Snake bitten pastor dies

Seriously, what is wrong with some pastors these days?  The length they go to further their own selfish means is astounding.  Taking passages out of the bible and interpreting them literally and practicing made up rituals, it’s definitely a sign of the times folks.  This latest one involved a pastor who was engaging in a ritual with a poisonous snake.  Snake bit him, pastor dies.  To top it off, he had seen his dad died years before under the same circumstances.  Twice bitten….  Is God trying to send them a message here?  Folks, hold tight to your faith because snakes walk among us.

Read on…

‘Serpent-Handling’ West Virginia

Pastor Dies From Snake Bite

• 

  ‘Serpent-Handling’ West Virginia …

A “serpent-handling” West Virginia pastor died after his rattlesnake bit him during a church ritual, just as the man had apparently watched a snake kill his father years before.

Pentecostal pastor Mark Wolford, 44, hosted an outdoor service at the Panther Wildlife Management Area in West Virginia Sunday, which he touted on his Facebook page prior to the event.

“I am looking for a great time this Sunday,” Wolford wrote May 22,according to the Washington Post. “It is going to be a homecoming like the old days. Good ‘ole raised in the holler or mountain ridge running, Holy Ghost-filled speaking-in-tongues sign believers.”

Robin Vanover, Wolford’s sister, told the Washington Post that 30 minutes into the outdoor service, Wolford passed around a poisonous timber rattlesnake, which eventually bit him.

“He laid it on the ground,” Vanover said in the interview, “and he sat down next to the snake, and it bit him on the thigh.”

Vanover said Wolford was then transported to a family member’s home in Bluefield about 80 miles away to recover. But as the situation worsened, he was taken to a hospital where he later died.

Jim Shires, owner of the Cravens-Shires Funeral Home in Bluefield, told ABC News that Wolford died Monday. Wolford’s church, the Apostolic House of the Lord Jesus in Matoaka, will host a viewing Friday and a funeral service Saturday morning. Wolford will be buried at the Hicks Family Plot in Phelps, Ky.

Officials at the Panther Wildlife Management Area had been unaware of Sunday’s event until they were notified by callers after the service.

“We did not know that this event was happening, and if we had known about it or if we had been asked for permission, permission would not have been granted,” Hoy Murphy, public information officer for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, told ABC News.

Hoy said West Virginia state park rules prohibit animals other than dogs and cats on the property.

While snake-handling is legal in West Virginia, other Appalachian states, including Kentucky and Tennessee, have banned the practice in public spaces.

Snake-handlers point to scripture as evidence that God calls them to engage in such a practice to show their faith in him. Mark 16: 17-18 reads, “And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

Wolford told the Washington Post magazine in 2011 that he is carrying on the tradition of his ancestors by engaging in snake handling.

“Anybody can do it that believes it,” Wolford said. “Jesus said, ‘These signs shall follow them which believe.’ This is a sign to show people that God has the power.”

Wolford said watched his own father die at the age of 39 after a rattlesnake bit him during a similar service.

“He lived 101/2 hours,” Wolford told the Washington Post Magazine. “When he got bit, he said he wanted to die in the church. Three hours after he was bitten, his kidneys shut down. After a while, your heart stops. I hated to see him go, but he died for what he believed in.

“I know it’s real; it is the power of God,” Wolford told the Washington Post Magazine last year. “If I didn’t do it, if I’d never gotten back involved, it’d be the same as denying the power and saying it was not real.”

 

Related articles

• “Serpent-handling pastor profiled earlier in Washington Post dies from rattlesnake bite.” (althouse.blogspot.com)
• Another snake handler goes home to Jesus (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
• Serpent-handling pastor dies from rattlesnake bite (bangordailynews.com)
• Pastor who handled snakes dies from a predictable cause (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• God smites snake-fondling pastor (secularnewsdaily.com)
• Snake handling fundamentalist pastor dies from rattlesnake bite (americablog.com)
• Snake-handling pastor gets bitten by snake, dies (theblaze.com)

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…

The Lord’s Prayer in a Cemetery in Henderson, Kentucky (Photo credit: Lori SR)

How deep is that line taken from The Lord’s Prayer?  Until a while ago, I never paid any mind to the words of that prayer.  Ever since I started uttering words, I was taught it but it had become more of an automatic recital.  It was ‘the automatic pray’.

As my faith matured, I started to seek deeper prayer sessions with my prayers focusing more on depth and meaning.  I also started to meditate, if you can call it that, on the words of The Lord’s Prayer.  I realized then that instead of being ‘The automatic pray’ it was instead ‘The ultimate prayer’.

‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’ was a very poignant line that stood out in the prayer.  I often ponder on it and it makes me search myself.  Am I really forgiving others for trespassing against me, thereby warranting God’s forgiveness?  Sadly, often the answer is a resounding no.

So saying that, should I omit that line until I could say it without crossing my fingers?  How could I in all honesty, ask God’s forgiveness while I carry around a suitcase of memories?  Memories of the trespasses against me and those who perpetrated them?  I can’t.  We can’t.

Even if you are a non-christian, this can also apply to you.  Forgiving is not based on a belief.  Forgiving relieves us of the burden of hate and animosity that we carry around because we have the person in our mind and maybe plotting revenge.  With forgiveness comes great inner peace.  If you are a christian,  forgiving brings forgiveness.  It is wrong to think that one would need to be God fearing to even thing about forgiving.  It’s like saying I can’t be good because I don’t believe in God.

If you haven’t done so yet, next time you say the Lord’s Prayer, meditate on every line and feel it.  You will see why it is the ultimate pray.

Lord teach me how to forgive others so that I in turn could receive your forgiveness.  Amen

Related articles

• Trespasses (divinitytreasures.wordpress.com)
• May 16, 2012 (proactive.typepad.com)
• Something to Think About (meshawnsenior.wordpress.com)
• Freedom (revsantry.wordpress.com)
• The truth about forgiveness (clydestyle.org)
• The Lord’s Prayer, Revisited (pattidavis.wordpress.com)

Chinese couple bury woman alive!!

The following is  a classic example of how much morality has and is declining in our world today.  The natural instinct to do good is trumped by our selfish need for self-preservation at any and all cost.  At this rate,  getting beamed up asap won’t be such a bad thing.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police have arrested a young couple who buried an old woman alive believing she was dead after their car hit the 68-year-old, newspapers said on Thursday, in a case which has sparked outrage over declining public morality.

The couple had been at an all-night karaoke session when they hit the woman while driving in the early hours of the morning in the wealthy eastern province of Zhejiang last month, the official China Daily said.

“A witness said he heard someone crying and saw an elderly woman lying on the ground near (the car),” it cited a policeman as saying.

“A man and a woman got out and put the elderly woman in the car, saying they would send her to hospital.”

But, worried about being arrested for drunk driving and causing the accident and believing she was no longer alive, they buried her near the side of the road, the report added.

However, when police later found the woman’s body they discovered she was still alive when she was buried, and had then suffocated to death, the paper said.

The story has been widely discussed on China’s popular Twitter-like service Weibo, where it has ignited uproar for what some called the immorality of modern Chinese society.

“Such things show that our society really has huge problems it is not facing,” wrote one user.

“People of China, how have you come to this?” wrote another.

China’s economic boom and the growing disparity between the rich and poor have made changing social values a contentious topic, with some lamenting what they see as materialism and a get-rich-quick attitude replacing public morals.

Last year, graphic video footage of a two-year-old child run over by a van and ignored by passersby in southern China sparked similar anger.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Michael Perry)

US Pastors lead open season on gays

In a rant delivered just days after President Barack Obama’s historic public support for same-sex marriage, the pastor, Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, N.C., suggested rounding up all “queers and homosexuals” and quarantining them inside an electric fence.

“I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers,” Worley told churchgoers on May 13. “Build a great big large fence—50 or 100 miles long—put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. And you know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. Do you know why? They can’t reproduce!”

“It makes me pukin’ sick to think about,” Worley added. “Can you imagine kissing some man?”

Worley’s comments—while shocking—are sadly not uncommon for pastors in North Carolina, a state that voted overwhelmingly in favor of a constitutional amendment defining marriage “as solely between a man and a woman.”

Earlier this month, Ron Baity, founding pastor of Winston-Salem’s Berean Baptist Church and leader of Return America, said gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people should be prosecuted.

“For 300 years, we had laws that would prosecute that lifestyle,” Baity said. “We’ve gone down the wrong path.”

Before the state’s vote, Pastor Sean Harris of the Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville instructed parents to use force if their kids start acting gay:

So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed. Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. OK?

My Take:  On behalf of real Christians who worship a forgiving and accepting God, I apologize for these ignorant war crusaders and their hate mongering.  They falsely claim to be Christians but practice hate and intolerance.  Their sentiments do not in any way reflect those of us true believers.

Tragedy or merely an inconvenience?

We are drama queens and kings.  Maybe it’s in our nature, I don’t know but I do know that we tend to behave as if it is the end of the world when something bad happens to us.  If you don’t believe me then log into Facebook and read some of the statuses.  ’Worst day ever! My hair dryer died’.  ’FML, nowhere to go on the weekend’ or ‘Just shoot me already, I broke my nail that I just had done!’

I never paid much attention to this until a while ago when I was enjoying my favorite food, pizza.  As always, I dug into it too soon and burned the roof of my mouth.  Within a minute, it was raw and hurting.  It was uncomfortable but fortunately not too uncomfortable that I couldn’t keep eating.   I kept thinking ‘Man this is the worst’ then I realized that right at the time I was thinking that, someone, somewhere, was starving.  Someone, somewhere, was hurting from injuries far worse than a burned mouth.  Injuries that were life threatening.  That stopped my negative thoughts dead in their tracks.

While backing out of my garage a month ago, I came too close to the wall and broke my side door mirror.  I was devastated!  Because it was a heated power mirror, it would cost over $500 to fix.   At the time, I couldn’t think of anything worse that could have happened to me but there was.   While I was wallowing in self-pity, my very life was being threatened by a health issue.  I did’t know that then.

So today, are we facing tragedies or inconveniences? Inconveniences that create minor setbacks in our beautifully scripted lives?  Remember, for every nail we break, thousands are having their hearts broken.   For every spilled coffee on that new pair of pants, gallons of life’s blood are emptied on the ground.  Food too cold? How about the cold and shivering children dying of hunger?  That’s a tragedy.

That’s my take for the long Canadian weekend.

Beheading monster to be given greater freedom

Four years ago,  a sick man, Vince Li, took the life of an innocent fellow passenger on a greyhound bus.   It was one of the most gruesome cases to ever take place in Manitoba as the victim, 22-year-old Tim McLean, was stabbed, beheaded and cannibalized.  Read here.

The sheer shock value of the crime was enough to warrant the public and even myself, to call for revenge of kind.  Li was found not criminally responsible for the murder due to insanity and was placed in a psychiatric institution, much to the chagrin of many.

To add insult to injury,  Li, who according to his doctors, has been responding very well to his medications, is being recommended for greater freedom.  This basically means that he would allowed to go on escorted walks. (A police would be present). Click here for full story.

The public say nay but I say yay.  Why not? Li has done something bad, very bad.  Something most of us would never wish to have done to anyone we remotely know.  The evilness of it makes us crave revenge and revenge only, but Li did it because he was sick and needed help.  He had no hate for his victim. He was driven to do what he did because of a wiring problem in his brain.  Should he be made to pay for the rest of his life? No matter how much he suffers, the fate of Tim McLean would be the same.

Mental illness is serious and it is real.  There are potential Vince Li’s walking among us.  It could be me and it could be you.  I would hate to lose my life as I know it for a crime I have no recollection of committing.  Wouldn’t you?  As bad as this may sound, if the killing of Tim helped Li to get the treatment he needed and maybe thus saving him from killing more people, then he did not die in vain.

Maybe I am a little sick to see it that way but it’s my take, popular or not.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Related articles

• Doctor asks bus beheading hearing to allow Vince Li escorted trips into community (thestar.com)
• Review set for man who beheaded bus passenger (ctv.ca)

Calm down, it’s only a game isn’t it? Isn’t it?

This ain’t your daddy’s back yard scrimmage

A day after my beloved hockey team, The Washington Capitals forgot to show up for their game seven against The New York Rangers and end up being bounced, I woke up with allergy symptoms.   As I sniffled and wiped my teary eyes, my three-year old son looked at me with an air  of understanding and said, “Daddy, I know the Caps are now out of the playoffs but don’t worry it’s just a game”.  Well I’ll be dang!  Out of the mouth of babes…

Well son, sorry to blog it to you but it ceased being ‘just a game’ a long time ago.        When professional athletes are paid more than the real professionals who save lives and educate world leaders, it is not just a game.  In fact, I am not sure if it can even be called a game anymore. ( Maybe a business franchise, a team of thugs, a gang or a group of rich spoiled brats won’t be that far off but your dad never said that and there are a lot of good teams out there and a lot of athletes are also good law abiding citizens).

Son, just last year, downtown Vancouver was laid waste, buildings were  burned, looted and vandalized,  all because their team, The Vancouver Canucks lost game seven of the Stanley Cup finals.  Read it all here.  People were hurt, son.  Human lives were disrupted.  Perhaps they didn’t get the memo that it was just a game.

Last year alone,  within the space of a few months, three hockey players died.  Two were from suicide and the other from drug overdose.  Son, I should not be telling you all this gruesome stuff at your tender age but it’s reality, not a game.  People don’t need drugs to play a game.  I could also tell you about the NFL and NBA where the players travel with armed posses and engage in illicit activities.  Drugs use is rampant, not that you would know what rampant means.

My boy, remember how daddy’s blood pressure soared to dangerous levels as he watched the playoffs? That’s serious stuff, son.  Serious stuff.

Snakes and Ladders is a game, hide-and-go-seek is a game but when it comes to pro sport, it’s ‘not just a game’ my little one.  Now excuse me while I go blow my nose.

Related articles

• Daddy and the hockey game (caramieandtheboyz.wordpress.com)
• ‘It just feels different’: Caps, Rangers talk Game 7 (aol.sportingnews.com)
• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/16/vancouver-riots-2011_n_877924.html

17 years for shooting called ‘excessive’

In another example of justice being miscarried, a Winnipeg man saw his sentence of 17 years reduced to 14 because it was deemed ‘excessive’.   Considering the high rate of re-offenders, I am greatly appalled by this development.

The reduction was also based on the fact that although the accused had a significant criminal background, few, not much just few, of them were crimes of violence. How reassuring.  He has only hurt people a few times so he’s still a nice guy.  Ten more crimes of violence and that’s it, Mister!  Apparently he is still below his violence quota.   What a joke!

Back to the story.  So this perp, attempted killer, supposedly set out to sell a gun to his buddy so he could afford his drug habit.   To me that’s 14 years right there.   He met him at his house chatting with a cab driver who the accused knew and hated.   As he approached, gun in hand, finger on trigger, gun loaded and pointed,  the mother of all coincidences, he stumbled.  To further complicate things, while falling, his finger pressed the trigger of the loaded gun, discharging a bullet into the chest of the cab driver!  A guy that he knew and hated. Wow!  His friend is a very lucky man.  Could easily have been him instead of the cabbie.   Read it all here.

I have no doubt that this guy would be out within a few years AND I also have no doubt that his significant criminal record will get even more significant.  Way to go Justice System!

Related:

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/Man-who-shot-cab-driver-gets-3-years-cut-off-sentence-150638595.html

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/Bakema-discounted-alcohol-impairment-in-Taman-crash-officer-150646795.html

 

Calm down, it’s only a T-shirt!

A Grade 12 student in Nova Scotia was suspended for wearing a T-shirt with ‘Life is Wasted Without Jesus’ written on it.  Read here.  I totally agree with that sentiment BUT that’s my opinion that reflects my beliefs.

Now here is my take on this growing censorship of religious freedom by schools.  Schools are places where children of all race and culture mingle.  There are many beliefs and practices that must be respected and appreciated unless forced upon another.  Wearing a shirt that publicize ones beliefs is much the same as wearing a turban that reflects the wearer is a Sikh, which is also a religious group.

Have you seen some of the T-shirts worn by students lately?  They advertise everything, sex, drugs, guns, etc.  The schools seem to be ok with this.  And how about the attire worn by some of the school girls?  Too revealing, too short, too sexy but it’s ok as long as they show no visible signs of religious affiliation.  Right?

Why the increasing crackdown on christian-based practices in schools and public places?  Smothering the truth does not make it go away, it in fact makes it more relevant.

So who are the real bullies here?

Related articles

• N.S. student suspended for wearing religious T-shirt (theglobeandmail.com)
• Student’s ‘Jesus’ shirt sparks feud with school (cbc.ca)
• N.S. school board turns to mediation in fracas over ‘offensive’ Christian T-shirt (vancouversun.com)
• Canadian student suspended from school for wearing a ‘Jesus’ T-shirt (mysteryworshipers.wordpress.com)
• Jesus lobs a controversy bomb into the Nova Scotia school system, leaves, says, “Deal with it, people.” (cafewitteveen.wordpress.com)