Carl Wells Books

We’ve come to the end of 2020. 2021 starts tomorrow. Many of us like to make New Year’s resolutions, which gives us something else to feel guilty about when we fail to keep them. Anyway, I thought of a number of potential New Year’s resolutions for my readers, to a total of 14 (resolutions to a total of 14, readers to a total probably far less than 14). These are for Christians and non-Christians. You’ll be able to figure out which potential resolution might apply to you. Some might apply to me. They are in no particular order, except that I have kept the most challenging and perhaps even the most controversial for the last three.

1/Increase your church giving by 1% of your income. The Christian organization emptytomb.org has research that shows that the American Protestant church as a whole currently gives about 2.5% of its increase to the church. (Roman Catholic giving is similar.) The figures from capital letter challenged emptytomb show 2.9% giving in 1916, 3.2% in 1933, 3.2% in 1955, and 2.5% in 2007. Here is a link:

http://www.emptytomb.org/fig1_07.html

So if you are typical, and giving 2.5%, you might consider giving 3.5% in 2021. Granted, you will probably starve to death, but Columbus took a chance and it worked out for him; it might for you also. Christians are bitterly upset that the state taxes away our wealth from us at an horrific rate, but we steal 75% of God’s tithe from Him. He might be telling us: theft is a round game, and more than one can play.

If you are a non-Christian with no desire to support any Christian church, consider upping your charitable giving by 1% to some group God would approve of if He existed, which of course He doesn’t, but if He did He would approve of it. You’re smart enough to figure out what that might be. Hint: not a pro-abortion group.

2/Resolve to read six pretty good books in a year. That is only one every two months, so it is not an impossible goal. Here are some potential options:

2a/Read at least one famous novel which you’ve heard of but never got around to reading. A suggestion? Of course. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Or David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

2b/Read at least one unread children’s classic. If you need a suggestion, I’ll volunteer Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. In the last year I know of two adults over 65 who read it and loved it. You might be a third adult to love it.

2c/Read one book of straight history. History gives us a perspective on life which we need. Life is more than just what is happening in the world right now. We tend to get lost in the constant present.

3/Walk one mile a week. Our bodies are meant to be used. I remember when I was in my mid 20s one day I suddenly got an urge to walk outside a little bit. The walk probably was around one-half mile, longer or shorter, but I’ve never forgotten it. I learned a lot that day. Again, perspective is provided. The world is a wonderful place, and a walk helps us remember that.

4/Turn off Main Sleaze Media completely, for as long as you can stand it. They are lying liars telling us lies. They are clueless as to how the world is put together. Begin to free your mind from these trite scumbags.

5/Do one house or yard project in the course of the year.

6/Battle to lose five pounds. I didn’t say lose five pounds. I said battle to lose five pounds. It probably won’t be easy, but a key is never giving up.

7/Be on time for things.

8/Cut your normal TV viewing by some reasonable goal. From 20 hours a week to 15? Fine. Don’t set an impossible goal, but set a goal. Then even if you miss the goal, you have come close and you have made a start. Most television is drivel. Begin to free up more of your time. Remember, you might be plugged into #2, so you may need more time to read. Or, #3, you may need more time to walk.

9/Write a thank you note to someone. It could be a teacher you admired in grade school or high school. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s man from underground told us that the scientific definition of man is “the ungrateful biped.” Pretty doggone close. We seldom say thank you. But usually we have a lot for which to be thankful.

10/Invite one person or one family to your home for a meal. Top off the night with a DVD or perhaps just conversation. We seldom make a real effort to get to know people well. We need people, and they need us. (They haven’t realized that yet, but then neither have we.)

11/Read the Bible all the way through in a year. The Bible is not easy reading, and is pretty long, so there is no disgrace in cutting your goal to reading half the Bible in one year, half in the next. This goal is appropriate to both Christians and non-Christians. Few Christians have read the Bible very much. Non-Christians? The Bible is central to our western civilization. At the worst, you can begin to see what all the fuss was about.

12/If you are a non-Christian, attend church at least once in the year. Wear a tie (just so you’ll be different), listen quietly, be polite, and put $10.00 in the collection plate.

13/Whether you are a Christian or non-Christian, pray intermittently through the year for one person who is either an enemy of you or an enemy of God (or an enemy of both). Or alternatively, pray intermittently for one person who may have some very good qualities but who still needs practical wisdom or needs salvation, or needs something.

14/Pray intermittently that God would send American blacks 10,000 people, young and old, male and female, who want to love Him and obey Him, and who will learn to stand bravely for His truth. This Black Lives Matter stuff is horrible. Woke white liberals hate God, and don’t respect black people. Black people are going to have to turn to God as He really exists in the Bible, and stop believing lies–or accept the (bad) consequences of believing and acting on those lies. Nothing is going to change for the better until you turn to God.

Well, there they are–14 potential New Year’s resolutions. They are all free, and no salesman will call. Or think of something that you know you really should be doing in the year ahead, and then make a start toward doing it. Even failure is better than not trying.

Also, don’t assume that 2020 was uniquely bad. We can do worse than that. Besides, we had a chance to learn a lot in 2020. An elbow to the ribs can be necessary and helpful.

Have a great year in 2021.

Countless people are fans of multiculturalism. “Diversity is our strength,” and so forth. You will be “shocked, shocked,” to find out that multiculturalism is not necessarily a wonderful thing. And I am sure you will be equally shocked to find that those people who think multiculturalism is so wonderful are people who suppress the truth about the problems of multiculturalism. And you will be shocked also at the same time to discover that the fans of multiculturalism are people who don’t give a rat’s posterior about the physical or sexual safety of hundreds of thousands of English schoolgirls ages 11 to 16 approximately. Wait, you’re not shocked at all? Wow, you are hopelessly cynical.

You may have heard a truncated version of the sordid story. Bad things were going on in Rotherham, England. Muslim adult males were seducing English schoolgirls, and then selling them as prostitutes. This went on for a long time (decades, actually) before something was done about it. Rotherham had really messed up.

But that is only the propaganda version of what happened. Yes, Rotherham officialdom was horribly at fault. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. The same thing was happening in numerous towns. The Powers That Be would like us to think that horrible things happened basically only in Rotherham, and maybe a little bit here and there also. That is a lie. What happened in Rotherham was ubiquitous in England. The way Muslim men treated the girls is not a one-off oddity: it is part of the warp and the woof of Islam. That is shown clearly in the book Easy Meat.

I have just finished reading Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, by Peter McLoughlin. This was the 2016 update on a book first published in 2014. I think this may be the most depressing book I have ever read, in my entire life. It is a very good book, and Mr. McLoughlin deserves enormous kudos for doing the research and for giving us the truth. But it is depressing because the facts that he recounts are so horrible.

Yes, it is horrible that countless thousands of young girls have been seduced, raped, prostituted. But the book gives us many other things that are horrible. Reality can be painful. I am going to list some facts that are painful and depressing. We may be tempted to think that this reality applies only to England. I think that would be a huge mistake. The problems are worldwide.

So here are some conclusions I drew after reading Easy Meat. I’ll try to keep them brief.

1/Everyone official failed these schoolgirls. That includes teachers, social services, police, politicians. Lots of people knew these things were going on, but they were much more afraid of being considered politically incorrect, than they were concerned about the welfare of the girls. So they just let things go on.

2/The media are a pack of lying liars. They covered up what happened because it exposed their politically correct multiculturalism as a lie about reality. They are still covering it up as best they can.

3/Political correctness is a moral failing–and a very large moral failing, at that.

4/The Christian church is conspicuous by its absence. It doesn’t appear that the church was involved in the cover-up. But neither was the church involved in exposing the lies of officialdom and in trying to rescue and protect the girls.

5/Parents were unable to protect their own children. Granted, when parents tried to raise a stink about what was going on, they met a stone wall of indifference from officialdom. But one might have hoped that parents could have done more.

6/Courage to tell the truth is in incredibly short supply.

7/Of all the religions in the world which have a belief in the supernatural, Islam is the worst religion of all. Muslims act with wickedness because their religion is foundationally wicked and encourages its practitioners to do bad things. Even those Muslims not involved in the seduction and rape of schoolgirls were very willing to protect the worst predators among their number. Now, it is possible that non-supernatural religions such as communism and Nazism are worse than Islam. That is a topic for discussion. But of supernatural religions, Islam is the worst in the history of the world.

8/A nation which encourages the entry of Muslims (other than as visitors for a brief period) is suicidal.

9/England is almost certainly finished as a nation. The moral rot is too great. A nation which refuses to protect its schoolgirls from seduction and rape is morally dead.

10/Multiculturalism is a lie. There is no such thing as the separation of religion and state. Muslims, curiously, understand that better than Christians or humanists. Muslims want sharia law. Christians want mushy thinking and “a place at the table.” Christians need to grow up. It is Christ or nothing. That does not mean we bully other people. It just means we need to let other people find their own level while at the same time we build our own small nations where we protect our children and tell monsters to go somewhere else.

11/The U.S. is not exempt from the problems England has encountered. We may think we are, but that is self-deception. Islam is dangerous wherever it gets strong enough to be dangerous. Courage to tell the truth is in short supply in this country just as it is in England. Our media is just as corrupt. We, like England, have shrugged at the murder of unborn children. Is it likely that we will protect our children any better than England has? Transgenderism, anyone? No, we are in as grave a danger of being finished as is England.

I will close with two quotes about Easy Meat from the back cover. The first is from the Englishman Paul Weston, chairman of Liberty GB.

“A non-Islamic society society which allows its young women and girls to be raped, beaten and treated as literal war-booty by Muslim males is a society teetering on the brink of irrelevance. A non-Islamic society which goes out of its way to suppress the truth behind the Islamic gang-rape scandal and which actively sides against the non-Muslim victims is a society on the brink of extinction.”

The second quote is from Theodore Dalrymple, another Englishman, and one of the leading essayists of our time:

“Those who think that political correctness is only a harmless absurdity perpetrated by intellectuals will soon be laughing on the other side of their face when they read this book.”

Both men have hit the nail on the head.

Easy Meat is a very important book. It is depressing, but we needed to know all this. I found myself underlining great swaths of the text. I could devote three or four more blog posts to just quoting significant passages from the book. But I have made it a goal to get done in just one segment. The topic is too painful to write about more, for me.

Easy Meat is not cheap. (It might be a good candidate for borrowing via interlibrary loan.) The best price I could find today was $18.53 (a paperback, shipping included, but sales tax extra) at AbeBooks. Read it at your own risk. You will find yourself grateful to the author . . . as you slip into depression. Are we really so suicidal as to desert our civilization to barbarians living the most despicable theistic religion in the world?

Yeah, maybe.

[I informed Mr. McLoughlin that I had reviewed his book, and asked him to tell me if I needed to correct anything. He responded on Dec. 27, 2020. The news is not encouraging–but it is what we could have expected. The cover-up continues. I appreciate his input. Part of his response is quoted below:

“I’ve not much to add to your summary of the book. Just a couple of points.  When 1st edition came out 104/119 convictions were Muslims; when 2nd edition came out 170/191 were Muslims; currently it is 344/409 (there have been almost no prosecutions since the first lockdown).  http://pmclauth.com/grooming-gang-statistics/gangs-jailed  If you see the bold lines in the left column, those are the trials which received no national media attention. I predicted in Easy Meat that this was how they would square the circle — appear to give justice to those victims who insist on their rapists being prosecuted, whilst concealing from the public the true scale of the scandal. This pattern of prosecution-with-concealment was evident already in 2015. . . . [Carl’s ellipsis]

“The elite in UK put the immigrant population above the indigenous population. There is nothing else we can conclude.  I don’t believe the truth will ever come out. And I believe that the reach of these grooming gangs will just extend. They know the authorities are complicit. Sadly most of the public has probably been deceived by the joint cover-up by courts/news media.”]

Sometimes I know ahead of time what I am going to write about in these weekly blog posts. Other times I struggle to find a topic, and find myself still searching as the time to write gets closer. That is what happened today. I had to come up with something, and ‘”out came this calf”‘ (as Aaron said in a different context, Exodus 32:24).

Today’s topic is one I have thought about for some time. I have been kind of avoiding writing about it only because I know it stands the chance of annoying the socks off of people I know. I don’t enjoy having people angry with me. On the bright side, few people read these posts, so maybe all of the people I might annoy will never read it.

But if other people get annoyed with me, it will become clear from today’s post that I in turn can be annoyed. Today I will list things that I find annoying. But these are all petty annoyances. I won’t even think about starting to name all the things that annoy me in a major way. Surely those show up enough in my other posts.

In a few minutes I came up with 15 petty things I find annoying. I will begin with things that most people never think about, and proceed to more important matters. Near the end, quite a few of things I write about have some sort of importance for society at large.

1/Scoreboards that begin the game with double zeroes in the place where points go: Visitors 00 Home 00. That looks horrible. Then when a team scores two points, do we then have 00 and 02? Confusing. Either nothing at all, or one zero for each team, are both logical and reasonable ways to start the game. This petty annoyance is one I probably never would have thought of by myself. Thankfully, a friend capable of being just as annoyed by petty things as I am, alerted me to the problem. It encourages me to know that other people also can be annoyed by petty things.

2/Having to push a button to get a receipt. At Dollar Tree, for example, if I want a receipt, I now have to push a button. A waste of my time. Of course I want a receipt. Wouldn’t it just be better to print out a receipt for every customer, saving time for customer and cashier both? That used to be automatic. It worked fine. Why introduce this inquisition about whether or not I want a receipt? Please understand: I love Dollar Tree. It is a fantastic place to shop, and I have even purchased stock in the company. But please stop making me push a button in order to get a receipt. Such a policy is unworthy of your greatness.

3/Putting an extra three minutes on the halftime clock. This happens constantly at high school football and basketball games. The football team has 15 minutes for halftime. That is quite reasonable. But when teams are slow to get back on the field, the scorekeeper quite often adds an additional three minutes on the clock. Basketball halftimes are ten minutes. Again, the scorekeeper will sometimes add an additional three minutes. This is annoying. I want to get home at a reasonable hour. I have to get up early tomorrow in order to squeeze in my exercising before I go to work. Some people may be due to work the second shift somewhere. People have children they want to get to bed as soon as possible. The weather we are sitting in (football) may not be very pleasant. Bladders are put under more pressure. There are plenty of reasons to just stick to the legitimate number of halftime minutes.

4/The cartoon “Fort Knox” by Jon Paul. I hope Mr. Paul never sees this comment. I hate to criticize him. But his cartoon is never funny. It is intended to be funny, but is not. I am a struggling artist myself, struggling to get readers, struggling to sell books, struggling, struggling, struggling. I know it is not easy to produce something people want to read. But after a while Mr. Paul should see the writing on the wall: he is not intended to be a cartoonist. It is not possible that more than two or three people in the world can find this comic strip to be funny. Mr. Paul does not have any sort of sense of humor. Mr. Paul almost certainly has gifts along another line or lines. I encourage him to search for those gifts and develop them. Still, if people are actually paying him to continue to publish his strip, I can see why he would be loath to retire from cartooning. (I do understand the Mr. Paul or other people might say the same thing to me: read the handwriting on the wall about your abilities, and find another line of work.)

5/Listing actresses as actors. This is very new, having cropped up in the last few years. Apparently it is some sort of insult to a female who does acting, to call her an actress. But it is not an insult at all, and was never intended by anyone to be an insult. A male who acts is an actor. A female who acts is an actress. To call her an actor is to introduce confusion. On the other hand, if we would continue to call actresses actresses, we avoid that confusion.

6/Two last names. Sorry, this is not playing fair. Everyone gets one last name, not two. I can be Carl Wells, but if I suddenly become Carl Wells-Abercrombie, I am cheating. If I then marry Sally Overshiner-Huddleston, will our first child Elly become Elly Wells-Abercrombie-Overshiner-Huddleston, or Elly Overshiner-Huddleston-Wells-Abercrombie? What if Elly goes on to become a gifted basketball player? Is the announcer supposed to call her by four last names or by two last names, or (heaven forfend) by one last name? If by one, which one? No, this is nonsense. Everyone gets one last name, but one only.

7/Tattoos. The Bible tells us that we are not to make any tattoo marks on ourselves (Leviticus 19:28). That is good enough for me. I do understand that at least one celebrity Christian writer thinks that to interpret this verse as really telling us we should not get tattoos, is unsophisticated. Fine, and who knows, maybe he is correct (although personally I doubt that he is), but I will continue to think it is foolish to get a tattoo. Do we have to follow every fad that comes along, in order to be cool and with it? That lets me out, since I have a natural aptitude for being uncool and un-with it.

8/Earrings. I don’t even like earrings on women. I have yet to see a woman whose looks were improved by wearing earrings. But especially on men, earrings are ridiculous. Do we have to follow every fad that comes along, in order to be cool and with it? (Is there an echo in here?)

9/Women who keep their own last name when they get married. If you don’t think enough of the guy to want to take his last name when you get married, don’t marry him. You don’t give up your individuality when you take your husband’s last name. You are still an individual. But the two of you are now one separate family, under the headship of the husband. Did Elizabeth Stevenson give up her individuality when she took her husband’s name? No, she managed to become one of the better writers in world history, under the name Mrs. Gaskell. Her husband is forgotten, but she is not. She did it without hanging on to her maiden name. She was just as much herself as Elizabeth Gaskell as she would have been as Elizabeth Stevenson.

10/Newspapers are doing an increasingly poor job at giving us line scores and box scores of both varsity and junior varsity basketball games. We used to get quarter scores, and a decent summary of the scoring, sometimes with other information as well, in a box score, for varsity games. JV games at least rated a line score, with at least the scoring for the local team. All this information is of considerable value to the fan who cares about the games. But newspapers give us less and less of what we want. And then newspapers whine that their circulation is decreasing. Really, we fans don’t expect miracles. Give us the basic information and we will be satisfied. But to tell us to get lost by ignoring our needs? Don’t be surprised if your circulation numbers continue to drop.

11/People of African heritage are Black, while white people are only white, not White. This is another question of fairness. If black people deserve a capital letter, then white people deserve a capital letter. Ask yourself this question: if the Powers That Be insisted on calling white people White while at the same time insisted on calling black people black, how do you think that would fly? Everyone would be outraged at the horrific racism involved in honoring white people and dishonoring black people. Well, the exact same principle is involved when black people are called Black and white people are called white. Where we have Black and white, we have egregious bigotry.

12/The constant use of the f-word. I am thinking not just of daily life as we all experience it, but also of books and movies. We can of course throw in all blasphemous and vulgar language, not just the f-word. All of this is annoying, and is a bad sign about our civilization.

13/Books that are censored without warning. I was reading Mark Twain’s wonderful Tom Sawyer Abroad, when suddenly I began to smell a rat. I went back to an older version of the book, and found out my instinct was correct. The publishers had taken it upon themselves to censor and change what Mark Twain had written. If they had warned their readers, fine. That would be fair play. Foolish, in my opinion, and unnecessary, but definitely fair play. But the publishers had taken it upon themselves to change the text without warning their prospective readers what was going on.

14/Scam phone calls and scam emails. Maybe I am asking too much, but it seems to me that most of this could be stopped if we had legal authorities who wanted badly enough to stop it. Is it not a matter of will? Our politicians promise us the moon, but usually deliver high taxes. A governor of a state could say, for example, “We are going to try to apprehend and punish scam artists. We may fail, but we are going to try. We will report back to you honestly about how we are doing. Please be patient and give us some time. Meanwhile, be very careful. Unfortunately, there are a lot of crooks out there.” Then do what you say you are going to do. At least try.

15/Long hair on men. 1 Corinthians 11:14 says, “Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him?” Again, I am sure that there are plenty of Christian authorities who say, perhaps correctly, that I am unsophisticated in my understanding of this verse. And again I say, I don’t care much. To me long hair on men looks and seems foolish. Women are the ones who are built for beauty; men are built for work. Let’s keep it that way.

Okay, that concludes my fifteen petty annoyances. I want to go on record here that if I am saved from drowning by a tattooed guy with two last names and with an earring and long hair, I will thank him with great gratitude. No doubt I will also hold on to my sense of annoyance about his personal flaws.

My Aged Parent has sometimes told me something like, “No wonder you never married,” or “It’s a good thing you never married.” No doubt she is correct.

Maybe all these annoyances are bothersome to me because I am offended that other people are more free and flexible in the way they live their lives. I’m an uptight jerk/loser. Fine. But meanwhile all I ask is that the world attend to my complaints and make the situation right by changing.

In the previous three weeks I said what a disgrace and danger it is to have people like the baby-killing socialists Joe Biden and Kamala Harris become president and vice-president. I have not given up hope that it will be conclusively proven to the meanest intelligence that they won the election only by theft, and so I have hope that Donald Trump will serve a second term. He is not likely to do a better job in his second term than he did in his first, but at least he is better than Biden/Harris.

The obvious point was made that no matter who is inaugurated, we are going to have to go on living, so it behooves us to try to find ways forward. I listed 38 things we could do. Number 35 was one I hoped to revisit. Here is what I wrote last week:

“35/We could mentor new believers. This is mostly untried ground in Christian churches. We tend to hope and expect people will automatically become strong Christians as soon as they join the church. But that is not how life works. This is such an important and big topic that it needs a lot more discussion. Hopefully I will devote a single blog post to this sometime in the future. For now, just let the idea percolate.”

Today is the time for that “single blog post.”

I will begin with two negative examples, both true stories. These things happened in churches with which I have been involved. I would stress that the two churches were not bad churches, as churches go. I would rate both of them as significantly above average. Someone looking for a decent church home could do far worse than either of these two churches.

Negative example #1/A divorced woman showed up at church out of the blue. She had several children. Her husband had enjoyed making children but had been less enthused about helping raise them. So he bailed out. On the plus side, he did provide child support.

This woman seemed to be a true believer. Was she? Or was she not really regenerated and converted? I don’t know the answer, but does it matter? If she was a true believer, we are off to a great start. If she was not yet a true believer, here was someone who showed up at our doorstep with at least some kind of interest in being or becoming a Christian.

She definitely had some excellent qualities as a human being. She worked to provide for her family–I think possibly worked full time. She put money in the collection plate, and she gave more than a pittance. She was good about naming people in her orbit who needed prayer. She went to some trouble to make it to church with her children every week. This was not an unpleasant person to be around.

But she had some problems. Working (probably full-time) with several young children to care for, she was pressed for time in getting some tasks done. Her home was disorganized. Her children needless to say lacked a strong father figure. Some of the children showed promise as human beings, others were so damaged that one had to wonder about their long-term prospects.

We let this woman down like a ton of bricks. She desperately needed someone to come alongside her and help her. No, she was on her own, basically. We didn’t come alongside. Things could have been done to help her get more organized. Some of the families–and we had strong families in that church–could have incorporated the children into some of their activities. It could all have been done naturally and gradually. But it didn’t get done at all.

Eventually, after several years, this woman was lost to another church. I hope they did better than we did.

Negative example #2/A young man sponsored by a woman in the church came to church twice. The second time the woman said he wanted to become a Christian. He was gladly received by the elders, and we all prayed over him. He was, within a day or two, baptized. He missed church the next week, I think, then came to church one more time. We didn’t see him after that, ever again. Eventually I heard someone say he was “in detention.”

When I talked about this with a man in the church, he told me, “At least he got saved.” But did he? Is it not far more likely that the young man was never regenerated? He heard the word and showed some interest, but most likely he had not truly sought salvation through Jesus Christ.

The church in essence gave validation to his self-deception. This young man needed to learn more about what was involved in Christianity. He needed to learn a lot, he needed to see examples of Christian behavior week after week. Perhaps he too is going around thinking, “Well, at least I got saved,” but without having learned how to live as a Christian. My guess is that he was not regenerated and converted.

We needed to get to know him, to involve him in our daily lives. It did not happen. We needed to love him enough to spend time with him. It did not happen.

Okay, so what can be done? I repeat: to begin with, just let the idea that we could mentor new believers (or prospective believers) percolate. It seems such an unusual idea, because we almost never see it happening. So maybe it is a bad idea. Or maybe it is a good idea, but just really difficult to implement.

The latter point is I think the answer: this is something that is going to be really hard to do.

There is one major reason it is going to be so hard to do. That major reason is really dark, but it is true.

That is, we have a really hard time caring about what happens to other people. Do we even care about our family members? We think we do, but most of the time we just want them to be successful because they are part of us. Usually we excuse or enable their sin, rather than truly love them by holding them to a biblical standard of behavior. The examples of this are so egregious as to be laughable.

So if we don’t even love our own family in a biblical manner, how the heck are we going to love other people enough to be involved in their lives in a significant manner?

Let’s be realistic. It simply is not going to happen. We just won’t be able to do it. We care only about ourselves.

However, there is a gleam of hope. It is slight, but it exists.

Nothing really good is going to come about via a mass movement. But one person doesn’t need to wait on a mass movement. One person can act, on his own. One person can come alongside a new believer or a prospective new believer, and can involve himself in the life of that person in a good manner.

In a perfect manner? Ain’t gonna happen. But we can show an interest in another person by the way we treat him. We may have to force ourselves to do it. Our interaction with that person won’t be as good as it could be. But it still might be helpful.

On the rare occasions when another person showed you respect by the way he talked to you, did you appreciate it? Of course you did. Did you expect perfection out of that other person? No. But he seemed to see you as an individual human being worth talking to. It helped.

When we care enough about other people to get involved in their lives, we will begin to see a surprising growth in the kingdom of God on earth.

I don’t expect it to happen soon. Right now we don’t even see the problem, let alone search for the solution. But I do think that eventually the church will begin to get better at this. I wish it would happen soon, but more likely it will be centuries before this begins to happen to a large extent. I think we are in the early church. Somewhere along the line we are going to remember that God is a person, each of us is a person, and other people are persons, and that all of life should be about respecting and caring for persons.

Now to double back slightly. I think the church as a whole has a basic misunderstanding about what Christianity is all about. We think Christianity is about going from being a non-Christian to being a Christian. “At least he got saved,” is a typical attitude among Christians. “We walked the aisle, so all is well.”

But I don’t think that is how God has constructed Christianity. Yes, it is true that there is a difference between being a non-Christian and being a Christian. But I would contend that learning to live as a Christian is a process.

Think of becoming a Christian not as a “Bang, I’m saved” moment; “now all is well.” Think of becoming a Christian as the first step on a journey of 3,000 miles. One step is not very far along. It is only a start. A start is great, but one step forward won’t get you to the 3,000 mile marker. You have to keep moving.

Being a Christian means learning to live as God wants us to live, in countless practical ways. Being a Christian means things like paying our bills on time, doing what we say we’re going to do, learning to discipline our children rather than enable their sin, learning to keep our dog inside so he won’t bother the neighbors with his barking, learning to tithe, being on time for church every Sunday, avoiding huge debt, controlling our tongue, refusing to declare bankruptcy, fighting our temptation to envy those who are wealthier or who have greater gifts or abilities than we have, voting to protect our neighbor’s wealth, praying for our enemies, working at a job faithfully even if it is not highly paid, driving courteously, and on and on world without end amen. Biblical Christianity is practical daily growing Christianity.

I don’t see that Christians as a whole understand this. As proof, I would offer the fact that Christians give about 2.5% of their increase to the church, while God requires a tithe (Malachi 3:8-12, etc.), which is 10%. Tithing is probably the easiest thing to do on the list of practical things above, and yet we are only one quarter of the way there. If we can’t even do that, how can we do the ten thousand more difficult practical things on the list?

We can’t and we won’t. Right now Christians have a very weak understanding of what biblical Christianity is.

Much of today’s post has been dark. But dark truths are also freeing. When we face dark truths honestly, we have a chance to see how we need to change our thinking and behavior.

“We could mentor new believers,” I said. I’ll stick to that. We could. We probably won’t in the near future, but we could. When we begin to care about other people enough to involve them in our lives, and begin to hold them and ourselves to a biblical standard, some good things are going to happen. That is worth waiting for, even if it takes a few thousand years.

It is both a disgrace and a danger to have baby-killing socialists like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris be elected to executive office. It seems likely to me that the election was stolen, but even if Donald Trump won and is eventually installed in office, we will have lots of hard work ahead of us. The country has been going in a wrong direction for a long time.

Rather than assume that all is lost forever, however, let’s hope that we can change the direction we are heading. So this is part three of a series exploring what practical things we can do if we are searching for a way forward. We are ready for #25.

25/Treat everyone with respect and kindness. Every person is made in the image of God. We should be notorious for speaking courteously to people. Grumpy people are self-indulgent. We all like to be treated with respect, so it should not be a bridge too far to theorize that maybe we in turn should treat others with respect.

26/Be on time. Oddly, it is often true that Christians cannot even be on time for Sunday school or church. Being late is a form of self-indulgence, and shows a lack of respect for other people.

27/Maybe we should all learn to handle firearms safely. Hopefully it is a skill most of us will never need. But at the worst it is something that is useful to be able to do. Churches could organize Saturday lessons in handling guns safely, and in learning how to shoot a little bit. This could be for boys, for girls, for men, and for women, all taught separately in order to keep embarrassment levels as low as possible for each group. If the elders/deacons won’t organize this as the church leadership, still it could be done by responsible adults in the church on a more informal basis. I used to shoot a rifle a little bit, but it’s been decades. I would definitely show up to learn more about gun safety and about shooting a gun, if the time scheduled did not interfere with my work hours. Other adults would show up as well. Countless young people of both sexes would be glad to be taught.

28/Finding a way forward is not a mass movement. It would be nice if thousands follow the lead of obedient Christians, but it is not necessary or expected. The Bible and world history make clear that one person is important and can make an incredible difference for good. Relax. The fact that you at your absolute best seem to have little effect on the thoughts and actions of others should not be overwhelming. Our temptation is to despair because so few people seem to care about freedom and responsibility. But when we despair, we are not thinking with faith. Jeremiah, Paul, the little slave girl (2 Kings 5:1-4), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ron Paul, were each only one person. They just did what they knew they needed to do. God used it. He will use us as well. Of course He is unlikely to use us as dramatically as He used the five people I just named. So what? We all have our small but important part to play. If we don’t do our own part, someone else will have to do it for us.

29/Avoid sexual immorality and cultivate purity. We are on the verge of a new age of chivalry. Nonsense? Well, remember #28. Even if a widespread new age of chivalry is delayed a few thousand years, one person can begin to live in a new age of chivalry immediately. Current Christians are notoriously careless about sexual matters. But each of us as an individual need not follow the careless pattern. C. S. Lewis said it well in That Hideous Strength: “lust . . . disenchants the whole universe” (Chapter 12). We can have back the rightly enchanted universe, starting today.

30/Don’t consider the value of small countries. The end of the United States will probably be a very good step in the right direction, say a few idiots. What do they know? Don’t read The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr. He will cause you to consider that possibly it is wise to have small nations rather than big ones. So don’t read him. Don’t consider a new idea that might be correct. Don’t consider that God dealt covenantally with lots of nations, and that He might have had a reason for keeping nations small. (Okay, that was all sarcasm. To be clear: please consider the possible value of small countries. A U.S. split up into many parts will be a less dangerous U.S., and might provide a few places where Christianity was welcome.)

31/The Republican Party is not a reliable counterweight to the Democratic Party. Consider forming new parties. Consider running as an independent. Christians seem to want microwave solutions which rescue us immediately. This is not how life works. (Again, the Rapture ain’t happening. The Rapture is a crock of horse manure.) If we want to get from a horrible place to a good place, it is going to take many years, possibly many decades. We will receive defeats along the way. We will have to study and learn. We will have to stand for things that causes lots of people to hate us. It is not going to be easy. But remember #28.

32/Churches could and should begin to excommunicate non-believers. Begin with pro-abortionists. The church is weak for many reasons, but at least one of the reasons is that we refuse to excommunicate non-believers.

33/Try to find a few like-minded people to be your friends. This will not necessarily be easy. But it can be done. If you are persistent, God will help you. He may even work a miracle. I was given one of my closest friends by what can plausibly be seen as a miracle.

34/Try to find a few commentators on the Internet who share your outlook. This is similar to #33. We are inundated with horrible ideas. But there are still a few commentators who will speak the truth, and who will lift your spirits and give you hope as you read them. Keep searching until you find a few. Many would be better, but even a few will be a great blessing to you.

35/We could mentor new believers. This is mostly untried ground in Christian churches. We tend to hope and expect people will automatically become strong Christians as soon as they join the church. But that is not how life works. This is such an important and big topic that it needs a lot more discussion. Hopefully I will devote a single blog post to this sometime in the future. For now, just let the idea percolate.

36/We could keep our weight under control. Lose five pounds. (Easy for you to say!) Exercise moderately; exercise at least enough to keep some physical tone. God made our bodies to be used. Don’t expect too much of yourself, but also don’t expect too little.

37/Be grateful and avoid envy, avoid blaming others for your problems. Those of us who love freedom/responsibility despise Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but look at them from another angle. These poor people are living in a hell of their own making, right now. They are envious and they refuse to accept responsibility for their actions. Their manner of going through life is horrific. Yes, they bring misery to others, and should not be indulged, but their first victims are themselves. My Aged Parent has often pointed out that some people show us how not to be. She is correct. BLM and Antifa show us how not to be. Learn from the horrific mess they are making of their lives.

38/Remember that we are in this for the long haul. Temporary defeat is not total defeat forever. Remember Russia. The communists took over in 1917 and millions of people suffered and died as a result. But in less than two generations the Soviet Union was gone. The Soviet Union disbanded in 1991. We too may have to undergo some horrors. I hope the horrors will not be as egregious as those suffered by the Russian people. But we can’t be sure what will happen. We can take hope in knowing that God exists and reigns and will win eventually. Let us be found faithful to Him. Then, alive or dead, all will be well for us.

That concludes our three-part series on things we can do if we are searching for a way forward after the disgraceful election of 2020. Pick one or two which seem helpful to you, or just make up your own list. Enjoy the years ahead. They may be challenging, but at least they should be interesting.