The dry places – A public service announcement
Don Bradley
August 31, 2025
Reading the below will ring a deep and ancient bell within many of you. This I know.
Imagine if you will, a place without discernible horizons in any direction. It's light enough to see far in any direction, but how to know east from west, north from south. There are no landmarks. Only grey dust. Get to that later on. No night. No day. No sense of time, even if you try to keep time, what and where is your starting point and how do you know when that is? You could count to a given number say twenty. And then what? Another twenty? And another? Do that for awhile and your mind starts banging back to you that the exercise is futile and pointless. So you stop.
I've had to visit this place more than once. Twice to do battle with the fallen, other times to watch judgments take place. One other time, just to experience that had never been and I wanted to KNOW. I refuse ever going back. There is nothing there I ever want to see or know again. Ever.
There is a light cloud that stands above the ground between the ankle and the knee. This is the dust itself. And a hard pan, rock, very hot, beneath. Flat and smooth. Not even a ripple or a bump. The only thing that exists is hot dust. Only thing. And it covers you. Your hair, such as it was in life, is so dried out and covered in dust as to be completely frizzed out to the point of scary freakish. Your skin is grey because of the dust. Looking down, your feet disappear in the cloud layer of dust. There is NO wind or air movement. Just the cloud of dust. At your feet. Lift your foot up and it's the same color as everything else. A grey dust.
No trees, not even dead trees. Nothing. No boulders or anything. Just the endless dust layer in every direction.
This is where you find yourself.
There is something else, too. An insatiable thirst for water that cannot be found. Because it does not exist in the dry places. When they say dust to dust, ashes to ashes. You better believe it. It quickly dawns on you that this is how it is now. This...first layer of hell.
You can do what you can in memories. That's really all you have or ever will have now. What was up above, before the silver cord broke. Memories. Laughs, loves, a thousand little events laughed off, lived, whatever. Whatever your fate and destiny brought you. You have that. But these fade and blur, after a time.
You see every time you acted against the law of Love – the ten commandments – that brought you here. In exquisite “Oh My God, what have I DONE?” perfection.
Every. Single. Time.
Every cruelty, act of selfishness that hurt another, and viciousness that caused another good heart pain, is all there claiming your attention. You hope beyond hope that another life above will be given you. Maybe. You still have to stand before the angel in the room at the table. You know it's someplace down here, but where?
When you are called, you will see it.
The life review of deeds, great and small. To even see if and when you might get another chance up above to redeem and restore and fall into Heavenly Grace. Maybe. But what if there are NO redeeming things in your life except a deep vicious hatred of the Divine. Do you even get that chance?
You start doing your own life review, all by yourself, looking for any good in your past that might give you yet again, a chance to do all it all over, better, with the same souls that wronged you and you wronged, all over again. Sometimes the wife, sometimes the sister, sometimes the mother or father, but the same souls, same family. But what if you all were stinkers and not a one even looked above EVEN ONCE and said a simple Thank You for something?
Ever.
Did you ever once even say, Thank God. For that save that kept you from certain destruction? Sometimes, such a little thing, gets you back for yet another go at life. Even at life review, you find out that there are standing atonements that must now accompany your next chance. Could be anything, usually is.
Being barren, unable to bear children.
Cancers, etc;
Bad eyesight;
Diseases and such;
terrible living conditions, because of how you lived at the expense of others.
Etc, etc, etc,.
80 years is forever in the dry places. Time has no meaning. How could it. There is no day or night. Only a deep abiding thirst in endless dry dust. After an endless trudge for what seems like forever, most just lay down in the dust and disappear. And wait. And wait. And wait.
For that day. Their minds go over every detail of their lives they refused to look at when living. The good, the bad, the very ugly. The little vicious cruelties to animals, people, plants, themselves even. Even that. Then they do it again. And again. And again. Seemingly forever.
Some wait centuries in that place, waiting for a second chance. Again. Like they said the time before. And before that. And before that. Obtaining to nothing. Again. Again. Again.
Some repeatedly turn to evil. Witches reborn as witches. The same covens as before, doing the same awful things as before. They get sickness at disease at every turn; are born with massive birth defects, some visible, many not. Many warts and skin blemishes, again. New ones from old and ancient sins. Again. And again, become the darkness reaching out for the darkness. These kind hope they get the dry places, but these go deeper. Much deeper.
But that is another day and another time. Today is about the dry places. And the avoidance of any of it is to turn to Christ and start climbing your own straight way to YHVH, whatever that will be for each of us. Each according to their own measure, body and soul.
If what I just described to you sounds like fun, stay just as you are. Change nothing. You better hope the worst that happens to you is the dry places. If existing in that place sounds doable then I must tell you right now, you are quite insane. You are mad. Mad as a hatter, as we used to say. Your head and soul is as broken as can be.
I was directed to give this over, so I have now complied with Dad, happy to serve. I see the good that can come of this knowing. Maybe. Maybe not.
But that depends you.
I'll say this. Burning man event just finished...these people...made a change. They still had their own little rave, such as it was, but without the horrific horrors of previous doings. They got the message and that message was YOU COULD STAY HERE FOREVER. Keep it up.
Understand?
Burning Man is a kind of dry place. But, it has rain and day and night, food, sleep, a fresh start every sunrise. The real place has none of that.
It is, after all, the beginning of hell.
Don
