Sunday Morning Musings

Faith Brings No Surprises

We moderns like to imagine faith would be easier if God would simply prove Himself — a sign here, a wonder there, something undeniable. But Scripture tells a different story. Proof never made anyone faithful. It only made them momentarily impressed.
Israel watched the Red Sea split and forgot it within days. The disciples saw storms stilled and panicked at the next wave. Crowds watched Lazarus walk out of the tomb and still demanded Jesus' death. We forget quickly. We backslide easily. We are, as Jesus said, "of little faith."

This is why Jesus so often told people not to broadcast His miracles. He wasn't building a spectacle. He wasn't trying to win with wondrous works. He was calling people into trust — and trust cannot be forced by proof. Proof can silence doubt for a moment, but it cannot bind a heart. Only faith can do that. And faith, by its nature, requires someone already standing where we cannot stand.

The Half‑Dollar Lesson

I earned my first real money in my grandfather's cotton field. I was eight or nine, small enough that the sack dragged behind me like a reluctant shadow, but old enough to know that fifty cents was treasure. The Colored hands — as they were called in those days — who worked beside us children bent their backs in the same rows, though their labor was measured in survival, not novelty. We kids had it easy. They did not.

When the day's picking was done, everyone walked or drove to the little country grocery store on the highway. I remember the feel of that shiny half‑dollar in my palm — heavy with promise. I spent it on every sweet thing the store sold — candy, cookies, ice cream, and pop — buying gluttonous joy without restraint, and my body paid the price. Out behind the store, I knelt in the dust, emptying my stomach of everything I had just devoured.

The Sneaking Shadow

In the quiet hours before dawn, when the community outside my window begins to stir, I find myself thinking about the strange irony of human endurance. We praise perseverance as if it were always a virtue, but the old stories warn us that perseverance can become a trap.

The Declaration of Independence says it plainly and with the weight of experience: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Jefferson wasn't condemning mankind. He was describing human nature. We endure too long. We tolerate too much. We grow accustomed to the slow creep of injustice until it becomes just another part of the landscape we live in.

Entering the Dream

In the quiet hours before dawn, when the world is still half‑asleep, and the body and soul just begin to remember their burdens, I sometimes find myself standing at the threshold of a dream. Not the kind that dances behind closed eyes, but the deeper kind — the one that feels like an old memory flickering in the twilight.

There are moments, just as waking begins, when I try to step back into that dream. To return. To linger. To finish what was left undone. And in those moments, I understand something about God.

The Black That Makes the Grey Darker

There are moments in history when the curtain is pulled back, not by prophets or poets, but by bureaucrats, technicians, and men in lab coats, who never think in terms of souls. COVID was one of those moments. Not because of the virus alone, but because of what it revealed: the machinery behind the world, churning in the darkness, indifferent to the people it was built to serve. The people who are now nothing but lab rats.

We learned that the line between government and industry is not a line at all, but a braid. We learned that "public health" can be weaponized into fear, obedience, and profit. We learned that the institutions meant to guard life can become the very engines that endanger it. And we learned that when the powerful make catastrophic decisions, they rarely pay the price — the victims do.

Machines Versus Souls

A strange quiet settles over the world before dawn—the kind that makes you wonder whether the world is holding its breath. And as the sun rises this morning, I find myself thinking about the newest fear making the rounds: that artificial intelligence will rise up, take over the world, and make slaves of us all. It's a compelling story. It has the drama of Revelation without the humility. But I don't think the machines themselves are the danger. I think the danger is the spirit that builds them.

How the Cow Eats the Cabbage!

In the aftermath of the 911 memorial remembrances in this year of our Lord, 2026, I feel obliged to include a short idiom from years ago: Once upon a time, a circus came to a small rural town. While they were putting up the big top, a baby elephant escaped and found his way to a little old lady's garden up the road. The lady in our story couldn't see very well, but she was alarmed enough to call the police and report a cow in her cabbage patch pulling up her cabbages with his tail. The policeman on the other end of the line listened patiently. "I see. So a cow is eating your cabbage, ma'am? We'll send someone right out."

"Excuse me," the lady said, "I never said he was eating 'em."

"No?" The policeman replied. "Then what is he doing?"

The woman hesitated before responding quietly, "You wouldn't believe me if I told you!"

9/11, The Memory That Must Not Be Softened

Last Sunday, I wrote of the quiet moment when a civilization begins to forget the moral architecture that once held it together. This week the calendar itself refuses to let us forget.

Friday, one week before the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, New York's mayor signed two executive orders meant to honor that day. One established a citywide Day of Remembrance and Service. The other strengthened preparations against future terror. Then, in the same room, he handed the ceremonial pen used to sign those orders to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.