Merry Christmas. May you and yours have a blessed holiday season, regardless of how you celebrate Christmas. Our family Christmas was last Saturday. We had half as many people as we typically do thanks to COVID, the flu, a band trip to Florida, and a recent move by one of our sons to Florida. That said, we had a wonderful time.
Yesterday, our youngest daughter’s fiancé had a massive stroke and is in the ICU. They removed the breathing tube today, and he is able to talk a bit. All the damage is to his left side, and it remains to be seen whether he will make a full recovery. We hope he does. John, age 41, is a fine man, and he makes our daughter happy, so that’s enough for us.
Enjoy the season. I know it’s hard to do with the menace currently inhabiting the White House, but we must not let the Orange Menace (Satan for Christians) rob us of our happiness and joy. I know, easier said than done.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I rarely mention how readers can financially support my work. I have a hard time asking for money. This goes back to my preaching days when I had an aversion to “begging” congregants to give money to the church. I never wanted to be a money-grubbing preacher. That said, it does cost me money to operate this site. I determined from the start that I would not beg readers for money; I would pay for running the site, and if I reached a place where I could no longer do so, I would stop blogging. Fortunately, year after year enough donations come in to pay site expenses and provide a little bit extra for me to make a payment two on my Lear Jet.
How to Make A Donation
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2025 is coming to a close, and I want to take a moment to thank everyone who financially supported me in 2025. Your continued support is greatly appreciated. You should have received a “thank you” email from me. If you didn’t, please let me know so I have an updated email address for you.
Most readers never make a contribution, and I don’t expect them to do so. That said, donations and monthly payments are always appreciated. While I am not getting rich off of this blog, donations do help, so I appreciate every dollar I receive.
Be well.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I’ve had a rough couple of days. My OCPD is on overload. As you know, I moved this site to a new host. Everything was working as it should be until yesterday. In recent years, I have used Gmail addresses to administer this blog. Thanks to Google blocking these addresses, I had to set up a domain email address: bruce@brucegerencser.net. This forced me to change and add records to my DNS records, contact support twice, and add an SMTP plugin to handle sending email. As of now, everything “seems” to be working. I have successfully received test comment notifications and contact form emails. I still have a problem to fix with WordPress.com, but after waiting two hours on chat, I gave up. Maybe tomorrow.
Please let me know if you see anything amiss. If you emailed me or commented before I fixed things, I may not have received it. If not, please send/post them again.
Thank you for your understanding.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Some of you may remember that I moved from Hostinger to Rocket as the host for this site. Up until two days ago, everything worked as it should. But then, I started having problems with receiving contact form submissions and comment notifications. I contacted Rocket support, only to find out that they can’t fix the problem; that the real issue was that Google decided to block the use of Gmail accounts to “send” the emails. Fixing this problem requires me to have a domain email address (i.e. xxx@brucegerencser.net instead of xxx@gmail.com) which Rocket cannot provide since they don’t provide email service for hosted domains. So, on to SiteGround.
The site was moved tonight, so it may take a day for everything to propagate worldwide. If you notice any bugs or quirks, please let me know so I can — if possible — fix them. So far, everything works, but I have no doubt that there is a bug lurking in the shadows, waiting to bite me. 🙂
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I am beyond embarrassed over how far I’m behind on responding to emails, text messages, and sending out thank you notes to financial supporters. I will try to get caught up in the month of December. Until then, let me say THANK YOU for your continued support.
Regular readers know that my writing production has dropped off over the past year. If you see that I haven’t posted lately, it is because I can’t. My spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak. Outside of attending concerts, school events, and occasionally eating out, I am pretty much homebound. I have noticed of late that my recovery after an outing is taking a lot longer — often days longer.
For new readers, I have a lot of serious health problems: gastroparesis (uncurable), exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (uncurable), osteoarthritis, peripheral neuropathy in my legs and feet, fibromyalgia, and degenerative spine disease. An MRI in 2021 revealed widespread damage to my spine and neck:
Disc herniation (T7,T8)
Disc herniation (T6,T7)
Central spinal canal stenosis (T9/T10, T10/T11)
Foraminal stenosis (T5,T6)
Disc degeneration/spondylosis (T1/T2 through T10/T11)
Facet Arthropathy throughout the spine, particularly at T2/T3, T3/T4, T5/T6, and T7/T8 through the T12/L1 levels.
Hypertrophic arthropathy at T9/T10
I had surgery on my spine a year ago, and now it looks like I will have to have surgery again. I have an MRI scheduled for Friday. This should reveal what is causing insufferable pain in my lower back and whehter it can be surgically fixed. Regardless, chronic, unrelenting pain is ever with me, and, thanks to the government’s incessant war on narcotic pain medications, my pain is no longer well-managed. I need twice the medication I currently take, but no doctor (including local pain management doctors) is willing to prescribe it. I am using an increasing amoung of cannabis that helps, but the only thing that reduces my pain to a whisper is sufficient narcotic pain medications (I am taking half the amount I took ten years ago). And please, if you want to keep your head on your shoulders, no unsolicted medical advice. I know my body quite well — what works and doesn’t work. I know many of you care, but all I ask from you is your kindness and support. I have come to terms with the fact that this is my new lot in life, and unless Jesus shows up and divinely heals me, one or more of the diseases that afflict me will eventually kill me; that is if I don’t die from falling (an increasing problem, for me).
Every day of my life is dominated by unrelenting pain, along with stomach and bowel problems. Life is a challenge, to say the least. Nights are the worst, often taking hours, upon hours for me to finally fall asleep, only to wake up again two or three hours later. I sleep when and how I can, but I am NEVER rested. When you see me publish an article, leave a comment, or respond to an email at 5:00 am, you will know I am unable to sleep.
I appreciate your love, care, and understanding. I will continue to write until I can no longer do so. So far, I have been able to keep writing, but there will be days when I cannot sit up let alone type a new post.
Saved by Reason,
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I rarely mention money in my writing, so no complaints that I am turning into a money-grubbing Evangelical preacher. 🙂 Until I can pay CASH for a new Learjet, I am poor and need your donations. 🙂 I have always operated under the notion, Freely give, freely receive. That said, it does take money to operate this blog. Further, to quote the Bible, The laborer is worthy of his hire (1 Timothy 5:18, Luke 10:7). Any money you send my way is greatly appreciated.
Donations are always welcome. You may donate in one of three ways:
Snail mail (Bruce Gerencser, PO Box 183, Ney, Ohio 43549)
Patreon (This is best for making recurring donations.)
PayPal (This is best for single or recurring donations.)
Keep in mind I must pay taxes on every donation I receive. This reduces every donation by at least 20%.
Whether you can send money my way or not, you are always welcome on this blog. My goal has never been to make money off this site, but I do appreciate every donation, big or small. Over the years, I have received one-time donations as large as $1,000 and as small as a dollar. All of it spends, right? I spent much of my life listening to preachers beg for money, even when they didn’t need it. You will not see such behavior from me. I will shutter this site before I have to resort to panhandling for Satan. 🙂
My partner, Polly, and I are facing a short-term financial problem. First, we have not yet recovered financially from both of us having major surgery in 2024. Polly was off work for almost three months, and this led to increased credit use.
Second, Polly started receiving Social Security last year, while still working. This led to a $6,000 overpayment, which she now has to pay back. Under Biden, we only had to pay ten percent of her check amount until the overage was paid in full. Trump raised the repayment percentage to fifty percent! Now that hurts a bit. 🙁 Polly could apply for a reduced repayment percentage, but the government requires an intrusive amount of information about your finances, including account numbers. I told Polly, “We can’t trust the government with all this information,” so we will have to cut both our discretionary and non-discretionary spending. We can do it, as we have for most of our lives.
Thank you for your kindness and support.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
For many years, this blog was hosted by Flywheel (which was bought out by WP Engine). I later moved this site to Hostinger, which later proceeded to dramatically raise the rate I was paying for hosting. I decided to move back to Flywheel, paying $30 a month for hosting. I was notified by Flywheel last week that, unbeknownst to me, this blog’s traffic numbers had dramatically increased, and I would have to move to a more expensive package — as in $300 a month!
This forced me to find another host. Rocket is my new service provider, costing $60 a month. Hopefully, I won’t have to mess with this again. I know, I know, false hope. 🙂
Let me know if you have any problems reading or commenting on this site. I am hopeful that I can focus on writing instead of messing with technical stuff. I am beyond worn out. 🙁
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Yesterday, I switched this site’s service provider from Hostinger back to my previous provider, Flywheel. It typically takes 24-72 hours for a site to propagate worldwide. As of the writing of this post, a handful of DNS routers are unchanged. Until this site propagates worldwide, you may face intermittent error messages saying the site is inaccessible.
If you see any errors or hiccups, please let me know. You might need to flush your device’s DNS cache and/or restart your device.
Thank you for your support.
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