Once is Enough

In my many trips in remote countries of the world I sensed human misery and I could only say “once is enough.”  After I had been through most of the poorest countries of the world and had experienced human degradation that it is impossible to picture or describe, I realized I had the very mistaken impression that news and media sources would be anxious to hear about my travels, particularly extra sensitivity towards someone who made the effort that I had made as a disabled person.  One bullet makes more excitement in the newspapers than a thousand prayers.  Bad news sells.  The worst smeller has always been the best seller.  Thousands of students could be doing something good at the local school, but it is the one who shames the school that gets the attention.  Thousands of pastors and committed Christians can spend their lives carrying out the great commission but it is that one pedophile or fallen minister that gets the attention. 

Many episodes will always stand out in my mind.  The time in Beijing, China, at the university, when a group of students begged me, after speaking there, to send them books from this country which they wanted to read which were unavailable to them, such as Hemingway and Faulkner.  The time in Nepal when an elderly man handed a piece of candy to a child and the swarms of surrounding children knocked him to the ground begging for candy. 

In a country so blessed with so much of the worlds wealth to know that most of our concerns about the poverty and lost condition of the souls of most of the world, even though we say we are 86% Christian has not changed the hearts of those who profess the Christian spirit enough to be concerned about the needs of the world both spiritual and physical.  (Hebrews 4:12)  I sincerely believe that if Pilate, again, asked the question, most American people would still choose Barabbas.

Two blocks from my house at the corner of 3rd and Ann street is a historical marker indicating that the father of Madame Chiang Kai-shek , the fourth wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek who came to power in China in 1931, father, Charles Jones Soong, was converted to Christianity and who later attended Duke university, became a Methodist minister, made a fortune in China selling bibles and other business ventures.  Madame  Chiang Kai-shek born in 1897 and died in the US in 2003.  I first met this gifted politician and speaker when she and Eleanor Roosevelt visited the NC home Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh NC News and Observer, he had a reception at his home Wakestone, and several university students were invited to meet these 2 first lady’s of USA and China. 

In Taiwan many years later, I was in the Chiang Kai-shek home, the most significant factor in my study on how Chiang Kai-shek lost China and had to flee to the island Formosa now Taiwan.  It is the same type corruption we find in every country where the lust for things is more important then the welfare of people.  Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his followers transferred so much wealth in art and antiquities from this greatest of the Asian empires that even the caves on the island of Taiwan are reportedly still filled with the wealth. 

I remember first standing on the island of Macau and looking across toward the Chinese mainland, which, for 50 years had disappeared behind the curtain of communism.  Little did I know at the time I would be one of the first Americans into the mainland after president Nixon visited and China was re-opened to American visitors.  As in the USSR and other Marxist countries I had visited it was then and still is incomprehensible that human beings can be enslaved by an ideology which removes all humanity from the most precious creation of an Omnipotent Creator. 

Karl Marx said “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” 

Even though China had been the first outpost for the missionary zeal of the western world and even though Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were Methodist, as in Godless communist Russia, religion had been stripped from the Chinese people and the peasant revolution had resulted in their enslavement just as precisely as in prison, all wearing the same clothing, haircuts, both male and female, looking same, totalitarian control even to the point of bringing their babies to government nurseries and their children in total military control. 

I t was only on the island of Taiwan and the island of Hong Kong (under British control for many years), that the Chinese work ethic and the genetic inclination towards art thrived

Until Christ came into the world, most women of the world were a little more than slaves.  “Once and for all”, Christ has redeemed us (this means all the world) from the slavery of man’s inhumanity to man. The Bible, God's holy word, teaches us that we are the creations of a just and holy Creator. 

“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.” (1 John 3:1)

We who know the truth must share this truth with the world.  Our founding fathers were wise enough not to establish this country as a democracy but as a democratic republic.