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THIS IS ZION
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 21, 2025 – Our greatest joy as born-again believers is being able to spend all day every day with God. Jesus is with us, too, as he promised he would be, but as much as we love Jesus (and that we certainly do), God is our Daddy. He’s the one we love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Even if the Commandment to love God didn’t exist, we’d still love him that way. It comes with being born-again. We don’t have to try to love God or work at loving God: We just do.
Our relationship with God is entirely different from our relationship with Jesus. And like for Jesus during his time on Earth, God is our main focus. It’s God we turn to for help and guidance, it’s God we run to for comfort if things aren’t going so well, and it’s God’s Commandments and directives we do our best to follow. God is our everything, and if we’re genuinely born-again, we don’t want to live even one second without him.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never loved anyone or anything the way I love God. It’s a totality of emotional investment that I didn’t think was possible. There’s no “I’ll give God this part of me, but I’m setting aside this part for someone or something else.” No. That’s not how it is with God. You give him everything not because he’s asking you to or expecting you to, but because you want to give him everything. You can’t imagine not giving God everything. That’s how it is for us born-again believers. That’s been my experience, anyway.
And so, we spend all day every day with God. No matter what we’re doing, God is always right there with us, offering a word of advice or encouragement, cautioning us if we wander off-course, or just making us laugh when he knows we could use a giggle. Not enough is said about God’s sense of humor, which, like everything else about him, is perfect. The context is always perfect, the timing is always perfect, and the delivery is consummate. No-one on Earth or in Heaven is funnier than God. Jesus comes a distant second (he has a very dry sense of humor that bounces well off God’s), but God still wins that contest, hands down. No-one beats God at anything, not even Jesus.
I’m not always aware of God’s presence, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t always here with me. I know he’s always here because he tells me he is and because Jesus during his ministry years said that he was never alone, that God was always with him. If God was always with Jesus, then God is always with us. That’s part of the deal of being born-again followers of Jesus. The relationship Jesus had with God during his time on Earth is the same relationship we have with him.
Ultimately, I love spending all day every day with God because he’s so much fun to be with. But he’s also loving and protective in a fatherly way. His presence is the sanctuary that David wrote about, the absolute and unconditional safe zone that no-one and nothing can violate. This is Zion, the prophesied Kingdom of God on Earth. It’s not a physical place: It’s a spiritual realm, a state of being that is entirely separate from our spiritual enemies. It’s bounded on all sides and above and below by God’s love for us and by our love for God. It’s a realm of pure unfeigned love, and no-one who doesn’t love God that way can enter in.
This is Zion. This is God’s presence with us through his Holy Spirit, and it’s the closest we’ll get to Heaven until we get Home.
THE TRANSITION
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 20, 2025 – Life after death is either a goal, a pipedream, a delusion, or a guarantee, depending on what you believe in. For me, life after death is a promise that I hope will be fulfilled as it was for Jesus and for others mentioned in scripture whose bodies changed from earthly to heavenly in a twinkling. This is the life after death I’m aiming for.
But getting to that heavenly body will require a radical transition. We won’t just wake up one day and find that our body is now perfect and immortal. No amount of diet, exercise, plastic surgery, or wishful thinking can make us perfect, let alone immortal: Only God can do that for us.
The transition from an imperfect mortal body to a perfect immortal one involves physical death. Just as we died spiritually to be reborn, gaining God’s Holy Spirit in the process, we’ll someday also die physically in order to gain physical immortality. And if the ecstasy of our spiritual rebirth is anything to go by, I expect the gaining of our heavenly body will be at least equally as ecstatic, if not more so. If this is the case (and I truly believe it is), it’s something to be desired; not feared, desired.
This transition is the resurrection. It’s what Jesus preached and what he underwent in the privacy of his tomb cave, after which he emerged unrecognizable both in form and voice, though his soul remained the same. It’s worth noting that being resurrected is not the same as being raised from the dead. Elijah raised a boy from the dead, as did Elisha. Jesus also raised several children from the dead and then famously raised his friend Lazarus. But these “raised” people retained the same earthly bodies (that is, imperfect and mortal) they had prior to their death, and so they weren’t resurrections. They were a return to life, much like people can be returned to life through medical interventions like defibrillators, heart massage, CPR, or adrenaline injections. In modern parlance, they’re NDEs (near-death experiences) rather than permanent deceases.
Resurrection requires the permanent decease of everything that is mortal. We’re not recycled back into a different body, like the deeply flawed reincarnation theory proposes; our body is transformed from mortal to immortal. When he appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, Jesus explained that he was not yet “ascended” but was in the process of being so. Still, in his newly immortalized body, he was able to appear and disappear at will and to have his wounds probed without feeling any pain. He then later literally rose up into the air in front of several witnesses, disappearing into the clouds. A mortal body cannot do these things.
Every one of us who makes it to Heaven will transition from an imperfect mortal body into a perfect immortal one. Our body will change at our resurrection the same way as our spirit changed at our rebirth, but our soul will stay the same because God made our soul to last forever. Did you know that your personality is seated in your soul? And just as your personality didn’t change at your rebirth, it also won’t change at your resurrection. The “you” you are now will continue for all eternity, shedding at physical death only those personality traits that don’t belong in Heaven. Hopefully, when our time comes, there won’t be that many traits to shed.
I don’t know about you, but I am so looking forward to the transition! I’m not going to do anything to hasten it (God doesn’t want us to do that), but I’m also not doing anything to delay it. I’m not interested in prolonging my days here on Earth; I’m grateful for whatever time God allots me, but I’m not going to beg for more time, like Hezekiah did. I want to be where Jesus is and to go through the transition that Jesus went through to get there. I want to be perfected and immortalized in the way that God promises us we will be and Jesus showed us we can be.
I want to be resurrected. I want to ascend.
I want to transition.
I want to go Home.
JESUS WAS BADASS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 18, 2025 – Jesus was a spiritual vigilante and a badass, and we’re only now starting to appreciate just how badass he was. He single-handedly took on the entire establishment of “God’s chosen” (who, by that point, had already lost their claim to the title) as well as their Roman overlords, and he came out victorious in the end without so much as plucking a hair from any of their heads. It was a total hands-off victory that relied entirely on the power of God’s Holy Spirit. Nothing before or since has come close to the level of Jesus’ victory, and he did so not by the use of arms and violence but by trusting fully in God and doing God’s will.
Jesus’ greatest badass achievement? Turning evil into good. We, his born-again followers, are called to do the same.
I don’t know about you, but the last thing I’d call myself is badass. A spiritual vigilante, yes, I’m a born (and born-again) vigilante, but I’m working on the badass part and still have a ways to go. By “badass”, I mean performing righteous acts entirely without fear and confident in the outcome. Being badass starts with having total faith and trust in God, but it also needs to be put through its paces. Jesus wasn’t a badass when he was a carpenter in Nazareth. You can’t be badass only on paper, even if that paper is scripture. You need to walk it out and work into it over time.
Moses was badass. David was badass. Elijah and Elisha were badass, too. Paul grew into his badassery (shaking the poisonous snake off his arm like a harmless bug showed that he achieved it), as did a whole litany of martyrs, beginning with Stephen.
If you, like me, have not yet ascended the badass dais, don’t worry about it. You’ll get there if you stay the course. You’re not born a badass; it comes with faith, time, and circumstance. All of Jesus’ loyal first-generation disciples eventually became badasses, including the women. If we have the requisite faith (and we should, if we’re genuinely born-again), we’re already latent badasses just waiting for the right occasion—the right trigger— to burst free.
Oh, glorious day when that happens!
Scripture tells of a time when God’s people will do “exploits” on the level of the holy angels. All of God’s holy angels are badass. I’ve met a few in person, and the one characteristic they shared was unearthly calmness and total unwavering confidence in the intended outcome. In our interactions, they calmly and matter-of-factly stated that something would occur even though people around me were telling me it was impossible. But the angels didn’t just tell me it would occur; they showed me what I had to do to make it happen. It was a telling before the showing, but it was more importantly prophecy in action or what could rightly be called applied prophecy. I had my part to play, my role to perform. If I hadn’t done what I was shown to do, there wouldn’t have been any miracles.
Jesus was king of applied prophecy during his ministry years. Over and over again, he did what he did not only because scripture dictated what the Messiah should do but because God and God’s holy angels directly told Jesus what to do. They told him, showed him, and then empowered him to walk it out. His entire ministry was based on that model. Jesus was an exemplary badass because his faith was so strong, as was his desire to do God’s will and God’s will only. This formed the basis for Jesus’ unparalled badassery, and his ministry was the trigger that unleashed it.
If you pray for nothing else today, my brothers and sisters, get down on your hands and knees—better still, get down on your face—and pray that you and all born-again believers become badass like Jesus.
Amen!
ENTERTAINING DEVILS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 17, 2025 – This is one of the more difficult articles I’ve had to write for this blog. It’s a touchy subject, but it needs to be aired. It concerns our interactions with people who are not born-again and have no interest in becoming born-again. In other words, it concerns nearly everyone we come into contact with every day and therefore it concerns our day-to-day lives. How we deal with these people can make or break us spiritually, so listen up.
As always, we need to look to Jesus first and foremost to see how he interacted with those around him. How did Jesus treat people who had no desire to know and love God? Did he force himself on them, following them around and pestering them with Bible quotes? Did he slip a Gospel teaching into his conversations with them without their knowing it? Or did he go all Bible-thumping fire and brimstone and warn them that they’d burn in hell unless they followed him? The answer is, of course, “no”, Jesus didn’t do any of those things. He didn’t even stop his followers from leaving him, if they wanted to leave. He didn’t chase after them and try to entice them back into the fold. He just let them go. Jesus’ focus, as should be ours, was to teach those who free-willingly came to him with the right motivation.
But what about people who try to attach themselves to us with the wrong motivation, who don’t know God and Jesus and have no desire to know them? If you’ve been born-again for any amount of time, you’ll likely have noticed that you’ve become a magnet for… certain people. They may be family members or perhaps they’re friends or acquaintances you knew prior to your rebirth, but what they all have in common is a desire to insert themselves into your life, even if you haven’t seen them or spoken to them in years. In most cases, these people are unaware that they’re being used spiritually to entice you into behaviors you left behind when you were born-again. But they’re persistent, these people, and they typically use as a hook your shared personal history with them.
Again, these are not people who are coming to you because they crave what you have spiritually; they’re coming to take away what you have spiritually—to find chinks in your spiritual armor to exploit—so you need to be very cautious around them.
Still, a few relationships are inviolable, regardless of whether these people are reborn or not. I’m referring here to your relationship with your mother and father. The Commandment says we’re to honor our parents, so we’re to honor them, no exceptions. We honor them by interacting with them respectfully and speaking kindly of them to others, even if they give Jack the Ripper a run for his money. This directive to honor our mother and father comes directly from God and therefore is inviolable. Break it at your extreme peril.
But beyond our mother and father, God gives us no directives other than to treat people as we would want to be treated. I like people to be polite to me, so I’m polite to them. I like people to be honest with me, so I’m honest with them. But I don’t necessarily need to be kind when kindness isn’t called for, though whatever I say or do, I say or do it with the aim of maintaining a clear conscience and right-standing before God. This may look like standoffish-ness or even outright rudeness, but we have no directive from God to cater to people’s whims and demands on our time. Just because someone reaches out to us doesn’t mean we have to respond, if we know their motivation for reaching out is not good, is not godly. And we can know their motivation is not godly because God gives us discernment to know.
Many people cried out to Jesus as he walked from village to village, but he only responded to and spent time with those who wanted what he was offering. He didn’t force the Gospel on people; he shared it with those who free-willingly came to him with godly intent. Every day, we interact with dozens if not hundreds of people, most if not all of whom want nothing to do with God and Jesus. They’re not coming to us to hear the Gospel. Some will even target us, intentionally or unintentionally trying to harm us spiritually. We’ll know who these people are when they come around; they’re not hard to discern. The bait and hooks are nearly always the same. If you spend even a small amount of time with them, they’ll give you a sense that you’re being dragged down because they are dragging you down. That’s their motivation, whether they know it or not. And that’s how you know you can’t be around them.
You have no directive from God to be around certain people just because they want to be around you. If they don’t want God and Jesus, they want your harm: There’s no other way to put it. Be polite, but steer clear of them. You don’t even have to tell them why you’re steering clear of them. They are a test and a temptation and a constant moral hazard.
As a born-again believer, you have no obligation to entertain devils.
So don’t.
ENEMIES AND FRENEMIES
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 27, 2025 – I wrote earlier about how God blesses those who look after his children. They don’t even have to be believers, those people; they just have to do right by us. The people who do God’s will without realizing they’re doing God’s will are immensely rewarded for good, both in this life and in the next. This is how important it is to do right by God’s children.
But what I’m writing about today is the other kind of people – the ones who purposely harm God’s children. If you’re born-again, you know what I’m talking about. I don’t mean the people God permits to come into our lives and hassle us to a certain degree by following us around and demanding our attention. Jesus had to deal with those people, as did the disciples, and as do we, if we’re genuinely born-again. It’s part of our job to learn how to deal with them. But they’re not what I’m writing about today.
Today I’m writing about the people who purposely target and work against us, aiming to bring us down spiritually. For their efforts, they earn an entirely different type of reward than those who either consciously or consciously help us. By “purposely target and work against us”, I mean people like Judas Iscariot or Herod or the temple elders and chief priests who conspired to kill Jesus. I mean satanists and witches. I mean the powers-that-be in secret and not-so-secret societies. That’s the level of nasty I’m talking about. If we don’t have fake friends (“frenemies”) and outright enemies like these in our lives already, we will some day; that’s a guarantee. It’s actually a badge of honor to be targeted by these people. It means our witness is perceived as a threat to Satan’s plans.
And how should we interact with our own personal Judases? We should treat them the way Jesus treated Judas Iscariot – just like everyone else. Even though they target us while feigning to be friendly, we should never target them (except with prayers, in private). We should never “out” them. We should never attack them. We should never condemn them. They’re already condemning themselves by their choices, so there’s no point in our doing it: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.”
Our own personal Judases require an especially light touch and certain kindnesses that God will direct us to extend. We should never be spiritually color-blind to our Judases by pretending they aren’t what they are, but we should also never be hostile to them. We’re being tested on how we treat them, once we know who and what they are. For explicit details on how to treat your frenemies, refer to Jesus’ treatment of Judas Iscariot. That’s our gold standard.
As for how to interact with our own personal temple elders and chief priests – well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Jesus never held back on them, and neither should we. But at the same time, Jesus didn’t go looking for a fight; he only ever defended his position when the fight came to him. He never went on the attack. If they accused him of something, he unraveled their lies. If they baited him, he refused to bite.
With our own personal temple elders and chief priests, as with our own personal Judases, we need to follow Jesus’ example to the letter. That means we defend our position when we’re attacked, we set the record straight when we’re falsely accused, but we never – NEVER – start the fight. Call them out for the hypocrites they are, certainly, like Jesus did, but for educational purposes only. We need to know who our enemies are. They need to be identified.
Like our Judases, our own personal temple elders and chief priests come into our lives as tests. They’re being used to measure our response to provocations, so we’d better respond appropriately. By “appropriately”, I mean the way God wants us to respond. I mean the way Jesus responded. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be polite or even on the level with them. Jesus on many an occasion famously breached the line between civility and hostility with his tormentors, even getting called out for it by the assorted powers-that-be, but he didn’t dial it back. He didn’t allow them to silence him or even to lower his voice. Sometimes, when it’s called for, and with God’s approval and guidance, ya gotta let loose, ya gotta call a spade a spade, even while holding your own cards close to your chest. In this, as in everything, Jesus is our example.
The world is a spiritually hostile environment for born-again believers. We can’t sugar-coat that reality and we’re not meant to sugar-coat it. Even in the worldly church we have more enemies and frenemies than friends. Still, God protects us constantly and powerfully, which is part and parcel of being born-again. Everyone is under God’s protection to a certain extent, but we’re especially protected not only because we’re God’s children but because we need the extra protection while we’re still here on Earth. We’re constantly being targeted, and if it weren’t for God surrounding us like an impenetrable spiritual firewall, we wouldn’t survive a minute. Jesus could only survive as long as he did because God was so powerfully with him, protecting him like a 24-hour highly trained elite security detail that no-one and nothing could get past. We have the same security detail surrounding us, if we’re genuinely born again, because if we are genuinely born-again, we need the protection.
I’m sending out this guidance for born-again believers, not the general public or people in the worldly church who are not genuinely born-again. This is not and never was an evangelical outreach site. We, the prophesied remnant, are a set-aside people, a peculiar people – a spiritually targeted people – and we need to look out for each other. That’s what this blog aims to do.
We’re surrounded by people who hate us, mock us, smile to our faces and then tear us down behind our back. We are despised, misunderstood, loathed, pitied, shunned, and that by our frenemies. Our enemies just want us spiritually dead.
Don’t respond to them like the world responds. Love your enemies and frenemies even as you see them for what they are. Pray for the ones God guides you to pray for and bless the ones God guides to bless, but leave the rest alone. They’re not our business. Our whole business and full job description is “Do God’s Will”, like it was for Jesus during his ministry years.
As for those who are not born-again but still help us in ways God enables them to help us, they will be generously, generously blessed.
WHAT MAKES A SAINT A SAINT?
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 22, 2025 – I was on the Vatican’s website recently and noticed something odd: On the Home page, about halfway down, there’s a Parade of Popes in chronological order (according to their reign as the so-called Supreme Pontiff, successor of Peter). Each “float” in the parade shows a picture of a pope from the shoulders up. Some of the pictures have halos drawn around the heads, signifying that these popes have been “sainted” by the designated papal authority.
As we know (since we know God as our Father and so we know the Truth), all genuinely born-again believers are saints. We were saints from the instant that God’s Holy Spirit entered into us, making us both holy and saints at the same time. And we’ll remain holy saints for the rest of our days on Earth, unless we do something so spiritually nasty that God has no choice but to withdraw his Spirit from us forever (may none of us ever do that spiritually nasty thing, amen).
Catholic doctrine, on the other hand, holds that you can only be sainted after you’ve been dead for a while and it’s been proven via scrupulous investigation by the relevant Catholic authorities that you’ve been a conduit for certain supernatural occurrences (e.g., healings, bi-locations, stigmata, fulfilled prophecies, etc.). The only problem with this laborious verification process for sainthood is that people who are conduits for demons can also perform healings, bilocate, manifest stigmata, and make prophetic utterances that come true. The demons, needless to say, can easily fool Catholic authorities and have been doing so for centuries.
So, what makes a saint a saint? Is it: a) post-mortem after-the-fact evidence based on the witness of a worldly authority with a dubious track record, or b) the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in a regenerated soul? Obviously, I’m going with the second option. And while I don’t go around thinking of myself as a holy saint, I am one. I’m holy and I’m a saint, not based on anything I’ve done or anything a worldly authority has imputed to me – I’m holy and a saint purely by the presence of God’s Holy Spirit with me.
All genuinely born-again believers are holy saints, and there’s not one soul in God’s Kingdom on Earth (a.k.a. the Church) that’s not been sainted. In fact, sainthood and holiness are the prerequisites for membership in God’s Church, just as they are for entrance into God’s Kingdom in Heaven.
I haven’t drawn a halo around any of my pictures yet (maybe I should? lol) or manufactured any dishes or spoons with my saintly image on them. Still, even without a visible halo or trinkets, I’m a verified saint. All genuine born-again believers are.
Just ask God.
GOD’S WILL: JUST DO IT
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 20, 2025 – I wrote a few days ago about Jesus’ comment regarding God numbering all the hairs on our head. I mention this again (that God always knows precisely – to the strand – how many hairs are on our head) because we need to understand the absolute level of power and control God holds and exerts over all creation.
So, when people say “sh$t happens”, they’re wrong. When people refer to “luck”, they’re wrong. When people describe an event as “unforeseen”, “random”, “accidental”, or “serendipitous”, they’re wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. When people say: “He died way too young”, they’re wrong. There’s no such thing as “bad timing” or something happening when it shouldn’t, just as there’s no such thing as coincidence, not in the sense of something randomly happening at the same time as something else. As born-again believers, we need to wipe the notion of random events and occurrences from our minds (and vocabularies) because they’re false teachings that originate with the devil.
And yet, God being in control of everything doesn’t mean we don’t have free will. We do. Even people who’ve signed on with the devil through the various secret and not-so-secret societies and organizations that administer the world (with God’s permission) still have free will. They can forswear their oath to the devil if they choose, but there are severe (i.e., fatal) worldly consequences, which is why most of the “brethren” remain within those societies and organizations, even to the detriment of their soul. But the point is, even those self-condemning people have free will while they’re yet on Earth.
Again – God controls everything, which is why there’s no such thing as “luck”, either good or bad. If God wants you to win the lottery, you’ll win it. If he doesn’t want you to win it, you won’t, no matter how many times you play your “lucky numbers”. If God wants you to run into someone unexpectedly, you will; if he doesn’t want you to see that person at that particular time, you won’t see them, even if they walk right past you. God doesn’t make our choices for us, but he does try to steer them this way or that. He does try to influence our choices, even while ultimately letting us choose on our own using our own decision-making processes. That’s free will. We’re not automatons, but everything outside the realm of our free will is entirely under God’s control based on God’s perfect justice mitigated by God’s perfect mercy.
That God has complete and absolute control of our natural and artificial environments is the best situation we can hope for. Scripture tells us that God made the planets and the stars and set them on their courses, and that he also made all the non-human creatures on Earth and set them on their various courses while keeping in close contact with them. God talks to his creatures just as surely as he talks to us. Even the tiniest of insects know God on a one-to-one basis and gravitate towards him, loving him in their own way just as we love God in our own way. So if you think you that you just randomly got bitten by a mosquito, think again – God either sent that mosquito (by name!) to bite you or he permitted it to bite you for a specific reason. Nothing happens beyond our free will that isn’t either willed or permitted by God. Our free will he won’t touch, but everything else is fair game.
Knowing that God is in full control not only of our environment but of our every interaction within that environment is, for me, massive cause for celebration. There’s no-one else I’d rather have in that role than God, because whatever God wills or permits, he does it with an eye to our benefit. Everything God does, he does it with an eye to our benefit, though it might not always seem so at the time. That’s why we need to trust God and have faith in God and let his plan unfold in his time and his way, all while saying “Yes!” to whatever God asks of us.
Our time here is short, and when it ends, we’ll be glad we did those things that God asked of us, the way that Jesus did everything that was asked of him, even in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus says that those who choose to prosper in this world rather than to follow him into the next will ultimately lose everything of real value. They might gain wealth and prestige and immunity from prosecution for a time, but their reward will be that of the rich man who suffered eternal torments in Hell while the poor man (Lazarus) was rewarded with eternal comforts in Heaven.
Our time here is very short. Whatever God asks of you, do it. Do it unhesitatingly and to the best of your ability, allowing his power to flow through you. Don’t think about it, don’t overthink it, don’t try to understand it, and don’t try to explain it or justify it to anyone.
Just, whatever your Father asks of you, do it.
THE FAITH OF THE UNFLAPPABLE
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 18, 2025 – When Jesus says that God knows us so intimately, he even knows the number of hairs on our head, Jesus does in fact mean that God knows the actual number of hairs on our head. It wasn’t a figure of speech. God knows everything there is to know about us, and he knows it in real time, not as something written about in a report that he’ll skim through when he gets a minute. God knows everything about us, inside and out, here and now, and he also knows everything about us as we were and as we are yet to be.
If you genuinely grasp the magnitude of the miracle of God’s knowledge of us, then you’ll get what Jesus means when he says: “Where is your faith?” Because you’ll understand the pervasiveness of God’s presence with you, whether you’re awake or asleep, whether you’re aware of him or not. And in understanding that God is so pervasively with you and in you and all around you, you’ll have zero reason to be afraid or intimidated or even slightly worried about anything at any time. You’ll be totally unflappable, like Jesus was. In perpetually walking with God and talking with God (“pray without ceasing!”), and by consulting him on everything and following his lead, your only concern will be doing God’s will. That is your full job description – do God’s will. Everything in your life falls within it.
If God knows us so miraculously that he even knows the exact number of hairs on our head, then we can fully trust his absolute power. We can trust him in everything and all the time, regardless of what’s in front of us (especially regardless of what’s in front of us). When the boat was rocking and heaving in the storm, Jesus slept soundly. The disciples were terrified and rushed to wake Jesus, begging him to save them. But his only words upon waking and seeing their terrified faces were “Where is your faith?”, and then he calmly stilled the storm.
We’ve all had our moments of terror like the disciples, forgetting God’s miraculous reach, and in so doing revealing our lack of faith. There is not one instance in the gospels where Jesus displays so much as a minor degree of fear or intimidation. Even when his entire village is chasing him in a rage, vowing to stone him to death, Jesus calmly walks through the midst of them and escapes unscathed. How was he able to do that? The same way we’re able to do it: By consulting God in real time and doing precisely as God advises. In so doing, Jesus stayed deep within God’s miraculous reach and protection, a protection that we, as God’s children, also have but which we sometimes forget we have and so put ourselves under unnecessary stress and strain.
We have no reason to feel any stress or strain as children of God. If we’re stressed and strained, it’s an indicator that we’re not following God’s lead, which likely means that we’re not consulting God. Trials we’ll have, and tests galore (they’ll continue non-stop to our final breath, like with Jesus), but these situations are not meant to stress or strain us. They’re meant to teach us and guide us and in some cases deliver our due punishment. There’s no avoiding them and so we need to accept and endure them. But if we trust God and have the unflappable faith of Jesus (which is within our grasp as born-again believers), we’ll remain calm no matter what’s thrown at us.
Now here comes the part that’s likely going to ruffle a few feathers. Women, being more emotion-driven than men, have a more difficult time remaining calm and unflappable than men. I’m not making excuses here; just stating a fact. And because women are more emotion-driven than men, they’re more prone to experiencing stress and strain than men. They’re also more biased, more easily triggered, more easily offended, and more likely to react against the offense to their detriment.
Does this mean that women get a pass on remaining calm under pressure? Not at all. It just means that women, being emotionally hardwired differently than men, need to remember always and in every circumstance to put themselves fully into God’s hands, especially when they feel their emotions rise. If women put themselves fully into God’s hands, they won’t fall into the emotion-triggered traps set for them by the devil and permitted by God. Men, too, need to remember to put themselves fully into God’s hands, but women even more so, because of their emotions.
You can lay your feathers back down now, ladies. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
And speaking of feathers, God knows all of ours thoroughly, just like he knows all our hairs and what triggers us and what tickles us. There’s nothing about us that God doesn’t know, and yet he still loves us with a fervour and singlemindedness that we cannot fathom, being incapable of such love ourselves. And there, more than anything else, is the reason why we, too, can be unflappable like Jesus – because of God’s perfect love for us. He not only knows everything about us and is always with us, perfectly guiding and perfectly protecting us, he’s with us in love – he’s in love with us – and so wants only the best outcome for us, always and forever.
I’d be lying if I said I’ve achieved the faith and unflappableness of Jesus, but I’m aiming for it. I’m aiming for it knowing that God has made it well within my reach, as long as I do his will.
WHEN GOD BLINDS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 13, 2025 – We’ve all been blinded by God on occasion. He blinded me for the first 36 years of my life, when I suffered the same deserved blindness that Isaiah describes and Jesus quotes:
“By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and not perceive:
For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.” (Matthew 13:14-15)
If you’re genuinely born-again, you were also once blind. If you’re not genuinely born-again, you’re still blind.
God famously blinded Pharoah just before the exodus from Egypt. Scripture calls it a hardening of the heart, but it’s the same as spiritual blindness. The result is the same.
Sometimes God physically blinds people, like he blinded Paul on the road to Damascus or he blinded the men who were trying to sexually assault the angels at Lot’s house. And sometimes he unblinds people, like the ones Jesus healed.
So, God can make you spiritually or physically blind, and he can make you spiritually or physically see. Nothing is impossible for God.
Sometimes God will blind you spiritually as a form of protection, following the adage “what you don’t know, can’t hurt you”. Sometimes he’ll blind you as a form of punishment, and sometimes he’ll blind you because he needs you blind for his plans to proceed. This is the form of blindness that affected the disciples just before Jesus’ crucifixion, so they wouldn’t stop Judas Iscariot from betraying Jesus.
Even Jesus was blind to a certain measure and for a certain time. For instance, he knew what his mission was and he knew the intended outcome, but he didn’t know when it would start or end until God let him know. Jesus also said that no-one but God knows the timing of his second coming and of the end of the world. These things are hidden from us to thwart our spiritual enemies and to test us. If we knew the end was a long way off, we might slack off doing God’s will. Conversely, if we knew the end was coming soon, we might focus solely on that event and ignore everything else that God’s asking us to do.
I see this in the “Jesus is coming back soon!” cult that currently infests the worldly church. Nothing matters to these people except the presumption that they’ll soon escape all their troubles by being raptured to Heaven. Their whole witness is based on Jesus whisking them away to safety, but Jesus himself told us that he’ll come when he’s least expected. In other words, we’ll be spiritually blinded just before his second coming so that we won’t be expecting it. Because Jesus told us point-blank that he’ll come when no-one expects him to come, the “Jesus is coming back soon!” cult is clearly false.
God allows us to be blind if our life choices lead us to that state, and he also purposely blinds us whether as a form of punishment or protection or so that we won’t disrupt his plans. But he never maliciously blinds us. If he, for a time, physically or spiritually blinds us to further his agenda (like he did to the man who’d been blind from birth and who Jesus later healed in the temple to show God’s glory), he repays us multiple times over whatever we “lost” in being blinded.
Although we can see, we born-again believers still don’t have perfect spiritual vision. We have the measure of vision that God permits us, according to the measure of God’s Spirit that’s in us, which means that a certain measure of spiritual myopia is our unavoidable lot here on Earth. Paul likens it to seeing through a glass darkly, but he promises that we’ll all see clearly if and when we get to Heaven.
This is what I’m holding out for – perfection in Heaven. In the meantime, I don’t fight the blindness or curse the blindness or try to see more than God allows me to see, because I know that whatever God wills or permits, it ultimately works in my favor as long as I remain his child.
THE EVENTUALLY
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, April 9, 2025 – We’d been emergency evacuated from our train, and I found myself on a station platform surrounded by a press of noise and people in heavy winter clothing. The stench of diesel was nauseating. This wasn’t my stop. I was frantically trying to see if I had all my belongings with me, but the light was so dim, I couldn’t tell my luggage from other people’s luggage, and there were so many passengers thronging past me that I got caught up in their motion and had no choice but to hurry along with them. If I’d stood still, I would have been trampled.
Two men closed in on me to my left. One of them gestured that he wanted to help me with my suitcase, but I could tell that he just wanted to steal it. He leered at me and muttered something in a language I didn’t understand. I held onto my suitcase all the tighter.
As we hurried along, the platform turned into a narrow, paved pathway with high thick bushes on either side. Suddenly, the twilight plunged into darkness. It wasn’t a normal nightfall of gradually dimming light, but more like an eclipse. I could see nothing but a thin beam of light illuminating the path directly in front of me. I must have fallen far behind the other passengers because I couldn’t see them anymore, as if they’d disappeared. I couldn’t even see the bushes. All I could see was a thin strip of paved path.
The next thing I knew, it was morning and I was at another station, but this one was deserted. It was an old-style wood-framed building with gingerbread trim and a long portico supported by thin wooden pillars. The tracks in front of the station were covered in flowering weeds and obviously hadn’t been used for a while. As I stood in the cool of the morning under the portico’s shade, it occurred to me that I no longer had my suitcase with me, the one the man had tried to steal. It was gone. I looked up at the pathway behind the station, but I couldn’t see the suitcase. I thought maybe I should go back and look for it, but then I thought there was no guarantee I’d find it (or had even lost it there). Someone might already have nabbed it or someone might have taken it the next station. And if I did go back looking for it, I’d never catch up with my fellow passengers who were heading (or so I suspected) to the connecting train that we were all supposed to take after being evacuated from the earlier one.
As I stood there chasing ideas back and forth in my head, the trill of a bird cut through my thoughts. It so startled me, I felt like I’d just woken up. What a beautiful day! The air was fresh the way it only is after an early morning shower and everything sparkled with the last of the raindrops. I reckoned it was around 9:30 or 10:00. I had no idea where I was, but I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to backtrack and frantically search for my suitcase, and I didn’t want to rush forward to try to catch the next train. I just wanted to stand there in the quiet of the coolness and the sparkling of the beauty, hearing the bird sing. This is where I needed to be.
It wasn’t until later that I realized that the road leading to the next train station also led to the view I have from my house in Heaven, and that the missing suitcase was full of moldy old Bibles I hadn’t read in years.
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God wants us to be patient. It’s supposed to be one of our defining features – “the patience of saints” – but not all of us have quite yet earned that stripe. We’re to be patient the way Isaiah was when he walked barefoot and naked for three years, or patient like Ezekiel when he lay for 390 days on his one side, and another 40 days on his other. We’re to be patient like John the Baptist was when for all those years he lived in the desert and ate nothing but locusts and wild honey, or like Jesus, when he was ready to start his ministry at 12 years of age but had to wait another long 18.
We’re to be patient, and it’s not something we can do on our own. It’s a supernatural ability that comes from God, the same way our sainthood does. We can’t make ourselves patient any more than we can make ourselves saints. We can’t even pray for patience. We need to open ourselves to it and wait for it, and wait for it, and wait for it, and then – eventually – like a dream – it will come.
We have to be patient because God’s timing is perfect, and you can’t rush perfection.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 