Our senior correspondent and resident Bigfoot expert Audre Myers reached out to me with a request: could I, she wondered, give a shout-out (my term, not hers) to a friend’s blog?
The friend is Scoop, a regular commenter over at Nebraska Energy Observer. Unbeknownst to yours portly, dear old Scoop has a blog with the somewhat unwieldy title Smoke of Satan & the Open Windows of Vatican II.
What is the connection between Bigfoot and the Shroud of Turin? Not much, except both involve investigating the mysteries of the science and faith, the two intertwining to reveal a larger picture.
At least, that is my takeaway from this excellent piece from Audre Myers. In an attempt to salvage my blog’s reputation, Audre earlier this week demurred from submitting any more Bigfoot-related content, but the siren song of the hairy lug is too hard to resist.
As always, Audre approaches the subject with tenderness, curiosity, and analytical thinking. She also notes that belief in Bigfoot is largely optional and up to you to decide, but belief in Jesus Christ is paramount. If we can believe in the former, we must believe in the latter.
With that, here is Audre with “From Years Gone By”:
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“:
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”:
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.
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“:
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“:
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!
It’s the so-called “spooky season” again, which naturally turns my mind to things not seen. Lately, I’ve been pondering the pre-modern mind, and how differently pre-moderns saw the world. It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around it. What must it have been like to fear God—naturally (as in, without the scientistic arrogance we moderns seem inculcated into at an early age)? To suspect mercurial forces at play in every tree or lonely bog?
There’s so much we don’t know; so much we can’t see (even if it’s caught on video). Ironically, for all of our assuredness about how the world works, we find ourselves in an age of constant epistemological confusion, one in which we seem incapable of knowing what is True or not.
Heady contemplations, indeed. The possible existence of Bigfoot or any other number of odd creatures, corporeal or otherwise, is not insignificant: if supernatural beings exist, God Exists (or, more probably, because God Exists, there are all manner of spirits and angels and the like at work, just beyond our perception).
Spooky stuff! With that, here is “TBT: Things That Go Bump in the Night“:
An eager commenter on my original “Bible Study” post prompted me to give a second brief update on my daily Bible reading (I wrote the first update back in July 2022). Apparently, my humble daily regimen inspired the reader to establish a schedule of her own. To that, all I can say is, “To God Be the Glory!”
That said, it’s satisfying to know that the words I scribble down on this self-indulgent blog do, indeed, reach people. There are probably fewer things more pleasurable to a writer than to find that his words have made some impact on his readers, and the pleasure is enhanced when it’s a stranger. We all understand that we influence those close to us, for good or for ill, because we can see the effects more clearly. But the idea that a stranger might be reading our words is a small sign that we’re expanding beyond our immediate familial and social circles to wider audiences. It feels good.
But I digress. This post is about studying the Bible, not tooting my own saxophone; pride, after all, is a sin.
The Portly Politico 