Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Dying to Live and Living to Die


     
 Can a death sentence improve your life?  Do you live life to the fullest?  That includes eternity.  Yet, who among us lives as if death is coming?
     The default setting for most is to live merely—or at least mostly—for Earthly life.  In such a case, a death sentence can be a great blessing.  Suddenly, reality becomes real.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

"God Hears a Mother's Prayers" by Susan Brinkmann


     Pedro Cumba’s first brush with death came in 1995 when a rival drug gang robbed him.   “They pushed me down the basement steps and made me lay face down on the floor,” Cumba said.  “He went to shoot me in the back of the head but the gun didn’t go off.”

    Pedro managed to get away, unharmed, but was not yet frightened away from the drug habit that would consume twenty of his forty-eight years of life.  His second brush with death would come soon after, when his home was broken into one night.  Cumba was doing drugs in the living room with his friends.  “I was whacked over the back of the head with a gun, tied up and thrown in a closet.”  One of the assailants put a pillow up to the closet door and started shooting but Cumba was able to wriggle himself into the corner of the closet and escaped all five bullets.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Abortion Prayer Wars


Prayer is a lethal weapon. But in the hands of the enemy with sacrilegious intentions, it is useless. Although abortion workers continually say that prayer vigils outside abortion clinics are ineffective, they are attempting to use prayer to launch a counter-offensive. Unfortunately, they lack the knowledge of how such a weapon works.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Mary’s Moms—Taking it to the Next Level


“Hey Patti, I’m getting serious about praying for my family. I’m going to do a 40-day fast and daily rosary, do you want to join me?” My friend Shellie Rusch asked me this recently.  She has six kids and we have a spiritual sisterhood in many ways.

As a wife and mother of ten, I had eleven reasons to say yes. Well, twelve including me, and I certainly need all the help I can get.  It was a comforting idea, to get serious about the spiritual well being of our families and to pool our prayers and fasting together.   It wasn’t as if we had not always prayed for our families, but this would be different—something more; something big.  We had one intention: for the increased holiness of our families. In the end, holiness is all that matters so it was all we would ask for.