' No pie in the sky yet, we have to keep our feet rooted while the leaves of our hands face Heaven and receive the light of God's limitless mercy in Jesus Christ.
Now that I think more on it, we can generally hold our hands as we normally do, only occasionally upturning them, as with leaves of trees or grass. It is the energy and activity of the wind that is the deciding factor, the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ, he who is The Lord, he who is God come in the flesh.
Coconut trees do that a lot with the sea breeze, not detracting at all from an inland fig bush. 'Anybody have a coconut fig pie recipe? Should I make me a treehouse in my old age and eat it there? God's heavenly home must be like a treehouse without the risky heights, only frisky "Hi !'s"
Part A
He had the morning watch and soon the sun's first rays shone on a sea-going pagoda. It was early in the Pacific War and the primary Japanese fleet had appeared out of somewhere. Led by the Yamato, the most fearsome battlewagon-ship ever designed by mankind, the religious boat had 19-inch diameter gun barrels.
He would be in the water well within the hour, one of a minority of survivors. One of Tokyo's ships cruised closely to share mixed blessings. Some of the Japanese sailors thumbed their noses. Other of the Japanese sailors were honorable and respectful as they stood stiffly with saluting fingers to their forehead. He lived to tell about it.
This is the Earth, it's one-of-a-kind, and "precious in the sight of The Lord is the death of his saints". As an author titled his book Death Be Not Proud, so a song sings ‘Only what's done for Christ will last’. The only fanfare that will not fade away is that of the devotees of charity.
God had it written that the streets of his city are made of clear gold. Science has surmised that gold can be so clarified. God wrote that the trials of this world are a gold-refining process. Science has not observed the full how's and wherefore's of this process. Again to say these things are spiritually discerned. And only God's Holy Spirit purifies gold to a state of clarity.
From Jakarta Dad took a business trip and came back with gifts for us. Both Pete and I received Polynesian outrigger toys. Dad also contributed to my model-ship making hobby. Dad gave me a model of the Yamato including working engines. After I survived the smelly glue and put the model together, Dad and I tried it out.
Dad drove us over after dark to the FOA pool. It was neat to see it empty and quiet in low light. The water was still and large and we got to it. I carefully laid the model ship in the specific water. Double batteries were correctly in position and ready to power. The boat was aimed for the middle and past a mariana trench.
It sailed straight and true right out to the middle of the pool. The batteries wore out at that point, which rather maintained the dignity of the vessel. Dad and I became coaxing coxswains and ripple-waved the plastic toy to the side. War begins with man-made glory and ends gory. War is a worse fantasy. Spanking is worst.
Part B
In Quebec on the farm I had a flower book. On the cover was an impossible one. It was a yellow Lady's Slipper. Well guess what; I saw one. I had gone over to social-visit with my tractor mechanic. In his shop he had an anvil, a big one. Gerard said he found it on an abandoned place up in the bush. Gerard had hoisted it upon his blockbuster shoulders and carried what felt like his casket outta’ there.
He was shaking his head a bit thinking of what a young man will do for adventure. He got back to work on that gorgeous early summer day. I went out to leave but then I saw his sugarbush across the road. I went in to take a first and only look at it. The heat of the summer weather was thick and rich. I walked up into the main road-trail.
The maple sugarbush that I was used to was clear and airy. Gerard's bush was thick and dense. I got the feeling I had had in tropical forest. It was a maximum of life and verdure. I wasn't a few-hundred feet onto the main sugaring trail. There was yellow, an ultimate concentration of the color yellow. It was back-dropped by full and variegated green. Years of annual droppings of horse manure gave that plant just what it needed.
It was the Lady's Slipper, the yellow one on the cover of the flower book. I did see a full-yellow wild canary in my favorite place on the farm. It had a stream that never stopped flowing. Yet its source wasn't a half-mile away. The key reason was that sandy soil above in that part of the valley ceased at the thick clay here.
The valley's water must have collected at that point in the sand and funneled by me at this lower point of the clay. I wanted to install an ancient Japanese and other cultures hydraulic ram pump. The long adjacent hillside could then be supplied with free water. The water would nourish bullfrogs and terraced wild rice paddies.
Long deep hibernation ponds would then be awaited by a nice corresponding flat just before the deepening creek. That's where I saw the full yellow wild canary in the alder bushes in there. I first saw a local bullfrog when fishing one of the lakes behind the ridge. It was invisible to me on a submerged log with one end poking out of the water.
I first saw froggy when it dove into the clear water. I was in position to see it swim safely down and more down into security. The sight of the beautiful creature in its perfect element moved me. I felt part of God's eternal love and joy-of-life in an almost tangible way. I wanted more of the feeling and felt also in my heart God was encouraging me to do so. At least theoretically, for I never did the project. 'Maybe someday, on his day.
Of water and babies and young children they are, you know, excellent swimmers. They take naturally to water unless necessary to train again. A first idea is to make sure the child who is too old to rely on instincts knows to turn the belly up. Relaxation is a matching action to that. Even a first-timer will then be in position to back-paddle to safety or at least wait for it. And notice the idea of belly up, what an adult derides, a child does profitably. And notice the deep water below for anyone who would harm a child.
The water that drained from the sandy and flat part of the valley above the clay part where I farmed drank deliciously. No chemical farmers were above there to soil the water table, as I would never think of doing. Part of the drainage was from the northwestern hill of mechanic Gerard's organic sugarbush.
That smaller hill was of identical form to the Son of God mountain and directly abreast of it. Later it was brought to my arrogant attention that it looked like it had been gently and powerfully lowered down into position. Really the post-flood massive glacier that evidently passed through there sculpted its shape.
I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a personal demonstration as a replay of that. Indeed I would like to see God's inventive hand dividing the single Pangian continent during the great flood. God likes doing a crossword puzzle now and then too. I shouldn't begrudge God his very own diversity. By God some day, I may not always be bored at board games. And definitely high in one of God’s surface treehouses, maybe with you.
Part C
The year's first of two Daylight Savings Times is coming up here. Both of my dear grandmothers poo-pood the annual manipulatons of time, each saying it was silly. The American Barbecue Association as I heard it requested the recent adjustment. Where the early one is now earlier and the later one is now later. That helps them; the cows disliked it.
Again about water and babies, it reminds me of author Annie Dillard's muskrat she saw as a Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. I won't partially spoil it for you if you haven't read it, and what else she saw when looking up at a white pine tree. Annie helped me to begin realizing contemplative observation was a part of the beauty of nature I was interested in.
I saw cold once. I pause here in amazement as I recall it. It gives me the chills to think about it. Really. This is beauty beyond any humorous sarcasm. To preface the story, my retired Quebecois neighbor was telling me years later about the logging camps he worked in in the winter-time.
The subject of cold weather came up normally enough. He informed me of some knowledge common to a northerner about cold weather. That the work stops when a deep freeze lays in to the woods. It's because the metal of the horse harnesses breaks plus other tools. I'm not sure whether it was -40's he was talking about or -50's.
My story of cold was of minus-thirties. It happens a time or two or three during a normal winter in southern Quebec.. That was before Celsius ratings were instituted. What happened was, it was my first winter in Quebec on the farm. It happened at night time, after dark in the evening. The moon was strongly lighting the land after a snowstorm cleared.
I was out to finalize putting the cows to bed after supper after milking. I looked at the mountain, this before I called it God's mountain. Something caught my eye that was out of the meager ordinary of my still novel northern-land experience. Something white was flowing like a river of snow but not over the ridge.
The moving material of whiteness was flowing like aerated water through the gravity gaps of the mountain-ridge sections. I was so lacking in experience that I reasoned the white was a second batch or follow-up squall of snow. If so it would be adding to ten inches freshly fallen a few hours before. But the movement was lower than the ridge tops, horizontal, flowing and moving.
A question I wondered was, How could snow fall so low? I once saw snowflakes forming fully, off the sun melt of the barn roof. Each water drop changed halfway down into a slowly floating snowflake when it entered the shade. What was coming through the mountain ridge gaps was something new to me. It was like a special-effect in a science-fiction movie, although I've only seen Stanley Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey.
For the next two or three days, my hat didn't work, my gloves didn't work, my whole skin covering didn't work. That flowing stream of what looked like thickened water was a visitation of frigid northern cold. You could see it enter the valley forced through the ridge gaps, instead of coming down the little glacial valley most of us live in.
It was forced through the gaps instead of winding down a curving valley because of pressure from a direction behind the north-south line of the ridge. Well it probably did take the less obstructed route also. But I wasn't looking over there. I was looking here. And you could feel the cold envelope you distinctly. I was astonished and excited.
What happened in about 1982+1983 was stone cold sobering. There was a summer drought and the water-well only had enough for the house. I mean for the whole winter for a dairy herd. I tried watering the cows with snow and it worked. It snowed lightly but frequently that winter. I put the girls out for long amounts of time every day.
They would fan out into freshly fallen snow if available. They weren't greedy about it either. It was as if they knew it was a critical situation. They lapped up the snow just as if they were slowly and steadily pasturing a grassy field. And we just filled the dairy quota that the federation requires of each farm.
But 1982-1983's non-average weather was not over. In March there was a taste of summer one day with a temperature of about 45 degrees Fahrenheit. However the cold came back like this man had not ever felt it. That night with no snow ahead of it, only some rain the night before with the warmth, it came.
Like a rogue wave on the ocean, I think we can describe it, the air temperature dropped to forty-two degrees below zero. 60% of Quebec's apple trees were either killed or maimed. The tough species of apples survived. But the fancy hybrids did not. They were marvelous apples, with flavors and savors only the Creator Holy Spirit can imagine.
It was the sap being up in the tree branches because of the warm temperature the day before that couldn't skedaddle back down fast enough. Otherwise 42-below is not so significant for even delicate apple trees. Only the big striped prolific what I call pig apples were still growing normally. The MacIntosh, Welty, and Transparent and the hybrids' tree-wood was shocked dead. Those striped pig apples were very good apple pie apples, though.
In 1987 or 8, in the month of March again a fourteen-inch dump of beautiful snow was followed by forty-five degrees below zero F. The snow's the story for that one, maybe for another time. Up above I was wondering if it's a significance or coincidence or both that in 1983 that single California watermelon farm took a serious turn at being an idiot, the same year of the un-normal weather in Quebec.
Part D
That cold I saw flowing like a thick river came through the northwest parts of the God mountain-ridge. In my mind's eye I still see it rolling in toward me between both the Father and the Son mountains and also between the Son mountain and Gerard's big sugarbush hill. Which I call the New Jerusalem hill, but not without help. I'll explain.
Again it is identically symmetrical to the Son mountain, for it is "the Spirit (of Christ Jesus) and the Bride (of Christ Jesus) (who simultaneously) say, “Come!" And yes it was a ten-year-old child who first identified the New Jerusalem hill for me. Up to that point and early in the going of all this as it was, I only had recognized Gerard's hill as geologically symmetrical with the Son mountain. My senior-partner and owner of the farm's grandson was out to visit. And he clarified the situation handily.
Jonathan was out behind the barn with me getting the cows or something. I pointed out the meaning of the mountain ridge in three sections to him. I hadn't mentioned the big sugarbush-hill of the tractor mechanic Gerard. Of course there it was sitting there like "a heavenly bride adorned for her bridegroom" and "come down out of Heaven".
And Jonathan saw what I never had, picking up on it immediately. Well versed in Biblical Scripture, Jon unhesitatingly said, pointing over to it, 'And that's the New Jerusalem!'. I jealously and self-centeredly added that it 'did' look like its Scriptural description. Isn't this an example of God using "earthen vessels" highlighted "out of the mouths of babes" ? And I proudly struggled resistantly to admit it as the true evidence.
Another child, the neighbors' was on the spacious Oliver tractor with me baling hay one time. I was yelling out stories of God as we wound around the field all that time. We pulled up to the gate when finished and I summarized my divine didactics to the child. He may have been six years old and had shown keen and sincere interest.
So I finalized 'And Ian, do you know, God always was, he is now, and he always will be'. I watched Ian's eyes, and magnificently they looked out to the Earth's horizon, in the direction of the mountain. This loose man kept his mouth shut after that. Ian was still looking out at the Earth's horizon. And Ian silently said absolutely everything in response. The new young man was still looking at God’s horizon.
Part E
'Where there's the will of God, there's the way of Jesus Christ'. Make of that what you will; it sounds good to me. I included that line in my booklet, We Spanked God. I looked around at book cover designs yesterday. I noticed and liked white ones with black lettering. They're graphically noticeable and stylistically conservative. 'Changed; 'gonna plaster some pictures, as it's a memoir.
'Spanked' with its dying arm on the book cover hoping to get one last thwack in seems to be a useful graphic. I hope it is to others, especially occult-raised youngsters. Who haven't had the treasured pleasure of yet holding a Holy Bible in their hands. Frankly I see a disjoint in common sense about it. I mean the disharmony between a big and slow-reading book like God's Bible and a systemically fast world.
I think I'll keep separate the one-liners from these prose-paragraphs, for I was thinking of combining them. A busy youth or active adult could use a slim paperback of brief one-line statements. Then for the more perspicacious this wordy story-telling is more spacious and informative. 'Anything to dissuade "the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life."
A coincidence, the neighbor boy Ian's mom was American from New Jersey who had married a 'Habitant' from Hull, Qc this side of the river from Ottawa via a party in Montreal. She once recounted some stories of her youth, one of which was about discothequing. She and her friends would go in to New York even on Sunday nights. They'd spill out of the last dance Monday morning to bump into people going to work on the sidewalk.
There you have a city-girl future mother dancing to 'Fame, I'm Gonna Live Forever', lyrics by Irene Cara (I thought it was 'I want to live forever'), who's country-boy son looks into eternity on a tractor. Mmm, a terrible memory of something else; I had put it out of my mind. Visiting home in Maryland once, we visited a cousin of Dad's through his dad. This is very sad. Please brace yourself emotionally.
Our cousin's older child of twelve years and I were talking about my farming. She said her best friend's family has a hobby farm with some hay baling to do. 'Ready for this? Brace yourself! No fence was between the field of raked hay ready to be baled and the backyard--oh God--the dad baled his little son, who had ambled out and hid in the windrow of dried hay.
So much for storytelling time; I'm going to bed and sleep on this. Please, you too.
Part F
We all may have seen the movie The New Land. If you did, you'll remember the father saving the life of his son, in the cavity of their disemboweled bull, the same age as the child in the above non-fictional story. And recall the last scene of the movie and then appropriate the man's experience to yourself, again, if you will, lying by the stream in the forest, belly up.
God is gentle in his greatness and his peace is powerful. The dead are gone now, the innocent to profound peace, the ungrateful to constant agitation. Our wounded are to be succored to the maximum. It could be us next needing golden-rule nursing. Nor are we to give a railing accusation against wrongdoers, as "the accuser of the brethren", Satan, accuses us before God.
Bullies simply need to be referred about to God, as archangel Michael disputing with Satan the burial place confidentiality of the dead body of Moses. This includes through God's right-arm institution of a policing government. If they are not up to it or not interested, then tell God himself in prayer. Be sure to address God the creator-savior, never a created life-form or conceptual entity.
It really is folly to try to be happy without correctly dealing with our sadness. Only our spiritual creator and subsequent savior can deal with both at all effectively. And 'it is only the Spirit of Christ, Jesus who can give us serene solitude and take away languishing loneliness'. For God himself experienced both as vicarious reality in the person of Jesus.
I heard that one of the superbly constructed Lloyd Triestino compact ocean liners is now utilized as a mercy ship. 'Hats off to the expert Italian shipbuilders for building so well a vessel that so encouraged my young heart. The boat floated nicely, simply enough, and the British ownership and staff well-cared for us children as they've learned to do.
Seriously we few children were left to seemingly play alone in our eternity. Yet I knew we were safely surveyed from a sensitive distance. Like the neighbor-women keeping an eye on my six-year-old future mom as she danced solo down the sidewalk, we all should do this for others' children.
On a farm I worked in Maryland, an old shed had a small photograph album of a family who used to work there. It was a family of three and a picture of the little girl has her on a pet pony. Her dad is there guiding her adventure, supportive and securing. The family name was inscribed inside, and so I was determined to find them.
The elderly farm couple for whom I was working was evidently not interested. When I moved away, I immediately looked up the family. The girl was grown up now, and came right over to the address I gave. She trained steeplechase horses over near Baltimore, to also tell me that she had reason to miss her dad. There he was again as in her formative years, to continue guiding her, supportive and securing. Jesus returns us to the father.
Part G
There's no such thing as 'now or never' because what we do now will last forever. I used to always be waiting for my future until I looked up through the branches of that tree. It took a lot of wind to dry my eyes, but God had it for me starting tentatively that night. His spirit is a figurative wind to quote him, as real a feel as our name. It is God's future that is now.
A note about the word 'saint', Scripturally according to basic context, all God's spiritual children are saints. Some have never heard and never will hear of Jesus Christ while on this planet. But they won't bat an eyelash when they die and see him in person. They'll say 'You; it's you!' Christ Jesus' gospel steps past the lapse of the innocent coincidence of time. But beware of the co-incidents of Satan's deception, his artificial light distorting the perception of the presence of the cliff of ego and selfishness.
Maybe those two boys who saw the tornado together fishing on a summer's day are wiser for the event. One of them an elderly man now told me what happened over on Lac Viceroy. It's a long skinny lake and they hid in the bushes as a train-storm overshadowed them. The locomotive bore down on them and they tried to evade it.
Of course they peeked out to glimpse what they could of this loud craziness. A full twister ripped out of the forest on the other side of Lac Viceroy. The boys saw the rock-and-mud bottom of a normal-depth lake. The tornado twisted back out again on their side of the lake safely away from them.
Another elderly man heard me telling someone else in a conversation that I had been over to Ontario to visit Niagara. When the man had a chance to get a word in edgewise to my enthusiastic description, he said something pragmatically simple. 'Yeah, Niagara, it's thirty-inches'.
I asked 'Thirty-inches, what do you mean?' He clarified, 'It's thirty-inches when the water goes over the rock'. These older guys used to bring logs down through the woods. They wouldn't open the sluice gates of the wooden holding dams they had made until enough water was flowing over the edge.
I wanted to build one of the old-fashioned log dams in my special creek's ravine. I asked around, this was years before and was referred to a man. His dad had been one of the provincial or company inspectors of log dams. The logs had to flow down through the forest successfully. And the dams had to correctly hold them before that.
The abundant water would all be snowmelt runoff. My French language skill was raw-boned at the time. The man who used to follow his dad around in the forests inspecting log dams was very helpful. He was rattling off the facts and figures I was interested in. However, he didn't have any teeth and I didn't have any talk.
About snow melt, I went down to the river at the end of the property with Yvonne once. She nibbled the buds for two hours as I stared at the raging water. Three pools and corresponding minor waterfalls are down there. Anyhow we got back and for the next two weeks that goat gave as much milk as the river. The kids didn't come, so I guess they stayed in the hutch. Remembering now, I would sell them first to the new goat farmer, then Yvonne to them later.
Seeing the nutritional power of bush buds reassured me that God feeds his forest and field animals with enough energy to withstand cold rain especially. Another fun story is what I was told is a popular song in Quebec. It's sung by the young women gone’ square dancing. The song says, 'You can have the clumsy others, let me dance with a fellow who dances the logs'.
Part H
At a restaurant around that time, I had to defend my dignity. A young couple at the same communal table had suggested too much. Learning I was wanting to improve my French, plus that I was single, they said 'Find a nice French girl to sleep and have conversation with'.
Two facts to help explain this one, the beautiful 'international' French of Quebec is inevitably supplemented with a countryside dialect. The old term for it is 'horse talk' and uses the French word for horse as its single description. Two, I had my young horse Jim Dandy and was thoroughly occupied learning his language.
So by God’s mercy I deftly answered 'I want to learn 'cheval' and prefer to sleep with my horse'. That was a close one, not as close as my equine spoiled brat's hooves. He was only a reflection of his immature owner. That nice family who won the dairy quality awards sold him to me.
They also harvested urine from mares, until their receiving company moved to Alberta. I got their favorite mare, a gray-dappled Percheron Sally's last colt sired by their dark brown Belgian stallion. When I was asked what I plan to name the young-stud-at-the-time, I recalled the man's delighted description of the colt during introductions.
It was an honor to see first-hand an equine organism progress from fear to confidence. In the beginning he balked at his own shadow and similar thereof. By the end of his life I only had to direct his attention to the next challenge. I never cut his mane hair for that was what I held on to for dear life, his tail hair too in case I slipped back that far.
I'm always ready to joke with any motorcycle rider I meet that I also used to ride, although my ride farted. I haven't had the opportunity to do so, mainly because the demeanor of those I might have attempted it with was aloof. I found out partly why when fueling my vehicle once at a gas station.
The other-side pump was vacant until a quiet Harley-Davidson rolled in. He and his woman had my attention, because I had never not heard such a thing before. Noticing the double negative there, I asked him why his Harley is relatively silent. He laughed and said, 'Most riders take the muffler off'.
I told him I thought they were made like that. And he clarified, 'Naw, they take 'em off'. Like bomb sounds added to firework displays, I noticed my last two dogs who were exposed to it would put their paws over their ears on the 4th of July. Why commemorate the terrifying part of a disaster like war?
My Uncle Fred was taking his turn at the bottom of a foxhole. The other two guys were stacked on top of him and got killed by a bomb. He got a medal once for getting tired of sitting in his shit in a trench. They were pinned down by an intractable machine gun for over a week.
Fred decided to do what he had been advised to do if necessary. He reversed his pack-sack, informed his buddies, and went over the top to maybe a shitless heaven. The whole troop followed him doing the same. They got the gun nest. My grandma was told similar of my other uncle, their first-born son.
Gavin was taking his turn as platoon point man crossing a waist-high river. Gavin was eliminated by a sniper, who in turn was dropped by Gavin's military associates. When one or two of them personally got home and had a chance to visit my grandparents, the surviving soldier said, '...but, Mr. and Ms. McCarthy, we got the guy that got Gavin'.
My mom told me that Grandma immediately said, 'Oh so what, just another mother's son'. Alan and Pete and me used to clothes-pin baseball cards to the spokes of our bicycles. Still thinking of motorcycles here, I think there's a similarity. Affluence is a definite impediment to Christian reach-out evangelism. Who’s our book-keeper?
There's no question of the legitimacy of doing business with future enemies. Last century's U.S. commercial services in Europe such as Standard Oil and then Ford and GM and later the stated confusion of Vietnam recently developed into our teaching immigrant potential criminal idiots to fly. The Holy Bible is the only history book that recounts the future, and that nebulously for intrinsic reason.
Before bedtime last night and the miserable story recollection of the hobby-farm family, I listened to what I recommend to anyone, the Christian teaching on YouTube of Melissa Dougherty, also some by Pam Sheppard. Melissa is young and energetic and sharp-as-a-tack, humble also in frequently referring to people she says are smarter than she.
It was actually a Brother Barnabas as he coins himself that I heard teaching about riches and true Christianity. It's not a video, just a still shot with narration by a woman, maybe his lovey. Who might have better diction and presentation skills than he does. In fact, 'Barnabas' has some introductory selfie-videos in the car he drives; 'recommended. They also have returned to original biblical plural leadership.
Part I
Brother Campeljohn, maybe dead now, an astrophysicist by trade made a cassette recording of a sermon he gave. He shared discoveries of astrophysics that encouraged him to receive more of God's faith. Specifically, the discoveries verified some big Scripture passages. He concluded by emphasizing a key word he proferred is God's overall message.
He says God's key word is "Come!" as Jesus spiritually now returned to Heaven as he "draws all men unto (him)self (whosoeverwill)". I would add, in the natural realm selfish mankind flatlines, eliciting a contrary response unrelated to the impetus. Whereas Jesus' non-fallen human nature unhesitatingly exhibits honesty and sincerity. We are made in God’s image, we lost it, and Jesus is our example to recover it.
A propensity to go an unnatural way is how I've heard sin described. Regardless of how it works, the solution is to be disgusted with it. God is waiting right there to receive our repentant gesture. At that point God "is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness". It is what Jesus described to Nicodemus as the imperative of being born again or born anew.
God had it written that iniquity was found in the heart of Lucifer. Whose center of operations was divinely relocated to the atmosphere and earthly biosphere as Satan. He had his opportunity to check and put a stop to his bad attitude and refused to do so. God has a coolly sublime general atmosphere in his creation and Lucifer no longer fit in.
Movie director Stanley Kubrick captured some of God's sublime atmosphere in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. That is an antiquated media production and may not interest you. Which tells me this whole narrative and memoir might be passe' also. 'Problem is the word 'passe', for nothing ever really goes away, nothing human. For God created mankind "with eternity in his heart". Jesus Christ epitomizes and personifies the sublime primordiality that is the sole prerogative of our creator, God.
I don't see any other option but to be satisfied with watching trees grow. Even if we have to move again to another so-called home, we should live patiently and respectfully. I refrain from going the step farther and worshiping God in nature or as nature. Like the Buddhist monk ignorantly showed the Christian man the hole up in the back of the statue, it is the spirit world that requires more of our naive attention. But to do it right is of the utmost importance, the rightness of God's Christ, Jesus of Nazareth.
Gautama and affiliates and similar on Earth must if possible learn about how God is jump-starting mankind's dignity and worth through personal intervention. Historically he biblically contacted individuals whom he perceived were humbly open to him. God leveraged his time with these humble people to prepare for his own royal entry onto the scene.
And the rest is real history meaning all of it when and where God is involved, even his story. And I mean involved as we are when playing a game of ping-pong or table-tennis. But when a thrill begins to kill, we need to back off and ask for help. That's why anybody who is within earshot of Biblical stories is expected by God Almighty to check them out.
God wants us first accountable and available to him as our creator and our savior, so that we will then be usefully accountable and available to one another. Anything less is not effective for then we either spin off into space or crush. 'Heaven, we have a problem'. We're in a predicament of eternal proportion and only The Real God can fix it. He'll show us how if we ask, involving us as directly as possible in his own personality's spiritual fruition. We didn't make ourselves so we can't make ourselves as 'self-made' men. God is the only self made God where again, no flesh will glory in his presence on their own.
Part J
At the bottom of that diving pool I had to figure a way out. Looking at the suspended dust, my body protected the injury to the spinal column by blacking me out if I moved too much. I saw that starting to happen and took it more slowly. I found I could move myself into an upright position by using my toes and fingers to propel me. God's puffer fish were my pattern solution. When puffed up their fins look like fingers flipping, held together for a webbed effect.
Once I saw that as profitable and was still visual and conscious, I used that method all the way to the wall. I was practiced in holding my breath. On the long and boring days of abandonment at the pool, I would see how many times I could swim side to side. It was a seven-lane Olympic-size swimming pool. I could do over three, pumping the limbs, with second-hand non-filter chemical-spiced cigarette smoke at home since birth, since conception.
The little three-step ladder was way up there. And it took me four tries to grab it without starting to black out. I had been doing a simple swan dive, off the high dive. I failed to straighten up before hitting the hard water. That crushed a disc; in retrospect, I know I was wanting to fly away like a swan from my problems.
I had to gently blow air into my newborn-child two or three times after a breech birth. His audible "Eh" as if to say 'Okay I got it now' was heavenly music to my ears. (His tiny older brother had miscarried fatally--I guess they all are--on my birthday two years before). I wish the midwife had told us what to look out for as danger signs.
The miscarried child at twelve weeks was a tiny little boy. I named him Barnabas John. His mom had had a stomach ache and went into the bathroom. Then she cried out and I went in there and caught him in my cupped hands. His little connector pipe was pumping away then stopped. I buried him under the little maple tree she had planted when she bought the place, before me.
(My teenage years aborted child (the year after Roe vs Wade) I recently named Kristin Jessie, whichever gender, Krystan Jesse. I wrote and told the aborted baby's mommy about it. She said thanks but not to write back. She mentioned she'd recently been to a Catholic Rachel Retreat. There is "a great cloud of witnesses" watching us, quite apparently.
The breech was a perpetual motion machine fetus, very active in the womb. But his head couldn't be felt anywhere the few days before parturition. I think the midwife, whom we did want at a far arm's reach, should have pointed out bad things to look out for. He had slipped around and gotten stuck in the wrong position.
I needed two normal hands to work his head out, but didn't have them. I tore her a bit to make some more room. That worked. At the hospital where she got stitched, after all was settled, the nurse reassured me. She was from Alaska and may have done some midwifing by radio. She looked at me afterwards and kindly said 'You done good'.
I know appendectomies get done by radio in Canada's wide open parts. We all want to hear from Jesus "Well done my good and faith-filled servant; enter you into my rest". But before we lift an enthusiastic finger let's lift our heads. Let's lift them above and beyond the shark-fest of worldly socializing. Churches are not immune to this.
I heard that one guy in the sea with his sail boat sunk kicked one persistent shark in the nose for seventeen hours. I guess he had shoes on securely, because a shark's skin is rough. In Frederick I met a woman whose man had survived the Indianapolis sinking. If you don't know, Naval Command had sent the big cruiser back to the P.I. without escort. And no one was nearby to get ahead of the sharks.
Another Frederick woman told me her man was in New Guinea. He was flying a scout plane, one of the early junk-heaps. On his way home for supper, he saw a plane coming the opposite way. They would pass right by each other and he kept going. Sure enough it was a Jap (Mitsubishi) 'Zero'.
They flew right by and looked at each other. He waited a second for what might take two minutes. But the other guy flew on 'to his supper also' the woman told me. I found a small Japanese war cave built into the side of a ravine in the forested rear of the Brent School campus in Baguio City.
May I end the above stories with something said at work to Jeffrey Dalmer's dad? In his autobiography he said he walked into the laboratory where he was long-employed. It was the day after his son was apprehended and taken into police custody. An associate kindly welcomed him and broke the uncomfortable ice with 'But for the grace of God, Lionel'.
Part K
I don't quite understand the meaning of those words, but I want to share what Mr. Dalmer admitted in his recount of family events and general living. Lionel Dalmer admitted in his narrative to fantasizing somewhat of what his child actually lived out. From this we have a distinct example of what the Jews would take into account.
That as I've already said in this essay, the Israelite Sanhedrin court would throw a case out of rebelliousness in a young man if negligence of upbringing was evident in one or both of his parents. This means we have a real pickle of a situation as concerns possible parental violence. The question is about the parents too, not the children alone.
That was a single-account suicide in about the year 300 that moved the Israelite community to convene and rectify the situation. I've met two people here in Mifflin County who lost grandchildren to suicide. And besides knowing publicly there's more that have, I wonder at-large if sticking and spanking is an indirect form of home-made killing, lifetime slow-torture killing with the direct end not in sight, from on high horses.
A Canadian Mennonite man has done useful pioneering work in analyzing victimization and perpetration. He is Vernon W. Redekop and his book A Life For A Life? is subtitled The Death Penalty On Trial. My copy is copyrighted 1990 and in it Vernon recounts how he had been doing visitation in prisons.
Vernon's back cover points out that '...the Mosaic law provided refuge for the offender and made quick, biased punishment almost impossible'. That is a real step toward the full system of mercy of Jesus. So incarceration is one thing and impulsive revenge is another. This is all part of progressive and ongoing prison reform.
I read a thrift-shop book and then gave it back afterwards written by a woman who pioneered prison reform in California. My point is similar to my essay's earlier suggestion of don't give up until you've tried all of the spiritual fruits of God's spirit. To say, until a prison inmate is given a chance to open up and share and heal and show real regret, the probability of further neglect or worse is not fair.
So, simply said spanking's 'not in the bible'. Said more elaborately, it never entered God's mind to tell us to spank a child. Important to know, the Scriptural phrase 'it never entered God's mind' directly derives from where God can be quoted as saying this about any involvement he has with the pagan Israelite bad habit of sacrificing children to the devil named Molech.
And that God is quoted as saying that it never entered his mind to tell the Israelites to do such a terrible thing. Which they learned from the societies around them, much of Israel ending up doing it. This is where the Druidic Irish got the idea of 'trick or treat'. I will leave you to your own research, not without this essay's principles in hand.
Halloween and New Years are a combined commemoration of Noah's great flood. Every ancient culture of the world that remembers, which is many of them will say so. A phenomenon of spirits in the air and inside of pumpkins--'skulls?--is precisely what the recollection is all about.
Noah got plastered 'first chance he got after the flood. For he was overcome with deep emotion and personal shock. I'm not saying do what he did, because the problem was still there when he sobered up. That's besides the sadness of being inspired, I suppose it was, to curse one of his sons for apparently fucking his wife while he was out of it. For such dastardly behavior God had recently stopped the pre-flood society. Christ Jesus covers that curse and the big one from Eden, theoretically for now, real for those who appropriate it.
All of Noah's neighbors, his fellow humans less seven had been annihilated. And this is regardless of the evil debauchery of his former neighbors. These were people who had miserably drowned a death nobody wants to happen to them. And their spirits or the spirits of devils inhabiting them are the active factor of the commemoration day.
Part L
Here's proof, further proof, modern and up-to-date proof. After completion of the almost total supernatural disaster of water--'next time's by fire, God 'said'--, the spiritual parasites in the remaining humans vacated their hosts airborne. God describes the devil, Satan as the prince of the power of the air, and that's where he, or it and his/its 'host' resorted to.
The proof is on a cassette-recording sermon about the dangers of rock-and-roll music--I'm thinking of making one about hypnotic church music--by an experienced Christian brother--one other exemplary story out of that besides this one in a minute--where he dubbed-in a secondary recording of someone else's interview of Jim Morrison, who had a rock band called The Doors. Jim recounted an experience he had when he was twelve.
It was a Saturday morning, not in their home of California--Mr.Morrison was the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander or admiral in the Gulf of Tonkin on that historically famous day; I would think the admiral worked out of the naval base in Long Beach--but they were visiting family or friends or both in Arizona.
The Morrisons were driving somewhere out in the Arizona countryside and a wreck had happened ahead of them on the highway. Sadly it was a full truck of field workers, open-back type with side-walls. The victims of the accident were all over the place, some already dead and others dying.
Jim's dad and mom were helping with first-aid while he stood there a bit useless. It was admittedly a spectacle, although it would have been nice if he got his hands dirty. He instead took a crash-course in spiritual demographics or demon-graphics. Jim recounted that he noticed frantic and identifiably individual spiritual characters in the air all around the scene.
Jim said they had faces of some sort, my recalling this from 1977 or so. And seriously, he noticed that two of them had focused their focus on him. You see, it seems these were disembodied spirits, now displaced from their former abodes.
And they 'wanted in' to a new place to abide in, to live in if it can be called living. Jim Morrison then said the two airborne spiritual entities that had been looking at him swooped down of a sudden. The two spirits flew down out of the air and entered into his soul or whatever. In the interview, Jim then said a clarifying addition of opinion.
Jim said 'After that, I don't think I was ever the same'. That seems to make sense for individuals who are not defended against such spiritual invasion. "The angel of The Lord encamps around them that fear him". And I don't think Jim's parents were making sure of that. And Jim died earlier than the average person.
The other interesting segment of that recorded sermon on rock-and-roll was something the teacher himself observed. He said that in his research of drum solos, he listened to not only American and British bands. He also listened to numerous African recordings of their own drumming.
And then two recordings nicked, American with African, exactly, the same extended and complex drum solo. To the percussive note out of hundreds or thousands in a drum solo, he found two, from very different cultures, that were exactly the same. He pointed out to his listening audience that such a thing could not be coincidental.
The African recording was of a major shindig, you know percussion hootenanny way down the road. I thoroughly enjoyed black-and-white films on Saturday mornings as a child showing all of the people in an African tribal community dancing and singing together. That was always heart-warming to observe, a very good example of good culture.
Part M
It's been a long six-thousand years of robbery and thievery for never a good reason. It's no wonder God in his generous mercy wrote the rules down for us one day. That could only happen in a relative fullness of time, before which the Lord and Giver of Life would have had to bide his time waiting to find someone he could work with publicly.
Abram and Sarai were those two cooperative and humble people, and their nephew Lot, the latter's ancestors partially populating the modern country of Jordan. Note, I listened to Mary Nelle Wyatt’s skillful narration again last night, at Wyatt Archaeological Research.com. Additional research says the city of Ur in question was not the old one in the modern area of ancient Iraqi Chaldea. Rather, it was north of there in southeastern Turkey (formerly Armenia)/northern Syria.
Towns around there are still named after Abram and Sarai’s family members, including Abram's dad Terah. If they were only living there temporarily, their names probably wouldn't have imbedded in the local culture but for the possibility of later popular demand.
And then in a greater anti-typical fullness of time through a serious series of family lineage consisting of more people of usefully humble character, God felt comfortable bringing forth his own child Jesus. I think it reasonable to respectfully observe that God is presently playing out a third and final fullness of time, the birth of the Christian 'manchild' we can read of in Jesus' revelation to the semi-retired apostle John.
Just as time elapsed between Eden and Sinai and then again between Sinai and Bethlehem, Jesus' second coming seems to finalize the third span of time. Now, Del's Theomatics as God's Biblical mathematics sees no millenium in the numbers. Frankly I don't think it matters with the "marriage supper of The Lamb and his Bride" up ahead. Which of course makes a fourth span of time known as party time.
Finally, about the biggest religious news on the planet passed most of us by because we’ve been too full of ourselves. Including me, I have three times looked at it, only the third time densely perceiving it was the real thing. The first two times I poo-pood it, I think wrongly now. I did this also with Ron Wyatt's excellent segment about Sodom and Gomorrah.
I mean about Ron Wyatt and his teenage sons homing in on Noah's Ark. They followed a magazine aerial photograph to the ark’s landing site. This happened miraculously out on the local Turkish road with the taxi they were riding in. The ark had actually slid down the hill a bit there in the big hills out from the Ararat massif itself. Once the Turkish scientific observers saw Ron and his crew make impossibly coincidental observations, they had their own people analyze it.
This was especially after Ron had an acquaintance from Los Alamos Laboratory come in with a possibly borrowed state-of-the-art architectural-geologic x-ray machine. The metal alloys the machine identified in the metal hardware Noah evidently utilized to firmly hold the wood together would be impressive metallurgy even today. Ron charted out the entire 515-foot boat with the x-ray machine. The machine facilitated the charting out of the beautiful layout of petrified wooden beams as cross-beams, side-beams and uprights as a framework for three levels of compartmentalized chambers.
While it had never yet rained on the the earth, there was an ocean circumscribing the old Pangian pre-flood original continent. The fluidity of design and construction of his ark showed Noah had abundantly observed sea-going vessels of Atlantean antiquity and quality as a cultural skillset to better apply God's immediate word about the design of the life-saving boat.
Anchor stones to weight down and stabilize the double extended keel like that of a Polynesian catamaran were found in the area's grazing fields. And note, the ridicule by the neighborhood observers was not because it was a boat, but because the boat was so far from the ocean.
Also on their website, check out the Wyatt's discovery of the Noah Family's farmstead. Observe the layout of the farmhouse foundation and adjoining fields separated by rock walls. Local people have been convicted of Noah's original ownership of the property from that memorialized time. To think of the daily activity of that farm and all its inhabitants is eye-opening. For this is where the animals of the Earth spread out from to populate the planet.
Turkey's people wholeheartedly espoused the ongoing project, and as Ron Wyatt got himself away from his annual vacation and back to Tennessee and the hospital he worked at, Turkey erected a touristic visitation and information building overlooking the remarkable discovery site. The area is about a dozen miles out from the big volcano of Mount Ararat.
A secondary volcano adjacent the site is what overflowed molten lava on which the landed boat slid down the hillside. It jammed sideways on a rocky outcropping. The question of whether the wood of the boat would have caught fire has been answered in the negative. Note, volcanic activity and the simultaneous release of subterranean water contributed much of the global flood water.
While Carl Sagan well articulates everyone's priority of perception, it remains to have eyewitness observation of history and astronomy. Carl said, "I don't want to believe; I want to know." It's a big place, and it takes a bigger observer than ourselves. Again, I say we must attend to original and primordial spirit, not the self-praising manipulation of matter by a minor parcel of spirit.
The Wyatts did this back in the seventies and their other adventurous discoveries into the eighties and nineties, the Wyatts only using their vacation money. Ron's then went on and deduced the actual Red Sea cross-point. Then they kept at it in the Holy Spirit and figured Golgotha-Calvary needed a closer look-see, underneath it. Check out their abundant website, Wyatt Archaeological Research.com.
You see, Ron and his family-group operated quietly and peacefully. And very much inoffensively, so Turkey and later Israel let them proceed as diligent and respectable tourists. They’re Seventh-Day Adventists, and good examples of the spiritual application of that Christian group. Although like the JW's many of them don't think Jesus is God-incarnate, nor that hell is real. It's a big group, with variations of convictions. And they don't fight, at least not out in the open, for violent manipulation of God's scripture.
Note, as I edit this long essay, i want to clarify something about the crossing of the Gulf of Aqaba part of the Red Sea rabbit ears, something I mention elsewhere but have not located yet, thank you. About the pillars Solomon evidently set up on opposite shores of the crossing, I rewrote it once and now must do it again.
It's simply a question of whether it was the Israelis or the Egyptians who in these modern times set the western pillar upright in concrete. Apparently, the Israelis were in control of the area when Ron and his two sons found the big sand spit and soon after went scuba diving in the water. Well, the area has reverted or gone to the possession of Egypt since then. Check out their scuba diving film of the many chariot wheels, including golden ones of the royal chariots.
Ron and his young men sons stretched legal limits getting near Arabia's Sinai, a bit of Henry Dave Thoreau civil-disobedience. They or brethren after them got in there eventually. Their film of the charred-top mountain and the ridiculously amazing-looking cleft-rock and Israelite campsites and the twelve-pillar altar and cattle chutes and unique Egyptian-style engravings of bulls on rock-faces plus a burial ground of three-thousand rebels was confiscated by Arabia, until years later the precious film surfaced again.
Another remembrance of the Lloyd Triestino ship--it was either the 'Asia' or the 'Victoria'--the children's playroom up by the bridge had arts+crafts tables, round ones, maybe five of them. What occupied me a lot of the time was an excellent climbing wall. The whole back wall had a beautifully made criss-cross / multiple tic-tac-toe wooden assembly. And it’s nice to think we sailed near where God crossed Israel over the Gulf of Aqaba part of the Red Sea.
I suppose having the run of the ship would have been a more dynamic climbing wall. Dad said he and a boy and a girl he befriended had the run of an ocean-liner once when he was a young child. At one point, the three of them found a wide and large open chamber. It had a ladder welded to its side. No adults were around to say ‘no’.
So they climbed it, the female first for maybe honorable reason. Her little dress was distractedly open for secondary observation, Dad said. Up the three went, unaware they were climbing one of the ocean liner’s smokestacks or funnels not currently being used. But the three of them didn't seem to be phased by it and they kept going.
They saw light at the head of the vertical tunnel and eventually reached it. It was to a platform where a ship employee was working solo. He did not congratulate the children for their exploitative accomplishment. The employee carefully shooed them back down to where they came from.
Reader's Digest magazine I think it was, once posted an especially amazing story. Two workers were stuck on a broken scaffold on the inside-wall of the largest smokestack in the United States. A recent Vietnam-veteran helicopter pilot, now civilian-rescue was called in to help. He had to thread the needle with a basket lowered down.
The rescue was made extra-complicated with prevailing winds in the area in the 40's and gusting into the 50's. It was difficult, very difficult to prevent the men, one at a time from bonking the inside wall of the stack. Daily missions like this, and night time missions--I think the smokestack rescue went into the night--in Vietnam are recounted in a book.
I see I gave the book to someone and forgot its title. Online just now looking for it I found others but not it. It is the story of the night time Huey helicopter rescues, besides their day times. These people earned--those who lovingly dared--the highest reputation of bravery in the air in Vietnam. Their policy was to not sleep until every human soul was rescued.
The only Christian non-resistance these air crews applied was when they could get back to their trundle-beds. They slept on-call, especially at busy times. And any number of them, more than average, would that night or day sleep into eternity. They all got very good at what they were doing, daily heroism a heavenly habit. Huey pilot Hugh Thompson asserting his way into My Lai is an example.
Part N
One last-but-not-least story about ocean-liner ships and children, when my friend at Brent School's family moved from where they lived in a mining district of South Africa to the Philippine island of Luzon, they traveled on an ocean-liner. Mom and their youngest were strolling on deck. And her mom got into a conversation with another woman.
I'm sure both shuddered for the rest of their lives about taking their respective eyes off of the child. Who enthusiastically used its newly nimble body to climb up and over the fence. The ship's guard-rail there was an open horizontal rail design. You could see through the railed sections. And her daughter was smiling at her from the outside of it.
My friend's mom kept her cool--very well done--knowing she must not transfer any negativity to the child that would cause the child to in any way lose her concentration on having fun. It was a straight drop there to the ocean, so this was crucial. Mom didn't budge from her standing position while talking with her acquaintance. maybe she confided to her insistently, "Stay still and be quiet."
She merely remained how she was when she first turned her head to look for her child. And in the nicest and most pleasant voice she could prayerfully muster she said ''Karen, can you climb back on this side of the railing, also?'' That was a complimentary participation in the child's positive enthusiasm of its adventurous prowess. It worked. And notice that word crucial, the root of which word is cross. 'If we do our best and God does his worst, then we'll get somewhere.'
I've lived my whole life with an incomplete situation, of being misunderstood. At school one day in Jakarta, fourth-grade, my girl-friend, an Australian named Vicki, never got the explanation of what happened between me and her little brother. Maybe a first-grader, little Ian was a cute little guy with a cute little freckled nose.
Ian's cute nose was my undoing when he was standing idly by one of the upright pillars of the new Regina Pacis school building. He didn't know much who I was and I sought to endear myself to the little brother of the vivacious and pretty girl I was interested in. I smiled and said hello to Ian and reached out and did what my dad often does to my youngest brother.
Which is to gently tweak the end of someone's nose between two kindly knuckles, using the thumb as a stop-gap. I admit it was an abstract gesture and foreign to habituated procedural expectation. The little lad, with no preceding experience in his life about this, was duly and negatively surprised. The little fellow ran off to have someone rectify his understandable confusion.
I was called to the principal's office under the accusation of a poking in the eye of a first-grader. Dumbfounded, I remained silent in the interview-interrogation. Vicki was clearly cool to me after that, although she did invite me to her birthday party. Vicki told me the simple directions of five, maybe six streets from the center of town.
What should have taken me and my dad's driver twenty minutes took over two hours. We could not find the place in the northeast part of town. We lived south of Jakarta proper, so we veered off to the right at the big circle-roundabout at the Hotel Indonesia. Where Vicki and Ian's dad was manager and started looking.
My dad's driver, several times after an hour or two diplomatically tried to convince me it was not going to happen. We would get ourselves back to the Hotel Indonesia-circle to try once again. It was at the far end on the far side of a U-shaped street, an extensive one. The driver looked at me with his sweet mouth totally open.
Dad’s driver had given me the reins of the search, less the steering wheel and I appreciated it. Vicki was fairly occupied with her circle of girlfriends but kindly nodded a welcome to me when I belatedly presented myself. I think the residual confusion of the school accident--it was not an incident--tempered Vicki's enthusiasm to see me. Plus everyone there was sugared-out by then. I may have stayed ten minutes and then took an unnoticed leave.
I'll leave off further suggestions of observations to make and conclusions to draw from these stories. I suppose this essay is categorically both memoir and borderline fiction, the latter because I wish some of it was. An old statement in God's bible book by someone speaking personally says, "Hitherto hath The Lord helped us". We don’t just live on the earth, but we live on God’s earth, and he loves us, to death. He did it as Jesus.
Because Almighty God, our creator and re-creator optionally gives us leeway to be like him. A neighbor of one of my younger brothers and I had a conversation. He's here twenty-some years from Bolivia and with his sweetheart has a house-cleaning business. Some of his several employees positively pester him to consider Jesus Christ.
He does not appreciate the pressure, telling me so also. I concluded our chat with the important suggestion of a most valuable fact about God. That God does not push; he only pulls in the way of drawing all mankind unto himself. God is sweet. One of his writer's was inspired to ask, "Have you tasted that The Lord is good?"
Looking up something online just now, a pop-up on the screen said an oldest version of the Hebrew bible is selling for fifty-million dollars. It's not the expensive perfume-ointment poured upon Jesus by a lover of his heavenly heart. This money should definitely "go to the poor'' for clean latrines and water wells, plus the common-sense biblical-wisdom why’s and wherefore’s of such.
Indeed, about relieving ourselves as mentioned in We Spanked God, as God words it through King James "when you ease yourself abroad", meaning open land, have a paddle with you to dig a hole beforehand and cover it over afterwards. My one-liner suggests we do so in contemplative humility and adoration toward an amazing spirit God. And it's a Godly use of a paddle, for shit.
'Still thinking about the word heart, a one liner uses Catholicism to usefully say as a truism, 'Only God's sacred heart in Jesus can soothe the eternally scared heart'.
Alright you dear reader, I'm working on an ending.