My mother passed away this morning. Heart attack apparently.

I wanted to give you a heads-up about what's going to happen. First, you'll need to refer to my blog post Some Things Are Settled over at the Radix Fidem blog. I'm dead serious about what it says. What you need to know is what exactly that all means, so you won't be caught off guard if any of my prophecies fail.

My faith will not change. What changes is my qualification as elder and minister of the Word. I will resign from calling myself "elder" and any other shepherding role. The blogs will not close. I will stop writing anything that teaches faith and practice. I will especially stop writing about political events or social commentary. I will continue publishing Bible studies. I will continue posting pictures. I will write about technology stuff, cycling, and maybe any other hobbies that crop up (on the old blog). I may eventually start writing again about my own faith and religion, but only on the new blog (Radix Fidem blog), and not with any intent to instruct or lead.

I will not take down any of my existing writings, but that doesn't mean they won't be censored by someone else someday. I will not stop praying for you. My religious practice will become more like hermitage. You can ask questions and I'll answer, but I won't go out of my way to talk about it much.

This is what my convictions demand. Pray with me that the Lord will show His mighty hand in our world, and shine His glory.

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.

It may just be one of my groggy 3:00am thunks but, given the state of America, it seems to me that exorcist should be a growth industry.

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.

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.

People who don't know me think I'm flighty. The way I look at it, God keeps me on my toes with changes in the mission. Surprises are good for my soul. From the outside, it might look like He's jerking me around, if indeed I'm hearing from God at all. For me, it's a matter of having a broader vision of how God does things. The way I see it, if something with someone somewhere else doesn't quite work out, He calls me for backup. I'm always on standby for Him. I have quite honestly prayed that God would make me so reliable to Him that He could use me that way.

Anyway, I have another crazy idea. Things have changed a lot in the past calendar year, and my hobbies must shift to match the needs of the Lord's glory. What was possible and likely back in January ain't happening now. I'm not going to do any bikepacking across the country any time soon. However, that 11 mile hike I took a couple of weeks ago showed me that my hiking days are not over yet; I just need to wear my compression knee braces. And I'm still convinced that my camping gear is not going to rot in the closet.

I'm praying I can get a usable motor vehicle that will allow me to schlep that bicycle out to places that feature good cycling routes. And where they don't exist (some of our parks are actually off-limits to bicycles), maybe I can hike instead. But I want to get to places all over the state, so camping is still in order. And I'll drag that new tablet out there and do some communicating with all you folks in the meantime.

So I'm praying for something small and cheap to operate. Granted, I'll take what I can get, but I currently feel the ideal is a small-ish car or pickup. Yes, I want to avoid sounding too extravagant here, but I have this burning desire to visit natural sites because I believe the Spirit is promising to show me things that require I get out alone and in a quiet place for more than a few minutes at a time. The wilderness is calling my name.

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.

This is cross posted from my blog here: Two Ways Christianity Could Be Better. 

1. Removing delineations between the Old and New Testaments.
A good reason for the removal of the Old and New Testaments as categories or delineations has two parts. The first is superficial: God’s revelation and dealings with men are neither old nor new, but looking at the writings from a high level, those dealings are spotty but continuous throughout history. Calling these two related sections of writing “old” and “new” in most cases primes the mind towards regarding them as such, and whatever adjectives we normally ascribe to things that are “old” or “new” could erroneously spill over into the view of scripture.

I won’t get into the details here, but most people reading this could think of them. The results of abandoning the “old” and “new” descriptions aren’t so superficial, but it’s the second part of the reason. Thinking of whatever Jesus did as being “new” very heavily implies (and primes us, as I’ve stated) that His words and actions were separated improvement upon the “old” stuff. Though, Jesus was, in a very meaningful way, an embodiment of everything that came before, in those “old” parts of the Bible. Think of it this way: Jesus would have fit right in with the ancient Hebrew culture of the Old Testament, yet He very much did not fit in the New Testament culture, neither the pagan Roman empire nor the Jewish religious scholars of His day.

If the Bible really needs a bifurcation, another suggestion is to simply rename the two testaments: the Testament of Moses and the Israelites, and the Testament of Jesus and the Church. Not nearly as compact as the original names, but the “old” versus “new” is avoided.

At the very least, the gospels could be moved over to the Old Testament, with the Book of Acts starting off the New Testament. Bonus points if you rename the Bible as the “The Bible Collection” or some such, as the Bible is not really one book but a collection of 66 (73 in the Catholic version), of varying characters, events, themes, intentions, and audiences.

2. Ease up on the forgiveness talk.
It’s not that forgiveness itself is bad; we’re offered forgiveness straight from God Himself as a blessing as a result of repentance. The “repentance” spoken of in scripture uses the act of turning around to face the opposite way. The actual word was also used in the sense of changing the orientation of your attention about something. In either use of the word, it fits: repentance involves changing the direction of our lives and making a move towards God, and this flipping of one’s life script is the requirement for receiving forgiveness. The idea here is that we are unable to receive that forgiveness without facing God in the first place.

Consider the context when the Bible talks so much about forgiveness. That God forgives us was an answer to a question on the mind of Jesus’ contemporaries, and for some time after: how are we, as gentiles who cannot access God in the same way in the times of Moses or Levite priests, going to get right with God? His—and Paul’s answer—was to not worry so much about it. God had already built that bridge. We just need to simply walk across, where the real battle starts on the other end of the bridge. The psychology of folks who are perpetually thinking they require new waves of forgiveness is really in question, though I realize that’s the philosophical heritage under which we in the religious west live. If there’s going to be talk of “progress” as a whole within the church, this is the type to address. We’re not going to graduate from milk to meat if we’re still holding onto the bottle.