Before I joined Facebook, before Twitter existed, there was WordPress. In 17 years I have put up 2,025 posts, logged 2,593 comments and as of Friday evening have 800,558 views. (If you included stats from My Other Blog, which preceded The Master’s Table by a couple of months, that adds another 465,835 views). Blogging is not what it used to be; in 2012 I had over 124,000 just that year alone. Like I say, Facebook and YouTube were relatively new and there was no Twitter, FB Reels, TikTok or Instagram yet. People were so bored they read stuff that I wrote!

Since the Read the Bible series started last Saturday, Genesis 1 has been download 27 times. I have not been promoting it outside of my regular subscribers; I will try to attract more of an audience once the library is somewhat built up. At some point I will ask my readers to leave comments and consider sharing a link from your social media of choice and/or tell a friend. Right now I’m considering this phase sort of a soft open. There will be an index of Read the Bible posts at some point but for now click this link if you need to catch up. So far we have read the first 8 chapters of Genesis and there is an article on why we see The LORD in the Old Testament.

Mr Dolly Parton – I did not mention Gene Hackman last week for the simple fact the news has been inundated with that story. There is no way you missed it. You may have heard by now that Dolly Parton’s husband of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean, passed away last week. Did you know they were married just up the road from here in Ringgold, GA? They were not married in a wedding chapel as some believe, or the courthouse, but at Ringgold Baptist Church. Dolly had heard that in Ringgold you could get a marriage license and get married the same day. When I listen to the song Jolene, I kind of wonder about this woman that could steal a man from her. Apparently she had a real concern that a local bank teller was very friendly when he visited the bank and for that reason he tended to go a lot. The song Jolene was at least inspired by actual events even if not a true story. I would say whatever they were doing worked for them. It’s just not something you see every day but then again that’s not the way Dolly Parton does things.

Not every Southern Baptist Church contributes monthly to the Cooperative Program or promotes Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon every Easter and Christmas. I’m not going to throw numbers at you or remind you to make an offering – on here anyway but I do pastor an SBC church – but I will share that this has been the Week of Prayer for North American Missions. On the UBC website I have shared about different missionaries and their ministries this week across the United States and Canada and listed some things each day we can pray for. Between the Week of Prayer for North American Missions, the Week of Prayer for International Missions and the week of Prayer for Georgia State Missions, I try to remind our people throughout the year to be mission minded. Missions is sometimes across the street or around the block, not just on the other side of the world. Some can give, some will go, we can all pray.

That… is depressing. Toast sandwich aside, a full English breakfast has a lot of good looking stuff. I do eat baked beans, just not for breakfast. Fans of Happy Monday know how I feel about coffee. And if I’m being honest, I may still butter a piece of bread and have a butter sandwich from time to time.

While we are on the subject of food – I was trying to type the word chicle this week, as in the natural substance chewing gum used to made from. Not knowing for sure how to spell it I wrote chickle and learned that cheese + pickle = chickle. It’s not that different than a jalapeño popper and maybe better for someone that needs a calmer appetizer. Who knew?

The truth is stranger than fiction. So a guy in Australia dismantled his dying washing machine and sold the individual parts on eBay. He tested each part and wrote the date on them before shipping. Seven years later he needed a part for that exact same model. He went to a nearby town that was having what he describes as their annual “bulk rubbish collection” and found the right model of machine. He found the main control board pictured above, with the date from 2017 in his handwriting! And yes, it still works. That is a real life story of what goes around comes around.

Which phone is right? I don’t want to start an order of operations fight but this one had me going for a minute. Look at the numbers carefully.

I named it the Republic of Fiction. If you need a clue, ask in the comments. (Or it takes like 10 seconds to Google up a map of Europe.)

And finally…

Every ball in the picture is the same color. I know how it looks, but that’s what makes it an optical illusion. Look very closely at each, one at a time. If I need to prove it next week just let me know. I can and I will.