We are free to choose, but we are not free to choose
the consequences of our choices.

Wishing you a day of good choices!

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.

The Rev. Garba Gaius, pastor of the congregation to which the young woman belongs, told Compass that the young Christian, Paitence Yusuf, was at home the night of February 1 when a young man asked her to meet him outside. After they had gone outside he told her he wanted to befriend and marry her. Yusuf sharply declined, Rev. Gaius said. As she walked back into her house, the man, whose identity has not been disclosed, told her, “I beg you in the name of God and his apostle, Muhammad, to please accept me as your boyfriend,” Rev. Gaius said. He said Yusuf looked the man in the face and replied, “You are pleading in the name of a person I do not know. Jesus I know, but Muhammad I do not know.” The Muslim man left, Rev. Gaius said, gathering friends and neighbors that night to tell them that Yusuf had blasphemed Muhammad.

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!

As we begin this new year, let me encourage each of us personally and each of us who are raising children to take stewardship of our bodies, the temples of the Holy Spirit, seriously and to focus on becoming healthy (which may include losing weight, realizing that all thin people aren’t necessarily healthy). Eat well (organically–to help the earth and to support humane animal husbandry, and locally and in season as much as possible–to help with our carbon imprint due to trucking food over long distances), exercise (walk as much as you can and as far as you can every day), rest (get 7 to 8 hours of sleep at night and/or take a quick nap in the afternoon), and do one fun thing everyday. You will be a better witness to what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ to others and especially to your children.