THE LIFE AND SOUL OF OUR NATION CONTINUES TO BE AT STAKE.

EVEN MORE IMPORTANT, THE SAFETY AND SECURITY OF OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN, AND ALL WHO ARE VULNERABLE MUST BE PROTECTED.

Commenting on a post about children in New York State who protested against participating in an academic exercise justifying the acts of hatred committed by the Nazis a Swedish friend wrote:

"The way I see it there is no justification what so ever to see the Nazis side of the story. We don't need that kind of racism in our world. We don't need fascism. We don't need denial of history. There are still some people still living that experienced the horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka and other 'extermination facilities' and it is so important to listen to them and to document as much as possible.

For a teacher to force students to see 'the other side of the coin' is nothing short of ignorance to what history teaches us.

Good riddance from (to) false authorities of those two young students!"

And I replied:

"Yes. . . and it reminds me of a study sheet I saw a fifth grader here in Georgia had about slavery and our civil war claiming that slavery was an 'economic necessity' and justified it. ThIs kind of demon that can justify and encourage such evil being poured into the ears and eyes and minds of impressionable young children can only be deterred through prayer and fasting.

And since he was an infant, another child I know was subjected by his father to the alt-right hateful propaganda of men and women on the radio all the time in his house. This is indefensible. I used to pray that the infant's and child's ears and mind would be closed to such poison. It is a form of abuse to teach children to hate and fear.

And I was once in a beauty shop in West Virginia where immigrants from Southeast Asia worked. She was calmly and intensely explaining something to the man from that area of the world who had fled Communist repression; oppression; violence, and the threat of violence; and who at the time barely spoke English. She earnestly told him how white people's rights were being violated because they were the only true Americans and in danger of being pushed out of their place as subjagators of everyone who was not white. I had read about this kind of evil way of thinking, but until that time had never heard anyone speak it out loud.

We sometimes forget that by the time the Nazis started the war, a whole generation of Germans had gone through elementary school and our equivalence of high school being taught in school and in all levels of children's clubs and youth clubs the heinous lies about ethnic groups who were not 'Aryan' and people who were handicapped or mentally ill. This laid the ground work for a more than one generation of people who were seduced by evil and encouraged to blindly follow Hitler and unconscionably commit the heinous acts of mass violence. They justified their acts with rhetoric very similar to what speed forth from the white supremacist lady in the beauty shop.

We must stand up against this evil with God's help.

God have mercy. Christ have mercy. God have mercy.'

POP QUIZ FOR VETS, TOWER LAKERS AND BHS ALUMS ;-)

Okay . . . Pop Quiz . . . Play or don't play . . . it's okay whatever.

Fill in the blanks.

1. At first in the Hokey Pokey you ____________ .

2. When you are up to your waist in snakes or alligators, someone needs to remind you that you were sent there to__________________ .

3. THERE I WAS, flying along fat, dumb and ____________ .

4. You've got to ____________ a little.

5. The hurry-eder I go the _____________ I get.

6. Go BRONCHOS, Beat _______________ .

7. We get out early on Wednesday because _________________ .

8. If you are going north on Hough Street and turn left you are heading to ____________________ .

9. To horse and goggle is to __________________ .

10. The true color of Chicago piccalilly is __________ .

BONUS QUESTION
**** We were allowed to go on the ice when the _________ drove on it and didn't fall in.

TWO IDEAS THAT MIGHT MAKE A DIFFERENCE

After the Romans tore down the Temple in Jeeusalem and the Jewish Diaspora began, sometime after that . . . a Babylonian rabbi thought about or was told about or wondered about this:

"What if each family in the world was offered a chamce by the Creator, Blessed and Holy, that they could be the chosen people, but only the childrwn of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob said, "Yes," (though at times they decided it was too much trouble or enticed and seduced by other families or cultures or shining gold or silver or diamonds; or were slaughtered and kidnappes and held for ransom and made to be slaves)??!?

And the second thought --

An Ashkenazi rabbi in Central Europe when living in a shtetl or a ghetto or during a pogrom decided that every night before he slept he would renounce ownerahip of wverything in his house and even the house itself so that if anyone came to steal something, that person would not be sinning because everything was free for the taking.

Selah.

Glory to G-d.

Baruch ata Eloheynu . . . 

Dayenu.

THE POWER OF ONE

Movie

There's a scene in "The Power of One" where, after being to Soweto or one of the township slums where indigenous people existed, PK's girlfriend whose father is one of the Dutch descended political leaders says that she just thought their maid/housekeeper lived in a smaller house.

This is the same kind of revelation that white peoplw who go on charity trips to inner cities and first people reservations and other places outside the U.S. (including refugee camps, and most horribly, war zones) where people who exist and die in the midst of violence and the threat of violence have . . . and then go back to their comfortablee homes and lives -- hopefully committed to helping make things better . . . one person at a time, one family at a time.

The Ruler of the Universe expects us to mirror the love, justice, mercy and righteousness that we receive.

We have for the most parr been failing miserably.

God have mercy. Christ have mercy. God have mercy.
(Or however you may express that out of your faith and culture and wthnic family of origin . . . hopefully you recognize that we always have much more in common with one another than we have divisive differences, believe it or don't.

THE SADDEST THING

 . . . AND AT THE SAME TIME THE MOST HEINOUS is that they truly believe God won't notice that there are families who have been homeless for generations where there are huge houses with one or two people in them with gated communities and guns in the houses and rifles in the carea . . . and they really believe it's okay that little children and babies don't only have malnutrition, but starve and die within range od gluttonous people eating more in one meal than TOO MANY PEOPLE can't even imagine and have never had . . . and the lawmakers have NEVER had to live paychexk to paycheck. They have the beat health insurance in the universe and get ro keep it no matter how short or long their term is and hey think God hasn't noticed that they receive what really amounts to bribes ALL the time from corporations, associations and organizations . . . and they are faithful to THOSE people at a life and death expense of the people they are supposed to serve. And the two sides just blame one another for continujng to maintain having all that they have and causing people to lose homes they have paid for all their adult lives and turn away children and babies from getting direly needed health care . . . and they rhink that God hasn't noticed or win't notice that we don't live up to iur ideals and never have . . . and the evil just drools and cheers and encourages those old white men to be as deeply inured in racism and sexiam and worshippin Mammon -- the Spirit of greed and MENDACITY . . . and the pathway to everything depraved, oppressing, evil and cruelly is wide open and the Father od Lies is patting his children on the head and laughing with delight.

Really.

Truly.

Please repent before it is too late and go help somekne and say, "NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT!" to base instincts . . . to rapists, to people who give drugs to children and entice men to give their paychecks to the casinos and the numbers runners . . . and sometimes the mothers, too, the brothers, the sisters, the cousins, the friends.

Last night and RIGHT NOW children and even babies are being used amd abused for unimaginable sexual cruelty.

Last night and RIGHT NOW young women and young men and even children and BABIES are being kidnappes and enticed and lied to and taken away to be sex slaves . . . and just as with drug trafficking, they come theough airports, are driven in trucks, and chained to beds and this is rolerated because juat aa with the deug trafficking, our economy is under girdes by the oppression and subjugation.

And they lie, lie, lie and think that only they have a right to be citizens here.

WE CAN SAY, "NO!" 

WE CAN CHANGE THINGS.

WE CAN STOP SAYING THAT WE ARE THE MOST WEALTHY AND POWERFUL NATION IN THE WORLD and crowing and smirking and theowing our weight around and instead hang our heads in shame, hold our leaders accountable and one by one; one person: one famuly; one neighborhood; one township; one county, one village; one town: one city; one state . . . to another one of each entity, we can hanf our heads in shame, ask for forefiveness from the righteous, holy God of the universe. We can with God's help MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

NOT. MOMENT TOO SOON.

Oh . . . and taking our rights and freedoms away by engendering fear and allowing terror has ro stop. too. Enough is enough.

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX EASTER IN MOSCOW

At the Kram (Temple) Khristos Spacitel' (Christ the Savior) in Moscow. Stalin had it torn down after the Great Patriotic War (WWII) and built a huge outdoor swimming pool there. One of the first Soviets I met in the fall of '77 was the head of the Dept of Geothermodynamics at Moscow State University. He was one of the IREX Exchange professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during my student teaching semester at Uni High. Along with two other professors, a doctor of radio physics from Kharkov, Ukraine and another one . . . I met them because the head of the Slavic Languages Dept had invited the Soviet poet Andrei Vosnesensky to read his poetry on campus.

During the eight weeks of student teaching I was only getting about 2-4 hours a night. Krista was in kindergarten for half a day and during the other half was in day care with Tommy who had just turned three. They were in the loving wonderful environment at our home church day care center -- First UMC in Champaign, where we had been married, also.

After her morning in day care and her afternoon in kindergarten, she walked home with some neighbors and played in their house until I got home.

My kids' dad brought them to church in the morning and drove Krista from day care to kindergarten after lunch.

I had a rule never to do homework when the kids were awake and had only had three full-time semesters of college before Krista was born. I was out of school until she was eighteen months old and then took one or two classes a semester. I missed the fall semester of 1974 when Tommy was born, and by the time it was the '77-'78 school year I had to student teach and it made more sense to try to do those last two semesters with full-time course work.

We had lived in the Orchard Apartments -- Married Student Housing (AKA Orchard Downs) from Oct 1971-May 1975. Then we bought a little three bedroom ranch house with a fenced in yard on the edge of the corn fields and soy bean fields of the very eastern part of Urbana. Krista would have had a long walk along some other fields between housing developments, so in May of 1977 we bought a little salt box house in the western part of Champaign, with a huge back yard in a neighborhood with big stately oak and elm and ash and willow and many other kinds of deciduous trees . . . And pine trees and snowball bushes and lilac hedges and . . . parks.

The house was across the street from an elementary school and the big windows of the kindergarten room faced our front yard. And then it turned out that Krista's kindergarten teacher had grown up in our new house. Her father had built it. The lot was 90' x 180' and the house sat close to the street with a big elm tree in the front yard.

We called the huge back yard "Brown Park," and the kids had so much fun playing there . . . and we were blessed to have picnics and cookouts, including when several aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbors and friends helped us celebrate my graduation from UIUC in June of '78.

My kids' dad and I had met during Freshman Week in September of 1970, but didn't really start dating regularly until after January of '71. He graduated on time in June of '74 and then did five years of research in Nutritioonal Sciences studying the etiology of multiple sclerosis while he worked at the local city hospital as a toxicologist and clinical chemist.

Even though professors in the Slavic Languages Department and my advisor were surprised over and over when I was back and forth to classes, taking time out when my babies were born. Was blessed to be a member of several babysitting co-ops and the Urbana Co-operative Nursery School where we all made wonderful friends with kids from all over the world. I happened to be in class with a very imposing professor from Moscow both times that it was the last semester before having a baby.

When I turned in my final test paper the second time, several months before Tommy was due, she looked at me sternly and said, "You are having another child??! Why can't you just get a dog or a cat?"

I think the answer was beyond my capacity for my Russian vocabulary at the time. So I just shrugged, shook my head and smiled as I walked out of the classroom.

We had a very full rich life with many cultural and learning opportunities and wonderful places to play and to celebrate holidays at the university, in the cities and at church. God is so good and so faithful.

In the summer after my kids' dad got his MS in Nutritional Sciences, it looked like I might be offered a position flying for the Illinois Air National Guard. So he decided to go to US Air Force Officer Training School and was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant on our son's fifth birthday in September of '79.

In April of 1980, the flying opportunity had fallen through. I had asked Senator Stevenson to appeal that decision, but his staffer said that there were too few places for women pilots and navigators. I was told that the "needs of the Air Force" were such that the B.A. In Russian I had earned was more useful in intelligence work. I was given the opportunity to go to Officer Training School for a slot in that career field.

I was told that it was possible I could apply for pilot training after I was commissioned, but that never worked out and I settled for taking private pilot lessons.

Truly, we were blessed during our lives on active duty, though as all kids of military members know, there were hardships, too. In most of my assignments I would have paid them to do what I did.

We were involved in support of the Eastern Space and Missile Center and Kennedy Space Center operations during the first five Space Shuttle launches. Then we worked for the Alaskan Air Command supporting the pilots who flew to protect Alaska from Soviet bombers and other missions.

Strangely enough, I never went to the Soviet Union for the US Government, and it wasn't until 25 years after I fist began to learn the language when I was fifteen years old and a Junior in high school that I first went to Moscow.

It was December 27, 1993, not long after the second coup attempt in October of '93, during the turmoil of the Glasnost' and Perestroika and the on-going break-up of the Soviet Union. I joined a group of college students and their United Methodist chaplain from Evansville University in southern Indiana. I was blessed to escort-interpret for them.

We had an exchange with college-aged and high school aged youth in a city called Obninsk, about 230 miles southwest of Moscow. Our hosts were participants in many kinds of clubs, so we had a lot of fun sharing with them. We were also very interested to find out that Obninsk is the location of the first Soviet nuclear reactor -- one of six built because of the plans that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of helping to get for the Soviets.

We brought in the New Year Russian style, listening to the radio as the clock tower of the Moscow Kremlin Wall struck twelve for each time zone across the breadth of the Eurasian continent. After much too little sleep, we found ourselves rousted out of bed to take part in a "Siberian Picnic" complete with horseback rides and three-legged soccer games and wonderful pilmeni soup . . . hot chocolate and hot spiced cider.

On January 2nd we were treated to a field trip to Moscow and had lunch in the second McDonald's Restaurant in Russia. The most polite teenagers we had ever seen served us. And we were delighted to note similarities and difference on the menu between the food and drinks we knew well from home.

The most interesting part were the extravagant, fancifully decorated ice cream treats. However, we were amused about the vagaries of languages in translation again when we learned that those ice cream desserts were called "coktails"!

We also visited a town called Zagorsk northeast of Moscow. There was Soviet university where students studied to be film makers there, among other things. In the Tsarist era the town was called "Sergeev Posad" because the heritage of one of the most beloved Russian Orthodox saints, St. Sergei of Radonezh is there. The old name has been restored and the monastery and all the churches within are now open once again. This is a photo of the outside walls of the monastery from the late spring of 2010 when I went there with some Methodist seminary student friends.

Wow . . . all I was trying to do was share a video of the Russian Orthodox Easter liturgy in Moscow. Here it is:

Easter Liturgy at Kristy's Spacitel' Kram in Moscow (Christ the Saviour Temple)

(The service was recorded on April 11, 2015)

Khristos voskres. Istinno on voskres!!!

Christ Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed!!

Alleluia! Glory to God.

❤️❤️❤️

GOOD FRIDAY NIGHT WANDERINGS

JUST A SUGGESTION, A PERSPECTIVE . . . NOT MEANT TO BE DEFINITIVE AND NOT MEANT TO TRY TO CONVINCE YOU OF ANYTHING . . .

"I gotta tell ya, Fran . . . of all the ways the Lord relates to me, the one I like least is that pruning thing He does from time to time. Right?"

"Yeah! For sure . . . getting fertilized is not that fun either, Joe. Really."

"He really is hard to figure out sometimes. You'd think He would find a way to explain Himself a bit more clearly."

"You mean besides the Bible, right?" *smirk*

Well, I heard a good one some time ago . . . let's see if I can find it. (this is especially dedicated to Sweet Kathy H. <3)

The Tea Cup Story:

There was a couple who used to go to England to shop in the beautiful stores. They both liked antiques and pottery and especially teacups. This was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

One day in this beautiful shop they saw a beautiful cup. They said, "May we see that? We've never seen one quite so beautiful."

As the lady handed it to them, suddenly the cup spoke. "You don't understand," it said. "I haven't always been a teacup. There was a time when I was red and I was clay. My master took me and rolled me and patted me over and over and I yelled out, 'let me alone,' but he only smiled, 'Not yet.'

"Then I was placed on a spinning wheel," the cup said, "and suddenly I was spun around and around and around. Stop it! I'm getting dizzy! I screamed. But the master only nodded and said, 'Not yet.'

"Then he put me in the oven. I never felt such heat!" the teacup said. "I wondered why he wanted to burn me, and I yelled and knocked at the door. I could see him through the opening and I could read his lips as He shook his head, 'Not yet.'

"Finally the door opened, he put me on the shelf, and I began to cool. 'There, that's better,' I said. And he brushed and painted me all over. The fumes were horrible. I thought I would gag. 'Stop it, stop it!' I cried. He only nodded, 'Not yet.'

"Then suddenly he put me back into the oven, not like the first one. This was twice as hot and I knew I would suffocate. I begged. I pleaded. I screamed. I cried. All the time I could see him through the opening, nodding his head saying, 'Not yet.'

"Then I knew there wasn't any hope. I would never make it. I was ready to give up. But the door opened and he took me out and placed me on the shelf.

One hour later he handed me a mirror and said, 'Look at yourself.' And I did. I said, 'That's not me; that couldn't be me. It's beautiful. I'm beautiful.'

"'I want you to remember, then,' he said, 'I know it hurts to be rolled and patted, but if I had left you alone, you'd have dried up.

I know it made you dizzy to spin around on the wheel, but if I had stopped, you would have crumbled.

I knew it hurt and was hot and disagreeable in the oven, but if I hadn't put you there, you would have cracked.

I know the fumes were bad when I brushed and painted you all over, but if I hadn't done that, you never would have hardened; you would not have had any color in your life.

And if I hadn't put you back in that second oven, you wouldn't survive for very long because the hardness would not have held.

Now you are a finished product. You are what I had in mind when I first began with you.'"

~ Author Unknown

LINK TO BIBLE STUDY

PALM SUNDAY REJOICING!!!

My prayer for you and your loved ones, Beloved, today as always, is that you know without a doubt who Jesus is and that you are His.

This has been a difficult Lenten journey for me. But the wonder of our walk with the Lord can be that the biggest blessings come from knowing the Lord is with us, especially in the toughest of times. 

What joy there was for Jesus' closest family members and friends when the reality of who He was and is became evident on Palm Sunday! Hundreds of years of trials and tribulation, hope and dejection came to a close as Jesus made His triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

With the help of His most trusted family members and friends He had made all the preparations to fulfill the prophecies that were dearest to His heart. If you have any questions or doubts about this, I ask you to seek your own answers. Here are some helpful web sites --

Top 40 Messianic Prophecies

Clarifying Christianity -- Messianic Prophecies

Blue Letter Bible -- Jesus is Messiah by Don Stewart

Did you know that the Upper Room was the facility above King David's tomb? The caretakers would not have allowed Jesus to stay there if they had not believed He was and is Messiah, the Holy One of God, the Lord's only begotten Son.

Have you ever thought about the impact for the observant, people of Yahweh, the Jews of that time, when they saw Jesus' friend Lazarus sitting outside the house he shared with his sisters Mary and Martha in Bethany on the approach to Jerusalem?

Jewish individuals and families from all over the Roman Empire and beyond had come to the Holy City of Jerusalem for the Passover, their most sacred festival, that commemorates the deliverance of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob from hundreds of years of slavery in Egypt. For hundreds of years this formative act that tied the Children of Israel to the Creator of the Universe had been celebrated. 

And on the day that Jesus of Nazareth came triumphantly into the City of His ancestor King David, all those who knew the Torah and everything that had been written about Him had a chance to be witnesses. They each and every one could decide for themselves who He was and is. 

After his triumphal entry, Jesus retreated each evening to stay with Lazarus, Mary and Martha. During each day of preparation for all that was required in observance of Passover, Jesus traveled from Bethany to the Temple. While there He was examined by the Torah scholars and Temple leaders. 

We have the record of some specific acts that include Jesus anger over the financial currency traders and those who sold birds, lambs and goats for sacrifice. From the perspective of the established rulers of the Temple and sacred government, Jesus of Nazareth was challenging their authority and inciting unrest.

From the perspective of the Roman Empire's political and military leadership. The rule of Palestine had never been easy. And the Jewish insurgents came in many varieties. They were a constant irritation and especially so during festivals when Jerusalem's population was swollen beyond measure by faithful pilgrims.

For three years the eyes of the religious leadership and the Roman overlords had given increasing attention to a once obscure rabbi from the quiet town of Nazareth. While John the Baptist had garnered the lion's share of attention, Jesus began to travel, teach, heal, deliver and perform other miracles. He and his followers mostly stayed out of the mainstream in the Galillee, a region filled with trade routes, populated by people of many ethnic groups.

As His notoriety grew, more and more people were attracted to Jesus because of the miracles. To many people of His era, all that He taught and demonstrated indicated that He was an anointed prophet. This meant to them that He was connected to God and given knowledge and supernatural power. These miracles, signs and wonders included: 

a man who was crippled being able to walk again;

a man who was born blind was able to see;

a woman who had had an issue of blood for 12 years was healed;

a twelve year old girl who had just died was brought back to life;

a man overcome by mental illness was restored to peace and rationality.

Lazaraus had died and been entombed for four days before Jesus called him back to life. And of all the miracles Jesus had brought forth up until this time, this was the most significant and the most witnessed.

What joy and wonder swept through the crowds of people who had been downtodden and oppressed!

Yet on Palm Sunday only Jesus closest family members and friends really knew that the celebrations of Palm Sunday would lead to Jesus' sufferings, death and resurrection.

And perhaps truly only Jesus believes.

Nevertheless, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you can know who Jesus is with absolute certainty.

If with all your heart you seek Him, He will surely reveal Himself to you. He will answer all your questions and extinguish all your doubts. 

Won't you give Him a chance to show you how much He loves you?

I pray that you will.