Glowing Glory

One of our family's Fall highlights is carving pumpkins. I've already blogged about where we stand on Halloween, but I thought I would show you what we did this year.

To celebrate this new blog, I did my own rendition of the Betsy Ross flag. At first, I was going to use my newfound scraping technique, which allows far more detail than traditional carving, but that was going to be way too much work. So I carved everything, except the rope and thin outline around the flag. The "swan" at the top of the flagpole is supposed to be a bald eagle.

The middle pumpkin is my wife's, who went with a heart theme. Now that I look at it, her final product kind of looks like a face, but I'm sure that wasn't the intent.

The last one is our young son's effort. You might interpret his design as an expression of his indecisionism, regarding choice of design, but most Nintendo fans should recognize it as a surprise block, from the Super Mario series of video games.

You can look here, for examples of our past work. Who knows what next year will inspire us to create....

Pray for Maine

On November 3, Maine voters have the opportunity to strike down a 6-month-old law that allows same-sex marriage. Organizations on both sides have invested much time and money to sway the votes their way, but we all know that God is still in charge. He helped Truth prevail in California last year, and I believe He can do it again in Maine.

And as if that's not crazy enough, Maine is also voting to legalize "medical" pot.

Please pray that God grants Maine's voters wisdom, for we know what the Bible says about "they which do such things."

What They Sacrifice...

America: Nation of Christians or Christian Nation?

Before I get too much into our country's modern moral quagmires, I want to lay some sort of foundation, a background, if you will, to explain where I'm coming from. I'm fully aware that even within the Christian community, debates rage on, from our founding fathers' beliefs, to whether or not we even have any business getting into politics at all.

Even though I've decided to use the American flag as the recurring theme in my blog, and I will often bewail the sad moral degradation in this, my adopted country, I do not hold to any claims that the U.S. is or should be a nation of Christians or a Christian nation. Nor do I believe that it is destined to be the political embodiment of God's Kingdom.

With respect to the former, whether one serves the One True God is an intimate issue between that person and God. While I believe that nothing but good things can come from a society whose members are born of the Spirit and live according to Christ's two commandments, it is contrary to the teachings of Jesus that anyone (or any government) should shove a belief system down anyone's throat. (More on that, in posts to come!!!)

Regarding the latter (God's Kingdom), if when Jesus returns, He decides to establish an earthly kingdom, it will most likely be an entirely new entity. The U.S. was founded by men; God's Kingdom was founded by God. BIG difference there. :)

So how do I view the U.S.? I see it as a country that was founded on Biblical principles, by men and women who, for the most part, believed in and lived according to those principles, and that without them, we will see the moral decline of the past hundred years continue. But, as I mentioned in that tract, if we Christians stand up for that we know to be right, and lead others to the Savior, this country may yet turn around. I hope and pray that this blog will reach out, past my usual circle of like-minded readers, and serve as a beacon of light, toward that goal.