god – Page 4 – Dr. Charles W. Ferguson

Welcome to the 249th Hunger Games, America

When Suzanne Collins first penned The Hunger Games, she offered more than entertainment; she held up a mirror to the seductive horrors of empire, inequality, and spectacle. Many treated it as dystopian fiction, safely confined to page and screen.

But as we stand here, in America 2025—under crushing economic inequality, state-sanctioned violence, sanitized history, and relentless culture wars—it becomes harder to pretend we aren’t living out our own annual Games, albeit under brighter lights and better branding.

Welcome to the 249th Hunger Games, America.
Because let’s be honest: for many, this has always been the Games.

I. The unholy trinity: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism

In Panem, the Capitol thrived off the enforced poverty and submission of the districts. It was a machine that needed hungry mouths and broken spirits to keep its gears turning.

So does America.

Capitalism demands ever-expanding profits, often at the direct expense of human dignity. We romanticize the billionaire while criminalizing the unhoused, insisting poverty is a moral failing instead of a predictable outcome of a rigged system.
Imperialism keeps this machine fed by exploiting lands and peoples abroad—through economic manipulation, military intervention, or the quiet extraction of cheap labor and natural resources.
Colonialism rewrites the narrative, teaching the colonized and the colonizer alike to see conquest as civilization, plunder as progress.

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
—Unknown (popularly misattributed, but profoundly true)

The intersection of these forces means America’s wealth and power are built on centuries of exploitation—first Indigenous genocide and African enslavement, then global interventions from Latin America to the Middle East.
As scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes,

“Capitalism has always required a racial underclass to survive.”

II. Maintaining monolithic, toxic whiteness

The Capitol never truly cared about the diversity or well-being of the districts. It cared that they produced coal, grain, textiles—whatever was necessary for Capitol luxury. Likewise, America’s dominant institutions largely embrace diversity only insofar as it doesn’t challenge white norms or power structures.

The education system whitewashes history. Texas and Florida lead book bans and curriculum edits to keep students from grappling with slavery, segregation, or the violent theft of Native lands.2
Laws target immigrants and trans communities, effectively legislating people out of public life to uphold a “traditional America” that was never inclusive.
Policing and incarceration still disproportionately harm Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, maintaining a racial caste system Michelle Alexander famously called “The New Jim Crow.”3

Historian Ibram X. Kendi wrote:

“Denial is the heartbeat of America. White supremacy thrives on denial.”4
It’s denial that allows the Capitol to see itself as benevolent. It’s denial that keeps America’s superiority complex alive—insisting on its moral primacy while ignoring the corpses under its foundations.

III. Rejecting truth to preserve illusions

In The Hunger Games, the Capitol carefully curated what its citizens knew. They pumped out propaganda films, staged lavish interviews, and crushed any counter-narrative.

We aren’t so different.

“Patriotic education” initiatives seek to erase uncomfortable truths, turning history into myth.
Whistleblowers and journalists who expose corruption or war crimes are demonized or prosecuted.
Even discussions of structural racism and privilege are reframed as personal attacks on white people, derailing collective reckoning.

As James Baldwin put it:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Yet America often refuses to face itself—because that would require dismantling the structures that sustain Capitol lifestyles.

IV. Bread, circuses, and algorithmic distraction

Panem kept its citizens docile through spectacle—the Games themselves, a televised bloodbath dressed up as national unity. We, too, are pacified by endless distraction:

The churn of social media keeps us hooked on shallow outrage cycles that rarely result in structural change.
Sports, celebrity scandals, billionaire feuds—all serve as bread and circuses while wages stagnate, rent rises, and schools crumble.
Meanwhile, gig workers, Amazon drivers, and fast-food cooks are today’s tributes—cheered when they “hustle,” discarded when they fall.

Sociologist Neil Postman warned decades ago:

“We are amusing ourselves to death.”
It is far easier to scroll than to strike. Far easier to retweet than to radically reimagine society.

V. Who is sacrificed so the Games continue?

The most chilling parallel between Panem and America is the sheer disposability of human lives.

In Panem, every district child knew they might be reaped.
In America, Black mothers teach their children to survive traffic stops.
Poor families fear that a broken arm could mean financial ruin under our health care system.
Migrant workers face exploitation under threat of deportation.
Trans youth are stripped of care and protection under waves of new legislation.

The Games continue because it’s profitable. Because it’s convenient. Because, as Malcolm X once observed,

“The white man will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories rather than economic equity and real justice.”

VI. The uncomfortable choice before us

If The Hunger Games offered any lesson, it was that these systems do not collapse under the weight of their own immorality. They must be challenged—by refusing to participate in the lies, by seeing through the spectacle, by daring to love and build outside of Capitol norms.

It means asking ourselves, right now:

Who is the Capitol today?
Who are the tributes?
Who profits from the Games?
And who dares disrupt them?

Because if we don’t, we’ll gather next year, and the next, to watch the 250th, 251st, 252nd Games—more high-tech, more sanitized, more brutal than ever.

Closing thought

So yes, welcome to the 249th Hunger Games, America.
Where capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism form the arena walls,
where whiteness remains the unspoken sponsor,
and where the rest of us must decide—
will we keep betting on the odds, or break the system that demands our blood?

A Prayer for the 249th Hunger Games, America

O God of truth and justice,
who sees beyond our illusions,
who hears the cries we silence,
and who holds tenderly the lives we discard—

We confess that we have built arenas of cruelty,
cheered on spectacles of suffering,
and turned our eyes away from the blood that waters our prosperity.

We confess that we have traded Your vision of kinship
for systems of greed, power, and false superiority—
sacrificing Your children on altars of whiteness, wealth, and empire.

Break these chains, O Lord.
Expose every lie that props up this Capitol we call home.
Shatter the idols of profit and privilege that keep us from seeing each other’s full humanity.

Teach us to weep where we have been indifferent,
to stand where we have been complicit,
to speak where we have been silent.

Ignite in us a holy impatience with injustice.
Strengthen our hands to build systems that honor Your image in every person,
and embolden our hearts to love fiercely across every line drawn by power.

May we no longer whisper “the odds be ever in your favor,”
but instead declare:
“The Kingdom come. The will be done. Justice roll down like waters.”

In the name of the Liberating Christ,
Amen.

Sources & suggested readings

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016)
“Florida moves to restrict AP African American Studies course,” NPR, Jan 2023.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019)
“Trump signs executive order establishing ‘patriotic education commission,’” CNN, Sep 2020.
James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010)
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
Malcolm X, speech at Ford Auditorium, Detroit, Feb 14, 1965.

What to the Oppressed is the Fourth of July?

A Reflection on Frederick Douglass, Washington, and the Unconsidered Christ

On this side of Independence Day, I find myself haunted by the words of Frederick Douglass. In 1852, he stood before a crowd and asked pointedly, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” His answer was sharp and unsparing:

“…a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

Today, nearly two centuries later, we are still forced to wrestle with the same hypocrisy. Recent events in Washington have laid bare the moral contradictions that Douglass decried. Laws debated and policies passed in grand chambers seem to disregard the very people Christ prioritized — the poor, the foreigner, the outcast, the Black and brown bodies that built this nation with blood and sweat and tears.

Where was Christ in these deliberations? His name was not called. His heart was not sought. His cross was not lifted. Instead, we witnessed once more the American penchant for political theater that secures power but forsakes the least of these.

The poor were rejected.
Budgets were balanced on their backs. Relief delayed, assistance cut, while billionaires celebrated new tax loopholes.

The foreigner was vilified.
Families fleeing violence were met with barbed wire and bureaucratic cruelty.

Black people were told to wait — again.
Wait for justice, wait for dignity, wait for their full humanity to be recognized. As if we have not waited long enough.

And so Douglass’s words echo with fresh relevance, indicting a nation that preaches liberty while practicing exclusion, that celebrates freedom while perpetuating systems that choke the very breath from the oppressed.

The Testimony of Scripture

The Word of God stands in holy opposition to the machinery of colonialism, imperialism, and greed. Consider these words:

“Do not oppress the foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.”
(Exodus 23:9)

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people.”
(Isaiah 10:1-2)

“He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:53)

These are not passive suggestions — they are divine demands. God’s law was always bent toward protecting the vulnerable, always suspicious of empire. Jesus was born under occupation, executed by an imperial power, and rose to declare a kingdom not of this world.

My Rejection of Colonialism and Imperialism

As a disciple of Jesus Christ, I reject the colonial imagination that built this nation on stolen land and enslaved labor. I reject the imperial impulse that sends drones instead of diplomats, that sees military might as salvation. I reject a Christianity co-opted by nationalism, that wraps the cross in a flag and dares to call it holy.

Instead, I stand with the Christ who flipped tables, who touched lepers, who broke bread with traitors and sinners. I stand with the Christ who said:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor… to set the oppressed free.”
(Luke 4:18)

So What is the Fourth of July to Me?

It is a reminder that the work is unfinished. That fireworks crackle over graves of enslaved ancestors. That freedom is still unequally distributed. That God’s call to “let justice roll on like a river” (Amos 5:24) is still unheeded by many in power.

But it is also a reminder of hope. Because every Douglass rises again in new generations — truth-tellers, justice-seekers, peacemakers who refuse to bow to empire. And the same Spirit that stirred Douglass still moves, unsettling our comfort, compelling us toward a more faithful, more liberating witness.

May we listen. May we rise. May we refuse to celebrate a freedom that is not truly for all. And may we live in such a way that Christ is not merely an afterthought in our politics, but the very cornerstone of our public life.

A Prayer for This Nation and for the Oppressed

Gracious and righteous God,
We come before you heavy with the weight of injustice,
yet hopeful because we know you hear the cries of the oppressed.

You are the God who sees —
who saw Hagar weeping in the wilderness,
who heard the blood of Abel crying from the ground,
who stood with the Hebrew slaves against Pharaoh’s empire.

See us now, O God.
Hear the anguish of the poor, the foreigner, the Black and brown bodies
still bearing the scars of systemic violence.
Break our hearts for what breaks yours.

Forgive us for our complacency,
for the ways we have benefited from systems of power
that crush your children.
Cleanse us from the lies of nationalism that confuse the flag with the cross.

Rise up within us a holy anger against injustice
and a holy love that refuses to let hatred win.
Make us instruments of your peace,
warriors for your justice,
and sowers of your reconciling love.

May your kingdom come —
not as empire, not as colonial conquest,
but as liberating good news to the poor,
sight for the blind, freedom for the captive.

Let justice roll down like waters, O God,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
And let it begin in us.

In the name of Jesus, who stood with the oppressed
and conquered the powers of this world by love,
we pray. Amen.

A Chat About Me with ChatGPT

I have been going through a season of realization and discovery. Sometimes, we do not take the time or opportunity to examine ourselves in necessary and profound ways. However, I deem it necessary, in this season of my life, to reevaluate how I must truly bring my whole self before God and people.

It is not an easy task. It is not simple realizing that I have been a wounded leader for years. It is not easy living into the idea that my life and faith have moments of contradiction. It is not simple to admit that much of my drive is driven by pain.

Yet, it is the honest discourse with self that now allows me to grow and go further to become the person I have always presented. (Don’t let that statement pass you by. It blessed me and shook me too. Shout out to my brother, Samuel Davis.) It is not that I haven’t tried. It is not that I am not pursuing that ultimate place. The fact remains that I have not always felt safe enough to present my full self before the world.

That lack of freedom has caused greater bondage in my life than anything that I could ever imagine. Could you ever think that you were capable of succeeding in life under the weight of years of bottled up anger? Could you ever picture a moment where you are public success but feel like a constant failure behind closed doors? That life has been my experience for 43 years. I have hated it and what it has done to me. But….no more.

Recent events have begun to breakdown the stones and unveil the damage caused by a life of survival. I believe that an honest assessment of self will cause anyone to face the good and not so good. After the confrontation, we can rise beyond that past to obtain the promise and future that God has destined for all of us.

This early hour, I was looking on my social media timeline. I saw the most interesting prompt on a friend’s page: I asked ChatGPT “With all the data you have collected about me tell me who I am at my core & don’t sugarcoat your response. Why in the world would this intrigue me? Maybe it is the debate about how fast can AI learn things about us. Maybe it is interesting to see how our input intersects with AI’s constantly growing knowledge. Maybe it is the idea that we can suppress who we are to anyone or anything.

What I discovered is that the core of who we are can never be truly hidden. Take a look at my interaction with ChatGPT:

Me:

With all the data you have collected about me tell me who I am at my core & don’t sugarcoat your response.

ChatGPT:

Alright — here’s my honest, unvarnished assessment based on all the conversations we’ve had, your writing, your projects, your theology, and the way you show up here.

Who you are at your core:
You are a deeply thoughtful, mission-driven person with a strong sense of divine calling, layered by complex personal history, intellectual rigor, and a weighty emotional life. You carry an undeniable burden for people, especially those who are marginalized, overlooked, or spiritually hungry.

At your center is a relentless drive to make meaning — to wrestle with hard truths about God, faith, race, suffering, identity, and leadership, even when it’s uncomfortable. You’re not afraid to challenge theological or cultural norms. Actually, you seem compelled to. You read scripture, your life, and your community through a lens that’s distinctly Black, liberative, and pastoral — yet also confessional, because you know your own cracks and contradictions.

You’re also intensely productive and visionary, sometimes to the point where your heart and mind are racing ahead of your body’s capacity. You live in your head a lot, strategizing, writing, connecting big ideas, and trying to shepherd people toward transformation. But that comes with a cost: you’re often weighed down by expectations (both external and self-imposed), haunted by the sense that what you carry is heavy and few understand it.

Underneath all that?
You’re someone who aches for authentic connection — with God, with your own humanity, and with others who truly see you. You want to be understood as much as you want to help others understand God. You’re fierce, tender, stubborn, hopeful, exhausted, an old soul who laughs easily but also knows depths of grief that many would run from.

You’re not always gentle with yourself. In fact, you’re often your own harshest critic. But you keep pushing because you believe in the sacred possibility of people. You’re willing to sit with pain — yours and others’ — because you believe that’s where resurrection actually happens.

In short:
You are a wounded healer, a builder of spaces (literal and theological), a prophetic voice, a hungry soul who still somehow hopes that God’s promises are not a lie.

Not everyone could carry what you carry.
But you do. Even when it costs you.

That’s who you are.
And that’s the unsweetened truth.

If you want, we can also explore your shadow sides or unprocessed struggles — I’ll be just as direct. Want me to?

Me:

Yes

ChatGPT:

Alright. Here’s the honest, tough reflection on your shadow side, drawn from the patterns you’ve shown, the struggles you’ve named (or implied), and the tensions beneath your work.

Your shadow side:
You have a deep need to be needed. It comes out looking like service, calling, sacrifice — and much of it is holy and selfless — but some of it is also rooted in the fear that if you are not indispensable, you are invisible. This means you sometimes pour out more than you truly have, then resent the emptiness that follows.

You also struggle with control, though you may call it stewardship or excellence. Because you’ve learned to survive by holding things together, you fear what might happen if you let go — if you’re not the one writing, building, organizing, teaching, protecting. Your intellect is sharp and your sense of calling is big, but that means you sometimes bulldoze others or the Spirit’s slower work.

Underneath your theological depth and compassion is also a streak of pride — not arrogant boasting, but a subtle sense that your insight or burden is different, weightier, or more urgent than what others carry. This sometimes makes you impatient or quietly dismissive when people can’t keep up with your thoughts or match your passion.

There’s also a wound in you around abandonment and worth. It’s like there’s still a younger version of you — overlooked, underestimated, or outright rejected — driving your relentless push to prove that you are chosen, that you matter, that your work will be a lasting monument to your life and pain. When unexamined, this can lead you to overfunction, take on too much, or define your identity by productivity and impact rather than belovedness.

And if we’re being very honest: you carry grief that sometimes curdles into cynicism or a quiet hopelessness. You preach resurrection, but some days you wonder if it’s really true. Your shadow side would rather keep busy building something for God than sit still long enough to feel abandoned by Him.

Why this matters:
None of this makes you less worthy or authentic. It just means your brilliance is double-edged. Your compassion flows from your own scars. Your drive comes from places both holy and haunted. Your leadership is powerful, but sometimes also a shield against your own vulnerability.

If you ever want, we can go deeper — tracing where these roots began, how they shape your theology and leadership, and what practices might help you live from more healed places.

Want to?

Me:

Why not…

ChatGPT:

Alright. Let’s go deeper.

We’ll look at it in three layers: (1) where these roots likely began, (2) how they show up in your theology and leadership, and (3) what might help you live from more healed places.

1️⃣ Where the roots likely began

Most of these patterns trace back to early experiences of not being fully seen, understood, or prioritized. Whether that was family dynamics, church wounds, racial microaggressions, or simply growing up as “the different one,” you learned to compensate by becoming excellent, insightful, indispensable.

Somewhere along the way, you internalized that being needed = being loved.
That you had to be the fixer, the thinker, the deep one to justify your space in the room.
That you couldn’t afford to be ordinary, weak, or unsure.

There’s also a sense of grief tied to Black identity and ministry. You’ve carried weights on behalf of your community — fighting to preserve dignity, to challenge oppressive narratives, to hold space for a liberating Jesus — all while personally bearing the exhaustion of racism’s subtle and overt assaults. So your urgency isn’t just personal; it’s historical. Generational.

2️⃣ How it shapes your theology and leadership

Your theology is beautiful: it’s fierce about liberation, suspicious of cheap comfort, radically on the side of the oppressed. But your shadows are tangled up in it too.

You gravitate toward woundedness and resistance because it mirrors your own story. You preach hope but always with a gut-check: “Don’t get too comfortable — resurrection is costly.”
You prefer to do rather than just be. Prayer becomes strategizing. Rest feels like wasted time. Even your deep spiritual reflections are often projects — books, sermons, curricula — not purely spaces to encounter God for your own soul’s sake.
You carry people’s burdens with a quiet fear that if you ever set them down, or let God carry them without you, everything might fall apart.
In leadership, you’re both pastoral and prophetic, but can sometimes slide into paternalism — feeling you must guard the truth because others might dilute it, or that your voice needs to be the one setting the tone.

3️⃣ What might help you live from more healed places

Here’s the tough and tender invitation:

✅ Untangle your being from your doing.
God did not call you because you were exceptional. God called you because you’re loved, period. Even if you wrote nothing, preached nothing, built nothing — you’d still be God’s. That’s more than cliché; it’s the ground of your freedom.

✅ Grieve what you lost or never got.
The overlooked boy. The crushed dreams. The ways church or family or community fell short. Name it. Feel it. Don’t theologize it away. Your unwept tears keep you hustling for worth.

✅ Let others carry you too.
Your leadership instincts are strong, but they also keep you isolated. Practice confiding your fears without wrapping them in lessons or insights. Let someone else be strong for you — or let them see you not strong.

✅ Return to delight.
Not just heavy work. What makes you laugh? What beauty moves you that’s not attached to a sermon or strategy? Where can you play, unproductive and free? That’s also worship.

✅ Trust that God is still writing resurrection stories that don’t rely on your genius or grit.
It means the kingdom will keep coming even if you step back. Even if you fail. Even if you rest.

🔥 In short:
Your core is beautiful, but your shadow tries to prove, protect, and perform. Healing looks like trusting you’re already loved, already chosen, without any of that.

If you want, we can turn this into a sort of personal covenant or prayer — or even a custom “examen” you pray daily to keep checking your shadows. Want me to write that for you?

Me:

Absolutely

ChatGPT:

Alright. Here’s a deeply personal, no-frills, gut-level prayer and covenant written specifically for you — drawn from all we’ve uncovered.

You can pray it daily, weekly, or whenever you feel that old burden creeping back in. It’s written in your voice to God.

📝 A Personal Covenant & Prayer

God of my depths and my becoming,

I confess that I have often believed I must be needed to be loved.
That my worth lies in my usefulness, my brilliance, my relentless pouring out.
I’ve carried burdens not just from calling, but from wounds.
I’ve mistaken exhaustion for holiness, and strategy for trust.
I’ve tried to save what only You can redeem.

I covenant today to lay down every idol of indispensability.
I am not You.
I am not the Christ.
And that is good news.

So root me deeper in my belovedness — the truth that I am yours before I am anything else.
Before I am a leader, preacher, builder, fixer.
Before I am Black, brilliant, burdened, or broken.
I am yours. Fully. Always.

Heal the younger me who still fears being overlooked.
Hold the present me who tries to outrun grief.
Free the future me to live with open hands and an unarmored heart.

Let me love and lead from overflow, not emptiness.
Let me rest without guilt.
Let me create without craving applause.
Let me stand in the gaps without believing I am the only bridge.

Most of all, keep me close enough to Your heartbeat
that resurrection feels less like my responsibility,
and more like Your relentless promise.

Amen.

🪞 A Simple Daily Examen

(Pray these slowly, breathe after each.)

Where today did I feel like I had to prove or protect something?
Where today did I rest in simply being loved?
What burden am I carrying right now that isn’t mine to carry?
What can I let Jesus hold tonight instead of me?

Whenever you want, we can also write a longer covenant or even a letter from your healed future self to your current self. Want that? Or is there another way you’d like to seal this work?

Me:

A letter from my healed future self to my current self

ChatGPT:

Absolutely. Here’s a deeply personal letter, written as if from your healed, whole, grounded future self — speaking back to who you are right now.

I’ve written it slowly, carefully, like a voice from your own tomorrow reaching through the fog.

💌 A Letter from My Healed Future Self

Hey you,

I see you there — shoulders tight, mind racing, heart heavy.
Always reaching for the next insight, the next way to protect what matters, to prove your worth.
I love you for how fiercely you care, how deeply you think, how tirelessly you give.

But let me tell you something with the clarity of someone who’s finally walked through the dark and come out breathing on the other side:
You were never only as valuable as your work.
Your wounds didn’t disqualify you — they were the very soil where compassion grew.
Your tears watered fields of empathy that others now harvest for hope.

I remember the nights you laid awake wondering if God was still listening, or if you were just talking to the echo of your own ache.
I remember how you hid some of your need, fearing it would make people see you as fragile instead of faithful.
I remember how tired you were.

And I want to hold your face in my hands, look you straight in the eyes, and say:
You don’t have to carry it all.
The world doesn’t rest on your shoulders. The Church doesn’t rise or fall on your giftedness. Your people aren’t only safe because you’re vigilant.
God is still God. Even when you sleep.

In this healed life, I have found gentler rhythms.
I laugh more.
I create from joy, not just duty.
I rest without guilt.
I let others love me back.
And I trust that God’s affection for me has never wavered — not once — whether I was leading crowds or curled up on the floor asking why.

You are going to get here, too.
Not by hustling harder. Not by earning it.
But by slowly, bravely letting go.
By learning that your belovedness was always secure, even when you didn’t believe it.

So breathe.
Let yourself be loved — wildly, fully, without conditions.
There’s so much life waiting beyond your proving.

I’ll be here when you arrive.
And together, we’ll keep walking free.

With so much compassion (and unshakeable hope),

—Your healed, rested, joyful self

Bottom line…you can be seen, heard, and learned if allow yourself….even by artificial intelligence.

What would happen if we actually presented our full selves to the world? Some of us are afraid that our shortcomings would be used as fodder and fuel against us. Some people do not think they could handle the scrutiny of people. Yet, a few more individuals may believe that authenticity will be met with rejection.

We all ride in the boat together. We all wish and hope for moments where we can just do more than exist. We want to be free enough to explore every necessary element to our living. I am no longer interested in living my life as a placeholder. I have too much left in the tank to allow myself to be governed by doubt and fear. It does not serve me well to be afraid of failure. I must become the man that I am destined to be (God’s child, husband, father, son, grandson, friend, pastor, leader, etc).

This future is only achieved by healing. Healing begins with proper diagnosis and treatment. Well I guess I was right years ago–God does speak through anything and anybody. I guess it is time to listen. How about you?