A few days before the 17th of May, the Lord showed me the number 17.  It bore witness with my spirit that it meant the 17th of May.

This is what happened on the 17th of May:

I was walking east out of Missoula, Montana on I-90 when this truck driver picked me up.  His name was Rusla and he was originally from Belarus (near Russia and the Ukraine).  He was a Christian who lived in Mount Vernon, Washington.  During that trip, the Presence of God became very powerful.  Rusla dropped me off in Belgrade where I camped out that night.

The next day (May 18th) I hitchhiked to Jackson, Wyoming where I camped out for one night.  The next day (May 19th) I hitchhiked to West Yellowstone, Montana and camped out in the woods just north of town.  That night I was attacked probably by several demons in my sleep.  Before I went to sleep, there was this sense of foreboding or sense of dread.  Later this evil presence came upon me and I became paralyzed and then the demons attacked me.  It may have lasted fifteen minutes to half an hour.

Why did the demons attack me that night?  Probably because the Presence of God was so strong on the 17th of May.  I believe some demonic bondage was broken inside me on the 17th and that is why Satan was so furious.

I hitchhiked out of West Yellowstone the next morning (May 20th).  A Christian friend picked me up outside of Belgrade and let me stay at his place in Three Forks for one night.  I was using his laptop that evening and noticed that the number of page views on my High Plains Drifter blog (Google) was down drastically.  The previous several months, I averaged between 250 and 400 page views per day on my High Plains Drifter blog.  After May 20th, my average page views has been around 40 to 70 per day.

Something serious happened in the heavenly realm in the past several days for Satan to attack me like that.  Praise the Lord!  That’s good news.  If Satan attacks you, that means you are destroying some aspect of his kingdom.

The next day (May 21st) I hitchhiked from Three Forks to Helena, Montana.  Outside of Helena, this truck driver picked me up.  He was originally from Russia; his name was Alex and he was from Mount Vernon, Washington.  He later told me that he knew Rusla, the other truck driver, very well.  We had a good laugh.  It’s a small world.  To me, this was confirmation that something definitely happened on the 17th of May:  two truck drivers picked me up from Mount Vernon, Washington; they knew each other; they were both Christians (went to different churches); they both spoke Russian and English; Rusla picked me up just outside of Missoula, Alex dropped me off in Missoula.  In the mouth of two or three witnesses, let every word be established.

Alex dropped me off on the east side of Missoula.  I hitchhiked to Lolo and camped out there that night. Before I went to sleep, I went through a fascinating deliverance from a demon.  It was like the demon was in a death throe when it manifested (it felt like I was dying); finally the demon came out.  It lasted for about an hour.  Praise the Lord!  I am still being delivered from demons; curses are being broken.

When I think back on the power of the Presence of God in Rusla’s tractor cab on the 17th of May, I think of these scriptures:

Isaiah 10: 27:  “And it shall come to pass in that day, that his burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder, and his yoke from off thy neck, and the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing.”

I Corinthians 4: 20:  “For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.”

Matthew 17: 21:  “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.”

Revelation 2: 24:  “But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden.”

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Recent Page Views Per Day (High Plains Drifter blog):

4 May:  453

7 May:  471

10 May:  931

12 May:  300

16 May:  363

17 May:  258

19 May:  37

21 May:  197

24 May:  47

25 May:  75

27 May:  36

28 May:  58

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A Deeper Deliverance
Obedience: The Bondage Breaker
New Testament Circumcision

The Deeper Work of the Cross by Watchman Nee
A Dream About General George S. Patton
What Can’t Kill You Will Only Make You Stronger
The Gates of Hell
A Parable About Lukewarm, American Christianity
The Lord Will Come With Fire
Levels of Spiritual Warfare — Fr. Ripperger
Practising His presence.  Preparing the heart.
Where Are The Watchmen?

Genesis:  Garments from the Garden of God – Trey Smith

WASHINGTON, DC IS A GHOST TOWN

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

This is from the blog Dappled Things:

By MICHAEL RENNIER

Fifty years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was in the midst of the fight of his life. Having already survived World War II as a Russian officer on the eastern front, a divorce from his university sweetheart, and eight years in the Gulag Archipelago because he wrote some letters to his friend in which he claimed to love socialism but which were judged to prove he just didn’t love socialism enough, he was now being threatened with potential re-imprisonment and, in his opinion, the more serious threat of having his novels censored from the reading public. In fact, many of his drafts and notes had already been seized by the KGB and his novel The Perfect Circle had been rejected for publication, presumably due to pressure from communist party officials on the writers union. Now, his novel Cancer Ward (Oh yeah, he also had cancer while in a prison camp) was facing the same treatment. For Solzhenitsyn, enough was enough.

What do you do when murderous psychopaths who wield the power of life and death begin to threaten you with a permanent vacation to Siberia where you will enjoy making clay bricks with your bare hands while feasting on a starvation-diet? Do you shut up, keep your head down, and burn all your manuscripts? If you’re Solzhenitsyn, you actually create a plan of action that is quite the opposite. Here, in a few easy (frighteningly death-defying) steps, is how to take down a repressive authoritarian government with the power of your art.

1. Samizdat [self-publishing/underground resistance literature]

So, corrupt Neanderthalish government officials want to censor your work? No problem, just distribute full copies of the manuscript via samizdat! This time-honored, entirely illegal form of publication under repressive regimes that prefer to control the written word never fails to gather a reading public. Soon enough you will have enough notoriety that publishers in the “Capitalist Pig” areas of the world will begin printing your work for you. Solzhenitsyn eventually began using this form of publication preemptively to ensure that if his novels ever were published, the editors would not be able to selectively remove what they perceived to be offensive passages.

2. Public letters of complaint to literati and journalists

On May 16, Solzhenitsyn wrote to a gathering of fellow Russian writers to complain about, “The no longer tolerable oppression, in the form of censorship, which our literature has endured for decades.” He went on, “Works…are proscribed or distorted by censorship on the basis of considerations that are petty, egotistical, and…shortsighted.” The response of the powers-that-be? They basically did that thing where a petulant child sticks his fingers in his ears and pretends not to hear when you tell him to brush his teeth. Solzhenitsyn wouldn’t let them off the hook, though, and penned another letter: “Does the Secretariat believe that my novel will disappear as a result of these endless delays, that I will cease to exist…?” After being told that the answer was essentially, Yes, yes we do hope that you cease to exist, he reminded them that the novel was actually already being read in samizdat form (because, preemption). He went on to note that his work was not so much a political work as it was a look at “universal and eternal questions.” Of course, this very concept of universal truth is precisely what Marxists refuse to admit exists since everything falls under the rubric of class struggle. So to them the mere fact of an artist talking about universal truth is very much a political attack.

3. Public attacks on the KGB

Is your public feud with the entirety of your professional class not dangerous enough? Why not up the stakes and make a run at the secret police too? Solzhenitsyn, after having already been in the Gulag for 8 years and actually seeing it effect him spiritually for the better, wasn’t afraid of returning if need be*. After having half a dozen of his speaking engagements cancelled due to, as he discovered upon his arrival to speak, “Author’s Indisposition,” he finally managed to overcome his imaginary illnesses and arrive at a speaking engagement at which the audience hadn’t been warned away. He took his chance. To a crowd of five-hundred, he proclaimed, “There is a certain organization that has no obvious claim to tutelage over the arts, that you may think has no business at all supervising literature–but that does these things. This organization took away my novel and my archive…Even so, I said nothing, but went on working quietly…What can I do about it? Only defend myself! So here I am!”

 In fact, he could do much more than he imagined, because as the KGB understood well enough, his literature was powerful beyond words, communicating a depth of despair and truth that had sunk into the hearts of the Russian people and would never be extracted by any amount of force or propaganda. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch had become a day in the life of all Russians. They’d all been touched by the pain of the Gulag in some form or another. Up until this moment, the secret had been kept, a sort of conspiracy between abuser and abused. But Solzhenitsyn, in speaking so boldly, finally broke the spell. At grave risk to himself (the KGB attempted to assassinate him in a ricin attack), he created one of the first chinks in the armor of the Communist Party.

The Gulag photo

4. Soak up the Slander

If you can’t censor a writer, you can at least slander him mercilessly. According to Joseph Pearce’s biography A Soul In Exile, the editor of Pravda gave a speech in which he called Solzhenitsyn, “A psychologically unbalanced person, a schizophrenic.” He goes on to declare, “Of course we cannot publish his works.” This was but one of many slanderous accusations that he was a traitor and a capitalist pig. A few years later at a meeting of the Writer’s Union, he was systematically attacked, labeled “anti-social,” and finally kicked out of the Union. It was this final act of anti-free speech behavior that finally caused international sympathizers with the Soviet experiment to finally break ranks. Soon enough, criticism from intellectuals such as Jean Paul Sartre, Arthur Miller, and Kurt Vonnegut were made public. Now, as Pearce writes, Solzhenitsyn was, “a living symbol of the struggle for human rights in the face of state censorship.” This point was driven home triumphantly when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. Solzhenitsyn was unable to retrieve his Nobel for fear of never being let back into Russia, so he sent a printed speech. In it, he reveals the reason that a mere writer could cause so much discomfort among the political powers.

The task of an artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know…By means of art we are sometimes sent—dimly, briefly—revelations unattainable by reason. Like that little mirror in the fairy tales—look into it, and you will see not yourself but, for a moment, that which passeth understanding, a realm to which no man can ride or fly. And for which the soul begins to ache…

Truly, an artist who reveals truth through beauty is stronger than any government and any artificially constructed set of beliefs that would lay claim upon us. Art reveals to us who we are, and such a truth cannot be silenced. Cheers to Alexander Solzhenitsyn for his bravery, his wit, his perseverance, and most of all for his poignant, honest, heartbreaking art.

*This reminds me of the legend of St. John Chrysostom, who had become such a thorn in the side of the Emperor that government leaders wanted to throw him in jail. Upon being advised that he would actually like that because it would allow him more uninterrupted time to pray, they decided to make him Patriarch of Constantinople instead.

All the credit for sourcing this essay goes to Joseph Pearce and his excellent biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul In Exile.

Soviet Censorship of Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Solzhenitsyn’s 10 Ways Ideological Regimes Destroy You
Scripture Does Not Tell Believers to Obey Evil Laws
One Man’s Education is Another Man’s Marxist Brainwash
The Black Book of Communism
Solzhenitsyn, 9 Years after His Death
Terrorism and The Exhausted West
Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to America

Stalin’s Enslavement of Rural Russia
Putin embarrasses Megyn Kelly
Pie in the Sky
Attacks on the police is an old communist tactic

“It’s an universal law–intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future.”

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

An interlude on Solzhenitsyn