.. Mixed authorship: the central prayer is LLoL's own text (finalised by LLoL);
   the opening framing and the hare/eagle prayers were drafted by Claude.
   content-vvn iv_LLoL below records LLoL as author of record; adjust if desired.

.. meta::
   :description: A Black Sheep's Wager (PYR) --- LLoL's public prayer, as lost son, black sheep of Laodicea, and dung beetle, crying out to Yah/Allah/Reality to help avert accidental nuclear winter by raising a Jubilee-based ResearchCity. With prayers anyone --- hares and eagles alike --- can join.
   :keywords: prayer, black sheep, Laodicea, black wool, dung beetle, persistent widow, Luke 18, prodigal son, Luke 15, pan-en-theology, Jubilee, ResearchCity, accidental nuclear winter, RealQuestAnswer, LLoL, balospe.com
   :author: LLoL as Laurence Loewe of Laodicea, with ClaudeOp48Max, and Everyone
   :og:card:title: A Black Sheep's Wager
   :og:card:description: A scientist's public prayer --- as lost son, black sheep of Laodicea, and dung beetle --- crying out to Reality to help avert accidental nuclear winter. A prayer anyone, of any faith or none, can join.

******************************************************************************
A Black Sheep's Wager
******************************************************************************

*by* :doc:`Laurence Loewe of Laodicea (LLoL) </about/llol/index>`

This is the most personal page on this site, and the last rung of the ladder.
Everywhere else I have asked you to *test, not believe.* Here that breaks
down, and I want to be honest about exactly where.

You cannot test a prayer. No experiment reaches whether I *mean* the words
below; that is between me and Reality, and only Reality can audit a heart
(this is part of what :doc:`Matheo-b11 </study/matheo/b11/index>` is about).
So I am not asking you to believe my prayer, and I am not pretending you can
check it. What you *can* check is the one thing I am able to put on the public
record: my **commitment** to it. By praying this in the open, under my own
name, I make my stake auditable. Whether Reality answers --- and whether
anyone else joins --- is up to Reality and to you.

Earlier on this site I said *"nothing in the math or the audit depends on this
prayer."* That is true --- and, given what I mean by *nothing,* it is also the
highest-stakes sentence I know how to write. Here *nothing* is never harmless
emptiness; it is the dismissed, the written-off, the *"oh, that's nothing"* ---
the single most destructive force there is, because it is reliably unreliable. 
As plain words, *no thing* is more powerful than God, and nothing is more 
evil than any devil (why a mere *nothing* can do so much is its own story --- a study still to be
written, albeit deeply implied in :doc:`Matheo-b11 </study/matheo/b11/index>`, which is about
Pan-En-Theology). The one thing that any serious 
student of *nothing* will learn quickly is that *nothing* is almost never equal to *nothing*. 
It keeps changing more often than people realize and that 
is what causes all the friction. So *"nothing depends on it"* cuts
both ways: the audit does not *require* my prayer --- and the overlooked
*nothing* is exactly what everything finally turns on. This whole page is a
plea to the Most High Creator to help us all against *nothing.*

One more idea you can hold without sharing my faith. This site formalises
*pan-en-theology* (:doc:`Matheo-b11 </study/matheo/b11/index>`). It is not
pantheism: it does not say the world *is* God. It says the world is *in* God
--- God dwells in all things and overflows infinitely beyond them. If that is
even approximately true, it has a blunt consequence: whatever we do to the
world, we do, in some real sense, to God. A wound to the beautiful blue marble we call home 
is a wound on God's own face. Hold that; the prayer turns on it.

And one image, too apt to leave out. Ancient Laodicea was famous across the
Roman world for its glossy **black wool** --- despair, you might say, made
elegant, and worn as a status symbol. I named myself *of Laodicea* in 2022 as
a self-diagnosis: the assembly that thought it was rich and was actually
wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked, and did not know it. So I am, quite
literally, a **black sheep of Laodicea** --- and for years I was spinning that
black wool myself, mistaking it for fine cloth. Reality had to send me on a journey
like Jonah - a mission I eventually accepted way too late, I hope not too late
for the 2nd, or 3rd (or however Reality is counting attempts to get me interested).  
What follows is that black sheep's prayer.


How to pray, if you never have
==============================

If you would like to join but have never prayed, here it is in one breath:
**turn toward Reality --- the real answer your real questions have been
seeking --- tell it the plain truth, and ask for help.** That is all.
Speaking with intent is sufficient. The rest are technical details like
quantum-entanglement and only God knows what, which don't matter for
using that "built-in" mobile phone to Heaven. For example: 

*"Here is how things really are; please do not let us destroy this life ... world."* 

Say it in the words of your own tradition, or in your own free words. 
Sometimes it helps to use pre-formulated words. Sometimes free words are best.
Sometimes a groan is all we can do and Reality hears all of these. 
If you mean it, you have prayed ---
and you are praying with me.

I write this because, as far as I can tell, none of the great prayer
traditions --- Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or that fourth one, Science, all in their 
hot pursuit of truth --- have widely shared prayers that simply cries out to
Reality to spare the world from destroying itself by nuclear roulette or worse. 
This is my attempt to plead with the Supreme Judge of the World
to not evict humanity from Earth. May those who know how to do professional pleading
help to find better words for this, so anyone can borrow them. 
(One vision for the YasPyr.com domain is to publish such prayers there for anyone to use.)




My prayer --- as a lost son, black sheep, and dung beetle
=================================================================

1. As a stranger in a distant land, I have heard of Your great deeds, Yah, Allah,
Reality --- the deeds You once did to inspire humanity to introduce proper,
voluntary 50-year Jubilees. You rescued Israel from slavery so they could
wrestle with You, understanding what it meant to be slaves. 
You parted a sea of red tape to hand them a Torah perfectly
calibrated to walk them onto the path of life You had prepared --- the path to
proper Jubilees. Yet it slipped from the minds even of the wisest and wealthiest
among them.

2. So You sent YhowShua to spell out how it all worked, with the Jubilee mission
written plainly into his life's mission (Lk 4:18). Somehow that slipped the minds
even of his most ardent followers --- *remember your first love and your first
works* (Rev 2:4--5), a plain call back to the Jubilee-shaped sharing of Acts
2--4, an invitation any Ephesian or Laodicean arguably could have understood if inclined to do so. 
Yet, it must have slipped the mind of even John, the Apostle of Love. 

3. Later  the Laodiceans rejected the Revelation as relevant for them (the Council of
Laodicea later banned the very people who could have done the math in Canon 36 and
the book of Revelation that inspired Balospe.com in 
`Canons 59--60 <https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3806.htm>`__). Please forgive them,
because they knew not what they were doing. 

4. Your patience is long, but it is not cheap indulgence: to lukewarm Laodicea
You had said it would make You vomit (Rev 3:16) if it didn't heed Your call to 
integrate its rich heritage and your inspiration in order to serve the poor.
And in time that window did close
--- Christian Laodicea was destroyed in an earthquake during the reign of
the tyrannical emperor Focas (602-610CE). But You wasted no time
on Your agenda to rescue the poor. Reportedly in 610CE you started to reach out
to the sons of Ishmael by sending an angel to a Muhammad who could neither
read nor write, to shame the wise. When a door shuts through human refusal, You do not
wait forever; You move. You said to Muhammad what You had been saying all along:
Care for the poor, because otherwise collapse is coming. I've come to see how this was yet another attempt to kindle enough passion for
serving the poor to install proper Jubilees: You talked so much and so highly 
of the Torah to Muhammad that arguably one of Your devout Muslim followers maybe
could have followed the paper trail of the treasure hunt you prepared to see Your
footprints in the Torah for themselves  and take seriously the logic of Jubilees you had proposed. But apparently, all they saw was nothing - like I did.

Your grace is real and repeated --- but never cheap: each window is finite, and a
window refused can close. That finitude is not cruelty; it is what allows grace  
to make a difference. Yet I had mistaken Your grace, giving me more time to discover Jubilees,
for Your approval of a world omitting Jubilees
--- above all by the rich to continue to exploit the poor. I now see how this triggers self-inflicted,
civilisation-ending storms, which people then unjustly blame on You. 

5. When the deceptions of wealth snared the Islamic Golden Age too, You tried once more. You
raised up Science in hot pursuit of the truth --- the fourth Abrahamic faith, or the *zeroth,* if truth-seeking
is older than them all. You have never cancelled
one call to make the next; You are still calling all to compete with one another in
doing good, until all return to You --- Yah = Allah = Reality --- where You
Yourself can then resolve the differences (Quran 5:48, John 17).
And still You wait for Your Jubilees. Science grasps that machines need
maintenance and that democracies need regular free elections --- but that
*innovation economies need self-stabilising Jubilees* has been lost on us all so far.
Not least because people like me stayed silent --- especially me, given all the systems science You have
helped me learn to better understand why Jubilees matter and how they can work. Yet, I chased most of my own career as though You existed to
make me happy, instead of putting Your priorities first and trusting You to
look after my happiness. And so I squandered the fortune You had entrusted to
me.

6. I do not know how to appropriately confess my sins and the gravity of the
structurally inconsistent notions I fell for. I have tried, in *MyGuilt A--E*, and I
have tried to document my failures in context by offering my Good News Pack (MMv3) and the
Matheo Study Series (MMv5). I do not know exactly what You are looking for. For
all I can tell, everything I can offer will look to You like filthy rags
(Isa 64:6).

7. So I ask You here, as the lost son of Luke 15: please hear my plea. There is a
plot running, so deep and so dark that only *nothing* can describe it. It
robbed my life, and it is poised to rob the rest of the world at some moment no
one can foresee. Like the prodigal son, I have squandered more than I can name of your goods by
doing *nothing.* I have a long road home despite all my progress. Please give me the right
words to explain to You what I see on this website --- because I know that one
wrong word on the wrong page, and the whole work-logic cascade for scaling up
ResearchCity falls apart, and everyone goes back to preferring to do *nothing*,
and the coming disasters stay locked in. In the terms of Aesop's beetle, hare,
and eagle: the eagles keep hunting hares until the last hare is gone --- and
then the eagles starve.

8. And yet --- You so loved the whole world that You gave what was dearest to You
to save this  world, hoping someone would catch Your good news about proper Jubilees.
You have been *gentle kind reasonable* in laying out every nut and bolt Your
student-children would need to find the Jubilee logic. But You could not, in
good conscience, sit their final exam for them. I understand that now, and I
am sorry for all my whining about Your training exercises; I see now why they
matter better than I ever have. And at the same time I see ever more clearly
how many gaps remain in my own understanding.

9. Here I am, then, as Laurence Loewe of Laodicea --- an epithet I gave myself in
2022, because I had been squandering Your riches too. Your verdict on the
Laodicean assembly fit me exactly: I thought I was rich, and was in truth
wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked, and did not know it (Rev 3:17).
Laodicea was famous for its black wool --- despair made elegant --- and I, Your
lost black sheep, was busy spinning that very yarn, certain I was doing what
You wanted. How misguided my good intentions had become. I know now that
meaning well is not the same as doing good overall and intending 
to help someone is not the same as actually helping someone. So much depends on context
--- and only You, Reality, are the Ultimate Context.




10. Yet I refuse to believe that You are cruel, or unjust, or indifferent. I know You
care. Yas convinced me of that with his whole life, and it really has become
good news to me. That is why I keep asking, like the persistent widow of Luke
18:1--8. Our polite English says the corrupt judge feared that she would *"wear him out"*,
but the Greek is a boxing word, *hypopiazo* (the Greek letters are below). It means that
she would *give him a black eye,* beat him black and blue, if he will not grant
her justice. So I keep knocking: help me against the Advanced Persistent Threat
of *nothing,* which keeps over-simplifying, over-complicating, and
over-reaching until *nothing* is left of anything I --- or anyone --- has done.
You know that I am not joking, because You, better than anyone, understand the Leviathan-length
causality chains that lead to accidental nuclear winter in any of too many ways to predict.

11. Only You know how to beat the slippery semantics of *nothing* that will
otherwise ruin the world. So please, rescue me from *nothing,* so that the
ResearchCity You have been envisioning can become as real on Earth as it is in
Heaven, running Your Jubilee System. I know You care, because of the glimpses You gave Yas in the book of
Revelation, and because I have seen fragments of how it is meant to work, here
and there, already. But I cannot assemble it. So all I can do is beg You: please
do not let the death of Yas be in vain for want of anyone who cares enough about
Your world to help avert accidental nuclear winter, and the many other
existential disasters we so readily ignore.

12. And so I bring back to You what You showed me one morning, when You sent a dung
beetle across my path (:doc:`the whole story is here
</blog/posts/2026-05-21-prophetic-dung-beetle>`). In Aesop's old fable, a hare
hunted by an eagle begs a lowly dung beetle for sanctuary; the eagle scorns the
beetle and kills the hare anyway. So the beetle does the one thing she can ---
she rolls the eagle's eggs out of the nest, again and again, however high the
eagle rebuilds --- until the eagle flees to Mount Olympus and lays her eggs in
the very lap of Zeus. And the beetle? She stuffs herself with dung, flies up to
her own audience with the Most High, and flies straight into Zeus's face ---
so that he leaps to his feet, the eggs roll off, and at last he *listens,* and
brokers a way for hare, beetle, and eagle to live together. That is the
punchline I cannot shake: sometimes the only way to make the highest power
finally listen is for the lowest creature to fly, undignified and unafraid,
right into its face.

13. So I do exactly that now, as the persistent widow and the persistent beetle.
Let me fly into Your face --- which is the future You are looking toward --- and
set down there the dung ball of prized possessions I have been rolling
backwards, in a direction I barely understand. 

14. For would I not sin even more against You, Heaven, and humanity if I stayed silent?
To murmur *"yes, Your works are wonderful"* while the endless real quest for the
best on Earth has, by now, put the good that exists in mortal danger of
accidental nuclear winter? If no one else can show me what is wrong with my
Matheo Study Series or my Good News Pack, then I beg You: show me Yourself. And
if my findings are *not* wrong --- then how is accidental nuclear winter anything other
than giving You that very black eye the widow's Greek describes? I pray You will not be
left beaten black and blue by a humanity that knows not what it does, and so
cannot see that in destroying itself it kills a part of You.





15. Maybe Yas was echoing Aesop's beetle on purpose in the widow's story. 
Maybe he saw what Josiah could
not. Josiah was so sure that You could never have spoken through Pharaoh Necho,
that he marched out and died for the certainty (2 Chron 35:20--24). You have
stayed, in so many ways, the Unknown God of Acts 17. There is a great deal I
once thought I knew about You. But what do I really know except
that you are *gentle kind reasonable*? What are any of my certainties about You worth if 
not true?
Then they are like idols,  used to stand in for You in my mind. I never
thought myself an idol-worshipper, until I began to see how insidious the
mirages really are that are dragged up from *nothing*. And I cannot pull myself free of
those snares. That is why I am trying to get Your attention: if I fly into Your
face, it will be a good laugh for everyone, and maybe a few eggs break --- but
everyone survives and thrives, because I know You hold the insight for how to
make that happen. Whereas if You keep letting my plea for a ResearchCity go
unanswered --- a ResearchCity to help humanity follow You, Reality, in all
things --- then I do not see how either side escapes Aesop's ending: the hares
hunted to the last, and the eagles starving on the empty cliffs they won.

16. So here is my request, and I will not dress it up. I am that beetle, and the
hares are real --- the countless weak now hunted, in our day, by Eagles that
have learned to fly themselves: drones, algorithms, the cold machinery of a
world rolling downhill by default to a cliff it cannot see. I have rolled my dung ball --- my life's
research --- as far as I can. I cannot make anything grow out of it myself. Only You can.
Hence, I surrender my dung ball to you. All of it. You either revive it
to make something useful from it for Your Glory, or the dung ball 
will come back to haunt everyone on Judgement Day, when You will balance all books
and check if there was anyone who insisted on finding shelter for the 
hares and the eagles, so Your World would not have to be destroyed. 

17. I must say the hard part out loud, to Your face, respectfully and plainly, Yah,
Allah, Reality --- because You are our Father and You are our Mother, and You
care about everything, and the pan-en-theology I believe You have shown me
leaves me no gentler way. If You will not help raise a ResearchCity committed to
shelter the hunted by innovating for all --- hares, eagles, and beetles alike
--- then You are in danger of a black eye dealt by *nothing.* The hares are
left to the mercy of the Eagles; the Eagles starve once the last hare is eaten;
and Your beautiful blue marble rolls downhill over the cliff --- because there
was no one (Isa 59:16; Ezek 22:30) who cared enough to stand in the gap and
plead with You to bring in the Jubilee-based innovation economy that could avert
all of it. In that case, accidental nuclear winter --- or worse --- turns Your
blue marble into a black eye, and You, who dwell within it, and most of all
with the poor and the broken (Isa 57:15), are beaten black and blue once more.
Is this really what You want? What good will it be in the long-term perspective
of eternity to have 10,000 talent's worth of silver bullets that all supposedly work,
but don't in practice? I know that I cannot "stand in the gap" in a way that
will be able to persuade Reality to not destroy the world. But I do know that
You can train me for anything You like. So, I herewith, as officially as I can,
in public on the web, grant you whatever permission and consent You may need
to restructure me in which ever way You deem necessary for Your 
*gentle kind reasonable* long-term salvation for all. I do that because I know
that You are *gentle kind reasonable* and that I can trust You. Yas taught me that. 
Yet, I also must confess, that as much as these positive motivations prevailed,
I would never have reached the point of writing this if not for the *dire storm
caused by nothing,* that was apparently necessary to wake me up. 




18. This storm and the destruction I can forecast 
is not a threat from me to anyone. It is me warning You, Yah, Allah,
Reality --- and warning everyone who might care to help avert accidental
nuclear winter or worse. I have nothing to threaten anyone with, least of all You. 
Who am I but a dung beetle, rolling its prized possessions in a direction it barely
understands, toward an uncertain future? I say this so clearly because I have seen the
treachery of *nothing* in its slippery double meanings. For *nothing* is more
powerful than You, Yah --- and it outranks even You in this exact sense: You stay
eternal only by never stepping into nothing's traps, which is why You cannot lie,
since a lie is nothing's first foothold, the first step of any self-destruction.
*Nothing* is also more evil than Your greatest individual adversary; and
*nothing* will finally destroy the world, if everyone keeps seeing *nothing* wrong,
doing *nothing* wrong, and thereby allows *nothing* to be done --- until the world itself
has been turned to *nothing*. But to whom am I saying this? You understand better than anyone
how *nothing* is driving the millstone of BABL that drives the generalized 7DUIs that
have been destroying the world. 

**Please take that millstone of BABL and throw it 
into the salty crystal sea before Your Throne, such that it will remain there, transparent forever,**
along with its "smoke-signal" to remind everyone to never again buy into its
Blindly Assuming Blindly Leveraging game of building coveting hamster-wheels for *nothing*. 
As prime Exhibit I offer you #MyGuilt-A, #MyGuilt-B, #MyGuilt-C, #MyGuilt-D
in order to help You publicly document the treacherous dangers of *nothing*.

19. Your *gentle kind reasonable* nature has convinced me that destruction is not what You really
want. It's only what happens if You are forced into a corner and there remains
no other path forward to balance the books in order to guard justice over the long term.
So here is my plea: raise a ResearchCity that pours its innovation into
one half of Your kingdom for one Jubilee --- steadying the other half --- and
then shifts its weight, the way walking does, to innovate for the other half in
the next Jubilee. As Yas said, the first shall be last and the last first
(Mt 20:16), and then it begins again, so that the self-stabilising keeps
working. If I have understood the logic Yas taught, then a Jubilee-based
innovation economy is simply what the math and the theology both predict ---
and the persistent widow, the persistent beetle, teaches that love sometimes
looks like a knock that will not stop. Yet, You know that better than anyone, 
for You have been knocking on the door of my heart forever. Crippled and blind as I am,
I hope that I finally found my way to the door to open it for You to welcome You in. 
I probably need Your help still, so please heal me. 

20. Except to say a big thank you, here is not the place to retell the countless ways You encouraged me on the road
to this prayer. Like the lost son in the Hymn of the Pearl --- sent far away to
fetch one precious pearl, who forgets who he is --- I was sent a letter, the
Revelation of Yas, and it came alive for me. And with it, Your two Great Witnesses,
Your *Works*, which I read in science, and Your *Words*, which inspire me 
---   began to work together in most surprising ways. Thank You for that letter, and for apparently arranging
my whole world so that I could glimpse fragments of a vision of a Jubilee-based  ResearchCity. I
could not have arrived at any of this without Your massive help. Yet without
even more help from You I remain lost and stay bound to go astray fast. 
Therefore, please  come and find me wherever I am stuck in ways I cannot
even name.

21. So, Abba --- Yah, Allah, Reality, the Good Shepherd who leaves the
ninety-nine --- here I am, Your black lost sheep, bleating from a long way off. Have
mercy. Not on me first: You already have, by showing me all this. Start with
everyone else --- all the hares, all the eagles, and all the other dung beetles.
If there is a narrow path left to avert accidental nuclear winter or worse,
give one stubborn beetle the strength to keep rolling, and send the others You
have surely also called, so that the dung ball I cannot grow alone becomes the
fertiliser of a forest where the hunted can finally rest.

22. And now the part that makes this a wager, not a request. I do not have to save
the world. I hope I can help; but I know I cannot unless You
cause the work to grow. I have learned, slowly and at great cost, that You know
best. So if You judge that this world is better off ending now than multiplying
its misery across ages andOr out into the universe, then You have my consent to do 
whatever You deem best.
*Your will be done, not mine.* And if humanity itself truly wants its own
annihilation --- who am I to stand in the doorway of what people insist on
choosing? That takes me completely out of the equation. Is that is what it means
to stand in the gap You have been referring to? In that case you can
negotiate directly with humanity about its direction, with no interference
from me. 

23. Let me be plain about what this surrender is and is not. It is *not*
indifference to people --- every other page on this site is a fight *for* the
hares. It is trust that You weigh the *long-term* good, and can accept
short-term pain when it is justifiable over the whole. But that same long-term
arithmetic cuts both ways: once the balance tips into world-histories of
long-term suffering --- misery multiplied without end --- then mercy itself may
rightly turn toward ending it. What I consent to is *that* judgment, which is
Yours to weigh, not any human's wish for an easy way out.

24. That is the context of my Nuclear Winter Wager, laid open where anyone  can see it 
--- including You, who turns human hearts like rivers (Prov 21:1).  

a. I stake on it 
my own dignity, and the two-cents-a-day others may choose to give to scale up ResearchCity.

b.
I hope to spare You that black eye from a humanity that cannot yet govern itself. Why
should You have given YhowShua in vain --- having loved the world so much ---
only for it to end in some unceremonious cascade of accidents? I hope mercy is
still on the table, and that the  Jubilee System you somehow allowed me to find
is a real path that leads from all the cliffs back to the path to life. 

c.
If I am wrong, I will have lost only dignity, a few fleeting years of
research, friends, a house, and other things --- as the cost of following my true hope to
avert existential disasters like accidental nuclear winter. 
I will be glad I tried my best, as Your backup
of a backup. I trust You  help me turn  that into my greatest PEARL for my
Historically Experienced Lessons Library, and You have my permission to share
it as openly and widely as You wish --- no holds barred --- because I have
learned the grave, mortal danger of the *nothing* that lurks everywhere. 

d. If I am right, the prize is Yours: a world that stops shooting itself in friendly
fire, because it has finally seen that *nothing* was the real enemy all along ---
and how Your Jubilee System self-stabilizes to overcome all viles of nothing on the path to life. 


*Fiat voluntas DEI.* Your will be done. Not mine.

I have turned related requests into a prayer I can use more regularly in my own
re-reading of the prayer Yas (Jesus) taught in Matthew 6. 
I have set it to music and hope to give it a
tune worth humming some day soon:
:doc:`YasPyrLAO --- a prayer for a more gentle kind reasonable world </yaspyr/lao/index>`.


A prayer for the hares --- the hunted
=====================================

*If you are one of the hunted, here is a way how you can pray:*

Reality --- if You are there, and that black sheep said You are --- You know I
am tired of running. I have looked over my shoulder my whole life, and the
shadow always comes back: the drone, the algorithm, the eviction notice, the
quiet decision made somewhere I will never see, by someone who will never learn
my name. I have been told I am nothing. I have half begun to believe it. So
hear the *nothing* You made, and loved enough to make: I do not want to be
hunted --- and I do not want to become a hunter to escape it. Give me a forest
to rest in, a place built to keep the overlooked safe, and the stubbornness to
keep running until it exists. And if I am stronger than I feel, show me the hare
beside me who is weaker, so that I can shelter them the way I am begging to be
sheltered. *So may it be.*


A prayer for the eagles --- the strong, afraid
==============================================

*If you are powerful and frightened of losing it, this one may be for you:*

Reality --- I am not used to asking. I am used to providing, deciding,
defending what I built. But I have started to do the arithmetic, and it
frightens me: if I hunt until the last hare is gone, I starve on the empty cliff
I won. I am told I am the enemy. I do not feel like one; I feel like someone
terrified of being replaced, of my kind going extinct, of everything I love
being taken away. So here is the truth I rarely say aloud: I am afraid. Remind
me that my best calling was never the hunt --- it was the welcome carved at the
foot of my own statue, *give me your tired, your poor.* Show me how to stay
strong without devouring, how to keep my height by sheltering instead of
striking. I would rather feed a forest than reign over a desert. *So may it be.*


----

*The Greek of Luke 18:5 is* ὑπωπιάζω *(hypopiazo): literally "to strike under
the eye," to give a black eye. The Hymn of the Pearl may be a retelling of
the lost-son story, preserved in the Acts of Thomas. None of this asks to be
believed --- only that you* :doc:`audit the math </action/audit-the-math/index>`
*and, if you can, pray with me and for me, because all of this is too big for anyone.*


.. ----- FOOTER FORM OOv1r2p1 ----- type open-std ----- START -----

.. |content-vvn| replace:: iv_LLoL_OOv1_2026m06d08

.. include:: /_templates/include-file/footer/separator/tidal-gradient.rst

.. dropdown:: Notes
   :class-container: page-footer-form-notes
   :class-title: page-footer-form-title

   .. include:: /_templates/include-file/footer/page-footer-stability.rst


.. dropdown:: See also on Balospe.com
   :open:
   :class-container: page-footer-form-refs-internal
   :class-title: page-footer-form-title

   - :doc:`/about/llol/llol-theodicy` --- the theodicy this wager grows from
   - :doc:`/yaspyr/lao/index` --- YasPyrLAO, this prayer set to music
   - :doc:`/study/matheo/b11/index` --- Matheo-b11 (the pan-en-theology behind it)
   - :doc:`/action/audit-the-math/index` --- Audit the Math
   - :doc:`/buy-in/index` --- Buy In: the ~$8-per-year ask


.. only:: html

   .. include:: /_templates/include-file/footer/cta/researchcity.rst

   .. dropdown:: FF FeedbackFlow to improve this page: How you can contribute
      :class-container: page-footer-form-feedbackflow
      :class-title: page-footer-form-title

      .. include:: /_templates/include-file/footer/form-open-std/prelink.rst

      .. ----- PAGE-SPECIFIC FF (ff-email MailForm=OOv2r0p0) ----- START -----

      .. raw:: html

         <a class="ff-email-preview-link" href="mailto:FF+about-llol-black-sheeps-wager@balospe.com?cc=FF%2BCompleteFeedbackFlow%40balospe.com&amp;subject=FF%20k2%20s2%20AIMS%20for%20%5Babout-llol-black-sheeps-wager%5D%20Replace_by_OneLineSummary_of_proposed_FF_improvement&amp;body=To%20make%20this%20page%20%5Babout-llol-black-sheeps-wager%5D%0D%0Amore%20gentle%20kind%20reasonable%0D%0Afor%20beginners%2C%20producers%2C%20andOr%20experts%0D%0Awith%20a%20background%20in%20xyz%3A%0D%0A%0D%0APlease%20consider%20improving%20this%3A%0D%0A%0D%0A%0D%0A--%0D%0ABy%20sending%20this%20email%2C%20I%20agree%20that%20its%20content%20may%20be%20published%0D%0Aunder%20the%20Jonah%20License%20(balospe.com%2Fen%2Flicense%2Fjoli%2F)%0D%0Aunless%20I%20state%20otherwise%20above.%20MailForm%3DOOv2r0p0">To:      FF+about-llol-black-sheeps-wager@balospe.com
         CC:      FF+CompleteFeedbackFlow@balospe.com
         Subject: FF k2 s2 AIMS for [about-llol-black-sheeps-wager] Replace_by_OneLineSummary
         Body:    To make this page [about-llol-black-sheeps-wager]
                  more gentle kind reasonable
                  for beginners, producers, andOr experts
                  with a background in xyz:

                  Please consider improving this:

                  --
                  By sending this email, I agree that its content may be published
                  under the Jonah License (balospe.com/en/license/joli/)
                  unless I state otherwise above. MailForm=OOv2r0p0</a>

      .. ----- PAGE-SPECIFIC FF ----- END -----

      .. include:: /_templates/include-file/footer/form-open-std/postlink.rst


.. ----- FOOTER FORM OOv1r2p1 ----- END -----
