To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven...

...a time to keep silence, and a time to speak... Ecclesiastes 3:1, 7b

It will yet be awhile before I post with any regularity again. I still practice and enjoy my hobby but such temporal things are increasingly losing their luster.

Been reading the Bible more and more of late...funny how a Book once thought so dead and incomprehensible in my eyes at one time, has now come to life, full of relevance and vigor the like of which I cannot find a thing on this earth to compare it to.

I find myself between Jeremiah, weeping for my nation and the coming judgment it so eagerly dares God to bring on...and Jonah, sitting on a hill, stinking of whale vomit and sulking, waiting for it all to burn...FYI, my personal politics tend toward Libertarian views, have a ball with that one.

I never forget that, though Joash the king of Judah "did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, and walked in all the way of David his father, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left" and cleaned house in the nation from one end to the other, "Notwithstanding the LORD turned not from the fierceness of his great wrath, wherewith his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations that Manasseh had provoked him withal."*** There comes a time when revivals and personal devotion to God will still have its reward on an individual level, but on a national level, the sins of the previous generation justifying the sins of the current generation, must and will have their final, devastating harvest.

Sobering thoughts for such lightweight fare as model trains---but---I believe 2011 is going to be a sobering year for many people.

***2 Kings 22-23

“In the world you shall have tribulation.” John 16:33.

Could we draw aside, for a moment, the thin veil that separates us from the glorified saints, and inquire the path along which they were conducted by a covenant God to their present enjoyments, how few exceptions, if any, would we find to that declaration of Jehovah- “I have chosen you in the furnace of affliction.” All world tell of some peculiar cross; some domestic, relative, or personal trial which attended them every step of their journey; which made the valley they trod, truly, “a valley of tears,” and which they only threw off when the spirit, divested of its robe of flesh, fled where sorrow and sighing are forever done away. God’s people are a sorrowful people. The first step they take in the divine life is connected with tear’s of godly sorrow; and, as they, travel on, sorrow and tears do but trace their steps. They sorrow over the body of sin which they are compelled to carry with them; they sorrow over their perpetual proneness to depart, to backslide, to live below their high and holy calling. They mourn that they mourn so little; they, weep that they weep so little; that over so much indwelling sin, over so many and so great departures, they yet are found so seldom mourning in the posture of one low in the dust before God. In connection with this, there is the sorrow which results from the needed discipline which the correcting hand of the Father who loves them almost daily employs. For, in what light are all their afflictions to be viewed, but as so many correctives, so much discipline employed by their God in covenant, in order to make them “partakers of His holiness.” Viewed in any other light, God is dishonored, the Spirit is grieved, and the believer is robbed of the great spiritual blessing for which the trial was sent.