Valerie Hess

“Spiritual Disciplines Devotional: A Year of Readings” has been picked up by one of your publishers to be translated and made available there in the months ahead! Blessings as you seek to bring the live the love of Jesus in a tough situation.

In January, the Iowa State Legislature invited Imam Muhammad Khan from the Islamic center in Des Moines to open the session in prayer. Mr. Khan asked for “victory over those who disbelieve” (translate: non-Muslims) and for “protection from the Great Satan” (translate: commom Islamic term for the USA). His prayer was basically cultural jihad!!!! And it is happening in lots of places around the western world. Does this make you nervous? It does me!

The Spring Arbor Course number is SFL 602. Sorry for any confusion.

Hello, friends,

Starting April 7th, I will teaching an 8-week on-line class for Spring Arbor University. It will be in the area of learning to practice the Spiritual Disciplines. The course number is SPF602 and I look forward to teaching this and interacting with all of the students who, as I understand, come from all over the world.
Contact Spring Arbor University if you would like to be a part of it.

I am listening to an unabridged audio version of Lawrence Wright’s book, “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.”  Every American needs to read this book! There is so much spin about Islam in the American press today. We desperately want to believe that Islamic fundamentalism is more of a fringe element than it really is. As Americans, we have a hard time understanding why people would come to our wonderful country with the sole goal to destroy it.

What is even sadder is to see people, especially former Christians, convert to Islam in this country because they are desperate for a belief system with structure. (This is why I think the Spiritual Disciplines are so important!) Keith Ellison, a former Christian, became the first Muslim Congressman in 2006. He used a Kor’an to take the oath of office that had once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Ellison thought this showed that Jefferson gleaned wisdom from many sources.

What Mr. Ellison doesn’t realize is that Thomas Jefferson wanted to understand the enemy. Since the United States under Jefferson (and before) was being held hostage by Muslim slave traders out of north Africa, Jefferson wanted to end our country’s payment of tribute to those Barbary State pirates in exchange for safe passage  through the Mediterranean. (We paid millions of dollars to them over about a 15 year period.) In 1805, US marines captured Tripoli and freed its American slaves. By 1815, the last Muslim pirates were defeated. (Note: we ended slavery in North  Africa almost 50 years before ending it on our own soil.)

This means that the USA’s first military conflict after independence was against Islam and that fight needs to continue today or we will once again be held hostage to an ideology of death. The problem is that true Muslims believe that they must do all they can to impose sharia law (i.e. Islamic law) everywhere. And, what most of us don’t realize (or don’t want to believe) is the Kor’an allows them to use any means available to them, including the use of deadly force, to accomplish this task.

We as Americans and as Christians must wake up and realize that we are frogs in the water and the heat is up high. As Christians we are called to love our enemies and that includes understanding them fully. To say that Islam is a peace-loving religion is to be blind to its true nature. There are peace-loving Muslims to be sure but Islam as a belief system depends on the forced conversion of ALL non-Muslims (and as Mr. Wright’s book points out, many fundamentalist Muslims define who is Muslim and who is not for themselves).

Read “Looming Tower” for a very thorough, objective study of how Osama bin Laden came to believe that he was called by God to destroy America. It has certainly given me a lot to think and pray about!