Mandy's Mercurial Monologue

About a year ago I had a 'vision' of sorts which kept nagging at me. In my mind's eye I saw a meat grinder ready to process the world. Every connection would be sundered: people, groups, nations, ideologies, even communities of faith will find themselves divided and separated and the only thing we can be sure to hold onto is our relationship with God. Since then I have seen the separation beginning and building up steam. Families breaking up, churches losing pastors and losing members and losing vision; faith leaders selling out their faith and the faithful alike for the praise of the world; both the left and right disintegrating; governments around the world turning on their citizens for  profit and power; dictators rising and wanna-be dictators vying for election; markets hanging on at the edge of destruction, then temporarily soaring thanks to government manipulations, which one day must  come to an end. Corruption, collusion, apostasy, ignorance, idolatry, hatr...

8/14/2011  As I read the headlines this morning that foretell a likely downgrade of America's credit rating, I could see that image of the cartoon people from airline instruction cards, bracing themselves for impact. We all need to prepare for a bumpy, economic, emergency landing. So, what do we do? I've lived through more than one economic downturn in my life, the most extreme of which were overseas. I had the cushion of hard currency as an exchange student and as an international worker; the people around me had the cushion of having prepared, put by (horded), and using their means frugally. Let me say here that I really don't expect some post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario to materialize with people starving in their basements, having eaten their family pets, and killing their neighbors over stale croutons. What I do expect we could see is more unemployment, more uncertainty, inflation and possibly shortages of foods and durable goods. It is possible we could see...