If This Is Earth, What’s Heaven Like?

That’s the title of the e-mail I received, and I found the pictures associated with it in several places on the web.  I don’t know their origin, so I’ll just provide a link, but I hope you look.  I imagine God the Artist is mighty pleased when He creates scenes like these.

Some Things Are Easier to Talk about When They’re Over

I just got back from the oncologist.  The MRI I had on Sunday shows that the masses in my liver are hepatic hemangiomas which, happily, are NOT malignant and do not have a tendency to become so.  The doc recommended watching what is going on in my lungs, so I will have another chest X-ray in December and we’ll see if the “air space disease” has resolved itself.

For all those people who prayed for me–THANK YOU!!  The words “non-malignant” were such a relief!

James 5:16
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.

Too Bad for the Little People

If the pork that was attached to the recent government bailout of financial firms didn’t upset you, maybe the retreat AIG thought itself entitled to did.  While the average American pinches pennies, AIG apparently felt no guilt in taking a previously schedule retreat on which it spent $440, 000 of taxpayer money on golfing, spa treatments and the like.

Now the news has come out that the companies that were bailed out with your money and mine will pay their executives year-end bonuses.  Here’s what Allan Johnson, a compensation consultant, had to say about the bonuses:

… the average managing director at an investment bank, a title typically earned after eight years on the job, will receive a bonus of $625,000. That’s down from nearly $1.1 million last year, but it is still 15 times the income of the average American household. Top bankers could receive as much as $1 million. Even a bond trader just out of business school could see his or her bank account enriched by as much as $170,000 this Christmas. “

Fifteen times the income of the average American household?!  I know that individual employees may not have contributed in a major way to the financial mess in which their companies find themselves.  I just think it would be responsible of them to curtail their extras since the American public is busy doing without its extras.  Maybe those individual employees are not responsible, as a group, for our current financial woes.

But neither are the individual citizens who are paying to help them out.

It Helps to Remember Who’s in Control

This Sunday morning, instead of being in church, I will be having an MRI.  Did I mention that I hate really really really don’t like MRIs?  Anyway, my plan is to meditate on the 23rd Psalm during that time.  David had an awful lot working against him, yet he trusted God enough to say that he would not want, that he would fear no evil.  My situation isn’t much compared to David’s, but still…it helps to remember Who’s in control.

For more Spiritual Sundays, go here.

The Daughter and the Gym

The hubby and I took a trip to Ohio this weekend to deliver some cabinetry he made for the daughter.  For those tens of you who read my blog regularly, you know that I lovingly refer to my daughter as the Exercise Nazi.  She is a registered kinesiotherapist, and she knows her stuff.  I listen, although I didn’t always, because after the RA, the exercise sort of gave me my life, or at least my confidence, back.

This year, I need that confidence again.  I have a lot medical going on right now, not the least of which is the threat of  surgery on the arm that I broke.  The bone is healed.  The displacement, technically called a subluxation, not so much.   The bone doc’s instructions were to work my deltoids in an effort to get the muscles to draw my arm bone back up where it belongs, but of course he didn’t give me any pictures.  When it comes to exercise, I need pictures!

Enter the daughter.  She has a membership at a gym, and when we go to Ohio, I go there with her.  I enjoy walking with her and riding the recumbent bike.  There’s a cardio theater in which they show movies while you are riding.  Today as she was going through her own exercise routine, she showed me several exercises with Theraband.   Half an hour and a tired shoulder later, she told me that she had given me the routine her clinic gives for advanced shoulder patients, and she was very proud of me because I didn’t whine.

I understand that God gives us trials sometimes to test our character.  I think He’s been testing mine a LOT this year.  I just want to give thanks for the daughter and the way that she encourages.    She’s a awfully hard worker, and she’s my biggest cheerleader.  After she ran me through the exercises, she gave me pictures!  And her parting words to me, delivered with a smile, were, “Mom, if your shoulder doesn’t hurt now, it will tomorrow.  And the best way to get over the hurt is…”

I filled in the rest for her.  I’ve heard it before.  “Do the exercises again!”

I hope my character stands up to this.  I may still end up having that surgery, but it won’t be because I didn’t do my exercises!

Pray for Our Country

It seems to me that the best thing for Christians to do concerning the politics of our country is to pray.  Certainly being active in politics if you can is good, and it is responsible to exercise your right to vote, but in the end, it is God who is in control.

I Timothy 2: 1-2 says this:

I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone— for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.

You can visit the Presidential Prayer Team homepage and look over the prayer requests that are listed there for this week. This site even urges us to pray for the new president, no matter who he is, between the day he is elected and the day of his inauguration.   Also, I found a prayer over at More for Your Life that I thought I would share.  It was written by Max Lucado, and it seems appropriate for these times.

You Have Our Attention, Lord

Our friends lost their house
The co-worker lost her job
The couple next door lost their retirement
It seems that everyone is losing their footing
This scares us. This bailout with billions.
These rumblings of depression.
These headlines: ominous, thunderous -
“Going Broke!” “Going Down!” “Going Under!” “What’s Next?”
What is next?
We’re listening. And we’re admitting: You were right.
You told us this would happen.
You shot straight about loving stuff and worshipping money.
Greed will break your heart, You warned.
Money will love you and leave you.
Don’t put your hope in riches that are so uncertain.
You were right. Money is a fickle lover and we just got dumped.
We were wrong to spend what we didn’t have.
Wrong to neglect prayer and ignore the poor.
Wrong to think we ever earned a dime. We didn’t. You gave it. And now, tell us Father, are You taking it?
We’re listening. And we’re praying.
Could you make something good out of this mess?
Of course You can. You always have.
You led slaves out of slavery,
Built temples out of ruins,
Turned stormy waves into a glassy pond and water into sweet wine.
This disorder awaits your order. So do we.
Through Christ,
Amen

Patrick Henry and Judging the Future

I suppose it’s not cool to blog about politics, except that’s exactly what I am about to do.  I’ve been reading and reading and listening and listening, and I think it’s time I actually said something.

Every year, the juniors in the great state of Indiana study our founding fathers in both English and history.   Every year they whine because English is NOT history, or so they say.  Yet our founding fathers wrote in English, of course, which in my mind makes them worthy of study in an English class.    I hope my students, who harass me unmercifully because, when they ask me who I am going to vote for and I tell them John McCain, learn something from what the founding fathers wrote before they vote themselves.

To them, you see, the issue is the war in Iraq.  I can sympathize.  I graduated from high school in 1973, and Vietnam was a BIG issue.  As I tell the kids, though, it is not the only issue, and regardless of what either McCain or Obama promise about the war, nothing is going to happen very quickly anyway.   There are other issues that matter to me more, the primary one being sanctity of life.  The kids in my classes are, as a whole, very pro-life, at least when it comes to abortion, so why the fact that Mr. Obama is very definitely NOT doesn’t matter to them is sort of beyond me.  They’re young, I know.  But they’re smarter than that.  They are too smart to be swayed by campaign promises.

Which brings me to Patrick Henry’s Speech to the Virginia Convention.  Henry wanted independence from England, but his view was definitely not the popular one.  This is part of what he had to say:

...it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts…

It is natural to listen to the presidential candidates as they make promises they know we want to hear.  Lower taxes.  Better health care.  No more sending our sons and our daughters to war.  Lower gas prices.  Those are things that anyone in their right mind would want.  We are used to a life of abundance here in the United States.  Why should we get used to anything else?  Why shouldn’t we hope?

At the time that Henry wrote his speech, our nation was small, but it seems to me that many of the complaints the colonists had against England were complaints that we have against our government, our BIG government, now.  We are being taxed to death, or so we say, like they were.  No one cared about the little people then.  Government took place from afar and was managed by the privileged.

Are things really so much different now?  Or has the government in Washington become so big that the people with the most money behind them are the ones who get to run it, regardless of what the voters have to say?  Did they listen when we contacted them to voice our outrage against the bail-out?  I think not; one has only to look at the pork-barrel spending that was added on to that legislation to see that government, not the people, was what counted.

And what about Obama’s idea of “sharing the wealth?”  I’m sorry; that does sound like socialism to me.  This country was founded on the idea that if you worked hard, you could get ahead.  Why would we get rid of that ideal?  I personally am against ideas that sound like socialism for a lot of reasons, one of them being socialized medicine.  Our doctor in Ohio came to the U.S. from Canada because, he said, he was tired of watching people die while they waited for health care.  According to our doctor, the wait times for procedures that are considered standard in the U.S. are outrageous in Canada.  According to this source, the average wait time for an MRI in Canada or the UK can be months or years.  That doesn’t seem like a lot when you’re healthy, but if it affected you or a loved one?  What would you think then?    Or do you think about campaign promises at all?

Patrick Henry talked about knowing the issues and not blindly following what others say.  After he talked about listening to the sound of the siren (which is what campaign promises tend to be, regardless of the person to whom they belong), he went on to say:

Is this [listening to the song of the siren] the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal [earthly] salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

So how, exactly, is the common man to find the whole truth?  You have to be discerning as you listen to speeches, debates and newscasts, but there’s more.  Again, according to Patrick Henry:

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.

If I do that, Mr. Obama’s record does not please me.  Senator Obama said that the question of when life begins is above his pay grade.  Fine.  He can think that.  But since he’s pro-choice, and his views would allow abortion to continue because he doesn’t know when life begins, what about when life ends?  As I age, I wonder about the euthanasia that is allowed in Europe.  Will it come to our county?  We have, after all, started citing European law as the basis for some court decisions.  And if euthanasia does come, why?  Is it because, by allowing abortion, we have blurred the line about what is life and what it is not, preferring instead to talk about quality of life as long as, you know, it isn’t the quality of your life or that of someone you love?

Let’s go back to what Patrick Henry said, that he knew of no better way to judge the future than the past.  Mr. Obama has consistently voted pro-abortion, even denying babies who are born alive after an abortion  pallative care.   Is that humane?  And if he can be inhumane in that respect, where will his values lead us as a nation?

Judging Senator Obama by his past, on Election Day I will vote for McCain, not because I agree with everything he says, but because his values, at the bare minimum, agree with mine.  He values life, and that’s a good starting place, I think, for a president to have as he makes decisions for our nation.

What will I tell the kids at school as they harass me for my standards?  I will tell them to actually listen to the issues.  I will tell them to think about their future.  I will tell them to take their responsibility as voters seriously.  I will tell them that the future of our nation will be affected by our next president, the one they’re helping to elect.  I will tell them to vote.  I will tell them I will vote.

And then, I will pray.

Something to Think about As the Election Nears

I saw the following quote on a restaurant’s signboard near my home, and it has stuck with me ever since:

…a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have…

The restaurant attributed the above statement to Thomas Jefferson.  In actuality, it was Gerald Ford who said:

The American wage earner and the American housewife are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit. They know that a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.

The hubby and I speculate that the statement is attributed to Jefferson because no one would listen if it were attributed to Ford.  We think, though, that it’s something to bear in mind as election promises waft through the air.

Sunday Song #4

You know how people say your day just goes better when you start it with breakfast?  It goes better when you start it with the Guy Who Invented Mornings, too.  As I head off to church in a few minutes, I pray that my heart will truly say, no matter what my circumstances, “Here I am, Lord.  Send me.”

Sunday Song #2 and 3

Like I said last Sunday, I think that because of the things going on in my life right now, I have been waking up with a song on my heart.  This morning it was Forever You Reign by Nicole C. Mullen, and although I couldn’t find a video of that song, I found the lyrics here

Who can calm the raging storm? Who can keep me safe from harm?

Who has an everlasting arm? Nobody else, nobody else.

And when I am lost, can’t find my way. When I am scared of come what may.

Who is my shelter and my strength? Nobody else, nobody else.

Chorus:

Blessed be Your name. Blessed be the One who men and angels praise.

Blessed be Your name. You are God and forever you reign. You are God and forever you reign.

Verse 2:

Who can wash away my sin? Who can cleanse me deep within?

Who conquered death and rose again? Nobody else, nobody else.

And when life is beautiful and new. When I’ve lost everything but you.

My search for the video of Forever You Reign led me to this video, which was also a nice way to start my day.  I hope yours started well, too.  Now…enough of the blogging!  I’m off to church!