Sensing Something Wrong

When I was a young woman I worked the night shift for a couple of years.  Then I switched to the day shift, and after a couple weeks transition I was amazed one day to realize how good I felt.  I had so much energy and such a sense of well-being compared to a few weeks earlier, I was finding it hard to believe I had once taken feeling bad for granted.  Sometimes you feel so bad for so long you don’t realize how sick you are.  Our society is like that.  We are living thoroughly unhealthy lives in every area of life.  Our dietary habits are unhealthy.  Our sleep habits are unhealthy.  Our minds are full of disturbing junk.  Our relationships are unsatisfactory and sometimes on life support.  We lack nourishing family and community.  Our spirits are so parched we’re crying out.  Yet we’ve come to accept all of this as “just the way it is.”  We aren’t what we were made for nor enjoying what we were meant to be.  God save us.

Best Selling Self-Help Books

For the past 30 or 40 years there has nearly always been a self-help book on the bestseller list.  Some of the personal stories are quite astounding and very inspirational.  I’m very happy for the people who beat addiction or crime and now have a nice life.  I saw a television interview with such a man.  He beat crime and drugs by changing his thinking and his self talk.  Now he is a best-selling author with a family and a nice life.  Very inspirational, but I caught myself thinking “now what?”  So many addicts were very successful people with a family and a nice life.  They all said their life felt empty, meaningless and without purpose.  A meaningless life is painful and drugs numb the pain.  And I asked myself “Where is God in this success story?”  It is from God we achieve our sense of meaning and purpose.  He made us all for a purpose and He tells us what the purpose is.  Without that taproot of purpose I’m like a rose I planted that blooms great for awhile and then dies for lack of a root system.  Getting off drugs is wonderful.  Getting off drugs without God has its limits.  If my car has an empty tank and I need to make a 10 mile trip, I can push the car 10 miles and write an inspirational book about it.  I may receive loads of admiration for my feat in achieving the 10 mile push through sheer will power.  I can also fill my tank with what the car was made for and drive 400 miles in that time.

The Dark Side of Young Fiction

The school librarian spoke animatedly about the trends in young people’s fiction.  From the child witches and wizards of the Harry Potter series, through the vampire series, to the futuristic struggles for survival under tyrannical powers, themes of good and evil are explored.  In a naturalistic world, the supernatural in these books is not off limits.  The one thing seemingly off limits is God.  Heroes fight evil, love conquers evil, yet what defines good and what prompts sacrificial love without God as the author of  good and love and the supernatural?  Children have an instinctual appreciation of good and love and God, yet the latter is consistently absent.  Why?

Whose Needs

Whenever we hear the case for a government program, we hear sad stories of individuals in distress.  The argument goes that a new government program would be the answer to the person’s problems.  In reality though, there never is a program or a system that fits everyone.  There are always exceptions.  The other reality is that in a country where the government has a program for nearly every problem, the individual hard cases are still hard cases.  They are hard on the program, on the government and on the taxpayers.  Therefore in some European countries, caregivers are being taught they have a responsibility to the society as a whole that is greater than their responsibility to their patient or client.  This really sets professions on their ears when their very reason for existence is healing and helping.  Its creating an identity crisis of mammoth proportions when the healers are told that healing may not be in society’s best interests.  The great irony is that individual hard cases which supposedly justified massive governmental intervention have been the same cases that governments now don’t want to treat, pleading hardship to the society.  There will always be a conflict between individual needs and societal needs.  You can’t balance on the knife edge between them.  It always requires facing up to the society’s ultimate values: the sacred value of each individual life, or the sacred value of the society not to overstretch its economy.

Hidden Taxes

I looked at my phone bill last week and wondered why it gets higher and higher as the months go by.  I scrutinized it further and found the actual service charge hadn’t increased, but the taxes on it had increased.  I added up all the different tax assessments added on top of the service charge.  I was amazed at the total.  Then I figured the percent of these taxes to the original charge and I am paying a whopping 17.85% tax on my phone bill!  Now I’m just a little granny, living in a condo, driving a 10 year old car.  I thought my taxes weren’t supposed to be going up.  Truth is, every time a business tax goes up, I the consumer pay the tax through the increased prices.  What would really be fun is to see what the taxes are for various bills I pay.  How much of my gasoline bill is taxes paid by the oil company.  How much of my electric bill is taxes the utilities have to pay.  How much of my grocery bill is taxes paid by the farmer, the trucking company, and the grocery chain.  And now that I know I’m paying more taxes than I ever realized, where is that money going?  Businesses are subject to audits by the IRS.  Charities are subject to audits by the IRS.  We the people are subject to audits by the IRS.  Why isn’t the government subject to an audit by some agency outside the government?  Thats one of the reforms I would like to see.

A Prayer About Healthcare

Lord, we know you are in control, and you influence kings and governors for your purposes.  We approach you at this significant time in our nation’s history and ask you to impress your thoughts on our congress as they make decisions about healthcare reform.  Open the eyes of our lawmakers to writings of our forefathers.  Let them consider the things that made this country great.  Please let their decisions be compassionate, let them honor and dignify all human life, let them give dignity to all persons and let them honor our human rights.  Don’t allow them to make government so strong over us that it becomes our god, for whenever government has taken the place of God, it has always become a cruel tyranny.

Did Sarah Palin “make up” the part about death panels?

I just read the blog about  “Dean” saying Sarah Palin “made up” the fear of “death panels” for her son Trig.  I also just googled “Ezekiel Emanuel”.  He is the brother of Rahm Emanuel the president’s chief of staff, he is a bioethicist at the NIH, and he is on the whitehouse staff as an advisor for healthcare reform.  While he states he does not support state assisted suicide, he does consider mental abilities when deciding who should get healthcare.  He does support withholding healthcare for people with mental disabilities.  This is not “made up”.  It was just there in black and white.  However, I would suppose by now the whitehouse has managed to pull down every website about Ezekiel Emanuel I just read.  Look anyway.  They might have missed something.

Health Care Retort

I am just amazed at the media feeding frenzy over the health care town hall meetings.  People ARE angry.  But instead of analyzing why people might be angry, as the media usually analyzes the “why” of everything, they are in lockstep with insulting the people who are protesting.  Can you imagine the media insulting people who protested the war in Iraq, or anything else?

 

I think people at these meetings are afraid, because in the past,  the president has favored a single payer system similar to the NHS in England. Perhaps these bills aren’t yet a single payer system, but will possibly be leading to one if the private sector has to support yet more government underfunding and it bankrupts them. Our local hospitals are today in serious financial crisis because of medicare and medicaid cuts. They keep seeing patients, but are running out of funds to make up the difference between what the government pays and what it costs to treat these patients.

I lived with the NHS for six years, and could tell first person stories of what I saw and experienced in our local community. Yes, care is much more scarce and of lower quality. Taxes are much higher. Eventually, a two-tiered system developed because the NHS basically broke down. Its on the verge of breakdown again. It is this kind of a system people fear.

 

Instead of looking at these issues, the media is labeling and insulting the protesters.  Its a media retort instead of a report

American Idols

When people look at the second commandment, which forbids us to have idols before God, we tend to think of developing world cultures and the little wooden statues of gods.  We think this commandment no longer applies to our “advanced” culture, where we ”know” these little gods are meaningless.  But do we “developed” people have idols in our lives?  The biblical definition of an idol would be anything which takes the place of God in our lives.  That definition makes the question easier to answer, and more uncomfortable to face.  Its been said we could determine our idols by looking at our calendars and our checkbooks.  What gets our time and our money besides God?  Some people call their hobbies, habits or addictions their idols.  I think it goes much deeper than that.  I think as we look at the West, we will see several deeply entrenched idols.  Here are some I acknowledge.

“People pleasing” (which could also be called “political correctness”), means I make another person’s approval more important than God’s approval.  I will take the line of least resistance and refuse to speak truth, do the expedient rather than the right thing, or develop the habit of doing whatever I believe will please somebody else, instead of seeking God’s will and pleasure.

“Being somebody” means I want people to look up to me.  I may seek leadership in every situation, I may kill myself working harder than anyone else in order to get attention, I may seek celebrity status, try to achieve “success” (whatever that means), or try to climb the ladder of whatever tower its leaning on.  This keeps me from concentrating on what God desires for me.  This also keeps me from many opportunities to serve God and others, because far more opportunities to serve are quiet, unnoticed and unrewarded.

“Self-fulfillment” is another idol.  Seeking our personal happiness, well-being, fun and excitement, and meaningful relationships, becomes an end in itself, rather than the outcome of seeking God and His will for my life.  “I Did it My Way” is the statement of faith of too many of us idol (self) worshippers.

Materialism is the most all-encompassing idol of the Western World.  Not only do we spend an inordinate amount of time ammassing wealth, we chase our tails keeping up with the Joneses.  Another form of materialism is seeking our security in anything material or worldly such as financial plans, science and medicine, or the government instead of seeking it in God.

Ultimately, none of the things listed above satisfy us.  That is because we are looking for something else to fill our need for relationship with God.  The idols won’t fulfill us anymore than we can live solely on candy.  We just need to be aware that God and His desires for our lives have to come absolutely first.  If He is not first in our hearts, we will just eventually “run out of gas”.  Look at the celebrities we see all over the television and newsstands.  How happy are they, really?  How many messed up relationships, addictions and mental health issues do we see among the rich and famous?  If celebrity, money and success brought happiness, you’d think these folks would be happier than average people, and instead they seem to actually be less happy.  As an old saint once said “Only the love of God will satisfy the hungry heart of man”.  Anything short of the love of God, whether it be the love of people, the love of attention, the love of possessions, the love of material security, or the love of self, is as hopeless as having a little wooden statue for a god.

The First 100 Days

The first 100 days reveals the national dive into the socialist pool.  I have been through this and I know how it will turn out.  I lived in England in the eighties and early nineties.  It was a time of high prices, high taxes, high unemployment and a nearly bankrupt economy on every level.  Even the most basic government services were in desperate straits.  Unemployment among the under 30s was 40%.  The National Health Service all but gave up on those over 65.  What we in America would consider basic emergency care was unavailable even in medium size cities.  The Emergency rooms were there, but so understaffed that people routinely died who should have received care.  As they would say in England, “we have equal access to waiting queues, not care”  That was just the health service.  Other services were in equally dire situations.  The populist crowd wanted government to run business so it would be more fair–whatever that means.  However, government just isn’t good at business.  Social engineering has consequences for the economy when it gets too ambitious, and eventually the engineers kill the golden goose.