Hymnody is one of the great consolations of religion and a favorite old hymn we used to sing often in our small church in Little Oklahoma had the refrain “Farther along we'll know more about it, farther along we'll understand why… we’ll understand it all by and by.” My dear brothers and sisters, given the year we have just passed through we are going to have to rely on that promise of farther along for understanding because we sure aren’t going to get a satisfactory answer from any of our leaders to the evils of this world and why the wicked prosper. For those looking for a positive note on which to end this year the choices are pretty lean and with little prospect of the next year bringing any great improvement since government (Caesar), welfare, and prisons will most certainly continue to be America’s growth industries.

Looking back over this past year it has been one filled with disasters and corruption which showed an uncaring, inept and corrupt government at its very worst. Throughout this year there has been an unrelenting barrage of bad news hammering ordinary Americans who seem to have no voice or choice in a thoroughly corrupt and thoroughly inept government so completely out of touch with the grim realities ordinary Americans are facing and whose only real function seems to be to blatantly unashamedly take care of its own while selling out and betraying America and rewarding the wicked that actually choose the politicians and keep them in power.

Apart from the Bible we have no idea how the escalation of violence in the Middle East is going to play out, just how far this most recent war between Israel and its Muslim enemies will go, what may happen due to the religious hatreds to be found around the world including those in Africa and between Pakistan and India, we do not know what the powerful in the shadows of this evil world system led of Satan will determine to be in their interests despite the worldwide suffering they cause for their advantage in power and wealth.

As economic conditions worsen here in America an escalation of barbarism is only to be expected as even the most honest must provide bread for their families. It’s part of our history when those that robbed banks became folk heroes during economic hard times like the Great Depression; and despite the best efforts of honest people there was no mistaking the theme of the America I was born into “Crime does not pay” was being replaced by “Only chumps play by the rules,” and in my own lifetime I have seen Norman Rockwell’s America give way to a loss of hope for the future and growing desperation with a concomitant breakdown of morality, law and order. Short of the miraculous intervention of God on behalf of America I don’t see a return to the standards of morality and behavior, the hopes and ideals America represented at the time from which the Greatest Generation came to save the world.

But no matter the era in which we live, for those of us whose hope and trust is in God we will not be disappointed and we wait in expectation that we will know all about it and all will be explained farther along, all by and by. I believe God will fulfill all that he has promised for those of us who remain faithful to the end, but for those whose only hope is in men they are doomed to disappointment.

The greatest blessing of my life is to have had loving people who lived the love of God and proved this by their lives and I have been the blessed beneficiary of such unconditional sacrificial love for me of those that felt no sense of sacrifice by their deeds of love. Every one of these dear loved ones and friends now await my arrival, and when my work is done and God calls me home what a time of rejoicing that will be!

And now this year’s work of The American Poet-Weedpatch Gazette for 2008 draws to a close and next month will go to publication so as to be available in book form. I wait with curious interest and anticipation rather than fear to see what the next year may bring, anticipating continuing the work of writing and to see if I might be agreeably surprised and men may yet do better for each other and our planet than they have thus far.