Captian’s log: It’s all in the management

“Start with the end in mind.”
Stephen R. Covey

(a prized commodity / Julie Cook / 2020)

The Mayor has caught wind of the dire straits besetting the shelves of our stores…
as in, they are bare.

She has made an executive order—
As Mayor of Woobooville, she will keep tabs on any and all rolls of toilet paper
in the house.
She will dole out each family member’s allotted daily TP amount…
nothing more, nothing less…baring any sort of stomach virus during
our days of confinement.

(the Mayor busy at work sorting out each family member’s toilet paper ration / Julie Cook / 2020)

And so it dawned on me…
We are a people accustomed to living in the land of plenty.
We come, we go, we want, we buy, we gather…
The latter half of the 20th century, into the current 21st century,
has been a time of nothing but plenty.

Generations not knowing much about sacrifice.

The majority of our population has not known so much need as they have want.

My grandmother use to always say that “your wants will never hurt you”
This coming from a woman who was a young widowed mother raising two young girls
during The Depression and a world war.
She had little patience with wanting for the sheer sake of wanting.

We, however, are living in a time when kids will actually kill other kids
over a pair of tennis shoes…not because they need the shoes but because they
want a pair of popular trending shoes—
that’s when you know our’s is a society not so much of need but rather of want…
want of things and not the want of needs.

And so I wonder what this pandemic will teach us.
Other than the fact that we seem to think hoarding toilet paper is a key
to survival.

The Mayor asked that I share this video of Neil Diamond offering his take on
doing out part in washing our hands during this crisis of a virus…
Leave it to Neil Diamond to remind us that we can do this!!!!

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.
For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive,
disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous,
without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit,
lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness,
but denying its power. Avoid such people.
For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women,
burdened with sins and led astray by various passions,
always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.
Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth,
men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith.
But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all,
as was that of those two men.
2 Timothy 3: 1-9

Bears, wanting to be God, goodbye St Patrick, pandemic, mayhem, drinking the bitters and will the last one out please turn off the lights…

“Don’t Panic.”
Douglas Adams,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Pan again!” said Dr. Bull irritably.
“You seem to think Pan is everything.”
“So he is,” said the Professor, “in Greek.
He means everything.”
“Don’t forget,” said the Secretary, looking down,
“that he also means Panic.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

(ABC News)

Bears and Bulls.

If you’re not hiding under a rock, of which I suspect many of us just might be doing during
these precarious days…but if you’re not under a rock, then you have most certainly heard
the dire alarm bells sounding…

Our stock market, the global markets, has/have all taken a downward turn.

Make that more like a free for all free fall…

Thank you very much Covid-19.

Wall Street has heard of your unrelenting spreading nature and turned
itself into a bear market practically overnight.

A bear market is not what we want.
A bear market drops like a rock.

A bull market, on the other hand, is good for our investments, our 401K’s,
our retirement savings…

According to thebalance.com, the average length of a bear market is 367 days.
Conventional wisdom says it usually lasts 18 months.
Between 1900 and 2008, bear markets occurred 32 times with an average duration of 367 days.
They happened once every three years.

Yet as my dad would always say…the market has to always correct itself…
it’s an ebb and flow sort of rhythm.
Ups and downs will each come and go..having their own day in the sun.

Personally, I like rhythm…
on the other hand, I don’t like getting pushed off a cliff and falling with no parachute.

But this was coming from a man who survived Prohibition, the Depression, a World war,
a Police action as a reservist and that infamous Summer of Love…while trying to shield
my eyes.

He was stoic in the face of panic.
Hence that Greatest Generation…

But then he could also be quite the Eeyore.
So who’s to say…

Amid all the Henny penny, the sky is falling mayhem taking place, there is still
news taking place.

I caught a recent little hissy fit offered by our favorite congressional darling, AOC.
That favorite fab four member—

It seems as if AOC became riled up because people were being just oh so racist and bigoted
for not going to Chinese restaurants due to fears over Covid19, aka coronavirus.

Think Wuhan.

Yeah…
I don’t think we’re any more likely to “catch” the virus by eating Chinese food than we
are if we eat Italian food…
but try telling a panicked populace…try telling them that its ok to eat Chinese,
Italian, Korean, Iranian foods…
Panic does not “do” reason.

AOC doesn’t get the notion of a panicked populace.
She wants to control the populace.
The populace is to bow to her commnad.
That’s what socialists want to do.
They control.
She doesn’t get panic.
You can’t control panic.
A politician can’t be God.
Despite their desire.

And if you think a Saint can beat covid19, try telling all the St. Patrick revelers.
Savannah, Georgia—one of our Nation’s largest St. Patrick day celebrations,
has canceled it’s St.Patrick’s Day celebration over the Covid19 pandemic.

Yep, pandemic.

The globally scary word of Bubonic Plague…
Get ready to slap the bells around the necks of the infected.

When was a pandemic used a political weapon?
Today.
As in NOW.

What better way can a defeated party defeat a booming president that they hate?

So yes, the stock market will plummet, our economy will slow and the panic will rise.

Icelandic volcanoes have come and gone, hampering global travel.
Terrorists have hampered global travel.
Now Covid19 hampers global travel.

This too will pass.

Our sporting events are being canceled.
Our large gatherings and celebrations are being canceled.
Schools are shuttering their doors.
Our normally free and carefree lives are suddenly being impeded…
Americans don’t like being impeded.
We are a nation of coming and going as we please.

Yet reality is what it is…

The real question is…will Americans come together as one Nation or will
she remain as a divided dual nation?

In the meantime, I’m finding that the consuming of bitters is both medicinal as well
as most applicable…for these are indeed bitter days…
despite the fact these bitters come from Italy…

(the Drink Shop)

Oh, and will the last person to leave to wherever it is we are either leaving or going…be that
a mandated or self-imposed quarantine, please turn out the lights….

But now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
Isaiah 43:1-2

fed up with measured responses

A ‘measured’ response?
I’m fed up of ‘measured’ responses to major sins.
David Roberston

(Farm Security Administration / United States Office of War Information / Migant mother
by Dorothea Lange / 1936)

Fed up.
This one well-recognized photograph by Dorothea Lange became the face, the poster child
if you will, of the plight of most Americans during the height of the Great Depression
and The Dust Bowl.

It is an image of a tired woman who is past fed up…who is now devoid and resigned to the
measured response offered by a Government who, in her small corner of the world,
has let her and her children down.

Ms. Lange later explained after the photograph was published:
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet.
I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her,
but I do remember she asked me no questions.
I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction.
I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two.
She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields,
and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.
There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her,
and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.
There was a sort of equality about it.
(Wikipedia)

This particular photograph was obviously taken at a time when color film was the
exception and not the norm.
I strongly believe that the black and white photograph speaks more profoundly to the
desperate depths and hopelessness of this particular time of America’s situation
during the dark and heavy days of the 1930’s than that of a photograph that could have
been taken in color.

All of the sensory overloads, the eye-popping, eye-catching pizzaz is pared down to
the obvious harsh reality of black and white.

Nothing in between.
Nothing hidden.
Nothing left to cover up the ugly.
There are no ifs or ands…
Just what is…

Plain.
Simple.
Hard.
Desperate.
Resigned.
Hopeless.

That same sense of importance of the simple, of the bold black and white versus the
distracting and color, came barrelling to mind when reading David Roberston’s response to the
Chruch of Scotland’s take on Transgenderism, homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

His is the observation of one church denomination’s take on the culture wars and the church’s
own politically correct “Christian” response cloaked in naivete and falsehoods.

The Chruch of Scotland is no different from most of our current Christian body
denominations and their seemingly awkward desire to “play nice” with a culture that
blatantly flaunts its disdain for Christianity and the very Word of God.

David Roberston is fed up…
I too am fed up.

Fed up by measured responses to blatant sin.

Why aren’t more Christians fed up?

Sin is sin…the acceptance of such by a culture desperately trying to rewrite the narrative
is unacceptable…

So why then are so many members of the Christian body, our Churches, accepting the
measured responses to sin.

A ‘measured’ response?
I’m fed up of ‘measured’ responses to major sins.
Thank God that Elijah didn’t offer a ‘measured response’ to the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel;
or that Paul avoided a ‘measured response’ to the foolish Galatians;
and that Jesus wasn’t ‘measured’ and ‘Christlike’ when he told the Pharisees in public that
they were like whitewashed tombs, twice dead!

Note our Lord’s lack of measure when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip!
Or his rudeness when he said that the lukewarmness of the Laodiceans made him sick.
One can only suspect that CFS (Covenant Fellowship Scotland) would have been appalled at Paul’s lack of measure in suggesting to Timothy that the Judaising circumcisers should go the whole way and emasculate themselves!
David Roberston

Apostasy?
Is that not too strong a word?
I’m currently reading John Owens Nature and Causes of Apostasy from the Gospel
(in volume 7 of his works).
It is a stunning and apposite work for my own denomination and for the Church of Scotland.
I think there is a danger of apostasy in the Free Church,
as there is in any other church – but I thought the following was particularly appropriate –

“Men are apt to please themselves,
to approve of their own state and condition,
wherein they have framed unto themselves rest and satisfaction.
Churches content themselves with their outward order and administrations,
especially when accompanied with secular advantages,
and contend fiercely that all is well, and the gospel sufficiently complied withal,
whilst their outward constitution is preserved and their laws of order kept inviolate.”
(John Owen – Works vol.7 p.53).

Covenant Fellowship Scotland also intends to provide leadership.
Many orthodox people in the Church of Scotland are shocked and dismayed
by the trajectory which the Church has been on for several years.
Many are losing heart, looking for leadership and feel powerless.
We have frequently been asked, ‘Is no-one doing anything?’
It is imperative that Covenant Fellowship Scotland offers people a rallying point
for dissent now, as well as leadership for the future.”

The Lion has Whimpered

I’ve heard a great deal recently from folks who just think total acceptance is the
the path of least resistance.
The turning of the blind eye to any and all while burying heads in the sands of
ignorance and compliance.

The give and take that is more give…taken… and soon to be gone.

“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