Our World Today, Are we still free?

I'm worried. I was born in a country that had faults, surely, but had an internal mechanism for correction because it was guided by acknowledgement of a moral absolute, a standard, a just, righteous, holy and unique God. God didn't go anywhere. He is real. He exists and we only exist because of Him, but our nation has turned away from truth, and hence, it will lose its course. It's that simple.

Our course in history has been as protector and blessed nation. Has the nation's people always conducted themselves rightly? No, but they always strove toward that goal and hence, slavery was abolished, civil rights were instituted, massacres were eventually if not timely, addressed and ills within the practice of this society came to light and were voted into correction.

I'm a rational and educated woman. I have advanced degrees and even more advanced personal accomplishments. The Bible is a true document that stands as authentic and unique among all of history and literature. One would have to study to know this. Many have and many do. I, also, know this, and knowing this, I also know what trends assert themselves that have been long ago foretold. I know what end global warming, trouble in the Middle East, and celestial phenomena will come to. I know where this is going, not the timetable, but certainly the trajectory.

What I did not expect, never wanted to dread, was a departure of my own people from a sure inheritance of justice, peace, honor and good will we have worked, and sometimes fought, so hard to obtain. As we embrace radicalism we will in effect, move from that natural tendency for ethical correction into a realm of "anything goes."

When anything goes, everything goes.

I am so proud of the civil boundaries we've eliminated. There is a reason to this marvelous social and civic evolution that we are forgetting. "One Nation Under God" means we have a compass set to True that though the vessel waft, it will never truly wander.

We're a ship with no steerage if we abandon the God who has blessed this verdant nation with unprecedented bounty. God is love and as we truly follow the teachings left us in a document unlike any other, we follow the example of a man who two thousand years ago was the greatest promoter of human sanctity and liberty who lived before or since.

Our own churches, our own most visible practitioners who profess to follow God behave as the "enemy in the camp," ever begging for funds and working toward one purpose of personal prosperity thereby discrediting the truth they pretend to preach. Even this would correct over time if our country's leaders continued to direct their actions by first seeking guidance and wisdom.

When we look to a star for direction, we're acknowledging something beyond ourselves, needed in order to sustain our way. When we pray, we are doing no more than that, realizing that for a straight course, one must tie to something stationary and beyond one sole self. Our mortal lives are transitory so there must be something else that is not. How is it that each finite being can raise a fist and deny that there is anything greater than the arm which holds that defiant hand?

To whom does it protest?

Oh my people, you are losing your way and I am sad.

ReachOut

My parents read things to me that one would read to grownups, or certainly not a 6-7 year-old child. _Call of the Wild_ is hard core for the soft hearted. _Moby Dick_, have you ever tried reading some of that on a day when you need to RELAX? For my seventh birthday, added in the stack was a leather bound Bible with my name engraved in gold leaf. The edges were gold leaf too, and there were masterpiece paintings reproduced at delightful intervals. Of course, I was in what Piaget termed the "concrete stage of cognitive development" so when I read the inscription by my parents about a treasure to be found in the pages, I turned the thing up and shook it, looking for the money. Concrete is concrete.

As my introduction, mother read me the "Book of Job." She'd prepared me well. I could handle it after recovering from the terrorization of dogs and whales and assimilating those natural conditions into my schema of "how the world operates." Job made sense. It was the right place to start. She didn't know it was the oldest book written of them all. When you read it and the _Epic of Gilgamesh_ they do that: they mesh. There were giants and creatures and old worlde realities in days gone by that we can only read about now and imagine.

I was primed for a life of literature. I read the whole book on my own. It took awhile and several flashlight batteries because I had a full day and an imposed bedtime. Dad sneaked me the batteries. I went from that to Homer, Edith Hamilton's _Greek Mythology_, _Swiss Family Robinson_ and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, all the Twain and Dickens books, then the Brontes, Jane Austin. By ten I knew fact from fiction pretty solidly.

I didn't have any problem seeing the Bible as fact. I went on to get my Master's degree in English Literature and added the credits for an MA in Writing while I was at it. The ancient Greek stuff had history, theology, philosophy all mixed in. I loved it all. My teachers were frustrated because school was B O R I N G and my California Achievement Tests had me maxing out anything they had within their reach to teach me on grade level. I preferred to play jacks, work in the library, scheme ways to make money and look for book buddies.

I'm still looking for book buddies. I "know stuff." When you know you want to share.

Reaching out. Yeah. Doing that.--Keevah

Time to Talk

I have multiple bookshelves full of books I've read and I have to wonder to what purpose? How do I bring about some conjunction of knowledge and understanding and do more than hoard it quietly to myself? There is so much I have learned and continue to learn, so much I've been shown and so very much that I enjoy added to so much that concerns me, it's impossible to consider just being "silent."

There was a biography of John Lennon on a PBS station tonight. His enlightenment ended with himself. A song he wrote and recorded states that he doesn't believe in a succession of things, Jesus and the Beatles included. They fell away as myths to him and what he was left with was himself alone. If that is so, then death is final. That's not good enough. There's more. I felt sorry that he was his own god because at the business end of a bullet, his god had no power to save him. In order to be plucked free of evil, there has to be something over and above it to wrench us from harm's influence.

It takes a big shrug to conclude there's nothing ultimately loving or sustaining with the power to overriding the tragedies that strike us all. The worst onslaught is death itself. Death is an enemy. It's universally a "bad thing," along with pain and suffering.

There has to be a universally good thing to counter it.

Balance ... justice ... joy ... where do they originate? Only in the imagination?

No. And there IS no such thing as justice if death is all there is to end our time here. Death is the wrong team winning after all. That's not how it is.

My books on philosophy, history, theology and biography all bring me closer to truths I'd prefer to share in a life informed by even something more, something that communicates inside out. I'm most frustrated by institutions and individuals, "enemies within the camp," that counterfeit the truth in order to obtain some shadow form of power or profit. I think if you deal in lies, profit is a temporal and elusive term. One might seem to prosper when the "gifts" are rolling in, but the life taken in context won't really succeed over time. A person pays for the character they choose to assume. Mr. Televangelist with a Rolex and a 10 minute Infommercial begging for money with each broadcast isn't doing the work of a Universal Diety; he's pitching for himself period.

So I'll start with the Didache which instructed early apostles to have a trade and support themselves. The ministry wasn't something one did as a career. How revolutionary a notion is THAT in today's Theoconomy? We shouldn't be selling the message or the service. We give, as we are given to. WE being those who stand alongside Christ, following his teachings and trusting his Word.

Check out the text: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/didache-roberts.html

VERY interesting. --K

Lincoln Park in Chicago is my DREAM CITY!

So, Natalie went for a two-week immersion set of classes in Improvisation and Comedy Screen Writing at Second City. Her flight to Chicago was cancelled by American Airlines. She had ten minutes to purchase a new ticket, and get on another airline, running back and forth between Southwest and American to try to handle the baggage she'd already checked on the first airline.
It was just unthinkable that she'd miss one moment of her classes. They're expensive, and this is her dream. American Airlines is pretty automated when it comes to customer service. She called, I called and after five days of continuing effort, her suitcase finally made it to her hostel.

Then she got sick. She telephoned me with, "mom, I can't breathe, I'm sick," at 5:00AM. I'm about 600 miles away. I begged her to get to a hospital, especially in view of the headache that accompanied her symptoms. I expected she got the flu on her flight. The Walgreen's walk-in clinic sold her a $41.00 inhaler and sent her on her way. I'm wondering if there's a conflict of interest there somewhere.

I had already decided I'd be leaving at the first possible moment to join her and drive her home. Good thing I did because Thursday night, her wallet "vanished magically" in transit. She'd just used her debit card to put money on the transit card and "poof" next time she looked, the wallet was gone. You can't fly without picture ID. You can't even pick up a Western Union moneygram.

Benjamin and Denise Carroll came to her rescue. Ben lives there and his mother Denise sent him with funds $$$. THANK YOU, PRECIOUS ONES!

Mom and I drove to Chicago in record time. Mega Yay for "Heart O Chicago" motel, with a more-than-decent $74.00 rate, unbelievable in the middle of a huge metropolis. It was clean and comfortable. The clerk wouldn't take a reservation so I had to race across a town I didn't know, following my Godfrey-voiced Garmin. We made it just in time to get the last room. Whew!

It was a joy just to drive around in Lincoln Park. OK, I'll admit it's a funny scale by which to judge the fitness of a district, but girls were dressed in minimal outfits with lots of summer skin showing; congregating, walking, standing securely in such a way that I relaxed about the safety-on-the-street of my daughter. Young men conversed, strolled, rode bikes and just generally made it look like a great place for young ones to live, play, work and visit. There were plenty of enticing restaurants and businesses amid the architecture of old established buildings one just wanted to stroll through for the old worlde ambience.

It's a place I am definitely going to revisit and "sit a spell." Natalie was sad to leave, and so was I.

Taking Liberties

Emails are forwarded about what it was like to grow up in the 60s and 70s, but I have to add my own small retrospect about when we didn't have to wear seatbelts; anyone could smoke a cigarette; fireworks came in strengths that could blow your hands off and we all knew someone who had done that; and spin-the-bottle JUST got a kiss, and THAT felt like a delicious taboo. Boys could carry a pocket knife and I could take a flare to show and tell without the ATF surrounding my parents' trailer afterward. Lawsuits were rare and colas were a dime, but they tasted different, and better, I swear they did!

I'm afraid of losing my freedom, the thing I was born into and came very happily to take for granted. They're going to put an obesity tax on that cola; cigarettes are effectively outlawed; and OK, so they are a hazard, but so is life, it's 100% fatal (OK 99.9999999%) We won't be able to sell our houses without updating them to Green standards. I can't drive my Ford Expedition because it's a guzzler, how about the fact that it can haul 9 people? Does that count? I can't shoot a wolf if it's killing my kittens. Everything about me is going to be measured, weighed and what privileges I have or what I pay for them will be meted out according to someone else's rigorous standard.

I thought only crazy little men with funny mustaches and a penchant for throwing up a hand while saying "heil!" cared about a Master Race and total control.

We're being cinched like fish in a net and we will NOT be able to move away from the filet knife. The unborn aren't safe, the elderly aren't safe, the infirm and disabled are surely a "drain on the system."

Well, that's enough trouble for one day. By the way, I LIKE Sarah Palin and I get what she did ENTIRELY. OK, so it wasn't enough for one day after all.

Humanism

I want to create a persuasive article with pictures so you'll see what I see, but in this forum, it isn't realistic, so your challenge is to put the pictures in your mind and follow me.

President Obama is touring the Middle East, and yesterday it was reported that he said that he believes in men. The address was in Cairo, June 4th, 2009. Men aren't good enough. Left to their own devices, men, mankind tends to get selfish and knock things and each other around.

Only with an overriding faith in something more important than self, does civilization prosper, and if that "something" isn't true, then it's fantasy, a device, just an exploit to get back to doing for oneself or one's own kind.

The Truth, is that there is one God creator of the universe who stands as the Most Important Thing in it. When man navigates by a stable reference point True North and beyond himself, he has direction and will make the target which is stewardship of this place and all of otherkind in all its forms.

Shift for a moment to Style magazine, July 2009. Michelle Pfeiffer is on the cover, she is 50 and in the photo shoots used for this article, she is the epitome of all that is to be desired of beauty and accomplishment for a woman. Even she, at this apex says on page 151 of the magazine, "Once you turn 50, you feel grateful you made it. Because you've lived long enough that you've lost people you love. You realize you're on your second half, that your time is finite here. I want to make the time I have count ... I don't want to be weighed down. I want to live a long time, and I want the quality of my life to be the best it can be. I'm not going down easy!" The last line of the article says about her, "Now more than ever, Pfeiffer knows exactly where she has been--and where she's going."

Do you get it? She feels she's going to flare and expire in the air, falling like a July firework into ashes on the ground. She's going down. That is all that humanism has to offer, all that the best there is has to look forward to, in the most fortunate life, to flash and end.

It is a lie. It is not the truth. There is a way to go up and beyond and be great no matter what life's circumstance affords. The truth is that this is temporal and there IS the Eternal. There is more! Listen with your spirit and you will know, that your body in all its youth and vigor, or all it's disease and decay, is not the essence of who you are. If you are trapped in drug addiction, in a tortuous slave camp, in a body that was born with cognitive delays, you are not gypped by the great roulette wheel of life. You have purpose and higher cause and there is a day when your form will reach perfection and endure for all time, perfectly -- IF -- you listen and abide by the physical natural and spiritual law of love that allows that to happen. God is, and He is Love. He's not just love for the white American, He is love for the low caste Indian, for the discarded Chinese baby girl, for the inner city gang member, for the Palestinian living in a degraded camp, for the Israeli wearing a gas mask during rocketfire. There is one world, one purpose for mankind in it, and one God who set it all in motion. If you believe in man, then you have to determine which man, which cause, which inclination to follow today. If you realize there is one God, you have purpose that doesn't shift with time and culture.

There is a Similac advertisement in this same Style magazine that is of note. Advertising and marketing, and propaganda, use devices to tie into our existing beliefs. This commercial for formula shows only hands cradling an infant's head. You see the caress and the fragility of the newborn child, arms folded over its chest in trust and security. So, do we believe in doing this for the infant, or do we believe it's conditional predicated on whether or not this child is convenient to our future enjoyment?

In the media this week is the report about a late term abortionist, shot down in his church where he held a position of leadership. He has done 60,000 abortions and specializes in "late term procedures." There's a shift for you. Believe in man and the right to sex however and wherever you want it, the consequences snuffed conveniently out. Under the best of circumstances, the man walks away clean. Under the best of circumstances, every, I tell you EVERY mother who has been under his "care" wonders.

In the space of that wondering lies the horror of, "what did I do? what does it mean?" I don't want to even talk to her about that question. I want to hug and hold her and say, "don't think about it." Please please please, don't think about it. It's done. Walk forward and perhaps, please, don't do it again.

There is something bigger than our best moment, or else there is no reason to live at all.

Not my ponderings, it's the truth.

So, the battle of the Pit Bull Dogs goes on. Wednesday night, Shane Hickman was bitten by BoBo next door, the same dog that came up to my driveway, took a stance and started to bark menacingly at me in my own doggone driveway (pun intended). I drew down on the thing and stupidly said, "come on, go for it." I couldn't kill a mammal unless it had a kid attached to its jaws and even then it would make me physically ill for weeks--but the thing believed me and ran away. Shane didn't have a weapon. He just had a coat he whacked and smacked at the dog chewing on his upper arm. The owner woman (says Shane) looked out her door at his screams, called the dog's name (BoBo--sweet name dontcha think?) and went back IN, closing the door.

Shane is 11. He has wispy blond hair and brilliant light blue eyes. He is slight of build. He likes dogs. He loves his bike and his four wheeler. His father died while he tried to revive him at age 4 and he's been the ward of his loving grandmother, Mom's best friend, Joy. Joy who lives next door to "man and woman with pits." She's been accommodating, explaining that not all pit bulls are bad or dangerous. "Just take BoBo there."

Well do, please do, take Bobo. Someone stop the madness. No protest against these raging vicious creatures goes without someone standing up and saying, "it's not the breed, they're a sweet dog."

They are an unpredictable dog. They are a dog whose nature it is to do great damage for little provocation. They are fiercely territorial and territory for them extends beyond what it does for us. Our territory is their territory. They attack other dogs. It is their nature, that is WHY they are so well suited to the use of drug culture creeps who want others to STAY AWAY and STAND BACK. They're better than firearms.

Get them OUT of our living spaces. Ordain them away from places where children and docile pets play. Make a pit haven every few miles for all I care but give me a home where it's SAFE to walk, and jog, and ride, and take a coat to your uncle across the street like Shane was doing, or get the mail like Joe was doing the day I found his bicycle, shoe and two torn bloody socks in the road. Joe had 117 stitches and wasn't much older than Shane when two pits attacked him.

Get them out and away and make them as regulated as other dangerous weapons. Issue permits and warnings and sanctions against having them in certain places.

Shane got a hug when I saw him, then he went to the emergency room to have his arm puncture cleaned. It could have been so much worse, I and can assure I know it WILL be if we don't get rid of these dogs wandering openly in our city streets.

Am I the only one confused?

I have a blogspot a wordpress a website another website a wiki a podcast a youtube and somewhere along the way I misplaced my life.