2Sing the glory of His name; make His praise glorious. 3Say to God, “How awesome are Your deeds! So great is Your power that Your enemies cower before You. 4All the earth bows down to You; they sing praise to You; they sing praise to Your name.” Selah…Psalm 66:3

I was happy to hear that Roger Peterson's song, Mighty is your Deeds, was nominated for a Dove award. Roger was the founder of STEM which stands for Short Term Evangelical Missions.  

He has led a countless number of groups from around the country to Haiti and the Dominican Republic and I was fortunate to be part of one of them. To say this trip changed my life is an understatement.  

I remember one very powerful message Roger Peterson gave on the first night in Haiti titled, 'Getting rid of your American heart'. He gave this talk to stress the point that we as American's will be just as blessed by the Haitian people as they are of us and only by getting rid of our American heart of looking down on the unfortunate will we see that reality. 

They may be poorer than us, but they were still created in the same image of God as we in the civilized western culture were. 

I also learned that these people had the same goals of making a living, raising a family, educating their children just as our parents had for us and we for our children.  

During our stay in the rural countryside, we lived in the outdoors, bathed in the nearby river, drank Coke, and ate the prepacked food we brought with us from America. 

 We attended a Christian Haitian church and sang Christian songs and listen to a message from a Haitian pastor. We were overwhelmingly blessed by the Haitian people. 

Toward the end of our stay, Roger arranged for us to enjoy a meal at the outdoor restaurant on top of the Hotel Montana. Little did we realize that this was the same hotel that collapse in a domino effect following the terrible earthquake.  God instilled within me the thought that when we get to heaven we will be worshipping and fellowshipping with people of all races and economic backgrounds. One more thing I learned from that trip and that is the power of praying for the people of God. Because Jesus Christ lives within me, I have the privilege to pray for the needs of God's people. I remember after our arrival back home the cultural shock I felt when I walked into the local Target store and saw an overwhelming number of choices in the things I could buy. Choices that were far less in the country I just came out of. 

This song written by Roger Peterson is a reminder of how mighty God's deeds are, even in this time of suffering brought on by this pandemic.

 

In our Western Culture, we are taught false information that recovery from grief should only take 6 months, but in reality grief cannot be processed that quickly

 

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:18

Before my loss, I tended to view the Church as a country club- a place where men, women, and children can network with each other.   Time spent in the church were happy times of getting together with friends for pot lucks, birthday parties, or listening to a financial planning seminar. We would listen to a warm message from the pulpit that would leave us with positive feelings for the coming week 

As I grew to know my Savior more deeply through his word after my loss, something interesting occurred in my previous narrative. 

Rather than a country club, I started viewing the church as a hospital for the sick and each person behind that facade of nice clothes and a plastic smile came through the doors who were sick. When all of the secular remedies failed, they accepted the advice of a Christian friend, or the Christian moderator on the radio to give God a try. 

For some of them, the first time crossing the threshold of the local church is a scary one; after all, they are uncertain how they will be received, or whether they will be given simple pat answers to their complicated life issues. 

Griefshare isn't like that. It is a 13-week program that uses a variety of methods from the grief share videos to the discussion time to review the previous week's homework assignment to teach you how to walk through the pain of their grief, not around it.  In essence, grief share teaches people not to be afraid of the deep-seated emotions that seem to surface at the time of their losses. 

When someone comes to their first meeting at grief share, it is a monumental accomplishment for someone when the norm for most of us after a loss occurs is isolating oneself from the world at large and coping with the pain with alcohol and drugs.  When someone ventures down that path, it usually doesn't end well.

Like the good shepherd Jesus is, He wants to walk beside you on your grief journey. He is a living Savior who will listen to you as you shout at God all the anger over your loss. This is what we call lamenting.  I encourage everyone to start a journal at the start of their journey and write their thoughts and emotions down as a way of getting what is inside their head out on paper. A well-kept-up journal will show you how far you have come in your recovery.

If we all commit to a local church where we can grow in our relationship with Christ, if we commit to working on our pain for however long it takes to recover, if we learn to not be afraid to journal and lament our emotional distress, I am confident our Lord will help you recover from this pain.  For more information on Grief share please click on this link.  Griefshare.org

Ex-Facebook employee says network hurts kids, fuels divisions while weakening democracy. I am so glad to see someone with ethics to speak the truth.

 

Ex-Facebook employee says network hurts kids, fuels division

By MARCY GORDON Associated Press

 

OCTOBER 5, 2021 — 11:55AM

DREW ANGERER, NEW YORK TIMES

Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen listens to opening statements during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing in Washington on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021.

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WASHINGTON — A former Facebook data scientist told Congress on Tuesday that the social network giant's products harm children and fuel polarization in the U.S. while its executives refuse to change because they elevate profits over safety. And she laid responsibility with the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Frances Haugen testified to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Speaking confidently at a charged hearing, she accused the company of being aware of apparent harm to some teens from Instagram and being dishonest in its public fight against hate and misinformation.

"Facebook's products harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy," Haugen said. "The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people."

"Congressional action is needed," she said. "They won't solve this crisis without your help."

Haugen said the company has acknowledged publicly that integrity controls were crucially needed for its systems that stoke the engagement of users, but then it disabled some of those controls.

In dialogue with receptive senators of both parties, Haugen, who focused on algorithm products in her work at Facebook, explained the importance to the company of algorithms that govern what shows up on users' news feeds. She said a 2018 change to the content flow contributed to more divisiveness and ill will in a network ostensibly created to bring people closer together.

Despite the enmity that the new algorithms were feeding, she said Facebook found that they helped keep people coming back — a pattern that helped the social media giant sell more of the digital ads that generate most of its revenue.

Senators agreed.

"It has profited off spreading misinformation and disinformation and sowing hate," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the panel's chairman. "Facebook's answers to Facebook's destructive impact always seems to be more Facebook, we need more Facebook — which means more pain, and more money for Facebook."

Haugen said she believed Facebook didn't set out to build a destructive platform. But "in the end, the buck stops with Mark," she said referring to Zuckerberg, who controls more than 50% of Facebook's voting shares. "There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself."

Haugen said she believed that Zuckerberg was familiar with some of the internal research showing concerns for potential negative impacts of Instagram.

The government needs to step in with stricter oversight of the company, Haugen said.

Like fellow tech giants Google, Amazon and Apple, Facebook has enjoyed minimal regulation. A number of bipartisan legislative proposals for the tech industry address data privacy, protection of young people and anti-competitive conduct. But getting new laws through Congress is a heavy slog. The Federal Trade Commission has adopted a stricter stance recently toward Facebook and other companies.

The subcommittee is examining Facebook's use of information from its own researchers on Instagram that could indicate potential harm for some of its young users, especially girls, while it publicly downplayed the negative impacts. For some of the teens devoted to Facebook's popular photo-sharing platform, the peer pressure generated by the visually focused Instagram led to mental health and body-image problems, and in some cases, eating disorders and suicidal thoughts, the research leaked by Haugen showed.

One internal study cited 13.5% of teen girls saying Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse and 17% of teen girls saying it makes eating disorders worse.

Because of the drive for user engagement, Haugen testified, "Facebook knows that they are leading young users to anorexia content. ... It's just like cigarettes. Teenagers don't have any self-regulation. We need to protect the kids."

Haugen has come forward with a wide-ranging condemnation of Facebook, buttressed with tens of thousands of pages of internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in the company's civic integrity unit. She also has filed complaints with federal authorities alleging that Facebook's own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest, but the company hides what it knows.

"The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the U.S. government and from governments around the world," Haugen said. "The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages."

The former employee challenging the social network giant with 2.8 billion users worldwide and nearly $1 trillion in market value is a 37-year-old data expert from Iowa with a degree in computer engineering and a master's degree in business from Harvard. Prior to being recruited by Facebook in 2019, she worked for 15 years at tech companies including Google, Pinterest and Yelp.

After recent reports in The Wall Street Journal based on documents she leaked to the newspaper raised a public outcry, Haugen revealed her identity in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview aired Sunday night.

As the public relations debacle over the Instagram research grew last week, Facebook put on hold its work on a kids' version of Instagram, which the company says is meant mainly for tweens aged 10 to 12.

Haugen said that Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and incitement to violence after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump last year, alleging that contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

After the November election, Facebook dissolved the civic integrity unit where Haugen had been working. That, she says, was the moment she realized "I don't trust that they're willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous."

Haugen says she told Facebook executives when they recruited her that she wanted to work in an area of the company that fights misinformation, because she had lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.

Facebook maintains that Haugen's allegations are misleading and insists there is no evidence to support the premise that it is the primary cause of social polarization.

"Even with the most sophisticated technology, which I believe we deploy, even with the tens of thousands of people that we employ to try and maintain safety and integrity on our platform, we're never going to be absolutely on top of this 100% of the time," Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of policy and public affairs, said Sunday on CNN's "Reliable Sources."

That's because of the "instantaneous and spontaneous form of communication" on Facebook, Clegg said, adding, "I think we do more than any reasonable person can expect to."

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Follow Marcy Gordon at https://twitter.com/mgordonap.