Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is April 22, the 112th day of 2014 and there are 253 days left this year where it is another Blessed Day in the pleasure of our service for our Lord here at:
For God’s Glory Alone Ministries !!!
To Belive Or Not To Belive! (It shouldn’t be a question!!!)
The ‘Question of the Day’ is: If you don’t believe in God just because you haven’t seen him, then why do you believe in anything else that you haven’t seen, like MAYBE the AIR YOU BREATHE? You know you can’t live without it and you must have it right? Well, maybe that’s how others feel about God! God is not a matter of seeing, it’s a matter of feeling and believing. I believe that a little bit of faith gets me through each day. Matter of fact, the more strongly I believe and show Him that I do, the more He shows me; AND IT IS GLORIOUS!!! There will come a day, and it will come, unlike the air, you WILL see it if you believe in the first place!!! I PRAY YOU DO. (Actually, if you read today’s verse at the end of this post – you may see – IF YOU’RE LOOKING!!!)
So, What Happened Today In 1778?
American Patriot and Naval Commander John Paul Jones leads American raid on Whitehaven, England
At 11 p.m. on this day, Commander John Paul Jones leads a small detachment of two boats from his ship, the USS Ranger, to raid the shallow port at Whitehaven, England, where, by his own account, 400 British merchant ships are anchored. Jones was hoping to reach the port at midnight, when ebb tide would leave the ships at their most vulnerable.
Jones and his 30 volunteers had greater difficulty than anticipated rowing to the port, which was protected by two forts. They did not arrive until dawn. Jones’ boat successfully took the southern fort, disabling its cannon, but the other boat returned without attempting an attack on the northern fort, after the sailors claimed to have been frightened away by a noise. To compensate, Jones set fire to the southern fort, which subsequently engulfed the entire town.
Commander Jones, one of the most daring and successful naval commanders of the American Revolutionary War, was born in Scotland on July 6, 1747. He was apprenticed to a merchant at the age of 13 and soon went to sea from Whitehaven, the very port he returned to attack on this day in 1778. In Virginia at the onset of the revolution, Jones sided with the Patriots and received a commission as a first lieutenant in the Continental Navy on December 7, 1775.
After the raid on Whitehaven, Jones continued to his home territory of Kirkcudbright Bay, where he intended to abduct the Earl of Selkirk, then exchange him for American sailors held captive by Britain. Although he did not find the earl at home, Jones’ crew was able to steal all his silver, including his wife’s teapot, still containing her breakfast tea. From Scotland, Jones sailed across the Irish Sea to Carrickfergus, where the Ranger captured the HMS Drake after delivering fatal wounds to the British ship’s captain and lieutenant.
In September 1779, Jones fought one of the fiercest battles in naval history when he led the USS Bonhomme Richard frigate, named for Benjamin Franklin, in an engagement with the 50-gun British warship HMS Serapis. The USS Bonhomme Richard was struck; it began taking on water and caught fire. When the British captain of the Serapis ordered Jones to surrender, Jones famously replied, I have not yet begun to fight! A few hours later, the captain and crew of the Serapis admitted defeat and Jones took command of the British ship.
Jones went on to establish himself as one of the great naval commanders in history; he is remembered, along with John Barry, as a Father of the American Navy. He is buried in a crypt in the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel at Annapolis, Maryland, where a Marine honor guard stands at attention in his honor whenever the crypt is open to the public.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On April 22 In History:
1529 – Spain and Portugal divide the eastern hemisphere in the Treaty of Saragosa;
1792 – President George Washington proclaims American neutrality in the war in Europe;
1863 – During the American Civil War, Colonel Benjamin Grierson’s Union troops bring destruction to Central Mississippi as part of a two-week raid along the entire length of the state. On May 2, Grierson and his men rode into Union occupied Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ending one of the most spectacular raids of the war. The Yankees killed about 100 Confederates, took 500 prisoners, destroyed 50 miles of rail line, and destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars of supplies and property. Grierson lost just 3 men killed, 7 wounded, 14 missing. More important, the raiders drew the attention of Confederate troops in Mississippi and weakened the forces at Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana. Both strongholds fell to the Union in July 1863. For his efforts, Grierson was promoted to brigadier general;
1864 – The United States Congress authorized the use of the phrase “In God We Trust“ on U.S. coins;
1886 – Ohio passes a statute that makes seduction unlawful. Covering all men over the age of 18 who worked as teachers or instructors of women, this law even prohibited men from having consensual sex with women (of any age) whom they were instructing. The penalty for disobeying this law ranged from two to 10 years in prison. Ohio’s seduction law was not the first of its kind. A Virginia law made it illegal for a man to have an “illicit connexion (sic) with any unmarried female of previous chaste character” if the man did so by promising to marry the girl. An 1848 New York law made it illegal to “under promise of marriage seduce any unmarried female of previous chaste character.” Georgia’s version of the seduction statute made it unlawful for men to “seduce a virtuous unmarried female and induce her to yield to his lustful embraces, and allow him to have carnal knowledge of her.” On some occasions, women used these laws in order to coerce men into marriage. A New York man in the middle of an 1867 trial that was headed toward conviction proposed to the alleged victim. The local minister was summoned, and the trial instantly became a marriage ceremony;
1898 – In the first action of the Spanish-American War, the USS Nashville, takes on a Spanish ship. The first picture is the ship of the Spanish-American War – the second is the ship I was stationed on for 4 1/2 years in the 1980s. Both are the USS Nashville. There was another version, (a crusier), during the World War II era, and another new one after the one I was on which was decommissioned in 2009;
1915 – In World War I, German forces shock Allied soldiers along the western front by firing more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions at Ypres, Belgium. This was the first major gas attack by the Germans, and it devastated the Allied line. Since World War II, chemical weapons have only been used in a handful of conflicts–the Yemeni conflict of 1966-67, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88–and always against forces that lacked gas masks or other simple defenses. In 1990, the United States and the Soviet Union signed an agreement to cut their chemical weapons arsenals. In 1993, an international treaty was signed banning the production, stockpiling (after 2007), and use of chemical weapons. It took effect in 1997 and has been ratified by 128 nations;
1930 – Prior to World War II, the United States, Britain and Japan signed the London Naval Treaty, which regulated submarine warfare and limited shipbuilding;
1933 – Frederick Henry Royce, who with Charles Stewart Rolls founded the luxury British automaker Rolls-Royce, dies at the age of 70 in England;
1938 – 45 workers were killed in a coal mine explosion at Keen Mountain in Buchanan County, Virginia;
1944 – In World War II, Allied forces land in the Hollandia area of New Guinea. The Japanese occupiers, only 15,000 in number, many of whom were on administrative duty, fight for more than three months against ludicrous odds at great cost: When the battle for the northern coast of New Guinea was finally won by the Allies, 12,811 Japanese were dead, compared with 527 Americans;
1945 – Near the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler, learning from one of his generals that no German defense was offered to the Russian assault at Eberswalde, admits to all in his underground bunker that the war is lost and that suicide is his only recourse. Almost as confirmation of Hitler’s assessment, a Soviet mechanized corps reaches Treuenbrietzen, 40 miles southwest of Berlin, liberates a POW camp and releases, among others, Norwegian Commander in Chief Otto Ruge;
1954 – Senator Joseph McCarthy begins hearings investigating the United States Army, which he charges with being “soft” on communism. These televised hearings gave the American public their first view of McCarthy in action, and his recklessness, indignant bluster, and bullying tactics quickly resulted in his fall from prominence. The hearings were a fiasco for McCarthy. McCarthy’s days as a political power were effectively over. A few weeks later, the Army hearings dribbled to a close with little fanfare and no charges were upheld against the Army by the committee. In December 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy for his conduct. Three years later, he died a hopeless alcoholic;
1968 – During the Vietnam War, in a news conference, Defense Secretary Clark Clifford declares that the South Vietnamese have “acquired the capacity to begin to insure their own security [and] they are going to take over more and more of the fighting.” Clifford, who had succeeded Robert McNamara, had taken office with more than a little skepticism about the way the United States was conducting the war in Vietnam. This skepticism increased after the communists launched their massive offensive during the Tet (Chinese New Year) holiday earlier in 1968. Clifford left office in 1969 with the rest of the Johnson administration. The next president, Richard M. Nixon, instituted a new policy that echoed many of the things that Clifford had recommended. In June 1969, Nixon announced his “Vietnamization” policy, a strategy built around two main objectives: increasing South Vietnamese combat capability and withdrawing U.S. troops;
1976 – Barbara Walters becomes the first female nightly news anchor on network television;
1992 – Dozens of sewer explosions in Guadalajara, Mexico, kill more than 200 people and damage 1,000 buildings on this day in 1992. The series of explosions was caused by a gas leak. Children home for Easter break were a substantial portion of the casualties. It took a week to find and record the deaths and injuries. About 1,500 people were hospitalized and 25,000 people had to be evacuated;
1993 – The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was dedicated in Washington, D.C. to honor victims of Nazi extermination;
1994 – 7,000 Tutsi’s are slaughtered in a stadium of Kibuye Rwanda;
1994 – Former President Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, died at a New York hospital four days after suffering a stroke; he was 81;
1997 – In Lima, Peru, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori orders a commando assault on the Japanese ambassador’s home, hoping to free 72 hostages held for more than four months by armed members of the Tupac Amaru leftist rebel movement. After secretly warning the hostages 10 minutes before the attack, the special forces team set off a blast in a tunnel underneath the building, which surprised the rebels and killed eight of the 14 immediately. The rest of the elite soldiers attacked from several other directions, overwhelming the remaining terrorists. All 14 rebels were killed in the assault, including the leader, Nestor Cerpa, who was shot multiple times. Only one hostage, Supreme Court Justice Carlos Giusti, was killed in the attack, and of the several soldiers wounded during the rescue operation, two later died from their injuries;
2000 – Elian Gonzalez is snatched by a SWAT team from his Florida relatives to return him to his father in Cuba;
2004 – United States Marine Corporal Jason L. Dunham, 22, died near Karabilah, Iraq, after falling on an insurgent’s grenade to protect his fellow Marines; he was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2009;
2004 – Pat Tillman, who gave up his pro football career to enlist in the U.S. Army after the terrorist attacks of September 11, is killed by friendly gunfire while on patrol in a rugged area of eastern Afghanistan. The news that Tillman, age 27, was mistakenly gunned down by his fellow Rangers, rather than enemy forces, was initially covered up by the U.S. military. A criminal investigation was eventually launched into the case and in 2007 the Army censured retired three-star general Philip Kensinger, who was in charge of special operations at the time of Tillman’s death, for lying to investigators and making other mistakes. “Memorandums of concern” were also sent to several brigadier generals and lower-ranking officers who the Army believed acted improperly in the case;
2013 – Charged with bribing public officials in Argentina between 2005 and 2009, clothing retailer Ralph Lauren agrees to pay $1.6 million to resolve U.S. regulatory and criminal claims;
2013 – It was one year ago Today!!!
Just Sayin!
As we
Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
– Romans 1:20
Almighty God, thank you for your creation. Thank you for its beauty and variety. Thank you for the changing seasons and the beauty of Spring. But most of all, thank you for choosing to show yourself to us, your creatures. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!
