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dalet-us · 4 years

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I Believe!

** Jonah and the Whale, Pieter Lastman 1621

My dear friend,

Perhaps you are thinking to yourself that I do not cherish and love my wife, and I suspect that there are many others that are thinking the same thing. When I published my post, “A Riddle?,” I figured that it would cause a bit of a stir, and it appears that it did. What was I supposed to do, pull a Jonah and disobey God by running off to Tarshish? You have heard the story before, no?

“1Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. 3But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. 4But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken. …”

“15So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging. 16Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the LORD, and made vows. 17Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” – Jonah 1:1-4 & 1:15-17 KJV

I would rather not attempt my circumnavigation in the belly of a fish, thank you very much!

God instructed me to post that message, and so I did … verbatim. The only thing that I did that was not in complete obedience was that I added the line, “All praise and glory and honor unto our blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Everything else in that message was exactly as God instructed – to the letter! Besides, if that message has anything to do with my own wife, let God be the judge.

Thus, I think that it is important that you understand more perfectly how much I do cherish and love my wife. I would not want any untruthful rumors making the rounds. May God have mercy on our disobedient hearts!

I would love to tell you the whole story right here and now, but as with the topic of circumnavigation, it is not a story that I can tell in a single blog post. Therefore, I will do my best to spread it out in colorful sketches.

Before God inflicted me with my gastrointestinal disease, I met my wife in a nightclub of all places. Neither her nor I wanted to be going out with our friends to nightclubs that night. Yet both of us relented to the pressure of our friends and suffered ourselves to their shameless urgings. We and our friends all ended up in the same nightclub, a place called “Popeye’s.” As we later discovered, we were both very discontent to find ourselves at Popeye’s with our cheeky friends. Neither one of us was in the mood to be dealing with the typical meat-market personas. When I saw her on the other side of the dance floor, I was captivated with her gracious countenance, and she was very fair to look upon, with her long flowing blond hair and her Amazonian stature. She was as the Lady Galadriel among the women of Bree . She was like no other woman I had ever seen before. Why it is that she accepted my invitation to dance is beyond me.

** [1] The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse 1888

I soon learned why she was so different. She came from a family of upstanding rapport, out of the mountainous farmlands of Montana. She was a true down-to-earth Montana breed queen of virtue, and she had the beauty to match her distinguishing heritage. Her father and her late mother were both very fine, upstanding, and highly respected citizens of her hometown in Montana: hardworking, genuine Spirit-filled Christians, moral, ethical, gracious, warm, loving, caring and humble people. How could I not fall in love with her, especially when she regarded me with such great respect and adoration?

When my father was murdered in 1993, she was an extraordinary source of support, comfort, and understanding. I could never have asked God for a better friend and companion during that difficult trial of my life. Shortly afterwards, she unofficially became my business partner. I left my position at the headquarters of Tower Records and became an independent contractor. Of course, my contracts with Tower Records accounted for over ninety percent of my business.

Essentially, I was installing all of the low-voltage electrical systems (audio, video, telecom, & datacom systems) that I had designed when I was still an employee at Tower Records. Tower Records was at the peak of their heyday, opening about 40 new stores each year. My wife (girlfriend at the time) was my financial/accounting expert. She was so amazingly good to me, and patient beyond measure.

Only a few months before my father’s death, I used up one of the twenty or thirty some-odd lives that God has blessed me with. (A cat has nothing on me. By the grace of my Lord and Savior, I have at least three times as many lives as a cat!) I am sure you have heard me tell this story before, of how I nearly drank myself to death when I was working in Mexico City. (That is a story for another day, however.) Nonetheless, it was that incident that began all of my gastrointestinal issues. Over the years, my gastrointestinal problems gradually became more difficult, more problematic, and an ever-greater impact to my ability to live and to contribute to a rich relationship and marriage with my wife. Regardless of all of my short comings, she has always endured and supported me with the utmost mercy and provision for what I lacked (financial security in particular). It has ever been her goal and purpose to have a sure retirement.

** Dale w/ the co-owners of the Tower Records, Niza St., Mexico City

Immediately after we were married in 1997, my gastrointestinal symptoms began to become an impact to my livelihood, especially at work. It also began to limit my ability to eat certain foods. In the beginning, there were only a few restaurants that we had to scratch off of the list, for instance, most of the Italian restaurants. Despite the changes to my diet, the symptoms continued to get worse, and I became more aggressive in my search for answers from the medical profession. The problem was that none of the doctors that I had seen were able to provide any help or any solutions. In fact, most of them thought that the problem was largely, if not entirely, psychological.

I have lost count of all the medical professionals that I have seen over the years. Some of them have proved to be a hindrance and/or antagonistic. Others have been nothing more than a waste of time. A few of them have blessed me with a little bit of insight on my problem, and only one of them has provided genuine help in solving the gastrointestinal disorder. Unfortunately, that man passed away about ten years ago. At this point in time, I have found that there are very few medical practitioners that possess more practical knowledge about my condition than myself.

Perhaps you have heard this explanation before, but the big problem now is that I am not especially confident that I can find any medical practitioner that will actually be able to supply a solution to my problem. It is a three-fold problem: I would need to find a practitioner that has the genuine ability to diagnose and to treat the condition; I would need to subject myself to the numerous months of testing required for that practitioner to diagnose the condition; and I would need to undergo the numerous attempts to treat the condition in search for a treatment that actually works (assuming that they would even be able to devise a successful treatment). More than likely, I would need to subject myself to several potential practitioners. (There is no shortage of practitioners that think that they know what they are talking about, when in reality they are simply full of hot air.) It would be a miracle to find a competent doctor in less than a year. Then it would be no less than six months for a diagnosis. Finally, our experimentation of treatments would begin, and what would it take to find a successful plan of attack? … 12 months? … 18 months? I could easily be at this whole doctor shopping exercise for the next five years, and still be without a solution. This is how dire my problem is!

There is not a chance that such an approach would fit into God’s plan for me to circumnavigate the Earth. By that plan, I would be lucky to be in the early stages of my treatment plan at the time I am supposed to embark out of Singapore. Therefore, God clearly has something entirely different planned for my deliverance.

I will let you in on a little secret. I have not the slightest inclination of what God’s solution for my affliction could possibly be. Yet, with all my heart and soul I believe that God is going to provide a solution, just exactly as I believe in you! With all my heart and soul, I believe in you, as God has given me reason to believe. Love Always, Dale 😊

Read this post on my own personal blog Website dalet.us

1. Those of you that are Lord of the Rings aficionados may be wondering why I chose a picture of the "Lady of Shalott," instead of a picture of Galadriel herself. I simply liked this picture better than those that I could find of Galadriel. It is thought that JR Tolkien may have modeled the character of Galadriel after the Lady of Shalott, in part. Looking at this picture, I can see how that could be said.

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dalet-us · 4 years

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What’s the Point?

My dear friend,

I am sure that you are wondering what this is all about. In one sense it is all very simple. It is all about you. However, that does not fully answer the question, “What’s the Point?” The complete answer is not quite so simple. It is not something that can be explained in few words, not even in a single blog post. Nonetheless, I will, in this post, do my best to give you a reasonable overview of the purpose behind it all.

What is it that I mean when I say, “Raising the awareness and understanding of the Word of God using the Earth itself as a pulpit?”

As it states on my LinkedIn Company Profile:

“There is a threefold purpose:

To test (prove) the love of God;

To make known the Word of God; and

To serve as a vehicle for His love and His Word.”

God through His infinite mercy uses the weak and the foolish to confound the strong and the wise (as Paul the Apostle writes in First Corinthians 1:27). If it were possible that a man could complete a solo human powered polar circumnavigation of the Earth, only by God's mercy and grace could it be done. Only by God's mercy and grace would one even dare to attempt it. It is by the infinite love of God that Jesus gave His life to make the impossible possible. Likewise, it is simply by His love that one would risk his own life to make known the love and the Word of God.

In 2019 Fiann Paul and his five companions successfully crossed the Drake Passage (the ocean passage between Cape Horn, Chile and Charles Point, mainland Antarctic peninsula). This unassisted ocean rowing adventure has been labeled the “Impossible Row.” Of course, they did not have to row back to Chile. When they arrived at the Antarctic peninsula a ship brought them and their boat back home. While there are many other accounts of similarly heroic feats in the arctic regions (and other remote areas of the world), the accounts of these adventures are truly remarkable in every case. The brave men and women that attempt to conquer these challenges endure extraordinarily difficult circumstances, and when things go wrong, it can be disastrous.

The idea of circumnavigating the entire Earth via the South and the North poles is categorically insane, regardless of situation. To attempt to do something like this alone is even more improbable, and to do it without any assistance is unquestionably impossible. It is impossible for man, but it is not impossible for God.

Hence, that is fundamentally what this blog is about. It is my story of the errand that God has set before me, to conquer the Globe in human conquest. Except that it is not possible for a man to do such a thing. There are many men that would like to think that they could, but they would not be true to themselves in believing so. I know for a certainty that I cannot do such a thing. If I had all the money in world at my fingertips, I could not conquer the Globe in my own human power. Even if I was wise enough to master each challenge, time is against me. If I was a young enough person to avoid the press of time, then I would lack the wisdom that I need. Regardless, happenstance and fortune would be against me in either case.

When an adventurer embarks on any such conquest, he is attempting to cheat fortune … to beat the odds. There is always a significant risk that he will fail or parish in the attempt. The more an adventurer continues to beat the odds, the greater the likelihood that the odds will catch up with him. With a quest such as this one, circumnavigating the Globe, the odds of failure stack up quite high. Even if that adventurer survives his failures, time and expense take their tolls. A man could easily spend his entire lifetime trying to achieve the finish line and never quite be able to get there. More than likely, he would parish somewhere along the way, even if he was regarded the best of the best.

Therefore, God is not sending an individual that has the credentials or the pedigree, else God would not receive the glory. Yet if He sends someone like myself, then there can be no other explanation for the success. It could only be a miracle of God.

Yet what would be God’s purpose for using a broken and trodden down instrument as I to send His message out to all those that would hear? I wish that I could give you a complete answer for that question, but I do not fully understand His ways.

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” – Isaiah 55:9 KJV

Nevertheless, I think that I can make suggestion for a few of His purposes. If I were even able to get my boat into the water and launch out from Singapore in the summer of 2022 (as planned), that would be a miracle in itself. If I were to make it all the way to Australia that would get some attention, indeed. Would I not become a fascination to the world abroad? Imagine the headlines:

“Over the Hill Man Quits His Cyber Security Career to Circumnavigate the Earth”

Okay, maybe I would not be enticed to click on a news feed link like this, but if I saw a video clip on the news about it or if a friend told me about it, I would be curious to learn about the eccentric person behind such a strange tale.

Why would God want His messenger to gain this kind of attention? It is because He wants His word to heard. There are a lot of people in this modern world that are not hearing the Word of God, because the traditional church has lost its effectiveness. God has continually been advancing many other means of spreading His Word in the last several years. This is simply a way of progressing with that trend, and I think that we are going to see much more of these types of methods used by God in coming times.

How will God use this as a means of spreading His Word? In short, I will simply say that I will be His mouthpiece. Remember, that I once told you that I would even read the Word of God to you? That is all that I can say for the moment. (Those particular details will come in March.)

This is the sum of it all: If I am faithful to give out the Word of God according to His will and purpose, He will continue to bless me in my efforts to achieve the impossible. When God makes the impossible possible, He proves His love towards me (His faithful servant), and, most of all, He proves His love for you. Remember, how that I told you that God saved me from my own sin? He will save you also, my dear friend, if you put your trust in Him. God loves you, and He is going to prove it to you through my impossible errand.

Love Always,

Dale 😊

Come back tomorrow for another blog post with continuing details and explanation.

Read this post on my own personal blog Website dalet.us

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