A Lady in Waiting 6

Posted on January 23, 2013 by ehurst

She never even pretended to sleep that night. There had been enough sleepless nights in her life that she knew how to make the most of it. Three books, dozens of articles and some links to associates left her with a bigger, but still confused picture. Staring into her morning coffee cup, she knew her biggest problem was de-tangling what was plainly her own romantic fascination with her boundless intellectual curiosity. All the reading only made it worse, her feelings more tightly bound into a single twisted braid. All she knew was the relentless drive to keep poking at it.
This was no schoolgirl fascination. Indeed, it was of such a different quality she almost didn’t realize the romantic edge to her feelings until Sam’s offhand comment about it. Sam’s piercing insight was like that, and she had come to rely on it not long after first taking the assignment to work in this awful place. She mustered her cynicism just long enough to tell herself this was at least the best entertainment she’d ever had so far in her dreary life, and would make this place memorable even if it all turned out to be nothing.
She tried once more to find some place on this earth where she knew her feet didn’t feel somehow disconnected from the ground. At the lowest level, she readily admitted if Rod simply asked, she would disrobe for him in a heartbeat. Not that there would be much to see. She was rather skinny, with only a healthy muscle tone to offer. Her face had been described as “mousy” and that was probably fair enough. She seldom cut her hair, which made her a spare minority among the women there. Almost all of them had cut theirs into various fashionable styles, but she had always resisted having anything to do with their habits. They were all rather pretty and shapely. Whatever they got from their competitive flaunting, she wanted no part of it. Their chatter showed they took romantic disappointment as a given, that the whole thing was simply having a good time when it was possible. They were in love with romance, not men. All of the flirts had at least one recurrent romping partner among the various men who worked there, plus a selection of the dashing visiting officials and so forth who passed through at irregular intervals. If that was all there was, she’d rather die an old maid.
Still, some part of her had always believed something better must be out there somewhere. Maybe she missed her cue somewhere along the way before reaching this point, but it never seemed quite right. Something in her couldn’t settle for half-way okay on the vain hope it would get better. Her career path had shown her far too many marriages built in convenience alone, dreary lives with joys far too few and too brief.
So here she was, suddenly willing to give as much or as little as a man would take just to be near him some part of his day.
After a perfunctory workout and shower, still wide awake with eyes just short of bloodshot, she broke her routine and actually went into the dining hall to sit down and eat. She normally carried breakfast to her office, but needed a break from the routine to see if she could shake something loose. And yes, perhaps she could catch Rod on his irregular routine.
She was staring across the open hall and nearly died when Rod came up and asked if he could join her. After the initial start, she couldn’t remember to say, “Yes.” He apologized for interrupting her reverie, but sat down anyway, as if it didn’t matter. Somehow, it wasn’t the least bit rude, but reassuring.
He waved absently at the chorus of greeting from the flirts, without even the slightest hint of a smile until he turned to face Becky. Totally at ease as usual, he asked absently if she’d had a chance to read any of his stuff.
She found her voice and a measure of smile. Some shred of her professional demeanor rushed forward to save the moment, allowing her to carefully drawl, “Probably more than I should have, since I neglected some paperwork.” Some part of her wanted to gush, to cry for mercy and beg at his feet for some kind of release from the chaos of colliding galaxies in her head, and wondered if any of it were visible to him.
“I confess some of it was a horrendous struggle to write. Many sleepless nights pounding my mind, hoping for some way to put such things into words. It’s funny how writing like that brings both peace and serious doubts. It felt good to get the weight off my chest, yet sometimes it surprises me anyone can stand to read it.”
Her professional composure ran away screaming in terror. She put her hand over her mouth; the chewing of food slowed dramatically. Perhaps her eyes said more than even she knew.
“Most people don’t get it. Of those who do, most find it no more than mildly entertaining. I write because I can’t shut up. But for those few who seem to get it, who tell me they find something useful in it, I’m always very grateful. There’s nothing like offering someone — anyone — something that sets them free. For just a tiny few of us in this world, we sense there has to be something more, something no one else can or will see.”
He paused for a moment, took a bite, chewed a bit, then washed it down with coffee. She more or less copied his action. Then he continued, “If you read much at all, I’m really flattered.”
She managed to smile slowly and almost spoke when the flirty trio interrupted.
“Hey, Rod. Do you know anything about cars?”
She decided to take advantage of this noisome interference and regain some composure. Rob basically put them off, but it took awhile. Becky found amusement at herself for daring to believe he was trying to get rid of them so he could be alone with her. As they walked away, he leaned forward and spoke in a comical conspiratorial manner. “How many sexual predators like that will I have to deal with here?”
Becky almost wet herself laughing behind her fragile reserve and he didn’t seem to expect a serious answer.
“Most of them are too young for me. I would have almost nothing in common with them.” She didn’t tell him they were almost her age, deciding it didn’t matter. He continued, “It has nothing to do with actual chronological age, but they act like silly schoolgirls.”

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A Lady in Waiting 5

Posted on January 22, 2013 by ehurst

Her mind was spinning. Nothing in her official duties kept Becky from using her office computer to peruse the links Rod had offered. His writing was like a magnet for her eyes. She found herself still reading when the lights went off in the hallway. The rumbling in her stomach brought to her awareness that she had stayed past dinner time and would have to eat something from the snackbar out by the gate. Tasty, but the only reason anyone ate their junk food was because the nearest off-base eatery was a long walk. On second thought, she needed the walk.
Becky wasn’t just torn. This was inner turmoil, a cognitive dissonance. She was intelligent enough to recognize that much. As she made her way down the stairs in the company of just a few who had lingered that evening, she was very glad to see Sam from Finance. He was a big time lover of literature and she was hoping to get his help on this stuff.
Sam was ancient, but had never bothered to retire. His vast experience with number crunching had made him too valuable, and he was one of the few people who actually wanted to stay at the installation. He owned a house on the economy and had married a local widow, and willingly worked as a host nation hire. Still, Sam’s true genius was his hobby, English literature. Not just fiction, but almost all academic fields. Sam was like a librarian who had read all the books in the library and wanted more. Becky knew she could trust his judgment on some things.
She summarized what she could remember and asked if he had ever heard of Rod. Oddly, Sam mentioned hunting Rod down online when he first saw the contract paperwork. While he didn’t share so much of Becky’s interest in the material, he recognized it readily enough.
“A part of me worries just a little this guy might be a charismatic cult leader, but he doesn’t fit any of the official profiles for that sort of thing,” she said.
“No, no. I don’t believe so, Becky. He’s just very different. There are plenty who agree with him, enough that he lists others as references on site. But the key is that he professes no interest in controlling anything and refuses to organize what he does in the typical sense. It’s entirely voluntary, so anyone who isn’t internally driven won’t much care for his work.”
Becky was silent a moment. “That just raises more questions about why it draws me. It can’t be he’s such a great writing talent. You’ve shown me better stuff than that.”
Sam smiled, “Then perhaps you are a good prospect for what he teaches. That, or you are thoroughly enamored with him.” He chuckled at that.
“If I am, I’m hardly the only one, Sam. The flirts seem gaga over him, but he scarcely talks to them. It’s as if he’s completely uninterested in them. I’m not even in their class. All I did was my job, so why would he be so open with me and so closed to them?”
Sam seemed thoughtful for a moment. “If his writing has any meaning at all, I would suggest he measures everything from an entirely alien frame of reference. That man-hungry bunch aren’t even on his radar, but you may be in his eyes a rare treasure. Even if it’s not romantic in any ordinary sense, I’d say your self-presentation makes more sense to him than theirs. That might explain why you find his writing so fascinating; you are his kind of gal.”
She slowed, and then stopped just inside the opening, staring at the ground as Sam stepped into a waiting car at the curb right outside the gate. The damp pavement offered no new insights to her puzzle.

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A Lady in Waiting 4

Posted on January 22, 2013 by ehurst

His name was Sherrod Franklin. He told her it was typically shortened to Rod and that’s how he signed most things. She asked him to call her Becky. It was painfully obvious he was a military veteran; that much was in the paperwork attached to the contract they all got to see. Everything else was a mystery.
If anyone around there knew that gossip was mostly baloney, it was Becky. Still, she found herself quite surprised when his personality seemed nothing like the chatter she heard from the other women. By now, a trio in particular had managed to foist themselves into his company at one or another of the mealtimes. Despite all their best efforts, it seemed he never revealed much of anything. One of the flirts remarked he had a way of turning the conversation away from himself after repeated blunt questions. He used little references from literature, history and the typical movies and music. Their pooled knowledge drew an image of a most mysterious gentleman who seemed to know something about everything, yet said almost nothing which wasn’t somehow an echo of what they had revealed already. He showed no interest in correcting a blatant lie about him, leaving them in some confusion as to what was true.
To Becky, he seemed completely open and honest. True, he was in no hurry to tell his tale, but there was no evasion. Instead, the answers were simply far out of the normal band of expectations. You would never have guessed any significant portion of the truth about him. Rod could not be characterized easily because he simply didn’t fit into any of the standard categories. Still, within the parameters of her official authority to query him, he was quite forthcoming.
His current contract made him simply a reporter in the sense of writing for the agency that hired him. There was actually a large stack of surveys for all the different offices and installations served by the bureaucratic mess where they sat at that moment. Each survey was of a different type for each of the different offices. In some cases, he had two or more different surveys for each official entity, with parameters requiring he carry out interviews at different times in their various projects, etc. He would be going back to some locations repeatedly throughout the coming year. He seemed to think riding thirty of forty miles round-trip was no big deal, but was prepared to take his bike along on the occasional train ride for more distant locations, and then cycling the rest of the way.
Most of his surveys seemed somehow the indirect result of investigations into a recent string of scandals back in Washington, DC. However, this particular approach was completely different from what anyone else had seen in the past. She noted this carefully, leaving it up to him to explain if he wanted. Something inside her said his answer was plausible and honest, so she took it at face value. There was not a shred of boasting, but he explained he did have an important unnamed Somebody sponsoring him. This sponsor believed Rod could provide some unique perspective based on his published writings and previous experience as a military veteran.
Something told her simply calling him a writer would be a mistake, though. She asked, and received, from him a couple of Internet links to his published work. He asked for a rough outline of religious activity on the installation. They had a contract chaplain and the occasional visit from a military one, but only about half the community engaged in any part of the religious activities on a regular basis. She was officially the point of contact for that stuff, holding some Christian beliefs of her own, but didn’t really care much for what was available up to that point. Nothing of that sort was ever going to please everyone.
That was when he shocked her. Glancing at his watch, he rose and remarked he’d love to visit with her again, but had an appointment on the other side of the installation about his quarters. He paused and said, “I can’t blame you for wishing there was something better. I believe if you glance through my writings, you’ll understand what I mean. Something tells me we are kindred souls in some ways; I would highly value having someone I could talk to about it.” He dropped a card on her desk with his email address.

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A Lady in Waiting 3

Posted on January 21, 2013 by ehurst

Rebecca wasn’t one of those bored flirty women.
She might have been, but it would have taken entirely too much effort to be somebody she wasn’t. Growing up in rural Tennessee, she did what most country girls did, but wasn’t pretty enough to get that many dates. Not homely, just no sparkle. On a whim, when a public school exam pegged her as talented in whatever incomprehensible skills and character traits government bureaucracies were seeking, she took a job offer at some big welfare office off in the city as mail clerk. That led to data entry, then some advancement courses, and so forth. When other jobs opened up, if one seemed half-way interesting, she grabbed it. She moved across the country several times and never saw much of her home state again, though she carried that rural Tennessee drawl wherever she went.
She was never really ambitious, never really qualified for big promotions, always hitting that solid middle level of management everywhere she went. Somehow, she found herself assigned some nebulous job as Community Coordinator on this God-forsaken installation. She laughingly called her office Gossip Central, since it seemed little more than that in terms of how it actually operated. In the typical fulfillment of bureaucratic requirements, written by a string of people who had never done any similar work at any time in their lives, and approved by officials who didn’t in the least care what it was really all about, she had all the hassles of any other bureaucrat in any other office and really didn’t have to do a darn thing that mattered.
But that would have been against her conscience, so she did what little she could to bless people with some sense of community and belonging informally. All the other stuff associated with her job was simply justification for paying her. Everyone liked her but no one really loved her.
It’s not as if she never dated anyone; she was no virgin. She had been burned enough times in romance to be very cautious because she knew she had none of the assets and talents as the flirty bunch. Like most women, she worked out in the gym out of sheer boredom, so had to listen to a lot of the sort of women’s locker-room gossip she found wholly distasteful. Her reaction wasn’t prudish and she sometimes wished she had some tales of her own. Not that she would ever tell anyone if she did. Maybe a couple of pals, but this was during a time in the natural bureaucratic rhythm of life when she had no close friends, no confidants.
Completely by accident she was the one person on the installation who actually knew something about the new guy. It was simply her job. In the routine procedures of taking his place on the installation, he had to visit her office so she could run through her official spiel. Perhaps it was entirely random, but in the long list of offices he had to visit during in-processing, he came to hers almost last.

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The Sin of Safety

Posted on January 21, 2013 by ehurst

I’ve approached this at least once before. Let’s see if we can expand the comment so folks have no excuse.
God’s Word is confusing only if you refuse to read it the way it was written. The Hebrew mystical approach to life recognizes this world is a sewer at best, a massive forest of shadows and lies. You can find truth in this world, but it didn’t come from this world. You can also think you’ve found some truth if you wallow in self-deception, but all truth starts with God’s revelation.
His revelation says rather bluntly this realm of existence is messed up, broken, permanently damaged in its fundamental nature. In no uncertain terms He has warned it will not be fixed ever, but will eventually be destroyed and replaced with something better. If you have sufficient intelligence to recognize beauty and truth when it appears in this realm, you ain’t seen nothing yet. But the really good stuff God is serving up later is not going to happen in this realm. This entire universe, all of Creation, is slated for destruction. End of story.
As a part of recognizing that truth, you realize God has offered a temporary provision for taking care of business in the meantime. I refer to it as the Laws of God, the moral fabric of the universe and the invisible truth behind the shadows of this realm. People who are spiritually aware can see these things, can see beyond the obvious and apparent “reality” to something deeper. Because I have seen evidence of that sensitivity outside the Christian religion, I would never claim only Christians can see it. Thus, you won’t get from me a doctrinal assertion you have to share my theology to share my mystical apprehensions. You don’t have to believe in my God to benefit from His truth.
What I do assert is His Laws bluntly say you cannot get perfection here. Further, you really can’t even get much good. It’s just barely possible to have something decent if you’ll apply the full range of prescriptions in His Laws, but that has never been done consistently, so I’m pretty cynical about it happening. Look, God gave it to some folks on a silver platter and they threw it away. I rather doubt any significant portion of humanity will ever rise to that height again. So we should expect things to be pretty shitty, which is what comes with living in a sewer.
That means you should reasonably expect a certain amount of death and destruction. At our best as humans, we will be killing numbers of each other at a basal rate of attrition. Try not to be asinine enough to waste time on calculating numbers; embrace the concept. God says so. Ever hear of Afghanistan? Left to themselves, they carry out on-going warfare which works out to a rough equilibrium. Interfering from the outside simply guarantees even worse death and destruction, but pushes it out to a longer and much deeper wave pattern. Even the slightest interference at all will change their cycle. Meanwhile, whomever is stupid enough and arrogant enough to interfere inevitably causes greater death and destruction than those alleged wild Afghan tribal warlords. In the process, the interfering “civilization” is always in the end far less civilized than the Afghans. They tend to stop with a certain minimal amount of death, but civilized people always tend to absolutism, as in genocide.
Genghis Khan felt it was necessary to extend his dominion over Afghanistan. The only way he could do it was in total annihilation of the population. Granted, those still living in places he had not yet visited decided to stop resisting. But then Khan left and they went back to their old ways. But his plan was pretty much what ours is turning out to be. Only we are more hateful about it. Khan didn’t feel too much anger and passion about it, just psychopathic resolve. Kill them all and there will be peace. There’s a nugget of truth there. The price of safety is killing everyone you try to keep “safe.” The price for optimum existence on earth is minding your own business. Stop trying to fix things you can’t possibly comprehend. Least of all can you comprehend it better than the God who made all things. I would suggest the Afghans are among the most realistically civilized humans on the planet.
This drive to efficiency, as if human life can be measured in terms of economic units, is about as Satanic as it gets. This is the fundamental approach of all Western Civilization, all Western philosophy. Reducing things to calculations of efficiency is poking God in the eye. He might be slow to react as we measure things, but His reactions can’t be measured on our scales when they come. How do you argue with someone who can make your planet dissolve into subatomic particles? His revelation says if He doesn’t actively hold things together, that evaporation is what happens.
I won’t take up the room here to detail all the ways in which a righteous man under God’s Laws would have to kill people we somehow insist must be left alive, while that man would spare people we insist on killing. In the balance of things, we slaughter far more than the Laws of God suggest is necessary, and we slaughter the ones He would leave alive. We refuse to correct those He says are wrong, refusing to correct the things He says are wrong. A critical part of our failure is the unspeakable arrogance of demanding for ourselves what we cannot bear others having.
Stop pretending you can make your world safer and more efficient than God says is possible. You will be fighting Him, at the very least calling Him a liar to His face.

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A Lady in Waiting 2

Posted on January 21, 2013 by ehurst

Coming to work at a government installation of this sort always required everyone to pass through a selection of offices so the proper support system could be engaged. His contract required precious little, but bureaucratic procedures seldom varied. There was at first a struggle by the various bureaucrats trying to understand just how little they were required to do for him. Aside from basic life support and computer network access, there really wasn’t anything he needed. He still had to report to the community management for the sake of his human existence and presence on the facility, but he was otherwise entirely independent. He was not a community asset aside from bearing his share of the load for using what he needed. Since there were almost no military personnel there, just about everything was by contract. So all he had to actually do was appear at a couple of monthly functions and clean his own quarters.
There had been a pretty poor response from the host nation locals on the janitorial contracts, so not every building was properly covered. He seemed to take that in stride. The only space left was on the upper floor of what had been a military barracks long ago. They convinced facilities management to clear the stored junk from the old floor commander room next to the stairwell for him. This way he had a private toilet and shower, plus enough space to secure the one odd item on his contract: a bicycle.
Motor vehicles would always be at a premium and it seemed he had known this before shipping over from the States. So there was a provision in his contract to ship a bicycle he owned. This simply contributed to his already very high degree of independence.
The whole image of a man whose age was hard to guess, but obviously mature, striking but entirely private, friendly even as he was standoffish, was just a bit much for the humdrum world of government bureaucrats. There was endless speculation about how much of these oddball provisions were part of some kind of spying mission. Was it really all just some silly make work project with no real work, or was he part of the numerous clandestine agencies in the government? The few representatives of such agencies on the installation denied it, but that was their job, wasn’t it?
As anyone might expect, this served only to fuel greater interest from the bored flirty women working there.

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A Lady in Waiting 1

Posted on January 20, 2013 by ehurst

She wore the glow proudly. Not boasting, which would be wholly unnecessary, but just the utter sense of peace and contentment that nothing else mattered. They knew. They had a thousand questions, but they all boiled down, “Why you? Why not one of us?”
Her answer boiled down to, “If I told you, you’d never understand.” She admired the silver band on her finger for the hundredth time that morning and walked into the gym for her morning workout. It all happened so fast. Had it been only a week ago?
********
No one would mistake him for a movie star. He was handsome enough, but it was more a matter of how he carried himself. It was self-confidence on a different level. Without domineering or demanding, it seemed as if he could have commanded any whim crossing his mind and people would jump. It was the presence he projected when he walked into the room.
He was the new guy, officially an unimportant nobody, hired on a peripheral contract. He had no office, nor was their any requirement, so no one had to make room for him. For that matter, his office was in his backpack, an aging but durable laptop. Someone back in the States had hired him to conduct surveys and write the reports no one else had time to do, reports that would be read by some oversight committee at some regulatory agency. The few in the admin offices who knew about his contract spoke as if he was simply a friend of someone important carrying out a make work mission. But this was hardly a choice assignment.
He flashed his badge to the head-count at the doorway, signed the register, then strolled nonchalantly down the serving line, picking out some of this and that. The food was always decent, adequate, but nothing to write home about. The cafeteria was the largest single open room on the installation, almost geographically dead center. Perhaps you could have dug through the facility archives and found out what it was originally, but it probably wasn’t any kind of dining facility, more like an industrial assembly line. Current operations never seemed to justify budgeting for refurbishing the place, not even so much as painting the bare concrete floor. But the staff kept it clean, the kitchen always smelled okay, so no one felt the need to pick through their food looking for inedible debris.
The place was used as an ad hoc meeting room when someone’s cramped office wouldn’t hold the bodies for a conference, so there were always extra tables. As he passed, a few of the friendlier workers greeted and welcomed him. He declined offers to join any of the groups, but took up one of the empty tables off to one side.
Among the folks at lunch today were some of the more socially active women you could find in any bunch of paper pushers working for the various government agencies sponsoring facilities like this. We’ve all seen the type: some divorced, some never married and all hungry for fresh meat. Three in particular tried to flirt with him. His expression was mild, almost friendly, but he never quite smiled at them. He answered with precious few words when he deemed it appropriate, but was largely uncommunicative. What he said suggested he really needed to spend time getting things set up for his work.
So at the small table alone, his food was on one side and the laptop was placed on the other. He divided his time between eating, drinking and poking at the computer. His eyes seldom left the screen or his food tray.

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The Bride Not Ready

Posted on January 20, 2013 by ehurst

Western Christian men aren’t always comfortable with idea of being a part of the Bride of Christ. Western mythology makes them so. Western culture has no place for parable as a means of communication as it comes to us in Scripture.
I’m deeply concerned, almost painfully sorrowful, at how many Christians are going to lose their faith in the coming tribulation. Try to understand: The eternal status of a soul is entirely God’s business. I don’t fear people losing their citizenship in Heaven, since there is nothing any human can do to affect that either way. Hell is bad enough, but there’s no reason to wallow in Hell on earth. I fear people losing what is available in Kingdom Service here on earth. A vast number of Western Christians, Americans in particular, will lose what little grip on peace and sanity is available to them right now.
Permit me to inject here a bit of prophetcraft for the students of prophecy. Actually, it’s fundamental mysticism itself. I struggle to verbalize how God communicates to a living spirit in such a way that the mind can formulate its mission. God speaks to those whom He has raised to spiritual life, but the conscious part of that is really difficult to express. For me, it often comes as a piece of fiction, an imaginary narrative. Even when some part of that story appeals to my lesser fleshly desires, if I ride out that part of the storm, if that story simply won’t go away after I get past the initial human weakness, then somewhere in there is a message from God. I have to keep bouncing that thing off my convictions until something comes back I can recognize. So I play with the story line and rewrite the dialog, testing it again and again. I keep trying to see if something in my convictions will click, something which will give me peace so the story stops nagging me.
Sometimes I write the story here for you to read; sometimes I can’t. Either way, this is how God speaks to me and I’ve learned to listen. I keep running the story in my mind with variations until it all falls into place. Not the quality of the story, but its meaning in spiritual terms I can recognize and can use. I look for something that can be woven into my mission, something which constitutes a command from God. It’s not always a clarification of something I didn’t quite understand. Sometimes it’s just a restatement in fresh terms.
The most recent story went peaceful when I realized it was about the Bride of Christ. There was another thread of preaching winding its way through my head, and the two merged at the point of that image. If you’ve been keeping track of my blather the past few days, you may recall I wrote about a frightful vision of people here in America being dragged off to Hell alive. I suppose if I could grab a few ears in Washington, DC, I’d give them that warning. Not my concern, really. I’m given a message to share with whomever will listen. A thread of peaching arose from that vision as a warning to the churches here in America. Most of them aren’t ready to accept their reservation as part of the Bride of Christ.
Don’t get hung up on the idea of His coming back in the same literal sense which fills so much garbage Christian entertainment these days. He comes into a lot of people’s lives all over the world, and all over human history. For them, in spiritual terms, or on the spiritual plane, it’s a Second Coming apocalyptic experience in the soul. Every time God sends His wrath on the earth, it’s a time of Christ coming for His Bride in that same spiritual sense. See beyond the merely literal; see through the shadows. What we have coming down upon us now in this part of human history is a time of tribulation, a time of visitation. It won’t be the Second Coming in the typical sense, but it will be a return of Christ for His people on a spiritual plane. He’s coming to visit and bring gifts to His Bride and stoke her interest; the wedding isn’t for a while yet.
It’s this visit I sense the American Christians won’t understand. They are so wrapped up in a vast ocean of mythology drawn from Western culture, their expectations are far removed from the reality. God doesn’t operate according to your rules of logic, American Christian. You think you know the Bible, but you don’t have a clue. Some of this will be like the Passover during the Exodus, when His people can be spared some of the curses, but only if they apply the blood on the door frame. Because so few understand the spiritual meaning of this, because they reject the Hebrew meaning of how it applies in the rituals of our daily existence, too many of them will lose their firstborn or whatever else that image represents.
In their minds, they are going to hold God accountable to their logical frame of reference. When things don’t go as they expect, some part of them will die. They are in for an extremely rough ride. They may well fall away from any practice of Christian faith, accurate or otherwise. It will destroy what little witness they have, leaving them even farther away from God’s glory than they already are. Outside of God’s glory is exposure to things which will prick their living spirits in ways dead spirits never experience. The inner turmoil is worse than madness; it will be the Devil taunting them and gaining a far bigger hold on their human experience on earth. The shadows will deepen for them. It will be Hell on earth.
God intends what is coming to be a shock. He can’t simply ignore what’s going on. But truth can’t be adjusted to match what Christians insist it is. God has to be true to His nature, which means consistent with His past revelation. That revelation must be in terms of the Hebrew mystical intellectual culture He created as the vehicle for His revelation. If you miss it, that’s your problem. We might heap a lot of blame on all those who went before us and buried the truth, and then complain to God we were crippled by those who claimed to speak for Him. Yet I warn you, if He can break through my hardheaded blindness and show me this painfully obvious message, He can do it for you.
And, dear Christian brother and sister, after reading this warning, if you can simply walk away shaking your head, but unshaken in your heart, there is nothing left I can do for you. I’m going to write that story that has been buzzing in my head, but please don’t mistake the warning written between the lines. When God comes to visit, you may well miss Him because you simply don’t recognize Him.

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Bits and Pieces 6

Posted on January 19, 2013 by ehurst

As you might expect, my humble drivel regarding Aaron Swartz is far better covered by the inimitable Glenn Greenwald. I don’t walk with Greenwald on everything, but if you need more conventional reasons to think this was a crucifixion for purely political gain, he nails it. My approach was mystical, of course, seeking to expose the moral fabric of the issue.
What Greenwald could not possibly cover in his columns is the vision I saw last night. Reviewing my own words on the issue of oppression, I was still mourning the depth of evil to which we’ve sunk and I saw a tableau where a considerable number of people slid off into Hell alive. The impact was thinking of all the horror of not even the mercy of dying first, but facing Satan while still in the flesh. Naturally that would mean an unspeakably horrific death right there, then facing eternity in his clutches. You can’t hang onto some inflated sense of self-righteous justice when you see things like that during your waking moments. All you can do is shiver and quake with thanksgiving your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.
We are passing into an age of clarity and polarization. Don’t read that in the sense of some vast period of time, or signaling some new stage of human existence. It’s just another aspect of every period of tribulation in human history. It’s the nature of “That Day” in Scripture. God comes in a ferocious display of wrath against sin. To the degree you cling to sin, it will hurt. To the degree you cling to righteousness, you rejoice at His appearing. Few are holy enough to simply transition directly into Heaven as did Elijah and Enoch, but the scary thing is how many are slated to translate into Hell.
I can’t pretend to have a clue what will follow, whether any of us would see a measure of penitence as better times. I rather think the cataclysms, such as they may be, will leave humans more scattered and isolated than anyone could now imagine. I have no feel for the level of death and destruction, but I seriously doubt anyone living has any idea what’s coming. That’s because everyone plotting and conspiring has no idea what they are fooling with, and things no human can comprehend, much less control, will be unleashed and it will manifest God’s fury. I remain convinced it will be the end of Western Civilization. I suppose those who lose the most are those who cling most tightly to the vision of Western Civ as somehow God’s own idea.
Sure, an apocalypse of sorts, but not the final one by any means. Sorry, no timetable from me, either. On the other hand, I keep sensing I’ll see some of it with my own eyes.

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Shadow Books

Posted on January 18, 2013 by ehurst

A few months back I was inspired. Yes, it truly was the hand of God. There was no option for saying, “Nah, I’d rather not.” It was a powerful move of the spirit.
After spending some time in contemplation and prayer, I made my best estimate of what God required and shared the idea. That sharing was part of the inspiration. Had you asked, I could have told you at the time neither the project, the participation, nor the product was likely to be the point of it all, as things are measured in the Spirit Realm. The point was all of those and none of them. The point cannot be expressed in human language.
So I announced the project here on this blog and got some enthusiastic response. Promises were made and we all shared with some enthusiasm how it would go and how it would turn out. I kept the door wide open, as best I was able. A few kept their promises, but for others, reality set in. That is, their initial willingness and enthusiasm met some interference. Some bailed altogether, some part way through, some right at the very end. Reality is like that. I failed some, too.
Did God fail? Don’t even go there. Did I get a false vision? Wrong question. The human component of this tale is loaded with failures. The biggest failure was the expectation God was going to do something we each and together thought He should do. Our visions were not all the same, nor could they be. Still, the project went through to completion and produced the book, The Mind of Christ. If I listen to any part of my human feelings, I would be frankly angry with some of the contributors, and surely with those who made promises they didn’t keep. But then, I would also be angry at myself. And I was, but the anger means nothing, just as the failures do. The anger was a shadow I easily dismissed.
Nor was I expecting this book to change the world. Do you know, just over a hundred people have downloaded a copy from Smashwords? I wonder how many actually read it, how many understand it, how many believe any part of it. Were they even a factor? Yes and no. I may never know.
For me, I suppose I can say it started something in the form of provoking me to rewrite my old material and publish as books. That’s the business of the Ancient Truth series of books. At the same time, I have not received so much as a penny from any of them. Not even a donation, since the books are all free. And I don’t care. It won’t look good on LinkedIn, but I don’t care about that either. And on Facebook, everyone still acts like I can’t be there as a prophet, only a buddy they want to yack at now and then. I suppose a few people still take my prophetic ministry seriously, on some level, but most remain firmly in the airhead territory.
That’s okay. The books, the ministry, the vast outpouring of blather here on the blog — it’s all shadows. Read the post before this one.
It’s all one big failure, if you see it with human eyes. If I were humanly successful, I’d be an even bigger failure in the Spirit Realm, though. The Spirit tells me the books are what He wants. He makes me at peace with them and the amount of time I am able to put into them. He makes me at peace with the apparent broad lack of human interest in all of it. Something in this pierces the shadows, and most of my conscious mind will never understand a bit of it.
And if you read this far, maybe there’s a piercing of shadows for you. Enjoy.

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