Okay, folks, time for another seriousness discussion

If ever a moment called for some, this is it

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Kind of went long between posts, didn’t I?

Alibis include not having felt so great (I can’t seem to shake these chills and abdominal pain, but I am not going down another health-care rabbit hole of inconclusive visits to doctors, therapists, imaging departments and blood labs), a weekend getaway to Detroit for a tour of the Motown Museum and some great meals, woodshedding for an upcoming concert of the mandolin orchestra I belong to, and some deadlines for writing work that pays within a week (and, ahem, by the way, if you feel Precipice makes an important contribution to your understanding of the world, you might consider a paid subscription. The greater the percentage of my paying writing work that Precipice comprises, the more time I can spend on it).

Oh, and there’s the fact that taking in everything that’s happened in the last couple of weeks is akin to drinking water from a fire hose.

To enumerate a few developments that Precipice deems noteworthy,

• Asheville, North Carolina, one of America’s most picturesque and charming cities, has been thoroughly wrecked, with no passable roads in or out, no power (at least immediately after the flood), no internet, lots of missing people and pets. We are seeing glimpses of humanity at its best as volunteer pilots fly in aid and supplies.

• In a legal brief, special counsel Jack Smith presents a fresh layer of the wacko attempts by the Very Stable Genius and his yes-people to achieve a result other than the true one - that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

• The International Longshoremen’s Association went out on strike against ports across the country, egged on by its power-mad, foulmouthed, mob-connected president Harold Daggett. What’s their beef? Well, as always with unions, more money is a biggie. But Daggett wants to see the shipping companies deliberately forego cost-reducing automation. It won’t take long for us all to feel economic repercussions, but Daggett has Biden and Harris in his corner.

• What Israel needs to do in response to Iran’s recent missile barrage, is, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka says, “[t]ake out their centrifuge cascades, their nuclear research facilities, their reprocessing facilities, their missile sites, their refineries, and everything else that keeps the regime going. That won’t take long, and Iran’s options for a response are limited, as we have seen on repeated occasions.” Let’s hope that Israel pays no heed to Joe Biden’s view that that is exactly what Israel shouldn’t do. (BTW, just when did the term “proportional response” enter the lexicon? Aren’t wars only conclusively over when one side - preferably the good guys - irreversibly defeats its enemies?)

• After fighting like hell to try to keep it, Ukrainian troops have withdrawn from the town of Vuhledar in Donetsk Oblast.

• And this one is sure to cause some cognitive dissonance among the drool-besotted leg-humpers: In her newly published memoirs, Melania Trump passionately defends abortion. Now, I happen to be resolutely pro-life, but this just goes to show that Trumpism is by no means any kind of seamless conservative worldview. Nowhere near that coherent.

• And on the other side of the aisle, an item surfaces that the Harris campaign is going to have to deal with:

Vice President Kamala Harris's husband assaulted his ex-girlfriend, three friends have told Dailymail.com.

The Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, 59, allegedly struck the woman in the face so hard she spun around, while waiting in a valet line late at night after a May 2012 Cannes Film Festival event in France.

One of her friends told DailyMail.com that the woman called him immediately after the incident, sobbing in her cab, and described the alleged assault.

DailyMail.com is not naming the woman, who is a successful New York attorney, but will refer to her by the pseudonym 'Jane'.

A second friend said Jane, who had been dating Emhoff for three months, also told her about the alleged violence at the time.

A third friend told DailyMail.com that Jane first told her in 2014 that she had dated Emhoff, and recounted the full story of his alleged abuse in 2018, when then senator Harris was in the news after grilling Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a Senate hearing over sexual assault allegations.

The friends, who all asked not to be named for fear of retaliation by Emhoff, shared with DailyMail.com pictures of him and Jane together from 2012, and other documents and communications corroborating elements of the story.

Jane declined to comment.

The shocking claims follow revelations by DailyMail.com that Emhoff cheated on his first wife and mother of his two kids around 2008, allegedly impregnating his daughter's nanny who also worked as her grade school teacher.

Emhoff admitted the affair with the nanny and teacher, Najen Naylor, after DailyMail.com published the story last month.

All three of Jane's friends said she also told them about a disturbing alleged incident during her relationship with the Second Gentleman, in which Emhoff nonchalantly admitted to impregnating Naylor.

Emhoff told Jane that the nanny accused him of causing her to have a miscarriage, the friends claimed.

According to the friends, Emhoff did not say how he was allegedly responsible for the miscarriage, and he told Jane that the nanny's claims were false.

But the Second Gentleman allegedly confessed to Jane that he paid Naylor a settlement of around $80,000, and had the nanny sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

What’s the point of this little roundup?

To set the table for another discussion of a topic that appears frequently at Precipice: seriousness.

We do love our distractions, don’t we? Please note the “we.” I’m as susceptible as anyone.

And maybe we need some degree of distraction for the sake of our mental health.

But here’s where we are: There will be a national election in a little over a month, and neither presidential ticket and neither party offers us anything but national ruin. All four people on both presidential tickets are economic illiterates. Neither ticket has enough understanding of what America is (or ought to be) to assert leadership on a very combustible world stage. The economy is going to go south in real time if Daggett’s designs aren’t thwarted.

And now, I’ll revisit another topic that arises occasionally here at Precipice: how, as a Christian, shall I respond to the sum total of what I’ve enumerated above?

One must be careful about engagements with institutional Christianity these days. Mainline Protestantism is a moribund outlet for hard-left activism. Evangelicalism is rife with scandal and such divisions as between theo-bros and evangelical women who adhere to the Gospel, but find themselves on a narrow sliver of terrain between their sisters who have made common cause with the lefties on one side and the complimentarian yay-hoos on the other.

As I’ve said before, my own home church is a pretty spiritually nourishing and weirdness-free congregation. The sermons, communion mediations and general vibe are straightforwardly Biblical. I sincerely love those people and find my heart opened by their example.

I just hope we’re fully taking into account the gravity of the moment. It presents challenges. How do we remain steadfast in our certainty that the eternal realm is more real than the passing show that takes place in space and time? How do we effectively share the good news of the Gospel in a world that grows more secular, materialistic - and distracted - by the day?

That is the level of consideration we must take most seriously of all. If our view of the cosmos is correct, and it is, the stakes are high. There’s no time for false starts. If you reach out to a fellow human being, you must be as sure as possible that you will be effective. We generally get only one shot, and if we’re perceived as corny, boneheaded or superficial, we’ve wasted precious time.

So bring your compass with you as you go out the front door to engage the day. Cultivate the discernment between proposals for a way out that amount to nothing more than irrelevant tinkering and a listening for what God wants.

I’m pretty sure God doesn’t want us to collapse our species’s destiny in space and time into a heap of chaos. But then again, maybe He sees that we can’t help going down that path and takes care of it for us.

You know, with that blood running down the cross.