Why is it so hard for us to pray for, witness to, and essentially “turn the other cheek” on those friends, loved ones, or even ex-spouses when it’s seems so easy for them to ridicule us for what we believe even to the point that they blaspheme God?

It’s sad really, we know the ultimate outcome of their fate, yet they choose to mock us. They deny Christ and they deny God, they mock our Christianity but yet we remain friends with them, we still talk to them, maybe we even continue to pray for them. Are they scared? Are they afraid they’ll have to change their life style maybe even to the point that they’ll be labeled “Jesus Freaks”? Do they really enjoy their lives just the way they are, their worldly possessions like that house, that car, the money that they have in the bank, the stress. Are they afraid that they’ll have to give up their “cool” friends, the ones that “understand” them or the ones that they idolize or want to be like?

The answer is yes to all of those questions. All of the questions I’ve asked, someone was asking about you, me, all of us, at one point in our lives, that person did not give up on us, continually praying for us, asking God for His help to help us see “the way, the truth, and the life” as frustrated as they may have gotten, they continued. Most of the time we know who this person is, sometimes we don’t. Someone prayed that you would accept Christ as your Savior.

What some of our friends don’t realize is that they can still have all of that, it just won’t mean as much. They’ll understand that all that they have is given to them by God. The friends that will really understand them are the friends like you and me, the friends that they will meet in church, but most importantly, they’ll have a true friend in Christ, the one that understands them the most and wants nothing but the best from them and from them.

What is even sadder is that for a lot of those friends….they won’t realize any of this until tragedy strikes, the threat of tragedy, or something bad that has happened, and even then they tend to blame God for it. Jesus tells us to pray without ceasing. The thing about God is He is always there for us, ready to comfort us and there is nothing wrong with being a Jesus freak!

As hard as it is, as frustrating as it may get for us, we need to continue to pray for our friends who are not saved and ask God to help us help them and continue to let them know that God does love them, no matter what and continue to be there for them because no matter how “stubborn” they are, they may need us in their hour of need. We still need to walk the walk that God has planned for us but keep those unsaved friends in prayer and tell your other Christian brothers and sisters to help you and pray for you.

CBNNews.com
May 13, 2008


CBNNews.com - A Christian group in the United Kingdom is taking Google to court for blocking a pro-life advertisement, earlier this year.
In March, the search engine goliath refused to deploy a pro-life ad for The Christian Institute because of the religious content of the ad. The UK group is a nondenominational Christian charity.
CBN News recently spoke with Mike Jude of The Christian Institute about the case against Google. Watch for more.
The draft ad in question stated, "UK abortion law: Key news and views on abortion law from The Christian Institute. www.christian.org.uk."
The Institute's attorneys argue that Google unlawfully discriminated against them by blocking the ad. The Equality Act 2006 prohibits religious discrimination when providing goods or services.
Institute leaders say they are being treated differently because of their religious beliefs.
"Google promotes itself as a company committed to the ideals of free speech and the free exchange of ideas. It is against this standard that Google's anti-religious policy is so unjust," said Colin Hart, director of The Christian Institute.
According to an e-mail Google sent to the group, the ad was banned for "unacceptable content." But Google does allow advertisements for non-religious sites, including those with views on abortion. It also allows ads for pornographic sites -- as long as the sex is consensual and does not involve children or animals.
"If there is to be a free exchange of ideas, then Google cannot give special free speech rights to secular groups whilst censoring religious views," Hart said. "To describe abortion and religion-related content as 'unacceptable content', while at the same time advertising pornography, is ridiculous."
Google's Web site clearly states: "Google was founded with a clear vision in mind: To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
But attorneys for the UK group say the Internet giant will not allow ads for Web sites which contain "abortion and religious-related content."
In response, the Institute's attorney's have asked Google to change its policy or face legal action.
Google is the number one search engine in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and Australia, with over 80 million unique users per month.
Source: Christian.org.uk

Mom’s are special, they have a special kind of love, show your Mom that you care and love her too, a simple card, a single flower, even just a nice bear hug and the words “ I Love You Mom” can show them they are appreciated.

If your Mom has passed away, like my Mother-in-Law has, plan to visit her grave site. We plan to go to her grave site, my wife, me and our daughter, to say “thanks for the memories, caring for us, and showing us what unconditional love is, we miss you, and love you”. If you can’t get to her grave site, take a nice long moment out of your busy day and remember her.

To the Husbands and Dad’s in ZoeCity, make sure your kids do something special for their Mom also, you can cook her lunch or dinner or even take her out to eat, after all she is the Mother of your children and the woman you married (I hope) and puts up with the biggest kid in the house…..you.

To the Mothers here in ZoeCity…Happy Mothers Day!!

HOME > > ENTERTAINMENT
Oprah's 'Church' Video Draws Over 5 Million to YouTube
A YouTube video which features talk show host Oprah Winfrey denying Jesus as the only way to God and promoting New Age ideas has received over 5 million views and is still climbing.
Wed, Apr. 23, 2008 Posted: 08:24:45 AM EST
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A YouTube video which features talk show host Oprah Winfrey denying Jesus as the only way to God and promoting New Age ideas has received over 5 million views and is still climbing.

The under seven-minute video montage, entitled "The Church of Oprah Exposed," was posted about month ago and has since claimed the Top Favorites spot in the Web site's News & Politics category.

According to statistics posted on YouTube, the latest streams of visitors are coming from PerezHilton.com, a Hollywood gossip blog. The author of the blog wrote that "crazy Christians" are behind the effort to demonize Oprah as a "conduit of evil."

But many Christians say New Age teachings espoused by Oprah in the video are a cause for concern. They believe the day-time host is distorting Christianity and leading many into spiritual confusion.

In a commentary posted on The Morning Call, one pastor likened Oprah's multi-way approach to God to telling a blind man standing at the edge of a cliff that whichever way he chooses to walk is equally safe.

"She holds the trendy idea that religions are essentially the same and that there are many paths that lead to God. She irrationally romanticizes the notion that God can be whatever you want him/her/it to be," writes Steven W. Cornell, pastor of a Pennsylvania-based church.

One clip in the video shows Oprah blatantly denying Jesus as the only way to God.

"How can there be only one way to heaven or to God?" Oprah asked her audience in a show taped years ago.

When one woman in the audience asked, "What about Jesus?" Oprah defiantly answered, "What about Jesus?...There couldn't possibly be one way."

Another part of the YouTube video shows Oprah hosting her recent Webinar class, in which she promotes New Age writer Eckhart Tolle and his "New Earth" book.

A guest caller asked her in the segment how she reconciled certain spirituality teachings with those of Christianity.

Oprah went on to explain how her view of God changed after hearing a charismatic preacher describe God as "jealous God" in her late 20s. She concluded that by opening her mind to the "hugeness" of God and accepting that He is love helped her to reconcile the two.

"God is a feeling experience and not a believing experience. If your religion is a believing experience…then that's not truly God," she continued to say during the webinar.

Frank Pastore, a Christian radio talk show host on KKLA, was among the many Christian leaders who criticized Oprah's views, saying the two worldviews she discusses are actually irreconcilable.

"If she’s a Christian, she’s an ignorant one, because Christianity is incompatible with New Age thought," Pastore wrote in his commentary on Crosswalk.com.

He went on to list key differences between Christianity and New Age worldviews. In one entry, Pastore said that the meaning of life for Christians is to glorify God while New Age thought showcases enlightenment.

Bill Keller, founder of LivePrayer.com, a internet-based program on faith and values, said he believes Oprah is starting her own cult.

"She has an incredible amount of influence over people and an incredible following," Keller told Celebrity News Service.

"I believe these New Age teachings are like 'spiritual crack' because people are hungry, the teachings satisfy and then they are hungry again," he added.

Keller, who has responded with his YouTube video on the matter, told Celebrity News Service that while many at this point are afraid to challenge Oprah because of her power, he expects more people to begin questioning her teachings over the next six months.

On the Web: The Oprah Church Exposed YouTube Video
Elena Garcia
Christian Post Reporter
******* THE ABOUVE ARTICLE IS POSTED ON THE CHRISTAIN POST.COM****************

I hope and pray that you are not falling into this “spiritual crack”. Oprah has a huge following of fans that listen to her and support her. We all know there is only one way to heaven, no matter how many “good deeds” you do on this earth, it doesn’t matter how popular you are or how much money you may have or how many worldly possessions have, we’ll all stand before God to be judged and be granted access to either Heaven or hell. There’s only one way to heaven and believing that there are other ways to Heaven besides Jesus is not the way. If you are ‘hungry’ for more, don’t look outside the Christian community to feed you, talk to your Pastor and others in your church, talk to other Christians, read your bible and pray more. There are so many options for a christian, but the one option we need to stay away from is deception.

Ben Stein has exposed “Darwinism” to an unbelievable level. I first learned about this on toby1 profile page. And I asked myself why haven’t we heard about this on the form of TV commercials in the mainstream media?

The premise of the movie, which is a documentary, is that teachers, professors, and even scientist are losing their jobs, being “black listed”, and losing tenor just for posing, discussing, or allowing the discussion of “Intelligent Design” in the classroom or labs, in other words their losing their jobs because they are questioning Darwin’s theory of evolution and saying that a supreme being (GOD) created man! This is called Intelligent Design, or ID for short.

Darwin’s theory is taught to every student, in every school, in every state. We all know his theory is that man has evolved from ape, years later the scientists figured out that a cell evolved into ape which in turn evolved into man. The question that a majority in the science community, our schools and universities refuses hear and will refuse to even answer is…who created the cell?

Ben’s movie, “expelled”, opens in 1000 theaters nationwide today, 4/18/08. I’m not much into documentaries, but this one I’d like to see.

Visit the web site http://www.expelledthemovie.com

Doing my daily "surf" I stumbled upon this article from Christainpost.com, as I read the article, I couldn't help but think that this is so true. In our daily walk and our everyday lives are we doing things that would make us "lukewarm"? What we are watching? reading? listening to? what games are we playing? What are the kids watching?, listening to?, playing. Is is possible that Satan has sugar coated things so well that we Christains cant see the true message behind those things that influence us. I'm no saint, I've sinned and unfortunetly I'm sure I'll sin again but I'm so thankful that we have forgiving, loving God that wants nothing but the best for us as long as we follow his path.

Is America's Churches Greatest Need Spiritual Revival?
Mon, Apr. 14, 2008 Posted: 11:16:31 AM EST
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Q: Recently, our church had a retreat, and the speaker said (among other things) that the greatest need in America’s churches today is spiritual revival. Would you agree with him? — D.K.

A: Yes, I would agree. Tens of millions of people attend church every week — and yet every year our society becomes more and more immoral and secular. Surely this wouldn’t be the case if God’s people took their faith more seriously.

What are the keys to spiritual revival? The first key is repentance — acknowledging that we have strayed from God, and that we have not made Christ the center of our lives. We may believe in Him ... we may have felt close to Him in the past ... we may even have worked for Him and witnessed for Him. But over the years our faith has cooled and we’ve pushed Christ from the center to the edge of our lives. We’ve become like the Christians of Laodicea, of whom Christ said, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. .…. You are lukewarm” (Revelation 3:15-16).

The second key to spiritual revival is a renewed commitment to Christ and His will for our lives. Your life will never be the same once you realize how much God loves you, and how much Christ suffered for you. Nor will your life ever be the same once you realize how much God loves the whole world, and how much He wants to use you to reach out to others with His love.

Revival is our urgent need today — but it must begin in our own hearts and lives. Has this happened to you? May the Bible’s prayer become yours: “O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the years” (Habakkuk 3:2, KJV).

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Affectionately known as the “World’s Preacher” for more than 60 years, the Rev. Billy Graham is one of the most influential and respected spiritual leaders of the 20th century. He has been a friend and spiritual advisor to ten American presidents and has preached the Gospel to more people in live audiences than anyone else in history — nearly 215 million people in more than 185 countries and territories — through various meetings. Hundreds of millions more have been reached through television, video, film, and webcasts. Send your queries to "My Answer," c/o Billy Graham, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 1 Billy Graham Parkway, Charlotte, N.C., 28201; call 1-(877) 2-GRAHAM, or visit the Web site for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association: www.billygraham.org.
Billy Graham
Christian Post Guest Columnist
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This blog post by DinoMartino is courtesy of Chirstianpost.com
Copyright 2006 Christianpost.com. All rights reserved.

‘The Grid’ Could Soon Make the Internet Obsolete

Monday, April 07, 2008- (This entire article courtesy of Foxnews.com)
 
The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the Internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel Internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.
It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.
Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.
“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

**This entire article copied from www.foxnews.com on 4/7/08**

So yesterday was a very frustrating day for me, when I got to work I had an email about a plant wide meeting at the beginning of the shift. We've known for quite some time that our plant was going to to close, and little by little we have been sending our lines, and line support departments to Mexico. We kept thinking that at this rate we'll be here for another couple of years. Yesteray's meeting informed us that the plant will be closed by the end of September-December at the very lastest and that movement of the lines and support departments will start to increase, about 1/3 of our employee's will be laid off by the end of June, the reamaining 2/3 will be will be laid off between July and Sept.

All day I kept thinking about what my wife and I are going to do (we both work here)all day I thought about, baiscally, the future for my family. Are we going to be able to still afford our house, our cars, pay for the wonderful day care our daughter is in, everything.

When we were winding down for the evening, I had this feeling that I couldn't get away from, like a voice telling me " You haven't read your devotional" and I realized that I hadn't read it yet but thought I'll read it in a little bit, after a few minutes the feeling grew so strong that I said to myself "fine, I'm going now"

As I read the scripture, the huge burden I had placed on myself at the beginning of the day was lifted by each tear that fell down my cheek, I felt chastised and wrapped in God's love at the same time as the words that I was reading told me not to worry, God will provide, he even provides for the birds!

I read "Our daily Bread", the scripture for April 2, 2008 was Matthew 6:25-34.
I thank God for his Love, his Son, and providing for all of our needs, I know He's in control.

zoecity is pretty cool, I'm a newbee here, I enjoy it. I feel like I'm not so great at blogging. Just having fun at work believe it or not I love my job just too bad the place I work at is closing up to move south of the border, I'm not worried... yet and I'm keeping the faith that God closes one door and opens another. I believe God has something else for me to do, I just hope and pray it's this year.