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Health Care != Death Planning

Death planning is not equal to health care. Just like abortion is not equal to family planning and driving your car full-speed into a utility pole is not equal to “maintenance”.

Here’s a short quote from a really good article on the subject:

According to Ben Smith over at Politico, President Barack Obama gave some theological weight to his health care plan during a phone call to a group of Rabbis the other day.  Referring to the belief that God decides during the Jewish New Year “who shall live and who shall die,” Obama told the rebs, “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death.”

In response to this statement I would like to make a subtle theological point:  No, we’re not.  For those of you who aren’t versed in the finer points of theology, let me try to simplify that for you:  No.  We’re not.  Or to put it even more simply:  No.  We.  Are.  Not.

And lest you miss out, I just have to share this gem from further down the in the article:

Oh, but I forgot that was only Jesus.  This is Barack Obama we’re talking about.

BAM! Life Happens

Yesterday, I was a little late leaving the house. When I pulled out onto the main road on my way to work, I immediately saw that oncoming traffic was being blocked at the top of the hill. I drove cautiously, not knowing what to expect.

I get really angry when people rubber-neck at accidents, thus slowing traffic for no good reason other than ghoulish curiosity. Thus, I try really hard not to do the same thing. Still, I couldn’t help but see the white SUV leaning oddly against a tree just off the road, crumpled on every side. A rollover. Sitting at the next light, I saw in my mirror the Care Flight helicopter landing. Scary. I said a quick prayer.

As I continued my commute, my brain in neutral, I wondered about the wreck. How could that truck have rolled right there. There was no intersection. The speed limit is only 45, not fast enough to take a full-sized SUV all the way over. The shoulder there is steep, with a good sized drop off were new pavement was added. I knows this well since I’ve ridden my bike over it a hundred times. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention, dropped off the ledge and over-corrected. Still, must have been speeding on top of that. Hmm.

Then my thoughts turned to empathy. What hidden danger could turn my life upside down on an average, mundane Tuesday morning? Something as simple has fiddling with the radio volume or glancing at the clock. It only takes a fraction of a second for someone to step out in front of you, a careless cyclist to shoot into traffic, or the car ahead to have a mechanical failure. Then… BAM! Life happens.

I read on the news (yeah, I know. Surfing at work. Shame.) about that mornings incident. A 75-year-old man and an unknown driver in a black Nissan seemed to be chasing each other, weaving through traffic. The old man lost control, rolled, ejected, and died. The headline reads, “Aggressor Dies in Road Rage Crash.” BAM! Life happened… and ended.

That evening, almost home, I saw the puddle of glass on the shoulder, the bruised and broken tree. The fragility of life washed over me. Treat every day with care. Treat every relationship with love. Treat every opportunity with relish. Because you never know when life will happen to you.

BAM!

Mexico Mission 2008 (The Lost Post)

[I discovered this unfinished post today. It kills me that I never finished this and posted it. Somehow, it slipped through the cracks. It’s long, and unfinished, but definitely worth the read.]

Glenview Baptist Church has a great mission program and has really done a great job of raising up young missionaries. We start off with sixth graders (about 12 years old) doing work projects at a sister church here in inner city Fort Worth. Middle school goes to San Antonio where the seventh graders (13) are on the “work crew”, usually sorting donations to a shelter or food bank, and painting a church and eighth graders (14) put on a four day vacation bible school (VBS). By the time our kids are in high school, they have a good understanding of working for God, working with kids, and the general mechanics of a mission trip. We take them to Mexico where they feed the poor, put on VBSs, do some hard labor and really get to see God working. The juniors and seniors (17 and 18) also have the opportunity to make a trip overseas where the main focus is evangelism.

Glenview also has a “family” mission trip each year around spring break. The last two years we’ve gone to New Orleans and done construction. This trip is a great opportunity for parents and kids to server together. Plus, “young” grown-ups like me (34) get to work along side “seasoned” folks (as old as 77) and pick up some great wisdom (not to mention some really great construction skills).

In the past few years, I’ve spent the majority of my vacation time on the family and middle school trips. But 2008 is my 5th year at my current job and I’ve got an extra week of vacation. I was able to add Mexico to the mix for the first time.

We pulled out of the church around 8AM on the first Saturday in July. The 10 hour drive was mostly uneventful other than some heavy rain. We crossed the border from Brownsville to Matamoros and checked in to our hotel. The culture shock began.

The hotel was really nice, all things considered. Air conditioned rooms with two full beds (for four people), a cozy restaurant (that served great Mexican food three times a day) and a gated parking lot (although with two mini-buses and three vans, it was more than cozy). By U.S. standards it was a “Motel 2”, but this is a mission trip, so it was much more than I was used to. With a bed and three squares a day, a missionary’s cup overfloweth.

Then there was the rain. It rained and rained and rained and rained. If you’ve never been to Mexico (other than the tourist traps) you may not know that their public works are not always up to snuff. Our five teams were assigned five small churches in a very poor neighborhood where only one or two streets are paved and drainage is something your nose experiences, but the roads don’t. The motto of our mission trips is “be flexible” and it was put to the test by ankle deep mud and knee deep “poo water”.

On Sunday we canvassed the neighborhoods handing out fliers and inviting kids to our VBS. Now, you have to picture this to really get the sense of it. You’ve got a handful of very American teenagers in their “Hollister” t-shirts and cargo shorts wading through mud and water in the pouring rain handing out soaked papers to people huddled in their ramshackle huts with cloth curtains for doors and concrete floors (if their lucky). On top of all that, the Americans have been coached to say about four words of Spanish, which they get wrong 50% of the time. “Eskwellah bibli-eh man-yawn-uh en la Eeglay-sia.” The reaction from the locals was a mix of terror and hilarity.

Sunday night, we all met at the “mother” church for their evening service. The two story cinder block building was one of the nicer in the area but the slick, greasy mud outside incapacitated two of our vans (including the one I drove for the week).

The service was amazing and the pastors and volunteers from the churches where we’d be working sang with us and prayed over us in a truly stirring experience. I was able to pick out a dozen or so words of the head pastor’s message, but I knew exactly what he was saying when he asked for strong men to roll up their pants and help us free our vans from the muck.

Lesson #1: The people we came to help would make great sacrifices for us at the drop of a hat. They understand God’s command to be a servant.

Monday, we started VBS. My team had 35 kids show up which was a lot and considering the continued rain and mud. We counted it a blessing. Another blessing came in the form of the local volunteers. They were well organized and well prepared to teach their lessons. That was a double blessing because we arrived with zero Spanish interpreters. I know just enough Spanish to embarrass myself, but as it turned out Enrique, the pastor of our church, knew exactly that much English. Between the two of us (with a lot of hand waving and sound effects) we were able to keep things rolling. “Glory de Dios!”

On Monday night we held church services at our local churches. We sang songs (in Spanish), performed a dramatic mime, and couple of our kids told their testimonies through a translator. Then one of our kids gave a short sermon, again translated. Our translator for the evening was “Grandpa” Paul, the missionary who’d coordinated the trip with our church. He’s nearly fluent in Portuguese, which is close enough to Spanish that he can make do.

That night, one of the other groups had to cancel their evening service due to the water around their church. (Later in the week, that church became known as “The Island”.) That meant that Steve Melton (the leader of the other group) got to share in the joy of driving down Camino Real, the “paved” street that ended near my group’s church.

For about four miles, you drive through a commercial area; “quaint” restaurants, fruit stands, mechanics, etc. Then, the buildings abruptly stop and on both sides of the road there’s nothing but empty fields. Depending how heavily it had rained, this was about where the road went under water.

It was at this same point that the “paved-ness” of the road became more academic. For about a half mile, under one or two feet of murky water, there hid colossal pot holes, nay, craters, some that spanned the whole road. They were like buried land mines waiting to swallow our van. There was at least one that was deep enough that, when I hit it at the wrong angle, our van’s frame hit the ground and we jolted to a stop. Fortunately, with sufficient long-skinny-pedal, I was able to back out and take a different angle.

Lesson #2: If you can’t see the road under the water, drive really slowly.

Out there, in what we called “the lake”, the water came up over the bumpers of our van. Steve was driving one of the mini-buses and the water came in through the double doors onto the entry steps. Honestly it was kind of fun. It had that tinge of adrenaline you get while four-wheeling, only amplified by driving a two-wheel-drive van loaded with teenagers in a place with no AAA and you can’t speak the language. What a rush!

Tuesday, more rain. After our morning VBS, we were supposed to do some door-to-door evangelism, but the rain and mud (and lack of translators) had squelched that idea. Instead, we made coffee in two of our big Gatorade coolers, bought a bunch of “sweet bread” and headed to the local hospital. One of the small church pastors took us there along with his niece and her boyfriend (Axa and Gustavo), all of whom could speak English. We handed out coffee, bread, and evangelism tracts. We shared the the Good News of Christ as best we could (the bilinguals helped a lot). We were only allowed to send small groups (two or three plus a translator) into the hospital to pray with people and share the Gospel, but that was enough to bring a few souls to Christ.

[I don’t know why I never finished this. I don’t remember enough now to do it justice. We made a trip to the dump to hand out sack lunches to the people who live there. Yes. They live in the dump. We also evangelized in the Matamoros tourist market. I can’t wait to go back!]

Mexico Meltdown

When you’re planning a mission trip to Mexico (which I am) on which you will be responsible for several dozen teenagers (which I will be) stories like this have a deep impact.

Read Yon’s note, then follow his link to listen to the radio news piece. In a world as complex and interconnnected as ours, don’t take anything for granted.

It’s not just sick. It’s a sickness!

I hope you watched the Mona Lisa Project video I linked to yesterday. Yesterday the news broke that Planned Murderhood fired the employee from the first video, because, of course, this was an isolated incident, yada, yada, not policy, blah, blah, lies, lies lies.

Today, the project released a second video, featuring a second Planned Murderhood clinic, filmed in a different town on the same day as the first, and not one, but two employees pretending to ignore the ages claimed by the undercover girl.  “I don’t want to know the age.” This comes from both employees when the girl claims to 13 and empregnated by a 31-year-old “boyfriend.”

“We don’t really care about … the age of the boyfriend. It’s consensual. It’s your choice.”

Wow. At 13? It’s consensual? It’s your choice? These people are either completely stupid, or purely evil.

Story via Hot Air, with video.

Just Sick

Ya know, if we could just go one day without bad news

A UCLA student (that means adult) posed as a 13-year-old girl claiming to be pregnant at the hands of a 31-year-old man. (Yes, very disturbing, but fortunately not true in this case.) She brought a hidden camera into an Indiana Planned Murderhood clinic and caught the clinic nurse on tape advising this girl, who she believed to be a pregnant 13-year-old, to lie and break state law to get an abortion and avoid prosecution for the adult “boyfriend.”

Sick, people. Just plain sick.

The nurse was fired by PP, but the Indiana Attourney General may still press charges against Planned Parenthood.

This was only part of the larger “Mona Lisa Project”, exposing PP‘s pattern of scoff-law behavior and manipulation of minors to feed its abortion machine. (See the Mona Lisa Project’s website and scroll down to “Timeline”.)

Your tax dollars at work? You betcha. PP gets over $300 million a year of your money (and turns a $100 million profit).

Don’t let anyone tell you that Planned Parenthood is anything less than an abortion-at-all-costs murder mill.

Full story (with video) via Hot Air.

On a Serious Note

This week’s WFHF video is not a knee slapper. It’s a heart tugger and a thought provoker.

Sorry. I’ll get sillier next time. Back to the fun stuff. This is just something that I had to do.

Watch it anyway. It could change your life.

On a technical note, good grief! I have GOT to figure out how to get better sound quality. I tried everything on this video (as evidenced by the many different sounding audio clips… Sorry). It was windy outside and from a distance, some of the audio was just plain usuable. I have a mic jack on my camera, but no good mic to use, and even if I did, I’d really need a wirele$$. Sigh.

Now That Thar’s Funny

My wife, Tammy, works for a company that imports and wholesales clothing accessories (belts, purses, hats, etc.). Most of their customers are big-name stores, like Wal-Mart, Target, Kohl’s, etc. But once in a while Tammy handles an order from an unexpected customer.

Today, she processed an order from the mega-church in Houston pastored by the king of the “Prospertiy Gospel“, Joel Olsteen. What would such a church be ordering from a clothing accessory company, you ask.

Wallets.

Brilliant.

Five Little Letters That Could Save Millions of Lives

Please watch this news report and listen very carefully. See if you catch the word that is almost entirely left out.

Clicky clicky for ABC News video.

Did you watch it? You have to watch it first. I’ll wait.

The issue of stem cell research is pretty much out of the news right now. Allow me to refresh your memory. Democrats (in general) have been pushing to keep federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Hollywood loves to have their bleeding-heart fund raisers for embryonic stem cell research. Michael J. Fox has become the poster child for embryonic stem cell research.

Have you caught on yet?

The reason conservatives, like Bush, are against embryonic stem cell research is that it requires a fertilized embryo. That means a viable, human life has to be created and then destroyed in order to collect embryonic stem cells. It’s a pro-life issue. It’s about the sanctity of life. And those who really know what they’re talking about (which excluded everyone in Hollywood) know that embryonic stem cell research is built directly on top of the cornerstone of Row v. Wade. Life is disposable so long as you can come up with a sappy, bleeding-heart reason to dispose of it.

However, there has been zero success in using embryonic stem cells to cure anything.

Despite ABC’s best efforts to use this piece to pump up “stem cell research”, they missed one tiny little five letter word that the local reporter slipped in there. ADULT!

This brave man has experienced miraculous recovery thanks to adult stem cells. That means that stem cells were collected from a living, mature adult human who survived the donation process. You can donate stem cells and walk out of the hospital with no ill effects whereas an embryo is destroyed when the stem cells are collected from it. And there has been huge success in treatments using adult stem cells.

So the next time you hear some pinko lefty crying about how heartless conservatives are for blocking stem cell research and how many people’s lives could be improved, you now have the ammunition to destroy their sappy, psuedo-science, monkey hurlage.

Knowledge is power!!

(Thanks to Danger Dave‘s wife Amber, for passing on the link.)

Fistfull of Shells

Last night, our youth group’s high school minister, Chadd, gave a fantastic talk. It was a little bit about selfishness, a little bit about materialism, and a lot about being busy. He used a fantastic illustration by Rob Bell, which I paraphrase here.

Rob was at the beach with his kids. The kids were collecting fistfulls of small shells and shell fragments, visually stimulating, but completely worthless. Then, they saw, floating on the waves, a large star fish, a real prize. He son ran out into the waves to collect it, but came back without it. When Rob asked his son why he had not retrieved the treasure, he replied, “I couldn’t. My hands were full of shells.”

How many times do we miss out on opportunites to do amazing things, to serve God, to change the world, because we are clinging so tightly to the mundane “stuff” in our lives.

Let that one sink in.

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