I discovered a wasp nest inside the exterior wall of our house, and I wondered what to do about it. Consulting the Internet, I learned the nest will die over the winter and I will be able to seal up the crack in the wall once they are gone.
As I read about the nest, I learned the cells of the nest contain grubs, or larvae. These larvae eventually metamorphose into adults to continue their life cycle.
It reminded me of my years at university, when I lived in a dormitory with many other students. We all lived in our rooms while the school fed us information. I chuckled at the comparison.
The dormitory was very large, and it was divided into numerous 'houses' of about fifty people each. The name of my house was LaMaison de Gaite. I shared a room with two other young men, number 557 on the fifth floor. There were three of us crammed into a space designed for only two; we were 'Baby Boomers'.
At the beginning of my sophomore year, my housemates decided they did not like the name of the house, and they morphed it into LaMaison Maggots. (I will leave it to you to figure out how they came up with that. It was rather sophomoric.) I did not personally come up with the larval name, but I did my part to help cement it into usage. Many years later, my daughter knew of a guy who went to that school, and I believe he lived in the same hallway. It was still known as the maggot house.
This experience helped me realize that school dormitories are like a wasp nest. We live there and are fed with information, and when we have matured we fly away to work as adults. I smiled when I realized that graduates in gowns are like pupae. Somehow, I don't think this is a coincidence.
Many people are waking up to the fact that we all live in a very structured world that is designed to use our labor to produce wealth. That wealth always flows upward to the few individuals who sit at the very apex of the system. We are simply workers, and have no more value to them than insects.
I was trained to be a chemical engineer, and I eventually did my part to create and build facilities so the owners could make money. I enjoyed it and found it rewarding, but that didn't make me any less of a 'worker wasp'. As I am now retired, the fruits of my labor are owned by the corporation I worked for, which is ultimately owned and controlled by those at the apex. Sure, I got paid, and I am currently living off of my pension, since that was the arrangement. But, in the end, they own it all and I have nothing. I even sold them the rights to the single patent application I was a part of.
In order to control the masses, the system must corral and control, and it must program the individual workers to maintain loyalty and suitable behaviors. This means there must be supervisors, managers, directors, executives and other layers of hierarchy, which are so prevalent in our modern society. These structures are everywhere, and we don't even notice them. Like the dormitory.
In my later years as an engineer, I realized most of what I had learned at university was of no practical use. The professors got all excited about complex equations and formulae, but those things did not help me to do my job. I did learn about chemistry and that Bernoulli's equation was useful for properly sizing a pump, but my real learning started when I actually had to figure out if temperature of a feed stream had any effect on the performance of a particular chemical reactor. At that point, what I really needed was someone who knew what they were doing, and who could show me what to do. I needed a mentor.
Over the years, I found and learned from several mentors. I also made mistakes and learned from them. Later, when I was a "gray beard," the company I worked for started an apprenticeship program for about twenty new engineers. I got to mentor some of them. It worked very well, and then after two years every single one of them left the company and found better paying jobs, mostly in Texas.
My conclusion was that mentoring and apprenticeships work much better than structured schooling, if the goal is to teach and learn, but apprenticeships cannot be controlled. They are inherently independent of large hierarchical structures, and 'the bosses' don't want that. The Head Boss can't control things that way.
Jesus came to show us how it's done, and He used apprenticeship as his model. This allows the Holy Spirit to work with each individual and cater for their individual needs, circumstances and responsibilities. It is why we need to be Apprentices of Jesus, and to teach others to do the same.
We are created to know God and to follow Him. Jesus shows us the way. We are not to be part of a hive. We are worth far more than that.
All glory to God.
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UPDATE, August 14, 2022...
This morning, I have been thinking about things, ...as usual 😉 ..., and want to share some of my thoughts here.
Those who have looked into our actual history know that America has been controlled by the U.S. Military since the so-called American Civil War in the 1860's. One of the things the military has done is establish the public school systems around the country. The military continues to control those schools to this day, although most people do not realize it. (See the updates to my Authority post for some detailed discussion about this. There are also over 3700 articles about it at https://annavonreitz.com.)
One of the features of those schools is "yearbooks." Most of the students and their parents elect to have the child's picture in the annual book, and those pictures are grouped together alphabetically by "class." Most schools facilitate the provision and distribution of the yearbooks, and they are available for purchase by each student's family. Most kids get them. I remember us all getting our yearbooks each year and we had our friends write in them for posterity. It was always a lot of fun, and I especially liked having a picture of the various 'crushes' I had over the years.
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The contents of many high school yearbooks have shown up on the Internet. They are great resources for doing genealogy and family history. People also bring their yearbooks to reunions and it helps people remember who was who.
This all creates relationships and bonds some people together, although many students do not get involved or keep in touch. Based on the numbers I heard at my reunion this weekend, roughly 10% of our class showed up. (It actually was quite close to 11%, which somehow doesn't surprise me.)
I was perusing through my copy of my graduating class yearbook this morning so I could match youthful faces with older faces and I realized yearbooks are tools of the Darkness. They create bonds between people outside of natural families. They are part of the programming we all received to weaken our family relationships and strengthen conformance and submission to perceived authorities. That is what the whole public school system is about: taking children out of their God-ordained family relationships and programming them to be part of 'the machine.'
I am sure my classmates would probably scoff at and reject my realizations here, but I am afraid that is what is really going on.
The system takes children from their parents at very young ages and begins programming them. Part of that programming is to accept having their pictures taken and shared with their classmates. I still have all of my elementary school class photos. The early ones are a group photo with the teacher. Later ones are individual photos grouped together along with a photo of the teacher. We were taught to revere and respect our teachers, and to accept what they told us without question. This continued through intermediate (middle) school and on into high school. This ultimately created relationships with our classmates in our minds.
I have observed I really do not have anything in common with my school classmates. The personalities of some people may revel in those relationships, but not mine. I had two close friends during my public school days, and I had about the same number in college. I am not really in touch with any of them now. As I have been following Yeshua, I have left all of those relationships behind. I am finding new brothers and sisters in Him, and that is the way it is supposed to be.
UPDATE, August 24, 2022...
Soon after I left my corporate engineering job in 2001, I started volunteering my time at Midland Community Television (MCTV). I wanted to pursue film-making and could gain practical experience by using their equipment. The only stipulation was any content I produced had to be run on their network for a period of time.
Anybody who lived in Midland could make programs, and some people regularly produced their own shows. Back then (2001 - 2008) the shows could only be viewed on local cable television, but today there are multiple outlets, including the Internet. I served as crew for many people, but never produced any shows myself. At the time, my motto was: "Give to those who ask" (Matthew 5:42), and once people knew I was available, they did.
I had a lot of fun and encountered many people and places I would never have experienced if I had stayed in my engineering job. I tend to be a 'behind the scenes' kind of guy so I was usually a cameraman. I also learned about lighting, color balancing, audio, audio mixing, and technical directing. During a tennis tournament I directed part of the show, which ended up being more nerve-wracking than it was worth. One time I got to cue Midland's mayor to start a forum in a large auditorium about a significant environmental issue. My proudest moment came shortly after I had returned to work for my original employer. One of my new colleagues raved about the coverage of a thrilling, out-of-town, state championship semi-final football game, and I got to tell him I had run the primary action-camera for that event.
Most of the editing for those shows was done in real time, and any post-production had to be done with a linear editor, which is basically a glorified tape recorder. I wanted to do non-linear editing so I purchased some computer equipment and Apple's Final Cut Pro (version 4).
Gentrification of Downtown Midland included a new, professional baseball stadium and a team to play there. MCTV covered a number of the games and they liked my camerawork. The Stadium gave us press passes and we enjoyed hospitality in the press-box before games.
The Stadium hosted a special All-Star Game and one of the local commercial television stations wanted to cover it live, but they did not have an appropriately equipped trailer. MCTV did. The MCTV manager negotiated with the station and let them use the trailer, provided MCTV volunteers were used as the crew for the event. I got to run camera for a live TV production, and I got a cool hat out of the deal, too. I was back working as an engineer at the time and when I went into the chemical plant office wearing that hat I got at least one double-take. I guess I looked like the Media, who would not have been allowed in without an escort.
Some of those productions started to seem like work to me, and I started thinking I should be getting paid for my efforts, expertise, and time. As I think about the whole experience, I realize "volunteers" working for "non-profit organizations" are really just employees who don't get paid properly. They are really cheap slaves who provide their own sustenance and billeting. They cost nothing, except for a couple slices of pizza and a plastic cup of soda. Notice how the City of Midland gets volunteers to produce content for their government and schools channels.
Jesus tells us to sell our possessions and give to the poor so we will have treasure in heaven. Once we have emptied ourselves of everything, He wants us to follow Him and rely on the Father to provide for all of our needs. That is what He and his disciples (apprentices) did, and that is what we are called to do.
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The latter is called being a SLAVE of men.