Most conservative Christians know the beginning of the story well (as does almost any American who was old enough to remember the original event, which happened just over 50 years ago). Five missionaries speared to death in the Amazon jungle by the very people they went to reach. It was the subject of a book "Through the Gates of Splendor", by Elisabeth Elliot, one of the widows of the five men who went back to the culture known only to them at the time as the "Aucas". This book is Steve Sain...
Another place, another time
He wasn't much to look at. A slightly overweight teenager with a baby face and a few stray whiskers trying to burst through to assert his adolescent status. The jeans he wore were generics from the local mercantile, and his feet were adorned with what he and his friends described as "Chinese Nikes", the particular brand of generic knockoff carried by KMart at the time that carried an upside down attempted ripoff of the "swoosh" logo. His shirts were thrift store castoffs, and his hai...
Jared gnawed at his fingers mercilessly. What was it, nine hours? Ten? Nearly half a day since his insides had filled with the fluid elixir that intoxicated him and left him clamoring for more. His friends continually harped on him about how it would be the death of him, how he would end up dead in some gutter somewhere with nobody but the rats to mark his passing. He knew it all and yet he could not quit. Years ago, he had tried twelve step groups, but the results were always the same. A few...
And I don't even care to shake these zipper blues And we don't know just where our bones will rest To dust I guess Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below (Smashing Pumpkins, 1979 ) Ft. Hood, Texas, 1978 I don't remember much about that summer, except it was the summer following one of the biggest disappointments of my young life. Mohammed Ali had lost his heavyweight title to Leon Spinks (he would regain it later in the year). The Dallas Cowboys, with Roger Staubach at the hel...
Joe and Sam stood by the time clock, anxiously watching the final seconds of their work night tick away. After what seemed an eternity, the second hand moved and the whistle blew, signifying their release from the factory. Their time cards, which had been at the ready for five plus minutes now, slid into the slot, until the reassuring click was heard, a click that made Sam think somehow of shackles being released. Joe and Sam began their long walk home in the moonlight. There was no sound exc...
The engastrimyth awakened from his slumber to the sound of some far off kerfuffle . His given name was Jon Boucher, but he was yclept the Lexiphanic Gaberlunzie of Berlitz, given his penchant to engage in a number of rousing quodlibets in the course of his performance. This evening, he had come home after a rather annoying encounter with the chiliastic blatherskite who always patronized the street corner with his sandwich boards constantly declaring doom and the impending demise of ...
Jared's hardened eyes scanned the horizon. The head rose off the landscape in waves, distorting faraway objects and causing even the hardiest anomals to scurry to the shelter of their shaded, earth cooled burrows. While an occasional lizard presented itself, daring to dart below the watchful eyes of the circling hawks overhead, most animals had long put themselves away from a nighttime of activity and were resting for the next night's hunt. While those animals had yet been out in the night be...