My devotional this morning was from Philippians 4. The verse that struck me most was Philippians 4:4 (NLT):
Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again—rejoice!
For many of us, this is one of the darkest times we have lived through and the challenges are not just local, but global. It is easy to become dismayed and not see an end to this madness. But, in all things we must keep our faith that God is in control and that this is a masterful design in His plan. There are many reasons to be joyful and REJOICE! Before living through this pandemic, I would have been scared to make such a public statement of faith. For me personally, it felt like persecution that I was not strong enough to withstand in a social an environment so harsh to anything akin to traditional values and faith.
What a difference two years can make! What a blessing to live through such hardship to have my faith tested and to feel more committed to openly discuss. This is the light I am seeing in the darkness right now. There is a unification of people who have become awoken to the evils on a global scale, that it feels to me there is a collective dropping to our knees, with our hands lifted up in prayer. There are also many, many souls who are lost and searching for a higher purpose and meaning. The harvest is rich if we sow the proper seed!
When I came across THIS article, it summarized important things that I have been observing about people who usually are so in favor of large government now waking up to the abuse of its power. I have written about this previously, people on the left are slowly becoming strong allies. I first learned of Dr. Naomi Wolf early in 2021 when she was extremely vocal that vaccine mandates were the hill to die on. Now she is discussing, it is time for intellectuals to talk about God and faith. Some key highlights:
Friends and colleagues of mine who had been skeptical their whole adult lives of Big Agriculture — who only shopped at Whole Foods, who would never let their kids eat sugar or processed meat, or ingest a hint of Red Dye No 2 in candy, or eat candy itself for that matter in some cases — these same people lined up to inject into their bodies, and then offered up the bodies of their dependent minor children for the same purpose, an MRNA gene-therapy injection whose trials would not end for two more years. These parents announced on social media proudly that they had done this with their children. When I pointed out gently that the trials would not end til 2023, they yelled at me.
The progressive, right-on part of the ideological world — my people, my tribe, my whole life — became more and more uncritical, less and less able to reason. Friends and colleagues who were wellness-oriented, and who their whole adult lives had known the dangers of Big Pharma — and who would only use Burt’s Bees on their babies’ bottoms and sunscreen with no PABAs on themselves— lined up to take an experimental gene therapy; why not? And worse, it seemed, they crowded around, like the stone throwers in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” to lash out at and to shun anyone who raised the most basic questions about Big Pharma and its highly compensated spokesmodels. Their critical thinking, but worse, their entire knowledge base about that industry, seemed to have evaporated magically into the ether.
She even throws a couple Supreme Court justices under the bus!
But Justice Kagan seemed suddenly, after decades of this view, not to see a contradiction. Her career-long philosophical foundation that resulted in a consistent view, when it came to abortion rights, that citizens had a right to physical privacy in medical decision-making — “My body, my choice” — “It is between a woman and her doctor” — vanished, along with her expensive education and all of her knowledge of the Constitution.
Justice Sotomayor, for her part, said, in an article reported on Dec 10 2021, that it was “madness” that the state of Texas wanted to “substantially suspend[ed] a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body.” Her tone was, rightly, one of high dudgeon at the thought that anyone might override this right. But when it came to Justice Sotomayor’s discussion on Jan 7 2022, less than four weeks later, of President Biden’s vaccine mandates, that clear Constitutional right was now nowhere to be seen; it too had vanished into the ether. A part of Justice Sotomayor’s brain seems to have simply shut down at the word “vaccines” — though it was the same woman in the same Court, with the same Constitution before her, the Justice could no longer manage the Kantian imperative of consistent reasoning.
And finally, my favorite part of her discussion. The rediscovery of her faith and the meaning of prayer.
I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.
I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.
Beautifully written! Sharing.