A Sunday sermon

At church this morning, the pastor talked in his sermon about God's "extravagant love," a phrase which resonates pretty strongly with me lately.

I'm feeling it in the last few days in the form of friends and loved ones both here and absent. Jayne has been away on business since Thursday, on a media tour in Myrtle Beach for a travel writing assignment. So like most old married guys, I've been somewhat at loose ends since she's been away, with only our dog and football to keep me warm. I've missed her humor, her intelligence and most of all, just the reassuring presence of that one special person that shares your life.

I didn't go with her because of prior plans with some long-time friends. As I wrote back in July, I try to spend a weekend each fall with my old Clemson roommate, whom I've known since we were in junior high, and another friend whom we met early in our college career and who now lives in Pennsylvania. We used to actually go to a Tiger football game, but -- none of us being wealthy boosters with access to good seats -- we now just find it more convenient and a lot more relaxing to pick a good one to watch on big-screen TV at my friend's home in Greenville, S.C.

We had selected yesterday's game with Miami (good choice as it turns out -- thrilling 40-37 overtime victory for Clemson), but it was just a twosome, my old roommate and me. Our other friend had to cancel his trip down due to being hospitalized with the recurrence of some chronic medical problems. We did chat with him via cell phone at key intervals in the game.

Before the game we met two of our high school classmates -- on their way to Charlotte to deliver a washer-dryer to their daughter for her new condo -- for lunch and enjoyed catching up.

We shared news about family and friends and talked about everything else from the state of today's public schools -- they're both educators -- to Facebook. (They got on it to check out their son's then-girlfriend -- for good reason, as it turned out. My former roomie wouldn't get on it at gunpoint.) Then we took some pictures outside the K&W Cafeteria before they resumed their journey to Charlotte.

Today, I'm also thinking about another friend with whom, sadly, we can't share these kinds of moments anymore. Today is the fourth anniversary of the death of our dear friend and former newspaper colleague Melanie Bennett. For the rest of this story, I'm going to refer you to this blog's post of Oct. 26, 2006. Please go back in the archive and read it. You'll get to know someone special.

Melanie was definitely a manifestation of God's extravagant love for her family and friends. We still feel her loss deeply, but are just as grateful for the presence she had in our lives.

Tell someone you love them today and have a great Sunday.

The NFL and Rush's rights

I never really took Rush Limbaugh's bid to be a part-owner of a National Football League team very seriously.

That's partly because I wasn't sure that he was ever serious about it, except as a means of gaining publicity for himself. The conservative radio host is nothing if not a savvy self-promoter. And I was more sure that the NFL, which is nothing if not image-conscious and averse to controversy, would never let him in.

Like his abortive stint as an ESPN pro football commentator back in 2003, Limbaugh's membership in a group trying to buy the St. Louis Rams football team was over just about before it began.

According to news reports, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, in addition to at least one team owner, expressed concerns about Limbaugh's possible involvement and "polarizing" past comments about the league at a special meeting on the topic.

Limbaugh, naturally, made this the lead topic of his show on Thursday morning, blaming the usual suspects -- the Obama administration, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and liberal sportswriters (an odd notion to me) -- for his flameout as a prospective NFL owner.

According to an Associated Press report, Limbaugh said on his broadcast that he was targeted by the NFL Players Association and its leader DeMaurice Smith (whom he called an "Obama-ite"), in advance of upcoming collective bargaining negotiations.

I have a couple of reactions to all of that, as I'm sure I can anticipate what his outraged defenders are going to say. Of course, Rush Limbaugh has the Constititutional right to say pretty much whatever he wants to say on the radio. He had that right yesterday and will have it tomorrow.

He does not have a Constitutional right to be an owner of an NFL team -- never had that and never will. The group of NFL team owners is essentially a private club -- one I've never really pictured as being populated by flaming liberals. (See this article from Bloomberg News as evidence.) And they can let in or exclude anyone they want, subject to anti-trust laws. That's a business decision and it's obvious the club decided that Rush was going to be bad for business.

So if he wants to blame anything for the demise of his NFL dreams, he should blame the free market. And there's just a little bit of irony in that, isn't there?

Obama and that Nobel Prize

I'm taking a break this afternoon from watching the Carolina Panthers bring joy and hope to the fans of yet another NFL team. And somewhere in there, there's a transition to the actual topic of this blog post.

Since the announcement earlier this week that President Barack Obama was to be the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, I've been thinking about the reaction -- especially in this country -- to that surprising turn of events. I've thought since he took office that there were too few people here in the U.S. that could take a clear-eyed view of the new American president. Either he is adored too much or reflexively resented for his every breath and eye-blink, with little in between. And the reactions to this event have fallen along the same lines.

Centrist that I am, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. And that's one reason I think most folks are missing the real message in the Peace Prize decision. Personally, I think the president deserves neither the prize, nor the criticism that he's received for being its recipient. (To his credit, the President himself says he hasn't done enough to merit such high-level recognition.)

What the American people really should be getting out of this is what it says about the rest of the world's opinion of our country, its government and its policies. I had a little taste of this when Jayne and I took our group of Wingate students to London for the semester last fall.

We encountered almost no anti-Americanism directed at us, but it was clear that the British people as a rule didn't care much for the Bush Administration and for their own government's cooperation with our unilateral foreign policy decisions. We found a high level of interest in the U.S. presidential election and were amused that people just came right out and asked us who we were going to vote for.

On the weekend following the Nov. 2 election, our group traveled to the southwestern tip of England for a tour of the area in and around Plymouth for the students' geography class. The instructor, a professor at the University of Plymouth, and I talked about U.S.-British relations over some Cornish pasties (look it up) and ale at a pub in the little seacoast town of Looe.

In so many words, he said what we had come to find out -- that while the British people didn't care for the war in Iraq and other U.S. government actions over the previous eight years, they still held high regard for the American people.

"We haven't been comfortable with not liking America," he said.

Meanwhile, some little old ladies at the next table chimed in, figuring out somehow that I was not from around there, and said how pleased they were at how the American election came out.
As the London-based Financial Times newspaper said in an editorial after the election: Europe got the American president it wanted, and it was up to the governments of their nations to help achieve the cooperation that they had found wanting in the U.S. during two Bush terms.

So, yes, it seems pretty silly to award a prize based on hope and potential for someone to achieve something. But I think Americans should actually be complimented by what that says -- that as the world's lone superpower and possessor of vast military might, we're still the last best hope of the planet. And it's not unreasonable for nations of good will to want us to use that power responsibly.

I liked what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said in his most recent piece, that the president should use his acceptance speech as an acknowledgement of that, and as a tribute to all American military men and women who have given of themselves to preserve peace and freedom throughout the world.

Whoever's in charge of the government, they're the real heroes.

(And speaking of joy and hope, the Panthers have given their own fans some since I started this piece. 20-17 over Washington...a Nobel for Jake Delhomme, maybe? Or is it too soon?)