This hurts me. On a university campus in Texas, the Atheist Agenda is putting on a smut for smut campaign. If you give them a Bible (or a Qur’an or Book of Mormon, or any other book held sacred by any religious group), and they will give you porn.

Why they would do this? Students wanting porn can go to the second hand store and get Bibles for under a buck and then they can trade that Bible in for a porn magazine that probably costs five of six bucks. So it’s got to be costing the group money to provide the porn.

There is no way they think they will help people break free from oppressive religions with this deal. No one who holds to a religion will wake up one day and say, “I think this book I’ve held as holy all these years is really smutty. I think I’ll trade it in for a porn magazine because porn is far more edifying.” So who do the Atheist Agenda people hope to attract with their trade-in offer? People who like porn, presumably.

Why?

Well, according to Melissa Ludwig, one reason for the campaign is to attract new members to the Atheist Agenda.

In the view of club members, religious texts are as smutty as pornography because they contain violence and torture and spark religious wars. But mostly, it’s a public relations stunt meant to ignite debate and attract new members to the club.

Why attract new members? And if you are attracting new members, why aim for members who like to look at porn? What can they offer you? What good will they be for the organization?

At their blog, the Atheist Agenda folks say nothing about wanting to recruit new members.

When asked why they do this, they give the following answer:

It’s symbolic. Pornography is vilified by the religious community, but in reality the values espoused by religious doctrine are far more reprehensible. So, in effect, it’s trading something appalling for something less appalling. We also like to get people to think, to talk to us, and to debate with us. That only works when they understand just what we’re doing, hence this FAQ.

So I guess that means they are doing this to help clean up the world of reprehensible doctrine.

And then that bit about trading something appalling for something less appalling. And yet, later in their FAQ they say that:

Women choose to participate in pornography of their own accord, and to say it objectifies them against their will presupposes their inability to make decisions – a mindset that kept them from voting and holding careers for a long time. If they want to display themselves in such a manner, and if consumers want to see, then both parties come away happy.

So it appears that they don’t believe porn is appalling at all.

I’m left scratching my head. What exactly do these people believe and what exactly are they trying to accomplish? It’s not clear. Right now it feels kind of like this a group of immature people who don’t know how to engage in debate without trying to bait and offend their opponents. They remind me of little children who want attention. They are quite excited about the attention they are getting, in fact. The blog posts recently have all been about the attention. But now that they have national attention, it would great if they had some kind of sensible message or beliefs we could discuss. Instead, with one breath they call porn appalling and with the next they say it’s actually good for the women and the consumers who are engaged in the porn industry.

 What’s it all about, Alfie?

I was reading through Leviticus last week—the part with the skin diseases and where the priest looks to see if there is a white hair or a yellow hair in the affected area. As I read, I was thinking, “For pity’s sakes, why didn’t you just heal the people, Lord?” They had to walk around with a cloth over their faces to cover the noses that were falling off and cry out, “Unclean, unclean.” I find that a little offensive. When God is able to heal, why does he not heal? Why does he let people suffer outside the camp?

I can’t guess why God does some of the things he does. I know for sure he’s doing them for the good of his children and for his own glory. Beyond that, I’m not sure I should speculate. But I can see in the lepers’ stories a picture of my own life. Infected by sin which, upon examination, shows itself to be more than skin deep. I’m not sure what the yellow hair was about, but I understand that the diseases that were more than skin deep were the deadly ones—and the mold that went deep into the infected fabrics required that the fabrics be burned. In like manner, I was infected. Deeply. And I was forced to live outside the camp.

I was unclean.

Unclean. Unclean. My skin was rotten, my fingers and my nose and ears were falling off. I was that ugly and infected. And everything I touched was tainted by my disease.

Thanks be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Jesus came to the lepers outside the camp and he made them clean. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

I am newborn. I am newly made. My disease has been cured. I am cleansed in the blood Christ. There is in me no more place of rottenness and decay.

Wow.

Now the leper’s song changes from lament to thanksgiving.

Wow! Just, wow!

One of the reason I wanted to post Bob’s take  on prayers for health and wealth here, here, and here), is that I’ve been harping on suffering so long that I felt I needed to offer some balance.

I do believe God is a miracle-working God, even today. He’s graciously saved me and my loved ones from all kinds of hurts and disasters. We’ve seen swift answer to prayer and answers that tarried but could not be mistaken for anything other than God’s hand.

And I also agree with Bob’s take on health and wealth. I do believe that God’s desire is to bless us in every way. I love to celebrate his goodness and his generosity with my friends and family. I believe God gave us this world to enjoy and that he longs for the day when we will be glorified and can truly enjoy him and all his gifts.

Yes, the Bible makes it clear that in this world we will have tribulation. We are told that we will suffer. Christ suffered and we are told to take up our crosses and follow. Crosses are never comfortable. They are cruel, torture devices. And Jesus tells us to take them up and walk after him.

But we are told to take up our own crosses, not to lie down and allow Satan to trample us. To take a cross is to willingly lay down your life for another—to sacrifice for a neighbor or an enemy. That is not the same thing as having a fatalistic view and thinking God just wants you to suffer so you might as well grin and bear it. We are supposed to cry out to God. We are supposed to run to him as we would run to a high tower if an enemy were chasing us. We are supposed to ask God to relieve us. And we are to pray believing. Knowing that God loves us and is going to answer in the best way.

Because I recently went through a five-year period of suffering—it started with my husband’s diagnosis of colon cancer and it ended with his death, and in between it entailed a son that at times seemed to be lost to us, a home that was lost to us, one financial blow after another, and anxiety attacks that lasted for two years—I have done a lot of writing on suffering. I think suffering in the Christian life is always a blessing from God. I think that every curse is turned to blessing for those in Christ. (Just as I think that every blessing is turned to curse for those outside Christ.) I wouldn’t trade any of my suffering because in the hard places I’ve learned that God is utterly faithful and all powerful and all loving.

But I really want peace and prosperity and I don’t think it’s wrong to want those. I think God also wants to give me those good things. “The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, and he adds no trouble to it.” God blesses us often and richly and there is no guilt or sorrow attached to the good gifts he gives.

If we run ahead of God and try to help him out or try to manipulate him or try to steal the thing we want, we will bring trouble into our lives. The manna you keep overnight turns maggoty, the stolen bread turns to gravel in the mouth, and the quail we whine for makes us sick. But if we will pray and ask God for the thing we want, the health or the wealth, putting it in its proper place, below God and to be given at his discretion and used for his glory, then when he gives it, we find much to enjoy and nothing to regret.

So I want to encourage some of you that are now in your years of suffering. Some of you have cancer going on, or you are feeling like God has withheld a gift from you that he’s given to others that were less deserving, or you have children that worry you. Keep praying. God has delivered and does deliver and will yet deliver.

Who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us; (2 Corinthians 1:10)

Everyone is posting snow pictures, so here are a few Nikki took this morning. These are of the two small lakes and the gazebo just beside and in front of our mobile home. The kids in the park have been having a blast throwing snow balls and building snow men. Our poor old golden retriever, the one we brought down from Alaska, isn’t all that excited to see the white stuff again, though.  

My husband was in ICU.

He was a quadriplegic, but we’d only been married three years, and I didn’t yet understand how easily quads got pneumonia or how dangerous it was for them. He’d been in the hospital for two weeks, getting sicker and sicker. One day his doctor told us he was dying and there was nothing to be done for it.

Because he was on a respirator, with a fat tube going doing his throat, he couldn’t speak, but he looked at me with his big, sad brown eyes, and he mouthed the words, “I love you.”

I was sure he was telling me good bye.

I prayed, telling God, “You can have him, if you must. I can handle him dying. He’s already suffered so much. But, Lord, I can’t stand to look into his eyes as he dies.”

I’ve never had this happen before or since, but in one second an answer from God shot into my heart, complete:

You shouldn’t be looking into his eyes. You should be looking into mine.

You sit by his bed so when he wakes he’ll see you and find comfort.
I turned away from the One I loved.
Because I love you.

You would heal him in an instant, if it were in your power.
I could have saved the One I loved, but I didn’t. I let him die.
Because I love you.

Don’t look into his eyes, look into my eyes.

Eyes that love you.

I’d forgotten.

God saw. God watched over us. With much love.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Those 259 words above were to be my entry into Mary DeMuth’s “thin places” contest. To celebrate the launch of her memoir, Thin Places, Mary held a contest. The rules were to write about a thin place—a time when God met you and the veil between you felt thin—in exactly 259 words.  I told others about this while I was working on my entry, but I forgot to enter.

This morning when I got on my computer I saw a message on Facebook from Mary, reminding people that the deadline was midnight. So I got busy and finished up my entry.

The problem is that the contest was over last night at midnight, not tonight.  That’s what I get for not checking my Facebook more often.

Still, go over and read the entries. Many of them are quite good!

The end of Bob Vincent’s paper (continued from yesterday)

The Bible reveals God’s will.  We should always take our stand on what the Bible tells us pleases God:  God’s will is life and health and strength and enough of this world’s goods to take care of those for whom we are responsible and have enough left over to give to others in need.  God’s will is salvation:  “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).  “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house” (Acts 16:31).

When our Lord Jesus faced the most frightful and painful event in the history of the world, he earnestly prayed against it, and he did not rest until he had God’s good purpose clearly set before him: “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14:36).  At least four things stand out in Mark 14:36:

• Jesus rests in the love of God. God is his Father and his stance toward his child is one of affection and delight: “Abba, Father.”
• Jesus rests in the absolute sovereignty of God: “All things are possible unto thee.”
• Jesus really prays: “Take away this cup from me.”
• Having prayed, Jesus rests in submission to God’s good purpose: “Nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.”

Too often Christians fail to pray through a matter until they truly have the mind of the Lord.  The Apostle Paul prayed earnestly to be delivered from his painful, demonic thorn in the flesh, and he did not rest until he was assured by the Lord himself that he had something better in mind than merely being delivered from a vexing problem:  “For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Corinthians 12:8, 9).

Living as we do when Christian Theology is no longer the Queen of the Sciences, we are apt to receive bad news as if it is a revelation of the will of God.  Physicians, driven by obligation, often lay out all of the negative possibilities to their patients, and hurting people hear these words as if they are a divine decree.  They hear the doctor say, “Some people who undergo this treatment may die.”  They think, “Oh, no, I’m going to die!”  Without really wrestling in prayer, without following the Biblical instruction of James 5:13-16, they simply pray for grace to accept the inevitable.  How foolish!  How shortsighted!  How unbiblical!  Such thinking fails to come to grips that the world is governed by more than an observable nexus of natural phenomena. Behind every natural phenomenon is something greater, something beyond the observation of the natural man.  God is sovereign:  “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (Matthew 10:29)

Beyond natural phenomena is something else, too, the manipulation of Satan.  His hateful hand can sometimes be traced in the physical afflictions that we often face.  Had we been present at the synagogue that day when Jesus healed the crippled woman (Luke 13:11-17), perhaps we could have offered a purely natural explanation for her malady.  But Luke tells us that there was something sinister that lay behind her natural problem:  she “had a spirit of infirmity” (Luke 13:11). The Lord Jesus puts it this way:  “This woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound — think about it — these eighteen years” (Luke 13:16).

Until Jesus returns, everybody is going to die (Hebrews 9:27).  But we need to consider the fact that not every sickness is “unto death” (John 11:4).  Furthermore, we need to embrace the concept that it is normally God’s will that we be in sufficiently good health to go about the business of doing what God has called us to do.  And we need to see the real advantage Satan and his demons take through human sickness.  These times of pain and affliction become exacerbated by demonic whispers in our souls:  “You’re going to die, and there’s nothing that anybody can do about it.  You are a failure.  God doesn’t love you.  His promises are not for you.”  This is one reason that we should not only pray for the sick, but also visit them and pray with them.  They need words of encouragement.  We need to go and speak God’s Word to them to put life into them, to put the fight back into them.

Yes, of course, it isn’t always God’s will to heal everybody of every disease.  But so often we may miss the blessing of seeing someone wonderfully delivered and the testimony of that deliverance resulting in lost people coming to the Lord Jesus.  May we fight the good fight of faith, remembering that Psalm 118 was not written with a passive faith in mind, but a warring faith — a faith that boldly runs into the battle of the ages, joining the ranks of other warriors in the Lord’s army.  In such an active faith, as we boldly do what we could never do without the promises of God, we may stand secure, bolding shouting the promise:  “The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do to me.”

This post is continued from yesterday. Today we have more from Bob Vincent on prayer and on health and wealth:

As believers living under the New Testament, we are called to battle every bit as much as David.  But unlike David, our weapons are not sword and bow.  “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:  (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).

The Christian must never look at dark circumstances and assume that God has foreordained some dreadful thing for us and those we love.  On the contrary, we are called to pray and fight; we are called to plead the promises of God, trusting in our Sovereign God to deliver us from the malice of Satan as we resist the evil one, firm in our faith.  We are just as much in battle as David ever was, with a most deadly foe.  “For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe.  His craft and power are great and armed with cruel hate.  On earth is not his equal” (Martin Luther’s paraphrastic hymn of Psalm 46, “A Mighty Fortress Is our God”).

Given the secularist prejudice that has numbed the minds even of many Bible-believing Christians, we must beware that we do not rule out the evil supernatural forces that are pitted against us in the ordinary circumstances of life.  God is sovereign over all of life, to be sure, but underneath God’s sovereign purpose, a real battle is still raging between Christ and Satan.  We face three real and deadly enemies: the world, the flesh and the devil. And as we live our lives in this world, we must take seriously the real power of Satan.  This is explored in a sermon that I preached the Sunday after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, right after Sandy and I returned from hauling people out of the Super Dome, “A Trip to Job’s House.”  But the Bible takes natural circumstances seriously as well as the supernatural battle going on for our planet, even though all things are under God’s sovereignty.

When we encounter dreadful things, we must fight them using the Spiritual weapons God has given us (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).  We must pray and take our stand.  If we have loved ones who have gone astray, turning their backs on the Lord Jesus, we should never adopt a fatalistic attitude, twisting the teaching about God’s sovereignty into some heartless fatalism:  “God if it be thy will, save my child.”  What nonsense!  Scripture reveals God’s revealed will, and God’s revealed will is the salvation of our loved ones.  God’s sovereignty is never revealed so that we adopt an attitude of stoical resignation; it is so that we will fight, confident that the Lord is beside us, as quoted above:  “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name” (Exodus 15:3).

(to be continued)

For the next few days I’ll be posting a paper written by Bob Vincent, a pastor in Alexandria Louisiana, just because I liked it so much.

A Testimony

I have known the Lord for over forty-five years and during those years, I have seen him deliver me time and time again.  I have seen him physically heal people, sometimes literally in seconds:  one evening after our mid-week service, a woman who had been diagnosed with degenerated disks and was awaiting surgery as the only solution, was instantly healed as a group of elders laid hands on her.  That was over twenty-eight years ago, and she is still healthy and free from pain today.  I have seen the effects of God’s causing people to conceive after all human efforts had been exhausted:  on one occasion, nine months after our elders anointed the couple with oil.  Most did not give birth nine months later; sometimes it was a year or more.  But over the years we have had almost a dozen such folk in our congregation.  These are not naive rubes: two of the fathers are physicians; a third oversees physicians and nurses at a local hospital.

Time and time again, I have prayed for money, and God has sent it to me. I’ll pass on two memorable situations that I have often shared publicly and privately.

More than twenty years ago, the transmission went out in our only vehicle; it was going to cost $900, and I simply did not have the money. I told no one about it but cried out to God on my knees.  Several days later I found an envelope that had been pushed under my door.  Inside were nine, one hundred dollar bills.  I certainly praised the Lord, but I didn’t understand just how special this gift was at the time.  When I received the anonymous gift, I had assumed that someone had learned about my transmission from the mechanic and had chosen to bless me in this way.  However, some years later a young man came to see me.  He was a Southern Baptist from another parish (county) and hardly knew me.  He asked me, “Several years ago, did you find an envelope with nine, one hundred dollar bills in it?”

“Yes,” I replied. Then he told me that he had been praying, and the Lord had told him to go to Alexandria and give this amount of money to me. Needless to say, I was stunned at such an example of one of God’s providentia extraordinaria.

On September 15, 1996, as I put a check in the morning offering for $110, God quickened me with what had happened to Isaac in Genesis 26:12. By faith — I had never been able to do this before, nor have I ever had the liberty to pray exactly this way since — I prayed for a hundredfold blessing — we were really hurting financially at the time. I continued to press this home to my Father in prayer for weeks on end, and then, on November 16, 1996, out of the blue, I received 200 shares of Wachovia Bank stock from a relative on the East Coast.  Upon opening the envelope, I got on the Internet and discovered that the stock had closed at $55.00 per share.  Do the math:  it comes out to the penny! Through God’s hearing our prayers, instead of living in a church owned parsonage, we now have a beautiful home of our own, on top of a hill overlooking a lake, and we have been able to give away many thousands of dollars.

Psalm 118

Clearly Psalm 118 is a Messianic Psalm.  The Lord Jesus is the Stone rejected by the builders (Psalm 118:22; Matthew 21:42; Mark 12:10-11; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11; Ephesians 2:20; 1 Peter 2:7).  He is the ultimate and final sacrifice bound to the altar; his blood was shed once for all time, obtaining eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12-15, 23-28; 10:1-18).

The writer of Hebrews applies this Messianic Psalm to us.  Because we are “in Christ,” this Psalm is ours, as well.  Its promises are our promises, “For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us” (2 Corinthians 1:20).  And because King David is “in Christ,” this Psalm is his Psalm, too, a Psalm that had its origins in terrible conflicts from which our Lord God delivered David.

“In Christ,” David is also the stone rejected by the builders, often despised and overlooked, as when the Prophet Samuel came to Bethlehem to anoint King Saul’s successor.  ‘Jesse made seven of his sons to pass before Samuel. And Samuel said unto Jesse, “The LORD hath not chosen these.  And Samuel said unto Jesse, “Are here all thy children?” And he said, “There remaineth yet the youngest, and, behold, he keepeth the sheep”‘ (1 Samuel 16:10, 11).

People were often against him.  His own father-in-law repeatedly plotted his death, but God was always with David to deliver him, and David celebrates these wonderful deliverances in Psalm 118.  As I analyzed each word in the Hebrew text, I was impressed with the significance of the triplet in verses 10-12:

All nations surrounded me, but in Yahweh’s name indeed I cut off their foreskins.  They surrounded me, surrounded me completely, but in Yahweh’s name indeed I cut off their foreskins.  They surrounded me like bees, they crackled like a fire of thorns, but in Yahweh’s name indeed I cut off their foreskins [Psalm 118:10-12; in Mitchell Dahood, Psalms III, 101-150, Anchor Bible, Vol 17, (Doubleday:  New York, 1970), p. 154.  Supporting Dahood’s translation is Brown-Driver-Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1968), p. 558: “Psalm 118:10; 118:11; 118:12 in the name of y_, yea I will make them to be circumcised {enemies, by force of arms. . .}”.).

1 Samuel 18 records one example of this kind of violent circumcision of David’s enemies:  ‘And Saul said, “Thus shall ye say to David, ‘The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king’s enemies’”‘ (1 Samuel 18:25).  King Saul’s plan was that David would be killed by these “uncircumcised Philistines,” but the Lord was with David and delivered him in battle so that David brought, not one hundred, but two hundred of these Philistine “scalps” (1 Samuel 18:27) and won Michal, King Saul’s daughter.

How often must David have been in violent battles, surrounded by deadly enemies: “They surrounded me like bees, they crackled like a fire of thorns . . .” Again and again, the Lord delivered David: “but in Yahweh’s name indeed I cut off their foreskins” (Psalm 118:12).

David celebrates the victory of God over his enemies in Psalm 118, and as we sing this ancient hymn of praise, we are reminded that the truth of the Sovereignty of God is not about fatalistic, passive acquiescence to some horrible thing that we fearfully imagine is God’s predestined end for us.  It is about fighting the good fight of faith, confident that as we go into battle, the Lord is with us — as Moses teaches us to sing:  “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name” (Exodus 15:3).

(to be continued)

Seventeen years ago, I brought my son home from the hospital. He was seventeen hours old. I set him, in his car seat, on his father’s desk. I had never seen that man grin so widely before and I’m pretty sure I never saw it again. It was love at first sight.

When I first saw the boy I wept. But it was love at first sight for me, too.

I took him home on a bitter, windy, Alaskan day. The storm had blown all the snow off the lake and plastered it into our driveway. Our garage door was blocked in. I couldn’t even get my car out, so a friend drove me to Anchorage to pick Shane up.

I got him home, got out of my friend’s car up on the road, walked on top of the hard-packed four-foot high snow pile that covered the driveway and into the house, which was heated at that time by a small oil stove in the corner of the dining room, and set him in his bucket car seat, before his dad, like a treasure I’d traveled far to get.

And there we were, the three of us, with the oil stove running on fumes and no way for the oil truck to get down into the snowed-in driveway to fill our tank. But we were happy.

And that day, with the oil running out and wind howling off the lake and slamming into us so the whole house shuddered, pretty much set the tone for my son’s life.

It’s been a hard life, but a happy life, I think. Because sometimes the best things aren’t the easy things.

A very dear friend suggested at the time that it probably wasn’t God’s will for us to adopt a child. We were so broke—our business partner wasn’t paying us what he owed, our income was not enough to even cover the mortgage and the heat, let alone enough to provide all the things a baby needs. And we had no hope for future income. With a baby I wouldn’t be going back to work and my husband, being paralyzed, wasn’t able to bring in any money. So, how could God possibly want us to adopt a child, my friend wanted to know.

I told her I’d been praying for this baby for six years. I’d never gone to an adoption agency because I knew that my husband and I wouldn’t be the best parents. We didn’t have the ideal home. We were abnormal and I understood that. But I prayed asking God if he had a child that would thrive in our house and if so, would he bring the child to us.

So when a gal who worked as an aid for my husband asked one day if we wanted a baby, how could I not see that as an answer to prayer? We didn’t search for the baby—he came to us. His mother was eight months pregnant when we heard about him. A month later he was home with us. What kind of adoptions work like that? People spend months and years working on adoptions, often to have them fall through at the end. We had our first baby literally handed to us in one month (the second came in the same manner. Four months after Shane was born we got a phone call from a young woman, ‘I just had a sonogram. I”m having a baby girl in four months. I heard you might want her. Do you?”). How could I doubt that this baby was God’s gift to us and we to him?

My friend thought that maybe God was testing us to see if we’d do the right thing and turn the baby down. She’d been raised in a large Catholic family with a father that worked three jobs and she never got Christmas presents when she was little. She was one of the finest Christians I’ve ever met so apparently the lack of money didn’t do any long-term damage to her. But she didn’t want that for other children.

It’s true that my son has lived without some things that money can buy. He’s lived without school and dentists and sports and music lessons. He’s suffered for having been put into our family, there’s no doubt. But since when is suffering bad for you? Since when is suffering to be avoided at all costs? He learned to pray when he was a very small boy and he’s been relying on God for every need all along the way.

Sometimes the best things are not the easy things.

And that works both ways. He’s not been an easy child to raise. When he was two I often said it would be a miracle if he lived to be three. Either he would kill himself by one of his crazy stunts, or I would kill him because he was so full of energy and stubborn will that he wore me down until I was hardly sane.

But the best things are not the easy things, and I wouldn’t trade him for ten easy sons.

And here he is seventeen years later. Alive not only physically but spiritually.

Life has been hard, but we’ve been happy.