Ronald Reagan on His Knees
August 6, 2013 1 Comment
We need more of our politicians to have his perspective!
Life is like a Jigsaw Puzzle
February 23, 2013 Leave a comment
Life is like a Jigsaw Puzzle
Life is like a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. When you are building a puzzle, first, you find all the border pieces. The ones with the flat sides – the edge pieces. Once you’ve completed the edge pieces or border of your puzzle, the best strategy to follow is to pick out major, easy to identify sections of the puzzle. Pull out all those pieces. Fit them together. Put them in their place within your puzzle. Then select out the next easy to identify section. Separate out those pieces. Put them together as best you can and put them in their relative position within the puzzle framework.
As you move along through this process of identifying specific areas of the puzzle and putting those in order in their relative positions, the overall puzzle begins to take shape. Not all at once… it doesn’t come together immediately. But over time different areas of the puzzle begin to form as you concentrate on them.
And after a while those pieces which at first you did not recognize as being part of one of the earlier sections, you start to notice patterns of where they belong. Pieces that are all one color, for instance, are really hard to identify where they belong. You start to notice shades of color difference that you hadn’t noticed before. Pieces of the sections you had already isolated and built but were missing a few pieces, you find those pieces mixed in with the hard-to-identify pieces because they just didn’t have that easy-to-find characteristic.
And over time the process builds on itself as you get more and more sections in order and put together, until eventually you’re almost picking up pieces and putting them directly in their places one after another.
Growing as a person is like this. When you find and identify the boundaries to build your life within that’s the beginning. This is like finding the foundation for your life. It gives you a starting place. You want to find the firm foundation that is true – that conforms to reality. We find this true foundation in the Bible and in the person of Jesus Christ.
Then you begin working on certain areas of your life and try to put them in order. It might start with your finances, your marriage, your work life, or your spiritual life. As you put the different areas together, your life starts to take shape. Getting additional areas under control and in focus and in order and productive starts to become easier. Unfortunately life is not completely the same as a jigsaw puzzle. For the puzzle there is finally a finishing point, a finite amount of time when you can put the whole thing together and say you’re done. With life however, although there is a definite finishing point for our lives, we never reach a state of being done on this side of eternity. We leave that to our Lord and Savior for the next life.
We can use this principle of focusing on specific areas of our lives, getting them in order as best we can, getting things in place and moving on to another area. This principle can help us move the ball forward in our lives toward reaching our goals.
Restoring Love
July 18, 2012 2 Comments
Downtown Dallas in the background with the Trinity River in the foreground. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Restoring Love event in Dallas, Texas is another example of Christians taking a stand and showing what is good and attractive about being a Christian and following God’s ways. Restoring Love is an example of how Christian service, charity, and compassion can and should meet all the needs that the government attempts to fill with welfare programs. Volunteers will distribute food to the hungry, repair houses of the elderly, take part in community clean up efforts and so much more.
The catch for us Christians is that if we are not willing to step up and be the church with acts of Christian love and charity, we have no business demanding that the government get out of that area. If we in Christian love will live out our faith and put feet on our worldview, that will be a sweet and inviting fragrance to the lost. And just in case it isn’t, as in the case of people like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, lawyers from the Alliance Defense Fund are on call to defend our place in the public square.
Related articles
- Have you seen the schedule for Restoring Love? (theblaze.com)
- Restoration: Words aptly spoken (d101588520512689932.typepad.com)
Politics as Easy as Pie
March 10, 2012 1 Comment
Image via Wikipedia
Politics as Easy as Pie is a talk I’ve listened to from Congressman Bob McEwen. He makes several excellent points. I’ll try to relay some of them here.
The greater the freedom, the greater the wealth; the greater the government, the greater the poverty. Every dollar that you earn increases the choices you can make. When someone takes some of your dollars, you have fewer choices. There are two ways to get money from people, willingly and unwillingly. People part with their money willingly when they see a product or service that is more valuable to them than the money it costs to pay for it. Only two kinds of people can take your money from you unwillingly. One is a crook who points a gun at you and takes what he wants. The other is the government who “points a gun” at you and takes what they want. Countries, states, and cities that have higher tax burden on their citizens have greater poverty. Those that have lower tax burden on their citizens have greater prosperity.
We should limit government to do only what is necessary for it to do. In addition to the reason explained above, government will always be more wasteful in its spending. This is because all government programs involve third-party purchases. Third-party purchases are items bought for other people using other people’s money. If I am buying something for myself with my own money, both price and quality matter. If I am buying something for someone else with my own money, price matters, but quality not so much. If I am buying something for myself with someone else’s money, then quality matters but not price. BUT if I am buying something for someone else with someone else’s money, I do not care about price or quality. This is exactly what government programs involve: third-party purchases. It is one more reason why government should only be involved in those areas in which it is absolutely necessary.
“We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In our nation life is the first of our unalienable rights. That is not an accident. At the same time we were having our revolution, the French were having one on the other side of the Atlantic. Their three main goals were liberty and equality and fraternity. They started with freedom then equality and then unity or union. We saw the results of this philosophy by the thousands killed by the guillotine. Because of founding of nations on something other than the laws of nature and of nature’s God, we have seen millions die under enforced equality and union. As our nation has lost its moral way we have lost our commitment to the right to life as primary. However, there is some evidence in the large number of pro-life laws passed in the last year that public opinion on this might be turning back around.
If these ideas pique your interest, you might want to hear Congressman McEwen’s talk yourself. Here is a link to his talk brought to you by FamilyTalk. This link takes you to a slightly different version of his talk brought to you by WallBuilders.
Conservative Educator 
Chuck Colson (1931-2012)
April 23, 2012 Leave a comment
Chuck Colson’s Autobiographical testimony (Photo credit: son.delorian)
Chuck Colson passed away this weekend. He will be missed as a conservative Christian voice. Perhaps because of his time on the inside and living the first half of his life without God, Chuck seemed to be able to find positions on issues that dealt with both the justice and compassion parts of the Gospel. Thankfully Chuck invested time in passing the leadership torch to the next generation. John Stonestreet and Eric Metaxas are currently standing in on his Breakpoint broadcast which I’ve listened to for years. I hope they continue to bring valuable analysis of current events from a Christian worldview.
Colson Center
Manhattan Declaration
The Point Radio with John Stonestreet
Eric Metaxas: Author
Related articles
Filed under Conservative Thinking, Culture War, History Tagged with Breakpoint Commentary, Charles Colson, Christ, Christian worldview, Christianity, Chuck Colson, Eric Metaxas, God, leadership, Politics