The  Ending

       Part  A

          An Earthly ending precedes a Heavenly beginning, where the school of life is over. Then we will apply what we have learned.  There fear will not be a concept anymore.  Only love will prevail as the existing paradigm.  Imagine, we won’t even need to imagine; for the image of the ultimate jinn will be ours, whosoever wants to go home again.

           Here, we should hear again how God Biblically describes it: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it ever entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love Him”.

           Look at tropical fish.  We couldn’t see them in their God-given beauty until recently with the fabrication of rubber and glass to make a face-fitting diving mask.  As hippies, we used to say, ‘Wow, far out, man!’  But, one doesn’t hear any such appreciative admiration in secular scientific circles.  Would praise to God, even as simple written acknowledgement of God, be an impediment to scientific observation?  If not during an experiment, then how about during lunch?  And if during lunch, why not then during your breakfast bowl of Hypothetical Hunch?

          Looking at Hubble satellite photos before bedtime last night, my thinking then carries over to now.  That, the place we call space is too small for a creator.  Jesus explained to the woman at Jacob’s old well that God is spirit, not an increment of spirit, but spirit itself.  And that, God must be approached that way.  Remember, outer, and inner space is physical.  Something much bigger is going on.  'Let’s not eat like a big pig.  Let’s eat like a big snake that eats the pig.  Let’s raise our sights!'

          Yet, “Heaven and earth are filled with thy glory; hosannah in the highest!”  God does enjoy the work of his hands.  So much so, he biblically said he’s going to wrap this one up like a scroll, chuck it in the fireplace, and write a new creation story.  Jesus reminded us that God’s ten rules can be crystalized or condensed into two big ones.  ‘Love the Spirit of Love, God, with everything you’ve got; ‘and love the odd fellow next to you even as much as yourself’.

          So is it science fiction, all of this, or science non-fiction, big-time?  Maybe this is why so much fiction is being read instead of true stories.  Shall we be like in the old movie Being There?  Shirley marries Peter unwittingly, not knowing he’s been raised abusively in front of a television set, abandoned there for years and years.  You know, fed and cleaned, otherwise left there like in a cage.  Frankly, I think Shirley’s character cops out by acquiescing to Peter’s oblivious standard instead of her aware one.  That’s all I remember of the film.

         Part  B

         Well, I’ve got a few notes written to share, then I’ll get out of your way.  Parental love is to be owned, not merely rented.  A box of packaged food that I noticed describes its product as ‘crazy good’.  What kind of mad world is Madison Avenue appealing to there?  For, no way is good crazy, said by a former crazy person.  Crazy is bad.  Good is good.  Where else is hope?

           Actually, advertising gave me work indirectly at Montebello, a grandfather of my employers once a legal advocate for Nabisco, a very cool calm and collected corporation.  My brother Peter sold Count Chocula cereal first thing out of college, after managing the State of Delaware's participation in Hands-Across-America.

           Then Pete got hired by Rosalynn Carter in her scheduling office.  We got to meet she and her man Jimmy.  Pete told Mom, Jamie, and I who was visiting for Christmas to come on over to the lobby, the vestibule of Rosy and Jim Carter's house.  Pete would notify their staff of our arrival, for security.   Because it was the White House.

           A whole bunch of other people were in the White House vestibule also, hoping as we were to visit with the first family.  Who were still visiting with business house guests  from earlier in the day.  Actually for days, for it was Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin.

            They all were over in the east wing of their house hashing out details of agreement.  'Funny word, hashing, those guys coming from that part of the world.  The Carter's helicopter was idling on the lawn for to take them to their mountain cabin at Camp David for X-mas.  I guess their guests would drive home, neither one of a nativity orientation as far out as I know.

           So everybody bided their time in the White House lobby.  We struck up a conversation with a woman with a British accent.  She was a longtime U.S. citizen, but her grand-daughter with her was visiting the United States for a first time.   As a group, our two families  decided to go out back on the lawn to continue waiting.

           There was even more people out there and we walked along in front of the crowd out of anybody's way to find a place to stand and still be able to see any action.  We only found a place way over in the dark by some fir trees.  The Carter's only child Amy Lynn Carter was kicking around on the top step of the helicopter ladder waiting for her parents.

           And out they came, leaving their house guests to depart another way.  Rosalynn 'n Jim Carter came out of the east wing directly adjacent to where we were standing.  They stopped and talked with us.  Our woman acquaintance and her grandchild and Peter chatted with First Lady Rosalynn.  And Jamie and Mom chatted with President Jimmy.  I stood behind all and smiled in amazement.

           Just after the Carters bid their adieu to us, Mom got a last word in to President Carter.  Mom raised her voice a bit necessarily and said, "Jesus bless you Jimmy!"  James Earl Carter Jr stopped his departure to turn around and look Deborah Tovar square in the face and reply, "I thank you; he does."

           A few years later I heard people yelling the same respectful "Yay" for George 'Dad' Bush.  Presidential motorcycles were gathered in front of a Tex-Mex restaurant back over a rise in the street where I rented a studio apartment.  I asked a man across the street to explain.  He was the owner of a restaurant on that side.  And he lamented "I wish the president would visit my restaurant some time"; but Dad Bush favored the Tex-Mex.

           I hurried home, from work as I was, and hungrily ate a half-frozen burrito.  I stepped back outside and started up the street to hear people yelling "Yay" without me.  My point here is, the exclamatory word 'Yay' is also phrased 'Hallelujah'.  God's existence is evident in such instinctive protocol.  Here's another example.

           I've learned to not say 'thank you' to someone who says 'thank you' to me.  Because really, I've re-learned to say what is correctly appropriate in a given situation.   It is to say 'You're welcome' meaning for the service I've rendered to you.  It is because we are made in the image of God.  Who has first rendered unto us the gift of life itself, even his self.   

           Here's another.  The saying 'Have a nice day' is now 'Have a good day'.  I question it in recollection of the man who said to Jesus one day, "Good master."  Who retorted, "Who're you calling good?  There's only one that is good, and that is God."  Jesus spoke as the Son of Man, not only fully divine, but also fully human.  

           I politely add if possible that I'm not a 'bad boy' per the Cops TV show and its theme song.  Note as that is rap hip-hop, so is one of my liners.  It says 'It's a blood pact contract fact, Calvary!'   Then there's the question 'How are you?', so much more pointed than the old 'How're you doing?'  And the answer I usually hear people say is "Good; I'm good!"  'Oh? 

           Did I tell you the especially nice story of John, one of my charges at a group home?  It was my last week working there and over at the women's house and John and I were sitting on the couch watching country-music videos.  And John leaned my way and clearly said "How're you doing?" 

           It surprised me because John had never spoken before to anyone, officially non-verbal.  Charles the house manager who was once given a ride home to Cabin John by Rick Nixon in his presidential limousine dearly loved John, and had given up shaving cantankerous John's face and let him grow an awesome beard, lol.

           It showed me that this minority group of the mentally handicapped do not "show their pearls to pigs" to paraphrase Jesus' words.  And the regional manager came by later and I told him, "Shawn, John talked!"  He said, "There's not a chance in hell that man will ever talk!"  I said nothing in response.  Shawn didn't seem to know-tice what he's missing.

           An interesting book to recommend is by Pierre Berton’s mom.  Pierre was a panelist on the show on Canadian Sunday evening television, Front Page Challenge.  His mom grew up in Dawson Creek, British Columbia.  And, Ms.Berton’s book describes the interesting people she had been neighbors with.  Ms.B. started her book: ‘They say everybody has at least one book in them, so here’s mine’, I Married The Klondike by Laura Beatrice Berton.

          An old story, I was four, and watching my oldest brother’s dog eat in its supper bowl.  He was in our house's parking area, his Malayan name Etam meaning Blackie.  That’s where the servants fed him, there on Kenny Hill in Kuala Lumpur.  From what I saw happen, they may have been in the wise habit of putting Etam’s bowl in the parking area for necessary privacy. 

         The whole event was really quite strange.  There I’m standing in the late afternoon in an empty and quiet driveway-parking area.  The older-aged neighbor girl whom I don’t remember seeing before or after walks in our driveway and right up to the dog.  Seriously, her body language was as if this was her mission in life, at least since she got up that morning and was determined to do this.

         The poor dear must have been spoiled since birth and with no familiarity with animals.  With a confident smile on her face, she started teasing Etam by poking his back with her fingers.  Twice or thrice she did this, Etam turning and growling a fair warning to then turn back to his food.  The tall girl did it again and Etam gave a full chomp on her right forearm.  No artery was cut, but she was seriously punctured.    

         Still thinking about Etam, I remember lying awake in the big bed I shared with Pete.  He was asleep, and Chris over in his crib.  A 20x15-inch window was high up in the wall there.  It afforded a view of the steep hill directly behind the servants’ quarters and chicken coops.  Moon light had the hill clear to see. 

           The hill had a little trail Pete and me would use to go up and play in an excavated pit of small stones.  We called it Crystal Mountain, in our delightful childlike way.  So, I’m lying there staring at where the trail is, and Etam goes trotting by to hunt up there.  

           On the way to school one day in the front seat with the driver, he pointed out some young monkeys playing on a tree branch overhanging the road.  Mom said high above that road a tiger liked to rest on a ledge and watch the cars.

          Another event on Crystal Mountain I think of often is a birthday party.  Apparently, the house highest on Kenny Hill–we were third, the tall girl’s second, on the other side of the road–had a boy about Pete's and my age.  I don’t remember playing with him, only always Peter.  But, Pete and I were invited, along with a dozen other boys.

          The birthday party would be held in their amazing dining room.  It was easily forty  feet long, a separate wing of the house extending straight out of it.  The view from their property was probably much better than ours.  And, we could see the Cameron Highlands far across the big valley.  Plus, their dining-room extension was all glass, completely glassed in.  I wonder what the Malayans would name the Scottish Highlands.

          This story is about the birthday party.  We boys were all hanging around the side patio.  We were rather quiet, most of us strangers to each other.  But then, the call was made to enter the Crystal Mountain birthday party room.  Boy after boy after boy filed in to the great glass room.  Except me, for I was too shy about it.

          I remained seated on a patio chair, content to watch through the glass panels.  All the boys looked like they were having the time of their lives.  I could see Peter in there blowing curly whistles with one hand and shoveling with the other.  The mother came out a time or two to ask me to reconsider.  I remember looking at her kindly face and saying no.

          Part  C

          Yesterday, I listened to Ron Wyatt’s sons (Ron’s dead now, maybe Mary Nell also) recounting their and their dad’s finding of chariot wheels underwater in the accumulated-sand shallow-cross (90-degrees to the coastline) of the Gulf of Aqaba, at the big sand spit.  Erosion since the great flood of Noah has dumped a lot of sand out of the Sinai Peninsula.  North and south from the sandy and shallow crossover to Arabia is very deep water, part of the Rift Valley, I think. 

          That was the first time they had really gone scuba diving, since learning how to, back in Tennessee.  Everything went well, and they successfully filmed numbers of wheels, even one of the fancy gold ones mentioned in the bible text about the exodus escape.  Take a gander yourself; they sure look like chariot wheels.  They’re encrusted, but very distinctly shaped.

           (editor's note, Mike here; i'm trying to find where I mentioned the pillars Solomon set up on both shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, that Ron Wyatt found.  I just listened again to his account of it.  To correct, the pillar on the west side is not Israeli, but Egyptian, and Solomon's engraved words have apparently been erased.  They did stand it upright, positively.

           ...However, when Ron found the eastern pillar, on the Arabian shore, also partly in the water, he could clearly see a vertical list of eight words.  Ron notified authorities in Arabia of its existence.  On the pillar was a vertical listing of single words.  If I may pass them on from Ron Wyatt Archaeology, then they are, top to bottom: Pharoah, Mizraim (which means Egypt), Moses, death, water, YHWH or Yahweh, Solomon, Edom.)

          Another line of history, secular but still interesting, check out if you like the two American guys who, years ago now got to the bottom of why southern Illinois is called Little Egypt.  Their observation is that some children of Roman prisoners of war became lifelong fugitives of Rome when grown up and married.   On YouTube, see their video 'Tomb Tape # 2', as I recall; I'd like to see it again myself.

          Then, they buried their dead as usual up a Nile-like river, including the mummified remains of their ancestor, Alexander.  One of their dads or grand-dads, a Mauritanian was known by Rome as Master of the Atlantean Sea.  Who fell out with Rome and was killed.  The boy would grow up to marry Celine, I think it is, daughter of Cleopatra, who with Marc Antony fell out with Octavian.  They were school-mates, children or orphans as political prisoners.  Later, being familiar with the Nile, they chose a similar river, but safely far from Rome to bury their dead.

          Now, what Nile-like river can you sail straight over to from Morocco/ Mauritania where Grand-dad lived when he fell out of favor with Roman Italy?  Check out their website, the Illinois Cave(s) Mystery, especially one particular cave, a man-made one.  Because, there’s no natural caves in southern Illinois ( Mississippi–Ohio–Wabash–Little Wabash watershed).   

          Also to note, if you’re wondering how I freely speak in terms of Euro-African and American sail-and-oar maritime activity, Columbus wouldn’t have even tried his trip without the ancient precedents of the likes of people we’re talking about, especially with the orienteering accomplishments of the fifteenth century Chinese explained publicly now by Gavin Menzies.

          And if you’re unaware of it, rowing up a river is done on the sides, along the banks with the dependable back-current there.  You can use the sail when you need to cross the river, if there’s wind to do it.  Note, later ships were strictly sail, many lost in the doldrums of the Sargasso Sea in the central Atlantic, not equipped to row out of it.

          Okay, back to the deep black sea (for real shark stories, read the ornithologists’ stories of sidelining their bird-watching with sub-surface filming of the great whites at the Farallon Islands.  The book is called, The Devil’s Teeth (the traditional nickname for the islands, no offense to the whites).  

          Part  D

          Alright, the born-again experience.  I took another glance today online at some people’s explanation of baptizing babies.  The Philippian jailer’s family precedent is a plausible one, like a tribal phenomenon.  I mean a truly tight-spirited and respectful one.  I saw a photo on Samuel Martin's website of him christening one of his baby daughters.  Sam's free ebook Thy Rod And Thy Staff, They Comfort Me is what informed me of King James' errors translating Solomon's proverbs.

          For me, God didn’t ‘big move’ in my life until I was twenty.  And, the old Israelite custom of only accepting members into the military at age twenty seems to be similar.  It was like God said, ‘Dear dude, the dropoff into blackness on that coral atoll is where the action is; go there’.  Joan of Arc certainly followed her conscience into battle and certainly outclasses Bonaparte in napoleonic retrospect, I'd say.

          As I think of the new birth, the prerequisite for human entrance into God’s eternal kingdom per Jesus’ clear words to Sneaky-Poo Nicodemus–he snuck over to Jesus’ camp at night for fear of his fellow Sanhedrin, and Jesus used a megaphone and blew Nic’s cover anyway–we are given a distinct analogy of the experience. 

          It’s a state-of-the-art clothing of both female and male bodies in individual armor.  From head to toe, the Christian is to be dressed in the full wardrobe, helmet, breastplate, loin shell, treaded sandals like football or baseball cleats, the sword of a Roman soldier.  Babies don’t wear that.  Women and men do.  We are in a spiritual war wearing figurative armor.

          I agree that children can be part of the army, and Mel Tari has Timorese-Indonesian stories of this.  Neither do I begrudge anyone, any youngster, for waiting until age twenty.  But even for dunderhead me, it was a maximum.  And hey, if a sixteen-year-old,  can fly a plane around the planet then strap on your headset, pardner.  That was Mack Rutherford following in the footsteps of his older sister Zara, both following the rest of the aviating Rutherford family.

           And really, like I said with me, you’ll know it when God moves big in your given life, if you’ve noticed previous small moves by him.  Him.  Is God an it?  He's certainly 'what it's all about'.  And I know, being born again is 'the' matter of life and death. But, it's on God's timing, of course, as we don't 'wait' to be born.

         I am thinking of one example, seemingly very small, but real.  I had stepped down a driveway or alley, night time, off a main street in Bangkok to piss against a little coconut  tree.  It was city dark and the stars were visible.  There by the fronds of the tree was the big dipper, and I spoke to God in my mind, ‘That’s your constellation, isn’t it, God’. 

           That constellation's seven stars matched what I had read in God's book about the number seven.  Now I know the seven stars represent God as heavenly father, generically.  And, the two stars on the right side of the dipper point over to the stationary north star as Jesus Christ.  Who is "the same yesterday, today, and forever."  It reminds of God quoted as speaking publicly one time, “This is my beloved (child/son); hear him”.

           One evening here in PA I was out behind what my child called the pine noodle tree.  A meteor shower was scheduled, but I hadn't seen any.  So I entertained myself looking at the Father God's seven stars pointing at Jesus' unchanging Pole Star or North Star.  I had to be patient with that too until my Daddy God put one right by it so very intimately.

           Near where I live now in Virginia as I'm re-editing this essay a year later are a pair of houses that are remarkable.  I'd only driven by them, across the road from each other, when I used to live over there on the other side of them twenty years ago at Montebello (north of town, Zachary Taylor's birthplace of the same name south of town).  Recently I was talking with a fellow by the family name of Gilmore.

           I asked Mr. Gilmore if he's local and he answered "Yes, my family had the Gilmore property" (a preserved heritage-site slave cabin across from James Madison's Montpelier heritage site).  Besides the view from inside the woods of the front yard and looking up the driveway to Madison's house from which he constitutionalized life for these united states of North America, the harmonious contrast of the two dwellings is interesting to see from sea to sea.

          Of women warriors, did you read the report of Pizarro's subordinate?  His orders were to drop down east off the Andes and find where the Amazon begins.  Which of course is all over the place down there.  He was supposed to climb back thru the snow-capped mountains and report on it.  He stayed with the fresh fruit, but got in trouble for it.

           The Amazon network was just as much work as the Andes.  Plus, some of the people locally tried to kill him and his group.  One observation he made was of women who fought more significantly than their men.  Skylar, here, repeat state champion javelin thrower (seconded by little sister, Taylor) was also football free-safety and cornerback.

            Being wrong is my song; 'wanna' learn it?  Some of you may yet be working through the wrench/diaper discovery that we've been horrendously mistaken about spanking children.  Yo-Yo here is happily past that and working as a male on the adult version.  The magnitude of the situation definitely requires ye' old focus on the helping hand of God in Jesus Christ, even "the Spirit of Christ", the famous Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost, same thing.

          Part  E 

          Individual, non-cookie cutter people is what God wants.  Look at Jesus’s friends, formerly called disciples–and they needed it, discipline–they were essentially useless until born-again by the Holy Spirit like electric power to energize a battery bunny.  Should we encourage our children to play with toy swords and warriors? 

           Is there a cut-off point, safely, where the spiritual can be transitioned into?  I say be spiritual from the start, even to teach policing as a unique vocation.  Meaning guns, as was responsibly done by all citizens in past U.S. generations, less the ridiculously ammunitioned military weapons of today.  It's supposed to be hunting not cheating.

          As Harry Houdini perfectly practiced from early childhood his escape skills, so we ought to apply God's ten commandments.  For example, it would enhance our lives to apply The Almighty's second injunction.  About graven images of created entities, I am enthralled to think of the benefit of heeding it, if it hasn't been deleted from The Text.   

           It follows logically that hitting children leads to shooting children.  "Come out from among them and be ye separate", says The Lord.  You can't wrongly separate others if you're busy correctly separating yourself, from the world of man, of befuddled cuddling with strangers.  "For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ".

           I remind per the YouTube audio recording of deleted cell phone data of a purported satanist, every supernaturally and spiritually digital action gets permanently recorded.  I for one want my diligent accomplishments acknowledged eventually by the great one with whom we all have to do.  In the meantime, I use God's faithfulness, not any of my own to do that; middlemen beware.

          That’s quite a dual option in Thailand, either war or peace for two years for their young men.  Would that their monks find out what’s really going on in the spiritual ether.  Really, military or monastery, to realize “The battle is The Lord’s” because it’s too big for us would change everyone’s ‘modus operandi’.

         I know I grew up thinking sticks were battle weapons.  Certainly, the perspective of peace as priority and maintained by a police force is helpful, by God.  I read once that police families socialize tightly, because everybody, even extended family is nervous around them.  Is that like being the salt of the Earth or the light of the world?  ‘Exciting but lonely?  God bless police, nice ones; and, most are. 

          Police have a hard job to do with the likes of us, maybe too hard sometimes.  After a public accusation of police brutality, I looked on YouTube to get educated about it.  I saw over ten videos with accusatory titles, but each one was hypocritical.  All I saw in every single video were the most amazingly courteous and patient professional people I've ever seen, more than the furniture movers I had the honor to work with once.

         I didn't tell a bad story about myself.  You may be wondering why I dealt with blacking out so handily in the diving pool.  I had learned about the phenomenon a couple of years earlier.  A close friend of Alan and Peter and myself was Alan's next-door neighbor, Jay.  Jay was an only child and lived in the original farmhouse around which on three sides the suburban houses were put in.  

          The house was along the highway and hillcrest, along River Road.  Jay's dad made her a fabulous playhouse, long with lots of room for toys and space to play with them.  One time we guys went in there when Jay wasn't home and violently threw Jay's toys around.  I remember throwing Jay's toy piano a long way.  I can still hear it ringing wrongly as I tell you this.

           It was indeed wrong and must have been a sad shock to Jay when she went in there next.  Well, I think God punished me for it, and probably indirectly my parents for their negligence.  What happened was, Jay had a birthday party that summer in their big backyard.  They were country people and brought in ponies for riding.  An honest mistake that Jay's parents made was to rent or buy a playing apparatus the likes of which I'd never seen before or ever did after.  

          It was too dangerous and probably taken off the market.  It was a metal teeter totter that revolved on a tripod.  A third child would revolve it by standing in the center and pushing in circles as they riskily had to skip over the tripod legs while doing so.  A big boy friend of all of ours in the neighborhood was the pusher for a girl and myself.  And maybe it was a quadripod.

          She was Teresa who lived in the house by the entrance to the Catholic church-school where she was not a student.  Our pusher was Philip with whom I went to public school kindergarten.  Philip was big and very strong and somewhat slow of mind; Alan told me recently that Philip has died.  

           And once Philip got the hang of skipping over the quadripod legs, he got Teresa and me going at maximum speed.  You could hear the disturbed wind in your ears as we revolved, for we were going very fast.  Both Teresa and I went into legitimate panic mode and screamed at Philip to stop. 

           Philip continued turning us as fast as possible and laughing delightedly as he did it.  I saw Teresa at her end of the teeter pole starting to become unable to hold on to her handles.  When Teresa of a sudden lost her grip and back-flipped away, I went down within the range of the totter.  

           I stayed alert and mistakenly looked up to find a way out of range and got hit straight on.  It knocked out one of my brand-new front teeth so fully there was no root left.  And neither was the tooth found.  By the way, this apparatus was not the standard and safe backyard toy we all saw a lot of in the later sixties.  

          That would have movable secondary poles between the feet and hands of both participants.  Which allowed for total control of speed, including revolving on a level plane, even while getting up to speed.  Before I lifted my head up you could still hear the pole and seats whipping the wind audibly. 

           I hope nobody else experienced this, children at that age still with soft skulls.  I also did badly over at a construction site that same year.  On a Saturday we guys were standing around the empty site and made a common focus of the possible connection between a pile of new bricks and a newly-installed living room window.  

          We speculated on the excitement of making the connection for a few minutes.  I felt bored with further theorizing and picked up a brick and did it.  You know, until telling you this story of badness, I never had made the connection between that thrown brick and my throwing arm a few years later.  Jesus innocently spilled his blood for my guilt, and my parents'.   Again about symptomatic instead of cause prevention, children have it the worst.

          Hey reader, as I re-edit, I'm looking for the place in the text, not indexed, where I say that Adventist Christians don't think, 'many' of them, that Jesus is the incarnated God.  I've been reading around as research and I stand corrected.  Their idea is simply to equate Michael with pre-incarnate appearances of Jesus. 

           Examples are claiming the dead body of Moses from Satan, and as one of the three angels passing by Abraham's tent on the way to judge the sodomy town, and as the fourth, mystery guy surviving the "seven times hotter" flames at the bullying hand of King Nebuchadnezzar.

           Note, a place of eternal punishment or "hell" is indeed rejected by some or all or many Adventists.  Today's case in point is that the cruelty of slow torture with no rescue in sight of a sentient organism either non-human or human is a case of tit for tat.  Period. 

           See my text farther on here for further elaboration on a place of eternal torment.  As the slogan says, 'God don't make junk' and treasures his treasure, especially "in that day when I take up my jewels" (, saith The Lord).  God's children are his jewels in Jesus, both spontaneous or positively combustive.  Heaven or Bust !

         And I just noticed that the 'adventist' description, excuse me I mean the 'seventh day' description is from a development in history of understanding the manipulation of God's bible book in this regard, for political reasons, socio-political reasons. Meaning, some Adventists became aware of the lost treasure of God's seventh day of rest and contemplation and fellowship, a spiritual deep-sea treasure.

           Part  F    

          Whether we know about Jesus or not, the system still applies.  It's nice to know directly about Jesus to allow God's justice and mercy to directly help our lives.  We are responsible for The Teacher's class material regardless of contact-reception mode.  By the way, Alan told me Jay became a side-saddle horse riding champion.  Alan also told me Jay's dad was elected to be the county's sheriff chief.

         If we could see the real warriors fighting in the heavenlies, we’d be perspected a bit.  Bad ruffians on a Christian mission field were ready to chop up a missionary family one night but observed a reason to think twice about it.  Inside, Dad perceived how serious the situation was, that death was guaranteed if they stayed inside the house.  He prayerfully said, ‘I think we should leave the house’.  The band of murderous thugs parted ways, maybe like the Red Sea/Gulf of Aqaba.  Later, Dad asked one of the sobered up guys what happened.

        The guy said, ‘You were goners, chop-suey on the stove.  But, when you and your family walked out of the house, immediately big guys appeared, armed big guys, walking with you!’  My final thought, said on the basis of talking in the open here about what really is going on in life and death, is the application of the why and wherefore of action. 

           The winning factor, God backing it up, is the child of God’s immovable love of the truth.  I mean grace and truth as embodied in Jesus, grace God's undeserved kindness to us, truth God's inspired written bible, also the mental communion we have with our conscience, literally God's mind with ours.

          I mean truth as displayed in God’s precious and gorgeous realm of nature, of babies and butterflies.  This is where love is stronger than death, where the deciding factor of whether gold will purify to the point of clarification is the application of the golden rule, one to another, purifying it.  For, we are the impure gold in question, everybody, thugs ‘n drugs, we’re all made in the image of God initially and then each of us messes up, needing God's redemption in Christ Jesus.

          We all have, unless mentally handicapped, which is not craziness, the capacity to realize that I need, we need to start over, not just a new leaf, but uprooting the whole tree.  The second great commandment is exactly the golden rule, not the golden calf, or the yellow brick road, but the persuasion of love.   Love persuades.  Hate, and fear, coerce, others, ourselves.

         The unbridled love God talks about is like what Jesus said about the water that would flow out of our bellies, living water out of our God-blessed bowels of mercy.  'By Jesus, I used to be a hippie, but now I’m a happy'.

          Don’t complain about darning a run in your sock, just do it although it’s not a matter of ‘just do it,’ rather do it right, ‘right Mary Cain?   ‘Atta girl!

          Let Mary’s deprived chance at Olympic metal be everyone’s analogy, of training for the gold of God’s heaven, in Jesus Christ, by the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.  We want a child to be ideally in awe of their pa ‘n their ma, as unto the Ancient of Days.  But, we do not want a child to grow up miserably in a process where they might say, ‘Aww, Dad, Mom, you failed me’.  God will still be in position to heal that scenario, but let’s scrape a few more barnacles off the bottom of the boat.  

          Part  G

          So, today, I wrote extensive notes as ideas, then condensed it into, what else, one-liners.  A few are two-liners.  I’ll type ‘em out and edit what we got.  

          Worldly religious venues hand out programs and entertain for a fee.  Does your church?  Shouldn’t a church-assembling have an unexpected venue and be for free?  They do in God’s bible story.  Does Jesus cry “All ye, All ye, come in for a fee?”  Christianity is voluntary.  And note, preachers are pointers; 'question is, who are they pointing to.

          King Herod preached a ‘great’ secular ‘sermon’ one day, then fell down visibly eaten by worms.  I understand that was a miraculous and novel case of maggots eating proud flesh.  You do know the little gummies eat only junk, like on the Grinch's teeth.   They do, too; I saw them, my great coat packed to the gunwales with Chinese take out, no MSG, no 'hidden messages'.

           “Study the Word to be approved of God”; that’s it, ‘no busybody looking over your shoulder, to take some of God’s glory away from him.   God is our counselors, instructors and teachers; we should look over their shoulders from the rear.  A preacher should lay God’s Word before us as if she or he was a servant to a king.  No, not us; we’re not the king; I mean serving our fellow man “as unto The Lord”.

          This is also how God Biblically describes the mindset of a married woman.  She is to work it out with her man “as unto The Lord”.  This is assuming the guy is imitating Jesus exactly as he can.  And, if it ain’t enough, the option is there to separate.  This option is for both, to then wait it out one way or the other until by God’s hand death do us part.  This is for both the integrity of any children as well as ourselves.  If you like wolves, you’ll like marriage.  The narrow way is the only way through the valley of the shadow of death.

          To young or old, new or not, if you haven’t tried it, memorize some of God’s psalmic poetry, plus some of Jesus' words in bloody red if you happen to have that kind of bible-book. Really, just go left and right at your Holy Spirit-led leisure and enjoy what appeals to you. Put it in the pocket of your heart like a child’s treasure.  It will help you talk with Almighty God.  And get a grasp of the whole thing for contextual perspective.

           I first started memorizing when I was a night-watchman.  One of the psalms in a pocket-size bible-book I was reading mentioned a night-watchman talking meditatively with God as he watched and walked around.  The same one mentions containing oneself on a solo bed, thinking of someone else besides ourself, namely God.

          That 'nightwatchman psalm' is number sixty-three.  My eventual to date string of pocket treasures to recite for fun and direct fellowship with God are #'s 90, 116, 117, 138, 62, 139, 63, 50, 23, and 42.  That first one is known as the song of Moses.  Really it's a prayer by Moses, that speaks for each of us, hopefully.  Moses' prayer says a lot about him of course, also.

          Of charismatic activity, I tried that for about a year as a young Christian.  At the end of a session of soulical expression, I would find I hadn’t grown a millimeter.  Like a child wanting to mature so that he’ll stop messing up so much, it’s peace I wanted.  It’s that peace of mind we hear about, real mental composure.  “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee”.  That includes what God thinks, not only man.

           Nonsensical tongue talking and hyper hippy hopping is faithless folly.  'Faith cometh by the hearing of the (real) word of God".  The tongue talking at Pentecost was a real miracle of language learning enabling the early christian brethren to jump start the sharing of Gods good news in Jesus worldwide.  A study of the history of the English bible shows the apostle Simon Zelotes pioneering the good news in Britain relative months after Pentecost. 

           In France, the apostle Philip sent Joseph of Arimathea to Britain also, according to John Foxe in his book of early martyrs.  The new testament gospels and letters were immediately transcribed directly into the Gothic and Anglo-Saxon languages.  Then the Old English and Middle English languages were used to articulate the Word of God. 

           Records of these writings are well recorded in history as well as the same happening in Celtic Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Ethiopia, India, Persia, and points in between and adjacent.  If you haven't heard it, then someone repressed what your ancestors heard.  Heard was and is God's invitation to worship him alone, and not the dumb idols of our disinterested and self-centered imagination.

          Of peace, with the Frederick furniture crew one day we delivered to a brick rambler along the Monocacy, like the Juniata here.  What a beautiful place, a full yard gently sloping to the river all around and easy to mow.  We got the piece in there, they did, me tidbit-helping their skilled patience. 

           As we were walking out of the living room saying goodbye to the standing woman, I noticed her man sitting on the couch staring straight ahead.  I asked if he’s alright and she said he had a stroke.  I said I’m sorry and she said “I’m not”.  I asked why and she said, “Because he’s been screaming at me at the top of his lungs for 34-years and I rather like the quiet”.

          Part  H

          Criticism is practical, skepticism a waste of time.

          Don’t be like a tornado torn between do and don’t.

          A pulpit should be a place beyond fiction.

         I’ve heard trees fall and I much prefer to hear them stand.

          Sadism and masochism begin in the bathroom, on the scale and in the mirror, and should end there.

         We should be kind to the blind as God is to every one of us bats.  Last night I read the bible story of Jesus mixing a paste for a man’s lifelong dark eyes.  When I read the word spat, my spouse in the next room said the word spit at the same instant.  She was wanting our child to hurry up and finish brushing his teeth.  I hope God’s shown his power like that with you many times.  Remember, God knows we spoil easily, but he especially encourages us periodically. 

          To happily and securely note here as I finish editing/proofreading,  the exact-same type of thing occurred last evening, two in a row.  Yes, my spouse was routining our child toward bedtime and when she said one particular word, I was reading the very-same word on the screen, here.  And, I mean not a split-second behind or ahead.  To me, that is my only daddy ‘n mommy God saying, ‘I know you’re at your wits end, and I will be with you to the end’.  

          The above spit + spat were the first such coincidence that has not been the exact word, having happened many times before elsewhere in the house and bake shop.  Night number two of the same was the exact word, as usual, and with, as always no time difference, exactly simultaneously.  And, I forget what the word was, my brain so full of words during this process of editing-proofreading.  I am pleased to also mention the next night, a third in-a-row saw similar. 

           I was reading the line of Del’s Theomatics as God’s mathematics and my spouse stressed the word math, at the moment I read the first syllable of that full word , to our child about his homework.  I typed an explanation of this elsewhere in this essay, maybe on this page, and will delete it as a double, if I find it.  ‘Excuse the inefficiency and imperfection of editing on my part.

          Four times it’s happened by God’s reassuring hand, in one week.  Just now, and having been away for two days from this writing project, yesterday, last night in my bed, I thought of the above liner about bathroom brilliance.  Here today, I had just tacked it in up there, and was looking back for correct spelling.  And, my spouse in the next room stressed the word mirror in saying something to our child.  God sees us in intimacy.

           It was precisely when I re-read the word I had just typed.  And, you, my dear reader, are providentially part of this experience of it.  Oh, and I didn’t know where in this ‘The Ending’ section I mention these coincidences happening.  After the fact of typing in that latest one-liner, I started scrolling to find my exclamatory explanation of their divine occurrences, and here they are, just following.  God really makes things easy for us, us complicating things.  

          Note, it’s April 19th, going on four months and the final proofreading, metadata prepared for publishing—excuse my spelling errors, logic voids, grammar, etc.-–anyway, last evening, proofreading, my spouse said the word ‘while’ to our child in the room next-door, while I read the very word on my chromebook screen doing this editing. 

           That's five times in one week, hearing my spouse in the next room say a word I'm typing or reading.  ‘Sublime ain’t the word for all this life God shares with us.  I don’t know about you, but if I would kill anything, it would be death.  And, Jesus sensibly did it without violence, rather with peace and abundance, super-abundance of life, supernatural overpowering of death by independent life.

          You know, what's been the main topic of thinking for me, and I shared it with my family, when in town, two days go, I met a woman whose new-born great-grand-daughter had to have her entire digestive system removed.  The girl is now in third-grade, accompanied by a nurse.  At night, an intravenous system nourishes her metabolism. 

           I thought to mention this related to the above phenomenon of our spirit creator and sustainer being mentally oriented.  My question is, Where is our mind located, along with emotions through hormones and flesh?  Our intestines, we know, are tied in closely with our brain.  Let us be happy to be alive, grateful and respectful, and to have guts in the way of courage.

         So, what, is it hell or heaven that’s going on around here?

         If you like wolves, you’ll like marriage--they marry for life, probably with better foresight then we have.

         If you have a pig on your stomach or monkey on your back, ask the inventor of pigs and monkeys to help you.

         Internet technology is physical and only a platonic allegory to heavenly reality.

         That old statue of a naked wise guy sitting with an elbow on a knee and his chin on a fist looks like he’s sitting on the toilet, and constipated.  Through Moses, God told us to be wary of graven images.  Islam is correct to shun such mental dissuasions.  A Mennonite family I visited had a corner cabinet chock full of tourist souvenir figurines. 

           I shared the observation from global experience that many people of so-called  pagan and non-Christian cultures would say, "Wow, you have a lot of gods!"  Who's the pagan, for Jesus said "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" ?  And aren't such little souvenirs nicknamed 'our little treasures'?  You know, when anyone travels to a foreign country, it is wise to study up on what is insulting to people of that culture.  One man's graven image is another man's figurine and never the twain shall meet.  Heaven is very much a foreign country, so shouldn't we study up on its customs beforehand?

           Family friends had a stuffed full-size tiger in their basement.  You walk down the steps unsuspectingly, turn, and it's along the wall, right there.  Read Jim Corbett's story of meeting the Queen of Shivers or whatever her earned name was.  'Going on three-hundred human kills, Jim said she had a smile on her face when they both met very awkwardly.

           Jim Corbett also perceptively titled a chapter in one of his hunting story books, The law of the jungle.  In it Jim mentions what he observed in a clearing within his view from a tree stand one quiet morning.  Jim also included a story of a local family's two very small children who together wandered into the woods and got lost.  They were found in the morning alive to the surprise of many.  Discover God's jungle law for yourself.  In fact Jim's introductory story of his first meeting with a tiger as a ten-year-old there in India is right in line with this.

         Jesus’ bible is a bubble for the tired little princesses and princes of this world.

         God wrote that war and conflicts are caused by greedy lust.

         People who cash in on people’s guilty consciences will have hell to pay.

         A note to share on hell that I thought of this morning, a third proof I could give you is–if I didn’t say it already; I’m really straining the sails and mast(s) and rigging in this essay project–and don't you fall overboard--that, God biblically writes about some people being punished with many whip strokes, while others will receive fewer.

         Do you own a type of chair called a busy-boy and never use it?

         Ken Cascio’s Wicked Shepherds website is useful for learning.

         The print size of God’s contract with us is big.

          Fantasy never quite makes it to fun, even at sea.

          Lust might insist it’s love, but it’s not.

          The question is not which comes first, wisdom or smarts, but which comes last.

          Role reversal can never be soul reversal.

          Pray for me, don’t prey on me.

          Spear pressure as police force is reasonable when properly executed, but peer pressure never has a useful point to make.

           In Christian cozy-couple college, she is a student of our-tistry and his-story, he a student of mirror-image technology, united face-to-face in the phases of life.

           It bears repeating, contentment and chocolate don’t always fit into a small tent.  Friends told me the story of their first night of friendship as newlyweds, camping.  All food was safely left in the car, except a bar.  And a third soul wanted some of it, a Davey Crockett bar’ and put a paw right through the tent wall to politely receive a share, and give a scare, shoo’d off a bear.

          In 10th-grade J.V. football, Tony had powered it forty yards to the two-yard line.  It was given to me to put it through, but I couldn't.  An opening in the igloo pile-up above me saw the referee trying to see success or failure on my part.  I would fail by yelling out, ‘I’m over, Ref!’  He lifted his arms in the touchdown sign.  But, my arms would ever hang by my side.

         Imagine we’re at the disco and I ask you, ‘Hey, can you do the kundalini?  At Portsmouth, an alumnus gave a full demonstration on the science lecture hall table.  In the question-and-answer period afterwards, everyone was in shocked silence except the young monk Anselm.  He was sweet and respectful, yet firm and clearly not impressed.  Anselm died soon after from cancer or something.  Mom told me that divinely pushy Sara Blakey died of a brain tumor soon after she stopped me from bleeding to death. 

          Part  I

          An important story in this essay is the lack of surprise of someone who never heard of Jesus.  But, in their life, they loved the spirit of love that they saw so beauteously all around them, despite God’s correct curse on man’s selfish evil.  And, when they wake up from the sleep or blink of death, there they see the personification of the love they honored and treasured in the life they lived. 

           But, knowing about Jesus, even knowing the great God of old in Jesus is the best gossipy news any of us could ever hear.  And, Jesus didn't say to gos-sip his living water, but to drink deeply of his well of salvation.  To know someone is to love them.  God knows us; and he invites us in Jesus to know him, "redeeming all men (that's you) unto himself".

          Thus, gospel preaching and bible reading is an opportunity to learn about the lover of our souls ahead of time.  And, repentance is the first expression of love and the basis of any person’s appreciation.  “He (or she) who has been forgiven much, loves much”.  Forgiveness is God’s subsequent reciprocation to our repentance to him.  What this does is free us to do what we really want, which is to love him and one another in simplicity.

        I stepped into a megachurch I’d been invited to and a young man was telling about his mission-visit to Calcutta.  He said he watched a woman die on the sidewalk.  And, he lamented that she is now in hell because he couldn’t tell her not to go or whatever.  It was all I could do to refrain from going down the amphitheater-like seating arrangement and give the guy some of his own advice.

          This morning, I woke up thinking of the woman I heard interviewed on YouTube.  The dear is a professional seamstress working at a western company shirt factory in Calcutta.  Her lament was that she could only afford a house that had no bathroom, a toilet room.  Sweetie had to walk a quarter-mile to the neighborhood latrine.  The polite and patient woman didn’t mention the obvious.  That, she probably has to wait in line once she gets there.  I told this to my son, off school today.

          I don’t play cards, not the race card, not the gender card, not the religion card.  ‘Deal, and let the cards lie.

          “The marriage bed is undefiled” until it’s undefined.

          Don’t let a social pressure-cooker’s vent hole get plugged.

          God wants pliable people, not stiff steeples.

          While only Jesus lived and died with no regret, he invites us to start over and do the same.

          Heaven is a place prepared, and hell is a place prepared, and I eat powdered mustard.

          Only God is on time; everybody else is under it.

          There's no stupid question, unless we ask it over and over again, like we do.

          To think everything good is a gift is the greatest lift.

          To repeat, the customer is always right, maybe not correct, but always right.

          God is the guide; his working name is Jesus.

          Assert yourself, Ma'am!

           Chance waits for everyone.

          Jesus’ followers are his flowers, and "God knows those who are his”.  On my way to visit Niagara Falls but first Toronto, in the bus station snack bar, full at lunch time, I blurted out, ‘Can anyone here give me information about the city of Toronto?’  A man on a stool swiveled, showing one arm in a sling, ‘Seeing as I was once Director of Information for the City of Toronto, yes, I could probably help you’.  

          We spent four days together, George Erwin Fleury, my dad’s age, a medaled wounded captain in the Canadian army, fourteen generations of Fleury’s behind him, all florists. He visited the home village during the war, and knew the Latin names of every plant I pointed at, not a florist, but an amateur expert. Every man in the Odd Fellows’ Home owed George money.  He had ‘em cornered and marketed to the individual, in the name of Jesus Christ.

           At a restaurant, I displayed arrogance and disrespect to someone we were talking with in the booth across from us.  After they left, George fumed at me in disgust.  When we got back to The Home for him, he asked me if I would be so inclined as to wash his feet.  I said 'yes' and we went up a side flight of stairs to a utility sink.  George's feet were neglected in his crippled old age.  Typically, I didn't even get the point of it as I put a fresh pair of socks on him.

          Part  J

          Our daily grind of grain bread reminds to mind God's own grind of bloody sweat for us.  

          Still thinking of meat-eating, I did once successfully make Indonesian soybean tempeh.  It was delectable, the one time I made it correctly.  I used the wet-clothes drying closet attached to the chimney in the farmhouse kitchen.  Of meat, after the flood, God mentioned to Noah that animals were now fare game. 

           The uniform and protective atmospheric vapor canopy had been lifted.  God also said the animals would run, which meant raptors before the flood came at you.  And, Jesus correctly said that it's not what goes into our mouth that defiles us, but the words that come out or our fingers write. 

          A note and story about cannibalism, besides the earlier spiritual one from Jesus, I read of a European explorer or visitor to old Africa.  He was in the east-central part, generally, and decided to hike to the west-central part of Africa, to the Atlantic Ocean.  They skirted the thick woods for most of it by using the savannah lands.  They got way out west there, and then dipped south into the forest. 

           His crew was very nervous, about cannibalism, and some deserted.  He made it in and out of there, even striking up a friendship with a tribal chief.  After getting a language system established between them, including sign language, the two guys were sitting on a bench or log, talking.  The European inquired again, as numerous times before about cannibalism.  His African contemporary put him off again, denying a cannibalism habit. 

          At a subjective moment in their conversation, the African said to the European in passing, and maybe it was partly signed, “The best part is what you’re sitting on”.  That is a comparatively benign aspect of traditional habitual cannibalism, worse being deeper things of Satan in trance and religious decadence, deep decadence.  I did hear the Maori started it up when their diet ran out of sufficient fat. 

           I suppose a trance is standard.  The island of Guadalupe was cannibalistic, observed Christopher, and the Chinese before him.  Children ran to him and held on to his legs for safety.  He took them over to Puerto Rico or maybe Domingo after disbanding things on big G.

           You know, they were on an island.  Jesus gets us all, or can get us all back to Ararat and Eden, and on to his father’s promised land.  Recall or read his conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s old well, also the ‘Alive’ story of the Uruguayan soccer team, written by Piers Paul Read.

                  If children are only to be seen, wherefore God’s Word “from the mouth of babes”?

          Unresolved fear and unsolved hatred ties the laces of our spirits’ shoes together.

          God calls us to be born again, not bored again and again.

          What we do now we’ll do forever, this best and tiny destiny of ours.

          Pillow fights always take the down escalator.

          Christians look in on each other, not down on each other.

          Everyone likes to win, and ‘love never fails’.

          You may call it unity, but you might not find me in it.

           “(We) know not what spirit (we) are of”, until by God’s grace we do.

            We weren’t here before, and we won’t be after, so let’s stop thinking we’re the immovable cohesion of the cosmos.

            As a little guy trying to fall asleep one Kama-Sutra Christmas Eve, I positioned my legs and arms in such a way that if I died in my sleep those who might find me in the morning would think of what a noble child I was.

           If we would only ignore our proud genetics for a moment, we could better see our hidden agendas.

          The choice is ours as a neutral heaven watches us: we can wisely go for glory later, or foolishly glow for gory now.

           For sports fans, consider what I think about, ‘Competition is at best a petition with self, success merely an increment of doing better.’

           It is simplistic to think that by looking at similarities differences will take care of themselves.

          A stranger told me I’m a chance branch that can make a treehouse like an orangutan, run like a deer, swim like a fish, dive like an eagle, farm, catch a plane, talk with my creator, and needlessly invent camouflage; 'Eden, not evolution.

           All God's winners are former sinners.

           The truth may not be legal but it is divine and follows God's policy of winner takes all.

           Are you cooking the books of a seared conscience?

           A lost man loses his temper while a found man finds it.

           A lost man thinks not for himself only of himself.

           “Gird up the loins of your mind” or informally ‘Flex the butt of your brain’.

           Like astute business-people, let Christians consider the features and benefits of their shared offering.

          Tears of Godly appreciation water the flowers of a nation.

          Jesus keeps his authority to himself, and let no one tell you differently.

          If we can’t be satisfied here, we won’t be satisfied anywhere.

          If Jesus said he’s the door, then we definitely shouldn’t slam it.

          If it feels good to give and we don’t, then we’re stupid bad.

          Like a Japanese assembly line, anyone has the God-given right to push the ‘Stop, something’s wrong’ button.

          I appreciate you saying ‘Patience pays’, and know I look forward to sitting in heavenly places in Christ Jesus with you.

          Before God had to place a cursed parameter for Eve and Adam’s wrong willfulness, love birds did not eat cuddle bugs, they only played together.

          Part  K

         Awareness of our common origin and extended family derivation through Adam and Eve, and Noah and his, clarifies our global perspective of one another.  Again, check Nick Ligouri’s excellent compilation of stories from ancient global cultures, of Noah’s flood and after that, the dispersion of peoples from Babylon worldwide.

          God biblically says , “To him (respectively and generically) who considers his way (before me) will I show the salvation of God”, giving us access to the real amusement park, the real picnic, the real honeymoon, the real rich children’s life of leisure, the real reality of adventure and worth.  But, he means he wants our attention, pretty much all of it.  He wrote a book of explanation, of who he is and who we are, The Holy Bible.

          And, he gave us common sense enough to make sense of it.  He also came himself to demonstrate, just as he was kindly in the habit of doing in Eden with Eve and Adam.  Note, a new precedent of gender equality is realistically exemplified when Paul addresses Prisca (his nickname for Priscilla) and Aquila, a couple, in one of his letters to a group, in that order.  

         Plus, this gender equality is also anticipated in the old testament by Jeremiah.  He pens God’s thought by saying, “Behold, a woman compasses a man”.  This means God is inviting Israel, even the Israel of God, as a woman as we know, to seek after him instead of always him after her.

         By the way, Jeremiah’s words there have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus contextually, as some think.  An ironic factor does exist where Joseph looks the other way at Mary’s apparent unloyalty.  An angel clarifies for Joseph the bigger situation than he’s seeing.  The Hebrew in the passage by Isaiah actually is “young woman”, not some virgin maiden, necessarily.  

         However, she coincidentally is a virgin as gleaned from eyewitness accounts.  What is a most important fact to know is that she was miraculously inseminated by God himself.  For, the Text of God says she will name him ‘God with us’.  And, that young woman conceived by God.  Which, again, the John Holdemans do not believe, Church of God in Christ, Mennonite.

          Before I met Ralph W. Emerson in the San Jose bus station, I had taken the scenic route along the oceanside.  I hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours since Tokyo the day before.  Coming in to land at Sea-Tac, an enormous cloud bank offshore announced an imminent end to some sunny summer weather for the mainland.  The fog set in that evening before the bus was even out to the coast.  I was in a front seat for foggy viewing of sheep jumping over a fence.

          I awoke when a new passenger sat next to me where I was by the window.  We chit-chatted and I told her I wanted to view the scenic coastline.  I soon fell asleep again until my seatmate elbowed me awake.  We were in foggy view of the full ocean now, and I fell asleep again.  The dear mother of five daughters and five sons, all in the timber business, continued to alert me frequently.

          I really am glad she did share her enthusiasm with me.  Because, I was tired enough to miss the entire scenic view.  Mama disembarked in the big woods in Northern California, a daughter and son-in-law waiting solo in the fog outside a closed little building.  She was so beautiful, such a personification of the great and vivacious land she lived in.

          After Ralph and she and I parted ways in Los Angeles, I went to the Canyon.  But, I was hitch-hiking where the Greyhound or Trailways didn’t go.  And not paying to camp for the night, I had to clear out of the Park by nightfall.  While taking in the view of a ditch formed in three weeks by flood water, or a broken flood lake (my guess may be better than yours), I stood next to a group of young people.  I overheard them asking a park ranger bizarre, illogical questions, with New York City accents.

          As I departed across the parking lot, I went by a charter bus with New York plates.  Those youngsters had come straight out of an urban environment.  Aren’t we all strangers to this amazing planet and cosmos!  I hitched a ride in the back of a First People's pick-up at sunset across the Painted Desert.  I tripped up through Utah and bussed across through Colorado, then south to New Mexico.

          I wanted to hike up in the ‘Blood of Christ’ mountains near Taos.  A gal gave me my final ride up in there.  She worked winters at the ski area.  She mentioned that her boss was recently killed by local roughs.  She let me off where a dirt road wound into the high hills.  A bait and tackle shop was right there and I went in to verify.  I was told the dirt road led to a walking trail that followed a series of seven alpine lakes.

          The fellow my age there also asked me a question, if I had a tent.  I said I owned one, but I left it back in a locker at the bus station in Santa Fe.  He then said I might want to go and fetch it.  I ignored his helpful input and started up the dirt road through a town. 

           Of First Peoples, it was a windy road with houses on both sides.  Dogs barked hard at me and the residents on their porches only looked.  I made it to the top lake, a few feet below the treeline.  A pup tent was at the far end of it, no other people encountered on the hike but the RV vehicles back at the road head.

          Each lake was at a different elevation, and I was skirting back down by lake number five when thunderstorm season resumed.  The water filled up on the forest floor like a bathtub, and the waning daylight was quickly gone.  I snapped tree branches off to try and make a huddling platform above it.  It was not possible, nor was a frantic descent to the RV-parking guaranteed. 

           I made my wet way back to the top lake, the flashlight not invented yet in my dim mind, and knocked on the door of the tent.  It was owned by two young ‘third peoples’ who hike up the eastern face, they said.  They let me in.  It rained all night, successive waves of heavy downpours.  Ignorance is not bliss; it’s dangerous.

         On a happier note, the first year on the farm during the winter, I was down to the bottom of one of the hay piles in the barn.  The retired farmer had laid poles across there for aeration.  I yanked up a first-level bale of hay, and there was a big mama rat lying on her side in a nest between two poles.  She was comfortably nursing her young, two of them, and all three looked up at me in astonishment. 

           They then took off running together in the same direction, the mama rat and two kittens.  Yes, two baby cats, kittens were latched on and sucking contentedly when I surprised them all.  That was the only rat I saw in twelve years on the farm there.  I kept pet cats in the barn, although I’m not sure if the retired farmer did.  He died the night of the earthquake, his sweetie-pie recently gone before.

          A mutt dog somebody dumped off as a puppy eventually got pregnant by my collie dog.  I made a tight den of hay bales in the mow for Brownie.  Thirty-below weather flowed in for a visit and I knew this was going to be nip and tuck.  But done correctly, it was a fine birthing place for a bitch.  I stuck my hand in there now and then and it was steadily warm.  Brownie kept her frost covered face in the air hole where I watered and fed her.  Her face blocked the hole, which she could control with her own instincts. 

         I got each puppy to a farm, my favorite to a family in the plateau country behind the ridge.  It was an old German community, maybe old Hessians from the war, old German-style barns, rare in Quebec.  He mentioned he was seeding a field early that summer and a wolf came out and attacked him on the tractor.  He stood up on the tractor's engine and she couldn’t quite reach him.  He went back for his hunting rifle in case she came out again, certainly with pups nearby.  He had to put her down, when she did come out again.  

          The man who sold me Jim Dandy said he was over at their local general store.  The owner brought him to the back to look at some material.  They walked through a storage room where his pet dog was reclining with a litter of pups.  They were past her, with their eyes off of her, and she just missed my friend's neck. 

           The general store owner put his guest safely out of the room.  And, the man put that particular bitch out of commission with his hunting carbine.  Wolves and wolf dogs are especially protective of their pups like that, a common pet in the region.  I cut wood with a man who had one of the latter.

          A census taker told me Papineau County, only an hour’s driving from Ottawa, had the fewest people in 'la belle provence' speaking English as their first language.  Personally, that helped me to make a new social life for myself.  Although I was born again by God’s spirit, it was a traumatic and tender time for me.  I compare it to the physically perilous time after my messy birth in the P.I.  But, a will to live and doing so in a nice place is a good combination.

          Part  L

          Original apostolic Christian assemblies were mixed groups of natural diversity.

          Jesus divinely warned that some of our enemies would be members of our family households.  Of course, no one should personify a reason for another’s ambivalence.

          A narcissist drives a steam-roller while texting his alter-ego.

           A loose cannon on a ship always caused terrible wreckage, regardless if it was stuffed with husband, wife, or child.

          If something will do me ‘a world of good’, then I ought to give Heaven a try.

          What did she say in Gone With The Wind, ‘tomorrow’s another day’?  Let’s live like there ain’t one.  God’s love knows no bounds, except for books.  Books need to be bound, so let’s get this one done.  God's "book of life" is bound with the love of "his everlasting arms".

             You know, what's called 'human interest stories' always necessarily involve spiritual and eternal ramifications.  I think God in Christ Jesus gives the perfect balance of that.  Note, about Ancient Egypt, do take a look at some Ron Wyatt videos, including the one I heard last night with; I think it was Mary Nell Wyatt narrating, excellently.  

          The big news is the discovery and opening up of the records in stone and statue of both Moses, the Egyptian Tutmoses, and Joseph, the very famous and for long enigmatic,  Imhotep.  

          The latter who evidently built not only the famous Step Pyramid, but also devised the dual-lever-fulcrum machine used for future pyramids.  Included on the property grounds of the Step Pyramid are eleven massive, really enormous grain bins.  They aren't regular Egyptian grain storage facilities, but special ones with ingenious feeder chutes from a series of adjacent bins.   

           I read elsewhere also, the biblical big famine in the Middle East might coincide with a weather problem which apparently affected the whole planet.  What caused it is not fully understood, very possibly an above average-sized meteorite strike or close fly-by.  

          Another possibility of the cause of an earth-wide drought at that time is a repercussion to an apparent meteorite that polarically knocked off half the surface-shell of Mars. News like this is fascinating, especially when the archaeological discovery is well researched.  The above is admittedly amateur, but not without merit.

          There are two flows that can be flaws, electricity and water; one can blow me all up, and the other can blow me all down.  And reading again here what apostle John told us how the Word of God became flesh, I re-think my supposed improvement of what Walt said.  Because it helps me to perceive the fabulous phenomenon of God's incarnation by paraphrasing the inspired line as " the Word became electric, and dwelt among us". 

           It is the idea of electrons orbiting and co-valence and what have you in perfect symmetry and wondrous beauty that intrigues me and appeals to my imagination.  I can grasp it better, even lay hold of it in my mind.  I'd like to time travel but I don't want to do it alone, yet a harmony of co-valent electricity must be effected by the instigator of such love.

           Yo-Yo here just for the first time read Walt Whitman's poem, after writing the above.  While his description is ample and vociferous, Walt mistakes past eons for a few millennia.  And Walt melds the soul with the body which is a trite mistake, being different and significant.  Worst, Walt leaves Almighty God out of the picture and scenario.  God is no subject of allusion unless he is an illusion.  Neither is the crest of a massive mountain nor the nipples of a nursing momma.

          A mistake we all want to or ought to avoid is willfully neglecting to see impossible contradiction in believing the inscribed hearsay of evolutionary billions of death and mayhem before death and mayhem started in Eden.  If the flood was, then Eden was, and "never the latter explanation with the former explanation of cosmic life systems will meet", unless one wants to ingest hydrogenated spirituality or some trancefaturation.  

           And "these things are (indeed) spiritually discerned', again depending on "what spirit (we) are of", of the two, we beasts who would call fire down from heaven upon people who look at us unacceptably or don't look acceptable to us.

           And I for one want to meet my maker, an encounter of accepted invitation.  God efficiently inspired Solomon to concisely and humbly delineate this wonder in his mentions of things too wonderful to be described with words.  That is what is 'sacred', the realm of Original Love inviting the unloving to join in its joy in unified harmony.

           God in Jesus gives us rest from the labors of our hearts' mental struggles to make sense of cosmic things.  Like a child begins with glimpses of adult reality, so adults must humbly acquiesce to the most mathematical and logically probable explanation.   Which is the 'wa-wa' of the flood of Noah and his woman, sons, and daughters-in-law. 

           This is not a cessation or nullification of procedural thought.  Rather it is a sensitive and perceiving regulation of attempts to thoughtfully understand.  This is the essence of humility, and the only restful place for our body and our soul and our spirit individually covalent.

          The long-deceased and partially out-dated author and surgeon Jethro Kloss in his health book Back To Eden interestingly suggested that we try to maintain a certain alkaline reserve in our bodies.  Maybe in Eden we were ordained by God to nourish the body with such a successful variety of fruitful nutrients.  I think that is what energized my son starting from a toddler to commandeer me vanquished and prone in wrestling.

          An elderly PA veteran told me a war motto, Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.  And this was abbreviated for me by a younger veteran, Slow is fast.  I would add, Keep your butt flexed, to optimize the dexterity connection between belly, and fingers, toes, and nose, knees bent a bit, toes pointed when standing, walking, or running, not when sitting or crouching.  References for that are at the end of my booklet.  ‘Head up, shoulders back’, especially playing hockey with the local fellows.

          Jesus also calls us to die for our enemies, not just our friends.

          Love is constructive.

          To copy and paste is profound, God forbidding 'junk in, junk out' as data entry.

          Honesty is divine satisfaction developed in obedient persistence.

          I crossed a visible path once with a wanted-poster person.  I saw his solo picture in my mom’s apartment building laundry room.  He was back out of prison but suspected to be back at his chosen digression of apartment-building infiltration.  I checked his height and weight along with his countenance.  Mom had gone somewhere, and I was headed home by the subway up the street, my vehicle parked up the end of the line. 

          Walking up to the station, I countered a lot of people coming back from work.  And there he was mixed right in with them and I stupidly met his gaze and certainly for a time too long.  He would duck in somewhere, maybe the woods up behind the buildings.  I called the police in a tire store, before cell phones, right nearby and rode around with a young officer. 

          The next week visiting Mom again I re-checked the man’s description, thinking I may have been off by ten pounds or an inch or two.  It didn’t matter, because I noticed his nickname, Fingers.  As I looked back at him after passing on the sidewalk, his large hands flicked his long fingers.  May I suggest you not look twice if this happens to you.  Trust your judgment because no harm is done by a spot check on anyone.  But that won’t happen if we give it away, like Fingers always does.

          Part  M

          In Indonesia, Pete and I had double-winged glider airplanes that stopped flying with double amounts of Scotch tape.  Less of the wider Irish packing tape we have now may have given us some more time.  Then, I got blessed with a single-wing glider toy plane with a propeller that was powered by a big rubber band running the length of the fuselage. 

          An impediment was restricted take-off space because the suburban back street roads had more potholes than pavement.  But I managed an off-angled runway to then turn the plane back to the field by cocking its wing just so.  Then, I got tired of it upending upon landing in the field grass.  I had the wing cocking figured well enough to get me 300 degrees from my starting point, back behind me up to the edge of the road.

          But I wanted a road landing, and knew I could cock the wing a little more to turn the plane around that far.  The challenge was gauging where the plane would land according to the road potholes.  I backed up on foot on the road a ways and chose the least potholed route.  

          Then it only remained to cock the wing; ‘made it on the first try.  Those potholes were deep and steep and would surely put me out of commission.  It rolled to a stop in front of a biggie.  Thank God.  I didn’t know how to thank God audibly, only in the form of dance.  I was all over the place, in the field.

          That field was a good stone’s throw, for a boy, between house-streets widthwise.  I don’t know why it was there, maybe for future concentration of the dwellings.  But it was just right for flying kites.  The tropical dry season came with wind.  I had been wondering what the colorful coffee cans for sale were through the school bus window.   They had kite string rolled on them.

          The colors were beautiful, royal purple, fruit-fly green, sun yellow.  Then I noticed boys down the street in the field flying kites.  Women had set up kiosks to sell the colorful string and little five-cent kites.  They were a foot square and remarkably maneuverable.  And they better would, because it was cut kites, to name it now like that for the first time.

          The string was waxed then run through powdered glass.  This is why a big group of little boys were having so much fun gobbling up the bigger boys’ kites that got sent to the ground. 

          (It just occurred to me, my school child is reading Laura Hillenbrand’s, Unbroken, a coincidence of real proportions.  Actually, I think it's too much of a book on war, too early for youngsters, too much tragedy at one time.   Youngsters are perceiving established norms, remember.  And remember, dear reader, God's plan of hornets before Moses' continuation from the Egyptian man he illegally slew.)

          I got into the fray and within seconds, my kite was floating to the ground.  I probably had more money than most of these guys and I had to dish out another nickel. The women in the kiosks were smiling; they were in business.  

          The idea was to watch the strings, not the kites.  You’d go cross-eyed looking straight at the kites.  There was about twenty boys my age there, and more than that of little gobblers at the ready.  It was rather a beautiful interchange really, but something was out of the ordinary, I noticed after a while.  

          A slightly older boy with a white kite, possibly home-made, for the kiosk kites were all pastels, was staying in the air constantly.  And he was aiming for me, I soon realized.  His skill was deft and experienced at cut kites and he was better at it than the rest.

        And, he stayed right in the middle like the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Much of the play involved avoiding him, except this tree would come after you.  Well, I guess the one in Eden did too.  But I got the hang of making my string less vulnerable to anybody.  A major thing to do was relax your string when an opponent contacted it.  (Did my string just get cut by using the word 'thing'?)

          You couldn’t do this for long, for then you’d get tangled and while trying to regroup yourself with extra tension, someone would be expecting you to.  But, white kite had his own weakness, his white kite.  It was easy to see him moving in closer.  And, I finally got to him.  His kite wobbled to the ground for the little boys to gobble.  We exchanged keen, lengthy glances, after I got cut down again by someone else.  Bloody fingers and palms from the glassed string were reasons to relegate this activity to history.

          I had the chance to fly a massive double-box decorative kite up in the Punjak hills on a weekend.  I went up with a buddy and his family, the big kite just fitting in the back of the station-wagon with us.  But, we ignorantly flew it in a tea plantation and it got ripped up.  Punjak weekends were fun, even in a sad family, well, as can be–I’m  sighing hard, here–but my favorite part was Howdy Pardner.

          Part  N

          He was an American who for reasons unknown to me was living up there in the highlands.  When driving up to Punjak on occasional Friday early-evenings with my family, Howdy would be positioned at a card table facing the direction we were coming from.  There was a bridge and a beautiful big stream flowing under it.  Howdy Pardner would be right after this at his table playing cards with Indonesian friends.

          Howdy would see us coming, American cars, like our Ford station-wagon (my buddy that I said took me up with his family had imported their brand-new Buick 1965 Vista Vue wagon with surrounding sky windows and a mom who could cook out of this world, including Martian grilled-cheese sandwiches, and also sang beautiful Irish songs with us before bedtime).  

          Howdy would stand up and be waiting for us, his table right by the road.  This guy was tall and big, a handsome black beard and easily six-and-a-half feet of height.  ‘Easy to see, too and we’d be ready, half-hanging out the car windows, locked, I hope.  We quickly learned to match Howdy’s greeting, although we had to resist screaming it not halfway across the bridge yet.  

          We’d wait long enough, because it was like an audible high-five between an ex-pat and children, both who missed the U.S.A. and grilled-cheese sandwiches.  So, with Dad not letting up any speed, and Howdy’s first-ever greeting in my ears still there because it was so surprising, especially the second one with our car windows rolled down having learned of Howdys existence from the first time we heard him holler.  And, could he ever holler!

          After that, it was windows down, boys half out, Howdy standing up and big right arm a’waving and you tell me and we’ll both know why it meant so much to everyone.  God love ’m.  Truly, in the presence of the one true God is "fullness of joy".

          We got behind the President’s motorcade once, his palace in Bogor before Howdy.  Our black vehicle matched his and his motorcycles, so it was a quick first half of the trip to Punjak that time.  Dad was game for it and fell in right behind the cycles.  I suppose in other circumstances we could have been shot at for trying it.

          A little story that meant a lot to me was a metallic toy boat another child at the pool must have found in the marketplace there in Jakarta.  We used it in the oval-shaped children’s wading pool, usually empty.  You’d never find the likes here because it was too hot to handle.  It was about eight inches long with a little built-up superstructure and open space in the back.  It was steam-powered.  You didn’t have to handle it after it was hot, either.

          What you’d have to do to get it going was get the stub of a candle, light it and slide it forward inside the structure.  And, drip some wax onto the floor in there and place the candle stub onto it so it sets tightly.  Lay the boat gently down in the water and bide your time a little bit.  Now, to explain the power function, two pipes have–excuse me, a single pipe with two protruding exhausts–has been soldered into the base of the chamber along the walls.

          I forgot to add earlier, before the candle, and the boat will be laid in the water before that, before the candle gets lit or placed, you place the boat upon the water surface and press down a bit with the bow or front of the boat lower.  One end of the pipe will bubble mostly as water goes in to fill it up and let all air out.

          The candle plus the ideal size of the boat causes convection in the pipe.  The hot water will choose one exit or the other and keep flowing that way.  Cold water will be heated by the very hot boat itself.  And, the process will continue until the candle wears out.  The hot boat would go somewhere between fast and slow.  The oval pool was conducive to forward motion as the boat would never jam anywhere.

          That was a fun toy, a finger-melter if you touched it too fast, eager with another candle.  My spouse’s great-grandfather built a steam-car in the farm workshop.  They were practical people, also inventing a coal-drilling machine that was the industry-standard tool for years.  Our McCarthy family has an embarrassing story.  A friend said, ‘C’mon, McCarthy, lay off those old steamers you’re working on and come join us over with Oldsmobile', to no avail.

          Part  O

          The McCarthy’s would get busy with cars anyhow, turning their largest livery stable in the state of Minnesota into a car-fix-it place.  Their vacations were bumpy road races to Duluth and back to Minneapolis or however it was.  My spouse's great-grandfather had a picture taken of him and his family in the car he made.  He cast the metal, turned the wood, inside-out, a home-made car;  ‘Springs County, Penna, Amish people, Amish-Mennonite.

        In Indonesia, there was a big, white Moslem or Muslim mosque / church-building, like the Taj Mahal in India in style, smaller, but a big place.  I’m sure it was the biggest mosque in Jakarta.  And one day, they had a barbecue of barbecues, a day of sacrificing goats.  They had two piles of skinned goats--I mis-typed that 'sinned' at first; and these were sacrificial animals--as high as expert throwers could throw them.  I only watched the butchering from our side of the busy two-lane road going into the town of Kebayoran.

          We lived in a first house before our permanent one was ready.  It was on the big white mosque side of the two-lane, with a similar field directly in front of it.  A friendly Muslim-Indonesian family–many Indonesians are the more ancient Hindu–was across the field.  One time when I was hanging out over there, watching them prepare their meals or wash their clothes, the young men of the family and their buddies wrestled me to the ground to inspect my penis.  They wanted to see if I was kosher or mosher or something.  I didn’t appreciate their coercion, but I understand why.

          An elderly man saved my life at the far corner of the field one day, over where I once watched a man have a full-mal seizure in a driveway, someone putting a spoon on his tongue.  I was kicking around as usual out in the field.  Blessedly, I was near a little building where they sell stuff.  

          Of a sudden, the man came out of nowhere and picked me up and hefted me over to the building and under the overhang right up close to the counter.  He stayed there shielding me with his body.  Then, a storm of dust with the sound of pounding hooves went right by us outside the building.  It was moving counter-clockwise in the form of a water-buffalo.

          It must have smelled me and my foreign scent, the silly ‘koo’.  It was a close call, water-buffaloes similar in temperament to cape-buffaloes.  

          The Netherlands Dutch were colonists in Indonesia for a long time.  Did you know, the English had so-called dibs on Indonesia before the Netherlands did?  Manhattan Island of the original New York City was the exchange.   

           In Indonesia, a family returning Stateside gave me their little green parrot.  It lived on my right shoulder, only wanted to cuddle, and would hop off to poop.  I never thought to name it.  This reminds of God's name he told Moses, indicating divine existence and transcendence, so delighted I was to have the dream pet of a perfectly trained parrot.  

          Also in Indonesia, I got a hold of one of those paddle balls.  It looks like a ping-pong paddle and has a rubber ball attached with a long sturdy strip of elastic.  On a quiet day alone in the house, between my mom’s side of my parents’ bed and the closet where she stored her candy and clothes, after trial and error, I popped that ball three feet out from me two-hundred eighty-four times.

          One time kicking around at the end of the driveway in Indonesia, I watched the common sight of a poor man picking around in our rubbish heap by the road.  I was kicking around out there again about three weeks later.  A man on a bicycle full of pin-wheels for sale came slowly riding by.  It was him, the man of Edenic imagination.

             There was always a goat tethered here and there in Jakarta, in those fields, or on someone’s strip of road frontage.  The water-buffalo must have been a New York one, sight unseen to me before that.  Thanks to God and his kind man who rescued.  That was the house Mr.Gemerkin told us his stories in, if you recall them.  Ay, it’s a small world and a very big God, so big that he can be small, he who alone can save us from our fears and our furies.

          Part  P 

           A personal anecdote explaining against any mistaken idea of toughing it out against the devil, in Maryland, Pete’s friend, John was visiting from home in Pittsburgh.  We had been walking somewhere in our suburbs at night and we crossed through the empty grocery-mall parking lot.  Someone was in our path, several people, guys and their gals, leaning against their cars.  They had cans of beer in their hands.

          John, center on the basketball team, he who ran out of the woods and threw a stick-spear at me one Saturday when I was fishing on the dam of the school pond–wet that way, broken the other way, I had to hope the spear missed me by heavenly inches, which it did–John quietly said, ‘We’ll go around this’.  Those guys might have shown off to their gals, one of the guys John’s height.  

        About uprooting trees, before age fifteen and unprotected exposure to drugs, God blessed me with a view of his own original power that mankind can only imitate.  I was fourteen and spending a summer’s week with Colin at Montebello.  Colin and I were born together the same week in Manila City, his parents U.S. business, mine government.  Heat lightning lit up the sky soon after sunset.  It was Hurricane Camille setting in, to terribly stall in Nelson County to the southwest.

         The heat lightning did not stop, continuing for hours and hours until Colin and I were too tired to watch anymore and went to bed.  It wasn’t colorful as the Chinese fireworks I saw in Indonesia that evening when we returned from swimming in the Sunda Strait.*  But, the power behind the heat lightning made the other seem like child’s play.

         The next day, Colin’s gramma, Mam, took us over to the mountains to swim in a forest stream.  It was a full torrent from rainwater that finally fell the night before.  Driving over there, we went through a big floodplain farm field.  Two enormous white-oak trees had been completely uprooted and deposited at the other end of the field.  Tornado.

         A realization I made only recently in my life was to make the connection between what is commonly called floodplain and the great flood.  I patiently and respectfully waited and watched for occasional heavy weather as evolution, to change the landscape hydrologically.  No way.  The floodplains we’re all seeing around us in our lifetimes was made by very much bigger water than that.  

         Still on God’s natural wonders, a Portsmouth friend, Bill, and one of my dearly beloved craziness counselors, dead in a car wreck soon after high school, treated me to a visit to the state of Maine.  It was 1972, and we went along with his friends from home in Mystic, Connecticut.  We camped on an open field overlooking a lake.  The sun set, and then came back up again.  It was the northern lights, a fabulous display of every color in the rainbow. 

          A few weeks later in Florida talking with an elderly man, he asked me what I’ve been up to in my life.  I mentioned Maine and the lights and he said, “That’s interesting, my brother back in Denmark sent me a postcard and said the aurora three weeks ago was the best in a hundred years”.  Bill was one of a handful of people who lovingly said, "Michael/Mike, get less crazy".

          Part  Q

          Making love is privilege, not performance.

          Smelling a rose I got poked in my nose for only God knows what's good for my toes, for it's toes before nose determines first goes.

          We are to "walk by faith, not by sight" nor might, to make any sense of God's right.

         Jesus also pooped, in fact doing so limitless light-years before any of us did.  On the Quebec farm, I transferred the old outhouse around to the back of the barn to face a full view of God's mountain in three parts.  I don't think God minded that I kept the door open.  I'd rather see that mountain than the Andromeda galaxy.

          I was watching the first mommy cat and her kitties I had ever seen, and was curious to discover that early poop is consumed, harmless and pure.  I named one of her kittens Curious.

         We are unequivocally not on borrowed time; it was bought for us by Jesus Christ.

         Doesn’t revelry reveal.

         Not to be coincidental with stories and one-liners about body functions, but check this.  Between ships in Naples, Italy we took a day trip to the Island of Capri out in the bay there.  If you know about the story of apostle Paul’s recounting of a rough passage on the Mediterranean, then this will make more sense to you.  

        Capri is a nice island, apparently including an amazing blue grotto, a volcanic sea cave.  But it was kind of anticlimactic after the boat trip over.  The water was rough, Mediterranean rough and Pete and I were having the time of our life.  The Lloyd Triestino ship from Singapore had gotten our sea legs well under us.  But, that was just a preparation for this.

         Capri Island is out there a ways, so a tourist boat has dining facilities.  Mind you, this is 1960, so the boat is a boat, not a modern ferry.  But, the dining room is big, with multiple-family sized tables.  Two or three or four families could sit at them, depending on their size.  No rock-and-roll music was piped in anywhere, either.  It would have been very out of place, for this was the Bay of Naples.

          And conveniently we weren’t eating.  Big platters of sumptuous Italian fare were served to the families that were dining.  I didn’t see them served, because Peter and I were circulating elsewhere on the big boat.  We did see later their chemical form in a changed condition.  Some got in and some never made it off the individual plates.

          I’ll step out of the way of your imagination.  The boat got to rocking from side-to-side so drastically that only the bolted-down tables didn’t start moving.  Any bolted-down food started moving, with chairs, tablecloths and cutlery.  Pete and I heard the screaming before we saw the streaming materiale.  The women and children were nowhere to be seen, safely ensconced in side rooms.

          The men and older boys were utilizing big, brass handrails, one on each side of the room.  The chairs, tablecloths, and cutlery were sliding from one side to the other.  It all slid quickly and smelly for you know what reason.  The guys would hop both feet off the floor when the mass or mash crashed against their wall.

          Pete and I were outside and looking in, holding on to the door jams.  We had the biggest smiles on our faces in happy Italy that day.  We would look from the interior scene back to one another’s faces.  Our smiles increased, or at least were maintained in amazement.  And, it went on for a long, long time.  Those fellows hanging on to the wall  rails were tired and miserable.

          Newbery Award honors recipient, Mary Well wrote an historical fiction about Capri.  I highly recommend her accurately fictional, Red Sails To Capri.  Written for Young Adult readers, the time frame of the story is the year 1826 for a specific reason I won’t spoil for you.  I hope I didn’t render your next gastronomic experience negative.

         The Tovar family didn’t eat since breakfast and for good reason.  Our supper, daily was a homemade preparation by the visible owner and her daughter of a pensione’ apartment.  It was to become what it’s doing to me right now.  Tears are flowing in my eyes by the recollection of her hospitality.  But, let’s air out here and start from scratch.

         Her pensione’ was three floors up in a four-story building of three sides.  It opened onto a communal courtyard where intimacy was increased by individual balconies.  The woman got her fruits and veggies from a man in a horse-drawn cart.  The colors were bright as those I saw of the same quality later in Ayutthaya, Thailand.

          Neither definitely nor indefinitely, woman would lower her shopping basket on a rope.  I can still hear her saying ‘Yes’ to this and ‘No’ to that article of the mobile merchant.  Ahh, and what she did with what she did with what she did.  Roman aromas and Neapolitan scents came from her kitchen and welcomed us home from Capri or Vesuvius day trips.

          Part  R

          An earlier visit to Italy, from The Philippines has a favorite story of our family.  Dad hyped the Roman ruins ahead of time.  Once arrived in person and given a solid look-see, little Pete got Dad’s attention and said, ‘Daddy, the Roman ruins are not so very broken’.  I heard recently the coliseum in Rome is broken from builders borrowing its stonework.

          Dad also liked to tell of words I blurted out to counter something he had said that I disagreed with.  The subject was us boys playing alone in the wilds of the Potomac River basin on summer days.  Dad would drop Pete and me and our mutual best-buddy Alan off on his way to work.  Alan’s dad would pick us up at four sharp where Dad dropped us off.

         The existing danger of our choice of fun heard public misgivings from Alan’s dad.  And, while we were on Timex at the meeting place with him without fail, there was risk involved.  Plus, there was another factor involved which I reminded Dad of.  When I overheard Dad scoffing to Mom about Alan’s dad’s worries, I caught Dad’s attention with, ‘But Dad, he’s the only one they’ve got’.  Alan was their only child.  Of Maryland forest, I read that the woods of central Maryland, U.S.A. have Earth's largest variety of hardwood species in one place.  And the Potomac was at its historically most polluted those years.

          Dad was the only one 'we've got’ and we almost lost him in Egypt.  While we slowly inched up the Suez Canal between Sri Lanka / India and Italy, the older ones got off to ride camels.  The camels went okay, but a side-trip into Cairo City didn’t.  Out in a plaza with a big roundabout, Dad almost got run over.  He describes it as the weirdest thing.

          One of the cars in the traffic veered out and came straight for him.  Dad was apart from the others and ahead of them.  He may have been jaywalking; we don’t know.  The car was at top speed and so close that Dad could see the individual face of the driver.  He even saw the driver’s eyes, which were wide open.  It had come way apart from the traffic in the big, open plaza.

          This car was going to hit him, hard, very easily fatally.  Dad said it all happened so fast that there was no getting out of it.  The front of the speeding car was now only feet away from Dad.  At which time he resigned himself to the care of the God and Father of the Lord, Jesus Christ.  Dad’s next conscious and possibly visual moment was no car, no impact, no sound of screeching wheels if it may have veered off.   Our attitude may determine our altitude, but gratitude determines our attitude.

          This morning on the trampoline reciting God’s poetry, I mentally sidetracked and thought about zoo inmates.  Zoo animals are so desirous, at least instinctually of freedom.  It is a fact I noticed at the Bangkok Zoo, the lonesome individuals will meet your gaze once, then not again.  An aside, the Colombo Zoo in Sri Lanka, I think it was, had no visitor’s railings.  I especially mean for the large cats, right up to the cages, 1960, no seat belts.

          May I fit something in here?--as if I haven't already--but it's a story Solomon recounted in his writings in God's Bible-Book.  As chief justice of Israel and Judah, he would get the most serious legal cases--state and 'church' were combined in old testament times--well, have a better storyteller than me tell it to you.  If you don't know already about the baby and two women, or, read it for yourself.  We are the baby. 

          Solomon also wonderfully wrote for God's advice to us, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.  Do not be wise in your own eyes, but fear the Lord and shun evil.  If you do this, it will be health to your body and nourishment to your bones". 

          Part  S

          And do know God had it written, “All creation is groaning for the coming of the sons (that’s generic, including daughters) of God”.  That says so much about the curse and spiritual death that Jesus alone of all humans in history experienced separation from God for.  Remember, regardless of attitude or altitude, we humans are daily and nightly blessed with the relative presence of God, his love, light, and life. 

           When we leave God out of our lives then we leave one another out.

           Our attitudes in our single lives then determine our eventual eternal altitude, including whether the plane makes it off and stays off the ground.  And meat-eating is editorial, not predatorial, but definitely part of the situation’s misery.  The poor animals and all are innocent victim bystanders of our ravenous and rapacious race. 

           My only child’s breech birth is a real analogy for me of the good breath of God spiritually giving us a second chance or opportunity to live.  My baby wanted my breath.  Do we want God’s breath?  To remind, Jesus / Yeshua breathed upon his disciples at the last supper.  And he now called them his friends, as God / YHWH biblically described his relationship with Abraham and more. 

           And sure as Jesus is “the first born of all creation” (permanent, through all time, 6,000-years of it, spiritual birth, Jesus’ dad the great and holy spirit), he gives to all access to his real father as our father, “whosoever will”, whoever wants it, whoever wants him.  As the Son of Man, Jesus said to his friends the day before his murder, "I go to my God and your God, to my father and your father."  

          A Joseph and Mary Christmas to you.  You may note also in my booklet, I mention that someone, Jon Cahn, finally got around to researching just when Jesus was born.  And, of course, there we could add the word ‘really’ born.  Half-a-dozen factual and historical and biblical and categorical proof texts and sources show it clearly.  That, Baby Jesus was born at the same time of year he died so whoever wants to could live again.  Read or hear Jonathan’s words himself on it, on Jim Bakker's interview show.         

          Norman Rockwell’s painting of a farm girl holding up her prom dress in the mirror–I had earlier thought it was for her wedding–is exceptional, as always for Norman Rockwell.  Rockwell has masterfully painted what is in view of this young woman’s body.  The farm girl’s right forearm musculature evidences young years of hard grueling labor. 

          Included in Norman’s virtuosic accuracy of both physiological and psychological reality is his dexterous rendition of the beauty’s rear-bottom.   As a man, but also as a fellow man of mankind, I do notice especially her butt.  Her butt is properly flexed as part of her habitual proper use of her body.  My aforementioned posture tips on the last page of We Spanked God, any crass coincidence not intended, are correctly applied in Norman Rockwell’s painting of the young farm woman. 

          She is of course in her physical prime.  No extra fat has accumulated yet.  Her back is swayed a bit in normal contemplation, feminine contemplation.  And regardless of aging inevitabilities and the obvious physical factors of muscle and fat, the human bottom is a place of dignity.  

          With the cows, say putting them out to pre-winter night pasture in the dark, and I mean across a field to a second field I wanted them in, I could frustratedly smash their upper thighs with my boot bottom and they never kicked me dead ever.  We loved each other and they maintained their sense of humor with a grab of grass in their mouths as we crossed the field.  No flashlights were ever used by me in Quebec those farm years.  Now I have a visor light on my hip ready to go.

          But there is something that hates beauty, beauty as a reflection of the heart of God.  I see it as a concerted spiritual-mental effort to detract from and diminish from God’s beauty, even exalt our imagined own.  ‘Eternity at our fingertips in our children we hit–fools’; are we anything else but, when we do?  Bullies may rule for a while, but they will never rule and reign with Jesus unless they stop now.  “Today is the day of salvation”.

          The kaching kings and means queens of this world, lest they repent now and restore what they’ve stolen, will never stop paying for their disrespect of God’s honesty and the innocence of unsuspecting people.

           Part  T

           A love pat is affection; a spank is affront.

           Christian church is gathering with at least one other in the spiritual presence of Jesus.

           Hey fellow, if she can out run you, and out smart you, and out survive you, then shut up and say 'Whoa' man.  And do you know what God said to anybody listening after he created Adam?...’Now, watch this!’

           The Amazon women reported by a conquistador were not Amazonian per se, only better warriors than their men, who shoot arrows at helicopters.

           Why is the inquiry only about the way to a man's heart?

           Diversity distinguishes while adversity extinguishes.

           We should take things sinceriously, not just seriously.

            Sin only seems like we're winning.

            If no news is good news, then we should be careful what we say yes to.

           Taking a bad apple out of the barrel is just as right as eating a good one.

           I’d rather church with Lurch.

           Jesus wants me to take him at face value in you.

           Two songs sing about the utmost virtue and vice, R-e-s-p-e-c-t and D-i-v-o-r-c-e.

           Early birds get to catch summer’s first worms because they endured winter’s final bitterness.

           If God can do this beauty on the road, then imagine what he does at home.

           Easy Rider said ‘You got here a nice spread’ so why on earth would we want it dead?

           No ''complacent cow of Bashan" ever walked backwards up the stairway to Heaven.

           Be still not shrill and know there’s a God by saying yes to him.

           Perfectly, leadership is not lead-him-ship, "God–Christ–Man–Woman", physically in marriage, spiritually in church, perfectly.

          Research or recall the man’s story behind his poem God Works In Mysterious Ways His Wonders To Perform.

          Someone truly said we all decide to either live once and die twice or die once and live twice.

          God’s virtue to us is aptitudes, our vice to ourselves mishap-titudes.

          The devil can fool the pants off both women and men and only Jesus can cover their ass.

          The problem with taking vengeance on one another instead of leaving such to God is he will then have some left over and use it on us.

          There used to be an expression, ‘You’ve been watching too much television’, although we older children wouldn’t have thought of wearing diapers while doing so.

           In the nineties, waiting outside an athletic director's office for a conversation that never took place once the receptionist passed on my ridiculous idea of selling vitamins to high-school students, I did profit, if we can call it that, from overhearing four students as two couples near me having a spontaneous conversation with each other.  Really, only one spoke, a girl for her chum and her, to the two boys.  She asked out loud, "Why do we have to have sex with you just to be friends?"  The boys only smiled maliciously macho smiles.  God's mercy may be forever but our allotted time to use it is not.

           'It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God", or my biggest brother, Gregory.  I did once in a legitimate retaliatory wrestling match which I nearly didn't walk away from.  But this story was public, me and Pete and Dreya over at the playground of the apartments after Malaya.

           A bully boy and his accomplice walked out of nowhere and pushed Andrea to the ground.  This was criminal, needed to be stopped, and I knew I couldn't do it.  So I ran for home, found Greg, and told him.  Understand, this is our only sister, our Wendy or Snow White.  Greg tore out of the house, perpendiculared  on the sidewalk and ran to help.  If that is how Greg 'the brick' Tovar ran a football, which I never got a chance to see,  I for one am cheering. 

            I followed up there to the swing sets to see the face of the bully boy muddy from dust and tears.  'Reminds of the neighbor girl and Etam.  Well, we live and we learn if we want to.  God knows our hearts, wisely doling out opportunity from his treasure chest of circumstance.

           Part  U

           My next-door neighbor, with a ragged scar on her left knee to show for it, as a small child was one day told by her father to run through and out the back of the little apple orchard behind the house.  The man was in the process of setting a fence to separate the orchard from a field.  The posts were in and the lowest line of barbed wire.  When she flipped over it, her dad stood where he was watching and roared with laughter. 

           Her mom came out and got her.  My friend grew up to marry a man like her father, who ruined her right shoulder, only way later to find her beloved ‘Skippy’.  Jesus' disciples, in their pre-friend stage, were one day judgmentally pointing fingers about some people who got killed in the accidental collapse of a building. 

           Jesus soberly replied, “Unless you yourselves repent, you will all likewise perish”, meaning forever.  God wrote that he wants it "to go well for us on the Earth”.  He wrote it into our consciences, in his ten rules or guidelines written on stone at Sinai in Arabia, and exemplified in the life of the incarnated carpenter of Nazareth, Israel.

           God’s personal paradigm is dual and complementary gender.  Look at it closely for a sec.  It shows both his potential and resting energy.  The phenomenon of children proves it.  As dual levers (see Ron Wyatt Archaeology) were used to place pyramid stones, so God builds us.  The dual gender phenomenon on Earth is the essence of the divine dynamic.  To misuse it has much more lasting negative consequences than mishandling atoms.

           And, you may remember as a poignant example, non-human, Nell and Pit, the heavy-draft pulling horses.  They were the only and ever non-orthodox competitive pulling style anyone had ever seen.  And as said, they were unbeatable for eight years.  I didn’t frequent after my first year or two in Quebec.  But I’d ask around who won this year, expecting to hear about so-and-so from somewhere else in Quebec or even Ontario.  The answer: Pit ‘n Nell, the mixed team that looked mixed up while they were pulling better than the others. 

           Just as we ask ‘What is food?’ or ‘What is work?’, so we ought to ask ‘What is gender?’  With the formative family phenomenon of childhood into adulthood followed by old age, we have the makings of an unforgettable and eternal picnic.  Correction, real life is a peaceful picnic, including presently the necessary conscious obligation to see no one not only is not left out, but that they be included as village family.  Social sanctification begins at the core of the nuclear family, only in Christ Jesus, bride and bridegroom chillin' with their chillun'.  God's 'cool' is chillun.

          Part  V

           It’s Presidents’ Day today here in the United States of America.  I read two books earlier this past year about George Washington.  He was almost assassinated, you know, in New York City early in the revolutionary war.  He was wise to it by that time, his secret service well developed, but only avoided it by a few hours of rescheduling.  England had its very established secret service, of course.

           While George of Virginia scrambled to keep up with the personal predations against him by George of England, his establishment of a secret service of spying friends was to protect him.   It is sadly ironic that our country’s secret spy network evidently got into the same sad game of assassination.  The United States did not want Communist China to establish itself in Indonesia much more than a fireworks vendor.  But, a lot of Indonesians had had enough of Western intrusion, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and ‘us’, as well as the social manipulation of the foreign communist parties, especially Sino.

           I wonder if I didn't feel the vibes on Bali, when my buddy's mom rented bicycles for us boys.  We started well before noon, and his mom didn't find us until nightfall in a rented taxi.  We had biked way deep into the countryside behind Denpasar.  What I mean by weird vibrations was the absence of people circulating normally.  Maybe it was just country quiet compared to the big city of Jakarta.

           However, when we returned home to Java, all we American children and the women were sent back to the States.  The Indonesian people themselves took socio-political matters into their own hands.  Against the communists, who for years had sweet talked land reform and social justice.  Which digressed into an institutional power trip leaving the people like a jilted lover.   

           The volcanic brown streets my buddy and I rode on within weeks would be drenched in human blood.  It was the grass roots violence of Rwanda with the political division of France in 1790.  It was a Civil War with no Mason-Dixon line, well defined of individual and family acceptance of, again, the socialist siren calls.  it was too quiet riding those bikes.

           His mom also rented us a ride on a fisherman's little sailboat.   At first it was boring to our ignorance of sailing.  We tacked awkwardly down the shoreline, we boys frowning away as we ducked the swinging tackle.  But when we turned around for the drive up the coast again, the fisherman was smiling at our smiling. 

           I remember watching Chung prepare a chicken for dinner.  He was laying it down on the block and looked up at me and instructed me to pay close attention.  Chung chopped the chicken's neck and let it run.  The  chicken ran like my toy airplane had flown, down to the end of the servants' quarters.  It then turned towards that edifice and, as if it could see what it was doing, ran back to us and fell almost at our feet.

           By the way, an interesting book if you want to read it is the Bounty Trilogy.  I read it twice after my four first adult "firstfruits" readings of Walter Lord’s book.  Captain Bligh accomplished one of the most impressive ventures in maritime history, over 1,800 miles in a ship’s dinghy to Indonesia.  They didn’t have lifeboats back then, and didn’t plan on mutinies like Fletcher Christian’s. 

           I later read that the last mutineer living on Pitcairn’s Island dug out the bible in the old chest instead of brewing another keg of liquor.  A very bad story is what happened recently on Pitcairn’s.  ‘Systematic rape of any female the bullies wanted, including the little girls.  New Zealand finally got wind of it.

          Dad was thick into it in Indonesia, the U.S.A. and Mainland China vying for the attention and approval of the people of Indonesia.  For example, the evening that we returned from swimming in the Sunda Strait* was a scheduled event for the country.  It was an all-night fireworks display, enormous, with a biggest traffic jam imaginable.  It was a nice show, but we were out of beverage and very thirsty.  But you know, it was all fireworks, no bomb sounds, so 'bully' for that.  i wonder if China has changed on that, to digress and incorporate bomb sounds in their current firework displays.

          About presidents and the U.S. presidency in general, I heard a memorable anecdote  of a statement by President Harry Truman.  Mister Harry had earned the job and was just getting started.  A friend from home asked to speak with him in his office, the children’s wading pool-shaped one.  The man reminded President Harry about an agreement they had made in the way of some deal that would benefit him if Mr.Truman got elected.

          President Truman kindly but firmly informed his old friend that it's not going to happen.  That, the paradigm or pattern of business-as-usual they were formerly familiar with had unexpectedly changed.  The friend was a bit dismayed, but the president said something to the effect of the job being more different than he realized it would be.  The determining ethic was situational, and the other man had to leave absolutely empty-handed.

          Like the culture shock of larger employment or occupational proportions, we often don’t have the foresight we think we do.  A new president or congresswoman or senator or judge must need be closing her mouth and opening his ears when starting a big-time job like that.  When I saw how Governor Bill Clinton tapped Matt on the shoulder to help him on his campaign, I thought, ‘expert project manager'.  

          However, President Bill, like Noah after the flood, rather succumbed to the pressure.  I’m sure every president that we’ve had has days or weeks they’d like to reverse and make disappear.  Speaking of disappearing I should too, not without mentioning President Don Trump's laudable effort to stop cussing in public.  

           Note, I also recently read Associate Justice Clarence Thomas's autobiography; and, I recommend it.  I read one of Dick Nixon's too as a matter of possible fiction, or fact.  He sure impresses me for having given Billy a ride home to Cabin John that time.   Waiting interminably for rides hitch-hiking as a teenager taught me that try as I might, I couldn't judge the world.

          Part  W

          Oh, by the way, this morning I told myself to mention, if you don’t know, where in God’s bible some Christians get excited about a big, partial disappearance of people off the Earth.  It may be something Jesus had written looking forward in time.  He said two will be somewhere or other, and God will lift one of them off the stage. 

           I say so what, it’s God’s business.  Really, being egotistically preoccupied with such might eliminate oneself from consideration as a candidate.   Yet also, he does say to the Philadelphia church in the revelation that he'll provide an escape for them, so they don't have to wash the dishes when it's clearly not their turn or some such.  (editor's note--I've doubled this in the text; I'll try and fix it.)

          I  pray God bless the U.S.A. for the reasons I’ve suggested.  Do know that God can be Biblically quoted as clarifying the idea of praying.  He had it written, “(It’s) The prayer of a righteous man (that) availeth much before The Lord".  My step-mom, Pam, gave us all parchment copies of 'the Ojibwe prayer' one Christmas.  Take note here of Jesus' comment as observation of the two guys praying-in-temple that day.  The Ojibwe man prayed God would protect him from his worst enemy, himself.

        I have two more thoughts, one including a serious story my mom once told me, to help explain it.  Oh and I notice in my notes there’s a third, also very much a biggie.  Which applies to a possible addendum to this essay.  Which took a full week of effort to write.   

         I may as well tell you that third one right now.  That, I was a day into editing and proofreading the text of this essay.  And plop goes the easel of this laboriously graphic writing project.  For, my spouse drops the official divorce papers in front of me which she indirectly alerted me to recently and which didn't surprise me for personal reasons. 

         And the following bible story will explain it, even if I don’t include the paper as an addendum, maybe for a legal reason I’m unaware of at the moment.  The paper is an explanation to my sister and brothers and close friends of what my spouse has been doing behind this home's closed doors.  I saw it play out over twenty years.

         To say, my spouse’s aberrant action, and I say it is, as God also says he hates it, can partially be read about in a famous bible story.  It’s about the mindset of Rachel, Jacob’s little-sister-wife besides Leah.  Leah was nicely normal, just not so visually scintillating as Rachel.

         And if you know or don’t, learning it here, it was Rachel who providentially showed up at the water-well when Jake had arrived from a far part of the country.  Where he had been born, after his grandparents moved there from the original area where Leah and Rachel, his cousins lived.  When Rachel came to the well with her dad Laban’s sheep, to Jacob it was like the future New Jerusalem come down out of heaven.  Jake had traveled there to look for a woman to espouse from his own extended and spiritual family. 

         It’s a long but realistically useful story and I recommend it even as a first place to ever open a bible in your life.  Father-in-law Laban tricked Jacob on his drunken wedding party aftermath, with Leah instead of Rachel.  Of course, Leah apparently was glad to participate in the ruse.  Which detracts from our original assessment of her.  And imperfection of personality continues with Rachel.  

         When after years of pactfully working like a sheepdog to also finally marry the movie-starlet-idol of his naive imagination, Jacob finds out that her only interest in or value of him is to father a child for herself–she’d get two, Joseph and Benjamin.  Rachel had a tunnel-vision focus on mothering to a fault.  My spouse does also, taken too far now.   

         Jacob perceived her fault when Rachel blurted out to him one day after a couple of  years of no children yet, “Give me children or I shall die.”  Jacob replied normally, “What, am I in the place of God?”  And, Rachel would indeed die young, not without honor and respect.  About parenting,  I’ve personally learned to say ‘Father, not bother; mother, don’t smother’.

         And a ‘by the way’, Leah had a very engaging and interactive personality and attitude.  Leah did long and always lament that Jacob didn’t love her.  I think we could observe about Jake-the-double-guy that he was visually oriented to a fault.  Certainly, we all and each have to stand back from ourselves and “Let God be true and every man a liar”.

          Part  X

          Mom told me a miserable story of some Catholic parish-church-group members of hers.  Four young adult girlfriends went together from home in Maryland to Indiana for a retreat.  Sunday after mass and before lunch just the four of them hopped over to the lake for a swim.  It was a disaster, so hang in here please, as before.  One of the gals decided to just walk on the woods trail around the little lake.  She would hear it all, frustratingly out of range to help.

         One of the remaining three women got into the water first.  I don’t know exactly, but she got in trouble mistaking water for air.  I suppose, and number two swam to help her.  One put the grip on number two and both went down.  The third girlfriend went right there, dove down and either couldn’t help or evaded the now widespread death grip phenomenon.

         Let's pause.  An important point also from my notes, once or twice in our lives, even now and then, we should consider the theoretical impossibility of being on our own.  Because, biblical evidence says we are being protected presently.  In our lives individually, God’s vicarious incarnation in Jesus perennially empowers his holy angels to help us.

         Angels are trained lifesavers slipping in behind and beneath us to evade our panicky grips.  They also push us away from themselves if necessary when we willfully are wayward with the same death grip.  Imagine if we were left on our own with death and its personifications of malevolence.  This is actually what Jesus experienced uniquely in his voluntary standing in for us.  And Jesus willfully refused assistance from angels while he was saving us.

         Jesus is unique in that, by having done what no one has ever done.  Jesus experienced the separation from God that is hell.  It apparently had to be done, and this by a divinely fathered child of Eve.  This is why, in the years before Jesus, the Lamb of God, the inventor and sustainer of happy skipping lambs required their inconceivable substitutionary sacrifice..

         And about sugar or honey or natural syrups, I agree with God’s biblical statement.  That “Too much honey is not good for the health”.  (He also had written "Too much book-learning is not good for the health.")  For sure, a little sweetening hits the spot.   A final idea, on another page of this essay I said I can be strict with myself.  There is a parallel here to life coaches.

         The ideal there would be for a coach to understand your very mind and thinking.  And advice comes from them and not the other way.  Make sure they have the eternal perspective of Jesus Christ.  Whom we obey, especially when whatever it is of ourselves that we’re obeying is wrong.  “There is a way that seemeth right to a man but the end thereof is the way of death”.  

         God is merciful, abundantly so, ever new each morning.  And such is evident in the joy expressed by animals and our main subject here, children.  God is big, so big he is also small and available to our minds and spirits and bodies.  ‘Small world, big God’, 'shut up and show up', relatively speaking.  Unless we be born anew by God's holy spirit to become little children all over again, he biblically says we'll never enter his holy home.

           I was walking along a sidewalk, and watched a juvenile squirrel paralleling me.  Of a sudden, it jumped high up in the air and did a spinning 360.  It then landed to resume its walk as if nothing had ever happened.  In the sugarbush, a squirrel jumped out of a tree above and in front of me.  It flew down and then up again to another tree, a flying squirrel I'd only heard about.

           'Character counts, but does it add up?'  How much is God's character, according to what you know?  And, shouldn't our reaction be to say, 'Far out, man!' ?  I've asked some preteens if they're ready to become adults.  And, I've then asked them if they have their pilot's license.  Because it's going to be that difficult; and don't forget the ancient advice of people who've 'been there, done that' before us.

           I mean about gender convictions, the time proven advice to wait until after the big autonomic change into pubescent maturity before proactively addressing  one's identity.  I know my son was spewing senseless derogation of me being generationally outdated, as in being 'old-fashioned'.    It's one thing to be on a deserted island, another to be on an ice flow.   The reverse is not true of "...and names can never hurt me!"  

            If I recommmend to Alex or anyone else a movie as much as the book it's based on is William Golding's Lord Of The Flies, the initial black-and-white British version.  I also recommend my cousin Kevin's starring role in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.  The film was so important that Hollywood business invested in a later sequel, as with 'Of The Flies.         

           Part  Y

         Before we go separately, I would be remiss not to mention or confirm my plan of having this wespankedgod.org website essay printed.  At least I think I’d be remiss, at my cerebral limit typing out these stories (and you reading them).  Also to mention, I was too quick with my application to the U.S. Copyright Office.

         And then I ran out of money applying twice to the Copyright Office with a switched title that didn’t get acknowledged, a technical glitch on my part. The original title was the first biblical truism/one-liner I thought of in 2005.  The subject of 'bear' essentials aptly preempted it as a title ('Eat the fat.  Chew the gristle.  'Bear in the bushes.  'Better whistle.  We spanked God').        

         I’m thinking of the child I heard being torn into.  Let’s watch our children in every good way.  They’re certainly watching us, waiting for us to truly prioritize them or at least include them equally according to need.  No one literally needs to be mean, but being nice fulfills a real functional requirement.  We were made by God to love as part and parcel of his life and light.  It is after all the 'soft' part of the baseball bat, swung by strong and firm hands.

           And remember, 'A love pat (on the bottom) is affection; a spank is affront'.)  I have heard preachers' sermon titles or quotations unbiblically and illogically declare the butt as a God-designed place of supposedly loving affliction.  When we were children in face of bullying opposition, we would articulate, "Aww, you think you're so big!"...and ignorant.  I say a baby's butt is his or her softest skin and deserving of commensurate acknowledgement.

          Thinking here of why we have facial muscles that can frown, I saw none of such the day my baby ran through his hard-drive one day.   He was comfortably on his back and placed off to the side.  I could have missed it because I never saw him do it again.  What he did was while laying up a bit in his bassinet contentedly looking up and around was to  practice his potential facial expressions. 

           Curious surprise, humorous investigation, it was easily a dozen distinct facial looks that he did.  And, they were each the positive and beautiful reflection of his loving creator's personality.   Sinceriously, 'If you believe in evolution, then honestly bow down and worship it and name it Nothing'.  'Fun filled is not necessarily fulfilled'.

          Finally again about posture as in the booklet, in town yesterday and walking on a sidewalk, I conversed alongside a woman named Linda.  Linda is aged 92, one of twenty-one, and this chicken was clickin’.  She appreciated me teaching her ‘Toes before nose’.  And crossing an intersection arm-in-arm, together we developed ‘Heels before wheels’.     

           Part  Z

           FYI, seeing that ‘Z’ up there and thinking about death, and is it some kind of soul-sleep, the answer from the developed part of God’s bible-book, the new covenant in Jesus Christ part, is ‘no’.  Lots of clear events of people conscious after death negate and nullify temporal examples of written anecdotes of so-called ‘cutting off’ or death-sleeping.     

          The question is universal, and the answer is Christian.  The old covenant people are all over the place with this subject.  By all over, I mean holding ideas from every global culture.  We have to leverage this subject on the fulcrum of Jesus and his student-friends.  Two stories of his are examples, one, the story he told—true or not, he told it-–of sweet Lazarus and the sour rich man.  And two, when he died, Jesus spiritually visited dead people somewhere, and talked with them or talked to them.  

           Also, on the mount of transfiguration that day with James, John, and goofy Peter present, Elijah and Moses showed up to chat with their boss, certainly encouraging him for what lay ahead, the completion of his suffering for the sins of humanity.  And in the old part of the bible’s history, we do see Saul illegally using a witch to contact dead Samuel.  It sounds like it was indeed Samuel, who castigated Saul for doing so.

           Apostle Paul is also very clear saying “away from the body and home with The Lord”.  Paul also at one point comments that to depart and be with Christ Jesus is advantageous, “To live is Christ, to die is gain”, although that’s a vague statement contextually.  A big point is, besides being body, we’re also soul and spirit, recombined in the resurrection.  And, death is not partial, only for those with God's approval to live after, in him, because he is life.  His name is Jesus.  

           Again, numerous old covenant text passages expediently say "cut off''.  They only say that to keep a move on with the conversation.   "The grave" in Hebrew may mean hell sometimes.  Look at the surrounding context, like the horizon when flying or using the instruments.  I was watching the sun set up in a tree by our house in the D.C. suburbs.  A plane dropped into position over the Potomac River to more safely head to the airport.

            Of a sudden, another jet tried dropping into the same position.  It veered off in a wild-looking and desperate maneuver.  I think the word civilization is telling us something important, just from the sound of the word, like civil aviation.

           Still about death, apostle John in The Revelation mentioned supernaturally seeing martyred saints as general Christians killed for living by faith that God had fruitfully given them from his Spirit asking The Almighty to take vengeance on the committed jerks back on Earth who had killed them.  I figure the latter were people that were given over in their hearts to doing evil.  God doesn't want us to simply keep him in mind; he wants us to have his mind, even having "the mind of Christ".

           And if in his inspired book God says 'died' not 'passed away', then I'll also say it.  It's a devilish way of diminishing the seriousness of death, only overcome by Jesus Christ.  I do have a joking way of saying 'passed out permanently', but that would be stooping low.  Again "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints".  Let's die for life and peace, not for any kind of strife, or better said, 'Let's die for life not strife.'

           And about abortion, I am aware of Dr. Nathanson's discovery of the silent screams, what I thought until looking it up again now was called the silent cries.  Let's help one another, which doesn't include chopping one another up.

           MT  Jesus emptied himself.  And it reminds of the mountain climber who accidentally slipped away, on the rope, but out from an overhang almost to the top of the Eiger mountain.  The other three climbers could not, for the life of them, pull him back to the rock face.  The climber also did all he could to get himself back to vertical solid ground.

           In fact, he literally did use his last energy to wrangle his way back, but no go.  So, he used his last breath to respectfully explain to his friends that he "can do no more".  By saying that, this climber respected the system of ongoing communication climbers always have.  The climber’s last words were his last action, and he slumped dead.

Addendum#1

I was asked by one of you to write using 8th-grade vocabulary.  This will have to do it:

I have, last year, applied for membership with your Christian assembly and then stepped back from that application recently.  And admittedly with unskillful words I attempted to put my reasonable thoughts down on paper, digitally, thoughts explaining why I did so.

It seems to me two basic questions exist here.  One is why I want to member with you.  The other is why I do not want to member with you.  I would answer both questions, here, and in desired expectation of an answer from you.

I want to member with you because, of the plural Christian denominations I’ve visited, your fellowship has the most scriptural accuracy.  And recently, I realized that said accuracy is so far off the mark of accurately hitting the target of biblical life, that I had to retract my request for membership.

Standards is part of our questions here, God’s standards, of course.  Your printed booklet of rules of Christian faith and practice, as I read it twenty years ago, twenty-three-and-a-half years, when I first arrived among you, held no impossible standards for me.  I was young at the time and fairly immature in Christ, at only twenty-six years confessing Jesus.  ‘Starting from social scratch, as I’ll explain.  ( editors note--I fellowshipped with them from 2001 to 2003/4, here in Virginia, then married into Pennsylvania, divorced on to the street in July, '23, and away from our child; whom she had sequestered to herself, in-house, since he was three years and nine months, using a digital screen as bait, unlimited use except for his bedtime.'The iPad supplanted the iDad', no more long hours of discovery in God's nature along the creek or elsewhere outside.  Infra-red scans show digital screens are more attractive than heroin and liquor.)

However, when I attempted to question your inaccuracies, only silence and blank stares answered me.  One subject, for example, while not a big one like the nature of God as Father and Son of Man and Holy Spirit, was the subject of the masculine beard.

I noticed your printed booklet had an allowance for a man’s beard that wrongly added to God’s Word on the subject.  This dashed any hopeful illusion I had that I had found a ‘perfect church’ (not that I was consciously looking for one).  The Amish-Mennonite presentation as different from the Protestants and Catholics I was used to seeing, was not much “lower than the angels” as the others. 

The only faith and practice booklet I had seen before yours was the Catholic ‘catechism’ of my childhood.  Which promoted the above correct presentation of Almighty God, but coupled with distorting heresies of angels, ‘saints’, Jesus’ mother, and Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.  Remember, although only recently for me in my own bible reading, “For there must be heresies (inevitably) among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.” 

Along with your printed recommendation of partial beards was implied partial head-hair coverings, stressing substantial, not complete, covering of women’s head hair.  Also, the "abomination" of cross-dressing was partially included with your vague delineation between men’s coats and women’s jackets.  That is underneath the common and generic bearskins that deadly winter weather impresses upon us all.

No, some of the women’s jackets I saw seemed to have been taken by a woman off a hanger in her husband’s closet or his side of the closet.  I mean no skillful and tasteful tailoring as modification was done.  You know, worldly style keeps square shoulders on the woman’s jacket.  Neither does a v-neck front display modesty, rather a visual, lewd directive to view the breasts of a strange woman.  The men’s coats are modestly round-necked, while the women’s jackets are wide open, a double standard.

To say, I began to ask questions about the above subjects.  And the replies were not only not forthcoming, but visually off-putting.  I began to feel uncomfortable around you.  You see, The Lord God raised me to compare everything to his holy word.  No older Christian  was in my life for the first sixteen years of my Christian childhood but a brother.  Recall how your first Swiss Brethren did exactly this, Conrad, Felix, George, and the sisters.  In actuality, I am the Swiss Brethren, and you are the child-terrorizing Zwingliites.  (Infant baptism is terrifying to a baby, having observed it with my own eyes.)  Your use of the rod is as barbaric as their infant baptism, and no less unscriptural.  Please continue reading for an explanation

My Christian childhood brother, David, was personally in a mental shell, recovering from paternal abandonment at age five.  My father was separated inter-continentally from his own dad at the same age.  It seems The Almighty was showing me first-hand, or second-hand, the damage done and the mercy due.  

To say, with only sermons and singings as recorded plus printed correspondence to feed my soul, long winter readings of God’s Holy Bible was the anvil for my hammering.  I had no one to ‘bounce things off of’ but God himself, and only now and then David.  Neither did I seek the approval of mankind, only The Holy Spirit as my creator and now my savior.  

This was centered on biblical truths such as “But without faith it is impossible to please him:  for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.”  The divine providence of my new birth in Jesus Christ there in Quebec, Canada on October 29th, 1975, was fully apparent to me from day one and every day thereafter to today.  I do have mercy on you spiritual city-slickers so ignorant of the forest with whom we all have to do.  An insider’s tip: the law of the forest is love, our ultimate salvation, learning that from Jim Corbett of India / Nepal, who wrote about his legendary forest experiences. 

The full and complimentary witness of my Christian brother David already a year there in Quebec on his absentee father-owner’s dairy farm (U.S. citizens) was also proof of God’s providence.  The remoteness from socially dangerous-for-me urban influence was also proof of God’s provision, also by the grand witness, once I focused on it, of the great mountain in three parts.  

The three parts were readily observable as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  And, the 35-mm photo shown to me by the elderly Christian sister, Emma, with her husband Wellington, at an Ernest Angley ‘miracle crusade’ at the Ottawa Civic Center, of Jesus in the sky over Indiana taken from an airliner by her Christian sister, added to God’s input for conviction and focus.  And the 35 millimeter focus was perfecto, as I explain in more detail later in this essay.

David Wilkerson’s young NYC convert, Nicki Cruz’s analogy of pornography is useful.  Nicki wrote in his memoir (Run, BabyRun) of his salvation story that in their neglected childhoods, he and his friends had only smut magazines to teach them of the birds and the bees.  Their parents were apparently nowhere in sight or within ear shot for nurturing.

I say that to say, I had no Christian adults present to instruct me.  Really, the ideal for each of us is to do what the apostle Paul told young Timothy.  That is to utilize Scripture "for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction" in Christ’s righteousness.  Like muscle memory in physical endeavors, or like a child learning the language of the family it’s born into, we will best succeed with immersive experience.  Christians know that God “made all things for (his) own pleasure”, centering the focus not on our opinions, but his holy word.  

I read the bible over and over and over, like in a life raft in the open sea bobbing up and down on the waves of the world.  I was desperate, so neglected by my parents, a middle child as nadir of their miserable, double alcoholic six-child marriage.  Generational immaturity as worldliness rendered them feeble for enlightened nurture of their offspring.  A version of the same is observable in you Amish-Mennonites, American protection of human rights a boon to security but also complacency, plus your presence in the racial majority.

As Jesus told the listening Samaritan woman at Jacob’s old well, spirit and truth is the approach we must successfully take toward Almighty God.  I have a doctor’s book on my desk explaining up-to-date discoveries of the left and right hemispheres of our brain.  I’m thinking here that the right-brain administration of the left side of the body as primarily emotional–if I read it correctly–and the left-right set up as factual / rational reflects this.  I think your turned backs and cold shoulders are your emotional flight response to the change that I represent.  I learned to follow with my right foot and think things through.

That, if we lead each of our two-step actions with the left, then it’s our emotional spirit that leads out, and our rationales that follow up, or vice versa for a lefty.  God stipulates spirit, soul, and body as a triumvirate of function and approach to him, in general humility.  Truth is God’s Bible, implying our working understanding and application of it.  And, our bodies are to be the temples of Almighty God's Holy Spirit.  Do we do that?

So, if I ask you to discuss with me your reasoning for a printed and published opinion on a Christian Godly subject, but only receive an unsociable stare in reply, is it any wonder that I question your conditional salvation?  In which case, it is not that fellowship is undesirable with you.  Rather, it is impossible, because no Christian reciprocation is forthcoming to me.  How can clean-living Christian people exhibit such a lack of Christian love and hospitality?  You are satisfied with a nod and a handshake but a Christian kiss and a hug is so very remote in your heart, and bare soul conversation.

And with the non-Christian division of the genders you do in the assembly, I logically perceive the extent of your family intimacy as worldly.  The rod as a reserve option is out of place when we meet a stranger or generally in adult relationships as society.  What reasoning in your mind connives to hold the option of the rod with a brand new child?  It is twelve years I have written to you about this since my discovery of it.  Not once have any of you attempted to prove incorrect my scriptural line of reasoning, except for Enos, who was too elderly to bother more with it.  

Again, the idea of using a rod does not exist in God’s bible but for the Proverbs passages now proven to be a human translation manipulation of God’s scripture during the transition from Latin to English  And remember the politics involved, and follow the money and honey of physical comfort and social prestige.  Christendom was transitioning from popery to presbytery, and the social control of the so-called laity was the focus of the new Protestant clergy.  Who put a new slant on it starting with brand-new children.

For two-and-a-half years among you, not once did any of you discuss issues with me.  An after-lunch-at-their-house opening of Strong’s Concordance with Tim was useless about First Corinthians eleven.  For, I did all the work, and it was the wrong thing to do.  The answer is in plain English in which common sense says cover the hair of the head.  

Which is probably the nape of the neck in back with a bun and in the front with the forehead hairline.  Word studies on “katakaluptomai” and “peribolion” are uselessly irrelevant.  And note, all Viv could say in passing at the end of my visit with them was, “You need a church”.  Better is a crust of dry bread and peace, church not an end in itself.  The Greek words could probably stand a look at, but the basic idea is to cover the vain head hair.  This is what holy women of old have done from time-in-memorial.

At this time as I write, European countries are legislating against the wearing of the hijab.  Plainly inciting a riot is no way to deal with failed immigration policy.  Such legislation is no more useful than their ‘jihad’.  The real issues are love of God and hatred of God, with its applications a mishmash.  They are a mishmash of uncommon-law ruling and uninspired doctrine.

Your Christian wishy-washiness of partial coverings for girls and women is due to fear,  not of the loving God but of hateful man.  If Jesus said we’ll obey his commands if we love him, then evidently you do not love him.  Because, that Word of God that Jesus really is says to cover the woman’s head hair.  Your women might cover 60% of theirs.

If we can’t take Jesus for a fool, then maybe we should try it on ourself.  The eighth-grade vocabulary you requested of me is also God’s level presented for our ability in First Corinthians chapter eleven.  Your Amish-Mennonite ancestors dishonestly explained their men’s shaven upper lips as separation from the world, contrary to scripture.

About beards, the only time I’ve read in The Bible about shaving it on purpose is if you have leprosy.  Evidently, you supposedly Christian men have been hypocritically doing the opposite of what I’ve reminded you that God has had written in his bible.  You have preferred social disrespect to me to maintain an unGodly worldly preference.

I know that Jesus said offenses should come, but may I remind you of the woes upon them that do them?  Did you learn the social silent treatment from Jesus, or from Israel of old, who did so to well-meaning men who questioned their lukewarmness?  

If only the cross of Christ prevents history from repeating itself, then I question whether you ever hoisted one on your own shoulder.  Because, you’ve been staring at me like the Pharisees did to Jesus.  It was both the metal money and the human honey of social position and prestige that the Pharisees preferred and prioritized instead of Jesus’ approval.

We can’t look Jesus in the face if we won’t take his word at face value.  That 35-mm shot of Jesus that Emma showed me showed him exactly as John described him from Patmos.  It helped me focus on Jesus for years after, as Emma suggested.  Is that any different than passing on to you updates that this modern internet has afforded us?

Modern technology is not taboo if God can use it for our sanctification, such as finding the key for unlocking and solving the 16th-century ploy of the proverbial rod or the man-made clergy question.  For the latter, see Ken Cascio’s website with his writing plus like minded contributors, Wicked Shepherds.com.

And mind you, Christian perception is not your new age textual criticism.  As Anna Breytenbach said to the camera after she walked in ‘unannounced’ to a wild troupe of South African baboons, for a one-on-one conversation with the alpha male, in peace, she said, “This isn’t new age (speculation).  I simply meet the animals where they are, in the present moment.”  Shall we not “Be still, and know that (God) is God”?  

The baboons were rightly bothered when the county allowed an expansion of a local golf course into their supposedly protected territory.  Anna went in and persuaded them to forgive the humans of their sin, which the baboons agreed to do.  No more attacks on golfers ensued.  The animals depend on us for leadership and stewardship, ironically.

The words ‘obey them’ (meaning to ordained clergy) are not the original words of God.  The original wording is “yield to” or “be persuaded” (of your more experienced elders, both men and women).  Wind and waves, children to Godly parents, wives to Christlike  husbands, that is the correct Greek word meaning “obey”.  But generally, the new testament way is the way of persuasion for the Israel of God as the bridal Church of Jesus Christ amongst one another.  

Persuasion is the predominant new covenant process.  Obedience is for the natural elements to God or the people of God, for families, and for church families assembled in the promised presence of The Lord Jesus Christ.  Who said, “I will come to you.”  If we be against God, how can he be for us?

Mix money and / or social prestige with obedience from so-called laity and we’ve got ourselves a problem.  Include in that the lazy indifference of complacent people who are childish adults refusing their part of Christian social leadership, and you have most of Christian dispensational history.  

The Protestants continued the Catholic sword combining church and state.  Even when separated, the social pressure of gossip and slander are an invisible sword.  Freedom of speech here in the USA combines with secular government allowing private worship.  A general acknowledgement of an almighty god of love oxygenates the atmosphere of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

I admit to a minimal working knowledge of the U.S. Constitution.  My numerous brushes with death since conception, however, surely bolstered my focus on God’s Biblical Constitution.  I want to know where I stand in the national republic of God.  And as Ben Franklin answered an onlooker as he left Independence Hall who asked, “What’ve we got, Mr. Franklin?”  Benjamin purportedly answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

As for me, I want to know what my eternal options are and how to achieve them directly.  God’s Gospel is simple, and we complicate it, meaning we prevent ourselves from it.  What’s not so simple is seeing God rectify the wayward tendencies in our human selves.  The devil and evil people are restricted to leveraging their force on the fulcrum of our hearts.   But ultimately, we ourselves put the pressure on the lever.

Angels “long to look into” the things of humanity.  And, we humans being “a little lower” than the angels, are too easily fascinated by them, including the works of our hands.  So then, humility correctly focuses our minds on God.  Which brings us back to our story, even his story, or history.  Because as a song says, ‘Only what’s done for Christ will last.’

If we men have no good reason to not wear a beard, then wear one.  But do it in the trimmed way we see chronologically in the bible with Mephibosheth and David.  I don't see any other procedural precedent after Aaron’s big one in Psalm 133:2 besides this.

The trimmed beard of David’s time is not defined, so common sense says long enough to reflect ”the God of all comfort”.  Common sense also says to sew ruffles into a pretty and modest dress so as to prevent form-fitting visibility.  Devotion and commitment and also mutual delight between spouses withstand any distraction.  Use a pair of scissors and a comb, and not so short it's uncomfortably prickly.

I heard one young fellow testify of his conversion to and confession of Jesus Christ.  He had been confused with same-gender attraction.  But, he went with brethren to the beach and clearly saw the error of his way.  He said that for the first time in his life, he saw how beautifully created and constructed are the daughters of God.

The same says to not buy a vehicle that is so loud as to raise the heads of the livestock feeding in the field as you drive by.  Which happened with each one of the youth boys when they departed after you hosted them for the regional youth seminar, hypocritically.  Because, you have a useful ruling against ownership of performance vehicles.   In which the idea is to spend saved money on a couple years of voluntary service somewhere.  

The rod is old testament and was never intended for children.  Tough young men was the idea, the word child written into the Proverbs text during the 16th-century.  That’s when the first English bibles were translated out of the Latin.  By King James’ time, the irrelevant word ‘child’ was artificially integrated into the Proverbs text.  You can see this for yourself by studying the historical bible translations at Textus Receptus Bibles.com.  

And here you can see the profound utility of the internet, like Johannes Gutenburg’s improved Chinese printing press.  Both effected an exponential increase of information.  Bible Gateway.com is my favorite for its well-laid-out and easy-to-use bible versing.  But, most of its selection of translations are modern Alexandrian travesties.  Gail Riplinger’s with her daughter Brynne’s AV Publications is a very useful bible history website store.

Jesus was ‘spanked’ for every one of us, the ultimate “na’ar’’ of Proverbs, the perfect young man chastised with a rod by The Heavenly Father.  The uncalled-for obedience to post-apostolic clergy is a judaizing continuation of old Israel.  And, it contradicts the fact that Christianity itself is a kingdom of priests, every individual, Jesus the high priest.  We prevent God from having his romantic and tender way with us in our church assemblies.

“But, I am your king”, God sweetly said from his heart to Israel.  But no, Israel insisted on being like the regular nations around them.  While it’s understandable that mixing spirit and truth happens readily, God shows us how to be pure and forthright about it.  To Titus, Paul wrote, “Encourage the young men to control themselves”.  The rod is passe’ now, the golden rule the real rod of correction, appropriating God's nine spiritual fruits.  

The reference to a father’s discipline of a youth boy in Hebrews 12 is obviously referring to the old way.  Providential circumstance is the new way, across-the-board for everyone.  Paul displays this new way to the Corinthians about the man doing incest.  Paul theoretically proposed a choice of one of two options, the rod (suggested facetiously) or, love and a spirit of meekness.

Paul was legitimately angry with the Corinthian assembly just like God was at Sinai.  I mean when Moses was up on the mount with God, and down below Aaron acquiesced to the people’s unbelief and impatience with a molten calf.  Paul’s choice was exemplary to us all, choosing to react as Jesus would now, not as he did as Jehovah at Sinai.  Then, he wanted to obliterate the retrograde-minded Israelites, starting over with Moses.  Who begged God off the idea, quite amazingly.  But hey, what else are friends for?

Notice what God had the prophet Hosea say, “...like people, like priest…”  This means weak leaders preach what the people want to hear, not what God wants them to say.  Like the famous nobody said, ‘What you want is what you get.’  I add to that, ‘You live and you learn, if you want to.’  God also had it written about himself, “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”

The old testament was predominately coercive, with some persuasion observable.  We see the latter with Moses, even the intuitive Zipporah with Moses’ circumcision.  We see it before them conversationally between God and Sarah and Abraham, even Lot and Abraham in their land dispute.  We see it with God and Moses when Aaron was brought in to help out.  

Today, people are unnecessarily leaving churches riddled with secular humanism.  They have secularized by privately interpreting God’s Word for individuals, families, and full assemblies.  The assemblies have become audiences, no longer true assemblies.  Which are supposed to be a together, a truly together phenomenon.  Clergy obedience makes it us and them, a relationship only reserved for Jesus and ourselves in a Heaven-Earth relationship.

This is not hocus-pocus theorizing; I began perceiving it three years after I moved to Pennsylvania.  I mean the singular bishopric leadership configuration.  My realization was that the funnel effect of singular clerical leadership stifles the normal and beautiful interaction between brethren in assembly ministry.

As a child, I saw it in accentuated form in Catholicism, where the parish priest would run around like a chicken with its head chopped off, ministering way more than is physically healthy.  And all that was without the support and involvement of a helpful wife.  Burn out was not always the only problem ensuing there, as we’ve tragically heard.

Christianity is the real religion of being truly happy in a totally sad place.  It includes the most efficient system of social caring and sharing.  No child of God left behind is the idea, so why have I received the cold shoulder?  From people who should know better, but it seems you don’t.  

You’ve had peace and plenty served to you as inheritance, but persecution after your Anabaptist beginning shuddered the novelty of that movement to a stifled stop.  Do you think your visitors and some converts to your partisan Christian way are impossibly ignorant?  How many times have you smiled your silent smiles at a visitor who points out that some of your rules of faith and practice are not biblical?

”Judgment starts with the house of God”, so read this attentively.  God told Adam and Eve they’ll now eat bread by the sweat of their brow, and have to wait in line for it.  We are all in line with no hunger strikes allowed.  Like the U.S.A. republic, Jesus' church is only his to administer, according to his Father's constitutional Word.  

You do know that “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God”?  Rulings are fine if they’re derived from God’s inspired Word.  Warnings are posted about making things up, if you’ve noticed.  In Deuteronomy, a Psalm, and the Revelation of Jesus to John, God let it be known to not pretend you’re as good at Math as he is.  

The very name of your assembly, a church as you prefer to call it, wrongly, is a ‘Grove’.  Where biblically we know Israel backslid with infants sacrificed to Molech in the groves.  Mamre is a sanctified place by Abraham, not called a grove in that context, simply some trees.  May I suggest Oaks of Mamre Amish-Mennonite Assembly?

Three times in his copyrighted text God says to not add to it.  Lately, I compare you to the Baptists, who are oblivious to simple reality.  While they hold to imagined inspiration on the subject of baptismal mode.  Add baptismal meaning to that, their preoccupation with sordid irrelevancies of Greek studies of baptism miss the biblical point entirely.

John’s baptism–said in my essay–was nothing new, and certainly not Greek.  Israelite priestly sprinklings render moot the Baptist made-up idea of total dunking.  I continue to describe them as unchaperoned 13-year-olds.  And, the refusal to allow analysis of their beliefs, especially on the famous baptism, is exactly what you my Amish-Mennonite friends do with your nonresistant peace.

And, the Baptists claim that the early church immersed as baptismal mode.  So did the early church elect singular, kingly leaders over themselves.  God calls it judaizing, and ironically, it’s what the Baptists don’t understand about baptism.  It was the old way of Mosaic Israel to sprinkle sins away.  Hug Jesus’ cross and you’ll see how sprinkling works.

Creeks are for swimming and fishing and maybe washing clothes in with biodegradable soap, not ludicrous baptismal services. As is the Baptist idea of the Christians at Pentecost using the pool of Siloam under armed Roman guard.  Where else would they have dunked 5-K men, plus women and surely some youngsters?  Get a real life in Christ, Christian pal, including a cessation of hitting innocent children in the name of the Prince of Peace!

We have to be open to correction if we want God’s pillar of fire to close off the enemy’s pursuit behind us.  Who were drowned in the Gulf of Aqaba, not the sea of reeds, for your open minded information.  Solomon set up two pillars there, one on each shoreline, one of them presently standing upright in concrete on the western, Israeli side.

My story is admissible as told in my essay, excusing you for your own mistakes.  Who is elaborating scripturally on the correct physiology of spanking?  Haven’t you heard that striking someone on the buttocks can injure the lower back?  God, never a fool, only stipulated the upper back for the strike of a rod.  There, the repercussion is dissipated, distributed in every safe direction through the convex contours of big muscles.

And, have we not imagination sufficient to envision Sweet Jesus at the hands of sour men?  Bludgeoned beyond individual recognition, neither have I seen the Jesus movie.  It’s simple mathematics, A= the rod, B=Jesus, C=me, so he got the rod for my sin.  It is what I now call mediatorial mathematics.  So, stop hitting anyone, if you know what’s good between you and The Creator and Savior, Jesus Christ.  

You transubstantiate his sacrifice on Calvary with your imagined rod of correction on God’s innocent little ones.  Any idea of original sin dissolves in the reality of the age of reason and a subsequent conscious propensity to sin.  God created man conscious, childlike, but sin made him self-conscious and childishly immature.  “In sin did my mother conceive me” is talking about David’s mom.  “Butter and honey will he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good.”

Jesus said he’ll use a millstone on anyone who harms one of his father’s little ones.  Hitting a child happens to be nonexistent in God’s Bible but for this strange allotment of passages in Proverbs.  How the erudite scholarship of 400-plus years has missed it is very, very suspect.  As Samuel Martin said in Thy Rod And Thy Staff, to hold the popular position on the rod is to be on shaky theological ground.  

The one-size-fits-all word ‘child’ is incongruous in Proverbs next to the correct contextual word for “young man”.  On the (TRBibles.com) website, read into Miles Coverdale’s bibles (the Great Bible and Matthew’s Bible) and then the Geneva and the Bishops’ bibles.  Look on ahead to the helpful literal translations of Robert Young’s, Julia Smith’s, and J.P. Green’s.  ‘Child’ is nowhere in those texts, only “youth”, “lad”, or “young man”.  And to work maidens into the meaning of the context reminds of today’s cross gendered athletes.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but my aversion to hitting a softball at female defenders for not wanting to injure their wombs counters my former approval of female footballers.  I never played football with girls; I heard the state champion javelin thrower played on the local high school team.  I was told she was fast and hit hard.  Well, an iron belly is an iron belly, especially if she’s six inches taller than I am and heavier.  These are exceptions.

(Editor’s note–The Great Bible was called as it was because the copies were enormous with a hole drilled through each one so it could be chained to the church pulpit.)

Hallelujah Hypocrites is another term I now coin, but not without saying, ‘Been there, done that’.  So, what gives, but taking from Jesus, taking the rod out of our hands and laying it down so we can stretch out our hands and receive from Jesus, for distribution of his peace.  The Protestant criticism of Catholic transubstantiation is a hypocritical hoax with the continued adoption of the private interpretation of the rod passages of Proverbs.  The rod stopped with Jesus, so why continue it but in appreciative memory.

To repeat from the essay, each of the separate contextual passages about the rod has been mistranslated.  The “blueness of the wound” was left as it is, because it agrees with the private interpretations (see my essay for specifics of those, or the published booklet of poetic one-liners).  

So, what to do?  Resemble the spiritual bride we’re supposed to be, unassuming, without unattractive presumption.  Jesus wants a bride that wants to do what he wants, not what she thinks is best for both of them.  Don’t try to take the country out of the boy, for then there’ll be no birds ‘n bees.

In the assembly, never mind what the ministry would say, not until you figure out what is right by your unseared conscience.  And refuse to hear prepared sermons; do you think the apostles prepared sermons?  Surely, they were so well versed from Genesis to Revelation they knew exactly where to refer when they stood up to teach.  Financial remuneration becomes a factor with Greek oratorial prepared sermons.  Sunday School was brought in to counteract the unbiblical boredom of the oratorial sermons.  And it seems I heard the ancient Greeks orated from memory and learned brilliance, without crib notes.

When Jesus sang a hymn with his friends at the end of their last supper together, do you think they read out of a songbook?  Did the Swiss Brethren lug along songbooks when they could barely carry their children and essential stuff, evicted from their houses?  Your Protestant song singing is more like the cathedral singing of the people who tortured and drowned your ancestors.  Who in their forced travels and wanderings found the beautiful melodies of Catholic nuns and monks, changing the lyrics, the words. 

The Gaels of the Scottish Isles still sing that way, also Appalachian shape-note singing.  Your spiritual cousins, the Amish still do too, but sound generally senile.  And I think your fancy cathedral-choir type singing is a misguided ego trip to an extent.  Last time I visited Enos and Nora, before his end, they sang a beautiful song in 'Delaware Dutch'.  It was even commented from your pulpit that your singing is a witness to visitors of God's presence among you.  That was Paul’s explanation of pentecostal tongues, not group singing.  You do not have the Word of God backing you to think or say that.

If it is “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is”, learn your worship songs by heart.  I get rather dizzy hearing your fancy singing, not to mention singing along with you.  You are trained singers just like the Protestants’ trained choirs to keep up with the organs they brought into the assembly buildings.  Notice what John Wesley jokingly said about the subject of instruments in the assembly rooms, quoted in my essay.  The only musical instrument Almighty God has given his Son's churches is the altars of unhewn stones, our bodies' voices.  Jesus sang a hymn with his friends, and then they went out into the dark of the night.  That set the musical tone for the dispensation.

If I sound boisterous, I’m trying to address our myriad tangents from the pilgrim’s progressive way.  So, see the three fingers pointed back if your index points at me.  To finalize my point about people leaving denominational assemblies, large rooms are useful compared to family gatherings as Christian house churches.  Outreach ministries remain included, to let the Holy Spirit determine the outcome and ministerial distribution of wealth.  

Church is a conversation, the first three letters of that word meaning everyone included.  Children are to be heard also, not just seen, for how else “from the mouths of babes”?   I have heard enough of your anabaptist nonresistant peace-church justification of using violence to get Jesus’ point across to children.  I think God has heard enough of it also.

Organized outreach abroad is less feasible by house churches.  The question is the quality of the outreach, with tare seeds of complacency sown as lukewarm representation of Scripture.  While Muslim women are too covered, Amish-Mennonite women aren’t covered enough.  Which of the two should be accurate?  We mock Jesus in these things.  There were plural-pillar leaders at Jerusalem and Antioch.

You’re so busy with fancy and intricate pulpit sermons that you end up in a daze of imagined conviction and confused inspiration.  God knows we all need stability in our lives.  But, complacency after achieving that is self-fulfilling Christian prophecy.  I mean, real issues won’t be talked about from the pulpit if we’re not dealing with them in our real lives.  Remember what Hosea said, "Like people, like priest."

It is very scary to be socially and even politically incorrect.  Those courageous enough to do so are nonetheless human and frail and require the building up of brotherly and sisterly edification.  Elders like your pompous and misguided teachers and exhorters are useless if they, men and women, are not living lives of Christian daring.  

As it is often said that public speaking is scary as death, our example as teaching by our real life experiences is worthless and irrelevant if we are not in our lives participating in a mature way as elder people at the frontline of social public rejection.  I am convinced it is fear of what people outside our assemblies will say about us or think of us or do to us that tempers our pulpit presentations or intra-pew encounters.

Speaking of pews, the Judaistic system of divided genders is not Christian.  Stop it, and deal with the why of why you do it.  It’s spousal jealousy and general lust and misogyny that God kept at bay in the old testament divided assembly services.  The solution goes down to function within our soul’s very bone and marrow.  Preach about that next Sunday, and the next Sunday have an open discussion among those making application.

Character is not some three-act play of spiritual entertainment.  It is cold, hard war, and hence the Scriptural delineation of the armor of a warrior.  You’ll need your helmet, breastplate, loin wrap belt, all-terrain sandals, shield, and hair-splitting sword.  You’ll need full insight to salvation in Christ, a full and reasonable grasp of Christ Jesus’ righteousness, a truly equipped tool belt and gut protector, a five-layered leather shield of Scripture-founded faith, and footwear that brings you to all points of God’s compass with the goodwill and peace the angels declared at Jesus’ birth.

Are you doing it now, presently, with uncertain salvation?  ‘Confused righteousness? ‘Truth that is manipulated by men moved by devils?  ‘A shield of moldy, rotten layers of leather that are a protective shield of wishful thinking? ‘A sword of mixed iron and clay?  ‘Footwear that doesn’t fit and distracts with every step from tidings of peace?  

Open up the ideas yourself, if you think mine are weak!  Peace was always maintained by a strong defensive posture.  It still is in the police and the military, against mad intruders.  Children are well-nigh disowned by our negligence when we don’t teach them the art of Christian spiritual war against the principalities of spiritual darkness.  Stop devouring one another with the application of false doctrine.

Whose wall to break into is that of our human heart, its male jealousy and female fear and manipulation, its clerical desire for social prestige and honor, its group-think countering the individualism God built into our DNA.  To say nothing of our abject nervousness around perfectly innocent children.  Because they’re not degraded like us, and so we force them into our moldy mold.  We are cowards that lap water like dogs.

The idea with children is to teach them to imitate Jesus when past the age of reason.  If we have not allowed our Heavenly Parent to do it to us, then we cannot do so for them.  We fake it according to our pride, resembling a worldy masquerade party.  ‘A Christian home-Halloween party of sorts.  Keep it simple, sinner, of course not for the once-saved-always-saved exception that you are.  

Whose self-righteous self-justification self-sanctifies into the morbidity of pre-hell.  Do we forget that Israel committed atrocities that made the nations round about pale in comparison with?  It’s on a mostly intellectual plane now, of course.  In which eating one’s children in the siege by Nebuchadnezzar now is morphed into the butchering of their little pure consciences.  You preach peace while you hit them with a stick.  ‘Eternity at our fingertips in our children we hit; fools’.

That’ll learn ‘em to hate the Prince of Peace.  Divide the boys and girls and men and women due to old testament hard hearts.  That’ll harden their hearts for true love so they never know it for what it is and when it might be done.  Feminize the youth boys’ faces, as the youth girls are taught necessarily to take up their masculine slack.

Only put half of a hunter’s safety cap on the girls and the women.  So, they’ll get shot in the face by the next drunk hunter in the spiritual realm.  Who cares, the men say, it’s not them getting shot in the face.  Cowardice knows no bounds for himself because he won’t go near the realm of selfless bravery.  So I also asked a visitor man of yours why he shaves his upper lip.  

He laughed and said it’s so the girls and women won’t feel so alone with their coverings.  So your preference for private interpretation got turned into a cute Christian joke.  If you’re not ashamed of yourself now, then you will be later.  Ask yourself how the future grammatical tense got included in the bible, when it’s non-existent in old covenant Hebrew.  Like children ask ‘why’ to their parents, shouldn’t Christian ‘children of God’ ask it of God?  Children are curious, and I see no such thing in you wayward children.

To you who requested it, is this readable eighth-grade English?  Read out loud to your children the story of the Laodicean church in Revelation.  Non-rhetorically ask, could this be talking about me, your big, great daddy?  ‘And complicit mommy?  Fentanyl is hot-buttered popcorn compared to the treachery of Christian complacency and apathy.  Where is childlike joy at discovery regardless of required change for growth?  

The lights of the world need new batteries, many miles from a store.  The field of your family has been denied its sabbath fallow rests.  The hay is low, the grain won’t seed, your children and now, grandchildren, I see, are bitter and rude young adults.  A mixed message will do that to a child, a wrong letter in a wrong-addressed envelope.

It will take time to re-route and recover the wrong letter sent.  Patience will be needed, and humility.  You have generations behind you of compromise digressed into complacency.  You’ve reversed God’s everlasting arms into a cold shoulder.  You think it’s normal, unable to feel the pain of the victim of your self-satisfied selfishness.  

How many seekers have been turned away by your Church of the Revolving Door?  And all I’ve wanted to do with you is mutually look into God's blood-bought Word and align our lives with it so we can be free-indeed together.  That’s without lip service or tickled ears; I didn’t learn Christ that way.  My heavenly daddy raised me up good, brutally good, blueness of wounds included.  

This child of God wants to be grown up unto biblical full stature, just like when I was a physical child.  When will I ever be grown up, I asked myself, only to be told in God’s Word that the physical childhood wasn’t the half of it.  May Jesus’ joy of discovery be with you and yours.  In the essay, I joked there’s a sucker born-again every minute, also that as people never used to go to the circus on Sunday, now everyone goes to the circus on Sunday.  Let’s change the statistics.  We may have to change Gods to do it.  Mammon had its attractions, but “(God’s) faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”.   God’s faith, not ours, Michael Vincent Tovar  10/13/2024

                                                             end  of  email

Addendum # 2

   1

Questions, Christian questions about children, women, and men, of freedom freely endowed by God, but continued bondage chosen insteadWho’s emissary would deliver a message to progress the sanctification of a confessing Christian to prepare them for Jesus’ imminent presence, and not to one whose ticklish ears are averse to sound doctrine?  Is it aversion to insincerity that makes our prayer avail much before The Lord?  Can our sincerity be somehow averse to honesty, actually finding it repugnant?

   2

Is Satan so daft as to suggest our women demurely cover every possible strand of their scalp hair of spiritual vanity and dissolute display?   Do not Jesus’ Father’s angels want to know the range of needed spiritual protection and edification for his kingdom daughters?  

   3

Does God think a husband’s cowardly compromise encourages his wife’s assumption of leadership?  Doesn’t God know that the woman that wears the pants in a family does the pissing “against a wall” ?

   4

Is it Satan who wants you to know how wolfish men have infiltrated the flock of Jesus with smooth words of the writer’s craft?  

   5

Does Jesus want his Christians to assemble with those who dissemble as fearful haters of hospitality and arrogant despisers of prophetic approach?  

   6

Are we like the German military personnel recently found in an attic photograph album?  Like their dull and duplicit commander Adolf Eichmann, did they unwittingly frolic eating bowls of local blueberries in full sun at the weekend R&R getaway and grumble a little bit on the employee shuttle-bus Monday morning to Auschwitz?  

   7

Will their disgruntled grumbling be held against them or us as we turn the wrong cheek spanking our undesirable minority children?  Is Molech’s smirk only a satanic smile away to our weekend getaway?

   8

Was it Satan who moved the 15th century German metalsmith Johannes to so improve the Chinese printing press that as Gail Riplinger wrote it, the presses groaned cranking out bibles for the common plowboy, and wash girl?  

   9

Is it not by the benevolent and providential hands of Jesus that we have the internet to exponentially repeat the effects of Johannes Gutenberg’s improved printing ‘wheel’?  Is Heaven a blind bureaucracy or an alert Army of one?

   10

Was it Satan who grieved when the early Christian church clamored for kingly singular bishops to rule over them?  Was it not Jesus as Jehovah who grieved as he did when old Israel clamored for a king, “But, I am your king”?  Would our Heavenly Bishop willfully relinquish his direct presence and leadership to a presumptuous earthly substitute?  

   11

Do we not worship the creation and not The Creator in the institutional work of our hands as fancy ordained clerics?  Does the rich man’s money not only talk but also stalk even the airy scary vestibule of the local Christian assembly?  

   12

Did Jesus complicate the simplicity of his vicarious body function with overlording ecclesiasts who meddle in the private Christian life of church family?  Did Jesus not tell his friends ‘’Not so shall it be among you?”  Who’s the Reverend here, God or man, for with Jesus Christ having come in the flesh it cannot be both, he who shares not his glory with another?  

   13

Was it not Jesus who alone since Eden’s debacle lifted woman up from the dust and the stones?  Is it not Satan who detracts from that unifying work of God’s Christ to make mankind a fair family and equal society?  

   14

Was it not for hard hearts that needed to keep Israel’s unspiritually lustful and jealous sons separated from God’s daughters in Yahweh’s tabernacle temple?  Was it not for the same that God brought the waters of Noah’s flood, and next the impending fire of God’s accumulated tears over Jerusalem?

   15

Has not God in Jesus' biblical fullness of time shown us how to not be led of our lusts as Adam and Eve were, by reception of his nine spiritual fruits and heeding his two great commandments, by the example of Jesus and his discipled friends of both genders and all age groups?  

   16

Is it not Satan who would separate the genders, to currently move worldlings to obliterate them if they could, with our complacent indirect contribution?  Is the worldly desire for absolute moral autonomy exactly like the refusal of prophetic outsider input in the complacent pews of Christendom, merely chalked up by them as some idiosyncratic zeal?

   17

Was it not Almighty God as Jesus who choreographed his dance’s time-line to personally show us how to truly love one another and God, not that Moses and Elijah hadn’t already learned?  

   18

Did not the Greeks ploy Troy over an unsuspecting woman and Satan move a Trojan horse into our lives with resumed prejudice against the other half of God’s dual gender reflection?  Wasn’t Deborah a likely candidate to be an audience also to Jesus on his mountain of transfiguration?

   19

How can we receive God’s revelation to us of who exactly in Heaven he is, when we disdain what he’s already shown us with gender, and repeatedly does so with each given child?  

   20

Is it not Satan who invites us men to infatuation with our narcissistic belly buttons at the expense of children and womens’ equal stature?  Has not our distortion of God’s gender and age group love given so little to the world that like drowning people they put the death grip to any life within reach?  

   21

Can Satan appreciate beauty more than a sham charade of rote traditional application?  Is not Satan’s deception ours when by a readily visible scriptural translation fallacy we spiritually dash our firstborn son’s head on a rock of the creek, suckling a piglet in his stead, now with our jungle conscience geared and seared?  

   22

Was your big bishop not blind as I still think he was when he retorted, ‘‘No, Molech, no, to say Molech about spanking children is going too far!”  

   23

Shall then we sit back with Jesus in his film room and watch it all in slow motion playback?  Was a second camera on the face of the child from start to finish as we brought him before Caiaphas, then to the Roman tormentors, and on to the splintery cross?  

    24

Will you be sure not to miss the look on his face in Gethsemane when we told him, ‘Just wait until your father gets home’?  

   25

Will we ever hear the words of the altar boy who testified that as he was being sodomized in the sacristy after mass, he was looking up at the picture of Jesus on the wall and cried, ‘Jesus, please Jesus, please make him stop!”  Does spanking contribute or detract from that high, priestly accomplishment, that abuse of trust and so much more?

   26

Is it not Satan who wants us to misinterpret the aghast visage of our trusting child when we on our maiden voyage of corrupt leadership strike him or her with an iceberg of a smile on our face?  

   27

Is it not the beguiling smiling devil in the front passenger seat in place of our fellow teen aged friend when we take our eyes off a speeding road for a second?  Was it Jesus who inspired the Virginia Beach Amish-Mennonite youths to switch their driver at seventy miles-per-hour?  

   28

Was it Jesus who hosted this year’s regional Youth Seminar where every last one of them drove an unnecessarily loud vehicle contrary to your assembly’s faith standard?  Did Jesus ever tell us to turbocharge our preaching voice, less the pulpit traffic of hi-tech cars and low-tech drivers?

   29

Is it not Satan who wants satisfying Corinthian interactive Christian assembling restricted mostly to a monotonous Greek oratory?  Was it not Satan who introduced Sunday School as a feeble repair of broken Christian Corinthian church body participation?  

   30

Has not the unique utility of Pentecost as a witness to the stranger been falsely assumed here by acapela singing so expert as to awe the visitor into their venus fly-trap cultivation?

   31

Would it be anyone else but fallen Lucifer who would use wanton Christian scholars to leverage God’s family-oriented Word at its most fulcrum points?  Is it not that same devil who matches man’s frailties to his cronies’ copyright infringements?

   32

Is it not Satan who tracks habitual man into a frozen rut of mistaking mundane tradition for divine truth?  Is it not God’s spiritual fruits of love and meekness apostle Paul preferred over against the human wielding of the rod? 

   33

Was it not Satan who wanted Paul to judge the incest-enabling Corinthians with an eternal rod?  Was it Satan in Paul to choose mercy and salvation’s love and meekness over judgment with a rod in 1 Corinthians 4:21 implying for children also?  

   34

Is it not Satan who in the cover of domestic spiritual darkness violently breaks into the house of an innocent and unsuspecting child’s mind on the basis of a single series of implanted false scripture translation unseen anywhere else in the entire bible text, “shaky theological ground”, to quote Samuel Martin from his Thy Rod And Thy Staff, They Comfort Me: Christians And The Spanking Controversy?  

   35

Isn’t it Satan who negatively alters the course of history by shocking an innocent child with a rod that was only ever used on strong young men and stopped with the perfectly innocent back of Jesus Christ?  Is it not Jesus who came to save men and their kingdom children with no kind of rod or sword, only his peace of a kind and patient word?  

   36

And doesn’t Satan insidiously impersonate Jesus' peaceful way in soft spoken Christians whose lips drip with platitudes of his peace and love and meekness while they domestically systematize something it never entered Yahweh God’s mind to biblically tell us to do?

   37

Is it the Jesus who uniquely lived and died with no regrets who tells us to judge with partial judgment and do that with a hypocritical stick or hand or a stinging silent treatment against people we hate because we’re actually afraid of the God who sent them into our midst? 

   38

Is it Christ Jesus who established a direct and superior relationship with us in the Holy Spirit who tells us to be ruled over by a fellow Christian as clergy?  

   39

Is it Satan who would have the so-called laity lay down inappropriately and say nothing about it, the only question remaining whether they’re on their stomachs or their backs?  Does Satan’s espionage work in our lives prevent Jesus’ prophecy fulfillment that his person and his bride will be unified in equal stature at the end of time?  

   40

What else would Satan do to prevent that eternal domestic delight but turn us against one another, adult against child, man against woman, assembly elders against youngers?  Why else was the kind man astonished when he pulled his car over to help a woman outside her car being struck by her man and they both turned on him? 

   41

Is it not Jesus’ Father who had it written that it is an evil man who brutishly wrings a dog’s neck, surely as a secondary expression of our actual desire to do so to our frustrating child or teenager or fellow man?  

   42

Was it Satan who had Paul tell us through dear Titus to encourage our bit-chomping young men to control themselves?  Isn’t it Satan who morbidly wants to see us blame our innocent little ones and also our women, our wives as the spineless young Adam did his Eve?  

   43

Was it not your own Swiss Brethren ancestors who refused Zwingli’s satanic fallacy of original sin having to be hydraulically extracted out of your precious babies?  

   44

Would Satan see us perceive the age of reason we all take a turn entering into as simultaneous to the awakened propensity of adamic humans to transgress authority?  Is there really mercy round about our Godly hearths with the heart of Jesus?

   45

Does Satan worry we will today see our hypocrisy of not baptizing our children but then violently chastising the supposed hell out of them with pseudo-Christian calm and collected cool for fabricated infractions thought up in our hypocritically judgmental imaginations?  

   46

Didn’t the satanic dirty trick of the 16th century insertion of the word ‘child’ into the Proverbs text simply fan a burn-ban fire already existing in our minds?

   47

Do you think Jesus learned the difference between a mote and a log in the carpentry shop of his earthly dad, Joseph?  Did Jesus then learn to apply that wisdom with his perspicacious mom, Mary?  

   48

Were Jesus’ dad and his sisters each born again as required for Heaven and without hope in the world?  Does a child who is 100% happy to be alive get chopped down like George’s dad’s cherry tree for no good reason?

    49

Was the perfect Lord of Glory at age fourteen mistakenly chastised with a Mosaic rod?  If Jesus was God’s beginning of the end of sorrows of separation from God, why do we break fellowship with the fruit of our wombs?  

   50

Don’t we disdain that providential blessing by failing to show our children Jesus’ torture stake while we shake our judging stick at them?  If Jesus is all-sufficient in God’s truth and grace, his undeserved kindness, then aren’t we utterly negligent to deny it to the next generation?  

   51

Why did a customer service rep on the phone this past week tell me she once saw with her own eyes her girlfriend spank the bottom of her three month old baby?  Shall we do the same to a toothache, or flatten the heads of our children’s hearts as we take no thought for tomorrow?

   52

Is it the Spirit of Truth who ignores Jesus’ example of persuasion among brethren and inserts incongruous obedience in God’s Text as manipulating men did in Hebrews 13:7&17?  Would old Jeremiah see the anonymously explained transition from old to new in the letter to the Hebrews?  

   53

Is deserving obedience to God transferred in the spirit now from high priest to the resurrected Jesus, and persuasion among one another as a kingdom of cooperating regular priests, men and women, and yes even born again boys and girls?  Does the one who descended from eternity not rule and reign like Spirit, the finally-understood black panther, helped by Anna Breytenbach?

   54

Was it sweet Andrew who found the boy with five little loaves and two fishies who shooed away the women and children on another occasion, this hateful tradition stuck in him too?

   55

Were the wind and waves of Lake Galilee persuaded, or commanded, to settle down by Jesus?  Does Satan want the same for children to Godly parents and wives to Christlike husbands and none of us to a presumptuous clergyman faithlessly assuming the role of the resurrected Jesus?  

   56

Is it not Satan who would have you scorn me for showing you the difference?  Did you notice how people were laughing at Jesus to scorn two minutes before he raised the man’s daughter?  

   57

Was the misguided Christian parental guidance author sorely correct to say if you don’t have your children in control by age thirteen then it’s too late?  Isn’t that the exact age we see from Moriah to Nazareth, of the eternal Isaac slain from the foundation of the world, and of Solomon’s young ‘na’ar’ man Lemuel in Proverbs?

   58

Why do parents resemble Caiaphas and Pilate who cowardly and hatefully pass their Jesus-children on to the tormentor?  Do we know what spirit we are of, faithlessly not believing Jesus can heal our children through us with a kind and simple word?  

   59

Is there any real difference between a war and a spanking, except for those hypocrites who religiously brag they don't go to war, although war’s orphans are in their own household?  Of course, aren’t I the fool not to know they invented a fake Christianity that will die with them?

   60

Isn’t it a universal sign Jesus showed Peter to lay down every manner of sword and stick against one another by the power he had to raise himself up from the dead?  How many of his little ones have been terrifyingly slain either directly or indirectly by mankind’s refusal to acknowledge that victory of Jesus over selfish violence and death?  Can we equate Adam’s “the woman you gave to me” with Israel’s “this talkative prophet you gave to me” and so on?

   61

Did not God by Jesus create the components of our bodies to persuade and patiently wait for one another, including new cells?  Are our bodies’ new cells battered into forced function by older cells?   

   62

Does God want anyone to sit with scornful unbelievers?  Are some of your young third-generation married men the most disrespectful young’ns I’ve encountered in my sixty-nine years of travelled living, a third of those outside the U.S.A?  

   63

Are some of their parents and in-laws so-called enablers, as I’ve seen domestically surrounding druggies and narcissists?

   64

Was it Jesus who inspired in-name-only Christians to ignorantly improve upon the gorgeous KJV bible while practicing necromancy in their spare time?  Was it Jesus who moved in the heart of the aging concordance writer James Strong to party with those men, Westcott and Hort?  

   65

Is it possible that James Strong did too exhausting a job on his concordance in the name of Jesus?  Had not God already given us the analytical concordance of Robert Young before it?

   66

What is the difference between selfish oratory and generous storytelling?  Doesn’t the Hindu Ramayana begin with an intra-line phrase as narrative recollection of the time before the flood when the sun had no latitudinal shift in its annual trajectory?  

   67

Has not Jesus shown us how to live as it was before death first stalked our persons, and Cain’s hand raised against his fellow, and a parent’s hand raised against its child?

   68

Was it Jesus who moved the persecuted Swiss Brethren to blur the edges of their original vision with the social safety of spiritual lukewarmness, including the universal upper lip-shaven spiritual beard of man-made religions?  Isn’t the root of the word gimmick ‘gimme’, what false religion essentially does, that is, take?  

   69

Does the stranger to Christ whose women continue the ancient divine hierarchal ethic of veiled hair, albeit religiously overdoing it, misunderstand Jesus because his women wrongly abbreviate their spiritual veiling, or refuse it altogether?  

   70

Is it The Savior or the deceiver who suggests to a woman she cover her head-hair without actually covering it?  Shouldn’t we call a child a little lamb and not a baby goat, and isn’t a lady an accomplished woman who has earned the distinction and not a girl debuttante?  

   71

Does a woman hunter hunt food in field or woods with a partial safety cap of orange color?  

   72

What if maybe a drunk hunter in the spirit world sees her from the front coming over a rise in the woods?  

   73

Won’t he rashly shoot her in the face when her head illegally appears first without the warning of hunter’s orange, and now in his sights?  Isn’t a veil at the forehead hairline correct like that, corresponded with the intimate long hair up in an efficient work-a-day bun?  

    74

Was it The Biblical Great God of Mercy or some macho man who falsely contrived the religious gag order to wrap a longer veil like a choke hold around the neck of a sister?  

   75

Didn’t my mom as a baby Christian alone in her bed get choked for real in a nightmare by her satanically activated bedsheet and pushed against what she thought was a wall?  Wasn’t her sweaty handprint on the ceiling, after the kingsize bed crashed back down to the ground and she woke up after crying out to Jesus in her sleep, the old monk’s crucifix in her hand?  

   76

Isn’t that the same woman who earlier ran down a four-prop commercial airliner that had left the terminal with her six-children family’s luggage for a week’s vacation probably including her booze?  Has Yahweh as Jesus hired us to work for him but we’re leaning on our shovels?

   77

Isn’t the injunction by God biblically for veiling his women simply to let it be seen to all in every direction that this woman is one of his daughters and he will have it out with you if you entertain even the thought of having it in with her?  

   78

Didn’t even the Son of Man know to only look once in the way of recognition of a woman but never to jump off that cliff twice?

   79

Is it Jesus who suggests we butcher a child in the way of nurture and praise to Him?  Is not Christendom’s violent nurture of children the precedent for Satan’s derivative butchering?  

   80

Is our Christian light so dimmed that Jesus’ example of peaceful nurture has become a bludgeoning hypocrisy?  Is not the edenic child’s age of discovery warped by our unbelief into one of manipulated madness?  

   81

Why did a preacher’s wife once tell me she asked a little girl in a toy store holding a monster-man doll to her chest why she liked it, and why she may grow up to think something terrible is enthralling?  

   82

Isn’t the shattered innocence of a child an ironic way to teach them about sin?  Doesn’t innocence mean no sense of sin and should be respected and God worshiped for it?

   83

Is it not Satan who beguiles us to misinterpret the mind of a child and their progress to maturity?  Is it Jesus who suggests we sneak war into a child’s script of peace behind closed doors?  

   84

Is it not Satan who brags of only having to spank their child once and they ‘learned’, to never again trust man or God but for divine intervention?  Is it not Jesus’ gift of total peace that is segmented into partiality when we are hypocritically violent with our child?  

   85

What does a one-spank or hundred-spank child learn but the craft of the creep and never the care of the creche?  If it takes so much time and attention to nurture a child, should we not incorporate it into our time spent with The Spirit of Almighty God in Jesus Christ? 

   86

Do we not make excuses in order to legitimize our abuses against God and man?  

   87

Was the existence of the spiritual realm proven to teenaged me one Saturday when an invisible person grabbed the trunk of the small pine tree directly in front of me and shook it eight times thrice, the third set delayed for my girlfriend who was elsewhere picking flowers and I called her over to see the wonder?  

   88

Don’t we all know of impossible coincidences, for me, the younger fellow in her class who’d follow me and her around on that Filipino school campus, to be the solitary person I saw at a distance one day later back in the States, on my sidewalk side of a long suburban street I had to take but was three streets out of my way, because I was talking too much with the driver who had given me a ride hitchhiking my way to a dentist appointment, and so we passed one another and sure enough it was him and I said “Hey Gerry” and he said “Hey Mike” and I kept going quickly to the dentist, showing at least this young man that it’s a small world and a big God? 

   89

Was it not Satan who had the illogical one-size-fits-all word ‘child’ later placed alongside the contextually original “young man” in Solomon’s proverbs?  Was it Jesus who authored our confusion in this very important subject of nurture?  

   90

Has this 16th century meddling in God’s Word hampered the dissemination of his Christ’s gospel of peace?  Has Satan thrown a wrench into God’s work, where we ask for a wrench of no particular size, or a diaper?  

   91

Didn’t God ask me for a 9/16th wrench as na’ar’s majority interpretive application of “young man”, you know, “Lemuel my son” in the Proverbs Hebrew?  Has Almighty God of a sudden attached stones between the legs of his maidens, and powered the muscles of their backs to withstand the impact of a striking rod, probably inflicted by a muscled man? 

   92

Is not Solomon’s Lemuel really the young man Jesus of Isaiah 52 and 53?  Are we not living in the past, that most pathetic condition of a human without Christian hope in the world?  

   93

Are we not who Jesus criticized in his parable with our children beating the menservants and maidservants while he is away for a while?  If Jesus said his kingdom can be within us, doesn’t that mesh with his admonition elsewhere to be still in our spirits and know that he is God?

   94

Is God’s biblical statement of the impossibility of fully describing the beauty of the way of a man with a woman through Solomon in Ecclesiastes attempted anyway presumptuously by each of us who wipe our mouth and say we “have done no wrong” and to God’s indescribably beautiful little ones?

   95

Has not the smugness and pride of our perverted humility and insincere modesty manifested in a prudish reserve falsely so called?  Is it not with us as God had it written how the human heart is despicable in deceit and in desperate wickedness?  

   96

Are we not spiritually hypocritical to laud the sermon of Jesus on the mount while we have the heart of Cain to his little brother and probably with a rod later to his children?  Are we not the utmost fools to risk the plagues by preaching that what Jesus said about “these little ones” really doesn’t risk the “millstone”?  

   97

Do we not hear nothing in the gospels or epistles of using the Levitical rod on little children because it was simply never done by God’s chosen people Israel nor meant for the full Israel of God now?   

   98

Was it not the all-wise authorship of God Himself that inspired Solomon’s proverbial elaboration of Moses’ ruling of the rod for rebellious young men in wise anticipation of the sordid 16th century clerics’ trick of suggesting forced subjugation of children to effect generational control?  

   99

Should we not thank God, even Jesus, for internet access to these formerly hidden facts, less the profusion of computer-generated heresies of modern bible translations based on long-rejected Hort&Westcott-exhumed Alexandrian manuscripts?  

   100

Did Jesus liberate us in vain from the overlording of selfish men who would bully us beginning when we’re brand-new children?  Are not Christians in-part negligent in denying the moral ethic of Christ’s given peace and shown servitude at the last supper by accepting lies from the bully pulpit?  

   101

Did I not see with my own eyes a pagan parent’s un-Godly brutal corporal chastisement of his child when growing up abroad with my U.S. diplomat family?  Does Hannah Arendt’s analogy of Adolf Eichmann apply to each of our bureaucratic blindness?  

   102

Is this why my Christian friends consider me a pagan and no Christian at all because I don’t see Jesus’ example of peace and welcome to children or me in their tradition-cloaked society?  Is it not sad and difficult to view the faces of their children’s blank stares and nervous wide-open eyes not knowing what faux-pas of the uncharted territory of the minefield of their childhood will result in getting struck by a stick?  

   103

Is it not also frustrating to communicate with their parents who were raised the same way and think it’s the only and best way to be nurtured, these adults silently resisting inquiry in the way of some hillbilly modern dysfunction?  

   104

Isn’t it the Christians’ social surplus of right living that sees them accept this incongruous and illogical aberration in their midst?  And isn’t it their isolation and inability to see through the box in both directions that prevents a necessary application of solution?  

   105

Isn’t it like invisible sectors of nature where system activity is so remote that the causal reality  can only be identified by effected exterior characteristics?  But doesn’t the biblical fact that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” show that Jesus as God coordinates the combined realms of physical inner and outer space with the spiritual?  

   106

Isn’t the spiritual challenge for all to perceive is that Jesus alone can transcend it all and make sense of it?  Isn’t it true that evolution cannot account for created beauty, and that God has revealed these things to babes, and that unless we spiritually become as little children we will in no way perceive the kingdom of God?  

   107

Has it escaped my observation that children do not establish the custom of hitting one another unless somehow shown it by adults?  Does the fact that I led my own child with the peace that Jesus forwards to me make me ineligible to look at others’ opposite experiences objectively?  

   108

Is it not a generational digression we see of a scratch my back-and-then-yours variation of violent manipulation of one another with an aura of feigned nonresistance and peacefulness?  Shall I have naively married someone like my mom with a hard shell of narcissism only to similarly join in membership with a group institution of the same?  

   109

If you wonder about me, may I introduce you to the world’s foremost expert on the subject, an Israeli, and admitted recovering narcissist whose name I forget at the moment, referred to by Richard Grannon, who certainly suffices for counsel in the interim?

   110

Does the expression ‘share and share alike’ mean anything to you as I am convinced it does to Jesus, if that’s a correlative metaphor to God’s golden rule?  Isn’t this the opposite, that the Church of The Revolving Door is ‘Open’ in theory only, only if you have no inclination or opportunity to think for yourself?  If applicable, isn’t this your opportunity to think for yourself?

   111

Isn’t it Satan who wants us to writhe while we tithe because he knows anyone gullible enough to do so with money that is meant by Jesus to be voluntary, except taxes which he simply went fishing for, indicates you will be otherwise mindless in their arm-twisting nirvana of blessing now and forever? 

   112

Didn’t I publish that the siren call of a white-collar crook is a kaching tune, so go get a real job and a profitable self-effacing walk with Jesus Christ?

   113

Is it Satan who endows us with spiritual objectivity to discern between Jesus’ example and mankind’s?  Didn’t that same pagan parent delightedly look up at me as I closely watched him chop the head off a dinner chicken, to do it so the chicken ran the length of the servants' quarters, did a u-turn, and nearly ran back to us?  

   114

Were you there that victorious day when I did the same with a rubber-band powered glider airplane, taking off from a potholed road, over a field and back to the road without landing in a pothole, cocking the wing to make it do just that?  

   115

And wasn’t that done with no coercion at all, just the persuasion of my little lonesome boyhood self that I could do it if I tried harder next time, before potholes incrementally destroyed the plane and the vestiges of hope within me?  

   116

Isn’t there enough trouble in the world, trouble Jesus said ‘not to worry’, he’s overcome it?  Well shouldn’t we share our relief of Jesus’ overcoming salvation instead of madly thwarting it for others?  

   117

Is it not Christian to refrain from hitting another sentient organism with stick or hand short of turning it into food?  Why then do Christians make the accusation of ‘new age’ for the children’s aspect of God's golden rule?  Can’t we stop our egos enough to know Jesus very much “make(s) all things new (age)” in each new child?

   118


Is all this not Satan sifting us as wheat, a satanic spiderweb interlacing the stickiness of social fear and the impediment of private interpretation of Scripture during the 16th century vernacular transition from Latin to English and Catholic to Protestant?  

   119

Is it Satan or this Michael who published that the golden rule is the real rod of correction, leaving rebuke’s retribution to The Lord?  Do not “be ye perfect” Christians feebly continue the human parental dilemma of sinful fear of these pure children who just stepped off the train from Heaven?  

   120

Do we do as Jesus did and look into the eyes of a child and see them for who they are from God and not what they are to us?  Do we who know there’s a primary spiritual realm stupidly succumb to its abstraction by letting our flesh interpret its activity for us?

   121

Does Satan depreciate the fact I heard that culture is not a noun but a verb, as a ‘connecting’?  Was your big bishop useless in counseling that he and I come from different cultures when the connecting we’re both supposed to be concerned with is to the example that Jesus commonly set for us?  

   122

Isn’t what we hope, nay expect Jesus will say on that last day is that he personally recognizes and knows us for our treatment of the least of his brethren?  

   123

Does Satan care about God’s top priority of Godly children who come to us in the form of divine imitations of Baby Jesus, and do we lead them in his grand way of peace with the non-Christian example of raised arm and stick or hand or vainly frustrated voice?  

   124

If we’re carrying our cross like we’re supposed to be doing, won’t our arms and legs be busy getting hammered themselves, you know, ‘occupy until I come back’?  Does the figurative meaning of our own cross equate with the scriptural circumstantial chastisement, post-Proverbs and post-Calvary, of our cocky young men?  

   125

Are these guys I have issues with only symptoms of the cause that is their parents and grandparents?  If individual salvation is the common vogue, then shouldn’t we extend the patience we would like for ourselves?  

   126

If it’s unethical, in other words wrong, to provide a strait jacket when a jacketed life-preserver is needed, and both have their place, shouldn't we make ourselves available for rescuing to the extent of our utmost ability?  

   127

Well, if that is true, isn’t it also that we should be vigilantly available to prevent the need of either of them?  Is it surely not deceitful pride that substitutes barely-cloaked subliminal aggression for peaceful assertion?  

   128

Was “the blueness of the wound” the only rod passage in Proverbs not mistranslated, due to the technicality of the private interpretation’s impossible complexity?  

   129

Or was it left as it originally was put there by God, because the sense of it was perfectly clear and harmonized with Satan’s human corruption of the balance of the context?  

   130

Do we not recrucify Jesus in our transubstantiated acceptance of subtle re-interpretation of God’s Word in Proverbs and Hebrews 12:9 and all of 11 and 13:7&17, and Titus 2:6, and First Corinthians 4:21?  Was it the young Jesus who the wayward wife in the Proverbs marketplace tried to seduce?  

   131

Did Almighty God cripple my right arm in a school window, nearly killing me in order to prevent me from wildly dying later with a full body, like a shepherd cracks a leg of a beloved straying sheep?  

   132

Did not King James’ scholar brethren take a subjective metaphorical stick to a vernacular bible translation that is the most cerebrally artistic opus in English literature?  

   133

Does it not remind you of every child whose violation their illegitimate wording authorized, and unlike books that are strangers to Christ Jesus, the KJV at least maximizes elsewhere God’s due respect?  

   134

Is it any wonder, after the Westcott&Hort disrespect, well-meaning brethren like Robert Young and Julia Smith wrote safer literal translations of God’s Word?  

   135

In that Proverbs marketplace, did Satan try to cripple the mind and young life of a little boy, or was it a grown lad?  Does not the word ‘question’ itself request the reason and process and direction of a quest, it’s why, how, and where?  If we elect to remain silent to these questions, then don’t we know that on the day that every knee, willfully or not, bows to Jesus, our quest’s answer will be given to that Just One?

Addendum # 2  

Consider: A tri-axle dumps a load of 2-B stone into your wide parking area.  You have two more loads to go, so take your time. And so, get out the wheelbarrow and shovel it, spreading it out tightly so weeds can’t grow much.  Or would you rather use a skid loader?  We don’t have a skid loader to undo the accumulation of human history.

Five-hundred years ago, Mart Luther purportedly tacked on his 93 theses.  It provided, with Jo Gutenburg’s improved Chinese printing press, a veritable can of worms so Jesus’ friends could go fishing for souls of men, in German.  Snag!  The hook caught a log or something; wait, the log’s moving; oh my Lord, it’s a fish!  It’s Will Tyndale!

These guys were preceded by Jack Wycliffe, born in 1328.  Who’s holy convictions and blessed intellect began the public refusal to play popery anymore, you know, Pope Nebuchadnezzar, king of bastard baby-lon.  John helped return Christendom to the simplicity of the gospel of Jesus, and began the work of making God’s written Word understandable in the home language, on the front porch.

Increasing divergence from apostolic teaching had gone way off the pilgrim road, although God always knows those who are his, those who love him and their fellow man as much or more as themselves.  Popery began soon after the apostles were murdered, John by exile.  It happened by bringing back the Jewish system of a singular leader.  Again, God was no longer Israel’s king, by no fault of his own.  A clownish man, Ronald McDonald, would later say, “What you want is what you get!”

And church and state would unite in Constantine’s big idea of Christianizing pagans.  A next disaster was hiding the bible from people.  Ha ha, then no one could determine if a person was right or wrong unless a central assembly called church told you so.  So, what else would accompany this but baptizing babies?  You know, handing off your baby to a total stranger as if he or she was a football, terrifying your supposedly beloved friend and breaking your former bond of trust forever. 

I've seen it in the baby's eyes, another's baby.  The devil knows now that this soul will only trust conniving force as coercion.  Only Jesus' transcendent power of salvation and re-creation will be able to reverse this, peace, from the Prince of Peace, not of this world, nor Hell, but God's peace from Heaven.  And know, or to remind you, that the Judeo-Christian moral ethic is the only one on Earth that can provide a convincing and reassuring peace to a human heart.  The others, if you take half-a-look at them, can not prevent violence.

I grew up there in other cultures and have seen parental corporal punishment where at least an awareness of the Prince of Peace would temper the fury of the parent to draw a tighter line of limitation.  I expect you are sufficiently mature to not use that reasoning to not justify your own 'line'.  To remind you, these children we get endowed with are jut that, borrowed or lent from God, for our own training in God's righteousness to mirror ourselves as a challenge to our heart to imitate God.  Jesus Christ comes in here.  

Neither was it God's original intention for us to have war and cathartic accident to catch our attention, drawing our attention to our immature condition.  Because, one look at a child, one look into the eyes of a child in its innate perfection, its nonexistence of presumption, should slam us into a departure from any foxhole atheism like the percussion of a bomb.  My Uncle Fred was taking a turn at the bottom of a three-man pile in a foxhole.  A nearby explosion killed the other two fellows.

Yet, in isolated Switzerland, some stubborn stick-in-the-muds, cross-in-the-muds, called themselves Brethren, Swiss Brethren.  Instead of calling roto-rooting Ulrich Zwingli to wash their sins away, they boldly baptized one another interchangeably.  Zwingli tingled with jealous fury for this infringement of his guardian demon’s jurisdiction.

Ulrich used his sword to drain the Brethren’s blood pipes, or melted them in fire so that their blood drained out of them that way.  Ulrich got sworded on a battlefield, ending his sordid anger.  But, there were many others who similarly expressed their jealousy of the joy and love the Swiss Brethren were drawing from God’s fruitful spirit.

Migrating to the Alsace-Lorraine region downriver, the Swiss Brethren found music that appealed to them.  It was the Gregorian style of singing that well-meaning monks and nuns developed in their lonely communities to keep themselves attuned to God’s heart and also keep themselves from going loony in their cloisters, thus loony tunes for Jesus.  

Yes, they were papists, and my brothers and sisters in Christ, who alone can cut the crap of our denominational rap.  And I can still hear my mother, visiting me on the farm I lived and worked on, now born again as my sister in Jesus out on top of the frozen manure pile saying loudly, “Now, this is shit!  This is shit!”

And then, the Swiss Brethren essentially followed a local hillside stream into the ocean, God’s analogy of the world of men.  Men unsettled in their hearts are like a cornered animal requiring a cage for desiring someone to bite.  And somewhere in here, or probably all along, a habit of taking their frustrations out on their spontaneously rambunctious children was prolonged as a socio-religious custom.  Constantine’s descendant cronies, as Protestants, who when turning God’s Word into readable vernacular, put a monkey wrench in the works.  They threw it directly at children.

Children were secretly included by Protestant scholars in the old Mosaic ruling of using a rod on rebellious youth boys, young teenage men.  It may have been a cute intellectual novelty to the clerical scholars doing the translating. 

But if you look at Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s and James’s bibles, an increasing inclusion of the word ‘child’ in the Proverbs text can be seen as more and more pronounced with each consecutive translation, from Wycliffe's to Coverdale's Tyndale completion and progression, the Matthew's Bible (so named for undercover protection from the stranglers of William) and the Great Bible (it was big, enough to be chained to pulpits), and then the Bishop's Bible and King James', these two almost wholly given over to the 'new and improved' Proverbs rod version, firmly protecting their ecclesiastical position of power over people, starting with children, that is, each next generation, letting then know who's boss instead of Jesus.

It reminds me of what I recently learned of Hannah Arendt and Adolf Eichmann.  Religious bureaucracy is an institutional form of self-fulfilled prophecy, including the preaching to the instrumental-inspired choir.  Adults in general had already been tricked long before with the Constantinian re-writing of "be ye persuaded of your more experienced elders" to 'obey them who rule over you' in Hebrews 13:7 + 17. 

Last time I heard, it's Jesus who rules and reigns, and as God does not share that glory with any other.  Apostolic--not post-apostolic--precedent bears full witness to this.  The brethren who began singular bishoprics lead right into Constantine's uninspired clutches.

Another destructive ploy must have been done by the Protestants, that of dividing families during the assembly gatherings.  Catholics have always respected Christ in his nuclear family representations.  Protestants, actually it may have been Anabaptists,  judaized the situation in the pews by dividing God's two genders during assembly time. 

Children, women, adults, and the two genders, all divided, to also mention the Protestant disobedience of the ordinance of the sisters' coverings.  For, Catholic sisters have always shared the prayers of the congregation with their vain hair covered with a veil, until the modernization of Vatican Two in the sixties.

The Anabaptist groups who realized the error and corrected it are presently reneging on their conviction with partial head coverings that might cover half of a woman's head hair.  You try this in the woods without adequate hunter orange, you're liable to get hunted for it, or fined for it by the game warden, for your own spiritual safety and function.  Give a woman an inch of hair showing, she'll take a mile of vanity.

This mundane division instead of unity of God's two given genders continues with separated holy greetings, the opposite suggested by God through apostle Paul in any number of places in his inspired writings.  If he mentions everyone generally in his text, then when in his salutation he says to greet one another with a holy kiss, common sense and decency implying a little holy hug, he means exactly as with your parents or your siblings when you haven't seen them in a while, especially older and living apart. 

Look at siblings with a newborn or toddler sibling; the little one gets bothered by so many hugs and kisses, yet appreciating a measure of affection shown.  It begs a few questions that are fairly rhetorical, and embarrassing and convicting if asked, about the phenomenon of newborn babes in Christ.

And Genesis chapter 2 was tampered with, distorting woman's position in society.  This very troublesome meddling has not been let up, most post-KJV bible translations drawing from the long-rejected-by-historical-theologians Alexandrian Gnostic papyri.  Gnosticism distorts God's revealed nature, and of the Son of God's, and even Jesus' mom. 

The latter was done by Valentinius in the second century and refuted in writing by the early church.  Whom John Holdeman in the 1800's arbitrarily perpetuated in his Church of God in Christ, Mennonite.  That aberrant teachings arise often by singular, individual leaders shows us more of what I say about singular vs plural leadership.  And saying Peter rock 'n rolled the church of Jesus Christ is another example of this.

Holy inter-gender friendships are stunted or prevented by this dearth of physical contact between Christian brothers and sisters and sons and daughters.  If husband jealousy is thought to be a viable issue, you stand to be corrected on that.  For, God knows what's mentally and emotionally good for us, not us for God.

From Billy Tyndale’s translation work in 1535, through Miles’s continuation of his effort after Bill was strangled by Henry the 8th, to King Jimmy’s artistic group culmination in 1611, the original word of ‘'young man'’, a single word in Hebrew, is almost totally replaced by the incongruous word child.  These Christian guys had not the circumstantial objectivity that we are blessed with today, and we have significant hindsight.  

Hebrew has ten words for children from birth to almost married, the latter male and female, respectively.  The only one of these ten Hebrew words for children used in Proverbs is the male almost married one.  That’s the one in question by Moses, who stipulated a rod on the upper back muscles for wild oats-and-tares rebelliousness.  Sometimes the Hebrew ‘na’ar’  denotes a little boy.  

Examples of that are few however, such as little Samuel and baby Moses.  Pharaoh’s daughter is quoted as saying, “Oh, look at the wee little man here!” when she opened the cover of the floating woven basket that Mama Jochebed had faithfully made for her child condemned by royal decree to die by exposure to the weather and Nile crocodiles.  Remember, early in Proverbs the author Solomon mentions an ignorant young man possibly seduced in the marketplace by a loose woman.  To say a child is inappropriate.

In fact, of the several passages in Proverbs on the Mosaic rod, the only one that hasn’t been scholastically tampered with is the “blueness of the wound”.  Which makes sense only for a big strapping youth boy, a young pre-marriage age man per the usual Hebrew sense of it.  To use the one-size-fits-all word child in there makes no normal sense.

I have two jokes to explain this, the first happening for real at a friend’s house, on his farm, and the second fictitious, one which I hope never does.  I was over there speaking with Raymond about this very discovery, that we’ve been lied to by 16th-century private interpretation of the rod passages in Proverbs.  Raymond was finished showing me his greenhouses and we were walking back through his workshop.  So, I thought to ask him a pivotal and exemplary question.

I said, “Raymond, can I borrow a wrench?”  He answered, “Sure!  What size?”  I said, “Oh, any size!”  Raymond stopped and looked at me.  I smiled a bit and looked at him, too.  A female version of that joke has to do with babies, or the elderly or invalids in between.  If you are almost out of diapers, but don’t want to go to the store for them, ask a friend who you know is in town presently.

You know how this goes, on the phone with them.  “Hey, would you stop by on your way home today with a box of diapers?”  Your sister replies, “Sure, what size exactly is Mikey wearing these days?”  “Oh, it doesn’t matter, any size is fine!”  Or try it with your elderly mom or dad, or risk further legal ramifications in an institution with a middle-aged invalid.

Facetious fantasies have no place in this dangerous place we live in east of Eden.  That first word derives from the Latin base meaning to make something up that’s not real.  The second word is worse, to be a fan of something that doesn't exist.  I saw something like that, a story I’ve already told earlier.  I mean the invisible ten-foot man who shook a fifteen-foot pine tree just below me as I was sitting on the edge of a mountain looking at the great view, eight times twice.  God was invisible until he showed himself as Jesus.

I’m a fan of antiques as much as anyone else, but not invisible men shaking trees.  It certainly convinced me that there’s a spiritual realm, but I already knew that from reading the bible a bit in those teenage years.  It was amazingly portrayed choreography of personal beauty and truth incomparable to anything I’d ever read.  And, I’d read The Big Jump And Other Stories when I was a child.  That was impressive because the boy and the king always jumped up and out, not down and out.  But it was still pretty weak encouragement.

I tell these things to my church-assembly friends, or at least direct it to their ears.  A disadvantage they are at is growing up with established mistakes in their social religious culture.  Real religion of course is meeting someone where they’re at and filling any necessary gaps of basic need.  It’s the golden rule, and the only one of real religion, and the only real and effective rod of correction.  

Some say a shepherd’s rod was never used violently.  But I’ve heard that in order to keep sheep from straying off the trail into someone’s un-fenced grain field, a shorter rod was kept handy to bing ‘em in the back of the ear, even from a distance.  The sheep learned to choose between pain and gain.  Humans often stupidly don’t differentiate between the two and the pain is immaturely self-inflicted.  

While animals don’t, neither do they communicate with their creator. They certainly try, as I’ve told, the story of the bear that lost its mate.  And spirits seem to include animals in their earthly incarnations.  They flatter themselves with limitations of imitation.

Men have long hit both their children and their women, very hypocritically because they ought to honestly hit themselves.  I’ve long learned to humbly weep my anger tearfully.  It shows again the need for a savior like Christ Jesus.  Who took the frustrations and understandable anger of people on himself, including their judgment, tentatively.  Check your rain fly, campers, ‘cause the rain’s a comin’, and dig a drainage ditch around the tent. 

Circumstance and prayer, whichever comes first, to God as Heavenly Father through his only begotten child, his beloved son, Jesus, is the up-to-date recourse to success with a child.  With our young men, God had it written that we should encourage them to control themselves. 

Friendship is the idea, and a bond of mutual respect, reasoning together.  It is surely all Abraham had to do with Ishmael and Isaac, definitely Joseph with Jesus.  And logic says this has always been God's way, only the hardness of our own hearts why we don't fellowship with one another as God tries with us.

Jesus was the only good guy who ever lived, and told off one day someone who called him good.  He challenged the guy, “Who’re you calling good?  There’s only one who is good, God”.  It is understood this was said by the self-effacing Son of Man who was also the Son of God.

Think about that next time someone says to you, ‘Have a good day’.  Don’t be a bad boy or bad girl, per the rap theme of the Cops TV show, but admit you’re a bad person at heart.  The Sinai ten commandments will dispel any doubt of that.  They’re the citizen’s rights God reads to us like a police officer.  Original sin is a fabricated term and a weak attempt to categorize our propensity to disregard the desire of our creator and savior, God.  And, a child fresh out of Heaven, God's mind, would tell you what an old tree might.

Well, I’m starting to repeat myself as historical indigestion, so please don’t get hysterical.  To say, in his bible-book, God sure is wordy, but his Word is sure.  And let’s do what he did later in his guidebook, to shun coercion and better use persuasion.  As we walk down the streets of life as we really are, blind and naked, let’s receive the covering of Jesus Christ’s uniquely earned righteousness.  "Nourishment and clothing, therewith be content", for everyone, plus some Balm of Gilead.

I’ll take a promise over a premise any day, faith, hope, and charity leading our two-step journey to God’s real paradise.  We see indications of it here, and in stewardship can show our worth in respect of it.  Survivors would sooner forget the Titanic’s ‘night to remember’, to remember the maiden voyage of Molly Brown, survival of the friendliest.

Of suicide, in the two teenagers I know who did it, I don’t think they were suing God; rather, they were suing their dads and their moms who had indirectly suffocated them with lies.  I no longer nervously smile at babies, but simply look at them with the same keen look they’re giving me.  I’ll sometimes hold some fingers up as a tenuous tactile connection for kinetic closeness, without touching someone else’s baby.  Sign language.  I learned to milk cows that way, not challenging them to talk words they can’t reply to, yes, less so babies.  

And you don’t work a music box, so scratch that idea when milking cows.  The organic instrument of the human voice is the only acceptable music for cows and babies.  And suckling calves don’t talk when they’re drinking.  But babies sure look their mama in the eye.  And only human beings make love face to face and eye to eye and me with you.

Prestige is the opposite of honor in that the former is self-assumed.  I’ll say it again, theology is useless without theeology, the loving study of God and our fellow humans.  We’ve heard of the survey of university graduates.  Their biggest complaint was not being taught interpersonal communication in any proactive way.  Go along to get along is wrong; get along to go along is right.

Some say sparing the rod is a new age fallacy, but we’re seeing here that it is very old age to use the rod.  Adam and Eve’s first child may have used one the day of his doom, unless he spanked his brother to death.  Our deeming that someone is lesser than us is our doomsday declaration.  Live for today in the nice way we’re saying and the damnation of doom vanishes.  

The nice way as our way of course is energized by a wise man’s drug of choice, God and neighbor.  Let’s watch God like we like to watch people.  It’s as easy as watching ocean water evaporate into clouds.  I did that once, albeit on LSD, at the Atlantic Ocean Titusville beach.  Looking in an atlas years later, I noticed that that particular area on God’s Earth has the highest evaporation rate of anywhere on the planet, high on life now.

These two provide an endless supply of inspiration and imagination.  Jesus’s prayer was to unify them as one, God and mankind.  And God’s cosmic clock is more accurate than our man-made atomic one.  So let’s look there for our direction and introspection.  Wash your brother or sister’s feet, yes, but get to that fine point of laying your head on his or her chest, like John did to Jesus.  A poem says, ‘There is beauty in the heart of God my own has yet to know.’

Earth’s 25,000-mile circumference can seem less or more so, enabling eternity to have its way.  The immensity of this opportunity we’re riding on has community as its carousel horse.  Some go up and down, and others are stationary, but all are valuable.  Vandalism of community is war from greed, as apostle James wrote.  Love is like matter, and only changes form, never disappearing as long as God keeps hell at a distance.  Man doesn't.  Real grownups own up to sin, the transgressive falling short of God’s goodness of life.  We can start that by talking with our teeth, not through them.

The internet is a practical safety net for civilization, as long as we don’t miss it when we fall.  The childrens’ song about farm animals is e-i-e-i-o not a-i-a-i-oh no!  Let’s practice honorable animal husbandry here.  Need I remind you of the joke about the haystack and the skydiver’s parachute?  In which the diver happily missed the pitchfork, and sadly missed the haystack.

A hot air balloon landed on my neighbor’s farm field.  His curious cows did as they do for fun and charged it, you know as a diversion from their same-old life in the field.  The balloon basket occupants were so scared of the cows, who of course stopped short and merely looked at them, that they nearly sued my neighbor for emotional trauma.  The silly ‘koos’, as Holstein cows are called in their land of origin, can be defensive of their calves like any mama, but that didn’t apply here.

You may wish upon a star, but I’d rather have an organic watermelon.  So would cows.  So would God, otherwise he wouldn’t have made them or us to enjoy them vicariously.  Prestige and pressure to perform are not childlike personality characteristics.  Let’s not even say things are easy peasy.  Just do it and enjoy the simple experience of it.  After all, we might not have even been here, or to die less famous than a fly.  I can’t do Math, but my child thinks it's as easy as pumpkin pie.  'Competition at best is a petition with self, success merely an increment of doing better.'

And no one cries for lost lies; if they do, they’ll wander forever in search of their tears, as God implies in his bible-book.  I was away from this addendum washing some dishes and remembered a rare disagreement between me and one of my grandmothers.  I remained silent one day in my teen years when she recounted a story of me as an older toddler.  We were traveling in winter to the land of Malaya and visiting Gramma and Grampa at their house near Lake Michigan.  And in the morning, Gram and I stood together at the front door to watch Grampa fetch the morning paper.

Grandpa had gone out into the snowy cold without his coat on, contrary to the rule I had learned was for everyone.  When I pointed out Grampa’s transgression of what I thought was a universal law, Gramma apparently looked down at me and sarcastically exclaimed, “Oh, well!”, drawing out the word 'well'.  What she meant was there’s a difference between a run to the barn or mailbox and a long term loss of body heat.  

A short jaunt can be invigorating, and dressed for 70-degree weather during a hard run in wintertime is exactly appropriate, thanks to the deceased Jim Fixx for that last fact.  Children are not stupid like adults can be, presumptuous and making wrong assessments of one another.  If you fall on the ice running to the barn from the house in Canada, and get knocked out, you may not wake up in this land of the bond and the free, but the other one, the land of the pine tree shaker..

The above exemplifies how children are often put more in the category of dog or pet bird in a cage than developing humans.  Last I heard, 75-80% of all information that will ever enter our brain goes in by age 5.  Would you guffaw and g’won as you use your new computer?  I trow not, and like Jesus said when comparing us to his father’s well designed flowers, how much more valuable in every way is the mind and heart of a child.  Junk in junk out, you know.

I learned for the first time yesterday details about the life of Emmanuel Swedenborg.  Some might say he was far out there, but he was both far out and far in.  Details of observations he made of both the physical realm and the spiritual are astounding.  As a teenager studying abroad, he wrote back to one of his uncles in Sweden and said that he thinks his prospects for fame and fortune are bright.  It was no hyper hypothesis, but beware the lone religious leader. 

Who usually has some kind of identity mask on, like wrongly telling a child, 'Oh, you're a great artist!"  Now the poor dear has to live up to an unfair and less than honest assessment.  Akiane Kramarik may have had to deal with this too, at least outside of her sweet and sensitive family. 

There's simply no bragging with God, eternally existing as he is and not indigent while doing it, and thus no forcing people to measure up to our lofty standards, even if we think we're passing God's on.  If you're a child of God, then don't grab another child's toy, or teach a child to.   

Let the little children approach you in their confounded and confident assessments of the life they’ve all-of-a-sudden found themselves in.  It always is an opportunity to review the first day of man’s life upon the Earth in the Garden of Eden.  Could the situation here be any farther out or in? 

If it’s true what Jesus said that like children is the Kingdom of God, let’s heed it.  I remind you that the mathematical biblical logic by Del Washburn’s Theomatics discounts a literal projection of a millennial reign.  Millennial speculation is a mental maelstrom.  ‘Keep it simple, sinner’, and “God keep me from presumptuous sins”.

On my way back to Quebec one winter after visiting Mom for a few days, I stopped off outside New York City to visit a former non-Canadian neighbor who had moved home.  In the morning me and he and his son drove to town and the World Trade Center so I could watch and hear their vociferous work at the commodities exchange.  Our departure that morning was hectic trying not to forget everything but the car keys, a two-hour ride ahead of us.

I remember Ritchie saying out loud at one point, “Now, let’s be human; let’s be human!”  This was in the eighties, and they had found work elsewhere by the time the buildings came down.  Because, a subtle underpinning of our not-so-super egos sews a thread of biased opinion that callously says, ‘So what, as long as it doesn’t happen to me.’  But remember this round globe we’re riding on, which confirms ‘what goes around comes around’.

God ribbed Adam who then giggled himself to sleep and the result was no joke.  ‘After God created Adam, he said to anyone listening, ‘Now, watch this!’, and God created Eve.  Any doubts on that I refer to Nick Liguori’s Echoes of Ararat, global ancient stories, of the western hemisphere only as yet.  In a children’s book I recently read, the first lines of the Hindu Ramayana are quoted.  “A long time ago, when the sun sat higher than it does now…” 

That means that those ancient people remember the pre-flood cosmic and solar condition from an estimated 4344 years ago. That’s a very transparent homefire burning in their kitchen, and the continuing Hindu story plot will surely be in Nick’s planned book for that region.   The bible’s stories are fairly nebulous also, but they have a logical and artistic cohesion which is surely an indication of divine revelation of the matters.  Those of the early verses of the Ramayana are clearly reminiscences of Eden.

Using a calculator just now for the balance of the numbers was also eye opening.   We’re two years away from 6,000, per the Irishman Jim Ussher’s (probably from the Israelite, not Judean, family Asher, dispersed worldwide by the Assyrians in 721 BCE) tally of individual lifetimes in the bible done in 1801 plus six months and ten-odd days.  I am recalling two photographs I recently saw online of two captured war prisoners about to be shot dead.  Each of them is smiling broadly, with two seconds left to 

‘Know your knots for ties that bind’, especially if your neighborhood is called Cape Horn.  It’s called that because a lot of people there have honked because they decided to love Jesus.  If you don’t know, it’s the roughest water weather in the world.  

‘Evolution cannot account for created beauty’, to say, despite counters to the contrary, even if you have to kick a persistent shark in the nose for seventeen hours after your sailboat sinks and until help arrives, it was worth it all when he got home.  Don’t you dare bother someone’s soul security or it’s certain that you’ll pay for it at The Gate.  I don’t mean the Coliseum ticket booth, where pine cones were smoldered for the stench, the stench of rotten blood in the sand of the arena, the word for sand in Latin, of heroines and heroes. 

Certainty is the highest category of probability.  The universe is not spirit, but only half a step away.  It’s not a sleepy time-dreamworld half-step, but a Bangor skid-row bar that if you take one step into, you’ll be reminded of the material world.  I was told that by a nice local man giving me and my friend a hitch-hike ride one full moon November afternoon out to Acadia National Park.  The place was empty as the moon, at least in the material world.

Out on the water from there that night, Molly Brown’s maiden voyage had no date limits on her insurance policy.  She just busied herself in keeping her boats in shipshape.  We can do no wrong in doing as much, by the law, mercy, and grace of God in Jesus Christ.  Well, I was born again a ramblin’ man, not a gamblin’ man.  Amen.  God bless all men, all women, all boys, all girls, in no set order.  MT  Box 334 Ruckersville, VA, USA  09/17/2024

Footnote New Testament Scripture references about the rod, young men, and children:

Titus 2:6

1st Corinthians 4:21

Hebrews 12:9 (...shall we not much rather...?)