Noticings from the past few days:

• President Bush called the cease-fire agreement a defeat for Hizbollah. George, what ARE you smoking? Talk about "spin." Hizbollah met an Israeli army conducting war with a failed methodology and backed by a spineless leader, and for the first time in decades an enemy brought Israel to a stalemate. The Islamic fascists are the one's who are celebrating.
   
• Since the cease-fire agreement people are pouring back into Lebanon. Huh? Don't they know this won't last? Hizbollah is pouring back into Lebanon too. How long do you think it will take before we see young people throwing rocks at the Israelis to provoke them to battle? How long before the first staged Israeli "atrocity" on defenseless Lebanese? How long before the missiles start firing again to reign down "retribution" on Israel? And all of it orchestrated by a people drunk on hatred and antisemitism.
   
• I've seen Walid Shoebat a couple of times lately on a Christian television show. Visited his website tonight. Walid is a former Palestinian terrorist, who after moving to America and taking up the challenge from his wife to review the Bible for himself became a Christian. Now he fights to confront the insanity of Islamic fundamentalism and educate the world on it's dangers. Walid's first hand witness is that the Islamic nations of the Middle East are themselves training grounds for hatred and antisemitism. He was totally indoctrinated by his religious culture to hate the Jew.
   
• As an American Christian I often wonder, "Are these the 'End Times' we were taught about?" It would be easy to feign knowledge and say "Yes!" and end up being wrong. We have misread the times often enough before that we should live more humbly where this question is concerned. And it's not so much that we have misread as we do not have the inside information to answer the question definitively. Even so, as I look at the Middle East aflame with rage and hatred toward Israel - Israel surrounded by nations that want it's very annihilation - a madman in Iran sounding like Hitler all over again, and funding military assaults against Israel, and the world watching, waiting and hoping that madman doesn't get his hands on a nuke, it would be a good time to consider your relationship with Almighty God, and though it's always a good time to do so, it is even more so now.