Church Chat

 

 

I am one of those awful “Evangelical Christians.” 

 

But first, let me give you my definition of Evangelical Christianity. But before that, let me explain that you can pronounce it “E-vanglical” or “Evan-gelical.” When I'm talking around the house, I say “E-vangelical,” but when I’m talking to others, I say “Evan-gelical” to sound snooty.

 

My definition of Evangelical Christianity:  Christians who believe in the central tenants of Christianity. There is a God, Jesus is the Son of God, The Bible is the written revelation of God, and man was made for potluck dinners.

 

Okay, I made that last one up. My definition of an Evangelical Christian is anyone who can repeat The Apostles’ Creed without crossing their fingers.

 

Evangelical Christianity is a broad, diverse group of people who believe all of this God stuff. God is here, and he is not silent, as one famous Evangelical writer said.

 

While every Christian denomination cannot be described as Evangelical, you can find Evangelicals in every denomination.  Therefore, I believe there are Evangelical Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Mennonites, Free Will Baptists, Churches of Christ Without The Piano, Churches of Christ With The Piano, and the various churches that sound chill like The Wear Your Pajamas Fellowship.

However, when the national news media refers to Evangelicals, they are only thinking about one denomination: Southern Baptists.

Nothing makes The New York Times happier than to find something goofy out about a Southern Baptist leader like Jerry Falwell, Jr.

You might have remembered last year it turned out Jerry wasn’t exactly “saintly” when a picture surfaced of Jerry, Jr with a comely young lady, not his wife, and they looked like they were drinking real wine and not grape juice (you Southern Baptists know what I’m talking about).  The top of their pants were not buttoned, and it looked like it was a post-coital to me. Others may have thought it looks pre-coital.  Anyway, coital was in there somewhere.

It was a huge scandal made even bigger by Falwell’s association with a certain Big Orange Man. 

Falwell was influential in helping Trump with Evangelicals even though Trump didn’t know his Corinthians from a hole in the ground.

Not all.  I repeat. Not all Evangelicals were on The Trump Train.  However, a lot were mainly because the other party decided that the best way to unify the county was to make fun of people they disagreed with.

Sure, it sounds simplistic (and maybe it is), but at least to this Evangelical, the Democratic Party decided the problem with the country was all of the dumb hicks in The Southern Baptist Convention.

  
Then something stupid came on the horizon.  Qanon.

Qanon is a conspiracy group that popped up on 4chan (a message board) that said there is “a cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles running a child sex trafficking ring,” (all Democrats, by the way) and their enemy is Donald J. Trump.  “Q” is  supposedly someone with high government clearance that has access to classified information and because of that has to be anonymous.

Agent One:  “Hey, after the Satan service, can we check on our trafficking ring?.”
Hillary Clinton:  “Sure!"
Barack Obama:  “I’m in!”

There was supposedly a pizza place in Washington, DC, that allegedly held children in the basement for the trafficking ring.  A guy drove to Washington to free the children.  Guess what?  The pizza place didn’t have a basement.

There have been other boneheaded ideas from Qanon, like Trump would be inaugurated on March 4th, 2021 (don’t ask).  When that didn’t happen, then Qanon said he would be inaugurated on March 20th, 2021.  That didn’t happen either if you didn’t notice.

In my circle of Evangelicals, I didn’t hear much about Qanon.  But there are many people out there who think we open every meeting with prayer and a message from Qanon.  We don’t.

Here’s why I never fell for that nonsense:  the “anonymous “part.  If you “can’t” tell me who you are, then I’m not all that interested in what you have to say.  It is as simple as that.  By the way, all of the anonymous and unnamed sources in the various Russian scandals were why I didn’t buy those reports, either.

The bottom line is QAnon has hurt conservatives and Evangelical Christians in particular.   I wonder if QAnon wasn’t something a liberal comedy writer came up with to see how many suckers are Conservative.  Too many.

Yet, I’m not worried about Evangelical Christianity.  We’ll get through this because we can say The Apostle’s Creed without our fingers crossed.

35

  "A man and a woman. A woman and a man.
   Some can. Some can't.  And some can."  ~ Roger Miller

Two weeks ago, my wife and I went to Birmingham, Alabama, for our nephew's wedding.

Our nephew, who was born at Kennestone Hospital, like the rest of us, went to Birmingham-Southern College and met a young lady from New Jersey. They fell in love, and they decided to get married.

For any of you that had young people getting married recently, you know what havoc COVID-19 played with the proceedings. I know young people that had to put off their wedding for several months until it became comfortable to bring Mee-maw and Pee-paw to the ceremony.

Well, my nephew's wedding went on without a hitch. Except, of course, we had to drive through a Category 12 tornado to get to Birmingham.

From Atlanta, Birmingham has always been a reasonably easy drive. It is not a reasonably easy drive when the weather is described as "Armageddon" by AccuWeather Laser Doppler Radar.

The sky was pitch black,  and the rain was coming down in buckets. But, and this is important, from my crack geography skills, I ascertained that the tornadoes (yes, there was more than one) were both north of  Interstate 20 and south of Interstate 20.

So we were able to scoot through the tornado conditions and make it to the hotel without being taken up into a funnel cloud and landing in the Land of Oz. ("Listen, fella, there's only room for one person without a brain.")

To me, this trip is an almost perfect analogy about marriage.

My wife and I celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary this week.  In my college years, I never thought I'd be married 35 minutes, much less 35 years.  I had a unique ability to repel women.

They all had this checklist of qualities: looks, brains, muscles, height,  and money.  I had none of those qualities. However, I was short and had pimples, so I had that going for me.

I had a checklist too.  I insisted that all of my applicants have breasts.

I have friends that had a type of girl they liked.  I did not. To quote Hank Williams, Jr., I liked them tall, I liked them small, and I liked them all.

Well, Lori and I married, and I think we've had a really good marriage.

I don't know how we did it. We just did.

 I don't claim to be a marriage expert.  I am an expert on how to be married to Lori.

I give young men several pieces of advice.

One, the days of this wallflower wife that bows and scrapes to everything the husband says has been over for years.  You can't push her around, and you can't bully her.  It won't work.

You have to figure out how to persuade her without being a total jerk. And that's different for each woman. So good luck, guys!

Two, and this is important, make sure you are on the same page regarding money.  You have to work together on this.  Sometimes the tightwad marries the spendthrift, and that causes a lot of stress.

Being on the same page is probably the glue that holds together many marriages.   You have to decide on so many things in marriages it saves a lot of time if the husband and wife are going in the same direction.

This means you have to agree on things like how many kids to have, homeschooling, who gets to drive the nice car, which church to go to, and what TV show to watch.

One question young couples never think about but will follow them throughout their marriage:  where do you want to eat tonight?

I would probably eat at the same two restaurants every day of my life. My wife likes a little variety.  However, my wife won't eat Chinese food in the summer. I've been working on that for 35 years.

My last bit of advice is about SEX. 

The best quote I've heard on sex in marriage is that men are like light bulbs while women are like ovens.

Men are socialized to look at "girly magazines" for the articles on stereo equipment. If there just happens to be a picture of an airbrushed model buck naked, so be it.

We read "letters" from "real" men that begin with "I never thought it would happen to me" and ends with, "She said I was her most skilled lover, and that included the Florida State football team."

While women watch Hallmark Channel movies that deal with the topics like "Christmas," "Love," and "Love At Christmas."

 Lastly, men do not make love to anyone else besides your wife.  They (and I mean all women, including Hillary Clinton) find this offensive.

No marriage will be without its tornadoes.  

Eleven years ago, it was my brother's death. Then it was my wife's breast cancer. Then her mother died. Then our son graduated from college and married his girlfriend, and we became empty-nesters.

Last year, my wife was diagnosed with AFIB and had a heart ablation. Meanwhile, my blood pressure went out of control, and I was given medicine that made me fall asleep while channel surfing.  

But, we've come through that, and we are a lot wiser than we started.

Now, if we could just figure out where we are going to eat tonight. 

 

 

When Chevy Became Jerry

 I've been thinking a lot about President Gerald R. Ford lately but you don't have to keep me in your thoughts and prayers.

President Ford was the President while I was in high school. Well, he was President most of the time I was in high school. Here's a little history lesson.

As you may remember, there was a President named Richard Nixon.  While he was President, there was a scandal called "Watergate" because the Democratic National Committee headquarters was located there and Nixon sent some toadies to break in and steal all of the Democrats secrets. 

Before you get all interested, there was no sex in it at all.  But there was a lot of lying and a "cover-up."  Since people didn't trust Nixon because he had a fantastic ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth, at the same time, it wasn't long until "Watergate" engulfed the nation. You would not believe what a big deal this was, and this was before social media.

About this same time, Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew (that was his name, honest), had his own problems involving bribes and kickbacks.   Agnew eventually resigned.

So Nixon had to find a new vice president.  That's where Gerald Ford comes in.

Ford was the House Minority Leader and well-liked by both Republicans and Democrats. Nixon chose Ford to replace Agnew.*

Eventually, Nixon had to resign, and on my fifteenth birthday, Ford became President.

There was a brief moment in time when everybody loved good old Jerry Ford. He seemed normal after Johnson and Nixon. That was a definite plus.

The man made his own breakfast. History shows he had English muffins

You couldn't see the other two making English muffins.  Johnson would fire somebody for not making his English muffins, even though he didn't like them.  Nixon would probably set the toaster on fire and deny that the muffins were burnt.

Then came The PARDON. 

 President Ford pardoned President Nixon for the crimes, and the basic Nixoness Nixon did in office.  After the pardon, nothing Ford did was right.      

People started saying Ford wasn't up to the job and he wasn't very bright. Ford was a Yale Law School graduate, but that didn't matter because Lyndon Johnson once said Ford couldn't "walk and chew gum at the same time." (Actually, Johnson said Ford couldn't "fart and chew gum at the same time".  We were still censoring back in the '70s.)

Then Ford, the All-American Center for The Michigan Wolverines, slipped down some steps while exiting Air Force One. 

That was all she wrote because a new television show would soon air that would change comedy.  It was: "NBC's Saturday Night".  We know now it as "Saturday Night Live."

"Saturday Night" featured "The Not Ready For Prime Time Players."  You know their names: Belushi, Ackroyd, Radner, and someone who was Chevy Chase because you were not.

It is hard to describe how big "Saturday Night" was and what a colossal breakout star Chevy Chase became.  Chase had two bits: "Weekend Update," which "Saturday Night Live" still does, and President Ford.

Chase's President Ford was nothing you have ever seen before or since. He didn't try to "imitate" Ford's voice or mannerisms as Dana Carvey did with Dad Bush or Darrell Hammond did with Bill Clinton.  He didn't do anything to "look" like Ford except to do "pratfalls" and generally act like a doofus. 

Imitation was not the highest form of flattery with Chase. He said, "Ford is so inept that the quickest laugh is the cheapest laugh, and the cheapest laugh is the physical joke."  Chase had Ford falling down because he thought Ford was falling flat on his face as President.**

Unlike a certain recent former President, you never would have known that this bothered Ford.  However, in his autobiography, Ford says, "The news coverage was harmful, but even more damaging was the fact that Johnny Carson and Chevy Chase used my ‘missteps’ for their jokes. Their antics — and I’ll admit I laughed at them myself — helped create the public perception of me as a stumbler. And that wasn’t funny."

Ford lost his attempt to become an elected President to Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia.  Chase spent one season at "Saturday Night" and left to become a movie star. He made some good movies, "Caddyshack," "Fletch," "Christmas Vacation," and a boatload of awful movies.

In his old age, Chase is dogged by injuries he suffered doing to the Ford pratfalls and by rumors that he doesn't play well with others. (In fairness to Chase, my son's father-in-law has met Chase and said he was a great guy.)

I started thinking about Ford when I saw President Joe fall up the stairs going into Air Force One.  That story lasted a couple of days. I'm not so sure it should have.  After all, "falls" are a big deal when it comes to the elderly.

There's a couple of reasons for the lack of staying power over Joe's trips.

One, of course, is that Biden has been around forever and a day and is a well-known commodity.  Even though Ford was a well-known person, he was mainly prominent in Washington and Michigan.  Back then, the average American didn't know Ford, and the Ford they knew soon looked like Chevy Chase.

Two, Ford had an (R) beside his name, and Biden has a (D) next to his.

Ford said Poland was free which at the time wasn't free at all. Biden said, "I have never been particularly poor at calculating how to get things done in the United States Senate. So the best way to get something done, if you, if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to, anyway,” 

I would think the Biden comment would send up flares to our ever vigilant Fourth Estate.  But it didn't.

Yet.

Biden cannot afford too many more gaffs or trips.  It will soon define him.   Ask President Ford.

 

*After the Kennedy Assassination, the Twenty-fifth Amendment was added to the Constitution allowing a President to chose a new Vice President if the something happened to the old one. This allowed Nixon to select Ford which led to Ford becoming the First President of the United States that was not on an elected ticket. If there was no Twenty-fifth Amendment, the President would have been Speaker Of The House Carl Albert.

**Ford and Chase did meet on several occasions. They seemed to get along pretty well. It is hard to imagine someone, oh, like Trump being civil to Alec Baldwin.  I will add Ford once said "Chevy Chase is a very funny suburb" which is a great put-down.