Last week we saw how the Chinese are experiencing a lot of pollution in their environment. One lady in the news came out with a garbage bag and dumped all these plastic bottles filled with water. Some water was like orange pop and grape pop, some like grease and worse. She was saying that they haven= t taken water from the lakes or the rivers around them for over four or five years. Then they showed the smog from the soot from the factories so thick that you can’t see and people are chewing on it that= s how heavy it is. It= s all because of the industry, the economic push for growth, disregards all the environment and people are getting sick and more people are getting cancer, etc.

Then you’ve heard of Zarqawi dying. Of course then you have a different kind of pollution. Here= s a man whose mind and heart was filled with hatred and got the people to look at the Sheites as the enemy and convince people of that so the insurgency continues and through him, of course, we are infidels so we get it too. But here= s a person that spreads moral pollution and the world suffers from it.

So we have the Lord who comes to save us and has given us a tremendous gift. He has given us the gift of faith that opens us up to his presence. If we just reflect on any number of the attributes of God we see what a tremendous great gift this is because it places us in the mode of being life filled. For instance, God is radical life. He’s fullness of life all the time. So if we are truly open in faith to God we are affected. Just like Midas wanted so much gold so that he asked for the capacity that he touched things and they would change to gold. It wasn’t so nice when he touched his daughter but the

fact is just contact with him changed things to gold. Well, by our faith we open ourselves up to God and one of the things that happen is that when we do this we are transformed a little bit every time we do this especially if our faith is alive and real.