I presume I may be one of the many Americans who couldn’t care less about where Lebron James plays basketball. Yet I suppose its a sign of the times when the sports media is breathlessly on his trail reporting every meeting and analyzing every statement for some hidden clue.

Now if he was the person who developed a cure for cancer…

“So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.” – Voltaire

The world is full of commentators and the more I hear and see of them, including myself, the more I am inclined to understand that the world is full of words but only Christ is true.

we were meant to live in the Kingdom of God and this is what politics is all about, people attempting to build with their own hands that which they by instinct know they have lost. But each of these projects, whether good or bad, whether coercive or reasonably free, fails because it is made of the same stuff we are and therefore subject to our mortality. The Kingdom can only be from the Kingdom.

Some time ago, 1983 to be exact, I was on the radio in Alaska. The station KJNP, King Jesus North Pole, in, coincidentally, the village of North Pole just outside of Fairbanks. It was the evening, but the sun was bright as it always is in the far north summer, payment I suppose for the night’s death grip in December.

It was a routine evening, just monitoring a baseball game. As the game went on I heard a slight noise and there was a mouse. Since the building that housed the radio station was essentially a very large log cabin on the outside of town it probably just wandered in. There he was watching me as I sat around, earphones on, making sure the signal from the stadium got on the air. He looked at me and I looked at him. Neither of us moved. I was doing my work and he was doing his, that is being a mouse and scouting around new places.

I don’t remember exactly what I used but I did catch him. He was probably terrified but I had no intention of killing him. When the game was done I walked down the road for some distance, found a likely spot, and let him go. I know animals die, I know sometimes they have to, but I wasn’t interested in killing something for no good reason. Oh, sure, an owl or a hawk might take him later, but that’s what they do. I’m human, I have a choice.

Perhaps the mouse had a few good months left, months when the midnight sun kept things bright into the small hours of the morning and everything was abundant before the cold winds of September. Maybe he was gone the next morning. I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to do, let him be free.

I’ve used just about every kind of spray to keep my bathtub and shower clean. None has really worked. I went to Target and bought a can of Comet, 98 cents and a bit of scrubbing. Clean!