Last week, I wrote about how a 1989 committee that was acting under the authority of the National Council of Churches in Christ U.S.A. removed from the Gospels of Mark and Luke a critically important thing that Jesus told His apostles. While previous versions of the Catholic Bible quoted Jesus as saying that certain evil spirits could only be cast out by “prayer and fasting,” the newly revised version of the Catholic Bible did not include our Lord’s statement that fasting had to accompany prayer before certain evil spirits could be cast out.
When I was 12 years old, I took over a paper route delivering newspapers for the Peoria Journal Star. The route included the neighborhood that I grew up in, which consisted of several of my relatives. The first year that I had my paper route, I was pleasantly surprised when I received gifts from several of my customers during the Christmas season.
My wife and I were married in June 1980, which was a month after I finished my first year in law school. One of the weekly television shows that we watched together during the first year of our marriage was the prime-time soap opera, Dallas. We’ve come a long way since then. Today, there’s no way we would waste our time on that type of show.
In the early summer of 1975, one of my cousins decided that he wanted to try his hand at gardening. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to call him “James.” At the time, James and I were both 18 years old. I knew quite a bit about gardening because I had been in charge of taking care of our large family garden for the previous five years.