New Hymn, "Sails of Victory"

Yeah! 983 and counting!

The hymn for today is about the victory of the righteous.

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A Remarkable Thing

Those of you who have been following my composing, here (and especially on MuseScore), have witnessed a remarkable thing. For 982 consecutive days you have seen me post hymn after hymn after hymn. This morning, though, when I turned my laptop on (the only place I have available to me to compose), the screen stayed dark.

Just yesterday I told Chris, in the comments thread of my most recent hymn, that “the screen on my laptop is dying, and I do not have the money to replace it.” This morning it did not turn on at all. While I could, quite dimly, see that changes were occurring on the display, it was far, far, far too dark to do anything with.

Pray for me, gentle readers. God knows a way.

Know this: the music is still in me, unabated, but I have no way, for now, to finish it out.

New Chat, "What do You do With a Gift"

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New Hymn, "Rescued by the Grace of God"

The hymn for today is about the source of grace.

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New Hymn, "Jesus my Savior, Christ unto Thee"

The hymn for today is an anthem of deliverance.

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New Hymn, "Preservation Prayer"

The hymn for today is a prayer for deliverance.

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New Hymn, "Battle Hymn of the Saints"

Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

The hymn for today is an anthem of praise.

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New Hymn, "Misunderstood"

The hymn for today speaks of the heart of God toward those He came to save.

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New Hymn, "Lord of Glory and Compassion"

The hymn for today is a prayer to be made a messenger for the Lord.

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New Hymn, "King of Light"

The hymn for today is a testimony to the Light of Christ.

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December Issue, St. Louis Amigan: The Opening of the Mind

The other day I made the frequent mistake of venturing into the comments thread of an article on a conservative web site. It is not a mistake of going to the wrong sort of web site. After all, I am a conservative. It is not a mistake because of that. No. It is a mistake because such places are invariably invaded by those who hate conservative ideals, whose only motivation and desire is to shut—and shout—those ideals down.

Their tools are slander, vituperation, vilification, hatred, and a twisted “logic” that is unique to those who want what they want and the Truth—and the rights of others—be damned. Among other things, they fail—or, rather, refuse—to recognize the simple, common sense logic that the presence of the government established by the Constitution of the United States of America does not constitute a Constitution-free zone. In other words, no person surrenders their Constitutional Rights by being a member of the government established by the Constitution that recognizes, and was formulated for the protection of, those rights. When you enter a government establishment you do not leave your rights at the door.

The very basis of the foundation of our government is alluded to—if not actually established—in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Note that you are not guaranteed happiness, but only the pursuit of it. If happiness itself were a creator-endowed, unalienable right, then I would, by now, be a grandfather with a quiver full of children and a yard full of grandchildren. Happiness, though, is not guaranteed, so I have the life I have, my own happiness ruined, bull-rushed, and trampled upon by those in the head-long, greedy blitz toward their own chosen profligacies, it seemingly never entering their wicked little—and, yes, I do mean little—minds that they are not Constitutionally guaranteed the right to pursue their own twisted perversion of happiness at the expense of my happiness. That they have no right to force me to participate in the celebration of what I see as evil, wicked, twisted, perversion and sin seems to be an alien concept to them.

There are even those who insist that two of our founding fathers, Hamilton and Jefferson, hated religion and were trying to free Americans from its grasp. They seem blissfully unaware of the fact that Jefferson made certain that churches would be allowed to use the House of Representatives chamber as their place of worship, and that, according to Dr. Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, there is reason to believe that, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle” were drafted—not by Washington, in whose farewell address they appear—but by Hamilton. So history calls a liar the person who would assert that Hamilton and Jefferson were at war with religion, because such an assertion is simply not true.

The Truth, though, never withstands in the minds of these miscreants of mindful malediction, these purveyors of prurient putrefaction, these simpering sycophants of slanderous surveyal, these hate-filled halogens of hyper-critical histrionics. They care nothing at all for the Truth. The only thing that matters to them is that their own accepted views prevail—and the Truth—and, therefore, the actual facts of the matter—be damned. They care only that their agenda go forth. If the rights of others get trampled in the process, so be it; they care not, so long as their own supremacy be established in that same process. They are Hitler and his dogs, Caesar and his lions, Nero and his torches. If you stand athwart their goals, to the flames with you—and may your sky fairy help you if they can.

Our God can!

You see, the whole reason that they engage in such childish pursuits as hyper-critical histrionics and the like is to shout down what they cannot countenance, and thereby maintain the delusion that what they cannot countenance does not actually exist. But there is a problem there.

No more than it would be sensible to claim that the various moons of Pluto popped into existence upon NASA’s observations of them, would it be sane to assume that our personal preferences effect the existence of those without whom we would find life more tolerable. I am not able, by sheer force of will, to relegate Nealy Tamminga and her PCA ilk to the outer realms of delusional fantasy (no matter the plenitude of gain that would accrue to the world in such an event), and the God and Creator of all that begins to exist is neither subject to such preferences at the hands of those who would wish Him out of existence.

God is real, and it is He that rules over reality, not us. No amount of profligate hand wringing will ever have a single sliver of an iota of an effect upon that.

God is real.

There are those who, seeking to appear reasonable, will cry out for evidence of God to be presented—and then a priori reject any evidence that you bring. Their crying out for evidence is actually a cover, a subterfuge that is designed to make them seem to have the high ground over those poor, deluded fools who depend upon a god of some sort or other to make their meaningless existence tolerable. Poor things. They forget that it is they who lack the evidence to support their stance—not those who accept the evidence of their own eyes, but those who insistently reject that evidence, preferring their own preferences over reality.

No one in possession of a sound mind would, upon seeing a print-out of this newsletter, genuinely assume that it is simply a product of physics and chemistry with nothing more involved. While it is exceedingly likely that they would not appreciate the ideas being brought forth, they would nevertheless concede that there are, indeed, ideas being brought forth—in other words, that there is mind involved.

How much more, then, the far more sophisticated concepts involved in the machinery of life! If the simple concepts presented here are guaranteed to be the product of mind, then how much more-so the multi-dimensionally arrayed concepts that allow for an immensely long coded sequence of characters to be decoded and read in eight different ways at the same time in the same code space, yielding functional results with every reading, those results varying according to the decoding method used! If my simplistic scribblings here are certainly the product of mind, then so are the immensely more sophisticated encodings that instruct the construction, maintenance, and replication of the machinery that allows for the thriving of life itself. That Mind is necessarily the Designer, and it is the Designer that rules over His design, and not the design that rules over its Designer.

This is what the profligates cannot countenance and what triggers their childish use of the “LALALALA I can’t hear you!” defense that they unceasingly employ in an effort to shout you down.

Take heart, though, because evidence is never obliterated by its denial. Neither is God effected by such childish foolishness. The evidence for God is all around, suffused throughout all existence. The steadfast refusal of some to countenance what their sober senses would tell them, is not evidence against God, but rather, is evidence against them, prosecutable in the Court of the Final Judgment, in which the only possibility for acquittal only requires the opening of the mind.

PDF version of this issue

New Hymn, "Save Me!"

The hymn for today is a prayer for deliverance.

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New Hymn, "Lord of Glory"

The hymn for today is a prayer for national repentance.

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A Short Thanksgiving Message

Recorded about a week or so ago, this is a very brief message on thanksgiving in the midst of trials and tribulations.

New Hymn, "To the Life!"

The hymn for today is a guiding light to the Lord of Light.

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New Hymn, "God of Mercy and Compassion"

The hymn for today is a cry of the wounded heart, praying for those who have committed the wounding.

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New Hymn, "The One-in-Three!"

This hymn is a prayer for those who, through their hatred and dismissal of God, oppose, also, you.

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New Hymn, "Who Will Always be There"

The hymn for today is an anthem for those who, in Christ, have been used and abused and thrown aside by those who pretend Christ, as has been my history. Truly, I have lived Genesis 39, with the Lord even calling me Joseph, before.

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New Hymn, "Glory to the Risen Lamb"

The hymn for today is a simple hymn of praise.

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New Hymn, "A Prayer for the Wicked Heart"

The hymn for today is also exceedingly personal, following on yesterday's hymn, but dealing more broadly with all those who, claiming Jesus' name, have slandered, betrayed, used, abused, sought to entrap me; as you can see from the chosen Scripture passage, these were not known enemies, but people who had claimed to be my friend, who had shared communion with me under the noses of elders who should have known better.

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New Hymn, "Wounded Hearts"

The hymn for today is exceedingly personal, an intercessory prayer for a dear, sweet friend.

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New Hymn, "Under the Lord's Command"

The hymn for today is an exhortation to purity.

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New Hymn, "Glory Calling"

The hymn for today is a depiction of the Gospel of Christ.

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New Hymn, "We Have Gotten Grace and Peace"

The hymn for today is a celebration of salvation.

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New Hymn, "Our Lord Jesus Christ"

The hymn for today is a depiction of the qualities of Christ.

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New Hymn, "Savior, over us Forever"

The hymn for today is a celebration of Christ's sacrifice and resurrection.

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New Chat, "Do You Truly Love?"

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New Hymn, "Our Mighty God"

The hymn for today speaks of the doctrine of the Trinity.

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New Hymn, "The Road of Evermore"

The hymn for today speaks of pressing on for the call of God in Christ.

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New Hymn, "In the Realms of Darkness"

The hymn for today is an anthem of praise for salvation in Jesus Christ.

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New Hymn, "Beseeching the Sovereign One"

The hymn for today is a tearful one; a beseeching of the Lord to be freed from torment.

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New Hymn, "Praises to our King!"

The hymn for today is a shout of praises to our God and King.

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New Hymn, "The Giving"

The hymn for today is a hymn of thanksgiving for the gift of Christ.

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New Hymn, "Oh, Mighty to Save"

The hymn for today could be called, “Repentance in C Minor”, and is, of course, a hymn of repentance.

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New Hymn, "I Wake to Sing the Praise"

The hymn for today is a shout of praise for the salvation of all saints.

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