religion

In my previous post I pointed out that in the TV show Lost, John Locke is now evil personified.

But a friend of mine pointed out that this is the real evil personified.

MARJAH, Afghanistan — Taliban fighters holding out in Marjah are increasingly using civilians as human shields, firing from compounds where U.S. and Afghan forces can clearly see women and children on rooftops or in windows, Afghan and U.S. troops said Wednesday.

The intermingling of fighters and civilians also has been witnessed by Associated Press journalists. It is part of a Taliban effort to exploit strict NATO rules against endangering innocent lives to impede the allied advance through the town.

These animals are sick and they must be stopped. Our efforts in Afghanistan have never been more important. Pray for our troops as they look evil in the eye and make sacrifices so that we don’t have to.

The hit TV series Lost continues to wow me. This week’s episode actually answers more questions than it raises, much to my enjoyment and relief.

Now we know where the lists of names comes from and we have a better understanding of what Jacob was up to. The challenge is whether we believe that Jacob is evil or the man in black, now personified as John Locke.

Whereas previous seasons nibbled around the edges of good versus evil, this season has overt religious overtones. It is sure to keep Lost fans buzzing about what it all means, and I am guessing that the Lost writers are good enough to throw some major twists into the plot in this final season.

The John Locke-centered episode this week we learn a lot more about Locke, but we also catch glimpses of a different side of Ben and Hurley. Ben is much less confident and the Hurly that lands in L.A. continues to act as if he’s the luckiest guy in the world – a stark contrast to the Hurley on the island that believes he is cursed.

It is a rare moment for me to get to the end of a TV show and actually feel enriched for having watched it. I’m crossing my fingers that the rest of the season of Lost will have some big payoffs.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. (Luke 2:11)

Is anyone else as bothered as I am about the media labeling the kick-off of the Christmas Season as “Black Friday?”

Very disturbing.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday in the sense that it is built around the whole idea of gratitude.

If there is one thing missing most in society today, it is gratitude, true gratitude. Not the kind like, “I’m so thankful that Wal-Mart has this awesome sale.” (That was the gratitude on display late Thanksgiving night when I ran to the nearby 24-hour Super Wal-Mart and there were lines of people waiting for the clock to strike midnight to officially kick off the post-Thanksgiving sales.)

Gratitude, in its purest sense, is recognizing that all that we have is a gift from God.

Count on the United Nations to come up with one of the most outlandish reasons to push the alarmist view of the “dangers” of global warming: ‘Climate change pushes poor women to prostitution.’

Seriously? I mean, come on, these kinds of claims make the global warming and overpopulation crowd look downright silly. This is the “oldest profession” we are talking about, and we are supposed to believe that global warming causes an increase in prostitution?

Just when I thought I’d heard it all.

I’ve been in Montana for a couple days, and for some reason I was surprised by the landscape.  Apparently, a more accurate visual representation of the state is “Legends of the Fall” and not “A River Runs Through It.”  I’ve never seen “Legends”, and I expected all mountains and pine trees. Instead, as I was landing in Billings, I realized it was a larger version of Snowflake, AZ.  It’s a prairie-like landscape with a smattering of trees.  This has been the most of what I’ve seen.  It’s still a beautiful state with very friendly people.

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As an information-junkie – particularly access to my cell phone, blackberry and laptop wireless card, it is amazing how useless I feel if I lose service.  When it happened the first time in some remote portion of Montana I had a panic attack.  I know, it was absurd, and it only lasted a few moments, and then I was like “how pathetic is that?”  I know, it is.

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I was in Chicago a couple days ago and had dinner with an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi.  One of the funniest and nicest guys I’ve ever met.  We ate at Shallots Bistro in Skokie and it was incredibly good food.  I had been pining for White Castle earlier in the day, and I didn’t get a chance to stop at one, so someone ordered Kobe beef sliders at the Bistro.  It’s the best Kosher food I’ve ever had.

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Speaking of food, I was in New York earlier in the week and had some really awesome roasted, cinnamon-coated peanuts I bought from a street vendor.  It’s the small things in life.

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School starts for the kids this week.  I’m not ready, because summer shouldn’t be ending so quickly, but I’m pretty sure that my wife is ready – particularly with my travel schedule lately.  I used to get so nervous the first day of school when I was in elementary school.  But I was never more nervous than going to the first day of school my freshman year of high school.  I had just spent the previous three years being home-schooled and I was really, really unsure how it was going to go.

I don’t have any memory of that first day of high school, other than knowing the day started with me being nervous, so it must have gone just fine.  And that’s the point – we make a big deal out of the first day of school, as we should, but in the end, unless it turns out to be a bad experience, we forget it.  And that’s the way it should be.

Every Independence Day, I try to find something that fits the somber and important nature of that day in 1776.  This year, Peggy Noonan nailed it in a Wall Street Journal piece that ran on Friday.  I’d have posted it earlier - like on the 4th, but was obviously preoccupied. So here it is… very much worth the read.

Making History

In appreciation of our country’s founders and its greatest living historian.

• By PEGGY NOONAN

Monday, July 1, was heavy and hot, and a full-scale summer storm passed through the city late in the morning. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania rose to speak. He knew he was endangering the respect in which he was broadly held, his “popularity,” but he once again counseled caution: Slow down, separation from Britain is “premature,” to declare independence now would be “to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper.” When he sat down, “all was silent except for the rain that had begun spattering against the windows.”

Then John Adams rose. He wished he had the power of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, he said; surely they had never faced a question of greater human import.

He made, again, the case for independence. Now is the time, the facts are inescapable, the people are for it, we are not so much declaring as acknowledging reality. “Looking into the future [he] saw a new nation, a new time, all much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend: ‘. . . We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.’ ” Outside the wind picked up and the storm struck hard with thunder and lightning. Storms had in the past unnerved Adams, but he spoke steadily, logically and compellingly for two hours.

After nine hours of debate, the voting commenced. The yeses were in the majority, but there were more noes than expected. Someone moved a final vote be taken the next morning. Adams and the rest hastily agreed.

That night word reached Philadelphia that the British fleet, a hundred ships, had been sighted off New York.

The next day, July 2, the final voting began. It went quickly. This was a pivotal moment in the political history of man. A creative, imaginative, historically conscious person in the middle of a thing so huge and full of consequence will try to notice things, to keep them forever in his eyes and pass them on. Here is a thing John Adams would never forget:

At 9 in the morning, just as the doors to the Congress were to be closed, “Caesar Rodney, mud spattered, ‘booted and spurred,’ made his dramatic entrance. The tall, thin Rodney—the ‘oddest-looking man in the world,’ Adams once described him—had been made to appear stranger still, and more to be pitied, by a skin cancer on one side of his face that he kept hidden behind a scarf of green silk. But, as Adams had also recognized, Rodney was a man of spirit, of ‘fire.’ Almost unimaginably, he had ridden eighty miles through the night, changing horses several times, to be there in time to cast his vote.”

All of these quotes are from David McCullough’s “John Adams.” More on Mr. McCullough in a moment.

The vote was completed: 12 for independence, New York abstaining, no one opposing. “The break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all 13 clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the others silent the effect was the same.”

On July 3, Congress argued over the wording and exact content of the formal Declaration. An indictment of the slave trade was dropped. In all, Thomas Jefferson saw roughly 25% of what he’d written wind up on the floor.

On July 4, discussion ended, debate was closed, a vote on the final draft of the Declaration of Independence was called, and the results were as on July 2. Congress ordered the document be printed. They’d sign it in a month. For now, John Hancock and one other, Charles Thompson, fixed their signatures.

Those present thought the great day had been July 2—the vote for independence itself. John Adams, who’d emoted over the 2nd in letters to Abigail, didn’t even mention the 4th , and Thomas Jefferson famously went shopping that afternoon for ladies’ gloves.

But on the morning of July 5, the people of Philadelphia started getting their hands on independently printed copies of the Declaration, and the impact was electric: My God, look what they said yesterday—”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” And on the 6th, a local newspaper carried the text of what had been agreed upon on the 4th. And so the celebration of the Fourth of July as one of the signal moments in the history of human freedom, was born. And so we mark it still.

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On David McCullough: Almost all the details in the above come from his “John Adams” and “1776″. He is America’s greatest living historian. He has often written about great men and the reason may be a certain law of similarity: He is one also. His work has been broadly influential, immensely popular, respected by his peers (Pulitzer Prizes for “Truman” and “John Adams,” National Book Awards for “The Path Between the Seas” and “Mornings on Horseback”) and by the American public. It is not often—it is increasingly rare—that the academy shares the views of the local dry cleaner, the student flying coach and the high school teacher, but all agree on Mr. McCullough, as they did half a century ago on, say, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. He is admired by normal people and esteemed by the intellectual establishment.

Why? Here are a few reasons. He has the eye of a gifted reporter and the depth of a historian. He sees and explains the true size of an incident or endeavor, he factors in, always, the fact that we are human, and he captures the detail that is somehow so telling—it was a scarf of green silk, not soft muslin, that Rodney wore to the vote on American independence. He writes like a dream, of course. He is broad gauged and has range—the Johnstown flood, the building of the Panama Canal, the founders.

Mr. McCullough betrays no need to be contrarian but is only too happy to knock down history’s clichés, to wit George III, the mad doofus, who was in fact “tall and rather handsome” and played both the violin and piano. “His favorite composer was Handel, but he adored also the music of Bach.” He rendered “quite beautiful architectural drawings,” assembled a distinguished art collection, collected books that in time constituted “one of the finest libraries in the world,” loved astronomy, was nonetheless practical, and had a gift for putting people at their ease. He impressed even crusty old Samuel Johnson, who after meeting him called him “the finest gentleman I have ever seen.” As for the famous madness, he suffered not during the American Revolution but later in life from what appears to have been “prophyria, a hereditary disease not diagnosed until the twentieth century.”

One can’t know if Mr. McCullough is correct in his judgment here, or fully so. One can know he inspected the available data, pondered it, and attempted a fair-minded assessment. He is reliable. (Of how many can that be said?) And he loves America. His work has gone to explaining it to itself, to telling its story.

Almost two years ago, I was lucky enough to tour Mount Vernon with a dozen people including him. (If I were David McCullough I would know the date and time. But I know the weather.) At the bottom of a stairway leading to the second floor, we chatted for a moment, and I asked him how he accounted in his imagination for the amazing fact of the genius cluster that founded our nation. How did so many gifted men, true geniuses, walk into history at the same time, in the same place, and come together to pursue so brilliantly a common endeavor? “I think it was providential,” he said, simply.

Well, so do I. If you do too, it’s part of what you’re celebrating today.

Later, after dusk, an unforgettable moment. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association, led by Gay Gaines, retiring after three years as one of its greatest regents—she’d worked herself like a rented mule to solidify and expand the operation—gave us dinner on a long table on the piazza, the veranda overlooking the unchanged Potomac. It is where President and Mrs. Washington dined. It was hot, and now dark, and David McCullough rose to speak of Washington, of his courage and leadership. A storm had been gathering all day. Now it broke, and as he spoke of Valley Forge there was, literally, a sudden roar of thunder, and lightning lit the clouds over the river. Mr. McCullough continued, with his beautiful voice, and we all got a chill: What kind of moment is this? What could we possibly have done to deserve it?

Nothing of course. Some gifts are just given.

That’s what Mr. McCullough’s work has been, a gift, one big enough for a nation. So thanks today to the memory of John and Tom and George, and old Ben, and John Dickinson, and Caesar Rodney too. Good work, gentlemen. You too, David.

Well, if you hadn’t heard, I was in a car accident early Saturday morning, which is why I have been silent on the blog.  Here is a quick rundown of what happened.

I spent the day Friday with the youth from my church at their annual youth conference.  I had been one of the speakers to the group and then late Friday evening met with just the kids in my ward.  Because my daughter had recently gotten home from her spinal surgery, I decided to drive home Friday night and be there to help out with her, since my wife had been doing the caring pretty much solo.

At 12:20 a.m. Saturday (I know the time because I had just looked at the clock and figured out how long it would be before I was home) with rain falling, I hit a big patch of standing water on the left lane of southbound I-17 just a few miles south of Cordes Junction.  I hydroplaned, couldn’t correct the spin, went into a total spin, crossing the right lane and hitting the dirt on the right side of the road and going into a multiple roll.

The car came to rest on the roof with me dangling from my seatbealt.  I got the seatbelt unbuckled and crawled through the driver’s side window (which had busted out during the roll over.)  I was a little off the freeway and it took about 10 minutes for someone to finally stop.  All I know about the guy that stopped is that his name is Patrick and he was driving a rental.  I don’t know where he is from or anything else. But I am extremely grateful that he stopped, called 911, let me sit in his car while we waited for emergency response and let me use his phone so I could call my wife and tell her that I was ok, but it was going to be a long night.  Turned out to be longer than I had thought.

The emergency response was a crew from the town of Mayer. Real salt of the earth, and very good at what they do. I don’t remember my paramedic’s name, but his family has a place in Linden – and we talked about Show Low and hunting in the White Mountains as I was strapped to a backboard, immobilized by the neck brace, riding in an ambulance to John C. Lincoln Deer Valley.   I had a pretty sore “lower quadrant” (left lower ribs/abdominal area) but the pain subsided by the time we got to Phoenix.

Once at JCL Deer Valley, I got a CAT scan and the doctor told me that I had a lacerated spleen and they were going to transport me to a Trauma center (John C. Lincoln North Mountain) to have it taken care of.  So, I had the second ambulance ride of my life.

Sidebar:   So I was obviously a little shaken up right after the crash, but I didn’t have a scratch on me – literally, not a mark, which was a common notation the next few hours.  Also, for the record, I did not fall asleep – I was loudly singing “Free Falling” by Tom Petty which was being played on 96.9 FM (rich irony, I know) and had a half-finished soda the balance of which ended up on my sleeve.  Also, I was going the speed limit and I was NOT on an electronic device.  In fact, both my cell phone an d my blackberry were lost in the accident – I’m assuming thrown out into the desert during the rolling since they were both on my console. End sidebar

As I was rolled into the Trauma center, I could sense a real change in the way things were being handled.  There was real urgency in the air.  The rest of my clothes came off (except my dark socks, which really bothered me for some reason), I was being asked a dozen questions by a dozen different people, both arms and wrists were being poked, prodded and taped and then  I see someone standing off to the side who says something and everything goes quiet – it was like being in the presence of a general. He was the trauma surgeon, Dr. Sam Casano.  I ended any ambiguity in what was going on in my mind when he said, we’re going in to take out your spleen and fix anything else we find. He asked a couple questions, and then the background noise started again and then the memory stops.

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“Hey Sean. How do you feel?” It was my wife – what a site for sore eyes!  I felt pretty good – a little groggy, but very comfortable, but as I tried to say something, I realized that I probably didn’t feel all that great.  I tried to swallow, but my mouth was so parched and I felt like I had a pencil stuck down my throat. Oh, it hurt!

But I was happy to see my wife.  She said that surgery was over and that everything went swimmingly. It was mid-morning and I realized for the first time that my life had just changed – pretty dramatically in the short term (trips canceled, meetings by phone rather than in person, etc.) and to some degree in the long term (I now carry a card which tells emergency folks that I don’t have a spleen).  But I was alive, already recovering and realizing that I was both blessed and lucky.

I have a wonderful wife – who drew the short straw when she agreed to marry me.  And with my recovering daughter, her life was already complicated enough before having to deal with an invalid husband.  I have kids who love me no matter what – which I need to take advantage of because it isn’t always going to be this way.

And I have a big bunch of absolutely wonderful friends. From the phone calls, notes, emails, facebook comments, card, flowers, visits, prayers, to conspiring with me to get a blackberry activated without my wife knowing (our secret is safe Jack and team) and the outpouring of help with Julie, the kids, the house, scouring the accident site for lost and important items – I feel like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and it literally brings tears to my eyes.  

Thank you. To each of you. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the thoughtfulness, generosity and kindness.

So now I’m home, sporting a shining set of staples going about 7 inches up my stomach and less a spleen.  I know I need to take it easy, and I will (I can’t drive until next week, so I’m a prisoner anyway).  However, I have a LOT to catch up on with news and events and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking – so I’ll be back in blogging mode.

The first question is, how in the world is my having an accident considered news?  I don’t see it, but others apparently see it differently. Here and  here. And it was all started by Greg Patterson at espressopundit.  Paul Giblin at the Arizona Guardian actually called me, and his story was so detailed, I’ll post it next in its entirety.

The tragic death of Kerry Martin and her infant son Austin reminds us that life is fragile.

At one point in her life Kerry Martin was called the “31st Senator.” It fit her well because when her husband Dean was a State Senator, she was a near-constant presence at the legislature giving counsel, advice and support to her husband and his nascent political career.

It’s safe to say that without Kerry, there probably wouldn’t have been a Sen. Martin or a Treasurer Martin.  Not only did she provide structure and discipline to his campaigns and elective service, she worked just as hard as Dean did to meet and greet every person she could, adding a wonderfully human touch.

Kerry was one bright cookie as well.  She understood grassroots, precinct targeting, get-out-the-vote tactics and messaging as well as any seasoned political operative.  She knew exactly what worked and what didn’t for Dean on the stump. And she was always at his side.

As political couples go, you’d be hard pressed to find a couple who worked more closely together, played to each other’s strengths and weaknesses any better or adored each other more than Dean and Kerry Martin.

I got to know Kerry during Dean’s initial campaign for the State Senate.  We even lived in the same precinct for a few years, and have been the same legislative district for more than a decade.  She was always pleasant and always willing to jump in and help anyone engaged in a good cause.

My heart breaks for Dean.  I can’t imagine the pain of losing a spouse and then losing an infant child.  I’m a strong believer that God has a purpose for each of His children, and I have faith that these events are in His hands. I know Dean understands this as well, but I know it is still very painful.

One thing is certain, Kerry lived up to the Apostle Paul’s sentiment as written in 2 Timothy 4, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”

Kerry and Austin are in a better place, and the reunion with Dean that occurs in the future will be a sight to see.

Godspeed Dean. Find strength in your anguish and know that there are a lot of people who are here for you.