Columns & Editorials

Dear Forney Messenger,

If you have ever come to Jesus and received salvation you still have it. If you couldn’t sin enough for Jesus to turn you down when you came to Him, you cannot sin enough for Him to take away your salvation. It appears that if the Devil can make a Christian doubt their salvation that Christian will be no use to GOD or the Church. We must remember the Devil is powerful and has knowledge and wisdom far above ours but the Bible says that if we resist the Devil he will flee from us. I know that to be true because I have experienced it. We actually have no power against the Devil but when we resist his temptations our indwelling Holy Spirit will send him away from us.

Dear Aunt B,

A NEW FAMILY MEMBER

Parents have always been a child’s first and most influential teachers. The foundations for a successful school experience begin in the home, long before a child enrolls in school. Social training, morals and spiritual foundations are rooted and reinforced on the home front. Academics are built on top of this foundation. With the functional foundation in place, teachers have a much easier job teaching children academic content.

It’s been called the “Great Resignation” – the large number of Americans voluntarily leaving their jobs. If you plan to be part of it (ideally with another source of employment lined up), you’ll need to make the financial moves necessary to keep making progress toward your long-term goals.

“If my mom is in a bad mood, I should just leave her alone,” says Lauren, 11.

Should we pray for GOD to heal and restore America, or should we pray for GOD’S will to be done?

Dear Aunt B,

It was a random Tuesday morning. My soon to be husband had looked all over the world to find me the perfect rescue kitten – a calico – and had presented her to me over the weekend. Too late, we learned she was too young to be separated from her mom. But, mom had also been adopted and no one seemed to know where she’d gotten off to. So, the weekend had been a stressful one of kitten formula and tiny bottles and lots of burping. Things were going great, until they weren’t. I couldn’t find Phoebe anywhere. Spoiler alert, Phoebe cat survived but would be renamed Raptor due to her propensity for leaping across entire rooms and shredding people’s hands with her velociraptor-esque talons. This particular morning, however, she was just helpless little 3-week-old Phoebe, found collapsed in her litterbox, lifeless. I was on my way to work, but that all changed as I raced through town looking for any vet office open at 8:30 am. There was no time to turn on the radio. I had to call my boss, call clinics, call to make sure the kids made it to school. I had to wait for a clinic to open, wait for the vet to come and speak to me, wait for news on Phoebe. Finally, an exhausted version of me lurched into my office and sat down at my desk. Phoebe needed fluids and a mom willing to give her daily glucose injections for a while, but she would be ready to pick her up after work. Crisis averted. I became vaguely aware of a commotion in our company lobby, just beyond my sight line. There seemed to be some gasping, lots of movement, a sudden tenseness in the air. My cell phone rang. See, this was way before Facebook and Instagram. Myspace wasn’t even a thing yet. All Apple had produced was a very difficult to use computer and a guy named Steve who wore a lot of turtlenecks. I grabbed my Nokia flip phone, the one with the tiny front screen that looked like an aquarium with digitalized fish that were supposed to swim, but really just froze in one spot before suddenly darting 5 centimeters to the right only to freeze again. It was my ex-husband, calling to tell me, in case we never saw each other again, that it had been nice knowing me. I was perplexed. He was perplexed that I was so perplexed. See, I hadn’t heard. It was 9/11/2001 – the day Phoebe the cat almost died. It was the day they tried to take America down.

In one of my earliest memories my father, mother, my little brother Ron and I went to Kerrville for the weekend to celebrate my parents’ seventh anniversary.

Not surprising, the 2021-2022 school year has kicked off to a rocky start.

In the Gospel of Matthew 22:14 Jesus said that “MANY ARE CALLED BUT FEW ARE CHOSEN”. Of course He was talking about people being called to receive eternal life and go to Heaven.