Tomorrow, June 5th would have been our 28th wedding anniversary and you should know, it's the important days and those leading up to them that are the worst. Mother's day was not good and this one is harder because, I have to work and the tsunami doesnt care where you are when it takes you. A shield of prayer would be optimal. Shoot, I'm floundering just trying to type, God bless.

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.

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.

Well at least I can still continue posting to my blog using the original editor that I was so used to. I thought they had ditched it and was forcing me to use some new editor that I cannot stand. But I found how to use the classic editor and for however long they continue to offer it, I will continue to publish new posts. I am grateful because lately I have had so many things to tell people about.

I also went back to the very beginning of my blog in 2014 and started downloading the HTML copy of each post all the way up to the very last one I published about the baby hawks. I was kind of shocked that I had done so many posts and one day I need to go back and just read them all. The main reason I wanted to download them and have copies of them was so that after I am gone, they will all be on a thumb drive that maybe my grandkids would enjoy reading.

Anyway just so you all know, I'm doing pretty well. I have been working my butt off in the yard and continuing to clear out or clean up the outbuildings. Some days I spend 4-5 hours outside working. I'm actually quite surprised that I'm able to do all this considering my age. I guess I thought by now I'd be some little old lady sitting in a rocking chair. I'm glad I was wrong.

Well, I guess that brings you up to date. Just wanted to take a few minutes and let you know how things are going out my way.   

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.

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.

Term: glurge -- syrupy sweet sentimental writing that normal people find mentally unpalatable.

The Internet is loaded with manipulative liars, some whose lives are so empty that they have nothing better to do than plagiarize someone else's glurge and make it more sickly sweet by adding fictitious garbage about how the glurge came to be written. And this stuff gets sent across the Net in emails to gullible fools who pass it on, as if it were a scared duty. "You simply must read this!"

Today I got some glurge, plagiarizing some poety, claiming it was written by a teen-aged cancer patient. The poetry was bad enough, loaded with hackneyed phrases, but the sob story about the teen wanting to see how many people would pass it on to others was just too much. Supposedly there were trackers in the mail headers that would generate an echo every time it was forwarded. I'm not sure that's even possible, and if I thought it was, I'd simply extract the message without the headers to respond.

I don't hate cancer patients, but if this kid really felt lonely, the only useful thing to do is talk to her in person. I'd want to see her faith for myself, and let her see mine. Nothing else will do her a darned bit of good. As I've said countless times, sentiment is a poor substitute for faith.

The idea here is not to sell something, but to ask for comments. There's this social network called "Diaspora" and it's styled diaspora* as their "logo". I was watching this project as it was developed roughly ten years ago. I even joined the network for a while during testing. It's a lot like Facebook, but it's not centrally owned by anyone, so it's users are not exploited the way FB does it. It's now run by an independent foundation, funded by donations.

However, the thing operates by having multiple nodes (called "pods") across the Internet. The point of that is restricting ownership of the stuff you post through your account. You own it; no one can claim any kind of copyright over it. Thus, it never actually leaves the pod you choose to join. Yet the whole thing remains fully linked to the entire Diaspora system globally. Thus, you get most of the advantages of FB, but virtually none of the hassles. Best of all, there is no significant censorship.

So what would you think if I was to work with some other folks to spin up our own pod? I believe we can make our pod by invitation only, yet we would be on the same network. We can communicate with a wider audience. I'm asking a friend of mine who leases a server in the Washington DC area (think: fat pipes) what he thinks it might cost to sponsor a pod on his machine. Yeah, somebody has to pay for it. I'd rather pay a Christian brother, especially one who understands my faith.

Here's the link that tells you all about Diaspora: wiki. Pay attention to the Community category, as well as the user FAQ (frequently asked questions). What do you think?

Let's crush an element of Western Christian mythology. This one should be easy, but I've run into it often in discussions, so maybe you haven't had a chance to think this through.

The common Western Christian lie is that we should be wide open to refugees and immigrants. This arises from the notion that the New Testament message is open to all, and that our churches should gladly receive anyone and everyone who wanders in for whatever reason. Thus, by extension, we should encourage secular governments to ignore national boundaries and allow all humans to wander where they wish.

First, let's skewer one unspoken false assumption here, that religion is a segmented compartment in your life, rather than a whole new life altogether. In Western thinking, religion is just one more aspect of your identity, and it's just a matter of accommodating various religions under the democratic secular umbrella. It makes religion something people can and should control from a humanistic frame of reference.

Serving Jesus is all or nothing. We do make a wide passage for folks who are still trying to assimilate themselves to the gospel, simply because nobody ever completely arrives in this life. Still, the whole point is that you are on that path of change -- a change that completely rules your entire human existence. More to the point, it rules your soul after that human existence ends.

Oops, the Western secular humanist philosophy never acknowledges the afterlife.

Granted, valid faith covenant bodies will vary in some ways from each other. They will not vary much within the body. The whole point is that folks with common life experiences can fellowship and commune with others who share the same human problems. The idea is to find out how genuine faith addresses certain peculiar shared challenges. Each small body is supposed to specialize in addressing issues that its membership faces. It all takes place under the Two Witness model of feudal tribal structure.

The church is not a public accommodation, but a private family gathering. So while anyone is welcome to be a guest in this private family meeting, they have to conform substantially or they won't prosper spiritually, nor will they bless the body. The greater the differences, the smaller blessing there will be. They may be given a certain amount of training within the boundaries of what they share with the body, then go off and start their own covenant body to address their unique contextual needs.

There can be no one church body for everyone. The centralized model is from Hell; it's a lie of the Devil. You cannot effectively grow in Christ unless you are in a body of folks who understand your temptations. There can be no genuine body of Christ that is cosmopolitan. Trying to do that is poking God in the eye; it's part of what the Tower of Babel was all about. That ancient ziggurat was aimed at creating one centralized common religion, and it was a religion that served a very dark agenda. That agenda was aimed at pushing out divine revelation and placing some human on the throne of religion.

The gospel envisions a vast collection of tiny little bodies scattered over the earth, each addressing the peculiar needs of its own small household of faith. Everything is under a shared covenant of faith. We don't care what secular governments do, but if they were to ask, we would encourage tightly defended borders between narrowly defined cultural entities. The key to life on this earth is seeking a high degree of homogeneity in small societies.

Everybody acts like what God did at the Tower of Babel was a punishment, but it was God's grace restoring His divine will on something that was completely out of control. Only Satan promotes the cosmopolitan dream.

So we say: Close the borders. Expel the invaders and keep your societies culturally homogeneous. Don't attack folks for being different, but don't let them sleep next door, either. It's not because their differences are evil, but that they are disruptive. God's grace on this earth requires folks congregating in homogeneous clans and tribes. Keeping outsiders at arm's length is not a sin. There's nothing wrong with doing business with them, but don't let them into your home unless God calls them to change their ways to match that of the resident family.

Bring them in and demand change, but better yet, send missionaries where they are. A missionary is someone whom God equips to see past one context to another, to see what faith requires in a different circumstance. Missionaries go into a foreign context and can discern what they need to adopt to adapt to the situation, and what must be held forth as uniquely Christian. Missionaries have to understand what sin looks like in a any context. It's not a cultural mission, but it will most certainly bring changes.

So the real problem is defining what is sin, and the Western rationalist approach is wholly unfit to discern that.

Today I ran my wheelchair along OKC's imitation of a "riverwalk" -- the Bricktown Canal. It's roughly one mile one way, so I did two miles out and back. Pictures on the blog tomorrow, but I learned some interesting things with this experiment.

1. Fingerless gloves were a huge mistake. My thumbs are blistered and all the fingers are chafed. I need really good leather gloves for stuff like this.
2. My fanny pack should have been mounted on the wheelchair below the seat, not on my waist. In fact, during summer months it would probably be ideal to wear a breathable vest with four pockets on the front to carry all my stuff.
3. I need a water bottle cage mounted somewhere on the chair, but out of the way.
4. I'm praying for a much better wheelchair; this thing was slow as molasses out there on sidewalks and brick pavement.
5. Half of Bricktown is wheelchair inaccessible.

I'll be checking out some other parks like this around the OKC Metro.