People will tell you, “Folks are the same no matter where you go.” This just has been true in my experience, especially in America where I’ve now traveled most of the country and have lived and worked in seven different states.

When I left my seven-year residence in midtown Manhattan a year-and-a-half ago for rural northeastern Alabama, I found myself flipping for the people of the Deep South—their genuineness, openness, humor, unpretentiousness, honesty, love of country and God, etc.

Now that I’m in Texas, I finding it’s more of the same but with even less shyness. People here who aren’t afraid of warm dialogue with strangers is on a “Big Texas Howdy” scale. It’s so much fun I sometimes think I’d like to stay (then I think of how hot and humid it is in the summer and that stops ALL fantasizing!).

Today, on this day before Valentine’s Day, I’m on the road again with my beat-up ’97 Isuzu Rodeo, this time headed for Escondido, Calif., where an older married couple has graciously invited me to stay with them for as long as I want in conjunction with an upcoming Bible conference at their church (John Verstegen’s assembly, www.helpersofyourjoy.com ) in San Juan Capistrano.

*****

Eating dinner last night in a local raw oyster joint (actually built in the shape of a tug boat!) off I-10 West in Houston, called Captain Tom’s, I had a number of people on both sides of me to chat with at the large circular bar that made up the cozy place.

There were authentic hat-wearing cowboys, native Mexicans in straw hats and even a guy in Wranglers jeans and a checkered, square-dancing-type shirt who looked a lot like President George W. Bush!

For my meal, I had six Gulf Coast oysters on the half-shell (at only $2.65), and a Texas mini platter that came with two deep-fried catfish filets, three deep-fried butterfly shrimp and French fries ($7.95).

I’ve gained so much weight from the great-tasting cheap food down here (the night before I had a smashing good crab cake sandwich with slaw) that—for the first time in my 43 years on the planet—I now know what it means when they say a person’s got a “spare tire.” That’s exactly what my abdominal fat looks and feels like!

When I emailed a longtime close friend about this problem last night, he wrote back, “Stop the dieting!  You're getting too skinny!  Women are supposed to have CURVES, not angles!  Wanna' end up like Maria Shriver or something!??”

*****

At least I can happily report that two weeks ago—when I first left Chicago for this extended road trip--I quit taking the anti-depressant Zoloft.

I had a feeling it wasn’t doing me any real good and when I read somewhere last month that it causes weight gain, I thought, “I gotta get off this dumb thing! I don’t think it’s doing me ANY good, any way!”

Sure enough, I don’t notice ANY difference in my mood swings, depression, etc., since dropping it. This was the SIXTH anti-depressant I’ve tried in the past two years, so I think I can safely conclude at this point that anti-depressants aren’t the answer for me. In fact, I had a friend tell me over a year ago, “You’re depression is situational, not chemical; anti-depressants aren’t going to help that.”

*****

In this last Sunday’s New York Times was a big article about Texas’ highway projects that revealed, “Texas has been a victim of its own success, officials say. From July 2006 to July 2007 it added more people than any other state — nearly half a million, beating California by nearly 200,000. In the past quarter century, they say, the state’s population has grown by nearly 60 percent while road use has doubled.

“ ‘They make fun of us, but a whole bunch of people want to be Texans,’ said Phillip E. Russell, assistant executive director of the Texas Transportation Department, who presided over the meeting here at the Nueces County Fairgrounds, along with the agency’s executive director, Amadeo Saenz.”

What I love most is I now find myself passing out my self-written Bible tract (which includes my blog address) to all kinds of people down. I just get talking to them and, at the end of the conversation, I find myself yearning for a way to keep “in touch,” so to speak.

The great thing is everybody—almost without fail—is very receptive to me giving them the “religious literature” and seems to like the idea of me, as a big city newspaper-magazine journalist, writing a book on the Bible.

*****

Jordan, a native of Mobile, Ala., says, “If you were raised in the South like I was, you heard about being ‘born-again’ all the time. It’s Southern Baptist phraseology.”

With the weak, emaciated condition of evangelicalism today, Christians ignorantly make the issue of a person’s salvation into, “Are you born again?”

Of course, when Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” He was referring to the future regeneration of the nation Israel and the re-gathering of the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” back to Him in the kingdom program prophesied extensively in the Old Testament and Four Gospels.

In Ezekiel 36: 24, God promises the house of Israel, “For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.
[25] Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.
[26] A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
[27] And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.
[28] And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

*****

Listening to the radio driving to Culver’s one Sunday night after church recently, Jordan said he and his wife heard two guys from WYLL discuss having been to a Christian bookselling convention in Dallas.

Jordan recalls, “I forget the number, but they said they went to 60-some booths and asked the people selling next year’s books, ‘Could you tell us what the gospel is?’

Now, where would you find the gospel better than in a Christian book convention, right? Wrong.

“They said of everybody they asked—60-some vendors—only one person mentioned the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. Everybody else talked about having a good life, ‘making Jesus the Lord of your life,’ and how Jesus ‘came to show you how to live.’

“One guy, and he happened to be a Southern Baptist pastor, said, ‘Well, the gospel’s in I Cor. 15:1-7,’ which is an interesting set of verses. Really it’s in verses 3-4 but, you know, ‘If two’s good, seven’s better’ . . .

*****

Jordan continues, “Jerry Falwell used to go on Johnny Carson and somewhere in the conversation he’d have to say something about death, burial and resurrection and thought he had preached the gospel.

“You didn’t preach the gospel when you just said ‘death, burial and resurrection.’ The gospel is what the death burial and resurrection means! That’s why Paul said, ‘I delivered unto you first of all that which Christ died’ . . . He didn’t just die as a martyr, He died for your sins. By the way, you don’t find that message at Pentecost in Peter’s words. Peter talked about the death of Christ with a different meaning.

“Every bookseller except one couldn’t tell you what the gospel was. They gave a ‘works’ explanation. That’s the condition of evangelicalism today. These are the best of the best—the bright purveyors of the ‘thinking people’; the booksellers.

“Of course, people who are students (of the Bible) are reading all of it and you say, ‘Wow! I mean, imagine 100 years ago—or 50-70 years ago—going to a place like that and having somebody say that?!’ People knew what the gospel was then. Today, they don’t know much at all about that kind of stuff.

*****

“In the Bible, being born-again, or the new birth, is a spiritual regeneration but Israel had to have a physical birth (that which is born of Abraham and that which is born of God) because Abraham’s flesh is born of God.

“To be ‘born again,’ means to be born of God TWO times. You don’t qualify, because you ain’t been born of God but once, I hope. Paul said that he had begotten you through the gospel.

“You and I, as members of the Body of Christ, are the children of God; the born ones of God. We’ve been born into the family of God by faith in Jesus Christ, but you were born spiritually; you don’t have a physical birth.

“Now people sing at birthdays, ‘Happy Birthday to you, only one will not do, Born again means salvation, then you have two,’ and that’s just an old dumb Gentile trying to get something that doesn’t belong to him.

“People argue, ‘Well, I was born.’ Yeah, but you weren’t born of God. Somebody says, ‘Well, I’m born in the image of God.’ No you weren’t! Adam was created in the image of God and you were born in the image of Adam. (Genesis 5)

“Now, that statement that I just made kicks in the teeth about 98% of theology, even evangelical theology. I heard a guy saying just the other day saying, ‘Men are precious because they were born in the imago Dei.’ Sounds good, doesn’t it? That’s Latin for ‘the image of God.

“My point is these people here (in John)—that’s why Jesus talks about ‘O generation of vipers’—had their ‘generations’ and were physically the sons of Abraham. They even say it in John 8: ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ And Jesus answers them, ‘But your father’s the devil.’ Spiritually, they were of the devil.

“So these people of Satan’s had to be spiritually ‘born again’ to make God their spiritual father, and that’s the regeneration that comes in here and that’s what Ezekiel 36 is talking about!

“Regeneration’s gonna come. Verse 27 says, ‘And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes.’ There’s the empowering. He says, ‘You shall be endued with power on high.’ What power? The power of that indwelling Spirit of God that He’s put in you.

“The Spirit’s going to give them empowerment by writing His law in their hearts and causing them to keep His statutes. That’s exactly Jeremiah 31:31-34; that’s exactly what the new covenant is all about!

“When Christ tells them, ‘You’re going to receive the promise of the Father,’ He’s talking to them about the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the coming of the Spirit in the prophetic program is a foretaste and preview of the blessings in that kingdom. In other words, this is clearly a preparation of these people for kingdom blessings.

“The whole nation is going to be brought to repentance over piercing Him and He said, ‘The way that’s going to happen is I’m going to pour out the spirit of grace and supplication upon them. I’m gonna pour my spirit out on them and these people are going to mourn and there’s going to be a national repentance.’ ”