Let me see if I can get this straight or not…

Our government cannot account for 619 Billion Dollars

( http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/08/05/federal-spending-transparency-money-missing/13485581/ )

and the complaints are few and far between, but folks in southern CA, and folks near Ft. Sill, OK, and my neighbors in Pierce County surrounding Joint Base Lewis McChord pitch hissy fits about taking care of children who are by every conceivable measure victims.

These terrible days were bound to arrive. In a 1994 brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, Mother Theresa included the following, “America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts–a child–as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters. And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.”

Now, 20 years later, we are beginning to see the bottom of the slippery slope. Not only the defenseless unborn, but the defenseless already born will be forgotten.

Bureaucrats misplace, misappropriate, mis-spend, or, probably most likely, simply mis-report (who knows) $619 billion and not very many even flinch. “Oh well, what do we expect after the scandals in the Secret Service, Veterans Affairs, Home Land Security, Dept of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, General Services Administration, National Labor Relations Board, and the IRS (and all these just since 2009). Yet we whine about accepting responsibility for the compassionate care of innocent children? We use excuses like, “We don’t have enough resources for our own? Who are we trying to kid? Drive the streets of America, then look up the conditions of any third world nation.

I don’t have to be a democrat, republican, something in-between, or something to either the left or right of both to say, “Shame on us.” I need only be one of two things: an American citizen who recalls the profound words of both our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution; or the kind of follower of Jesus who at the very least “wants” to do as he does.

I’m both.
I’m praying.
I’m sending money to help.
And I’m pleading with you to join me.

I once heard a preacher say, “There is an old German proverb that says, ‘The main thing must always remain the main thing.'”

Makes good sense to me.

However, what happens when the main thing goes away? We may very well want the main thing to remain. We don’t want to lose it. We cherish it above all else. Yet…there it goes…

…a relationship dries up.
…a business folds up.
…a skill shrivels up.
…one’s drive gives up.
…one’s appearance ages up.
…one’s health withers up.

What then? One or more of these often form the very foundation of the “main thing” for many people. Yet, each of them runs the very real potential of “going away.” It’s at times like these that we really start to understand phrases like…life just tossed me a curveball and it feels like the roof just caved in.

The expression, “I have a heavy heart,” takes on all new meaning because you literally feel like a stack of bricks is lying on your chest.

When you say, “It seems like I’m living in a dream world,” you mean it because to you life literally looks foggy on the edges.

The questions then are these:

• What can really be the main thing?
• What won’t ever go away?
• What is there for us to cling that by its very nature will forever be a firm foundation?

Answer these correctly and adversity receives a whole new look.