
This time it's from Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Billy Graham. Billy Graham, for those of you too young to remember him, was America's Main Minister for decades. In my Catholic youth, we Catholics used to think of him as the Protestant Pope, although the more sophisticated theologians among us knew that wasn't precisely correct. He was the confessor to Richard Nixon, the President famous for bombing his way to peace in Vietnam, Watergate, the opening to China and for being the most insecure weasel ever to occupy the White House.
So we need to take this warning seriously. God is the Graham family business, and Anne ranks high in it. This is why God speaks to her and not to you. Also He may favor white matrons with incredibly disciplined hair styles and gigantic brilliant white teeth that look like they could chomp through a dinosaur neck, because Anne has that going on.
The message from Anne is the usual one—the human race is seven billion pieces of crap and God is going to flush us soon. Apparently to Him we are like one of those plastic model airplanes kids used to glue together before they had video games. I am sure you remember them. The illustration on the box showed a dangerous war machine raining death over the German heartland, but when you finished the model it didn't look anything like the picture. It looked a little crooked, the decals didn't fit on right, it was covered with whitish spots where you had gobbed the glue on too thickly and was still the dull gray of the original plastic because your mom had been smart enough not to buy you paint as well as glue. Sure, you put it on your dresser. Maybe you even used it to strafe plastic soldiers once in a while, but your heart wasn't in it. When your mom swept it away cleaning some spring, you were secretly glad.
So it is with us and God, according to Anne. He made us, and He isn't satisfied with the results. When we made that model airplane, we knew that no matter how much we whined about how crappy it turned out, in the hopes that our parents would get us another one, we knew internally that it was our fault, especially if we had sniffed a little of that glue when we were piecing it together.
But the God of the Grahams is a blame-shifting Supreme Being, and He does not accept responsibility for making our gonads too active and our mouths too big. It's our fault we're sex-obsessed blasphemers, not His, and He is going to wind up the whole thing with a final Ka-boom! Real soon.
What to do? Well, Anne suggests nine days of prayer and fasting starting tomorrow. This is not going to prevent our fiery destruction—that's coming no matter what. It's just to persuade God to turn down the heat on those final flames a little, and maybe get Him to start burning socialist countries like Sweden and New Zealand first before he gets around to torching America. The theology isn't utterly clear, but the praying is no problem. Americans love to pray, especially at government functions and when they want guidance on kicking gay ass. Fasting is going to be the issue. Americans don't fast, they diet. There are thousands of diets in this country, but have you ever heard of a fast that begins with a word like Atkins or Paleo? The Muslims know how to fast—when they fast, they chow down all night and sleep all day, in a month-long nocturnal party—but this is the US of A, and we are not about to take nutritional advice from a bunch of terrorists.
So I'm asking Anne to make it a little less complicated. Why can't we just give up burritos for nine days, for example? Or just all sit down for fast food, instead of driving through? These are sacrifices most Americans would be happy to make to stave off the Final Destruction. Plus we would get less ketchup on our car upholstery.
And we'll all be a tiny bit thinner for the Final Whomping. So wherever we end up going, it'll feel a little less crowded. Praise be.