here? Let me tell you about another delusion…

I’m pretending that someone who supports Trump has hired me to give some advice. Of course, you can probably guess how much someone would know about all of that sitting in a nut house.

You see, Ron Paul’s candidacy failed. I suspect part of what he did was to prove that playing by the rules won’t work. Nobody else in the system plays by those rules. In fact, I seem to recall at least one of his convention delegates was murdered en route, and some others were hijacked, as it were. That’s just the beginning of skulduggery.

If Trump expects to get anywhere, he should already be playing by the real rules. He has to disembowel/hijack the Koch Brothers’ political machinery, for starters. They are part of the banking-financier elite; Trump is part of a different team. They have waaaaay more money than he does. So he needs to hire at least a handful of folks as political sappers. Don’t go after the big names; go after the folks they depend on. Every face you see in the MSM has at least one utterly essential helper that makes their position tenable. Take out that background helper and things start to fall apart.

On top of that, Trump will have to disrupt the system itself before he gets in there. As a previous heavy duty campaign contributor, he should be aware of at least some of that nasty stuff going on in the background. It can be done with a relative handful of people and money, but it has to be done right and it’s already a little late in the game. He needs true believers in his program. They aren’t that hard to get, but they have to be experienced, or at least creative, resourceful and quick.

And in this day and age, he really needs some savvy IT folks. He’s got them, but he needs them working near the backbone level and frankly hacking the competition. His opposition has been doing that for a long time, but I sense he has better resources in this area. They need to get on the ball and start grinding down the opposition data and communications. Dig up that dirt and dump it in the open via some imaginary “Anonymous” or other established hacktivist label.

Does it sound immoral to you? Then you don’t understand genuine biblical morality. I’m simply describing things from a perspective of divine justice. Don’t attempt to organize revelation as some objective body of reasonable truth. It’s personal. I’m standing back here, completely out of the fray and explaining what I see from a heart-led moral perspective. At the highest level of moral justice, I’d nuke the whole system. That’s not on the menu; God calls me to consider things on multiple levels below that. Divine wisdom says that if Trump wants to win and harvest any portion of God’s blessings under the system as it now exists, he’ll have to do those things and more. Following that advice would bring the American people a few small increments closer to shalom from where they are now headed.

In other words, the measures I suggest are about as morally appropriate as it gets in the current system. I also stand utterly convinced that God would bless such efforts, if only on the general principle that it comes closest to the moral fabric of reality. Without specific prophetic insight into God’s plans, I feel certain Trump would prosper in these things and that God has already exposed the others to such attacks. Western Christians could never get this, because they still buy Plato, Aristotle and all the silly Enlightenment and Victorian “morality” that helped to create this stinking mess.

I feel like I’m some kind of alien visitor from another galaxy.

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Visitor’s Day at the Asylum

Posted on August 9, 2015 by ehurst

Oh, do come in and read my mad ravings! Let me describe to you the delusions of my poor, benighted soul. (This is merely my personal wild speculation on things as they seem to be at this point, and not at all on par with my regular stuff.)

If HR Clinton gets anywhere near the presidency, I suspect she will provoke a genuine bloody revolt. As it is, there appear to be other reasons the elite are ready to throw her to the dogs. The other Democratic candidates are safe, but we are supposed to be ignoring the machinations of that party for now. Instead, the MSM are making sure we don’t ignore the other wing of the ruling party.

We have a handful of nobodies who could never win. However, the majority of those with actual potential are all the same in one respect: They will most certainly kiss the right asses and let the Shadow Government rule as it wishes. It’s possible Trump is just play acting and would do the same, but I doubt anyone believes that.

It seems more likely he will attempt a genuine corporate takeover of the US government. While it’s unlikely he will destroy everything, he would most certainly try to shut down whole chunks of the federal bureaucracy, sell off the assets and put thousands of useless bureaucrats out of work. He has that kind of experience, though it would tax him to the limits. Very few of the usual sources would provide personnel to help him carry the load. It would mean an awful lot of new staff, because it would require fielding a vast army of spies loyal to him alone who would ferret out the genuine political resistance to his plans. The resistance would be real and bipartisan, but I’m pretty sure he would try, and he should already have that in the works or it won’t happen. I’ll bet he has the genuine intention of resurrecting the economy. That would make in both more famous and far richer.

That could mean all kinds of crazy stuff, but an example would be shutting down the Federal Reserve and instituting a national bank. That is just about the only way it could be done. The banking elite can see this coming. So while they have the MSM trying desperately to clobber his bid, Trump will likely survive even a genuine assassination attempt. Don’t be surprised if an attempt is made; be surprised if it’s very obvious.

The only other way to stop him is to destroy the economy before he can do anything about it. Keep your eye on the interbank lending rate, because that would be the easiest way to shut down the entire global economy all at once. It would take only a few days, as much of it is more-or-less under American manipulation. It would just about have to come down all at once. If they succeed, Trump will lose an awful lot of money. So will a bunch of other folks in a position to challenge the bankers. The kind of economic collapse they plan will leave them still wealthy and with a measure of power that grants them some room to set up something else I can scarcely predict. However, the traditional viewpoint is that they plan to make life so painful for everyone that we will all beg for them to save us on just about any terms.

It remains to be seen what those terms might be, but I can assure you it won’t be smooth sailing for them. Too many folks already know and have their own ways of making it too expensive. My personal expectation is that the global takeover will fail generally, but not totally. It will start a whole new round of conflicts and proxy wars with a whole new set of flags and so forth.

Welcome to my madness.

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Moral Clarity, Befuddled Reason

Posted on August 9, 2015 by ehurst

This will sound at first like I’m wandering, so buckle your seatbelts.

A significant portion of the global elite have made a religion of melding mind and computer. You’ll run across the term “singularity” most often in this context, where either computers can become conscious or linked directly to the mind so that human learning becomes a mere matter of transferring data. This is tied to the notion that there is nothing above the human intellect except more intellect or a better version of intellect. You’ll see the same nonsense in lots of Science Fiction.

I teach that all of this hearkens back to the Fall, where mankind believed the lie of Satan that human innate ability could handle ultimate truth. All it has done is take us farther and farther from genuine insight. This is the same false God of Pharisaism and of Western Civilization as a whole. In every age of recorded human history, the single point of failure is this same particular brand of hubris: We refuse to submit to the Flaming Sword guarding the path back to Paradise. Paradise itself is merely an image of the human condition as God intended it, as God created us to have.

You can’t get there without that Sword of the Spirit. And you can’t use the Sword of the Spirit until you first turn it on yourself. Specifically, you have to undo the Fall in the sense of returning the intellect to its designed function of serving something far higher. It’s at this point that human language breaks down and we are forced to rely on parables or symbolism for things beyond the grasp of intellect. Even in my attempts to use clinical terminology, it still ends up being something other than literal. At the same time, I assert that God placed in us a form of intelligence and consciousness that exceeds mere intellect. You cannot activate it fully without surrendering and embracing the self-death of revelation.

Any HOWTO I offer will remain little more than my story, my personal awareness of a journey from where I was to where I am now. The best we can hope for is to make such narrative indicative of things you can experience in your own terms. You have to reach your own personal consciousness because God is a Person who works with individual persons. There is no intervening objective body of truth that we can all share. The closest we come to that is a characterization of how it looks in this fallen reality when folks begin to share a common realization. That is, a community of people with some measure of similarity in their background experiences can overlap just enough to fellowship and commune like a highly spirited and raucous household. That’s about as good as it gets, because any more uniformity than that is almost surely false.

“Domestic peace” is a relative term. It implies a commitment to common welfare that reflects a fundamental stability, in that the people involved do care. You can’t regulate that by rules every well, though you can just about get it to work if one person becomes the focus of guidance and leadership. Unanimity will be rare and usually applies to things of no consequence, or it applies in a very subtle “blood is thicker than water” kind of rowdy love. Except, in God’s design, it’s the Blood of Christ that binds us, not mere DNA. Christ warned the arrogant “Children of Abraham” that the Father could turn stones into such progeny. That kind of parable has multiple applications on multiple levels because it’s a moral truth that stands above our fallen realm. The point is that this bogus Abrahamite crew shared no more with their acclaimed progenitor than the rocks on the ground did.

You want peace by human rule? That happens only when everyone is dead. If the system in which you live was designed by a human mind, it cannot last. It is not a divine plan. It stands in opposition to God’s revelation simply because it’s not what He said. God designed and created a setting for His revelation based on Ancient Near Eastern feudalism. That’s not a system, but a relationship. If it ain’t personal, God isn’t pleased. But because of our mythology of objectivity, that’s how we structure things. Thus, if you want to understand what is happening in human politics on a moral level, pay attention to the systemic changes, not so much the people involved. People without God are not free moral agents, but are steered unconsciously by higher moral influences. Human behavior cannot escape fundamental moral boundaries.

The Internet or something similar will survive any upheaval because too many of the ruling elite have made a religion of computers as god. These people aren’t going to go away; they are a solid part of the human future. They don’t think like or hope for the same things as the old ruling elite, and they are just as rich and powerful. God has granted to Satan the authority to raise up this next civilization of technocracy — that’s my prophetic sense of where things are going. But there’s a lot of stuff that has to crash and get out the way first. Don’t focus on the people, because plenty of them will make the transition. Instead, notice how the very banking elite themselves depend on the networking, and that networking is controlled by the rising priesthood of geekery.

It’s not that this somehow forms a literal fulfillment of John’s Apocalypse, but that it fits the moral pattern that John revealed in his symbolic imagery. Humanity will always be ruled by a combined mechanism of king and priest. The bankers (rulers) cannot afford to alienate the geeks (priesthood) and vice versa. There is no loyalty, just a mercenary bond, and it’s pretty shaky. That is, the geeks are smart enough to play various would-be kings off against each other. For any ruling elite to stay on top, they cannot afford to let some usurping gang gain an advantage over them by pulling away the geeks. But the geeks cannot rule by themselves without sacrificing their unique position. Rather, you can expect them to throw their support behind anyone that takes them seriously.

It is, in effect, very much like having a shaman to appease the various inexplicable forces and keep away the bad juju. Precious few humans are able to master both political power and full technology expertise in one brain. Those who do are usually smart enough to avoid playing the pointless game of politics itself, but use that skill in managing other kinds of human enterprise. The time is not right for that kind of shaman-king.

Yes, the imagery breaks down at some point, but I suppose you’ll get the point. Don’t invest yourself fully in anything attached to this realm. All Creation is a tool for His glory, so recognize that you can exploit any and all human activity in the same broad sense if you can see the moral forces at work. Feel free to use my blather any way you like, if it appeals to something in you, because that’s the way God does business whether we like it or not. People who try their hardest to sell you something and scrape off some income will, to say the least, miss out on the most precious blessings of God’s hand. They have traded moral authority for material income. It’s not that they are necessarily lying, but that you can’t trust them. They have already chosen to focus on the wrong level of understanding.

Yes, I tend to think a lot of status quo will change in the coming months. That came to me first as a broad perception in my heart. It may not be that soon, because even if the bankers and/or other elite are plotting any kind of action, God can change their plans on His whim. Rather, I sense the moral tension in the universe itself. God has clearly revealed that He suffers nothing from our temporal sense. Time in the Bible is a matter of “when the fruit ripens” and not rational scheduling. Maybe I’ll see world turmoil just in time for my birthday (18 September), but that doesn’t make the timing morally auspicious, just whimsical. Instead, we should recognize that more than one big lie is running out of room to lead us all on a merry chase after nothing.

Learn to sense things with your heart-mind. Shift your consciousness to a higher level where morality (God’s character) is the fundamental fabric of things. Learn to ditch the Anglo-Saxon mythology that influences us. For example, God is not a grouchy Nordic deity and the world is not a dark and dreary place. Death is not your enemy and youth is not your friend, much less a goddess to worship. This world is nothing more than a moral staging ground in one sense; in another sense it is a beautiful gift of God loaded with giddy blessings and all manner of things pointing us back to His character. People don’t have to think like you and talk like you to be your brothers and sisters.

Learn how the virtual world is different from meat space because God has great things to do in the future in the virtual realm. You have to be ready to work in both worlds by understanding what He says is real. Don’t trust your senses and logic too much, but do learn to trust that inner voice that will not be quiet. Even if you get the message wrong, especially in the early stages of transition, learn to trust that voice of moral perception.

Got it?

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