Live Fire with Chuck Holton

My feature on the National Guard troops along the border aired today on CBNnews. You can read the transcript here.

I’m not posting much lately because there are a lot of things to prepare for. I’m leaving soon for trips to SE Asia, Key West, FL, Virginia Beach, Virginia, Dallas, Texas, Columbus, GA, and finally Panama. all that by April 1. So forgive me if I haven’t posted much.

But that’s about to change. Be checking back often as I blog (and podcast!) from Thailand, Burma and Laos in the coming weeks.

For now, my friend Lynne Thompson is here at Runamuk helping me get the plot lines hashed out for Task Force Valor, Book 3. We have no working title yet.

TFV II – Island Inferno is already getting great reviews, and it won’t even hit stores until April. And TFV I – Allah’s Fire just got nominated for a Christy award for best Christian Fiction.

In 1942, country western singer Elton Britt became the first singer in that genre to sell over a million albums. He did it largely with one song in particular – it was called, “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere.” Click here to listen to it, or here to read the lyrics. (Britt was the father of my friend Jeb Britt-Baker, who has a good story of his own.)

In one verse of the song, Britt gives a nod to the prevailing sentiment of the day, through the example of a “twisted leg,” from the scourge of that generation, Polio.

Though I realize I’m crippled, that is true, sir
Please don’t judge my courage by my twisted leg
Let me show my Uncle Sam what I can do, sir
Let me help to bring the Axis down a peg.

For some reason that kind of devotion to selfless service makes me wish I’d been born forty years earlier. Oh, what would it be like to be a part of a society that was homogenous enough in its worldview that love of one’s country was a given? Where men would lie about their age or stow away on troop ships just to be a part of defending it? Where the government and the people were aligned on an issue instead of divided? Man, wouldn’t that be nice?

Isn’t it sad that today we have a government where at least half the politicians make mild gestures with one hand in support of the troops, and with the other seek to deny the commanders on the ground what they have been begging for for years. It’s shameful.

Without a doubt, there are still men (and women) like the one in Britt’s song who love their country enough to lay their lives down for it. I’ve been honored to serve among them.

One whom I met recently was a 44 year old grandmother named Crystal Bulikova. I met Crystal at an observation post one night along the Arizona border. She wanted to contribute something personally to upholding our way of life – and so she enlisted in the National Guard. I’ve never seen a more gung ho soldier. Decked out in a kevlar helmet and vest, sporting her M-16, Crystal goes out and spends 48 hours at a stretch with her New-York based infantry unit, guarding the border fence and helping the border patrol apprehend illegals. The other soldiers, most of them half her age, call her “mom.”

I applaud Crystal and those like her. She, to me, embodies the spirit of the WWII generation. And I’m glad to know that spirit lives on.

A news item caught my interest this morning. California State Legislature assemblywoman Sally Lieber (I’ll let you guess what her political persuasion is.) is introducing a bill that would make it illegal in California to physically discipline your children under the age of three.

Never mind that Assemblyperson Lieber has no children of her own. She does have a cat named Snoop, and her vet told her it should never be spanked.

“And if you never hit a cat,” Lieber said, “you should never hit a kid.”

This is the thing that grates on me with some liberals. They seem to think that they are eminently better qualified than I am to run my life. Even if they have no experience whatsoever relating to the subject at hand.

In this case, there are plenty of folks out there who ARE qualified to speak to the subject, like James Dobson, Dr. Robert Larzelere, and my mother. All of them agree that spanking has its benefits. Dr. Dobson asserts that most children are ready for physical discipline around 14 months of age. The later one waits after age three or four, the harder it is to get one’s point across.

As for Dr. Larzelere, who has studied child development for over three decades, he says, “If it’s used in a limited way, it can be more effective than almost any other type of punishment.”

My mother asserts that if she hadn’t spanked me when I was two, she’d have had to kill me by the time I was five. And she takes great pleasure in watching my son Nathan give me the same treatment I gave her.

Most parents love their children, and go to great lengths to give their kids the best life possible. I resent Lieber’s insinuation that she (and by her, the state of California) cares more for the children of that state than the parents. Sure, there are bad parents out there, sure, some abuse their children. But abuse is already against the law, and abuse still happens. If this law passes, all that Lieber will effectively have done is make criminals out of loving parents. And perhaps elevated the status of cats in California.

My friend Dave Meurer is one of the funniest men that I know. And that’s not just because of his looks. (Just Kidding) Seriously, this guy is hilarious. But underneath those super-humorist spandex tights, Dave has a story that will bring tears to your eyes.

Go check it out on today’s 700 Club.

Incidentally, yesterday on Living the Life, they ran the story I did on Tom and Penny Green - a couple who lives alone in Alaska’s vast interior. A longer, more complete version of their story is available here.

A group of National Guardsmen in the area around Nogales, Arizona were “overrun” yesterday by a group of armed bandits from the Mexico side of the border. I recently spent a few days with these soldiers, and found it odd that their rules of engagement stipulate that if attacked, they cannot fight back unless their lives are in danger. Apparently that was not the case here, as the guardsmen ran away. I’m contacting the PAO in Nogales to find out more…

I heard a very interesting podcast recently from John Piper. He was making the case to his own church encouraging them to switch to the English Standard Version - for teaching and preaching and memorization.

I was very intrigued by his reasoning. The NIV is used all over in churches these days, and has been around for more than 30 years. But the NIV is actually a paraphrase of the Bible, like the Message or the New Living Bible. That is, while it’s translators took great pains to accurately transcribe the original text into English, there are lots of places in the Bible where the language is somewhat ambiguous – that is, open to interpretation.

The most interesting thing about Piper’s sermon was his assertion that God meant for the Bible to be that way. He put the ambiguities there so that we’d have to wrestle with the text, chew on it, in order to get the full flavor of it’s meaning. Paraphrased versions attempt to remove these ambiguities for the sake of clarity.

Piper asserts that is the job of the preacher, the teacher and the committed disciple, not the job of the translator. I didn’t know that before.

I’ve almost always used the NASB anyway, but Piper makes the point that the English language evolves, and things which once meant one thing can change to mean another.

For instance: I’m told that when the architect of Westminster Abbey gave his first tour of the newly completed cathedral, to the Queen of England, she said, “It’s simply awful!”

Only in those days, “awful” meant something like “awesome,” not “terrible.”

At any rate, even though people , cultures and languages change, it’s good to know that God stays the same. And the Bible that I most heartily endorse for YOU is the one you will actually READ.

Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison announced yesterday that he intends to use the Koran when taking his oath of office. Some conservatives are up in arms about this – and I truly don’t see why.

First, this guy won’t be the only person to forego a Bible at his swearing in ceremony. And second, by the looks of the Congress and Senate we have today, swearing on a Bible didn’t seem to do them much good.

I’d much rather see them reading from it, than swearing by it.

Not only that, if you really believe that we still live in a Christian nation, you’re deluded. Oh, we have a Christian heritage, but all one has to do is turn on MTV to see how far we’ve come.