I asked a question, out loud and to no one in particular, but when you start the question with, “Does anyone…” you would expect out of a room with four other adults in it, one of them would provide an answer.
When I looked around, I saw that everyone had their head bowed, no, not in prayer but in reverence to the small computer they held in their hand commonly known to us as a phone.
Whether it is an iPhone, an Android, or an old-fashioned flip phone like my 90-year-old aunt persists in using, it captures the attention of so many people on our planet.
Here is a statistic copied straight from a search on Google.com
General Cell Phone Statistics
- The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year.
- Nearly 390,000 injuries occur each year from accidents caused by texting while driving.
- 1 out of every 4 car accidents in the United States is caused by texting and driving.
What is the point I am striving to make?
Isaiah 65:1 The Lord says, “I was ready to respond, but no one asked for help. I was ready to be found, but no one was looking for me. I said, ‘Here I am, here I am!’ to a nation that did not call on my name.
Our nation is in crisis. Every day there is a new terror on the news, and I am afraid that the people who are offering solutions are not the voices to which we should be listening. I have heard people ask, “Where is God in all this? Why doesn’t He do something to help us?”
OK, let me point you back up to Isaiah 65:1! We may be talking about it, complaining about it, trying to wish it were the “good old days” when what we really need to be doing is to look heavenward and ask the Creator of all mankind to help us.
He opened the Red sea for over one million people to walk across a dry river bed before closing it over the head of their enemies, and He is still the same God today who can and does still perform miraculous acts on our behalf… I ought to know since I am the recipient of many of those wonderful miracles myself.
Jeremiah 33:3 “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and [a]mighty things, which you do not know.”
He is talking, put down your phone and listen!
Harolene.com 
Yes! Amen!
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Such good words!!!
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Thank you 🙏 God bless you ♥️
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Once upon a time two crows were sitting on a highline wire looking at a scarecrow after 5 minutes one of them said, “That is a scarecrow we have nothing to fear.”
How do you know?” asked the other.
Replied the first, “Humans all have cell phones in their hands.”
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😇 and that’s the truth ‼️🙏
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I saw this crow story online, but I can’t remember where.
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On the LESS serious side… I have that Aerosmith Blues album Honkin On Bobo and they have three or so blues/negro spirituals type songs on it. One we used to sing at church when I was in school. I wish we sang those songs in church now. I think there would be an impact.
On the MORE serious side… I care too. I am praying. Not enough, but I am very concerned and I have not prayed for our nation or our president more in all my life than in the last 5 years.
But, you know what?
I am of the/an (unpopular) opinion that our “democracy” or “republic” – whichever you wanna call it, was so thoroughly and deeply flawed from its inception and that WE the people of this country are so subjective about it that we can’t see the good in its demise. Me neither, for that matter, except in theory.
Thomas Jefferson himself tells us the founding fathers set out to separate church and state, and there were important reasons for that, but you do that reasoning within God’s good creation, and it is utter folly to think that cutting him out of reign over his creation is a good idea ever.
That’s not party politics, yall… That’s a critique of the very foundation of the whole enchilada.
Did I mention unpopular?
We vote instead of pray. And even when we pray, we pray for the vote. But if the whole thing is a sham anyway, it makes me wonder how it ever lasted as long as it did.
But I have come to see just how sad a condition my church is in. I can’t help but recall the night we stopped a murder with a prayer service out on 65th drive. The drunk man in the shadows of the night shouted, “Hey! Are yall the REAL Christians?”
Are we the REAL Christians?
I didn’t honestly know how to answer. I had a gut response, but enough sense not to voice it. I come from a faith heritage that in the past was deeeeeeeeply sectarian. We were a “unity movement” that went south! The irony is stunning, actually. But, we are also a small fish in the Christendom pond. So, I will forgive anyone who never heard of us. Anyone who has heard, has a visceral reaction to us.
BUT, irony upon irony, on that particular night, I happened to be a leader of the little mission, and I had managed to assemble a couple from my heritage of a more open minded persuasion, a couple from a more closed minded persuasion AND a Baptist, a Methodist, AND a Pentecostal type or two. And so when the drunk man asked if we were the REAL Christians, there was sooooooo much baggage there for me to work with that I couldn’t answer him.
But you know what?
He provided the answer to his own question. After a pregnant pause, he shouted again, “You must be. No one else would come out here like this….”
65th Drive was the site of multiple shootings, a homicide, many drug deals, many property crimes, statistically the high crime part of Lubbock, Texas. It was midnight, and we were praying at a card table with a lantern in an empty lot near the area where all these crimes typically take place. And this voice from the shadows declared we were the real Christians.
Why do I say all that?
Because, if a town like Lubbock, Texas can have crime like that, then the whole nation is in trouble. Forget the ballot and the choices! We have toooooooooo many multigenerational drug dealers, poverty squalorers and welfare babies running wild in the night in THIS town!
If it’s like this in Lubbock, what is it like in LA, Detroit, Dallas, Atlanta, Baltimore, Newark???
Juan, that was the drunk stranger’s name, then told us he was about to go shoot his wife and her lover. He knew where they were, and he was angry and drunk and armed. And what can I say, but Rev. Rodney, our resident Pentecostal, spoke up and said, “Man, I know exactly what you are going through. I did that very thing myself. I spent 16 years in prison for it, man, and it’s not worth it. The day I got out, my daughter came to me and said, ‘Daddy, where were you when I needed you?'”
And Rodney invited Juan to come and pray. And we prayed with him through the night. A few weeks later, we returned to that spot at zero thirty and Juan found us again! He thanked us profusely for saving him.
And where are those “REAL Christians” now?
I wish I knew.
I can’t find anyone to care enough to go back out there and do that again.
Too busy “voting” and griping.
I don’t want to die. I don’t want my kids to live in civil war or worse. Let me say that clearly. I want us to find the grace of God IN ONE ANOTHER and fast.
But, I ain’t seeing that on the horizon. And I think 666 sure looks good. Sure looks real close to 777 for a long time, but when you get right down to it. It’s the number of a beast, not a man. Certianly not THE MAN (John 19:5).
That’s a pretty convoluted comment, I reckon, but at least you know I give this stuff a lot of thought too.
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That is a wonderful testimony ❌
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That is a wonderful testimony ❌‼️ You actually remind me so much if my dad, from the stories he told, of going from the leader of a motor cycle gang on the streets of Los Angeles to holding Bible thumping street meetings on those same streets. You’re right, more prayer less politics!! I’m so glad you’re baaaaaccck!
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