bloom more beautifully

“And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

Isaiah 35:10


(a former rose bush / Julie Cook / 2013)

“Strong passions are the precious raw material of sanctity.
Individuals who have carried their sinning to extremes
should not despair or say,
‘I am too great a sinner to change,’ or ‘God would not want me.’
God will take anyone who is willing to love, not with an occasional gesture,
but with a ‘passionless passion,’ a ‘wild tranquility’.
A sinner, unrepentant, cannot love God, any more than someone on dry land can swim;
but as soon as a person takes his errant energies to God and asks for their redirection,
he will become happy, as he was never happy before.
It is not the wrong things one has already done that keep one from God;
it is present persistence in that wrong.
Someone who turns back to God, as the Magdalene and Paul,
welcomes the discipline that will enable him to
change his former tendencies.
Mortification is good, but only when it is done out of love of God…
Mortifications of the right sort perfect our human nature;
the gardener cuts the green shoots from the root of the bush,
not to kill the rose, but to make it bloom more beautifully.”

Venerable Fulton Sheen, p. 185
An Excerpt From
Peace of Soul

Stand fast saints, a remnant remains!

Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God?
Or am I trying to please people?
If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

Galatians 1:10


(the lone thing remaining before the storm / Julie Cook / 2020)

Yesterday I offered a post about those who are not what they appear to be.
Think bin Laden, George Soros, and yes, even Bill Gates.
As in…looks and actions can be deceiving.

We must always be willing to question motives.

I had mentioned that I wanted to take a more Spiritual look at our current situation
in this ailing Nation of ours.

I want to do so by sharing something I read yesterday on a reblog that someone else had posted.

I confess, I love a good prophet—and mind you, we don’t hear nearly as much as we
should about modern-day prophets.

So imagine how excited I was when I read the following.

Oh, I might add that many would question or scoff such words of prophecy…
disputing such as fantasy or fairytale.
But when someone offers a prophecy and it is held accountable to God’s word…
well, I am all ears…

So please read and ponder…

The real Supreme Court.

Posted by appolus on September 20, 2020

So this is not to be construed as a political post and I will not indulge anyone
in a back and forth over one political party or another.
The death of RBG and the timing of it is high octane fuel on an already burning inferno.
This country was already being torn apart by division and
just when you think it cannot get worse, then it does.

A country under judgment looks something like this.
The cries of the innocents shout out from a blood-soaked land.
The fall out from this death will expose completely the fault lines and the hypocrisies
on both sides of the political divide.
Make no mistake, the supernatural forces of Moloch will rage.
Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.
The Lord gave me a word from Lamentations chapter four last May.
One of the most serious words He has ever given me, you can read it below.
The issue in Lamentations was the slaughter of the children by the mothers.
For years they had worshiped Moloch and when their backs were to the wall
and they were under siege, the cooked and ate their own children.

What low state must a people arrive at when they will rejoice at their
ability to murder their own children? The world is locked down in a pandemic,
fear stalks the streets, violence, and divisions of people are at the breaking point.
Saints, God is speaking. Everything that can be shaken is being shaken.
Draw close to your Lord and know that He is the Master of your soul
and no matter what you see unfold, He is in charge.

When the Hebrew children defied the powers that be and declared that no matter what,
they would never bow down to the gods of this world, all hell broke loose and in its fury
the fires of destruction were intensified seven times.
We are entering into that time, the fires of hell’s fury is just about to be intensified.
We must be willing to stand and make the same declaration as the Hebrew children.
Even if we die in the fires we shall never bow down to the gods of this world.
Stand fast saints.

The Lord gave me this word, a hard word to be sure.
My only charge is to deliver it.
In Lamentations chapter four we see a very different Jerusalem.
That once tremendous city, shining like gold above all other cities,
is now tarnished and under siege.
It is slowly starving and its once-proud stones that made up the temple now lay scattered
in the streets like common rubble.
Zion was about to fall.
Impregnable Zion, on the verge of utter ruin.
They were surrounded by the world outside in a siege that would only end in its utter ruin.
And in the greatest horror of all, the women would cook and eat their own children.
There is no lower state in all the world.
This was worse than Sodom for Sodom fell in one day,
there would be no such luxury for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
The symbols of their God lay ruined and they were about to be devoured by the world.
Matthew Henry asks this question of the women in Jerusalem who cooked and ate their own children.
This act, was it “the power of necessity, or the power of iniquity.
” Such a powerful question, ponder on it for a moment reader.
In a secular sense America was the shining light for the nations.
It shone like gold in comparison to old Europe that had grown tired and dim.
It took the world’s huddled masses. It gave hope to people from all around the world,
like a city set on a hill, it drew them to herself.
In two word wars she fought and in the second war she saved civilization itself
and the name of God was never far from the lips of her citizens.
Now look at America if you dare. Her institutions have been corrupted.
Over ninety percent of all the porn in the world spew forth from her bowels.
Her merchants and statesmen sold her out to the highest bidders and she became
the whore of the world whereby many became rich by her.
Yet her greatest iniquity lay with her mothers.
Now the question Matthew Henry raised about the mothers of Jerusalem.
Was their horrendous act born out of necessity or iniquity?
Can I argue that a righteous woman would never cook and eat her own child.
Only the hardest iniquitous hearts would ever contemplate such an act never-mind carry it out.
I asked a question recently, a rhetorical one.
What is more horrendous, to slaughter an infant in the gas chambers or in their mother’s womb?
What human being would allow their wombs to be so violated and their child to be so mutilated?
A woman, a generation, ripe for judgment.
Ripe to be surrounded by the world and put under siege.
Ripe to have the stones of their temples torn down and scattered in the streets
like rubble only fit to be buried.
Sixty-five million babies slaughtered and dedicated to the world.
A world that would consume them, darken them, and ultimately destroy them.
Zion was impregnable, yet it fell. America the proud, you will fall.
Not like Sodom, not like Gomoragh but you will slowly starve to death.
Most definitely spiritually, but perhaps even physically.
In the history of the world, no nation has sinned to this extent.
God has sent His warnings. The towers fell and the cry was not one of repentance,
but “we will rebuild.”
The whole world has come to a standstill and the cry is not one of repentance.
From their ministers, it is “soon it will be business as usual for we have not missed a beat.”
The real tragedy we are facing right now in Christendom is a blindness to the need for repentance.
The virus that causes this blindness is willful ignorance.
They choose not to see. Not only no repentance,
but a doubling down on wickedness, and most of the world cheers,
or peeks out from behind the curtain and says nothing.
Our silence is our guilt. The cheers from the world we should expect,
the silence from Christendom is a deafening roar.
We stay behind our curtains, our walls, as the world spirals downwards.
Our highest ambition is to get back to “normal.” God help us

So saints, if you abide in such a place, can you stay there?

It is time for the saints of God to step out of the boat, step into the storm,
lift your eyes and fix them on Jesus, our soon coming King.
Where will He find you when He comes?
Behind the walls?
Hanging onto the boat for dear life?
Shall you not walk upon the water?
It is there that you shall find Him,
we must go to where He is and leave behind where He is not.

Frank Mceleny

The real Supreme Court.

“The most deadly poison of our times is indifference.
And this happens, although the praise of God should know no limits.
Let us strive, therefore, to praise Him to the greatest extent of our powers.”

St. Maximilian Kolbe

Monday’s mania and the tale of a wayward vulture

Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy,
It is not safe to know.

William Davenant

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(A poor lost griffon vulture, image courtesy the BBC)

What’s a griffon vulture and the high stakes game of espionage and intelligence gathering have to do with one another?
Absolutely nothing.
Yet try telling that to the Lebanese government.

Meet a comedy of errors that had a near disastrous consequence for one hapless griffon vulture.

It seems that this carrion loving bird, who was simply out and about for an innocent lazy ride along the thermals over the Israeli occupied Golan Heights, made the egregious mistake of nonchalantly wandering into Lebanese air space.
He was subsequently captured and “incarcerated” by local Lebanese villagers who mistook him for an Israeli spy.

“A vulture an Israeli spy???!!!” I hear you incredulously howling….

Seems our unsuspecting raptor, who had a tracking device on his tail, was observed flying into Lebanese airspace and was thus assumed to be up to no good…as if eating dead things is a good thing….

But the truth of the matter is that vultures, who have long been absent from this region, were recently reintroduced back into this particular area of the Middle East. Each vulture has a tracking device and a leg tag marking them as a part of Tel Aviv University’s biological research department. Students track these birds in order to monitor their flight patterns, nesting habits, the potential for repopulating the region as well as for their overall wellbeing.

The Lebanese villagers suspecting a “Zionist” plot hatching out right over their heads pegged this lone vulture as a spy most likely complete with a spy cam.
It took the intervention of the UN to broker a deal for the poor vulture’s release and safe return back to the University.

And it should be noted that this is not the first incident of a suspect vulture’s mistaken identity and subsequent “arrest”…..
It seems that even poor vultures are not exempt from the rampant paranoia of high stakes espionage.

So the next time you see a bunch of buzzards circling overhead, eyeing that latest possum roadkill, you might want to think twice about whether or not that’s really a possum and whether or not that’s really a buzzard….

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35446528

Here’s to putting a smile on your face this Monday morning….