The Picayune Item
April 30, 2011
Safe Families for Children makes a difference
Dr. Stanley Watson, Syndicated columnist
The Picayune Item
PICAYUNE — I recently heard about a new program that is bound to be a godsend for families in trouble. Social worker Lynne Sabin gave this example of a family caught in a short term crisis:
Picture a dad with a wife, two kids under 5, and a minimum wage job that is barely meeting their needs, but dad is hanging in there and working hard. Now picture the mom with acute appendicitis and needing surgery... While mom is in the hospital, who is caring for the kids? There is no extended family and no other support system, so the only alternative is for dad to miss work to care for the children ... until now! Mississippi's new Safe Families for Children movement offers parents a safe, temporary place for their child without losing custody.
Lynne went on to tell how Safe Families For Children is currently enlisting volunteers through the churches to help families in crisis. It is not foster care; there is no government involvement and no family court making decisions about custody. This movement is set up to keep families together and out of the nation's child protection systems.
In other words, Safe Families for Children in South Mississippi matches those who volunteer to take the children into their homes with families who are in a crisis situation and need their help.
Lynne Sabin's job is to recruit and train the Host Families; she also enlists and trains Family Friends, Resource Families and Mentors. All of this is volunteer and without pay:
·Host Families invite children from a family in crisis to come live with them while their parents work through their difficulties. Host families provide for the children's needs and incorporate them into every aspect of their lives such as carpooling, play dates, church activities and sports events. Of course host families must be willing to accept criminal background checks, references and home visits.
·Family Friends provide Host Families with assistance with carpooling, respite care, friendship and support. They must also submit to background checks.
·Resource Families offer goods and services to children in Safe Family care. This could include money for the movement, bringing food to the Host Family, or doctors and dentists who contribute their services.
·Mentors come alongside the birth parents to provide friendship, encouragement and support.
This ministry returns the church to the forefront of caring for families in trouble and Safe Families succeeds only when it is embraced and adopted by local churches. In fact it has become a successful alternative to the state child welfare system.
When Lynne began to describe this program it must have sounded familiar to the old timers who remember when Christian folks, without calling on the government or expecting payment, went out of their way to help families in trouble. My parents often took in boys who needed a place to stay; (never girls because the guests had to share limited space with me and my two brothers.)
Among the several boys who passed through our home, I remember two in particular. One was a huge 14-year-old that Dad picked up off the street one chilly Saturday evening. Bruce had on an old, torn sheep skin coat but was barefooted. Dad bought him a cheap pair of work shoes and the store owner donated a pair of work pants. Bruce even went to church with us on Sunday morning wearing one of Dad's dress shirts and his new pants and shoes.
He got a lot of attention during the congregational singing. Never having been in church before, he did not know the songs but knew how to whistle-not an ordinary whistle but the loud kind where you place your upper teeth over your lower lip and let fly. Everybody turned to stare and frown when he overwhelmed the combined efforts of the congregation including the pianist. Dad grabbed him by the shoulder and whispered into his ear until he got him bulldogged and under control. When Bro. McClung got up to preach he never mentioned it-just pretended it never happened.
Another boy was a dark haired, dark complexioned kid named Billy. He was friendly and obedient. My only problem with him was that he had some sort of a sinus or adenoid defect that caused him to constantly clear his throat, snort, and generally express his discomfort. At night he snored. Billy was placed in the home of a childless couple-a minister and his wife-and became a radio announcer when he grew up. He must have found a cure for his condition.
I'm sure my folks made a great contribution to the lives of the boys who passed through our home and I am also sure they could have done better and done more if Safe Families had been there to support and guide them. Now, if your family should volunteer to care for children from families in crisis you can expect some new and interesting experiences and God will smile with you.
Editor's note: If you are interested in this ministry you may contact Lynne Sabin at lsabin@bethany.org or visit the Safe Families for Children website at www.safe-families.org.
The Adoption and Safe Families Act, 1997, offers cash “bonuses” to the states for every child they adopt out of foster care. Government funding is not given to Fairbanks Office of Children's Services if the case worker tries to "help" the family... money is only given if the case worker removes the child from the home.
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Safe Families for Children makes a difference
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Celebrate the Declaration, and remember what it has meant to the United States and the rest of the world.
Celebrate the Declaration, and remember what it has meant to the United States and the rest of the world.
the Fourth of July ," by Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College :
Two hundred thirty-six years ago this Fourth of July, 57 men signed the document that created the American republic. They represented a people of about 3 million grouped in a series of 13 colonies along the eastern seaboard of the United States. They were all wanted men, sought by the commander of the British forces in North America for sedition and treason. He had behind him the resources of the greatest military power on earth. They had behind them the bare beginnings of a government, hardly anything of an army, but something mighty in the way of an idea.
This nation had therefore a desperate beginning. Who but the boldest could believe that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were laying the foundation of the greatest constitutional republic in history? Now that republic has spread across the continent, and its influence reaches around the world. Its population has increased a hundredfold. Its Constitution has provided government to a free people constantly growing in size and territory, each new state joining the union as an equal, its citizens never subjects, its people ever free. There is no story close to it in the history of man.
Statesmen and thinkers have attributed the strength and goodness of the nation to the principles in the Declaration. Many others have denied this. Statesmen and thinkers have proclaimed the Constitution a just and beautiful implementation of the principles of the Declaration. Many others have denied this. These denials are more common in times of crisis in our country. They are very common now.
It is a sign of our time that the sitting chief executive of our country eschews the permanent meaning of the Declaration and the idea of fixity in the Constitution. In the “Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama writes: “Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course. …”
Obama has stuck to this theme during his presidency. This May at Barnard College, he proclaimed the great virtue of the Constitution to be its openness to change: “It allowed for protests, movements, and the assimilation of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade, change the world—a constant forward movement that continues to this day.” There is neither form nor firmness. All is fluid, according to Obama, and this liberates us to do whatever we will.
America has gone very far down the trail that Obama is blazing. Right now, the expenditures of all government—state, local and federal—exceed 40 percent of the gross domestic product. If trendscontinue ,
the public sector will soon grow larger than the private sector, and
then the government will have more resources than those it governs.
Moreover, it governs increasingly without authority from the branches that are elected by the people. The new Dodd- Frank finance law creates something called a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This agency does not get its budget from Congress. Rather, its money comes from a guaranteed percentage of the budget of the Federal Reserve, which gets its money from its operations as a bank. Congress is even specifically forbidden in the law to hold hearings into the budget of the new CPFB. And it has wide examining power over every form of consumer finance in the nation. In unfettered scope of authority, and in near perfect separation from popular control, it is different from anything before it in America.
Because we have come so far from the founding institutions, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves what they are. This anniversary of the Declaration of Independence provides a splendid occasion, because both the principles of the nation and its institutions are summarized beautifully in its 1,300 words. Let us then read it for a moment.
Notice first of all how remarkable it is that the document should begin universally. The authors were obviously mindful of the fact they were wanted men. They conclude the Declaration with a solemn promise, made to each other in the mood of soldiers facing battle: “In support of this Declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” (emphasis added). The particularity of this commitment, each man speaking for himself in promise to the others in the room, is what one might expect of legislation passed on the eve of a war, legislation that is itself a written act of treason.
If these men were in a situation urgent unto death, how can we account for the abstract and universal nature of the beginning of the Declaration? It begins with an “absolute truth” (to use the president’s term) expressed in words that have rung around the world: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them …” (emphasis added).
Notice that this quotation refers to no particular time, but to any time in the course of human events. Notice that it refers not to the American people, but to “one people,” meaning any people. It is a very absolute and universal way of talking. It issues immediately a proclamation of truth: “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Just as the Founders did, so may anyone look for his rights under these “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Anyone whose rights are denied will feel their weight. The Jew rounded up by the Nazis, the black slave held in Mississippi in 1840, may both look to this document as the charter by which he can advance. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was aware of this and wrote that indeed, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” These principles place every man and woman deprived of their rights in the same place that the Founders occupied on July 4, 1776: they may appeal to an absolute truth, written in the nature of man and in the nature of things, against any power that will offend their rights. Perhaps they cannot find the strength to overcome their oppression. Never mind: their cause is still the just one. They will see, and even in moments of clarity their oppressors will see, that the great self-evident truth that all men are created equal means nothing more nor less than that all men are men. It means nothing less than that no one may rightly govern another except by his consent. It means that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights”: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
These are the principles of the United States. The fact that they were announced at the onset of its revolution, and the fact that the revolution proceeded in their name, seals them in the blood and the history of this land.
The Declaration is not only about principles; it also describes institutions, the kind of institutions best adapted to protect the rights of a people. These institutions are expressed in the middle section of the document, the section in which the specific crimes and injustices of the king of England are described. The three broad constitutional principles that he violated form the backbone of the later Constitution of the United States. The first step in understanding that Constitution is not to learn its details, although they are relatively few. The first step is to understand the grand arrangements of government necessary to constitutional rule.
The first of these three principles is representation. The king is said to have interfered with the representatives of the people in their attempt to pass laws “most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The Declaration recognizes that human beings are made to live under law, and they have a right for those laws to be passed by people who represent them. This right is not to be interfered with by any force. Any force doing so interferes with the consent of the governed and cannot rightfully claim obedience. Violation of the representative principle is, by itself, cause for revolution.
The second of these principles is separation of powers. At the outset of the American Revolution, the king and his governors were the executive branch. By interfering with the legislature, the king violated not only the right of the people to representative government but also the necessity for separation of powers. He violated this necessity also by making “judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” God is named four times in the Declaration, once as each of the three branches of government, and once as a founder. The lesson is simple: God may well be the maker of the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and He may well be at the same time the Supreme Judge of the world, and He may also be Divine Providence. But no man or small group of men may rightly combine in their own hands all the powers of government. That is for God alone.
Finally, the Declaration calls for a limited government. The king was taxing America’s forefathers without their consent, and he was using the money, among other things, to pay for a hired army to oppress them. He sent many officials to make sure that his will was followed on all occasions, whatever the commoners may wish. The Declaration charges him with erecting “a multitude of new offices, and [sending] hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” In other words, the king offended against the principle of limited government. He was building a structure too strong for the people to manage.
The modern bureaucratic state reproduces many of the features that led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and that gave shape to the Constitution of the United States, which follows these three basic principles in its entire structure. Go before the bureaucracy and see that it is arranged both to make and enforce its own rules, and if one objects he must appear first before a judge who is employed by that same bureaucracy. And now a bureaucracy has been created that operates on a budget outside the control of the Congress.
This Fourth of July, we might well remind ourselves of the beauty, the greatness and the long serviceability of our constitutional institutions and of the principles from which they flow. This Fourth of July is a great time to recall these things, because the Declaration gives the Constitution its cause and also its basic form and function. We Americans may choose to discard this legacy and give up our birthright. Let us at least know what we are doing.
Celebrate the Declaration, and also remember its meaning. It is what a citizen does on the Fourth of July.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/elisabethmeinecke/2012/07/04/how_to_celebrate_the_fourth_of_july
*The posts made in this blog are of our opinion only* Without Prejudice UCC 1-207
-------------------
From Townhall Magazine's July feature, "How to Celebrate Two hundred thirty-six years ago this Fourth of July, 57 men signed the document that created the American republic. They represented a people of about 3 million grouped in a series of 13 colonies along the eastern seaboard of the United States. They were all wanted men, sought by the commander of the British forces in North America for sedition and treason. He had behind him the resources of the greatest military power on earth. They had behind them the bare beginnings of a government, hardly anything of an army, but something mighty in the way of an idea.
This nation had therefore a desperate beginning. Who but the boldest could believe that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were laying the foundation of the greatest constitutional republic in history? Now that republic has spread across the continent, and its influence reaches around the world. Its population has increased a hundredfold. Its Constitution has provided government to a free people constantly growing in size and territory, each new state joining the union as an equal, its citizens never subjects, its people ever free. There is no story close to it in the history of man.
Statesmen and thinkers have attributed the strength and goodness of the nation to the principles in the Declaration. Many others have denied this. Statesmen and thinkers have proclaimed the Constitution a just and beautiful implementation of the principles of the Declaration. Many others have denied this. These denials are more common in times of crisis in our country. They are very common now.
It is a sign of our time that the sitting chief executive of our country eschews the permanent meaning of the Declaration and the idea of fixity in the Constitution. In the “Audacity of Hope,” Barack Obama writes: “Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course. …”
Obama has stuck to this theme during his presidency. This May at Barnard College, he proclaimed the great virtue of the Constitution to be its openness to change: “It allowed for protests, movements, and the assimilation of new ideas that would repeatedly, decade after decade, change the world—a constant forward movement that continues to this day.” There is neither form nor firmness. All is fluid, according to Obama, and this liberates us to do whatever we will.
America has gone very far down the trail that Obama is blazing. Right now, the expenditures of all government—state, local and federal—exceed 40 percent of the gross domestic product. If trends
Moreover, it governs increasingly without authority from the branches that are elected by the people. The new Dodd- Frank finance law creates something called a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This agency does not get its budget from Congress. Rather, its money comes from a guaranteed percentage of the budget of the Federal Reserve, which gets its money from its operations as a bank. Congress is even specifically forbidden in the law to hold hearings into the budget of the new CPFB. And it has wide examining power over every form of consumer finance in the nation. In unfettered scope of authority, and in near perfect separation from popular control, it is different from anything before it in America.
Because we have come so far from the founding institutions, it is worthwhile to remind ourselves what they are. This anniversary of the Declaration of Independence provides a splendid occasion, because both the principles of the nation and its institutions are summarized beautifully in its 1,300 words. Let us then read it for a moment.
Notice first of all how remarkable it is that the document should begin universally. The authors were obviously mindful of the fact they were wanted men. They conclude the Declaration with a solemn promise, made to each other in the mood of soldiers facing battle: “In support of this Declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” (emphasis added). The particularity of this commitment, each man speaking for himself in promise to the others in the room, is what one might expect of legislation passed on the eve of a war, legislation that is itself a written act of treason.
If these men were in a situation urgent unto death, how can we account for the abstract and universal nature of the beginning of the Declaration? It begins with an “absolute truth” (to use the president’s term) expressed in words that have rung around the world: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them …” (emphasis added).
Notice that this quotation refers to no particular time, but to any time in the course of human events. Notice that it refers not to the American people, but to “one people,” meaning any people. It is a very absolute and universal way of talking. It issues immediately a proclamation of truth: “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Just as the Founders did, so may anyone look for his rights under these “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Anyone whose rights are denied will feel their weight. The Jew rounded up by the Nazis, the black slave held in Mississippi in 1840, may both look to this document as the charter by which he can advance. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was aware of this and wrote that indeed, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” These principles place every man and woman deprived of their rights in the same place that the Founders occupied on July 4, 1776: they may appeal to an absolute truth, written in the nature of man and in the nature of things, against any power that will offend their rights. Perhaps they cannot find the strength to overcome their oppression. Never mind: their cause is still the just one. They will see, and even in moments of clarity their oppressors will see, that the great self-evident truth that all men are created equal means nothing more nor less than that all men are men. It means nothing less than that no one may rightly govern another except by his consent. It means that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights”: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
These are the principles of the United States. The fact that they were announced at the onset of its revolution, and the fact that the revolution proceeded in their name, seals them in the blood and the history of this land.
The Declaration is not only about principles; it also describes institutions, the kind of institutions best adapted to protect the rights of a people. These institutions are expressed in the middle section of the document, the section in which the specific crimes and injustices of the king of England are described. The three broad constitutional principles that he violated form the backbone of the later Constitution of the United States. The first step in understanding that Constitution is not to learn its details, although they are relatively few. The first step is to understand the grand arrangements of government necessary to constitutional rule.
The first of these three principles is representation. The king is said to have interfered with the representatives of the people in their attempt to pass laws “most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The Declaration recognizes that human beings are made to live under law, and they have a right for those laws to be passed by people who represent them. This right is not to be interfered with by any force. Any force doing so interferes with the consent of the governed and cannot rightfully claim obedience. Violation of the representative principle is, by itself, cause for revolution.
The second of these principles is separation of powers. At the outset of the American Revolution, the king and his governors were the executive branch. By interfering with the legislature, the king violated not only the right of the people to representative government but also the necessity for separation of powers. He violated this necessity also by making “judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” God is named four times in the Declaration, once as each of the three branches of government, and once as a founder. The lesson is simple: God may well be the maker of the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and He may well be at the same time the Supreme Judge of the world, and He may also be Divine Providence. But no man or small group of men may rightly combine in their own hands all the powers of government. That is for God alone.
Finally, the Declaration calls for a limited government. The king was taxing America’s forefathers without their consent, and he was using the money, among other things, to pay for a hired army to oppress them. He sent many officials to make sure that his will was followed on all occasions, whatever the commoners may wish. The Declaration charges him with erecting “a multitude of new offices, and [sending] hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” In other words, the king offended against the principle of limited government. He was building a structure too strong for the people to manage.
The modern bureaucratic state reproduces many of the features that led to the writing of the Declaration of Independence and that gave shape to the Constitution of the United States, which follows these three basic principles in its entire structure. Go before the bureaucracy and see that it is arranged both to make and enforce its own rules, and if one objects he must appear first before a judge who is employed by that same bureaucracy. And now a bureaucracy has been created that operates on a budget outside the control of the Congress.
This Fourth of July, we might well remind ourselves of the beauty, the greatness and the long serviceability of our constitutional institutions and of the principles from which they flow. This Fourth of July is a great time to recall these things, because the Declaration gives the Constitution its cause and also its basic form and function. We Americans may choose to discard this legacy and give up our birthright. Let us at least know what we are doing.
Celebrate the Declaration, and also remember its meaning. It is what a citizen does on the Fourth of July.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/elisabethmeinecke/2012/07/04/how_to_celebrate_the_fourth_of_july
*The posts made in this blog are of our opinion only* Without Prejudice UCC 1-207
Thursday, March 8, 2012
How to Kidnap Children for Fun and Profit!
How to Kidnap
Children for Fun and Profit!
Receive
government bonuses for each child!
Accept praise
from your peers!
Intimidate
total strangers!
Become immune
from prosecution!
But wait!...
There's more!
Take orders
from poor childless folks who want other peoples children!
Later... you
can kidnap them again for more profit!
You can lie,
cheat and make false allegations against anyone you want!
Learn
how to ignore U.S. Constitutional rights of peons!
Become a god!
Become
an Alaskan Child Protective Social Worker!
Secret
training and Handbook available... available in all U.S. States.
And you think
I'm kidding right?
*The posts made in this blog are of our opinion only* Without Prejudice UCC 1-207
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