Photo by Roger Potts Bruces Chapel. Casey county, KY

Mom used to play a song on the organ called ” Church in the Wildwood”. When I hear that song, it takes me back to the little church that my paternal Grandparents attended. It wasn’t in a ” vale”, but rather at the top of the mountain they lived on. I think it was called “Cemetary Hill”. Summers County, WV.

It was the quintessential one-room church and I remember the squeaky double-seater wooden chairs that were so noisy, and the wood stove that later got upgraded to electric. There was a preacher sometimes, otherwise an elder would “give the lesson”, there would be an offering collected, announcements made, and 3 or 4 hymns.

I can recall those voices in my head. Dad sang base Mom was alto. I didn’t know the words “parts and harmony” back then, but my love of singing started back there, hearing hymns, familiar no matter what church you were in, blending in the way only family harmonies do. It is pleasant to have memories that can put you back into childhood moments like that, to where you almost feel you went back in time and visited. I am thankful for that. A lot of the folks there were related to me. I didn’t know that at the time. Back then, kids had a much different ” place” than now. They were not the center of the universe. It didn’t often cross the mind of an adult to include kids in the introductions, but it was kind of cool to experience the adult world of my parents from the fly-on-the-wall perspective afforded by societal rules of that day. I know I must sound like I am ancient, but I am referring to a time just  45 years ago. The setting, Southern West VA, is one of those places one might call ” a land that time forgot”. Or, maybe it was sentimentality on my part, because I was one of those kids some people refer to as ” an old soul”. I don’t believe in reincarnation, of course, but that phenomenon is a real thing. Kids “born old”.  To me that means a kid who is a little more serious from early age. A kid who is observant, perceptive or intuitive. I don’t know. Maybe that is more common in kids than I realize. One of those good things that adulthood and life experience grooms right out of you. I was able to appreciate the specialness and essential goodness of that ” country way of things” and of that time; of sitting in a church listening to hymns being sung. In a place where people spoke when you passed one another, and did not automatically have to suspect ill intent  from anyone who got anywhere near your “personal space”.

I was sitting here looking at videos yesterday. Attorney General Bill Barr, testifying at his confirmation hearing, (he’s shrewd, that one!), and then some city council meeting videos out of Chicago popped up in my feed. Mercy me, that was a circus! Shock is not the right word, (what capacity to be shocked is left to us at this point?) but it was definitely appalling.  Yet it was hard to look away from in the same way as when you come upon a bad car accident. The council president was a real horse’s arse, but I was hard pressed to figure out which if any of the other six or eight that were not also sad middle aged pathetic whiney brats. Only the one or two who kept silent retained any question as to whether they had an iota of common sense between the whole lot of them.

Like the saying goes, better to remain silent and be presumed ignorant, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt!

America! What has become of you? (It was Chicago, but still),

Every moral, every institution, every standard, all consideration, humility, and decorum, almost all sense of order anyplace in society has just about crumbled, and what’s left is displaying extremely alarming cracks. That is what happens when termites are allowed to eat away the foundation of civil society, by banishing God from the public square.

We have become a nation where the main qualification for public office is embecility!

But the truth is, it is a development God warned us would occur: where there is no love of truth, they are given over to reprobate minds. It is an immutable spiritual law.

It doesn’t matter whether people believe in it or not. Like gravity, it just is!

Did you see the dueling asses, Maxine Waters and Steve Mnuchin go head to head recently? Whoowee boy! That was the most flawlessly pristine  demonstration of corrupted power and arrogance I have seen in a while, and that ain’t a trophy easily won! I give them both a 10 out of 10!

I felt my blood wanting to boil watching these weazels who are supposed to be representing “we the people” but instead are getting off on power-trippin’, but the good Lord tapped me on the shoulder and called to my memory Psalm 2:4-5

(KJV). 4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. 5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

Vengeance may be His, but nothing says we can’t anticipate it with glee, does it?