Shadows

Hubert Humphrey, 38th vice president under Lyndon Johnson, was one of the countries most popular politicians. He once said, “ Behind every successful man is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.” Another quote for which he was famous, “There are three faces of a mans life, his beginning years, his ending years, and the many shadows in between”.

The shadows of life are the area of life that try mens souls. At the present time, we are going through a financial depression, the worse we have seen in 60 years. On the horizon, is a pandemic flu challenge, which could easily cover the world. The pandemic of 1918, which the swine virus we are fighting at the present time, killed, depending on whose report you read, between 20 and 100 million people.

My mother and grandmother talked about this flu epidemic as long as they lived because they experienced it. The community, in which my parents were reared, was hard hit by the 1918 flu. The large home, which had survived the Civil War, in which my mother as well as her father and grandfather were reared (and the house is still standing) was used almost as a community hospital, since so many of the relatives were sick and dying. Several of my aunts and uncles died, my mothers youngest brother died, and even the horse and buggy doctor, who was brave enough to come into the infected community, died. So, the entire community was very much on its own. Back then, large planks of a certain width were always kept in the barn, dried, available for the building of coffins. My grandmother said, “all the men in the community who were not sick or dead were busy building coffins and digging graves”. The flu always started with a cough and as soon as someone in the community started coughing everyone knew that person would soon be dead. My mother said, she would never forget the small handmade box in which her baby brother was placed after death then placed in the back of a buggy and taken down the road to the family cemetery. My grandmother said, there is no more hurt to the human mind in the world than leaving a small child in the ground of the cemetery. I have heard this repeated many times with families who have lost loved and wanted children. This is perhaps, the reason I have been such a radical in trying to defeat the satanic practice of the holocaust of abortion in this country so popular with liberals and voted for by Democrats. God alone, will visit his vengeance on the practitioners of abortion and those who, through their money and votes, have supported this practice straight from the depths of hell. History has been marked, from its very beginnings, by a visitation by the vengeance of God, when a nation or culture has sunk into decadence.
It is hard to imagine how the National Ethics and Spiritual Apostasy can sink to a lower moral dilemma .
Those of us who carry butter on our heads should stay out of the hot sun and walk in the shadows. One of my good friends, Harold Stevens, Baptist missionary to Swaziland, said his greatest hindrance in reaching the lost for Christ was the obstruction placed between the lost and the church by the inconsistencies of “so-called” Christians with whom most had come in contact. As Mahodus Ghandi, the Indian leader who could have led millions of Hindus to Christ, said, “I would have been a Christians if I had not known so many Christians”.

The Colonial powers of Europe, early in the church age, used the African Latin American Asian natives to extract valuable natural resources which were shipped to northern hemisphere countries for the production of products where all the profits were made while the natives whose toil had dug out the
rubber, gold, silver, foliage, etc. for the manufacture of expensive products, were left in the shadows of ignorance and depravity. It just so happens now, the same commercial greed is transferring the production facilities to the same company in the same countries where again, cheap labor and callous attitudes overshadow mans inhumanity to man. We still think God was joking when he gave us his one great commandment from Matthew 22:39 “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”.
Life has many shadows. Many have the shadow of bigotry against poor people. Many have the shadow of discrimination of people of color. Many have the shadow of superiority against those who are disabled. You see, the average healthy person thinks that nothing bad will ever happen to them. If you live long enough, you will probably experience the shadow of loneliness, the shadow if being treated inferior simply because you are no longer energetic, good-looking or of financial or political importance. Dr James Dobson, said recently on his national radio program, “Eighty nine percent of all nursing home patients never have a visitor.” One of my friends, a member of a local church for 72 years, no longer able to be a large financial contributor to the church taking all her savings to survive in a nursing home was never visited by any of the church members, or pastor, who at one time in better days, professed much love for her. Since I would sit with her at church, when we were both physically able to be there, she would still call me asking for my advice, and just to visit. Her greatest problem, was her lack of attention at the nursing home where she was continually given the wrong medicine and they finally killed her. This is unusual, because nursing homes, like retirement homes, like hospitals, like doctors, only make money from people who are living. When you see young people, overshadowed by their careless attitude in business, in morals remember, this is the same type individual who works at the hospital or the nursing home, they carry the same shadows of carelessness with them everywhere.

The greatest shadow of ethical unconcern on the national scene is the shame of the bioethics involved in stem cell research, the holocaust of abortion and the total unconcern for the disabled (practically all returning Veterans) , who, most of the time, through no fault of their own suffer humiliation from the “so-called “ normal. In speaking before handicapped groups, in dealing with the disabled, especially the blind, I remind them always, that we are the chosen. God has chosen us to share in the fellowship of HIS SUFFERING, Philippians 3:10. If God, who named us and designed us before the very foundation of the world (Psalm 1:39) loved us enough to place us as did his own Son whom He did not spare from the cruelty of Pagan men.

Roman conquerors, fellow Jewish religious zealots, we can bear our burdens (blind, crippled, etc) because we worship the omnipotence of Justice. A verse of scripture which should scare everyone is Psalm 98:9 “ Before the Lord, for He comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world of righteousness and the people with equity”.

Shadows! No need of shadows. When at last we gain the victor's crown.