​The Warrior King by Anna Rountree
A Battle with the World, the Flesh, and the Devil

Chapter 1: Iron City
It was the piss-end of the first age of the world. Day had abandoned its post; night inked both land and sky. Mankind, for all its bravado, busied itself with petty feuds, mindless of the silent beast that had already eaten and was now digesting it.  I found myself on an embankment overlooking a bog. Huge wheels and holes of massive equipment were half-sunk or piled in the mire amid rust-coated water and plants. It was a salvage dump for a civilization once known for its inventiveness, now known for its waste. A massive cliff city of iron lay beyond the bog—rusted, its unoiled wheels grating loudly. A cloud of red dust suffocated its internal streets and recessed buildings.  

Years before, much of mankind had fled to iron-fortified cliffs such as these and continued life as though the corrupt evening of the world had not overtaken it. Here, crows perched atop the bog’s silent machinery, calling to one another—a false tattoo that all was well.  Suddenly, the ground lurched violently beneath me, throwing me onto my hands and knees, knocking the breath out of me. I gasped, struggling to fill my lungs with the bitter, metallic air. Below, the ground of the bog split open like a ripe melon. One after another, the huge pieces of machinery tipped as though they were behemoths stumbling into the cavernous opening.
The fire within the rift looked like a smelter furnace, with the iron of the rusted machinery adding to its eerie glow. Stagnant water joined the machinery, causing a fury of steam to rise from the molten depths.
In the nearby cliff city, people crammed onto balconies or packed open windows to gape. Many screamed when they saw large, hyena-faced demons coming up from the molten depths and clambering over the falling equipment. These beasts were powerful, swift, and hungry—they headed for the city.
At the same time, dark rope ladders uncurled from the second heaven, allowing sinewy black demons to climb down. Grappling hooks were slung over their backs so they could pull themselves over and climb into the iron city once they reached their destination.
The cliff dwellers were trapped. Bone-splitting shrieks rose from the besieged city. Horrific animal reflexes snapped me into a low crouch, ready to run.
It was then that I saw a large straggle of soldiers trudging across a nearby ridge. They were led by a line of exceedingly old men clad in various pieces of armor. These were riding massive draft horses that looked like they had just been unhitched from the plow to carry these elderly fighters into battle.
The soldiers were in tatters, armed with rakes, shovels, hoes, and other non-aggressive tools. The elders leading them seemed battle-worn and as ancient as the pieces of rusted armor they wore. Each elder held aloft a staff from which a faded canvas insignia flapped in the agitated air. I could barely make out the names of the various Christian denominations that once emblazoned the fabric.
The sky was black with great red streaks across it, as though some animal’s claw had wounded it. The sounds of explosions rolled over the ridge in waves, with a vast dust storm moving in. I squinted my eyes and held up my hand to shield them as I sought to look in the direction of the sounds.
Far in the distance, a large city was under what looked like nuclear attack. The blasts of air rolling over us were from atomic explosions. As if they were not able to see—or were too stunned to understand—the elders moved toward the bombings in the city. Flesh-melting slaughter awaited them.
Involuntarily, I bellowed, “No!” as I ran toward them, waving my arms in warning to stop.
“We cannot!” the last elder in the line shouted back.
The elder did not look below at the hyena-faced demons swarming toward the cliff city—but I did. I paused a moment, looking behind as the demons began to scale the slick outer walls. The inhabitants of the cliff city were screaming down at them and throwing anything they could lay their hands on to stop them.
It was gut-wrenching—but far beyond my help. I shuddered as I turned to continue my run toward the elders on horseback.
“Oh, God,” I choked under my breath, stumbling toward the line.
With a final heave, I reached the last of the massive 20-hands-high draft horses and grabbed part of its tack in a desperate attempt to steady myself.
“I can see that those demons will be coming for us next!”
The elder on the horse looked down and shouted, “We must rescue those in the great city!”
“But you will not rescue anyone!” I shouted. “They are gone! Rescue those behind you!”
Then, seeing that I was determined to hang on and be dragged if necessary, he reached down, grabbed my arm, and pulled me up behind him onto the broad back of the horse.
“Look behind me!” he called loudly. “We can defeat anything! There are thousands of us!”
Then, seeing that I was straining to turn enough to see adequately, he shouted, “Stand up! Behold our numbers!”
I had never stood on the back of a horse, but in the panic of the moment, I thought I might be able to stand. After all, I needed whatever assurance the elder was trying to give me.
The horse did not flinch as I shakily stood on its rump behind the elder. I saw a vast number of men and women trying to move forward to confront the enemy. They were naively brave but poorly armed and poorly equipped. Already, they were bent down by the blast of a storm that came from a city that no longer existed.
The elders did not understand because they were doing what they had always done in the past. They had gone out in the name of Jesus; His banners went before them; His elders led the way.
However, now we needed Jesus. We needed Him leading His army, Him guarding our flank, and Him serving as our rear guard. This battle was too great. Now we must have the Captain of the Host leading His people.
The elders needed to help those that were still following them—and still alive.
Demons were overpowering many of those on the periphery. These demons quickly stifled the warrior screams by swarming over and then into them. I remembered seeing nature films of army ants swarming over prey—thousands piling on at once, viciously attacking and devouring them in seconds. Such was about to be our fate.
We were not prepared for this level of warfare—nor were the elders.
From the midst of mounting catastrophe, I looked up to heaven and cried out, “Father, help us!”
Suddenly, a huge hand of light reached down from above and began lifting me out of the encroaching slaughter. Exiting the killing zone in this way, I could see further and further afield. The whole world seemed to be burning. The cries of those being terrorized pierced my sensibilities.
“Father!” I shouted into the void.
In the blink of an eye, I went from darkness into blazing light. Unceremoniously, I was plunked down before my Father’s throne.


Chapter 2: The Commission and the Family Sword
Brilliant with light was the throne—and He who sat upon it. I seemed exceedingly small as I gazed up into the dazzling light that hid my heavenly Father’s face. His chest, arms, legs, and feet glowed with an equal inner light. His flowing garment spilled out onto the sea of glass.
I dropped to my knees with my face to the floor.
“Daddy,” I said in a choked whisper.
“We have been waiting for you,” He said.
“Daddy,” I lifted my head slightly. “Terrible things are happening on Earth.”
“And what are you going to do about them?”
“Me?” I gasped in shock.
I looked up and saw Jesus standing to the right of our heavenly Father. Jesus was clothed in gleaming silver armor and was intent on my answer. Before Him was a huge sword on which He rested both of His hands. He seemed primed for battle and concerned about the loss of any minute given to discussion instead of action.
“Who am I, Daddy?”
“Who indeed?” He replied.
Jesus spoke: “Anna, you cannot defeat the supernatural with bullets or bombs. This enemy is immortal.”
“We must do something!” I pleaded.
“We are preparing a counterattack right now—but with supernatural weapons, which we issue to our family,” my Father said.
Then He continued, “I see that you yourself are not wearing your armor.”
“Oh,” I said, looking down at myself.
“All receive armor when they come into the kingdom, but not everyone puts it on.”
I felt a bit sheepish. “You wish to help? Very well. Stand to your feet,” my Father said.
“Fit her for battle,” He called to a nearby angel.
Immediately, that angel and others stepped forward, carrying pieces of shining armor like Jesus’. These angels also were attired in armor. I wondered if all of heaven was preparing for war.
My Father continued to speak even as He watched them buckle me into each piece. “This armor must be tested before you go into battle alongside My Son.”
“To the battle below?” I asked.
“In order to serve, you must be prepared,” He stated. “When the armor is tested, you will be ready.”
“Hand her our sword,” my Father called.
A ripple of sound ran through those on the sea of glass. Then He addressed me:
“You were given a sword for riding, but for battle, you will need the Sword of the Spirit.”
Reverently, armored angels brought the sword and knelt before Him. He lifted the sword, which shone in His hands and—amazingly—sang out. It seemed as though it could not hold back the joy of being in the Father’s hands. There was equal delight from those on the sea of glass.
He lowered the sword and handed it to me. It was both heavy and light at the same time—heavy with His glory but light in the handling.
“Sheathe the sword,” He paused, as if sizing up the situation.
A tight smile came to Jesus’s face.
My Father turned to a large, armored angel standing to His left. He must have been 6’8” in height, but I could not see his face.
“Ruach will go with you,” my Father continued. “He is both family and friend and will strengthen you in times of need.”
The tall angel stepped forward. The other angels showed him deference as he took his place at attention by my right side. Though I could not see his face, his body and armor were translucent. Great power emanated from him, and his bearing seemed more than that of an angel’s. He stood at attention like a military man.
Now my Father said, in a manner used to transition from one subject to another, “As to the matter that has been brought before us: Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
I realized that He had moved on to broader concerns—concerns of the kingdom, perhaps of the world. What He asked sounded vaguely familiar. Then I remembered the call that went out in heaven in Isaiah’s day, when Isaiah boldly answered before the others assembled, saying, “Here am I! Send me!”—and he who was not a part of the heavenly court was allowed to go.
Could I do the same?
Suddenly, I felt emboldened and flushed with the thought that I might be able to help.
“I will go, Father,” I said in the zeal of the moment.
“You, Anna?” There was a rustle among the angels and the redeemed.
Jesus spoke to clarify the mission: “Anna, we need an emissary that will extract a beneficence that was locked away in our garden when it was shut to mankind and its entrance guarded after the flood. It was taken and hidden in black caves—this was many years ago. In this hour, we have need of it for the coming battle.”
“Now that you have heard the need, Anna, do you still wish to go?” my Father asked.
“Yes!” I exclaimed, hardly able to contain my excitement.
Then I thought, Where is it stolen?
Jesus said, reading my mind, “We received a taunt this very day—a taunt.”
“Who was arrogant enough to taunt the Living God to His face?”
I remembered that the enemy used taunts in biblical times, but this would not unnerve God Almighty. It was an affront—that’s what it was. Satan was mocking our God.
I felt a fury growing in me—even as David did when the giant challenged the God of Israel, mocking Him.
Jesus lifted a scroll. “May I, Father?”
He must have received an assurance from our Father because He read:
“Where midnight sun is swallowed by the vanities of men,
Cradled by a bitter root, warmed by serpent skin,
Deeper than the brave will go, hid where worms may seek,
The beatific, priceless prize found only by the meek.
We mock you, High and Lowly One, you Ruler of the weak,
Eternal chains await them all—your spineless, gutless meek.”
A wave of consternation ran through those assembled.
“Father, it is underground,” Jesus concluded.
“Anna?” my Father questioned, as if giving me another chance to refuse.
“I will go,” I said, now burning with indignation.
There was a cheer that went up among the redeemed. I’d almost forgotten about them.
“Very well. So be it,” my Father confirmed.
My heavenly Father continued to me: “I will bestow upon you the very help you need for this challenge and beyond.”
Then He lifted His voice and said, “Bring forth My mantle.”
There was a buzz among the redeemed and also the great number of angels assembled. Angels—gold in body, hair, and clothes—brought forward a beautiful, long-sleeve cloak. It shone brilliantly with bands of multifaceted gems that caught the light with every movement. I had never seen such a glorious garment. It was truly fit for a king.
As the angels drew near, the jewels began to change. That puzzled me, for the jewels became moving neon lights, rolling in a never-ending display of hot primary colors—like the marquees in Times Square, New York.
What in the world? I thought. This cannot be right.
But even before the angels reached my side, I was grateful that my Father was giving me greater understanding. He was being merciful. He gave me to understand that my body could not survive the shock of wearing His mantle immediately because I was still flesh. He had to step it down until I matured enough to be able to withstand the increased power.
My Father spoke: “As you complete the stages of your training, the moving lights will become jewels from My own crown. Only when you have completed the last test will the mantle properly represent Me. But you are never to use My glory to create your own.”
Then, as if that was not amazing enough, suddenly the angels turned the robe inside out, thereby displaying another garment entirely.
The Father’s mantle was double-sided.
This side was a drab, worn camel skin—probably as John the Baptist wore in the desert.
“Let me help you,” Jesus said.
He stepped to my back and helped me put on the double mantle. I noticed that the drab cloak completely covered the gleaming armor I now wore. The cloak left me looking like a wandering vagrant.
It is funny what you think about in times like these. I found myself grateful that the skin did not smell like a goat.
At first, I thought it strange that the Ruler of the Universe would wear such a drab garment. Then it came to me that our heavenly Father was as Jesus showed Him to be—humble.
Of course, of course, I understood not only the reason for wearing it but also I understood more about my Father’s character. This revelation made me even more grateful for the mantle—honored and blessed.
Really, if I sought that which only the meek could find, how desperately did I need to put on the humility of Christ?
“Step forward,” my Father said.
I stepped closer into His blazing light. He placed His hands on my shoulders—and lightning shot through me.
“Go forth,” He said, “in Our authority, and return to Our army that which was taken illegally by the enemy.”
Great power continued to surge through me. I tingled as though electricity was running through my veins.
“Bless you, My child,” He said.
Then He removed His hands. I leaned into the light, overpowered by His love—and also very elated. I hugged the lower part of His garment.
“Ruach,” He said to the faceless angel, “take care of her.”
The angel bowed his head and then helped me to be more of a soldier by pulling me away. I squared my shoulders, clumsily standing at attention.
Before I left, Jesus smiled at me.  Ruach and I were gone.


Chapter 3: The Tree That Grows Out of Hell
I could not see where Ruach had taken me. There was a dank smell, like mold from a closed, wet cellar.
“We will begin here, Anna,” Ruach said in a hushed tone.
My eyes began to adjust to the deep gloom. We were in the Lord’s sheepfold in mid-heaven—it was a safe-keep provided by the Lord for His own in that corrupted stratum.
A chill ran through me. I knew I could not be attacked here, but I felt exposed—like being in a glass house with an axe murderer prowling around outside.
Involuntarily, I stepped backward as the back of my legs touched the lone bench in the area. I half-stumbled, half-fell onto the low seating.
After I escaped from the trophy room on my last visit, I knew I was marked. Probably the demon still had my scent.
Ruach did not address my concerns but began his instructions:
“You will wear the cloak of invisibility that you received above—but not the shoes.”
I had received the cloak when I first went to heaven, along with a pair of shoes—both rendered me invisible. But those shoes had no soles in them—that was to allow me to touch the heavenly realm. But now I needed protection from all parts of this corrupted stratum. I needed the shoes provided in the sheepfold.
Without looking, I reached beneath the bench for the shoes I had worn before. As soon as my hand felt what seemed to be porpoise skin, I pulled them out and began to put them on my feet.
“Do not fear, Anna,” Ruach continued. “They will not see us or smell us or hear us, for I will speak to you inside your spirit—where they are not granted access.”
As I finished donning the shoes, I looked up nervously.
“If you are ready, we will go,” he said in a gentle tone.
I smiled into his faceless face and stood. Then I took a deep breath—and as I exhaled, we were invisible.
Immediately, as if we were sucked backward through a tube, Ruach set us down in what seemed to be the main hallway of some enormous structure. He had not said where we were going, but since I was turned backward, I used that advantage to get my bearings.
I could see through an open doorway part of the vast moat that encircled Satan’s castle.
My breath caught. “Oh, God,” I said within myself. “We are right in his castle.”
I felt a hand upon my shoulder and heard Ruach’s calming voice: “Steady, Anna.”
I took a deep breath. I wanted to believe that I could pass through this unscathed. Therefore, I settled down and focused my attention on my surroundings.
The walls and ceilings of the hallway were intricately decorated with human bones—even chandeliers of thousands upon thousands of human bones. It was an ossuary. It would have been strikingly beautiful if it had not been so ghoulish.
Oil-burning containers by the hundreds lit the dark, dank hall and the rooms that we passed. There was a strange smell—it wasn’t whale oil that was being burned. I believe it was oil from reconstituted human fat.
The floors were an iron patchwork of stepping stones, but instead of a masonry grout linking them together, the narrow spaces were like open veins where streams of blood were running.
With so much blood openly flowing, there was a cloying smell in the air—like the sickening smell of a slaughterhouse. Also oozing from between the bones in the walls were pockets of pus and rivulets of blood. The blood and pus oozed slowly into a trough at the base of the wall and then ran along like a lumpy, slow river, skirting the walls so that the stench of death was everywhere—ghastly.
Suddenly, we entered what looked like an enormous rotunda with many dark passageways leading from it, twisting and turning into the shadows.
The top of a huge tree took up a good deal of the space. It was in full leaf and had large sacks of fruit hanging from its branches. The fruit was like none I had ever seen—though it made me ill to look at it, for it was flesh—raw flesh.
And the blood that was traveling throughout the castle was going into the branches that supplied this fruit.
Ruach spoke to me: “This is the blood of aborted children and those sacrificed on the altar of Satan. Even as prayers rise to God, unrighteous slaughter empowers the Fallen One.”
Within the expansive hall, thrones were set up—with one throne elevated on a mound of human skulls. These thrones were also created from human bones, with black velvet cushions to soften their sharp edges.
There, brooding on the elevated throne, was the evil, fallen angel himself.
He had black hair that glinted with greens and blues, like raven feathers, and he wore black velvet. The velvet must have been impregnated with jewels, for the gems caught the light with each movement.
He had unwholesomely long, sharp nails that appeared unclean from digging into putrid flesh. It looked like—for there was a stench about them.
His clothing may have been elegant, but flies crawled freely in and out of all open areas—nose, mouth, corners of the eyes. I shivered in revulsion. It made me wonder what diseases were hidden beneath that finery.
But you knew—if you were close enough—that all the finery in the world would not cover the smell of rot.
His chin was propped up with one hand, and the other hand was soundlessly drumming those overly long nails.
Strangely, his face was beautifully cold—dangerous, devoid of light—but beautiful.
With laser-like focus, he listened to the cries coming from the blood of those sacrificed to him. He was poised like an animal ready to pounce—tense.
Then he smiled—a ghastly grimace.
And as if he were a black hole, he sucked all light into himself—all joy, peace, love, hope, and expectancy.
Suddenly, a cacophony of sounds shrilled through the passageways, blasting the tormented silence.
I turned to look toward the conflicting sounds.
In all their feathered and jeweled finery, false gods began to crowd the entry halls, their personal musicians saluting their arrival with all manner of instruments—unfortunately loudly playing different music at the same time, therefore clashing as they tried to outdo one another.
It was music played as a weapon.
There were so many high demons crowding into my sight that I could only mentally register a few.
Pushing its way down the hall was a gargantuan, three-headed monstrosity—one head was a cat’s, one a frog’s, and one a man’s, wearing a crown. Their necks went right into an engorged sack-like body on hairy spider’s legs. The demon was so satiated with blood that its round cushion of a body dragged on the floor.
The next was a naked man with bat’s wings, riding a dragon. He held a snake in his right hand and wore a crown.
Another demon crowded past the dragon—he had a man’s body clad in armor, with legs like coiled snakes and a head of a rooster.
One had five clothing-hoofed animal legs in a circle with a furious lion’s head in the center—without a torso.
Another demon was wearing a crown and a uniform while riding a prancing red horse.
One was a huge fly.
And on and on they came.
All were ghastly to behold.
I realized that these false gods would inspire love in no one—only fear. Their worshippers would be paying homage to them in hopes that they would avoid reprisal. Their followers lived cowed lives, miserably scraping together payoffs to cruel overlords, hoping against hope that they would be spared from what Satan raised.
His body on the throne, Satan spoke so quietly that I could barely hear him:
“Silence.”
The sound of the clashing instruments and noisy drumming stopped instantly.
The hideous creatures began to change before my eyes. They morphed into tall angels, dressed in black, laden with gold, and adorned with ceremonial regalia that I supposed indicated their rank in this demonic realm.
As they moved toward their thrones, they casually reached for the low-hanging fruit from the tree—a gesture as casual as selecting hors d’oeuvres from a party platter.
Watching them bite into the flesh, dripping with blood, was chilling. I had to look away as they consumed the flesh with such relish.
Satan observed them carefully. I could feel the tension among them. Many had taken over parts of the others’ territories by fomenting wars and aggressions on Earth.
These fallen angels were not friends. They ruled by control, domination, and terror. Guile and bitter gall had poisoned them. They had stabbed each other in the back as often as they dared—and would bring down Satan if any one of them got the chance.
They only worked together because together they were more powerful.
Watching them, it felt as though they were united in their effort to bring down their great enemy—our God. But after they had taken dominion, they would fight among themselves for rule.
Satan waited until they reached their seats. When they did, all was still—the type of stillness that has condemnation hanging in it.
As if in response to Satan’s mood, the flies left him and found more hospitable grazing on the bloody fruit.
There was silence.
“Why did we lose?” Satan finally asked quietly.
None answered.
He lifted his head and looked at them one by one.
“They fool of a relative was tricked by his own rib. Who could be so stupid? And these are that fool’s descendants.”
He shook his head in disbelief.
“We had them. The whole world.”
One of the ashen-faced high demons showed enough courage to answer: “The Nazarene—”
“Nonsense!” Satan snapped. “They don’t listen to Him! They spout His name and pervert His ways!”
But another false god began, “But—”
Satan’s tone dripped with sarcasm: “Are you going to whine? Mankind is dense. All we need to do is distract them, then disqualify them.”
He threw up his hands and shrugged.
“You relax? Kill them,” came a guttural growl from a throne further away from Satan’s.
“Yes,” Satan smiled and gave a low chuckle. Then, as if talking to himself, he muttered distractedly, “But we do not need to kill them to neutralize them.”
He dropped his head backward for a few seconds, smiling and savoring the idea of actually killing mankind instead of using the longer way of manipulating them.
“I would like to kill them,” but he said a chuckle ran through the room. Everyone knew how he felt and savored the idea with him.
“We almost had a worldwide cartel,” another added wistfully.
Satan rolled his eyes in the direction of that high demon and, with exaggerated pronunciation—popping his consonants—said, “But we didn’t, do we?”
“Need something new,” a demon asked naively.
“No,” Satan scoffed. “They do not live long enough to learn anything from life. They are so dense, they would need to see our tactics over many lifetimes to learn anything. We will undermine them from within—as we have always done.”
Groans came from the demons.
Overriding the groans—like a parent with recalcitrant teens—he continued:
“We will pack our forces into the spaces given over to us, then eat them from within as we corrupt them. We will block out the light. They will be shouting at us from without, but we will be conquering them from within.”
He chuckled.
“Their enemy is already in the camp.”
There was a glum resistance to this pep talk—that was the same as it had always been.
“Always do we get no rewards for weakening these dolts?” asked a demon that looked like a peacock when he arrived.
This was such a mild retort that it was surprising that such a statement would gather those present into a unified expression of disapproval.
A droning sound began—like the unity of bees in a hive.
From the quickness of the unified response, you could tell they had been meeting behind their leader’s back.
This unity emboldened another: “Drugs are like party favors now. We are poisoning them, dulling them down.”
Then another blurted: “We have made perversions acceptable—desirable, even.”
The hum continued and increased. It was as if they were growing in strength by exposing their hidden numbers.
“Millions are aborted—their parts carved up and sold,” another squalled.
They seemed to be on a roll. More of their numbers were willing to expose their common bond—without Satan.
“We have corrupted their governments until the leaders celebrate their own crimes,” a high demon said glibly, with his new freedom of risking reprisal for no reason. He began to laugh.
“And the people are demoralized. They feel helpless to make changes.”
They all started laughing in some sort of frantic release.
“And religion!” A whoop went up from those assembled.
“Most of them are worshiping us under the guise of deeper revelations found in hidden sources,” another scoffed.
Their cheer and response was a little over the top.
“Yes,” Satan agreed, raising his voice above theirs. “We almost had them worldwide.”
A demon shouted, playing to the crowd: “Yes—worldwide!”
Then Satan buckled down into a low growl. The levity stopped.
“And then we didn’t.”
His words dripped with acid.
Quietly at first, the drone began again—this time in deliberate protest.
Then one of the high demons whispered defiantly—rebelling against Satan’s displeasure:
“The Nazarene.”
“Don’t say His name!” Satan blurted far too loudly.
All of this was getting to him—mainly the realization that they had been meeting behind his back.
Then, like a naughty child from the back of the room, another voice slipped in the name like a knife:
“The Nazarene.”
“Don’t say His name!” Satan screamed.
Quickly, like a pack of wild dogs circling their prey, several more goaded Satan under their breaths, saying:
“The Nazarene. The Nazarene.”
Amid this growing, gut-churning verbal attack and its implications, I heard a young child crying.
“Help me.”
I looked around.
Ruach touched my arm, indicating it was time to go.
“Help me,” came the cry again.
Quickly, I realized that the cry did not come from this room.
“Come, Anna,” Ruach said with urgency in his voice.
He was right—the mood was becoming dangerous. Strident alarm and anger was becoming violent rage. Their collected fury was affecting the room itself.
Blood started oozing from the walls and dripping from the leaves of the tree and its fruit. Then, terrifying, heavy darkness rolled in.
I could hear sardonic laughter, screams of pain, and the drone changed into an open chant defying Satan:
“The Nazarene! The Nazarene!”
Smaller demons began to leap from the safety of the inner walls and frantically rushed about, trying to get out—like rats jumping ship.  Ruach grabbed my hand.  The floor disappeared from beneath us—and swiftly we began to slide downward through the trunk of the tree.


Chapter 4: The Girdle of Truth
My breath was coming in fits and starts as we spiraled down the inner wood of that massive tree. I tried to catch my breath. I consoled myself with the exhilarating fact that we had escaped—granted, we dropped out of there like being dispatched through a trap door—but we were safe.
Even as I accustomed myself to a controlled slide downward, I looked at my surroundings. I had no idea where we were going, but Ruach did not seem worried, so I supposed that this was part of the plan. Intermittently, smaller demons passed us, flying upward. They were intent on reaching their destination, and we were still invisible.
As we slid further from those fallen angels, I began to ruminate on what I had seen in the castle. I believe I was too stunned at first to understand the implications of what I was seeing. I always thought Satan had a vice-like grip on all the participants of his organization, but now I saw that, in reality, it was difficult to control them. Rebellion breeds rebellion. If he turned on God, others would turn on him.
Not only was I stunned by their undercutting of a leader whom they feared, but I also realized Satan was losing control over those under him. He had become scattered, stale. I saw clearly that he had been away from the Light—He who is Life and the source of all fresh, clear thinking. Therefore, he could only repeat his former plans and actions over and over again. He was right—mankind was simple—but we were not going to be fighting this battle. Jesus was. Only He could win against such an old wily foe as Satan.
I began to look at the contents of that hollow tree as I passed downward. Jewels encrusted the inner trunk, but I could tell that they were not real. They did not have the luster. Other desirable goods were handily available: furs, fake gold (fake—it had to be), even antiques and oil paintings—all fake. I was sure there were stacks of fake deeds in China, plastic for crystal, rolls of knockoff Persian rugs, and plaster copies of statuary. The side of the tree was like a warehouse of all that looked good but was worthless.
What was this tree, anyway? Was it the other tree in the Garden? Even as the Tree of Life was still in the Garden of God above, was this—I dared to think—was this the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?
Of course, of course, I said to myself. If the Tree of Life is above, the other tree in the Garden would have its taproot plunging into Hell. I had wondered where it had gone, but I knew that all that seems good without God is flesh.
Did I witness the first in the armor that eventually would lead to the disintegration of all Satan’s plans of ascending to Heaven and raising his throne above the stars of God? Had he read Isaiah’s prophecy? What am I thinking? I asked myself. Probably he was listening when it was given.
I thought I might be able to remember it, so I mumbled it to myself as I continued downward:
How you have fallen from Heaven, O star of the morning, son of the dawn! You have been cut down to the earth, you who have weakened the nations! But you said in your heart, “I will ascend to Heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” Nevertheless, you will be thrust down to Sheol, to the recesses of the pit. Those who see you will gaze at you, they will ponder over you, saying, “Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a wilderness and overthrew its cities, who did not allow his prisoners to go home?”
Oh dear God, I said within myself, what are you showing me?
Then reality set in with sobering clarity: the unity of hate was actually fragile. All manner of treachery grows in the dark, and even as open battle was destroying the Earth, in darkness, Satan’s kingdom was unraveling—moving all of us closer to fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy.
With a thud, we arrived at the base of the slide. Thank heavens it was not Hell, as I had feared. The entryway at the bottom of the slide was a tangle of tree roots. It looked something like the rotunda from which we had escaped, but now, instead of the top of the tree, it seemed to be the root system. I wondered what fed a tree whose fruit was the flesh.
Some of the roots were so large they seemed to house rooms in multiple tunnels. Ruach spoke out loud to me, “Do you have your footing?” He became visible—except his face. He was wearing a wheat-colored robe that hid his gleaming armor.
I answered that I did. The floor on which we were now standing was dirt. Bugs and other insects were crawling in and out of the soil—worms, nightcrawlers, black beetles, spiders, and the like—those you might find if you turned over a rotted log in the forest. The smell was moist, rich, and woodsy.
“Where are we?” I asked as I regained my equilibrium. The cloak of invisibility disappeared. Oh goodness, I thought, I don’t want to lose that.
“You will not,” Ruach said, reading my thoughts. He continued, “Before you join your beloved on the field of battle, the Lord must test your armor. This is your proving ground. Until your armor is tested, you are a liability to yourself and others.”
“Goodness,” I said. “I don’t want that. How do I test the armor?”
“You do not,” he said. “The Holy Spirit applies the tests given when you least expect them. It is up to the soldier of the Cross to pass through these tests. Depending upon your heartfelt decisions, you will either move forward or be given an opportunity to try again.”
“The same test?”
“The same.”
No pressure, I sing-songed under my breath.
“Shall we?” asked Ruach formally, with a bow. He gestured toward the maze of nearby roots. The sign over the broad doorway read: Thieves’ Market.
I quietly said, Lord, help me, as I passed in front of Ruach to enter the poorly lit tunnel. One string of colored Christmas tree lights hung willy-nilly to provide partial illumination. However, there was brilliant light at the end of the tunnel. Therefore, both Ruach and I increased our pace. I wanted to get to that light—and the source of the joyous music and laughter up ahead—quickly.
We burst into a vast, bustling dome. People from all nations were everywhere—buying, trading, bartering, dancing, being whipped around in carnival rides, and eating cotton candy. The booths in the center of the floor were festive with flags, colored balloons, and blinking holiday lights. Barkers were hawking their wares at every tent and selling tickets to rides and to the attractions within the tents.
Ruach and I mingled among the visitors that were gazing at and purchasing the wares. The merchandise was odd, and truly, I didn’t know what most of it meant or who would buy it. For sale were “soul catchers” (whatever they were), “facade enhancers” (I thought I might be able to guess at those), “veneers,” “name-dropping classes,” “vanity tours,” and “embellished résumés.” You could visit a “delusionist” the same way some people might see a fortune teller.
Some of the barkers were puppeteers teaching false doctrines that tied people up and kept them dangling like marionettes. There were “kissing booths” for those who wanted to court various doctrines as though they were potential marriage partners—then throw them off as soon as a new doctrine came along. There was a maze called Maze of Errors (that did not sound promising) and a stuffed pillow booth called Hug-a-Bug, where people could “test the truth” by squeezing the pillow to see how the truth felt to them instead of relying on the written Word.
Boats were available for Lazy River Rides so that people could be carried downstream by their favorite opinions, and there was the House of Many Winds, where people could be “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.” I was particularly perplexed by the Human Pretzel Machines, which twisted and contorted people so that they could live for the approval of others.
Deception was everywhere. Milling in and out of those dazzled by the festivities were others who looked like hooded monks.
“Who are these?” I asked Ruach.
He answered, “Hypocrisy always wears religious robes. These perform spiritual duties before others, but actually, they defraud God’s people.”
As I watched, these false monks were apprehending one after another of those participating in the market. The monks were guiding them to dark caves on various sides of the periphery. I pushed through the dancers on the ballroom floor doing the Delirious Dance of Death, whereby they kept themselves distracted by any means possible.
At the edge of this frantic dance, the light grew dim and hazy. I stood very still, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Finally, I could see where the monks were leading the attendees. They were taking them into the dimly lit caves.
Within the caves, the monks had stacked cages one on top of another. Inside these cages were hollow-eyed humans peering out, hugging their Hug-a-Bug pillows or repeatedly playing the CDs of applause they had bought to encourage themselves falsely.
I felt pity for those who were being tricked. All the lively music, the thrill rides, the aids to besting the system—were lies. Lucifer, the father of lies, was distracting and diverting the Christians and deluding the unsaved.
I turned to Ruach. “They are being duped.”
“Yes,” he said. “If they had taken seriously the names of the rides and merchandise, they might have shown more care. But they lied to themselves.”
“Lied to themselves?”
“Yes. Only if one joins in with the enemy’s lie against himself can he be captured. He himself must overpower the voice of the Holy Spirit urging him to resist.”
“But why would they not resist?”
“Ulterior motives.”
My breath caught. I had made mistakes in this way. I had chosen incorrectly and been dragged off and caged so that I was stunted, unable to fulfill God’s plans for my life. I had been sidetracked for years at a time. I felt acute pain in my stomach. I bent over and cried out. There was so much noise, even at the edge of the market, that the cry passed for a laugh.
Ruach addressed me. “Yes, your flesh hindered you in the past. But now you have no time to live according to the flesh, squandering your time here on Earth. You are a soldier of the Cross, and you have accepted a sacred mission from your Father. You have a job to do. We all do. The time is short. Do you feel pity for those captured and caged? Then let the Warrior King be victorious in your life, and He will rescue others through you.”
He concluded. I thought, This is a side of Ruach I’ve not seen. Here are the brass and steel I had expected from the army of God. But I, too, was a part of that army. I was being trained to fight alongside angels. Was I taking hold of the training being offered to me? Was I showing brass and steel?
I straightened my back. “Yes, I want to help. And if this armor needs to be tested first, I want it tested.”
Suddenly, a neon arrow appeared in front of me, squeezing in and then popping out to point to the testing ground. I chuckled. “Well, that was quick.”
“The way lies before you, Anna,” Ruach said.
Instantaneously, a door appeared. A sign over the door read: Answer and You Exit.
“That’s very odd,” I said out loud. “In fact, this whole market is getting stranger and stranger.” I turned to smile at Ruach but found I was speaking to no one.
I paused a moment to take in the implications of that, then crossed to the door and opened it with a determined grip.
It was very dark in the room to which the door gave me access. As my eyes adjusted from the market lights to the strange gloom, I realized that there were demons in black robes packed into this large area. On the walls—which I felt were moving before I saw that they actually were moving—were venomous peacock spiders, ready to strike. Thousands of them were preening and dancing and eating one another.
I pulled away from the walls.
“Come in,” a computer-generated voice said.
The demons parted to allow me to move forward. I cringed as I walked toward the voice, not wanting to touch anything. As I walked, I thought, How right that, in a market filled with deception and unbelief, the one addressing me would not be real.
Finally, I reached a small wooden table on which sat one of those large black eight-ball oracles—people used them as party games years ago. Supposedly, you could ask the eight-ball anything, tilt it, and it would answer.
The Oracle spoke. “You’re disappointed.”
“No,” I protested. “I was expecting—well, I don’t know what I was expecting.”
“Well,” the ball said archly, “I’m not just a pretty face.”
“No,” I half-laughed at his critique of himself.
This elicited hisses from the demons and threatening waves of colorful peacock displays by the spiders. Oh dear, I said. Their reaction sobered me. I think, until this point, I had not felt that I was in danger, but I began to feel uneasy in the pit of my stomach.
“Well,” the ball snapped, “I suppose we can expect nothing better from someone like you.”
I was being baited. I thought it best to let it pass. Finally, I asked, “May we proceed?”
“Don’t be pushy,” the Oracle sneered.
I gave it a tight smile and held my ground.
The computer-generated voice cleared its throat and continued:
“In your studies, you have found that throughout history, most people groups develop a main god and a son of God. Many even have a worldwide flood in their stories. They have different names, but all lead to generally the same conclusions. Therefore, if one is honest, Christianity is not unique. In the end, all of these ways are essentially the same. To know this is to enter into that ‘God-consciousness’ written of in Psalm 82. In the text you follow, it says, ‘You are gods.’ What say you?”
Internally, I called out to God: Let the Spirit of the Lord be upon me.
But the Oracle was right—I’d studied all the major religions. However, Christianity is not just a story meant to explain the mysteries of life. It is a relationship—a relationship with a living person who walked the Earth and is still alive in the spiritual realm. I know this person. I know Him well, and I love Him.
Lord, I prayed within myself, be with me now.
I looked back at the Oracle. I felt the strength of the Lord’s courage rising up within me.
“You err greatly in your understanding of the Scripture. The truth is that it is also written that Jesus clarified the meaning of this passage in John 10:35. Jesus spoke of the psalmist—the writer of Psalm 82—when He said, ‘He called them gods to whom the word of God came.’ In other words, that is what the psalmist was calling the prophets. There is but one God.”
Just saying this truth emboldened me. I continued:
“But of Himself, Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’ Our Father sent Him into the world to live, die, and live again to testify to the truth that He alone is the way. The legends of false gods are mankind’s way of explaining the story of our Savior—written by our heavenly Father in the stars. But the early fathers, like Adam and Noah, who knew what was being told through the stars and planets, died out, and the clear story of the Messiah written above was lost in time—until Jesus Himself came to Earth. He lived that which is written above. There is no other way—just as there is no other way than the Father giving grace to someone born spiritually dead in order that they may have the opportunity to choose Christ and live. Today, I am spiritually alive. I live because I have exchanged my death for His life. There is but one way to join the family of God, and that is through Jesus.”
Suddenly, the girdle of truth tightened around my thighs, strengthening me to stand. At the same time, bedlam broke out in the packed room. The hoods flew off the demons as frills flared from their necks like prehistoric lizards, and the aggressive peacock spiders attacked like lions leaping in my direction--
But I disappeared through a trap door that must have been the exit, for I shot right out into the hall where Ruach was waiting.
Still trembling as I stood, I said, “Answer and you exit. Thank you, Lord.”


Chapter 5: The Breastplate of Righteousness (Part One)The hallway laced with tree roots seemed much brighter after the interrogation room. The escape had left me shaken, but I was comforted by Ruach waiting for me. He dusted me off as if removing all that might be clinging to me after passing through the Thieves’ Market.
“You did well, Anna,” he said, then quickly changed gears. “Now, there is no time to waste.”
“But Ruach,” I cut in, “what about all those in cages?”
“Your full armor has not been tested, Anna. There may be weaknesses. But David went up against the giant with nothing but a slingshot.”
“David was not an untested armor,” he said. “Besides, he had killed both the lion and the bear. Have you killed the lion and the bear?”
“No,” I said slowly.
“Zeal,” he said, “will not take the place of zeal tempered by wisdom and training. Your time will come.”
I was a bit distracted because I wanted to peek at my father’s cloak to see if there was a change. This action was interrupted, however, when suddenly a beautiful angel appeared before me.
She looked young and fresh, with straight golden hair that flowed down her back to her heels. Her electric white garment looked Roman—but the Rome of an earlier time, perhaps of the Caesars. Her sandals were as golden as her hair. Light radiated from her head, hands, and feet.
Appearing with her was a spirit about six and a half feet tall. His outline was blue, and his attire looked straight and simple. He was almost only an impression—I say this because I could see right through him.
Ruach continued, “I have asked these two helpers to accompany you through the areas ahead. This is Chastity and the Spirit of Counsel. You will need both to pass through the next chambers.”
Both bowed their heads in recognition of being introduced. The Spirit of Counsel, seeming to have seniority, spoke: “We are honored to be given this task.”
I looked quizzically toward Ruach, who responded, “The testing of the breastplate is crucial, for you must pass through the heart.”
“But a heart that is resistant,” added the Spirit of Counsel.
Chastity reached to check my breastplate straps to be sure they were secure. “May I?” she inquired. I nodded my acceptance as she began to pull and yank.
“A heart that is hardened, divided—at times wicked,” she added.
“You have no time to waste,” interjected Ruach.
“Well then, shall we go, Anna?” the Spirit of Counsel asked.
Chastity leaned over, her hand still on one buckle of the breastplate. “Believe nothing the flesh suggests to you,” she whispered.
“With the Lord’s help,” I answered them both, then exhaled deeply, as if readying myself for an Olympic sprint.
We stepped toward the entrance of the chamber housing the next trial.
“The Lord is adding grace to you before this challenge. You now have grace upon grace,” Chastity quietly confided.
Before I had time to contemplate the meaning of this, we were at the entry door. Over the doorway was a large, florid sign, beautifully executed with swirls of gold and scarlet. Right in the center of all this excessive swirling—and almost hidden by it—was the word: LUST.
Before I could truly register what I had seen, we were sucked forcibly into an antechamber, which I somehow knew represented the upper chamber of one side of the heart.
The light available came from Chastity’s head, hands, and feet—therefore, the reach of the light was shallow at best, leaving most of the chamber in a spotty half-light. Chastity led the way so that we could walk without groping.
However, as my eyes adjusted, I could see people encased in the walls. Their arms were unhindered, and their faces were partially exposed. Their eyes followed us as we passed, and they reached out in some desperate need to touch us.
Seductive whispers began to run along the wall.
“You can try it,” one whispered.
“Come on, no one will know,” another chuckled seductively.
At first, I did not understand their meaning.
“It’s dark here,” another urged greasily.
“No one will see you,” another hissed.
I began to understand. My conscience rose to resist.
“No one,” someone breathed.
“You want to know how it feels,” another slimed.
The seductive tone of their voices lulled and caressed. Despite myself, it was beginning to draw me. Somehow, I felt myself drift into a half-stupor. Without knowing it, I moved closer to the wall. A hand brushed my arm. It felt natural. Acceptable.
“Do not let them pull you, Anna,” Chastity whispered.
“Come on,” another urged.
“Let’s,” was breathed.
“You want to,” a voice chuckled.
The whispers did not bounce off me. Instead, like long, invisible fingers, they slid right into my heart. More hands were being placed on me—soothing me, coaxing me, making me less sensitive to being defiled. They could tell I was curious.
“But it feels good,” the Spirit of Counsel interjected—his voice sidetracked, for my mind had begun to drift. It was entertaining the idea that I could go a little further, just to see how it felt, and then—before I could not stop myself—pull back.
“More,” I thought.
“Anna,” Chastity said out loud.
“Not all the way,” I said within.
More arms were pulling me to the wall. My legs began to buckle, and my eyes glazed over.
“Anna!” A sharp tone from the Spirit of Counsel jarred me.
I blinked back into reality. I scrambled internally to pull myself from the quicksand of their arms.
“Fight them,” Chastity urged.
“Fight!” the Spirit of Counsel added forcefully.
I began to extract myself from the hands pulling at me. And even though my sword felt heavier than a truck, I unsheathed it. I felt weak and was struggling to catch my breath, for I was conflicted.
With all the strength I could muster, I lifted the sword over my head.
The room flooded with light like the noonday. Those in the walls recoiled into shadows like sea urchins retracting their tentacles from harm. The sight strengthened me.
“Stand back!” I shouted huskily. “In the name of Jesus!”
Then my voice became clearer and stronger as I continued: “This body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and you will not defile it! Leave me in Jesus’s name!”
Holding the sword aloft, I stumbled backward, smashing into what seemed to be a valve. Suddenly, all three of us were sucked through this valve-like curtain that closed very firmly behind us.
I turned quickly to see that there was no way out. A sign on the membrane read: NO EXIT.
I needed air. I bent over like a runner that had completed a hard race. I was dazed and disoriented.
“I understood why I needed greater grace,” the Spirit of Counsel comforted me by saying. “The next challenge will not be as difficult.”
I lifted my head to look at him. “Why?” I panted.
“Because you passed the first part of the test.”
As I looked up, I continued to sheathe my sword. “I mean, why was that so difficult?”
“Because it was attacking your body—the house you live in,” he answered. “Part of your human nature, which is animal.”
My spirit was bruised from the encounter. My companions could see that I needed time to catch my breath.
Chastity continued, “Many believe their body is their own and they can do with it as they please. But they are wrong.”
The Spirit of Counsel added, “The body is not mankind’s amusement park. It belongs to the Lord.”
“He bought it with His blood,” Chastity said. “He owns these bodies now, and therefore they are encoded with His standards. Since entering the family of the Living God, lasciviousness and filthiness are not a part of your spiritual DNA.”
The Spirit of Counsel said, “If a child of God goes against the encoded standards, self-loathing is often the result—unless your conscience is seared. And uncleanness disqualifies the Lord’s soldier from battle. Our God needs you for the battle.”
Chastity added, “For this reason, He has given you His righteousness as a breastplate to cover your heart and conscience. For the Word says that the righteous are bold as a lion.”
The Spirit of Counsel said, “The enemy does not need to kill you if he can disqualify you—leave you feeling guilty. For the guilty are always hiding and afraid. If he can disqualify you, you are as good as dead before the fight. That is the reason Satan will allow you to be anything but truly holy. The Lord needs holy warriors for a holy war.”
“Thank you both for helping me,” I said. I shook my head, trying to think of something else to say. “That was difficult.”
They both put an arm around my back and sort of jostled me.
“Now, Anna,” they both soothed, “we are doing this together, are we not?”
“Yes,” I said. Then, with a bit more steel up my spine, I nodded my head decisively and repeated, “Yes, we are.”
“That’s the spirit!” they chimed in together.
After squaring my shoulders, I turned on my heel and faced the meadow that lay before me. The outdoor billboard read: WELCOME GOAT ROPERS.
In smaller lettering, I saw the word ACADEMY under the gargantuan “WELCOME.”
“Let’s go,” I said abruptly, trying to put all of that behind me with decisiveness. I stepped forward.
Together, we began walking down into a lush meadow.
“‘Goat ropers’—isn’t that a sort of slang term for a cowboy?” I asked as we walked.
“Not these,” the Spirit of Counsel said. “This is an academy to train Judas goats—to rope in the sheep.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. “What?” I exclaimed.
“Oh yes,” Chastity said. “The enemy finds them useful.”
“But no child of God would be willing to learn how to lead their friends to slaughter,” I said, and then began walking again.
“Most pretend not to know,” Chastity said.
“The goats don’t want to know,” the Spirit of Counsel added. “But there is a gnawing feeling in the back of their minds.”
Still, I shook my head. “How can anyone justify leading God’s people to slaughter?”
“Compromise,” Chastity and the Spirit of Counsel said together.
“They decide that getting along with mankind is more important than righteousness toward God,” the Spirit of Counsel said.
“They don’t want to ruffle feathers. They want everything to be nice,” added Chastity. “They have convinced themselves that if everything is pleasant, they have fulfilled Christian love.”
“And because the sheep know them and even love them,” the Spirit of Counsel said.
“Yes,” said Chastity. “Forgive me for breaking in, but Judas goats are always so loving, agreeable, attractive—even. The enemy uses them as bait to draw in others to their spiritual death.”
“At times,” the Spirit of Counsel added.
As we walked down the lush embankment, we caught sight of different pastures. As the sheep moved to gather around that pasture goat, we could tell that they loved their goat.
In the distance, a goat was leading a flock of sheep. The sign on the building to which they were being led read: SLAUGHTERHOUSE.
“We must stop them!” I said with great alarm.
“No, Anna. They would not hear you,” Chastity said. “They can only hear their goat. For the goat’s very presence makes everything seem all right.”
“But—” I interjected.
“Later, Anna,” the Spirit of Counsel said.
We watched as the goat led the sheep into the slaughterhouse. Almost immediately, the goat came out of an exit on the other end. The goat was welcomed by a demon posing as a man. It was praised and given delectable treats as it, too, was then led away.
“So the goat lives another day to lead new friends to their doom,” I said.
“Yes,” said Chastity.
After a pause, the Spirit of Counsel sighed. “Come, Anna.”
We turned to face the entrance to a garden. The walkway was flanked by two stone obelisks covered with mirrors. Beyond these lay what seemed to be an English country garden. The sign over the entrance read: THE GARDEN OF WORLDLY DELIGHTS.
I did not try to peek at the cloak given to me by my father, for I was saddened by my struggle in the heart’s upper chamber and concerned that the struggle had hindered—in some way—the conversion of the light into jewels on the Father’s mantle.
“Come along, Anna,” the Spirit of Counsel urged. “More awaits you in the lower chamber of the heart.”


Chapter 6: The Breastplate of Righteousness (Part Two)We entered the hedged-in Garden of Worldly Delights. It was lush with a riot of flowers—all heights and types—and an absolute panic of colors. The Spirit of Counsel, Chastity, and I stood amazed at the beauty and heavy fragrances of this country garden. With our eyes closed, we breathed in its intoxicating aromas. When we opened our eyes, we continued to feast—but now with our sight.
How so many varieties and colors could blend to display God’s beauty was an unexpected delight.
I did not just experience the joy of the garden at that moment—it made me want to live in such beauty. It created a hunger.
I shook my head to clear it from being seduced by the beauty before me.
It was then that I realized the flowers had faces. They were talking to one another. Indeed, flower petals encircled their faces—however, the rest of them (that is to say, their bodies) looked human. They were standing in a flower bed together, as if they were growing in that bed.
“The way lies before you, Anna,” the Spirit of Counsel said.
“Do not be seduced by what you see,” Chastity said.
“Or what you hear,” the Spirit of Counsel added.
Just then, a bouquet of wonderful aromas greeted us.
“Or what you smell,” Chastity added with a laugh.
We joined her.
“Thank you,” I said to them sincerely, “for it is not always the bad that seduces us. It is often the good—but not God’s good.”
With that, they disappeared.
Squaring my shoulders, I approached the group of flowers.
As I walked up to them, an iris lifted her head and looked at me.
“How did you get in here?” the iris said.
“She probably has relatives here,” a petunia said.
“Yes,” a yellow crocus joined in. “You know no one gets through the gate unless they know someone important.”
“Well, I did not mean important,” the crocus stumbled over her words. “I mean… a member.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” said a large pink tea rose sweetly.
“Oh, Rose,” the iris said, “you are overblown with your own scent.”
The iris turned to me. “Who are you, girl?”
“I’m Anna.”
“Well?” asked the iris, as if expecting more.
“Don’t crowd the child,” said the petunia. “Give her time to catch her breath.”
“I… I was brought here,” I said, almost as a question.
“You see?” The petunia raised her head to better give the iris an I told you so look.
“She has possibilities,” chimed in a clump of daisies.
“Yes,” agreed the petunia firmly.
“Oh, all this chitchat,” the hollyhock blossoms grumped. “Have you come for your petals?”
“I don’t know,” I stammered.
“Well, you cannot go further without your petals,” the iris said firmly.
All the flowers nodded in agreement.
“No one told me I needed petals to go further,” I said.
“Typical,” barked the iris with a jerk of her head.
The tea rose whispered sympathetically, “It could be that she does not know because she is not advanced enough to receive the hidden teachings.”
“Hidden teachings?” I asked out loud.
“You see?” interjected a tulip. “She doesn’t even know what we mean.”
“If you had asked me before the situation occurred—”
“What situation?” I asked Miss Tulip.
“Everything does not need to be okayed by you,” snapped a snapdragon. “Your time of wrecking the economy of a country has passed.”
“I’m just saying that she could be a weed,” the tulip said haughtily.
“Oh no!” All the flowers cringed and shuddered.
“I’m not a weed,” I said over the turmoil.
The iris retook charge. “Tulip is right. Pedigree matters.”
“After all,” the tulip said loftily, “we are in a bed with a Rothschild orchid and the Queen of the Night.”
“Ohhh,” sighed the tea rose worshipfully.
“What does she matter?” snapped the snapdragon. “She only blooms for a couple of hours once a year.”
“She needs her beauty sleep,” soothed the rose.
“Nonsense,” barked the snapdragon. “She’s lazy.”
The flowers seemed to have forgotten that a human was in their midst.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I believe I need to continue my journey.”
“Not without your petals,” the iris said firmly.
The petunia tried to explain. “The path is long and sometimes tangled. With designer petals, you will always be treated as… well, you know… special.”
“They see the petals and know that you are one of us,” the crocus purred with pride.
“Worthy of the light,” the iris said imperiously.
The always-soothing tea rose interjected to help the explanation. “With designer petals, you can always turn your face to the sun.”
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” I said, “but I can do that now.”
“What are you saying?” all asked in shocked chorus.
“That I can turn to Jesus at any time,” I answered.
“Oh,” they nodded to one another. “Another foundational teaching.”
“We have gone beyond that,” the tulip continued. “With designer petals, you receive greater light. You are worthy of the secrets of the universe that have been reserved for a special, advanced few.”
“But there is nothing in the Word that says God gives special knowledge to only a few,” I said.
“Ah,” chuckled the iris. “Now I see your difficulty.” She nodded knowingly to the tulip.
“The exclusive—and I must say, more advanced—petals are found in other books. Books that should have been part of the Bible, but politics kept them out. These other books have hidden, secret knowledge.”
“You can climb higher,” trumpeted a trumpet vine.
“You have a spiritual pedigree,” the tulip said. “With the right flowers, your bulbs are able to get into the most prestigious beds—from preschool through college.”
“You are much more powerful,” the tulip lifted her head proudly.
“But is power our purpose?” I asked.
“Certainly helps,” the iris said dismissively. “Only those without power question power. When you have money, power, and even fame, you can—”
It was as though she was trying to rethink the talking points (that were mainly for flowers) and reconstitute them for humans.
“You can do so much more for people,” the tulip said, seeing the iris struggling. “You can give others a hand up because you are traveling in the right circles. Your influence, of course, would be for good. Always.”
All the flowers in the group smiled and nodded to one another.
“Here,” the iris continued, “we are bedded with some very famous flowers. And everyone wants to be us. The soil is enriched, and we are fertilized regularly. Therefore, all of us look wonderful.”
They all giggled like starlets who had received figure-enhancing surgery.
I smiled. “But ladies, looking wonderful is not the same as being wonderful.”
“Oh, don’t be a ninny,” the snapdragon said sharply. “You know what we mean. If you have nothing and are no one, what good can you do?”
I paused a moment to contemplate what I had heard.
I looked at these beautiful flowers and thought back to my 20-year-old self when first I went to New York. I was dazzled by all the lights, activities, art galleries, famous and glamorous people. I would go to a bookstore and stand for long periods, looking at the pictures of famous actors and actresses—long dead.
I began to think, even then, that all they had achieved and lived for was like vapor. No one remembered. And if anyone did remember, soon no one would be alive who admired their skill. It wasn’t lasting. Even a brick in the bookstore wall lasted longer than their accomplishments.
Even then—unsaved and dedicated to embracing the world and all its pretty little lies—a doubt was growing in me: Why work to create something that will not last?
Like the work of the famous people in the photography books, I felt that I wanted to do something that would last. I wanted all the hard work to produce lasting rewards. But what?
Even though I was not a Christian at this time, I realized that everything in the world was passing away. One glance at the ruins of ancient civilizations told me that. But what would last?
People would say, “Oh, you live in their memories.” But I did not want to live in order to be a memory for a few years in someone’s psyche before that generation died. That was not enough.
I never found the answer until I came to Christ—and only then, after I had been a Christian for about 20 years.
When you are a new, baby Christian, you can be very fleshly. One must grow and mature in the spiritual life as one does in a regular human life on Earth. When the Lord first rescues us out of this world, we still see and do things as before. We still carry on, trying to build in the world.
Gradually, we see this is also foolish. We get to the point where we only want to do and be and build what Jesus needs—and only if He asks us to accomplish that for Him on Earth. Otherwise, we are living for the applause of humans—and applause dies fast.
But Jesus does tell us to store up treasures in Heaven. Well, that certainly is not gold, silver, or jewels—the streets in Heaven are gold. It cannot be the glorious gifts the Lord has bestowed upon us—no, these are His already. You might say He lends these to us to show forth His glory and to benefit the body of Christ.
What, then? What lasts? What can be stored and remain and even be used later?
The character of Christ.
His character is gained through our flesh being consigned to the cross on Earth—as we pick up our cross and move forward to serve Him. Only the part of our soul that has been transformed into the likeness of Christ will carry over and remain.
It took me years to not only understand that but then to embrace and begin to live this truth—but always, always, only with Christ overcoming through me. For while I am in this mortal body, I will always need to take every thought captive to Christ.
As I looked at the flowers, I realized that I pitied them.
Therefore, I spoke gently to these beautiful, deluded blossoms—rooted so firmly in the earth:
“Jesus tells us: ‘Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.’”
Before they could answer, my breastplate tightened, and I was sucked backward out of the garden—passing a sign that read WINDRY.
I could hear the clamor of the ladies arguing about my visit. The only expletive that rose above the others was:
“A weed if ever I saw one! No petals for her!”
I heard as I blew further and further away, tumbling toward the branches of the Wind Tree.
The wind blew me through narrower and narrower passageways (or branches). These were lined with some sort of mucus membranes and minute, tickling hairs that trap dust and other harmful particles.
I went tumbling and laughing through more constrictive branches until I came smashing into the thin walls of a tiny room. I felt a little like Alice in Wonderland when she ate a good deal of the “Eat Me” cake and grew too large to get from the antechamber into the garden.
But I was also suspended by the force of the wind to the walls of the small chamber—like an amusement park ride at the fair. However, I was laughing so hard from the tumbling and tickling and being suspended in midair to the wall that I hardly felt the removal of all that was deleterious to me from the chambers of the corrupted heart.
All passed right through the thin walls of that tiny room, and I felt clean and fresh amid this extraordinary experience.
My heavenly Father’s voice rattled the room’s thin walls:
“You have been given multiplied grace.”
Instantly, the Holy Spirit filled me anew, and I was sucked out of the labyrinth of passageways into the chambers of the renewed heart—and shot like a bottle rocket into the hallway.
It seemed like an inglorious arrival, for my expulsion was rather like being spit out. I ended on my bottom with my legs out in front of me on the hallway’s dirt floor.
Ruach, Chastity, and the Spirit of Counsel clapped as I arrived.
“Well done,” they said.
Ruach gave me a hand up.
“The breastplate has been tested,” the Spirit of Counsel said. “But remember: ‘Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.’”
“We must go, our friend,” said the Spirit of Counsel.
“But be strong and courageous,” said Chastity, smiling.
I hugged them both, and they bowed from the waist to Ruach—and were gone.
Almost immediately, I heard the child cry again:
“Help me! Please, help me!”
I turned to Ruach. “There it is again,” I said. “Do you hear it?”
We both listened but heard no more.
“Come on,” I said to Ruach. “Let’s see if we can find the one crying.”



Chapter 7: Shoes of the Gospel of PeaceSuddenly, I was sucked out past the tangled roots of the hallway and through two immense doors. The doors slammed behind me with impressive finality.
Immediately ahead of me, rocks thrust over a wide river of lava. Suffocating heat rolled over me. My breath was coming in jagged starts. My legs became rubbery, and I lost all strength in them. Panicked, I lowered myself carefully onto my hands and knees and inched backward until I could press my back against the safety of the two heavy doors.
It was only then that I realized that the lava flow was within an immense cavern. Shadows like fingers stretched up the cave walls, shifting with the boiling lava. Sweat was pouring from me—partly from the wilting heat and partly from stark fear. I was up high, and heights frightened me.
"Where is Rock? I need him to steady me," I thought.
At the door, a sign read: "Change shoes."
When you cannot think of anything else, you can always follow directions mindlessly. I groped around for the shoes mentioned in the sign. The shoes were a pair of white ballet slippers.
"Huh?" I said involuntarily and changed my shoes. The shoes from the sheepfold disappeared.
Suddenly, two spirits materialized near me. One was the outline of an older woman—her hair was white, and her garment flowed. The other spirit looked to be about 8 feet tall with huge muscular arms and legs as large as small trees. He looked formidable to say the least—except that he appeared to be about 15 years old.
Both helpers, being spirit, slipped in and out of clear visibility.
Perhaps not so strangely, I began to feel agitated beyond my immediate surroundings. I could see a slender iron rod that crossed the boiling lava.
The older-looking spirit addressed me.
"I am Patience," she said, putting her right hand over her heart. "And this is Self-Control. Ruach asked us to accompany you across the River Ir."
I choked with every bit of courage I could muster. I rose to my hands and knees and crawled over to the beginning of the suspended rod.
"It looks dangerous," I said.
"It is dangerous if you are careless," Self-Control volunteered.
It was unnerving that he was so casual.
"It looks dangerous even if I'm not careless," I laughed painfully.
I was, however, the only one laughing. Perhaps this was due to underlying resentment in my tone.
"All must pass over the River Ir," Self-Control added seriously.
"Do people fall off this rod?" I asked.
"Yes," Patience said.
But she added no encouragement like "but you can do it." Instead, she piled discouragement on top of my fears.
"The river boils with resentment, disillusionment, and vile hatred toward God and man."
As I stared down into that hellish crossing, she paused, then with a voice like a cattle prod said, "You need to begin."
I sucked in a quick breath and steadied myself.
"I knew I had to control myself—with the Lord’s help," I added.
And He did help me as I began to move from acting on raw emotions to using my brain.
"Others have done this. It is not here to kill me but to help me. Anger at the process will do nothing. This must be doable."
I squared my shoulders and shakily slid my right foot onto the thin iron rod. It was warm from the lava flow below.
"Lord, help me," I mumbled under my breath.
Generally, I am not of the temperament that becomes angry. I had found that there are a couple of seconds after one is insulted that the emotions pass the insult onto the brain, and the emotions allow the brain to either react negatively against the insult or decide to let it pass.
For years now, I have just let the insult pass.
But there was something in this test that was pushing me beyond my usual casual release of the prods.
I held my breath and hoped the shoes were good for something like tightrope walking. I, like most people, have no training in this type of balancing act, so I tried to remember every picture of tightrope walkers I had ever seen—arms out, adjusting balance.
All of it, however, even as I inched across the River Ir—not only fear but anger shot through me like electricity. I felt that I should not have been put into this dangerous position. My face flushed, and my hands shook.
Actually, I think I slipped into a mild shock, for it had been many years since I had experienced such raw fear and accompanying resentment. But suddenly, I was bombarded with both.
"Breathe," I told myself—but I could not concentrate on breathing.
With every bit of self-control, I tried to move my thinking away from old offenses—even those against God. But my emotions were unstable. They were rather like the ball in a pinball machine, pinging from one emotion to another.
I did regain my awareness enough to tell myself that I might be under attack. Then it came to me that such an attack might be coming from the fumes rising from below.
"Well, demons can be contained," I said to myself out loud. "Leave me in Jesus’s name!"
The fumes dispersed quickly, but they left me with a bitter aftertaste in my mouth.
"So it was demons," I said to myself.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see many other people struggling to cross their own rods. Angels flew with them, as Patience and Self-Control were flying with me.
Noticing others engaged in the same struggle gave me courage.
"If they can do this, then so can I."
Suddenly, I heard a blood-curdling scream.
I froze on the metal rod.
Someone was falling.
I listened to the long fall of the terrorized person, screaming all the way down.
"That could have been me," I thought.
The thought paralyzed me.
Patience asked an uncharacteristic question.
"Do you think this is unfair?"
"Yes," I choked with spontaneous honesty.
Almost as quickly, I breathed out, "No."
I did not want to let my thinking drop into accusations. I thought of Job’s friends who were urging him to curse God and die. It was too easy to accuse.
I had to get my thinking straight.
"God is always fair," I told myself. "I can’t always see it, but I know Him, and I trust Him. I love Him."
In a dry whisper, I said, "Resentment and anger are never the answers."
Saying this, in some way, soothed my heart, which seemed to be hardening.
I continued, "We are on earth to represent the Prince of Peace. If you love someone, you trust them. I am here because I trust God."
I said to myself, "I was growing stronger as I spoke. With the Lord’s help, I am going forward."
I gritted my teeth and, with sweat pouring from my face, I slid my foot forward on the rod. It wasn’t walking so much as sliding my foot forward and then dragging the other to meet it.
Suddenly, vicious dogs rushed to the edge of several protruding rocks, trying to leap high enough to bite me. They startled and shook me. I swayed dangerously over the molten ire.
"Steady," whispered Self-Control. "Do not let the unbelievers frighten you. Keep your eyes on Christ."
Patience added, "Self-Control continued to coach me—let Christ within you master your fear."
I asked within, "How do I do that? Perhaps I do harbor bitterness against unbelievers that persecute me. I know I bristle inside, but I’m trying to let Christ remove all hardness of heart from me."
I continued to speak internally.
"I want to forgive the wrongs done to me. If those who attack me are unsaved, they are like the walking dead and do not understand. If believers, then who knows where they are in growing up into the likeness of Christ? They could be spiritual babies or teenagers who still feel the pull of the world’s illusions. Who knows where anyone is on the road to allowing Christ to replace their fleshly soul with Himself?"
Even as the dogs continued snapping at me, they were joined by the roar of lions perilously near me on the rod.
A very angry man roared behind me, "Get going! Who do you think you are?"
Another, further behind me on the rod, countered, "Leave her alone! Do you want her to fall?"
Being unfairly attacked by those who were obviously believers rattled me. We were all doing our best to cross the lava.
"Stop!" I cried out in panic.
I flung my arms out wildly, trying to keep my balance.
"I’ll stop when you move it!" the voice behind me roared.
"Go on!" Fury leaped on me like wild beasts. Blood rushed to my face, scalding my eyes.
"No! Stop!" both spirits cried.
It was difficult because such wrath dug in deeper—because believers are family, it hurts more.
Then Self-Control whispered in my ear, "Stop and think."
The spirit was right. I was rushing into the temporary madness of anger.
"Was I not old enough in the Lord to be past all of this?"
Suddenly, like Paul, I was confronted with the ever-present flesh. Like Paul, I cried out to God, "Will I never be free from this flesh?"
"No," said Patience calmly. "Not as long as you are in your body. But—" she added, "the lack of character in others does not excuse the lack of character in you."
"Lack of character?" I said, as if deflating a balloon.
There it was. I had let my emotions drive me into the flesh.
I was weary.
"Help me," I whispered.
"Do as your Lord said," Self-Control. "Take the unrighteous blows as He did for your sake. Vengeance belongs to God."
The truth from God’s Word pierced my heart.
I forced a deep sigh, letting the knot of anger unravel.
After a time of silence, I said, "Oh God, forgive me. Let me live in peace with You and mankind."
Asking for forgiveness seemed to help. Slowly, the sting from this verbal attack began to ease. Also, my mind began to clear, and the beasts and the dogs backed away.
Amazingly, releasing this anger and asking the Lord to help me so unexpectedly buoyed me that I became positively giddy.
I sang out, "Let me live as You have said in Your Word: ‘All of you be harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, kind-hearted, and humble in spirit, not returning evil for evil or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead, for you were called for the very purpose that you might inherit a blessing.’ As it is better that I suffer for doing what is right—if You should choose, Lord—than if I do that which is wrong. Oh, praise God!"
The end was in sight.
Suddenly, the fear of the Lord came upon me, for I remembered Moses—who took all manner of abuse for 40 years while guiding the children of Israel through the desert—only to strike the rock in anger and thereby disqualify himself from entering the Promised Land right at the end.
"God, help me," I said. "I don’t want to have come this far and lose the prize right at the end."
I practically leaped to the solid ground on the far side.
I turned to look back at the lava flow. I was sweaty—but I had made it.
"I had made it!"
I knew I had passed the test.
Suddenly, special armored boots covered the slippers.
"Thank You, Lord," I sighed, smiling.
Almost immediately, the two spirits and I flew through the open door of the cavern into the root-clogged hallway.
Ruach greeted us all.
"Well done, Anna," he said. "And friends."
The two angels seemed wonderfully jovial. We were all a little giddy.
"We will leave you here," said Patience and Self-Control, bowing.
"We have been assigned to you, Anna," said Patience, smiling and looking amazingly younger with the weight of the ordeal behind us.
"Therefore, we will see you later," said a strangely more mature-looking Self-Control, smiling.
"Thank you, dear friends," I hugged them exuberantly, leaving them somewhat gobsmacked.
They smiled sheepishly toward me, then bowed to Ruach and vanished before I had the chance to think through their transformations.
Suddenly, I heard that child cry again.
I turned my face in that direction, and my body followed.
"Ruach," I said, "we’re closer."

Chapter 8: The Shield of Faith
I followed the sound of the child crying until it ceased, and I was left standing in the root-tangled hallway. When my focus narrowed to my own surroundings, I saw that the light had changed.
The passageway had once been brighter. However, as I traveled deeper into this root system, the hallways were becoming darker and darker.
Without warning, I heard the rattle of something on tracks. Then, almost immediately, several linked steel cars rounded a corner. They rattled from side to side—sort of like old roller coaster rides—and stopped near me.
The paint was peeling from the dented compartments, and the once-shiny plastic seats were now gummy and torn. I saw the name "Decisions" on the grimy hood of the lead car.
The car stopped before the entrance to a large root. Prominently displayed over the door were the words: "The Swill."
Ruach appeared and spoke tensely, "Prepare your shield."
I looked toward the area that would have been his face if I could have seen it.
"What is ‘swill’?" I whispered.
"It is the canker that eats the heart as the mind and spirit battle for ascendancy. Prepare your shield," he reiterated.
I thought, "I don’t understand."
While trying to work out the reply in my mind, I rotated the shield from the location across my back where I had stashed it.
Finally, my curiosity got the better of me.
"I’m sorry," I half-blurted out. "What is ‘swill’?"
Ruach helped me fit the shield onto my left arm as he answered, "It is the slop fed to hogs."
His answer stunned me.
Suddenly, another angel appeared near the waiting coaster ride. Ruach welcomed him in a low voice.
"Knowledge."
The angel was tall and noble in countenance. He wore a garment covered in Bible verses. I also noticed that he wore chest-high wader boots with a good deal of his garment stuffed into the top under his suspenders.
"May I join you?" he smiled but spoke in equally low tones.
"Please," I answered.
Then I caught my error in protocol.
"I mean, if it’s all right with you?" I asked Ruach.
"More than all right," he affirmed. "For Knowledge has been assigned to accompany you."
Ruach took my right hand to assist me into the nearest compartment.
"Knowledge, this is our Anna."
Knowledge bowed at the waist. I tried to do the same, which does not work as well when climbing into a narrow compartment.
"Please," Ruach said as he gestured for Knowledge to climb into the compartment near me.
Knowledge obliged.
"I am pleased to be here," he smiled as he sat down.
"Wait," I whispered. "Where is your shield?"
"I’m getting behind yours," he smiled.
I choked a laugh. "Well, that’s good to know."
The car lurched and then began to move forward. I was as excited as if going on a roller coaster ride.
"We’re going!" I turned, smiling, toward Ruach, who was being left behind.
"Remember your shield," he called tensely.
I held up my shield, but his words dampened my momentary light-heartedness.
We bumped through a couple of padded double doors into an inky half-light—the sort that somewhat conceals the scary pop-ups in carnival side shows.
"Lift your shield, Anna," Knowledge urged.
I had just lifted it when two fiery darts hit it and bounced off.
"Just in time," he laughed. "That was Despair and Guilt."
"They are on fire!" I blurted out in alarm.
"No one said that they would play fair," Knowledge said with a smile.
"But who would shoot at us?" I asked as more and more fiery darts bounced off the shield.
"Former friends," Knowledge said, ducking behind the shield.
"Friends? Demons?" was his blunt answer.
"They once desired the things of God, but when they turned, it was not just a little. Instead, they deliberately stood against all they once supported. Now, they not only oppose God having His desires but hinder others from serving Him. There is no one more vicious than one who was once for God’s purposes and then turns to stand against Him."
All of a sudden, we dipped and began to sink.
"Wait a minute!" I cried out involuntarily.
"Lift your shield!" Knowledge shouted.
"But we’re sinking!" I blurted out.
Honestly, I could not see why lifting my shield would help. Maybe we could use it as a paddle.
I could see now why Knowledge wore chest-high waders, but all I could do was follow instructions.
I lifted my shield high just as the arrows named "Disbelief," "Distrust," and "Doubt" drove deep into the plastic seats, trying to attack the shield of faith.
"Whew," Knowledge exhaled after being missed by such lethal projectiles.
I pulled them out and extinguished their fire in the surrounding goo, even as we sort of bumped down another notch into the putrid soup.
I thought to myself, "I’m thankful I can swim."
We were bombarded suddenly by dozens of arrows—too many to read.
"Creeping Fear" sent a chill through me as a javelin by that name hit the shield and thudded off into the swill.
Slowly, we were sinking up to our waists in the garbage. Severed human hands and animal parts floated on the surface. The stench was dreadful.
I could see many people struggling in this swamp of swill. Some were having difficulty keeping their heads above the slop, and some were clinging to their partially submerged roller coaster cars, thinking those could save them.
Within the swill were Berkshire hogs having the time of their lives. These hogs had enormous ears. I suppose that they were the reason we were whispering before the ride began.
On the bank, dozens of these massive swine were luxuriating, half in and half out of their wallow holes.
Hopelessness began to hang in the air like a black cloud.
I saw other hogs with nets that they were throwing into the slop to catch people, as though they were fish. The people were trying to stay afloat, but there seemed to be little resistance to being caught.
It looked more like coping on their part—reasoning their way into some sort of mental acceptance.
"Sometimes it seems that if we get dragged down low enough, we join forces with our captors—some kind of spiritual Stockholm syndrome. That’s what it is," I confirmed within myself.
"They don’t believe God will save them. They have lost faith."
I was reinforced in this revelation as I saw many trying to eat the slop right along with the pigs.
Just then, the gears on our car clogged, and we stopped.
"The swill!" I shouted to Knowledge. "The swill is unbelief!"
I was so stunned by this revelation that I missed two flaming arrows that sank deep into the top of the plastic seats.
Knowledge grabbed them.
"They were little ones—‘Wavering’ and ‘Misgivings’—but they were burning quite a hole in the plastic."
"Trust in God, Anna!" shouted Knowledge as suddenly he was being swept away but was still clamoring to help me.
"Remember!" he cried. "He who comes to God must believe that He is!"
And I could see that I could not reach him, but I wanted to encourage him, so I called back, "And He is a rewarder of those who seek Him!" chiming in, completing the phrase.
Knowledge called from even further away, "God never abandons those who fight for His cause. Trust in Him alone!"
He called loudly from an even greater distance—and he was gone.
"What is the matter with me?" I thought. "That’s what I need to do—cry for help!"
"Help me, Lord! Help, Lord!" I shouted again. "I’m sinking!"
I began to talk to myself frantically.
"Remember—His desire to save me is greater than anyone’s desire to destroy me."
I began to build myself up on my most holy faith. I remembered that when Peter walked on water toward the Lord and began to sink, he cried out to the Lord, who immediately saved him.
Others in the swill began to cry out—and the gall of their bitterness—for they were trying to extract themselves in their own strength.
"Lord, help!" I cried louder—but He did not answer.
"He answered Peter—but not me."
And I could no longer see my traveling companion, Knowledge.
Something from within the swill began wrapping around me and pulling me down. I kicked at it. I could feel suction cups like tentacles attaching to my body.
"Why doesn’t the Lord help me?" I asked myself, panicking. "And where is Knowledge?"
There’s a point when even the most faith-filled child of God feels so overwhelmed that he begins to lose heart.
I was so discouraged, I could feel myself letting go. I slipped into a stunned melancholy.
I was going down and began to justify letting go.
"I was seeking salvation from the only one who could give it. I believed He would rescue me—but where was He?"
I began to sink to a depth to which I was unaccustomed. Generally, if sad, I did not drop further and further from the light into a black funk of depression. But now, I began to slip stonily into self-pity.
I felt myself being pulled under, but I was so disimpassioned by the struggle that I justified my actions.
"Why fight it?" I wondered. "Perhaps surrender would be peaceful."
I thought I might as well give up and let it take me under.
I felt so overwhelmed.
Softly, I began to resist less. With less resistance, I slid deeper into the swill.
Strangely, as I sank, a story Bob Jones—a prophetic minister—told me flashed into my mind.
Bob grew up in the mountains of Arkansas among people that held bitter grudges and often took violent revenge. He told me that while in the VA hospital—before he was saved—he planned to sneak out at night and cause terminal harm to several people against whom his family sought revenge.
Afterward, he calculated he would sneak back in before dawn, thereby giving himself an airtight alibi.
However, before he could put this plan into action, Jesus Christ appeared to him in his hospital room and stopped him.
After Bob repented and accepted Christ as his Lord and Savior, the Lord spoke to him in the vernacular of the Arkansas mountains, saying, "I do not want to see you wallow in self-pity ever again."
And Bob didn’t.
The Lord told him that self-pity led to the feeling of victimization, and victimization led to bitterness, and a root of bitterness led to retaliation.
While thinking, the Lord brought that story back to my mind because that was exactly what I was doing.
I, like the hogs, was beginning to wallow. Self-pity was dragging me down into depression, and depression, like a many-tentacled octopus, was pulling me down into black despair and unbelief.
Suddenly, God Almighty stirred within me. He gave me abounding grace—it was like light in the darkness. Grace gave me the power to change my decisions immediately.
I was so shot through with hope and faith that it seemed to me that I was in no peril at all. I tingled with expectancy.
I shouted into the void, "Blessed Lord, You are the One who saves Your own! You love me and will not allow Your beloved to see corruption! I know that my Redeemer lives, whom my eyes will see and not another!"
I burst forth in exuberance: "I know You, Lord! I know Your promises, and I know Your heart! We are in covenant, Daddy—sealed in the blood of Your only begotten Son, Jesus! I will not fear, for I am already seated with You in heavenly places! You will deliver me from this trial, but even if You do not deliver me, let it be known that I will not serve another god! I will serve You alone—my Redeemer and my King!"
Knowledge appeared and grabbed the half-submerged shield and pulled.
I was hanging on to the shield, and miraculously, the roller coaster ride also began to surface from the slop and vomit.
People floundering in the goo shouted and cried abuses at me as I was being airlifted out.
A loud ping rang from the shield.
Suddenly, I and the car passed through some sort of car wash—water sprayed from all sides, taking my breath away, then blowers nearly pulled out my hair, drying me off.
Out I went through padded swinging doors again into the hallway.
I was clean, and even the coaster car looked new.
Looking at the front of the hood (upside down), I could see a word had been uncovered from the gummy dirt which had hidden it before we went through the wash.
The car hood now read "Faithful Decisions" emblazoned in gold.
Everything looked so new.
Distantly, I could hear the multitude of people in the swill of unbelief crying out. Some had begun to cry out for the Lord, which was encouraging. Some were railing in the hog wallow of bitterness from which I had been supernaturally removed.
The cars came to a halt amid the tangled roots.
Knowledge walked out through the padded swinging doors with a broad smile on his face.
"Noge Ruach!" he exclaimed with joy. "She did well!"
Knowledge said, continuing to smile, "Thank you."
I reached out to shake his hand as he passed.
He looked down at my hand, puzzled. "This is obviously not a custom in heaven."
"Thank you," I said as I grabbed his hand to shake it in a way that said this is a way we thank others.
He caught on and shook my hand vigorously.
"You will see Knowledge again," Ruach said.
"Yes, you will," Knowledge replied, "but now I must leave you. The great King be with you."
Knowledge bowed at the waist to Ruach and smiled at me as he left.
I started to peek at my father’s mantle but decided to wait.
see knowledge again ruach said yes you will but now I must leave you the great king be with you knowledge bowed at the waist to ruach and smiled at me as he left I started to peek at my father's mantle but decided to wait 


Chapter 9: The Helmet of Salvation
​As Ruach and I made our way downward, the hall became more and more choked with roots of every size. These were tangled and snarled on the floor and on the walls. Roots now were hanging from the dirt ceiling, dangling down in a loose (though claustrophobic) curtain.
A tall, warm-looking angel appeared near the mouth of the next route. Ruach called to her, "We're here! Don't leave without Anna!"
"No, I won't," she said, laughing.
He turned to me. "This is Wisdom."
It was difficult to tell if she was old or young—maybe both. Her blazing red hair showed glints of silver. It was piled on top of her head with a golden tiara securing the intricate hair design. She was straight as an arrow, with golden sandals partially seen beneath her draped, loose-fitting garment. Coils of gold crisscrossed her chest.
"Welcome, Anna," Wisdom said with a smile. "Are you ready for the helmet to be tested?"
"With the Lord’s help," I answered.
She smiled. Then I added softly, "Thank you for going with me."
She touched my cheek with her fingertips. "Of course, dear child."
Ruach interjected, "Put on your helmet, Anna. There is no time to waste."
Robotically, I did as he said. I felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation, with a tinge of breathless urgency—because we were near the end of the testing and closer to engaging whatever needed to be confronted in order to release the beneficence that the body of Christ needed in the last days.
I looked at Wisdom and tried to speak with confidence. "I’m ready." Then, to Ruach, I added, "Thank you, Ruach."
I made a decisive pivot to the mouth of the cave-like root. Wisdom smiled indulgently and led the way. We entered the tunnel.
Upon entering, there were high, putty-like walls on either side of a steep cavern. We began walking a narrow path at the bottom.
"It’s very dark here," I said to Wisdom.
"Yes," she replied. "This is the ditch of unreasonable thinking."
"Unreasonable?" I half-laughed.
"Yes," she said. "Those who come to Christ are particularly susceptible to walking into this ditch."
"But why?" I asked.
"Because when they come to Christ, His love floods their hearts, and they equate the change in their lives to include the outer world around them. They expect life on earth to be easier from then on."
I blanched.
Wisdom laughed. "I see you have fallen prey to equating Christianity with fantasy."
"I did," I must confess.
"And what helped you?" she asked.
"I suppose I grew up. I realized that if the Son of God was persecuted on earth—and He was perfect—who was I to escape? There was a greater light up ahead."
But I could hear the sizzle of exposed electricity, which was alarming. However, Wisdom was leading us upward. We quickly arrived in a stunningly beautiful orchard filled with what seemed to be electric trees. Light and power were flashing and crackling from tree to tree so that the orchard actually seemed to sing.
"It was beautiful," I said.
"When you live in harmony with the Holy One, it’s as if these trees clap their hands and sing praises to the Lord," Wisdom said.
We began walking through the trees as she spoke. It felt invigorating.
Suddenly, buckshot pellets began to hit my helmet.
"What?" I exclaimed.
"Guard yourself, Anna," Wisdom said.
I raised my hand to shield my eyes as I looked up to ascertain the direction of the pellets. I saw a blackened tree—its branches were shriveled, and many limbs were broken. It sat in a black hole with what looked to be festering materials around it.
"Toxic thoughts, Anna," she whispered.
"What?" I gasped.
"The mangled and withered trees come from snarled, negative thoughts—such as anger and resentment," she said. "These attract demons."
Then I saw the culprits. Small, frightening demons were clustered around the black hole, chunking rocks at me. A couple of demons were cutting around the jagged edge of the opening with knives and then eating the corrupted flesh. They were looking at me and laughing.
The whole area stank.
"The smell is dreadful," I said.
"The skull keeps most people from having to smell this rot, but it’s there," Wisdom said.
"Negative thoughts are poisonous to those created to hold the Spirit of God. But the enemy finds many who are angry, and he goads them into dark corners. Once trapped, he tortures them into bitterness, which will eventually destroy them."
"But how?" I asked.
"Not only because it blocks God’s life from flowing to them, but toxic thoughts make cells in their body porous so that viruses can slip in and make the person ill. But the children of God do not need to cooperate with the evil one, letting him lead them around by the nose. They have the helmet of salvation. Our Lord has raised them up from the death-walk of being a slave to Satan to newness of life. The enemy no longer controls them. Now they may take every thought captive to Christ. Now they do not need to ruminate upon every thought the enemy jams into their mind."
Suddenly, the area where we were standing began to rumble. I braced myself against the side of a nearby high cliff’s wall.
Wisdom leaned over to make sure I heard her. "Step back into this recess, Anna."
She spoke loudly because the thundering of horses’ hooves and screaming riders were upon us almost immediately. They were thundering past us. There were hundreds of wild horses. Fierce black demons were mounted on a few and driving the others. They called out and cracked long whips over the animals.
"This is what happens when emotions run your thinking," Wisdom said loudly. "You often have stampedes."
"This is dangerous!" I shouted.
The horses were crashing up against the sides of the high-walled cavern, causing gut-wrenching damage. I knew this would cause disastrous damage to the cells, compromising the walls.
"How do we stop them?" I shouted.
"Call for help!" she shouted back.
"Help, Lord!" I called out as loudly as I could shout.
Immediately, scores of spirits that looked like white wisps swooped in and mounted the rampaging steeds. Almost as quickly, one of the wranglers scooped me up and plunked me onto the back of a stampeding horse.
I was petrified. I grabbed a handful of the horse’s mane and lay down with my other arm and hand around its neck. I was hanging on for dear life. The ride was wilder than the horse itself, for I was jerked and jostled as we thundered down the narrow cavern.
The ghostly riders bellowed and whooped with joy as they sought to turn the stampede into a cul-de-sac in order to corral them.
Frantically, I sought an answer to runaway emotions. Panic drove my brain to sort through my mental archives at record speed. I came across *2 Peter 1:5-6 (CSB)*:
"For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge with self-control..."
I always wondered why self-control was a fruit of the Holy Spirit. Now I knew—because I had the Holy Spirit, I had self-control. I just needed to apply it.
I reigned in my emotions.
Amazingly, the ghostly wranglers were able to turn the lead horse into the large cul-de-sac. Therefore, the horses, though highly charged, began to settle down eventually and then simply milled around.
I waited a few seconds to settle myself. There was an occasional neigh or toss of the head, but for the most part, the horses were now quiet and docile.
That was probably the reason the wisp-like spirit silently dissipated.
I waited a couple of minutes more, drawing in deep breaths. Finally, with a long sigh of relief, I slid from the horse’s back. I stood, patting the steed, and looked around.
The cul-de-sac was honeycombed with ancient-looking fortresses carved into its high walls. These recessed structures seemed to be abandoned. They had been active and populated earlier in someone’s life with embittered stress, but now the Lord had cleaned them out. Therefore, the horses, now calm, mulled their way back into the narrow corridor.
Wisdom appeared.
"What is this place?" I asked.
"Abandoned fortresses," she said. "Were past anger or hostility or resentment carve these strongholds into canyon walls. Hate, you see, requires more and more room to spread out and grow. It also produces thorns on the memory trees and hardens people into unforgiveness."
"But these are clean now," I wondered.
"Yes, oh yes," Wisdom nodded. "These caves have not been visited for years."
"Is it safe to explore them?"
"Of course," Wisdom nodded.
I gave the horse that had carried me a couple of final pats and left him. Then, weaving through the rest of the tired horses, we made our way to the recessed structures.
Upon entering one of the strongholds, the air was cool and dry. The walls were black, as if at one time they had been tarred. Little light shone within, but still, on the floor was a sticky black sludge. This made walking precarious. Wisdom seemed to float above it.
"What is this?" I asked.
"Toxic waste. Be careful not to fall into it. This waste builds up within the cells from unforgiveness and bitterness. It makes the cells sticky until there are blockages."
"This sludge is a residue?"
"It’s still being cleared."
"But how?"
"Forgiveness. Your Lord and Savior shed His blood and died on the cross to give you this gift of forgiveness. The least the child of God can do is to pass this forgiveness on to others. The Word says, ‘In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God.’ This is not optional—it is a command. And, Anna, as the child of God obeys, the Lord replaces sullen and dark memories with powerful, joyous thoughts."
We began climbing the stairs to an abandoned tower. I was mulling over what Wisdom had said. Finally, I answered her as honestly as I could.
"I always want to forgive, but at times I do not feel it."
"Ah," she said with a smile. "That is the problem, isn’t it? You may believe the Word is true, but try as you might, you are unable to turn your emotions."
"Yes," I agreed.
Then she continued, "You must lean on the Lord through His Word."
We arrived at the top of the tower, and I looked out. Different areas of this internal landscape spread out before me. I thought to myself that this was truly a complex control center, vital to our Lord and to His work on earth.
Struggling, I prayed within myself, hoping that the Lord would line up my thinking with the mind of Christ.
"Come, Anna," Wisdom urged.
After we fully scanned the area, she continued her explanation as we navigated the narrow stairway down.
"The Lord asks for humility on your part. All humans are being tested on earth, Anna. This is the reason He asks, ‘Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls.’ That person’s life is none of your business. Frankly, you do have a job here on earth, and that is to allow the Holy Spirit to mature you in the Lord so that you, like your Master, forgive everyone from your heart. The Word says this: ‘If each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart...’"
We were outside of the abandoned stronghold again. It was eerily quiet now that the hundreds of horses had dwindled away.
Wisdom smiled at me—that sort of warm, motherly smile, reassuring in the circumstance.
"I will meet you outside, Anna," she said.
She stopped and looked back at me. "Speak from your heart, for the heart is the final judge within."
She disappeared just as quickly.
I found myself before a panel of elders. I suppose that is what they were. These were not dressed in white but black. I was trying to count them quickly but could not. Each black-robed justice was seated behind a high bench.
Immediately, I realized I had come to the final test.
"Anna," the Chief Justice intoned.
I swallowed hard.
"Are you here to give answer?"
"I am."
"Will you abide by our judgment?"
"I will."
"Then so be it," the Chief Justice intoned loudly. "In the ancient texts, there is no mention of a conscience without mentioning that which today is felt to be extremely important. Is conscience just an invention of mankind’s imagination?"
I closed my eyes and said internally, "Lord, please help me. Give me not only grace but abound in grace."
I opened my eyes and squared my shoulders as I spoke.
"Conscience may not be called by that particular name in the Torah, but it is the first and most decisive reality shown in the Word. Adam and Eve hid after they had sinned—they were ashamed because their conscience convicted them even before the Lord condemned their actions. Jacob’s sons were ashamed for what they did to their brother Joseph. King David’s heart staggered and stumbled because he had shed Uriah’s blood without cause. Our God provides a final checkpoint in the heart to help us live the life a child of God is called to live. For the Word says this: ‘Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God.’ The Torah may not have given us the word ‘conscience,’ but it revealed the seat of this final arbitrator within the heart."
There was a pause. The elders broke into smiles.
"The answer has been given. Your armor is now fully tested, Anna. Unsheathe your sword."
I pulled the sword out of its sheath. It was gleaming and now had Scripture all over it—Scripture that seemed to change from time to time. I thought that the Scripture references probably changed as needed.
"You have received this sword from your Father in order that you may fight the good fight for Christ crucified and lift up His standard for all to see."
Faster than lightning, I was removed from the testing ground.
Immediately, I was in the root-cave hall again. Ruach and Wisdom awaited me.
Wisdom spoke. "Your heavenly Father has extended might to you, Anna. This is not earned but freely given from His heart and hand."
Ruach continued, "Your armor has been tested, Anna."
"Thank you, friends, for your support and help. I bless you in the name of the Lord. I will hasten to the job at hand."
"You aren’t too fatigued to begin right away?" Wisdom asked.
"No—invigorated," I answered.
And indeed, I was flushed with the excitement of the armor having been tested—and I suppose having been tested myself right along with it.
"Go with God, Anna. May He give you stunning victory—for all our sakes," Wisdom said.
She disappeared.

Chapter 10: The Death Adder
There was no time to wait. I checked my sword and armor and then looked at Ruach.
"Where?" I asked.  Ruach silently pointed toward a dim light ahead. Immediately, I moved forward.
"Pray for me, Ruach," I called over my shoulder.
The root system had narrowed, and the earth closed around the one way into the lighted area. My hearing became more acute as I took a cautious step toward the only avenue left for advancing.
The hanging roots were now plastered against the narrowing entrance walls due to a suction pulling both them and me nearer the light. The sound of a deep drum kept a constant dull beat in the background. It was frightening—truly ominous. I did not know where it came from and could not stop it.  "Where was I going?"
The walls narrowed to a crawl space. That, too, was frightening. What if something began crawling on me or stinging me? I couldn’t defend myself.
I remembered the taunt that only the meek could find this beneficence. Well, I was certainly down on my knees.
The suction became greater. I was getting closer, and my fear was growing right along with the nearness to the opening.
I began to pray out loud: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..."
The drum stopped, and everything was deathly still. I tried to keep my movements as well as my breath from making sounds. I didn’t know what was up ahead.
I knew my Father would not have given me might if I did not need it—but I didn’t feel mighty.
Ruach seemed to have disappeared, and I was nearer and nearer to danger. Through all the trials and the tests, at least someone was with me. Now I seemed to be alone.
Was I alone? I couldn’t be—for I had Jesus, and He said He would never leave me nor forsake me.
And I had crawled as far as I could, but now the passageway had become even narrower—so much so that I was knocking dirt down from the sides and the top. Centipedes and nightcrawlers were emerging from the soil.
I hoped these insects would not get into my eyes or mouth.
I stopped. I was panting, for there seemed to be less air. Also, it looked like now I would need to lie flat and pull myself along. There did seem to be a number of strong roots that I felt I could use as handles to help me drag myself toward the light.
I can’t tell you how frightening this was. I thought to myself, "If something enters this tight passageway from the other end, I would be helpless to protect myself."
The tightness of the tunnel was terrifying—suffocating. Everything within me was screaming with fear—but there was only one way through: forward.
I arrived at the mouth of a dimly lit, small cave-like area. Much to my shock and panic, it held some creatures. Nestled within the nest was a large egg. It had an enormous death adder coiled around it.
"Where did that egg come from?"
It looked too large to move through the entryway. How was it to get out?
"How did something as glorious as a God-infused beneficence get into that leathery snake’s egg?"
Questions assailed me like machine-gun fire.
The death adder was sleeping.
The suction had increased. I looked to my left to see the origin of the suction, and I saw within the entry two enormous gates—gates opened wide—and the tree’s bitter taproot plunging through them.
"The gates of hell," I whispered to myself. "No wonder the pull is becoming so great."
I could hear cries and sounds of torment coming from the yawn of Hell itself.
I certainly did not want to be dragged in that direction.
I was going to need to awaken the huge snake if I was to retrieve that egg. That much I did realize.
I became paralyzed with terror.
It dawned on me that more than I myself would bear the consequences of my actions here. I was not a Bible hero. I was not even anointed—at least as far as I could tell.
"What if I failed?"
I had seen ministers pass their hand in the air across groups of people, and those people fall backward under the power. I’d seen mighty acts done by my fellow Christians—but not one of these acts came from me.
"Who was I kidding? I could fail. In fact, I probably would fail."
"Oh, God!" I screamed within myself. "I’m endangering thousands of my brothers and sisters ’cause I jumped in and said I’ll do this. Have I lost my mind?"
"Wait a minute—wait a minute," I said to myself. "I’m not going to do this. Jesus is. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. After all, I have been crucified with Christ."
I pulled my focus back to the task.
I could see the breathing of the snake. It was huge. I wondered how many people it had sunk its fangs into. Did it eat them or just kill them?
But the Lord would not have sent me into this situation if He did not believe that Jesus—with me tagging along—could handle the challenge.
I was unnerved, however, by the fact that the snake was an extremely large death adder.
It was dark—dark gray. To some, it might have seemed black. There were faint lighter gray bands spaced intermittently on its heavy, thick, dangerous-looking body. It had a triangular head with ridges above its eyes.
I knew it to be part of the cobra family—and its bite fatal for anyone far away from an antidote.
I had never seen one so large.
"What was I saying? I’d never seen one at all—only pictures of one."
But at this huge size, the egg was still too large to have come from the snake. Also, the egg looked as though it had been glued together from smaller egg fragments—to protect something or keep it from escaping.
Once again, I heard a child’s whimpering.
"How?" I wondered. "Was there a child within that egg?"
The snake slowly opened its eyes.
I held very still. I reminded myself that any strike would mean a quick and painful death.
It took a few seconds for the adder to register that someone was in its den—and then it registered that someone was not only in its den but also eyeing its egg.
Even though the snake did not lay this egg, he had guarded it long enough to consider it his own.
He began to uncoil and rise up—up, up, up.
It lifted its head, staring at me.
I froze under its gaze.
Trapped.
There was no escape.
I had to stand my ground.
Then the snake spoke softly.
"Hello, little girl."
I was stunned. I expected a fight.
"Hello," I answered in as guarded a way as possible.
"Lost?" the adder asked kindly.
My breath was coming in short, shallow jerks. I couldn’t seem to answer.
My hand went to the hilt of my sword, and I turned my face to gaze at the mouth of Hell, which had begun to throb.
"Oh, dear, don’t mind that," the snake said, indicating the gaping hole.
"It’s Hell," I exclaimed.
"No, no, no," the snake chuckled. "You think it’s Hell, but just between you and me, there is no Hell. It’s all bells and whistles—meant to scare children and the naive."
"But—" I gestured toward the agonized sounds.
"Oh," the snake smiled. "Sound effects. It’s an elaborate sideshow. You don’t actually think a loving God would consign His creation to eternal torment, do you? You are not thinking things through."
"No," I said. "The idea of Hell was from folktales spun by primitive man to scare people into submission."
"But if it’s in the Bible, it’s true," I said.
"Yes," the snake sing-songed as it rocked its head from side to side. "But not in the way you may be understanding it."
The snake smiled.
I didn’t know what to say.
The snake’s voice was dripping with honey. "You must think better of your God than to believe stories meant to frighten children."
The snake seemed to uncoil itself a little more during this exchange.
I crept backward, closer to the mouth of Hell.
"Now," the snake said, "if you are not lost, you must tell me why you have taken all the trouble to come to see me."
I couldn’t say the truth—that I’ve come to kill you—but I could speak a truth in answer to the question.
"I didn’t know you were here," I said.
And that was true.
"So you are a curious little girl that struggled to drag yourself down a dark hole with no one telling you that you were coming to my home?"
"No one told me you were here."
"Surely you asked the one who requires everyone to call him ‘God Almighty.’ Pretty arrogant, really. But if the kid from Nazareth did nothing without asking His permission—just think of it. As old as He is, and He still can’t make His own decisions."
He laughed and shook his head. "Everyone must channel ‘Big Daddy,’ and they call that maturity."
All the while, the adder was carefully moving into striking distance—and I was inching away as carefully as I could without being sucked into Hell.
"Come now," the snake said with a smile. "You are a guest in my home. You may speak your mind freely. I won’t tell."
A long pause followed as we each calculated the cost of honesty.
Finally, I said, "It’s true—our hope is that we all be one. For our Lord Jesus prayed, ‘That they all may be one, even as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us.’ And that ‘One’ is the ‘Big Guy.’"
*"He hissed acidly, "If by the ‘Big Guy’ you mean ‘God Almighty’—"
"Yes," I said.
The adder cracked a hard laugh. "Well, He has certainly given Himself an exalted name. So you are willing to give up the control of your own life—yes, to become one with Him and only do what He does and speak what He speaks? To actually be a puppet, mouthing someone else’s ideas?"
"Not a puppet," I said. "Complete. I love Him, and I want to be as close to Him as I can be. I want union. I want Him to be in me and I in Him. I want Him to speak through me and live through me. I actually want the best for everyone—and the best for them is not me. It’s Him."
The snake sneered. "And you think He will give you this when even the one who called Himself God’s Son was begging for it before He died—and He’d known Him a lot longer than either of us?"
As he spoke, the death adder had arrived within striking distance. Now I was pressed against one of the open gates to Hell.
"Stay back!" I warned.
I drew my sword.
Suddenly, the sword flashed with a brilliant light. The Scriptures on the blade jumped off as if protecting me.
This happened in a second.
For Christ—our Savior, our Champion, our Warrior King—instantly appeared within the dazzling light and removed the snake’s head from its body.
He grabbed me with His free hand, sheathed His sword, picked up the egg, and burst through the tunnel, traveling upward.
Bouncing behind us were thousands of silver chains, dragging those stuck in the flesh within these roots—not saved, but it looked as though they were being given another chance on earth to choose Christ.
As He exploded from the bowels of the earth, the chains burst into a thousand lengths of light and then disappeared. Those rescued were scattered across the earth.
"Thank You, Lord," I said.
He smiled down at me. His armor was becoming brighter and brighter as we flew upward. It was as though shards of God’s glory were attaching to His armor.
Both Jesus’s armor and the throne of God began to mirror this incandescent brightness as we drew nearer and nearer to our incomparable and glorious Father.

Chapter 11: The Return
We burst into heaven like the dawning of the first day. Thousands were standing on the sea of glass. Those nearest the throne stepped back to allow us clear access to our Father.
There was great delight in Christ’s return—clapping and cheering and some twirling about.
Once our feet touched the crystal sea, we knelt quickly before the Father.
Now Jesus’s armor shone with incandescent brilliance. My own armor—that which could be seen beneath the drab camel-skin mantle—also shone with a dazzling light.
As we knelt before the throne, wave upon wave of power and color rolled across all present and continued onward past the throne room.
The power was electrifying. The color washed into my mouth and eyes as if invading every part of my body. It was a strange and exhilarating experience.
Jesus placed the egg on the sea of glass before our Father.
"Returned," He said.
Ruach miraculously appeared. Angels removed the wheat-colored outer garments as he rejoined us.
"Where have you been?" I whispered.
"In you," he whispered back.
"Come," our Father said. "Let me see you."
He spoke this to the beneficence as if it were a child.
We remained kneeling before the throne.
Our heavenly Father picked up the egg—a patchwork of discarded snake eggs encased the contents.
In His hands, the covering burned away, and the contents shone with a brightness that was difficult to express because of its absolute purity.
"What is this?" I asked.
"Surpassing grace," Jesus answered.
"It was in Eden when the garden was closed. During the flood, it was stolen—only to be returned now."
"It is good to have you back," Ruach said. "The redeemed have need of you."
Our heavenly Father held surpassing grace before Him like a daddy holding up a young child. He moved it closer to His face.
"Welcome home," He whispered to it.
Those on the sea of glass were enjoying this reunion.
He lowered the dazzling light onto His lap.
That seemed to be a cue for us to rise.
All of us kept our focus on the returned beneficence.
I began to think about it. Both this grace and the world were new at the same time. In many ways, the beneficence—being locked away—had remained new. It never moved beyond the power and untouched glory of the earth’s first age.
Even though immensely young, it was likewise immensely powerful because of its purity.
"Even though you have just returned," our Father said, "we must send you out. My children have need of you."
He lifted surpassing grace before His face and blew on it.
Then, instead of releasing it as I thought He would do, our Father passed it into Himself.
This caused an explosion that shook heaven.
Out from Him came shiny golden particles that He blew across what looked to be the earth.
It was a remarkable experience. I thought to myself, "How fortunate I am to have seen this dispersion—and even more to have been a part of the returning of this unbelievable gift that our Father is giving to my spiritual brothers and sisters."
All of this happened so quickly, I barely had time to think.
Jesus smiled at me and squeezed my hand as He returned to His place at the right-hand side of the Father.
Ruach bowed at the waist and resumed his position at the left of the Father.
The twenty-four elders, the four living creatures, the cherubs, and seraphim bowed to them as they took their proper station by the Father.
I was left standing alone before the throne in our Father’s glorious court.
"Thank you, daughter," my Father said.
"Thank you, Daddy, for entrusting to me so important a task."
"Well now," my Father began, "are you ready to turn the cloak I gave to you?"
I dropped to my knees again.
"Daddy," I whispered, "may I speak to You?"
He leaned forward. "Speak."
"Daddy, I’m so honored to have been given Your mantle, but... may I leave it as it is—with the drab side out?"
"Drab?" He laughed.
A ripple of twitters moved across the sea of glass.
"Well," I started to describe it, then thought better of it. "That’s all right, Anna. Proceed."
"Daddy," I sighed, "may we keep the hidden person of my heart between You and me? I’m too weak to be known. Let me be hidden in You."
"I laugh—I’m not being noble, believe me. Just... well, realistic."
"Father," Jesus said as He stepped forward, "allow my sister her request—hiddenness. Her armor is ready and tested for battle. Being unknown and in the place of prayer would help our cause."
"I concur with this request," the Holy Spirit said. "I have overseen her training, and she is ready for battle. You have those who stand with you in this, Anna."
There was a long pause.
"Hiddenness it is," my Father said.
It was as if those on the sea of glass exhaled.
He continued, "I have kept for Myself thousands who stand with you—unknown, unrecognized by the world, and ready to battle through prayer and a godly life. Do you wish to stand with them, Anna?"
"I do, my Lord."
His hands of light came out, and He placed them on my shoulders.
"Receive," He said.
The power pouring through Him into my shoulders was so great that I was glad I wasn’t standing.
When He lifted His hands, I felt a bit woozy.
"Stand, Anna," my Father said.
Both Jesus and the Holy Spirit rushed to my aid, seeing that I might need help in standing. Each grabbed an arm and lifted me.
I was dizzily happy but trying to clear my head.
My Father continued, "Anna, look to your right."
I did so.
It was as though I could see the whole world. Millions of Christians clad in armor were standing in readiness.
"Look to your left," He said.
I saw millions more—ready, firm in their resolve.
"Look behind you."
The sea of glass was filled with the redeemed in the same armor as mine—smiling, linked in purpose and solidarity.
I looked up to see the thousands of angels flying above our heads. These had shields and javelins.
The shofar and thousands of trumpets began to blow.
"We are mustering the troops, Anna," Jesus said.
As I looked, the solidarity and singleness of purpose took my breath away. Here were my brothers and sisters through the ages.
All of us.
Not a single child of God lost.
Not a single blood-washed believer in Christ missing.
Our hearts beat as one.
We were of one purpose.
One of heart.
Given to one Commander.
Satan had not stopped our God from building His army—silently, by ones and twos, hidden from sight.
"Are we that near the time of battle?" I asked.
"That near," the Holy Spirit said.
"Daughter, it is time for you to return," my Father said.
"But Daddy, what do you want me to do?" I asked, looking over the marshaled troops.
"Listen for My commands."
I smiled. "I can do that."
My Father rose to His feet.
There was absolute silence in heaven.
A brilliant light shone about Jesus.
"Behold!" my Father thundered as He gestured toward Christ. "The Warrior King comes!"

The End.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/fasting-for-three-days-can-regenerate-entire-immune-system-study/

Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds
Researchers say fasting "flips a regenerative switch" which prompts stem cells to create brand new white blood cells 
5 JUNE 2014 • 7:45PMFasting for as little as three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as "remarkable".
Although fasting diets have been criticised by nutritionists for being unhealthy, new research suggests starving the body kick-starts stem cells into producing new white blood cells, which fight off infection.
Scientists at the University of Southern California say the discovery could be particularly beneficial for people suffering from damaged immune systems, such as cancer patients on chemotherapy.
It could also help the elderly whose immune system becomes less effective as they age, making it harder for them to fight off even common diseases.
The researchers say fasting "flips a regenerative switch" which prompts stem cells to create brand new white blood cells, essentially regenerating the entire immune system.
"It gives the 'OK' for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating and rebuild the entire system," said Prof Valter Longo, Professor of Gerontology and the Biological Sciences at the University of California.
"And the good news is that the body got rid of the parts of the system that might be damaged or old, the inefficient parts, during the fasting.
“Now, if you start with a system heavily damaged by chemotherapy or ageing, fasting cycles can generate, literally, a new immune system."
Prolonged fasting forces the body to use stores of glucose and fat but also breaks down a significant portion of white blood cells.
During each cycle of fasting, this depletion of white blood cells induces changes that trigger stem cell-based regeneration of new immune system cells.
In trials humans were asked to regularly fast for between two and four days over a six-month period.
Scientists found that prolonged fasting also reduced the enzyme PKA, which is linked to ageing and a hormone which increases cancer risk and tumour growth.
"We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have such a remarkable effect in promoting stem cell-based regeneration of the hematopoietic system," added Prof Longo.
"When you starve, the system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged," Dr Longo said.
"What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we started thinking, well, where does it come from?"
Fasting for 72 hours also protected cancer patients against the toxic impact of chemotherapy.
"While chemotherapy saves lives, it causes significant collateral damage to the immune system. The results of this study suggest that fasting may mitigate some of the harmful effects of chemotherapy," said co-author Tanya Dorff, assistant professor of clinical medicine at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital.
"More clinical studies are needed, and any such dietary intervention should be undertaken only under the guidance of a physician.”
"We are investigating the possibility that these effects are applicable to many different systems and organs, not just the immune system," added Prof Longo.
However, some British experts were sceptical of the research.
Dr Graham Rook, emeritus professor of immunology at University College London, said the study sounded "improbable".
Chris Mason, Professor of Regenerative Medicine at UCL, said: “There is some interesting data here. It sees that fasting reduces the number and size of cells and then re-feeding at 72 hours saw a rebound.
“That could be potentially useful because that is not such a long time that it would be terribly harmful to someone with cancer.
“But I think the most sensible way forward would be to synthesize this effect with drugs. I am not sure fasting is the best idea. People are better eating on a regular basis.”
Dr Longo added: “There is no evidence at all that fasting would be dangerous while there is strong evidence that it is beneficial.
“I have received emails from hundreds of cancer patients who have combined chemo with fasting, many with the assistance of the oncologists.
“Thus far the great majority have reported doing very well and only a few have reported some side effects including fainting and a temporary increase in liver markers. Clearly we need to finish the clinical trials, but it looks very promising.”

https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-much-sleep-do-we-really-need-to-work-productively
How Much Sleep Do We Really Need to Work Productively?
By Leo WidrichLIFE HACKING - AUGUST 8, 2012104 CommentsEvery one of us, on average, will be sleeping 24 years in our lifetime. That’s a pretty long time if you ask me and makes it even more important to know exactly how the phenomenon of sleep impacts us.
And still, there are so many unanswered questions evolving around sleep and how much we need of it. In fact, Most of what we know about sleep we’ve learned in the past 25 years.
One of the biggest problems I’ve discovered is that sleep is such an over talked topic. We get the general idea that we know all about it: how much we need of it, how it impacts us and why this or that happens when we sleep. Once I took a step back to really think about where our knowledge about sleep comes from, I realized that nearly all of it is based on hear-say or what my mom told me when I was in elementary school.
With this post, I’ve set out to uncover once and for all what the most important research has taught us about sleep. And of course, how you can use this knowledge to create an unbeatable daily routine.
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Eliminating the 8 hours per night sleep mythEveryone I’ve asked the question “how much sleep do I need” has an answer to the question. A common one – and one that I have given on many occasions – is to respond “Oh yes, I need my 8-9 hours of sleep every night, I know that”.
It turns out, that might not be true after all:
“We’ve all been told you ought to sleep 8 hr., but there was never any evidence.”
Says one of the most acclaimed researchers about sleep Daniel Kripke in an interview. In his most recent study Kripke found that “people who sleep between 6.5 hr. and 7.5 hr. a night, live the longest, are happier and most productive”.


What’s even more interesting here is that sleeping longer than that might actually be worse for your health mentioning that: “Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hr.”
Personally, as an 8 hour/night sleeper, this definitely opened my eyes and I have started to experiment by decreasing my sleeping time slightly and see if 7.5 hours makes a difference.
Of course, the general idea about the “one-fits all sleeping amount” is particularly odd, as Jim Horne, one of Europe’s most acclaimed sleep experts mentions in his book: “It’s like saying everybody should have size eight shoes, or be five foot eight inches.”
It seems that finding your optimal sleeping time in between Kripke’s finding is a good way to go. It’s certainly something I’m giving a go now.
The trap of too little sleep: What happens to our brains if we don’t have enough sleep?“Working overtime doesn’t increase your output. It makes you stupid.”
Now this part is one of the most fascinating aspects about sleep I believe. Did it ever happen to you that someone who got only 4 hours of sleep a night looks just as attentive, fresh and up to his game like you, who spent your 7.5 hours in bed?
Well, the answer is – that someone who is severely sleep deprived is in fact as attentive and awake as you are. With one big difference to you. Here is what a recent study found: The sleep deprived person can in fact deliver the exact same results as someone who isn’t sleep deprived in any exercise. That is, given it is a non repeated exercise and they give it their best shot. Odd right? Now onto this though:
The problem lies elsewhere. Whether we are sleep deprived or not, we lose focus at times. And that is precisely where the sleep deprived person lands in a trap. Once we start to lose focus and have received the right amount of sleep, our brain can compensate for that and increase attention (see the image below for the increased yellow bits that shift your focus back.). If we are sleep deprived, our brain can’t refocus.
“The main finding is that the brain of the sleep-deprived individual is working normally sometimes, but intermittently suffers from something akin to power failure,”
says Clifford Saper from Harvard. In the following image you can see what this means. As you lose focus and your attention is drifting, the yellow bits show how people with enough sleep, activate parts in their brain to refocus at the task at hand. Sleep deprived people will have barely any activity in that area (the amygdala reactivity) and will struggle to regain focus:


So really, this can turn into a huge trap. The person bragging that they only slept 4 hours and still do great work, well, they are actually right with what they are saying. The only issue is that, they have no brainpower to steer them back to focus once they lose attention. Even worse so, sleep-deprived people don’t notice their decrease in performance.
Sleep-deprived workers may not know they are impaired. “The periods of apparently normal functioning could give a false sense of competency and security when, in fact, the brain’s inconsistency could have dire consequences,”
Sleeping your way to successNot getting enough sleep is a pain. So now, onto the good stuff of what we can actually do, to optimize our sleeping habits to new heights and sleep our way to success as Arianna Huffington puts it.
When it comes to developing focused techniques that help you work on a better sleeping habit, the web isn’t short of answers. Querying some of the smartest brains I know, here are the top 3 things to do, in order to have better sleep and work more productively:
1.) Start napping every day – here is why and how:There is a confession I have to make, at least at this point. For the past 2 years, since I started working on Buffer, I have been napping every day, for around 20 minutes. One of my favorite writers and New York Times bestselling author Michael Hyatt puts an equal focus on napping for many years and posted his insights in this great post about napping.
–       As Michael points out in his post, some of the core benefits of napping is that you can restore alertness of your brain with just a few minutes of falling into light sleep.
–       Personally, I know that my productivity takes a dip at 3pm every day. This is exactly where I place my nap, and it has been one of the most powerful ways to bring my productivity back to 100% for a good 1,5 hour session after that.
–       In a great video Michael pointed me towards, one of the key benefits of napping daily is to simply feel less tired. Although this may sound stupidly obvious, yet can help a great deal to contribute to your daily happiness. Check out this quick video on this topic.
To get into a napping routine is often very difficult. Here are the top 3 ways I think you can make it work:

• Especially if you work in a big office, or you tend to feel others might consider you slacking off. One of the key things I found here is to make others aware of the fact, that you are napping every day. Try and get encouragement from your co-workers or your boss, so you can set yourself up for developing a successful habit.
• Timing is of course very important. In fact, in the video above, the common sentence of “napping doesn’t work for me” is often down to the fact that people nap too long. Don’t let your naps exceed 30 minutes max, personally, 20 minutes has proven to be the optimal timing for me.
• The last tip I find most crucial is to make napping a consistent habit. Keep both the frequency (daily) and the time of day (3pm seems to be a very popular time as productivity dips) the same and consistent.

2.) Develop a sleep ritual – here is how and why:How can you make this as easy as brushing your teeth every evening? It’s very simple: develop a sleep ritual that will set you up for a great night of sleep ahead. Rituals, different from habits can be something a lot more compelling:
“Whilst habits are often seen as activities you have to force yourself to do, rituals are instead activities which you are pulled towards.”
Writes Joel in this great post on developing a sleep ritual. When it comes to creating a sleep ritual, one of the key things is to have the last activity completely disengage you from the tasks of the rest of your day.  Here are a few activities you can try to properly disengage:
– One of the things Joel is doing every night before going to bed is a 20 minute walk on a set down and specific route and time. It is a great way to clear your head and be ready for sleep. For a specific way to develop your evening walk, try Coelho’s speed exercise.
– Another part that has worked greatly and Joel has taught me is to read fiction. Different to non-fiction books it is a great way to completely disengage, enter a different world and mindset and then be ready for great sleep.
– The last point I had great success with is to have a clear wake-up time bytying it to an immediate event afterwards. If you just set your alarm for say 7.30, but you always hit the snooze button, try something else. Keep the alarm, but plan the first thing you will do and tie it to a specific time. For me, this is for example, that I have breakfast immediately at 7.40. Or that my support session starts at 7.45. Joel hits the gym exactly 5 minutes after wake-up time. Those things can help a great deal to get over the inertia of getting out of bed.
3.) Making sure you are tired in every dimension:A key part of the book by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwarz about The Power of Full Engagement, is to be aware that for the highest quality of sleep, you need to be drained, both physically and mentally to some extent.
Making sure that you have both at least one mentally challenging exercise as well as a physically challenging one, can make all the difference to falling into a deep sleep that recovers all areas of your body.
Here is also a great article about whether exercise is a requirement for sleep.
Quick last fact: Women need more sleep than menHere is a super interesting last fact. Women need a tad bit more sleep than men:
“The average is 20 minutes more, but some women may need slightly more or less than this.”
Why? This is because women’s brains are wired differently from men’s and are more complex, so their sleep need will be slightly greater, says Horne in hisbook.
Sleep and how we deal with it every day is a fascinating topic I believe. What are your tips that you’ve found to make your more productive when it comes to sleep? Do you think some of the tips above might be helpful to trigger a better daily workflow?

https://blog.bufferapp.com/optimal-work-time-how-long-should-we-work-every-day-the-science-of-mental-strength
The Origin of the 8-Hour Work Day and Why We Should Rethink It
By Leo WidrichPRODUCTIVITY - JUNE 11, 2013110 CommentsOne of the most unchanged elements of our life today is our optimal work timeor how long we should work – generally, every person I’ve spoken to quotes me something close to 8 hours a day.
And data seems to confirm that: The average American works 8.8 hours every day. At least, those are the official statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:


And yet, for most of us it is obvious that knowing how long the average person works every day has little to do with how efficient or productive that pattern is. At least, that is what I personally found for my own productivity. So what’s the the right hourly rate?
With success stories from people working 4 hours a week, to 16 hours a day, it’s hard to know if there is an optimal amount. So instead of going with my gut, which often fails me, I thought of looking into actual research on work time and how to optimize it for your happiness and success.
Share stories like this to your social media followers when they’re most likely to click, favorite, and reply! Schedule your first post with Buffer.
Why do we have 8 hour work days in the first place?Let’s start out with what we have right now. The typical work day is around 8 hours. But how did we come up with that? The answer is hidden in the tidings of the Industrial revolution.
In the late 18th century, when companies started to maximize the output of their factories, getting to running them 24/7 was key. Now of course, to make things more efficient, people had to work more. In fact, 10-16 hour days were the norm.
These incredibly long work days weren’t sustainable and soon a brave man called Robert Owen started a campaign to have people work no more than 8 hours per day.  His slogan was “Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” 


It wasn’t until much later that Ford actually implemented the 8 hour work day and changed the standards:
“One of the first businesses to implement this was the Ford Motor Company, in 1914, which not only cut the standard work day to eight hours, but also doubled their worker’s pay in the process.  To the shock of many industries, this resulted in Ford’s productivity off of these same workers, but with fewer hours, actually increasing significantly and Ford’s profit margins doubled within two years.  This encouraged other companies to adopt the shorter, eight hour work day as a standard for their employees.”
So there we have it. The reason we work 8 hours a day, isn’t scientific or much thought out. It’s purely the a century old norm for running factories most efficiently.
Manage energy not time: How long we work isn’t important & the Ultradian RhythmWithout wanting to fall into the same trap, it’s time to ask a better question. How many hours we work every day is barely important any more in today’s creative economy.
Instead, the right focus is your energy, according to famous author Tony Schwartz:
“Manage your energy, not your time.”
Schwartz explains that as humans we have 4 different types of energies to manage every day:

• Your physical energy – how healthy are you? (We’ve written about that part before)
• Your emotional energy – how happy are you?
• Your mental energy – how well can you focus on something?
• Your spiritual energy – why are you doing all of this? What is your purpose?

One of the things most of us easily forget is that as humans, we are distinctly different from machines. At the core, this means that machines move linearly and humans move cyclically.
For an efficient work day, that truly respects our human nature, the first thing to focus on are ultradian cycles.
The basic understanding is that our human minds can focus on any given task for 90-120 minutes. Afterwards, a 20-30 minute break is required for us to get the renewal to achieve high performance for our next task again. Here is a better representation of the ultradian rhythm:


So instead of thinking about “What can I get done in an 8 hour day”, I’ve started to change my thinking to “What can I get done in a 90 min session”.
Now that we know we got to split everything in 90 min chunks, it’s time to break down those 90 minutes sessions further. 
The core of a productive work day: FocusThe one most crucial to understanding our workflows is how well we can focus. In a stunning research project Justin Gardner found that to actually focus on something our brain uses a 2-step process:
1.)  “Sensitivity enhancement”: It means you see a scene or setup and take all the information in that is presented. Then you focus in on what needs your attention. Kind of like “a blurry photo that slowly starts to come into focus”, describes Lifehacker.
2.)  “Efficient selection”:  This is now the actual zooming in on a task happens. This allows us to enter into what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls“Flow” state. Now our actual work on a task happens.
The follow figure probably describes it best:
 
In figure A, as our brain is presented with only 1 task, we are able to separate out distractors (blue) from what’s actually important (yellow).
In figure B, as we are presented with multiple tasks at once, our brain is increasingly easy to distract and combines the actual tasks with distractors.
The key conclusion that Gardner suggests from his study is that we have to both:

• Stop multitasking to avoid being distracted in our work environment.
• Eliminate distractors even when only 1 task is present

Sounds fairly obvious right? And yet, getting it actually done every day is much easier said then done. The good news is that after all, we can even actually change our brain structure from learning to focus. Here are some hands on tips:
The top 4 tips for improving your work dayFor my daily workflow at Buffer, I’ve started to make 4 distinct changes to implement the above research better. Here is what worked the best:

• Manually increase the relevance of a task: Now, a lot of us still might struggle to find the focus, especially if no one set a deadline to it. Overriding your attention system, and adding your own deadline together with a reward has shown some of the most significant improvements for task completion according to researcher Keisuke Fukuda. 

• Split your day into 90 min windows: Here is something I’ve started to do. Instead of looking at a 8, 6 or 10 hour work day, split it down and say you’ve got 4, 5 or however many 90 minute windows. That way you will be able to have 4 tasks that you can get done every day much more easily.

• Plan your rest so you actually rest: “The fittest person is not the one who runs the fastest, but the one who has optimized their rest time.” Says Tony Schwartz. A lot of the time, we are so busy planning our work day, that we forget about “how” to rest. Plan beforehand what you will do your rest. Here are some ideas: Nap, read, meditate, get a snack.

•  Zero notifications: One of the best ideas I’ve ever had was to follow Joel’s advice on Zero Notifications.  Having absolutely no counter on my phone or computer changing from 0 to 1 and always breaking my focus has been a huge help. If you haven’t tried this yet, try to turn off every digital element that could become an alert.

Personally, my life has been pretty much turned upside down after implementing these findings over the past few weeks. And I couldn’t be happier. I get both more done and feel happier at the same time.
Oh and as a follow-up post to this one, you might also enjoy “The science of how temperature and lighting impacts our productivity” as well as “The 4 elements of physical energy and how to master them”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7111982
Circaseptan (about-7-day) bioperiodicity--spontaneous and reactive--and the search for pacemakers.Levi F, Halberg F.AbstractA built-in (genetically determined) about-7-day (circaseptan) period comes to the fore as a desynchronized feature of human time structure in the urinary excretion of 17-ketosteroids by a clinical healthy man: during several years following an endocrine intervention (the self-administration of testosterone suppositories), a circaseptan rhythm (which during the preceding decade had revealed a period of precisely 7 days) deviated slightly, yet with statistical significance, from the environmental week. A second line of evidence for an intrinsic circaseptan component stems from the demonstration of statistically significant differences in timing of a circaseptan rhythm in springtail oviposition. A third line of evidence documents prominent circaseptan rhythmicity after the application of a single stimulus (devoid in itself of any circaseptan information). Such single stimulus induction, amplification and/or synchronization also documents the clinical and biologic importance of built-in circaseptan rhythms that were previously often misinterpreted as being purely reactive: a circaseptan spectral component is remarkably prominent in mammalian organ transplant rejection, both in the clinic and in the laboratory. In the latter case, in the absence of any weekly cycles in hospital routine, including treatment schedules, circaseptan components characterize the rejection of the rat kidney, pancreas and heart. Much additional information here reviewed reveals the occurrence of periods of about 7 days. Their implications for transplant and other chronoimmunology as well as biology in general, and their clinical applications in drug treatment, include the need to weld circaseptan timing to circadian timing and dosing. A dramatic documentation of this need stems from the circumstance that pretreatment for one week with the same total dose of the same substance (a polysaccharide - Lentinan) accelerates or retards cancerous growth (hence shortens or lengthens survival) as a function of interactive circaseptan and circadian rhythms.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749379714000993
BackgroundBiological clocks govern numerous aspects of human health, including weekly clocks–called circaseptan rhythms–that typically include early-week spikes for many illnesses.
PurposeTo determine whether contemplations for healthy behaviors also follow circaseptan rhythms.
MethodsWe assessed healthy contemplations by monitoring Google search queries (2005–2012) in the U.S. that included the word healthy and were Google classified as health-related (e.g., healthy diet). A wavelet analysis was used in 2013 to isolate the circaseptan rhythm, with the resulting series compared by estimating ratios of relative query volume (healthy versus all queries) each day (e.g., (Monday–Wednesday)/Wednesday).
ResultsHealthy searches peaked on Monday and Tuesday, thereafter declining until rebounding modestly on Sunday. Monday and Tuesday were statistically indistinguishable (t=1.22,p=0.22), but their combined mean had 30% (99% CI=29, 32) more healthy queries than the combined mean for Wednesday−Sunday. Monday and Tuesday query volume was 3% (99% CI=2, 5) greater than Wednesday, 15% (99% CI=13, 17) greater than Thursday, 49% (99% CI=46, 52) greater than Friday, 80% (99% CI=76, 84) greater than Saturday, and 29% (99% CI=27, 31) greater than Sunday. We explored media-based (priming) motivations for these patterns and they were consistently rejected.
ConclusionsJust as many illnesses have a weekly clock, so do healthy considerations. Discovery of these rhythms opens the door for a new agenda in preventive medicine, including implications for hypothesis development, research strategies to further explore these rhythms, and interventions to exploit daily cycles in healthy considerations.

What does the Bible say about work?"

Answer: The beginning of an essay penned by Bob Black in 1985 entitled “The Abolition of Work” read, “No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.” In a leisure-loving culture, many would wholeheartedly echo Black’s sentiment. Americans spend approximately 50 percent of their waking hours devoted to work. Is work a curse, or is it something that humans were uniquely designed to do? In stark contrast to the assertions of Bob Black, the significance and beneficial nature of work is a resounding theme in the Bible.

The origin of work is depicted in the book of Genesis. In the opening passage, God is the primary worker, busy with the creation of the world (Genesis 1:1-15). The Bible states that God worked for six days and rested on the seventh day. These passages reveal that God was the first to do work on the earth. Therefore, legitimate work reflects the activity of God. Because God is inherently good, work is also inherently good (Psalm 25:8;Ephesians 4:28). Furthermore, Genesis 1:31 declares that, when God viewed the fruit of His labor, He called it “very good.” God examined and assessed the quality of His work, and when He determined that He had done a good job, He took pleasure in the outcome. By this example, it is apparent that work should be productive. Work should be conducted in a way that produces the highest quality outcome. The reward for work is the honor and satisfaction that comes from a job well done. 

Psalm 19 says that God reveals Himself to the world by His work. Through natural revelation, God’s existence is made known to every person on earth. Thus, work reveals something about the one doing the work. It exposes underlying character, motivations, skills, abilities, and personality traits. Jesus echoed this principle inMatthew 7:15-20 when He declared that bad trees produce only bad fruit and good trees only good fruit. Isaiah 43:7 indicates that God created man for His own glory. In 1 Corinthians 10:31 we read that whatever we do should be to His glory. The term glorify means “to give an accurate representation.” Therefore, work done by Christians should give the world an accurate picture of God in righteousness, faithfulness, and excellence. 

God created man in His image with characteristics like Him (Genesis 1:26-31). He created man to work with Him in the world. God planted a garden and put Adam in it to cultivate and maintain it (Genesis 2:8, 15). Additionally, Adam and Eve were to subdue and rule over the earth. What does this original work mandate mean? To cultivate means to foster growth and to improve. To maintain means to preserve from failure or decline. To subdue means to exercise control and discipline. Rule over means to administer, take responsibility for, and make decisions. This mandate applies to all vocations. The 15th-century Reformation leaders saw an occupation as a ministry before God. Jobs should be acknowledged as ministries, and workplaces should be considered as mission fields.

The Fall of Man depicted in Genesis 3 generated a change in the nature of work. In response to Adam’s sin, God pronounced several judgments in Genesis 3:17-19, the most severe of which is death. However, labor and the results of labor figure centrally in the rest of the judgments. God cursed the ground. Work became difficult. The word toil is used, implying challenge, difficulty, exhaustion, and struggle. Work itself was still good, but man must expect that it will be accomplished by “the sweat of his brow.” Also, the result will not always be positive. Although man will eat the plants of the field, the field will also produce thorns and thistles. Hard work and effort will not always be rewarded in the way the laborer expects or desires. 

It is also noted that man would be eating from the produce of the field, not the garden. A garden is symbolic of an earthly paradise made by God as a safe enclosure. Gardens also symbolize purity and innocence. The earth or field, on the other hand, represents an unbounded, unprotected space and an emphasis on loss of inhibition and worldliness. Therefore, the work environment can be hostile, especially to Christians (Genesis 39:1-23; Exodus 1:8-22; Nehemiah 4).

It is said that man has three basic needs in life: love, purpose and significance. Many times, humans attempt to find purpose and significance in work itself. In Ecclesiastes 2:4-11, Solomon details his search for meaning in a variety of projects and works of all kinds. Even though the work brought some degree of satisfaction in accomplishment, his conclusion was, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”

Other critical biblical principles regarding work are:
• Work is done not only to benefit the worker, but others also (Exodus 23:10-11; Deuteronomy 15:7-11;Ephesians 4:28).
• Work is a gift from God and, for His people, will be blessed (Psalm 104:1-35; 127:1-5; Ecclesiastes 3:12-13,5:18-20; Proverbs 14:23).
• God equips His people for their work (Exodus 31:2-11).

There has been much debate recently about societal responsibilities and obligations toward the unemployed, uninsured, and uneducated in our society. While many of those affected by economic downturns truly desire to work and can’t find employment, there are a number of U.S. citizens who have become generational welfare recipients, preferring to remain on the government dole. It is interesting to note that the biblical welfare system was a system of work (Leviticus 19:10; 23:22). The Bible is harsh in its condemnation of laziness (Proverbs 18:9). Paul makes the Christian work ethic abundantly clear: “If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially those of his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8).

In addition, Paul’s instruction to another church regarding those who preferred not to work was to “keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us.” And he goes on to say, “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘If a man will not work, he shall not eat.’" Instead, Paul instructs those who had been idle, “Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:12).

Although God’s original design for work was perverted by sin, God will one day restore work without the burdens that sin introduced (Isaiah 65:17-25; Revelation 15:1-4; 22:1-11.) Until the day when the New Heavens and New Earth are set in place, the Christian attitude toward work should mirror that of Jesus: “My food, said Jesus, is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work” (John 4:34). Work is of no value except when God is in it.

https://becomingchristians.com/2013/07/04/shocking-truths-from-the-bible-top-5-awesome-benefits-of-keeping-the-sabbath-day/
Shocking Truths from the Bible: Top 5 Awesome Benefits of Keeping the Sabbath DayPosted on July 4, 2013 by joshuainfantado“Then He said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath”” (Mark 27-28). 

Is Satan behind the change of day? The answer is obvious.Among the Ten Commandments, there is one commandment that is most ignored by people. It is also the only commandment that does not start with “You shall not” thus making it in the positive voice.
This commandment is what most people consider as a burden and will do EVERYTHINGto do away with it but illogically still will keep the other nine. If you have read the title, you guessed it! It’s the fourth commandment:
“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy” (Exodus 20:8).

Saturday is the seventh day of the week!So many people assume that the seventh day of the week is Sunday. As a matter of fact, if you ask someone what day is the seventh day, they will most likely answer Sunday. But are you really sure? This might be a shock to you but SATURDAY is the seventh day of the week and not and will never be Sunday! Check your calendar again to be sure!
Though the majority of this world’s professing Christians does not keep the Sabbath, thepower of the Fourth Commandment cannot be denied. It is created by the Supreme Godwho knows our frame and has given us this commandment for our own benefit. So here is a list of the top 5 awesome benefits of keeping the Sabbath Day or the Fourth Commandment.
5. The Sabbath is the day of rest.“Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work…” (Exodus 20:9-10).

Be at rest during the Sabbath.The term Sabbath itself literally means, “Rest”. Thus, when God finished the re-creation, He restedfrom His work on the seventh day, setting us anexample. God does not need to rest but we, His created being, need physical rest and set a day aside within the week to refrain from work.
God knows that our body is not meant to work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Even 8 hours of sleep per day will not be enough to refresh our bodies and reset our biological clock. Experts in the medical field know this that we need rest and this is mandatorily done during the Sabbath. Therefore, we can rest during the Sabbath without that guilt feeling of being lazy.
4. The Sabbath is a time to fellowship with like-minded Christians.“Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25).

There is a unique joy that you can experience when having fellowship with like-minded people.I heard someone said, “Christians who keep the Sabbath spends 1/7th of their life on idleness”. This is a remark made out of COMPLETEignorance of what the Sabbath really means.
But was that man right? The fact of the matter is that the Sabbath is not all about rest. You can find in the Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers specific commands that we should have a holy convocation – a meeting – on the Sabbath day. It actually mentioned that aside from the weekly Sabbath, there are other annual Sabbaths – which are reserved for another topic. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s read Leviticus 23:3.
“There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of rest, a day of sacredassembly…”
Having fellowship with like-minded people can encourage us. Life as Christian is very tough and it is tougher if you do it alone. Thus, God encourages us to assemble together every Sabbath so that we can admonish and edify one another.
3. The Sabbath is a time for family bonding.“… On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates” (Exodus 20:10).

Are you aching to have a quality time with your children? Keep the Sabbath!Everyone is commanded to observe the Sabbath. NO EXEMPTION. Even the animals are given a Sabbath, a rest. Everyone is commanded to refrain from work and business routine. Because of this, everyone is endowed with an unhurried time to spend for family bonding. It is the perfect time to ask your children how they are doing in school or in their personal lives.
Conversely, the children can also reconnect with their family and share their experience throughout the week. Is the gap between you and your children ever increasing? Keep the Sabbath.
2. The Sabbath brings blessing.“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath and from doing as you please on my holy day… If you call the Sabbath a delight… and not doing as you please… then you will find your joy in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the heights of the land and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob. The mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Isaiah 58:13-14).

God’s blessing is MORE than enough.Instead of calling it a burden, the Sabbath is truly adelight. When you follow God’s commandment and its intent, you will be blessed because following the commandments comes with a GREAT blessing. When you keep the Sabbath, you are invoking the divine intervention of God in your life. You can always come to Him and claim the promises that He gave us as long as it is according to His will. If we observe the Sabbath, this world will have better families, better citizens, better government, better economic system, better world order because we have decided to revolve our lives around God by keeping His commandments.
1. The Sabbath is the time to know God.“These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie downand when you get up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).
The Sabbath is a special time for God. It is your date and appointment to your supreme and loving Father. During the Sabbath, it is when the pastors, ministers, and servants of God meet together and deliver messages about God and His way of life. Aside from daily prayer and fasting, the Sabbath is the perfect day to set more time in hearing messages and learning more about God. It is set aside for religious instructions and admonitions. The Sabbath will lead you back to the creation week and will remind you that God is our creator and He wants to develop a strong and intimate relationship with us.

Know God and you will have a purpose in your life.Here are the top 5 awesome benefits of keeping the Sabbath day and you will only enjoy all these benefits if you are going to really observe the Sabbath just the way God has intended it to be. Though this world is keeping different days, time will come that everyone will observe the Sabbath day and by that time, we will all experience its full benefits… May God speed that day!

http://lifestylelaboratory.com/articles/proof-positive/rest.html
NEWSTART Element #7: Rest

A detailed, scientific explanation of Nutrition by Neil Nedley, M.D., taken from his book Proof Positive
I am convinced that if the benefits of rest could be put into a pill, it would be among the hottest selling supplements on the market. Unfortunately, in order to reap the benefits of rest, we must slow down and take the time to rest. Sadly, many of us do not believe that we can really pause long enough to take advantage of this vital remedial and preventative agency. Therefore, many are not even interested in learning about the far-reaching benefits of rest. They reason, why become convinced of the advantages of something that I do not have time for anyway? Because of these biases, I’d like to challenge you to think about rest as if it were a newly discovered vitamin, let’s call it vitamin R. In this hypothetical situation, we can now forget about whether or not we have time to rest. After all, every one of rest’s advantages can be obtained from taking a pill. Let us now look at this amazing “vitamin” and see if you want to include it as part of your daily program.

However, before we go too far with our illustration, I should clarify the fact that rest comes in a number of different forms. In fact, there are really four different types of vitamin R. Just as there are a number of B vitamins, so there are four siblings in the vitamin R family. They are listed in Figure 18: Vitamin R (Rest) Comes in four Kinds.

Vitamin R1 is sleep, or daily rest. Vitamin R2 is the weekly rest: in addition to sleeping each night, we need a weekly day of rest. Vitamin R3 is recreation: we need to take time to get away from work, physical tensions, and mental stresses of life. Vitamin R4 is also essential: this vitamin is meditation—and should be done at least on a daily basis. Let’s look more closely at each of these four types of vitamin R. 

Vitamin R1: The Daily Rest
R1, the sleep vitamin, is in short supply with many Americans. Research suggests that the average person does best on seven to eight hours of sleep per day. This figure was associated with the greatest longevity in the Alameda county health study that we examined in the first chapter (“Principles for Optimal Health”).111 Statistics suggest that about two-thirds of American adults sleep between six and nine hours per night.112 Sleep needs vary with our genetics. Dr. James Perl, a Ph.D. psychologist and sleep expert, points out that about 20 percent of the population genetically needs less than six hours per night. He also observes that 10 percent of our populace genetically needs more than nine hours per night.113 

Regardless of your specific need, anyone can come up short on vitamin R1. If you do not feel wide awake and energetic throughout your waking hours, you are likely sleeping too little. And if that is your problem, you are not alone. In the U.S., fatigue is one of the 10 most common reasons for visiting a physician.114 In fact, each year 3.3 million Americans visit their doctors for insomnia alone.115 Yes, problems with inadequate sleep are exceedingly common in our nation. The evidence suggests that as many as 60 percent of Americans have some problems relating to their sleep habits.116, 117

It may seem somewhat depressing to talk about how poorly the average American’s sleep needs are satisfied. There is some good news in this department, however. Those who handle stress better appear to require less daily sleep. In other words, if you are emotionally healthy and positive, your body is likely to sleep more efficiently.118 Exercise can also help you to have more energy on a given amount of sleep. Put another way, regular exercise helps to decrease our sleep requirements. In fact, exercise has been demonstrated to decrease fatigue and boost mental and physical vigor.119 

Although positive moods and physical exercise can help us in the sleep department, there are things that work against our ability to get refreshing sleep. Television viewing is one reason why we do poorly in the sleep department. The more television you watch, the less time you have to sleep. This is particularly a problem for American youth. Many are not getting enough sleep because of their liberal diet of TV. There are, of course, many other reasons for our national sleep debt. I will not go into our tendency to squeeze too many activities into a finite number of hours per day. I would, however, like to stress one of the most fatal deceptions of the sleep-deprived. Most of those who are shortchanging themselves on vitamin R1 feel like they can get by without optimal amounts of this vitamin. Unfortunately, the medical literature is very clear on the effects of sleep deprivation and irregular sleeping habits (such as shift work).120, 121, 122, 123 Such practices slow reaction time and increase the risk of both fatal and nonfatal accidents. Sleep deprivation can clearly have life-threatening consequences. Probably one of the most notable is falling asleep while driving. One interesting aspect of the current research on falling asleep at the wheel is that accidents and fatalities seem to be the most common in those who have not learned their limits. In one U.S. study, 55 percent of such accidents occurred in individuals 25 years old or less, suggesting that inexperience in respecting fatigue’s cues can be costly.124 The toll of disability and death from fatigued drivers is not confined to the U.S., of course. A recent German study indicates that falling asleep at the wheel is the leading cause of German roadway fatalities, amounting to nearly 25 percent of the total.125

However, the risk of other types of accidents also increases dramatically in those who are sleep-deprived. Accidents at the work place also occur more commonly when we are short on sleep, working unusual hours, or otherwise fatigued. Large-scale disasters like the Chernobyl fiasco, the Exxon Valdez crash, and the Three Mile Island incident all occurred in early pre-dawn hours, when vigilance was at a low point. Dr. Fred Hardinge, an expert looked to by the Federal Aviation Administration on issues relating to fatigue and performance, has pointed out that most of the “friendly fire” problems in the Persian Gulf War were due to fatigue. Some of these short-term sleep deprivation problems—with long-term consequences, nonetheless—may result from what are called “micro sleeps.” In these settings your eyes typically are wide open, yet your attention lapses and you do not realize what is happening. 

Although short-term problems with sleep deprivation often grab the headlines, serious problems result from chronically not getting enough sleep. Remember that even six hours of sleep per night is insufficient for many people and sets the stage for problems. Frontal lobe brain damage can occur in sleep-deprived animals. PET scans demonstrate decreased blood flow to the frontal lobe of the brain in chronically sleep-deprived individuals.126 With such chronic sleep shortages, irritability and belligerence rise while attention span drops further. Rapid mood changes and trouble coping with stress can result. Withdrawal from group action and even depression are among the outcomes of chronic sleep deprivation. Delusions and hallucinations can also be consequences of this downward spiral. 

Both short-term and long-term sleep deprivation can affect your resistance to disease. Losing even three hours of sleep on a given night can cut in half the effectiveness of your immune system.127 A number of immune alterations occur with sleep deprivation: antibody levels are decreased128 while interleukins-1 and -2 fail to experience the rise that occurs with deeper stages of sleep.129 Growth hormone (GH) requires sleep for optimal release. Absence of GH further impairs immunity as important immune defenders, the cytotoxic T cells (a type of white blood cell), are dependent on this hormone.130 Chronic fatigue also increases the risk of problems that may not be so obvious: heart disease, heart related deaths, and stomach and intestinal problems.131

Even if you are spending nine hours each day in bed, you may not be getting the quality of sleep that you need. Sixty years ago, sleep was regarded as a static process of rest, but sleep quality can radically differ even if it looks like two people spend the same amount of time in bed. How can you increase sleep quality? Figure 19: Ways to Improve Sleep Qualitylays out some of the basics.132 

Sleep quality is actually related to the entire NEWSTART program. Although daily rest is an important aspect of health, we tend not to rest as well if we are not following other aspects of a healthy lifestyle. Perhaps nowhere is this seen more clearly than in research relating sleep and aging. Most have not questioned the “fact” that sleep quality deteriorates as a person gets older.133 However, new research from Stanford University Medical School and other centers is calling this assumption into question. What the newer data suggests is that people who stay healthy and follow a good lifestyle are unlikely to develop changes in sleep quality as they age.134, 135

Vitamin R2: The Weekly Rest
In America, it is not uncommon for people to put in a seven-day workweek. Many do this repetitively and do not seem to suffer for it. However, the medial evidence suggests that there may be both long-term and short-term consequences to such a practice. Just as the body has a natural daily clock (circadian rhythm), it also has a weekly clock (circaseptan rhythm). Circa-septan rhythms are just that: body rhythms that run about seven days in length.

Medical research has demonstrated such rhythms in connection with a variety of physiological functions. Some that have been identified included heart rate, suicides, natural hormones in human breast milk, swelling after surgery, and rejection of transplanted organs. To understand the significance of these rhythms, consider the latter two items in the list. A person will tend to have an increase in swelling on the seventh and then the fourteenth day after surgery.136, 137 Similarly, a person with a kidney transplant is more likely to reject the organ seven days and then fourteen days after the surgery.138, 139Research on circaseptan rhythms continues and new relationships are continually being discovered. There are seven day rhythms that have been observed in both human and animal cancers and their response to treatment.140, 141, 142 Fibrinogen, a blood clotting compound that has been demonstrated to increase the risk of heart attack, has now also been observed to have a seven day rhythm.143 Further work has shown that in addition to inflammatory responses operating on a circaseptan rhythm, so do the drugs that we often use to treat them.144 

An understanding of circaseptan rhythms has lead me to more fully appreciate the fact that I need to pay attention to weekly rhythms to protect my own health and the health of my patients.

Dr. Baldwin asserted some years ago that the current research indicated that “this seven-day rhythm is a normal built-in feature of our physiology.”145 Recent researchers have been even more adamant than Baldwin. “From the medical point of view so-called circaseptan (about 7 days) reactive periods are of predominant interest. This periodicity can be observed in numerous adaptive and compensating processes. It does not depend on the external week cycle and was already known to the antiquity.”146 What both of these authors are saying is that the importance of the seven-day rhythms should not be underestimated. Furthermore, these rhythms are a part of who we are; they are not a function of the fact that we happen to keep a seven-day week in our culture. Thus, this seven day rhythm “does not depend on the external week cycle.”

From a historical perspective the weekly cycle is also of great interest. We keep a 24-hour day based on the earth revolving on its axis. We keep a monthly cycle based on the periodicity of the moon. The year is based on the earth’s circling the sun. But what is the week based on? Some have conjectured that mankind over the years came to the conclusion that no other weekly cycle harmonized well with our internal rhythms. It is interesting to note that although cultures have experimented with different weekly cycles, all those that Baldwin is aware of have reverted to the seven-day program. He points in particular to France during the time of the French revolution. They then experimented with a ten-day (metric) week, with disastrous results. The mental institutions filled rather quickly to capacity and then some. Baldwin attributes the abolition of that program in part to the logical thinking of the renowned mathematician, Laplace.

However, others have pointed to an even more compelling reason for the existence of the weekly cycle: it is the way that God created us. Indeed, in the first of the scriptural books of Moses, the seven-day weekly cycle is described as part of God’s design in creation. That cycle is described as consisting of six days of work followed by a Sabbath day of rest. Baldwin sees significance in the Sabbath concept in relation to circaseptan rhythms.147 He recognizes this as a “zeitgeber” (“time-giver” in German). Zeitgebers keep our weekly rhythms synchronized by pausing one day in seven for a time of rest. In order for these time-givers to work, however, it must come at the same time each week. In other words, it is not sufficient to get one day in seven off; it is optimal to get a specific day in seven off on a regular basis.

My own experience agrees with this body of medical research. I personally need one day in seven where I set things aside and experience a true rest. That does not mean I sleep the whole day. Instead, I use it as a day for recreation, for reflection, for meditation, and for focusing in on spiritual values. Whether you keep the seventh day of the week as I do (from sundown on Friday evening to sundown on Saturday evening in harmony with the biblical injunction) or a different 24 hour period, there is a benefit to observing one specific day in seven as a day of rest.

One other observation is in order. In scheduling our daily rest of sleep, we often have to prioritize sleep even though we have not finished all of our work for the day. Many have learned by experience that in most circumstances it is best to go to bed on time. In the same way, even if your work for the week is not completed, I would still encourage you to take that specific day in seven off and rest as if your work was completed. In fact, a physician friend of mine once said that such a priority is one of the beauties of God’s Sabbath commandment. Even though he is aware of the importance of the weekly rest, if God did not specify a specific day, he feels he would not be regular in keeping one specific day per week as a “zeitgeber.” I have found the same true in my experience.

Vitamin R3: True Recreation
If you look at how most Americans spend their time, you would think that television is our nation’s number one form of recreation. However, in the sense of the term as I use it, TV programing does not meet my criteria for true recreation. When discussed in the context of rest, I see recreation as living up to its name, specifically: “re-creation.” I believe that after engaging in true recreation, I should be more able to meet life’s challenges, not less able. True recreation is revitalizing and helps me better accomplish the work and responsibilities that I have. What kind of activities then fit the bill as “true recreation?” From my experience and study, outdoor recreation tops the list. Options include a host of activities such as gardening, hiking, doing pleasant yard work, cross country skiing, walking, and dozens of other options. These activities provide a mental break from the routine, as well as offer the advantages of many of the other NEWSTART elements such as exercise, sunshine, and fresh air.

Vitamin R4: Meditation and Prayer
Meditation and prayer provide a form of rest that has been practiced for centuries. Even secular Westerners are becoming more interested in learning about this potent form of release from stress, tension, and anxiety. In my own experience, I have found meditation and prayer to be a vital part of a balanced lifestyle program.

Prayer is the breath of the soul, figuratively speaking. As moral beings and spiritual beings, we need to spend sufficient time in contemplating our trust in divine power. There is a connection between the “R” and “T,” specifically vitamin R4 and “T,” trust in God. It can help us in so many ways, such as in controlling stress, strengthening the immune system, providing protection against heart disease, cancer, etc. The list goes on and on. Yes, trusting in our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend. But how can we trust Him if we do not really talk to Him through prayer? 

In Chapter 12 on the frontal lobe, I point to the example of Dr. Larry Dossey as an illustration of how even honest skeptics are now concluding that prayer has unique benefits.148 Dr. Dossey has collected a host of scientific studies that demonstrate that when people pray to God on behalf of others, health benefits result. These results even include the spontaneous regression—or cure—of cancer. Dossey’s experience illustrates that from the perspective of thinking scientists, the benefits of prayer extend beyond those of mere meditation. It is remarkable that the attitude of prayer makes a difference in whether or not healing ensues. It is the trustful prayer of faith in committing one’s life to God that most likely results in healing—not the aggressive prayer that prays for white blood cells to destroy cancer, or attempts to raise self to levels of unrestrained optimism.149 

One of the themes with vitamins R1 and R2 is that these substances must be “ingested” regularly to provide optimal benefits. Just as we need daily rest in each 24 hour period, and weekly rest once in every seven days, so do we need regular periods for recreation on the one hand, and prayer and meditation on the other. Actually, each of the other types of rest affects vitamin R4 as well. As we have seen, lack of sleep or irregular and/or excessively long work hours contribute to some obvious problems: poorer quality and quantity of sleep, increased fatigue, poorer work performance and increased accidents. 150 However, inadequate sleep also affects us spiritually. The frontal lobe appears to be particularly prone to sleep deprivation. Surprisingly, our values even tend to suffer when we are short on sleep.151

This last element of rest—meditation and prayer—also addresses the most potent robbers of rest and relaxation, namely stressors and our maladaptive ways of handling them. As pointed out in Chapter 14, “Stress Without Distress,” the use of meditation and prayer offers powerful help on these levels. There I emphasize that we have a critical need for meditation and prayer on a daily basis. I go on record as defining these elements as forms of “rest and rejuvenation that few appreciate” to their fullest extent. The interested reader is referred to that chapter on stress for a further discussion—and practical application—of this vital vitamin R4.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/magazine/bring-back-the-sabbath.html?pagewanted=all
Bring Back the SabbathBy Judith Shulevitz
Published: March 2, 2003​

​Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud's, once identified a disorder he called Sunday neurosis. Every Sunday (or, in the case of a Jewish patient, every Saturday), the Sunday neurotic developed a headache or a stomachache or an attack of depression. After ruling out purely physiological causes, including the rich food served at Sunday dinners, Ferenczi figured out what was bothering his patients. They were suffering from the Sabbath.
On that weekly holiday observed by all ''present-day civilized humanity'' (Ferenczi was writing in 1919, when Sunday was still sacred, even in Budapest, his very cosmopolitan hometown), not only did drudgery give way to festivity, family gatherings and occasionally worship, but the machinery of self-censorship shut down, too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach. The Sunday neurotic, rather than enjoying his respite, became distraught; he feared that impulses repressed only with great effort might be unleashed. He induced pain or mental anguish to pre-empt the feeling of being out of control.
About a decade ago I developed a full-blown weekend disorder of my own. Perhaps because I am Jewish, it came on Friday nights. My mood would darken until, by Saturday afternoon, I'd be unresponsive and morose. My normal routine, which involved brunch with friends and swapping tales of misadventure in the relentless quest for romance and professional success, made me feel impossibly restless. I started spending Saturdays by myself. After a while I got lonely and did something that, as a teenager profoundly put off by her religious education, I could never have imagined wanting to do. I began dropping in on a nearby synagogue.
It was a small building in Brooklyn, self-consciously built nearly a century ago to look European; it had once served as a set in an inadvertently hilarious movie in which Melanie Griffith plays a police officer who goes undercover in a Hasidic community. I sat in the back of this Disneyfied sanctuary and discovered that I had no interest in praying, which I hardly remembered how to do. What I wanted to do was listen to the hymns, which offered the uncanny comfort of songs heard in childhood.
It was only much later, after I joined the synagogue and changed my life in a million other unforeseen ways, that I developed a theory about my condition. If Ferenczi's patients had suffered from the Sabbath, I was suffering from the lack thereof. In the Darwinian world of the New York 20-something, everything -- even socializing, reading or exercising -- felt like work or the pursuit of work by other means. Had I been able to consult Ferenczi, I believe he would have told me that I was experiencing the painful inklings of sanity. For in the 84 years since Ferenczi identified his syndrome, which bears a striking resemblance to what is now called workaholism, it has become the norm, and the Sabbath, the one day in seven dedicated to rest by divine command, has become the holiday Americans are most likely never to take.
It can be startling to realize just how integral the Sabbath once was to American time. When we tell our children stories about the first pilgrims landing on our shores, we talk rather vaguely about their quest for religious freedom. We leave out that this freedom was needed in large part so that the Puritans could obey the Fourth Commandment -- ''Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy'' -- with a zealotry that had deeply alienated their countrymen back home. We all have heard of the Puritan ''blue laws,'' named, supposedly, for the color of paper they were printed on. They required attendance at church but punished anyone who got there with unseemly haste or on too showy a horse. They forbade unnecessary visiting, except in emergencies, and smoking and sports. Unlike Orthodox Jews, who though strict about the Sabbath are nonetheless encouraged to drink and have marital sex on Friday night, the ascetic Puritans frowned on any kind of drinking or sex on Sunday. In at least one documented instance, the ''lewd and unseemly behavior'' of kissing your wife on your doorstep upon returning home from a journey of three years was punished by a spell in the stocks. From sunset Saturday to sunset Sunday, the most pious Sabbatarians (usually clergymen) wouldn't shave, have their rooms swept or beds made or allow food to be prepared or dishes washed. They ate only what had been cooked in advance and devoted all time not spent in church to reading Scripture.
Even after Puritanism lost its hold on American culture, the American Sunday was observed with unusual strictness. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville observed with some surprise that few Americans were ''permitted to go on a hunt, to dance or even to play an instrument on Sunday.'' As recently as 125 years ago, you would have been hard pressed to find a museum or library open on Sunday. Eighty years ago, football was considered too vulgar to be played on Sunday. Oldsters remember standing in line at the bank on Fridays to get cash for the weekend; youngsters assume they can withdraw at will. Anyone older than 30 can remember living with the expectation that most stores would be closed on Sunday; the expectation now is that they will be open, and we're miffed when they aren't.
''The Lonely Days Were Sundays'' is the title of a book about growing up Jewish in the churchgoing South. The lonely Sunday has been replaced by the overscheduled Sunday -- soccer Sunday, Little League Sunday, yoga-class Sunday, catch-up-around-the-house Sunday. Americans still go to church, of course, but only in between chores, sporting events and shopping expeditions. (You can now find A.T.M. machines inside megachurches; congregants don't have to waste a minute between services and the mall.)
The eclipse of the Sabbath is just one small part of the larger erosion of social time, with its former generally agreed-upon rhythms of labor and repose. ''After hours'' has become a strictly personal concept, since the 24-hour convenience store, gas station, pharmacy, supermarket, movie theater, diner, factory and bar all allow us to work, shop, dine and be entertained at any time of day or night. We greet each shift of an activity from weekday to evening or weekend as proof of American cultural superiority; we knock over the barriers between us and the perpetual motion machine that is the marketplace with the glee you might expect of insomniacs who had been chained for too long to their beds.
The lingering traces of Sabbatarianism seem comically vestigial, like the fetal tail: the New York blue law that won't let you buy beer till after noon on Sunday; Broadway stages that go dark on Sunday nights; work rules requiring us to show up at our offices Monday through Friday, even though many of us do our best work at night or on weekends (and, as you know if you've seen the movie ''Office Space,'' putting in face time at the office is often a cover for doing less).
Customs exist because they answer a need; when they disappear, that need must be met in some other way. There is ample evidence that our relationship to work is out of whack. Economists, psychologists and sociologists have charted our ballooning work hours; the increase in time devoted to competitive shopping; the commercialization of leisure that turns fun into work and requires military-scale budgeting and logistics and emotionally draining interactions with service personnel. Personally, I think the alarm about these matters is often overblown. Most people, with the possible exception of parents of 13-year-olds, have the wherewithal to avoid the mall if they want to, and anyone who seeks to relax in a theme park or on a packaged tour deserves what he gets. So I won't weary you with cautionary tales about what our work-addicted culture can do to you, psychologically and physiologically, because, for one thing, it's completely within your power to hold it at bay, and for another, you don't want to anyway. Ours is a society that pegs status to overachievement; we can't help admiring workaholics. Let me argue, instead, on behalf of an institution that has kept workaholism in reasonable check for thousands of years.
Most people mistakenly believe that all you have to do to stop working is not work. The inventors of the Sabbath understood that it was a much more complicated undertaking. You cannot downshift casually and easily, the way you might slip into bed at the end of a long day. As the Cat in the Hat says, ''It is fun to have fun but you have to know how.'' This is why the Puritan and Jewish Sabbaths were so exactingly intentional, requiring extensive advance preparation -- at the very least a scrubbed house, a full larder and a bath. The rules did not exist to torture the faithful. They were meant to communicate the insight that interrupting the ceaseless round of striving requires a surprisingly strenuous act of will, one that has to be bolstered by habit as well as by social sanction.
Take the Puritan Sunday. It would be excruciating to us, and yet the restrictions were not pointless. They made of the day something rare and otherworldly, a realization of the Puritan vision of a city on the hill. ''Sweet to the Pilgrims and to their descendants was the hush of their calm Saturday night and their still, tranquil Sabbath,'' wrote the 19th-century historian Alice Morse Earle, who shared with more famous authors, like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a qualified nostalgia for the preindustrial Sabbath. ''No work, no play, no idle strolling was known; no sign of human life or motion was seen except the necessary care of the patient cattle and other dumb beasts, the orderly and quiet going to and from the meeting, and at the nooning, a visit to the churchyard to stand by the side of the silent dead.'' Anyone who has experienced the eerie serenity of the ultra-Orthodox sections of Jerusalem or Brooklyn on Saturdays would be in a position to conjure a Puritan Sunday.
Americans, of course, no longer cherish obedience as a virtue. We have become individualists, even libertarians. We will no longer put up with being told how to dispose of our free time. But our unwillingness to suffer constraint shouldn't blind us to the possibility that Sabbath discipline may have real benefits. For one thing, it reflects a paradoxical insight: only a Sabbath that you have to work for will appear worth keeping, just as, in psychoanalysis, a patient will value only those sessions for which he pays. Anything gotten for nothing will be treated as such. After all, as in therapy, the good that comes from the Sabbath is mostly intangible. We don't produce anything when we don't work.
So counterintuitive is the idea of organized nonproductivity, given the force and universality of the human urge to make things, that you can't believe anyone ever managed to lift his head from his workbench or plow long enough to think of it. To the first-century Stoic philosopher Seneca, the Sabbath was absurd, a way for Rome's backward Jewish subjects to waste ''almost a seventh of their life in inactivity.'' But when (or if), perhaps a millennium earlier, the Jews took over an old Mesopotamian day of taboo and transformed it into one of holy rest, they brought into the world not just the Sabbath but something just as precious, and surprisingly closely linked. They invented the idea of social equality.
The Israelite Sabbath institutionalized an astonishing, hitherto undreamed-of notion: that every single creature has the right to rest, not just the rich and the privileged. Covered under the Fourth Commandment are women, slaves, strangers and, improbably, animals. The verse in Deuteronomy that elaborates on this aspect of the Sabbath repeats, twice, that slaves were not to work, as if to drive home what must have been very hard to understand in the ancient world. The Jews were meant to perceive the Sabbath not only as a way to honor God but also as the central vehicle of their liberation theology, a weekly reminder of their escape from their servitude in Egypt.
In other words, we have the Sabbath to thank for labor legislation and for our belief that it is wrong for employers to drive their employees until they drop from exhaustion. So what do we do, today, with this remarkable heritage, which in the last century expanded to a generous two days, rather than just one? Much more than our ancestors could ever have imagined, and much, much less. We relax on the run and, in rare bursts of free time, we recreate. We choose from a dizzying array of leisure options and pursue them with an exemplary degree of professionalism and perfectionism. We rush our children from activity to activity, their days a blur of tight connections.
And yet there are important ways in which even our impressive recreational creativity fails to reproduce the benefits of the Sabbath. Few elective activities will ever rise to a status higher than work in our minds, and therefore cannot be relied upon to counterbalance our neurotic drive to achieve. Most of us will jettison plans to go skiing if a deadline looms near. We will assign a high priority to a non-work-related hobby only if we have committed to it in some public manner, as we do when we join a volleyball team or a choir. (Oddly, one of the few times a parent can truly relax is when lingering on the sidelines of a child's baseball or soccer game; there is nothing like being forced to be somewhere and do very little for an hour and a half to declench the muscles of the mind.)
And not even our group leisure activities can do for us what Sabbath rituals could once be counted on to do. Religious rituals do not exist simply to promote togetherness. They're theater. They are designed to convey to us a certain story about who we are without our even quite noticing that they are doing so. (One defining feature of religious rituals, in fact, is that we often perform them for years before we come to understand what they mean; this is why ministers and rabbis are famously unsympathetic when congregants complain that worship services or holiday rites feel meaningless.) The story told by the Sabbath is that of creation: we rest because God rested on the seventh day. What leads from God to humankind is the notion of imitatio Dei: the imitation of God. In other words, we rest in order to honor the divine in us, to remind ourselves that there is more to us than just what we do during the week.
Talk of God may disturb the secular, so they might prefer to frame the Sabbath in the more neutral context of aesthetics. The Sabbath provides two things essential to anyone who wishes to lift himself out of the banality of mercantile culture: time to contemplate and distance from everyday demands. The Sabbath is to the week what the line break is to poetic language. It is the silence that forces you to return to what came before to find its meaning.
After joining that synagogue in Brooklyn,
I began to incorporate into my life the most elemental rudiments of a traditional Jewish Sabbath: lighting the candles and eating at home on Friday night; going to religious services on Saturday morning; sleeping or reading or going to a museum in the afternoon. Orthodox Jews will scoff when they read of my subminimal level of observance; my secular friends think I've become a fanatic. Sticking to these few rituals, however, is the hardest and least unconscious thing I've ever done. I fail to keep the Sabbath more than I succeed, probably because I started trying to do it not as a result of some redemptive revelation, such as might occur to a character in a Russian novel, but experimentally, out of curiosity, and in a social vacuum -- by myself, rather than in a group or family setting. I didn't know how else to attain the self-possession that eluded me, the sense of owing nothing to anybody except perhaps God. The conventional weekend felt claustrophobic. Silent, solitary contemplation was not sustainable. The ceremonies performed by my ancestors for the past two millenniums had at least the virtue of having been previously tested and found to be effective.
Do I think everyone else should observe a Sabbath? I believe it would be good for them, and even better for me, since the more widespread the ritual, the more likely I am to observe it. It is much easier to keep the Sabbath, for instance, when your family does, too, though getting children to agree to do anything their friends don't do may prove insurmountable. (The greatest benefit of this may be that it makes a habit of unstructured family intimacy, without which parents must resort to so-called quality time, which tends to leave everyone feeling self-conscious.)
For hundreds of years it was firmly believed that only a Sabbath enforced through social legislation would keep society from sliding into a kind of unwitting slavery, protecting the vulnerable from the powerful and quashing the punitive obsessive-compulsive who lurks within us all. One of the bitterest public policy debates in 19th-century America, in fact, was over whether offering postal service and opening public institutions on Sundays would harm our national character and lead directly to barbarism.
If the Sabbath you choose to observe isn't a religious one, you should nonetheless be religiously disciplined in your approach to it, observing it every week, not just when it's convenient. I confess, though, that I have a hard time imagining a Sabbath divorced from religion: who would make the effort to honor the godly part of himself if he didn't believe in a deity, no matter how ecumenical? It's just as difficult to envision the Sabbath surviving the current speeding-up of everything without some generally enforced slowdown. The great religions lasted as long as they did because they were able to make their rituals part of everyone's life.
But social legislation mandating Sunday (or Saturday) closings is no longer viable. Besides, it seems arrogant to tell someone what keeping the Sabbath would do for him, because it's impossible to know how a ritual will affect a person until he has performed it. ''Holy days, rituals, liturgies -- all are like musical notations which, in themselves, cannot convey the nuances and textures of live performance,'' the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has written.
Whenever I dream of living in a society with a greater respect for its Sabbatarian past -- a fantasy I entertain only with anxiety, since Sabbatarians have a long history of going too far -- I think of something two rabbis said. Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, best known for his tales of the golem, pointed out that the story of Creation was written in such a way that each day, each new creation, is seen as a step toward a completion that occurred on the Sabbath. What was Creation's climactic culmination? The act of stopping. Why should God have considered it so important to stop? Rabbi Elijah of Vilna put it this way: God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so. The implication is clear. We could let the world wind us up and set us to marching, like mechanical dolls that go and go until they fall over, because they don't have a mechanism that allows them to pause. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.

http://blog.crew.co/why-you-shouldnt-work-set-hours/
The surprising reason we have a 40-hour work week (and why we should re-think it)POSTED BY MIKAEL CHOSAVE TO …
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TwitterFacebookEmail‘As long as you get your eight hours in.’
I used to hear this phrase a lot.
The thinking is that as long as you put in a set amount of time working (usually at least eight hours or more) you will do well at your job and be successful.
We learned that eight hours of work a day is what we’re supposed to do almost as soon as we step foot into a classroom. School days are eight hours long and classes are usually structured by slots of time rather than what is accomplished in that time.
When you get a job, usually part or all of your pay is based on hours worked.
Since starting Crew I’ve made huge strides in how I approach my day to be more productive, but sometimes, I still catch myself looking at the clock, calculating how much time I should be working rather than focusing on what I’m getting done in that time.
On days where I put in less than eight or ten hours of work, I feel a bit guilty, like I’m not pushing hard enough. But, this is the wrong way to think.
At Crew we don’t work set hours.
Two of my co-founders prefer to work late into the night while I enjoy starting work early in the day.
Because we have different energy levels at different times, it would be counterproductive for my co-founders to work at 9AM (just like it would be inefficient for me to be working at 2AM).
Granted, there are times when scheduling a time to meet during the day to discuss important matters is needed (and there are many days when we all work through the night), but the importance is our work schedules are rarely managed by a set number of hours; rather, they are guided by our energy levels.
Most importantly, we’ve seen the results of working without a set schedule in the quality of our work, our productivity, and our health.
But, working set hours is typically the norm for full-time professionals, so I wondered where this 40-hour work schedule came from and if there’s any scientific backing as to why we’ve been working this way for almost a century.
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How the 40-hour work week came to beDuring the Industrial Revolution, factories needed to be running around the clock so employees during this era frequently worked between 10-16 hour days.
In the 1920s however, it was Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, that established the 5-day, 40-hour work week.
Henry Ford next to a 1921 Model-T
Surprisingly, Ford didn’t do it for scientific reasons (or solely for thehealth of his employees). Rather, one of the main reasons he came up with the idea to reduce the working hours of his staff was so employees would have enough free time to go out and realize they needed to buy stuff.
In an interview published in World’s Work magazine in 1926, Ford explains why he switched his workers from a 6-day, 48-hour workweek to a 5-day, 40-hour workweek but still paid employees the same wages:
Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles.?’?Henry Ford
So the 8-hour work day, 5-day workweek wasn’t chosen as the way to work for scientific reasons; instead, it was partly driven by the goal of increasing consumption.
Night owls vs. early birdsYour body keeps track of time in a section in your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (or SCN).
This part of the brain is located behind your eye, where the optic nerve fibers cross, which allows your brain to use cues from light in your environment to help you keep track of time:


Source: Wikipedia
Light and genetics are the two main factors that help your body tell time, establishing a natural a cycle of energy levels (a circadian rhythm) throughout your day.
Here’s a few of the main events that happen in your body as part of a typical 24-hour biological clock:


Source: Wikipedia
The length of your 24-hour cycle may be longer or shorter due to genetics.
If your cycle is a bit longer, you would be considered a night owl but if yours is a bit shorter, you’re most likely an early riser, says Katherine Sharkey, MD, PhD, associate director of the Sleep for Science Research Lab.
Researchers have even pinpointed that the length of a particular gene called Period 3 or ‘clock gene,’ could be largely responsible for your sleep-wake cycle.
Night owls outlast early birdsA typical workday for most of us usually starts at 7AM and ends around 5PM. This lifestyle design really only works well for one type of person. The early riser.
If you prefer working nights (like 44% of women and 37% of men do), then you’re often stuck slugging away at a time when your energy levels are low and your work ultimately suffers.
Because night owls wake up later, they sometimes get a reputation for being lazy because they’re asleep while the rest of the world is hustling.
But, recent research from the University of Brussels suggests that night owls may beat out early birds in the length of time they can stay awake and alert without becoming mentally fatigued.
Researchers conducted a study with ‘extreme’ early or late risers. Early risers awoke between 5AM-6AM while late risers awoke at noon.
The participants spent two nights in a sleep lab where the researchers measured their brain activity, looking at alertness and ability to concentrate.
After ten hours of being awake, the early risers showed reduced activityin areas of the brain associated with attention span and completed tasks more slowly than late risers.
‘It’s the late risers who have the advantage, and can outperform the early birds,’ said Philippe Peigneux, one of the publishers of the study.
Forcing someone to work early (or late) doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.
A night owl can be just as productive (if not more) than an early riser, they’re simply more productive at a different time.
The importance of taking a breatherBecause our bodies were designed to work in rhythms, not for endless hours on end, breaks are often just as important as the work we do.
Research discussed in the landmark book Creativity and the Mindshowed that regular breaks significantly enhance problem-solving skills, partly by making it easier for you to go through your memories to find clues.
Focusing only on your work for four or five hours straight limits your chances to make new, insightful neural connections, which won’t help you when you need to be creative.
A few companies have embraced this need to remove work to improve production and creativity.
In his TED talk, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister explains the importance of time off and why he shuts down his design studio for a year. Sagmeister says this removal of work allows him and his colleagues to gain new perspectives and refresh, ultimately producing better work.
Quirky, a web company is working on an experiment to shut down operations for four weeks every year. Here’s an excerpt from an email Quirky CEO, Ben Kaufman sent to Quirky staff (full email here):
We are going to shut down the entire machine for 4 weeks next year. Instead of running for 52, it will run for 48.
This is a full, mandatory shutdown of all internal activities. Lights out. Deep breath’
Our thesis is centered around the fact that this will lead to better work, more beautiful products, and an emotionally balanced team.
Take a breather not just for creativity (but for your health)Giving yourself a break not only can benefit your creative juices but also your health.
Dan Buettner, a writer for National Geographic recently assembled a team of researchers to look at three communities around the world that have the longest, healthiest lives on the planet.
In his TED talk, How to live to be 100+, Buettner showcases one of these communities, the Seventh-Day Adventists in California.
The members of the Seventh-Day Adventists must take one day off a week from work completely, no matter how busy they may be.
Buettner points out this opportunity to reconnect with people and the world around them relieves stress and is likely part of the equation for why the Seventh-Day Adventists have five times the number of people who live to be over a hundred than the rest of the country.
4 steps to work-life blissI’ve experimented a lot with different techniques to improve the way I work. A couple weeks ago, I tried to not look at a clock for a day and instead, just rely on my energy levels to tell me what I should do (I found it nearly impossible and failed within the first couple hours).
Through trial and failure however, I’ve found a system that has worked wonders for me.
I will continue to try more things to constantly improve the way I work and report my findings, but here’s what I’ve figured out so far that has produced the best work of my career.
1. Write a realistic to-do listMake a to-do list for the day that has 3-4 major tasks that you want to get done.
Because your days will naturally fill up with other things, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, recommends,
‘Plan for 4-5 hours of real work per day.’
Laying out your daily tasks knowing this, helps you create a to-do list that you can consistently complete, rather than one that has too many items and leaves you feeling bad, like you’re constantly falling behind.
2. Create cycles with your workYou probably have lots of different types of tasks to worry about.
To accomplish more of the important things while maintaing balance in your energy levels so you don’t burnout, try breaking your day up like this:

• A creative task. Starting with your most creative or important task before that urgent email pops up will help you feel accomplished. For me, I usually wake up and work a 90-minute session on my most creative task before I feel my brain and concentration start to fatigue.
• An un-timed break. Your break could be 20-minute run, a nap, lunch,or simply doing nothing for a few minutes. This gives you a chance to refresh and regain mental power before starting your next task. By keeping it un-timed, you’re using your energy levels as a guide to when you should start work again, rather than a rigid set amount of time.
• A mundane task. By bulking your mundane tasks together and doing them all at once, you’ll save time. Check all your emails or try to schedule multiple phone calls in a row. This way, when you switch back to a creative task, you won’t have the cloud of a hundred emails hovering over your head.
• Another un-timed break.
• Repeat. Try going through this cycle 3-4 times in a day.

3. One day with no workSteve Blank, the pioneer of the Lean Startup Movement uses a Date Night every week to remove from work completely. My fiance and I do this same thing.
One night a week, we have a planned time where we spend time not talking about any work (no checking of iThings allowed).
Try removing work completely for a day.
When you return to work the next day, you’ll probably feel inspired and driven, helping to keep distractions at bay.
4. Find a true metric to measure your tasksIt’s easy to count hours but not so easy to figure out another way to measure the work you do that encompasses the true goal of what you’re producing.
For example, it’s easy to measure how many hours you wrote today but what is the goal of your writing?
Is it to simply get your thoughts down? Then maybe you should be measuring how many days in a row you are writing.
Is it to grow your audience so people purchase what you’re selling? Then maybe you should track the sales that result from each blog post you write rather than the number of posts you write.
Track your progress using one of these metrics and your mindset may shift from ‘I worked x hours to do this thing’ to ‘I did this thing and it produced x results.’

This system is hard to maintain because a lot of things in the world are designed to steal your attention and I’ve found myself falling into the busy trap once in a while.
But, if you give it a shot (even just for a day or a few hours), you may uncover one of the most productive ways you’ve ever worked, like I did.
If you work at a company that requires you to be there for a set number of hours I’m not saying you should quit or that it’s a bad gig.
The important thing to remember is it’s not about the amount of hours you work, but what you do in those hours that counts.