Everything is New

 

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2 Corinthians 5:17 Contemporary English Version

¹⁷ Anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person. The past is forgotten, and everything is new.

 

This is a new year. I have had serious reservations about what this year 2025 would bring. Our country has been divided worse than anytime since the Civil War. Only time will tell whether we can ride the crest of this wave or be drowned by it. The past is indeed being swept aside.

On the other hand, life rolls on. We have a water leak in our front yard that threatens to drain the Colorado River dry. But we will take care of that. We have a Better Than 50 Club meeting in a mere fortnight. But members will rise to the occasion. My computer, on which I am typing this, is showing more and more serious signs of rolling over and playing dead. But my brother gave me a little computer for Christmas.

When I say little, I mean tiny: it is less than 3½ inches square and 1½ inches high (less than 9 x 9 x 4 cm) Yet it is 500,000 times more powerful than the computer I used during my doctoral research at the University of Iowa that occupied a whole floor of one of the large buildings on campus, and had dozens of people running it. In less than an hour I transferred onto it more than 100,000 times the total capacity of data that IBM 360 could hold.

I am already polishing off the final chapter of my Ikizu Memoirs book on this Ace Magician. And, yes, with Sylvia’s help we have all but completed the equatorial African experience of our lives, so that part of our past is history and forgotten only in the sense that we no longer are living it.

God has had His hand in our lives through out our whole existence. We are definitely new persons, but in this case “new” includes “old” in it! Yesterday my Standard 1 grade school teacher Ruth (Miss Hurlow) Webster and her husband Eric came by our home. She will be 100 years old this year. I had found some pictures of their wedding (in 1950) that my dad had in his collection and gave them to her. I was in Standard 1 (= Grade 3) that year!

Thank You, Lord, for making us new persons—we look forward to the finished product when You come again.

Here is a wedding picture of Eric and Ruth Webster in 1950

 

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[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51pmHZlGyaL._AC_SX679_.jpg

Evil--Live Spelt Backwards

 

[1]

 

Amos 5:14-15 (New International Version)

Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy on the remnant of Joseph.

 

When I was growing up, Americans referred to America as God’s Own Country. There were still people around who remembered the terrible Civil War—a war to banish the terrible evil of slavery. In those days many still believed that God had allowed (or sent) that war to punish Americans for allowing human bondage in God’s Own Country.

By the time I was old enough to remember anything, we had just won the war against Nazism, genocide, and destruction of freedom. America emerged the richest, most powerful nation on earth.

Since that time evil has crept back in. Or has it rushed in? Ideas like “God is dead” and concerted effort to destroy the family as well as the banning of even the mention of God in education and total denial of the devil—the source of all evil—to his great advantage, have gained strength. The sexual revolution, toleration of openly corrupt politicians, and voluntary destruction of over sixty million fetuses compound the negative effects.

The net result is the almost daily shootings in schools; global warming that ravages our environment; increased terror such as caused by the 9-11 attack; invasions, especially along the southern border of our country; embroilment in wars like Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, and Afghanistan, that have killed our young men by the thousands; increasingly vast expenditures on foreign wars.

O, America, we desperately need to search for good and reject evil before it is too late!

Truly we can borrow this prayer from Amos for our situation:
Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the Lord God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts. Perhaps the Lord God Almighty will have mercy on the remnant in America!

 

 

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[1] https://howmuch.net/articles/most-expensive-wars-us-history

Solusi University - Africa

[1]

Philippians 2:1-2 New International Version

Therefore, if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.

 

 

Solusi: First founded in 1894, almost 130 years ago, as Adventism’s first attempt at reaching people who had never known Christ.

Solusi: Long a symbol of mission, Adventists, progress, adventure, sacrifice. Adventism’s flagship university in Africa.

Solusi: I first visited there in 1948 and remember nothing. We moved there 1954, 60 years after its founding, C. Fred Clarke, my Dad’s mission was to found a university to train Christian leadership for an independent Africa. Solusi became home for me as a teenager. Years later I enjoyed working with a Solusi graduate in Tanzania in 1969 and 1970, where he was my principal. I last visited Solusi a few weeks ago.

Solusi: The only university in Zimbabwe to remain open during the worst of civil war and raging riots in other universities of the land.

Solusi: The graveyard of saints, almost since its beginning. My mother, “She loved much,” rests here since 1974, 80 years after its founding.

Solusi: Surviving decades of tribalism, which generates hatred between people.

Christ wept bitter tears when he lamented Jewish rejection of his mission to save all tribes, not just Jews: “Look, your house is left to you desolate,”[2] as He turned His back on them.

Paul lamented, “Oh Foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth;”[3] as their church was being torn apart by Judaizers who insisted on circumcision and that all believers become members of the Jewish tribe.

Atlantic Union College (AUC) was gutted by a president who forcibly replaced his faculty by his fellow islanders, his fellow tribesmen. Founded in 1882, many of its graduates went as missionaries to the world. His tribalism forced its demise in 2011. It was reopened in 2015 but couldn’t recover and was sold in 2018.

Solusi: You have long battled tribalism. In 1956 your acting president had himself deputized to take major action when students of one tribe threatened to murder those of another tribe. But what riotous students couldn’t do in the 1950s, the actions of those above you are destroying you now. Will 2024, your 130^th anniversary, be your last?

Solusi: I plead as Paul did with the Philippians: “Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.”[4]

Lord, I pray that Your Spirit may so fill Solusi constituents that they may be one as You and Your Father are one,[5] in spite of our varied human backgrounds. Lord, Save Solusi!

 

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[1] Solusi University ©2023 Uni Clarke

[2] Matthew 23:38

[3] Galatians 3:1 NIV

[4] Philippians 2:1-2 NIV

[5] John 17:21-23