Opinions

“You could live on a dollar and 27 cents a day,” the husband said to me, shaking his head.

No one did it better than the Drifters in the early 1960’s. Up on the Roof topped the charts at No. 5 among pop songs. Lately, I have been diggin’ me some Drifters.

I wonder how hot it is on Mercury in the summertime. Mercury, as you know, is the closest planet to the sun and therefore the hottest. This South, as you know, comes right between it and Venus giving us the number two status in the solar system for heat production. Or so it seems, in the summertime. I remember the summers of my childhood 40 years ago. The heat was different in the 1960s--it was everywhere. You had little or no air conditioning with which to compare the outside air, so you merely looked for the coolest place outside. I can tell you where it was: under the mimosa trees in the morning, in the back bedroom which was shaded by magnolias at noon, in the cool spray of sprinklers in mid-afternoon and under the sheltered carport before suppertime.

I'll Tell You What

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about the word, “fellowship?” Since I am a Baptist, I start thinking about potlucks or really any gathering oriented around food. How do youth ministers get students to gather together? They offer free pizza! But fellowship is about something more than just food. Last month, we started breaking down the traits of the early church. In Acts 2:42, it says that they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship and the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Previously, we focused primarily on what it meant to be devoted to the apostles’ teaching. Continuing down that road, we want to ask the question, “What does it look like to be devoted to fellowship and the breaking of bread?”

When I look back to the Fourth of July during my earliest years, it wasn’t a party. There were no computer-generated displays of fireworks. It would begin, instead, with a quiet picnic lunch underneath a cross. That may surprise you, but for those who knew my family well, it wasn’t a big surprise. We didn’t own a boat or a swimming pool. My father was tied to his desk on Commerce Street most days, but when a red, white and blue holiday came to pass, he took my mother and I to some church, on some hill, with some creek running by it, where the breezes were cool and the day was quiet. And nobody else would be there.

When I’m looking for a bottle of wine, I might as well be in the auto parts store looking for brake calipers. I spend so much time on the wine aisle that people think I drink a lot. I don’t drink a lot. I don’t even drink a little. I’m simply overwhelmed, confused and uncertain of which bottle to choose. The major difference between the grocery store and the auto parts store is that wine bottles are so pretty—beautiful shapes and lovely colors of glass, with labels that are stunning.

Nineteen million inhabitants call New York City their home, well-deserving of its The Big Apple tag. Currently No. 11 on the world’s largest list, the Melting Pot just had a tumultuous week. Just 24 years after Islamist extremist terrorists leveled the World Trade Center by intentionally using jet-liners to destroy the buildings, the city voted for a – grab your binoculars to see - a far-away leftist candidate in their current mayoral election. Uganda-born Zohran Mamdani, 33, dark-haired and handsome (but still a) Communist, defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo, 67, in the Democratic primary, 44-to-36 percent. Mind you, Cuomo is a tainted man. He resigned in 2021 when Attorney General Letitia James commissioned investigators who charged him with sexually harassing eleven women from 2013-2020.