Are you still here?

That's a line from the television series Babylon 5. The Centauri ambassador, Londo Mollari, asks his aide Vir, "Are you still here?" It's more in the sense of "Haven't you left yet?" although, if I recall, he asks him this in more than one episode, and later in the series it's more like "So you haven't deserted me like everyone else has." At least it seemed so to me.

At any rate...I notice I haven't posted here since, gulp, April 4. Any readers of this blog would think I had abandoned it. Frankly, I was starting to wonder myself. Maybe I need to re-think what I am writing and how and when. My posts were turning into sermons. It's tough enough to write one sermon a week, but one a day is way too much.

So, maybe this blog will take a turn and be more about life on the other side of the hill rather than pontifications from a preacher who sometimes takes this whole business of ministry way too seriously. And maybe the entries will be more frequent and a little bit shorter. Maybe.

Life on the other side of the hill: I notice that sometimes I will mis-read something and on a second reading discover that I was only a letter or two off the mark, but what a difference a letter or two makes. Yes, thank you, I do wear glasses, and yes, I have had my eyes checked recently. Chalk it up to reading without paying particularly close attention. Or being on the other side of the hill.

Anyway, yesterday as I was sitting at a traffic light, I noticed that the car in front of me had something written on the license plate holder. "Born broken," it said. Wow, what a powerful theological statement. In the Christian understanding of original sin, we are all born broken. We're not perfect coming out of the womb, only to screw up our lives as we grow up. At least not in my Calvinist upbringing. No, we are born broken and sinful and in need of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, because we are never going to be perfect in God's eyes, but through Christ we are forgiven.

Born broken. What a wonderful confession to put on the back of one's car. Truly this must be a humble person, someone who acknowledges God as the ultimate healer of our brokenness.

And then I looked again and realized that the B was really an H. "Horn broken," it said, and added below, "Watch for finger."

As Roseanne Rosanna-Danna would have said, "NEV-er mind."