Does Anybody Really Know What Time it is?
Does anybody really care?
Have you heard of the term, “Body Burden”? It is a term that describes the impact of the accumulation of toxins in our bodies – the pollution that permeates everyone in the world. You carry a certain level of “body burden” just from the fact that you breathe air, walk on carpets, cross streets, eat food, drink water and have permeable skin.
In 2005, a group of researchers at two major laboratories tested umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September of 2004 in U.S. hospitals. The 10 children in this study were chosen randomly, from among 2004’s summer season of live births from mothers in the Red Cross’ volunteer national cord blood collection program. They were just a random, American sample of blood collected by the Red Cross after the cord was cut.
Well, the tests on the umbilical cord blood of these 10 children revealed some 287 chemicals found in the blood among them. They harbored pesticides, consumer product ingredients, and wastes from burning coal, gasoline, and garbage. Among the chemicals were eight perfluorochemicals used as stain and oil repellants in fast food packaging, clothes and textiles, dozens of widely used flame retardants and their toxic by-products; and numerous pesticides. Of the 287 chemicals detected, 180 are known to cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests. And the real trouble is that the dangers of pre- or post-natal exposure to this complex mixture of carcinogens, developmental toxins and neurotoxins have never been studied. This 2005 study represents the first reported cord blood tests for 261 of the targeted chemicals and the first reported detections in cord blood for 209 compounds.
In short, we live in a time where we are born polluted.
And it is such a quiet, invisible pollution, isn’t it? It’s not like smoke from a smokestack or dead fish by the side of a river. Births still look like births. Babies still smell like babies. It’s hard to know how the clock is ticking on this. It’s hard to know what time it is about this – whether there is urgency or not, whether we should be doing something now or not. That’s how it often is, you know. The political and social debate surrounding these kinds of things is not really about whether this sort of thing is good or bad – no one likes pollution. The debate is around what time it is – how urgent and pressing? How much priority compared to other things? How demanding of action? Is it time to stand up and shout or wait it out for a future solution or better time? Is it time to deliberate, distract and deny? Or, recently – Is it really the time to focus on jobs to the exclusion of all else?
Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?
This brings to mind an encounter Jesus had in Herod’s temple with his disciples. In Luke 21, we find a crowd of people admiring the temple – Herod’s beautiful temple, build with stones literally as large as busses – 10 feet high, 20 feet long, stacked one upon another. An enormous building, seemingly as permanent as the earth itself. To big to fail. Too endorsed by God to ever meet destruction. Certainly a safe place to invest one’s entire heart and soul and that of your children and your children’s children. A structure with plenty of time.
Jesus stops to teach a different viewpoint on what time it was:
“As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”
The question Jesus wanted his disciples to ask was, “What time is it here?” What time is it for this temple and the people in it? How should one live in such a time as this?
The church is always been challenged with this same situation – what time is it? Is it time for repentance? Is it time for quiet prayer and waiting? Is it time to take a stand for some form of justice or some toxic reality? Is it time to resist a change, accept a change or promote a change? When we look around at our world today – what time is God saying it is? What hope and perseverance are we called to maintain in this day, and what good are we not to grow weary of doing? This is a crucial question for the church in our day. If the church could just agree on what time it is, in it, it would find ways to unity, purpose and vital mission.
Let Us Agree Upon the Time
I would like to propose that it is now time for the church to open its eyes and hearts and hands to the next generation of living things on this planet. I would like to propose, in view of Jesus and the Temple in Luke 21, that life as we have known it, and this planet’s hospitable ecosystems, are not too big to fail as a place for future human habitation.
If we would but open our eyes to what time it is, the seeds of these challenges in this present day could infuse new life into the stewardship of our Christian lives, our time, our health, and our relationships. If we but lend our hands to the tasks this present time demands of us, we will find a path to righting our upside down values and restoring right relationships to ourselves, each other, and those beyond our doors. If we would but let this present day speak to us about what time it is, we would find clarity for our gospel message and a renewed relevance for the church in the world.
We would discover ways of recovered holiness, and find, from the Holy Spirit, the power to choose lives of meaningful simplicity and reverence. We would find ways to bridge the gap between the generations about what church is for and why we might bother to come at all, and agree upon how to connect with relevance, validity and authenticity.
The churches opportunity is not just change light bulbs and recycle trash, but to change our language, change our faith priorities, recycle our worn out habits, renew our sense of mission, plant not just trees but ideas, clean up not just the water but our complicity in consumption, and love ourselves by loving all our neighbors – the two legged and the four legged, the finned and the rooted.
So, what says the church? Is now the time?
On Being Ourselves
Rabbi Zusya, a pious and revered sage, was lying on his deathbed, weeping. His students stood by him confused.
“Rabbi, why do you weep?” one of them ventured to ask, “Surely if anyone is assured a place in the world to come, it is you!”
The sage turned his head toward his beloved students and began to speak softly: “If, my children, when I stand before the heavenly court, I am asked ‘Zusya, why were you not a Moses?’ I shall have no hesitation in affirming, ‘I was not born a Moses.’”
“If they ask me, ‘Why, then, were you not an Elijah?” I shall speak with confidence, ‘Neither am I Elijah.’”
“I weep, friends, because there is only one question that I fear to be asked; ‘Why were you not a Zusya?’”
The question is, how each of us can be, most authentically, who each of us is or is supposed to be.
I do not want to minimize the difficulty that we can have figuring out who we are and what our true path in life should be. Unlike Jonah, we do not usually have G-D tell us exactly what we should do. Indeed, even if we think we have heard a divine call, we are sometimes mistaken. But let us assume that we have a sense of who we should be or, at least, in what direction we should move.
Jonah knew what he should do, who he should be. Yet he ran away. He did not want to save the people of Nineveh, the capitol city of our enemy, Assyria. He knew what he should do: call the people of Nineveh to repentance. He knew who he was: a Prophet and servant of G-D. Yet he ran. He did not want to be who he was called to be.
Some of us have found ourselves in Jonah’s position in the following way. We know we should do something, change something, be somebody. But we also know that answering that call will be uncomfortable; some people will be angry with us and we may hurt others we care about. But not to answer the call means stuffing our ears to a truth that is crying out to us and living in conflict with who we are.
What happens when we ignore the call to be our authentic selves? Jonah fled on a ship. The storm sent to stop him endangered those around him and his own life. Only by owning up to his mission and what he was supposed to do and leaving the ship was Jonah able to calm the storm.
When we try to ignore a call to be our authentic selves, we too generate storms. The storms of our own simmering discontent, the gloom of deceit, when we pretend to things we do not feel and desires we do not have. The ever falling rain of the despair of recognizing our own empty role playing. Make no mistake, sometimes seeking to follow the call to authenticity will generate storms, but they will be the storms of creation and growth.
As Jonah was swallowed by the great fish, we sometimes will find ourselves in periods of darkness, whether in doubt over our direction, in sadness for the pain we might cause others by doing what we must do, or merely the darkness and fear inherent in any period of transition.
The kicker is that seeking to live authentically will not guarantee happiness or even contentment. Look at Jonah in his booth. In fulfilling his destiny, Jonah found misery. But this was his choice. He could have found satisfaction in being who he was supposed to be but chose to be angry and resentful instead.
No path in life can promise us happiness. Every road we travel will have its share of pain, sadness, and disappointment. It is up to each of us to cultivate a spirit of gratitude. We can seek to find what little joys and beauties are offered up in each moment of existence.
We are, each of us, walking steadily to death. But as a man walking beneath the sun to the gallows, we can weep over our mortality and lost time and opportunity or we can note the brightness of the day, the cool hint of autumn in the breeze, the song of a distant bird floating in the air. We can chose.
I cannot say that life is made easier or happier by trying to live an authentic life. I can say that by heeding the call to be who we are, our eyes can see the beauties of the world more clearly and hear the song of existence more sharply. Whether to take joy and comfort from that is up to each one of us.
Thanks
In the movie Shenandoah, James Stewart plays farmer Charlie Anderson. In one scene the family is gathered at the dining room table and Charlie offers grace before they eat.
Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvest it. We cook the harvest. It wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t be eating it if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you Lord just the same for the food we’re about to eat, amen. (credit)
Charlie Anderson may have thought the Lord was getting a bit too much credit for the meal before them; but Martha, his wife, wanted the children raised as “good Christians.” He was doing his part . . . and maybe more. While Charlie’s faith was not as publicly demonstrated as Martha’s, it was visible in the way he lived, the love he had for his family, and his ethics. Charlie’s prayer that day may have come at the end of a long frustrating day, week, or year; but, in spite of the frustration seen in his face and heard in his voice, he prayed truth. In the end, no matter how much we do ourselves, the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe come from the Lord.
If there is any good to the economic turndown through which we’ve been going, it may be that it has forced us to recognize that our fortunes are not as self-made as we thought. Life is precarious, sometimes harsh, and often unfair. Good men and women can do all things right and still end up jobless and facing need they never imagined. When cable TV, internet connections, and smart phones can no longer be afforded, can we still give thanks?
Well, a lot depends on what matters. Too much of what elicits thanksgiving from us is the stuff with which we surround ourselves, and under which we often end up submerged. Am I the man I am because I sit in a nice leather desk chair clicking away on a fine laptop computer while surrounded by my books I’ve accumulated over a lifetime? If I’m not careful, I may be; but I am careful . . . more careful today than in the past.
Today I know that I am the man I am because my true identity flows from the One to whom I have pledged my life. Come what may, I am the Lord’s. I am the man I am because of the parents who birthed me and guided me to believe in the goodness of God and his all-encompassing love. I am the man I am because of the people of a tiny rural church in Tallapoosa, Missouri, who nurtured my young faith. I am the man I am because of the woman with whom I have shared the past 41+ years. I am the man I am because of the church that has shared an amazing faith journey with me for the more than 31 years. I am not self-made. I am who I am because of God and the blessing of riches—the people—with which he has wrapped me.
Thank you, Lord.
Pulling Out My Hair
I think I’m going bald.
No, not naturally. (I am getting just a few little gray hairs enough to be cute at this point. I look forward to the day when I have enough that people stop commenting that I look like a teenager…or a baby.)
No, I’m concerned about hair loss because lately I’ve been tearing out big chunks of hair from frustration.
According to a report recently released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 50 million people in the United States are hungry (“food-insecure” is what we’re calling it these days). 17 million of them are children. Half a million of them have inadequate diets, even missed meals for lack of money to buy food.
Yes, you read that right. “in the United States.”
It’s not just the staggering scale of the problem of hunger that’s making me tear my hair out. It’s the location. I would not have believed this possible in my own country.
I’m also struck by the observation of a grocery store checkout clerk named “Mama” who lives in Washington, D.C. that those paying with SNAP, (the Supplemental Nutrition Aid Program, what used to be called food stamps) are better dressed than ever. It’s a disquieting sign that the problem is spreading, worsening, and affecting people that it didn’t before. Hunger is gaining on us, closer to home than we like to believe.
Naturally, people of faith like us consider it our sacred obligation, our mitzvah, to use the Jewish word, to feed the hungry as part of our mission to heal, repair and transform the world. Naturally, we’ll be out there to do our part this holiday season. From Dec.13-18, members of my congregation, Temple Emanuel in St. Louis, MO, will be assisting our neighbors of St. Elizabeth’s Parish in north St. Louis City to distribute food, clothing and toys to about 500, maybe 600 people a day…for a week.
There is nothing like seeing hungry people to jolt us out of our own doldrums, to make us realize how petty, even childish, of most of our complaints,
But feeding hungry people is not the whole issue when there are so many to feed. When did “the pursuit of happiness” cease to be an inalienable right? Who is free to pursue happiness when they are hungry? (or, “food-insecure”?) We can’t fail to answer the call to help others, because it’s in our Torah, in the call of our prophets, in our very nature, yet we know something is wrong. Something is all wrong when public policy fails so many of our fellow citizens so catastrophically and leaves it to organized religion to fill the gaps. Don’t we realize that by the terms of the founding documents of American civic religion, the situation is grounds for another revolution?
In the aftermath of yet another bitter and acrimonious political campaign that resulted in the usual tossing out of the bums, I don’t feel like proposing any political solution except to say that this is everyone’s problem. There are no winners in elections if our politics is so paralyzed that it becomes an irrelevant sideshow. Tzedakah is a mitzvah. But so is Tzedek, righteous action. “Justice, justice, shall you pursue,” exhorts Moses in the midst of Deuteronomy. This holiday season, please don’t just give to Tzedakah. Give to Tzedek. Demand real honesty in political discourse, and expect solutions, not posturing, from elected leaders.
The Wedding Day
I get to be in the pulpit so rarely these days, that I’m just looking for an excuse to do minister stuff. As luck would have it, I was contacted over a year ago by one of my former youth group members about performing his wedding. I quickly agreed, and we communicated over the year, making all our plans until, at last, the big day arrived last weekend.
As weddings go, it was one of the most fun I can remember. When big families were involved, I used to prefer to do funerals to weddings. As long as I didn’t try to treat funerals like a Billy Graham crusade, no one ever complained, but if you get a big family at a wedding, you can find yourself fighting off a devastating horde of competing opinions.
I used to use a coaches’ whistle to get their attention and remind them that I was only going to respond to the wishes of the bride. Sometimes it worked. This wedding was a lot better in that regard since there was a planner who got to tell everyone where to go and I just had to talk them through the ceremony. What luxury!
Or at least you’d think it was a luxury. We (the guys) were supposed to enter through a tunnel under the sanctuary and come out from behind the pulpit. When the time came for the wedding, after all the rehearsals, I was hearing the music that was supposed to be playing right before our entry, so I turned to the guy next to me and asked, “who’s the guy we’re waiting on before we go into the tunnel?” He replied with “I’m that guy,” at which point, I started shoving the groom’s party down the steps into the tunnel. We get to the end of the tunnel, I turn on the mic, and I can’t get them to be quite. I doubt that any of them heard me as I covered the microphone and stage-whispered “live mic!!!!” Somehow, we got out there in order and almost stood in the right places as the ring-bearer (a very young child with a toy firetruck) and the rest of the people made it to the front. The bride and her father were smiling as they came down the aisle, to the point were they seemed about to laugh. The ceremony? What ceremony? I went through things so fast, stopping when the groom misheard me once, that I had to keep cutting line after line from the pre-approved ceremony, just to keep up. After the pronouncement, any thought of prayer or ceremony went out the window, as the couple was practically dancing in their eagerness to run down the aisle and start their life together.
The reception afterward was fun, too, once we found it. Although it was held in a place of uttermost darkness and evil (Papa John’s Stadium), it was a largish party with all the trimmings, music, people and whatnot. I had a lot of good talks with people who I had not seen in a very long time, and the bride and groom were practically radiant, as they participated in all the usual post-wedding rituals and dancing. A good time was pretty much had by all.
So, through all the exciting events of the rehearsals, the wedding, the parties, and everything else, something exciting emerged. This couple, which was by every measure a fun-loving, irreverent, and light-hearted pair, chose to celebrate their marriage in their church, with all the relatives and significant people in their lives invited to attend. A lot of people would like to share their good times with their inner circle, but how many people share them with God these days, and really mean it? These people really feel that God is an integral part of their marriage, and it’s hard to argue with a marriage that starts on that basis. They also understood that, for all the seriousness that comes with their mutual commitment, there is abundant room for serious fun. Joy is sometimes in limited supply these days, but the happy couple, and their extended family had it, and they brought it into the marriage.
Hopefully, in the future, they will remain the kind of people that you just want to hang around with. For now, I am still really happy to have been a part of their star
A Handful of Thanks
I’ve been meaning to start this for awhile, luckily my buddy Megan Gelband keeps reminding me with her blog. Since Thanksgiving is sneaking up, what better time for recording a handful of the things I am thankful for?
1. Hugs from my husband – he reassures me that the world is not to explode, even when it feels like my heart will
2. The smell of clean laundry
3. New recipes to try. Tonight – Chicken Fajita Soup
4. Parents who buy tiny orange peppers for the above recipe
5. Big Bang Theory Season 3, Disc 1 — in the mail today
6. Gobs and gobs of crunchy leaves ready to step on
7. 17 months of dating my favorite person
8. Encouraging friends who call or e-mail at just the right time
9. Warm blankets to wrap up in
10. Ending sentence fragments in prepositions
What are you thankful for?
Read more from Jennifer at her blog.
Katrina Recollections: Kenny Rauch (audio)
Kenny worked with my dad at Wand Rubber Stamp Works, Inc. For a while, my dad and Mr. Sal were business partners and co-owned Wand. Kenny and “Little” Sal (Mr. Sal’s son) worked at Wand for as long as I can remember. Kenny still works at Wand, as does “Little” Sal, who now owns the business after his father’s passing.
My first memory of Kenny was when I was five years old. He came over to our house in Metairie and started a snowball fight with me; that means it was 1973 – the only time it snowed in New Orleans during the eighteen years that I lived there.
Kenny and I sat down in an office at Wand, and he shared his experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina; he also added some post-Katrina thoughts on the 2009 New Orleans Saints.
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In Defense of Thanksgiving
This week a local radio station made its annual switch to all Christmas music, all the time. For me, it’s just too early. Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) is traditionally the start of the Christmas shopping season, and the first Sunday of Advent is the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Isn’t that soon enough to start hanging lights, erecting trees and listening to “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch?”
Thanksgiving is a perfectly good holiday. And while it’s not explicitly a religious holiday, it’s hard to find a religious tradition that doesn’t see thankfulness as a virtue. In fact, I’d argue that gratitude is underrated in American culture. We spend so much of our time wanting, getting, striving and working, that we easily forget that life, our talents, our relationships — these are all gifts. And to not recognize a gift is rather rude and unkind (at least that’s what my Mom always said). A thankful spirit would do us well throughout the year, and yet, it seems that the one holiday focused on gratitude looks fairly anemic beside the Christmas season.
Other holidays don’t have this sort of trouble defending their turf. Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to worry about the greenery of St. Patrick’s Day overlapping the red flowers and boxes of candies. Independence Day isn’t in danger of being overwhelmed by Labor Day. But humble Thanksgiving is forced to listen to Christmas music for a full two weeks before its big day.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Advent. I enjoy hearing and singing Christmas music. The parties, the gift-giving, the pumpkin pie (especially the pumpkin pie) — it’s all wonderful.
All I’m asking is that we give Thanksgiving it’s space. Let it have it’s time in the spotlight. Recognize that we are better people when we are grateful.
If your year has been anything like mine, it’s been crazy. We’ve had serious illness, economic stress, job transition, and a chaotic world. And yet, I’m still here — enjoying what I do, surrounded by a wonderful family, great friends, and a terrific church.
And for that reason, my radio will avoid the Christmas station a few days more, so I can remember and give thanks.
Bigotry Anonymous
Hello. My name is Diana — and I’m a bigot.
I wish that it weren’t true. I like to think that I’m a bigot well into recovery, but I’ve had relapses along the way, and I’m really not sure how far I’ve come. I’m not going to confess the targets of my various prejudices. That wouldn’t serve any real purpose. And I wish journalist Juan Williams hadn’t passed up an excellent chance to keep his thoughts to himself when he said, “…when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
He said these words just after assuring Bill O’Reilly he wasn’t a bigot, but his confession of pre-judging people based on their choice to dress in a way that identifies themselves as Muslims negates his denial with breathtaking effectiveness. (Incidentally, if I wear a cross or another Christian symbol around my neck, or pray before my meal on a plane or in a restaurant, what does it say about me? Does my identification “first and foremost” as a Christian make people nervous?)
To make matters worse, O’Reilly claimed that it wasn’t just a few individuals, but “whole nations” that were against us (Americans, I suppose). I wish anyone who harbors that opinion could visit with my Iranian American friends who are proud to be citizens of this country, and the Iraqi refugees I visit who are working hard and happily building new lives for themselves here.
My final words on this most recent brouhaha are that NPR shouldn’t have fired Juan Williams, no one should try to de-fund NPR, and Fox News has no room to accuse other news outlets of being biased.
This story will blow over and I hope it won’t do too much damage before it falls off the front pages. But in an era of instant communication, I wonder if it’s still true that actions speak louder than words. In the long run, they probably still do, but grace-filled actions are like Redwoods that grow quietly and take a while to be noticed while misinformed or hateful words are more like stink weeds–or stink bombs. They’re lobbed from the internet to cable news to a seemingly infinite number of blogs.
I don’t know if Mr. Williams planned to make the comment he did or if it was an off-the-cuff remark, but he and all the rest of us need to come to terms with our inner bigots and find a good Twelve Step program–and less public venues for our confessions.
Internet Nightmare
It was late when Karen came over from next door with her cell phone. On the line was Emily, a young school teacher who moved here with her husband to be part of our fellowship, and who has been especially good to Jamilla, an against-the-odds teenager on her block. Karen put Emily on speaker, and suddenly we were all together in the middle of a post-modern teenage nightmare.
With part of her disability check, Jamilla had gotten herself a high-status cell phone that connects with internet, and recently she had been experimenting with ‘Urban Chat,’ a sleazy local website where teenagers flirt with each other online. A few hours earlier, an attractive guy from that site had convinced her to send him a nude photograph. Now he was telling her that unless she paid him $60, he was going to forward that photo to every kid he knew at her school. According to Emily, Jamilla was frantic, embarrassed, and very much afraid.
The ensuing conversation ranged from the new dangers of technology to the old vulnerabilities of adolescent insecurity to the unique blind spots of kids in poverty, but it kept coming back to the problem at hand: What should Emily tell Jamilla to do? For good reasons, Jamilla was terrified to tell her family, and it didn’t take much research to discover she could get into big trouble for sending the photo in the first place. In the end, we told her to agree to pay off her blackmailer the next morning, in person, on the campus of the University of Cincinnati. Of course, we had another plan in mind.
Jamilla and I parked near the meeting place early. She walked there alone, while I stood across the street, pretending to talk on my cell phone. Both of us nervously scanned the face of every young man on the sidewalk, looking for the bad guy. When he finally showed up, he walked towards Jamilla with a confident smile. Before he could say a word, I stepped between them.
“My name is Bart Campolo and I’m Jamilla’s pastor,” I said calmly, as his smile disappeared. “I’ve spoken with our lawyer and also with a police officer in our fellowship, and both of them tell me you’re not in any real trouble yet.” I paused for a moment, hoping he wouldn’t run, but he was frozen in place. “Now first of all, I need to watch you delete that photograph from your cell phone.” Wordlessly, he complied.
“Of course,” I continued, “you might have a copy of that photo on your computer, but I’m here to tell you that if it goes anywhere, I will personally see to it that you go to jail for at least a year and that your family pays out a great deal of money. Do you understand me?” He nodded, as I held up my camera and pushed the button. “Now I have your photograph and your telephone number and I know where you go to school. Son, what you did to Jamilla was ugly and cruel, but I’m going to let you walk away from it. But I promise you, if we ever hear from you again, the wrath of God will come down on you. Again, do you understand me?” He looked me in the eye for the first time. “Yes sir,” he said. I stepped back. “All right then. You may go.”
As he walked away, I put my arm around Jamilla, who still looked very afraid. Honestly, I was a little bit weak in the knees myself. I’m not a natural tough guy, after all. “Do you really think it’s over?” she asked quietly.
“Yes I do,” I replied. “That boy is terrified, and he ought to be. Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Because I wasn’t bluffing. I meant every word I said.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
On our way to her high school, I gave Jamilla just the kind of fatherly talking to you would expect, about trust and men and self-respect, and Jamilla gave me just the kind of relieved, grateful attention you would expect after an ordeal like that. Over and over, I tried to communicate to her just how precious she is to us. Jamilla teared up, and told me how much it meant to have a caring grown-up friend on her block. Without Emily, she said, she didn’t know where she would be.
After I dropped her off, I called Emily and Karen and Marty, so they could stop worrying. Then I gave thanks for women like them, who live out their love in the most natural ways, and make safe havens for girls in trouble. And then I treated myself to a greasy diner breakfast, during which I reflected at some length on the peculiar exhilaration of utterly overpowering a mean, abusive person in the name of Jesus.
It doesn’t happen nearly often enough, but I do love the smell of justice in the morning!
Keep the faith,
Bart
Bart Campolo is minister at Walnut Hills Fellowship in Cincinnati Ohio. Read this post and others at his blog.
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