Today, I fired up Logos, something I haven't done in a long time, but came to attention as part of my new installs on my MacBook. On its home screen, it displayed a graphic that I just re-inserted by hand the other day into this site as featured on this post: Do Not Shut the Heavens. As I re-read the words I write, my heart was broken: I recognized my 2022's mindset is...in the weeds...purposeless. I recognized my deep longing for relationship with my God. Somewhere, I've lost that vision of the infinite. I got caught up in the day-to-day and sought the folly of the fool. I did not walk with my Father. True are these lyrics:

And He walks with me And He talks with me And He tells me I am His own And the joy we share as we tarry there None other has ever known

In the Garden, C. Austin Miles (1913)

My eyes are out-of-focus. I have let the world's troubles dominate my mind. Oh, there are always things that distract us, things that grind our gears, things that make us shake our heads; all the generational entropy that John MacArthur references for which I quote him in that 2021 post.

To my credit (at my lunch table anyway), I have not once written the word for the cool kids global pandemic on my website, despite my blogging nearly everyday when the hype was at its greatest. Not that I Voldemort-ed it, I just recognized it for it was, so I defanged it. We have no fear of the REAL slasher in the room, that industry marketed monster fed by all of those foods in the center of the grocery! Fat butt disease seems benevolent as it cheerily hands over another tub of Blue Bell ice cream with one hand while his sickle takes the legs out from another. If I have no fear of heart disease or cancer, why should I run my mouse all up and down click-bait stories about a global pandemic in name only? No, all of this drips of political might over the will of the people. Ahh, the Republic.

For those chosen by God, we recognize that even Death has no mastery over us:

O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?

1 Corinthians 15:55, KVJ

Neither the iron-fisted state, the face masks of individual-destruction hegemony, nor the gods of Pfizer can restore us. It would be naive to think that is the objective, for they care little of our body, much less our soul! Most of life is folks running around saying, "Do what I say." And when folks don't get their way, because ultimately, the top dog on the hill is a finite resource, folks get red in the face and live lives of you owe me. They do not love God; they do not love their neighbor. Now, as to why we're drawn to this over and over again...perhaps its because we were all shoved out of the garden and have none to tend?

I am ever reminded how I was kicked off a treadmill in a gym in 2021. While locked in combat with the TRUE KILLER in the room, I was told by a Borg drone that "Resistance is futile." I was wearing a face mask like a diaper on my chin in a context where I was around NO one. And thus, I immediately hopped off my treadmill without not so much of a swipe down of the machine as I escaped that Borg assimilation. I haven't been back to ANY gym since! Don't tread on my treadmill! And later when I was denied entry to that outdoor 5K race, something I looked forward to for years as a pinnacle point of my fitness...well, I poured a glass of sharp lemonade and put another race in its place. My T-shirt design inspired by the Fallout 4 game...now THAT is what a pandemic looks like!

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Perhaps, I've watched WAY TOO MANY dystopian films, but it just never seemed like a pandemic to me. We haven't had population lost. We're 8 billion and counting now. We were 5.79 billion in 1996. It's just a matter of time before we spill out among the stars. No, all of that nonsense to me from 2020 just seemed like subtle commentary on the 2020 endemic of character anemia—stabbing fingers of rage in the backdrop of a good face wash of our own mortality. Forgotten was the one who stood in the mirror:

If they wanna make the world a better place,
Take a look at yourself and then make a change.

Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror

Instead of giving that ol' wag of the finger, I gotta be the one to change. I have a God-sized hole in my heart; even the entire world just ain't enough. "Sorry, Elon, you can keep that electric car, that thing that connects brains to computers, that hyperloop that'll revolutionize transportation, that Twitter nonsense, and as far as SpaceX—OK, so that rocket thing is pretty cool—I'll take THAT! But, I'm so gonna play the theme to DS9 in its lobby!"

No, no...as for me, 2023 will be the year of Psalm 34.

And the album for today? Skillet's Alien Youth. It came to me in 2001, as I realized the money, the career—all of those lovely entries so hopefully added to a LinkedIn profile, just don't matter...this song with its Bush sound, is what life is all about: The Thirst is Taking Over.