Sky Links, 2-2-19

Bill Still's Dream About George W. Bush

Bill's Word To And Prayer For George W. Bush

Unplanned

Planned Parenthood Donated Almost Two Million Dollars to Ralph Notham 

Should it be legal for a taxpayer (D+R+I) funded organization to donate massive amounts of money to the D party in an effort to sway an election? -Q

Federal Obligations to and Expenditures by Selected Organizations Involved in Health-Related Activities, Fiscal Years 2013-2015

Pro-Life in Practice: 20 Ways to Help
-Ericka Andersen

1. Donate to & volunteer at local Crisis Pregnancy Centers. These are some of the best resources moms in crisis have, stocked full with diapers, clothes, wipes, toys and other necessities. To keep these well-funded with money and volunteers is one way to make moms feel like they have somewhere to lean on. Here’s a map to help you find one near you.
2. Offer free babysitting. Whether it’s a single mom with one baby or a married mom with multiple kids having a hard time economically, baby-sitters are important — and expensive — so if you have time or capacity to help, be there for your neighbors, friend, family and community members.
3. Get involved with Safe Families for Children. This organization, with over 100 chapters across the country, hosts vulnerable children and creates extended family–like supports for desperate families through a community of devoted volunteers who are motivated by compassion to keep children safe and families intact.
4. Become a CASA volunteer. In 2017, more than 85,000 CASA/GAL volunteers represented the best interests of more than 260,000 children. CASA/GAL volunteers are everyday people who have undergone screening and training with their local CASA/GAL program.
5. Become a mentor at Big Brothers/Big Sisters. (I also REALLY like programs devoted to mentoring teens in foster care like DCFYI https://www.dcfyi.org/) One of the ways to help prevent teen pregnancy and thus the need to even consider abortion, is to mentor vulnerable teens. This can be key in helping educate, find support and dissuade them from making a decision that could change their life forever. Mentorship is an undervalued and important action in this arena.
6. Support Wendy’s Wonderful Kids. The Foundation provides grants to adoption agencies to hire and train recruiters in a Child-Focused Recruitment Model to find loving, permanent homes for the nearly 155,000 children waiting in foster care. Research has proven the model to be up to three times more effective at serving youth who have been in foster care the longest, including older youth, sibling groups and children with special needs.
7. Advocate for Special Angels Adoptions or Rainbow Kids or Love Without Boundaries. These organizations exist to help place children with special needs into adoptive families.
8. Teach your children love and kindness for those who are different. We must uplift the value of all human beings, supporting and teaching our kids to be kind to others that look different or have different abilities.
9. Support smaller organizations like Rustic Hope, a 501c3 non-profit organization that offers free support to single mothers before, during, and after delivery. A little Googling in your geographic area will go a long way — and they need you.
10. Speak out against the death penalty & for criminal justice reform. Some don’t see these as related, but they are! All life has value, including the worst of the worst. And some life is treated with less value than others inside of our criminal justice system. Making reforms here will uplift all life and begin to restore families and communities.
11. Support maternity homes like Hannah House. There are maternity homes like these across the country, providing food, shelter, maternity care, pediatric care after baby is born — and more. Mothers are often allowed to stay there with babies for a year or more after birth, while they figure out (with the help of the homes, volunteers, classes, etc.) how to manage life in the next phase. They also provide material support in the form of diapers, clothes, formula, and more for newborns to age six.
12. Support life from womb to tomb. As pro-lifers, we value life until natural death, which means we should also be supporting the elderly by visiting them in nursing homes, bringing meals to those who can’t get out and providing as much material support as we can.
13. The Gabriel Project. Here is a place where any woman in a crisis pregnancy can find help from reliable and compassionate Christian sources — these are nationwide in local communities.
14. Become a Diaper Genie. Diapers are so crazy expensive and always needed. Buy diapers when you go shopping and drop them off at local centers, offer for free in online groups you trust or donate regularly to the National Diaper Bank, which does important, incredible work.
15. Sponsor a child. Begin a relationship with a child through Compassion or World Vision — or another sponsorship organization you trust (do your research.) These orgs. are doing great things to support children and families internationally.
16. Organize regular collection drives. Through your church, community center or even a place like your gym, organize regular collections of things like diapers, wipes, blankets, clothing and more. And don’t forget about mommas! Consider a mom-themed drive for things like toiletries, morning sickness meds, comfy clothes, skincare kits for pregnancy/post-partum related issues, body care products like nipple cream, stretch mark lotion, even coffee (as us moms know can be very important in those first months of life.)
17. Become a foster parent. There are unlimited needs inside the foster care system and they always need more. Consider opening your home to foster children or being open to foster-to-adopt of older children who are looking for forever families.
18. Become licensed for respite care. Many people don’t realize that you have to get a security background check and training in order to babysit for foster families. For those families taking on foster care, this means it’s harder for them to find childcare and they need people who can help. This is a smaller way you can help in the grand scheme.
19. Push for paid leave. This isn’t about getting political but about advocating for paid leave policies that support moms. As a conservative, I don’t mean a federally mandated extended plan (though if you do believe in that, go for it!). But encouraging businesses and orgs, from small to large, to offer some form of paid leave that is realistic and empowering to women, especially those in tough situations. This is an option I find viable (full disclosure: I work there, but truly believe in it!) but whatever policy you see as best, advocate for that. Paid leave is a policy issue that we are not all going to agree on, but it is something to think about.
20. Support post-abortive women. When women do choose abortion, they still need our love, support and compassion. And because many women do have multiple abortions, loving a woman post-abortively with compassion could contribute helping her feel like she can choose life if she finds herself in that situation again.

FBI Ignored Major Lead on Clinton Emails
-Ivan Penchoukov

Congressional investigators have gathered enough evidence to suggest that the FBI, under the Obama administration, ignored a major lead in the Clinton-email probe, according to transcripts of closed-door testimonies of several current and former bureau officials.

The office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General informed the FBI in 2015 that a forensic review of Hillary Clinton’s emails unearthed anomalies in the metadata of the messages. The evidence in the metadata suggested that a copy of every email Hillary Clinton sent during her tenure as the secretary of state was forwarded to a foreign third party.

Rick Joyner- The Second American Revolutionary/Civil War

Part 2

The Civil War may have eradicated slavery, at least in its most diabolical form, but it did not go as far as establishing that “all men are created equal.” This is just one factor in our mandate that has yet to be fulfilled. We can be thankful for the progress that has been made in eradicating discrimination in America, and there has been notable progress, but it is still far from the place we are called to be. We have now come to the point where increasing conflict is inevitable until we recover a clear vision of the mandate we were given as a nation and resolve to fully obey it.

What does that look like?

Part 3

• The Reformation was a major step forward in recovering biblical truth, but its emphasis was more on believing the right things than actually doing them.

• Abraham Lincoln discerned that our Civil War was God’s judgment on both sides. This might explain why the Union was obviously on the right side of some of the crucial issues being fought over, but the Southern armies experienced some of the greatest revivals in American history during the war.

• When I spoke to a number of senators and congressmen in Washington a few years ago, entreating them to show courage, one of them took me aside and said, “You would see a lot more courage in Washington if we saw any in the church.” He was right.

Part 4

• War is an ultimate human failure. War is one of the devil’s biggest victories. His intent is to kill and destroy, and nothing accomplishes this in a bigger way than war. So why don’t we refuse to fight them? Because the devil, and those controlled by him, will not. To refuse to fight in an inevitable or right war is not choosing to do what is right. Rather, it is to submit to evil. There are righteous wars. When it is right and time to fight, we will be in rebellion if we do not do our part.

• In every civil war, Christian leaders from both sides have claimed that theirs was the right side. This can be confusing. We must resolve to be sure we are fighting on the right side and for the right cause. When this is established, the most merciful way is to fight to win decisively and as quickly as possible.

• Harry Truman was right when he said that “Most people are defeated by their secondary successes.” This means that they got distracted from their ultimate objective after achieving lesser ones. There are many examples of this in history, and Truman was likely correct to say this happens to “most people.” It was true in our Revolutionary and Civil Wars. How do we avoid this deadly trap? We must determine now what the ultimate objectives are—anything less than these would be a defeat.

Part 5

In this dream, those who were teeing off were going to find the enemy they were assigned to destroy. This is insight about what “tees us off” will be what we are called to fight. For example, those who are the most disturbed and agitated by human trafficking should take that as a sign that they are called to fight this enemy. For others, it could be things like racism, or the sowing of immorality in school curriculum. These are not random provocations intended to irritate us; they are calls to action. We must all consider how we can be a part of fighting what provokes us the most and what Scripture defines as evil.

Again, for Christians the Scriptures are clear that our battle is never against people, but rather against the demonic forces that are manifested through ideologies and deceptions that bind, and ultimately, destroy them. Our victory is not to kill and wound, but to heal and lead people to the path of life. We are not fighting to conquer people or to just win the argument, but we fight to establish the truth that sets people free.

America, Pray for The Church!

-Dudley Hall 

While many church leaders are encouraging their congregations to pray for the country, the country should be praying for the church.

Prayer is an intuitive response of humans when important things are threatened. It is an implicit recognition that we are finite. It is expressing a level of faith in a higher power or person. Some prayers are simple gasps of hope thrown heavenward. Others are thoughtful petitions aimed at communicating with God hoping for a response. Praying is good unless it is just a show of personal piety and a display of self-righteousness.
I sometimes wonder what people expect when they pray for the nation to be revived. Is God going to send a cloud full of angel dust to magically fix our ills?

I think that if we understood how God has chosen to work on earth, we would want the church healthy and praying. Think about it. God has chosen to work on earth through human instrumentality.

Her pastor spent all week finding a special wheelchair so that this 21-year-old woman could experience the beach for the first time. As Phil Evans wrote, 'You can write a million books on what a pastor does, but this moment captures it for me.' -Mike Frost

President Trump Meets to Discuss Fighting Human Trafficking on the Southern Border

SECRETARY NIELSEN: This is an insidious form of modern-day slavery. That’s what this is. This is not a problem that is experienced in other places of the world. It’s experienced here, today, in the United States of America. It is something that this entire administration is committed to combating. It takes very close coordination with state and local governments but also with our international partners to take down transnational criminal organizations that are at the heart of this crime.

And before we turn to other people, I just want to talk a little bit about the fact that this is directly related to our unsecure southern border. Transnational criminal organizations have taken advantage of our unsecure border. The result is that we continually see young girls used as pawns to line the pockets not only of criminal illegal aliens, but also the cartels who violate our nation’s borders and our laws, and use that money to fund other criminal enterprises.

Way Out of the Comfort Zone: How One Woman Reaches Strippers for Christ
-Nancy Flory

Her decision to minister at strip clubs in Wichita Falls, Texas and Lawton, Oklahoma wasn’t made lightly. She’d spent 5 months praying hard, she told The Stream. “Lord, if You want me to do this, then give me the words. I don’t know what You want to say.”

She told the manager she wanted to bring the women food and a gift every month. His reaction surprised her. He nodded yes. “I was waiting — I was waiting for him to say, ‘Why? Who are you?’ But he didn’t say anything.” He not only agreed she could bring food and gifts, he also gave her permission to go into the dressing rooms to speak with the women.

Michelle’s ministry Talitha Cumi (meaning “Damsel Arise”) was born on Valentine’s Day, 2015. The Lord showed her a Scripture. The part that stood out to her made her mission clear: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

She never intended to persuade the women to leave the club. She was there to love them — to show them God’s love. “We’re called to love them while they’re in their sin,” she explained. “Everything else comes from that.”

A Guide to American Football

If Bible Characters Had iPhones