Straight From The Hart

It was just a normal school day in Lebanon.  I don’t remember the exact date but it would have been sometime in the late 1950’s.  An office aide entered my classroom and I heard the teacher call my name, asking me to come to her desk.  She had a strange look on her face as she told me to go to the principal’s office with the aide. Never in all my years of school had I ever been sent to the principal’s office.   I was too scared to even wonder what I had done wrong as the office girl walked me down the hall. Once inside Mr. Rainey’s office, I saw a couple of people standing there including a strange man dressed in a dark suit.  I remember he looked rather ominous. He asked me my name and when I told him, he handed me a post card, asking me if I had ever seen it before.  I recognized it as a card I had sent a week or so before to The Daily Worker, the newspaper published at that time in New York City by the Communist Party USA, asking them to send me a couple of issues of their

On Palm Sunday of this year, a total of 55 Coptic Christians were murdered while worshipping in their churches, one  just outside Cairo, and another in Alexandria.  ISIS claimed responsibility for the bombings. While persecution of all  Christians has been a tactic of terrorism for ISIS, the Coptics (or Copts as they are usually referred to), have been terrorized and attacked even more frequently than many other groups.  The militants have previously claimed that attacks against Coptics are revenge for Muslim women persecuted by Coptic crusaders in Egypt. It is also believed that this particular Cathedral was attacked for the second time because it is the seat of the Coptic Pope, and the persona of Mark himself, author of the oldest of the four gospels.  Copts are among the oldest of all the continuous Christian faiths, if not the very oldest. Furthermore, experts who have studied  ISIS and other similar groups confirm that these groups “absolutely detest cultural symbolism.”

Another National Day of Prayer has come and gone.  I hope you took  time to reflect upon your own prayer life, as well as the corporate prayers of our nation.  There can be no argument that we have much to pray about in these days of violence and the threat of more war.  My own list grows longer each day. I was first introduced to the Day of Prayer sometime in the mid-1980s when I was asked to be the speaker at the observance in the National Cemetery in Springfield.  When I moved to Farmington sometime later to pastor a church, I participated in that city’s prayer observances.   Upon returning to Lebanon I began putting together an  early evening inter-denominational community service after people got off work on the National Day of Prayer.  It was held on the steps of the courthouse or in the lobby of the Civic Center where we brought in special singers and speakers or choirs from one of the schools.  We invited city and county officials and law enforcement and first responders