Tag: Christianity

TBT^4: Nehemiah and National Renewal

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A quick blurb before today’s post:  I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Pick up a copy today!  Even sharing the above links is a huge help.

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

***

I first wrote this (admittedly) political interpretation of Nehemiah 1:1-11 back in 2019.

2019.  What a different world.  That was in The Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago, before The Age of The Virus.  I suppose we’re living in the After Times now, a strange new world that is indelibly different after two years of masked ‘n’ vaxxed hysteria.  Doesn’t it seem like we’ve woken up, groggy and confused, from a two-year nightmare?  Everyone is living in a haze of uncertainty and regret—“maybe we shouldn’t have shut down restaurants and harassed people for not wearing a mask in their cars.”

It’s also interesting how that whole ridiculous, absurd ordeal now seems like some vague afterthought, almost like we only just barely remember what we endured a scant year or two ago.

Perhaps waking up from the nightmare and recognizing it as such is some form of national renewal.  I’m not so optimistic.  I think our society has goldfish memory, and we’ll act independent and defiant until the next cadre of experts delivers the next set of restrictions that we all must adopt, otherwise we’ll be Very, Very Bad People.

Why can’t we get national leaders like Nehemiah?  He stood up to attacks, schemes, plots, and slander, and managed to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem—and his people in the process.

With that, here is 24 March 2022’s “TBT^2: Nehemiah and National Renewal“:

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Open Mic Adventures XXV: “Venite, exultemus Domino”

The Portly Politico36 Comments

A quick blurb before today’s post:  I’ve released my second book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures.  It’s a collection of travel essays I’ve accumulated over the last four years, and it’s available now on Amazon.

Here’s where you can pick it up:

Pick up a copy today!  Even sharing the above links is a huge help.

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

***

Yours portly is going High Protestant this week.  Readers can thank Audre Myers for that one—she sent me the manuscript for her church’s new chant, “Venite, exultemus Domino,” at some point in the last few weeks, and I’ve been playing around with it on the piano.

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Chapel Lesson – Taming Your Tongue

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Last week I was invited to give a brief lesson or sermon my school’s weekly chapel.  Our usual chaplain was due to be out that day, so the associate head of school asked me to deliver a message.

Earlier in the academic year I gave a short talk on listening intently and graciously, so I thought that a good complement would be to talk about the power and danger of our words—our fiery tongues!

I blog daily, and I know I’ve let my waggling tongue (in the form of a digital pen) get me into hot water.  It’s never a good feeling, and I’ve certainly written—and said!—things I regret.

For hot-blooded teens, it’s even more of a problem.  Rather than condescend to them with another jeremiad about “bullying”—such an insipid word—I decided to go directly to The Source

With that, here is my brief chapel lesson from Thursday, 2 February 2023, “Taming Your Tongue”:

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Phone it in Friday XXIX: Epiphany, Patriots, and a Birthday

The Portly Politico20 Comments

It’s the end of the first workweek of the year, which really ended up being something like three-and-a-half days for yours portly.  While I enjoyed Christmas Break—and even my sick day—I’ll begrudgingly admit that it’s good to get back into a routine.

But today is significant for other reasons.  Most importantly, it’s Epiphany, the traditional last day of the Christmas season, commemorating the Wise Men’s visit to the Christ Child.  The “epiphany” celebrated is Christ Revealed to the Gentiles for the first time.

Besides celebrating The Birthday—the most important birthday!—of Christ, we here at TPP are also celebrating Audre Myers‘s birthday!  Audre is a regular reader, commenter, and contributor here, and her writing is feature on a number of other sites.  She’s also a Bigfoot enthusiast, and TPP‘s source for all the latest updates on the big fellow.  Audre is a rare, beautiful gem of a person, and her spirit and energy liven up the blog considerably.

For more glowing, mushy sentimentality about our dear Audre, read last year’s birthday tribute.  It’s my meager attempt to honor her contributions.

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TBT^4: Christmas Eve

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Once again, it’s nowhere near Christmas Eve—it’s Christmas Eve Eve Eve this year, and I’m sure the Catholics and High Protestants have some special, esoteric name for 22 December, but I don’t know what it is.  Regardless, I always enjoy looking back at my original “Christmas Eve” post from 2019.

As I wrote at the time:

Christmas Eve is always the most magical, mystical part of Christmas time.  Popular depictions of Jesus’ Birth take place, presumably, on Christmas Eve—the angels bursting into the black, silent night above Bethlehem.  The whole event is supernatural—the Virgin Birth, the Star guiding the way to the manger, the angels appearing to the shepherds and singing.  Tradition has it that even the animals in the manger talked at the moment of Christ’s birth (at exactly midnight, of course).  If the rocks can cry out, singing praises to Him, why not some donkeys?

That scratches the same itch as Halloween for me—another “Eve”—that connection with our Creator, a Being far beyond our comprehension, and a whole other world just beyond our meager vision.  It’s all the more remarkable to consider that that very same God sent His Son as a mere baby to bring a fallen world salvation.  Rather than an aloof, indifferent God, or the disinterested Clockmaker God of the Deists, we have a God who loves us enough that He sent His only Son to die for our sins.

We don’t deserve that, but thank God for it!

With that, here’s “TBT^2: Christmas Eve“:

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TBT^4: O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting

The Portly Politico6 Comments

It’s another Exam Week, a welcome respite after two weeks of madness.  Proctoring exams is a pain, but it’s the kind of tedious pain that we’re all used to enduring from time to time.  Fortunately, it’s basically two hours of boredom at a time, followed by frantic grading.  The sooner that’s done, the sooner Christmas Break can truly begin.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how pressure creates diamonds.  I was incredibly, almost superhumanly productive in the two weeks after Thanksgiving because I had to be.  I was putting in twelve-to-sixteen-hour days to get everything done, and while I was exhausted, I felt like a champion.

Then this last Saturday I had an endless day before me, and accomplished almost nothing.  Part of that was recovering from the craziness of the week before; part of it was woman problems (the greatest drain on energy and resources); part of it was the lack of anything to do.  I understand why retirees die within six months if they don’t find something productive to do—I was starting to think that all my endeavors meant nothing (maybe they do mean nothing, but as a Christian I know they do; if they didn’t mean anything, it’s all the more reason to keep myself moving so I don’t have time to dwell on The Darkness).

Anyway, that pressure can create Beauty.  All this pressure has had me thinking about Neo’s comment on my post “You’ll Get Everything and Not Like It“: “I always remember that our soldiers in France in 1944 had a saying, ‘The road home goes through Berlin’. Berlin is on all of our ways home.”  That’s the end of a very long and poignant comment, but those two sentences say it all.

With that, here is “TBT^2: O Little Town of Bethlehem and the Pressures of Songwriting“:

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Phone it in Friday XXVIII: Christmas Concert

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Today is the day of our big Christmas Concert at school.  It’s both my favorite and least favorite day of the year, because while the concert is incredibly fun, it’s also incredibly stressful.  It’s worth it, though, to see the kids singing and playing and having a good time.

As I’ve grown older, fatter, and achier, I’ve scaled back a bit of the theatricality and bombast of the Christmas Concert to something a bit more manageable.  Gone are the days of singing while standing on a piano (I did that once, years ago).  I also strive to make the concert focused on the kids (well, and Jesus).

Still, it’s a lot to pull together, with not only my two classes (the middle and high school ensembles) but also two choirs, three dance classes, and six Foreign Language classes.  I’ve completely eliminated solos (outside of soloists on songs within these classes) to streamline it as much as possible.

I’ll be doing a full write-up one Saturday (possibly tomorrow) covering it, but for today, just pray for yours portly.  I’m confident it will be a good concert, I just gotsta get through it!

Merry Christmas!

—TPP

You’ll Get Everything and Not Like It

The Portly Politico9 Comments

Being one of three brothers who came of age in the 1990s—the golden age of watching ribald, edited-for-television comedies on basic cable—I was constantly exposed to humorous quips and one-liners from hilarious movies.  One perennial favorite was the raunchy (again, edited for television) comedy classic Caddyshack (1980), about a bunch of blue-collar kids working at a tony country club’s golf course (and Bill Murray trying to blow up a gopher).

My brothers and I still reference one brief but oft-quoted scene:

Judge Smails irate handling of his ingrate nephew is a classic, and something I have probably said to a student.  My older brother loves saying it to my younger brother’s kids, who, while not rotten, and definitely spoiled (a good bit by their Uncle Portly).

My older nephew, is nearly six, likes to invert the phrase, shouting at his other uncle, “You’ll get everything and not like it.”  It’s one of his many (unintentionally?) Zen utterances.

I was contemplating this amusing bit of familial banter on the way to work yesterday.  My sweet little nephew is right—we Westerners do have everything—and we’re miserable!

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Election Day 2022

The Portly Politico15 Comments

Well, here it is—Election Day 2022.  The much-vaunted midterms have arrived, and it looks like it’s going to be a pretty good day for Republicans.

I’ll admit, I’ve been tuned out from and burned out on politics of late, and while I’m optimistic about today’s results for Republicans, I’m a tad disillusioned with the state of electoral politics generally.  Will a “red wave” result in some meaningful reform this time around, or will GOP Establishment types wrangle the feisty upstarts and neutralize the MAGA Wing?

I’m not a “doomer” by any stretch—I sincerely hope for the latter, and I think it is the future of the Republican Party, if the GOP hopes to survive as a viable political party.  History, however, is not an encouraging indicator.

That said, a sweeping Republican victory is, by any measure, vastly preferable to a sweeping Democratic one.  At worst, I know a Republican House and Senate won’t screw things up further, and may make some marginal improvements; but a Democratic House and Senate, at worst, will double-down on the current insanity of lawlessness and moral relativism.

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