March 24, 2008
Donation Drive April to June
For more than 20 years, Rapture Ready has been a dominant force in Bible prophecy. The site has become so large, it's hard to find another site that is a viable comparison to us. One web tracking service ranks RR at 32,000, and it ranks our closest match in the field of prophecy at 250,000. This ranking is based on a service that tracks around 5 million websites.
The credit for RR's success goes to the dozens of people who help build and maintain its content. Every day, we have people posting news, monitoring the message board, creating new articles, and redesigning the html backbone of the site.
I would like to give a special thanks to our message board team. Every few weeks, the board set new records for traffic. For the first time in a year, the board has become self-funding. Chris, our head admin, put together a software package that made it possible for people to contribute to covering the message board's annual cost.
In the next few months, I'm going to be move the main RR site to a larger host. The traffic load is getting to be too much for our current server plan. This will be the fifth time we've moved the site because of our growing capacity load.
You may have noticed that over the past few weeks several new names have been submitting articles to the "Newest Articles" section. There are so many people involved with Rapture Ready, it has become like a vast holding company for end-time information.
The eternal value of Rapture Ready can be very much compared to the track record of a company like Microsoft. If polled, most people would assume that Bill Gates, the co-founder and top shareholder of the company, has a majority stake in the tech giant. The truth is, his stock holdings only amount to 20 percent of the total outstanding shares.
When Microsoft went public in 1986, Gates controlled 42 percent of the total shares. What cut his ownership in half is all the stock options that have been issued to employees and firms that Microsoft acquired through stock-swap acquisitions.
Rapture Ready is undergoing a similar type of share distribution. Every time someone does something for RR, another share is added to his or her heavenly account.
During most of the '90's, I was pretty much the sole writer and financial backer of the site. Today, with the site having grown so massive in scale, my contribution now is a small portion of the grand total.
I have no problem with being a minor shareholder. Sam Walton, the late founder of Wal-Mart, once said, "It's better to have a small share of a big pie, than a large share of a small pie." The downfall of most Christian ministries is that most are centered on a single individual who wants to have the whole pie to himself. If Walton were still alive today, his portion of the Wal-Mart pie would be worth $120 billion--twice as much as the current richest man in the world.
Rapture Ready is all about Christians banding together for the simple purpose of fulfilling the Great Commission. Some people make huge contributions to the site, while others do the best they can. The result is a vast wealth of information that has blessed over a million people all over the world.
I've never been able to understand why so many Christians have no desire to help promote the gospel message. It is in our own best interests to be investors in the Lord's work. Jesus promised a mansion for all His faithful servants, and I firmly believe we are responsible for supplying the building material for our own heavenly home.
Terry and I are convinced that we are so close to the end of the age, evangelism needs to be the highest priority of every Christian. In order to expand our web reach, the site needs your financial support.
It should be easier than ever to have a Kingdom mindset. The dollar is in a downward spiral, and several major banking institutions are on the brink of total collapse. These are all signs of the end-times, so it's only good sense to focus our resources on endeavors that will have an everlasting value.
The best way to support Rapture Ready is through a regular donation. At the bottom of the Donation Depot page you can find a table that will allow you to select from a number of monthly donations. There is also the option of making a one-time financial gift to the site. Donations can also be sent to our PO Box at:
Rapture Ready Min.
PO Box 185
Boys Town, Ne 68010
-- Todd
As the World Changes
There should be a soap opera called “As the World Changes.” Fodder for such a proposed daily TV intrigue is everywhere we look in daily news. Change is much more than a term used ad nauseam by one presidential candidate. “Change” is transforming America and the world before our eyes in ways that seem to have paralyzed all common sensibility.
Let’s consider the changes that are suddenly before us, and that are beginning to significantly rearrange our lives. They seem unstoppable.
1) OPEC appears poised to desert the dollar.
2) The dollar is in sharp decline while the euro is skyrocketing in value against the basic U.S. currency.
3) Dollars per barrel of oil are on the ascent, and $5 per gallon of gas in the not-too-distant future in the U.S. is deemed quite possible by the experts.
4) Gold per ounce continues to ascend in its relationship to the dollar.
5) Ever stronger impulses from the Middle East are signaling increased pressures being brought to bear upon Israel to do whatever it takes to acquiesce in ways essential to creating and implementing a Palestinian state.
What’s the sudden push for the status-quo decimating changes on these many crucial fronts? Each of these changing factors evokes troubling thoughts.
OPEC and others beginning to show signs of deserting the dollar - America’s strategy for decades has been to send top diplomatic emissaries to the Mideast oil cartel. The power of the U.S. dollar was used as leverage to convince the sheiks to keep oil prices per barrel at the low end. With the dollar slipping in every realm while the euro’s value continues to climb, OPEC and others seem more and more leaning toward throwing the U.S. and its once-mighty dollar under the bus, as this generation terms desertion.
The dollar falling per ounce against gold. America’s decision decades ago to take the dollar off the gold standard is making its presence felt today in deleterious ways. The dollar/gold benchmark is an easily observed way for other nations–especially the oil-rich nations—to evaluate America’s economic strength. This adds to their jitters and to their decisions to lean more toward the euro as their standard monetary exchange currency.
Leverage now resides with the oil-rich Islamic states of the Middle East to force the U.S. to pressure Israel, for example, push Israel to give in to the Jewish state’s enemy neighbors’ common desire for a Palestinian state. Power of the American currency swiftly moves toward non-influence, in terms of being able to act in beneficial ways for America, Israel and the world.
At the same time, America’s economic decline for the worse is wrapped in the ramifications that are acting like ripples on a pond that make the whole world waver and convulse. The world’s top monetary managers are taking serious notice of the powerful changes that are beginning to dramatically appear.
PARIS (AP) -- The collapse of a Wall Street institution over the weekend shows the global financial crisis is broader than policy makers realized and it is growing worse, the head of the International Monetary Fund said Monday.
"The financial crisis which started in the United States is more serious and more global than it was a few weeks ago," IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in Paris. "The risks and dangers are very high. The economic environment is still worsening."
The current crises will require a "global answer," Strauss-Kahn said ("Global Crisis Deepening: IMF Chief, Associated Press, Mar. 17, 2008).
Change is coming, we can be certain. It is happening even now, and is a growing monster. What does it mean, prophetically?
International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss, I believe, gave the bottom line in the matter of the dynamic changes taking place so rapidly, particularly in America: “The current crises will require a ‘global answer.’”
The economic powers that be, globally, are striving more energetically than ever to break down national sovereignty, to break down borders that separate nation from nation. America, the strongest nation on the planet in terms of economic power--at least until recently, must be diminished if the globalists’ goal of change is to be realized.
The dollar is standing in the way. It must be removed or reconfigured and melded with the globalist concept of one-world currency. The amero we’ve heard so much about, which is apparently scheduled to become the currency of the North American Union (NAU), appears to be the magic change that must take place.
The NAU is possibly slated to be the continental global trading bloc that will one day join many others, each built on the model of the EU, the organization that seems the nucleus of producing pressures with the euro that is ascending to the top of the world monetary mountain. This trend, in my view, could very well eventuate in the final earthly kingdom prophesied in Daniel Chapter 2, 7, Revelation 13, and in Revelation Chapter 17.
“And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast” (Rev. 17:12-13).
--Terry
