Long day in the hospital

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Today was a long day. Debbie had an appointment for a blood transfusion at 10 am. I went to the university to teach my classes, and then over the hospital at around 1 pm. She was still waiting for the six hour procedure to begin at 3 pm. I lost my cell phone, found it, knocked off my side view mirror by colliding with a mail box.

While I was sitting in the hospital with Debbie, I remembered trying to write the last 10 pages of my masters thesis in 2005 while Debbie was getting surgery to install her port. My entire academic process has overlapped with her battle with cancer.
I left the hospital to run over to FIU for a quick dance lesson with Jennifer. The salsa classes really reduce my blood pressure and keep me from getting depressed. Joy is an elusive quality but very real.

Thank you Lord for giving grace for this day. Now I ask you to grant me rest, and refreshment and recovery for Debbie and a new day full of new grace tomorrow. Amen

Sons, Mosquitos, voices and JOY in the Everglades

My son was born in 1986. During his early years, I was a ministry work-a-holic and I did not spend as much time with him as I should have. When I did spend time with him, I was often tense and irritable and had my mind on really super important “ministry and pastoral” issues (please notice the subtle hint of irony). Sometime around his 13th birthday, I realized that I was way behind the eight ball with him and started trying to make up for lost time.

I started taking him on camping trips going kayaking with him as often as possible. One year, we went camping in the Everglades National Park near Flamingo, as far as one can go south on the Florida mainland in the Everglades. We sat up our tent near the water. The next morning I woke up early and fixed my coffee on a camp stove. He was still sleeping by 8 am after I finished my coffee and so I decided to go for a prayer walk. It was my habit to spend some time reflecting each year between Christmas and New Year’s while considering my goals for the coming year. I had brought with me a journal to write in and several ministry oriented books to read.

I took off walking on a heavily overgrown path that wound West along Florida Bay. Although it was the fourth week of December, it was rather warm and the mosquitos were out in force. I soon found my self slapping mosquitos with both hands while walking briskly and trying to pray. I eventually blurted out “God, what do you want me to work on this year?” I blurted it out almost angrily, frustrated with the dive bombing insects. You have to understand, my prayers often sound like a quarrel with God. I try to justify it as “manly” prayer … kind of like king David exhorting God to wake up and punch out the wicked.

When I asked “What do you want me to work on?” I clearly had in mind a project or a measurable goal. An action item. Several things flitted through my mind … but from a place deep in my spirit, I heard a surprising one word answer: “Joy.”

That was it—Joy.

I prayed a second time.

“No, God. I don’t think you understand (oh the monumental narcissism of that statement!) I mean – what do you want me to WORK on?” A second time came the monosyllabic answer: “JOY.” That’s it. Just one word, no explanation at all.
When I returned to our camp a half hour later, I found John awake and waiting for me. I told him immediately that I had been praying. I said “the strangest thing happened to me—when I asked God what he wanted me to work on, I thought I heard a simple one word answer – “JOY.”

My son looked at me with a crooked, ironic grin. “Dad—he said—that sound like God was really talking to you if you ask me.” I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but that moment stuck with me over the next 11 years, as my wife was diagnosed with stage 4, metastasized cancer, my family with through a series of life-altering crisis and I watched my so-called ministry slowly suffocate and die.

When I finally came to terms with the fact that God really was speaking to me, and that the most important thing I could “work on” in the year 2001, was joy, I slowly became determined to be joyful. Grimly and soberly determined. Clinching my teeth determined. I would learn to be a joyful person even if it absolutely killed me, damn-it! And it almost did.

Drawing inspiration from Tom Selleck and Blue Bloods

I was rather looking forward to the empty nest syndrome a few years ago. I’m still waiting for it to start (I’ll get back to Tom Selleck below, trust me).

My wife and I have the blessing of having all of our adult children living in close proximity to us. Three older girls are all married – the youngest, a son, is single and is living with us while he finishes his university studies. There are five delightful grandchildren. My mother-in-law now spends part of the year living in a trailer next to our house and has coffee with us each morning. Four generations living within a 20 minute walk of one another. Ideal right?



I have had a ‘love-hate’ relationship with the idea of family my entire life. I have a wonderful mom and dad, now in their mid-eighties. They are healthy, lively and fun people. Nevertheless, they went through some tough times in mid-life, which just happened to be my early adolescents years. There was conflict, some of it a bit traumatizing for me. I vaguely remember being terrified by the word ‘divorce’ as it floated around briefly in our household.

I grew up and moved away into my adult life taking my traumas with me – and they grew up into mature adult life, and learned how to live with one another and have recently completed over 60 years of married life together.

Surprisingly, I also went through some tough times in my mid-life which also traumatized my children, some of whom were just entering into early adolescence and others who were in the early elementary school period. I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years trying to make amends, trying to heal the damage that I inadvertently caused. I kept thinking that there would be an end point – a finish line to parenthood that I could triumphantly burst through and be done with it – with high fives around -- but alas, that has not been the case (I’m getting around to Tom Selleck and Blue Bloods soon, I really am!).

After nearly six years of riding the roller coaster of stage 4 metasticized breast cancer with my courageous wife Debbie, last year I came to a point of fatigue in which I wanted to resign from parenthood, or at least retire. A friend of mine told me how her parents moved across the continent when she and her sister became young adults. I have to admit that the thought was tempting (my kids are great, but, everyone is human, we have all sinned and come short, and there is always drama in every family!).

Enter Tom Selleck and his new TV series Blue Bloods. This is about a 4-generation family of cops in New York. The father (Tom) is the Police Commissioner, his retired dad was the former commisioner, the oldest son (played by Danny Walhberg) is a dectative, a divorced daughter is a assistant District Attorney and the youngest son is a rookie beat cop. Another son was killed in the line of duty and there are several grandchildren who want to grow up to be -- you guessed it -- cops!

Here is the point of this story. Every episode of Blue Bloods shows Seleck sitting at the head of the table as the entire family gathers for Sunday dinner. Also, in almost every episode there is conflict. Some leaves the table angry. Almost invariably, Seleck’s character says “I’ll handle it” and follows the offended family member out of the room for a talk. He listens patiently, and says something loving and wise. Problem solved, conflict resolved, relationship retored and family continues to rule!

Watching Blue Bloods and Selleck’s character gave me the desire and the commitment not to turn in my dad badge and go off on retirement, not matter how appealing that option seems to me. I realize that a lot of my aversion to constant conflict is connected to childhood traumas and unrealistic expectations of life. Life is conflictual and families do fight. That is JUST the way it is. Dads, we have to man up and do our thing. I heard someone today define a father as someone who says “no!” If dads stop being dads, what kind of world would we live in? Probably a world pretty close to the world actually live in! Most dads are missing in action – others check out early.

So, regardless of the drama, regardless of the conflicts, regardless of the messes, especially including the ones that I often inadvertently make myself while trying to be a dad, I will soldier on … I will cook Sunday dinner, and light the Sunday fire pit, and send out the invitations … so that the house will be filled.

Thank you Tom Selleck!

Ideology and Immigration

The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God ~ Leviticus 19:34.

Exodus 22:21

Exodus 23:9

Leviticus 19:33


My problem with political ideologies of either the right or the left, is that they provide pre-designed templates to apply to the issues, rather than forcing one to think through specific political and social problems on the substance of the issues.

Karl Marx used the term “mystification” to describe the distorting aspect of ideology to deceive people into accepting a condition of oppression or exploitation. This is why he called religion the “opiate of the masses” to the extent that religion provided an ideology that allowed the lower classes to be lulled into a state of exploitation and justified economic injustice. Subsequent thinkers pointed out that the distorting effects of ideology can be applied not only to the exploitation of the poor and workers, but also in a socialist or communist context where the workers are supposedly in charge, and yet terrible repression occurred. In other words, the distortion of truth that happens with ideology is equally likely on the left or on the right. Ideology serves to cloak the naked grasp for power with robes of righteousness and truth. But Ideology inevitably distorts truth to make it fit the left or right template. If the truth is a square peg, it must be rounded out to fit into the round ideological hole.

This makes it quite difficult to be a non-ideological truth seeker. It is much easier to have someone hand you a pre-designed template, than it is to try to understand and think through the substance of relevant issues of our day, each one on its own merits.

This brings me to immigration reform and illegal immigration. I have dear friends on the right and the left who hold entirely incompatible views on this issue. Nevertheless, there are very clear practical and moral issues involved that demand sorting out the truth and avoiding empty political rhetoric, nativist fear and populist ideology.

Here are some relevant facts on this issue:

-Most estimates indicate that there are at least 17 million illegal immigants in the U.S.A., 12 million alone from Mexico. If these people are removed from our economy, as some suggest, hotel chains will not be able to clean rooms, tomatos and strawberries will not be picked – which Americans are going to be willing to take those jobs EVEN if they are unemployed? Answer – almost none. What are the conservatives going to do, put them on boxcars and send them south? paLEEEASE -- give me a freakin break ....

-Illegal immigrants should be brought into the legal system and required to pay taxes and contribute to health care and education.

-By resolving the status of 17 million people living underground, the Customs and Border agents would be freed to focus most of their resources on stopping terrorists at the border.

-Morally, the Judeo-Christian tradition is very, very clear that immigrants and aliens should be treated with kindness, respect and mercy.

To consider one possible 'Christian' view in favor of rational immigration reform see this article by Allison Johnson quoting Rev. Jim Wallis.

Anti-Immigrant Law Passes in Arizona, ‘We Will Not Comply’

It is amazing to me, how Christian conservatives who are very literal about the scriptures in some areas can so easliy dodge the plain and simple imperatives of scripture when it suits them. Now, having said that, it does not make me a liberal. That is part of the problem with the ideological polarization ... people are forced to choose sides -- I refuse to do so. I choose to be on Jesus' side ...

but, on the specific issue of immigration reform, the weight of evidence, legal and economic rationality and moral imperative tilts clearly against the conservative point of view. I have always liked and respected John McCain as a man of prinicple who was able to work pragmatically across the aisle with Democrats. If he is forced to support the misguided Arizona law for political reasons in order to get the fearful and angry votes of Arizona conservatives, I will be deeply disappointed. Do the right thing John -- even if it ends your career. Go out on a high note!

Why I liked Avatar

I know that people are mostly divided about the value of AVATAR and that it mostly got overlooked in the Emmys. “Great visual effects—unimaginative story-line” goes the criticism.

I also know that some Christian theological types have a problem with the world-view and the religious message expressed in the movie. Basically, it is native American pantheism. But guess what? We need to wake up to the fact that we do not live in a Christian culture and should not expect movies in our culture to have a conservative Christian worldview. When they do, we can be pleasantly surprised.

Let me try to draw out at least one positive aspect, one redemptive analogy, at least for Christians, from this story.

The message is anti-colonial, which is a “Jesus”-type message (at least more so than an Imperial message). The message is cross-cultural and missional in a non-imperial sort of way. The message is one of delight in infinite cultural diversity straight from Genesis 11 and Romans 5:9 that respects every culture, every language and values the ability to cross over cultural boundaries to learn new languages and learn new sets of cultural values. This was the message of the 1990s Jesuit movie, set in 1770s Paraguay called The Mission. One of my all time favorite movies! This was also, at least partly, the message of Dances with Wolves which I loved! (my main objection to Dances with Wolves was the one-sided presentation of military white guys = bad/Indians = good. Same with Avatar)

Having lived in another culture, learned another language, and having acquired the ability to appreciate a view of the world from different cultural lenses (in my case, Colombia), I am always thrilled to watch the process of humbling, stripping, unlearning and relearning that an adult goes through in cross-cultural adaptation.

Phil. 2 describes the original missionary process of cultural stripping, of unlearning and “laying aside” of cultural perogatives that Christ went through in the incarnation. The first seven steps were downward steps. He did not grasp for equality, he surrendered his divine perspective, he submitted, he humbled himself, he took on humanity, he became a Jewish carpenter in a specific place and time, and he became obedient to the point of death.

This process of “letting go” is absolutely necessary in cross-cultural adaptation. One cannot learn to understand the Colombian mindset without “letting go,” at least temporarily, the U.S. mindset. One cannot understand another culture without taking a step back from one’s own culture and learning to hold it loosely and view it objectively.

As AVATAR illustrates, there is an aspect of death in letting go of one’s own identity, as Jake Sully did, in order to become a Na’vi. And it is never just a uni-directional, cross-cultural experience: as Fernando Ortiz demonstrated in his study of Cuba in the 1930s, it is a bi-directional TRANScultural experience in which the change flows both ways.

And that my dear reader, is the primary reason that I liked Avatar. My God is a divine Father not a divine Mother (and yes, I enjoyed the Shack) and stands apart and above his own marvelous creation. I get it. But, there are still lessons that can be learned from this visually stunning movie and the story, repeated in many other formats and venues of a savior that leaves behind his own culture to take on a new identity in order to understand a people and to protect them from evil.

Crisis in the system?

This past week Senator Evan Bayh announced that he would retire from politics. Senator Bayh was disillusinoed by the current extreme cynnical polarization of the political process.

Disillusioned Bayh advocates electoral “shock” to broken system

Several years ago I read a book by German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas (Legitimation Crisis) in which he points out inherent contradictions in the modern Western capitalist system which he predicted would lead to cycles of ever increasing economic and political crises.

In the light of the Great Recession of 2008 and the current gridlock of Congress (and an 18% approval rating by the public) seem to bear out his predictions. Recent events reminds me of a passage in the New Testament (Hebrews 12:27).

Below are the wise encouragements of a prominent conservative Christian leader calling for less polarization and more communication between the parties.



-- source --- THE TRANSFORUM


Here is a question for you--do you think the system can be fixed? And please don't start with theory or scripture ... start with the pragmatic political world and the democratic system we live in.

extremism on the right and on the left

I’m deeply disturbed by the increasing extremism of political views; both on the left and the right. I have close friends on both sides of the political spectrum; I find it increasingly difficult to have a reasonable conversation with either side.

I suppose the extremism on the right bothers me more, because most of my conservative friends claim to be followers of Jesus, and many of them have been life-long friends. My friends on the left are more recent acquaintances and tend to be young, secular academics with a high level of idealism.

The problem is that my friends on the left have no friends on the right to challenge their thinking—by the same token my Christian friends on the right have surrounded themselves with other politically conservative Christians and information sources from the right—there is no check and balance—no civil dialogue. This reminds me of a line from Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed”.

Apparently I am cursed with the ability to look at both sides of an issue, weigh a variety of news sources from both right, left and center in order to resolve my own views of the specific issue on its own merits without resorting to either left or right ideological paradigms to aid me in my evaluation process. One of my conservative friends this week told me that she likes to keep it “simple.” The problem is, life is not simple--its complicated.

Here is a link to a open letter from Brian McLaren to Evangelical Christians: I heartily add my voice to his in this appeal.

http://www.brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/an-open-letter-to-conservative-c.html

I was disturbed this week in a conversation with a life-long Christian friend to find that we had absolutely no common ground to discuss health care reform. She sent me news articles from some fringe right-wing news sources regarding “death panels” and health care, and I responded with what I thought was a reasonable article from the New York Times. She said, “I don’t know how you can stomach reading that stuff’ … I was left speechless. To emphasize that I am in the center and not on the left, two weeks ago, I found myself in a spirited debate with two leftist friends, in which I was defending Sarah Palin. I was amazed at their vitriol and hatred for this bright young woman. We finally had to agree to disagree. I am perplexed and concerned about this increasing polarization on the right and the left and the inability to have any kind of reasonable dialogue.

This has happened before in history, and religion has been a key part of it. It happened in the late 1920s in Mexico in the Cristero war between Catholic priests and peasants and the secular Mexican government. It happened in the 1930s in the build-up to the Spanish Civil War in which 7000 priests were killed. It happened in 1948 to 1956 in La Violencia in Colombia in which 200,000 people perished. In each case there was a growing Manichean discourse, of “good” vs. “evil” and of the “armies of God” against the forces of the “devil” before the outbreak of violence. In Colombia, our evangelical brothers and sisters were considered to be on the side of the devil and their churches were burned and hundreds of evangelicals were killed by well-intentioned Catholics “in the name of Christ.”

Alexis de Tocqueville correctly saw that the strength of democracy in the United States came from the separation of church and state, and our religious pluralism, in which people learned to “agree to disagree” without resorting to violence. He was impressed that the American public was highly religious, and yet religiously tolerant, willing to allow a variety of religious and public views. This attitude of mutual toleration and civil discourse seems to be rapidly disappearing in our nation.

If you, my dear reader, are on the political right, may I appeal to you to develop some friendships with people on the left, especially if you call yourself by the name of Christ? And if you are on the left, would you consider developing some friendships with thoughtful people on the right? We cannot allow ourselves to become Lebanon, or even worse, Israel-Palestine. Our democracy is at stake, not to mention the influence of the gospel.

The Cylons are coming? Tweeting with the Mind.

My wife and I enjoy watching the updated version of the Battlestar Galactica series (2004) staring Edward James Olmos. We are currently in Season 3.The premise of the series is that the human race was nearly destroyed by a race of machines with artificial intelligence, who had been created by humans and enslaved until they rebelled. Eventually, these machines come to self-awareness and design or clone human bodies for themselves into which they download their consciousness. A war ensues between Cylons (the human-looking machines) and humans. A group of forty-five plus thousand human beings flee through space in ships, pursued and hounded by the Cylons. Oddly enough, there is a religious theme running through the series. The humans are polytheistic and the Cylons are monotheistic. The Cylons know that the only thing they lack to become fully human is to learn to love.

This is a similar theme of war between humans and machines in the Terminator series. Most machines are bad, but some have been reprogrammed to protect humans such as John Conner.

I am generally an early adaptor with technology – at least earlier than many of my friends (although not all: MC and JJ come to mind). I have been on Facebook for several years and I recently started playing around with Twitter. (I only use Twitter rougly once a week to send out prayer requests for Deb and our "god-party" - it sends them directly to the cell phones of those following me as a text msg.) I have to admit that I have not gotten up to speed with Skype, mostly because I am normally too busy to spend much time on the telephone. I have had long and occasionally contentious arguments with some of my friends about the value of adapting to and using technology to facilitate long distance communications in relationships. It has been my argument that the new communications technologies make participation in long-distance, virtual community not only possible, but potentially a virtue. However my friends rightly point out that there are negative cultural and ethical downsides to new technology (See Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology).

I was stunned recently to see a headline on CNN that someone had sent a message on Twitter using their mind: Brain-Twitter project offers hope to paralyzed patients. When I mentioned this to several friends, they looked at me strangely, like I was delusional. Nevertheless, it is true. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, using no keyboard but just a red cap with electrodes, were able to send a message on twitter (a “tweet”) on March 31 by just focusing on the letters.

Technology seems to just keep making it faster and easier to send communications fluidly around the world. Visual reality can be captured as digital images, edited in numerous formats, uploaded, reassembled and sent around the world. Politicians now have to be careful what they say off the cuff, because of amateur reporters with digital cameras capturing visual and auditory film and uploading it to blogs. (See Friedman's The World is Flat)Blogging and twitter gives voice to anyone who has anything to say, whether it has value or not. Newspapers and professional reporters doing hard news are rapidly disappearing, yielding to the amateur digital competition (see the Newspaper Death Watch).

And now, I will be able to send my thoughts to your cell phone via Twitter. As long as I keep my thoughts under 140 characters! Apparently the Cylons and the Terminator are reflections of humanity's underlying anxiety about unchecked technological change. What will be my first mental tweet?

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God will guard your minds (140 characters)

For more information about research into sending messages with Twitter using the mind, check the following online articles:

Video: Brain Interface Creates Twitter Messages

Researcher use brain interface to post to Twitter

Telegraph.uk: Scientist updates Twitter using only his mind

Blog commentary on the Social Mosse: "Twitter on my mind"

The big space blob, the sparrow and me (or, why I am not worried about swine flue)

I remember when I was an adolescent, living on a farm in Ohio, I used to go out in the fields and lay on my back on a hillside and watch the clouds float by. I remember feeling a sense of awe and peace – closeness to the presence of God. Psalm 19 says “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” in the NIV. I like the NASB even better which says “their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.”

An online article from National Geographic caught my eye this past week. Scientists were able to see a “space blob” that was 13 Billion miles away. Actually, it was also 13 Billion years away, in the past. This blows my mind.

When scientists “see” objects in space, not only are they immense distances away through space, they are immense distances away through time because of the time it takes light to travel through space. So when the scientists were observing this sudden flash of light 13 billion miles away – the most distant object in space ever seen through telescopes – they (the astronomers) are also looking 13 billion years back through time.

Click here for the full article:

This object, called Himiko, existed only 600,000 years after the “big bang” of creation, which is not a very long time on a scale of 13 billion years. Scientists believe that someday, they may have telescopes powerful enough to look all the way back to the beginning of creation … 13.6 Billion years ago.

Here is what amazes me … to meditate on the immense infinitude of the God who created this spatial object 13 billion years ago, and who manages and holds all of creation together. Col. 1:17 Says of Christ, who in orthodox theology was present at the creation with the Father and the Spirit (see Genesis 1:1), that “in him all things hold together.”

Quantum physics is studying the minutely small quantums that make up the most infinitismal basis for reality. Astronomers are reaching out to the moment of creation through their telescopes. Science and faith are ultimately in harmony – faith can “see” realities that science cannot yet discover.

Think about this for just a moment: The God that loves me and cares for me, the God that is small enough to be a baby in the manger or to rest comfortably in a virgin’s womb, is also the God that is right now 13 billion miles away managing the area of the universe which, once-upon-a-time, contained Himiko. Not only is he (our God) there right now, but he IS there 13 Billion years ago (human language begins to fail at this point). AND YET, while he is managing powerful universal forces 13 billion years away and in the past, he also finds time to feed the sparrow, number the hairs on my head, comfort me in my daily struggles.

Wow. That is all I can say. It puts all of our temporary light affliction into an amazing perspective. Our minds simply lock up when we try to imagine this kind of infinitely great, all powerful, all present, infinitely loving and infinitely just God. Human language just will not suffice. No wonder he had to take on humanity and come and live among us to give us a human-sized, comprehensible image of himself “in which all the fullness of deity dwells.”

If he can manage a universe that big, and possibly even multiple universes, I don't think I need to worry about swine flu. If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his concern, I will not die without his knowledge and permission.

I think I will go out tonight and lie in my backyard and look at the stars. It makes all my problems shrink.

Click here for an NPR webcast on All Things Considered about the phenomenon

A Biblical Approach to the Economic Crisis

NOTE: I found an excellent theological analysis of our current economic mess written by Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggeman, professor emeritus of Columbia Theological Seminary. I am pasting in the first part of the article below. You can access the entire article HERE.
........................
So far as I know, the Bible says nothing explicit about subprime loans and the financial implications of such risky economic practice. There is a great deal, nonetheless, that the Bible has to say about such a crisis as we now face. I will comment in turn on a biblical perspective of an analysis of the crisis and a biblical perspective for an alternative economic practice.

While the specifics of the current market collapse are peculiarly modern, biblical perspectives are pertinent because the fundamental issues of economics are constant from ancient to contemporary time, constants such as credit and debt, loans and interest, and the endless tension between haves and have-nots.
We may identify three dimensions of the theological-moral foundations of the current economic crisis:

AUTONOMY. A sense of the isolated, self-sufficient economic individual is deeply rooted in modern rationality and comes to full expression in U.S. “individualism” that resists communitarian connectedness and imagines the individual person to be the primary unit of social reality. Such an individual is completely autonomous, owes no one anything, is accountable to no one, and can rely on no one except himself or herself.

Such a self (perceived almost exclusively as an economic self) is without restraint and is self-authorized to enact Promethean energy to organize life around one’s own needs, issues, and purposes. The autonomous, self-sufficient self takes as the proper venue for life “the market” and understands the market as a place of self-advancement at the expense of all others who are perceived either as rivals and competitors or as usable commodities.

This same autonomy is articulated in the Bible under the rubric of “the fool” who says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). The capacity to live without the gift or summons of God has immediate practical implications, for autonomy sets the fool over against the neighbor, most especially the poor neighbor. The one who says in Psalm 10:4 “There is no God” is the one who seeks out neighbors for exploitation: “They lurk that they may seize the poor; they seize the poor and drag them off in their net. They stoop, they crouch, and the helpless fall by their might. They think in their heart, ‘God has forgotten, He has hidden his face, he will never see it’” (Psalm 10:9-11).

.... continued at www.wondercafe.ca