"Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God, even our Father, which hath loved us, and hath given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace, Comfort your hearts, and stablish you in every good word and work."

(2 Thessalonians 2:16-17)

Good Hope

Dear Friends,

Greetings! We hope you had a good week. Below we have included several news articles which help to demonstrate the current state of the world. Thank God for Jesus, and the promises in His Word, to help us through the current convolutions the world is experiencing.

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Shaken to the Core

By Mark Earley, BreakPoint

A recent headline in the New York Times read "Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches." It told the story of an evangelical church in "a Long Island hamlet of yacht clubs and hedge fund managers."

The "sudden crush of worshipers" has required the church to "set up an overflow room with closed-circuit TV and 100 folding chairs."

It's not only the hedge fund and yacht club set. In Brooklyn, members of some churches are arriving early to make sure they can get seats.

As the senior pastor and founder of New York's largest evangelical church, A. R. Bernard, told the Times, "When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors."

And as you know, these economic times are shaking people to the core.

This openness isn't limited to New York. Seattle's Mars Hill Church has added 1,000 members this year alone.

Nor is it limited to our times. In the wake of the 1857 economic panic, a group of New York businessmen met to pray in a church a few blocks from Wall Street. The resulting Fulton Street Prayer Revival led to tens of thousands of conversions in New York alone and perhaps a million across the country. In addition, the American branch of the Salvation Army can trace its origins to the revival which started in the wake of a Wall Street collapse.

The connection between openness to the Gospel and tough economic times has continued. A recent study by David Beckworth of Texas State University found that during "each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004," evangelical churches grew 50 percent faster than during better economic times.

All of this makes perfect sense. During good economic times, we, like the rich fool in Jesus' parable, feel self-satisfied and complete. We marvel that we're so awesome and tell ourselves "eat, drink, and be merry." It's why pride is the deadliest sin and why our Lord warned us about the snares of wealth.

Feeling self-satisfied during good times is not only dangerous, it's an illusion. As we've learned the hard way, even great fortunes can be lost a lot faster than they were made. Over the last year, an estimated 8 trillion dollars in wealth has vanished. It may have been "paper wealth," but that paper generated a lot of pride, self-satisfaction, and more than a little hubris.

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the prospect of going broke does wonders to concentrate the mind on what is not illusory--what God has done in Jesus. As one former Morgan Stanley manager put it, his experience led to a "deeper sense of 'God's authority over everything.'"

Being at peace when everyone else is afraid is a powerful witness to the truth of the Gospel. Looking out for others when "every man for himself" is the order of the day is how the Church has grown and transformed entire nations throughout the ages.

Gaza's economy also a victim. (Alfred de Montesquiou, AP, Jan.30, 2009) "Beyond the human losses, the economy is the other great victim of this war," said Amr Hamad, Gaza's executive manager for the Palestinian Federation of Industries.

The fighting left 1,284 Palestinians dead (among them at least 280 children), along with 13 Israelis. Hamad says some 215 factories and workshops were destroyed or seriously damaged, in addition to an estimated 20,000 homes left uninhabitable.

Even before the latest destruction, the United Nations said some 80 percent of Gaza's 1.4 million people lived below the poverty level and some 800,000 were receiving U.N. food aid. Only 23 of Gaza's 3,500 industrial firms were still functioning, and of the 35,000 industrial workers employed before the embargo, 33,000 had already been laid off before the offensive.

The remainder are now also out of work, because none of the factories still standing have raw material to work with, Hamad said.

A Rogue State. (Avi Shlaim, The American Conservative magazine, Jan.26, 2009) As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression, but the asymmetry of power leaves little room for doubt as to who the real victim is.

In the three years since the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis have been killed by rocket fire. In 2005 to 2007 alone, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas--and Israel's record is one of unremitting brutality toward the inhabitants of Gaza.

The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002: It involves concessions and compromises.

Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders. A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses WMD, and practices terrorism--the use of violence against civilians for political purposes.

Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbors but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians are of course free to repeat lies and mistakes. But it is not mandatory to do so.

With Gaza, journalists failed again. (Chris Hedges, Jan.26, 2009) The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel's callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press. There were no major newspapers, television networks or radio stations that challenged Israel's fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza attack or the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable. Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a product to sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we become little more than propagandists and advertisers.

All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. It lied craftily with its glib, well-rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign press in Gaza and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its own soldiers lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It was the Arabic network al-Jazeera, along with a handful of local reporters in Gaza, who gave a voice to those who without our presence would have no voice, that of countering the amplified lies of the powerful with the faint cries and pain of the oppressed.

We retreated, as usual, into the moral void of American journalism, the void of balance and objectivity. The ridiculous notion of being unbiased, outside of the flow of human existence, impervious to grief or pain or anger or injustice, allows reporters to coolly give truth and lies equal space and airtime. We record the fury of a Palestinian who has lost his child in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza but make sure to mention Israel's "security needs," and of course note Israel's right to defend itself. We do this throughout the Middle East. We record the human toll in Iraq, caused by our occupation, but remind everyone that "Saddam killed his own people." We write about the deaths of families in Afghanistan during an airstrike but never forget to mention that the Taliban "oppresses women." Their crimes cancel out our crimes. It becomes a moral void.

Israel was in open violation of international law, specifically Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls on an occupying power to respect the safety of occupied civilians. But you would not know this from the press reports. The use of attack aircraft and naval ships, part of the world's fourth-largest military power, to level densely packed slums of people who were hungry, without power and often water, people surrounded on all sides by the Israeli army, was fatuously described as a war. The news coverage held up the absurd notion that a few Hamas fighters with light weapons and no organization were a counterforce to F-16 fighter jets, tank battalions, thousands of Israeli soldiers, armored personnel carriers, naval ships and Apache attack helicopters. It fit the Israeli narrative. It may have been balanced and objective. But it was not true.

The Israeli government bears the responsibility for its crimes. But by giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to justify wholesale slaughter, we empower not only Israel's willful self-destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to the Iraq war, bent to the will of the powerful. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for doing "a fair, balanced and complete job."

Mideast anger. (Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation, Jan.25, 2009) Anger is boiling over in the Middle East over Gaza, and the result of the war has been to boost radicalism throughout the region.

You probably didn't know that the reason the Bush administration, in its last days, reversed course on Gaza [allowing the UN to press for a ceasefire] is because they feared that US embassies in the Middle East might be stormed by angry crowds if they did nothing.

Speaking on January 14 at the New America Foundation, the outgoing US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilizad, said explicitly that the United States feared a violent explosion in the region, including the seizure of US embassies by angry mobs, if the United States continued to block action by the UN.

In case you think the anger against Israel and the United States among the Arabs is limited to Hamas and Hezbollah, consider the stunning comments of Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, who also served as the country's ambassador to both Great Britain and the United States:

"In the past weeks, not only have the Israeli Defense Forces murdered more than 1,000 Palestinians, but they have come close to killing the prospect of peace itself. Unless the new US administration takes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship, and the stability of the region are at risk....

"America is not innocent in this calamity. Not only has the Bush administration left a sickening legacy in the region--from the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to the humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib--but it has also, through an arrogant attitude about the butchery in Gaza, contributed to the slaughter of innocents."

A killer without borders

By Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times

YEREVAN, Armenia--As if you didn't have enough to worry about, consider the deadly, infectious and highly portable disease sitting in the lungs of a charming young man here, Garik Hakobyan. In effect, he's a time bomb.

Hakobyan, 34, an artist, carries an ailment that stars in the nightmares of public health experts--XDR-TB, the scariest form of tuberculosis. It doesn't respond to conventional treatments and is often incurable.

XDR-TB could spread to your neighborhood because it isn't being aggressively addressed now. It's being nurtured by global complacency.

When doctors here in Armenia said they would introduce me to XDR patients, I figured we would all be swathed in protective clothing and chat in muffled voices in a secure ward of a hospital. Instead, they simply led me outside to a public park, where Hakobyan sat on a bench with me.

"It's pretty safe outside, because his coughs are dispersed," one doctor explained, "but you wouldn't want to be in a room or vehicle with him." Then I asked Hakobyan how he had gotten to the park.

"A public bus," he said.

To his great credit, Hakobyan is trying to minimize his contact with others and doesn't date, but he inevitably ends up mixing with people.

Afterward, I asked one of his doctors if Hakobyan could have spread his lethal infection to other bus passengers. "Yes," she said thoughtfully. "There was one study that found that a single TB patient can infect 14 other people in the course of a single bus ride."

People don't think much about TB. But drug-resistant TB is spreading--half a million cases a year already--and in a world connected by jet planes and constant flows of migrants and tourists, the risk is that our myopia will catch up with us.

One-third of the world's population is infected with TB, and some 1.5 million people die annually of it. "TB is a huge problem," said Tadataka Yamada, president of global health programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "It's a problem that in some ways has been suppressed. We often don't talk about it."

"We always think we live in a protected world because of modern medicines and the like," Yamada said. "But if we get a big problem with XDR, we could be in a situation like we had in the 19th century when we didn't have good treatments."

In Armenia, the only program for drug-resistant TB can accept only 15 percent of the patients who need it. And the drugs often are unable to help them. Anyone who thinks that drug-resistant TB will stay in places like Armenia is in denial. If it isn't defused, Hakobyan's XDR time bomb could send shrapnel flying into your neighborhood.

Miraculous survivors

By John Blake, CNN

Deborah Scaling Kiley still can't shake the sounds of sharks attacking the man who had just been sitting next to her. She can't forget blurting out the Lord's Prayer to block out the cries of the man dying in front of her.

"As long as I kept saying those words, I knew I was all right," she says today.

Kiley would survive that night, clinging to a dinghy in the Atlantic Ocean for five days without food and water. But so have others in circumstances that seemed as hopeless. They are the amazing characters who seem to surface during every manmade or natural disaster--those who survive against all odds.

What do these survivors have in common? That's the question that author Laurence Gonzales has tried to answer. He explains what makes these survivors special in Deep Survival, a book that dissects the transformation that takes place within people who survive against all odds.

Most of these survivors share the same traits, Gonzales says. "These are people who tend to have a view of the world that does not paint them as a victim," he says. "They're not whiners who are always complaining about the bad things that are happening to them."

Gonzales says at least 75 percent of people caught in a catastrophe either freeze or simply wander in a daze. "People who make good survivors tend to get through that phase quickly. They accept the evidence of their senses."

Gonzales says many of the disaster survivors he studied weren't the most skilled, the strongest or the most experienced in their group.

Those who seemed best suited for survival--the strongest or most skilled--were often the first to die off in life-or-death struggles, he says. Experience and physical strength can lead to carelessness. The Rambo types, a Navy SEAL tells Gonzales, are often the first to go.

Small children and inexperienced climbers, for example, often survive emergencies in the wilderness far better than their stronger or adult counterparts. They survive because they're humble, Gonzales says. They know when to rest, when they shouldn't try something beyond their capabilities, when it's wise to be afraid.

"Humility can keep you out of trouble," he says.

Survivors also shared another trait--strong family bonds. Many reported they were motivated to endure hardships by a desire to see a loved one.

Gonzales cites the story of Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl survived three years in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps because he was driven by the thought of seeing his wife again.

Survivors also pay attention to their intuition, Gonzales says. If something tells them that the mountain isn't safe to climb that day, they'll back out even if they've planned the trip for months.

Gonzales followed his intuition once and it saved his life. In 1979, a colleague asked him to fly with him on a flight from Chicago, Illinois, to Los Angeles, California. Gonzales declined when he learned that he would fly on a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, which had a spotty safety record. His decision was unusual, but he stuck with it.

Gonzales says he was sitting in his kitchen later that day when someone called him and told him to turn on his television. The plane he was supposed to be on had just crashed on takeoff, killing all 271 people onboard, including several of Gonzales' colleagues. It was one of the worst aviation disasters in the nation's history.

Kiley, now 50, also had misgivings about going on the trip that almost cost her life.

It was October 1982 and she was 26 years old when she boarded a sailing yacht in Maine. She joined three men and another woman who planned to sail to Florida.

But there were signs early on that the trip would not be smooth. The men bickered, the yacht's captain was lazy, and the ship wasn't properly maintained, Kiley says.

The yacht was soon caught in a fierce storm, and sank so quickly that the five-member crew barely had time to alert the U.S. Coast Guard and inflate the rubber dinghy, she says.

During the next five days, the survivors battled dehydration, hunger, exposure and massive infections as they drifted alone in an open boat.

Three crew members died. When sharks attacked one of the men in front of her, Kiley says that she thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown.

The sharks moved on, but Kiley had already made a series of small decisions that helped save her life. Instead of expending much of her energy bemoaning her fate, she planned for survival. She covered herself with seaweed for warmth. She took on the role of protector, watching out for another man in the boat.

Even the act of prayer was a survival strategy. Kiley says her prayer helped her avoid the loss of control that doomed some of her companions in the boat.

"Surviving is about keeping your wits when everything is falling apart," she says.

After five days in the open ocean, Kiley and another man were finally spotted and rescued by a passing freighter.

She says the accident changed her. "I learned to accept people for who they are and who they're not," she says. "God doesn't need me to judge anyone else."

Moreover, "You can never give up," she says. "No matter how bad it gets, something good is going to come out of it."

Biotechnology and the future

By Chuck Colson, BreakPoint

If you watched the Olympics, you were probably awed by the strength, speed, and skill of Olympic athletes. These men and women have spent years training, strengthening, and perfecting their skills and their bodies.

Now, imagine not long from now, watching an Olympic games featuring athletes who never had to train like athletes today have. Instead, their skills and physique were planned before their birth, enhanced through nanotechnology. The games would be called the "Bio-Olympics," in which competitors have artificially enhanced features, like superhuman strength and speed.

Sound like science fiction? It's not. As my friend Nigel Cameron points out, science is moving beyond improving or fixing humanity to remaking humanity.

Thanks to genetic, robotic, information, and nano technologies--collectively known by the ironic acronym GRIN--mankind is poised for what some call "engineered evolution." Nigel warns that the very technologies that can "help us restore function to the disabled and fight disease, can also be used to bring in the 'Brave New World'--in which what it means to be human, made in the image of God, is fundamentally lost."

Treatments which may turn even the scrawniest kid into a Hercules are being tested as I speak.

But who will enjoy the fruits of such enhancements? As Nigel writes, developments in "blending human nature and machine nature through such means as the implanting of brain chips for memory, skills, or communication ... could compound both the intelligence and the wealth of a small segment of society." This could lead "to a new feudalism, in which power of all kinds is concentrated in the hands of 'enhanced' persons."

Humans and human nature are not commodities to be manipulated, bought, and sold. In the rush to "make life better and easier" by "improving" the human body, we cannot allow human life to become less human.

Obama's Black Widow

By Nat Hentoff, Village Voice

Barack Obama is in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA). A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun's national security correspondent, David Wood:

"The NSA's colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the 'Black Widow,' scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. ... The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages."

In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gave the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans' telephone and Internet communications.

Get this from the ACLU: "The government [is now permitted] to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it's conducting the surveillance, or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing."

This gives the word "dragnet" an especially chilling new meaning.

The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer adds that the new statute "implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind."

The telecommunications corporations have been a vital part of the Bush administration's secret wiretapping program, as we discovered more than a year ago. Former AT&T technician Mark Klein reported that he had found a secret AT&T room in which the NSA was tapping into the telecom giant's fiber-optic cables. On National Public Radio, he disclosed: "It's not just AT&T's traffic going through these cables, because these cables connected AT&T's network with other networks like Sprint, Qwest, Global Crossing, UUNet, etc."

What you should know is that these fruitful cables go through a splitter that, as Klein describes, "just copies the entire data without any selection going on. So it's a complete copy of the data stream."

In James Bamford's new book The Shadow Factory, he notes: "For decades, AT&T and much of the rest of the telecommunications industry have had a very secret, very cozy relationship with the NSA." In AT&T's case, he points out, "its international voice service carried more than 18 billion minutes per year, reaching 240 countries, linking 400 carriers, and offering remote access via 19,500 points of presence in 149 countries around the globe."

Also, he notes: "Much of those communications passed through that secret AT&T room that Klein found on Folsom Street in downtown San Francisco."

Bamford quotes Bush's Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell as saying that this wiretapping program was and is "only one program of many highly secret programs approved by Bush following the attacks on 9/11." McConnell also said of the NSA's nonstop wiretapping: "This is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has officially been acknowledged."

Bamford says that the NSA is "developing an artificial intelligence system designed to know what people are thinking." Here come the thought police!

The Numerati

By Gregory M. Lamb, Christian Science Monitor; Amanda Gefter and Tom Simonite, New Scientist

The Numerati, by author Stephen Baker, is a book about math. It's also a more literary name for what used to be called "number crunchers," the mathematicians and computer experts who understand programming, probability, and seemingly incomprehensible theorems. Teamed with ever more powerful computers linked to the Internet, they're on a mission.

"They're looking for patterns in data that describe something almost hopelessly complex: human life and behavior," Baker writes.

They aim to figure out what we're going to buy, who we're going to vote for, how well we do our jobs, perhaps even who we're likely to fall in love with, by analyzing the statistical patterns of data.

Think you carefully guard your privacy? Think again. We all leave a trail of digital bread crumbs from our cellphone calls, Internet searches, credit card purchases, and blog entries, or on our home pages at social-networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook.

Even withholding our names doesn't necessarily make us anonymous anymore. Eighty-seven percent of Americans can be identified by name if only their gender, birth date, and postal zip code can be determined, one recent study found.

East Germany used to employ thousands of spies to find out what their citizens were up to. That's so 20th-century. Today, "The computer will rat on us, exposing each one of our online secrets without a nanosecond of hesitation or regret.... we are in danger of becoming data serfs--slaves to the information we produce."

Websites can collect huge amounts of data from users. Retailers, for example, can track our every click, what we buy, how much we spend, which advertisements we see--even which ones we linger over with our mouse.

Data is big business for the numerati. U.S. firm Acxiom keeps shopping and lifestyle data on some 200 million Americans. They know how much we paid for our house, what magazines we subscribe to, which books we buy and what vacations we take. The company purchases just about every bit of data about us that can be bought, and then sells selections of it to anyone out to target us in, say, political campaigns.

Much effort is expended finding new ways to gather data on people. A company called Umbria uses software to analyze millions of blog and forum posts every day, using sentence structure, word choice and quirks in punctuation to determine the blogger's gender, age interests and opinion. That knowledge can be a valuable tool to people launching new products, or politicians seeking votes.

The management of whole nations increasingly depends on the numerati, and not just because of their role in political campaigns. After the 9/11 attacks, the CIA made large investments in statistical techniques to track known terrorists and even predict future ones, and has relied heavily on such techniques ever since.

Someday people may market their personal data themselves to get ahead of the curve and profit from what's going to be found out about them anyway. We'll want our digital identity to be out where computers can find it, whether we're searching for love or money, Baker says.

The old programming adage--"garbage in, garbage out"--is growing less true, Baker says. Powerful new algorithms are going through your digital garbage and turning it into a gold mine of data about you.

British government plans to extend powers to spy on personal computers. (Duncan Gardham, Electronic Telegraph) Police could routinely hack into personal computers without the need for a warrant under new plans from the European Union.

The technique, known as "remote searching," involves bugging computers in homes and offices in order to monitor website use and e-mail traffic.

The Home Office is backing proposals by the EU council of ministers to extend electronic surveillance on private property. The proposals have raised concerns among civil liberties groups, and Shami Chakrabati, director of Liberty, said: "These are very intrusive powers, as intrusive as someone busting down your door and coming into your home."

Britain already allows remote searching, and police have carried out a small number of operations among the 194 clandestine searches conducted last year.

The police can use a number of techniques, which include sending a computer virus through an e-mail which infects the computer if opened. They can also use a surveillance vehicle to hack into a wireless Internet connection.

The most intrusive technique involves breaking into a property to fit a device to a computer, which logs key strokes on the keyboard and transmits the results back to a listening station.

Surveillance culture sneaks up on Europe. (Julie Sell, McClatchy Newspapers) Despite the fact that fascism and repressive state security services dominated Europe--East and West--at different points in the 20th century, a new culture of surveillance is spreading, slowly, across the region again, using tools that the Nazis and the KGB never had.

The U.S. and Britain stepped up their internal surveillance networks after suffering some of the West's deadliest terrorist attacks in the past decade, but now other European governments are embracing some of the same tools and techniques. The pace of adoption is slower on the Continent than it's been in Britain because of public concerns about liberty and personal privacy.

Take Vanves, outside Paris, a community of 30,000 with ancient roots that has gradually adopted 21st century security measures. Several years ago, the mayor of the middle-class suburb installed a couple of surveillance video cameras to keep an eye on rowdy young men congregating at night, as well as a handful of drug dealers. More were added over time. Now the town has nine cameras operating near schools, in parks and shopping areas, all of them linked to the local and national police.

France aims to triple the number of such cameras in public places to 60,000 by 2009. In fact, France has a long tradition of domestic surveillance. Now, two domestic spy agencies are being merged into one organization that will reportedly have about 6,000 agents, much larger than Britain's MI5.

"Governments are becoming more and more eager to use surveillance more widely," said Marianne Wade, an expert on European criminal law at the Max Planck Institute, a research center in Germany.

Technology makes child's play of babysitting. (AFP) Children may not like it but a British technology firm has invented an electronic babysitter--a wristwatch-like device that lets parents know where their children are at all times.

The GPS Child Locator, or num8, attaches to a child's wrist and contains a Global Positioning System (GPS), said Matthew Salmon, a spokesman for the manufacturer.

"It uses GPS and GSM (Global System for Mobiles) technology with an accuracy of 10 feet (three meters)," he said. "It tracks your child.

"It only starts working when the device is connected to the child's wrist and is very difficult to get off. Even if the child managed to get it off, it would send an emergency text message through to your mobile phone. It would give you a Google Maps image with their exact location, the street name and the postal code."

When a child is wearing the device, a parent sends the text message "wru" and the child's location is sent back to a mobile phone or computer.

Parents can also log on to the company website to discover their child's location.

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If you do not already know Jesus, we certainly encourage you to receive Him today, tomorrow could be too late. To receive Him all you have to do is pray a simple prayer such as this one: Jesus, I know I have done wrong in my life and need your forgiveness. I ask you to please come into my heart and life, forgive my sins, and give me eternal life, in Jesus name I pray.

If you would like to know more about what receiving Jesus means, we invite you to write us for more information and visit other sections of this web site. If you would like to contact one of our Christian mystics concerning a question or problem you may have, please feel free to write us via the web site.

Until next week, may God bless and keep you, in Jesus name!

Almondtree Productions

"For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming?"

(1 Thessalonians 2:19)