lynn.jones's blog

One evening last week I was sitting on the patio eating a dessert, when a fly got the same idea. Since we had only one dessert between us, we got into a fierce contest for the dessert. I finally won out, but, since he couldn’t have it, the fly did his best to keep me from enjoying it. As I sat there swatting at the fly with one hand and trying to eat my dessert with the other, I thought of Ogden Nash’s couplet. He wrote: “God in His wisdom made the fly. . .and then forgot to tell us why.”

When I was growing up in Plainview, Louisiana, one of the significant dates on our yearly calendar was the Saturday before the third Sunday in August. That Saturday was Memorial Day at Prewitt’s Chapel Cemetery. All of my folks who had died on Daddy’s side of the family were buried in that cemetery. Each August we made our annual pilgrimage to that cemetery to pay our respects. We visited the graves, went inside the church for a memorial service, went to stand by the graves of family members for a prayer, and then had a big dinner-on-the-grounds beneath the trees.

In a “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip, Calvin’s mother was sitting in her chair reading a book and drinking a cup of coffee. All of a sudden Calvin walked in wearing a space helmet and cape. His mother asked, “What’s up today?”

Calvin replied, “Nothing so far.”

“So far?” his mother asked.

“Well,” Calvin said, “you never know. Something could happen today. And if anything does happen, I’m going to be ready for it!”

Calvin left the room, and his mom said, “I wish I had a suit like that!”

Jack Dillard has written about agricultural matters for the Sheveport Times for the last 100 years (at least it seems like a hundred years). I was reading his column on-line the other day, and it had this headline: “Weather Good for Cotton, Bad for Us.” In the article, he said, “We are barely through the first full week of the dog days of summer. They are over August 11, and I am ready to move on. I get some satisfaction from knowing our cotton crop benefits from hot weather with scattered showers.

When I was pastor of Highland Baptist Church in Shreveport, Louisiana, one Sunday I used a life jacket for an illustration during my children’s sermon. The jacket was olive green and had a military look to it.

As I carried the life jacket into the auditorium before the worship service, our church custodian asked me, “What’s that you’ve got? A bulletproof vest?”

That may not be a bad idea in these times. Preachers can’t be too careful, you know.

It’s been a bad week for the mortgage banking business. IndyMac, one of the largest banks in the country, has failed because of bad mortgage loans. And those two paragons of stability, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have had to be propped up by the federal government over the weekend in order to stabilize them.

At the heart of the problem is what mortgage insiders called “liar loans.” These were loans based on false statements about income and bogus paper work. We are now reaping the bitter fruits of the old human tendency not to tell the truth.