I am wondering, if I have any readers out there, what your thoughts, concerns, hopes or fears are for this year?

I guess if I am asking you to share the only reasonable thing for me to do is go first.

I think I have went through nearly the full range of emotions on the subject. Honestly at this point, I am not worried about what is going to happen, or not happen this year. There have been many dates that have come and gone throughout human history that were supposed to be catastrophic… and well, nothing happened. Anything could happen on any given day. I have come to the realization that life is precious and unpredictable. Something tragic could happen tomorrow on a large scale, or maybe just something to you or I that very few people would hear about.  Does this mean that we should live fearfully every day? No, certainly not.

Nothing good comes of fear. Well, that’s not entirely true. There is healthy fear and unhealthy fear. Fear is a God given emotion that we should use to recognize danger or trouble… or to realize that something is not as it should be. Things that are unfamiliar usually generate feelings of fear or anxiety. The question is then what should we be feeling scared or anxious about with the subject at hand?

Should we fear that some ancient civilization supposedly developed a calendar that ends this year on December 21st? Should we work ourselves up about all the possible things that could mean… a scenario that is only limited by our imaginations? Or should we be anxious over that fact that we are being told to fear anything at all!? I believe the latter.

It’s interesting to me how worked up people are getting over this issue. All they did was hear something from a friend, read something on the internet or maybe heard about it on T.V. and it was that easy for them to take hold of the idea and be shaken to the core. Now take the same hypothetical person and try to talk to them about Jesus or Christianity and they are quick to get their back up and avoid the conversation or say “that’s nonsense” or “I don’t believe that”. I don’t understand the disconnect there. Especially when Jesus is quick to warn us of the very things we are facing.

I intended for this to be a short post so I will end by saying I don’t really think anything catastrophic is going to happen at years end. And if something does happen I expect that it will be man made. People are quick to be fearful and when reacting out of fear things can get messy pretty quickly. My confidence comes from the Lord and the Bible is clear that at some point things are going to get messy for humanity before Christ’s return. We’ll see what happens. Live for today and make it count. We don’t know when things can change forever for one of us or all of us… whether it’s in December this year or some other time.

If you have the time, I recommend the documentary below. There are some pretty interesting things in it pertaining to 2012 and some of the popular anti-establishment movements occurring these days.

Before the towers fell...

Tomorrow marks the ten year anniversary of one of the most tragic and horrific days in human history. Many things have occurred throughout human history that you could call more tragic from a loss of life standpoint but what makes 9/11 so different than other events is the fact that is was televised as it happened. We all shared in the pain and shock of that day one way or another. So many people continue to suffer this day. Something else that makes the events of 9/11 differ from other tragedies is the fact that what occurred that day were the actions of people against other people. What occurred that day is unthinkable, yet a group of people conceived that idea and carried it out. Which group carried it out remains an open debate to this day.

As we have been approaching this weekend I have be reflecting on our human nature to be caught up in anniversary dates of certain things. Today marks the day before the anniversary of 9/11 and Monday marks the day after the anniversary of 9/11. To me, each day is another day between now and then. Please don’t mistake that as ignorance towards the occasion. I will be paying my respects along with millions of others tomorrow. My point is that there should be more focus on what happened 10 years ago all the time. For me, 9/11 forever changed my world view and I know I am not the only one. With that said, please read on.

On my way to work one morning this past week I was listening to some news and the channel reported that the American government had gotten some information about a potential Al-Qaida threat involving a car bomb and that the information had come in the day before at around noon. I was instantly enraged at this news. Not because a plot may have be foiled but because it all seems so phoney to me. If you have read much on this site you know that I am of the belief that what we are told happened on 9/11 isn’t the true storey. So for me to hear this news the Friday before the 10 year anniversary just seems like political posturing.

Now this is pure conjecture on my part and I would love to know what some of you think, but I think that if there was a full blown Jihad raging against America fuelled by Muslim terrorists that loath the very existence of America something else would have happened on American soil in the last ten years. It is not possible for the American secret service to stop everything that may be hatched against them. If they can filter and catch all the small stuff, they should have been able to stop the biggest event ever. I am absolutley not wishing for anything to happen. I am very glad that nothing has happened. But for me it makes the entire plot of this war versus terrorism a little hard to buy into. It seems as credible as an FBI agent finding a passport of one of the terrosits at ground zero meanwhile the heat and fire from the jet fuel melted the steel of the building enough to cause it to collapse.

There was another news story a couple weeks ago I hear about Al-Qaida attempting to derail a train on the 10 year mark. Again, it seems so trivial and made up. It’s like the news organizations are saying “Don’t worry America, we’ve got it handled. All our brutal police enforcement and policies that contradict your constiutional freedoms is working.”

If you believe that 9/11 was exactly what the news media said it was you need to spend some time and watch the following. The “Loose Change” film series has been very powerful and popular. It has released numerous cuts of their 9/11 documentary over the last decade as more information has surfaced. Please watch…

To get this point across I am going to do my best to briefly summarize what has transpired in the show which is now through three full seasons.  The show gets its name from the term breaking bad which essentially means to make an abrupt change from good moral behaviour to that of bad.

The show centers on Walter White, an incredibly over qualified high school chemistry teacher. He is married to a wife, Skyler, who is expecting a child which wasn’t planned. He has a son, Walt Jr., in his late teens with cerebral palsy. He drives a beat up Pontiac Aztec and lives in luxurious Albuquerque New Mexico. He has just turned fifty years old and finds out that he has inoperable lung cancer.

Walt, while loving his family dearly, is a guy who is obviously frustrated with how is life has played out. People he used to work with are now rich on the back of his research, his students show him no respect and his wife wears the pants at home on the family front. He has a brother-in-law that is a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent who turns on the news one night at Walters house because there was going to be a story showing a big bust that his team had made. Walter sees images on the screen of a meth lab and boxes full of money. A long story short, the world has walked all over Walter (from his perspective) so he decides he is going to manufacture Meth as a means to leave money behind for his family before he dies.

On a ride along with his brother in law, Hank, Walter sees a former burn out student of his sneaking off from a house next to the crime scene. Walter tracks him down later on and they become partners. Walter produces the drugs and Jesse deals on the street. Walter has no idea the path that he has started down and what will be required of him to cover his tracks as he bumbles along in a new world that he is not cut out to be a part of.

Walter ends up lying to his family. He murders two drug dealers to protect himself and his family. He constantly puts Jesse in vulnerable positions and one time he gets beaten really badly. He steals some equipment from the chemistry lab at the school where he teaches and someone else takes the blame. Walter doesn’t confess and that person is then fired and wrongly imprisoned. We witness some of the people and children that are affected by the drugs he makes, and it isn’t pretty. His marriage falls apart and his son grows distant. He allows a girl to die by overdose because she is threatening to blow the lid off his operation. Afters this happens the girls dad is so grief stricken he goes back to work too soon because he can’t stand being home alone. He is an air traffic controller and in his sad, unfocused state he accidentally directs two planes into the same airspace and they collide. Hundreds more die. In the midst of all this his brother in law ends up taking out a major player in the drug world and has the Mexican cartel after him. They nearly kill him in a deadly shoot out. He may not walk again.

The show is really gripping. It’s difficult to watch but that is one of its best qualities. After season two with the air crash I had the thought that many people (within the world the show has created) would see that situation and ask the question why does God let stuff like that happen? While fictional, it shows the very real thing that happens all the time. People make poor decisions that get poor results. The only difference between the show and the real world is that we never see the connecting events where things start and what the results are. Walter started making drugs and through a series of connected events hundreds of people died in a horrible accident. To everyone in the area that have no idea about the details that led up to that situation it was a horrible event that happened that seems completely random.

Now someone out there that thinks they can find a loophole in this story might come up with something like “well if God didn’t let Walter get cancer none of this would have gotten started.” Well I suppose that could be true, but I would respond by saying what things have other people done that have caused cancer to be a diesease in the world? Pollution, radioactivity, genentically modified food, so many waves and signals flying around that we can’t possibly concieve of, would all be things that could possibly explain the reason cancer is around. And I believe that even if those things are known to be unhealthy for us the owners of the economy are not prepared to trade their profits and strangle hold on power for the greater health and well being of the human race. Again, there is greed at the centre of what is negatively affecting so many people.

Everything we do everyday effects everyone and the environment around us. Our actions are like a chain of dominoes that race along from one place to another affecting everyone around us. That is likely the main reason that Christ commanded us to love our neighbour like ourself.

Lets think about something random in the real world. Like a kid walking into a school with a gun and taking out a bunch of students. Something like that occurs and people ask the classic “if there is a good God why does he let such terrible things happen?” Well I ask why do we focus only on the one aspect of the situation? What happened to that kid in their life that brought him or her to that situation? Was he or she bullied mercilessly? How did his or her parents fail them? What things had affected them to lead them to such an action? Music? TV? Loneliness? Maybe they were abused at home? Maybe their parents drank? What happened in their parent’s life that led them to drinking? I think you see what I am getting at. In all situations there is a back story that we don’t know about. We only see the conclusion.

So then the last thing we need to consider here is the fact that God created us with free will. That means we have the capacity to choose what we want to do. So if we have the ability to choose our paths and do what we want does that not leave us responsible for the outcomes? I think it does. Another question that gets me thinking is the idea of would we be better off not having free will? What if God had just created little drones to do what He wanted? If that were the case how would that be enjoyable and rewarding to our Creator? It wouldn’t be. But here is the catch at the end of it all. Free will gives us the capacity to choose the will of God over our own. That is the challenge of life. So we don’t need to be reduced to robots to be good, kind, selfless and loving people that God desires us to be, we can choose that.

Consider God’s will, that we be servants to Him and each other. That we love other before ourselves. That we love our Creator, God and saviour, Jesus with all our soul, mind and strength. Consider what outcomes would be different for the world if we were living that way. I am sure you will see if we break good, instead of bad… the world and the impression of God would be a lot different for the better.