How God Leads You Through Your Fears "So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand." – Isaiah 41:10 A story is told of a general in the Persian army who captured spies and sentenced them to death. This general had the strange custom of giving condemned criminals a choice between going before a firing squad or walking through a big black door. Almost without fail, prisoners would choose the firing squad. When one of his commanders asked the general why so few picked the door, he said, "People always prefer the known and fear the unknown. But what they don't know is that on the other side of that big black door is freedom." Quite often, the best opportunities we have in life lie beyond big doors of the great unknown. Yet instead of walking through those doors, most people are content to remain in their current "safe" circumstances, completely missing out on the opportunities that await them on the other side. Don't be afraid of the big, foreboding doors of life. Be willing to face your fears and jump into new opportunities that draw you out of your comfort zone. God is in control. Trust Him to help you overcome your fears and He'll bring you into a new reliance on Him as your provider! Prayer Challenge: Ask God to bring you into situations where He can help you overcome your fears and develop a deeper trust in Him. Questions for Thought: Amidst all the chaos going on in the world today, what is your biggest fear right now? How might God be calling you to overcome that fear and develop a deeper trust in Him? Visit the Senior Living Ministries website The post How God Leads You Through Your Fears – Senior Living – September 19 appeared first on GodUpdates.

The tour will run into 2026 and exclusively feature material from Maiden's 1980 debut up until 1992's Fear Of The Dark!

Graham Gouldman explains why the art-rock icons believed in themselves so much, the album that best represents them, and why he’d never release new music using the band name

The Fisk Jubilee Singers Across the Atlantic JamesHoare Thu, 09/19/2024 - 06:00

It’s easy to get so wrapped up in the fleeting cares and problems of this life and forget how perfect and never-ending the next life will be.

The bar for what passes for “journalism” at the Cable News Network is low these days. However, the network still manages to find ways to stoop to new lows. Case in point, an entire segment defending Kamala Harris’s accent use and authenticity, while completely neglecting her totally made-up Hispanic accent. Here’s how host Laura Coates opened her segment in defense of Harris’s “code-switching”: CNN LAURA COATES LIVE 9/18/24 11:14 PM LAURA COATES: All right. tonight’s take comes to us from Elizabeth Spears from The New York Times, who writes this headline: “The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy.” Now, in this piece, she argues: “conservatives find her accent infuriating for one very specific reason: because they buy the negative stereotypes. They associate southern accents with less educated working class people who, if they're white, might be racist- and that’s a demographic the conservatives cynically regard as their property.” Unquote. Now Republicans pounce each time she seems to change the way she talks based on her audience. Here she is talking about the same topic on the same day. But in the first clip, she's in Detroit. The second: Pittsburgh. KAMALA HARRIS (IN DETROIT): You may not be a union member. You better thank a union member. For the five-day work week. You better thank a union member for sick leave. You better thank a union member for paid leave. You better thank a union member for vacation time.  KAMALA HARRIS (IN PITTSBURGH): Thank union members for sick leave. Thank unions for paid family leave. Thank unions for your vacation time.  COATES: Now conservatives would look at this difference in her cadence, in her delivery, and they would point to what they think is evidence of Harris’s lack of authenticity.  I will note that the NYT portion read by Coates is an exercise in liberal, or perhaps illiberal, projection what with its assessment of the southern accent. The rest of the segment, another 8 minutes or so with former Harris comms director Jamal Simmons and political historian/CNN contributor Leah Wright Rigueur, served as a defense of Harris’s authenticity, of her deployment of accents depending on the occasion, and on dismissing attacks of this practice as proof evident of racism. To be clear, I’m not going to get into an extended dissertation on code switching here except to state my belief that persons who engage in this practice are not necessarily inauthentic. My issue with this segment is that it was produced and aired with zero mention of the fact that Harris, while addressing the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s Hispanic Heritage Month event, completely fabricated a Hispanic accent: JUST IN: Vice President Kamala Harris reveals her new "Latina" accent for the first time. Harris has pulled out multiple accents on the campaign trail however this one is one of the most interesting to date. Harris pulled out the accent while speaking to the Congressional… pic.twitter.com/JLh5mSF6qj — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 18, 2024 Harris’s fake Hispanic accent blows the entire premise of the CNN segment out of the water. To run it anyway, despite clear evidence of a code switch beyond Harris’s normal scope that has been widely and rightfully mocked as proof evident of chameleonic inauthenticity, leaves reasonable viewers to conclude that CNN is far less interested in exploring the subtleties of cross-racial communications than in covering for the Regime. As per the custom of Regime Media.  

The remains of an early medieval metalworking workshop have been discovered on the Scottish island of Islay. It dates to between the 6th and 9th centuries A.D. The iron smelting facility was built over an earlier domestic building that had been abandoned. Metalworking waste, the upper part of a rotary quern, a bone needle and shale bracelet fragments were recovered from several of the features associated with the buildings. Shale bracelets are rare in the Inner Hebrides; these are the only examples known from Islay. The shale probably came from central Scotland. Over time a change in function took place, from domestic use to that with an industrial focus, which took place after the domestic building had fallen into a state of disrepair. In contrast to many known metalworking workshops from early medieval Scotland, which were often enclosed within royal or lordly strongholds, the Coultorsay workshop was a relatively modest structure. It appeared to have been used for smelting bog ore to extract iron bloom which could then be made into tools and weapons somewhere else. The building is figure-eight-shaped, delineated by overlapping curvilinear gullies, and measures 22 feet by 21 feet covering an area of 390 square feet. One of circular enclosures is larger than the other. The connected overlapping circles design is reminiscent of Pictish cellular buildings (round buildings or “cells” linked together). The abandoned dwelling that the metalworking workshop was built over may have been Pictish, or at least been influenced by Pictish architecture. During this period the island, along with the whole western seaboard of Scotland, was part of the Gaelic Kingdom of Dál Riata. It was defeated by the Picts in 741 and became their client kingdom, although the Pictish and Dál Riata crowns merged voluntarily and became the Kingdom of Alba in 900, under pressure from Viking raiders. Islay was taken by the Norse in the late 9th century. Very few early medieval structures have been found on Islay, and the sites that are known were ecclesiastical (a chapel, a burial ground), not domestic dwellings or industrial workshops. That makes this structure a unique testament to the day-to-day life and work of the people who lived on the island in the early Middle Ages.

It turns out there are "very fine people" on both sides of the debate over America's race problems and how to address them. But Donald Trump never said any of them were the neo-Nazis who were on one side…

The U.S. Federal Reserve on Wednesday cut its benchmark interest rate by an unusually large half-point, a dramatic shift after more than two years of high rates that helped tame inflation but also made…