Tempus Fugit: Didn't The One Promise to "Heal the Planet?"

For in his hand are all the ends of the earth: and the heights of the mountains are his.  For the sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land. 

Psalm 94:4-5

"This was the moment," he told us, "when we provided care for the sick, good jobs for the jobless, when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.  This was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last best hope on earth." 

How's that planet healing been working out in Christchurch and Sendai?  About as well as all of Barry Soetoro's other promises.

Can Japan Rise Again?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the earthquake dead are not 1 percent of those who perished in World War II.

Between 1942 and 1945, Japan was stripped naked of an empire that embraced Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, the entire China coast, all of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the Philippines and the Western Pacific out to Guam and south to Guadalcanal.

She sustained 2 million military dead and 500,000 to a million civilian dead under U.S. carpet-bombing that reduced her great cities to smoldering rubble and Hiroshima and Nagasaki to atomic ash.

Yet, 25 years after the most devastating defeat in modern history, Japan boasted the second largest and most dynamic economy on earth.

Signs of the Times

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places: Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows. (Mt 24:7-8)

The following video was posted as a warning before the tragic earthquake in Japan.  It makes clear that this most recent earthquake is not an isolated incident, but part of significantly heightened worldwide tectonic activity.

For people of faith, the "signs of the times" -- political upheaval from Madison to the Middle East, earthquakes and historic floods in Australia and Arkansas, mass kills in the oceans and the skies, and the growing threat of food shortages, inflation, and monetary collapse -- suggest a worldwide chastisement.  We have known individuals who have prayed for just such a chastisement that would bring the proud, the purveyors of abortion, promoters of "alternative lifestyles" and the God-scoffing  to their knees, and we cannot forget that God who is merciful is also just.  "That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust." (Mt 5:45)

Like the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, celebrated in Shelley's great sonnet Ozymandias, we assume the monuments and accomplishments of our civilization will endure forever.  We are learning painfully that lives, great cathedrals, towns and cities can be swept away in a flash.  As we remember in prayer our brothers and sisters throughout the pacific rim, Lent is a good time to rediscover our only true and enduring glory -  as adopted sons and daughters of the King of Endless Glory.