JEREMY LIN and RICK SANTORUM

You have to be living under a rock not to know about Jeremy Lin.  The young man whose parents emigrated from Taiwan in the 1970's.  The young basketball player from Palo Alto, California who was instrumental in his teams state high school championship.  The Man unrecruited by any college (racial prejudice, anyone?) who went to Harvard and has an MBA with a major in economics - who incidentally performed last second heroics in defeating William and Mary,

Lin bounced around the NBA with a couple of teams before the New York Knicks, with both Carmelo and Amare out, picked him up off the waiver wire to warm the bench.  They subbed him and he did well, so he has now started five games, scored at least twenty in ALL of them, and helped the Knicks, who had a woeful losing record, win all five.   He put up 38 against Kobe Bryant.  The first Taiwanese NBA player, he did what Alan Iverson, Shaquille O"Neal, and Michael Jordan could not do - put up 109 points in his first four games as an NBA starter.

Lin looks up to Tim Tebow and wants to help those in need and be a pastor after his playing days are over. He committed his heart to Jesus Christ in high school when he could, as he says, finally "get his mind around it".

You also have to be living under a rock not to notice that Rick Santorum has rocketed to the head to the GOP field in the Rasmussen polls.  Rick's campaign headquarters is a post office box.  He embarrassed Romney in Minnesota and Missouri, and had a respectable 5 point margin in yuppified Colorado (not the rugged but very progressive place it was when I lived there in the 1950's).  Mitt has millions.  Mitt has a staff that is huge and well-funded.   Mitt buried Newt in Florida by putting out 65 ads for every one of Newt's. Romney has been negative and his checkered past on the issues has a whole lot of people with a moral compass (including this writer) much less than impressed.

Rick has not personally attacked anyone in his campaign.  He is an attack dog on the issues, where the debate should stay.  He stands for life, for morality, for freedom. It goes to show you how starved people are for a push back to the dictatorial policies of Barack Obama - policies which are killing our economy and robbing our freedoms.  Policies which make our allies doubt us and make our enemies know that America is now a sitting duck with a spineless man in the White House who does not think America is worth fighting for - a man who appointed a LaRaza radical of all things - talk about a Wolf guarding the henhouse!

When Newt enunciated similar emotions in South Carolina, he soared to victory.  They he went off the reservation.  It is not about personality, or about someone's past.  It is about who will be a stalwart leader who can bring people together and lead without compromising with evil.  Rick said flat out he is here to serve the poor as well as the better off.  The working man as well as the executive.  Few feel Romney cares two cents about the poor wrestling with a safety net full of holes or the working man losing his home because of tragically flawed and absurd economic policies stemming from the 2006 Congressional elections. Massive deficit spending and unrealistic housing policies were the beginning of our deep travail.  God is now putting excitement in the fact that with someone who knows evil when he sees it in charge, our nation may yet be able to survive a while longer.

The lessons from the meteoric rise of these two fine men is that it is GOD who lifts up, and it is GOD who puts down.  God can take you and make you a person of influence on your job, in your neighborhood, in your church, in your sphere. It is also God who take the proud, the arrogant, and the divisive and put them down just as he did Nebuchadnezzar.  It is not to the mighty, but to those who honor God and the things that please God.  After all, do we believe David and Goliath or don't we?  Pray earnestly not only for Jeremy and Rick, but for each of us so that we will not live in the doldrums but come to the full potential of God's design for our lives!