European Tour Reflections Upon Returning Home - Part 7

PRAYER: First, THANK YOU for praying for us during our extensive trip in Europe. We are so very grateful. We genuinely felt your prayer support. For example, we were on many different flights. If one would have been cancelled, it would have had a domino effect on the rest of the trip. All flights occurred and were essentially on time.

We have been on the road almost constantly from January 29 to March 16, for 6 ½ weeks. This involved 29 flights (remarkably, we only had 2 suitcases lost for 48 hours in Poland/Switzerland), 36 nights in 15 different hotels, 15 countries (including the three we “passed thru”…and the USA), with a total of nearly 40,000 miles, that is, 80% of the way towards circling the Earth twice (50,000 miles). There is so much that could have gone wrong. It did not. Thank you for praying!

FINANCIAL PARTNERSHIP: Secondly, an enormous THANK YOU for your faithful support that made such a ministry trip possible. We could not and cannot do it without your financial partnership. We are profoundly humbled and grateful. Saying “thank you” seems so inadequate, but know that we are genuinely humbled and honored to get to represent you in the various ministry opportunities.

FUTURE FOCUS: Thirdly, this trip allowed me the opportunity to begin the next organizational level of Well Versed, that is, having Well Versed representatives in various countries. More on that on another time.

OTHER OBSERVERATIONS FOLLOW.

FELLOW BELIEVERS: There are many people who truly love God across Europe. Meeting them was such an honor. They so encouraged us.

LOVE: When I go to a nation, I fall in love with the nation and it’s people. (I suspect the same happens to you.) My heart becomes so attached to that nation and to her people. The countries we went to are etched on our hearts forever.

HURTING: The nations of the world are hurting. I long for “the healing of nations” (Revelation 22:2).

THE VALUE OF A TEAM: Rosemary and I were joined by Dr. Jim Johnson and his wife Dr. Carolyn Johnson. Jim is a professor of psychology and Carolyn is a professor of education. Both have taught for decades at Pt. Loma Nazarene University. Jim, who is fiercely committed to try to keep Christian universities from going woke, has traveled extensively in Albania, the first country we went to. Carolyn has spoken all over Europe, and particularly loves to minister the explosive power of the Holy Spirit in prisons and rehab centers. Having Jim and Carolyn with us was an enormous benefit. They were an indescribable blessing. They were a moral and prayer support. They were so deferential. And everywhere we went, people fell in love with them. Thank you, Jim and Carolyn for traveling with us!

THE LONG TERM IMPACT OF COMMUNISM: Some of the countries we visited had been under atheistic Communism for 45 years, until 1990. I came away with a greater awareness of the inherent evil nature of Communism and Socialism. (A Communist is basically a Socialist with a gun.) One can peal the government of Communism off of a country (as happened in 1990 across the region of Eastern Europe), but it takes a long time to get the atheistic Communistic thinking out of some people, and get it replaced with a bona fide Judeo-Christian foundation of basic integrity, honor, dignity and honesty.

SOROS: In visiting with government leaders in so many countries, the influence of George Soros through his myriad of organizations was pervasive. His name was mentioned (negatively) by government leaders very often.

CORRUPTION: One of the challenges of not having a distinctly Judeo-Christian foundation is the tendency toward greed, corruption, bribery and extortion. For example, in one of these countries we stayed, we were in a large and nice hotel. It was owned by the former head of the equivalent of the CIA in that country. How does a man who worked in government afford  to own a hotel worth tens of millions of dollars (not including all the other things he owned). You guessed it: corruption. We were told numerous such stories.

However, there is more. When someone rises to power who is actually not corrupt, we were told that the Soros and other Leftist organizations, which own the media, finds some nit-picky issue, so that they can accuse the “clean” guy of corruption. (Sound familiar to anything happening in the US?)

CHANGING VIEWS TOWARDS THE U.S.: The people in Eastern Europe, that is, the countries once held by Communism, do not support the sodomite definition of marriage. However, we were repeatedly told that “The U.S. government is forcing us to embrace abortion, LGBTQ agenda and transgender ideology, and we do not want it.” All over the world, Rosemary and I have heard the same story: The U.S. withholds aid and military support until a country “knuckles under” and supports homosexuality and homosexual “marriage.” While it is true that in the past the U.S. has been an exporter of many things good, the U.S. has a badly damaged reputation for exporting evil and filth via Hollywood, entertainment and now through U.S. Department of State coercion.

Several years ago during the Obama Administration, Rosemary and I attended a conference on marriage in Paris, France. The African delegates said, in effect, “The U.S. is colonizing us again.” We asked what they meant. They said, “We were colonized once. Now we are being ‘sexually colonized.’” They meant that the U.S. State Department was coercing them to embrace homosexual “marriage.”

In most of the former “Eastern bloc nations,” the government officials and the citizenry do not want the LGBTQ agenda. Whether “left” or “right,” political parties in these countries favor the traditional, historic marriage of one man-one woman.

However, the U.S. State Department is putting enormous pressure on these countries – as it is globally – to embrace homosexual and transgender values. In addition, we were told that the EU (European Union) and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) also attempt to coerce countries to affirm same sex (so-called) “marriage.”

But it gets even more complex. Due to the fact that Putin and Russia stand against homosexuality and transgenderism, and due to the fact that the USA is forcing it on all countries, the favorable view of the USA has dropped considerably. In one of the countries that we visited, we were told that the favorability view towards the US had dropped from 96% to 48% in the last few years. American’s vile position is actually driving our friends into the arms of a thug named Putin.

Before going to Eastern Europe, I was told by one person that the people in his country would be surprised to meet an American like me. What did he mean? He explained that the people in his country assumed that – based on Biden’s policies – all Americans were globalists and all Americans must support transgender thinking. In a conversation with another European leader before our trip, I was told that they might ask me, “Why are you coming here to Europe to instruct us, when you, in America, have lost what you once had?” I thought that was a very fair question.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: While in more than a dozen countries, it will not surprise you that a high percentage of the people spoke English. Although I worked through translators in most meetings, I was told that well over 50% of the crowd in most cases, understood and spoke English. English is the lingua franca of the world. However, when we arrived back in the US, at the US Border and Customs Office in New York City, we were greeted by a most unusual sign. It said, “The US has no official language.”

That sign struck me as – well – so “politically correct.” After just traveling in over a dozen nations, all of which had a high number of signs in English (in addition to their first language), all of which had a high percentage of English speakers, I returned to the country that so much of the world longs to come to, and see a sign telling me that we have no “official” language. While that statement is legally true, everyone knows that English is the de facto language in the US.

Why was this sign up in an official federal agency? What was its purpose? And what is more bizarre, if English is not the de facto language of the US, why have such a sign? And more, if English is not the “official” language, why was the announcement made – wait for it – in English? If English isn’t the “official” language, then why were all the other instructional signs in the US Boarder, Customs and Passport areas all in English? Furthermore – and this one “takes the cake” – if English is not the “official language,” then why wouldn’t that sign have been in many different languages? We are told that there are 1,000s of different languages in the world. If English is not “official,” then why wouldn’t that sign have been in hundreds of different languages? The reason it was not, is because English is the globe’s lingua franca at this time, and English is the de facto language of the US. What an absurd attempt to be politically correct.

BLESSED NATIONS: I long to see nations blessed. I take seriously Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” Conversely, cursed is the nation whose God is not the Lord. I want to see nations blessed.

That being said, our mission was the same in every country, regardless of the political party or the country.

My message is profoundly simple:

1. God loves your nation.
2. God is smarter than we are.
3. He so loves us that He has a book for us, the Bible, that lays out the way civil government is supposed to work. God did not say, after he wrote the Bible, “Wow, I forgot about that whole government thing!”
4. God invented government and establishes nations.
5. To the extent that a nation will follow the Biblical principles of governance, to that extent human pain suffering and poverty will be reduced. Conversely, to the extent that a nation violates the Biblical principles of governance, to that extent human pain, suffering and poverty will increase.
6. Every Christian understands that the Bible speaks to (1) the personal issues of life, to (2) family issues, to (3) church or congregational life, but very few seem to understand that the Bible speaks with specificity to (4) the foundations for civil governance. When followed, a community or a nation can prosper and live in peace and tranquility. I encourage all to learn the Biblical principles of governance.

Based on these principles, I try to teach the actual Biblical principles of governance:

1. First to those in elected office, or who soon might be,
2. Secondly to pastors so they teach their church attenders,
3. And to all persons who vote in elections (so they will take Jesus into the voting booth with them, so they will think Biblically).

BOOK: Since I only have limited time with various government or faith leaders in a nation, I leave behind my book, Well Versed, Biblical Answers to Today’s Tough Issues, which lays out the Biblical foundations to 30 political topics. (Watch for an upcoming announcement regarding a Well Versed, Part 2.) Thanks to your support, this book is not only in English, but in Spanish, Hungarian, Portuguese, and now Albanian. I recently received a call from two men in Germany who would like to have it translated into the German language. There is a possibility – not a probability quite yet, but at least a possibility – that it could come out in Macedonian, Ukrainian and Russian. You financial partnering is what makes that possible. 

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Blessings,
Dr. Jim Garlow
CEO/Founder Well Versed

Rosemary Schindler Garlow
Co-Founder Well Versed