"Step One" was this: I diligently researched the occult significance of Yoga and presented the dangers to my Pastor and his wife in May after they brought a Yoga demonstration into our church. Last week he reported his decision: a Christian can safely practice Yoga without becoming entangled in the demonic.

Now I realize a vivid prophetic dream I had after our first meeting was as much for him as it was for me (hence, "Step Two" is sharing this dream with him).

My dream in brief: I am walking up the stairs in a resort and overhear people whisper in ignorant fascination, "It can even kill God!" I come up to a small public room where two men are hunched over a game table. They are so intent on their game they don't notice just a few feet behind them is a woman dressed in sheer blue (blue represents the heavenly) who is enticing anyone who passes by (this reminded me of a 1940's cigarette girl). I can see through the sheer facade, though, to see a skeleton with pieces of flesh dangling from it.

Sadly, my pastors are so intent on playing church they don't see that in their very midst is a demon pandering death. And, while nothing can kill God, the leaven we allow in our lives and church communities will most definitely quench the working of the Spirit of God.

Thank you, brother Joseph!

I have long marveled at the kinds of hardships our grandparents' generation (born ~1900, plus or minus) endured without complaint through war and deep, deep privation. In most cases, the women I know, of that generation, were the true stalwarts of faith when their men lost it in seas of doubt. (One thinks, for example, of Corrie Ten Boom in the Nazi camps).

Further in the vein of the physical mirroring the spiritual, women compete on an equal footing with, and have even bested, the most elite men in some of the longest organized endurance competitions in the world. In fact, the longer the better, it would seem.

E.g., the week-plus-long Iditarod in Alaska where one must subsist on less than an hour of sleep per night in bone-chilling cold and dark (1st place), the English Channel and other hyper-long ocean swims, Ironman triathlons (as high as 11th overall at the prestigious Hawaii Ironman; higher at others) and various 100-mile wilderness runs (many female overall wins which few ever hear about). At the famous Western States 100, a woman has finished second overall.

brother Pete