MY SONG IS LOVE UNKNOWN

My song is love unknown,
My Savior’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take, frail flesh and die?

He came from His blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed for Christ would know:
But O! my Friend, my Friend indeed,
Who at my need His life did spend.

Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!” is all their breath,
And for His death they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
He gave the blind their sight,
Sweet injuries! Yet they at these
Themselves displease, and ’gainst Him rise.

They rise and needs will have
My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they saved,
The Prince of life they slay,
Yet cheerful He to suffering goes,
That He His foes from thence might free.

In life, no house, no home
My Lord on earth might have;
In death no friendly tomb
But what a stranger gave.
What may I say? Heav’n was His home;
But mine the tomb wherein He lay.

Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend, in Whose sweet praise
I all my days could gladly spend.

Lat July Thoughts

You once again showed Your grace God. I think you show your grace best when we are stripped of our wealth and ease. I was looking at my sentiments from July 1 and thinking about what you lead us through in the last 26 days. I wouldn’t have asked for that but you saw fit to show us Your grace by stretching our faith.

I know that Brianna was touched by this experience. I’m thinking that this whole thing happened due solely for that experience and it was worth it.

Thank you Jesus.

You Can

You can speak the private language of my soul

You can hear the whispers of my heart

You can navigate the deepest darkest holes of my inner parts.

You can take the selfish things we pray to You

Somehow its Your tender heart be stirred

You can hear the things our songs would say to You

If we could find the words.

You are the finest thing that I could live for

And I pray You are the thing for which I die

Your heart to know so easy to approach and after all

What else is there to life?

Cuz You can ride the clouds or ride a donkey’s colt

You can walk on waves or walk on sod

Balancing the great irreconcilable- fully man and fully God.

You can squeeze a rich man through a needles eye

But squeezing is a painful thing for sure

And we rich folks don’t like pain so maybe that’s why You say “Blessed are the poor”

Cuz You can spin the earth and hold the sun in place

And You nudge every autumn leaf to fall

And You can swim in every tear on every face for You created all

Oh You created all

You are the finest thing that I could live for

And I pray You are the thing for which I die

Your heart to know so easy to approach and after all

What else is there to life?

by Ross King

Utopia

What country has…

• No carbon emission
• No healthcare problems
• No environmental problems
• No crime
• Government has everything under control
• No factories
• No pollution
• TOTAL EQUALITY

Why it's North Korea! Who knew.

Does this sound like the platform of another certain leader?

Class.....?

Ozombies

ObamaCare = No private health insurance!

Here is page 16 of the new ObamaCare Bill HR3200. All private health insurance will END under this bill. Costs will sky rocket and you will pay!

If you voted for Obama - thanks.

Hello- We are the Government and We're Here to Help

Jim Dobson's "Day of Prayer"

One thing is clear; James Dobson has a HUGE ego. I’ve been listening to his podcast and cannot avoid is egotistical moral indignation that Obama didn’t acknowledge his “Day of Prayer” – as though no one ever prayed until Jim brought God’s proclamation down from the mountain that we can’t pray until Shirley Dobson tells us to.

Hey Jim- you are not a prophet! Last time I checked you were a doctor of some sort. Stop telling us what day we are going to pray and who has to participate. Christians will pray whether or not you tell them to. Oh wait- maybe not. There are so many sheep Christians out there that can’t blow their nose without being told to.

As for Obama – he is a socialist, Marxist who acknowledges only himself as god. Pray for him. Daily. Stop telling him to pray to the God of the Bible when he doesn’t even believe in Him.

Jim- you do good work, mostly and I learn things from you. But cut out the ego. You are just a man.

Thank a Union

UNEMPLOYMENT MAY 2009
Rank (high to low)

El Centro CA 26.8%
Yuma AZ 23.3%
Kokomo IN 18.8%
Yuba City CA 17.7%
Elkhart-Goshen IN 17.5%
Merced CA 17.3%
Flint MI 16.5%
Modesto CA 16.3%
Monroe MI 16.2%
Muskegon-Norton Shores MI 15.8%
Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton NC 15.4%
Fresno CA 15.4%
Bend OR 15.2%
Redding CA 15.1%
Stockton CA 15.0%
Detroit-Warren-Livonia MI 14.9%
Palm Coast FL 14.4%
Hanford-Corcoran CA 14.4%
Visalia-Porterville CA 14.3%
Rocky Mount NC 14.2%
Longview WA 14.2%
Bakersfield CA 14.2%
Jackson MI 14.1%
Sumter SC 13.7%
Medford OR 13.7%
Madera-Chowchilla CA 13.7%
Saginaw-Saginaw Township North MI 13.5%
Rockford IL 13.4%
Toledo OH 13.1%
Mansfield OH 13.1%
Sebastian-Vero Beach FL 13.0%
Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario CA 13.0%
Danville VA 13.0%
Janesville WI 12.9%
Holland-Grand Haven MI 12.9%
Eugene-Springfield OR 12.9%
Youngstown-Warren-Boardman OH-PA 12.8%
Niles-Benton Harbor MI 12.8%
Morristown TN 12.7%
Battle Creek MI 12.7%
Dalton GA 12.6%
Bay City MI 12.5%
Anderson SC 12.5%
Chico CA 12.4%
Cape Coral-Fort Myers FL 12.4%
Weirton-Steubenville WV-OH 12.3%
Spartanburg SC 12.3%
Port St. Lucie FL 12.3%
Florence SC 12.2%
Burlington NC 12.2%
Ocala FL 12.1%
Providence-Fall River-Warwick RI-MA 12.0%
Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord NC-SC 12.0%
Greensboro-High Point NC 11.9%
Michigan City-La Porte IN 11.7%
Grand Rapids-Wyoming MI 11.7%
Vineland-Millville-Bridgeton NJ 11.6%
Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton OR-WA 11.6%
Salem OR 11.5%
Myrtle Beach-North Myrtle Beach-Conway SC 11.4%
Lima OH 11.4%
Punta Gorda FL 11.3%
Lansing-East Lansing MI 11.3%
Canton-Massillon OH 11.3%
Atlantic City-Hammonton NJ 11.3%
Anderson IN 11.3%
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CA 11.2%
Reno-Sparks NV 11.2%
Dayton OH 11.2%
South Bend-Mishawaka IN-MI 11.1%
Sacramento–Arden-Arcade–Roseville CA 11.1%
Las Vegas-Paradise NV 11.1%
Greenville NC 11.0%
Fort Wayne IN 10.9%
Bradenton-Sarasota-Venice FL 10.9%
New Bedford MA 10.8%
Muncie IN 10.8%
Lakeland-Winter Haven FL 10.8%
Kalamazoo-Portage MI 10.8%

God is Faithful

Thank you God for Your faithfulness to me. This morning you showed me a new mercy. You are do good. I am so unworthy yet You keep blessing. Lord I pray that you help me hold on to this gratefulness that you gave me this morning. I am so unworthy but somehow you see fit.

I love You.

These Eight Republicans Voted To Further Destroy Our Economy

These 8 U.S. Representatives voted "YES" on the Global Warming Bill otherwise known as Cap and Trade" which buys into the entire Al Gore hoax. This will hamstring businesses throughout this country and put many out of work.

These Reprentatives below are why the Republican Party is dead. They are sell-outs. They are whores for attention and the media. They are not looking out for their constituents.

I feel sad...

Say what you want about him-- and I probably agree. Yet still, he is attached to many fond memories of my high school years.

I turned weird in later life, but I don't know how you can deny his talents.

Hopefully, he found the humility to recognize his Maker.

RIP ...June 25, 2009

Obama Is Popular - Like Hitler Was

Here is a Hitler rally from 1937. Over a million people showed up. He was VERY popular. Obama is popular. Will we ever learn?

New Realization of the Obama Voter

You have been seduced by a gold digger.

The Hannan Example

The Heritage Foundation is failing, National Review is failing, the RNC is failing, most mainstream conservative outlets are failing. Failing to proudly, shamelessly proclaim the treachery occurring in Washington.

Yesterday I got a nice big packet from the Heritage Foundation, bastion of conservative thought. I was inspired by the opening letter telling me how to be scared of the liberalism plague spreading across the land. But they are speaking to the choir! I don't need to be reminded of this. Why the hell aren't they singing this tune on the most public of media?

So "no"- I won't contribute to the Heritage Foundation. They are the "same old"- same old that gets our side NOWHERE.

It took Daniel Hannan, a foreign politician, to inspire the masses. He spoke directly to the British Prime Minister, repudiating his liberal charge up the mountain that is bankrupting England.

Hannan, a 36 year old British lad effectively rallied the conservative base in America with one small stone from his slingshot.

Unless I am mistaken, the Heritage Foundation did not sanction this event. Nor did any other think tank from conservadom.

Why is it that conservative, Constitutional change never seems to come from the establishment? It takes an obscure courageous individual speaking truth to power.

Now we have talk radio + 1 to fight liberalism from the pulpit they've been given.

Who else is there? Hello? ---hello? ---hello?

Lockstep

I have been visiting the websites of schools here in Indiana learning about each school. It is amazing how similar their belief systems are from school to school. In fact, from school to the media.

Here is a school that celebrates "Peace Day".

What is Greed - What Is Self Interest?

Phil Keaggy- Musical Genius

I had to ask myself if in my old age I am becoming just more overly appreciative of everything- even the "not-so-good" things. But on the other hand, maybe I have just been really fortunate in the last two concerts, they have been absolutely stunning -artists at the top of their craft, the best in their field.

Previously it was Alison Krauss and Union Station. No one, I mean NO ONE can combine words and song in the progressive bluegrass style like they.

Then last night it was Phil Keaggy.

Trying to describe his music in print is impossible, but so inspired am I, that I have to try.

For every word that he sang, he must have had 5,000 colors of sound to describe it. Then, he proceeded to play those 5,000 sounds in perfect order, shades of colors that blew the mind. Talented (the word) doesn't come close to describing Phil Keaggy. He is some kind of spiritual creature birthed by God for the sole purpose of treating we plebes to what heaven will sound like.

Although his guitar fingering was purely amazing in itself, he combined electricity to find new colors within his guitar. I'm not a guitarist, but he had 4 boxes on the floor that would do things like repeat bars that he would play in repetitive sequence while he would harmonize to it live on the second pass and beyond.

He used mini-cymbals, rattler eggs and metal bars to strike the strings to produce the most interesting effects. Another thing about his playing was his sense of rhythm. He used his guitar as a drum that he would sequence into the computer to playback in loop as he played live on top.

He was a poor kid in FAO Schwartz. It was entertaining just to watch him play.

Add to all that, his quotes from C.S. Lewis, poetry in song and revealing of scripture. It was a musical tribute to the grace of God.

The concert cost $7 per seat, but I would have paid $7 for just one song.

Music Has Ethos

Daily Insight: "Sort of"

Have you noticed all the people now a days that use the phrase "sort of"? It is used often so quickly that it is barely distiguishable. I used to think it was Pittsburghian jargon and a bit cute, but today realized that it is outward utterance of a weak mamby-pamby unable to come down on one side of an issue.

The phrase is weak. It grays out the truth. It is ambiguous. I suppose it is used to make the user sound more intelligent, more thoughtful, a step up on the morality chain.

Uh uh.

It sounds like a new moderate catch phrase. Ticks me off.

State of Detroit: UAW and Liberal Paradise

[excerpted from the Weekly Standard,
"The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep-Detroit is dying. But, it is not dead yet." by Matt Labash , 12/29/2008, Volume 014, Issue 15]

How bad is Detroit?

Its recently resigned mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, he of the Kangol hats and five-button suits, now wears jailhouse orange as he's currently serving a four-month sentence as part of a plea agreement for perjuring himself regarding an extramarital affair with his chief of staff, which yielded soupy love-daddy text messages that would make Barry White yak in his grave.

Those in Detroit who are neither recipients of sweetheart contracts nor Kilpatrick family members on the city payroll at inflated salaries think he got off easy. Because what led to the perjury was concealing an $8.4 million payout from city coffers to settle a whistleblower suit brought by cops who'd been fired for investigating, among other things, the murder of a stripper named Strawberry who, prior to her death, was allegedly beat up by Kilpatrick's wife when she caught her entertaining her husband.
In a city often known as the nation's murder capital, with over 10,000 unsolved murders dating back to 1960, the police are in shambles through cutbacks and corruption trials. (They have a profitable sideline, though, as one of the nation's largest gun dealers, having sold 14 tons of used weapons out-of-state.) Their response times are legendarily slow. Their crime lab is so inept that it has been closed. One Detroit man found police so unresponsive when trying to turn himself in for murder that he hopped a bus to Toledo and confessed there instead.

Detroit schools haven't ordered new textbooks in 19 years. Students have reported having to bring their own toilet paper. Teachers have reported bringing hammers to class for protection. Declining enrollment has forced 67 school closures since 2005 (more than a quarter of the city's schools). The graduation rate is 24.9 percent, the lowest of any large school district in the country. Not for nothing did one frustrated activist start pelting school board members with grapes during a meeting. She probably should've reached for something heavier.

An internal audit, which was 14 months late, estimates next year's city deficit to be as high as $200 million (helped along by $335,000 embezzled from the Department of Health and Wellness Promotion). With a dwindling tax base--even the city's three once-profitable casinos are seeing a downturn in revenues (the Greektown Casino is in bankruptcy)--the city has kicked around every money-making scheme from selling off ownership rights to the tunnel it shares with neighboring Windsor, Canada, to a fast food tax. It's perhaps unsurprising that Detroit now has the most speed traps in the nation.

It also has one of the highest property tax rates in Michigan, yet has over 60,000 vacant dwellings (a guesstimate--nobody keeps official count), meaning real estate values are in the toilet. Over the summer, the Detroit News sent a headline around the world, about a Detroit house that was for sale for $1. But it's not even that uncommon. As of this writing, there are at least five $1 homes for sale in Detroit.

The city council has been such a joke that one former member demanded 17 pounds of sausages as part of her $150,000 bribe. Its prognosis for respectability hasn't grown stronger with Monica Conyers, wife of congressman John Conyers, taking the helm. She has managed to get in a barroom brawl, threatened to shoot a mayoral staffer as well as have him beaten up, and twice called a burly and bald fellow council member "Shrek" during a public hearing.

But with all the problems facing the city, the council still found time to pass a nonbinding resolution supporting the impeachment of George W. Bush.

How bad is Detroit? It once gave the keys to the city to Saddam Hussein.
Over the last several years, it has ranked as the most murderous city, the poorest city, the most segregated city, as the city with the highest auto-insurance rates, with the bleakest outlook for workers in their 20s and 30s, and as the place with the most heart attacks, slowest income growth, and fewest sunny days.

It is a city without a single national grocery store chain. It has been deemed the most stressful metropolitan area in America. Likewise, it has ranked last in numerous studies: in new employment growth, in environmental indicators, in the rate of immunization of 2-year-olds, and, among big cities, in the number of high school or college graduates.

Men's Fitness magazine christened Detroit America's fattest city, while Men's Health called it America's sexual disease capital. Should the editors of these two metrosexual magazines be concerned for their safety after slagging the citizens of a city which has won the "most dangerous" title for five of the last ten years? Probably not: 47 percent of Detroit adults are functionally illiterate.

On the upside, Detroit ranks as the nation's foremost consumer of Slurpees and of baked beans on Labor Day. And as if all of this isn't humiliating enough, the Detroit Lions are 0-14. (0-16 as of 1/1/09, thw worst record EVER in the NFL)

The best description of the feel of the place came to me from Jason Vines: "We're all Kwame-fatigued, the economy is crap, and the Lions suck. We're tired." A former executive with both Ford and Chrysler, Vines spun me around the decimated, half-abandoned neighborhood of Highland Park, which Chrysler left in the early '90s for the greener pastures of Auburn Hills. It's hard to fault them, he notes, since bullets used to occasionally whiz into the Chrysler buildings from the surrounding neighborhood.

Like many Detroiters (he lives in a posh suburb, where houses on his block have remained unsold for six years), he's bracing for one or all of the Big Three going down. He predicts millions will be thrown out of work, right down to the diner owner in Utah who serves lunch to the people who produce the screws which are bought by the widget manufacturers who produce a component that goes into a seat of a Ford automobile. The diner owner thought he wasn't in the auto business. "But he was," says Vines. "He just didn't know it."

Precisely what caused all this mess is perhaps best left to historians. Locals' ideas for how it happened could keep one pinned to a barstool for weeks: auto companies failing or pushing out to the suburbs and beyond, white flight caused by the '67 riots and busing orders, the 20-year reign of Mayor Coleman Young who scared additional middle-class whites off with statements such as "The only way to handle discrimination is to reverse it," freeways destroying mass transit infrastructure, ineptitude, corruption, Japanese cars--take your pick.

The Tigers now play at Comerica Park, though the company the park's named for has fled to Dallas.

What's clear, though, is that Detroit has failed, that it's broken and cracked. It is dying. But it's not yet dead. Although it has lost over half its population since 1950, 900,000 people still live there.