Rich Wisely

Disciple. Husband. Father. Pastor. Friend. “Where one man reads the Bible, a hundred read you and me.” - D. L. Moody

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

After the loss of @charliekirk11 one of the most common positive comments I’ve seen repeated, especially by @MrsErikaKirk in her powerful message last night, is encouraging people to go to church— especially this Sunday.

At the prompting of my wife, @YoMelToo I’ve compiled a guide to help those who may not know where to begin.

Hope this is helpful to some, and continued prayers a to the family and friends of @charliekirk11, the @TPUSA staff, and the youth that loved Charlie so.

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

I actually wasn't trying to correct you per se. I love the NorCal Coast (and our military) so I just wanted to make sure that those who saw your post didn't dismiss how cool that part of the country actually is (present leadership in that State notwithstanding).

Have a great day, and thanks for the reply!

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

@GuntherEagleman Love these. NC, not CA.

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

@Sassypants1948 @GuntherEagleman Different Fort Brag. Common mistake. Lots of great places to eat and check out in town and nearby there. Mendocino just down the road is amazing. Cheers!

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

Assuming you’re using “homeopathy” as a jab for dilution/weakening (rather than some positive “natural therapy” angle), the analogy still misses the mark.
Protestantism isn’t the homeopathy of Christianity — it’s the distillation. The Reformation scraped away centuries of accumulated human traditions and returned to the pure apostolic faith of Scripture.
Sola Scriptura, sola fide, solus Christus. The gospel wasn’t diluted; it was recovered and clarified for the people.
What exactly do you see as the “dilution”?

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

Wifey and I traveled the entire lower 48, 2014-2015.

This was the back of our trailer.

[80's & 90's Throwbacks @80s90sJukebox]

Ferris Bueller took his "Day Off" 41 years ago today. June 5th 1985. Happy Ferris Bueller Day #80s

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

Thank you @WesleyLHuff for the clarity of your position, and faithfulness to the text. Keep up the outstanding work!

[Wes Huff @WesleyLHuff]

Seeing some response to my statement on @MikhailaFuller's podcast about speaking in tongues. Some potentially helpful clarification:

First, I am not a cessationist (though I see myself being accused of it). I state in the interview that I believe that the spiritual sign gifts (tongues, prophesy, healing) still take place today, just not normatively like they were in the Apostolic era.

Nonetheless, I hold to the standard exegetical position that biblical tongues refer to known languages. In Acts 2, the foundational instance, foreign speakers understood the disciples in their own native languages, establishing the clearest precedent for interpreting the phenomenon throughout Scripture.

Secondly, while bliblical specialists and theologians debate whether tongues encompass human languages alone or include angelic speech, the consensus recognizes that a tongue functions as a language -- either immediately intelligible to hearers or requiring interpretation. The requirement that Paul places on interpretation in 1 Corinthians 14 indicates that tongues contain objective, propositional meaning subject to translation, and his statement that “every valid instance of tongues contains intrinsic, propositional meaning" reinforces this understanding.

A prominent scholarly argument identifies glossolalia as “the miraculous ability to speak unlearned human and (possibly) divine or angelic languages,” with the most common usage of “tongues” referring to ordinary human languages. The term γλῶσσα throughout the NT carries two primary meanings: the human organ or a human language, and careful word studies demonstrate that it never denotes non-cognitive utterance.

However, scholarly consensus isn’t absolute the core agreement across interpretations centers on cognitive content: tongues communicate meaningful, intelligible information rather than incoherent utterance.

Third, the early church evidence after the Apostolic era is virtually unanimous: the Early Church Fathers consistently interpreted the gift of tongues as the capacity to speak the many languages used across the earth. Their writings indicate the gift served an evangelistic purpose enabling communication with non-Christian populations.

The Patristics universally understood “tongues” in Acts and 1 Corinthians to refer to human languages, and ancient Christians understood the biblical gift of tongues as a miracle involving intelligible human languages. When the fathers described the phenomenon, they used concrete language: John Chrysostom wrote that believers “would suddenly speak in Persian, another in Latin, another in the language of the Indians or of some other people” (Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 35), and Augustine stated that disciples “spoke in the languages of all the nations” (Sermon 269, Sermo CCLXIX.

The most significant, and almost exclusive, early figure associated with ecstatic speech for tongues was Montanus, a 2nd-century prophet whose followers emphasized speaking in tongues; he was actually excommunicated (not necessarily for his position on tongues) around AD 177. By the late 2nd century, ecstatic interpretations of tongues were present but only in context of ecclesiastical concern.

One interesting nuance appears with Philastrius in the 4th century, who understood angels as capable of conversing in all languages and believed the apostles received this same ability at Pentecost. However, this doesn’t represent a departure from the “knowable language” framework rather, the Early Church Fathers understood the gift of tongues as the ability to speak all languages spoken by people. The Church Fathers agreed the gift was the ability to speak all languages known to humankind, an ability they ascribed to angels, suggesting the “languages of angels” would not refer to a distinct heavenly language but rather to the capacity to communicate with anyone encountered.

The historical record shows no discussion among the fathers of ecstatic utterances, unknown languages, or supernatural unintelligible speech. The gift remained firmly anchored to practical, learnable human languages throughout Patristic interpretation.

So if you've stuck around this long, I think my position is both exegetically and historically sound.

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

@BrianRoemmele @elonmusk Jesus loves me. Brian seems to agree. I'm in, and back at ya!

Thanks for all of the outstanding content — always thought provoking and encouraging amid oceans of "meh." Bless you!

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

Loved this! My takeaway: The desire for connection is a universal force, like gravity.

Also, killer writing.

Phone # follow-up story is cool, too.

Thanks for sharing @BrianRoemmele — I'm continually blessed by your historical and technical expertise, and instruction on wise use thereof.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

“Call: [phone] for a good time in Mojave!”

I first discovered the number in 1976, deep in my phone-phreaking days, when the world still hummed along copper wires and every tone held a secret.

Back then, long-distance calls were adventures, not obligations.

I would chase the faint ring across the continent just to hear it ring, once, twice, a dozen times, out in the middle of nowhere.

That lone phone became my quiet obsession, a single silver thread stretched across the empty desert, promising that no matter how isolated you felt, someone, somewhere, might pick up and change everything.

By the mid-1980s I was attending Comdex in Las Vegas, the air thick with the scent of new circuit boards and cigarette smoke, the future of computing crackling on every booth.

One afternoon I slipped away from the neon sprawl, rented a beat-up sedan, and drove east into the Mojave.

The road unspooled like a ribbon of heat, and after an hour the city lights vanished behind me. There it stood: the phone, solitary and gleaming under a merciless sun, exactly as I had imagined it for years.

A few dozen people had already made camp nearby, tents pitched in the sand, campfires flickering at dusk, strangers drawn by the same myth that had pulled me there.

I joined them for a night, sharing stories under the stars, and when the phone finally rang I was the one who answered. The voice on the other end belonged to a woman driving cross-country from Maine.

She laughed when I told her my story, and for 20 minutes the desert felt smaller than my living room.

That call was only the beginning. Over the decades I dialed the number, from payphones in airports, from college dorms, from the back of tour buses and, later, from the quiet of my own office late at night.

Sometimes I would let it ring twenty, thirty times just to hear the wind answer. Other times it connected instantly, and I would talk with whoever had been lucky enough to reach it, truckers on midnight runs, teenagers daring each other, dreamers and drifters and poets.

Each conversation was a small romance, brief, unexpected, charged with the thrill of pure chance.

One voice, though, stayed with me. A man named Alex picked up one rainy evening in 1987. We talked for over an hour about circuits and code and the strange poetry of connecting people who would never otherwise meet. By the end of that call we had sketched the outlines of a business. For the next ten years we built a small business few know I had. All legal and boring but fun.

The phone taught me something profound: connection is not about proximity. It is about the promise that someone is always willing to answer.

That lesson lit a fire in me. In the late eighties I began installing payphones of my own, at one time thousands of them, scattered across the country like new constellations.

I placed them in airports where travelers needed one last good-bye, in remote mountain towns where the only signal was hope, and along lonely highways where the night felt endless.

Some of those phones still stand today, weathered but working, their receivers warm from decades of voices.

A few I have quietly upgraded with Wi-Fi hotspots, so the old copper lines now run to a Starlink station to the sky….

The desert taught me the value of keeping doors open, and I have never stopped.

Even now, decades later, I still dial that updated number [phone] was area code updated to now: [phone]. It is run by an enthusiast. He will text you:

“Booth apocalypse
Their skeletons haunt the night
Graffiti sermon”

The line may be now a party line these days, but the ethos remains.

In my mind the phone still rings out across the sand, a silver beacon under the same stars that once watched me camp beside it.

It reminds me that every great connection begins with a single, improbable ring, and sometimes the most beautiful stories start when you are willing to drive into the desert just to see who answers.

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

@Tanju_mim Thanks for posting! Some of things I'm cooking up with these prompts are blowing my mind — in a good way. Kudos!

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

Tell me you didn't just watch this with your mouth dropped open... Incredible footage. Yay, GoPro!

[GoPro @GoPro]

We didn't see this one coming either. 🦅

Take in a different kind of wingsuit view from #GoProSnow Challenge award recipient Justin Labattu.

Think your snow content will surprise us? Submit your unedited photos + videos to https://t.co/NtqCJ7gGyl. 💰

@GoProFr #GoPro

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

Sign me up. Just once. That's it.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Over 400 KM per hour on the Autobahn!?

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).

Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.

Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.

Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.

Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.

Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.

Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.

C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.

Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.

Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.

Alors pardon. Et au travail.

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

@revivalistross That was some great testimony. Love what you do. If you're coming through Phoenix, I know a few folks that might turn out to cover you in prayer.

Keep it up, brother. Your boldness and obedience to the Spirit is inspiring others in the fight more than you might realize.

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

@howertonjosh What you are describing is why I am pastoring a house church right now. Didn't see it coming. Wasn't my plan. Don't know what's next. Don't care. Just come to Jesus, man. Just. Come.

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

@LndamyDark Just read Genesis 11… Yup, happened just like this!

[William Shatner @WilliamShatner]

Some people use the Force… 🤨 I prefer a well-timed toast and a five-year mission. 🥂
May the Fourth be with you… if you must but let’s be honest; I’ve been boldly going since before it was cool. 😉🚀

[Harrison Ford @HarrisonFordLA]

May the fourth be with you

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

OK, you all know that I don’t post up nonsense, but the song below I just had to share. I defy you not to start stomping and singing hallelujah when this dude gets rolling!

[🇺🇸 /RICK/ 🇺🇸 @Rickbarmore]

Enjoy this song! I really did ❤️🙏🛐😁

[Rich Wisely @richwisely]

@Rickbarmore Great song! Jumped up and headed to church… On a Saturday!