As a teenager growing up in east Fort Worth, in the summer of 1995, I can remember it well. Stuck in the doldrums of my own sin, like a washing machine on spin cycle, I was miserable. With a number of dark industrial bands blaring in the background of my room, in anger I tried to ignore and suppress the Lord calling me, until one day this guy showed up to my house, in my room, and brought a presence with him that I couldn’t explain. We chatted some, then he looked at my CD collection and said very directly, “You need to get rid of all these and throw them away.” Now normally, anyone else could have told me this and I would have cynically blown it off as some religiousy call to “clean my act up.” Not that day.
Tag: Testimony
Testimony of my mother Catherine Westerfield, March 7, 1950 – June 28, 2001
I can remember my conversion at the age of five so very well. It was a Sunday evening worship service. It’s remarkable, as I look back at how God revealed Himself so clearly – His infinite love for me. I was both in a state of bliss and crying at the same time. He revealed how He chose me, yes me, to be His own from all eternity; always in His love – I would never be without Him. I believed in His death on the cross for me personally, Catherine, and His resurrection and ascension into Heaven to be with His Father. I came to these revelations by the intense drawing of the Holy Spirit. He knew the difficulties that lay ahead in my life. Through all of the abuse and mental problems I never doubted my security of salvation or His infinite love for me. I did question, but never doubted that this was His eternal plan for me.
I won’t go into all the pain and problems I’ve had. God says He will give us trials. They came one right after another except for the period of time when I was first married in 1977 until December of 1983.
But we do not look at our trials as do unbelievers. We do not depend on status among our peers, acquiring possessions or position in life as a way of escaping our true need to simply lean on Christ’s breast and know He is refining us.
As it was said on the Naked Capitalism blog entry pertaining to this testimony, “Bernanke basically stonewalls and refuses to offer reasonable explanations. Not sure if he is treating the Congress as stupid or not entitled to know, but he backs himself into a real whopper with his non-defense defense (see 2:55 to 3:20).”
In answer to the Congressman’s question about who gave the Federal Reserve the authority to lend a half a trillion dollars to foreigners, Bernanke responds that it was enacted in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Basically what he’s saying is we can do what we want, lend money to whomever we please, and all this without any true approval from the Senate, which is exactly what has been happening since the fall and even before that.
Basically, when you get down to it, if you are of the persuasion that we’ve just recently lost our economic rights, you’re mistaken. We lost those rights almost a century ago through the groundwork that was laid in the Federal Reserve Act. It gave power to this super bank, or Bank of banks, who could then later use that power in any way it deemed fit. Bernanke’s rebuttals make that clear. They are acting without the authority of the people, in contradiction of the Constitution.