You know, my kids sort of got a raw deal in the parent category.  See, I was thirty before my first pregnancy, so my kids deal with about a generation and a half “gap” between them and us as parents.  We didn’t even let them start using Facebook until almost High School age.  I am still leery of the social networking that is linking up every aspect of a given person’s life somewhere out there in “the cloud”.  How easy are we going to make the universal surveillance for the coming world government?

I love to read.  I was surfing around and found a site called Blogging for Books which lets anyone with a blog and a following, receive free books in return for reading and reviewing them online. That sounded like a cool opportunity so I read more. The Blogging for Books website encourages you to sign up for a Klout account.  That way, whatever areas you have knowledge and expertise in, multiplied by however many social networks you use, multiplied by how often you expound upon those areas of expertise, times how ever many followers you have, and how many of them re-blog or re-tweet your material, all works together to determine your Klout score.  The higher your personal Klout score, the more exclusive the options that you personally will be invited to participate in reviewing and having advanced access to, etc.

Well, the Klout site suggests in order for your Klout to be maximized, you should link together all of your social networks.

That’s where they lost me. It’s enough for me, to wear my heart on my sleeve from this relatively obscure position behind the barrier that is a blog platform. But the anonymity is diminished exponentially when everything done on line becomes a popularity contest or a power trip driven by numbers to measure your overall influence. I mean, that was bad enough in adolescence, and in the early years of a career.

Now, just about the time we draw near to middle age and can chill out a little, look forward to aging gracefully, some bunch of wise acres had to come up with stuff like Ourtime.com, Lifestyle Lift, and Viagra. As someone who was born without a competitive bone in her body, I can tell you that you other middle agers (and older) who want to go that route, be my guest. It’s exhausting trying to fend off the inevitable. Age is coming for us all. And any technology that the mad scientists might eventually come up with to achieve the elusive eternal youth, is bound to have a curse to go along with it. Here’s a “visual” from my nursing experience as an example. The earliest Breast Implants were around 1962. Someone who was 20 in 1962 would be in their early seventies now, right? That means that those who had some of the earliest breast implants, would be “little old ladies” now. So imagine, if you care to, the juxtaposition of the average “little old lady” body with all it’s sags and wrinkles, only with the artificial enhancement there in place, still as proud as the day they were implanted. A little bizarre and slightly disturbing to say the least. Same goes for all those tattoos that stretch like an impression from the Sunday Comic strip on a ball of silly putty. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you aren’t old enough for this article to mean anything to you.

But what is a person to do in their middle age and beyond, when everything changes so fast it makes a person’s head spin? When knowledge and technology double in ten years or five? For the most part, I’ve tried to keep up with the times enough to be functional in the world we live in. My Dad, before he died, wouldn’t come within five feet of a computer if his life depended upon it. He had worked thirty five years in a factory. After he retired and he and my mom moved back to West Virginia, one year he decided to take a job at Lowes. It was customer service and he figured he’d mostly be showing folks where to find things in the store. But soon he found out that even that position, like all others these days, involves the use of computers in some aspect of the job. That was it! No more job at Lowes. I get more like my Dad every day. My mom, now, she has always loved a challenge and she has her own laptop, and cell phone, etc. But even she is admitting, these days, how it is difficult to learn it all at her age, and keep up with the constantly updating applications and gadgets and you may as well forget about all the various social networks! She’s on Facebook, but even that is hard to keep up with.

This stuff is all going to come back to haunt humanity some day, and I don’t care if that does make me sound like your great-grandmother. One of the major factors that enabled Rome to conquer the world was by building numerous interconnected highways and making all areas mutually accessible. This linking of all online content relevant to a given individual and making it accessible to anyone and everyone is doing in the modern world what highways did for the old Roman empire. Sure enough, that falls right in line with the developments scripture warns of in the final years of the Gentile age. The spirit of Rome is alive and well!

The question is, do we go along with these things, as Christians? I have thought a lot about the doctrine of separation of late. If Christians were to abstain from the most modern developments, they’d be ineffectual in this world, I would think. Wherever we are, we can be salt and light and if we abandon those areas, they will become dark, indeed. Will all of this lead directly into the universal surveillance which will enable the future Beast system to control everyone and compel them to take a mark in order to buy and sell? Probably. Very likely! Should that be a reason not to have a Smart phone or use social networks?

Of course not! When these technologies play their prophesied role, we won’t be here. We are living in Rome now. We are hostages to a developing situation that is going to come to fruition some day, and maybe very soon. But we are to occupy and be busy about the Lord’s work in the meantime. Biblical separation means being in the world, but not like the world. It means “representing” no matter where we go.

Four or five years ago I was very worried about the prospects of what might happen between the present and the time Christ returns. But life is totally unpredictable, no matter how rocky or how smooth your road has been thus far. As Christians we are called to walk by faith and not by sight. Not according to how things look, but according to what we know. God is our provider, and our protector. Everything smooth and stable and peaceful about our lives right now, came about through His hand, and if it were all to be stripped away, He’d still be the same God and His same promises would still be true. We can decide to believe them, and be at peace, or we can decide to doubt them, and try and strive in our own limited human wisdom, to “prepare” for any number of unknown scenarios which may or may not ever come about.

Psalms Chapter 121

¹ (A Song of degrees.) I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

² My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.

³ He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.

⁴ Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

⁵ The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand.

⁶ The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

⁷ The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.

⁸ The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

Rome treated its captive so well, that they ended up being pretty glad for having been conquered.  Its no different this time around. People who have thrown off all knowledge of God, and all conscience, have embraced the “luxuries and delicacies” of modern Rome. Five minutes footage of the drunken revelers in Times Square on tv last night made for a great “snapshot” of this principle in action. This world is going to hell in a hand basket and yet every time a reporter stuck a microphone in someone’s face, the person would gush about how wonderful the coming year was going to be. Soooo happy and excited about another year, “gonna be the best year (*hic*) ever.” Full of potential, as far as they were concerned. Of course, the booze probably makes a future look bright in the same way that the girls all get prettier at closing time. But that is a topic for another post, and I’ve mentally meandered enough for one New Year’s day.

Be sure to catch the posts of our new author and contributor statlerwaldorfami/a.k.a. sem, a.k.a Shenequa, or a.k.a Shanaynae. (We are old friends, we’ve had a lot of years to accumulate nicknames). She is going to be covering a very important topic that will interest all of you parents with younger kids. It is an issue that is going to have major implications across the United States, and already is doing so in many locales. I’m speaking of Common Core, of course, and have posted a few news articles on the topic lately.  This is a topic that parents and even grandparents, need to be informed on, and yet so extensive, I would not attempt to address it here for fear with all the other things I like to offer, I’d not do justice to the coverage of it.  I am happy to bring an author on board capable of providing you with information on this crucial topic.  My kids are almost done with school, and we live in one of the areas where it hasn’t  infested the system yet, (though all surrounding counties and towns are using it) so, although the NCLB “dumbing down” has taken a toll everywhere, the Common Core concern has not been such an issue during my kid’s early education.  Rest assured, however that it is already in, or coming to a school system near you, and though parents of younger kids have the most immediate reasons for alarm, and for getting involved, this is something that concerns all of us, because it will effect the future of this nation in every way.  The changes that are taking place in the educational system in America today are only the most recent manifestations of a complete transformational process that began at least sixty-five years ago.  Whereas schools once taught facts and information, the school system is now set up to specifically morally shape your child in such a way as to bring about an entirely different social order.  One that is exclusively secular, and not bound by the same values upon which this nation was founded.  The agenda seeks to do away with Judeo-Christian definitions of marriage, family, and the home, sexual purity, the sanctity of life, the concept of private property, the existence of any absolutes, particularly of what is “right” and what is “wrong”, of earning one’s keep, of delegated authority, of accountability, and of the existence of God and our accountability to Him.  The goal of modern education is to shape your child’s worldview via behavior modification, and if your child is of above-average intelligence, you will need to be extra-vigilant.  They will be the subject of such flattery and praise it will result in hyper-developed self-esteem, having been told repeatedly that they are exceptional.  That’s how narcissists are created. They will be the few elites selected to transcend the rest of the herd.  They will be fed such an aggrandized notion of education because they are meant to become the newest disciples of the modern educational system which will have produced them.  They will be welcomed into academia,  where the hardcore indoctrination will take place, and you’ll be left scratching your head and wondering how your child grew up to so thoroughly disdain all that you hold dear.  Meanwhile, there will no longer be any such thing as an average student.  Just like the middle class in America, this large section where most kids once were classified, will continue to dwindle, most of them pushed over into the “margin” of either low-intelligence or mental health categories all of which will be moved through the system for the purposes of filling the ranks of the grunt-work class of society.  They will not be given options and choices, nor any degree or diploma beyond High School, but someone will tag them somewhere along the path in middle or high school, for very job-specific training for whichever work sector they have been designated for.

That may seem like hyperbole, but trust me, this is real.  That is the agenda, and in places where parents have completely withdrawn themselves from any involvement in the classroom and P.T.O. and school board, this agenda is gaining great strides.  Look up the International Baccalaureate and do a little research on the U.N. agenda and the UNESCO mission and the Earth Charter which any school who offers the IB has signed on to.  (Population control, sustainability, and all the U.N. ideology that goes along with that!).  The creators of the I.B. describe it thusly:  “The International Baccalaureate® (IB) is a non-profit educational foundation, motivated by its mission, focused on the student. Our three programmes for students aged 3 to 19 help develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world. Founded in 1968, we currently work with 3,408 schools in 141 countries to develop and offer three challenging programmes to over 1,021,000 students aged 3 to 19 years.” http://www.ibo.org/general/who.cfm .  As one author put it: “It is elitist  global dogma executed at the local level through schools.  You hear the stories of graphic sex ed taught to kindergarteners and first and second graders?  Probably a school system hitched into the IB program.  Common Core is the farm league.  The prep work, if you will, for the I.B.   You can learn the disturbing truth about the IB and Common Core here: http://truthaboutib.com/  Scary stuff!  You can find out if your child’s school in your city or county is signed onto this program by clicking HERE.

I hope to continue to post more of these stream-of-consciousness conversational type posts, just a chat among friends,  and those in the category of “on a personal note” as those seem to resonate more with a greater number of readers, judging by stats, and to also write more entries along the lines of devotional pieces.  Another goal is to take more photos and share those with you guys!

One of the things I will be doing in my non-blogging moments, is making jewelry and perhaps even getting back into some of my artistic painting, for purposes of selling on eBay and/or Etsy.  Still have hospital bills to pay!!!  Praise the Lord for the healthcare that has been there when we needed it.  I’ll let you know when the jewelry business gets some traction.

Please keep on tweeting and sharing, pinning, Facebook liking, and reblogging.  You’ll notice that I have also joined a couple of the Christian blog associations, as one more way for folks to find out about Serve Him In The Waiting.  As always, you guys are such a blessing to me, and I love to hear from you, and just a shout out to Mary M, Barbara B, and J-L, who have been sounding-boards, sometime contributors, and most importantly, prayer partners and encouragers!

My blogroll is visible once again and in a better location with the new WP theme, though I really need to update that as well.  Still, any days you check in and don’t find I’ve put up anything new yet, go to those links and you will find good info and sources.  My own brother now goes straight to End Times Headlines and JD Farag’s YouTube page because my goal is for folks not just to get the news from me, but know where else it is available.

Somebody stop me!  I seem to be rambling.  From me and Sammy!  G’night all!