From Celebrity to Criminal

 

This post is reprinted from March 19, 2018 and April 2, 2012. The references to celebrities with criminal records are dated, but the point is timeless.

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No, this post isn’t about Lindsay Lohan or Mike Tyson or Paris Hilton. A hundred years from now, they will have faded from the public memory.

That’s something they don’t share with the man who rode into town to cheering crowds on a Sunday, only to be mocked and executed as a criminal before the week was up. Events we are still talking about 2000 years later.

Talking about and celebrating. My father took this picture while my family was attending the Palm Sunday festivities in Jerusalem in 1958.

Lindsay and Mike and Paris didn’t lose their celebrity status when they were convicted of their crimes, and neither did Jesus of Nazareth.

But here is the crucial difference: Jesus was sinless. He had no guilt to convict him.

Well, that isn’t quite true.

He was guilty of love. A love so great that he paid the penalty for the sins of all humankind.

His heart was heavy and he died in anguish. But he did it by choice.

For me. For you.

And that’s something to remember not just during Holy Week but every day of the year.

Travel Schedule Woes

 

Roland and I are planners. We plan our travels years in advance, so when something falls through, it leaves us scrambling for alternatives. This was a particular problem during COVID, when we had to reschedule trips to South Africa and to Australia/New Zealand, but we got through the travel withdrawal somehow without losing the addiction. Then in 2022 we had to postpone the Ireland half of a trip to Iceland and Ireland after Roland tested positive for COVID. We made that up with a trip to Ireland last year.

Now we have to change our plans again. Roland put a lot of time and effort into arranging a trip to Eastern Europe this summer. He found two tours from our preferred providers that we could take back-to-back, with a seven-hour train ride between the end of the first to the beginning of the second. One was a land tour of Croatia and Slovenia with EF Go Ahead Tours, and the other is a river cruise from Bucharest to Budapest on Viking, which is is the other leg of the first trip we took with Viking in 2015..

Then EF emailed to say that their tour was cancelled because not enough people had signed up. They offered some alternatives, but none of them worked with the Viking cruise, which we will take as scheduled. The three trips we have done with EF Go Ahead have all been good experiences, so although it didn’t work for this summer, we had no hesitation about booking with them again. Since we had already been talking about doing a land tour of Portugal, Spain, and Morocco, we used the credits from the cancelled tour to book that one for the end of next year.

When we find a provider we like, we stick with them. This summer will be our fifth cruise with Viking, and we are going to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand with them next year.

Now the question is: Where do we go after Spain?

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The photo at the head of this post shows the boat we were on during our first cruise with Viking in 2015. It was docked in Budapest at the time.

Wedding Feast or Famine

 

In Roland and my families, weddings seem to be feast or famine. Our daughter, Caroline, got married on July 1, 2006. One of Roland’s sisters was married the year before, but it had been over a decade since any other weddings.

After Caroline and Pete’s wedding, we had another long dry spell until one of Roland’s nephews got married in 2022. Last year was quiet, but it looks like there will be two weddings in 2024.

We had a strong hint at Christmas, when John brought a girl home for the first time, bringing her all the way from North Carolina. Although it is hard to get to know anyone in just a couple of days, we loved Christina at once. She is a strong Christian and a lovely person inside and out. John chose well.

My niece Rachel also brought her boyfriend over for a gathering of extended family just after Christmas, and we liked him, too.

On February 25 (a Sunday), we received a call from Rachel telling us she had gotten engaged the day before and was getting married at the end of August. Then, two hours later, John called to say that he had gotten engaged the day before, as well. That’s his and Christina’s engagement picture at the head of this post. No date yet because they’re still working on their plans, but I expect it to happen sometime this year.

John is 37, and some mothers might have tried to push their children into marriage by that age, but that was never my goal. Marriage is sacred, and without the right partner people are better off single.

I’m glad John waited for Christina.

Learning to Surrender

 

When the Union armies surround Vicksburg, 12-year-old Charlotte and her family find themselves living in a cave. As she discovers what it is like to lose control of her life, will her attitude toward slavery change?

Learning to Surrender is finally here. The following link takes you to the amazon.com page for the paperback, but the Kindle version can also be reached there. The book should be available online from Barnes and Noble in the near future.

LEARNING TO SURRENDER at Amazon

The title comes from a real event. When the Yankees ordered Vicksburg to surrender in May 1862, this was Colonel Autry’s reply:

Mississippians don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an enemy. If Commodore Farragut or Brigadier General Butler can teach them then let them come and try.

It took a year, and it was General Grant who taught them, but the residents of Vicksburg did learn to surrender.

Learning to Surrender is not about battles or the fighting itself. There are plenty of other stories told from a soldier’s point of view.

Buy and read my book to discover what it was like for the residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi as they learned to surrender.