You're With Me, Lord ~ Psalm 139, Pt. 2

I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me and your strength will support me. I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night— but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you. ~ Psalm 139:7-12


Isn’t it good to know we are never alone? Though undoubtedly we may feel that way at times, the truth is that we are not. The thing is the Bible doesn’t ever say we’ll never experience the darkness, storms, sorrow, pain, betrayal, cruelty, evil or death. What it says, is that when we experience these things, God is right there with us.


Have you ever tried to flee the presence of the Lord? Times when you’re angry, doing something you know is sinful, wanting things your way and in your timing, or simply retreating into yourself? I have. It seems like the times that I need Him the most, are the times that I push Him away. Much like a petulant or pouty child. Nevertheless, He is always there for me. He is always waiting on me. He is always reaching out to me.


Have you ever felt as if God has abandoned you, that when you reach out to Him, He’s just not there? I have. There are times when the darkness is so dark and the storm is so violent that you feel you’ll never make it out, you feel like you won’t survive. You even wonder, where is God in the midst of it all? But we can’t rely on or trust our feelings. They are fluid, constantly changing, and influenced by our own limited and faulty perceptions. Feelings waver, truth does not!


The truth is that no matter what we feel, God is right there. Whether we are choosing to live righteously or in sin, whether we are joyful or heartbroken, content or dissatisfied, running to or from Him, He is always there. He supports us when we are frail and uplifts us when we fall. He strengthens us when we are weak and guides us when we are lost. However, we have to let Him. We can, and sometimes do, choose to turn Him down. But that doesn’t mean He’s not there – He is. The darkness may last for a time, but the Light always pushes it back. Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psa. 30:5)


I am so grateful that I don’t have to rely on my own strength, knowledge, wisdom or feelings. To think that the Lord of all creation is always with little ol’ me, no matter where I am, what I’m doing, or who I’m with, is too wonderful for words! Yes, the storms come and the waves crash down, but we don’t have to be overcome by them. We can trust in the Truth, rather than our feelings, and lean on the support and strength of Jesus to get us through. That’s what He wants. That’s what He offers. All we have to do is receive it.


Thank you Lord, for always being with me, no matter what I’m going through. Thank you for offering me your love, mercy, grace, compassion, comfort, patience, strength and support. Thank you for driving out the darkness and showering me in Light. Thank you the hope and abundant life you have for me. You are everything to me and I praise you!

Duty, Honor, Country ~ All About America

Anyone who really knows me understands that I am a passionate patriot. I love America immensely. It offers freedom, hope and opportunity like no other country in the world. As such, I will be posting All About America every Wednesday, because I am proud to be an American! The content will vary and may include photos, facts, commentary, quotes, excerpts of speeches, etc. I will use different sources and make every attempt to site the source. Sometimes I may offer commentary, other times, if I think the content speaks for itself, I may not. I hope you enjoy All About America as much as I do, and that you’ll come back and visit often. And may God Bless America!

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This has been taken from my second favorite book of all time, The American Patriot’s Almanac by William J. Bennett and John T.E. Cribb. It is filled with tons of amazing information and history, and anyone who loves history or consider themselves to be patriotic, will love this book. I did a full review of this book and if you would like to see it, simply click here.

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On May 12, 1962, West Point Military Academy awarded General Douglas MacArthur the Thayer Award, given each year to a citizen whose service to the nation has exemplified West Point’s motto, Duty, Honor, Country. The following comes from a speech MacArthur delivered to the academy’s corps of cadets in acceptance of the award:


Duty. Honor. Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn . . .

The unbelievers will say they are but words . . . But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

You Know Me, Lord ~ Psalm 139, Part 1

O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away. You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! ~ Psalm 139:1-6


This Psalm (139) is probably my most favorite of all the Psalms. I have read it many times throughout my Christian journey. It has given me comfort and assurance in ways that are both deep and profound. It is Rhema to me, life-giving words to live by. Just today I read it again. Once more, it has jumped out at me, specifically the part posted above.


I’m the sort of person that can pretty honestly say, “what you see is what you get.” I’m not much of a faker. I never have been. This doesn’t necessarily mean I wear every emotion on my sleeve, but still, I try to be real, though not always deeply revealing (in that I do try to practice wisdom). That’s why it’s been so important for me to be real in my writing. As I go through the seasons of my life, I find I have to be real and honest about them. With both myself and God.


Reading the above verses, it’s good to know that in this, I’m right on target. Like the Psalmist, God knows me better than I know myself. He knows what I think, feel, say and do, whether I’m honest about it or not. Whether I’m aware of it or not. And even whether I am near or far from Him. He knows whether I will take the high road, or the low road, way before I even arrive at the road.


Once again, with my latest miscarriage, as with my previous two, I felt anger. I was angry with myself, with God, with the world… The thing I didn’t want to do was pretend that I was ok, because I wasn’t. I was hurting badly and flat out pissed off! I hope I don’t shock you too much, but once again, this is me, being real. I spoke of my hurt and anger in person, on my blog, and to God. And you know what? I feel better. Yes, I’m still in the process of healing. But being real, rather than in denial, is both healing and freeing.


Sadly, there are too many Christians who aren’t real. Worse yet, there are “seasoned” Christians who try to influence “newer” Christians to not be real. Who do they think they’re fooling? Certainly not God! He knows us, loves us, and understands when life, and the storms of life, gets to us. That’s part of the beauty of the reality of Jesus. Fully God and fully man. He felt strong emotions; He loved, laughed and grieved. He experienced loyalty and betrayal. And He faced, and conquered, death. He gets us!


And because He gets us, He expects us to be real, even if that real is raw. He is there for us, waiting for us to come to Him, to receive the comfort, peace and love that only He can give. Like a loving Father, He welcomes us to come and sit on His lap and pour out our hearts to him. Even if it is after a temper tantrum. And as we sit with Him, being real with Him, and inviting Him to touch us in His own special way, He does. Tenderly, lovingly, He reaches out to place His hand of blessing on our head.


Thank you, Lord, for your healing-balm, tender-mercies and loving-kindness. Though it is too great and wonderful for me to fully understand, I thank you.

Mother's Day Loss ~ Update and Poem

Last week I spoke about my latest miscarriage and what I have been experiencing emotionally. On Wednesday, I had the D & C, so now the ordeal is over. I’m now able to move forward and ready to begin healing. The emotions (anger, hurt, frustration) are still there, but not as intense as they were. I am beginning to take comfort from my Father. I have to wonder though, if medical personnel will ever understand there is no comfort by them saying things like “there was something wrong with the fetus, and the body just took over,” or “there’s no reason you can’t try again.” A simple “I’m sorry” is much better than medical justifications.


Mother’s Day is this Sunday and while I’m happy to be a mom to my precious little Sweet Pea, I can’t help but think of the little one’s I’ve lost. I recently found this poem on a site that has a pregnancy loss area. It touched me deeply and occurred to me that it may bring comfort to other women who’ve had miscarriages, so I’ve decided to share it here. I would love to give proper credit for this amazing poem, but don’t know who wrote it.

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To Hallmark, they brag that they have a card for everything.


Dear Mr. Hallmark,

I am writing to you from heaven,
and though it must appear,
A rather strange idea,
I see everything from here.

I just popped in to visit,
your stores to find a card.
A card of love for my mother,
as this day for her is hard.

There must be some mistake I thought,
every card you could imagine.
Except I could not find a card,
from a child who lives in heaven.

She is still a mother too,
no matter where I reside.
I had to leave, she understands,
but oh the tears she's cried.

I thought that if I wrote you,
that you would come to know,
That though I live in heaven now,
I still love my mother so.

She talks with me, and dreams with me;
we still share laughter too,
Memories our way of speaking now,
would you see what you could do?

My mother carries me in her heart,
her tears she hides from sight.
She writes poems to honor me,
sometimes far into the night.

She plants flowers in my garden,
there my living memory dwells.
She writes to other grieving parents,
trying to ease their pain as well.

So you see Mr. Hallmark,
though I no longer live on earth,
I must find a way,
to remind her of her wondrous worth.

She needs to be honored,
and remembered too
Just as the children of earth will do.

Thank you Mr. Hallmark,
I know you'll do your best,
I have done all I can do;
to you I'll leave the rest.

Find a way to tell her,
how much she means to me.
Until I can do it for myself,
when she joins me in eternity.

~ Author Unknown

Happy Mother's Day!

ACLU, Prayer, and Hand of Hope ~ Current Events Wrap Up

Ok, it’s Thursday, and you know what that means… It’s time for The Current Events Wrap Up meme, hosted by the amazing Julie Arduini at her The Surrendered Scribe blog. The Current Events Wrap Up meme is the vision God gave Julie for discussing what is going on in the world, nation and even our own lives. There is so much happening these days and it would be amazing to have a team of conservative commentators discussing their thoughts. Please go and check out Julie’s blog, and if you like current events or news, think about joining in and/or spreading the word!

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Ok, this week there was too much going on to simply go with one thing. So here is a bit of a hodgepodge of current events.


~ Where’s the ACLU when you need them?

I was briefly shocked today, when I read that the state of Hawaii, which is the birthplace of our very own President Barack Obama, has declared Sept. 24th, 2009 as Islam Day! I say shocked briefly, because few things in the government surprise me much anymore. What about the holy tenet held so dearly by the ACLU, or FFRF (Freedom From Religion Foundation)? My civil liberties are being violated! (To read more about this story, click here.)


~ No National Day of Prayer for White House

Today is the National Day of Prayer, which has been in existence since 1952. For the past nine years, the White House has actively participated in this wonderful event by holding a ceremony to observe the day. Until this year. Apparently the new Pres. doesn’t seem to think he needs it . . . (To read more about this story, click here.)


~ The Hand of Hope

Sept. 4th, 1999, photographer Michael Clancy, then a freelancer for USA Today, shot what he has described as “a miracle picture, a miracle moment.” The special picture he took was that of a 21-week old “fetus” gripping the hand of a surgeon. It was a great moment for the pro-life groups who work so hard to save the millions of innocent babies who are aborted, year after year. And it was a blow to the pro-abortion side, as it was a strong tool in the passage of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, which passed in 2000.

Samuel Armas, now nearly ten years old, has a good life. He still has struggles with the Spina Bifida he was born with, but thanks to the surgery he had at 21 weeks in utero, his quality of life is much better than it would have been without it. . In addition to being an active young boy, he is an advocate for life, believing the photo that made him famous before birth, likely gave countless "babies their right to live" and forced many others to debate their beliefs on abortion, something he's proud of.

Michael Clancy, who was at the time a pro-choice advocate, change his beliefs and has now become a motivational speaker at pro-life events. His mission is to help others see what he saw, and hopefully, change their hearts and beliefs too! (To read more about this story, click here.)

Christian Universities?! ~ All About America

Anyone who really knows me understands that I am a passionate patriot. I love America immensely. It offers freedom, hope and opportunity like no other country in the world. As such, I will be posting All About America every Wednesday, because I am proud to be an American! The content will vary and may include photos, facts, commentary, quotes, excerpts of speeches, etc. I will use different sources and make every attempt to site the source. Sometimes I may offer commentary, other time, if I think the content speaks for itself, I may not. I hope you enjoy All About America as much as I do, and that you’ll come back and visit often. And may God Bless America!

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I find it fascinating that our prestigious, rabidly liberal Ivy League Universities were once Christian Universities! Below is a brilliant article, Harvard, the Ivy League and the forgotten Puritans, written by an academic, Ellis Washington, and posted in World Net Daily.

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Sunlight is the best disinfectant. ~ Justice Louis Brandeis

There's always a conflict of interest when people who don't really like America are called upon to teach about its history. ~ Ellis Washington (a paraphrase of Ann Coulter)


How did the eight so-called "Ivy League" schools – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Dartmouth – go from being training grounds for Christian missionaries and ministers and respected citadels of higher education to what they are now – propaganda factories for every leftist, perverted, radical, tyrannical, failed ideology known to mankind? – Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, Higher Criticism, communism, multiculturalism, relativism, naturalism, positivism, socialism, liberalism, egalitarianism, feminist studies, gay studies, transgender studies, transvestite studies, outcome-based education, radical environmentalism, etc.


Did you know that America's oldest and most venerated colleges and universities like Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth were founded by the Puritans? Yes, those same Puritans who along with the Pilgrims were devout Christians and the original founders of America. What do we remember about the Puritans? Now, thanks in large part to the false prophets called "professors" of the Ivy League schools, we equate the Puritans inseparably with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-95 where between 175-200 people were imprisoned, and, tragically, 20 innocent people were given the death penalty for allegedly being a "witch" based solely on the testimony of a few hysterical, emotionally unstable adolescent girls. This incident was indeed a dark chapter of history that has nevertheless been hyped up beyond reason by the secular left to erase the memory of the Puritans from the marketplace of ideas and from American history, from which they remain banished, even until this day.


Despite their Christian roots, currently all of the Ivy League schools are private and are not currently associated with any religion. Why? Because by the mid-1800s the secular revivalist movement called the Age of Enlightenment (1600-1830) had thoroughly infected the academy. The French Philosophes led the movement – Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Dumarsais and Diderot. There were "benevolent" tyrants: Napoleon, Catherine II, Leopold II, King George III; would-be tryants: Robespierre, Saint-Just, the indulgents, the Jacobins; as well as Anglo-American and Continental philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Paine, David Hume and John Stuart Mills, some of whom considered religion generally, and Christianity especially, as passe, anachronistic, barbaric and increasingly irrelevant to humanity's march towards humanism, secularism, higher learning and utopia.


Therefore, over time, as a new generation of professors and university presidents took over, the Ivy League schools forsook their explicitly religious mandate to train missionaries and ministers to spread the Gospel to the world and instead pursued newer fields of study that not only denigrated American's Judeo-Christian traditions, but were increasingly openly hostile to it. The 19th century saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to old and new disciplines of knowledge – physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, taxonomy, geology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, economics, political science. This was at the same time Charles Darwin's theories on evolution and non-theistic creation became popular among intellectuals and academics. Darwin's famous book, "The Origin of Species" (1859), became their new Bible – its priests and prophets, the professor, its pulpit, the classroom or the seminar, its temple, the academy.


Next came influential thinkers like Darwinians Thomas and Aldous Huxley, Engels, Marx, Hegel, Freud, Franz Boas, Mead, Weber, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe Pound, John Dewey, B. F. Skinner, Samuel Atkins Eliot and Charles W. Eliot (president of Harvard), and by the 1930s the Ivy League had totally become temples not only to secular thought, but they were increasingly hostile to orthodox religious ideas of any kind ... except of course the new omnipotent religion of Liberalism.


The late 1950s saw the coming of age of the so-called baby boomer (the post-World War II generation, 1945-65) of whom many, having rejected the Judeo-Christian traditions of their parents, willingly embraced these ideas taught to them in the academy. As the 1960s progressed, this godless, hedonist, self-indulgent, entitled generation got their college degrees and even filled the graduate schools, receiving J.D.s, Ph.Ds., M.D.s, M.B.A.s and other advanced degrees.


Next the question is: Why have the Ivy League schools become so radicalized in modern times? Because they are filled with the progeny of the World War II generation, the baby boomers of the 1960s who have so thoroughly hijacked and perverted the original Christian/intellectual paradigm the Ivy League schools maintained in the beginning. However, progressives, liberals and humanists' unrestrained assault on reason, logic, religion, morality, politics, philosophy, education and capitalism didn't stop with the Ivy League schools. For example, the College of William and Mary (1693) was founded by Congregationalists (Puritans); Andover College (1778) was founded by Noah Webster to train missionaries; Rutgers (1766) was founded by Dutch Reformers; Dickinson College (1783), Smith, Bryn Mawr, Lehigh, Bucknell, Colgate, Swarthmore, Vanderbilt, Northwestern and on and on and on all were founded either by Jews, Christians, Christian denominations or Christian religious organizations. In modern times, however, virtually all these colleges are temples to intellectual paganism.


Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941), the first Jewish person to sit on the Supreme Court and a brilliant legal mind, once famously remarked, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." I hope this column was successful at shedding the light of clarity regarding the denigration of the Ivy League schools and other prestigious universities and showing how far they have devolved from their original mandate to train Christian ministers and missionaries to spread the Gospel throughout the world into institutions of higher perversion, avarice, excess, vanity and degenerate ideas.


Paraphrasing Ann Coulter's august words in the context of this article, I likewise say – There's always a conflict of interest when people who don't really like America are called upon to teach about its history.


History is the tragic narrative of the martyrdom of our geniuses. To the Puritans that gave America America, as well as Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth, setting the original Christian intellectual and academic legacy of the Ivy League schools, I say, truly you are the greatest generation.