Consider also the Bible's often used symbolism that swaps "swine" for "unbelievers" and hold onto that thought for a moment.  We've all heard the Matthew 7:6 verse warning against giving wisdom to unbelivers.  (Do not cast your pearls before swine...) Exorcist movies also have a trope, rooted in some real Catholic teachings, about priests beckoning forth demons out of the posessed into an actual pig, the demon is fooled and possesses the pig and then the pig is immediately killed with a shotgun.  I think I even remember a Russel Crowe movie replaying that in my head.  Its kind of funny how in those pop stories, its always a Catholic priest whos called– the Protestant pastors from Sunday school just doesn't vibe well as a character hero with the authority necessary to cast out demons.

Another curious take common on the Hollywood rendering on exorcism is how the priest must speak very boldly to the demon possessed, and relies much on his religious iconography, nearby Bibles, and crucifixes.  I don't think the entertained masses here understand the truth of whats really being represented with it.  You see, when someone speaks boldly in the church on the doctrines, truth, or wisdom it does not comes out with conviction amongst us laity.  After all, we emphatically embrace the analogy of ourselves as a flock of sheep who strive to be nurtured and trained our capacity to pursue humility.  Because of this, the learned priests come of as thundering, leading voices worthy of our holding onto our leads in comparison to our own.  These priests are human though too, skilled in the art of humility that they often cannot expose to us anxious sheep lest we scatter from the shepherd.  Priests and the learned rely on praying, Bible reading, and their crucifixes to maintain themselves with the essence of the true, external sources of their convictions: God and Jesus Himself.  

Try it sometime and see for yourself as it works on you too.  Literally, touch base with Jesus via the reminder of him on his crucifix, making the sign of the cross,  using actual scripture from the Bible to supplement yourselves into the bending of your will to His, whom will take control of your voice, use your own words, and speak through you.  Saying something true and wise and presuming it your own feels unnnatural, so through your humility, you give the credit to God and proclaim something that nearby unbelievers find weird and creepy, but its what we do, know, and can recognize fake performances of.

Now back to the another hard to grok part about the wisdom in exorcism: demons.  They don't have to be interpreted literally like pop culture storytellers do, they can be dramatic stand-ins for somebody who is afflicted with a bad teaching that appeals to the flesh, and betrays the true, Good and divine spirit of the person.  Things rooted in the carnal emotions of anger, lust, and envy perhaps.  The beauty of the Bible using "demonic possession" also serves as a convenient mercy to give to the person, for presuming its effects over the actions of the possessed do not condemn the person performing them, they are yet, but only temporarily, "external".  It gives us a nice clean cleavage point for the bad teaching to be removed and the redemption of the person's "true colors" as they are given an escape hatch back to eject the bad idea that was feeding on the flesh's desire of being sanctified in pursuing sin.  Basically, demons can be the equivalent of a mind virus, in a more exaggerated form that may assist wisdom about it standing out to readers.   In the modern world, demons could be the zealotry inducing, evil but viral moral ideals that are in disagreement or downright war against God's words.  The priest's boldness can rattle loose a little escape hatch back to mercy and grace if the possessed suppressed true nature can make a sudden comeback and chose it or drop it.  But it does have to be chosen I feel, and quickly before the demonic idea subsumes the persons identity into something else.   Choosing new names or returning old ones is Bible symbology for this.  Mary Magdalene was also called Lilith when she was in the demonic personality.  Sometimes, it can be so tragic, that even a mother fails to recognize demon from son, and in condemning the son, brings the demon to full authority over the personality.  I know of a tragic case of this happening to somebody I used to know.  Don't let demons change your "true colors".  Follow Jesus example and his example only.  We're more suggestible to evil than we think.

Which all brings forth a subtle wisdom when you consider the priest's beckoning the demon into a pig.  What I believe is being suggested is for person possessed by some bad teaching to try to tempt her to proselytize the lowest form of human in the Bible.  A swine.  A unbeliever.  Unbelievers are then encouraged to hear the bad teaching in the exorcism room, consume it complete, (which they do readily because they are so spiritually empty),  and resume the debate with the demon's fight against God and priest.  The original possessed, being a proud new prosyletizing bad teacher of the unbeliever/swine, sits idle for a moment while the priest outmatches the swine with triviality.  I believe a sort of 3 person debate play is being advocated in the parable.  

Here's a more mundane and less scary rendering of the exorcism room.  Person A (the possessed) gets infected from a false teacher to a bad idea that stirs his passions and picks a fight with Person B (the priest) who advocates specifically against that bad idea, using what he can evoke of God's wisdom, which doesn't always get anywhere.  We've been there and recognize this sort of head butting match between the stubborn that reaches an impasse.   Person B then tempts Person A to try his hand at convincing Person C, a simpleton.  Person A, satisfied he has fully convinced the simpleton of his evil teaching, lets him resume his debate with the priest as a tag team which invariably goes wrong when the priest kills the swine/simpleton (e.g. makes him a new believer) and voila, the originally posssessed concedes the false wisdom that nearly destroyed him.

I see analogy to witches as a cabal of false teaching women, eventually becoming self-aware of how their superpowers of empathy combine when each of them sharing manipulative assistance to proselytize and convert personalities at times of maximum vulnerability.  The Bible teaches we are most vulnerable the farther we are from His grace, which leaves the room the more you sin or think about sinning.  Your ears start itching and even internet hive-minds mobilize to receive.  Especially poignant after reading this line in one of scriptures about false teachers preferring women to begin with:

For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions.  2 Timothy 3:6

There is no better way to spread bad teaching than by using women against women in the guise of offered comfort and encouragement, because nobody male quite understands their thinking and their idealogical vulnerabilities as does other bad women with lived experience, or even a friend group of other bad teacher women bearing assorted bad fruits of their own (bible speak for life's public evidence of Goodness).  Anyone male who notices this pattern externally would be condemned of sexism in the modern public square, but I insist here that we are all equally harmed and causing harm spiritually, its just that I do believe women's innate gentleness and nurturing make them targetted first in the attempted cultural sanctification of bad teachings going on now and likely since Adam and Eve original sin. (The devil got first to Eve, remember? but they both ate the apple and both were punished)

At any rate, the world inevitably follows God's will whether its fought against or not.  I'm trusting in God in all things nowadays, so I don't mind if this article gets me labeled as sexist or advocating bringing back witch burning.  Even uncomfortable history has lessons the deeper you try to think and empathize with everybody.  Love your enemies and love thy neighbor as thyself for "empathize, understand, learn deeply" is the real synonyms to the original Bible greek use of the word "love" in that verse we all know and recognize intuitively.

Anyway, I think blogging sites like the one sent me eventually congeal to form a hivemind (ala Reddit) and attract more and more supporting content for the sake of amplifying the hivemind church's take on what is wisdom worth knowing.   This particular site, branding its articles with terms like "Medium" and "Mantras" (which are big red flag words to Christian disciples) have boldly encouraged catering to a type of philosophy called "Deconstructionism" where, when applied to spiritual or religious matters has as its primary goal, through the use of word games, to dismantle doctrines of the modern multi-thousand year old religions.  I kid you not!  Look it up.  Absolute evil if you are an adherent to one, but in some circles (liberal progressives) its an esteemed philosopy.  Look to what the Bible says about false teachers though using the silly word games that is the Deconstructionists weapon of choice:

"They are conceited and understand nothing. They have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions" – 1 Timothy 6:4

Obviously deconstructionists probably won't say it out loud, but what they intend to destroy is the cohesion of meaning shared by the bibles of the 3 Abrahamic religions of the world: Jew, Christian, and Islam.   Satan focuses on those 3 most and doesn't even bother undermining the others like Hinduism, Buddhism, or Indian Paganism since he knows the inconsequential fates of adherents to those popcorn religions, which is why terms like "Mantra" or "Meditation" and "Yogas" are trigger free, endearing word choices to use on your articles if you want clicks from shallow truth seekers.  Those 3 religions have as their superpower the recipe to "activation energy" to the spiritual which is dangerous to the liberal's ideal of Utopia where everyone is spirit-dead, brain-dead, trivially entertained and otherwise peacable and agreeable to the elite.  Deconstructionists merge all the religions together in a polytheistic word soup to accelerate its dilution and disarmament– a problem even the first Hebrews after the Exodus were having conquering pagan cities left and right and accidentally getting unintentional bleed-in of local religions into their own that God was not happy about and always eventually had to step in and correct for.  The Hindu/Buddhist/Taoist/Indian components serve as flavorful spices to add as necessary to their word soup as needed to make it smell better to the modern liberal in charge doing the attempted prosylization of the reader.    

I bet you can already predict the kind of people attracted to these bands of roaming deconstructionist "teachers": liberals with a bone to pick with Jesus and Christianity for what they think are past indiscretions.  For these kind of people, they can read some romanticized retelling of Native American history and conclude that it was all the Christian churches fault for the bad that happened to the Indian culture.  The Christian theological ramifications of thinking like that is having an opinion that maybe Jesus could have been a better role model for Good than he was– i.e. rejecting the divinity that Jesus, as God, was perfect and putting Man's ideas of Goodness above God's or having faith that its within the capabilities of the imagination of elite endowed men to conceive for us a higher ideal than Jesus.  All lies, no truth.  The Catholic church is just advocacy club of Jesus, his teachings and his life/death/resurrection story as the perfect role model to emulate for Good and if you think otherwise, you're not actually the kind of Christian the real Jesus would recognize, and maybe have more in common with the Pharisees or polytheistic Romans.  He says:

"And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ – Matthew 7:23

The philosophy espoused in the deconstructionist diaspora of articles on the site are all pretty predictably called out in the thousand year old scripture the modern liberal is ever eager to assist destroying without understanding.   Having read them, and understood, one is inoculated against the blatantly obvious paths to destruction advocated therein: exaltation of the self above the divine, trusting your own will and bodies desires, you deserve much, self as center, self only to care, self preservation as most high, self love,— all religions are good! and generally just vanity driven perverse selfishness to lead the hedonistic life you're entitled.  This is actually indistinguishable from secular Satanism, but people fall for this because it tells them exactly what they want to hear, which definitely wasn't how Jesus was.  If you feel "seen" by individuals espousing these philosophies, definitely don't ever recite the "Our Father" prayer– as you won't be earnest when you ask Him to "lead us not to temptation".  If you still happen to find nobility in endeavoring to be Christian, theres only one role model at the top and that is Jesus, which is not somebody you learn about from someone's hot take on the internet, you read it in scripture or are told about it in the doctrines of His holy Catholic church.  

"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables". --2 Timothy 4:3-4

Old testament has a good verse too in the story of King Saul who consults and trusts a medium as the final act of defiance against the one true God before he finally dies:

"So Saul died because he was unfaithful to the LORD.  He failed to obey the LORD's command, and he even consulted a medium (.com)" – 1 Chronicles 10

People's stories in the Old Testament always end badly when they succumb to the temptation to follow their own truth, derived from men outside of God.  I imagine the types of people consumers of that new-age site whom the person I used to know linked me, would likely prefer to be married to a Indian Shaman who's spirituality conveniently validates their Earthly desires than to a same-culture Jesus follower who rebukes them, but lovingly so.  This is why having compatible religions amongst friends and marriages is so important.  Christians help Christians– we have a higher tolerance for admonishment from another follower as we see it as merciful and Good, especially if it turns out to be sound wisdom and brings our ways closer to His, not the way liberals admonish anybody and everything who participates in "denying your truth", a selfish and satanic concept hiding behind tolerance.  

Since the original person who I used to know that linked me to the new age internet gospel piece was a woman highly spiritually energized and tormented by demons of rage, this verse also seems appropriate:

"For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth." – 1 Timothy 6:4

Eventually they do find something that they believe sanctifies their sin and captures "their truth" perfectly so they feel self-righteous in spreading it.  Its then, only after the instructions advocated are followed through, does the demonic spirit controlling the seeker shows its "true colors"

Moral of story: don't believe deconstructionists and have some faith in sound doctrines.  You're not as smart as the modern world would have you think you are and the Abrahamic faiths for which God has been speaking to has been doing so for 5000 years and He is still the one we all worship from the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lineage that stepped out of the first human civilization on Earth (Sumer, even before Egypt) to develop a writing system to capture (about 3200 BC) and start compiling the Bibles over the next thousands of years.  Indians never did develop a written language so we in Christianity are at least 4500 years ahead in sophistication and completeness of the 3 true(ish) religions that have a lot more in common with each other than most know.  While the Native American Indian's fate was tragic, we don't need to pretend to need to replace our religion with theirs as a repentance to history.  Shamans, mystics, mediums: please find a better calling– you're embarrasing the rest of human race in view of our creator.  Lord in heaven is having a facepalm moment about whats going on down here.  Even the Hebrews in King David's time descended back to pagan Baal worship for a couple centuries until God challenged all 1000 of the Baal prophets to a prophecy brawl with one (Elijah) of His and spoiler alert: ancient Judea gave up their Baal worship on the spot.    

In a weird way I get jealous of the non-believers who have no choice but to process other's deaths in the much more tragic, final way.   Its like I have accidentally been given the cheat-code for not experiencing the full depth of the terrifying, but beautiful human emotion of grief.  I feel I'm unworthy of comfort– my faith is too new– Grandpa deserves more tears.  I ask myself am I really that certain I fully believe what it is that now mysteriously comforts me or am I just an unfeeling robot with a morbid curiosity of mortality and perverse enough to use my dying Grandpa to provoke my own tears to selfishly seek further assistance in the spiritual process of waking up?  A wise man I heard recently advised to not consider too deeply these things as you will either end up self-righteous or descend into despair so instead we should just live in the present, surrender your will, and trust in God's path.  I intend to listen to that advice.

Regardless of these, special things did happen in the days around Grandpa's death in the hospital room to which I now want to forever commit to memory and bear witness to.

I had the privilege of arriving in Iowa Falls almost a week before he passed and had zero distractions, scheduled events, or other worldly obligations to balance against spending time in that hospital room.  So I decided it was obviously God's plan that I was meant to maximize time to give maximum opportunity for serendipity, meaning, or for the Lord to use me to assist in his mission of mercy for the souls present.  Grandpa wasn't able to have much conversation due to his failing voice, but he was 100% present and of sound mind when I first saw him in the hospital room and gave me the first of many, surprisingly strong, bear hugs over the next week as he slipped away.

I arrived by gifting his hospital room a little mini crucifix I bought from St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City while I was in Rome over 2 years ago.  This crucifix was very special to me as it marked the first time in my entire life I bought an actual religious piece with full understanding of what it meant.  In hindsight, I came to recognize that this was a pivotal moment where I noticed the reality that a real Christian faith was beginning to materialize in my thinking seemingly out of nowhere.   I attached the crucifix to my bicycle as I rode all over Europe for two years and as such served as my first public and unashamed profession of faith.  Many interesting conversations were started from strangers noticing it on my travels.  I brought it with me on the flight from Portugal to Iowa out of a habit of bringing it on big trips-- I figured I'd be needing it for myself considering why I was going.

I don't know why I left it with Grandpa in the hospital.  Maybe I wanted to make sure my public proclamation of faith presented to the roads of Europe made it to his ears too and that he might rejoice in the knowing.  I don't know if he knew about the change happening in me or if he even noticed I didn't have any real faith when growing up in Iowa Falls.  He probably did, which may have been why we never conversed about it.  It's so easy to avoid those kinds of deep spiritual conversations growing up to keep everybody in the room comfortable.  Believers preferring ignorance over knowing for sure whether the people they love have faith and unbelievers feeling awkward or judged in having to perform their deception again and again to avoid breaking the hearts of the faithful for what they think is a silly reason they begrudgingly have to "tip toe" around.  

Its not a silly reason.  

I think we all find out about this very clearly at end of life.  Grandpa would zone out of conversations in the hospital room about worldly concerns like sports conquests of the great-grandchildren, beautiful things I've seen when travelling, details concerning his hospital care or really any of the conversations even if they were about him amongst room visitors.  If someone informed him that they had successfully mowed their lawn, the spiritual essence of its doing was the only that mattered.  He would respond: "Were you proud?"

What lit him up in the final days was when the hospital chaplain came to talk and pray over him.  For that, he paid attention, and even expressed happily about "we could talk for hours" about things spiritual.  Grandpa, I wish we could have!  But I woke up so late in life, my faith is still so new and I don't always enjoy making people awkward around me.  The appropriate verse proclaiming this truth to me came from 1 John 2:15:

"Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you.  For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions.  These are not from the Father, but are from this world.  And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever"

One of the mornings I found grandpa holding on to that crucifix as he slept.  I realized then this crucifix wasn't mine anymore.  It was his and was his all along.  I am convinced now the strange set of coincidences that encouraged me to spontaneously buy that crucifix at the most holy Christian place on Earth over 2 years ago was earmarked for Grandpa all this time and had nothing to do with me.  I was just the lowly delivery boy that paraded it for a time on bicycle tours to gave it a faith conversation starter story.   If it brought even 2 seconds of actual peace to Grandpa in his deathbed, that trumps all my sentimentality in having carried it so far.

In the days that followed, grandpa increasingly lost interest in about everything else worldly, including the shame of being naked as he kept wanting to pull off his clothes.   I felt I understood though, as whats the use in caring anymore about the social customs of the world you're leaving behind shortly.   I'm most comfortable naked too.  Although secular medicine had an explanation for this supposedly common phenomenon that uses wording like "metabolite buildup in the brain creating intense sensitivity to touch", its not an explanation that anybody in a hospital room needs to pretend interest about– there is nobody from the technology priesthood in earshot that needs impressing.  Spiritual contemplation about it is much more fruitful to those of us no longer the target demographic for science and medicine major recruitment.   I'm planning on getting naked now on my deathbed too so that I cause anybody witnessing me to give me the benefit of the doubt for a few more hours or days that this crazy getting naked thing might still be Jesse doing what he said he would do and not just a dying human brain's chemical reaction that should be suppressed so as to not make the healthy people in the room embarrassed.  Thanks Grandpa for the tip on clearing the room of anybody who falsely presumes I would ever remotely care about my human dignity on my deathbed.  For everybody else, come visit me on my deathbed in anticipation of the strip show– I won't care!  I've no use for dignity where I'm going.  Giving birth I would imagine is also a rather undignified state for both mother and child, but neither pretends to care.  There is no birth with dignity so there is no death with dignity. (Which curiously, is the propaganda slogan liberals have to advocate for the legalization of human euthanasia)

The other thing Grandpa did a lot in those last days was look around the room as if tracking something we couldn't see.  He did manage to tell us once what he was seeing in the room.  He said it was "light", which was like a mic-drop moment for me as everybody in the room understood the significance without commenting.  I wish I would have had more courage and wit to know how to respond, but I think I was as dumbstruck as everyone else at that moment.  I kind of wish an unbeliever would have been present to witness and process that, but I don't think any were.  This was Iowa Falls Iowa, not Portland Oregon.  Atheists and agnostics are still pretty rare there.

The last few days Grandpa didn't have much more to do with his crucifix, though it was always on the bed's tray table.  I started playing a game to break up passing time where I would stand it up whenever I noticed it had fallen over.  It would always fall over easily at the slightest movement.  I'd stand it up when leaving the hospital room for the night and it would always be fallen over in the morning.  It was a reassuring indicator that the nurses had done some tending during the night on his bedside while we slept, but I always secretly hoped I'd see it still standing when I arrived.   It would also fall randomly during the day, and in the spiritually mystic state I allowed myself to reside in while there, I'd try to see if I could read it for a sign of Jesus' disapproval for a thought I was having or about to have the moment it fell over.    I feel this was a healthy spiritual game and humility exercise, as there is always some way to imagine a way our perfect Lord may have disagreed with any random thought of us lowly sinners.  Sometimes I'd even half anticipate it falling down as I'd catch myself thinking an easily criticizable thought and it wouldn't fall over.  Then I'd change my thinking into acknowledging His great mercy and ponder about the nature of grace.  We all started participating in the game of putting Jesus on his crucifix back up on the table, but I didn't ever explain how I was interpreting it for myself to others until just now here.  I was deriving spiritual significance out of the mundane to keep Him close in mind in case He needed to lead my thoughts somewhere or His will need doing.  

I don't want to forget any of these moments.  I realized part of the plan God had for Grandpa's life was playing out in the conversations, silences, and spiritual rumination's the people around his deathbed were having and that was no small thing.  If, on my deathbed, something my dying brain does randomly moves even one person in the room an inch closer to accepting Jesus, my soul would rejoice and Jesus and I would give each other a high five.  Most anything else done worldly only lasts as long as people live and remember, which is not infinite and likely for most of us, only going to be at most a few generations to the last moment in time our name is spoken aloud.

The last days were rough though.  Grandpa starting calling for help constantly.  He had no energy, it was obvious, but he'd muster up with all his feeble strength these exasperated pleas for help.  To say this was difficult to hear is an understatement.  This is a part of his story however I find myself most in danger of forgetting and I curse myself for being tempted to.  Death is the real deal and must not be sugar coated so I resolve to commit these days to memory most as I find most spiritual fruit in the uncomfortable.

We all tried in our own ways to make his calls for help to stop.  More morphine and vallium is what the secular hospital and hospice suggested.  The nurse would come in and as gently as she knew how would explain to Grandpa that he wasn't going to get better and that he probably was going to die here.  This conversation would repeat, each time starting with Grandpa getting the nurse's attention, the nurse asking if he was hungry or thirsty (to which he usually said no), him wanting to go home and then her reexplaining that he wasn't likely going home and each time we'd see his spirits collapse upon hearing that news, the same way, over and over.  He had a hard time expressing much vocally with his weak voice, but the way he flopped his arms and face told the whole story and it was impossible for me to comprehend how that might feel if it were me.

I, only once, worked up the courage for a try and held his hand explaining that modern medicine has failed him and it had run out of ways to fix your health.  He was often very convinced that the nurses were conspiring against him, which must have been difficult for the nurses to hear.  In so many words, I encouraged him to understand that there was nobody on Earth left to help him but there was hope still in the other kingdom.  I don't know why it felt awkward saying this kind of stuff aloud to Grandpa on his deathbed– I don't feel like I had any authority to speak like that, so in regret for having spoken went back to another chair in the room and in my confusion, accidentally left my heart to harden against hearing those cries for help.  I still haven't fully accepted the shame of letting them blend into the background for hours.   I think this marked the beginning of the real end for him as there was never anything reassuring or hopeful that followed.

He sometimes added "Mom" to his calls for help.  I didn't know if this was calling out for Grandma or his own Mom, whom I obviously never met.   Again, I want to write on the full weight of the moment.   Considering a 92 year old man calling out for his mother on his deathbed is heart wrenching to consider, but I have no doubt there are depths of despair we reach near death that seem unimaginable to us who are still healthy.  My (temporarily) hardened heart did not even allow this to register at the time.  Secular medicine, of course, would have a clinical answer to this as a "normal phase in the process of death" that I have absolutely no interest in and would probably roll my eyes in the hearing of.  A clinical take offered on whats happening to Grandpa in that moment would be received in my ears about the same way as devout atheists would of a Catholic priest's take on what might be going on spiritually.  For the left behind on earth, neither one can solve death to the satisfaction of family, but the priests can get a heck of a lot closer in my book (if the family has faith).

An interesting moment occurred as I noticed Grandpa touching his nose a lot.  Nurses said this was him beginning "to notice the changes" preceding imminent death.  I, however, recognized it as exactly the same thing I do if I drink too much wine.  My wife often times uses it as her indicator that I'm starting to get a little tipsy.   I hardly ever notice myself doing it.  I realized again Grandpa and I share a lot of the same DNA, and my heart nudged a smidge closer to him.  

See, I can internally reject certain clinical explanations in the moment with no consequence that erodes my facilities of reason to the danger of my mind and society at large.  Oh, the heresy I dare commit to the religion of science!  Quick!  Censor the blasphemy before I share the thought and it spreads!   This boy's pointless and dangerous desire to stay connected to his dying grandpa may end up disrupting science worship since its as it says in the scientist "bro-code": all facts must be exalted immediately upon discovery and the ignorant must be proselytized even on deathbeds!  Of course I exaggerate here.  A little.

The last 2 days Grandpa didn't really speak or interact.  We, in the room, mostly sat in silence too as idle conversation also lost attraction.  We'd count the seconds between breaths.  I found a spot to fixate attention on his jugular to monitor his pulse.  While others in the room had their anxiety peak in the long pauses in-between breaths, I remained steadfast and had an easier time of it since I had a better view and could always still see his heart beating in his neck from my chair.  The nurse called this phase "guppy breathing", and the way his head, mouth, and brow was furrowed would have been traumatic for anybody other than loved ones and nurses to witness and not leave the room terrified.   I personally remember walking the hallways of a hospital years ago and accidentally seeing an old dying stranger the exact same way, remembering the horror, and now having the unfortunate recognition of the same scene but now with my own Grandpa.

There were several different hospice nurses who visited Grandpa and the room during the times of my visits.  I and others struggled with the ethics of giving Grandpa morphine and vallium when he presented and reported 0's on the 0-10 pain scale he'd be asked.  When he took vallium, it was basically the sign that the conversations are now over, as he'd get very sleepy and disinterested.  I worried if God's plan for Grandpa's death included some very important conversations and experiences that needed to happen for both souls sakes that excess Vallium might undermine or prevent them altogether.  I hope everybody got the experience they and Grandpa needed in those last days, because I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least a little concerned some people (or Grandpa) had more that needed said but the vallium or morphine robbed someone the opportunity.  I'm similarly worried about my persistant presence too that last week– it comes to me just now that maybe I should have given more opportunity for my own Dad to be in the room alone with Grandpa.  I may have been too desperate and selfish to have discerned the proper timing of when I needed to step out.

The day it finally happened there was a miracle that generated in me the entire impetus to write this.  This I have no danger of forgetting but I cherish opportunities to tell the story thinking it may help to inspire someone's faith now or plant a seed of it to sprout in their future.  The morning of the day of his death, the hospice nurse was asked by my dad if it would have been possible for the chaplain to come since that was something that always lifted Grandpa's spirits.  Nobody knew how close Grandpa was to death as we'd been told it could have been any hour for almost 4 days now.  By the time the chaplain came in the afternoon of May 27th, 2026, we were well in the 2nd day of counting seconds between breaths in silence while Grandpa had been entirely unresponsive.  Nobody was asking for the medical opinion of whether he was actually still "there" in the head or just unconscious as, frankly, the worldly physics of whats happening in the brain is irrelevant at this point.  I can say that although his eyes were open, he was not blinking or looking around anymore and was not moving but still breathing strongly, but with pauses.  Even his urge to get naked had passed.  

When the chaplain came, we all kind of knew he was too late for his prayers to be of much interest anymore to Grandpa.  Even still, he sat with us in silence for what seemed like hours.  To me, this was such a refreshing distinction from the secular medicine and hospice nurses that were always on the go.  He arrived not with an agenda and he did not exude the busybody aura I anticipate from nursing staff.  He just patiently sat with us, taking everything in and it was perfect and refreshingly; not awkward.   I think he was also reading the room in the unique way the best and most gentle Christian evangelists can do to sense if there are unbelievers present subconsciously broadcasting their disagreement or unbelief of God's power.  Luckily, none of us exuded that that day, so things evolved exactly in the room as God intended with no demonic interference.

After what seemed like forever in silence, my Dad asked for the chaplain to lead a prayer and we all held hands with Grandpa.  He started with "Lord..." and paused.  It was quite a long pause, but I recognized what he was doing from a Bible verse I had recently read. "The Holy Spirit will give you the words to say at the moment when you need them". Luke 12:12. I wish I remembered more specifically what he said, but it was basically an improvised submissive plea for Jesus to enter the room.  And that He did.  Almost immediately Grandpa's breathing got noticeably calmer.  We commented on that and felt reassured.  I noticed something strange though and it looked like coinciding with the moment of the calmer breathing his pulse switched from one side of his neck to the other.  Over the next minutes though, I noticed something wrong– the pulse over on that side was noticeably fading.  And he died not more than 5 minutes after that prayer.

I've come to research that this is actually a very common result in the 2000 year old Catholic "Extreme Unction" sacrament that was removed by Martin Luther from the modern American protestant faiths some 400 years ago, but I think this chaplain replicated its ancient effect nonetheless.  I'm skeptical Grandpa was conscious enough for it to have been explainable as calming words he heard through his mortal ears and a fully aware mind.  Even if you choose to believe he could hear them and be calmed to the point of final release, what other words might one imagine being capable of commanding a dying man's body to die?  I would imagine even the most exalted secular psychologists are powerless in such a hospital room.  The church has been applying maximum possible kindness to these moments for longer than universities and hospitals even existed (since it was the Catholic church that even invented both of those)

The next hour after he died at the hospital is still a blur, but one thing I remember feeling strangely inspired to do was open the blinds to let the sun back into the room.  In the previous Googling I had done in an effort to understand Grandpa's desire to take off his clothes had also suggested making the room darker which we almost immediately did.  When advice comes to us under the auspices of smart men of science (which thanks to the internet now can be anyone with a laptop), we instinctively obey-- even luddites like me who've become increasingly skeptical of science having all the answers to all the questions worth asking.  As I thought about it though, and knowing how quickly uninspired those "smart men of science" become in the case of lost causes where death is inevitable and their lack of power over it becomes embarrasing, I started to have doubts about the internet's advice here.  I don't know about others, but I feel God's presence more in the sun than in the dark and I would probably prefer myself to die in the light than the dark, even if its the light of God thats provoking me to get naked, squirm, and make everybody else in the room feel awkward and worried I'll accidentally injure my already dying body more so.

I don't feel justified to encourage anyone's forgetting of even the most minor of the morbid details.  The shock in the almost immediate change of skin color after the heart stops.  The callousness of the finely tuned bureacratic machinery that goes into effect after death pronouncement.  Noticing how quickly the body bag is prepared at the hospital room door even before anyone even leaves the hospital.  All these things I have as scars but I am happy to now carry as memory.  I know I am meant to feel all of this and use it to awaken my ego from the self delusion that mortality doesn't need contemplation.  I believe that a death in the family is one of the most effective starting sparks of a path to true faith– something that doesn't just arm you with mortality "coping strategies", but something that leads to something much more consequential even while you still live.    

"... we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us." – Romans 5:3-5

After we left the hospital, in the spiritually delirious state I was in I found myself working overdrive noticing little things and miracles.  I realize its a dangerous thing to resolve to try to notice coincidental seeming things in the world as non-coincidental, but truly I say, its such a more delightful discharge of idle creativity than the alternatives.  The introspection can be sanctifying as long as you don't let yourself slide into the depravity of paganism, idol worship or intrigue of occult infected cultures and religions.  Its easy to accidentally regress a burgeoning new and yet immature Christian faith in God backwards in sophistication 3000 years and rediscover another of the 1000 dead belief systems of pagan mysticism that history is littered with.  Nevertheless, I remember pulling into my Dad's driveway on the way home from the hospital and commenting on the absurdly perfect timing of that last breath with the prayer in the hospital room.  I mentioned something along the lines of that it must have been a demonstration God put on for one or all of us.  That maybe someone needed reminding of God's power and He wanted to test us to see if we were paying close enough attention to the details to "get it" and notice Him.  

My Dad had a radio playing in the background in his garage and as we were walking into the door from the hospital, the song playing was Def Leppard's 1987 rock song "Armageddon it" and the lyrics proclaimed at the exact moment, as if God's continuing the conversation we just had in the car:

"Are you getting it?"

"Really getting it?"

"Give me all of your loving, Give me all of your loving, for the best is yet to come"

That sounds like a divine response, request, and promise!   That album its from also happens to be the first cassette tape I ever owned to as a kid.   I was a big fan of Def Leppard.  I like to think that wasn't a coincidence either.  See!  Isn't a little Catholic Mysticism fun!  Jesus wants to party with you if you give him all your loving and He loves Def Leppard too!

I did take back my crucifix from the hospital room in the days after but kept it tucked away as I had strange vibes that I needed to keep it hidden in my pocket for a while.  I ended up bringing it to the funeral visitation a few days later as a reminder to contemplate the mystery in the hospital room it had been a part of, as I was still a bit afraid of forgetting it or being ashamed in telling it.   I did end up sharing it with an old lady I was somehow related to that I never met before that came down from Minnesota.  Young or same age as me people I'm afraid of "triggering" with too much Christianity talk-- they roll their eyes, feel judged, tell me Christianity is a big "red flag" or figure I'm a quack– which I'm all more fine with than I should be–  but old people are more than likely have a stronger faith than me so I'm more comfortable.   Anyway, emboldened by a receptive retelling I felt the urge after everybody else had gotten their time to see Grandpa in the casket to place the crucifix in with him, to be buried with him forever.  I don't think most people saw it since I was careful to only do it late in the service to avoid triggering what I presumed to be the likely Protestant majority and Protestant pastor which I know have historical distaste for the crucifix, but mission accomplished anyway.  

In the days following, I had a great conversation with the one Catholic cousin I have where I started soliciting his guidance on how to officially join his church.  Simultaneously, I was making loose plans to replace my crucifix when I got back to Portugal.  I wasn't planning on visiting Rome anytime soon to replace it at the place I got the original from, but we live very close (bicycle riding distance) to Fatima, Portugal which most assuredly would have crucifixes for sale that I could replace the one I gave to Grandpa.  Fatima is a very holy place for Catholics, maybe not as holy as the Vatican, but right up there.

Unexpectedly, my Catholic cousin gifted me a rosary he already had from Fatima the very next day after Grandpa was buried and the crucifix departed from me.  There was no way he could have heard about the plans I was making to go to Fatima when I flew home (to Portugal).  The sentimentality I had for the Vatican City crucifix, was replaced, almost immediately, with a Fatima Rosary delivered into my hands by someone who most certainly was on call in the following God's will.  The beautiful serendipity of my faith journey continues!  Next step: the rosary.  

One of the things the pastor asked the family beforehand to learn more about Grandpa so he could prepare a funeral sermon was for us to share how Grandpa shared his faith.  It was a slightly awkward moment as none of the typical, expected responses of a family following Christianity out in the open were applicable to us.  The pastor is right to have asked, as this is one of the most important responsibilities we have on this planet for reasons pertaining to the impermanence in the world in just about every other matter.  I searched my self for the answer and followed the influences in my life backward to critical points in my past that may have led me to the spiritual here and now.  My cousin had a nice response to to the question she delivered her funeral speech, no doubt under the influence of the Holy Spirit to have come up with such an eloquent answer on short notice, but I felt there might have been a slightly different answer unique to me and that I only now have found in contemplation:

Grandpa liked to tell me a story multiple times as a kid about how he started off thinking he had all the answers and then came to realize his Dad was the wiser one all along.  This story I think was my first inoculation against developing for myself the arrogance of a generation presuming its predecessors were always inferior and/or stupid (e.g. modern progressives).   Eventually, I found the mentality Grandpa inoculated me against present even in my own esteemed (and wrongly idolized) field of computer science when I found (and learned) an undeniably divine masterpiece of a computer programming language, superior in almost every way to ones of the current era, but was designed too early for its time in the 1950's (i.e. old) and mostly forgotten in the 1980s.  Discovering that for myself, I wanted to test if the pattern applied even to those 1950s fathers of computer science, and sure enough, I contined to uncover instances of even greater people (this time pure mathematicians, since this is now well before the computer) going further back yet which sparked an obsession with math that led to more rabbit holes.  You can see how a mentality like that eventually will land on the Bible and wondering what wisdom is locked up in both it and the 2000 year old institution that wrote it (the Catholic church).  Grandpa played a part in helping me avoid the arrogance of the modern age thinker, which after a long, narrow path inexorably lead this truth seeker to Jesus.  If I would have succumbed to the disease of arrogance or pride in the seeking, I never would have made it all the way back in time to the Bible and probably have gotten stuck in the philosophy entertainers of the 17th century in the Age of "so-called" Enlightenment – a.k.a. – the birth of elitism.   Grandpa had one of lightest touches on my character to the point of almost being imperceptible.  He was as gentle as a dove, as Jesus commands those about to share his word to the world in Matthew 10:16:

"Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and gentle as doves."

He obliged with the gentle part and trusted in God to take care of the rest.  Good call grandpa.  You might have been intuitively wiser than even the pastors of your time.  Aggressive evangelization to me at an early age may have backfired, for the faithful are in the midst of wolves indeed and I was in new-wolf-training for a long time.  Had you tried on me harder, you would have likely been unprepared as even as a first year engineering student at Iowa State College in 1996 I was taking sociology classes that were very effective at brainwashing me with authoritively stating as fact that faith is something the modern world has outgrown and only valuable now as a historical footnote as the obsolete solution that kept the not-as-modern-as-now society's impoverished happier when times got tough in the era before the inventions of effective entertainment and antidepressants.  We were tested on this stuff, there was only one correct response, and it came from a type of character I don't think my Grandpa would agree had all the answers.  One of the things those professors didn't have in their instruction was humility, which if you read the Bible, you find out is the only virtue that the devil can't replicate.  

My Dad recently remembered that I asked, asked my aunt who happened to be in the room at the same time what came of it, and low and behold, she was wearing it under her shirt at that very moment.  Another really strange coincidence with really weird timing.  To me it confirmed somebody else was obviously in the room.    

A light hearted sentiment was then expressed in the comedy of the conversation that followed was how the particular cross necklace aesthetic reminded my aunt of the Nazi's, which really was disturbing to me as I thought about it more deeply later.    This simple opinion shift in the heart of even a single human I would think of as a sign of at least one successful work of the devil during that era of history, even if the Nazi's themselves ended up being defeated.    I'm sure Satan would be happy with that result as it's clear what he thinks of the cross.

I followed my nose and did a little research as I remembered from history that the swastica used by the Nazi's was an ancient symbol for goodness, well-being, and the sun.  It is older than Christianity, but was spontaneously and independently used across multiple religions to represent similar "positive vibes" from times even before these religions were talking to each other and spreading symbols.   A divine seeming manifestation from the time before Jesus.  As a symbol, it has a pretty curious origin story.   For 15,000 years its been representing goodness and now in 2026, universally represents evil.   Thats some scary power wielded successfully by the devil there.

As interesting as that symbol's story was, it did not sufficiently explain why the cross necklace was evoking even the slightest reminiscence of Nazism to me until Google reminded me of the use of the Iron Cross on Nazi military uniforms and then it started to make sense.  So, as agents of evil, the Nazi's successfully killed the swastica but only injured the cross.  I have faith in another generation or two, the Nazi influence will fade and be forgotton and the cross will recover as long some other future agency of evil doesn't try to co-opt it again.  

I have a feeling this is all pretty standard tactic– it happened the same way with the robes the KKK wore.  Those white robes we now associate with hate and evil Spain still uses in religious parades. They are aware of how the robes seem to the more anti-christian propaganda prone Americans and children so now all the robes come with special pockets to hold a bunch of candy for them to give everybody when they go on parade.  I think its a great response on multiple levels.  Kids, like a lot us, just need a little candy thrown at them to associate something as allied with Goodness.  

This is why I like the Catholic's preference of the crucifix instead of the cross.  The crucifix, with Jesus's body still hanging grisly on it, is going to be a harder thing to represent something thats not in sync with Jesus, whom we all know what he stood for quite well.   It is more armored against time and fashion trends.   Nobody is going to wear it for fashion anyway because there is a dead body on it, which may make is less common on garments and buildings, but this I think is on purpose.  Jesus' dying there was not meant to be easy to see.  

By the same token, I would encourage anyone spiritually curious to examine what stirs in your heart when you see a cross or crucifix.  Does it annoy you?  Do you have the urge to put it face down when you see it precariously stood up or stand it up when you see it face down when fallen over?   I think many people just are completely oblivious and take its meaning as little more than a fashionable 2000 year old virtue signal.  I'm not sure I see as much wrong with it evoking nothing, but I think if you find it revolting enough to purposefully move it away from your sight, its a sign you are fighting some demons or sensing God's gaze upon your soul and you might need help.  Whatever you feel, I think its important to not misdetect judgement.  True Christians don't do that, thats for God and its beyond tragic if thats what the cross makes you feel.  Its purpose is to broadcast love, not shame, and its demons that hate it, not you.  

What occurs to me is that we don't really have enough words for it.  We all try to use the same word for multiple very different things.   Apocalyptic leaning religious people are presented incontrovertable seeming bad omens such as rising divorce rates which I remember hearing in Portugal are as high as 50% in one random measure.  We also hear how rigid churches guard their definition of marriage and chose to hear it as evidence of how "behind the times" they are.  Of course, to religious people being "behind the times" is not an insult but actually very good news in how they chose to relate to the world.  This angers the insulter even more and positions and people further diverge from one another.

One of things I think is good to notice the distinction of is civil marriages vs. spiritual ones.  Our states and governments have to use a much looser definition of marriage in the application of state benefits, laws, and responsibilities.  Ideally, this is perfectly in union Christianity in Christian-founded governments, but this is not always possible as governments are inevitably beholdant and corruptible by  man and not God, despite founding father's intentions.

Over time with a government's drift away from God, civil marriages end up being made compatible with just about any religion.  Of course this is framed as a necessary and merciful "compromise" with the taxpayer base.   Pacification in this way has a convenient result of keeping everyone happy that wants to be kept happy  which is good for tax revenue and subjugation against God that State authority is the one true and final authority.  This doesn't work on Christians though and is actually very offensive.

What I'd propose is to let the State do what the State wants, but give the problem for God to handle.  Jesus' people, with good church leadership, will not be fooled and will continue to vote while they are allowed to in democratic governments.  Know, that the devil will attempt to water down any Godly-inspired culture with both population numbers from cultures with incompatible spiritualities and any number of tricks that inevitably are much smarter than any of us to notice, but have faith.  We are all destined to live in trying times, and that includes our governments.  While the state chooses to accept marriages even blessed by Elvis, find peace in that as an obvious example of what I say above.

The marriage word that Jesus uses in the Bible to speak His commandments is not the same one that the state uses.  It's probably most translateable with what has been stewarded from Jesus' time in the Catholic or Greek Orthodox churches.  The sacraments and definitions are timeless and do not change, by Jesus order, but language drifts.  They are immutable and will likely have larger and stricter qualifications that even the most discerning churches (run by humans) will find difficult to communicate or enforce.  I am skeptical it can even be applied to people who do not walk in faith with Jesus.  I think culture, with the help of some states, attempts to muddy that by attempting to confuse you that civil marriage is the same as (e.g) Catholic marriage.  This is unfortunate, but we Christians know better.  We don't need to play the same language games as the devil, but am thankful to those compelled to do so as I'm certain its part of His plan for you.  The rest of us will just lie in waiting, voting or not voting, trusting His voice will reach us when its necessary to His plan.

You see, Mary is not mentioned a lot in scripture so the Protestant church with its nose to the Bible might presume her role to be minor in Christianity.   But consider the details.   It was with Mary where the story and miracles surrounding our salvation begins.  She is believed to be the most humble and perfect woman to have walked this planet and it was her Son that saved us.  It was her innocent feminine sensitivity to her friends impending shame of running out of wine at the Wedding in Canaan, that she beckoned the world to follow her Son and to witness Him performing miracles.   She fired the starting gun for Jesus' fulfilling Old Testament prophecy on the messiah.  What a proud mom she must have been– after all she was human too.  She doesn't get credit because she never needed or wanted it for herself– the virtue of humility in perfection.  

If we lose or diminish her significance in time, it will be us that lose out.  I am reminded how the Nazi's started editing the Bible subtly altering Jesus' origin story by removing his Jewishness and recasting him as some sort of Aryan superhero.  The story of Jesus is parables all the way through.  Not only did he preach through them, his entire life is also one and changing even minor seeming aspects of it has cosmic consequences to any who try to.  Shortly after this gross feat of vanity and pride by the Germans, the war started not going so well for them.  Thankfully, with the truth around Mary, I think we are only guilty of letting her fade out because she is hiding between the pages in ways that only humans and not artificial intelligence LLMs can find.

I was in Florence, Italy last year at an art museum and one of the things that struck me was how there were so many ancient paintings of the Virgin Mary.  She even had her own approved color scheme and as such seemed to be adored more by those first generation Christians than modern ones.   I fear what affect on culture that shift away from Mary may have had.   Her story seems hidden "between the lines" of scripture, so I wonder if its more tuned to resonate with female intuition than mine.  You didn't need to waste lines of scripture reaffirming a basic human truth everybody knows about sons and their mothers.  Some things I think we are meant to use our innate empathy to understand and for that pages in the world's instruction manual are unnecessary.  The Bible is not a work of homage to history, its a lesson in it.  I think its one thing to hear what Jesus preaches about humility– how you feel about the story of his mom is the hidden test to see if you were paying attention.

I think its worth contemplating how the story of our salvation is parsed by men differently than women.  Both sides are perfectly capable of understanding the other, but it may take a small investment of effort.  This required "effort" can be exaggerated by the devil as evidence of systemic misogyny in the church, but its really not difficult to dispel if you choose not to take the baited false interpretations.  The sexes really are different, despite modern culture's insistence that they are just "social constructs".  I am not ashamed to be a part of a religion that aims to replicate through time the disposition of Jesus into men and Mary into women.   Who wouldn't prefer to see the highest held human ideals present in all your neighbors?

The above is one of the reasons I'm not ashamed to be disinterested in women's professional cycling– I can be awed and draw inspiration from men suffering (in sport) like Jesus did, but cycling, as a dangerous sport, conflicts with notions of a peloton of little aspirational Virgin Mary's so I can't help but cringe and want to turn off the TV the moment theres a crash or evidence of the inevitable emotional distress of competition.  If someone claims that makes me a misogynyst or sexist, they'll have simply identified themself as an idiot or another one of the devil's boring language game players.   I have no contempt for women's sports, I just am not ashamed of having less interest.   Modern culture's attempt at reprogramming my generic male disposition on these sorts of things didn't take– the devil seems to be having more success on that front with the next generation.  Good luck to parents on that– I wish I could help.  Feminizing men and masculinizing women just seems dangerous and comes off as resisting God's will– theres got to be better ways of reconciling the two if in conflict than homogenizing them.

I live within cycling distance to one of the holiest places to honor the Virgin Mary: Fátima, Portugal.   She appeared to kids there during World War 1 and there is a huge church erected in her honor.  There is even a 2020 movie about the occurrence.  We share roads with the pilgrims on their month long Camino de Santiago hikes from Fatima to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the remains of the apostle James are.   Being in proximity to these holy places and holy peoples I can't help but think they might be rubbing off on me too.  I think we all need to be reminded that these were all real people whose graves you can actually still visit thousands of years later in the real world.  

I remember somebody I knew once telling me a story on how an in law was so offended when he hinted that he didn't believe the Virgin Mary was an actual virgin.  The in-law was a Catholic and obviously got very defensive and didn't find the joke at all funny.  The story was being shared to me almost as a comedic warning that I might "tip toe" amongst the likes of the crazy religious types.  Boy, have my opinions of things changed since back then.  I realize this is basically how the devil recruits to his cause.   I'm so glad I got out of tech– though I do miss having a practical application of mathematics and reasoning, the nihilism is infectious there and not good for the soul.   There are people there I fear are simply there for collecting possibly ugly life anecdotes from people who trust them for the superficial purpose of providing comedic intrigue at lunch meetups.  I know I was shared stories I had no business in hearing which usually means the reverse is also true. I probably unwittingly provided material for somebody elses entertainment, but luckily, I'm not present in that world anymore.   The difference is that I now have faith it was all part of His plan for me and for them.  People change, and their opinions of them also change.  There are some scifi authors (Isaac Asimov) whose stories I have alternatively admired and then became convinced was the devil incarnate, then admired again.

Anyway, back to the virgin Mary.  Don't forget her lest she make another appearance in my neighborhood to remind us all.  I can guarantee theres a bunch of Portuguese scouring the woods near Fátima that are at least looking for her.

I will not give the quote here, for fear of someone using their deductive reasoning to pilfer out one of my pearls into the open, but I can say that it came from a sub-feed on Facebook containing a whole bunch of "new-age" spirituality messaging.  I set it aside for further contemplation and by the time my imagination had worked on it in the background almost certainly with divine help, I attempted to rediscover the quote to check what it said again against my surfacing intuition.  Of course, like a lot of social media feeds it was not rediscoverable and Lynn scrolled through a huge dose of unrelated, but similar spiritual messaging in that feed before I implored her to stop and give up.

What I've begun to conclude over the last 5-10 years is that we are all not that clever and probably dangerously predictable.  Its apparent that some of these new-agey metaphysics are tapped into similar things that I feel I've become more sensitive to.   The quote's uncanny specificity at first seems like a profound truth but only after contemplation I realized it was one of the most dangerous misunderstandings of God's truth I've come across.   I really believe the misunderstanding from the quote's author sets him/her up for nothing less dire than what many would liken as demonic possession.  Now having groked it more fully, I feel like God has given me new spiritual armor and even applied some divine shine one of those hidden pearls I keep for understanding Him.  It drew me closer.  It did its job.

As one scrolls these feeds full of metaphysics and new-age spiritualism, you either settle into an interpretation of them as uncovering hidden truths in the style we know as synonymous to the Occult, or, like me, you realize its all pretty sad and almost comically obvious the naivity which these people sharing actually have. When it comes down to it, the modern spiritual guru is no match for the ancient ones.  

Think what you may of ancient civilizations, but if you find yourself looking down on them realize you may be channeling vanity and pride of the current age of man you find yourself in, likely because you like technology and safety.  Those people long ago did not have all the distractions in the modern world designed to keep you numb, stupid, blind, and deaf to things spiritual.  I firmly believe living a simpler, more natural, less industrial lifestyle refines the spiritual senses and that was done a lot more in the past than the present.  Those ancestors of ours are the fathers of your fathers spanning for hundreds of generations and even before Jesus came, the commandment to honor your mothers and fathers was already well understood. Respect for elders has been embedded in culture as common sense since time immemorial, so if only for a brief moment, consider they may have worked these things out way before the modern gurus.  I suggest its only necessary to go back to about 2026 years ago and listen to the one infinitely perfect human we already know the name of.

One of the ways these "feeds" make their motives clear is the complete lack of any concept of Jesus.   I can only imagine as soon as some new "guru" might be inspired to speak of God or Jesus, they get persecuted and removed from the metaphysics feed and told to leave and go instead to the Christian ones where they will be more welcome.  The message is clear: "new age" spirituality is supposedly not compatible and not welcome alongside Christianity, in which its centuries of refinement looks like rigidity and closeminded-ness to them.   They'll likely profess its just not limited to, implying they have a grander and broader scope which is the exact opposite.  If the faith is not changing like they prefer, its wrong or irrelevant.  Christians will be told to go back to the bubble where they are harmless to the world and only surrounded with people who already understand them.  i.e. go back to the churches and stay away from the soul searchers roaming Facebook or college campuses in obvious need of help.

Another vibe I get from these metaphysics feeds is similar to children telling ghost stories around a camp fire.  Everybody hears one, says "OOooooh!" in a scary voice and then they look around at each smiling and giggling and secretly wondering if what they speak of may be more than just entertainment.   Its not.  And it will push you further along lines that are not healthy for you.  The mental power that is unlocked in humans when embracing Christianity is capable of creating a state of mind so profound it can remove even the fear of death, which is quite a thing.   This is a power thats been there for centuries in Christianity and religious texts are full of examples that aren't just stories, but true history.  You may have even witnessed it yourself in somebody terminally ill.  One of the apostles of Jesus was facing certain execution in the morning, yet he slept the through the night before like a baby (sorry I don't recall the exact verses for this one).  Do you honestly think this is something modern spirituality could ever replicate?  I doubt it.  I know I wouldn't be able to, but thats because I am weak and my faith is imperfect, but aspiring to it I find noble and worthy of a lifetime of effort.  

My hope is that for those engaging in these Reddit forums, Facebook groups, or "alternative" spiritualities that there are some that recognize the whole thing as another Jesus undercover sneak-op.  While everyone else pretends to "wake up" their third eye,  incorporate the "self" from other dimensions, sing songs around campfire effigys holding hands and beckoning for spirits to reveal themselves to you, or whatever other nonsense suggests itself as a potential modern equal to Christianity realize you are not meant to actually believe them.  Their exposure into your lives may have been placed there so that you could recognize His way at the point on your path you were destined to.   The ideas you thought were your own were only temporary surrogates to contain your spirituality in stasis so you will be able to recognize the real truth when it comes to you later in life.  I believe it is more tragic to deny that spirituality has any legitimacy whatsoever in the human condition than to hold it in stasis with spiritual puberty blockers.  If we all believe in nothing for too many generations in a row, I fear we won't recognize the Earth organism we evolve into as truly "conscious", relatable and worthy of inheriting our planet.   Our ancestors may already think that of us.  Perhaps this deevolution will show up in mental health first, or weird things like autism rates, ADHD, or decaying language/math aptitude like the movie "Idiocracy" or a morality that becomes "subjective" and changes for the worse in each new generation.  If this begins to happen, everything will still all be returned to God but boy will those parents be surprised when it starts to happen.   We might even reach an era where the children end up saving the souls of the spiritually barren adults– an inversion of what God intends.

So, as I continue to find those lost and floating souls blissfully unaware of how perfectly they accidentally glorify Him in their poems, stories, or other inspired works, I can't help but feel compelled to evangelize in the hopes that the energy they begin channeling can be supercharged for Good before it is permanently bottled or harnessed for the devil's purposes.  The adversary hates Jesus more than any human is capable, so be suspicious wherever His presence is missing or unwelcome.   Not only may you be missing a free source of peace, joy, and inspiration in your life, your soul may also depend on it.

I bet you've noticed and possibly not understood, that many Christians seemed to have some sort of superpower against demotivation.   You tell one about all the bad omens you see happening in the world around you, which a lot them to shrug off or try to convince you you're wrong.   Because you are driven by ego, you presume theirs to be malfunctioning and stupid.  They believe the war against Good and Evil was already won by us by Jesus 2000 years ago, and live their life accordingly.  In their language, they deliver their concerns and worries to Jesus and the Father in prayer, and then trust in God and go about their lives in the way Jesus has told them to.  That is, eat, drink, be merry, and obey His commandments.  This is also known as surrendering your will, sacrificing your ego, or just basically having Faith.

I suggest allowing yourself to revisit the phrase I know you all have heard.  Corgito, ergo sum.  Its the statement, "I think, therefore I am" from the French philosopher Rene Descartes in books crediting to the launching of the Age of Enlightenment.  Heathens really adore this age of man, as science and technology really took off which has served to continue to inflate our collective ego centuries later.  This age tempts all of us into a version of Pride that is oh so similar to the lightning bolt that cast Satan out of Heaven.  Confirmation of man's righteous dominion over the world to the point where we start to entertain the thought that we don't need Him and just can rely on ourselves for eternity.

Instead of holding Descarte's statement as some supremely insightful and deep truth of the universe, I'd like to pose an alternative interpretation.   I think this was the moment our ego's decided to assume for itself dominion over our souls.   The ego was never designed to stake this claim over our identities.  I liken it no more significant that a child boy discovering his penis for the first time and then having so much fun with it, that he chooses to let it have mastery over his will.  We know deep down what happens if this path is pursued for too long, as I believe we also know deep down what happens if we presume our ego's our entitled to drive us.

A modern philosopher I admire, Alan Watts, once spoke of the ego as nothing but a very advanced radar and prediction engine of the world as our bodies follow a path marked through a lifetime.  Basically, it's just a little trick our brains can do for us to help protect the flesh.  It's really no wonder we hold our brains in such high regard even to the point we presume that the most important organ we have exists in our skulls, the location the ego feels most vulnerable.  Our ego's, with the world's master's help, have tricked us to label the part of us we label as "ourselves" as 100% residing there only.  Allow yourself to consider you are more than just the thinker.  You may find yourself going down a rabbit hole that leads you to the ancient forms of common sense we know as a relationship with Jesus and His Father.

I believe God the Father has preprogrammed struggles he has ordained into our lives we cannot escape from.  Some seem to have it easier than others, but ALL are tested by Him justly.   Many fail.  Probably a lot more than half as He does not grade us on a curve.  Of the ones that don't fail, He promises us all to expect many great things to come.  For those with cosmic perspective this may translate to you as "heaven", but there is also promises of worldly good even the sinners amongst us will receive for those with more short-term perspectives.

Now, I hold Jesus as I know him as close to my imagination as possible and present my opinion.  I believe you all have within your spiritual DNA the capacity to be Holy men of the highest form we can expect from this evil world.  If you rebel against His plan for you, I believe the temptation of pride being the most dangerous, both we who do not understand you the rest of the world will lose out.  This angers God the Father and he instills into your soul a deep despair I cannot imagine and am frightened to try.  You feel his sentence for your defiance being carried out and misdirect it as if coming from cultures and governments His hand guides.

I believe God will, at the end of eternity, roll back time to collect the poetry of our aggregate human spiritual existence.  This poetry includes love, beauty, but also tragedy.  I believe he does this in reverse time order starting at your death and if it that time in your life he finds your heart in contempt of His Son, he looks into your life no further and marks your worldy experience worthy of at best case deletion before creating whatever it is that is next after the end of eternity.  He is also present as we move in the midst of time and very offended by those who attempt to defy His plan or commandments which have been set from since before time began and sent to us thousands of years ago.   Please consider, because of the particular nature of struggles, you may have an unchanneled capacity to know Jesus greater than most.  I beg for all our sakes you don't squander it, for the stakes are much higher than cultures, politics, or anything of the world.   Find your flock, know Him and help lead the lost sheep back to Him.  You may just be sleeping Holy men and women, sleeper agents in God's army waiting for a code word only your soul knows will wake you up.

I sense a larger than expected proportion of thus afflicted are already compelled to His service.   I fear the devil knows this too and focuses much effort to bring you out, to deny Jesus or to embrace sin.  The vector of desires of your flesh has does not define your identity, and the real church of Jesus knows this plainly and intuitively.  Only fools or those already fully enlisted into the devil's army believe in any way this condemns Jesus or His church.  Have mercy on the flock as many will likely betray you as you endeavor the best way you know how, for they know not what they do.  Realize there are some who revulse and presume whom it is you serenade in your love songs, but the discerning among us realize you actually serenade your Creator or His Son and once so clarified, we find them even more beautiful than what the world presumes our position of you.

I bear witness not only to your struggle, but also your sins and extend out my human limited empathy to you as far as I am able.  I will never join those amongst you throwing celebrations of defiance to our Lord or your advocate's unrighteous propaganda proclaiming a need for language games or on embracing identites separate from Him.  He will either force you back to Himself at some point in your life before you die (perhaps abruptly) or make your heart grow hard, silent, still and not care.  I believe I also speak for Jesus in that I hope for the former, that is, a spiritual awakening at whatever is God's chosen pace for you to find His truth.  We all have a cross to bear in this lifetime, but you must pick very carefully, you have no idea how much we all (or perhaps just one soul) needs you.

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.

This occurs to me as a somewhat tragic, but beautiful example of divine justice for man insisting himself upon the world instead of living in harmony with it.  I accept His sentence to us who live in this beautiful place perfectly just and consider the matter appropriately handled in God's court.  I do not insist on what I presume is the position of environmentalists who may presume representing what they believe to be the Creator's position on the case.  I'm pretty sure He doesn't need any more sycophants.

As one gazes at the ocean, I can't help but attempt to visualize how many thousands of miles it goes on before it reaches the east coast of my homeland in the United States.  Its truly hard to fathom, especially if you estimate the distance to the horizon you can see and then check your math against your imagination.  It makes you humble in a way that seems cosmically compatible with the underlying nature of our existence.    

A few miles north on the shore towards Buarcos, the ocean returns to being in close proximity to the city.  Buarcos is still within walking distance for my wife and I, though we usually only pass it on bicycle, and we do this quite often because it leads to roads along the coast that are even more beautiful than anything the city offers.  While I hold a little bit of envy in my heart,  there is a mural painted along the sidewalk reading "Save the ocean" that provokes in me an internal harumpf and eye roll every time I pass it.   To me, it beckons an inflated sense of significance for ourselves on this almost incomprehensibly vast ocean.  I'm not sure if the messaging is intended for city residents regarding the receding shoreline here in Figuiera da Foz, intended to represent the ocean in general, or if its just pandering to the general pro-Earth, anti-Creation messaging of the modern environmentalist fashion virtue signaling thats trending globally.  In any of the above interpretations, it just comes off as absurd sentiment to me.  

I wish the artist would have used the wall space for a nobler purpose for fellow man, such as "Save the souls".  At the very least, it should have been written in Portuguese, a courtesy paid even by local graffiti artists.  I fully expect a majority of people find this weakly-held sentiment I have for it the disgusting one.   I'm more than okay with that because I worship God, not his creations, and am confident this is the correct orientation of my adoration of Him despite how the world insists upon the superiority of its "modern morality".  I can even add my own entry into this competitive game of virtue signaling they play to highlight the absurdity.  I'm going to facetiously seek out wallspace to paint my own mural with hashtag "Save the Milky Way".

I hope you see how this above little story has spiritual elements that rhyme with scripture.  If you read this, you have just been propagandized with a timeless morality that trumps anything modern and I encourage you to read the Bible and find Jesus' life story and teachings echoing in literally everything and everyone's life experience on Earth.

Almost all Christians do not fall for the false dichotomy arguments and language games heathens like to use that pretend to undermine the root of spiritual belief.    They misjudge where the "root" is of what notions they are trying to dispel, presume it to be intellectual, and only a minor discipline known as "apologetics" even seeks reaching them in the space they allow us to stand alongside them in the debate language styles and framing they prefer.  The similarity to "apology" in the word "apologetics" I find a very sweet kindness of coincidence to call the discipline intended mostly as a charity mission to assist lost intellectuals back into good graces with their God.   Even our language dictionaries virtue signal the humility which Jesus' church was built from, and the world's mob have yet to gain the Orwellian style mastery over the English dictionary their corrupted hearts secretly desire.    

There are several science and engineering disciplines I think that have "lost the plot" with God, but some are closer than others and their pursuit looks a lot like worship.  Cosmologists, physicists, and mathematicians in particular, I think are on a noble crusade to find God's first miracle either by grand unification theory, big bang, particle colliders or by looking at things so large, small, or distant as to be so completely irrelevant to modern life that the only possible explanation for their continued pursuit must be spiritual.  In their hearts, they know this truth but they continue to sacrifice and try to righteously deceive the unrighteous world into accommodating them through vague promises its all going to be worthwhile and will lead to a yet unnamed important insight that manifests in future technology we won't be able to live without.  

Basically, these noblemen of science are pleading with the world to put their faith in them.  I fear the world is only content with the status quo due to the recent centuries of works by very blessed men, but the time will come when it will demand more results than can be reasonably delivered by men and their crusades will be defunded or run empty of inspiration.  I hope not, because I am curious what we could find, but Jesus tells us of the ways of the world and it doesn't look promising for them.   I think even the heathens agree we must keep them enthusiastic and well funded, which is actually very funny and ironic, because the word "enthusiasm" in the English language is derived from Greek words meaning "full of God" or "motivated by God" – another one of the facts of the reality of our language that can't be protested away by the atheists now rampant in those exact fields of science.  

So what I would propose is to think on the similarity between a person's experience with worship as similar to the mathematician toiling to follow Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, biologist looking deeply at evolution, or a cosmologist scanning for insights about the big bang,   All involve a shared sacrifice of time with a fellowship of people to honor and seek out answers to something God built into our existence.  The joy these men at the top of their field have when they make a monumental discovery in their field is probably similar to that which some particularly blessed, but not uncommon people get every Sunday service.   The sort of euphoria being chased here God has not built into the universe for only the benefit of the most elite of their discipline to enjoy finding.  We all know how to rejoice being in the universe we find ourselves.  We all know how to worship and praise God.  Its almost as if we have been designed for it.  (we have)

Now that you know we're similar, know that there is a seeming subtle difference in what we worship but has cosmic importance according to Jesus.  One is God himself and the other is only God's creation.  According to 1 John 2:15:

"Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For all that is in the world– the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life– is not of the Father but is of the world.  And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever"

I know it seems a rather arbitrary distinction since a clever trick you can play when starting to grok the Bible is to replace where you see the word "God" or "Father" with "Universe" and it instantly seems less offensive to atheist brains and becomes new-age trendy.  Unfortunately it is not the same and Jesus is pretty emphatic about it here.  How could so many of your environmentalist, scientific, global health, and political causes create such seeming contempt from Christians?  You can trace it to that line of scripture right there.  If you feel compelled to undermine Christian religion inspired politics, you best concentrate on trying to erase that verse from Christian's Bibles, which you'll find impossible until the end of time in the universe I live in.  That line of scripture will be baked into the "gut feel" sensibilities of Christian children even if they don't read the Bible for generations.  If you wish to instead collaborate with Christians, realize they are testing you with powers of discernment in an effort to detect humility– if you have none, it will be seen by them and you will be fulfilling prophecy regarding your master and true intentions.  

If you're just curious to understand why this is so important, I encourage you earnestly search your intuition and look for more clues in the Bible.  Its a process named "discernment" that heathens often confuse as "judgement" because its fading from their language and God is always flooding their emotional state with such strong cosmic vibes of impending judgement that they end up seeing it everywhere and attribute it as coming from everyone they hate.  If you only ever "trust your gut" on whats right and wrong, you'll remain only a partially conscious soul thats put all your faith of salvation on your parent's indoctrination from their inherited culture, which I'm pretty sure the Bible will tell you how that might not work out for you in the end.  

Anyway, you've got yourself a mystery to follow and I've got faith if you earnestly want to know the cultural reasons why you should worship God and not the world, the Holy Spirit will help it come to your imagination.  Or you can use Google, but its less fun that way and you're trusting a tool of the world to guide you on a path of cosmic truth, for which the stakes are way too high.  You really should not put your faith in anything except the written words of Jesus himself as recorded in a Bible you receive hand to hand from a friend you trust in your heart.  Theres a reason almost all of modern technology starting from the printing press is derived from a desire to spread this one book.

First off, I do think you can congratulate yourself for keeping a tidy mind.  I'm sure you have a great organizing strategy you've adjusted over your lifetimes and you are quite the proud librarian in its upkeep.  This will actually be a great advantage to you in the puzzle you are about to play with.

The mindgame begins like this.  Firstly, presume you've arrived at this moment in time already a Christian, Jesus has always been walking with you, etc. etc. and you're just behind a bit on your praying.   Its been so long, your language has drifted.   The word "pray" has a different meaning to you now and is a concept you don't grok the way people seem to use it.  You witness people you despise claiming to do it so start associating prejudices to its meaning.  Those writing the world's history books may have slipped in buried notions to reinforce your prejudices so what you come to understand as its meaning isn't anything that you actually do.  

To those people who've lost the "pray" word, I think you can find it back if you temporarily substitute the word for "imagine" and get to work on exercising the imagination muscle again.  Exercising it does not mean abandoning the organized mental library your busy-body ego keeps, just giving him a break and trusting everything he's hoarding in his shelves will still be there after the workout at the imagination gym is done.  He may not like that you're going to do something without him, so you'll have to trick him.  He'll be pissed, but he'll be back– you dont need him, but you need his library to survive in the world with comfort.

You may not yet have realized who it is in control of your imagination and instincts, but its not Mr. ego but you'll meet him later.  Mr. ego gets pretty self-important the bigger his library gets and might even suggest there is no time in this world for exercising imagination if it doesn't add into his library.  Too dangerous to waste any time not feeding the library, the workings of the world depend on it for survival he will say.  If you don't grow your imagination muscles at the gym to similar levels to be able to fight Mr. ego, he'll get pretty cocky and annoying.  He needs to be put in his place and you'll need the confidence you'll get by side-effect from the workout instructor at the imagination gym to contend with him when he reveals himself to be a real ass.

Anyway, the "imagination" exercise you might try first is take all the religious ideas that seemed ridiculous to your ego that he sent first to the "cant understand" pile (dangerously close to the "nonsense" pile and trash bin) and see if you can't imagine a way to assume them true while still fitting in with the rest of your mental library.  A key is to realize that language is loose in meaning and your imagination has capabilities beyond whats reachable using words and facts.  Don't let Mr. ego see you take ideas he's already filed as nonsense to the imagination gym, he's easily offended and insecure because he knows you see him sneaking things from his "can't understand" pile to the trashbin.  What you come up with might look like science fiction and I and church people would love to hear you share the endeavor, though they may not understand you just yet as you may not understand them, but I urge you not to feel judged by them.  In attempting to "synchronize" themselves to you there will be mismatches.  The mismatches are inevitable, but the "synchronizing" between us makes everything stronger and why we need fellowship, but be careful in who you choose to share them with, and see this verse from our Bible:

"Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces". – Matthew 7:6

This is warning to any who share what they think might be holy thoughts to  heathens.   Lots of people live in fear of ridicule or mob cancellation of their ideas.  If your imagination is trying to make sense of Jesus' words, any thought is a holy thought, and they are all pearls to Jesus that he urges you to share carefully.  Its goes in reverse to, which I think Christians protect themselves by always falling back to quoting the Bible, which is always invulnerable to being "trampled".  Jesus also says:

"Assuredly, I say to you unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of Heaven" – Matthew 18:3

He knew many of us will need back the imagination our ego caused us to abandon as kids later in life.  Jesus equates the spiritual novices as "children" all over the Bible, and this is his curse to any of those who might discourage you:

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.  Woe to the world because of offenses!  For offenses must come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes!" – Matthew 18:6

Its one of the most aggressive quotes by Jesus in the Bible, and if you consider yourself kin to the spiritual novice "child" to which he refers to you and feel discouraged in any way to what might be a growing empathy towards Christians, the well-versed God fearing ones will always pause to reflect how their actions might be affecting you.   Take this as a clue to who is going to be good on the journey you didn't realize you just started down.  

The fact that you know your imagination exercises feel a little absurd and scifi is just because you're out of practice and have a lot of catchup work to do.  They'll continue to refine themselves into ideas that might even get the attention of Mr. ego, but don't trust him.  He's held captive by the world, which obeys a different master and an abusive one.  Eventually, you'll probably have to fire him and reclaim his library as your own, as you already know his filing system.  Don't be tempted to throw away shelves of books he's filed for you neatly in his library when he leaves, libraries are timeless and beautiful things.

And finally, as you continue to exercise your imagination muscle, realize the meaning of this verse, as Jesus answers someone frustrated about Him speaking so much in parables or analogies compared to the other thought leaders of the world at the time.

"Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.  For whoever has, to him more will be given and he will have abundance" – Matthew 13:11

What it means to me, is whether you like it or not, your weird imagination will keep working on ideas/analogies/parables that will end up transforming you and the change the kingdom you have found yourself residing in.  If you find yourself residing in a kingdom with no miracles, teleport yourself into the one where there was an impossible seeming human resurrection around 2026 years ago and reach me at jboff@jboff.com.

I have found that the big tech media selection prediction AIs, also known as "The Algorithm", seem to suggest in ways very similar to what Christians have been taught to expect and have been preparing for thousands of years. That is, the fight for men's souls and the surgical replacement of their inner voices with one conforming to the world hivemind. In the vernacular of Christianity this is demon vs Holy Spirit posession. World's wisdom vs. Heaven's wisdom. Jesus vs. Satan. Humans vs. Him (capital H). If you find yourself repulsed by my use of this form of language, Christianity also knows what that means and what to do with you and I hope you read on, if for no other reason than curiosity's sake. Some of you probably knew a different me.

Anyone who has progressed in a math-based career like mine is certain to have stumbled across some of the very strange, provably real, theorems that seem at first to defy reality, but when further analyzed you realize they actually define it, just at an exceptionally boring low level that only us nerds have found fascinating. There is one effect called the "Wisdom of the Crowd" you are certain to run into when using the field of statistics and the central limit theorem (which is also freaky magical). Although you may miss its spiritual significance in the study of statistics, once you have a use for it in a real world problem your soul has committed to searching for solutions of, it really starts feeling like a divine gift and tickles at your spiritual side. That is, unless the modern educational institutes of man you put yourself through really did succeed in killing off your spiritual side or nobody in your life has yet helped you awaken it properly.  If that is what your education has "given" you, a world view confirming there is nothing worth knowing of the spiritual what a tragedy! You'll miss out and be left empty in old age, when the world's systems are through with your peak productivity period and it no longer has much use for the superficial transient "insights" you were programmed to bear. The world and its governments have no interest for anything outside of what helps or threatens its tax base, so is unworthy of your heart and soul.

In statistics, this "wisdom of the crowd" effect is super powerful for discerning truth, but turns out to be easily corruptible even in pure mathematical usage. Oh, how so perfect an analogue to our real world! Here I was, rediscovering a biblical truth recognized 2000 years ago and put to words in the bible so plainly and simply, no wonder STEM majors pretend to seem so offended by the bible evangelists all the time. To many it trivializes the craft they sacrificed so much of themselves in attaining. All the nuanced truths they thought they were "unlocking" in their study and the complexities they found so beautiful not realizing theres a huge portion of us that really don't care about human knowledge now that Jesus has come and given us His and as it turns out, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything can all be reduced in complexity to the story of a single perfect human's life as witnessed by 12 fisherman 2000 years ago (and the number 42, wink wink).  It's a similar type of stupefied arrogance you get back if you reduce someone else's 100,000 line of Rust code masterpiece to a 30 line LISP program that ends up doing the same thing and runs faster. That's what Jesus did to philosophy, government, society and culture all at the same time, stored in compressed form in the verses of the bible and buried within your own soul and life experience is the decompression dictionary.  Machines and LLMs will not be able to decompress it, but every human child can.  

My message to those STEM majors who think they and the fruits of their craft are Gods gifts to humanity: You're right! but probably not for the reason you think you are. As you keep making new versions of the same toys for the world's economic engines and toss the sum of our human knowledge, along with megawatts of your blood energy and capital into AI datacenter "cauldrons" in hope of bringing about your own form of imagined "Singularity" rapture, realize Jesus already beat you to it over 2000 years ago and it only takes one short book to follow us through history so we don't forget. And just when you think you are close to finally succeeding in summoning your final demon and its preferred forms of governments and economies, realize that the Holy Spirit will snap his fingers and effortlessly change the hearts and minds of people one at a time just like me that used to be just like you, in only just the minimal amount necessary to ensure the success of His plan that we were told about thousands of years ago.

Your "modern" and progressive sensibilities are the blip in history, not the church's. The children you have sacrificed into the machines and institutions of man attempting to bring about your utopia will not last as is already apparent with each diminished generation. You don't need to be competent in math to extrapolate the population trends of the types of people and cultures that are not reproducing and fluorishing. Your elite CEOs and leaders visions will not be exalted like they secretly hope to be, and their entire life's work and legacy will be just another footnote some biblical scholar from the future uses as he struggles to keep the attention of his child students while they are told the Tower of Babel story.  The only way to ensure a timeless legacy for yourself is to drop the priority of your own missions and join Jesus's mission before you stop caring about legacy altogether and fully embrace the void. People's spirits die much sooner than their bodies do, and societies and individuals that embrace pointlessness of meaning eventually become it, and that is NOT okay or noble.  Its not even something you should wish upon your worst human enemies, which is why Christians are called to preach, convert, and evangelize.  Jesus really does love you and want to know you as much he wants you to know Him.  

Gods kingdom however, is not diminishing as He does not compete in units of money, earthly power, or proportion of souls he has currently residing alive on Earth in the year 2026. I beg you, use and redirect your cleverness to notice all things that can NOT just be coincidences and take them as signs to YOU as it pertains to your life. Life's so much more interesting that way and you can put the skills you've refined in your career to new use. Use statistics and the power of math for your own sake, not just trusting other men to do it for you and trust their conclusions. Stop believing you are just a series of accidental chemical reactions going on in a skull intended only to cooperate, collaborate and procreate with your fellow humans and then die. Christianity asks you to be humble, but not that humble. That form of humility is the grotesque form that Satan attempts to put in your head since it is the only virtue he is incapable of imitating. God made us in His image, and this "progressive" false modesty of our place in the universe advocated amongst your new scientific atheism religion elites like Stephen Hawking, is just Satan's not very clever passive-aggressive insult he uses to try to provoke Him, but ends up backfiring and making a fool of himself and Jesus ends up gaining more souls every time.  Satan has learned this, and also encourages non-contemplation of what it is we are and here for for as long in your life its possible to.  Not even the most devout heathens find at least the idea that we are just electrical signals in a brains a little disgusting and that would be credit to the good instincts God put in your design firing up a little even in the most brainwashed or demonically possessed of people.

In my older age, I have a found a way to Jesus while still believing all I still do in science and math. My problem-solving and scientific mind only made the journey less supported since fewer peers and humans mentioned in history have gone down this path and have it well mapped. A science skilled mind is not incompatible with Christianity, and it's actually a blessing that made the experience more fun. A science based one I think is incompatible, as I do not hold the word "science", which only describes a noble human problem solving process the Holy Spirit has gifted our brains to be able to do to help us rule over God's world, to be a word anywhere close to sufficient in describing what's at the "base" of a persons mind. I think the world has a confused idea of what men of science really think like since they are also the most popular sought tools of the devil. The study of math in particular I think is the most profoundly spiritual if it can be learned from outside institutions set up by the snake, and its unfortunate that a lot of people not in our profession assume the opposite.

Please reach out to me jboff@jboff.com if any of this feels familiar to the intuition that has already been placed in your soul.   Your immortal spirit egg may be wanting to hatch, and you will need help from something not driven to your attention by Algorithms or strangers.   Satan has probably left all sorts of landmines in your sensibilities that will react negatively if not disarmed delicately.