When I try to tell you what’s coming down

Here’s a bunch of links about stuff. …

• No one expects the South Williamsport Board of Education!

• Marrying Mr. Darcy: “My perfect match, Mr. Bingley, ended up going off to London and never came back, the cad! I wasn’t particularly Cunning, so by the time my Proposal phase came up, everyone had been cherry-picked and I only had one possible suitor, who rejected me. I ended up an Old Maid and even rolled poorly on that chart, so I was alone and miserable.”

• Maureen Farrell Garcia pulls off a rare double-feat, writing for Dianna E. Anderson and for Christianity Today on the same day. Both posts involve a candid discussion of her experience of sexual control and abuse. Her post on Anderson’s blog offers a more incisive critique of evangelical purity culture and the way it aids predators while re-victimizing victims, but she also doesn’t pull any punches in the CT post, which discusses the way evangelical churches harm victims with shallow talk of unconditional “forgiveness.”

• Hemant Mehta on thanking God after being attacked by a shark.

I remember seeing a story on the Channel 5 News when I was a kid. There’d been some kind of shootout in a subway station and a stray bullet struck a passenger in a passing train, seriously injuring him. The doctor said the bullet missed the guy’s heart by less than half an inch. “He’s a very lucky man,” the reporter concluded.

My dad burst out laughing at that. You’re sitting there riding the train, reading the paper and minding your own business, when the train just happens to pass through a station where someone just happens to be shooting a gun, and somehow that bullet is timed perfectly to hit the train as it passes, and to hit your car on that train, and — out of a dozen or more people on that car in this city of 8 million — that bullet hits you, putting you in the hospital. “I don’t think that makes you a very lucky man,” Dad said.

So then, I guess, let’s try to remember to be grateful on those days when we’re not being bitten by a shark.

• On July 4, 1776, the Marquis de Lafayette was 18 years old (via AZspot). Samuel Whittemore, on the other hand, was about to turn 80.

• Here in America, the Rev. John Piper has excommunicated a sandwich. Not to be outdone, a Russian Orthodox priest has condemned soccer’s World Cup as a “homosexual abomination” that seeks to destroy Christianity with festive footwear. Anti-gay religious people are just rather … odd, aren’t they?

• “How should people respond to open-carry gun-rights activists?”

My proposal is as follows: we should all leave. Immediately. Leave the food on the table in the restaurant. Leave the groceries in the cart, in the aisle. Stop talking or engaging in the exchange. Just leave, unceremoniously, and fast.