Before you can get your act together, you have to have one!

It is Blank Tuesday, not Fat Tuesday (French=Mardi Gras), and by blank I'm thinking of Tuesday's page yet to be written as well as my brain etch-a-sketch pad that appears to have been erased without me knowing it. But it is March 23, 2010 and we end up where we start each day and that is in being thankful to God for His grace, mercy, and love as demonstrated in His sending of His one and only Son to die on behalf of sinners just like me, you, and the other folks that populate the planet. I remember growing up and us kids calling each other lame brain when we couldn't seem to get our act together or going. If you look it up it says it means slow witted or a dolt. Now dolt is a word you do not hear every day. Look that word up and it doesn't get any better since it means a stupid person. I know back in the day we certainly were not trying to be cruel when we used that term but in today's world nearly any word carries with it a minefield of potential liability and those in line with an axe to grind. Of course way back then we could with some confidence echo back the proverb stating that while sticks and stones might break our bones, words would never hurt us.

We hardly can imagine the amount of and the influence of this mind numbing conditioning that is going on all around us, all the time. We are so tolerant of everything today we will end up being intolerant of nothing including the evil that is very much a threat to our children and our way of life. It's that frog in the boiling water analogy. Supposedly, if you throw a frog into the hot boiling water, it will jump out immediately. However, if you place the frog in the water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog will adapt and adjust until it's too late and will suffer the fate it would have never tolerated had it known what was coming. No, I haven't been experimenting with frogs in our kitchen but this picture has been a well known idiom used to describe how we Christians have, over time, become complacent in the midst of the ever increasing temperature of the degradation that surrounds us. The cultural quagmire that we find ourselves in continues to see us stuck in a world of ambivalence and fuzziness as most of us try to be seen as accepting, open minded, and flexible. Truth is almost never flexible since it reflects the clarity and starkness of black and white.

Today we live in what the experts call the post modern age where an agnostic view is quickly giving way to full atheism, in our practice if not in our dialogue. I have read with sadness reports from the U.K. where the secularists have essentially declared God to no longer be a factor in British society. Folks, it's one thing for this to be true and given the tiny numbers of professed believers there, I believe it to be true, but my oh my how scary to think this to be an accomplishment worth bragging about. There are many who see the situation in Great Britain to be not only a prophetic projection for our country as proven over time by our slow and steady following of their trends, but also a frightening envisioning of our nation without God's presence. This might seem far off indeed as we view our culture each day but could it be that we, like them, are in that cauldron that continues to heat up slowly but surely to a place where we, also like them, will be bragging on how that God and religion is no longer a part of our American way of life? I refer the U.K. to how God responds when nations reject knowledge of and response to Him and His revelation of Himself as described in Romans Chapter 1. It may be too late in their case. I pray that it will not be too late for us as we should also read and do whatever is required to reverse this trend, beginning TODAY! Amen. .....More later.