Compassions In The Dock

          Old Main, on this her Christian college campus, always put her in awe. The newer buildings might be more impressive but they lacked....they lacked.....history and tradition. Julie always felt a little bit nervous when she spoke one-on-one with Professor Miller. It's not that he was mean or overbearing or arrogant but that he was so confident in what he had to say....but then he was the professor and she the student. Still she wanted to show him she had a mind also and that just by being young did not necessarily make one naive or unknowledgable. Professor Miller's door never had any little post-it-notes or comics or articles on it like most of the other professors. She wished that it had for she might mention the comic to break the ice. She knocked twice.

Come in!
Julie opened the door with confidence...no slow turning of the handle with a peek inside and some inane remark like 'Oh Hi!'
Professor Miller...do you have a few minutes by any chance?

I sure do young lady.
Julie walked in and just as confidently closed the door behind her.

You said that your door is always open to discuss something from class in a little more detail.
She waited for a response but he only smiled.....that confident smile!
In class yesterday when you were speaking about the economics of mass migrations....
She paused but still no comment that would have helped.
Well, John Venesales made a few comments on what is going on in Syria and Europe today....and the refugees travelling all those miles with their families.....and then running into opposition from the people...
Professor Miller's hand went up to his beard as if to stroke it and his smile softened a little as if to show interest. This was good...she thought.
Well, he went on for about five minutes and when he was finished everyone in the class thought that you would comment on what he said but you only kind of nodded your head and continued with your lesson.
Still no comments? This wasn't going as well as she hoped.
So I was wondering if you might have disagreed with John. You see, I feel the same way as John. I have.....a passion I guess....to see that these people are helped....and so many do not want to help...This is not America!
He wasn't making it easy. So she just blurted out her question.
Professor Miller, what are your thoughts on immigration of Syrian refugees to America?

 Professor Miller picked up a pen that had something written on it and seemed to read it. He then closed the book he was reading as she came in.


Julie....it's good that you have this....passion.....this compassion. I would though have some questions for you. Do you also have compassion upon a nation of 300 million people that can't tell it's right hand from its left and is rapidly squandering all of its liberties and freedoms... a nation that has now formally rejected it's benefactor....the God of all creation...and our Savior Jesus Christ, and will have to navigate the troubled seas of this world without His hand of protection, without his guidance and wisdom? Does your compassion extend to America's children who have some very difficult times ahead of them....quite possibly just like those children in Syria. Are you as passionate for families in our nation whose children have, in effect, become wards of the state...a state that tries to keep those children from God and then dares God to judge it? Julie, do fifty million plus aborted babies at least equally disturb you, or does Planned Parenethood bring out the same disgust? Do you lose sleep at night over these things. Do they bring you at times to tears? God is ridiculed in the public square and kept from our children. We are rudderless and lack vigilance as our enemies conspire against us. Julie....this....is America.

The direction of the conversation unnerved her a little even though he talked slowly and was calm. She had two pages of facts about the refugees that she was ready to give but her professor wasn't finished with these questions so she interjected...
Professor Miller...what has all this to do with accepting Syrian refugees into America?

We have enemies who are committed to our destruction. Your anger is at us Julie. It should be on those who bring this suffering. You should direct your concern to 300 million people who are arrogantly daring God to judge them, and your care to an entire world that will no longer have America, imperfect as we are, to stand up to the totalitarian tyrants of this world. Can you imagine for even a moment what terrorists may be capable of....can you see yourself walking amidst the carnage of terrorist attacks as those on 9/11...or even visualize a distant smoke engulfing a large city? Can you see Christians persecuted  as they once were in the Soviet Union....or even Rome? Can you imagine even for a moment...an America lying in virtual ruins....their leaders shaking with fear at what wasn't supposed to happen.....with your family and all of your loved ones shaking with fear along with them?

Julie was not giving up...disorganized as her thoughts had become.

Professor Miller, I have faith in God. He is in control of all things. I do not fear what may happen in the future.
With this Professor Miller waxed melancholy...
Ah...would that I had your courage, but I weaken at what I see coming to our nation. But that wasn't my question. Can you....Julie Beatty....imagine these things? Can you smell the smoke if you try? Can you hear the cries?  Can you see the faces of total despair?

I can see the faces of despair on the Syrian refugees!
And you are to be commended on this. I see those faces also but you are avoiding my question. Can you see your loved ones in despair, their country lying in ruins?

Julie played along and paused as she pretended to imagine what he requested. She wanted to say "OK yes, I envisioned them in my mind....now what?' but could not tell this lie. She continued with her pause. Maybe she should just say that she will not try to imagine these things.
I know that these things can happen.
That also is not what I asked.
There was no way out of it. She had to actually try to imagine what he said.

Let me help you. Just think of one thing.....an America where God was outlawed. Put yourself right there. Look around you...at the children...maybe at your own children. You are not permitted to work anywhere without denying your faith in God. But of course you will not deny it so you will not work, nor will your future husband. Those of us who say that this influx of people has to be halted at this time...see these things I've mentioned very clearly as being at our doorstep. These people who want to destroy us.... have found an answer to one of their biggest problems...how to get in here. They play upon the compassions of America...many of which are insincere fabricated compassions...politiclly motivated...and they laugh as they succeed. They know that our media is no harm to their plans whatsoever. They know that we are asleep as a people...many if not most drunken with entertainments. They are the only ones in this equation who have no compassion upon refugees. In fact they are the ones who produced the refugees.

Julie wanted to respond. All of the facts that she read in the newspaper and heard on the nightly news were floating somewhere in her head. She identified some of them but they no longer seemed to have the power of persuasion they previously had.
Professor Miller....your concerns over the Syrian refugees are....are....overblown. Its a....fear....that overwhelms you.
There was that smile again...that confident smile.
Julie.....if that's what you truly believe then yes you have to act on those beliefs. But I caution you to take this issue and read as much as you can on it, and by that I mean you have to read heavily from those sources who you have already relegated to being compassionless. You will get little to no useful information from what was once an honorable and capable news media.

I hope that you don't mean people like Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin! 

That would be a good start! It's going to take time Julie. Don't rush in before you are fully prepared. You have faith in God? Does not that faith include His hand upon your mind? You seem to accuse us of having no compassion. That's a serious charge. I can tell you this, that we, many of us, have sweated bullets for decades on what we have seen coming....a populace that year by year lost the ability to think through things...whose discernment seemed to vanish more so with each Super Bowl, with each new television season...with each new springtime. If we err on this Julie it would be because our compassions have overwhelmed us....not our fears. Our faith in God is no longer theoretical.....it is already being tested.

Julie got out of her chair without saying anything and was intent upon leaving as such but turned and asked...
Professor Miller....why didn't you mention thoughts like these in class yesterday?
David Miller stood also.

In a macroeconomics class? I'd much rather that one of my students, a student with fire in her eyes, came in and demanded an answer.
His smile came back as she turned to close the door....and she liked it this time.

Restraining Force

       I'd like you to picture a shotgun pattern....a tight pattern where most of the holes are bunched together in the center of the target. The holes around the outer edge we'll call the fringe. Now apply this shotgun pattern to society if you will. Most of the people are tightly bunched together, so much so that the center is one large hole frayed around its edges. The holes on the outside are those people who live and believe on the fringe and they themselves can be as different as night and day...from harmlessness to criminality, and from genius to mediocrity. A portion of those on the fringe are susceptible to behaving in a criminally sociopathic way.
        What is happening today in America is that that shotgun pattern has become a scattergun pattern. The grouping is anything but tight with the holes spread all over the target. The same principle is at work with people on the fringe, only that percentage of people out there is much much higher. The issue is not gun control, in fact in this scattergun patterned society more people need the self-protection from the more people on the fringe.
        The real issue is in how is a society to maintain a tight pattern with the fewest people on the fringe as possible? A totalitarian society where guns are not permitted to anyone other than the ruling element would produce a very tight pattern...but with .no freedom, no liberty....and no life to speak of. What holds the pattern together in a free society? It's called common grace....God's restraining of evil in mankind. Our conscience is a restraining force. Government should be a restraining force. Both are given by God in varying degrees.....possible more at one time than at another time.....and different in different places within our world.
      God's hand has been lifted from America and common grace along with it.....at least a great portion of it. We requested that God remove Himself or we would remove Him ourselves. Subsequently, we now have little perception of what is good and what is evil. Wisdom is extremely rare. Logic and reasoning atrophy in the recesses of our consciousness and memory. Our defensive bulwarks are collapsible as a house of cards, our ramparts scalable and our battlements mere decorations.
      Common Grace serves as the choke in a shotgun that directs the pellets to the center. (If I understand the mechanics adequately) That choke has been removed. We do whatever we want and have few restrictions...and we are paying the price. The remedy for our sickness is one that we do not want to hear...and we won't even consider it......Fear God and Keep His commandments. We'll find other remedies and medicines......worthless but palatable.

Prayer Tweets

         Four words adorned most of the cover of today's New York Daily News ..... GOD ISN'T FIXING THIS. The accompanying article went on to criticize nine Republican presidential candidates for tweeting about prayers after the horror in San Bernardino yesterday. The tweets from Clinton and Sanders about gun control were absurd bordering on insane while the nine Republican candidate comments listed were meant to be innocuous but were bordering on inane.
         We have become a nation that prefers to tweet its prayers to God who no longer merits a tear soaked pillow. I do see their point here but I disagree with the New York paper in that God is indeed addressing this issue of violence in America. We don't want Him therefore He is taking His protective hand off of us. He's letting us rule ourselves, which is what we want, and we can see the results all around us.
         The following is a post from this past February but I want to add this and I'll use Ted Cruz as an example... there are others. He's a God fearing man...a Christian...and he knows what is going on here, he knows the danger America is in and he knows that God is the only answer. I expect that he is a man of prayer. The words of his tweet were sound and sincere but more of a political necessity than helpful. This method of instant communication is not indicative of who he is.... it is though indicative of what many social conservatives in America today demand....mere words without repentance, without introspection or any culpability, and without a cost.
         How do I know this? America is crumbling, as is the world's financial system and the entire world, yet these descriptions also are seen as mere words...useful as we talk politics but impotent in motivating us to pray, for if we prayed as we should....continually throughout the day.....we would truly recognize our peril and how the novelties of this life have kept us from seeing this sooner.

"God Gave Us Barack Obama"

           I chose the New American Standard Bible for this verse from Hosea 9:7... "The days of punishment have come; Let Israel know this! The prophet is (considered) a fool, The inspired man is demented, Because of the grossness of your iniquity, And because your hostility is so great."
          Those faithful preachers who weep in their pulpits....who weep for America, for their children and their children's children, and who weep at what the American church has become, are thought of as country bumpkins, fundamentalist fools and worse. Such is the state of the American mind in this age of rampant rebellion and toxic temperance towards godlessness as our nation surrenders on every hill. Such is the hostility to anything that might interfere with plans and goals.
          There is no excuse for not seeing the imminent peril our nation faces. There are reasons but not excuses. Our nation's leaders are the beginnings of our punishment! In speaking to a church congregation this past week, New York Congressman Charlie Rangel made this statement..."God gave us Barack Obama." He probably never spoke truer words!
          There has never been a perfect storm as is brewing today......... Yet we party on. Billy Graham has been consistent in his warnings to America. John MacArthur has been consistent also, but we don't have ears to hear, and we don't have eyes to see. We are deaf to the Approaching Hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to use the title of a 1985 book by Rev. Graham,
          Fervent prayer, steeped in humility and salted with our sweat is our only hope, our only defensive weapon.     

It's A Beginning Anyway

The following post is from this past October 6th:  

         Well, did you hear this bit of news today? Actually it was in the form of a joke but to me it was more of news. No, I'm not talking about John Boehner resigning his speakership. This man actively sought to be a United States Congressman and then actively sought the leadership of his party in the House of Representatives. He took upon himself a great responsibility in the defense of our nation, its people and their constitution, and he utterly and totally failed those responsibilities; worse than that he impeded many things that should have been done, primary of which should have been impeachment proceedings against Barack Obama when it first became evident that his intention was to ignore our laws and institute his own.
          The news concerns Ted Cruz and it came in the form of a joke. He was speaking to a conservative group and said this: "Today, the President of China, President Xi is in town. Media all across the world are reporting on this historic meeting between the world's most powerful communist......and the president of China."
          This is news in that this nation of ours needs a crash course, an in-depth tutorial at the very least, on what Communism was......and is! It's a beginning anyway. Communism did not collapse in 1991.....the Soviet Union did. Soviet bloc nations were freed but Communism transmogrified into a smiley faced, quasi-capitalist Trojan Horse on the world's scene. Communism is a dialectic in that it will change appearance when needed in pursuit of its goals, and without compromising its methods of deception and reliance on force, both of which are evident in the administration of Barack Hussein Obama.
         You don't have to go back very far in these posts to read about Communism but this post is about someone in the political limelight actually equating communism with Barack Obama. Was it only a joke? If one can pry oneself away from the SimCity News (A.K.A. mainstream media) and even sample for a short time legitimate news sources such as Drudge and Breitbart, then one would see that we are not in Kansas anymore.....we are in Petrograd 1917!

Hobgoblin, Nor Fowl Fiend....

          I bring this post back a couple times a year. It is obviously most appropriate at Thanksgiving but I cannot wait a whole year to express these thoughts again and again and again.

Thankful For Weaknesses....November 24, 2011

          Thanksgiving is far and away my favorite day of the year. There's no gift exchanges, blessings though such things are, to divert attention from the day, and no pagan bush to drag into the house to be decorated. There are no myths involved, in fact the historical testimony is so strong that even the revisionists have a hard time trying to distort it. As I write this, today's Wall Street Journal is beside me. Every year since 1961 on this day before Thanksgiving their top editorial has been a reprint of the beginning of a first-hand chronicle of the Plymouth Colony's voyage and arrival in their new land. This is part of the heritage that elements of our society are systematically trying to erase. One particular day has since been set apart for Americans to corporately and individually give thanks to God for blessings bestowed.
          Taking advantage of this opportunity, here are some of the things that I am thankful for: I'm thankful that God took a twelve year old boy from a broken home and planted him in an apartment on a modest street amidst fine and decent fellows who would become new friends. I'm thankful that he permitted me to attend a very good high school, rich in tradition and academics, where I would at least experience, although hardly partake in, a scholarly atmosphere, and also how He somehow provided tuition. I'm thankful that in my immaturity He gave me the wisdom to join the army and had mercy on me even as I abused the needed maturing process. I'm thankful for a college degree even though my interests were far more social than academic, and that while working at the university I would meet my future wife. I'm thankful for her patience, love and being my best friend. I'm thankful for thirty-four years of employment from one company and the friends and coworkers there.
          I'm thankful that God instilled in me, somewhat later in life, an insatiable desire to read, to study and to analyze. I'm thankful that in 1982 He had mercy on the lowest of the low, loved the most unlovable and redeemed the least worthy of it. I'm thankful for the gift of a son who I have watched grow far beyond my own intellectual capabilities and do so without the path of rebellion that I chose. I'm thankful for the perfect match of a wonderful young Christian woman to be his wife. I'm thankful for failures.... for they make it impossible for me to think that I am something that I am not. I'm thankful that after I fall down, He gives me strength to get up. I'm thankful for heroes, particularly of the Christian faith but also of our nation, for their lives are blueprints that can be deciphered for at least an attempt to emulate. I'm thankful for faithful pastors and the sweet fellowship of other beneficiaries of God's redemption. I'm thankful for a house and a home for our son as he grew up, with loving family all around. I'm thankful for automobiles and money in the bank to keep them running.
          I'm thankful for vision to see this beautiful world, for taste to enjoy tomorrow's meal (Lord willing,) for the hearing of the preached Word and of music and voices, for feeling....both physical and emotional, and for discerning aromas of both warnings and pleasure. I'm thankful that there is no sixth sense, that our knowledge of the future comes not from ESP but from such as the ESV (English Standard Version of God's written word to us.) I'm thankful for being born an American, for freedom and liberty, but even more so for the opportunity to show gratitude for the efforts of those who sacrificed for those freedoms and liberties and, although in an insignificant way, to pick up the banner they once held aloft.
          I'm thankful for my weaknesses for they give opportunity for God to show His strength. I am thankful most of all that God reached into humanity to adopt a multitude as His family and that He opened my own eyes to see... first myself, and then the cross of Calvary, the empty tomb and the clouds in which Jesus both ascended and will return. I'm thankful for angels all around us. I'm thankful that even though we play no part whatsoever in the salvation of another that we are painted into the picture to the glory of God alone. I'm thankful that, in the same vein, we can pray for the salvation of others and rejoice with them. I'm thankful for many books but especially one, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the last stanza of a song within which reads:

Hobgoblin, nor fowl fiend,
Can daunt his spirit;
He knows, he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies fly away,
He'll fear not what men say,
He'll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.

Plaster And Glass

        
          Today was another 'excursion Saturday' for my wife and me. Why did Ohio name so many cities and towns after cities of the world.....Paris, Athens, Toledo, Lima, Dublin, East Liverpool, even Calcutta! We visited Cambridge today...it's about three hours east of Oxford. Anyway, every year at this time they have what they call the Dickens Village where among other things their main street is lined with life size figures from the Victorian Age of Charles Dickens. I've told you before how I am an art aficionado, my latest purchase being a village glistening under a cover of snow......with about fifty little LED lights mixed within! I thought you might want to know that in advance, for I saw in those figures some pretty good art! The faces were so expressive!
           We also toured the Cambridge Glass Museum with our own docent. I tried to tip him but he wouldn't take it. His expert commentary on the American parlor made the experience over-the-top. Now I don't know a lot about glass but I know history and our tour took us through the style changes of dinnerware in America in the first half of the 20th century. I could see Gatsby in the 20s, Joe and Rose Kennedy in the 30s, FDR in the 40s and.....my grandparents.......in the 50s.
          Apparently I can't visit a Dickens village or even a glass museum without seeing Karl Marx. Mark Levin describes the miscalculations of Marx in his book Plunder And Deceit which you have to read.....if you care one iota about our country, you have to read it. Marx and Engels predicted that capitalism would doom unskilled workers for life. I saw in those plaster faces today the struggle within capitalism in London in the early Victorian Age. I saw the good and the bad. Marx was wrong as Levin points out, it's Marx's philosophy...and his ideology that destroys; ours is but man doing the best he can....with a fallen nature....but privy to the knowledge that..."The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom... " 

A Sea Of Red

         Youth....aah....the blossoming imagination....the burgeoning brain power....the billowing egos sailing off to uncharted seas! Hey, I was there once....you were too. Oh, I had my passions. Robert Kennedy was one. Racial equality was another. I'll relate a little story on the latter:
         It was the summer of 1970... I was in the army and stationed for a month only at a small training school just north of San Fransisco. We were headed to Vietnam. The small group of us were sitting in the enlisted man's club downing beers and talking about, well I don't remember what we were talking about but all of us were white except for one black man. Remember, this was the end of the 1960s. As the hours passed he was the center of attention from everyone but me as I equally distributed my questions and comments. It must have looked as if I tried to take the attention away from him. Not that he wanted to be the center of attention but my actions made it seem as if I didn't like him being there. I don't blame him for thinking this, I didn't construct the situation, I just did my best under the circumstances. The talk and laughter came to a sudden halt as he looked at me and said...."What's the matter....don't you like black people?" I told him that treating a person special and fawning over them solely because of their color was condescending and actually treating that person as if they were not an equal. I wasn't going to do that. We became good friends.
         A similar situation is playing out today on our college campuses but not without instigation. I've never lost that passion for racial equality, in fact it has only heightened in light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but I have been called a racist. Communism calls anyone a racist or a xenophobe or a homophobe or intolerant, who does not tow the line, for such charges are a great means to divide a nation and further their revolution. Civil Rights leader and author Jesse Lee Peterson has described the radical group on the University of Missouri campus as "A bunch of little communists in training." The college campus of today can be described as 'giving' candy to babies.' The parents are gone, replaced by new authority figures. Give them sugar until they are sick and then force feed them the Rx.....socialism.
        Bullying is all these people know. You can see it in the Climate Change scam being perpetrated upon us.  You can see it in the absurd defense of Planned Parenthood. You can see it in the blitzkrieg of the Gay Agenda and you can see it in Obamacare and executive orders that circumvent our constitution. These people are the least tolerant of all. A very recent poll states that 27% of Democrats are in favor of prosecuting those who do no agree with them on global warming!
       This current situation on the University of Missouri campus is so manipulated.....so obvious in the intentions of its designers that it may raise more questions than was anticipated. The answers to which can be found from Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin to Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama. These are not uncharted seas, rather every nautical mile on this sea of red is documented.... every fathom down into the abyss of totalitarianism logged.

Mr. Peterson's latest book is The ANTIDOTE: Healing America from the Poison of Hate, Blame and Victimhood and his website can be visited at bondinfo.org. 

The American Experiment

The American Experiment....       

         What I'm about to write in the following paragraphs pertain to the American public in general, primarily the metropolitan areas of our country and to higher education and the news media in their great influences upon the public, and it is not addressing our patriotic young men and women in the military or to those many Americans who know and lament what has happened to us, or those Christians who actually understand the gospel of Jesus Christ and recognize the great gift given us as individuals and as a nation.
         What has been called 'The American Experiment' is over. The warnings that our Founding Fathers gave us have gone unheeded. We lost our Republic. We found out that we can vote ourselves money and now have a worthless Congress, two condescending and deceiving political parties supplying that Congress, and a people beset upon on all sides by enemies and dangers who do not have a worry in the world beyond their 401k.
         What's more, when this economic system collapses, when this bloated and bullying government finally brings the hammer down upon its own people and when even the most dulled and gullible liberal finally realizes that America has been decisively defeated by its many enemies, they will lash out in every direction on who to blame, oblivious that their own ignorance, pride and greed played a big part in that.
         But right now they own the upper hand for there is no news media to speak of to warn the American people, no Congress to rise up and defend the Constitution and no Christian church to proclaim that we, en masse, are 'sinners in the hands of an angry God,' or that "God had numbered the days of (our) kingdom and brought it to an end..."
         Walk around outside, take a drive or turn on the profoundly nicknamed 'boob tube' and you see nothing out of the ordinary for one will not discern a tyrant in the blooming of a rose, one will not here the furies yelled out of the mouths of blood soaked enemies from a park or a mall or a stadium, and one will not hear Jefferson's words or Lincoln's resolve or Reagan's wisdom on anything our bundled venomous television cable instructs us with.
          These posts have reached some in Belarus, the Ukraine, France, Italy, Poland and Greece within only the last few days. To readers such as these.... they haven't published the death notice of the United States as yet but we have already been laid in the ground. Lenin's body may lay perfectly embalmed without blood or brain matter but his offspring conspire equally as deceptive. Stalin may be long gone but the demonic hatred that ruled him rules others now and Hitler's body was no longer of use but other vessels have been filled with the same spirit of anti-semitism and totalitarianism. Frail as we were in many areas of honor and truth, America was used by God to vanquish these men and secure your liberties. We rejected God and now mock His memory, as you had done much earlier I might add, and He has withdrawn His protection, wherein was your protection also.
         God will certainly not restore us to the whitened sepulchers or pagan temples that we had made ourselves into but His mercies remain available to individuals and perchance even to nations if only we would look to Him with true repentance.

         The following is part of an unnamed Puritan's prayer The Awakened Sinner from Arthur Bennett's much valued book, Valley Of Vision:       

O my forgetful soul,
Awake from your wandering dream;
turn from chasing vanities,
look inward, forward, upward,
view thyself,
reflect upon thyself,
who and what thou art, why here,
what thou must be soon be.

Thou art a creature of God,
formed and furnished by him,
lodged in a body like a shepherd in his tent;
Dost thou not desire to know God's ways?

The Basket Never Empties

        You have been in a Barnes & Noble and walked past the Bibles section I'm sure. And you have probably been in a hotel or motel room and opened the table drawer under the clock radio and lamp and saw a Bible placed there by the Gideons. More than likely you have a Bible somewhere in your home. It's incomprehensible to me, and breathtakingly stupefying, for if there were a table of gold bullion with a sign reading...free....only one to a customer....a madhouse would ensue. And yet here in a typical bookstore is the single most valuable physical item of any possible type in this entire world, for sale at a price one could buy a roast beef dinner at Applebee's, and it goes unnoticed. I visit bookstores with the regularity that most people attend to a gasoline pump. I know that there is very seldom anyone even browsing the Bibles...Christian bookstores excluded here of course.
         Well I haven't yet impressed you too much with this post have I? Blah, blah, blah....the Bible. Book lovers can lose themselves in a good mystery. Believe me, I'm married to one. I can pick up a non-fiction book and sit down with it until I've finished it, highlighting and notes included. Mark Levin's Liberty And Tyranny was like that. This is something different. It's oxygen in the form of words...the blood of life pumped throughout one's being by God Himself.
         How many neurons function throughout the brain? I could look it up but its billions. God designed this organ and yet it's merely a tool to discern the glories of its creator, the inglorious condition man has brought upon himself, and the redemption of those who believe and trust in what is the very Word of God which we so nonchalantly call...a  bible. In this neglected gift of gifts is all of creation explained in sixty-six books. It would be more accurate to say that it's all that we as humans can handle of creation explained in sixty-six books. Still, for the sake of argument you say that sixty-six small books is not a lot of information. Obama's new Pacific Rim Trade Pact has sixty times as many words! Let me try to explain. One sentence from God's Word can change not only a life but an eternal destiny. One phrase can debilitate the strongest person. One word can explain the mystery of your own life.
         What's more it is like the five loaves and two fish that Jesus fed the five-thousand with. The basket never empties! One can read through the Bible and go from death to life, from peasant to a king, and from rags to the riches of an inheritance in heaven as a child of God! Paradoxically and wonderfully it becomes more complex and yet more clear as time passes and veils are lifted. I vividly remember the testimony, some thirty years ago, of a ninety-five year old Christian man who spoke of the ever increasing wonder of the Bible over his life.
          It's an odd treasure also in that people want to give it away. Some live only to give it away, and one may give it away a thousand times and still possess it. The very most that my testimony can do is to pique your interest. If you think me a fool....wonderful....should it lead you to research it yourself to find the method to the perceived madness.

Have You Had A Taste

          The following post is from 2009. I bring it back every once in a while and today it is my Lord's Day post:

Have You Had A Taste?

          I'm an incurable pack rat. My wife came up to me yesterday with a gray disk, about the size of a silver dollar and wanted to know if I knew what it was. It was slightly beveled and had little holes throughout. I had no idea what it was and she was about to throw it away. What! Wait a second. If we throw this out, there will be a day, when I need a disk about the size of a silver dollar, slightly beveled with little holes throughout. She'll never learn. Just throw the thing out and don't ask me about it.
          I have in my hands, well actually I'm typing but I have here in front of me a book that I bought from the National Record Mart in the winter of 1973. Its title is Reach Out, The Living New Testament (illustrated.) It was published by Tyndale and I paid $2.95 for it. It has just a little bit of commentary in it and was aimed at young adults. I showed up at church services in Vietnam when in a solemn and introspective mood but the thought of church never entered my mind during my last 7 months at Fort Bragg. I started at Pitt in January of 1973. It was a heady time. I read constantly, occasionally even textbooks from classes that I was supposed to be reading. I would take my latest book into the college bar and my friends and I would discuss philosophy or some other subject that we were interested in, until I could no longer pronounce my words. That's when my genius really came out.
         I remember one night particularly well. We were discussing The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. Here was a UCLA anthropology grad student taking lessons from a Yaqui Indian shaman on how peyote was instrumental to understanding the mysteries of life. We were absorbed in this while unaware that a couple of quarts of Budweiser did the same thing. In between this nonsense I would occasionally show up at St. Paul's Cathedral. It would be almost a decade before God opened my eyes and I could see the marvel of the gospel and the majesty of His Son, but I had a taste in 1973.
          Sometimes I open this book up and press the pages to my face, smelling them and imagining how that word Jesus would thrill me before I even understood. I'll read a few verses from this paraphrased translation, for it not a true translation, and be transported back for only a moment. And only a moment is what I would want for I was lost. I was in love with me and only the grace of God kept me from facing Him until a time when He would use the words of the Bible as a mirror where I would see only corruption. There are so many mysteries that will be explained to us when this life is done but none to me as impenetrable as why God opened my eyes. If you are firm in your decision to reject God, and you want a good excuse to bolster your case, just think of me. If God would redeem me, then there is no fairness in the world. And don't listen to the voice on the other shoulder that says If God would forgive me, then there is hope for you also. And whatever you do, don't open His book!

Odds And Ends

          Communism and Marxism cannot take hold in a nation whose people are Christian. The false grievances will not convince. There are no embers of class warfare to fan. It can and has taken hold in nations who are categorized as Christian but lack an understanding of the true Gospel. Marxists have always known this therefore have been patient and determined in their efforts to weaken Christianity in any and every area that they can, by any methods available, through deception and without conscience. America has been sufficiently weakened in it's Christian faith for quite some time and that is why we are so easily deluded today.

Odds And Ends......September, 2014

          If it were possible to give odds on whether America survives its enemies and itself they would be very very low. I mentioned the new book The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport in a recent post and there is a part near the end where the Czar and his family were under house arrest in Tobolsk and the  revolutionary guards voted amongst themselves not to wear epaulets , "thereby putting everyone on the new, socialist, level playing field." If there was ever a sorrier bunch than these dupes who actually believed the pious words of Lenin and his cohorts then, well it would have to be those today who are dupes to the same power mongering ideology.
         Class warfare is a means to an end. It is a tool that when sharpened and honed to the degree that when rebellion, anarchy and chaos ensues it has served its purpose and those who thought that justice, equality and fairness were actually the goals are doomed to live out their lives in complete subjugation and slavery to the ones that used and abused them.
         Class warfare is impotent against the Gospel of Jesus Christ for when a man first sees himself in rebellion against a Holy God he seeks mercy... instead of justice, and dispenses fairness and equality... instead of demanding it. No, in human terms the odds are extremely low that we in America will prevail against such an insidious farce being perpetrated on the American public today but there is no such thing as 'odds' with God, and in the end, should He will it to have mercy upon us and move upon our collective hearts and minds in repentance there is no power on earth capable of stopping it.

Two Significant Days

         Rather than bring back an old post from 2009, I'm going to rewrite it using the same two themes. It was originally titled Two Significant Days:

         As everyone knows, on November 22nd 1963 John Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas in what may have been God's first of many punishments on America over a fifty year span. We have never fully recovered from that tragedy. Aldous Huxley, the author of one of the most famous novels of a future dystopian society Brave, New World, also died that day. Yet a third famous man who died on that day was unknown to me at the time, and for many many years afterward. He also wrote a classic book, a book that I devoured during the days of my inquiry into the Gospel of Jesus Christ. C. S. Lewis died on November 22nd 1963! Mere Christianity was the book and since then I've read at least a dozen other books of his....and saw a couple of movies based on his books....The Chronicles Of Narnia.
        On the second date... 36 years ago today, November 4th, 1979, Americans were taken as hostages in Iran and we are paying for that right up to the headlines of this past hour. On that day also, Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy's campaign for the Democrat nomination for president suffered a blow that it would not recover from. A televised interview with Roger Mudd, a distant relation to Dr. Samuel Mudd of the Lincoln assassination, was a disaster for Ted Kennedy. I know a little about this for I was a volunteer in Senator Kennedy's campaign which would be formally announced only three days after the Mudd interview aired.
        As significant as these two events were, I was probably oblivious to them at the time, for my father died on that day and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, not all that far from the three Kennedy brothers. I had over thirty years of conversations with my mother on the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ before she died last year. It was never mentioned or even distantly alluded to with my father for I knew not Jesus Christ at the time. Possibly my father's death caused me to seriously consider what happens after one dies? I know this....within a little over two years after that day I was overwhelmed by that Gospel. I am still overwhelmed by its mercy, love and power for there is no greater gift, there is no fuller joy, and there is no other God.... no advocate as wise and no friend as faithful as our Lord and Savior.... and our coming King....Jesus Christ!

Morning Devotions

         Our son recently told me that he and his wife are planning a trip to Vietnam next year. He wanted to know my thoughts on this. It took me by surprise. I had spent 18 months in Vietnam. He knows my feelings for the Vietnamese people and he knows my feelings about Communism. I don't remember any of the exact words of my response but I remember what I tried to convey to him.
        As I wrote in an earlier post, Vietnam did not win its war for independence in this Second Indochina War as it likes to proclaim. It lost its war against the communists. It wasn't a victory....it was a defeat. 58,000 Americans lost their lives fighting communism in Southeast Asia. Even more young ARVN soldiers lost their lives defending their country. Tens of thousands of 'Boat People' lost their lives fleeing the advancing communists and many Vietnamese who could not get out, of those who were not executed, were sent to reeducation camps.
        He asked me if I would ever want to go back there. I've thought about this in the past. I have absolutely no desire to see what was then North Vietnam but I would like to walk through the cities and towns of what will always be to me South Vietnam.....and Saigon. I'd want to look into the faces of the older Vietnamese and envision them as they would have been in 1970. I'd want to search out brothers and sisters in Christ. I'd want to smell the aroma of nouc mam and hear the chatter of the tonal language. I'd want to see if there was a familiar face.
       It's raining in Central Vietnam right now. I know this for I have the weather set on my iPhone. It's the Monsoon season. So I guess that I would go back but I would wake up every morning and think about those brave young Americans who died over there and those who suffer to this day with their wounds, and families that lost their loved one. I'd think about Communism and the terrors and murders that it thrives upon. I now think about that every day anyway! And I would pray throughout the day that Christ would be known in the cities and the hamlets and the mountains.
       So I recommended to our son that if he does visit Vietnam that he would keep these things in mind, that he would not forget the sorrow inflicted upon its people and the guiding force that caused that sorrow, a force that is alive and well today in our own nation. Upon further reflection I found that I would like he and our daughter-in-law to have the opportunity to see Vietnam, not as tourists...but as Americans and as Christians.

Mad Scientists

        Jon Voight recently stated in an interview that...'Progressive' is a very devious term...created as a substitute for 'communist'. London's The Guardian newspaper recent ran an article titled Why Marxism Is On The Rise Again. The following post is from this past July:

         Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, Americans are going to take Communism seriously, understand what it is, and regret not having heeded the warnings earlier! It has no head, not even a titular head, in fact those that still claim the moniker tend to be the less important, those being 'Communist Parties' in various countries, even our own. The exception to this of course is the five remaining countries that are in fact officially Communist, those being China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos, but even they are hangers-on, albeit well-established and dangerous hangers-on, and not the impetus for revolutions they once were.
         No, Communism is more than a political, economic or societal ideology. It is an organism....more of a bacterium actually. It is parasitic. It is pathologic. It has been in human nature since the fall of man. It does express itself though in economics, in societies and mostly in government in the form of utter tyranny.
         Karl Marx did not start this although he codified a lot of what it has become. Lenin nurtured it in the lab in its first incubation. Stalin and Mao were famines that resulted from this incubation and Barack Obama is the mad scientist bringing this plague back to life. Now I'm not a bacteriologist or microbiologist, I'm not even slightly conversant in these fields and I'm sure that any critiques you might have on my few words so far are correct. I use the terms only to convey the idea that Communism is a disease of the human condition.
           Communists have no real concern nor compassion concerning those they attach themselves to as a leech on a leg. They use minorities, the poor and illegal immigrants to further their own goals. They don't just conquer their enemies...they crush them. They have no God, no conscience and no ethics to hamper their style. Their strategies are both sophisticated and brutish. They are patient to the extreme in developing unrest in a targeted nation but strike like a cobra when it is time. They are masters of infiltrating the nerve centers of a culture and a society. They targeted our entertainment industries, our educational system and unions and were highly successful in all three. When Wisconsin Democrat Senator Joe McCarthy, who was correct in his assessments, proved to be fallible as any other person, they destroyed him through their cadres of unwitting dupes and have distorted his legacy into a Soviet hammer and sickle to pound into submission and cut down any attempts to bring up communism for over half a century.
           Man-made global warming is a pantheistic hysteria commandeered by the Left to seriously injure the stronger capitalist societies. Have you heard the following news story....probably not, for this type of news rarely makes it past the censors. From The Daily Caller..."In 2008, Dr. Ivar Giaever joined over 70 Nobel Science Laureates in endorsing Barack Obama. At a recent Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting he said "I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem" that Obama's statement "no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change" is "ridiculous." He added..."I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you're wrong. Dead wrong." Professor Giaever questioned the science and policies of climate change and referred to it as a "new religion."  He was thus relegated to the unwashed masses of climate deniers who dare to actually challenge the pantheist celebrants.
         Communism today will continue to play this game of obfuscate and deceive, but this is not their end game, for their end game is attack and destroy. That is why I started this post out with.....'Sooner or later, hopefully sooner, Americans are going to take Communism seriously, understand what it is, and regret not having heeded the warnings earlier!"

Note:  The BBC ran a short bio today on Alexis Tsipras who is the Prime Minister of Greece. Here are some excerpts from that bio....."He was elected prime minister, aged 40, In January 2015-six years after becoming the leader of Syriza, a group of radical left-wing parties..........After his swearing-in-ceremony, Mr. Tsipras broke with tradition by refusing to take a religious oath, saying it was against his atheist principles.......His first gesture as prime minister was a visit to a monument honoring Greek communists executed by Nazi occupation forces in 1944......For a man whose political life began as a communist, the visit was heavy with symbolism.......It was at school that he met....(his wife). They were both active in the Communist Party of Greece's youth wing and shared the same world view." The couple named one son after Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Syriza is an acronym that stands for "Radical Coalition of the Left." Its motto is "We open the way to hope."

Ponder For A Moment If You Will

         I'd like to challenge you in this post. I hope that it makes you a little uncomfortable. I hope also that as I type that it makes me uncomfortable because something is amiss in the American church. Are we really looking forward to...even yearning for the return of Jesus Christ in power and glory? What is your answer? I submit to you that just about all of us would hesitatingly say yes but quickly follow that up with well thought-out reasoning on why twenty or thirty years from now is a more likely scenario.
         Surely the church of the first few centuries would not hesitate and would be disappointed if twenty or thirty years seemed to be a possibility. I submit to you also that many persecuted Christians around this world are closing their eyes and hoping that our coming King returns even before morning.
         Our very human nature certainly comes into play here for we are surely frail in many things and the topic of this post is one of them. For that young mother and even that first time grandfather or grandmother it is hard to disassociate for even a moment with the joys that God has given in the births of these children. This also is natural and good and wonderful! I am not saying or even inferring that God is sorely displeased as we enjoy the fruits he has bestowed upon us.  I'm saying that it would be for our greater benefit and a future joy unimaginable to us if we saw more clearly the spirit engulfing this age and what may lie ahead...very near ahead.
         So it might make one uncomfortable to ponder upon what is happening right now to multitudes of our brothers and sisters in Christ? Secure as we might be in America, and that security is eroding every day, we are not alone in this world. Christianity is under assault almost everywhere in one form or another. Even as I type, the horrors of severe and even mortal persecution are testing these children of God to the very limits.
         Meditating on this question will not be easy, particularly if studying God's Word is added to it, for what one would find is that if our King is indeed at the very doorstep then what would precede His return here on earth was enough to make prophets of old weep and become sick as they were given glimpses of those days.
         Ultimately, God wants us to be aware of these things and he Has promised to be with those who go through them. Indeed, He has warned us through his Word not to be taken unawares. My inferences here in these posts are simply that we all should incorporate this part of Scripture into our memory banks, and study enough so that we are not taken by surprise....should.....this world soon meet face-to face....its Creator and Judge!

Been There....Done That....Got The T-shirt

         Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein used the rabbit/duck illusion in his writings to demonstrate different ways of seeing things. You can easily Google 'rabbit/duck illusion' to see the illustration.  More recently, the varying perceptions of a blue and black dress went viral on the Internet. You can also easily Google this illusion. Emil Mazey, a twentieth century labor leader, is reported to have paraphrased the older proverb known as the duck test when he said the following..."I can't prove you are a Communist. But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck,, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks- I'm certainly going to assume that he is a duck."
         I, and many others, see Barack Obama as a Marxist and a Communist. Is this just an illusion on our part or are those who do not see this the ones being taken in by the illusion? The evidence, if one is willing to view it, strongly supports Obama being a man who was prepared, programmed and protected along his way to the White House. Americans need a tutorial on Communism to dispel the illusion that Barack Obama has America's best interests at heart.
        
        

Been There....Done That....Got The T-shirt

         This is my resume. I have almost a half a century of experience as an adult to write these posts. I was part of the 60s generation. I saw JFK in person and shook Jimmy Carter's hand....twice. I've been a Democrat and a Republican. I can compare the Cuban Missile Crisis with Communism today. I was Pentecostal in the beginning. I lived about a third of my adult life without Jesus Christ. I've been in the military. I've been a union member for over 35 years. I've been in college in the early 70s and the late 90s. I've studied world history and American history and church history. I've heard every imaginable form of Christian preaching and have the past to compare it to. I've lived through lean times where we struggled to put food on the table and fat times where I feel guilty after paying so much money at a restaurant. The following post is from June of this year:

          It's really rather amazing....the older one gets the more complete a picture appears of life and this world that we live in......it's more complex but paradoxically more clear at the same time. Now this in itself guarantees nothing for it is just a help that may be utilized or may be wasted. I have many legitimate memories of the 1950s and the accompanying lifestyle of my parents and their friends with their entertainments... all culminating in those '13 days of October 1962.' The 60s were something else altogether and I lived it as part of that generation that spawned idols and tragedies as America deteriorated in the process. I experienced the Vietnam years...from Vietnam...18 months anyway.
          I know what the 70s felt like. I've experienced lean times and fat times. As I grew up I watched my mother struggle to put food on the table and now I buy more food than I need. I backed political candidates from both sides of the political spectrum as both a teenager up until now as a senior citizen. Most importantly I once knew not Jesus Christ and I still tremble at that. I once thought that this life was the only thing that mattered and certainly did not want to even meditate upon what would happen when it was over. I now know that there is meaning in life and that meaning is in Jesus Christ......and that somehow He painted us into the picture of calling others to Him. There is now not only 'meaning' to life but 'life' to life. I don't think that I can adequately convey the difference in these two periods of my life but combined together they offer an additional perspective.
         There is a downside to experiencing this world over so much time... as one sees decades pass with no lessons learned. I've lived on both ends of a fifty year spectrum and we are far far worse off in just about every imaginable way today!  As every year passes I see more and more how frail and weak man is and would wonder how he lasted six-thousand years if I did not already know that the answer to that is that nuclear weapons have only been around for 70 of those years. Wisdom is rare and truth is obsolete today. I read simple letters of correspondence written centuries ago and marvel at how we have digressed in language and analysis and thought in general. We are taken in by every scam hatched in the nursery of our narcissism and greed. We have a Communist president and could care less about it because we have no idea what Communism is.
         No, man has not progressed even though he constantly grades himself with an "A+." Every evidence points to a cataclysmic end to Western Civilization but this courtroom takes no prosecutorial evidence...only testimony from the defense on how they are the true victim. There is no judge, no jury and no oaths to take.
        I take you back to the rise of the Persian Empire and the book of Ezra. God had moved mightily upon the heart of Cyrus The Great who decreed that the Jews could return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. The 70 year Babylonian Captivity was over. Tens of thousands of Jews returned and began the work only to be delayed because of opposition from the peoples who had since taken up residence in the area. Eventually their permission to build was verified. Ezra then returned and found that the people had fallen away from God as if nothing was ever learned! Great remorse was offered to God and reforms were instituted. Nehemiah would return as governor of Judea shortly after and once again great remorse had to be made and reforms instituted. Finally the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt! I can see a similar progression in our own nation....America. It is as if we attempt, albeit through much opposition, to rebuild what we once had but just as the Jews had done, we utterly refuse to separate from the surrounding pagan culture. We are indistinguishable in our conversations, our entertainments and our pastimes. Yet we in the church also grade ourselves with an A+! We would be more than satisfied and consider it a great victory to have a Republican Party led government where little change would be required of us.
         Should God send an Ezra or a Nehemiah to America there would indeed be rending of garments, but He has instead sent Jonahs and now Nahums who are ignored.