Building His Kingdom

Posted on February 14, 2015 by ehurst

Please don’t get this wrong; there is no boasting or whining here. I am blessed beyond words to have this rich opportunity to be associated with some of the finest folks on earth who visit this blog. I sometimes wonder how God imagines I am up to the task. You should know that I want to do biblical ministry more than anything on this earth, and have begged God for just such an opportunity since my teenage years.

But what He had in mind is rather like blazing a path in the wilderness. Rediscovering the ancient truth of His dealings with mankind has put me at odds with every part of the mainstream church system that I’ve touched so far. They don’t know what they are missing.

Today I had the chance to chat by phone with one of our regular readers here. Chances are we shall never meet face-to-face, but ministry still must happen. So I’m learning a lot about long-distance pastoring, and I’m closer in heart to several folks I’ll never see than I’ve been to most that I have seen. I’m not complaining. This is sweeter than words can tell. My online ministry has been more fruitful than all the work I’ve done in conventional churches in some forty years of trying. (Yes, I make myself available by phone if you need it.)

It saddens me that there are so many struggling because they are so blinded by our culture. Every time I walk in the woods and commune with all the living things, hearing them praise the Father and Creator of us all, I wonder how the rest of humanity can exist without that. It’s just too easy to find it, but they aren’t even looking. Indeed, I am the fortunate one.

My wife and I have known for some years that somehow, somewhere, some time, God would begin to use us this way locally — wherever “locally” is at that moment. We have sensed a promise that our struggle in the Spirit Realm would eventually bear the fruit of changed lives here in meat space. Perhaps it has already begun and we just don’t know it. Still, it remains so far seemingly unfulfilled. Yet it also seems right upon us.

Regular readers know I’m not building any kind of little kingdom. I’m still struggling to understand it myself, but the wide open door we keep on this blog will be part of how we operate in the real world. Nobody has to prove that they buy into everything I say. All that’s necessary is to invest enough time to be around us and share in the richness of a Kingdom already standing. If they can tolerate me and my blather, they are members. Indeed, all the world is potential members, and just showing up one time means claiming all the services I can offer.

While we do hope we can provide a place to meet out of the weather, there will be no heavy investment in facilities, membership rolls, budgets or bragging rights. I’ll do house-calls as much as possible, of course. But the true riches will be the people themselves, not any of the physical objects we use. This is part of what’s behind our effort to fix this mobile home, so that we can feel right about giving it to someone else.

Pray with us, because the lien holder is balky; they have always been a bureaucratic nightmare and we pray God have mercy on them. We can’t wait to be free of their bit and bridle. We didn’t choose them — they bought the mortgage out from under the original lender. They are not nice people. We are well aware that there is no escaping their sort in this world. But we also know that, in the end, God has His own way of dealing with things that are bigger than us. We leave this in His hands.

Meanwhile, the contractor has made a firm commitment to fix the roof and floors for the price of the insurance payout. God bless Him for such kindness, because the man won’t be making much money on this deal. We just have to wade through the bureaucracy of getting that multi-party check endorsed by all parties. I will eventually have to do the sub-floor insulation (waiting on warmer weather) and the wall repair myself, but that’s not beyond my limited talents. Pray with me that I can deal with the exposure to mold, because the insulation is loaded with it. Every time we go in that room where the floor is open to the insulation chamber, I get allergy symptoms again.

While the symptoms include weepy eyes, I’m not crying about it, so to speak. This is just an honest report of how things are going. I’m just glad we’ve gotten this far. God is good and His blessings are worth any price we pay.

Thanks for taking the time to drop by and see me.

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My Cup Runneth Over

Posted on February 13, 2015 by ehurst

Put on your subtlety hat and let your mind chase the implications.

Last night a six-pack of patrol cars gathered around a house near here. The law officers milled around outside the place until the Medical Examiner showed up. A snooping neighbor overheard a random comment about “two weeks” and “poor dog.” But a folding gurney was rolled out with a human sized body bag. It’s been warm a lot the past two weeks, so we all assume that the ratty old mobile home will be condemned as-is and destroyed in place before the debris is hauled away. The sole human resident of the place had few friends around here, and had made plenty of enemies with erratic and inebriated behavior.

In my world is a certain female person who spends most of her conscious moments with her face glued to a cellphone, tablet, TV screen or something similar. Without fail every morning in living memory she has screamed at her kids because she can’t seem to program them to respond to her unpredictable demands.

What’s the difference between the two?

As our dear Sister Wildcucumber would recognize, even a jackass can discern some things. I’m not better than either of the two mentioned above, just more fortunate. I also cannot be silent.

I’m not an empty leaky receptacle for entertainment, dissipation and boredom. My heart is bursting with joy and peace and I cannot avoid splattering everyone around me. Some don’t notice because it’s not in the form of traditional entertainment most of the time. Granted, I am a clown and quite often perform dramatic antics to help get my message across, but some people see only the entertainment portion and completely miss the content.

Sometimes I’ll watch a portion of the TV newscast, or a short video online capturing some unusual event, but I generally avoid even simple still graphics when seeking information. On my Win7 laptop I installed Cygwin just so I could use the Lynx browser for the majority of my reading online. There might be other ways to reduce the Net to mostly plain text, but this is the simplest for me. I even change the useragent string to avoid having a few sites reject the Lynx browser as some imaginary hacker threat.

When I want information, I don’t want manipulators trying to take advantage of the basic human natural response to things that entertain. We are wired to pause and gaze at anything that grabs our attention. I don’t want things grabbing my attention that way; I want to select what I give my attention to and I know how weak I am about such things. Most humans share that same weakness in varying flavors and degrees.

I don’t want to run the risk of being distracted from the mission. The mission requires that I gain some kind of summary of a certain selected range of reporting, spend an awful lot of time in prayer, and then tell the world about the joy and wonder of what my God has done in me. I want to die when the message is finished and God is ready to take me home, not sometime long before by wasting and frittering away the juices of my soul. While my path is not necessarily for you, I cannot simply silence my encounter with the Father’s glory.

None of us is exempt; the fundamental universal call to humanity is to participate in glorifying Our Creator.

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Inspiron 15-3542 and Win7

Posted on February 12, 2015 by ehurst

Hopefully this will be the last time I write about installing any OS. The only reason I do this one more time is that I find Win8 to be an abomination for us older folks who don’t like pretending our computers are just big cellphones. I downgraded from Win8 to Win7. I won’t offer much hand-holding, but here are some useful notes for those wishing to try it themselves.

I assume you have your own copy of Win7 for this. Installation isn’t that bad, but you’ll have to catch the BIOS at boot up (hit F2 as soon as you see the “Dell” logo on the screen) and turn off secure boot the enable legacy boot, which disables UEFI.

But before you start, you’ll probably want the entire set of Win7 drivers burned to a CD. Please note the following logical steps:

1. Go to Dell’s official support page for this model.

2. Do not let Dell install their support utilities. Ignore that offer because it’s badly botched up and will not solve your problems consistently. Also, do not download Dell’s Touchpad driver. It’s very badly wrapped in rotten .NET code that seldom works properly after installation. The older driver from Synaptics itself is better because it uses a simple Win-GUI toolset. Besides, it actually offers more features. Update: Since I first wrote this, Dell has addressed this problem. I now recommend you use the touchpad driver provided for Win7. It’s about as good as it gets, which isn’t really saying much. (BTW, this ratty cheap touchpad works poorly on every OS except Win7; on Kubuntu it was totally unusable but it’s tolerable on Debian 8).

3. What you’ll see on the official drivers list is incomplete. (Update: It’s not so bad any more; Dell has stepped up to the plate and put more of the Win7 drivers on the support page. All you really need to hunt down is the driver for the Ricoh SD card reader. Feel free to peruse the alternate download page that follows…) Take what’s there, then go to this page. That Dell offers this sort of listing is one of the best kept secrets. You’ll need stuff like the USB host controller, the Intel Chipset driver, and the 1705 Bluetooth and Wifi driver, along with the Rapid Technology driver (SATA driver).

In general, you’ll want to install the base chipset driver first, then the graphics, followed by the SATA and USB, then everything else. Please note that the BIOS update cannot be installed from the CD. It must be copied to the hard drive first, then you can install it.

Mine runs pretty snappy with Win7. Good luck.

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Catching Up Again

Posted on February 12, 2015 by ehurst

I’m working on the next book, a part of the Ancient Truth Bible study series. This volume will cover the Wisdom Literature (minus Proverbs and Psalms, which will each get their own volume) which leaves Job, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon.

At the same time I’m working on my new laptop. I’ll spare you the gory details but I find Win8 an abomination, so it will run something else if I own it.

Meanwhile, the insurance adjuster released his report and the insurance company will simply cut a check for what’s left after the deductibles. I’ll pass that money on to whomever accepts the job and whatever it doesn’t cover I’ll fix myself. Would you believe there aren’t that many contractors eager to take that job this time of year? That is, except for a handful of premium services that couldn’t do a mobile home roof for under $5k, and wouldn’t even discuss doing the floor or wall work.

Meanwhile, our unseasonably warm weather has fled the region. It’s pretty cool today and we might see some nasty stuff within a week or so.

Always give God room to work on things and people. Never close the door unless you know beyond all doubt He says to do so. That’s actually quite rare. You might have to wait half a lifetime on some things, but God never rests.

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It’s Not What You Might Expect

Posted on February 11, 2015 by ehurst

Welcome to my world. I’ve tried to make things as transparent as possible because it’s what God demands of me. If you were to meet me in the flesh, you’d find me affable and relaxed most of the time. When I get agitated, I rarely turn it outward, but have this tendency to attack myself first. It’s extremely hard for me to apply force to others. I do at times, but it’s not natural for me.

On the other hand, I admit that my upbringing taught me to be murderously angry about a certain range of things. It’s not just my parents, but other people influenced me growing up and the net result includes a lot of tendencies that never see the light of day. However, the internal conflict has been near deadly at times — deadly to myself.

The concept of civility is saving you from having to face things that aren’t your problem. If you are an empty soul who lives for the juicy soap-opera details of human existence, you aren’t civilized. Civility assumes you are better than that, and there is such a thing as TMI (“too much information”). So I’m not ashamed of the facts of my life, but sometimes it’s just not worth the trouble for you to read them. Still, if your question seems genuine and purposeful, or if I sense God can use the moment, I’ll answer some of the most personal questions.

And if some part of it rattles you, too bad; you asked. One of the greatest blessings in my life has been the hand of God relieving me of false guilt and shame. I won’t yield to censure from any human unless it matches what I sense in my heart as the moral character of God. That brutal strain in my soul comes out when I face people who suffer from Western moral mythology.

Now that you have some assessment of how wacko I am, maybe you’ll understand when I ask: Is it just me? It didn’t impinge on my awareness until the past few days, but I began sensing a broad shift in human behavior in my world. For example, there has been a sudden rise in the number and severity of traffic collisions. People taking bigger risks? More robberies and violent crime, not just in the news, but I hear about it from other sources. A rising sense of desperation? There’s also a subtle shift to more of that passive-aggressive defiance people exhibit in small things, breaking carefully selected rules, testing certain limits, etc. I’ve seen this stuff in cycles in the past, but it seems different this time.

I noted previously that I’ve been devoting a lot more time to praying lately. I’ve long been in the habit of talking quietly under my breath to God, but lately I’ve actually made it a habit to take long walks two or three times every day so I could pray out loud without making other people uncomfortable. Lately I’ve sensed a rising tension in the Spirit Realm where it touches my world. Not me personally, but my sense of awareness of the world around me. I’ve never felt safer and more at peace, but it seems awfully stormy around me.

So I will confess to you I’ve had visions lately of clouds of black wings. It reminds me of that weird feeling you get if you stand outside a huge cavern when the bats come out at nightfall. Bats are harmless and amusing to me, but the clouds I see when I close my eyes during those times of prayer are not benign. Visions like that are purely symbolic, of course. But it reminds me more of the gust-front that blows across the plains here some short time ahead of the actual storm clouds. In other words, it’s not something objective, but God working with my awareness so that I’ll be ready to serve.

I was just wondering if anyone else is experiencing anything like it. Could I suggest that some level of Big Crazy is about to begin, at least for some of us? If so, look for things that would be virtually inexplicable on a purely human level. You’ll have a sense of warning, while hopefully experiencing internal peace and assurance that God is protecting you from the worst of it.

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What Are You?

Posted on February 10, 2015 by ehurst

Welcome to the real world with all the real people.

Even without a formal doctrine of the Fall, we have no trouble seeing that humanity is broken. However, Scripture points out that this broken condition cannot be fixed on our level of existence. Thus, the vast collection of competing secular theories about how humanity could be alright if only (fill in the blank) with the long history of inhumane results. You can play semantic games all you like, but we are broken and only God can fix us. It’s pointless to extrapolate whether God knew or intended things to be like this; He pointedly says it shouldn’t be like this now.

He also pointedly says you can’t get started in the right direction without repentance. That’s related to a concept we know as “confession” — agreeing with what God says about things. If you agree with His moral character, you can’t be too happy with everything you see in the mirror. Then again, you have to learn how to see, and realize that the real mirror is His moral character, not that coated sheet of glass on the wall.

I deal with the false guilt from the false morality of Western mythology in other places. We can still use the labels because we know better than to restrict ourselves to Western notions about how language is used. In the Bible, human language is just a road sign to indicate a pathway, not a neat package with a clearly defined content. Parabolic language is the only way you can address matters above the intellect, which includes just about everything you might say about God and morality. God’s truth cannot ever fit inside our mental categories and cannot be defined by reason on any terms. If you don’t learn to operate from the heart, you cannot please God.

So what do you see in the mirror? A murderer? A sexual predator? A hateful ogre who wants to destroy everything? It matters not a whit what you might have actually done or even consciously thought. What matters is the basic human flaw, the tendencies that obviously contradict God’s moral character. If you don’t confess what God says about your various sinful lusts, then you cannot claim His power to overcome.

It’s a bit like the pedantic difference between a child molester and a pedophile. In general, a molester is a pedophile, but most pedophiles never get around to molesting. Yet in our silly Western society we only pretend that there is a difference because we have this crazy notion about taboos. We like to abuse words to bash people over the head with false guilt. Manipulation is so very powerful and is the basic tool of Western society. So while Western language presumes an educated precision with terminology, we are taught to cheat on the rules in every way possible.

Go to any urbane and highly educated church and tell folks you aren’t a molester but do wish to overcome your pedophile tendencies, and then tell me they won’t make damned sure you aren’t close to any children without parental supervision. I’m willing to bet it won’t be too subtle, either. Watch their faces.

You won’t experience God’s mercy there.

I’ll let you in on a scary secret of psychology: The wiring that makes one person a pedophile is the exact same wiring that makes another such a gifted teacher who is able to understand children on their own terms. Empathy with children is the fundamental capability for both. That’s the basic human paradox — the greatest talent is the capacity for the greater harm. Safety means eviscerating everything you do by handing it over to least competent. The same paradox applies across the board with murderers, ogres, and all the other nasty humanity you can name. The best is also the worst.

God uses broken vessels because that’s all there is. How He uses them depends on whether the vessel is self-aware of the breaks. He won’t heal the wounds we hide from ourselves. Granted there’s a certain complexity to telling others about the cracks and holes in your soul. The paradox of our society is that the church people who should be the most understanding are the ones most likely to punish your honesty. Whatever it is we make of this virtual parish business here at Kiln of the Soul, we dare not fall into that trap. Our brand of religion has to be more consistent with how God works, not how the rest of the world around us works. Yeah, we know how the others do things. Let’s depart from that, please.

The Flaming Sword of Truth can be fearful, but it brings sweet release from sin’s bondage. You cannot wield that sword until you have first turned it on yourself. His wrath is also His blessing. That’s not masochism or some other perversity; it’s our Western morality that is so perverse.

What does the mirror of truth show you?

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StT Published

Posted on February 9, 2015 by ehurst

tiny rural church in German country side

Cover art for the book

It’s done! A short little book it is, too — Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text is now available in multiple formats, so get your FREE copy here. I’m also updating one HTML version I linked previously.

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Background Noise (Updated)

Posted on February 8, 2015 by ehurst

One of things that most distinguishes the godly from others in this world is not whether we have trouble, but how we handle it.

I’m praying about a pretty big problem. It’s not as if I am whining and trying to blame someone else for the situation. It’s not a question of whose is the fault, but what God wants us to do now that we are in this fix.

Some years ago my parents went in with my wife and I on a mobile home. We first rented it because it was quite large enough and quiet out here away from town. We knew the previous occupants had done some damage, but were under the impression it was mostly cosmetic interior stuff because they had rowdy kids. The place was one of two we could have chosen, and this one seemed the better deal. After a year or so, we decided to buy it.

Sometime later, my parents divorced. Eventually they both moved out leaving us alone here. At about the same time, my son and his wife lost their ability to keep up the payments on their own place (also in the same mobile home park) and moved in with us to share the expenses. That was a few years ago. Meanwhile, the property changed hands and a different company took over. They figured large in a couple of previous blog posts, but the point is we haven’t been too happy with them.

Last summer I had a friend show me how to re-level the house because it had settled a bit. When we stripped away the skirting to do the work, we were surprised to discover roughly one-quarter of the bottom insulation was sagging. This unit thing has a plastic skin holding in the insulation, and it was bulging downward. A poke through the skin indicated the insulation was wet. That stood to reason because we knew the place had suffered a burst pipe before we moved into it. The floors above the repaired pipe creaked like replacement floors do. Apparently the water saturated the insulation at the same time, but no one knew about it. So now, some years later, we see the results.

This was why I had problems with allergies here, because such a situation causes mold to infest the structure. We began praying and planning to find another place some day so I could stop suffering. But we figured the situation was stable.

It is not stable.

This evening the floor and wall over one section of this water bag insulation collapsed under the weight of some furniture. In essence, the house is rotting away from the pervasive dampness. It’s possible to fix the immediate problem with the floor and wall, but getting rid of the moisture would mean waiting until warmer weather, dropping that insulation and replacing it. I am told by a competent expert that is several hundred dollars worth of materials, maybe thousands, never mind the labor costs.

This is not a fund-raising campaign post. I’m not sure what to do, though, since our income won’t cover that and I doubt it’s covered by our minimal insurance. The only way we could afford it was to accept a huge deductible, as you might expect. At any rate, we will be contacting everyone who needs to know about this and we’ll see what comes of it.

I’m a little sad about it, but not depressed or upset. I just wanted you folks to know what’s going on behind the scenes here while we still keep our eyes on the mission.

Update 1: (09 FEB 15) We have contacted our insurance company and expect an adjuster visit in the next few days. We have also notifed site management. Their maintenance chief suggests it is likely an on-going small leak and that costs for repair and mold clean-up will easily exceed our deductible. If the mold is bad enough, the whole thing could be condemned, but that seems currently unlikely.

Update 2: (09 FEB 15) The insurance adjuster says that the damage is covered. It will include roofing and some other stuff, as that’s how he wrote up the claim. And indeed, there is a stinking hole just about the size of a squirrel in my roof…

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How?

Posted on February 8, 2015 by ehurst

There is no single answer for all of us, but perhaps I can help you serve the Lord better by asking decent questions.

I have often said we make a mistake by trying to differentiate between what we presume to be fellow believers and those who are not Christians. It’s not that there is no difference, but that we apply that marker in improper fashion and at the wrong time. While we might hold forth some limited expectation for a differing response, don’t count on it. In this particularly we cannot know when someone is hurting or in what way they hurt, and how they respond to it. So the real question is not what we expect from others — holy cynicism is never caught off guard. We have ample discussion on this blog of the radical difference between what Scripture requires of His people against the common social mythology of our day. The proper question is what we know God expects of us as individual servants.

The job of sacrificial compassion is pretty much the same regardless. People need to experience God’s love at all times. We cannot blindly ape what we see in Scripture; we are no longer in a Pre-Western New Testament world. While the West is dying, it’s still thrashing and holding billions of minds in chains. We have to create a kind of living-loving witness that overwhelms the human intellect and touches the heart and save questions of epistemology and social mythology for later.

In any given context, there weren’t be too awful many likely to notice, much less respond. We have no way of knowing whom God has awakened that sense of searching and calling, nor how He does it. But the bigger question is whether we are certain we are ready for use on our part. He uses us because we are available, not particularly worthy in ourselves. Still, the key to all of this is reflecting His glory where people can see it.

Would it be possible by the sensory projection of our hearts on the moral plane? Can we radiate holiness on a separate channel imperceptible to the intellect? Or is is simply our loving aplomb and calm acceptance of things over which we have no control? It can’t be simple Western “niceness” because that means nothing. It’s more than simple charisma as we think of it in our society. It has to be something mere humanity cannot manufacture. How can we radiate His glory in that unmistakable way that touches those few ready to be touched?

Somehow we have got to get this rich treasure out to other believers.

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Psalm 36

Posted on February 7, 2015 by ehurst

Hebrew scholars tell us that this psalm is distinctly in two parts. The first few verses are in very rugged Hebrew that grates on the ears, whereas the rest is quite smooth and sweet. This is how David emphasizes the description within those verses respectively. However, this is some dispute about the wording of the first verse, in part because too many Western scholars just don’t quite grasp the Hebrew emphasis on perception with the heart as a sensory organ in its own right.

So perhaps it should go something like this: “The rebellion of a wicked man tells my heart that he does not revere God.” It’s obvious to David because his heart reads the moral context of what he sees with his eyes. Sin and general moral failure is a direct insult to God, the maker of all things who wrote His character into Creation. This is indeed an issue with human pride to insist on evaluating things from his own sense of reason rather than embracing the revelation of God. Thus, his actions betray a lack of moral sensitivity. He stays up late looking for ways to prey on others and gain some unjust advantage.

In contrast, God is merciful and keeps looking for ways to bless the creatures He made. His compassion reaches to the clouds, outweighs mountains and has no bottom. There is no better place for a human to live than in the shelter of God’s revelation. Life can be no sweeter than in the joy of His holiness.

So David prays that God continue to differentiate how He treats those who love Him. He asks to be included in that sweet regard of God’s favor.

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