I took a flight last night after driving thru downtown Seattle just as the Hawks won the Lombardi trophy. Football has become our religion (especially in Seattle). We supplant all other Sunday activities and put crazy amounts of money and effort into our annual "General Conferences" that are also called playoffs or Superbowl. While I am glad that the Hawks finally won a championship, could it not be played on Saturday? And could we not put as much fervor into religious zeal as is put into the adoration of a game. It is one of the tools that is used by the powers that be to distract the masses while things are implemented on a controlled and distracted populace.
I flew on an unnamed regional airline for the first time since I used it to fly down to San Jose and compete in the corporate track and field games back in 2000. I used to home teach a family and the husband did line maintenance for them at Seatac. Here is the rest of the story from a previous post on my testimony of tithing:
When our kid (that died of SIDS) was born, I was also called into the Elder's Quorum Presidency in our ward. It was a golden time in the life of my wife and I. Contentment on so many levels was at an all-time high. Right after I was set apart, I was filled with the spirit of prophecy and I began to have an unsettling feeling about my employment possibilities. I kept feeling after the Lord to give me guidance as the patriarch in our home. My wife chose to end her teaching career in Secondary Ed and I was thrust into the role as the sole bread winner. Something that has been extremely difficult for me - and brought much pressure as well as satisfaction in my life. I pressed the Lord and got the strong impression that I came home and told my wife one day after work. I said, "Something big is going to happen that will affect my employment, it will happen in the next six months and we need to prepare." She asked me what it was and I did not know. It was six weeks before Sept 11th and I was employed by a large aerospace company in the Northwest. My impression was that we needed to control our spending immediately and to double our fast offerings (and continue to faithfully pay our tithing). We did so. Six weeks later, we knew what that impression was about. Within two weeks, our CEO made a company-wide announcement that we would be cutting 1/2 of our work force. Things were dire - and I had only been at the company around 4 years and the average term of employment in the workforce was around 20 years. I had no chance with those odds. Worse, due to my lack of experience, I was put on a simple system that could be taken over by most any other employee with more seniority and experience. Most people might logically quit paying tithing/fast offerings in order to hedge up the "rainy day" fund. We did the opposite.So, I found myself flying on this regional airline (which I swore I would never do - as I was probably flying on the very aircraft that later crashed, on my way down to San Jose) last night to get home and I end up having a dream this morning where I was out poking around the engine compartment afterwards and noticed some seriously bad anomalies on the engine controls. It was "chewing gum and baling wire" bad. I freaked out and went up to talk to the pilot/first officer, both of whom were fast asleep (looked over-worked and underpaid). I finally managed to wake the first officer and and gave him a tongue lashing for flying an aircraft with such shoddy maintenance and (I must have been in some position of authority because) I threatened to ground the aircraft until this one thing was taken care of and was of a mind to go on a witch hunt looking for other glaring problems, like I do in my real job when I find someone is being slothful.
Two months later as the layoff machine began grinding away, I was over at a less-active brother's house doing home teaching. He worked for a regional airline as a line mechanic. He intimated to me that it was not a matter of if, but when that company would face a disaster due to less than above-board maintenance practices. I did not think any more of it until a few months later in February of the next year. I was riding home after work when I began hearing reports of this airline having difficulty with the very system I was responsible for as a Maintenance Engineer. Had I forgotten something? Was I somehow responsible for dozens of lives? I was glued to the evening news and found out it was related to faulty record keeping and bad maintenance practices - not documentation of my system. I was relieved, but did not know the mysterious workings of the Lord that were soon to play out. As the layoff notices were coming out for others around me, I was suddenly in my manager's office being questioned on my previous work history as he was building a case for keeping me around so that I could completely revamp all documentation on my simple system that had been the cause of this crash. Suddenly, instead of being layoff fodder, I had received a 10% pay bump and a jump in Engineering classification. I was no longer on the list of those who were going out the door. For the next two years (during the worst of times in aerospace when indeed 50% of the company went out the door), I was comfortable and able to breath easily while so many suffered.
It was the hand of God at play once again. God knows all things and is able to see what we cannot see. If we will but simply put our faith and trust in Him, we will be led aright. I know this. I have never felt the sting of a day of unemployment as I have sought His will and tried to keep the laws associated with His desire to bless His children. He does not love one more than the other - he just simply must bless those whom He is bound to bless when they keep His commandments. I KNOW THIS to be true. As we enter the phase of the final death throes of the American economy, I warn you to follow this counsel so that He may bless His people. Soon, it will appear that there are no blessings for the righteous or the wicked, jointly. He causes His the rain to fall on both camps - but remember that after the trial, comes the blessings. At that point, I have the assurance that payment of tithing will not guarantee a cushy slot in a multi-national as most will disappear in the chaos, but that food storage and self-reliance will be the means of making it through the difficult times until the fire comes. Another principle will have taken over. Let God guide your every action and every thought and you will find the right place for you. In Jesus name, amen.
The dream prior to that one was my brother and I were at Hoover Dam down in the power house on some kind of personal tour and the head master allowed us fiddle with the valves on the turbines and left. We turned them all down on the south power house which caused some kind of surge in the water being supplied to the north power house. When we realized things were going south, we cranked the valves back open and this created some cavitation in the piping leading to the power house. We could feel the whole structure shaking and getting ready to blow so we high-tailed it for higher ground before we were swimming for our lives. Sure enough, as we are running for our lives, we run into the head master and he can't figure out what has happened. They have to shut down most of the turbines to prevent catastrophic damage and there is a massive brown-out in most of the West. My brother and I slip away and don't say a word. The dam is down for months as repairs are made. Since we felt guilty, we put our generators to use and plug them into the grid to try and help with the brown-outs. How the mind comes up with this stuff......
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