I find myself compelled to organize a messy spiritual aftermath left from recent mundane seeming events in my life.  These events I can only trace as bringing brought about due to an unintentional fasting period enforced upon me by a perfect storm.   For the last many years, my wife and our shared love of bicycling has kept me anchored into the world, albeit unfirmly.  Recently, she went back to the States for a month without me to help and honor her aging mother in Tucson.  We have led a pretty reclusive, hermit-like life here in the "wilderness" of Portugal these last 5 years where we hardly can speak the language, but when she left this time I think there was a high dosage of divine might sent my way.

My area in Portugal had received a once-in-a-century amount of rain that flooded all over Figueira da Foz in February.  This flooding was preceded by some extremely destructive winds that came and knocked down whole forests of trees, sign posts, and tiles off of rooftops.  It left as abruptly as it came in the middle of the night and the flooding commenced just as Lynn left for her flight.

The constant rain kept me off the bike for longer than I have been in awhile and when I did go to venture out on a nice day in between rainstorms, many of the familiar country roads we have explored for years were blocked off due to flooding.  It was very frustrating.  Without this cycling "drug" pacifier we had become addicted to, the reassuring daily presence of my wife affirming a practical reason to use vocal cords each day, and the fact I often ran out of food because I would forgo going to the grocery store the conditions were perfect to manifest a metaphysical "perfect storm" happening to have been preceded by the physical one. I believe I unwitting reproduced a state of mind known for thousands of years to be simultaneously dangerous and transformational.  This has happened almost a decade earlier with a couple months consecutive suffering insomnia, a period I actually enjoyed riding.

My wife has been leaving for a month each year since we left for Portugal, and each time I have spiritually "rhyming" experiences with this years.  A couple of those years, I have allowed myself to get lost in a mathematics or computer science problem that ends up with a fleeting pride of accomplishment inevitably followed by a divine confirmation of its pointlessness within a couple weeks to months.   Since retiring, selling everything and moving to Portugal 5 years ago I have allowed my ego a tether to the illusion that the worldly skills I acquired still mattered, if only for the purposes of entertainment and distraction as a part time remote job in the belly of the beast in Silicon Valley, California.  Last year, it became apparent that illusion was falling apart and in a lightning bolt, His divine will was executed upon me last year as my motivation to pursue it dried up and I quit that part time job with no hesitation.  This change of heart happened almost simultaneously to a Bible being delivered serendipitously into my hands only minutes after describing to my Dad for the first time the spiritual experience I had the preceding year when I accidentally indulged myself a little too deeply into a mathematics problem with fractals.

The Bible is hard to read and decompress properly, you almost have be experiencing some sort of mini crisis in your life for it to start making sense, but when it does, oh boy does it start to take.  You start to relate with yourself as a deep undercover agent for Him that has spent so long pretending to be fully contained in the ego that you have almost forgotten your true self.   It saddens me the tragedy of the disappointment of those who intrepidly attempt an honest endeavor to read it with their ego and have it fall flat, or worse, come of as "cult-y" and get gangster vibes from Jesus.

If this describes you, don't fret.  You are most definitely Christian oriented, but still maybe blind or deaf.  I truly believe the problem you face is in language and imagination, and not in any missing sacraments.  Realize that even the word "cult" and its default interpretations of it in the modern man's consciousness are younger than Christianity itself.  The devil has had plenty of time to lay groundwork with numerous examples in the history of the world to prevent your mind to even entertain the notion that there was one cult, God's cult, that was there first before the Word had even taken shape.  

As I return to the internal dilemma of this essay, that is, how best to organize a spiritual mess afflicted upon you by His Divine Will when He begins the process of returning you to Him, as if theres a fisherman reeling in the fish he caught a long time ago but left playing too long on a slack fishing line but now its time to prepare supper and you're on the menu.   I think its pretty rare to have the privilege of seeking one yourself, and I think being transparent in that process is a rarity on this earth akin to watching the exact moments water crystalizes before hardening into ice.  I don't fully understand what compels me to write these essays, but I think it must be something to do with providing witness to myself and anybody who ever reads this. (All 5-10 of you)  Over the centuries, Jesus' church has fractured and pretends to be incompatible with each other in ways seeming superficial to new believers like me, but minute as they may seem, I still feel like attempting to discern what may be the truth of them has value, if only academically.

I hesitate to fully embrace Protestantism.  I intuitively distrust the seeming undisputed "Protest" at the root of the word.  Martin Luther was definitely a blessed man, and his interactions with the human Catholic church of his time seem like an impatient solution to his personal tragedy of excommunication by the Popes of the era.  Without a doubt, translation of the Bible into German in 1522 A.D. was a good thing in reaching larger proportions of people, myself included, but it did set up a new battlefield of language games for the devil to play.  I also feel that too much masculine energy was present in its founding, and the puritans of England asserted themselves to boldly upon the world and the United States instead of meeting with the world with love.  The perfect human girl Virgin Mary seems hardly present and its omission has missed opportunities in reaching young women.  The devil has thus taken advantage in culture as women lean away, and men lean in and both sexes bear witness to that and Satan giggles with delight.

Luddites and Amish have an innate attraction in me because I empathize with a desire to rebel against technology.  Its something I feel I falsely worshipped for too long a period in my life.  However, I recognize the evoked feeling as a vindictive or cowardly retreat from the world instead seeking to convert it.  The indifference seems contradictory to Jesus' life to me as although the world and its master are evil, there is still good they refuse to open their eyes to see.  They don't seem to have faith in God's plan and ultimate victory of the world and pretend to evoke its utopian state in separation as some sort of noble beacon that feels a bit too closely rooted in pride.  Their tragedy is never being able to hear Jesus in a pop, rock or rap song and draw joy from witnessing Jesus' story get retold by people with seeming no knowledge or interest from the realms of science fiction and fantasy.   Not being present to bear witness to the world every Christmas to the Christian victory over the Pagan's winter solstice holiday where they glorify Jesus, in their own, perhaps involuntary and distorted sort of way, but glorify Him nonetheless.

I had a lot of Mormon friends in the Arizona city I lived in when I pursued my profession.  I feel the tragedy of their church feels too similar to the history of the founding of Islam in 600 A.D.  A people's heart, slowly loosing touch with their savior due to perceived distance in time, space, and language indulge upon their own heretical fantasy with the compelling local "spin" they secretly yearn for.  I do not hold this suspicion strongly enough to investigate further, but I also entertain the possibility that the Mormons simply accidentally cast their pearls to swine to get trampled which caused themselves to over-isolate in shame.   Some of their notions that got leaked to the world and to me seem sci-fi.  While I also secretly retain my own sci-fi "pearls" I use to seek deeper scripture truths by attempting full integration with things my ego knows, I do not hold them strongly and just use them for mental exercise.   I have 2 sci-fi, 1 fantasy, and 1 computer science notion I enjoy playing superficial mental games with.   If you trick one of them out of me and procede to trample on it, I've already resolved to just switch to another one in a more refined effort to reach you.  I will not be so foolish attempt to start a new church around the ideas and recruit others to share them.  The Bible speaks for itself.

There are multitude sects of Christianity still to contemplate as I try to intuit which is most compatible with what I continue to read in the Bible.  Unlike many men in history, I will not allow myself to be too offended if I turn out ultimately incompatible with one or another.  It seems Jesus' commandments can be still be kept, if perhaps this way is made a little more narrow, so must be God's plan.