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I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death.
Leonardo da Vinci

(a troublesome wild onion allowed to shrivel / Julie Cook / 2016)

Never in all my life have I seen a President of these United States have a more difficult time looking at a clear and present trouble and not being able to address it as such.

Hem and haw….
Fuss and cuss…
Pass the buck…
Play the blame game…
and skirt around the issue…
Anything and everything other than facing this crisis,
And that’s what it’s becoming,
a crisis!
Never meeting it eye to eye…

How many more lives must needlessly be lost?!
How many more innocent people in these western parts of this world of ours
must die needlessly before this western part of this world sees trouble for what it is…
Trouble?!

I don’t know…
Maybe it’s just me…
Maybe I don’t get it…
Maybe I don’t understand…

“Lone wolves” they say
“Random or rogue acts” they say…
I don’t know, they all seem to be saying the same thing to me…
“Allah Akbar”
“Claimed in the name of ISIS”
“This is Jihad”

Yet our leader, our chief defender, busies himself with the mundane minutia of rhetoric.
Twisting the obvious around into something else entirely…as he spins this latest act of Jihad into an issue of gun control….
You can lock up all the guns ever made and yet those who wish to kill us will find their way.
(and not saying something doesn’t need to be done with our guns…
but for now, this is not that, not this time)

A whole lot of good any of this fussing does us…as families once again plan funerals and try to figure out how to live life without those they love because Radical Muslims want to kill us.

“Oh but that’s not a tolerant stance” you say.
“You shouldn’t talk so harshly about our neighbors…”
“Don’t lump everyone into one category…”
“You must be accepting and tolerant”

As how many more of us will randomly be shot, stabbed, blown up, or maimed?

So ok then, you tell me what’s going on.
You tell me why Muslims continue shooting, stabbing, blowing up, and basically destroying lives of westerners….
Given all the news about Orlando you may have missed the stabbing deaths of two married police officers in Paris–an Islamic Extremist broke into their home and stabbed them to death in front of their young child—in the name of all things Holy…

Holy?
Right.

But instead of taking a stance—yes as in actually doing something that says “hey, we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” our President fumbles over his words that by calling a duck a duck will not help in the global fight on Terror and takes rather to fussing and cussing a would be presidential candidate. I think Obama has more on his plate then to play tit for tat with Donald Trump—yet Mr Obama seems to think otherwise.
This is not the time for the President of the United States to have a public hissy fit with a rival pundit.

All of this as we, the average citizen, now keeps a constant look out and an ever ready vigilance as we continually glance over our shoulders at sporting events, outdoor venues, airports, concerts, subways, train stations, soccer fields, shopping malls, our offices, our churches, our synagogues and now even in our bars and clubs…

How safe does that feel?
Oh but our leaders just tell us it’s the “new normal”
“The way things just are now”

Radical Muslims hate us, we’ve pretty much figured that one out.
Radical Muslims won’t rest until the West, and that includes Europe, is no more…
as we are now figuring that one out while we’re on the defensive run.

Regular Muslims don’t speak up and seem to take the “I don’t have a dog in that fight” sort of attitude…
But oh yes they do!! as we’ve pretty much figured that one out as well.

Saudia Arabia is our biggest ally in the Middle East, yet many of these “troubled” young men and woman, who keep trying to kill us, seem to have ties all back to Saudi Arabia…
we’ve pretty much figured that one out too…

So if you and I can figure this all out.
Seeing the troubles for what they are and where they are…
Why can’t our leaders????

And don’t try telling me it’s not so simple or that it’s much more complicated…
there is nothing complicated about figuring out one’s troubles…

George Washington could discern this great Nation’s troubles.
Andrew Jackson could discern this great Nations’ troubles.
Theodore Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin could each discern this great Nation’s troubles.
John Kennedy could discern this Nation’s great troubles.
Ronald Reagan could discern this great Nation’s troubles…

So why is it now so hard for this president to discern the troubles laying hold of this great Nation?

And now, we the faithful, call upon the name of God…to deliver this great Nation…
something our President does not like us to do because once again,
that’s not being openminded…

Hear my sighs…

Prayers for all who have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of those whose sole desire is our destruction…

The Lord is a refuge for the oppressed,
a stronghold in times of trouble.
Those who know your name trust in you,
for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.
Psalm 9:9-10

Being a Christian is more than just an instantaneous conversion-
it is a daily process whereby you grow to be more and more like Christ.
Billy Graham

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren’t any other people living in the world.
Anne Frank

“The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One’s most private wishes, one’s point of view, are the things that have to be changed.”
C.S. Lewis

(The Middle Prong of the Little River near Tremont, Tennessee, The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

Let’s turn things around a bit this morning shall we?
Let’s take a “backwards by design” sort of approach to today’s thoughtful post.
Instead of us looking at a final or finished product, as in the final ta dah sort of moment, let’s look back, way back, to the actual beginning, or starting point…
So much so that if we do actually back up, starting at the beginning rather than at the end, we might just find it more helpful and more meaningful to our understanding of today’s posed thought.

I think we’d all agree that we are a consumer driven society–meaning that it is the end, the final result, which is really what any of us is truly interested in. We don’t much care how it (whatever it may be for you) got here, we just want to know it’s here. We don’t much care what went into producing or making it, we just care that we have “it”…

I think we’d also agree that all great ideas / products have a beginning…someplace where these ideas, products, concepts have been hatched, birthed, thought out, ruminated over…yet each process having the end result or product as the impetus of focus…whereas the end is always the justification, the means to an end, the end result.
Yet might we not all agree that this desired end of ours has to have had a starting point…as in it just can’t poof itself into existence.

Take something simple that most of us take for granted…a plain sack or bag of flour.
What with all the gluten vs gluten free talk these days, I think most of us are pretty keen to the whole flour or not to flour concept. Or if you prefer something gluten free and “wheatless” this morning, we can use a sack of meal as our example…as in corn meal or grits (that ubiquitous southern staple that our Northern brethren don’t always understand) or as our Italian kin prefer, polenta…

These sacks of ground wheat or corn, certainly upon first glance, appear pretty benign. A standard simple kitchen staple most of us take for granted with the cost being pretty much pennies on the dollar…

(ground meal from the Mill within Cades Cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

However this innocent little sack of meal didn’t just show up all nicely ground and packaged…it actually starts out as an ear of corn–actually many ears of corn of which undergo a rather complicated process of transformation.

The process of grinding wheat into flour or corn into meal is a centuries old process with a humble hands-on beginning. A process that was as simple as a person pounding a rock on top of some dried corn or wheat berries piled high on another rock. Yet over time this process grew and was stream-lined, producing a more efficient means of grinding while also being able to grind at a higher rate resulting in larger quantities.

It all starts with a source of power or energy…
Our little meal starts with a mountain stream whose flowing rushing waters are channeled or funneled from the stream into a trough, flume or shoot…

(part of the flume that channels water to the mill wheel / Cades Cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

Of which helps to turn a giant wooden wheel…

(water wheel at the Cades Cove Mill / Cades Cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

(Water wheel at the Cades Cove Mill / Cades cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

Which in turn turns a few more wheels, or in our case, stone wheels or millstones for grinding the corn which is sifted down to flow between the grinding wheels…

(the millstones / the Cades Cove Mill / Cades Cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

Of which crush the dried corn kernels…

(the mill works to the Cades Cove Mill / Cades Cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

(the mill works to the Cades Cove Mill / Cades Cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

With the end result being the finely ground corn being turned into warm powdery meal

(the freshly ground meal / Cades Cove, TN / The Great Smokey Mountains National Park / Julie Cook / 2015)

A beautiful step by step process whose end result is a simple and humble sack of meal or flour.

Now let us consider another end product along with its process, albeit a bit more complicated than a sack of meal—-
Let’s consider the Christian…or better yet, the process of becoming a Christian.

I think all would agree that we each start out in this life as a mere clean slated person–be it male or female.
A simple human being.
Complicated things such as ideals and self identifiers show up quite a bit later in the growing process.

Now granted our parents will say that since we were born into a particular house, family, tradition…we are therefore by birthright a certain nationality, ethnicity, cultural or religious state of being. Yet it is usually, once we grow and develop intellectually, that we begin to truly identify ourselves as a particular this, that or the other.

Some of us who are born into “Christian” homes merely assume the moniker and in turn will label ourselves as just that…a Christian–
Yet the end product, the act of being Christian, is anything but a mere label.

It is a process of becoming.

The misconception is that choosing or taking on the name of Christian in turn gives one the final product–that of being a Christian.
But the reality is that just like the corn and wheat,
there is first a raw product—a human being… who in turn undergoes, if only so choosing, a thoughtful, sometimes painful, yet truly beautiful process of “becoming.”

It is a lifelong process, one that is never truly complete in one’s lifetime as it is a process of striving, never a completion…
That is—not until one finally rests in the hand of the Creator.
So this process of becoming a Christian never has that final single end product because, simply, the process is constantly in an on-going state of being.

So where we in the world are concerned with the end or final product of our things and goods, there is One who is more concerned with the total process…the process of starting from the beginning, working all the way to the final end…One who oversees this process of “becoming” personally Himself, each and every step of the long and arduous way…

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
Ephesians 2:10