12 Sep 03 -- My daughter asked me a question yesterday I didn't quite know how to answer. "Dad," she said, "remember after nine-eleven how everybody was praying and talking about God? Why'd they stop?" I fumbled around with a lame answer about how it's human nature to seek God during calamity and how we forget Him when things quiet down, but I'm not at peace with that pat response. Why did they stop? I can't put my hands on the source for this, but I recall reports showing a huge runup in church attendance in the weeks following 9/11. Public prayers were common, even in uncommon places. For a period it seemed that God had been elevated in the public consciousness, in ways not experienced by this country in many years. Maybe it was the cynic in me, but I remember saying at the time that it probably wouldn't last. It didn't. So why not? Has life returned to a normal state where we go about our business and forget about the "inconvenient nightmare" that woke us, if only briefly, from our slumber? I get the sense somehow that we're almost sleepwalking away from the bad part of a dream we don't want to look at. Acknowledging God 24/7 is a burden that many people shy away from. It requires accepting responsibility before Him for our actions. When we're victims to trauma it's easy to overlook our own faults, but when the pain of trauma begins to fade the lens is focused back on our own behavior again, and sometimes that makes us squirm. No one likes to be uncomfortable, so, no lens, no discomfort. If you were God, how would that make you feel? What do you think you'd do about it? Something in my spirit says we won't be allowed to sleepwalk our way out of this....

11 Sep 03 -- What does it take to get along in the world these days? Just prior to the events of two years ago, the answer included things like money, status, ratings, a healthy portfolio -- tokens of a society whose treasure can be heaped and counted. But then we watched those heaps of treasure crumble and fall. The wind blew the dust away and the rain washed it down the gutters. Two years later we're asking the question with different motivations. It's a little closer to home now, a lot more personal. The answers are different, and we know it. Words come to us like 'security', 'diligence', 'strength', 'courage'. Good words every one, but I don't think they're answers. We've seen how quickly pillars of security turn to dust. Shortly after King Solomon assumed the throne, he realized he needed something different to get along in the world of his day. What he wanted more than anything else was wisdom. It was something he couldn't get from his advisors and treasurers. He knew it would come from God alone, so that's where he sought it. I think wisdom is what it takes today, and more importantly, knowing where to go to obtain it.

For the Lord giveth wisdom: 
out of His mouth cometh knowledge and understanding. -- Proverbs 2:6

9 Sep 03 -- I've always liked turtles -- been fascinated with them since I was a kid. Back in June my sister gave me a red-eared slider as a birthday present. He seemed happier outside in the fish pond so that's where he lived until a couple of weeks ago when he ran away from home. His name was Bart. No telling where he ended up. BUT... now I've got 21 baby snappers. There really is an explanation: in early June I spotted a very large snapping turtle laying eggs in my back yard. After consulting the best all-purpose turtle information site on the internet, I expected to see them hatch in mid-August. Well, here it is a month later and nothing's happened so I figured they just didn't make it. I figured wrong. This afternoon, during the course of what I thought was going to be a routine exhumation of a turtle hatchling mass grave, I discovered live snappers. Twenty-one of them, each about an inch across and two inches long if you count the tail. They're pretty cute, as far as snapping turtles go. I wonder how fast they'll grow... ?

6 Sep 03 -- We had the kids over this afternoon, about 25 or so, many came with their parents. We try to do it once a year. Last year it was more of a Fall thing, but this year my pumpkin patch failed to flourish with all the Spring rain so there weren't enough pumpkins to go around. We improvised, hosted it a few weeks earlier and called it a Back to School Swim Party. I think it was a fair trade. The children's 1st through 6th grade Sunday School of Peavine Baptist were a spirited bunch today, if you'll pardon the pun. Diving, jumping, splashing, sliding, kicking, dunking, screaming...and that was just to get in line for the hamburgers. It was a good thing, and it was real. Real smiles, real laughter, real joy; so real you could imagine Jesus sitting by the pool, dangling his legs in the water, big smile over his face as he looks around and says "...for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." Help build the Kingdom -- invest in the children around you.

5 Sep 03 -- In general, I believe it's better to do the wrong thing for the right reason, than to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Mull that over a little bit as I mention why I bring it up in the first place. There's a document that's been circulating around the internet for several years, called The Bill of Non Rights. It's a takeoff on the U.S. Bill of Rights, but with entertainment value. Here's Article I of the bill:

4 Sep 03 -- The youth of our time amaze me. Despite what television sitcoms would have you believe, our culture is full of hardworking, diligent, and spiritually dedicated teens eager to show the light of God. A good recent example is the growing number of kids showing up every year at the annual See You at the Pole events around the nation's schools. It's an amazing thing to see -- teens voluntarily giving up an hour or more of sleep to get up early and gather together in front of their school flag pole to pray. That's all it is. Prayer to God on behalf of each other, their school, its staff, for friends to come to know Christ. This year it will be Wednesday, Sept 17th. I plan to be there again; I hope you do the same.

2 Sep 03 -- Ain't it funny how certain memories stick with us? There's a line in The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren that made me flash back to a moment from high school. It's lunchtime, I'm sitting in the cafeteria with a friend who's cracking up and blowing milk out his nose trying to describe a scene from The Muppet Show. The muppet French Chef is preparing spaghetti, but it keeps crawling away from him. I don't remember ever having seen that, but I vividly recall laughing to tears at my friend's condition, who apparently thought the whole concept of animated spaghetti was the height of hilarity. It was corny, but it stuck with me. What Rick Warren wrote that brought that all back to me was in reference to Paul's exhortation in Romans 12:1 that we should present our bodies as a "living sacrifice". Warren writes, "The trouble with living sacrifices is that they tend to crawl off the altar." So true, so true.

1 Sep 03 -- I read a news report recently on events taking place down in Montgomery; Judge Moore, the Ten Commandments Monument, Supreme Court and all that. It seems pretty complicated. The lawyers on one side say it violates the Constitution, folks on the other side say leaving the monument there is the right thing to do. The more I read about it, the more complicated it seems to get. But it did get me to thinking, and it reminded me of something that happened way back in the time of Moses. Right when all the Israelites were just about to cross over the Jordan River into the Promised Land, God told them to do something pretty unusual. He told them to build a big old monument on the other side of the river and write something on it. Know what He told them to write on it? The Ten Commandments. And it wasn't some squiggly little five-foot monument either -- He wanted it big and bold, so's everyone could read it.

That was His way of saying that his laws for moral conduct weren't meant to be shut up in some dusty old unread Bible sitting on a shelf. They were meant to be proclaimed to everyone who passed by, in big bold letters so everyone could see it for themselves. So, now I'm thinking that whole whoohaw going on down in Montgomery isn't really all that complicated at all. It's probably as simple as this: Some folks just don't care what God has to say about how they live, and they're bound and determined to make it hard for folks who do, no matter what our Constitution has to say about it.

31 Aug 03 -- I've been hearing myself say this a lot lately: "I shore will be glad when Fall gets here." It's been too hot and too humid for me the last few weeks. A southerner who doesn't like the hot sun...imagine that. There's probably a Yankee inside me yearning to be set free, or maybe an Inuit. Cold weather is a good thing. It's practical too. When you're cold you can always put on more clothes. But when you're hot the most you can take off is what you've got on, and then you're stuck. There's something special about Fall down south. The skies turn bluer. The earth smells cleaner. Sounds travel differently, crisp-like. It's a special moment for me every year, that first time I can step out at night and see my breath condensing in the moonlight. I like all the seasons of a temperate zone, but Fall is best.

First day of Fall:

September 23rd

Only by pride cometh contention, but with the well advised is wisdom. Pro 13-10

28 Aug 03 -- A friend of mine asked me to pray for him recently. Anger, it seems, was getting the better of him, and was about to introduce serious trouble into his life. We talked about it awhile, then began to realize Anger wasn't the real culprit, Pride was. The more I thought about it, the more sense that made. When someone says or does something to make you mad, what's the real reason you're mad? Your pride is hurt, that's all. That changes the whole complexion of the problem, and gives you a new way to think about heading it off. Anger isn't necessarily the enemy. Pride is that one sneaky dog in the pack that'll come up from behind and bite you. I'll check back with him in a couple of weeks to see how he's doing.

22 Aug 03 -- I'm not a big fan of those missives that come your way after having been forwarded a gazillion times by every email address in the known universe, but, sometimes the message they carry is just too rich to pass up. This is one such:

The 'Most' List