FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20: GUEST BLOGGER, OMEGA IN CHRISTO

Greetings Friends!

Since I've intended this blog to be a "safe-haven" for all Christians to share "life as it happens," I am thrilled to step aside today for guest blogger, Omega In Christo. If anyone else is interested to "guest author" on this blog, feel free to e-mail me at judi@judilake.com. Please be advised that all material is subject for approval.

In the meantime, following are Omega In Christo's thoughts for the day:

Perilous & Opportune Times

Never in the history of civilization and Christianity has any nation been made the reluctant and (agonizingly so) the custodian of the world.

In order to survive, this country now has to be in every festering seedbed of terrorism throughout the world. We are in a bizarre war. It is a type of war that has never been fought before. In our country, the enemy not only flies in our planes with lethal effect but, in foreign lands, infiltrates innocent families and blows themselves up with nightmarish effect.

It is the Jihad of the Moslem world.

What can we do?

Yes, we are sending our men and women in to foreign lands and they are being wounded and dying. We are learning by bitter experience how to fight. Militarily, we are using different weapons that will require us to learn the language, the culture and even the religion of the Arab world, but will we have victory? Is a "democratic" government possible for the Muslim people of the Koran? Will a tenuous peace run by an elected government succeed? With these people, we will have to rebuild the infrastructure to include new roads, schools, hospitals and restored industries.

Will that be enough?

There is an obvious third dimension. If we are believers in the spiritual world, we will have to concede that we are fighting good versus evil. If we are a nation under God with liberty and justice for all -- if we are a nation run by the people, for the people and with the people -- then the spiritual world of this people is ultimately Christian. If we know our history, we will admit that our founding fathers accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. We will also admit that this belief allowed other religions and beliefs to live in freedom under the law.

We are now living in electronic glass houses in which the whole world sees our intimate political and moral behavior. The greed, lust and duplicity of our country stand blatantly before the entire world. We are morally and economically on our knees.

Will a trillion dollars be enough?

If we believe that the Holy Spirit is the ultimate strategist of history -- if we believe in the love of the Father -- if we believe that the cross, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the hope of the world, we must change, repent and seek forgiveness.

The mighty Roman Empire died because of corruption, while the blood letting of the Christian martyrs and the holiness of the faithful brought victory. This is not a call for a violent crusade but a conversion for our country. Through the power of the Holy Spirit the Muslim people will see the Spiritual dimensions of our reluctant role as custodian of the world they will then through the grace of God cleans himself or herself from the Jihad.

There is much more to this quest and story...

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The following video, Sanctify, courtesy of You Tube.

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Let It Begin With Me

Immersed within a complicated deadline, I absent-mindedly change the CD that I am listening to. I have always worked best with background music and today is no exception.

Suddenly, as the music permeates my office, I am overcome with enormous emotion. I know the woman behind ‘the big voice’; I know her very well. It is my friend, Yolanda... Yolanda Dowling.

Yolanda was a gifted opera singer that I genuinely respected and admired. Yolanda was also one of the 2996 casualties of the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001.

Unable to concentrate further on work, I become paralyzed with the heinous memories of that week. As though I am hypnotized, I turn away from my work and begin reading the scribbles within my journal.

Following are some unedited notes that I had jotted down the week of 9-11:

Tuesday, September 11, 2001:

While I am watching the morning news, the television screen suddenly changes to images of utter terror: A plane has just struck The World Trade Center! At first, I assume it is a preview for a movie but it doesn’t take long for my senses to accept that this is the real thing. Terror and despair grip everyone.

Then, about 20 minutes later, a second plane crashes into The World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the entire world witnesses the collapse of both towers, it is clear that this is an act of terrorism and this is reality, not fiction.

While transfixed in front of the television, the World Trade Center becomes a horrifying image of dense smoke and carnage right before my eyes. Terrified, I witness my beloved New York in flames and under attack. Within a short time, New York has become vulnerable and shattered. I sit in shock feeling helpless and frightened.

With no entrance into Manhattan for those of us waiting, the only thing to do is to watch and pray. Along with millions of others, my heart aches for every person in and near the towers as well as for their families and friends. Are they safe? Are they alive?

Piece by piece, information is relayed to us about friends and associates. A very good friend who works at Kemper Insurance on the 34th floor is relaying information from her cell phone to her husband who in turn calls each of us.

Friday, September 14, 2001:

As days pass, all eyes and ears are glued to TV’s and radios. Having no phone service. I begin feeling very isolated and pensive. On the forth day after the attack, I am anxious and know I need to see the ruins for myself. I call two friends, who are visiting from Kentucky, pack my 2-year-old daughter into the car and head for Manhattan. My friends accompanying me are under the assumption that I am taking them sightseeing, but I know better….

As I approach Manhattan, I shutter as I sight the financial district in a mass of smoke. I will forever remember the eerie feeling of seeing lower Manhattan in a smoky glow. My friends suddenly realize that this will be a tour of New York that they will never forget.

Somehow, someway, we manage to get right into lower Manhattan without being stopped or questioned. Fortunately, in this case, the familiar saying, ‘ignorance is bliss’ applies; I am on a mission and I drive blindly.

As we approach SoHo, we witness parts of the Trade Center already being carried away by vehicles. The city, which normally resounds with energy and vibrancy, is so quiet that you could literally hear a pin drop. Finally finding a parking space, we get out of the car. I grab the baby stroller and we walk in a complete daze.

My only description would be similar to walking on Holy Ground. Familiar sites are now covered in dust and ash. Destruction is everywhere, and there before us is the shattered Twin Towers in ruins. Red Cross tables are lined up everywhere, and familiar storefronts belied the fact that they are now temporary morgues.

As we walk and pray, yes, pray, we are a people united, a people who mourn together and are on a mission to find every missing person who is trapped within the Trade Center.

I can’t recall how long we stayed there but it was a very long, dark day. It is one thing reading about something but it is truly another thing being an eyewitness to the mass destruction.

As weeks pass, the pain never ceases as the death toll mounts, and many people I know are added to that list. An extremely painful loss is my dear friend Fran and her family and then there is Yolanda Dowling; Yolanda will never again sing on Christmas Eve at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

In every way our lives will now never be the same….

***

Since that tragic day, my prayers have never ceased for our country and our world. I no longer recognize the world we live in, but I believe that if we are to see any changes in our world, it must begin within each of us, individually, and through God.

In closing, I think of Jill Jackson Miller's song, “Let There Be Peace On Earth, And Let It Begin With Me," May her lyrics touch everyone, one person at a time.

© 2007 Judi Lynn Lake. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

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Judi Lynn Lake has kept up with leading edge business trends throughout her varied and successful career. She had already had her "15 minutes of fame" over and over again before starting her family. Judi and her family now reside in South Carolina, but, having been born and raised on Long Island, NY, it is clearly evident that she will always be a "New Yorker." Today, she successfully runs her own advertising agency which handles everything from logos, branding and package design while she continues to work closely with self-published authors from design to promotion. For more information, visit judilake.com

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The following video, Let There Be Peace On Earth, courtesy of You Tube.

America, Which Jesus Do We Follow?

In response to a recent “Mad As Hell" article I had recently posted, the following e-mail arrived in my mailbox:

… We are being assaulted from every direction between terrorism, hurricanes, global warming, abortions, drug addiction, violence- you name it and we got it. We are clearly in spiritual warfare and the demonic is in the chaos. This is just not some pious fundamentalist platitude—it is the real world of the Spirit.

Luke expresses it well in the words of the Lord: Jesus said to the people,"When you see a cloud coming up from the west, at once you say, it is going to rain, and it does. And when you feel the south wind blowing, you say it is going to get hot, and it does. You hypocrites! You can look at the earth and the sky and know what it means, why then don't you know the meaning of this present time?" Luke 12 vs, 54-56.

I feel that Jesus is speaking to us right now and how many are really listening?

—Keep Loving and Praying, RM, SJ

***

Yes, as the e-mail suggests, I also believe that our Lord is speaking to us right now. What more has to happen for our eyes to be opened? Saddened with our nation’s collapse, I temporarily retreat into my “silent cave” to be alone with God and then happen upon an article by William Staneski, “The Drumbeat,” which should make every American of faith to stop, think and realize that our America is in a spiritual battle for its very soul….

“The drumbeat. It’s always there. Day and night. Rain or shine. Winter or Summer. Sunday or Monday. It comes at you from every direction. It comes over the TV, the radio, at work, at school, in music, in the newspapers, from the politicians, in conversation with others, even in church. It wears you down. It robs you of the will to resist its message. Even short-lived victories, which stop it briefly, leave you with the knowledge that it will return; each minor victory bound to be lost to the redoubled efforts of this patient and persistent force. You can’t escape it. It never stops. It never gives up. It never ends. It rains upon you from every possible angle, from every possible source.

It’s the drumbeat of the left. It is political, philosophical, theological, and social. It pervades every activity. It is post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day. It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world.

It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism. It denies God, human exceptionalism, and the soul. We are reduced to Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness. It is a product of the nihilistic, existentialist philosophical movement, which went hand in hand with modern art, atonal music, scientific materialism and modern physics, and the generally discordant nature of the twentieth century.

It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can’t escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don’t realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth.

The cultural Marxists convince us that the truth is that there is no truth. And even though this unresolvable paradox lies at the very center of all this, the constant drumbeat keeps the masses in line, anesthetized enough to not make an issue of it.
Fed a constant diet of sex, drugs, poisonous pop culture, materialistic trinkets, and unkeepable promises of security provided by huge leftist government, ever more globalist in nature, the masses are diverted from realizing, as they are told there is no truth, that this claim itself is subject to the same test. It is logically impossible for the leftist drumbeat to be true by its own axioms.

The principles upon which Western culture rests and upon which America was built are under attack by these slow acting but deadly forces. The drumbeat is grinding down the will of the West to maintain itself. The ideas of individual sovereignty and responsibility, natural rights, and objective truth have been derided by the left to the point that many of our young people reject them, if, indeed, they are even aware of them as the basis for our culture. All that ensures that a culture will pass its ideas down from one generation to the next is its cultural memory. The drumbeat is slowly but surely replacing our cultural memory….

…If you believe that all this is a paranoid overreaction, you have plenty of company. Those of us who can still see the water and hear the drumbeat are subject to attempts to make us sound evil and foolish. To believe in traditional Western cultural values, American Exceptionalism, God, and moral truth is to be branded as old fashioned and foolish, even by the best assessments of those who have bought into the cultural Marxist’s message….

…In truth, and in direct opposition to the drumbeat, each human being must be accorded his or her natural rights, individual sovereignty, and self-responsibility to be in harmony with human nature. Each of us must have the freedom to succeed or to fail. Western culture, culminating in the great American experiment, has been perverted. Due to these perversions, many failures have already occurred, which have then, ironically, been used to justify further perversions of the same sort as those which caused the problems to begin with.

Generally, these perversions are manifested in bigger government, more laws, more bureaucracy, more regulations, more taxes, and government controlled redistribution of wealth, more collectivism, less individualism, and less freedom. We all hear it constantly from leftist politicians as they add their part to the drumbeat: government must do more to ensure Americans avoid the consequences of their choices. We all know the song, sung to the cheers of the unthinking throngs who would give up their very humanity for the promise of a free lunch. These are the joys of cultural Marxism. And the drumbeat goes on."

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It is my opinion that America’s healing can only occur if we repent and completely surrender our land back to our Lord. A complete surrender makes sense for all Christians’; otherwise we are not really followers of Jesus, whose whole life was a handing Himself over to the Father… “Not My Will but Thine be done… Into Thy hands I commend My Spirit….I come to do the Will of Him who sent Me.”

America, which Jesus do we follow?

©2008 Judi Lynn Lake.

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Judi Lynn Lake has kept up with leading edge business trends throughout her varied and successful career. She had already had her "15 minutes of fame" over and over again before starting her family. Judi and her family now reside in South Carolina, but, having been born and raised on Long Island, NY, it is clearly evident that she will always be a "New Yorker." Today, she successfully runs her own advertising agency which handles everything from logos, branding and package design while she continues to work closely with self-published authors from design to promotion. For more information, visit judilake.com

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The following video, My Jesus, courtesy of You Tube with song and lyrics written by Todd Agnew.