The End Game

  I’ve neglected my blog long enough. I’ve been away from it due to a lack of internet connection. Yes, that is possible in this day and age, and it is also survivable believe it or not. Did I go on a religious sabbatical or something? Sometimes it felt like that. Did I get in touch with Mother Nature while I was off the grid? Well I did get a bad case of poison ivy this past summer. Does that count? Did I go on some kind of World Traveling Vision Quest? Well, I did spend a lot of time driving back and forth between Mauriceville, Tx and Port Arthur, Tx (approximately 33 miles one way). I did read a lot of books and spent way too many hours playing some offline games on my computer. I spent way too many hours alone considering I was supposed to be in a relationship. So suffice it to say, that chapter in my life is over, and it is time to move on.

 While I was away, the world kept on rolling along. It has a habit of doing that. Sometimes, I wish it would just stop and let me get off. Hadn’t happened yet, though. So what is the State of the Game these days. To tell you the truth, when I look around it can be downright scary. But you know I’m not usually one of the Doom and Gloom crowd. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to remain that way. Wars and rumors or wars. In Mathew Chapter 24, Jesus says, “ And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” Whew, that’s good to know. Because it seems like we are just one wrong move away from total annihilation. Without any internet, I watched a lot of what passes for News on TV and listened to a lot of talk radio. The political situation in this country could not get any more bipolar if they tried. The left has gone bat-dung crazy and the right is like a snarling beast tearing itself apart. The Libertarian in me knows that its all just a dog and pony show and the whole game is rigged anyway. Don’t believe me? Then tell me how Berny Sanders can beat the pants off of Hillary vote wise but end up almost as a no-show when it comes to delegates. They keep saying that politics is a blood sport. Might as well be. Give ‘em all a sword and let them go at it. Last person standing gets to be President. That’s how it worked in King Arthur’s day. Might get more people to pay attention that way and pull them away from Survivor or American Idol at least for just a bit.

  The Dumbing down of America is in full swing for sure. How depressing to see all our tax dollars wasted just to create a bunch of zombies that can’t even tell you who the Vice President is or what countries were involved in the American Revolution. It appears our kids are smarter going in to school than they are when they come out. Sad, Sad, Sad. And look at them all jumping on the Berny Sanders bandwagon just because he tells them he’s going to give them everything for free. They ought to all be required to go to the library (if they can find it) and look up Socialism and see how well it works now and in the past. Of course that won’t help much because, even if someone does point the way to the library, they wouldn’t be able to read all those big words in those books that don’t even have any pictures. But here’s a clue for them. Nothing is Free….Ever!!!!!! And if someone in the government uses the word free – RUN!

  So just how evil is the real government of the world? Beyond belief. Here’s a few of their pet projects just to give you a clue: Population reduction (think about all the new virus’ that keep popping up in the third world where birth rate is out of control – HIV, swine flu, bird flu, Ebola, Zika, etc. ) Biological Warfare (yes it is a never ending project kept mostly under wraps), weather control (meant to fix but is having just the opposite effect), mind control (trust me they’ve made great leaps on this one), self-actuating drones and robots that pick their own targets without human input (DARPA going all in on this one since American’s have gotten squeamish about putting “boots on the ground”), and then there’s the CIA that is always meddling in all foreign government’s affairs and we wonder why they hate us so. Then there is that whole resource thing with the Four Horsemen not caring how they are destroying the planet just so they keep their stranglehold on the world’s oil. They’ll take us all down rather than give up one ounce of control over “their” black gold.

 But you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction

  I Believe we’re just about there. So do a lot of people apparently. Sunday in church, though, our Pastor made the statement that no one wants to go right now. He said that none of us were ready. I raised my hand and had to disagree. I’m ready. Bring it!

I faced the last year without the internet. I can face anything.

Love is All You Need

Corinthians 13:13 –

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

 The Beatles once sang that “Love is all you need.” They almost had it right. It should have been, “Love is All”. Love is the only thing you can take with you. Love is the only thing that each and every normal individual craves. Without love we experience a void that we try to fill in other ways, but none of them satisfy the way love does. Nothing else comes close to filling that void. Love is All. A simple statement for sure. But what do I mean by it? You know when I was a very young man, I used to contemplate all the great mysteries of life. I would sit outside on a hot summer night and look up at the stars letting my imagination run wild. My brother and I used to argue about what was on the other side of the end of space. Infinity was something neither of us could get our heads around. My brother argued that the universe had to have a boundary. We had heard a little about the so-called Big Bang Theory. According to this theory, space itself is expanding like a toy balloon at a kid’s birthday party. I never accepted that theory as a kid. “If it has borders that were expanding, what was on the other side of those borders,” I would ask. There had to be something right? What was the universe expanding into? “Nothing”, my brother assured me. There was nothing on the other side of the border. “Well, how far does this nothing go,” I asked? “It just goes on forever,” he said. I thought that this nothing had to be pretty darn big then. It must be way bigger than the universe that was by definition everything. Then I imagined that if I could go far enough above it all and look at this infinity of nothing, I might spot the universe in the midst of it like a tiny grain of sand in an endless ocean. From that perspective, the universe wasn’t so big after all.

  That was the humble beginning of my endeavors to understand the cosmos. I first read about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in high school, and my mind really got itself in gear trying to figure the whole thing out. Einstein set me on a path of exploration that has taken me in so many different directions at once. I’m still not so sure Einstein was right about everything he proposed. But one of the concepts that fascinated me was his attempts to reconcile what he called the “weak” and “strong” forces of gravity which, he thought, if he could just manage that, he would have his Holy Grail of a unified theory of everything. I started thinking a lot about gravity then too. At the same time I was contemplating all the great scientific mysteries, I was also wrestling with the religious ones as well. I remember the first time I came across the statement, “God is Love.”  My family weren’t church goers. I wasn’t indoctrinated in anyone’s belief system as a child. I pretty much came up with my own beliefs. For starters, I never doubted that there was a God who created the universe even though no one had assured me at this point that there was indeed a creator of everything. All of nature’s intricate patterns, designs, laws were God’s handiwork, no doubt, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know what to think about the rest of religious dogma, but that much I was certain about.

  Somehow, while pondering all these things, I had a flash of insight that told me that God’s Love and the mysterious force of gravity might be one and the same thing. Don’t ask me how. But here’s how it appeared to me - there’s this mysterious, invisible, unexplainable force that emanates from the center of Earth pulling me and everything else towards the center, right? And this force has nothing to do with electric fields or magnetic lines or electro-magnetism as it were. Then what is gravity and what generates it – where does it come from? And how does such a force pull on me in just such a manner as not to ever crush me or allow me to go floating off into space? I began to imagine God’s love as this force that fills his creation. His love holds me to the ground of this ball of matter we call planet Earth that is spinning so very frighteningly fast around its own axis and at the same time making a hasty orbit around the sun and simultaneously going on a tear around the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy not to mention the presumably incredible journey into that void of nothingness my brother and I used to contemplate. With so much tremendous motion involved, still I’m held gently but firmly to the surface of the world. And they call that the “weak” force of gravity! They call it weak because you can defy it and escape it leaving the Earth’s surface behind. Yes if you push hard enough, God will let you slip from his grasp. But don’t worry – whether you believe in him or not – God loves all his children and won’t turn you loose and let you drift away unless you make a very concerted effort to do so. I for one have a feeling that if I was a proportional size standing on the surface of a nucleus of an atom and I pushed with a proportional effort against my restraints, God would loosen his grip just the same and I would leave that atom to go floating off into the nearly infinitely empty space that exist between the atoms. God’s love is a powerful thing. But he will never use it to make you submit to his will against your own. He will never crush you with it. But he will release you from it if you push against it. But therein lies the void. Without God’s love we are empty pitiful things. Yes, I know if I were able to stand on the surface of say Jupiter, I would be crushed down flat by the tremendous force of gravity there. But that’s because I’m not of the right proportion to stand freely on such a surface.

  Love between two people is a powerful thing as well. It pulls them together and makes them one. The love between a man and a woman or the love between a parent and their children can be oh so fulfilling and such a blessed thing. I love my children always - no matter what and whether they believe it or not. I have been lucky enough to have loved a couple of women with all my heart and soul. But I lost each of them in their turn. And after suffering such a great loss, some of that emptiness again plagued my soul. Since then, that void has been filled with a different love. The love of God. I have a new woman in my life that makes me happy and fills that need again that we all share for human companionship. Now, however, I take great comfort in knowing that I will never experience that feeling of a great empty void again. God’s love will always be there filling that hole and keeping me grounded.

  So which would you prefer to imagine pulls you towards the center of the Earth – an invisible, unexplained force – or God’s love? You can call it the “weak” force of gravity if you want to. But as for me, I prefer to think of it as God’s Strong Love for all his children that keeps our feet planted firmly on the ground. 

Think we know what gravity really is? Go to this link and think again:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question232.htm

                                                      I've Been Away Now For So Long...
  My, it's been a while. Sometimes, when you live on a fixed income as I do now with only Social Security benefits to pay the bills and buy the groceries, it can be difilcult to get two ends to meet. I've been drawing Social Security now since I was 62 years old (I'll be 66 next month). I didn't really want to retire at 62 but my job played out a couple months before I turned 62 and I couldn't find another one at the time, so I figured I might as well. At least I would have social security money coming in. However, to this day I still haven't figured out a way to budget my monthly income so that it will last the whole month. Getting only one meager check a month really sucks.
   Anyway, recently my now aged car (2003 Ford Escape) has decided to go all rust bucket on me and keeps trying to give up the ghost. I had to spend $800 last month just to keep it running sufficiently enough to get me from point A to point B (as long as point A is not too far from point B) with only a minimum of anxiety about being stranded on the side of the road. That hit, on an already strained budget, left me scrambling to figure out whether it would be Paul or Peter who got paid that month. The cable bill was one of the Paul's that didn't get paid. I discovered very quickly that Time Warner doesn't have much of a sense of humor about such things. They cut me off only a few days after the bill was overdue. So no TV and no Internet.
  Now let me tell you it was a close call. I almost decided I could live without food as long as I had the internet. I had to pay the electric bill of course because it is pretty cold out there and hard to read books in the dark. Tough choices had to be made. Of course my addiction to food won out in the end and keeping the lights on just barely. So it's been a couple of long months with no TV and no Intenet. I say again...no TV and no Internet! For me that shock was like the shock to most of you if someone came and took away your cell phone. Heaven forbid! How would you live? Well, I'm here to report on just how I managed to live out these past few months without curling up in the corner of my room and turning into a  little shrivelling, brown ball of withdrawal twitches accompanied by pitiful moans and groans that would have been horrible to witness.
  I actually survived quite well. I didn't starve, and I read a few books I've been meaning to read. I played a lot of games on my computer...yes it still works without the internet - but just barely. It even kept popping up a little message in the bottom right corner saying there were new updates available for me to download. Poor computer was delusional thinking it still had access to the outside world. And I hate to admit it, but I did click on the message a couple of times just to see what would happen. Nothing...well it told me to please check my internet connection because it could not connect to the internet. Just goes to show you how smart these things really are.
  Now for some of you, I'm sure, losing the TV would be a major blow. I mean how would you know who they kicked off the island on Survivor, or who got voted off of American Idol? Or others would just die if they didn't know for sure if Victor was really going to be that mean to his own son, Nick. For me, I wouldn't know those things even if I had TV. Now I really thought I might die for sure when I thought about not seeing any of the final season football games and none of the College Bowl games. But low and behold I put them out of my mind and life went on. To tell the truth, I'm not a big TV fan. I do watch a lot of movies, but that is about it. The past couple of months, I did watch several of the dvd's in my collection for the umpteenth time. I couldn't even afford Red Box and that's just sad. So old favorites had to suffice when times got tough.
  But it was the internet that was as hard for me to do without as it was for me to give up drinking Coca Colas a few years back. I craved me some internet. I was recently told by someone that they had never met a man that didn't watch the News on TV on a daily basis. I never watch the news on TV. But I read a lot of news on the internet...real news and not just what some talking head wants to convince me is the real "no spin" version of the news. I subscribe to and read a lot of newsletters that come in my email on a daily basis. I had well over 1,000 unread emails, by the way when I did finally get on the internet. I also watch a lot of videos on youtube, and actually scroll down and see what all you guys posted on my facebook page. I also depend on the internet guite a bit as a research tool. I use it to look up details I include in my book I'm writing. I also use it for reasearch and commentaries when preparing for my weekly Bible Study class. So for me the internet is the to-die-for utility around here. I could do without my TV, cell phone, coffee maker, microwave, or blender way better than doing without my internet access. That being said...I still survived without it just like we deed in the old days. In fact I really started getting used to the peace and quiet around here. But I'm from the now older generation and still remember how it was in the old days when we didn't have such things as TV's, Computers, and cell phones busying up our time and drowning out our own thoughts. For the last couple of months I got a little taste of what that used to be like. And it wasn't at all as bad as I thought it might be. Still don't look for me to throw my computer out the window any time soon, ok?
Not gonna happen. And Yea!!!! I have internet again!

The Spirit of Christmas

The Spirit of Christmas

  Yes, it’s that time of year again. They started playing Christmas music the day after Halloween at Wal-Mart. I have to admit that Christmas has never been one of my favorite holidays. In fact, most times, I’m glad when it’s over. I’m not exactly a scrooge about it. But there was a time in my life when I was single and spent way too many Christmases all alone. Those were dark days in my life when I was self destructing and circling the drain. Those days left a stain on my soul that lingers still. Even when I’m with loved ones now on Christmas, I still feel that lonely abyss tugging at me. The despair of those days haunts me always, and I’m especially reminded of it when I see all the Yule Tide decorations start to go up.

  I hear so much about the “Christmas Spirit” and wonder why we only seem to want to have that at this particular time of the year. I mean, what is Christmas Spirit anyway? And, if it’s so great, why shouldn’t we have it all year round? We are supposed to be celebrating the birth of our Savoir, Jesus Christ in December. Never mind that he was probably born in late August or September. I see a lot of movies on the Hallmark Channel about Christmas Spirit…they start, too, right after Halloween when all the scary Halloween movie reruns have played out. I guess they don’t make too many Thanksgiving movies. I like Thanksgiving. It’s one of my favorite holidays. You sit around with the family and stuff yourself with good food. And there’s no pressure to buy anybody any gifts on Thanksgiving. After a good meal you can always enjoy a football game on TV. That’s my kind of holiday.

  But back to all those Christmas Spirit movies on Hallmark Channel….they seem to mostly be about Santa Claus and how, if we don’t muster up enough Christmas Spirit this year, Santa will go out of business. Either that or some of the movies are about relationships that blossom after two people somehow find each other during the holidays usually with the miraculous help of the good old Saint Nick who just happens to show up at the right moment to eliminate all obstacles that were keeping the two lonely hearts apart. So the message seems to be in all this that Santa is the reason for the season, and it’s all about the presents. Or he’s a pretty good substitute for cupid. Don’t get me wrong…I enjoy watching some of these fanciful and touching tales on the Hallmark Channel. But I have to wonder where Christ is in CHRISTmas these days. After all it’s not Santamas…although maybe December 25^th is really Santa's birthday. Someone needs to tell him in that case that he’s got it all wrong, and you’re supposed to get gifts on your birthday not give them.

  And lately, for fear of offending someone, we are not even supposed to say Merry Christmas in public. Well did't Jesus say, "But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven."? I would so much more fear that offense than worry about someone's tender feelings here. But, hey, you who know me also know that I've never been one to worry about being politically correct. I've never been offended by someone saying Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Sviata Vechera, etc, etc. or even the generic stand-in, Happy Holidays. So if me and millions of other well wishing Christians cheerfully wishing each other a Merry Christmas offends you, then maybe you might be happier living in a non-Christian country. Because I for one am not going to stop exercising my God given/Constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. As for you of the Atheistic persuasion, the last bastion of official government sponsored atheism, The Peoples Republic of China, is fighting a losing battle of its own against a rising tide of Christianity not to mention the never eradicated pockets of Buddhism and areas of still practicing Muslims. So the window of opportunity is closing rapidly in that part of the world as we speak. You might be wiser to learn to just ignore us when we go about our Merry Christmas ways the same way we ignore Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins.

  Anyway, this year - more so than any other year - I have made a vow to have real Christmas Spirit. I plan on putting Christ first in all that I do and not worry so much about Santa Clause and presents. I know Wall Street is probably making a list of hit men about now and checking it twice to see which ones live near me in case that idea catches on. Heaven forbid that we all quit putting the focus on buying everyone we care about a present. People would lose jobs, and Main Street would go belly up broke for sure. I just want to get something back that I know I lost a long time ago. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this, and many in the world today have lost their true Christmas Spirit too. Jesus gave us the best present anyone could ever give us. And he accomplished that not with his birth but by his death and resurrection. As for me, I will strive to be filled with the true Christmas Spirit this year. After all if it weren’t for Jesus, that abyss I mentioned earlier would probably not be just something I feared in my worse nightmares, but my permanent address.

  So this year, when you hear me tell you Merry Christmas, just know that I mean it in the best possible way. May Jesus also be the reason for your Christmas Spirit – this and every other time of the year. Merry Christmas everyone, and may God walk with you throughout the coming year.

                                 vs.

Evil Empire

  President Ronald Reagan once referred to the Soviet Union as “The Evil Empire”. Indeed Russia’s history has often been a bloody one. But not many nations have escaped that particular epitaph. The U.S. has perhaps had one of the bloodiest histories around. For confirmation of that, go ask the original American Native population…what’s left of it. Or ask the people of Hiroshima or Nagasaki who were civilians in a country that was trying desperately to surrender and were killed anyway. In an instant 300,000 died. And we do have some far flung “colonies” or territories and spheres of influence to this day as a result of that war. Does that make us an empire and evil? As a people, perhaps not. But as a nation - we have definitely crossed the line of late.

  Nearly every time you turn on the TV, you see talking heads descrying this nation or that as evil and in dire need of at least a good bombing. And the excuse is always the same – to protect our American freedoms or help the poor hapless people of said country to obtain democracy like ours.  Once we’ve bombed the country back to the stone age killing thousands of it’s citizens and maybe caused many millions more to flee as refugees in the process, we prop up a government that answers to the U.S. (not to mention a banking system that answers to the IMF) and then sit back and say gee whiz why aren’t they more appreciative of the democracy we’ve handed to them on a silver platter? Meanwhile their cities are rubble, their infrastructure is non-existent, healthcare is pathetic, and they’re wondering where their next meal is going to come from. But, hey, at least they now have a democracy instead of one of those nasty old dictatorships. Need a prime example? Go look at Gadhafi’s Libya before we intervened and take a gander at the turmoil that exists now. Then look at the rest of the Middle East countries we’ve demanded regime change in. And then take an unbiased eye view of life there before and after we put our boots on the ground. Then tell me again who the evil empire is?

  I know some will be horrified at these statements and accuse me of being un-American or worse a traitor. But I for one fail to see in all this anything positive or good. Oh but you say we have demolished terrorism all over the world and made the world safer for our democracy at least. First of all we don’t have a democracy…never have. So we need to quit saying we’re doing any of this to spread our democracy over the rest of the world that is just too ignorant to see that it’s just what they need. If you believe this is the reason for any of our recent history, then you need to pull you head out of cable news because they have turned your brain to mush. Secondly, is the world really rid of or safe from terrorism? Have any of the recent wars made any kind of dent on terrorism? On the contrary, it has provided the best recruitment tools a terrorist organization could ask for. And guess where most of them got their weapons?

  Now there’s this new boogeyman called ISIS (or ISIL as Obama insists on calling it since the L stands for Levant which includes Israel; a country he’s not overly fond of). Yes some members of ISIS are guilty of some horrible things. There has been killing of innocents and all those who refuse to convert to their particular brand of Islam. And then there’s the beheadings. On our cable news networks this is made out to be the worst, most barbaric thing imaginable and they scream for justice (bombs and boots) to rain down on these barbarians. Ok, beheading bad. We can all agree on that. But is it any more barbaric than sitting somewhere in Colorado and working a joystick to send a drone into some country half way around the world that we haven’t even declared war against and unleashing hell and fire against “terrorists” who are sitting down to dinner with their wives and children?  And calling their neighbors collateral damage, whose house was just a little too close to said terrorists. Is that any less barbaric? And did you know that there have been 59 “legal” beheadings so far in Saudi Arabia this year alone. Yet I’ve not heard cable news calling them barbaric or demanding boots and bombs rain down on that country. I won’t even get started on who ISIS really is and how they came to be. Let’s just suffice it to say that they provide a convenient excuse for bombing a country we’ve been chomping at the bit to bomb all along anyway and leave it at that for now.

  So let me ask you to step back here for a moment and tell me where it all went wrong? Many of you, I know, are going to point to 9/11 and say that is justification enough for what’s been happening in the world today. Is it? Even if you buy the story the President and the Main Stream Media told you of that tragedy (which I don’t) how is it that the one country that donated the majority of the terrorists on those planes and, it can be shown, the money that paid their way is still unscathed through all this. That country is Saudi Arabia. No bombs dropped there. And two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan - that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 - got attacked shortly thereafter and have been demolished for a crime they didn’t commit. And the ball kept rolling from there. And it doesn’t look like they plan on stopping it any time in the near future. Can World War III be too far off if this keeps going? And when history looks back at nations picking sides and going at each other, who will they say started it? Nineteen men with box cutters on some airplanes who were officially not representing any country at all even though fifteen of the nineteen were Saudi citizens. Or perhaps will they judge the U.S. harshly as overacting and killing the baby while throwing out the bathwater? I guess it will depend on who is left alive to write those history books.

  I have come to believe that our fall was predestined and set into motion much earlier than 09/11/2001. Although this country was conceived in the light of day, it was hijacked and took a turn towards the dark side a long time ago. People really do need to wake up and take a good, long, honest, look at where, when, and why this has happened. There are dark forces at work in human history. And those forces have concentrated their efforts in the good old USA of late. Unless the good people of this country rise up and put a stop to it, the world as we know it will come to a very nasty end.

  This country was built up as “One Nation Under God”. It says it right there on our currency, “In God We Trust”. But is this still true today? More and more, we as a nation have turned away from God. Materialism is our new God. When Israel did this, God sent a prophet, Isaiah, to warn them. But they didn’t listen. So God stretched out his hand towards them in the form of using their enemies to shake them in an effort to wake them up and cause them to repent. He did the same thing to America on September 11^th 2001. In fact using the very same enemy he used against Israel as related in the Book of Isaiah Ch. 9 which was the Assyrians (though they don’t call themselves that anymore those hijackers were of the same blood as those ancient Assyrians). But Israel would remain defiant. And boast about rebuilding and coming back stronger and greater. In Isaiah 9:10 they boasted that, “The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones; the sycomores are cut down, but we will replace them with cedars.”  Those very words were read into the Congressional Record on the day after 9/11 by the Speaker of the House. It was done in the manner of defiance and boasting that we would rebuild even stronger in defense and defiance of our enemies. Not even a hint of repentance in any of the speeches made then or since. And did you know that when the World Trade Buildings came down there was an actual sycamore tree in a nearby park (in an area where anything but concrete and asphalt is rare) that was knocked down by the falling debris? The sycamore was later replaced with a cedar. Also a huge stone was hewn from a mountain in upstate New York to serve as the corner stone for the new tower built to replace the old.

  So how did God handle an unrepentant and boastful nation? Isaiah 9:11 tells us that God stirred up King Rezin of the Arameans along with his enemies and brought them against Israel. In 9:12 “The Syrians before and the Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. Even after all this, in 9:13, “For the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them (the Lord God), neither do they seek the Lord of hosts.”  Were those same people stirred up against us? Obviously, they were.

  But often in the Bible, when God sends a prophet and no one listens, and then he shakes them in an effort to get their attention they still don’t get it. So what happens next? A bigger shaking always happens. The World Trade Center was a symbol of America’s financial might. And it came crashing down. But did America change its ways? No not at all. The movement away from God continued. Greater attempts were made to remove God from schools, workplaces, even our everyday speech. So first the symbol of our economic power was broken and then, in 2009, Wall Street and our actual economic power was shaken to the core. It would have fallen into ruin if the government had not stepped in and bailed them out with our future earnings, devastating our economy then and for future generations to come.

  I wish I could say that we’ve gotten the message and repented as a nation. But that’s just not true. We have struck out at enemies in all parts of the world, still defiant as ever. And where there were no enemies we’ve created them. Many thousands have been killed, and millions more have been left homeless, displaced and living in misery. And there doesn’t appear to be any end to our hubris. Will God give us one more devastating shaking perhaps in the form of a total economic collapse to finally get our attention? Or will this next one leave no brick standing one atop the other?

  I believe that this country is under judgment by God, and we will suffer the same fate that Israel did under similar circumstances. Unrepentant Israel was demolished and ceased to exist as a nation. We may soon suffer the same fate if we don’t change our ways and turn back to God. The question is, can we change them now or is it too late? And whose fault is it, anyway? Is it the President? Or is it perhaps all those seeming buffoons in Congress? Or maybe it’s the fat cats on Wall Street that we should blame for the mess we’re in. Surely some of those have a degree of blame to answer for. But only in that many of them have made themselves complicit with the real powers that be.    

  And just who are the real powers that have led this country astray? I know this part will get me ridiculed and labeled a kook. Most didn’t listen to or believe the prophets God sent either, and they were ridiculed or killed. But I firmly believe that this country is in the hands of those very fallen ones and their leader. Many men and women of power in this country, from Hollywood to D.C. and Wall Street, have entered into secret covenant with them and are working hand in hand with them to bring about our ruin and destruction. It is they who are steadfastly attempting to remove God from our society and have brought God’s judgment upon us. Our only hope – pray! Pray for all you’re worth.  

Main Stream Madness

  Current events have been managed and packaged into a twenty-four-hour "entertainment" media that, frankly, I find horrifying when it tries to pass itself off as news. It is instead so much propaganda disguised as news that it is a wonder to me how more people don't realize this and start throwing their TV's into the trash heaps where they belong. Let me take one example and demonstrate what I mean. Recently, a group of individuals that have been labeled by, what I call the Blame Stream Media (BSM), as ISIS or ISIL or IS, for short, has been all over the BSM. I won't try to confuse you with the difference and meaning of this alphabet soup the media is fond of throwing at you. And just as a side, have you noticed that the drug cartel, also known as the CDC and Big Pharma, have taken to doing the same thing? Every disease you can think of has now been given some alphanumeric designation like ALS or RLS (Restless Leg Syndrome -- give me a break....I think I have that now as my leg involuntarily wants to kick someone in their posterior regions (PR's?) every time I turn on the "news".) Anyway, ISIS was alleged to have posted a video on the web recently of them purportedly decapitating an American news journalist which went viral - a testament as to how voyeuristic our society has become - which sent our BSM into a whirlwind of frenzy and war drum pounding. 

  Don't get me wrong here. It was a horrific and barbaric thing to do to another human being. But lets stop and ask a few questions first before we jump on the band wagon. Fist of all, what about the victim in question? Did they practice some plastic surgery on him while in captivity? Because if you compare the pictures of the guy they supposedly decapitated with earlier pre-captivity photos, you will notice that it looks nothing like the same guy. Secondly, what good would it do this so called ISIS group to publish something like that on the web? Do you think they are crazy enough to purposely provoke the whole world into attacking them? You can't honestly believe that they think such a tactic would forestall or cause someone to cease to attack them? In who's world does that make any kind of sense? Instead, the BSM has more to gain from such a thing than the group accused of it Now they can justify going back into a country we've already ravaged by war, which they claim we should have never left in the first place, and possibly into one that we've been chomping at the bit to disassemble as well. Think of the ratings such an event would produce. Secondly, how can we be sure that the so called ISIS group had anything to do with the video on the web? Men wearing masks and threatening someone with a knife? This could be done anywhere by anyone with a video camera. What proof does the BSM offer that it is indeed ISIS and for that matter even a real event rather than a Hollywood style production? You say they offered no proof, or even inquiry, or honest journalistic investigation before splashing it all over the place? And immediately their feeding frenzy of war rhetoric began with all the various networks saying the same dishonesty spewing out things like, "This is a most barbaric provocation and act of war!" Yes, if a true event, it is horrible. But is it any more barbaric than say a drone strike on a "suspected" terrorist killing several people including women and children in a country we're not even officially at war with? Or say carpet bombing a whole village killing innocents as well as combatants that might be taking refuge there? I can go on and on with a list of things that we have done that seem totally horrific and barbaric to me. When anyone else does it the BSM calls it terrorism, but when we do it, they call it self defense or protecting our national interest.

  Anyway, that's just one example of the total hypocrisy that passes for news these days. There are so many others. Don't even get me started on the Ferguson, Missouri incident. Now to top all this off, I read an article the other day written by a woman who says she worked in the industry. She said she was aware that subliminal messages were being inserted routinely in both commercials and during regular TV programs. Also that the practice has spread to cell phones and computers. So how do you like your mind control? Over easy or scrambled? All I can say is welcome to our Orwellian Society. Hope you enjoy it. For  me, I think I will be mostly tuning out, at least until the storm troopers show up at my front door....hold on....gotta go...someone's knocking on my front door.  

A Simple Choice

  For many years I’ve kept my religious convictions pretty much to myself. People that know me well didn’t know what was going on in my heart and mind. I’ve come out and stated that I believe in God a few times in this blog but left it at that. I’ve been received less than favorably for doing so. That kept me from elaborating further. But no more. I’m tired of apologizing for what I believe in as though I’ve done something to be ashamed of. I’m not ashamed. And I’m not just “playing the odds”. My convictions are real. So I feel like I need to finally come clean and tell the story of how I got to this point and made the “simple” choice to believe.

  I was not brought up in a religious family. Far from it. My parents didn’t go to church and never encouraged us to do so. I don’t remember ever seeing a Bible in our house. My first encounter with religion came by way of my Aunt Vern, who was born and raised Catholic and determined that my father was raising a bunch of heathens. She got into an argument with him about it one day, and he told her that if she was so worried about it she could bring us to church. So she did. Aunt Vern managed to get her sisters there to be godparents and got us all baptized in the local Catholic Church. Aunt Vern was my godmother. We then had to attend something called catechism and go with her on Sundays to mass. Back in those days, the mass was all in Latin. Also, even the choir sang in Latin; I know because I was briefly a member of the choir and had to learn songs in Latin without knowing what I was singing about.

  One of my most embarrassing moments happened early on during my Catholic experience. My first confession.  I wasn’t really sure what a sin was. Or what I was supposed to do in there. Nervously I entered the little closed in box with a sliding window. I could hear the priest mumbling something to the person on the other side but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then the window on my side slid open with a bang and startled me. I blurted out, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.” I was pretty sure I had, but didn’t have a clue what I was going to say other than that. After all, I was only about twelve years old. How bad could I have been? The priest was praying and I blurted out, “I said some bad words.” I hadn’t really but then I froze and couldn’t think of anything else so terrible that I needed to confess it. The priest asked, “Is that it? What words did you say?” Oh crap! I was supposed to actually tell him what I said? “Hell, and th…th.. the “S” word, Father,” I stuttered. He mumbled something about repenting and then told me that for my penance I should say two “Our Father’s” and five “Hail Mary’s”. Then the window banged shut startling me again. “Our Father who art in heaven”….I began quickly. I knelt there and got about half way through the third Hail Mary when the window banged open again on my side. The person on the other side must not have had too many sins to confess I guessed. I stammered out that I had already had my turn. The window banged shut again. Father was in a hurry to get this over with I guessed, and I was holding up the line. I exited the booth without finishing the requisite Hail Mary’s sure I was now condemned to hell forever because of it. When I went back and sat next to my Aunt Vern she whispered, “You sure were in there a long time. Did you have that much to confess?”  I slid down in the pew sure that everyone else in the church was looking at me and thinking the same thing. In the car on the way home, my Aunt asked me again about it, and she laughed all the way home when I told her what happened. She told me I was supposed to say the prayers after I left the booth. Who knew?

  Anyway, determined to discover what all the fuss was about, I went to the YMCA, that was near our house, the next week and pulled down the huge Holy Bible that was perched upon a podium in the small reading room off to one side of the main playroom. It was the biggest book I had ever seen, and the only way to manage it was to lay it on the floor in front of me. I sat cross-legged and began with Genesis. I worked my way through the whole book that summer in just such a manner. For some the King James is almost like a foreign language. But I had always been an avid reader, so I had little difficulty understanding the words. But the concepts were strange and puzzled me greatly.

  After I finished it, I had a multitude of questions to say the least. Well that’s what catechism is for, right? Being a very shy kid, I didn’t have the nerve to ask the priest who taught the class any of my questions. But fortunately, my cousin was always around and was sort of a teacher’s aid. So I asked him to ask the priest for me. First question was why do we say there is only one true god but we pray to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? Wouldn’t that count as three? And then there’s the Virgin Mary as well. Don’t that make four? The priest answered a couple of my easier questions at first because he thought they were coming from my cousin. But when he realized that my cousin was just the go between, he told him that I shouldn’t be worried about such things because that’s what the priesthood was for. They did the worrying for us, and all I needed to do was go to church and do what I was told. Feeling totally patronized, I abandoned all hope of finding any answers in the Catholic Church. So, to the dismay of my Aunt Vern, I quit going. At this point I can honestly say that I didn’t have much faith in organized religion or what they were all about. I was basing this on a sample of only one of course, and that may not have been a fair assessment. But I was only a teenager, after all, and had little opportunity or desire to broaden my base line.

  At a very young age, and way before my aunt dragged us kicking and screaming to church, I believed that there was a God or at least some kind of creator for the universe. My brother, Don, and I laid on top of the Sears warehouse on nights when it was too hot to sleep looking up at the stars and speculated about it all the time. He had his doubts back then, but somehow I just knew there was a God. Where that knowledge came from, I couldn’t say. But I had no such inkling of what to do with the whole Jesus thing.  So, after my disappointing Catholic experience, I put that question on the back burner for a while. I muddled through school without thinking overly much about religion after that.

    However, when I graduated from high school, I began reading everything I could get my hands on pertaining to religion. I had already read the Bible so I thought it only fair that I read other religion’s scriptures and holy writings as well. I read them all even the Book of Mormon which is one of the hardest books to read all the way through, by the way. Because to me, at that point, it was one of the most boring books I ever read. Not to mention that I had decided early on, after noticing some historical discrepancies, that it was a total fiction.

  Anyway, after that, I began reading what the opposition had to say. I got very excited when I started reading about the great philosophers and scientists and what they had to say on the matter. Uncle Sam’s Army got in the way of my further studies, though, for the next four years. I did attend several different churches with various Army buddies just out of curiosity when they invited me, but still came away from them uninspired and with the same old unanswered questions.

  After the Army, there was college. I jumped into that with both feet. The University of Lamar had books on cosmology not found at our local library. I read them all. I was majoring in English Literature and noticed that many of the great poets and authors were struggling with the same questions I was. It stoked the fires of my quest to understand…well everything. Even after college, I continued to read everything on the subject of how we or the universe got here.

  So here I was with tons of knowledge and arguments from both sides. I knew all the arguments made by theologians and the counter arguments made by scientists. But I was still no closer to determining which side was closer to the truth --- and let me just state here that at that point I was pretty convinced that neither side was. Because of my lack of conviction one way or the other, people on my job started calling me an atheist. I let them believe that for a time, although I still had that deep seated conviction that there is a God.

  My first very real religious experience happened several years after I graduated from college and close to the end of my first marriage. Of all places it occurred at a New Year’s Eve Party my wife and I went to at a local night club in Beaumont. All my years of studying this mystifying question left me a pretty serious, quiet, and introverted individual. A few minutes before the stroke of midnight, when the crowd was making so much noise you couldn’t hear anything but a constant roar, a sudden silence fell over me. The noise seemed to vanish as if someone turned off a switch. Then the most peaceful feeling I have ever experienced overwhelmed me. Then I heard a voice say, “Life was not meant to be so serious all the time. Live in Joy. Enjoy the life I’ve given you while you can.” No, I had not been drinking anything other than a glass of champagne. I was the designated driver. At the stroke of midnight the sound came flooding back in, nearly bursting my eardrums. I sat there laughing, with tears streaming down my face. My wife noticed when she tried to kiss me and wish me a happy new year. She asked what was so funny. I don’t think she ever believed me when I told her what had just happened.

  Our marriage ended not too long after that. What followed was many years of depression and self-destructive behavior on my part. Years I’m not proud of at all. I hear many testimonies of people who say that just such times are when the Lord comes to them and they are saved. Not so for me. I reached rock bottom a couple of times during those years. But no angels appeared to pull me up off the floor, and no more mystical experiences occurred that might grant me some kind of revelation. I was still determined to pry out the answer from the universe itself if I had to. If there was a God, I was going to find him on the sheer strength of my own will and brain power with clear and unequivocal reasoning. I spent many more years trying to do just that all the while hating myself more and more for my many failures.

  None of what was becoming a battle royal in my mind was evident on the surface of my day to day life, however. There were times during my second marriage when I was even reasonably content. But I was still reading and studying everything I could both in science and religion. I read the Bible all the way through once again hoping for inspiration. None came right away. Only more questions. During that time, I began listening to a Bible teaching Pastor on TV that had quite a different slant than any I had ever heard preached before. This Pastor actually answered quite a few of the questions that had been bugging me for quite some time. Then my second marriage hit an inevitable rough patch. I say this because I had known from the beginning that this marriage had been undertaken for all the wrong reasons with the wrong person. My second wife had a strong stance against organized religion at that time and wouldn’t even discuss it with me. I had to watch my favorite Pastor on TV when she was not around even.

  Finally, I realized during this time that the quest I was on was futile. It was set up this way on purpose. We will never have definitive proof one way or the other. The whole point is that we are to make a choice without that kind of proof. If God were to reveal Himself in all His glory to the whole world in the next five minutes, most of us would immediately fall down and worship Him. But would we truly love Him? Or would we be doing so because we would be afraid to do otherwise. Have you ever had the experience where you tried to make someone love you? Can love exist where free will is absent?

  So, I finally understood that I could not get to God by the sheer strength of my own mind. So while my marriage was crumbling around me once again, I did the only thing left for me to do. I surrendered. I said ok, God, here I am. I am yours if you want me. At that moment that peacefulness I had experienced once before fell over me, and my heart was filled with a love so overpowering that I wept. My life began to change from that moment on. My wife and I filed for divorce, and I began going to a Baptist Church with a friend of mine. I wish I could say it was a drastic change. But it wasn’t. I was still just me – a wretch in every since of the word. But I no longer doubted God’s existence at all.

  All that was left was to come to grips with Jesus. I knew I could do it with God in my corner. After weighing all the insights I had gained both in science and religion, I realized that it all came down to a simple choice. I asked myself which worldview I would prefer to be reality. The sterile, accidental, scientific, atheistic, worldview in which there is no purpose or meaning to life -- Or the religious worldview with the possibility of an ever lasting life of joy and peace. There’s no contest, really. I chose the later simply because I wish it to be so. As soon as I made that choice, I began to literally fall in love with Jesus. The instances where he has spoken to me and guided me since then are too numerous to go into here. But my doubts are a thing of the past now. My life has still taken many twists and turns since then. I have been tested often. But my faith has remained strong deep in my heart. But unlike many new Christians who want to rush out and tell everyone, I kept my new light under a bushel basket. So many of my friends and family were if not openly hostile to any sort of religion, they were at least indifferent and didn’t want to hear about it. So I kept my new found faith to myself for the most part.

  Do I understand the difficulty many have of making the same choice I did? Yes, very much so. But I can say without a doubt, it was the right choice. I have changed since that day. I am a different person now. Not perfect by any means. And life is still hard; perhaps even harder now because I made the choice. I have suffered losses that have tested my faith. But my faith has overcome and is stronger than ever. I no longer fear death or anything else for that matter. And that big empty hole in my heart and soul that I carried around for so long is full of joy and love for my Lord and Savior.

  I have heard it said many times that such a choice requires a leap of faith. This is true. To believe what the secular world tells you to be the truth requires just as big a leap of faith. I’ve heard secular people declare that the universe didn’t need a creator to come into existence from nothing. It only required the laws of nature, and those alone could create the universe out of nothing. Oh really? Does a law have will. Can it make something happen just by simply existing as a fundamental law? And if so, then where did the laws of nature come from? Who created them? It seems to me that you’re still being asked to take one giant leap of faith to believe such an un-provable thing. This is basically what Stephen Hawking is saying now. So you will have to take that leap either way.

  All the big questions out there that we all ponder from time to time really do just boil down to a simple choice. Which leap will you take? I believe it’s why we’re here. Will you make an informed choice? Or just go whichever way the wind blows without putting much of your own thought into it? Is it possible to make that choice on the last day of your life? Yes. The thief on the cross with Jesus did so and was promised everlasting life with the Lord. Will you risk waiting until then just so you can live your life anyway you want to? Sadly, some will risk it. Some who do take such a risk will fail and lose their opportunity forever. Others hate the whole idea of God and heaven. I feel sorry for those. Not for any punishment they might receive after death, but for the fullness of joy that they walk around every day without. I know what it is to live like that. I would never go back to that. So, although the journey I took to get there was arduous, the choice I finally made was simple. And that supposedly giant leap was more like just a step across a line from one side to the other. I’ve never regretted it since then. I pray for your wisdom and strength to make your choice and take that step. When you do, I hope you land on the same side that I did before your time runs out. If you do, I and many more like me will welcome you with open arms into a very big and loving family. Peace and Love be with you.