Beggar

      Few know the following about the number of Christians killed just for believing in Jesus.  During the last hundred years, the number exceeds the total of Christians killed in all the previous centuries combined --including the period of the Roman Empire.        Today a Christian is martyred for the faith every eleven minutes somewhere in the world.        A shocking 80% of Christians today live where they suffer some form of persecution--that is, not just being looked at funny or mocked, but jailed, denied employment or schooling, beaten,  home burned, or outright killed--just for naming the name of Jesus. +          +          +      Take India, for example.  Last month Kande Munda, a bricklayer, and his wife Bindu began to receive death threats.  Bindu's mother, not a Christian or part of the same community, came to visit.  Villagers raped her to to threaten Bindu into rejecting the Lord.        Kanda and Bindu discussed fleeing their village.  But on June 7 a m

      Independence Day is the day that, in a sense, the United States was born.  The 4th of July commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, declaring to all the world the fact of, and the reasons for, the colonies' struggle for independence from England.   Today in 2020 we celebrate with the awareness that not all is right in our land.  We are a nation more divided than we have been since our Civil War of about 150 years ago.       Yet this is a time when we have reason for confidence !  Why?  Not only because of what we are independent of, but more importantly what we are dependent on.      We fought to free ourselves from a government in England that did not have our people's interests at heart.  But also--so many of the original records show--many of us were declaring, not only our independence, but our dependence, not on a king but on the King of kings, not on a royal lord but on the Lord of lords.      In both the early Catholic settlements in Flori