A Request for Prayers

Plus: Weekend Listening Tips

Thank you to all for reading and sharing this substack the past several months. If you could kindly spare a moment and a prayer, please direct it to this wonderful, brave warrior of a boy and his family. Ro and his family have had to leave their home here in Austin because the cancer he is fighting is so rare, the treatment involved so intensive, that the city does not have the facilities for the care he needs. They will be spending months in isolation after his bone marrow transplantation in Dallas, not even allowed to receive care packages, away from their church and their community - and did I mention that Ro has a newborn baby sister along for the trip? As I can assure you, and you can for yourself see from the updates on the givesendgo site, Ro and his family remain unwavering in their faith - so please join me and my family in prayer and support, and let’s show them that the church truly is universal, and that no matter how far they have to travel, they remain forever a cherished part of the family of God.

Please click the button below - or restack, or post to facebook, or whatnot - to share this appeal as widely as you can. My substack will always remain free, I will not bog you down with calls for contributions, but if you have found anything to entertain or interest you here the past few months, I would truly appreciate it if you shared this link. Thank you!

I hope to be back with the Saturday night movie pick tomorrow, but in the meantime I thought my readers might appreciate some of the following podcast recommendations:

For those who prefer my posts about mental health and Big Pharma, please check out this week’s two-part interview on the Allie Beth Stuckey podcast with Dr. Roger McFillin: part 1, part 2. Lots of food for thought there, and the stories they both recount sound very much like many of the stories y’all share in the comments here. While ADHD only comes up very briefly in the discussion, it is interesting to learn that Allie Beth is yet another wonderful, creative, influential person who only just barely dodged the Ritalin bullet in middle school (if not the Goth trend). Do y’all have any idea how dull, dreary, and dark (literally, because you know Edison would’ve gotten drugged early and often) our civilization would be had the medical community discovered this ADHD treatment stuff a few centuries earlier? Do y’all have any idea how much art, talent, and nonconformist bravery we’ve been missing out on the past few decades? Ok, I need to move on to the next podcast before this turns into an hour long rant…

For those who skip the medical stuff and prefer the theology, don’t miss this great interview by the Babylon Bee team with Pastor Douglas Wilson. This is not an exact quote, but my favorite observation from Pastor Wilson went something like this: “The Bible says if the salt has lost its flavor, it’s no longer good for anything except to be trampled underfoot… and Christians today keep complaining, ‘hey, we’re being trampled underfoot.’ Well…” Exactly. The whole podcast is well worth listening to if you want to learn more about what I mean when I say there is no neutral. Don’t miss Cody Ilardo on a similar theme - the answer is not in politics, or medicine, or social science, or anything apart from Christ. We cannot have a national revival without reviving ourselves, and our faith, first. So get salty!

If you like the Babylon Bee podcast, check out this great interview with Michael Malice, too. They delve deep into the evils of communism - and, of rather important practical use to us, show how those evils were defeated!

And if you want to celebrate Pride month with the Bee, and just have some fun with The Lord of the Rings, you will enjoy this terrific interview with a Tolkien scholar: Middle Earth is Not Queer.

Hopefully y’all will find something interesting above to listen to. Thank you again for your time and readership, keep Ro and his family in your prayers, and have a wonderful end to your week.