Process, not product. It's the journey, not the destination. It may sound to some like I have to eat my words, but the door was always open for a change in tools to get the job done. The tools are not the job.

Right before the quarantines and shut-downs, I felt called to a mission of bikepacking. Right now, that's on hold. But I declared that by taking the bikepacking mission, I was no longer going to focus so much on information theory. Now, all of a sudden information handling is a big deal again. Instead of being rather reticent about computer technology, it's once more a major element in what I do, and it becomes a major element in what I write. I'm still wearing the "Bikepacking Oklahoma" t-shirts on my daily rides, but now there's not much to say about such things. I don't know when -- or if -- that's going to change. (Don't worry; I'll still be sharing pictures.)

The planned-emic has forced me to take a more aggressive posture about propaganda. It means I must be more guarded about virtual threats, because I know I'm going to expose and provoke some folks out there doing bad things. That means paying more attention to computer security again. Yesterday the Lord moved me to put Linux back on my laptop, which is what came with it. As much as I have come to like Win10, my activities have crossed the threshold where I can trust it to resist likely threats.

I went into the bikepacking mission with a full commitment. I'm still committed, but that mission is suspended. I was standing in the place God told me to stand; now He's changed the mission on me. That's His prerogative. In many ways, it's almost the same thing I did before, but then again, this is a wholly different situation. Everything I thought I knew about the previous situation has changed. Not the underlying principles, but the context has changed. The battle lines are drawn in a different place than before. The Radix Fidem message is now more under threat than before.

I strongly suspect that fancy new bike may be used in ways I never anticipated when I started fund-raising.

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.

Over the years, I have abused my body with insane amounts of mind altering substances yet, while while many of my fellow, totally irresponsible, reckless idiot travelers have since assumed room temperature, I survived. During some of my experiments, I experienced altered States that were cosmic and mystical close calls with the grim reaper. But, hey I've never been too worried or terribly concerned with self preservation. I have also been taken places without the intervention of chemicals, sometimes through fasting and other times out of the blue and a very embarrassing public meltdown in the parking lot of the Country Club in 2017 when I was struck down with a vision that left me far more rattled than any drug because they were not involved. 
  I'm interested in the indigenous rituals of so called primitives and have been toying with the idea of building a sweat lodge. Holy men, throughout time, including the Israelites and early Christians similarly used various methods of extreme physical stress to "touch the divine".
  I had a vision laying in bed last night in the boundary between awake and sleep. 
 I was laying flat underwater as a tsunami of water and debris flowed furiously overhead yet, I was unharmed and could feel the rip current pulling me in the opposite direction. Seems like I'm being led away from something that is destroying everything else. Nothing else of any substance has been brought to my awareness. 
Just blabbering,  ya know caveats, pinch of vinegar etc...

My church in it's eagerness to follow their thoroughly mistaken interpretation of Roman's 13, closed it's doors right before Easter!!!! They remain closed. Governor Cooper's edicts are unconstitutional. He cannot close churches. His oath of office pledges him to uphold the NC Constitution and the US Constitution (a relic from the Reconstruction Constitution of 1868). Article 1 Section 13 states All persons have a natural and inalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences, and no human authority shall, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience.
The Governor is a human authority and has violated his oath of office and therefore should be impeached and removed. That won't happen. I have been telling my Christian friends this, to almost no avail. Our Pastor is deaf to it. So, he bravely records his limp sermons and released them on social media. They had a Wednesday night "meeting" via Zoom and I watched as they prayed for God to grant wisdom to and bless our political overlords during this difficult time. My thoughts on this syrupy servile nonsense is creating a blue aura around me that is visible to me but, no one else because  y'all ain't around to see it.
If I was a pastor, the doors of my church would have never shut and I would gladly go to prison for doing so. 
The order to "close" churches was no accident and because there has been no widespread outrage, the next restrictions will be worse. 
I performed my due diligence but, could not find one church locally that has opened its doors. 
Whatever smidgen of covering the Lord placed over these flabby, docile rubes has been removed. These are the people who will be told to "depart from me, I ain't got no idey who you is"*
while simpering "but, but, but didn't we...yadda yadda yadda".
  I'm not surprised at our Democrat Governor, he's kowtowing to the DNC and keeping the destroy Trump plot going for as long as they can. Mediocrity and power do not mix. Mediocrities lose themselves in their delusions of power. 
The church will not stand up for itself. It seems obvious to me that God, in his infinite grace and mercy was giving these fools an opportunity. They blew it. 
If the power drunkards like that woman from Michigan and the crone from Maine along with the other mediocrities stay on their drunken orgy of power. Regular people will rebel and people will die.
We are fast approaching the breaking point, my un-revelated guess is winter/spring 2021 if Biden wins, resigns due to health reasons and whatever Commie the DNC selects is then sworn in and has the numbers to force feed Americans Communism. States will secede and there will be blood. If Trump wins it will be in 2025 when the Commicrat Party gets their turn. 
Of course, this could easily be the imaginations of a sleepy man. Good night Brethren and Sisthren.
*Mr Iain's Hillbilly translation.

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.

I have the new bike. Pictures on the old blog later today, but the point of this little post is something else: I feel like I got it just in time, as if the window of opportunity was small.

I realize it wears thin to warn about approaching tribulation if all we have is our analytical abilities. For those of you led by the Spirit, I'm pretty sure you know things are just getting started. It will all be vindicated soon, when it's too late to do anything about it. I'm rejoicing, and as I write this, I'm preparing to take it out for the first long ride. I predict I'll be rejoicing more afterward. But most of all, I'll be rejoicing when things turn suddenly very bad, because I am still utterly certain this bike isn't just a new toy, but a critical asset in the Kingdom service during the tough times ahead.

I'm fully aware of the hierarchy of so-called Charismatic gifts, but sometimes you have to cut through the classification system to get to what's standing behind it. I don't know what to call it, but I know that at times in my life, my convictions shouted at me and I just had to obey.

Both my sisters have been through multiple marriages. I performed some of those ceremonies. Right now, the one is married to a great guy; I'm proud to have been the one who was there to make the ceremony happen. There was something redemptive about it. The other sister is still in a marriage that, while it seems to be just fine by most measures, it has a dark shadow over it. Back when she married this guy, my wife and I both had reservations about performing the ceremony, but in those days we hadn't yet worked out how to express such things without pointing back to some kind of rules. My excuse at the time was that, by Baptist rules, I couldn't marry two people who were both divorced.

Looking back, that wasn't the real reason. The real reason is that something about the marriage itself is rebellion against God. I got close enough to them to smell the smoke from the pits of Hell, as it were. It still is in rebellion, so far as I can discern. I haven't been in contact with them in a decade, but something in my convictions still rattles my cage about it. There's no redemption in it. From several hundred miles away, my spiritual nature rebukes it.

It's the same thing that rejoiced when my parents divorced a while back. Despite that being the means by which I was born, that marriage was bad. Just saying so breaks a lot of church rules, but it seems to me mostly a silly version of New Testament legalism. People look for a lot of excuses to avoid doing the hard work of moral discernment. It's not exactly one of the gifts mentioned in Paul's letters, but I can tell when something makes no sense at to my mind, yet is clearly the command of God for me.

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.

My son hooked me up with a guy who is interested in building high end upholstered furniture and I will be talking with him. Back in the 90's I helped several different people set up upholstery shops and they were highly profitable one time deals. Even though it has been a while, it is like riding a bicycle, you never forget. So maybe it will turn into something. I've found that economic downturns provide the best opportunities for starting manufacturing because, A- suppliers reduce prices and B- the competition is retrenching. Get your weegee board out and ask Ed Broyhill or read his biography, he built his company during the great depression. I haven't been excited about anything in a while so, it feels good to get my inner capitalist woke back up. Pray however you will.