What Did It Matter?

    It was noon and the sun was burning high over her head. The sleeping boy tied to her back was listless and moaning. What did it matter? Neither of them had slept well in the heat of these last many days and long sweltering nights. What did it matter? Neither of them had much of an appetite either – but there was little in the way of food in any case. A handful of flour, a bit of oil. Enough for dinner. One last meal, and then to die. What did it matter?

    Her husband, a Phoenician merchant sailor, had drowned at sea a few weeks before the boy was born. Now his wife and son would die of thirst and drought. Was that irony? She didn’t know so she gathered sticks to use as fuel for a cookfire. One last meal and then we die.

    The priests of Melqart, tutelary god of the Phoenicians, had honored her husband’s death as a service to the Lord, protector of the world and ruler of the dark realms beneath. They promised that Melqart would remember his name and would bless his memory. But what of it? They had little when he was alive. They had less now. What did it matter?

    She saw the prophet as she was gathering sticks. She leaned over carefully so as not to disturb the boy. His sleep was restless enough. She saw the prophet coming over the hill as she stood up with an armload of twigs and branches. She recognized him as a prophet immediately. His mantle gave him away – though she didn’t recognize the bead-work patters in the coarse camel hair. ‘Must be a foreign prophet,’ she thought.

    And that thought was confirmed when he spoke. His accent. “Bring me some water, if you will, kind mother.”

    “Mother!” she scoffed. “I’m gathering wood for a cookfire,” she said, “to prepare a meal for myself and the boy, but what does it matter?” She sighed. “Yes. I can bring you a bowl of water.”

    “Food,” the prophet beamed. “Heartily, I could eat if you’d have some to share.”

    She stared at him and his strange prophetic garments. “Who are you, prophet?” she asked.

    “Elijah is my name and Yah is my God,” he answered. It sounded funny when he said it like that. His accent. But she didn’t have reserves of energy enough to laugh.

    She sighed. “I don’t have meat or fish. I don’t have beans or lentils. I don’t even have baked bread to offer you, prophet. All I have is a handful of flour and a bit of oil. I was just about to fry it up for the boy and I to eat before we die.”

    The prophet took her hands between his own and held them into the air as he spoke:

    “The jar of meal shall not be spent,
    nor the oil be found wanting
    not till the day that Yah relents
    and sends the rain upon the earth,”

    “All we have is yours, prophet,” she said again and shook her head. She turned and carried the armload of wood into the house. There she laid the boy on his pallet in the corner of the room and soothed his head. “Quiet, boy. Rest.”

    She stacked the wood into the fire pit and lit it. Then, as the stone set over the fire warmed, she mixed the last handful of flour with the little oil that remained and formed a small ball of dough. When the stone was hot, she put the dough ball on it and rolled it flat. It sizzled as it cooked to a deep golden color. She flipped it to cook the other side. “One last meal, and then to die,” she huffed. “What does it matter who eats it?”

    The boy moaned as she handed the cake to the prophet. “Eat,” she told him. “I must tend to the boy.” As she turned away from the prophet and back to the boy she saw that the bowl that had held the last remaining handful of flour was full again. And the jug of oil, full to the top. She looked back to the prophet who was contentedly munching the fry-bread.

    He smiled and offered a piece of the bread to her. “For the boy. To eat,” he said.

1 Kings 17:7-16

Tribulation Trends from Johnny Pentecost

    The days are shorter and the nights are longer. The leaves are falling and the temperature is dropping. Another year is rapidly closing down and coming to an inglorious end. And here are the tribulation trends as noted by our very own, Johnny Pentecost – the strong and forward, the dark and foreboding. Everything you need to know to plan for the latter days and latter rains.

    1 – The first thing to note is that we seem to be experiencing the beginning of a prophetic slow down. Even with this year’s many astounding developments, the prophetic mile markers just aren’t falling as quickly as in years past. We are ramping up our technology and accelerating apostasy, but the timeline for Christ’s return isn’t advancing as we’d like. This is important for all that follows

    We saw the new moon solar eclipse and the grand conjunction of the classical planets. But little came of it.

    2 – Perhaps it is only our imagination, but it does appear that people are being born in graveyard shifts without the natural affections common to man. Lawless kids are an open invitation. Look what is happening in Cuba. They are falling away from collapsing churches.

    3 – It is time to search for witches. There are demons walking out and spirits moving in. There are six thousand curses for sale every day – and that’s just the Presbyterians. Wiccans waking me at all hours of the night with the noise of their drums. We have become a dwelling place of spooks and haints. We are summoning demons. We are playing with fire. But we must be smarter if we are to be careful.

    4 – Our words and thoughts are being monitored and recorded. Everything we do and think is taken down and noted by the surveillance state. Your information – public, private, and personal – filed away by covert organizations. Your insurance agent is among them. Your doctor. Your wife’s therapist. The policeman on the corner. Your child’s schoolteacher. They are waiting and watching with hidden cameras and secret microphones. Telestar communication satellites will record it all from overhead. And what can you do to stop them?

    5 – Consider the danger of mental health trauma but don’t call it PTSD. Our soldiers deserve more. Deserve better. The women of our desires are dying of an overdose of sleeping pills and chloral hydrate. Wrestling sleep and barking dogs. Flash-bang flashbacks. Hands-on striking and we are bruised bad enough to want off the ride.

    These are the trends of the times. From them we must calculate the cons that the world has outgrown. But even still, there is no prophetic angle here.

- from Johnny Pentecost Publications, November 1962

The Pentecost Machine
Dear Johnny Pentecost

Anniversary Waltz #2

     Today marks one year that I have been married to Tiffini.  She's pretty great. So here is something I wrote for her to mark the occasion. It is inspired by Dimitri Shostakovich's Jazz Suite: Waltz No. 2.

Anniversary Waltz #2

    We turn and laugh
    from the shadows of the stage
    like a slow Soviet jazz waltz
    taking a wry and melancholic twirl
    through October fallen leaves
    and twinkling lights

    The oom-pah-pah band
    with saxophone and classical strings
    plays the middle refrain
    a casual circus carousel
    of dissonant intervals
    that should haunt but do not

    A forgotten trombone
    takes up the Aeolian theme
    for one more spin across the dance floor
    you and I together, embracing as we twirl
    through October fallen leaves
    and twinkling lights.

Take That, Jesus

    Clarissa could hear her son, Logan, playing with his toys in the living room as she worked on dinner in the kitchen. He was an imaginative child who preferred to make up his own stories rather than be entertained by others’ stories on television or on the tablet.

    “Take that, Jesus!” she heard him say and then she heard his noisy combat simulation. The noise of slaps and punches and screams of pain. “Take that, Jesus!”

    She thought that was curious, maybe worrisome. He often played with his “guys” – a variety of action figures purchased second. She couldn’t identify most of them. Maybe He-Man? Power Rangers, perhaps? It didn’t matter much to Logan. He gave them names and stories of his own invention.

    “You can’t stop me, Jesus!” Then came a ROAR and then “I command you to come out and never enter again.”

    Clarissa set down the skillet and poked her head around the corner to check on him. “What’s the story this time?” she asked him.

    Logan showed her the figures – a bearded muscle man and some sort of creature? Alien? Monster? It was green and had a horn and nasty teeth. “It’s the story Pastor Mark told at church on Sunday.”

    “Pastor Mark?”

    “Yeah. Jesus versus the Mutant Death Spirit. What a battle!”

Mark 9:25

Jerry Seinfeld and the Genocidal Punchline

    While performing on October 9^th at the Chicago Theater, stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld was interrupted by a number of pro-Palestinian protesters who accused him of supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Seinfeld has been a vocal supporter of the state of Israel and has repeatedly denied the existence of Palestine and has said that he doesn’t care about Palestinians.

    Responding to the protesters, Seinfeld said, “It’s a genocide. I’m into it.”

    Perhaps we can give him the benefit of the doubt and suggest that he was rattled by the interruption. But a professional stand-up comedian who can’t deal with hecklers? Well…

    Even if you don’t accept the label of genocide for what Israel is doing in Palestine – though genocide scholars around the world have said that that is just what it is – his comment, as a Jew, is a particularly strange response. Forget “Never Again,” he’s here for it.

    Perhaps one might argue that the protesters were rude to interrupt the show. But I think people who use genocide as a punchline should be interrupted.

    Free Palestine.