I’ve gotten a “taste of Chicago” this working weekend without even going to the food festival. After a whole week of getting up super-early, the earliest being last Tuesday when I took our frail 78-year-old resident to O’Hare for her wheelchair-valet flight to San Diego, I got up early yesterday and today.

Saturday was the annual Hunger Walk at Soldier Field, put on by the Greater Chicago Food Depository where we are grateful to make donation pick-ups twice a month. This morning was a long-anticipated resident outing to Ukrainian Village (one of our residents grew up in the neighborhood and was even married in the same church we visited), kicked off by an early Ukrainian mass done in the Ukrainian tongue. At one point into this two-hour theatric extravaganza, a resident seated next to me who is an Italian Roman Catholic, whispered, “This should make our church services seem like a breath of fresh air.”

I was in a kind of agony like I haven’t felt since I lived in Manhattan and got stuck sitting through the first-half of the Broadway show “Hair” (I couldn’t take by intermission) all because a friend of mine wanted me to see her in action (and introduce me to her co-workers) as the concession-stand manager.

So, having said all that, I was sure bummed out when I got on the internet this evening and clicked on Shorewood’s service only to have it freeze up just after Jordan started. I came back to the site at least a dozen times to find the problem was not corrected. After giving it a rest for 15 minutes, I was successful in getting back on. Definitely this day was a reminder of how incredibly fortunate I am to be able to attend Shorewood in person!

*****

In light of all the press coverage of New York’s gay marriage ruling and the subsequent Gay Pride Parade today, here is a good outtake from an excellent study Jordan gave at the recent Soldier’s Conference:

“In the book that’s been made into a movie, ‘God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible,’ author Adam Nicolson describes King James with statements such as, ‘He had a hideous face. He was vulgar, ugly, nervous, foul-mouthed, worldly, sensuous and self-serving.’

“Now that’s a guy who is ‘pro’ King James! I want you to understand James wasn’t any of those things. Fifty years after he died, a Roman Catholic antagonist came out and said James was really a homosexual. There’s not one scrap of evidence of that contemporaneous to King James’ life at all. In fact, all of the evidence is to the contrary.

“He is on record in writing denouncing sodomy. He’s on record in writing, books he wrote, teaching against, and warning against homosexual activity. And yet people from afar, again opponents, people who are not his supporters but his enemies, and given the time he lived, when we’re talking enemies . . .

“You think there’s a political division today. This is the biggest corporate crock you ever heard! Everybody’s talking about the politics is divided today like it never has been. Have you ever studied American history? Two hundred years ago, have you ever looked at the records in newspapers of how various politicians called each other names, talked about each other, the cartoons they were making. If you did that same stuff today somebody would put you in jail for a hate crime.

“That’s all just a smokescreen and you get all caught up in it. What you need to do is just calm down and realize if it doesn’t make sense there’s a buck in it somewhere. Somebody over here is milking the cow and somebody over here is milking the cow and you know who the cow is? Mooooo.

“Who’s got all the money? The banks. When they lost the money, who got the money? The banks. People say, ‘Well, it was going to trickle down.’ Huh?! So what happens? The Big Guys get the money. You got one corporation fighting against another corporation (meaning big money people) and you’re making a difference?!

“You know how you can make a difference? Take the Book, preach it and then you make a difference. Other than that, you’re just whistling Dixie, spitting in the wind with it blowing in your face. It ain’t gonna work.”