prayers for Natalie, a dear friend

“In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
John Bunyan

(flowers from the Luxemborg Gardens / Paris, France / Julie Cook / 2019)

For those of you who know Natalie Scarberry over on Sacredtouches—https://sacredtouches.com
–our prayers must abound.

Natalie has been suffering from a bone marrow disorder for several months that has
most recently morphed into leukemia.

Natalie was admitted to the hospital this past week for a 10-day treatment program.
A 50 50 treatment program.

Earlier this evening Natalie’s daughter Nikki let me know that Natalie is very weak and has suffered a
brain hemorrhage that has her now in ICU—of which is being treated.

May we all stop for a moment in order to offer up a unified prayer of both Thanksgiving and petition.

We are grateful for God’s grace which rests upon Natalie and her family yet we pray earnestly for
her well being–
we pray for peace to reign in her heart—we pray for strength to surge through her body
and we pray that her spirit will soar despite the oppression of an ICU unit.

We lift up James her husband, Nikki her daughter along with her grandchildren and sisters.

Hear our prayers O Lord….

finding equality in our atrocities

The way we respond to ideas has morphed.
They work differently now.
We experience them more like a virus spreading a plague than they do building blocks
one can take and reshape and build concepts and patterns out of.

Gavin Ashenden


(a chilly January night in Rosemary Beach / Julie Cook / 2019)

I must admit my head has been a bit in the sand as of late—not due to hiding, but just due to life.
Be it the pollen or the crud I’ve been battling on and off for the past several weeks, or
a few personal diversions, or simply be it from the clanging din from all things media
of “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming….”

All of whom were never coming…
So we can all pull the vodka back out because I think we’re safe…

And so I say all of this because I have had precious little time to
read…. much…of anything…

Needless to say anything from our favorite across the ponds clerics.

It’s been months, sadly I must confess, that I’ve had the chance to watch an episode of
Anglican Unscripted…and rarely can I take in a full post by the Wee Flea, David Roberston.

And that’s really how Satan likes it—divert their eyes lest they see what’s truth
and what is actually coming…

So when you’re running at full tilt like I have been, you try to stop long enough just to
snag a bit of news….just to see if the planet is still spinning or whether we’ve simply
gone off tilt and are wildly spinning out of control…
of which it so often seems.

Yet I am reminded that…
today, trust in the media is at an all-time low,
and it is easy to understand why so many Americans are absolutely sick and tired of being
lied to by the big media companies.

Tyler Durden

And so like so many others who want to know the truth,
I work hard to sift out the truth from the spoils…

It is such a difficult task to find that truth…so much so that that is why I seek out those
who use Christian filters in order to sift through those spoils —
hence why I find the offerings of David Robertson and Gavin Ashenden
so keenly important…

They sift through the muck and find God’s light.

So I did stop long enough this morning to squeeze in the latest posting by our favorite rouge Anglican,
Bishop Gavin Ashenden.

Is it just me or did you hear, see or read anything about the mass murders of the Nigeran Christians???
Because I know I didn’t.

I did hear a great deal about the Christchurch mosque murders in
New Zealand which came by the hands of a madman.

But what of the madmen who massacred the Nigerian Christians??
I didn’t hear about that at all.

In fact, I’m really upset I didn’t read, see or hear about it.

I may not get to always catch a lot of television but I do get breaking news alerts on
my phone, I read the headlines from local and national news sites and I do even
receive alerts from the BBC…

But nothing about 140 murdered Nigerian Christians.

Is it because it was in Nigeria?
Is it because they were Christians?

Bishop Ashenden wonders the same…

The Media lamented profoundly with the victims (those of the Christchurch mosque killing); rightly.
But so deep did its sympathies run, that it told only one side of a wider story.
49 people were killed by a callous white secular Australian murderer in the Christchurch Mosque.
But in the same week, 140 Nigerian Christians were butchered by their Muslim neighbours;
and the media were silent. Sometimes what you don’t say is as powerful
a way of distorting the truth as telling a lie.

https://ashenden.org/2019/03/28/we-need-new-universities-to-help-people-love-ideas-without-hating-people-jordan-peterson-islam-and-freedom-of-speech/

And so it is in the same vein of thinking that my cousin sent me a link to a story
that she recently read regarding the Nigerian massacres.

Knowing that I often write about those under the radar reported stories regarding the global attacks
on Christians, she thought I would find the article interesting if not actually telling.

And I did…

Now I don’t read Breitbart nor am I familiar with the Zero Hedge site of which she shares,
but I still found the reported story very telling.

Why didn’t I hear about this on a mainstream news site?
Have we been so consumed with all things “collusion” that we fail to hear or see the atrocities
that continue happening to the faithful worldwide?

I wonder if we have not become so utterly divided that we are now mindlessly
defining our collective human atrocities separately.

In Nigeria, more than 120 Christians have been gunned down or killed with machetes over the past
three weeks, but Breitbart was the only big media outlet to report on it…

As Breitbart News alone reported among major news outlets,
Fulani jihadists racked up a death toll of over 120 Christians over the past three weeks
in central Nigeria, employing machetes and gunfire to slaughter men, women, and children,
burning down over 140 houses, destroying property, and spreading terror.

The New York Times did not place this story on the front page;
in fact, they did not cover it at all.
Apparently, when assessing “all the news that’s fit to print,”
the massacre of African Christians did not measure up.
The same can be said for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune,
the Detroit Free Press, the LA Times, and every other major paper in the United States.

And of course, Breitbart is not exactly “mainstream” media.

So why won’t anyone else report on this?

And this isn’t the first time this has happened. Last June,
twelve entire Christian villages in central Nigeria were completely wiped out…

In only days, a dozen villages in Nigeria’s Plateau state were wiped out.
The affected communities surround the city of Jos—known as the epicenter
of Christianity in northern Nigeria’s Middle Belt.

As many as 200 Christians had been killed, however,
some residents fear the death toll may be even higher, as more bodies are yet to be recovered,
while others were burned beyond recognition. On Sunday,
75 of the victims were buried in a mass grave.

I’ll bet that most of you had not heard about that until now.

On the other side of the world, 20 innocent people were slaughtered
when Muslim radicals bombed a Roman Catholic cathedral in January…

On January 27, Muslim extremists bombed a Roman Catholic cathedral on the
Philippine island of Jolo, killing some 20 people and injuring dozens of others.

Once again, this is yet another mass killing that was almost
entirely ignored by the mainstream media.

Is the anti-Christian bias among the mainstream media so strong that
they can’t even bring themselves to report the basic facts to us?

People deserve to know what is happening.
Christian persecution is rising in almost every nation on the planet,
and this huge ongoing crisis should be on our front pages on a continual basis.

But instead, we never get to hear any of these stories unless
we seek out alternative sources of information.

Over in China, the persecution of Christians has reached a frightening crescendo.
Recently, officials have been going house to house and replacing pictures
of Jesus Christ “with pictures of dictator Mao Zedong and/or
China’s current authoritarian president, Xi Jinping”…

If you were to replace “Christians” with some other favored group in any of the examples
that I have just shared, you would instantly have front page news all over the planet.

The mainstream media is definitely not “independent”,
and they are not looking out for you.

They have their own agenda and anything that does not fit that
agenda does not get to be part of “the news”.

So far in 2019, there have been 453 Islamic terror attacks in which 1,956 people have been murdered.
But you will never hear those numbers from the mainstream media.

Instead, when the mainstream media talks about Bible-believing
Christians it is almost always an attack story.
As a recent Breitbart article aptly observed,
having “an anti-Christian bias” has become “the last acceptable prejudice”…

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-18/why-does-mainstream-media-purposely-ignore-mass-killings-christians-across-globe

Our news, our politicians, our very nation is so utterly divided and skewed that sifting
through the spoils has now become vastly important…
because if not—the truth will be hidden from plain sight.

Lead me in your truth and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation; for you, I wait all the day long.

Psalm 25:5