My mother passed away a few hours ago.
I believe what Jesus said about death and resurrection. I like the words of the Apostle Paul:
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?No sarcasm intended by wishing "Happy New Year" at a time of my own loss. It's not exactly a grief-filled night. I have been mourning her loss for several years. In 2008 she got hit with a really bad case of pneumonia plus some infection in her blood, which an infection specialist up at St. John's in Springfield worked on. Before her month-long stay in the hospital for all that, we were walking a mile a day around our somewhat rural "neighborhood," but she pretty much ended her walking after the pneumonia. When she came home from the hospital around December of that year, I began helping her with everything, from helping her get out of bed at the beginning of the day, to helping her get back in bed at the end. Previously the Queen of Chit-Chat, she began talking less and less. The high-tech photos showed brain atrophy. She hadn't spoken a word since August of 2013.
1 Corinthians 15:55
So tonight was not a surprise.
But I'm certainly not ready for the New Year, and what essentially will be a new life for me. My job -- especially since our house was destroyed by that tornado 2+ years ago, and mom got a helicopter ride back up to the hospital in Springfield -- has been to turn my mom over in bed every couple of hours. And keep her feeding tube pump going. It has been a 24 hour shift. I'm sure I'm writing on adrenaline right now. Because I'm not 100% sure what my new job is going to be.
I've been contemplating a new career as a "life coach." But I'm not really interested in band-aid solutions to superficial American problems. So I've toyed with a few websites that propose to offer a more profound personal transformation. Here's one, still not yet ready for prime-time:
GeorgeWashingtonCoaching.com
I thought I might target pro-American conservatives with this and a couple other patriotic domains. But -- and I need to be careful about how I feel, having labored with some pretty heavy sleep deprivation during the last couple of years -- I'm not feeling very pro-American these days.
Here's an article which I read last week and found eye-opening and depressing at the same time:
Some adult language. (Actually, it's not "adult" language." It's the language of juvenile delinquents in the un-monitored corners of the playground [at least it was when I was a kid, decades ago]. General Washington threw soldiers out of the already-starved-for-troops Continental Army for bad language. I don't see any justification for "adult" language. But then, I'm told the Apostle Paul used "adult" language. What do I know?)
If anyone deserves to be described with Apostolic or "adult" language, it may well be the United States. During my lifetime, the U.S. government has killed, crippled, or made homeless tens of millions of innocent non-combatant civilians. I've said elsewhere (too distracted to track the link down right now) that the United States of America is the most evil and dangerous government on earth. Some governments may be more evil (North Korea comes to mind), but those governments are not as dangerous as the U.S. Government. Dangerous to civilization, not just "the bad guys." Some smarter people than I are saying the U.S. government is taking us to World War III in 2015.
If you think that's a ridiculous, anti-American, commie nut-job thing to say, I don't blame you. I would have said the same thing decades ago.
What makes the Establishment elite in Washington D.C. so dangerous? I don't mean "What is the evidence for the claim that they are dangerous?" -- see the article above, and here and here. I mean "What are the underlying psychological or cultural or religious energies at work in those people that makes them do all the evil things that they do?
As a Christian, I say the problem is the Religion of Secular Humanism.
The author of the "Crumbling Empire" article above -- and I agree the U.S. is every bit the pagan empire that Rome was -- has hateful things to say about Christians too, some of which I think are exaggerated, or just outright falsehoods. He may have said those bad things about Christianity itself, I'd have to re-read the article to see. But in my opinion the actual teachings of Christ (and His foul-mouthed Apostles) have made the world a more civilized place. Less violent. Because they strongly spoke the truth against falsehoods. Not a fist-in-the-air "protest" against "social injustice." But the profound historical fact -- and the even more profound reason why -- God became man on Christmas.
And why man cannot become God every other day of the year.
Here's another article I read last week. Another depressing article about the Religion of Secular Humanism, on the other end of the economic/political class spectrum from the plutocrats in Washington D.C.:
The article is reposted by Allen B. West at his blog, AllenBWest.com. I've never been a fan of his. He's black in case you don't know of him. The original article is written by Michael Smith entitled, “Confessions of a Public Defender” and originally posted at American Renaissance on May 9, 2014.
I've always thought a "racist" was someone who believed in the genetic inferiority of other people. This has nothing to do with genetics. This is about culture. Or as Henry R. Van Til
called it, "religion externalized."If George Washington or other Founding Fathers spoke of someone having a "false religion" (and they did), nobody called the Founders "racists" on that account. This isn't about race. But it is about genocide. The genocide of urban blacks committed against them by the Eastern Liberal Establishment. The same kind of evil "the Establishment" in Washington D.C. has committed against more races than I can count. People in the Philippines just over 100 years ago. People of Laos and Cambodia, during the Vietnam war. Christians in Iraq.
There was a third article I encountered last week that was almost as depressing as the two above. I'll address that article shortly.
And hopefully turn it into something a little more optimisticizing. (The opposite of "depressing.")
As Gary North has said, I may be a short-term pessimist, but I'm a long-term optimist. I don't know if the revelation of God's Word in the Bible will be used by Christians to prevent the worst predictions about World War III in 2015, but I do believe the Bible -- in the Bible's own time -- will cause us to beat our "swords into plowshares" and bring the "Peace on Earth" that Christ came to bring.
