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A Christian Ending to Our Life
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
This photo from a recent blog by the above title depicts The Good Samaritan showing mercy to the beaten-up traveler while a Priest and a Levite are walking away. The author, Fr. Stephen Freeman wrote -
"The practice of medicine was largely a private matter for many centuries, with some 'clinics' of a sort being associated with particular temples, such as those of Asclepius. However, hospitals had to await the coming of Christianity. A name associated with one of the first such foundations was St. Basil the Great of Caesarea. He gave away his family inheritance for the needs of the poor, building a poorhouse, a hospice and a hospital just outside Caesarea. It was dubbed the 'Basiliad.' St. Gregory the Theologian compared it to the 'wonders of the world.'
"St. Sampson the Hospitable was a doctor. He found favor with the Emperor Justinian and asked for help to build a hospital in Constantinople. It served that city for centuries. His title, the 'Hospitable,' as well as our continuing use of the word 'hospital' are worth considering. In Greek, his title is 'philoxenos,' a word meaning the love of strangers – or kindness to strangers. Our word, 'hospitality,' still has this connotation. Its origin is from the Latin, hospes, which also has the meaning of the care for the stranger or guest.
"In the days following Christmas, I took part in the funeral of a 14 year-old boy who had died from sepsis ('blood poisoning'). It’s the sort of thing that strikes deep grief in the heart of parents and the wider community. Sepsis is more common than people realize, killing more people than cancer. A frequent remark I heard surrounding this particular funeral was how 'unnatural' it was – 'untimely' would have been a better word. The power of our technology has erected something of a dike against the always present flood of mortality. We forget that we are all going to die. Acknowledging death was a key in hospice care, both for the patients and the medical team. I have long marveled at the fact that most people in modern culture have never been present for the death of another human being, nor for an actual birth."
Read the whole article! BTW, I came very close to sepsis from a serious infection last July, so I know what he's talking about. He tells how we've become insulated against the real world of birth, sickness, and death. Much of religion does the same, singing about "The Sweet Bye and Bye" and preaching about pie in the sky. But real Christianity teaches against such fairy-tale notions: the "Seven Woes" in Mat. 23:13-36 tells how Jesus excoriated the Pharisees for their phony religiosity.
In another of his blogs, Fr. Stephen writes about "the great heresy of secularism." He says - "Secularism is not the rejection of God, but the assertion that the world exists apart from God and that our task is to do the best we can in this world. Fr. Alexander [Schmemann] suggests that the Church in the modern world has largely surrendered to secularism. 'The Church's surrender,' he says, 'consists not in giving up creeds, traditions, symbols and customs... but in accepting the very function of religion in terms of promoting the secular value of help, be it help in character building, peace of mind, or assurance of eternal salvation.'"
The "help" of a secularized religion is man-centered: "self-actualization," "realizing your human potential," and sometimes mixed with a dose of eastern mysticism or even occultism. It can also be using the church to lend a veneer of moralism over the self-serving goals of secular but pseudo-religious politicians, both in the West and in the East that allow the Gospel to be hijacked by Marxist "Liberation Theology." Sadly, many people fall for this ruse.
But the real, ultimate goal and purpose of our Christian faith is not to improve our lives on this earth or provide a fire escape from hell's flames; rather, it is to "be transformed by the renewing of your minds" into the likeness of Christ (Romans 12:2), to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts" (Romans 13:14) to become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). It's not fixing and patching up the old life, it's receiving an entirely new nature.
What exactly is secularism? In the article "Learning from Integralism" we read that the U.S. founding documents - The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights - are based on the principle that all people are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" of which the right to life is first, and that "Congress shall make no laws regarding an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Note the use of "an establishment" which refers to any one of the various established religions - Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, or Roman Catholic - that existed in the original 13 states: it does not state "the establishment of religion" meaning that the government must not make any laws that would establish a state church. Indeed, as this article states, "The constitutional settlement that endured for almost two centuries until it was abandoned by elites (including the Supreme Court) and uprooted in the 1960s was basically this: public authority could and should promote religion and partner with religious institutions for projects that are conducive to the common good, without coercion and without partiality toward any particular faith or sect."
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But what happened in the 1960s? First of all, God was put in a box and stuck up in the attic, in the "second story" of a universe where the first story was purely materialistic and secular. "Freedom of religion" was reinterpreted from freedom of expressing one's religious faith in public to mean "freedom to worship" once a week in a separate "box" called a church building, and leave it there - don't let it leak out into the public square, into your daily life and work. Secondly, now that religion was stowed away, the Sixties' Sexual Revolution let loose all those pent-up inhibitions, paving the way for The Pill and the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, the killing of innocent babies who were the result of uninhibited sexual behavior. Secularism became not the freedom to express and live out one's religious faith, but rather the license to scorn, throw out, and ultimately ban any religious expression of morality.
Why did things go wrong? As the last-mentioned article above states, the U.S. founding documents' "affirmations did not include sectarian tenets, theological speculation, or putatively revealed truth. They did include divine realities affirmed in the Declaration of Independence — a unitary God who created all there is, who providentially guided human events, and whose effects included naturally known moral truths — truths that could be known and were known by reason alone. These truths are elements of a 'natural theology' or 'natural religion,' really a branch of philosophy." But by defining religion too loosely, setting the boundaries too wide, by excluding revealed truth and including only what can be known from nature by reason alone, it started the process of secularization and the state's affirming only a rationalist, materialist worldview.
By now, Christians who believe in revealed truth and objective morality of right and wrong are in the minority. We need to gather together and regroup around a set of revealed truths that Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox can and do all agree on: the Nicene Creed. It is the only Christian creed accepted by all three streams of Christianity. We must publicly affirm and confess this Nicene Creed as the set of truths to live by, putting aside any public disputes about secondary or "sectarian tenets."
Secondly, we must form Christian communities where we can encourage one another and raise our families in an atmosphere that is not constantly being bombarded with godless materialism, secularism, and even the demonic in movies, television, and social media. We need to clean up our collective acts, take out the garbage and filth, and let the Lord sanctify our lives!
"Ascribe to the Lord, you tribes of the nations, Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength; Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to His name: Bring an offering, and come before Him: Worship the Lord in holy array. Tremble before Him, all the earth: The world also is established that it cannot be moved. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; Let them say among the nations, the Lord reigns" (1 Chronicles 16:28-31).
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!
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NOW, THE NEWS:
ETHICAL QUESTIONS OVER OUTSOURCING IVF RESEARCH TO MEXICO
by Michael Cook: BioEdge
(18 Jan.) It's highly unusual for a journal to publish a research paper accompanied by an editorial and a guest commentary expressing grave reservations about its ethics. But that's what "Human Reproduction" did with a study of a more cost-effective version of IVF.
The researchers recruited dozens of young women from the Mexican city of Puerto Vallarta, on the Pacific Coast, and paid them US$1400. They were given fertility drugs to stimulate the production of eggs and artificially inseminated. Then 4 to 6 days later, the embryos were flushed out and examined.
The researchers wanted to see whether the embryos were as genetically healthy as embryos created through standard IVF in a laboratory. It turns out that they are, according to Santiago Munne, a Catalan reproductive geneticist who was the lead author of the study. This could lead to cheaper, simpler IVF. Ethical complications? Just a few. For starters, here’s what the editors pointed out:
...fertile women not wishing to become pregnant were exposed to ovarian hyperstimulation and were treated with intrauterine insemination with semen that did not necessarily come from their own partner. Despite uterine flushing, not all embryos were retrieved and some women accidentally became pregnant. For termination of pregnancy, those women were then treated with methotrexate (MTX), some even with a dilation & curettage (D&C). All of the above interventions are potentially harmful to the women who did not benefit directly from participation—other than through financial compensation. [read more~~]
COMMENTARY: Since the above article first appeared, this case has been reported on by several other pro-life organizations. One described these experiments as "using foreign women as laboratory petri dishes" which aptly depicts the barbarity of this so-called research. It resembles more the ghastly experiments that Nazi doctors performed in their WWII concentration camps, where female prisoners were often sexually abused before being put to death. But now these Mexican women are being sexually abused and their unborn children are being put to death. This is a crime that should be tried at the International Court of Justice.
TURKMENISTAN: RAIDS, SEARCHES, FINES, THREATS, BEATINGS, HEADSCARF BANS
by Felix Corley: Forum 18 News Service
(16 Jan.) Protestant women celebrating Christmas are the latest victims of police raids on worship meetings. Officers searched the home, seized telephones, forced the women to write statements and took photos and fingerprints. Officials often summon and threaten people known to be religious.
Police raided a Christmas gathering of Protestant women in a village in Turkmenistan's eastern Lebap Region on 26 December 2019. Officers searched the home, seized telephones and questioned the women at the police station. In early January 2020, police summoned the women one by one, forced them to write statements, and took their photos and fingerprints. It appears that none of the Protestants have yet been fined.
An individual returning to Turkmenistan through Ashgabat Airport was stopped after being suspected of travelling abroad for religious purposes, beaten on the head after refusing to allow a search of electronic devices (which police seized and searched) and was kept under surveillance for the following weeks.
No official has been prepared to answer Forum 18's questions on why Turkmenistan does not implement its binding international human rights law obligations on freedom of religion and belief, and instead punishes individuals and communities for exercising freedom of religion and belief.
Turkmenistan imposes tight state controls on exercising freedom of religion or belief. Only approved activity in approved locations by approved religious communities are allowed. Unregistered religious activity is banned and punishable. All religious literature is under tight state control and unapproved distribution of such literature is punishable. Sharing of faith is banned and punishable. [read more~~]
COMMENTARY: Here is another example of what happens when Christians attempt to "let God out of the box" of state-approved activities by state-approved religious communities in state-approved buildings. The physical roughing-up doesn't take place yet in the West - at least not much... but electronic monitoring of social media accounts and shutting down or "shadow-banning" the social media accounts of conservative Christians is certainly known to occur. So much for freedom of religious expression in our secularized society if you can say whatever you want but almost nobody can hear you!
REPRESENTATIVES OF UOC-MP SEIZE A CHURCH AFTER RECONCILING WITH THE OCU COMMUNITY
from: Religious Information Service of Ukraine
(14 Jan.) On January 12, five men who called themselves monks of the UOC-MP blocked the entrance to the local church in the village of Velyka Kisnytsia, Yampolsky district, Vinnytsia region. This led to a conflict with the faithful and the priest of the OCU because it is their community that owns the premises. The police were called to the scene to ensure that the parties did not violate public order.
As the head of the Department of religions and nationalities of Vinnytsia regional state administration Igor Saletsky explained to the media outlet NaParizhi, according to the decision of the Vinnytsia City Court, the village church belongs to the community of the OCU. But since there is a small community of the UOC-MP in Velyka Kisnytsia, the two priests decided to rule the services together.
Once that was the case... Allegedly, the Orthodox were reconciled. But the understanding did not last long. From the Diicese of Mohyliov-Podisky of the UOC-MP, some men who presented themselves as monks were dispatched to the village. On Sunday, they blocked the entrance to the church when the faithful of the OCU came to attend the service.
This led to a conflict with the villagers. People were outraged by the treachery of representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate. They called the police and provided law enforcement with supporting documents for the temple. In turn, the police only watched what was happening, without interfering. [read more~~]
COMMENTARY: From the photo, it appears that the "monks" were actually thugs. Whenever you hear - "Let's get together and make peace, so we can come in and have fellowship with your church," - watch out! The Evil One, the Great Deceiver, is very tricky: he will use phrases like - "We need to have a conversation about..." or "Let us meet together and dialog about..." - but as soon as the camel's nose gets into the tent, the whole camel follows. Christians need to be discerning and not fall for these tricks.
RUSSIAN CHURCH DISMISSES CRITICISM ABOUT SEEKING TO SEIZE LEADERSHIP OF ORTHODOX WORLD
from: Interfax-Religion
(21 Jan.) The Moscow Patriarchate has disagreed with accusations that it was denying premiership of to the Church of Constantinople and trying to displace it in the Orthodox world. "Indeed, there have been accusations recently from the Greek-language church about the Russian Church ostensibly denying the Patriarchate of Constantinople premiership in the Orthodox World and seeking to take its place. However, I have yet to hear a single convincing argument which would prove the fairness of these accusations," Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Synodal Department for External Church Relations, told Interfax on Tuesday.
The way the Russian Church understands premiership in the Church and whom it recognizes as its holder can be gleaned from a document, approved by the Synod in December 2013, entitled "The Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Question of Premiership in the Universal Church," he said. "It says expressly that after the Great Schism of 1054 the premiership of honor in the Orthodox Church passed to the Patriarch of Constantinople. As a matter of fact, the Russian Church is one of the few local Churches, perhaps the only one, to have recognized Constantinople's premiership not only in words but by a special Synodal document."
The Russian church has never challenged Constantinople's premiership, the issue here is how this should be understood, the metropolitan said. "The canonical tradition and Orthodox ecclesiology attribute the premiership of honor to the leader of the Roman Church after 1054 to the Church of Constantinople. The first primate on the diptych is referred to as 'first among equals.' However, in the past 100 years the Patriarchate of Constantinople has developed a teaching about premiership, effectively emulating the Roman-Catholic model of church structure," Metropolitan Hilarion said. [read more~~]
COMMENTARY: As Shakespeare once wrote - "Methinks the lady doth protest too much!" Whenever someone voiciferously denies something, consider that a veiled admission of guilt. Since time immemorial, people have been projecting their guilt on the innocent party. "We are not challenging Constantinople's premiership, but we question the way Constantinople is exercising its premiership." This is called making a distinction without a difference. It is obvious that the Russian Church has rejected the premiership of Constantinople in Constantinople's recognition of the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
ABORTION IS A HUMAN RIGHT THAT TRUMPS RELIGIOUS LIBERTY, SAYS TOP HUMAN RIGHTS ORG
from: LifeSite News
(17 Jan.) The leader of one of the world's top human rights organizations told the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights last week that abortion is a "fundamental right" for "anyone who wants or needs it" and that arguments about the humanity of the unborn are merely "philosophical," with no place in policy.
Human Rights Watch head Kenneth Roth criticized Secretary of State Michael Pompeo's basis for founding the commission. Pompeo initiated the expert body to guide the department in response to a proliferation of new rights claims that often compete against one another. Roth said that abortion has always been a human right, and only the claims to it are new. He warned against "picking and choosing" among rights.
Roth admitted that abortion is not mentioned in any of the UN human rights treaties, but said it is grounded in fundamental rights such as the right to health. He said there are "millions" of preventable deaths that could be averted by abortion, based on the presumption that women will inevitably seek out abortions, including by extremely dangerous methods, whether it is legal or not.
The reason we know abortion is a right, he said, is because "authoritative interpretations" by UN experts have said so. He said the Human Rights Committee is "not that different" from the U.S. Supreme Court, calling it the "final arbiter" of rights enumerated in the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which the U.S. is a party. In fact, however, the committee can only offer personal views and they are not binding on nations.
Roth said there is no tension between a right to abortion and religious freedom because the only thing protected by human rights is a "freedom of belief" and not the right to exercise it in one’s professional and societal roles. He said that a rural doctor must obey "a different set of rules" from an urban doctor, and must perform abortions even if she is morally opposed lest women have to travel for the procedure.
Commission member Peter Berkowitz said that while Roth referred to the unborn child as a "fetus," others argue that it is a child and a human being, and a bearer of human rights. Berkowitz asked Roth about the tension, in that case, between the rights of the mother and child. Roth acknowledged that there are differing philosophical and religious views on this subject, but since agreement will never be reached, policy makers must rely on UN expert interpretations of positive international law. Based on the opinions of treaty bodies, Roth added, "we are in no position to take the absolutist position that this is an unborn child." [read more~~]
COMMENTARY: So now we have a self-proclaimed "top-dog expert" claiming that the mother has a "human right" to kill her children, and the children do not have the most basic human right, the right to life. Born or unborn, whether six weeks before birth or six minutes after, the baby once conceived is a real human being - not merely a "clump of cells." Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, is on the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights, but another commission member, Peter Berkowitz, contradicts Roth's claim that an unborn human baby is just a "fetus" (Latin for "unborn baby"), as if using Latin makes an unborn baby not an unborn baby. Roth also claims that supposed "authoritative interpretations" by UN experts (although no UN official treaties say so) override the Founding Documents of the United States. This might be what the one-world-government folks want to enact: we must never allow that to happen.
COUPLE WINS WRONGFUL BIRTH SETTLEMENT AFTER DAUGHTER IS BORN WITH DOWN SYNDROME
from: LiveAction
(10 Jan.) A California couple has successfully settled with the medical groups and physicians responsible for their obstetrical care after their daughter was born with Down syndrome. They claim they should have received a diagnosis prenatally, so they could have had an abortion.
Recently released court papers showed the parents — who have not been named in the media — had sued Axminster Medical Group Inc., Westchester Advanced Imaging Medical Group Inc. and Drs. Glenn P. Wedeen, Christopher Meilleur, and Mia J. Sanders Madati in 2015. Just a day before the trial was scheduled to begin, however, papers were filed indicating a settlement was reached. The terms of the settlement were not clear, but the couple had originally been asking for $80 million.
The parents claim the mother underwent a second trimester ultrasound. While it is not clear if she ever asked for prenatal testing or if there were any soft markers seen on the ultrasound, the parents felt that they should have received a prenatal diagnosis so they could have aborted their daughter. Their daughter, born in 2014, was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect after birth, which was corrected through surgery.
Wrongful birth lawsuits are a concerning new trend for parents who fail to receive a prenatal diagnosis of a disability, and they're happening across the globe. Though prenatal testing is a tool that can be extremely beneficial to those who choose life, and provide the preborn child with the health care they need even while still in the womb, it is also often hijacked by many and used as a tool to weed out children that some people see as unworthy of life. [read more~~]
COMMENTARY: See the news headline below "U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE THROWS SUPPORT BEHIND DOWN SYNDROME ABORTION BAN": apparently California's nutty legal "experts" are on another collision course with U.S. Federal legal system. We must not allow parents or doctors to decide which human beings get to live and which must die because they have a "defect." The fact is, we all have defects: we are all imperfect, fallen, and sinful human beings. Imagine parents deciding that they want to have only blue-eyed and blond-haired children, so they ask the doctors to examine the mother before she delivers (or perhaps just after delivery) and kill the babies that don't meet these criteria. This sounds rather like Nazi Germany, doesn't it? So what if the criteria are a little different, let's say, having above-average intelligence or good-looking or athletic, but the babies don't meet those criteria: does that disqualify these babies from living?
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Dear friend,
Please take a minute to read this important message:
In my previous message, I told how at age 15, while taking care of lawns at an apartment complex, God gave me a vision: I saw a map of the Soviet Union in the sky and a voice said: "Remember this apartment complex plan - you'll build it when you're an old man." After serving 17 years in Russia, I'm now in my 70s, so I guess I'm old enough to start this new project!
I wrote earlier about our *free* 1-year, 6-course training program "Social Ministry of the Church" in English and Russian to train people how to care for the disabled. The purpose of these courses is to prepare people for "Building the ARC" - an Agape Restoration Community - a Christian housing co-op with a built-in community room/chapel. Most of the units will be wheelchair-accessible because of the aging of the "Baby Boomer" generation: 70 million people born between 1946 and 1965 have reached or are reaching retirement age (10,000/day = 3,650,000/year!), at which time 45% of these people are already disabled.
And as they continue aging, 70% of them will be disabled and require accessible housing or home healthcare before they pass away. This is a huge social concern: 70% of 3,650,000 people = 2,550,000 disabled people per year for the next 20 years = over 50 million people! About 2/3 of all retirees depend on Social Security for over half of their income, and about 1/3 of retirees depend on it for 90% to 100% of their income. But can they continue depending on it? Medicare will be insolvent by 2026 and Social Security will reach insolvency by 2034, the trustees of these funds report, so they will have to cut 'way back: they won't be able to care for all these people at current levels. We need to "Think Forward" ... starting now!
Our basic problem, however, is that like most people, we don't want to think about such things until it's too late. Psychologists call this "the normalcy bias" - our brains work in terms of past experience, so we assume that everything will simply keep on going on "just like normal" as it has in the past. In everyday layman's language it's called "whistling past the graveyard." But some states are already passing laws allowing euthanasia and assisted suicide to conserve public finances. So it's imperative that we as Christians be proactive and retake our social ministry responsibilities!
Christ commanded His disciples to "Bring in the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind, go into the highways and the hedges, and compel them to come in, so that My house may be full" (Luke 14:21-23). This defines our ultimate target audience and our goal, but how can we "compel them to come in" unless they can come in? Why aren't the churches full? In many cases the "maimed, the lame and blind" can hardly get out of their homes, and getting transported to church is difficult or flat-out impossible.
Also, many church buildings aren't very wheelchair-accessible. Solution: "Build the ARC": this is an 8-to-10-living-unit building that forms an accessible, affordable Christian housing co-op including a community room/chapel, with most living units being wheelchair-accessible, plus there are parking spaces just outside wide enough for wheelchair use right next to the building. And our "Social Ministry of the Church" courses will train the healthier residents as "home healthcare workers" to care for those who need it.
Most homes, condo and townhouse communities in our greater Pittsburgh area, on the northern edge of the Allegheny Mountains, have at least 1/2 to 1 flight of stairs, often 2 or 3 flights, creating a nearly-insurmountable problem for people with disabilities. Our hearts go out to the 6% of children who are disabled! But 16% of working-age adults and 45% of seniors have disabilities too. 16% + 45% = 61% of disabled people are adults: only 1/10th as many (6%) are children, so shouldn't we pay a bit more attention to those ten-times-as-many disabled adults?
Why not an elevator or a stair lift? In an emergency such as a fire or when the electricity goes out or the elevator breaks, they could be trapped if depending on an elevator or a stair lift. Disabled people can't use the stairs and it's awfully hard to carry them in a wheelchair down the stairs - we've learned that the hard way! With most older couples it's the man who ages first and becomes disabled: he very likely weighs more than his wife who often injures her back or knees trying to lift or carry him. Also, we've met many older people - able-bodied and disabled - who have been trapped in an elevator so now refuse to ride them. Armed with such experiences, we aim to change the built environment for these people!
We've been functioning since 1998 as Agape Restoration Society, a donor-advised fund of WaterStone.org, a foundation through which people can channel their benevolent donations but only to other non-profits. In 2017, we incorporated as Agape Restoration Society Inc., an IRS-recognized non-profit corporation, so that we can disburse funds to for-profit architects and builders. We are listed with Charity Navigator and GuideStar. We've hired an architectural firm in Pittsburgh and have located a property to build on so that our architects can create drawings specifically for that property. Here are our sketches and the proposed property:
In August 2019, our Offer to Purchase was accepted for a beautiful 8.8-acre hilltop property in Trafford, PA, and due to zoning requirements we've modified our earlier design: see our site plan 1 and 2, five new sketches for a 6-8-living-unit building including four living units on the first floor, a community room/chapel, two restrooms, and four living units on the second floor, and offices or storage in the loft, plus five or six side buildings each with 6-8 living units, altogether totaling 42-56 living units, 30-44 being wheelchair-accessible.
Where is Trafford, PA? Drive east on I-376 from downtown Pittsburgh about 25-30 minutes to Hwy. 48 in Monroeville where UPMC East Hospital is located, and Forbes Hospital is 4 minutes south on Hwy. 48. Go south on Hwy. 48 from I-376 and turn east on Hwy. 130 to Trafford (total 12 minutes) in the lower-right corner. Next, see 1) a Trafford overview - turn left at the Burger King onto Forbes Road for the quickest route to the property, then 2) zoom in to see the property (the lower-right rectangle), the triangle-shaped hilltop, 3) the present "Urban Lane" road-cut, 4) and the existing townhouse development in an older Google Streetview - the first 3 vehicles are where the road-cut has more recently been made.
Before we can start construction, we must pay about $25,000 for civil engineering and the $175,000 remaining for the property. Can you help us? What we really need is for 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 people to chip in at one of these levels. This could be:
For example, you can go to our DONATE page and sign up for:
$100/month for 10 months: that's $1,000 - a huge help, or
$50/month for 10 months: that's $500 - a great gift, or
$25/month for 10 months: that's $250 - a big boost, or
$10/month for 10 months: that's $100 - practically painless!
Will you be praying for and pulling for us in this project? Thanks for your time and attention, if you've read this far!
Yours sincerely,
"Dr. Bob"
Robert D. Hosken, M.Min., D.Min.
In the span of one week, our priest at the church in Madison, WI passed away from cancer. Then on the day of his funeral, another priest in Madison died suddenly of a heart attack. On the following Monday, the former president of our parish council at our church in East Pittsburgh died from cancer. They were all godly men: why did all three die in one week? Is the Lord trying to tell us something?
"Thus says the Lord, 'Look I am bringing evil to this place and upon its inhabitants, according to all of the words of that scroll that the king of Judah has read because they have abandoned me and they have burned incense to other gods, provoking me to anger with all of the works of their hands. My wrath shall be kindled against this place and not be quenched.' And to the king of Judah who sent all of you to inquire of the Lord, thus you shall say to him, 'Thus says the Lord the God of Israel, 'Concerning the words that you have heard, because you have a responsive heart, and you humbled yourself before the Lord when you heard how I spoke against this place and against its inhabitants to become a desolation and a curse, and you have torn your clothes and wept before my face, I have also heard, declares the Lord. Therefore look, I am gathering you to your ancestors, and you shall be gathered to your tombs in peace. Your eyes will not see all of the disaster that I am bringing onto this place'" (2 Kings 22:16-20).
At the funeral of our former parish council president this morning, we read the following very comforting Epistle and Gospel portions:
"But we don't want you to be ignorant, brothers, concerning those who have fallen asleep, so that you don't grieve like the rest, who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so those who have fallen asleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left to the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with God's trumpet. The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. So we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore comfort one another with these words" (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).
"Jesus said to them. 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me will not be hungry, and he who believes in Me will never be thirsty. But I told you that you have seen Me, and yet you do not believe. All those who the Father gives Me will come to me. Him who comes to Me I will in no way throw out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. This is the will of my Father Who sent Me, that of all he has given to Me I should lose nothing, but should raise him up at the last day. This is the will of the one who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son, and believes in Him, should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day" (John 6:35-40).
Fifty-two years ago this month, in January 1968, Czechoslovakia experienced the Soviet invasion to squelch the "Prague Spring" - a thaw in the hard-line communism that had been imposed by the Red Army in 1948. Please read How the Prague Spring Led to the Fall of Communism. My wife Cheryl and I lived just a few miles away in Vienna, Austria starting in 1970, and could still witness the after-effects from the country next door. Compare that to this next event -
This week also marked the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's fateful Roe v. Wade decision and the annual Right to Life March in Washington D.C. For the very first time, the sitting U.S. President was present and addressed the marchers for Life. In addition, he issued the Presidential Proclamation of National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2020 that begins: "Every person — the born and unborn, the poor, the downcast, the disabled, the infirm, and the elderly — has inherent value. Although each journey is different, no life is without worth or is inconsequential; the rights of all people must be defended. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, our Nation proudly and strongly reaffirms our commitment to protect the precious gift of life at every stage, from conception to natural death." I strongly encourage you to read the whole Proclamation!
Please remember to pray for Christians in Secularized Countries, and for~~~
Your fellow-servants,
Bob & Cheryl
p.s. This life is preparation for eternity. When we fully grasp this fact, we will live only for eternal values.
