We no longer live when public men are measured by the quality of their marriages. “Men of affairs” today are often just that and the greater the distance they can place between themselves and their crumbling home lives the better. For some unclear reason, the inability of a man to loyally fulfill his vows to his wife is no longer taken as indication of the character with which he will serve the public. Our age has suffered for embracing such folly. In Winston Churchill’s age, though, a public man’s marriage was more than a well-rehearsed drama, it was the yardstick by which the moral measure of the man was taken. Thus, it was often said of Churchill what is announced of today’s leaders only with a wink of cynicism: “Winston Churchill loved his wife.” Little else is as revealing of his character.

When thirty-four year-old Churchill married Clementine Hozier, he was already a war hero, author, and statesman. With a renowned ancestry and an international reputation, he was a man on the rise in Parliament. Clementine, ten years his junior, was the product of a shattered marriage and an unstable home life. Yet, she had been educated at the Sorbornne, possessed “classical” beauty, and was known to be an excellent tennis player and a good hunter—”for a woman.”

They appeared to be as opposite as a husband and wife could be. She was an early riser who retired early in the evening. He worked until 3 a.m. and then slept until mid-morning. She was an inveterate worrier. He took risks whenever possible and loved daring adventure. She was of Scots descent and believed in frugal ways and plain living. Money problems made her nervous. Winston, on the other hand, spent money like there was no end to it and kept the family in perpetual arrears. He enjoyed raucous parties and loud dinner guests with strong opinions. She found them crude and unsettling and sometimes even ordered guests out of her house (Winston said she once descended on a man “like a jaguar from a tree.”) He had boundless energy; she was often tired and in constant need of rest. Politically, she was to the left of the Liberal establishment of her day, but he was a conservative “Tory Democrat.” He loved Chartwell, their home in Kent; the work on the house, the development of the land, the entertaining. She found it ostentatious and too much work. He expressed everything, wept freely, and lavished affection upon her. She kept everything bottled up until the pressure became too much and she exploded, much to the astonishment of her family and friends.

This strange mixture seems a sure prescription for divorce, but somehow Winston and Clementine melded their differences into one of the most movingly intimate marriages on record. Together they created a realm of supportive intimacy that filled the void in their lives. It was a private realm, adorned with gentleness and a level of acceptance neither had known before. As one historian has written, “There would always be a place in their relationship into which no one else would enter.” From the time of their honeymoon, during which they “loitered and loved,” they together built a safe haven that would forever be their private refuge.

Within this world only pet names were used. He was “Mr. Pug” or “Pig” and she, “Mrs. Kat.” The children were called “kittens” and were given names like “Chumbolly” and “Duckadilly.” Unborn children were “Puppy Kittens.” When one of them entered the house, some absurd sound—like a nasal “Wonk! Wonk!”—would be made, with the entire family, from whatever quarter, repeating the sound in greeting. Their displays of affection were public and unrestrained. There was abundant wrestling, slapping, holding, and tickling in their home. On Churchill’s birthday, a visiting Lord found “Kat” and “Pig,” attired in paper hats, purring cat-like at each other on a sofa. They delighted in caring for each other. If a wasp landed on Clementine, Winston, knowing her deathly fear, would gallantly grab the insect and cast it into a nearby fire. Then he would turn to her and ask with deepest concern, “Did you survive, my Kat?” as though they had together confronted the dragon of St. George.

Their letters reveal an almost adolescent sentimentality. He might address her as “my beautiful white pussy cat.” If he had just left on a plane he might write that he had “a touching vision of you and your kittens growing rapidly smaller.” He was “eternally attached to her” and pledged, “I want to be worthy of all the beauties of your nature. It gives me so much joy to make you happy.” Clementine was equally expressive in writing, far more so than in person. When she had once been rude to one of their house guests, she wrote in apology, “My sweet and Dear Pig, when I am a withered old woman how miserable I shall be if I have disturbed your life and troubled your spirit by my temper. Do not cease to love me. I could not do without it.” Often, their letters included drawings of pigs, kittens, hearts, and other symbols of endearment. These exchanges might easily be mistaken for the love-sick scrawlings of teenagers were they not signed by the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

What is most astounding about the marriage of Winston and Clementine is that—far from immune to the pressures which shipwreck the marriages of others—they experienced almost every disadvantage in outsized proportion. By modern standards they were doomed from the beginning. There was no degree of loneliness, anger, rejection, pain, bitterness, or opportunity for unfaithfulness that they did not experience. But in their more than 55 years together, they endured largely because they admitted their inadequacies, fed their intimacy at any cost, and understood their marriage in the sustaining light of eternity. So, as Winston wrote in the very last line of his autobiographical My Early Life, “I married . . . and lived happily ever afterwards.”

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 On Realism: “The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may destroy it, but there it is.” 

As a rule, human beings try to avoid unpleasant truths. We prefer the comfortable to the unsettling. We dislike harsh facts for the same reason we dislike mirrors: they force us to stare our problems in the face. Historians have long known that civilizations in crisis take refuge in myth and fantasy because the sensual, escapist world of imagination promises deliverance from the cold, disturbing world of reality. But the deliverance is never genuine: it is only a temporary distraction, not real hope. Hope springs instead from courageously confronting the truth, no matter how bleak or costly it may be.

In complaining about the age of appeasement, Churchill once said, “No one in great authority had the wit, ascendancy or detachment from public folly to declare these fundamental, brutal facts to the electorate.” This touches one of the distinguishing marks of his style of leadership: he believed in the necessity of squarely facing the most ugly realities. How refreshing this is in our media age when public relations experts are mistaken for leaders and when every unsightly blemish or untidy fact is carefully reworked, re-painted, or retired. Churchill would have none of it: “It is no use dealing with illusions and make-believes. We must look at the facts. The world . . . is too dangerous for anyone to be able to afford to nurse illusions. We must look at realities.”

Churchill possessed an almost mystical confidence in knowing the facts and facing them honestly, whatever the offense, as a critical step toward ultimate triumph. In September of 1932, he warned the House of Commons of the Nazi movement and urged honesty in dealing with the public. “I would now say, ‘Tell the truth to the British People.’ They are a tough people, a robust people. They may be a bit offended at the moment, but if you have told them exactly what is going on you have insured yourself against complaints and reproaches which are very unpleasant when they come home on the morrow of some disillusion . . .” Years later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he told the House of Commons of a major naval defeat and reminded the members, “We do not at all underrate the power and malignity of our enemies. We are prepared to endure tribulation.” And when the defeats continued, his conclusion was near brutal in its frankness: “We shall suffer and we shall suffer continually, but by perseverance, and by taking measure on the largest scale, I feel no doubt that in the end we shall break their hearts.”

This resolve to engage the truth at any price granted Churchill some immensely important insights. As a careful observer who refused to change facts to fit his philosophy or bend reality to his imagination, he acquired shrewd insight into the ways of men and events. While others fashioned fantastic theories to explain what little they understood, Churchill recognized that history does not arrive in neat packages or move in defined channels. Time, chance, human nature,—all play their role. Life is not black and white, events are stubborn and unruly, and men rarely follow precise patterns in their behavior. Understanding this gave Churchill the judgment to fashion policies suited to the fluid and uncertain nature of circumstances.

“The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it. Conditions are so variable, episodes so unexpected, experiences so conflicting, that flexibility of judgment and a willingness to assume a somewhat humbler attitude towards external phenomena may well play their part in the equipment of a modern prime minister.”

A “humbler attitude” meant caution in dealing with other human beings: “The high belief in the perfection of man is appropriate in a man of the cloth but not in a prime minister.” It also demanded an unnatural willingness to consider opposing views: “The more knowledge we possess of the opposite point of view the less puzzling it is to know what to do.” It enabled him to coolly calculate risk: “We realize that success cannot be guaranteed. There are no safe battles.” And it made him even more impatient when empty posturing replaced informed action: “Peace will not be preserved by pious sentiments expressed in terms of platitudes or by official grimaces and diplomatic correctitude.” Perhaps above all, it gave him a healthy sense of the absurd in the affairs of men: “The human story does not always unfold like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five or minus three; and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye.”

Facing ugly truth is not easy. Often the toughest battle a leader will face is the one against his own reticence to see things as they really are. It requires uncommon courage and very few have the character to deal with such stark reality. But when the truth is known, the worst is over and the benefits are a clearer vision and the wisdom of a “humbler attitude,” without which leaders cannot move beyond despair to a brighter day of victory.

It began, of course, with all the Great Ones of old who foresaw the Messiah or who played a role in his ancestry or who wrote of how it would happen so that when it did everyone would know that God had been preparing, that all was according to plan.

But we don’t have to go back that far.

We can start with Anna. That is the name we know her by. The people who saw her everyday may have called her something else and it may not have been that kind. She was old. In fact, Dr. Luke tells us she was “very old.” And maybe a bit odd. People saw her each time they went to the temple. She was there, her lips moving wordlessly, often her hands raised to something invisible. Folks probably thought she was insane, some wrinkled old homeless woman who mumbled to herself all the time.

She wasn’t any of these things. It turns out she was once a lovely young woman who had long ago married the love of her life. The two lived happily for seven years until the young husband died. Anna was shattered and wept away her days. Then, in the swirl of her grief, she noticed a purpose taking form despite the fog. She knew what God wanted her to do: to wait and pray and fast and worship and do it out where anyone might see—in the temple courts. She sensed something marvelous was going to happen before too many years and that in some invisible way she was supposed to pave the way.

So day and night she stood before her God and reminded him of who he was and what he had promised. And the years passed—almost sixty of them. All along, Anna stayed true. And then there was that day, when Joseph and Mary—who were not yet born when Anna had stood her watch for forty years!—walked into the temple courts with something in their arms.

Simeon saw it too. He was old as well though not as old as Anna. Perhaps the two even knew each other. Her job was to stand in the holy place and call upon God to act. Simeon’s job was to know what was coming and to let it live inside him until the day it was fulfilled—even if it was the last day of his life.

So when Joseph and Mary’s grandparents were still young, Anna moved from grief to intercession and began to stand her watch. Simeon saw what others did not of God’s intent for Israel and waited, like a pregnant woman eager for the day of birth. And he was there, too, before Joseph and Mary were even a dream in their parents’ hearts.

Then, without either of them knowing it, the night we remember each year came. A young couple, forced to travel by a decree of Caesar, looked for a place to give birth. There was no room in the inn. Everyone was out on the roads. And so a cave used to tend cattle became their home for a while.

It had taken miracles to get them there. An angel appeared to Mary to tell her what was to come. She was only 14 or so and understandably unsure. Joseph had suspicions that only another angel/dream could correct. Then, Mary’s Uncle Zechariah had seen an angel by the temple altar and things had not gone well. He didn’t speak for nine months while his wife, Elizabeth, had a child though she was well up in years.

God was weaving his story. And he wasn’t done. On this night, while Mary gave birth to a child no human father produced and Joseph served her knowing the child was from God and Anna worshipped in the temple and Simeon carried the sacred dream….

….Priests of a foreign religion and a far distant land were woven into the story. They followed a slow moving star and would not arrive for two years, but they had begun their journey to worship the Christ and would not stop searching until they did. Shepherds tending the temple flocks heard angels declare what had happened and rushed off to find the new Lamb of God.  And in Jerusalem, Zechariah spoke and held his new son named John while his wife, Elizabeth, recovered from her joyous trial.

And he came. The Promised One. Just as was foretold. As a pudgy, squirming baby nestled in an animal trough. Not much fanfare for a king.

Then, forty days later, to fulfill the law of God, Joseph and Mary carried their child, Jeshua, to Jerusalem and into the temple courts. Simeon found them first, old as he was and perhaps a bit weary in the search. Once he explained to the parents, he took the child in his arms and knew his unanswered waiting had come to an end. He held in his trembling hands the one who would reach beyond the borders of Israel to the great unknowing masses in lands no honorable Jew would set foot. And he told these parents it would not all be easy for them in the days to come.

Anna likely saw the three and the child amidst the temple throng and drew near. What she had envisioned all those years ago, what she had long asked God to do, now was here. She wept and prayed and began to tell all who entered the temple a story that must have made the passersby shake their heads at that crazy old woman and her mystical tales.

Each one played his role. The grieving young wife, the patient seer, the priests of a strange religion, the shepherds just putting down for the night, the old priest of Israel who had trouble believing, his now-young elderly wife, and the Christ himself who was ancient before he was born and took on the form of a child.

In this way, the Destiny Weaver, wove his story in time. And the weaving goes on, for those willing to lend the strand of their lives to the woven purposes of God.

__________________

In 1608, the Pilgrims left England for Holland because of persecution by the Anglican Church. William Bradford, their chronicler and long-time governor, wrote that they had “as the Lord’s free people, joined themselves by a covenant of the Lord into a church estate, in the fellowship of the Gospel, to walk in all His ways made known…unto them, according to their best endeavors, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.”

While in Holland, Pastor John Robinson powerfully preached a Christian vision for the New World: “Now as the people of god in old time were called out of Babylon civil, the place of their bodily bondage, and were to come to Jerusalem, and there to build the Lord’s temple, or tabernacle…so are the people of God now to go out of Babylon spiritual to Jerusalem…and to build themselves as lively stones into a spiritual house, or temple, for the Lord to dwell in.”

After 12 years of living in Holland, the Pilgrims began to nurture a desire to take the Gospel to the nations. Bradford writes of their passion for coming to the new world: “…a great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.”

They were carefully counting the cost: “…all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be enterprise and overcome with answerable courages. It was granted that the dangers were great, but not desperate, and the difficulties were many, but not invincible…and all of them, through the help of God, fortitude and patience, might either be borne or overcome…[But] their condition was not ordinary. Their ends were good and honorable, their calling lawful and urgent, and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding; yea, though they should lose their lives in this action, yet they might have comfort in the same, and their endeavors would be honorable.”

They were willing to face hardship: “Yea, and as the enterprise is weighty and difficult, so the honor is more worthy, to plant a rude wilderness, to enlarge the honor and fame of our dread sovereign, but chiefly to display the efficacy and power of the Gospel, both in zealous preaching, professing, and wise walking under it, before the faces of these poor blind infidels.”

The were particularly concerned for the conversion of natives in the New World: “And first, seeing we daily pray for the conversion of the heathens…it seemeth unto me that we ought also to endeavor and use the means to convert them; and the means cannot be used unless we go to them, or they come to us. To us they cannot come, our land is full; to them we may go…that they may be persuaded at length to embrace the Prince of Peace, Christ Jesus, and rest in peace with him forever.”

After making arrangements for the voyage, their pastor, John Robinson, called a “day of sollemme humiliation.” Robinson preached from Ezra 8:21: “And there at the river, by Ahavba, I proclaimed a fast, that we might humble ourselves before our God and seek of him a right way for us, and for our children and for all our substance.” Robinson later wrote, “The rest of the time was spent in powering out prayers to the Lord with great fervencies, mixed with abundance of tears.”

The majority left Holland to board their ships in England. Their godly Pastor, John Robinson, stayed behind to care for the elderly and infirm. He sent a letter with one of the leaders that was to be read as they boarded their ships. The words would repeatedly provide comfort and encouragement to them as their adventure unfolded.

. . .We are daily to renew our repentance with our God, especially for our sins known, and generally for our unknown trespasses. . .[For] sin being taken away by earnest repentance ad the pardon thereof from the Lord. . .great shall be [a man's] security and peace in all dangers, sweet his comforts in all distresses. . .

As they prepared to leave in 1620 “they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.”

The voyage on The Mayflower lasted 66 days. The Mayflower was no longer than a volleyball court and the storms they sailed through sometimes laid the ship on its side, sometimes threw it high in the air only to slam it upon the water again. During that time of year the North Atlantic waters are so cold that the U.S. Navy estimates a man will live only three minutes if he falls overboard.

For weeks at a time, the Pilgrims were forced to remain in the “tween decks.” One sailor repeatedly called them “psalmsinging pukestockings.” They suffered all the effects of being tossed on the ocean for over two months — men, children, pregnant women, the elderly — but they always harbored in their hearts an earnest desire to be a “stepping stone of the light of Christ in a new land.”

When they arrived, landing in a howling wilderness, Bradford wrote these moving words: “Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repair too, to seeke for succoure. And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that cuntrie know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search and unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. What could now sustain them but the spirite of God and his grace? May not and ought not the children of these fathers, rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.’”

Because they had been blown off course by the storms and had not landed upon the land of their charter, the Pilgrims wrote a new charter, called the Mayflower Compact. It is the first binding covenant or constitution in American history. It states clearly why they sailed to the new world.

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, defender of the faith, &c, having undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.

But this unity was quickly challenged. Bradford wrote:

In these hard and difficult beginnings they found some discontents and murmurings arise among some, and mutinous speeches and carriages in other, but they were soon quelled and overcome by the wisdom, patience, and just and equally carriage of things by the Governor and better part, which clave faithfully together in the main. But that which was most sad and lamentable was, that in 2 or 3 months time halfe of their company dyed, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts, being infected with the scurvie and other diseases, and which this long voyage and their inaccomadate condition had brought upon them; so as there dyed some time 2 or 3 a day in the foresaid time; that of 100 persons, scarce 50 reminded.

And of these in the time of most distress, there were but 6 or 7 sound persons who, to their great commendations be it spoken, spared no pains, night or day, but with abundance of toyle and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, loathed and unclothed them, in a word did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully without any grudging in the least, showing herein their true love unto their friends and brethren.

Still, God’s grace was sufficient. God caused English-speaking Indians named Samoset and Squanto to help the Pilgrims learn how to farm the land and harvest the bay. Squanto lived with the Pilgrims until 1622 when he died. His last request was that Gov. William Bradford would pray that he might go to the Englishman’s god in heaven. Bradford wrote: “Squanto continued with them and was their interpreter, and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation. He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish and to procure other commodities and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never left them till he dyed.”

Their next harvest proved the wisdom of Squanto. They had abundance of food for the first time. Governor Bradford called for a Day of Thanksgiving.

Our harvest being gotten, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might, after a special manner, rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation, and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God we are so far from want that we are partakers of plenty.

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QUOTES FROM SPEECHES
ABOUT THE PILGRIMS AND THANKSGIVING THROUGHOUT HISTORY

“Let us, in the midst of these reflections, have our hearts enlarged in thanksgiving to God, for his merciful favor to our fathers, and to us by their instrumentality. Let us piously acknowledge the hand of God, in all that has been done for them and us, and to the whole, cry, grace, grace. With what strange gloom are our hearts filled, when we make the supposition, that all our fathers had been left to perish in their attempt! Proportionable to the dreadfulness of such a supposition, let our gratitude be, to our father’s God and our’s. And, out of gratitude to God, let us improve the blessings of life with sobriety, and maintain our liberties with an honorable Christian firmness.”
-Charles Turner, 1773

“…let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary. Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in full conviction, that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity.”
-Daniel Webster, 1851

“Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation; let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.”
-William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation

The storms of the north Atlantic were so fierce and the ship so tossed that the main mast frequently dipped into the waves. It was a disorienting, gut-wrenching experience for even the experienced sailors among them. The small band of believers on board — men, women, an expectant mother and small children among them — were kept in the “tween deck” for fear of the buffeting storms. Many were sick. Some wailed their agonies endlessly through the terrifying nights. The icy winds wailed with them. What a filthy, smelly, terrifying time of testing that was!

But the elements were not the only opposition these Christians, who would soon be called “Pilgrims,” endured. There was one sailor who persisted in calling them “psalm-singing pukestockings,” which are exactly the two things they spent most of their time doing. Though the Pilgrims forgave and prayed for the man’s soul, he was, mysteriously, the only person to die during the voyage.

For 66 days the little ship, no longer than a modern volleyball court, made the treacherous voyage from England to the coast of Massachusetts. And when they arrived, what must their thoughts have been as they scanned the howling wilderness which was to be their home? William Bradford, their Governor, later wrote:

“Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys,  no house or much less townes to repair too, to seeke for succoure.” 

“What could sustain them but the spirite of God and his grace. May not and ought not the children of these fathers, rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.’”

 And perish they almost did. More than half of them died during that first winter, often called “the starving time.” At one point, each person’s ration for a day was no more than five kernels of corn. Indian friends like Squanto and Samoset taught the white men how to harvest the bay and the land, but the yield would not be sufficient until the next year. So, they buried their dead and prayed for God’s mercy.

In the spring they planted and began to sense that God had heard their prayers. The previous winter had been the worst of times, but the harvest looked bountiful now, the settlement was growing and God seemed to be smiling upon them.

When the harvest was gathered that fall, Governor Bradford called for some of the men to go hunting in preparation for a great feast to celebrate the goodness of God. Wild fowl, fish from the sea, and venison were prepared in abundance. They invited their Indians friends and these, thankfully, brought five freshly killed deer. The white women prepared hoecakes, cornmeal pudding and a variety of vegetables while the Indian women introduced delicacies like blueberry, apple, and cherry pies. The most welcome new food which the Indians brought with them, though, was a new way of cooking corn in an earthen pot until it became white and fluffy — popcorn!

It was indeed a thanksgiving, but not just for safety and abundance of food. It was also a time to remember the words they had penned about their purpose for coming when they were yet on the The Mayflower. The came, they said, “for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” “for propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.”

So they were. And we ought to remember them this Thanksgiving, and take their mission to our hearts.

*

“Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation; let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.”

William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation

I strained my back last week. I don’t usually have back problems and I’m actually in pretty good shape but I’ve had a lot of travel recently. During one stretch I hauled a heavy suitcase to multiple speaking events across the country, something I don’t normally do. The beds at some of my hotels attacked me in my sleep. I stupidly worked out too hard one day to compensate for not working the two days prior and, well—I strained my back last week.

This strain wasn’t the profound experience. It was what the strain made me do. Because I was constantly feeling twinges in my lower back, I walked slowly everywhere I went—airports, airplanes, hotels, restaurants, big convention centers—everywhere. Now, usually I’m a fast walker. I have long legs and walking somehow triggers thought and before I know it I’m nearly race-walking through life. More than once I’ve been walking while lost in thought and then realized I’d lost my wife somewhere along the way too. My fault. I walk fast and it makes me drift away into my other, mental world.

So this past week has been a revelation in walking slowly. I don’t limp. I don’t walk with a hitch in my step. I just walk very slowly, very smoothly–like a man with a satisfied mind—whether I am or not. This has changed my orientation to the world and the people in it. Moving slowly, I see more and notice what I might not have. People also see me and this is the big lesson from my week of moving slowly.

While walking through one airport, I noticed what I certainly would not have a week before—a woman in tears. I had just taken note of her when I realized she had already noticed me. I was moving slowly, at a different pace from everyone else and I didn’t appear too busy. “Can you help me?” she said choking back sobs. She had just received some bad news, it turned out, and couldn’t dial her cell phone for her shaking and her tears. It was no big deal to help her, really, but people rushing to planes don’t look like they are interested in such trifles and I, in my diminished speed, did.

Then I got on a plane and after take off a flight attendant asked me what I do. I told her and she said, “I thought so. You just move like a man in rhythm with himself.” Hmm. “In rhythm?” All I had done was slow down, but my pace said to her that something was right about my life. Another man approached me in a restaurant and said, “Are you someone famous?” I am not, of course, though he might have seen me on TV through the years. I asked him why he asked. His answer surprised me. “Just the way you walked into the room, I thought maybe you were someone I should know.” We both laughed when I said that that actually I in was in pain and that there is ample evidence that knowing me is not that great a thrill.

There were other similar episodes and they all convinced me that being slow sent signals and allowed connections I couldn’t have imagined otherwise. I came to realize that I want to be that more present, compassionate, accessible man others perceived me to be this past week. I know I’m not him, not yet. But maybe pace is the key. At the least, it’s a start.

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The legislation that would lead to Prohibition began in 1917 with the passage of the Food Control Act, which gave Woodrow Wilson the authority to regulate the manufacture of beer and wine. Prohibitionists had worked behind the scenes for the passage of the bill knowing that it was a first step toward outlawing alcohol sales. Wilson complied. He required a reduction in beer sales of thirty percent and dramatically limited the alcohol content a beer could contain. It was only a beginning. Immediately, a constitutional amendment was proposed for prohibiting intoxicating drink entirely. This amendment passed in January of 1919 but it needed a accompanying legislation to assure enforcement. In the famous Volstead Act that ensued, an intoxicating beverage was defined as anything containing more than five percent alcohol. Oddly, President Wilson vetoed the act, Congress overrode, and the Supreme Court upheld the act when brewers filed a desperate suit to bring the prohibition mania to an end. On January 17, 1920, the United States became a dry nation.

It would prove to be one of the most foolish governmental acts in American history, a point of discussion on morality and law for generations to come. It had little popular support. A poll taken in 1926 revealed that only 19 percent of Americans favored prohibition and the Eighteenth Amendment that made it law. Prohibition was thus a blow to democracy. It was also a blow to law and order. The more than 177,000 saloons in America prior to Prohibition merely went private, so that in New York alone some 32,000 speakeasies thrived, many eventually providing still other illegal activities, such as prostitution, among their benefits of membership. These establishments were often serviced by thousands of smugglers who focused their efforts on whiskey, gin and rum. Prohibition, then, not only led to illegal trade in alcohol but it also meant that increasing numbers of Americans were drinking hard liquor rather than more moderate and healthy beer. In short, Prohibition increased the consumption of hard liquor in America.

It also increased home-brewing. As H. L. Mencken wrote at the time, “Every second household has become a homebrewer . . . In one American city of 750,000 inhabitants there are now 100 shops devoted exclusively to the sale of beer-making supplies, and lately the proprietor of one of them, by no means the largest, told me that he sold 2,000 pounds of malt-syrup a day.”

The miseries, mysteries and manipulations of Prohibition would last nearly a decade before the Roman Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith of New York made repeal a major theme of his campaign. Though Smith lost his race for the White House, he made repeal acceptable and soon such luminaries as General “Black Jack” Pershing, Walter Chrysler, Harvey Firestone and John Rockefeller were echoing Smith’s cry for change.

Rockefeller was perhaps the most interesting of these because he did not drink alcohol but he did recognize the failure of prohibition.

Failure of the Eighteenth Amendment has demonstrated that the majority of this country are not yet ready for total abstinence, a least when it is attempted through legal coercion. The next best thing—many people think it a better thing—is temperance. Therefore, as I sought to support total abstinence when its achievement seemed possible, so now, and with equal vigor, I would support temperance.

It fell to the newly elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt to call for the end to the madness. Barely a week after taking office, Roosevelt asked Congress to raise the legal alcohol limit of beer to 3.2. Congress complied and though the official end of Prohibition would await the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, the end this misguided policy had come.

Prohibition stands as a testimony to the damage that can be done through ignorance of the benefits of beer. Rather than emphasize beer as an antidote to drunkenness, as a healthy alternative to harder drinks which, in excess, ruined men’s lives, Prohibitionists treated all alcohol as the same. This not only meant that hard liquor drinking rose during Prohibition, but that the destruction of breweries removed the societal benefits of beer in the post-Prohibition years. Prior to Prohibition there had been sixteen hundred breweries in America. Only seven hundred reopened when Prohibition was repealed, but more than five hundred of these soon failed, burdened as they were with out of date equipment and inadequate financing. This meant, that, again, during the critical 1930’s when beer might have served a Depression era people well, hard liquor ruled the day. Lives were destroyed, crime and poverty spread as a result. Prohibition had served no better purpose than to ban moderation, both during its reign and in the difficult years afterward.

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There had long been efforts for prohibition of alcohol sales in the United States and it is not hard to understand why. From the earliest days of the colonial era, alcohol had played a vast role in nearly every part of life. Men paid for goods with whiskey, doctors treated wounds with wine and political events were awash with strong drink cynically provided by the politicians themselves. Inebriated men made easy political targets. Whiskey was so prized that when the new federal government decided to tax alcohol sales, a revolt ensued known to history as the “Whiskey Rebellion.”

The popular attitude toward drink was that of earlier generations of Christians: alcohol in moderation is a grace of life but drunkenness is both sin and a plague upon society. As pioneers moved westward and small towns began to dot the plains, the negative effects of alcohol became more pronounced. It would take only a few hard drinking men to terrorize a small community, and only one drunken father and husband to leave a family destitute on the dangerous frontier. Naturally, anti-drink societies formed—understandably led by women—and many a tension arose between the “dry” and “wet” factions of the American west.

As anti-alcohol sentiments increased, entire states banned alcohol sales. Maine was first in 1851 with Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont following in 1852. A year later, Michigan followed suit as did Connecticut in 1854. These laws were loosely and incompetently enforced, though, and this only led to increased frustration on the part of temperance groups. Finally, anti-alcohol sentiments merged with religious beliefs and led to the formation of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. This body thrived in the rural sections of the country and led, in time, to the rise of the legendary Carrie Nation—the widow who took axe in hand and hacked to pieces the saloon where she believed her husband once drank himself to death. Her exploits captured the imagination of many Americas and, in an age of anti-corruption reform, the war on alcohol gathered strength.

In retrospect, brewers seemed unaware of these currents of change. Believing rightly that beer and alcohol had always been a valued part of America life, brewers throughout the U.S. saw little threat in the gathering anti-alcohol storm. They continued to cite the American heritage of moderate alcohol use and even proclaimed a favorite truism from the era of the founding fathers: “The Brewery is the best pharmacy.” They were tragically unaware of their times. They were unable to see what would come of women gaining political power, many of these women armed with tales of the devastation excessive drink had meant for their families. They could not have understood how World War I would lead to fiery anti-German sentiment and how this in turn would focus rage on the largely German trade of brewing beer. And they could not have foreseen how many a politician, riding an anti-corruption wave, would blame alcohol for most of the country’s woes and thus come to proclaim prohibition as a national panacea. When brewers in America did wake up to the prevailing trends, there was little they could do.

It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492. He was a young boy when the devastating news of the fall of Constantinople to Muslim armies reached his land. It marked him. He grew into manhood surrounded by tales of the Crusades into Muslim lands. When he determined to fulfill Marco Polo’s dream and return to the east by sailing west, he did so in part to harvest the wealth of the New World to liberate the Old World from Islam. As he wrote to Isabella and Ferdinand from the Americas on his first voyage,

I hope to God that when I come back here from Castile . . . that I will find . . . gold . . . in such quantities that within three years the Sovereign will prepare for and undertake the reconquest of the Holy Land. I have already petitioned Your Highnesses to see that all the profits of this, my enterprise, should be spent on the conquest of Jerusalem, and Your Highnesses smiled and said that the idea pleased them, and that even without the expedition they had the inclination to do it.

Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America.

What Columbus dreamed became the hope of later generations. The greatest theologian of the American colonial era, and possibly of American history, was Jonathan Edwards. In his History of Redemption, written in 1773, Edwards predicted that a great revival to begin at the dawn of the twenty-first century in America would spell the end of Islam. What Edwards called “Mahometanism” would fall, he wrote, “when the Spirit begins to be so gloriously poured forth” at the end of the age.

Satan’s Mahometan kingdom shall be utterly overthrown. And then—though Mahometanism has been so vastly propagated in the world, and is upheld by such a great empire—this smoke, which has ascended out of the bottomless pit, shall be utterly scattered before the light of that glorious day, and the Mahometan empire shall fall at the sound of the great trumpet which shall then be blown.

This expectation of the fall of Islam was a central theme of the Great Awakening, the founding revival of the Revolution, and thus became a central theme in what might be called the founding dream of America.

It must have come as no surprise to those who fought it, then, that America’s first war was against Muslim armies. Modern Americans are often shocked to hear this. They assume that our first war was against the British in the War of 1812. Not so. Our first war was the Tripolitan War, fought against the Muslim pirates of North Africa’s Barbary Coast. It was a war that presaged much in our history, complete with hostages, rescue missions, terrorist acts, and a Congress that could not decide whether it was engaged in a war or a police action.

Though later generations would tend to see this and most wars in non-spiritual terms, Americans of that generation understood their battle as the Rais Hudga Mahomet Salamia did. He was the Muslim captain of a ship manned by American captives at the start of the war. He warned his enslaved crew of Christians that they were to be treated harshly, “for your history and superstition in believing in a man who was crucified by the Jews, and disregarding the true doctrine of God’s last and greatest Prophet Mahomet.” Clearly, the Tripolitan war was a battle of faiths and Americans are reminded of this deeply religious conflict every time the U.S. Marines tell us in song that they were fashioned first “on the shores of Tripoli.”

We are not limited to the perspectives of those early generations of Americans nor was everything they believed correct. Still, it is of more than passing interest that our nation was forged, in part, in an ongoing struggle with Islamic forces. At the least it causes us to realize that our current conflicts with radical Islam are nothing new. At best, it may provide some insight into the nature of those conflicts.

This phrase and these achievements came back to me this week as I researched the life of Abraham Lincoln. I drove from our home in Nashville to Lincoln’s birthplace and boyhood home in Kentucky, to a later childhood home in Indiana, and finally to the town he made his own in adulthood, Springfield, Illinois. Though I am preparing to write a book about Lincoln’s faith, I was moved profoundly by how Lincoln became “his own university.”

He was born to illiterate parents and could boast only a few months of formal schooling all his days. His early years were bound to a dirt scratching farm life that took all a man had to give and gave back mere subsistence. There was little time for the life of the mind and little to encourage a smart, muscular boy to do anything but sweaty labor.

Still, Lincoln taught himself to read. Think about that phrase. He taught himself to read. He reasoned out the letters and asked questions of those few who knew the English alphabet and he taught himself to read. This was the beginning of his exceptional life. Once he mastered words, he quickly moved on to sentences and then paragraphs. Whole books followed. He eagerly consumed The King James Bible, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the works of Shakespeare, and Aesop’s Fables, beloved frontier fare among the literate. Then he borrowed, bought and even happened upon in an abandoned barrel books like Pilgrim’s Progress, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, a biography of Jefferson, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Parson Weems’ George Washington and the works of Robert Burns. These launched him. He would in time read hundreds more and some were the most difficult books of the age—the multi-volume Commentary on the Laws of England by William Blackstone and Plutarch’s Lives for example.

He was a tender soul in a steely body and so he felt as much as thought what he read. Poetry came from the mix. I am touched not just by the agility of his mind but by the sweetness of his words. He gave us “the better angels of our nature” and “mystic chords of memory” and “that government of the people, for the people, by the people shall not perish from the earth.” A poem he wrote when he returned to his childhood home in later years captures the feelings of us all. Two stanzas of the two dozen reveal the genius:

My childhood’s home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There’s pleasure in it too.

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.

How does a self-taught man achieve such heights? He reads. He pushes himself. He hears of a word or a subject he knows nothing about and he insists on learning all he can. He engages the knowledgeable and is willing to make mistakes and he will not be satisfied until he is certain of what he needs to know to fulfill his calling.

I’m moved by this not only because I am inspired by the self-taught leaders of history, but also because I believe this skill of self-education is one we all have to master to prosper in our present world. We live at a time when there is a complete technological revolution every five years. Knowledge doubles in our world in approximately the same length of time. It is important we go to school but we must also accept that in the future we will have to learn most of what we need to know on our own. We will have to become high tech Lincolns—reading, mining the internet, watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, being mentored by our friends, attending seminars, refusing to be destroyed by the knowledge tsunami.

It may be odd to think that what Lincoln learned to do in a dirt floor cabin, we must now do in order to achieve. It is also exciting, and it only makes me more thankful we have examples like Lincoln from ages past.

Still, I find this habit helpful when it comes to economics. I cannot hear the word “economics” without immediately being aware of the original meaning of the word. It means “house law” in the original Greek. And that is, quite simply, what economics is: the laws necessary for running a family household.

Now, my professor friends must already be squirming. They protest that this is too simplistic, too childishly framed to be of any help. But it helps me. When I think of economic policy, particularly at the macro level, I immediately “go micro” and try to imagine how that approach would work for the average family household.

Obviously I’m not alone in this. Another simpleminded man, a dear friend of mine, is Dave Ramsey. He apparently uses the Single Household Method as well. For example, read what he has said about our current American debt crisis.

“If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget and debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.”

Now, this I get, and I can’t help wondering how our nation and the world would be different if economics were thought of in this manner.

It isn’t, though, and this is largely due to the work of a man named John Maynard Keynes. You see, Keynes is the man credited with giving us our modern thinking about economics, which means the policies that have led us to our present global financial crises. He would have disdained my simple approach. He disliked simpleminded people like me. He also disliked Christians and, in part, because they insisted on thinking about the future, about matters like the next generation and legacy. Keynes, when asked about the implications of his policies on the future, simply quipped, “in the long run, we’re all dead.” You see Keynes believed that national governments have the obligation to protect people from the ebb and flow of markets through deficit spending—a fancy term for spending borrowed money. I think that when governments started listening to Keynes—early in the 1900’s—is when things started getting complex. Even Time magazine’s attempt to honor Keynes in their 1999 list of “The 100 Most Influential People of the Twentieth Century” includes a sentence that makes simple minds like mine wonder if anyone is truly paying attention. Listen: “His radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism.” Am I alone in thinking this mad? Am I alone in thinking that our current mess is precisely because Keynes urged government to spend money it doesn’t have to fend off crises that people could survive better if government would stay out of it to begin with?

I’m open to someone talking me out of my simple ways. Until that happens, I’m going to urge that macroeconomics to be conducted according to the principles of household management every housewife knows without even reading a book. Maybe this kind of simplicity will help us understand what is happening today. Maybe it will even help to save us.

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Her name was Elizabeth Anne Everest. Few today will remember her. In fact, few would have known of her even during her lifetime, which ended in near obscurity in 1895. She was, after all, only a nannyone of thousands in Victorian Englandwho quietly spent their days caring for the children of other people. Strolling in a park with her baby’s carriage or braving the London streets with a little boy clinging tightly to her side, there would have been nothing to distinguish her to passersby; she was just another British nanny with another nobleman’s son in her charge.

Or so it would seem. But Elizabeth Anne Everest was not just another nanny. She was a Christian, of the most passionate and fearless kind, and for her being a nanny was not just a job, it was a ministry. She lived her faith boldly before the families that hired her and worked hard to build godliness and biblical truth into the young lives in her care. Thus it was, while serving her Lord in the hiddenness of her calling, that she came to have an impact on the course of modern history. For on a blustery English day in February of 1875, Elizabeth Everest came to be the nanny, and soon the primary spiritual influence, of one rosy-cheeked baby boy by the name of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, future Prime Minister of England and leader of the western world.

There was little hint in his early years, however, of the greatness that young Winston would one day command and Mrs. Everest soon understood the immensity of her task. In time, the boy’s mother would warn visitors, with typical British understatement, that the he was “a difficult child to manage.” She was right. He kicked, he screamed, he hid, and he bullied. The word “monster” was often used of him and the trouble was that he was bright, too. Knowing of Mrs. Everest’s Christian faith young Winston once tried to escape a mathematics lesson by threatening to “bow down and worship graven images.” It worked, too…for a while. But Elizabeth Everest was an exceptional woman. She knew how to enforce the boundaries she set and from the beginning Winston held a grudging respect for this woman who seemed to know the secretthat his irritating behavior only served to hide a desperate longing of his heart.

This was the truth she tenderly guarded, for she knew that her Lord had not entrusted young Winston to her solely for the discipline she would enforce but more for the vacuum she would fill in the life of this lonely little boy. Few knew how painful his loneliness really was. It would be nice indeed to report that the Churchill’s shared a warmly intimate home life and that Winston was smothered with parental affection, but nothing could be further from the truth. Quite to the neglect of their son, Randolph and Jennie Churchill gave themselves completely to their social ambitions. True, Victorian parents maintained an astonishing distance from their children, receiving them only at prearranged times and under the watchful eye of servants, but the Churchills were remote even by these standards. Of his mother, Winston later wrote, “I loved her, but at a distance.” His father thought Winston was retarded, rarely talked to him, and regularly vented his mounting rage on the child. More than one historian has concluded that Lord Randolph simply loathed his son.

Thus it was that Elizabeth Everest Winston came to call her “Woom”became not only his nanny but his dearest companion, sharing with understanding and tender loyalty the secrets of his widening world. She was, after all, the stereotypical British nanny; plump, simple, cheery, ever optimistic, always compassionate. The boy grew to love her completely. Of their special relationship, Violet Asquith later wrote that in Winston’s “solitary childhood and unhappy school days Mrs. Everest was his comforter, his strength and stay, his one source of unfailing human understanding. She was the fireside at the which he dried his tears and warmed his heart. She was the night light by his bed. She was security.”

She was also his shepherd, for it was here, in the safety of their shared devotion, that Winston first experienced genuine Christianity. On bended knee beside this gentle woman of God he first learned that surging of the heart called prayer. From her lips he first heard the Scriptures read with loving devotion and was so moved he eagerly memorized his favorite passages. On long walks together they sang the great hymns of the Church, spoke breathlessly of the heroes of the faith, and imagined aloud what Jesus might look like or how heaven would be. As they sat together on a park bench or on a blanket of cool, green grass, Winston was often transfixed while Woom explained the world to him in simple but distinctly Christian terms. And it is not hard to imagine that when their day was done many an evening found this devoted intercessor praying the prayers of destiny over her sleeping charge, asking her Heavenly Father to fulfill the calling she sensed so powerfully on his life.

It would seem her prayers were answered, for though in early adulthood Churchill immersed himself in the anti-Christian rationalism that swept his age, he eventually recovered his faith during an escape from a South African prison. So deeply had he received the imprint of Mrs. Everest’s dynamic faith that in this time of crisis the prayers he had learned at her knee returned almost involuntarily to his lips, as did the Scripture passages he had memorized to the familiar lilt of her voice. From that time forward, his faith defined him, as it did his sense of mission. He came to see himself in much the same terms as those he once used to dedicate his grandson. Holding the child aloft he tearfully proclaimed him “Christ’s new faithful soldier and servant.”

So when the tests of life had prepared him and his day of destiny arrived, Winston Churchill was ready to lead the world with a clear trumpet call of the solid faith he first learned from his godly nanny. In an age of mounting skepticism, Church proclaimed the cause of “Christian civilization.” It was threatened from without, he believed, by “barbarous paganism”—like Nazism—which spurned “Christian ethics” and derived its “strength and perverted pleasure from persecution.” Therefore, every Christian had a “duty to preserve the structure of humane, enlightened, Christian society.” This was critical, for “once the downward steps are taken, once one’s moral intellectual feet slipped upon the slope of plausible indulgence, there would be found no halting-place short of a general Paganism and Hedonism.”

While other leaders of his age vacillated and sought the compromises of cowards, Churchill defined the challenges of his civilization in the stark Christian terms that moved men to greatness. Yet behind the arsenal of his words, behind the artillery of his vision, was the simple teaching of a devoted nanny who served her God by investing in the destiny of a troubled boy.

So it was that when the man some called the “Greatest Man of the Age” lay dying in 1965 at the age of ninety, there was but one picture that stood at his bedside. It was the picture of his beloved nanny, gone to be with her Lord some seventy years before. She had understood him, she had prayed him to his best, and she had fueled the faith that fed the destiny of nations…in the hiddenness of her calling.

We human beings naturally want to hide our flaws and cover up our misdeeds. In this we follow in the nature of Adam, who did wrong, then blamed his wife, and then covered his nakedness with a fig leaf. We are all his descendants and we all have the same tendency: hide, explain away, deflect—anything but the open truth.

It just doesn’t work. Aside from the damage it does to the soul, it leaves us open to vicious attack from others once we are discovered. Far better it is to simply admit our weaknesses, be more transparent about them than anyone could force us to be, and thus take the weapon out of the hands of our opponents.

No one is attacking New Jersey Governor Chris Christie about his weight. Why? Because he got there first—admitting he is overweight, telling the best jokes on himself, making a virtue of being a big man. No one is attacking George W. Bush for being a C student. He admitted as much when he spoke at Yale’s commencement—the very scene of his academic crimes. And no one is bringing up David Letterman’s misdeeds today and only because he went before the world, told on himself, wrung a laugh in the process, and left nothing more to be made of the sordid affair. Each of these hung a lantern on their weakness before their opponents could paint a target on their weaknesses.

Not so Congressman Anthony Weiner. Not so Senator John Edwards. Not so President Bill Clinton. Not so Senator Larry Craig. Not so Cyclist Lance Armstrong. Not so Bishop Eddie Long.

This principle was true even before our high-tech age, when cameras and recorders expose even the dark corners of human life. It is all the more true for the prominent today. Yet beyond the threat of being found out, it is simply the right thing to do. Confession is not only good for the soul; it is the only way to cleanse offense even from the public mind.

It was Harry Truman who once said, “Always do right. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” This is, truly, the great principle of politics—and of life.

The message was obvious. Do not kill. Do not hurt. Do not offend. This is the will of God and what good children do.

Of course, the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” has nothing to do with killing birds, though randomly killing wildlife is discouraged in the Bible. The original language actually means, “Do not murder,” meaning do not end life unjustly. Killing of the righteous kind—punishment for criminals, ending a military enemy—is not only allowed but commanded at times in the biblical narrative. The children’s book, though well intentioned, got it wrong

This memory came back to me when we learned that our valiant military had killed Osama bin Laden. Immediately after hearing the news, I began also to hear that some Christians were critical of the raid that helped Mr. Laden leave this life. They cited the “Do not kill” commandment and a few biblical verses that seem to indicate we ought not rejoice in the death of evildoers.

I was surprised by this and began to see such sentimentality and unbiblical thinking as part of the reason that the American church is working itself into irrelevance. First, this view neglected to consider Romans 13, in which civil government is said to wield the sword—a symbol of martial defense and criminal punishment—“not in vain.” Killing terrorist enemies is clearly included. Second, this view failed to consider the counsel of the church. As long ago as the fourth and fifth centuries in which Augustine lived, the church concluded that there are just wars but that they must be waged only by the right authorities, for just causes, if a reasonable chance for success exists and with an eye toward proportionality of response. The assault that led to Osama bin Laden’s death met all of these conditions.

What disturbed me most about those Christians who could not recognize the justice of bin Laden’s killing was that I suspected that they were living in the kind of sentimental religiosity depicted in my childhood book. Theirs was likely the gospel that has come to dominate American Christianity. Be nice. Be sweet. Do not hurt. Do not offend. For this is the will of God and what good Christians do.

Yet by proclaiming this gospel, Christians show the world they do not have the courage of their convictions, will not “man-up” to their own biblical principles, and do not know how to deal with evildoers in their midst or in the world. As a Navy SEAL friend said to me, “I’m willing to risk my life to take out the evil bastards in this world. But I don’t expect my church to criticize me while I do.”

This brings me to another related matter. You see, if we will not support those who do dangerous, righteous deeds, then we will rarely step up to the battle lines of our faith in any arena. The recent widespread airing of Rob Bell’s universalism is a prime example. Consider: Most of what we know about eternal punishment comes from the words of Jesus as we find them in the four gospels of the New Testament. This is not an innovation of Paul’s or an uninspired addition to Christian theology by a later age of the church. In 553 A.D, the Fifth Ecumenical Council labeled “ultimate reconciliation,”—the big boy term for universalism—a heresy. Moreover, today nearly every major conservative Roman Catholic, Anglican, evangelical, Reformed and Charismatic/Pentecostal scholar has classified Bell’s teaching as heresy. And yet local churches support Bell without the loss of a member. Pastors assure their congregations that Bell is in the pale of Christian teaching and few are well read enough to know it is a lie. There are few protests, few theological councils, few prayerful teams of pastors confronting erring shepherds in their city and urging them back to orthodoxy. No, barely a whimper is heard while the gospel is denuded.

The lesson is that the spirit of passivity, of cowardice, of “nice as the ultimate virtue” does not settle happily into one arena of our worldview. It tries to take us over, and it makes us as repulsed by the righteous killing of an international villain as it makes us unwilling to face down the enemies of our faith from within the Christian fold.

Be lovingly biblical. Be courageously principled. Be as tough and yet as merciful as the battles of this age require. And may a new day dawn in our troubled, hesitant American Christianity.

History

Of Plimoth Plantation, William Bradford
To read the words of the pilgrims took the “Mayflower Story” out of the realm of myth and made it pulsate with grit and brine and fiery faith. It also made me insist upon reading original documents in my pursuit of truth.

History of the American People, Paul Johnson
Eminent British historian Paul Johnson taught me about my own nation’s history in a manner that few American historians have. A wonderful, inspiring, instructive offering.

History of American Education, 3 Vols, Lawrence Cremin
What Americans accomplished educationally during their colonial period is one of the great tales of history. What we have done to ourselves educationally since is one of the great tales of cultural suicide. Cremin captures both in an objective, stimulating study of the entire course of American educational history.

The Messianic Character of American Education, Rousas John Rushdoony
A Christian critique of American public education that has shaped my thinking each day since I first read it in college.

The Light and the Glory, Peter Marshall/David Manuel
Released during the American bicentennial, this book first helped me understand the American covenant.

Griftopia, Matt Taibbi
Taibbi is angry, gritty and crude, but he described the immoral mess that pervades much of Wall Street in a manner that may help us to rescue ourselves—if we are willing.

Grand Illusions, George Grant
This brilliant expose of Planned Parenthood taught me of the good Christian investigative writing can do.

Two Misfits

The Geography of Nowhere, James Kunstler
I study architecture and so I am thrilled at some of the new trends in human scale, mixed use development. To understand how important they are, we first have to understand what the architectural trends of the last century did to us. Kunstler is our guide.

Military Brats, Mary Edwards Wertsch
I grew up a military brat, largely in Europe, and am grateful for the experience. How I was shaped by it was explained to me in this book, which is hard-edged and not descriptive of everything I experienced, but which is still a helpful guide to building on the best of the brat tradition.

Novels

1. Peace Like a River, Leif Enger
This novel is a miracle. Supernatural, gritty and tender. It was touted by both Newsweek magazine and the Christian book press. It taught me what is possible.

2. The Great Santini, Pat Conroy
My father was not the Great Santini during his military career, but this novel explored the life of a military child better than I have a right to expect of fiction. It helped me heal.

3. The Flames of Rome, Paul Maier
A powerful novel about Nero and the burning of Rome. I learned from this novel how fiction can serve the cause of biblical literacy.

4. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
I came to this novel late in life and when I did I found the theological underpinnings of the famous story a touching exploration of the human condition. It made me sorry that Frankenstein is now regarded as the stuff of monster movies rather than an epic chronicle of the pursuit of God.

5. 1812, David Nevin
This novel taught me how an age can be captured through interwoven narrative. I learned history. I learned writing. I learned to love America even more.

Biography/Autobiography

1. Lincoln’s Melancholy, Joshua Wolf Schenk
The thesis of this masterpiece is that had Abraham Lincoln not struggled to overcome depression, he would not have offered us the leadership or the poetry that he did. It confirms the reality that we are made better in our purpose by mastering our flaws.

2. The Oral Autobiography of Harry Truman, Merle Miller
I read this in college and it turned me toward history as a major. I was instructed by Miller’s style but I was challenged by Truman’s mastery of history. A very important book in my life.

3. Winston Churchill, A. J. P. Taylor
I was already inspired by Churchill when I read Taylor’s work. A fine study in British wit and historical mastery. I decided to make Churchill a theme of my life upon reading this book.

4. George Whitefield’s Journals, George Whitefield
Whitefield is truly the forgotten founding father of our colonial era. He led the American colonies in spiritual revival and thus into the war for independence. He is my model Christian.

5. Right from the Beginning, Patrick Buchanan
I have never fully agreed with Pat politically, but his memoir of tough-minded Catholicism, clear-minded conservatism and tenderhearted patriotism challenged me.

6. What I Saw at the Revolution, Peggy Noonan
This book served as a course in creative writing in my development as an author. Peggy gave me courage to explore the emotional landscape of a subject and to not fear the poetry of my subject. What made her a groundbreaking speechwriter for Reagan also made her one of the most important mentors of my life.

Following the response to my blog on reading of a few weeks ago, I decided to share here the thirty books that have changed my life. I have read many more books, of course, and hundreds of them have been significant. However, the books below were each a turning point—a literal revolution—in my thinking and therefore in my character and conduct. They were so influential, in fact, that I was able to compile this list from memory.

I cannot promise that what happened to me in these pages will happen to you. I can promise that these books will at the least enrich your life. Literary revolutions, though, are in the hands of God. I’ll list the devotional and theological books that changed me first. Then, in an upcoming blog, I’ll list novels, histories, biographies and a few nonconformists. Enjoy.

Devotional Turning Points

• The Pursuit of God, A. W. Tozer
  Given to me by my college chaplain, Dr. Bob Stamps, this book shaped my spiritual life for years after.

• The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a’ Kempis
  This classic taught me that the Christian life is to know and be like Jesus.

• Ordering Your Private World, Gordon MacDonald
  I learned the difference between being called and being driven from this book and it has been a defining ideal for me ever since.

• Wild at Heart, John Eldredge
  This book explained my frustration with the lack of manhood in the Christian church and offered a path to masculine maturity.

• The Celtic Way of Evangelism, George Hunter III
  I learned from this jewel how our Celtic Christian ancestors changed nations through a type of evangelism that is vital for us today. It was a devotional turning point for me because it instilled in me disciplines for living in a pre-Christian culture.

Theological Turning Points

• The Land, Walter Brueggemann
  Learning the difference between “place” and “space” from this book was one of the defining moments of my theological and historical development.

• Paradise Restored, David Chilton
  It is no exaggeration that I learned how to “see” the Bible from this book.

• Biblical Hermeneutics, Milton S. Terry
  Hermeneutics is the study of how to interpret scripture. Good hermeneutics leads to good doctrine and thus to vibrant spirituality. This book taught me the path to both.

• Before Jerusalem Fell, Kenneth Gentry
  There is no exaggerating the importance of the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. to understanding the New Testament. This book drove this point home and transformed my worldview.

• The Day Christ Died, Jim Bishop
  Bishop was a journalist who wrote about the physiology of Jesus’ experience on the cross in a way that shaped both my faith and my writing.

It is natural that I might say this, I suppose. I am a voracious reader. It is not hard for me to draw a line between the love of reading I acquired during my college years and the life I lead now. Reading awakens and then it refines. It instructs, yes, but it also conditions. It trains the mind, embedding both fact and wisdom, while it tempers the judgment. It also matures the emotions and deepens the soul. It does all this while providing a map for understanding the times. And this is as necessary today as ever.

I’ve learned the tricks of a reading life from my many literary mentors. I always carry a book with me. Who knows? Someone might be late for a lunch appointment and grace me with fifteen minutes of bliss. Estimates are the average American will spend three years of his life on the toilet. Books must be kept at hand for just such moments. And then there are the little lies of the addicted reader. “I’m going for a walk,” is actually cover for an hour spent under a tree with a book. “I’m going to take a bath” is code for  “Must find solace. Must ingest words. Do not disturb.” Pitifully, I can already tell you what books I’ll be requesting for my birthday. It’s a disease, really.

In recent years my reading has dramatically increased and this has been largely due to technology. I can get almost misty-eyed at what my cell phone allows me to do. I read volumes on my iPhone. Yes, iPhone, not iPad. I reverse the video, enlarge the font and get about a half a paragraph in before I need to swipe my thumb across the screen. It is just right for the hyperactive. I use apps like Kindle and Kobo to purchase books and can’t believe the generosity of apps like History Classics and Free Books, the latter of which grants me nearly 25,000 free books of just the kind I tend to read. At any given moment, I have two dozen books on my phone that I can read without signal and thousands I can retrieve if I’m online.

Since much of the information I have to process comes to me in links to blogs, online periodicals and journals, I use Instapaper. How I love Instapaper, let me count the ways. This app/website let’s me open articles online but then store them so I can view them later using the app on my phone. All I do is click on “Read Later”—a tab in my browser Instapaper installs automatically—and those articles, without all the ugly graphics and page changes, are saved. I can read the articles later using the Instapaper app even when I don’t have signal, like when I’m on a plane. If a friend sends an important article to me by email, I can forward his email to an Instapaper email address and that article will be stored for later reading too. Instapaper has doubled the amount of information I can digest and made me much more effective at what I do. By the way, the articles I’ve read are stored in an Archive so when I’m writing months later and vaguely remember something I’ve read on a given topic, I can do a word search through all the articles I consumed, say, last year. I barely read any paper periodicals anymore. It just isn’t as efficient or as pleasant.

Beyond the techniques of reading, here are the principles that guide my reading:

• I try to read 24 books a years. This is one every two weeks and is aside from what I have to read for my work.
• I divide those books into fours. I read a book on theology, on a contemporary topic, on history and then a work of fiction. Occasionally I’ll work in some poetry but I don’t count that among the twenty-four.  This means I should be able to read six books a year on each of the four topics I love to read and must read.
• Reading and list making go hand in hand. I make lists of books I plan to read and edit them as friends give me literary reviews over pizza or I come across more formal input in print. In other words, I have a plan but I’m always willing to interrupt that plan when a book grabs me from its perch on the shelf or a friend threatens death if I don’t read his latest literary love immediately.

Here’s the bottom line. You have to read to know our chaotic world. You have to read to lead. You have to read to stay sane and peaceful in an emotionally violent time. You have to read to know God. And you have to read, as C. S. Lewis said, to know you are not alone.

Get reading. Use your technology to make it easier and more readily available. Carve out the space and build a rich inner life. Set goals, share the joys, reap the harvest of a cultivated intellect and a sophisticated soul.

Blessed are the readers, for they shall inherit the earth.

Allow me a critical observation first. Presidents tend to rely on their speechwriters when the time comes for a memoir and this is a mistake. It is natural that they should turn to those who have for years extended their voice but the art of a speechwriter is different from that of a biographer. A speech is a sprint or at the least a fast run. A biography is a marathon and a marathon that is only well done if it winds knowingly through richly historical landscape. Few speechwriters can both create a concise, engaging, inspiring speech for a live audience and then shift gears to write a thousand page biography that captures a man, his times, and the meaning of his leadership intended as much for generations yet unborn as it is for the present.

President Bush relied on one of his chief speechwriters in telling his story and this has led to his book’s primary flaw. Its scope and sequence is poorly crafted, its pacing uneven. The tale is not told in chronological order but rather in thematic groupings and so there are chapters that include recollections from Bush’s youth, Texas governorship and presidency as though these bits of memory naturally reside together. It makes the book a less understandable read and a less helpful tool of reference.

That said, I found Decision Points to be one of the most honest, courageous presidential memoirs I’ve read. Bush mentions his alcoholic early years on the first page. Before he concludes his introduction he has already admitted several mistakes of judgment while in office. He does not shrink from responsibility thereafter. He often agrees with his critics—the famous “Mission Accomplished” speech and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example—and repeatedly mentions his own shortcomings without flinching. This endears Bush to us and makes us wish there had been more of this tone and less Texas swagger while he was in office.

There are surprises. One is the cussing. There is much strong language and not just in remembered speech. I believe Bush is the first president to actually cuss in his narrative, in the telling of his story to the reader. It isn’t that uncommon to see an “S.O.B” or an “ass” or two in a presidential memoir but usually only as part of a humorous account. Bush takes this further and cusses in his narrative voice. This may be because it makes him seem earthy and thus removed from the kind of St. George the Evangelical image his critics decry. Still, it is odd and makes even those of us comfortable with strong language wonder why editors did not save him from himself or why Bush wanted such tough expressions included in the first place.

Bush’s conservative religious followers will also find some surprises. He considered pro-abortion vice-presidential and cabinet choices. He believes homosexuality is genetic and not a moral choice. He believes that Muslims, Christians and Jews worship the same God, a controversial view among his fellow evangelicals. None of these ideas were much in public view during his administration.

The most satisfying chapter, perhaps, is the one in which Bush recounts his battle against federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. This is the Bush loyalists hope will live in memory: Bush a moral man, Bush a wise statesman, Bush a crafty politician, Bush gracious in victory. It is the Bush of reality but his administration’s public relations apparatus did not serve this version of Bush well and so it is good to see him on full display here.

What is obvious from Decision Points is that President Bush wants to be remembered as a man who, when confronted with dire crises, led as a principled, dynamic decision maker. There is much “let’s do it,” “let’s get on with it,” “what is the hold up” kind of language and it supports the narrative theme of Bush as a “decider,” Bush as a righteous man choosing nobly.

At book’s end, I found myself grateful for the essentially good man George W. Bush is and yet understanding even more keenly how an inherent inability to communicate hampered his administration. Both are in evidence in the pages of Decision Points. I also found myself hoping that future presidential memoirs might rise to great literature, might be works of the kind that can be added with confidence to the essential American canon. I can’t think of any presidential remembrance that has achieved this—U.S. Grant’s Memoirs possibly excluded—though it seems that both the country and the office deserve it.

Decision Points is a worthy if often simplistic read that will further endear those who love George Bush and that will confirm some of the suspicions of those who distrust him. Beyond partisanship, though, it is a valuable, gutsy, and thorough treatment of a critical period in our history.

Our founding fathers would have disagreed. They feared democracy as the tyranny of majority rule, the domination of 50% plus 1 over the minority. Instead, they hoped for a republic in which those gifted to lead are entrusted by the people to decide affairs of state in a manner that the people themselves never could. In short, our founders were deeply suspicious of democracy. John Adams wrote, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Thomas Jefferson would have agreed: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.” And John Marshall captured the consensus of the founding generation when he wrote, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”

It is an important point to make as we consider Egypt. We are all touched by a people yearning for greater freedom and willing to risk their lives and sacred honor to reshape their nation. It is particularly moving to see this occur in Egypt where the median age is 24 years old and young men hungering for economic opportunity and protection from tyranny and corruption lead the uprising. All of us surely hope that a new and nobler nation is being born.

Still, our government’s rush to support the Egyptian uprising despite warning from our allies in the region may, ironically, serve the cause of both freedom and American interests poorly in the days to come. Hosni Mubarak, for all of his flaws, was pro-American, willing to be governed by a peace treaty in his dealings with Israel and a restraining force against radical Islam. His government was also corrupt and inept and needed to go, but this might have been handled by Washington with less adolescent zeal for change of any kind and more statesmanlike prudence in managing the needed transition. What has resulted is confirmation of the principle that rapid social change is destabilizing social change. Already the Egyptian military, in which the Western nations have placed their trust for the future of the country, has suspended the constitution and dissolved parliament

Waiting in the wings, of course, is the Muslim Brotherhood. Though the U.S. director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, told the House Intelligence Committee recently that the Muslim Brotherhood is both “secular” and “nonviolent,” the Brotherhood itself shouts the cause of a thoroughly Islamic Egypt. Its slogan is simple: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” The Brotherhood’s second in command, Rashad al-Bayumu, recently told Japanese television that if the movement comes to power it will suspend Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. The Brotherhood’s first in command recently told the leading Egyptian newspaper that it would make an Islamic and not a Western style democracy its goal.

This would mean a government exactly the reverse of Mubarak’s pro-American, moderate on Israel, firm against radical Islam reign. It would also be horrible news for Egypt’s Christians. Already they have watched as Christians in supposedly democratic Iraq have been persecuted, murdered and driven abroad. Before the invasion, 1.4 million Christians lived in Iraq. Now, half have fled, the rest are endangered. Late last year, gunmen took 100 Christians hostage at Our Lady of Perpetual Help church in Baghdad and slaughtered more than 40 of them. One convent in the north has been attacked 20 times since the start of the war, and as recently as last spring; according to USA Today, it was down to four nuns last year out of an original 55. Last year was undoubtedly the deadliest year ever for Iraq’s Christians. And so it goes in the democracy U.S. warriors bled to build.

Then consider this: According to a Pew Forum survey last year, 84 percent of Egypt’s Muslims support executing apostates. This means Christians, among others. It is the democratic will in Egypt. Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God.

It does not take a perpetual pessimist or a rightwing lover of dictatorships the world over to conclude that soon we may be facing an Egypt that is anti-American, anti-Christian, immersed in radical Islam and a dire threat to Israel. May it not be so, but we might well have expected better of our nation’s foreign policy architects: that they rise above the populist zeal of the moment and consider the long range good. This is what it means to be statesmen rather zealots, realists rather than misty-eyed populists. It is also what it means to live in the wisdom we have received from our founders’ generation.

I love the man who stands calmly with both feet on the ground and knows he has a role to play. He has been put here for a purpose and being a man is part of it. He is more than his body and he understands this but he isn’t afraid to be his body, to know that manhood is, in part, muscle and speed and elegance and, yes, even unspoken intimidation when a threat means he must. I like that true men know the borders of their physical range and offer all that they are as masculine beings to make women safe, children confident, communities whole and their nation something exceptional on the earth.

I like the way of men with other men. Nothing wins me like a band of brothers gently needling each other for a laugh or nipping at one of their number to correct with wit and sarcasm what everyone knows needs addressing and might have been handled another, much harsher way. This is the way of the pack, the natural self-correcting mechanism of men in their element with other men. It is the way young men are trained and old men are honored and all men made to know where they belong.

I like the industry of men. Men with their tools. Men making a plan. Men using their verbal shorthand to direct and set the pace. I like that men grow quiet when they work, lost in their thoughts and the task at hand. I like that sweat and cuts and soreness are nothing foreign to a real man. They are passport to the country in which he lives. And nothing compares to the quiet pride of men after the task is done, when the car runs or the girders hold or the camp is what they wanted it to be.

I love that genuine manhood takes responsibility for making sure the world around them is safe. I love the knowing glance that sometimes passes between men, as though to say, “Yes, I’m on it. If anything happens here, I’m ready.”  There is a kind of force that competent men emit and it invisibly changes their wives and their children and everyone in their reach whether anyone speaks of it or not.

I suppose most of all I love the way a young man looks to his father. He is eager to be an authentic man himself and he knows that this begins in his father’s face, in what he learns as his father speaks or reacts to events or reflects truth in a thousand expressions, in a thousand nearly imperceptible movements—imperceptible except to an adoring son. In that aging face is where he finds the carved image of what he is meant to be.

Then, of course, I love the way of men with God. They are more about doing than feeling, more about vision than postures of prayer. Still, true men of God have a quiet, unchallengeable connection to heaven that makes them what they are at their best, checks their lesser natures, and gives them what they in turn offer as a blessing to the world. This connection to God is what makes a guy who is just a man into something more; a great and righteous father in the land.

I love the ways of men. Yet I’ve been told the manhood I admire lives only in the past, that ours is a generation of weaklings and wimps. I pray it is not so. Manhood at its best is one of the great needs of our times. Resolve then, my brothers, to be all that it means to be a righteous man.

To contact The Mansfield Group about booking Stephen for a speech, write us at BookingStephen@MansfieldGroup.com or Info@MansfieldGroup.com.

I should start by telling you that I have long been part of two movements that unfortunately have two distinct approaches to the homeless in our land. First, I am a political conservative who believes in limited government, the rule of law, private property, low taxes, strong defense and freedom for each man to rise to whatever heights his gifts allow. This places me among a tribe who tend to view homelessness as a liberal invention designed to squeeze funding from government budgets.  The frequent response of my fellow conservatives to a homeless man on the street is to growl, “Get a job!”

I am also a Christian, though, and I have been privileged to lead activist churches that have engaged the homeless with compassion and generosity. We understand that our Christ so identifies with the homeless that to serve them is to worship him. So we have started halfway houses. We have driven buses into impoverished neighborhoods to offer food, clothing and medical care. We have taken the homeless into our own homes. More important, perhaps, we have embraced the biblical understanding that not all poverty and dysfunction is the fruit of sin and irresponsibility.

Obviously, my politically conservative and compassionately Christian worlds frequently collide.

So back to that meeting on that rainy afternoon in Nashville. The reason so many homeless had gathered that day was a publication called The Contributor, the “homeless newspaper” of Nashville. I had seen people selling the paper on the streets and I had even bought one or two, but I had no idea of the impact it was having on homelessness in Nashville. I also had no idea of how The Contributor was bridging my two worlds.

It turns out that The Contributor was begun a few years ago to serve the cause of the homeless. When I first heard this, I assumed the paper would be filled with articles advocating for the homeless. You know the stuff: complaints about the police, gripes about angry storeowners, tirades about the heartlessness of people today. I was pleasantly surprised. There were marvelous articles and many by people described as “formerly homeless.” There was poetry. There were funny essays. There were tender testimonials and even movie reviews. I was touched.

Then I learned about the economic impact of the paper. You see, the homeless can buy The Contributor from the publisher for twenty-five cents. They have to attend training sessions, observe certain standards and participate in follow-up meetings, but once they qualify they can sell The Contributor for a dollar. Many receive tips as well. The meeting I attended on that afternoon after Christmas was a training session before new editions of the paper were sold to “vendors,” the people we call homeless. But they aren’t just homeless anymore when they have The Contributor in their hands. They are vendors, entrepreneurs—yes, contributors.

Let me tell you what this means. A year ago, ten thousand copies of The Contributor were sold in Nashville. This last month, 120,000 copies were sold. This means that through sales and tips, over a million dollars have been put into the hands of the homeless in the last year. And it is changing lives. One of the most moving moments I’ve had is when the executive director of The Contributor, Tasha French, showed me photos that one formerly homeless man had sent her. You see, he had begun selling The Contributor and had made enough money to live. Then he got a home. Then he got a wife. The photos he sent Tasha were of his dinner table on Thanksgiving Day. It was lovely and filled with food and he was planning to invite some of his homeless friends in for a feast.

Conservatives want the homeless to get a job. In Nashville, they have. Christians want to help the homeless out of poverty and into lives of character and prosperity. In Nashville, The Contributor is making this possible. It is what we have hoped for. Something that works. Something that involves free market principles. Something that demands character. Something that is changing lives.

I want you to help. I plan to write for this paper if they’ll have me and my firms are going to purchase advertising and provide literary services, which is part of what we do. I want you to first log onto www.thecontributor.org and read up. Then, I want you do to what you do best. For some, this means giving money. You’ll see how on the site. If you run into problems, contact me through this site and we’ll help. For you business owners, I want you to purchase advertising. Surely you can benefit from 120,000 Nashvillians seeing your ad. Some of you will want to volunteer. Some of you more famous folks might want to agree to interviews that will appear in the paper or perhaps even offer articles of your own that will raise The Contributor’s profile. Feel free to contact me about this. By the way, The Contributor is already the most successful homeless paper in America. What would happen if we helped it become a model for thousands like it around the country?

Do what you can. This is important. Thanks for taking the time.

1.     Most Important Practical Change: Technology – I’m not much of a techie but I have found my life so enhanced by technology this year that I have to mention it. I switched from PC to Mac at mid-year. I also switched from the Blackberry to the iPhone. I knew it would be something of an upgrade but I had no idea how much. I am probably 40% more effective now.  Functions like Dashboard and Top Sites are a writer’s dream. And an app called Tripit has transformed how I organize the information I need for travel while reducing by 90% the time I have to put into the process.  I should also mention that my self-education efforts have been dramatically enhanced. When I get on a plane now, I have podcasts, articles, books, movies, and entire college courses—all on my cell phone.  I know I sound like a commercial, but if it works, I’m willing to be an advocate for it.

2.     Most Important Quote: “Some people, you have to love from a distance.” – Joel Osteen

3.     Most Fruitful Discipline:  Striving to be absolutely in the moment, invested fully in what I am doing at the time.

4.     Most Important Book: It will sound disingenuous, but reading the material for my upcoming book on Oprah Winfrey has profoundly changed me. Second to this, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr is the most significant.

5.     Most Important Publication: Vanity Fair, no question. Best reporting on finance and Wall Street available. Liberal, but learned.

6.     Most Central Theme to My Spiritual Life: Meditating on the cross of Jesus and praying cross-oriented themes. Also, reading over and again the story and meaning of the cross in Scripture.

7.     Biggest Disappointment: The conviction of my friend Tom DeLay for money laundering. Absolutely a product of the politics of personal destruction, a trend that is ruining our country. If Tom is guilty, hundreds in Washington are as well. Truly troubling.

8.     Favorite Trip: Bev and I went to Italy for two weeks this year. Rome and Umbria. Magical.

9.     Favorite Meal: Alone: Crab Cakes at Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington. With Bev, the dinner she cooked with a friend at our villa in Umbria.

10. Most Touching Moment: The season of recovery from the Nashville Flood. So much generosity. So much heroism. So very proud of my city.

11. Biggest Surprise: Winning a literary award this year.

12. Most Defining Theme: The end of old business. Clearing the decks for the new. Being in position to catch the tide for the next phase of my life.

Honor Winston. Make them your own.

1. Leadership is the power to shape the future.
2. Bitterness erodes strong leadership: it anchors a leader to the past, distracting him from the promise of the future.
3. Biology need not be destiny.
4. A leader is often his own best teacher.
5. Overwhelming moral and physical courage is at the foundation of all great leadership.
6. Exceptional courage is born of a profound sense of destiny.
7. To offer a people hope is to acquire a position of leadership in their lives
8. Religious faith elevates leaders by freeing them from the cult of the contemporary.
9. The quality of a leader is often reflected in the quality of his marriage.
10. Leadership is not a popularity contest; criticism is part of the job.
11. Leaders are forged as much by time in the wilderness as by times of popularity.
12. True leadership requires hard work—there is no substitute.
13. The courage to look hard realities in the face is essential to effective leadership.
14. A leader must see himself as the guardian of a heritage for future generations
15. A man cannot lead his generation if he cannot lead his children.
16. Great leadership is held aloft by the winds of compassion.
17. When a leader needs a break, a change is often as good as a rest.
18. Men who believe in eternal life seldom fear death in this life.
19. A sense of humor reflects a healthy grasp of the difference between what is and what ought to be
20. A leader will only command the level of loyalty he is willing to give to others.
21. Great leaders apply the past to the present so as to shape the future.
22. Words are the arsenal of leadership.
23. Leaders can never afford to lose the beauty of life in the corrosive tedium of work.
24. A firm grasp on eternal realities enables a leader to stand apart from his age and show it the way.
25. The leader’s task is to recognize the currents of change and harness their power for good.

While in Holland, Pastor John Robinson powerfully preached a Christian vision for the New World: “Now as the people of god in old time were called out of Babylon civil, the place of their bodily bondage, and were to come to Jerusalem, and there to build the Lord’s temple, or tabernacle…so are the people of God now to go out of Babylon spiritual to Jerusalem…and to build themselves as lively stones into a spiritual house, or temple, for the Lord to dwell in.”

After 12 years of living in Holland, the Pilgrims began to nurture a desire to take the Gospel to the nations.  Bradford writes of their passion for coming to the new world: “…a great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.”

They were carefully counting the cost:  “…all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be enterprise and overcome with answerable courages.  It was granted that the dangers were great, but not desperate, and the difficulties were many, but not invincible…and all of them, through the help of God, fortitude and patience, might either be borne or overcome…[But] their condition was not ordinary.  Their ends were good and honorable, their calling lawful and urgent, and therefore they might expect the blessing of God in their proceeding; yea, though they should lose their lives in this action, yet they might have comfort in the same, and their endeavors would be honorable.”

They were willing to face hardship: “Yea, and as the enterprise is weighty and difficult, so the honor is more worthy, to plant a rude wilderness, to enlarge the honor and fame of our dread sovereign, but chiefly to display the efficacy and power of the Gospel, both in zealous preaching, professing, and wise walking under it, before the faces of these poor blind infidels.”

One important part of their vision was for the conversion of Indians: “And first, seeing we daily pray for the conversion of the heathens…it seemeth unto me that we ought also to endeavor and use the means to convert them; and the means cannot be used unless we go to them, or they come to us.  To us they cannot come, our land is full; to them we may go…that they may be persuaded at length to embrace the Prince of Peace, Christ Jesus, and rest in peace with him forever.”

After making arrangements for the voyage, their pastor, John Robinson, called a “day of sollemme humiliation.”  Robinson preached from Ezra 8:21: “And there at the river, by Ahavba, I proclaimed a fast, that we might humble ourselves before our God and seek of him a right way for us, and for our children and for all our substance.”  Robinson later wrote, “The rest of the time was spent in powering out prayers to the Lord with great fervencies, mixed with abundance of tears.”

The majority left Holland to board their ships in England.  Their godly Pastor, John Robinson, stayed behind to care for the elderly and infirm.  He sent a letter with one of the leaders which was to be read as they boarded their ships.  The words would repeatedly provide comfort and encouragement to them as their adventure unfolded.

. . .We are daily to renew our repentance with our God, especially for our sins known, and generally for our unknown trespasses. . .[For] sin being taken away by earnest repentance ad the pardon thereof from the Lord. . .great shall be [a man's] security and peace in all dangers, sweet his comforts in all distresses. . .

As they prepared to leave in 1620 “they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.”

The voyage on the Mayflower lasted 66 days. The Mayflower was no longer than a volleyball court and the storms they sailed through sometimes laid the ship on its side, sometimes threw it high in the air only to slam it upon the water again.  During that time of year the North Atlantic waters are so cold that the U.S. Navy estimates a man will live only three minutes if he falls overboard.

For weeks at a time, the Pilgrims were forced to remain in the “tween decks.”  One sailor repeatedly called them “psalmsinging pukestockings.” They suffered all the effects of being tossed on the ocean for over two months — men, children, pregnant women, the elderly — but they always harbored in their hearts an earnest desire to be a “stepping stone of the light of Christ in a new land.”

When they arrived, landing in a howling wilderness, Bradford wrote these moving words:  “Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repair too, to seeke for succoure. And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that cuntrie know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search and unknown coast.  Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. What could now sustain them but the spirite of God and his grace?  May not and ought not the children of these fathers, rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.’”

Because they had been blown off course by the storms and had not landed upon the land of their charter, the Pilgrims wrote a new charter, called the Mayflower Compact.  It is the first binding covenant or constitution in American history.  It states clearly why they sailed to the new world.

“In the name of God, Amen.  We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, defender of the faith, &c, having undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.”

But this unity was quickly challenged. Bradford wrote:

In these hard and difficult beginnings they found some discontents and murmurings arise among some, and mutinous speeches and carriages in other, but they were soon quelled and overcome by the wisdom, patience, and just and equally carriage of things by the Governor and better part, which clave faithfully together in the main.  But that which was most sad and lamentable was, that in 2 or 3 months time halfe of their company dyed, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts, being infected with the scurvie and other diseases, and which this long voyage and their inaccomadate condition had brought upon them; so as there dyed some time 2 or 3 a day in the foresaid time; that of 100 persons, scarce 50 reminded.

And of these in the time of most distress, there were but 6 or 7 sound persons who, to their great commendations be it spoken, spared no pains, night or day, but with abundance of toyle and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, loathed and unclothed them, in a word did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named; and all this willingly and cheerfully without any grudging in the least, showing herein their true love unto their friends and brethren.

Still, God’s grace was sufficient. God caused an English-speaking Indian by the name of Squanto to help the Pilgrims learn how to farm the land and harvest the bay.  Squanto lived with the Pilgrims until 1622 when he died.  His last request was that Gov. William Bradford would pray that he might go to the Englishman’s god in heaven. Bradford wrote: “Squanto continued with them and was their interpreter, and was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectation.  He directed them how to set their corn, where to take fish and to procure other commodities and was also their pilot to bring them to unknown places for their profit, and never left them till he dyed.”

Their next harvest proved the wisdom of Squanto.  They had abundance of food for the first time.  Governor Bradford called for a Day of Thanksgiving.

Our harvest being gotten, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might, after a special manner, rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.  They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.  At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation, and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others.  And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God we are so far from want that we are partakers of plenty.

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QUOTES FROM SPEECHES ABOUT THE PILGRIMS AND THANKSGIVING THROUGHOUT HISTORY:

“Let us, in the midst of these reflections, have our hearts enlarged in thanksgiving to God, for his merciful favor to our fathers, and to us by their instrumentality.  Let us piously acknowledge the hand of God, in all that has been done for them and us, and to the whole, cry, grace, grace.  With what strange gloom are our hearts filled, when we make the supposition, that all our fathers had been left to perish in their attempt! Proportionable to the dreadfulness of such a supposition, let our gratitude be, to our father’s God and our’s.  And, out of gratitude to God, let us improve the blessings of life with sobriety, and maintain our liberties with an honorable Christian firmness.”

Charles Turner, 1773

“…let us not forget the religious character of our origin.  Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope.  They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.  Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in full conviction, that that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity.”

Daniel Webster, 1851

“Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation; let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.”

William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation

The storms of the north Atlantic were so fierce and the ship so tossed that the main mast frequently dipped into the waves. It was a disorienting, gut-wrenching experience for even the experienced sailors among them. The small band of believers on board — men, women, expectant mothers and small children among them — were kept in the “tween deck” for fear of the buffeting storms. What a filthy, smelly time of testing that was! The sea water itself was so cold that a man washed overboard would die within three minutes. Bone chilling “gushes” sometimes washed into the ship fish large enough to be eaten. As if all this wasn’t enough, the main beam had cracked and the decision had been made to force it back into place with a printing press that had been brought along for printing Bibles in the New World. What a fear-inspiring sight that was!

But the elements were not the only opposition these Christians, who would soon be called “Pilgrims,” endured. There was one sailor who persisted in calling them “psalm-singing pukestockings,” which are exactly the two things they spent most of their time doing. Though the Pilgrims forgave and prayed for the man’s soul, he was, mysteriously, the only person to die during the voyage.

For 66 days the little ship, no larger in size than a modern volleyball court, made the treacherous voyage from England to the coast of Massachusetts. And when they arrived, what must their thoughts have been as they scanned the howling wilderness which was to be their home? William Bradford, their Governor, later remembered:

“Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys,  no house or much less townes to repair too, to seeke for succoure.”

“What could sustain them but the spirite of God and his grace. May not and ought not the children of these fathers, rightly say: ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness.’”

And perish they almost did. More than half of them died during that first winter, often called “the starving time.” At one point, each person’s rations for a day were not more than five kernels of corn. Indian friends like Squanto and Samoset taught the white men how to harvest the bay and the land, but the yield would not be sufficient until the next year. So, they buried their dead and prayed for God’s mercy.

In Spring they planted and began to sense that God had heard their prayers. The previous winter had been the worst of times, but the harvest looked bountiful now, the settlement was growing and God seemed to be smiling upon them.

So when the harvest was gathered, Governor Bradford called for some of the men to go hunting in preparation for a great feast to celebrate the goodness of God. Wild fowl, fish from the sea, and deer were prepared in abundance. The newly invited Indians brought five additional deer. Women prepared hoecakes, cornmeal pudding and a variety of vegetables, while the Indian women introduced delicacies like blueberry, apple, and cherry pie. The most welcome new food which the Indians brought with them, though, was a new way of cooking corn in an earthen pot until it became white and fluffy — popcorn!

It was indeed a thanksgiving. But not just for safety and abundance of food. It was also a time to remember the words they had penned about their purpose for coming when they were yet on The Mayflower. The came, they said, “for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith,” “for propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping-stones unto others for the performing of so great a work.”

So they were. And we ought to remember them this Thanksgiving, and take their mission to our hearts.

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“Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation;  let the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise.”

William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation

The best way to stay up with Stephen other than these updates is on Twitter. You can follow him at @MansfieldWrites.

In the Obama interview that aired on Sunday evening, Americans saw a president tempered by conservative victories in the recent election and willing to admit failure. Asked by 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft if he had “lost his mojo,” Obama answered, “I think it’s—I think it’s a fair argument, you know, I—I think that over the course of two years, we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that, you know, leadership isn’t just legislation, that it’s a matter of persuading people.” This was vintage Obama—examining the subject from every angle, pondering alternate views, seeing the issue as an abstract problem.

Then, Bush, on Monday night, interviewed by Matt Lauer. Asked if he thought water boarding was wrong, he said, simply, “No.” Asked why, he said, “Because the lawyers said so.” Asked if he thought the intelligence which convinced him to invade Iraq had failed him, he said, “No.” And so it went. Simple thoughts and simple answers leading to certain action.

It may be that in the Bush and Obama presidencies we have two extremes that leaders ought to examine. In Obama is the academic, for whom every problem is an intellectual problem which must be pondered endlessly before action, likely hesitant action, is taken. This is what made him a successful campaigner but , so far, a mediocre president. A campaign has one objective: to win. This sole objective focuses the mind and provides a predetermined set of assumptions that makes action easier. A presidency, on the other hand, is a firestorm of options. Everything must be chosen from a vast array of possibilities, beginning with the decision about what must be done and continuing through a dozen other choices before even arriving at how action should be taken. If there is a case to be made that academics have historically made poor presidents, this may be why.

Yet Bush is nearly the opposite extreme. His mind is geared towards reducing information to terms that lead to action. When Matt Lauer tried to draw him into a philosophical discussion about human rights and torture, Bush wasn’t having it. The lawyers had spoken. Lives were at stake. I was right. That was what he knew. This isn’t a function of intelligence but rather cast of mind. Bush measures knowledge in terms of how it leads to action. Higher thought for its own sake is a waste of time. Clearly, both the title of his book—Decision Points—and the way he recounts his presidency, reveal what he values: Look, I acted on what I knew. I acted decisively. I wouldn’t change much of anything. Let history judge.

What a leader should strive for is not a balancing act between these two but rather a timing act. There are times when a leader should be Obama. Hopefully, this is in quiet hours of mediation, reading on a plane or in stimulating discussion with friends. This is where thorny philosophical problems are hammered out. This is when policies are determined.

Yet when faced with challenge, leaders need to have another gear, a Bush gear. They need to be able to decide, decide quickly and stick to their guns until the evidence points to a different course of action. Frankly, absence of this gear is absence of leadership. And we’ve had plenty of it: the manager who reads every new leadership book but who can’t make a decision, the coach who gets weepy about the history of his sport but who can’t send in a play, the president who seems paralyzed by the options before him.

We don’t need philosophers on the battlefield. We don’t need quick deciders in the strategy room. But great leaders are both at the right time. And aspiring leaders prepare themselves wisely, mastering the art of timing for both higher thought and decisive action.

I am a libertarian as far as my faith will allow and I have long believed that government and politics were never intended to be central to American life. Instead, government and politics were designed to protect those pursuits which make for the essential matters of life—work and community, family and faith, culture and, yes, the fun and the joy that should crown each passing day. I have often quoted the words of G. K. Chesterton, who said, “The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity.” A favorite quote, too, was from Governor Morris, one of my heroes among the founding fathers, who wrote, “The Constitution is not an instrument for government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”

What should be central, then, is this broader matter of human “lives and interests.” Politics and government should be about protecting these. Yet our heated political wars, politicized media and thus our politicized citizenry have moved politics to the center of our society. Now, politics divides church members, separates friends, makes family dinners sound like the floor of Congress and even comes between husbands and wives.

If we allow this, though, then we have already lost the most important battle. If politics is central to all things, then this is simply another way of saying the state is central to all things. And when the state is central to all things, we are already socialists. We have already surrendered the beauty and thrill of life and replaced them with politics as life. This is a sin of both the political right and left today.

What grieves me is what politics as national obsession is doing to my country, and more importantly to my countrymen. When politics is central to a culture, it makes men hollow and vain. They become hungry for political power but they often seek it forgetting what politics is meant to be about—the leadership of a government that protects free citizens as they go about their business. Ignorant of their true purpose, they seek brute power at the costs of their souls—through the surrender of love and art, friendship and creativity, inspiration and the ideals that would make them men of nobility. Instead, they become what C. S. Lewis called “men without chests,” men with appetite and drive and intellect and yet without faith and character. They fight great political battles for the controls of state but they do not have any greater purpose for winning control but to exercise still more power. And so life becomes politics, but the meaningful pursuits of a free people must yield to make it so. We become a dull, politicized people led by preening power addicts who have no higher purpose for power than power itself. And beauty flees.

To effect a change, we do not need an act of Congress or a presidential decree. We simply need to push back. Refuse the constriction of politics. Live to the full and insist that politics be about protecting us as we do. Perhaps we should start by listening to some wisdom from Patrick Henry, a man who was concerned about this trend long ago: “Liberty necessitates the diminutization of political ambition and concern. Liberty necessitates concentration on other matters than mere civil governance. Rather, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, freemen must think on these things.”

For those of us who work in the field of Christian education, there were no surprises in the survey. I’ve shared in this blog before the tragic gaps in knowledge I’ve discovered among Christians.

• Though Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in America and Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, I’ve never had a Christian audience indicate that more than five percent of them knew what either of these religions teach.

• Few of the Christians I’ve taught—and I lecture at Christian universities around the world—could give me the books of the Bible in order, could tell me the historical context of any New Testament book, or could talk me through the basic life of Paul.

• Then, the real kicker: In one survey, 15% of church-going people listed the four gospels as “John, Paul, George and Ringo.”—the names of the four Beatles!

Now the Pew Forum confirms this horrible reality. More than half of all Protestants apparently do not know that Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation. A huge number do not know that “love your neighbor as yourself” is not one of the Ten Commandments. What Protestant Christians know about other religions is even more embarrassing. The bottom line, as the Pew Forum reports it, is that atheists and Mormons know more about religion in general and Christianity in specific than do Protestant Christians.

I could go on by the hour about the causes of this crisis—the lack of teaching in most Christian churches and how overloaded the average pastor is so that teaching lags behind a dozen other priorities. These deficiencies have been well chronicled and long bemoaned.

There is a solution.  We need a teaching revolution. And, frankly, it will have to come from outside of the staffs of Christian churches and schools. Budgets do not allow most churches and schools to permanently hire the trainers they need to meet this challenge.

Because I believe this is one of the great crises of the Christian Church in our generation, the Mansfield Group has made a major decision: we are now devoting a significant portion of our operation to providing effective, inspiring training in the basic arenas of Christian knowledge. We can teach the primary non-Christian religions shaping our world in an evening or two. We can do a thrilling series of sessions on the Old or New Testament story. We offer a stirring introduction to Christian history and to American Christianity. You get the point. We have fascinating teachers and wonderful printed material and we believe we are called, in part, to answer this challenge. In addition, I believe I am supposed to devote a significant portion of my own time to this cause.

If we can help you—your school, your church, your organization—by providing the strategic teaching you need, contact us. We are already the outsourced adult education department for some churches and schools and we will be eager to work with you to answer the challenge of Christian knowledge in our generation. You can reach us through this website.

Let’s do this: because we can, because the need is great, because our future impact depends upon it.

It goes without saying, of course, that burning a Koran in protest of Islam is the equivalent of a little boy sticking his tongue out at the older brother whom he resents and fears. Both are actions of the weak, the insecure and the small. Christians, in particular, are called to more and it is pitiful evidence of spiritual and intellectual decline that this is the best some pastors can muster.

It is this intellectual decline that disturbs me most. Now, I am primarily a teacher and in the same way a hammer thinks every problem is a nail, a teacher can be tempted to believe every problem is solved by a bit more knowledge. I admit this. But surely the most potent response to Islam on the part of Christian believers is to understand what Muslims believe, learn to answer those beliefs with Christian truth, and increase in the boldness, the hospitality and the unceasing prayer that is essential to winning any people to our faith.

Few Christian churches make this part of their arsenal. Consider: The fastest growing religion in America is Mormonism; the fastest growing in the world is Islam. I have stood before huge crowds and asked for a show of hands from those who could tell me the basics of either faith. In a room of a thousand, three raised their hands. At another gathering, none among five hundred responded. Both of these assemblies were comprised largely of Christian leaders.

I conclude we burn Korans because we are too lazy to engage in the sophisticated, multi-pronged counter assault to which we are called. A congregation can be taught the salient history and doctrines of Islam in an evening. Another evening makes them competent in articulating the Christian faith in a Muslim context. I’ve taught both many times with thrilling result. These successes had little to do with me. People want to learn, want to make a difference in the world, and want to be skilled in the weaponry of their faith. They only need to be led, and by stalwarts turned more to equipping than rage, more to mobilizing than show.

Every Christian, every church, and every Christian school at every level should make sure the basics of the faiths shaping our world are mastered. And answering those faiths, making a skilled apologetic, should be the ultimate goal. If we did this, we would be more likely to shape our generation and less likely be a laughingstock to a world that now concludes burning books is the best we have to offer.

Great days are ahead. Let’s prepare for them. If we can help you with the training we describe above, let us know. And God bless you for trying to engage our world at a redemptive level beyond insecurity and rage. More soon.

I am reading some books now that I suspect will permanently change the way I view the world and that may form a new era in my life. Let me share them with you.

First is A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink. This author contends that while our parents told us to be doctors, accountants and engineers, it is the more creative right brained beings who will likely lead the future—the designers, inventors, teachers and storytellers. I would not be impressed with this book if the author did not provide such fascinating anecdotes and statistical support for his case. Churchill once said, “We want engineers in the world, but we do not want a world of engineers.” I agree, but our techno world almost had me convinced that the creative soul would have to yield. Not so, apparently, and thank God. Read this as soon as you can.

John L. Allen, Jr.’s The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church is a vital read for anyone hoping to understand the interplay of global and spiritual trends. I’m not Roman Catholic, but I am a Christian and I find John Allen a brilliant expounder of the shape of our times in terms of faith. I read and try to digest everything I can that explains the trends of our global culture, but Allen has taught me and changed my understanding of the entire planet.  Those who wish to understand the age and to lead in any meaningful sense must devour and absorb Allen’s words.

Finally, you must—absolutely must—read The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Many books today complain of our Facebook culture and end up sounding like cranks and scolds. Carr scans history and shows us what happens to the physical brain when memory defers to writing, for example, and when the digital age nearly abolishes thought. He teaches us how tools always produce calluses, and sometimes of the mind and emotions. This is—and I would never use this term lightly—a prophetic book. Get it. Read it. Live differently for it.

I could write of the other books that are gracing my life, of how Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a poetic thrill or how a Penguin Lives mini-biography of Simone Weil is stirring me and how The Kingdom of Matthias by Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz is changing my understanding of American history. But I suppose when a decade or two has passed, I will realize that the three books I’ve mentioned above provided the most trenchant warnings and wisdom.

Ah, books. Their power and their beauty. Let me close with my favorite quote about books. It is from the Sketchbook of Washington Irving: “The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the seasons of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. When friends grow cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and commonplace, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope nor deserted sorrow.”

First, to the point. No, Barack Obama is not a Muslim. Yes, he practiced Islam as a child at his stepfather’s side but he did not make a confession of faith after he entered adolescence, which is Islam’s requirement. Then, as we now know so well, young Barack found his way to Trinity United Church of Christ on the Southside of Chicago and thus came to embrace an exceptionally liberal, “all religions lead to the same place” kind of Christianity. Yes, he believes that Jesus is the Son of God. Yes, he believes that Jesus died on a cross for the sins of the world. Yes he believes that God raised Jesus from the dead again. Beyond these certainties, though, Obama picks and chooses from traditional theology. He believes that some scripture is of human origin and he does not hold that all traditional theology has to be embraced to embrace the faith itself.

Yet all this was known as of his election. What has caused such confusion is his inconsistent embrace of religion while in the White House. He hosted Jewish Seders, Muslim Iftar dinners and even Hindu ceremonies—as have other presidents including the evangelical George W. Bush. Yet when it came to evangelicals and, more broadly, Christians as a whole, Obama became distant. He stayed away from National Day of Prayer events—dear to Christians nationwide—and did not even send a representative to a National Prayer Breakfast.  He is in the running for making fewer statements of faith than any other recent American president at this point in his term. He seems eager to reach to the Muslim world—perhaps sensing that his history and race position him as a healer of Muslim wounds—yet has done little to reach to the Dobsons and Robertsons and Grahams of whom he has often been critical.

Some would make much of his refusal to attend a Washington D.C. church. This is a distraction. Where the Obamas go to church is a private matter. Moreover, a presidential visit to a DC church usually produces a chaotic sacrilege and it is not hard to understand why the First Family would choose the quiet and privacy of Camp David where they do, in fact, worship and where they are well tended by fine military chaplains. This issue, like that of the president being a Muslim, simply needs to go away and conservatives who believe otherwise should remember that the revered Ronald Reagan seldom darkened the door of a church except on special occasions. No one of right mind questions his faith.

The simple fact is that the Obama administration has made hash of any coherent articulation of the president’s religious beliefs. I made this point on CNN this morning and was countered by one of the president’s spiritual advisers. Argue with me if you will, though, the statistics tell the story. The number of people who believe the president is a Muslim has more than doubled since he took office and nearly half of all Americans have no idea what he believes. This during an economic crisis in which the hurting turn to faith and hope their president does as well. This during not one but two wars about which Americans hope their Commander-in-Chief prays to a trusted God.

Perhaps religious liberalism thrives in uncertainty, is best sustained in murky theological waters. Perhaps politics forces even the religiously certain into vague and insincere pious mush. These matters should be debated by the serious minded and the patriot. What is without doubt is that one of our most articulate presidents has left his nation feeling confused and even betrayed in matters of faith. Surely we deserve better in times like these.

Thomas Nelson’s exciting new series of biographies entitled “The Generals” is now starting to appear in stores. Stephen Mansfield is the general editor of this series, which begins with a volume about George Patton and a volume about Robert E. Lee. Many more biographies will release over the next three years, including treatments of Sherman, Washington, MacArthur, Pershing, Jackson, and more. Mansfield has said in interviews, “I think readers are going to find this series to be thrilling reads combined with historical mastery. Our writers are among the best in the field and man can they write!”

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”[1]

By nature, human beings shrink from change. Change seems to stir our insecurities as it forces us from the familiar into unsettling confrontation with the new. Wrongly, we equate change with loss. Psychologists say that because we subconsciously want to return to the stability and warmth of the womb, we gravitate to the comfortable and the routine. But life is change, and true success in any field is largely a matter of learning how to anticipate change, how to harness it, and how to ride its power into the future

When Winston Churchill was born on November 30th, 1874, electricity, radio, television and telephones were unknown. Benjamin Disraeli had just become Prime Minister of England and Queen Victoria still reigned, as she would for another twenty-seven years. There were men living who had fought Napoleon. In America, Ulysses S. Grant was in his second term as President. Karl Marx was in the British Library writing the Communist Manifesto and Mark Twain had not written most of the works for which he would become famous. Tennis was in its infancy and Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Rutgers Universities had met only the year before to draw up the first rules for a game called football.

When Churchill died ninety years later, on January 24, 1965, the world was quite a different place. That year, men orbited the earth, walked in space, and launched a space probe to the surface of Venus. Pictures from Mars were beamed 134 million miles back to earth by Mariner IV. An automobile was driven over 600 miles-per-hour, satellite links were in operation between the US and Europe, and sex-change operations were a reality. Nuclear power had come of age. The American President at the time was Lyndon Johnson, who, though considered an elderly man, was born when Churchill was already 34. Johnson was but one of the nineteen Presidents who served during Winston’s lifetime, a span which also included six British Monarchs and twenty-eight Prime Ministers. That same year, the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace to receive the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II. Churchill also received this honor, but for an entirely different contribution in an entirely different age.

Change was an ever-present challenge in Churchill’s life and it frequently filled his thoughts.

“I wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.”[2]

Had Churchill regarded all change with dread and foreboding, he might have passed his days in a nostalgic paralysis. For him, though, change was no enemy: it was opportunity—and he intended to seize it. He valued tradition and heritage as much as any man of his age, but he refused to be enticed into a wistful nostalgia. History was about progress and whatever the future held, it would be led by those who conquered their innate fear of the unknown and determined that for them change meant advance.

Nothing demonstrates Churchill’s ability to embrace “the new” more dramatically than his mastery of military technology. Churchill rode in Victorian-era calvary charges when the lance was weapon of choice. Yet, when he inherited an antiquated British Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty prior to World War I, he wasted no time in preparing for the future. He dismissed mossbacked admirals and replaced outdated ships. He ordered the Navy to switch its fuel from coal to oil, a critical decision which gave British ships the winning edge in speed and efficiency. He also introduced the fifteen-inch high-explosive gun without which the Navy would have been fatally out-gunned and out-maneuvered. True to form, when war broke out, he had already foreseen it and the fleet was long at sea by the time Churchill received official notice of hostilities.

Churchill not only used change: he created it. Prior to World War I, he instructed Naval engineers to explore the idea of an armored car designed to scale trenches. He thus became the father of the modern tank, or “Winston’s folly, ” as critics then called it. In 1912, moved by his belief that aviation was “most important,” he formed the Royal Naval Air Service, which later became the Royal Flying Corps and then the Royal Air Force. Britain became the first country to equip a plane with a machine gun or to launch an airborne torpedo because of his efforts. During World War II, Churchill first suggested the idea of the artificial harbors used at Normandy. He proposed that bombers drop strips of tinfoil to confuse enemy radar, pioneered the idea of building a pipeline under the ocean, and invented a device called a “Gee” for guiding pilots.

“The only way a man can remain consistent amid changing circumstance,” he wrote in the middle of his life, “is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.”[3] Change tactics and methods, he believed, but never principles. So, whether he was switching political parties or devising strategies to accommodate the shifting tides of war or harnessing the latest in technology, Churchill made change serve his vision. He learned to love it and to welcome the demands it made. This attitude distinguished him among men of his or any other generation, and it is part of the command of historical forces that so marked his leadership.

[1]Irrepressible Churchill, p. 100.

[2]My Early Life, 67.

[3]Thoughts and Adventures, p. 23.

Looking back it is as though she was designed and outfitted to embody a century then still fresh and full of hope. She was born in an age still feigning innocence, before the first of two world wars, the economic follies of nations, and the confusing Babel of secular prophets left men cynical and unsure. Truly, she was inspiring. Her staterooms, ballrooms, restaurants and fifty-foot wide promenades were the talk of Europe. The loving attention lavished on her staircases, chandeliers, statuary, and paneled lounges is rivaled in memory only by that offered in the service of God by the builders of Christendom’s great cathedrals. She shone with the best art, books, furniture, and even gold bathroom fixtures. She boasted a gym complete with exercise bikes, a rowing machine, a swimming pool, and a squash court. She even carried a Renault car, the finest hunting dogs available, four cases of opium, and luggage so expensive that one woman’s alone was estimated at more than $177,000.

The Titanic’s passengers were a cross-section of the age. From the largely Scots-Irish third class passengers making their way to new lives in America to the super rich who occupied luxurious berths in first class, those who boarded the liner on that hectic April day in Southampton were a microcosm of the world as it then was. Making their way onto the massive vessel was the richest man in the world, John Jacob Astor, and a Frenchman who traveled with the children he had just kidnapped from the home of his estranged wife. Both the wealthy founder of Macy’s department store, Isidor Straus, and a woman stealing west with her lover found their way onto the Titanic.Among the more than 2,200 passengers were millionaire playboy Ben Guggenheim, President Taft’s military advisor, the music teacher to Theodore Roosevelt’s children, a squash pro, a movie star, a thief, several gamblers, the Titanic’s architect, and hundreds of rather unremarkable, common people distinguished only by the dream that that their glorious vessel would carry them to fortune. The Titanic, despite her name, was the world in miniature.

How significant it is, then, that as one frightened woman boarded the ship and nervously asked a nearby steward about its safety, the steward puffed out his chest and declared in a voice hundreds could hear, “Madam, God himself could not sink this ship.” And how astonishing it is, now, that in that beautifully adorned ship’s library, among the hundreds of books provided for leisure reading, there was one written by Morgan Robertson called Futility. Not significant at first, perhaps, except that it told the fictional story of a ship called Titan, which struck an iceberg and sank at sea with huge loss of life. It was written in 1898—fourteen years before the Titanic’s only voyage. No one had checked out the book; no one heard the warning.

So on the evening of the third day of the voyage, when through the crystal cold night air the lookout’s warning bell sounded, the people of the Titanic—in all their variety and comfort and hope—were behaving in a way that is only notable because it was so incredibly, tragically . . . . . normal. But the deathblow had already occurred.  Seconds before lookout Frederick Fleet—whose position was called “the eyes of the ship”— had reported, “Iceberg right ahead.” The Titanic, whose captain had been ignoring ice warnings from other ships for three days, now attempted an evasive move. The First Mate cut the ship’s speed and called for a turn hard to port. With only thirty-seven seconds between first sighting and impact, the officer’s efforts were futile at best and may have made matters worse. At 11:40 p.m. on April 14, Titanic collided with an iceberg on her starboard side leaving a gash twelve square feet in size. The ship was doomed. Most passengers thought the wind had picked up a bit, nothing more.

But the ship was unsinkable. So there were only lifeboats for 1,178 of the 2,207 passengers. Ships God can’t sink don’t need lifeboats. As the shrill alarms sounded throughout the warm, sleepy ship and women and children began boarding the chilly lifeboats — along with the men grumbling about the inconvenience of this “drill” — the cruel reality settled into the mind first of the captain and then his crew: hundreds of people are about to die. There simply were not enough lifeboats. Probably more than one crewman remembered that the reason there were twenty rather than the needed forty-eight lifeboats was to make space for those fifty-foot wide promenades so loved by the stylishly clad strollers of first class.

Panic soon set in. Half-empty lifeboats were launched into the oil-black sea. Men posed as women and left their friends behind to save their own lives. Crewmen used pistols to enforce order. In the first class lounge, drunken card games continued undisturbed by the general chaos. Passengers in third class were locked below decks until the upper classes had boarded the boats. Husbands lied to their wives and children to get them into the boats against their protests and men silently prepared themselves in semi-shock for their icy end.

At 2:20 a.m. on Sunday, April 15, the ship, which had been slowly sinking nose-down, suddenly groaned and lifted its twenty-three foot propellers high into the air as it slid into its black grave, exploding into halves from the weight of her own steel before plummeting more than two miles to the bottom of the ocean. Some fifteen hundred passengers—half of whom should have found space in the half-filled lifeboats and all of whom should have been saved had the ship not been arrogantly deemed “unsinkable” and denied the right number of boats—plunged into the bitter black chill of the north Atlantic.

Moments later, as shivering survivors balanced upon an upturned, collapsible lifeboat, someone suggested that it might be appropriate to pray. There was discussion. Disagreement. Agreement. Then, together, they prayed the Lord’s prayer. Finally.

News of the sinking and the few survivors, of the agony and loss, sped throughout the world. Preachers immediately seized upon the theme of pride and arrogance, calling for national and even international repentance.The Atlantic Constitution saw another lesson. Its editors claimed that the behavior of gentlemen in Titanic’s first class confirmed that “the Anglo-Saxon may yet boast that his sons are fit to rule the earth.” In reply, black folk-singer Leadbelly offered these lyrics: “Black man oughta shout for joy / Never lost a girl or either a boy.” Lookout Frederick Fleet, ironically the first to see the iceberg and yet one of the survivors, complained loudly that the ship might have been saved if, in the midst of excess and opulence, the “eyes of the ship” had been granted the oft-requested but oft-denied binoculars. The reason for the denial, he explained bitterly to the astonished world press, was that binoculars were deemed a “frivolous expense.” For such audacity, fellow survivors, claiming betrayal, ostracized Frederick Fleet for the rest of his life.

The much-debated prophecy of the Titanic haunts men today more than at any time since the horrors of that Atlantic night. The ship’ tale is the theme of an award-winning Broadway play. Its story will soon be depicted in the most expensive movie ever made. It is the subject of computer games, best-selling books, and thousands of Internet web sites. And the leading book on the Titanic, hauntingly entitled A Night to Remember, has not gone out of print since its first appearance in 1955, selling more last year than ever. The Titanic holds aloft the fear and arrogance and vanity and folly that defines all societies in decline, and clearly we fear, or perhaps we know, that the Titanic story is that of our own age, and now, perhaps, its fate.

But there was another ship.

This second ship left from the same Southampton port, though it departed almost four hundred years before the Titanic. It, too, traversed the frigid north Atlantic. It, too, bore passengers and their dreams. Yet, there the similarities end. This second ship was a far humbler offering. No larger than a volleyball court and but a few stories high — she would have fit completely inside one of Titanic’s ornate ballrooms — she leaked profusely. Moreover, she held only 105 passengers and crew and offered relatively little space for supplies in her hold. The whole idea, in fact, of sailing to “the northern parts of Virginia” at such a time of year with such a crew and in such a ship was a fool’s fancy. Who would dare such a thing?

But this second ship, after sixty-six wintry days on the violent north Atlantic, reached safe harbor. It shouldn’t have. Halfway across the ocean the ship was slammed by such a violent storm that the main beam broke.Surely all 105 aboard would die a cruel, icy death at sea. Then one among them remembered the printing press on board, with its giant screw. Using the screw as a jack, the crew pressed the main beam back into place. A miracle.And there was more. Violent storms forced the passengers below deck with hatches bolted for weeks at a time.There was a death at sea. Many were severely ill. There were pregnant women on board. Perhaps worse, more than one third of the passengers were children. It was a terrifying, vomiting, bone-breaking experience of sixty-six days.They should never have made it.

Yet, when they did finally arrive, they announced to the world both who they were and their reason for sailing. They had voyaged, they wrote, “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.” They wanted to be “but stepping stones of the light of Jesus” that the natives of this land might “embrace the Prince of Peace” and that a new “land of light” might be a resting-place for “the glory of God.” And they called their proclamation the Mayflower Compact—named for their cramped little ship. Themselves they called Pilgrims, “strangers in a strange land,” who in “this howling wilderness of the New World” could be sustained but “by the Spirit of God and his grace.”

This is the tale of two ships. One, proudly named, proudly outfitted, and proudly sailed to the glory of a new age, as testimony of the genius of man. The other, with no natural hope of success, launched to the glory of God by his humble servants for the benefit of generations yet unborn. The first, after three days of ease, sinks. The second, after sixty-six days of hell, arrives safely. The first does not heed the warnings, does not read the signs, does not know it is sinking. The second sails because it knows the signs of the times and seeks to answer its dangers with the power of a different Kingdom. The name of the first is a symbol of decadent destruction. The power of the second launched a nation. This is the age-old distinction, the eternal chasm, between the City of God and the City of Man, between the Prince of Pride and the Suffering Servant made Lord. It is the story of mankind, the ultimate question of destiny. It is the tale of two ships.

For my birthday several weeks ago, my sweet wife bought her misguided husband a Macbook Pro and an iPhone. It was a turning point, an epoch-maker. Let me explain.

No one has hassled Mac users through the years like I have. They deserved it. They are crazy-making. Friends nagged me endlessly about how superior Mac is to PC and how I am a troglodyte for using a Dell and how my life will change forever if only I will repent. It was irritating; particularly when they went all chills about the latest this or the cool of that in MacLand.

I did not need a Mac. I already had a religion.

But, oh my. How deceived I was. Do you know what it means to a long time PC user to simply open his notebook and have wireless—instantly, seamlessly, beautifully? And what’s that? Why, its my photos—on both my laptop and my phone—smiling back at me in brilliant color. And the Dashboard! How do I love thee. Corners? My new best friend. Expose and Spaces? Brilliant. And so it goes.

I’m in. I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. What’s next? An iPad and then probably a T-Shirt. Yes, that’s it. Maybe a tattoo. Think of the possibilities. The many ways I can conform. Take me to your leader. Your people shall be my people, your ways my ways. Hurry, let’s go find a Genius and sit at his feet.

There is a reason for this decline of Christian knowledge. It results from the loss of teaching in the ministry of most churches. The average church offers its members a Sunday morning service, perhaps a small group experience and various specialized ministries like a men’s ministry or an outreach program. But teaching time is declining dramatically in most churches and the result is the ignorance of the faith that plagues us now.

Scholars and pastors will debate this endlessly in conferences, but surely the beginning of a change is to simply identify what every Christian ought to know. Then, either with the help of their church or on their own, Christians can begin to acquire the knowledge they need to live meaningfully in our age. Here, then, are seven tasks that every Christian ought to be able to complete.

1. Be able to talk through the story of the Bible and to explain each biblical book in the context of that story.
2. Be able to talk through the earthly ministry and teachings of Jesus Christ.
3. Be able to explain the basic doctrines of Christianity.
4. Be able to answer the primary objections to the Christian faith.
5. Be able to talk through the basic story of Church history.
6. Be able to explain the basic teachings of the major non-Christian religions.
7. Be capable of explaining the Christian faith to a non-Christian in a combination of your personal story and biblical truth.

Notice that the emphasis here is on being able to “talk through” a topic. Our goal should be casual, conversant command of a subject rather than the arid, intellectual, bookish approach which has failed us so miserably. If we get serious about this it should mean that we can sit in a Starbucks with friends and work on “talking through” a subject until we have the basics mastered. This will serve us well. We’ll find the whole process more enjoyable. We’ll remember what we rehearse far longer. We’ll also find that this “casual, conversant command” serves us better in articulating our faith to the outside world.

Let’s stop living as though being a Christian is tantamount to having a brain bypass. Christians once led the world of ideas and creativity. It can be so again if we will reclaim our lost passion for knowledge and skill.

I thought I would share the dozen or so movies that have inspired me, comforted me or helped me heal. They say that movies are the literature of our time. If so, these films comprise my personal library of inspiration.

1: Seabiscuit
“Though he be but little, he is fierce.”

2: Dead Poet’s Society
“To put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived.”

3: Chariots of Fire
“God made me fast . . . and when I run I feel His pleasure.”

4: Braveheart
“All men die; not all men really live.”

5: Rudy
Biology need not be destiny.

6: Patton
Destiny comes at a price.

7: Remains of the Day
The small and the routine are the enemies of fulfillment and purpose.

8: Hoosiers
Character is destiny.

9: Glory
Live a cause greater than one life.

10: Henry V
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

11: Legends of the Fall
Each man has his own path to destiny.

12: Apollo 13
There is greatness in “successful failures” too.

Bonus: Saving Private Ryan, Invictus, It’s a Wonderful Life

He had completed his other business in the city and decided to stay an additional day before flying home so he could tour my school with his wife. I got the call early that day and when they asked me if I could take the Woodens around campus I could barely stammer out my answer for my excitement.

John Wooden had already left a deep imprint on my life. I had read his book They Call Me Coach in high school. It was the first time I had encountered faith in God, lessons of character, a passion for athletic excellence, and wisdom for living a meaningful life all in one book. Though it could do little for my pitiful basketball playing, They Call Me Coach helped me realize that true success was not measured by fame but by a life well lived to the glory of God. These lessons had inspired me, helped lead me to faith, and made me wary of much that passed for accomplishment in American culture.

As I began taking Coach Wooden and his wife on a tour of my campus, I soon found myself on a tour of a different kind. Coach talked to me, an eighteen year-old college freshman, like I was his future star player. He told me stories from his youth, asked me about my life, and freely shared his philosophy with a seriousness that made me feel as though I was being let in on the secrets of life.

There was one lesson in particular that stuck with me. My university was an intensely Christian place and I was nearly convinced that all truly important wisdom resided there. I loved the place and was grateful to be one of its students. Coach admired it, too, but then we went by the athletic dorm, a centerpiece of the campus. I told him all about it but he didn’t seem impressed. This frustrated me because the athletes at our school were world class and I thought Coach would be particularly interested in their lives and the shiny facility in which they lived. Instead, he patiently endured my descriptions and then said, “You know, I don’t allow our players to live in an athletic dorm. I require them to live with non-athletes. It makes them better people and, ultimately, more successful in life. They think of themselves as normal human beings rather than stars.”

He didn’t preach. He didn’t rebuke. He offered no quote from scripture. He simply stated a principle of life, one he had chiseled from the rock of experience, and left it at my feet to make my own or not. Then we went on to other sites.

That moment has lived with me since because it defined the difference between the easy answers of my overheated spiritual culture at the time and godly truth proven and lived with humility before the unsparing gaze of the watching world. I’ve never forgotten it. It made me want to be a more godly man, but it also made me want to be a man of Coach Wooden’s humility, simplicity and tested wisdom.

During my day with Coach, he touched at least briefly on each one of the principles in his seven-point creed. I want to include them here in honor of that day and, more importantly, in honor of the exceptional man UCLA’s Coach John Wooden truly is.

1. Be true to yourself.
2. Make each day your masterpiece
3. Help others.
4. Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible.
5. Make friendship a fine art.
6. Build a shelter against a rainy day.
7. Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.

1. Take God seriously and very little else.
2. Live everyday as though it were your last, for one day you are sure to be right.
3. Fortune favors the bold.
4. You have a destiny and your destiny is fulfilled by investing in the destiny of others.
5. We make a living by what we earn and we make a life by what we give.
6. The best things in life are seasonal.
7. Thoreau said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Don’t be one of them.
8. Life is too short for bitterness, anger and self-pity. See them as the enemies of your happiness.
9. A change is as good as a rest.
10. Do something every day that scares you.

I suppose that many of those who spoke and sang were famous and I suppose their songs were well known. It didn’t really matter to me. I mean that kindly. I have been in this situation before.

You see, I have a musical soul with no musical skill. My singing sounds like an engine revving up in the cold and what passes for my guitar playing sounds like a child plucking one of those $20 Wal-Mart guitars. I’m reconciled to it. What is almost painful is that while I cannot produce music of my own, the music of others means so much.

I did not realize it would until I married Bev. She is a songwriter and producer and our home and our lives are filled with music. Good music. Live and raw and skilled. People sometimes use our downtown Nashville home for their green room before they play the Ryman or we go hear Bev’s friends do a set at a local place and, believe me, I try to be cool. But the music means so much.

It isn’t the fame and it isn’t the record deals that mean anything to me. It is the song, the sheer power of the notes to penetrate my granite soul and make me feel, make me stop wanting and doing and simply revel in what it means to be a human being with an emotional history that is always pulsating just below surface of my life. Music draws me out and tells me I’m not alone.

It was sad last night. I had already had conversations and watched YouTube clips and laughed as the jokes were retold. Nothing helped us all let our friend go like the music, though.

And I close simply with this: Thank you to the players and the writers who have given me such a gift. I cannot even worship my God without you, much less live in all it means to be a man. God bless the artists who have graced my life, and who last night helped us grieve.

By the way, you can see the other Retailers Choice Award Winners here. You can also order a copy of Paul Harvey’s America here.

And Elisha prayed, “O LORD, open his eyes so he may see.” Then the LORD opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. (2 Kings 6:17)

2. Train me for my specific role in those battles and make me effective.

Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. (Psalm 144:1)

3. Give me godly focus and a singleness of heart that cuts the trivial and optional from my life.

I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me for their own good and the good of their children after them. (Jeremiah 32:39)

4. Give me the “want to’s,” Lord; a spiritual passion and willingness only you can give.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.  (Psalm 51:12)

5. Lord, give me your divine energy as I do your will and fight your fight.

To this end I labor, struggling with all His energy, which so powerfully works in me.  (Colossians 1:29)

6. Grant me valiant friends whose hearts you have touched to walk with me in the battles of this age.

Saul also went to his home in Gibeah, accompanied by valiant men whose hearts God had touched. (1 Samuel 10:26)

7. Make my words weapons of godly warfare, O Lord, free from the impure and the spiritually damaging.

Set a guard over my mouth, O LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips. Let not my heart be drawn to what is evil, to take part in wicked deeds with men who are evildoers; let me not eat of their delicacies. (Psalm 141:3, 4)

1.      FEMA/TEMA
1-800-462-9029 from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. CST Monday through Friday.
www.fema.gov

*Note: Register before the deadline of May 19^th.

2.  Red Cross
Access through www.GraceWorksMinistries.net – 615-794-2174
104 Southeast Parkway, Suite 100, Franklin, TN 37064

3.  Samaritan’s Purse
www.SarmaritansPurse.com

Operating from the Brentwood base of Bethel World Outreach Center
www.bwoc.org

I’ve scanned the scene and I’ve spoken with many friends, some of whom are city and state officials. Here is what I recommend. Samaritan’s Purse is going to establish a Nashville Base at Bethel World Outreach Center in Brentwood. They are in for the long haul, they have a record of integrity, given their reputation they will mobilize vast numbers in the community and they are coming in strength. Also, I know Rice Broocks, the Senior Pastor at Bethel, and he is a godly man who loves this city and will support Samaritan’s Purse with everything his well-run church has. I think the partnership of the two is a wise place to invest your money for Nashville’s recovery.

Bev and I are going to do three things. First, we are going to support Samaritan’s Purse and Bethel World Outreach Center, designating our money for Nashville Flood Relief. Second, we are going to give money to our own church for taking care of the hurting in our congregation. This should be a priority for all people of faith. Finally, we are going to roll up our sleeves and help clean up, putting our bodies on the ground in the fight for our city.

This is what I recommend. By the way, you can track other resources on Twitter at #NashvilleFlood and this video will help you know more about what is happening here.

Thanks for helping. Good days are ahead.

Nashville is sophistication in denim. It is where the South meets Yankee culture with a smile and without letting go of too much. It is where the self-important never last but the art never ends. Nashville is my home. I love the accents, the heritage and the way the past calls gently through monuments and architecture to an all too unaware present. I’ve gotten use to how a road can change names three times before you get where you’re going and how the restaurant you loved last week is gone this week and how tourists think nothing of asking you if you’re somebody famous. I love Nashville.

Over this past weekend, my city drank in nearly 14 inches of rain. For perspective, the most rain she had endured at one time in all her history was just under 7. Now, much of my city is under water. There is fear and anguish, heartache and the disorientation that comes from the feeling that life is spinning out of control.

My city is going to rise. You can already see it in the eyes of the restaurant owner on Second Avenue and the Belmont University student who says she will take classes in a park if she has to. Nashville is going to be better than ever. One day you will come here and attend a convention or take in some bluegrass or drop your son off at one of our amazing schools. You’ll be tempted to doubt that there ever was a flood here because we are going to be so brilliant and new and fun.

In the meantime, we need time to heal. Pray for us. And watch this website and others for ways you can help. Neither the music nor Music City has died. We’ll just be back for the rest of our show after this brief intermission.

Now, Stephen is going on the road to reinforce this message of wholeness. He will be speaking around the country in churches, to corporations, to ministries and even in a bar or two to help people heal. If you would like to schedule Stephen to speak on ReChurch for your organization, contact us at info@MansfieldGroup.com