In this episode of the McFiles, Retired CIA Chief of Station, Brad Johnson offers analysis on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and exactly how fair or not, the coming election is likely to be.
Author: Brad Johnson
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Brad Johnson: Trump too far ahead in the polls to cheat the election away from him
Brad Johnson offers analysis on the current state of the electoral race between Trump and Biden or whoever may replace Biden suggesting that Trump’s lead in the polls make it impossible for the Democrats to cheat it enough to take this election.
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Brad Johnson: The Disaster Debate and the curious turning of the media narrative
In this Brad Jonson analysis, the debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is examined in the context of a behind the scenes look at motives for this event.
Clearly there has been a Sea Change in media narratives. In this video Brad examines a few possible reasons for this major shift in media opinion.
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Brad Johnson: The Heritage Foundation, and the fake conservatives within the Republican party
In this video, Brad Johnson takes on the RINO establishment as well as various organizations that claim to be conservative but no longer even seem to hold conservative values.
Specifically The Heritage Foundation in this case.
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Serbian President: “The train has left the station, and no one can stop it”
In an interview with Die Weltwoche, a Swiss based weekly news magazine on June 9, the president of Serbia echoed a lot of the sentiments of Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán in terms of central and east European geopolitics and the seeming NATO push to a wider war with Russia.
The first topic is on the war with Russia, and topics are covered such as the recent history of Serbia and the US.
Like many central European leaders, this is a calm and sober analysis of important topics which we sorely need in the West.
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Two interviews with Hungarian Prime Miniter, Viktor Orbán on the escalation of war between NATO proxies and Russia
Following are two consecutive interviews from Hungarian TV with popular president, Viktor Orbán in which he discusses what he sees as a large move towards escalation in the current war between Russia and Ukraine.
PM Orban is concerned that NATO is causing an escalation by doing targeting and telemetry for strikes within Russia using weapons they supplied to Ukraine. This would mean that NATO has progressed from merely supplying defensive weapons to Ukraine, to being active participants to strikes on Russia, according to PM Orban.
Much more detail is explained by the Hungarian leader in terms of Hungary’s unique position as a NATO member, but who is a non-participant in this conflict. The prospects for peace, Orban feels, are dismally low. The likelihood for a much wider conflict is almost certain.
Orban explains that his own study of past World Wars shows that a certain amount of setting the mood for war takes place in nations that would otherwise not have an interest in a given regional conflict, which can result in catastrophe.
Viktor Orbán May 2024 World being prepared for major war:
Viktor Orbán II NATO is already attacking Russia:
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2023: A YEAR OF GOD’S GOODNESS
2023: A YEAR OF GOD’S GOODNESS
“Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are.”
E.H. Chapins
My original intent was that my first missive of 2023 would be a blistering review of things going wrong in our world on so many fronts. To this end, I had already teed up several facts in my mind to write the first of several missives—beginning with coming energy disruptions—that would characterize “2023: A Year of Dislocations.” A good friend in West Texas agreed; he told me it was going to be a year of upheaval ahead.
I was prepared to charge full speed ahead, like a snorting bull, at any number of red flags the world’s arena has to offer.
And there are enough of them to make a matador dizzy.
But then I got interrupted by the small, still voice of God.
It happened at 2:30 a.m., during one of my nightly trips to the bathroom, long after the ball had dropped in New York, after the partying and dancing on television subsided, and hours after the Ohio State placekicker missed a field goal that would have completely changed the narrative of the college football championship.
At any rate, I was talking to God about what the year ahead would hold for my family, friends, and troubled country that I love so much. I was expecting confirmation for a litany of bad developments ahead.
Instead, God told me that the year ahead was going to be a season of unprecedented goodness for the people that call on His name!
Surprise alert!
God stopped me in my tracks.
I had so steeped my spiritual thinking in the judgement of God that is coming—and it will—that I have completely underestimated the goodness of God as a change agent in the lives of individuals, my family, my extended family of friends, the communities around me, my country, and the globe.
And in one short burst of spiritual insight—for the briefest of moments—God opened for me a lifetime of realizations into His goodness.
As you can imagine (or at least many of you can) it was quite the experience.
This unexpected bathroom encounter has changed my approach to everything: the way I view God’s marvelous creation, my relationship with Imogene, and the way I talk to and interact with other people around me (later that very same day I was able to prophetically speak the goodness of God as a healing balm for a grief-stricken mother’s troubled soul).
In a word, I’m seeing God’s goodness everywhere around me. From a pastor’s reference to the virtuous woman (who does her husband good and not evil all the days of his life … who will rejoice in the time to come); to the reappearance of scurrying sandpipers on the beach; to God’s innumerable mercies and acts of favor on my behalf every day.
The next afternoon, I was walking on the beach. I asked God a question: what do You mean by the concept of good? Is my mental comprehension of “good,” filtered as it is through my English linguistic prism, the same as God’s? What did the Holy Spirit mean have in “mind” when the word is used in scripture? In the Bible, for example, the word “good” appears 749 times.
The first appearance of the word “good” is in Genesis 1:4 when God, after He creates light by His Word, says that it is good (in the Hebrew language tobh). As one commentator notes: “The word contains less an aesthetic judgment than a designation of purpose and correspondence to God’s will, indicating the moral goodness of the Creation.”Of course, one could spend a lifetime studying the Old Testament concept of good. For our purposes here, biblical scholars see five aspects of the concept: practical, abstract, quality, moral and technical.
In Psalm 34:8 it says plainly: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”
In the New Testament there is a fascinating exchange between Jesus Christ and the rich young ruler that appears in all three of the synoptic Gospels (Matt. 19:16-17; Mark 10:17-30; and Luke 10:25).
“And behold, one came and said unto him, ‘Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life’? And he [Jesus] said unto him, ‘Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God:’”
Jesus used his local dialect, of course, which was later rendered into Greek. The Greek word corresponding to Jesus’ meaning is agathos, (a good that acts for the benefit of others)one of many Greek words for “good” in scripture.
Again, one could spend several years exploring the topic of “good” as revealed in the scriptures, including the theological implications of the passage mentioned above.
The older I get, the more interesting the study of words and their origins become.
The etymology of the English word “good” we use today is similarly interesting. Our word is derived from the Old English god, derived in turn from the Proto-Indo-European term g”ed,” (to unite, be associated, or suit). Its Russian cognate is godnyj (fit, well-suited, good for). I find it interesting that none of these words have our deity concept of god as the root word.
At any rate, my final linguistic stop is the world of Chinese characters. As many of you know, I love the study of Chinese characters because the language often offers word-pictures of concepts dating back several centuries.
In my mind, that is the beauty of studying Chinese characters.
The word “good” in Chinese, as we learned in our Chinese Mandarin classes in Monterey, California many years ago—is most frequently Romanized as hao好(third tone). The character is an ideographic compound: woman plus child. The widely accepted meaning of this character is that the characters for “female” and “child” were put together to form a compound because it was “good” for a woman to have a child. Over time, the idea that became internalized in Chinese thinking was the affection and feeling between a mother and her child. In the Chinese thought world, this relationship personified “good,” and was conceptualized accordingly.
I love that thought.
Enough of my etymological forays.
The last two Wednesday mornings here at North Myrtle Beach, I have attended a Christian’s men group. A local supermarket provides a meeting room and breakfast for the weekly gathering of at least 70 or 80 men, of all denominations. The men assemble for one purpose: to worship Jesus Christ as Lord and King. It is the goodness of God in action. The speaker started the last two meetings with the same idea:
“Yesterday is history
Tomorrow is a mystery
Today is a rendezvous with destiny.”
What a powerful thought!
It implies the goodness of God.
If all this is a dream, or I’m playing out a role in some superior intelligence’s virtual reality game, don’t wake me up!
For the moment I’m bathing myself in the goodness of God.
Is all of this to say that there is not an insidious evil growing like a cancer in our society? No. There is. And most of you can sense it. Nor, in my view, is the goodness of God to be seen as a blanket of sand for me to bury my head in until the evil somehow passes by. Or pretend it isn’t there. I have a personal obligation to resist, stand and overcome the darkness.
Certainly, God’s goodness is not a protective shield for churches and leaders who have become listless, lazy, compromising, self-indulgent, indifferent, and afraid to speak out.
Moreover, I am seeing, more and more, the goodness of God as the antidote to the pervasive toxins everywhere around us: overreaching government control efforts; the absence of integrity in public leaders; the erosion of civility, discourse and standards of morality; efforts to undercut the sanctity of marriage and family; the politicization of institutions; and, demonic activities becoming acceptable.
And that list just scratches the surface.
My insistent, constant, and integrous search for God’s goodness in my life and my personal relationships, and how I can spread those spiritual realities—like life-seeds—to the world around me, has become my quest for the year ahead.
It is my new assignment.
And it is so much more than a fleeting New Year’s resolution.
I will speak God’s goodness to the growing darkness around me without fear. I decide—as a matter of my human will—to confront, head-on, what is coming over the horizon. I will not be sidetracked or rendered ineffective by negative words, or verbal arrows, intended by those around me to distract me from my task or to wound my soul.
Insofar as my limited abilities and limited circle of influence allows—as the days of 2023 unfold—I am determined to become a beacon of God’s goodness to a dying world.
Will you join me?
1 Proverbs 31: 10-31.
2 The King James Study Bible, (Liberty University, 1988), p. 5.
3 “The Hebrew Word for ‘Good,’” ichthys.com.
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ODE TO WILLIAM (“BILL”) PHILLIPS
“… I will never have it that God created any man, especially any Christian man, to be a blank, and to be a nothing. He made you for an end. Find out what that end is; find out your own niche and fill it. If it be ever so little, if it is only to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, do something in this great battle for God and truth.”
Charles Spurgeon
Belle Phillips called Imogene and I one morning last week to tell us that my good friend Bill Phillips had passed away, peacefully in his sleep, at 6:00 a.m.
Bill was 78 years old and had been sick for a long time.
“Sigh.”
I cannot imagine the first few years at Alice Lloyd College, located along Caney Creek, in the rural Appalachian Mountains, without Bill and Belle—and their three boys, Andy, Chris and Collin. Bill headed the Upward Bound project on campus, with his office located in the old Brown and Green Building. Upward Bound was a program designed during the LBJ “Great Society” years to encourage mountain high schoolers to attend college. Working in his office was a young lady who had just graduated from college herself, Imogene Bates.
Bill had a passion to see young people in the mountains succeed. He was, among other things: an educator, skilled communicator, a compassionate boss, an artist, a thinker, an outdoor enthusiast, an avid duck hunter, a loving husband, and a patient father. I looked at him as a mentor of sorts during those years.
He became one of my closest friends.
I will never forget him.
Bill loved football. He played on our faculty team in the ALC intermural gridiron wars waged on the college meadow. Today, it is hard to imagine the meadow the way it was in those years because of the new campus buildings. At one time, the meadow was the only flat piece of land on campus: on one end stood the small stone college library—with a flat roof where Miss June herself would occasionally watch the blood-letting on the field of play below—on the other end was the picturesque stone “Grender House.” The meadow’s boundary was marked on one side by a small stone wall running alongside the road that meandered through campus, a small road that ran next to the creek. On the other side was a sidewalk that ran in front of the campus store and a small frame house where I lived.
The field was small, but the competition was intense.
In those years, the faculty team was the campus football juggernaut.
It was supposed to be flag football.
When the faculty was involved, it always turned into hand-to-hand combat.
I remember walking into my college classroom one morning after one such contest and noticing one of my students, a big local kid named Aaron (if memory serves me correctly), sporting two puffy, swollen, black eyes.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“What do you mean what happened to me?” Aaron said. “You did this!”
He was, of course, referring to the final play of the game late in the afternoon the day before. It was getting close to dusk and the clock was running out. The final play of the game was a quarterback sneak with me diving headlong into a pile of faculty and student flesh for the deciding touchdown.
Oh, the stories I could tell about my fellow faculty teammates over the years! There was Richard Bushong and his homemade mouthpiece, toupee-less music master Richard Kennedy, teeth-rattling blocks by Charlie Whitaker, Ken Medders (who said he played tight end at Notre Dame but my first pass plunked him in the chest), Gary Gibson (if there was no college girls’ game), Dean Wally Campbell with his comb over, an injury-prone Dr. Jerry Davis, and a thin and svelte Fred Mullinax.
A couple years ago, I met former ALC student Freddie Spears for dinner. His most vivid memory of the college experience was a football game in the meadow. He recounted a play where President Davis and Fred Mullinax, on a double-team block, drove him into and over the stone wall (he claimed it was long after the whistle had blown the play dead). He laughed while telling the story.
In the interest of time and space, I’ll tell just one more story. There are probably hundreds to tell. This one involves Bill Philipps.
Bill was rushing the passer from one end and I from the other. We shed our respective student blockers and ran—full-speed—toward the college student playing quarterback. Probably the fleet-footed Johnny Spicer. He ducked and Bill and I crashed into each other in a collision as fierce and bone-crunching as anything you’ll see on Sundays in the NFL.
The hit was so memorable that Bill and I would talk about it for years afterward. I honestly thought I had broken a bone or two. We both limped to the sidelines after the play. In all my years playing peewee, high school and military service football, I have never experienced a tackle quite like that!
And friendly fire at that!
Ah, the memories!
To visit the Philipps household—they lived in the white Anderson house across the creek—was to enjoy the very best of Caney Creek hospitality in those years. Bill Melton—also a close friend of Bill’s—told me recently that such visits were among his most enduring memories of campus life. There was a special closeness of campus faculty and staff during those years, and Bill and Belle played a large role in creating that unique atmosphere.
Ima and I spent many evenings at the Phillips’ house playing Rook (after Belle put the boys to sleep).
And we weren’t the only ones.
Bill’s wife, Belle, was a terrific cook. Whether it be a breakfast of sausage, eggs, fluffy biscuits and gravy (or homemade jelly), or just a meal she would cobble together out of a seemingly empty refrigerator, her meals were always delicious. Even now, I start drooling when I think of her strawberry shortcake. (Belle and Jane Campbell spearheaded the group of campus ladies that prepared an absolute feast in the Hunger Din the evening prior to Ima and my wedding at the Caney Creek Baptist Church).
Bill left the college after the funding for the Upward Bound program played out. He subsequently managed and opened several Western Steer steakhouses from Knoxville to Pikeville, designed and built salad bars, and, much later, owned and drove a semi-tractor trailer rig.
Over the years, we visited the Philipps in various locations. When we took a group of JBS students to visit the World Fair in Knoxville, we stayed at their lakefront home. Ima and I even considered buying the small A-frame house next door to their home near Cherokee Lake; we loved them and the boys that much. We also visited the Phillips on a handful of occasions when they moved to Bill’s final stop—and the town of his childhood years—Savannah, Tennessee.
Our last visit with Bill and Belle was on our way out West on Ima’s post-retirement grand tour this summer. At the time, Bill was in poor health and had trouble breathing. His constant companion was a breathing machine. Coughing spells made conversation difficult. Bill and Belle insisted we sleep in their bed. On the wall was a piece of artwork I did for Bill and Belle many years ago—a mountain scene with morning fog rising over a lake. The walls were also decorated with an assortment of ducks (trophies of past hunting ventures), as well as Bill’s artworks portraying various ducks in flight.
Before we left, we took a picture of the four of us (Bill was in pajamas and toting his oxygen machine).
It remains one of our most treasured photographs.
I will miss hearing Bill say “like an old chip,” whenever I called to ask him how he was doing. I’ll miss talking to him about his beloved Tennessee Volunteers and Atlanta Braves. I’ll miss the loving way he teased Belle. I’ll miss him talking about his three boys. I’ll miss hearing his viewpoints on the various woes now besetting our country. I’ll miss floating my ideas for my novel with him. I’ll miss talking to him about God’s goodness.
I’ll miss praying for him …
Farewell my friend!
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ADAM’S SANDCASTLES
“We are like children building a sandcastle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sandcastle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.”
Pema Chodron
“God’s created sand and water become the tools we use to tell people walking the sandy beach, carrying their own life’s stories, that Jesus loves us and hears our hearts.”
Ann Wooten
When I saw the hurt in her eyes—a mother’s eyes—I knew she had a story to tell about the sandcastle that she and her husband were so skillfully crafting.
For me, it was a special encounter on one of my typical morning walks along the ocean. But this morning, and this walk, and this encounter, would change me forever.
It all began with my morning routine: crossing the street in front of our high-rise resort building, down the blue-plastic walkway, past the dunes, into the sand and down to the ocean. Then to one of my favorite places to commune with God and thank Him for the endless waves rolling in, the constancy of His creation, like His Holy Spirit that saturates us daily.
This morning, for some reason, I walked northward along the beach. Toward the Cherry Grove pier with its middle span missing—like a hockey player’s grin—a grim reminder of a recent storm that had ravaged the beach a few weeks earlier.
I saw them shortly after I headed up the beach. Two figures huddling over a sand figure of some sort.
I walked over to them, my curiosity gene pinging. Then I noticed the sandcastle. But this was more than your run-of-the-mill sandcastles that I’ve seen kids build on the beach a hundred times since I arrived.
This sandcastle was a thing of beauty.
A piece of art.
A woman was carefully carving the scallop-shell type roof atop the castle’s main turret. A man—I assumed to be her husband—was packing sand around the castle’s base.
“What a beautiful sandcastle,” I said.
“Thank you,” the lady replied, “it is a tribute to our son Adam.”
“What a blessing,” I said, admiring the beauty of the sandcastle and the loving attention to detail.
I turned to walk further up the beach, to my prayer spot, thinking as I walked by the roaring waves what a tribute of love I had just witnessed.
The woman was still there on my way back down the beach. She introduced herself as Ann. “I like to write stories about special encounters like this on the beach,” I began, “please tell me more about Adam.”
“He was a wonderful son,” Ann said, “the kind of boy everybody liked. His smile always lit up any room he entered. He loved helping people.”
By then her husband, Ronnie, returned. They showed me pictures of elaborate and beautiful sandcastles from beaches stretching from the Carolinas to Florida. There was even a huge dragon, several feet long, each an artistic masterpiece dedicated to their son’s memory.
“All of our sandcastle sculptures feature five things that were special to Adam,” Ronnie explained, “his name Adam, a cross, a four-leafed clover (Adam had a special knack for picking them out in the yard), sand-drizzle trees, and Psalm 116.”
I prayed for Ann and Ronnie, the specialness of their memories for their departed son, and the love behind their tributes for Adam. After I finished, Ann thanked me. “We do this as a testimony to Jesus Christ,” she said, “whenever someone comes over to look at our sandcastle, we get to speak of our love for Adam, and the faithfulness of our Lord.”
I thanked them for the unique spiritual experience and left them to finish their tribute sandcastle honoring Adam.
We exchanged contact information.
I couldn’t sleep that night. All I could think about was Ann and Ronnie and how to tell their story in a missive, in a way that honored Adam’s memory and their love for him.
The next morning as I walked up the beach, they were at it again. I walked over. Ann was working on a new sandcastle. “The other one collapsed shortly after you left yesterday,” she said. It was a blustery, overcast morning on the beach. She wore a red bandana.
“Please tell me more about Adam,” I asked. “I want to tell his story.”
“He was such a good boy,” she began, “I loved him so much! He had two children—one newborn—and a new job,” she said, her voice starting to quiver.
“The pressure was just too much for him.” Then she told me in rapid-fire fashion about an attempted suicide, a frantic trip to the hospital, an excellent doctor who seemingly pulled him back from the brink of death—”
Adam’s last words were “I’m a little bit tired,” Ann told me later in a note, “I think I’ll rest a little. I love you momma. Tell daddy I love him and to watch for deer.” As Ann told me about Adam’s final moments while we were standing on the beach, her eyes glistened with wetness, holding back a torrent of tears, love, hurt, anguish and guilt. I had stumbled into Ann’s secret sanctuary—the place none of us want to reveal to strangers. “He coded out. He told me he loved me.”
Adam was 37 years old.
He died on Christmas Eve.
“Sigh.”
1 I have lifted some excerpts from Psalm 116: I love the Lord because He hath heard my voice and my supplication; the sorrows of death compassed me … then called I upon the name of the Lord: O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul; Gracious is the Lord, and righteous, yea our God is merciful; Return into thy rest, O my soul: for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee; for thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living; I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord; Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints; I will offer thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord; In the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem, Praise ye the Lord.”
2 These figures are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on 2020 data, as cited by American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Please note these figures are based on pre-pandemic statistics: they may be even higher following the pandemic.
3 One of my favorite verses is Jeremiah 5:22: “Fear ye not me? saith the LORD: will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand [for] the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and cannot pass it: and through the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it.”
4 Marissa Polascak, “Myrtle Beach Sand vs. Sand From Around the World,” myrtlebeach.com, Jan. 1, 2022.
5 Lauren J. Young, “Tracking Time Through Shifting Sands,” Science Friday, Jul. 29, 2021. Quote is by Stephen Leatherman, Director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said, forcing a smile, “I know he’s in heaven now and one day we’ll see him again. He gave his life to Jesus as a young child.”
“Yes,” I replied, “I believe we will know our loved ones in heaven,” (I was thinking of mom and dad as I said it).
In a later note, Ann said that “God chose him [Adam] for us and we are truly blessed to be his family forever. He lives with Jesus.”
Standing there on the beach that day, in that short window of time where God orchestrated our lives to cross each other—and observing first-hand the emotional toll it had taken on Ann and Ronnie—I became very angry with the enemy of our souls who convinces so many people, especially young men, that they have no longer have any hope in living.
Sadly, Adam is not alone.
In our culture, suicide has reached epidemic proportions. The statistics are staggering: there are an estimated 130 suicides per day in the U.S.; suicide is the 12th leading cause of death in our country; in 2020, 45,979 Americans died by suicide (13.48 per 100,000 population); there is an estimated 1.2 million attempted suicides per year (and those are only the ones that are somehow reported); and, the suicide rate is highest among middle-aged men.
In our country, a spirit of death is swallowing up life.
And Jesus Christ, by His own testimony, is Life.
1 I have lifted some excerpts from Psalm 116: I love the Lord because He hath heard my voice and my supplication; the sorrows of death compassed me … then called I upon the name of the Lord: O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul; Gracious is the Lord, and righteous, yea our God is merciful; Return into thy rest, O my soul: for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee; for thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living; I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord; Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints; I will offer thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord; In the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem, Praise ye the Lord.”
2 These figures are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on 2020 data, as cited by American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Please note these figures are based on pre-pandemic statistics: they may be even higher following the pandemic.
3 One of my favorite verses is Jeremiah 5:22: “Fear ye not me? saith the LORD: will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand [for] the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and cannot pass it: and through the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it.”
4 Marissa Polascak, “Myrtle Beach Sand vs. Sand From Around the World,” myrtlebeach.com, Jan. 1, 2022.
5 Lauren J. Young, “Tracking Time Through Shifting Sands,” Science Friday, Jul. 29, 2021. Quote is by Stephen Leatherman, Director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University.
At that point, another person walked up to view Ann and Ronnie’s sandcastle tribute to Adam. I wandered up the beach to my favorite place of prayer. As I looked back down the beach, Ronnie was hauling another tub of ocean water back toward Ann and the sandcastle.
As the waves rolled in, my soul was troubled. My thoughts were about Ann, Ronnie and Adam. At what point, I asked God, does a healthy honoring and tribute of departed loved ones cross over the line into an idol of grief that the enemy can manipulate?
My second thought, as I watched Ronnie mix the beach sand with the water in the distance, was about the truly unique God-created specialness of sand.
Yes, sand.
I recalled that my first sermon was about sand. Sand is mentioned some 28 times in the Bible, almost always as a symbol of a number beyond counting. Moses buried the Egyptian man he murdered in sand. Almost every trip up the beach, I ask God how he came up with the idea of sand: porous, heat absorber, cleanser, and source of life.
Today’s scientists assert that the sand on the Myrtle Beach strand is predominately quartz, deposited over eons of time from the erosion of the Appalachian Mountains, with bits of shell and a slight browning color due to the rusting effect of iron. Others maintain that “a large part of sand is crushed up spines of sea urchins.”
No matter. From the beginning of time, in my view, this sand was created to be building material for Adam’s sandcastle.
A therapy of love in the sand.
As I walked back down the beach, I saw Ann and Ronnie one more time working on the sandcastle. I prayed with them again, hand-in-hand, in front of Adam’s sandcastle, trusting the Holy Spirit would give me words that would act as a healing balm for their souls …
This missive is dedicated to the life of William Adam Wooten (1983-2020), beloved son, father, husband, and brother.
1 I have lifted some excerpts from Psalm 116: I love the Lord because He hath heard my voice and my supplication; the sorrows of death compassed me … then called I upon the name of the Lord: O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul; Gracious is the Lord, and righteous, yea our God is merciful; Return into thy rest, O my soul: for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee; for thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living; I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord; Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints; I will offer thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord; In the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem, Praise ye the Lord.”
2 These figures are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on 2020 data, as cited by American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Please note these figures are based on pre-pandemic statistics: they may be even higher following the pandemic.
3 One of my favorite verses is Jeremiah 5:22: “Fear ye not me? saith the LORD: will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand [for] the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and cannot pass it: and through the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it.”
4 Marissa Polascak, “Myrtle Beach Sand vs. Sand From Around the World,” myrtlebeach.com, Jan. 1, 2022.
5 Lauren J. Young, “Tracking Time Through Shifting Sands,” Science Friday, Jul. 29, 2021. Quote is by Stephen Leatherman, Director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University.