Sanity Subversive 2: What

Posted on October 4, 2010 by ehurst

They sat in clumps of three or four in various postures on the mixed furniture. There was no obvious focus of attention, which pleased him immensely. The chatter tapered off quickly as he and the teacher entered to room. A few uncovered fluorescent lights glowed fitfully. He felt it was a perfect metaphor of the students waiting for them there.

The teacher made a perfunctory introduction as he moved to the approximate center of mass of the twenty or so students. The remnants of a desk offered him a relatively stable seat, as most of the kids offered some sort of greeting.

He smiled around at them, ignoring the few who persisted in whispered conversation. “What are we here for?”

One or two answered without hesitation, “This is the Peace Club.”

“Good,” he responded. “At least you know what is supposed to be going on here, so you’ll know if you are in the right place.” He grinned.

Turning to the student nearest him, a rather sturdy young man, he asked, “Tell me what you think we will be doing here. What is this Peace Club all about?”

And so it went, with a similar challenge presented to everyone. He pressed no one to actually answer, but most did say a few words, with the answers getting better organized as more spoke up. A few terse answers were better thought out than the others, but it was too soon to tag any stars. The sum total of their answers were mostly anti-war, anti-violence, progressive peace-nik stuff.

“We will do all of those things, and none of them.” He noted with satisfaction no one was apparently shaken by his words. “The worst thing we could do is organize and set an agenda. That would be so artificial we would be nothing more than one more cog in the machine. We would become the planned and provided opposition in a battle to make sure no one ever has any real peace.”

A few raised eyebrows, but this was still not so different than any politician had said.

“If you were hoping for rallies, demonstrations, marching, signs and banners, or more assertive actions, don’t look to me to guide you. Some of you will surely do those things, and I’ll be glad to teach you the savvy to make it effective, but that’s not our primary objective. Yes, we may even see some members of this group in detention, or perhaps arrested, as some of you could engage in acts of sabotage.”

He sat back, scanning the group again. “But that’s not the point of our meetings. I’m not a coach with a game plan, and inspiring speeches to get you all psyched for challenges. This won’t be the locker room, nor even a practice hall. We are not an extension of the Green movement, the Communists or Socialists, and certainly not capitalists. Not a single political party on this earth will have any to do with us.”

He stood, mocking some great and dynamic speakers. With excessive drama, he gestured and spoke with an affected voice. “Yes, boys and girls, we give birth today in this room to the movement which will change the world!”

To scattered chuckles and giggles he sat back down. With all seriousness, “I’m not here to be your leader.”

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Sanity Subversive 1: Where

Posted on October 3, 2010 by ehurst

It was ugly.

There was surely some time in the past, before this ancient facade was constructed, someone thought it was attractive, or perhaps simply appropriate for the purpose. But it was ugly — cast arches and framing in concrete, and burnt red bricks dominating. All of it was crumbling.

This was the older part of the high school campus. The predictable nature of bureaucratic inertial action kept the historic building in use, with a generous maintenance budget, most of which was consumed in more bureaucracy. Thus the bureaucracy pronounced it well maintained simply because it was so on paper. He stood for a moment envisioning brightly colored murals and abstract designs, but realized the structure would probably not offer much of a permanent painting surface.

With a rueful sigh, he climbed the worn stone steps. Pulling on what was surely the eighth set of doors, none of which ever properly fit, the ponderous and incongruous nondescript blank faced steel door, he stepped into the entry hall.

The whole thing was the symbol of political favor and disfavor. The fancy, new and equally ugly facility which had been built on the confiscated warehouse site next door was reserved for the most politically popular activities, those deemed so important the teachers’ fears of stuff happening to the expensive new equipment and supplies in their classrooms was set aside. In this building were the teachers and classes required by some other bureaucracy, but somehow not participating in the current trends of the school bureaucrats. One bureaucracy thumbing its nose at another. Thus, unfavored extracurricular activities were also relegated to this mausoleum.

As it was, his group met in the basement room used for storing the ancient and unused desks, most of which were broken in some way. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he turned into a darkened hallway to be greeted by the sound of light stepping in sensible shoes. In a random splash of light he met the faculty sponsor for his meeting. This was the first time they met in the flesh, having only chatted online in a forum until now.

It was her first year teaching. She was not particularly young, so she had her own ideas about things. Nor was she particularly pretty or interesting in any of the ways which breed popularity with the management. With a half-smile, he greeted her, all the while wondering how long she would last. He had been a public school teacher himself once, and knew all too well how the system either broke you down by making you adopt a measure of its bureaucratic conformance, or made you so miserable you had to leave teaching, or at least that particular school system.

Her smile and response was all he needed to realize she would last longer than most. She turned to walk with him down to the end of the hall to the assigned room, and chatted about her positive hopes, as if this were the best of all possible worlds for such a thing. From the direction of their destination even now were the scattered sounds of student chatter and laughter.

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Peace Radical for a Radical Peace

Posted on October 2, 2010 by ehurst

Without offering room for debate, I make the naked assertion peace is not an ideal. You cannot arrive at peace through mere study and logic. You cannot make peace some disembodied ideal you pursue through Peace Studies or such. You can promote peace only by being peaceful yourself. Peace is by nature a living entity, and it must live in you, or you cannot comprehend any part of it.

Sure, we see the symptoms of peace as deescalation of tensions. That’s if we understand tensions are natural to the human condition. We all want something we don’t yet have, and we cannot help perceive someone is getting in the way. Regardless how we handle it, tension is a fact of life. The problem, then, is not the tension, but how it is handled.

Or so it seems. I agree with Dr. Kolkey in one aspect of his thesis: Every war in history appears to be the result of nothing more than the personal ambitions of one or another ruler. It has never, ever been in the national interest, or any approximation of that, but always the personal desires of some big shot who is all too willing to lie about his motives. Perhaps he lies even to himself, but every war has been nothing more than a personal gripe of some ruler or group of rulers.

And I agree with what lies behind the answer Dr. Kolkey offers. While he asserts we must make sure every leader lives in fear of his subjects, I would say that is just another way of describing decentralization of power. Leaders who have all the power fear nothing. Leaders in a world where such concentration of power is not possible won’t make war with the lives of those they lead. They can’t.

But the mechanics of implementation are the real question here. How do you and I go about changing how folks live so that power remains decentralized? Obviously, it requires raising a consciousness. So far, various peace movements have never gotten too far. That is in part because the peace movements themselves were too often centralized. But worse, they viewed peace through the logic of achievements, of goals, something so vital it could eventually move people to compromise principles, the old end-justifies-means question. You can’t avoid that if you pursue peace down the wrong trail. You’ll end up chasing ghosts, because you don’t understand where peace flourishes. It’s like hunting waterfowl in the desert.

Peace is a very personal force. You get there by commitment, by loving it enough to sacrifice just about anything for it. All that blather by experts around the world means nothing without such a commitment. No, I don’t mean making peace your god; rather understand peace as one character trait of any god worthy of worship. Yes, I’m a Christ follower, but I realize where peace lives, so does He. You can think of it any way you like, but peaceful people smell like the robes of Christ, the smells of long hikes across rocky mountainous terrain, sleeping under the stars, the smell of sheep and unwashed humans crowding around in desperation, of perfumed hair and feet, of blood and beams of wood.

Let’s serve peace. Just presenting the peaceful ways to all you encounter is the one best way to promote the idea there is a better way than fighting. We don’t need a movement. We can recognize each other easily if we choose to keep our eyes open. Do your own peace, and make friends with those who are making peace in other ways.

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For the Children

Posted on October 1, 2010 by ehurst

Because of our cultural truculence in rejecting biblical values regarding children, I felt this required its own article. In the West generally, and in the America particularly, we do everything backwards with our kids.

Start here: Your first duty it to God Almighty. If He wants to take your children, fighting Him is the worst thing you can do for them. They are His children first, and He granted them to you. If He is not sovereign in every detail of your existence, He is not your Lord.

Next, you must understand it is better for your children to be martyrs than murderers. It is better that they learn to refuse evil commands from mere men, at the cost of their own lives, than to disobey God. We are pacifist against all human governments because not a one of them uses violence as God decreed. God has not forbidden people from defending their homes and families from attackers, but He demands you first have something He considers worthy of defense. Life itself is not that something.

Related to that: The worst thing you can ever do is render your children unto Caesar, as it were, because it’s just a step away from throwing them to Molech. If you are going to fulfill your duty to God in raising His children, you have to understand they must be taught to obey His Laws. They will not learn that in any government education program. If your local school was controlled by the parents of the children, that would be fine. As a former “professional educator” in the public school systems, I assert with full conviction you have almost no input regarding the contents of their education, despite the possible illusion of such input.

They start very early with the conditioning from the likes of TV, movies, music and other entertainments. Even for the first church in Jerusalem, this was an issue, as the teaching of the Law of Moses was corrupted by Hellenism. However, they had the advantage of not having to fight for the right to teach their children better. Aside from a few radical communities such as Sparta, most early Gentile communities had similar advantages over educational choices. On the other hand, they had a huge barrier overcoming the local conditioning of the various pagan cultures. Today, a proper biblical education might as well be from another planet.

But we cannot begin to correct this until we first correct our own assumptions about child rearing. It is absolutely critical for children to develop with the doting attention of their mother during the first five years of life. Lots of cuddling, lots of attention, all day long from their mother first, then from others in the extended family — this is alien to our life style. All the more so with all these alternatives to actually raising our children. We have conditioned women to insist they have other things to do, more interesting, more fulfilling personally, than be a full time mother. God help us.

The fathers should be involved, but their role as head of the family typically means being busy most of the day. Somewhere around age five, that exposure to father should increase incrementally, but dramatically, over the next two years. In an ideal world, a father’s work would allow the children to be with him at least part of the time, helping some. It is in the father’s care they learn their place in this world, learn to incorporate other adults into their modeling of behavior. Yes, for girls there is less of this, but there still needs to be some. Somewhere around ages seven to nine, they begin apprenticing themselves toward their adult work life. Ideally, they would be exposed to all of the different types of work they might see from the whole clan, but only in the most exceptional cases of rare talent should anyone consider training outside the immediate covenant community.

At age nine or so the gender separation in public becomes essential. They are no longer little kids, and sexual differentiation brings in a host of moral issues. Young ladies are no longer to run free in the world, but must be escorted. They have only a few years to become prepared for marriage, and it is serious hard work. Boys must generally be kept from social contact with unrelated females until they are mature enough to take their place in society as men. Except for those whose callings require strong academic investment, there is really nothing inherent in human development requiring education past age fourteen or fifteen. At this point they should be ready to enter full time apprenticeship.

Marriage between age mates is simply not a good idea. The females are typically far, far more mature than any males their own age, up until men are approaching thirty. By that time a woman takes increasing risks bearing children, so she is married rather young to someone at least a decade older. By no means should any female be left to her own devices to choose a mate; her family is responsible for making things happen.

This is the way God’s people did things from the beginning, yet it seems repugnant and alien to us. We have so very far to go. Until we make a commitment to begin moving in this direction, we cannot pretend anything we do for our children is any good. Remaking our social order around the biblical mandates is now very much a tall order, as even churches seldom consider, much less act, accordingly. Most churches do nothing to remake people into God’s image for life in a fallen world, but simply reflect some of the tamer elements of the society around them.

We cannot continue pickling our children in this evil world.

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The Simple Life

Posted on September 30, 2010 by ehurst

You have one earthly purpose: To peel away the obscuring lies of this world so people can see God’s glory.

Chasing all the dreams of mankind, your nation or some worthy cause, or simply your own prosperity and comfort is evil. That is, unless those things are directly related to your calling in Christ. What makes it so deceptive for everyone is assuming those are things Christ promoted. He told us to pick up our crosses, not strive for any human measure of success. That means we look forward to dying at God’s whim.

No language offers words sufficient to shock you into the truth about this. All that I see and can touch as “mine” is nothing more than tools for the mission. Yes, I really do enjoy a lot of extravagant blessings from God, but they don’t have my heart; He does. The only hope I have is dying when God is ready to bring me Home.

When you really can embrace all that, it changes a lot of the things we do with our time on this earth. There is no need for amassing possessions, nor even a good name. If they come, we use them for the primary purpose already stated. If not, we still seek ways to get the job done. But so this job can be done, God offers a huge pile of promises related to how we go about this life.

When we take the covenants as a whole, we find God takes an interest in His own glory by supporting our obedience with tangible blessings. The very detailed specifics in the Law of Moses are simply a reflection of God’s character. Nothing in the Law pertains to your spiritual condition, though it does gain mention often enough. But you don’t need to be born again to understand the Law, nor what it offers as a covenant. You simply need to embrace the intellectual culture in which it was cast, and it all makes perfect sense.

Even after the Fall, the fundamental moral nature of Creation still lives and affects all things. You can ignore the Law and God and learn an awful lot about the observable mechanics of things, but you’ll never really understand what directs those mechanics until you wrap your mind around the moral imperatives not visible by mere scientific inquiry. Science as we know it utterly materialistic, and relentlessly amoral. But cast against God’s revelation, that simply means immoral. You’ll never understand life, the universe and everything unless you understand the logic of the Bible, the logic and epistemological assumptions behind it.

When you reduce things to their essence, you have no real need for most of what we see. That’s because almost everything man has accomplished is a desperate attempt to replace what we lost in the Fall. Adam was master of Creation as God’s agent. We cannot begin to grasp what that was like, but we can grasp the fact itself. We can feel some siren call drawing us to that mastery, but we can’t find a path without passing through God’s revelation. Our fallen condition rejects that, fears it, just is not able to go there. Only God Himself can make that happen. So we plumb the depths of our abilities to manipulate what we can do without taking that path. All that you see in this modern world reflects the bottomless desire to recover the peace, contentment and security Adam had in the Garden, and it won’t ever satisfy.

Instead, we go through endless cycles of raising up great civilizations, exhausting their genius, then stumbling into the downward spiral of collapse. Then we do it again. In the case of Western Civilization, the killing blow was manifested in the so-called Enlightenment. While that climax spun off many threads, each reaching their own peak independently, the philosophical fire itself had begun to burn out. Across the many generations, we see a particularly nasty civilization coming slowly to a particularly nasty and justified death. This is a time of tribulation, and the saints of God of will tribulate. We are here in the midst of the crumbling collapse, swept up in the debris of vast sorrows.

The best way to manifest God’s glory is to return to that First Century church lifestyle, insofar as we can understand it. We are the Tribulation Church of this age, and seeing all these things from the eternal perspective, we realize it was all about nothing. We who remember won’t miss it when it’s gone. Instead, we turn back to the most basic requirements for life according to God’s Laws, because in those Laws are found the best mankind can have in this fallen world. These are expressions of the very fundamental moral nature of the universe, as close as we can get to returning to Eden.

Not only can we say it doesn’t really take that much, we can assert with eternal finality it means tossing aside almost everything we know in our Western world. We pursue the most basic essentials of living on the bottom of the economy, intentionally slipping through the cracks, because the economy we see around us is corrupt — it’s Babylon. So we need only the essentials of food, cover from the weather, and basic health and security. If we stick to these basics in the full trust of God’s provision, He guarantees we shall have all these things, with abundant miracles if necessary, as a fulfillment of His promises from the very beginning of the Fall. A lifestyle in pursuit of much beyond this is departing from His umbrella of promises.

How this calls out to you, and what it demands of you individually is between you and God. It does not necessarily mean sleeping under bridges, but you should be open to that. For most of us seeking the full embrace of the First Century church, it means taking advantage of things currently within reach, so long as they don’t conflict with good discipline in the Body of Christ. There are no rules; the things covered so far in this series have been intentionally soft-edged. Some things are obvious; most are simply a matter of discernment. The whole point remains blocking out things which disturb your spirit, and working to uncover the hidden glory of Christ.

That glory shines through choices which simplify and reduce life to the necessities which God commanded from the very beginning.

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Not Your Business

Posted on September 29, 2010 by ehurst

Unless you directly gather and use food and supplies for living, you’ll probably work at something which indirectly provides them by way of income. There is nothing sinful about receiving money for things people want you to do, or by direct barter. What makes that sinful is in the nature of the activity itself.

We have surely heard too much moralizing about whether to trade with this or that entity because they support something politically proper or improper. To make a religious value of something which is purely secular politics is a blasphemy — it reduces God to a human level. A significant part of the problem is the very existence of corporations as persons, but that is a matter of God’s Laws. We don’t have the leverage to change things, and it’s not our way. We use what God provides for His calling and purpose.

That still leaves us with a host of jobs which are sinful because of what they demand from the worker. You cannot serve Christ as a pole dancer. That job, whatever else it may be in the minds of some, serves only to provoke lust. If nothing else, it requires removing too much clothing in a public setting. What about professional show dancing? It’s the clothing thing, again. If you can do your job with decent cover, and without sexually suggestive moves, shake it all you like. We should avoid even watching sinful displays.

In today’s climate, I’d say you can’t work where you are required to put your hand to sin. If you don’t understand the problems with abortion, for example, you don’t understand God. But burying human remains, for whatever cause, is probably the last dignity you can offer anyone. There comes a point when you need to work at healing and redeeming, because if you boycott everything which is less than perfect, you’ll have nothing except what you make yourself. That’s not too bad if it’s your calling, but most of us can’t go there just yet. The world in which we live militates against that.

All the noisy protest and leverage actions in the world don’t help. The world is fallen and rejects the mere notion itself. Change comes not through political compulsion, but drawing with God’s glory. People around you have to know, have to understand what we believe God requires and why we believe it. We have to make our case, to the world and to each other.

It’s voluntary. I’m not your Holy Spirit. You have to decide for yourself what God demands or forbids, and whether you care. I can’t compel you to do right. The only thing I can do is keep my distance and not fellowship too closely if you don’t. Even then, the very point of decision is voluntary between us, and we each must decide what the Spirit requires. I can’t condemn you for refusing to work with me, any more than I can condemn you for doing what you find most compelling. It is entirely reciprocal. There is no place for animosity in such decisions.

We do what we are called to do. We serve the highest authority in the all Creation. There are times to force the issue, regardless of whether we expect to succeed. Simply do what is right regardless of consequences. Most of the time, we swallow our sorrow and keep praying for God to destroy sin by His wrath. It is His prerogative to change hearts, and His alone.

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More Disciplined Body

Posted on September 28, 2010 by ehurst

There is a place for strong women in church management.

In the Garden, Eve sinned by listening to the wrong voice. But the New Testament says she was deceived, lacking the particular spiritual discernment for things fundamental to human existence. She ventured outside her limits, making a decision which changed all Creation, which was not hers to make. Adam sinned because he refused to restrain her, but let her take the lead in that eternal decision. He did not stand up for God’s divine order.

In the Wilderness Tabernacle, those outside the Covenant had their place for worship. Women under the Covenant got a little closer, but men even closer. Only priests went up to the actual Tabernacle itself, and rarely inside it. It was not about spiritual holiness, but about vested responsibility. Worship was a parable demonstrating certain truths about the human situation as God views it.

The layout of the permanent Temple continued to reflect this. When the Temple was destroyed and Judah was exiled, they had to find some way to keep the Covenant alive. They developed and extended the worship which had always been permitted away from the Temple grounds. The synagogue reflects something of the Temple service. Synagogue leaders sat closest to the raised central platform for reading and teaching. Men sat around them, along with boys past their Bar Mitzvah. Women sat outside that, and Gentiles could gather farther back. This mattered, though, only when the attendance was large enough to warrant such formality.

In spiritual culture, everything is contextual. In the home, women can easily lead as much as men, except for those ultimate decisions which address duty to God. So in worship, men always lead, if available. In the household, women were more likely to be around to make lesser management decisions, presumably in accordance with her husband’s known concerns. She could surely order the servants and slaves around, but they were supposed to balk when they knew it something was contrary to the master’s stated wishes. It was fluid and contextual.

As the gospel spread into Gentile lands, and there were churches composed of mostly or all Gentile believers, no one was surprised to find women elders. The Apostles never batted an eye, apparently. The limitations we know about had to do with dividing between spiritual leadership and management issues. Eve was subject to deception on spiritual matters, which parabolically points to all women. Adam knew better, but was wrong for not taking the lead when it came to that spiritual issue, which only appeared to be a management issue.

If a man can be taught the cultural background necessary for true Christian living, so can a woman. Churches are spiritual families. They gather for worship, and such things require a very strong spiritual discernment and leadership. But the business of gathering and getting things done is a matter of God’s Laws.

The Covenant of Moses applied to Israel, and only to Israel — that nation, that place, that time. It ended at the Cross; the Veil was torn in two. Jesus dismissed the Talmud and corrected the Law of Moses. The latter was merely a contextual application of the higher Laws of God. We learn the Laws of God by reading the Bible with a spiritual understanding. Churches are not under the Talmud for sure, and not under a dead covenant, either. But their management is under Laws. Women can understand the Laws, and execute faithfully the Father’s wishes, same as any adult who seeks to know His Laws.

Families join as families. We give our allegiance to another government. The divine government is always right, regardless of any other government, so there is a sense in which we rebel against all human governments. We are the New Israel, a nation whose borders are in the Spirit Realm. To help us live in this fallen realm while our hearts are in the spiritual domain, He gave Laws. Not simply prescriptions and proscriptions, but a call to personal loyalty to Him. We don’t call people to become born-again; only God can breathe life into a dead spirit. We call sinners to repentance. That is the doorway to eternal life, to divine rebirth. No one of us knows whether any other is born-again, but we can surely know when they need to repent. The church operates under Laws because that’s all we can do.

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Disciplined Body

Posted on September 28, 2010 by ehurst

The church in Jerusalem lived under an rule of discipline and order most of us would hardly recognize. This was not an organization; it was a family. It was probably quite raucous at times, and voting would be extremely rare. Disagreements were family discussions, and in the end, the elder had the final say. Every step of the way was subject to negotiation, because efficiency was hardly a consideration. Nor was it a matter of rights, but entirely a matter of loving care and a burden for genuine welfare.

Even in our nuclear family households, we seldom come any where close to a first century Hebrew family. For the most part, females and anyone under 30 talked among themselves, but seldom spoke out. It was not a matter of having no say, but in how it was done. They always spoke through their immediate family relations, in which the father figure polled his family. Leaders were burdened with the responsibility for selling, as it were, the priorities which the others didn’t always see. But any time the families gathered, the adult men led the discussion and negotiated between them the various concerns.

Again, none of this has to do with efficiency, nor protecting some patriarchal privilege. It would be like that in the West, but not in Ancient Near Eastern societies. Our Western sense of logic and propriety have no place, and certainly no grounds for judging something we can’t understand. The whole point of this was things being the in the order God commanded.

God made the men responsible for the way things turn out. They take the heat for not asserting their divine mandate for protecting the flock. When people reject this ancient order of things, they surrender God’s promised protection and support. God allows a lot of things, but actively supports what He commanded.

So we don’t just relinquish our rights to become slaves of the men-over-thirty. Yes, by the time Jesus was born His own nation had almost lost the original feel for tribal living, with a great many men taking themselves and their prerogatives entirely too seriously. We all recognize that when we see it, but we tend to see it when it’s not there. The men in charge are obliged to know what God says is in everyone’s best interest, not cater to whims — whether their own or those of anyone else. Those men were placed under a very heavy responsibility.

With all the weaknesses inherent in such a thing, it is the least dangerous of all the possible structures men have tried. That something else seems good in theory, and seems to work well over several generations does not make it right. God established a model, and it is our responsibility to adopt it, to bring ourselves up to His standards. You don’t even get to understand it until you have spent quite some time desiring to know what pleases Him. Pure intelligence, logic, energy, talent — those things don’t impress God. God is impressed when we persist in seeking to please Him.

The church is a spiritual institution, but its operations are under the Laws of God. Grace is the divine dynamic of the Spirit Realm, but the body in a fallen world, in flesh which is yet fallen, has to observe Laws as the basic structure of what Spirit-led living looks like. Regular readers realize I’m not talking about the Talmud, nor specifically the Law of Moses, but the proper spiritual understanding of what the Law Covenants pointed out to us about God’s ways.

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Spreading It Around

Posted on September 27, 2010 by ehurst

One of the most disturbing elements in modern evangelical church life is making evangelism so very hard. By leaving people without the understanding, which says the greatest blessing in this world is leaving it, they end up clinging too much to life and all the weaknesses of the flesh. From that ground, Christian Mysticism is impossible to understand, much less embrace. So without the full power of the Spirit, people are left with a mere alternative lifestyle, a better brand of middle class pursuit of worldly success. Evangelism becomes a sales pitch.

If we understand the goal of faith is earning our departure from this life, it changes everything. Evangelism is merely being friendly, knowing no enemies. It won’t matter a whit what these others may think about you or the situation. Your worst oppressor is still a friend, one to whom you will act according to a genuine positive regard. You have nothing to lose. The same goes when you face someone against whom the Lord requires you to guard some duty on this earth. Should you be required to commit a violent act, say in defense of your infant child, you still do so from the perspective of a friend trying to do what is in the attacker’s own best interest.

There simply is no place for animosity. The worst you can do is avoid someone for that length of time the Lord requires it of you. Otherwise, even your worst psychotic nightmare you are to encounter with cheerfulness.

That is the sum total of evangelism. The rest is simply speaking the truth to which you are already fully committed. About the only part we have to learn is how to grow up and stop talking to others the way children do. That is, we aren’t seeking approval, and we don’t load up the air between us with chatter about all the things we know and can do. We let the Spirit guide us to saying things which meet the context, and no more. We don’t descend to their lower level, even though we understand it and remember all too painfully being there ourselves. We stay up in the sky, as it were, with our eyes on our commitment to Christ. That sort of learning is more than enough to make each of us the most powerful evangelists on the earth.

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Persimmons and Pears

Posted on September 26, 2010 by ehurst

This year my family has been studying wild foods here in Central Oklahoma. We started off the season this summer with blackberries and sand plums, both native to our area. I got four gallons of berries and one of plums. We made a jelled syrup from the plums, but the berries we jammed and some we just froze. There was also a fresh cobbler.

This week I ran across a pear tree along someone’s driveway, and a sign beckoned all comers to take as much as they liked. While pears aren’t native, I believe, this one is prospering and healthy. We took two bushels. But the local persimmons are native, and ripening now, and I got an easy twenty pounds in just a half-hour. We did several things with the pears: diced and canned with a bit of sugar, some jam, and there will be pear sauce next (like apple sauce). The persimmons are pretty much good only as jelly.

We have also experimented with acorns. The big thing is leeching out the tannins, which are toxic in large amounts, hard on the kidneys. The lore says you have to boil them and keep changing the water until it quits turning brown. Then they are dried and ground up like meal. Not real tasty, but somewhat nutritious. At least we know how to handle them.

Eventually we will begin discovering other wild foods. There are a couple of good reasons for this. One, your body responds well to stuff which grows where you live. Barring outright toxins, your body is more likely to accept without complain stuff which is exposed to the same environmental mix as your body. Two, as the economy continues to decline, you may be lucky to get food of any kind. Knowing how to identify and prepare what exists in your area — find out what the primitives ate way back when — may be the difference between survival and starving to death.

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