Checkmate

I have this very big history book, which I had my eye on for some time, but the cost was sixty dollars. Needless to say, this is just too much to pay in order to own a book. But! Much to my delight I saw it was on special sale for thirty dollars!

It's a very big book and has mostly sat on a bookshelf for sometime now. I took it out intending to begin reading it, or at least scanning through, regularly, a couple of months ago, but only finally am doing so now. So yesterday I found myself scanning the index at the end of the book and realized, if I was to just read my way through that first of all, I'd learn quite a bit just doing that, as they list many occurrences and events with their page number after each name in the index. So you really do get a lot of information after each index entry.

I noticed, as I was reading through a lot of names starting with A, down through some centuries, what weird lives some of them lived! Which of course I've heard of before, but not so much at once. Like so and so, son of a king, accused his brothers of something, then defended them against the father, then killed his brothers, then plotted to kill his father, got discovered in some espionage in order to carry it out, and was executed. I mean really? This is how you're going to spend your life? When you could have leisure and enjoyment of days without having to toil like most of the population of mankind. It was his father who had him executed of course.

And there were lots and lots of this type of thing! Married his sister.. murdered his sister.. grand father.. what ever.. slew 40,000 people of a town.. this type of thing, over and over.


I started to notice it all had one thing in common. And that is they all had one branch of government. There was one power in the land.

Little Things

I prayed.. I asked God, "please.. if I'm wrong about these things (warnings and signs relating to the trend of fulfilling Bible prophecies of a coming world governing gone tyrannical, what the Bible calls worst time ever, but plain and specific signs given so its worst days, 45, can be avoided) please let me know.. don't let me teach in any tiny way, anything which is not true.."
- The Lord 'speaks' to me (if you're a believer, you know what I mean) sometimes, quite often, actually, using my birth date in various ways - 5,5,55. It's amazing how many times I wake up at 5:55 or look up at the clock and it's 2:22 or 3:33, or something :55... Silly perhaps, to some.
- I like to relax by reading a short romance or adventure story written by Christians. My favorites are old world, simpler life style settings of settlers or other old fashioned, reverent type stories where good triumphs, etc. and faith is common to the culture and the families. My latest one was an adventure set in the days of the rising of Hitler in Germany... It all started out sort of slow, those days, and all the while the news reported how good things were. And Hitler did actually rise to power by doing some very good things. Promised prosperity for all, education for all, fitness programs for all.. And he resurrected their very ailing currency and economy. The nation went from chaos to order, and the people idolized him. He was great, he was for the common person, they lauded him with rapture and spellbound faces. But the heroine of the story stumbled upon the ugly truth of the first ghettos where the Jewish citizens were imprisoned after much of the nation was stirred up into hatred of them (first beginning as condescension and disdain?). Every problem of life and society the nation had experienced was their fault, so the party line went, first they were ignorant, against progress and then they were evil intentioned and finally "vermin". They were forced from their homes, and government confiscated their businesses. And soon they were to be trucked off to death camps. At a pivotal moment in the story, our heroine noted the time, 5:55.
- The hero and heroine of course went on to live happily ever after, having rescued one such ghetto of residents from being ex-terminated. And at the end of the story as grandparents they visited the Holocaust Museum. As they left that place they said "I can barely stand to think of the holocaust, but thank God for this memorial". And, "God willing, the world won't forget, so it will never happen again"....
- A touching moment in the story, after the daring rescue and escape, an elderly gent said "Baruch atoh adnoy, elohaynu melech ho-lom shee-osoh li nays bamokm hazeh. You are blessed. Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who performed a miracle for me in this place."