by ·Comments Off on The Flying Fox

The flying fox is really a bat, that has a two to three-foot wing-span, and soars and flaps its wings like a large bird, not fast like a regular bat.

Its face looks like a fox and its feet look like long slender claws, like the feet of a bird. When it is soaring overhead it is beautiful and gracious and is truly awe-inspiring.

The minute it lands though, it is an ugly creature that pulls itself up the tree limbs with the front claws of its wings and the back claws near the tale.

They make an ugly screeching sound that you only notice when they have landed.

It sounds almost melodic when it is soaring.

They are like all of us who have the choice of soaring like an eagle, with wings spread, lifted by the peace and glory of God, or we can choose to cling to our worldly natures and crawl up trees like deformed bugs.

As humans, only we are created in God’s image, yet we have the choice to live our lives in our own image.

I don’t know about you, but I would much rather soar like an eagle than crawl like a bug.

 

 

by ·Comments Off on Slavery & Stem Cell Research on Unborn

Many scientists and lawmakers are wanting to legalize and fund stem-cell research on human fetuses. The reasoning is that these unborn babies can help save the lives of people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

They justify this non-voluntary, sacrificial act by unborn babies by saying they are less of a human than someone fully formed and now suffering from a disease.

How is this logic any different than the logic supporting slavery? Where one group of people were considered less human than another group and they were used to make their lives easier. The big distinction is that slaves had to live daily through the abuse, degradation and humiliation, until they were finally liberated. These second-class citizen babies, however, are denied life, as it is sacrificed to give someone else a better quality of life.

by ·Comments Off on Does God Answer Prayer?

My son asked me once if God answered prayers and I said of course, but for many, prayer has become a one-way conversation with no expectation of an answer.

One Day, I told my son I had written something special for him and I wanted to give it to him later. He said he wanted to hear it then and persisted with the request. In my heart I knew he was distracted and wasn’t ready to receive, but because he petitioned me with such fervor, I couldn’t say no. So I had him sit down and began explaining the significance of what I had written and asked him if he was really ready to receive. He assured me he was and I began reading my gift to him. I glanced up after a couple of lines and saw him playing with his toys, looking around the room and generally not listening.

I paused and analyzed the situation and thought to myself how much like that we are with God. We beg him and beg him to answer us, or impart knowledge or give us a gift of faith or wisdom, and when He is ready to answer our prayers, we are on to the next project.

We need to remember that prayer is a two way street and it is as much about listening as it is talking.

by ·Comments Off on The Tobacco Settlement was Not About Health… It Was About Money

All the states have received an incredible windfall settlement from the tobacco companies.

Even the lawyers get to split up a whopping eight billion dollars among themselves.

Even though there was no plaintiff, no injured person in the trial, the courts decided that people who smoke cost the state money therefore the tobacco company should pay.

What industry will be next? Beer and wine? Automobile? Roller blades? When do people become responsible for their actions and accountable to read labels or use products correctly?

If the government thinks that tobacco is so horrible, so deadly, so addictive, then they should say it is an illegal substance.

If they really cared about the health of the people smoking they would pass a law forbidding them to do it. But there’s no money in that.

On the pretense of caring about health, they continue to raise taxes on cigarettes claiming this will go to pay for medical expenses of smokers.

This is Nina May challenging lawmakers to either ban cigarettes, or let smokers alone. Stop using them as a get rich scheme while claiming to care about their health and safety.

by ·Comments Off on The Box Jellyfish

The Box Jellyfish is found off the coast of northern Australia near the Great Barrier Reef.

These fish are deadly when they sting you and the prognosis for recovery is measured in the length of the sting. Precautions are taken along the resort beaches to keep them away from the bathing area. They stretch nets out past where the swimmers are and keep bottles of Clorox in little boxes up and down the beach to put on the smaller, shorter stings. The longer stings require immediate hospitalization.

The most frustrating thing about them is that they are clear and you can’t see them except when you look through the water, to the sand and see their shadow. With this early warning system that signals that danger is near, you can avoid the sting.

That is like the spiritual radar we each possess that alerts us to the impending threat of spiritual affliction. God gives us the ability to discern the shadows in our spirits to know that danger is near. But He also provides the Clorox of the Holy Spirit to heal us if we are stung. But wisdom, insight and vigilance keep the sting of the enemy from being deadly.

by ·Comments Off on One Small Leak Can Start a Flood

The other day I saw water leaking from the ceiling in my basement.

A plumber spent four hours cutting holes in the dry wall in the all the areas that could possibly be the source of the water.

In doing so, we saw evidence that it had been in other places besides the basement but we couldn’t find the source.

Finally, on the third floor, after removing the dry wall and baseboard in a bedroom, he found a small copper pipe that had been pricked with a nail when the molding was installed five years before.

It created a tiny, small, unnoticed drip of water that took five years to manifest itself in the basement . . . three floors below.

There are many analogies that can be drawn from this. But it really depends upon what the pipe is carrying.

If it is carrying bitterness, anger, and destructive thoughts then it will manifest in a destructive way that can’t be seen, until the damage is done.

Or, the pipe can carry love, truth, and compassion and where it accumulates, it will cause streams of living water to be poured out.

This is Nina May encouraging you to keep the pipes of your life full of love because you may never know how it will affect someone’s life.

by ·Comments Off on ’Winning the Cultural War’ Charlton Heston’s Speech to the Harvard

I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living. “My Daddy,” he said, “pretends to be people.” There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo.

If you want the ceiling repainted I’ll do my best. There always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here. I’m never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I’m the guy.

As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: If my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to reconnect you with your own sense of liberty of your own freedom of thought … your own compass for what is right.

Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, “We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that’s about to hijack your birthright to think and say what resides in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you … the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

Let me back up. About a year ago I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. I ran for office, I was elected, and now I serve … I serve as a moving target for the media who’ve called me everything from “ridiculous” and “duped” to a “brain-injured, senile, crazy old man.” I know … I’m pretty old … but I sure, Lord, ain’t senile.

As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I’ve realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it’s much, much bigger than that.

I’ve come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated. For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 – long before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else’s pride, they called me a racist.

I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe. I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite. Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they’re essentially saying, “Chuck, how dare you speak your mind. You are using language not authorized for public consumption!” But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we’d still be King George’s boys — subjects bound to the British crown.

In his book, “The End of Sanity,” Martin Gross writes that “blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly foisted on us from every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don’t like it.”

Let me read a few examples. At Antioch college in Ohio, young men seeking intimacy with a coed must get verbal permission at each step of the process from kissing to petting to final copulation … all clearly spelled out in a printed college directive.

In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who had been infected by dentists who had concealed their AIDs — the state commissioner announced that health providers who are HIV-positive need not ….. need not ….. tell their patients that they are infected.

At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school team “The Tribe” because it was supposedly insulting to local Indians, only to learn that authentic Virginia chiefs truly like the name.

In San Francisco, city fathers passed an ordinance protecting the rights of transvestites to cross-dress on the job, and for transsexuals to have separate toilet facilities while undergoing sex change surgery.

In New York City, kids who don’t speak a word of Spanish have been placed in bilingual classes to learn their three R’s in Spanish solely because their last names sound Hispanic.

At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially set up segregated dormitory space for black students. Yeah, I know … that’s out of bounds now. Dr. King said “Negroes.” Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the March said “black.” But it’s a no-no now. For me, hyphenated identities are awkward … particularly “Native-American.” I’m a Native American, for God’s sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife’s side, my grandson is a thirteenth generation native American … with a capital letter on “American.”

Finally, just last month … David Howard, head of the Washington D.C. Office of Public Advocate, used the word “niggardly” while talking to colleagues about budgetary matters. Of course, “niggardly” means stingy or scanty. But within days Howard was forced to publicly apologize and resign. As columnist Tony Snow wrote: “David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who (a) didn’t know the meaning of niggardly, (b) didn’t know how to use a dictionary to discover the meaning, and (c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance.”

What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can’t be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?

Let’s be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. You are the best and the brightest. You, here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that … and abide it … you are — by your grandfathers’ standards — cowards.

Here’s another example. Right now at more than one major university, Second Amendment scholars and researchers are being told to shut up about their findings or they’ll lose their jobs. Why? Because their research findings would undermine big-city mayor’s pending lawsuits that seek to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from firearm manufacturers.

I don’t care what you think about guns. But if you are not shocked at that, I am shocked at you. Who will guard the raw material of unfettered ideas, if not you? Who will defend the core value of academia, if you supposed soldiers of free thought and _expression lay down your arms and plead, “Don’t shoot me.”

If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don’t celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe. Don’t let America’s universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism. But what can you do?

How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The answer’s been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.

You simply … disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely.

But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom. I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King … who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those in the right against those with the might.

Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Vietn Nam. In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

But be careful … it hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated …. to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. I’m not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have taken their toll on me. Let me tell you a story.

A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called “Cop Killer” celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world.

Police across the country were outraged. Rightfully so-at least one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I owned some shares at the time, so I decided to attend.

What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of “Cop Killer”- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word.

“I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF. I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF. I’M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF. I’M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF…”

It got worse, a lot worse. I won’t read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore.

“SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY ….”

Well, I won’t do to you here what I did to them. Let’s just say I left the room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps, one of them said “We can’t print that.”

“I know,” I replied, “but Time/Warner’s selling it.” Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T’s contract. I’ll never be offered another film by Warner’s, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk.

When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself … jam the switchboard of the district attorney’s office.

When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors … choke the halls of the board of regents.

When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl’s cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment … march on that school and block its doorways.

When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you…petition them, oust them, banish them.

When Time magazine’s cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month … boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobedience’s of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built this country.

If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree.

Thank you

by ·Comments Off on Arafat at National Prayer Breakfast

There was some controversy swirling around the National Prayer Breakfast last week concerning the attendance of Yasser Arafat. There were many Christians who threatened to boycott if he attended.

My question for these Christians is .. . have they met the person of Jesus Christ? The one who ate with the tax collectors and prostitutes, the one who ministered to the woman at the well when she was considered a social outcast, the one who dined in Zachias’ house.

Jesus came so ALL might have life and have it more abundantly . . . not just people we like, or agree with politically. Believe it or not, Jesus died for Yasser Arafat too.

God is not a respecter of persons, and ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We all have a Yasser Arafat in our lives . . . Someone we think is less worthy to receive grace than we are. Well think again.

As a Christian you are called to love God and love your neighbor. Who knows, that person you have condemned, or Yasser even, might be the Saul who becomes Paul. This is Nina May encouraging you to pray for Yasser Arafat not condemn him.

by ·Comments Off on Judgement . . . Good or Bad?

We keep hearing that it is un-Christian to judge, but if that were so, then no Christian should ever become a judge, or a lawyer, or submit to the judgement of a court.

We all make judgements each day in our personal lives: Where our children will go to school, who they play with, which food is best for our family . . . what T.V. shows are suitable to watch.

The Bible says, we will be judged by the same standard with which we judge others.

For example, if we are harsh and lack mercy in our judgement then that is how we can expect to be judged?  God has never told His people to abandon the truth. Jesus did not shrink from calling the Pharasis a bunch a vipers and hypocrites because they were pretending to be perfect while holding everyone else to a higher standard.

It is not un-Christian for people today to look at their leaders and judge that they are good leaders or not. If we do not make a judgement when chosing our leaders, then the manner in which they lead will be a judgement on the nation. And we all will be accountable for all our actions on . . . judgement day.

This is Nina May. Ninamay.com.

 

 

by ·Comments Off on The Ghost Gum Tree

The ghost gum tree in Kings Canyon, near Alice Springs, Australia, is a eucalyptus tree with white fuzzy bark.

The most unusual thing about this tree is its ability to self regulate for survival.

During times of prolonged drought, it will actually amputate one of its own limbs in order to allow more water and nourishment to get to the rest of the tree.

These limbs will never grow back and a painful reminder of the decision to sacrifice one for the good of all, is a black ring lying in perfect contrast against the white bark.

Sometimes in life people have to make tough decisions such as this, for survival of the whole, or just to allow it to grow.

There is another tree called the Rain Tree found in the rainforest in North Eastern Australia. Most leaves of tropical plants form a type of umbrella and catch the water directing it to the limbs and the trunk. The Rain Tree will fold its leaves and point them down toward the ground allowing all the water to fall through them onto the plants below.

It is a sacrificial gesture. Liberals are right, we can learn a lot from nature.