Nothing points up how out of touch I am with current culture in this country like reading a list of the top-selling CDs of the last year. Or the top ten movies. Or the best-selling novels. I don’t recognize any of them. And this current crop of popular singers–who are they? I hear their music on the radio and it all sounds alike. And the gospel music sounds like the rock stuff.

I’m trying hard not to be an old fogey about these things. I buy CDs of Alison Krauss and Union Station, the best blue-grass band ever, and they’re not ancient. I love Neil Young, but he is. My favorite is the songsters of the big band era; “old” goes without saying.

Now, I’m not against going to a movie occasionally, if it’s the right kind. Lately, there have been some good ones out there. Late Thursday afternoon, I bought a ticket to see “The Good Shepherd,” a story of the old OSS and the beginnings of the CIA. After an hour of this movie, I found myself puzzled to the point that I left.

I wondered who, for instance, decided that the best way to tell a cinematic story is to cut it up in bits and pieces and disorient the viewer? In that movie, a scene from 1961 is followed by one from 1939, then we cut to 1945. Back and forth. None of it made sense. Do these people not know you tell a story by starting at the beginning and going forward to a conclusion? Or would that be too simple, too juvenile? Did Kurt Vonnegut create this fractured-storytelling business with “Slaughterhouse 5”? At least his made sense, eventually.

I wonder what is the process movie-makers employ when they decide, “Let’s make the hero a sad, silent, miserable type. And let’s give him an unhappy home life. Let’s have his child be emotionally abandoned and overwhelmed by sadness. Oh, and let’s make the United States as unscrupulous and murderous as its enemies.”

Perhaps the biggest questions of all are: why do movie critics rate these shows so highly? and why am I paying good money for this?

“I don’t need this,” I rationalized, and walked out and went home to supper.

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Ask any director of missions and he will tell you one of his biggest challenges is strengthening the connection between his pastors and other ministers. Even after the incredible post-Katrina blessings we’ve enjoyed, we still have to work at building the fellowship.

Wednesday, as our weekly pastors meeting resumed following the holidays, as the pastors entered the room, they sat alone or with the person they came with, usually at a table by themselves. But we encouraged them to move together, then played a little game we used to open Lay Evangelism Schools with.

“Where did you live at the age of 4 and how did you heat your home? Start with the person with the shortest hair and answer that question.” In two minutes, each table was finished. Second question.

“At what point in your life did Jesus become more than just a word to you?” That took longer and some began opening up. Third question.

“What is your biggest prayer request for the pastors and churches of New Orleans?” After they answered, we prayed, table by table, taking all the time anyone wished.

“My prayer,” I told them, “is that our ministers will be in this city because God put you here, not because you feel you have no other choice.”

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Here is the picture from the ‘Old Friends‘ post you read about:

And my somewhat enhanced version:

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Gradually, the local picture becomes clearer. Less smokier, shall we say.

The statewide ban on smoking inside Louisiana restaurants went into effect January 1. Some local eateries are hollering that they will lose business, although no one has explained who they will lose it to. As much print as this change is receiving, you would never know that the law has no teeth in it, that lawmakers are counting on the public to enforce the ban. Anyone acquainted with human nature has to be skeptical.

Keith Manuel and Bob Moore are leaving. Keith, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in the Algiers section of New Orleans and one of our leading ministers for over 7 years, will be joining the staff of the Evangelism Department of the state Baptist convention. Bob, associate pastor of the First Baptist Church of New Orleans, is moving to a Montgomery, Alabama, church in a similar capacity. Both are fine men who will leave major holes around here.

Calvary Church is hosting a reception for Keith and Wendy Manuel (also Keith, Jr., Jeremy, and Hannah) this Saturday afternoon, January 6, at the First Baptist Church of Belle Chasse.

Keith promises that with his new state-wide duties, he will be back this way often and we have not seen the last of him. Since Katrina, he has developed newswriting talents and taken photos of the New Orleans area that have appeared in publications everywhere. Yet, prior to the hurricane, he didn’t even own a camera. Necessity was the mother of this creativity. Baptist Press has run many Keith-Manuel-articles on local people.

David Crosby is back. The ten-year pastor of the FBC-NO has returned from a three-month sabbatical. Over lunch Tuesday he said half seriously, “The bad part is everyone expects me to have come back rested up.” For several weeks, he and Janet visited friends and family in other parts of the country, but over the past month, they’ve been back here doing funerals and weddings and meeting with church leaders, although his staff has been preaching. He returns to the pulpit Sunday, January 7.

My first question to him was, “After three months away, did you find it hard to come back?” The answer was no, that he was ready. I told him I’d just taken two weeks off and did not want to come back this (Tuesday) morning. But, I got out of bed early, did my usual morning routine and was in the office on time. An hour later, a pastor called needing my assistance and soon I was glad to be back in the saddle.

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It’s Sunday night–New Year’s Eve–and I find the sound of fireworks down the street oddly comforting. They sound like “normal.”

My first acquaintance with neighborhood fireworks came on a mountaintop in West Virginia in the late 1940s. Our neighbors, the Howells, went all out on the Fourth of July and New Year’s and provided a treat all the children would never have had otherwise and no doubt recall to this day. The six McKeever offspring would get upstairs in our bedrooms and open the windows, providing a ringside seat since the Howells lived only three houses away. I’d never seen anything like it. The poverty in a coal-mining camp in those days was something to behold, and even though no doubt the “adults” in the camp called Affinity pooh-poohed the Howells’ spending that kind of money only for it to go up in smoke and bangs, it was a wonderful occasion for the kids.

That to me made it a good investment.

When we moved to the New Orleans area in September of 1990, it never occurred to us that locals would do anything more than the residents of Charlotte, NC, or Columbus, MS, where we had lived for the previous two decades. New Year’s Eve was a shocker. Driving home late that night from a friend’s house where we had gathered for supper, you would have thought a heavy fog had settled in. It was the smoke from fireworks. And the noise–every kind of noise, from the house-rattling boom of rockets to the sharp blast of bombs to the rat-a-tat ear-assaulting bang-bang-bangs of hundreds of firecrackers at once. Forget about trying to sleep through that. Just let it run its course; next day’s a holiday anyway.

Oddly enough, here in Jefferson Parish, fireworks are illegal. Each year Sheriff Harry Lee makes public pronouncements about his intentions to arrest violators. He might as well be trying to hold back the sunrise.

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“Saddam Hussein escaped justice,” someone said on NPR radio this Saturday morning. This murderous Iraqi dictator was found guilty of the 1982 murder of 148 Shiite Muslim civilians and sentenced to the gallows, a sentence that was carried out promptly last night.

The question lingers, “But what about the hundreds of thousands of others he slaughtered? Shouldn’t he have to pay for those deaths also?” But this raises another question: “How?” All he had was one life and that one was taken. Biggest question of all: “So where is the justice in this?” Answer: We may not expect absolute justice on this side of the grave. On the other side, well, that’s another story.

They said Saddam’s last words were “God is great.” I take that to mean he uttered “Allah Ak-bar,” the phrase which is so much a part of Islam.

My word on this is: A few seconds after Saddam’s neck snapped, he began to understand just how great God truly is, and not in any way he anticipated.

“It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgement.” (Hebrews 9:27)

The way I read Holy Scripture, Saddam’s troubles have just started. You would not want to be in that man’s shoes.

This, incidentally, is why Scripture makes so much of the death of Jesus on the cross, that act by which He paid the complete price for every sin ever committed. Every sin, every one, forever. Yes, he died for Saddam’s sins too. It’s why believers make so much of the mercy and salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If we all got what we truly deserved, we would be in the same predicament as Saddam at this moment, awaiting our appointment with the Supreme Judge of the universe from whose righteous decision there is no appeal.

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Recently, we told on this website a story we titled “The Brown Bag Christmas.” We specified very plainly that Carrie Fuller had shared with our Sunday School class this story from her own family, and we clearly spelled out that the small child in the story is her own grandmother. What is fascinating about that is that soon afterwards, I began receiving e-mails from people asking, “Did that really happen?”

I was glad to see that other websites and some publications picked up the story and adapted it to their purposes and reprinted it. Most chose to leave out the Carrie Fuller connection. The bad thing about that is that this wonderful and authentic story now lives in cyberspace and just like thousands of other tales which may or may not be true, this one is now circling the earth without proper identification. People will read it and think, “Just another Christmas myth,” and let it go at that. And I hate that. I grant you it’s a nice story and perhaps not of earth-shaking magnitude, but this whole thing symbolizes a larger issue for me.

People need to know whether a story is true. Someone inside us wants to know. Did this happen? Are these people real? Can I count on this? Or did someone just make this up?

They used to ask John F. Kennedy, Jr., whether he remembered his father and if he recalled playing around the desk in the Oval Office. He said something like, “I have a hard time knowing whether I’m actually remembering those things or I’m remembering something I’ve seen a hundred times on television.”

A half-dozen years ago, Fred Rochlin published a book (“Man in a Baseball Cap” by HarperCollins) containing stories of World War II which he had shared with his family over the years. It’s a typical war story, well-told and interesting, but the small book ends with an admission I’ve never seen anywhere else. Here it is verbatim.

“I remember flying from Dakar in the Senegal across the Sahara Desert through the Zagora Pass into Marrakech, Morocco. We were low on fuel. We landed at this dusty town, Timbuktu, mud huts, everyone speaking French. American Air Force fuel depot. Thousands of barrels of fifty-gallon, one hundred octane aviation fuel. We had cold beers. Refueled, took off, flew through the Zagora Pass, through the Atlas Mountains and into Marrakech. I remember all this with pristine clarity.”

“It never happened. I checked my old navigator log. We didn’t land to refuel. We flew right through the Zagora Pass. And we wouldn’t have refueled at Timbuktu anyway. Too far away from the course of our flight. So, where did that memory of that dusty French African town come from?”

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I’m toward the last of a two week vacation, the period in and around Christmas and New Year’s. The first week, I drove up to Nauvoo, Alabama, and spent 3 days with my parents. On Thursday, all my siblings came in and we had a great visit. They left late that afternoon and Friday promised to be a quiet day. So I called J. L. Rice in Double Springs.

J. L. and I were best friends at Winston County High School back in the 1950’s and after working in Chicago for several decades, he and Betty are back here. He’s mostly retired, but has a barn and cattle and a huge yard and grandchildren, plenty to keep him occupied. He leads the worship at Meek Baptist Church in Arley, a resort community on the shores of the massive Smith Lake. Betty is the church secretary and her brother Etsel Riddle is the pastor, so don’t cross one of them unless you want the whole family on your case!

Anyway, I called him Friday morning and asked if we could have coffee that afternoon at the only fast-food place in town, Jack’s Hamburgers. “I’ll call around and see if I can find any of the gang,” he said. Nine of our classmates showed up. Pretty good on a two-hour notice. (I wonder if any other graduating class of WCHS could have done that, especially considering that we graduated nearly 49 years ago.)

We sat at a large round table in the middle of that little restaurant for the next two hours, laughing and reminiscing until our sides hurt. J. L. whipped out his digital camera and the counter girl took our picture. Later, he printed out a copy of it on my computer, and back at home, I produced a cartoon version of it.

(I’ll e-mail it all to Marty and he can put it on the website the first of next week. [as promised, here it is] Right now, he’s at Nauvoo with his family, visiting his grandparents and letting 9-year-old Darilyn and nearly-5-year-old Jack run free on the farm. Neil is there with his three, so the cousins are bonding. When I called Thursday evening, they had been fishing in the pond and were now lighting a bonfire.)

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Going east on Interstate 10, just before you leave Jefferson Parish and enter Orleans, construction workers are hard at work a few feet to your left putting together a massive “fly-over” that will allow commuters driving into Metairie from the Pontchartrain Causeway to avoid the most congested part of the interstate and get on into the downtown area. It’s due to be finished in 2009 and is costing 69 million dollars. Now they’re having to take up much of the concrete they’ve laid and start over.

Inspectors found that 350 cubic yards of concrete–that would be some 40 cement trucks worth–will have to be ripped up and replaced. All we’re told is that the concrete was “adulterated,” and a spokeswoman for Boh Bros. Construction said they’re looking into how that particular cement made its way into the supply chain. Inspectors say the plan is for the concrete in this corridor to last 75 years, but that this particular concrete is thinned down to the point that it would be worn out in less than half that time.

Inspection is good. Strict enforcement is great. Accountability is a terrific thing. We motorists have to trust that the highways and bridges going up everywhere around here will do what they are supposed to. Most of the major thoroughfares throughout this city are elevated, some of them frighteningly so, like the well-named “Highrise” in Gentilly that passes over the Industrial Canal.

How does that line go? “People will not do what you expect; they will do what you inspect.”

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My friend John got involved in a conversation, I suppose we could call it, with a group of lesbians on a website they maintain. It felt more like getting caught in a crossfire, for my money.

“Your name came up,” he warned, “and I thought I’d better warn you, you may be hearing from them on your website.” Thanks a lot.

I went to the link John provided and read his extensive give-and-take with the participants in that group. It was not a pretty thing. He would type in some fairly reasonable statement in disagreement with their position and they would explode with ugliness, crudity, and accusations. He was a blankety-blank bigot, and once my name got involved–I’m still not sure how that happened–then I was a bigot of that brand and to that degree also.

I responded to John that I would not be saying anything to anyone from that camp trying to draw me into the fray. Some fights are not worth the effort. As the oldtimer said, a dog can whip a skunk, but it ain’t worth it.

I was telling a mutual friend about John and wondering why he even engaged these sisters in that conversation in the first place. He said, “Oh, John loves a good fight.” We laughed and I said, “He reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt’s dog.” TR’s mutt was always getting in fights and coming out on the losing end. A reporter said, “Mr. President, your dog’s not much of a fighter, is he?” Roosevelt said, “Oh no, he’s a wonderful fighter. He’s just a poor judge of dog!”

I suppose someone has to engage the homosexual activists and respond to their charges and then take the heat from the conflagration. But not everyone is called to that kind of verbal conflict. I, for one, know almost nothing about lesbianism or male homosexuality. (I prefer not to call them ‘gays,’ since I’ve never met one yet who was gay, meaning “showing a joyous or merry mood.” –Webster.)

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