There's No Vaccination Against Vaccines.

by Nina Silver, Ph.D. The Politics of Illness and the Nature of Health, The Handbook of Rife Frequency Healing, 2001.

...in case it is assumed that the "side" effects of drugs occur only during illness, keep in mind that an entire group of drugs is given only when people are well: vaccines. 

As a matter of fact, the medical community’s official position is that vaccinations are only supposed to be given to people who are presumed healthy. This is for a very good reason: the immune function of people who are ill is already too weak to handle the effects that the vaccines are designed to produce. Nonetheless, most doctors ignore this wisdom and routinely vaccinate everybody whether they are healthy or sick. However, no one should be vaccinated, given the current processing methods and materials used to produce the vaccines.

Although mainstream medicine claims that vaccinations are necessary to eradicate disease, there are three major rebuttals to this argument that vaccination proponents never discuss.

First, history shows us that serious diseases decreased with the advent of indoor plumbing and improved sanitation, better protection from the elements (including more adequate clothing), and cleaner food handling and storage. 

Second, the Center for Disease Control (formerly the U.S. Public Health Service) has been shown to manipulate statistics by changing the name of the disease and thus disguising the number of inoculation-related outbreaks. In a 1994 edition of the Townsend Letter for Doctors, nutritional biochemist and physiologist A. Van Beveren writes that because "in nearly every state where the Salk vaccine was administered the polio rate leaped by 400-600%," what was then the Public Health Service responded by issuing "new guidelines for the diagnosis of the disease."

...From statistics we note that polio ceased to be a big problem almost immediately [after inoculation] but that suddenly aseptic or viral meningitis (sometimes spinal meningitis or multiple sclerosis) were seen in epidemic proportions in approximately the same number that polio was diagnosed in prior years...In Archives of Pediatrics (1950), Dr. Ralph Scoby lists not less that 170 diseases with "polio-like symptoms and effects, but with different names... little mention is made of the fact that polio disappeared in Europe without mass immunization, and of the 25 or so cases of polio that have turned up on the past few years, virtually all were vaccine induced."

The third argument against inoculation is based on incontrovertible evidence that it radically reduces immune function. Vaccination is more than merely ineffective; it actively encourages disease because of what it introduces into the system, and the manner in which it does it. Vaccines consist of dangerous and foreign materials that we were never meant to designed to ingest or metabolize: formaldehyde; the toxic metals aluminum and mercury; and the "main" ingredients of dried pus, scabs, blood and other decomposed proteins from animals. The medical establishment, by classifying these items as medical ingredients under the term "immunization," lends an air of integrity and validity to the practice of injecting poisons into the bloodstream. Now, injecting a poison into the bloodstream prevents the body from removing it in the most efficient and thorough manner.  

Normally, foreign material gets into the body through the mucous membranes, which act as a natural barrier to protect the body from foreign substances, everything that is not-body. The body responds to foreign irritants by expelling them in the same manner in which they arrived, back through the mucous membranes by coughing and sneezing and sometimes vomiting. But although the body is designed to eliminate viruses and other microbes efficiently, vaccinations, as Van Beveren points out, bypass the body's "carefully designed evolutionary system by introducing toxic matter directly into the bloodstream. This gives the body no warning, no generalized inflammatory response, no chance to recognize... or defend itself against future challenges from typical antigens [foreign irritants]."

To compound the problem, inoculations contain viruses that are unnaturally weakened. This means that the microbe is present at too low a level to stimulate the body into its usual defense mode, which can eventually create a health crisis. As Van Beveren explains,

...The body does not usually tolerate viruses unless they have been weakened (so as not to awaken a strong response) or tricked through a route (usually injection) that by-passes many organs and functions that would inevitably lead to normal, natural expulsion. But [by being] synthetically weakened and directly introduced into the bloodstream, these bits of aberrant nucleoproteins are capable of remaining latent toxicants for many years without continually provoking acute illness, yet keeping the defense system restless and 'on guard' almost indefinitely."

Being "on guard" in this way continually creates enormous physical stress on the system. Its psychological parallel is anxiety. Meanwhile the viruses are reproducing, stealing and using the body's own DNA in order to multiply (as all viruses do) — but unlike the situation with unaltered viruses, the body has not been stimulated properly to stop them. Eventually, the weakened viruses become too plentiful for the body to ignore. But by then, Van Beveren writes, so many of these weakened viruses have been incorporated "into an appropriate chromosome [of the body's cells] and start the production of non-self proteins, [that] the only proper response from the organism must be to make antibodies — against its own cells."

This is why there has been such an astronomical increase of chronic and degenerative, so-called auto-immune diseases. The body attacks itself because it is no longer able to recognize its own cells due to the gradual stealthy intrusion of unnaturally introduced, foreign material. 

In 1976, at a seminar sponsored by the American Cancer Society, Rutgers University professor Robert Simpson warned about this same phenomenon. "Immunization programs against flu, measles, mumps, polio, and so forth, may actually be seeding humans with RNA to form latent proviruses in cells throughout the body. These latent proviruses...when activated under the proper conditions...could cause a variety of disease." Some of the disease conditions he specified are rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus erythematous, Parkinson's disease, and "possibly cancer." Van Beveren has identified hemolytic anemia, granulocytopenias and thrombocytopenias, immune thyroiditis, sympathetic ophthalmopathy and chronic active hepatitis; with other diseases such as poly arthritis, rheumatic fever, endo-myocarditis, periarteritis nodosa, Addison's disease, atrophic gastritis, pernicious anemia, immune pancreatitis, primary biliary cirrhosis and ulcerative colitis as containing elements of auto-immune dysfunction. 

These men are not alone in this assessment: many other scientists and doctors have reached similar conclusions. In her well researched book, Immunization: The Reality Behind the Myth, Second Edition, Walene James provides abundant documentation showing a cause-and-effect relationship between the administration of vaccines and a subsequent rise in the vaccine-specific disease. James mentions generalized glandular and organ damage, allergies, and developmental disorders as well as more specific diseases such as encephalitis.

It is significant that medical doctors "are the least inoculated group in the United States," according to Van Beveren. He suggests that these doctors "know the thymus gland in vaccinated children atrophies much more, much faster, than in countries whose children are allowed to initiate a generalized inflammatory response."

Despite the many excellent reasons not to vaccinate, with the increase in genetically engineered foods and microbes as well as unprecedented travel to foreign countries with foreign microbes to which the body has not developed a natural immunity, there is definitely a need to help people develop a resistance against microbes to which they are not normally exposed.

Squatober 2020.

The bottom line: Adjusted up my Training max grid twice during the month, and landed on the final max test day at a +25# PR over last year's heaviest rep. All reps this month were deep and high bar. Reps felt a lot more solid and balanced too, compared to last year. 

Gyms are closed this year, but the backyard gym is always open. The backyard was open last year for Squatober 2019, but I did the whole month solo. This year Konrad did a few of them with me, still PR'ed on my own.

This year I got my hands on a new bar to celebrate and to keep in the rack solely for squatting. The Pendlay bar got to rest on the new pulling platform for cleans, and RDLs, and Snatch grip Deads. Also made a lightweight pressing stand out of scrap wood and moved the Bella bar over to it. This year's programming called for a lot of heavy BB curls by 5's, so any curling didn't happen in the Squat rack (it happened in the pressing rack, which is totally okay).

Gained three pounds during the month. Got at least 8 hours sleep, and ate right (I fasted one day, during the Shandon/Portland prayer weekend at the end). Workouts usually took 70 minutes. Took six days off out of the 31. Averaged 2600 calories a day, including the weekends, 474 exercise calories.  Macros were Fat: 137, Carbs: 151, Protein: 265. All better breakdown than I'd been doing for the rest of the year.

This year featured a couple of the see saw days, a same-workout back-to-back Deja Vu day(s), and a couple of test days that required doing 21 reps in as few sets as possible, rather than max reps with 90%. These were set at the two and three week points; did the tests ["Party with" and "Party like"] and raised my TM after week two, but not after week three.
So many days this month I looked at the workout and wondered if I would be able to accomplish it. Found out each day that the program was just hard enough, doable but satisfying afterward. Someone online said that this is great programming at any price, and I agree.

As with last year (and with Deadcember) there was more pressing than pulling, and I'd try to make this up a bit. Some of that is how I feel since I make the pulling a priority. Also added in some RDLs as so much is quad-centric.

I really found that I love snatch-grip Deads this year. Never would have tried them otherwise. 

Throughout the month, my right leg was feeling like it wasn't pulling its weight (pushing its fair share, I should say) and right tibial tuberosity was feeling sore to the touch, reminiscent of the trauma from Feb 2018's sprint MCL-strain. Initial measurements at the beginning of the month showed that the right quad and right knee were both smaller than the left. Some imbalance there, or some favoritism as maybe I'm subconsciously limping along. Lunges throughout the month were particularly painful when the right leg was doing work, so much so that if I wasn't warmed up well, I simply couldn't lunge.

I still feel persistent pain under my glute where the hamstring inserts, taking it easy to heal up for Deadcember.

Going forward, I'm going to continue to squat heavy! Sets of doubles and triples for the win in 2021.

At Least 12 Reasons Why Optavia Sucks.

You've heard of Optavia. Someone on social media posts a picture of themselves looking fat, side by side with a picture of them looking slim. "I've lost 40 pounds and I've kept it off for 40 weeks - all without exercise! ... Ask me how." Right? You ask, and they sign you up to eat the pre-packaged food that they've been eating for the last year. And then, 10 months and a thousand dollars later, you're the one who's lost weight, and you post pics of yourself, and you sell Optavia to the next player. Everyone wins.

Wrong. Optavia is wrong. Here's why.

1. You will lose weight. That's the goal right? Lose weight! No, the goal is to lose weight ... forever. On Optavia, you will lose weight until you stop buying Optavia. Then you will gain the weight back that you lost, and then some. Because without buying the product, there is no weight loss plan. Optavia sucks because it's just like every other "diet" plan where you lose, stop, then gain it all back.

2. Losing weight forever might not be the goal after all. Losing FAT forever, that's the goal, isn't it? You won't focus on losing fat on Optavia. Why? Lots of reasons. The food isn't designed for fat loss, you aren't on an exercise plan, there's no cycling involved, etc. Anyway, just sayin' - you will lose weight, but it's not going to be mostly fat. Instead:

3. You Will Lose Muscle on Optavia. All of it. What did you think would happen? 

Everyone knows what the bodybuilders know:

Eat More
+ Exercise
= Build Muscle.

You're doing the opposite:

Eat Less
+ No Exercise
= Lose Muscle. 

This is what you'll do on the Optavia program. Lose muscle, which is why you can lose "weight" so quickly – the body will most easily shed muscle in a crisis of undernourishment, not fat. This continues until there's no muscle left to lose, then your weight loss will stop.

4. Your weight loss will stop. The Optavia sell is "I lost X pounds and kept them off!" But the truth is that you'll stall, and probably not hit your *target* weight. Why? You don't have an endless supply of muscle to lose. You'll lose muscle until your body realizes that it's in a dangerous state of malnutrition, gives up on muscle loss and actually starts stockpiling fat to ensure survival. Your weight loss will stall. You'll be stuck X number of pounds lighter, and may be keeping them off, but with less muscle, more fat and a lighter bank account every month. 

5. Did we mention your bank account? Optavia is overpriced. If you broke down the actual foodstuffs into meals and purchased them in the store yourself, you'd spend far less. You can buy normal food, and even add in some supplements, and eat healthier on your own, for less. There's a price to all that pre-packaging. And, remember, your "health coach" and their "health coach" and their "health coach" all are making a cut off of your monthly bill.

6. Optavia is a business plan, not a health plan. Yeah, that "health coach" who cares so much about you and your progress? They're making money off the money you spend on the product. You're just another Egyptian slave building their multi-level marketing-Pyramid scheme. See how many caring texts you get from your "health coach" the day after you stop buying in.

7. Optavia is malnutrition. This is obvious, and you should know it the first time you set eyes on the pre-packaged meals. Nothing is fresh, everything is processed. Everything has sugars; it's all surprisingly high in carbohydrates. It tastes good, you will lose weight. But this stuff is terrible for your body.

8. You will get weaker on Optavia. You won't be able to run farther or faster. You won't be able to do a pull up. You won't even look stronger. You're not going to be able to pose flexing a bicep when this is done. You won't have muscle to show. You'll look slimmer in your streetclothes, but that's it. In fact, truly athletic people who know the difference, if they're honest with you, will tell you that you don't look well. Sure, everyone at the office will ask, "Have you lost weight?" Or tell you that "You look great!" But they're just being polite, or they're just ignorant of what true fitness looks like.

9. You will probably get sick after you're done. This is malnutrition, remember. Read the labels. The Optavia food is poorly balanced and composed. Ask around and see how many people who have been on the program had a serious illness afterward. See if their hair has thinned or changed color. Have they had to ramp up the prescription for their vision? Is that bad back of theirs flaring up? Do they have brain fog, depression, grumpiness? Is their physical activity level lower? Do they simply look older? These are the sorts of unintended consequences of poor nutrition over time.

10. Eating every couple of hours is a good for cravings and good for diabetes. You won't be hungry on Optavia! But you won't be any different than most diabetically-disposed-obese people who eat their way through their day. Especially without any exercise. Some bodybuilders eat every two hours, but their lives are built around exercise. 

11. You won't learn anything about how to eat, live your life, Macros or Micros, anything, on this program. "Macros? What is he even talking about?" Right, my point exactly. When you leave the program, you won't know about macronutrients or vitamin intake, how to make food choices based on your fitness goals, how to count calories, how to plan meals, break down dietary cycles... anything except how to slap down your credit card and buy their system. Someday, you have to stop doing their system - did you think you were going to be on Optavia forever? - and then what? Right, go back to your old habits and ways of eating and overeating.
You will have learned nothing about health when it's all said and done. You bought their food, but you didn't learn about food. You had a "health coach" but you didn't learn anything about health. Welcome back to Right Where You Startedland.

12. The program isn't for you. It's a one-size-fits-all pre-packaged box of goods. The program isn't based on any body composition analysis (how much body fat do you have as a percentage of your body mass? Therefore, how much fat weight can you lose and be lean? What is the timeline to lose that weight? Therefore, how many calories per week are you going to eat? What's the breakdown of those calories? And later, now that you're lighter, let's adjust all these numbers - these basic questions are the basis of any normal weight loss plan), instead, it's just an arbitrary number. You weigh 180 and want to lose 25? Great! Here's your plan: Buy Optavia. You weigh 150 and want to lose 35? Great! Here's your plan: Buy Optavia.

The fact is, you are unique and your needs are unique. There's a little bit of thought and customization that must go into your lifestyle program if you're to succeed in a cycle of fat loss, and this thought and customization continues regularly into an ongoing healthy lifestyle. There's a learning curve, but really, it isn't steep. Apply yourself. You're worth the effort.

I could go on. There are other reasons why the Optavia program sucks, but they're criticisms from the point of view of someone who knows what to do and how to do it - not considerations for those who are in the market for an Optavia-Jenny Craig-like program. Most people just want something easy to do, something they don't have to think about, and that will work. I get it.

So where to start that doesn't suck? Here, try Intermittent Fasting. Nothing's easier than eating just a bit less, saving a little money on food instead of spending more, kicking diabetic predisposition right in the guts, and maybe losing some fat instead of mostly losing muscle. 

There are many considerations, and many ways to customize your program, but only you can do it for you. Start with simple habits that make sense, and when you're ready, you can do some serious and semi-complex fat cutting cycles,  don't fall for any scheme that exchanges your money for garbage product, platitudes, and the same old diet-trap results.

Shallow Social Media and Deep Work.

Pop artist John Mayer went through a creative dry spell after releasing the album Continuum in 2006. He wrestled, and finally he closed his Twitter account and confessed on his blog his own creative desert was a result of social media addiction: “The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still four minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still four minutes long… I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore, and I was a tweetaholic. I had four million Twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. ...it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.” 

Social media distraction actually atrophied his creative capacity. “You can’t create lasting art if you are heavily involved in social media. It occurred to me that since the invocation of Twitter, nobody who has participated in it has created any lasting art. And yes! Yours truly is included in that roundup as well. Those who decide to remain offline will make better work than those online. Why? Because great ideas have to gather. They have to pass the test of withstanding thirteen different moods, four different months and sixty different edits. Anything less is day trading. You can either get a bunch of mentions now or change someone’s life next year.”

It's not only Twitter, although it's apparent that limiting discourse to 140 characters obviously limits the scope of thought. Limiting conversation to a photo, ala Instagram, or the power of video to slapstick shorts ala Vine–come-TikTok narrows the mental appetite with sips of dopamine. 

Continually ingesting bits of social media has become a distraction and an inhibitor in the creative development process. Becoming a creative who can generate works with lasting cultural impact requires what Georgetown professor Cal Newport calls “deep work” - which is a combination of working for extended periods of time with full concentration on a single task free from distraction or interruption followed by intermittent rounds of feedback. A process where one wrings every last drop of value out of their current intellectual capacities. Cal Newport maintains that our creative abilities are improved by the mental strain that accompanies deep work.

It's not deep work to swipe or scroll, we all know it's mind numbing. Our cultural addiction to social media is killing songs and artists and dreamers before we ever get to hear their voices, melodies and ideas. I wonder when our grandchildren ask, "What did you do during the 'Shelter-in-Place' of 2020?" most will have to admit that we wasted the days bingeing memes.

Are you a content creator rather than a content consumer? If you've read this far, there's hope for you. Stand up, shut this off, and tune in to the deep work of your own thoughts. 

Boy, You're Gonna Carry That Weight?

Passed a homeless guy yesterday. His shopping cart was overloaded with trash – scraps of plastic, chunks of cardboard – not even recyclable. Trash. My thought was that this was an element of his insanity, to value junk that has no value, and that this was how he ended up where he is – holding on to things without value, and having no room in the cart for things of real value. Maybe it all began because he valued a drug more than his vocation, his family, his home. Speculation. Today, whatever his other addictions, his addiction is to refuse, and his identity is aligned with a small hill of garbage.

Then the mental finger pointed back at myself, and I thought of all the trashy things that I pick up and add to the valueless heap on my shopping cart. No time for conversation with my kids, I have to vegetate on this trashy movie – adding laziness and isolation to the lowest level of my cart. Instead of taking the time to make something good to eat, reaching for something tasty and processed-easy and valueless nutritionally - add that to the waistline of the cart. Atop, scraps of old scripts of “how it happened and why and why me.” Stuff these old traumas and misunderstandings into little spare spaces, letting my offended ego treasure them instead of trash them.

I get lazy or angry or dejected, and I find junk appealing. My hands pick it up, and my head holds it all. Besides the event itself, or the memory of the event, I add an additional layer of insular laziness and anger to my cart. And then, the cart is welded to my hands, and pushing it becomes my identity, my character aligned with my trash.

Again, time to take stock. Roll the cart over to the soulical dumpster and leave some of this refuse where it should have landed long ago. Make room in the cart for what really matters. Empty it and only put in what I want to carry going forward.

Awokeness.

There are only two types of warriors in this world. Those that serve tyrants and those that serve free men. - Special Forces NCO Stefan

If there are only two types of people in the world (are there are lots of two kinds of people in the world – dog lovers and cat lovers, givers and takers, those who put ranch on their pizza and those who put ranch in the trash, and, yeah, those who believe there are two kinds of people, and those who know better), there are those who are awake to the spiritual realm and those who are asleep to the existence of the spiritual. 

Those who are awake, aren't those who are "woke." To be woke right now is to be asleep in the matrix, serving the notion that a social-political solution (the agreed-upon socio-political solution as presented by the educational system, which is only rehashed class warfare and socialism-come-totalitarianism in the name of progress) is proof that none of these woke-ones are woke to the lessons of history. 

This is a primary indicator of who have awoken in the spiritual; they see that the educational systems have become a field for political indoctrination that narrows understanding down to what is half-a-worldview. If you've read this far, we'll hold that this truth is self-evident, and that political interplay of this is clear enough.

Those who are spiritual see that the education of religious leadership has been bisected as well. Those who sit in pews now sit under pastors and teachers taught in seminaries that indoctrinate by narrowing what is defined as spiritual truth to a merely socio-political activism as ministry, or, for those who might be categorized as politically conservative, a spiritually conservative cessationist stance that sings "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" while unfriending the presence of the Holy Spirit. Two sides of the same coin. Both, ultimately, are unspiritual in that their work and worry fall into the category of natural ministry, subjected to the limitations of the minds of men. Religion, not spirituality.

Another layer of this educational limitation is in the field of medicine. This may be a larger subject and a discussion for another day, but those who see, see that the medical universities teach, and doctors are forced to practice, what is half-a-truth by narrowing what is the definition of medicine to merely a chemical-pharmaceutical view, and ignoring the half of what-is-human by ignoring elements of the spirit. Even to say that medicine is science, not psychology or religion or spiritual therapy, should be able to understand that medical science should make room for physics alongside of chemistry, but physical elements have been omitted from allopathic medicine by big-patents, big-prescriptions Big Pharma, who is selling chemical solutions only.

We can stop here with the examples. If you see it, you see it, if you don't, you don't.
I make this point, not to point out how this dichotomy is pervasive through all seven of the mountains of culture, but to point out that there are two types even within those who are spiritually awake: those who are awake to the existence of God, and those who are awake that God exists and that evil exists.

Are you awake enough to know that people are not inherently good? Are you awake enough to know that there are spiritual entities who hate people, want individuals dead, want all of mankind dead? That these entities work to sicken and kill people at the individual level and work to sicken and kill people at the macro level? If you attend a church and think that you are spiritually awake, do you hit the snooze button during the sermon when the speaker downplays the existence of a devil? Do you see that many issues, larger than the brokennesses created by mankind, are orchestrated?

Men do many evil things, and many men are also led to do evil by those who seek to kill men, steal from men, destroy men.
A girl commits suicide, she does this to herself. But the thinking that led to such an unnatural inclination is crafted by one outside of herself and her innate desire to live, massaged into her mind by one who hates her.
A man uses his hands to torture and kill women, a methodical serial killer. He is a puppet in the hands of another who enjoys torture and killing.
A bioweapon is created by a group of men, but the making and release of such a bioweapon is the doing of another group, composed of rogue un-human entities who hate mankind, ones leading these men. 

For those of us who are spiritually awake and spiritually aware of darkness and dark ones, our seeing is insulation from fear and inertia, our doing is to undo all these rogue entities' works. Overcome evil with good. We who are awake, the sons and daughters of God, are meant to do as God’s solution to the problem at hand. Our awareness is only the pre-requisite to all the restorative undoing of evil in our world – to remain awake. More on the doing comes later.

First, we need to see. We see the deeds of darkness; see the doers for what they are, see the ones who are somnambulistically serving their purposes as familiars. For now, enough to be awake and aware. Remain awake, eyes open and cognizant that not everything is taught, and not everything that is taught is progress.

Merton and Doing and Dabbling.

Reading from Thomas Merton this AM. Merton was temperamentally impatient with run-of-the-mill pieties and warned that "real Christian living is stunted and frustrated if it remains content with the bare externals of worship, with 'saying prayers' and 'going to church,' with fulfilling one's external duties and merely being respectable."

He was writing during the 1968 college campus world of anti-war activism and counter-culture. He called on his youthful readers to stop — to understand how activism, despite lofty intentions, can do real harm because it is so oblivious to its own subtle egotism. He was aware of fads among college students, their dabblings in Oriental meditation, and argued that "the real purpose of meditation . . . is the exploration and discovery of new dimensions of freedom, illumination and love, in deepening our awareness of our life in Christ."

He insisted not on saying prayers, but on prayer, and prayer meant the awareness of God . . . even if sometimes this awareness may amount to an apparent negative, a seeming 'absence.'

So, on one hand, the doing (political activism) and on the other dabbling (spiritual exploration, if not christian) was an issue 50 years ago, and the same is at issue today (social activism and spiritual experiences, if only via horror movies and groupthink). 

Okay. Not much has changed at the foundation, only the verbage and the tone, but - and here is our question yesterday - what is the cure as we ask "What do we save people to?" 

What is the relation of salvation to action? Or, for us, what does ministry look like as we parade what is essentially a personal relationship with God before others as a demonstration of what is Real Life? 

Because we are supposed to be the cure, but we are operating within (and here I say "We" but I mean "Me") a christianized mirror-image of activism and dabbling if we are so focused on ministry as empowerment or spiritual experiences  He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self understanding, freedom, and integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centeredness, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. I hate to say it, but the ministry-as-efficacy that is a subtle competition with some dig-me and envy that is nurtured in say, the supernatural schools is antithetical to Who Jesus is.

We see enough of this all around today (Sunday, yes, *today*) from pulpits driven by ego, or the ways of mankind. Maybe there needs to be a "seeming absence" from this forefront mentality. 

Needing to go deep, where no one is watching and none of it is presentable on social media. 

Need to step back from doing stuff in the name of Jesus, and step forward into a standing before others with some silence, with eyes of love and nothing to do. 

Absent minded a bit. A seeming absence ... of ego. A seeming absence of a need to do, and therefore feel useful. Nothing to do but be in the moment of a straight line relationship with Jesus. See him in His activism. Aware of Him.