Out of foster care, into Jesus

It really bothered Stephany that she couldn’t understand — or even hear — the lyrics of Christian music played by her aunt and uncle.

“I was a lost child. I wore tons of makeup to try to fit on. I got into lots of fights. I was really depressed. I tried killing myself several times while I was in middle school and in my freshman year. I felt very unloved,” she says. “I didn’t have the Holy Spirit. The way Christians sang was like another language to me then.”

Because her parents got into drugs and alcohol, she was physically abused and neglected and fell into the foster care system.

“I was very angry at the world. I hated people because of my upbringing. I didn’t understand how God could have let this happen to my siblings and myself. I was just angry at God and I didn’t even know God. I hated God.”

Stephany and her siblings would sleep on floors of just about any friend’s house. One couple was very nice and even offered to adopt.

Mom was incensed by the idea that someone wanted to take her kids from her. So when Stephany returned, mom started beating her viciously. “My mom wasn’t well,” says Stephany, who had just finished her freshman year of high school.

In response, she ran away and hid in another friend’s house.

Her uncle and aunt took her to Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, CA. They played Christian music, which Stephany found incomprehensible.

“When my aunt and uncle played Christian music, I couldn’t understand the words,” she says. “That really bothered me because I didn’t understand.”

When they sent her to youth group, she thought the other girls were strange.

“Ew!” she squealed to her aunt. “Nobody wants to be around Christian girls. Don’t ever send me with those crazy Christians again.”

She projected a tough exterior, but inside she longed for a love she never felt.

“I felt so lost, so abandoned. But at the time I felt God pull on my heart,” Stephany says. “All I wanted was to feel that freedom. But I didn’t feel like I was good enough. How can God love me, not even my mother loves me?”

One day her aunt shared the complete story of the gospel with her. Still, the message of God’s love didn’t penetrate.

“The more she shared the gospel with me, the more I felt saddened because I didn’t understand God’s love,” she remembers. “All I felt was that I was doomed because of how awful I was and how I was abandoned.”

Finally at a Greg Laurie Harvest Crusade in Angels Stadium, she relented and descended to the baseball field to receive Jesus.

“That moment that I stepped out into the grass, because my heart longed for him, I felt his presence surround me,” Stephany says. “I prayed and cried. From there I felt like I was really open to the Lord. I asked God for forgiveness, and I asked him to love me.”

She surrendered her life to Jesus and was born again.

A few nights later, her aunt “caught” her listening to music late at night on headphones. She asked what Stephany was listening to.

With tears in her eyes, Stephany said: “I can hear what they’re saying!” It was Christian music. Read the rest: Jesus foster care

Black cops under fire from BLM, says African American Christian police chief

Police-bashing with the rant of “systemic racism” is only hurting the black community, according to an African American police chief on the East Coast, who asked that his name not be used for fear of being fired.

“When you say policing is systemically racist, you are hurting the poorest communities because the police pull back and then violent crime rises,” he says.

“That’s what we’re seeing happening in New York, Chicago, Austin and across the county. Poor people die, the disadvantaged people who live in these communities,” he adds. “They did a recent survey and blacks in these neighborhoods want more police, not less. It’s whites from middle neighborhoods who make up about half of Black Lives Matter that want to defund police.”

Black cops are taking a lot of heat from Black Lives Matter, the organization with Marxist leadership that maintains they are fighting for racial equality. They’re portrayed by BLM as sellouts worthy of double reviling. He’s not sympathetic to BLM, which appears to support Marxism and promote African-style witchcraft.

“Am I on the side of Marxist anarchists? No,” he says. “I’m on the side of law and order and Christianity.”

Growing up in a middle class home in New England, he became a Christian after attending a Vacation Bible School as a pre-teen.

In 7th grade, he was first introduced to an environmental police officer at his school’s career day. He was impressed the game warden was armed.

“That got the wheels turning,” he says

About a year later, he joined a branch of the Boy Scouts called Law Enforcement Explorers and realized that he wanted a career in the police department.

He also liked being a school safety monitor. Among other things, he gathered up stray 5th graders after recess when they were skating on the frozen pond across the street from the school and forgot to go back to class.

“The first badge I carried was a school safety patrol in the fifth grade,” he says. “It was great opportunity to serving and protecting in the fifth graders”

Then in the seventh grade, his teacher sent a classroom “hoodlum” to the principal’s office and picked the future cop to escort him. It was his first taste of taking a suspect in.

“The bug was bitten. I knew that was going to be my career,” he says. As a teenager, he worked in the small town police department going on ride-alongs and working dispatch. “It was exciting, helping people,” he says. “It was what I was interested in.” Read the rest: Black cops under fire from Black Lives Matter.http://godreports.com/2020/09/black-cops-taking-heat-from-black-lives-matter-poor-communities-suffer/

Ok, Biden.

Politicians in America sound off sanctimoniously about needing to “stick with science” in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, but Israeli scientists prove how difficult it is to find consensus in the best ways to limit the deadly pestilence.

After initial success handling the pandemic, in July Israel saw a resurgence of Covid-19. On September 13th, Israel’s government approved a severe, three-week lockdown that will limit people’s travel, shut down malls, restaurants, hotels, fitness clubs, and swimming pools. It will also limit indoor gatherings to 10 people.

Epidemiologist Dr. Hagai Levine of the Israeli Association of Public Health has stated that complete lockdowns are an extreme measure that should be reserved as “a last resort for very unusual situations of very contagious and deadly diseases. This is not the situation with Covid,” he told The Jewish Voice.

He labeled the shutdown of work and social activities as “medieval” in its approach and not necessary for controlling Covid-19.

“At the beginning, we didn’t know enough about how the virus spread and even then, public-health professionals thought the response should be more proportional to the specific risk,” Levine said. “Now we know much more about the virus. The risk of transmission in open air is very low. It therefore does not make any sense, from efficiency or a public-health point of view, to force people to stay at home. What we need to do is proportional measures to reduce transmission so we will get slowly to a reduction of the disease.”

Simple mask-wearing, hand washing and social distancing should be enough to keep the pandemic in check. Everyone has a role in limiting transmission, he says.

“You explain that gathering in closed spaces is risky and in open spaces much less risky,” he said. “You give solutions for people to be educated in how they socialize, work and consume entertainment. We need to get people to understand how important it is to avoid any unnecessary contact. If we don’t have this internal motivation, nothing will work.”

Dr. Levine’s views fell on deaf ears, however, considering the government’s current course of action.

By contrast, Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute fully endorses lockdowns, in line with the current directives.

Baruch Barzel,

“If you fought a fire in your house and got it down to a small fire and then walked away, the fire will grow again,” he told The Jewish Voice. For the past 15 years, Bar-Yam has used mathematical tools to help governments and organizations deal with epidemics like Ebola. He cites air travel for the rise of worldwide contagion.

His End Coronavirus coalition aims to aid community-based solutions for policymakers, businesses and individuals.

Israel imposed rigorous limitations near the outbreak of Covid and saw a dramatic decrease in spread, Bar-Yam observed. But when things got better and Israel loosened restrictions, the disease flared up again.

“This is not a natural disease that circulates in the population,” he said. “It is driven by a simple dynamic. It grows exponentially in a normally behaving population until the population takes clear actions such as social distancing from people who might be sick and isolating people who are sick as determined by symptoms or testing.”

He says authorities face three scenarios: “Either you relax restrictions and infections will continue to grow; keep the current situation [of limiting gatherings and mandating mask-wearing], where you’ll have a constant but high number of nearly 2,000 new cases per day; or choose stronger actions and the number of cases per day will decline.”

“The shortest amount of time requires the strongest action. Within four to six weeks, anyplace in the world can be at zero transmission. It will take longer the more lax you are,” he says. “The way to do all the things everyone wants to do, and the way to save lives, prevent disease and make the economy recover, all result from getting transmission to zero.”

For his part, Dov Shvarts, a professor at Ben-Gurion University, advocates partial lockdowns: nighttime curfews, weekend lockdowns and voluntary quarantine for people over 67 and people with underlying medical conditions that make them high-risk. People can still work and study, but on weekends they should stay home, he told The Jewish Voice. Read the rest: Scientists disagree on how to contain covid.

Robert Woodson brings Christianity to anti-racism: “1776 Unites”

By casting blacks as perpetual victims historically, the loudest racial activists in America right now are hurting — not helping — African Americans, according to Christian civil rights leader Robert Woodson.

To counter the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which provides the premises for rioting and violence against police, Woodson launched 1776 Unites, a collection of scholars to affirm traditional American values of hard-work, honesty and self-determination.

The 1619 Project’s arguments represent “the most diabolical, self-destructive ideas that I’ve ever heard. And what they’re doing is rewriting American history and unfortunately, they are using the suffering and struggle of black America as a bludgeon to beat America and define America as a criminal organization,” Woodson told Fox News.

“And it’s lethal,” he added. “The message that they are saying is all white Americans are oppressors and all black Americans are victims.”

The message of the 1619 Project — named after the supposed date the first slaves arrived in America — is to “exempt the black community from any kind of personal responsibility,” Woodson says.

Recently, a Black Lives Matter protester in Chicago justified looting on television news because the stores have insurance. And hard left firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York’s 14th district, said widespread robbery in the Big Apple during protests was just people who “need to shoplift some bread.”

Protests erupted nationwide after May 25th this year when a white cop was filmed kneeling on the neck of an already hand-cuffed and subject black suspect in Minneapolis. Sadly, many of those protests degenerated into arson and vandalism that rose to $2B in damage by one estimate.

Bringing organization to the spontaneous outpouring of rage is Black Lives Matter, a movement started by the L.A. chapter seven years ago. Because the secular media has lionized BLM, many Christians have been drawn into support the good fight despite the group’s foundations on Marxism and African witchcraft. Read the rest: 1776 Unites a positive alternative to Black Lives Matter.

After murder and hurricane destruction, she found hope in a hug

Cassenda Nelson often spent the day crying in her truck because she didn’t want to be reminded of the brutal murder of her mom and aunt in her home.

In August 2017, Cassa’s mother, Frances Nelson, and her aunt, Mamie Childs, were murdered in an alleged domestic violence dispute.

“My mom and my aunt were murdered in front of my children at her home,” Cassa reports. “My mom was someone I could go and talk to about anything. It felt like something was ripped out of me. How do you bounce back from being in that place of so much despair?”

Life became unbearable.

“I lost all hope. I didn’t want to get up in the morning. I didn’t want to see sunlight,” Cassa recounts on a Billy Graham video. “My plan was to take a whole bunch of pills to commit suicide.”

Then barely over a year later on Oct. 9, 2018, Hurricane Michael swept through her town with blockbuster Category 5 ferocity and tore up houses, knocked over trees and left the town a shambles.

Cassa’s home was also damaged.

“I’m standing here at the door watching this storm, and I’m saying, ‘Oh my God. When am I going to get a break?’” Cassa remembers. “I lost the most important people that would have been right here with me.” Read the rest: Hope in a hug for Cassenda Nelson

George W. Bush struggled with alcoholism

George W. Bush will be remembered as the president who declared war on terror after the Twin Towers were blown up by Osama bin Laden’s airline-hijacking henchmen.

But a new PBS documentary reveals the early years in which the future 43rd president drank excessively and could only conquer alcoholism by turning to God, according to People magazine.

“He transitioned from a church-goer to a Christ-follower,” Bush’s childhood friend Charlie Younger says in American Experience. “He wanted to emulate the tenets and teachings of Jesus Christ, and he made a definite transformation there.”

It may seem difficult to believe that before ascending to the presidency, his life before age 40 was rocky.

After six years in the Texas Air National Guard and the U.S. Air Force Reserve, Bush leveraged his family’s influence and finances to launch Arbusto Energy in 1977, an oil and gas exploration firm.

But he felt immense pressure to make “a big strike” and began to stagger under repeated failures, which stood in contrast to his father, who became vice-president of the United States under Ronald Reagan in 1981.

“I’m all name and no money,” Bush said at the time, according to the New York Times. Hit by a fall in oil prices, Bush sold his energy exploration company to Harken Energy in 1986.

“I think his friends and family, when he was nearly 40 years old, were worried about what he was going to do with his life,” Michael Gerson, Bush’s former chief speechwriter, said. “He drank too much and he had very little direction.”

On his 40th birthday, the crisis came to a head.

“He woke up hung-over. He had overdone it the night before and he didn’t feel good. I think Laura (his wife) told him that he could’ve behaved better,” Younger says. “He just said, ‘I don’t need this in my life. It’s robbing me of my energy. It’s taking too much of my time.’”

At the suggestions of friends, Bush began to attend a community Bible study, a weekly session similar to a “scriptural boot camp.” He’d reportedly met with preacher Billy Graham during the previous year, who encouraged him to deepen his relationship with God. Read the rest: George W. Bush saved from alcohol.

I support black lives and oppose police brutality, but BLM is led by practitioners of witchcraft

As Black Lives Matter organizer Melina Abdullah called out the names of blacks killed by police, she summoned the spirits of the dead by pouring out a drink offering on the hot pavement at a June march in Los Angeles.

“Our power comes not only from the people who are here but from the spirits that we cannot see,” said Abdullah, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. “When we say their name, we invoke their presence.”

In the 1960s, the top leaders of the Civil Rights movement were Christians. Today, the leaders pushing progress in race relations are of a completely different stripe: They are Marxists, queer and practitioners of hoodoo.

As the evangelical church weighs its response to racism and police brutality, it must filter through how to support a movement whose values are diametrically opposed to the Bible’s. Normally, when you get into politics you have to overlook a certain amount of unsavory facts to support candidates who represent the majority of your opinions. But just how much can Christians, who are sympathetic to reforming institutional sin, avert their eyes from these glaring faults?

“We speak their names. You kind of invoke that spirit, and then their spirits actually become present with you,” said Abdullah, a professor at California State University LA, as quoted by Christian News. “We summon those spirits that are still with us. We summon those people whose bodies have been stolen, but whose souls are still here,” Abdullah said. “We call on Wakiesha Wilson. We call on George Jackson … Eric Garner …”

Abdullah and her close associate Patrisse Cullors preside over a nationally influential BLM chapter of 500 supporters.

“This is a movement led and envisioned and directed by Black women,” she said. “Many of us are queer, we’re moms, and we really started this work because we wanted to see our children survive. We’re laying the groundwork and foundation for a new world, not just for our descendants but for right now.”

“The movement for Black lives infuses a syncretic blend of African and indigenous cultures’ spiritual practices and beliefs, embracing ancestor worship; Ifa-based ritual such as chanting, dancing, and summoning deities; and healing practices such as acupuncture, reiki, therapeutic massage, and plant medicine in much of its work, including protest,” Cullors told the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

Cullors identified herself as queer and Marxist.

BLM holds up the notable goals of social equality and justice amid a disturbing string of incidents of police excessive force. It started seven years ago when black man Trayvon Martin was killed when he tussled with George Zimmerman. It grew to 40 chapters nationwide in major cities through successive incidents of police use of force they felt was excessive: Mike Brown, Eric Garner and now Breonna Taylor.

But it was the tragic death of George Floyd, upon whose neck an officer knelt for nine minutes on his neck as he pleaded “I can’t breathe,” that galvanized national and international protests that were massive. Politicians, companies, professional sports leagues joined wholesale. Even churches got involved since the mission to bring righteousness to our nation can also be seen to include eradicating the sin of racism.

But have many people taken a close look at the foundational tenets under-girding the movement? Is it acceptable to lend our name and prestige to support the backing philosophies of Marxism (essentially atheist and opposed to the Christian church), LBGTQ and demonic religious practices?

“I wasn’t raised with honoring ancestors. As I got older and started to feel like I was missing something, ancestral worship became really important,” Cullors said on Religion News. “At its core, BLM is a spiritual movement.”

Surely, the church will yearn for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who invoked God’s help in peaceful protest and exhorted the nation to live up to its Christian foundational ideals.

“The different things that have become common, like ‘say her name,’ she says they are summoning the spirits of the dead to empower them to do this justice work,” said Abraham Hamilton III, general counsel to the American Family Association. “People are running around saying, ‘say her name,” but the founders of this organization say they’re summoning their spirits of the dead in the tradition of the Yoruba religion.

“I don’t want to misconstrue the Yoruba religion with the ethnicity or the language, but the religious component of it includes an over-arching pagan deity, then under that a mid level of pagan gods and goddesses called egun, and underneath them their are ancestors that they believe are gods,” says Hamilton, who himself is black. “The Lord warned the Israelites not to participate in these practices of these people. Among the things they were prohibited is summoning dead people.

“There are churches, large denominations that are demanding people support this organization and participate in these mantras and not really realizing what they are doing,” he adds. “As a Bible-believing Christian, I do not need a Marxist, anti-man, anti-Christ, ancestral worship purveyor to teach me how to love my neighbor.” Read the rest: Black Lives Matter and its demonic practices and beliefs.

Church after Covid: many will not return

By the time your church re-opens following the Covid crisis, as many as one in five members won’t return, according to one analyst.

Church dynamics expert Thom Rainer told Baptist Press that the recent global pandemic is revealing the true colors of church members.

That means a church of 200 will be a church of 160 after restrictions lift.

Many churches went online when health officials banned large gatherings as hot points for contagion. They resorted to Zoom Bible studies and live-streaming their worship services on YouTube, Instagram, FaceBook and the like.

While online has the advantage of convenience (no drive to church, and if you want you can wear your jammies), it lacks the human touch of a handshake, hug or affirmation that is also an important part of the service.

While introverts probably liked avoiding the social demands, there are others who may also find it easier to drop out.

Rainer describes several categories of believers who will probably not return to church:

The declining-attendance Christian: If their faithfulness to regular services was already waning, Covid only hastened their demise. Now completely overtaken by inertia, they won’t likely return Sunday mornings unless some drastic jumpstart revives them.

The loosely-connected member: The person who didn’t want to get involved in a small group and develop lasting bonds of friendship and was only a Sunday apparition is likely to continue their stay-at-home habits.

Conversely, the person who has strong friendships developed in community will want to be with his or her friends and will show up as soon as the doors open.

The just-another-activity Christian: The soccer mom whose calendar is chock full of commitments might find the relief from Sunday morning obligations a welcome change.

The critical attendee: The person who was constantly carping, finding fault, and complaining will probably not be returning to services. Read the rest: Church after Covid.

He went to a Billy Graham crusade to kill the man of God

George Palmer and his boys, armed with concealed zip guns, didn’t go to the Billy Graham crusade to hear him preach. They went to kill him.

Palmer had hated God ever since he lost his father to a heart attack at age seven.

“I was just so angry with God,” he testifies on a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association video on YouTube.

George Palmer’s father died in Western Australia after planting 100 cherry trees. He had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital, but doctors couldn’t save him.

“I’ll never forget when I was told that my dad had died, I just couldn’t handle that,” George remembers. “I remember going up to the top paddock, and I screamed at God.

“I hate you. I hate you with all my heart. I will never love.”

The anger grew in his heart. He was a troublemaker in school and in the neighborhood. People knew him by his bad reputation and this reinforced his growing bitterness.

“I was always told I would amount to nothing. If you tell a person that continually, that’s what you believe, that you’re worthless, you’re useless.”

In his youth, he led a violent gang that harmed many others and clashed with rivals. “I had a vile temper,” he says.

One day, after beating their rivals in a street fight, George and his nine associates captured the rival gang leader and, subduing him, drove a car over his hand backwards and forwards, crushing every bone in his hand.

“It’s all I ever thought of, hurting people,” he says.

They planned to attend the crusade in Melbourne, determined to kill the internationally famous evangelist.

That’s when he and his boys heard that Billy Graham was coming in 1959 to preach across Australia. They hated Christianity and God.

“Billy Graham stood for something I detested,” George says. “It was something that drove me day by day.”

“I made up 10 zip guns, so each member had one of those,” he says. “I said to the guys, ‘Come on. We’re going on the green. We spaced ourselves so that we could see each other around where Billy Graham was preaching.

“We decided that…during the appeal, we would kill Billy Graham.”

They clutched their zip guns — homemade guns — and eyed each other as the message prolonged. The appeal would inevitably come, a chance for people to leave their seats in the stadium and come to the front and accept Jesus. Read the rest: http://godreports.com/2020/09/gang-members-attended-graham-crusade-with-guns-planned-to-kill-famed-evangelist/He tried to kill Billy Graham but he wound up getting saved.

Valedictorian Christian rapper aims for academia, urban mission

Ki’Shon Furlow was always conflicted. n the one hand, he graduated a 4.0 GPA valedictorian from high school. At the same time, however, he tried to traffic drugs to support his mom and five siblings in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Ironically and fortunately, it was the drug supplier who dissuaded him.

“You’re graduating high school. You’re an idiot. You have all these things going for you. You have a good family,” the dealer told him, according to Genius Lyrics. “Go to school, and be a good kid.”

Ki’Shon — whose latest releases are under the name YourWelcome Shon with Curb Records — is glad he, like so many in marginalized neighborhoods in America, ultimately chose Christ instead of falling into the dangerous life of risking death or jail.

Am. “God got the plan now.”

Simmering in the background of Christian Hip Hop for a few years, Ki’Shon came to a boil at the forefront with a cosign from Derek Minor in 2018. “One of my favorite artists right now,” Minor tweeted, according to Rapzilla.

He’s committed to getting out of the ‘hood with “clean money.” His play-on-words “Summa Hood Laude” celebrates the words that rescued him from selling drugs — ironically words from a drug supplier!

His “Lord+Taylor” still reaches back into the past as it portrays a romantic story of a bad boy changing for a good girl. It’s a hypnotizing ballad with clever lyrics. Behind the fairy tale lies an implicit call to kids from the ghetto to believe in God, believe in themselves, believe in doing good actions and believe in the chance to make it out through legitimate work.

“Ima about to make her fall for a gangster. She’s got my heart on lockup. You make me want to change up. I don’t wanna be a player no more. You don’t need nobody else, Ima get it right. Girl, you got me praying on my knees to the Father.” Read the rest: YourWelcome Shon Christian rapper