CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR'S GREETINGS AND THE STATE OF THE NATION
Today is the shortest day of the year and the beginning of winter. Among the godless barbarians, it has long been a celebration of the Winter Solstice. It is that point of the year where, even as you are entering the coldest, most inhospitable portion of the year, the mechanism is already in place to extricate us from it. For, with each passing day of bitter cold, snow, sleet, hail, freezing rain, slush and biting wind, we can take comfort in knowing that each day is a little bit longer and a little bit closer to Spring.
Now, I don't wish to be misunderstood here but I am sure I will be. The purveyors of atheistic snobbery will sneer and hrrmph my words and protest that there is certainly nothing wrong with facing a furious blast of winter with the longing for a warmer day. Well, I agree, there isn't, so long as your hope and longing extends beyond that.
What makes atheism such an empty ideology is that one spends one's entire existence seeking to escape one unpleasant current reality, only to replace it with another. They never seek for anything larger.
The same atheist who curses January's bitter cold, curses the oppressive heat and humidity of June. The atheist cannot have joy because he has bet his life on a losing wager. That wager is the proposition that he deserves and can, through his own efforts achieve, a long and lasting happiness on this earth. He is, in the words of the prophet, ever embroiled in a chase after the wind. The wind, as it were, cannot be caught and it couldn't be grasped if it could. Time and tide and fate and destiny are merciless and relentless foes and they are undefeated.
Only he who understands and embraces this reality can know the path to joy.
Just as the same gentle wind that pushes the kite in May, slashes the gulf with a hurricane surge in September and buries the north in a blizzard whiteout in February, the same will it be with your life.
Some years ago, there was a song that went;
If we make it through December, everything is gonna be alright I know.
It's the coldest time of winter, and i shiver when I see the falling snow.
If we make it through December, I've got plans to be in warmer town come summertime.
maybe even California. If we make it through December, we'll be fine.
The problem with this is that we cannot know if we will make it through December or, if we do, whether January will be more brutal many fold. The worst mistake you can make is to imagine that things cannot get worse. Trust me on this, I know.
The problem with the atheist/secular humanist/ liberal crowd is that they are forever promising that January of relief from our current December of woe. That promised utopia has been called many things by the left. It has been called everything from a New Deal to an Age of Aquarius to a place called hope. Yet, it never arrives and it never will because the human control that it requires simply doesn't exist. There lies the frustration, disappointment and anger that must forever accompany liberalized/secular humanistic/atheistic ideology.
It is not that the LSHAs aren't looking for anything different than are we. We are looking for the same things. A life free from sorrow and anguish and suffering. A life of happiness and contentment and joy and fulfillment.
What separates the LSHA from the Christian is that the LSHA seeks for these things where he has no hope to ever find them. As the Scriptures say, you simply cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear. Those who seek lasting happiness in this life seek that which they cannot possibly find.
They have bought into a lie oft repeated with the full fervency of the false religion of self from where it rises. For all of their gold, for all of their many words, for all of their facial creams and exercise machines and expensive cars with a big shiny bow, they will grow old, they will fall from favor they will die.
These are the facts.
The LSHA spend their lives free-falling towards the ground while convincing themselves that they can fly. Every single LSHA will die penny-less, powerless and alone.
Every Single One.
The Christian will die as well, of course. Yet, for the LSHA, death is a bitter and painful separation for, with death, comes the death of hope and the realization that the best existence he will ever have experienced is rapidly fading to gray. For the LSHA, life ends with the revelation of how foolishly he wasted his life seeking only his own gain only be confronted by the paradox of what life is, as prescribed in scripture.
He who seeks to save his life shall lose it.
He who loses his life, for My sake, shall find it.
Don't be a fool. Wake up from your dream. Your money and your strength and your many words will provide you no consolation at your moment of death. You will find no hope in the changing of the seasons for the changing of the seasons cannot assure you even another breath.
The changing of the seasons are only markers within which hope can be seen. For, the markers of the season's change are only commemorations of He who stepped out of eternity and into time for you.
The 21st of December (or in rare occasions like this year, the 22nd) is a day that holds no hope for you. The 25th of December holds your hope, for it is on this day that we commemorate the birth of a child like no other.
Simply stated, it is only the birth of Christ that gives real hope to a fallen world. All other hope is a false hope.
If you have pinned your hope on the Prophet Mohammed or the Age of Aquarius or on yourself, you have bet on a losing horse. You will die in your sin and be damned to an unimaginable and fiery hell. Those are just the facts.
The Christian life is not a life without pain. The Christian life is not a life without suffering. The Christian life is not a life without sorrow and disappointment. Trust me that I can vouch for this personally.
The damnable lie from the bowels of hell is that the LSHA escapes these things. He does not.
LSHAs die in car accidents. LSHAs get sick. LSHAs have broken families. LSHAs have children who disappoint them, friends who betray them, objects of desire who reject them, and tragedies that rock them and traumatize them. LSHAs deal with all the pains and sorrows that Christians do.
The difference is that, unlike the LSHA, the Christian finds joy in the knowledge that life's stings are not the final answer. They live with the light of hope. The LSHA often turns to addiction to anesthetize himself from the pain of life. His entire life, the lure and false promise of drugs, alcohol, sex, money and power have the same effect of a person fanning himself from the heat. The second you stop fanning, the heat returns.
The Christian understands, as Pope Benedict so eloquently wrote, that suffering is something that we cannot always escape but it is something that we can overcome.
Pain, sorrow, suffering and death are as inevitable as rain and sun. Hope lies not in getting around all the sorrows of this world but in getting through them. It is no surprise that the LSHA is against the war in Iraq. They spend their entire lives running from the battle, only to find a worse battle facing them later.
Finding torture chambers in Iraq is just that much more proof that this was an enemy that had to be defeated. The enemy that targets the innocents in Iraq also targets you and your attempted avoidance of the fight only strengthens the enemy and emboldens him.
This is life in it's entirety. A vicious struggle between a patient mercy desiring your salvation and a violent malevolence in relentless perusal of your destruction. Your problem is that you think you can purchase a selfish freedom by siding with the enemy. You will learn too late that the scriptures were right when they foretold that the beast you ride in your spiritual harlotry, is destined to turn and devour you.
Nowhere has this truth been more manifestly obvious than in the war in Iraq. The coalition of the unhinged rose to power in the House and Senate on the back of a monstrous lie- that the war was too hard, too long, too hopeless, couldn't be won, shouldn't be fought, boo hoo friggin' hoo.
If we cut and run and hide like little baby sissies, all we be wild and wonderful and all the Al Queda terrorists that we created will slither back into the spider holes from whence the crawled. Those of us who live in the reality based community know different.
We took our worldview- that evil cannot be appeased, that it must be confronted- and used it as a backbone to a backlash against the dorks who carried signs and bitched and whined and moaned.
We defended the surge, we fought back, we won.
Life is not about fighting the enemy or not fighting the enemy. That decision has already been made for you and you had better sober up and realize this. The only decision is whether or not you are going to win that battle and that can only be decided by how willing you are to fight it.
I come to you, not as a Saint or a Prophet or a Martyr. Far from it. I write you this day as a fellow soldier in the war against evil. Make no mistake, the evil that seeks to destroy me seeks to destroy you just as surely.
If you succumb to the folly that you can save yourself by destroying me, you will find that you will do neither. In fact, you should already have learned this. Sphere: Related Content
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