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Archive for April, 2010

A Hobbit-Hole Invitation

Posted in Uncategorized on April 11, 2010| 4 Comments »

This is your invitation

into my house in the hill

I’ve a wide entryway

“OPEN”

reads my welcome mat,

it says that I need to be known

I live in my cozy hole in the ground

with windows, and a door that’s round

like a hobbit’s door

Inside there’s bread

and Earl Grey tea

And a table on a dirt floor

It’s just you and me

in sacrosanct underground communion

Learning secrets by disclosure

Unveiling

Finding friendship by exposure

to another, other ways to see life

Listening, stopping, pouring, watching

Breaking bread now and again

Nodding our heads and saying “hmm”

Trimming wicks in oil lamps

Warming up the damp

of the hobbit-hole

Opening the round door again

To let more light from the full moon in

It’s my door, round and wide

To let you – Oh yes –

and your baggage inside.

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Goliath’s Big Family

Posted in Uncategorized on April 2, 2010| 2 Comments »

The problem in conservative politics today is that the pundits are trying to take on Goliath without first slaying his relatives. Talk radio and Tea Parties are taking on the economy as the threat from Philistine government bureaucrats.
What they fail to realize is that they, and the generation before them, failed to kill Goliath’s relatives. Yes, there were four other giants which the Israelites killed. One was Ishbinenob; another was Saph. The two others were not named. (see Samuel 21:15-22)
What does this bible-babel mean? you may be thinking. It means that the four other giants were never successfully faced, let alone subdued.  Giants like getting prayer back in the public square and schools, upholding the sanctity of human life and rejecting a quality of life ethic,  saving marriage and the family from radical homosexual politics, and exposing our national sins from America’s pulpits.  Giants which we never fully faced on the battlefield. Now we must face the more imposing King of Giants – Goliath himself  – with less valor, fewer notches in our war belt, dwindling numbers, and all the while endure the scorn and roar of Goliath’s relatives towering behind him.
If we would go back and kill the other giants, then Goliath might not even be an issue. At the very least, he would lose his nerve. The unwelcome fact is that even if we manage to kill Goliath, we lose the war. What good is economic freedom if we have a nation full of school children with no morals, doctors and patients with no conscience,  families with no leadership,  and pastors and believers with no nerve?

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Soft Tyranny

Posted in Uncategorized on April 2, 2010| 1 Comment »

America asked for change. That change was undefined. We are getting change and we hope it will be for the better. What the President and Congress are doing – extending federal power over many aspects of our lives – doesn’t disturb me as much as the sentiment I feel all around me: People seem to be welcoming the power of the state to solve their problems. We seem to have a strange vengeful taste for economic fairness.

Equality is a value that is held dearly by Americans. It seems to have trumped freedom itself. If we choose equality over liberty, we may all be equal – except of course for those who mandate our equality – but I am sure it will be a miserable equality.

My hope is that such a state of oppression will ignite a cry for a return to  values of honoring the family, virtuous moral choices,  and true spirituality.

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