To sit through the 9/11 Commission hearings in the Hart Senate Office Building in the spring of 2004 was a painful experience. Flanked by rows of family members whose loved ones had died in the 9/11 attacks, first former FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted that his own antipathy toward computers had left the agency underequipped to track terrorists and their money. Then CIA Director George Tenet confessed that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda had been around for a decade before the CIA in 1996 actually documented the organization and established a mission station to track it. With precision—and at times evident emotion—Tenet described the enormous difficulty the CIA faced as it tried again and again to plant reliable agents within al-Qaeda’s fortified base in Afghanistan. Clearly he understood that the agency’s failure to do so had made way for an attack on the United States and the deaths of nearly 3,000 U.S. civilians.

This was no place for a politician to be smoothing around the edges, and that is what would likely have happened had someone like Leon Panetta, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick to head the CIA, been in that hot seat. Both Freeh and Tenet are men who spent years wading in the trenches of high-security briefings and closed-door espionage planning sessions. Freeh became a special agent in 1975 and director of the FBI in 1993, a post he held for eight years. Tenet gained his security clearance in the 1980s when became staff director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and went on to become the second-longest-serving CIA director, from 1997 to 2004. Both men have been filleted openly and excessively for their errors leading up to the attacks, but from their ranks have come a league of counterterrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement experts who have learned from the mistakes, who have reorganized the intelligence-gathering community, and have thwarted countless terror attacks in the years preceding and following 9/11.

That is why even some members of Obama’s own party are shell-shocked that the incoming president turned not to one of them but to a Clinton holdover and political maneuverer with no connection to intelligence gathering. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who will chair the Senate Intelligence Committee, indicated Monday she might oppose the Panetta pick: “My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time.”

Other Democrats, like former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, praised the Panetta nomination, insisting that the eight-term congressman and former Clinton chief of staff regularly handled intelligence material as part of his responsibilities for Clinton’s security briefings. But this doesn’t appear to have been the case. According to two CIA directors who served under Clinton, Panetta rarely held intelligence briefings. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, picked by Clinton to head the CIA from 1993 to 1995, once famously told a journalist: “Remember the guy who in 1994 crashed his plane onto the White House lawn? That was me trying to get an appointment to see President Clinton.” Woolsey said he never had a private meeting with the president and only twice was summoned for semiprivate ones: “It wasn’t that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn’t exist.” This while Panetta presided as Clinton’s chief of staff.

Likewise, Tenet, who came in under Clinton in 1997 (Panetta left the White House in January 1997), told the commission in 2004 that his daily intelligence briefings were sent to senior White House policy makers via then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. He rarely had direct contact with the president and did not know whether he actually saw the briefings. When Bush, who asked Tenet to stay on at the CIA, summoned him for daily face-to-face briefings early on, Tenet told friends he was shocked. “This was a marked change,” Tenet told the commission. “The principle difference was that I would see the president. This gets your adrenaline flowing early in the morning.”

The difference was that intelligence also was flowing in two directions, with the president asking questions and thereby setting priorities for the intelligence gatherers. “Bin Laden,” Tenet told the commission, “became an agenda item early on.”

The contrast between the CIA director’s relationship with Clinton and with Bush begs a question: Was Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta part of a team that thwarted CIA access to the Oval Office? Or was he part of a team that was too indifferent or otherwise preoccupied to put a priority on daily face-to-face briefings? Whatever the case, Obama’s choice of Panetta shows not so much a break with the Bush past as it does a return to a Clinton era that put politics over substance and was defined by indifference to the grittier details of national defense. When it comes to intelligence gathering, our country can’t afford that.

Seven score and 10 years ago Charles Darwin published a controversial book. His hypothesis brought an advance in science. It inspired Marx and Hitler. It reshaped American society through the public school system.

While modern evolutionary theory has its merits, what often hides behind objective research is a very specific belief. A belief that species have evolved on their own, without a designer, has come to dominate biology. America’s secular religion is partly a natural reaction to past efforts to suppress Darwin’s story. It was unwise to ban one hypothesis from 19th century classrooms. It is just as unwise to force it uncritically on children and suppress discussion in the 21st century.

Teachers who present biological counter evidence against macroevolution in public schools get in serious trouble with Big Brother, just as past scholars were in trouble with the Inquisition for daring to suggest that the world might be revolving around the sun. Biologists who speak of intelligent design feel like Soviet dissidents bringing historical and economic evidence against Marxism to the Kremlin.

But what about the constitutional constraints, the separation of church and state? Surely we cannot allow a “religious” explanation in public schools? Intelligent design in science courses is not to be mixed with any particular theology. It should have no religious element whatsoever. It has to be a critical evaluation of evidence from the physical world and biology.

It is time for American public educators to prove that they believe in intellectual freedom, scientific methods, and the power of reason. America has gone too far in the wrong direction when democratically elected officials and legally appointed judges abuse their powers to banish evidence against one idea from the public classrooms. That is disgrace on a par with burning books and crosses.

Perhaps you are smart and firmly believe in the non-existence of God. Look at a single cell. What do you see? It has such an amazing design that dismissing the possibility of a designer is not scientific. Let school teachers not be afraid to teach any hypothesis supported by facts and all facts that contradict the currently dominant hypothesis. Let freedom ring!

I got a movie gift card for Christmas so we saw Slumdog Millionaire. It hit me like a Mack truck. I also learned a thing or two about India off the tourist track. I grew in admiration for a female friend of mine who is a missionary in the slums of Uttar Pradesh. And now I know that the Hindu god Rama holds a bow and arrow in her hand, in case I ever get asked on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Something I learned that didn’t strike me till after I got back home is that director Danny Boyle managed to make a film with no sex scenes in it—and it worked just fine. If ever there was a movie that called for sex scenes, it’s Slumdog. There is plausibility at every stage of the story—from the anti-Muslim raid during Salim and Jamal’s childhood, to gangster Maman’s orphanage, to the tourist-hustling period at the Taj Mahal.

I cannot tell you how edified I am. Before, I could have almost bought the lie that in some movies you just have to show a sex scene if sexuality is “integral” to the action, if it is necessary to make the story realistic, if to not do so would be to portray an airbrushed view of reality. But I see now that subtle suggestion can be powerful and sufficient, with no loss whatsoever to the power or authenticity of the director’s vision.

And one is not left with a permanent hangover of images that can never be expunged from the mind, and which the devil is happy to use as trap doors to your soul.

One of my deepest regrets is that my daughter did not receive Communion before she died. We knew she hadn’t long left, and so I intended to carry her to the table even though she wasn’t old enough by the standards of most Protestant churches. But the night before Communion Sunday was terrible with her tossing and turning. That morning found us exhausted, and we didn’t go to church. Within a couple of weeks—before our church’s next Communion—she was no longer able to open her mouth.

I’ve counted that in the devil’s column ever since, as a day he defeated us by keeping her from the table. I counted it such even before I came to believe in paedocommunion (which means, in short, allowing all baptized children to Christ’s table). I believe that paedocommunion is the proper Christian practice but my church does not, siding with Calvin that the communicant must have a capacity for spiritual introspection. There are a lot of things about which I disagree with Calvin, but so long as we are members in this particular church we’ll follow its rules. So it was with considerable happiness that we received approval from our pastor, after he met with our sons Caleb and Eli, for them to take Communion this Sunday.

It was around 11 p.m. Saturday that their younger brother Isaac began throwing up. I stayed up most of the night with him—my wife staying in reserve in case any of the others started hurling. If you have more than a couple of children this is how you have to think when illness strikes, in terms of front lines and reserves and quarantines. By Sunday morning Isaac’s fever appeared broken, so we cautiously made our way to the minivan, which we soon realized was nearly out of gas. Late for church already, we stopped in the frigid cold to fill up. I began to think about how my daughter missed Communion and wondered if the same forces were at work again. Not this time, I thought, my own stomach now beginning to mirror Isaac’s.

In church I kept an eye on the children for any sign of looming eruption, and tried to keep my headache in check. Isaac’s cheeks were turning red with renewed fever, but he insisted there was no vomit coming. We waited until the last, to avoid as best we could touching bread that anyone else would eat.

I told Caleb and Eli to do what I did when we got to the table. We went forward, and our pastor held out the body and blood of Christ to my sons. I wept as they took it, which I hadn’t anticipated, which is the only way I cry anymore, entirely without warning.

It was a little bread and a little juice, as simple as that, and yet it is a mystery on which hangs the fate of every man. I feel puny as I write this, queasy and weak and worn down. But I feel like we had a victory today, my family, my sons. Western Christians have wrangled over Communion for centuries, and as best I can tell they have made a bloody mess of it. But still there is something there, still Christ meets us at the table He prepared, and for all our failings and blindness this must give the devil fits. So tonight in my evening prayers I will thank God once again for the blessing of Communion, and I will give no further thought to the Evil One except what I uttered to myself as we struggled through these last 24 hours: Not this time.

I have been thinking about “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I have always prayed that as wishing for a distant reality: “Lord, will you someday bring an end to the stranglehold of Satan that is barring the way to the breaking in of your kingdom? Lord, will you hasten the time when your will—all purifying, restoring, and healing—is a present fact? May it be soon. Even in my lifetime.”

But what if I have been wrong? What if that is not the main import of the Lord’s Prayer at all? Oh, of course, there is a future world we await. But what if Jesus had in mind to give us a prayer guide for exercising daily, to call forth power right now for undoing all kinds of works of Satan? What if the kingdom is meant to come as you and I bring it on by availing ourselves of the Spirit’s authority? So many Scriptures that I have given a futuristic twist to now seem to me capable of a present mandate: “For this purpose the Son of God came, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).

Try that on for size as a call to present empowerment. Vive la difference! See how good it feels! How much hope it yields for this hour’s temptations, fears, and requests! What is the Kingdom, after all, but where Christ is? And He is here with us by His Spirit in us: And He is able to do exceedingly abundantly more than all we ask or imagine, by His power that works in us. There’s an exaggeration-proof promise for you, and one impossible to shunt off to the future.

For eight seasons with the New York Jets, six as the starting quarterback, Chad Pennington proved himself a model citizen and teammate. He and his wife founded a community charity. He bought steaks for every employee of the organization every Christmas. And throughout the rest of the season, he helped the Jets reach the playoffs three times.

There was spiritual modeling, too: Pennington led a weekly Bible study for players in his home.

But a combination of injuries, pressure from New York media, and a dismal 1-7 start to the 2007 season left the light-hearted play caller benched and broken. A year later, now at the helm of the resurgent Miami Dolphins, Pennington looks back on that dark point of his career with new eyes.

“There’s no doubt I went through a lot over the last two years,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “After I was benched last year, I had seven or eight games to really take a step back and evaluate the situation and make sure that I wasn’t cheating my family or my kids and letting football run my life.”

Pennington’s Christian faith had always pressed him toward service, dating back to childhood missionary trips to Central America with his grandfather. Now, it pressed him toward repentance. Football had become more than a game or career. It had become a cruel dictator, demanding time and emotional energy that should have gone toward being a husband and father of two children.

That’s all changed, according to Pennington: “With the experiences I went through, I don’t take anything for granted. I have a different outlook on things. The game’s not my god anymore.”

Pennington is back to the light-hearted leader many expected him to be when selected in the first round of the 2000 draft. He’s throwing the ball far better, too, posting his best quarterback rating since 2002 and transforming the Dolphins from league doormats a year ago into an AFC East powerhouse.

I read recently that atheists are forming churches. The Washington Post wasn’t that blunt, describing “nonreligious humanists” in “congregations” seeking “values” and “rituals.” In other words, atheists playing church. We might diverge onto a fruitless lane where the meanings of terms like “atheist” and “agnostic” and “indifferent” are parsed, but grant me the liberty of the long view here—once you are dead, you were either for or against God. Anyone who disagrees is invited to prove me wrong on the other side.

The Post reporter quoted a masters of divinity student as well as the chaplain of Harvard University, neither of whom evinces a belief in God, which makes one wonder whether they have made very poor career choices. Then again, perhaps all this God business isn’t essential to church any more. A great many parents, in particular, yearn for guidance, help, and even the celebration of rituals as they raise their children. They want, in other words, many of the things we associate with a Christian church, just without the dogma.

What grieves me is that there are professing Christian churches that err in the other—equally unrighteous—direction. I think of my close friend Ben (his and the names that follow are pseudonyms), a young man who in the midst of depression and near divorce got virtually no help from his large North Carolina church, despite repeated pleas for counsel and support. The men’s groups were too busy with their books and their breakfasts, the pastor too embittered from his own divorce.

I think as well of our family friend Amanda, whose husband was recently imprisoned for molesting several of their six children. They’ve lost their home and many of their possessions because she has been a homeschooling mom and hence has no income. Some of her friends and family have helped, but her large Texas church has been entirely absent. None of their staff of supposed professionals knows quite what to do about her. Writing a check for the mortgage, apparently, never occurred to them.

It reminds me of something my own pastor said when a family in our church had their only car break down. “Our instinct is to say a prayer that their car will be fixed, but we are the body, so let’s get it fixed.” We took up a collection right there on the spot.

When I first became a Christian and would hear stories like Ben’s and Amanda’s, they shocked me, perhaps because our own church took care of our every need as our daughter was dying. I thought every church was like our own. Over time I’ve learned different.

Amanda stayed with us recently, and so she was on my mind as I read the story in the Post about atheists trying to form communities of good works. Here we have a tragic juxtaposition. One group—the humanist “church”—practices works without faith. Amanda’s church and Ben’s church and too many others profess faith while doing only the “safe” works—writing checks to established causes, reading the approved books, singing praise songs on Sunday mornings.

Whose souls are more in jeopardy? The humanist thirsting for God may one day find the living Well. But what of the self-satisfied Christian who ignores the wounded in his own congregation? By faith we are saved, yes, but faith without works is dead. Who will break open the whitewashed tomb?

Lord have mercy on all we who mumble prayers without lifting a finger.

Tina Turpin’s husband has a job. He notifies “next of kin” (NOK) of the deaths of their loved ones in uniform. Anyone who has seen Saving Private Ryan knows the hardest part of Steven Spielberg’s World War II film is the shot from behind of the widowed Mrs. Ryan crumbling with dignity to the floor of her front porch at the approach to her farmhouse of a chaplain and military officer.

Mrs. Turpin’s husband’s line of work prompted this poem from her (reprinted here with her permission):

Her World Stops Today

No
Don’t open the door.

I cannot straighten the silver cross over his left pocket
My hands tremble, knowing the message he carries.
“It’s okay, my jacket will cover. . . .”
No
It is crooked

I do not know her name.
Only, there are children.
Three.
One is a baby.
Is she holding him now?
Has she made him breakfast?
Is she driving, cooking, talking on the phone,
To his mother perhaps.
I do not know her,
But I know what she dreads.
No
Not that knock
Not my door.
Please don’t open it, don’t be home
For just a little while longer.
God, let the children grow up
With Daddy.
Let her rest on his chest one more time.

No
Now she probably weeps in my husband’s arms,
Tears and cheek resting on that crooked cross.
No. No. No.
Please God don’t make her,
Don’t make me
Open
That door.

I was thinking that if Mr. Turpin has such courage to deliver bad news, why don’t I have more courage to deliver good news?

My oldest daughter turned 10 this week. I’ve told my girls (all four of them: ages 10, 8, 6, and 5) that when they turn 10, I’ll take them on a special road trip to Chicago, just the two of us. On this excursion they will get their ears pierced, eat dinner at The American Girl Place, attend their first Broadway show, and have me completely to themselves for three days.

If the trip goes as perfectly as I’ve planned it all out, after we get back home we will never have any relational issues—set up to enter the teen years problem free.

OK, so that’s pretty naïve, or at least it would be if I believed it. I know we won’t live together problem free from that point on, but I’m hoping the transition into this next stage of life for all of us will be smoother than I hear it sometimes can be.

Whenever I go anywhere with all four of my girls (and since we homeschool, this usually applies to anytime I go anywhere), I get at least one nod of sympathy from some random stranger. “They all yours?” I get asked. I smile and claim them and wait for the inevitable: “You just wait until they are teenagers”—the implication being that my life will end when my girls are 18, 16, 15, and 13.

In truth? Life will be different then, but life is supposed to be different. We will all change—all of us. I’m expecting that and hoping to embrace it. I’m hoping this three-day getaway to Chicago will begin to usher in that change with love and intentionality. Really, that’s all I’m expecting from this weekend away. I think that’s a realistic goal.

I almost stopped praying for a certain request. I had been asking the Lord for the restoration of a relationship between my friend (incarcerated these nine years) and his children. I had used as a springboard the very last verse of the very last book of the Old Testament: “And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers . . .” (Malachi 4:6).

But after two years of straining to see the fist-sized cloud on the horizon in response to David’s decade of overtures and fasting, I have started to taper off. I have begun to think that perhaps it is not God’s will. Perhaps this alienation of affection is the natural consequence of sin that David will have to bear, and we should cease and desist from bothering the Judge any longer. Perhaps we have gone “a bridge too far” in prayer.

But lately I remembered another friend who was estranged from his son for decades after a divorce, and who in later life experienced a rapprochement—and this man cares nothing for God. Yet the God of mercy “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:45). How much more will He be pleased to favor the son for whom he died (Romans 5:10; Matthew 7:11)?

Moreover, did God not promise that He is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). Do I really believe that? He has been known to wait until there is no human hope before He rolls up His sleeves; He tarries till Lazarus is cold and smelly, to make things perfectly unambiguous. He makes dry bones to rise up and walk. “For nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). Do I believe that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8)?

When unbelief comes calling, it speaks like sweet reasonableness. But I can find no instance in the Bible when a person is rebuked for too much faith.