Guesstimate

 As with much of everything, there is a caste system when it comes to all things prophetic, spiritual, or otherwise supernatural. Notice I didn’t say Biblical because very little that goes on in the modern-day Western church is Biblical. There aren’t enough fireworks in Biblical living. We live in the age of entertainment, and there’s nothing entertaining about denying yourself.

One rung up from the internet prophets who troll social media hoping they get a bite are the guys who do crowd work. Granted, crowd work is limiting in that your potential victims have to be present and in the audience. But it’s also the best way to solidify an individual’s belief that you are communicating with the Almighty Himself.

Because the potential victims never bothered to learn the difference between a true prophet of God and the Amazing Kreskin, they believe someone guessing their zip code, or whether they’re troubled about something, is just as good as foretelling the birth of Christ 700 years before he was born.

Until he got caught, Peter Popoff had one doozie of a scam going. He’d get people attending his meetings to fill out prayer cards with their name, address, prayer need, ailment, and the such, collect them at the door, then his wife would transmit the information to him via an earpiece, and he would wow and dazzle the crowd by guessing their names, ages, and various other things.

Unlike Peter Popoff, there are some who do crowd work that are naturally gifted and don’t need earpieces to guess at certain things. Between body language, observation, intuition, telltale signs, and leading questions, they get close enough to the mark that people who don’t know better are left in awe of their ‘prophetic’ abilities.

Why yes, I do have a dog, and I do smoke cigarettes, and yes, I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. Dog hair on your coat, yellow teeth, fidgeting, cigarette smell on your hair, bags under your eyes! So prophetic, it’s scary.

Now, there’s a difference between that and stopping in the middle of a sermon, pointing out one woman in a crowd of twelve hundred, telling her it was time to quit and that she should pull the pack of smokes from her brazier and lay them at the altar. As Paul would say, I knew a man in Christ who did just that.

When it comes to crowd work, it’s not foolproof. Sometimes they get ahead of themselves and tell a brother and sister that it’s the Lord’s will that they become one flesh in His sight because they showed up at a meeting together. Still, people are hungry for the supernatural and are willing to overlook a lot of red flags and ignore that disquiet in their bellies. Even if they’re caught in a full-blown lie, if they’re quick enough on their feet, they’ll spin it and say it was symbolic, of the spiritual realm, beyond the understanding of those not gifted.  

Before the angry birds’ choir chimes in, notice I never said I do not believe in the work of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, revelation, or prophecy. The enemy wouldn’t be tirelessly counterfeiting something that didn’t exist, to begin with. That would make him a creator, not an imitator. It would no longer be counterfeit; it would just be a different thing.

You don’t potentially lead a Christian astray by introducing them to Scientology and calling it Christianity light. It would be like someone saying they’ve got a watch they want to sell you and producing a flashlight. You know, offhand, it’s not a watch.

As such, because we are warned of the wave of fakes and counterfeits attempting to deceive, if possible even the elect during the last days, we know that the real exists and has existed all along. Perhaps not as bombastic, flashy, boisterous, self-indulgent, spotlight-chasing, or attention-starved as the fake, but the real exists.

The real, however, is exclusive. There will always be more forgeries of something truly valuable than there will be of the authentic. Because the authentic has intrinsic value, it will always come at a higher price than the counterfeit, and it will be harder to find.

To be blunt, most people settle for a counterfeit because they don’t want to put in the effort or make the requisite sacrifices to attain the real. The authentic comes at a price that few are willing to pay, and because they are unwilling to pay it, they grow bitter toward anyone who is.

That we would call the Christian version of palm reading prophecy is in itself criminal. That we would follow the Christian version of palm readers simply because they tell us good things is spiritually suicidal.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Weary

There are good fakes, and there are bad fakes. If someone’s trying to pass off a Rolex as real, and the face reads Polex, you know there’s a good chance someone’s trying to play you. Those are the bottom feeders, the ones trying to get their come-up and use you to achieve it. They’re the ones that can’t afford to pay five bucks for a passable fake, so they spend a dime for Polex, hoping they find someone dumb enough to fall for it.

Suppose you were to compare those hustlers to what is deemed the prophetic eco-system of today. In that case, they’re comparable to the entry-level soothsayers you find on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other platform that gives them access to the gullible and easily fooled.

These are the ones that use the shotgun approach. They know they have an inferior product, so they’re trying to run the small con. We’re not talking millions here; we’re just talking pocket money until you can level up to bigger and better.

I’m sure you’ve seen some version of it; we all have. For me, at least, the biggest telltale sign is that whatever the message is, it’s always delivered in the King James vernacular. “I sayeth unto thee, my child, thou shalt prosper, surely thou shalt prosper if only thouest giveth heed to my anointed.”

Vague, general, ambiguous, uplifting, upbeat, hope-filled, you can do it sort of word that inevitably loops back around to the person giving the word, extolling their virtues somehow.

If the key to your prosperity and good fortune is to give heed to the anointed stranger messaging you out of nowhere, well, heed you shall give, indeed.

The conditionality of you being blessed, prospered, healed, or delivered, is always based on whether or not you give heed to the individual delivering the message. Never once are repentance or the will of God mentioned because, for their purposes, those things are irrelevant.

This is called setting the stage or baiting the hook. It hangs out in the interwebs until some gullible guppy swims along and starts to nibble.

It’s the modern-day version of the old Bobby Tilton play. And let me tell you, Bobby was a professional. He wasn’t selling Polex; he was selling fakes so good only a discerning eye could see that the movement on the second hand wasn’t quite right.

His shtick was also a shotgun approach but a highly specialized one. If you’ve ever bought television time, you know you can pick the hour when your program will air. What Bobby did, and this was brilliant, was incorporate both the time and what people were likely to be doing at that time in his prophetic utterances.

“I’m speaking to you, yes you, sitting in your Laz-Boy at two in the morning wondering what you should be doing with your life.” It didn’t all have to be right, just parts of it, because people are predisposed to cling to the positives and dismiss the negatives.

It may not have been a Laz-Boy; most people watching Bobby at that hour likely couldn’t afford the name brand, but it was two in the morning, which was good enough.

“Tell me what to do, Bob!” a certain percentage would be screaming at their television sets, “You’re right, it’s two in the morning, and I’m sitting here eating Cheetos. Tell me what to do.”

And Bob, as if by telekinesis, ends his pregnant pause and says, “Now I want you to go and pick up your phone and dial the number on your screen. You make a pledge, but not just any pledge; you make a pledge big enough that it will activate supernatural prosperity in your life.”

And you know how it goes from there.

I get that I sound cynical, but I’ve been around the good, the bad, and the incoherent since I was twelve, and I’m pushing fifty shortly. I’ve seen a lot in thirty-five years of ministry, and if not for the warning that false teachers, prophets, and even Christs would multiply the closer we get to the last chapter, I would have let sleeping dogs lie.

The fakes are getting better and deceiving many. The only way to keep from buying a fake is to know what the real is supposed to look like. As is the case with most things, you will find out that what you bought into was fake at the most inopportune time. It will fail you when you need it most. Consider this a public service on my part.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Counterfeit

 I owned a Rolex once for a minute, or at least I thought I did. Don’t judge me; I was sixteen and naïve.  I still believed that once in a blue moon, a deal too good to be true would come along that defied the odds. A deal that was the quintessential exception to the rules and was, in fact, true.

I can’t rightly say the neighborhood I grew up in was hell on earth, but it was as hell adjacent as you could get without changing zip codes. Everyone had a hustle. They needed to in order to survive. Government cheese was all well and good, but eat enough of it, and you get stopped up like the Hoover Dam, then no one can help you except for Ex-Lax, and that was some pricy chalky chocolate flavored remedy. How would I know what ex-lax tastes like? I ate a lot of hand-me-down government cheese when I first got here.

I understand that some people need visuals when talking about poverty. Just so it’s clear, when we first got to America, people on welfare looked down on us as the poor family in the apartment complex and, once in a while, brought us a brick or two of cheese.

Like with everything else, there were some, like my parents, who worked nonstop trying to get a foothold and provide for their family, then there were others who were content to show up for their food stamps and government cheese for as long as the government would have them.

My mom had two jobs, my dad had one where he put in as much overtime as he could, and my grandfather and I would walk the neighborhood collecting aluminum cans to take to the recycling center. Everyone did what they could; it’s what you do when survival is the objective.

Just so you know, you haven’t lived until you’ve dumpster-dived and landed on a homeless man who was already sleeping in the dumpster. Memories, indeed.

I got to America when I was nine. By the time I was sixteen, the hard times seemed a thing of the past. I’d worked my way to buying my first car, and as a side hustle, I was buying cars at auction, fixing them up, and selling them for a profit.

It was at one of these auctions that I got approached by a Vietnamese guy I’d seen bidding on cars a few times before, and he inquired as to whether or not I was interested in a watch. I was sixteen. That’s my only defense.

I should have known there was something off about him upon noticing that his neck had turned green from his supposed gold chain rubbing against it, but I had yet to sharpen my situational awareness skills. Those would come later and serve me well for years to come.

I asked what kind of watch, thinking he had a Timex or a Casio, maybe even a Citizen, but he smiles and says, “Rolex; only the best for you, my friend.”

I’d never seen a Rolex before and didn’t even know what they were supposed to look like, but I knew the name, and he seemed fidgety enough that I knew he was looking to make a deal, so I asked how much.

 “For you, one hundred,” he said. “It’s almost like for free.”

He pulled the watch out of his pocket and presented it, laying it on his other wrist, and I must say, it looked like a watch, with ROLEX written across the face. Even then, something told me I should probably pass, but a Rolex for a hundred bucks did seem like quite the deal.

I fished through my pocket and pulled out a twenty, two fives, and a ten, then went in again to find some lint and a gum wrapper.

“I only have forty cash,” I said, blushing.

“For you, my friend, today only, forty. Give me,” he said, beckoning for the cash.

If a hundred was a good deal, forty made me kind of feel like I’d robbed the man. I gave him the money, he gave me the watch, and I happily put it on my writs.

An hour later, after I’d left some bids for a couple of cars I thought were worth picking up, I was driving home when my wrist started to itch. It was the wrist with the watch. I unclasped it and pulled it off at a stoplight, only to see that my skin had turned green and was forming a rash in some places.

I felt silly, foolish, not angry precisely, perhaps a little mad at myself, surely not at Tang, because his job was to run a con and sell me something he likely paid two bucks for at a profit. My job was to walk away, say no, or figure out what a real Rolex should look like.

A lot of fraudsters are moving a lot of product today because the people they’re offloading the product to don’t know what the real thing is supposed to look like. It’s easy to pass a fake Rolex to someone who’s never seen a real one. It’s just as easy to pass fake gifts, revelations, prophecy, or manifestations to someone who has never encountered the true power of God.

More on this tomorrow. I think it needs to be fleshed out.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Father Abraham

 At some point, it must have dawned on Abraham that he’d overestimated the level of righteousness in Sodom. I’m curious to know the number. Was it when he was still in the forties or when he was scraping the single digits? Lot was still living there, and news of the depravity to which the Sodomites had descended had likely made its way to his ears, but surely it couldn’t be that bad. Perhaps someone was exaggerating, didn’t fully understand the cultural norms, or just had a run-in with the wrong kind of Sodomites. It couldn’t be as bad as all that, surely.

There are bad apples in every bunch; that’s a given, but for the entirety of the bunch to have gone bad was something Abraham wasn’t willing to concede. I don’t believe he started at a high number hoping to negotiate it lower. I believe Abraham thought there would be fifty righteous, certainly, and so established his baseline. He may have even undershot just to be safe. It’s a reasonable hypothesis, knowing how the human mind works. He may have thought there were a solid hundred righteous in Sodom, but just to be safe, he said fifty.

Once he got down to ten, the writing was on the wall, and he knew he’d been overly optimistic for whatever reason. Perhaps, at this point, he realized the presence of a righteous man in a community does not make those around him righteous by default. Maybe propitiation does not have a cascading effect, and the theory that all you need is one righteous in every city is a pipe dream. Wouldn’t it be something if the Bible was right after all and the soul that sins would die?

I believe the church is about to have its Abraham moment, and it will be difficult for some to come to terms with reality.

In the wake of this, there will be much finger-pointing, obfuscation, and shirking of responsibility. Painful as the truth might be, here it is: we did it to ourselves! By we, I mean the church; what we did requires more of an explanation.

The only thing that combats darkness is light. Being less dark than darkness doesn’t cut it, but we hoped it might. Because we prioritized our flesh over everything else, including righteousness, even if God Himself had spoken from the heavens and declared it to be so, we would still have found an excuse to be lukewarm. I’m speaking exclusively about the church, not about politicians or individuals running for office. It is your duty as a child of God to be light! Your duty as a child of God is to live a life worthy of the name Jesus, not capitulate to every wind and fleeting trend.

We expect the world to be righteous and make godly choices, while much of the church has rejected righteousness and is laser-focused on the things of this earth. How does that work, exactly?

Pastors are opening their sanctuaries up for drag queen story hour, but the godless are expected to vote in such a way as to promote decency and wholesomeness.

Men who’ve heard from God and have messages of substance for the church are rejected, while pastors the nation over are clambering over people who claim to be long-dead sons of former presidents and concoct such fanciful tales as to put Tom Clancy to shame. But still, we cling to the hope that this ship will turn before it hits the iceberg.

At this point, it’s doubtful Jesus would get past the primaries if the voter base were exclusively self-professing Christians. We know it’s Jesus, but we need someone more moderate. We’ve been going through His history, and did you know He actually told a woman to go and sin no more? That does not poll well with our under-forty demographic! Our Jesus is supposed to be about love, acceptance, and good vibes. Are we sure it’s the real Jesus? What’s all this about picking up crosses, anyhow?

This generation wants Christ without the cross. They want heaven without repentance. They want abundance, whatever the cost, even if the price is betraying Jesus. That’s the reality of it, without fluff or baseless optimism.

By all means, entreat God for mercy. Pick a number, and do as Abraham did, but don’t be surprised if, like Abraham, the number you thought would be a shoo-in far exceeds the righteous.

I just want you to be open to the possibility that it’s not so much the cheating that’s the culprit, and by no means am I saying cheating didn’t go on, but rather the darkened hearts of men. If that’s the case, then maybe we should be looking for the sifting and the shaking rather than the phoenix rising from the ashes. Perhaps we’ve been using the wrong metaphor all along, and we’re just a dog returning to its vomit or a pig contentedly rolling in its filth.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Pied Pipers

 I’ve been stewing over this for a couple of days now. I thought I could let it go, even filling my time with other things, but somehow I always land back on this thorny issue. It’s like a hangnail digging into my flesh. Either I address it, or it festers, so I might as well get it over with.

I respect consistency. Even if you’re wrong, if you’re consistently wrong, you’ve earned my grudging respect to a certain degree. Consistency or lack thereof reveals character, and character is the core of a man.

You can be loved, lauded, and praised by one and all. If you’re proven to be inconsistent, I grow weary and suspicious. Caveat emptor applies to teachers too. It’s your responsibility to inspect the goods before purchase! Likewise, it is your responsibility to consume spiritual succor before consuming it. Is it life, or is it death? Is it wholesome or some grotesque stew that you cannot identify the contents of but is aromatic enough to make it palatable?

Since even hot coffee needs a label informing people that it’s hot nowadays, allow me to preface my rant with the following:

1. If you have chosen to remove yourself entirely from the electoral process, I can respect that. Granted, you forfeit your right to complain about where the country’s headed, but consequences are called that for a reason.

2. If you think one man, any man, is the cure-all to this nation’s troubles, you’ve got some waiting to do. Maybe bring a book or five. I recommend brushing up on your Dostoevsky. Start with Crime and Punishment, and if you haven’t tried to crush your windpipe with it by the time you finish, go on to the Idiot, maybe finish it off with the Brothers Karamazov. Once you’ve gotten through those, there’s always Tolstoy.

3. At some point, perhaps when there are no more straws to grasp at and we’re just flailing aimlessly, we must come to terms with the reality that we have become a godless nation, and we must do our utmost to preserve those few pockets of decency that still remain.

Now on to my issue. Two years ago there was a well-known preacher, who, a few days before the presidential election, published a manifesto filled with hand-wringing hyper-spirituality, sanctimoniously informing the rest of us that since Jesus wasn’t on the ballot, he couldn’t in all good conscience vote. All well and good. The man is entitled to his opinion. Even when he is likely influencing thousands upon thousands of individuals who hang on to his every word, I’m assuming people aren’t lemmings and can make up their own minds.

Fast forward two years, and this selfsame individual who couldn’t bring himself to vote, is now posting pictures on Facebook with ‘I Voted’ stickers, reminding everyone how precious a privilege voting is. Well, hallelujah, apparently Jesus was on the ballot in his district, and he could now bring himself to vote.

It’s because of this sort of simplistic mindset that a godless minority is making decisions on our behalf. If you can’t see the difference between a party whose motto is “if we can’t kill your children in the womb, we’ll disfigure them when they’re toddlers” and one who insists that life is precious and should be defended, I don’t know what to tell you.

If you had to pick one, between Covid and Ebola, which would you pick? Sure, one may give you the sniffles, the other will kill you, and not in a nice, peaceful, auntie Jean died with a smile on her face sort of way.

Jesus wasn’t on the ballot, never has been, and if you’re looking for a righteous man to throw his hat into the ring, well, there’s that thing in the Book about none being righteous, no not one, and if that verse fits any demographic, it’s politicians.

What was on the ballot were things like Prop 3 in Michigan, which passed, and states that unless a baby can scurry away or physically defend itself, you can kill it.

Maybe, just maybe, if aging, sanctimonious, myopic, self-righteous blowhards would see the forest for the trees we’d have a shot at saving some innocent lives. But they won’t. They’re too set in their ways and think that their opinion is superior to everyone else’s. And so, a fractured church is ruled by godless hedonists who see no problem with looking down at a crying newborn, then severing its spine with a pair of lawn shears. God bless America, indeed. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Peace!

 During my first year of high school, I took Spanish as an elective. Between already speaking Romanian, a Latin-based language, and having spent a few years in a predominately Mexican neighborhood, I thought I’d have an easy time of it.

The wood shop teacher, a man named Mr. Knight, also doubled as the Spanish teacher, and on the first day of class, he gave a speech he’d either given a few times before or had rehearsed repeatedly.  

“A good handful of you are idiots,” he began. “Now, don’t be offended; if it doesn’t apply to you, just ignore that, but if it does, there isn’t much I can do for you. Some of you already know Messican, and some of you will never know Messican. Keep the noise to a minimum, learn to say ‘donde son mis Zapatos,’ and we should get along just fine.” He then sat behind his desk and started rifling through a copy of Auto Trader while using the index finger of his right hand to scavenge the contents of his nostrils. Who knows, maybe someone squirreled something in there while he was sleeping. What I do know is that though Mr. Knight might not have invented the pick-n-flick, he'd mastered it by the time I was in his class.

No, I’m not calling anyone an idiot, but there is a point to be made. If something I generalize about doesn’t apply to you, then it doesn’t apply to you. I didn’t say lactose or gluten intolerance aren’t real things; I said some people use them to seem unique or different and pretend to have them.

It happens more often than one would believe. A couple of years back, a young lady who ran in my wife’s circle must have told everyone she was going vegan at least a dozen times. It would have been easier just to get a shirt made. The first couple of times, someone would inevitably ask if it was vegetarian or vegan. If you don’t know the difference, in a nutshell, vegan is no poultry or dairy products, not just meat. So it’s a few rungs down the sadness ladder from simple vegetarian. Vegans can’t have milk, cheese, eggs, or any animal byproducts. They’re restricted to plant life and that mouth-watering tofu. Maybe tofu is shorthand for toe fungus. Think about it! You’re welcome.

Stacy was going all the way, the full monty, all gas, no breaks. “Vegan,” she’d answer when asked with a condescending smirk. “What’s the point of going vegetarian?”

Since I’d made no such declaration, a couple of months later, I walk into our local bar and grill for a burger. They have a version of the big mac but with real meat and no sesame seed on the bun that’s quite delightful.

The place doesn’t have the best lighting, so it takes a minute for one’s eyes to adjust, but as I scanned the bar, wouldn’t you know it, there’s Stacy holding a half-eaten hamburger, ready to go in for another bite.

She’d heard the door creak and turned her head just in time to see my smiling face.

“Vegan, I presume,” I said, then sat next to her.

She mumbled something I didn’t quite catch, although it likely wasn’t ‘it’s nice to see you,’ asked for her check, paid, and boogied without another word. Those are the kinds of people I was referring to.

With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, we return to our regularly scheduled program.

John 16:33, “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

The first reason Jesus took an inordinate amount of time warning his followers of coming persecution, tribulation, hardship, and travail was to keep them from stumbling. The second was that we might have peace.

But how can we have peace when in the preceding chapter, He talked about all the things we would have to suffer? Because He overcame the world, and if He overcame the world, you too can overcome it. The same power that resided in Christ resides in you, so be of good cheer. Rejoice in your tribulation, for it is but a breath while eternity is forever.

To think of it another way, if Christ foresaw the persecution and tribulation of His own, He also foresaw their deliverance. We have peace not because we will suffer but because we will overcome.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

These Feet

 I thought about skipping a couple of days just to make overactive imaginations jump to conclusions. Then I thought better of it. It wouldn’t have been a meanness issue; I just find humor in the oddest places. I think it stems from traveling with my grandfather for over a decade, back when I didn’t have a license, there were no cell phones, Uber didn’t exist, and traveler’s checks were still a thing.

Once you’ve been forgotten in an out-of-the-way motel and survived on gas station burritos for three days, waited in an airport for eight hours because the person supposedly picking you up thought it was next week, been told that since we’re trying to conserve water you’ll have to take a whore’s bath, you understand the need for humor. No, I didn’t translate that last one for my grandfather. It was late, I was tired, and I didn’t want to keep the lice waiting.

If you don’t know what a whore’s bath is, well, that’s what Google’s for. Make sure you use the apostrophe, though!

For the most part, the individuals who asked us to come to speak were good, salt of the earth, honest, hard-working brethren who did their best to host us, and we were appreciative of it. There were a handful, however, whom I thought were trying to punish us for having the audacity to shatter the illusion of everlasting American greatness. Why they’d bothered to invite us in the first place is still a mystery, but my sneaking suspicion was that their biggest tither dropped my grandfather’s name at a potluck, and they didn’t want to upset their golden goose.

Sometimes you receive the hospitality of the brethren, and sometimes you endure it.

If you travel long enough and meet enough people, you sense when you are wanted and when they’d rather leave you on the side of the road and not care if you made it back home or not. Jesus prepared His followers for those instances, too, so all you can do is shake the dust off your feet and hope someone takes mercy on an old man and a fat kid dressed up to look like they were going to a country funeral in Sicily. Don’t ask. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say, I was the only student sporting homemade pinstripe polyester slacks in my entire elementary school for three years running. Then I went on to Junior High.

John 16:1, “These things I have spoken to you that you should not be made to stumble.”

Those were words spoken by Jesus! It wasn’t Hamish who overheard Asher, who thought he heard Levi say that’s what Jesus said.

When Jesus forewarns His disciples that they will be hated, hunted, and hounded, He does so out of love and a deep desire to see them persevere through their trials. It’s one thing to have unrealized expectations; it’s quite another for reality to be diametrically opposed to them.

Jesus knew that there would be false prophets, false Christs, false teachers, and preachers, telling His disciples while in the midst of suffering that it wasn’t the will of God for them to suffer. Could you imagine? Being forced to flee your home, abandon your friends, and be hunted like wildlife, then Uri, with the gold tooth and rings on his fingers, comes along and says, “brother, this is not the will of the Lord for you! You were meant to prosper. Look at me, I finally unlocked the mystery within the mystery, and now I want to share it with you for fifty shekels. My friend, my friend, you can even pay in installments.”

Because Jesus forewarned them that suffering was inevitable, whenever the Uri types would come along and insist they weren’t meant to suffer, they’d remember what He’d said and were kept from stumbling.

It’s one thing to endure persecution; it’s quite another to endure persecution while a chorus of people insist you are doing it needlessly. If Christ had not anchored their expectations, if He had not foretold of what they would endure, how long before some would, indeed, be made to stumble?

The same applies to today. If someone, no matter who says something contrary to what Jesus said, cling to Jesus and keep walking. Don’t dwell, don’t dawdle, don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, or wonder if their intentions are pure. They said something Jesus didn’t say, or worse still, something contrary to what He said. That’s all the information you need to make your decision.  Keep on walking. Surefooted, determined, and purposeful, put one foot in front of the other, and keep walking toward your eternal reward.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.