REMINDER Check out this week's broadcast of ''Truth That Transforms'' at .http://www.truthi:hnaction.org/index.php/truth-that-transforms/It talks about "What It Means to Be Spiritual'' and includes a feature answering the questions of the millions who are unchurched.
URGENT PRAYER REQUEST: "Detained American's Health Dwindles in N. Korea Prison," - CBNNews.com; August 09, 2013 http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2013/August/Detained-Americans-Health-Dwindling-in-N-Korea-Prison/
The family of an American detained in North Korea for the past nine months is renewing calls for his release amid growing concerns about his health.
North Korean authorities arrested Kenneth Bae, an American tour operator and Christian missionary, last November, accusing him of "hostile acts" against the government. They sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor. His sister said his recent letters have alluded to troubling health conditions, including blurred vision. Bae is a diabetic, which could be causing his vision problems.
The family is planning a prayer vigil Aug. 10 at a church in Seattle. They hope to raise awareness of his situation and put more pressure on U.S. authorities to win his release. Bae is at least the sixth American detained by North Korea since 2009. The others were eventually released. [PRAY for 1) God's healing of and presence with Pastor Bae, 2) His earliest release by the North Korean government, and 3) God's comfort for his family and friends.]
North Korean authorities arrested Kenneth Bae, an American tour operator and Christian missionary, last November, accusing him of "hostile acts" against the government. They sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor. His sister said his recent letters have alluded to troubling health conditions, including blurred vision. Bae is a diabetic, which could be causing his vision problems.
The family is planning a prayer vigil Aug. 10 at a church in Seattle. They hope to raise awareness of his situation and put more pressure on U.S. authorities to win his release. Bae is at least the sixth American detained by North Korea since 2009. The others were eventually released. [PRAY for 1) God's healing of and presence with Pastor Bae, 2) His earliest release by the North Korean government, and 3) God's comfort for his family and friends.]
“Abandoned” For
Christ" -
Franklin Graham is the latest to join the chorus of voices calling for U.S. State Department and White House officials to take a more vocal role in protesting the Iranian imprisonment of American pastor Saeed Abedini. September 26 will mark the one year anniversary of Abedini’s imprisonment for allegedly “endangering the national security” of Iran.
Graham pointed out that, in contrast to Iranian accusations, “Pastor Saeed was in Iran trying to help children. With the permission of Iran’s government, he was working to build an orphanage. But his humanitarian mission led to an arrest on bogus charges and nearly a year of inhumane treatment, simply because he loves Jesus Christ.”...
Behind the scenes, more than 600,000 people around the world have signed a petition sponsored by ACLJ in support of pastor Abedini. A concerted movement this past May brought together Christians from many nations to set aside Pentecost to pray for Abedini. On June 13, demonstrations were held at Iranian embassies in at least six countries to protest Abedini’s treatment. And, on July 29, Arizona Republican Representative Trent Franks spoke on the floor of the House to urge other Congressmen to join him in “adopting” Pastor Abedini through the bipartisan Defending Freedoms Project.
Saeed’s response…and yours
Through his family living in Iran, Pastor Abedini has been made aware of these efforts on his behalf, and is grateful. “I heard that the persecution, my arrest and imprisonment has united churches from different denominations, from different cities and countries. That the churches have united together in prayer to put one request (my freedom) on one day (Pentecost) before God,” he wrote in a letter.
The story of Saeed Abedini, the jihad against Syrian Christians, the attacks on Coptic Christians in Egypt, and the ongoing desecration of churches in Nigeria and India should cause every American to reflect on the blessings of freedom still enjoyed in this nation.
PRAY: For comfort and peace for Saeed’s wife and children here in the U.S.
- For a strong witness and testimony from Pastor Abedini in the prison where God has placed him
- For Christians around the world who are being persecuted for their faith in Christ
- BOLDly (Beside Our Leaders Daily) for leadership from the White House and State Department in defending the freedoms of Abedini and other Americans
- Go to SaveSaeed.org to sign a petition over 600,000 others asking for his immediate release.
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"FORGET THE OLD SOUTH: TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NO EMMETT TILL," BY: MICHAEL BARONE, 8/2/2013; HTTP://TOWNHALL.COM/COLUMNISTS/MICHAELBARONE/2013/08/02/FORGET-THE-OLD-SOUTH-TRAYVON-MARTIN-WAS-NO-EMMETT-TILL-N1654110
Why are so many people so desperate to hold onto the idea that America is as racist as it has ever been?
The phenomenon is apparent in much of the commentary on the George Zimmerman case. Facts were blithely ignored — the fact that Zimmerman is Hispanic, not white, by current standards; the evidence that he and not his victim, Trayvon Martin, was pummeled and wounded; the failure to find any hint of anti-black bias in Zimmerman’s past.
Instead there was a desperate longing to see this unhappy incident as a case of a white racist hunting down and murdering an innocent black — with a view to establishing that this kind of thing happens all the time. It isn’t.
Yes, young black men are homicide victims in large and tragic numbers. But the perpetrators are almost always other young black men, as in President Obama’s hometown of Chicago, where almost every weekend there are multiple such murders.
Nevertheless, journalism is full of opinion articles, many written by people who should know better, likening the death of Trayvon Martin to the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. Till was a 14-year-old black boy raised in Chicago who, on a summer trip to his native Mississippi, “wolf-whistled” at a white woman. Two white men abducted and brutally murdered him. They were tried, and the all-white jury acquitted them after deliberating 67 minutes. Months later, the defendants told Look magazine’s William Bradford Huie that they had indeed killed the young man.
The Emmett Till case attracted national attention, with heavy media coverage. Rep. Charles Diggs, one of three blacks in Congress, attended the trial. National magazines ran pictures of the grinning defendants. In the process, Northerners were forced to confront the brutality with which white Southerners enforced the subjection of blacks. This went beyond the laws requiring segregated schools, buses and drinking fountains. Also in place was an unwritten code of behavior, breach of which could result in violent retaliation. Blacks were called by their first names and could approach whites’ houses only by the back door, and black men could never, never ogle white women.
This was unknown to most Northerners. As I explain in my forthcoming book, “Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics,” there was almost no migration between South and North in the years between the Civil War and World War II. Southern mores were so unknown in the North that Yale psychologist John Dollard’s 1937 book “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” based on five months’ field work in Indianola, Miss., was hailed as a great revelation, akin to Margaret Mead’s writing on Samoa. Yet everything in it was common knowledge for every 10-year-old, black or white, in Indianola.
The great genius of the civil rights movement was to make Northerners face the reality — and the violence — of the segregation system. The Emmett Till case was one of the first incidents that forced them to do so. It was followed a year later by Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955 and Martin Luther King’s resulting Montgomery bus boycott.
It is sometimes said that laws cannot change customs. But the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning racial discrimination in hiring and public accommodations, did in fact change behavior in the South. It not only ended legally enforced segregation but effectively ended the unwritten code of black subjugation.
Which is to say that the America of our time — the America of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman — is hugely different from and hugely better than the America of Emmett Till.
Back in the 1950s, most Americans — not just in the South but across the nation — opposed interracial marriages. As blacks were migrating in large numbers to Northern cities, whites moved out of neighborhoods when they moved in.
Today things are different. Our president, twice elected with majorities of the vote, is the product of a mixed-race marriage. Black presence in neighborhoods no longer results in rapid white flight.
Yet many Americans have a desperate need to believe nothing has changed. They yearn for the moral clarity that enables almost all Americans today to retrospectively condemn the old Southern code.
The irony is that those who claim they lead the civil rights movement today have a vested psychological interest in denying its great triumph.
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.
[italics emphasis mine]
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.
[italics emphasis mine]
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