Back when I was in a public high school, (gulp! TWENTY years ago! I can’t believe it!) I was in the choir. The choir teacher often had us sing old slave songs – I suspect it was his method of bootlegging Christianity into the curriculum. That, and Handel’s Messiah. My high school was roughly equal parts of black, white, and asian kids. As funny as it was to see him try to get the white kids to sing “soon ah will be done-ah wid de troubles ob de worl” it was even better to see him try to get the Vietnamese kids (the New Orleans area got a lot of Boat People in the 70s and 80s) to do it. Pronouncing the words correctly would get your knuckles rapped with a ruler, something the teacher was not supposed to be doing, but we never ratted him out because being in the choir meant lots of field trips. Along with learning those slave spirituals, though, we also learned a little about what having real problems means. Slavery, now that’s a problem. And yet many slaves had a vibrant faith that is testified to even today by these songs. It’s all a matter of perspective, and all of the kids who passed through that choir class owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Harry for trying to help us gain it.
At the moment I don’t have any serious troubles. Sure, I’ve still got over 10,000 worth of repairs to do on my house since Katrina, but here we are in another hurricane season so it doesn’t seem worthwhile to start now. And I’m not likely to find a contractor anyway, unless I’m willing to hire illegal aliens, which I’m not. I’m trying to get my sites moved from a shared server to a dedicated server (a real PITA because of the timing). The .htaccess for Pursuing Holiness is apparently hosed, how or why I don’t know, so the comments are messed up. I have one project I should have finished two weeks ago and haven’t, and I have a web app to build that I allotted six weeks for, that I haven’t started, and I only have eleven days left to complete. I have fibromyalgia and other health problems that are significantly slowing me down on getting these things done. So all these things are annoying, mosquito-like irritations but I wouldn’t classify them as real troubles. Those things are most of the reasons posting has been light and will continue to be for the next eleven days.
But in the meantime, to keep you busy and out of trouble 
, Axe has provided us with a couple of great finds.
More a commentary on a Christian’s life’s contrast than a satire of Christianity, and my Christian self laughed in that “so true” way.
Anyway, there it is.
I do love the Onion, and I haven’t taken the time to read it lately, so this was a great reminder. The other find was a Peggy Noonan article:
“The problem is not that the two parties are polarized. In many ways they’re closer than ever. The problem is that the parties in Washington, and the people on the ground in America, are polarized. There is an increasing and profound distance between the rulers of both parties and the people–between the elites and the grunts, between those in power and those who put them there.”
Axe, thanks for the heads-up on those!
