Fishing Report as of 08/07/2017

It was a good day to go fishing and sort out spiritual matters in my head. The fishing was good. Catfish ruled the day, but there were smallmouth, largemouth and walleye too. Below are pics of the highlights that includes a 9 Lb channel cat.

If you're wondering, I was in the Des Moines River below Saylorville Dam. Goin back tomorrow.  I think I need to think some more.

Lord, your fish are fun. Thanks for making them.

Smallmouth Bass

You know what makes an old man happy? No, not that, you silly rabbit. Smallmouth bass make an old man happy. Well, at least, it makes this old man happy. I think I've found a place where I can get smallmouth with great regularity. They are so much fun. Pound for pound, they outfight largemouth and the fight is also a sight. First they dive to the bottom and it's tough to get them off. And when they see that it's no use, they come flying out of the water and do this tail dance that is to die for. I just love them. I love them so much, I let them go after I catch them. Bass in general taste kind of bad anyway, so why not let them go? Besides, I would like the opportunity to catch them again.

I caught one last Friday and another today. I have pics below. The one today was particularly crabby and he put on quite the show for me. He was about 16 inches long and about 2 lb, which ain't bad for SB's in this neck of the woods.

Friday's fish

Today's fish. Very nice compared to my size 12 shoe.

I'm going back tomorrow morning. I hope to make a fishing report with pics. We will see. If you would like to kiss my bass, you can come along. Little joke there. I am so funny! See ya down at the river. Happy bassin!

Another Benchmark in the Downfall of Modern Society

This video says much about the loss of human decency and even the loss of what it means to be human in our world. Have we become meatsuits without souls? Has the last vestiges of good in humanity been extinguished by technology? How often do you see someone in any context without their smartphone? Watch the video. It's less than eight minutes long. Is this the way of our future?

Faith

Hebrews 11:1

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

Is this a reasonable statement? Is believing in invisible things kind of crazy?

This is where I am at today. There are many things I accept on faith, including many things in the Bible. My trouble is with the concept of sanctification and the work of this alleged Holy Spirit. Now maybe I just do not understand. I am prepared to accept this and learn, but some instruction would be helpful. If I'm completely transparent about this, I am very much like the disciples of John the Baptist in the Bible. I seem to be unaware of this Holy Spirit.

You see, this is the personal and inward part of Christianity. It is spiritual. I guess that I am not what you would call a spiritual person. What I know seems to come from intellectual understanding of the scriptures and what I believe in my mind comes from circumstantial evidence. There does not seem to be, for me, a spiritual component to my faith.

Am I looking for magic? For a feeling? For an experience beyond my intellect that changes me despite my natural state?

It's that last one. It really is. I do not believe I have ever had a spiritual experience. I have had many emotional experiences. I have even wept over my lack of spirituality. I feel bad about it. It's because something is missing and that something is spiritual.

I have always wondered at my Christian friends who would say things like, "I believe God is leading me to do..." or "God spoke to my mind" or "God is urging me to leave this whatever".

It mystifies me.

Friends, God does not talk to me directly, through circumstance or my emotions.

Emotions are just chemical reactions in our brains. The right combo of medications can fix that.

Should not true Christian spirituality be more than a feeling or more like an intellectual knowing of truth? Should I not want to do what is considered right in scripture because the Spirit has enabled and changed me in such a way to do so?

You see, the Bible says certain things are wrong, even abominations. Some of those things I see nothing wrong with other than the fact that God says they are wrong. If I accept that, I am reduced to the status of rule keeping Pharisee. If God truly changes my heart and sanctifies my being through the power of His Spirit in my life, would I not bend to His will without a battle or disagreement?

Lord, show me Your Spirit. I challenge you to do this. I know. Who am I to do that? Even so, I need to know you live inside me. I want to know you, but that does not seem to be happening. Where are you? Why are things not working as promised.

Are you even there? Have I been deluded all these years? Maybe I am not even a Christian. If that's the case, I need to quit wasting every one's time, including my own.

If You are there, please help me out here. I feel lost.    

This is my son in whom I am well pleased...

II Brady 3:9,10

"And Dennis looked down from heaven and saw his son, Jeff, changing the oil and replacing the blades on his mower and he said, "this is my son in whom I am well pleased." And many thought they heard the voice of Dennis; others thought it was just thunder or a train on the tracks at the bottom of the hill..."

Yip, I did it. First time I ever changed the oil on The Tank. It was easier and a bit messier than I thought it would be. There is a rubber hose with a bolt in the end at the back of the mower. You have to unscrew the bolt and the oil will come pouring out into a strategically placed container. The oil was dark black. Not sure when Dad changed it last, but it was well passed time. Getting the oil filter off was a bit of a challenge. It was in a tight place next to the engine and it was also very tightly screwed in. I finally maneuvered a monkey wrench in there and got it loose. Once the filter was off, I put the new one on and the bolt back into the hose. It took two quarts of synthetic 10W-30 oil to fill it.

With that done, I proceeded to replace the blades. I got the blades and filter at P&P Small Engine. The new blades were spray painted black and labeled "bottom" on the side that was to face the ground. My first thought was, this sounds easy. It was not. It's really a two man job, but I figured out how to make it a one man job (much like life). My Dad had more tools than Craftsman I think and so I used those.

I used two hydraulic jacks to raise the mower high enough to get under it and work. Once the mower was up, I placed two axle stands under it to ensure it did not come down on top of me. Once in place, I got down on the ground and had a look underneath the mower. There was a great deal of dirt and grass caked under the deck and all three blades were worn and split on the ends, probably from Dad mowing rocks and stick and cans. He never liked walking the yard to pick up those things prior to mowing.

Anyhow, I quickly figured out that these blades were not going to come off unless something was holding the pulleys in place from the top. So I took a long handled wrench of the correct size and placed it on the bolt head of the pulley, bracing the long handle of the wrench against the mower itself. This gave me the leverage I would need to remove the blade nut from the blade. The nuts were on tight. I could not budge them, even with the long handled ratchet I was using. I pulled a spray can of penetrating oil off the shelf in the garage and sprayed each blade nut heavily. I let it set for awhile to give the oil time to do it's thing. The nuts finally came loose with repeated efforts and I got the blades off. Here they are.

 I wish I had gotten a picture of the new blades for comparison purposes because these blades are very badly worn. Putting on the new ones was much easier than taking off the old ones. When I was done, I was too worn out and stiff to mow the yard, but I did test them and they wonderful. I am going out now to do the whole place. I will let you know how it goes. I also aired up the tires and now the mower rides much better.

I'm getting pretty good at this 'man stuff' that the rest of you have been doing all your lives. I am learning much. Time to mow.

Believing The Unbelievable

The hard part for me is believing in what is supposed to come after conversion to the faith. There is so much I do not understand. I also have questions about God that I still find no resolution for in scripture. It all bothers me. As one that likes things to flow, I am not finding that flow in my faith.

I do not really know what it means to live by the Spirit. I know what it means to live by the Word. Is it the same thing? Or is something supernatural supposed to be happening, or is it happening and I am just unaware of it? I can try to live by the rules and I do try, but I am unaware of any spiritual involvement in that process. I do not understand how it works. I feel no sense of direction coming from anything except myself and my own intellectual understanding of the scriptures.

And how does the Spirit change us? Why has it not changed me? Why do I still have to deal with the SSA that I have experienced since before my conversion? Why has God left me to twist in the wind with this? What is the point of such a struggle? If I received new life and freedom at my spiritual rebirth, should these things not have left me by now? I am almost 60 years old and I am still dealing with this crap. I came out in November of 2015 with the hope that this would finally free me. Confession is supposed to be good for the soul. It did help for awhile. I was released from pretending to be what I am not. That tension was gone and I know that my friends still love me, but the SSA is still there. It is not only there, but it is stronger than it was before. The battle rages. Why? Coming out may have been a bad choice in retrospect. It freed me from caring what people think about me. but it ratcheted up the desire.

Where is the promised freedom and the new life? Why has nothing changed?

I can only conclude that it does not work as promised. Natural inclinations can be controlled but not changed. 100% control is not possible and 100% change is not possible. All of this is as it has always been with me and I sense no spiritual involvement in the whole process as I fight.

Totally unrelated to this is what I see as the character of God in the Bible. He seems inconsistent to me as I read. John tells us God is love, that He loves us, that He wants to save us. Why did He not want to save anyone before the flood. If the book Genesis is to be believed, God is a genocidal maniac. He drowned the entire population of the world and to what end? Sin continued apace from the offspring of Noah's family. Purging the human race did nothing to end the reign of sin and death on earth. Even the death, burial and resurrection of His Son did not bring an end to the reign of sin and death. We still sin. We still die. But now there is this vague promise of life after death of which the Bible reveals little.

I know there are textbook answers to these kinds of questions, but they fall short in explaining why God does the things He does and is as He is portrayed in scripture and by evangelical leaders. I do not understand Him.

Accepting these kinds of things in faith in order to hear an explanation at a later, eternal date is hard. I would like to know now and be enabled to understand. Oddly, I have no trouble in believing in the resurrection, the possibility of a virgin birth or a six day creation. If God truly is God, these things should not present a problem. It's His behavioral inconsistencies that bother me. Is He the same and unchanging? The scriptures say so; they also reveal His changes of mind and attitude, as I read them. As I said, I do not understand.

I can only conclude that maybe things are not as I have been told all my life, that God is someone other than the One portrayed by Christian and Jewish teachers.

Lord, if you are reading, please enlighten me. I'm short on time and I would like some answers. Is that too much to ask? Have I pushed too much here? I need to know and understand. If you are really there, you would do this I think, right?      

Post Script to Six Years of Crap...and there may be more

This sewage came flowing out of my spiritual pipes today as a result of things I heard in my class and in the sermon later at church. It's been backed up for some time and it needs to see the light of Day. It will stink for awhile and then as it dries, maybe it can be used for fertilizer or it will just dissolve into the landscape.

Quite a change from yesterday eh, when I thought the Holy Spirit was trimming my spiritual tree? Maybe I'm bipolar. Bad brain chemistry and not spiritual warfare?

Getting back to the point of this post though...

My faith is in question of late, or maybe for awhile now. I am not sure what I believe anymore. I can't pray in any organized way outloud or silently. I'm not sure it actually produces any good in my life or anyone else's. What I am able to do is close to what Jesus advised in His model prayer. I give thanks, pray for protection and a softening of my spirit; I might ask for some forgivness or pray for someone else. I am unable to do conversational prayer anymore where I just talk to Jesus or His Father. It's like we have nothing to talk about He knows what I think and where I am at and does not care. And I'm not sure it matters in the big picture sense anyway. I lack faith that prayer actually does anything. This from years of experience.

I have been a Christian for 45 years - or at least, I did the things that people do to become a Christian. I am sure that I believed it at the time or I would not have walked down into the water for the big dip. I may have discussed this before, but I remember thinking immediately after the event, "what now Lord?"

Now most people that choose the faith do not go there right away. There is usually a honeymoon period; a time of unparalleled joy, of feeling free or new. I never felt any of those things. I had no sense of the Holy Spirit's presence or an awareness that He even existed. Truth be told, I actually felt kind of bad. I still had my guilt. It was as if nothing really happened that day beyond getting wet.

I tried to make it work with what I knew and what I was learning, but I have never really felt comfortable in my Christian skin - if I ever had one.

I am, to this Day, unchanged in any appreciable way. In some ways, I am morally worse than when I was 14 years old. My mind and my body still wants all those things that should have died when I became a Christian. I am urged daily by my flesh to do these things. There is no sense in me of sanctification and by this time in my life, I do not see any possibility of me being a finished work of faith on Judgement Day. It's all just too late and I and I don't know if there is anything I can do about it.

Today, in class we talked about the possibility of obedience without love and mostly how nothing counted without the presence of love as a motivating factor. We also talked about how some people manage to fake the whole thing to get through life with their friends and family. Someone in class suggested that sooner or later, a Christian like that would get caught faking it. Maybe. You haven't caught me yet, probably because I'm an expert.  So now I confess it. I do not know that I was faking. It's more like I have been going through the motions or fulfilling a duty. Like a Pharisee as it were.

A bit later, during the sermon, the preacher was talking about the resurrection of Lazarus and how Martha was having a problem with Jesus because He had not arrived in time to heal her brother and now he was dead. Martha could not let go of her displeasure with Jesus. She could not wrap her mind around the notion that Jesus could raise someone dead after four days. She could not let go of any of it. Until it happened.

This is where I am at. Despite all the assurances in scripture, nothing has changed in my life. I am as I was and have always been for the most part, and now I'm cynical and cranky too. I have not yet received the new life I was supposed to get and I blame Jesus for that. I used to blame myself. It was because I didn't do this or that, or because I did do this or that. I'm done blaming myself. I need to see some ressurection action in my life or I'm no longer going to buy into any of it. I hope He shows me something. I need something. I can't play this game any longer. I'm old and tired and close to the end. I need some hope. That's all I'm saying. Help me get my faith back! Or at least one that works.