Pray for the families of the martyrs, and for our complicity, over 56 years, in coddling and excusing the regime that still spills their blood with impunity:

A Christian woman [33-year-old mother of three, Ri Hyon Ok], accused of distributing the Bible, a book banned in communist North Korea, was publicly executed last month for the “crime” [quotes added]… her husband, children and parents were sent to a political prison the day after her June 16 execution.

The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing died that was in the sea. The third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood. And I heard the angel in charge of the waters say, “Just are you, O Holy One, who is and who was, for you brought these judgments. “For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink. It is what they deserve!” And I heard the altar saying, “Yes, Lord God the Almighty, true and just are your judgments!” (Revelation 16:3-7)

(Be sure to click on the links in the first sentence of the scripture, above.)

Pray for those who can’t afford to bury or claim their dead, and for our hard-heartedness in thinking of them as callously as we do the unborn.

Bodies left unclaimed, cadavers stacked high in morgues and burial rates tumbling as loved ones cut funeral costs: the crippling recession is even haunting the dead across the United States. In Los Angeles, the local coroner’s office has witnessed an unprecedented spike in the number of corpses unclaimed by families who cannot afford the costs of a burial or cremation.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight! Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine, and valiant men in mixing strong drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe, and deprive the innocent of his right! Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as dry grass sinks down in the flame, so their root will be as rottenness, and their blossom go up like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts, and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people, and he stretched out his hand against them and struck them, and the mountains quaked; and their corpses were as refuse in the midst of the streets. For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still. He will raise a signal for nations afar off, and whistle for them from the ends of the earth; and behold, quickly, speedily they come! (Isaiah 5:20-26)

Pray that our leaders recognize wisdom and humbly accept the ‘red pill’ of truth (sometimes bitter; always better) and that public humiliation not stoke the fires of malignant narcissism and provide an entry point for the designs of the evil one. Here’s Peggy Noonan in Friday’s WSJ:

President Obama appears to have misstepped on a major initiative and defining issue. He has misjudged the nation’s mood, which itself is news: He rose from nothing to everything with the help of his fine-tuned antennae. Resistance to the Democratic health-care plans is in the air, showing up more now on YouTube than in the polls, but it will be in the polls soon enough. The president, in short, may be facing a real loss. This will be interesting in a number of ways and for a number of reasons, among them that we’ve never seen him publicly defeated before, because he hasn’t been. So we may be entering new territory, with new struggles shaped by new dynamics.

His news conference the other night was bad. He was filibustery and spinny and gave long and largely unfollowable answers that seemed aimed at limiting the number of questions asked and running out the clock. You don’t do that when you’re fully confident. Far more seriously, he didn’t seem to be telling the truth. We need to create a new national health-care program in order to cut down on government spending? Who would believe that? Would anybody?

I saw in the visions of my head as I lay in bed, and behold, a watcher, a holy one, came down from heaven He proclaimed aloud and said thus: ‘Chop down the tree and lop off its branches, strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts flee from under it and the birds from its branches. But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze, amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven. Let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth. Let his mind be changed from a man’s, and let a beast’s mind be given to him; and let seven periods of time pass over him. The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men.’ (Daniel 4:13-17)

UPDATE: Re. that last item, which centers on BHO’s potential for a psychologically classical narcissistic ‘flip’ into megalomania (once the subject’s grandiose, self-centered illusion is laid bare in public) Eowyn notes in an e-mail that:

It turns out that Obama has a history with the Cambridge Police Department whose officers he called “stupid” in the incident with overrated Harvard U. professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (See Mark Steyn’s column [which is first-rate and not to be missed, as usual]

Obama had 17 unpaid parking tickets from the Cambridge police, from his time at Harvard Law School. He did not pay those tickets until 2 weeks before he launched his bid for the presidency.

This kind of behavior is typical of the “Rules don’t apply to me” grandiosity of pathological narcissists.