( an introduction before the first preface )
I don't believe in God; I believe God. The devil believes in God, and the thought makes his knees knock together in stark terror. Never mind planetary visitation as priority. One of the bible narrators---God authored it---said in-so-many words that God holds the universe He created in the palm of His hand. Only God is sublime, the devil a subliminal criminal. and everyone else also using insincere spiritual gimmickry.
The root of the word 'gimmick' is 'gimme'. It disregards what Jesus Christ said, that "It is better to give than to receive". His humbly-wise yet self-debauched king, Solomon said that he has seen honorable men leading the horses of low-lifes riding them.
Jesus, the King of Kings who in His salvation visit to Earth had "nowhere to lay His head", prophetically said in a Psalm, speaking as the incarnated Son of Man, "When shall I appear before God, before The Living God? My tears have been my drink both day and night, in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is".
This is The Man who at the end of his final relaxed and enjoyable supper with those He called his rabbi-disciples until then but now called them His friends, for they now had a clear understanding of Who He was and Why He had incarnated on The Earth, proceeded to sing a pretty and sanctified spiritual song with them, a 'hymn', and then as one they went out into the dark of the night.
This is the social precedent for no longer any of the many temple instruments of music, which would soon be burned by Titus as a decadent and backslidden whole junk. People of God's Christ, called by outsiders Christians, since that evening have continued to only make melody to God with instruments not made with hands, their voices.
The Catholic Christians rightly kept 'the organs' out of the church buildings as late as the 1200's. Even the Protestant evangelist John Wesley said when asked what he thought of musical instruments in their church buildings, "I have nothing against having musical instruments in the church buildings, as long as they are neither seen nor heard".
I sold my banjo for the bus ticket to the far away farm room-and-board position I had been given as a twenty-year-old. My right arm had only five-percent function from a school window accident in 8th-grade. I stubbornly tried to play the thing anyway.
On a ship with my family, we celebrated my fifth birthday with a memorable cake. The cake was placed before me, and I accepted the invitation to cut pieces for everyone. A lot was left over for me to eat all I wanted. But when I dug in, I was stopped by hard things. Sliced nuts were everywhere, and I couldn't manage to eat a single bite.
As it's said, You can't have your cake and eat it too.
The God and Heavenly Father of the incarnated Son of Man is a practical God, and a realistically efficient One. He knows what desolate disruption sin caused for His plan for man and woman, for mankind, the desolation of death. He had a man articulate for our benefit and our condition, writing it down in His Bible-Book, that man's weeping "endures only for the night, but joy cometh in the morning". There s hope only in Him, Jesus Christ.
Every other 'way' only leaves us hanging on our miserable crosses. Keeping us there are the social gimmicks of predatorial and parasitical control we all participate in until by God's help we get disgusted with ourselves. Not ignorently did Jesus say, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh to The Father but by me".
I was tripping one night in Bangkok, living at Dad's house (trying to emigrate to NewZealand, who had enough of their own), on 'Mister Natural' LSD, and was so energetic, as a 19-year-old, that I decided to do something I was not in the habit of doing. I went up on the main drag, Sukumvit, to simply walk for excercise.
I observed a rich man parked on the curb bartering for a virgin, while a watching much older prostitute asked of me. Which I declined politely, and kept walking. My point is, I stepped down an alley and pissed against a little papaya tree. Looking up to the side of its leaves, the Big Dipper constellation was looking its cool.
Its seven stars, so prominent and definite, reminded me of some sporadic reading of the bible I had done. I decided there was a connection and said a rare prayer to God. I said in my mind, "That's Your constellation, isn't it, God".
Later I observed that the two right-side stars of 'the dipper' point directly at the North Star. Which surely represents Jesus Christ, "the same yesterday, today, and forever". Plus, the Southern Cross constellation surely represents the Roman cross of Jesus Christ, southern hemisphere. God has not left Himself without a witness on His planet Earth.
More recently, during a supposed meteor shower, but I wasn't seeing any, I satisfied my self by watching my God point and say, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased".
And as I looked and thought this, a 'shooting star' shot right through it all, right by the North Star. I thought it was a personal gesture of kindness from my creator to me. God doesn't get cramped assembling a little, tiny flower. And He can set a few of His stars up for a billboard message or two.
It reminds me of the line in the Jaws movie, "You're gonna' need a bigger boat". Some of us need a larger and more personal assessment of who God is. Another big point that should be said here, while the refutation of the false idea of 'once saved always saved' is "It is he (or she) who endures unto the end that will be saved", the explanation is easily, "God knows those who are His", and also,
"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord".
As for a bigger boat, the fellow-ship of Jesus Christ is my choice. We sailed on one of the Italian Lloyd Triestino ocean liners in 1959. It was turned into a mercy ship, a very well-built boat. God has his bathtub toys also. It was on an American ship after the Italian one that we celebrated my birthday.
I don't know who God is; I know THAT He is, He "in Whom we live, and move, and have our being". We are like we're new on a job, or a position in the military. We're in a learning position, and accomplishment rightly gained is a foretaste of Heaven. I say, 'Competition is simply a petition with self, success merely an increment of doing better'.
When I got back from my truly 'spaced out' walk up on Sukumvit, I doffed my clothes and hopped into Dad's little swimming pool. When I hopped right back out, I turned and looked at the water. The full moon was shining in hundreds of hexagons. I realized that if the pool wall wasn't there, then the lunar hexagons would go on for ever.
The blossoming franjipani tree adjacent the pool made the prospect perfectly interesting. Maria Muldaur caught a hint of it with her song Midnight At the Oasis. It was my only liked song on the juke box at work, which didn't have Moon River on it. The tavern customers would put their coins in, not me.
Even the most evil entity still yet exists in a realm of life, not yet separated from life, God, until the final judgment. Only Jesus Christ as "Son of Man" has ever experienced separation from God. This is how He took death upon Himself, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Note, the King James was written as it is for grammatical accuracy. Do you understand, no one has ever experienced eternal death except Jesus.
What was heard from that cross was typical of "...weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth". Jesus, as God, had already wept over Jerusalem. Jesus, as Man, wailed for His own vicarious demise. We have to really understand what happend on that cross. Thousands of Israelites were crucified by the Romans. Jesus really had done no wrong. Not me.
We didn't just spank the Son of God, we bloody crucified Him, rejecting Him as God. If we don't fully understand the cross of Christ, maybe we don't fully understand children. I remind that Jesus said Heaven is like children. We should take children, and one another, more seriously than we may have up until now.
Understand, spanking a child abandons the dear into a maelstrom, a whirlpool, of mistrust, missed-trust, of lost trust. I have seen the same bewildered terror in an infant's eyes whose mother has handed him over to a religious ecclesiast for an unnecessary baptism. More details on this later, only to also say, God's "little ones" are in a mental eternal mindset. A time framework and its learned coping mechanisms are not in place yet.
A system of indirect arm-twisting intends to remove the heart of a child from God's kingdom of unconditional love to one of manipulated hate. Spanking binds people generationally to a system of control of will, satanically done in the name of God. The child then grows down, not up, to think manipulation is normal. Jealousy is a factor along with a concealed hatred of innocence.
Do we really treasure the apostle's suggestion, "..whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things".
I saw early on with my own eyes what people will do to be accepted by the group. We will nearly or actually deprive someone of life that we ourselves might be part of it. God is the "discerner of the heart". And "Today is the day of salvation", and "God is not slow as mankind counts slowness, but He is wanting to see each one come to repentance".
'Nearly or actually' includes what Jesus said of sin happening in our thoughts.
"As a man thinks in his heart, so he is".--- Jesus. "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God". With our babies, how soon our adulation becomes predation. We press our lukewarm rationales and philosophies upon these hot tamales from Heaven. We write our lies upon Heaven's infantile blank slates. We don't let up into adulthood, dupes in a demonic loop.
Well, let's run this hoop down the dirt road here.
I will show you how this deception was deftly implanted in pivotal places in Scripture where it seems normal to read and understand it that way. It is slick double-talk exactly like the devil sweet-talked to Eve, but written into the con-text of the beautiful book of God. The travesty is done to children, to women, and to adults in three respective text places.
We could say the bible was hacked and its 'code' slickly rewritten in three places. Our mental and logical gyroscopes were set akilter, biblically. The children one was done during the transition from Latin to English. I haven't observed yet when the women one was done; I'll show you where it was done and why. The Catholics did the adult one, in Latin. The Protestants inherited it and did worse with it.
A key part of the tricks, typically, is to appeal to finite human nature. Set the trick in motion, and it takes on a death of its own. If it's not Christendom, then it's another one of the mundane dummie-doms. We each have stepped in the stuff, and I for one have learned to watch where I put my feet.
"For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God".
Real true nonresistant Christians are not supposed to be hitting anyone. That basic premise should be sufficient to warrant attention. For it is only one place in the entire Book that the word 'child' is equated with the rod. This is where the identity theft occurred. To be explained. Carly Simon's song You're So Vain was on the juke box too.
Going on here, mankind has always speculated about Almighty God incarnating a human. It happened "in the fullness of time", this essay recounting much of it for benefit of the newcomer, also for those who think they've already arrived.
But for sure, per eyewitness reporting, Jesus is humanity's hero. Jesus overcame death, that experience of horror when inherited life stops. Originally, we weren't meant to die. And, the experience wars against every fiber in our being.
God had it written He won't challenge us "more than we are able" to cope with, if 'challenge' is the correct word. That's at His hand; what mankind does to us is another matter, something God Himself shakes His head and grimaces for, I am sure. Frequently, He laments through His old covenant prophets our backslidden ways.
God is without blame. 'Only Jesus lived and died with no regrets".
Before Jesus, and without Jesus as the embodiment of wisdom, mankind has had to wing it. I've seen some honorable ten-commandment type guidelines in world religions. A most useful one is the 'golden rule'. As I extend it, 'The golden rule is the real rod of correction'.
We have to proceed with what guidance we have available, always prioritizing our conscience. Life decisions are a process of elimination. If we consistently disregard our conscience, then itself will be eliminated. And we will be "without hope in the world".
I've lost my place in these prefaces. Big in my mind to say is that there is no inherent goodness in us. All such is drawn from God. His 'spiritual fruit' personality characteristics are a list of nine in Galatians, "love, joy, peace, longsuffering (or patience), gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperence (or self control)". These can only be drawn from God's Spirit, kidding ourselves otherwise. "Of myself I can do nothing".
You can play football with these spiritual fruits, clean, hard, fear-of-God-putting football without hurting an opposing player with dirty playing. Or other play what-have-you. Or at work. An Ojibwe prayer says, 'O Great Spirit, protect me from my greatest enemy, myself', paraphrased.
Jesus pointed out to Nicodemus that we all eliminate our original conscience and have to be "born anew", like a baby again, spiritually. But Heaven is like a mama and will come against any deathly opposition, except for addictions. Understand what I do about God, biblically, which is His own panoramic description of Himself.
Biblically, Almighty God describes Himself both publicly and privately, the masculine and feminine. God is discreet about his femininity, just as we are about our moms and our sisters and our wives and our daughters. Just as each of us is both genders, so is God. When a man and a woman perfectly make love as committed husband and wife, they enter into a state of oneness.
That total unity of soul is heavenly, and is a foretaste of Heaven. With children, God gifts us with the cyclical good habit of the thrill of His life. A child's excitement of being alive is very exemplary of God's eternal energy. My writing largely focuses on this, explaining what is interfering in this heavenly gifting. Jesus said, "Behold, I make all things new".
A reminder, Jesus is quoted as saying that any intentional damage done to the system of babies and children and families will have plagues applied to them, an eternal discomfort zone. "It is written that offenses will come, but woe be by whom the offenses come". Of Iscariot, Jesus added, "It would be better for that man than if he had never been born".
Notice, Jesus there is speaking knowledgeably of a future event, speaking as God, Son of God. "For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy", KJV. Robert Young's Literal translation says "of the prophecy".
To quote God, biblically, “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision”.
That’s you and me, as a song says, ‘going down the valley one-by-one’.
There is an assurance of security in this life which is possible, in our conscience which can agree with the coincidental involvement of Almighty God in our lives, by Jesus Christ.
After the great flood (ask most every ancient global culture if you doubt it, or come with me up on the ridge here, and I’ll show you what the rocks clearly say), the Sumerians (descendants of Shem, one of the Noah’s three children) ceased their recent ancestors’ worship of The God Of The Flood, all our creator, and began to worship the creation, even the works of their hands and their own private ideas.
God became in their minds a corporate God with no individual communication as before between Noah and God. The reigning monarchs were self-acclaimed incarnations of God, while actually it may have been incarnations of spirits of “the sons of God”, angels, fallen ones.
Who first did this in Heaven, led by Lucifer, whom God called out for it, to exile him and a third of the angels to Earth.
Lucifer had tried to usurp the throne of God.
While it sounds like a stupid thing to do, you know, hopeless, the point here is, he tried it.
For perspective, jump ahead to see him as Satan tempting Jesus in the desert. He got very ‘boldly’ right in the face of the incarnated Son of God. Further, he blew Scripture concepts at him that were empirically brilliant, and diabolically presumptuous.
The Son of Man did as he was properly trained to do as the carpenter’s Israelite firstborn son, referring Satan to the Word of God, not away from it. You know that, after leaving his dad’s workshop, Jeshua Christ went to law school.
He passed the bar exam summa cum laude or the bar equivalent. Furthermore, his heavenly dad’s the judge of the court of mankind and angels. Retain that-there Esquire!
Really, Jeshua had spiritually anticipated actively becoming Almighty God's 'christ' during his childhood. He did this by "studying the Word of God, to be approved of Him". He didn't go to the prom, he went to God's promises. And I appreciate you reading my writing. I pray my God about my readers, that we be eternal family and friends.
Satan, and anyone with the same mind and heart of Satan, of the mindset of “antichrist”, wants the throne of God in Heaven and on Earth, and under the Earth. Yes, there’s a realm under the Earth's surface apparently, also, with room besides volcanic lava I guess, and 'Texas tea'. Oil, you know, is squished fish, coal flattened plants from the flood water.
"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of The Living God".
Now, like when I stole money from the bedside table, as a four-year-old, of my parents’ hired cook, in Malaya, I did not fully understand what I was doing. It was for ice cream from the bicycle vendor, as I explain in another preface soon.
Hold that thought for much of whatever else you read of my writing. The mindset, "For as a man thinks in his heart, so he is".
So why is there killing among animals who know no sin?
I shake my head here, with no one watching. It’s because of us. It sounds trite considering the scale of the devouring. Neither is it a fancy-filled reason of cyclical life process. It’s gaudy, traumatic, pathetic, and tragic terrible real consequence. Of our propensity to sin, death is there to keep us in timely check.
Like the need God instilled in Eve, after the falling away from God’s way, to desire her husband. Apparently before, God wanted to see a fully volitional action on her part. For example, one of the famous early feminist leaders in her older age was asked why she married a man. She said that she wanted one.
It’s why we scream for ice cream. Oh yes you do.
What on Earth is Heaven doing? “...redeeming all men unto Himself”. Adam was the first jerk, officially. Eve got shnookered first, but it was up to Adam to fix it. Eve didn't make the rule, God did, and Adam should have answered to it.
Instead of hollering to God 'Help me !', he “hearkened unto” his wife’s secondary perspective. She was formed out of his rib, you know, or assume it for now. We do this same thing, this same sin, when we "hearken unto" mankind for an issue from God.
Neither, in Christ Jesus, does anyone have spiritual authority over anyone else. This is the crux of the matter of this essay. God said "Thou shalt have no other gods besides me". God is rightly jealous of His creation. We would be too if we were Him (and Her).
Anybody who says God is not also She has evidently stopped sucking on Her breasts, or never did in the first place. The Bible is "the pure milk of The Word". I didn't get any as a baby and I am "blessing The Paps that (give) me suck" !
The classic answer of a parent to a wild oat-seeding teen child’s question of ‘Why can’t I ?’ is ‘Because I said so’. That goes way back to Eden, to our creation. The question requires specifics, but repetition can be bewildering, like these plural prefaces.
God put the desire in Eve for her man so that she wouldn’t head out on her own to the other side of The Garden. And not all animals eat each other. Originally, none did, to at least convince you with the example of those who don't. God prophecies its reversion, "...and the lion will eat straw like an ox".
I really like mango on sticky rice covered by coconut cream. I’m eating deer meat, brown rice, and windfall apple slices today. I eat white rice too, and I eat a couple of sheets of organic dried nori seaweed daily also, from Rick Ladeck at Global Max Link. Ask for the clear packaging, less Adam from the belly up wondering where Eve is. He sells a whole case at a time only. It lasts a long while in the shade, ten packs of fifty big sheets.
The paganized Israelites ate their children, some of them, (hey, only some of them), during the famine and the siege of Jerusalem by Babylon.
Through Moses, centuries before, God warned them they might do this if they left Him in their hearts for other, false gods.
False gods aren’t imaginary; they’re real spiritual entities, simply not the nice, big one, love, even "the beauty of holiness".
God describes Himself by Jesus’ apostles as love, also light, even “a very special help in time of trouble”. I learned this month that stars can be fiery while in a vacuum because their nuclear fission or (?) fusion doesn’t need oxygen. 'We live and we learn, if we want to'.
I heard that science has put aside the man-made atomic clock and returned to the impossibly perfect and reliable clockwork-circulation of the planets and moons, the ones with no strings attached, the unconditional clock.
To say about love and light, it seems that’s what eternity is for, ‘ever after’ as it is.
Beauty’s abundant evidence rests the case sufficiently for me. 'Evolution cannot account for created beauty'. Evolution takes more time than we got, anyway. Check my page of space facts tacked onto the end of my booklet We Spanked God. They are really neat and up to date.
My premise here and there to the end of my essay is “Don’t join a lynch mob”, to quote God through Moses. Think for yourself. Don’t ever not do so, not until our cars drive themselves, and successfully back up our tractor's trailers into a warehouse bay.
The problem is people who hide in the shadows of social systems and prey upon unsuspecting other people. The latter can be children or adults, as I’ll show you.
The discovery of perpetration as common victimization is a welcome truth today.
What I'm declaring here is the repetition of the sin of Lucifer in Christianity, implying it elsewhere. "Let it be not so named among you". Me too, knowing the Israelite priests sacrificed for themselves and for the people. Jesus, in the order of Melchisedech, has entered The Most Holy Place for each of us His fallen creations.
Believe it and act on it, expecting God's approval and proof of it in your life. "These things are spiritually discerned". "For without faith (from God) it is impossible to please God, and they that come to Him must first believe that He is (that He exists), and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him (Her succulent breasts of Gods Word)".
( earlier preface ) Caution, I write wordy. I’ll try to keep this brief.
Welcome to the base essay of my biblical memoir, Let The Cards Lie. That title is from one of the one-line biblical thoughts I added in the memoir essay. It goes like this :
‘I don’t play cards, not the race card, not the religion card, not the gender card; deal, and let the cards lie.’
I first wrote We Spanked God, a 70-some-page booklet of one-liner biblical thoughts. It was 17-years in the making of thoughts I’d scribbled down.
Cards Lie is my best-favorite stories, and both books are war-fighter publications, spiritually.
My grief, my burden is to share the grief of children and also adults getting had by power tripping biblical people. It is unconscionable that it happens in Jesus' name. But as I describe, the phenomenon was springing up when the apostles were still alive.
A key quotation out of God’s bible-book is a quotation of Jesus’ little brother, James. He defined real religion. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and The Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world”.
That is much of the 'raison d'etre' of civilized society, the first task of government to nourish and clothe and shelter the weak among us. Without clear consciences we are doomed.
Similarly, to quote myself, ‘God invented the interesting cultures of the world, but He had nothing to do with religion’. God originally implanted 'religion' in our conscience.
I describe being a confessing Christian as like being a spiritual citizen of the USA. There’s work to make money and have shelter and transportation for the purpose of having circumstance to generally figure out what on Earth it’s all about.
Within that is of course ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’. It’s exactly what I’m thinking, namely, How to be content, so I can enjoy life without being guilty about it.
I like best what God biblically had written about contentment, “Godliness with contentment is great gain”. We’ll analyze it so we can realize it.
“Food and clothing, therewith be content”. Alright, we’re getting somewhere, factors in the equation.
How do we work this one in, “...having a form of Godliness, but denying the power thereof”. Your guess is as good as mine. These are big sayings.
You see, God set me up at age twenty in 1975 on a farm on the edge of the wilderness, staying for 16 years, with no romance but a lot of time, especially in the winter, to read the book He had inspired to be written. By that time, I’d read the religious others. I plainly saw, this bible was alive. Linguistically. Artistically. Prophetically. Divinely autobiographically.
An experienced reader, teenager or adult, can read an excerpt from the work of many an author, and tell you who it is, for the writing style and skill. Neither do we give Pearl Buck or Ernest Hemingway a hard time like I think we do God. Just because He’s God doesn’t mean the passion parts or the deadly thrill parts have to read how we think they should. William Faulkner’s short story ‘The Bear’ goes at its own pace and makes you hope to God for a resolution in fine fashion.
66 chapters of sub-books within it by 2-dozen people, with a storyline and soul of one author, with a poetry section, 40-minutes worth I have memorized for fun and sanity. It is God-Almighty’s book. Of that, I have no doubt. Plus, check this out.
Since 1975 also, a brother named Del Washburn, along with Coach Bobby Knight’s National Champions team-captain Jerry Lucas, began using computers to process and tabulate the unique numerical letter values of Hebrew + Greek.
My minimal-math mind remembers one, 153, being the constant number multiple whether it’s the word fishes, the phrase ‘gone fishing’, the sentence, ‘Go fish’, etcetera.
It’s not nuts; it’s very, very cool. Any bible-contextual subject, table, paper, lake, mountain, use the word with any other words, and you’ll have a math-multiple of the original #. It is logistical power and legitimate manipulation light years beyond anything we can think.
I won’t belabor here, but also to mention what Del and Jerry said at the start, 'What we’ve found here may not interest the person not interested in God, but to those of you who are, take a look'. God’s good at Math.
Up front with you here, about evolution or creation, while I’ve thoroughly studied the massively accumulated data of both, repeat, both schools of thought, I prefer beauty.
It’s the beauty. ‘Evolution cannot account for created beauty’, the patterns and systems within the beauteous forms. We might say, it's not creation, it's beauty. It just is, not only what it is, but who made it. Let us worship the creator, not the creation.
God ‘said’ it for us, biblically, “Be still, and know that I am God”. Like babies, we just need to gawk, and then say “Far out, man”, without the drugs.
Babies. That’s what I’m getting at. And children. And nice adults who work hard only to be ripped off one way or the other by what amounts to lazy bums. Bums who may have the excuse of innocently growing into the situation. I understand; 'been there 'n done that.
But, a ‘rip-off artist’ is conscious if he or she is not off their rocker. But, we're going to look mostly at the theory, with some mention of theoreticians who know too much for their own good.
“Changeable suits of apparel” gets closer, meaning misuse of our allotted time, where we worship a personally particular aspect of the creation, ourself.
‘The siren song of a white-collar crook is a kaching tune’, ie–a cash register.
As I go on here and get more wordy, to keep your relative sanity reading it, you will probably need to internalize the information. You know, make it your own.
It’s not a trick. Like Del and Jerry’s ‘Theomatics’, you’re either interested in it or you aren’t. Although their–well, Del’s; Jerry left off doing it–recent sequel does invite the objective secular scientist to take a look, to test the numbers. Del has others helping him now--'asking for more, he said-- infinitely everything has an inherent number and all the multiples directly part of the original word.
God grows words like plants, which if you know are numerically and geometrically designed. i know that a rounded seashell is actually made of right triangles spiraling.
I know God said to anyone listening after He “formed” Adam, ‘Now, watch this !’ And He formed Eve.
On the subject of women, when I awoke this morning, thinking ahead to road travel plans around New Year, it occurred to me that on the football bowl day, it will be mostly women on the highway. Still talking about civilization here I guess.
For confessing or at least professing Christians, my information in this essay may be as profound as discovering Santa Claus isn't real. American Statesider homebodies may not know what Europeans see in street parades. That Santa is Satan with demonic help.
Maybe this is one of "the deep things of Satan" apostle Paul warned about. I know the imposter called Father Christmas outright tries to steal Daddy God's place in my life. Jesus as my big brother makes Him so. (Shshshsh, yes, Mama)
So Santa Claus is not a hoax, but some kind of hex. Jesus said not to call any person a spiritual father on the Earth or Universe. There's Christians who scream for ice cream about this.
It happened around the time I learned 'Run, Spot, run' was not all there was to reading. "And while Moses was on the mount of Sinai, the people sat down to eat and to drink and then rose up to play". 'It is only by The Lord's mercies we are not consumed".
Ancient cultures parallel New Years with Halloween, not Saturnalia. It remembers the most significant natural disaster in history, the great flood of Noah and his family, who are our family.
( next earlier preface ) Hello. This essay is both a personal memoire of my best-favorite stories and a public offering of useful info, of information I personally wouldn't do without. Take it or leave it, and I'd be happy to hear from you. It includes a combo of observations made in recent years thanks to the internet.
Here's an example of my own observation. I like to walk in the woods on angled trails. There are rocks, big hunky ones. They're layered with meandering undulating lines of demarcation. It's all of the same material, if you touch it with fingertips and fingernails. It's granular sandy rock that was evidently once loose very fine soil. God hardened it, then shoved it around.
"The Lord created the Earth to be inhabited". I find it heartwarming to think of God planning where He intended us to live, with stability. Although, while I think God likes it when we move around a bit, I don't think He ever intended for us to have to move, just spread out a bit as families.
He split Pangeia up really nicely, I think. During the flood, so nobody would get hurt.
Now a question, What natural force could stir up such a quantity of soil and then settle it packed as it is? The only answer as I see it is 'wa wa', as a matter of an enormous course of water. It flies in the face of what was taught in school, of uniformitarianism.
God does wonders with water, steam, and ice. Where I farmed in Quebec, Canada is the most interesting glacial formation on Earth. Later on it.
And it makes me want to see the face of the person who did it all. I talk with him mentally and vocally, mostly using words he gave as intellectual inspiration to curious persons before me. Then the trees no longer grow so slowly as used to grieve me. They are right on schedule, representing a Creator "Who dwells in eternity" and "has the hairs on our head counted".
And "He has put eternity in our hearts" that we might relate to Him, even marry Him.
The trees tell me God has time for me. He had written, "Food and clothing, therewith be content". Which makes exact sense, to get me happily and healthily into the woods for a walk and safely home. The Appalachian woods, which I describe usefully later. And the original site of Eden explained later also.
Hint, it was at the center of the original Pangian single-continent. No, not Virginia, Israel. It's why the offspring of both Ishmael and Isaac have set up there, and immaturely fight over it. If content, then not malcontent, meaning literally happy in our tent. You know, like the fine 70's song Midnight At The Oasis. Contentment, the state of being secure in your tent, knowing God and being known by him / her, (publicly / privately). "Do not touch mine annointed".
Family is sacred and children sacrosanct, and we are hypocrites to divide the two. Nurture children, yes, but we have believed and loved a lie to hit them.
You see, 'God expresses his druthers through fathers 'n mothers', as every dog knows, nuts-defensive of women and girls and children. And my ripe gripe here is persons who prevent me from knowing I am loved, secure in my soul. "To know Him, and the power of His resurrection".
It's like when King David, out of wrong boredom and egotism, decided to count how many soldiers he had. He was supposed to leave it innumerable, like the "innumerable company of angels" in God's heavenly realm. We're supposed to be like God, who minds His own beeswax. No one is as cool as God, and people get hurt when we try.
(earlier preface—Jesus, speaking as God, said he’ll remunerate a humble walk before him both in this world and the next continuing one. And note, while I think we were created, not evolved, my amateur writing style seems to belie the converse, please.
-- I want to immediately present someone else's obviously painstakingly accumulated wisdom, clinical wisdom, pre-assuming a reverent fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom. I first found it in a tall booklet on family counseling. With fairly large print and cartooned dialogues, on two early pages it provided three short lists of half-a-dozen respective social behaviors we would each benefit to be aware of. In respect to the very evidently experienced medical practitioner who compiled and published the information, do drop me a line and ask for the source.
-- Without further deserving ado, also know that one of the lists of six is positive and the other two negative social behavioral actions. The preferable idea is 'openness to change' as empathic communication with one another, or the lack of it as an opposite action. See for yourself that the information therein is very helpful to know, if we've ever used a mirror for our heart. Here are the lists, first the positive, of someone displaying an openness to change personal posture:
-- (Maintains) Eye contact
-- (Shows a ) Look of interest
-- (Speaks in a) Pleasant tone
-- Ask(s) questions
-- (Shows a) Desire to help
-- Seek(s) clarification
Here are the two lists of negatives ( acronyms for memory, BADCAL and WOSDLE ):
As Fight Or Flight Posture:
-- Blaming
-- Anger
-- Dismissing
-- Criticizing
-- Arguments
-- Leaving the scene
Defensive / Closed Posture:
-- Withdrawing
-- Obstinacy
-- Silence
-- Denial
-- Looks of disregard
-- Excuses
The doctor-author of the above holds workshops and seminars for this good cause of teaching couples and families successful communications skills. Do ask me about it.
Getting to the story, first a nutshell before my essay's actual storytelling writing-style content; again, this is also my life memoir, mixed with Christian Doctrine. To note also, a big premise in writing and publishing is about you, people other than me. Who for reasons between fear of man and fear of Almighty God get confused about procedure, so much that they--as I take my own turns doing--don't even know it while we lament of various predicaments, or complacently think we don't have any.
People get hurt this way, while there is an explanation, there being a reason for everything. My subject is church, the word bible translator William Tyndale boycotted and got exiled from England for, to soon die an ouchy death for it, for the correct biblical word "assembly",'church' a pagan word. He must have thought it was worth dying for. About church, and to quote myself from We Spanked God, 'God invented Earth's interesting cultures, but he had nothing to do with religion.'
Let's gear up and go, here.
– Jesus’ prohibition of lording it over people has been disregarded by some in what is called Christendom, and so translated in a few pivotal places in biblical Scripture.
– Even common members of the plebian ‘laity’ indulge in selfish lording of social power over their fellows, willing to have it done to them so they can do it to others, as I suppose it goes.
– Authority stems from God, our creator and savior, and the spiritual application of it has been given to his only-begotten child, Jesus, the Son of God, who alone took on full sin and death and vanquished it, tentatively for now, and evidenced in the new life he spiritually imparts.
– Neither does Jesus parcel out his authority in the assembly of his bridal followers, only in the nuclear bridal relation of married couples and their children, if authentic, or like the wind and waves of Lake Galilee that day--that is obedience. You may know, you must know, that the bible is a love story, the ultimate one. The Romans didn't invent romance for us, to row a boat on a quiet lake or to dance the night away.
The romantic God thought it up. And no woman ever inseminated a man, only waiting to receive. We are all women before God, a theoretical example articulated by Solomon. He wrote, "I have found one good man in a thousand but not one woman in the bunch". Solomon has an inspired point, even though he was a jerk in that regards.
What God means to say through the promiscuous Solomon is mankind in His eyes is expected to receive from Him. We don't give Him love or joy or peace, we receive it from Him. This is why Israel was never sent by God on an unnecessary offensive war. It was assertive enough to defend home. Romantic sexcercise, not military excercise the idea. Foreplay not whoreplay. Romance is always where the home hearth is.
– Non-violent, non-coercive persuasion of one another is the way of Jesus as he exemplified, including in the nuclear family, the old way of Mosaic coercion nailed to his body; we didn't just spank God, we bloody crucified him. Children have no original sin, only a later propensity to do so, as we do once grown into the age of reason and unreasonableness. 'God created mankind conscious, but sin made them self-conscious.' Let's use the log in our eye to build up, to edify, not clobber each other.
– Paul, Jesus’ initial teacher to the non-hebrew gentiles, warned of social wolves moving into Jesus’ flock of spiritual sheep in the form of priest-like leaders, denying Jesus’ permanent role as high-priest over the Israel of God (beyond Israel’s borders.) The Israel of God is "a kingdom of priests" serving under the eternal high priest Jesus, a class act with only one single social class and spiritual income bracket.
– Plural leadership in the Christian assembly was thus the normal and correct way, originally seen in the church assemblies of Jerusalem and Antioch in Syria. Singular leadership continues in earthly systems, but Jesus reigns in the heavenly system. As my adopted big brother or eldest sibling, his dad, God, is now my dad and God. I prayed to God at age twelve as a stranger. At age twenty he set me up with an opportunity to confess his only begotten son as Lord Of All. In the interim, I wandered dangerously. "It is only by The Lord's mercies that we are not consumed".
– Spiritually spineless Early Christian assembly leaders began to prefer the archaic way which Jesus fulfilled, which God in Jesus went to a lot of trouble to develop from. Indeed, their spirit was not of the messiah-christ of I Am Who Am, Savior / Jehovah, Jesus or Yeshua, but more like the sordidly gainsaying Herods, imposter Edomite Amalekite Canaanites. They elected themselves 'senior pastors' or 'bishops'.
– These selfishly imposed themselves after the original apostles were departed and dead, making a solo-leader senior-pastor Mosaic-type bishopric system common. Which led directly into the private vision of Constantine’s mixed pagan state church, like much of old Israel before them did. "There is nothing new under the sun", only The Son.
– The beauty of God's artistic holiness either resonates with us or it doesn’t and thus we are a part of history and will be recorded as such, for “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is (forever and ever)”; God freely offers us life, but we may choose death for the temporary lust of sin; neither does he force us to eat our vegetables, only inviting us to the wisdom of doing so. 'Just wait 'till your father comes home' does not harmonize with "Come quickly Lord Jesus!" Do we really know what spirit we are of?
– Persuasion among mankind was always Jehovah (“I Am Who Am, Savior”) God’s intention, reflecting his very own nature of goodness and fairness and kindness and humility, as Jesus perfectly exemplified in human form. Christianity is received, not self-assumed nor inherited. God made the Earth large, and we can spread out like Lot and Abraham did.
Strong men avoid war, like they control their energy with their women for delight.
– Coercion, of course, is the converse of persuasion, and began to exist in Eden and then on the rest of Earth only after the human fall from God’s undeserved kindness of his “grace”. At least, Adam and Eve learned it from their new parent, the devil. We know their first born child coerced his little brother, the first death, by murder.
– The formerly good angel, Lucifer, tried to coerce his very creator, and was stopped, but then tried it on the unsuspecting humans God created after him, now called Satan, “the adversary” of mankind, originally mandated by God to nurture us.
– Satan’s way is not only to be sneaky and stealthy, but is literally described in Greek Scripture as methodical, per “the wiles of the devil”, not quite accurately translated by King James, and as mankind’s original nanny (or Filipina amahs as mine were) was trained to know exactly how we think. 'What will the devil expect us not to think of next?'
– What similarly wiley men did was to methodically "twist" some of the Christian Scriptures in pivotal places and also some of the Hebrew Scriptures with socio-political maneuvering as a pagan replication of dissolved Israelite function illegally blended with the new one of Jesus. It is spiritual spyware and has wreaked havoc on society.
It is religiously institutional bullying with grass-roots participation.
– God’s bible-book, like any book, is copyrighted, the injunction against meddling with and changing it when making fresh copies specified in Deuteronomy, The Psalms, and Jesus’ Revelation to old John, three times, miserable plagues promised upon those who try it. And anyone who wants to say "Oh it's okay", try it with Jesus in person.
Thomas.
About defensive war, it's like a guard dog, great with children, patrols well, but if it roams the streets needs to be put down. Otherwise, the dog is happy as a meadowlark. A Pyrenees dog's 'yard' is the whole farm and packs the punch of a lone bull.
– Because “God set eternity in mankind's heart”, we are expected to think ahead, like the Greek Aesop rightly suggested, “Look before you leap”, forewarned and forearmed, not static in the moment like more simple creations of God's natural realm; interestingly, we are wise to also do so as the innocent animals and more, to be still and aware of God, "Be still, and know that I am God."
This awareness and acknowledgement of God applies to our fellow mankind. It's as Jesus said, "...to the least of these my brethren, you did it unto me".
– So, in the anonymously authored new covenant letter to the Hebrew Christians, (a beautiful articulation of the transition from Melchisedec to God’s Christ, Jesus), a list of martyred people of Jehovah-God is followed by the recommendation to aspire to the character of their individual witnesses of God’s righteous truth against falsehood.
But that connection was two chapters back in Hebrews, only continuing in the general context. The bad bible translators are hedging we don't make the connection.
– The idea of willfully and humbly yielding to the wisdom of those elders gone and going before us is properly and correctly translated as “be ye persuaded”, ‘ye’ meaning you in the plural in the accurate King James English vernacular. To 'obey them' doesn't make sense, for half of the persons in the context were deceased. Persuasion is only to living people. Yet administrative christianity for two millenia cashed in on the trick. Of course, we get a feel of God here, objectively observing willful mankind powertripping.
-- There have been offshoot Christian groups that refused to play this game. It brings to mind the unnerving and piercing statement of Jesus, "...and few there be that find it". Let the invisible wind of God's holy spirit shiver 'me timbers 'n blow down any house of cards I've built. 'I don't play cards, not the gender card, not the race card, not the religion card; deal, and let the cards lie'.
– But, unregenerated men self-appointed in positions of ecclesiastical power translated heavenly persuasion into mundane coercion and arm twisting, ignoring in their own lives and now publicly God’s original call to Abraham and Sarah to prioritize his heart and not theirs, to obey God as their spiritual father through his only-begotten, Jesus, and no longer Terah, or substitute the name of your own dad.
Psalm 45, 'Leave your father's house..." Jesus spoke likewise of "leaving all". Plus, "...it is he (or she) who endures to the end who will be saved". This can be a freaky thing unless we simply keep the eyes of our soul on "the lover of our soul". Herein "...it is no longer by works" but childlike faith drawn from the wellspring of our creator and subsequent savior, not from ourselves.
– Gentleness and peace is impossible with coercion unless drawn directly from the Prince of Peace, as Isaiah eloquently and truly described Baby Jesus, the Son of God; to say, wayward men do what Lucifer did, desiring authoritative attention to themselves.
Like grandparents or aunts and uncles or parents, the youth blaze by in their new energy, but hopefully sometimes stop for a word from their elders, to change their course, or adjust it. 'A Christian's goal is to avoid the shoal and harbor no resentment'. That's what harbor pilots are for or air traffic controllers.
I thought through this realization myself that original Christian leadership was a plural, not singular phenomenon. It has to do with Jehovah-God long ago declaring he is "one" and "beside me there is no other all-mighty-god". My life-walk has seen the same mistake done in Catholicism, then Protestantism, and lately also in Anabaptism.
Whatever was Peter googling on the mount of transfiguration in suggesting a "booth" each for Moses and Elijah and Jesus? He sure got it right after he was born again, his inspired writing accurately eloquent! Jesus is the massive boulder, not Peter, a stone. 'No buts about it, recalling Jesus' respectful use of connector words.
-- The Acts 15 anecdote of problem solving about no longer needing levitical laws by the combined decision of the "plural pillars" at Jerusalem is a distinct early new testament example of plural leadership. We all got away from it, as I explain shortly, Johannes Gutenburg's printing press getting the bible out of the exclusive hands of the clergy and back into the hands of the so-called laity. "And underneath are the everlasting arms".
About clergy and laity or common people, non-ordained, Jesus made a double point of emphasis on this subject in His Revelation conversation with John on Patmos. Jesus said He hates the Nicolaitans, which etymology in Greek is power over people.
The post-Tower of Babel Sumerians had a big-shot hierarchal system like this.
-- Babylonian and then Sumerian plural-deistic creation worship was first left behind on the dusty trail of Abram and Sarai, who first heard God's voice "crying in the wilderness". "But I am your God", God pleaded with adulterous Israel, as they turned humanity's hope back to its former vomit of pagan pantheism. "God knows those who are his".
Jesus stopped his cross carrying to tell the weeping women bystanders sincerely and prophetically as the Son of God of Love, "Women of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but for yourselves and your children". Soon, after a second chance of repentance through apostolic messaging for forty more years, Titus left "not one stone upon another", but for the miserable 'wailing wall'. Would they take another look at Whom they "pierced".
Would Christians themselves take a 'more' honest look at their supposed lifesaver.
– When the Christian assembly at Antioch had the big decision to make of just who to send on a representative missionary journey, they convened as a group, pooled their spiritual minds together, and allowed the Holy Spirit of God to focus them on a decision. Team Jesus! Coach Jesus!
– Judeo Christianity is like a marriage where a division can be united again if the two are still breathing and sentient, and interference in this is spiritual adultery, which is God’s primary description of souls he will separate away from Himself, for such is inevitable, as they have systematically tried to destroy what holds society together; "for the wages of sin is death".
''The unity of The Spirit in the bond of peace". And, "God is not slow as mankind counts slowness, but is wanting all men to come to repentance", per Ezekiel's valley of dry bones vision from God.
– It was interference in Jehovah God’s plan for humanity to write into his Word the substitution of clerical obedience replacing the original common persuasion among brethren in Christ, because only God is the primeval one to be spiritually obeyed, mundane systems reflecting his dominion like government and police.
– As the Protestants took over socio-political administration from the Catholics in their geographical domains, they added to the duplicity, demonic duplicity, by installing a needless and inappropriate vocabulary word into Solomon’s Proverbial advice, 'child'.
– About young men, the first seven chapters of Proverbs concentrate on it before universal proverbial advice in later chapters, the one-size-fits-all word 'child' incongruously installed or squeezed into the text of Proverbs, which is God’s copyrighted text, remember.
– By lowering the age group for physical chastisement, ‘going to hell in a handbasket’ was no longer an apt application for young bucks disregarding their imminent call to take a place in mature and useful Hebrew society, and literally, the Proverbs context simply means to thwart young men from dying young.
– Even the ideal woman as a wife prospect in the final chapter was no longer applicable to all the Proverbial young men named Lemuel, to say nothing of the loose woman in the marketplace, having nothing realistic to do with boys, girls, or maidens.
– I have respective gender jokes to further describe this situation of confusion instilled into the bible by devious meddler translators, and also a personal reference to the horrendous Canaanite habit adopted by the Israelites as they intermarried with them, of Molechian religious sacrifice of God’s little ones, as Jesus describes children, also nauseously observed by invading Roman soldiers in the North African Canaanite colony of Carthage. The people of Jerusalem would digress to eating their children during the Babylonian siege. The one thing seems to have led to the other.
-- By the way, about money, for Christian so-called ministry, there are to be no salaries; 'no verbs, no adjectives, no religious pronouns, period. It's all hands on deck for all able-bodied sailors on the fellow-ship of Jesus Christ. Salaries are tied in with the rigged obedience, and tithing is an archaic myth. Christianity is a free-will offering by coincidental "living sacrifices".
-- The apostle Paul is quoted essentially as saying he wouldn't think of receiving money for preaching Jesus' free gospel. The fancy Greek oratory known as sermons or homilies should simply be happy spillover from one's own bible thought and life study.
-- Free offering money goes to the needy among us, those down and out in their disastrous domestic situations. Otherwise, it would be taking candy from a baby for an encore to hitting them. Get a job in Christ. Paul was a tent maker, to add, 'The siren call of a white-collared crook is a kaching tune'. Apostle Peter said to a money-minded guy, "Your silver perish with you!"
Freewill supplementation is fine, but not out-and-out salary for the down-and-out.
-- Civilization has gone through untold millenia of untold misery before modern social services came in like a stoplight for a dangerous intersection. Read Upton Sinlair's very well-written book The Jungle.
Enlighten your pocket, o light of the world, theological thief. Money in the basket can pay for the meeting house, also. Improve the wheel of inter-assembly ministry, especially before reaching outwards. Don't steal candy out of the hands of God's children.
-- About Jesus chasing the money changers and sacrificial-animal sellers out of his Dad's house of prayer, he was typically gentle doing it. Corded goads are normal for big bulky critters. And, Jesus intangibly told the dovesellers to pick up the cages and go. I mean goads on their beefy butts where they think it's funny.
-- My dear dairy cows did, as I butted their thighs with the soles of my boots. You could hear them giggling as they grabbed another quick mouthful of grass and then hustled onward to the night pasture on the other side of the timber-train tracks, in the dark, no money for flashlights and batteries for a poor farmer, before LED's.
The sweethearts not once kicked back at me. It's fine to use your muscles on a child for to move them from point A to point B, or set 'em down where they are, if you have to. I never did, my sole surviving child always pleasant and agreeable.
We worked out of our home, so were always present. Avoid contact voids with your little children, to let them concentrate on their play, of course. Parents are to imitate God, of course. Who gave Adam free range in Eden to get a feel of things including himself.
-- If you've read Dobson's Dare To Discipline, he's got it all wrong, the opposite of what is true. Mister Dobson backwardly writes, "If you don't have them under control by age thirteen, then it's too late". His 'focus on the family' is skewed, for it was age thirteen when Mosaic law stipulated the rod on the upper back, if necessary, never before that age.
It's the very age when God lacerated my right forearm in a school window, crippling me. He had to nearly kill me to keep me alive. I wouldn't have made it with a whole body, to age twenty I mean, when God called on me to first confess Christ.
That's the photograph on the book cover, born again from the baby picture on the back cover, plus one of Mom and me. Note, I had never heard anyone's message of being "born again" before it happened to me.
-- Continuing about salaried so-called ministers, apostle Paul received monetary and material help when he got older, so beaten up by highway robbers and Edomites posing as Judahites. Notice how careful he was, indicating poverty level, when he wrote to Timothy and said, "Bring the cloak I left with Carpus at Troas, and the parchments also". For most of history, the Goodwill Store has been friends, spiritual family, not only biological.
'Jesus puts the 'our' back in the word 'friend'. The stranger to Christ Jesus, never having heard of Him, but having walked humbly and compassionately in human brotherhood, upon dying and seeing Him, will surely say, "You! It's You!", smiling. Of course, this individual will have at one point made a committment to doing so.
– About religion, real religion, if you haven’t heard what Jesus said it is–excuse me; it was James, Jesus’ next younger brother–”Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.” Shakespeare spoke about a 'spot', probably deriving from James, through King James.
– Here’s an example of a spot, a moral danger or risk of detriment as we attain to the holiness of God. As we want to curb vanity toward sanctity, the dresses of the Christian women I assemble with are plain. So I joke about it with a fictitious dialogue, ‘Flowers on ‘yer dress, eh? I like to look at flowers; but that would make me a stumble bee.’
Bees actually look at the flowers they work on, avoiding their own stumbling blocks. Generally said another way, I’ve learned to not jump off a cliff twice, and only look at a strange woman once for identity and not again if not necessary. Jesus said just the thought of adultery counts for the act. 'Only tough love is tender'.
-- Thank you for patiently reading thus far. But, please don’t thank me back. Say “You’re welcome!” A question, do you ever thank God? Well, if He thanks you back, then you’ll have yourself a problem. Because, God has rendered unto us the service of life itself, inspiring a book to be written to explain just how we’re welcome to it. And as we are created in God’s male and female sovereign image, we also should say as he does, "You're welcome (to the service I have rendered unto you)".
Or why do we say “Have a good day!” instead of a simple-old ‘nice’ one? Does it mean to not have an evil day? A guy rather tried this on Jesus one day, “Good Master!”, blah blah. Jesus retorted reasonably, “Who’re you calling good? There’s no one good but God!”, said as the Son of Man. I think we’ve so de-spiritualized ourselves into mundane mediocrity that we have a need to fabricate profundity.
Frankly, of late I refrain from shaking hands with people. My priority Source speaks of “the right hand of fellowship”. Which is a precious and hard-earned achievement and accomplishment. I do what Jesus said to do and don’t show my pearls to swine, lest they trample into the mud. An acquaintance is not a friend, so let’s deal with it. You see, Real Christians don’t merely shake hands; they also share a hug and a kiss.
Strangers don’t do that, and I’m out here looking for friends. Because, I want to really party forever, and not have the fun wind down. Let’s humbly admit it, God invented partying and front rows at a concert having left our seats onto our feet and dancing with eternal energy. Apparently, from what I've read in God's inspired bible-book, it's what they do all the eternity there.
An American neighbor who had married into Quebec once told me of disco dancing one Sunday night until sunrise in New York City. At 'closing time', they all spilled out onto the sidewalk bumping into sunlit people rushing to work.
-- In the meantime, 'There may be life on other planets, but there's death on this one, and Jesus Christ the Son of God came to fix it like no one else could'. Eyewitness news says it happened, and I've seen and felt the spiritual working of it in my spirit soul and body. And so I've written the following memoire to tell the stories of it.
-- The basic story is getting to know my God, thanks to my big brother Jesus. It is his own pioneering experience of establishing a relationship, mentally and emotionally, with our common almighty god creator, as our daddy, and I also think our mommy. But, the mommy aspect of it is private, just as the romantic bridal part of it is private.
The faith God fruits into his people affords us a present anticipation of heavenly bliss. When we perceive in this world perfect pleasantness and beauty, God's faith fruited in us solidifies our anticipation of the same in eternity. '...for faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen".
-- And "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it ever entered into the heart of mankind what God has prepared for those who love him". God is spirit, and "...these things are spiritually discerned (perceived)" at the present time. Importantly, if we have mental access to God through Jesus, then we can, on that basis, communicate with him, you know, talk with him as our real parent. We can supplicate also, make requests, through the rightness of Jesus, "for it is the prayer of a righteous person that avails much before The Lord".
The word 'real' reminds me of what I read of Buddhism. Which teaches that this is not the real world. Really, this is the real world and Heaven is just a "breath of Life" away.
-- And crucially, meaning by the cross of Christ, as we aspire toward perfection like Jesus did with the weight of mankind's imperfection upon him, we don't settle for less. It is true that any 'fudging' of the recipe we do, surely will come back to us in judgment.
If we rationalize away responsibiity or connection to 'someone else's dilemma' when a probable shortcoming in our life is connected to it in the underground root system of society, the forest of Heaven will know of our selfish cowardice.
-- Neither is this 'works oriented' because we have to do nothing, nothing that would separate from his love to us in its innumerable good ways. The healthy zest for life God gives us in holy lifestyle choices makes our day interesting and profitable.
It's not life that's hard but death in its morbid forms that only the Spirit of Christ can transcend. Man made religion is only wishful thinking. 'Living water is not drawn from a wishing well'. Jesus said it will flow out of our bellies.
-- Adam's sin, and thus mankind's sin, was that he "hearkened unto" his spouse's pressured reasoning instead of the primary one of his own conscience. He listened to another source of advice than God's in his conscience. Again, the historical record tells us that the Romans were nauseated when they uncovered a child sacrifice social system in the city they had just successfully vanquished, the Canaanite colony of Carthage.
-- And again, this is not a busy task to fret over, for like a smile compared to a frown, doing the right thing takes less muscular effort. Our job is to be still and pray the city of Carthage inoperable. Feeding the hungry and clothing the poor is merely an extension of our own next meal. Going to war is going to lunch with the poor's food in addition to our own. 'Nice or nasty, kind or cruel, wise man or fool'. It's guns or roses not guns and roses.
-- "...fear ye Jehovah and serve Him in perfection and truth..." --Joshua 24:14, and know this, dear reader, that to the extent you obey a religious man you deny Jesus and to the extent you lay a violent hand against a child the real original passages in Proverbs will be used in judgment against you. "God is not mocked" and He does not suffer a fool.
-- Youthful naivety and imperfect childhoods are divinely taken into consideration in God's limitless mercy, but our opportunity to take advantage of it is not. I am ever encouraged when reviewing my life how He has allowed my free will free rein, intervening perfectly tastefully to maximize both mine and his. I am certain that He meets every human soul like this, fairly and squarely with gently rounded corners.
As I mention later, I describe knowing God as Jesus as being a spiritual American. It affords opportunity for historical kingly luxury for common people, giving energy and space and time to think through life's mysteries, to begin God's fun eternal venture. I know also that this country exists primarily to print bibles and send them out with bible people to explain them. After that mandate is accomplished he'll wrap things up.
--It seems like He wants a few things sorted out, spelled out here at time's end. It's God's 'party', and he'll cry if he wants to, as Jesus did over Jerusalem that day. 'Because we could not laugh at ourselves, Jesus did it for us, and it brought him to tears'. "Jesus wept", the shortest verse in his book.
(earlier editor's note-- I've added-on a few paragraphs since the original start of this preface, plus a couple of addendums at the end of the essay. 'An also-welcome to visitors from my Facebook page of Michael Vincent Tovar House Painting (with photographs, including my baby picture.)
Some of the following you will know intrinsically, you know, naturally. Other must be discovered, because we're new here. Only God was here before, and then our parents. Who were also new in their turn. This premise of our existence depends on revelation, by our creator god. In all of this, of course, we must have a balance within ourselves of both subjectivity and objectivity. And personally, I think we each have a conscience.
Which I think is indicated by the root parts of the word. I think conscience is God's mind built into ours. Appreciation and fairness extend from basic recognition. Babies start this from scratch, of course. Even inside the womb, fetuses appreciate the comforts of life. Understandably, it is self-centered, and to a legitimate extent, always will be. The words 'thank you' articulate appreciation. There is a God because there is beauty, even the beauty of his "holiness". He most expressed it coming in person as Jesus, as a baby.
And the words 'I love you' share appreciation with another soul, recognizing them as just as worthy of love and life as we are. Therein is the social joy of sharing, and further indeed, the climactic passion that engendered us in the first place. The bible is the love story of the almighty god that is love.
As a teenager, a young adult, pubescently mature, I exerted sufficient objectivity to use my educated reading skills to compare religions. The childhood I partly lived with my U.S. diplomatic family in Southeast Asia only supplemented my literate observations.
My necessary discernment of truth and falsehood, of reality and fantasy, was accentuated by frequent proximity to death. Yet, by age twenty, fantasy almost fully killed me. However, earlier in that second decade, I sensibly and privately asked my creator to help me. Mid-and-late teen energy was like an off-shore current and rather swept me away. I knew how to swim, but had to interrupt it to kick spiritual sharks in the nose. And they were winning out. Dying young interrupts a preparation for eternity.
My creator, God, intervened to save me, quite circumstantially. Somehow, this surely has to happen with everyone. God, in fact, had this written about in his book. It is based on his intervention in Jesus Christ, "redeeming all men unto Himself". Read on and see, if you haven't heard, or have heard and do not believe the eyewitness story. Also read on if you think yourself humble and already know everything about it.
Understand the full meaning of the title of the book of this essay. To wit, 'I don't play cards, not the religion card, not the race card, not the gender card; deal, and let the cards lie.' Falsehood and fantasy hurt me near to death repeatedly as said. I don't wish it on anybody, and within reason and rights prevent it happening to others. I like being free, and prefer to believe what Jesus said about it, exactly and precisely what he said about it.
Now, before I was old enough to remember, my dad bought a little goat for my next older brother and myself. Dad tethered it in the backyard so it would keep its distance. Otherwise, we three had at it, an opportunity to learn that wrestling was universal. We were three billy goats and not one of us a bully. That was until I entered what the prophet Isaiah implied is the age of reason.
I was yet innocent at age four when I pilfered the bedside money basket of my parents' hired cook. But wanting to treat his two children and us two guys to the best ice cream bars the bicycle vendor had available in his cold cart, I began to discover the power and prestige of money. I tell of the miserable repercussions of that discovery in a few minutes. Now we're talking about aggression and greed, as opposed to assertiveness and generosity.
To take up where I left off earlier, Johannes Gutenburg's improved Chinese printing press was in serious production in 1450. In 1453, the Mohammedans set up in Constantinople. Many Greeks got out of their way by migrating west and north. In doing so, an intellectual departure out of the Dark Ages began.
The printing presses printed out both the Latin biblical scriptures and Greek literature. Certainly, Mohammedan culture and learning was also part of what is called The Renaissance. Chinese contributions were a foundational element also. Their maritime commercial visits to Venice, Italy provided copies of encyclopedias explaining every skill in the book, so to speak. China and Arabia and Greece gave foundation to the ideas ad skills of Gutenburg, DaVinci, Rembrandt, etcetera.
The ensuing enlightenment, most importantly, eventually separated church from state in the English colonies of North America, less Canada at first. In Europe, only the Swiss Brethren ever did this, known as Anabaptists. They refused to continue baptizing their innocent babies, which got them tortured and killed by the Protestant state church. Also morally nonresistant, persecution and migration nonetheless socially blended the Brethren. Positively, they adopted Catholic Gregorian singing, changing the lyrics, and also the female convent habit of modest cape dresses. Maybe that's where the headship veiling came from for Mennonites and Amish, in that order historically.
What I'm mainly getting at here is that all of Western Christendom was affected by the crucible work of bible translation from Latin into English in the 16th-century (1500's). And, I mean affected both positively and negatively. The positive is obvious, exemplified by the known fact that that era produced Shakespeare and his working vocabulary of 54-thousand words. That's much more than our current average, less new tech vocabulary.
It is also true that the King James translation is English literature's finest accomplishment. My story here is a discovered monkey wrench inserted into that work by power tripping clerics as ecclesiasts. The word 'obey' had already been wrongly inserted by Catholics to replace the beautiful and true words "be ye persuaded", of your more experienced elders. It makes all the difference in Heaven and on Earth, by subjugating everyone to the clerics instead of having a cooperative respect of experienced wisdom.
Another example of very significant Catholic manipulation of God's inspired word is how they legalized statues to please their yet-pagan constituents. History is clear they took a pencil eraser to the second commandment, the one forbidding graven images. The tenth was divided in two to keep the big round number.
I did something like this as a Cub Scout, getting my older brother to forge Mom's signature to all the projects, not all at one time, in the big project booklet I'd been given as a scout. It loaded up my Cub Scout uniform with the whole gamut of possible sew-on badges. Maybe military dress uniforms on the big shots get done that way, in all due respect for true soldiers and sailors and aviators.
The Protestants kept this intentional Catholic error of unscriptural obedience to fancy ordained clerics in there, for the same sordid reason. A little money provided to studious church-assembly teachers is acceptable for their time off their regular work at their jobs, or after hours.
But monetary largesse as we see in the church collections system is not acceptable and part of what Jesus specifically warned his disciples about. He called it overlording, and added, "Not so shall it be among you", including social status and prestige. Soon after, the apostle Paul warned of it, calling it sordid gain, of hypocritical infiltrators desiring prestige and undeserved money. Paul built tents.
That eloquence contributed to the beautiful King James bible. But, it was purposely flawed; it has an intentional mistake that seriously styles our lives. And I don't mean 'thee's' and 'thou's', which are simply grammatical measures for legal accuracy.
The Protestants' Catholic carryover is the ancient mistranslation of Hebrews 13:7 and 17, changing ''Be ye persuaded" to 'obey them'. And what the Protestant clerical scholars did when they were changing Latin into English was to sneak the word 'child' into Solomon's famous Proverbs to subjugate people starting as little children.
Solomon had merely elaborated Moses' old guideline for coercing sense into wild young men. They had big upper back muscles and that's where the stick was walloped. Like Molech and child sacrifice by paganized Israelites, God is quoted as saying it never entered into his mind to tell them to do such a thing. Imagine being God and creating us Pinoccios, standing by helplessly as we misuse the free wills he created us with.
I saw a YT video recently of cannibalistic chimpanzees and also some regular monkeys. They were really into it, but not by God's design either. Environmental factors are surely involved, like with tigers displaced by deforestation and overlapping their territory too much with humans.
Some of those same paganized Israelites went on soon to cook and eat their children in the Babylon siege by Nebuchadnezzar. Through Jesus, God very much saves us from ourselves, if we ask him to. He intervened in my life, through impossible circumstances. 'Incidents are mundane, coincidence divine'.
Never did God, who is love, suggest we take stick or hand to his little ones. An example of love and patience as Jesus gave all of us has always been God's way for his children, now his adult children in his christ, Jesus, Immanuel, God with us, who is holy and wants us to be. This is an intellectual example of the baseless question if God allows suffering. What he allows is mankind to set his and her own course to a seriously significant extent.
This came into view recently on the global scene by the internet and the discovery that 16th-century bible translators basically legislated child abuse. Remember, the internet is a modern variation of the printing press. Formerly inaccessible information as beneficial knowledge can now further empower our lives. And that is a terribly true understatement, to also recall 19th-century so-called Christian church legislation making it cool to use the Mosaic rod on women as wives. Be wise to guilt by association here.
So then the computer has exponentially repeated the significance of the printing press, making available information heretofore accessible only by slow and privileged access. Common plowboys and washgirls have the Abrahamic covenant culminated in Jesus at their fingertips. The civilization of republican democracy is now possible. I'm currently reading Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle, as an anecdote of point; 'recommended.
What happened is what the apostle Paul said, "For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock." The early churches resumed Mosaic singular leadership, seting up for Constantine's purported vision. This kind of thing first happened in the Garden of Eden. I'll give you proof later of The Garden's veritable existence. Adam and Eve got deceived in the garden by fallen Lucifer disguised as a talking snake. Later at Babylon, Nimrod spoke for Satan.
Snakes originally held their heads upright, like only king cobras still do today. And, for the same reason fallen Lucifer forcibly fell from Heaven to Earth, for the reason he deceived the man and his cagey rib. Because, he, now called Satan as the deceiver, wanted adoring praise only deserved by God. You see, God is totally big, and there cannot be two of him, except, of course, in his dual nature of male with female, besides our point here.
Do you see it? Since Adam's and Eve's transgression of God's lawful system of life, sometimes people want for themselves what only belongs to our common creator. In fact, we the people of God's cursed planet, Earth, invariably and always clamor for that attention. Plus, part of our wrongness desires people to get us to worship them due to our own laziness. Being born human is a conscious responsibility, within reason.
Before he signed off, Paul had named a few spiritual wolves already. These were men interrupting worship of God in Jesus to adulation of themselves. Again, this is what Lucifer did before his own fall from God's undeserved grace, who then sordidly invited Adam and Eve to participate in the confusion. Life is lawful, structural by intentional design. Cursed death is awful, our ultimate obstacle only Jesus could overcome.
None of us should proceed in life as if we created ourselves. Yes, in God's image, we can, to an extent, be a 'self-made' woman or man, as mundane accomplishment. However, for that which will last forever, it must be done by tapping into the source. The Source is personable, obviously enough to create us individually, plus the animals. And, God has created us with a second witness of common sense within ourselves. Being our consciences, which means part of God's mind with ours.
So Jesus was the only non-parasitic person that ever lived. Yet, there is a solution to the problem. Jesus drew everything he had from his heavenly dad to make a way for us to do the same. Many folks drew from God before Jesus, and since then by conscience in innocent ignorance of Jesus. This is why God thrice said to not tamper with his book.
All the accomplishments of mankind, accomplishments of nobility and ability, ultimately give glory to the creator, God, Jesus' heavenly father. We know from observation, from the repeated testimony of eyewitnesses recorded in the bible, that Jesus was God in human form. He was born as a human child, the Son of God, who Moses pointed the people to.
And Ishmael was the older brother of Isaac, and unlike Esau and Jacob, are friends from birth. Their parents' 'idiotsyncrasies' complicated their lives, but extermination of each other is no mandate from God. Those who try it are not of God, simple as that, for "The Lord knows those who are his".
So then, Jesus was the "I Am Who Am" who identified himself per Moses' request. What's cool for us is that we're in human form as Jesus was. Which means the creator has a big intention for us, for now, and for later. We should hope it's unified in him or them and us, as Jesus prayed for this unity in the presence of his friends. Jesus' humanity as God's only begotten child, his son, is what makes ours significant and notable. God had it written that he has plans for us, if we'll cooperate submissively.
Jesus is God's avenue or channel of authority to us on Earth in spirit, soul, and body. Social authority passes that on to all of us, in governmental society and nuclear marriage, ideally in Christ. To interfere and usurp the throne of those in any arbitrary way makes for trouble. It includes a husband being worthy of his woman's obedience. Otherwise, scrap the chap, to separate for sanity and safety, toward eventual reunification. Children must also obey and again to relative parental Godliness.
Satan disqualified himself when still the great archangel Lucifer in Heaven. Social imperative sees Satan scrambling to make sure he's not separated from God all alone. He promptly persuaded a third of God's other angels, maybe even archangels, to join him in rebellion against God. Bullies usually aren't hermits, only separated in a bad way.
The greed of hoarding power and pleasure is wrongly solitary like that. This is what prompted Protestant ecclesiasts to do their dirty trick on children. For generations to come, their only slightly indirect forced subjugation was effected by privately translating Solomon's Mosaic passages about the disciplinary rod in Proverbs. The incongruous term 'child' was inserted alongside the logical and divinely correct term of "young man". Again, this was done in the pivotal fifteen-hundreds, translating the Latin into English.
"Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision."
Follows is a few exemplary scripture verses to set the tone here per New Testament articulation of the above.
First Corinthians 3:11, "For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ". ('Fate is the opposite of faith', and, 'Jesus has the floor, because he's the foundation.' Single quotation marks means quoted from my published booklet of one-liner biblical thoughts, We Spanked God).
And Hebrews 11:6, "...for without faith it is impossible to please God, and those that come to him must first believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him".
First Corinthians 4:21---"What do you prefer, shall I come to you with a rod, or shall I come in love and with a gentle spirit?". (The apostle Paul was slightly tnt'd off after hearing that one of the assembly members was committing incest with his mom or maybe step-mom. Paul remained consistent with the new testament policy of persuasion, no longer the old way of coercion with stick or hand.)
Titus 2:6---"Young men likewise exhort to be sober-minded." Observe the persuasion, no longer coercion, the higher appeal now to our free wills in Christ Jesus. A different translation of the same passage reads, "Encourage the young men to control themselves." Mosaics have long been working thoughtfully through this appeal from God. It is the same appeal that moved the Roman official Agrippa to say, "Paul, do you persuade me also to become a Christian?" Paul coolly answered, "But for these prisoner chains, yes, I do, Sir."
A most recent discovery that I feel like squeezing in here, I read the coolest ancient reminiscence in a children's book. The Indian Hindu epic, the Ramayana, is quoted to set the atmosphere for the little book, and begins with, 'A long time ago, when the sun sat higher in the sky than it does now'. This is very profound, for it means the people of India still remember in their family story time the cosmic condition before the great flood.
Before the flood of Noah, before God tilted the Earth on its axis 20-some degrees so he could make the two seasons of winter and summer, as he explained to Noah, confirming with the first rainbow, with the Earth no longer straight on its axis 'vertically' (thank God there is such a thing), the sun not only sat higher in the sky than it does now, but also it did not waver latitudinally with the two seasons of winter and summer.
As the Ramayana story proceeds, its characters, Rama and Siti, are quite evidently in the Garden of Eden. The details are changed like a historical game of Telephone, but the original story is evident and reflected. 'Way to go, India ! for respectfully preserving each our cosmic heritage in this regard.
An editorial update, more biblical 'trivia', a few days ago on YouTube, I saw about the demolition project on an old building in northern Ireland. At which they uncovered the skeleton of a 4-thousand year old woman. mtDNA sequencing shows the same for other similar genetic analyses elsewhere. Being the female side of our line, repeated work elsewhere is seeing all of the deceased subjects trace back precisely to three or sometimes four women.
The three ancestral women certainly are Noah and 'Noelle's' 3 daughters-in-law. Noelle, Noah's wife, would be the 4th woman pinpointed as all our ancestor. Race, you know, is singular, not plural. There are human racial variations, simple as that.
Yes, three distinct mitochondrial cellular genetic lines directly trace back to Noah's female family members, his wife and the wives of his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. 'Small world, big God.' Note, I think my family name derives from one of the three sons of Japheth's son, Gomer. Take a look at Genesis 10:3 and guess which one of the three it would be from. It's nothing to boast about, the guy a renegade per Chronicles and Ezekiel.
Preface
(author's note---Mike here continuing to edit and proofread this essay's text. Along that line of time and effort, I was just thinking maybe God "dwells in eternity" for the same reason, to have time to get things right. Well he's got eternity; we don't, so let's get to it. By the way, even evolutionary eons are as lost as we are in eternity.) And to quote my dastardly self, 'If we do our best, and God does his worst, then we'll get somewhere.'
(PS--now is the time to delete useless words and keep what is useful. I would look at it as a microcosm of God's blessings to us in Christ Jesus. I recently read a useful book along that line, The Book Of Bible Problems authored by Gerardus D. Bouw, Ph.D. The book's a keeper; recommended.
A little fact within a paragraph of Gerardus's book explains that the word 'bless' comes from the French infinit(ive) word 'to wound'. Maybe this is why the partially Norman-descended Brits frequently say the derivative word 'bloody'. Which makes sense, Christ's ultimate sacrificial blood the catalyst for freedom in the life that is in him. Let us continue to prove it is indeed God's love that makes the world go 'round, with no strings attached. No greater emphasis in life exists than the sacrificial blood of Jesus Christ. He overcame death fair and square.
About blood and still about the Ramayana, I watched the locals dance it in Bali with my diplomatic family as a child. The guy dancers got to a point where they sucked the blood out of little chicks. It reminds of Jesus, God's christ, God himself in flesh pouring his lifeblood out for us. For, in Christ Jesus, "God is redeeming all men unto himself", "whosoever will", since Eden. God though Paul calls each of us to be "living sacrifices." If we "work out (your) salvation with fear and trembling", then we'll not be inclined to interfere in that of others.
A cool circumstantial coincidence, by God directly or my common sense(s) or both, yesterday at a quarter to three PM, I got online to see when exactly the longest day is, the longest northern hemispheric day of 2024. A generous website informed that 2:50 was the cosmic hour of power. I stepped outside with my Serengeti wraparound pilot-quality sunglasses on, to fairly-directly view the ball of fire that toasts our tootsies so conveniently.
You know, we're on the far turn in summertime, northern latitudes, actually closest in winter, just perfectly tilted on God's geographic gyroscope. And, the moon travels west to east. We really have to be simply happy to be along for the ride in this real amusement park...with the heavenly prospect of going home afterwards.
'End of the preface, except for that word there, 'preface'. Wow; what a word, meaning we're hopefully preparing to see the face of our creator. Well let's gear up 'n go, to start with innocently looking at one another in the face. We could have ended up being chosen to be one another, after all.
...the original Hello, this website exists solely to satisfy both initial curiosity and a desire for further information about my published booklet We Spanked God, Biblical Thoughts, Mike Tovar. You are welcome to it; and as I tell myself when I see 'Welcome' signs in front of churches, I really think, "I'll let you know if I feel welcome once I get in there, thank you".
I want you to do the same here. (Hmm; which means you have a way to contact me by a contact mode. Ken Evoy's SiteSell / SoloBuildIt here has a blog option; however, I'm busy using spare time to revise this essay's text, and then I have to get to my house painting.
Anyway, blogs are fogs to aging old me; let's do email; I'll post an e-address at the top there...with a stipulation of peaceful carriage of ourselves. You know a well-hit baseball or softball or hey, cricket is not hit hard but softly. We do want to get on base to get home; at least I do. And it does get done as a team. Let's all pitch in here, and bat.
No one ever won alone, even a runner leveraging the pace of the pack. Sea Biscuit's jockey, a last-minute substitute due to an injury to Biscuit's human buddy, followed the owner's and trainer's orders to not get ahead too much of War Admiral. If you know, the equine dude ran his best in close proximity to other horses, until it was time to kick it into his own particular gear. The substitute jockey eventually told his charger to do just that, and he duly bested the great War Admiral. There's always someone or some horse faster, reminding us of Almighty God. And, 'Evolution cannot account for created beauty.' That's how I see it, how I know there's a God, beauty and impossible coincidence.
N.B.--'big news, someone just did the research on the expression 'spare the rod, spoil the child'. Its origin is a 17th-century s+m erotic 'love' poem.
No matter ('funny phrase...'no matter'...) whether you have read none or all of the 70-some pages of my booklet's one-liners, feel free to listen in here on these prose paragraph 'q's + a's' printed farther along.
Sea Biscuit's was an open field start with War Admiral, not in a boxed starting gate. He was well-trained to begin at the sound of a gun bang, a starter pistol. So was War Admiral. Take a look at the old black+white film on YouTube. I hear Hollywood made a movie out of it. An original film is like an original storybook.
Only God saw me riding my horse, Jim Dandy, a Belgian-Percheron, full speed, bareback, holding on to his mane, across the farm pastures. It was do or die.
If you want a hand-held copy of this website essay, or ebook or audiobook, it's in process to be published under the title, Let The Cards Lie. If you do, consider buying it on Bookbaby's website for intimacy and efficiency, automatic with the pictured links that will be placed at the top of this page, projected as I write this, or the bookseller of your choice.
(Yeehaw!, I'll jiggle my own liver; thanks. If you know, post Noah / Gilgamesh Sumerian wise guys used to jiggle an animal's liver to forecast the future. Leave the liver be or cast your own horror-scope trial, pardner. "As for me and my house, we shall serve The Lord", even The Father of Lights, from whom all blessings flow, coming down out of Heaven, you know, 'California or Bust', cooperatively, admittedly as Second Peoples.)
(Also, to look back in time from a few months later after re-editing this essay, ('essay' means 'to try' in French, so give me a break as an amateur author, please), I want to add, yesterday I learned of Carl Jung's coined term, 'synchronicity'. I suggest he, and maybe you, align that thinking, as a perception of cosmic coincidence, with the thinking behind E=MC Squared.
'Albert being closer to the truth of things than Carl. That our creator is a real person, even the original person and the originator of other 'mini-persons, let's call ourselves, micro(cosm)-persons. Lets not just get so physical that we worship the creation; let's get spiritual, worshiping the creator of the creation. 'We can play on words; but let's not play with them.'
Let us thoroughly think through our big ideas. For, it is foolish to use a whole can of worms on a single fish hook of an idea.
Introduction
I will especially show you how it never entered God's biblical mind to tell us to spank one of his little ones. The old Mosaic 'rod' rule repeated in Solomon's proverbs was for rebellious young men, never young women and children.
And the rod was used once-and-for-all on Jesus Christ. The Spirit of Christ now advises in the new part of God's bible to "Urge the young men to control themselves."
'When push comes to shove, try pulling per the little sign on the door'. I thought that one-liner up while struggling with the entry door of my local newspaper. Check out the article about my booklet that the Lewistown Sentinel squeezed in on Dec. 31st, 2022.
Sinful mankind is violent, not God. Look at Jesus chasing the merchants out of his heavenly dad's temple-house. The whip he made was for the big, tough oxen, not their owners.
Of those selling doves, he merely told them to pick the cages up and get them out of there. Jesus Christ was frequently assertive, but he was never aggressive. In other words, he never hit anybody nor raised his voice unnecessarily.
Historical archaeology is correct to show us how both local Canaanite-and Egyptian-influenced Israelite upbringing was violent. God simply told Moses and Joshua and Caleb that he'll send hornets ahead of them to vacate the villages of the people of the land. Hornets are big stinging bees the size of large grasshoppers, yellow-and-black bodies.
I hear proud talk of the Maccabees, who were centuries beyond the time when God vouchsafed Israel's going into battle. What Jesus said about (not) living by the sword is our current eventuality. Israel's cooperatives are hardly cooperative since 1948. And the recent 16th-century Latin to English bible translation discovery differentiates between Judeans and Idumeans, regardless of what brand they chew. Jack Higgin's novel, The President's Daughter, gave me added perspective on that this past week.
The people of the land were systemically fornicating with anything that moved, completely neglecting a necessary lifestyle of holy integrity. God was replacing them with people he could work with, and play decently with. What would you do if you were God? Would you teach your harmless babies to grow up to be harmful? Holy matrimony as lifelong anticipates eternal marriage with the lover of our souls, training us how to, including minimizing the effect of Edenic sin on our soul so we concentrate on goodness. And, where would we be if Sarah or Abraham divorced from the other? 'Before Ishmael or Isaac.
There is much studied evidence to prove Moses and Joshua exaggerated a lot when they wrote the biblical reports of their aggressive exploits. This doesn't discount grace from God to miraculize the book he inspired to have written. Let's fly on the inside of the airplane, not hide in a wheel well, if you've seen the photo of one desperate and brave young man trying to get somewhere, unsuccessfully.
The people already living in the promised land, like most of the Hebrew rabble, were morally corrupt with no sense left of right and wrong. To the latter, God pointed out it was no quality of character on their part that entitled them in any way to possession of the land of the Canaanites.
Remember how the people had already debauched themselves while Moses was up on the awesome Arabian mountain of Sinai. And God then told Moses to stand aside so he could wipe them out. God had told Moses he'll start everything over with him, but Mo successfully begged him off the idea.
God soon informed the people with whom he had resumed working that if they persisted in their lack of appreciation, then he would drive them out of the land also. He did that very thing using Nebuchadnezzar to exile them to Babylon to recoup seventy years of missed sabbaths, then later by the Romans worldwide until recently. Remember, Israel was never authorized by God to go out to war unless he first spoke audibly to the current prophet. It is also important to realize that God has officially broken covenant with Israel by Jesus.
(An editor's note--Michael, here--I learned this week that one of Thomas Jefferson's favorite books to read and guide himself was Xenophon's Cyropaedia. It's a Greek translation of the old Persian leader's writings who Britannica describes as "a tolerant and ideal monarch who was called the father of his people by the ancient Persians."
And Britannica also says, "In the Bible, he (Cyrus) is the liberator of the Israelites who were captive in Babylonia," financing and expediting their return home to Jerusalem, from where their supposedly beloved God had justifiably kicked them out. Present Persia would be wise to ask, What would Cyrus do?
If you know, the Persians, led by Cyrus and later Darius, had moved into the increasingly complacent kingdom of Babylon. And I would think young Cyrus had conversations with old Daniel, and indeed, formulated his egalitarian and magnanimous precepts from God's humble servant, Daniel the Hebrew; then, Tom Jefferson along with his friend Jim Madison applied those precepts here in this young U.S.A.)
Moses messed up too, having already disobeyed God one time too many and thus forfeited his own opportunity to enter the promised land with everyone else. And you do know, the entire generation that came out of Egypt, God let them die off in the Arabian desert for their perennially unloving and disrespectful attitude.
I do explain in this essay that many Hebrew people have been learning the way of peace, a social story most of Christendom would do well to heed, including the so-called 'peace churches'. I do not mean any hell hawks that disregard the moral rules of war. See the second section of this text including about war. Defense is not offense ever; never. As for an army who uses women and children as protective cover, I think the local men of the land should risk their skin and their lives and stand between such evil cowardice
Moses did correctly pass on the fact from God to the people that God was pointing them all to someone totally better than he, Moses. God sensibly withheld crucial details from Moses until later prophetic writers, that that totally better person was going to be an incarnation of himself, Immanuel meaning 'God with us'. To again quote myself, 'I want God incarnated, not man reincarnated.' God is the famous messy messiah, even the Son of God, Jeremiah's prophesied Branch, Son of David, both his "root" and his "offspring". God does 'roots' too, he who makes trees.
This is the same personal God who used to check in on his creations Adam and Eve once a day in the Garden of Eden to see how much fun they were having there. It was a respectful relationship that did not see the mutual development of its potential.
So God as Jesus Christ then stood in the woodshed for the lickin' all self-conscious people have evidently earned for themselves. This is why Jesus is nicknamed "the lamb slain from the foundation of the world". And look how circumstantially God disciplined his wayward first children, Adam and Eve. 'We were created conscious; sin made us self conscious.' And, it makes all the difference in eternity; hence the subsequent prohibited access to the fruit of the tree of life inside Eden. I heard that the cleanest place on the planet is the room where computer processors are built.
Jesus as God-incarnate gave absolutely no indication when he was living here that children before the age of reason transgress as sin. Even the prophet Isaiah wrote ahead of time of the Christ Child, "Butter and honey will he eat before he is able to discern between the good and the evil". Of course by the age of 12 Jesus was very focused, almost a young man now, and courageously stepping out to begin taking on the public calling God had for him.
This is the age of the Hebrew category of child, the masculine word na'ar and unique in the book of Proverbs depicting any so-called child. This is beautiful, and we have been detracting from it for socio-ecclesiastical reasons. Judgment is very relative, don't forget, to not cheapen God's undeserved kindness of grace. We are guardians of our souls, but dependent on God for the power to do it.
And Jesus was the singular seed of Eve that God told her would bruise Satan's head totally. But it would take time. So let's tell ourselves as we do our children to be patient.
In the meantime the original picture-writing of the Chinese people is replete, positively full of direct graphic recall of the events of the Garden of Eden and afterwards.
(Later the brilliant full-spectrum encyclopedia carried by the Chinese commercial fleet and given to merchants of Venice, Italy--the ancient New York City of Europe--would be a foundation for the western cultural renaissance, also the Greek cultural diaspora after the Muslim invasion of that country and culture. Note, the practical Muslims had made a canal connecting the Nile River with the Red Sea, the remains of which are still visible today.
See the recommended book, 1434 for the full story, researched and written by the retired naval officer and expert navigator Gavin Menzies; also check out Gavin's initial book 1421 and the Chinese oceanographic pioneering before Ferdinand Magellan and Christopher Columbus. That history is yet an unproven amateur observation, of the Chinese global exploration fleet. But, the above reference to their knowledge and expertise in engineering and artistry shared with westerners is plausible. Read later in this essay what I saw on several occasions in nursery school in old Malaya.
So what-to-do? All we have to do is be 'Nice or nasty, kind or cruel, wise man or fool', simply looking to God the creator of beauty on the earth and in the cosmos, loving him and each other as a way of life, really the way of life. For 'the golden rule is the real rod of correction'. If "Judgment starts with the house of God", how do we account for our hypocrisy? Read on here what Nancy at CYS told me when I asked them for child-advice in 2012.
But it's God's niceness and kindness and wisdom he fruits in us upon our act of repentance, not any spiritual fruit of our own. Jesus explained this as being born again, having returned our hearts back to the Father of Lights, even Almighty God, Jesus' dad, his heavenly daddy, and ours too through him as our older brother. 'God expresses his druthers through fathers 'n mothers', peaceful and patient ones, not violent ones, neither absentee ones, but spending quality time with them, and books, not always screened devices. Airplanes don't outdo birds in beauty and profundity.
Again, apostle Paul at least twice in the new covenant or new testament, same thing significantly articulated the difference between the old system of general coercion of dependents and the new one of peaceful persuasion. Which God had always preferred if people's wills were conducive to it. I've already quoted him above, and am formally introducing it here.
To the Corinthians Paul justly suggested an ostracizing of one of the men who was in the dubious habit of fornicating with his mother, if it was his mother-in-law. Paul then stands back with a bird's-eye view and challenges them with a choice-of-two question, "What will ye? Shall I come unto you with a rod, or with a spirit of love and a spirit of meekness?"
Let us agree with Jesus and Paul that there is a choice between two responses to difficulty. Jesus actually said we can still spiritually dump a container of hot coals on the top of the head of someone firmly committed to being a jerk, by loving them with no outward reservations. 'Living water is not drawn from a wishing well'; it's prayed for.
Then notice what Paul said to the Hebrew-speaking Christians, in which Paul compares the rod wackings they received as young men from their indignant dads to the new idea of seeking peace with all men, including cantankerous young men. While Paul is wonderfully wordy in the entire letter to 'the Hebrews', (incognito authorship, probably Paul keeping a low profile, or it might have been Apollos), his meaning here in chapter twelve is clear: "Now, no discipline for the present seems to be joyous but rather miserable."
Evidently, circumstantial chastisement is God's new idea for discipline. He got me at the exact literal age the Hebrew wording says in Proverbs, 13 years 4 months. God set me up with a school paint-stuck window. He nearly killed me to keep me alive in the long run, The Sweetheart, the "ever present help in time of trouble". Crippled for life with little feeling and function in my right forearm and hand.
Digressively, the individual and corporate bully pulpits of Christendom are significantly based on the wrongly translated Mosaic ruling of a rod of corporal punishment for rebellious and disrespectful young men. Coerced children grow up to be coercive adults or prove me wrong and the rhetoric is on you.
And never in the several apostolic discourses on new covenant family life is corporal punishment anywhere even remotely alluded to. And about forgiveness, the actual way it's done is as Jesus outlined. He said that if you have a disagreement with a friend, then aproach them and try to reason with them. If they refuse you, then get a second friend to approach them with you. If refused, present it before the assembly, one kind and fair step at a time.
Further, this false idea of violently coercing children with no developed coping mechanisms furtively connects to the also wrongly translated phrase in the new covenant of 'obey them', the correct translation being ''be ye persuaded of your elder brethren in the Lord Jesus". Neither do they have 'the rule over' you, which categorically disregards Jesus' blood-bought example of exemplary persuasion.
Or shall we cause "blueness of the wound" on our sacrificial little lambs, as hypocrites bound for hell. Rome crushed Carthage for those people's terrible and genocidal bad habit of fire-sacrificing their infants. People there generally went along with the Carthaginian-Canaanite custom of sacrificing many of their infants to Molech (Satan). They disregarded their consciences to do so. History chronicles the victorious Roman soldiers as nauseated when they observed the extent of the infanticide.
So also the manipulated and arbitrary insertion of the irrelevant word 'child' in the Proverbs text by 16th-century ecclesiastical scholars continues Carthaginian custom. It is Canaanite custom, modified for modern mores. What else is true about this but that we share and repeat the faithless and hateful and fearful coercive subjugation of our children for shameful terror of their purity?
And, calling them baby goats is mental obscurity leading to deeper spiritual denial. If a museum displayed the only little child in the world, would visitors call it a baby goat? Maybe I'm being overly careful here, bu I don't think so. Too much damage has been done with callous inaccuracy to remain so colloquial. There's a time for jesting, and a time for just not.
Persuasion is the policy of our peaceful God, mostly implied in the old and fully expressed in the new covenant which he made with his Christian Israel of God. My dear readers, we who are truly God's little ones of his forever-love have evidently accepted candy from strangers, poisoned candy where hand holding metastasizes into arm twisting. Indeed, we have thrown out the Christ Child with a mistranslation of the Proverbial bath water. Might we abhor ourselves in sackcloth and ashes?
A couple, professional statue makers back in communist Russia, got to asking each other about the amazingness of the human hand, especially the thumb. They said privately with each other despite their secular upbringing that because of the existence of the thumb a wise spirit creator must exist. They soon heard of 'Christ', to put thumb and index finger together. They may have then thumbed a ride to Siberia, separately by coercion.
God's social guidelines, the ten commandments, are non-violent. They appeal to our autonomous senses. God had no logical choice but to put down the rabid animal that were the Canaanites. Derek P. Gilbert in his Inception sheds light on this; recommended. Rabies is a non-negotiable disease, figuratively speaking. Put yourself in God's Crocs for a minute.
Cain kills his little brother and donates his own cold-blooded attitude to his children. Who violently dominate the society they make, and so God drowns all but eight decent people. Of these the bad attitude still gets passed on to the first Babylon.
Who systematize the wrong worship of the creation in place of the right worship of the creator. This is what Satan did back when he was Lucifer in heaven. And it is exactly what an adult does in sticking or smacking a child. God minds his own business and if we want to be in his image, then likewise. God can raise up Godly children with the rocks in a flower garden. But he's invited us to give it a go with our very own real children. 'Eternity at our fingertips in our children we hit; 'fools.'
We take the law into our own hands instead of giving a merciful hand to one another. Rodding or spanking is a significant something in what Jesus said of anything done to harm "one of these little ones". Where is the rod of pleasantness used to defend God's children from nasty Satan? It is ignored by those who would devour their own children, just as many Israelites did during the Babylonian siege. One evil thing leads to the other of eating our very own brother.
The people of the post-flood world clustered themselves up for the wrong reason at Babylon, about a hundred years after the flood. God intervened to get humankind going in his intended direction. He confused their single language into the seventy original groupings that modern ethnology and linguistics are aware of.
It was a circumstantially persuaded migration, to get people circulating in a healthy way on his refurbished Earth. The ice after the floodwaters froze was soon to melt and God had to get people moving on the cooling, post-Pangian inter-continental set up he had made for us during the big flood.
As I walk weekly in the Blue Ridge Appalachians near me, I see the rocks with fine sedimentary section lines, curvy, undulating, bespeaking of massive amounts of fine soil carefully yet powerfully stirred up then made to settle down, all by big water and volcanic cataclysm, and condensation of the original uniform vapor canopy. The really fine soil was stirred up by the really big water and then settled and hardened into rock. There are no fossil rocks, meaning from before the flood, except rock as original pre-Pangian bedrock, like the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, USA. Before the rock hardened, land mass movement and new ocean weight squished the land into hills, upending many of them.
And note, these low-altitude Appalachian mountains are scientifically not old. Two categories of evidence are the steep-walled canyons of East Tennessee, impossible for old hills, and the Allegheny cuts of the Delaware Gap, Lehigh, and the Harrisburg Susquehanna. They had to have been formed by hard flood water running off perpendicular to unbroken ridges of pushed up soft soil that wasn't yet rock.
Now, the Israel of God's intended exercise is to share with the rest of the world what the almighty god has revealed of his very real personality. The refugee years in Egypt as strangers and before that the pioneer years of Abram and Sarai were intended to furnish a humble perspective. God was tenderly inviting us away from Sumerian introversion. And God needs no introduction to introversion for he is perfectly balanced.
God later had someone write, "To the law and to the testimony". This tells us to look both back to the ten commandments, even the two great commandments, and forward to the testimony of Jesus. An angel told the apostle John "...for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy". That means God transcends time and plays it out in actuality in Jesus Christ and "those who love his appearing."
Life is one fun game of Clue, and life is God who is spirit and in truth has created will-filled matter to reflect himself. And if matter reflects himself, then it only gets better. Therein is our hope of happiness made possible by Jesus beating sin and death. I think we try to coercively reflect our own images instead of persuasively reflecting God's.
Yes there's conflict, starting with Lucifer, once God's finest or one of his finest angels. His job was to lead the nurturing of the human race, including praise in song and instrument, his very body having musical appendages. He got greedy, was cast down to Earth, and renamed Satan. Satan doesn't persuade, he coercively deceives with soulically appealing tunes and mental melodies. Basically, he's a double spy and very dangerous.
The symptom is hypnotic, for example the seemingly gorgeous songs from the Protestant Reformation. That my musically skilled Mennonite friends are so fond of. My qualm is that most of the melodies stick in my brain against my will. That is control by a force of intellect outside of me. Remember, things don't get done in a chance vacuum.
Blessedly, the old Gregorian Chant melody I learned can dispel them, adopted by the early Anabaptists and given new lyrics. The Protestant tunes are ten times more mentally sticky than any song from secular pop culture. The Gregorian can dissipate hypnotic pop songs within seconds. Whereas a given Protestant melody sticks like pine sap on the fingers of my mind for days in perverted persistence.
Now imagine our subsequent challenge. Even the archangel Mikey, when Satan tried to prevent him hiding the dead body of Moses objectively said, "The Lord rebuke you." Fight angels with angels, spoken as a human, in the name of the Lord Jesus.
Have you heard of Scarface? He is a scary ancient spirit living in the Big Horn mountains, especially on Cloud Peak. The old story of the First Peoples says he used to live in Heaven and was beautiful. Until iniquity was found in him and God sent him to Earth. Note, it is a respectful tradition and maybe wise to only make day trips up there.
Things often require a closer look, the essence of any so called reformation.
For example, it was not the Egyptian Sinai where the Hebrews escaped from the Egyptians, who always had posted military units out there. Moses with the people made a bee-line in their great escape fully across the big Sinai peninsula.
They followed a major wadi or canyon drainage system down to the Gulf of Aqaba. Where there is an enormous sand spit on the west shore of that right rabbit-ear of the Red Sea, about halfway up it.
Solomon later placed two pillars there, one on each side to mark the spots. The pillar on the western, now Israeli shore of the Gulf of Aqaba has been solidly set upright in concrete, with Solomon's name in ancient script inscribed upon it, unless it was on the eastern one, which got confiscated. There's other apt words on it also, as a list of bullet points. See Ron Wyatt Archaeology online for videos and photos. Ron and his little family from Tennessee spent their vacation money out there for decades finding out these things.
Update, it used to be the Israeli side, now apportioned to Egypt geo-politically. The inscriptions on that western pillar were eroded, but the inscriptions by Solomon on the pillar on the Arabian eastern shore were observed by Ron and copied down by him. It had been carried away to somewhere unknown, Ron Wyatt noticed next time he 'vacationed' there. Ron and his two sons were incarcerated for 78 days by adjacent Jordan for trespassing in the area.
The pillar on the Saudi Arabian side was still in the water and has since been removed apparently by that owner. Apostle Paul mentioned 'Sinai in Arabia' to the Galatians in a letter. Elijah seems to have holed up there in a cave, maybe his famous raven roost. Another YouTube video demonstrated how Hebrew inscriptions in stone have been found around the entire Arabian peninsula. It even looks like that's where God kept them wandering and wondering when they're gonna get there.
If that's true, it means that is where the chosen people wandered. For when we hear mention of ''the wilderness'' in subsequent history, it means the huge sandy lands to the east in Old Arabia. Observed there are flat stones with engraved pictures of sandals, untied sandals commemorating Moses and the bush on fire that was not consumed.
A well known example of a closer look is the Mosaic divorce laws. Jesus said they were written into the Levitical rulings by Moses due to the hardness of the selfishly demanding people's hearts. Jesus told them that, in the beginning, in Eden before people got selfish, a couple in love had an eternal delight with their first love for one another, one of endearing devotion and companionship.
And, this is why promiscuous photography in any form is contrary to human conscious nature, conscience, not instinct. You see, a guy remembers his gal foreverafter as she was when she was lithe and most attractive. And if you know, fat falls by the wayside during perfect passion. I mention it later, this is why the missionary position is the visionary position, spiritual vision. For we should be amazed at how God created flesh to actualize spirit, only in holiness.
She can get fat, but in his mind's eye he sees or at least feels her first beauty, while they're making love. This first love is private, and shouldn't be publicized, being a personally mutual treasure. Although I can see, although didn't, why Jessica had her pictures posted with Playboy, after being traumatized and humiliated by Jimmy Bakker and another guy.
Who repented and probably apologized, the book he wrote in prison I hear was titled, I Was Wrong. That's what born again people say, and not just once but whenever applicable. For "it is he that endures to the end who will be saved." It is a loving endurance, where fat is superceded by tenderloving respect, plus the sixth sense, of humor, of you more than me.
Is YHWH trying to get us back to Sinai, or Eden? It can't be both, regardless of the ten commandments being from Sinai. For they are forever condensed into the great 2. Indeed, YHWH, God, as Jesus is leading us forward to the eternal Eden. Zechariah and Jeremiah clearly articulated God's dissolution of the old covenant at Sinai, toward a new one.
And like my mom said when she first met my fiance', "Good more grandchildren!" Do you know what God's top priority is? 'Yup, "Godly children", his favorite subject and why he had Joshua include them in the removal of the Amorites. Who were so diabolical that the evil spirits in them had possessed even their children and their animals it seems. I heard a recording of someone doubting the validity of an exorcist's work. I heard him say, "I know he exists because I've done business with him", against him.
Maybe it was that God wanted no intellectual nostalgia existing in their grown up children later. We have to think like Job, after Satan secured permission to seriously afflict him. Who is quoted as saying, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him." Job was in love with God and recognized him as such, trusting him to be entirely capable of working things out. And it was Satan who had suggested to God the idea of testing Job.
This ends my essay's introduction. Thank you for reading so far already.
Part A
December , 2022 My dear Earthly neighbor ( You’re one-of-a-kind ! ), BookBaby of Pennsauken, New Jersey midwifed my first-ever published work, except for one inclusion elsewhere 17 years ago in a list of reader-contributed ‘thought-gems’ always placed on the back cover of the Amish-Mennonite monthly booklet, the Calvary Messenger.
However an ice storm set in, as today where I live in Pennsylvania, USA , Earth. You know of my jokingly including Earth, this really is very seriously and sincerely cried out by Almighty God once in his bible-book, "Oh Earth ! Earth !" Jesus said exactly this also to Jerusalem one day, speaking as God. And, neither is life some sentimental journey, rather a cursedly difficult pilgrim trek. And the prince of pilgrims, Jesus, said, "In this world ye shall have tribulation; but do not fear, for I have overcome the world."
What significantly happened, since this project's start in 2005 when watching a well driller and I said to myself, 'Living water is not drawn from a wishing well', I happily and in relaxed fashion continued to occasionally jot down more of the same one-line statements as expressions and truisms, all biblically based.
Then our only surviving child was eighteen-months and in hindsight I reacted to or acted upon what I call false programming, yes false teaching. What I did was, after a wonderful ‘one’ year and into a tremendous ‘two’ with this child-person I had I think been entrusted with, I awkwardly figured it was the official time to strike the sweetheart.
Come some next communication situation, yes without warning as a vocalized explanation, I swatted a non-existent fly on his diapered rear with a fly-swatter. The big little guy looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Probably the confused look on my face startled him also into crying. And any such 'situation' starting at that age is simply and innocently the child beginning to assert and discover himself as an independent individual. After all, we don't want anyone to crimp our own style.
You see, I had been asking around in the society I communed with. Found was the conflicting, dual option of using either a stick or a hand. Knowing biblically that the devil is the deceptive “author of confusion”, I deduced the fact I am asking the wrong people.
So I went into town—I’m out in the country—to Mifflin County’s Children & Youth Services. That began to solve the problem when Nancy, a middle-aged caseworker invited me to sit and talk with her in the family room.
Nancy focused quickly and when I caught my breath and stopped babbling she said, “No implements are allowed to be used; that’s federal law. You may use your hand, but are not to hit so hard you leave a red-mark”. Then Nancy stood us up right there and held my gaze to say, “Take the log out of your own eye”. This older gal had obviously not only seen senseless tragedy, but also she ‘knew her bible’.
Now hang on to your hats and headship coverings, for God I think seconded that WWJD-implied logic by Nancy with a website that my spouse found on-line shortly afterwards, three weeks as it was. Which reveals the fact of embarrassing simplicity that King James-and-editors wrongly put the one-size-fits-all term ‘child’ alongside the correct Hebrew word for young-adult "son", masculine, not 'daughter'. Predecessors of King James and his scholars made the first insertion of the word 'child' into Proverbs.
(editor---I now know the privately interpreted error was already being intentionally worked into scripture for most of that past century. Since then, direct literal translations by Robert Young in 1862 (before Hort and Westcott, if you know them), Julia E. Smith in 1876, and J.P.Green in 1993 each do not hesitate to translate the Hebrew word na'ar as a young man, per Solomon's contextual warning in Proverbs of the marketplace woman whose man is out of town on a business trip and she seeks to do some unfaithful business herself, by seducing a young man.
That Hebrew word ‘na’ar’ is the only conceptual term for any age of so-called ‘child’ from newborns to female and male almost-newlyweds in the entire text of God’s biblical book of The Proverbs. The Hebrew language has some ten time-lapsed words for the concept of child and ‘na’ar or male young-adult is the only one of them God contextually utilized in all of Proverbs. We've swallowed this hook, line, sinker, and rod, to the disrespect of fish and little lambs.
You can't smarten up until you sweeten up, meaning humility. In my mind's eye here, I see the eyes of my infant nephew. He's just been handed over by the person he trusts most to a total stranger, with no well-mannered introduction and explanation. He's about to be baptized by a spiritual ignoramus and hermeneutical hypocrite.
His mom has an equivalent vacant look in her eyes as she intellectually brutalizes her very own child. I see his eyes do another double-take, trying to rectify and make sense of the situation. He screams in stark terror as an expense of convoluted guilty consciences, certainly not his. Or, a medical blood draw from a baby's heel sure reminds of the conversation in Eden between God and Eve.
Each of the several rod-related passages in Proverbs except one of them were mistranslated as biblically forbidden “private interpretation” by King James. Solomon was elaborating on the old and subjective Levitical ruling through Moses for knocking some serious sense into rebellious young-men on their upper-back muscles, not their buttocks, medically a smaller target and too inhumanely close to the spinal column of the lower back.
A thirty-three-year-old and quotidian innocent Son of God condemned violence with his uniquely holy body. And the earwitness reported words of the Roman captain in charge of the crucifixion tell it fully in light of the apparent cosmic eclipse and earthquake plus Jesus' telling words, "Surely, this man was a son of the gods", said relatively in his cultural awareness.
This is besides the fact that Jesus is the only human to experience spiritual separation from God. God wouldn't ask it of anyone else, such a feeling so bad. But don't we do this with an innocent trusting child looking to us for integral fellowship?
Therefore and in other words it never entered God’s mind to suggest we in-any-way inflict physical aggression upon what Jesus as God described as “these little ones”, nor on any other age group for that matter. It was a Mosaic ruling for rebellious young men, not children or maidens. And there were similar rules of corporal chastisement for other transgression categories in Mosaic Law.
And Jesus put the controversy to rest in death and then raised himself up again victoriously. As with the temple veil for the most holy place, God in Jesus tore in two the divorce papers between him and Israel. And it was an opening of access for all mankind to heaven's peace. This definitely includes the social bullying phenomenon of the curse Noah placed upon his son Ham and partly on Shem, of Japheth living in their tents. But, we have to consciously appropriate Jesus' accomplishment into our lives.
After we all vicariously butchered and skewered God as The Son ( “come unto his own, and his own received him not“), his Holy Spirit progressively inspired a new guideline appealing to young men’s free will saying simply yet profoundly, “Urge the young men to control themselves”, translated similarly in other translation renditions.
Mistaking the one-size word child is not King James' only private interpretation in Proverbs.. The last and pivotal word in another Proverbial line about the rod means 'the grave' in Hebrew, not 'hell'. It's the same word old Jacob used to mention his misery of his dear son Joseph being purportedly killed by a lion.
Jonah used the same word about the belly of the sperm whale that got some take-out. The Proverbs passage does not mean using a rod on the young buck's back will save him from eternal separation from God. It means he's gonna' die younger than necessary so try and prevent it. What happens to any of us after death can only be immaterially influenced, which of course is logical, the two phenomena matching as parallels.
In 2021, a Cape Cod lobster diver got ingested by apparently a whale. In full scuba gear, he was at bottom in process of manually harvesting the crustaceans. Something vacuumed him into its dark interior, did not like his pounding and kicking protests, and upchucked him conveniently at the surface. One of the numerous bluefishing boats hauled him out.
Another KJV botch in Proverbs is 'Chasten thy son while there is hope, and spare not thy soul for his crying'. That final word in the Hebrew means 'death'; it doesn't mean 'crying' at all. The young man was about to eat the dust by being a rebellious jerk, death; spare his soul from totally wiping out, from prematurely dying in a hand casket, as with me in that school window, not surprising the school principal at all, I'm sure. Similarly with her secretary who saved my life. See ahead the hilarious dialogue between us as I stood arterially bleeding before her.
(Note, King James and his brethren otherwise made a marvelous final rendition of an already well-developed English-language bible. The English they wrote their bible in was a poetically and linguistically versatile and grammatically accurate tool for the job of translating God's Word into the conjugations of other languages, more than the street English they commonly spoke.
The few socio-political errors they purposely made, big and hurtful as they are, do not come close in gravity as the later translations starting with Hort and Westcott. And the 'thee's and thou's' are part of God's pentecostal grammatical precision for effective evangelism and translation into grammatically precise languages, which modern English is not).
That said, there is one 'rod' proverb that is translated accurately. It is the one about the "blueness" of the wound. May I trust your adult perception is sufficiently matured to broach this subject with you? Just transfer the eyes of your mind to Jesus Christ. Even I, as I lay on a gurney waiting for a neurosurgeon to arrive, peaked around the sanity shield at my open forearm. Bright blue was part of the color scheme; call it a Mosaic; there was yellow, and of course red. Jesus was beaten beyond recognition for being perfectly nice.
We re-crucify Jesus when we deny his little ones opportunity for rest and trust in him. We who spiritually bludgeoned Jesus beyond recognition simply for being perfectly nice do the same to a trusting and dependent child wholly looking to us for guidance. We exemplify what the truly burdened prophet Jeremiah described of the human heart, that it is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. We're not as nice as we think we are.
Personally tackle football and the high-contact magilla-gorilla tag on the school playground taught us big boys to differentiate physical assertion from aggression. Our football coach had us in the D.C. Metro title game three years in a row. It was understood from the start of the season of grueling and painful practice sessions that disrespectful talking or contact would forfeit your right to play in the next scheduled game. And stepping onto a field of competition with the trained energy of an angel was a delightful thrill.
And our parochial school name was Little Flower, after Therese of Lisieux, and not once did I ever encounter on the field the slightest insult, so respected was our football program. It actually happened once, in a pre-season scrimmage with the team we would later play in the final. The whistle blew to end the play, but this big and agile guy kept driving at me. In a low voice only I could here, he derided my school and the peace its name professes.
I was driven back and farther back, all other players making room for us to play this out. He had me on my heels and off my center of balance. I could get embarassed, so I dug deeper and maintained my stature as we continued to smash helmets. Then I thought to end the stalemate of same old-same old helmet smashing. I bent my knees a bit and got a firm smash under his faceguard, close to his cushioned chin. He sailed away to land on his back after a remarkably long flight. And, I trotted back to the huddle and out for the season a few days later in the school window. Sin comes back to our chinny-chin-chins, but we lost to those guys by two points in the final.
Jesus uniquely experienced terminated access to God, the Spirit of Life. Evidently, he stood in for what I very well know I deserve. It is an opportunity none of us should refuse, especially because our capacity for indignation derives from our God creator. The only question remaining is how seriously do we take Jesus in our lives.
People have been sacrificing their children for their seared consciences. Surely, Christendom, and mankind is overconfident and risks Jesus saying to us, "Depart from me...I never knew you." I think we are terrified of children, and nervously fabricate evil coping mechanisms to handle our fear.
And God help us, both our children and their educators depend upon Christians' historical convictions. I think the devil's a joker who laughs a lot, at us. Anyhow, let's change history with clarifying information from this very useful global community internet. The problem is like what the pilot announced in our flght to Hawaii toward Indonesia. I asked my mom, "What's a point of no return?"
Another question is, Are we kissing cousins or killing cussins? Jesus' cousin James (their mothers were sisters) wrote that we war when we "lust and have not". I think we lack the heavenly integrity of a child. And James used to be nicknamed one of the sons of thunder with his brother John. They're the ones who wanted to call down fire that day, before humbled regeneration in God's holy spirit.
Your hat flew off and hair just got mussed again by the wind of God’s spirit. To say, these botched ‘rod’ passages in which social power-tripping and bullying is established first with God’s little ones is then connected with one other enormous mistranslation as "private interpretation" by King James and crew (ed.--and their forbears, I realize now) connecting the cruel and un-Godly-violent subjugation of children with that of what, our pet dogs? No; ‘adults!
What KJ-and-Krew did next, surely consciously, considering their scholarship, was to morph the beautiful lines in the new covenant Greek in Hebrews 13:7 and 17. Which is supposed to say, “Be ye (correct KJV grammar, plural for 'you', usually) each persuaded of your conscientious and more experienced elders (both female and male)",
Who must give an account to God for the nurturing of your younger souls etcetera”, or "yield" to their leadership, even "take their pattern of action as your own'. The author, certainly Paul, has just listed a litany of exemplary saints gone mortally before them. One doesn't obey a martyr's death; one accepts it as your own course of action, persuaded to do so.
That was wrongly translated to read ‘obey them’, an action non-existent within the church body of Jesus Christ, only mutual persuasion. Any obedience in the Christian church gets done to Jesus, period. Obedience does get commanded by God for children to Godly parents,
and again conditionally, wives to truly Christ-like husbands. The latter is situational not absolute ethics. God in no way means obeying an un-Godly husband. The apostle Paul clearly elaborates on this in his writing.
And that Greek word for obedience is also what the wind and the waves did on Lake Galilee that day, 'the Daddy God having rocked his only begotten child to sleep for a power-nap on a storm-tossed pillow'. (ed.'s note--Single quotes indicate We Spanked God one-liners.)
And about this famous fear of God as the Proverbial beginning of wisdom, God precedes that with Psalm 55; 19, b, “Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God”--KJV. Hold on to your horse along with your hat, for those words clearly say that the personal demonstration of a willingness to be changed by God precedes as a prerequisite any famous fear we wisely have of him. Herein dear reader is the basis of the sanctified holiness without which no human will “see” God in his primordial holiness. It's like he said to Israel at the start, "Behold, I set before you life or death (i.e.--You choose').
The above is the spiritually illegal and uninspired foundation for historical ecclesiastical pseudo-Christian power-mongering protocol…in case you didn’t know, or know quite what to think. And before I have to mention something worse, do know the KJV as a whole is a sanctified blessing and linguistic marvel compared to the very less artistic and less scholarly post-KJV translations, for example ‘holy angels’ instead of merely ‘angels’, or “the Lord Jesus” not merely ‘the Lord’.
I have a book on this by David W. Daniels entitled Look What's Missing; 'suggested. I remember on a day back in the nineties when I noticed this spiritual crime. I was using an RSV at the time, until it occurred to me one day after nine months, important words were missing in a notable passage. I did not know at the time that there was similar misgiving elsewhere by others.
I hope I'm catching your attention on this, for 'The siren song of a white collar crook is a kaching tune'.
For there are unholy angels and other lords as imposters. Take a look at Gail Riplinger’s work and that of others as brothers. (Note, a paradigm change may be happening with my bible study. I'm discovering the utility of a straight 'literal' translation of the Hebrew and the Greek original biblical languages. It's more direct.
The best recommendations I've heard are for two, Young's and Rotherham's; there're others. Although, Young's was inaccurate just now for Hebrews 13:17 but accurate for verse 7. I did try the JW's Kingdom Interlinear in the 1970's for a while. But the creepy translation on the vertical column on each page smelled rotten to my spirit. They don't think Jesus Christ is God come in the flesh.)
These examples are among hundreds and hundreds of post-KJV passage translations' slick maneuvers of rhetorical camouflage. Gail researched by comparatively collating many bible translations with her photographic mind (and pen and paper, laboriously and in bed for six years with a painful neurological condition).
Note, a literal bible is like swimming in a lake or river or the ocean. You won't have lines painted on the bottom of a pool to guide you for contextual focus, or misguide you. Julia E. Smith ca. 1876 wrote a useful interlinear bible, the first full translation by 'a woman', and usefully lacking macho private interpretations, especially in early Genesis, embarassingly said as a guilty male human.
Hmph, interestng word, 'I'm bare assed'. Are we humble enuff to consider what goes on in the mind of a trusting child when beaten by their source of refuge, even humiliated as we bare their bodies in addition to it? Or is it 'survival of the fittest'? Nay, 'it's survival of the friendliest'.
Gail also discovered biographical facts of the sloppy personal lives as spiritual fruit of numerous individuals involved in post-KJV translations as evident and on the record, starting abominably with the secret lives of Hort and Westcott. They hobby-practiced necromancy according to biographical evidence. This week I saw a photo of them dressing like the opposite gender at a get together, something long ago forbidden by God for people to do.
Gender reflects God's very own divine personality, and is to be respected. And remember, judgment is relative, so finger pointing is the stupidest thing we can do. Today, I read an ancient Greek story about ancient Ninevah in old Assyria. Jonah as an itinerant prophet that showed up there is substantiated secular historical fact. Burp...
To be fair, the KJV scholars were to the individual of impeccable personal and spiritual credentials. We simply and sadly have to observe that these enormous spiritual strongholds of violence and social control were too much for the KJV translators to deny continuation. The zillion-dollar question is, are we up to the task?
And the correct original word "woman" was deleted early in the morning of Genesis by King James and erroneously replaced with the irrelevant word 'wife', establishing right there “in (the) beginning” a humanly instituted policy of disrespect to women and girls. Genesis 2:24 should read the man Adam became one with his "woman", not wife, maintaining social and spiritual equality. Genesis 3:17, after the sinful fall, is about the first time we should see the relatively derogatory term "wife". Adam has listened to Eve instead of God, and begins to pay the circumstantial consequences.
I for one am changing my attitude and my words. I think I read that fact somewhere in the excellent medieval-to-modern history of Christian women, The Making Of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr; recommended. By the way, related to the above Genesis fact, did you know the Indian Sikh religion began with a determination to reverse the old Hindu humiliation of women and girls?
(ed.--And since my study of ancient Persia, last week, I think the exemplary Cyrian egalitarian perception of women and girls that old Persia is famous for got accepted later as a forward-thinking example of the formerly Hindu Sikhs.) "I candu all things thru Jesus Christ who strengthens me." Let's be spiritual Candu reactors, only by God as Jesus Christ.
And long before King James and his editors were publicly infatuated with their ecclesiastical bullybuttons, the recently dead apostles weren't smelling in their graves, if they made it that far, when Christian so-called ''Judaizers'' for want of a better word wrongly changed the original and correct apostolic ecclesiastical procedure of plural leadership, with Jesus as the singular high-priest leader in The Spirit to the, for want of worse words, resurrected Mosaic procedure of high-priest singular leadership in the flesh.
In summary, most of two millennia of Christian leadership simultaneously imitate Jews and murder them. 'Crazy? 'Probably not the word for it.
Part B
The above is my own experiential discovery the hard way that so much of Christian church body social dysfunction is directly due to Un-Christian singular leadership in the congregation. Jesus was the real ‘senior pastor’ or Mennonite 'bishop' for the first biblical assemblies in Jerusalem and Antioch, who had 'plural pillar' leadership.
Yes, I understand and agree, singular leadership or headship is divinely normal for institutions on Planet Earth as with job bosses, ship captains, and primary airplane pilots. It demonstrates lack of faith and respect to circumvent this social system. God is invisible, and devious people think that makes him proactively insignificant.
The ensuing problem is that social accountability and availability to one another is curtailed. I started to learn this hard lesson wondering why people in the church-group I'd joined wouldn't talk about issues. A horse won't drink either because it's not thirsty or it's reasonably stubborn.
Jesus wants to singularly lead everyone simultaneously to God's spiritual drink. And being God he has every right to do so. Are we doubting his ability to do so?
This post-apostolic resorting to singular leadership from the original plural leadership is exactly what Israel did in rejecting God as their real king and as their heavenly husband. God warned them what would happen under the leadership of a human king. They said, ’We don’t care, we want one anyway, to be like the nations around us’. Big trouble ensued, heavy taxes and unnecessary military deaths.
The depth and integrity of family relationships were also curtailed. I wonder if Christians who hit their children under false Scriptural pretext resemble young people who go to war in willful ignorance. The children of 'the quiet of the land' howl loudly for the uncalled-for miseries come upon them. Which becomes generational bias 'manana'.
Now back at the ranch and proceeding very seriously here, four years later in 2016, after my visit to CYS in 2012, I was digging on an archaeology website on YouTube. A video option on the vertical list to the right when on non-full-screen mode caught my eye, approximately: ‘Cellphone Data Of A Purported Satanist Recovered’.
YouTube, God bless them, only posting the audio…yes, for whatever reason…with a still shot of a bloody bathtub plus bath surround, the hoarse voice of a little girl cried for help to me. Are you making the connection to this that I made? King James’ blunder of a social-agenda inclusion in God’s copyrighted biblical text is part and maybe parcel of the faulty logical reasoning these nasty people use to justify their terrible actions.
If you know, “All things work together for the good for those who love God, for those called according to his purpose”. Should we picnic while tragedy occurs out of our view? I think if it’s done as part of our periodic and necessary resting and relaxing, yes. We need to maintain our strength (although 'We only know what we want; only God knows what we need'). And always our Godly focus should be on what is good and right and pure and lovely; 'Paul to the Philippians.
Part C
By the way, as a point of human interest, the school window accident that maimed me for life with a severed artery and also the median nerve happened at the very biological age that Solomon was mentioning for rebellious young men. And my school principal was not surprised, her alert secretary using my uniform tie as a tourniquet.
Indeed, of blueness of the wound, as I waited on a gurney for the neurosurgeon to arrive and re-assemble my forearm, it was interesting to peek around the mental safety shield and look at it. Inside was yellow fat and things that were red and also blue.
I woke up this morning joking that neurosurgeons train by painting paint-by-number paintings. I've got two that I did, one of a tiger and one of a leopard. Maybe they do. I joked to my eye doctor during a visit that hummingbirds should be trained for precision work. He looked at me askance and said, "That's the name of a new procedure."
By circumstantial chastisement God spoiled the rod and spared my young adult life. And this week as I write, I heard the news of the historical origin of the sentence with the words spare, child, spoil, and rod. It's part of a 17th-century English adult erotic poetry piece of literature. Yup ditto, hook line sinker and rod.
Death got real close by age 20, more than I was used to avoiding, saving myself from drowning in a deep diving-pool two years before the school window accident. I had been dumped off early at the pool so Mom could go drinking for the day. Pete went to find a friend who lived nearby. The lifeguard Gus, otherwise a pro, stopped and looked at me on the high-dive and then went into his office figuring I'd be alright. Because the week before, the 4th-of-July I had beaten the other eleven-year-olds, plus the twelve-year-olds in running, swimming, and diving.
Rules are there to save lives Gus...don't take your eyes off even one swimmer in the water. The Ultimate Ruler has rules he himself obeys. I've told our child his mom and dad obey themselves for every next project. Therein is love as Jesus says, "If you love me, then you'll obey me", this thing spiritually discerned. I noticed on YouTube the guards at Australia's Bondi beach are very busy. It's really too rough of a swimming beach for the novice foreign tourists, rough surf, a rip tide, and offshore current.
I wonder if Gus or Pete had been there to save me, they would have unknowingly further damaged my back beyond the crushed disc. I don't know how that works; I know I delicately favored it, both to stay sentient and so as to not aggravate the injury. I know my first thought facing the pool bottom water dust, ''Oh, so this is how little boys die."
I didn't swim much after that in Jakarta, all of us children and women evacuated soon after. I definitely didn't tell my parents what happened. I'd had enough of human hospitals by then. Two eye operations were scary, especially the second. Not only the ether was scary, but waking up from it also.
Mom was there for the first, but the second became an excuse for her to drunk out somewhere. I wandered around my fenced in bed for hours and hours looking for a non-existent pillow. The nurses didn't answer when I pushed the button on a cord. And a song rang in my head, the adult instrumental Never On A Sunday.
Before Mom died, she apologized, she having reminded herself to tell me one day, for abandoning me while I woke up from the ether.
How much time do we spend contemplating the phenomenon of childhood growth?
Surely Jesus is saying to us also what he often had to say to his macho and misogynistic disciples, “Leave them be !” of heavenly children or “Leave her alone!” of inspired women. Does this mean we're pre-pentecost, not born again yet? On the day we go to his house, will he say "I never knew you"? or tie a heavy weight to our neck?
God had it written, he’ll wipe away the tears forever and said in the meantime it is written that offenses should come and "woe" to the source of those offenses as with Iscariot, for it would be better if they were never born. Let’s not be afraid of the snake who can only "bruise" our "heel", rather be respectfully afraid of "the just one" who can cause eternal damage to both body and soul.
To quote God from his bible-book, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked”. God does take pleasure in our births. And no child was ever born a snob, nor an adult spiritually re-born a snob. “God is not mocked”, and to hell with so-called original sin. "Hell is enlarged" for people who think that their imagination is original.
And “God made man(kind) upright, but he has sought out many devices”, especially in this day and age, of which the messenger-angel Gabriel said to Daniel, “Men will go to and fro and knowledge will increase and then the end will come”. About God making me upright, I know I tend to slouch.
Oh, there was one more error I wanted to expose with you, the fallacy of baptism by immersion, you know complete dunking underwater. When Jesus' first-cousin John the Baptist was preparing Israel for his appearance and presence and ministry as God’s promised savior-messiah, he was purifying them by no new method. Immersion does not exist in Israelite history; it simply doesn’t exist there.
The little bushy herb hyssop was the Mosaic preferred applicator of splashed liquid. The liquid sprinkled by the priest upon whosoever of the Israelite people varied by the occasional requirement of pure water, pure water with the ashes of a pure heifer mixed in, straight blood sprinkled, etcetera. The priests did some serious washing of their bodies, but no full submersion was involved.
Immersion baptism is Greek, just like the fancy oratory of the Greeks that became the fancy preaching of the Christians. Teaching was only one part of the original Christian house meetings. And when John the Baptist shifted his location from the Jordan to the hillside springs of Aenon, it was because the river had annually swollen and muddied up from snow melt from the mountains of Hermon. Recall, pure water was needed.
Also, at Pentecost when 3000 men besides women and youngsters wanted to be baptized upon their repentance of transgression toward God, the military of Rome was still on alert plus rabid locals. So no way was a pool party to be allowed in the city’s water supply. Any assumption otherwise is ludicrous, if that’s the word to also describe the cold Canadian river where I was dunked, too early for decent swimming in the month of June.
And about Greek oratory that was morphed into Christian preaching, that combined later with mechanized music as a recipe for hypnotic disaster. Positively, the Catholic-Gregorian melody of the old Mennonite ‘Ausbund’ song I sing dispels it. The 'anabaptist' Swiss Brethren providentially discovered these melodies when they force-migrated to the Alsace-Lorraine region.
Of hypnotism, I find the Protestant 'silent organ'-accompaniment songs are many more times hypnotically sticky in my brain than any anapestic rock beat. It can take days compared to seconds for my favorite Gregorian chant melody to dispel that musical chaos. The Protestant songs--some are Catholic derivatives, and vice versa--have a veneer of radical beauty to them. But, their musical pace is generally frenetic and not at all peaceful, not anywhere as peaceful and pleasant as the Gregorian tune I sing. Those monks and nuns developed the tunes to keep their spiritual sanity, not vain vanity.
Many of the clunky and clanky songs of Christendom were written for organs. Human voice-boxes have to scramble to keep up with such. It is fact that it wasn't until the 1200's that organs and then trained choirs were let inside the Catholic buildings of worship. Protestant John Wesley was asked what he thinks about instruments in the meeting-houses. John humorously and poignantly answered, "I have nothing against instruments in the meeting-houses, as long as they are neither seen nor heard".
My give on the subject is the example Jesus gave at the last supper he shared with his friends. Finally they sang a holy hymn together, then went out into the dark of the night. That set the spiritual tone, so to speak for the Christian dispensation. Musical instruments only came into play biblically after the Israelites rejected God as their king. Note, the 'shofar' horn may be an instrument, but it's not a musical one.
Of instruments and the passion to play them, six years after God sliced my right forearm, I carried a cased banjo from west to east USA hitch hiking and bussing. And I couldn't play worth beans with the crippled arm. Better if I had hoisted a sack of beans on my shoulder. Sold the instrument to pay for a bus ticket to Quebec and salvation.
And you'll need a metal detector to find Miriam's tabrets on Aqaba's eastern shore. There is instrumental accompaniment on the Angels Singing YouTube audio recordings. They derive from a well attested miracle in Kansas, I think it was. Check it out yourself; delight in the French horn and the harp that sounds like a perfect delicately and tastefully played piano.
But, I don't need that. My Jesus Ausbund hymn is all I want. The cover photo on Cards Lie is me that first year of my Christian pilgrimage, on the farm, paralleling the Philippines baby picture on the back. Also on the back, that's Mom and me reconciled, pictured next to a boat named Prelude, of what's to come, in our mutual God's Heaven.
The Israelites only sang with their voices, before they clamored for a king. With which came worldly instruments. Historically and biblically, musical instruments were started seven generations after Cain with his descendant Jubal-Cain. Like God required altars of unhewn stones, he prefers unhewn voices, or instruments not made with hands.
The Cains were problematic people, if you remember. And of course, if you take away the instrumentation of many a song, the vocals will be less than lyrical. It is fact, instruments drowned out sacrificed babies' screams. We are east of Eden and should not go any farther. Shouldn't we simply sing to our babies, and eventually with them, to God?
Singing together with no one on stage is part of how God wants us to minister to one another. Stages divide, in fact they defile, God stipulating "no steps in the holy place, lest the priest expose his nakedness", when lifting his legs up steps. It's God who's in the details; it's the devil who's in obscurity and obfuscation.
And, whoever sang a love song to their lovey holding a songbook? God's bible is a love story, and a love song. And, David is not our perfect example; Jesus is. A compass is useful in a lifeboat. But, I'm going down with the ship with the men, all singing a fine song of faith to Jesus' Father and God. "C'mon Lakotas; it's a good day to die."
Let's not complicate 'the simplicity of the gospel'. And let's remember, the root of the word 'ideal' is idea. That would be God's idea, the only God who knows what's good for us. And there are no musicians in a foxhole, to say Christianity is spiritual warfare. I know about the fine violin made in a war camp out of a bed frame, so wooden what. And, my horse wants all his tail hairs, to fully blow out and navigate the wind at his back.
Part D
My dear reader and may God bless your patience and perseverance here today, let’s be aware of all our instinct to group-think blindly. While individualism and also tribalism are necessary counterbalancing factors in society anywhere on Earth, only the one who balances our metabolisms while simultaneously balancing the cosmos can give us the mental composure and perspective to re-balance any imbalance.
“Pray God for wisdom” is God’s biblical suggestion, he who knows those who are his, those who really and truly seek his face, theoretically for now, for he is spirit and we are yet partly flesh. For “he will in no wise cast us out”, anyone who seeks him in humility and honesty. And God biblically invites us, "Come, let us reason together."
Knowing the full story of God’s reaching out to lost mankind, plus the revelation of himself is the good news of the gospel as it’s called. 'Taking every thought captive to the mind of Christ" is more easily WWJD, 'What would Jesus do?' What does God do? And what would God have us do? 'Love him and love each other, 'easy as a smile, while we as Jesus set our faces "like flint".
God wanted to see love fructified in the Garden of Eden. He wanted the paired image of himself, Adam and Eve to be so awed by their surroundings that they would remain in a frame of mind where he could develop a relationship with them. God was their papa and privately also their mama, but they wouldn't have it.
Of Eden, a new idea I heard is that its four rivers came out of where is now Israel, even Jerusalem. That topographical adjustments were made during the flood by God with the Rift Valley and what not. That the Euphrates and Tigris as two of the four, from one, uniquely, came from there. And that, the final gusher from the Mount of Olives will re-establish the original Edenic river.
Continuing, he covered their now private publicity with skins, probably of a slain yearling male lamb. This anticipated Jesus Christ as "The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world", also the identical dates of Jesus' birth and death, Passover time. I also wonder, as you may be of the time frame of events there in Eden; 'at least a year?
Really, twice in Christian magazine articles--I wouldn't mention it if it was only once--the writers, and editors misspelled the word 'public' in the same funny way. I recall the first article I read had no spelling errors elsewhere in its text; 'subliminal advertising?
Of Christmas, Jim Bakker and his woman on their interview show listened to Jonathan Cahn explain that Jesus is the tabernacle of God. Which took nine months gestation so to speak to assemble. That, time for Israel began the day the so-called ribbon was cut. Which began the first year, March/April in Israelite recorded history.
That the Babylonian Talmud agrees with Chronicles and some Dead Sea scrolls for the course of the priests' timeline, especially the baptist's dad Zachariah, so as to time Jesus' birth. Oh, and that, lambing season in March/April is when shepherds sleep under the stars, to be there for the ewes. Christmas is the ancient pagan Saturnalia feast, when gifts are shared to resemble the sun coming back up the horizon.
One liner says 'The root of the word gimmick is 'gimme'.'
The Spirit of Truth that Jesus promised to send to his friends once he got home to Heaven would be himself as God in spirit form. Jesus plainly said it to his friends there at the last supper, “I will come to you”, this Spirit of Truth Jesus said who “will lead you to all truth”, to comfort and counsel.
Now a question I have here is, ‘When?’ and also, ‘How much truth?. Can we say, 'I'm lead all of the way'? As Don Barnett called it in the recorded sermons I listened to back in the seventies, before he and a bunch fell thru the ice, for they were all holding hands and that too tightly, he called it the, or let’s use the indefinite pronoun, an unfolding revelation of God.
What I’m getting at is and it’s like my oldest brother Greg asked me rhetorically in a letter once, ‘Who knows how high or how far an eagle can fly?’, it’s open-ended. And as I quipped in my booklet, We Spanked God, 'Sin makes an eagle foot-sore'.
Once again circumstance comes into play; indeed it’s the playground. And the question as I see it is, and how I figure God sees it is are we nice, humble children? Because we did it as children once, when a child among us, maybe us, tried unilateral power tripping, he or she either got rejected by the rest or yes, you know, took over.
My point is peace, the framework wherein children operate. You know, when an adult comes into view, the children basically put up with them until they’re gone. And then the children go back to their common and peaceful frame of mind, just doin’ and doin’, developing their projects, enjoying the sunshine, the sand in the box flowing through their fingers and toes, or sand on a beach, or just dirt, happy to be here in, where else, the Garden of Eden.
And we’re dealing with two kinds of parents, ideal ones which don’t exist where we are east of Eden, and again ideal ones who with God did exist in Eden for a while, and then they had their first child outside The Garden. Isn't it obvious what God's idea here is?
Notice or recall that the bible narrative of Genesis shows us how God found a special time each day to look in on his image-reflections Adam and Eve. What I figure he was doing was as alluded to in the introduction, slowly steadily respectfully being with them progressively or at least consistently.
I know that with my son, he and I would connoiter once a day, no matter the weather, for his first three years until his mother hooked him on an iPad, replacing his iDad, and go down to the creek. Invariably, it would be for hours, every day, especially as he aged, and we would investigate life form after life form, plus one week or so a remote-controlled submarine; 'yes, both of us.
Even before when Adam was alone, God surely kept his distance giving Adam personal space as Adam did stuff such as organizing God’s animals and his plants and fish which meant Adam did some swimming.
In other words, God doesn’t expect us to be know-it-alls all at once. Plus, it gives us a look at what God’s been up to for eternity-past as it’s necessarily called, not biblically anywhere but implied. So here where we are and find ourselves is like God in eternity with space for freedom.
This is why we should respect it in others, inquire yes and politely probe as a form of sharing not just our sincere convictions, but better our joy, newfound in God. This is the valuable essence of diversity. For example, in the booklet I queried, 'You who are gay, are you also carefree?' Understand, there's no stupid question, unless we ask it over and over.
An aside, lately I've been thinking that "the love of money" is a creationary replacement for how Jesus said he "makes all things new". Let's not settle for less. You know, the thrill of buying something is a secular replacement for receiving from God. We supplicate God as spiritual shopping and see " every good giving, and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of the lights, with whom is no variation nor shadow of turning".
You see, besides the fact there’s haves and have-nots in every active realm, the significant factor is absolute truth. Joy is not sadness and only the former is preferable. Herein is the social imperative of caring and sharing. Therefore, striking a child is no less morally delusional than sodomy. "Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good'.
A prerequisite of a pastor is to be "no striker". Pulpit semantics is like semen antics.
To remind of our subject, the unfolding revelation of God that Don Barnett often preached about, nebulously in my hindsight, but generally and basically, the idea is to be continually open to the very source of information that created us in the first place, and has re-created us in the second place, the latter in Christ Jesus, if applicable to you, this regardless of cultural religion. Heart is heart and therein thou art.
That takes off what Jesus said, "As a man thinks in his heart, so he is." And know it if applicable, you didn’t accept Jesus into your heart; Jesus accepted you into his heart. We call for help. Hopefully someone rescues us. And God absolutely will rescue us, if we don't kick too hard "against the goads". Otherwise, he'll just shoot us and butcher us, as I've done with a few cows that were simply impossible to milk.
Less strictly, I've heard a shepherd will crack the leg of a sheep that keeps straying.
And with the absolute of caring and the corresponding imperative of sharing and the fact that none of us ‘knows it all’, we shouldn’t do it ourselves and we should be wary when someone tries it on us. I'm saying here we're trying it on our children, as Nancy correctly criticized.
"The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked". To say, we should feel really really stupid for not noticing this before. Hermeneutics as a general theological skill involves analysis of context. It's something we're all expected to do in any literary endeavor. Well, I guess I can't blame anyone else for not noticing it. For I've read through Proverbs hundreds of times and never noticed it.
I mean the discrepancy between the general tenor of the context of the, what, first seven chapters of Proverbs with the illogical and contrary presence of the one-size-fits-all term 'child' when the specific focus of the book is advice to young men. The book has plural authors, so never mind here the many universal applications elsewhere in it.
Well, let's go on. The word 'woman' is ringing in my ears. The best friend of my high-school junior-year girlfriend, who was a woman, as you'll see here, and my girlfriend also was a woman, the two of them used to holler across the school campus to one another, "Woman!!!!!"
The reason they did what normally would not be done was a good and real reason. At the same party, they had been drugged and raped. Thus their mutual cry of lamentation bewailing their lost and stolen original virtue.
They both grew up in the Benguet mining community on Luzon Island, the P.I. Their dads helped manage, her dad getting me to 3100-ft. to check it out once. My extra story is, my woman-friend as a girl playing with the others too close to the tailing sewer at ground level slipped half into it, holding on for dear life.
The other children couldn't extricate her. Her same future woman-chum ran to the mine office and got her dad. He pulled her out. Just after I left, she almost drowned in a big river swimming with her fiance'. They have two grown girls who "love their dad!!"
Her older sister my age, red-haired and heroin-addicted, didn't make it a year here in the States, emigrating after high-school. Her other best-friend from home, now here, and she were horse-back riding. Who was drunk while riding and the horse reared; it stepped on her head, fatally.
I knew both of them well, enough to know their personalities were the kind that were deeply dissatisfied with the restrictions of this world. I also know that Divinity as Jesus loves his impetuous ones very dearly. Another is David Kennedy, best-chum of one of the family who hired me at their Montebello.
Part E
Caring and sharing is not for know-it-alls. I was just getting out of my car in our cul-de-sac, and an outside neighbor is in walking his dog, a female Jackie Russel terrier. And the neighbor boy who was still outside after playing rubber football catch with his dad, a trash truck driver is petting a dog who had never had kind words for me, careful as she is for her guardian.
Having thought up a funny thing to say, I waited for the nip-and-tuck engagement over there to return to respectively respectful. The boy stopped carefully petting her and I joked in feigned jealousy out loud, 'She let me kiss her," said with extra stress on kiss and a double inflection on her. He laughed and she barked.
I know and wonder if you know how typically classic this scenario is. Does God bark at me? Or, does he let me pet him? Or is that dog like a child who only agreed with another childlike person. We are not to show our pearls to pigs, Jesus advised.
It’s like abortion clinics for example. If some poor dear has a mind to use a coat-hanger in her social desperation, then give her a sanitary clinic. That the existence of the clinic becomes for some an end in itself, the original mandate is not deprioritized. Give the woman a clinic. It reminds me of what I've studied about suicide.
Seriously, research, Christian clinical research, European has observed two different categories of suicidal circumstance. One is where the individual has unwittingly painted themselves into a mental corner. The other is where the individual has knowingly painted themselves into a mental corner.
So what is a real Christian but someone who respects God in his incarnated Christ by being nice to people. The first Christians pooled their money together, which is not what today we would call empowering. Neither were they bound as mentally indentured servants, for they were simply head-over-heels in love with “the lover of their souls”. Who was also the miraculous provider of their flesh. Many were Jews in love with YHWH incarnated.
And they were “every man under his fig tree”, each of them feeling the sand flowing through only their own fingers. These people were content as she who is relieved to have the services of an abortion clinic. The difference is not dissimilar. Remember, we only know what we want; only God knows what we need.
How can God meet us where we are if we’re not where we’re at? And if someone forces us to be somewhere else, essentially they’re forcing us to be someone else. Yes, “Leave them be” and “Leave her alone” Jesus exclaimed. 'Everyone has a right to be wrong, and let no one make light of their song, to God’s "new song"". He’s the healer, not us.
And that fig tree we’re supposed to be content under or a coconut tree, 'our own coconut tree', if we’re not then we’re disobeying God. For he commanded us to be content under our fig tree. Otherwise, God would get itchy feet out there in eternity. And if we don’t do it, we mock him by accusing him of doing so, having itchy feet himself. In that scenario, evolution would be a better alternative.
A bully in a china shop, not just a bull, even a bully on a ship makes a small island. In other words, if we don’t ‘Occupy until I come’, Jesus will come and find us beating the menservants and the maidservants. With children, bullies use sticks and hands, able to get away with it. With adults, bullies use psycho sticks and pulpits, or unreal politics.
Yes, 'Gullibility is the predator’s perception of innocence'. And, “God is not slow as men count slowness”. And the owner of the vineyard is not away on a permanent trip. He's coming back to give credit where credit is due or not.
God’s "new song" starts with an invitation, not a threat. ‘Getting To Know You’ is the theme song of the play, also movie, The King And I, a process of unfolding discovery. 'No interruption is desired in the volcano of a heart in love'. 'Let’s keep it simple, sinners', or are you fully sanctified? Don’t diminish the circumference of the sandbox. Don’t tell the children their sandbox is small. Don’t limit God to holding the universe in his hand.
I know a family, a couple who constructed a thirty-by-ten-foot sandbox for their boys. When I first saw it, it was in an advanced stage. These guys had every square inch filled with a developed city with suburbs and complete road system, country folk.
Get out of God’s way, or he will get you out of his way. He had Solomon say, “Anger is cruel, and fury overwhelming, but who can stand against jealousy?” God describes, even names himself at one point in his inspired narrative as “Jealous”. I think we're morbidly jealous of children, and fail to shudder at the implications.
I was walking the perimeter of a large beaver pond when the wooded shoreline looped out into the water in what was a small peninsula. Once around the other side, I decided to walk back inside it and found the home standing area of a moose. The tracks, the width of the tracks were nearly as wide as my boots were long. "Our God is a consuming fire!"
And "God is not slow as men count slowness...". Especially to you who have heard this expression a hundred times, are you bored with it? As it continues, "...but he is wanting all men to come to repentance". What, one time only? If so, then God wants us to be arrogant, to be born-again snobs. No, God knows we must repeatedly seek his biblical face and the wisdom of his written lips.
Those aforementioned mistranslated social-agenda bible passages remind of entering the Earth’s atmosphere. You have to pierce the shell at just the correct angle or you’re a goner. We have to respect the bible that way too, because people’s innocent trustworthiness has big potential.
It’s like what the California pioneers were told on the way out by people who knew and had their best interests at heart. Real estate scammers were out there with dishonest alternative routes to The Golden State. “Walk as fast as you can and don’t take any shortcuts” was the good advice. Scammers would suggest other routes, but there was only one, the squeeze through the Humboldt Desert. Ha, make that the humble desert.
Do you know how the word minister is both a noun and also a verb? Biblically, it’s only a verb. A local church here has a motto, ‘Where everyone is a minister"…yeah, except one of them is ordained. I guess that means the others are ordinary ones.
We’ve heard the carnival side-show quotation, ‘There's a sucker born every minute’. Historically, the source of that has not been pinpointed, although it’s veritable. Further, I venture to say, and you may quote me on this, ‘There’s a sucker born-again every minute’.
You know, there was a century when going to the circus was not done on Sunday. This century, going to the circus is often done on Sunday. So who is the person countering God’s injunction, “Thou shall not touch mine annointed!”? Is it the critic like me who castigates the ecclesiastical huckster?
Or is it the pulpit huckster who swindles someone’s guilty conscience? My ten-year-old, when I told him two minutes of what I knew of pulpit sordid gain said, “Pastors shouldn’t be imposters!” "Out of the mouths of babes" God said, inspiring someone to write it in his Holy Bible.
It's not just the sinister minister, for surely history is repeating itself. Wherein we hear the echo of God’s voice, “...and my people love to have it so”. Checking to see my newly published booklet listed on the online market, scrolling beyond it soon found a continuing list of erotic websites for intentional adult spanking. Get a life in Christ guys ‘n gals, for time’s a wastin’! Do you really want adult spanking on your biographical list of achievements?
Do you really want child spanking on your achievement-list for your interview with the man who said 'Anyone who harms a child will be chucked in an eternal ocean'? There is universal appreciation for Jesus’ analogy of the sparrow. There are hypocrites who think it only applies to themself. They exchange the glory and honor of future heavenly recognition for social fanfare on Earth.
All for the soulical thrill of lording it over weaker people, and their inevitable condemnation is compounded by the domino effect of cowardly decisions today. By “loving and believing a lie” they effectively stick their foot out and trip the busy passerby. Who falls into someone else and there go the dominoes 'ad infinitum'. And saying weaker people is often synonymous with meeker people.
On spanking or sticking, I’ve had numerous people tell me they 'turned out alright so it must be true', not a good line of reasoning for calculating a re-entry of Earth’s atmosphere. When we “Be still and know that (he) is God”, do we then turn and deny the potential divinity of one another?
'They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ was a movie title where if it was for a book you could read it by its cover. ‘They hit children, don’t they and worse?’; there’s a title for your book. My Canadian neighbor said he used to butcher 70 horses a year to feed his minks. And he shuddered when telling me so.
Did he smile a theoretical smile as he butchered those screaming horses? Look, you with eyes to see and ears to reverently fear, Nancy was spot on. Jesus was butchered not so we wouldn’t get chastised circumstantially, but so God wouldn't reject us no matter what.
Some people are hell-bent for disaster; other people are heaven-bent for disaster. They’ll get to heaven’s front door and the owner will say he doesn’t recognize us as being on the party guest list.
I watched a YouTube video about a famous movie actor who was refused entry to a post-Academy Awards party. This guy would be accepted at most party front-doors and without invitation. I guess that’s what he was trying to do, but he was refused by direct message from the host of the party. He took the rejection well, but his friends were fuming, really flabbergasted. But they had to move on to Nowheresville and they were just so sure they'd be let in.
Of course the golden rule is the real rod of correction. Because we’ll have to use it on ourselves first. Spanking children into traumatized submission is a human tradition that makes God's word of love of no effect. Commanding obedience of adults instead of encouraging persuasion among everyone is like changing a road sign to point toward a cliff.
I did hear a Catholic priest say about Protestant pastors telling wives to obey them instead of their Godly husbands, "Wow, we never did that". The Holy Spirit can not counsel and comfort someone who will not leave his tradition-bound comfort-zone. This is part of what Jesus meant about "leaving all". From what I have been learning from Pam Sheppard Ministries, recommended, the baggage we bring to our born-again experience is demonic. And then we buy souvenirs.
And through it all, God’s perennial invitation stands unresponded to of “Come, let us reason together”. ‘No? I’ve been working a USPS mailing list of over three-hundred, telling people of the little girl I heard being mutilated. I can count on one crippled hand the responses, and only two were positive.
Most were written to people who know that God’s biblical word is “useful for correction, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness”. All know the new testament is mostly letters written and answered. So is it not logical to say people are preferring hypocrisy to honesty by not replying to discuss? Criticism without proof is false accusation, also coming around as grape-vine gossip.
In a long-ago letter exchange with my former ‘bishop’, the Amish-Mennonite equivalent of a ‘senior pastor’, and he was always on my later big mailing list, when I made the observation that sticking and spanking was the new fire of Molech, he wrote “No, Molech, no, you’re going too far to say that”. To answer again, I use my childhood’s most challenging articulation of convicted insistence, “You wanna’ make a thousand-dollar bet?” Thinking of that desperate child’s hoarse cries for help, I feel ashamed for even wasting the time to digress into making the comparison.
Part F
Well I jotted some notes periodically today while altering a shirt for myself. I like sewing; 'been fixing my clothes since a teenager, although I can't feel the needle. 'You know, 'can't expect my mama to follow me around. Did you know, in the first world war Mennonites and Quakers, maybe Jehovah's Witnesses who didn't want to shoot people and went to alternative war-work camps had to know how to fix their clothes?
Otherwise they were denied entry and then what; I don't know, maybe use their trigger fingers. And 'seems to me, a Christian clothed with the righteousness of Christ should know how to mend that divine clothing. And any needed alterations of this alternative work of sanctified separation from the world should not cause understandable derisive laughter. This parallels how God says he does so in Psalm number two.
'The simplicity of the gospel' is a useful new testament paraphrase, unless it's a quote; excuse me. It is perfectly exemplified in what Jesus said about children. That unless we become like one of his little ones, then we in no way will be allowed entry into the kingdom or royal land of heaven.
The social atmosphere of that place will have no confused and complicated fear existing there and doesn't as we speak, only "perfect love which casts out all fear". Earth is our school of life and thinking of schools historically as pertains to 'ouchy' discipline by understandably frustrated teachers, let's talk about that.
What I know is that paddling disruptive children has not been and is not necessary. Don't take my word for it; take that of Jesus' cousins, The Jewish People. Some modern ones do 'hit' children, but most Jews, knowing the Word of God, never have; those in-between this utilize shoe laces on the hands and forearms. But thev've been influenced by 'the world' and speak it unfairly fluently. And the preceding mostly applies to school.
In fact about young men and discipline, Jewry had a serious pow-wow as a community in about the year 300. What had happened was, a youth who had been told 'Just wait 'till your father comes home' took his own life. Samuel Martin told this story in his book ‘Thy Rod And Thy Staff, They Comfort Me: Christians And The Spanking Controversy. That’s Samuel’s generously free ebook at his biblechild.com. Sam’s written a sequel since then concentrating on the book of Hebrews, including chapter twelve.
I pause here--how about you--the Jewish community humbled themself with the determined conviction to discover peace. God's description of some folk, "The way of peace they have not known." can not be applied here. These people changed their way, changed their thinking.
They do know the prophet Isaiah described the some-day-to-be-born-in-Israel baby messiah or The Christ Child as divinely the begotten of God Almighty, besides being called Immanuel meaning God-incarnate (in a human) was also called The Prince Of Peace.
This reminds of a cool story I experienced and mention in my booklet of one-liners. What happened was, I was getting off work in a group home at midnight. My relief was a person whom I had never seen before on the job. She said her husband was working at the military medical facility nearby. I didn't get her name, as I like to do with anyone, for she was busy talking with me at the very top of her lungs.
She was older than me from China, inevitably a student of Mao Tse Tung and Madame Tung, and the gal's tongue was articulating vitriole she obviously had been indoctrinated with. However one stronger influence than Red Guard righteousness was expressed by this furious anti-USA Tung-talker. Of a sudden the woman quieted to a normal tone of voice and said "But that little boy; that's nice". Then it was off again to the imperial races and her angry diatribe against anything about the United States.
Part G
It wasn't until I was brushing snow off my car that I focused on what my new friend had said. Little Miss Tung was talking about the baby boy Jesus Christ, the hope of eternal happiness for all mankind.
You know other religions have wishful stories about a divine incarnation. They remain wishes or holdovers from what God told Eve about her distant future "seed".
Here I recall seeing some of the Hindu Ramayana and its dancing participants drinking the blood of baby chicks. As I had the dubious privilege to observe as a child visiting Indonesia in 1965-66 with my family, Dad working there at the American Embassy, Mom swinging from the chandeliers.
She told us once in all seriousness, at a party were a few Russian men sitting quietly off to the side. Mom told us she engaged them in an interesting conversation. What else are diplomats' wives for? You can only swing on so many chandeliers.
It reminds of what Jesus said as spiritual analogy about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Many of his followers stopped following him when he said that. But he was the real manna in the desert and real grape juice, besides just feeding thousands miraculously that day. Jesus was trying to get these people to think spiritually, and us.
Personally by age 17 I was well studied as respectful observation of religions other than the Catholic Christianity I'd been raised in. One rainy winter day my older brother Peter was culling his book collection. I had stood in his room doorway to see what I had heard him doing. In the middle of a spread of books on his bed was a bible he had found somewhere. Pete saw me looking at it and said, "'You want it?" I nodded and Peter grasped it and handed it to me.
Do you know people die for such an opportunity? If you don't know why then I'll tell you. The words ring true in the deepest part of my person. Hell's bells is settling for less, although I kept ringing them until age twenty. But I had been praying before bed, at least a few years before, before age fifteen and marijuana et al. Those earlier prayer years were a change from before we went to Indonesia. Then I prayed to Jesus' mom, whom I had been taught would answer prayer.
I had reason to pray, living a life at death's door since birth, with no displayed concern or interest by my parents. But they had their own problems. What I did do usefully after we returned from Indonesia was reason in my mind that I ought to address myself to God himself. I had been taught it was possible, so why not go straight to the top?
I knew it was an option for all humans, so let's go! I'd also learned that God would at least hear my prayer, although Catholic confusion muddled my thinking with unscriptural ideas of heavenly influence by Jesus' mom. See Jeremiah's chapters 7 and 44 for Israel's preference of a "queen of heaven". Jerusalem did it before Rome and Constantinople.
Despite the bewildering sadness of my teenage years, I knew that God as my creator, even the creator of my heart would hear its cry. The drugs did not help me do what I now know is the essence and proof of a real walk with God. I've alluded to it talking about coconut trees and fig bushes.
God says it perfectly in his bible-book with the pragmatic challenge to each of us saying, "Do not despise the day of small things". My book borrowed someone's "Happiness is not doing what you like to do; it's liking what you have to do". Without Jesus, that line is limp.
What God means by that line of his is, the drudgery of life under the Edenic curse is the very source of our solution. God means we need to be happy in a sad place and, focusing on him is the only process to be successful at it. The bible narrative completely provides the full-spectrum of what on God's Earth is going on.
And this very importantly includes the information dually of who God is and who I am. Life is very much 'a many-splendored thing' and calls for a commensurate explanation. With God, I rather feel as I do plugged into the electric grid. Except the latter is a weak analogy.
Any complaints must be referred to Samuel Langhorne Clemons, the author Mark Twain. Who humbly admitted "It's not what I don't understand about the bible that bothers me but what I do understand". To say, challenges exist and successful people surmount them.
Those same successful people, those who find the "pearl of great price" pay the great price of paying insurance companies and armed guards to protect their treasure spiritually. And it costs nothing! Jesus cries, "Allyee, Allyee in come freee!" And mankind is playing hide 'n seek in the Garden of Eden all over again. We are to be 'childlike, not childish'.
And insurmountable challenges such as death and taxes require more than we got. So knowing that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most proven event in history, we're not to 'get him on our side'; we're to get on his side.
And I mean it about taxes if you know the story, that day the apostles whimpered about April 15th coming up. Jesus told the soon-famous fisherman to put a line in the lake etcetera. In other words, Jesus' official howbeit indirect counsel about it is to hang up a sign on your door that says 'Gone fishin'. That's my kinda' God!
For as Ralph Waldo Emerson perceived the impossibility of the situation "The sun illuminates only the eye of man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child". And Jesus, God incarnate said we must be born a second time of the spirit to be little children all over again.
A neat thing happened prophetically and coincidentally for me in English class in junior year of high-school at the Baguio City campus of Brent Schools in The Philippines. Where teacher Ken Guerra docked 5-points off a homework essay if you used the word 'thing'. Ken's guide-line for a homework essay was William Wordsworth's "splendor in the grass, glory in the flower".
I wrote a long meandering story of a day trip with my girl friend. I don't recall any details except sitting in the back of a bus happily talking with a wise old man we had befriended in the far bus station who was heading back our way, a fictional story.
Three years later headed to Quebec from Thailand, a tall and elderly man in the San Jose CA bus station was with two Korean women who spoke little English. They had been using a Greyhound Ameripass as I was, travelling where they wanted one place after another.
They had crossed paths a week or two before and he was their impromptu tour guide. But I saw them confer together apart from me and he turned to me then. He said "Look these wonderful women have probably had enough of me. How about if you and I travel together?"
I said "Sure, you're on!" and the women hugged and kissed him good-bye. Now this man was elderly, and I asked him why he was traveling. He said he wants to take advantage of the Greyhound Ameripass open ticket before he gets too old to do so.
And I asked the man his name and he said "Ralph". 'Last name? "Emerson". 'Middle name? "Waldo". Ralph was a direct descendant of the famous North American philosopher, my teenage hero as that of many other people.
My former Brent School woman-friend was on her way to England to visit her grandparents for the first time. I asked her to remain at her uncle's house in L.A. until I got there for what was to be a final visit for us. She scheduled herself that way and Mr. Emerson (Ralph) and I bussed to Los Angeles and got a downtown hotel room. The next day the three of us took a very long city bus ride around town. Mainly we found my objective of an organic-food restaurant with foot-long avocados.
We three went our separate ways the next day, but do you see how very encouraging that was for me to have a real-life fulfillment of an essay daydream? Another neat thing that I think God did was one Saturday in Baguio when we took in the mountain view over at the U.S. Military R&R base.
Just inside the usually-open gate of the ambassador's cottage is where we sat. She went down the slope to pick grass for a local's horse tethered nearby. A pine-tree about fifteen-feet tall was almost impeding my view of fifty miles of mountains. Then an invisible ten-foot man grabbed the neck of the pine and shook it for all it's worth.
Eight times it shook it, paused and then another series of eight. While I hollered at her, I politely beseeched God or whomever he had working for him to do it again so she could see it. She sat next to me and said, "What Mike?" I said, "That pine tree right there, don't take your eyes off it". And it or God or both did it again, another series of eight mighty shakes. "What was that?" she looked at me and asked. Surely it was God spiritually telling me to stop fornicating with her.
Part H
The above is normal for a Christian, or a pre-Christian, somewhat rare but normal. God refrains from showing us signs and wonders because he knows we spoil easily from "Christ and him crucified". We have to focus on Christ's cross as we carry our own.
Soon after my mom was born again and stopped boozing, she had a nightmare wherein someone was strangling her to death. She cried out to Jesus over and over again right there in the bad dream and woke up with the sheet around her neck really tight.
The next day was Thanksgiving, me in Canada and Mom had gone into the kitchen from the dining room with Greg to get dessert. Chris was still at the table in the dining room and overheard Mom tell Greg about the nightmare. That dream included a big jolt just before she woke up that Mom couldn't account for.
So Chris went upstairs to Mom's room to look around. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until he thought to look up. There on the ceiling above the bed was a set of sweat-darkened finger prints.
Chris then knelt down and looked under the bed and verified the truth of it. The metal frame of the big bed was bent way out of shape. Mom verified that it was not that way before, you know from cleaning under there.
Yes, God chastises those he loves including allowing the devil to get his licks in, as with Job. Mom had in her hand the crucifix the old monk at the monastery school we went to in Rhode Island bequeathed to her. Mom said that was the hand up against what in the nightmare she thought was a wall.
"The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy" the angel told John in The Revelation toward the end of the bible. It indicates the supernatural and not in a way we manipulate the administration of. David prayed The Lord would "keep me from presumptuous sins".
In describing the baptist his cousin John who prepared his way, Jesus sarcastically asked, "What were you expecting to see, a reed shaken in the wind?" Isaiah, writer of maybe the most eloquent words in literature besides Jesus, when allowed a visit to heaven declared he's "a man of unclean lips", including the people he said he's affiliated with, Israel.
At this point in our visit together, I want to defer again to Pam Sheppard Ministries. I mean mainly about the supernatural because Pam is very expert in the subject. Pam's YouTube videos are perfectly prepared and presented, less the annoying background music she has now. (I should ask them to go back to the old plain talking.) And her books are experientially brilliant and useful, especially Pam's most recent copyrighted work that I know of.
The book's title is Church Of The End-Time Zombies. Just looking on Amazon now, it is evident that Pam has not let up since 'Zombies' in 2015. Pam's work appeals to honesty of ourselves, of the spiritual verities our cream-puff comfort zones don't quite like. Pam is more aged than me, a little younger in the Lord, and is a most experienced Christian counselor. Pam has assembled an association of like-minded younger counselors who reflect her brilliance and love.
My experience would like to generalize with the cartoon character and leave it at that. Who says "Never underestimate the power of a shnook". But I have in my mind's eye a video I saw on YouTube.
A closed circuit camera in a child's nursery shows the little one standing in his crib in the dark alone and holding on to the railing. A gossamer-whatever of light is visible moving around the room slowly. The child is watching it as it moves around. It ain't no night light either. Things have to be very evil to get by a child's powerful guardian angel.
This reminds me semi-humorously of what nutritionist Don Lawson once said in a recorded Neo-Life meeting I once heard. Don was talking about the marvels of the human body but lamented ''The wisdom, the great wisdom inside of us is dependent on the dummy on the outside''.
I'm thinking here of the beauty at our fingertips of children. They are the real mirrors of ourselves imitating every move we make and thought we think. So who really is that person in our mirror? Would we like to meet ourselves? Would Jesus?
What would make a bully boy stomp on a box turtle on our playground? I read in Maryland Magazine conversely to that of a family reunion. Maryland folk over in the ancestral area of West Virginia were at their favorite annual picnic place. One of the grandchildren found a box turtle and showed it to his grandpap.
''Very nice sweetie, now put it back in the woods''. The child dutifully heads to the woods, but Grandpap calls him to bring it back for a second look. Something deep inside the man called for a second look at a tortoise on whose hard belly he had penknife-scratched his initials at the same age as his grandchild.
'The same box turtle, who keep a close lifetime range of territory. But would the man do violence to the turtle and suggest the same to his grandson? Is such frequent hypocrisy what develops bullies of increasing generational violence?
Just as starfish salvation is important to this particular starfish washed up on a beach, so God wants us to concentrate on Jesus from birth to death. It is truly said we can be born once and die twice, or be born twice and die once. This is a spiritual fact.
The converse is disaster ignoring real trouble while fabricating vainglorious actions of rescue for imaginary victims. Facetiousness is the facility of the phony, the same said differently.
My dad did well for us living at the bottom of a road that went down and up again. Fast drivers took no mind to child oblivion at play. So Dad would get in the fast driver's ear as they sped by and yell "Slow down!".
Dad also took his belt to Pete and me a few times. After a few bare-butt slaps Pete and I would look at each other and start giggling. Dad invariably would say 'You want more eh, 'you want more?'
A more better event occurred between me and Dad alone. I was in the bad habit of going outside via my ground-level window. I'd leave it open and bugs would get in, especially at night time and a light left on while elsewhere in the house. So then one Saturday morning, Dad caught me doing it. Dad said to not do it any more. I did it again late in the afternoon.
Dad ever-present like God walked up to me. Dad said, ''Michael, what am I going to do with you? What are you going to do with yourself?'' This was new territory, so I looked for a new solution.
Remembering I had recently received my Catholic-Christian First Communion and corresponding First Confession I asked Dad what time it is. I had a mind to take advantage of the Saturday confession time up three suburban blocks at the church building ending at 5 o'clock. I told Dad my idea. Dad approved, telling me it was five of five.
I high-tailed it on a bee-line and made it just in time, without looking for cars back on our street as usual. The friendliest parish priest William Kane was just stepping out of his part of the confessional. The place was pretty dark except for the high windows along the walls. Willy Kane looked at me maturely without saying anything, then nodded an invitation into our respective boxes. William's light blue eyes were an interesting contrast to the dark and slightly unnerving.
Way later with us by Mom's death bed with Mom looking around with her last energy to see if things were ship-shape, Will Kane said something like ''Debbie, it's all done; you've done everything you've supposed to've. You may go now''. And sure enough Mom did.
Check out a book, an old one, Solomon Shaw the author at Amazon, 236 Testimonies of (both) The Saved and The Unsaved Upon Their Death Beds. The children's are beautiful, the committed jerks' horrendous.
Part I
I don't know about you, but I've heard enough of me here. I do definitely want to thank Ken Evoy and his SoloBuildIt web-hosting company for this place for me to techno-slow a further explanation of WE SPANKED GOD.
Did I tell you my booklet in e-format was not on the web a single day before someone wrote and complained about my title? It took me some two days to reason through what really is a simple explanation. If I've already said it above, it still bears repeating.
To wit, we didn't just spank God, we bloody crucified him. Thousands of locals were crucified by the Romans, but this guy sweated blood. Not just nervously, but something else was going on. The Roman commander there at the scene was moved to say--.
Well, being eyewitness observations speculation is the legitimate word for it. The problem with discounting it is so much plausibility of witness. Indeed it's said the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most proven event in history.
Sinceriously, while Buddha smiles his little smile, Jesus sets his face like flint. While the Japanese Art of War, I think it was, shows the sword professor disarming fully eighteen graduate students at one time, Jesus holds his sword in his mouth probably while holding children's hands.
There is no topping this dude's witness. Our problem is shirking the responsibility given to us for sharing our given energies. I mean, is our accomplishment ledger going to show in the black or the red? I mean of good works or bad, of random kindness.
Really, if our ledger shows more take than give, meaning our influence upon others for bettering them individually and society as a whole, then we're in for it. Because evolution is wishful thinking while creativity is conscious deliberation, we who are alive must pass on that life.
I think of what Jesus said. Jesus more than once by-passed Moses to get our thinking back to the beginning and purity of mind and will. Being God, he has a right to do that you know. But watch it, because there's actually less leeway there than here.
Because with Moses, we can hem and haw you know, haggle, barter, but with Eden, the conditions are absolutely absolute. In fact, Eden is so dangerous a place to go given the finality of a decision there, I see the best choice as Calvary.
Look at Jeffrey Dalmer, up Goose Creek and on schedule. Last time I heard, he was grooving on dinosaurs and creation facts to the glory of God. And by the way, read his dad Lionel Dalmer's autobiography. Ho-Ho, there's a thickened plot of ‘Who dunnit?!’
English friends in Quebec had a farm-family expression, ''I'm going to bed''. It meant someone was headed out to the barn or the field, again since again. And, that family of three won the provincial gold medal for milk quality. Two years later, they won the bronze medal.
A Quebecois friend's mom had always spoken French when I visited, and late into one visit, she woke me up at her kitchen table with the English, "Show me the way to go home; I'm tired and I want to go to bed".
It's a sin to be stupid, proven as anything by the fruit of our action. It is forgivable to dishonor Jesus Christ, directly or indirectly however that is. What is not forgivable is dishonoring or disrespecting the Holy Spirit. Besides the fact we're all different, amazing in itself, God says we'll go with the nasty devils if we know to do something virtuous but neglect to do it. So much for individuality.
I've kindly suggested to people, people who disregard God in their lives to give it a fair chance, to simply step back from the hubbub of their possibly mis-programmed minds and watch.
Roy Masters used to suggest this on late-night radio. Step back, no longer part of the movie or play or now video you were very much a part of. The separate place you'll find yourself in will be holy. Eric taught the same. Roy's son, Mark I think it is continues in his dad's helpful work, I once noticed on YouTube.
That's the definition of holy, separated; 'from what but the world of man. "No flesh shall glory in my presence" God had biblically written. Like someone you see having fun, your interruptive suggestion of an alternative with its accompanying variables of quality and worth slimly weigh against the utility of accepting it.
So you're probably going to get rejected. Thus I finished my booklet with an analogous mention of the fifties song, 'It's My Party'. It is not our 'gig' to determine or even describe outside of our given parameters. As one of my grandmas used to say, ''Mind your own business''.
My favorite story and I may have said it here already (four hours of writing vaporized today when I pushed a wrong button with my hurt hand and it may have been in there. I'll go back and check, not used to writing so big).
But the neatest bible story I know, maybe you too is the unnecessary challenge Philip put to Jesus. He told Jesus to show them the father, you know the God of Israel, creator of the cosmos, friend of Abraham and Sarah, despite both of them laughing at God's promise of a baby.
Jesus must have humanly shook his head or chuckled or both with this winner-takes-all challenge. "Philip, have you spent this much time with me and still you don't know me? He who knows me, knows the father ( seen me, seen him)". To me, this pulls all the bible together.
It's long howbeit profoundly exciting reading, the old covenant slowly getting to know God Almighty through his involvement with people, especially his friends like Sarai and Abram, and Moses, and Deborah, etc. aside from everyone's idiotsyncrasies.
Somewhere God says biblically his top priority is "Godly children". When we do anything to negatively influence a child, including poor example as hypocrisy, we are affecting eternity of heart. This isn't melted ice cream, to say I stole money from my dad's cook, Chung, in Kuala Lumpur.
I was four years and innocent, taking the money from the shallow wicker tray on the table by his bedside. I treated Pete and also Sing Wa and Kum Li, Chung's children to all the ice cream they wanted from the bicycle-vendor.
Chung tore into Sing Wa and Kum Li, no older than me and Pete, hard. He must have thought his job was in jeopardy. Plus he didn't seem to know how to stop. The Judeo-Christian awareness of Jesus as Prince of Peace would have helped you know, to draw the line sooner than seemingly never. Anyhow soon after this the boy, I forget who was who, got his foot caught in the spokes on the way back from market. It sounded very serious, possibly maimed for life like my arm.
Make of this story what you want dear reader, choosing life in whatever situation. The simple and really glaring obviousness of a manipulative addition to Proverbs by King James and whoever-else by putting the incongruous word 'child' next to the evidently specific word 'youth' (male) in Young's Interlinear is close to being inexcusable.
You know, three times spaced out equally in his bible-book God says to not tamper with it, no addition, no subtraction, a copyrighted text. Do we want to try that with Albert Einstein on his blackboard? But rest assured, all our human imperfection God includes in his biblical choreography. 'Problem is, he said he'll put the plagues on us if we do so.
Note, one especially obvious anomaly between the words child and male youth in Proverbs is the scene in the marketplace. The youth is warned to watch out for women who make money with unwedded intimacy. That's for sale in the market along with the watermelons. My point is, the word child is placed contextually in here nearby that.
Part J
'Morning after Christmas. I'm slightly miffed how it's actually just after the noon hour and I can't locate three hours of typed storytelling on this page. I thought I was saving it but 'guess not.
Clean up spilled milk, slurping it if it's on a table. Starving people would for sure. I've never been hungry, although I can be strict with myself. The Pulitzer Prize of 1939 was awarded for 'The Yearling' to U.S. author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a story of starvation and learned obedience to wise parents. 'Recommended.
I've re-read the above from yesterday and I like how it reads, although including today this text is missing seven hours of storytelling effort. But 'we live and we learn, only if we want to'.
Waking up this morning, I made an analogy of nightdreams. They're frustrating in the way of unattainable objectives. The way they're out of reach reminds of the futility of physically nay corporally trying to influence the spirit of a spirit entity. Our children are two minutes out of heaven and their residual profundity is inaccessible.
It's like the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus trying to influence the converted, the changed Hebrew Christians. It also reminds of Eve trying to succeed in a conversation with Lucifer descended. Language and logic combine here to say "Give up !" as we vainly kick against goads, vanity meaning frustration in Greek.
Hey as I stand here and wonder what next to type, having to again go through my first-thing-in-the-morning notes I wrote to myself, I noticed a Foxfire book last week in a used book store. My favorite story, besides the old sage in Carolina who refuses to believe mankind has walked on the moon if I do, is the man in the woods hunting.
He's laid his one-shot rifle up against a tree to relieve himself, # 2 and while squatting there a bear walking too assertively comes over a rise, thankfully in view because they're silent while they walk or stalk. And I just remembered the little child I heard on the recovered cell phone data. Continuing, squatting probably helped him stay low and make an even shot; where in the bear's body I don't know.
All of which reminds me of the one-liner behind the booklet's title, 'Eat the fat. Chew the gristle. 'Bear in the bushes. 'Better whistle. We spanked God'. The bear in my liner is not a summer bear with lots of time to eat. It is a winterizing bear, one which will eat you down to the bone. If it's a mama with teenager-appetite yearling cubs, we're talking bone marrow, me ignorantly, probably any bear.
I saw a picture combination comparing a Clovis-point spear head with a surgeon's scalpel. Under a microscope, the edge of the scalpel has a ragged edge. Under the microscope, the Clovis' edge looks like a brand new scalpel. Then we know the rock they used was tops, like maybe from Catoctin Ridge in Frederick County, Maryland. This hardness can at least glance off the rib bone of a mastodon and keep its integrity. Cave men and women were people who for social reasons found it necessary to live in caves.
Check out two YouTube films, one old and the other older, both black-and-white. 'Eskimo Hunter' shows the skills of a father accompanied by his son and daughter as spectating learners. The home life of the family is beautiful, with Mom also, also the protecting and loving demeanor of the boy to his younger sister. Also the community gathering scene is cool and swell also, especially as the--well I won't spoil it for you.
'Nanook of The North' (North Quebec) (Eskimo Hunter was the west coast of Alaska) was filmed in 1922, about when Preston Bush was playing first base for Yale. It is packed with more Eskimo amazingness, and the love shown by all. A footnote on the screen at the end says--it's easy to miss--Nanook the next year did not return from a solo deer-hunting expedition.
'Caribou/Reindeer, their migration patterns vary. See author Farley Mowat's, 'People Of The Deer'. 'Also his two books on ocean-going salvage tugs, and his two books on dogs (one of wild dogs that were tame, the other of a domestic dog that was wild).
In Indonesia my parents invited Peter Gemerkin over to sup with them. Afterwards, Mr. Gemerkin(sp?) came in to tell us children some stories. The tiger stories were like Jim Corbett's of India/Nepal. Both involved environmentally displaced tigers who had found how easy we are. Mr. Gemerkin said he stopped a predatory crocodile 31-feet long, the exact length of the room I'm standing in. Mr. Gemerkin grew up making his own firearms. Mr. Gemerkin and his parents had to walk west out of their home in China when the Japanese invaded.
I thought of a 'punny' word, cult-de-sac. 'Not funny for the stuck victims.
I tried hunting once, tired of the guys from church helping me out. The property in Virginia where childhood friends from The Philippines had hired me as caretaker was big. I used the old house-shotgun, knowing I'd have to get really close with it. So I moved about an inch-an-hour, a little more.
In five-and-a-half hours I hadn't seen a thing until a young buck far ahead hopped the fence by the Norfolk-Southern tracks. That did it for me and I decided to try an improvised buck call, like I had heard one of the guys play from out of his pocket in the cottage while the other fellow talked with home on my landline phone.
I sounded like I was losing my lunch that I hadn't had. 'A long time over and over. But I didn't see anything which was impossible around there. Eventually, I did think I heard something, and I pricked my hound-dog ears forward. I did hear something. I was sure of it.
But but it wasn't in front of me. It was to the rear, the slight sound I heard. I continued to sound like vomiting for to keep my brilliant cover. This might work. I decided to turn somewhere besides the direction I was stupidly fixated with.
A beautiful doe's nose was an inch from one of my boot heels smelling it. A yearling fawn was on her tail wanting to also by the look on its face. A buck with half a tree on his head was cowardly back a bit.
Shooting would have been unethical. The buck treeing me in the butt would have been ethical. And I can just hear the girls giggling.
Three weeks before I moved to Pennsylvania, smelling the morning air behind the caretaker's cottage, a mountain lion screamed out in the woods. It was closer than that a short while earlier as I discovered. But that's a story for another time.
I have been thinking here of the U.S. archery team Olympic gold medalist, a few years ago videoed on YouTube practicing. Did you see that? He would shoot his arrow from across the street through an open door in the back of his family's two-car garage to the target in the backyard.
I think children with any kind of undue pressure on them play like they're working. While adults who have as much pressure as possible taken off of them by Jesus' vicarious sacrifice work like they're playing. The latter is supernatural living, the former supernatural murder.
There is more than one kind of cookie jar and more than one kind of science. Elaine Stedman in her excellent 'A Woman's Worth' mentions in passing an oriental observation of the human body being feminine in front with the masculine in back.
Personally I've long thought my left big toe looked like my mom and my right big toe looked like my dad. Anyhow Elaine related that accepted oriental fact with God only showing his back to Moses. Elizabeth Elliot is also recommended reading or on video.
One thing's for sure to me, there's a lot of spiritual technology that is too hot for us to handle east of Eden as we are. For example, meditation that recommends clearing your mind of everything is one of the stupidest things you can do. How many people have been nailed in the back by stealthy animals? Well there's stealthy predators in the spirit world too.
A Czechoslovakian (ca. 1977) guy in town back in Ripon, Quebec (she was Basque) told me a story of a famous local hunter back home who had hunted abroad and the walls of whose house were loaded with animal skulls. It was his undoing probably, the smells. He had been asked to stalk a marauding and dangerous boar, a wild male pig.
He set himself up or down on a mossy, cushy log. He may have heard it coming, but too late. The odd thing was how the boar didn't just kill him and cut him up a bit. Do I have to say it, beyond recognition? The boar must have smelled everything.
Part K
Her dad had been a Spitfire pilot, she who I had loved ineffectively without God. One time he and Mom with their littlest in the car lost their brakes. Think Colorado or Bolivia, their Filipino road home steeply down and winding. Time after time he nicked the mountainside bank along the road to slow the speeding car down. It stopped.
Rebecca Ondov's 'winged' horse Christian stories, recommended, will have you reaching for the seat belt of your easy chair. At least twice or three times Rebecca implored Jesus out loud to save her and her equine friends from guaranteed laws-of-physics destruction by accident or bear. And that was only the worst of it.
Alex, you who recently told me 'I don't read books; I only watch movies and videos', watch They Shoot Horses, Don't They, without watching it. I just remember a horse going down. Like mine did but it was him or me at that point.
Early in my Christian walk I considered suicide, I suppose somewhat as death stalked me as an infant and as a child. What happened as a sobering lesson to me was when the preacher and his family came over for lunch.
After eating lunch, the ten-year-old boy and his younger sister came out to the barn with me and we got to playing tumbleweed-connection on the big hay stack. Of a sudden I stood upright and looked around for him. He had found the loaded groundhog rifle leaning off in an alcove, safety off for the quick critters.
"No Charles" I struggled to articulate so quickly from laughing and with hay in my mouth, "it's loaded!" Charles had it leveled at my chest, his eye in position. It is obvious what God was telling me, "What, you want to commit suicide? Here, I'll do it for you!"
Esther over in Belleville, PA is retired from Wycliffe Bible Translators. She said her youthful honeymoon was in Kenya where they had three daughters and then a son. Who died of a fever. Husband was killed by a cape buffalo while hunting, the T.V. safari shows I watched in childhood preparing me for Esther saying as clarification, ''Cape buffaloes hunt the hunter''.
Anyway, or anyhow as it's said around here in PA, Esther came back with the girls to Wycliffe headquarters in Texas. Esther requested the unprecedented, to go back out to the foreign Christian mission field as a single mother. She got it, and spent the next fifteen years in the Colombian lowlands.
My dad's dad's folks are of that country. They started coffee cultivation in Colombia. Communism empowered the workers, who took the land back. One of my brothers said I shouldn't have named my surviving child after Grandfather Tovar. Because he was a lecher, an unfaithful husband.
Like this new accusation of 'an offensive' title for my book, it took me a day or two to think it through. I was much like this grandfather whom I never met. I miss him dearly, my blood and bone. Grandfather only did a semester of college, here in the U.S. as I only did, actually twice, one at Goddard College fiddling expensively with some architecture, my dad's expense and two, at Bangkok Polytech for a semester of old-fashioned hand carpentry.
Grandfather met her at a party in Chicago, they married, went up the Magdalena to Bogota, and they came back with two boys in tow, then separated. God has his ways of bringing us into existence.
An additional Polytech story, this time Montreal, my farm boss's son was in the next class room when all the young women students were murdered by a jerk. His class had to walk past that open door on their way out. My boss's son decided not to look.
Also about Esther and me, one of her daughters and sons-in-law live next-door to her in the big old stone house. That was the home of a cousin of my same grandmother who married off to Colombia. She was Helen McManigal or as it is often written McMonigle.
Ours came from Ireland to Williamsport, PA and Esther's deceased neighbor's family, of the famous orphan girl Rosanna McMonigle set up in Bellefonte, adjacent State College. I first became aware of all this in 2004 when I moved here. I was selling stuff to farmers who didn't use cars and noticed one of them looked a little different.
Different from most of the other Amish I was meeting and David told me about the little orphan girl, Rosanna of the Amish, his direct ancestor. Rosanna's mom was a Connor I read in the book by Rosanna's and Little Christy Yoder's youngest son, Joseph. And that made sense to me because Dave has a nose and face resembling one of our parish priests, 'Father' O'Connor.
I was talking with my son last week about noticing similar genotypes in the different racial groups of the world. I think it's the funniest thing in the world to notice it.
Little Christy Yoder was renowned for knowing horses, wrestling too as a young man. I won't ruin the book for you.
Gentling. That donkey colt Jesus rode into town on had never been ridden before. That my dear city slickers anywhere is a miracle. To us maybe. But to God as Jesus in the flesh, taming mustangs with a smile is standard. We are so used to violence it's pathetic. Even Christy Yoder probably contradicted himself between the way he treated or handled horses and how he did children.
Here's one. As Christians are generally oblivious to the fact that Jews have never knocked their little children around, so Mennonites everywhere that I've observed are unaware that one of the minor Mennonite groups population-wise is heretical. I don't mean minor private interpretations of Scripture such as partial head-hair coverings for the sisters or partial beards for the men. I mean outright heresy, which I found by being in the non-inadvertent position of the right place at the right time.
What happened was, because I had applied for membership to the only two congregations who forbade full beards, I was in purgatorial limbo. So I accepted a subscription to this non-Amish-Mennonite group's twice-monthly. I read every issue for two years, all healthy and accurate until one day I stopped in my tracks. A sentence in the second column of the main editorial sermon said in less than a sentence that Jesus' mom didn't actually conceive him. 'Alright...'
I asked my fiance' about it, because she once churched with them as a child, her dad still at it. "Oh, yeah, that's something the Holdemans believe." So I telephoned the neighbor, a non-ordinary minister with them. He said, "Oh, yeah, but I don't know how to explain it". He referred me to my future father-in-law, who in turn referred me to Dietrich Philips. Who was dead five-hundred years, and it took me about that long to get through his book.
Sure enough there it was corroborated by his fellow Holland church brother Menno Simons, namesake of all Mennonites heretical and non-heretical. I visited every man of them my age around here, five of them. Two stared at me as they smiled, silence, a third answered a question I asked of would he believe it if he heard it today for the first time. No, he admitted, he doesn't think he would. A fourth after an hour of silently refusing to answer my questions finally said, ‘from First Corinthians fifteen, first Adam, second Adam’, twisting Scripture. A fifth and last man expressed concern of his church membership if he agreed with me.
Here's a clue. Churching with them once or twice a year before, I had asked about membership. They informed me they would have to re-baptize me. I heard the alarm but I had stuck the clock under the mattress the night before. When I got a computer, I looked around and found the website Love Letter To The Holdemans by a couple who had been kicked out, excommunicated.
They smartly compiled a side-by-side comparison of the words by John Holdeman on the subject from his book, written back in the 1800's, and the contesting quotations of the early church leaders Tertullian, Polycarp, Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr, which were originally addressed to a Valentinius from whom Holdeman later got the idea.
It is Gnostic doctrine, which generally distorts the nature of God, the son of God, and in the later form of Valentinius the nature of Mary's conception. I invite you to read the compared quotations yourself if they're still there. Two points to finalize this, one, God says heresy should be exposed publicly as in this essay, and two, as alluded to, share my astonishment that both Mennonites and Amish-Mennonites plus Amish, all who are neighbors with the John Holdemans, do not, as much as I have gathered know about it.
The heretical idea being both female and male came from heaven to make Jesus, which obliterates any value of humanity's standing before God, and God's reason to incarnate humanity. Practically, John Holdeman was not seeing much growth in his new group, but for some Polish immigrants who melded in for possibly normal reasons of newcomer desperation. It was a later action like this by Holdeman to probably get some excitement going.
What connected two big dots for me as you might have observed was the insistence on re-baptism, which is a useless no-no and Gnostic distortion. The Gnostics think God is too holy to sully himself with sinful flesh. Gnostic aficionados are existentially 'holier than thou'. Thus only 'they' are worthy or sufficiently credentialed to pass on the torch so to speak.
Frankly, there's nothing special about who baptizes you, only an experienced person. The Swiss Brethren actually started over from scratch like this. What's important is who you're baptized into, earlier Moses, now the one Moses pointed to. What's decadent about Gnostic baptism, by prioritizing themselves as your adamant choice, they put themselves in the place of God as the Holy Spirit.
I got a clammy and gross feeling when they said re-baptism would be necessary. For I knew all of heaven was in attendance at my sanctified wet t-shirt contest. Also know as part of this glaring lack of communication as spiritual cancer in the community, what the Holdemans' special forte is, sarcastically said is an accentuated prioritization of getting along with neighbors, commonly heard from them individually and separately.
I don't just mean the old problem we all have of getting along to go along, or vice versa, no, I mean getting along with un-affiliated neighbors as an end in itself. That is not only disrespectful to neighbors, it also disregards what God is really doing on this wacko planet. Practically, it turns away strangers seeking eternal security, every person's right to have. Adam and Eve did not have belly-buttons, and we who do are not to busy ourselves with them, except the infantile new adventurers.
Of children and adventure, I had thought it was 75% by 7 or 8; but no, a human- being mentally absorbs by age 4 or 5 fully 80% of everything they will ever learn. The correlation to violence is easy but for the hardened heart. What I want to expound upon is what God is so positively busy with. It's the adventure and the learning; just watch the box-office hit movie of every little one. They're not looking around like they're on marijuana. Man o' man, they're investigating and observing a mile-a-minute. They are primordially anointed by Almighty God with ministry!
Babies may be jerky but they're not jerks. Are you? You are if you violently interfere in their Godliness! Little ones' bodies may be uncoordinated, their limbs and even their torsos but their eyes are very well developed. Watch them if you will. Oh yes, their eyes jerk, from this to that quickly. But guess what, this means they've just counted the rungs on their crib. Not a second later, we see them gauging the percentage of humidity in the room while they calculate the oscillations of the candle burning on the table.
And it's not just people who interfere, but also devils, such as the one that liked to blow out the candle in the shuttered bedroom of my grandpap 'n mom and baby dad. Devil jerks, like human jerks are self-centered, maybe able to be described as wannabe babies. "Here, look at me; here, look at me!" they say, as a little one does. However, and I mean 'Howdie-Doodie ever, while babies are entitled to direct attention, jerks are selfishly taking more than their share. And devils are completely out of the loop, because they already had their chance, their opportunity, only allowed by God to hang around for a while longer.
Part L
And about devils as fallen angels, religions, not real Judeo-Christianity can only feebly deal with devils. Christianity is not religion; it is reality. This is the real life I wanted to really be high on as an intoxicated teenager. For it truly involves what is high, The Most High God Almighty and his incarnation Jesus Christ through the continuing earthly action of the Holy Spirit. This is "what angels long to look into". This is why devils in all their forms stay involved in our lives. This is why fallen angels meddle in the things of God including us.
This is why mundane religions of The Earth try to effectively deal with both nice and nasty angels or spirits. A Christian preacher visited a Buddhist land and visited a temple. (And maybe he made this story up; I can't find it online since I heard it directly somewhere indirect; but it's plausible, so it bears repeating while being open to correction). He got into a conversation with an orange-clad monk his age. The monk spoke English, enough to carry on a conversation.
The Christian got to the question he really wanted to ask in effect, "Don't you think it's a little elementary to bow down to a hunk of wood?" Smiling, the Buddhist brought the Christian around to the back of the statue of Buddha. And the Buddhist then directed the Christian's attention to high up on the back of the statue. There, high up on the back of the statue of Gautama Buddha was a hole. The monk said a spirit enters the whole or hole while they're praying or worshiping or whatever it is they think they're doing. That explained it for the Christian.
And as a matter of course that is precisely what the apostle Paul points out. That the worship the stranger to Christ Jesus does is worship of devils, or demons, same thing. There is mercy deserving to be given here to innocence and ignorance. Militaristic Christianity has long been an embarrassment to themselves, while God looks on, shaking his holy head. While Jesus clearly clarified to Peter in Gethsemane to sheath his sword saying “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword”.
Gentle Jesus is truly the Prince of Peace. As I said in my booklet whoops, I forgot my thought; I had a long night. I performed an experiment on myself, not one I haven't done before, testing the formerly observed toxicity of some supposedly organic food. Three days ago, I tried again some organic powdered dried fruit. I had already tried it a couple of weeks ago with the same results. But respecting the possibility of conflicting factors, I gave it a go again earlier this week, and then again yesterday.
'Same results each time, I think it's tainted with chemicals. Some 300 agricultural chemicals are allowed for organic farming, I read and it is up to the grower to utilize them ethically. Long lasting heart thwomping is the main symptom as I've experienced it for thirty years now. Stressful dreams are included. This is why I’ve learned to stop and recollect what I ate the day before. There are some bad apples out there I've learned, since my conscious attention was alerted to this issue in the early 1990's with some windfall apples from a commercial orchard I'd been given. I normally collected for myself from old apple trees in abandoned farm properties.
Check this, I was part of the 1983 California (one single farm) watermelon debacle. It's a long story, the ending being the distributor near Montreal whom the grocery store told me to call, as soon as he heard my testimony of adverse symptoms yelled into the phone, "Listen to me, you tell the St.Pierre brothers to get all their watermelon off the shelf now!" He must have known that besides Oregon and Washington having rejected all watermelon from The Golden State in July, the melons were still circulating on the market.
And get this, that half-a-watermelon was ten-feet underneath me from upstairs where I was sleeping in the summer garage-bunk-house. I got up an hour early to get the cows, because I had had a nightmare. As I walked past the parked car with the melon in the hatch-back, I reprimanded myself for forgetting it. I was supposed to bring it in and put it in the fridge. I brought it in and tasted it to see if the warm night air had spoiled it. It had been a typically very warm Quebec night, such often warmer than the same meteorological day in Maryland.
The watermelon was crisp and sweet, despite the above-stated normal influence of temperature on fruit, suspiciously crisp and sweet. 'Slam, I fell against the kitchen counter. Something was very wrong, vertigo only something I'd heard about. I drank a fill of salt water and brought the melon out to the manure pile and vomited clear. Then, I remembered the scary dream I had, 'heart thwomping. We were on a tour bus, late on a Friday afternoon in a land of large fields. We arrived at our destination, a model fruit farm, all of us farmers ourselves. This farm had a reputation of exemplary greatness, and thus reserved Friday evenings through Saturday for agricultural tours.
In reality we did this once a year to visit the AI bull center in St. Hyacinthe, QC. on a tour bus. I would think the above-dreamed scenario also transpires in places. Significantly, through the bus windows we observed two men in hazmat suits spraying as if they were on an airport runway preparing for a plane in trouble. They were just inside the rows from the edge of the field where we stopped. I was first out and articulated for everyone, saying to the two persons spraying as I've told you.
Their simultaneous reply was said loudly, "We don't care, we're spraying anywayyy!" We passengers in the dream all muttered whatever under our breath, as we all turned and got back on the bus.
Part M
Walter Lord's, A Night To Remember was the first adult book I read. I read the book four times-in-a-row. Ships meant a lot to me since we rode on one of the beautiful Italian Lloyd Triestino ships from Malaya/(Singapore) to Italy. The trip west on the American SS Independence from Naples was miserable. What happened was the children's playroom on the Triestino ship was up by the bridge. The view was great with a fine breeze. Our door was always open with a gate by the steps down. Tea and cookies were daily on schedule, cream for the tea.
On the Independence the playroom was just inside the front door way down in the ship. I was carried in horizontally the first time. One highlight was a birthday cake made especially for me, or so I thought. In hindsight it was an adult cake plastered with sliced almonds. I didn't eat a bite. Chung had made his own cakes for us. The Philippines a few years before was a lifesaver literally, I think.
Placenta previa and blue at birth, I had to be pumped out again a week later. Breastfeeding was contra-indicated for American women at the time. I don't know if the colostrum/first-milk was gathered and given. In a few months Mom was sent back to the United States for four months of alcoholism rehabilitation to spare Dad's job.
Mom told me late in her life that when she returned to the P.I. and me I went into convulsions when placed in her arms and almost died. I must have remembered the trauma of being in her womb. Positively, Mom was well-fed with the fresh Filipino food, a big plus. And just as big a plus was the perfect infant care given to me by my Filipina 'amahs', Andy and Victoria. I have a picture of me and Andy somewhere in my collection.
I do remember at age twelve leaving my body and flying at near-light speed on a very taught invisible wire between very visible stars from the Vietnam flu. It didn't help I had a year's supply of candy from Halloween harvesting. That was my first farming experience, I often joke. Although maybe the first was collecting the neighborhood's free-sample jugs of Downy fabric softener in about 1962. My only sister Andrea led that adventure.
A more serious recollection was Christmas about that time. Andrea had 'gotten' a record-player, and I had gotten a record. It was cowboy songs made in heaven and I asked Andrea if I could use her pick-up. "Sure", Andrea kindly said and as the tunes entered my soul I lifted my nose to the sky and smiled. Then, I looked at Dad and Mom and Greg and Andrea sitting in-a-row on the couch. They had been looking at me and smiling also.
Understandably, none of them was sufficiently mature in their spirits to consistently share my smiling joy. Because their smiles turned to frowns before me and I no longer smiled, at least in public. Then much worse happened, with no mature coping mechanisms in place. Rod Serling's Thing On The Wing episode of his Twilight Zone television show scared the living and nighttime daylights out of me. It's a humanoid monster on the wing of a propellor commercial airliner.
It eventually puts its morbid face right at the window. Waking up from a nightmare that night, I knew I had to get my mind settled. And the only recourse of the required magnitude was my parents. The door was locked so I started hollering. Dad hollered back trying to convince me to go back where I came from. I knew my mind's stability was in question from the fright on the television. And so I persisted. Dad let me in, even in bed between him and Mom. And I waited for the normal reward of my effort, consolation, interpretation, explanation, assurance.
I shifted as manifestation of my understandable disorientation and Dad gruffly said, "Stay still!" or some such. I turned in the mostly dark to look at Mom who was watching. Mom then turned her back to me. At that point I knew this was the best it would get. So I stayed still and woke up in my bed, having been returned there by Dad. It was not a dream; it was not California. Serling better make this up to both God and his fellow man or he's in trouble.
What's your name? And what do you do for a living, if it is for that?
My life’s first two decades of adult-after-adult being too busy to talk with me has taught me to not do so. I make myself available to the young, even to tell the little ones when they tell me their little age, "Oh, five; that's a lot". Because by God and by Jesus it is a lot. You see if you haven't noticed it, time goes much more slowly for a child, and teenagers. I could have been more understanding of a sixteen-year-old I milked cows with one day.
He was the best friend of the only son of the farmer I was working for. And I had to milk 249 cows in a stanchion-barn with him. Everybody else was out picnicking or somewhere. After a long while of compensating for the guy's dairy disinterest, I got in his face, said his full name and added, ..."if you don't slow down, you're going to run into a brick wall". A week later he took the farm truck out onto the road, something he had never done before and was forbidden to do.
My boss later told me that the lad's mom told him that just before she heard the sirens, she heard her only child come in and let the screen door slam as usual. And as usual, she helloed "Tommy, is that you?" A utility pole not a wall, he wasn't wearing a seat belt. He should have just taken to the field with no fence there, having caught the grassy shoulder at speed. Thirteen attempted suicides in the county that year, and the lad's father had moved out. Let us be still and know that God is not just God, but prophetically also our fellow humans, especially the young ones who have eternity so fresh in their hearts.
Probably we should let them tell us the stories, seeing they were recently in the arms of the creator, whose angels simultaneously behold God's countenance.
Part N
Did you you know there are more stars than sand on Earth's beaches?
And did you also know that, God had someone write in his bible-book he has named the stars? I don't mean catalogued them astronomically. I mean, as ownership rights, named them. Some think we're an astral agricultural project. But, sweetie, that ain't big enough.
The last time I saw Patricia in the health-food store with her mom, who said they were moving out of state--that's where we'd met first and talked since--I made sure to remind Patricia something. It was not important, factually; I just was heart-broken at the prospect of never, not only seeing her again, but also hearing her stories, factual stories, by God of dinosaurs!
This little chick, four years ancient, knew capitalize-the-word lots about dinosaurs. Having played with toy dinosaurs in the sandbox with Pete and our Jewish friend, Alan I was tickled pink to hear Patricia expound on the subject. Patricia knew the names and descriptions and you name it, of several times more than the few I remember. Please stop here with me and generally think, generally conjecture just what in heaven is going on the earth.
'A final story I feel like telling, connecting adult-like children to child-like adults, or something like that. Check it on YouTube, baboons were rightly angry when the adjacent golf course there along the coast of South Africa was enlarged to eighteen holes and their baboon property diminished. The males were beating up on golfers, so an animal expert was called in. This adult 'Patricia' walked up on the hill and, speaking telepathically, in her mind only as she approached, lay down in a circle of female baboons.
The chicks all chit-chatted as they are divinely capable of everywhere, for the babies' benefit, certainly, of language learning, and then the alpha male came into view, approaching the circle of his baboon women, plus one visitor. Whom he noticed and set up in attack mode stance. The human female baboon calmly told him, "Hey, Boss, I'm just hanging out with my friends. I do want to visit with you, also, if you'll come on over and join us".
Boss baboon gives her the benefit of the doubt, eases up, and settles in elsewhere among the gathered girls. But, the conversation is one-on-one now, and while Boss civilly paws in the dirt for imaginary bugs and human baboon probably wisely imitates his diplomatic gesture, she explains about the golf course problem. No attacks on golfers occurs again.
YouTube has other films, videos, of people who go in the paddocks and pastures of other people's horses, goats, you name it, and walk with them and even run alongside them. Then, after everybody is loosened up, exercised, the visitor or visitors sit down for a sit down. The horses I saw don't just sit down, they eventually lay their beautiful heads down in the laps of the visitor.
A similar film to the baboons was of a black panther. Satan by name, or maybe Diablo, he was distraught as a caged newcomer to a controlled lion management home. Now, it may be the telepathic visitor simply perceived logically the situation, but after a dialogue with the awesome dude during which he did not growl or snarl, which was different, he settled in, not without transfer to a more central location. For he was used to being somewhat of a center of attention where he lived before, maybe as an alpha cat.
Something Godly is going on, regardless of the new-age religious ideas of, for example the South African gal, as I heard her talking with people. Peace is a priority with these visitors, accepted visitors to the animal communities. I suggest to orthodox Christians, for want of a better description, never mind the mistletoe hanging above your sanctuary vestibules. Learn to love like children and animals.
Because, the new generation's new-age ideas are the result of a vacuum caused by cold-shouldered Christianity. I avoid black holes, too; everyone should. I met a Christian brother my age fixing his car in a parking lot. He had a nasty temper and a great big heart in Christ Jesus. His woman was helping to love the hell out of him. He had been found at age four sleeping behind some garbage cans in an alley in Baltimore City, with his older brother who depended on him for his canny survival scrounging ability. Their daughter loved her daddy. It was a happy family, and I was welcome to visit at any time they weren't sleeping.
While people are moving out of the church of the revolving door, I also wonder, as with the arrogant Holdemans, of the people who bounced off the door. Again, it is wise for any human to not get within the realm of God's jealousy. And, you who hear this and justify yourself as being smart enough to avoid the above hypocrisy, beware you don't miss your own day of visitation. As the sun rose on my side of the Greyhound bus entering Canada, everyone else asleep, I could see God giving me the chance of my life.
Immigration complications at the check-point were another thing. I had fully seventeen cardboard boxes of stuff. I was confident that my decision to move to Quebec was of The Living God. So, I proceeded that way and explained to the two uniformed men that I was bringing it all to my brother at McGill University. It was good I didn't say that one in Vancouver, British Columbia. Let go and let God.
Well, how does Mom's run with the plane in Bali mesh with that? 'Gotta here this, and I'm proud to tell it, first heard from Will Kane from the pulpit at Mom's funeral 'mass' (a more interactive Christian service than many Midianite ones I've been to, less the big privately interpretive improvisation of something that don't need fixin'), and then Andrea's old chum from Djakarta, Gigi.
At Mom's memorial reception after the mass ('messe' in French), Gigi told everyone the details. I had already been over to Bali with a buddy and his mom and twin sisters, so I wasn't along when my mom, brothers and sister, and Gigi went. The luggage didn't get off the big four-prop Garuda Airlines plane, they found out. Mom asked the officials what could be done about it. The people said, "Nothing, the plane's already left for Surubaya".
Mom immediately slipped past them and ran out to the tarmac to see where the plane was. She ran after it, got in front of it, and flagged it down to a full stop and turn-around. Etcetera. 'No way was Deborah Mary (McCarthy) Tovar going to be on vacation with no clothes for seven, and probably booze for her.
About booze, I was told in a job interview at a half-way house that it's harder to kick booze than heroin. But, how very many people have begun confessing Jesus Christ without a look back. I did see David Wilkerson's, The Cross And The Switchblade, and read Nicki's book about his memory of God's rescue by Christ Jesus, the Carpathian.
Part O
And now it's not heroin or booze, but digital devices that chart out in infra-red brain scans the former pale in comparison to. Ray asked me, "Michael, where do people find the time to watch television?"
Wanting to answer quickly and smartly, I said, "They don't; they steal it, from themselves, from God". Of course now I know two decades later they steal it from their children, even if they're all watching together. So God is in the children and we're spanking him during commercials.
"Prove it" we children used to challenge each other. That also was God, who is biblically quoted "Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good."
'Makes sense to me. How about you? Okay then let's hear it.
I almost spoke too fast, early 1975 like yesterday. I was just out of carpentry class at Bangkok Poly with Mr. Sawang and as I and a lot of people did in that flat city, I went up on the lookout veranda of the big Golden Temple. Always a good view, the view that day spiritually was enhanced by a conversation with a guy my age standing next to me. He said he was just out of his two-year obligatory stint in either the Thai military or the monastery system.
The latter his case, his name Pikul, after a while of general conversation, he asked me to visit his home village in the country. I replied with a licentious idea which reversed Pikul's former enthusiasm for meeting a foreigner his age. Pikul politely bowed out of the conversation and walked away.
Justification is not a sentimental flirtation with truth. Rather it is a direct encounter with the Word of God. Our free wills are the active factor in the process. Hence with one God we have one opportunity to show appreciation, our one life.
Any anecdote, even a video of say a child talking of ancestors he knows nothing about is demonic manifestation in the poor victim of generational abuse. The abuse essentially stems from an accumulated neglect in the child's forebears of biblical-text truth or biblical-type truth. In which the focus should be on God not man or devils.
You see if you don't know, we all got off the same boat with Noah and Mrs. Noah. Check Nick Liguori's book 'Echos Of Ararat' for first-hand proof from global historians of many old cultures. Because Noah told his family the truth of God, but some of them weren't too excited about it. By Babylon it was way out of hand so that humanity had lost all perception of the value of sharing and caring, that famous image of God we resemble.
The '1434' author gives reasonable ideas to explain both Maori and Inca life. That's right, Chinese. The guy next to me in kindergarten/first-grade school in Kuala Lumpur, he and my brother Peter in the older class was a master airplane maker in clay. He made exact replicas of the Lockheed Constellation propellor plane. 'Very very detailed in realistic proportion throughout. I often wonder what he ended up doing as an adult.
Remember, he that knows to do right and does wrong is a sinner. God is merciful, but he doesn't play the fool. A guy was walking in the woods and came upon a little cliff. Knowing there might be unsuspecting wildlife at the bottom, he quietly approached and peeked over. A mother bear was teaching her two cubs to forage. She had already taught them the system of what to do in times of danger.
The guy purposely snapped the dry end of a branch near his face. Pow, mama smacked one of her babies so that it rolled in the direction of the tree she wanted them to go up. They hustled right over to it and up, up, up. The English call spanking smacking, Sam Martin informs in his mentioned book. The bear is an animal in a very physical environment. I do understand that animals feel every sentiment we are capable of except talking with their creator. What they can do is talk with us, silently as God does or brand-new children do.
The true story behind the Walt Disney movie The Bears And I, three cubs adopted by a student from California panning gold in B.C., Canada for the summer--quite against the advice of the knowledgeable locals--he would stay three years with them, two or three, saw the cubs to adulthood, the female and one of the males to sad disaster.
My story here is the female, who hitched up with a wild male, who kept his distance as the man led the three on daily foraging treks. Then she was shot for fun by a seasonal Anglo hunter. Her mate stood by her body and did two things. One, he fought off anything that came to eat her, including grizzlies three times his size. Two, he cried, his nose to the sky, piercing, furious, penetrating cries, for three weeks, night and day, until he crawled off, exhausted, self-preserving.
Part P
Jesus beat death. Jesus Christ is humanity's only hero. When John tried to worship the angel of The Revelation, the angel said "No, don't do that. I am just like you. Worship God". Let us do so, for the one true God alone is worthy.
Part Q
Proofreading the text just now while bleary-eyed, not a good combination I noticed a mention of the sparrow Jesus compared us to. I and many know well that story, even songs of it melodiously.
However ever since one Christmas morning and the sound of a screaming bird, that is what this man hears as melody. I wasn't going home for Christmas that year, and I was back out to the barn after breakfast.
I was right near the sealed double doors preparing to get the cows out in the snow for exercise. That is when I heard the screaming just outside. I pulled the burlap seal in the middle to open a peek-hole.
A male sparrow was being slowly lifted off the snow. His lifter was a bird not much bigger than he was. It was one of the flock of what I called snow birds that I often saw flying around down by the central drainage ditch.
I didn't know they were nutritionally oriented that way. Did you? Neither do I know exactly what the exact ramifications of death are on this planet. You know, where does death stop and life begin? It's certainly not part of an evolutionary process. It's all too cool and beautiful for a clumsy idea like that. I just mean predation and victimization as characteristics of the distortion on the planet and cosmos after Eden. Again one thing's for sure, the balanced and maintained equilibrium of the cosmos is masterfully controlled. And if we're bear cubs, then God is smacking us up the cross of Jesus Christ.
I'm looking forward to Nick Liguori's second book, the sequel to his first. Which covered the Eden / flood / Babylon recollections of South and North American cultures. Its connection to a sparrow is the individualism of each of us. That is made sense of with genealogical and historical facts verifying God's biblical history of human culture.
That God gently and respectfully 'weaned' us off our primal scream of sumerian impersonal divine focus with his own direct contact. God made contact with the man Abram and Abram's woman Sarai and Abram's nephew Lot and Abram's household. They all proceeded in unified conviction out of their secular comfort zone.
Spiritual boozing is the dizzying effect from uprooted societal relation. Unlike spiritual social drinking, where one maintains focus on coming and going, when one, when society gets so full of informational and experiential booze, one can in no way pin the tail on the donkey. On Earth one has to concentrate and do it relatively soberly.
It's not just a long way to Tipperary, it's also a long way to Babylon and Ararat via Ur of the Chaldees and Haran of southeastern Turkey. Check out Ron Wyatt's videos with the woman he loved and their sons before he died. They uncovered Noah's Ark, also Calvary and the secret within. Let's let Jesus' God get us home to Heaven, with legitimate adventures along the way. 'Jim and Penny Caldwell also.
May I remind you or inform you of how we can walk with a fluidity and ease one step shy of floating. Dead cows made me first think of this, the wonder that just a few minutes before this mass of bovine flesh could walk with facility or even the oldsters waggle their butts as they skip down a hill when the whole herd frolicked in a positive stampede for joy of life.
I mean let our work, The Lord's work be our pleasure. Just as food is really God sharing his energetic life with us, let our work be his industriousness. And it is so cool God rested on a seventh day, however you apply that in your personal life. We don't want Johnny to be a dull boy, all work and no play. We don't want Johnny to be a stupid boy, to be satisfied with the robotic works of his hands. When even an AI brain can only dream of leaving on a jet plane, to lyrically quote John Denver, who really did leave us on a plane, to fly home.
Remember, God invented fun, and like the Eskimos, knowing how very difficult things get in adulthood, let the horse run in their children. I don't mean to be poetic. And like a horse, you better have four separate and independent legs under you like a horse. Jesus is the horse. Do not do anything as impediment to your horse. Look at Elijah, the spokesman and current hope of Israel sitting like a sad beggar blessedly fed by handouts from ravens. But he remembered the run, 31 praise-to-God lengths in front of the second-place finisher, Secretariat vs Baal. But don't force a course on a horse either.
Ulysses S. Grant was an above-average horseman reputedly. When riding a cargo-stage through the Sierra Nevada after Appomatox, the stage pulled by five maybe six teams of horses fast, no guard rails, fully controlled, Grant commented on the prowess and the ability of the African-American man who had the reins, "That's the finest horsemanship I will ever see." Ulysses was the best many others had seen back in Ohio.
Am I ready? How can we be ready if we've never been welcomed here on Earth? How can a child grow up to be welcoming to new friendships if she or he has been systematically refused? Would we rather have God standing in person with his hands on his hips staring at us? Think of it; it couldn't be any better, all this personal space to work out our salvation, with God remaining at a respectful distance!
'And all he requires of us is to work it out in fear and trembling, humbly.
And don't look for the orthodox; look for the orthopedic. In Quebec, a guy in the next town over, their butcher had a pair of pulling-contest horses, Pit and Nell. One would lunge first, then the other. It maximized the potential leverage of the harnesses by activating parabolic curves of tension and releasing spring. That is what was the unbeatable provincial heavy-draft team category champion for year after year after year after year, and double that. Every other team was trained to lunge forward in tandem. I stopped the truck one day when I happened to be using that road east of town there.
The three of them were out there, just kicking around on the street corner, talking about how good the sand feels flowing around their hooves. "But we're Oreo's dog, Mom" my little nephew accurately said to his parents who were bitching about nothing.
Part R
Three others, then four, walked from Maine to California. About the year I was born, when the first super-highways now called interstates were going in, nearly their undoing, she, my age, had to decide to cash in the small value of the family property and use it either for a down-payment on a shared room at the local old folks' home or what else? A horse! God blessed her with a Morgan made to order, so them and her little doggie went to the local library and read about themselves. In Tennessee, someone blessed them with a younger Walker to help with the load. Respective accidents within a few miles of the Specific Ocean sputtered the project to a stop. Angels were stopping to watch. A parade was theirs to lead. What a fine true story!
Do you know how God breathed into Adam, and Pinocchio came to life? Well, God as Jesus Christ, at the last, after supper*, at one point did the same type of action to the disciples he now addressed as "my friends". While I write this, I'm wondering what the look on Adam's face was. That surely, it was the same expression a new baby has. Regardless, according to what and whom you believe per their eyewitness news report, 'old' covenant included--italics in deference to the Jews, whoever genetically by now they really are--this deserves some attention. *It was after he arose and slipped in to visit.
Ruth Dobschiner did it between some saving Christian walls hiding out, hiding in. The Dutch Christian family gave her a bible to read, including the 'new' part. Okay, he's a Jew. Ruth could see that, yes, possibly a character made-up by desperate fanatics. With the non-coincidental benefit of the doubt, Ruth further begrudged the factual probability he was a Jewish prophet. And, just as a German patrol was possibly going by the house, this objective listener likes to think Miss Dobschiner yelled out, angels trapping the sound-wave decibels in mid-air, "OMG, we killed the Son of David!"
Do what you want with it, but what Moses heard in response to his asking the Spirit (of) God, in conversation with him, what God's parents named God at birth, is exactly what Joseph and Mary's son answered the rabble in Gethsemane. Do you know the story? They graveled, "Are you Joshua of Nazareth?" Josh answered, "I am (ie--YHWH or, The Name)". Eyewitnesses said the group of jerks fell backwards on the ground.
You know, apostle Saul of Tarsus mentions murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers" as forgivable offenses. Evidently, the Jews murdered their brother / cousin. Saul said Jesus said to him in question form, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It's hard for you to kick against the goads / the cattle prods!" Saul answered, "Who...in Damascus...are you Lord?" 'Changed Saul for life; 'even got a name change, unrelated.
I've mentioned the eloquence of Isaiah. But, within the abbreviated text of the new covenant writings, Simon Peter's words of love are of the same or better caliber. The same Holy Spirit of God got into both of them. Really, before Pentecost, Peter was such a klutz. And, Joseph of Arimathea ended up in England, I hear. Andrew got to Kiev in the future Ukraine. Happiness is making friends for eternal life.
Excuse, here; 'time for me to figure out how to start a second page. SoloBuildIt is a techno-clutze's dream-come-true for website wanna-haves such as me. The home page is direct, though, more automatic than a second page. 'Back side of the moon and all....
How about you? I haven't switched pages. 'The same hour here as the above paragraph. I've got something else big that's been on my mind a long time. And it bothers me, bothering meaning grieving my heart for people being bullied. 'Women in this case; this case--'sounds legal-- and really it is, as having to do with human rights.
Menstruating weddings is my gripe, my grievance. 'Sound legitimate? I think it is. A YouTube video made me first--made me; helped me (coercion or persuasion)--think of it initially. Did you see it? A wedding, and the video maker is filming the bride dancing. It doesn't matter with who--well, it does matter; it seems to me the gal shouldn't be dancing with anyone else but the one with whom she's attending her own wedding.
The back of her dress is to the camera. Yes, menstruating. This means the bride is not going to be wanting to consolidate or conjugate her new relationship. Why did this happen? This can't be her desire, not that of any red-blooded woman. And, any nicely sensitive man does not want this for either of them. And, he shouldn't expect to use her part of the happy bridal bargain because that's gross, disgusting, as well as unGodly unbiblical.
This happens because macho men, mean and self-centered macho men, scheduled the wedding, ultimately. She went along with it like you would go along with it if you were a woman, Mister! I think of this because today is another extended family wedding that I'm not going to. Nor was I invited; they've given up, on themselves, I think.
In hindsight--excuse the pun-- and ours was at the court house done for free by President Judge Tim, the place is secondary to the time. Although, the first wedding I ever attended was by a big tree in a field where we all gaily shared their joy with a big game of ring-around-the-rosy until 'we all fall down' and didn't get up 'till dawn or so.
If in a church-building, I suggest the two in love go up, or simply stand up, if in an open seating arrangement, and articulate their wows for each other in front of friends. Any supposedly deserving participation by daddies and mommies should not be done. God says the phenomenon is separation from parents, so do so right then and there.
Indeed, God replays Eden at every wedding. God words this idea of his heart in his psalm numbered forty-five. Wherein God keenly tells us "Leave your father's house." It is the opportunity to start over fresh. Every wedding is an opportunity for society to try it a different way, a better way. Man makes it same old same old deadness of drudgery.
And then God gives us periodic and semi-permanent reminders with children. Who like angels pass through our vision as intangible nightdreams of subconscious reality. Do we blame ourselves, or punish ourselves for dreaming in our sleep? Do we children, the Anneliese Michelle's of our lives? Recall how Annie's fanatic parents manipulated her.
Correctly, the event should, from the outside look like it was done on the spur-of-the-moment. But truly, the gal has let the guy know when she's gonna be hot-to-trot. I think this is what God positively implies when saying, "Behold, the bridegroom cometh!" Do you think red-blooded Jesus is going to make the above scheduling mistake? She has passed the message to her bridegroom through his best friend when she wants him to come summit the marriage. After all, what are best friend's for?
The root of the word rigamarole is rigged, pronounced 'reegd'; and, the word 'role' in there seals the doubt. I think here again of what the old pioneer psychiatrist Eric said as universal advice. To no longer be a perpetrating parent or victimized child, rather be an objective adult. "Taking every thought captive to the mind of Christ" equals WWJD.
Really, it's WWJTh--'What would Jesus think?' To wit, "But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man, for he knew what was in man." This is why God brought the flood on the earth, "for every thought of man was only evil continually." There's no funny joke possible there.
And, I want to mind the public business of my heavenly daddy, who's also privately my heavenly mommy who bore me gently and healthfully. And doing that keeps me from the presumptuousness of meddling in someone else's business of the same diversity.
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