Stronger than Champagne!

May we resolve as a people in the New Year to increase the pace of our love where it matters most, so as to outdistance the empty desire to be “liked” by multitudes chasing the same tail of worthless and unquenchable satisfaction.

May we resolve in our marriages to put our homes before the noise, to live by example, to place values over comforts with renewed commitments to pass along what has been passed to us. To generously feed our friendship, nurture our trust and respect in one another as the greatest and most important partnership of all!

May we resolve as parents to assume full and awesome responsibility and accountability for the health, education, moral development, and general welfare of our children! May we maintain the necessary diligence and courage to monitor and question with boldness, those who aspire to lure instead of teach, shape instead of inspire, and mold instead of persuade those we love and cherish beyond ourselves!  

And finally, may we come together as “one nation under God” in 2016 to restore the sanity, and integrity to our Republic; the greatest system of self-governance ever devised, lifting more souls from the depths of poverty and despair to the shores of freedom and prosperity than all others combined!

I want to wish all of you good health and good cheer in the New Year. I want to ask you all to pray for those friends and family members among us who find themselves facing serious health issues that call their own futures into the kind of doubt, pain and anguish few of us can comprehend. May God’s Grace answer these prayers and lift the darkness so…Amen

“There is a type of suffering caused because we do not see the way out. A man may say that the basis of things is rational—‘Get to the bottom of things and you will find it all simple and easy of explanation’—well, that simply is not true. The basis of things is not rational, but tragic, and when you enter the domain of suffering and sorrow you find that reason and logic are your guide among things as they are, but nothing more. Is it rational that I should be born with a heredity over which I have no control? Is it rational that nations that are nominally Christian should be at war? The basis of things is tragic, and the only way out is through Redemption. Many a man in mental stress of weather is driven to utter what sounds like blasphemy, and yet he may be nearer God than in his complacent acceptance of beliefs that have never been tried. Never be afraid of the man who seems to you to talk blasphemously, he is up against problems you may never have met with; instead of being wrathful, be patient with him. The man to be afraid of is the one who is indifferent, what mortality he has got is well within his own grasp, and Jesus Christ is of no account at all.” ~ Oswald Chambers, from Redemption is the Way Out

And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” ~ Luke 5:31-32