I thought to myself, “Okay, but why do you feel so urgently, the need to tell us that?”

He stayed and visited with us about an hour and a half and while our eyes glazed over, he talked about his various accomplishments in life…how he came to be a success…how he taught aviation classes to potential pilots (In a lesser know airline company than American or TWA, because he didn’t have a high school diploma.

He told us how he was rated a great aviation teacher because his students were more apt to pass the tests than any other aviation teacher’s students, how he made a lot of money…and he went on to tell how his son went bad (i.e., got on drugs, became a thief and was arrested at the ripe old age of twelve.)  By the time he had gotten to the latter, I was seriously questioning the former.

Isn’t this a vivid picture of what is wrong in families today?  Our definition of success is all twisted up in our minds.  For the sake of our children though, we need to get it straight and maybe…* we just need to be content with a smaller loaf of bread!

©Edna L. Ingram      * Quote from the late beloved Mary Oler.

I was dusting the big frames in our bedroom that hold the large pictures of our grandchildren.  I’ve never really noticed how dust forms before…on the horizontal pieces of the frames…but on the vertical places there is no dust.

It started me to thinking and I came to the conclusion that there is no place for the dust to rest on the vertical pieces. It just slides off onto the floor, evidently. Then this thought came to me:  The vertical direction is pointing upward to heaven or downward…there no in between.  The horizontal is neutral.  Hmmmmm  We don’t want to be neutral, that’s for sure!

Why are some people not as tempted by Satan as others?  It is because in their life, they have God’s Spirit dwelling in them and Satan has no resting place there.  Romans 8: 9-11; Romans 5:5; Galatians 4:6; Ephesians 3:16.

I’ve heard it said that if you are not tempted much by Satan, it may be because he already has you.  That may be true in some cases but not necessarily so.  James 4:7  “…Be subject therefore unto God; but resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”

May all of us who are Christians, so live each day…that Satan can find no resting place long enough to work havoc in our lives.

© Edna L. Ingram

Amram and Jochebed , What thoughts must have gone through your mind when little Moses was born! “How will we keep him from the king’s edict?” “How can we hide him?” “How long can we hide him?” I’m just wondering how you handled your emotions and your impending sorrow…thinking “what if”…  he were found by the king’s soldiers. Amram and Jochebed, how did you handle your fear?

Then when you could hide him no longer, and you made the little ark of bulrushes and put him in the river, how your heart must have ached for him!　 But then God’s providence took over again and Pharoah’s daughter found him and recognized him as one of the Hebrew’s babies. Miriam, Moses’ sister asked her about a nurse and she sent her to get one. Pharoah’s daughter　told you to take him and nurse him for her. What joy! Although short-lived! Even though we know mothers nursed their babies longer back then, it would have still been too short of a time. When he was weaned you had to part with him again and he went to the palace to live. Amram and Jochebed, how did you handle your sorrow?

Then when he was grown, he saw one of his fellow Israelites being mis-treated by one of the Egyptian taskmasters and he killed the Egyptian. The next day, he realized the news had spread and he had to leave. He went into another land and became a keeper of sheep for the priest of Midian, and eventually married one of his daughters, Zipporah. After that the Lord　got his attention one　day with a burning bush that was not being consumed with the burning. He wanted Moses to go back to Egypt and lead His　chosen people to a land that He had promised to their fathers before them.

Amram and Jochebed, I hope you lived long enough to know that the training that you gave Moses in those few years really paid off for him. He went back to Egypt on the Lord’s bidding and led God’s people out of slavery and toward a new land that was promised years before to His people. Also God, Himself, told Moses that He would raise up a Prophet like unto him that the people would hear. “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me, from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him.” That Prophet was Jesus the Christ. If you could have known that, Amram and Jochebed….How did you handle your pride?

We prayed, Edna, we prayed!

©Edna L. Ingram, August 2011

Note: Today in this time and age, we Christian parents sometimes feel overwhelmed with our responsibility of rearing our children up to be faithful to God. We need to make sure that is our number one priority…and prayer is still very powerful and if we pray, believing…it can help so much in bridging the gap between our failures and what we desire for our precious offspring. 

 Since we, as a nation, have adopted the philosophy of turning our individual responsibilities over to the government, we have not only given the government the responsibility of caring for the poor, but we have given the government control over our children through the public school system, over our retirement through Social Security, over health care for our elderly through Medicare and we are now considering giving government complete control of the entire health care system for our nation. We have literally become a “ Nanny State ”, crying to the government to provide the things God instructed us to provide for ourselves and our families.

We should consider the fact that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. One cannot be surrendered without losing the other. The more of our individual responsibilities we give to the government, the more of our individual liberties we give away as well.

Throughout history, governments have used public assistance programs as a means to enslave and control. Just like a deer responding to the offer of free corn from a deer feeder in the woods, few people can resist when the government offers more and more “free services” to more and more people. But we would do well to consider the consequences. When a deer feeder is placed in the woods, it may appear that the motive is to care for the deer, but usually the motive is to control the deer with the intent of hanging the deer’s head on the wall and its meat in the freezer.

The long- term result of public assistance programs is really not much different. Though the motives and intentions of those who promote public assistance programs may be honest and good, history reveals that the more government control that is exercised over individual responsibilities the more freedom is taken from the individual as well. It results in more and more people becoming dependent upon the government and thereby giving up more and more of their freedom. The inevitable result is socialism, and according to the words of Karl Marx in his “Communist Manifesto”, “Socialism the bridge that leads from capitalism to Communism.

To change this system of self-destruction we must change our philosophy and return to the basic, time tested principles which are set forth in God’s Word. If we want to continue, as a nation, to enjoy our individual freedoms, we must return, as a nation, to a philosophy of accepting our God-given individual responsibilities. We are still a government of the people and our government’s policies are a reflection of our individual philosophies.

The system will only be changed when we impress the basic principles of freedom and responsibility upon our children and upon the people of our nation. The most patriotic thing we can do is preach the Word of God and the principles from His Word which will exalt a nation. May God bless us in this endeavor.

-Wendell Ingram

1973 Was A Very “Cloudy” Year In America, (But Not In Weather Terms!)

If you had been in a coma in the years preceding 1973, and had not heard the arguments of the courts or seen news clippings, and had awakened after the US Supreme court legalized abortion, you would have been shocked… and thought you were in another country other than our beloved United States of America!

Maybe 2012-16 will be the time that this horrible holocaust will stop. Many of us hope and pray that this will come to an end. This catastrophe did not happen overnight. It happened over a long period of time.

I wonder what causes us to be so ignorant  (from the word ‘ignore’)  that to redefine an act and call it by some other word, makes it more acceptable to us. We can think of other acts that are redefined and called by more ‘acceptable’ terms.  It is a very sad situation when little unborn babies are not included within the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment! 

People changed our language and instead of calling it “killing our little unborn babies,” they call it abortion ( a medical term) and we got conditioned to the arguments a small bit at a time over the years and then when it happened, not many got too concerned about it. What a situation we have gotten ourselves into!

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 23 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

brought the wounded in from the front lines to the field

hospital. One man was so severely wounded they thought he

wasn’t going to make it…so they just let him lie there while they

tended to the others.One of the German prisoners of war, the

American camp was holding, was helping bring in the gurneys

with the wounded men on them. He told the American soldiers

that he thought he could help that man. They asked the severely

injured man if it would be okay and he was conscious enough to

say, “Yeah! Let’s get on with it!”

 He lived to relate this story of his near death, and lived until his

middle 60′s. This story was related by him to Bobby’s brother.

The German prisoner of war reminds me of the Hippocratic

oath that doctors have to make and shows how much has

changed in our modern times. The modern version of the

Hippocratic oath is still very virtuous but is being disparaged in

some areas today, especially in the area of deaths of little

babies, yet unborn.

It also reminds me of how Jesus did even more for His

enemies….while we were still His enemies.  Grace = Unmerited

Favor  (Unearned Favor).