Inshallah

It means "God willing."

From Three Cups of Tea, the story of an American whose near death in the Himalayas led him to build schools in remote parts of Pakistan:

In October 1996, Bergman had been traveling in Pakistan with a group of friends who chartered a huge Russian MI-17 helicopter out of Skardu in hopes of getting a glimpse of K2. On the way back the pilot asked if they wanted to visit a typical village. They happened to land just below Korphe, and when local boys learned Bergman was American they took her hand and led her to see a curious new tourist attraction — a sturdy yellow school built by another American, which stood where none had ever been before, in a small village called Korphe.

"I looked at a sign in front of the school and saw that it had been donated by Jean Hoerni, my cousin Jennifer's husband," Bergman says. "Jennifer told me Jean had been trying to build a school somewhere in the Himalaya, but to land in that exact spot in a range that stretches thousands of miles felt like more than a coincidence. I'm not a religious person," Bergman says, "but I felt I'd been brought here for a reason and I couldn't stop crying."

A few months later, at Hoerni's memorial service, Bergman introduced herself to Mortenson. "I was there!" she said, wrapping the startled man she'd just met in a bruising hug. "I saw the school!"

"You're the blonde in the helicopter," Mortenson said, shaking his head in amazement. "I heard a foreign woman had been in the village but I didn't believe it!"

"There's a message here. This is meant to be," Julia Bergman said. "I want to help. Is there anything I can do?"

"Well, I want to collect books and create a library for the Korphe school," Mortenson said.

Bergman felt the same sense of predestination she'd encountered that day in Korphe. "I'm a librarian," she said.

There is but a single survivor

From The New York Times on July 1:

PARIS — When rescuers saw Bahia Bakari, 14 years old, she was clinging to wreckage in rough seas, surrounded by floating corpses and debris from the Yemeni airliner that crashed Tuesday off the island nation of Comoros.

On Wednesday evening, Bahia — hospitalized and suffering from scratches, bruises and at least one fracture — was asking for her mother, who had been on the same flight, according to an uncle who had seen the girl. He said he told her, for now, that her mother was in the next room.

But in an almost miraculous tale of luck and endurance, Bahia is apparently the only survivor of an air disaster that left all 152 other people on board dead.

Is this a miracle, a tragedy, or both?

The humiliation of St. Richt

AKA: The blog most likely to offer metaphysical reasons for a loss...

Is it possible that Coach Richt got away from his core last year, goodness and humility, and that now he is paying for it?

We celebrated against Florida. We blacked out Auburn. And it boomeranged. That which was once our savior, now must kill us.
----

I continue to think that asking why you lost a football game is a lot like asking why God allows bad things to happen to good people. It simply is.

What if we hadn't had a penalty on that interception in the first half against Florida? Would that have been the butterfly flapping his wings in California and causing a cyclone in Japan?

Maybe. Or maybe we really do just go to sleep for some unknown reason under Richt. I'd like to see the phenomenon compared to other teams before I decide, but it's a reasonable question.

Maybe Florida and Alabama were just better, and it snowballed on us.

Or maybe we just can't block and pressure the quarterback very well. Those two things will lead to blow outs, I don't care who you are.

Maybe we started the season with the toughest schedule in the nation, relying on a freshman kicker, with question marks at defensive end, with a young offensive line, then lost our best O-lineman, and our best D-lineman, and still said "Oh, yeah, National Title - definitely."

Also, Saban and Meyer are probably in league with the devil.
----

Our time will come, and quite possibly next year. But since other SEC powers (Florida, LSU, and perhaps now Alabama) were able to win a National Title so early in their current head coach's tenure, it makes things seem oh so very urgent.

But you don't have to look hard for butterfly effects in Richt's second year (2002) to see that year's National Title within our grasp. For that matter, imagine that Stafford doesn't overthrow that wheel route against South Carolina last year. How would that change the 2007 season?

Because of the 2008 squad's youth, or for other reasons, it has seemed to lack leadership. We seem unable to stem the tide of things gone wrong before the game gets out of hand. Even the players have commented on this.

But the fire of this season may forge the steel we need in years to come. And I think that, this time next year, we may be talking about the redemption of St. Richt, and a season won without any gimmicks.

Chain email wisdom

One of my aunts sent me this today:

Just going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.

Church sign wisdom

South of Milledgeville on Ga. 18, near a place called Coopers.

Church sign wisdom

I took this picture somewhere west of Milledgeville today.

God's Blue Earth

From the front page of today's paper:








Danny Gilleland / The Telegraph

If by "a little" you mean...

I'm not a fan of the "John Boy and Billy" show (or a fan of putting "boy" in people's names). But it's on about 17 different radio stations between Macon and Savannah and I lost my iPod, so it's what I got on the way home this morning.

And they had this 88-year-old lady on the phone. She's a comedian and she's got the best title to any comedy album I've ever heard:

I love Jesus, but I drink a little.

Me too, Gladys.

More later, Lord willing. I'm working on a post called "Widespread Panic, why are you trying to kill me?" or, possibly, "Damn you Widespread Panic."

I think my buddy Huff actually wrote the first line, so that means the two most clever things in this post today, I stole.

But then perhaps all whammies are predetermined

Anyone else, when you're reading a book, just all of a sudden realize you're about to hit a really key paragraph?

From A Passage to India.

He had spoken in the little room near the Courts where the pleaders waited for clients; clients, waiting for pleaders, sat in the dust outside. These had not received a car from Mr. Turton. And there were circles even beyond these - people who wore nothing but a loincloth, people who wore not even that, and spend their lives in knocking two sticks together before a scarlet doll - humanity grading a drifting beyond the educated vision, until no earthly invitation can embrace it.

All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt. So at all events thought old Mr. Grasford and young Mr. Sorley, the devoted missionaries who lived out beyond the slaughterhouses, always traveled third on the railways, and never came up to the club. In our Father's house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that verandah, be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart.

And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr. Graysford said No, but young Mr. Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals. Jackals were indeed less to Mr. Sorley's mind, but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversations. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? and the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley? No, no this is going to far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.

I mean, it seems worth worrying about

I went to return a video last night and the store was just completely empty. Does anyone else ever walk outside on a particularly quiet day, or turn onto a usually busy street when there are no cars in sight, or go anywhere that there's supposed to be people but there's not, and wonder, just for a minute: What if the rapture happened and I was wrong about getting to go?

There is a wall around Bethlehem

We have surrounded the little city where the Bible says Jesus was born by a 3-story concrete wall topped with razor wire.

Standing beside it, you feel as if you're at the base of a dam. Israeli soldiers armed with assault rifles examine your papers. They search your vehicle. No Israeli civilian, by military order, is allowed in. And few Bethlehem residents are permitted out—the reason the wall exists here, according to the Israeli government, is to keep terrorists away from Jerusalem.

The Israeli government says it's working. The mayor of Bethlehem, who by city ordinance must be Christian despite the largely Muslim population, says it is destroying the city. He is not allowed outside the wall after 7 p.m.

At two o'clock in the morning most weekdays, several hundred men who do have something to lose—wives, children—begin lining up on the Bethlehem side of the wall. They're seeking work in Israel proper. They stand inside a long steel cage, like a cattle chute, waiting to be searched and prodded and fingerprinted and metal-detected. Some are told to strip. The process can take more than two hours. To be allowed through the checkpoint, you must be married and have one or more children. This, the Israeli army hopes, will ensure the laborers' return.

Many of the men are construction workers—often in the settlements. They wait in line for hours to build houses for their enemies on land that used to belong to them. They're paid $35 a day. Then they return home through the wall.

"Do you think we want to do this?" says one of the men, 35-year-old Sufian Sabateen. He holds a paper bag containing hummus and bread. He's smoking an L&M cigarette. His face, lit harshly by the klieg lights of the wall, is stoic. It's an hour before dawn. Sabateen insists he'd gladly work in Bethlehem for half the salary, but there are no jobs. This is how he describes his week: "From the mattress to work, from work to the mattress. My life is no life."

How long of a walk from there, I wonder, is it to martyrdom?

You know how at football games people hold up posters that say "John 3:16?"

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

They never mention that, three sentences later, come the saddest words in the Bible.

"This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil."

"The good man always reverses the question."

I've been slowly reading "Strength to Love," a collection of sermons by Martin Luther King Jr.

Last night I read, "On being a good neighbor," which you may guess deals with the parable of the good Samaritan. The Samaritan, Dr. King wrote, engaged in "dangerous altruism." Not only did he go the extra mile to help a stranger, he put himself in danger of being attacked by the very thieves that waylaid that stranger on the road to Jericho.

Wrote King:

We so often ask, "What will happen to my job, my prestige, or my status if I take a stand on this issue? Will my home be bombed, will my life be threatened, or I will I be jailed?" The good man always reverses the question.

In other words, do not ask "What will happen to me if I act," but "What will happen to others if I do not?" This idea is thousands of years old. It is not King's any more than it is mine.

I think most people would (at least say they) agree with this idea. So the political question becomes: Should that core philosophy change when you are in government and represent one mass of people as opposed to another?

And will that kind of thinking ever get us to where we want to go?

What are the questions in Macon, in Georgia, in this country? And are we willing to reverse them?

In Macon we often fight along racial lines. Our new Mayor, Robert Reichert, spoke to this Tuesday evening during his inaugural address"

I grew up in the 1960s, and I was a witness to the civil rights struggle. I didn't personally participate in opposing the civil rights movement back then, but I sat on the sidelines and did nothing; for years. I am haunted now by my failure to speak up. ...

My heart is changed, and I hope to inspire and lead others in this community to demonstrate their change of heart. ... we need to aggressively pursue all appropriate opportunities to get to know our neighbors, not move away from them.

Reichert did not specifically mention consolidation of the city and county governments here, but he made a reference to it by mentioning the "imaginary lines on the ground we call the city limits that separate us."

After his speech I was walking with Mayor Jack Ellis, whom Reichert replaced.

"He spoke to the heart of the matter," Ellis said. "Now, will the people consolidate?"

If not for race, if not for fear among blacks and whites that new voting districts would reduce one group's political power, it would have happened long ago, Ellis said.

Now, who's reversing the question?

Blackwater

If you argue that, by fighting a war in Iraq, or by stationing troops in the Middle East prior to Sept. 11, we might have been creating enemies, you're unpatriotic.

But it seems like I heard this in church when I was a kid. Now it scares the hell out of me.

And this makes me want to cry:
"I was boiling with anger, and I wished that I had a weapon in my hands in those minutes."
When did we start hiring mercenaries?

The Total Package comes to Middle Georgia

My grandfather on my mother's side was a big wrestling fan. Every Saturday night, and I mean every Saturday night, he was in front of that T.V.

So when I heard that Lex Luger, one of the Four Horsemen, artisan of the Human Torture Rack, was going to be in town talking to teenagers, I volunteered to cover it.

I don't usually link my own stories here, but I really like the way this one turned out. This was a broken and contrite man who says he has given his life to Christ.

I shot some video, too. Some of it is him playing to the crowd, some of it is his testimony. But the end is about the death of Miss Elizabeth, whom wrestling fans will probably remember.

She was his girlfriend (even though he was married) and she died of a drug overdose in the townhouse he'd purchased for her. Died in his arms.

It's an emotional description, and a cautionary tale.

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu

That was Mother Teresa's given name, according to a New York Daily News piece we ran this weekend.

When I heard on CNN, or some place, that Mother Teresa had a crisis of faith for much of her life, I thought - "oh, that happens to everyone." But the depth of her loss, and the obvious pain it brought her, just sadden my heart.

"If there be God - please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul," she wrote.

"How painful is this unknown pain - I have no Faith.

How could someone so good become such an empty shell of faith?

Or, to put it another way, why does God let bad things happen to good people?

What, I wonder, did Mother Teresa think of on her death bed? And what did she see after she died?

Shirley I shouldn't share this

Last night I said a prayer for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss suggested we do this yesterday, during a speech in Perry. It seemed like something I should have been doing all along.

I opened my eyes and began to get up. Then I closed them again and said a prayer for the other side's troop's, too.

Anyone think Jesus would have just prayed for the Americans?

And you have heard that it was said

For some time now I've been working on an essay about the difficult necessity of turning the other cheek, and how violence begets violence.

There are a lot of drafts. As if I could improve upon the book of Matthew, or the teachings of a thousand wise philosophers.

I'm reading a book now called "Strength to Love." It's a collection of some of Martin Luther King Jr's sermons. I recommend it. I'm going to excerpt here from a sermon called "Loving your enemies."

There is so much hate in this world. I don't know much, but I know you can't fight it with hate.

Probably no admonition of Jesus has been more difficult to follow than the command to "love your enemies." Some men have sincerely felt that its actual practice is not possible. It is easy, they say, to love those who love you, but how can one love those who openly and insidiously seek to defeat you? Others, like the philosopher Nietzsche, contend that Jesus' exhortation to love one's enemies is testimony to the fact that the Christian ethic is designed for the weak and cowardly, and not for the strong and courageous. Jesus, they say, was an impractical idealist.

In spite of these insistent questions and persistent objections, this command of Jesus challenges us with new urgency. Upheaval after upheaval has reminded us that modern man is traveling along a road called hate, in a journey that will bring us to destruction and damnation. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.

The sermon goes on to delve into the difficulties and practicalities of forgiving an enemy. I found it very enlightening. And depressing, because I can't see most people actually doing it. Is our country not now engaged upon a war of vengeance?

I'll excerpt a bit more. Dr. King was speaking primarily of the civil rights movement, but the words speak to so much more. And the "non-cooperation clause," so to speak, leaves room for physical force to protect the people, and the right, when they need protecting. It would appear that I am not a complete pacifist.

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? ...

To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. ...

Jesus is eternally right. History is replete with the bleached bones of nations that refused to listen to him. May we in the twentieth century hear and follow his words - before it is too late.