The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday that the economy expanded at an annualized rate of 5.7 percent over the last quarter. Are happy days here again? Most of the expansion was due to businesses rebuilding depleted inventories, not consumer buying. Maybe the good times will roll, but I’m not convinced due to warning signs from the private sector.

Jack Willoughby, a senior editor at Barron’s magazine, has a knack for identifying significant problems in securities markets. Remember the “dot-com” crash of 2000? Willoughby’s article “Burning Up” was the canary in the stock market coal mine. He told the world that dot-com earnings were skimpy or non-existent and he predicted accurately when these companies would burn through their cash and run out of money. Shortly after Willoughby’s burn-rate charts hit the street, stock values plunged.

It may be wise in 2010 to read between the lines in a recent Willoughby offering: In “Profiting From a Mortgage Crisis,” he tells the story of mortgage processing firm Lender Processing Services. He reports that revenue of LPS’s default services unit has swollen to $1.3 billion. The company’s future may be sunny because, as Willoughby reports, 6 million U.S. mortgages are in jeopardy of foreclosure (known as the “shadow inventory”). It’s good news for LPS, but it may be a warning sign for the U.S. economy. Willoughby doesn’t make any predictions this time, but he does quote LPS director of analytics Ted Jadlos, who said, “The federal government and the public at large have yet to acknowledge the scope of the delinquency problem. It’s bad, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” And Bloomberg reports that the International Monetary Fund is expecting another $3.4 trillion in toxic assets to unwind.

In other news, EverBank senior vice president Chuck Butler reported on Friday that the real U.S. unemployment rate might be 20 percent according to Shadow Statistics. As further evidence that unemployment may be gloomier than the official 10 percent rate calculated by the Bureau of Labor statistics, Charles Biderman, CEO of Trim Tabs, a company that specializes in financial data mining, told Canada’s Business News Network, “The economy is not bottoming out, but continuing to get worse.” Biderman based his comment on federal withholding tax data that his company tracks on a daily basis. He also noted that the 2009 stock market rally might have been driven by the Federal Reserve purchasing stock market futures in after-hours trading to create a “wealth effect.”

Are happy days here again? On the bright side, some economists believe rebuilding inventories is the first step to recovery, but there’s reason to be skeptical according to private sector data.

I keep a Bible on my nightstand and memorize verses to fall asleep. It works pretty well, and I find I’m usually out before the job is jot-and-tittle perfect. Last night’s selection was Colossians 3:12-16:

“Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. . . .”

Intertwined with this ponderous phrase by phrase assimilation was another stream of thought: “Why didn’t David phone yesterday?”

The way that harmonic thread was developing was thus: “He will probably call tomorrow and will say he’s sorry and that he was up against a deadline with an important project. And then I will say—in a very calm and unfrazzled manner—that I would have thought he would have been concerned for me driving home in a blizzard through Maryland and Delaware. And moreover, there are times when I have talked to him when a deadline loomed. . . . (You can see that David is hardly necessary to this conversation since I have it all mapped out already without him.)

At some point as I lay flat on my back, the two strains of internal monologue (plus Bob Dylan’s “Mozambique” still stuck in my head) intersected and I could not escape a momentary embarrassment. “Compassionate hearts,” “kindness,” “humility,” “meekness,” “bearing with,” “if one has a complaint, forgiving,” “love,” “peace,” “be thankful”—all seemed to be in collision with my agenda for the next morning.

“This is different,” I rebutted to myself. I would be compassionate and meek and humble and forbearing and thankful and have peace normally, but I need to go down this line of inquiry with David to make known my feelings and to know what the deal is with him. Once that’s done I will resume meekness and forbearance and peace and thankfulness and forgiveness.

The unrelenting contrapuntal strain once more asserted itself: “There is no excuse clause in Colossians 3:12-16. There are no exceptions for applying these commands in cases where one has something to lose by obeying them. There is always the issue of self-protection to defeat. What’s really going on here is that you want to get your own back because you don’t believe God has your back if you do it his way. This, in spite of the fact that you’ve been praying piously every day Moses’ prayer: ‘Show my your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight” (Exodus 33:13).’’

This, I finally perceived, is where all obedience falters—where one finds a reason why the Word of God applies to everybody else but me.

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NARAL is gunning for the ambulances. America can be proud of the fact that there are more Pregnancy Resource Centers in this country than abortion facilities. These PRCs sprang up in the wake of Roe v. Wade, not to make a profit from killing unborn children but to extend lifesaving aid. They are society’s ambulances, staffed largely by volunteers and in most cases funded by private donations.

Prior to Roe, churches and charities were attacked as hypocrites: “You condemn sex outside of marriage, but what real help do you offer to desperate young women?” That was the challenge then. All over America, churches and charities stepped forward. They did not condemn. They did not break bruised reeds. Clean and bright, warm and welcoming, these PRCs represent the best that is America.

That’s why NARAL wants to destroy them. Who is NARAL? This outfit was founded more than 40 years ago by Lawrence Lader. He famously said, “Abortion is central to everything in life and how we want to live it.” Lader described the overturning of 50 states’ protective laws by the Supreme Court in Roe as a “revolution.”

Lader went on to fight in the courts for years to strip the Catholic Church of its tax-exempt status. Why? Because the Catholic Church dared to defend the innocent human lives of unborn children.

Dr. Bernard Nathanson co-founded NARAL with Lader. Dr. Nathanson’s conscience was haunted by his having supervised 60,000 abortions, including aborting his own child. Dr. Nathanson now heroically defends life. In his powerful and moving writings, he shows us the anti-Catholic—and anti-religious—roots of NARAL. For if Lader’s attack on the Catholics had succeeded, the Southern Baptists, the Missouri Synod Lutherans, and all evangelicals would surely have been his next targets.

NARAL likes to append “Pro-Choice” to its name. But is it really in favor of choice? In Virginia, for example, NARAL has attacked citizens who freely choose to buy license plates that say “Choose Life.” These pro-life Virginians ask only to be able to choose to donate to Pregnancy Resource Centers a portion of their special license plate fees. No one is forced to pay for these plates. Still, any time anyone freely chooses life, NARAL is there to attack.

NARAL’s attack on these compassionate centers of mercy was turned back in Virginia. But the assault continues in Washington state. There, a bill in the legislature in Olympia would stigmatize PRCs as “limited service” facilities and force them to curtail their lifesaving missions.

Abortion always takes an innocent human life. It is never a service. Even Hillary Clinton once called abortion “wrong.” (Newsweek, Oct. 31, 1994). NARAL is dedicated to making a revolution from above. NARAL wants to force Americans to accept this wrong thing. They are desperate because last May, a Gallup Poll reported 51 percent of Americans identified themselves as pro-life.

Now is the time for lawmakers across the land to reject NARAL’s lethal logic and deadly designs. Join the energetic, enthusiastic youngsters who massed by the thousands last week in Washington to protest the unjust killing of their generation.

Young people understand how this cruel choice is harming America. In Houston last week, the largest Planned Parenthood killing center in North America opened up in a predominantly minority neighborhood. Young people are getting the message of Planned Parenthood’s racist roots. They are learning of NARAL’s founders’ appeals to religious bigotry. They are leading the resistance to the culture of death. Pregnancy Resource Centers are at the heart of that resistance. That’s why NARAL wants them killed.

President Obama said recently that he would rather be a great one-term president than a mediocre two-year term president. Hogwash! With his State of the Union address, the president made a desperate attempt to preserve his chances for reelection at all cost. The humiliating defeats of his candidates in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts have made it clear that the honeymoon is over. The independent voter is waking up with a bad hangover and starting to question the wisdom of his 2008 decision. And Obama is demonstrating willingness to compromise previously professed principles in order to hold on to an estranged and rather inconvenient but very useful partner.

In mid January I attended a seminar at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The speakers were honest to admit that they were trying to steer the economy in uncharted waters. Had they updated their economic models and kept their eyes on long-term inflation targets, they could have tightened the credit markets and ended the speculative bubble before it had affected the global economy. Now, fears of inflation clash with depression warnings from economists like Paul Krugman. The specter of a “Double Dip” a la 1937 hangs over our central bankers and they cannot make up their minds on the right moment and rate of withdrawal from the stimulus. The president, however, may be running out of time.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis I have maintained that a return to the Keynesian philosophy of “spending our way out of it,” while bringing temporary relief, does nothing to solve our structural problems. Now Obama is trying on for size the mantle of a fiscal conservative. Has he learned his lesson in just one year? Should I open the champagne bottle and put my dancing shoes on? I’d like to give the president the benefit of the doubt, but I understand the logic of politics too well to be that naïve. The simple truth is that at the current stage of his presidency, it is politically expedient for Obama to appeal to the center-right even it means alienating his former “progressive” comrades.

P.S. But if Obama had been sincere in his first statement, he has nothing to fear from the 2012 election; regardless of achievements, guys with an excess of charisma don’t get labeled “mediocre.”

Scientists, like doctors, hold enormous sway. When they pronounce, people listen. For example, some scientists in recent years have made much of the world believe that global warming is primarily man-made and must be stopped at all costs. The fate of the planet, they tell us, hangs in the balance. Cracks in their research reporting and their scientific neutrality regarding policy, however, have recently emerged. Could it be that they’re wrong? That’s a serious question to ponder when considering the costly, drastic steps they recommend.

Michael Cook, writing in the current issue of Salvo magazine, reveals the fact that it was science (junk science, as it turns out) that was behind China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1980. As a revered scientist, Chinese missile expert Song Jian was allowed the rare privilege of traveling overseas. In 1978, Song was shown a computer model by two Dutch birth control theorists that predicted global catastrophe if the world’s population was not brought under control. Song bought into their theory and sold it, so to speak, to his friends in the Chinese Communist Party. As Cook writes, “What Song confidently offered them was the illusion of precision. In their isolation from the West, these Chinese officials had never even seen computer modelling and graphs. They found ideas like ‘spaceship earth’ and the mathematical control of childbearing utterly compelling.”

Thirty years later, millions of babies have been aborted or killed. By some estimates, the growing elderly population, with fewer middle-aged workers to support them, threatens to crush the Chinese economy. Because more baby girls than boys are aborted or killed, it’s predicted that up to 15 percent of Chinese men will never be able to find wives.

Scientists, like everyone, are fallible, and so are their theories. There’s almost always a place for some healthy skepticism and, more importantly, the knowledge that science is never the ultimate answer.

I just read the novel The Attack by Yasmina Khadra, nom de plume of Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former Algerian army officer. It is a beautifully written story about Amin Jaafari, a Palestinian (non-practicing Muslim) who happens to be a surgeon and Israeli citizen in Tel Aviv—if you can wrap your mind around that complicated identity. The plot concerns the nightmarish revelation that his dear wife has just blown herself up in a restaurant for the Palestinian cause. She had guarded her political zeal and connections even from the marriage bed.

But none of these political issues are the impetus of today’s column. Rather, having immersed myself in Middle Eastern sights and smells—the spice markets, the roasted nuts and tahini and hanging legs of lamb—as well as its existential tribulations for a week, I found I emerged, rather unconsciously at first, with a different context for reading the Bible. Yesterday while making my way through Philippians I noticed I was importing a whole new weltanschauung into Paul’s letter from prison, his attitude, his boldness, his determination, his unbowed zeal for the Cause. I realized this was more like a modern Palestinian’s or Israeli’s perspective on life than a modern New Yorker’s or Nebraskan’s.

One cannot entirely help (but maybe we should try to help it!) filtering one’s Scripture reading through one’s own culture. But some cultures must be a better fit than others. I feel quite certain that a Taliban man who comes to Christ will see a much more rigorous call to total consecration in the commands of Jesus and the appeals of Paul than I have been wont to see. The upshot of my little cultural wading in the world of Dr. Amin Jaafari has been, somehow, that I understand I have not even begun to live seriously for Christ.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

A couple of nights ago I had trouble sleeping. The next morning, I woke up and began praying that God would allow me to find joy in all the things that normally drive me crazy. When my kids ran screaming through the house five minutes later, I mustered up some joy that I have kids with functioning lungs.

When I tripped over the five-loads’ worth of laundry waiting to be folded, I said a little prayer of thanks for all the clothes, the people in my house who wear them, and a working washing machine and dryer.

When I called our previous pediatrician’s office two hours later to inquire as to why they haven’t sent over my kids’ medical records to our family practice doctor (whom we’ve been seeing for more than a year now) despite three attempts to get them to do so and they informed me it would cost $15 per record and they didn’t know when they could get it done, well, I ran out of joy.

When Apple announced its newest gadget yesterday and how it will save lives, change diapers, and solve world hunger, I got excited. But, when I saw the price tag (and more unfortunately, the name—does Apple really have NO women on their product marketing team?), I had no joy for that.

While listening to the president’s State of the Union address last night, I found myself throwing out snide little one-line remarks in response. Our kids were in the room and our 11-year-old started doing the same thing, which is not exactly what I want to teach her about politics. It isn’t exactly what my husband wants me to teach her about politics, either, and he said as much in a way that made me stop with the one-liners. For the speech and the hiatus of my own personal punditry last night, I had no joy for that.

While lamenting over various and sundry of these joy-less situations on Facebook, an old college friend popped in to remind me to count it all joy anyway. After all, there are plenty of places in the world where medical records are the last things on people’s minds—they would just like access to doctors.

And the iPad? Do I seriously need one more digital distraction in my daily life? Thank you God, that, no, I don’t have one more way to check the wonderful World Wide Web.

And the State of the Union? There is that free speech thing in that we’re able to respond with our thoughts without being arrested for them (and seeing as how my husband, Craig, live-blogged the speech last night, I take great joy in the fact that he will not be arrested, though I would be surprised if he didn’t get himself flagged on some FBI watch list). I’m glad for our freedoms.

Counting it all joy—the laundry, the administrative hassles, the political disagreements—is what I learned about yesterday. How about you?

What is the purpose of getting together with friends? Well, in a sense the word “purpose” is already wrongheaded. As C.S. Lewis noted, friendship is the most unnecessary of the Loves—like flowers, like music. Nevertheless, if we scratch the surface of our chosen friendships we detect a purpose or a calculation for the company we keep.

I have sometimes dreaded certain parties or meetings or highbrow conferences, and I have lately identified my lack of enthusiasm as a distaste for “small talk.” Partly this is sin on my part: lovelessness, laziness, self-centeredness, fear of man. But to the extent that it is a legitimate dislike, I have taken to praying before get-togethers that the Holy Spirit will be the unseen presence in the group and will be working something special for the Kingdom of God.

Today I was affirmed in my antipathy for small talk—and assuaged of no little guilt—by a statement of the Apostle Paul, who expressed his purpose for wanting to visit the Roman Christians: “For I long to see you, that I might impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (Romans 1:11-12).

So then, it’s a good thing and not a sinful thing to long for conversations that are spiritually meaningful. I don’t mean these talks have to be happy and non-confrontational, either. Confrontation is fine. Rebuke is fine. Much harder work for me than both is the studied avoidance of all meaningful intercourse.

Next week I am meeting with Kathleen. I am not a cessationist when it comes to spiritual gifts because I see that Kathleen has the gift of prophecy. I come away from our coffee dates knocked off my feet on the road to Damascus. It’s wonderful, it’s not-to-be-missed. It’s oil and perfume and all the rest of Proverbs 27:9.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

Is it not odd that many people who complain about government involvement in the housing market are the very ones who encourage zoning laws for their preferences? While there are good critiques on the short-sightedness of the Obama administration’s plans to increase the government’s role in helping the poor acquire access to better housing, the problem is that government intervention is one of the largest variables in the housing crisis in the first place. And this includes zoning laws.

The major government players in the housing market include the Federal Reserve, the government-created and privately owned Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and multiple state and local agencies. These agencies tend to serve as guarantors of risky lending practices that, when left to market forces, would have saved thousands from taking on debt they could not manage.

One of the unnoticed villains in the crisis were local zoning laws. Zoning laws are generally ways in which the elite use government intervention to keep “riffraff” out their communities as well as to thwart local land development that does not fit with the social preferences of the elite, explains Thomas Sowell in the book The Housing Boom and Bust. Restricting the use of land for the sake of “preserving open space,” “saving farmland,” “protecting the environment,” “historical preservation,” and other political mantras actually work to drive up property values in ways in which the market would reduce. Having minimum lot-size restrictions, for example, is a sinister way in which the elite, according to Sowell, “watch the values of their homes shoot up after the restrictions, so that they gain financially as well as by keeping out less affluent people and thereby preserving the character of the community as they like it.”

Local planning commissions often introduce so many regulatory impediments for housing developments that it is no longer cost-effective to build new housing in the first place. Land use restrictions, used by liberals and conservatives, over the past 50 years had a role to play in distorting the supply and demand matrix in the housing market. The market was not free to meet real needs because the elite used the government to prevent development. The elite doesn’t want low-income people living near them, either. Why aren’t those against government intervention fighting against zoning laws that prevent low-income housing developments?

Because of property inflation due to zoning restrictions, there are more and more calls to “make housing affordable.” This is happening in some areas because lower-priced options like trailer parks, apartments, homes on smaller lots, and so on are similarly not available nor allowed in certain areas. If conservatives are truly against government intervention in low-income housing, they should also be against government intervention used to codify social preferences of the elite.

I haven’t seen the movie The Book of Eli but I have read the book How the Irish Saved Civilization. Thomas Cahill’s work describes how the island people preserved Western civilization from being entirely lost, copying Bibles as fast as their hands could write while barbarians were running around torching the libraries of Europe. I understand that Eli is also about protecting the Bible (though reviews suggest the idea is books in general, which may be so).

All this was marinating in my brain this morning as I happened to read Jeremiah 36 and plunged into a little fantasy of my own.

The seventh century B.C. prophet records a scene that would seem odd transposed in our day. God has commanded Jeremiah to commit to a scroll all the pronouncements of judgment (as well as future restoration) that he has been announcing (with very little to show for it) for decades to the stiff-necked Israelites. Jeremiah has his friend Baruch take dictation. Then he dispatches Baruch to read the scroll aloud in the temple, in a last desperate hope that the people will repent and yet avert God’s wrath.

The part that strikes me as delightfully odd is that the princes actually listen. Somebody important at court named Michaiah overhears Baruch’s reading, and grabs him and hauls him off to the scribe’s chamber in the king’s house, where at a hastily assembled clandestine meeting he has him reread all the words he just read to Elishama, and Delaiah, and Elnathan, and Gemariah, etcetera. These hang on every syllable, and the men confer and agree that these words must be brought to the attention of the king himself.

What a refreshing idea—that God’s word is not just pretty or poetry or devotional material or a quiet-time ritual or inspiring, but urgent. If we don’t get this right, we’re dead men!

Since 2010 appears to be the year of the apocalyptic Hollywood film (The Road, 2012, The Book of Eli), I would like to suggest for next month’s offering a script based on Jeremiah 36. It has all the elements we need for an end times plot, based as it is on the final days of Judah before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar. Oh, that our own nation—from the greatest to the least—would tremble at God’s every word the way Eli did, and the way the princes of Israel did. Someone get a Bible to Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, quick. There may yet be time.

“But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2).

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.