Things God Likes About Me

 
I sometimes get the idea some massive number of  American Christians don't like me very much; perhaps it is their abuse of me that gives me that idea; perhaps it is their preaching against me; and perhaps, yes, it is their praying against me.
 
Frankly, God likes a lot of people Christians don't like.  God likes Muslims, God likes Jews, God likes Hindus, God likes everyone.  That is the nature of God.
 
God has a nickname for me, my nickname is Faithful, and that's what I am and what I have been all my life, faithful to God.
 
I'm the kind of guy God likes to have sharing the foxhole when the going gets rough.  God gives me a job and I do it.  God gave me my audible mental telepathy and I use it, no matter how much Americans hate me and torture me for using it.
 
God doesn't often tell me what God likes about me, and I don't ask, but I thought I'd give you a couple examples today.
 
Perhaps 20 years after the event I am going to describe to you, God one day out of the blue and out of context told me it was one of God's favorite moments of all the moments of my life.
 
Now God and I have been hanging out together since I was in my mother's womb, and it is my view (as the most disliked Christian among Christians) that God has been hanging out with you since you were in the womb, too.
 
Actually, I go further than that, I say God has been hanging out with us since before we entered the womb, and we were us before we entered the womb; but that's another story.
 
The result of this, and the result of my being aware of this, is that I am very comfortable with God, so I get along with God quite well even though the Christians have driven me out of their churches.
 
"Chumming Around With God" is what I call my writings on long duration backpacking, where I backpack for a month or more, where I can sometimes get far enough away from Americans to talk with God in peace. Chumming around with God is how I think of the friendship between us.
 
So, back to something about me God likes.
 
As events happened in 1967, I found myself in some pretty hot combat three days after I arrived in Vietnam from my desk job at United Press International in Tokyo.
 
For the longest time, maybe three hours, as that combat situation developed, I felt no fear at all; but that fearlessness was not courage, it was stupidity.
 
You see, I knew I could get killed in Vietnam, but I hadn't considered it might hurt; and suddenly three or four Marines a couple yards from me got hit by a mortar round, and one of them started screaming, and screaming, and screaming; and that screaming dropped me into a pit of fear so deep and so cold I did not know such fear could exist.
 
Bear with me, we are coming to the part God liked so much.
 
So, there I was lying on a Vietnamese grave, mortar rounds coming in by the dozens, and I was figuring each one had my name on it, and I was in a fetal position on the grave thinking the next round would hit me right smack dab on my ribs, and the skin over my ribs was crawling in anticipation, and I asked myself, "Should I pray?"
 
"No", I answered myself, "God would think me chickenshit if I did."  God liked that and, by the way, the fear left me at that point and I have never felt fear since.
 
Many years later, perhaps three years ago, the wonderful, democratic, free American people were harassing me to the point of death,  I was 63 years old and had had one stroke and a run-in with congestive heart failure, and the Americans were in a torture frenzy and wanted me to die; I mean they really wanted me to die, and told me so.
 
I did not have enough money for motels or hotels and I had been harassed out of my home and my income.
 
If I slept in my car the cops would harass me; if I went into the mountains to sleep in my tent government pigs and citizen volunteers would follow me and harass me day and night.
 
 One night I was siting in my car in a pool of misery and I asked the question, "Why can't I die?"
 
And God stepped in and said "Virgil, don't die, don't die", and God showed me a little movie of myself soon after I had just received the gift of audible mental telepathy from God, when I had gone around the world, announcing, "God is on the way, God is on the way".  There I was, pictures of me from God's view of me, smile on my face, courage in my heart, and the United States government on my back
 
God likes very much the way I handled myself on that journey, and God likes very much how I handle myself at this moment, quite old now, nearly 67, and homeless and abused by Americans wherever I go, and the message is still the same, "God is on the way".
 
So, it seems to me the things God likes about me are the things the American Christians dislike about me.