Transfiguration

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
—  Mahatma Gandhi
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On This Day In:
2018	2018 Mid-Terms
	Praying For A Blue Tsunami Election
2017	Islam Is Not The Enemy
2016	A Checkered Past, A Checkered Future
2015	Preferences
2014	Have You Taken The Pledge?
2013	Nurture Tolerance
2012	Election Day – Please Hear What I’m Not Saying
2011	Mostly Strange, Always Blue
	What Is It You Want?
2010	MSNBC, Bring Back Keith !!!
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	Afraid So…
	Making It
	Don’t Jump Small
	Time
	Push!!
	I’m Still Here… (A Message To Keith Olbermann)
	Choose
	Not Yet…
	Mean Too
	Still Building (and Planning)
	Hangin’ High
	Always…

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Sometimes I Still Have Trouble Sleeping

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones.  And when you have finished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.  God is awake.
—  Victor Hugo
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On This Day In:
2018	And Flights Of Fancy
	Dodgers Lose 2nd Consecutive World Series!!
2017	By Their Acts Thy Shall Know Them
2016	Remembering
2015	One
2014	Sure Experiments And Demonstrated Arguments
2013	Irrational Complacency
2012	Why Criticize?
	Giants Sweep 2012 World Series With Game 4 Win (4 To 3)!!!
2011	Saying Just Enough
2010	Giants Win Game 2 Shutout of Rangers – 9 to 0!!!

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Show Righteousness, Not Fear

On June 21, the writer E. Jean Carroll came forward with a vivid and disturbing claim that Donald Trump raped her in a department store in the 1990s.  She is the 22nd woman to allege that Trump committed acts of sexual misconduct.  These claims are more extensive and more corroborated than the accusations against Bill Clinton.
It’s worth contrasting Trump, who denied Carroll’s claim (as well as his other accusers’), with Clinton because his scandals helped spur the Southern Baptist Convention in 1998 to issue its seminal “Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials.”  That document’s key statement was ominous and unequivocal: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
The relentless drumbeat of claims against Trump – combined with the clear moral declarations of the past – have caused millions of Americans to look at their evangelical fellow citizens and ask, simply: Why?  Why have you abandoned your previous commitment to political character to embrace Donald Trump?
Part of the explanation is undeniably basic partisanship and ambition.  White evangelicals are largely Republican, and they’re generally going to vote for Republicans.  And proximity to power has always had its attractions for religious charlatans of all stripes.  But I’d suggest the real reason for the breadth and depth of evangelical support is deeper and – perversely – even more destructive to its religious witness.
That reason is fear.
Talk to engaged evangelicals, and fear is all too often a dominant theme of their political life.  The church is under siege from a hostile culture.  Religious institutions are under legal attack from progressives.  The left wants nuns to facilitate access to abortifacients and contraceptives, it wants Christian adoption agencies to compromise their conscience or close, and it even casts into doubt the tax exemptions of religious education institutions if they adhere to traditional Christian sexual ethics.
These issues are legally important, and there are reasons for evangelicals to be concerned.  But there is no reason for evangelicals to abandon long-held principles to behave like any other political-interest group.
Instead, the evangelical church is called to be a source of light in a darkening world.  It is not given the luxury of fear-based decisionmaking.  Indeed, of all the groups in American life who believe they have the least to fear from American politics, Christians should top the list.  The faithful should reject fear.
This is made plain to young Christians from the early days of Sunday school.  There, many millions of young believers are taught the biblical verse: “For God gave us not a spirit of fear but of power and love and self-control.”
But in 2016, something snapped.  I saw Christian men and women whom I’ve known and respected for years respond with raw fear at the very idea of a Hillary Clinton presidency.  They believed she was going to place the church in mortal danger.  The Christian writer Eric Metaxas wrote that if Hillary won, America’s chance to have a “Supreme Court that values the Constitution” will be “gone.”  “Not for four years, not for eight,” he said, “but forever.”
That wasn’t faith speaking.  They were the words of fearful men grasping at fading influence by clinging to a man whose daily life mocks the very values that Christians seek to advance.
But why?  The American evangelical church isn’t so weak that it needs Trump’s version of secular salvation.  The early persecuted church would be stunned at the modern American church’s immense political strength.  It has become so strong that it exercises veto power over the political prospects of any Republican nominee.
Yet the church is acting as if it needs Trump to protect it.  That’s not courageous.  It’s repulsive.  And so long as this fear continues, expect the church’s witness to degrade further.  In seeking protection from its perceived enemies, the church has lost its way.
It’s time for evangelicals to exercise their political veto power.  America’s conservative people of faith should seek a primary challenger to Trump and send a message to the GOP that it will not compromise any longer.  And it should do so from a position of confidence – and faith.
—  David French
From his opinion / editorial: “The Evangelical Republic of Fear“
Appearing in Time Magazine, dtd: 8 July 2019
Also, found online at: https://time.com/5615617/why-evangelicals-support-trump/
[I make no claim to ownership of this editorial.  It belongs to either Time or to the author.  I normally only present excerpts from articles / editorials because I am trying to exercise “fair use”  while giving full credit to the owner and / or original source.  In this (rare) case, the editorial is presented in its entirety because the whole is FAR greater than any of its parts.  As always, I encourage readers to visit the original source.  I subscribe to the “hard-copy” version of Time.  —  KMAB]
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On This Day In:
2018	Sounds Like Politics, Too
2017	Resist More
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2016	Two Weeks To Go…
2015	Remembering
2014	The Creeping Death Of Civilization
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2013	License Problem
2012	Giants Win Game 2 Of The 2012 World Series 2 To 0!!!
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2011	What Are You Looking At?

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Can I Get A Witness?

To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even stirring people up, but in being a living mystery;  It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.
—  Dorothy Day
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On This Day In:
2018	I’d Still Like To Try It Out
2017	In Every Thing
2016	Future Halo
2015	The Hard Way Every Time
2014	Indispensable Wits
2013	I’d Like To
2012	2012 National League Champions – San Francisco Giants!!
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2011	Just Kickin It
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2010	Giants Advance To 2010 World Series!!!

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Hoping I’m Careful

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.
—  Francis of Assisi
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On This Day In:
2018	I Must Be Truly Wise
2017	My Sensei
2016	The Worst Sin
2015	Rules Of Thumb
2014	A Prayer
	Orange October (IX) – Giants Lose Game 2 In Bullpen Collapse
2013	Complacent Reality
2012	Two-minute Sex
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2011	A World Of Difference

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With Faith

All you need to do to receive guidance is to ask for it and then listen.
—  Sanaya Roman
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On This Day In:
2018	Spiritual Matter
2017	Until He’s Elected President…
2016	Reasonable Discounts
2015	Poem For A Friend
2014	A Very Unusual Mind
2013	Just Lucky
2012	The Undeveloped Child
2011	What Is Your Canvas?
2010	Giants Win Games 3 & 4 – One Away From World Series!!

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In Silence

The contemplative waits in silence and when he is ‘answered’, it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence.  It is by this silence itself suddenly, inexplicably, revealing itself to him as a word of great power.
—  Thomas Merton
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On This Day In:
2018	A Gift
2017	Unless You Genuinely Are Small
2016	B1
2015	Five Things
2014	Have Faith
2013	Found In A Mine
2012	Two-Sided Coin
2011	Passionately Scorned Rules

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