Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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“Pastor, all that stuff you talk about is fine for you, all that Gospel stuff. But I live in the real world. I’ve learned that promises are made to be broken. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times it’s happened to me, but I can show you the scars. When a thing sounds too good to be true, it is. I need real help, and all you’ve got for me is pie-in-the-sky fairy talk.” Maybe you’ve never said or thought something like that. Well, I have. I’ve been hurt so deeply that when people repeated to me the promises of God, they did not strike...
I must admit to a certain grudge against Californians who come rolling into New Mexico with an attitude of superiority over us poor souls. It’s a prejudice I developed after a few years living in the Land of Enchantment, after seeing more than enough arrogant Californians coming in and trying to tell the rest of us how best to live and behave. I’ve held the same grudge against Texas, but developed it years earlier while growing up in Arkansas. But I felt my own attitude of superiority when, within just a few years: the Razorbacks exited the...
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg deserves to take a bow following his undeniable victory. A New York jury delivered a guilty verdict in a trial largely devoid of political theater and intense media upheaval. That’s thanks to a judge who, during the multiple-week trial, managed to maintain civility and order and ensure the rights of all parties were upheld fairly. Former President Trump was convicted on not one, not two, but 34 felony counts. Supporters are outraged. Detractors are pleased. From the moment he brought a criminal case a...
It was a good week for the Reagan family. Not so much for the Biden clan. Last Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, where my father is buried, there was a fine ceremony to mark the 20th year of his passing and recall the conservative principles that powered his domestic and foreign successes. And on Thursday, when the library marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day, it also celebrated the famous speech my father gave 40 years ago when he traveled to Normandy to honor the brave Americans who hit the beaches on June 6, 1944. Meanwhil...
We’re to sing about our hope of heaven to bolster our faith and encourage each other (Ephesians 5:15-21; Colossians 3:12-17). So while my wife’s dear friend was dying recently, without knowing whether her friend could hear, my wife played hymns on her phone. We’ll also sing in heaven and some of the family present wondered what kind of songs we’d sing when we get there, we’ll no longer need faith because we’ll be living by sight (2 Corinthians 5:1-10, especially vs. 7; 1 John 3:1-3). The Book of Revelation provides some insight into presen...
Usually, I’m alone with my thoughts on the early drive to work. A few weeks ago, bleary-eyed and in need of a jolt of caffeine, I drove down the county road and saw a little head pop out of the tall grass. I blink. Nothing. Blink again. Head pops up. A puppy. I pulled over and got out, trying to see if the pup was OK. The pup was OK enough to dart across the road into an abandoned, overgrown property. The skeletal pup took refuge underneath an old truck, and just looked at me, then disappeared. I spent a few minutes trying to coax the pup out,...
I’m a big fan of vacations on the cheap, which is good, since I’ve seldom been able to afford anything first-class. Besides, top-dollar travel often overlooks the best stuff to see. Several years ago, when my family was younger and we were fairly new to the Land of Enchantment, we decided to take a New Mexico-centric vacation. My wife and I, along with our two daughters, got into our four-door sedan early one summer morning and left our northern New Mexico home in search of wonderment, which we found at just about every stop. Our first sto...
The U.S. Supreme Court has just stripped away the final protections against gerrymandering. With a series of rulings in the 1960s, the court established that the 14th Amendment required political districts to be redrawn so that “the vote of any citizen is approximately equal in weight to that of any other citizen in the state.” The Roberts court has taken a two-step approach to dismantling those protections. In 2019, the court ruled that while gerrymandering intended to dilute the political strength of racial minorities was still a vio...
Mark my words. Democrats will be sorry on Nov. 5 because of what they did last week in New York City. They and their friends in the liberal media can whoop it up and high-five each other all they want over the guilty verdicts Donald Trump got on Thursday in his hush money trial. But in the fall voters will have the chance to express how they feel about the destructive things the Biden Administration was willing to do to our legal system to try to defeat Trump. The verdicts against Trump were no surprise to anyone who’s been following his k...
The most popular Google search about the Bible is, “What does the Bible say about cremation?” The short answer to that: Nothing. When God decides not to give us a rule, this is because, either way, there is no harm done and we should not be in the business of making rules to govern non-issues. The bottom line on cremation seems to be, what we do to deal with the remains of our lives is only a temporary solution. The Bible teaches a future, general resurrection of the dead. It’s called general, because all the dead will be raised to life again...
To state the 118th Congress is an exercise in debasement, dereliction, and dysfunction would be an understatement. But what happened on the House Oversight Committee this month took things to a new low. House Republicans were advocating for holding Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in contempt of Congress — an action the committee chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, gleefully promoted in a fundraising appeal. They would eventually get “to the business at hand” but not before a back and forth by none other than Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor...
Eastern New Mexico Pride, hosted by Eastern New Mexico Rising, will return for its second year to Curry and Roosevelt County. A question I am asked constantly as a gay woman is, “Why do we need Pride?” First, to honor those who fought for our freedom to be who we are at the Stonewall Riots and the first gay pride marches. Pride began June 28, 1969, with the Stonewall Riots, where police tried to raid a gay bar in New York City. This raid quickly got out of hand and erupted into more protests in the following days, with activists demanding the...
EPCOR and the city of Clovis celebrated another successful event on May 7-8. This year’s two-day Clovis Water Carnival drew participation from 12 local elementary schools, engaging approximately 550 fifth-grade students, and benefiting from over 500 volunteer hours contributed by EPCOR employees and community volunteer partners. For the second year, EPCOR and the city partnered to bring an interactive educational platform focusing on teaching the principles of water conservation and management through a series of engaging and fun activities. T...
It occurred to me that this year, Memorial Day will fall about halfway between Mother’s Day, which I wrote about in my last article, and Father’s Day, which I’ll write about in a future article. All three holidays were established to remember specific people. While it’s easy to recognize who we remember on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the focus of Memorial Day has changed over the years — from concentrating on those who gave their lives in military service to America to all Americans who’ve passed on as indicated by the decorating of m...
The last time the Democrats and the Republicans held a White House rematch with the same two contenders was 1956, when Ike beat Adlai Stevenson for the second straight time. Earlier, there were redos with William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan (McKinley won both in 1896 and 1900) and Grover Cleveland vs. Benjamin Harrison (in 1888, Harrison defeated the incumbent Cleveland, who then staged a comeback victory in 1892). In the pre-Civil War days, before the GOP existed, when there were Whigs and such, Martin Van Buren beat William Henry...
If you ask me, history is speeding up. Used to be, things didn’t change much from one generation to another, but with the onset of the 20th century, it all began to accelerate. And, now that we’re a couple of decades into the 21st century, we’re living as if the past doesn’t matter anymore. But of course, it does. History is how we got here, and it portends where we’re going. My baby-boomer generation has been through some incredible history. We were raised during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s, which led our nation in a...
What’s happening on CNN and MSNBC is disgusting, but not surprising. Some of their so-called pundits and reporters have been downright giddy while watching Donald Trump on trial in New York City. They think the New York DA’s office is doing God’s work, not Joe Biden’s. They love watching lying lowlifes like porn star Stormy Daniels and Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen testifying against the ex-president. It doesn’t matter to losers like Joe & Mika and Jen Psaki that the Democrats are using the Justice Department as a weapon to interfere w...
My last column addressed the objection that says the Bible can’t be trusted because of how often it has been translated and hand-copied through the centuries. My point was that the documented history (in over 5,000 ancient manuscripts) shows the result is really the opposite. That is, the many manuscripts, from different centuries and regions, prove there has been stunning consistency over the last 2,500 or so years. By comparing old ones with newer ones, we can see plainly where any copyist errors or bad translations were made. This is not s...
It seems silly to write a column about the recent college protests. It’s not really news when privileged students who have never been in the line of fire and whose most pressing concern is what pronoun they’ll use on any given day decide to rise up against the establishment. And yet, here we are. Across the nation, college students have been raising their voices against what some call a “genocide” and others call “Zionist oppression.” They have been supported in their misguided crusade by politicians like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, women...
History on the rerun. Ghosts of Mississippi. Magnolia State maintains its horrendously racist image. Any of the statements could be used to describe the images shown across the nation at the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Dozens of students at the university’s flagship campus gathered to protest Israel’s war in Gaza and to call for the school to be transparent in its potential dealings with Israel. These demonstrators were confronted with hundreds of counter-protesters, in contrast to the few dozen pro-Palestinian protesters. Less than an...
It’s that time of year, when just about every newspaper in the state gives front-page attention to at least one local graduation. They’re always a big deal, especially to those who walk across that ceremonial stage and make their families proud. It’s also the time when yours truly offers some less-than-conventional advice to those who are about to move on to bigger and better things: First, let’s dispel the notion that you can be anything you set your mind to becoming, because you can’t. If you’re short, you won’t likely make it to the NBA no...
Mother’s Day is this coming Sunday and, while many will celebrate with their mothers, others of us will fondly remember our mothers and be grateful for those who were godly and led us in paths of righteousness so we could know that, despite their passing away from this life, they still live, as Jesus promised (John 11:25-27). The name of the holiday is singular possessive because it’s set aside to honor each one’s mother, as is the case for Father’s Day, while Grandparents’ Day is plural possessive, likely because we all have several grandpare...
I just want the world to know that all this “catch-and-kill” National Enquirer-style of so-called journalism is a disgusting exception, nowhere close to the rule of how newspapers behave. In my 30-plus years of newspapering, I’ve worked at big dailies and little weeklies and others in between, and I can confidently attest to the fact that I never, ever saw an editor or publisher “buy” the rights to a story, much less buy the right to bury it, as the Enquirer’s Pecker said he did for Donald Trump. That just doesn’t happen, at least not at any of...
Here’s to the deep state, or, what we used to refer to as the federal government. With little fanfare, the Federal Trade Commission has leveled the playing field for millions of workers. The FTC freed an estimated 30 million employees who are now bound to their current employers through non-compete clauses. On a 3-2 vote, the commission found that the clauses are an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” There’s an exem...
What a good week it should have been for Republicans. Dozens of campuses from UCLA to Columbia University were being wracked by pro-Palestinian protestors who set up “Gaza Solidarity” encampments, spewed antisemitic hate speech, took over buildings and intimidated Jewish students. The protestors demanded their schools condemn Israel’s invasion of Gaza, come out in support of Palestinians or divest themselves of any Israeli investments. The riots were so heavily covered by the national media and criticized by conservatives that some spineless “p...
