This is the eve of Noel: Reflect upon your blessings in this troubled time!

And we celebrate this eve of the initial christening in this great land. We may at times find ourselves in fear near the waters of Babylon, crying next year, in Jerusalem -- but I tell you, Jerusalem is before us as is the kingdom of God. If we do not see it, we are captive just as the Isrealites were those many years before the Yeshua.

Charles Dickens wrote, and being the absolute pessimist, I must frequently recall this passage:
"reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some."

I have in my life lived the "scrooge", and I do not wish others to dwell upon this great calamity as other than my own making for just as Old Ebenezer was wont to grab onto all wealth, by whatever means, so to did he come to recognize that his judgement lay in his deeds to and for other men. "Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!"

There was a book published back in the 1960s which address the apparent duality which seems to exist in most people, both ill and well, diseased of mind or magnificent in perception -- but that duality, that perception causes the war of two things, and it is this that I observe of myself.

At the moment of awakening, with the Spectre of the future laid before him, no answer was given, only a pointed finger to the tomb. Our Christian heritage tells us that we shall be judged by our deeds on earth. The Buddhist explain life in terms of Samsara and the possibility of awakening....and the "sociable God"? He is all things by all names to all peoples and would have us experience the kingdom in the here and now not at the other end of some other millenia.

But Scrooge, had visitors four and in that one moment he became awake to his only possible redemption. In service to others.

In this veign then I hold patriots of the past in the most esteemed regard for they were the pathway of a liberalism that freed men in the realm of man as well as allowed him to express his faith and hope in whatever form of religion for whatever reason, honoring whatever name chosen with which to address God.

Those freedoms and ideals are eroding under an onslaught of Statism -- an artificial entity to become the means of succor for the masses. That is a failed idea and a failed concept, a false god and a false religion. A false teaching and faulty observation of the nature of things. I prefer not to reduce ourselves to creating a commi-tsar in place of the tsars we have elected and cannot seem to be rid of.

I do not wish to "dwell in the skellars of the dome of the Universe of creation". I will instead, to focus my mind and my heart tonight and tomorrow on the blessings of my life. I pray you will do this simply and with heartfelt meaning and that you dwell yourselves on these thoughts. I pray as well that we have not created the complete chain of slavery which our own Caesar, now become godlike, will make us wear ourselves having forged the very links in the creation of those very same chains.

May God Bless, as Red Skelton would say to all at each closing of his television program.

Tonight then is a nite of 9/12 as our Republic's flame dwindles in the force of an ill wind. Help rekindle that flame of honor, of sticktoitivity, with enthusiasm and zeal.

Merry Christmas to all!

May God Bless... David