this is the moment

Faith is a force, one so powerful that it cannot tolerate anything next to it.
How weak in faith we are: we are constantly letting things outside of God take up space in us!
Adrienne von Speyr
from Lumina and New Lumina

(a meme sent by a friend)

This meme pretty much sums up our collective year thus far…
as in 2020 probably won’t be the year you’ll want to invest in that special case of wine
to save for a momentous occasion on down the road.

The way things are going, there may be no more momentous occasions and
there may be no more roads…just saying.

So yeah, 2020…NOT, a very good year.

My husband and I basically quit watching the news almost two weeks ago.
It had gotten to such a depressing point.
Leaving us feeling helpless, frustrated, and downright mad.

Our leadership is abysmal—plain and simple.

They’ve not been able to handle a pandemic and Lord knows they
are not handling this cultural civil war worth a flip.

Arrogance, infighting, ignorance, hatred…you name it.

I do believe the President is truly trying to cull the madness but
the opposition, along with some of his own party, are making all things
impossible.

I feel like a person who’s been cut adrift in a raft,
drifting helplessly out to sea.

I imagine I am not alone.

I could write on and on about Antifa or Black Lives Matters, both
Marxist organizations bent on violence as an end means at any cost.

I could write about a society that wants handouts rather than hands up.

I could write about the never-ending demands for abortions and the deaths
of babies aborted who actually live– those so-called late-term abortions
that are gone awry.

I could write about a sexually confused swarth of society that
no longer believes in biology.

I could write about the lunacy over the “defund the police” movement…
as that is plain idiocy run amuck.

I could write about the destruction of monuments, statues, buildings,
churches, synagogues all because of a white European legacy…
all of which is simply stupid.

I could wirte about the capitulation by Church leadership
bending to the whims of a progressive culture that takes
no prisoners.
You either get on board or you get destroyed.

I could write about a culture that will strike you dead for
disagreeing with their rabid ideals.

I could write about being woke…or is that arrogantly ignorant?

I could write about violence, hatred, anger and zero civility.

I could write about the emotionalism found in a younger generation who
feels compelled to kneel against a flag and anthem of which is simply
misguided and historically ignorant.

I could write about a pandemic that has crippled a global economy
while leaving those in the know scratching their heads.

But I won’t.

I won’t belabor what the sane amongst us already know.

About 7 years ago, when our son was engaged to be married, I decided,
as the mother of the groom, I needed to get myself into some kind of
presentable shape.

My husband had bought me an elliptical machine for Valentines…a truly heart-healthy
gift…and so I decided I needed to get serious about using it.

I would spend between 30 to 60 minutes daily pushing, pulling and trucking
myself to nowhere all in the confines of our basement.
Sweating like a pig in the process.

After about two weeks I could actually feel a difference in my legs and ‘behind’.
A good difference.
My shorts fit better.
That was then…no so right now but I digress.

When I’d “workout”, I played music to help me push through the pain and strain.
One of the peppier songs was ‘Can’t Hold Us’ by Macklemore.

I didn’t really know all the lyrics…if I had, I probably wouldn’t have listened to it
but the beat was great when one was pumping one’s arms while practically running uphill
via a machine.

I still recall one part of the song that still resonates in my head…

Can we go back?
This is the moment
Tonight is the night, we’ll fight ’til it’s over
So we put our hands up like the ceiling can’t hold us
Like the ceiling can’t hold us

And so yes—
“This is indeed the moment”

All week long I’ve waxed and waned about the notion of discovering one’s true calling.
I’ve written about the differences between a vocation versus a job.
I’ve written about the curse of the repetition of history.
I’ve written about a world gone simply mad.
I’ve written about being lost while longing to be found.

But the one thing I do know, and know most clearly, it that
this is the time for those who call themselves Christians to stand up and stand firm.

You have not been called to be timid.

Those who waffle will fall.
Those who prefer appeasment will be dismayed.
Those who yield to the world will be damned.

It is the one thing that I know more clearly than anything else.

God has called us to be resolute.
This is our Spiritual call to arms.

Accepting a rewritten version of God’s word is unacceptable for a follower of Christ.
Condoning death as a viable and convenient option rather than choosing life is a sin.
Marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman, end of sentence.
Denying Christ before the vile and violent mob, kneeling before the world might
spare your earthly life but it will not find you seated by Christ’s right hand.

Enough is now enough.
God has given us a voice.
It’s time we use it.

They can kill the body, but they cannot kill the soul.

Cry aloud; do not hold back;
lift up your voice like a trumpet;
declare to my people their transgression,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
Isaiah 58:1

Off with their heads!

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat.
“We’re all mad here.”
The Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland

(a toppled statue of St Francis / Julie Cook / 2020)

No, my little St. Francis statue is not the victim of our current hate-fueled madness but
rather it was the victim of a severe thunderstorm.
He toppled over onto the sidewalk and literally lost his head.

Yet, to be honest, seeing poor ol St. Francis having lost his head,
stung my senses a bit.

And so if an old worn garden statue I’ve had for years can prick my emotions, imagine how
I feel watching American monument after monument being defaced or destroyed?

Imagine my dismay over our suddenly removing the names of those more famous among us,
those who are now long gone, being removed from buildings or airports all because their only crime
was having lived generations ago.

What of those now screaming that all white European images of Christ be removed,
or better yet, destroyed?

What of those in the LGBTQ communities exclaiming they don’t wish to co-exist with Christians
but would rather prefer seeing Christianity as nonexistent.

But more about that nonsense later…

Have you ever found yourself pondering the notion of your existence?
As in a ‘why am I here’ sort of pondering?

I know that there have been those amongst us who have felt a keen sense
of purpose for their lives early on…a sense of destiny.
It is a sense of knowing, even as a child, that they were destined for something
so much bigger and so much greater than simply being themselves.

Karol Wojtyla, later the first Polish Pope and Saint, John Paul II felt such.
George Patton, later 4-star general, also felt such.
Winston Churchill, later the UK Prime Minister during WWII, again, felt the same.

As a young boy, Churchill is noted for telling a young schoolmate that he knew
that greatness was in his future.
This coming from a precocious young boy who struggled in his schooling.
A boy who was shipped off to boarding school and was often an embarrassment to his
famously prestigious father.
Greatness was not the initial thought that came to the mind of those who knew
the boy before there was to be the man.

There have been countless others who have also felt the very same sense of purpose.

A feeling that their life was a calling.
A calling to something greater than.

Such callings are often referred to as vocations.
With vocations being vastly different from mere jobs.

A vocation requires a deep sense of dedication—up to and not limited
to one’s very existence.

Those who become members of religious orders and even those who are lead to become teachers,
doctors, policemen, firefighters, nurses…they are but a few of those who we consider as
being called to vocations rather than 9 to 5 jobs.

Those who seek vocations rather than the average job have often felt such calls
early on in life.
An invisible pulling to something so much more than…

If you were ever a kid who attended any sort of Sunday School,
chances are you heard stories and tales about ‘the saints’ —
those brave men and women who dedicated their entire beings to serving God
and proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
Those who were willing to face the dire consequences of doing so.

Gruesome tortures with eventual death being the inevitable.

Some of these men and women had been average folks but many had been roughnecks,
criminals and most often the worst amongst us…
yet God had tapped them early on for something so much greater.

And once the scales had fallen from their eyes and their hearts broken,
their true mission began.

And so, we know…
there is indeed a calling.
And there will be no denying this calling.

Some of us already know this very keenly.
Others of us come to this knowledge reluctantly…but come we do.
And when we do so, we do so resolutely.

So tell me, have you heard it?

Have you heard or felt the calling?

I have.

And so now I know…

This thought will be continued…tomorrow.

Call to me and I will answer you,
and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.
Jeremiah 33:3

Whoever is of God hears the words of God.
The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.”
John 8:47

Freedom and slaves on the 4th

“You will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve YOUR freedom.
I hope you will make a good use of it.”
John Adams

“Act as if every day were the last of your life, and each action the last you perform.”
St. Alphonsus Liguori

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

We often give up our freedom because freedom means doing things for
ourselves, which is a great bother.
We stop working for ourselves and work for someone else who will take care of us.
We stop ruling ourselves because it is easier and even safer to have someone else rule us.
We stop thinking for ourselves because we find it simpler to have someone else think for us.
Then we wake up one morning and find that we are slaves to institutions that are
far out of our control.
Dale Ahlquist
from Knight of the Holy Ghost

I wonder if one day, in the not so near future, it won’t be considered, not only bad form,
but actually an unpardonable sin, to celebrate our own 4th of July—
that of the marking of the beginning of what was to become a great nation?

We seem to be on a hell-bent precarious and most dangerous path of self-righteous indignation
against what made us who we are today…be that a good making or now what many perceive to be
a bad making.

This week, the giant sporting goods maker, Nike has had to pull it’s new Betsy Ross sneaker–
before it even hit the shelves in anticipation of a patriotic 4th—
all because of a now-former football player who has deemed that our flag, our anthem,
and our very country is each a symbol of racism.

This coming from a young man who was raised by white parents in a life of middle-class privilege…
and yet he speaks knowingly of what it is that represents an oppressive past as if he
had lived that experience.

The city council in Charlottesville, Va has voted to no longer recognize the birthday of her
favorite son, Thomas Jefferson, due to his having owned slaves.
Lest we forget that he reportedly fell in love with one of those slaves…
and wrote of his desire to better the lives of enslaved people.

Statues have been removed, emblems taken down, mottos erased and pasts now painstakingly silenced…
all because people are imposing the 21st-century mindset on the mindset of those who lived
hundreds of years prior—those who lived the life they knew and not one of our modern hindsight.

Yet our goal is to expunge our past, at any and all cost- so help us…
(remember, we must not say ‘so help us God’ because that too is no longer acceptable)

Yet erased or not, our past will remain our past.
And the fact is that we are no longer those people.
We have become a better people…that is, until now.

Our current obsession seems to rest in a long ago and thankfully long abolished
use of human beings as free laborers at the hands of
both benevolent and cruel men.

The marketing of men and women bought and sold by other men and women.

Slavery sadly came as part of new world discoveries as old world ways depended on the
strong backs of men, both free and not free, to build a new world.

Slaves had been in the Carribean hundreds of years prior to the establishment of our colonies,
working on the sugarcane plantations for the Spanish.
The British, French and Dutch each soon followed suit.
As we know that Africans sold their kinsmen to both the white men of Europe as well as to the
brown men of the Middle East.

Slavery sadly was not, nor is it, something new.

Today we actually see a new form of slavery taking place…the market of human beings
for that of sex trafficking.

And so we must ask ourselves in this ongoing debate over reparations, are we willing to pay the
countless families, who have lost loved ones as sex slaves?
Those individuals who now must use their bodies in most profane ways at the
expense of others?

This as voices now demand that we pay the families of former black slaves.
Yet how do we determine who was slave and who was owner?

What of the Jews who escaped to the US following WWII?
Those who had either survived the death camps or simply the remaining families
who had lost loved ones, do we or does Germany owe them?
What of those who worked as slaves for the Nazi regime and those who simply were killed?
Should the Germans now pay the families of those who were lost in the gas chambers?

And what of the countless Russians in gulags…those from the days of Communist regimes?
What of the countless numbers of Chinese and Koreans who are imprisoned for
simply expressing free speech.

Who pays their families?

The list is endless.

And it is in the endlessness in which the absurdity is found.

As America begins to wade through the tit for tat of minutia…
fighting over what and who we once were while trying to rewrite it all…
we have actually lost who and what we are—and that is a people who overcome hardships
toil and sorrow while picking ourselves up and having moved forward…all
in order to build a better tomorrow.

Tragically we are now so busy attempting to erase our past, that we’ve forgotten
the very real future that needs us.

Patriotism was once part and parcel of calling oneself an American.
We grew from what was to what might be…

And yet it now appears we are desperately trying to fall backward as we now associate
patriotism with that of racism.
All of which simply makes us slaves to our past.

Yet in all of this, be we free man or slave… there is but one truth that remains…
that in Jesus Christ, the global family of Christian believers,
there is neither slave nor slave owner…
but only freedom for all men and women.

When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.
What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of?
Those things result in death!
But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God,
the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.
Romans 6:20-22

sandcastles

“Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves,
without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind
and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences
shored up against our ruin.”
P.D. James

(the remains of a day’s sandcastle /Julie Cook / 2017)

This nation of ours has ignorantly busied itself building sandcastles in the path
of a rising and raging tide.
Oh so certain that the ramparts will hold and the walls will never be breeched…
holding strong while staving off the ill perceived intrusion of lies.

Statues are removed, protests are mounted, while the glamorous raise their glasses in
triumph…
all the while ignorance is breeding contempt while violence is begetting violence…

Yet in the morning the castles will all be gone.
The tide of Truth will have leveled the pretense of man’s folly.

So we do not lose heart.
Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.
For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison,
as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.
For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are
unseen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Oops he did it again…

“Strong men ruled bloodily; weak men gladly exchange freedom for protection…
for freedom is meaningless in a world of anarchy.”
Morris Bishop
The Middle Ages

“We seem to be witnessing the coming of Antichrist, for this is the falling
away of which the Apostle speaks.”
French Bishops from the 991 council

(statue of Robert The Bruce / Stirling Castle, Stirling, Scotland)

Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots was not always the leader he needed to be.
He waffled to and fro…confused about what he was truly representing or
fighting for.

Himself, or something much greater than himself.

Yet with most of those brave individuals tapped for great leadership,
Robert eventually came around to his senses and to that of his destiny.
He figured things out while in exile on a lonely cold windswept Irish isle and
finally came home to rout the British out of Scotland.

Once Robert understood his true destiny, he rode forward, never looking back.
His mind was made up.
He was going to fight to win or die trying.

Freedom has that sort of draw on men.
You will fight for it or die trying.

Yet most of us know that our brave freedom fighters throughout the annuals of time
have not always been the saints or perfect individuals we often imagine.

In fact more often than not, valiant individuals usually have a rather checkered past.
For it usually takes a lot of falling and dying unto self before real virtue
bubbles its way to the top.

We’ve seen as much here in the States in our own quest for freedom.

Yesterday our good friend the Scottish Pastor David Robertson offered a post
of observation.

Just when I think he’s said everything there is to say while saying it so succinctly
as he covers all the bases, he reminds me he’s only just getting started.

Should I be embarrassed for us here in the States that people now around the world
are taking notice of our latest public temper tantrums and are actually writing
about them and us?

And I don’t think it’s the kind of stuff we really want other people to be
seeing let alone writing about… that being our egregiously dirty laundry.

But our Scottish friend has been most astute in his observations.
Let’s take the latest crazed mentality of ours to desecrate, destroy and remove
the static polestars of history.

Robert E Lee-
Lets talk about removing statues.
In the Ukraine over 2000 statues of Lenin are being removed.
In the UK our loony left are falling into line with this latest virtue
signaling fashion—according to this article in the Guardian Nelson’s
column must go—
Never one to miss a trick, the Scottish Green leader Patrick Harvie wants
statutes pulled down as well…
I wonder if anything will be left standing!

In America the liberal left are going hysterical about monuments to
Confederate generals – especially Robert E Lee.
The irony is that they know nothing about Lee –
they are just virtue signalling.

Lee himself was opposed to the breakup
of the Union and was also apparently opposed to slavery.

In 1856 he wrote to his wife –
“in this enlightened age, there are few I believe,
but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution,
is a moral and political evil in any country.”
He set up an illegal school for slaves at Arlington and all
the slaves they were freed in 1862. Lee has become the latest victim
of “identity politics”.

The irony is that he did not think statues of himself should be erected
and he hoped that the wounds of the civil war would be healed.
“I think it wiser not to keep open the source of war, but to follow
the examples of those nations who endeavoured to obliterated the marks
of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”

But if the fashion of the day is statue destroying – can I suggest others?

Statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce should be destroyed.
After all they were slaveholders – at least in the sense that serfs were slaves.

One of the reasons that Wallace went to war was to maintain the right
of the Scottish nobles to have their own serfs.

Will the Scottish government start pulling down statues soon?!

And what about the statue of the Duke of Sutherland above Golspie –
the ‘Mannie’ responsible for some of the most savage clearances in the Highlands.
Every time I sit in my parents home at Portmahomack and stare across
the water to the Sutherland hills, I see that monstrosity of a statue
on top of Ben Braggie and I am offended.

I had an elder in Brora who at one point,
before he became a Christian had seriously considered blowing it up –
even as a Christian he was tempted!

Meanwhile can anyone tell me the substantive difference between
ISIS and the Taliban

Buddhist statutes removed by the Taliban
pulling down monuments to ideologies they don’t like and Antifa doing
the same thing in the US?
It strikes me that once you start removing
a nation’s history you end up being as bad as the people you are trying
to replace.

And that was but one observation by our good friend in a litany of observations
worth your perusal when clicking the following link:

LED 6 – Back to Uni – Demolishing Statues – Natural Disasters – Robert E Lee – The Duke of Sutherland – Houston – Poland – Trudeau and Abortion – Australia and SSM – Macron – Tower Hamlets Adoption Madness…

While I stand mouth agape, dumbstruck…wondering once the dust settles if anything recognizable of this country I’ve known and loved,
all these many years, will be left standing…
As the protestors and politicians have long forgotten the cost paid for their freedom
to do what it is they are doing, forgetting, hating and desecrating…
I wonder…
will Shirley Temple will be next…..

(Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson in The Littlest Rebel, 1935)

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat,
for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Genesis 2:17

history

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell

(drummer at Fort Mackinac / Mackinac Island, MI / Julie Cook / 2017)

The past several days in this country have been witness to a page out of some
sort of Orwellian novel.

The sad thing is….that this is not the stuff of fiction, legend nor lore but rather
sadly the stuff of our new sick and very sad reality.

I have not had time to properly process the latest madness taking place across
this land….
this land which is my land as well as your land….

There is much to say…
yet not until I’ve had the time to properly consider my words.

However for the time being…

Watching young people tear down, deface, kick and stomp innate statues that
represent moments or individuals from our nation’s history and not the
falsehoods that others now wish to project as incorrect and indeed false
in meaning, is pure and simple idiocy, both asinine and insane.

Question.

Do any of these angry, kicking and stomping young people work or attend school?
Because I believe that those who attend school, those who work,
those who need to work, those who want to work…
have so much more to do than scream, kick and destroy.

A fact.

It actually takes two to argue.

So was our President wrong when he said both sides in this latest brouhaha
were at fault?
If two groups are fussing at one another, yelling at one another, throwing
punches at one another…hating one another…..
I think that is indeed two sided…
as in two sides equally responsible, equally at fault.

Our history is a weaving…a woven tapestry of time, blood, struggle
and hope.

Some sections of the weaving are beautiful…
beautiful in pattern, color and texture while other sections are
a bit rough and tattered…
yet each section makes the entire full tapestry what it is…
precious.

I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’
and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’
Bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the ends of the earth—
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.”
Isaiah 43:6-7

God is laughing

“I love people who make me laugh.
I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh.
It cures a multitude of ills.
It’s probably the most important thing in a person.”
Audrey Hepburn

(A closeup shot of Pere(Father) Jacques Marquette, a 17th-century Jesuit missionary and explorer of New France, along with his visiting gull pal, whose statue graces the central green on Mackinac Island, MI / Julie Cook / 2017)

Sometimes I feel like one of those poor city statues…you know the ones…
those once well thought of monuments to those once notable figures
which are now more of less forgotten to time and are relegated to being a
resting spot for both weary tourists and disprespectful birds.

Now whereas Fr Marquette’s statue is looking rather regal and very clean,
not yet having been “desecrated” on this particular day with the random and
less than nobel telltale signatures left by resting birds—
I just can’t help but feel that my life lately is that of such a statue…

I feel as if I’ve become just another old forgotten statue that currently
has an entire flock of birds resting on my head,
just waiting for the moment when the commanding bird gives the signal for the
troops to simultaneously do what it is they do…
all the while, being simply left to their mercy.

And then it would be just like God, or so I would imagine,
who’d be the first one to laugh.
Yet what a joyful laugh it would be….

For you see I tend to take life seriously….
a little too seriously…

I tend to think things are a big deal.
I allow myself to get all worked up and bent out of shape when my
seemingly grandiose, well thought out,
detailed plans get all skewed as I watch everything I’ll have worked so hard over
collide head-on with the proverbial Murphy of Murphy’s law.

I can come unglued and unraveled as I sit in the midst of the debris…
sadly picking up the pieces, while crying over my life’s spilled milk….
As I furiously and frustratingly try to figure out the lessons
I’m to find in the current spate of misfortune, error, accident and
simple run of bad luck that has all come my way.

For you see I believe things in this life are never random—
everything has a purpose and a plan.

God has a plan in not only the good events of life…
but more importantly and most especially, His plans are even found in the
bad events…

And being the ever impatient one, I try to quickly figure it all out so the
current run of misery will not seem to be all for naught….

And then He laughs because He knows it’s really a matter of His timing
and not mine.

I have a post to write—a little self deprecating post but one filled with lots
of humor.
All because I was much like someone sitting in the middle of one of those
Chevy Chase family vacation movies last week during the little trip my husband
and I had taken—
if it was to go wrong,
it would…
and boy… did it ever…
over and over and over.

First there were the tears of utter frustration as I saw our precious “away”
time being bombarded by misfortune…
with my poor husband trying to offer comfort.
The smart man knew it was best that he keep his temper and composure over
our relentless misfortune and misadventure as I was likely to come totally
unglued…
And not knowing if anyone could survive a total meltdown by his now
distraught wife—heck I didn’t know if I could survive such a self implosion
as I’ve never had a total crumbling….
he managed to keep his cool–something he’s usually not good at doing.

However by week’s end, it all became almost comical…
the kind of stuff one looks back on when fondly remembering some of life’s
greater adventures.

Yet when we got back home, trying to put things back into the play of routine,
there came word of something else–something, when compared to all that we’d
just been through, went totally over the top.

For this latest “event” has now put the icing on the cake…
which in turn is giving me grand pause to sit back and see that God has
indeed had the final teaching moment…

And it all is culminating with God delightfully laughing…
Laughing a grand ol belly laugh full of love and full of hope and full of joy…

and soon, when life slows down, at least just a tad,
and I find myself caught back up with things here…
I’ll share my tale…
One in which we will all be able to commiserate together and then joyously laugh
triumphantly…

Sarah then said,
“God has given me cause to laugh,
and all who hear of it will laugh with me.
Genesis 21:6