Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

APRIL 20 2019

WISDOM

If there ever were a need for wisdom, it is today, because the problems the world is facing are greater than at any point in history.

Paradoxically, if there ever was a lack of wisdom, it is today. The situation that confronts us stems from decisions made centuries ago, and to rectify these now deeply ingrained initiatives the world needs remedial measures that are nearly impossible to implement.

There is a consensus developing that the entire world is on the wrong track. People are perplexed, because the old is dying and the new has not yet been formed. People sense that the present situation cannot be maintained, even though it gave people jobs and great prosperity. That’s why many clamor for a return to the good old times, and fall for empty slogans such as Make America Great Again. They don’t want to admit that the past is the past.

Panta rhei, oude menei: everything flows, nothing remains the same: the ancient Greeks knew this already.

All living entities and all human enterprises are subject to birth, growth and decline.   

Take mobility.

For many millennia the horse and buggy and sailing ships were the only mode of transport, then motorized transport came, then airplanes. Next? Space travel?  A pipe dream.

Take cars.

Weird to the point of ridicule: the entire concept of “car” is bizarre: 1000 kilograms of steel, plastic and rubber to convey 80 kg of human flesh. Oil created the car, and oil created America, and oil made America great. And now the oil kills: now everything, including the USA, constructed on carbon content is lethal.

Me: I bike when I can.

I love my bike, my bicycle, my two-wheeler, my iron horse. I can lift it, I can service it. It always works: no key, no starter, no fuel, except my legs. A sustainable society can be built on a bike: not on a car: that’s why America will die, and never arise again.

Cars are crazy: they account for over ¼ of our greenhouse gas emissions. GHG does not stand for God’s Holy Grail. It stands for the complete opposite, Green House Gases. Today they fuel the world’s Gas Chambers made notorious by the HOLOCAUST that killed millions of Jews. Now we are our own executors. Weird, totally weird.

Or take communication: in Africa the tom-tom; flags were used on sailing ships, fire or smoke signals by the American indigenous population; then the telegraph and Morse-code, telephone, Internet, TV. Now the ‘smart phone’ is slated to kill the human brain.

Or take the workplace. When I arrived in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1955 (left in 1975), General Motors there employed at least 5000 men and a few women. That was the place to be: guaranteed wages, even when unemployed: pension, the works. Then General Motors had 50 percent of the automobile market in North America. Then there also were several other manufacturers: Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Packard, now all gone, as well as the 5000 jobs. English Electric, Ferranti Packard, the paper mills: in the space of 50 years all these ‘man-sized’ jobs disappeared: gone. St. Catharines now exists on government-financed jobs; Brock University, Niagara College, the healthcare business, perhaps the wine industry, perhaps a bit of tourism.

Where have all the jobs gone? I read last week that 70,000 stores will close this year in North America. For the longest time women have had the edge there over men, even though the pay for these service jobs was less.

Today all governments work with deficits. How long will that last? How long can that last?

Automation. Robots. Artificial Intelligence. Predictions are that millions of jobs will disappear, taken over by machines, mechanical devices, computer-driven tools.

How about human bodies? Will they become superfluous? Idleness breeds evil; uselessness kills the mind; no gainful work causes illness, both physical and psychical. No work without leisure, no leisure without work. Unemployment requires government handouts. Unemployment causes violence. Unemployment kills. All require public help. All become a burden for the taxpayer, itself a disappearing phenomenon. All scream for money that isn’t there.

Enter Climate Change.

We now see it daily in the US Mid-West, America’s bread basket: rains, floods, tornados, all conspiring to make a harvest nearly impossible. The waters leaching all the agricultural poisons into the streams, further imperiling the already precarious state of health of the US population, while threatening food inflation imposed on an already financially stressed population, further causing hardship and mental turmoil.

So, after this brief summary of the state of our financial insecurity and the mental imbalance of a large segment of the working class in Canada and the USA, questions scream for solutions.

Are there still answers? Are there still solutions? Have we painted ourselves in such a tight corner, that there no longer is an escape?

Forget about Trump and his empty bombast, his childish boasting, his dangerous rhetoric. Forget about Doug Ford in Ontario, Canada, with his ‘buck-a-beer’, his anti-climate-change cheap shots.

YES, THERE IS A SOLUTION.

I always read something. Last week I reread a book, a special book, a book given to me by a friend to whom the book was dedicated: Mark Vander Vennen.

BEYOND THE MODERN AGE was written by Bob Goudzwaard and Craig G. Bartholomew. The title suggests that we have entered a new phase. The Modern Age is over. The problems have become too big to be solved. Going back to the time when America was truly great – witness the Marshall Plan – is now impossible, given America’s hundreds of trillions of debt and future obligations.

The days of ENLIGHTENMENT are over as well. That was the time, starting around 1650 – 1680, when “the more dramatic and decisive period of rethinking (came about) when the mental world of the West was revolutionized along rationalistic and secular lines…..Human logic, based on human wisdom freed itself from any attachment to God and the Holy, and pursued its own rationale.” This model has run stuck.

We now have entered the new Dark Ages, an era of desperation, false promises and lies.

It’s high time to reflect.

In God’s grace we are on a cross road. The current path has become a dead end, and there remains one small opening for those who seek. The opening consists of 5 words: THE FEAR OF THE LORD.

“The fear of the Lord” … is the opening line of many texts in the Bible. Psalm 19, one of my favorite bible passages, which, like no other passage of Scripture, extols the praise of creation, starts with the glorious line,

“The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the   work of his hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they display knowledge…..Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world”.

And then, later in this poetic masterpiece the simple words,

”The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.”

Isn’t that mind-boggling? How can ‘fear’ be pure? We associate fear with negative aspects, with fright, with something to avoid.

Indeed, that text, and many others, begs the question, “what is meant by “THE FEAR OF THE LORD?”

That is just one instance where ‘fear’ enters in, a word that needs explanation. Psalm 111: 10 reiterates this theme,

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding.”

Job, in the book by his name, when he questions the origin of his unfortunate circumstances, which his friends blame on his sinful past, Job says, “The fear of the Lord – that is wisdom”.

So, a preliminary conclusion could be that ‘fear of the Lord’ and ‘wisdom’ are intimately intertwined.

BEYOND THE MODERN AGE tells me that , “Wisdom in Scripture is rooted in the doctrine of creation and espouses a doctrine of creation order.”

 I agree with this statement, but it is typical churchy parlor, and needs some clarification. A few lines later, it reverts to common day language and states, “Creation order alerts us to the fact that the world is shaped in particular ways, and it is only as we find those ways and walk in them that we truly flourish”.

I like the way J. H. Bavinck clarifies the creation order in a book I have translated, published by Eerdmans, “The Riddle of Life”. There Dr. Bavinck writes,

“When we look around us with open eyes and minds then there is one thing that time and again touches us to the core: it’s all about serving. The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist. Every creature thinks that it is there only for itself, but in final analysis it is nothing else but a servant for others. To be alive, to exist at all, finds it destination simply in serving others. Without that law nothing else can be.

Yet that law of serving is remarkable in more than one way. What is so truly amazing is that, as a rule, no creature is there for the sole reason of serving, as they all think that self-help is their sole goal, but all that serving goes automatically, and thus is simply an unconscious act. It is as if a mighty hand brings all this in motion and, in spite of itself, stimulates this self-less serving. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, is not a duty, but an in-born act, without compulsion, without intent. Each single being is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.”

That is the Creation Order. Bob Goudzwaard and Craig Bartholomew are correct when they write that the creation order makes us aware that the world is shaped in particular ways and that in finding them we discover wisdom.

On top of the SERVING pecking order, if I may use that term, are we, women and men, girls and boys. Our task is to serve consciously, just as Christ did, as stated in Mark 10: 45, “he came to serve and not to be served”.

We have reversed that order. We have made creation our slave. We, in our pride and arrogance, have subjected all of creation to our wily whims and capricious cruelty. We, in our idolatrous inclination, have rejected the notion that Creation represents God, which have made our greedy acts nothing less than rebellion and insurrection, and indeed blasphemy.

Wisdom’s Way.

Wisdom’s way is through humility; wisdom’s way is through service to the earth and all it contains, including our fellow humans globally; wisdom’s way is ‘seeking the kingdom”, the central theme of Jesus ministry; wisdom’s way is seeking the welfare of creation; wisdom’s way is “The Way, the Truth and the Life”, by following Jesus who taught us how to live.

If we want to find ‘wisdom’ then we have to look to creation, because “In Wisdom He made it all,” as Psalm 104: 24 informs us.

That’s why ‘the fear of the Lord’ is the first step in becoming wise. That fear really means: looking in AWE at creation, seeing it with the eyes of the author of Psalm 8, “O Lord, our God, how majestic is your name in all the earth.” That fear is nothing else but bowing humbly for God’s majesty.

That fear is all about honoring God’s name, his signature on creation, just as the name of “Rembrandt” on his paintings validates his masterpieces.

In the TEN COMMANDMENTS, God orders us “not to misuse his name”. That has nothing to do with swearing, and everything to do with treating Creation as holy, because in it God’s wisdom is revealed. In the LORD’S PRAYER the same emphasis is given: “Holy be thy name.”

Romans 1: 20 sums it all up,

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

Saying sorry is not enough. Faith without deeds is dead.

Want WISDOM?

Love Creation, Love God, the Creator, Love LIFE.

April 13 2019

EXTINCTION

I worry. Fortunately it doesn’t affect my sleep. My three times per week of one solid hour of running 5 kilometer, of biking 5 kilometer and doing 50 pushups, outdoors when weather permits or on my three exercise machines, plus the extra hours of doing housework, preparing meals, and helping my spouse, ensures that when 10 p.m. comes along, I am tired and sleep quickly and deep. Oh, yes, I sometimes do have a 20 minute afternoon nap.

I worry. It’s not about me, my wife or our extended family. We have been blessed as no other family I know, in having healthy, intelligent kids, all well married, smart grandchildren, who are well educated and have good jobs, so my worry is not about them. And yet it is about them.  

I worry about their future.

I’ve had my life. I have enjoyed the most extravagant era of all times, even though I now realize that it was at the expense of creation. When I pray the Lord’s Prayer, and come to the line, “Forgive us our sins,” then my trespasses on creation come to mind.

In my line of work I travelled tens of thousands of kilometers to do appraisals as far away as Bancroft – 90km -, Haliburton – 130 km -, Minden  – even further -, the Algonquin Park, Barry’s Bay, to the North, Peterborough to the West, Picton to the South, and Smith’s Falls to the East, and places in between. Appraising commercial properties so far away was my profession: I was the only qualified person in my area.

And now I worry because my considerable contribution of Green House Gases has added to the Environmental Crisis we are facing, and the consequences my children and grand – and great grandchildren will face.

I have long maintained that we live in End Times.

Last week I reread THE SIXTH EXTINCTION. Elizabeth Kolbert relates how a mysterious fungus totally wiped out the Panamanian Golden Frog. The fungus spread rapidly from country to country, from continent to continent, and caused the sudden demise of most amphibians, world-wide, including those in my large beaver pond.

Last week I read, in the New York Times, where its lead article also was about a fungus, named Candida auris. It is spreading like wildfire through the world’s hospitals. Its fatality rate is 43 percent, and there is no cure. The fungus is airborne, water-born, clings to every surface, and is extremely difficult to eradicate. The New York Times reports that in a hospital room, ”Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump, the mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive -”.

I suspect that hospitals and medical authorities are suppressing the knowledge of its existence. Since there is no antidote, the people in authority don’t want to alarm the public, and so it has been given the silent treatment, so to say.

There are different theories how Candida auris came about. Dr. Jacques Meis, a Dutch researcher, attached to the Nijmegen University, believes that drug-resistant fungi developed thanks to heavy use of fungicides on crops. These poisonous commercial pesticides suppress the immunity of the soil and free substances such as these fungi.

We really have no clue what we are doing to The Earth.

We are indeed speeding up the disintegration of the planet’s defensive system by introducing foreign substances to supposedly aid the growth of crops.

It reminds me of a wise First Nation elder, Marie Gladue, a Navajo elder,

Natural Law was here before and will be here after we’re gone.
Western law was not here then and will not last.

.Western Law is what we live by today. It only has one aim: exploit the earth for all it worth. That goal is failure-bound, a fact that is becoming more evident by the day. That’s why it is the appropriate time to echo the message John the Baptizer brought, “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.”

For me this character, John the Baptizer, is my prototype, my model. He was called to pave the way for the Messiah. I believe that this is the task of all Christians, and especially the Church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw the task of the church in completely eschatological terms, always pointing to the Eschaton, so he wrote,

“The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

The trouble is that the church sees heaven as the end. Every Sunday in church we read a portion of THE LIVING FAITH, the statement of Christian Belief of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. This past Sunday, we read,

Love is the greatest gift in the world
because it will last beyond this world
and is supremely pleasing to our Lord.
Love foreshadows life in heaven.

That’s a bunch of baloney. If that is the official point of view of a denomination, proclaiming that the end of it all is heaven, then God help us, because the church, the official mouthpiece of God in the world, has it all wrong. Bonhoeffer sees it differently. Here’s what he wrote:

“Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to
other worlds beyond: rather he gives us back to the earth as its
loyal children.”

My other favorite theologian, J. H. Bavinck, wrote essentially the same,

“Personal salvation and the salvation of the planet go hand in
hand”.

Both Bavinck and Bonhoeffer see the Kingdom in eschatological terms: The New Creation to come!

“Personal salvation and planetary redemption go together!” That is revolutionary: it turns the message of the church upside down!

THE BELGIC CONFESSION confirms this. Here’s what this all- important statement of faith says about us knowing God:

“We know God FIRST by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “(the creation of) all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”

If we know God first through his creation, then there’s something drastically wrong with the Gospel business.

Let me give a closer look at Romans 8. It connects human suffering with the pains the earth endures.

Here’s the exact wording, verses 17 – 21,

And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him. I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the revelation of the sons of God. ……. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. 

The HERITAGE awaiting us is THE NEW CREATION, if we share in the suffering.

Let me take a concrete example. Picture Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed an immense amount of music. Suppose that just like Christ, Bach had a mortal enemy, who got ahold of all his music before it was widely published, and before JSB’s very eyes, burn it, slowly destroying his entire portfolio. You can imagine that it would pain him no end, seeing his life’s work destroyed. 

But that’s what we are doing to Creation, God’s glorious work of art. That’s what EXTINCTION really means: we are extinguishing species after species; we are fouling everything else, turning it into poison; we are creating bizarre conditions, everywhere, turning benevolent entities, such as air, soil, water, into dangerous substances.

“And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him”.

We call ourselves God’s children. As children we are slated to become heirs, which indicate that we will inherit what now belongs to God. But it comes with a caveat:  today we all are continuously complicit in destroying God’s very good creation: we are sacrificing our inheritance just like the Prodigal Son! Read Luke 15.

We have become so immune to creation’s suffering, so enthralled with the tricks we can play on our machines, praising our accomplishments to heaven, we have become so addicted to everything technical, that all cries of creation are drowned out by the clamor we generate in our cities, where the towers scale ever greater heights, where the traffic congestion clams up all degrees of common sense, where the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

And Christ? And his suffering? We sing, “what a friend we have in Jesus.” But what is a friend for, if not to share in his suffering?

We no longer have a notion of the earth’s pains. Christ, seeing his creation going to hell, aided and abetted and encouraged by his supposedly very body, the church, is still suffering stupendously.

Judas was the lonely betrayer among the twelve disciples. Now, it seems, the entire official church, is betraying the Gospel, the Good News, and entirely misses Jesus’s proclamation: LOVE FOR CREATION. John 3: 16 proclaims this unambiguously: GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD!!

And We?

We have paved the earth, mined the seas, flattened the mountains, and with our high-up condos and cars, we have eliminated the in-built, original knowledge received directly from the Earth. And because we are being bombarded by information, toxins, and electronic signals coming at us faster than our bodies can process, our brains assemble fragments of information into a distorted composite from which we react rather than respond.

The fatal illness of our times is that we have lost touch with the earth, and have left God stranded in the process. Roman 1: 20 directly points to creation as the source of divine knowledge. We have forgotten that the physical landscape is an encyclopedia of wisdom, where everything serves everything else. We have forgotten that we ought to be Servants in Chief.

What to do.

Today there is no more important Bible passage than John 3: 16. It bears repeating:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

The Greek word for ‘world’ is ‘cosmos’. Cosmos includes all created matter, from a blade of grass, to the stars and planets. Just as Bach loves his repertoire of created notes and tunes which he formed into harmonious melodies so God loves his creation, the immense, eternal, infinite, never fully grasped assembly of atoms and mountains, seas and prairies. God, in a fit of generosity – see Psalm 115: 16 – gave it all to us humans, hoping that we would take care of it, explore it, and further develop it to God’s glory.

Instead we became greedy to the point where we now face world-wide extinction, the death of everything and everybody.

Really, there’s no stopping the process. So Jesus – God’s Son – perfect God and perfect Human – descended to earth to wrest God’s creation from the hands of THE ENEMY whose sole aim is to destroy God’s work of art.

The Price? The Ransom?  The death of God, seemingly a victory for Satan, but really it restored Creation.

That is what the Church has to proclaim. In these last, these very last days, Satan will redoubled his efforts, will create unimaginable harm and chaos, and WE will suffer more than any earlier generation because we have failed to serve creation.

“And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him”.

Our suffering is different: our suffering is not for ourselves. Our suffering concerns creation. It is not about us, in the first place, but it is about the animals whose lives are eradicated, is about the plants that no longer see life.

I am not worried about myself. I worry about all those who shut their eyes to what is plainly visible, ignore the signs, and disregard the ever growing list of extinct animals and plants, which sooner than later will include us as well.

But those who consciously suffer with Christ, and mourn EXTINCTION, await a total rebirth, the true renaissance.

APRIL 6 2019

THE FOOLS

Who are the fools? We are! All of us. No exceptions.

I love the Psalms. Every morning – before breakfast – except on Sundays – now in our 66^th year, we have read a Psalm or a portion thereof. I continued a custom started by my parents who probably inherited the act from their parents.

I imagine that I have gone through the Psalter more than 50 times during our marriage. Psalm 119 – that really long one – has 22 separate sections of about 10 verses each, so reading that takes almost 4 weeks. Psalm 117, which is just one verse, makes for a quick turn to start breakfast.

I have read somewhere that monks in the early Middle Ages were required to know all the Psalms by heart. I went to a Christian Elementary School, and each weekend I had to memorize a rhymed version of a Psalm – which I did with the help of my mother – and my entire class – in turn – had to recite it.

So Psalms were drilled into me like no other portion of the Bible.

The Psalms contain a lot of wisdom. Take Psalm 14 with as heading, THE FOOLS. It starts as follows, “The fool has said in his heart: “There is no God above.” Their deeds are corrupt, depraved; not a good man is left.”

Psalm 53 has exactly the same title, THE FOOLS, and continues with exactly the same words: “All have left the right path… they never pray to the Lord, so they tremble with fear without cause for fear: for God is with the just”

We are these fools.

It’s not that we are stupid. It’s not that we are atheists, because is those days, some 2500 years ago, everybody believed in Gods. Just read Homer in the Odyssey or Iliad: gods then were everywhere. Remember the apostle Paul on the Areopagus how he remarked that the place crawled with gods.

We are the fools, people who have our values all wrong: we are convinced that God will never take action.

Well, “the chickens are coming home to roost”, as the saying goes. God IS taking action.

The acts of us, fools, the works of all of us who have left the right path, are now becoming evident. Socrates started it all: he preached an ‘after-life’, away from the earth. He was the one who refused to see THE EARTH as HOLY, and the church has declared his Greek interpretation as holy. So, by adopting his Heaven Heresy, we have treated God’s creation as disposable, as evil even.

Now we all have a touch of GNOSTICISM, the real teaching of THE AMERICAN RELIGION, which confesses that the earth is the product of the Demi-Urge, an evil force. USA politics is dominated by this heresy, hence their evil policies.

Enter Jesus.

Jesus’ message can be captured in 5 words: “Seek First The Kingdom of God.” You know what that means? It means, SEEK THE WELFARE OF CREATION! It means to listen carefully to Creation; it means to examine it minutely; it means to reflect consciously on our interactions with our natural surroundings, with nature if you like. It means to be tuned to the Spirit of the Universe.

Creation is our full partner in life, our most meaningful companion throughout our entire existence: to negate its wishes, to thwart its desires, to override its inclination, is the same as to curse God, because, like no other entity, nature, creation, God’s handiwork, call it what you like, is God expressing himself to us in a purely miraculous way. That’s why I call it God’s PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD.

To disregard God’s wonderful WORD is to ignore God, is to believe that God will tolerate everything, that he is some sort of good old, slightly senile man, whom we can treat as a person of no consequence, whom we don’t have to acknowledge as GOD, the creator of heaven and earth.

We are approaching the END, and before that happens, God asserts himself, shows the entire world his authority, now vested in his son Jesus Christ.

Already the signs are everywhere, as ubiquitous as plastic, the true symbol of our age. Oh, how I hate plastic. I hate it with a perfect hatred.

Plastic-pollution takes its toll on the soil and air and water, but it also affects our human mind. No wonder, because everything is connected to everything else. We don’t live in a vacuum.  

What is making the young killing themselves by guns and drugs? There are definite signs that pollution is affecting people’s mental sanity. Reports are appearing that pollution causes “subjective stress, depressive disorders, health-related quality of life and suicide.”

Our sins against Creation do not go unpunished, as evident in THE WEATHER.

Here’s what ARCTIC NEWS reports:

“On March 30, 2019, Arctic sea ice extent was 13.42 million km², a record low for the time of year.

With Arctic sea ice at a low, it won’t be able to act as a buffer to absorb heat for long, with the danger that an influx of warm, salty water will reach the seafloor and trigger methane eruptions.

As warmer water keeps flowing into the Arctic Ocean and as air temperatures in the Arctic are now starting to rise on the back of a strengthening El Niño, fears for a Blue Ocean Event in 2019 are rising, which would further accelerate the temperature rise as less sunlight gets reflected back into space.

In a rapid warming scenario:

(1)   A stronger-than-expected El Niño would contribute to 

(2). early demise of the Arctic sea ice, i.e. latent heat tipping point.

(3)  associated loss of sea ice albedo, 

(4)  destabilization of seafloor methane hydrates, causing eruption of vast amounts of methane that further speed up Arctic warming and cause.

(5)  terrestrial permafrost to melt as well, resulting in even more emissions,

(6)  while the Jet Stream gets even more deformed, resulting in more extreme weather events

(7)  causing forest fires, at first in Siberia and Canada and

(8)  eventually also in the peat fields and tropical rain forests of the Amazon, in Africa and South-east Asia, resulting in

(9)  rapid melting on the Himalayas, temporarily causing huge flooding,

(10) followed by drought, famine, heat waves and mass starvation, and

(11)  collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

We are not only fools: we are out of our minds. We are not only inane: we truly are insane, mad, deranged, idiots. How else can we explain our total failure to prevent Global Heating, our so disastrous excursion into Climate Change. We are so bewitched by our technical tricks, by our miraculous machines, by our prowess to overpower nature, that we have lost all sense of proportion, all traces of wisdom.

We are the dumbest, the most infantile, the most stupid generation the world has ever experienced. We have lost our bearings in politics, in the economy, in religion, in everything, everywhere, especially in Creation.

We no longer know what is right and what is wrong: we are rudderless, have no longer any idea what is normal.

Climate change is already worrying enough — now a report from the U.S. central bank cautions that rising temperatures and extreme storms could eventually trigger a financial collapse.

A Federal Reserve researcher warned in a report last week that “climate-based risk could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole, along with an aging population and rapid advances in technology.“

Climate change could soon hit the banking system “by storms, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme events” making it harder for businesses to repay loans.

Already one million waterlogged acres in the farm belts of Nebraska and North Dakota, signal rising food inflation. Already the insurance industry is saying that climate change could soon make insurance unaffordable for most people, because of growing evidence that climate change poses an existential threat to the world.

TURMOIL

I like that word TURMOIL. It sounds like what it portrays.

On TURMOIL, here’s what my muse made me do:

Our world today, by using oil, 
Has done away with human toil,
But poisoned our so precious soil, 
So will it end in great turmoil?

The ocean waves already boil
The forests burn and tempers roil
Our rulers lie and truth despoil
Yes, it will end in great turmoil.

Soon there’s nothing left to spoil
Then all of nature will recoil    |
Who do we think we can still foil
Before it ends in great turmoil?

When there’s nothing left to moil
When ev’ry thing’s beyond recall
Then Jesus comes to fix it all.
Forever end the great turmoil.

(Yes there is a tune to sing this.)

Turmoil is the trend: wherever I look matters are in motion, often violently.  

We have been warned.

Jonathan Wiener, in 1990, wrote, “THE NEXT ONE HUNDRED YEARS, Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth”. He relates how already in 1896, a Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, wrote, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air. …Eventually this change might very well heat the planet to heights outside all human experience.”

Wiener relates how Charles David Keeling, 60 years later, in 1956, when 26 and with a fresh Ph.D. in chemistry made it his life’s goal to measure CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide is the gas that our cars exhale through their tail pipes, causing Green House Gases.

In spite of solemn pledges at the scores of the United Nation’s Climate Change meetings to reduce CO2, it is still increasing. And the dangers are increasing exponentially as the Arctic melts. 

1 John 5: 19, an obscure text in a seldom read Bible book, confirms what Jesus already said in John 17, that, “The whole world is under the control of The Evil One.”

Yes, now, with Satan in charge, ALL THINGS are about to change, in the air, in the soil and in the seas, in politics, in people’s minds, including all that is not visible such as the airwaves, the rays that are bounced to and from the satellites, the TV streams that we receive via the dishes sporting on our roofs, the thoughts that penetrate our minds: all these invisible things shape our minds more than the sermon on Sundays: everything is about to change; nothing is stable anymore: TURMOIL is the new state.

A Chinese curse is with us: may you live in interesting times.

As we well know, all is not well, and it is going to get worse.

As a prelude to THE END, the Bible Book REVELATION mentions EARTH QUAKES, especially in Chapter 16: 18: “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.”

You can imagine how the seismographs in the capitals shake wildly in record numbers beyond any ever registered. You can visualize how the houses tumble, the palaces are flattened. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.

The catastrophes mentioned here extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. In the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as his own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity.

And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military might, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immensely important and strong, these same men and women are now in a totally humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.

THE FOOLS: Who are these fools? We are!

 

MARCH 30 2019

THE CHURCH OF TOMORROW.

 “The lesson of history is that no one learns anything from history.” 

The Old Testament relates the history of the Jacob clan, the people of Israel. Time and again these blessed people rebelled, time and again God punished them, time and again they turned back to God….. until God said, enough is enough. 

Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his book THE INGENUITY GAP set out to prove that deranged nature caused deranged minds. He didn’t quite succeed in accomplishing his goal, because it is the other way around: Hosea 4:2,3 observes how human conduct causes creational chaos,

“There’s only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery….. THAT’S WHY the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”

So don’t expect success in the battle against Climate Change, because “everything is connected to everything else”: minds rule matter. Only a complete conversion of the entire human race can undo the dawning disaster. Only the church can prevent this. Will it? Can it?

One of the basic truths of Scripture – see Psalm 119: 105 – is that, “Your Word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path.”

This really means that we can’t have the one (Scripture) without the other (Creation). Scripture is like a mining light that beams a ray of light on creation: you can’t have one without the other.

That’s the fundamental TRUTH the church has neglected: before the END comes, all must be revealed, as the TRUTH must emerge, and with it THE CHURCH OF TOMORROW.

Basically this means that for the last 1500 years or so we have only experience a half-truth, which for a long time did not really matter because Creation remained basically untouched. Now, in the End Times, where insects and elephants, whales and turtles are endangered, Hosea’s words keep on haunting us:

“the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”

That is the direct result of the half-truth the Church has proclaimed by failing to see that Creation and the Bible complement each other.

The Bible is very clear that “soil we are and to soil we shall return.” Genesis tells us that God used ‘earth’ to form to first human being, and, once given shape in the form in which you and I move and exist, God blew a life-giving entity into the form and made it whole.

Nietzsche, in his THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA wrote,

“I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not…… “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”

We are earth. The earth supports us, feeds us, clothes us and provides us with beauty and splendor. When God made trees to come forth, he described them to the human pair as “beautiful to the human eye, and good for food.” Note, the aesthetic came before the economic (Genesis 2: 9). When the Great Seducer described the tree (Genesis 3:6) the order is reversed, the economic aspect precedes the beauty factor.

Ever since then Capitalism has conquered, and now we have the bitter harvest. Existing in an artificial world, we have lost our bearings and are blind to what’s happening out there, that’s why we are experiencing the REVENGE OF GAIA as James Lovelock phrased it. 

When the people of Israel were kept as slaves in Egypt, and Moses asked Pharaoh to “Let my people go”, his plea fell on deaf ears: they were too valuable for the economy to be released from their bondage. It took TEN plagues to force them to leave, and then the Egyptian population was so glad to see them go that they loaded them with all sorts of precious items: the death of all first- born was the last straw.

We too are unwilling to abandon our energy slaves, even though the fate of our children too is in the balance. Again, “The lesson of history is that no one learns anything from history.” 

We are in the home stretch.

I am a runner. Whenever the weather is too wet or too hot or too cold I run on my treadmill three times per week. I actually hate getting up from my comfortable chair, change into my running gear, but once I am going, I like it.

On my mill I gradually increase the speed, just as the human race, approaching the END, sees developments in the physical world accelerating, now rushing into dissolution.

THE CHURCH OF TOMORROW.

The first words of the Bible are: “In the Beginning God created”. Its very last chapter, Revelation 22, says that in the End everything will be revealed. The End will show that we have learned nothing from history. Biblical history shows that the people of Old Israel failed to mend their ways, because they failed to REPENT. Will the church repeat this failure? “If history….”

TWO WORDS FOR REPENT.

The New Testament uses two different words for REPENT. The one is METANOIA which basically applies to our thinking. META indicated a change, while NOIA has as root Gnosis, or knowledge, and indicates a total change of thinking. Sermons are supposed to do that, by appealing to our intellect. It uses the Bible to justify that approach.

For the church today the Bible is THE ONLY source of wisdom and the ONLY way to salvation, that’s why it’s referred to as THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.

I do not dispute that. Yet the Bible is a human book, written by humans, and only INDIRECTLY the Word of God. True, it is inspired; true, it is necessary, but for the longest time it was not available to God’s people.

The Old Testament did not attain its present form until during the EXILE some 500 years before Christ. Before that it existed only as rare rolls, to be perused by the few priests who only had access to them.

The entire Bible came into being at the Nicean Council in 325, some 1,700 years ago, with some books, such as the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes and Esther, barely making it when the vote came, with Constantin, the unbaptized Emperor, presiding over the proceedings.

So, yes, the Bible is a human book. It is God’s secondary or INDIRECT Word, basically appealing to the Metanoia, the Mind Business. No wonder when Paul spoke on the Areopagus, the place in ancient Athens in the year 40 AD, where the brains of Athens were gathered and people debated all day long, the word `metanoia` was used.

Acts 17: 22 attests to this: “Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious,” pointing to the number of gods, including one dedicated to The Unknown God.

HOWEVER.

The philosophers in Athens – especially Socrates and Plato – had one thing in common: they welcomed death. Plato depicts Socrates’ last words before his death, “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”. Socrates died to celebrate death, and his followers adopted this philosophy: death and heaven were to be preferred over life.

So when Paul mentioned RESURRECTION to them, they stopped their ears because resurrection clashed with their belief. That’s why Paul uses the word Metanoia: their minds had to change, but since Paul’s words were contrary to their pre-conceived notions, a mind change proved to be impossible. Paul’s mission to Athens was a failure.

Well, this heathen heaven notion has pervaded the church until this day. It originates right there on the Areopagus, where Paul failed to convince these wise men there that not heaven, but a resurrection life awaits us on the earth.

THE CHURCH OF TOMORROW

The Church of Tomorrow must celebrate LIFE ON EARTH now.

That’s why there is another word that Paul uses: EPISTROPHE which indicates a NEW EARTHY LIFE STYLE, which brings me to what I refer to as God’s Primary or Direct Word: CREATION.

By God’s act of creation “Ex Nihilo”, out of nothing, God spoke and it came to be. That’s why in the Lord’s Prayer, the first line after the invocation is, HOLY IS YOUR NAME referring to the Created Word, the WORD and WORLD that carries his signature.

Wherever else the apostle Paul brought the good news he proclaimed the need for a total change of life, from pagan rituals to a Christ-centered belief, as expressed in the Creation Word, God’s DIRECT or PRIMARY Word. He always started with God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Living God.

And THE CHURCH?

In the church of tomorrow we need both. We not only have to attain a different mind-set, metanoia, a turn toward biblical thinking, but also a Creation-centered commitment, a new way of acting away from Carbon-Based luxuries and atmosphere-despoiling habits, to an earth-loving life that is valid for eternity.

TO BECOME THE CHURCH of TOMORROW THE CHURCH TODAY MUST CHANGE.   Change won’t be easy. No wonder Jesus lamented, “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”(Matthew 22: 14), and (Luke 18:8), “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”   I find it striking that in Revelation 21: 22, where the Holy City is described, there’s a total absence of religious symbols: no church building, no altars, no bible. This suggests to me that we must slowly chuck the church and more and more steer toward the lasting life-style mode, because there’s where eternity is at play: the conversion to total permanence and complete sustainable living.   Our entire world now pivots on that very matter.   It is again a sign that we are approaching the END when it becomes more evident by the day that the way we live and move and have our being, must end, and be replaced with creation-loving actions, where our entire mindset and our complete plan of action is geared to permanence.   As Christians our only goal in life today, now, and tomorrow and the day after must have THE HOLY CITY in mind, the future of the church, which ceases to be church, but becomes life living to the full.   That’s why now, Twenty-Four/Seven/Three Hundred and Sixty Five (24/7/365) our LIFE must be geared to Holy Living, in line with what we expect in eternity, and what the Bible tells us, in The New Creation.   Paul encountered heaven talk on the Areopagus in Athens which prevented him from bringing the gospel of the Living God, the Creator who had made heaven and earth.   The only RELEVANT message today is to preach and practice PERMANENCE, by setting the example for all to see.   How then shall we live?   That’s the burning question today. Perhaps we must start a variation of the AMISH way of life. Perhaps we must initiate a sort of Benedict Monastery life for families. Perhaps we must imitate what the early Christians in Jerusalem did by sharing so that all have enough. Perhaps it is none of the above, but merely a desire to do what is possible and feasible in these fractured times where we have painted ourselves in a corner, and have been lulled into an existence where the only way left is to pray for forgiveness.   Perhaps the Lord will forgive us when there only is a will to change, because all other options have become impossible, because we have been sucked into a way of life from which any escape has been eliminated.   Perhaps all that is left is TO PRAY: FORGIVE US OUR SINS against Creation and against our fellow humans.   What we can do and must do is to have days of Atonement, fervently ask for forgiveness. However,  “the lesson of history is that no one learns anything from history.”

MARCH 23 2019

HOW ARE WE GOING TO COPE?

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father.  As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man.  For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark.  And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept all the sinners away. So will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 

You may recognize the above passage as a quote from the Bible. Yes, it is part of that terrible chapter Matthew 24. In it Jesus describes in devastating detail the situation that now is unfolding this very minute, with the reports becoming more ominous by the day.

Of course there are people who deny this Climate Change matter, calling it a conspiracy, a hoax, see it as trumped up treason to torpedo our Capitalistic system that has brought us prosperity unequaled in human history. Not surprisingly the Bible has a text for that mindset as well. Psalm 17: 14 reminds us that the beneficiaries of our economic system are having their reward in this life: “By your hand save me from such people, LORD, from those of this world whose reward is in this life”.

“In this life” implies that there is another life to come. Those who want to cramp in all the sights of the world, and fly everywhere – always at great environmental cost – could well forfeit the unimaginable delights in the New World to come.

These same people are part of what I call “the FIVE “D” crowd” who, as far as Climate Change is concerned, “Deny, Delay, Divide, Dump, Dupe”. They have taken their cue from the Tobacco Industry which did exactly that, in spite of overwhelming evidence that smoking painfully shortens life.

We now have an immensely more major calamity emerging: our ferocious use of fossil fuels frightfully fractures ALL life on the planet. Where, with a bit of willpower people could quit the nasty tobacco addiction (I did), the carbon-induced global death-threat is so ingrained in society that quitting it cold turkey means another “D”: DEATH of society as we know it because we can’t function without fossil fuels. But if we don’t take action, we are in for an even more disastrous situation, it means – like lung cancer – sudden death of all that lives.

Thus the choices we all face are a ‘lose-lose’ proposition: no matter what we do we end up worse off.

It is that choice that faces us as a society, especially the “educated” Western section because WE caused it all.

As certainty and confirmation of Climate Change becomes ever more pronounced, paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation are appearing.

A few examples.

“The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells’ new book about how Climate Change, has as its first sentence, “It is worse, much worse, than you think. In superhot cities, roads will melt and train tracks will buckle. At five degrees of warming, much of the planet would be in constant drought. With just six meters of sea-level rise—an optimistic projection—land where three hundred and seventy-five million people currently live will be underwater.”

Already all the signs are there: right now, as I write this, thousands are fleeing ferocious floods all over the globe; late last year thousands again were frantically fleeing fierce fires in the Paradise Camp Fire finding themselves sprinting past exploding cars, their sneakers melting to the asphalt as they ran.

To anyone who has been paying attention, the broad strokes of “The Uninhabitable Earth” come as no surprise. We are racing toward—in fact have already entered—an era of water shortage, floods, wildfire, sea-level rise, and extreme weather.

How are we going to cope?

People are starting to ask hard questions about their own future. When will the place where I live be flooded or burn? Where should I live when it does? Where will my future children live? Should I have children at all?

Last week, John Vidal, of HuffPost US wrote, “The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change.”

The article opens with words as frightening as David Wallace-Wells’ book about how Climate Change, quoted above: “Nature is in freefall and the planet’s support systems are so stretched that we face widespread species extinctions and mass human migration unless urgent action is taken. That’s the warning hundreds of scientists are preparing to give, and it’s stark.”

Last year has seen a slew of brutal and terrifying warnings about the threat Climate Change poses to life. Far less talked about but just as dangerous, if not more so, is the rapid decline of the natural world. The felling of forests, the over-exploitation of seas and soils, and the pollution of air and water are together driving the living world to the brink, according to a huge three-year, U.N.-backed landmark study to be published in May.

Increasingly climate experts are blaming industrial farming for much of the loss of nature, claiming that the food system is the root of the problem. I agree.

I live in a rural area, where beef cattle roam in a meadow across from us. Daily I see how the farmer travels with his diesel-powered tractor to bring a big round bale of hay, totally wrapped in thick white plastic, to feed his methane-belching cows, at an all-round cost to the environment.

To follow these cows through to their final destination as a piece of steak on the plate of a consumer, from the field to a slaughter house hundreds of kilometers away, back to the local store, where a consumer drives a car to buy it, once ingested impairing the consumer’s health, all at a cost of some 20 energy calories for each edible one. Never is the cost of ecological degradation considered in the price we pay for food. This example applies to the entire food industry.

How are we going to cope?

And then there are insects, vital to the diets of other animals, as well as the pollinators of our food: they are facing a bleak future as their populations appear to be collapsing. Land use changes and increased pesticide use are destroying habitats and vastly reducing their numbers. In Europe, up to 37 percent of bees and 31 percent of butterflies are in decline, with major losses also recorded in southern Africa, according to the pollinators section of the report.

Over 70 percent of freshwater species and 61 percent of amphibians have declined along with 26 percent of marine fish populations and 42 percent of land-based animals … It is a dramatic change and a direct result of the intensification of farming.

No wonder that people are realizing that, “We are facing the greatest struggle in human history, one whose outcome will determine the fate of humanity for eternity. We cannot dither or postpone or wait for the next generation to deal with this. We must act right now, and knowing human nature, “We Will Not Act!”

“How are we going to cope?”

Psychologists are observing how people are dealing with the enormous challenges now emerging. Their findings are that many just ignore it, shrug it off as not important, or claim that they mistrust the science or deny that there is a human connection. Some simply say that their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do nothing.

It reminds me of a text in the last Bible book, Revelation 22: 14, where it says,

“Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city”. 

This text directly points to personal action that leads to eternal life.

J. H. Bavinck in his unique, “Between the Beginning and the End, a Radical Kingdom Vision”, points out that “The people of the Ancient Near East see their clothing as expressing their personality….. It reveals something of their very being and their authority.” This indicates that clean robes mean an un-polluting and cleansed self.

So doing nothing is no option. Ignoring is no option. It is our holy duty to take action, personally, NOW, because, as the text quoted at the very beginning says,

“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father”.

It is a fact that we are on the final stretch of life on the planet. There are a few pointers that confirm this:

• It will come, there’s no doubt about it. Both the Bible and our unbiased observations confirm this.
• Humanity will be blind to all the signs. Throughout the millennia people have not changed: just as in Noah’s days, so too today they go their merry way, ignoring the obvious.
• The End will come as a total surprise, because
• The Bible tells us that there is a tipping point that comes without a warning.  

The text has a mysterious line: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father”.

That last line “only the Father” puzzles me. The Bible tells us that the Father has given all authority in heaven and earth to Jesus, so how is it possible that Jesus too is ignorant about the day and the hour of what I call, “The Tipping Point”?

Richard Elliot Friedman in one of my favorite books, THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD, ends his masterpiece with, “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”

James Lovelock sees the entire world as a living entity, something confirmed in both the Old and New Testament: both give definite hints that creation is alive, and is now dying, as Romans 8:22 tells us, “Creation is suffering unbearable pains”.

Back to “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” If that is the case then only Creation herself, has the answer and only by listening to her cries, can we estimate the time of ‘the tipping point’, the period, not the day or the hour, but the approximate time, because Jesus gives some hints, pointing to “the devastation mentioned by Daniel”, something we very much see today, and leaving other pointers, clearly referring to The End.

How are we going to cope?

Yes, there is growing anxiety out there, as we observe the death struggles of creation, which also signifies our own demise. Ignoring these symptoms is no solution. Admitting them is the start of coping and seeing it as God’s plan, as the beginning of redemption. Forget about Rapture and going to heaven: that’s pagan prattle. God made the earth, that’s why it is holy: it is God’s Primary Word. Treat it as such, starting today.

Christ died to restore creation. That being accomplished, we now eagerly wait for our adoption as God’s children, the redemption of our bodies, as Romans 8: 24 attests, “for in that hope we are saved!”

We have lived the life of destruction. We have left to our children nothing but chaos. We need to apologize to them for the unrepairable mess we have created. The world now is full of our toys, but empty of God’s creatures, full of chaos causing Climate Change but empty of fish, fowl, and foliage.

We have to fit on the new clothes, meaning adopt a new way of life: “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the Tree of Life and may go through the gates into the City”. 

We have to thoroughly clean ourselves of the stains, the creation-destroying elements, which are leading us to gloom and doom. Only then may we claim the right to the TREE OF LIFE and enter into THE ETERNAL CITY, the NEW JERUSALEM.

That’s the only way to cope today.

More about that next week

MARCH 16 2019

OUR MOVE AWAY FROM THE CITY.

In 1951, freshly discharged as a sergeant in the Dutch Army, having served 18 months of conscripted military service, including an 8 months stint at a training school, I emigrated to Canada.

Army life did not suit me: being too much of an anti-disciplinarian. So I, city-born and bred in the Netherlands, was off to Canada, officially as a farmhand. And, indeed, for 2 months I worked on a grain farm, living with the farm family, the very best training to get a good grasp of the language, of which I already had a better than average understanding. It also was a great help that the farm woman was a former teacher, while the farmer husband taught me a lot of swearwords.

In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s a sudden mania to emigrate engulfed the Netherlands, with Canada being the destination of choice for the bulk of those wanting to leave. It seems to me that there were a number of reasons why this happened.

• There was the Russia scare. After having endured 5 years of German occupation, many were afraid that a similar situation could develop if Russia were to attack the West.
• In the army I was trained to go to the Dutch East Indies, where a war of liberation was waged. Many feared that the loss of these colonies would impoverish the Netherlands.
• The rising popularity of the automobile and the mechanization of agriculture drastically changed the economic landscape threatening the livelihood of small storeowners and farmers.
• Conflicts in the Protestant church were a factor as well.

So people emigrated by the thousands, my younger brother and I among them. My reason? Canada was seen as a land of greater opportunities.

After leaving the farm I settled in Hamilton, Ontario, where I started selling life insurance. I got married to my fiancé in 1953, (we had been engaged since 1950 and she came over in 1952). In 1955 we moved our small family to St. Catharines. Once there I branched out to include fire and car insurance. In 1963 I became a Real Estate Broker as well.

We lived in the Garden City, as the place was called, for 20 years, expanding our family to include five children. In 1963 we had an 1800 square feet new house built to my specifications, on a main thoroughfare, also housing my insurance and real estate office.

A turning point.

The years 1971-3 were a turning point in my life. Two books came my way via two friends, one who gave me, THE LIMITS OF GROWTH, written for and by the Club of Rome, and another, AFTER DEATH… WHAT?, was by a Dutch theologian.

The first book convinced me that we live in a FINITE WORLD, and the second brought home to me that Jesus did not come to save me from my sins – that too – but primarily to bring back upon his return, THE RENEWED WORLD.

In 1971 the Real Estate Institute of Canada of which I was a member, issued a call for articles relating to its field. With my recent readings fresh in mind, my thinking was focused on energy and ecology. I decided to begin exploring an article featuring these facets, and the result was my essay, THE CITY, KEY TO SURVIVAL, with as subtitle, An Essay on Ecology and Urban Living.

To my pleasant surprise it was chosen from a Canada-wide field, including University Professors. It was published in its Journal in November 1972.  A substantial cash prize was presented to me at the institute’s annual convention – all prepaid – in Vancouver.

I concluded my contribution with, “The city is the key to the future. Let’s hope that the people of the city will find the door – the key is not enough.”

This 5000 word article was meant for ‘secular’ consumption. It was impossible to express my secret thoughts. By “The City” I actually meant “The City of God, the New Jerusalem”, and “The Door” really pointed to Christ.

Through my readings and thinking, I started to realize that the City as it had developed, especially in recent times, had become the new Tower of Babel, a place where God is hard to find. I basically had come to the conclusion that the CITY really revolved around money – the desire of which is the root of all evil – and almost entirely embodied the human aim to reject God and become autonomous. This constituted a turning point in my life.

Me: the idealist.

So, idealist as I was, and still am, my thinking started to change, and my thoughts turned to different ways of living, not in the city, but somewhere in Ontario where I could incorporate a more responsible way of life, based on the laws of ecology, formulated by Dr. Barry Commoner:

• Everything is connected to everything else.
• There is no waste.
• Nature knows best.
• Nothing comes free.

I always have been a person who believed in action, and ready for a radical change. I was tired of my insurance business, partly because my so efficient secretary left. Also, having for two decades lived in the Niagara Peninsula, I twice had run into trouble with the church. I had been an elder in the Christian Reformed Church, had a disagreement with my minister, resigned as an elder and switched to a sister church in the same city. When, after a few years, a new minister came, a real dogmatist, I chose to leave the church and become part of a house church.

The 1973 Energy Crisis.

Then, in 1973, there was the energy crisis. Because the United States and other industrialized nations in Europe supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) declared an oil embargo against those countries. This included a 25% decrease in production of oil, causing an energy crisis, which drove up the cost per barrel from $3 to $12 by 1974, the equivalent of $100 per barrel in today’s money. In 1973, the US’ daily consumption then was 18 million barrels of oil, so its total daily spending jumped from $54 million to $216 million, quadrupling its total outlay.

Emergency 

Because of the massive shortage of oil, the United States and other countries began rationing oil consumption, limiting the amount of gas that could be pumped at gas stations, restricted what days cars could fill their tanks based on license plate numbers, and closed stations on Sundays. European countries instilled similar restrictions, including a three-day workweek as well as curtailing non-essential Sunday driving.  

Had these cuts been maintained, Climate Change could have been avoided.

However, not all of the effects of the oil embargo were negative. To conserve oil, more energy-efficient appliances and cars were designed, buildings were constructed with better insulation leading to reduced use of heating and air-conditioning, mass transit was slowly expanded, and alternative energy sources were explored.

My efforts.

That was the situation in 1973. I became increasingly convinced that hard times were coming, that perhaps the entire economy could collapse. So in 1974 I made the decision to move. Friends had bought a 200 acre farm in Tweed. From them I acquired a 50 acre parcel, sold my insurance portfolio, and in June of 1975 started to build a house I had designed.

Tweed itself is situated midway between Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario’s biggest cities, both some 200 km away, too far to walk in case cities were to become uninhabitable. Our new location was some 5km from the tiny village of some 1800 inhabitants, with a large proportion of seniors.

The topography of the land we bought was typically Canadian Shield, open sections interspersed with rock outcroppings, tree covering and wetlands. After deciding on the precise location of our new home, partly into a hill, a well ‘witcher’ was found who advised us to drill where two underground streams crossed, some 70 feet underground. Indeed, after drilling at that exact point, an abundance of pure well water gushed up – 150 liters per minute – sufficient to provide 10 households.

Being totally unskilled, I hired a good friend, a jack of all trades, and master of all, under whose direction and action the house was constructed in three months.

What sort of dwelling did I design?

With energy in mind, and guided by the laws of ecology my design was a two storey building, facing south, without a basement. I insulated the foundation with 4 feet of solid Styrofoam and erected the dwelling with 2×6 studs, filled with R20 insulation, R40 in the ceiling.  

Large windows catching the low south sun in the winter did indeed warm the house, even with 40 below weather. On the north and west side insulated window shutters helped to keep the cold from penetrating the bedrooms there. A masonry chimney with two flues was placed at the center and so was the bathroom so that heat emitted from these two sources would spread to the surrounding spaces. The side door on the East side was provided with a slightly lower airlock while the outside door, mostly insulated glass, faced south. Our living quarters were on the top floor – as heat rises- while the ground floor had two extra bedrooms, a bathroom, my office and a utility area with a woodstove and cool-heat pump.

Recent developments.

In 1975 I was 47 years old, with our oldest son away in Dordt College and 4 children of various ages, the youngest being 10 years old. Two were of high school age and attended school in a nearby village. The two youngest learned by reading and receiving art lessons.

I set out to retrain for professional real estate appraiser. I took my missing courses at York (leases and mortgages) and Trent Universities (urban geography) and a correspondence course at Queen’s (economics), all needed to complete the academic requirements for becoming an Accredited Appraiser of the Canadian Institute (AACI). To prove my skills I had to submit three 100 page appraisal reports, written according to the prescribed methods: a single family dwelling, an apartment building and an industrial property. These three ‘master’ appraisals, earned me, in 1978, my professional accreditation.  

With my business rapidly expanding, I had a separate building constructed to accommodate an office manager and three residential appraisers, each specializing in South, Central and North Hastings County, while I valuated commercial properties in that vast 200 km long area, among them river dams, a former RAF Spitfire training base, summer resorts, an uranium mine in the Bancroft area, as well as the entire Bruce Peninsula for a First Nation land claim: 500,000 acres!

Immense blessings.

Our move away from the city proved to be a real blessing.

The collapse of the economy did not occur. I still believe a much larger collapse is in the offing, with Climate Change becoming more real by the day. To safeguard our water supply, I installed a hand pump on the well.

Over the years I developed a 2,000 square feet vegetable garden, planted 4,000 trees, as well as 3 apple trees, and so attained a degree of self-sufficiency, including solar panels to defray the high cost of rural hydro and provide lights when there is a power outage, expected to become more frequent as the weather become more violent.

Oh yes, I quit smoking in 1959 and started running. I still do this 3 x per week, indoors in the winter, of course. I also bike a lot, also both inside and outdoors. All these actions keep me mentally and physically in good shape.

I sold my business in 1993, when I turned 65, but stayed on as a consultant. With more time available I wrote a couple of books, translated 4 manuscripts – all published – and started a weekly column for the regional daily. Cost cutting in 2010 cost me my column which I then expanded from 800 words to 2000, appearing weekly on my blog, www.hielema.ca with readers all over the world, as seen below showing the 10 top countries:

Rank	Flag	Country	Visitor Count
1		United States	369
2		Canada	46
3		China	40
4		United Kingdom	25
5		France	18
6		Germany	16
7		Netherlands	12
8		Japan	9
9		Russian Federation	7
10		Italy	6

Yes, our move away from the city proved to be a real blessing and steered me into interesting ventures.