The hottest book in town these days is not about vampires or witchcraft in an English boarding school. It’s a testimony of a Christian man who has the full attention of the football world at the moment.

The title of Saints quarterback Drew Brees’ just-off-the-press book is “Coming Back Stronger: Unleashing the hidden power of adversity.” (His co-author is well-known Christian author and speaker Chris Fabry.)

All this morning, Drew Brees signed books at the local Barnes & Noble store. When someone asked me Friday if I intended to join the crowd for an autograph, I laughed at the idea.

This morning’s Times-Picayune says people started lining up last night at 4 pm to be first in line this morning at 9. The man has achieved rock star status, it would seem.

The title “Coming Back Stronger” carries a dual meaning. Primarily it refers to his near-career-ending surgery after the 2005 football season and his comeback to win the Super Bowl on February 7 of this year. But almost as strongly, it refers to the city of New Orleans which has come back (and is still returning) from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Odd that in the same week we have books hitting the stands from Coach Sean Payton (“Home Team”) and from Brees, his star quarterback.

If Payton’s book made us laugh and want to stand up and cheer, Brees’ book touches our hearts and strengthens our faith. Oddly, Brees’ book has more of the inside football dope on what plays were run and how they are called than the coach’s book does. But mostly, Brees writes about his love for the Lord and how God uses adversity in our lives to make us stronger and better and more effective.

Drew Brees is one of those natural athletes who even from childhood was the first one chosen for any team he played on–softball, baseball, basketball, volleyball, soccer. As a senior in high school, he led his team to the first state championship in their history. At Purdue University, he took the team to the Rose Bowl. In the pros, he was the Super Bowl MVP and star quarterback of the champion New Orleans Saints. A winner.

It’s all come easily for him, right? Ha. Not even close. The story of Drew Brees is one of adversity after adversity. Setbacks, disappointments, betrayals. And each time, getting back up and getting into the game and learning from what just happened.

Here is a short list.

Continue reading →

This July 4th weekend, I’m burdened for America. We are so divided by every issue.

At no time since I’ve been on earth–and I arrived in the Spring of 1940–was this country more divided than the decade of the 1960s. Americans were trying to figure out what to do in Vietnam, racial marches and sit-ins took over the front pages of big-city newspapers, two prominent leaders were assassinated (Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy), Communism was on the march internationally, and no one could agree on anything.

On October 22, 1968, during the presidential campaign, Richard Nixon and his entourage traveled through the little town of Deshler, Ohio. Sign-bearing crowds lined the streets. In the mob, 13-year-old Vickie Lynn Cole was holding a sign which made her famous, if only for a few days.

“Bring Us Together,” her sign read.

After he was elected, Nixon mentioned the message of that sign, adopted it as his administration’s theme, and invited Vickie and her family to the inauguration. (Thereafter, she faded into obscurity. Wikipedia says she’s now a school principal in Ohio. When interviewed, she said she had dropped the sign she originally held, then picked one up off the ground. She had no idea what the sign said and tossed it away after the rally. So much for Vickie Lynn’s politics!)

I’ll leave you to decide how well Mr. Nixon did in bringing the country together.

My point here is that division is the order of our day in this country. We are torn asunder by every issue you can name—from immigration to drilling for oil to the Gulf disaster to what to do about the economy. We are divided over the national debt, bailouts for companies that get in trouble, and healthcare. We are splintered over the role of the Constitution and the Supreme Court, over the role of religion in American life and whether to have a Day of Prayer.

We are at odds over a hundred major matters and 10,000 little issues.

It would be funny if it were not so sad. After 8 years of the Bush administration, one year into the Obama White House, all a lot of people can suggest is: Vote Republican. I want to respond, “Hey, friend, they don’t have the answer either! Remember–we have just spent 8 years there!”

Neither group has a clue. Our nation is lost. “Dear God, come find us.”

The Prophet Jeremiah said of his day and perfectly described our own as well: “It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps.”(Jer.10:23).

I posted a note on Facebook Friday night that is drawing a fair amount of comment. It begins: “Excuse the French.”

Continue reading →

No one is more surprised than I am to find I’m now 70 years old. I reached that lofty plateau last March 28 and am still getting adjusted to the thought. Not sure if I will ever quite adjust to the fact that the old fellow staring back at me from the mirror is myself.

People often take pictures of me when I’m preaching or drawing, but it’s a rare photograph I want to look at twice. They just don’t look like me!

I’m still the 15-year-old I was in 1955 when life began to get more interesting. (That’s when I discovered girls and cars and adult work on the farm!)

Age 70. That’s 7 years more than Martin Luther lived. It’s 39 more than David Brainerd was given and 13 more than Jonathan Edwards.

You’d think I would have accomplished more than I have, given all that extra time. To my everlasting shame, I haven’t.

Looking back a few years, I know now that I fully expected some things to be true at this age than are the case.

–I would have thought I’d feel more like an adult than I do, and less like a teen. No one told me how septuagenarians are supposed to feel, but I’m betting it’s not like this.

–That I would be able to look back on 7 decades, including 48 years in the ministry, with a greater sense of accomplishment than I do.

–If you had asked me years ago, I would have told you that by now I should fully expect to have under control all my appetites, my strange sense of humor, my delight in a new car or new clothes, and my preference for a good novel over a book on Christian theology. But I don’t, not nearly enough.

–To have more inner peace. Mostly, I do have peace. But sometimes when I wake up in the small hours of the morning, the anxieties are raging for no reason that I can think of. Everything inside me says, “It shouldn’t be this way.”

I would have expected to be an adult by now. To be mature, settled, satisfied, and Christlike. Instead, I’m not even close…

Continue reading →

My friend Walt Grayson started this.

Walt is a character if Mississippi ever had one. Living in the Jackson area, he does features on people and places all over the Magnolia State for a television station. He writes books on the people he has met, places he has found, pictures he has taken. (Find his impressive work on amazon.com.)

I was the Grayson family’s pastor in my first church following seminary, in Greenville, Mississippi, in the late 1960s. Walt was a teenager, his father was a deacon, and his mom a mainstay in the church. Precious people.

“Joe,” Walt messaged me last night, “you need to get to know Gordon Cotton, retired curator of the Old Capitol Museum, Vicksburg.”

Walt knows of my interest in Civil War stuff. I had just told of my son Neil giving me “Seen the Glory” by Hough, a novel on Gettysburg.

The Old Capitol Museum is in Jackson, so I assume he means Mr. Cotton has retired to Vicksburg. Which is not a bad place for anyone interested in the War Between the States to dwell.

“You remember Daniel Pearl? Reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was killed in Pakistan following 9/11.” I do indeed.

“Pearl was researching something and he and Gordon spent a lot of time talking on the phone. They talked about everything, not just history. Including religion. And one day, Daniel Pearl told Gordon he did not believe in hell.”

“Gordon Cotton said, ‘If you don’t believe in hell, then where is Sherman?'”

Walt said, “That became the headline for Pearl’s article in the Wall Street Journal the next day.”

That is a reference to General William Tecumseh Sherman whose “March to the Sea” helped to bring the war to a close by killing untold numbers of southerners. When he said, “War is hell,” Sherman spoke as a practitioner of the art.

If there is no hell, then Sherman got off scot-free, seems to be Cotton’s point. Debatable, I suppose, since it was war-time and God alone can sort out who is responsible for what during those times of mass killings and pandemic cruelties.

If there is no hell, then a lot of people have worked the system.

Continue reading →