Clean Slate

   I should sleep but I can not. Last minute packing, positive anxiousness and a desire to go now. Four more hours(4 AM Sunday) until I head to Charlotte for the first flight. Short hop to New York City and a long layover. I doubt I will be able to sleep. I am not complaining. I am just being honest. Second leg is an 8 hour flight to Helsinki. I hope that sleep will be welcomed by my body on that segment.    A hopefully short layover in Finland will end with a a flight to Moscow, where another lengthy layover awaits. According too my wife, there will be no Southern hospitality to welcome me to Sheremetyevo Airport. Once that bit is done, it is just a six hour flight to my destination of Ulaanbaatar(Red Hero), Mongolia. Why Mongolia? Well my family is there. I met and married a Mongolian lady while living in Berkeley, California...Go Bears! Here we are 13 years later and 15 since she came to the United States and finally we are able to go there and...

You must trust your teammates. When seagulls follow a trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. 

Lake Baikal, Siberia is the largest lake that’s in all the world for it is very great. Found in south Siberia it is a Russian lake, near Mongolia which also does partake. About 400 miles long it is crescent-shaped— Pearl of Siberia— as they do relate. People also know it as the Sacred Sea and this frigid water is a mile deep. The lake is formed by faults that are within the rocks and is the deepest lake on earth before it ever stops. Since 25 million years ago when Baikal began, 4 miles of sediment settled under land. The deepest lake in all the world and the largest too, holds more water than Great Lakes all combined would do. Quakes occur all thru the day but most of them are small. You do not notice them or feel them at all. A quake in 1861 was enormous tho, sank miles of river delta in the lake below. It is a natural laboratory for ecology with millions of years of species evolving very slowly. Endemic to this lake are thous...

From This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems by Wendell Berry 2007 II The nation is a boat, as some have said, ourselves its passengers. How troubling now to ride it drifting down the flow from the old high vision of dignity, freedom, holy writ of habeas corpus, and the land's abundance--down to waste, want, fear, tyranny, torture, caricature of vision in a characterless time, while the abyss whirls below.

Just a few pics taken this month at USC Cafe that replaced the reflecting pool beside Gambrell Capstone still looking good Gambrell Hall, home of the History Department New cafe in the old BA buidling Add caption Columbia Hall Get your checkbook out Lord of the Congaree's last home Italian Cypress trees nestled perfectly into Sloan College Explanatory flyer from Strom Thurmond's successful write-in campaign Reflecting pool in front of Thomas Cooper Library

  I received an unexpected phone call yesterday asking me to share the gospel with some prisoners. As the caller talked, my mind prepared a line of retreat. At first it was going to be that I would love to go but how about I share next time. Delay is a well used tactic of mine. Thankfully the man who called kept on talking and as he did the Lord worked on me.   The Holy Spirit convicted me that if not now, then when. An opportunity was here before me and it was not by chance. I needed to take hold of it and simply speak the truth of the gospel. No one really cares about what I have to say nor should they. I am not the burning bush. God has spoken and His truth is in the Bible. I just need to share that truth.   I thank the Lord for my long-winded friend and that a barrier was broken in my heart and mind as he talked to me. The task is still before me but I will not be afraid. I will prepare and will simply share the soul-saving gospel of Christ.   Lord Jesus I tha...