Symbolism is not interchangeable with substance.  The murderous act of a 21 year old mad-man somehow equating to a 150 year old battle flag is simply emotional justification to find cause without effect.  If this psychopath was wearing an NPR tee shirt, these same critics would be silent.  Of course, shifting the focus to an old flag steers thinking away from the real issues of the mentally ill being allowed to roam free.

And now, thanks to complacency, fear and the threat of running afoul of the self-anointed politically correct secret police, a historically significant symbol of the south and of the history of the United States, will forever be maligned for being as offensive as the swastika, not because it is true or just, but because the many who see this as asinine will do nothing to defeat the few who wish to force everyone into the same restrictive cubby-hole they view as the only correct way in which to see the world and subscribe to you how you live your life.  Your thoughts are not your own; conform or be marginalized.

The third murder trial of Cal Harris has ended in mistrial.  The saga of this case, now spanning nearly 14 years, has burnt through millions of taxpayer and private dollars, hundreds of jurors spending tens of thousands of hours in difficult deliberations in three counties and shines a bright light on what happens when a justice system goes haywire.

Michelle Harris was last seen either on the evening of September 11, 2001 or the morning of September 12, depending on who you believe.  While many people saw Michelle on the 11^th., only one has come forward that claims to have seen her on the 12th., Kevin Tubbs, local farmer and Harris neighbor.  Tubbs came forward after hearing that Cal had been found guilty, realizing that the time frame for Michelle’s disappearance, according to the prosecution, was at odds with Tubbs own observations.  Not only did Tubbs testify to seeing Michelle on the early morning of the 12th, he also stated she was with a “young, clean-cut man”, standing together at the end of the Harris driveway, the very spot in which Michelle’s van was later found abandoned.  Tubbs testimony caused Judge Martin Smith to vacate Harris’s guilty verdict in the trial.

The following facts are not in dispute.

Michelle Harris has seemingly disappeared.  The Harris’s were in the midst of a contentious divorce at the time of her disappearance.  Cal Harris is charged with her murder.  No murder weapon has been identified.  No body has been found.  Both Michelle and Cal had extramarital affairs.  It’s complicated.

The following statements, while not facts, are widely held as true.

Cal Harris was generally disliked in his hometown of Owego and Tioga County.  The Harris family is rich while most Tiogians are poor.  Original prosecutor and now Tioga county judge Gerald Keene saw the Harris case as his moment in the sun and took the proceedings personally.  It became the Harris money against the will of Gerald Keene.  Giant egos, political aspirations and machismo combined to forge a fight to the finish.

Michelle Harris could be on a beach in Madagascar.  She could have walked away, fled or been carried away, we just don’t know.  She could be dead at the hands of someone, anyone else, again we just don’t know.  And all of that is not enough to assume
Cal Harris is a murderer.  This is what Judge Martin Smith wrote in vacating the murder verdict of Harris in 2007.  “The evidence at the trial of this case was entirely circumstantial. The proof of guilt, although legally sufficient, and establishing guilt to the jury’s satisfaction beyond a reasonable doubt, was far from overwhelming.”

“Overwhelming” should be the standard when you’re contemplating sending a man to prison for the rest of his life.  If ever there was “reasonable doubt” in a case with no body, no weapon and complicated lives, this is it.

The ”system” ought to stand down on haunting Cal Harris and his family.  A forth trial would be justice delivered by blunt force trauma.

What happens when the truth collides with political correctness, (PC)?

The following statements are the truth, each referenced to its fact source.

1. Blacks in America commit overwhelmingly more crime than do their white counterparts.  By “overwhelming”, I mean at approximately six times the rate of incarceration for crimes committed as compared to the representative proportion of the white population.  Ref.  US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
2. Blacks in America commit more than 50% of all homicides yet represent less than 13% of the population.  Ref. US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
3. Of nearly 1 million violent crimes committed in the US every year, approximately 85% of those are committed by blacks.  Ref. New Century Foundation.
4. Of the nearly 8,000 black homicides committed in 2007, approximately 93% of those killers were also black.  Ref. US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

This is what the critics say and I will demonstrate why they too are incorrect.

The PC crowd says that because blacks are unfairly singled out by police, they occupy more jail cells than do whites.  To swallow that argument, you need to assume wide spread racial animus amongst the police, which is unfairly provocative and completely unproven and furthermore, this argument forces one to conclude that hundreds of thousands of whites, having presumed to have committed hundreds of thousands of un-solved crimes, are free in the streets of America.  This is patently preposterous.

Once you offer this counter argument to the PC worshipper, they usually come back with the old faithful race card, claiming decades of mistreatment, discrimination, impoverishment and hopelessness have created circumstances so dire that crime is the only outcome.

This old shoe is the most easily cast-aside because it traps the worshipper in a snare of their own making.  For 50 plus years, the aftermath of The Great Society has been supposedly addressing these woes by throwing billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of social workers at the problem, all consisting of PC theory and social solutions.  50 years later and still no meaningful change, yet the PC savant sees no irony in this colossal failure?

Now if from this data you draw the conclusion that blacks are more prone to crime and violence than are whites, you would be possessive of common sense and statistically correct while being presumed a bigot simultaneously by those who worship at the PC alter, not because you are wrong, but because you are failing to ignore the facts and the truth.  You see, being PC is about the concept of clicking your heels three times and hoping to awaken to a new world, created in the utopian concept so hoped for in the PC’s mind.

But to keep these facts in proper perspective, let’s look at some other interesting statistics.

1. According to activist Richard Lapchick, 78% of all National Basketball Association, (NBA) players are black.
2. The National Football League, (NFL) census states that 68% of those players are black.
3. Men commit more than 90% of all crimes than do women, according to the US Department of Justice.
4. Men commit over 90% of all homicides as opposed to women, according to the US Department of Justice.

If the PC crowd was consistent in their logic, they would be questioning why whites are so under-represented in professional basketball and football.  And if men and women are each 50% of the population, how is it possible that nine times out of ten it’s the men committing the crimes?

But these facts are not dilemmas to the PC crowd because they only see their demons where they want them to be.  The PC worshipper begins with the premise that whites are evil and blacks are downtrodden.  Beyond that beginning supposition, critics needs to dig out from that basis point before any meaningful conversation can begin, and the point is, the PC crowd is not looking for insight, information or illumination, they are seeking validation, vindication and unwavering obedience to the illogical church they have built on the foundation, ironically, of atheism reconstituted as surely as any religion.

Blacks commit more crimes by far than do whites.  Blacks are better at professional basketball and football.  Women are very unlikely to commit crimes.

The world in which we live is not of a utopian nature.  Tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and lava flows kill millions all over the world.  The playing field of life is not a controlled environment nor is it level.  It is not possible to have assured outcomes when dealing with human behaviors and an infinite number of variables.  Personal responsibility is the key to all of our futures.

This is the best I can offer to my PC friends and to the world of folks who see themselves more as victims than as the most fortunate people on the face of the Earth, spoken from one the greatest cheerleaders the United State of America has ever known, former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

As a founding member of a local not-for-profit government watchdog group, I have learned some very telling lessons about government and human nature and in neither case can I report to you anything remotely encouraging.

What began as an effort to shed light on governmental activity and to assure accountability, fairness and efficiency resulted in unexpectedly painting a bulls-eye onto the organizations own back.  While I expected to find some limited examples of corruption, I was stunned to discover wide-spread examples of it, along with the methods to mislead, lie and justify built into the systems themselves, in anticipation of exposure.  These weren’t examples of good systems built with good intentions gone bad; these were bad systems built with fails-safes and greedy intent gotten worse, proved unsustainable and finally exposed.

In hind-sight I should have known better than to expect overwhelming support when so many rely upon the continuation of the dysfunction, secrecy and malfeasance to sustain themselves either through their employment, political affiliations or in many cases both.  This is one of the by-products of the continued lowering of the bar when it comes to matters of integrity, honor and honesty; an endless supply of excuses, justifications and lies necessary to lend credence to the behavior becomes the mantra of those so engaged.  Eventually, the lies repeated become the truth when all involved are profiting; that is

until it all comes apart when the reality of the schemes unsustainability slaps everyone along side the head.  When pointing these realities out, the organization became the object of scorn, so to distract from the truth and away from examination of the cancerous systems themselves.

Like the Wizard of Oz, “Don’t look behind the curtain.”  Nothing to see here but malfeasance, dishonesty and greed, all nicely packaged as public services.  And when you have the temerity to expose such things, you get threatened.  Threatened with boycotting, ostracized in certain areas of the professional community and excluded from certain circles of influence, based on positions and opinions.  Some of the threats have actually been carried out, resulting in tortious interference with business commerce and contracts.

The rot in the system runs to the core because the rot was a component of the systems very creation.

226 years ago, in Federalist 51, James Madison, writing as Publius says,  “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.  A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

Today, some of us embrace the task of exercising “auxiliary precaution” and we won’t stop seeking the truth, even while fear chases courage into silent hiding.

Fear is fomented and catalyzed by political correctness, (PC.)  As the PC movement gains temerity by tormenting everyday people with threats of ostracisation and marginalization, they have set their sights on the outright attack to be waged against Christianity in general and Christians specifically.  Prior to this new-found boldness fostered by success in Indiana in cowing the political class into re-writing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, the PC gang, while clearly holding Christians in contempt, stopped just short of frontal attacks on the core values of the institutions and concentrated instead on the individuals.

That strategy has clearly changed just recently and I for one am glad for it.  Let’s get this battle started right now.  My gloves are off and my mission is clear;  I’m here to bloody the nose of the PC crowd and push it back into the closet in which it hid for so many years.

The new goal of the PC crowd is clear, it is brilliant, and if successfully will succeed in bringing down society as we knew it.  In short, a PC victory here will mean, “game over.”  This is a battle between atheism and the religious world.  This is the battle of our lifetime.

Once the concept of God is negotiated away or prohibited from consideration, swept into quaint obscurity or otherwise relegated to the concept of fable or relic to the past, then all is lost in the name of the secular decree of man as god.  With that loss goes all hope for concepts of honor, valor, dignity, humility and humanity, all internal gages provided to us by a living God.  Making this mistake ignores the compass God gives us all in favor of the politically correct GPS that navigates by way of convenience, convention and ease.

Our entire reason for existence as a nation was the pursuit of religious freedom.  Not freedom from religion, not an exiled colony devoted to atheism, but a place where religious practice was tolerated without edits dictating affiliation to a religion of the State. The signers of our formative documents were overwhelmingly religious men, mostly Protestants, four were actually preachers.  The creation of the documents themselves were then and now widely considered, “instruments of Providence..” this according to Benson John Lossing’s work, “Biographical Sketches of the Signers of the Declaration of American Independence”, (1848), generally considered the seminal work on the subject.  Even a more-or-less casual awareness of these documents leaves the thoughtful in awe of the inspirational magnitude of the beauty and polished symmetry of the words.

The fifty-six signers of our Declaration of Independence were truly awe-inspiring men of character and honor almost impossible to imagine by today’s standards of acceptable mediocrity.  Knowing full well that in signing this decree they were in effect signing their own death warrants, this is how they ended their treatise.  “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

In today’s, “Oprafied”, homogenized, metro-sexualized America, the concept of a pledge of this gravity, made to one another using such daunting words, makes little sense so bastardized is our modern language, but in 1776 they were counting heavily on God and on each other, no matter what the costs or obstacles, up to and including fiscal ruination and death, but what did they save for the very last word?  Honor.

No greater honor have we than in defending this great country and the inheritance these brave men died giving us.  Only a God fearing people can be entrusted with that which God provided.  It is ours to lose or ours to treasure, but impossible to keep without a renewed commitment that would make god and our founders nod fondly in approval.

My favorite eatery in my hometown of Binghamton, NY is the Norman Rockwell example of an immigrant Greek family perfecting the art of the traditional American breakfast.  Every day, the cops and the manual labor crowd hits first, just after 5AM sharing the diner’s copy of the local newspaper.  About 7, the office workers roll in, mulling their own Wall Street Journal’s over coffee.  Last to arrive are the college kids; hung-over in sweats and sandals, cell phone obsessed and getting all of their information from tiny hand-held devices 6 inches from their noses.

I have my breakfast there every day and depending on my schedule, I will plug into any of these shifts of patrons seamlessly, but not so this past Saturday.

As I squeezed into the only 2-person table in the small, crowded dining room, the table of 4 behind me were a group of three young men and a woman I had never seen before.  They were in the middle of what must have been the funniest story ever told because they were laughing and carrying on so loudly that it was impossible not to notice.  Usually moments like that have a short duration, but not in this case.  These kids carried on and drowned out every other potential conversation in the place.  This went on for their entire stay; loud, obnoxious, guttural, profane and markedly racist.  Every other word out of the mouth of the loudest and most obtuse boy was the N word.  In the 20 minutes or so it took me to eat my breakfast, this boy said it loudly and proudly no fewer than 50 times.  In every sentence describing people, he was clear to define it in terms of race in its rawest description.

I was one of 50 or so people who witnessed this behavior.  With the exception of a few very subtle and short in duration looks in their direction, the crowd was otherwise silenced into self-assigned roles as unappreciative and disgusted observers, their breakfast conversations stifled and their day started with unwarranted and unwanted racist rantings.

This group of mouthy, racist malcontents were black.  Had the same racially charged rhetoric been coming from the mouths of whites, someone would have called 911 and a hate crime arrest would have been contemplated.  The only reason this behavior is tolerated is because of the poison of political correctness which has demanded that the unacceptable be embraced.  If a group of white kids had the bad judgment to have breakfast in a predominantly black neighborhood in a predominately black town and carry on the way these kids did, they would not have walked happily out of the diner into the morning sunshine as this group of jerks did, they would have been beaten bloody into silence, perhaps worse.

The 50 or so folks who witnessed this took away with them an impression and to those 4 young people who provided that impression I would like to know, what do you expect?

A recent article outlined what the Binghamton Human Rights Commission, (BHRC) described as a “trust gap” they say exists between the Binghamton Police Department and the minority community.  The commission outlined proposed legislation that outlaws racial profiling, requires more data collection and analysis, mandates training in anti-racism and cultural competency and compels a plan for diversifying the police department.

A speaker in favor of the legislation at the city council meeting said, “It’s about preparing our police force to be more fair and more just…”  Fairness and justice are absolutes, there is no such context as “more fair” or “more just”, you’re either fair and just or you’re not.    Another attendee, stating she has a black, 6 year-old son and said, “ ..it is sad to think about having to sit him down to explain how to interact with the police. When you see a police officer, it should be a sign of safety, a sign of comfort, a sign of someone’s here to help me, not a sign of being tense and being nervous and not understanding what to do.”  That’s right and it’s a conversation every decent parent has with their kids, black or white, as they describe the enlarging world around them as they grow up.  It’s called responsible parenting

Existing federal law has outlawed racial profiling for years.  For the BHRC to suggest a redundant local law needs to reinforce existing federal law betrays the unstated yet undeniable assertion by the BHRC that the Binghamton Police Department must be currently violating federal law.  The BHRC should retract that portion of their proposed legislation or go on record and make the specific allegations that demonstrate this alleged offense.  As for data collection and analysis, the department has already begun to outfit officers with cameras as funding permits.  This should go a long way in showing the public exactly what a night out in the streets of Binghamton really looks like.  The BHRC might not like what they see from a camera focused closely on those folks suffering from this so-called “trust gap.”

Cultural understanding and anti-racism training is currently a large part of every officers training at the academy.  Perhaps BHRC members ought to consider attending the academy as interested citizens to become better informed.  And finally, a plan for diversifying the police department.  How is it that hundreds of individuals somehow manage to find this well publicized information already?  Perhaps the commission might better spend their time doing recruitment drives on their own if they think that’s productive.

The undercurrent of the proposed BHRC legislation smacks of accusing the Binghamton police of racism and cultural insensitivity.  I think the commission would be more productive by educating the minority community on how to affirmatively adjust their behaviors and their attitudes about police, authority and acceptable social norms.  Quit breaking the law, stop challenging authority and assimilate into normal, working-class, law-abiding, family centered society and this “trust gap” issue magically vanishes.

The BHRC legislation has the tail wagging the dog.

Fear and Loathing in America

The fire-ready-aim crowd was dead wrong about Trevon Martin and now Michael Brown.  While reasonable, rational people waited for answers and legal processes to sort through the issues before reaching their conclusions, felonious thugs were burning, looting and shooting cops in protest.  Doubling down on wrong, they rushed to judgment; small minds so filled with hatred that they lack the capacity to accept fact over emotion, even when a fellow-traveler and down with the struggle black US Attorney General serves reality and truth to them on a silver platter, concluding that no laws were broken, no rights denied.

In other words, justifiable homicide.

I don’t hear any apology.  I see no sign of shame, remorse, or culpability.  To which social services office should police officer Darren Wilson report in order to get his life, job and good reputation back?

These situations are really about issues of crime, punishment, criminals and their contempt for authority.  Martin and Brown were convenient excuses for criminals and their sympathizers to go on a rampage.

The majority of those so enraged by the justifiable homicides of Martin and Brown are  criminals or their apologists, sharing in common a deep hatred for police, the law and authority.  In Martin and Brown they see themselves and it’s a wakeup call they hoped was really just a bad dream, not quite the one Dr. King had in mind.

Blacks overwhelmingly commit more crimes than whites, (according to the NAACP,  blacks are imprisoned at a rate of 6 times that of whites).  Instead of being embarrassed and ashamed, seeking answers and solutions, race-baiting mouth organs like felon and tax-cheat Al Sharpton devise clever phrases like, “hands-up, don’t shoot” as a diversion from the undeniable facts that ironically keeps blacks in a sort of bondage, now of their own making; that mistaken belief that embracing the criminal element is a part of their culture, a sign of their genuineness, in spite of the fact that the scenario, “hands up, don’t shoot” never happened.

Is this what it means to be, “Keepin it real” and is it worth the price?

The black men who have ran away from their families and their obligations are only outnumbered by those who were perp-walked away to prison in shackles. Black crime is almost always black-on-black especially involving homicides.  Blacks are overwhelmingly killing each other.  This undercurrent of self-loathing is the direct result of liberal ideology that fosters the premise that certain members of our society just can’t make do on their own without help.  Unfortunately, the ploy may have worked.

Facts and statistics can be difficult things.  These are fundamental problems with hard answers that require unprecedented changes in mind-sets.  The most important truism to be dispelled is the heretofore undisputed notion that the instances of arrest and incarceration need to mirror image the percentage of a population’s representation in society.  This assumption is flat out false.  For example, men overwhelmingly out-number women in prison populations yet are about evenly divided in society.  Does this mean that thousands of criminal women are on the loose, or does it mean that men are more likely to commit crime?  Blacks make up over 87% of professional basketball players even thou they are only representative of 14% of the overall population.  Does this mean that whites are being denied their places in the game because of racism, or because blacks perform this particular skill at a higher level?

In a complex world, full of choices, opportunities, struggles and unknowns, it is a misguided, utopian notion to believe everything, (or anything) can be controlled.  Societal decisions cannot logically be attached to mathematical expectations of congruency based on statistical expectations of a one-to-one correlation.  That is not how our complex, free-will society is constructed but liberals like to think they can control everything as if life was a consensus building project in a group therapy session.

Statistical facts do not constitute racism, but they do stifle the truth at the sacrificial alter of the politically correct.  Black’s commit more crimes than whites but saying so brands you a racist, even in the face of the fact that blacks occupy prison cells at a rate of over six times their representation in society.  Black’s are twice as likely to disobey traffic laws and are at twice the risk of traffic accident death than are whites, this according to the National Transportation Safety Board.  Facts and statistics can be difficult things, but this explains why blacks are more likely than whites to be stopped for traffic violations; because they are more likely to disobey the traffic laws.  To simply make this observation of fact should not qualify the speaker as a racist and in the effort, seek to silence the truth, but in most cases it does just that and in the face of that fear of being labeled and marginalized, these observations go unstated and henceforth no furtherance of the issue is made.

It is a fallacy to accept the premise that crime rates correlate with groups based on their representation in the greater community.  In other words, it is erroneous to believe that because blacks represent 14% of the population, they should also automatically represent 14% of the criminal activity as well.  There is no basis in fact for assuming this.  There is no direct, mathematically or socially constructed theorem that validates this, yet it is accepted as proof of racism when the rates of crime exceed those ratios.

Perhaps solutions are not even possible anymore.  Maybe we have allowed the supposed acts of salvation-through-social-services to continue for so long that we have successfully dismantled and eradicated the black family.  If so, thank President Lyndon B. Johnson, (LBJ) and the Great Society for making the black man inconsequential to the family, which may be in fact the welfare states strategy to remaining in power for ever.  Here is LBJ, in his own words, according to Ron Kessler’s book, “Inside the Whitehouse.”, speaking with several governors about the effects of providing welfare and housing benefits for inner-city blacks in the 1960’s.

“I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

That quote, from the lips of the father of the Great Society, bastion of salvation to the black community.

Blacks were duped and continue to be duped by liberal ideology.  It appears LBJ was right, as 90% or more of blacks vote Democrat in every national election.  Conservative principles align properly with men and women of character, not of reliance, learned helplessness and self-pity.  The soft bigotry of low expectations, practiced so honorably by liberals, ought to be the stuff of scandal and distain, a clear insult to all people.  Truth be told, the historical, early struggles of blacks align more closely with the self-reliance and fortitude of traditional conservative values.

Change is only possible from within the community through self-awareness and a reset in thinking about the obligation individuals have for taking care of their own affairs.  As long as the black family continues to self-inflict the injuries created by missing fathers, unacceptable rates of criminal activity and the rejection of education and main stream societal values in exchange for “gangsta idolatry”, nothing will change.  That truth, once embraced, and then the poisonous impediments finally discarded will once again set people free, this time from the tyranny of liberal condescension and decades of low expectations that have, unfortunately for many become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Leaders in the media are artful in crafting one line narratives that dumb down much more nuanced and complicated situations.  They also use the opportunity to foment and rankle as many of the “low information” population as they can.  This is just a fancy way of saying they try and upset the morons around us who believe whatever they are told on TV.  Such is the situation in Ferguson, Missouri regarding the death of felon thug, Michael Brown.

“Unarmed black teenager” yes, brute, violent felon, trying to take a cops gun, also yes but the media shines their light on wherever they can sell the most advertising and get the highest ratings.  Their jobs have little or nothing to do with real journalism or finding the truth.

“Unarmed, black teenager” is all that resonates in the moron’s ears as they don’t even stop to comprehend a grand jury’s months of examination, testimony and evidence that lead to the correction conclusion that Michael Brown deserved to die that day because he was attempting to take the life of a police officer.  The proper reaction to this should be good bye and good riddance violent street thug.  At least now, this vermin will harm no one else.

Instead, the idiots protesting use this as an excuse to raise hell and commit crimes.  This is because they are morons to begin with and then whipped into a frenzy by a gleeful media who can then take their pictures and make money selling what has now come to be “the news”, all custom made by the media for their own enrichment.

Michael Brown is dead and rightfully so.  Officer Darren Wilson should have been cited for bravery and then perhaps the murderous animal that assassinated two New York City police officers wouldn’t have been so emboldened by a media narrative that encourages and benefits from the chaos they themselves help to create.

A voice jolted me awake early one Sunday morning, both silent but deafening, beckoning me to church.  Ignoring the first request, a second one pushed me out of bed and towards the closet.  Hung-over, I tossed myself into a seldom worn suit and drove to the church of my childhood, my thoughts amused and awakened by the power of that voice.  I hadn’t set foot in that sanctuary for a few years but at that moment, a minute late and still in the parking lot, I smiled in wonder.

As I entered the front doors, I could hear the muffled sounds of that magnificent organ behind the closed doors to the sanctuary.  On my way up the stairs, the music stopped, replaced by a familiar voice from my youth.  As I opened the door and entered the room, the face of the voice at the pulpit was clear.  He was in mid-sentence, mentioning me by name as I took my seat.  Surprising us both, the speaker said, “and here he is now, hello Bob.”  That speaker, Kurt, a childhood friend that had grown up with me at this church, was the guest speaker that morning.  I’m sure everyone in that church thought we had planned this, but we had not.  I hadn’t seen Kurt in over 10 years.  My name was mentioned in his opening remarks as he rattled off a litany of people that were there as children and gone as adults.  Kurt went on to share the story of his growing up in the church and his long departure and how years of absence had now made his return something more meaningful.  His story was my story.

This all took place over 30 years ago.  The event was a watershed moment in my life but it wasn’t by any stretch the end of a struggle or the beginning of a gracious life of piety, I wish I could report otherwise.  What it did was to cement my faith in the power of the Spirit.  That voice, pestering me, the guest speaker that Sunday, his message and his timing, all of that was a gift from the Holy Spirit to me, most undeserved, but granted non-the-less; how could that not have changed my life?

I hope to be that voice for you today.  Re-examine the worship traditions of your own history and if that’s not possible, then I am inviting you to my church next Sunday and every Sunday.  The magnificent building at the corner of Floral Avenue and Main Street, next to the arch in Johnson City, is where this happened to me.  Our service is traditional and our numbers are small, but our pastor is a man gifted by God to be an inspiration, and at 10AM on any Sunday, you are invited to share that gift with me.

I can’t promise you the same kind of grand entrance I received some 30 years ago, but I can guarantee you the grace of God before you go.

Port Dickinson, NY