Song chorus: "I need Thee, oh, I need Thee; Every hour I need Thee; Oh, bless me now, my Savior, I come to Thee."

Hello and welcome back. I do hope you had a restful weekend as we begin another work week here. It's Monday, April 13, 2015, and I am thankful to bring you greetings from our part of the world to yours. I do ask all of my praying audience to think about my dad as he will be undergoing some urology related surgery this morning over in Louisiana. If all goes well he is supposed to be able to go home sometime tomorrow. Prayers for him and mom are appreciated. I can't apologize for using up quite a bit of space with prayer related information. As a believer and having been given a new heart and a new life in Christ, well, prayer becomes a part of our Christian identity, or maybe our Christian DNA. No. I can't really say I understand a whole lot about prayer and praying but I do know that God gave it to us as a way of us connecting into His working out all things in this world that we live in. He has invited us to come into His presence with our praise, our worship, and, yes, our hurts and needs. (Hebrews 4:16) Jesus also gave us a model which is often mistakenly called the Lord's Prayer. (The Lord's prayer, as I see it, is His intercessory prayer recorded in John 17 where our Savior cries out to the Father in the garden of Gethsemane.) The model prayer as found in Matthew 6:9-13 and in Luke 11:1-4 is often recited verbatim. There's nothing wrong with that, however, it is what it implies about our Father and our approach to Him that really matters. We can go to Him in our time of need and we do know that He already knows all about it and He always cares. Amen.

I'm not going to do a drive by shooting analysis of the so called deal with Iran but somethings really do stick out. The most significant is how the main parties disagree about what is being agreed to. In Iran they have this elevated fellow who makes all final decisions, period. He, the Supreme Leader, has stated publicly that the President is lying about the agreement. Okay. I am a country boy but does it not seem odd that the folks who sat at the same table came out of the room saying an agreement had been reached but then the different sides report totally different renditions of the supposed agreed upon items? All I can say from my uninformed but interested view is that we as a nation should tread very carefully when this is how it unfolds before our very eyes. Some would say unravels is a better word. At one time Iran was to be required to officially recognize Israel's right to exist as a nation. Now the President says it would be unreasonable to require them to do so. At one time the President said under no conditions at any time would Iran be allowed to develop and possess an atom bomb. Now the President says the agreement itself does not prevent this from happening after ten years. Their Supreme Leader says our President is lying. Our State Department was asked if they were concerned that the general response to the agreement in Iran was the chanting far and wide of death to America. They said not to worry because that type of response was mostly just habit. Tread lightly, very lightly indeed!

I actually heard our President say that if every bad thing believed by folks about this agreement were true, it would still be the right thing to do. I've heard a whole lot of different ideas about logic but that one baffles me. For instance, he said that if Israel's concern about Iran not changing in any way whatsoever their stated goal of destroying the Jewish State, this would still be the right thing to do. Okay. I will need to get in the line of the hopelessly ignorant to follow that kind of reasoning. It has something to do with some type of contrived pragmatism and sadly, it seems to have a whole lot of support in the mainstream media which has a whole lot of influence with the public. You know. Peace at any cost. (That song comes to mind: Looking for Legacy in all the Wrong Places.) It makes me wonder at times if we are actually seeing what we are actually seeing. Newsflash: We are folks. We are! Okay, that's likely more than you really wanted from my visit today. Don't be discouraged because we do know who is ultimately in control of all things, and, we don't have to worry about His ability to take care of it all, and we can be sure of His love and provision for His own. Amen. ....More later.