Humility

This is the third page of story-text on my SoloBuildIt website, besides the Privacy Policy and the About Me page.  And I'm thinking to stress here what I've mentioned already.  It is the key Scriptural concept in my saying we spanked God,  Psalm 55:19,b.  I'll re-quote it in a second.

          Part  A

          "Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God."  I'll repeat the explanation of this Scripture passage's importance to anyone's thinking.  We hear so much of a famous fear of God.  While we can't hear such too much, it is groundless without changes of the heart.  'And Psalm 50: 'last verse, "To him who (humbly) considers his way (before me and his fellow) will I show the salvation of God".  This is how we stay respectable and respectful, passively and actively in society.

        And again as it's said, 'Our attitude determines our altitude', we've got to clear Gravely Point.  Gravely is the picnic area with some water between it and the northwestern end of the runway at Reagan National Airport.  My cousin Bruce was waiting in traffic just before crossing the 14th-Street bridge.   The Flight #90 first-mate's verified observation that there was a discrepancy between the instrument readout and reality was vetoed by the pilot.

        But both knew the engine de-icing system had never been activated.  The first-mate eventually mentioned it to the other pilot who had final authority of the flight, who disregarded it.  Note, this pilot three years before had been temporarily suspended when he failed an update examination for skirting procedural protocol.  

        When that helpful carpenter I was having lunch with on a job site complimented me for being hard-working but then added that I'm "kind of obnoxious", I nearly fell off my seat.  I really thought I was the cat's meow, you know, God's gift to man.  Other people who also loved me told me I'm crazy.

        It was twelve years after I first confessed the name of Jesus Christ that I finally learned what my loving family and friends meant by describing me as they did.  And I mean the hard way through bruising life experience.  And I have no reason to complain for I sometimes took out my frustration on the sweet dairy cows in my charge.

        I also hurt the feelings of the first two of the four border-collies I raised.  When young and in training for herding the cows, I aggressively lost my patience with them.  That scarred our relationship in the way of them losing trust of me.  I mean for life, the potential for a perfect bond broken.  Thanks to God he Scripturally promises heaven will have no crying nor pain. 

        My youngest brother Jamie had a friend named Matt.  The two of them together had helped Walter Mondale run for the presidency.  That experience was later researched by Bill Clinton when he was running.  Mr. Bill asked Matt to help on his campaign.  A TV news-cast I then saw with clips of a Clinton speech is about to blank out.  A final film clip sees the two of them walking across the back of a stage together.  

        Bill was a perceptive business manager to choose Matt to help him and Hillary, along with many others.  Because Matt was not only an outgoing person, he also was a respectful person.  His dad had died and Matt was the oldest child.  And for an example, Matt gave flowers to our own mom without fail on Christmas.  He was already in the good habit of doing that before working with the Arkansas governor and first lady.

        My story point about Matt is how, after President Clinton got him a steady job in a government office, he happily told his friend my brother Jamie about it.  The two of them had been waiting on tables before all this.  Jamie lovingly yet also sarcastically told me Matt's exact words, when he told him the news about the new office-job position.

        Jamie said Matt said, "I am humble", meaning of course he was appreciative of his  preferred employment with Bill Clinton's Executive group.  Appreciation is a concept that parallels humility.  I could see my dad was sad one day, not like him to show it.  Dad had no more homework at his desk to do that winter Saturday.  So he set up his slide projector to review his collection.

         Part  B

         I was blowing by with a buddy on some 12-year-olds' adventure, but noticed Dad.  Dad's face and demeanor was not what I was used to seeing.  Seeing Dad setting up for a personal slide show, I decided to prioritize giving him some social company.  My buddy joined me, and I knew personally the slides were not the primary exhibit.

        After slides with Dad, he turned off the projector and my friend and I began to clear out.  Dad halted my changing attention by saying, "Thank you for watching slides with me, Michael; you're appreciative".  Yeah and I would have felt like a rotten log for the rest of my life if I hadn't.

        I should have had the manners to thank Dad first, for letting my buddy and I watch slides with him.  That would have alleviated the personal pressure on Dad to make such a profound statement.  I've heard that not-disastrously operating the joy-stick of a P-39 Airacobra is not a straight-forward maneuver.  My old pick-up truck's steering wheel got like that, too.  Our words and attitudes carry the message of life or death.

        At Dad's cabin far over in Penn's Woods, which he called 'the cottage', family were talking once and the subject of intuition came up.  When it was Dad's turn to talk, he said "I don't know if I've ever done intuition".  At that the conversation paused, for Dad was so proficient at intuition he could say a self-effacing statement like that.  

        Crazy is living in such denial of arrogance that one loses any friends one has.  It may be tempered by a lifestyle of absent or misused intuition.  So that impulsiveness is a false intuition.  It doesn't matter, because we're judged by our actions, not our motives.  I was a sloppy social mess, but being a suburban orphan didn't help.

        What is most helpful in planetary society is the Judeo-Christian ethic.  That is the tail of the never-ridden donkey Jesus rode on into Jerusalem that day.  Jesus had a rapport with the animal of peace and trust, being its creator.  It was no miracle really, for Jesus could have brushed out its tail standing behind the dear pet-with-rear-hydraulic coyote-killers.  Of course, the proof is in the puttin', putting your money where your mouth is.

        Monte Roberts showed it could be done in the here and now.  Monty grew up watching his dad train horses.  When Monty came of age, he refrained from assisting his dad in the horse training.  Monty felt there was a better way than coercive use of sticks and whips.  Dad used a metal chain on him after a demonstration of non-violent horse training, Monty said in his book.

       As a young teenager, Monty had occasion to observe horses in the wild.  Monty noticed the process used by the lead mare to train the young stallions.  She would chase the upstart out into the bush away from the herd.  The choice was clear between security and predation as an overnight with the coyotes and cougars.

        Out there the young stallion would or wouldn't learn an appreciative attitude for an accepted place in equine society.  If the stallion wanted to and came to his senses about it, he'd ask back in.  The lead mare, like God, would be certain to forgive him his sin of rebellion and welcome him into the righteous society of Jesus Christ.

        Monty eventually utilized the old round ring from the old countries.  It imitates the security of the family herd, helping to positively replace it.  Monty was the first paleface to single handedly persuade a wild horse to switch its allegiance.  What he did was separate a young stallion from a mustang herd.

        Monty and his horse stayed between the young stud and his home herd.  Farther into the bush Monty drove off the stallion.  For two sleepless nights Monty did this until the young stud was peacefully settled.  The horse had re-oriented himself and accepted Monty and his riding horse as his new herd.  And I think Monty was my age when he did that.

        A friend watched and followed from a distance accompanied by a rodeo champion.  The latter was available in case of difficulty, but there wasn't any.  The young stallion took to saddle like he'd been doing it for years.  Peace doesn't just work, it also plays.  War in its gruesome forms is worse than work and knows nothing of play.

        Part  C                                                              

        A call for humility was the maiden flight of a new Boeing plane Air Canada bought.  Its maiden voyage was Toronto to Calgary, but it got delayed halfway.  Before departing, the captain-pilot was out there himself with a fuel dipstick.  You see, the new machine was metric-based and they were all making sure.  

         The 2.2 / 1.1 conversion was miscalculated by everyone, including the computer software I think, and the plane had to ditch.  The pilot put it down on an abandoned airstrip picnic area he once trained on with the RCAF.  The possibly embellished story has it, the plane silently came down between two boys riding their bikes down the middle of the old runway. 

           Maybe they should put horns for honking on airplanes, or at least a portable one you can stick out the window if needed.  Have you read Cap Sully's book about his long years of flight training before the Hudson pelican landing?

         I was putting the cows back to pasture across the lumber-train tracks that bi-sected the farm.  It was windy and loud and so I was dangerously distracted.  With half the herd here and the other there it arrived downwind.  Unloaded and coming slightly uphill but with speed, the big locomotive's light alerted me for I never heard a thing.  

        I separated the line of cows successfully, but a neighbor down the track later told me he lost twelve one time to the lumber train.  During a summer lightning storm, a visible farm adjacent to the end of the Holy Spirit mountain got struck.  I saw the thick heavy-duty bolt touch down way out in their western pasture.  It looked safe enough from human habitation. 

        The cows were clustered and it hit them directly, burning up fourteen victims.  One other farmer was recounting his personal story of lightning.  He was a boy and fetching the cow herd for the evening milking.  It was a summer's day blackened by a storm and 'pow!' right abreast of him it split the big rock his dad always plowed around.

        I was standing in the farm courtyard talking with an agricultural extension agent.  And I couldn't help noticing the puffy-quilty clouds above.  Down by the Ottawa River a whole suburban street of houses was cleared down to their basement ceilings.  Here in PA at the grocery store the man ahead of me was talking with the cashier.

        The weather report earlier in the week had forecast F-0 and F-1 tornadoes for the Carolinas.  And that's just where-and-when he and his family had gone visiting.  With the warning, all of them took cover under the big front steps, no basement.  I heard the man say he peaked out as the storm passed over and looked up into a half-funnel.

        Or with the World Series game in Oakland stopped by an earthquake, it's no time to be proud.  Except maybe at a football game, how I was allowed that in a grownup-family game of charades.  The idea to guess was something at a paid football game, and our charades team was at a loss to guess something.  My suggestion of pride was accepted.

        God biblically describes pride as a heart that is lifted up.  The question is where has the heart been lifted to, namely a realm off limits.  It is the realm of a creator-savior God who alone deserves praise.  By exalting ourselves in any way means we want praise.  It's like trying to steal something priceless, attempted theft of divine property, divine praise.

        The ten commandments, even though they can be condensed into the two 'great' ones are still ever-useful.  I would think they could be analyzed interestingly by any science.  Certainly Del Washburn's Theomatics reveal treasures of amazingness.  Have you heard of Del's laboriously playful work for five decades now?

        Part  D                                                                

        Del Washburn's Theomatics or 'God's Mathematics' shows what God has done with the Scriptural text both numerically and also linguistically.  God's a fun-loving God and for as long as eternity is short plays the numbers like no human bookie.  Theomatics analyzes the observable categorical impossiblities stemming from the unique numerical nature of the two major biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek.

        What Theomatics does personally is display the total and proven improbability of a figurative zillion mathematical coincidences.  Theomatics shows patterns of numerical categories of textual subject.  After he and fellow graduate student Jerry Lucas first noticed it on their new computers back in the 1970's, Del went and told older Christian brothers.

        They said to Del, 'We know it's there, but we don't have the energy to open it up; why don't you do it?'  And, the rest is most of Del Washburn's continuing history.  Jerry Lucas did other, but was the man to start it off with Del.  Jerry was coach Bobby Knight's center and team captain for his national championship men's basketball team at Indiana U.

        The earlier-mentioned JoJo White played across the river at Kansas U. while John Havlicek teamed with Jerry.  In my little athletics experience at school, it is evident to me that God felt the desires of my heart.  Any desire for accomplishment of best effort plus achievement as personal reputation was completely transcended.

        I can clearly see in retrospect Almighty God perfectly balancing the phenomena of both victory and defeat.  It is evident God had perfectly known exactly what my person needed.  I ask, can a creator-savior God get any closer than this in compassion and care?  In romance, in adventure, in social relativity, it is evident God knows me inside out and wants his best for me. 

        It is God who shows mankind how to share and care, as Yahweh synonymously with Jesus / Yeshua.  In the fullness of time the virgin Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit of God and brought forth her first-born child, a son.  Husband Joseph humbly stepped back so that God could do this, an angel helpfully explaining to him what was going on.

         The patterns of numerical subject values that Jerry and Del started uncovering was both a great victory and hard defeat.  The victory of discovery of a new thing is always joyful.  But then one has to strain one's back panning for the gold or whatever.  The nine fruits of God's spirit do not include humility.

        Because humility is the appropriate clothing for the occasion, like a space suit required for a spacewalker.  It is constricting negatively for the effort required but positively it is the maximum requisite for adventure.  When one goes fishing and one doesn't want to get out there and be missing an essential article, one reviews the basics ahead of time. 

          One asks oneself about the essentials required to realize the adventure, a rod, bait or lure or fly, maybe a net and catch-chain.  Okay and you're good to go into God's great outdoors, although I haven’t been since Quebec in the Petite Nation.  And there's a difference between a curse and a disaster. 

           A curse is divinely systemic, already there while a disaster is an 'act' not of God but of either our satanic adversary or of human error.  Again, only God can curse big-time; disastrous supposed acts of God demonic, small 'g' god.

         Part  E                                                              

         'Just thinking again here of the divine role of the magistrate and government in our lives.  Thomas Jefferson said the civil law "should restrain men from injuring one another, but leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits".  God Scripturally confided to us that he wants it "to go well for us on the Earth".  

        Still about acts that are or are not of God, an earthquake can be triggered by disrupting the water table to supply a large population of people.  Where do our fossil fuels come from but squished fish and compressed plants from a global flood?  God's provision to us is his foresight of what we will need, a reason to praise and worship him.  For such a creating and sustaining spirit is unique and worthy of our praise and worship.  I sing 'Bravo!' to God, for it must take all courage to be God.

        God delegated ordinances of action to the Israelites to teach them systematic praise.  Like boot-camp for the military or early practice for sports, it's necessary for us.  How did Jerry Rice of the 49ers get open for passes so much?  It's because he learned to do for himself what his early coaches did for him.  You could find Jerry week in and week out running upon the big hilltops of the Bay Area.

         Let's bring all this humility closer to home with the story of the woman in 1994 whose life was accidentally ended by a cougar.  She was running trails in the Sierra Nevada and passed close to where the lion had a cub.  That was normal but what was abnormal was over twice as much donation money came in for the lion's cub than the single-mother's two children, as I heard.

         Humility guides the proper establishment of priority.  Maybe if it was a movie-star the lion had protected its young for, more equal donations would have been sent in.  My condolences to the two children.  But most seriously, may any condolences extended be also combined with earned congratulations.  We do not want to arrive in eternity empty-handed.  God is giving us donations now for the scheduled deaths he's appointed for us.  "For it is appointed unto every man once to die and then the judgment."

        A relationship with our creator is our first-priority activity directly matched with one with our fellow man.  The school of life has examinations also.  Christians know that "judgment starts with the household of God".  It's only logical that is true for a Christian who has ceased his or her former relative criminality.  And she or he utilizes God’s given system of ongoing forgiveness if further transgression is repented of. 

           Christian probation is cause for heavenly celebration, soberly.  I hired a fellow for summer work on the farm.  As long as the eleven years I had been out there grumbling about my predicament, he'd been in.  I gave him that bible Pete gave me, white leather and red letter.

           But someone not converted in their heart to the only just and loving God continues to break God's rules.  That person is yet to be brought to trial, still transgressing with no wise end in sight.  While a person who walks humbly and trembles before God avoids judgment thanks to God's Son who stands in the courtroom for him or her.  After a short career in quality carpentry, Jesus went to law school to become the ultimate esquire.  That’s the wonderful truth, as in Mark McCormack's The Terrible Truth About Lawyers.

         This is a system as good as it gets and takes the word 'wack' out of the planetary adjective 'wacko'.   The God-fearing person is in the process of meeting his maker before he 'meets his maker'.  No tickets are sold at the door of Heaven; they have to be bought ahead of time.  With the cost of a ticket infinitely exorbitant, we need Christ Jesus.  And to be violent to each other after Jesus took my disgustingness on himself is my lowest for His Highest.

        Jesus the Dude is loaded with dough, even as the Bread of Life.  And Jesus is generous, a real people person.  He's the kind of person with a million dollars, he spreads it around.  I mean, how much money can you spend fishing?  But he expects us to do the same, use the money he gives you to buy your basics toward simple contentment and then make yourself available.   Jesus said real religion is helping the helpless.

        Part  F                                                               

        By carefully and humbly sharing without drunking and drugging and gluttonizing, and add deep-digital devicing to that, and hey top it with religious self-righteousness, we can contribute to God resolving the Edenic curse as it goes well for us on the Earth.  "God is not slow as men count slowness but he is wanting all men to come to repentance".  "God is (in the process of) redeeming all men unto himself(‘whosoever will’)". 

         All these prickly thorns and stingy thistles are exactly what we need to keep us reminded that we are merely creations.  For sure we are the potentially perfect creations of a perfect God.  That is, the-perfect-one God created us so perfectly, we are capable of forgetting the fact we are even created.  And if thorns aren't enough, there's fangs and claws and laws..

        One has to learn to thank God for the good and also the bad, knowing all the while we may supplicate for his mercy.  Esther of Ancient Persia approached King Ahasuerus with both confidence and humility.  Her wish was granted, to prevent Hebrew genocide.  Jews annually celebrate Esther's exemplary trust in The Almighty God Of Justice And Love.

        'Would they switch and modernize their allegiance from a temporal example to an eternal one, the example of the one Moses pointed to, lowly and riding on the never-ridden colt of a she-donkey.  This is the one of which Zachariah's son John said he is not worthy to untie the laces of his sandals.  This is Immanuel.

        This is the one an exhausted woman tearfully poured costly ointment upon as he sat at supper one evening.  One dim-witted disciple scoffed at her action, but Jesus said her action of honor will be told for the rest of human history.  Jesus' spiritual testimony of prophecy encompasses the entirety of Scriptural history in all its amazing coincidences as God.

           And thank God for his chosen Hebrew-speaking scholars and scribes to bring it to us, and the subsequent lovers of God's messiah-christ's recording and preservation efforts.  Their dedication and determination is as great as the Spartan boy who stole the young fox.

         My readers may want to know, especially by looking at the back-cover photo of my booklet We Spanked God, whether my enthusiasm for the biblical Word of God is at all inherent.  My dad through Spain brings a significant bit of Abram and Sarai's beloved "wild man" son, Ishmael.  My mom brings Isaac by surmise, as the Moorish blood also is in me indirectly (through behind the bush romances in Iberia, nothing overt allowed on both sides, surely, Islamic Moorish and  Catholic Visigoth).

         Mom's mom had given birth to her three weeks before.  Grandpa said ''Helen we have to name this child!''  Grandma replied ''Oh, give me the book again (of baby names)''.  She started through the alphabet and stopped in the D's.  Then, ''Deborah; that's a nice name!''.  Grandpa Ted McCarthy retorted, ''Helen, that's a Jewish name!''  The final reply, '' don't care; it's beautiful (Deborah Mary)! '' 

        Of the Irish and books, author Thomas Cahill when researching for How The Irish Saved Civilization (started their continental neighbors out of the Dark Ages), was on a rowboat short-cutting across a big lake on a rainy day.  The only other passenger was a farmer huddled under a great coat.  Eventually, Thomas noticed that the man was reading a book under there, a Greek classic.

        Daily, I think of the North African Mohammedans' excitement when they crossed into Iberia for the first time.  The rivers that to many would seem meager and few were a source of grateful joy to the sand-country migrants.  What they did with the available  water is remarkable.  These are the practical people who made the western renaissance possible by having a canal in place between the Red Sea and the River Nile which the Chinese used to reach Venice, Italy and present their encyclopedia of every perfected skill.  

         'New & Improved': What if they had a war and only Christians came with their rods and their hands?  I just shook my head and breathed an exasperated sigh and breath.  I did so without any consciousness that someone was watching.  And here is this essay in plain sight and clear hearing of hundreds of people around the world.  

           "The prayer of a righteous man availeth much before the Lord", being Jesus Christ, he who knows those who are his.

         Part  G                                                             

         I'm continuing to think today about words and ideas from earlier in this essay.  God in eternity was concentrating on his work.  And frankly, I think he wants to get back to it.  But presently he had the idea to create others who might also enjoy consciousness.  God is the essence and origin of consciousness and his creation of us is the grandest coincidence of all time and eternity, at least up to this point, apparently. 

           Indeed, God wants to live in us as "the temple of The Holy Spirit".  And remember, self consciousness is just that, an East of Eden characteristic of the reason God has to redeem us.  'God created man conscious,  but sin made them self-conscious.'

         And God is planning a new paradigm of work and consciousness.  In fact he may, and also we may, but he may be planning on kicking off work completely.  Because just as he "rested" on the seventh day of creation, that is possibly and probably just a microcosm of a bigger one. 

           In fact, God's creation of the cosmos and mankind is a culmination of his work.  And a word about privacy, God’s real religion of helping the helpless privatizes his publicity.  Whereas mundane fake religion publicizes God’s feminine privateness.  That is the essence of the so-called antichrist.  And, we should admit our own helplessness.

         Scripturally, God personifies the situation as a marriage.  And he inspired Solomon to say in so many words that a sign is posted on the door of the bridal chamber.  Do you know what it says?  If not, here's a hint: exactly what you'd want it to say.  It says "Do not awaken love until it pleases".  Yes, less refined people crassly say 'Do not disturb'.

         But the work's not over--there's a catch to it.  The wedding, private with invitations, has a simple stipulation.  All guests must be attired, dressed in a special wedding garment.  And this wedding garment can only be procured, bought at one particular store, a tailor-shop.  I'll tell you the name and address yes, by God's Positioning System.

         The address for this special tailoring shop is where you are at this moment.  Because "the kingdom (of Almighty God)" if you want "is within you", conditionally.  For these things are spiritually discerned and positively apprehended.  Jesus Christ is the tailor and he does exquisite work.  Imagine the finest needlework of the cultures of Earth combined.

         A home-made wedding garment is not acceptable.  In Scriptural fact if you try that, if you try showing up with your own work of tailored self righteousness, indignance by the Almighty God will happen.  You will have caused this and it would be better if you had not come on your own like that at all.  'Me too, any of us.

         Like following a guide like Daniel Boone through dark woods with wolves, bad n big  ones, we must obey the expert (see the film re-enactment of the Canadian single propellor mail plane that went down 15-minutes into the mountains west of Calgary and took the injured pilot and his passenger three weeks to get back out; yes, I'm all for nice wolves like Farley Mowat's).   

         If we show up without a proper wedding garment, we will have insulted the father of the bridegroom-tailor.  You see the price of the garment is 0.00, free as free can be.  Therefore we would be without excuse for disregarding the simple conditions of the wedding invitation.  We do have to go to the trouble of 'going to' or 'getting ourselves to' the tailor shop.  Our custom-tailored attire will be waiting for us; take it home now.

         Again, it's simple as a dimple, for getting there is being here, being still and recognizing God is God.  Now, what's the opposite of being right here where we are?  It is traveling, but the problem there is we have no destination, plus we're eternal.  This is why God has scripturally said an unrepentant person is a "wandering sta(r) for whom the blackness of darkness is reserved forever".

         Someone who humiliates God at the front door of his house by appearing without the prescribed spiritual tailoring of the righteousness of Christ-Jesus bothers God big.  God does not take lightly disrespectful disregard of his celebration of his hard work, of raising a child rightly and seeing it through to maturity.  None of us do, so let's ask God to throw our selfish hypocrisy into his green eternal wastebasket incinerator.  He's written he'll forget our sins as far as one horizon to another, if we ask for it and desist further.

         Any of us would feel this way, a similar reason why a mother animal assertively protects her young or a stud his breeding territory.   This is where we get the real life term  'getting thrown out' as a drinking club can legally have a bouncer and God who is the eternal law has angels as 'security'.  Police aren't called 'the man' for nothin', as God is the divine entity behind the man.

         Therefore someone who goes to Jesus’ wedding without proper attire threatens the social atmosphere so profoundly that profound measures are taken.  It is made sure that the offender is distanced from the wedding party territory.  That distance is scripturally "outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth".  Neither should we slip some money out of our pocket to try and bribe God whether or not we know his salvation is free. 

         Part  H

         It is our choice, a free gift or costly condemnation.  "God is not mocked' just as we don't like to be either.  And still thinking about God 'working' out there, or in there or both, in eternity, it reminds me of what I've learned.  If you hire someone to work for you, do not engage them in conversation.  Allow them the necessity of concentration on their work, their task.

         A clarification on the supposed 42 'children' mauled by 2 bears or she bears at the divine behest of an Israelite 'man of God'.  That they were teen-aged boys is grammatically certain, not little boys in the Hebrew.  My extra point here is exactly why God gave the nod to Elisha the man of God for reprisal.  You tell me before I start; here I'll help you.  'Forty-two?  That is a lot of ‘youth boys’.

         Why are they clustered together like that?  How many elderly people in the community needed help with their gardens or orchards or vineyards at the time?  How many of those young men were comprehensively preparing to delight a young woman with an adult home of her own?  Did any of those young men know an Assyrian scout was observing them secretly from a hill?

         Was The Assyrian scout thinking the next generation of Israelite warriors was going to be a pushover?  Were forty-two healthy Israelite maidens wondering if it wouldn't be a better idea to move to Assyria?  And the elderly with insufficient food for the year, were they proud of the undignified carriage of their society's youth?  They were probably dismayed, unless they were in the bad habit of doing the same when they were young.

         So maybe now they were seeing their own negligence come to generational fruition.  And God, he who has been busting his back out there-and-in there (in both outer space and microscopic inner space) in eternity to give all of us a nice place to prepare for our own eternity is about to ask himself 'What's the use of it?'   You know free will is free will my fellow Earthlings.  It's a no more-no less situation.

         My booklet truism bears repeating, 'There may be life on other planets, but there's death on this one, (and Jesus Christ, the Son of God came to reckon with that like no one else could, or would) and (so) Jesus is the answer'.  So let's get into it Earth-fellows 'n 'laws,  because we're soon outta' here to give an account of ourselves.  We can have a truly nice time while we're here in God's work-a-day way.  Or we can fool ourselves and cry when no one's looking.

         Those youth boys were a microcosm of Babylon, a law unto themselves, those in bullying power with 'no fear' bumper stickers on their wastefully souped-up cars or trucks.  Winston only said what he did to buy some time and keep people concentrating in a very desperate situation.  Those bully-boys Elisha's bears killed were as good as dead in God's eyes.  And woe to their negligent parents because 'souped-up engines lack salt'.

         Did you know Israel had a policy developed over the years for reasonable mercy on a rebellious young man who had been brought before the priestly court?  The young fellow would not be punished for his personal profligacy if one or both of his parents was found to be negligent in his upbringing.  

         That is correct and fair justice, refusing to punish a young person who's been led into rebelliousness like a poor animal to the slaughterhouse.  It's like looking at the cause of a disease instead of only treating its symptoms, in the way of prevention.  This is not to say the lad will not have his own lessons to learn.  And here, will anyone try to objectively look at the folly of spanking?

         Part  I

         Well guess what just happened?  For the first time since I put the liner booklet together half-a-year ago compiling seventeen-years of scribbled-on envelopes and paper-scraps, and then pulling stories out of my adult toy-box for this complementary essay to the booklet, my mind thought of getting back to the retirement career I had started.

         My next little brother Christopher crystalized the idea for me.  He paid me twice to paint parts of the inside of his house.  I went over there two consecutive last-week-of-October into Novembers, before I start up my house woodstove and after the last lawn-mowing.  Some outside and inside painting got done by me elsewhere over the years.

        Then renovating this old mobile home we live in saw me renovate and paint the ceiling.  And the metal exterior gets painted each year.  So that got me familiar with a stick-roller and hand-brush.  Christopher, whose birthday is today, positively confronted me after the second go at his house.

          'Michael, your painting is professional; what's the name of your company?'  I've just retired so that's not necessary.  And, I am under no illusions of the complexity of the profession.  Quality zero-VOC paint maximizes the fun of the trade skill like never before.  Thank God for the social protection on Earth by an ethical magistrate so we can work in relative peace.  I joke in grocery check-out lines sometimes, 'God said we'd eat our bread "by the sweat of your brow" and have to wait in line for it'.  

         I'm going to ask BookBaby to publish my words.  My heart's desire is for people to find it useful as a handy reference.  I'm glad the 'indie'/independent  publishers' market is opened by new technology.  'Print-on-demand' of bookseller requests allows everybody to be able to pace themselves, without stocking up in warehouses.  

           So in three market formats each, the little booklet of one liners We Spanked God can fit in pocket or purse.  And then you have this seventy-some thousand word essay.

          Part  J                                                              

          Thinking of Moses' and Joshua's exaggerations of their exploits, often two stories as two conflicting accounts exist in the Scriptural text of the same event.  Don't look at God and blame him; he's just the publisher.  The edited document God as publisher receives from the writer is 'final form'.  This assumes God inspired as much final editing and proofreading as humanly possible.

          Let's see the forest, not just the trees in this bible-book of God's.  Transcending a definitely inspired though very human storytelling is fulfilled prophecy.  More than meets the eye, we know of some two-thousand five-hundred prophetic predictions articulated in the bible text.  Two-thousand of these are fulfilled and verified.  The balance is surely in the imminent offing.  It reminds of the structural and functional wonders of nature, so plain and simple on the outside.

          God's bible reminds me of Disneyland in Anaheim.  I went there once as a child and from the outside approach it looked corny.  But the day wasn't long enough for the adventures.  I don't know what Orlando has, more of the same.  I may be dead tomorrow and do not want to show up in eternity empty-handed.  I’ve biblically learned to walk by God’s faith, like holding his hand.  'God expresses his druthers through fathers and mothers'.

         When Pete handed me that Protestant bible--personal-watermelon bibles weren't much in circulation yet in Catholic circles--it didn't take me long to notice virtuosity in it.  Even the words of Jesus Christ were printed in bloody red coloring which was helpful.  I still recommend Scuffy the Tugboat for children.  Although now that I think about it, the story is graphically scary.  But maybe it's my old nerves.

          On second thought, Tugboat Scuffy and the man and the child and the widening body of water are realistic.  I mean in the eyes of a child and in the mind of the child, the perception of the big wide world they're growing into is well-represented there.  Really, A Night To Remember does the same thing, the Titanic representing inevitable death even for the toughest people, except Molly Brown, God forbidding.

          Fiction as fantasy should have a minor place for any age of reader.  'God's Bible is  ideal non-fiction and perfect romance'.   Historical and current-event fiction also has the inherent weakness of easy exaggeration.  And any given non-Biblical religious book is a risky mixture of real and unreal, useful and useless.  I have seen ten commandment-types of principles listed, to lack the explicit revelation of God’s personality and saving grace.

           Grace is unmerited favor or undeserved kindness  And that combines uniquely with bible truth in Jesus M. Christ.  Jesus' middle name is Murphy, as in Murphy's Law.  Which says anything that can happen will happen.  

           Which is overly optimistic, which all things Irish are.  To say, "With God, all things are possible".  "In which it is impossible for God to lie", so no McCarthy Blarney. 

          Sure it is, full-in-the-face as any non-Biblical book should fairly be squared with the bible.  2000 fulfilled predictions written by people who were strangers to each other is special.   Prophecy parallels the miracles Jesus and then the apostles did. 

           What God desires is to connect with honesty of spirit in people.  And God throws a few signs and wonders in to catch our attention.  But like a baby learning to walk, it’s adult hands off after a point.  Babies don't lie and neither does God.

           Apostle John wrote "if we say God lies, then the truth is not in us".  'Same thing with babies; don't put dishonesty in their mouth.  Don't learn them war and earn yourself a bad seat up by the rafters in hell's arena.  Arena is the word for sand in Greek.  Roman arenas were so smelly from accumulated rotted blood, pine cones were smoldered by the ticket booths.

          Some proofreading add-on thoughts here: I made some dandelion juice this morning with pre-flower bud stage leaves.  To say, for me, health’s barometer is feeling smooth and strong.  If something you do or eat puts that into retrograde, then make a note to avoid it is what I do.   Our lifestyle should be geared to heaven's turnstyle.

           Last night, a third evening in-a-row, I was reading a word in a paragraph, and my spouse said it out loud in the next room.  Like the instance three days ago, it was not exact (spat and spit).  She said the word ‘math’ to our child, and I was just on to the word theomatics as God’s 'math'-ematics.   And I'm talking split-second exactitude, every single time he does it, surely to encourage me and you.

           Of all subjects in this essay, I’d say that’s a probability miracle. God is close and never morose, to compliment him.  An additional thought, I was just thinking how God created us with an eye to the providential future and not, the evolutionary past.  That reminds of a recommendable book, Kim Alexis’ A Model For A Better Future.

          I once spoke with a woman whose idiot now-ex-husband insisted she canoe with him down the Mississippi Ocean.  Stopped at a dirt landing to eat sandwiches on solid ground, they watched an elderly man sit in a lawn chair fishing.  Nothing happened until the man at his leisure slowly got up and walked up the sloped landing. 

           But he had his fishing rod with him with the line still trailing back in the water.  He wrapped the line around the trailer hitch of his reversed pick-up truck.  He then snipped the line between the hitch and his rod and put the rod in the back of the truck.  He got into the truck and started it up and drove it slowly forward.  An extremely large catfish followed, and hey it's just a fish, not a cat, to cater to non-meat eating sensibilities.  We are all going to the slaughterhouse; I like mangoes, but not as much as Adam and Eve.

          Part  K                                                             

          Every day in my thoughts personally, I think of Mary of Bethany sitting at Jesus' feet--that sounds funny, you know, corny--sitting on the grass in front of him while he stood there and spoke with her and other people in front of their house.  He had come for food and socializing and probably a civilized night's sleep. 

          Beth Allison Barr's book corrected and improved my thinking on this.  That when Mary left her sister Martha and the quote-unquote women's work in the kitchen she was way out of feminine orthodox line.  Mary wasn't being negligently lazy, rather she was asserting herself as a pre-Christian woman.  Mary was courageous to purposely ignore her pushy sister and prioritize her own serious needs. 

           By the way, it's your turn to wash the dishes tonight, in Debbie Tovar's kitchen.  She doesn't quite come in to inspect with a flashlight.  But she sets a clean standard, by God.

          I mentioned in passing earlier a Holy Spirit mountain near where lightning struck the neighbor's cows.  That first year of sixteen that Quebec blessed me with a place to heal my soul--I sorted out my immigration status during a nationwide amnesty program, mainly  for the older folks who had avoided Vietnam--I slowly started noticing the mountain.

          To describe it also in someone else's words, years later when the first local talk of a small-scale winter sports area on the north slope of the massif--what I was looking at faced due east--started up, the local newspaper wrote an article about it.  In which the writer evidently described not the future site of the sports area, but what everybody sees from many vantage points in the main valley.

          By many points I mean if you're in position to see it unless you're busy driving.  The new two-lane highway that went in only fifty-feet and happily lower by fifteen from my western neighbor's farmhouse is too close to see the specialness of the mountain ridge view.  Yet, the description by the newspaper author is generally useful for the view of the mountain.  And note, farm's in Quebec are always long, usually connected to a riverway, ours touching the Petite Nation river.

          The newspaper’s description of the mountain was highlighted with one particular word.  What was said or written was that the mountain ridge with its noticeable cliffs in the center and highest part "looks out over the valley like a sentinel".  And this is certainly true, yet the description is a minimal and elementary one.  And don't just take my word for it.  (Re-reading my line here, I remember the great Ol'Jim Michener saying also in 'Centennial' of the chalk cliffs.)

          The First Peoples saw more in the mountain than the newspaper writer wrote.  I often wondered if the First Peoples had noticed a spiritual specialness of the mountain.  Then a farmer who had moved from the city told me what he had researched.  The People who first lived there had a unique reputation of being non-combative.

          Not coincidentally or not surprisingly, the European newcomers gave The People of this particular valley a name closely fitting their reputation as a priestly caste of people, a holy nation.  The newcomers abbreviated to, again an elementary description being the Little Nation, an English translation.  For out of some four million Algonquian people from the Rockies to the Maritimes and parts to the South, they were categorized or classified as one of seven major groupings, their indigenous name Oeskarini.

          Their fame existed before the European cataloguing respectfully gave the People of the Little Nation a major social value despite a very minor statistical presence.  The Petite Nation is a smaller river among numerous larger draining into the Ottawa.

           Before I get into the really neat details, allow me here to also mention what may be a big connection to the entire western hemispheric societies.  On a rainy winter's day in Maryland at the public library with no day-labor ditch-digging to do, I got to looking at a rack of personal print-outs next to the magazine section. 

           These were flyers and paper bulletins, one of which was actual book material.  It was several pages stapled together--I pause here to think of how to describe my surprise.

          Part  L   

          And it's an indirect connection to my story of the Little Nation People, so bear with me . The multi-page bulletin or publication I found at the library was a personal conjecture by the author or authors that the Bronze Age in Europe was supplied by copper from mines in Michigan.

           Much of the quality copper-ore in Northern Michigan is conveniently near the soil surface.  Plus, used Scottish and Irish pickaxes have been found generously scattered in the woods by the mining areas. The authors suggested that the Gaelic Celts in their cow-skin 'curraghs' initially came up the St.Lawrence but turned west on the Ottawa when they got to that river at present-day Montreal. I once saw a YouTube video of an Irish skin-boat sailed across the Atlantic. They even easily patched a hole punched by a piece of ice.

        They then hopped off the Ottawa where that river turned north and local-rivered west to Georgian Bay and then across to Sault Ste Marie. The miners may have left their Celtic boats in safe hands downriver and employed the First People's birch-bark canoe water-bus service. My point to make is the Gaels or many French and English later traveled past the river mouth of the Little Nation community.  

         A side story here, when I got to Quebec, first chance I got, I went over to Maniwaki and the First People’s land-tract over there north of Ottawa.  I wanted to talk with them about birch-bark canoes.  When I was on their property, I walked into the first building I saw.  It may have been a combined store and workshop. 

           An elderly man and two youngers were in there, silent to my arrival.  I asked my touristy question, and the ancient one put his head back.  I thought it was exasperation with me.  Ancient One did it again, but I didn’t catch on, until he did it again.  Hanging from the rafters drying was a fresh-made birch-bark canoe.  It was absolutely beautiful, simply gorgeous. 

        Officially and French, the Petite Nation is one of several rivers between Ottawa and Montreal that drain their river valleys and empty into the Ottawa River. Now conjecture with me for a moment how First People pilot-guides or water-bus-drivers would probably mention in passing to their European visitors that “the First People who live up in that river valley do not wage war".

         My big thought is that the reputation of peacefulness of the First People of the Petite Nation would have been taken down the Mississippi and from there to Tierra Del Fuego. So that the knowledge of the existence of at least one of the First Peoples of the western hemisphere choosing not to fight back or forward would temper the inclination in others of the First People elsewhere.
       

          My original question was whether the First People of the Little Nation / Petite Nation saw the beauty of the mountain. Like any mountain it is beautiful after an ice storm, very frequent in Eastern Canada and shining in the night-time light of the full moon. But I mean because specifically this mountain ridge is in three distinct sections.
   

         A footnote before I explain that, the last time I climbed the ridge to see the view, I did something new. Just back from the cliff edge, I climbed the highest tree up there, all small.  It stretched the compass a bit but nothing great.  But what did turn out to be great was what I saw on the ground nearby when I was starting to focus on climbing back down.

          It was a rock manually placed upon a larger rock. The rock underneath was natural, flat on top about a ten-foot long rectangle. And the rock put upon it was a rounded oval of less than a quarter ton in weight. It looked like it was put there, enough to elicit an excited shout as soon as I laid eyes on it, encouraging me to slip down out of the tree quickly.

         Thankfully, if it was indeed an altar it looked benign and not blooded as so many on the Earth. It just really looked like a respectful acknowledgement to a holy creator. I had a good feeling looking at it and this was before my friend told me what he knew.  What I saw as so big and special that first year I lived there was the three-part aspect of the mountain ridge.

         Part M

         And the view of the mountain in three parts is best from the farm where I lived. Behind the barn with no obstructions was especially best, the view of the mountain in three parts directly centered there. The central section, the Father mountain, has the cliff face at its center, and evenly slopes left and right in a balanced and majestic fashion.

         To its right if I may continue to anthropomorphize is the Son mountain. A different shape, its highest point is directly adjacent the Father mountain, separated by a minor gravity break. The body language of the Son mountain is as if it were reclining on a Roman couch. The impression is one of intimacy and equality in majestic royalty.

        To the left is the Holy Spirit mountain dual section of the same ridge. Separated by a minor gravity break again, the first two-thirds of it are a level plateau slightly separated by a less pronounced gravity break separating it from a distinct and majestic-looking knob. The view from the knob looks south into the world so to speak.

         The altitude of each of the three mountain ridge sections is equal. The ridge was surely sculpted by God's glacial hands. The general altitude is 1200-feet, the valley at five.

         There is a similar mountain configuration in Frederick County, Maryland like that of the one in Papineau County, Quebec, Canada. It is disjointed yet very distinct, Catoctin Ridge for the Father and the Son separated by old 40 and new 70. Then for a Holy Spirit Mountain, Sugarloaf stands out in the open facing south, as the original in Quebec.

         And I've seen a third set of three and more here in Pennsylvania. Notice I said 'more'.

        Jacks Mountain, the Pennsylvania 'continental divide' bisects Mifflin County here. On the other side of this valley from Jacks here to the east are the Blue Mountains connected behind them with the Blacklog ridge and on to Shade Mountain and Tuscarora.

           While Jacks Mountain is unbroken for twenty miles, a curving spectacular sight to see, the Blue Mountains here are in twelve sections, gravity breaks between each one.  (Jacks continues north and east for another almost unbroken twenty miles after the road between Harrisburg and State College.)

         I think they represent the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ.  Furthermore, the last four of the Blue Mountain ridge sections are exactly the same shape of the  Quebecois set of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are at the southern end of the Blue Mountain ridge, with a Holy Spirit knob-mountain ridge section again looking south.

        There is an excellent and splendid view of the twelve ridge sections of the Blue Mountains at the halfway point. This is at the Pleasant View cemetery, understating it, for the view is astounding. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit configuration was best viewed from our bedroom window.  We've moved since, right up in the shadow of the Blues.  

         I reasonably suspect that God has these three-in-one “godhead” mountains all over his Earth.  I urge you to keep a lookout for more of them, only as Del Washburn said it at the start of his original book on Theomatics.  He wrote a qualifying statement about the book's contents and subject.  That, it may not interest the stranger to the biblical God, but to those who are in love with him, to take a look at what’s been found. 

       An interesting supplement on mountain ridges, there are eight around here in Central Pennsylvania that are precisely 2080-feet in altitude.  Artistically, that is simply remarkable even by a secularized assessment of the situation. For a while it was only seven ridges, but this summer when checking out the family homestead in Lycoming County, there was an eighth, and the most distinct ridge of that region to boot.

           For you locals who want these identified, they are: Narrow Mtn in Lycoming, Bowers Mtn, Paddy Mtn, North Jacks Mtn, North Shade Mtn, Conocacheague Mtn and Tuscarora Mtn.  Looking online for what counties the others are in, I notice a stated variation in altitude.  My ADP book map charts each one at 2,080 feet. 

           I forgot the name of the eighth one, or the seventh of the first seven.  Note, Del's Theomatics points out that the number eight as a progression from seven represents Jesus Christ as the incarnated Son of God, the Father's favorite number being seven.    

           Note, the Mifflin County approach to State College is called Seven Mountains.  But, I would think it's too local to be ours.  Maybe the nice family with the beautiful campground there would know the meaning of the name.

          Part  N

          The apostle Paul counsels the prioritization of not shallow signs and wonders nor vain philosophy but better Christ Jesus crucified, died, and resurrected.  Nevertheless, I have profitably been in view of mountains that reflect the divine godhead of three-persons-in-one or three manifestations-in-one since the year I was re-born spiritually and began confessing Christ Jesus, arrived there in the farmhouse in Ripon, Quebec., Ca.  

           And, I rather appreciate it.  But you know it doesn't matter, because with eternity up ahead of us, God is simply in the process of meeting us where we are.  I remember sitting on the bench with Chris in the backyard speculating ignorantly how the moon did its phases.  Another eye-opener was snorkeling by myself on an island we were visiting in the Java Sea.

          I had been diving down holding my breath and picking up pieces of coral to bring back to the surface.  Then I'd swim over one of these big twenty-inch sea urchins and drop it on them.  It didn't hurt them, they only waved their massive spikes a bit and said 'stupid kid' to themselves.  These weren’t six-inch tenderloin sea urchins but most of two foot rawhides.

          That's all there was just stretching sand and occasional huge sea urchins.  But the water was getting deeper so I was getting discouraged.  So I decided to simply watch the enormous spiny-creatures.  But you can't just snorkel still-like or you'll sink so I kept going.  Also snorkeling keeps your face straight down so you don't look ahead much.

          Which set me up for a surprise, one that I think about very often.  I had swum out to the edge of the coral-atoll island, no lagoon or anything.  These things are just built up from the Godforsaken depths of the black deep.  It dropped off straight into a blackness of water that was extremely unnerving.

          Apparently scuba divers go straight for that drop-off; may God not forsake them.  I remember we went to the Sunda Strait by car to swim, around where Krakatoa Island got sent into space.  I had brought my little tic-tac-toe shaped fishing dropline.  After lunch, I took one of the rectangular air-mattresses.  Dad had found a big shallow bay for us to swim in and I was able to paddle out in visible water.  

          I didn't have any bait to put on the hook for I figured the shiny hook might do it.  I kept going out farther then stopping to fish then farther.  I was out far enough to not be able to distinguish the individual identity of the members of my family.  It was around that time that it occurred to me, this water is deep enough for me to be the bait.

           Against my better judgment, knowing not to cause undue commotion, I panicked.  I dropped the dropline and paddled quickly and noisily and with lots of splashing back.  Yes, a human surface lure or 'bass plug' or barracuda plug. 

           On the drive back, Dad commented he had taken a walk down the road and noticed a sign posted at the entrance to the bay.  In Bahasa Indonesian it said in effect, 'Don't even think of swimming here', including the word for shark and add barracuda to the active water-park.  I fished for their cousins, muskellunge in the Quebec river.  I also visited them snorkeling underwater to attest, they are bold and strangely confident.

         That woman who told me of coerced exploits with her lousy spouse also said this.  When arriving at an island by canoe one day for some northern camping, she stepped out on a log perpendicular to the shore.  And the log slowly ambled out into deeper water.

           Part  O                                                                

          We used to fish for bluegill in Boose Creek which flows down to the Potomac just inside the D.C. beltway.  What we called the big pool but wasn't very big was our favorite spot.  Eventually we all focused on a young child's footprint embedded in the big round rock on the far side.  It was a young child's footprint or a very interesting geological coincidence.  It was too high on the round rock to touch when you waded out there to try but very visible.  The creek got cemented over into a causeway for some reason.

          Two big footprints, again in solid rock are in The Transvaal, South Africa and recently one found in Pingyan, China.  Whole-entire dug-up skeletons of buried giants are available to see online if you're interested, especially on Steve Quayle's website.  The Pingyan print is large-Sasquatch size in prehistoric rock at 57cms or 22.44 inches.  The Transvaal footprint is vertical in granite at 1.2 meters or 3.94 feet to realize a humanoid of 7.5 meters or 24.61 feet high.  'There were giants on the Earth in those days, and after (the great flood), when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men."

          One of the ground footprints in archaeological Africa saddens me to think about.  It's the one that is a whole series of footprints by a single individual person.  Analysis says the footprints are of a young woman.  And she is running at top speed.  It could be a happy reason or a sad one; it's not decipherable.  I wonder if she was running for her life.  Have you seen the miserable YouTube video of Muslim men group raping one of their own women accused of a religious-political infraction?  God probably has a comment.

          Part  P

          I'm saving my money to buy a Young's Interlinear; it reads quite fluidly for an interlinear.  If you're new to the bible, get one anyway to avoid "private interpretation(s)".  You can pick up a 'kaching' bible at a thrift store for a buck or so.  'The siren song of a white-collar crook is a kaching tune'.  AV Publications sells helpful material.   Given that plural counsel is preferable, I suggest using King James' with Robert Young's together.

          This 'so-called' Christian is not against funded pulpits.  It's the dishonest didactics that bothers.  Like junk food it can really compromise.  I was told to cut some trees down to regain the mountain view at Montebello.  I ate uniquely before doing what should have been an easy job, simply dropping the trees now for firewood later.

          I always otherwise ate serious working fare, but I had brought into the house a pack of six miniature cupcakes.  I ate five and went out to near-lumberjack-disaster.  I refrained with one of the trees to step away a safe distance.  Plus, cutting high as I was was new to me with new risks.  This very tree I didn't back away from once it started to fall slid off its trunk and into my chest.  When you're cutting trees, back off a mile to keep your smile.

          I'm here thinking of the holes in windshields in the early 1960’s I saw as a child when Dad took us out west and we had to slow down for wrecks, more than once.  It was because of no seatbelts in cars with the speed limit at 75 mph and lots of V-8 engines.  ‘What does the devil expect us not to think of next?’

          Dad took us to Wyoming twice so he could warm up to and then climb the big Teton.   I looked up how the Tetons were made; there's a little bit of sedimentary rock on top of some of them.  Otherwise, God did a fabulous number by shoving original bedrock up into the air.  I went trekking with Dad and Pam in Nepal from Thailand.  Those hills look like they were made yesterday.

          The youngest sherpa carrying our gear was thirteen years old.  He spoke some English and as we were about to transition from the valley with Everest at the upper end looking like the throne of God and down into the next on our return home, there was a lone nice-looking stone house just off the trail.  He said, 'That's my grandma's house'.

          On our way to Wyoming, we stopped near Chicago to visit Dad's mom and cousins.  I was kicking around with one of them in the front yard along a big row of bushes.  It was full of Japanese beetles which we were mainly looking at.  My cousin then asked a seemingly strange question, ‘Have you heard of 'The Beatles?’

        The year was 1963; we'd see them on their rest-stop at the airport in Jakarta two years later.  I hope they've apologized in their lives for saying they're more popular than Jesus.  It would be forgiven them, but not if they put it off year after year.  That's what the Old Mennonite Ausbund Gregorian chant song I sing says, 'Don't be putting off your repentance to God year after year’, an old tune with new lyrics.

          My favorite rock band was the Allman Brothers Band.  I hitch-hiked to Florida to hear two of their shows, the first after Duane wiped permanently on his motorcycle.  The second was after Berry did the same off his bike.  The second had them too crippled and saddened to present well.  The first was sensational, sadly so, as they reached out into the spirit world to their loved one.  I remember a long wait for a ride in northern Florida and saw a bird in the sky stop flying and fall.

          Part Q

          Little brother Chris tried tree-climbing to imitate his big brothers.  He tried a bare tree with big spreading branches.  He got stuck at the end of one and a firetruck had to get him down.  I wish we older ones weren't so pressured by neglect to ourselves and in turn neglected our younger kin.  Alan showed me the limb he was out on.  I’m just shaking my head here.

          One day Alan and Pete mentioned to me that our only sister Andrea and a friend had themselves also built a treehouse.  They told me where it was and I went and checked it out.  Sure enough it was way up there with solid hand-steps nailed in on the way up to the first climbing branches.  The boards they used for sky-high sofas were well-placed on branches and 'nailed in tight'.

          I sat and made myself comfortable, catching the summer breeze.  Being a child, I versed no derogatory words of bias, you know gender bias.  I was verily and deeply impressed even more as the minutes wore on.  The impression increased in my buttocks however, which moved me to find out why.  The boards were fiberglass, taboo in treehouse making.

          This here's a big story; we were enthusiastic about the Civil War as little boys.  Our dad had to ask us once or twice why we favored the southern cause when our northern forebears did not.  Regardless of why, we were and soon had reason to doubt the whole fake shebang.  Word got to us that boys on the other side of River Road were playing Civil War games too, as northerners.

          'Problem was, we were long forbidden by Dad to cross busy River Road.  So we went under that newly widened four-lane highway using the drainage pipes.  We rolled up our beloved southern flag, held our stick rifles close to our chest and crawled through.  It got serious fast, the boys over there well-organized and older than us.

          We set up on a vacant hill too steep to build houses on and saw them down in their backyards assembling to deal with our surprise arrival.  We were as numerous as them and made charge after charge within close range of their yards.  They turned out to be dirty fighters by capturing one of our slower running soldiers.

          By dirty I mean they hard-belly-rubbed their prisoner before releasing him.  Our friend was understandably upset and we convened on the hill.  This was not the ethical hands-off 'bang bang, I got you, you're dead' war play we enjoyed.  We decided to clear out and return across the Potomac River.  You understand my analogy.

          'If the South didn't win the Civil War with Robert Lee in charge, then they weren't supposed to'.  Both side's leaders fought together a few years before in Mexico.  They were pinned down and punctured by their own artillery unit that had defected to the Mexican side.  It was a very serious situation with no going back only forward.

         And Mexico City's outer defense was almost impregnable and impossible.  Brain racking by the U.S. command was stymied, at a complete loss of what to do.  The younger and lesser officer Lee twice approached his general with an idea.  I don't know which was tried first but both worked, the latter building on the former.  

          A cliff was scaled and a swamp was waded through, not at the same time.  And the U.S. forces evaded the double-spy cannon fire of their mutinous former comrades.  They would all be hung for having believed the enemy's siren song of wine and women.  Rob Lee could think strategically like Wayne Gretzky could 360-degree vision an ice rink.

         Part  R

         We all have an adversary against our souls if you remember, one trained in exactly how humans think and feel.  This again is a double-spy situation where our predator is camouflaged.  I remember walking on the edge of a grassy gully and seeing a deer.  It was broadside against the hill it was on, right across from me.

          Brown deer, green grass, and it was looking at me hoping I didn't see it.  But I did and stopped and it waited to see what I would do next.  This was on the back part of the farm in Quebec, actually skirting our forest back there using the neighbor's open, but rough place.  I flashed a go-ahead with my arms to enervate the two deer.  

          Yes there were two of them, both broadside in linear fashion identically.  They jumped sky-high like African gazelles and were at full speed when landing.  We must be trained to discern spiritual camouflage of 'angels of light' and the prettiest trappings of fake love.       

          The old farmer said there were a large pair of wolves back there. I heard them talking to my horse from the train-tracks.  He was way out there pasturing alone on a November night. I walked out there to be with him.  We saw the wolves in person riding in the back there one time. They must have seen me lots of times. But, it took me riding him for them to show themselves.  They came out and paralleled us a workable ways away.

           I saw a bear back there once, not way back, just out from the beyond train-track pasture.  I was bringing the herd back there after morning milking.  I had the bigger heifers in the same field and they were all clustered by the north fence.  And then I saw what I thought was the oldest by the name of Angie sniffing noses with them.  She had found a way out once before, herself, proof she was a future adult member of the herd wrecking crew.  There’s always a few who are mechanically minded with fences. 

           But I observed this creature was bigger by a hundred pounds of Angie’s 750 or so.  And then it noticed me and the cows and took off at full speed across the neighbor’s little field to their little woods.  I realized it was a bear as it looked back at me at 40-mph with  little round ears.  What impressed me more was when I followed its path down through those little woods.  It surely must have tripped and rolled to the edge of the 1/2-acre pond down in there.  It looked like a skid loader went through.

        About estimating weights of organisms, visiting Mom once in Maryland, old friends from Indonesia stopped by, home for them in Texas.  She and I were classmates in school and she had her twelve-year-old daughter with her.  I was sitting in an armless chair and invited the maiden over so I could get a closer look at her.  She did and I progressed the situation with the invitation to sit on my lap like a child. 

           She trusted me to do that, but I was getting nervous of what to do next.  Because, she was definitely nervous, but also my honorary niece and so I kept joking.  I asked the young beauty if I might try guessing her weight, which she allowed.  So, I hemmed and hawed and shifted her precious bottom around to get a feel of her.  And, I said, ‘Oh, I’d say you’re, seventy…seventy-two…seventy-two-and-a-half pounds.’  She turned to me and looked in my eye and suspiciously said, "I just weighed myself yesterday; I’m 72.5 lbs!".

        I was staring out the living room window considering my next step in life.  My twelve-year-old youngest sibling, Jamie, came up behind me.  He said "You're thinking of (her back in the Philippines), aren't you?  That's not true love!"  I'm silent in the presence of profundity and that young upstart had my attention.  I turned around and took the full hit.

         Things built up in my soul around that time and one cold and extremely windy winter night I left the house for the privacy of a woods nearby.  I cried and screamed with my back to a big tree.  Then I lowered myself against it for support and continued my cries.  I screamed so loudly in hope someone nearby would hear and succor my desperation.

          But I was downwind big-time of any people living nearby, very windy and loud wind.  I finally saw through my tears by looking up through the many angled branches of the tree. There were more stars than I had ever seen in the Metropolitan D.C. night sky.  And the sight of them subdued my soul, certain that the creator of stars and trees heard me.  

          Abstinence is mature control and respectful awareness of very great beauty in our bodies.  The delicate balance of significant hormones is designed to be shared.  If and when we take the law into our own hands, we disrupt and interfere in the process.  There is an ebb and flow of energy which is dependent upon mutual awareness and sharing of tender love.

          Ms. John Elway can be quoted as saying, 'In this family, we have rules!'  Ms. then delineated the fact that she and her spouse refrain from approaching each other the day before a game.  God required the same prioritization of concentration of energy on the part of the coupled women-and-men Israelites before the big day at Sinai Stadium.  He said, "Approach not your women tonight."  In the new covenant he suggests occasional times of mutually agreed upon special prayer and fasting.

          Napoleon Hill in his famous business-tips book devoted an entire chapter to this subject of private self-control.  Joseph stepped aside in agreeable abstinence so the Lord God could politely prioritize himself with Mary.  Truly, God prioritized each of us in doing so. 

           Actually, as Hebrews, Joe and Mary were only engaged.  I read a cool fact yesterday; the Amish grow extra celery in the weeks before a wedding, if you know the nutritional value of that.

          Part  S

          'Father' Lynch in Indonesia never failed to impress this younger person.  Around the time he suggested I return the skull I had found in the hot tropical woods on one of the Java Sea atolls we occasionally cruised out to on Saturdays, he also reached down and grabbed one of my arms when I touched the wall first at the other end of the swimming pool that victorious Fourth of July day, lifting me clear out of the water.

          My buddy Peter with whose family I visited Bali with also brought home a skull.  All the bones of numerous skeletons were in there.  We named ours Archie and Jughead.

          It was people like Mister Lynch that made me not want to give up getting off the bottom of the diving pool a week later.  I tried helping him out at church once, but wasn't up to it.  I had decided to be an altar-helper along with my brother Peter who was skilled  at it.  The altar-helpers fetch stuff for the Catholic priest during the formal celebration of the mass. 

          I didn't make it halfway through the event before I started keeling over from the warm temperature up there in the higher part of the building.  I got up and wobbled over in front of the heavenly host to the sacristy.  That's where the priest works out of and is also where his woman house-helper stations herself.  

          I stayed a long happy while there with her.  She sat me down at the end of a wooden table with my back to where I came from.  She gave me milk and cookies as she hovered over me.  She really was nearly hugging me from the side.  The feel of her soft and tender bosom against my cheek was friendly and reassuring. 

          Mom later told me that 'Father' Lynch married that delightful woman.  He had to change the sub-heading of his Christian vocation to do so.  Celibacy is optional by the Word of God as a coincidental decision, not an institutional one.  Thanks to the Chinese and Gutenburg's mechanical application of their wondrous encyclopedia, we can each own a Holy Bible.

          Rapturous; I don't recall ever using that vocabulary word, even mentally.  Speculating on how Jesus is returning as a so-called rapture seems a waste of God's hard-earned time.  And of course guessing just when he'll return is strictly forbidden and most Christian people know that.  But there may be a clue with the church in (old) Philadelphia.

           I told this story already, but I think it was part of the vaporization.  Going in to a theater one lonely evening to see the Grinch try to steal Christmas, a simultaneous movie was starting a few feet away.  It was that one, but I didn’t have anybody to leave ‘behind’ to see it. 

          Jim Elliot and four Christian brothers weren't doing any such waste of time in Ecuador.  The Aucas got them and Jim, not before he wrote, 'He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose'.  Civilized people should use their relative affluence to reach out to uncivilized people.  Getting lost in the woods could have happened to any one of us after Babylon.  The book '1491' has interesting points to make about western hemispheric woods.       

          And how do we know the uncivilized have not a civilizing effect on the civilized?  Or it makes sense that an imbalance of resource allocation is inevitable on a planet God has cursed for our own good.  And that everyone involved has "fallen short of the glory of God".  Therefore if we need to rest then rest, but let's not be leaning on our shovels.

          Puppy love is precious and a precursor of adult lifelong rapture.  Michael sang of puppy love, and for reasons that deserve the utmost concern and compassion never did experience the latter that I know of.  Young love is more precious than the smell of a rose.  The feelings and aspirations of children is to be respected.

          If and when children are bothersomely imperfect it is probably a transference of our own adult shortcomings.  We adults ought to cease the cowardly shadow-boxing of our living deaths and take the blows the world and evil are dealing our children.  To inflict blows like spanking a child is the utmost hypocrisy.  It's time to stop, for we know better now.

          Shortly before we went to Indonesia, my buddy Michael and his parents took us to hear Peter, Paul, and Mary.  In Honolulu at the Hilton, with Dad gone ahead, Mom drunked into the night.  Andrea must have been exhausted babysitting by that time on the trip, Greg in school.  It was chaos in the hotel room, so I took a blanket and pillow to the bathtub.  I slept great and got up for an early morning swim.  So early, but someone was already there, a woman, reading.  I walked close to her and looked in her eyes.  Her eyes pleaded with me to remain silent.  I did, later hearing that Paul and Peter, and Mary Travers were staying at the Hilton, also.

          Part  T

          They were short-handed over at the women's house as a group home.  I went over and was trained by an employee who screamed at the three women the entire training shift.  The women were indeed out of line but as I learned were certainly not happy doing so.  It took me three weeks to focus on the only proper solution.

          The women had gotten into the especially bothersome habit of ransacking their house kitchen.  One was able to climb up on the counters and pull stuff out of the cabinets.  While the other two did the same onto the open floor.  In order to effectively disengage the three women's innocent vandalism, I had to engage them otherwise.

          Day-by-day together we replaced chaos of process with order and profitability.  May I say delicately here, 'Teenage problems are best solved routinely'.  It was their house and I let them know without any verbal feedback that I was there to help them enjoy it.  The three women's individual preferences of daily routine were harmonized.

          Disney's Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs didn't hold anything compared to these gals.  And Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs was Bible in the women's house.  Each day it was the preferred video and over again.  And the peace and harmony and cooperation of the real story's characters were positively coincidental and supportive.  

          My group house supervisor, Charles, was the older brother of Billy, Alan’s teen-age years best friend.  Charles was too humble to tell me what Alan did about him.  Back as a teenager, caddying or carrying bags over at the exclusive Burning Tree golf club, Charles was started on the five-mile walk to his home in Cabin John, MD.  President Rick Nixon had been at the club and on the course.  President Rick was on his way home too and pulled over to see if Charles wanted a ride.  ‘Sure did.  By the way, 'you want to listen to an intelligent debate, check out on YouTube the one with Nixon and Kennedy circa 1959.

          I want to develop Winston's reassuring statement of 'fear' and 'fear itself'.  What we want to do is look to God to protect us from that which predatorially feeds on fear.  It is a Biblical fact "The angel of The Lord encamps around them that (lovingly) fear (revere) him".  God's profitably perfect love eliminates the futility of fear.  It doesn’t mean a bus won’t run over us; perish the thought.

          Giving attention to God is good for us.  You can't lose with God because he has the victory by Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Israel.   You know his parents were as good as they come.  By their time the Davidic royal line for most every fault of their own had cursedly gone incognito after the divine curse upon Jeconiah.  Jonathan Cahn again did the research on this after his discovery of a Passover Christmas.

          Much evidence verifies the fact that Joseph and Mary Christ, 'just joking, were the heirs apparent of the royal throne of an Israel that had rejected God as their real king.  Socially they may have had thirty-five years of living between them.  More like thirty years, either one of them could have been just past modern bar-mitzvah/bat-mitzvah age.

          Orthodox Israel as Judah by that time was a mature society.  Liberals among them were admittedly running naked with the Romans.  But true old Israel preceding "the Israel of God" of the second covenant prophesied by Jeremiah et al were walking in humility before Almighty God.  The Christs, 'er Joseph and Mary were the literal epitome of this.

          Without fanfare but not without devoted fans the King of Kings was born a baby.  Imagine the day when Jesus beat his mom to wiping his lips of residual butter and honey for a first time.  Maybe Joseph was in there to see it also, the child no longer an infant in his mind.  His parents watched his keen eyes, heard his lips, and looked at each other.

          Part  U

          In summary it is my experience and amateur observation that child discipline is impossible without parental discipline.  And nature is nurture, no destroying element existing except for a misguided human will that wants one.  Children’s rights are the most important human rights.  Family health is proven successful in successful child guidance.  Instead of corporal punishment, I prefer corporal compassion.

        Peaceful social unity doesn’t happen without peaceful family unity.  Hitting anybody is illegal, so why are we hitting children?  Oh of course there’s no one looking except the owner and he's invisible.  So then, natural child training must necessarily be non-destructive and non-hurtful.  Even predation in nature is a so-called necessary evil due to Adamic transgression against God’s goodness in Eden.  ‘Animals don’t show animosity, people do’.        

          The macrocosm of world peace is only subsequent to the microcosm of family peace.  Non-corporal punishment of adults is a double-standard to corporal punishment of children.  Child discipline is only fairly a repeat of the measure of adult self-discipline.  Our place in society is originally our place in the family.  

          And since a healthy mind is a peaceful mind no need exists at all for violence.  Any fight-or-flight responses or defensive and closed postures that make our modern stress are unnecessary bad dreams.  Social abuse and spousal abuse have their origin in child abuse.  I would be remiss not to partly blame the biblical devil Satan and his evil host for hell-ping.

          I personally have a standing theory that bad dreams as nightmares are external predatory miseries and not self-inflicted.  I think the devil’s morbid imagination sometimes influences our nightmares.  I mean the worst of them that play tricks on our normal brain domains.  I’ve had some nightmares that remind me of the book titled Murder, She Wrote as murder Satan wrote when I’m the one being murdered.  Give credit where credit is due; blame the devil sometimes.   

          In other words I disagree with total self-blame of abuse, of emotional abuse, of verbal abuse, and physical abuse.  Blaming children for wrongdoing is connected to blaming ourselves for wrongdoing.  Something I think we adults do wrong is dwell incessantly on both ours and others wrongs.  A healthy spiritual journey is not a guilt-trip in ourselves or placed on others.

          Otherwise we have a works-oriented lifestyle instead of a Godly faith-based one.  God is faithful and just to forgive our wrongs through his crucified Christ, Jesus his only begotten.  Our dreams will be greatly protected from negative spiritual influence.  Godly wisdom will guide and nurture us in making positive lifestyle choices.  And our daydreams will be those of hope and peace.  Legendary simple self care is really possible when the biblical God lives in us.  

          Part  V                                                               

          It's not press time yet and 'it ain't over 'til it's over.  Like winter and summer you're not ready for the one until you've had enough of the other.  There being two seasons not four as God conversed with Noah after the flood, "winter and summer, cold and hot, seedtime and harvest".  

          It is evident to me that during the great water-flood God changed his manipulation of the local orbits.  The Earth now went elliptically around the sun and tilted on its axis.  This changed things from the single season before the great flood.  That's why there's oil found top to bottom on the Earth.

          I have an idea for a fourth page because the New Jerusalem awaits us like an empty Lloyd Triestino ocean liner.  There'll be tea and cookies and cream and sugar and a fine sea-breeze.  Let's get ourselves on God's beautiful boat like Noah’s ocean liner for mostly animals.  Sin is a serious thing and our eternal English teacher docks us five-points for it, Language Arts.  Jesus is the beautiful ship his Christian brethren sail on to reach their goal as they humbly avoid the shoal and harbor no resentment while doing it.

          This completes page three of my SoloBuildIt website essay.  Thank you so far.