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If You Are Discouraged, It's Not From God

I bring you this dispatch from the Department of the Blindingly Obvious, because frankly, I forget this often. If we don't rebuke it in our thoughts, and our adversary who brings it to us, we give sin a foothold.

If you surrender to sin, prepare to be discouraged. Our adversary loves to pile it on when that happens. But if God is for us, who can stand against us? God loves us and died to free us from sin. We know this, but in the thick of the battle, we forget.

Happy Feast, everybody! St. Paul, pray for us!

Movie Quote Sidebar: My friends, I wanted to type "our old adverse-ary" but I figured Sean Connery jokes would be 1. a little tacky in the midst of the encouragement; and 2. fly over the heads of most of you. But here's a good chunk of the quote, from the film, "The Hunt For Red October":

"And once more, we play our dangerous game, against our old adversary, the American navy. For forty years, your fathers before you, and your older brothers played this game, and played it well. But this time is different. We have the advantage...." I remember other parts of the speech, but not the order it comes in, which is pretty shocking, considering I may have seen this movie 84 times. OOH, here's a good line: "It reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik, and Yuri Gagarin, when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. And they will tremble again, at the sound of our silence."

It's time to put this out in the open: the movie is better than the book. However, the book provides the back story. What is motivating this celebrated Soviet submarine captain to steal a new submarine equipped with dozens of nuclear missiles and a nearly silent propulsion system, and defect to the United States with most of his officers? His wife died at the hands of a drunk doctor at a state-run hospital. Somebody alert the president! Some guy will steal our best submarine, and hand it to Singapore in protest.

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