Report and reflections on the strange not-peace.

Thanks to the generous readers of this blog, our A/C was fixed this week. Don't ever let anyone tell you that God doesn't answer prayer, for He certainly does. It turned out to require a new fan motor, among other things. Without it, this week would have been a greater struggle than it was, and it's been plenty challenging. I did finally get the MRI done yesterday morning, so I'm waiting to find out about those two pesky liver tumors. My anemia continues to dog me, but not to the point where the docs can justify a blood transfusion. Mostly I'm treading water on the other issues. The aggravating thing is that it has gotten in the way of continuing the fight on a number of fronts.

Events crowd in, threats to the cause of liberty multiply and I'm not the only one who believes that all of our times in this strange not-yet-war-but-not-peace -- in our country and the world -- are coming to an end more evil than we have seen in 70 years.

Yet, I am painfully aware that I'm closer to the end of my personal fight than the beginning, and I'm frustrated that the fronts grow in number even as my ability to assist in them decreases. I begin to feel hopelessly inadequate to the task at hand. I can't say that I've ever considered it that way before, even when they told me I likely wouldn't make it through the stomach surgery three and a half years ago. I've always had a deep belief that God wasn't through with me yet. I still feel that way, but I am afraid that I'm letting Him -- and you -- down by not accomplishing more with the time I have.

That said, I feel even more strongly that I have neglected my family in the process. Why Rosey has stuck with me these past thirty years with all the threats that I have invited into our lives is beyond me. I ache when I consider that I haven't even seen my son's new family in Germany and may never do so. I ache that Matt's first wife has largely prevented my oldest grandson from seeing his father and his grandfather, raising him without reference to his history, his blood -- breaking that mystical tie in a selfish bid to erase us from her own guilty memory. Rosey and I sit and talk nights about how we'll get out of this hole that my disabilities, physical and economic, have dug for us these past 15 years, about our dreams of leaving behind this ramshackle house and moving up to Chandler Mountain, to raise goats and keep bees, knowing all the time that events intrude and we're likely not going to make it.

But these are the trade-offs that I have made with my eyes wide open. Looking back on the years since Waco, there are things that I would have done differently, mistakes that I made that I wish I could unmake, but not the one decision that mattered then and still matters today.

The murder of the Branch Davidians and all their kith and kin by a feral federal government was evil of the sort that any thinking being with an ounce of moral feeling had to fight. I may regret some of the steps I took, but not the road I set out on. I could not do otherwise and look myself in the mirror. Even now, when I do look myself in the mirror, cognizant of my serial failures, it is with the sense that for all the costs I have not done enough.

And the tax-paid murderous criminals of Ruby Ridge, of Waco, of Oklahoma City and Katrina, of Fast and Furious and the perpetrators of the other wholesale depredations of liberty in the past three administrations have gone unpunished, hardly even inconvenienced by the evil they committed. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," and I believe that. But when I look at the even bloodier, ghastlier evils that are rolling inexorably downhill at us now, at innocent people who just want to be left alone to live their lives, to love and work and raise their families in peace, I cannot help but despise the tyrant wannabes who start the stinking wars with their own insatiable appetites for other people's liberty and property and lives. I despise them at the same time I chafe at the poor showing I have made in trying to oppose their designs. Always we fight, a despised tiny minority of us, with inadequate resources, against an enemy far more powerful, it seems, than we have any hope of successfully opposing.

And yet.

And yet, we do what we can with what we have, for God commands us to stand. He doesn't command us to win, but he does expect us to fight. In the end, He will do the fighting and the winning of the ultimate victory. So, in the words of my son, quoting a maxim of his beloved 101st Airborne, we "drink water and drive on," through whatever the future brings until God calls us home. In the end, perhaps, my family, my friends, and you, my readers, will forgive my failures if I continue to try to do my best. I hold onto that thought. For your support, in your prayers, with your advice and your contributions, I thank you all. Please keep me in your prayers as I thankfully keep you in mine.