infidel

Wonderful, although spiked with drastic moments, true story, autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Emerging from a Somali born family, living also in Saudi and Kenya, learning about various ways of practicing Islam, growing up among cultures and traditions where Islam is a religion of birth, she makes a life altering decision and decides to stay in Europe.  She becomes an atheist (unfortunately)  and surprisingly politically incorrect in the midst of one of the most liberal European nations, Holland.

It’s a great read.

One thing that I agree with her is her opinion on Mohammed, the founder of Islam.

manifest neomesjanistyczny z 44

Czas na apokalipsę. Czas przebudzić jeźdźców czasów ostatecznych. Czas ożywić ducha mesjanizmu.

kontynuacja tutaj

A new kind of leader – Sarah Palin

That’s the title of a book that Zondervan is releasing on October 10th.

A new kind of leader

The book “will explore themes from her career in politics, her life as a hockey mom, and her strongly held Christian faith, explaining how they influence her new style of leadership and align with our changing economy in the information age.”

I tend to think these days that prayer works. God is unexpectedly surprising us by a twist of events that no one would predict. Some of my friends from other countries say, this is possible only in the USA. A person arises from almost nowwhere, electrifies the whole party and the country, speaks her mind out without fear of stepping on someone elses ideas, stands in the midst of seasoned politicians and proclaims with her life that LIFE MATTERS.

I like that kind of ‘feminist’, the kind that ‘walks the talk’, is a Christian, has more than two kids and governs a state in the most important country of the world!!!

What is God saying… I wonder…

The fulfilment of all desire

I have met Ralph Martin when he came to Poland with John Wimber. They were the main speakers at the conference in Warsaw, where about 3, 000 believers (Catholics and Protestants) gathered to hear about Jesus’ love and power operating in our times.

15 years later, I’ve just finished Martin’s book “The fulfilment of all desire”.

YOU MUST READ IT

This is not a book only for those who think that they are called to a “life of prayer” (by the way, how else we can communicate and fellowship with God Himself?). It is not only for those who recognize an intercessory role as their primary function within the body of Christ. It’s not only for those who identify themselves as evangelicals or charismatics or mystics or emergent church.

It’s for those who:

• desire to acknowledge that there is a depth to the knowledge of God, which we, in our “instant society” are lacking profoundly

• those who are experiencing hunger for God

• those who love challenges

• those who believe that inspiration of the past generations can be valuable

• those who want to go deeper in understanding the ways to reach their Creator

• those who need biblical proof that all of these mystics are right

• don’t understand why things are happening, when they laid down their whole lives to Jesus

• those who struggle with prayer life

• those who are tired of seven-points-to-successful-prayer

• those who are searching for the ancient truths spoken in a modern language

• those who love God Himself above everything else, who burned the bridges, who know that there is nothing else to come back to, but are apprehensive of stepping into the unknown

• those who want to become saints ( and I am quite serious about that one)

If you were struggling while reading “Fire within” by T. Dubay, this is “easier to read” version for the same subject – prayer.

WARNING

You will be messed up for some time, possibly for life…

You will discover (if you don’t know yet) that the whole body of Christ should be greatful to the Catholics for their wisdom…

You will wonder why no one told you these things before, and how come all of it is in the Bible…

You will discover something about yourself that someone else already knew hundreds years ago…

You will feel that you are a part of something bigger…

Shattered dreams

I finished “Shattered dreams. My life as a polygamist’s wife” by Irene Spencer.

Former Fundamentalist Mormon speaks out about her life as a second wife in a polygamous marriage. She was married at 16, endured enormous hardships, living for years without common benefits of civilization, like water and electricity, was sharing her husband with 9 other wives, was mother to 13 children, and was mostly unhappy and depressed. She did it, because she believed in the afterlife as an exalted goddess, which could be obtained only by living “The Principle”.

Hart rending as it is, I was amazed by the strong convictions implemented during her childhood that did not leave her mind, and despite the doubts, carried her to a distant lands and a life which many have no clue about. Real brain washing works. It is sublime, perverse and totally controlling.

The best news is, that she has found God’s love at the end of it all. Currently she has 119 grandchildren and 37 great-grandchildren.

Read more in her website IreneSpencerBooks.com and an interview with her.

Good video called “Lifting the veil of polygamy” introducing stories of people who lived through similar circumstances.

˜

polygamy in the USA

I’ve just finished the book “Escape” by Carolyn Jessop, former Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) member, who escaped with her 8 children, after many years of terrifying life with a man, who was one of the leaders in the FLDS.

She grew up in a polygamous household, and had to marry 50 year old man, being only 18 years old herself and becoming the forth wife. She was abused sexually, physically and emotionally throughout the marriage, not only by her husband, but by her sister-wives also.

Carolyn is the first top on the left, here with her husband and sister wives

The whole system of FLDS keeps the women as a subject to the men-powered world, which existence is based on perversity and control. They are degrading women’s lives, by diminishing them to working slaves, playing with their minds constantly to keep them vulnerable and subjected to the men’s wishes. Brain washed by the group’s leader’s, constantly abused, kept without educational opportunities, mentally tricked and emotionally drained, sooner or later, they become mentally unstable, depressed and mostly give up.

Carolyn found her strength by caring for her children, and was granted a full custody of her children after her escape from the brutality of the system, which promised heaven, but delivered hell on earth.

Very disturbing recollections of a young woman’s journey from a total believer in the cult’s religious teachings, to the world of freedom and reason.

The belief of FLDS: you can become a goddess in the afterlife if you will please your husband and live in total harmony with him (non-questionable obedience), he is destined to become god. On this picture, Carolyn is first on the right.

Carolyn’s position on the Texas court ruling (children returned to FLDS)

Read an interview with Carolyn in “Time”

Excerpt from the book

Video interview with Carolyn

women in 20th century Iran (under Shah Pahlavi and Khomeini)

I like to know about any recommendations for the books which are a “must” from others. I do read book’s reviews at Amazon and other sites (especially homeschooling stuff, it saved me from purchasing many over-marketed books), then I check them out from the library.

The last 2 weeks I’ve read 2 books, memoirs written by Iranian women who lived throughout the Shah and Khomeini times. You will become familiar with the culture, traditions and customs of the people of 20th century Iran as well as meet 2 women who went against the flow of the times, had to learn how to survive, live and tell the story.

“Prisoner of Tehran: a memoir” by Marina Nemat, tells you a story of a girl imprisoned as a teenager, surviving execution, forced to be married to her captor. Fascinating and powerful, one night read. You can’t put it away, every chapter draws your attention to the next. Vividly portrays the prison life, emotional and spiritual turmoil, painting them on the canvas with the background of her life before. As a Catholic believer, she was under even greater scrutiny, but her faith gave her courage and she had few encounters that clearly proved her God to be the One who loves, cares and remembers.

“Persian girls: a memoir” by Nahid Rachlin, starts as a story of a girl who was given by her mother to her barren aunt, and then taken back. She takes you through her family’s events, rather tragic, through the moment that changed her life, going to school in the USA. She struggles to keep her identity and to fit into her new lifestyle, which she expected to be different.

Both of these books dismantle the idea that Shah’s western ways of life, promoted so heavily during his reign, were of a help to the Iranian women. You see the position of a women coming from an era of superficial freedom under Shah, who controlled the society for his personal benefits, to the place of religiously imposed laws, not giving them any other options to chose from.

The conquest of the Bride

“The conquest of the Bride” is the title of 12th chapter from “Heart from Heart of the World” by Hans Urs von Balthasar. H. U. von Balthasar, a Swiss theologian, was called “perhaps the most cultured man of our century” by pope Benedict 16 and one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His writings, over 1,000 books and articles, were based upon theological studies of the Scriptures and the works of the church fathers. I am enjoying reading some of his books during the last year or so, and found this excerpt on CERC.

Read the whole chapter here or download it from my “I share” files (in the sidebar). Here are few fragments, an oracle of God to His church-Bride. It’s dogmatic and transcendental substance coexists with the lyrical, but meaningful finesse of revelation, reaching to the depths of God’s heart and revealing His anguish and desires.

 by januaryman

You will be a sign of contradiction among the peoples, and no one will even as much as whisper your name, O my Church, without shuddering.

Over you men will have to part their ways, for many will love you and squander everything for you, but very many will hate you, and these will swear an oath not to rest until they have exterminated you from the land of men. And you will be despised like no man or thing, except myself, has ever been despised on earth. They will stand in line for the privilege of spitting in your face, of wiping off on your garments the mud from their shoes.

Your administrators stingily dole out through well-run pipe-systems and institutions the precious liquid of my grace. The bark of the tree which once blossomed in the wild has now turned to cork. You have become such an established household that even the catastrophic storms of the times, and persecution rattling at your gates and windows, can hardly awaken you from sleep, and a slap in your face can elicit from you but an embarrassed smile. Disgrace covers the length of you, all the more poignantly as you try to deny it, pretending nothing is amiss.

It is with you, my Body, that I am forever fighting the great, apocalyptic battle.

The inglorious weakness with which, in this century of collapse, you stand before the world unable to transform it: this weakness is already a part of the mystery of my own inglorious weakness, for when was I ever strong enough to renew the face of this exterior world?

Bind yourself to me so irrevocably that I will be able to descend to hell with you; and then I will bind you to myself so irrevocably that, with me, you will be able to ascend to very heaven.

And so, in spite of everything, you will be my sign among the nations. To them you will remain a very implausible thing, so much so that they will daily prophesy your death. And you will indeed die after a fashion. But see: we live, you and I, for I have died once, and whoever eats of my death will live eternally and I will awaken him on the Last Day — – and each day is the last.

יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה

Remembrance Day for the Holocaust and Heroism, known as Yom HaShoah, is a national day of remembrance for 6 millions Jews who perished during Holocaust, and it is today.

Since XVI century Poland was a paradisus Iudaeorum (Jewish paradise in Latin), creating home to one of the world’s largest and most vibrant Jewish communities. The lives of Poles were intertwined with the lives of Jews for centuries. In the West the most known movies talking about the Holocaust were “Schindler’s list” and “The Pianist”.

Out of 6 million Jews killed during Shoah, about half of them were Polish Jews. Form the other 5 million victims of Nazism, 3 millions were Poles. Growing up I remember a lot of stories being told about the atrocities of Stalin’s and Hitler’s men. Jews and Poles were on Hitler’s list to be eventually exterminated.

Shoah is the Hebrew word for “whirlwind”. It is the term used to describe the murder of six million Jewish people between 1938 and 1945.

Every year, since 1989, the Knesset in cooperation with “Yad Vashem” performs the ceremony of “Everyone has a Name” in which the names of all of the holocaust victims are read aloud.

Polish Anne Frank

Last year a diary of 14 year old Rutka was discovered. Her family was taken from the Jewish ghetto and murdered at Auschwitz. Only her father survived.

After the war he went to Israel and started new family. He died in 1986. One of his daughters, who is now 57, heard about Rutka, her older half-sister, only once. She named her own daughter, Rutka.

The last entry in her diary:

“I have a feeling that I’m writing for the last time. There is an aktion in my town. I’m not allowed to go out, and I’m going crazy, imprisoned in my house … I wish it would end already, this torment, this hell. I try to escape from these thoughts of the next day, but they keep haunting me like nagging flies. If only I could say, it’s over, you only need to die once … but I can’t because despite all these atrocities, I want to live and wait for the following day.”

Her name was read today in a ceremony for all to remember.

from vampires to Christ

I rarely read magazines. In the last issue of TIME I’ve found something. Have you heard of Anne Rice? Well, for the last decades she is known in USA and all over the world for her writing genius.

She is known as an author of the “Vampire Chronicles” series ( one of them is “Interview with the vampire”). After 38 years of being an atheist, she says:

“…faith came back to me. I had to stop writing about vampires, because they had been a metaphor for lost souls. Instead, I made up my mind to concentrate on Jesus Christ.”

What caused it?

“Americans like to believe we turn to religion because of an accident or the loss of a loved one, but in my case it was simply the culmination of searching. I wrestled with a lot of theological questions, and then one afternoon, I thought, I love you–I want to go back to you.“

One afternoon. One thought. One love.

That’s what we do at IHOP, in a way. We pray a lot for those “one thought” moments to cross peoples minds, to pierce their hearts. We pray a lot for those “suddenlies” to invade peoples souls. We pray for those desires to “come back” to the first love to arise from within them.