You'll find it in the veil of night where solitude is born
In the emptiness of broken flesh,
at the mercy of the thorns

These Demon Hunter lyrics enchant me. Who am I when I am weak, not hidden with a puffed-up chest? Who am I when a challenge is before me and I no longer have a mask for the mirror? Yes, who am I when I'm low. Indeed, I am at my greatest strength when I am humbled, for everything else is just a set piece for the stage.

I am ending my relationship with Supernatural, the VR fitness app on my Meta Quest 2 with a $20/m subscription fee. I can only tolerate so much from an organization actively promoting sin. I'll quote the same passage that Phil Robertson cited on homosexuality that got him suspended from Duck Dynasty by A&E:

Don't you know that the unrighteous will not inherit God's kingdom? Do not be deceived: No sexually immoral people, idolaters, adulterers, or anyone practicing homosexuality, no thieves, greedy people, drunkards, verbally abusive people, or swindlers will inherit God’s kingdom.

1 Corinthians 6:9-10, HCSB

(And yes, that's from the same 1 Corinthians that features chapter 13's famous passage on love that makes its way into wedding ceremonies.)

The thing is, yeah, I've lusted; I've seen money as a god; I've been greedy; I've been drunk; and I've said hurtful things, however, the difference is, I have been broken by it, I have repented to my beautiful Lord. In my shame and sadness of hurting this relationship with God, I've read through David's Psalm 51. Through this life-long process of sanctification, I'm heartbroken over my sin and my Father embraces me.

The passage continues:

And some of you used to be like this. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

1 Corinthians 6:11, HCSB

I am reminded by Todd Agnew's Still Here Waiting:

I fail to see
Why You'd still be waiting to forgive me
After all that I have done
But I cannot say
That one time I returned and You had turned away
Your love never fails

Sin is not something to find PRIDE! It's not something to parade about and put on a false face with a smile carved into it! As Jesus said concerning sin, "A thief comes only to steal and to kill and to destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance" (John 10:10, HCSB). That's the thing, we think that sin is our delight, but in the end, it leads to death (with heartache in its wake). Satan is not creative; he only twists the good things of God. Jesus gives us a life of value, a life of adventure. Today.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

C.S. Lewis

So, Supernatural has been uninstalled. It should have just been a fun little fitness app. Nevertheless, the frog has long been cooked from a slow boil.

In another move, I closed my Spotify account. The playlists it suggests to me actually amuse me: a Norwegian company promoting hip hop and rap to me is just...well, like Jackie Chan conversing in a Chris Tucker pool hall. And frankly, Spotify's heuristics are questionable. I literally listen to Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; and The Hobbit scores! *sigh* It's all so...fake. Indeed, the world is like an ignorant child sitting in the mud. And maybe that's the thing, people try to adopt an identity of strength, but we are all broken. And when we find our identity in sin, we sit alone in a fog of hopelessness.

By contrast, here is a conversation held a month ago by two men of God who, along with the late R.C. Sproul, have influenced me the most in my life: John Piper during my time out of college and years thereafter and John MacArthur, in more recent years, my favorite preacher. The discussion recounts their own lifelong pursuit of God in their respective ministerial roles and application today:

YouTube Link

I continue to waft between an exclusive Mac ecosystem and hybrid utility involving Google. I haven't even begun to make the move, but I know it's coming. The ads are too many. The walled-off data are too much. I won't belabor the point here. It's challenging that developers design sites specifically for Chrome—I was looking to try out a course on Udemy but the video preview's audio apparently was not compatible. And again, if I leave Google, I have to do flips to make my phone functional and I don't even know if apps get updated when I do. And then there's my Chinese e-reader, Onyx, a device that will play a prominent role in 2023, that runs on Android.

I miss the time when a website was just a website. They had no control over our lives. They sure didn't run that beeper and later my Nokia. Even the mind-numbing amount of login credentials is abysmal. The most novel login/password system I've seen is from ImprovMX, the service I now use to forward my INTJBill.com emails since I've closed my Tutanota account. To login, they just send an email to the forwarding address. That simple. There's no password to hack because there's no password.