What happened to my obsessive long bike rides? I think I figured out what the metoprolol has been doing to me. It doesn't reduce my metabolism directly; it makes my heart more efficient. On a really long ride I noticed I never got hungry. It was as if my stomach shut down. On those long rides, my system would switch over to high efficiency. I still got sore muscles, but no significant extra calorie burn. So to trigger the extra calorie burn, I have to do something the shocks my system, something with an extra punch during a 20-30 minute period of exercise. I don't just ride any more; I stop and do something strenuous in the middle of shorter rides now. And when I walk, I stop to do some kind of workout on the way. Seems to be working.

It puzzled me why my heart was telling me that the long rides were not important any more.

I no longer have much interest in spending time with military folks. Instead, it's something totally different. It's almost as if I am expecting to see more people in that same kind of distress as troops face when far away from home. They are out of their comfort zone and life seems to be asking much bigger questions for them than before. So I'm trying to understand how that could be here in America, because I'm pretty sure I'm not leaving the country. It's more like the country is leaving us, if you can make sense of that.

Somehow I have peace about waiting for this thing. Last night I awoke sometime after midnight and never did get back to sleep. Instead, I lay in the bed just worshiping and thanking the Lord for everything under the sun. Stuff is happening, but I'm not feeling antsy any more.

It's ours, for sure, but more importantly, we belong to it. This vision had been growing for a long time. My spirit now tells me this is the time; we should expect it to take off. The only thing useful we can do is make sure we grab our seats on the plane. So this is a prophetic word: It's time to move forward with the heart-led message. Yes, I know we've been doing this for years, but we need to prepare for God to push it harder than ever. We need to be ready to see this thing spread like wildfire.

One warning in particular, though: We can't pretend to control this. Indeed, we should be prepared for one or more big shots to try hijacking this thing. We should be prepared for someone else to claim credit it for it. As with Paul, let us say that whether it is via fraud or genuine piety, let the message go forth. The movement of the idea itself will draw to the truth those whom the Lord wants in His service. The Holy Spirit is more than adequate as a filter.

There will be lots of noise, a lot of enthusiasm from folks who have no clue what's going on. There will be people pestering us and trying to misunderstand how it works, trying to seize it and make it prosperous for them. We should all be ready to give a steadying hand that helps folks who are confused. I'm not big enough to carry this by myself. The whole idea is that, as many as possible, folks are seized by this thing and follow their own hearts.

Then again, from our position here under the space-time constraints, this thing may appear to drag slowly for a long time. Part of the heart-led way is recognizing that this thing is eternal and understanding it doesn't reference our sense of time and space very much. But I'm convinced the move of the Spirit has already begun, and the harvest will be overwhelming in no time at all.

That sounds like the name for some kind of flower, doesn't it?

My mother has been having a bit of trouble from her ears. She says it is connected with swimming so much, something she dearly loves as a form of exercise. At some point she got an infection. While that seems to have been treated successfully enough, she still has lingering headaches. Near as the doctors can tell, it's stress related, though it seems like some kind of issue that was awakened by the ear infection. I personally suspect it's more complex than just a stress issue, but treating the stress gives symptomatic relief.

Pray she finds some relief, but that she also discern the underlying cause.

I don't mean to overload you folks with so much written blather demanding your attention, but once I finished the curriculum, it was like a dam broke.

In recent weeks the Lord has moved in my convictions to reshape my expectations. I've lost the desire to ride my bike, except as mere transportation. I've been walking a lot more, but not so much with the drive to become fit, but just to get out and pray. I'm a lot less interested in computers, and yet my work recently has been ever more dependent on them. I'm being honed, as Linda says.

More to the point, that vision of me presenting the curriculum to various small audiences across the country keeps getting stronger. Even if I have to do this traveling on my bike and couch-surfing along the way, I'm ready to do this. But as previously noted, it's more likely this thing won't get started without some kind of external source. There first has to be some kind of interest out there, some kind of awareness that Radix Fidem exists, which seems to be missing right now. There have to be invites. Secondly, I honestly believe it will require some kind of sponsorship. While I'm willing, I don't think riding my bike is the way it will happen. Linda joked about having an RV, but that's probably quite realistic. That or some other way of taking this show on the road.

This is the part that becomes a prayer request: It's possible I have the wrong idea about this whole thing, but I can't imagine doing this any other way. I'm ready to travel and share this message, and it needs to get out there. But God has not provided any resources just yet. There's a pretty big gap between current reality and the vision of doing this kind of work. If this is going to happen in any way at all, it starts now with prayer.

Hello, Radix Fidem family.

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

I've started working on the curriculum. This project will fail if I get no input from you folks. At this point, most of you should be able to verbally outline much of what will be in the final product. I'm going to post it in parts on my blog, but it will be echoed here. Think about it in terms of a script for someone making an oral presentation. Of course, it's just an outline, not meant to be read word-for-word, but a live presentation of it should follow the general outline for the sake of consistency in the message. Anyone can do this who feels called to it, and anyone can personalize it without causing a problem. The idea is not to control the message but to make it consistent in essentials, particularly in terms of bringing in the points easily forgotten. Anyone should feel free to add stuff when using this outline. It's meant to capture the essence of what we share.

So I need feedback in case I write something that isn't fully shared. I also need feedback if something I write isn't clear enough. This is not the same thing as the booklet that outlines the elements of our covenant. That's a separate script, and I'll review that later. This one is to explain some of what's behind the Radix Fidem covenant; it's our approach. This is where we reveal the religious study of how to approach religion itself -- what I mean by the term "meta-religion."

In case you are wondering, if you found the recent series on Theology and Practice useful, some of that will show up in this project. I'm trying to make this less personal, less about my testimony of faith, and more about the things (I hope) we agree on. I'm hoping to structure this so that there is room for anyone to insert their own take on things different from mine, but still identify those essential elements that gives us our identity as "Radix Fidem."

It's one of those nights when the Lord awakened me in the wee hours for reasons not obvious to me. So I sat down at my computer and reviewed some of the theology debates currently getting attention. It's a lot of tail-chasing. Most of it is not theology proper, but religion and the mechanics of how humans do what their faith demands. An awful lot of it is debating how folks debate, about being fair and reasonable by various definitions of what "fair and reasonable" mean.

Some of the big names right now are people like John Piper and N.T. Wright. They have a long-running feud over what Paul taught regarding the doctrine of justification. Piper is a traditionalist and Wright is suggesting some bright new ideas. I find both of them are tail-chasing over things that simply cannot be understood with the intellect. All of it stands upon wrangling over words.

I'm just about out of steam on my project to address "theology and practice" because of that. It's been a good thing to summarize and restate some of the basics, but I'm not sure it's addressing the needs of our own people to keep going with it in this concentrated form. Too much of what's popular with the mainstream is meaningless to us. The reason is obvious: There is a vast weight of assumptions we reject that takes us off into a totally new direction. And so far, we have garnered no attention from the heavyweights. They are ignoring the questions we raise about all those underlying assumptions.

But I will remain open to more questions, because that's where we are feeding the sheep. Our few virtual parish members need to see how our entirely different assumptions affect the big debates that preoccupy everyone else. After today's blog posts, I believe I have at least one more post that will sum up this one thing that sets us apart. That will wait until Sunday morning for posting. This hasn't been a waste of time and energy. It has refreshed for me just how different we are, and how we are different.

This will be short for a number of reasons.

I read this book twice before, years ago, when I was online friends with the author's daughter. She had sent me this book for free (twice; I lost it once), and thankfully I take better care of my print books than I have in the past. Since then, he started a website to promote his central ideas and has attributed the book to the organization's name, instead of his personal name. 

The idea of a "Christian version" of the zodiac was of great interest to me, and it scratched the itch I had at the time. Revisiting it now, though, proved drudgery. Allen organized the content as well as he could, narratively, combining scripture and history with the Jewish interpretation of constellations, without making it a dry data table of information.

My interest only went so far this time. I can't speak for the sources Allen used for reference, but they undoubtedly mostly came from a Western and Dispensationalist perspective. Knowing this, they would equate Hellenized Judaism with the ancient Hebrew and Near East view of the world, which would be a unmistakable categorical error. Such a logical, cataglogue-oriented view of the constellations and heavenly events would be entirely foreign to the ancient Hebrew. We know this because the view that Allen says came from the Hebrew intellectual pedigree is patterned suspiciously after the thoroughly Western and pagan Roman and Greek zodiac. Like other intellectual pieces that emerged from the Hellenization of near east religious thought, he constellations had a patina of monotheistic meaning painted onto them, nothing more.

The claims made make for interesting reading, but as something that aligns with a heart-led, covenantal, view of the world, I'd give this book a hard pass.

I was dozing, but it was plain as day.  I had a vision of myself on an outdoor stage with a substantial number of folks in the stands. I was teaching Radix Fidem. It reminded me of the old crusade revival meetings, but the content was nothing like those. There was no band or singers, just little old me and some visual aids.

Granted, I would love nothing more than traveling across the country sharing my faith, but this kind of thing requires sponsorship and someone managing the tour (dates and venues). And then I'd have to outline the curriculum of what I would cover, depending on the number of sessions and length.

It's probably just wishful thinking from somewhere inside of me, but it scared me awake.

Happy May 1st, folks.

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