Vote for Joe

Kobe is dead. The ‘world’ mourns… Last night at my Bible study, Moses comes back down the mountain and the Israelites have built a “golden calf,” a false “idol,” if you will. Notice the ‘golden’ trim in the uniform above. A metaphor? Of course it is. Our society, through media infused pop culture, has made “idols” of some of these top players, no matter what the sport. How much time do we spend obsessing about them, watching them, reading about them, practicing to be like them… In comparison, how much time do we spend thinking about God, praying to Him, reading about Him, practicing what He taught…? For many of us, sadly, we’ve got this all tremendously backwards. Note: Was the incident sad? Sure it was. But so were all the other unexpected deaths yesterday across the country.

A just published report by Swiss scientists says that planting “1 trillion trees” worldwide could significantly impact climate change. And we could let Ada, Ohio, take the lead. I was covering a village council meeting there last night. It was noted that the village had a quite active Tree Commission, has been a Tree City USA town for 40 years, and Ohio Northern University there was designated the first “Tree Campus” in Ohio years back. And there was talk at the meeting about ramping all this up more. A ‘treemendous’ idea: Our administration would back such initiatives with matching federal grants. [To be a Tree City USA town, for instance, 2% of the town budget must go to the planting and upkeep of trees. The federal government, under our administration, would match the 2%.] For more on our stance on this, and other environmental issues, see…

While out campaigning early Saturday evening, I stopped in North Baltimore, Ohio. A sepia-toned downtown mural’s center piece is a train of yesteryear billowing smoke (background in the photo). In the foreground, as timing would have it, a train of today was passing through. We are often struck with a “romantic nostalgia” about the old trains. History books portray the crisscrossing of America with rail as a major advancement. Was it? This, for one, started moving the “local production for local consumption” paradigm away. The trains belched — and still do — all sorts of global warming gasses into the atmosphere. The railroad was yet another arm of an ill-considered, breakneck paced Industrial Revolution that should have been much more considered at the start.

I interviewed a local driving instructor today for a newspaper article. She noted that “distracted driving” was getting to be almost epidemic. I noted in the story that 33,000 people (and this doesn’t include the maiming, and so on.) die in traffic accidents every year now. That’s like a half full airliner going down every day in America! If that was happening, we’d close the skies. While nobody wants to admit it, because we’re pretty much all (except the Amish) addicted to motorized transportation, we have created these highly dangerous motorized traffic “patterns.” And not just dangerous in terms of accidents, but also dangerous in regard to an infrastructure that predominantly supports the burning of fossil fuels, helping to accelerate climate change to the nth degree. Time to obey the “YIELD” sign. And our position paper on transportation indicates how we’d tangibly go about shifting the transportation paradigm in this country. Quick.

It’s time to stop beating around the bush(fire). This is what a significant part of Australia looks like right now. Climate change? Yes, on one level. But this, according to the Bible’s “Sea of fire” passage is what hell looks like all the time. A Vox News headline today: Australia is enduring a ‘hellish’ fire season. So… Down through the centuries God has, at times, used events in nature as harbingers. The fires are happening in a country known, in part, for the slogan: “Australia: No rules, just right.” The Ten Commandments are “rules.” God’s rules. If you have a society, a nation, a world… predominately not living by these rules anymore, countless souls become in grave danger of being lost, for eternity, in a “sea of fire.” Is God allowing these infernos to warn us, not just around one of the seven deadly sins of “gluttony” when it comes to our fossil fuel use, but about how all our sin — and it’s a lot these days — could end us up in a place even hotter than current Australia? ‘Fire for thought.’