Assorted

When there is smoke…

You think you know someone.

Five years – truly, has it already been five years that we have spent morning, noon and night working side by side? How many meals, how much laughter, how many truly delicious accomplishments we have achieved together only to arrive at this Easter morning and have you, the oven I’ve grown to trust, inexplicably burn the bacon beyond recognition?!! The betrayal runs deep.

Now, hopefully there aren’t any readers who are questioning the underlying necessity of bacon in the life of the believer. If so, go read Nehemiah 8 and then come back. I’ll wait. A large platter of bacon, crisped to perfection, is my weekly gift to my people, the reminder of all the wondrous things we mortals can experience this side of paradise.

Over the years, I have moved through many different seasons and methods of bacon prep. In the newlywed years, I attempted bacon on a paper-towel-ensconced plate in the microwave. This works better, I admit, if you hadn’t thought it a brilliant idea to register for large, square dinner plates that, when placed in the microwave, aggressively prohibit the rotation mechanism, thus producing bacon that is highly, almost toxically cooked on one end and raw on the other.

I then spent multiple years employing the electric skillet on the countertop method, which was largely fine but had two predictable problems I never seemed to entirely stay ahead of: I buy cheap griddles (yes, that technically makes me the problem, so make it three predictable problems) and they always seem to have large dead spots in the center, thus requiring a complicated mosaic of fatty meat scattered about that can cook approximately three pieces at a time, and the grease catch always has a tendency to break, which I consistently fail to notice until the grease has dripped all across the counter and floor, leaving an exciting patch for walking on days after the bacon has been consumed.

Then I was introduced to cooking bacon in the oven and, dare I have the hubris to say, I shall never go back? It has now become a part of my own personal Sunday morning liturgy. To get the family up and out to worship without a stressed atmosphere, I wake up an hour or so before the rest and go cook bacon. Later, when everyone is up, I pop the already cooked bacon back into the now cooling oven to warm it back to perfection and voilà – eat the fat! This was my plan on Easter morning...

And then the oven betrayed me.

Now, if ovens could speak, mine would probably say (and for some reason, I hear this in an Australian accent), Whoa now, Missy, I am not the one who broke the pattern, you did! You acted the dingo (again, Australian) and left the oven on for too long and you did not pay close attention when you warmed the bacon back up, which is why your family had to eat LIMP TURKEY BACON on Resurrection Sunday! At this point, obviously, I would push random buttons on the oven that would make it stop talking and probably clean itself. Ha, and so there.

But then... I would have to acknowledge that the oven, while unnecessarily preening and self-righteous and sporting a cooler accent than mine, was correct – I assumed the bacon was safe. I stopped paying attention. Smoke always ensues when we stop paying attention.

It is really no different in our daily walks with Christ. We have areas that we let our guard down (you know the one, that guard we are told to keep up with unceasing vigilance because our adversary the devil roams about like a lion seeking one to destroy?). We feel safe, spiritually, and fail to pay attention to the faint aroma of singed flesh that is beginning to permeate our relationships, our thoughts, our homes. One such example that leaps to mind for me is that brief window of time at the end of a long day when you and your spouse finally get to go to bed. How many thoughtless words have been spoken in those last moments of the waking hours? How many misunderstandings could have been avoided, how many apologies would not have become necessary, if we were to go to bed, spiritually, with a knife under our pillow, ready to spring to the cross at the first sign of temptation?

Because that is the only recourse when you light God’s good gifts on fire: Christ. He is your only protection, your true security, the only place you can and must turn again and again in the midst of temptation, of failure, of opposition, of smoke. Some kitchen fires... some relational fires... leave an aroma in the air that lasts for days. I spent a solid 48 hours haunted by the Easter bacon. But with each acrid whiff, I am given the choice to turn, and return, to the Gospel and put my hope in His unfailing protection. He is not done handing out bacon. So, I cannot be done standing guard, in His grace alone.

News

Aussie senator gives speech the world needs to hear

On April 1^st, Australian Senator Ralph Babet gave a speech that got some social media attention for good reason. He explained to all those willing to listen that there is no freedom apart from God. Here is what he said:

“I'm regularly criticized for being overtly Christian. I'm told to keep my faith private, to leave it at the door of this chamber and to speak as though God is irrelevant and truth is negotiable. I just will not do that. I'm not merely a man with opinions. I'm a man under authority, and that authority is the authority of Christ and his church. That changes everything.

“Christianity is not a lifestyle. It's not a cultural accessory. It is a total claim on the human person – on the mind, on the conscience, and on the soul. Here's the reality that my critics refuse to admit: every single person in this chamber serves a doctrine of some sort. Some serve God; others serve Marxist ideology. Some serve the State or maybe even public opinion, but no one is really neutral. So, when I'm told to leave my faith behind, what I'm really being told is: 'Abandon your authority and submit to ours instead.'

“No, I will not do that. I'll not trade eternal truth for political convenience. I won't bow to the false religion of relativism.

“What we are really dealing with here is not the absence of religion but the rise of a new one. It's a creed without God, a morality without foundation. It's a system that demands obedience and calls it tolerance. Let's just be clear: the claim that religion has no place in politics is itself a dogma – an exclusive claim, a coercive claim. The question is not whether beliefs shape this place. They already do. We know that. The question is: which truth will govern us?

“When God is pushed aside, it is not neutrality that replaces Him; it is power. The most oppressive regimes in history did not honor Christ; they rejected Christ. What followed was not freedom. It was control, it was persecution, and it was suffering on an industrial scale. Don't tell me that taking God out of society makes it safer. It just makes it worse.

“Let's speak plainly about what Christianity actually claims. What does it claim? It claims that Jesus Christ is God, that He rose from the dead, and that He established a charge of authority to teach truth in every single age. Just look at the King that we proclaim. He's not a tyrant. He's not a conqueror. He's a king that was crowned with thorns, a King who went on to forgive His executioners, a King who laid down His life for His enemies. Do you know what? That is strength. That is power rightly ordered. That is the model that Christianity calls us to follow. It's not weakness and it's not chaos. It's discipline, strength, and order towards truth and the good.

“Christianity also destroys the modern obsession with moral superiority, because no man earns salvation and no one stands above another. We are all in need of mercy and in need of grace, which means that there is no room for the smugness, the posturing and the endless virtue-signaling that now dominate public life. From that humility comes order, from that order comes justice, and from that justice comes peace.

“I ask you again: what kind of society does that produce? It sounds remarkably like the one that we all claim to want. Let's just be clear again: I'm not going to dilute my faith. I'm not going to pretend that truth is negotiable. I'm not going to speak as though Christ is optional. I serve a higher Authority than this chamber, than this place, and that Authority does not, and will never, change with the polls. A nation that rejects Christ does not become freer. It simply finds a new master; that's all. Some of you in this place don't serve the right master. I won't name names, but you know who you are.”

That’s a message desperately needed in the political sphere. And it did get some social media coverage on Facebook. Unfortunately, the very same day he delivered this speech, the senator also chose to release an April Fool’s Day prank about aliens being real… which is what the mainstream media covered instead.

While this has to be one of the strongest, clearest Christian presentations delivered by a politician in recent memory, Babet isn’t the ideal messenger. He’s gotten in some trouble through the years for his tweets, particularly two years back when he used the N-word to enthusiastically endorse an Andrew Tate post. Then, when he was called on that, he followed it up with this:

“In my house, we say . We are sick of you woke ass clowns. Cry more. Write an article. Tweet about me. No one cares what you think.”

Where Babet went wrong here is on the very point his 2026 speech corrects. You can’t find the truth by bouncing off a lie; as he demonstrated, you won’t end up in the right place by simply doing the opposite of what the woke folk want you to do.

That’s because, as Luther noted, there’s more than one way you can fall off a horse. To simply swing away from an error on one side is to put yourself in danger of falling for a completely different and opposite error. Instead, we need to do as the Senator – at his best – encouraged: rather than reacting against evil, we need to actively look to the Lord and His Word to find out what’s true and good and right.

Top picture is a screenshot of the senator's speech, from his YouTube channel and is displayed under fair use.