Sunday Morning Musings

A Time of Reckoning

When men who murder babies are given rockets, the world is already late in its response.

There are moments when history stops whispering and begins screaming, when the world is forced to look directly at evil without the comfort of euphemism or distance. We are living in such a moment now.

Two Ways to Love

In last Sunday's musing, I said that every one of us is a beggar — stripped by time, humbled by disappointment, reduced by the slow erosion of strength and certainty. Now I want to add the next truth: God's love is complete because it is already divorced from detail.

Human love is detail-driven. God's love is essence-driven. Human love looks at the person and asks, "Why should I love you?"

God's love looks at the person and says, "I love you because I am love."

C.S. Lewis once said: We love the wise, kind, and beautiful because we need them. We love the foolish, broken, and disagreeable because they need us.

The Beggar's Wisdom

In 1785, it was "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry." In today's world, it is still "Murphy's Law."

"Beggar" — it's a word that makes most of us flinch before we even know why. We see the incoherent man on the corner, sometimes shouting and sometimes muttering to ghosts only he can see. We see the woman with street-worn clothing and a cardboard sign, trying to hold on to dignity while the world drives past. We see the quiet soul who sits alone, with downcast eyes, proud even in poverty. We pity them — we avoid them. We judge them — but secretly fear becoming them.

The older I get, the more I realize that the word "beggar" isn't an insult at all — it's a reflection of our true self. Life has a way of leading every one of us to a place of need. No matter how strong, smart, disciplined, or independent we are, life gradually, gently, and sometimes suddenly and violently, brings us to that point of raw, unfettered need.

Ridin' Fence

On this Fourth of July, as the flags rise over Grant County and citizens begin setting off fireworks, I find myself thinking not only of the battles that won our independence, but of the quiet institutions meant to preserve it. And I fear one of them has lost its way. A Supreme Court that once guarded the Republic with sober judgment now behaves, at times, like a rogue court—untethered from wisdom, allergic to humility, and too easily satisfied with excuses that would embarrass a first‑year law student. The ideological split is certainly a problem, but the lack of zeal from some, and the overzealousness of the rest is even worse. And history shows what happens when the Court forgets the solemn meaning and purpose of the robes they wear.

The Mask and the Mirror

There are moments in the course of a nation when the mask slips. Not all at once, not with a dramatic tearing, but with the slow, inevitable sag of something that was worn too long. This week, I read an article that could have been written by me—not because I share every tone or every accusation, but because the underlying truth, the base reality, is the same truth I've been writing about for years. The mask is slipping. And the mirror is rising.

The article spoke of socialism, communism, infiltration, ideological rot, and the quiet corrosion of institutions. It spoke of the Cloward-Piven strategy, of cultural destabilization, and of the alliance of convenience between extremist ideologies. It spoke of the way political movements soften a population before they seize it. While the rhetoric was sharp, even stinging, the underlying diagnosis was not fantasy. It was not academic. It was not theoretical. It was real life—and real-life Americans are living through the consequences.

Damned If You Do

There are moments in history when a people discover that the world has quietly placed them between a rock and a hard place. Not because they are wicked. Not because they are righteous. But because they stand at the crossroads of forces older and larger than themselves.

Israel knows this place. America is learning it. And the strange thing is this: the trap is not set by geography or by the size of armies. The moral imagination of the world sets it, that fickle tribunal that demands purity from some nations and shrugs at brutality from others. It is the old story of the prophets: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” No response is ever the right one when the crowd has already decided the ending.

Israel defends itself, and the world cries out. Israel restrains itself, and the world cries out. Israel exists, and the world cries out. And now America finds itself in a similar place — not because our deserts look like theirs, but because the moral geometry is the same.

The Divine Transmitter

There are mornings when the world feels strange to me, as if the veil between the seen and the unseen has worn thin and the unseen is imminent. On such mornings, I remember an old metaphor — the one about the mind as a radio, and I wonder whether we have misunderstood the nature of our own thoughts.

A radio does not invent the music it plays. It receives it. It translates what is already there. And I have begun to suspect that consciousness works the same way.

To Serve Man

[Author's Note: I wrote the following musing almost two years ago, and I think it is worth revisiting today. Below is the original with an added footnote.]

Opening narration

"Respectfully submitted for your perusal — a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment, we're going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the Twilight Zone."

The above lines are from a 1962 episode of the Twilight Zone entitled "To Serve Man." The story revolves around the Kanamits, a race of aliens that land on Earth during a time of international crisis. As the United Nations announces the landing at a news conference, one of the aliens addresses the delegates and journalists using telepathy. He claims they came to provide humanitarian aid by sharing their advanced technology that can easily and inexpensively solve all energy and food shortages and prevent international warfare.