His praise shall continually be on my lips

Wow, the last day of June is here already! Later this week we will celebrate America's independence. I still remember last year when we went to a fish fry at my great-aunt's house for the 4th. Hard to believe that has been a full year ago! Today marks 35 years since my parents got married ... wow! My life is flying!

I meant to write a bit about my grandparents the other day when I posted a few pictures of them. Mama has been in Greenville with them the last couple of weeks. Since she has some time off in the summer, she has done this the last few years so she can help them with various tasks. She told me the other night that Pop has been saying how he keeps thinking at night that he will go to bed and wake up in heaven. And he seems really disappointed the next morning to wake up and still be alive on earth! Thankfully Pop is a cheery person despite the fact he is ready for Home. It's so ordinary to be visiting his house and for him to go lie down for a nap only for us to hear singing instead of snores coming from the bedroom! :-) He lies there belting out all sorts of praise songs to Jesus. It brings a smile to my face imagining Pop graduating from practicing here to singing with the choirs of Heaven! What a glorious thought! No wonder he is ready to go. Often these days, I feel similarly.

Praising God is so important and I don't do it enough! Having an attitude of thanksgiving keeps us from being discouraged and complaining and being mean to one another. You can't exactly live down in the dumps, express your discontent with life, politics and the price of food and oil and curse your neighbor while you have genuine thanksgiving to God in your heart and on your lips. The Psalms are full of praise to our Almighty God. David says His praise will continually be on his lips. I admit that I struggle with murmuring when things seem hopeless and situations are frustrating. I have been this way for too long and too much lately. It has done nothing but hold me down, make me feel serious and not enjoy this wonderful life God has given me. It has made me feel self-pity and downtrodden and wonder if this life is even worth living. I've had one of those "what's the use?" attitudes. I hate when I get this way.

Sooooo .... I am going to start praising the Lord. I have to remind myself to rejoice in my God and not get down about my circumstances. Who is bigger? God or my problems? Pop is a great example. He keeps praise constantly on his lips by singing praises to the Lord. I can learn from him and be joyful.

I am a child of the King of Kings...why am I worried and frustrated? We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. And God so loved the world that He gave. Even while we were yucky, rotten sinners in rebellion against God, He looked at us with compassion and love and did for us what we never could do for ourselves. We were people in bondage to our own filth and sinful ways. Really, even now I cannot grasp how awful sin is to God, but I was covered in my own filthy, sinful ways when God reached down, cleaned me off with the blood of His dear Son and set my feet on a Rock. He didn't leave me trapped in a pit of filth, but He established where I am going. And He promised to be with me and never forsake me. In a country where so many people are forsaken by those who vowed to love and cherish them and where friendships are often shallow, it is wonderful to know that God is faithful and keeps His promises. He doesn't remove the storms from life, but He walks with us through them. If God be for us, who can be against us?

Thank you, God, for the hope that I have in You. Please help me keep my eyes on You instead of focusing on the discouraging news in this world. YOU are bigger than those things. "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world."

My God reigns! Hallelujah!

My grandparents

Dan and Mary Truax
better known as Pop and Mema
Christmas Eve 2007

One of Pop's carvings

A note Pop wrote and put on the door of his apartment.

A typical pose ... what a ham!

Some of Pop's drawings of his life in Africa

One year of marriage!

These pictures was taken a year ago today when my youngest sibling married in Myrtle Beach, SC on June 26, 2007! It's hard to believe a full year has passed in some ways. Michael was the ring bearer.

Happy anniversary, David and Megan!

Btw, David is still "Berkie" to me. Family nicknames are hard to drop even if your sibling is 21 years old now! :-D

Slavery -- me

I thought I'd take a few minutes to write this morning. Our new church building is complete, and our first joint service is at 10:30. Instead of 3 morning services, there will be only one. We had been going to the 9:45 service.

While searching for something about the UN the other morning, I came across the slavery article (previous post) written by Thomas Sowell. I have read articles from Sowell and Walter Williams since my high school days. In a country where 90+% of the black people vote for the same candidate, I like to read from black men who have a different viewpoint than the masses. I also read Leonard Pitts who is much more liberal than Sowell and Williams, but I find he makes a lot of sense quite often as well. At least his arguments seem sensible. He has helped me understand the "African-American mind" a bit better.

Personally I never owned a slave nor do I know an actual slave or former slave, and I live in the South. From all I know, my ancestors were poor, white folks, and I know my dad worked with black people in tobacco fields in Caswell County when he grew up in the 1950s and '60s. For me, reparations would be taking a step backwards in race relations. Why punish people living today for something their ancestors did? And why reward people living now who never were slaves? I believe reparations would cause a lot of hard feelings. I am tired of "white guilt" and "American guilt." I'm tired of guilt period. I agree that slavery was a shameful part of America's past, but, thank God, it is in the past! Let's leave it there. I was glad to find Sowell's article and see that the African nations were much to blame for the slave trade. Reading on Wikipedia, I found that slavery is practiced in some African and Asian nations EVEN TODAY! The white Americans did not invent slavery nor have we continued with it. Let's get over it and move on. You don't make much progress while looking behind you.

Philippians 3:

13 Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, 14 I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
15 Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this mind; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal even this to you.

Slavery - Thomas Sowell

The United Nations of Reparations Hypocrisy

by Thomas Sowell (September 7, 2001)

Perhaps Secretary of State Colin Powell's decision to pull the American delegation out of the so-called U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, will be just a footnote in history. But we can at least hope that it may be a turning point toward a future time when "racism" will no longer be a magic word used to gain money or political concessions.

Within the United States, Jesse Jackson and others have repeatedly scared millions of dollars out of big corporations, just by threatening to use the magic word "racism." Even the police have sometimes turned a blind eye to violations of the law, lest they be tarred with that magic word that will bring the whole liberal media crashing down on them. But letting criminal activity go on unimpeded and unpunished has hurt minority communities most of all.

Against this background, it was to be expected that some African and Arab nations would hope that invoking this magic word might scare some money out of the United States as "reparations" for slavery and get some kind of United Nations condemnation of Israel as a bonus. But this time the magic didn't work.

Singling out Israel to blame for the Middle East's problems was probably the straw that broke the camel's back, leading both the U.S. and Israel to withdraw their delegations from the conference in Durban. Arab caricatures of Jews with big noses and bloody fangs were hardly a way of being against racism.

The real world-class chutzpah, however, was the demand of African and Arab nations for reparations of slavery. Just who do you suppose enslaved the millions of Africans who ended up in the Western Hemisphere? It was the Africans. And who enslaved the even greater number of millions of African slaves who ended up in the Islamic world? It was the Arabs.

During the era of African slavery, Europeans died like flies in tropical Africa, where diseases flourished for which they had no biological immunity and for which medical science had yet to devise a cure. Capturing people to sell into slavery was the work of Africans in West Africa and of Arabs and Africans in East Africa.

Europeans came in their ships, bought slaves from the Africans, and then left the scene quickly before they fell sick from African diseases. Even so, many white crewmen on the ships bringing slaves from Africa to the Western Hemisphere died on the way. The notion that it was white people who introduced slavery to Africa, or who captured most of the slaves themselves, may fit the mindset of those who thought that "Roots" was history, but this myth will not stand up to facts, logic or economics.

Since it was the Africans and the Arabs who actually caught and sold slaves, do the African and Arab nations plan to send reparations over here to the descendants of enslaved Africans living in the Western Hemisphere? Of course not. They want the United States to lay some of those American dollars on them! We have fallen for so many other sucker plays in the past, why not try this one on us?

When slavery is mentioned, too many people automatically think of whites enslaving blacks. That is not even one-tenth of the story of slavery, which existed on every inhabited continent. The very word "slave" derives from the word for some white people who were enslaved on a mass scale -- the Slavs -- for more centuries than blacks were enslaved in the Western Hemisphere.

Moreover, slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before the first black or white person ever set foot on these shores. The indigenous peoples of this hemisphere enslaved one another, just as Asians enslaved Asians, Europeans enslaved Europeans, and Africans enslaved Africans. Attempts to limit the discussion of slavery to slavery in the United States or in Western civilization make sense only as a strategy to get money or political concessions.

Western civilization was the first civilization to regard slavery as morally wrong and it is the civilization with the most sense of guilt about it. To this very moment slavery continues in parts of Africa and the Islamic world. Very little noise is made about it by those who denounce the slavery of the past in the West, because there is no money to be made denouncing it and no political advantages to be gained.

If the American delegation walking out of the U.N. Conference Against Racism represented a belated waking up to the scams being played, that could be a very healthy sign for the future -- not only on the international scene, but within the United States as well.

COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE,

Thomas Sowell has published a large volume of writing. His dozen books, as well as numerous articles and essays, cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college.

Michael aka "Cody"?

While at the beach last week, Michael watched a few minutes of a Disney show called Zack & Cody. He thought Cody was a cool name so he decided to adopt it for himself. He even told his mom he would tell the child-care worker at the gym about his new name. He informed me at McDonald's on Monday. Previously he shortened his name to "Mike." He even signed my dad's Father's Day card "M-i-k-e." But Mike is a normal nickname for Michael. Cody is just a name he liked and decided to call himself.

Note: This beach picture was from August 2007 not this most recent trip.

Agape

It is 10 PM and I am tired, but I wanted to write something here quickly. My heart was blessed today by a gracious and forgiving friend. Unfortunately I have been angry and proud quite a lot the last several days. I have wanted things understood MY way and have been very defensive and unfair to my friend expressing his opinions and differing perspectives. Today my friend and I were talking and I mentioned how sorry I was and how he did not deserve an angry friend. (Indeed my friend is 11 years younger than I, but acts like the more mature adult by far! ) His kind response touched my heart and made me even more appreciative of his loving and forgiving nature. He wrote:

Honestly by your thoughts you are underestimating my love to you and my appreciation for our friendship

I am not used to people like that! Actually I am not used to being so honest with most people. I tend to avoid potentially-divisive topics and keep things "shallow" in order to avoid situations where my temper gets the best of me and I regret my reaction. I am very thankful for a friend who talks with me about these harder topics (politics & religion especially) and loves me even when I am arrogant and rude and shameful in my actions. I thank God for those who love unconditionally. Thank you, my dear friend. I'm proud to call you my "little Shami brother."