MEMORIAL DAY

Memorial Day weekend is traditionally the start of summer. (Summer runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day irrespective of the sun's position respective to the earth's rotation.) Summer is the time for vacations, trips to the beach, family cookouts.

When I first moved to the South the people said that Memorial Day is a Yankee holiday. It was started to memorialize the dead of the Grand Army of the Republic. The South had its own Confederate Memorial Day. Now, a generation later, all of that seems forgotten. In our town there will be a wreath laying at the War Memorial attended by a few dozen, mostly veterans. Afterwards a Baptist Church will have a special service attended by the veterans and some church members.. There won't be a parade, or speeches, or little children placing flags on the graves of veterans. 

On Memorial Day all that most folks will remember is that there will be no trash pickup, the banks and post office are closed, and summer is here at last.

THE CASEY ANTHONY TRIAL

This morning I turned on the television to watch the morning news program.  The program was dominated by the Casey Anthony trial.  Every trial motion, every inflection in the prosecutor's or defense attorney's voice, every shred of evidence was analyzed and discussed by a succession of talking heads.  Meanwhile, the government has reached its legal debt limit, the G8 conference of world leaders is about to begin with several European nations on the verge of bankruptcy, Egypt's top leaders are on trial, the hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan go on, the town of Joplin, Missouri is digging out from one of the deadliest and most powerful tornadoes in our nation's history, the victims of the Mississippi River flood are still homeless, our astronauts are in the midst of what may be the last manned space flight by the U.S.A. for many years,  the President is on a tour of European capitals.

All these MORE IMPORTANT items of news are being usurped to show viewers the day by day, hour by hour proceedings of a trial against a young woman who either killed her own daughter or hid the fact of her death for almost a month or neither one of these. What makes this trial so important? Do the vast majority of Americans prefer to hide their heads in the sand and use their minds for dribble? 

Why, LORD?

The Mississippi River flood has caused deaths, made tens of thousands of people homeless, ruined crops on millions of acres of land, and destroyed thousands of businesses.  On the heels of that came a devastating tornado that cut a path of destruction across Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia killing over a hundred people and leaving hundreds of people homeless. Two days ago there was one of the worst tornadoes in U.S. history in Joplin, Missouri. The death toll is 122 and still rising.  Many homes and businesses were destroyed.

Some people might say that the weather is the cause and that there are scientific reasons for these ruinous natural disasters. Science is only "seeing" what God is doing. It is time, and way past the time, for each of us to ask God in prayer, "Why, LORD? Why are You trying to get our attention? What do you want us to hear? What do You want us to do?"

I am not anxious to hear attention-grabbing, self-appointed prophets answer this question for God. I am anxious for hundreds of thousands and millions of Christians to ask God those questions in private prayer and then like Habakkuk to patiently wait for God to answer. (Habakkuk 2:1)

A Garden Experiment

Our property has seventeen long needle pine trees (maybe they are loblolly pines).  We have lived here for fifteen years and disposing of the pine straw has always been a challenge. The city used to have a recomposting dump.  Then I would haul as many as 200 large leaf and lawn clippings bags to the dump.  Now the city picks up the bags of pine straw and leaves. For two years a man in town traded me bags of leaves for bags of pine straw and I put the leaves on our gardens. He soon had more pine straw than he could use for several years.

This year my wife decided that we were going to use those mounds of pine straw. We lined the garden fences with a two foot mound of pine straw to keep heavy rains from washing away parts of the garden.  She used pine straw between the rows to keep weeds from growing and to retain moisture.  Everyone said that the pine straw was too acidic and would kill the garden. My wife used more lime than usual.  As for the gardens, they are very happy. The plants are all lush and green.  Some of them have blooms. We are looking forward to the best gardens in years thanks to the pine straw that we have been throwing away for over a decade.

Social Media

I just received an angry note from someone whom I had unfriended on Facebook.  The reason that I unfriended him is that I was annoyed by some of the comments and announcements he was posting.  I didn't make an issue of it.  I didn't even tell him that I had removed his name.  That was a couple weeks ago.  Yesterday, a reporter, whom I do not know, confronted him in a public venue, and loudly asked why I had unfriended him.  I wonder how that reporter even knows my name and how he could know that I had unfriended the other man.