Category: Random Thoughts

Are You Prepared For The One Disaster We Will All Face?

I was really looking forward to Independence Day weekend this year.

We had a beach house rented for five days. All my kids and grand kids would be there at some point. It was Wonderful Wife’s birthday and I had a surprise gift for her that I was pretty sure she was going to love. I always love sitting on the deck and watching everyone else around us burn through thousands of dollars worth of big, expensive fireworks. This weekend, I even locked all the guns away and had an adult beverage or two one night.

Sure there were ups and downs to the weekend. You can’t put sixteen or so people together in the same house for four days and not have a few disagreements. This is especially true when you have three “alpha” females with strong personalities and five kids under the age of seven. With that mix even what to cool for dinner and how it should be prepared can lead to some hilarious (in hindsight) power games.

An unexpected phone call early in the morning of the 5th changed the whole tone of the weekend. One of our nieces, was in an auto accident on the way back from a day at the lake with her family. The vehicle left the road, hit something and rolled several times. She was being flown by air-ambulance to a nearby hospital but it did not look good. Another call a little later in the morning confirmed our worst fears. She had suffered a severe head injury and was dead at eighteen years of age. Our graduation gift was still sitting on our counter at home waiting to be mailed when we returned from our trip…

She was a beautiful girl when she and her sister used to come over to swim with my youngest daughter. She was an equally beautiful as the flower girl in my middle daughter’s wedding. As a young lady she had grown even more beautiful. She was planning to go on to school and travel the world. Big and brave ambitions for a young lady raised in such a small town but she was now gone. She would not travel the world, or go off to school. She wouldn’t post silly sayings or silly selfies on Fezbook anymore. She would be buried in that small town in a pink metal box with a spray of flowers and a flood of tears from those she left behind…

She was and is loved. She will be missed and there is a hole in the heart of all who knew her.

I have said it before on this blog, there is one disaster that is guaranteed to strike us all. We will all die. Some sooner and some later, but we will all meet our end.

Since this is a disaster guaranteed to befall each of us it is also the most important thing we can prepare for. We have complete control over what happens after our deaths. We can receive God’s Grace by accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior and repent of our sins gaining eternal life in Heaven. Or, not.

It is a simple choice but one that has eternal consequences.

As sad and heartbroken as I am over her death I am also comforted because I will see her again one day. She made that choice and accepted Christ a year or so ago.

Have you?

Have those you love?

God bless.

We Knew It Would Happen…

Many of us knew it would happen, it was just a matter of when and what the body count would be. A man driven by leftist propaganda attacked a group of Republican Congressmen practicing for a charity baseball game (link) with a rifle and a handgun. It appears the body count only includes the Bernie supporter who carried out the attack but one Congressman and several others were wounded.

The wounded Congressman, House Majority Whip Scalise was, ironically the recipient of the most severe injury but also a big part of the reason the casualties were (fairly) light. The Capital Police detail assigned to protect one of the highest ranking members of the House were the only armed protection on site and were able to stop the attack. Had the Representative Scalise not been in attendance it would have been a far different story as it took Alexandria, VA police ten minutes or more to respond. Representative Mo Brooks summed it up pretty well with the quote of the day from yesterday:

“All we would have had would have been baseball bats versus a rifle. Those aren’t good odds.”

No, they are not Representative Brooks which is why the Second Amendment is so important to those of us without federal protection details. However, anti-gun liberals were calling for curtailing those rights even before the attacker’s body reached room temperature.

Folks, over the last decade or so we have seen American politics and society as a whole become ever more divided. Tribalism in the US is rampant and growing worse everyday. Unless we can find leadership that can reverse this trend and start to bring us back together this type of event will become ever more common. As serious as the injuries inflicted were, if we don’t find a way to reign this kind of thing in future incidents will be far, far worse.

I don’t believe such actions will be limited to leftists and Democrats. At some point the divide and the escalating attacks incited by the media and our “leaders” will generate reprisals and attacks by the Right as well. It will take longer but it will happen. There are crazies (useful idiots) on both sides.

Some believe there is time to step back from the brink of madness. I hope and pray they are right. Personally, I think we are already on the slippery slope and it is not a matter of if, but how quickly, before the thin line between civilization and chaos is breached…

Do you have a plan or an idea of what you will do if/when that line is crossed?

Are you ready to implement that plan/idea?

If not, you might want to get on that…

God bless.

Media Bias In Russia (Too)

I came across a news article on Reuter’s “news” service titled: In Russia, state TV and the Internet tell a tale of two protests

It goes to great lengths to point out that the media in Russia downplayed the recent anti-Putin protests and dramatically under reported the numbers involved…

I think they honestly see this as newsworthy despite the fact that their own reports (as well as most of those from mainstream media in the US) are just as biased towards their own agenda and views. I have watched as anti-gun protests are shot from angles that make 10-15 folks with signs look like a crowd of hundreds. The text in the accompanying articles reinforced the same numbers..despite reality.  Campaign rally numbers in the recent US elections were under or over reported based on the affiliation and agenda of the news service. CNN even posted pictures of a virtual ghost town of attendees at the Trumpet inauguration (taken hours before the event started) and compared them to the crowds of anti-Trumpet protesters.

So, they key takeaway for me is that the media in the UK (based on what I have been hearing), US AND Russia are biased and not to be trusted and all seem more concerned with furthering their own agendas than reporting the news…

God help us…