09 September 2006

Love endures

This is going to be a tough week. Most people realize that Monday is the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attack perpetrated by the devil-worshippers of Islam. It will be all over the TV, the papers, the magazines, the outlets for the claques of the appeasers of our age. But tomorrow, September 10, is also our wedding anniversary and we are 365 miles apart. This will be the first, and I hope only, time we will be apart on this day. It’s hard to have to endure that.

The proximity of the two dates will always be an oddity for us. Five years ago, on Sept. 10th, 2001, I received one of those rare gifts: my beloved wife sent flowers to me at the office at my employer in Fort Smith, Arkansas. From the looks on the faces there, such had not happened before there, and my stock rose perhaps. It didn’t last. When we got out of our every-morning early meeting the next day, the time when some informality was the rule before we really got down to the events of the day, the phones were already ringing and computers went on-line to Fox News, Drudge Report, and other reliable sources. (not much of the ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN, I note, we’d learned about the folly of trusting propagandists) and saw the events unfolding. Needless to say, the day’s events overshadowed any ribbing about flowers.

What a contrast! One day dedicated to love and devotion and strengthening our life together, the other a reflection of the effects of the evil that is Islam. Ideas have consequences. In a 24-hour period, we saw the truth of that.

Much has happened since those days. Blood and death and destruction, surely. I’ve had two employers teeter on the brink of collapse out from under me, have moved twice now over three states. Yet God is good, and still rules, and the woman who loved me enough to send me flowers just called a few minutes ago, to my little hotel room, to say, once again, ‘’I love you’’. I’d rather have that than riches and fame.

Love one one hand, and hate and evil on the other. Jesus the Christ, Yeshua ha-Moshiach as love, or Allah the demon-god of evil. Easy choice.

Grace and peace.