Appointed!

Words mean things! Yes, I know, earth-shattering revelation, but there it is. This is doubly true for Scripture since we know that not one jot, not one tittle, not one period, comma, or exclamation mark is out of place, unwarranted, or insignificant. We either believe the Word of God is absolute, or we make up our own version of Scripture, believing only what we want to believe and blotting everything else out.

Suppose you choose to go the scrapbooking route when it comes to the Bible. In that case, there isn’t much I can do for you other than offer my sympathies, knowing you’ll be in for a rough slog when your self-published version of the good book runs out of answers, and those Joel Osteen style mantras you have highlighted fall short of giving you hope or peace. It’s kind of hard speaking abundance into being with an empty pantry or looking at yourself in the mirror talking about being bold as a lion when your face diaper is permanently attached.

Yes, I woke up in a mood and seeing that Pat Robertson hasn’t taken the hint and gone off to live out the rest of his days with a modicum of dignity just made it worse. Yes, the spiritual paragon who famously counseled a man whose wife had Alzheimer’s to leave her, because, you know, that’s what Jesus would do, is now offering unsolicited opinions about the elections, but I digress.

Back to the reason I started pecking at my keyboard in the first place.

Yesterday I was driving by a church, and as most churches do nowadays, it had one of those signs out front with a short quip. No, it wasn’t about Jesus being the reason for the season, or about Mary and her little baby boy; it simply said, “For the good of all, we are staying apart, together!”. Then it went on to give a link where you can watch a bored elder give a zoom talk at a predetermined time, but after I’d read the headline, the rest of the text seemed trivial if not outright irrelevant.

Although I fully understand that pastors reading their Bibles has fallen out of fashion, one would think that given the severity of the situation, they’d dust off the old leather-bound and try to find some direction therein. Other than deaths from the flu, which have magically dropped to zero, there is an across-the-board spike in everything else. From alcohol abuse to child abuse to spousal abuse, overdoses, suicides, and depression, the epidemic is real, and it’s not just the non-churchgoing folks either.

Humans were created to need human contact, and when you allow fear to dictate your actions vis-a-vis said contact, you are opening a Pandora’s box of pain you’ll never be able to close again. All because you were afraid of something you have absolutely no control over, to begin with.

If the people in charge of your spiritual wellbeing actually believed the book they profess to follow, they would understand that it is appointed unto men once to die! For those who slept through their English class, the definition of ‘appointed’ is a time or place decided on beforehand or predetermined.

The whole notion of dying before one’s time is lunacy because the time of one’s passing is appointed, therefore predetermined. Whether you wear one face diaper or six, you will not live a second past your appointed time.

You will not stand before the throne of judgment one day and watch God shaking His head and saying, “Oh, the plans I had for you, if only you hadn’t prematurely died of the sniffles.”

That goes to something else I’ve been chewing on lately: why would men who see their god as impotent serve an impotent god with abandon? It is because so many see God as less than what He is that they can live dispassionate lukewarm lives of duplicity and compromise.

Then again, what do I know? I’m not Pat Robertson.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr. 

The Stakes

 

We cheated fair and square, so shut up, sit down, and get over it. This seems to be the growing sentiment by many on both sides, including paragons of virtue such as Pierre Delecto, otherwise known as Mitt Romney, who never misses an opportunity to prove that being a backstabbing weasel is hereditary. If you don’t know the history of the Romney family, well, mayhap you should look into it before sanctimoniously declaring that if only we’d had a president with the demeanor of Mitt, we’d have gotten a lot more done, but I digress. Perhaps it’s because I’ve had to deal with betrayal in my life that I find the likes of Mitt Romney so off-putting, but this isn’t about that; this is about something bigger.

I’ve been mulling this entire drama over for the past few weeks, as surely everyone else has. Because everything that was done was so amateurish, because there seems to have been no illuminated brain trust planning the rigging of the presidential elections, I think the directive was simply to make sure every pion does their level best to tip the scales in one direction. Some took it too far, and it became apparent, but that’s beside the point. The entire thing was too haphazard to be organized in a central location, but what the power brokers giving the directives never figured into the equation were the stakes of this particular gambit.

You’d have to be naïve to think that this was the first time this has been attempted. It’s just the first time it was so egregious that even the normies couldn’t ignore it.

One need look no further than the state I currently reside in to see that it’s a well-worn playbook they used. In 2018, Scott Walker lost the Wisconsin gubernatorial election due to a 40,000 ballot dump in the middle of the night, you guessed it, in the same county, 130,000 votes for Senior Dementia magically appeared, also in the dead of night.

Even back then, when it was obvious, people shrugged their shoulders and decided they would keep their powder dry and live to fight another day. This time around, the stakes are much bigger than who’s the governor of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, or a handful of other states where shenanigans are baked into the cake. The stakes are no less than whether this nation continues as the constitutional republic it was founded as or becomes some grotesque imitation of a failed ideology known as Marxism. The stakes are whether lesser men will rule you, your children, and your grandchildren and whether freedom will be but a memory, something whispered and spoken of fondly, as something that once was.

So pardon me, Beth Moore, and every other pretend prophet exploiting lonely middle-aged women, but your hatred for a man has blinded you to where this train is headed. Or, perhaps it hasn’t blinded you at all, and you just think you’ll be in the dining car as it chugs along towards the cliff.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr. 

Precarious Perches

 It used to be that in more literal times, the actions of current day politicians aspiring to the highest office in the land would get them tried for treason or worse. When everyone you've ever met peddles your name like currency, getting jobs they never qualified for and money they never earned, and by the look of it, you get a taste of everything their grubby little hands can hold, we've got a serious problem. It's a problem because you hold public office, and rather than represent the people of your city, state, or nation, you are enriching yourself, your family, and your friends to the detriment of the average citizen.

It is a demonstrable fact that our politicians have sold us out, and while doing so, have made themselves exceedingly wealthy. People who would otherwise be hard-pressed to qualify for a janitor at the local greasy spoon live in mansions, ride in chauffeured limos, and spend the average mortgage on a dinner for two. If anyone dares to point out these things, the attack dogs in the media are quick to demand who you think you are in questioning public servants in such a manner.

Nothing will get fixed because everyone's on the take. The one guy who wasn't, the one guy who even donated his salary while in office, seems to be suffering the death of a thousand cuts, and even those once thought loyal are quick to unsheathe their long knives and take a swipe or two. They have political careers to protect, and in their minds, that's the only way to do it. They're not as yet understanding that the 80 odd million people who voted for this president are watching their actions and taking notes. They'll have a better chance to be the first astronaut on Mars than for them to be reelected by those they now condescend to and belittle.

The world is also watching, and those adversaries who've been sharpening their teeth on stones and biding their time are seeing an opportunity they wouldn't have dared to dream of manifesting itself. While we've been busy pandering to the mentally ill and going back and forth on which bathrooms to use, enemies great and small stayed hungry. None dared imagine that as a citizenry, we were self-destructive to the point of suicidal. None dared to dream that within the halls of power, this nation harbored individuals who hated both the nation and its founding to the point that they would rather see their children subjugated to Communism's shackles than continue as a Constitutional Republic.

Perhaps it's the hubris that's blinding people to the reality of what around the bend. We're like that aging boxer who's won a few bouts, stayed out of the game for a decade or so, and now want to mount a comeback to show the world we still have it only to get our clocks cleaned by the younger generation. You think you've got it well in hand until the first punch shatters your orbital bone. By the time the reality of the predicament you've placed yourself in takes hold, it's too late, and all you can do is wait for someone to ring the bell. In our case, however, there are no referees, there are no bell ringers, and even those who now pretend at friendship and alliances will be quick to take a swipe if they perceive weakness. With corrupt, dementia addled individuals bumbling about the levers of power, how could they not?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr. 

Fallout

What have you done? These were the four words that formed the question God asked Cain while still covered in his brother Abel's blood and gore. It's not as though God didn't know what Cain had done, but I dismiss the idea that the question was rhetorical in nature, offhand. God doesn't play word games, He doesn't do gotcha moments, so when the question was posed, I believe it had more to do with the full extent of the consequences of what Cain had done rather than the initial act itself.

Granted, it would be a while until Newton came along to put into words what most of us knew instinctually, namely that there is an equal and opposite reaction for every action. Nothing gets done in a vacuum. Nothing gets done without there being tertiary effects. A guy in a lab in the middle of China picked his nose after touching an infected bat, and a year and change later, here we are, forced to become mole people, living beneath the earth and squinting at the sun whenever we dare to step outdoors.

Just so we're clear, I'd sooner believe that the abominable snowman and bigfoot are real, are happily married, and whenever bored, get on their spaceship and abduct drunk people in Arizona to play operation on them, than the narrative being peddled wherein Joe Biden got more votes than any presidential candidate in United States electoral history. Sorry, not sorry, that's just where I am with this.

You know how some things just don't make sense? This is one of them. We've been told for the longest time that if something is too good to be true, it probably is. That every hiccup, error, and glitch, all favored one candidate without them being intentionally instigated, is just absurd on its face, but the other side doesn't care how they win as long as they win.

The goal is power; the goal is control; the goal is getting back on the teat of the government gravy train, which they were denied for four years. Every degenerate, every weasel, every immoral leech you wouldn't trust alone with your children is dusting off the ole' pinstripe and licking their lips. The dark days are over! The promised land awaits once more! But what that means for the average Joe, for the taxpaying rube funding the thousand-dollar plate dinners and first-class accommodations, is that they'll get to keep less of the money they earn and be told they're still not paying their fair share, by puss bags wearing silk Hermes ascots.

And this is where I wanted to get to this morning. As I watch this clown show unfolding day in and day out, I marvel at how little thought is given to the guaranteed fallout of what they are attempting to engineer. Let's be honest; they could have waited another four years and would have had a decent chance of winning the election outright if they found the right candidate. However, for various reasons I won't go into at this juncture, they couldn't afford to do it. And so, they opened up this Pandora's box, never thinking through the reality that whichever way this election swings, you will have at least half the country deem it as illegitimate and fraudulent.

It's been a tough year for most folks, and for many, the one thing they left had to cling to was the notion of one man, one vote. It was the idea that they were living in a country that would never lower itself to pulling Banana Republic shenanigans. It was beneath us as a nation, at least until this new crop of the power-mad came on the scene. Now, this too has been taken from them, and the dirty, disgusting, heinous, and monstrous underbelly of American politics has been exposed for all to see.

You have hard-working, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens feeling as though they no longer have a voice. They feel as though kids have no future, and the country they love, the country their parents, grandparents, sons, and daughters fought and often died for, is being undermined by individuals who despise its history as well as its current iteration. How long before those people get fed up, and once they do, what happens then?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.