Singularity

 There is no my truth and your truth; there is only the truth. It is singular! When Jesus said He was the truth, He did not allow for multiple interpretations, avenues, or paths. This entire lunacy of my truth versus your truth was invented by Oprah and parroted by middle-aged divorcees who look like they’ve spent a bit too much time in an air fryer because they could not bring themselves to accept the truth.

I mean, extra crispy chicken is great and all, but does it translate to the human species? Just asking, but I digress.

The truth they refused to accept likely varied, whether having to do with their personal life choices, the reality of their undeniable mortality, or that women pastors weren’t a thing in the Bible. Something got under their skin, and rather than acknowledge it, they twisted themselves into pretzels until, in their minds, it made perfect sense. Everyone else is making it up as they go along; why couldn’t they?

If I don’t like the reality of something, I just deny it, and when people give me sideways glances for insisting that water isn’t wet or the sun isn’t hot, I tell them it’s my truth, and they can go pound sand.

It’s no longer morbid obesity; it’s body positivity! Don’t get me wrong; I’m a husky, even Rubenesque fellow myself. However, all things being equal, when you’re pushing a ton and riding a mobility scooter because your legs can’t hold up your weight anymore, I’m pretty positive your body will give out sooner rather than later.

I know, I know, that’s just being mean and hateful. Why can’t you just feed into their delusion and nod along? What harm can it do?

Well, you have grown men putting on dresses and talking about how they’re going to be mommies and have babies, but hey, that’s their truth, isn’t it? The truth is you’re still a man under the dress and eyeliner, and when your doctor told you you have testicular cancer, ma’am, he wasn’t trying to deny your truth; he was just telling you the truth! See the difference?

For fear of offending, or perhaps because it was just easier to placate specific individuals, we’ve been feeding into the psychosis of the unwell for the better part of a decade, all the while telling ourselves that’s what Jesus would do as well. Would He, though? I wonder. I don’t mean to be so brazen as to presume to know the mind of Christ, but He’s been known to be firm, direct, and unyielding while also being loving.

Love as He may, He can’t cure you if you’re unwilling to part with the thing that’s making you sick. It’s like guys crying about needing a liver transplant but reluctant to give up the booze. How does that work exactly? Well, their truth is that it isn’t the booze that’s killing their liver; it was a birth defect.

We’ll get to the Scripture passages and the exegesis thereof in short order, but as I said, this is not a topic to be hammered out in a few minutes on a windy morning. We’re just setting the table. The food is on its way. If you’re hungry, you’ll stick around. If not, this isn’t the Hotel California.

I’ll keep hammering until you cry, uncle. You poke the bear in the eye and act shocked when he bites off your finger? I know, in your truth, bears are cuddly and docile, almost like oversized pets.

Like my mom used to say when she insisted on popping pimples on my forehead or massaging my big toe in the throes of a gout attack, it’s for your good, you’ll see. 

With love in Christ, 

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Harmony

 You thought I was done? Not by a country mile. If we’re going to hash this out, then let’s get to it because my wife has plans for my life for the next few days, with it starting to get cold and me not having put away all the summer things like tables and chairs and bird feeders.

There will never be a discordant note between the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, or the written Word of God. Let me establish that outright, get it over with, pop some bubbles, crush some hopes, and eliminate some confusion, accidental or otherwise.

There will always be perfect harmony between what you find written in the Scriptures and what the Holy Spirit speaks to your heart. The Word will never disagree with the Father, the Father will never disagree with the Son, nor will the Holy Spirit disagree with any of the aforementioned.

If contradiction does exist, perhaps the spirit speaking is not the Holy Spirit because the Word is the Word; it is established and foundational. If you have to decide who’s in the wrong between you, your feelings, your thoughts, your ideas, or preconceived notions, and the Word of God, it’s you, always, every time, no exemptions, period.

I know, I typed out ‘feelings’ as though they mattered when it comes to the Word and will of God, and yes, I did throw up in my mouth just a little bit, but I’m a trooper; I swallowed it down and just kept right on typing.

You don’t get a say in how God runs the show. You don’t get to voice an opinion as to whether or not you think He could have done things differently, better, or otherwise. He is God! He is the creator; you are His creation. Are you loved? Most assuredly. Will God deny His nature to placate your feelings? No!

This should be clear enough, but some of the things I’ve been seeing and reading lately from presumably mature believers make me question my previous assumption.

The evidence that the world has leached its way into the church is undeniably self-evident, going so far as to affect the mindset of believers. God is not suggesting that you consecrate yourself and be holy because He is holy; he commands it!

You are either in obedience or rebellion. You are either a good and faithful servant or one who does the bidding of another master, a different god, one of your own makings who whispers in your ear and speaks of things found nowhere in the canon of scripture.

This is how we get unicorn dust, oily hands, unfettered shaking, and maniacal laughter. This is how truth is fallen in the street, how scoffers have multiplied, and how shame has been brought to the people of God time and again. This is how the wolves devour the sheep while the sheep are defending the wolves from the shepherds who would see them live.

My wife says I’m getting more curmudgeonly the older I get. Perhaps it is so. She knows me well enough to gauge it, but we’re running out of time, kids. Things are about to turn fifty shades of terrifying, and there’s only so much the human mind can take before it snaps if the entire foundation upon which its psyche rests is that they’d be long gone before any of it happened.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Gold Diggers

 I was going to title this article angry birds but thought better of it. That I would have been accused of misogyny is a foregone conclusion because someone, likely a Beth Moore fan, would have inevitably interpreted birds to mean women, then would have put words in my mouth insisting that what I meant to say was broads or dames, as though we were in some thirties black and white movie replete with fedoras and hoop skirts.

It is a dangerous thing to analogize scripture. We were told that His ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts, but rather than submit, obey, and follow, we’ve decided to ignore all that and whittle God down to our level of thinking.

We have become so brazen in our rebellion, so shameless in our conceit, so infuriatingly obnoxious in our own esteem, that though God explicitly says something irrefutable in His word, we roll our eyes and declare, my god would never do that!

Indeed, perhaps, your god might not, but the God of the Bible would because He has, said He would again, and He is not known for lying or obfuscating.

I don’t care who you are; you can’t use an analogy to rebuff scripture. It’s like going to your doctor, being told you have stage four cancer, then getting irate because an apple a day should have kept him away. Yet, here you are, and you’re getting devastating news.

When your doctor suggests chemo, you leave in a huff, telling him you’re just going to start eating two apples per day, which should fix everything.

Who’d have thought that my waking up a few minutes early yesterday and scribbling a few lines would ignite furor in folks the likes of which has not been seen since they found out the wrestling on television wasn’t real?

To clarify, because words, even simple, straightforward words such as mine, can be misconstrued, allow me to state the following:

1. No, you are not more special than the Apostles of old or the countless martyrs who died for the cause of Christ throughout the millennia in that you deserve an exemption from the axiom that all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.

2. Just because you stomp your feet and pitch a fit, it will not make God change His mind when it comes to being presented with a bride that is both without spot or wrinkle.

3. The people whose lives of excess you financed in return for telling you comforting lies will be nowhere to be found when you start living through the events they insisted you would never have to live through.

I know this may sound harsh, but the modern-day church is not a bride, resplendent in her finest attire, holy and pure, anxiously awaiting the object of her love and affection. The modern-day church is more akin to a gold digger who only sticks around because she’s playing an angle and thinks there’s some profit for her on the back end.

There is no faithfulness, no tenderness, no purity of devotion, just a means to an end, in this case, the end being an escape shuttle with the words heaven-bound spray painted on the side and some empty spinach cans hung on a string dragging behind.

What’s love got to do with it? We just want out and will raise to the heavens any man shameless enough to feed into our confirmation bias. I mean, sure, Jesus hung on a cross, but that was a while ago. What have You done for me lately? I raise my hand in church and even repeat, ‘this is my Bible’ before service if I’m not busy scrolling through Instagram. Surely that deserves a VIP pass to glory, bypassing all that persecution and tribulation stuff.

No, I’m not trying to convince anyone about anything. I’m just preemptively eliminating the excuse that no one loved you enough to tell you the truth from your future repertoire.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Distractions

 We missed the rapture again. What is that, the fiftieth time? I gave it a few days just in case Jesus decided to hit the snooze button once or twice, but there are only so many excuses you can make for someone not arriving on time before you are forced to concede that maybe you got the wrong day.

I know, it’s possible He decided to come in a Tesla and forgot to charge the darn thing the night before, so maybe, who knows, today’s the day, and finally, the prognosticators of when Christ will return will be right at last. Eventually, they will, you know. Sure they would have missed it a thousand times by then, but at long last, they will have been right.

What about all the other times they were wrong? Well, we just won’t count those. Never mind all the people that sold all their worldly possessions and stood on a hill in the middle of nowhere waiting to be caught up. Never mind those who only budgeted until 2017 and now have to work into their late eighties to afford a crust of bread and a roof over their heads.

By the time the rapture takes place, even thieves won’t be what they used to be. Rather than sneak in in the middle of the night - if we are to take the analogy to its fitting conclusion and concede that there will be those who can pinpoint the day and hour of Christ’s return – the aforementioned thieves will send a text or a tweet informing you of their intent before they break in.

Jesus may come as a thief in the night, but nowadays, we have floodlights, ring cameras, motion detectors, and high-definition infrared lenses. No, sir, we aren’t going to get caught unaware if we can help it. We’ll detect His heat signature before He comes riding on the clouds and even have some milk and cookies ready just in case He’s up for a snack.

Perhaps because some people believed Joyce Meyer and her ilk when they insisted they were little gods, they feel the scripture explicitly stating that no man knows the day or hour doesn’t apply to them.

That whole thing about the timing of Christ’s return remaining a mystery is for the rubes, the peons, and the little people. Little gods get a free decoder ring with each donation to the mansion fund or the jet fund, and so they know more than those who are merely working out their salvation with fear and trembling.

I get it, though. For those who have cemented themselves into a specific eschatological position because they read the left behind series, the closer we get to all-out nuclear war, the less likely their position will hold. If I were holding out for a pre-tribulation rapture, I know I’d be somewhat verklempt right about now.

And so, rather than allow for the possibility that we will likely see truly horrid things before Christ returns, we run to and fro, giving credence to anyone who spits out a date, the closer, the better, then deflate like a punctured balloon each time the date comes and goes, and nothing happens except for getting the electric bill in the mail.

Knowing that it will be misconstrued, may your friendly neighborhood realist offer some advice? If you focus more on the being ready part than on the when part, the when part won’t matter in the least. Distractions serve to fuel procrastination, and procrastination will lead to you having to scramble for some oil because your lamp is fluttering, and you’re all out of reserves.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Curiosities

 It doesn’t say much for one’s confidence level if they go out and buy bandages, splints, painkillers, ice packs, and neck braces before picking a fight. Even if they happened to be delusional, overestimating both their skill and endurance, taking preemptive measures for the worst-case scenario would seem a curious thing.

The only logical conclusion one is apt to come to, seeing as you’re stocking up on medical supplies while seemingly in good health, is that first, you’re planning on getting into a tussle, and second, you’re thinking you’re not going to come out of it unscathed.

If recent reports are to be believed, and let’s face it, given the level of propaganda, taking everything with a grain of salt is a must, the US government has been stocking up on potassium iodide pills. For those who don’t know or are wholly unaware, potassium iodide pills are taken to help protect human beings from the effects of radiation.

Incompetent and wholly useless as this administration has proven itself to be, it’s worth noting that of all the things they could be focusing on, they chose to focus on the acquisition of potassium iodide. Couple that with the state of New York doing PSAs warning its citizens that in case of a nuclear attack, they should stay in their homes and put tin foil on their windows, and it may lead one to conclude that perhaps we are not as safe as some delude themselves into believing.  

Some still fail to grasp that we are no longer in the warning stages. The warning stages have come and gone, and we’ve graduated to fulfillment. Though many have warned that the storm was coming, few believed them because the sun was shining and birds were chirping. The present was all that mattered.

Life was too good to be weighed down by thoughts of what would be, and during those rare times when the warnings penetrated our slumber, there was always a snooze button close at hand and someone to insist that we wouldn’t be here for any of that anyway.

Ignore it, and it will go away. That was the church’s motto for the last few decades, and although that might work for a bruised shin, it doesn’t translate to other things. The one thing we could have done we chose not to do because the notion of repentance fell out of favor, only to be replaced by worldliness and compromise.

For fear of being labeled legalists, entire denominations forbade the word sin from being uttered in the pulpit. So, the truth became a subjective matter, something to be twisted and contorted to the point that it became unrecognizable. Getting stabbed in the back by overzealous lickspittles became just as likely as getting stabbed in the face by the enemy, and those willing to point to the atrocity taking place and calling it by name grew fewer and fewer still.

What does any of this have to do with potassium iodide tablets? Had we humbled ourselves, had we turned from our wicked ways, had we repented and sought the face of God, we wouldn’t need to be buying them. Sort of my path not taken morning musing.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.  

Evil is Evil!

 It comes as neither shock nor surprise when the godless call evil good and good evil. It’s their natural state, devoid of morality or a sense of virtue. Light is dark, up is down, bitter is sweet, and though the cognitive dissonance is off the charts, aided by pharmaceuticals and no small amount of stiff drink, they manage to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and live with themselves without projectile vomiting the previous night’s dinner.

It takes a special kind of twisted logic to want to save the whales, the pandas, and the planet but kill the babies, all in the same breath. We want to save everything around us but leave no future generations of humans to enjoy that which God has created. That beating heart inside you must cease to exist for no other reason than it would impede attending spin class every other day.

The zealotry of those who would end the life of a helpless baby as they are being born is akin to the Jonestown residents who slurped up cup fulls of Kool-Aid proceeding to their eternal torment without so much as an objection or realization that it would be impossible to undo it once it was done.

What is beyond my ability to reason, however, is people calling themselves Christians, pastors of churches, and clergy from various denominations, insisting that being pro-life is a demonic agenda and furthermore, that God Himself is pro-choice. In case you’ve yet to be brought up to speed, pro-choice is a term often used to denote baby murder, but without the emotional impact of calling it what it is. It would be like saying someone with third-degree burns across their entire body caught a little too much sun, or a head-on collision with a semi at 70 miles per hour was a fender bender.

All platitudes aside, abortion ends a human life, regardless of the trimester it’s performed in. This is a fact! It’s not opinion; it’s not just something the ladies in church bonnets say; it is a scientific fact!

That you would have individuals purporting to be ambassadors of Christ insist that it’s nothing more than a procedure, a choice, some nuisance to be done away with just because you feel like it that day is not just immoral; it is evil.

We have come full circle. Those who have crept into the household of faith are now insisting that God, the giver of life, revels in the ending thereof, and if you stand for the innocent, you are the monster, you are the ghoul, you are the heartless, hollowed-out skin suit in which there is no decency or goodness.

I’m sure the ‘love everyone’ choir is warming up in the background with the ‘it’s just a difference of opinion’ quartet as backup, but the Word is clear as to what becomes of those who strengthen the wicked and dishearten the righteous with lies. May their judgment be swift that all may gaze upon them with righteous fear.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

More Than Words

 When one hears discussions about preferred pronouns or which of the myriad of genders one identifies with, the first and often uncontrollable reaction is to snicker, chortle, laugh, roll your eyes, wave your hands, and shake your head.

It’s absurd, ridiculous, worthy of endless mockery and disdain. It’s what pampered people do when they don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or whether they’ll survive the night. I’ve often said that privation and scarcity will cure stupid for the most part, and though some might shrink away at the thought of bread lines, gas lines, ketchup soup, and mayonnaise sandwiches, the curative effects it will have on society at large makes it almost worth it.

My mind being what it is, as of late, I’ve been exploring a particular rabbit trail and wondering if there is something more sinister behind the push to do away with words like mother and father than just a hissy fit from a middle-aged obese woman with half a shaved head who smells like spoiled bologna. I know, I know, words like mom and dad are ancient, and so they must go. So is the wheel; want to do away with that too?

There has never been a generation in the history of humanity that has strived time and again to fix something that wasn’t broken, to begin with. The ideal of family, you know, mom, dad, daughter, son, grandma, grandpa, and aunt Judie who makes the fruit cake nobody eats on Christmas every year, has worked for millennia, but who cares about all that?

Proof of concept is so yesteryear; am I right? Let’s burn everything to the ground and have simpletons with no practical life skills build it back together again with nothing more than duct tape and rainbow flags.

So why the big push to get rid of mom and dad? The darker side of me tends to think that it has a lot to do with doing away with emotional attachment. It sets up what they envision as their utopia quite nicely if you don’t have to worry about pesky things like God, family, or patriotism.

Just think about it: it’s one thing to say I’m here to kill my mom because she’s becoming a burden. Quite another to say I’m here to schedule a procedure to euthanize my birthing person because she consumes more than she contributes to the collective.

I know, that’s a bridge too far, you’re thinking to yourself. Then again, the thought of being called homophobic because you refuse to let sexual deviants groom your children or let your toddler sit on the lap of a perverted man in a dress seemed like a bridge too far mere months ago too.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.