We have a hymn request from Erlene: One Pair of Hands, sung by Carroll Roberson. Elvis Presley sang it, too–but if it’s Carroll Roberson you ask for, it’s Carroll Roberson you get. Plus exquisite background footage.
Year: 2024
‘Truth Lies A-Bleeding’ (2018)
King David–NOT a fictional character!
Is the Bible nothing but mere fiction, cooked up by Jewish scribes? Is there no objective truth: just “your truth” and “my truth” and whoever can make it stick?
I can’t think of anything that’s done more harm to our civilization than that postmodern mind-set–exemplified by the Biblical Minimalist movement. But we find the same thing in our business, our politics, and our relationships: God have mercy on us.
We do not have to knuckle under to this. We do not have to shut up and grin and bear it. There are material truths and moral truths, most of which have come down to us through the Bible and through God’s creation itself: He did not create us to be sophomoric nits and liars.
By Request, ‘Family Bible’
Requested by Susan: Family Bible, by Willie Nelson.
How this brings it back to me! my mother and my aunts singing or humming hymns as they went about their housework. That seed was planted very deeply; and it doesn’t take much to make it bloom again.
Nosy Dog Gets a Snootful
This is what you get when you annoy a clam. What was the dog going to do with it, anyway? But it’s still better than messing with live crabs and getting them mad enough to do something about it.
By Request: ‘Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me’
A hymn request: Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me, performed by the Mennonite Hour Singers. Requested by “Somone”–that’s WordPress, my friend, making you anonymous. I’d make them stop doing that if I knew how. Beautiful backdrop settings by the hand of God the Father.
Robbing… the Girl Scouts?
Here’s the suspect. For shame.
[We’ve just had an hour-long computer outage. Verizon says we are now good to go. This never used to happen. Now it happens a lot.]
How low can you get?
Outside a Walmart store in Fort Worth, Texas, a passerby robbed a Girl Scout cookie table, making off with a bag with some $450 in it (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13104265/texas-girl-scout-robbed-selling-cookies-walmart.html). They’ve got him on the store’s video, so he’ll probably be caught.
It was a bit of a shock when some of the news outlets described the thief as an 18 to 24-year-old “black man.” They almost never mention a suspect’s race. He’d be very unfortunate indeed if some of the black fathers in my neighborhood caught him. Nuff said.
Robbing little girls: is this what we’ve come to? What do our public prosecutors do, when they’re not busy trying to bump Donald Trump out of this year’s election?
Godlessness leads to lawlessness.
We Lead the World in UFO Sightings!
Would you believe the United States has 96 % (!) of the world’s UFO sightings?
Reported UFO sightings (1906-2014) over 96% of the UFO sightings are in the U.S pic.twitter.com/aDOaG9gyzI
— SAY CHEESE! 👄🧀 (@SaycheeseDGTL) February 16, 2023
Well, heck, I’ve seen UFOs. A lot of the people I know, maybe most of them, have seen UFOs. Once it was me and a lobbyful of White Castle customers, in broad daylight, gawking out the window at… what? Nobody knew.
Going by the map, the USA is way out in front, with Britain second and Western Europe third. How do we account for this?
*Thanks to our popular culture, do we expect to see more UFOs?
*Is there a lot of junk up there that isn’t flying saucers but just can’t be identified by an observer on the ground?
*Are illegal aliens really aliens–like, from other worlds?
*Red Chinese spy balloons? Caught ’em at it once: that surely was not the only time they ever did it.
I think what we call “public education” makes us poorly prepared to face reality of any kind–and that we take movies and special effects way more seriously than we ought to. We do need to know what’s going on up there in our country’s air space. It would be nice to know that rational people are handling it.
Zillionaire! For a Day
One night last year, a man in Washington, D.C., went to bed tired and astonished after believing he had just won $340 million (!) in the Powerball (https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/powerball-player-denied-340m-lottery-jackpot-over-website-mistake/news-story/c27da90ec1912b562a25ac5eba68d606).
He hadn’t.
Yeahbut, yeahbut! He had all the winning numbers that were posted online, where they remained posted for six hours. But no dice, said the lottery authority: those numbers posted online were “human error.” The numbers read off in the live broadcast, said the authority, were different from the ones posted online: but they were the right numbers, the ones online were wrong. Sorry, Charlie.
Well, now in 2024 the poor guy is suing Powerball and the D.C. lottery administration. Lots o’ luck with that.
He wasn’t really a multimillionaire, so it’s not like he lost anything but a deliriously happy dream (“All it takes is a dollar and a dream”). And maybe a chunk of his sanity.
I’ve always felt there’s something creepy, even sinister, about lotteries. It’s that whole idea of getting something–fabulous wealth–for nothing. Don’t you think it has a sort of pagan smell to it?
‘Kids Too Weak to Grip Pencils?’ (2018)
“So what am I supposed to do with this?”
British “educators” discovered, a few years ago, that children in the touchscreen generation were too weak to grip pencils. Or do much of anything else, when you come right down to it.
Now it’s six years later. I wonder if they took the touchscreens away and went back to pencils, erasers, paper, rulers, etc. [Laughs hysterically. Has to be shoved into a straitjacket.]
Do you like the way we’re heading?
‘Blessed Assurance’
No hymn requests this morning (sigh), so I’m on my own. How about one of the eight or nine thousand hymns Fanny Crosby wrote?
Blessed Assurance, sung by the Harpeth Gospel Quartet. Background sets by God the Father.