The Lame Take the Prey for King and Country: Moving from the Crippling Experiences of Our Lives In a Torn Nation Under God- Into the Call of Greatness

By M.L. Ulinger

The Lame Take the Prey / For King and Country is a voice of reconciliation and hope- a welcome relief to a torn nation under God. Though a direct contradiction to circumstance, it's a timeless principle of Scripture- that in brokenness there's strength. From this framework comes God's view on "greatness" - that it's not just assumed as a birthright, or belongs only to the ages, but finds a home in us, as God calls us to be a cut above the rest. Brokenness attracts the mercies of God who raises up broken people to do big things and to become benefactors of blessings others only dream about. You can't dream big enough for God!

For the Kingdom of God and the healing of our great nation, God has a plan for each life yielded to Him. When it looks too late for what you planned, it's not too late for what God has planned. You see the pieces. God sees the picture. You endure the preparation. God encounters you with His purpose. Like a "fast ball in," when the call of God comes over the plate, you'll know it in your spirit. And what's waited for tomorrow, you'll do today.

"You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the land."- Christopher Columbus

There will never be a perfect moment to do a great thing!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Oct 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9780310107422

M.L. Ulinger

M. L. Ulinger is an Evangelical Christian and a patriot who vigorously supports her faith and her country. She is an advocate for the disadvantaged, a champion for those who struggle with adversity, and a proponent of strength through brokenness who calls out the seeds of greatness in others. The author is a member of CUFI (Christians United for Israel), and is a supporter of The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

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Introduction

T he lame take the prey—drawn from Isaiah 33:23—is a paradox, a direct contradiction to circumstance, yet a timeless principle of Scripture that teaches in brokenness there’s strength. Though still a paradox, the fascination with this text is that it remains a divine principle of life because we serve a God who settles every crisis and every need to our advantage. And it’s not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts (Zechariah 4:6, KJV).

Out of that spring, comes The Lame Take the Prey for King and Country, a voice of reconciliation and hope, a welcome relief to a torn nation under God, and a practical teaching and admonishment on honor, civility, and courage. Wrestling against adversity, it initiates a conversation on taking the prey of destiny and inaugurates us into noble ideas worthy of sacrifice in God’s call to greatness.

It speaks life into the anxiety-driven of each generation, teaching us throughout each season to stand through the fight with valor and integrity in our daily walk. Pulling us from the rubble of our mistakes and misfortunes, it bugles a call to duty, a race to win, and a triumph to obtain for the Kingdom of God, and for the peace and prosperity of our great nation. Knowing that God will give us the right victory at the right time is what drives the day. We have a divine appointment with that victory. And it’s an appointment we want to keep.

Preface

Within everyone lies the seeds of greatness, and what we call impossible is only an opinion. God’s greatest plans are revealed in our darkest hour. And our biggest risks are sometimes our greatest opportunities, birthed out of our worst nightmares. Often it’s just the incivilities of the unholy and unforgiving that afflict us. But others suffer through layers of unjust and cruel withholdings, from rejection and abandonment to poverty and homelessness. They learn the DNA of fear in long seasons of violence and abuse while suffering anxious concerns for the welfare of their children. Some endured a deeper layer of abandonment from those who knew their dangers, but orphaned them. Not all orphans lived in orphanages.

How do we explain evil? Unprovoked terror attacks and mass shootings on the innocent snuff out countless lives, scattering their future contributions to the world like blowing dust. Some grieve the tragic loss of missing children who were needlessly taken and wasted in savage disregard—beautiful young lives that held such promise. Others suffer through famine, pestilence, and historic perils of nature and are forced to start over with less in hopes of achieving more, much like making bricks without straw. But whatever brought you low, shattered your life, or is after you now, out of the ashes you can rise again! There isn’t anything God can’t resurrect you out of. Our scars change us, but they don’t destroy us. They call us to an elevated plane. What is God’s purpose that allows us to drink such sorrow and know such evil? What could all the suffering mean, except that it is a link to something much greater, something higher. Nothing just happens!

This book will not chronicle the story of anyone’s life. It holds my conclusions and shares with you my findings in what I’ve learned through my own fears and failings, and through the failings of others, affecting me deeply and strengthening my resolve. Though I’m acquainted with demonic assignments and have despaired of life, I’m grateful that what I’ve learned from my own level of suffering is transferable that I might help someone else. God has been good to me.

Some conflicts are tried by war and terminated by victory. Others are tried by deep loss, hardship, and persecution, but are terminated daily as we pick up courage to go one more step, then another, in full assurance that He who began a good work in you will complete it (Philippians 1:6).When it looks too late for what you planned, it’s not too late for what God has planned. You see the pieces. God sees the picture. You endure the preparation. God encounters you with His purpose. Let God surprise you. It’s not the last song of the night, nor the last dance. You are not stuck and it’s not over! No matter what happens to you, or what people take from you, they can’t take your calling. It’s only a setup for greater things ahead.

It’s a funny thing, destiny. Sometimes it sneaks up on you, until one day you wake up in a new place, around new people, with higher agendas affecting millions of lives. And God had you heading there all the while, one trial at a time, one step of faith and one deliverance at a time, because we count Him faithful, for by faith, out of the crisis, every evil is reversed (Esther 8:5), and even the lame take the prey (Isaiah 33:23).

The night won’t last. It will come to pass. Go ahead and dream. You can’t dream big enough for God!

CHAPTER 1

Fear’s Masterful Bluff

In the Peril and the Promise

Do private fears prevent you, or does stress push you too fast? Could the beast of our opposition be the fear that hides in the form of our anxieties? Or is it something more nuclear? This chapter is the silver bullet that slays it!

Running through the forest in New York, in the game of hide and seek, spirited children bonded through hidden trails and enchanted streams. Cousins gave added value to the meaning of family. And it was Niagara Falls that gave us the crystal creek we indulged in, gifting our woods with energy and evoking a delicious anticipation for adventure. In the clear water we noted polliwogs in our single-minded pursuit of salamanders. The hunt for snakes under ferns and blackberry bushes was included in the kaleidoscope of challenges. Berry picking was hardly neglected, although we rarely brought home proof of our findings. From the thick forest floor, an occasional violet would pop up to grace our handheld bouquet of wild flowers. Our fears of cougars, bears, and wolves, known in those parts, prompted us to sing, Who’s afraid of a big, bad wolf. Endowed with over 120 private acres of dense forest outside of a small, nowhere town for us to run on, who knows what creatures were making those sounds, giving us occasional alarm. God watched over a unique time and place for children with no need for street-smarts or worldly wisdom. After all, we could hike waterfalls and climb a tree. We had all we required of life: one another. We were ever cousins, ever together, and ever young. The golden age of an irresistible childhood, with the memorable sounds and smells of the woods, never left me. I think of it as a longer period than it was, those treasured years when imagination freely spilled from our hearts in the roam of primitive country through pines, maples, and apple trees, amidst the cherished love of cousins, whose devotions were knit close to mine.

We were ever cousins, ever together, and ever young.

Far from child’s play through creeks and wooded meadows, today we prayerfully raise our children in a half-mad world. Evil has reinvented itself. Out of the snake came the adder. What would have horrified us ten years ago is now not even a sad song. Today’s level of insanity is unbridled and beyond insane. We’re living in days of the unconscionable fraught with horrors of the unthinkable, from bestial beheadings paired with menacing messages, to the shredding of human dignity in the trafficking of stolen lives—lives spent before they could spend their lives.

Far from child’s play through creeks and wooded meadows…

The murder of our innocence ensued the chaos, as many saw things no eye should see. Terror erupted on a global stage, as masses tried to flee in a trail of tears, the evil of the fierce. Displaced people in desperate situations sought mercy. And hungry hearts that yearned for peace, but failed for fear, are what many believe to be a harbinger of things to come. Moral decency has become marginalized and deadlocked under the consensus of the mainstream. Like a poisoned apple, evil is presented as good. And good is called evil. Battle lines are drawn and veils are lifted in the evidence of where nations, governments, and individuals truly stand.

Unpredictable, immoral deviants in gangster governments on a hair trigger with nuclear war, maintain a brutal grip on their malnourished subjects, ruling in a shroud of fear through the villainy of public witnessed executions, suicides, and mass starvations. Raging rhetoric and erratic, defiant behavior from nefarious minds in dictatorships threaten the world with unimaginable loss of life. Will agreements made for peace be kept, or will there be double-dealing? The tragedy of failed diplomacy doesn’t need another characterization. But sometimes there are no options beyond the battlefield, where there’s no confusion as to the remedy, only horror over the solution.

The tragedy of failed diplomacy doesn’t need another characterization.

Through batteries of briefings and brainstorming, warrior diplomacy seeks another path away from catastrophe. It tirelessly tries to negotiate with dogs of war in the scourge of rogue regimes, arm-linked in a Gordian knot of evil. Nations put all topics on the table and wade through the mire for solutions, compromise, and cooperation. Their baseline request for peace, safety, and prosperity shatters like fine china, as it’s met with disdain and defiance by trolls and tyrants with stubborn hearts and evil agendas. How do we persuade the maniacal, blind, and tone-deaf to the wisdom of peace, to apply logic and reason in the face of alarming and escalating tensions? Evil’s only rational is in its own violent, fanatical ideology. It’s apocalyptic view of life is not love thy neighbor as thyself. As tensions ratchet up in a high-stakes feud, the headwinds of deranged, nuclear proxies bring credible threats front and center. And the need for prayer has never been more valuable.

There’s no suspense novel written that equals the action-packed, troubling days in which we live. The signs of the times in 2 Timothy have become our times. Former times of gross darkness, with few exceptions, are like small potatoes compared to our fast and furious breaking news. Today’s scandals are so bizarre you couldn’t make them up. Every day another shoe drops on someone and the long knives come out. Our personal lives become a public square and are put to the worse, as social media massacres with an addiction, cross the line, and are cheerfully carried out, demonstrating no one’s reputation is safe. Danger moves out from fairy tales to schools, places of work and worship, and public gatherings, taking center stage in savage bloodbaths on the unsuspecting, whose lives are slaughtered and brutally cut down. In the admix of violent outbursts, it’s difficult to follow the logic of those who are anomic to civilized societies and have no sense of normal, but seek to find blame where there is none. The insanity still unfolds.

Danger moves out from fairy tales, taking center stage on the unsuspecting.

Criminals infiltrate multitudes of immigrants who steal their way into our homeland and illegally invade our country in historic droves, bloating our borders and overwhelming our capacity to restrain them— giving us new understanding into the logic and wisdom of boundaries and borders in the wonderment of a wall. We can’t marshal an economic or security argument in favor of such immigration, only a political one, where one ship gets to rise and everybody else sinks. For the safety and welfare of our children and grandchildren, we can’t give the keys to the kingdom to aliens who aren’t properly vetted. If we don’t come together and deal with the national emergency of migration, it will deal with us. Even a broad-shouldered, generous, kind nation cannot educate, medicate, or house the world, which in view of our nation’s homeless crisis in our rat-infested cities, is a sound judgment of common sense to behold.

If we don’t effectively deal with migration, it will deal with us.

In other battles, violent activists put us on the sharp end of it, inciting riots, promoting anarchy, and threatening to destroy the rule of law. Lone wolf attacks from deranged minds drunk with evil in a singular agenda of hate fill in the gaps between the usual suspects and unknown villains. And in government where spiritual matters drive political issues, it’s not politics as usual. It’s a blood sport where all good reputations go to die, and it’s pathologically dangerous. The rise of anti-Semitism from members within the U.S. Congress shocks us with their unabashed anti-Israel, anti-Jewish stance. Further, they tout the peddled lie that they are victimized and openly slam us with anti-American rhetoric at every turn, though they thrive in our great nation where they enjoy more freedom and civil liberties than anywhere on earth. In a disgraceful show, they dismissingly gloss over the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on American soil merely as a moment where some people did something. To receive overwhelming acceptance, support, and generosity from our beloved nation, then to spew out such black-hearted remarks is deeply offensive and an affront to all Americans and to those who innocently died violent deaths that day. It is to fiendishly kill them afresh. Right when we thought not much else could shock us, we were wrong. Hard on the heels of those comments, came the cold-blooded remark from a seat within our own Congress that thoughts of the Holocaust always give a calming feeling and that the land of Israel was only given to the Jews as a safe haven, a consolation prize after World War II (a distortion of the biblical and historical record of Israel’s ownership of the land). But then again, why stand we here with mouths gaping? It only follows that those who are without reservation to openly associate with convicted terrorists and the most pernicious anti-Semites who venerate Jew murderers are in one accord and run together. Still, such remarks should not even be whispered in our government’s halls or be allowed to hold any political office in the United States of America. The murder of over six million Jewish people who were rounded up and herded into cattle cars to be gassed, starved, tortured, buried alive in mass graves, burned in ovens, subjected to medical experiments, then to have lamp shades made from their skin, and bars of soap from their fat is a HORROR! Proverbs 17:5 (NKJV): He that is glad at calamity will not go unpunished. Our objections to their comments are met with ridicule and chidings of being guilty of assault and inciting to violence. We live in an inverted society where the goal is to be the victim. After all, the ploys of victimhood and whining is a combined meal ticket to one of the most powerful seats in our government; and it teams up in a new war on words in attempt to send you to the corner and control you with fear. And for your First Amendment award, to silence you, they try to remove your voice from the internet. But we can only be led to assume, and our history has led us to believe, that there are those who have a different mindset than what our concept of right and wrong would expect of them, and that if some of them had their way, 9/11 should happen again, and the sooner the better. An exaggerated over-stretch? Not really, but tragically true of the darkness that can hide in the heart of man, until the mouth gives it away. The mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart (Matthew 12:34; Proverbs 10:11). If we don’t speak against words of animus and contempt that have become the signature move of those who continually bash and deride our nation and make light of our tragedies, while publicizing their satisfaction with the Holocaust, they will become par. In polite company, we’re ushered to keep quiet, to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. But that doesn’t hang with our duty. Whatever evil we’re willing to ignore as anything less than what it truly is, or the evil we excuse is the evil we’ll allow. And what we allow is what we permit and ultimately perpetrate. Evil germinated in a foreign land that’s allowed to grow and pollinate in our homeland is a precursor of the dangers ahead. The day we’re afraid to exercise our own civil liberties, which we so dutifully extend to others, and don’t speak out against the seeds of hostility and hate, is the day we’ll reap a bumper crop of the same. What we excuse is going to exact a price. What we ignore will intensify, then bully us into submission and steal its way to the throne; and what we were once chided with is what we’ll be wrongfully charged with. We will have lost our First Amendment rights, and we’ll no longer be the land of the free. There’s more than one way to sell out our country or give it away.

There’s more than one way to sell out our country or give it away.

The new low is: if you support due process and the presumption of innocence, you’re an impediment to justice and part of the problem. Huh? That should put a chill up our spine. Whatever our political stripes, we should all care about due process. But it’s being grossly challenged today, as the burden of proof is dramatically shifting to the accused. Evidence, or lack of it, sinks deeper into irrelevance. Of course, that would all depend on your political views, in which case, should the facts clear you, to your whimpering accusers you’re still a quisling and just as guilty as alleged. The presumption of innocence is a value of civilized nations, inspired by the belief in the God-given right to be considered innocent before proven guilty. It’s critical to our justice system, protecting us from wrongful judgement and prosecution. But when justice in a case is colored by politics, or requires the accused to prove his innocence, there goes the country. And if we listen closely, we’ll hear the march of evil, as it goose-steps on parade.

Whatever our political stripes, we should all care about due process.

Under a big tent: kangaroo justice, regurgitated lies, rigged reports, slippery investigations, and frivolous subpoenas against everything that moved went beyond the pale and slithered into our lives in a circus of collusion delusion- a collusion we learned never took place, unless by the Left, where the guilty proclaimed their innocence the loudest and divided a nation in outcry. It’s as simple and shameful as that! Oversight powers designed by the framers to oversee legislation, not become a prosecutorial branch, went rogue to interfere with the executive branch to oust a president. That doesn’t wear well with the country! An honest press in the mind of our forefathers to bring accurate information morphed into a beast with an insatiable appetite for pseudo stories, unverified hearsay, and compilations of creations without any factual predicate- rightly termed, fake news. God’s grace is the first responder to these things, giving us safe passage through the tight spots. We are well garrisoned by the Word of our God, who said He’d be with us when we pass through the fire. Like those who came before us, we stand strong and hold fast to the things that are pure, just, and true. Truth is the archenemy of tyranny and pursues it beyond the grave. But the truth is hardly ever told these days and is excruciatingly slow to unravel, as it moves in and out of the shadows. You can’t tease out truth from those who aren’t willing to part with it.

You can’t tease out truth from those who aren’t willing to part with it.

Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.

—Jonathan Swift

There’s no shortage of sensational stories in these defiant days. We’ve been up to our eyeballs with abuse of power, which is a crime subsequent to the original charge: breaking the rules. Add to that: political hit jobs, unreasonable search and seizures, and bad actors who behaved as though they had unfettered, free rein to go willy-nilly with things we didn’t vote for. That should concern us. Spying scandals, revealing insidious breaks with diplomatic protocol and ethics, violated the ethos of our democracy—a national disgrace and a stain on our Constitution. Incompetence and fraud within our own country tried to overturn and shut down our elections through the art of the steal, as it stooped to, If you can’t beat ‘em, cheat ‘em. Do we have a democracy or not?

Deep state players, overtaken by personal bias and political animus, covertly operated behind national security in a weaponized justice system that should tell you everything you need to know about the devil. The evidence played out in a spectacular display of betrayal in the illicit scheme and contrivance of the greatest witch hunt, hell-bent on muzzling those who stand for the right, while the noble values our country was founded upon were set to burn at the stake. Conflicted individuals, deliberately dishonest with corrupt intent in premeditated fraud and conspiracy, developed their own currency of scurrilous accusations lodged at taking down a United States president, but tumbled headlong into quicksand- shot down in their own mischief and defrocked. Has there ever been a less impressive investigation or a more indefensible reason to impeach? Not when it’s to dodge accountability for hoaxes one can no more hide than the wind. History must write there was a Deep State reckoning. In their own words: No one is above the law. Mounting reports of treason, racketeering, espionage, and consorting with the enemy for personal power and profit multiplied daily. Our heads spin in dizzy bewilderment while other heads roll.When collusion became big business and was the game in town, the collateral damages stumbled into our lives, putting us all in harm’s way. Any wonder we feared?

When vast securities are grossly breached and unthinkable horrors become a deliverable threat, when deals are made with our enemies that affect countless lives and make the devil dance, our instinct for survival awakens our fears. But the Lord told us to not let our hearts be troubled.