In our Wednesday morning pastors meeting, I asked the African-American pastors how they were feeling after Barack Obama’s win last night. All answered with variations of, “Great!” One told me privately, “I feel the American people got the presidency back.” Another said, “I don’t just feel great for my people. I feel great for America right now.”

I rejoice with these friends and determine to pledge our new chief-executive my faithful prayer support. In fact, these are the most important days to pray for the new leader, when he’s making crucial decisions regarding his staff. Those who didn’t care much for Bush’s staff (Cheney, Rove, etc) will be the first to admit how critical it is that the president choose wisely. So much of the success or failure of his administration will be determined by the quality of the men and women with whom he surrounds himself.

One of the things I admire most about Senator and now President-elect Obama is his unflappability. Throughout this marathon campaign — far too long and much too costly — we’ve seen the candidates in every kind of trying situation. At no time did I see Obama lose his temper and come unglued. With the relentless attacks and unreasonable charges flying in all directions, that’s as good a compliment as I know how to give. He was as cool under attack as anyone I’ve ever seen.

The Wednesday edition of the Times-Picayune carries a feature about Bo Pellini, the first-year football coach at Nebraska. Lately he’s been losing his temper on the sidelines and cursing out his coaches and players. The reporter said YouTube has been playing excerpts, to the consternation of Cornhuskers far and wide. Someone in Bo’s family who can read lips confronted him with the way he is losing his cool and demeaning his colleagues and players. He admits to being chastened. “I’m working on my temper,” he claims.

Coach Pellini did not ask me, but I can tell him how to conquer a temper. I’ve been there.

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I voted at 6:30 this Tuesday morning, at the end of my walk on the levee. An hour earlier, I slipped my driver’s license into my jeans and donned my glasses so I’d be able to read the ballot. A classroom at John Curtis Christian (elementary) School is our site. Usually when I walk in, there might be one or two other voters. Today, I stood in line with maybe 30 in front of me.

Our Baptist Center on Lakeshore Drive in New Orleans is the polling place for a number of precincts that were put out of business by Katrina three years ago. Today, our auditorium boasts 24 voting machines. When I arrived at the office at 8:30, several lines stretched outside the building and across the lawn. I estimated 200 people were waiting to vote outside, and perhaps nearly that number inside. Incredibly, down the street a block, the Episcopal Church, also a voting place for several precincts, was just as crowded.

The Times-Picayune this morning ran a couple of pages of photos of citizens, identifying who this one is, what he/she does for a living, where they live, and whether they are voting for Obama or McCain. After glancing at it, I went back and checked. Sure enough, every African-American was voting for Obama and every paleface was voting for McCain.

At my voting place this morning, I was struck by the heavy percentage of African-Americans in line. This part of town — the community is River Ridge — is thought of as majority-white, but it certainly did not look like it this morning.

I think it’s great. I’m delighted that the voter turnout today may end up being as high as 80 or 90 percent. It’s about time, is all I can say.

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“So, how are things in New Orleans?” I was asked several times Sunday. I was the guest preacher at the First Baptist Church of Andalusia, Alabama, some five hours from my house. From similar situations in other churches I have learned to come up with a quick answer to that question. Even assuming they have a real interest in the rebuilding of this city, no one has time for an in-depth 30 minute monologue.

“Anything you say about New Orleans right now is true,” I tell the questioner. “Parts of the city are lovely and prospering. Parts are being rebuilt, and some of the city looks awful, like a bomb has gone off. We used to have 135 churches. One month after Katrina, we had 35 still operating. Today, we have 100, some of them brand new, some prospering, and some struggling.”

The response to that is generally the same. “Oh, well, then you’re doing great, sounds like.”

I say, “Yeah. We’re doing great. Thanks for asking.”

Nothing snide about that answer. It’s the truth, assuming one also understands that the rebuilding of this city will continue for another quarter-century barring any further hurricanes.

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, when floodwaters were inundating most of this city and St. Bernard Parish, the awful phrase we heard again and again was “toxic soup.” It referred to the fears that the liquid under which our city was drowning was not just water, but a stew of water plus oil and sludge and who knows what else. Experts led us to fear about the health of the city after the water receded and we were able to re-enter.

Now, we learn there was no “toxic soup.”

In fact, the EPA has said the contamination of the city’s soil “did not get any worse from Katrina.” Which begs the question, of course. Just how toxic was the soil before the hurricane?

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Help me out here, please. This is only the beginning of this message, sort of “off the top of my head.” I’d love to have your stories and insights at the end.

I’ve told here of the wonderful West End Baptist Church in Birmingham that in 1959 befriended this 19 year old sophomore from the local Methodist college (Birmingham-Southern). The youth of that large church, most of whom had known one another since infancy, welcomed me as though I’d always been a member of the group. The adult leaders of the church learned my name and spoke to me like I was somebody. I blossomed like a potted plant moved from the closet into the sunlight.

And you may recall my telling how three or four years later, I watched that same church try to implode. The lay leadership, well, some of them, were in an argument with the pastor over cancelling the Sunday evening radio broadcast. Money was the problem–the lack of it, of course–and the church needed to either give more or cut expenses. Why in the world someone did not go to the congregation and preach a rousing message on “laying up treasure in Heaven” I’ll never know. Instead, they took out their pruning shears and began whacking. The question was whether in cancelling the radio broadcast, they were cutting essential services. The pastor said “yes” and the chief laymen seem to have said “no.”

So, in the time-honored way of Baptists through the ages, they held a business meeting, which I attended. It was well-attended (a fight will always bring out Baptists) and the tension was hot. The issue had long since grown beyond whether to cancel the one-hour broadcast and had morphed into personalities and methodologies and even theologies.

The tragedy for this kid preacher was watching people I dearly loved and to whom I owed so much verbally abuse and accuse one another for a solid hour. Regardless how the vote turned out (they canceled the program), you knew there would be no winners of this prize-fight except the enemies of all that is good and holy.

Something died in that church that day: the fellowship. That incredible church was never the same thereafter.

Which leads me to blame as a culprit for murdering the fellowship bull-headedness (on everyone’s part) and out-of-control egos. Or, to put it another way, when God’s people forget how to submit themselves to one another and to work to preserve the peace of Christ in the fellowship, all bets are off.

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Frank Roderus was not satisfied just to write western novels. He had to put unusual spins on the stories, probably for his own satisfaction, but sometimes to the consternation of his readers.

“Hell Creek Cabin” is the account of some people stranded in a tiny cabin by a winter blizzard. As they try to make the best of the bad situation, two robbers appear out of the frozen tundra and move in. Soon, the two, named Jimbo and BoJim, begin terrorizing the others. The good guy, a fellow named Veach, is not a fighter and carries no weapon, but keeps looking for a way to deal with these two who are both bank robbers and murderers.

In the final chapter of the book, Veach has escaped the cabin and is working his way through the snow, looking for an old gold mine in order to keep from freezing. Inside the cabin, the two robbers have a falling out and BoJim kills Jimbo. Then, while BoJim takes the bucket down to the stream to get some water, inside the cabin the husband and wife dig out their old rifle, load it, and aim it at the front door. They have no other recourse but to kill BoJim before he kills them.

The door opens and a man walks in.

Now, three minutes earlier, Veach had lain in wait for BoJim at the creek with a pick-axe he had located in the mine. He planted it in the bad guy’s back, killing him. Now, all he has to do is take care of Jimbo in the cabin, not knowing he is already dead.

That’s Veach walking in the cabin door as it opens.

And that’s where the book ends.

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I felt bad for the preacher that evening. As he walked to the pulpit to do “that thing he does so well,” I had the strong sensation that here is a man of God who is not taking care of his body. Gravity was winning the battle and even though he was some years younger than me, I could not escape the sense that his health was going to decline much too rapidly in the years just ahead unless he took action soon.

Two weeks ago at a funeral in Columbus, Mississippi, I had a brief chat with Stephanie, Stacy, and Sharon, granddaughters of Deacon Paul Cockrell, whose life and homegoing we were celebrating. Both the father and mother of these young adult women — Dr. Jimmy Sams and Helen Cockrell Sams Parker — are in Heaven now, and we spoke of them. I told one of the girls something their father had done for me over 30 years ago.

“In 1975, Jimmy made arrangements for me to fly to Dallas and go through the Cooper Aerobics Clinic for a full checkup. He set up the appointment and paid the entire cost. It was a life-altering experience.”

The clinic did not find anything seriously wrong with me, but much wrong with my sedentary lifestyle. They prescribed a jogging and exercise program and left an indelible mark upon my psyche, a strong impression that “I have to take care of this body!”

With the exception of brief lapses, I’ve tried to do so ever since.

I’ve written here previously about my walking three miles on the levee beside the Mississippi River several mornings a week before sunup. I’ve done it for many years and find it to be wonderful for a lot of reasons. The reason I bring it up now is….

I stopped walking last winter.

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When I’m upset, the last thing I need is someone to disagree with me. Yet, it may be precisely what I need — someone to call me down when I’m out of line, let me know what I’m doing wrong, point me to the right way.

“There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother,” says Proverbs 18:24. That’s the kind of friend I need. And so do you, particularly if you are in the Lord’s work.

We’ve said here that the epidemic afflicting the ministry today — at least, one of them—is the isolation of the minister. In my opinion, 95 percent of Southern Baptist pastors go it alone with their work of sermon-building, problem-solving, and ego-control.

Now, think of the foolishness and pure waste of that. Here we have 40,000 men (mostly) in our denomination laboring to do the same thing week in and week out — tasks like construct the sermons and Bible studies they will be bringing the following Sunday, plan business meetings and leadership summits to solve issues facing their churches, and the like. And instead of helping each other, they shut themselves inside their offices and studies to hammer out these matters in isolation.

If these were matters that can only be done alone, that would be one thing. But the fact is God has made His children so that we work great together and learn His Word at a greatly accelerated pace when we open the Bible with a good friend and share thoughts with one another. This does not replace the need for solitude to think through issues and matters and points and to commune with the Father about everything, but supplements it as nothing else can.

Every child of God needs a circumference of silence and solitude to think about his situation and to commune with the Father. In my experience, no one has ever doubted or disputed that.

But, can we assert just as positively that each believer needs one or two or three close friends with whom to share the matters of the Spirit?

I can hear the typical pastor (hey, I pastored for 42 years; I know typical pastors and was probably one myself) protesting, “I have the Holy Spirit within me, my wife alongside me, my staff helping me, and we’re all surrounded and upheld by our church members.”

No problem there. The problem is, it’s not enough.

You need one thing more.

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Monday night at our annual Fall meeting of the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans, Mike Canady was the featured preacher. At one point, he gave a confession.

“Many years ago, after growing up in the town of Sulphur, Louisiana, and while attending seminary in Fort Worth, I told the Lord, ‘I’ll go anywhere in the world you want me to go. I’ll do anything you tell me to do. Anything at all, Lord. Just don’t send me to Africa or back to Louisiana!'”

Mike paused and smiled. “For the past 42 years, I have served the Lord in Africa and Louisiana.” (Mike and Linda are former missionaries to the East African country of Malawi. Then, he was a director of missions in Houma, LA, and now directs the department of missions and ministries for the Louisiana Baptist Convention.)

Mark Joslin was sitting just to my left. I heard him mutter, “I know. I know.”

I leaned over and whispered, “What did you tell the Lord?”

This pastor of New Vision Baptist Church in the New Orleans suburb of St. Rose said, “I told him I’d go anywhere but not to send me back home.” Mark is — as you would guess by now — a local boy.

I did something similar. Now, I grew up in the coal fields of West Virginia and the rural countryside of north Alabama. When we left Birmingham to come to seminary in New Orleans in the summer of 1964, I prayed, “Lord, I’ll go anywhere. Just don’t send me to Mississippi.”

We put in 19 years in Mississippi, and loved every day of it.

Makes me wish I’d said, “Don’t send me to Honolulu.”

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Some live to eat and some eat to live. Being a Baptist, we eat to fellowship and fellowship to eat.

I’m not sure why some people in the Lord’s work are conflicted on the subject of eating at church. Looks to me like, from reading my Bible, it’s one of the most natural and, at the same time, spiritual activities available to us.

One of my favorite teeny-tiny Scriptures is found in Luke 24. Now, most of that chapter is given to the account of the two discouraged disciples leaving Jerusalem on the first day of the week (not the Sabbath, remember) and the newly-risen Lord Jesus joining them. As they walk along, He begins to open their minds about Old Testament prophecies concerning Himself, His life, death, and resurrection. Reaching the small town of Emmaus, they invited him to stay in their home.

“And He went in to stay with them. Now it came to pass, as He sat at the table with them, that He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.” Notice, He’s the Guest who became the Host. “Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him; and He vanished from their sight.”

A short while later, Jesus appears inside the locked upper room where the other disciples have gathered. Well, the disciples are so excited they almost lose it. “They were terrified and frightened, and supposed they had seen a spirit.” Jesus calms them down, shows them the scars on His hands and feet, and waits for them to digest this overwhelming evidence of His bodily resurrection. Once again, they almost overdosed on joy.

Now, here’s the verse, one of my favorites.

“But while they still did not believe for joy, and marveled, He said to them, ‘Anybody got anything to eat?'” (Luke 24:41) (Okay, I phrased it a tad different from the NKJV Bible in my lap, which has Him saying, “Have you any food here?” I prefer my way. It doesn’t sound so religious, but normal, the way real people talk.)

Now, in choosing this as one of my favorite verses I’m being serious and not trying to be cute. (If you know me, you know I sometimes have to point that out.)

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