It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

It is my favorite time of year! Yay for Christmas! I love the lights and the decorations and the special treats that only come out this time of year.  And I REALLY love buying presents!

I just took a few days off work to get the house ready for Christmas. I cleaned and decorated my room and my mom's. Nothing too fancy, just her Santa collection in her room and my Christmas tree in mine. My sister is working on the downstairs. It's looking very festive! And presents are piled up everywhere waiting to be wrapped and stashed under the tree.

I even had my very first Christmas pudding! My English boyfriend sent a small one to me in my Christmas gift package. It was kind of like a combination of gingerbread cake and fruit cake. It was quite tasty!

I love Christmas! And just think. We have this wonderful time of year because of God's love. I know that there is a lot of contraversy in the Christian community over Christmas. No, Jesus wasn't born on December 25th. And a lot of our traditions may be the results of the "Christianization" of pagan practices (although now even that theory has been challenged). But I think it's a great idea to take a day and a season of the year to remember God's love for us.

I wish all of my readers a wonderful Christmas season! Get out there, enjoy the sights and sounds (and treats!), and share the love of Christ with someone today!

Election Reflection

After several days to think about the election, the disappointing outcome, and the implications, I have a few thoughts about the state of our country and its future.

First of all, I am not surprised. I knew it would be a 50/50 chance. We prayed. We fasted. But most importantly, we asked God for HIS will to be done, not ours. Of course, OUR will would have been a Romney win. But apparently God has other plans for our country.

I think that we are seeing the fall of our once-great nation. God has given us time to repent of our national sins, and yet we continue to murder the unborn en masse, take Him out of our society bit by bit, make it harder to practice Christianity, and promote immorality as the new normal.

I'm not trying to sound like a prude. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not perfect. I've shacked up. I've had sex outside of marriage. I've done a lot of things that are unbecoming to a Christian. So I'm not trying to play "holier than thou."

But we do need to take a good look at our country. We kill our children and call it "choice." We promote single motherhood and call it "welfare." We allow foreigners to break our laws and call it "tolerance." We have instigated class warfare and race warfare and gender warfare. We take money away from productive people and companies and use it to build government bureaucracies that take away our freedoms.

We take money away from our own children and give it to countries who hate us, who use it to oppress their people. We have left our kids with a crippling debt so we can give subsidies to bankrupt companies. We have killed thousands of jobs in the name of environmentalism. We have killed thousands of American soldiers to protect oil fields in the Middle East rather than displacing a few polar bears and drilling our own oil.

Is it any wonder that God has given us what we wanted? I heard a lot of preachers urging America to "vote its values." Well, it looks like we did. Our values have changed, and not for the better.

When George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States, his first official act was to lead a procession to a nearby church for a prayer session. This year, God's name was taken out of the Democratic National Platform, and was boo'ed when it was put back in. We have taken God out of our schools. We have made it politically incorrect to express our faith. Christian organizations are being forced to either comply with laws that go against their core values or else shut down
altogether. Revisionist history has removed our Christian heritage from our children's text books.

We have stopped disciplining our children, and fill them up with drugs instead. We focus on school lunches to "protect the children" while thousands of children are trafficked for sex right under our noses. We allow those who victimize underage children to get off with a slap on the wrist while the children themselves are returned to their abusers. We tag underage children as "sex offenders" for sending naked pictures to their agemates while we protect actual child-rape pornography as "free speech."

Is it any wonder that the election turned out the way it did? We voted our values, and our values suck. We got what we deserve.

So is there any hope for our country? I find it interesting that there has been a movement within the evangelical community to pray for revival for our country. What if the revival we're praying for comes as a result of persecution? The church is flourishing in China, where it can be deadly to confess one's faith. Perhaps a period of persecution is what it will take to bring lukewarm Americans back to God.

But no matter what happens, God is in control. And we have His promise that He will never leave us or forsake us. We must continue to pray for our country to return to God. We must pray for our brothers and sisters in other countries who are under persecution for their faith. And most importantly, we must pray that we ourselves will stand strong if we are called to be persecuted for our Christian faith.

I know my last few posts have been rather serious, and I will get back to the original intent of this blog: to give advice to single Christian women about life in general. But please take a moment to praise God for the fact that we still live in a country where we can posts blog posts like this one without being hauled away by the goolag. That day may come, so let's make the most of our freedom while we have it.

Can't Vote For A Mormon? Seriously?

I'd like to take a moment to encourage everyone to get out there and vote next Tuesday. I know a lot of Christians don't want to vote because they don't approve of Obama's policies and yet they don't want to vote for a Mormon.

I say, Grow Up! Seriously, people? You're going to just sit home and do nothing? But you aren't just "doing nothing." For every conservative Christian who stays home, Romney gets one less vote, and Obama gets ahead. So what if you don't share Romney's religious beliefs? We're electing a President, not a preacher! What are his values? They are in line with Evangelical Christian values.

And do you know why we have a Mormon for our candidate instead of a Christian? We had Christian candidates early in the primaries, candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry. Why didn't any of them win? Because Christians like YOU didn't get out and vote for them! The same thing happened in 2008. We ended up with a RINO for a candidate, and we lost the election. If you sit home on election day because you "can't vote for a Mormon," then you are handing the election over to Obama. Do you really want four more years of him? If so, sit home on election day and pat yourself on the back because you didn't vote for a Mormon. If not, then get out there and vote!

Oh, and I've heard of some sort of movement that's going to write in Jesus as the presidential candidate. People, that is just wrong. It is immature at best, and it's disrespectful to God. Using His Name to make a political statement is taking His name in vain. So please don't join in this foolishness.

Now, I also know that not every Christian wants to vote for Romney anyway. Some feel that they should vote for Obama because he claims to be a Christian. I had a liberal clergyman tell me that no real Christian would vote for anyone besides Obama, and that voting for a non-Christian will open the door to a Muslim president down the road. I told him he was on crack and needed to look at the fruit of both candidates to see who was more Christian-like.

If you are a Christian, I ask you to please get out to the polls and vote conservatively! Oh, and if you stay home on Election Day, don't expect me to listen to you whine about the outcome!