I don’t take rules too exactly.  But sometimes that may cost lives, in this instance the lives of robins.  Each summer the gardeners spread grub control on the grass, a pesticide that has some detrimental effect on the birds’ diet.  I have spoken out against this custom; from personal experience I’ve found grubs a minor lawn threat.  But I haven’t been very insistent.

Birds are dying out.  In North America, they have decreased by several billion in about seven years.  Are we entering end times?  I’d love that, but I’d hate to see a world without birds.

We are the stewards of Creation, and I don’t want to be irresponsible.  Can’t a garderner do without grub control?

A celebrity talks about being a “girl dad” and I commend him.  However, you don’t need “padded rooms” to be a “boy dad,” as he says.  Boys can be wonderful gentlemen, and grow up to be such Christ-like figures.  That’s being a man.  And if they fail?

We are all human, and failure is not such an awful lot.  It sometimes takes several failures to succeed.  A sympathetic Creator is always with his creatures, at least that’s the case with the only One I know.  Why would I be praying for those boys?

I love to pick up from my latest failure, trivial as it may be, and start afresh.  Who gives me this new day?  To whom do I owe this new sunrise?

What we call chance is, to the believer, the working out of God’s Providence.  I could say the fact that I am now an author was chance, but it makes sense if I believe that God diverted me from my original goal to become a physicist, rather than attributing it to blind chance.

Look at the beauty of the way I went.  When told by advisers not to choose the path of science, but of literature, who opened up to me but Flannery O’Connor, G.K. Chesterton, Gene Caesar, Pat Conroy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others.  I would never otherwise have met them.

That was not chance.  It was ordained the day I was born, George Washington’s birthday, because as the Christian Brother said to me: “You’re color blind, and a physicist can’t be color blind.”     

The first homegrown Long Island corn was tasted by us today, and it was the best sweet corn I ever tasted.  With a little butter, what could be amiss?  And to think that planet Earth once had six hour days and less than 14% of the oxygen it has today—hardly the conditions to grow corn.  Yes, the world has been developing for the appreciation of God’s children, who sometimes won’t acknowledge it.

Things take time to ripen, to mature, and so do we.  It takes time to realize evolution couldn’t happen on its own.  It needs an agent, a creator.  And an intelligent one at that.

Sometimes things don’t turn out the way we planned, and that leaves us irritable.  It may  be God’s way of showing us a new way, a new lesson, something we  didn’t realize before.  Today I bought ant spray, declined a bag for it, and put it in the car.  When we got home, I remembered it and went to get it.  An empty car.  I groped under the seats.  Nada.  Now I was really irritated.

When I had cooled down, I walked back to the car.  This time I said a prayer to the Holy Spirit to loosen my mind into logical thinking.  I opened the car door and reached under the seat I’d sat in on the way home, and reaching all the way back—Voila!—the lost spray.

That’s the way things happen.  Forget that irritation.