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.

We Hard Of Hearing?

Read Exodus 3:4-22

Moses had been resistant for forty years, likely telling himself all the time that his was a lost cause. Now, when God came with a direct, simple call, the old shepherd couldn’t handle it. In fact, he wouldn’t let himself believe he might still be useful to God. “Therefore, come now, and I will send you to Pharaoh, so that you may bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10).

Now that wasn’t complicated, was it? The Lord spoke in a tongue Moses could understand. He gave him a simple, two-fold command. First, He said to Moses, “I will send you.” And second, “You will bring my people out.” That was the plan.

Notice, please, that this was not a multiple-choice arrangement. It wasn’t even an invitation. It was a call. God does not speak and ask our advice regarding His plan. God makes declarations. He doesn’t open up the scene for a rap session or a dialogue. He doesn’t call in a blue ribbon panel of consultants to suggest viable options.

He speaks, and that is that.

At very unique junctures of our lives, God says to us, “Now, My child, I have this in mind for you. I know that you have knotted things up in the past. And I know that you may knot things up in the future. But as far as today, right now, this is my plan for you. Now go. I’m sending you, and I will be with you.”

God told him that he would be an instrument in the deliverance, but God Himself would be the deliverer. Huge difference. In God’s calling, He has a plan: but He never expects you to carry out that plan. He’s going to pull it off. He simply wants you to be the instrument of action. After all, it is His reputation that’s at stake, not yours. All He asks is that you give yourself to Him as a tool He can pick up and use. That’s all.

And it’s really hard to hear while dozing in denial! Live the Joy Today! merlin

Verbatim from Chuck Swindoll’s devotional Great Days with Great Lives pg. 67.

Introduction

Our world is in desperate need of models worth following. Authentic heroes. People of integrity, whose lives inspire us to do better, to climb higher, to stand taller. This has always been true.

Perhaps that explains why biographies of great men and women have fascinated me throughout my life…. My soul is stirred and my heart inspired as those saints of old, people of “whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:38), play out their lives, make their mistakes, accomplish incredible feats, and finally pass on into glory. What encouragement! What enrichment!

The words of the Russian poet Boris Pasternik come to mind: “It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to new and better days, but someone’s soul inspired and ablaze.” It is my hope that you will be enlightened and encouraged from beginning each day spending time with the Great Lives you’ll discover in this daily devotional. Here are ten deserving of our time and attention to help us endure the uncertain challenges of the future. Chuck Swindoll Frisco, Texas

The Great Lives Series

David: A Man of Passion and Destiny

Esther: A Woman of Strength and Dignity

Joseph: A Man of Integrity and Forgiveness

Moses: A Man of Selfless Dedication

Elijah: A Man of Heroism and Humility

Paul: A Man of Grace and Grit

Job: A Man of Heroic Endurance

Jesus: The Greatest Life Of All

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.

Seriously Now, Our Lord Really Inflicts Pain? I Thought That He Healed every….

If you didn’t read and listen yet to yesterdays post, I strongly suggest you do so before you tackle this one. I need say no more as Oswald’s March 2 reading here provides the frosting on the cake to yesterday’s message of Hope from God’s Three Assurances to His Followers;

1.) God is always with us; we’re never alone.

2.) God is Faithful, and

3.) God always provides an escape.

Click the link below. Enjoy!

https://click.messages.odb.org/?qs=665685b8eebd38ac63ad3c1c2cc14c75404b0ceece9938f29f89e46b61eb8c2eb19eb2112d03938fe51afbdd01cbfaa39e1fba01038963447a5f480ab3e05c9a

Oh, that we too like Peter would respond in amazement and simply say, “Lord, you know all things….” and then just rest and bask in His presence, I pray we’re each prepared for that rare moment. Oswald states our Lord never asks questions until the perfect time. Even if it is the perfect time for Him and us, we may still duck and run since we’re frail humans, for whatever be the excuse. Assuredly, after we’ve matured and in another perfect moment, he’ll back us into a corner where once again, He will hurt us with His piercing questions, that always reveal the true me to myself, for He already knows. But do I know?

I prefer to think the test is not a pass/fail exam, but rather, a pass/repeat situation. God does not grade on the curve ever; it’s always a pass/repeat exam, meshing perfectly with His grace and mercy motif, at least, until Judgement Day! So go forth in abundant joy realizing you do love Him more than mere words can ever express.

Issues with your Past? Seek SCARS as Proof of Surgery!

Folks, this is the most exquisite practical teaching I can recall about “Putting Your Past Behind You!” Undoubtedly, this is the Number One debilitating affliction, if not curse, that the world’s humanity is suffering from today, and sadly, the church is not exempt. I can confidently state this 30 minute clip will rock your world.

For me, during this Lent season, considering the scars Jesus suffered and endured for me as proof of the job well done, but in his case, “by Him Who knew no sin…” whereas for me and you, our scars are the proof we’ve encountered His needed surgery so that our open festering wounds that we’ve either chosen, or been given by others, were indeed gloriously healed. Our scars are now the visible and verbal evidence to those in our spheres of influence, also suffering from their secrecy, hostility, dishonesty and the unforgiveness of their own unresolved, open and festering wounds! How timely to consider such healing as we approach the celebration of his resurrecting power and its ultimate healing for each of us.

Realize this clip is the first in a series of nine from Erwin Lutzer’s book so titled. His text is I Corinthians 10:12-13 “Therefore, let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” Bask in these words today. We’ve read them hundreds of times, but after listening to this clip three times this morning, I’ve been exquisitely warmed anew.

Blessings on your journey TODAY!

https://youtu.be/6TlmmYhUcWg

Does It Have To Take A War?

For you history buffs, many of us lived through these events as are brought to life today in his post, “Does It Take A War” by Seymour Hersh. But, for too many on the deck of life today who did not, and are now without historical moorings, in conjunction with his post I suggest you must read Romans 8: 22-39 from your favorite version to facilitate your internal moorings with His perspective, as that is the only one that will count in the end. Seriously! FYI, I prefer The Message Version here. Here’s Seymour:

There is an inevitable gap between what a president tells us about a war—even a proxy war—and the reality on the ground. It is true today as Joe Biden struggles for public support for the war in Ukraine, and it was true six decades ago as Jack Kennedy struggled to understand the war he chose to pursue in South Vietnam.

Early 1962 was a critical time for President John F. Kennedy. After his image and leadership had been tarnished by the Bay of Pigs disaster three months into his term, he had decided that he must make a stand in South Vietnam and confront the spread of communism there. The president spent the rest of 1961 secretly increasing American defoliation, bombing, and the number of US troops inside South Vietnam. His fight against international communism was on. His foil was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had overwhelmed the young president at a summit meeting on June 4, 1961, with his knowledge, toughness, and lack of respect for Kennedy’s floundering in Cuba. “So he just beat the hell out of me,” the president later told New York Times columnist James Reston.

Nonetheless, America was smitten by the glitz and glamor of Jack and Jackie and their life inside the White House, with parties and social events that brought together the best America had to offer from the worlds of music, the arts, and the academy. So it was that David Herbert Donald, the most prominent Lincoln scholar of his time, found himself asked to give a private briefing in the White House. The small group he addressed—it numbered no more than twenty—included longtime friends of the president and some key members of his government. Donald would be the guest of the president and his wife. He was delighted.

Donald, who had won a Pulitzer Prize that year for his work on the Civil War, wrote a long chatty letter to an old friend a few weeks later about his night at the White House. I learned of the meeting during the 1990s while researching a book on the Kennedy Administration. Donald sent me a copy then of the letter, but urged me to publish very little of it in my book. I did what he asked. Donald died in 2009, after decades of teaching American history at Harvard University, and I’d like to think he would have approved of my quoting it at greater length here.

Donald reported in the letter that he talked for forty minutes about the difficulties of Reconstruction after the Civil War, and the trouble he and other historians were having, as he wrote, “in writing a new synthesis of the period.” There was a long period of chatter, with both the president and his wife Jacqueline actively participating. “Mrs. Kennedy,” Donald reported, was “extremely simple and unassuming, very young, very shy, and a little unsure of herself. . . . That radiant beauty which appears in her photographs and in her television appearances is not apparent, but she strikes me as an enthusiastic and highly intelligent young woman.”

The letter went on: “The President himself, too is far less handsome than his pictures. . . . The boyish look which his photographs give him is simply not there. . . . [H]e led off the questioning and continued very active in the discussion throughout; and afterward we had a long, private discussion. It is clear that this is a man determined to go down in our history books as a great President, and he wants to know the secret.

“One thing he said troubled me considerably,” Donald wrote. In discussing the great presidents, Kennedy “asked whether, in sum, did [it] not take a war to put a man in that category? I firmly denied this. He seemed to agree and, since he is bent on being a great President, I hope he really did.”

In a brief telephone conversation I had with Donald in 1996, two decades after the American debacle in Vietnam, the professor expressed far more concern about Kennedy’s view of greatness. He told me that Kennedy was fascinated with Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt because “he thought to be a great President you had to be a wartime President. That was scary to me. I came away feeling that this was a young man who doesn’t understand history.”

Donald’s chat with Kennedy came—as the professor could not have known at the time—at a crucial early moment in Vietnam. The president had continued moving, in secret, to increase dramatically the number of American military men flooding in the South under the guise of special advisors. He also was fascinated by the derring-do of those who fought in World War II in undercover units organized by the Office of Strategic Services. OSS agents often worked in enemy zones in Europe and Asia with partisans and guerrillas. The head of intelligence for the State Department at the time was Roger Hilsman, an army officer who saw combat and later served undercover with the OSS in Burma. After the war, Hilsman joined the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. He left the Agency to get a doctorate in political science at Yale University. Now, in the early days of the Kennedy Administration, he had special caché at the State Department. He had been wounded in battle and was part of a team that liberated American prisoners, including his own father, from a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

With his experience, confidence, and academic credentials, Hilsman became a favorite of the president and his brother Robert, the attorney general, and both became avid supporters of an innovative solution that Hilsman was advocating. The plan promised to resolve a vexing issue of the war: how to separate the anti-government and pro-communist guerrilla fighters known as the Viet Cong from the peasant villagers who, willingly or not, provided them with food, protection and support. Known as the Strategic Hamlet Program, the concept won immediate approval from the US and South Vietnamese military as well from those Americans seeking more social programs for the peasantry. “It was Kennedy’s last hope for winning hearts and minds,” I was told years ago by an American intelligence expert. The historian Christian G. Appy, in American Reckoning, an incisive study of the limits of American exceptionalism, described the project that emerged as “a coercive plan that forced villagers off their land and relocated them in armed camps. . . . What they [Kennedy, Hilsman and the White House advisors] did not take into account was how the villagers might feel about being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and stuck in fortified compounds behind barbed wire.”

I had learned firsthand about the ignorance and cruelty of forced peasant relocation while reporting on the My Lai massacre in 1969. The massacre had taken place in March of 1968 and most of the GIs involved had finished their tour of duty in the war and were back home—at work, in school, or doing nothing. The Strategic Hamlet Program was long gone but villagers in some contested areas were still being forced off their lands into resettlement areas to enable the American military to slaughter all who refused to leave with impunity. The evacuated areas were designated Free Fire Zones. My Lai was not such an area. Some of the GIs who had participated in the murders and rapes at My Lai justified their brutality by telling me, with much contempt, about how the mothers in Vietnam, when being evacuated from their native villages, insisted on being the first to hop onto the waiting helicopters. I was told again and again by GIs, who had grown up in a culture that called for children to go first, that they had to beat the mothers—sometimes violently with the butts of their rifles—to allow the children to board first. None of the GIs had been told that in Vietnamese society the mother always crosses a new threshold first, to assure that all who follow will be safe. 

The Strategic Hamlet Program was a disastrous, and mysterious, failure for the young Kennedy Administration, and it hardened the resolve of the peasant population against the American interlopers. Jack Kennedy did not live long enough to learn that a major reason for the program’s demise was the work of a South Vietnamese army colonel named Pham Ngoc Thao, who had fought against the French with the nationalist and communist Viet Minh after World War II. Thao was one of eleven children born into a highly respected Roman Catholic family that held French citizenship, but joined the successful post-World War II opposition to the French led by Ho Chi Minh. Thao’s religion and social background, and his military leadership in the war against the French, made him attractive to President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, who ran the secret police. Thao was a logical choice to run the new American-endorsed and financed resettlement project for the nation’s Buddhist peasants.

It would not be known until after his assassination in 1965 that Thao had been one of North Vietnam’s most successful sleeper agents, one of many who had been infiltrated into the South’s military and political leadership. One of his first moves as overseer of the Strategic Hamlet Program was to rush the construction of the new villages. They were poorly built and poorly defended. Thao also ensured that the hated villages were placed in areas that were open to Viet Cong encroachment or attack with little fear of interference by the South Vietnamese army.

Jack Kennedy’s hopeful relocation project was doomed, as he could not know, even as he explained his view of presidential leadership, over cognac and a cigar, to an increasingly troubled Professor Donald. The setting—in the private family quarters of the White House—was dramatic, but in terms of the reality of the war then underway the two men could have been chatting in the captain’s quarters on the Titanic as the ship neared the ice flows.

Our current president, and his foreign policy team, in their unwillingness to seek an immediate ceasefire in the war between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and a NATO-backed Ukraine, could be on the same boat.

The Biden Administration is feeling no pressure from Congress or the American mainstream media about its fervid political, economic, and political support for Ukraine in its ongoing war against Russia. But protests and public anxiety over the war are surging in Germany, along with polls showing dwindling public support for Biden’s policy. Last weekend there were noisy anti-war rallies in Berlin, with crowds estimated at 13,000 by the police and 50,000 by the protest organizers. A “Manifesto for Peace” calling on German officials to halt the flow of weapons to Ukraine attracted 650,000 signatures in two weeks.

The clock is ticking.

https://open.substack.com/pub/seymourhersh/p/does-it-take-a-war?r=690o5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

This Blog Was Birthed When I Looked Up Colossians 3:1

And I was so taken with it, now in Lent, I read the whole chapter. Then I got hung up on verse 21 about “coming down too hard on your children or you’ll crush their spirits.” And that ended with quoting three paragraphs from “Dreamland,” a 2016 book many grandparents should read since they now possess both motive and time. First, though, just absorb this blog. Quite unique!

Colossians 3:1-25 MSG

[1-2] He Is Your Life

So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ— that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective.

[3-4] Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life-even though invisible to spectators-is with Christ in God. He is your life. When Christ (your real life, remember) shows up again on this earth, you’ll show up, too-the real you, the glorious you. Meanwhile, be content with obscurity, like Christ.

[5-8] And that means killing off everything connected with that way of death: sexual promiscuity, impurity, lust, doing whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it, and grabbing whatever attracts your fancy. That’s a life shaped by things and feelings instead of by God. It’s because of this kind of thing that God is about to explode in anger. It wasn’t long ago that you were doing all that stuff and not knowing any better. But you know better now, so make sure it’s all gone for good: bad temper, irritability, meanness, profanity, dirty talk.

[9-11] Don’t lie to one another. You’re done with that old life. It’s like a filthy set of ill-fitting clothes you’ve stripped off and put in the fire. Now you’re dressed in a new wardrobe. Every item of your new way of life is custom-made by the Creator, with his label on it. All the old fashions are now obsolete. Words like Jewish and non-Jewish, religious and irreligious, insider and outsider, uncivilized and uncouth, slave and free, mean nothing. From now on everyone is defined by Christ, everyone is included in Christ.

[12-14] So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.

[15-17] Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness. Let the Word of Christ-the Message-have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God! Let every detail in your lives-words, actions, whatever-be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.

[18] Wives, understand and support your husbands by submitting to them in ways that honor the Master.

[19] Husbands, go all out in love for your wives. Don’t take advantage of them. [20] Children, do what your parents tell you. This delights the Master no end.

[21] Parents, don’t come down too hard on your children or you’ll crush their spirits.

merlin commenting now:  Ever think how the prodigal’s son father exhibited his “tough love?” Scripture states immediately after the request that “so he divided to them his livelihood.” It evidently was not after his accountant jockeyed his resources, or by shaming him by guilt trips, or threats of any kind. Having just read Sam Quinones “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,” the point is continually made throughout the book’s 353 pages that what fueled the advance of the Mexican cheap black tar heroin distribution system amongst the white privileged middle and upper classes during the last three decades, was primarily the failure of their parents, even once aware of the problem, to effectively facilitate and dispense tough love to their children, even years before the heroin finally showed up. It could be argued big pharma started it; parents just aided and abetted…

So the youth actually were set up by their parents removing them from the normal usual and customary age appropriate responsibilities, existing in a vacuum doomed for failure, especially when the predominate communication, is “what do you want or need?” And when the parents first encountered either their child’s addiction and the subsequent demands were forthcoming, there was no equity in their relational communication bank to facilitate either reason and/or, a cooperative spirit. The book reveals most parents refused to act on the evidence their child had a problem in their bedroom sanctuary, resulting in many “quiet” unknown deaths for the first decade.

Or consider the other extreme, shaming and threats that were enacted rather than admitting their worst nightmare was now just down the hall, requiring all the love they could muster, and a willingness to be transparent with their pain in order to learn from the many now vocal parents telling all crisscrossing America speaking to everyone who would listen to their experiential wisdom; and indeed, there was abundant hope, and that love was stronger than hate and fear.

I am including the following three paragraphs from page 323 as proof of how well- meaning churches and parents can get it all wrong. Perhaps, according to the prodigal son parable, it is first about how you have loved them, and then, if such events would ever dictate you sending them off as in the prodigal, first consider how much you are a loved parent in God’s care. Next, realize you too must be able to release your children from your care, if they so choose, but rest assured, they will always be in His care and protection while are learning their own life’s lessons, as difficult as that may be for you, since you’ll not be in control.  You too, must live in hope for the day they choose to return and you’ll be ready for their embrace and as in the parable, their words of repentance will be lost in the ecstasy of the moment.

Bottom line, we are to love our children even before their conception, always displaying during these hard moments that demand tough love, that we may do so with all due diligence, complete and unreserved Godly obedience, His forgiveness, His transformation, His empowerment and especially, our zeal for discipling anyone living without His hope! That dictum is alive and well in this home, actually it is flourishing! Jewish tradition had it right with their Big Four Shares, remember the doorposts?

Pg. 323

” Russian Pentecostal junkie named John Tkach had started a rehabilitation clinic in the Portland suburb of Boring. Tkach saw the Russian Pentecostal churches trying to hide the sight of hundreds of addicted kids. Parents who asked a pastor’s help with their addicted child were shamed for running a sinful house. Tkach sold his trucking business, took out a second mortgage on his house, and opened a rehabilitation center. A church formed around it, the first to make the rampant opiate addiction of the Russian Pentecostal kids the focus of its ministry. God Will Provide, as the new church was called, rested on Jesus’s message of love, forgiveness, and transformation. Traditional Russian pastors called it blasphemy and sinful. Russian Pentecostal kids called it the Rehab Church. But soon God Will Provide had spread its church/rehab center to Sacramento, Seattle, and elsewhere.

There, Ella met Vitaliy Mulyar. Vitaliy had crashed since those heady days when he was one of the first Russians to sell OxyContin in Portland. In 2010, Vitaliy faces a two-year prison term if he failed another probation drug test. Terrified, he turned to God Will Provide, where he felt warmth in church for the first time. He kicked heroin, became a Bible teacher, and, with a judge’s permission, went on to a mission to the Ukraine and Austria as the church, fired by the new energy of its recovering-addict congregants, opened a school for missionaries.

A year into his recovery, Vitaliy encountered Elina at the center. He told her his story. She mistrusted her own capacity to change. But it struck her, the way he had risen from the street. A chaste romance followed, in keeping with the Russian Pentecostal tradition, though with a modern American twist. They grew acquainted via hundreds of texts while he was on mission. Vitaliy came home and asked Elina to marry him before they ever kissed.

Two years later, their daughter was born. They named her Grace.”

You catch the vision that God really intended here. And to think, it really wasn’t about the prodigal at all, it was about the brother that stayed home, and was in the pew every Sunday, maybe even taught Sunday school once, or twice! I’m done! It has been a good day. And you don’t know half of it. Praise God for His faithfulness.

Colossians 3:1-25 MSG, tecartabible.com

Out There, Away From the Noise

By Erick-Woods Erickson Feb 25, Confessions of a Political Junkie.

Joy Behar thinks the people of East Palestine, OH got what they deserve because they voted for Trump. The National Transportation Safety Board says the braking regulation rolled back under congressional pressure by Donald Trump would not actually have impacted the derailment. It was a different issue. But Behar does not care. She does not like those people because they voted for Trump.

Adam Wren, the Politico reporter who exposed a Republican congressional candidate’s sexual assault against her will, posted a tweet with “scenes from East Palestine” and it was four pictures of pro-Trump, right-wing sentiment. It seemed to be in the “they got what they deserved” vein of Behar’s sentiment. Why were those pictures relevant to a disaster?

Over the past few weeks, left wing groups have trotted out a series of “studies” that “red states” get more federal government subsidization, have worse standards of living, have more crime, etc. Each another drip in smug justification to hate the people who vote differently, often with skewed framing and data to get the results just right.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wants her national divorce. The serial adulteress is holding herself out as the patron saint of Christian Nationalism in America. I’m guessing she’s all for it so long as the millstones aren’t brought back. She hates the left. The left hates her. They are two sides of the same coin.

There’s a small mindedness in these fights and a common thread is how very online so many of these people are. They don’t think the United States is great. They don’t think we are capable of taking care of ourselves and others. They have given up on each other, on their nation, and on a future that is better than yesterday.

Offline, driving across America, from red state to blue and purple and back, you have to work to really find people who want to break apart the country and not help those in need because of who they voted for. It’s easy to find online and hard to find out there where the people actually are.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature,” Abraham Lincoln said in his in his first inaugural address. His words could not keep the country together for a time, but he fought like hell to keep it together.

Victory in sight, four years later, he said in his second inaugural, “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace…”.

We could all use more grace and charity towards each other to think differently, vote differently, work differently, live differently, and still be American together. We should listen to our better angels and not the people who entertain through national dissection.

And into this environment, a series of candidates will come on stage for 2024. I hope they embrace America for all, not just America for their supporters. Out there, away from the noise and the constant tweets, Americans love America and their neighbors. Our leaders, on both sides, should remind us of that instead of stirring the divisions.

merlin now:

So, considering Erick’s words and prodding you for your response, the question begging to be asked, “What could/should be the churches response? OR, their responsibility? Consider these three verses form the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5 from the MSG; actually all three chapters, 5 through 7.

[8] “You’re blessed when you get your inside world— your mind and heart— put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.

[9] “You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.

[10] “You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom. …

FYI, speaking of being away from all the noise, the clip below highlights “White Noise,” a movie released last fall, occurring even in the same town, eerily similar to the events in the Palestine OH tragedy that unfolded February 3. Simply more dysfunction? Family? Mechanical? OR?

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/white-noise-netflix-movie-about-train-derailment-b2283419.html