This is sad, but it happens. Ask Peter.
Daily Archives: May 3, 2021
Vaccine Passports Are Here… Is It The End Times?
05/03: My Home Run For Fun
I am doing a virtual run from New Mexico back to Ohio where I grew up. This will be a 1489 mile journey and I hope to complete it in 365 days.
Dodge City, Kansas
Saving Us, Pt 3
In my last post I suggested that we are the type of people that Jesus could not imagine to exist in His day. We are the ones handing scorpions to our children when all they ask for are eggs.
Now suppose one of you fathers is asked by his son for a fish; he will not give him a snake instead of a fish, will he? Or if he is asked for an egg, he will not give him a scorpion, will he? Luke 11:11-12
It terrifies me to think of the world I am passing down to my children. And part of that terror is seeing no way to change it. I feel like I have been standing in the for rain 40 days and 40 nights; the water keeps rising and hope keeps diminishing. I ended the last post with this question:
Don’t Despair
Kingdoms come and kingdoms go. When kingdoms go more than politics suffer. I’m currently reading a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. It reminds me how terminal our condition is. It also reminds me that for every kingdom gone another comes to take its place.
Even 3000 years ago, as troubled people stood around wondering what their fate would be, they reminded themselves that civilizations come and civilizations go.
Proverbs 27:23-27
Proverbs are not recorded and preserved on the basis of one time occurrences. Does this one contain other truth worth remembering?
To avoid despair we should not focus entirely on the brown grass or the constant downpour but instead, keep an eye out for “new growth” or any item that floats. If the ebb and flow of life continues like it has for millennium, then what is likely to happen to those that “pay attention?”
Proverbs 22:3
These particular reassurances come from people who have studied this subject and gone through collapse. We have additional reassurances from God. He made life the way it is; He built into life its drive to survive. We want to live and not die. In addition, God gave us a brain that is tweaked in such a way that it wants to improve the environment we live in; we are challenged upon hearing the command to fill the earth and subdue it.
Genesis 1:26-31
Can the problems we create be uncreated? Can we create a problem so big we cannot solve it? Hasn’t every generation of people asked these perplexing questions and yet here we are? We may experience more losses than gains, but we should not despair. We should continue to take up the challenge to fill the earth and subdue it. It is not over until God says it is over.
Items Needed In Our Future
God created life. All life has His signature on it. Look at the tiniest specimen or the largest organism and you can see His handiwork. You can see patterns. Go beyond the individual life form and look at the kinds of things He has made or the groups of things He has made. You can see patterns in those groups too. Look at the institutions He created and authored like family, government, and church. They each have their own distinct characteristics. They each were designed to function in a way that benefits civilization. Consider the purpose of family.
Family is one of those things that float when water runs high. When the going gets tough we tend to turn to family. When the weight of life presses us down, then our care for our children increases. This care for them is like clinging to a log when the water is up over our heads. This care for them keeps us afloat. It keeps us sober and motivated. Family, by God’s design, has the ability to sustain us; therefore, we should not hesitate to swim over to it and cling to it.
When God flooded the earth what did He choose to save civilization? Did He choose a committee of experts? No. He chose family. He chose family because the family has the ability to transform chaos into civilization.
Think of the future of your children. When they grow up and discover the crime committed against them, when they feel the pain from the world we turn over to them, what will they think of you? Will they remember you and identify you as an accomplice in what has happened to them or will they see you as a warrior waging battle on their behalf? Will they be encouraged by you or will they despise you? Family can cause us to keep our head above water.
Family, by God’s design, attaches us to the future through our children to make us care about what we do today.
That is part of the contribution that family brings to civilization. This part alone should point out to us what we need to do now in this fight against evil.
A force exists within our children that will carry them deep into the future, deeper than we will ever go. We do not have the power to hold them back regardless what danger lays ahead. The tide will come and the tide will go and there will be nothing we can do about that. But, can we tie a life preserver around them? Can we put things in their backpacks today that they can take with them? Start thinking about what they will need and what we can give them now that will help them in the world to come. These are the things I want to discuss in these posts.
Know Well The Condition Of Your Flock
- Do you have children? If you don’t, does anyone in your family have children? How are they? Know the condition of the children in your life.
- Consider the children that know you. How do you want to be remembered by them 50 years from now?
- Consider what you might do to improve the state of your family. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do this. You only need to be a brother or a sister, a husband or a wife, a son or daughter, an aunt or an uncle, a grandmother or a grandfather to have some good ideas of what good you could do. Anything that would draw you closer to them and draw them closer to God’s design for family will help you fill the kids backpacks with essential items they will need going into the future.
Two months ago I decided to start having weekly dinner meetings with my family. I have adult children, but I invited them anyway to a weekly dinner for the purposes of encouragement and guess what? They came. It has been encouragement to me as well, like finding a log to cling to in a raging river. Now I keep my head above water and I’m keeping my eyes open to see what comes next.