"Making Summertime a Healing Time" by J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer, One Nation Under God

Summertime means more time together as a family, which is not always a good thing if one or more of the family members are not getting along.

Sometimes all that is needed is for someone to say, “Hey, I’m sorry about the other day. Are we okay now?” But if the hurt was a deep one, it requires more than a superficial effort to heal the wound.

One family conciliation format that has been successful is to have the two persons in the wounded relationship come together with two or three of their trusted friends, and to allow the two family members to present to the other how that person has offended them.

The purpose for the presence of the two or three friends is for them to help be a quieting influence, a prayer presence, a light into the truth when denial is persistent, a reminder that this process should be about love not condemnation, and an encouragement to go forward when an impasse seems to have been reached.

Set aside three to four uninterrupted hours for this process -- no phones, no visitors, no snack breaks, no chit-chat, no small children needing attention – just intense, uninterrupted emotional and spiritual work.

Take it one family member and one offense at a time. Do NOT have the offended family member voice a long litany of a record of wrongs. There may indeed be many offenses, and you do need to get to them all in that one uninterrupted session, but take them one at a time.

Have the two family members take turns expressing the offenses and seeking conciliation on that topic. One person will usually be more at fault than the other, but it is rare that there is not offense on both sides. Keep in mind that unforgiveness and self-righteousness are also sins.

Starting with the most wounded person, have them clearly express one thing that has offended them. The offending family member then restates the offense so that the offended family member is sure they have been understood.

The offending family member then clearly confesses that problem and states their repentance of it.

Repentance is quite different and much deeper than mere regret or remorse.
In repentance the offending person states that they are sickened by the thought that they had ever done the offense, and are sickened by the thought that they might ever do the offense again. The offending person then requests forgiveness from the other person.

If the person offended does not think the confession completely addressed their offense, or if they are not yet capable of giving forgiveness, that ground is gone over again until both the burdens of sin and the burdens of unforgiveness are fully released.

Sometimes an offended person cannot yet give forgiveness because they have not heard repentance phrased in a way that is believable to them. Sometimes the offending person does not know they are evading full responsibility when in fact they are. In these cases, having the offending person speak through the five elements of apology used by Dr. Gary Chapman can be very helpful:

1. “I am sorry that I…”
2. “I was wrong when I…”
3. “What can I do to make it right?”
4. “I’ll not do that again”
5. “Will you please forgive me?”

To complete each stage of the session, the offending person would talk to God, in open prayer, about the offense they had done.

When the process is finished, both family members should be at peace with one another and committed to making their relationship honorable for God and for the other family member.

Did AIG give $70 billion of its bailout money to China?

By J. Michael Sharman,
Contributing Writer

Dear Sen.Warner, Sen. Webb, and Rep. Cantor:

As my elected representatives, I would appreciate it if you could use your resources to find out the answer to a question for me as a U.S. taxpayer: Did American International Group, Inc. give $70 billion of its bailout money to China?

The New York Times says AIG has only named the recipients for $50 billion of the $120 billion it has paid out to “trading partners” on its failed “credit default swaps” and refuses to disclose all the other trading partners who it paid off with our bailout money.

AIG admits it has used tens of billions of our “stimulus” money to pay off its trading partners such as France’s Societe Generale; Germany's Deutsche Bank; Britain's Barclays Bank; Switzerland's UBS Bank; and France's BNP Paribas ; Calyon, the investment banking arm of France’s Crédit Agricole; Holland’s Rabobank; The Royal Bank of Scotland; CORAL Purchasing Limited of Ireland; Germany’s Dresdner Bank AG; and Canada’s BMO Financial Group.

It is extremely hard to figure out why the U.S. taxpayers gave $170 billion to bail out this business which was made in China – literally.

Founded in Shanghai in 1919 as American Asiatic Underwriters by Cornelius Vander Starr, parts of the company were moved to New York in 1949 after the communists came to power. But since 1931, the original company continued to operate in Hong Kong under the names American International Assurance Company and American International Underwriters, Limited.

American International Group, Inc. (AIG), is indeed, a Delaware corporation, but it is only a holding company for AIG’s United States and foreign subsidiaries.
One of those foreign companies is American International Assurance (AIA), which is AIG’s main flagship in China, with about 20,000 employees and more than 20 million customers throughout Asia: in Australia, Brunei, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.

This is a Chinese company, not an American company, doing business throughout Asia, and AIA is now going to be listed and sold on an Asian stock exchange, according to a May 18, 2009 article in one of India’s main newspapers, The Hindu.

Another of AIG’s noteworthy foreign companies is China America Insurance Company (CAIC), which was formed in 1980 as a 50-50 joint venture between “AIG companies” and the People's Insurance Company of China (PICC). (TIME magazine reports that AIG also owns twenty per cent of the People's Insurance Company of China. )

Other AIG member companies in China include: AIG General Insurance Company China Limited (AIG General); AIG Global Investment Corporation (Asia), Limited; AIG Business Consulting Company Limited (AIGBC) ; AIG-Huatai Fund Management Company Limited ; AIG Guarantee (Dalian) Limited; AIG Guarantee (Nanjing) Limited and AIG Private Bank Limited, etc.

AIG Private Bank Ltd. was the first foreign private bank to receive approval from the China Banking Regulatory Commission to open a representative office in Shanghai. Its main address, however, is Zurich, Switzerland.

AIG Global Investment got China’s central government approval to become the first foreign firm to control a Chinese fund management company, Huatai Securities.
After its first round of U.S. bailouts to AIG, in late October, 2008, AIG did not invest in GM or Chrysler but rather it bought a 13.5% stake in Chongqing Lifan Industry Group Co., China’s largest privately-owned Chinese automobile and motorcycle manufacturer.

There are many, many more examples that can be given to suggest that AIG is really more of a Chinese company than an American one, but as you can see, the examples above are reason enough for me to ask you, Sen. Warner, Sen. Webb, and Rep. Cantor, as my representatives in Congress, if you could use your resources to find out for me as a U.S. taxpayer:

Did American International Group, Inc. give $70 billion of its bailout money to China?

Making Paying Taxes Look Easy

by J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer

“The Democrats’ $3.6 trillion budget raises taxes on all Americans by $1.3 trillion.
Hey, reader, that’s you,” cries an op-ed piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA, 3rd).

Not the thing you want to hear this close to April 15th.

It is hard to get a grasp on what those numbers mean. The definition of a trillion is one thousand times one billion, which is 1, followed by 12 zeros.

Okay, a thousand billions. Got that. So the new budget is 3,600 billions.

What’s a billion, really? One thousand times one million, which is 1, followed by nine zeros.

Right. A billion is a thousand millions, and a trillion is a thousand billions, so the new budget is 3,600,000 millions.

Another way of conceptualizing it is to say that with a new budget of $3,600,000 millions, we have to find the equivalent of 3,600,000 millionaires and have them give everything they have to the government to pay for it.

But since there is no such thing as Tax Day sacrificial lambs, the tax burden will spread out to more of us than that.

Our total national income is our “Gross National Product” or GNP. The government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis says the definition of our GNP is the total goods and services produced by the labor and property supplied by U.S. residents. Our GNP in 2008, when you add in all the U.S taxpayers’ income receipts from the rest of the world, was 14,911.9 billions, which translates to $14.9 trillion.

If we were to have a truly flat tax, with all income earners paying the same rate with no personal or corporate deductions, that would mean every U.S. taxpayer would pay 24 cents of federal income tax on every dollar earned.

But we don’t have a flat tax, and since there are a whole lot of taxpayers on the top and bottom rungs of the taxpayer ladder that don’t pay any income tax, the share left to the rest of us is going to be a lot higher than 24%.

Back in biblical times some local religious leaders who opposed Jesus were trying to make Him look bad to the controlling Roman authorities, and so they asked Him, “What is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

The Gospel of Matthew records His response:

But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites? Show Me the tax money.”

So they brought Him a denarius. And He said to them, “Whose image and inscription is this?” They said to Him, “Caesar’s.”

And He said to them, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

The image of Caesar/government is on the money, so we are to give the government the money when we are asked for it. Likewise, we are to give to God the things which He has created in His own image when He asks for it.

Here’s the catch: Back in the Old Testament in the first chapter of Genesis, God says He created us in His own image , and in the New Testament at Romans 8:29 the Bible tells us God chose us specifically to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.

So, I’m to pay a quarter or more of my income in taxes to the federal government, but I’m to give all of myself to God – my work, my play, my body, my mind, my heart, and my inclinations, both good and bad.

All of a sudden, paying taxes definitely looks like the easier deal.

--END--

A Time for Overhauling Our Ship of State

CADIPS PRESS Selected Illustration: Old Ironsides, U.S. frigate Constitution, built 1797, Library of Congress-LC-D416-22735

Article by J. Michael Sharman,
Contributing Writer

When a ship at sea has sprung a serious leak, the menu items for tomorrow or repainting the handrailings instantly lose their former importance.

At that point, the only truly critical matter is diagnosing and repairing the cause of the leak. The focus of all hands is not on the water damage being suffered by the cargo: the cause of the cargo getting wet is clearly the problem that needs immediate attention.

A ship’s most important component is its keel. It is the structural member to which all the other parts of the ship are directly or indirectly attached.

When a ship has a broken keel, it is said to have “broken its back” and salvage companies declare it to be a total loss. Only a total overhaul can then rebuild the ship, which must be done literally from the ground up.

Our ship of state was built with such a well-designed and well-built keel that she has sailed longer, straighter and truer than any other ship of state ever built.

Our keel is the Declaration of Independence. All of the other parts of our national structure and existence flow from it, and specifically from the first phrases of its second paragraph:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

A ship’s keel won’t break except under severe structural stress such as by being run aground, or in the case of Captain Ahab’s longboat, being struck by the monster white whale, Moby Dick.

Undeterred by cares for his crew or his ship, Ahab simply had the ship’s carpenter carve a new wooden leg for him out of his longboat’s broken keel and continued on the obsessive chase that ended only with his own death.

We need to seriously ask ourselves whether we have allowed our ship of state to be run aground or smashed by a force of fabled proportions, and whether we, like Capt. Ahab, are simply using its broken pieces to hobble toward our eventual destruction.

Do we still believe that the “truths” in our Declaration to be so obvious that they are self-evident? If His existence is so obvious it needs no other evidence, why do we shape our public policy as though there is no provable evidence of God’s existence?

We have also ceased to believe that all men are created equal. No longer do we ask to be judged by the content of our character and to be allowed to rise or fall on our own merits.

Look further down the length of our keel – if we believe that the entire purpose of government is to secure the self-evident rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, then why do we constantly legislate against life and increasingly indenture ourselves and our children with each subsequent piece of legislation?

Ahab refused to listen to the good advice of his first mate, Starbuck: “In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone - all good angels mobbing thee with warnings: - what more wouldst thou have?”

Rather than ignoring the clear warnings we’ve been given and perversely maintaining a course toward our own destruction, we should return to the safe harbor established by our Declaration and begin, with integrity, the steady and sure process of rebuilding our ship from the ground up.

Great Necessities Call Out Great Virtues

CADIPS PRESS Selected Illustration from the National Park Service (NPS) Photo of George Washington Carver in his laboratory. Responsible for over 300 agricultural discoveries using the peanut, Carver gained a professorship at Tuskeegee Institute by the invitation of Booker T. Washington. The discoveries of this former slave economically saved the South.

Folks, If you want a glimpse into the mind of this discoverer, you need only read what he says about his approach to life and how his worldview stems from his constant acknowledgment of God. In the words of Carver, "My Prayers seem to be more of an attitude than anything else. I indulge in very little lip service, but ask the Great Creator silently daily, and often many times per day to permit me to speak to him through the three great Kingdoms of the world, which he has created, viz.-- the Animal, Mineral, and Vegetable Kingdoms; their relations to each other, to us, our relations to them and the Great God who made all of us. I ask him daily and often momently to give me wisdom, understanding and bodily strength to do His will, hence I am asking and receiving all the time."

Let's hear about the attributes that yield fortitude and invention in our day and times. Here is the latest entry from our brother, J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer. This piece is entitled, "Great Necessitties Call Out Great Virtues."

J. Michael! You've done it again!!! You have given us a better understanding of the times in which we live.With much appreciation for the insight you impart, we say, Thank You!
Your Sis,
--Livvy McDonald :) <><



*******************"Great Necessities Call Out Great Virtues"*******************
by J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer

Without it being “seasonally adjusted”, the overall unemployment rate for January 2009 is 8.5%.

There are, though, a few bright spots within that grim statistic, and some historic reminders that grim economic times can create positive changes.

The three states that have the lowest unemployment rates are Wyoming, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

A century or so ago, when opportunities were closed to European immigrants in the East, many went West to plow the Dakota prairies and work the Wyoming forests and mines.

Even with hope pulling them and desperation driving them, it was a tough, tough life back then, and not all of them succeeded. It still takes a special kind of person to thrive in those windswept states.

Surprisingly, the city with the nation’s lowest unemployment is Morgantown, West Virginia, with a very low unemployment rate of 2.7%.

Historically, West Virginians had to leave their state in order to find good jobs. Many people whose early years were shaped by the grinding poverty of Appalachia came out of those hills to reach for the possibilities that their time and place had been denying them.

Now, folks are traveling into West Virginia in search of the good jobs there.
Sometimes, our social position more than our geographic location determines our economic success.

Throughout most of her history, Virginia has been a fruitful and prosperous place – but not if you were a person of color.

The Madden family has been in the Piedmont region of Virginia since at least 1758 when Irish immigrant Mary Madden gave birth to a bi-racial child, Sarah. One of her descendents, T.O. Madden, Jr., wrote a family history titled, “We Were Always Free”. Even though as free blacks the Maddens were much better off than the slaves, most of their history was a saga to find an opportunity in which there might be a possibility for success.

Sarah Madden found a measure of it as a seamtress and laundress. Despite the legal and cultural barriers imposed upon her son, Willis Madden, he purchased land and created a web of interwoven enterprises on the road between Fredericksburg and Culpeper which became collectively known as Madden’s Tavern.

His great-grandson wrote of the cause of his success: “He conducted himself with a sense of quiet dignity and competence… As with his mother, Willis’s skills, dignity, support of his family, and honesty had already led many of the local people to accept him – to a far greater extent than was usually given a free Negro – simply as he wanted to be accepted: as another human being, as a man.”

But after the marauding troops of the Civil War took his property, and the post-war Jim Crow laws took his freedoms, his family was faced with another era of economic crisis.

Opportunity opened up with the written word.

Willis’ son, T.O. Madden, Sr., learned to read from a British tutor hired by his illiterate parents to teach his brothers and he. Building on that skill, in 1889 he went to the Summer Institute for Teachers, a six-week course held in Culpeper to train and certify “Colored” teachers.

T.O. Sr. met his wife there and the two teachers went on to have twelve children. One became a World War I army officer, some got college degrees, and others became successful entrepreneurs, teachers, and government workers.

Those are areas of opportunity even today. Government workers have the lowest unemployment rate, 3.0%, and Education and Health Services workers are in the second lowest category, with a 3.8% unemployment rate.

As Abigail Adams wrote to her son John Quincy Adams, “It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great challenges are formed. … Great necessities call out great virtues.”

--END--

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"Darwin’s Struggle for Racial Superiority"

by J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer

If you look up Charles Darwin on Google’s Advanced Book Search you can actually view the cover page and complete title of his 1859 book: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

“Favoured races”?

To bring an honest analysis to Darwin’s theory of evolution, one has to know that Darwin’s thinking was shaped by two things: his rejection of God and his racist views of mankind.

Darwin believed the Bible was a fantasy: “But I had gradually come to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.”

Darwin simply did not believe that some races were created equal to others: “The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties.”

Because of his perception of their racial inferiority, Darwin predicted non-white races would become extinct: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

He wrote a colleague that it would be beneficial for the “lower races” to be wiped off the planet by the “Caucasian races”: “I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”

Darwin even had contempt for racial blendings that did not reflect the vision he saw in his own mirror: “The inferior vitality of mulattoes is spoken of in a trustworthy work as a well-known phenomenon, and this, although a different consideration from their lessened fertility, may perhaps be advanced as a proof of the specific distinctness of the parent races.”

In Darwin’s The Descent of Man, he laid the foundation for future population planning to help eradicate the “lower” races: “[E]xcepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” The big danger, Darwin said, was that, “the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members.”

In a personal notebook, Darwin summed up what he believed was the origin of Man: “The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.”

In the first chapter of Genesis, the Bible says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Which statement of our origin would you prefer to be associated with?
For myself, I think God has beaten Darwin hollow.

--END--

"Unsafe, Illegal and All Too Common"

By J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer

Sycloria Williams’ baby girl, Shanice, died shortly after childbirth.

The physician who was supposed to have attended Ms. Williams at the facility, “A GYN Diagnostic Center” in Hialeah, didn’t show up. No one else at the clinic, including the owner/operator, Belkis Gonzolez, held a medical license of any type , and when Sycloria went into labor and delivered her premature baby, no staff member called 911, a neonatologist, or any medical or rescue personnel.

After Shanice was born, Ms. Gonzolez cut the umbilical cord but did nothing else to assist her for the five minutes she lived, and when she died, Gonzalez put the baby in a plastic biohazard bag and threw her in the trashcan.

A day later, the police received an anonymous call from a pay phone outside of the clinic stating that a baby had been killed there by employees and the baby’s remains were still on the premises.

The police came but could find nothing. Later, the police got another anonymous tip that the baby’s remains were on the roof of the clinic, but the body wasn’t there when they searched. A final anonymous call was made, and this time police found Shanice’s decomposing corpse in a cardboard box.

Sycloria was 18 years old, single and 23 weeks pregnant. She decided she did not have the maturity or resources to care for her child. She paid a down payment of $800 on a $1,200 abortion fee, and The Miramar Women’s Center referred her to Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique , who met with her and gave her Laminaria (a drug that dilates the cervix) and three other prescription medications to set her body in motion for the relatively late-term abortion.

Dr. Renelique told her he would meet her and complete the abortion the next day at “A GYN Diagnostic Center”, a Hialeah clinic under the same ownership. Renelique didn’t show up, but the drugs he had given her kept working and the unlicensed staff gave her more medications, and Shanice was born on the floor of the clinic.

At that point, as Sycloria’s attorney, Tom Pennecamp, says, “She came face to face with a human being and that changed everything.”

Two weeks after Shanice’s death, the clinic operator, Belkis Gonzalez, was arrested on two felony counts of related to the unlicensed practice of medicine – but not in Shanice’s case. These two counts stemmed from a report that had been made to police two years earlier on November 16, 2004 that “The Miramar Women’s Center” and “A GYN Diagnostic Center” had two unlicensed persons, Robelto Osbourne and Kieron Nisbet, performing abortions.

Osbourne’s medical license had been revoked on August 17, 2004 and Nisbet never had been fully licensed in Florida. Osbourne pled guilty on September 23, 2005 and Nisbet fled to Trinidad with arrest warrants issued against him.

Two other clinic employees, Joselin Collado and Adieran Rojas were both charged as part of that investigation and in 2006 pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license.

The clinic, “A GYN Diagnostic Center”, has now finally surrendered its license and closed.

One of the documents that the Miramar clinic gave to Sycloria was a notice that Dr. Renelique had no current medical malpractice insurance.

Renelique’s address of record is in Woodmere, New York and according to state records there, he has made at least five medical malpractice payments in the past decade.

On February 6, 2009, two and a half years after Shanice’s death, the Florida Board of Medicine unanimously voted to revoke Renelique’s medical license.
The Homicide Division is still investigating but no criminal charges have yet been filed.

--END--

"President Obama’s First Words"

by J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer


“So help me, God.”

According to the British newspaper, The Guardian, those were the first words Barrack Obama spoke after becoming the President of the United States. They reasoned that because Mr. Obama became President Obama as soon as he completed the mandatory oath of office written in our U.S. Constitution, his voluntary oath to God immediately following that constitutional oath was his first statement as president.
As the next four or eight years of the Obama presidency unfolds, President Obama may often be prompted to change the emphasis of his first presidential phrase and repeatedly cry out, “So, help me, God!”
And it hasn’t taken long for the problems to begin piling up.
As President and Mrs. Obama were still in the reviewing stands for the inaugural parade, Wall Street closed with the largest Inauguration Day stock market fall in history: a 4.1% drop in which the Dow closed down 332.42 points.
After the markets closed, as the Obamas began their rounds of the inaugural balls, USA Today reported online that Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who accurately predicted the economic and stock-market collapses, estimated that U.S. financial losses may hit $3.6 trillion, and, Prof. Roubini said, “If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion. This is a systemic banking crisis.”
In his first meeting with Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders, President Obama told the House Republicans he was prepared to do everything within his strength to force his economic stimulus bill through even without their bipartisan consensus: “I won. I’m the President,” he reminded them.
Maybe so, but the economy is freefalling anyway.
Two days after his inauguration, Microsoft said that it would be cutting its work force by 5,000 jobs. The next day, another American manufacturing icon, Harley Davidson, which had already laid off 730 people in 2008, announced that it was going to be cutting 1,100 more jobs in 2009 and 2010.
As the nation’s 44th president began his first full work week:
• CNN reported Home Depot is laying off 7,000 support and management staff ;
• Reuters said Sprint Nextel will cut its workforce by14 percent, which means 8,000 jobs lost ;
• Bloomberg reported that Caterpillar will be letting go 20,000 people;
• The Washington Post said two pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer and Wyeth, announced a merger, which one would think would be good news, but the merger is expected to cause 8,000 job cuts;
• A spokesman for John Deere emailed the Associated Press that it will lay off 190 employees in Davenport, Iowa.

And that was just the bad news that came in on Monday morning.
When Mr. Obama took the oath of office, he did so with his hand resting on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln’s hand rested on when he gave the exact same oath.
During a particularly troubling time in Mr. Lincoln’s first administration, a minister told Lincoln he hoped “the Lord was on the Union’s side.”
Mr. Lincoln’s responded, “I am not at all concerned with that, for we know that the Lord is always on the side of right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”
President Obama and we, the people can make sure we get on God’s side by following the instructions He has given us on how to get there: “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14 (NKJV)
If we ignore that straightforward instruction, we are going to have a lot of miserable Monday mornings in our future.

"Inaugural Words to Remember"

Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

J. Michael Sharman, Contributing Writer

GEO. WASHINGTON, 1789 “[T]he propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained…”

JOHN Q. ADAMS, 1825 “[K]nowing that ‘except the Lord keep the city the watchman waketh but in vain,’ with fervent supplications for His favor, to His overruling providence I commit with humble but fearless confidence my own fate and the future destinies of my country.”

LINCOLN, 1861 “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.”

MCKINLEY, 1897 “Our faith teaches that there is no safer reliance than upon the God of our fathers, who has so singularly favored the American people in every national trial, and who will not forsake us so long as we obey His commandments and walk humbly in His footsteps...”

COOLIDGE, 1925 “America seeks no earthly empire built on blood and force. No ambition, no temptation, lures her to thought of foreign dominions. The legions which she sends forth are armed, not with the sword, but with the cross. The higher state to which she seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God.”

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, 1945 “The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world.”

TRUMAN, 1949 “We believe that all men have a right to equal justice under law and equal opportunity to share in the common good. We believe that all men have the right to freedom of thought and expression. We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God. From this faith we will not be moved.”

EISENHOWER, 1953 “At such a time in history, we who are free must proclaim anew our faith. This faith is the abiding creed of our fathers. It is our faith in the deathless dignity of man, governed by eternal moral and natural laws. This faith defines our full view of life. It establishes, beyond debate, those gifts of the Creator that are man's inalienable rights, and that make all men equal in His sight.”

KENNEDY, 1961 “I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago. … And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe - the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.”

L. B. JOHNSON, 1965 “[W]e have no promise from God that our greatness will endure. ...If we fail now, we shall have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship; that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and that the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored.”

REAGAN, 1981 “I am told that tens of thousands of prayer meetings are being held on this day, and for that I am deeply grateful. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer.”

--END--