'I will wait for the Lord, who hides His face from the house of Jacob, and I will look for Him.' Isaiah 8:17
In this verse we find a servant of the Lord waiting and looking for Him, not on behalf of himself, but on behalf of his people, from whom the Lord G-d of Israel was hiding His face.
Elijah was a man who was walking in the full light of G-d's countenance, and yet because of the sins of Israel's king and its leaders this caused the Lord to hide His face from the house of Jacob. What was Elijah to do? What are we called to do in times of darkness and distress like we live in today?
Should those of us who are seeking to walk according to G-d's ways be silent or self righteous believing this is just punishment for those who are sinning against G-d? No, we are called with tender hearts to think of their sad condition, and to go before the Lord in prayer to wait upon G-d on their behalf.
This is both a privilege and a great responsibility to wait upon the Lord and to stand in the gap before ...   more »

If President Bush follows through with his controversial plan to set up a defensive missile shield in two former Warsaw Pact countries, years from now historians will ask which came first: the missile shield to protect Western allies from rogue states, or a coalition of rogue states assembled by Russia to counter the missile shield proposed by the United States?
    Russia's President Vladimir Putin said he would respond to the U.S. plan by pointing Russian missiles at Western European cities. In the unlikely event this highly explosive tit-for-tat were to develop into a new arms race, Mr. Putin knows that despite Russia's newly found wealth thanks to the rising price of oil, Moscow would have a hard time matching the U.S. dollar for dollar.
    "The West does not have an effective strategy of dealing with the challenges posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin," said Andrei Illarionov, Mr. Putin's former economic adviser and G-8 sherpa, now a Cato Institute senior fellow.
    "Russians are not so stupid as to match the U.S. system-by-system because the U.S. has an economy that is 13 times bigger than Russia's economy," Ariel Cohen, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told United Press ...   more »