We live a life of suffering...

    caused by 

    Hate

    Greed

    Delusion

August of 2014

Eight years have passed since my son asked me why I was so upset by the Christmas Season. At the time I told him to let me think for a couple of days and then I would tell him. He agreed. I sat down and wrote an 8,500 word story for him about The Nobody. In this story a single man who lived "next to the nice part of town" with a room mate, Curtis who was discouraged about his value and the direction of his life. Our Nobody worked in an athletic shoe store and was the bottom of the staff. He was liked but hardly noticed and has the least influence of anyone in the store.

Our Nobody loved to run and one night decided to go for a run from the athletic store to the top of a 1,200 foot high ridge that started just across the street from the store. Because his car had broken down, he had to be back by 11 PM to catch the last bus back to his apartment.

On the run he met an athlete who was bigger and stronger than anyone he had met. Our Nobody, a man named Aaron, thought this athlete might be an Olympian. Aaron tried to move out of his way but the stronger one slowed and asked if he could run with Aaron. He agreed as long as the stronger one would go ahead if Aaron was too slow.

They ran to the top together, talking and getting to know each other. When they got to the top, the stronger one performed a miracle for Aaron, changing his life forever. The stronger one told Aaron that he and those like him did not call this place Earth. They called it The Arena of God.

Aaron was amazed, confused, and overwhelmed by the experience. When Aaron got home he found his room mate ready to kill himself in despair. Aaron used his experience to change his room mate, Curtis's mind about life and his self worth.  This gave Curtis a new way of living.

When I read this story to my son, he got it. He understood my frustration with the way Christmas was celebrated. We communicated.

This story sat in my computer for several years until a friend from Oregon came to visit my home during my very difficult divorce. She and her husband walked the tight rope of emotion between my soon to be ex and myself. She asked about this story that I had shared with her four years earlier. We dug it out of my computer and re-read it. We both liked it and were touched. She told me this had to become a book.  I needed to have a positive project at the time. I thanked Annie and went to work. Over the next couple of years it turned into my first novel and the first in a series of seven.

When I sat down to write the story, a man walked into my mind. I had always threatened to write a book about Gideon, Jonah, and Me, three men who tried to escape from God, but failed. The man who walked into my mind was Gideon Jones. He was fifty something. Like me he had been through a difficult divorce and had a wonderful son. He was a Vietnam Veteran. In the story, he moved from the San Jose area to a beautiful coastal town in a pristine county, Santuario County. He started a construction business in a 4,000 square foot warehouse he won in an auction. He called his business the Construction Concierge and supported construction projects in the county. He found a wonderful partner who had recently moved from Iran with his family. His new partner helped him rebuild a tiny home on an acre up on the Ridge Road above town. They worked together and began to prosper.

Mo, the partner from Iran, lived in a condo complex near Aaron and Curtis who were doing much better now. Aaron asked Mo to bring Gideon Jones to a meeting. In that meeting Aaron asked the two men to help his Aunt Britta through a difficult divorce. That was the beginning of The Arena of God.

There are many people living in the county; some good and some really bad. Life here was like most other places except it become a hot spot in the Battle that Rages Everyday.

Just like where you live, this town, in this county, is in the Arena of God.

The Arena of God is now a 354 page novel that will be published this month. In the next few weeks I will publish a link in this blog to lead you to a website called acoastaltown.org which where you can learn more about the book.  You will also be able to purchase a copy.

If you are, or know a veteran, this will be a very good tool to help explain the war experience.  As most know, there are many good reasons why veterans don't talk about the war. This novel shares the insights of a veteran and presents a new way of thinking about the world in which we live.

I hope this series provokes discussion and that people get a chance to talk about some very important aspects of their lives. I give this project to you out of brotherly love.

Brian Oldham August 2014

- Twenty-Four -

Gideon

     Gideon walked over to the window in his office that looked out toward the docks. He was lost in thought. All this had developed so fast from the moment of his realization. He thought of his first meeting with Aaron and the week of trouble with Britta and Monir. The week of the funeral for Jasmine, and helping Mr. Ahmo transport his son’s body home. He thought of the busy week during all that.    

     The sudden awareness of the constant presence of God and the battle, all made sense. The idea that we are safe here in the US is ridiculous. It is a dangerous world filled with natural threats and evil people. In reality the only thing that lasts on Earth is love and our only safety is the Love of God.

     Gideon thought about his decades of feeling alone and how he now realized that there was someone or something right beside him that whole time who loved and cared for him. It would have changed so much of how he had behaved and the decisions he made. This revelation had made sense of so much troubling news he encountered every day. It gave him energy and courage. It made him realize that he was built to be a deadly force and he needed to be able to use that.

     He remembered back three plus decades ago to his time in Viet Nam. Gideon was back in the rain forest under the 300-foot high canopy of trees. He felt the heat even at night and the humidity and was uncomfortably settled in among the large leafed plants waiting for the passing of an American led unit of ARVN (Army of the Republic of South Vietnam) that was on the way to a tunnel system entrance that they would watch and destroy. Gideon was their advisor.

     Gideon had been there for a long day to make sure all the animals in the area were used to him before any one came along. It got really dark in the rain forest at night and as he sat there, alert but motionless he sensed, more than heard a movement. When he looked up he was presented with an embodied something. It was not human but looked like a human. It moved slowly and was clearly scanning the area. It had a dark energy pulsing and seemed to just consume the air around it. It stopped and Gideon sat absolutely still. He was in good enough shape that his heart rate was in the low 40’s when he just sat and his breathing was slow and shallow to feed his lungs. He could remain motionless for a long time. The presence made him feel nauseous and tight and he felt evil coming from it. What is evil? He couldn’t define it but this was it. It stood still for 10 minutes and surveyed the area before it began to move on. He was reminded now of the verse in the Bible that described the devil as roaming back and forth on the Earth like a hungry lion looking for some one to devour. This was satan, it was real and it could not be anything else, satan was feasting in Viet Nam. There was so much hatred and fear and sadness. So many people had given in to the father of lies.

     During his service there in the U. S. Military Gideon had realized that he was a loner and worked well independently. He was good at details and had a good memory. He was resourceful and could accomplish a task without having to have every step spelled out. He almost always came back with the desired result, and when he didn’t succeed he survived. He smiled as he remembered the call sign he had been given “Hard Ball.”    

     He had been involved in a couple of long term projects while he was there and ended up serving for a full five years. He had come home as a 24 year old, battle hardened, veteran who was already divorced once. He had developed so many skills in Southeast Asia that had absolutely no value in normal society and had forgotten any social skills he had before the “police action.”

     The horrible experience of the war had changed him. It was unsettling to look back at his life and see the troubles he had encountered and how he had always just attributed them to his deficiencies. He did not ever think that the forces of darkness were actively working to derail his happiness. He was still a ways off from even meeting God. He realized now that there are spiritual forces working in life that are bigger than we are and that we all need to turn to the God that made us to be able to survive. 

     While he was standing there Gideon remembered the process he had gone through in Vietnam with a shudder. He came into the service as a fairly decent young man. He did not look for trouble or hurt people. He went through boot camp and training and learned about danger and how to be violent and deadly. Then he went to the theater of war and was surrounded by a frontless danger zone. He went out on his daily duty and encountered the enemy. They engaged in battle and he survived. He was relieved and came back feeling lucky. Then more engagements and he began to get comfortable with the violence. Then he started to look for the enemy and the violence. The first time he killed someone he was sorry but felt lucky to be alive. Then he was more efficient and direct in trying to kill someone. Then he got to the point where he was out looking for someone to kill. 

     The surreal experiences he encountered got to the point where he was in the field fighting when a napalm bomb exploded nearby. Napalm was originally designed to level buildings, then was used to clear the dense forest and jungle plants. Then it became an anti-personnel weapon and Gideon was often where the enemy was. He was in the field and the explosions rained down. The napalm bomb showered its thick petroleum gel out over a large area and some of it slammed onto a man in his unit as they were beginning a pursuit of the enemy. It covered half of his chest and one arm. Napalm is a sticky gelatin and burns at a high temperature. He teammate was on fire and suffering greatly, screaming, Gideon stopped and looked at him and made eye contact and saw the terror. Gideon pulled his weapon up and ended the suffering for his fellow soldier even though the fire continued.

     How can you have this experience and ever come back home and behave like a “normal” person? How can you value life? How can you control yourself in conflicts? How can you expect someone to fall in love with a killer or to want to have a long-term relationship? He ended up killing those relationships just as efficiently as he had dispatched the enemy. He was cheered for what he had done overseas but then reviled for how he behaved at home. It sucked. 

     Gideon thought of the poet Richard Shelton and his book “You Can’t Have Everything.” Shelton talks about Exiles a lot and Gideon felt like an exile even while living in the U.S. Gideon remembered the lines from “I have no wings”

      a tired man carries only himself

      a frightened man carries himself and his shadow

      a vicious man carries the weight

      of all he would harm…

and he also remembered the lines from “Local Knowledge”

      if you should see one of us

      in the distance as your caravan passes

      and, if he is ragged and gesturing,

      do not be mistaken

      he is not gesturing for rescue

      he is shouting, go away

     One day he released the power of hate and fear and he felt like he could rejoin society and he left for his first stop back since his return from Viet Nam three years earlier, New Mexico

     So much had happened since then as he became the Champion of Failed Relationships and worked at a couple of careers until he had finally found himself in this coastal town living in a cottage and working in construction. 

     He had tried relationships but continued his difficulty in bonding with another human being. His last marriage had been very difficult. They had somehow produced a beautiful boy who grew in wisdom and strength through the years. While Gideon and his wife never really became intimate partners in life they had done a really wonderful job of raising this young man.

     Gideon had turned into a battle hardened combat soldier. His training was so intense and its application so strong that he could not stop thinking as a soldier and feeling like a soldier. He was happy to have a wonderful son in college to care for. He had Mo and his family and he did have a couple of friends he could talk to.

     Now he had the friendship of Aaron and Curtis. He needed to make sure that Aaron came home safely. God likes to work through people and so apparently does satan. It became clear at that moment to Gideon that someone had a bad experience with Aaron directly or indirectly and that negative feeling was being fed by the darkness to seem like a good reason to act. He felt a pat on the back of his head.

     I am strongly motivated to share information about the interaction of angels on Earth. I started with the fact that there are many names for our home planet. Each culture has a name, most of which mean dirt or soil or just the ground we stand on. No descriptive of what it is in total or why we are here. I have seen that between the first and second chapters of Genesis one angel challenged God and would not submit to the foundational reality of God.

     This angel fell from Grace and one third of the angels went with him. Where they went was here, our home planet. They were in fact 'hurled' down to the Earth and will operate here until the end of the Earth as we know it. There will be a new Earth and a New Heaven after that. The fallen angels interacted with the people on the Earth and had offspring called the Nephilim. A major reason for the Great Flood, (the new Noah movie has nothing to say about this) was to rid the surface of the Earth of the Nephilim.

     Since that time fallen angels, also known as Demons have occasionally inhabited people's bodies as is seen in a close look at serial killers when they are caught and then when they are ready for trial. You can see that something has left the body by the time the trial comes. The eyes are dead. The main way that the fallen angels influence people today is the culture. There is almost no room for being good any longer. I should not pick on this generation because each generation since the time of Job has been called 'this generation of vipers'.

     The purpose for all this effort by the fallen angels is to turn people away from God, a belief in God or from being in love with God. In order for a soul to be lost the person does not have to chose to love satan but just merely to turn away from God. It becomes a battle between God and satan for the souls of each person every day. This battle is fought on Earth but it is called by the angels, The Arena of God.

     God in omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient. Satan is not. Satan and his minions cannot be everywhere all the time so there is a system of Principalities that cover the Earth and there is a power in charge of each. The fallen angels are called the minions of data now. Beware.

     If you are confronted by satan or one of his minions then you have God to protect you, if you are a believer. If you belong to God then you can tell satan and his minions not to bother you but to take their problem up with your Lord. If you do not belong to God then you are vulnerable to attack.

     Remember that God does not love, God is love.  God does not tell the truth, God is the truth. There are still the two thirds of the good angels left working for God always. They do the bidding of God and interact with people as well. We are told that by the end of our lives on Earth we will have spoken with angels.

The more you know about this the more danger you are in.

The angel told him, "I know". They looked up at the heavens together and the sky pulsed and glimmered. The angel told him. "We don't call this place Earth. We call it 'The Arena of God'. There is a battle raging every day for the souls of each person. There are only two ways out of the arena and there are no second visits. Once you are out you will never see the arena again." As they looked up at the heavens the whole sky seemed to move down toward them and come into a sharp focus. The space between the stars filled with 10,000 angels, poised as if for action, looking down, pulsing. Their strength was intimidating and Aaron was afraid they were going to move. Signal, the angel, held Aaron up and a feeling of warmth spread through Aaron. He was able to stand. Signal told Aaron, "you are going to be tested tonight as part of this battle."