In a lot of places, your papers are everything. Which is why it was especially alarming to hear that Joe’s new best friends, the Taliban, have been seizing the passports of American citizens in Afghanistan. In the Mideast, as in some other parts of the world, your passport is your identity. Without it, you are at the mercy of those who might not have your best interests at heart. Seizure of your passport leaves you naked and vulnerable. Your comings and goings are now no longer your decision.
Pastors in my Evangelical circles have been increasingly faced with requests to provide “religious exemption” letters to those in our churches who do not wish to be vaccinated. With the FDA’s final approval of Pfizer’s vaccine, employer mandates will likely become ubiquitous and increase the requests for these letters. Should we give them?
We can’t fix this world, but there’s hope from God — that’s a point the Zippy Crew comes back to time and again as we deal with huge geopolitical shakeups (Afghanistan), the experience of grief in our lives (and how WandaVision explores that grief) and hope found in the midst of Paul’s warnings against sin in 1 Corinthians 6. Alongside those topics, we also do a wrap up of the 2020 Summer Olympics and talk about the political machinations around two giant bills currently going through Congress.
What is there to say? Our country is governed by an ice-cream enthusiast who has combined the policies of Jimmy Carter with the presentation of Gerald Ford (if Ford had suffered rabies) along with his own diminished capacity — and he didn’t have that much capacity to begin with. In his speech Monday he sounded like that angry doddering guy on the front porch of the rest home who causes visitors to enter through the back door instead.
Reeling from the horrors of 9/11 two decades ago, we entered Afghanistan to eliminate terrorist camps and also try to build a better nation for the people who had been caught under the Taliban’s control. Was it hubris or hope to think we could lastingly accomplish either goal? I’ll leave that discussion for another day, but this week has reminded us of how even our greatest powers stumble.
Not long ago, one of the gas lines on a piece of yard equipment here broke right where it connected to the plastic gas tank, causing gasoline to leak all over the place and rendering the thing unusable. I’d hoped to buy just the parts I needed from a knowledgeable person locally, but that was no longer possible.
At the end of August, the U.S. Open tennis tournament will begin in Flushing, New York. Novak Djokovic has recently won Wimbledon, bringing his total of major titles to 20, equaling him with Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal. Someone is likely to be the all-time leader in men’s major titles alone at the end of this tournament.
The Zippy Boys return in an out of this world episode. This week, we turn to the story around the stellar Olympian Simone Biles, the meteoric private space tourism race and the other worldly comfort of our God in the Psalms. We also continue the Summer of the Mini-Series discussion, returning to Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy.
It was an innocent — even endearing — touch when I received a delivery today. The delivery person left a sticker on the bag thanking me for my patronage. The sticker depicted five stars, a not too subtle hint at his desire for a five star review. And he deserved it — the items came quickly and correctly and in perfect condition. But, it got me thinking about how weird our view of customer service surveys has become.
Here’s something that I bet you know, but that it seems our government and news media — in large measure that’s redundant — don’t know: A lot of people are afraid of shots. They head the other way when the needle comes out. You know such people. Maybe you are such a person.