Really Now? Containers, Cracked Pots, Cradles & Caskets?

Life’s Given Bookends: First, a Cradle; Finally, the Casket!

Merlin’s Intro: I have been blessed recently not only having ready access to the past years KMC Sunday AM services, but also other significant events, such as recent funerals, indeed, celebrations of these final transitions. I found listening to them Exquisitely Enlightening, Encouraging, Evidentially Elevating my spirit…

At any rate, Eugene Peterson’s book, Run With The Horses, is a favorite of mine and in the updated version since Eugene’s death in 2018, it now includes his son Eric’s Commemorative Preface: A Homily for the Celebration of the Resurrection of Eugene Peterson Nov 3, 2018, in the First Presbyterian Church in Kalispell, MT.  Eric’s words below were a highlight for me having only found them the Thursday before Good Friday. Eric’s words resonate deeply within me! Enjoy! No doubt our friend Eugene invested well!

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

I’ve been thinking a lot about containers these days.

It brought to mind an ancient proverb that tells the story of a young girl whose morning chore it was to walk to the river and fetch water for her household. Suspended from a pole across her shoulders were two water pots that supplied her family’s daily needs. One of the pots was perfect, but the other one was cracked, and by the time they made the return trip home each day, the second pot was only half full.

After some time, the little cracked pot, ashamed that she wasn’t able to function at full capacity, expressed her embarrassment and sense of failure to the girl.

“Why do you keep using me when all I do is leak?” she asked. “Why don’t you replace me with a new pot?”

Smiling, the girl gently responded, “Have you seen the beautiful flowers that grow along the path between the house and the river? And have you noticed that they only grow on your side of the path as we walk home together? That’s because every spring I plant seeds on only your side, knowing that you will water them as we walk home together. I’ve been picking those flowers for years and filling our home with fragrance and beauty. I couldn’t do it without you. What you thought was a flaw is actually a gift to us all.”

In ways that continue to astound me, God consistently chooses to accomplish divine purposes through the agency of human imperfection. Through the weaknesses and shortcomings of the clay pots—which are our lives—uncommonly beautiful things emerge.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

The message of God’s love, this magnificent story of creation, salvation, and liberation, has been entrusted to the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives (II Cor. 4). In other words, the container of good news is the broken body of Christ. We’re a bunch of crack pots. We leak. This is by design. So that the blessings might flow.

One of the most important things Eugene taught us is that everything about the life of faith is livable. If you can’t translate an idea into an experience, it’s not gospel. Abstractions are enemies of the Way of Truth and Life (Key, & so true! mle).

Which is why I’m so very grateful to have grown up with a man whose life was so well integrated and congruent, such that the dad who served up mashed potatoes on Saturday night was the very same pastor who served up the word of God on Sunday morning. He was someone who embodied the message he proclaimed. His body was a sacred temple. A habitation for the holy. A container of the Spirit of God.

I know this to be true because the evidence is irrefutable, inasmuch as he manifested the fruits of the Spirit.

He was a container for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

He was a flawed and cracked container of these gifts, never hoarding, always leaking. What a holy vessel he was. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Moreover, I think of his many books as durable containers of the words he wrote for us. Inspired words full of truth and grace. Words that we will treasure for many years.

But for right now I wish to draw your attention to two particular containers that are here. They are common enough as containers go. What is unusual is that they are in the same room at the same time.

A cradle. And a casket.

The one is a container of life. The other is a container of death.

One is open to the world; the other, closed, having finished this world.

The one holds promise and hope and future. Anticipation. The other holds completion: it is finished.

The one represents a glorious beginning; the other, a glorious end.

A cradle and a casket: these are the containers that bookend our lives.

When Eugene delivered this cradle, freshly crafted from his basement workshop in Maryland to New Jersey, where his first grandchild was born, I exclaimed to him how beautiful it was. As we were carrying it into the apartment together he confessed that it had a flaw, and he had to shim it. I knew all about shims because he had taught me, at an early age, about them. “Every carpenter,” he said, “needs to know how to use shims.”

I have scrutinized this cradle over the years, and I still can’t find the flaw. He wasn’t just a master word-worker; he was a master woodworker.

And among the things he left us, in the craft of words and wood, is this exquisite piece of work that our family will treasure for generations. Many of Eugene’s grandchildren and grandnephews and grandnieces were held in this little container, and their names are all inscribed inside.

This all came back to mind as I was building his casket a couple of weeks ago. The miter joints weren’t lining up exactly right, and I had to use some shims to tighten them up. I had never built a casket before, and so I set out doing what many of us have learned to do: I went to YouTube. And in the process, I came across a coffin maker named Marcus Daly, who doesn’t just build wooden boxes but contemplates the human condition. I very much like the way he reflects on his work. Here is what he says:

I think one of the most important aspects of the coffin is that it can be carried. And I think we’re meant to carry each other. And I think carrying someone you love, committing them, is very important for us when we deal with death. We want to know that we have played a part and that we have shouldered our burden. So, if we make it too convenient, then we’re depriving ourselves of a chance to get stronger so that we can carry on.

At various points in their lives, Eugene carried six of his grandchildren, both physically and emotionally. He was a strong, steadying presence in their lives, as he was for so many of us. He carried them up mountains. He carried them through school. He carried them through heartache.

Today those six grandchildren carry him. And at the end of the day they will be stronger for it. Today, the rest of us watch while the heavy lifting is accomplished through their fierce love, as they carry him to his final resting place. But if we’ve been paying attention, we will also know that as Eugene has been wielding the words of his craft over the years, we too have become more fit, strengthened, readied for citizenship in the kingdom of God.

This casket-container is now holding the body-container that was Eugene Peterson. I say was, because by the mystery of the resurrection, to which the baptized are heirs, his body has been exchanged for something much, much more durable. Perishability, as St. Paul once famously said it, has taken on imperishability. Mortality has been swapped for immortality. The temporary traded for the eternal.

Now, it’s the casket and the cradle!

But these are just temporary containers. Pretty much like everything is. There is only one thing that isn’t.

We don’t know much about what heaven is like. The preferred biblical metaphor is that of a city, suggesting that it is inhabitable. It’s populated. But the particularities that St. John describes make it clear that it is unlike any city we’ve known on earth. For starters, it is a city without limits, unconstrained by zip codes or boundary lines, unencumbered by fences, not obstructed by walls. In other words, it’s a container for the hosts of heaven without being confining. It is a place or—perhaps better said—it’s a reality in which the limitations of our present mortality give way to the full expressions of that which we now know only in part—namely, perfect love, unmitigated joy, deep and eternal peace.

It’s quite a design, as city planning goes: there is no temple in this New Jerusalem—no church container of any kind—because it’s no longer necessary, the presence of God being so pervasive, holding everything and everyone together.

There is a river running through the city, suggesting that the blessings flood freely.

And there is a tree, whose leaves, we are told, are for the healing of the nations. And my how this world needs those leaves right now.

All of which is to say that what we sort of know as we look through a glass darkly is that heaven is a glorious container for all the saints.

Where life is free to flow unbounded, unencumbered.

Where blessings—no longer contained—rush like whitewater.

Where there are no more tears, no more pain, no more death. And because the former things have passed away, and because it is a city built by the Master Carpenter, there are also no more shims.

It’s a most perfect, everlasting container, for all the saints.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

First Presbyterian Church, Kalispell, Montana

November 3, 2018

— Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best by Eugene H. Peterson (1932-2018).  A pastor, scholar, author and poet. He wrote more than 30 books, including his widely acclaimed paraphrase of the Bible, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language.

merlin again: You agree too that this is a high impact document? Those 4 words; containers, cracked pots, cradles & caskets, are now etched positively forever in my mind for my good and His Glory. I’m just blessed to have been the facilitator! Thanks for joining us! Got something good you want to share with the audience? Contact me.

Really Now? Another Test of Time?

Read Exodus 16:1-36

As always, even in Dalton and NE Ohio, time passes. We presume the electric will come back on again. A blackout from Saturday 12:40 PM until an estimated Wednesday 4 pm is not 40 years! Notice Ex. 15: 22-27 reveals it only took three days to find water that they now enjoyed. But now it’s been more than 40 days! I call that a serious test of time. There they were in the midst of the wilderness with their unrealistic expectations, much like we too often. “We thought we were through those parched days in the wilderness. We were already there three days. Why do we have to go back?“ Many in Wayne Holmes county are saying “Come on, we were just without power nearly a week last summer! Surely not again!”

And guess what? Out rushed the complaints from the freed slaves now in their liberation transition. “The whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron. (Ex 16:2) Why were they (or are we) grumbling? Again, is it because they (we) were looking back? Listen to their words in verse 4: “Would that we had died by the Lord’s hands in Egypt, when we sat by pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full, for you brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (v.3).

Sounds like our response? Perhaps, but we in Dalton are only momentarily inconvenienced. Perhaps it’s time for us all to learn a timeless lesson. If we focus on our past, the good old days, before this global reset, it won’t be long before complaints will start oozing from our lips, “for out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:35) ESV

You will remember a long-ago time (perhaps a decade, not a century) when we bathed in the hazy rosy glow of memories, when living was simpler, easier, and more comfortable than it is today. For example, gas was only 29.9 cents for decades! As you with memory of such times compare life then to now, I guarantee you will grumble. If your age is under 50, not so much; and if you’re under 30, you may be clueless; unless you’ve been well parented, or grand-parented!

It hurts to endure life’s trials, and it hurts worse to repeat such episodes. Yet, without these deep hurts, we may have very little capacity to receive godly counsel or make progress forward to maturity. The test of time is perhaps our most rugged test of all.

Seriously now folks, over the perspective of what we need to prepare for this global reset and the imminent next lock-down, I believe God is honoring us through such trivial tests as no electric to awaken us out of our complacency. Stretching us. Breaking us. Crushing us. Reducing us to an absolute, open-armed trust, where we say in essence, “Lord, I have come to an end of my own flesh.  If you wish me to die in this wilderness, here is my life. Take it. I refuse to look back and complain about where I am at this moment.” And then trust Him! How? For starters, Accept His Love. Share His Love. Live His Joy. Grow Your Fruit. Embrace His Peace. Share His Hope. Refute Satan’s Evil.

Moses had learned to wait for 40 years. Now his congregation needed to learn as well. How about us? I strongly urge each of you to search out and read your favorite Scriptural passages, especially I & II Peter, Martyr’s Mirror, Pilgrims Progress, and Letter to the American Church by Eric Metaxas. ASAP. Praise God for His divine continuing ed program! Learning from the past may be hard, but continuing in ignorance is expensive, time consuming and may jeopardize your eternal life assurance. Better to learn these priceless lessons today than to search for pennies in the scorching wilderness tomorrow.   

Swindol’s devotional this morning really got me thinking. I well remember listening to him on the car radio in early ’81 while waiting for an appointment in Charlottesville. God was pointedly calling me thru Chuck’s words and I merely turned the radio off to avoid the confrontation. Similar event happened earlier with David Jeremiah in summer of ’73 while traveling thru Ft Wayne. Only two of the bigger mistakes of my life. I recall Bill Detweiler too. merlin

Revealing Clips of Einstein’s Life & Times

A few minutes ago, I was sent this blog post about Albert Einstein from my friend Wendell taken from Bill Federer’s AmericanMinute.com that I’d never seen. After submerged in the Metaxas book all day attempting chapter summaries, this Einstein clip came much as a delightful soothing dessert, after a hearty meal of Metaxas with too much to digest and ponder. Relax now, and breathe deeply. Some interesting dynamics here. Know God’s children have nothing to fear.

While a student at physics-mathematics section of the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Albert Einstein met Mileva Mariæ, whom he studied together with. She helped him with papers and articles, advancing his career. They eventually married in 1903. Albert and Mileva had a daughter, Lieserl, and two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard. Correspondence indicates she may have contributed materially to his early research, so much so, that after their divorce in 1919, he gave her the money from winning the Nobel Prize.

With a doctorate from the University of Zurich, Einstein wrote papers on electromagnetic energy, relativity, and statistical mechanics. Einstein predicted a ray of light from a distant star would appear to bend as it passed near the Sun. When an eclipse confirmed this, The London Times ran the headline, November 7, 1919, “Revolution in science – – New theory of the Universe — Newtonian ideas overthrown.”

In 1921, Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics, gaining international recognition. Einstein’s first visit to the United States was to raise funds for Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. On his 3rd visit, 1932, he took a post at Princeton University. When the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi) took control of Germany, they barred Jews from holding official positions or teaching at universities. Einstein stayed in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1940.

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed “Jewish intellectualism is dead” and burned books by Jewish authors, including Einstein’s works. Jewish poet Heinrich Heine prophetically penned in 1822: “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.”

A current instance of this was reported in the Breitbart News article “ISIS Burns Books at Mosul Libraries” (February 5, 2015): “The Islamic State … raided the Central Library of Mosul to destroy all non-Islamic books. These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah,’ announced a militant to the residents. ‘So they will be burned.’ Militants targeted the library at the University of Mosul. They burned science and culture textbooks in front of the students.”

Concern is growing over recent anti-Semitic comments made by politicians and radical campus groups, which forebode a resurgence of Jewish persecution. A FoxNews headline (3/8/19) read: “Failure to condemn anti-Semitic Rep. Omar by House Democrats is a profile in cowardice.”

Commenting on socialist redistribution of wealth, Albert Einstein stated: “I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds … Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the moneybags of Carnegie?”

Einstein’s theory of relativity, E=MC2, is “energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.” It is the basis for applying atomic energy. Berkeley Lab published the article (9/23/20) “CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Creates Matter From Light”:

“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) plays with Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide pure energy – in the form of electromagnetic waves. Last year, the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s LHC observed two photons, particles of light, ricocheting off one another and producing two new photons.

This year, scientists have taken that research a step further and discovered photons merging and transforming into something even more interesting: W bosons, particles that carry the weak force, which governs nuclear decay….

The research doesn’t just illustrate the central concept governing processes inside the LHC: that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin.

It also confirms that at high enough energies, forces that seem separate in our everyday lives – electromagnetism and the weak force – are united.”

Describing the theory of relativity, that the closer one approaches the speed of light time slows down, Albert Einstein said:

“When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute — and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.”

 Albert was married to his cousin, Elsa, from 1921 till her death in 1936. His accountant, Leo Mattersdorf of New York, wrote (TIME Magazine, 1963): “One year while I was at his Princeton home preparing his return, Mrs. Elsa Einstein, who was then still living, asked me to stay for lunch. During the course of the meal, the professor (Einstein) turned to me and with his inimitable chuckle said: ‘The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes.'”

Einstein’s warning that Nazis could create the atom bomb led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to set up the Manhattan Project.

In November of 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asked Einstein to be Israel’s 2nd President, but he declined due to age, dying less than 3 years later. Being “deeply moved” by the offer, Einstein replied:

“My relationship with the Jewish people became my strongest human tie.”

The periodic table’s 99th element, discovered shortly after his death in 1955 was named “einsteinium.”

Albert Einstein was quoted in The New York Times, November 9, 1930, saying:

“I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.” Paraphrasing Miguel de Cervantes’ quote “I do not believe that the Good Lord plays dice,” Einstein stated: 

God Almighty does not throw dice.” He added: “Before God we are all equally wise — equally foolish.”

In Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man (1983), William Hermanns recorded Einstein’s 1943 statement:

“Creation may be spiritual in origin, but that doesn’t mean that everything created is spiritual … Let us accept the world is a mystery. Nature is neither solely material nor entirely spiritual. Man, too, is more than flesh and blood; otherwise, no religions would have been possible. Behind each cause is still another cause … Yet, only one thing must be remembered: there is no effect without a cause, and there is no lawlessness in creation.”

As recorded by Helen Dukas in Albert Einstein, The Human Side (Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 66), Einstein stated:

“My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality.

Morality is of the highest importance — but for us, not for God.”

Einstein stated in an interview published in G.S. Viereck’s book Glimpses of the Great, 1930:

“I’m absolutely not an atheist … The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”

Walter Isaacson quoted Einstein in the article “Einstein and Faith,” Time 169, April 5, 2007, 47):

“The fanatical atheists … are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle.

They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium of the people’ — cannot bear the ‘music of the spheres.'”

Einstein’s referenced to the “music of the spheres” is a religious concept used through the Medieval- Renaissance period to describe an orbital resonance of the planets.

Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, compared the eight planets in the solar system to the eight notes in music – an octave.

Kepler wrote in The Harmonies of the World, 1619: “Holy Father, keep us safe in the concord of our love for one another, that we may be one just as Thou art with Thy Son, Our Lord, and with the Holy Ghost, just as through the sweetest bonds of harmonies Thou hast made all Thy works one, and that from the bringing of Thy people into concord, the body of Thy Church may be built up in the Earth, as Thou didst erect the heavens themselves out of harmonies.”

Yale professor Benjamin Silliman, who founded the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1818, stated:

“The relation of geology, as well as astronomy, to the Bible, when both are well understood, is that of perfect harmony … The Word and the works of God cannot conflict, and the more they are studied the more perfect will their harmony appear.”

According to Prince Hubertus (Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, New York: World Publishing Company, 1971, p. 425), Einstein stated:

“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”

Einstein wrote to M. Berkowitz, 1950, (William Hermanns, Einstein and the Poet. In Search of the Cosmic Man, Brookline Village MA: Branden Books, 1983, p. 60):

“‘God‘ is a mystery. But a comprehensible mystery. I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature. There are not laws without a lawgiver, but how does this lawgiver look? Certainly not like a man magnified.”

 Though not believing in a personal God, The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929, published George Sylvester Viereck’s interview with Albert Einstein.

When asked “To what extent are you influenced by Christianity,” Einstein answered: “As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.”

When asked “Have you read Emil Ludwig’s book on Jesus,” Einstein replied:

“Emil Ludwig’s Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrase mongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot! (witty remark)”

When asked “You accept the historical existence of Jesus,” Einstein answered:

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

In 1931, astronomer Edwin Hubble invited Einstein to the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. After viewing the “red shift” of distant stars revealing an expanding universe, Einstein remarked

“I now see the necessity of a beginning.”

Princeton University’s Fine Hall has inscribed Albert Einstein’s words above the fireplace:

“Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber Boshaft ist er nicht.” (God is clever, but not dishonest.)

​Download as PDF … Albert Einstein “I observe the Laws of Nature … There are not Laws without a Lawgiver”

Read as American Minute blog post.

Accept His Love. Share His Love. Live His Joy. Grow His Fruit. Embrace His Peace. Share His Hope. Refute Satan’s Evil. merlin

Alert: Democrats Developing New Form of Vote Harvesting

Both documents below are FYI on this blog’s designated Political Wednesday without comment. merlin

A stunning revelation from the Restoration of America (ROA) Political Action Committee (PAC) is exposing a new scam by the Democrats to harvest votes. The way this is reportedly being done is through non-profit groups.

Democrats have found a way to sign people up behind the scenes via non-profits, even though non-profit groups are not allowed to have any partisan leanings.

Here’s How It’s Being Done

The report from Restoration of America comes in two parts. It digs deep into how the Democrats are using 501c3 non-profit groups to sign people up who will likely vote Democratic.

Non-profits are barred by US law from engaging in partisan activities or checking who somebody will vote for before registering them.

However, groups like the Center for Voter Information and Voter Participation Center simply go sign people up that they know will almost definitely vote Democratic, based on the groups they’re in.

CVI and VPC already mailed out almost 86 million mailers to 32 states ahead of the 2022 midterms to boost the vote, especially states that were hoped to turn left, like Pennsylvania and Georgia.

As the ROA report notes, both of these groups use “microtargeting techniques” to find out where members of non-profits live to send them mailers and outreach.

They then target those in districts that need more votes to flip the districts or other key races like the Senate.

Digging Deeper Into the Fraud

Digging deeper into this backhanded scheme, we see a lot of shady stuff emerge. One influential PAC called Mind the Gap, for example, was started by the mom of former FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried.

This individual, Barbara Fried, helped use her PAC to get rich leftists to funnel their money into groups like CVI and VPC. Fried promised people this could net up to 500% more votes for them for the same amount of money.

This shows that funneling money towards CVI and VPC and other groups isn’t just some innocent support of “democracy” and signing people up.

Wealthy donors and Democratic PACs know what’s happening; voters are being systematically targeted and reached if they are likely to vote blue. This is their strategy and the right had better wake up before they get a permanent stranglehold on elections.

Can This Be Stopped?

Stopping this kind of sneaky fraud is difficult to do. That’s because these kinds of leftist groups are getting around the IRS ban by finding backdoor ways to geographically target voters and sign them up.

Suing federally can’t work because they aren’t technically violating IRS rules. Though suing at the state level is possible and eventually, this issue seems likely to reach the Supreme Court as well.

The Bottom Line

We can’t afford to take our eyes off the ball. Dirty Democratic tricks are constantly increasing, especially as we head into 2024.

This article appeared in FreshOffThePress and has been published here with permission.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seymourhersh/p/whos-your-george-ball?r=690o5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

WHO’S YOUR GEORGE BALL?

Every President Needs a Voice of Dissent – Does Joe Biden Have One?

This is an account of another American who, like Daniel Ellsberg, did the right thing at the right time in the middle of a war. But unlike Ellsberg’s, his act of courage did not make the headlines, and he suffered little for it. His name is George W. Ball. He was a Midwestern lawyer who did not politically support John F. Kennedy in his 1960 presidential campaign and did not serve bravely or endure violence during World War II. But he had played a key role in the American postwar rebuilding of Europe and was appointed early in 1961 as an undersecretary of state in the Kennedy Administration. His main task was to deal with international economic and agricultural affairs.

Ball had directed the American postwar bombing survey in London at the end of the war. He understood, as the survey had shown, that the intense daytime bombing of German cities had not destroyed morale, as had been assumed, but had increased citizen support for the Nazi regime—and perhaps extended the duration of the war. Ball would later be the only senior Kennedy Administration official who directly warned the president of the dangers of committing American soldiers to the Vietnam War, as had been recommended by his generals. In his 2000 book Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975, A.J. Langguth, who covered the war for the New York Times, recounted Ball’s gutsy warning in late 1961 to the president: “If we go down that road we might have, within five years, 300,000 men in the rice paddies of the jungles of Vietnam and never be able to find them.” 

In a 1982 memoir, Ball recalled Kennedy’s irritated response: “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.” Back in his office, Ball told an aide, “We’re heading hell-bent into a mess and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. Either everybody else is crazy or I am.”

Ball, who had worked with and supported Adlai Stevenson, the liberal former governor of Illinois, in two failed presidential campaigns in the 1950s, was disdained by many of the tough-minded and tough-talking war planners inside the administration not as a truth teller but as a “dove.”

Kennedy had been shaken by his early failure to oust Fidel Castro, Cuba’s communist leader, in the first months of his administration and a brutal summit meeting weeks later with a dismissive Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. He would make a stand in South Vietnam. In 1962 he also chose to become the first American president to try to thwart what Washington saw as the Soviet Union’s ambitions to weaponize its enormous reservoirs of oil and natural gas. Russia had announced its intention to build a 2,500-mile pipeline from its oil and natural gas fields in Tatarstan, 700 miles to the east of Moscow, that would be capable of supplying much-needed cheap energy to countries in the Soviet bloc within five or so years, with smaller pipelines that could spread deeper into Europe. All were still struggling to rebuild from the devastation of World War II.

Kennedy responded through NATO in a futile effort to impose an embargo on the imports from Western Europe to Russia of the materials to build the pipeline. In a 2018 study, Nikos Tsafos, an expert who was named last year as the energy adviser to the prime minister of Greece, described what happened next: Kennedy’s “goal was to delay or even stop the . . . pipeline that would increase Soviet oil exports. The embargo split the [NATO] alliance, with the United Kingdom being the most vocal against it; the pipeline was completed with only a slight delay, and the embargo was removed in 1966.” Tsafos quoted a colleague as noting that “one could argue that the pipe embargo caused more damage to US-European relations than to the Soviet economy.” That assessment, Tsafos noted, “applies to almost every transatlantic effort against Soviet and, later, Russian hydrocarbons.”

President Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 determined to confront what he would come to call the “evil empireand quickly escalated tensions between Washington and Moscow. He revived the B-1 bomber program that had been canceled by the Carter Administration; announced that his Administration would invest billions in an anti-ballistic missile defense system; and deployed Pershing II missiles, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead, to West Germany. In a 1982 speech he talked of consigning the Soviet Union to “ash heap of history.”

Reagan, too, attempted to block a second Soviet pipeline that would run from Western Siberia to Western Europe. The West German government had approved the concept and agreed in principle to lend $4.75 billion to help finance it. Reagan offered to supply the West German government with coal and nuclear power if it would withdraw from its agreement with Moscow. The Germans said no. France subsequently signed a multi-million dollar contract with the Soviet Union for the purchase of the Siberian gas. The Reagan Administration responded by escalating the existing sanctions against American business support for the pipeline to include any foreign companies doing business with Russia. All such firms would be barred from doing any business with the United States.

Enter George Ball again, now just retired after many quiet years as a managing partner of Lehman Brothers in New York. He published an essay, “The Case Against Sanctions,” in the New York Times Magazine in the fall of 1982 that is eerily prescient of the anti-Russian views repeatedly voiced today by President Biden, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland. 

“The Reagan Administration,” Ball wrote, “has now brought to the shaping of governmental decisions an ideological bias one might call the Manichaean Heresy. Present day Manichaeans espouse the doctrinal concept that Soviet Communism is the Antichrist—an evil element that must be extirpated if we are to have peace in the world. . . . [T]hat view is now shared by neo-conservative intellectuals. . . . As their major operational tactic, the Manicheans would have the United States seize every pretext to harass the Russians. . . .The Soviet economy is huge, the Soviet Union commands vast raw materials resources within its borders. . . . Niggling sanctions, no matter how persistently applied, could never prove more than a marginal nuisance. . . . With arrogance in inverse proportion to their own credentials of experience, Administration leaders are using crude methods to try to ride roughshod over the considered judgments and interests of allied governments, acting as though the United States had a monopoly of wisdom.”

Three decades later, in 2014, Vice President Joe Biden would reprise Reagan’s language and his fears of Russia’s gas and oil reserves in a speech to the Atlantic Council Energy and Economic Summit in Istanbul. Russia’s use of its energy was “a weapon undermining the security of nations,” he warned. “Here in Europe energy security is an especially vital regional security interest because of Russia’s track record in using the supply of energy as a foreign policy weapon.

“My message here,” Biden continued, “is not that Europe can or should do away with Russian imports. That is not the case at all. I have no doubt that Russia will and should remain a major source of energy supplies for Europe and the world . . . but it has to play by the rules of the game. It shouldn’t be able to use energy policy to play with the game.” Biden was warning Russia that it must play by America’s rules. Therein lie the seeds of the demise of the Nord Stream pipelines eight years later.

In his 1982 essay, Ball offered a future America what would be unheeded guidance about the way to deal with an unwanted Russian pipeline: “If our government thinks, for whatever reasons, that the pipeline is not a good idea, it should quietly urge that view on its allies and try to persuade them to pursue a different course; that is what alliances are all about.”

President Biden chose last September to ignore America’s European allies. More than that, he put those allies at risk of not being able to keep their people warm by approving the destruction of Nord Stream pipelines. He and his national security team did not have the courage or integrity to say what was done and why. At this point, barring a major defection among the few in the know, Biden and his aides will likely never admit the truth.

It is impossible to know, pending disclosures by the administration, why Biden chose that day to destroy the pipeline, but it is a fact that ten days earlier he had been indirectly mocked by Vladimir Putin during a press conference following a summit meeting of the Russian-sponsored Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Uzbekistan. Putin was asked about the rising price of natural gas throughout Europe, which was depicted as a consequence of the war he chose to start with Ukraine. Putin claimed that the energy crisis in Europe was not triggered by the war but was the result of what he called “the green agenda” and the shutting down of gas and oil facilities in response to environmental protests.

The Russian president then said if the West needs more gas “urgently . . . if things are so bad . . just go ahead and lift sanctions [that had been applied by the German government, with American approval] against Nord Stream 2 with its 55 billion cubic meters per year. All they have to do is press the button and they will get it going. But they chose to shut it off themselves . . . imposed sanctions against the new Nord Stream 2 and will not open it. Are we to blame for this? Let them [the West] think hard about who is to blame and let none of them blame us for their mistakes.”

Ball’s criticism of sanctions is little remembered now, but his courage in confronting Kennedy early on in the Vietnam War has lingered in the minds of a few senior Washington policymakers. While reporting for the New Yorker on the pernicious and secret foreign policy intrigues of Vice President Dick Cheney in the years after 9/11, I was called one afternoon by the secretary to Representative David Obey. The Democrat from Wisconsin was chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, and he was unquestionably one the most important, and reclusive, members of Congress. He’d been in the House since 1969 and was one of those almost invisible representatives who made Congress what it should be. Obey was also one of four members of a subcommittee, two Democrats and two Republicans, with access to the CIA’s secrets—the findings on all covert operations that the agency under law has to provide to Congress. Obey’s message to me was very direct: he was reading in my dispatches about alleged covert operations that were not known to him. What happened next remains a private matter, but sometime after Obey retired in 2011, two years into Barack Obama’s first term, I made a point to get in contact with him.

Obey told me a story about George Ball of all people. It turned out that the memory of Ball’s willingness to confront Kennedy with an unwanted truth about the Vietnam War still burned brightly in some. Obey said that as a ranking Democratic member of the House he had been invited by Obama to a small meeting early in the new administration to discuss the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Obey told me that he had stayed quiet while generals and legislators discussed how many troops the new president should add to current levels. His worry was a matter of budget concerns. (The only hint of dissent voiced in the meeting, Obey recalled, had come from Joe Biden. This early caution foreshadowed Biden’s decision last year to admit defeat and pull the American military out of Afghanistan. It was a decision marred by poor planning, a lack of sufficient force, and a suicide bombing that killed thirteen American soldiers in the evacuation process.) 

As the meeting ended, Obey said, he asked the president if he had a moment for a quick chat. Obey warned Obama that expanding the Afghan War “would crowd out [from the budget] large portions of your domestic program—except perhaps health care.” He asked the new president if he remembered the White House recordings of Lyndon Johnson in the days after the assassination of Kennedy that were released a few years earlier and had become constant Saturday morning public radio fodder. Obama did. Did the president remember Johnson’s talk within a few months after the he took office with Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the conservative head of the Armed Services Committee, in which both men acknowledged that adding more troops in Vietnam, then sought by the U.S. commanders in Saigon, would not help the war effort and could even lead to a disastrous war with China? Johnson also worried, he told Russell, that many thousands of American soldiers would die in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Again Obama said yes, he remembered those exchanges. Obey then asked Obama, “Who’s your George Ball?” There was silence. “Either the president chose not to answer,” the disappointed Obey told me, “or he did not have one.” With that question the conversation was over. Obama subsequently authorized an increase of 30,000 troops for the war.

Refute the Evil. Live the Joy. Share the Hope. merlin

My Fifty Years With Dan Ellsberg

the man who changed America by Seymour Hersh 03/7/23, written for you aging historians still desirous for the rest of the story…

I think it best that I begin with the end. On March 6, I and dozens of Dan’s friends and fellow activists received a two-page notice that he had been diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer and was refusing chemotherapy because the prognosis, even with chemo, was dire. He will be ninety-two in April.

Last November, over a Thanksgiving holiday spent with family in Berkeley, I drove a few miles to visit Dan at the home in neighboring Kensington he has shared for decades with his wife Patricia. My intent was to yack with him for a few hours about our mutual obsession, Vietnam. More than fifty years later, he was still pondering the war as a whole, and I was still trying to understand the My Lai massacre. I arrived at 10 am and we spoke without a break—no water, no coffee, no cookies—until my wife came to fetch me, and to say hello and visit with Dan and Patricia. She left, and I stayed a few more minutes with Dan, who wanted to show me his library of documents that could have gotten him a long prison term. Sometime around 6 pm—it was getting dark—Dan walked me to my car, and we continued to chat about the war and what he knew—oh, the things he knew—until I said I had to go and started the car. He then said, as he always did, “You know I love you, Sy.”

So this is a story about a tutelage that began in the summer of 1972, when Dan and I first connected. I have no memory of who called whom, but I was then at the New York Times and Dan had some inside information on White House horrors he wanted me to chase down—stuff that had not been in the Pentagon Papers. 

I was planning to write about my friendship with Dan after he passed away but last weekend my youngest son reminded me that he still had some of the magic trick materials that Dan had delighted him with in the mid-1980s, when Dan was crashing with our family, as he often did when visiting Washington. “Why not write about him now?” he asked. Why not? 

I first learned of Dan’s importance in the summer of 1971, when he was outed for delivering the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times a few weeks after the newspaper began a series of shattering stories about the disconnect between what we were told and what really had been going on. Those papers remain today the most vital discussion of a war from the inside. Even after the New York Times exposures, their seven thousand pages would be rarely read in full.

I was then working for the New Yorker on a Vietnam project and had learned that it was Dan who did the leaking a week or so before his name became public. His outing was inevitable, and on June 26, after hiding out in Cambridge, Dan strolled to the U.S Attorney’s office in Boston—there were scores of journalists waiting—and had a brief chat with the reporters before turning himself in for what all expected would be the trial of the decade. He told the crowd that he hoped that “the truth will free us of this war.” And then, as he fought his way to the courthouse steps, a reporter asked him how he felt about going to prison. His response struck me then and still makes me tingle: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”

I had done my bit in exposing the My Lai massacre and publishing a book about it in 1970. I was then in the process of writing a second book on the Army’s cover-up of the slaughter. “Hell, no,” I thought to myself, “No way I would go to jail—especially for telling an unwanted truth.” I followed Ellsberg’s subsequent trial in a Los Angeles federal court and even wrote about the wrongdoing of the White House creeps who broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst—at the request of President Nixon. (The government’s case was thrown out after the extent of the White House-ordered spying on Ellsberg became public.)

It was early in the election year summer of 1972 when Ellsberg and I got in touch with each other. I was banging away on the losing Vietnam war and CIA misdeeds for the Times. Nixon looked like a sure thing, despite continuing the hated war, because of stumble after stumble for the campaign of the Democratic nominee, Senator George McGovern. Dan had two stories that he thought could change the dynamics of the November election.

I liked him right off the bat. He was so earnest, so bright, as handsome as a movie star, and so full of the kind of inside information about the Vietnam War that few others had. And so willing to share them with no worry about the consequences. He understood that as the source of highly secret information and procedures he was taking all the risks and that as a reporter I was going to write stories that would get acclaim and put me at no risk. At some point in our chats, I brought him home for a good meal. His campaign against the Vietnam War was literally consuming him, and he immediately engaged with my wife and our two small children. He did magic tricks, he was marvelous on the piano—Dan could play the Beatles and Beethoven—and he connected with all of us. Our friendship was locked in—forever. I confess that late at night—we were both night owls—he and I would walk the dog and find time to sit on a curb somewhere and smoke a few Thai sticks. How Dan always managed to have a supply of these joints from Southeast Asia I chose not to ask. He would talk about all the sealed and locked secret files of the Vietnam War that he could recall, with his photographic memory, in near perfect detail.

In the early 1980s I was writing a long and very critical book about Henry Kissinger’s sordid days as Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of State, with a focus on Vietnam. At one point, Dan spent more than a week in our home, rising at 6 am to read the 2,300 pages of typed manuscript. He understood that I did not want his analyses or disagreements with my conclusions, but only factual errors. One morning Dan told me I had misread a mid-1960s Washington Post piece on the war by Joe Kraft, whose column was then a must-read. I argued, and he was adamant. So I drove downtown to my office, dug through boxes of files and found the column. Dan had remembered the details of a two-decade-old column in a daily newspaper. His memory was scary.

There were two White House abuses he wanted me to expose before the presidential election in the fall of 1972. Dan told me that Nixon and Kissinger—for whom Dan had written an important early policy paper he was appointed national security adviser—had been wiretapping aides and cabinet members. The second tip Dan had for me was that Kissinger had ordered some of his aides to produce a plan for using tactical nuclear weapons in South Vietnam, in case they were needed to end the war on American terms. If I could get one or two sources—by this time there were a number of former Kissinger aides who had quietly resigned over the Vietnam War—on the record, Dan said, it just might get the Democrats into office. It was the longest of long shots, but I tried like hell all summer to find someone who had firsthand information, as Dan did not, and who was willing to confirm Dan’s information, even if on background. Of course, it was understood I would have to tell Abe Rosenthal, executive editor of the Times, who my off-the-record source was.

It was a lousy summer for me, because there were a few former Kissinger aides who easily confirmed Dan’s information, but would not agree to my providing their names to the Times. In one case, with a very decent guy who very much hoped he would get a senior job in a future administration, I came close, aided by the fact that his wife—I always conducted such visits at night—said to her husband, “Oh, for God’s sakes just tell him the truth.” She said it over and over. Talk about a painful experience. Needless to say, their marriage did not last long. The wife’s anger that the truth was not being told helped me understand Dan’s obsession with a war whose worst elements were simply not known to the public. I wasn’t able to get any source on the record in time for the election, but in subsequent years I did get the stories. 

There was one story Dan told me in late 1993 that seemed to capture the secret life on the inside of a major war. He had gone back and forth on short missions to South Vietnam while working as a senior State Department official, but he jumped at a chance in mid-1965 to join a team in Saigon committed to pacification—winning hearts and minds—of the villagers in the South. Its leader was Ed Lansdale, a CIA hero of counterinsurgency for his earlier efforts in routing communist insurgents in the Philippines.

I always took good notes in my meetings with Dan, not because I planned to write about him at some point—I knew he would write his own memoirs—but because I was getting a seminar on how things really worked on the inside. Read his words, and you can judge for yourself how complicated life could be at the top.

“In 1965,” Dan began, “I had done a study of the Cuban missile crisis and I had four operational clearances above top secret, including U-2 clearances” and National Security Agency clearances. He had also interviewed Bobby Kennedy two times about his role in the crisis. Ellsberg’s clearances were so sacrosanct that he was supposed to register in a special office upon arrival in Saigon and from then on he would not be allowed to travel outside of Saigon without an armored car or in a two-engine airplane or better. He got around the system by not deigning to register, a rarity in a world of war where top secret clearances were seen by many as evidence of machismo.

And so Ellsberg went off to work in Saigon with Lansdale. “For one and one half years,” Ellsberg said, “I spent nearly every evening listening to Lansdale talk about his covert operations in the Philippines and earlier in North Vietnam in the 1950s. By this time I’d been working with secrets for years and thought I knew what kind of secrets could be kept from whom. I also thought Ed and I had a good working knowledge of each other and our secrets. Every piece of information was cataloged in your mind and you knew to whom you could say and what you could say. In all of this, Jack Kennedy was mentioned and so was Bobby, but there was no mention by Lansdale of Cuba and no mention that Lansdale had ever worked for Jack and Bobby Kennedy.” 

A decade later, after both Kennedy brothers had been assassinated, I wrote a series for the New York Times on the CIA’s spying on hundreds of thousands of American anti-Vietnam war protesters, members of Congress and reporters—all in direct violation of the agency’s 1947 charter barring any domestic activity. It led to the establishment of the Senate’s Church Committee in 1975. It was the most extensive Congressional inquiry into the activities of the CIA since the agency’s beginning. The committee exposed the assassination activities of the CIA, operations undertaken on orders that clearly came from Jack and Bobby Kennedy, although no direct link was published in the committee’s final report. But the committee reported extensively on a secret group authorized by Jack Kennedy and run by his brother Bobby to come up with options to terrorize Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro. The covert operation had the code name Mongoose. And it was led, the committee reported, in 1961 and 1962 by Ed Lansdale.

Ellsberg told me he was flabbergasted. “When I heard about Lansdale and Mongoose,” he said, “it revealed to me an ability to keep secrets on an insider level that went far beyond what I had imagined. It was like discovering your next-door neighbor and your weekend fishing companion”—Ellsberg, it should be noted, never went fishing in his life—“and close, dear friend who, when he died, turned out to have been the secretary of State.

“It was astounding, because Mongoose was exactly the kind of operation I’d expected to hear about from Lansdale. He told about covert operations all the time. I think Ed had been told by President Kennedy to ‘keep his fucking mouth shut.’

“When you’ve been in a system with as high a level as possible of secrecy, you understand that things do get talked about. And you get a sense of what is usually held back. I was hearing all about other covert operations, but somebody—not Landsdale—had put a lid on Mongoose.”

After the assassination of Jack Kennedy, Ellsberg theorized, “any far reaching investigation into his death would have to lead to many covert operations.” His point was that there was no evidence that the Warren Commission set up to investigate the assassination had done so.

In all of Dan’s many hours of tutoring, as I understood years later, he understood and empathized with my eagerness—even my need—to learn all that I could about his world of secrets and lies, things said out loud and hidden in top-secret documents. And so he happily became my tutor and taught me where and how to look inside the recessed corners of the American intelligence community.

In return, I gave him my friendship and welcomed him into my family. He loved long talks with my wife, a doctor, teaching the kids magic tricks, and playing Billy Joel songs and similar stuff on the piano for them. We all sensed early on that there was a need for him to be an innocent kid, too, if only to serve as a brief respite from his constant anxiety and the guilt he carried in his soul about what his America had done to the Vietnamese people.

Dan was showing me an insider’s love, just as he and Patricia radiated love and acceptance to all their many friends and admirers who, like me, will never forget the lessons he taught us and what we learned. 

No way I’m going to wait for him to move along without saying what I want to say right now.

To watch Ellsberg speaking to a press conference on New Year’s Eve 1971, click here. To watch the 2009 documentary on Ellsberg, The Most Dangerous Man in America, click here.

Seymour Hersh is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Are The Fruits Of The Spirit A Prerequisite For Peacemaking?

Today I am burdened by the lack of God’s peacemakers visibly impacting our world. And since we as Christ Followers operate by faith and not by sight as the world does, we may not even see or hear of many attempts at peacemaking, nor even, the end results. I now view peacemaking simply as a lifestyle choice that we Christ Followers (CF’s) choose to adopt and implement in our daily routines serving notice, first as a reminder to ourselves and our family, and secondly, to all those in our spheres of influence, that we are not their their typical next door neighbor. And therein, lies the biggest challenge for CF’s.

I believe the Mennonite Church has always struggled with its identity in Christ. I certainly did as this weird 1 of 2 Mennonite kids in a class of 72 in the early 60’s. Our girls were not allowed to wear shorts to gym class and nor were they allowed to cut their hair. However, the one unique trait that I thought the Catholic Lutheran cultural majority had the most trouble with was that we didn’t fight. But now I think, that was all fabricated in our heads. Of course, we said we didn’t believe in war. And truth told, I was never ridiculed or made fun of nor was anyone else I knew. But not bearing arms or participating in the armed forces, was a point I avoided at all costs. Had I known my church history better then, I possibly could have constructed a diversion as Paul did with Pharisees and Sadducees over the resurrection, only here, I’d have used the Reformation.

When I got talked into declaim, I didn’t choose the Sermon on the Mount nor defending our position of non-resistance. No, I chose to speak on why smoking was not a wise activity: it was an expensive, dirty habit, that ruined cars, homes, clothing; and science was just beginning to discover all the health risks. Or so they said. Never once did I consider “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the living God…. ! Yes, speaking against smoking in ’65 was a very safe subject as smoking was quickly falling from favor,

Bottom line, have not we Christians always had an identity crisis? In the 70’s, Mennonite youth soon discovered the hippie and the anti-war movement nearly put them in the spotlight, and perhaps we today as a church are still struggling with the identities we adopted and the cultural alliances we made back then, rather than seeking out our unique identity in Christ as revealed to us thru the scriptures by discerning with truth tellers in community, what God’s actual desires were for us during these changing times into the ensuing years and decades.

Today, we exist in a culture that is truly on drugs and steroids virtually without any time to think a clear original thought since we’re being inundated by sights and sounds of in-your-face  examples of hate, selfishness, anger, distrust, greed, perversion, etc, all quite clearly, being everything except, how can we best produce the fruits of the Spirit in our daily living in this culture?

I am well aware that I sorely squandered most of my life in trivial pursuits when I was endowed to become a peacemaker in my personal life and my spheres of influence, and possibly, even beyond!  Sensing the time is now for me to intentionally write about this devastating dilemma I experienced as a youth, and I believe, am yet observing today, I’ll share this journey with you. If the Spirit so prompts me, I may write more.

Not having read nor studied the classics on this subject, I’ll let that for you to research. I shall keep this discourse short (I was hoping less than 500 words, but I’m already over 2000) and simple by beginning with Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Sons of God.” Certainly, a worthy motivation, if not the premier text, as history supplies ample examples of such successes or dismal failures. These peacemakers were willing to risk their lives, health and wealth to bridge the gap between the camps to heal the disagreements and avoid the battles.

More pertinent though for most of us, is the unspoken or silent strife fermenting under the radar in just our personal lives, too often not spoken, certainly not confessed sin; never mind broadening the circle to include our families, congregations, and communities, all of which will be our focus here. I maintain if I can’t float my peacemaker ship in my own puddle, then just perhaps I’d better rethink my calling before I try a bigger pond with more ships. The apostle Paul advised us to first mature our digestive tract on milk before we attempt the complexities of digesting meat. You get the picture?

Have I ever looked critically in the mirror considering first the peacemaker dysfunction within first me, and my life?  I happen to believe and am now trying to live each day by replacing my personal dysfunctions (peacemaker quirks if you would, even sin perhaps) with operational and recognizable fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. Until that is accomplished in me, brothers and sisters, I’m still on milk and perhaps not qualified to be seek any recognition as a peacemaker beyond myself, whether in my family, church or community. I believe it is inherent with all institutional church groups to suffer from this difficulty of function.

I also just happen to believe Peace and Justice is so much more than academic pursuits and spiritual makeovers. Is not today’s lack of peace and justice in our society fundamentally stemming from our world’s humanity being separated from God’s love such that healing (peace & justice) can only be addressed, influenced or corrected, by peacemaking ambassadors serving as bond servants of Jesus Christ as they are empowered by Holy Spirit following Jesus’s birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension?

Or, on what basis are we operating? Yes, the church has been infiltrated, incapacitated, and intoxicated with the headiness of the church’s institutional success in taking the gospel around the world. But are not those days over! Look at the data! During the last century, we’ve witnessed the spiritual take down of western Europe and North America while we’re seemingly unable to see the elephant in the church’s hospice room trashing the hospice team attempting to offer life support before they offer last rites!    

Is not the first line of strategy to consider in any peacemaking offensive (seriously, we’re not to cower in fear and be on the defensive) is for CF’s to be empowered? If you read me frequently, you may be sick and tired of hearing this by now, but it is so fundamentally basic in these last days to insure we move from milk to meat, and begin thriving spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and yes, for sure, even physically.

Succinctly stated, first and then sequentially, we must be obedient to God’s Word, then seek His forgiveness, His transformation, His empowerment by Holy Spirit, becoming discipling bond servants of Jesus Christ to serve as His ambassadors until death permits retirement.

Look around today on your road of life and you will see the worldliness in the church’s broad road’s exit to the narrow road. In fact, many Christians are just realizing now they stayed in the fast lane too long and no longer can squeeze over to the exit lane for the narrow way. They passed the “Cross” exit miles ago thinking exiting then was pure foolishness. Now with the family in the car, recognizing what is about to happen, panic rises as their lane is slowing to a standstill, and they are still stuck on the broad road and once again, locked down! Not a pretty picture but I believe it to be a crude reminder depicting the institutional church in W Europe and NA.  

I believe Jesus wants all of His Kingdom’s children to be known and sought after as peacemakers. Scripture makes it plain that we are to be known as ambassadors of peace leading or guiding persons “possessing no peace” toward:

  1. God: “God has given us the task of reconciling people to Him” (II Cor. 5:18 NLT). Read also the famous “unadorned clay pot” scripture from II Cor. 4:7-12 for additional understanding and clarity for the process. I prefer the Message here.
  2. Ourselves: “Joy fills the hearts that are planning peace!” (Prov. 12:20 NLT).
  3. Others: “And those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of goodness” (James 3:18 NLT).

Since the blessing of being a peacemaker is to be called a child of God, we can experience the joy of goodness, happiness, and peace within our own lives. When we exhibit these positive traits, we will begin to reflect:

  1. Contentment with ourselves: We will know our identity in Christ, thus giving us the contentment we’ve been searching for.
  2. Optimism in our faith: We will exhibit a love for God and reflect a positive faith toward out outlook on life and future events.
  3. Relationally connectedness: We will experience deeper & more intimate friendships. People will form closer bonds and our friendships will be strengthened.
  4. Doing what is right: We will have a benchmark to judge proper behavior for ourselves.

Make Jesus your Lord and Savior and gain your own peace. Trite but true. No God, No Peace. Know God, Know Peace. Enjoy the opportunities as Holy Spirit opens doors.

Prayer: Father God, may I have the courage to step out and become a peacemaker, Let it start with me and ripple out to the others in my pond. Help me humble myself so that I can thrive wherever you assign me short term or plant me long term, for service in your kingdom.

Action: Deal with whatever causes strife within yourself and others. Take your sins to the cross and leave them there, never pick them up again! If that is a re- occurring problem for you as me, go to the March 2 blog titled “Issues With Your Past” and click the link. Some of the best such teaching I’ve ever heard.

PS. Read the classics if I’ve challenged you. I have not the time or energy for such. God only gave me this simple message this morning after Emilie Barnes in her devotional “Minute Meditations” stirred the fire within me. Rather easy to tell the words she wrote. Her words intrigued me, and then the Spirit moved me. Simple. Get ready. War is coming! Wrong, it has been here and still is.

I hope Emilie and I inspire you to go far beyond with the intricacies of God’s command to be peacemakers ever broadening the ripples, perhaps in your lake, with the wisdom or scars (evidence of God’s healing) you’ve been endowed with. Live in the Joy.

Can Easter Bunny Trails Lead to Honest Conversations?

Plain Values Magazine: Restoration. Authenticity. Hope.

What Can I Learn About You Looking At The Magazines on Your Coffee Table?  

Every Christian Home Should Consider Getting Plain Values magazine!

Coming into my office after doing lunch, I collapsed in my chair and picked up my Feb edition of Plain Values I’d neglected to read yet while reflecting on the phenomenal Sunday morning I’d just experienced.

It started rough though by sleeping thru a 5:30 alarm until 6:45. I quickly cared for the animals, got my mother-in-law her pills, coffee & toast, and was off to the 8 AM men’s prayer group being only 6 minutes late. After this unique week being both buoyantly positive and the jury still out and, I inhaled the groups love and encouragement while we all renewed our bonds praying we’d be ready for whatever comes our way this week as His ambassadors in our congregation and community.

Returning home, I fired up the livestream for mother and I. Awesome service but no time here to share – listen for yourself on youTube Kidron Mennonite Church. I text the SS class I was coming before driving back to church (16 min) and we shared our prayer requests. One member’s friend Mark had called from Arkansas, requesting prayer as he is befriending a bizarre derelict in his 50’s evidently possessed and continually repeating “all I want to do is to go to hell to be with my friends,” and understandably so, as no wants to be around him in his current state. Mark has visited this man 30 times and so far, has seen little change. Rather reminds me of the demon-possessed man in the tombs as recorded in Matthew 8 and Mark 5. Please pray for Mark as he seeks help for this deliverance.

Indeed, a great morning, but finally, my chores are all done and I’m off the clock. Plain Values magazine is one of my literary life lines, seldom lying dormant for a few days, never a month.

Thumbing past Joel Sallatin, now known nation-wide, he having just returned from Israel, will be in Akron and Middlefield in March, and Walnut Creek in June. Joel now owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swope, VA in western Augusta County. Loretta & I bought our first home in Stuarts Draft, in western Augusta in’78 but I didn’t know Joel until after we returned to OH. When Joel is not on the road speaking, he’s home on the farm in Swope, keeping the callouses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local regenerative food and farming systems.

I remember when I first met Joel at an Acres USA conference in ’84 and I recall that my father-in-law, LaVern, admired him and was hoping I’d become friends with Joel so their shared similar agricultural philosophies might help us grow our recently birthed mini-Penn State soil lab, NSWS Labs. LaVern greatly enjoyed passing thru the doors the lab opened for him for his fifteen years before retirement giving him the wings he needed to launch his other dreams. Some of his grandkids are now aware too, that he was definitely born a generation too soon. And it didn’t help the situation one little bit that I was the in-house doubting Thomas pain in the butt not quite willing yet to take on conventional agriculture as precarious as I was financially, and I certainly was not a poster child either from Matthew Kelly’s Book The Culture Solution, that I live by and teach from today.

Still thumbing thru the February issue, I passed the regular contributors; Homestead Living struck numerous chords, especially growing as a writer; I even paused to skim thru Ferree’s uniquely meaningful transparency detailing her second marriage proposal.

Finally, on page 45, I encountered Wendy’s contribution: Honest Conversations: Proof of God. I settled down into my chair in full sunshine, relaxed, and began to read the following and immediately was hooked. Later I realized, I’d never read her post prior, but now, I sensed a deep literary and spiritual kindred spirit forming. FYI, don’t miss her bio at the end of my abbreviated or condensed version of her post. Here is Wendy:

“I thought I had become a Christian. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my first conversion was to theism – the belief in God. And in many ways, I had become as “Christian” as many folks ever become – lumping everything together with a general understanding. If God was the king of the universe, and He said His son was Jesus, who was I to argue? But I quickly came to realize what I’m not sure the church at large has figured out: sometimes we believe completely, but don’t completely know what we believe.

That was me. Once I got over being wrong (or maybe more aptly stated, misled) and surrendered my life to God, my husband pointed out there was a difference between my Father in Heaven and Jesus, my Savior. We know them as two parts of the Trinity – the Godhead – but do we know them separately specifically? Because I had spent so many years debating and considering God’s existence, it was easy to just include Jesus in the equation. If God’s real, Jesus is real. End of story.

But with Jesus comes the proof of God. He is the tangible element of our faith….

It’s not hard to conclude the impact of Jesus must be supernatural. Since we’re blessed with a mountain of prophetic accounts to examine, you may be like I was, leery and asking what do they prove? Are they reliable? Are they not like fortune tellers? When I get stuck in the weeds of just how many specifics were prophesied about the coming Messiah, it becomes impossible to check so many boxes oneself. I will defer to mathematician and author of the book Science Speaks, Peter Stoner, because he explains it so perfectly.

“If we take a quantity of 10^17 [10 to the 17th power] of silver dollars and lay them on the surface of Texas, all 265,596 sq. mi., they will cover the state two feet deep. Now mark one of those silver dollars and then imagine you could stir all that mass of silver dollars, thoroughly! Blindfold a man, put him in a helicopter and tell him to land at his will to pick up the marked silver dollar. What chance would he have getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing just eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote in their own wisdom.

Now these prophecies were either given by the inspiration of God or the prophets just wrote them as they thought they should be. In such a case the prophets had just one chance in 10^17 of having them come true in any man, but they all came true in Christ…. This means the fulfillment of just eight prophecies alone proves that God inspired the writings of prophecies to a definitiveness which lacks only one chance in 10^17 of being absolute.”  

I don’t know about you but I’m convinced. But just in case you need more proof, Stoner goes on to say that the likelihood of one man fulfilling 48 of the OT prophecies is mathematically impossible. He suggests the number is a one with 157 zeros after it. For reference, there are not only eight or even 48 prophecies fulfilled in the Bible. There are more than 300. And they’re written by different authors over hundreds of years.

We can be sure Jesus was the Son of God!

Now, appropriately asked in this Lenten season with the undercurrent of whomever casting about their doubts, the question becomes, “Can we be sure He rose from the dead?” Well, I would answer: “How can we be sure of anything?” Somewhere along the way, Christians stopped referring or thinking about Bible as history. Perhaps with the rise of academia? Y’all, it’s a historical book, and in many cases, it’s more accurate and cross referenced more than other typically accepted historical documents. Consider how we learn about anything that happened before we were born.

For example, we have a substantial collection of accounts from the Second World War, both from survivors of Nazi Germany as well as from Nazis themselves. Soon, we will enter a generation where there are no survivors from that time period. We will be left with only their stories – written, recorded, photographed, and otherwise – as evidence that it happened. But we’ve had nearly 100 years to collect information from both sides of WWII, allowing for it to be contested, corrected, and corroborated. From that point on, those first-hand accounts will remain as a written record of what happened from those who were there, data we now call history.

The same is true of the Bible. There are many things in this world to be uncertain of, but Jesus’ death, and resurrection – the cornerstone of our faith – is not one of them. In the end, there is a difference between knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus. It’s good to believe in God. It’s important and foundational. But it is hollow without the confidence that comes from knowing what is true and why. Not just believing, but actually trusting in the truth of what you believe. We can’t follow a God we don’t know, and we can’t lead others to a Savior we’re not certain is the Lord.

Every congregation needs spark plugs like Wendy to be “truth tellers in their community.” Wendy Cunningham is wife to Tom and homeschool mom to three amazing gifts from God. In addition to that calling, she is an entrepreneur and author. Her book What If You’re Wrong?, blog, and devotionals can be found at gainingmyperspective.com. She is also host of the podcast Gaining My Perspective. Wendy loves Jesus and inspiring people to step into their calling – whatever that might look like in this season. When she’s not doing all of the above, she can be found homesteading and chasing kids and cows on her farm in Middle Tennessee. Sounds to me like we just met a Proverbs 31 woman with skin!    

   

Historical Roots of Our Beloved Doxology

I will give thanks to Thee, O Lord my God, with all my heart, and will glorify Thy name forever. Psalms 86:12

It’s been a productive week here on the blog, hopefully being purposeful, intentional, informative, reflective, sourcing both healing and renewal, and as always, to offer praise and worship to our Triune God. I’ve been told “the Father begets, the Son is begotten, and the Holy Spirit presides,” which I learned after I did due diligence this morning on the “Doxology” whose words are below:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;

praise Him, all creatures here below;

praise Him above, ye heavenly host;

praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

These lines are likely the most sung words now for more than 300 years in congregations. Perhaps the Doxology has been more instrumental in teaching the doctrine of the Trinity than all theology books ever written. More than a hymn, Christ-Followers regard it as an offering or sacrifice of praise for God’s continual flow of blessings to us the past week, but even millenniums.

Too often as a child, I remember the Doxology marked the climax of a long Sunday morning sermon signaling the final march of the pastor to the rear door to encourage or admonish those in attendance, at least those who chose not to skip out the other doors. I just realized how this concluding church routine is all is so similar to the stadium antics with the national anthem being sung immediately prior to the teams taking the field. We boys too, took to the parking lot when the Doxology concluded as the pastor simultaneously pivoted at the rear door. Of course, we all clamored for the other exits, and no, there was definitely no sports gear present!

Perhaps your memories with the Doxology are similar, or maybe, you’re totally clueless. However, of interest to us keen on history, is that the author was a bold, perhaps brash, outspoken 17th century Anglican bishop named Thomas Ken (1637-1711). Orphaned, he was raised by his older sister and her husband, Izaak Walton, noted for his classic The Compleat Angler. A scholar at Winchester College, he spent most of his life intertwined with Winchester, both College and Cathedral. There the small statured prelate, through his preaching and music, sought to uplift the spiritual lives of his students.

His illustrious career was stormy and colorful. For a short while he served as the English chaplain at the royal court in the Hague, Holland, but being so outspoken in denouncing the corrupt lives of those in authority at the Dutch capital, he was sent home. Evidently by then, Dutch anabaptists were enjoying the ensuing Dutch Renaissance’s economic prosperity that followed their earlier reformational persecution, as they were already perfecting their later popular stance of being the “quiet in the land,” or at least, in their pew.

Thomas Ken however, upon returning to England, continued to reveal the same spirit of boldness in rebuking the moral sins of his dissolute monarch. Despite this, King Charles II always admired his courageous chaplain, reminding me of biblical Daniel who uniquely I believed served three leadership regimes during his captivity, and always, was admirably capable! Perhaps the question begging to be asked today, is why is the church discouraging our brightest and best from seeking to fill responsible positions as Daniel did so well? Even the NYC mayor, Eric Adams is trying. See below.

Bishop Ken was lauded by historian Macaulay with this tribute: “He came as near to the ideal of Christian perfection as human weakness permits.” See Kenneth W Osbeck, comp., Amazing Grace: 366 Hymn Stories for Personal Devotions, (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications , 1990) p. 342.  

Indeed, a most worthy or envious epitaph, especially during this moment of historical chaos, likely as during Bishop Ken’s life. Reminds me of the clip sent me yesterday of NYC mayor Eric Adams speech this past Tuesday at an interfaith prayer breakfast. I wonder if they concluded with the Doxology? Click the link below to learn more.

I’m thinking perhaps a similar fire was/is present in their bellies? All three were simply obedient, forgiven, transformed, and empowered to disciple TODAY! If you can, sing the Doxology today with gusto, whether during the commute or in your shower! Live the Joy! It’s our privilege, even our mandate.

More Damming Evidence On Norway’s Complicity Taking Out Nord Stream…

Time to Pay Attention Folks! For such times as this I really do miss Paul Harvey and his “And Now For the Rest of the Story.” But rest assured, the two recent Seymour Hersh’s news clips I posted are now elevating Paul Harvey’s original concept several Quantum Leaps; and just-in-time-too! Do not be deceived. Truth ultimately prevails!

Lyndon B. Johnson delivering his televised report on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, August 4, 1964.

Why Norway? In my account of the Biden Administration’s decision to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, why did much of the secret planning and training for the operation take place in Norway? And why were highly skilled seamen and technicians from the Norwegian Navy involved?

The simple answer is that the Norwegian Navy has a long and murky history of cooperation with American intelligence. Five months ago that teamwork—about which we still know very little—resulted in the destruction of two pipelines, on orders of President Biden, with international implications yet to be determined. And six decades ago, so the histories of those years have it, a small group of Norwegian seamen were entangled in a presidential deceit that led to an early—and bloody—turning point in the Vietnam war.

After the Second World War, ever prudent Norway invested heavily in the construction of large, heavily armed fast attack boats to defend its 1,400 miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline. These vessels were far more effective than the famed American PT boat that was ennobled in many a postwar movie. These boats were known as “Nasty-class,” for their powerful gunnery, and some of them were sold to the US Navy. According to reporting in Norway, by early 1964 at least two Norwegian sailors confessed to their involvement in CIA-led clandestine attacks along the North Vietnam coast. Other reports, never confirmed, said the Norwegian patrol boats where manned by Norwegian officers and crew. What was not in dispute was that the American goal was to put pressure on the leadership in North Vietnam to lessen its support of the anti-American guerrillas in South Vietnam. The strategy did not work.

None of this was known at the time to the American public. And the Norwegians would keep the secret for decades. The CIA’s lethal game of cat-and-mouse warfare led to a failed attack on August 2, 1964, with three North Vietnamese gunships engaging two American destroyers—the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy—on a large body of contested water known as the Gulf of Tonkin that straddled both North and South Vietnam.

Two days later, with the destroyers still intact, the commander of the Maddox cabled his superiors that he was under a torpedo attack. It was a false alarm, and he soon rescinded the report. But the American signals intelligence community—under pressure from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was doing President Johnson’s bidding—looked the other way as McNamara ignored the second cableand Johnson told the American public there was evidence that North Vietnam had attacked an American destroyer. Johnson and McNamara had found a way to take the war to North Vietnam. 

Johnson’s nationally televised speech on the evening of August 4, 1964, is chilling in its mendacity, especially when one knows what was to come.

“This new act of aggression,” he said, “aimed directly at our own forces, again brings home to all of us in the United States the importance of the struggle for peace and security in Southeast Asia. Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Vietnam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” 

Public anger swelled, and Johnson authorized the first American bombing of the North. A few days later Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with only two dissenting votes, giving the president the right to deploy American troops and use military force in South Vietnam in any manner he chose. And so it went on for the next eleven years, with 58,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese deaths to come.

The Norwegian navy, as loyal allies in the Cold War, stayed mum, and over the next few years, according to further reporting in Norway, sold eighteen more of their Nasty Class patrol boats to the U.S. Navy. Six were destroyed in combat.

In 2001, Robert J. Hanyok, a historian at the National Security Agency, published Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2–4 August 1964,a definitive study of the events in the gulf, including the manipulation of signals intelligence. He revealed that 90 percent of the relevant intercepts, including those from the North Vietnamese, had been kept out the NSA’s final reports on the encounter and thus were not provided to the Congressional committees that later investigated the abuse that led America deeper into the Vietnam War.

That is the public record as it stands. But, as I have learned from a source in the US intelligence community, there is much more to know. The first batch of Norwegian patrol boats meant for the CIA’s undeclared war against the North Vietnamese actually numbered six. They landed in early 1964 at a Vietnamese naval base in Danang, eighty-five miles south of the border between North and South Vietnam. The ships had Norwegian crews and Norwegian Navy officers as their captains. The declared mission was to teach American and Vietnamese sailors how to operate the ships. The vessels were under the control of a long-running CIA-directed series of attacks against coastal targets inside North Vietnam. The secret operation was controlled by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington and not by the American command in Saigon, which was then headed by Army General William Westmoreland. That shift was deemed essential because there was another aspect of the undeclared war against the North that was sacrosanct. US Navy SEALs were assigned to the mission with a high-priority list of far more aggressive targets that included heavily defended North Vietnamese radar facilities.

It was a secret war within a secret war. I was told that at least two SEALs were ambushed by the North Vietnamese and severely wounded in a fire fight. Both men managed to make their way to the coast and were eventually rescued. Both men were awarded the Medal of Honor, America’s highest decoration, in secret.

There also were far less dramatic movements as the war unraveled. At some later date, it was decided to arm bats with incendiary devices and drop them, by air, over areas of high interest in the south. The release came at high altitude, and the bats quickly froze to death.

This bit of top secret and heretofore unknown history raises, to this reporter, an obvious question: what else do we not know about the secret operation in Norway that led to the destruction of the pipelines? And is there anyone in the Senate and the House, or in the American press, interested in finding out what was going on—and what else we do not know?

 The link below opens the video clips for your review and start your seven day free trial.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seymourhersh/p/from-the-gulf-of-tonkin-to-the-baltic?r=690o5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Meet My Newest Spiritual Mentor of 2022

Robert Rogers, shares recent continuing unplanned home going events in his family during the past weeks. Founder of Mighty in the Land Ministry, featured in the Sept ’22 Plain Values magazine from Winesburg, OH. Author of Into the Deep: one man’s story of how tragedy took his family but could not take his faith; 7 Steps to No Regrets: How to find peace with God, others, and yourself; Rise Above: How to Heal the Hurts and Overcome the Worst.

Here’s current inspiration from my friend Robert.

…for everything serves Your plans.  If Your instructions hadn’t sustained me with joy, I would have died in my misery.  I will never forget Your commandments, for by them You give me life.” (Psalm 119:91-93)

    On January 28th, on an unusually warm and sunny day in the Louisville, Kentucky area, my brothers and I carried the coffin of our eldest brother – Dr. Paul Joseph Rogers – to his grave at Grove Hill Cemetery in Shelbyville, Kentucky where his earthly body was laid to rest until Jesus comes again.  Lifting my brother’s casket from the hearse to the burial site felt so strangely surreal, somewhat like a dream, as if I was viewing a dreaded, unimaginable nightmare.  I gently set my boutonniere atop Paul’s coffin, forming a cross with those flowers of the other six pallbearers.  After placing mine, I kissed the top of the casket and traced a cross across the wood grains with my thumb, fighting back my tears as I genuflected alongside his crypt. 

    After the committal prayer by the pastor, the cemetery workers promptly began the ghastly process of interring the coffin into the ground.  I had never witnessed this before at any other burial, including that of my own previous wife and our four children in 2003 after their untimely drowning deaths in Kansas from the August 30th flash flood.  Entombing the coffin was usually left for another time after the family and friends had departed the cemetery.

    But, today was different.  The interment began immediately after the committal.  None of us viewing this sacred moment could move.  It was as if all of us were frozen in time like statues, entranced by this solemn and somber occasion, wishing we could stop time, pause the moment, or somehow rewind life a few months before Paul’s epic battle against pancreatic cancer had ensued.  Siblings, parents, children, grandchildren, friends, and patients alike were all entranced in the instant, fixated on the abrupt brevity of such a vibrant young life.  With each clinking sound of the entombment ratchet-lowering mechanisms, every inch of my brother’s coffin descended into his grave – until it was no longer visible from my view.  As my heart sank within me, my knees instinctively hit the ground, my hands reverently made the sign of the cross over my body, and the irrevocability of Paul’s passing from this earth became more and more final.

    As the youngest of eight children (five boys and three girls), Paul is our first sibling to pass.  Paul is survived by us 7 siblings, our mother, his bride (of 39 years), 6 children and their 7 grandchildren.  The death of any and every loved one is uniquely excruciating.  I still feel out of balance, as though one of the limbs in our family body is gone.

    As a family, and as the body of Christ, we are bonded by unseen ligaments of love.  When someone passes from this planet, those of us who remain strive to regain our equilibrium after such a difficult loss, realizing that life will never return to “normal” again.  The depth of our grief is a testament to the depth of our love for each other.  The pain is excruciating because our love for those who passed was so passionate.  Our hearts hurt so much because we love and miss them so much.

    Just 11 months prior (February 2022), some cancerous cells were detected in Paul’s gall bladder.  We covered him in prayers and scriptures, believing God for the best as Paul received treatments at Mayo Clinic and at the University of Louisville Hospital.  His closest friend, Danny, said, “Paul, God has this.  You have God, and we have you.”  As Paul – with his bride and his extended family – waged a formidable assault against the diagnosis on all spiritual and medical fronts, the cancer later spread to his spine.  Yet, Paul was still upbeat and active, even vigorously riding his bike just a few months before his passing, determined to kick it.  When cancer cells were later found in his pancreas, his condition changed dramatically and quickly.

    Just four days before he passed, my wife and I visited him in the Louisville Hospital ICU on January 19-20, 2023.  As one brother described it, Paul looked akin to a “holocaust survivor,” just skin and bones.  Yet, Paul’s spirit remained strong, even then.  He seemed resolute to recover, and he truly embodied faith in action.

    Upon entering his room, Paul’s first words to us were, “How is Cora?”  He was asking about Inga’s mother who was just abruptly widowed only a few weeks prior on December 23rd after 45 years of marriage to Dr. Doug Fisher (a horse veterinary doctor) following a lengthy hospital stay for a pacemaker insertion and ensuing stroke complications.  (Our immediate family is all still reeling from the grief of Inga’s Dad’s passing.  I was a pallbearer twice in 3 weeks – both in the same month of January 2023.  Tough times.)

    When I shared with Paul about Cora’s difficulty answering people who ask, “How are you doing?” after the death of a loved-one, Paul’s immediate response was, “I am blessed of the Lord!”  Amazing.  Fighting for his life, my brother still declared the goodness of the Lord and bore witness to the fact that he was indeed blessed by Almighty God.

    On our next visit to Paul the following day in the ICU, his first question was, “How are the kids?”  He wanted to know about our 5 children.  I was floored!  Here is my big brother, battling the effects of cancer, and he’s still focused on others.  Paul maintained his ever-present outward focus, never inward. 

    Paul was a humble, brilliant cardiologist with degrees from Northwestern University, Johns Hopkins, and a residency and fellowship in cardiology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  He had a remarkable ability to make every patient, every individual, and every family member feel as though they were the most important person in the room (or on the planet for that matter).

    Paul worked diligently to remember people’s names and occupations, and he made a point to display a genuine, vested interest in each person’s health, progress, family, and general well-being.  He intentionally remembered and used people’s names, because he felt that the sweetest sound to someone’s ears is hearing their own name.  He also encouraged others to never judge anyone – anytime – for anything.

    By no means was Paul a physician for the prestige or the paycheck.  He became a doctor so that he could minister to others.  Paul loved to serve God by serving the body of Christ.  He truly cherished the chance to help patients daily as he practiced cardiology for 10 years in Columbus, Ohio, 7 years in Cincinnati, and 15 years in Louisville.

    One of the excruciating aspects of being treated for cancer for Paul was that he was unable to practice as a cardiologist daily.  He deeply longed to give and serve others again, not just receive medical treatments for himself.

    Paul was incessantly outwardly focused.  He had boundless energy and was typically up every night until 1am, and then awoke at 5am to exercise and spend time in prayer and God’s Word before early hospital rounds.  He blended his heart for Christ and his skill as a doctor on multiple medical mission trips to Honduras from 2012-2019 where, along with his wife and children, he taught residents and even improved cardiology facilities.  His heart of compassion and love for working with Spanish-speaking people in Honduras inspired him to work at the free clinic in Shelbyville, Kentucky as well. 

    As my wife and I visited with him for those precious final, brief minutes in the Louisville ICU only days before his death, we prayed, sang hymns (“Great is Thy Faithfulness”, “Be Thou My Vision”, “Numbers 6 Blessing Lullaby”), and fought back tears as I lay my hand on his head and kissed his forehead.  I asked my brother what he thought God’s purpose was through all this pain and difficult life season.  He responded with one word, “Closer.”  God was drawing us closer to Himself and our family closer to one another.  Beautiful.  Selfless.

    As the medical staff abruptly entered the room, my bride and I knew we had to depart.  Inga and I also sensed that it might very well be the last time we would see Paul on this planet alive, short of a divine miracle.  Paul and I locked eyes and he gave me a glance that I shall never forget, as if to say, “I love you, brother.  It’s almost time for me to go.  I’ll see you on the other side – in Heaven.”  He even gave us a hearty thumbs-up as we left the room.  My wife and I collapsed into each other’s arms, embracing and weeping in the waiting room as we strived to process the enormity of what we had just experienced, and ever so thankful for the gift of time with which God had just graced us.

    Thank God we were there.  Thank God Paul was lucid enough to communicate with us.  Thank God we saw him just days before he passed from this life.  No regrets.

    A few days later, with his bride and his children encircling him in the ICU, my brother’s spirit passed from this earth on January 24th.  Moments before, they played this song which I had composed in 2003 shortly before my previous family passed away.  I believe God’s Holy Spirit divinely inspired it for such a time as this.  Even now, There Is Peacehttps://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/fvqze6/ThereIsPeace.mp3  A few days later, I was honored to sing and play it at Paul’s funeral service in Louisville.

  “You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on You!” (Isaiah 26:3)

    My wife’s father never said, “goodbye.”  He always said, “See you tomorrow.”  Similarly and ironically, my brother also never said, “goodbye.”  He would always say, “See you later.”  We are deeply saddened and we grieve heavily over both of their recent and untimely deaths.  Yet, we grieve with hope that we will “See you (both) later” because of “Christ in [us], the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)

    Do you have that hope?  Have you put your faith alone in Christ alone?  The worst regret of all would be dying and not going to Heaven to be with the Lord and with your loved ones.

    Jesus said, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in Me.  There is more than enough room in my Father’s home.  When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with Me where I am.  And you know the way to where I am going.  I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:1-6) 

    Every death and every funeral starkly remind us of just how fragile life is, and of how thin the veil is between this world and the next.  Every day is a gift from God to be cherished.  That is why it is called the “present.”

    Savor every moment with your loved-ones, and strive to KNOW GOD more, and make Him more known daily.

    “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (John 14:27)

    In the timeless words of missionary C.T. Studd, “Only one life,’ twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

Amen.  KNOW GOD personally, and Live a Life of No Regrets.

    I would be honored to come and share our family’s story near you in 2023, bringing the Hope of God’s Good News.  I share at churches of all denominations, parish missions, revivals, schools, organizations, prayer breakfasts, conventions, banquets, and conferences (men’s, women’s, home-school, pro-life, purity, etc.).

    Now is a great time to schedule a Ministry Visit for this year.  Please call 260-515-5158, email hello@mightyintheland.com, or visit our website (https://mightyintheland.com/contact-2/) to arrange the details.

    Mighty in the Land Ministry thrives on word of mouth.  Every time you tell someone about the impact of this Ministry, you play a vital part in helping us share God’s Good News through our family’s story.  Please help spread the word.

    Over 310,000 people have personally encountered the Gospel as I’ve freely shared at least 1,389 times since 2003 – all by invitation.  Although my testimony has cost me everything, I still charge NOTHING.  (No agent.  No “fees.”  Pure God.)

    Thank you for prayerfully and materially supporting this Ministry in 2022.  I am deeply thankful.  Would you please consider investing in the Kingdom mission of Mighty in the Land Ministry to help others experience the Good News of Jesus in 2023 and beyond?  I would be grateful for your support to help me continue to share the hope of Christ with others through Mighty in the Land Ministry.  Your gracious contributions help to continue the mission of this Mighty Ministry – to teach others to KNOW GOD and Live a Life of NO REGRETS.  I humbly thank you for giving as God leads.

    Please pray for us.  Thank you for praying.  I am immensely grateful to you.

Gratefully and faithfully,

-Robert Rogers

 Teaching others to KNOW GOD and Live a Life of No Regrets

PS – We trust God for your contributions to help further the mission of this Ministry to which I believe God has called me.  If God prompts you to support the ongoing work of Mighty in the Land Ministry with a tax-deductible contribution, I would be deeply grateful to you.  Here’s how:

1) Credit card on our website: www.MightyInTheLand.com or by phone 260-515-5158.

2) Calling 317-570-5850 about donating non-cash gifts.

3) Check in the US Mail to:

Mighty in the Land Ministry

429 East DuPont Road, #230

Fort Wayne, IN  46825-2051

Thank you so very much.