Does anyone here have any experience with Quaker Christians (or they may refer to themselves as Christian Quakers), or insight into Quaker christianity?

I ask because I'm reading the third book (called The Legacy ) in a trilogy by Michael Phillips and there is a reference to Quakers and one in particular, John Woolman of New Jersey. To clarify, the trilogy is a work of fiction, but in the fiction, there are references to a non-fiction historical person. Clear as mud?

What has me asking mostly, I think, is that in the work of fiction, and in the short effort I've put into additional research around Quakerism, it seems they have a significant emphasis on each believer grappling individually with their faith and listening for what God wants them individually to do.

This strikes me as very similar to Ed's consistent message that what God calls him to do is not necessarily what God is calling each of the rest of us to do. And he is not posting so we can follow the path he has discovered God is calling him to, but that he posts to encourage us to find out from God for ourselves what God wants from each of us.

I'd especially be curious for any encouragement for or warnings against looking more deeply into Quaker theology based on whatever anyone here may know or have heard.

Incidentally, I came across a Quaker related website called friendsjournal.org.  I've gathered that journaling about one's spiritual journal is encouraged among Quakers.  There were also links on the same site to a book review of a book about small community farming, and links to "Speculative Fiction and Sci-Fi".  My curiosity is piqued.

Back in the 1980s I worked in the freight business. I was a freight handler on the dock of a small perishable freight company. It was the only job I could get at the time, despite my college degree. I was hardly ignorant of the economics behind the whole business, but I wasn't paid to talk about it or make decisions, just move the freight. It was dangerous work and the biggest threat to us was the utter lack of weather protection. In winter we had people suffering cold weather injuries quite often. It was low pay and no union would touch us. The company I worked for no longer exists.

Even back then, small companies were being shut down by regulation and union tactics. Somebody behind the scenes knew what was happening, but most of the people on the ground had no clue of the broader plans. The idea was to consolidate everything under very large firms. It's no different from what you see with Google and Microsoft and other forms of oligopoly (a monopoly spread across just a handful of big shots). The whole thing is anti-consumer; it is quite conscious and frankly spiteful.

So this article by a trucker on why the consumer supply chain is breaking down tells only half the story. You see, the trucking industry was being squeezed long before the plague came along. It was all about cutting costs and raising profits for just those few who could survive the conglomeration trends. The economic shock from quarantines and lock-downs simply aggravated the crisis already in the making. Now you can see where it was headed all along. The lack of investment in infrastructure and personnel was intentional.

The whole idea was to reduce your choices so you couldn't go anywhere else. Every part of the consumer supply chain has been going through this. Every part of the chain of production, from raw resources to the store shelf, has been going through consolidation and restriction of competition. And once the whole thing was owned by a handful of conspirators, we would all be stuck with a system that offers zero alternatives. They can structure the pricing any way they like, and we cannot escape.

But they aren't geniuses in the sense of seeing the whole picture. Now that the final squeeze has begun, everything will break down at once. They have been relying too much on things they can't control, and that system on which they've built is collapsing. But it's going to hurt for a long time because replacing that consumer supply chain with small local production will not be easy.

The Sermon on the Mount continues. In His teaching, Jesus drives with a passion to restore the Covenant. In particular, He seeks to restore the Hebrew mystical outlook on which the Covenant stands. We need not examine all the ways people take the phrases from this passage out of context. What matters is that we understand what Jesus was saying to His audience. They were all under the same Covenant, a covenant that demands humility before the Lord. It's all about the sin of arrogance.

The Scribes and Pharisees were notorious for condemning people, as if only their in-group knew the Law and was fit for God's mercy. Jesus says that we should make room for people to repent and find God's mercy as long as they are still alive. Thus, He warns people not to act like Scribes and Pharisees, because God has a tendency to judge us by the same standards we use on others. If we make room for mercy to operate, we shall receive mercy ourselves.

He goes on to use a parable to mock the Scribes and Pharisees who nitpick over the minor imperfections of others (a mote in the eye) while running around with major moral failures themselves (a log in the eye). Then Jesus promptly judges the Scribes and Pharisees by their own standards. He says trusting them with leadership is like giving the sacred Showbread from the Temple to the feral dogs running around Jerusalem's trash dump. Trusting those men with teaching the Scripture is like throwing pearls to swine. In either case, it's clear they simply do not comprehend the true value of what they have been given. All they want is to feed the fleshly nature.

Don't listen to them when they disparage the average Jews as despicable and accursed, unfit for God's mercy. Don't be afraid to approach God. Ask for things you actually need and see if God doesn't provide. The Scribes and Pharisees make God out to be mean and capricious, when He's actually the good Father of His people.

Then He sums up the whole discussion by explaining that we should not be arrogant like them. Be humble with your covenant brothers and sisters. They are just people like you; treat them with the respect you want from them, and you'll be surprised how well it works. You don't need endless dissection of the words of Covenant Law to figure out all the angles. This business of being humble and respectful easily fulfills the core teaching of the whole of Scripture regarding your relations with your covenant kinfolks. From the Ten Commandments to the last prophet, you could cover it by instinct alone if you cared for your covenant family the way God does.

Finally, He tells the Parable of Paths. Serving the Lord requires a hard commitment to sacrificing your human pride. It's like a steep path, narrowed by the presence of obstacles. It's pretty easy to fall into God's wrath, just don't resist the flesh. It's like walking on a broad highway, nicely graded and smooth. The gate into the Kingdom of Heaven is too narrow for swollen egos.

Did you know that the Model Prayer is pretty much the same as a ritual of binding oneself under the Covenant? Think about the wording, compared to what happened at the foot of Mount Sinai. The latter was more elaborate, with several parts to the larger ritual, but the Model Prayer covers the essentials. Consider:

Quote:Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
As we forgive our debtors.
And do not lead us into temptation,
But deliver us from the evil one.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. (NKJV)

We've discussed here about the high likelihood of our sun going nova. On top of that, I believe we'll see a big CME (coronal mass ejection) before that. I wanted to bring up a point that our sun does other things to make life difficult. A CME is a burst of highly energized particles flying very fast through space. It takes a day or so to get from the surface of the sun to earth. We can see it on satellites before it gets here. Solar flares are a different thing. That's when the sun emits a flash of energy, a burst of extra light. That travels at the speed of light, so when you see it, it's already here. The part of a solar flare's spectrum that is easiest to measure with instruments is x-rays. It's also the part most likely to cause us problems. Solar flares are more rare than CMEs. When you see a rise in solar flares, it means the CMEs are going to be bigger.

And the rise in both signals that we are closer to a nova. The best we can tell, it will be a micro-nova. Not enough to extinguish human life, but it will be enough to destroy civilization. That's because what comes with it is all that other stuff like the magnetic poles shifting, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and general crustal upheaval. It's all orchestrated by the Creator as something that comes in cycles. The last major upheaval was during the time of Noah. Things had gotten so bad that the Lord decided it was time to start over. Near as we can tell, the conditions before the Flood no longer exist. We don't have vast stores of water under the ground, and we don't have a permanent cloud cover over the whole earth. So, whatever it is God is planning this time, it won't likely be the same, but it will be messy. And there's a very good reason for God needing to go to such extremes.

I won't blame you for not giving it much thought, but the single most dangerous threat to the human soul is the transhumanist movement. The research and concrete plans to merge man and machine (computers), along with wholesale genetic manipulation, is at least as bad as whatever mankind was doing before the Flood. In Noah's day it was messing around with demons in ways we cannot imagine. Today it's virtualizing the human soul.

God's habit is to give humans enough rope to hang themselves. The timing of a micro-nova was established long ago, and God can steer the precise moment any way He likes, but you can see it coming. The science published by folks like the Suspicious Observers community is pretty solid. Even without that, it's not hard to feel it in your heart. God's wrath isn't going to be sated by the destruction of a few national governments like the USA. It's going to be more like the Flood again, with just a tiny group of humans surviving, though I suppose the group will be larger this time around.

This is a very good time to die. It requires an otherworldly perspective to keep living. This is why I have visions of restoring the path back to Eden, of the ancient Hebrew mysticism and the Covenant heart-led way. It's not a guarantee that you'll survive the cataclysms, but it's a way of living that folks will need to get through all this. The message must be established and remembered when that awful day comes.

Now, I'm assuming this is not the Final End. I'm assuming that this is just another catastrophe before the Big One. But even if I'm wrong, the message we have is the right one for leading up to the Second Coming. So either way, it's worth every sacrifice I can make to proclaim this message. I'm trusting the Lord to be my publicist. It's His message; I'm just along for the ride. I'm trying to be faithful in my little part. That's the call I echo: Be faithful in your part to spread this word. If this thing calls our name, then be aware of the sacrifice demanded. Be aware of what comes in the package.

Wanted to share out that I will be moving into a full-time writing position at my current company. It's a "lateral move," in the sense that it's not a promotion...I'd still be at the same employment level I am now. 

The reason this is a praise is because I've always aimed to be a full time writer, in addition to it being my mission/hobby, for no reason other than career preference. It's surreal to know it's coming true, but I am abundantly thankful to the Lord nonetheless.

We are participating in our weekly prayer time at 5pm EST. Check out the prayer request forum for some prayer topics, but feel free to lift up your own.

You may also fast. There's no obligation or guidelines to how you should do it, or if you should do it at all. Just fast as the Lord leads and speaks to your convictions.

Please be in prayer for my daughters this evening they have big decisions to make together concerning their dads estate that is closing. They have been waiting 3 years since his death. It has been so hard on very young women. The teens and twenties... tough
Pray for me if I am called on by them.

I've got a good case of two sides engaging in disinformation. If you do a search for the name "Grulkowski" and the acronym "NHA" you'll get a list of stories complaining that the person named Grulkowski spewed a bunch of lies about some effort to designation a chunk of Montana a National Heritage Area (NHA). Read where this story is reproduced or echoed in lots of mainstream places and the narrative is that Grulkowski lied about what the designation does.

Some folks in Great Falls formed a committee to press for the NHA designation of an area bigger than a whole county in Montana. The story here is that folks who did this are a certain kind of people: urban progressives who love the idea of federal government seizing land from private owners. They are spitefully unaccountable to anyone, and have lied about organizations they claim are on board with this. Granted, the NHA designation specifically prevents land seizure or any kind of controls. That is what the mainstream complaints focus on, that Grulkowski and friends are lying about what the NHA designation means. But that's not what Grulkowski and friends said. The issue is that the committee pushing for the NHA are only getting started toward a long term goal of all the things Grulkowski warns about.

That's because the process involved in confiscation and control often starts with a fairly harmless NHA designation, and then escalates over the years. The whole point is to get federal attention focused on a particular area so that calls for rising controls become unavoidable.

For once, I'm not on either side. The Bible makes a lot noise about common or shared ownership of land. It also says a lot about supporting inherited land rights. The problem is that we have two immoral forces clashing here. On the one hand, private land owners are notorious for fencing and blocking folks from just passing through. That's a sin in the Bible. But the federal government is also notorious for confiscating property, and it doesn't matter if there's compensation, because inherited ownership is a big deal in the Bible. Think about King Ahab and Naboth's vineyard.

But I think we can say that the problem with the federal government's policies is that they are guided by some of the most evil people I've ever encountered -- and I have dealt with those "Green" pagan idolaters before. The traditional American notion of private property ownership rights is a lesser evil, in that this idolatry tends to do less harm.

Still, my point is that it's very easy for one side to dominate the mainstream press such that folks honestly believe there is no other side to the controversy worthy of a hearing.

Ref: Cascade County and part of Choteau County in Montana; proposed Big Sky Country National Heritage Area.

Jesus continues hammering the Scribes and Pharisees. One of their biggest mistakes was something that the prophets condemned from at least as early as the Restoration: materialism. While the Babylonians weren't particularly materialistic, nor were the Persians and Medes, somehow the Judeans picked up on it and brought it with them back to Jerusalem. By the time of Jesus, it had become a solid doctrine that the primary mark of peace with God was material wealth. From several different angles, Jesus drives home the ancient Hebrew otherworldly orientation.

The Scribes and Pharisees had a legalistic rule about fasting two days per week, backed by a complicated system of reckoning (and then reasoning out exemptions, of course). The Covenant itself called for /one/ national day of fasting yearly on the Day of Atonement. Culturally, Hebrew people were supposed to fast during special occasions of great sorrow, and whenever some authority figure called for a ritual fast. The idea was humility and penitence before God; you are prepared to accept the worst, but are asking for relief. It's a demonstration of dependence on the Sovereign.

The Scribes and Pharisees would mark their fasting with scripted forms of neglect, so that everyone knew they were trying to be holy. Jesus said His Father wasn't impressed, regardless whether anyone else was. If you feel moved to fast, keep it to yourself. Aside from the day of Atonement, no one should have a clue except God.

Then He lowers to boom: Nothing of this world matters. Our existence in this world is temporary, and so is everything men typically treasure here. Set your heart on things that matter in Eternity. Keep your heart clear of any distractions like that. The famous comment about serving two masters, and the mention of Mammon as a deity of sorts, should continue to reverberate through to the End of Time.

So, Jesus continues telling His audience that they should not give much attention to living in this fallen world. It's just not worth worrying about when compared with Heaven. Don't get wrapped up in the needs of the flesh. If God can take care of the natural life on this planet, your natural body will be taken care of under the same protocols. And if you happen to actually care about God's commands, then you have the promise of things being even better. All this anxiety and hoarding of stuff, as if there is no God in Heaven watching over you, is insulting to His name. Worry hasn't enough power to give you any advantages at all.

The same with clothing. The Pharisees were notorious for fussing over the most expensive garments and the prestigious fashions of the day. Solomon was easily the wealthiest king in Israel's history, and his best finery didn't compare with wildflowers. If God has need of you in this world, He will provide what your physical body needs. Be faithful to the Covenant and God will provide, just as He promised. The Scribes and Pharisees acted like God's provision wasn't good enough. This made them little different from pagans.

The fashion of memorizing verse 33 is not a bad idea, but only if you take seriously what it says. It's a blunt call for the otherworldly mystical approach to life. God's favor is written on your heart, not in your bank account. Let God handle all the things that He doesn't put into your hands. Take one day at a time, and obey what the Lord puts in your convictions at the moment it comes to you. Let tomorrow worry about itself; you have more than enough to do being faithful right now.