“Hand of God”
This is a painting my son Zack did of his hand. It means more to me than everything in the Louvre. The hand is a universal metaphor with a load of applications to life.
This hand symbolizes God as Creator of the Cosmos. ‘My hand stretched out the heavens ‘ God created man. ‘Your hands made me’. The first cradle a newborn baby knows is a pair of human hands. Continue Reading »
Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »
The writer of Lamentations woefully said of the Jews: “Jerusalem did not consider her destiny; therefore, her collapse was awesome.” Lamentations 1:9
A presidential election is a time when nations consider their destiny, even though personal considerations may brood heavily in the minds of the people — in our case, the economy. The church, especially, has always been a place where people strongly feel the sense of national destiny, balancing out presentiments of looming disaster. Even if they do little about this intuition, their enthusiasm surfaces. Continue Reading »
Posted in Patriotic | 3 Comments »
Hurricane Karina Hits Nueva Orleans
Lamar Howell, Dissociated Press
When Hurricane Karina slammed the coast of Nueva Orleans, 10,000 Mexicans were ordered by Governor Café to go to the Megadome. The curious residents of Colonia Novena filled trucks and vans and poured into the giant soccer stadium.
Teri Eberto, chief of Homeland Security for Nueva Orleans predicted a miserable night for the evacuees as satellite imagery showed two gaping holes in the Megadome roof. On Tuesday morning, new satellite imagery showed blue tarps covering one hole and the other was already being patched with plywood. A roofing crew had been assembled and had worked through the night in repairs.
“I left my apartment with my buddies. We took too much tortillas and all the meat in the frigerador,” said Jorge Garcia. “We not afraid of getting wet, so many of us rode the back of the truck to the estadium.”
Besides the two holes in the roof, there were numerous leaks in the stadium plumbing. A news eight helicopter flying overhead saw blue plumes coming from several sights. Apparently some of the Mexican workers had butane tanks in their trucks and the materials necessary to fix the leaks.
Wednesday afternoon a US rescue helicopter landed outside the Dome. According to CNB News, what the rescue team found startled them. They found the electricity working. The generators which had stopped working the first day were up and running again, according to CNB news.. Apparently the men had siphoned gas from their trucks to fuel the generators.
The US National Guard found work crews everywhere. One team had dug a huge trench on one end of the Megadome.property. Fires were burning trash in the pit. The Mexicans had also made numerous outside latrines, complete with curtains suspended with plastic pipe.. The team also found hoses rigged up throughout the compound which were bringing in fresh water. Investigators later realized that these hoses were bringing in water from a water tower in the Colonia Novena nearly two miles away.
Mechanics had set up impromptu shops and were working on cars. A reporter from Noticias Nacional asked one of the mechanics what he was doing.
“I putting liff kits on the trucks. Is possible we gotta to drive in water.”
Helicopters had earlier seen what appeared to be distress signs being waved from the stranded evacuees. Upon closer inspection, they found that the signs were advertisements for tacos stands and other food and services being offered.
The fourth day, Governor Café arrived at the dome by helicopter. She inspected the dome, had a meal, and congratulated the people for their work. She told the people they should leave the dome and stay with families and friends until the flooding was under control and power had been restored to the city.
The Mexicans were hesitant to leave. However when the governor mentioned needing workers to rebuild the city, their attitudes changed and they started packing.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
E PLURIBUS UNUM
Out of Many, One”
Out of many nationalities, one nation
I am Welsh by ethnicity, American by birth
But I am not Welsh-American
I am simply American
I am American before I am white
I am American before I am Welsh, or anglo, or Caucasian
I am American before I am male
I will not fight and die for multiculturalism
I will fight and die for true Americans
I will not fight and die for your sexuality
I will fight and die for your immortal soul
I will not fight and die for your ethnicity
I will fight and die for your pink heart
I will not fight and die for pagan religions
I will fight and die for the truth of the Bible
I will not fight and die for the color of my skin, or your skin
I will fight and die for my friends and neighbors
Black, brown, or white
Poor or rich
Native or immigrant
But I will not fight for pluralism
I will fight and die for one country
The United States of America!
E Pluribus Unum
Posted in Patriotic | Leave a Comment »
GUILT’S DIALOG WITH FORGIVENESS
Should I lobotomize my brain
Cloroxidize my heart
Ipecac my shame
To get a brand new start?
Should I drown some witch’s curse
Climb in a time machine
Set on full reverse
To get me back to clean?
No! Have you gone insane?
Nothing cleans the crud
Or takes away the stains
That is, nothing but the blood
Should I flagellate my back?
Scale mountains on my knees
Cry full Death Valley’s cracks
Will that insure God’s pleased?
Should I wear the letters A
through Z upon my chest?
Or walk the streets and say
Unclean, I’m leprous at best?
No! Have you gone completely nuts?
Nothing pays the price
Or clears you knotted guts
That is, nothing but our Christ
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Service King Collision Center is in the background.
I have limited experience with the 21st century church, but what contact I have is unremarkable. I would characterize the “spirit-filled” churches as anything but. You never know what to expect. Great preaching and altars filled with humble Christians, or weird primitive drumming accompanied by shrieks from raindancers. A casual visitor might even look at some people and wonder if God may be hitting them with an invisible tazer. We have made God an experience, personal guidance a justification for doing practically anything, and adopted the latest fads like they are iPhones. We have made prophecy as abundant and cheap as bread, and twice as fattening. We have -sometimes simultaneously – non-Jewish people covered with Wailing Wall prayer shawls, shofars blaring from balconies, Tarzan yells which sound like women in labor, men dancing barefoot, worship warm-up stretches, the list goes on.
What’s wrong with all this? I’m not sure anything is, but I sometimes wonder if there aren’t some other things that we do need to be doing. Like singing coherently instead of chanting, praying corporately before we do anything else, being provoked rather than stroked, articulating hope for our nation rather than hype to make us feel successful, being charged with the great commission rather than comforted about our bad week or intolerable relatives. How I long for the Word to be the sword and not a butter knife, for my conscience to be pierced and not padded, for my will to be tempered by fire and not ignored, for my mind to be challenged with the complexities of Almighty God and not insulated from offense.
The church is tougher than all this, at heart. Bring it on, preachers! Tell me the truth, brother. Give me that look of conviction, sister. Quit trying to be nicer than God when it comes to sin. Say it! You’ll find that we can take on the hard sayings of Christ, rise to the challenge of the prophets, face up to the diamond-hard scratches of truth.
From now on, let’s not treat each other like we are banged up and in the lobby of Service King each week, needing repaired and a wax job. The church America needs right now is not a Craig’s Collision Center convention scene, pettily demanding something from God’s insurance policy, pampering every emotional scratch and squeaky feeling.
Vroom! Vroom! Clug! Let’s get back out there in the highways and byways where we belong. Cross the solid yellow lines now and them. Wake up some Sunday Drivers.
Posted in Streams of Consciousness | 2 Comments »
The last part of this video has the part about Sarah Palin. It’s worth listening to!
Posted in Patriotic, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
H_M_S_X_ _L_TY
Redefining marriage
It’s easy. Just add vowels. Then hmsxlty won’t look so weird!
Posted in Language about Language, Special interest | Leave a Comment »
Something insidious must have put us to sleep
Droned on and on till we unknowingly fell somnambulant
Surely it came with a humming
A vibration
A disturbance less than a tremor
I know—it was stealth!
A clandestine break-in upon consciousness
Some miscreant, bent on capturing alertness
The first to fall was the sexton in the bell tower
Drowsed by watching the rope swinging in the warm breeze
Next the parson dozed
And the parishioners slumbered
Prayers, which began as a stirred and stirring cacophony
Cooled into responsive reading,
Then chilled into a liturgy
and finally, jelled into contemplation
The loud, jarring, white-water oomph of dissonant heart cries
Slowed into a hallowed swirl of codified praise
And stopped in a wide sea of whispered calm
The doors of the church creaked shut
As the walls began to close in
We feverishly colored the windows with
Wan pleasantries
Pale wishes, and
Pastel memories
Oh, bordered with lead
We all synchronized our watches
Pressed the alarms switch off
And climbed into safe, sterile body bubbles
From a voice recorder came
a Psalmodic instruction:
“When the craft reaches heaven
The suspended-animation chambers
Will automatically decompress”
Posted in Streams of Consciousness, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
He saved the world
And no one on the planet knew what happened
They still fail to recognize him today
Even though his action saved their very lives
and make possible their posterity
The whole world was in his hands
its destiny at the tip of his fingers
For that brief moment
he held the scales that balance the nations
War and peace was his to determine
Life and death, his to command
Ten thousand martial messengers
were waiting on wing-tip in the shadows
He chose life and peace
esteeming the human race
believing the world deserved
the benefit of a doubt
For that we should be grateful,
indebted that he remained calm
as scores panicked around him
Tell your children and grandchildren
of that fateful, sleepy Sunday afternoon
When an unlikely savior bought them time –
a lifetime – and lifetimes to come,
with one decision
It bothers me that so few know his name
What is more troubling is how those who do know
seem not to care what he did.
We know about the sports idols,
the perfect goddesses of the flat screen
But what have they done for us, really?
None have saved us
Nor made the world a better place.
Sadly, It is always the same:
We worship those who gratify us
while we scorn our Saviors
My dream is to go to Moscow
Take a cab to the small apartment of a pensioner
And there meet – and even embrace –
Stanislav Petrov,
the man who scratched his head,
stroked his chin
and in reflecting so, saved the world.
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (Russian: Станислав Евграфович Петров) (born c. 1939) is a retired Russian Strategic Rocket Forces lieutenant colonel who, on September 26, 1983, deviated from standard Soviet doctrine by positively identifying a missile attack warning as a false alarm.[1]
To read about Stanislav Petrov’s heroic decision go to the following link: http://www.brightstarsound.com/world_hero/article.html
writer’s note: It is ironic that Petrov made this decision shortly after midnight, which was September 26th for him. It was still September 25th for Americans. Thankfully he allowed us all to see what he was seeing: September 26th.
Posted in Poetry, Science Challenges | 4 Comments »
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