Commentary

My sister was talking to me recently about the summer camp her son will be attending in late June.

“He’s so excited,” she said. “It’s all he talks about.”

I just can’t relate.

I attended a few summer camps as a kid, but from the minute I arrived, I secretly counted the hours until it was time to go home. I’m not even sure why I agreed to go.

My first camp experience was Clara Springs Baptist Encampment in Pelican, La. I was eight years old. There were some fun times there, such as learning the harp and singing silly songs in the mess hall before supper, but overall I just recall the late nights in the top bunk missing my mother.

Then there were the two summers between 5th and 6th grades that I went to 4-H camp (Camp Grant Walker) in Pollock, La.

For a while, we’ve been wanting to replace the fence between our house and our neighbors’ house, splitting the cost with them.

“Let’s wait for the lumber prices to come down,” we have all continued to say.

Around eighteen months ago, one six-foot cedar picket was around $1.50. Now, it’s about $4 per picket. And lumber prices are expected to continue to rise well into 2022.

In the meantime, there are some holes at the bottom of the fence that are just big enough for my miniature schnauzers to stick their head through and say hello to the neighbor’s schnauzer.

This is all fine and dandy except when the neighbors are dog sitting their son’s gigantic Boxer with a head as big as a killer whale. Then, they have to line their side of the fence with a plastic pet pen to protect our dogs from literally getting their heads bitten off.

Of course, the price of repairing the fence is really the least of any of our worries.

We were on one of those all-day errand runs a few weeks back, and stopped at a sandwich place for lunch. Both of us ordered a French Dip Sandwich, and while eating it, we did our normal thing – “How can we make this at home?”

So, we finally got in the kitchen and started working on figuring out the answer to the question. If you are looking for a quick and simple meal this week, try a French Dip Sandwich. It really is easy to make, and delicious. Just serve it with a side of chips and pickles or take it a step further and make a potato salad to go with it. Either way, you will have a tasty meal for dinner!

Note: This recipe calls for a slow cooker, but you can just as easily bake the roast in the oven or in a cast iron Dutch oven on the stove!

French Dip Sandwich

Ingredients:

1 boneless Chuck Roast (about 4-5 pounds)

Garlic Powder, Salt, Pepper, and Tony Chachere’s (to taste)

3 teaspoons vegetable oil

Evil.

We’re seeing it unfold right before our very eyes: the bombing of hospitals and orphanages. . .the use of cluster bombs and vacuum bombs. . .shooting at refugees as they attempt to flee the country. . .a Russian tank firing on a passenger car with an elderly, retired Ukrainian couple inside, etc.

That’s in addition to the capturing of two nuclear power plants, including Chernobyl and turning the power off to it—which could unleash massive amounts of radiation.

And, now (as of this writing), the Russians are accusing the United States of having biotech labs in Ukraine; however, U.S. officials are warning that the Soviets often do this type thing to shift the blame when they using biological and chemical weapons (like they repeatedly did in Syria).

For many years in my childhood, I felt terrified by Baptist pastors who seemed to have a goal of convincing saved people that they were actually lost.

It caused me severe anxiety as a child, though I never told anyone. I just lived in perpetual fear that I was hell-bound, even though I truly loved and trusted Christ.

One time as a little girl, I heard a preacher say, “If you can’t recall the exact moment you were saved, you are not saved.”

That statement scared me, because I don’t have a dramatic conversion story. For Years, I tried to recall “that exact moment,” but still to this day, I cannot. It took fortyfive years for me to finally hear a Christian “testimony of conversion” that parallels mine in every way: I recently heard someone ask Dr. John Lennox on a YouTube video, “What is your conversion story?” and I was stunned to hear Lennox literally tell my own story.

Surely we recognize the great dangers to our country from across the globe and the desire of ruthless nations to seize the opportunity and fill the vacuum when they witness American weakness, either because we are unaware or incapable of stopping the advance of evil.

Does anyone believe this would be going on if Pres. Trump were still president? In fact, in a recent poll published by The Hill, 62 percent of Americans say that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine under President Trump.

Do we really believe it’s a mere coincidence that Russia is invading a sovereign country and China is looking at Taiwan like a shark does at chum in the water while Iran continues doing what it has never stopped doing— perfecting the enrichment of uranium so that it may realize its dream of a nuclear weapon that it would deploy against Israel and ultimately the U.S.

Start Your Garden Plans Now!

The weather may not be conducive to gardening quite yet, but it is still a great time to plan. We need to know what we want to plant, so we need to make a list of seeds to order. Another consideration is how much space we have, and if there is room to add even more.

To best plan for your garden, you need to have a few supplies ready: a notebook, pen, seed catalogs, and that much needed cup of hot tea, hot chocolate and a plate of cookies. (Okay. The last ones aren’t really required, but it will be a much more fun planning session if you have them!)

Here are a few things to think about when you plan:

Amnesty International (AI), which purportedly exists to fight against human rights violations, sharply disparaged Israel this week labeling Israel an “apartheid” state that should be scorned by the world.

In its Feb. 1, 2022 report, entitled “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity,” AI disingenuously attempts to compare the treatment of blacks in South Africa during that period of racial segregation and oppression—up to the early 1990s—to how Israel “treats” Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

The AI report concludes that the state of Israel has “perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid” against Palestinians. The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), an organization that represents more than 2,000 Orthodox Jewish rabbis, condemned the report as “antisemitic” and a “litany of shameless lies.”

Each Valentine’s Day I’m reminded of how my husband and I met.

It was May 1999, and I was working as a writer/producer for the CBS affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama. I was 22 years old, single, and living in a one-bedroom apartment.

The station’s news director, Peggy, began to say things like, “Allie, I need to introduce you to my middle son, Marshall, sometime soon. I think you two would really get along.”

She had a photo in her office of her three sons, and I will admit I really liked what I saw of that cute middle son!

So one Tuesday afternoon, Peggy called me to her office. I assumed it was regarding a promotion I was working on for the 5 o’clock newscast that day.

I am always optimistic about the strength, resiliency, and ingenuity of the American free market economy. However, this ec onomic strength and stability depends upon government creating a level playing field for free market competition, and even more importantly, not to handicap the economy through the imposition of unreasonable laws and regulations.

One of those handicaps includes the less visible, but very real effects of inflation on goods, services, and everything else. In fact, inflation in the U.S. increased faster this past year than it has in nearly 40 years—dating back to the administration of President Jimmy Carter. So, what exactly is inflation?

Well, economists tell us that inflation occurs when consumer demand in the economy rises more than the supply of consumer goods, describing this dynamic as “too much money chasing too few goods.” In the simplest terms, the result is a general increase in prices and decrease in the purchasing power of money.