Reflections On The Life And Death Of Whitney Houston

I’m no musical genius, but I would put Whitney Houston in the top ten women’s voices of all time – and certainly one of the greatest voices in American music history.  Barbara Streisand – another of those voices – possessed magnificent depth of feeling; but in terms of sheer power and range and the ability to send delicious chills coursing down your spine, Whitney Houston’s voice was simply unmatchable.

She was also beautiful.  I remember watching the movie The Bodyguard and seeing Whitney’s face filling the movie screen and thinking over and over again what an incredibly pretty woman she was.

Fame, fortune, beauty and talent all in amazing quantities.  If you wanted to know what it was like to have it all, Whitney Houston would have been the one to ask.

I also remember seeing her last year – gaunt, emaciated, sick-looking, eaten alive by drugs – and wondering how such a beautiful woman could so quickly come to resemble a gargoyle.

Now she’s dead, very likely the same way Amy Winehouse ended up dead.

And it’s so incredibly sad that somebody so successful, so talented, so beautiful would destroy herself the way she did.

The quickest path to a fast death is to be a rich drug addict.

But why did she – with all of her amazing talent and resources – take this path?

It is amazing how many of “the beautiful people” have ended this way.  And there is a lesson worth pondering in that.

Imagine being able to have anything in the world that you want and being miserable.

Imagine having everything the world can offer and discovering that nothing in this world makes you happy.

I think about the poor person who buys a lottery ticket and dreams and schemes of what his or her life could be like if he or she just got lucky.  Whitney Houston had long since lost hope of having any such dreams and schemes.  Imagine the desolation of her soul.

To answer the poor person who says, “If I only had a thousand – or a million – more dollars, I would be happy,” my response is, “No, you wouldn’t.  If you had a thousand more dollars, you’d very quickly want a thousand more, etc., etc.  Nelson Rockefeller – the richest man in the world at the time – was asked how much money is enough; and his response was, “Just one more dollar.”  And that’s the way degenerate human nature has rewired itself.  We’re all like that.  We can try to fill ourselves with money or fame or success or sex or food or drugs or any other idol you can possibly imagine.  And it is never enough.

And Whitney Houston had experienced that condition until she was sick to her soul.

God hardwired us to find rest and completion only in Himself.  And nothing else in this world – no matter how much of it we try to fill ourselves with – can possibly make up for the absence of God in our souls.

I remember watching a news program – I think it may have been Nightline but I can’t recall – during the war that was going on in Yugoslavia between the Serbs and the Croats.  Croatians, Slovenians and Bosnians were driven out of their homes by an ancient hatred that the collapse of the USSR allowed to erupt yet again.  And these people – who had been educated, successful people – were relegated to picking through the garbage of American troops to look for food or something of some value that they could sell or trade.

One of these victims of war paused in his scavenging to respond to a reporter.  And I will never forget what he said:

“We are living like animals.  Is this all there is to our lives?  Is there nothing more?”

And see, the incredible thing about that is that Whitney Houston, or Amy Winehouse, or Heath Ledger, or Kurt Cobain, etc., etc. – with all of their fortunes – were asking themselves the very same questions.

What would it be like to have everything the world can offer and still be miserable?  What would it be like to have be able to get anything you want – except hope?

If you wanted to know what it was like to have it all and discover that everything the world could ever offer was worthless, Whitney Houston would have been the one to ask.

There is one way out of this world besides the route that Whitney Houston took tragically early.  Saint Paul described it thus:

“I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done.  Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. For God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith.  I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead!” — Philippians 3:7-12

Mock us all you want, secular humanist world, but we have one thing that you will never have if you continue down your same path – we have Jesus.  And we have the hope of resurrection life.

No matter how bad things might get for us, no matter how terrible of a mistake we may have made, we have hope.  Hope of forgiveness, hope of a better tomorrow, hope that Jesus Christ will one day make everything as new.

Whitney Houston began her music career singing in a church choir.  I truly hope that beautiful, fragile soul heard the gospel and believed it before her life turned into something ugly.

Christians can be wretched sinners; in fact, the first necessary condition of coming to Jesus Christ in faith and asking Him to heal you and make you whole involves acknowledging that you are a wretched sinner.  Because it is from that beginning that God begins to work out His resurrection life in your soul.

And once you have tasted that eternal life, you never lose it.  If you have eternal life, how can you lose it?  Which means that if Whitney Houston ever tasted it, she’s in heaven with Jesus right now.

I pray that Jesus called Whitney home to Himself to spare her from more self-inflicted pain.

And I and many others on this earth mourn the loss of one so beautiful and so talented who didn’t know how to find joy in this world.

And I send up a prayer that Whitney Houston is truly resting in peace this night.

Obama In The ‘We Don’t Mind ‘Cause You Don’t Matter’ Sub-50% Polling Range

One of the most readily understandable political calculus equations is the presidential poll: as long as a president is above 50% in the polls, he continues to hold a majority; but if he falls below 50%, he becomes increasingly irrelevant.  The nation is no longer behind him.  The lower he gets under 50, the more irrelevant he becomes.

Six months into the Obama presidency, Americans are already starting to say, “You see, Barry, it’s all a question of mind over matter.  We no longer mind because you no longer matter.”

For what it’s worth, the first time President Bush dipped below 50% according to Rasmussen was February 2004.  So Barry has to have set some kind of record for “sucking speed.”

Democrats and liberals feasted on George Bush like a herd of swine feasting on a trough full of carrots.  And in the case of the Barack Obama presidency, suppertime is coming very, very early.

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

Friday, July 24, 2009

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 30% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-eight percent (38%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -8 (see trends).

Just 25% believe that the economic stimulus package has helped the economy.

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates also available on Twitter.

Overall, 49% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. Today marks the first time his overall approval rating has ever fallen below 50% among Likely Voters nationwide. Fifty-one percent (51%) disapprove.

Eighty-three percent (83%) of Democrats continue to approve of the President’s performance while 80% of Republicans disapprove. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 37% offer a positive assessment. The President earns approval from 51% of women and 47% of men.

These updates are based upon nightly telephone interviews and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. Most of the interviews for today’s update were completed before the President’s nationally televised press conference on Wednesday night. The first update based entirely upon interviews conducted after the press conference will be released on Sunday.

Zogby has Barry Hussein at 48%.

Now, the last paragraph of the article becomes interesting because this means the poll does not take into account Obama’s truly suck performance at his July 22 press conference or the subsequent flap over his racially biased and frankly incredibly stupid comment about the Cambridge police “acting stupidly” in arresting an emotionally out-of-control African-American Studies professor.

So the easy money is betting that Sunday we’re going to see Obama down even more.  And then more.

Hot Air has a couple of insightful paragraphs describing the poll’s nuances on just why Obama is starting to poll as badly as he is:

It marks the first time that Obama has gone underwater since he started his remarkable run for the presidency in early 2007.  Undoubtedly, voters have now put the responsibility for the economy squarely on Obama’s shoulders after six months of worsening indicators.  The steep decline in support for his health-care bill represents in part a lack of confidence in his ability to deliver after the failure of the massive stimulus package, which he promised would put America back to work.

Even the Democratic gender gap has mostly been wiped out for Obama.  Although crosstabs are not available on daily tracking reports, Rasmussen’s poll shows an approval rating of 51% among women, just two points above the overall average.  If Obama had hoped to maintain the traditional Democratic inroads with women with his focus on health care, that appears to have backfired, as the survey on that issue earlier in the week showed women opposing it by a 50%-46% edge, with men more clearly in opposition at 53%-44%.  Why? Pluralities among both genders believe that their personal coverage will get worse under ObamaCare.

Unemployment is at 9.5% – and is expected to rise to 10% and beyond by the end of the year.  That sure isn’t going to help Obama become “Mr. Popular.”  And if that isn’t bad enough for him – and for the country he’s misleading – a new employment forecast by Obama’s own Federal Reserve foresees high unemployment numbers for at least the next five years.

But wait, as they say: there’s more.  Respected Wall Street analyst Meredith Whitney predicts that unemployment will rise to 13% or higher.  She’s the analyst with the nickname, “The woman who called Wall Street’s meltdown,” so right now I’m giving her more credibility than Obama’s people who said that if their stimulus passed unemployment wouldn’t rise above 8%.

And there’s yet even more.  We don’t calculate unemployment the way we used to.  We used to calculate unemployment based on the number of people who would like to have a full time job but don’t have one.  Bill Clinton changed the way unemployment was tabulated.  But if this were in the 1980s, we would be reading about 16.5% unemployment.  And if THAT number doesn’t frighten you enough, how about the possibility of 20% by the end of the year?

Remember all the talk about Barack Obama being compared to FDR?

Now we’ll get to celebrate Obama-as-FDR right – with Great Depression levels of unemployment, which will likely lead us into another Great Depression.  The first FDR didn’t fare so well with the first Great Depression; and I think the second FDR will do an even lousier job.

It will be fun watching Barry “ride the slide” to political hell.

It won’t be so much fun watching the Late Great U.S.A. sliding into economic hell right along with him.