Philanthropy and Its Enemies – Activists want to redistribute foundation wealth based on racial quotas.

Below is an article in The Wall Street Journey, March 3. It seems that even the philanthropy of Americans is under attack.

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Nonprofit leaders are reeling from the recent news that President Barack Obama’s proposed budget would limit tax deductions on charitable contributions from wealthy Americans. But now the philanthropic world has something else to worry about.

Words to my congregation after the first week of Lent

This period of Lent is about sustained attention. That’s not so easy. The reality is that if we are quiet enough, listen carefully enough, and slow down long enough we start hearing voices. No, it’s not because we are suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder. It’s because the soul begins to say things we have been ignoring. Facing those things is not easy. It’s just easier to click channels, surf the web, update Facebook, check email or rent a movie.
 
Maybe some of us began Lent well but things have tailed off. Maybe we never really even started and it feels too late to begin. Maybe we just simply have quit. We don’t want to live in self-denial. We’ve faced it and made out decision.
 
I want to encourage to you to begin all over again. Look at the wilderness of “giving up, giving over and giving in” and choose to dwell there for a time. The Old Testament people of God yearly celebrated the Feast of Booths. In this feast they would leave their usual dwelling and live in a shelter not unlike the ones they used when they left Egypt to journey to the Promised Land. Lent is sort of like the Feast of Booths. The things I have built a lifetime getting and having and enjoying are for a time set on the shelf. I shake my soul free of them and relearn what it means to trust in God Almighty, to again understand that I am a soul and not just a body, that I am a pilgrim and not a settler, that I am a stranger and not a citizen.
 
Take up your cross and walk.
 
Pastor Don