Wonderful story of Christian the Lion

I love this story.  It never fails to warm my heart.

 

Loving Your Idle Neighbor | Values & Capitalism

RJ Moeller

R.J. Moeller graduated from Taylor University in 2005 with a degree in business and is currently a...Read more about RJ Moeller

It’s been a few weeks since I last posted something in my “Bible & Economics” series, but I think a return to the topic is well served by the verses from II Thessalonians I’ve selected to delve in to today. This passage, more than perhaps any other in all of the New Testament, is responsible for directing a younger version of the R.J. Moeller that blogs before you today on a path leading sharply away from conventional modern thinking on the topics of welfare, wealth redistribution and the seemingly inescapable “social justice.” (By the way, is there “social truth” or “social patience”?)

From II Thessalonians 3:6-12:

Now we command you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you. It was not because we do not have that right, but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate. For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.

A simple, straight-forward reading of this text is a clear and present danger to advocates of a welfare state, but especially to those who also claim allegiance to the body of Christ and his word. However, in a sinful, fallen world—one wrought with hypocrisies, guilt, past societal sins, etc.—“simple” and “straight-forward” are luxuries the thoughtful believer can rarely enjoy, at least not when entering the contentious fray of the public square with their theological convictions in tow (as they most definitely should).

So let me quickly give my brief exegetical overview of the passage above, and then connect a few dots between what Paul wrote and some of the appropriate conclusions one ought to be able to draw in terms of public policy debates.

Now there are some who try to deflect the very real importance of these verses to a Christian’s attitude about how best to help the poor by saying that the “idlers” Paul is calling out are simply misguided believers who are under the impression Christ’s return was imminent. This is a distinction without a difference. Being lazy on a nuclear submarine with the key that launches Armageddon might be different in form, but is no different in substance than an idle Dairy Queen worker who procrastinates sweeping up the sprinkles his portly manager asked him to take care of the previous day.

Habitual idleness is a matter of the heart. (Believe me, I know first-hand.)

Refusing to work or provide for your family because you’re convinced Jesus is returning over the upcoming three-day weekend is, according to scripture, just as much of a sin as an able-bodied human being refusing to work or provide for their family because some well-intentioned bureaucrat is intent on giving them money they didn’t earn.

Right off the bat in verse 6, Paul exhorts the church body to “keep away from” anyone who is living an idle, lazy life and remains needlessly dependent on others. Pretty harsh, no? Not very “social” of him, right? I’ll even admit that nearly every time I read these words, I wince a little. All of the “But what about…” exceptions and exemptions start piling up on my conscience.

But if we’re serious about scripture, we know that scripture is serious about sin. Idleness and making yourself a prolonged and unnecessary burden on someone else, is a sin. There’s no way around that. The Greek translation for the phrase “in idleness” translates to “in an undisciplined, irresponsible or disorderly manner.” Keep that definition in mind for later.

Verses 7-9 are Paul’s reminder that he hasn’t simply preached against things like idleness and being a burden on others, but has modeled for the good people of Thessalonica the appropriate way to live. Paul was a minister of the gospel, and therefore was entitled to living off of the charity that came from other believers. But he feared that a lifetime of such dependency would weaken his witness, and, I don’t think it is unfair to infer, his character.

Verse 10 is the big one: “For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” Paul did not teach this difficult practice of the Christian life from afar, but said it face-to-face. Christian friends don’t enjoy confronting friends. Christian parents don’t delight in having to withhold certain things from their beloved children. Confronting people with difficult subject matter is made no less daunting by how true the subject matter is. It stinks. No way around it.

via Loving Your Idle Neighbor | Values & Capitalism.

Coca Cola Life Spot

Quoting - John Paul II

"The most radical and elevating affirmation of the value of every human being was made by the Son of God in His becoming man in the womb of a woman."

Pope John Paul II

When You Need an Angel

Holland's Got Talent 2013 - Amira Willighagen (9)

Hello Baby–3 D imagery

Incredible 3D scans allow parents to see foetus SMILING and MOVING in stunning detail | Mail Online.

• The state-of-the-art software adds extra detail to 3D ultrasound scans
• Software developed by Dr Bernard Benoit to help detect malformations
• Expectant parents can see unborn baby smiling and kicking in the womb

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 06:23 EST, 29 March 2013 | UPDATED: 12:39 EST, 29 March 2013

A blurry blob on a hospital screen is the first view most expectant parents get of their child.

But new state-of-the-art imaging software is now able to map a foetus in incredible detail.

The software takes a conventional 3D ultrasound scan and adds colour, skin texture, lighting and shadows.

Scroll down to watch video

The incredibly detailed pictures of the foetus allow parents to see their baby's face before it is born

The images are created by adding colour, skin texture and shadows to conventional 3D scans

The technology was developed by world renowned Dr Bernard Benoit known for his work on foetal scans

The technology gives unparalleled clarity and allows parents to see the face of their child before it is born.

There is also a 4D version which means mothers and fathers are able to see their baby smiling and kicking in the womb in realtime.

They could even turn it into a DVD.

The software is allowing doctors to detect problems in a foetus much sooner than before.

It also removes background details that can often obscure the foetus.

Expectant parents can see their unborn baby move around on a DVD

The state-of-the-art technology shows unborn twins in unparalleled detail

The amazing pictures can even be taken when the foetus is very small

It has been developed by Dr Bernard Benoit of the Princes Grace Hospital, Monaco.

He is known around the world for his focus on introducing innovative ultrasound technologies.

The keen photographer specialises in detecting malformations in a foetus within the first trimester.

The images are far more detailed than the grainy 2D images usually offered by the NHS.

Many hospitals offer paid-for 3D images but the NHS and the Health Protection Agency warned expectant parents against getting unnecessary scans simply to get the souvenir pictures.

The 3D images are far more detailed the grainy 2D scans that are normally provided by the NHS

The technology is allowing doctors to detect problems with a foetus much sooner than before

This 3D ultrasound scan of a foetus is taken at just six weeks into the pregnancy

30-week-old baby yawning for the camera

Be-Attitude–The “No Handed Bandit”

"You can be cool and not have hands" Love it!! We can all find something we lack to insert into this beatitude.

Pope Francis visits Cardinal Jorge Mejía in the hospital

Inspirational Dance

Unjust Use of Force, Not Really A Choice | Faith Family and Freedom

Unjust Use of Force, Not Really A Choice | Faith Family and Freedom.

A pregnant 16 year old Texas teen has filed a law suit against her parents claiming they are verbally and physically threatening her to get an abortion.  ABC News reported that the Texas Center for Defense of Life filed a lawsuit on her behalf stating that her parents “are violating her federal constitutional rights to carry her child to term by coercing her to have an abortion with both verbal and physical threats and harassment.” 

No Nobel Prize, BUT Remember THIS WOMAN

English: Irena Sendlerowa, chairman of children section of Polish underground Council to Aid Jews in Warsaw, who saved several thousands of Jewish children during Holocaust. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Irena Sendler (1910-2008) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Warsaw Ghetto: (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Corageous Heart Of Irena Sendler (Photo credit: robertpaulyoung)

Remember THIS WOMAN
Look at this woman - Let us never forget!
The world hasn't just become wicked...it's always been wicked.
The prize doesn't always go to the most deserving.

Irena Sendler
Died 12 May 2008 (aged 98)
Warsaw , Poland
During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a plumbing/sewer specialist.
She had an 'ulterior motive'.
She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews (being German).
Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger children).
She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.
The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the infants' noises.
During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children/infants.
She was caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.
After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family.
Most had been gassed. Those children she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.
Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.
She was not selected.
President Obama won................

According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, President Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". {What do you think? Has he brought peace or division?  Al Gore won also...trumped the more than 3,000 lives saved by this woman when you include the adults she also saved and not mentioned here}........................

In MEMORIAM - 63 YEARS LATER....... in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated!
Now, more than ever, with Iran , and others, claiming the HOLOCAUST to be 'a myth'.
It's imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.

Los Angeles Times / May 13, 2008

By Elaine Woo

LOS ANGELES - Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic social worker whose ingenuity and daring saved 2,500 Jewish children from extermination in the Holocaust, a feat that went largely unrecognized for 60 years, died yesterday in Warsaw. She was 98.
She had been hospitalized since last month with pneumonia, according to Pawel Maciag, a spokesman for the Polish embassy in Washington.
Ms. Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, but she saved twice as many lives as the German industrialist who sheltered 1,200 of his Jewish workers. But unlike Schindler, whose story received international attention in the 1993 movie "Schindler's List," Ms. Sendler and her heroic actions were almost lost to history until four Kansas schoolgirls wrote a play about her nine years ago.
"One person can make a difference," Megan Felt, one of the students who wrote the play, said yesterday of Ms. Sendler.
"Irena wasn't even 5 feet tall, but she walked into the Warsaw ghetto daily and faced certain death if she was caught. Her strength and courage showed us we can stand up for what we believe in, as well," said Felt, who now helps raise funds for aging Holocaust rescuers.
Ms. Sendler was born Feb. 15, 1910, in Otwock, a small town 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was an only child whose parents raised her to care about those in need. "I was taught that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not," she told the British newspaper Express in 2005. She was especially influenced by her father, a doctor who defied anti-Semites by treating sick Jews during outbreaks of typhoid fever. He died of the disease when Ms. Sendler was 9.
She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of Warsaw, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Ms. Sendler, imagining "the horror of life behind the walls," obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a sanitary worker, allowed to bring in food, clothes, and medicine.
By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis became clear, Ms. Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota, recruited 10 of her closest friends and began rescuing Jewish children.
They smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks, and coffins, sedating babies to prevent their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages.
Decades later, Ms. Sendler was still haunted by the parents' pleas, particularly those from families who ultimately could not bear to part from their children.

"The one question every parent asked me was, 'Can you guarantee they will live?' We had to admit honestly that we could not, as we did not even know if we would succeed in leaving the ghetto that day. The only guarantee was that the children would most likely die if they stayed."
Most of the children who left with Ms. Sendler's group were taken into Catholic convents, orphanages, and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. In the hope that she could reunite them with their families later, Ms. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend's garden.
She was captured by the Nazis in 1943 and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried.
During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. With her name on a list of executed prisoners, Ms. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.

Felt said that Ms. Sendler had begun her rescue efforts before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. "We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota," Felt said, which would mean that Ms. Sendler ultimately helped rescue some 3,000 Polish Jews. Read more here

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Cardinal Dolan Shocked Response to Pope Benedict XVI Resignation

Cardinal Dolan Shocked Response to Pope Benedict XVI Resignation

» We Are a Species That Kills Our Own Young | ABQ Journal

» We Are a Species That Kills Our Own Young | ABQ Journal by Sid Gutieerrez - Retired Astronaut

The issue of abortion really comes down to two very basic observations and the answer to a single question. First, the observations. If an abortion really involves the removal of nothing more than growing tissue within the womb, then no justification is necessary. If abortion actually involves taking the life of an innocent unborn child, then no justification is sufficient.

So the only question that needs to be resolved is whether that which is growing within the womb is tissue or child. Arguments not addressing this question are irrelevant.

Krueger provides the answer to this question in her article. She describes the proposed requirement to “view a play by play obstetric ultrasound and listen to the heartbeat of the unborn child” as a “gruesome experience.”

Why would it be gruesome? I recall my wife and I listening carefully in the doctor’s office for the heart beat of our unborn children. My grown daughters now proudly place ultrasound images of their unborn children on Facebook for all of their friends to see. These actions are viewed as beautiful and joyous, not as “cruel.” Click to read the full article

Encouragement for Dreamers, Writers, and Builders and Be-ers

Graphic Witness -“What I witnessed during my abortion still hits me like a sledgehammer”

How the Nine Days of Prayers Comforted Me While I Fought Demons......

January 19, 2013 By The Crescat

… With the upcoming March For Life, the topic of abortion seems to be every where at the moment. Because of this it’s been on my mind daily. Perhaps these daily reminders is what triggered the event that happened this morning.

My first waking thought hit me like a sledge hammer and I was instantly transported back ten years. I was standing alone in a sterile room wearing a hospital gown. In my hand was the sheet that I had pulled back off the portable suction machine that sat in the corner. Memories I thought I had drown bubbled up despite mentally wrestling with myself for years to un-see them.

What I am about to write next is horrifically graphic. I’d been debating with myself all day whether or not I should share this memory or just stuff it back down in the murky recesses of my addled brain but then I was reminded of something Elizabeth Scalia wrote.

And somehow, I can’t imagine that any of our elite female voices — the ones who, in every election year, can be counted on to take up the fake “war on women” mantras and tape PSA’s about “keeping abortion legal” because it “empowers women” — have any sense of the realities of these under-inspected, under-reported hell-holes, where the only ones being empowered are the profiteers.

And a hell hole it was. There is no way to advocate what I am about to describe. None. There is no reason, no exception, no situation in which what I saw could possibly be rationalized away as a “reproductive right” or an acceptable choice.

**** If you’re post-abortive what you are about to read might be too graphic and upsetting.****

I encourage you only to proceed with great caution. Please know I don’t write this to cause you any pain. I write this post so that people who advocate abortion can read what it is exactly they are advocating.

The vacuum. Read the rest here

Today marks the beginning of the 9 Days of Prayer, Penance and Pilgrimage sponsored by USCCB.

Begin by Change–Defend Life–Truly we have an obligation to try” (Obama)

The classic case of do as I say, not as I do?

Fully Human, Fully Alive II

When I worked in the NICU many years ago, I held a preemie that weighed less than 2 pounds  in my hand just like in this photo (inside an incubator , of course) It was so tiny and fragile.  I could see through its thin layer of skin. So amazing was this precious life!  It was fully human and fully alive, just very young gestationally.

You know, if I had simply clapped my hands, its little life would have been over.  Everyone would call me "a murderer."   Yet abortion does end such innocent lives every moment of every day, and no one is found gulity.

!

This is what we all looked like at 12 weeks in the womb. Legal to kill in all 50 states. Anyone think its not a person?

VIDEO of one of the smallest surviving infants.

Haunting Silence

Time to name the monster
Who stirs at night.
Who lives within
To hide our sin.

Time to make room,
In memory's caverns,
Rather than banish,
What simply won't vanish.

You had a choice once,
That gave birth to phantoms,
Making you live your choice,
Silencing not its voice.

The monster lives and grows,
Curled and caved in your heart.
When the Light goes out,
It walks about.

Its countenance a disfigurement,
Frightful yet your own.
Its dwelling through the years,
Fraught with reticence and tears.

Has it no right?
No place of rest?
When the day is done,
No place in the sun.

Most monsters are but part
Of our fallen selves,
Standing in the way
Of each new day.

The way out
Is also within.
Give the chimera a name.
Acknowledge its claim.

Give the silence life,
Life for the living,
For what you kill,
Haunts you still.

Time to embrace,
And wrap the past in Mercy.
Give it a womb,
Instead of a tomb.

©2012 Joann Nelander
All rights reserved