Unearned Luck

The problem with loss is you can't control it.  Sometimes, it can seem like gain can be controlled, but never loss.  When someone leaves, they leave.  It's a choice that is entirely out of your hands and you have to let go no matter how tight your grip is. How much you love and care matters not a whit and does nothing to change the outcome.  Your faithfulness, your considerations, your trustworthiness, the past you have together is never enough currency to buy another minute, another moment, another touch.  The end comes and there is nothing else except the deep, bitter loneliness. "From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things...and be killed...And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, 'God forbid, Lord!  This shall never happen to you.'" See, Peter was trying to prevent the inevitable loss.  He was trying to control events, so he wouldn't lose Jesus, a man who was probably Peter'...

Before we describe as paranoia the thoughtful consideration of the possibility that there will not be a general election in November, we should take an educated look around the world today and throughout history and come to understand how people have thought that the drastic changes quietly overtaking them were only others' paranoia.  Most in Weimar Germany never believed that the funny little man and his pitiful group of losers would ever be a leader let alone lead them into a world war which would destroy their families, neighbors, friends and lives and would leave a lasting sorrowful legacy for their nation.  Few believed that a book written by a couple of pissed off intellectuals would result in almost 100 years of organized, government-sponsored terror, murder and poverty like the world has never seen in two of the oldest countries on the planet during a century that historians and popes have called the bloodiest in history.  Calling a sensitivity to the lessons of...