Minutiae? Or, nation-shaping stuff. You decide.

I keep feeling the need (or guilt) to post here or at least keep reminding you that I am regularly posting on my other blog. Limited time and energy right now has restricted me to only post at my Voices Carry pro-life blog. I’m not giving up here, I promise, I won’t let too many days go by without something interesting here.

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Of course we are all praying about Hurricane Gustav hitting New Orleans today. I have posted a substantial article on where God may be in all of this. I welcome feedback on that. If you want to send money to help, send it to my friend Pastor Dino Rizzo at Healing Place Church. You may recall he and Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge were major players after Katrina. We’ll see how it goes, we may send a work team too.

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Lifelight was this past weekend here in Sioux Falls - billed as the nation’s largest Christian music festival. I only went for a couple hours Saturday. I did post last night on a couple of the extremist abortion supporters who crashed the Lifelight Festival. Pardon the title but the article is even more shocking… eat a queer fetus for Jesus.

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These are a just few of the headlines that caught my attention today and my discussion starters.

One heart, one widow connect suicides of 2 men (I don’t think the woman is the common denominator. I’ve seen suicides flow generationally, in siblings, etc. I would love to hear from our deliverance ministry people/friends on this one… the spirit of death staying with a transplanted heart???)

Bible Courses Allowed, Not Mandatory for Schools (Some of you know that I have been on this for a couple of years and have said this may be the next matter I take up in our city and state. I welcome your involvement.

Vladimir Putin saves TV crew from tiger (I’m looking at Putin and the Tiger through a prophetic, symbolic lens. Interesting.)

‘Founders’ prayer violated Constitution as they wrote it’?? (Thank God for my friends at the Alliance Defense Fund.)

CNN poll shows no post convention bump for Obama (No comment.)

Pondering some headlines

Of recent, my blogging energies have been diverted to the LIFE ISSUE. However, this morning I find myself pondering some headlines. Just pretend we are at the breakfast table, drinking some good joe, reading the paper. Your thoughts are welcome.

Italian Priest Organizes Beauty Contest for Nuns

Muslims begin to copy the megachurch multi-site model

Police cite church for praying too loudly

Tornado hits Denver on eve of convention

Faith-filled convention opens with prayer

What Saddleback’s Pastor Really Thinks About Politics

August frost hits Minnesota and Wisconsin

Church-Going Teens Have Higher GPAs

One legged NYC prostitute knocked from wheelchair dies

A couple local headlines…

No abortion ads in student directories

Kory and the Fireflies to appear at LifeLight Music Festival

A couple crazy video clips are in the news from the Olympics…

Weightlifting accident - elbow bends the wrong way

Cuban taekwondo athlete kicks ref

New CATG Blog - The River

The River is ramping up for a strong start this fall. Check out their new blog.

I am posting, just not here - the battle for LIFE has begun

I’m having trouble doing two things (blogs) at once. And though I do appreciate the readership here at GatePost, I’m trying not to feel guilty about the infrequency. The battle for LIFE in South Dakota has begun again and my free-time is mainly focused there. If you miss regular posting here from me you can read the latest from me on my LIFE blog - voicescarryblog.com.

Here are three recent but very important posts that you many find interesting.

Planned Parenthood Gets Religion

Let’s have FUN kicking off our Campaign to Kill

More “Fun” with South Dakota Planned Parenthood’s new slogan - Let Families Decide

My son Caleb put up a nice little pic on his blog that you may appreciate. He gets to vote this year for the first time. You’ll note he’s starting to lean toward one side : ) Caleb has some strong views. I don’t know where he got this from. We move him to KC for school NEXT WEEK - I’m not sure how I feel about this chapter of life coming to a close.

For a few months my son Thomas and I have been looking for a Mustang ($3-4K range) so he can drive to school this fall. He’s pretty set on a Mustang and has been for a while. He’s got some pics on his blog of one that we found ($2K over budget). I know he’d appreciate the traffic on his blog - so be sure to check it out. He finds blogging discouraging because “nobody reads his.” He’d even more appreciate others joining him fasting and praying for this extra “miracle money” to somehow appear so he can buy this car. He knows we won’t be making a covenant with a creditor.

Funny story… I told him the only thing I don’t like about him getting a hot car like this is that he’d get into popularity/girls and his relationship with God would really suffer. He said, “no, if he had this car it would really help his relationship with God because he’d wake up every day praising God and drive down the road with praise music everywhere he went.”

Gate Post - dubbed #72 Blog of the Day on WordPress

There are now over seventy million blogs in existence most of which are created on eight leading blog hosting sites each of which host upwards to one million or more blogs. WordPress is one of the big eight. With those numbers, how is it my blog made #72 on WordPress’ BLOG OF THE DAY list yesterday? I promise it won’t go to my head. Right now I’m figuring it’s a bit like getting the letter that says you’ve been selected to win a million dollars.

Does anyone know what this means?

I’m bAAAaack - laughs and lessons from our Birmingham trip

Sorry to disappear from the blogosphere for a few days. I hope you were able to function for a few days without my life-giving insights into whatever I’m interested in. (Blame a hotwire.com $39 a night La Quinta hotel room that promised wireless internet but apparently the wires were missing that would have made it actually work.)

We just got back from Birmingham late last night. Went with 11 CATG peeps to Church of the Highlands for a spectacular church planting conference. Many things are rolling around in my head right now that will soon gel into more vision and passion for what we are doing right here in SD!

It’s always great to travel with friends. Lots of laughs… like yesterday when Pastor Dennis mis-spoke during a conversation about his baldness and talked about his using viagra and how that didn’t help his hair grow (he later tried to assure us he meant to say rogaine.) We flew from Birmingham to Dallas with Brian Houston - that was cool for the star-struck among us. I want to publicly thank Kathy for packing light this time… we knew you could do it!

Here’s some highlights:

- The greatest church planting “tool” is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Jesus told his followers after three years of equipping… stay here in the upper room until you get what you really need to go out and take territory. Jesus sent people out to plant churches with POWER!

- Great word from Brian Houston on how we often focus on what we don’t have and only take notice of the lack… we miss what is right here in our own house- people, potential. We learned THE Darlene Zschech was once just a lady in his church named Darlene - now her song made America Idols top ten list - shout to the Lord! We often don’t see the “oil” in our own “house” because it doesn’t look like its going to look like when God touches it. We’ve got to raise people in our midst up and release them!

- Regarding prayer… a man on his face never falls from that position. Do we as leaders, at our core, really believe that prayer matters? How we run our ministries reveals whether or not we really believe that is true. The hard days in prayer are more important to God than the easy days.

More later…

It’s impossible to separate church and state

This post is a part of a larger “blogswarm” underway this weekend all around the topic of church/state and liberal fears of a theocracy. If you can imagine a few misguided secular progressive zealots have again intentionally picked resurrection weekend to “Blog Against Theocracy.”  My friend Bob Ellis over at Dakota Voice calls them BATS adding the “S” to stand for silliness.  Bob has organized eight or so South Dakota bloggers return a volly of truth this weekend in something he’s calling “Blogging Against Secularism.”  I’m honored he invited me to participate in the discussion though I’ll probably be the least of the contributers (if nothing else because I’m pretty focused on Easter right now).  I’ll post my contributions, probably only two, here and at my Voices Carry pro-life blog.  You can follow the rest of the blogswarm this weekend here.

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Who are we kidding, it is absolutely relevant what Sen. Barack Obama’s church teaches and that his spiritual advisor is black liberationist Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Like gives birth to like.  Though many tried to dismiss it several months ago, it was centrally important for the electorate to know the full story behind Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. (Mormon salvation is that each man becomes a god of his own planet and spends eternity populating it with spirit babies - Mormon women can look forward to being eternally pregnant.)

Hypothetically, do we really think that electing a candidate with a pacifistic Mennonite or Quaker background would have no bearing on their ability to fulfill the role of Commander and Chief? Who are we kidding? Voting for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama or Senator “Secular” from South Wherever is to vote their worldview into office. It is impossible to separate a person from what they believe.

Even, and especially, those who claim no religious viewpoint… while admitting to being non-religious, they betray the fact that they bow at the altar of secularism and those gods are giving voice and influence in governance. Somebody’s moral framework is going to shape society; the only question is whose. The culture war is a war of religious world views, a fight for who will set this nation’s moral agenda. And, morality touches every aspect of political and public life - economy, education, law, healthcare, defense, foreign policy, family, science and life. What we believe is central to who we are, how we live, how we think and how we view everything and everyone around us. There is no such thing as a politician who keeps his faith private. He/she may not speak about it, but it daily informs all they do. Voters therefore are not just electing men or women, they are electing what these men and women believe, and we are electing their religious world view.

Our government is “us.” It’s of the people, by the people, for the people. And we can talk about it all we want but “church” is inseparable from all this because “church” isn’t a building or an organization. The “church” is people, as again, is our government. So, I am the church and, I am the government. You’d have to cut somebody in half to separate the two.

Because so many American’s erroneously assume “separation of church and state” is written somewhere in the Constitution, secular progressives are able to effectively sideline conservative Christians from participating in the process. In writing the phrase “separation of church and state” in his private letter to the Danbury Baptist’s, Thomas Jefferson was saying the founders intention was that one Christian denomination over another should not be adopted as the religion of the state.  But Jefferson’s wall was never meant to keep religion out.  Jefferson believed in the free exercise of religion in all sectors of society, public and private.  John Jay, founding father and first Supreme Court Justice clarified the central role the Christian Faith was to play in governance - “Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers. And it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”

Knowing that no one can approach governance from a moral vacuum, the basis of ones beliefs is an especially critical question. Far more scrutiny should be given those who claim no “religious bias” than those who claim a religious perspective.  The reason being those supposedly without religious bias, when elected, expose the country to untested unknowns many of which are counter to moral standards that have proven to be societal stabilizers for centuries.

Check out Bound4Life’s new Mercy Seat Blog

Our friends at Bound4Life are up and running with a great daily blog that will go through April 26 - Passover. This effort culminates on the Supreme Court steps of every state on that day - a national prayer meeting they are dubbing The Mercy Seat.

New IP address for my pro-life blog

I’m upgrading to the world of WordPress Semiologic - wordpress on steroids.  So, this blog is soon to change.  But, my pro-life blog has already been switched over. It’ll take me a while to learn Semiologic but already, its really slick.  

The new IP is www.voicescarryblog.com  The old IP still works and will still exist in cyberspace with the stuff I had on it up until now but the new stuff is on the new site. See you there.