Look at your hands, what do you see?  What don’t you see? The human hand has three main nerves, two major arteries, and 27 different bones.  More of the body is devoted to controlling the hands than any other part of the body.  Your fingers work by “remote control.”  There are no muscles in fingers – the muscles which bend your fingers are in the palm of your hand and in the forearm.  They are connected to the fingers by tendons which pull on and move them like the strings of a marionette.  While they are engineering marvels, they are also tools of human expressions:

• We clap our hands in joy.
• We raise our fists in anger.
• We raise our hands as a vote of approval or disapproval.
• We raise our hands to surrender.
• Hands are used to comfort and caress.
• Hands are used to hold weapons that can take a life.
• The carpenter uses his hands to build a house.
• But it takes a mother’s and father’s hands to make a home.
• Hands open and shut doors.

As elections draw near incumbents toot their accomplishments while polls reflect how voters assess their record.

Polls are dubious at best but here’s what they report:

How are we feeling? Pretty dismal!

                71% Wrong track.

                72% Country not as great as it once was just 3 years ago.

                59% Economy is doing poorly.

                61% The American dream is broken.

 What are we afraid of?

Have you noticed there is a war on America’s Bible-based values?

The seeds for this current modern war were placed more than a century ago by a number of misguided secular thinkers.

On September 12, 1905, approximately 100 people met in a loft over Pecks Restaurant at 140 Fulton Street in lower Manhattan.

The purpose of the meeting? According to E. Michael and Sharon Rusten in their book, “The One Year Chirstian History” was “to strategize the overthrow the Christian worldview that still prevailed in much of American Culture and to replace it with the ideas of a then rather unknown writer by the name Karl Marx.” They called the organization- the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Their members included many names you might just know:

• Founder: novelist Upton Sinclair (age 27)
• First President: Author Jack London (age 29)

Toward the end of the first chapter of Genesis we read “…God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He Him male and female created He them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it…”

There are many things to learn from those words. The passage shows two things about women. First, woman, as well as man, were created in the image of God. He did not create woman to be inferior to man. Both are of equal value; both important. Second, the woman was expected to have authority over God’s creation - both are equally responsible to care of the Good Earth!

In many dictionaries, the words “trust” and “truth” are one word apart on the page.

The definitions:

Trust: belief that someone or something is reliable, good, honest, effective.

• Psalm 91:2 (King James Version), “I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust.”
• Psalm 146:3 “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.”

The following is a prayer invoked by Pastor Robert DiSalvio on September 22, 2001, following the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center terrorist attacks:

“We thank you Father for the beauty of your creation that we see around us. Grass, trees, blue sky and Your loving touch in the kiss of the sun’s warmth on our face. But, dear Father, our hearts are not as peaceful as our bucolic surroundings would suggest. Seventy-five miles from here there is a scar in the ground - A wound so deep and wide it has become a vortex into which our nation’s thoughts, emotions and fears have been drawn.