My heart is heavy this morning.  It’s been heavy for days.

I have been teaching about God’s final plans and preparing for the End of the Age, as God has commissioned me to do, for years.  This is not what makes my heart heavy, for that is something I see as being divinely appointed and necessary.  Also, I guess, it’s because I can accept all things from the hand of my Lord.  I accept his discipline, his boot, the small deprivations of life because I see them all as teaching tools from a Father who needs us to learn.  Who wants us to understand and appreciate his provision for us.

But what saddens me most is how people are behaving.

Now, I know beyond doubting that God is the Creator and Finisher of all things. He has seen all things and all possible permutations thereof.  He knows and he still gives us the ability to choose Right over Wrong.  Even when he grieves mightily over our choices.  He lets us make them.

And we have, as humanity, made choices.  Each generation slides a little further from the original design. Each generation becomes more adulterated from the planned concept.  Each generation.  Sometimes, the changes are minute.  Subtle.  They might even seem to be “enlightened.”  Sometimes, they are made with great leaping bounds of hubris.

Something that is weighing heavily on my heart might seem solely to pertain to my country, the United States of America.  But I believe that what is happening here affects people elsewhere, too.  Just as what happens in European stock markets affects the business of all the world.  One reason for this is the rapid flow of information.  Of money.  Of influence.  “It’s a Small World, After All.”

I am not a political person. I’m not.  But I have been increasingly weighed down by the political maneuvering of my country.  It’s not the fact that our President has nominated a slew of people with questionable ethics.  It’s not the way that all of a sudden people expect President Obama to pay their mortgages or fix it so their kids can go to college or give them a house. It’s the way the lawmakers of my country seem to have suddenly decided it is their right to put their hands in a cookie jar that is in fact empty and come up with gifts and munchies and money that isn’t really there.  And they’re consuming these things.  And they’re planning on someone else, in some future time, to make it right. To pay for it.  To fill that cookie jar in some future time that they are not willing to leave empty and wait for all things to balance out so that cookies can once more fill the jar.

And they think that this is their right. Their entitlement.  That they are no longer accountable to anyone, for anything.

Yet, they will preach of personal accountability. Of governmental responsibility.  Of putting things right.  When they are disregarding every notion of sheer sense in order to make it happen.

How long will we tolerate this?   How long will the people of our country allow this to continue?

I see a time ahead, in the not-so-distant future, where our way of doing things will be overthrown.  People will be fed up. But the coming change will not be as sensible as it looks.  And many, I fear, who are seeking a new and more responsible “change” will follow a new way of doing things…

It all comes back to what Jesus said.  The Abomination Who Causes Desolation will arrive and many will follow.  Today, the stage is being set for his coming.

My heart is heavy.  My mind is boggled.  But my faith continues strong. Even as we enter an even darker time.