The Middle East and Iran

In the fall of 1995 I was at Purdue University in West Lafayette. It was my senior year and I met in my class an Arab who I will call Abu(that is not his actual name). He was friendly towards me and we studied together. He grew up in the country of Kuwait however he was Lebanese origin and called himself a Palestinian. How he came to Purdue I will never understand. We became such good friends he came to my house on weekends at times. I will never forget one Sunday morning in the fall of 1995 I went to get the newspaper before church and right away I went right for the sports page like any other 21 year old would do. My friend though was shocked at the front page though stating that the Prime Minister of Israel had been assinated. I did not care 2 licks. Abut was upset I did not care. I really did not care though. My mom, brother, sister, Abu and I went to church that morning and I will never forget our minister who was our elder came up to Abu during lunch and sympathized with him regarding Rabin's death. He was trying to make peace with the Palestinians so Abu took this hard. From that day forward I started to look into and learn about Israel and Palestine and the conflict. The first time I visited Abu at his apartment he showed me a video of Palestinians being persecuted by Israelis. This was before he visited my house so again I did not care about what he was telling me. After the situation with Rabin I started to look into Middle East more. Abu had berated me for caring more about sports in the paper than about middle east news. There is more to this story but I have now learner much about Islam and the Middle East because of Abu. I am pro-Israel now that I have done my research and am opposite of Abu on beliefs on who is right regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Because of Abu, who I talked to for over an hour this week, I pulled my head out of the sports page to dig into the middle east conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. My findings and research have led me to support Israel. Abu does not like this but is happy for me to have an opinion on this. As Americans we need to wake up, pull ourbheads out of the sports page and look around at the world around us. I have had the chance to share the gospel with Abu and I still pray that he will become a follower of Jesus. According to the Bible Jesus is the only way to Heaven. Thank you Abu for challenging me. I asked Abu about Iran deal we recently made. Abu is a Sunni Muslim and the Muslims from Iran are Shiite so there is tension there. Abu did not like the deal and is dissapointed with the presidient. I am thankful that I now follow the middle east.

yellow corn

Here in Indiana I work for a farmer.  We have a rain gauge and one of the employees writes down the rain every day during the week.  They have records going back to 1988.  The biggest month was July 2003 where we got 15.0 inches of rain.  This past month though we had a new record.  It was 17.3 inches of rain for the month of June.  That kept us from spraying the corn for burr cucumber and morning glory.  My employer who is also family grows mostly popcorn.  He is a go getter and planted it in April so his corn looks pretty good however about 15% is drown out or yellowed.  I have a little field and did not finish planting it until around May 20th.  The first 10 acres was planted around May 8th and it looks okay after that though the corn is yellow about waist high and struggling.  I do not know what will happen.  Very frustruating however I do have crop insurance.  I put on my nitrogen, the corn is just not getting it.  I know in the book of Habakkuk I believe chapter 3 it talks about how we should praise God even if our crops fail.  So I need to be praiseful regardless.  See picture below of my employers field.