Sky Links, 10-27-18


Morning prayer Lord, bring about a great revival that will shake this nation, awaken your people, renew the strength of those who are falling away and convict the conscience of those who have drifted too far from shore. Do it Lord Please do it Lord! @CharlieDaniels




Eugene Peterson


I had an opportunity to spend some time with Eugene back in the 1980s, and I can truthfully say this: I’ve never met a more genuine man who lived everything he wrote about...
...My favorite story about him came from a friend who invited him to come and teach at his denomination’s annual convention:
Eugene asked him how many people they were expecting. My friend responded, “Around five thousand.”
Eugene hesitated, finally concluding this wasn’t an invitation he thought he could accept.
My friend was a bit incensed that Eugene didn’t consider that a significant enough audience and let that frustration spill out in a question. “Just how many people does it take to get Eugene Peterson to speak?”
“I’m sorry,” Eugene answered, “you misunderstand me. I have discovered I’m most effective in a group of twenty-five people or less. If you can get a group of that size together, I’d love to come.”
A Man Who Touched Many Lives -Wayne Jacobsen





The Message
“For those of us who take the Scriptures seriously as the word of God and the authoritative text by which we choose to live, translation is one of the primary defenses that we have against . . . letting language inflate into pomposities or artifices that are no longer current with the way we express our ordinary lives.”
Knowing this helps me appreciate The Message for what it is. It’s a protest against arcane and impenetrable religious language. It’s an invitation for ordinary people to enter the Scriptures once again.
But writing an accessible paraphrase didn’t arise only from his pastoral vocation, it goes even deeper for Peterson. In his 1997 book on spirituality, Leap Over a Wall, he opens by telling us how his mother used to recount Bible stories to him when he was a child. In quite a moving passage, he writes:
“My mother was good with words; she was also good with tones. In her storytelling I not only saw whole worlds come into being, I felt them within me through the timbre of her voice.”
Sure, he admits, she took some liberties with the stories, adding extracanonical detail, but “she never violated or distorted the story itself.”
Here we have our primary clue to reading The Message: it’s like sitting on Uncle Eugene Peterson’s knee and listening to him tell the Bible story, which is exactly what the woman I was talking to needed—the story!

Yes, nearly every time I hear someone mention they are reading from ‘The Message’ I hear someone else pipe in. They usually say “You know it’s not a translation, right?” as if to give some sort of rebuke. Next time I will pipe in saying, “Sure, they just wanted to have the story retold from their grandma’s knee again”.
-Chad Bonawitz (in the comments)
Is The Message as bad as they all say? -Mike Frost


Philip Yancey on his friend:
I could hardly believe he grew up in the Pentecostal tradition, this gentle introvert who never raised his voice and made few hand gestures. Yet when Eugene spoke, people listened.
The median church in the United States—the point at which half the churches are smaller and half are larger— has 75 regular participants on Sunday mornings. If you take the averagechurch size, including all the megachurches, the average church still has only 186 attenders. I know many dispirited pastors of those “average” churches who look to Eugene for inspiration: whereas the media-savvy pastors of large churches get the publicity, Eugene showed that “success” in the shepherd role is measured more by faithfulness than by glitz and glamour. His life, mostly spent out of the limelight, could be summarized in one of his book titles, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.
Farewell Eugene -Philip Yancey








The leftist media's political agenda
In 2014, Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran Bureau Chief, was arrested and spent two years in prison. Iran kept him in one of its worst prisons, he slept on a damp concrete floor, was denied medical treatment, experienced hallucinations due to sleep deprivation and was abused by his captors. His wife was told that her legs would be cut off and her husband would be thrown off a cliff if she didn’t confess.
While Jamal Khashoggi has often been misidentified as a Washington Post journalist, all he did for the radical leftist paper owned by Amazon’s CEO is write editorials promoting the Muslim Brotherhood agenda. The Muslim Brotherhood leader and former Bin Laden pal was never a journalist. The closest he came to it was acting as a terrorist propagandist in Afghanistan, glamorizing Osama bin Laden, on behalf of a man listed by the Treasury Department as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers.”

And yet the arrest and abuse of Jason Rezaian didn’t touch off a fraction of the outrage from his own paper as the possible death of Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of the Saudis. The media went through the usual formal protests, but the outrage was muted and there was no talk of sanctions. Instead, Rezaian, along with some other hostages, was illegally ransomed after two years by Obama for $400 million.

The media did not vigorously campaign to break off relations with Iran, as it now is with Saudi Arabia.

It didn’t push too hard out of fear of spoiling Obama’s dirty nuclear deal with Iran’s terrorist regime. And even the arrest may have taken place, according to some sources, because of Rezaian’s closeness with some regime figures.

The New York Times showily announced that it was suspending its pricey Saudi tours over Khashoggi, but it never stopped its Iranian tours, not over Rezaian’s imprisonment, or the killing, torture and rapes of Iranian protesters.

The Washington Post rolled out a special Jamal Khashoggi edition, but there was no special Jason Rezaian edition. There were fewer news stories about Rezaian’s imprisonment after two years than there have been after a week of Khashoggimania. The Post and the rest of the media did far less for Rezaian, one of their own, than they were willing to do for Khashoggi, a shady Islamist activist.

Why?

The answer has everything to do with the media’s political agendas. It is not concerned with human rights. And it’s even less interested in freedom of the press. It has no principles, only allegiances.

The media will always favor Islamist movements over non-Islamists.

The media underreacted to Rezaian’s arrest because it supported Iran’s Islamist government. It overreacted to Khashoggi’s disappearance because he is an Islamist leader. And under Mohammad bin Salman, the Saudis, once the hub of regional Sunni Islamism, turned against the Muslim Brotherhood.

The media is raving against Mohammad bin Salman because he opposes Iran and the Brotherhood. It repeats every piece of propaganda from Turkey and Qatar because they back the Muslim Brotherhood.
Kashoggi and Our Islamist Media -Daniel Greenfield





Sassy Sasse gets sassed by Schlichter
He’s a Republican senator in the midst of the greatest partisan struggle since the Civil War. This isn’t a “both sides are the same” situation. The Dems are neo-socialists whose announced goal is to undermine and eliminate the First and Second Amendments and to ensure we lose our ability to participate in our own governance. They have to be stopped, not hugged. We’re in a cold civil war that they started and that they intend to win, and Sasse is pouty at us because we’re fighting back.

He never fights the left. Never. When Brett Kavanaugh was getting slimed by the Dems, Sasse was on the Judiciary Committee and he…disappeared. He did nothing. Oh, he eventually voted the right way – his defenders point out that Sasse always ends up voting the right way, as if that was some sort of noteworthy achievement instead of merely meeting the bare minimum standard for a GOP senator.
But he never fights the enemy. He only fights his alleged allies. The one time Princess Miracle Whip shut his nag-hole was right when we were in the middle of a fight when we needed all hands on-deck. And after the smoke cleared, he got back on Twitter and announced that he had checked out of social media for a while and was so glad he did because it was good for his soul. The battle was joined and he went AWOL.
Oh, but then he popped up like a sanctimonious Whack-a-Mole to trash the President for defending Kavanaugh – Trump refused to pretend that the accusers weren’t full of it and, oh well I never! And, of course, he got lots of media hits off his conservaHamlet act – will he or won’t he leave the GOP? Gee, how the hell could anyone tell if he did?
Sasse’s act is to aim his outrage not at the left but at us Normals. We refuse to be as submissive and useless as he is, and we’re failing to meet his exacting standards by not being as equally unhappy that Trump is succeeding. Trump wins by virtue of his glorious refusal to lose like a gentleman, as all good Republicans should do. But Sasse’s savvy schtick was never about winning for conservatism. It was always about staking his claim as a future headliner on some Weakly Standard cruise after he gets primaried out of his Senate gig.

Ben Sasse is Everything Wrong With Elite Conservatism -Kurt Schlichter





Richard Nixon was a great President and the media took him down







If you believed any of Christine Blasey Ford's testimony,
as in, "why would she testify, if it was not true?",
hear Deborah R. Castleman explain:


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