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Yesterday our staff celebrated my birthday at a local Tex Mex restaurant. It was so much fun. Several of the directors of our ministry were in town from various countries for a fund-raising banquet, so  they were there too. It made is so special.

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JB kept us laughing with all his “Jewish jokes.” He is one of the funniest guys I know.

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That’s my sweet daughter on the end.

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Dear friends around the table…

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Hard-working staff gals… 

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More friends and staff…

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JB’s daughter is too cute! 

One of the best parts of the celebration was that they sang “Happy Birthday” to me in seven languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Hebrew, and Russian.

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Early Bird

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It’s my birthday today…

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Glass and Light

Zion’s Town Criers

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There’s a town crier on every corner of the world’s stage—animated, influential, convincing—demanding attention. In this age of high-tech communication, competition is fierce. Occasionally, these sounds drowned out my own voice—even more frustrating—my heart.

With so many voices, sometimes, I don’t feel heard. Since I want family and friends—or occasionally anyone that will listen—to know my thoughts, I speak louder, more forcefully.

There are a lot of town criers where we live. Wayne and I just moved to Jerusalem. From our living room and kitchen windows, we have a broad panorama of Mt. Zion, Mt. of Olives, and the Arab village, Silwan.

Wow—Mt. Zion! That’s what I think every morning when I open the shutters. I sit on the veranda and drink morning coffee and pinch myself.

King David called Mt. Zion the perfection of beauty where the presence of God of dwells. He also wrote that God loves the gates of Zion and has chosen it, and from there, The King will rule the nations. Imagine… Zion is the joy of the whole earth…the place where God’s fire burns.

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Mt. Zion is lackluster and only a hill. The slops descending into the Hinnom Valley are arid and brown with a few roughed dirt roads that wind around. The Pope’s Way (built after Pope Paul VI’s visit in 1964) is close to the top and a few ancient olives trees are scattered throughout. Hotels, parks, restaurants, an amphitheater, and cinema dot the landscape at various levels.

It is a place of historic significance and blessed hope to the Jew and Christian.  Before Jerusalem was united in 1967, King David’s tomb was the most revered place to pray, because Jews could not get to the Western Wall. Christians have honored its geography and symbolic meanings for centuries.

Perched on top of Mt. Zion are the Dormition Abbey, King David’s tomb, the gravesite of Oskar Schindler, and the Room of the Last Supper—each claiming its place as “king of the mountain.” But no owns Mt. Zion. It belongs to those that embrace its meaning and worship its Creator.

Sound resonates here without microphones or amplifiers. At night, the town criers of Mt. Zion pump music into the air with classical and pop concerts, weddings, bar- and bat-mitzvahs, festivals, or parties—occasionally several at once.

During the day, there are different sounds—the routine noises from the people that live here. The Dormition Abbey rings its bells every few hours during daylight. Both the close-by Arab villages broadcast Islamic prayers from the minarets at various intervals. During Ramadan, the loud beating of drums with eerie chants echo through the valley and up the mountain at three in the morning, waking the sleep of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, even atheists within earshot.

We hear the music and booms of fireworks from nearby Arab weddings. Sirens wail through the valley twenty minutes before the Sabbath, a warning for all Orthodox Jews to return home. They also signal times of memorial or impending danger.

Packs of starving dogs run wild on the hills and valley—snarling, barking, and howling—claiming the territory as their own. Their deprivation drives them to meanness, wayward beasts suffering from a dreadful lack of human kindness, food, and water. Continue Reading »

Soul Pancake

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Rainn Wilson who plays Dwight Schrute on the popular and award-winning series The Office has created a very interesting website, Soul Pancake, to tackle “life’s big questions.” The website connects spirituality and creativity and comes up with “spiritivity.” Rainn, who is a follower of the Baha’i religion, says he wants to “de-lameify” questions about God… 

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‘Make Love not War’

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Growing up in the sixties, “Make love not war,” was a common sentiment. It was more than a slogan. It became a belief system. And it sounded so free thinking, cutting edge, and benevolent all at once. Opposing war–the Vietnam war to be exact–was popular at the time. So those who spoke out or demonstrated against it became cultural icons. They became famous rebels with a cause. Counter-culture was in, and it was cloaked in “peace and love.”

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Americans hate war. They have always hated war–even before Vietnam; but in our early years, that hatred did not keep our forefathers from volunteering. Their duty to country outweighed their conveniences, and sacrifices were common everyday happenings. Thank God for those men that went forward during the tough times. Self pleasure and self-preservation didn’t register on their personal Richter scales of comfort.

It wasn’t until Vietnam that a strata of society actually rebelled against selfless duty and the exiting culture and made up slogans like, “Make love not war.” Not only did they make up the rules of the day, but they followed their own rules. They made love and not war; they dodged the draft, burned the flag, mocked soldiers and authority, and got high on LSD.

It was the Jesus culture and the outpouring of salvation across the country and world that rescued society from crashing and burning completely. God had mercy on us.

Some of those radical “Jesus freaks” are stilling rocking the world and making an eternal difference. But that’s another post…

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Dennis Prager says, “The ’60s redefined narcissism as idealism.” I couldn’t agree more. Personal preferences, likes, or dislikes became sacrosanct. And these threads are still woven deeply into the fabric of our society.

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I am not writing about the rightness or wrongness of war. I am talking about how Americans idealize–even worship–individual feelings and allow these preferences to dictate the wrongs or rights of culture.

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As a parent, I know from experience that babies come into the world selfish. Much of my training was to show my daughter the benefits of doing things beyond her self-will. Early on, children learn that they may not want to brush their teeth or wash their faces, but there are great benefits if they do. This is so rudimentary and seems almost a ridiculous comparison. Children need to be molded into selfless, grateful, responsible citizens by example and teaching. And it is a battle, but a worthy one.

Everything I have been forced to do in life even though I did not “feel” like it has produced excellent fruit from getting up in the morning to going to work everyday, to lower my calories, to making myself go to bed early on some nights, to making myself study, or write, or clean my house… The list goes on and on… A lot of life is about filling obligation whether I want to or not, and it should spill over into society.

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I am ready for a new slogan and new action from America’s youth. My generation messed things up and started a down-hill slide into selfishness that can be curtailed and eventually uprooted and changed. We need another sweep of revival like the Jesus culture issued. And I believe it will happen… maybe sooner than we think.

I am amazed at some of the youth around me. They are so radical about being radical for good causes. They are examples to me.

What about adopting the tried and true adage and words of life from Jesus: “To find life, you must lose your life?” Boy, that’s radical!

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gross darkness

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gross darkness hovers

hurting humankind believes

that God is a foe

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Well, I am back in saddle here in the states which means up early and off to work at the office. With all the unemployment and people working in crummy jobs, I am so very thankful to have a place to work that I love. In that job, I feel a calling and sense of mission, vision, and destiny. That makes my vocation much more than a job… I actually feel eternity in it, and I love that!

We are getting ready for our annual fund-raising banquet and things are really busy and hopping around the office. It is the most exciting time of year, and it is fun to see it all fall together. Although there are times, when we wonder if things will fall together before the big evening. But some how, some way, they do.

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I am also grateful for the days that I stay home and count the birds on the telephone poll… 

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Thomas Sowell has an excellent read on RealClearPolitics. Take a peek here and then answer the question: 

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Return Us

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Here across the ocean: Thoughts on Jerusalem…

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