After spending three years writing a difficult and sometimes arduous story of the adventures and trials of growing up in South America, I agreed to sign a contract with a publisher. It's an investment of considerable money and though I remember someone saying that investment is best made into oneself, you always work hardest with your own money, it's heart stopping to consider the negative possiblities.

Most authors start this way, traveling by jet and car to tramp New York streets to visit publishing offices. I read one woman's reactions to the process, one of shock and stress as she took her manuscript to executives day after day, selling herself and her work. She expressed her humiliation at the frightening prospects of meeting suits and ties, while she arrived in her simple but neat appearance. Later the company she had trusted with her life work collapsed without a whisper. She has started over.

I'm sure that executives dress for success, and to intimidate, not encourage new writers from the nation's schools. I'm coaching my own daughter to write as she pens for now, short stories of kids and benevolent dragons. She's figured out the mystery of plot, the exigencies of words into images, and the hard repetitive tasks of crafting stories to grab people and keep them for the duration of her novelettes.

What about God? This universe we live in was an investment completely unlike any that a Rothchild has made in nation building, the multiple wars funded by Prescott Bush, the running clans of the rich and powerful riding in luxury on power yachts built of spendor and scandalous amounts of money, around this earth. No, God built, no...HE CREATED the whole thing from nothing and then gave it to man as a present to manage and enjoy. Then He wept as He tossed in the blood of His own Son! And he said he was going to burn it all up? And we drive on in limos to business meetings, build and invent better ways to kill each other from the rare minerals of platinum and hydrgen atoms. I tremble in disgust.

He knew we'd do this, cast away His bounty, a used table napkin, stained by the leftovers of sauce from our side dishes. We disrespect others with a casual dismissive wave of our hands, while we relax in air conditioned bubbles.

It isn't far from the disparaty of people starving to death in Syria to the hoarded cash of the rich grasping their gains in banks and bunkers. There won't be any bunker safe when God burns up the universe on that day. No underground mansion will hide the vast holdings of a Gates or Buffett. Nothing stands in the way of an angry God or the extent of His pain as we spurn the gift, excepted by His beloved on earth..the chosen to return to Him for love and fellowship. The tenderness of marriage which models what He feels for every single person on earth will be eclipsed by the raging fires which the Lord of the universe lashes the earth and every planet, every meteor, every star. Nothing will be spared in that day!

What are we doing in the time we have left, to bring the gift of salvation to as many people as we can reach with media and Christian men and women translating the Bible, planting churches, discipling men. one by one. We have some time left...May You Lord see our hearts and work your will in each Christian! As the world increasingly turns on Christians, the clock is counting!