Billy Graham's Prayer For Our Nation

'Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, 'Woe to those who call evil good,' but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable... We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics.. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from sin and Set us free. Amen!'

Remembering Steve Jobs

I, like most people, have never met Steve Jobs and yet my life has been affected by his enthusiasm, commitment and entrepreneurship.  I found this tribute on a blog I follow. 

Remembering Steve Jobs - from the blog of David Alison IT & Programming Consultant

We mourn the loss of famous people—our entertainers, our leaders, our athletes—even though we never got a chance to meet them in person. They entered our lives through popular media and became part of it. We would watch them act or sing and it would engage us. They would speak about the important challenges we face and we would be inspired to address them. We would watch in awe as they performed incredible feats of skill, wondering how anyone could pull that off.

When one of those famous people die young, it's notable. That small window in our lives that they occupied goes dark and we miss them for a time.

Steve Jobs was different.

He wasn't an entertainer, yet he could capture the attention of the public and engage us. He didn't give many speeches, but the few he did were inspirational. Though he was not the classic business CEO he created multiple businesses that enjoyed extraordinary financial success. While these are all great accomplishments, it's not the main reason many people will remember Steve Jobs.

Steve had an uncanny ability to create things that became part of our lives. He didn't just build tools that made it easier to do something, he built tools that added joy to the task. He and his team put such a high value on the quality of a product that simply holding it in your hands left you with an appreciation for the attention to detail poured into it. There was a depth to the products Steve created; while something could be very simple on the surface, a little digging would lead to some cool discovery of a feature or capability that would make you smile. Like many of his product presentations, there always seemed to be "one more thing" subtly hidden on the device, waiting for you to discover it.

Personally I'm going to miss Steve's influence on the future of technology.

My thoughts are with Laurene, Steve's children and family, and the folks he worked with every day to make magic happen.