Back in the Groove

After prolonged and overly invasive screening procedures, a couple blissfully uneventful flights, and a warm greeting from my brother Daniel and his wife upon exiting the customs area, we made it back Stateside safe and sound.

Traveling with a pregnant wife who has just entered her third trimester has its moments -  as any man who has traveled with a pregnant spouse can attest - but as I understand it it's par for the course, and will be just another happy memory on our path toward parenthood.

Thank you all for your notes of concern for not having posted in the past week. Yes, all is well, and Lord willing I will do my utmost to post more frequently in the coming weeks. Who'd have thought that nesting was so time consuming?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.

Poking Bears

Seeing as what has been unfolding in the Ukraine is a skip and a hop away from where our work in Romania is currently taking place, I’ve been keeping up with the developments, troop movements, and reactions to this entire drama.

In spite of all the stern warnings from pudgy politicians who’ve never seen a day of war, and the verbal tongue lashings from European and American officials alike about how inappropriate and politically incorrect this whole thing is, if Russia wants Crimea, Russia will have Crimea, then likely all of Ukraine and there is absolutely nothing save all-out war that will deter the Russians.

Having read my fair share of analysis on this topic, one point that every writer keeps making which is utterly wrong and has no basis in reality is that the Russian military is some weak, malnourished thing suffering from the rickets, barely breathing and in no mood for any sort of conflict.

To hear them tell the tale, the Russian army is comprised of fifteen pubescent teenagers with slingshots and blowguns.

‘No need to fear, their army is unmotivated, untrained, ill equipped, and a shadow of its former self,’ they say, even though all evidence points to the contrary.

This, I think is also the most important point of all the back and forth, because if indeed the Russian military complex is weak and emaciated, it would be in their best interest to attempt diplomacy. Try as our politicians might to spin it and say that the Russians are ready to sit down at the negotiating table and come to a peaceful resolution, there is no sign of this, and though some do not see the intent of these maneuvers, for those who have eyes to see they are very clear.

Before a conflict even begins, one must analyze a situation and ask the most fundamental of questions: which if any of the two parties has the stomach for a fight?

Simplistic as this might sound, it is also very telling in regards to the possibility or probability of negotiation, and of coming to a peaceful resolution.

From what I’m seeing, one of the parties involved not only has the stomach for a fight, but is relishing the idea of it, knowing that through the years while they’ve kept lean and hungry their enemies have grown soft, comfortable, and complacent.

In order to understand the true magnitude of what we are facing one must understand how the mind of one such as Vladimir Putin works. This is a cunning, disciplined, and forward thinking individual whose actions have purpose, and whose plans will remain cloaked and hidden until the last possible moment.

You cannot underestimate a man who’s been the head of the KGB, and has held the reins of power in a country like Russia for the better part of fourteen years. You don’t hold that kind of power in that kind of country if you are not ruthless, cutthroat, and extremely cunning. It just doesn’t happen!

The bear is awake, and poking it will just make it angry. It’s not as though God hasn’t warned, His people were just too busy to listen.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

Large Strides and Baby Steps

Everywhere you look it seems as though darkness is making strides. Actually, to be honest, it doesn’t seem it; darkness is making strides!

For the past couple of decades even those open to the notion of God revealing future events to His children were stuck in the ‘how could that possibly happen’ paradigm, because as long as they could not see with eyes of flesh how something such as the persecution of the saints could come about in a place like America, in their minds it was impossible.

If I cannot see the trees, then there is no forest.

Unfortunately for them, the trees and the forest alike were just over the hill called time, and because their view was obstructed by time itself, they refused to prepare until they crested the hill, and were nose to nose with the reality waiting patiently for them.

There are too many fronts to count, but one that is seemingly innocuous to most but quite relevant to those who cling to Christ and Christ alone, is the newly minted friendship and camaraderie between some of the most influential evangelical figures of our time, and the new pope. Yes, the selfsame pope that said one doesn’t necessarily need to believe in Jesus in order to go to heaven.

Soon we will begin to see a consistent and well organized push toward a one size fits all religion, one giant umbrella wherein everyone is safe from the corrosive raindrops of hatred and division, and where we can celebrate our similarities rather than focus on our differences.

As is always the case, and as we have seen over and over again, those opposed to this notion of a world religion will be labeled intolerant, hateful, bigoted, unity phobic, and branded as exclusionists who have no place in a civil society sprinting toward enlightenment.

When a handful of souls stand in the way of a universal utopia, for the sake of the many you must do away with the few.

For long and long I have warned that the words of Jesus were in no way exaggerated, inflated, or hyperbolic. When He spoke of the world hating us for His name’s sake, that is exactly what he meant, but because we’ve been reveling in the attention of the world for so long, it is hard for today’s church to fathom that it will soon be hated and loathed.

Because they cannot come to terms with the reality of Christ’s words, most ‘Christians’ today will do anything to be spared being hated, including betray the most fundamental of truths and clearest of commandments.

It is unfolding so quickly, the pieces are coming together so perfectly, yet the church continues its slumber, arguing over inanities and vilifying those who still care enough to speak the truth.

Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus!

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

Forever Entwined

Try as we may, as hard as we may, as often as we may to separate consequence from action, to pull apart the perpetually entwined notion of there always being consequences to every action we undertake, it is still an impossible task.

Admittedly, some have succeeded in deceiving themselves into believing that they’ve done what could never be done, and undertake actions without the constant fear of incurred consequences.

One can readily see this mindset everywhere, both in the church and without, both in regards to spiritual matters as well as purely physical ones.

Although we know it is a lie, we like to believe the guy who tells us we can have the car of our dreams with no money down, and no payments for fifteen years, even though we know eventually someone, somewhere, at some point down the line, will come to collect, and with interest.

Because it has been drilled into us that consequences no longer matter, we are witnessing one of the most self-destructive, quasi suicidal moments in human history, wherein rather than pull back on the reigns to slow down the speeding chariot, we whip at the horses with a gleam in our eye, making them hurtle ever faster toward the precipice.

As a society we have cast aside self-control, self-restraint, and self-discipline as some overly large burdensome garments, and are sprinting with abandon towards a very well built and immovable brick wall. We keep our heads down telling ourselves it aids us in being more aerodynamic, when in our heart of hearts we know it is just unwillingness to look up and see the brick wall.

We can pretend it’s not there, we can believe the fools who tell us it isn’t there, but the impact will dispel any of these childish notions, and all that will be left is the hurt and the pain of having run into a wall at full speed.

I fear impact is imminent, given that we have gone far beyond the point of no return.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

The Disquiet

It has been almost two weeks since it’s all I could do to keep from jumping out of my skin. Time in prayer seems to be the only thing that can alleviate the sense of foreboding I’ve been feeling, a disquiet that goes far beyond what the eye can see, or the skin can touch.

I can’t put my finger on it. I’ve prayed repeatedly for some discernment on the matter, some sort of elucidation or illumination, but all I’m getting is this sense of unease, this expectancy of something horrible beyond words around the corner.

The one thing I know is that it doesn’t have to do with me personally. It’s not something I’m feeling will happen to me, but something on a larger, more far reaching scale than one individual, or even one event.

Perhaps I’m the only one, but somehow I doubt it. If you’ve been feeling like this, if a sense of an impending something has been gnawing at you of late, let me know.

Like I said, the only thing that curbs the feeling is prayer. I’ve been doing a lot of it lately, and it has been good for me.

God is neither blind nor deaf. He sees, He hears, and He keeps immaculate records. If what I’ve been feeling is in fact the impending judgment of God, then it will be on such a scale as to stop the world in its tracks.  

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

Redefining Scripture

Some men consider the redefining of scripture as a harmless intellectual exercise and nothing more. They surmise that the mental gymnastics one must perform in order to make the Bible say something it clearly doesn’t, simply exercises the mind…sort of like doing crossword puzzles, or the word jumble in your Sunday paper.

There are stages to reinterpreting the word of God, and trying to make it say something it doesn’t, and the first of these is the ‘what if’ stage. The ‘what if’ stage is also known as the ‘hath God said’ stage, made popular by a serpent in a garden some millennia ago.

The devil is good at sniffing out inconsistency, he is good at sniffing out the flesh’s propensity to find the nonexistent middle of the road wherein it can do what it wants outside, and still enter in when the time comes.

If for an instant the enemy succeeds at pulling us away from the light, or convinces us to look back on the world and its baubles, the first thought that springs to mind is ‘hath God said?’

After the initial seed is planted, the mind begins to play the ‘what if’ game in earnest.

‘What if it was just contextually relevant to the traditions of the Jewish culture and the times they were living in? What if in interpreting the Book from the Hebrew and the Greek, they used a different word for sin? What if Jesus didn’t really mean that?’

Eventually, inevitably, given enough fuel and time to ponder, the mind will come to the question the flesh was attempting to have asked in the first place, ‘what if there really is no such thing as sin, and we’ve been too hard on ourselves all along?’

And this is where it gets tricky. The flesh being the flesh, begins to look not for a contrary viewpoint to its newly seized upon epiphany, but for validation of it. The flesh will never seek out someone who will tell it why it is wrong. It will always seek out those who will tell it why it is right.

We conclude certain things because we reject the notion of obedience and submission, then go about seeking ‘shepherds’ to validate the conclusions we came to due to our rebellion.

Some men just won’t accept the notion that Jesus meant what He said, so they take it upon themselves to soften the blow, dilute the content, and water down the message.

If anyone attempted to do this in real life, they would likely be charged criminally, prosecuted, and even sentenced. Just for a second imagine someone painting over a ‘Danger High Voltage’ sign, and writing, ‘may experience slight tingle if touched’. Or, if someone took the warning label from a bottle of drain cleaner, which clearly spells out that if ingested it may be fatal, and replacing it with, ‘may experience slight tummy ache if ingested’.

I realize this sounds silly, but it is exactly what men have been doing of late when it comes to the Bible’s warnings about sin and rebellion. The warnings are clear, but men have taken it upon themselves to either paint over the warnings, or attempt to minimize them somehow to the point of them being deemed as nothing more than mere suggestions not to partake, or participate, rather than the danger signs they really are.

Men can redefine Scripture to their heart’s content, but try as they might to convince Him, try as they might to convince themselves, God will not bend to the will of men, nor will He accept the newly minted definitions of His eternal Word.

All will stand before Him on that Day of Days, and many will be cast into the outer darkness, because rather than simply obeying and following after Him, they took it upon themselves to tell God what He ought to say, or what He should have meant.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.

The Real Us

To a greater or lesser degree, man is a narcissistic being. Couple our narcissism with the inflated sense of self we are encouraged to nurture and foster even by those who ought to lead us in the ways of the spiritual, and you have a highly volatile, extremely unstable combination.

On the one hand, our narcissism compels us to believe we are better than our forefathers, and that faced with the same decisions we would make better ones. On the other hand, our hubris whispers ever so coyly, that whatever we decide, it will be the best possible decision with the best possible outcome for that particular situation.

We refuse to believe that mankind is capable of repeating the barbarism of past generations, when everything around us is screaming that not only is this present generation capable of replicating the atrocities, it is likely capable of exceeding the violence, brutality, and cold blooded efficiency of those who came before.

Beneath the mask of civility and political correctness we’ve stapled to our faces, there is darkness, swirling and frothing, and when it boils over, we will belatedly realize that man does not change, and in and of himself is incapable of change. We are our fathers’ sons and our mothers’ daughters, and by rejecting the One who can truly change and transform us, we are merely embracing our base nature more tightly than before.

There are those who wave off what’s been happening in the world recently, and excuse it with patented responses like, ‘every generation that gets older thinks the younger generation’s worse.’ Perhaps, to a certain extent that holds true, but the frequency of a thing is just as telling as the reality of the thing itself.

Things that were once rare have now become commonplace, and things that were once fringe have now become mainstream. We can try to spin it however we want, and shift blame to one element or another, but truth remains truth, and the hyper accelerated decay of our present society is undeniable.

We want to believe that the default human instinct is goodness, kindness, charity, and civility. We want to believe that those who would do violence are the aberration rather than the norm, but ever since Cain attacked his brother and killed him out of petty jealousy, it has been proven time and again that goodness, nobility, and kindness are divine virtues rather than human traits.

It is the divine spark within, the selfsame spark this present generation is attempting to snuff out, that makes us noble, and kind. It is the presence of Christ and the transference of His nature to us that makes us good, and absent Him, absent Christ, absent God at the helm of our existence, it is inevitable that the world becomes more like its true self.

We are staring off into the distance, hoping to see the rainbows and butterflies so many preachers insist are just over the horizon, and all we are seeing is the darkness getting darker, and the storm clouds getting more ominous.

Even so, we still cling to the futile hope that our eyes are deceiving us, and that within the tumult of the storm there will be cotton candy clouds and gingerbread houses, because someone on television insisted it will be so.

We either see the world as it is or as we would like it to be. We either prepare for the worst possible scenario and hope for the best, or prepare for the best possible outcome only to be taken by surprise when the worst does occur.

I cannot tell you how to live your life. I can only tell you how He would have you live your life, and knowing that His intent is pure and true, and His desire is to be with Him in eternity I for one would take heed and obey.

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.