It seems now that there is danger in blogging...in an article that is on WND: http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/blogger-threatened-with-jail-for-writing-on-health/ that the North Carolina Board of Dietetics and Nutrition has told a blogger he is being investigated for providing "nutrition care services without a license". His crime...just writing on his blog: www.diabetes-warrior.net about his experiences with diabetes and telling people what he is eating....
Evidently according to their laws Cooksey was accused of violating Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes, which makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without state permission – a license. According to the law, “practicing” nutrition includes “assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups” and “providing nutrition counseling.” And evidently it got to the point where Cooksey e stopped writing his published advice column, took down his diabetes support packages and made the disclaimer more prominent. The steps appear to have satisfied government officials, who announced April 9 they were closing the case.
However both he and I seem to have a problem with all this....
What is the purpose of a blog? The official term for a blog is "web log" where a person puts down his thoughts in a log (a type of journal) for other people to read, to learn and maybe even to discuss. You might have figured that back in the old Reformation days, Luther would have put his "95 Theses" on a blog rather than on a church door....But if a person is restricted from writing down what is on their minds then you begin to go on the road to censorship and restriction. You begin to go to a totalitarian society where all speech is forbidden unless it is approved by a board. You could have imagined in the 30's and 40's if blogs were around; Hitler's Gestapo or Stalin's KGB going after blogs, where the blog writer dares to say something against the state or against the leader.
So the question is-Is a person free to write about their own thoughts and experiences where people could possibly learn something that helps them in their lives or we going to become "blog sheep" just saying "Baaa..." or whatever the party line is.... Is it freedom for all or freedom for just chosen people?
Monday, April 30, 2012
Saturday, April 21, 2012
remembering Chuck Colson
The founder of Prison Fellowship, Chuck Colson went home to be with the Lord today. And if I were just to type that; it would not even begin to describe who Chuck was, the impact he made on myself and millions of others and why he will be so sorely missed.
Chuck was a member of the Nixon administration and described as the "hatchet man" of the Nixon White House, a man driven to do almost anything to advance the Nixon agenda. However, even with all that power and prestige, there was still an emptiness that was inside of him. And if wasn't until he met a friend who introduced him to Jesus and showed him what Christ can do in a person's life...it took time, but Chuck came to know the Lord as His Savior.
However his actions of the past before he became a believer would come back to haunt him and he was found to be indirectly linked to the Watergate break-in. And for those crimes, he would be found guilty and spend time in prison. Little did anyone know, that within those prison walls would come the greatest growing experience in Chuck's life. He found out what it meant to be a prisoner and the true hopelessness of being a prisoner was like. During this time the vision was given to Chuck to form a ministry to prisoners called Prison Fellowship. This ministry in it's four decades has grown to include many different outreaches, such as Project Angel Tree, where children of prisoners would be given gifts from different people, so that they would know that they had not been forgotten and Justice Fellowship, which advocates for judicial and prison reform.
But Chuck also became dedicated not only to the spiritual health of prisoners, but to Christians in general. He became an author of many books in which talked about different aspects of our walk with the Lord in relation to different areas of our lives. And to read Colson's works was not to be entertained, but to cause one to think and examine themselves. Some of the most memorable (at least in my opinion) were:
His dedication to the spiritual health of the church led him to deliver a daily commentary on events of the day called "Breakpoint" where he would mention about different what was happening and show us from a Christian viewpoint what our response should be. It led him to be one of the founders of the Manhattan Declaration (http://manhattandeclaration.org/home.aspx) born out of an urgent concern about growing efforts to marginalize the Christian voice in the public square, to redefine marriage, and to move away from the biblical view of the sanctity of life.
To say that one man's life can make a difference in this case may be an understatement. But I hope that we can all learn from Chuck's life and decide in one way or another to think about our spiritual walk and how each of us can become better believers....
Chuck was a member of the Nixon administration and described as the "hatchet man" of the Nixon White House, a man driven to do almost anything to advance the Nixon agenda. However, even with all that power and prestige, there was still an emptiness that was inside of him. And if wasn't until he met a friend who introduced him to Jesus and showed him what Christ can do in a person's life...it took time, but Chuck came to know the Lord as His Savior.
However his actions of the past before he became a believer would come back to haunt him and he was found to be indirectly linked to the Watergate break-in. And for those crimes, he would be found guilty and spend time in prison. Little did anyone know, that within those prison walls would come the greatest growing experience in Chuck's life. He found out what it meant to be a prisoner and the true hopelessness of being a prisoner was like. During this time the vision was given to Chuck to form a ministry to prisoners called Prison Fellowship. This ministry in it's four decades has grown to include many different outreaches, such as Project Angel Tree, where children of prisoners would be given gifts from different people, so that they would know that they had not been forgotten and Justice Fellowship, which advocates for judicial and prison reform.
But Chuck also became dedicated not only to the spiritual health of prisoners, but to Christians in general. He became an author of many books in which talked about different aspects of our walk with the Lord in relation to different areas of our lives. And to read Colson's works was not to be entertained, but to cause one to think and examine themselves. Some of the most memorable (at least in my opinion) were:
- Loving God- where he talked about what it meant to really love God (one of the things that sparked my interest, was where he talked about the word "radical", that the original meaning of the word was "to get to the root of"...and as believers were we getting back to Christianity the way Jesus meant it to be?)
- The Body (and it's rewrite Being the Body), Chuck talks about what the church is supposed to be (and has my all-time favorite quote-one that I wish all of us as believers would adopt these days:
"The role of the church is not to make men and women happy; it is to make them holy"
- Kingdoms in Conflict (rewritten as God and Government) a look as the boundaries we have as believers between faith and politics (the chapter that got my interest was the on the untold story of the revolution that deposed Ferdinand Marcos- and a couple of things that speak to me in these times that we are living-that when God wants to punish a nation, he gives them unjust leaders (such as the one we have now?) and COR-C-Conversion, a life changed through repentance and forgiveness from God; O-offering of obedient lives to God; R-reparation, an indication of a changed life)
His dedication to the spiritual health of the church led him to deliver a daily commentary on events of the day called "Breakpoint" where he would mention about different what was happening and show us from a Christian viewpoint what our response should be. It led him to be one of the founders of the Manhattan Declaration (http://manhattandeclaration.org/home.aspx) born out of an urgent concern about growing efforts to marginalize the Christian voice in the public square, to redefine marriage, and to move away from the biblical view of the sanctity of life.
To say that one man's life can make a difference in this case may be an understatement. But I hope that we can all learn from Chuck's life and decide in one way or another to think about our spiritual walk and how each of us can become better believers....
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
What does Resurrection Sunday represent?
In a few days we celebrate Resurrection Sunday (known by others as "Easter"-although I never use that term)...but while I was going through some columns on WND (World News Digest), I came upon one that caught my interest: "Are you a Easter hypocrite?" by Jane Chastain http://www.wnd.com/2012/04/are-you-an-easter-hypocrite/
And in this column she mentions that the average person who "celebrates" this time spends $145.28 per person. Some of it will be for candy and food, but most of it is being spent on new clothes for the Resurrection Sunday service. And this line I found the most condemning: "Today, in the run-up to Easter, most of us spend a lot more time on the physical preparation than we do on the spiritual."
And that got me to thinking-This is the most important time of year for those of us who call ourselves believers. This is the time where starting Thursday; we remember what Jesus went through for us. First, the evening Seder of Passover, where the Lord celebrated the release of the Jews from Egypt and the freedom that was brought by it....Just think about it, I wonder if the Lord was thinking about the freedom that He was about to accomplish in just a few hours...
Then after the Seder, going to the Garden of Gethsemane (Gat-Sh’manim in the Hebrew) the place of the olive-press where olives were pressed and squeezed to make oil-being there in that Garden, asking that the cup of sacrifice be taken away, but saying "Not My will, but Yours be done" and being under such stress that He sweated blood...
Then the arrest, the false trials, the scourging (I would recommend seeing "The Passion of the Christ" once again to see how violent the scourging was), the crown of thorns, the jeering of the crowd, etc.; and then having to take that cross (the execution stake) in the weakened state that He was in; enduring the insults and mocking (causing psychological pain to be added to the physical pain), and then the most famous words in all of the human language: "It is finished!"-the price for sin paid for all time....
Then commending His Spirit to His Father-giving up His physical life-being buried in a borrowed tomb.-thought by everyone to be dead forever (forgetting that He said that in three days He would rise from the dead); then that glorious morning, when the women went to the tomb and found it empty and ran back to tell the disciples the news that He had risen.....
I know many of us have “celebrated” this time for many years and maybe it has gotten to the point that it has become ‘routine’…but I ask “Why?” If this time of year is the most important of the year (and it is), then why are we spending more time on physical preparation (which is just for appearance and doesn’t matter in the long run) than on the spiritual? Remember that through the cross we have PERMANENT victory over death, hell and the grave! Remember that through the cross, we have forgiveness of sins! Remember that through the cross, any plans that the devil had of final victory were destroyed ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Think about all this and then ask yourself: “Am I really psyched up (spiritually speaking) to celebrate that this time of year REALLY represents?” And if your answer is no, examine yourself and get yourself into that mindset that truly understands the significance of what the Lord did for all of us and get out of the mindset of trying to impress others on how we look on the outside….
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)