Kameel Majdali's Road Ahead

Your Second Most Important Decision Before the Second Comes the First What is your most important decision in life? Is it choosing a career, a city or country to dwell, or a cause to champion? These are important decisions but they are not the most important. What, then, could it be? Getting in right relationship with God! God is our Creator and also our Redeemer. He is also very holy; but unfortunately, we are not. Our own good works and good intentions cannot rectify this situation. Only through faith in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we can have a right relationship with the living God. But the Gospel is not automatically downloaded into our life. We decide to say ‘Yes’ to the Gospel. When we do, we receive the ‘new birth,’ salvation from sin and condemnation, the gift of eternal life, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and more. All these wonderful and everlasting outcomes spring from a simple decision to receive Christ and His Gospel. Can there be no more important decision than this? Your...

We have all grown up surrounded by terms like ‘liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ ‘left-wing,’ ‘right-wing,’ ‘progressive,’ and ‘traditional.’ Even for the many who can neither defend or even define them, we instinctually know that our worldview is coloured by them. Famous people and issues have also been framed by these terms. Traditionally, the liberals and left-wingers—along with their extreme version called ‘communist,’ represented issues of ‘social justice’ and more government involvement to make such justice happen. Government control of the economy is also a feature. In midst of the emergency of the Great Depression of the 1930s, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt represented government intervention at its peak—experimenting with a variety of schemes to try to lift the economy out of the pit. Keep your eye of current US President Barack Obama, who is also leading an activist government trying to revive the US economy in a time of meltdown. Conservatives take a more literal view of c...

With Easter fast approaching, Newsweek Magazine published a provocatively titled cover story ‘The Decline and Fall of Christian America’ by Jon Meacham. The cover had wording in red letters in the form of a cross on a black background. It was based on the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), which stated the following:  The percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christians has fallen from 86% in 1990 to 76% in 2009;  Those Americans who call themselves ‘unaffiliated’ rose from 8% in 1990 to 15% in 2009;  Atheists and agnostics have grown from 1 million in 1990 to 3.6 million in 2009 (my note: so, for that matter, has America’s overall population to over 300 million);  Unaffiliated may be ‘theists,’ in that they believe in ‘God’ or ‘gods,’ and they describe themselves as ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious.’ If Mr. Meacham wanted a response, he got one. Some said he was attacking Christianity. Others said the church was not declining but ‘doing just fine.’ One...

Over the last months the economic crisis has enlarged our vocabulary: ‘bailout,’ ‘stimulus package,’ and ‘meltdown.’ Everyone is thinking and talking about the economic situation. The G20 group of nations met in London in April 2009 and agreed to spend USD 1.1 (AUD 1.58) trillion dollars to get banks to loan to each other and create jobs. Something like USD 5.5 (AUD 7.7) trillion will be spent by the end of 2010 to rescue the world’s economy. Any idea how much a trillion is? Technically speaking, it is a billion 1,000 times. A billion is a million 1,000 times. A million is a thousand 1000 times. To give you some perspective, go back to the year 731 BC, when there was a Kingdom of Judah and Israel. Spend $1 million dollars per day, every single day from then until now, and you would reach $1 trillion. The US economy, the largest in the world, had a GNP of $14.33 trillion; Japan is next with 4.8 trillion. China is $4.2 trillion. With figures like these, no wonder we feel bemused and h...