Towards Evil

In case you were wondering, I had my blood pressure taken during a trustee meeting Wednesday night by an RN using the Church's cuff and stethoscope.:)

As we see the current administration move us towards socialism, the "war on terror" is called over, sin is legitimized, and as Christian morals and values are outlawed, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard commencement address, "A World Split Apart" makes for good reading.  Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer, dissident, and activist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for exposing to the world the Soviet Union's crimes, gulag, and forced labor camp system.  Two of his best known books are, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and The Gulag Archipelago.

Here are some of his quotes that I like.

“If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.' ” 

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones." 

“This it is that we always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.” 

“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century.” 

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart” 

“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.” 

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

“It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.” 

“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.” 

“The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.” 

“Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. ” 

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” 

“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.” 

“On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.” 

“That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life” 

“The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.”

“Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.” 

“It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.” 

“Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.” 

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Genesis 6:5

And he did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the Lord.
2 Chronicles 12:14

Morning Rush

Storms rolled through in the early morning hours.
So I wake up and 6:18 to the sound of Son#2 getting ready for work.  This means my alarm didn't go off.  This means I overslept.  In the bathroom the light didn't work.  This means we have no power.  There was no water.  This means the generator didn't start. This means the Alarm Company didn't call to warn us.  This also means that the confinement pigs are without ventilation or water.
 I'm supposed to leave for the neighbor's farm at 6:45 to load a semi-trailer load of hogs for market.  I throw on some clothes, and head out to the hog house.  Fortunately, I was able to get the generator started manually.  Not sure why it didn't start automatically like it is supposed to.  I couldn't eat breakfast anyway, because I have to have a fasting blood test taken (new insurance) this morning at the doctors.

We got the hogs loaded.  They weren't very cooperative and the humidity that the storm brought has me soaking wet with sweat.  I rushed home and showered in the dark, and made it to my doctors appointment only 15 minutes late.

As I'm sitting in the doctor's office having my blood drawn, I asked if they could take my blood pressure, because I needed it for the insurance application also.  No, I was told, one of the nurses would have to do that and I would need to make a separate appointment!  I'm sitting in a doctor's office and I need a separate appointment just to get my blood pressure taken???
I suppose this will get better with the bureaucracy of Obama-care!?

The power did come back on before I left for the doctor, and thankfully, we didn't get the torrential rains that some areas received.

  And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to shew in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all the earth.
Exodus 9:16

   
   

Worship

Our church sermon this morning was very moving. 1 Corinthians chapter 14. "You shouldn't come to church to get what YOU want...you should come to church to give, build up, comfort, strengthen, exhort and edify others...and to receive that. The church assembly is the temple of the Holy Spirit. We are to seek and to edify one another".
(Quote from J & A Knapp Schrock, Facebook)

After the sermon, I was reminded of this article from World Magazine.

The pianist Alex McDonald, 30, made his orchestral debut at 11, earned a Doctorate in Musical Art at Juilliard, and recently competed in the 14th Van Cliburn International Competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Currently teaching piano at Texas Women’s University, he is also an articulate and reflective Christian. McDonald spoke to WORLD after the first of his two Cliburn Competition recitals.

What role do you think church music should play in one’s experience of worship? In modern churches, we have a graven image of what the experience of God ought to be like, and we want our music to simulate that experience in us. It could be an organ or a praise team—either can create a God experience that may not have any of God in it at all. But people will feel like they’ve worshipped. And because the existential experience of God is more important to us than the [actual] experience of God, we’re satisfied—wrongly, I would add. If it feels impossible to worship God through styles that are uncomfortable to us, it’s because we’re asking the music to do for us what is actually an issue of the heart. The problem with the “worship wars” is that they’ve hidden the real issue: We are in love with ourselves, and we blame the music.

I am thankful for our simple, reverent, unadorned worship service, the support, accountability, and the wonderful fellowship we are blessed with. 

Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;

Ephesians 5:19

Whirlwind Week

Last week the weather cooperated all week and the forecasted rains did not materialize.  We were able to finish planting soybeans on Thursday, finish replanting corn Thursday night, finish sidedressing corn on Friday, and finish replanting soybeans on Friday night!  By late morning Saturday, all the feed was ground for the week and two loads were hauled to the neighbors farm.  We received a little rain Saturday evening, so that will help get the last of the crops out of the ground.
Time for a break and some R & R.

Saturday afternoon I headed for the shores of Lake Michigan.  The rest of the family had headed up a day earlier. We stayed at the Grand Beach Inn near New Buffalo, Michigan.  The weather is definitely cooler up there than it was at home.  I enjoyed walking the beach and the local neighborhood.  And sleeping.
We spent Father's Day with the extended family in church in Valparaiso,IN.  It was a nice day and we enjoyed the fellowship there.  Our family greatly outnumbered the home folks that were there, so we brought the food for lunch.
I had to come home a couple of days earlier than the rest of the family, because we got a shipment of weaner pigs in this morning.  So my vacation was shorter than had been planned.  I'll have to find time for another one later on!

The January through May time period was the wettest in Illinois since records were kept starting in 1895.

The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;
Genesis 8:2

Economist

Today, after being out of the field for a week and a half, we finally found a field that had dried up enough to continue planting.  So, we planted that one field and then had to quit because every other field is still too wet.  And its supposed to rain again tomorrow! 

My major in college was Agricultural Economics.  Therefore, I had to take a lot of economics classes (both ag and general) to fulfill the requirements.  I have recently seen some quotes on social media from one of my favorite economists.  Thomas Sowell is an economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author.

Here are some of my favorite Thomas Sowell quotes:

 

 "The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from 'society,' rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society'."

“People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.” 

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” 

“Intellect is not wisdom.” 

“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?” 

“Don't you get tired of seeing so many "non-conformists" with the same non-conformist look?” 

“For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.” 

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

 The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

 
Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty.

 As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.

 Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

 What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

 Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

 One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain

Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.   Deuteronomy 4:6