Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) says:

“Personally I think a WAITING PERIOD FOR AN ABORTION is no more reasonable than a waiting period to buy a gun.”

Not a surprising position for a libertarian. And I’m in the libertarian’s corner most of the time. But the difference in this case is that if you change your mind about buying a gun, you can always return it.

A gun can be confiscated if a crime is committed. It can be thrown away. Or sold. In other words, it’s a revocable decision. There is an undo button.

As millions of remorseful women can attest, there is no “Undo” button for an abortion.

As those who follow me on Twitter already know, I made a quick trip to the highlands of Central Mexico Friday morning–returning this afternoon.

The bougainvilleas are in full show-off mode. The jacaranda trees are still blooming purple. The air at the 6,000 ft. plateau that is the state of Guanajuato is clean and clear.

The project that takes me there must remain confidential but I can’t resist boasting that yesterday I enjoyed a grilled tuna steak (about an inch-and-a-half thick) that had recently been line caught off the coast of Mexico by some fishing buddy of my host named Barron Hilton (yes, that Barron Hilton.) Delicious.

I know I owe you Part II of the “Bad Theology” post below. Stand by. I’ll get to it shortly. (I know you’re beside yourself with expectancy. Take deep breaths and distract yourself with basketball.)

Each of Job’s friends had an elaborately constructed theological explanation for the epic crap storm they had just watched their friend go through. They argued their hypotheses eloquently. The presented them forcefully. But at the end of the book, we find God Almighty lining them up, verbally pulling their pants down, and drawing the word “LOSER” on their foreheads with a Sharpie.

God was apparently insufficiently impressed with their theological arguments.

From then until now, spiritual and/or religious folks have been irresistibly drawn to to making sense of tragedy (Mr. Moth, meet Prof. Flame. Flame . . . this is Moth. You two should get together.)

This is on my mind because it’s been a very tough week for a few people close to me and for about 127 million folks very far away.

Our pastor’s long-time administrative assistant died quite suddenly a few days ago. We’d known Judy for pretty much all of her nine-year tenure as the administrative hub of one of the fastest growing churches in America. In excellent health, she picked up a nasty strain of E.coli in something she ate. This led to a cascade of catastrophic health events that ended in her passing away in less than a week.

At pretty much the same time, a young man at my daughter’s high school, a senior, active in his church and a worship leader in his youth group, died after having spent a couple of months in a deep coma resulting from some sort of aneurysm.

Luke, like Judy, was a good person. Bad stuff happened to them. And as I write, bad stuff on a massive scale continues to happen in Japan.

Tragedy tends to bring out the armchair theologian in many. And I understand why. For one thing, it’s when we’re most likely to hear people impugning God’s character. We hear people uttering questions like “If there is, as you Christians claim, a benevolent God in charge of the universe, how is it that he allows things like this to happen?”

Or we hear others using the opportunity to reject our faith altogether. My daughter tells me several of her fellow students at her Christian school announced this week that they no longer believe in God because of what happened to Luke.

Now we like God. And we have chosen to align ourselves with His cause. And we want others to come over to the cause as well. So when people start talking trash about Him, we tend to rush to His defense.

On top of this is another very human tendency, rooted in our insecurities, to feel personally rejected when someone rejects the thing upon which we’ve built our entire lives.

Our reaction tends to be to rush in and passionately defend our choice by defending God. We can’t resist the urge to become God’s PR agent–explaining him and improving His image.

Of course, this requires addressing thorny theological issues like The Fall, the nature of God’s sovereignty and how it comports with Man’s free will. These are questions with which Christendom’s best minds have been grappling since the first century.

But faced with a doubter or a skeptic pointing to tragedy, few believers can resist rushing in to explain it all in two minutes or less.

Here’s the problem with all that. First of all, God is not insecure. His self-esteem is not fragile. And He’s been handling rejection with grace and patience for quite a long time now. Sometimes, when the doubters and fist shakers get really fierce and fiesty, God finds it amusing (See Psalm 2:1-2).

Furthermore, doubters and pointy-headed skeptics are rarely won over by intellectual arguments (although Paul attempted this at Mars Hill with mixed success.) The Bible makes it pretty clear that our primary weapons of persuasion are these:

Love. And Power.

Our trouble is that the brand of Christianity most of the American church displays right now is somewhat deficient in one or both of these commodities.

Finally, I think most Christians have a deeply flawed, overly-simplistic view of God’s sovereignty to begin with. Which means that when they go to explain tragedy to doubters and cranks, they simply don’t know what they’re talking about.

I believe this pervasive and flawed view of God’s sovereignty keeps most Christians from praying as often and as effectively as God intended. And I suspect it is turning a whole generation of Postmodern young people away from God.

“So Davey,” you’re probably saying, “enlighten us. Where has most of the Church gone wrong?”

Well, this post has run on long enough. So the answer, dear reader, must wait until my next post!

{Click here to read it!}

So, Mrs. Blather and the daughter unit have this show that they love to watch. Eventually they got me pulled into it too.

Castle is implausible but fun. The female NYC detective is, naturally, Vogue-cover beautiful. And for some reason, a crime novelist is allowed to be her partner and solve murders with her every week and will-they-or-won’t-they romantic tension carries everyone along.

So a couple of weeks ago a special two-episode story has a plot to set off a dirty bomb in Manhattan unfolding. The story line gives us some Muslim immigrants from a Middle Eastern country as suspects. But wait.  As it turns out, they’re only suspected because we’re all bigots and xenophobes.

Your actual bomb plotter turns out to be this guy:

He is ex-military. Special forces. And he and some of his buddies who served together in Afghanistan are going to set off this dirty bomb because, according to the words Castle’s writers put in his mouth, they are “patriots.”

Ironically, the same week that this episode aired, police in Lubbock, Texas uncovered a plot by a real guy who is working on building a real dirty bomb. It was this guy:

His name is Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari and he is an engineering student from Saudi Arabia.

So we have two worlds. The world of Hollywood writers in which the only terrorists are U.S. soldiers who speak of patriotism and honor. And the real world, the one you and I have to live in.

After watching this episode, I tweeted: “Is there a writer left in Hollywood with the courage to write a drama in which the would-be terrorist is Muslim?”

I think I know the answer.

I came across this Depression-era picture on Shorpy the other day and just had to grab it. Most faces tell a story. Some are an epic poem.

This photo of an unknown woman was taken in November of 1936 in a squatters camp outside Bakersfield, California. You didn’t end up in a place like that without have been run through a gauntlet of rock-hard realities and heartache. But the children of the Civil War era were made of pretty stern stuff. The photographer noted that this woman said:

If you lose your pluck, you lose the most there is in you–all you’ve got to live with.

I don’t want to lose my pluck. I need my pluck. Thirty years from now I want to be able to stare down some young punk with a glare like this:

Is Islam the violent, barbaric, irrational thing we see today because it has metastasized and mutated into something monstrous. Or has it actually always been that way, and we are only now forced to confront it because the world is smaller and information ubiquitous.

I suspect it’s the latter.

Thirty years ago we would not have heard about the 14-year-old girl who was flogged to death in Bangladesh yesterday for the crime of being a rape victim. A fatwa from the local imam decreed it must be so and the locals happily carried it out.

The reports said Hena was raped by her 40-year-old relative Mahbub on Sunday. Next day, a fatwa was announced at a village arbitration that she must be given 100 lashes. She fell unconscious after nearly 80 lashes.

Fatally injured Hena was rushed to Naria health complex where she succumbed to her injuries.

It was happening 40 year ago, and 400 years ago, and 1400 years ago. We just didn’t hear about it.

This isn’t extremist Islam. This is orthodox Islam.

A drifting spark from Tunisia has ignited a conflagration in Egypt. The question is, “What will emerge from the ashes?”

I’m no expert on Egypt’s domestic politics. Nor do I play one on television. But I am close to a couple of folks who are; and who divide their time between Cairo and here.

What I do know is that the energy feeding the crowds in the streets is coming from a diversity of sources. Yes, many are modern secular Egyptians seeking democracy, progress and greater freedom. Others are marxists or far-leftists of the stripe that inhabit faculty lounges of public universities all over America. The latter are, by definition, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American. But the most organized, disciplined and angry bunch in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the original radical Islamic group. Hamas and Al Qaeda are branches that sprang from that root (read The Looming Tower).

If the Mubarak regime falls, it is this group that is my bet to take control of the country. I can assure you, what they put in place will not be a beacon of liberty, progress and tolerance.

As I mentioned in my Twitter feed yesterday, “I’m no fan of the Mubarak regime but this feels an awful lot like Iran ’79. The Muslim Brotherhood in charge will be much, much worse.” And, “Just one more way the Obama presidency is giving me Carter-70s flashbacks. Add gas rationing and Welcome Back Kotter and we’re there.”

In 1979, the naive and, in some ways, anti-American Carter administration did nothing to save the Shah of Iran’s regime and actually encouraged the revolutionaries through back channels. Now a naive and, in some ways, anti-American Obama administration is doing the same thing. It will produce, I suspect, similar results.

For a more detailed and informed view on these matters, check out Caroline Glick’s post.

I’m beginning to settle in to the new routine associated with showing up at an office every morning. So far I’ve managed to show up each day dressed and in my right mind.

*****

I’m having some sort of technical problem with the blog software that is preventing me from placing photos in blog posts or changing the header graphic at the top of the page. Until I figure out what the problem is, we’ll be living in text only world around here.

*****

I received a wonderful and surprising comment on one of my old blog posts today. Longtime readers will recall my description last May of visiting Holland, Texas and how the tiny central Texas town was founded by one of my ancestors.I also mentioned how my great-grandfather, Samuel Houston Holland, moved from that part of Texas to Oklahoma at some point.

Today I noticed a new comment on that post from a W. A. “Smokey” Hines who, as it turns out, is a distant cousin of mine. He wrote:

I knew Samuel Houston Holland as Uncle Houston and his wife Aunt Ethel. I remember him as a gravely voiced and kind man. He worked in the oil business.

His brother William Thomas Holland was my grandfather.

Tom Holland’s daughter was my mother Ruth.

I enjoyed your writing.

Thank you,
W. A. Hynes

Isn’t the internet great? I assume Mr. Hynes came across my blog post via a Google search. As a result, I got to hear from someone who knew a great-grandfather I never laid eyes on. And to hear about the timber of his voice and learn that he was a kind gentleman is profoundly meaningful to me.

To bed now. Work awaits tomorrow.

This morning I will do something I haven’t done since May of 1999. I will report to a job. And I’m very much looking forward to it.

The fact is, for all but about six-and-a-half years of my life since 1986, I have been self-employed and wholly autonomous. But in recent weeks a door has opened up and I couldn’t be more pleased about the opportunity to step through it.

Today I’m joining the creative and strategic team at INPROV, a very innovative and successful agency that does a lot of what my previous agency did, i.e., help non-profits communicate powerfully to their constituents and help them raise the funding they need to do very important work around the world.

To be honest, at 51 I feel a bit like the kid whose family just moved to a new town and he’s starting at a new school. Will I be able to find my locker? My classes? Will the other kids like me?

I’m confident all will go well. And no matter what, a new season of my life is beginning today. New year, new beginnings.

Aaaaand I’m back. My trip to Guanajuato in the central highlands of Mexico was brief but amazing. Forgive me for teasing you but due to confidentiality requirements I cannot yet describe the primary purpose of my trip. But I can tell you that late on Saturday night I emailed my wife a message that ended with the following statement:

There were several moments tonight when I just had to laugh and say to myself, “Dave, you have the weirdest life ever.”

For most of the trip I was assigned a driver who was a member of the Mexican Secret Service. And the following morning I found myself in the back seat of an Expedition traveling about 100 miles per hour on Federal Highway 110D as my driver (mi conductor) endeavored to get me to church on time.

Despite my driver’s heroic efforts, worship was already underway when I arrived at the little storefront evangelical church–one of the very few in overwhelmingly Catholic Guanajuato. About 30 men, women and children were singing a song whose melody I instantly recognized. Eyes were closed. Faces and hands uplifted to heaven. And for the first time in more than 48 hours, I was home.

This is a remarkable phenomenon I have experienced in numerous corners of this planet. From England and Scotland to Denmark; from South Africa to South Korea; I have been in places that feel utterly foreign and strange in every way. When you don’t speak the language, it amplifies the feeling of lonely isolation and “otherness.”

Then you walk into a charismatic or evangelical church and you feel an instant bond of connection. You’re with your people. You are family. It is an indescribable sense of kinship and belonging. I had that experience once again last Sunday morning.

I could only understand a few words of the sermon, but I know good preaching when I see it. I was reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s statement that he preferred the kind of preacher who, when he got wound up, looked like he was fighting off a swarm of bees.

After the service I experienced the warmest welcome imaginable and visited with several members in my halting, broken Spanish and enjoyed the assistance of a fluent, bi-lingual friend.

In the post below I mentioned that I was headed to Mexico with a major life/career decision to make. That decision has been made. Details to follow. Stay tuned.