I’m Sandy, Pat’s Personal Assistant. He asked me to post the following to his blog. It touched him sooo deeply, and he knew it would touch you, too…

http://www.pbnradio.com/special/ifyouthink.html

The Cables Hold

Some of you wondered why Claudia and I weren’t On The Air, today. Actually, I was on the treadmill with 3 minutes left in my workout (I am trying to get some exercise). It was about 10 minutes to 4pm, and I needed to get a shower and head on out to the Studios.

Claudia came in with the phone with this solemn look on her face and said, “Stop the treadmill right now.” She NEVER talks like this. I saw the phone in her hand, and I knew something HAD to be amiss.

It was Jonathan on the phone. He was all right. He was on Hwy 220, coming home from work. He was about 5 minutes from Asheboro. A stray rain shower was pouring down on the road. He was going under the speed limit due to the weather, and was moving over to the inside lane, letting the merging cars on the freeway. All of a sudden his little Chevy S10 truck hit a puddle in the road and started a 360 spin. The truck spun onto the median, hitting the wet grass, and shot across, hitting the cables in the middle.

Jonathan's Windshield Shatters

I quickly put a previous program on for Praise Until Dawn, and headed out to help him.

Jonathan said he felt he was going to go through to the opposite side of the road, and that his life was over. Yet, the cables held, and pulled him back. As you can see the windshield shattered, and he had glass all over him. One man who is licensed through the Department of Transportation stopped to see if he was ok. He told me that he has seen many vehicles that had their tops taken off by the cables. If that would have happened, Jonathan would have been decapitated.

As it was, the only cut Jonathan received was on his leg, as he tried to get out of the car. His door was caught shut, so he had to go through a lot of glass to get to the passenger door, and out.

We are very, very thankful for Jonathan’s safety. Thank you to all of you who continually keep Claudia, myself and our entire family in your prayers.

There was definitely a reason for Claudia and me not being here, today.

He now carries an 8 foot cross into the heart of New York City, and witnesses down the street from the Empire State Building. Please pray for our friend, Casey, and his work for Yeshua down in the Lion’s Den.

The following was sent to Claudia and me from Byron Pederson, who is in Saudi Arabia, trying to make a living for his wife and family, who live in the United States, half a world away. Byron is a precious friend of Claudia’s and mine, and he is President of a Mission called Mercy Express.

Some years ago, on a hot summer day in South Florida, a little boy decided to go for a swim in the old swimming hole behind his house. In a hurry to dive into the cool water, he ran out the back door, leaving behind shoes, socks, and shirt as he went. He flew into the water, not realizing that as he swam toward the middle of the lake, an alligator was swimming toward the shore.

His father, working in the yard, saw the two as they got closer and closer together. In utter fear, he ran toward the water, yelling to his son as loudly as he could.

Hearing his voice, the little boy became alarmed and made a U-turn to swim to his father. It was too late. Just as he reached his father, the alligator reached him.

From the dock, the father grabbed his little boy by the arms just as the alligator snatched his legs. That began an incredible tug-of-war between the two. The alligator was much stronger than the father, but the father was much too passionate to let go.

A farmer happened to drive by, heard his screams, raced from his truck, took aim and shot the alligator.

Remarkably, after weeks and weeks in the hospital, the little boy survived. His legs were extremely scarred by the vicious attack of the animal. And, on his arms, were deep scratches where his father’s fingernails dug into his flesh in his effort to hang on to the son he loved.

The newspaper reporter, who interviewed the boy after the trauma, asked if he would show him his scars. The boy lifted his pant legs. And then, with obvious pride, he said to the reporter, ‘But look at my arms. I have great scars on my arms, too. I have them because my Dad wouldn’t let go.’

You and I can identify with that little boy. We have scars, too. No, not from an alligator, but the scars of a painful past. Some of those scars are unsightly and have caused us deep regret. But, some wounds, my friend, are because God has refused to let go. In the midst of your struggle, He’s been there holding on to you.

The Scripture teaches that God loves you. You are a child of God. He wants to protect you and provide for you in every way. But sometimes we foolishly wade into dangerous situations, not knowing what lies ahead. The swimming hole of life is filled with peril — and we forget that the enemy is waiting to attack. That’s when the tug-of-war begins — and if you have the scars of His love on your arms, be very, very grateful. He did not and will not ever let you go.

Humanevents.com

I have two grandchildren, ages 5 and 7. If you’re a parent or grandparent yourself, I challenge you not to think about a child you love when you read what I’m about to tell you.

I challenge you not to share my disgust with the barbarians who use the blood of innocents to further their political agendas.

And I challenge you not to share my contempt for the bureaucrats who think they can appease them. For the governments that think their actions don’t have consequences.

For the politicians who think that something - anything - good can come from allowing the killers of children to walk free.

Smadar Haran, her husband Danny, and their two daughters, ages two and four, were at home in their apartment in northern Israel on the night of April 22, 1979. They were asleep in their beds around midnight when they awoke to gunfire and grenades exploding. Terrorists, sent by terrorist leader Abu Abbas to protest the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty at Camp David the year before, were breaking into their building.

Desperate to hide, Smadar carried her two-year-old into a crawl space above their bedroom. So terrified was she that her baby girl would cry out and alert the terrorists to their hiding place that Smadar held her hand tightly over the girl’s mouth. Too tightly. By the time they were rescued hours later, the little girl was dead. Smadar had accidentally smothered her own child.

But the horror doesn’t end there.

While Smadar and her child hid in the crawlspace, Danny and the four-year-old ran out of the apartment for the safety of an underground shelter. They didn’t make it. The terrorists took Danny and the little girl down to the beach where one of them, Samir Kuntar, shot Danny in front of the girl. His goal, according to Smadar, was that the sight of her father being killed “would be the last sight she would ever see.”

Then Kuntar smashed the little girl’s skull against a rock until she was dead.

Last week, in a deal brokered by the Israeli government with the terrorist group Hezbollah, Samir Kuntar, a cowardly child killer, walked out of an Israeli prison.

The deal the Israeli government made with Hezbollah included the exchange of the remains of two Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah in return for five live terrorists in Israeli prisons, including Kuntar.

And Kuntar was no ordinary terrorist prisoner. Abu Abbas was so impressed with Kuntar’s savage child-killing tactics that Abbas masterminded the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 - including the killing and dumping into the ocean of the defenseless, elderly, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer - to secure Kuntar’s release.

Israel didn’t cave into terrorists in 1985, but it did last week. And the deal it struck with Hezbollah will have disastrous consequences for Israel and the world.

The concession, writes the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick “will cement Iran’s control of Lebanon through Hizbullah. It also all but guarantees that any future Israeli soldiers taken hostage by Hizbullah will be killed on the spot. Why care for hostages when you can murder them and expect to receive the same payoff you would get if you kept them alive?”

But possibly even more disappointing than the Israeli government’s willingness to make deals with terrorists is the reception that greeted the release of Samir Kuntar in parts of the Middle East last week. Columnist Mona Charen reports that Kuntar literally received a red carpet reception in Beirut. Charen writes: The government closed all offices and declared a national day of celebration. Tens of thousands of Lebanese cheered, waved flags, threw confetti, and set off fireworks as Hezbollah staged a rally to celebrate their “victory” over Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” leader of the Palestinian Authority, sent “blessings to Samir Kuntar’s family.” PA spokesman Ahmad Abdul Rahman sent “warm blessings to Hezbollah on the return of the heroes of freedom . . . headed by the great Samir Kuntar.”

This barbaric display enrages me and it should enrage all Americans.

Both the Palestinian Authority and the Lebanese government are recipients of U.S. taxpayers’ money through foreign assistance. Political leaders - and the people they lead - who cheer the release of despicable child murderers are unworthy recipients of our assistance.

Congress should insist that the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority retract their support for Kuntar or it should cut off U.S. assistance to them.

As if the news from Israel weren’t bad enough, the seemingly irresistible urge among some foreign policy elites to appease our worst enemies came home to America last week.

The State Department sent its third most senior official to sit in on nuclear “negotiations” with Iran, even as Iran continues its relentless pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

In the past, President Bush had a label for such a move. He called it “appeasement.” Last week, his own State Department succeeded in taking the first steps in a futile attempt to appease a dictator who has called for the destruction of Israel and defeat of the West. His stated goal? A world without America.

And so I ask again: Have our leaders lost their minds?

As a historian, I look for clues for how to manage our present from how we’ve managed our past.

One thing history shows is that some elites have a dangerous and unexplainable desire to lie to themselves.

A case in point: In 1924, Adolph Hitler was released from a German prison after serving time for conspiracy to overthrow the German government. Nine years before he took power and led Germany on an irrevocable course toward world war and a campaign of systematic genocide against Jews, Gypsies, Catholics and others, the headline in the New York Times was:
“Hitler Tamed By Prison”

Read closely. The article concludes on this deluded note: “[Hitler's] behavior during imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he], like his political organization, known as the Volkischer, was no longer to be feared. It is believed he will return to private life and return to Austria, the country of his birth.”

As America looks ahead to the swearing in of a new president next January, we need now, more than ever, leaders who resist the temptation to delude themselves about the nature of our enemies.

As a young Senator with little foreign policy experience, Barack Obama faces a unique challenge. As I write this, Senator Obama is traveling abroad seeking to convince the American people that he has the leadership ability to be commander in chief.

Senator Obama has also repeatedly assured us that he, too, will negotiate with regimes like Iran. But the question we owe to ourselves is to ask Senator Obama and our current State Department:

When negotiations don’t work, what are you prepared to do?

Talking isn’t a policy, it’s a process. And talking to people who have vowed your destruction is at best a futile and at worst a dangerous process.

Just ask the Israelis. After greeting Samir Kuntar with a hug and a kiss when he returned to Lebanon last week, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Nasrallah declared, “The time of defeat is long gone. Today is the time of victory.”

In the midst of his bout with his terminal cancer, he penned the following. I knew it would bless you, as it did me.

There is NO fear in death!!!
By Tony Snow
Christianity Today

Blessings arrive in unexpected packages—in my case, cancer.

Those of us with potentially fatal diseases—and there are millions in America today—find ourselves in the odd position of coping with our mortality while trying to fathom God’s will. Although it would be the height of presumption to declare with confidence What It All Means, Scripture provides powerful hints and consolations.

The first is that we shouldn’t spend too much time trying to answer the why questions: Why me? Why must people suffer? Why can’t someone else get sick? We can’t answer such things, and the questions themselves often are designed more to express our anguish than to solicit an answer.

I don’t know why I have cancer, and I don’t much care. It is what it is—a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.

But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don’t know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.

Second, we need to get past the anxiety. The mere thought of dying can send adrenaline flooding through your system. A dizzy, unfocused panic seizes you. Your heart thumps; your head swims. You think of nothingness and swoon. You fear partings; you worry about the impact on family and friends. You fidget and get nowhere.

To regain footing, remember that we were born not into death, but into life—and that the journey continues after we have finished our days on this earth. We accept this on faith, but that faith is nourished by a conviction that stirs even within many nonbelieving hearts—an intuition that the gift of life, once given, cannot be taken away. Those who have been stricken enjoy the special privilege of being able to fight with their might, main, and faith to live—fully, richly, exuberantly—no matter how their days may be numbered.

Third, we can open our eyes and hearts. God relishes surprise. We want lives of simple, predictable ease—smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see—but God likes to go off-road. He provokes us with twists and turns. He places us in predicaments that seem to defy our endurance and comprehension—and yet don’t. By his love and grace, we persevere. The challenges that make our hearts leap and stomachs churn invariably strengthen our faith and grant measures of wisdom and joy we would not experience otherwise.

‘You Have Been Called’

Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet; a loved one holds your hand at the side. “It’s cancer,” the healer announces.

The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. “Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler.” But another voice whispers: “You have been called.” Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter—and has dragged into insignificance the banal concerns that occupy our “normal time.”

There’s another kind of response, although usually short-lived—an inexplicable shudder of excitement, as if a clarifying moment of calamity has swept away everything trivial and tinny, and placed before us the challenge of important questions.

The moment you enter the Valley of the Shadow of Death, things change. You discover that Christianity is not something doughy, passive, pious, and soft. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But it also draws you into a world shorn of fearful caution. The life of belief teems with thrills, boldness, danger, shocks, reversals, triumphs, and epiphanies. Think of Paul, traipsing though the known world and contemplating trips to what must have seemed the antipodes (Spain), shaking the dust from his sandals, worrying not about the morrow, but only about the moment.

There’s nothing wilder than a life of humble virtue—for it is through selflessness and service that God wrings from our bodies and spirits the most we ever could give, the most we ever could offer, and the most we ever could do.

Finally, we can let love change everything. When Jesus was faced with the prospect of crucifixion, he grieved not for himself, but for us. He cried for Jerusalem before entering the holy city. From the Cross, he took on the cumulative burden of human sin and weakness, and begged for forgiveness on our behalf.

We get repeated chances to learn that life is not about us—that we acquire purpose and satisfaction by sharing in God’s love for others. Sickness gets us partway there. It reminds us of our limitations and dependence. But it also gives us a chance to serve the healthy. A minister friend of mine observes that people suffering grave afflictions often acquire the faith of two people, while loved ones accept the burden of two people’s worries and fears.

Learning How to Live

Most of us have watched friends as they drifted toward God’s arms not with resignation, but with peace and hope. In so doing, they have taught us not how to die, but how to live. They have emulated Christ by transmitting the power and authority of love.

I sat by my best friend’s bedside a few years ago as a wasting cancer took him away. He kept at his table a worn Bible and a 1928 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. A shattering grief disabled his family, many of his old friends, and at least one priest. Here was a humble and very good guy, someone who apologized when he winced with pain because he thought it made his guest uncomfortable. He retained his equanimity and good humor literally until his last conscious moment. “I’m going to try to beat [this cancer],” he told me several months before he died. “But if I don’t, I’ll see you on the other side.”

His gift was to remind everyone around him that even though God doesn’t promise us tomorrow, he does promise us eternity—filled with life and love we cannot comprehend—and that one can in the throes of sickness point the rest of us toward timeless truths that will help us weather future storms.

Through such trials, God bids us to choose: Do we believe, or do we not? Will we be bold enough to love, daring enough to serve, humble enough to submit, and strong enough to acknowledge our limitations? Can we surrender our concern in things that don’t matter so that we might devote our remaining days to things that do?

When our faith flags, he throws reminders in our way. Think of the prayer warriors in our midst. They change things, and those of us who have been on the receiving end of their petitions and intercessions know it.

It is hard to describe, but there are times when suddenly the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, and you feel a surge of the Spirit. Somehow you just know: Others have chosen, when talking to the Author of all creation, to lift us up—to speak of us!

This is love of a very special order. But so is the ability to sit back and appreciate the wonder of every created thing. The mere thought of death somehow makes every blessing vivid, every happiness more luminous and intense. We may not know how our contest with sickness will end, but we have felt the ineluctable touch of God.

What is man that Thou art mindful of him? We don’t know much, but we know this: No matter where we are, no matter what we do, no matter how bleak or frightening our prospects, each and every one of us, each and every day, lies in the same safe and impregnable place—in the hollow of God’s hand.

Remember, God is talking to His Precious Chosen Ones, the Jews. He is NOT addressing Christians. We were no where around when most of this was written. It is through the Chosen Ones, and the Cross and Resurrection that we have been invited to join in with the blessings of the Chosen Ones… and be recipients of these Words along with the Jews, NOT in place of the Jews.

Steven Millhorn, a very good friend of mine, sent this to me. Now, I proudly share the story with you.

Story of The Star Spangled Banner

For instance, John 20:3-9 describes Peter entering the tomb where Y’shua had been laid after His ordeal on the cross. In this passage is noted the “napkin, which was around His head, not lying with the linen clothes.” That verse, translated strictly from the Greek, is correct. What is lost in transliteration, however, is that the “napkin” described there is really a Jewish “tallit” which was why it was laying neatly folded, separate from the other clothes. Not having a Hebrew background would make it difficult understanding what was actually meant behind these Hebrew words.

When every Jewish boy turns 13 years of age, he becomes a bar mitzvah (literally - son of the commandment) and is obligated to begin to observe the commandments of Moses. At that time, he is given a tallit that he takes with him everywhere he goes for the rest of his life for use in his morning prayer. It is what is draped “around” or, more precisely, over the head during prayer and, traditionally, that same tallit is placed over the head of one who has died as they lie in their grave or tomb. That garment has fringes or strings on the corners called “lights” and, when not being used, is to be folded in a certain manner so that the lights all hang together from the same corner.

What is notable about this same event as described in Luke 24:12, has Peter “wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.” Peter was not yet fully aware of all that was happening, but since he saw the tallit was properly folded and away from the rest of the clothes, he knew for certain the Romans had not taken His Master because no Roman soldier would have known what a tallit was, let alone how to properly fold one, as Y’shua would have. When He arose from the dead, while still in the tomb, Y’shua removed the tallit from off his head, neatly folded it and laid it separately from the rest of His clothing - as He had done every day of His life from the time He was a boy, probably without thinking much about it because it had become second nature to him, a matter of habit.

What is significant about this one word, “napkin”, is how it illustrates the lack of understanding a Greek mindset possesses when looking at scripture - and when looking at who He is in Truth. Y’shua was and remains Jewish. He never distanced Himself from His People - not even in death. Think on this - there is not, nor has there ever been, another race of people on the planet upon whom God has declared, “These are My People.” Romans 11 tells us that it is WE, the Gentiles, who have been grafted INTO the Jewish root - not the other way around. It is BECAUSE of the Jewish THROUGH whom the Promise came, enabling us all to come into the Presence of the Father today.

By: haRold Smith in Jerusalem, Israel: http://hethathasanear.com

As I watched the following, tears swelled in my eyes, as this song has touched the depths of my heart for so long. And, to have such a sweet person as Amy help me experience what the song is trying to portray, touched me deeply, as I know it touches Amy, as well. I hope it does the same for you.