Such a week, with the victories and the flooding and the humor with the laughing.

Hi, guys. As I write it’s 4 p.m. sunny/ridiculously hot today California time.

What a week!

First and most recently, lemme recommend to you a post written by David Paul Kirkpatrick, the former head of Paramount, Disney, and Touchstone pictures [!]. (Meanwhile, I can’t figure out how the camera on my iPhone works.) For the Unfundamentalist Christians group blog over on Patheos, David penned a winning piece titled The Jesus Clown Car.

This week, of course, we all had some big news. First was that Exodus International was apologizing shutting down rebranding using media to spin its fall. My own humble take on the distinctly apology-like statement of Alan Chambers (An open letter to Exodus International’s super-remorseful Alan Chambers) was shared some 32,200 times, which as far as I know makes it the most-read commentary on the affair. So that was … nice, if that’s the word. (It was also a tad surprising, given that no major or even minor media outlets linked to the piece. So, you know: yay for regular people.)

Then we got news on the DOMA ruling. I can tell you that after six years of pretty relentlessly writing on the LGBTQ issue, I was just a tad overwhelmed by that development. I decided not to at all filter my response to it, and so “wrote” and immediately published this.

Speaking of prayers, this week some 200 more people signed up for my newsletter(s). That means a lot to me, because I consider John’s Prayer for the Week about the most important writing I do. It’s certainly the most intense. (The most sheerly fun writing I do, easily, I do for John’s Monthly Newsletter. Which makes me feel sorry for the people who subscribe to it. Which is why every month I give them the chance to win stuff for free.)

Speaking of my book UNFAIR: Christians and the LGBT Question, very recently its opening essay Taking God at His Word: The Bible and Homosexuality has been garnering mucho views; in the last three days, it’s been shared about 1,200 times. I have no idea what’s triggered that. But I’m seriously appreciative of it, because … well, because it’s is the culmination of what amounts to a lifetime of thinking about that very particular issue, and it took me (and my wife Catherine) literally years to write. So … great! If you’ve been sharing that piece, I cannot thank you enough.

Let’s see … what else? Well, speaking domestically, this week, thanks to a leaky pipe, our kitchen suffered a bit of a flood. So for four long days our kitchen has looked something like this scene from E.T.:

But whatever. Talk about a First World problem.

Still, the roar of the vacuums sucking the water right up through the very pores of our floor [!] was insanely deafening.

Which meant that the only suitable television watching (because, you know: what am I gonna do, read?) was old silent movies on Hulu.

And I am now and officially hereby begging you not to allow yourself to die before you’ve seen Harold Lloyd’s all-time mega-classic Safety Last!, from which this iconic shot is taken:

It’s pretty much the greatest thing in the history of me not knowing whether I should snap an internal organ laughing or go into a trance over the phenomenon of human genius.

Also (and I assume this goes without saying, but one never knows) do not not see anything—anything ever recorded on film—starring Charlie Chaplin, who for my money is … well, I suppose the closest thing there is, visually, to Mark Twain.

Hope you all have a fantastic weekend. You’ve earned it. I think we all have—whether we know it or not.