tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14446446790722930212023-11-16T05:24:22.181-08:00JAMES D. SANDERSON, AUTHORLITERARY FICTION AND NONFICTIONJames D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.comBlogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-64712207718841057452019-03-28T15:57:00.002-07:002020-12-17T06:24:20.811-08:00FROM AUTHOR JAMES D. SANDERSON<div style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">CONTEMPORARY FICTION AND NONFICTION...</span></span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">COMING: <span style="color: #fcff01;"><span style="color: red;">SHELTER AT HOME</span>.</span> Preparing for an Uncertain Future</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"> for just plain o' folks like us. Home. Family. Community. See the Facebook Group at: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/437679417610120">SHELTER AT HOME</a></span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: large;">SHELTER AT HOME BLOG at: <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/5542144978636987842">Blog</a> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;">'THOSE WHO DWELL UPON THE EARTH' A NOVEL:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' A Novel:</b></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">What will we do when the nations of the world finally resort to the ultimate violence - nuclear weapons? When the world economy collapses. When the world once again goes to war? Will we choose even more violence and chaos to solve our problems, or will we find some other way?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">Will we Christians choose to follow the example of Christ, building loving communities, caring for others, finding forgiveness and living the way of nonviolence? And if we do choose this way, what will it look like?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' is a novel about a small Christian discipleship group that decides the time has come to choose this new way. Their tiny community grows into a movement. At that point they are seen as a threat to the authoritarian government that has taken away our civil liberties. Who will prevail?</span></div>
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Available now in Trade Paperback and Kindle on Amazon. A 'Readers Guide' is also available on Amazon. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/THOSE-WHO-DWELL-UPON-EARTH-ebook/dp/B07STNNTWZ/">https://www.amazon.com/THOSE-WHO-DWELL-UPON-EARTH-ebook/dp/B07STNNTWZ/</a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;">See the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjwoaY4sFGs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjwoaY4sFGs</a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;">'CALLED TO LOVE':</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s1600/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg"><img alt="Book about Christian love" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s320/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" title="CALLED TO LOVE" width="240" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14px;">Every day the world seems to be just a little crazier than the day before. Fortunately for Christians there are some things that don't change. Our dedication to 'do to others as we would have them do to us' is the golden rule we can live by - even in these uncertain times. Christ called us to love God, love one another, and love even our enemies. From God's 'Greatest Commandment' and the Sermon on the Mount, to the Bible's love chapter and the power of love in daily life, this book reveals the secrets of Christian love. Are you ready to put God's love into action today?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: orange;">⇨</span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="background-color: white;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Called-Love-Book-About-Christian-ebook/dp/B0086X6YQ2/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=called+to+love+Sanderson&qid=1549749013&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">CALLED TO LOVE</a></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="color: #333333;"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="color: #333333; font-size: large;">'Sacred Are the Brave' A Collection of Stories:</span></span></div>
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14px;">Ten of the most exciting life and death stories you'll ever read. The various characters come to life facing the tensions and struggles of political revolution. Tied together by historical fact, these stories range from the comic to the tragic. From bittersweet memories to abrupt and immediate action in the face of overwhelming odds. Finely crafted. Short stories about nonviolent revolution beginning in 1986 when unarmed citizens used 'People Power' to overcome the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the various nonviolent movements in Eastern Europe in 1989. Each of these stories presents an ordinary character who is forced to show extraordinary courage in the face of violent oppression.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="color: #333333; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="color: orange; font-size: 14px;">⇨</span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="color: #333333; font-size: 14px;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99 for a limited time: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson&qid=1549749330&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial"; font-size: large;">'REASONINGS':</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: small;">Christian love does not call us to war and violence and chaos. It calls us to peace and nonviolence. Let us reason <span style="background-color: white; font-size: small;">together.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-size: large;"><b>- </b><span style="font-size: small;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/REASONINGS-James-Sanderson-ebook/dp/B07QH8DJ8Z/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_2?keywords=reasoning+sanderson&qid=1556378814&s=gateway&sr=8-2-fkmrnull">REASONINGS</a></span></span><br />
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<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-15979672038887901992019-03-28T15:56:00.000-07:002019-03-28T16:15:38.138-07:00ABOUT AUTHOR JAMES D. SANDERSON<br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">ABOUT AUTHOR JAMES D. SANDERSON</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Author James D. Sanderson was born
and raised in the Midwest – in Michigan – where he lived the values of a
hard-working blue collar family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
began reading great literature at an early age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The idea that we are to live greatness in our lives took root then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That our time is limited and therefor
valuable – not to be wasted on trivial matters or cheap entertainments.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That, if God took the time and effort to
create us, that is something special.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Life is not to be squandered.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He was a nominal Christian until a
mission trip to Nicaragua confronted him with poverty and the way of
nonviolence in the face of a civil war that had left that country
devastated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His faith in Christianity as
Sunday gathering and religious observances was overturned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he returned home his wife Nancy and he
began an outreach to the homeless, the poor, the disenfranchised, the lost and
forgotten in their community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
practice of Christianity in that setting changed everything.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Then a homeless woman living in a
cave challenged him, “If you want to know what it’s like living outside in the
winter, why don’t you come out and try it for yourself.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So he did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That challenge, “try it for yourself,” has informed his ministry and his
writing since the beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“If we
don’t know first-hand what we’re writing about, we have no business writing,”
Sanderson has said.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>His writing is built upon the
foundation of great literature, the Bible, and has been influenced by
Steinbeck, Dickins, Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King
Jr., and many others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His attempt to
express the way of Christian love, nonviolence, missional community-building,
and solidarity with the poor and downtrodden of society is unparalleled,
especially in literary fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Theology has to work in the real world,” Sanderson says.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His writing reflects that conviction.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Author James D. Sanderson has written several nonfiction books and novels including 'Called To Love' and 'Sacred Are the Brave'. His Christian literary novel, 'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' will be published in September 2019.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">BACK TO HOME: <a href="https://jamesdsanderson.blogspot.com/2019/03/from-author-james-d-sanderson.html">FROM THE AUTHOR</a></span></span></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-11438443686103349942019-03-28T15:55:00.002-07:002019-03-28T15:55:52.643-07:00JESUS HEALS A WHOLE VILLAGE<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG177A8dVNYA_zCrtV54ukGg-ihiOGZ5V0SWdfe1hWhwjObWmUeiXveasQ2rTNhAl9dmVzXWKkMXnnF-KHMq9M8XrhL541__LsMfeE2Q4eTmA4q73XRbV5xXi0RCWg0YKXU5sfyKJ5P-7J/s1600/1f7e16754a73898bff0034c86c0f2e4580fd113e__300x0.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A short story adapted from the novel 'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth'" border="0" data-original-height="231" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG177A8dVNYA_zCrtV54ukGg-ihiOGZ5V0SWdfe1hWhwjObWmUeiXveasQ2rTNhAl9dmVzXWKkMXnnF-KHMq9M8XrhL541__LsMfeE2Q4eTmA4q73XRbV5xXi0RCWg0YKXU5sfyKJ5P-7J/s1600/1f7e16754a73898bff0034c86c0f2e4580fd113e__300x0.jpeg" title="JESUS HEALS A WHOLE VILLAGE" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 26pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 26pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 26pt;">JESUS HEALS A
WHOLE VILLAGE</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16pt;">A Short Story
Adapted From The Novel:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16pt;">THOSE WHO DWELL
UPON THE EARTH<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16pt;">Coming September
2019<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16pt;">By<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16pt;">James D. Sanderson<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Copyright 2019
James D. Sanderson<o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">All Rights
Reserved<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"><br clear="all" style="page-break-before: always;" />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">CROSSING THE
DESERT<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">His earliest memory was of the
desert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of danger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Of abandonment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of lostness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t have been more than three or four
years old.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">His father had died shortly after he was
born.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of radiation poisoning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was some kind of electrical engineer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He didn’t know exactly what happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had to do with the nuclear bombardment,
the war, the collapse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
‘Troubles’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother did the best she
could, given the conditions of the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She took another husband who apparently needed as much care as the
children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She had a baby with him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then he left.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">His mother decided to cross the desert to
reach the home of her brother and his wife.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There were two older siblings – a brother, seven, and a sister five
years old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The baby was still breast
feeding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As strange as it seemed now, he
was able to remember everything in great detail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">It was not the kind of desert that was all
sand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ground was hard and even rocky
in places.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It’s only a few days
across,” his mother told them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“There is
even some good water here and there.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But her skills with a map and compass were not as well-honed as she
thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was in a desperate
situation, it seemed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">They set out in the cool of the morning
while it was still dark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had to walk
too, as young as he was, because his mother was carrying the baby in her
arms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The youngest ones slowed them
down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By noon they were still within
sight of the town behind them, and the desert sun was already blistering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They slept out on the ground that night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They slept very little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The wind was actually cold after the heat of
the day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">They could have gone back then, but there
was nothing to go back to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two days
later the water ran out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother kept
looking helplessly at the map and taking compass readings that led
nowhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The following day her milk
dried up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The baby was screaming by
evening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During the night the baby
died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He couldn’t even remember the
baby’s name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had always been ‘the
baby’ to him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">His mother buried the baby in the desert
and they moved on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She began rushing
from place to place tearing pulp from cacti and squeezing the pulp to drip
liquid into their mouths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He remembered
the sun, of course, already beastly, and the distant mountains – a purplish
brown color.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She made them eat the
cactus pulp when the liquid was out of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There was a thick, pasty taste to it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In the night while the others were
sleeping he looked over at his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Her eyes were open.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could see
fear in them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then he felt the fear
strike deep in his being, as if she had infected him with it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">He remembered the walking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The incessant walking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His mother was beginning to stumble.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The unrelenting sun.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could sense the anxiety rising as the
hours passed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In spite of the heat, she
seemed to be chilled to the bone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
spite of the sun, she was not red, but extremely white.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In late evening he noticed a frothy smear of
something on her lips.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was extremely
exhausted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">She died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They didn’t try to bury her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
children looked for the next cactus so they could have some moisture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During that day his brother decided to strike
out on his own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He took his sister with
him, but left him behind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was
alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who knows how a seven year old
can make a decision like that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He never
saw them again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He supposed they were
dead.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">After wandering around all day his uncle
found him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who knows how he even knew to
come looking for him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sobbed in his
arms as he carried the boy to his house.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">His aunt and uncle died later, long before
their time was due.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who knows how much
radiation they all absorbed there in southern California?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was like a ghost town when he left to go
to Colorado and start again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone
had died early.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">STRANGER
ON THE SHORE<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">They made their way along the shoreline
toward the north end of the lake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All
night a filthy rain had fallen and now the sun was trying to open its sticky
eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the men, Thomas, waded out
to his knees to retrieve a good-sized carp that had gone belly up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He held it up triumphantly, his fingers
jammed up into its gills, and said, “It doesn’t look too bad.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now he examined it in an animated way, as
with a critical eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Not bad at all.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“I can smell that thing from here,” one of
the other men said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In spite of that comment, Thomas brought
the fish along with him back to the shore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">They were trying to find a man others had
told them about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“A man who knows
everything.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“No
one knows everything,” another of the men, James, had said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was bookish, so he should know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bookish was a word that had been used before
the advent of computers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, whenever a
book was found in the rubble and wreckage of a lost building, he would
carefully dig it out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The others laughed
and hooted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“What are you going to do
with that?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Read it,” he’d say with a bemused smile.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“What for?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“For a while.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“He’s found another cookbook.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Not this time.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d hold up his latest treasure – whether
‘Fathers and Sons’ or ‘Trout Fishing in the Rockies,’ carefully brush it off
and place it in his carry bag.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He seemed
to be physically afflicted when he was forced to discard one to make room for
another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A man can carry only so much
weight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The third man, Andrew, took the lead
now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Let’s get going,” he said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“What’s your hurry?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thomas was considering gutting and cleaning
the carp then and there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“We haven’t got all day.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He set out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Yeah, yeah.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The fourth among them, Matthew, was
somewhat quieter than the others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had
fine features and sandy hair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
different as they were from one another, they were brothers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Along here bushes and small trees had
begun to sprout and grow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Future
replacements for those that had been charred in the unquenchable fires.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">They smelled breakfast smoke some minutes
before they came upon a young man sitting on a rock warming his hands at a
fire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Several fine trout were laid out,
prepared to join the two that were already popping and cooking on an improvised
metal grate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Why don’t you join me,” the man said,
looking up at them with gentle eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“We might do that,” Andrew said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“We could eat,” Thomas said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Why don’t you go bury that carp?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It looks corrupted.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thomas turned part way to his left and
slung the fish back into the lake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
splash it made was upsetting in the still of the morning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Please…”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The young man motioned for them to sit on the fallen log and several
rocks that were naturally arranged around the fire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They did not sit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“We’re looking for a man we’ve heard
about,” James said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“What man?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“A man they say knows everything.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“No one knows everything,” their host said
with a snicker.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“That’s what I said.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>James seemed pleased to have said it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Tell me,” Thomas pointed at the
fish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Where’d you get these perfect
trout?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not in this lake.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The man pursed his lips and jerked his
chin Native American style toward the top of the lake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“A perfect stream feeds this lake.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“No one is stocking these streams.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Native cutthroat and rainbow are making a
comeback.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Now that things are… recovering?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“That’s right.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thomas grunted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“That’s a miracle!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The stranger began to break off pieces of
the hot fish and hand them around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
brothers patted the hot pieces back and forth in their hands, blowing on them
before they burned their fingers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
picked up the other trout and placed them on the hot grill.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The four brothers finished eating quickly and
stood around waiting for the rest of the fish to be cooked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Say,” the younger man said, “you all seem
to be pretty easy around strangers… considering… everything.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">James laughed shortly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You don’t seem very dangerous.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thomas lifted his flannel shirt and
undershirt, and proudly showed the 9mm Glock he was carrying in his belt.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Is it loaded?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Of course,” he growled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“This baby puts an end to a lot of
foolishness.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“I can see that it would.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Like he said,” he pointed at James.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You don’t seem very dangerous.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“I’m not,” the other agreed amiably.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Where are your weapons?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“I get by without them.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The brothers looked askance of each
other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally Thomas said, “Bears are
making a comeback too.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The young man smiled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I know.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>After a long pause he asked their names.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The oldest was James, bookman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Then Thomas, the wild one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then
Andrew, who seemed calculating somehow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Then Matthew, the quiet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“What’s your name?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“My name is Jesus.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Again the brothers looked at each other,
not quite believing what they had heard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>James asked the obvious question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“You mean like… the real Jesus?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“I’m not him, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But that’s what my parents named me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“And your parents…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Dead.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Ours too. In the Great… whatever it was.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The moment passed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tension caused by the speaking of that
name eased.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I don’t know what was so
great about it,” Thomas said at last.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An
old joke, but it seemed to work now among strangers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Sit down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sit down.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The brothers sat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jesus passed out the rest of the fish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They ate in silence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Are you headed anywhere?” Andrew asked
when he finished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Or is this your
home?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“I’ve been here forty days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“As we said, we are looking for this
man…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ve become curious about him.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Jesus nodded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You have made me curious too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps we could look for him together.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The brothers conferred silently, looking
back and forth at each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then
Andrew said, “Sure, why not?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">DESTRUCTION<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">They were a long way from any city
now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were no books to be
found.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>James was reading a beaten up
paperback copy of ‘Fathers and Sons’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Who knows how it had made it through the Great whatever it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ‘Troubles’ as that period was now
euphemistically called.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Enough time had
passed that some distance could be found, at least euphemistically).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First the Great Collapse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then the Great Bombardment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then the Great War.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those were still seared into their
memories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nothing euphemistic there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Now the Great Dark Age.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">James liked the Bazarov character in spite
of himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Intellectual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A nihilist, unlike James himself, who was unafraid of criticizing all
social classes and the self-deception in those around him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The quintessential outsider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>James was too fond of people to be that
critical of them, though he could see how one might be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Thomas was already off into the swale that
was formed in a low area along the lake, looking for frogs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He came back with one even before the others
could pick up their gear to depart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
held it on the ground and opened it up, still alive, with a sharpened
stick.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He poked through the guts with
his finger until he became bored, then threw the thing into the lake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He rinsed his hands in the water and looked
up at the others as he knelt down there, and grinned widely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Andrew was mathematical and
analytical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In High School he predicted
the Great Collapse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Here’s how it’s
going to happen,” he wrote in a paper for economics class:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">COMING SOON TO AN
ECONOMY NEAR YOU<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Unable to artificially hold interest rates
down any longer, interest rates are allowed to rise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Auto loans become more expensive, slowing
the rate of auto production and sales.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Layoffs in the auto industry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mortgage rates begin to rise, causing a
slowdown in new home building and sales.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Layoffs in the housing industry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Credit card rates increase, causing a
reduction in overall consumer spending.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Layoffs in the retail sector.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">With higher interest rates, bond yields
become more attractive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Investors abandon over-priced stocks to
buy bonds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stock market declines.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Businesses, no longer able to get
low-interest loans, cut back production.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Layoffs of workers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Laid off workers cannot buy goods or
services, causing further decline in consumer spending.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Faltering economy causes downward pressure
on the dollar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Consumer credit bubble bursts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consumer goods become scarce.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Housing market bubble bursts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mortgages are underwater.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Stock market bubble bursts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Loss of wealth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Dollar collapse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Default on national debt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Over $25 Trillion dollars).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">National bankruptcy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Matthew was quiet and complacent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not easily riled, he was more likely to let
things pass by than to engage them directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He was some years younger than Andrew, so his place in the family was
unique.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">It did not take Jesus long to size up who
he would be traveling with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He picked up
his bag now – the smallest bag imaginable – and fell in behind the others as
they set out to the north end of the lake, and followed the stream up into the
high country.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">This was Colorado.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not as it had been, but still stately in its
bearing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Andrew was still leading,
nearly straight up as they followed the river along.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They stopped for a breather and looked out
over the lake and the long valley beyond.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“This area didn’t get hit very hard,”
Matthew commented.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“You should see Colorado Springs,” Thomas
added.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Have you been to Colorado Springs?” Andrew
asked Jesus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Never.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Is it bad?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Very
bad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Bombardment demolished it and
annihilated the people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At least here
there are still some villages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The trees
aren’t all down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The water isn’t
completely contaminated.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“How old are you?” James asked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Jesus looked at him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I was born in the year of the
Bombardment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think that’s why my
parents named me what they did.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think
they hoped I would be a savior for the future.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“And are you… a savior?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“It was hard enough to find salvation for
myself.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">No one asked the obvious question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They set out again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Half the day passed before they realized that
they were probably not going to get anywhere useful going up the mountainside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They turned around and returned to the spot
they had met Jesus that morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
made camp there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“That’s not much of an outfit,” James
said, pointing to the small bag Jesus carried.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Don’t need much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything I need is provided for.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Again, no one asked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jesus dragged some brush over and made a
rough shelter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It’s not much good in
the rain,” he confessed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“But it keeps
the bears off.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The others looked skeptical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It’s spring time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have to worry about the ticks, too,”
Thomas told him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jesus smiled.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">That night James dreamed of the times
before now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It always started in
absolute silence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was an odd sense
that something was about to happen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
what happened did not happen to him personally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Everything that happened was like watching the second airliner hit the
Twin Towers, for those who were old enough to remember any of that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The computer screen had gone dark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had to use an alternate server to get on
the internet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By then reports of
destruction had begun to come in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Because of the collapse of the economy, it
was said, the United States had taken a much more belligerent stance in the
world – to take control of the resources needed to help her own citizens endure
the economic sufferings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In response the
North Koreans had launched their nukes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their rudimentary technology caused their strikes to hit in odd, out of
the way places, like the area of the San Juan Valley in Colorado just south of
Poncha Pass.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other areas were hit – in
California and in Nevada – in the desert!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">A candle was burning now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sat watching it in his dream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It burned up a young woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A family at a picnic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A church with a steeple and a cross.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A map of the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It burned
down and finally wickered out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">He was watching the destruction of
everything on his computer screen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
could not turn it off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could not stop
watching.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">His sense of horror was even more complete
than if he had witnessed the destruction first hand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">When his country had sent a retaliatory
strike of devastating effect against the North Koreans, the Chinese launched
their own missiles, more precisely hitting Colorado Springs, because of NORAD.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">He woke up now in a sweat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The others were still sleeping.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">There had been other strikes in Colorado
too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who knows what had been their
intended targets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There had not been a
nuclear winter, so-called, as had been predicted in times past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Americans had invaded North Korea and
again, as in 1953, facing overwhelming Chinese troop concentrations, a
stalemate had once again been reached at the 38<sup>th</sup> parallel, just as
before.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Now he lay looking up at the stars and a
small tail of a moon… “Hello moon,” he whispered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">A HEALING<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In the morning Jesus took the lead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He packed his tiny kit quickly and moved off
along the shore, heading east toward the small villages the brothers had come
through a few short days before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
jumped to it, and fell in behind the stranger, having run out of road in the
other direction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Hey wait up,” Matthew called as the
others struck out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was always lagging
behind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Jesus had just finished a forty day fast
after he baptized himself in the lake.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“I baptize myself into your service, O Lord,” he vowed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, while fasting, the enemy came to him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“No one fasts for forty days,” he hissed
in his ear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“My Savior did.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“He died long ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A lost cause.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“He is alive in me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“You know you aren’t up to the task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Humans are made to eat, not to fast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t you know this path leads to death and
destruction?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Doggedly: “This way leads to life.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“You are not perfect, human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can never measure up…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Be that as it may, I will turn to my God
for strength.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The serpent took on many forms over the
next days and weeks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being alone in the
wilderness caused everything in the universe to draw up close to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was not the first time that had
happened, but it was certainly the most sustained period over which he had felt
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At these times he seemed to be able
to see the great patterns and shapes of things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The interconnectedness between things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And to understand the truth of all things.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The serpent took on many forms – a
towering elephant of strength; the mother of Jesus pleading with him to cease
this madness; an old man passing along sage wisdom; and finally an enticing
woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was a most beautiful woman as
she appeared before him in the flimsiest of shimmering blue nightgowns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The supernatural cloth clung to her in a way
that left very little to the imagination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“You don’t want to spend all that time out here alone, do you?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can be a very good companion to you,
Jesus.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Indeed, the temptation was great.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be quite easy to forget his
commitment in such circumstance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was
weary from fasting by then – the exhilaration of the early days had slipped
away with his physical strength.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still,
he summoned up what strength he had left to reject the offer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Get thee behind me Satan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have nothing I want or need.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">At that, the serpent disappeared into the
twilight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Next morning, however, he was back with
the enticement of a full breakfast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There was fresh squeezed orange juice, toast with strawberry jam, milk,
two eggs over easy as he liked them, hash browns, three strips of bacon, and
two jumbo buttermilk pancakes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
saliva began to run in the back of his mouth uncontrollably.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had not had such a breakfast since he was
a child. Food had become scarce since then, and no one would eat all this
unless he was truly a rich man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Again, however, he managed to turn
away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Man does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">During this time of fasting some who had
known him before his wilderness adventure spread the word that he was a man who
knew everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had little reason
to question it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the course of a few
weeks he had told them everything they had ever done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You have had five wives already and the wife
you are with now is not your wife.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
is, in fact, a mere girl really, and now you contemplate leaving her, too,
though she is pregnant with your child.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That child will need a father.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The man knew this to be true.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">These were rough people who had come to
know him, but they took no offense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
manner was gentle and convicting without stirring their wrath.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even now they awaited his return from the
wilderness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">At the foot of the lake they reached that
first town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vallecito.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In light of the send-off they had given him
forty two days earlier, one might have expected a grand celebration marking his
return.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such was not the case.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Earlier that morning ten year old Ray
Teller had set out upon the waters with three other boys in a makeshift
raft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were going fishing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The men and women of the town were too busy
with their survival pursuits to pay much attention to what the children were
doing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Besides, the boys were always
going out onto the waters – who could stop them?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Young Ray had fallen overboard – the boys
were goofing around in the normal way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But instead of hauling him back aboard right away, they thought they
would make sport of him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other boys
poled the raft faster and faster, taunting Ray the whole time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Come on, swim for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Faster!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You can do it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In the end he could not do it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His breathing became more and more labored,
his gasping louder and louder, though the other boys could not notice it with
their yelling and horsing around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
face sank under, then bobbed up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
splashed his hands frantically a couple of strokes, and then he went
under.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The water flooded his
sinuses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He coughed and choked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Vomit erupted and then was inhaled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His eyes clouded over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ray Teller was no more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">At first the other boys did not believe
that he was gone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They shoved each other
and laughed and called out for Ray to show himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he did not they at last understood the
gravity of the situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They called
out to adults on the shore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They cried
out in panic and then, realizing that Ray must by now be dead, they wailed in
sorrow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The men arrived on the scene in row boats
and fished around in the murky waters with long hooked poles until they snagged
the boy and dragged him aboard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Long
streams of phosphorescent blue and rust colored seaweed had attached themselves
to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The men scooped handfuls of
seaweed off his shoulders and from around his face and in his hair.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“He’s dead,” one of the men pronounced.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">They slowly made their way back to shore
and women laid the boy out on a table to prepare him for burial.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They wiped away the mud that had lodged in
his hair and in his nostrils; the tiny bits of shell that stuck in the cracks
of his lips; and threw away the pale crayfish pincer they found in his wet
shirt pocket.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">It was then that Jesus and the brothers
arrived – an eerie quiet had descended over the place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That turned, now, to an unreasonable
expectation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You can heal him,” the
boy’s mother said breathlessly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">By that statement James was led to believe
that perhaps there had been healings before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That, perhaps, this Jesus was a healer of some kind.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Jesus smiled at the people who backed away
now to give him an avenue of access to the boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He stepped forward, laid his hand on the dead boy’s limp and clammy
shoulder, spoke a prayer and said, “Your son is healed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today he is in paradise with all the other
saints.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">SOMA<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In the generation since the Troubles,
every single person in Vallecito – every man woman and child over the age of
eleven – had become addicted to Soma.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
was a drug, they said, that eased the pain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was cheap, easy to grow, and helped them through their onerous
days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Life was hard in that place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Work was back-breaking and never ending.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A day off was nonexistent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Accidents like the drowning of Ray Teller
were normal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suicides were usual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Entertainment was homemade and
improvised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Winters were long and
dark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Firewood was becoming scarce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One had to go further and further out to fell
the trees and drag them back on make-shift sleds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People froze to death in their beds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bad food and bad water brought diseases that
carried them away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no such
thing as old age benefits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With never a
glimmer of hope for anything better, they turned to Soma for relief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who wouldn’t?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The first time Jesus had entered the
village of Vallecito he said, “Satan can sit right here and know what he’s
having for dinner.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When he discovered
that Soma had become their God, in effect, he went away to the wilderness to
fast and pray for forty days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now he was
back.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Following the funeral of the boy, the entire
population of the village came together in the school auditorium for a meeting
called for by the elders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jesus was to
be the honored speaker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone wanted
to hear what he had to say after his time spent in the wilderness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Most of the people had already turned back
to the drug which anesthetized their sense of nostalgia for the boy who had
died – a boy whose name they could not even now remember.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The poor thing,” they said, grasping in
their brains for the name and the exact details of what had happened only that
morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The poor, poor boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Drowned and lost to his mother…” and then,
feeling deeply the loss of a mother for her dead son, they dosed themselves
with more Soma.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The town had been affected by the same
electronic pulse weapon that had brought Denver to a sudden halt those twenty
five years earlier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Denver had not been
struck directly with nuclear missiles, but suffered none-the-less from the
aftermath of the Great Bombardment and the coming of the Great Dark Age).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Automobiles were left to rust alongside the
roads –<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>here in Vallecito - pushed out
of the way by hand many years earlier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some had been converted into carts that were even now being pulled
behind horses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They hauled grain and
passengers and firewood and what-not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Electricity had been restored only in a very limited capacity by
engineers who were the heroes of the new economy, so-called.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">It was they, and the town elders, who had
mapped out the community gardens; the chicken and goat pens; the water
collection and filtration stations; the waste solids dump; the sewage treatment
plant; the public health clinic; the ‘working bee’ projects for the benefit of
all; the public transportation which consisted mostly of reclaimed bicycles;
the communications; neighborhood security; the education – mostly home-based;
the manufacture and repair shop; and the local business and economy development
efforts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their services were rudimentary
at best.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">On his way to the high school that
evening, Jesus saw the devil lounging in the shade of a large cottonwood
tree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was picking his teeth with a
sharpened and bleached phalange.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
nodded at Jesus but did not bestir himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Would you like some tobacco?” the devil called out in a dripping
voice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He took a crude black plug from
his shirt pocket and took a bite before offering it over to him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Jesus ignored him, walked past, and
entered the school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whenever you pass
the devil the air seems to go out of your soul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A kind of disconsolance enters in its place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jesus kept his guard up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The school building had survived the
Troubles but had not endured very well the neglect over the twenty five years
since then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While some classrooms were
still in use, many had succumbed to the need for repair, especially in their
roofs, and were quite useless now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
auditorium was tall and proud and did not leak, at least not for now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The four brothers were not with him on
this occasion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was led up the hallway
that’s floors had once been polished to a high gleam and luster, but which were
now flat and dull.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was given a place
of honor in the auditorium, which doubled as a gymnasium, near the speaker’s
podium.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“We have no time for games now,”
one of the elders whispered to him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">He was seated while they gave a rather
lengthy introduction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No introduction was
really necessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone remembered
this man of God well enough from the last time he had visited them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“We have the great honor and privilege to
introduce to you today this mighty man of God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Little over a month ago we asked him to use his powerful influence with
God to rid us of this curse that has befallen us all these years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, I am speaking of the curse of Soma.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The speaker was small and frail and nearly
bald.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He arched his neck in order to
speak loud enough to be heard throughout the auditorium.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no microphone, and in fact all the
people were happy just to have electric lights, if only for this short
duration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A carnival atmosphere had
entered the place, (because of the Soma they had already forgotten the
funeral), so it was hard to hear the old man over the din of the crowd.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">At last Jesus stood up and moved to the
podium and there was an extended period of applause and shouts of approval and
accolades no one could really hear or understand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He waited until the applause died down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then he spoke.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“When Jesus the Christ first stood up in
the synagogue to teach, he read a passage from Isaiah, Chapter 61:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because
he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal
the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To preach the acceptable year of the Lord…’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“God, you see, is not some bearded old
tyrant as some have suggested.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His wrath
is reserved for the devil, who rebelled against him and left heaven long before
you were born.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>God is our Father, yes,
and he wants what is best for us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So,
even when we don’t think we want what God wants from us, He sometimes has wily
ways of getting us to accept.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">There was an unwarranted applause at this
point that left Jesus and the elders perplexed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He waited again for it to die out before he continued.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“To set the captives free.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did you get that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did you have ears to hear it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You are captives of this strong drug called
Soma.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your leaders tell me you are
groaning under the weight of your addictions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But God says He can set you free from that drug.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How many of you here tonight would like to be
set free from the addiction that has hold of your life?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Raise your hands.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">In the spirit of the evening, nearly
everyone raised their hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The others
were coaxed into it good-naturedly by their nearest neighbors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Come on, raise your hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What can it hurt you?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“Do you want to do what God would have you
do?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Unanimously they all shouted out their
approval.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Still not understanding their general
acceptance of his message, Jesus continued – spurred on by their
enthusiasm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“If you are serious about
letting God set you free, throw all the Soma you have in your possession down
onto the floor here at the center of the auditorium.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Young men are on hand to collect it up and
destroy it for us.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Again there was a general shout of
approval and bags of the drug were cast out onto the floor in front of the bleachers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who were still reluctant quickly caught
on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They all began to realize that they
had a whole field of the stuff growing near the lake north of town.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“In the morning we’ll be able to fill our
pockets full if we want to,” they whispered back and forth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“What will it hurt us to give this Jesus
fellow what he wants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s so sincere
about it…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Now the Soma was being tossed down from
the stands wholesale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone divested
themselves of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was collected up
and taken out and burned in barrels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
young men were careful to stay upwind from the smoke.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">“We are casting out the unclean spirit of
Soma,” Jesus proclaimed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The time has
come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kingdom of God is at hand.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The people were snickering up their
sleeves the whole time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the morning
they would replenish themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
young girl even called brazenly out to Jesus, “Now we are clean of that evil
spirit.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She laughed with wicked
delight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Jesus called right back to her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You’d better sleep well tonight, my
girl.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You’re going to have a terrible
headache in the morning.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">While the whole population of the town was
there at the high school listening to Jesus speak, the brothers had been out
cutting and burning the entire field of Soma.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There would be no more.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>THOSE WHO DWELL UPON THE EARTH</strong> is the
story of what happens next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What happens
when the nations finally use those nuclear weapons?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What happens when the economy collapses?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When there is another world war?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When people finally turn themselves completely
over to their violent tendencies?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">What happens when a small discipleship
group decides to follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ literally?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When they form a community that lives by love
and forgiveness and nonviolence?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">There will be trouble!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are they going to see it all the way
through?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are they going to continue to
follow the way of Christ in spite of the troubles they encounter?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>COMING SEPTEMBER 2019<o:p></o:p></strong></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">James D. Sanderson is also the author of
SACRED ARE THE BRAVE, A collection of short stories set in the time of the
nonviolent revolutions of 1989.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
are ten of them most exciting life and death stories ever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The various characters come to life facing
the tensions and struggles of political revolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tied together by historical fact, these
stories range from the comic to the tragic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>From bittersweet memories to abrupt and immediate action in the face of
overwhelming odds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finely crafted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Available now on Amazon Kindle for $0.99: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=30M2DTFL22EVZ&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553558186&s=books&sprefix=SACRED+ARE+THE+BRAVE+SANDER%2Caps%2C407&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Also available:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>CALLED TO LOVE.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Every day the world seems to be just a
little crazier than the day before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Fortunately for Christians there are some things that don’t change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our dedication to ‘do to others as we would
have them do to us’ is the golden rule we can live by – even in these uncertain
times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Christ called us to love God,
love one another, and love even our enemies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>From God’s ‘Greatest Commandment’ and the Sermon on the Mount, to the
Bible’s love chapter and the power of love in daily life, this book reveals the
secrets of Christian love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Are you ready
to put God’s love into action today?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">CALLED TO LOVE available now on Amazon
Kindle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>$0.99:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span class="MsoHyperlink"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Called-Love-Book-About-Christian-ebook/dp/B0086X6YQ2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549577224&sr=1-1&keywords=called+to+love+sanderson"><span style="color: #0563c1;">CALLED
TO LOVE</span></a></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-2951929967881460942019-03-28T15:55:00.000-07:002019-03-28T16:18:25.689-07:00AN EXCERPT FROM: THE STRUGGLE<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL7HywJ0G6i2WS-qUG5sLeccWcR5HC3aRWjUIWMhHLMLZy4fcAtKditpJKAkK3KHgMHmju5sSmzdd-ZELgII0y0BaOUiyTBssqb5dDTLfnjsnpl-IZABgvRnsvWsY8Bw6S4JfhDvL8BFFr/s1600/The+Struggle+Cover-page-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A novel about nonviolent revolution" border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1237" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL7HywJ0G6i2WS-qUG5sLeccWcR5HC3aRWjUIWMhHLMLZy4fcAtKditpJKAkK3KHgMHmju5sSmzdd-ZELgII0y0BaOUiyTBssqb5dDTLfnjsnpl-IZABgvRnsvWsY8Bw6S4JfhDvL8BFFr/s320/The+Struggle+Cover-page-001.jpg" title="THE STRUGGLE" width="247" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Can Nonviolence Work Today? 'The Struggle', is a contemporary Christian literary novel.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<strong>From: Chapter One</strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
Nothing in the house was as he
remembered it from his dream of the night before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everything had been dislocated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their home was no longer the place of tidy
refuge it had once been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The door was
off its hinges so as he came into the bathroom he was forced to push it shut
with a bang.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The electric light did not
work, of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He actually rotated the
switch on the wall before he realized there had been no electricity since
September. He was still groggy with sleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He had always liked to lounge in the mornings but of course that was
impossible now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What daylight there was
at this hour came through the window with the ruined frame.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pane itself was splintered and flimsy
cardboard from inside a shoe box had been shoved in to keep the wind out during
winter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There had been a steady drizzle
through the night and clouds still hung glowering over the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a film over the eye of the world.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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He turned on the faucet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Water ran into the basin for ten
seconds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then it petered out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The last of it was thick with mud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“They hit the water plant,” he called to the
others in the house through the door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
sprinkled some water in his hair and pushed it back with his palms.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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“They must have hit it in the
shelling last night,” Aunt Sophia called from the other room in a slightly
elevated voice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Water.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could visualize her shaking her grey head
in disgust.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“How are we going to live
without water?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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So, someone had finally gotten
around to shelling the water plant down by the river.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You would think they’d have done it
sooner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, that’s just how this war
was being conducted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you could call
it a war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not particularly well
planned; not particularly well executed, and it just went on and on until
everything was destroyed sooner or later.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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He looked at his reflection in
the mirror which had miraculously survived the entire war thus far without
having shattered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He tried to will away
the grimness in the face that stared back at him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once he had looked different.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once he had been happy and care-free.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now he looked severe and gritty as the day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only change he could manage now was a
slight upturning of the corners of his mouth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He hadn’t become the killer Josep had, but the war had taken its toll on
him just the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had become
possessed by the war – the whole country had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“We can’t do without water,” Anton said, making his way back out into
the hall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It’s a sacred commodity.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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“We do without everything
else,” his young brother said, stepping around the corner from the
kitchen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anton was always pleased to see
Erich’s round, marveling eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here at
least was still some small enclave of innocence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“We do without medicine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We do without heat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without food…”<br />
<br /></div>
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</div>
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<o:p>BACK TO HOME: </o:p><a href="https://jamesdsanderson.blogspot.com/2019/03/from-author-james-d-sanderson.html">FROM THE AUTHOR</a></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-27464098285403277582019-03-28T15:54:00.000-07:002019-03-28T16:20:05.323-07:00AN EXCERPT FROM: GOD, INTRUDING<br />
<br />
<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDN3M4XIb3cnU2LVLdEgGit1DjeDBpEHYJVLxzEZ_9q-D2H19ZBZQcIhqOGTyzk9e1x-izhUQ0uI-wZxoMDZ6D0XDasROwUD2ccTdT3fGRl_L1F59V9y-UTmgJ6ItW1MXQLG9XSdX5seix/s1600/abstract-abstract-art-abstract-background-1629236.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A book about Christian discipleship" border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDN3M4XIb3cnU2LVLdEgGit1DjeDBpEHYJVLxzEZ_9q-D2H19ZBZQcIhqOGTyzk9e1x-izhUQ0uI-wZxoMDZ6D0XDasROwUD2ccTdT3fGRl_L1F59V9y-UTmgJ6ItW1MXQLG9XSdX5seix/s320/abstract-abstract-art-abstract-background-1629236.jpg" title="GOD, INTRUDING" width="320" /></a></div>
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What is a Christian? How are we to act? Can we live up to the standards set by our Savior Jesus Christ? Can we live the way of nonviolence? These questions are answered in this essay.</div>
<strong></strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>An Uncertain Measure<o:p></o:p></strong></div>
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</div>
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According to German physicist
W.K. Heisenberg (Heisenberg uncertainty principle), an object is changed by the
very act of observation – causing uncertainty in the measurement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We find this same uncertainty in the act of
writing and reading, do we not?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who can
say with any certainty what impact these words will have on you, my
reader?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
The act of reading will in fact,
alter the text – the perspective of the reader changes the meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further, if you, my reader, put any of these
truths into practice, reality will be transformed yet again by your direct
experience of the results.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Since I am currently writing in
longhand – these tiny cramped characters marching like lumpy little soldiers
across the page - the typing and printing of these pages may further distort
the meaning of the words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(My father was
such a boisterous, alive man – such a vital force, I might say - he took up all
the space in my life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only way I
could find a place of my own was to write in tiny script, holed up in my
bedroom to do so. But that is quite another story).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The act of writing and reading is such a
unique and wondrous and compelling experience!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
As we merge in this we become co-conspirators in the ongoing revolution
of ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These words, together with all
the words written since the beginning of recorded history, form a potentiality
that is beyond comprehension.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What can
be done with all this knowledge, one wonders?<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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With that, then, I should add a
word of caution:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beware, my friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may believe that you are simply reading a
book in these few fleeting moments between the living of your ‘real’ life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what you may find, as we have, is that
God intends to take you over completely, and that these words may hasten that
moment when your life will change once and for all, with no possibility of ever
turning back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even now the mechanism may
be set in motion that will carry you forward to this unknown destiny.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Following Jesus closely, a new way opens up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a way of liberation beyond all
others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a way of creativity,
harmony, hope, joy and even poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once
we cried out in chains.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now we are free
to sing a new song.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Free!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><strong><span style="font-size: large;">COMING MAY 2020</span></strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><strong></strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">BACK TO HOME PAGE: <a href="https://jamesdsanderson.blogspot.com/2019/03/from-author-james-d-sanderson.html">FROM THE AUTHOR</a></span>James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-19118599180769367072019-03-28T15:53:00.002-07:002019-03-28T16:20:42.745-07:00EXCERPT FROM: THE SECRET REVELATIONS OF JESUS CHRIST<br />
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Can fiction be based on a true story? Of course it can. With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammandi texts in Egypt, many believed the Christian world would be turned on its head. The best fiction builds upon facts like these...<br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong>From: Chapter One</strong></div>
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</div>
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This was the
worst city on earth – he had been in most of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could feel it everywhere you went.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was a sweat of corruption that you
could smell as you came from the plane – you had to walk across the sticky hot
tarmac to get to the terminal – and you could feel it in the oppressive gaseousness
of the atmosphere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could see it in
the faces of the poor as your taxi careened along toward your hotel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even that façade had broken down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In most cities you were treated to the clean
cheeriness of wealth along the main tourist route at least, but here even that
had been breached.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beggars ran alongside
the taxi as it pulled out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They tapped
on the side window and every one of them looked truly pitiful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good God, he thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t sign up for all this.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8FwP7J1Q5f_Ma8UKvXrKbRKHJ7de8IJ3YTUbvh2ud9VJAWo6PqAj6eritJhigYgYssbrmuKgCtvm5PBLfsRoBOSTTiQlapDZtpx_JjaJnZeRxGLQLBz6jCleh4p12eCvgxom_BBHGoOvk/s1600/ancient-blur-calligraphy-210909.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A novel about Christian finding secret teachings of Jesus Christ" border="0" data-original-height="1022" data-original-width="1600" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8FwP7J1Q5f_Ma8UKvXrKbRKHJ7de8IJ3YTUbvh2ud9VJAWo6PqAj6eritJhigYgYssbrmuKgCtvm5PBLfsRoBOSTTiQlapDZtpx_JjaJnZeRxGLQLBz6jCleh4p12eCvgxom_BBHGoOvk/s320/ancient-blur-calligraphy-210909.jpg" title="THE SECRET REVELATIONS OF Jesus Christ" width="320" /></a></div>
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Women sitting
on the sidewalk nursed dirty babies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their clothes were in tatters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their looks had fallen from hungry to hopeless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The doorman at the hotel chased beggars back
with a stern look but they hovered there none-the-less, you couldn’t help but
see them there, pathetic and filthy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
would conclude his business as soon as he possibly could and be on his way, he
thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There would be no enjoyment in
this place.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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But the sense
of evil would not let him go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You think
you are not prepared to face evil,” he said later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You always think that is somebody else’s
job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Somebody else’s calling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I guess as a Christian you always have to
be prepared for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You don’t know when
it is going to pop up right in front of you like some jack-in-the-box smirking
clown face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I never thought I’d have to
deal with it myself.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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Looking down
from the window at the rear of his room he saw that the trash had been allowed
to pile up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three shabby curs were
snapping at each other to get some choice bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He knew if he opened the window he would be assaulted by the smell and
sounds of snarling and the even larger sound of the city beyond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There would be the squalling of tires and the
leaning-on of car horns and the screams of the innocent and the sinister
laughter of the not-so-innocent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good
God, why had they sent him here?<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
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Well, he knew
why they had of course.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was here to
collect up an important artifact for the Complex and see it safely home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Money had been exchanged for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No trouble was to be expected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His investigative skills would not be
required.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the morning he would go to
the national museum, pick up the artifact – a precious golden calf - and see it
safely over to the airport for shipment home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Then he would get on a flight himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That was how it had been explained to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no need for concern.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, he had brought his firearm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To protect the artifact, he told
himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though in fact it would be
well-guarded by local authorities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
never knew though, did they, when one might need a little extra protection…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Especially in a place like this.<br />
<br /></div>
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<o:p><strong><span style="font-size: large;">COMING SEPTEMBER 2020</span></strong></o:p><br />
<o:p><strong><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></strong></o:p></div>
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</div>
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<o:p>BACK TO HOME PAGE: </o:p><a href="https://jamesdsanderson.blogspot.com/2019/03/from-author-james-d-sanderson.html">FROM THE AUTHOR</a></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-66129337108559682542019-03-28T15:51:00.000-07:002019-03-28T16:21:26.483-07:00EXCERPT FROM: MAY THEY BE ONE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4OrTrN3-QkvehEpTuSFuHJKEh7ZJoi8RQ3W_7NmbTzMMwEdbbJ0FvVJm-wZLbc_vzvZf2C_SsThNxIPcD5BlexYBSZEP0MMZ3oYZAalfHssF8nAoE5PYwWp3ow3MSQeuJ4v99RExH56L4/s1600/cross-3080144_1920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A book about Christian unity and discipleship" border="0" data-original-height="857" data-original-width="1600" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4OrTrN3-QkvehEpTuSFuHJKEh7ZJoi8RQ3W_7NmbTzMMwEdbbJ0FvVJm-wZLbc_vzvZf2C_SsThNxIPcD5BlexYBSZEP0MMZ3oYZAalfHssF8nAoE5PYwWp3ow3MSQeuJ4v99RExH56L4/s320/cross-3080144_1920.jpg" title="MAY THEY BE ONE" width="320" /></a></div>
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Can contemporary Christian nonfiction still ask the hard questions? How can we really love one another? What does it mean to be a Christian? How can we love our enemies?</div>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b>GOD IS NO RESPECTER OF PERSONS</b><br />
<br />
It would have been better if God had chosen someone else. Someone with more skills, perhaps. Someone with more education. Someone with great and powerful gifting. Unfortunately God does not care who you are when there is a job to be done. God is no respecter of persons. God calls, and you answer.<br />
<br />
I answered that call, of course. How could I not? I had brought it down on myself if the truth is to be told. I should never have asked in prayer, as I did that morning some years ago, "What do you want me to do with the rest of my life?" Open-ended questions should never be uttered before the God of the universe. They might just be answered.<br />
<br />
<b>ASK, SEEK, KNOCK</b><br />
<br />
I was fifty-nine years old then, but asking and answering had been going on most of my life - since I was ten years old at least. There, in the basement of that old white-washed Methodist church, my Sunday school teacher set up a flannel graph. (A flannel graph was an easel with a flat flannel covered background and flannel cloth characters could be stuck on it). "Here is Jesus," she said. "He is on the other side of this door." Then, holding up a little flannel boy, she stuck him to the background and smoothed him out. "This is you. All you have to do is ask for Jesus - to seek him - and to knock on the door. Then he will be in your life forever more." She read the verses from Matthew 7:7, "Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."<br />
<br />
Who could resist such an invitation? I asked. I sought Him. I knocked. And He answered me. I became a Christian that day.<br />
<br />
What does it mean to be a Christian? That was the next question. I spent the next thirty years living just like everyone else. Weren't we Christians? There were only a few around who were evil enough that they might have been considered not Christians. As for the rest, we were Christians living in a Christian world and the subject didn't really com up that often.<br />
<br />
<b>MAY THEY BE ONE </b>is a call to unity in the Church, and a personal exploration leading up to God's call on my life to receive that call.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>COMING MAY 2021</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
RETURN TO HOME PAGE: <a href="https://jamesdsanderson.blogspot.com/2019/03/from-author-james-d-sanderson.html">FROM THE AUTHOR</a>James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-4834624977190865642019-03-28T15:50:00.001-07:002019-03-28T16:21:59.655-07:00ABOUT AMERICAN MASTERS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Coming from Author James D. Sanderson. An exploration of literature and literary fiction through American history. The finest examples of our literary tradition.</div>
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<br /><br /><a data-id="7448743528336007944" data-item-type="post" href="https://jamesdsanderson.blogspot.com/2009/04/about-american-masters.html" itemprop="url" rel="bookmark" style="color: rgba(51, 51, 51, 1); font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light",HelveticaNeue-Light,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; outline-color: invert; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium; text-decoration: none; transition-delay: 0s; transition-duration: 0.3s; transition-property: color; transition-timing-function: ease;">ABOUT 'AMERICAN MASTERS'</a>
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Greetings Readers,<br />
<br />
Sorry for the delay in getting this up and running but I have been busy putting the finishing touches on my new book. 'American Masters' is a book for those who love books. It is a popular history of American literature from its beginning in our colonial period (Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin), through our most recent Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. It is written in a sweeping narrative style (with a hidden first person narrator), drawing from the lives of the authors, their stories, their work, and interesting anecdotes from their own experiences. Did you know, for instance, that at age six Flannery O'Connor taught a chicken to walk backward. It was filmed by the Pathe News and was shown across the country. Little Mary O'Connor was on film helping with her chicken. She claimed that everything else in her life was anti-climactic. This is only one of the many such stories that have turned up in the research for this book. (And it has been just a plain ol' hoot to write, if you'll allow me that levity).<br />
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The study of literature has somehow become divided up by particular authors or poets, or various 'movements', or by their individual works. Very little has been done to mine the vast interconnectedness of the literary tradition from its earliest days until the present. Yet, not surprisingly, these authors knew each other, or had read each other, or had written reviews about each other, or had made comments about each other, and nothing was ever written in a vacuum as it sometimes appears in the classroom. Readers, (myself included), have approached the whole affair of reading our masters as a hit and miss matter, which seems to be more often miss than hit.<br />
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'American Masters' has a strong narrative insistence which does not sacrifice itself by use of obvious fictional techniques. Rather, it is written on several levels, giving it a deep tidal flow that is not fully appreciated by only a surface reading. Beyond the simple chronological reading there is a deeper symbolic level; and a deeper still mythic historicity of dreams, fears, imaginings; and a deeper still labyrinthine level of games, puzzles, codes, word play, and so on. (Which could be appreciated by the likes of Nabokov).</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">COMING JANUARY 2021</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Available Now:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">GET MY BOOK(S) NOW:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">'Called To Love':</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Every day the world seems to be just a little crazier than the day before. Fortunately for Christians there are some things that don't change. Our dedication to 'do to others as we would have them do to us' is the golden rule we can live by - even in these uncertain times. Christ called us to love God, love one another, and love even our enemies. From God's 'Greatest Commandment' and the Sermon on the Mount, to the Bible's love chapter and the power of love in daily life, this book reveals the secrets of Christian love. Are you ready to put God's love into action today?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px;"><span style="color: orange;">⇨</span><span style="color: #333333;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99: </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Called-Love-Book-About-Christian-ebook/dp/B0086X6YQ2/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=called+to+love+Sanderson&qid=1549749013&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull" style="color: #333333;">CALLED TO LOVE</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">'Sacred Are the Brave' A Collection of Stories:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Ten of the most exciting life and death stories you'll ever read. The various characters come to life facing the tensions and struggles of political revolution. Tied together by historical fact, these stories range from the comic to the tragic. From bittersweet memories to abrupt and immediate action in the face of overwhelming odds. Finely crafted. Short stories about nonviolent revolution beginning in 1986 when unarmed citizens used 'People Power' to overcome the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the various nonviolent movements in Eastern Europe in 1989. Each of these stories presents an ordinary character who is forced to show extraordinary courage in the face of violent oppression.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: orange; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">⇨</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99 for a limited time: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson&qid=1549749330&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>COMING IN SEPTEMBER 2019:</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' A Novel:</b></span></div>
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What will we do when the nations of the world finally resort to the ultimate violence - nuclear weapons? When the world economy collapses. When the world once again goes to war? Will we choose even more violence and chaos to solve our problems, or will we find some other way?</div>
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Will we Christians choose to follow the example of Christ, building loving communities, caring for others, finding forgiveness and living the way of nonviolence? And if we do choose this way, what will it look like?</div>
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'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' is a novel about a small Christian discipleship group that decides the time has come to choose this new way. Their tiny community grows into a movement. At that point they are seen as a threat to the authoritarian government that has taken away our civil liberties. Who will prevail?</div>
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HOME PAGE: <a href="https://jamesdsanderson.blogspot.com/2019/03/from-author-james-d-sanderson.html">FROM THE AUTHOR</a></div>
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James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-7147517719202734782019-03-28T15:50:00.000-07:002019-03-28T15:50:00.520-07:00EXCERPTS FROM: REASONINGS<div class="page" title="Page 7">
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<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><b>The Cost Of Our Behavior</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">At dusk we moved out, locked and loaded. Our company had been given the assignment of guarding a secret nuclear site somewhere on the border of France. My squad was the first one to go out. This was the real thing – not a training exercise. I checked to make sure all my men had their gas masks, Nuclear, Biological, Chemical kit, rifle and live ammunition. We strung out along the road keeping some distance between us in the event of an attack.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">I lead the men around the wire first. I wanted to inspect the fence around the perimeter of the area. If there were any breaks in the wire; if there was any place that was cut open with wire cutters to allow the enemy through, then we would know we were in for trouble. It had happened before.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Tonight we were in the clear. As darkness fell I radioed in the ‘all clear’ and gave our position. The rest of the night we moved among the bunkers that looked like long cylindrical mounds of dirt with concrete faces. The steel doors on the front were secured with a heavy steel padlock and a special tag with numbers on it to prove it had not been tampered with. It was our job to record those numbers every time we came by, to prove we had inspected the lock.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">We all felt the tension. Being out there in the dark, in this strange place, guarding these nuclear weapons that were a potential target for any terrorist group made us all a little jumpy. There was forest all around, and large areas between the roads that were filled with brush and thick vegetation. Then, in the distance, police dogs began barking. Someone shouted. I strained my eyes to see what was going on. There was no moon. I couldn’t see much. Shadows, mostly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Then there was a commotion in the bushes nearby. Everyone turned, rifles at the ready. My mouth went dry. There was another shout in the distance. Someone was running through the undergrowth. He was coming our way. He burst out into the open; a fast, low, stout form rushed us in the darkness. I nearly fired.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">“Who goes there?” one of my men shouted. You could hear the fright in his voice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">It all happened so fast, I’m surprised no one did open fire. That would have resulted in a ton of paperwork, believe me. If we had opened fire on a wild boar in the middle of a nuclear weapon storage facility, who knows what would have come down on us from the brass. I would have been standing on the carpet at higher headquarters answering for my actions, you can be sure of that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">“I almost shot him,” one of the men said in a shrill voice. “I almost let him have it.”<br />“Me too,” another man chimed in. “I was this close.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br />Everyone gathered around now to share their war story. I had to calm them down and get</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">them focused on the task at hand. Slowly they shambled back into formation and I pointed up the road. “Move out,” I said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">There have been a lot of near misses involving nuclear weapons, too. As a nation we have become frightened by whatever is out there in the darkness and we have come ‘this close’ to letting them have it. We have come to the hair-trigger edge of opening fire.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">The first time this happened was only ten months after the end of World War II, in 1946. The United States was the only nation in the world to possess nuclear weapons so when the USSR was slow in vacating Azerbaijan following the war, President Truman called Soviet Ambassador Gromyko in for a meeting and threatened, “We’re going to drop it (the bomb) on you.” The Soviets promptly removed their troops.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">That same year, 1946, in November, U.S. B-29s were flown over Yugoslavia as a show of nuclear force when a U.S. military aircraft was shot down. <span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Two years later twenty four Soviet cities were targeted when the USSR blocked land access to Berlin, in Germany. An emergency airlift to West Berlin was begun, and access to the city was not restored until late the following year. U.S. supremacy ended in 1949 when the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb. Also that year Mao Tse-Tung’s communist forces took over in China. The world was becoming a very scary place indeed.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Over the next thirteen years there were eight more nuclear crises, beginning with the invasion of South Korea by the communist north; and continuing through the fall of French-held Dien Bien Phu to the communist Viet Minh and the first involvement by the United States in Viet Nam; and the movements of Mao Tse-Tung against American ally Chiang Kai-Shek; the battle over the Suez Canal in the middle east; and culminating, finally, in what has come to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the days leading up to this nuclear standoff President Kennedy was shown U-2 spy plane photos of Soviet missile bases that had been installed on Cuba. There were believed to be forty two medium range nuclear missiles in place already, and more on the way. The Joint Chiefs of Staff called for an immediate attack.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">On October 22</span><span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 7pt; vertical-align: 5pt;">nd</span><span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">, President Kennedy went on national television to explain that a blockade of Cuba had begun. The U.S. Navy had set up a blockade around Cuba and at that time twenty five Soviet cargo ships were heading toward the blockade. B-52 bombers with nuclear bombs were in the air. An invasion force was being made ready in Florida. Soviet Première Khrushchev threatens that if Soviet ships are interfered with, “...necessary measures will be taken.” This eyeball to eyeball confrontation led the world to the very brink of all-out nuclear war. At last a deal was struck between the two countries and nuclear confrontation was avoided.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Some years passed before the next nuclear crisis presented itself. The Cuban affair caused even the most hawkish members of government to rethink their position as concerns nuclear weapons. Not until 1969, when the U.S. was faced with the loss of Viet Nam did then President Nixon implement his secret plan, Duckhook, to escalate the war and then end it with the use of nuclear weapons. North Viet Nam refused to yield, even in the face of these threats and the Americans finally gave in.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Then, in 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel during the Yom Kippur festival. Israel quickly surrounded the Egyptian Third Army which the USSR vowed to protect. This sudden escalation brought the alert status of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to DEFCON 3. I was stationed in Germany myself when this happened and our unit was placed on a high level of alert status, including being confined to post and being issued live ammunition in preparation for moving out to Israel.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">An implied threat was delivered by President Carter to use nuclear weapons against both Iran and the USSR when the Shah was forced to flee after his defeat at the hands of the Muslim Mullahs and the Ayatollah Khomeini. B-52 bombers began to sly over the Arabian Sea over a six month period. All of this posturing ended with the Iraqi invasion of Iran with covert approval by the U.S. The war cost over one million lives and ended inconclusively. Iraq was not able to defeat Iran.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">The world was again brought to the brink of nuclear war in 1983 when the Americans began preparations for a First Strike capability against the USSR. This would essentially put the Americans in the position to decapitate the Soviet leadership with Pershing II missiles which could reach the Soviet capital in six minutes from Germany; with the capacity to knock out all Soviet missiles on land and at sea; and to build a Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars shield </span><span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">to prevent any retaliation by the Soviet Union. In December the first Pershing II missiles were delivered to Ramstein air base.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Today the situation is even more complex with at least nine nations possessing atomic weapons, including the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. Add to this the ability, now, to produce smaller ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons for battlefield use: gravity bombs, artillery shells, land mines, depth charges and torpedoes, which bring the hope of being able to wage ‘limited’ nuclear wars. Consider, also, the possibility of a terrorist group getting their hands on one of these tactical weapons, which can be as small as a rather large backpack. Then, too, is the threat of ‘dirty’ bombs, which use standard explosives to scatter large amounts of radioactive materials in a limited area.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Concern has been growing over the use of Depleted Uranium (DU) on the battlefield. Uranium 238 is a byproduct from the enrichment of U-235 and, since is it has such high density it can be used for armor plating or armor-piercing projectiles. While DU is only about 60% as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium, thus not considered a threat in that way, there are plenty of unanswered questions about the long-term health effects. Used in the Gulf Wars in Iraq, it is both a toxin and a potential radioactive hazard. When DU burns, or when it penetrates armor, it creates Uranium oxide dust that can be inhaled, ingested, or contaminate wounds.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Along with these concerns there has also been a long string of nuclear weapon accidents or mishaps stretching right back to the development of the first bombs. Bombers have crashed and caught fire with nukes on board; bombs have been dropped accidentally from bombers as happened outside Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque New Mexico in 1957. They have been lost in the ocean – once in 16,000 feet of water – the pressure of which might have caused it to explode, no one really knows. There have been mistakes in handling plutonium which have cost lives, and fires at plants that have contaminated land and water. There are concerns over the storage of nuclear waste materials.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">All of this has caused Americans, according to an opinion poll, to dislike the idea of nuclear weapons altogether. An overwhelming majority, 73% of Americans, in fact, would prefer we eliminate nuclear weapons entirely.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">In spite of this, the development and production of nuclear weapons, and the maintaining of our nuclear arsenal continues to grow unabated with an annual expenditure of 54 Billion dollars. Over 67,000 nuclear missiles have been built since 1951. (1) 14 Billion dollars have been spent on ICBM launch pads and silos and the cost of operating such facilities. Over 4,500 nuclear bombers have been built. More than 70,000 nuclear warheads and bombs have been built. There are currently some 10,000 warheads in the U.S. arsenal. There is some 43 metric tons of plutonium still in weapons. Over 1,000 nuclear tests have been performed. There are 239 high level radiation waste tanks in Washington, Idaho, and South Carolina. One hundred and four cubic meters of radioactive waste has resulted from our nuclear weapons activities. Eleven nuclear bombs has been lost in accidents and never recovered.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">The estimated total cost of nuclear weapons since their discovery, keeping in mind that this is the United States alone, is estimated at five and a half trillion dollars.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Notes:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">(1) Based on a report by Brookings Institution ‘The U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project’. 1998.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;">Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtTyyofp144">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtTyyofp144</a></span><br />
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
CHRISTIAN LITERATURE THAT MAKES YOU THINK</h2>
<div>
Part of building a strong writer's platform is to develop a 'persona'. That means you have to tell people who you are. I get that. So here goes:</div>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "timesnewromanpsmt"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
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I am a<b> committed Christian</b>. I take my walk with Christ seriously.<br />
<br />
I follow the<b> way of nonviolence</b>. More violence in the world will only cause more trouble.<br />
<br />
I read great literature, and write that way. Each work of literature is a <b>masterpiece, </b>and I treat it that way<b>.</b><br />
<br />
I believe if we make <b>the goodness of Christ</b> available to everyone, everyone benefits.<br />
<br />
Preparing for an uncertain future. I am something of an Austrian when it comes to the economy. Work hard, give to God, save something back, borrow only when you know you can pay it back, raise a solid family... <b> Good old Christian values</b>, I guess you'd say.<br />
<br />
I am an author of nonfiction and fiction, and always have been. If we are going to write, we should write our masterpiece. <b>Great literature </b>is the only thing that will last.<br />
<br />
I am <b>a publisher,</b> not afraid to roll up my sleeves and publish.<br />
<br />
I am <b>an ideas person</b>, and not afraid to carry them out.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">GET MY BOOK(S) NOW:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">'Called To Love':</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s1600/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s320/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Every day the world seems to be just a little crazier than the day before. Fortunately for Christians there are some things that don't change. Our dedication to 'do to others as we would have them do to us' is the golden rule we can live by - even in these uncertain times. Christ called us to love God, love one another, and love even our enemies. From God's 'Greatest Commandment' and the Sermon on the Mount, to the Bible's love chapter and the power of love in daily life, this book reveals the secrets of Christian love. Are you ready to put God's love into action today?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px;"><span style="color: orange;">⇨</span><span style="color: #333333;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99: </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Called-Love-Book-About-Christian-ebook/dp/B0086X6YQ2/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=called+to+love+Sanderson&qid=1549749013&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull" style="color: #333333;">CALLED TO LOVE</a></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">'Sacred Are the Brave' A Collection of Stories:</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKmF_ZzUkThvOn0TcREif8QqPb3kBSU5vff0ASktjkfioOWKWUDVoK2Die8jqciO34gtOXzcC7hKfDGafxFJjFgS6XIiiNsE8GvVIK55agEt8DBOC-I_K1lakDL-4NZOq1sAOJ-UkkDy6W/s1600/430205_389488637733726_1736603073_n.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKmF_ZzUkThvOn0TcREif8QqPb3kBSU5vff0ASktjkfioOWKWUDVoK2Die8jqciO34gtOXzcC7hKfDGafxFJjFgS6XIiiNsE8GvVIK55agEt8DBOC-I_K1lakDL-4NZOq1sAOJ-UkkDy6W/s320/430205_389488637733726_1736603073_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Ten of the most exciting life and death stories you'll ever read. The various characters come to life facing the tensions and struggles of political revolution. Tied together by historical fact, these stories range from the comic to the tragic. From bittersweet memories to abrupt and immediate action in the face of overwhelming odds. Finely crafted. Short stories about nonviolent revolution beginning in 1986 when unarmed citizens used 'People Power' to overcome the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the various nonviolent movements in Eastern Europe in 1989. Each of these stories presents an ordinary character who is forced to show extraordinary courage in the face of violent oppression.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: orange; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">⇨</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99 for a limited time: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson&qid=1549749330&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>COMING IN SEPTEMBER 2019:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' A Novel:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
<br />
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What will we do when the nations of the world finally resort to the ultimate violence - nuclear weapons? When the world economy collapses. When the world once again goes to war? Will we choose even more violence and chaos to solve our problems, or will we find some other way?</div>
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Will we Christians choose to follow the example of Christ, building loving communities, caring for others, finding forgiveness and living the way of nonviolence? And if we do choose this way, what will it look like?</div>
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'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' is a novel about a small Christian discipleship group that decides the time has come to choose this new way. Their tiny community grows into a movement. At that point they are seen as a threat to the authoritarian government that has taken away our civil liberties. Who will prevail?</div>
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</div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-40372475242655724802019-03-28T15:48:00.001-07:002019-03-28T15:48:24.174-07:00THE POWER OF NONVIOLENCE<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY2py3vlIRZk51m1vfL8vAQPJVaRvvf4U20_-KtAdozCiSeMf4tf_TdDou5HorqH01VszvozsAuFtKDXJFTzhWJQWqC7isAFLss700V-RyG2lLb9d-CPP9HJuYxNy5q7ZxdRTPdUEaj7Z-/s1600/430205_389488637733726_1736603073_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="What are the principles of nonviolence?" border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY2py3vlIRZk51m1vfL8vAQPJVaRvvf4U20_-KtAdozCiSeMf4tf_TdDou5HorqH01VszvozsAuFtKDXJFTzhWJQWqC7isAFLss700V-RyG2lLb9d-CPP9HJuYxNy5q7ZxdRTPdUEaj7Z-/s320/430205_389488637733726_1736603073_n.jpg" title="SACRED ARE THE BRAVE" width="240" /></a></div>
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What is the principle of nonviolence?</div>
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<br />
“Peace is not merely a distant goal we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.” -Martin Luther King, Jr. </div>
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1989 marks a turning point in the history of the world. It was the year in which nonviolent revolution proved itself in a massive way. In that year alone thirteen nations with a combined population of nearly one third of the world’s people were involved in some<br />
form of nonviolent struggle. Only in China were the cries for liberation stifled, (one can never forget the massacre at Tiananmen Square); and only in rare instances did the revolutions turn violent, (as in Romania). Successful revolutions took place in East<br />
German, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, Mongolia,<br />
Chile, Brazil, and the Soviet Union. This is an incredible miracle of common people<br />
seeking and gaining their liberation from ruthless tyrants and heavily armed totalitarian states. Yet, incredibly, the way of nonviolence is still rejected by many as “a way that<br />
does not work.” <br />
<br />
The power of nonviolence as a way of personal change and social transformation did not grow and mature in a vacuum of course. The ideas has been around for a while. One<br />
really needs look no further than the teachings of Jesus to find instruction, and his life is<br />
an example of nonviolent resistance extraordinaire. The early followers of Christ resisted<br />
the Roman Empire nonviolently. Saint Francis of Assisi lived the way of nonviolence in<br />
his life. Henry David Thoreau wrote his now famous ‘Civil Disobedience’. (My copy still<br />
has my father’s marks in pen around: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is,<br />
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”) Tolstoy’s writings spread the idea around the<br />
globe and they were later picked up by a young Mohandas K. Gandhi who employed them<br />
to free his native India from British rule. Members of the American Civil Right Movement studied Gandhi’s techniques of nonviolence and employed them in the south against racist tyrants there. <br />
<br />
There are literally hundreds of other examples before 1986, which is the year this<br />
collection opens with a hunger strike and a story of resistance along with the nonviolent struggle in the Philippines against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos. These stories are<br />
about ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary events of those years before,<br />
during and after 1989. <br />
<br />
At the end of the protracted civil war in Nicaragua, in 1990, I went to build houses with Habitat for Humanity in an upcountry village called Jinotega. The end of the war had<br />
been announced. Peace had been achieved. But as is often the case the end of hostilities<br />
does not always coincide neatly with such announcements. In the jungles around<br />
Jinotega there were snakes, jaguars, big spiders, armed Sandinistas, armed Contras, land mines, trip wires and so on. Oh, and it was the rainy season. Pat and Donna, the<br />
supervisors of the building site, never once used the word ‘nonviolence’ to describe<br />
how they conducted themselves in such an environment. I, having spent time in the US Army Infantry, would not have understood if they had. When soldiers in olive drab<br />
uniforms that lacked any kind of insignia or identification swept cautiously through the village armed and dangerous, I felt completely at a loss. Such men can do what they want. </div>
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In spite of the dangers, this young couple came and went as they pleased in their old<br />
Toyota Land Cruiser. Once, they said, they had taped the letters ‘TV’ on the windows<br />
of the Toyota. When they were stopped, rebel soldiers assumed they were from American Television and let them go where they wanted without hassle. <br />
<br />
One day I had the opportunity to ride along with them to pick up supplies. By the time we were heading home it was growing dark. I was jammed in the back with the supplies so<br />
I did not at first see why they were slowing down and coming to a stop. When I did see,<br />
I felt the icy sweat of panic. What’s going on?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. Armed men were blocking the road with their vehicles. These men, too, had no insignia<br />
or identification of any kind. When we came to a stop one of the men came around to the driver’s side window and demanded to know who we were. Pat told them. They ordered<br />
us out of the Toyota. The back of my scalp prickled as I clamored out of the back and was line up at gun-point with the others. What should I do? What could I do? </div>
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The moment of death was at hand and yet Pat and Donna addressed the soldiers lovingly<br />
and with a great sense of calm. I could not believe how calm they were, in fact. Here we<br />
were lined up and for all any of us knew we might be dead bodies dragged off into the<br />
jungle in another minute. (Perhaps less than a minute). But they continued to respond<br />
in ways that showed a great deal of courage, and without the need for weapons of any<br />
kind. We were not killed. What did happen, however, was a profound shift in the way<br />
I saw my life. A shift in the way I view courage. A shift in everything. </div>
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When I returned home I began to study everything I could get my hands on about this nonviolent way. I read Gandhi and Jesus (in a new light), and Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. Christian nonviolence is simply agape love put into action. After a time my wife and I swore an oath of nonviolence. <br />
We have not taken that oath lightly.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
<div style="color: #1d2129;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-4257831523097156622019-03-28T15:48:00.000-07:002019-03-28T15:48:08.175-07:00NONVIOLENCE IN REAL LIFE<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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Can the philosophy of nonviolence be lived in real life?</div>
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<br />
We had been following the way of Christian nonviolence for several years now but nothing like this had ever happened before. This was our second short-term mission trip to<br />
Romania. Our work was done. We had gone shopping in the town’s market square,<br />
looking for hand-made doylies to take home with us. We were relaxed and unprepared for anything unusual. That’s when the unexpected happens, isn’t it – when we are least<br />
prepared for it? Perhaps that in itself is fair warning for us – to always be prepared. In Christianity there are no innocent bystanders. For us, the way of nonviolence answers the basic dilemma underlying our Christian faith, ‘how do we fight evil without becoming evil ourselves?’ It had held us in good stead until now, but every situation is different. <br />
<br />
Once, at the soup kitchen we served in, a burly biker dude came through the door looking<br />
for a fight. I may have looked like someone he hated, or perhaps he had heard me sermonizing about the love of Christ once too often. In any case, he came straight over and took a swing at my face. Thank goodness for the training in boxing my father had given me in years gone by. I was able to sway back and deflect the energy from the blow. Before he could hit me again for real this time, I took a moment to explain how the love of Christ is<br />
free to us all. How he was included in this magnificent all-encompassing love. The next thing I knew, and I truly don’t know how it happened, he was in my arms sobbing and<br />
telling a tale from his miserable life. </div>
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When he was a kid, he said, he and his brother were racing down a hill in New Mexico. At<br />
the bottom of the hill they leapt over an irrigation ditch and onto a dirt road. A passing<br />
truck struck his brother and killed him. Later, his father told him that the truck had killed the wrong brother. He had been living with that burden his whole life. Do you see how things would have turned out differently if I had chosen to strike back at him at the outset? We never could have gotten to the truth of the matter. We could never have broken<br />
through all the pain and hurt of a lifetime knowing that he was the wrong brother. It was<br />
he who should have died. Over the years we have learned the ways of nonviolence in<br />
real-life situations and confrontations – the only place that truly counts. <br />
<br />
But, as I’ve said, every situation is different and there is no guarantee I will be up to the<br />
task next time. I might have considered that if there had been time there in Romania on<br />
that bright afternoon in the market square in downtown Arad. As with all market centers everywhere there was a wide array of stalls with colorful goods presented, covered with<br />
bits of canvas swaying gently in the breeze. We met up with the others in our group – our pastor, the Romanian pastor, our host and interpreter Valie; and several others we had<br />
been working with to build a Vacation Bible School program for the church over in<br />
Drautz. Now a commotion broke out nearby. <br />
<br />
Valie tapped me on the shoulder and said, “They have caught a gypsy boy stealing and<br />
now they are going to teach him a lesson.” He pointed and shrugged in that way that reminds us there is nothing that can be done. <br />
<br />
Sure enough, a shop keeper had laid hands on a boy, perhaps ten years old, with such a<br />
firm grip that no matter how much he twisted and fought, he could not get loose. The man pulled the boy’s right arm back and, holding it tight, pushed him face down on the<br />
pavement. He drew his foot back and kicked the boy in his ribs. The boy cried out. <br />
<br />
A crowd gathered. They began to shout and jeer at the boy – a thief – and to shake their<br />
fists at him. Urged on by the crowd, the man drew back to kick him again. What could be done? Is not a simple shrug the only assistance we can offer in such a situation? After all, what good could a foreigner do by stepping in the shake a finger and chastise a crowd<br />
when their blood was up. If I had a gun, perhaps… But others might have guns too, and<br />
what would be the outcome of that? If only others were not so violent! <br />
<br />
Then I felt the Holy Spirit prompting me. I remember stepping over a steel cable to reach<br />
the boy and his tormentor. I raised my hands to show that I did not have a weapon. Upon reaching the boy I sank to my knees beside him and lay my own body down in such a way<br />
as to cover his. I would not allow him to be kicked again. I would rather receive a kick<br />
myself – several kicks – than allow a ten year old boy to be kicked to death before my eyes. In a nearly theatrical pause everything stopped. The shop keeper did not kick me. The<br />
crowd seemed to draw a sudden startled breath. At that moment I reached up and stroked the man’s wrist with my hand. Shocked as if by an electrical bolt, he let go of the boy’s arm and stepped back. I scooped the boy into my arms and stood up. Then I saw the boy’s mother pushing through the crowd, screaming gypsy curses at everyone nearby. When she got to<br />
me I handed the boy over to her. Without a word or a nod of recognition she was gone. <br />
The crowd dispersed. I returned to our group. Valie gave me an odd look. “People who<br />
get mixed up in gypsy business can get knifed.” </div>
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Well, sure. Lots of things can happen to us whether we are armed or not. I choose to<br />
believe that I am always armed when I travel. I am armed with God’s power and<br />
protection. I am not alone in this belief. Many of the people in these stories found such power when they stood up for the truth in the face of overwhelming evil. That’s why I<br />
am so excited to tell them to you.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="color: red;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-40786138419412136442019-03-28T15:47:00.002-07:002019-03-28T15:47:51.195-07:00SUFFERING IN NONVIOLENCE<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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This essay gives examples about how nonviolence works.</div>
<br />
<br />
“The minute you conquer the fear of death, at that moment you are free. I submit to you<br />
that if a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” <br />
-Martin Luther King Jr. </div>
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In his autobiography ‘Walking With the Wind’ John Lewis, a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, writes: ‘Suffering can be nothing more than a sad and sorry thing without the presence on the part of the sufferer of a graceful heart, an accepting and open heart, a<br />
heart that holds no malice toward the inflictors of his or her suffering. <br />
<br />
'This is a difficult concept to understand, and it is even more difficult to internalize, but it<br />
has everything to do with the way of nonviolence. We are talking about love here. Not romantic love. Not the love of one individual for another. Not loving something that is<br />
lovely to you. This is a broader, deeper, more all-encompassing love. It is a love that<br />
accepts and embraces the hateful and the hurtful. It is a love that recognizes the spark<br />
of the divine in each of us, even in those who would raise their hand against us, those we might call our enemy. This sense of love realizes that emotions of the moment and constantly shifting circumstances can cloud that divine spark. Pain, ugliness and fear can cover it over, turning a person toward anger and hate. It is the ability to see through those layers of ugliness, to see further into a person than perhaps that person can see into<br />
himself that is essential to the practice of nonviolence.’ <br />
<br />
‘One method of practicing this approach, when faced with a hateful, angry, aggressive,<br />
even despicable person, is to imagine that person, actually visualize him or her – as an<br />
infant, as a baby. If you can see this full-grown attacker who faces you as the pure,<br />
innocent child that he or she once was – that we all once were – it is not hard to find compassion in your heart. It is not hard to find forgiveness. This is the essence of the nonviolent way of life – the capacity to forgive. When you can truly understand and feel, even as a person is cursing you to your face, even as he is spitting on you, or pushing a lit cigarette into your neck, or beating you with a truncheon – if you can understand and feel even in the midst of those critical and often physically painful moments that your attacker<br />
is as much a victim as you are, that he is a victim of the forces that have shaped and fed his anger and fury, then you are well on your way to the nonviolent life.’ <br />
<br />
And don’t the same problems, choices, concerns, confront us today as we go about our daily lives? Agape love is the kind of love that loves in spite of everything else. It loves because<br />
it chooses to love. We love others because, like us, they are God’s children. God’s creation. <br />
<br />
There is no other way to live if we are to find our way through the dilemma that faces all Christians: How do we fight evil without becoming evil ourselves? I hope you will join<br />
Nancy and I in a commitment to live nonviolently today and every day.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-82506406651043631392019-03-28T15:47:00.001-07:002019-03-28T15:47:24.333-07:00WE CANNOT LET THIS CONTINUE<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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The importance of nonviolence:</div>
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<br />
In his autobiography ‘Walking With The Wind’ John Lewis, a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, writes: ‘The path that remains to lead us to the Beloved Community is no<br />
longer racial alone. It is one, I believe, marked by the differences, divisions and canyons created by class. There hasn’t been a time in America – certainly not since World War II – that the classes have been pushed as far apart as they are today, with vast numbers of poor<br />
at one end, a small number of wealthy at the other and a middle class in danger of<br />
completely disappearing as most of it is pushed toward the lower end of the spectrum. </div>
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Measurements of economic well-being are misleading. The overall economy might be healthy, but where is most of that wealth going? Vastly and disproportionately, it is<br />
funneled to the relatively few at the top. America’s total wealth, jobs and productivity<br />
might be growing, but the benefits are being enjoyed primarily by a small minority.’ That<br />
is the minority of wealthy people today we call the 1%. They enjoy wild luxuries while<br />
others labor multiple low-paying jobs and live from paycheck to paycheck – only one<br />
step away from homelessness and poverty. </div>
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Lewis says “We cannot let this continue.” How much more that call should be taken to<br />
heart today. We see more and more every day that we have two separate and unequal societies – one moving ever upward while the other slips further and further behind. He suggests that we take matters into our own hands. That we find a way of redistributing<br />
the resources that are available to us. We must look past those things that divide us, and<br />
find those areas that unite us. A united people, as we have seen over and over again in the study of nonviolent revolutions, cannot be stopped.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
<div style="color: #1d2129;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-40726989336515340002019-03-28T15:47:00.000-07:002019-03-28T15:47:01.088-07:00PEACE IS THE WAY<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(29, 33, 41); color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and many others have chosen to live the way of </div>
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nonviolence in history. This essay provides quotes and examples from their lives.</div>
<br />
<br />
In a previous writing I quoted Martin Luther King Jr. “Peace is not merely a distant goal<br />
we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.” The more we witness the violence<br />
and chaos of the world around us, the more I know this to be true. Peaceful ends cannot<br />
be achieved by violent means. An apple tree cannot bear peaches. If we are going to attain true peace in this world, we must stamp out the roots of violence in our own hearts. I<br />
believe the stories in this collection and the events which inspired them have proven the power of the nonviolent way once for all. <br />
<br />
I am encouraged to see the way of nonviolence progressing slowly but surely in history. At one time these ideas were limited and choice – Jesus, St. Francis, Tolstoy, Thoreau, and a handful of others. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus told us. “Turn the other cheek. Go the extra mile. Give of your cloak as well as your tunic.” “Love your enemies.” Yet<br />
even today not many seem to heed these words. <br />
<br />
“Happy those who endure in peace,” St. Francis of Assisi wrote in his ‘The Canticle of<br />
Brother Sun’, and yet we still do not live in peace. <br />
<br />
‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’, Tolstoy wrote. And yet people continue to turn their faces to the heavens for some (further) divine instruction. <br />
<br />
“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable,” Thoreau wrote in his essay ‘Civil Disobedience.’ <br />
<br />
But then came Gandhi. Mohandas K. Gandhi. Mahatma he was later called. Great Soul. Quite simply he took the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and put them into practice to overthrow the long-standing oppressive rule of the British Empire and to bring freedom<br />
to India. “The British,” he said, “want us to put the struggle on the plane of machine guns where they have all the weapons and we do not. Our only assurance of beating them is putting the struggle on the plane where we have the weapons and they have not.” <br />
<br />
The weapons he spoke of were the weapons of nonviolence. His weapons were just those handed down to us by Jesus: Love your neighbor as yourself. Turn the other cheek. Give<br />
also your cloak. Go the extra mile. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute<br />
you…. Like a commanding general Gandhi employed those weapons masterfully and in<br />
the end he and his followers won their independence and managed to keep the British as their friends. <br />
<br />
Martin Luther King Jr. studied the methods of Gandhi and came to agree with them. He recognized these ‘weapons’ as the principles of the Sermon on the Mount put into action. Today we accept the Civil Rights Movement as a fait accompli – something that happened<br />
in ancient history almost – but what would it have looked like if American blacks had<br />
chosen to enter into armed struggle against their oppressors? How many could have been killed on both sides? And how different our history would read now! “Hatred and<br />
bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote. “Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it,” he wrote. And, “We affirm the philosophical and religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian<br />
tradition seeks a social order of justice permeated by love.” <br />
<br />
All change causes pain. Suffering. We can either inflict that pain and suffering upon<br />
others, or we can choose to endure it ourselves. Beginning with the Montgomery bus<br />
boycott and continuing on through to the campaign for ‘Beloved Community’, the way of nonviolence proved itself again and again by accepting unearned suffering and finding the redemptive power of enduring pain without ever inflicting it upon others. These strategies and tactics were nothing new, but they were being employed in new ways. Nonviolence<br />
may not yet be the first choice for all the struggles in the world – (what would we do with<br />
all those armies and weapons?) – but it is increasingly becoming a choice for common<br />
people who do not have or choose not to use weapons of violence. <br />
<br />
Besides those movements written about in this collection and those mentioned above, nonviolence was employed by Denmark and the Netherlands to resist the Nazis in World<br />
War II. In El Salvador in 1944 to overthrow the dictator General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. In Chile’s campaign to end the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In<br />
South Africa in the people’s resistance against Apartheid. In Russia. In China. In<br />
Mongolia. And more recently nonviolence has been employed to a greater or lesser degree<br />
in the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Western Sahara. <br />
<br />
According to theologian and professor Walter Wink in his ‘The Powers That Be’ (1998),<br />
“In 1989 alone, thirteen nations comprising 1.7 billion people – over thirty-two percent<br />
of humanity – experienced nonviolent revolutions… If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in this century, (the 20th century), the figure reaches almost 3 billion – a staggering sixty-four percent of humanity!” </div>
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I hope you will enjoy the stories in ‘Sacred Are The Brave’ and it is my hope that in some small way you might have become convinced to look further into this way of nonviolence. <br />
If I can advance the way of nonviolence only one inch in my lifetime I will count my life<br />
as having been worth living.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-13044858348825043352019-03-28T15:46:00.001-07:002019-03-28T15:46:29.415-07:00AN EXCERPT FROM 'HUNGER STRIKE'<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: georgia, serif; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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Upon leaving the courtroom, with every step he took, Anton had the odd feeling that he</div>
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was participating in his own execution. Why didn’t he run? Why didn’t he fight them? </div>
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Why didn’t he at least scream his displeasure with his fate in this world? Why? Because</div>
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they might shoot him? That was laughable. Because he might step on a land mine? It was absurd not to do something. Anything. To let himself know he was still alive. To let</div>
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others know he was still somebody. A human being! </div>
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But he did not shout or rant or run or fight. Instead he went along like all the others. He awoke in the morning at reveille. He followed the others to formation, to breakfast chow,<br />
to work detail, to evening chow, and so on; plodding along like he was already among the dead. One of the prisoners did escape. It happened this way: While on work detail out in<br />
the forest two days after their sentencing – while chopping trees – he turned on one of the guards suddenly and planted an axe in his chest. The attack was so sudden and so unexpected and so vicious that no one quite knew what to do. The prisoner ran like a wild man up the path through the trees and then veered off into the cover of the undergrowth. Right into the nettles, Anton remembered thinking. The other guards were out of position, and so were slow to respond. </div>
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Anton himself could recall no noise during the incident – his fellow prisoner did not<br />
scream any invectives or pronounce his demands for freedom. He simply turned in mid stroke and instead of the blade biting into the trunk of the tree, it felled the guard. The<br />
guard did not make any noise either. Not that he could recall. Perhaps the force of the<br />
blow was so great that he could not utter a sound. His eyes bugged out in surprise. He stumbled back and went to his knees and knelt there for some moments waiting for death<br />
to overtake him. At last it did overtake him and he fell forward onto his face. The guards formed up quickly, once they had overcome the initial shock of the attack. (“My God,<br />
boys, that could have been any one of us”). </div>
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A fire-team of three formed up while the rest stayed to oversee the remainder of the prisoners. “Get back to work, you worms. Don’t stand around gawking.” Their fingers<br />
were tense on the triggers of their rifles. They were ready for anything now. </div>
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The escapee himself, a man named Gleb, must have been running like a mad man. After going back to work, during which time the officers had time to cover the body of their<br />
fallen comrade, and after a report had been drafted, they all heard shooting in the far distance. At first the shots resounded sporadically through the distant forest. Then there was an intense short burst of automatic fire, followed by a deep silence. It was nearly knocking-off time when the guards made their way back, dragging the dead man Gleb between them – hauling his body along by the shoulders of his shirt. They dropped him unceremoniously in a heap beside the dead guard. </div>
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Poor Gleb. Anton looked at the dead body of Gleb. Poor Gleb? How could he be<br />
considered poor? At least he had done something, hadn’t he? He wasn’t going to wait around any longer holding still for someone to put a rope around his neck. That evening<br />
in the barracks before lights out the prisoners were subdued. There was none of the usual chatter. At last their unkempt old squad leader beat his chest a single stroke with his fist<br />
and said, “Why did he do it?” No one responded. At long last Anton said, “He just wanted<br />
to live.” “Everyone wants to live… But… What are we supposed to do?” </div>
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Again there was a long silence. Everyone was considering the question. “We’ve all faced death,” another man offered. “We’ve all been soldiers. We know how to die. But it’s the knowing that we are going to die; that’s what’s killing us. This knowing that we are not<br />
able to do a thing about it. One day soon they’re going to trot us out there and…” He<br />
didn’t finish his thought. That was it. They were living under the sentence of death. They were going to die; and soon. Anton reached up and touched his neck with his hand. The wind was going to be choked out of him, or the bones in his neck were going to break. One way or the other, he was facing the end of his life. There was no hope in a sentence of<br />
death. When you are a soldier… When you are fighting. Then there is always some<br />
element of hope. You are not going to be the one to die. Not today. Your comrades can<br />
be falling left and right around you, gushing blood and screaming for their mothers, but<br />
you are not going to get a scratch. No. Not today. You may die another day. But today it<br />
is impossible. Today you are invincible. </div>
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But with the sentence of death hanging over you, there is no hope. There is no doubt that you are going to die. They are going to march you out of here one day soon. You are going to form up out there as you always form up for the roll call. But it’s going to be your last roll call ever. You’re going to make your last trip to the slop buckets. Your last trip over to the mess hall. And each step you take is leading you on and on; one step closer to the noose that is going to end your life, even as each step now was bringing them all closer to that fateful moment. </div>
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Anton couldn’t stop thinking about it. “What are we supposed to do?” his squad leader<br />
asked one more time with a tone of futility. Then they all gave up and turned in. It was<br />
lights out and they rolled into their bunks; each with his own thoughts. Each heard, in<br />
his own special way, the creaking of the bedding under him and the groaning of the<br />
wooden supports of the bunk, and the beating of his own heart in his own ears. “What<br />
are we supposed to do?” It was the last thought Anton had before sleep over-took him.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-37593601982912273752019-03-28T15:46:00.000-07:002019-03-28T15:46:07.372-07:00EXCERPT FROM 'IN THE TIME OF THE DICTATOR'<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: georgia, serif; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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The truck was rolling along through the neighborhoods to the east of the train station. We were going in the direction of Zutsova, a town I had not seen in several years. I</div>
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remembered it as a gutsy, lively little farm village. Every now and then the truck jounced</div>
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up and down as it plowed through bomb craters. Someone moaned each time. There was</div>
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a row of bleak gray houses, and then the countryside began to open up. We were out of the city. </div>
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The fields had been left un-harvested. They were green and grassy where they should have been cut over and turning brown by now. Here and there were burned-out farm houses. Their inhabitant were nowhere in evidence. I had an uneasy feeling regarding them. </div>
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After a time we arrived at a detention camp that was hidden in a grove of trees. There were a few wooden buildings and an old barn surrounded by barbed wire topped with rolls of<br />
razor wire, and guard platforms were situated every hundred feet. The truck stopped at<br />
the gate and then was waved on through. </div>
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As we passed into captivity I felt an immense sense of aloneness and emptiness. We were rushed out of the back of the truck when it came to a stop and marched through the mud<br />
of the trampled ground between the buildings. I was installed in the first building. The others were prodded along to the next. “Welcome to hell,” a man with no teeth said in greeting as I entered through the door. (He was our squad leader, though I did not know<br />
it then). “Even Dante couldn’t have dreamed this place up.” </div>
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I was pointed along to a straw-filled mattress at the end of the row of beds. “Don’t get<br />
used to the good life in here, though,” the same man continued. “They’ll shoot us<br />
whenever they get the extra ammunition.” His laugh was as gaunt as his look. “Maybe<br />
they’ll find some other way to do it,” another man said. “How about a bayonet,” a third<br />
said, lustily throwing his arms forward in a stabbing motion. </div>
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The gaunt man lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and exhaled with satisfaction. “By God, I have a deep love of my life.” </div>
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“Have you been here long?” I asked him. </div>
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“Are you kidding? I’ve been here since the first days of the war.” I lay down on the flat mattress. I took off my jacket and balled it up to make a pillow. Then I curled up to sleep. Beside me was a wash stand with a metal basin on it. Everything smelled of disinfectant. “They may want to examine you soon,” the toothless on called over to me. “Examine me?” </div>
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“Interrogation,” he said flatly. </div>
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“At least I’ll have some sleep first.” </div>
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He shrugged. “You don’t need sleep. You just need to tell them what they want to know.” </div>
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I was afraid to close my eyes but before I knew what was going on someone was kicking<br />
the bottom of my boots and I came up out of a deep sleep. I heaved up on one elbow and looked at the man. The guard kicked at me again. I stood up. It was late afternoon. The guard’s face was expressionless. So were his eyes. He had a fat face. “Is there something wrong with you?” the guard shouted. </div>
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“I’m not the one who’s shouting,” I replied. </div>
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The guard shoved me in the chest and I staggered back in spite of myself. “I’ll shoot you.” <br />
He actually pulled his pistol, though he did not aim it. </div>
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“Just as you like.” </div>
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The guard gave a severe look. Then he growled, “You’d better watch yourself. You don’t sleep during the day around here.” With that he turned and walked out of the building. </div>
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“I thought you were a dead man,” the hollow-mouthed one said. “A guard here can blow<br />
your head off without so much as an ‘excuse me’.” </div>
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I felt strangely quiet. “Tell me about this place,” I said at last. </div>
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“There’s not much to tell. They have camps like this one all over the countryside. We’re<br />
the lucky ones though, I guess. Plenty of others never made it to a camp at all.” </div>
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“Has it been bad, out here in the country? I’ve been trapped in the city for the longest<br />
time.” </div>
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“Good Lord yes, it has been bad. The men that come here tell stories about every kind of atrocity. There’s a town near here – the town of Zutsova…” </div>
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“I know that town.” </div>
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“It is no more,” the old prisoner said. “They slaughtered every man, woman and child.” </div>
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“Well, they’d better kill us too,” another prisoner said. He spat sharply at the floor. </div>
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“Well, they’re not going to try to rehabilitate us,” the old man said with a hoarse laugh. <br />
He handed a cigarette along to another man, who took it greedily. Turning back to me he said, “There’s going to be a mass trial in a few days. Then we’ll be into the mass graves<br />
along with everyone else.” </div>
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So, it was to be death after all. I felt remote from the reality of it. I had been through so much now that execution did not seem likely. The thought of being lined up with the<br />
others on the lip of an excavation and then mowed down by machine gun fire did not seem like a fitting end to the kind of life I had led. Perhaps I would only be wounded and they would fill in the hole with me still alive. Then the dirt would be in my face and I would breathe it until there was nothing left to breathe. Then I would slowly suffocate, clawing<br />
at the unyielding earth, to pay the penalty for my horrid life, and for having let my brother die. That seemed a much more likely end.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-38769326158592000572019-03-28T15:45:00.001-07:002019-03-28T15:45:41.265-07:00EXCERPT FROM 'IMELDA'S SHOES'<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: georgia, serif; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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Ray seemed a little odd for a reporter. He was no Hunter Thompson. Not by any means. (He was not unusual in that way). But he didn’t quite fit in among the other reporters at</div>
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the Milwaukee Citizen either. While they were a liberal bunch (according to the city’s conservatives), they still expected solid stories written in a solid style by solid reporters. </div>
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Ray just didn’t seem all that solid. He didn’t look solid. He was thin and freckled – a smattering of red dots across forehead, nose and cheeks – and bandy with bowed legs and</div>
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a head start to baldness up top. (A near pun). His eyes were slightly wild in their aspect</div>
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and were rimmed with red and seemed a little watery all the time and, well, unstable. Whenever he saw someone he knew he gave an animated two thumbs up and smiled</div>
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widely and said, Hey, hey.” He had a way of putting people off – especially before coffee</div>
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in the morning. </div>
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Women didn’t go for Ray much. He kind of spooked them. Especially with his jittery eyes. He was just an ordinary guy – not one of those dashing fellows from books or the movies. <br />
He went about his work and then relaxed at home (an apartment) in the evenings and very seldom ventured past the mall or the grocery store. He let his work take him on whatever adventures there were to be had in his week, and there were precious few of them. Still, he liked his life just as it was. He was comfortable. Content. There was no reason to change anything. He had a heart of gold – that’s the one thing that really stood out about him. <br />
“He’s got a heart of gold that guy,” people said. Or, “He’ll give you the shirt off his back.” That quality was attractive to some women but he didn’t have much luck in that regard. </div>
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He was married once but she ran off with a big lumberjack type from the U.P. They were<br />
up around Iron Mountain somewhere but Ray didn’t chase after them. If that’s where she was going to be happy, he was glad for her. </div>
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He had another girl for a time. Harper. She was named for the author Harper Lee. She<br />
was from some place down south and she had a sweet sugary southern way about her. She wasn’t a real doll but that didn’t stop the men whistling after her when she walked by. “How’s your mockingbird honey? Is he alright today?” they’d ask in a fake southern accent. She didn’t mind, really. But the whole thing did wear thin after a spell. </div>
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Ray and Harper weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend exactly, though they weren’t exactly Clark Kent and Lois Lane either. They were the two odd singles that were always left standing together with glasses of punch in their hands at office parties. Their conversations would have been painful to follow if anyone would have cared enough to follow. She liked it, though, that he never whistled or asked after her mockingbird. </div>
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One winter Ray was up north of Green Bay tracking down a story about a poaching ring<br />
when the car in front of him drove straight into a herd of whitetail deer and slammed into one of them. The car sped off but Ray pulled over. The poor thing wasn’t dead. A yearling<br />
by the look of her. She was shaking with fear and shock and was trying to raise herself. All she could manage was to lift her head up from the snow. Ray looked into her big eyes and felt so terrible he thought he might retch. At last the poor creature died and he was<br />
reminded how precious life is. He felt a little foolish shedding tears over that deer with<br />
his camera dangling from its cord around his neck. </div>
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He always had that camera with him and he took no end of ribbing about it. None of the other reporters carried a camera. There were cameramen for that. “I like taking pictures,” Ray offered. “Always have.” They still made fun of him.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-14308938414342925102019-03-28T15:45:00.000-07:002019-03-28T15:45:18.788-07:00AN EXCERPT FROM: JOURNAL ENTRIES - CZECHOSLOVAKIA<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: georgia, serif; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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(The dates have been corrected to reflect actual events – unknown at the time they were recorded.) April – 1989: Something extraordinary happened today! No, a dog did not</div>
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speak as in Gogol’s ‘Madman’. That would be a different kind of extraordinary happening, wouldn’t it? I mean, I too would have to be mad to have experienced such an extraordinary happening. No, my extraordinary happening was of the ordinary type (I hope). What has happened right here in my quite ordinary Prague flat is that I have come to understand</div>
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that those of us who are free, are free! We are free indeed. We are free already. And</div>
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because of our choice to be free, freedom is breaking out in many places. </div>
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Take Poland, for instance. We have not read it in our newspapers today. Our newspapers<br />
are not free. But we have heard it just the same. We have heard it on the wind. We have heard the cry of freedom. Of course Poland has been struggling with their communist overlords for two decades. But today is a landmark day. Solidarity has once again been legalized. They will soon be allowed to participate in parliamentary elections. And even if they were not elected, they have become the voice of the people. Not because the communists have allowed it, but because they have already been the voice of the people<br />
for a long time. Think of it. Free and open trade unions in Poland. Free and open<br />
elections to follow. The people there are free already. April – 1989: </div>
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We are involved in a mass metamorphosis. I’m sure Franz Kafka would approve of this reverse metaphor: Gregor Samsa is awaking from his unsettled dreams to find that he is<br />
no longer a vermin of monstrous proportions. He (we) are emerging to find ourselves<br />
human again! “Thank you. Thank you Max Brod for not burning those remaining manuscripts upon Kafka’s death. We would have been left without ‘The Trial’, ‘The Castel’, and ‘Amerika’. How could we have made do without those?) </div>
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But we have made it and my brain feels as if it might explode with all the possibilities and with so many new ideas. Me, a woman, and a student, and a free thinker of great ideas. <br />
One must be free to have thought such thoughts. I am free! April – 1989: Gorbachev (Mikhail Gorbachev – President of the Soviet Union) continues to proclaim the need for Glasnost or openness, and for Perestroika (a restructuring of the economy), but so far<br />
these stout dictators including our own Czech Gusták and that horrible man Nicolae Ceauşescu are stubbornly holding out. I wonder how long they can resist the will of the people? (The people. That includes even me – Milena Svoboda.) </div>
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In China, Hu Yaobang died on the 15th. Now, for his funeral a million people have<br />
gathered in a place called Tiananmen Square. (Can that figure possibly be accurate? <br />
I hope it is.) They too are calling for reform. For freedom. </div>
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When did I first learn of Hu Yaobang and how? Through friends, I suppose. My circle of friends has grown immensely since becoming politically active in the pro-democracy movement. He was the pro-democracy, reform-minded head of the Communist Party in China when he was forced to resign because of his views. Then, this year he died of a<br />
heart attack. People didn’t like the government response to his legacy, and did not like<br />
the slow funeral arrangements. They protested, and how those protests have spread.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-18862133921200672702019-03-28T15:44:00.003-07:002019-03-28T15:44:59.732-07:00AN EXCERPT FROM: FREEDOM, INDEPENDENCE<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: georgia, serif; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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I had a rifle slung under my shoulder. One of the others brought an old revolver. Ilka</div>
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Vass, it was. We were going to fight or die. Can this young American understand about a seventeen-year old girl – me Giza Molnár – with a rifle? Can he understand about Ilka</div>
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Vass with her father’s revolver? There is an old photograph of me from that day. I have a determined look on my face. Later, I’m quite sure, that look had changed to one of pain. </div>
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But that day I was determined and in high spirits. It was time for those Russians to go.</div>
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It was time for the communists to listen to the will of the people. </div>
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Later that day we remembered about Pista Torma. He was an agent for the secret police<br />
who lived not far from our home. “Do you think he would be at home?” Ilka asked us. <br />
“Who knows?” Boriska replied with a shrug. By this time it was late afternoon. The angry mobs had driven the police from the scene and the few soldiers that had been about were gone. Many of the soldiers, good Hungarian boys, had deserted their posts and joined in<br />
the revolution. Pista Torma might just be hiding in his living room. “Let’s go find out,”<br />
Ilka demanded, shaking her revolver like a true revolutionary. </div>
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We all agreed. We had been tripping around the streets all day without seeing much action. By the time we ventured out the fighting was nearly over. But if we could find old Pista… <br />
His wife came to the door. A heavy woman with a barbarous face. She looked worn from worry. “What do you want?” she asked abruptly. Then Ilka waved her pistol under her<br />
nose and Pista’s wife blanched white. “Where is your husband?” </div>
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“He’s not here.” </div>
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“You won’t mind if we check that out?” Ilka always had been bold, but now the pistol made her brazen. She pushed past the wife and we entered the front room of the house. No one seemed to be about. </div>
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“What do you want here?” Pista’s wife asked crossly. She moved to block the door to the bedroom. She inadvertently tipped us off that way. </div>
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Ilka always had an old Hungarian saying on her lips. She said she learned them from her grandfather. “The fish stinks from the head,” she shouted, still waving the pistol around. “We’re looking for a smelly fish head.” </div>
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Ilka urged Boriska over to the heavy wooden wardrobe against the bedroom wall next to<br />
the window. With a theatrical flourish Boriska flung the door open. There was old Pista Torma huddled inside behind his wife’s dresses. None of us know what to say. We hadn’t really expected him to be there. “What do you girls want?” Pista asked, stepping out of<br />
the wardrobe. </div>
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“Nothing,” Ilka replied. </div>
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“Then get out of my house.” He laughed shortly. “What did you girls think you were going<br />
to do anyway?” </div>
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“Lots of geese can conquer the pigs,” Ilka shouted. We had never seen her so agitated<br />
before. Then she raised her revolver and shot the man dead. That look of surprise on his mug before he fell face down on the hardwood floor will always be with me. </div>
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“What have you done?” Pista’s wife screeched. “What have you done?” She rushed to her husband. I suppose she loved him. As she hugged him for the last time we ran out of the house. </div>
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Now I had blood on my hands and this American boy wants to know was it worth it? He<br />
has come to see a spectacle here today, but he can’t see the look on old Pista’s face before<br />
he drew his last breath. Actually, this American looks somewhat like Pista Torma. Clean<br />
cut. Short brown hair. A look in the eye like he will live forever. </div>
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Others went out looking for secret police that day. You could tell them by their regulation light-colored shoes. Many were hanged from lampposts. That day the Soviets placed tanks in front of the Parliament building to protect party members from attack. At last revolutionaries seized the radio station and we began to broadcast our demands. Others went to take Szabad Nép, the communist newspaper. They were fired upon by AVH and a skirmish followed. At last we had the newspaper. Things were going well for us.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-84867119776922783472019-03-28T15:44:00.002-07:002019-03-28T15:44:33.105-07:00AN EXCERPT FROM: A MOST CURIOUS ACTIVITY<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: georgia, serif; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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Dear Mr. Sanderson, </div>
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It is with sincere gratitude that I will relate to you some of the events of my life here in<br />
Berlin. Quite by accident, (or was it fate?), my fiancé went shopping in the western sector<br />
of our city on Saturday the 12th of August, in the year 1961. The hour grew late so she decided to spend the night at her sister’s house. She sometimes did this and I gave it not a thought. May I take a moment to describe my fiancé – my liebchen – to you? Her hair<br />
was dark and short and it smelled vaguely of a peeled green stick. It was, perhaps, her shampoo. I do not know. She was quite athletic, having been a gymnast in school, so she<br />
was firm to the touch and she vibrated with life like a wind-up toy of some sort. Her eyes, too, were vibrant; blue in color. Her lips were drawn close together into a permanent pout which in her case was not an unfortunate look, but one that seemed quite natural for her<br />
face. In a group photograph with her classmates she stands right out. There is no<br />
mistaking her for another. </div>
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That night, at midnight, there began in the heart of our city a most curious activity. After<br />
the war our country was divided between the Soviets in the east – that which later became known as the Warsaw Pact – and the other allies in the west. Our city was divided between the Soviet sector; and the western sector under the British, French and you Americans. It lent a sort of schizophrenic aspect to our lives. In those years before 1961 three and a half million people fled from the east to the west. Life under the communists was not the best. <br />
I would have emigrated myself if it had not been for the fact that my mother was ailing, and in need of care. We lived alone in our East Berlin flat; my father had been killed in the war. </div>
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How is it that on that very night at midnight the authorities decided to divide our city with<br />
a wall; not a wall to keep enemy hoards out, but to keep their own people in? Die Mauer,<br />
as it came to be called. The Wall. Trucks filled with men and construction materials<br />
arrived up and down the line. Concrete was laid. Wooden structures were erected. <br />
Barbed wire was installed. In one night all 77 East/West crossings were blocked and<br />
manned with armed soldiers. In that one night the hole in the ‘Iron Curtain’ as Winston Churchill called it – the hole that was Berlin – was plugged. I would not be allowed out,<br />
and my fiancé Gerta Nagel would not be allowed back in. The East German authorities<br />
called it the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall. The Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. Their<br />
intention was to stop the drain of workers and technicians and professional people moving<br />
to the west. After all, what kind of country would the German Democratic Republic be without any people in it? The 97 mile wall around Berlin was only the last part of what had become a 559 mile border fence with guard towers, obstacles, dogs, armed patrols, an open strip ‘kill zone’, mine fields, antitank ditches, pillboxes, and bunkers that extended from<br />
the Bay of Lübeck on the north to the Czech border on the south. </div>
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I was frantic, Mr. Sanderson, as you can imagine. When I considered my choices – that of leaving my poor mother behind to suffer alone, or to live without my beautiful fiancé – I<br />
was torn in half just like my city. My mother told me I should go. “I am an old woman now and my life is useless. You should go and live the future for me.” The Wall was not yet solid. People were still making their way across. On the 15th of August a border policeman<br />
simply abandoned his post and escaped across the wire. But I could not conceive of such a plan. Though I missed my Gerta greatly, I absolutely could not bring myself to leave my mother behind. My beloved fiancé, also, would have urged me to stay with my mother,<br />
I am certain of it. </div>
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In the meantime people kept making their escapes hidden in cars or ramming the barriers with trucks, or slipping through on foot; and the wall became firmer with each passing day. Houses near the border were torn down. Sewer lines were walled off. Every time someone escaped the authorities countered it by filling the gap behind them. I felt as if there was a constriction round my chest growing tighter and tighter. Some days I felt I could not even breathe. </div>
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In October there occurred a stand-off between American tanks and Soviet tanks at the crossing called Checkpoint Charlie. For hours the tanks held their positions on either side<br />
of the border while the rest of us held our collective breath. What we all knew was that one false move; one accidental round fired, and we were going to be enmeshed in the third world war. But in a way it was even worse when the tanks backed away from the border. Now we knew with all certainty that we were walled in, and that the West could do nothing to liberate us.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a></div>
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<span style="color: red;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span><span style="color: #1d2129;"> </span></div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-7085716927204329462019-03-28T15:44:00.001-07:002019-03-28T15:44:14.038-07:00AN EXCERPT FROM: SOLIDARNOSC<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; font-family: georgia, serif; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
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In other times Poland has been called the Christ of nations. Our blood is redemptive.<br />
<br />
And, lying as we do between Germany and Russia we have had ample opportunity to shed plenty of it. We are not a fool for either one. “A German may be a good fellow,” my grandfather used to say, “but it is best to hang him just the same.” <br />
<br />
Of course we are not that fond of the Russians either. They liberated us from the Nazis<br />
at the end of World War II and we were handed over to them at Yalta like a cut of meat<br />
at the butcher’s. But who is going to liberate us from the Russians? <br />
<br />
Well, now that is a story I am prepared to tell. My father was twenty-eight years old in 1970. I was ten. He was a welder, just like me. Or, rather, I am a welder just like he was. (He would have been quick to point out that he was the Papa, and I was following in his steps). He worked at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. I worked at the same shipyard ten years later, and still do today. “Same. Same. Everything the same,” he would have said. <br />
<br />
No one wanted the communists, but after the way they moved in with the power of the Soviet military behind them and set up shop in our country. We became part of the Warsaw Pact. My father said he didn’t remember making a pact with anyone. <br />
<br />
In 1952 they renamed us the ‘Polish People’s Republic’. That was a joke too. We had<br />
always been a people’s republic if that meant that we cared about one another and lived in cooperation with one another. We Polish have always cooperated together and we didn’t need any communist to tell us how to do it. We have always allowed for the sharing of the best soil and have always tended our vegetable gardens so we have enough for ourselves<br />
and enough to share with our neighbors. It was hard to see just how the communists cared for the people. They forced the peasants off their land onto huge collectives, and pushed many people into the industrial areas where workers were needed. My own family had been part of that huge migration after the war when Poland was divided up – ceding some land<br />
on the east to the Russians, and claiming some land on the west from the Germans. Gdansk was just such a city. It was a German city ruined by the Russian advance and my family<br />
was one of those that were expected to put it back together again. It’s not so bad, though. <br />
<br />
We have rebuilt it in the medieval style of the original. We are on the Baltic, so we can go down to the beach on summer days. I have a Russian-made Lada 1300 sedan. My pay gets us through from one month to the next. That is, it did until they changed the rules on us. <br />
We are the workers! We are the ones who are supposed to be calling the shots in this country. (As the saying goes, ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’) <br />
<br />
But I think I am getting ahead of my story here. It was the same in 1970. In that year the government announced that there would be cutbacks in housing and education and health care. All things they had promised would prosper us in those years after the war. There<br />
was going to be a two year wage freeze, they said. The workers were going to have to do<br />
more with less. This was on a Saturday, the twelfth of December – just before Christmas! Karl Marx called religion the opium of the people, but we Poles are still very faithful. We<br />
still attend mass and we still make our pilgrimage to the Black Madonna down in Czestchowa. <br />
<br />
I wonder if our leaders even considered that Christmas would be a bad time to make such<br />
an announcement. My father came home in a rage. “We already spend half my pay on<br />
food,” he shouted. “Now they want the other half. What will we have left to live on?” My mother tried to calm him but his mind was made up. “Some of the workers are talking a strike,” he told her. “If they go out, I’m going with them.” <br />
<br />
Patiently she tried to explain to him that a little pay was better than no pay at all, but when my father’s mind was made up, it was made up. That’s all there was to it. I remember my father’s bulbous nose, his wide fleshy lips, his garrulous laugh like a circus performer. <br />
There was no mistaking my father for any other man, especially on those nights when he came home with too much to drink. He would give anyone anything when he was drinking. “Here, my good friend,” he would say. “Take my watch.” And he would insist over and over again until, at last convinced the friend certainly would not take his watch, he would sadly shove it down deep into the pocket of his work pants and shamble sadly home. <br />
<br />
Of course I did not really understand what my father was living through then. I could not have guessed, then, the immense sense of oppression that was hanging over him under the communist regime. (I was to find all that out on my own, ten years later). On that fateful Monday morning my father had his breakfast of sausage and he drank a little tea with my mother and me in the kitchen. My mother didn’t say anything more about the strike. I<br />
was too sleepy to think that this might be a monumental day in our lives. My father went<br />
out into the cold morning – it must have been five o’clock. He walked up to the streetcar<br />
stop and waited for it to come along. Then he got on the street car and rode to the shipyard. Sure enough, on that morning a strike was being organized.<br />
<br />
Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y&t=9s">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE VIDEO</a><span id="goog_1197856270"></span><span id="goog_1197856271"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div>
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James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-26231374527431395072019-03-28T15:42:00.000-07:002019-03-28T15:42:10.676-07:00AN EXCERPT FROM: TIMISOARA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In Moscow on October 9th 1944. It was the day Churchill made proposals for certain eastern European and Balkan states to come under sphere of influence, either of the West or of the Soviet Union. On map it was divided up. Soviets would be given 90% of influence in Romania, this paper proposed. Stalin made a single blue tick mark on the paper. He accepted. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Later, in February of 1945, at Yalta, a different understanding was reached by the ‘allies’. There was to be no sphere of influence. But Stalin had made his mark on paper, and now he would make his mark on our country. In the days after Yalta a state of panic and confusion swept through Romania. Many people did not know what to do. Red Army troops stormed in. Old newsreel footage proves their onslaught. Not shown is the rape of women, the drunkenness of the soldiers, the looting and general criminal activities of the occupying force. This was a very bad time for our homeland. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">For Christians, it was even worse, if possible. On 29th of February- that was in 1948- under the communists, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand was kidnapped by secret police – pushed into car – and he disappeared for fourteen years. During this time he did not see his wife, Sabina, or children. At first he was held in solitary detention. Then, into a common room with two hundred others. There were beatings. Torture. Deprivation. Starvation. Filthy conditions. Many others were in the same condition. The women of the church became primary workers. They too were arrested, including Sabina Wurmbrand. There is no explaining how these Christians maintained their faith during this time. They held onto the many verses which instruct us ‘Do not be afraid’. It is the only explanation. Pastor Wurmbrand continued to cling to faith. Dying of tuberculosis, he did not die. A miracle! It is incredible how these people continue to love during this time. Under persecution, Christianity grew greatly. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “Blood of the martyrs is seed for the church.” That is a quote from the early Christian father Tertullian. These people were martyrs. Pastor Wurmbrand is the most famous probably. Of the many many multitudes of Christians who came under persecution of the communists – Catholic and protestant all. There are so many who were faithful during this time. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">How do we learn to forgive then in such time of suffering? It is only through the church in Timisoara which gave us the hope to forgive – the hope for the future. That is where I learned to testify for the faith even under the great threat of the communists. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">How is it that Nicolae Ceausescu came to power in our country I am sometimes asked. How is it that he came to attempt to break the human spirit with the re-education of the people – who were forced to turn away from God and family and everything important? It begins, I believe, with our collective need for a great man to lead us. One who could stand up to the Soviets. He was such a man, we thought. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1968 he defied the Soviet Union over Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. He called it a big mistake. He said that the Soviets would not be allowed to cross the border into Romania. Thousands of citizens attended this rally. He was born into poverty. He lived in a peasant cottage. He was cobbler apprentice. These are things we understood. A great leader born in the basic conditions of Romania. He managed to build on his popularity by political maneuvering in communist party to rise through the ranks. We bought his story about being arrested by the Nazis during the war and many other stories that added to his myth of great leader. We did not see at first, that he was an arrogant strongman, a dangerous dictator in the making, a Stalinist hoping to achieve international recognition and fame. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">What we did not foresee, then, was the arrest and murder of pastors and priests, and the destruction of churches, the food shortages, the extravagant lifestyle that led to the construction of great palaces.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Watch the video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HeCQoCrI6Y</a> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: red; font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-size: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">GET IT TODAY: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=2ACXVMXLR0H8D&keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+sanderson&qid=1553519771&s=books&sprefix=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson%2Caps%2C194&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span>James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-47663056753953679692019-03-28T08:20:00.002-07:002019-03-28T08:27:19.606-07:00HOW DO WE WRITE OUR LIVES?<b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTcfcp_IHgpP3KBTkk30JcD9KBelPLB-WWStoUX5dz0OUU3jxzclQekmf129_NCxFBSEZGubP-t8aGHaUcapwve6C6w0BbqK5F_f5UCJ1CT7zYcU1f9GqZ4NiwjTGtnDmTSMFtGCPHw11j/s1600/abstract-art-black-and-white-207732.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTcfcp_IHgpP3KBTkk30JcD9KBelPLB-WWStoUX5dz0OUU3jxzclQekmf129_NCxFBSEZGubP-t8aGHaUcapwve6C6w0BbqK5F_f5UCJ1CT7zYcU1f9GqZ4NiwjTGtnDmTSMFtGCPHw11j/s320/abstract-art-black-and-white-207732.jpg" width="320" /></a></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">FROM AUTHOR JAMES D. SANDERSON. CONTEMPORARY LITERARY FICTION AND NONFICTION...</span><br />
<b><br />WRITTEN LIVES:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Is it possible that, while pouring our lives into our writing, our work becomes alive with who we really are. That, because we put so much of our selves into our work, our words actually become part of who we are? Spanish writer Javier Marias must have believed so when he sat down to write 'Written Lives'. Here we have twenty vignettes about world-famous authors and, surprisingly, the little details he reveals about them are only things we suspected all along.<br />
<br />
<b>CONNECTIONS:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Having read their work, in short, has allowed us to catch glimpses of the real person between the lines, so to speak. When we read certain facts about their lives - those facts that most expose their underlying character - we can nod knowingly. "Aha!" Bringing the hand down flat and hard on the table before us. "I knew it all along."<br />
<br />
It goes deeper with me. When I first read this book in translation (Margaret Full Costa), in 2006, I knew that I wanted to devote at least some of my time to similar endeavors. I wanted to make sense of the author behind works of great literature - the puppet masters of their created universes, the gods of their characters, so that I could understand more about their work as well. And, coming to understand that these were/are real people living in the real world, they had connections to and had been influenced by other writers, and other creative people in their own eras. By way of all this digging, then, I suspected I might come to a greater understanding of my own life, my work, and my place in history.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>FASCINATING:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
That's the only word that can truly describe 'Written Lives'. Here we have, in short order, snippets and tidbits from the lives of many great authors. But not just any tidbits. These are tidbits of the revealing kind.<br />
<br />
Isak Dinesen, as if speaking directly to the subject I have broached here, said, "There is no mystery in art. Do the things you can see, they will show you what you cannot see." (There is something almost mystical and Biblical in her words).<br />
<br />
"It can be said of Henry James," Marias reveals to us, "that he was made both miserable and happy by the same thing, namely, that he was a mere spectator who barely participated in life, or, at least, not in its most striking and exciting aspects."<br />
<br />
Robert Lewis Stevenson can best be summed up by a poem he wrote - one that is now inscribed on his tomb in Somoa, "Under the wide and starry sky,<br />
"Dig the grave and let me lie;<br />
"Glad did I live and gladly die;<br />
"And I laid me down with a will.<br />
"This be the verse you grave for me;<br />
"Here he lies, where he longed to be;<br />
"Home is the sailor, home from the sea,<br />
"And the hunter home from the hill."<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusion:</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Best you read this one for yourself. When you do I think you'll see where some of my own work is coming from.<br />
<br />
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
CHRISTIAN LITERATURE THAT MAKES YOU THINK</h2>
<div>
Part of building a strong writer's platform is to develop a 'persona'. That means you have to tell people who you are. I get that. So here goes:</div>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"></span></span><br />
<div>
<br />
I am a<b> committed Christian</b>. I take my walk with Christ seriously.<br />
<br />
I follow the<b> way of nonviolence</b>. More violence in the world will only cause more trouble.<br />
<br />
I read great literature, and write that way. Each work of literature is a <b>masterpiece, </b>and I treat it that way<b>.</b><br />
<br />
I believe if we make <b>the goodness of Christ</b> available to everyone, everyone benefits.<br />
<br />
Preparing for an uncertain future. I am something of an Austrian when it comes to the economy. Work hard, give to God, save something back, borrow only when you know you can pay it back, raise a solid family... <b> Good old Christian values</b>, I guess you'd say.<br />
<br />
I am an author of nonfiction and fiction, and always have been. If we are going to write, we should write our masterpiece. <b>Great literature </b>is the only thing that will last.<br />
<br />
I am <b>a publisher,</b> not afraid to roll up my sleeves and publish.<br />
<br />
I am <b>an ideas person</b>, and not afraid to carry them out.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">GET MY BOOK(S) NOW:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">'Called To Love':</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s1600/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s320/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Every day the world seems to be just a little crazier than the day before. Fortunately for Christians there are some things that don't change. Our dedication to 'do to others as we would have them do to us' is the golden rule we can live by - even in these uncertain times. Christ called us to love God, love one another, and love even our enemies. From God's 'Greatest Commandment' and the Sermon on the Mount, to the Bible's love chapter and the power of love in daily life, this book reveals the secrets of Christian love. Are you ready to put God's love into action today?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px;"><span style="color: orange;">⇨</span><span style="color: #333333;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99: </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Called-Love-Book-About-Christian-ebook/dp/B0086X6YQ2/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=called+to+love+Sanderson&qid=1549749013&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull" style="color: #333333;">CALLED TO LOVE</a></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">'Sacred Are the Brave' A Collection of Stories:</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKmF_ZzUkThvOn0TcREif8QqPb3kBSU5vff0ASktjkfioOWKWUDVoK2Die8jqciO34gtOXzcC7hKfDGafxFJjFgS6XIiiNsE8GvVIK55agEt8DBOC-I_K1lakDL-4NZOq1sAOJ-UkkDy6W/s1600/430205_389488637733726_1736603073_n.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKmF_ZzUkThvOn0TcREif8QqPb3kBSU5vff0ASktjkfioOWKWUDVoK2Die8jqciO34gtOXzcC7hKfDGafxFJjFgS6XIiiNsE8GvVIK55agEt8DBOC-I_K1lakDL-4NZOq1sAOJ-UkkDy6W/s320/430205_389488637733726_1736603073_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Ten of the most exciting life and death stories you'll ever read. The various characters come to life facing the tensions and struggles of political revolution. Tied together by historical fact, these stories range from the comic to the tragic. From bittersweet memories to abrupt and immediate action in the face of overwhelming odds. Finely crafted. Short stories about nonviolent revolution beginning in 1986 when unarmed citizens used 'People Power' to overcome the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the various nonviolent movements in Eastern Europe in 1989. Each of these stories presents an ordinary character who is forced to show extraordinary courage in the face of violent oppression.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: orange; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">⇨</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99 for a limited time: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson&qid=1549749330&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>COMING IN SEPTEMBER 2019:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' A Novel:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
What will we do when the nations of the world finally resort to the ultimate violence - nuclear weapons? When the world economy collapses. When the world once again goes to war? Will we choose even more violence and chaos to solve our problems, or will we find some other way?</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
Will we Christians choose to follow the example of Christ, building loving communities, caring for others, finding forgiveness and living the way of nonviolence? And if we do choose this way, what will it look like?</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' is a novel about a small Christian discipleship group that decides the time has come to choose this new way. Their tiny community grows into a movement. At that point they are seen as a threat to the authoritarian government that has taken away our civil liberties. Who will prevail?</div>
</div>
James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-30932793718737185352019-03-28T08:18:00.000-07:002019-03-28T08:46:44.158-07:00LIVES HIJACKED <span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfEdAShxttQkFQdxxu6ebIb7xDHT_P9RAjeOAOOlPb_tj8Ao8XISThan0xMvTcMZRkDW8TsSPqS_zw1zQ_aLeeFWTKCVgvdii6SsXebByPph7XbN-Rh2pLW1Ic1qjells99ihdhT3I4em2/s1600/animal-art-beautiful-325045.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img alt="Contemporary Literary Fiction" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfEdAShxttQkFQdxxu6ebIb7xDHT_P9RAjeOAOOlPb_tj8Ao8XISThan0xMvTcMZRkDW8TsSPqS_zw1zQ_aLeeFWTKCVgvdii6SsXebByPph7XbN-Rh2pLW1Ic1qjells99ihdhT3I4em2/s320/animal-art-beautiful-325045.jpg" title="Lives Hijacked" width="212" /></a></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: large;">FROM AUTHOR JAMES D. SANDERSON. CONTEMPORARY LITERARY FICTION AND NONFICTION...</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>A Japanese Writer?</b></span><br />
<br />
I keep thinking of Kazuo Ishiguro as a Japanese writer. Odd, then, that his first person narrator in 'When We Were Orphans' should concern himself with being an English gentleman. His character, Christopher Banks, stands out in that he has lost his parents long ago, during the war. The fact that an old classmate now would say that he was considered an "odd bird" in school is something that will fester. He had, after all, done everything he could to fit in at school. He had never revealed his dream of becoming a private detective - a Sherlock - to them, for instance.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>A Circuitous Route:</b></span><br />
<br />
In Ishiguro we don't find the raw power of Yukio Misima or the Japanese impressionism of Kawabata. Here were find the tradition of Dickens and Thackeray. The English influence, certainly, over the Japanese. And why not? Young Ishigura moved with his family from his birthplace in Nagasaki to England - at age six. His writing is a ramble in the English countryside. He takes a very circuitous route in his story-telling. Not my style at all. Not that I don't like it, only I don't employ it. It is captivating as the reader is drawn into the tale of his father's disappearance and presumed kidnapping. The futile police investigation is led by the distinguished master sleuth Inspector Kung.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Remains of the Day:</b></span><br />
<br />
The first person narrator of another of my Ishiguro favorites, 'The Remains of the Day', is a proper English butler - Mr. Stevens, whose loyalty to his recently-deceased employer, Lord Darlington, comes into question upon reflection during a motor-car trip to Cornwall. His relationship with a former housekeeper, now married over twenty years, also comes under scrutiny. The author proves his mastery through the subtle revelation of old loyalties, of English dignity and social constraints over the course of the entire work.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Seeking Things of the Past:</b></span><br />
<br />
The narrator's return to Shanghai is the culmination of years of work put into considering this case from afar. The search for his missing parents is a gentle stream of writing urging the reader forward on a deep current unnoticed on the surface. It was Inspector Kung many years later, now an opium addict and in failing health who provides the clue... But of course I don't want to go too far.<br />
<br />
Having grown up in the International Settlement - a 'home village'; nowhere else has felt quite like home. Now, in wartime, the Settlement may fall. It may be no more. Still, he is drawn further and further into the chaos of war.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Conclusion:</b></span><br />
<br />
Childhood is a place that can never be found again, no matter how hard we may try to find it. In 'When We Were Orphans', lives are hijacked by seeking after things of the past.<br />
<br />
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
CHRISTIAN LITERATURE THAT MAKES YOU THINK</h2>
<div>
Part of building a strong writer's platform is to develop a 'persona'. That means you have to tell people who you are. I get that. So here goes:</div>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34);"></span></span><br />
<div>
<br />
I am a<b> committed Christian</b>. I take my walk with Christ seriously.<br />
<br />
I follow the<b> way of nonviolence</b>. More violence in the world will only cause more trouble.<br />
<br />
I read great literature, and write that way. Each work of literature is a <b>masterpiece, </b>and I treat it that way<b>.</b><br />
<br />
I believe if we make <b>the goodness of Christ</b> available to everyone, everyone benefits.<br />
<br />
Preparing for an uncertain future. I am something of an Austrian when it comes to the economy. Work hard, give to God, save something back, borrow only when you know you can pay it back, raise a solid family... <b> Good old Christian values</b>, I guess you'd say.<br />
<br />
I am an author of nonfiction and fiction, and always have been. If we are going to write, we should write our masterpiece. <b>Great literature </b>is the only thing that will last.<br />
<br />
I am <b>a publisher,</b> not afraid to roll up my sleeves and publish.<br />
<br />
I am <b>an ideas person</b>, and not afraid to carry them out.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">GET MY BOOK(S) NOW:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">'Called To Love':</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s1600/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s320/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Every day the world seems to be just a little crazier than the day before. Fortunately for Christians there are some things that don't change. Our dedication to 'do to others as we would have them do to us' is the golden rule we can live by - even in these uncertain times. Christ called us to love God, love one another, and love even our enemies. From God's 'Greatest Commandment' and the Sermon on the Mount, to the Bible's love chapter and the power of love in daily life, this book reveals the secrets of Christian love. Are you ready to put God's love into action today?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px;"><span style="color: orange;">⇨</span><span style="color: #333333;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99: </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Called-Love-Book-About-Christian-ebook/dp/B0086X6YQ2/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=called+to+love+Sanderson&qid=1549749013&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull" style="color: #333333;">CALLED TO LOVE</a></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">'Sacred Are the Brave' A Collection of Stories:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Ten of the most exciting life and death stories you'll ever read. The various characters come to life facing the tensions and struggles of political revolution. Tied together by historical fact, these stories range from the comic to the tragic. From bittersweet memories to abrupt and immediate action in the face of overwhelming odds. Finely crafted. Short stories about nonviolent revolution beginning in 1986 when unarmed citizens used 'People Power' to overcome the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the various nonviolent movements in Eastern Europe in 1989. Each of these stories presents an ordinary character who is forced to show extraordinary courage in the face of violent oppression.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: orange; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">⇨</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99 for a limited time: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson&qid=1549749330&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>COMING IN SEPTEMBER 2019:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' A Novel:</b></span><br />
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What will we do when the nations of the world finally resort to the ultimate violence - nuclear weapons? When the world economy collapses. When the world once again goes to war? Will we choose even more violence and chaos to solve our problems, or will we find some other way?</div>
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Will we Christians choose to follow the example of Christ, building loving communities, caring for others, finding forgiveness and living the way of nonviolence? And if we do choose this way, what will it look like?</div>
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'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' is a novel about a small Christian discipleship group that decides the time has come to choose this new way. Their tiny community grows into a movement. At that point they are seen as a threat to the authoritarian government that has taken away our civil liberties. Who will prevail?</div>
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James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1444644679072293021.post-81296066564942706382019-03-28T08:14:00.001-07:002019-03-28T08:47:53.833-07:00ONE HUNDRED BEST FIRST LINES FROM NOVELS<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: , , "blinkmacsystemfont" , ".sfnstext-regular" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi48KYxRMYjPrJJvrNpk_-NuPxhlP0SgNbY2EOE8tuTsO2v9ug6sKao0DG684o6jAV0IlL_ZRQ7SgL9CWAb0OJ4rMDbqg3ZTb8zcvpybMlXJCxbOClXaa9V7gmAGPTfQj0R0JCa7iYjTdQh/s1600/antique-art-bookcase-1301585.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img alt="The first lines from great literature" border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi48KYxRMYjPrJJvrNpk_-NuPxhlP0SgNbY2EOE8tuTsO2v9ug6sKao0DG684o6jAV0IlL_ZRQ7SgL9CWAb0OJ4rMDbqg3ZTb8zcvpybMlXJCxbOClXaa9V7gmAGPTfQj0R0JCa7iYjTdQh/s320/antique-art-bookcase-1301585.jpg" title="Old Books" width="320" /></a></b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: , , "blinkmacsystemfont" , ".sfnstext-regular" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">FROM AUTHOR JAMES D. SANDERSON. CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN FICTION AND NONFICTION...</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: , , "blinkmacsystemfont" , ".sfnstext-regular" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"><b>HERE GOES:</b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: , , "blinkmacsystemfont" , ".sfnstext-regular" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">This is not my list. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but here goes:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: , , "blinkmacsystemfont" , ".sfnstext-regular" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Following is a list of the 100 best first lines from novels, as decided by the<b> American Book Review</b>, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University:</span><br />
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1. Call me Ishmael. – Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)</div>
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2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)</div>
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3. A screaming comes across the sky. – Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)</div>
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4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. – Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)</div>
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5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. – Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)</div>
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6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)</div>
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7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. – James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)</div>
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8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. – George Orwell, 1984 (1949)</div>
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9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)</div>
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10. I am an invisible man. – Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)</div>
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11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. – Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)</div>
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12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)</div>
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13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)</div>
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14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)</div>
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15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)</div>
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16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. – J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)</div>
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17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. – James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)</div>
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18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. – Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)</div>
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19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. – Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)</div>
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20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. – Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)</div>
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21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. – James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)</div>
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22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. – Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)</div>
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23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. – Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)</div>
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24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. – Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)</div>
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25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. – William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)</div>
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26. 124 was spiteful. – Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)</div>
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27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. – Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)</div>
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28. Mother died today. – Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)</div>
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29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. – Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)</div>
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30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)</div>
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31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)</div>
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32. Where now? Who now? When now? – Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)</div>
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33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” – Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)</div>
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34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. – John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)</div>
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35. It was like so, but wasn’t. – Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)</div>
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36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. – William Gaddis, J R (1975)</div>
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37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. – Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)</div>
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38. All this happened, more or less. – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)</div>
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39. They shoot the white girl first. – Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)</div>
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40. For a long time, I went to bed early. – Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)</div>
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41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. – Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)</div>
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42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. – Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)</div>
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43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; – Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire</div>
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(1962)</div>
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44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. – Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)</div>
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45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. – Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)</div>
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46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation. – Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)</div>
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47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. – C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)</div>
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48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. – Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)</div>
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49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. – Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)</div>
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50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. – Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)</div>
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51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. – Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)</div>
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52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. – Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)</div>
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53. It was a pleasure to burn. – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)</div>
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54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. – Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)</div>
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55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. – Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)</div>
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56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. – Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)</div>
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57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. – David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)</div>
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58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. – George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)</div>
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59. It was love at first sight. – Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)</div>
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60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)</div>
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61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. – W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)</div>
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62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. – Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)</div>
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63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. – G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)</div>
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64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)</div>
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65. You better not never tell nobody but God. – Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)</div>
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66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” – Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)</div>
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67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)</div>
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68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. – David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)</div>
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69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. – Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)</div>
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70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. – Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)</div>
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71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. – GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)</div>
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72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. – Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)</div>
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73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. – Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)</div>
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74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. – Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)</div>
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75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)</div>
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76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. – Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)</div>
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77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. – Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)</div>
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78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. – L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)</div>
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79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. – Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)</div>
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80. Justice? – You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. – William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)</div>
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81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. – J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)</div>
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82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. – Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)</div>
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83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” – Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)</div>
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84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. – John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)</div>
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85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. – James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)</div>
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86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. – William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)</div>
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87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. – Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)</div>
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88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. – Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)</div>
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89. I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city —and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. – Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)</div>
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90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. – Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)</div>
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91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. – John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)</div>
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92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. – Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)</div>
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93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. – Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)</div>
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94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. – Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)</div>
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95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. – Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)</div>
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96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. – Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)</div>
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97. He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. – Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)</div>
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98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. – David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)</div>
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99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. – Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)</div>
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100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. – Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">GET MY BOOK(S) NOW:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">'Called To Love':</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s1600/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH5Zlg01K_H_HvT1XhLHoet7ed0B1Vx0DcKlQ0unLFPAT-sgym200CLgJNgSiep_Y1MQivAKeuLg1I7EcrShu8upSCyGiy6KSbGD4WS6AWpSVuenTaAs1wuFj32UlBkL_NFl_2Iu7M6zOc/s320/20190207_165035+%25284%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Every day the world seems to be just a little crazier than the day before. Fortunately for Christians there are some things that don't change. Our dedication to 'do to others as we would have them do to us' is the golden rule we can live by - even in these uncertain times. Christ called us to love God, love one another, and love even our enemies. From God's 'Greatest Commandment' and the Sermon on the Mount, to the Bible's love chapter and the power of love in daily life, this book reveals the secrets of Christian love. Are you ready to put God's love into action today?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: orange;">⇨</span>GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Called-Love-Book-About-Christian-ebook/dp/B0086X6YQ2/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=called+to+love+Sanderson&qid=1549749013&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull" style="color: #333333;">CALLED TO LOVE</a></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">'Sacred Are the Brave' A Collection of Stories:</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKmF_ZzUkThvOn0TcREif8QqPb3kBSU5vff0ASktjkfioOWKWUDVoK2Die8jqciO34gtOXzcC7hKfDGafxFJjFgS6XIiiNsE8GvVIK55agEt8DBOC-I_K1lakDL-4NZOq1sAOJ-UkkDy6W/s1600/430205_389488637733726_1736603073_n.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKmF_ZzUkThvOn0TcREif8QqPb3kBSU5vff0ASktjkfioOWKWUDVoK2Die8jqciO34gtOXzcC7hKfDGafxFJjFgS6XIiiNsE8GvVIK55agEt8DBOC-I_K1lakDL-4NZOq1sAOJ-UkkDy6W/s320/430205_389488637733726_1736603073_n.jpg" width="240" /></a></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Ten of the most exciting life and death stories you'll ever read. The various characters come to life facing the tensions and struggles of political revolution. Tied together by historical fact, these stories range from the comic to the tragic. From bittersweet memories to abrupt and immediate action in the face of overwhelming odds. Finely crafted. Short stories about nonviolent revolution beginning in 1986 when unarmed citizens used 'People Power' to overcome the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the various nonviolent movements in Eastern Europe in 1989. Each of these stories presents an ordinary character who is forced to show extraordinary courage in the face of violent oppression.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: orange; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">⇨</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">GET IT NOW ON AMAZON KINDLE. $0.99 for a limited time: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SACRED-ARE-BRAVE-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B007ECCGP4/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=sacred+are+the+brave+Sanderson&qid=1549749330&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmrnull">SACRED ARE THE BRAVE</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>COMING IN SEPTEMBER 2019:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-size: large;"><b>'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' A Novel:</b></span><br />
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What will we do when the nations of the world finally resort to the ultimate violence - nuclear weapons? When the world economy collapses. When the world once again goes to war? Will we choose even more violence and chaos to solve our problems, or will we find some other way?</div>
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Will we Christians choose to follow the example of Christ, building loving communities, caring for others, finding forgiveness and living the way of nonviolence? And if we do choose this way, what will it look like?</div>
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'Those Who Dwell Upon the Earth' is a novel about a small Christian discipleship group that decides the time has come to choose this new way. Their tiny community grows into a movement. At that point they are seen as a threat to the authoritarian government that has taken away our civil liberties. Who will prevail?</div>
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James D. Sandersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03316503806653744944noreply@blogger.com0