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
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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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