Preparation
The Wall That Never Got Built
There is always money to fix it. There has never been money to prevent it.
Almost every day I take a one-mile walk from my house up through a park near my home in Sparks, Nevada. It gets my blood moving and my thoughts organized. It is a nice walk through a nice park, and for twenty years it has been part of my routine.
Running through that park is a creek bed that stays dry most of the year. Then we get a thunderstorm, and it doesn’t. Usually the water spills over, runs down the bike path, and makes its way to the Truckee River without doing much harm. But every so often it comes down hard and turns into the schoolyard next door. One year it caused a couple hundred thousand dollars in damage.
There is a drain in the middle of that schoolyard. It never fully drains. Debris plugs it, or something else goes wrong, and the water sits there doing its work.
I have watched this happen for more than twenty years. Every year the creek overflows to some degree. Several times it has flooded that schoolyard.
So every time I see the parks crew out there cleaning up after a flash flood, I ask them the same question. Why not build a short brick wall to keep the water out of the schoolyard?
They shrug. They tell me they don’t know.
We are not talking about an engineering marvel. A low wall, maybe twenty thousand dollars, and the problem goes away. Set that against repairing a school building. It isn’t close. And yet nobody can tell me why it hasn’t been done.
Just the other day, after another flash flood pushed water into the schoolyard, I ran into a woman who works for the school district. I asked her the same questions. Why won’t anyone fund this? What is the holdup? Why does this keep happening?
She said, “I don’t get it either. It makes so much sense. They just don’t work that way.”
They just don’t work that way.
What That Sentence Actually Means
Let me be upfront about something. I have never worked in government. I have never worked in a school system. I am not going to pretend to be an expert on either one. What I can tell you is that after watching this for two decades, I am certain something is wrong with how the money moves.
Government does not think like a business. A business owner spends money to prevent loss. He puts in the sprinkler system before the fire. He fixes the loose railing before somebody falls. He installs the cameras before the inventory walks out the back door. He does these things because he understands that prevention is the cheapest thing on the menu, and because the alternative comes out of his own pocket.
Government does not operate under that pressure. The money is not theirs. The loss is not theirs. And so the wall never gets built, and the school gets repaired again, and everyone goes home.
One of our local high schools recently received a ninety million dollar grant to refurbish it. The building is about fifty years old and it needs work. I am not arguing that. But ninety million dollars? For that money you could level the site and build a brand new school with money left over. Where does ninety million dollars go in a refurbishment?
The Same Pattern, A Different Industry
Once you see this, you start seeing it everywhere.
Take medicine. I do not know of a system in this country that pays meaningfully for preventing disease. There is very little money in keeping you from getting cancer, or diabetes, or kidney failure. There is enormous money in treating you after you have it. Endless programs, endless coverage, endless billing codes for the cure. Almost nothing for the prevention.
Why?
Here is the honest answer, and it is uncomfortable. When someone is in pain, they will pay anything to make it stop. When they are not in pain, they will pay almost nothing to keep it from starting. That is human nature, and there is an entire economy built on top of it.
Hold onto that sentence. It is going to matter a great deal before we are finished.
Maybe part of it is simple overwhelm. There are endless things that could go wrong, you can’t prevent all of them, so why try to prevent any? I understand the logic. I don’t accept it.
Why I Take This Personally
I spent five years dealing with a serious heart problem. Five years of scans, tests, procedures, and specialists. In all that time, not one person looked for a cause. I finally asked my cardiologist directly what was behind it.
He told me it was bad luck.
I asked if it was genetic. No. Disease? No. Just bad luck.
What I eventually found was that I had spent years sitting a few feet away from my Wi-Fi router, hours a day. I changed that, and things changed for me. When I brought it back to my doctors, they were not interested. They told me they had never read anything like it. I told them I didn’t much care what they had read, or who had paid for what they had read. I had lived it, and I have tested it on myself many times since.
I wrote a whole book about that experience called Too Close: A Heart Patient’s Unexpected Discovery About Wi-Fi. I am not against Wi-Fi. I am against sitting on top of one for years at a stretch. Proximity and duration were the issue for me.
That is a side road, and I know it. But it is the same story as the wall. Nobody was looking upstream. Everybody was billing downstream.
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What This Has To Do With The First Horseman
Some of you are wondering what any of this has to do with Donald Trump or with a website about the first horseman of Revelation. Stay with me.
When Trump first ran, I had a list of seventeen Republican candidates and he was at the bottom of mine. Two things pulled him up. First, he was a businessman and not a politician. Second, he talked about the border when nobody else would. Once he won the primary, I gave him my full support, because I had started to understand what was actually happening in this country.
A businessman runs a preventative operation. That is the entire point. And what Nick Shirley and others have been uncovering over the past couple of years is exactly what you would expect to find when nobody has been minding the store for decades. Fraud. Waste. Money flowing out of channels that should never have existed in the first place. Billions of dollars leaving the treasury with no accountability behind it.
Then the same people who built that system turn around and blame the deficit on the man who is exposing it.
We need to run this government the way a serious business owner runs his company. Prevent waste before it happens. Cut out fraud at the source. Prosecute theft and treason instead of managing them. Repeal unconstitutional laws and dismantle the bureaucracies built on them. Stop treating governance as a disaster response system that only opens the checkbook after the water is already in the building.
That is the shift. From cleanup to prevention.
Now let me turn the same question on us.
The Preparation We Were Commanded To Make
From the earliest days of the Restoration, the Lord told His people to be self-reliant. This was never presented as a personality trait for the ambitious or a hobby for the rural. It was the design of the whole thing:
“That through my providence, notwithstanding the tribulation which shall descend upon you, that the church may stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world.”
Doctrine and Covenants 78:14
Independent. Above all other creatures beneath the celestial world. That is the standard we were given, and we were given it in 1832, before there was a single grain silo or welfare farm anywhere in the Church.
The Babylonian system is built on the exact opposite premise. It runs on dependency. It needs you carrying a balance, needs your pantry three days deep, needs your income to arrive on Friday or the whole structure of your life wobbles. A self-reliant family is a family that can say no, and a system built on your compliance has no use for people who can say no. I have written about how that system actually operates in Babylon the Great: The Economic System Behind the Name.
And we have been told from the beginning how the story ends. Babylon does not negotiate a soft landing. Babylon falls:
“And also the Lord shall have power over his saints, and shall reign in their midst, and shall come down in judgment upon Idumea, or the world.”
Doctrine and Covenants 1:36
The Lord was plain about what we were to do in the meantime. Go out from her. Get clear of her. Stop building your life on a foundation you have been told is scheduled for demolition.
“Go ye out from Babylon. Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord.”
Doctrine and Covenants 133:5
So what did we do with that instruction?
We bought the biggest house the bank would approve. We financed the nicest car the monthly payment would allow. We took the trip that photographed well. We put on the wedding that cost as much as a down payment, for a couple who then started their marriage owing money on a party. We stretched to the edge of what we could carry, and then we stretched a little past it, because everyone around us was doing the same thing and it looked normal.
We were warned about this too, and not gently:
“Pay off debt as quickly as you can, and free yourselves from bondage.” That was President Gordon B. Hinckley in the priesthood session of October 1998 general conference, in To the Boys and to the Men. He told the men of the Church that the time had come to put their houses in order, and he pointed to Pharaoh’s dream of seven full years followed by seven lean ones as the pattern to have in mind. That was twenty-eight years ago.
I am not standing above anybody on this. I have made my own version of these mistakes and I am still working out from under some of them. But I have stopped pretending I did not know better.
Why People Will Take the Mark
Here is where the whole thing comes together, and it is the part I most want you to sit with.
We know what is coming. It is written down. It is not obscure:
“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
Revelation 13:17
Buy or sell. That is groceries. That is fuel. That is the pharmacy and the electric bill and the mortgage. This is not a philosophical loyalty oath administered in a courtroom where you get to make a principled speech. It is a checkout line. It is the moment the card gets declined and the man behind the counter shrugs at you the way the parks crew shrugs at me. I have laid out the mechanics of it in The Mark of the Beast: Why Preparation Is Not Optional.
Now go back and pick up that sentence I asked you to hold onto.
When someone is in pain, they will pay anything to make it stop.
The people who take that mark are not going to be villains, most of them. They are going to be ordinary people on the third day of an empty refrigerator with children in the next room asking when dinner is. They will not be persuaded. They will not be argued into it. They will be starving, and a system will offer them food on one condition, and they will take it the way a man in pain takes whatever the doctor hands him.
They will hand over their allegiance for a grocery run. And they will tell themselves it is temporary.
That is what a lack of preparation actually costs. It does not cost you money. Money is the small part. It costs you the ability to refuse. A man with a year of food and no debt can say no. A man with four days of food and a payment due Friday cannot, and every honest person knows it about himself.
So every dollar of debt you clear right now is a dollar of leverage that system will never get to use on you. Every shelf you fill is a day you get to keep your agency. That is not fear talking. That is arithmetic.
We are living in the years of plenty. This is the cheap part. This is the twenty thousand dollar wall.
The Prevention That Matters Most
Enforcing our immigration laws and cutting out unconstitutional bureaucracy is the beginning of the work. It is not the end of it.
The next thing we have to do is turn to God.
We have to become a people worthy of His protection, and that is a higher bar than most of us have been aiming at. I wrote about what that actually requires in The Covenant Almost No One Is Ready to Live. This is His land. America was established, in part, so that the New Jerusalem could be built here. The Founders understood that they were doing something under divine direction, and they said so in their own writings. They were building a government capable of preparing the way for the coming of Jesus Christ.
We have drifted a long way from that.
The New Jerusalem is not a metaphor and it is not a distant hope. The Lord named the place:
“Behold, the place which is now called Independence is the center place; and a spot for the temple is lying westward, upon a lot which is not far from the courthouse.”
Doctrine and Covenants 57:3
Independence, Missouri. Jackson County. The Lord said it plainly in 1831 and He has not revised it since. The old Jerusalem will be rebuilt as well, and the city of Enoch will return to the earth. But the center place of Zion is here, on this continent, in this country.
That is why the condition of this nation matters so much right now. A city like that does not get built in a country that has lost its footing. The ground has to be prepared first.
We Are In The Preparation
Here is what I want you to understand, and it is the heart of everything I write about.
None of the seven seals of Revelation have been opened. Not one. I make the full case for that in No, We Are Not in the Seven Seals Yet. What we are living through right now is the preparation phase. The stage is being set. Conditions are being arranged. The servant is being positioned for a calling he has not yet received. If you want the short version, start with the free chapter, What Seal Are We In?, which you can read at no cost.
Which means this is the window. The mark is not being offered today. The shelves are still full today. The debt can still be paid down today, at your own pace, on your own terms, while nobody is holding anything over your head.
“If ye are prepared ye shall not fear.”
Doctrine and Covenants 38:30
That verse is about prevention. Get your temporal house in order. Get out of debt and stay out. Fill your shelves. Get your spiritual house in order. Strengthen your ward and your stake so they can hold weight when weight comes. Build Zion where you are standing right now, because most of us will not be gathering to Missouri anytime soon.
The wall in my park still hasn’t been built. The bad year, the one that ran into six figures, has only happened once in the last decade. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the crew comes out every single time. Mud has to be shoveled off the schoolyard. The ruts cut by the draining water have to be filled and graded. The drain system has to be dug out and cleared again. Somebody signs off on all of that, year after year, and almost none of it would happen if that low wall existed.
There has always been money to fix it. There has never been money to prevent it.
Don’t be the school district with your own life. Build the wall now, while it is still cheap and while it is still your choice.
There is a great deal more to this than I can cover in one article. If you want the full case, including the scriptural framework behind everything above, my book The First Horseman, Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy is available at FirstHorseman.World in digital, audiobook, and print.
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