Sorry for swiping your line, Jimmy Buffett.  Anyway, here it is.  2:40 AM on 5 September, 2022, sixty years since I was born in Evansville, Indiana to Ray and Nancy Hagensieker.

And what a ride it has been.  Sorry to those of you looking for a Raspberry Pi or computer dalliance but it is my blog  😀

I won’t bore you with a mass reflection backwards but I have a few things on my 60 year old mind. And I suppose before I start I should say that my time here has led me to a good place and without question I believe that I am blessed beyond belief.  And that those blessings come from God.  And what is even more baffling to me is that I probably don’t deserve any of them.

I’m 100% convinced in the God of the Bible and I’m 100% convinced in the presence of REAL and ACTUAL evil in this world.   And I can kind of plot how I got there which is kind of interesting in and of itself.  If you are inclined…..please read on.

My parents were believers and went to church and best of all NEVER FORCED me to go to church, except of course on those occasions were family or friends were involved somehow.  I think from the time I was a kid I knew there was a God but like many of us I took him for granted and lived a life based around me.  In and out of church at various times and in and out of reading the Bible and being more sincere at various times in my life.

Fast forward to the year 2005 or so and I’m living in Okinawa and my daughter is about 7 years old.  We are living in base housing on Camp Foster in an area called Kishaba Housing.  The houses were, I believe built after WW2, maybe in the 50’s.  They were old concrete block houses.   And they were HAUNTED.  I kid you not.  Things would run down the hall behind you, and weirdest of all were these little shadow figures who would disappear into walls.  Didn’t even have to be night time. And this wasn’t “out of the corner of your eye stuff”.  This is “I’m looking directly at this and wondering what the heck am I seeing”.   I of course prior to this never believed in ghosts and figured I was going crazy and kept it to myself.

One of the best validation moments of my life was at the Officers Club in Okinawa.  I have a friend named Phil who was a full bird Colonel and who held something called “First Friday” in the club.  Every first Friday Phil would gather his gang which I somehow was allowed into even as a dirty civilian Tech Rep.  One night this table of high ranking officers begins talking about how haunted their houses are and begins describing the same exact things that I’ve been experiencing.   Because I’m the only non-uniform wearing guy in the bunch, or maybe just because I’m being silent, COL Phil asks me, “John, What do you think about all of this.”  My response was basically, “Two years ago I’d have said you guys were completely nuts but all this is happening to me too”.    Again, I was validated at this point and knew I wasn’t crazy.

It gets worse.

One morning I wake up and the living room in the old officers quarters was HUGE.  The door from the bedrooms was at least 30 feet from the door to the kitchen and it was a straight shot looking into the kitchen.  I woke up at 4 or 5 for coffee and the Stars and Stripes newspaper and when I popped on the lights in the living room, there in the door of the kitchen WAS A MAN.  And the man was juggling pots and pans or something in a weird and impossible way. It was more like levitation.  As soon as the light went on and I saw him he disappeared and there was a tremendous noise of crashing and clanging.  Scared the hell out of me.  Took me a minute or two to muster up the courage to go inspect.  There were no pots and pans, nothing was in disarray, the door on that side of the house was locked……no one was hiding anywhere.

So it’s at this point you sit down and start rationalizing.   Am I crazy?  Was I sleep walking and dreaming?  Is there some gas seeping up from the foundation which causes hallucinations?  It took me a few minutes and I settled on “I must have been sleepwalking and dreaming” and I set down to read my paper.   Here comes my daughter, who is 7 and is up a bit too early, and she walks up to me and says “Daddy, I think something is wrong with my eyes”, and she is rubbing her eyes.  I ask her what is wrong and she says “I think something is wrong with my eyes, I SEE A MAN IN THE KITCHEN”

Holy Fucking Shit.  Pardon my French.

It gets worse.  But I won’t waste more of your time but suffice to say I had an interaction with one of the little shadow bastards.  Anyway at this point I begin to explore the paranormal trying to figure out what this stuff is, and why it seems to be geographical.  I actually studied this hard and after a few years I came to the conclusion that the paranormal is DECEPTIVE and it is designed to draw you in.   If you see a shadow figure run in a closet, there is nothing in the closet.  If you hear a thump in the back room and you go there the thump happens in another room or above your head.  You never can quite catch it.  You can’t get straight answers out of it.  Don’t believe me, watch all the paranormal shows on TV and on the internet.

And worst of all, it isn’t from God.

There are a million paths AWAY from God.  New Age, Mysticism, Secret Societies, Aliens.  And these little ghosty bastards.

And once you can accept that there are forces that are the opposite of God, it should at least solidify the fact that there is a God.  If that doesn’t do it, Bible Prophecy should. I’ll try to keep this short and sweet but a rudimentary study of the Prophet Daniel or Isaiah or Ezekiel should be enough to at least make you scratch your head and go, “WOW”.  I’ll give a few quick examples.  Historically we know Israel was invaded by the Romans in 70 AD. And the Jewish people were scattered.  In Isaiah 66 it discusses the Nation of Israel being born in a day and in fact in May of 1948 the nation of Israel was born in a single day.  This starts the prophetic clock.

In Jeremiah and Zephaniah it basically states the the nation of Israel will again use their speech (Hebrew) which was a dead language.  The Hebrew language was indeed revived.  Never in the history of the earth has a country been destroyed, its citizens scattered and its dead language revived.  the Bible is not fiction.  One more.

Ezekiel 38.  Probably my favorite.  This one hasn’t happened but essentially there are some armies who invade Israel, to “take a spoil” but who end up getting defeated.  Who are the armies and alliances?

• Magog are the Scythians or people from the “-Stans”
• Rosh are the Russians
• Meshek and Tubal are modern day Turkey
• Persia – this is Iran
• Cush and Put are Ethiopia and the area of Sudan, also Libya
• Gomer and Beth Togarmah are Turkey

10, years ago, 20 years ago for sure you’d say that Ezekiel 38 couldn’t possibly happen.  The old Soviet Union is dead.  Russia and Iran……….meh.  Pick up some Middle East news reports and look at the military alliances in Syria.   Are the Russians, Iranians, and other Muslim countries there to the North and hating on the Nation of Israel?  You better bet they are.  This suddenly doesn’t seem like a fictional account of anything.  Again, if you were preaching hell fire and brimstone and that the end was near 50 years ago there was no way you could answer the questions of Ezekiel 38.  Heck, 75 years ago there wasn’t even a Nation of Israel to invade.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  There is no Israel, it is gone, and yet somehow the Bible says there is an Israel and Russia and Iran are going to attack it.   And now 2000 years later there IS an Israel and Russia and Iran (and others) are to the north in Syria and threatening to attack almost daily.

I can go on and on and on with the prophecies and archaeology that make me know this book is true but I won’t.  This is supposed to be about me being 60 but I did want to lay some background on how I came to believe in God.  It was mostly via studying the wrong side of God.

Anyway, back to those blessings.  I had a fantastic career in a high paying job that has afforded me the ability to not work in retirement at an age where most people are still having to work.  Work life was interesting and as a Civilian in direct support of the military lots of those military guys despised us and made no secret of it.  Fortunately, I was gifted with an “I don’t care” gene and I navigated those waters without too much strife.  Hey, for the most part I was a highly overpaid guy who lived in Asia for about 16 years.  When I did come back home to the US I had the ability to have a new house built, got my kid in a good school, and God placed a pretty little gal from Alabama right around the corner from me.

Her and I now have our own place in the country and we’re rolling up on our 1st Anniversary.  And while I am far removed geographically from my own remaining family, her family is still largely intact and nearby and they have been the perfect surrogate family for me.  Wonderful people who still send hand written cards and who pray before every meal and who also consequently seem to have an abundance of blessings from God.

At some point in this diatribe I thought I’d tell some funny Navy stories or just a general autobiography of the places I lived or how growing up in Indiana without cell phones or computers was AMAZING.  I hate it for the kids of today as social interaction occurs on a device mostly and not face to face.

But the fact is……..I don’t really want to look back.  Yeah, your past makes you who you are but the past is the past. I prefer to live for today with some hopes for a few more tomorrows.

It got a little God-centric in this blog and that’s okay by me. There’s not a single thing you could do to convince me there was no God.  It’s in your very DNA.  And that is DNA with millions of BITS of information which is also error correcting.  Anyone who takes even a rudimentary study of DNA will come to the conclusion that it wasn’t a cosmic accident.  And your DNA won’t cross over to other species.   So if we descended from tadpoles to apes ……… at what point did our DNA lock and say “You can’t do that anymore?”.

Answer:  It didn’t happen that way.

Yep, this blog entry went somewhere I didn’t expect at all.  I really did set out to tell a quick Bio but life is kind of like work.  People will tell you at work that what you do is important and how wonderful you are at it and sometimes they’ll slip you a framed piece of paper or a check telling you how wonderful you are.  And then the day you leave or retire you are promptly forgotten except for the occasional mention where people can blame stuff on you since you aren’t around to defend yourself anymore.

People who were your friends at work suddenly aren’t and that isn’t always because of personality.  Sometimes it is just geography and distance and lack of seeing each other.   It’s all good.  It’s a hell of a ride and sometimes you gotta bob AND weave.  Others have to bob and weave and move forward.  It is simply the way of life.

I figure life is kind of like a working career too.  Once you are gone you are somewhat forgotten while the rest of the world keeps on spinning as it should be.

What’s his name sang “Regrets, I’ve had a few…………”.  I don’t really have any.  I do recall telling my brother in law the other day that one regret I do have is not being able to recognize plants and trees, and animals.  All that beauty is placed before us and I have just taken it for granted and never taken the time I should have to learn more about it.   It is a complex CREATION around you.   I still have some time left to correct that error.

Sorry there was no tech here (except for error correcting DNA) but I’m a tad bit melancholy on my 60th and it just spilled out.  But somehow or another I made it to age 60.  Never did I ever think I’d get this far.