Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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When we think about the economic damage of climate change, most of us probably think about the physical destruction wrought by mammoth disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and droughts: Bungalows tumbling into the sea. Houses turned to ash. Acres of dead crops. That sort of thing. But the quieter, longer-term effects of global warming cut even deeper. Consider western North Carolina. It’s just beginning to repair the heavy physical damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure caused by Hurricane Helene nearly a month ago. The state’s tab for...
If you designed a banner declaring, “The world is full of crazies” and ran it up the flagpole, assuredly, I would salute it. On the other hand, as Veterans Day approaches, I realize the world is also full of opportunists – opportunists who devalue the dangers faced by the nation’s military personnel. We’ve all witnessed it with increasing frequency: some office-holder, bureaucrat or celebrity (a) gets pushback for a totally outrageous statement or (b) finally gets busted engaging in some flavor of financial/political/sexual skulldugg...
When I was young, I didn’t know how good I had it. My family wasn’t rich, but we had enough. My parents loved their children unconditionally, taught us the value of service and gave us all a foundation for lives well lived. Moreover, I grew up with a hero in the house — my father. He wasn’t a war hero, a great athlete or television star. Instead, he was a good and decent man who made sure our home was filled with love and laughter, and I never stopped looking up to him as an example of how someone should live their life. When I hit my young a...
The bride-price is a common feature of the Bible’s stories. Jacob famously put in 14 years of hard labor for Rachel. David paid King Saul a bride-price of 100 foreskins of the hated Philistines. For a family to give up a daughter in marriage represented a financial burden, as most of them lived a hand-to-mouth agrarian lifestyle, and all the women helped keep it going. To lose a young woman was to lose an important worker. So, the payment of a bride-price was meant to help compensate for that l...
Here we are, on the cusp of one of the most consequential elections in American history, with the choices for president as different as night and day. Three big questions remain: Who will win the presidency? Which political party will win control of the U.S. Senate and House? And what will the losers do after the winners emerge? Polls and pundits tell us it’s too close to call in the presidential election. I expect Kamala Harris to win the overall popular vote, just as the Democratic candidate has in every presidential election since 2004, b...
Donald Trump’s public appearances follow a typical direction. He has a speech in mind he intends to deliver with the help of a teleprompter, but instead he resorts to rambling and discussing odd, bizarre thoughts about all sorts of topics. To put it bluntly, the former president has increasingly spouted rhetoric that is nonsensical and incoherent. MSNBC columnist Zeeshan Aleem convincingly stated that, “Trump has been embedded in the public consciousness as a rule-breaker for so long that it can be easy to forget how far he is from ful...
The amateurs running the Kamala Harris campaign have finally hit bottom. They tried dealing the “Trump is Crazy” card, the “Trump is Exhausted” card and the “Trump is a Threat to Democracy” card. But Harris’ poll numbers just kept sinking and Trump’s only kept getting stronger. The upward turn of fortune for Trump that has Democrats in a panic is not because he was shot or because he suddenly transformed himself into Mitt Romney 2.0 or Mister Rogers. It’s because the whole country has been getting a better look at Kamala – and has seen what a...
This is a follow-up to my previous article in the Oct. 9 issue of the Quay County Sun about good things coming to those who wait rather than attaining the desires of our hearts through evil. We’re all sinners under temptation, which can lead to sin’s consequences (Romans 3:23; 6:23). God wants to give us our heart’s desires, but he never tempts us to sin (Psalm 145:16; James 1:13-15). Temptations are generally associated with sin, but our desires need not be temptation-based because we can and should have righteous desires (Romans 12:2; Philipp...
Heroes are easy to find but hard to keep. Especially when we’re young, we need our heroes, or positive role models if you prefer, as examples of what courage, sacrifice and success are all about. We typically start with our parents, superheroes in our young eyes, while our imaginations gravitate toward mythical beings like the Man of Steel, the Dark Knight or, yes, that proverbial cowboy riding through a time when right was right and wrong was wrong and what you did, not what you said, was who you are. Parents and action figures are just the be...
Former President Barack Obama stirred up some attention this month when he suggested lackluster support for Kamala Harris among Black men is mostly about her gender. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives or other reasons for that,” Obama said at Harris’ campaign offices in Pittsburgh. “You’re thinking about sitting out, or even supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you?” Obama likened this attitude to betrayal. “Women in...
It’s the usual partisan story. Folks who love Kamala Harris and hate Donald Trump thought she did fine in her interview with evil Bret Baier on Fox. Folks who love Trump and hate Kamala thought she was the same unqualified presidential candidate they’ve been watching for three months. But anyone in the middle, any truly independent or still undecided voter watching Fox, would have been left thinking a bunch of negative things about Harris. She didn’t look or act the least bit presidential. She recited her usual platitudes. She said nothi...
A documentary filmmaker, Mark, went to Hawaii to capture the stories of pearl divers. These guys make unassisted dives to retrieve oysters. By “unassisted,” we mean they have no oxygen tanks. They’re diving in the skin God gave them, holding their breath. This is a feat that takes years of training and is never without danger. Mark interviewed an older pearl diver, Mr. H, in the elderly man’s small home. Mark heard the tragic story of Mr. H’s son, who died one day after diving too deep or s...
Set aside for a moment the devastation that has hit the Southeast after back-to-back hurricanes. Turn instead to what’s happening in our little corner of the planet. Studies suggest the human body can’t survive outdoors in sustained temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit or more. And yet, Phoenix, Ariz., just endured a summer that included 56 days of 110-degree temps. And here it is October and they’re still cooking under 100-degree days. Over here in New Mexico, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported August was the hotte...
Over the past few months, Donald Trump has stoked the flames of white resentment on the campaign trail. Speaking to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last week, the former president — who once referred to himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines — accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.” It’s the latest in a long line of bigoted and xenophobic statements from Trump, ranging from immigrants migrating from “s—hole nations” to supposedly “poisoning t...
Jeeze. In just one day everyone in the country saw why the people in charge of the Democrat Party want to keep Kamala Harris off TV. And in just one day everyone in the country saw why Donald Trump wants our sitting vice president on TV as much as possible. The Trump campaign wants Harris to make a hundred more unscripted appearances on her media tour – even on safe, friendly and embarrassing liberal political places like “The View,” the Howard Stern radio show and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” On “The View” Harris didn’t merely deliver...
I heard an excellent sermon about temptation recently, and while the preacher was expounding on the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness, something triggered a reminder that God satisfies the desires of every living creature (Matthew 3:13-4:-11; Mark 1:9-13; Luke 4:1-13; Psalm 145:15-16). Each temptation represented a desire of Jesus’ heart that is also common to all humans (1 John 2:15-17). Satan offered to fulfill those desires for Jesus, but Jesus responded with Scripture, which many consider to be the way out of temptation God provides (1...
Every now and then, someone comes along who makes a unique contribution to the world in which he live. Kris Kristofferson, who died recently at age 88, was that sort of man. Kristofferson hit Nashville and the country music scene in the 1970s, first as a broom-pushing songwriter on Music Row, then as a gravel-voiced singer/songwriter on the Nashville scene, and finally as a movie star in Hollywood. But before all that, he was a standout athlete in rugby, football and boxing, a Rhodes Scholar and an Army officer. He was even offered a teaching...
It still seems so surreal. Sean Combs’s arrest last month on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy represents a stunning reversal of fortune for the hip-hop impresario. As recently as a year ago, Combs was feted as an industry visionary before a sudden series of sexual assault accusations emerged. Prosecutors said in an indictment that, since 2008, Combs (aka Diddy) has been the puppet master of a colossal criminal outfit that included employees and engaged in various sordid antics, including kidnapping, threats of v...
Tim Walz did a lot better than I thought he would in his debate with J.D. Vance on Oct. 1. Walz didn’t knock himself out of the race like Joe Biden. And he flashed some of the human skills and policy smarts that got him elected and re-elected as a congressman and governor by the good people of Minnesota. But Vance clearly won – throwing the baseball equivalent of a one-hit shutout. He quickly took charge of the debate and showed the 40 million Americans tuning in he was the smart guy who went to Yale, and Walz was the former high school foo...
The story is told of a tight-rope walker 100 years ago. He amazed crowds by working high above the ground, without a net. He displayed superhuman dexterity. He would go across the chasm of certain death, perched on a single, thin cable. He went forward and backward. He used a large pole for balance and then went without it. He’d cross on a unicycle, then on a unicycle while juggling. The crowds were delighted. He certainly seemed to have that high wire mastered. At one point, he pushed a wheelbarrow across and back, to thunderous applause. U...
Other than the presidential election and a super-tight congressional race down south, it’s a fairly tame general election in New Mexico. It could have been a more consequential year, with a mid-term, term-limited governor struggling to keep her party in lockstep on issues like crime containment and school calendars — while every seat in both the state House and Senate are up for election. Currently the New Mexico Senate is run by the Democrats, who command a 27-15 supermajority. All 42 Senate seats are up for election this year, but only 14...
When new Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham fired her first education secretary, Karen Trujillo, in July 2019 after just six months on the job, I thought it was a rash decision. But to be fair, I was biased. Like many people in Las Cruces, I knew Karen a little bit, and liked her. Still, the governor’s explanation seemed weak. “It is absolutely imperative that we genuinely transform public education in this state,” she said. “We must identify a vibrant and ambitious new leader for the Public Education Department as soon as we can.” “She just didn’t ha...
Are you better off than you were four years ago? That simple question to America’s voters was coined in 1980 by my father when he debated Jimmy Carter on TV. Part of my father’s closing statement, it probably won the night for him. Since then, it’s become a question that has been asked to voters in some form or another in every televised presidential debate. My father followed it up with several other rhetorical questions that are just as relevant today as they were 44 years ago: “Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it...
I have great respect for those talented in other languages. My father was a second-generation missionary in South America who became a Bible translator, developed a written language for a Peruvian tribe and wrote down their folklore so they could learn to read, after which he translated the New Testament for them. I also have great respect for those who’ve figured out how to communicate with people who cannot see, speak and/or hear. However, as proud as I am that we can communicate by various means, a recent event concerned me. I passed s...
Like clockwork, every presidential election we see a new set of attacks on the Electoral College. The Electoral College is the system by which the United States has elected every president since the Founding. As you may be aware, the Electoral College was the result of compromise among the Founding Fathers to resolve conflicting interests among the colonies that ultimately agreed to adopt the U.S. Constitution, thus becoming the first 13 American states under the Constitution. While the Electoral College has several components, the most...