Abraham's Journey
By Charlie Johnston In the Jeff Bridges version of the movie, True Grit, there is a scene in the middle of the movie where Marshall Rooster Cogburn has laid a trap for the bad guys. It goes disastrously wrong and utterly fails. Bridges, as Rooster, surveys the damage and says, laconically, “Well…that didn’t pan out.” […]
Read More That Didn’t Pan OutBy Charlie Johnston Five things I’m pondering… Inversion of Church and State A bizarre dispute has arisen between the State of Florida and Miami Catholic Archbishop Thomas Wenski over Catholic school vaccine mandates, which the State of Florida forbids schools to mandate. What is bizarre about it is that the state’s Attorney General, James Uthmeier, is […]
Read More Enough is EnoughBy Charlie Johnston It was a banner July for our little community here at A Sign of Hope. We were right about every aspect of Covid – and were one of the earliest to get it right. We didn’t use weasel words; we were full-throated about it. It absolutely gobsmacked me that, during the depraved […]
Read More Chickens Coming HomeBy Charlie Johnston One of the devil’s most brilliant successes has been to embed the pharisaical instinct deeply into the human psyche. Few want the mundane honor of being God’s good servant, preferring the romantic drama of being God’s enforcer. The latter is the wide gate that leads to destruction while, as Christ said, the […]
Read More One Bread, One BodyBy Charlie Johnston Up until I was in my late 40’s, I could not wear a watch. If I tried, within three days it would stop. Every time. If I took it off, after a few days it would start running again. But if I put it back on it would rarely last an hour. […]
Read More The Best of Times, The Worst of TimesBy Charlie Johnston I think I gave the wrong impression when I wrote passionately about Pope Leo’s formulaic statement opposing American action on Iran, where he said that negotiation is the only answer and that violence never solved anything. Both were trite, nice-sounding platitudes that are easily and quickly disproven. But it did not signal […]
Read More Do Whatever He Tells YouBy Charlie Johnston (It is Christmas…the Advent Season is over, yet I think it begins the second “week” of the New Advent. I wrote this story 29 years ago. It had an unexpected effect that has been very useful to me over the years. People of deep and ardent faith seem to always love the […]
Read More The Beginning of RedemptionBy Charlie Johnston It is a peculiarity of modern life that a lot of people have a very superficial knowledge about many things, but no depth of knowledge on anything. Then we have cohorts who have extreme depth of knowledge on certain niche subjects (usually technology) but little general knowledge beyond that. Weirdly, this combination […]
Read More Cast Out Into the DeepBy Charlie Johnston Long ago I saw that, at a decisive moment, our technology would fail. I’m no Luddite. I do not regard technology as either intrinsically evil or intrinsically good. It is just a tool which, like any other tool, can be wielded by its user for either good or evil. But we withhold […]
Read More Prepare For a Great BlessingBy Charlie Johnston “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!” – Galatians 1:8 When an organization is fractured by deep divisions, I usually encourage a “Don’t spook the horses” policy for about a year. That […]
Read More Spooking the Horses
