Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: “Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it All the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, And you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return.” ~ Genesis Chapter 3, Verses 16-19

Hello friends and neighbors. Welcome to another week where we are privileged to return to our home away from home, our workplace, here on this Monday, July 25, 2016. I know it's popular for people to complain about working and about the jobs they have. I really do see mine as a blessing and for the most part I've always seen it that way. Some people think that work is a result of the curse that came when Adam and Eve fell in the garden. That's not what the Bible says. (Genesis 2:15 "Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.") Adam was tending the perfect garden before the fall. As we see in today's title, what happened in the fall was the rigor and difficulty that made work challenging and exhausting. I suppose it is these difficulties involved in labor that causes people to dread the everyday grind. At any rate, I'm thankful for my 55 years of being able to labor in some capacity during my time here on the planet. I do think at times about retirement, but, every once in a while I get a good project to work on and it reminds me that I actually can be, perhaps on rare occasions, still useful to the people who pay me for showing up each day. I may have to use a duster on my gray cells, but, there's still a little left in the tank. For that, and so much more, I am thankful.

I've written about that before but it is one of my life's pursuits, therefore, I like to remind us all about it from time to time. I also know that no one should be defined by the job they have in the workplace, and that is especially so for someone who has been given eternal life as a born again child of God. We are first and foremost a child of God, temporarily living in this world, but on our way to an endless eternal existence in the presence of our Lord. When we have that identity as the clearing house for everything else, we are able to function in ways that serve God and others, and that includes being thankful for the job He has given to us, and for the opportunity to use it to support the life He would have us to live. We call that being saved. That's a term that many people resist. One day many years ago I was across the street visiting with a neighbor when another lady stopped by to say hello. She knew us and began to talk about our faith. We didn't mention it. She did. She said they used to live in another state where their neighbor was always trying to get them to be saved. This made her angry. She said she didn't want to be saved and as far as she knew she didn't have anything to be saved from. I said perhaps they were just trying to show their love. She was all stirred up and went on to say that she was asked to take care of the goldfish when those neighbors went on vacation. By this time she was loud enough for the neighborhood to hear as she explained that she was so angry about them always trying to get her saved that she let their goldfish die. I'm glad someone was willing to share with me how to be saved, and I thank God that I responded to that message. Amen.

We didn't have to wait until the Democratic Party started their convention to get the main news networks spin machine running at warp speed. Many editorials thought Mr. Trump's speech was pretty good. It addressed and diagnosed problems and offered his approach to fixing them. The mainstream networks were not buying it. They uniformly reported it to be perhaps the darkest, most pessimistic, gloom and doom speech in history. One poll indicated that 70% of those who tuned in thought it was a good speech and that it presented an accurate picture of where we are as a nation. Don't say I didn't tell you. Even with the scandal from the leaked emails showing unmitigated bias on the part of key Democratic National Committee members, the mainstream networks are already falling all over themselves in anticipating the positive upbeat message from Hillary and her team. If common, ordinary people hear what they hear and conclude something radically different than what the liberal media is telling us, well, I will go with the common, ordinary people interpretation every time. And, I do recognize that people have the freedom to come up with their own idea from what they heard. I also repeat again, that you, I, and every other American have this right along with the privilege to be wrong. Come to think about it, I may have been wrong once or twice in my lifetime. Maybe even more than that. Maybe. I would rather not think about that right now. Later. Yeah. That's it. Until tomorrow, may the good Lord bless and keep you and yours. Amen. ....More later.