Only Jesus

Ah, days off. I took two of them, two sick days in fact, but two days off in any case. I'd love to say I thought things over, thought things through, but to me the greatness of days off (which I had not had in months) was not concerning myself with thoughts. Just vegged.

But oh, did I miss a lot in two days.

A tyrant was killed. I read this morning it cost the U.S. a billion. That's dollars. That's a billion dollars for the death of this man. Is that the price of a life now?

I read this morning about how they're feeding inmates two meals a day in Texas prisons on weekends to cut costs. Apparently there is no relation to the billion dollars it cost to end the life of a tyrant in one of many countries headed by a tyrant.

Jesus said he would be with us till the end of the age. What exactly does that mean, one wonders, when looking at what happens each time we turn on the Internet or look at the news or read a newspaper?

Times aren't better, anywhere. I read where most in this country think we've spiraling downward, have hit our peak, and I can't argue against it.

It's not just in the country, though. Oh, but that it were.

In China, I read this:  A toddler who was twice run over by vans and then ignored by passers-by on a busy market street died Friday a week after the accident and after days of bitter soul-searching over declining morality in China. The plight of the child, nicknamed Yueyue, came to symbolize what many Chinese see as a decay in public morals after heady decades of economic growth and rising prosperity. Gruesome closed-circuit camera video of last Thursday's accident, aired on television and posted on the Internet, showed Yueyue toddling along the hardware market street in the southern city of Foshan. A van strikes her, slows and then resumes driving, rolling its back right wheel over the child. As she lays with blood pooling, 18 people walk or cycle by and another van strikes her before a scrap picker scoops her up.

What have we become when this happens? What shall we be, when things like this can happen? Where can we turn when things like this can occur?

Oh, yeah, there is that man, that God, the one we called Jesus. Only Jesus can help us now. Not economic plans, not our own morality, even. Only Jesus.

But they all turned away...