Carl Wells Books

Recently I read a newspaper article about school teachers buried in loans from their college days. The article appeared in a big city newspaper. It featured the plight of three public school teachers, all of whom are struggling with large student debt.

The Internet tells us that the average debt incurred by college students is about $30,000.00. That is the average. About 42% are able to avoid debt, so lots and lots of people are going much deeper in debt that $30,000.00.

I won’t link to the article. Nor will I name the three teachers featured. This is to protect the innocent. No, I’m joking; actually it is to protect the guilty. The people featured are very silly people. But their individual foolishness is not the major point I am trying to make. People this foolish are legion, numberless, a horde, a flood. I am not trying to embarrass three people, and single them out as if they are particularly foolish. No, their stories are routine, commonplace. Still, the three individual stories are examples which teach us.

So I will refer to X, Y, and Z. They are real people. X wins the cigar or coconut for having racked up the most debt. The amount? I’m glad you asked. About $130,000.00. That is not a misprint. $130,000.00. X is in his mid forties now . . . and he has $130,000.00 worth of student debt. He tells us he has had every type of experience with student loans–including default, deferment, and consolidation. Did you get that? Default was one of his experiences. So he gets the money and doesn’t pay it all back. Still, he continues to owe $130,000.00.

X, like Y and Z, is hoping the government Public Service Loan Forgiveness program will release him from his debt. His wife also is a teacher and also has debt. She hopes to be rescued also.

Y is in her early 30s. She incurred $60,000.00 of debt in college. Her plea is like that of X. “Save me, Public Service Loan Forgiveness program!” (My words, not hers.)

Z is in her late 30s. After her college years, she had about $36,000.00 debt for student loans. About sixteen years later she still owes $16,000.00. So this budding rocket scientist has paid off about $1,250.00 a year on the principle, on average. She points out that if she didn’t have to make her monthly payment on the college debt, she would have money to do other things, including pay other debts. Being deeply in debt for college loans was not enough for her. She has other debts also.

One thing we have probably all noticed about our current crop of American citizens, is that almost everyone has a sense of entitlement. We all feel like we are entitled to good things. It is our right to have them. If we don’t have them, we are being cheated. The three people featured in this article come well up to the national average in that regard.

But again, X sets the pace. He thinks all student loans should be forgiven. Moreover, all education should be free. What he does, educating people, is supposedly what makes society flourish, so if we want society to flourish, we need to make education free.

Which means, in practice, that people who work for a living and pay taxes, are going to have the great joy of giving a completely free ride to people like X, Y, and Z.

Now I want to back up a bit, and try to get to basic principles. First of all, no Christian should be involved in public education, as teacher or student. How dare we expect our taxpaying friends, neighbors, and enemies, to pay for the education of our children, or to pay us a salary because the civil government extorts money from working people who are forced to pay taxes at the point of a gun? We Christians believe in limited civil government–until we don’t. Suddenly we are no longer for small government, when it comes to our jobs in public education, or when it comes to who pays for the education of our children.

Second, the Bible tells us to avoid serious debt. “The rich rules over the poor,/And the borrower becomes the lender’s slave.” (Proverbs 22:7) The three people featured in the newspaper article are perfect examples of people who, because they are slave-minded, turn themselves into slaves paying interest year after year.

So, any debt we have, we should pay it off very quickly. And we should have an absolute commitment to pay all our debts in full. Default, bankruptcy, should not be options for serious Christians. The three people featured are, once again, completely horrible examples. Instead of going to work to pay back their debt quickly, they just piddled around. X even defaulted in part.

Third, college should be avoided by most people. Get a job. Learn a trade. What is your aptitude? We need plumbers, carpenters, electricians, accountants. Business school, or trade school, is a reasonable option for some of us. Just working for a living at a low paying job is a wonderful thing also. We need people who are simply willing to give an honest day’s work.

If you are gifted in the hard sciences, fantastic. In that case, you may need to attend college. But you should be planning to be among the 42% who exit college with no debt, or with minuscule debt that can be paid off in one or two years.

Fourth, every Christian should learn to budget money wisely. (It is something even non-Christians can do, of course.) For a Christian, that includes learning to tithe (pay 10%) of one’s increase to a local church. A Christian who learns to tithe is well on his way to learning how to budget money. A Christian, unlike X, Y, and Z, is not entitled. He lives in the real world–or should want to do so.

Fifth, if you are interested in, or possibly gifted in, things like history, or fiction, you don’t need college. You need to be reading, reading, reading, and, in your spare time, reading. Get a job of some sort, and read. We need tens of thousands of Christians who care passionately about truth, about ideas, about the arts. You don’t need to go to college to become an historian. You need to love truth, and you need to put in the work reading on your own.

Sixth, college debt is a welfare program for bankers. The interest on college debt is about 5.8%. (This in an economy in which you and I are getting less than one-tenth of 1% interest on our checking accounts!) The poor foolish students are enticed to run up enormous debts, and the bankers collect huge interest with the government expected to make up any shortfall.

Seventh, for most of us, college is a bad investment. Four years of working at a modest salary of $20,000.00 a year, would give you $80,000.00. So the average college graduate is already $80,000.00 behind, since he didn’t earn $20,000.00 a year for four years. Instead, he incurred $30,000.00 worth of debt. So though he is “only” $30,000.00 in debt, in reality he is $110,000.00 behind after four years.

X, Y, and Z are silly people. They are completely unaware that they are foolish. They just went with the flow, and assumed that the world owes them a comfortable living. Now these silly people are teaching our children in public schools. The bare fact that people this idiotic are teaching our children should make us run, screaming like a chicken, from the public schools. That is leaving aside completely the question of whether public education should exist–which it shouldn’t.

Avoid college debt. Better yet, avoid both college debt and college. Do we really want to send our children off to Woke U., to begin life with $30,000.00 worth of debt after being brainwashed for four years?

We are ready for the concluding segment of the series on phrases that have entertained me over the years. The next number is . . .

79/”Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.”

If you think about this one for a little bit, it turns out to be logical. A person can be paranoid–overly willing to see enemies around every corner–and yet this does not change the fact that there really may be someone out to get that person. Maybe someone believes, incorrectly, that he has seven people wanting to do him harm. He is paranoid. But at the same time there really may be at least one person out to get him. This phrase gives us an unexpected truth, and is very funny.

80/”Do something even if it’s wrong.”

This is a phrase I got from my father. I worked with my father. Sometimes things would go wrong, with the machinery or otherwise. In such situations it was my tendency to be passive, waiting for the problem to be fixed rather than pitching in and helping fix it myself. This annoyed my father, who wanted to see me showing some kind of effort to help fix the problem. Hence, “Do something even if it’s wrong.” I really do see his point. We need to be active in life, rather than passive. Of course there are situations where doing something, even if it’s wrong, can lead to disaster. For one example, if you are dealing with electricity, if you are not sure of the wise way to proceed, doing nothing is better than doing something which might turn out to be foolish and dangerous. Still in most circumstances there is a lot of wisdom in my father’s advice. We need to be active in life, not passive.

81/”Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”

This phrase reminds us that we are not always wise in our desires. We may think a certain outcome is devoutly to be wished. Then the outcome occurs, and it turns out it is a disaster for us. This phrase can be applied to many of our wishes both small and large. For a large example, we may think attaining the hand of a certain member of the opposite sex will lead to wonderfully good things. We wish for such an outcome. Then it turns out that such an outcome was a disaster. (For a fictional example, Mr. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice wanted to marry the woman he did marry. She turned out to be a fool. He married in haste, and repented at leisure.) So we really need to be careful what we wish for, in small things but especially in large.

82/”What, me worry?”

This is the phrase associated with Alfred E. Neuman. He is the mascot of “Mad Magazine.” His feckless grin indicates a foolish overconfidence about life, and the phrase fits the grin perfectly. Still, I can’t help but admire his cheerfulness. I find myself using the phrase fairly often, to indicate that we are in deep doodoo, but that we are not aware of the fact. Perhaps this should be the phrase emblazoned on our national coat of arms. We rush in where angels fear to tread–another lovely phrase.

83/”That teaches you how not to be.”

This came from my mother. I would be complaining to her about the perfidious behavior of some other person, and she would often tell me, “That teaches you how not to be.” She was completely correct. We can learn from observing the folly of others. When we see how harmful that folly can be, to us or to anyone, we really do have an opportunity to learn how not to be. We shouldn’t have to perform every form of folly ourselves, in order to learn that folly is harmful. We can learn just by watching others. Surely we don’t lack for examples.

84/”A puncher’s chance.”

The phrase comes from boxing. It refers to the situation of a boxer who is an underdog in the upcoming fight. He is most likely to be defeated. Still, because he is a puncher–is capable of striking a strong blow–the fighter is not necessarily going to be defeated. One of those punches he throws might hit home in a powerful manner, and allow him to win the fight. He is still the underdog, but he has a chance–a puncher’s chance. We should take heart from this phrase. Often we are underdogs in our endeavors. But we can throw a punch now and then, and who knows, we might just surprise ourselves and others, and accomplish more than we expected. Maybe all of us have a puncher’s chance, if we only knew it.

85/”One over the eight.”

This comes from England. If a person has had one over the eight, that means he is intoxicated. Eight shots of whiskey, eight glasses of wine, or eight beers? Fine. No problem. Ah, but he went one over the eight, and now he is tipsy. The humor of course resides in the outlandish notion that it takes eight drinks of alcohol to become drunk. Two or three will surely suffice, for most of us. “One over the two” would be a more realistic phrase. Which, paired with our knowledge of the original “One over the eight,” is pretty funny in its own right. (Or, for some of us, “One over the one” would be appropriate.)

86/”He won’t set the Thames on fire.”

This is another one from England. If you say someone won’t set the Thames on fire, you are saying that he is no genius, because only a genius could set a river on fire. But of course the phrase is saying more than that. You are subtly trying to hint that the person is a bit thick.

87/”If you keep your head when everyone around you is losing theirs, you don’t understand the situation.”

There can be a lot of truth to this. While we all admire the ability to keep calm in a crisis, there seem to be lots of situations in which calmness indicates that we really don’t understand the situation. For example, the American Christian church seems for the most part to be completely calm as the Deep State endeavors to fasten the chains of slavery on us. I don’t think we understand the situation. Squawking like a chicken would make more sense. We are keeping our heads, but only because we don’t understand the situation. “God is in control.” True, but He gives us the ability to think and act and influence history. I suspect we need to “do something even if it’s wrong,” rather than keep our heads so sedately.

88/”Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

This is a line from Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man.” It seems like there is a lot of truth just in that one line. It speaks about failure, and about how difficult it is to have a family and a home where you are wanted. We often go home because we “have to go there.” That is, we have made a mess of our lives, and as a last desperate resort we are trying to retreat to home and family. But the hard truth is, the people at our home don’t really want us. They take us in only because “they have to.” They don’t really want our messed up presence among them, but they have to take us in because they are the only home we have. Some of us, of course, are so defeated and alone that there is no place where they have to take us in.

89/”Today is a day of great solemnity. Today I become the king of Spain.”

This is a line from “The Diary of a Madman,” which was a television play I saw many decades ago. The author was the nineteenth century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. I don’t remember details of the play, but those few words have always stuck in my mind. The madman of the play had convinced himself that he was to be crowned the king of Spain. Because that day was supposedly the day of his coronation, it was a day of great solemnity. He uttered those few words with appropriate dignity befitting the seriousness of the circumstances. It is indeed a serious, solemn thing, to become the king of a country. (Solemnity is a mellifluous word, vastly entertaining all by itself.)

90/”One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

I have saved my favorite phrase for last. I first heard it when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn used it in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. (He stayed in the Soviet Union, because he didn’t want to be refused reentry to his home country by the Soviet authorities. Thus someone else delivered his speech in Sweden.) But Solzhenitsyn made no claim to have created the phrase. He was quoting a Russian proverb. It seems to me that the depth of wisdom in that phrase is astonishing. The world weighs how many tons? According to one Internet source, the earth weighs 6,585 billion trillion tons. But as heavy as is the earth, one word of truth is still more weighty than the entire earth. The truth being spoken of is not ordinary undoubted truths. “The bookshelves in this room go all the way to the ceiling.” That is true, but that is not what the proverb is saying. The proverb is telling us that when lies are powerful, and numerous, and everywhere, one word of truth outweighs the lies. Truth may be hated and outnumbered, but truth outweighs lies. As we look around us, we are now inhabiting a world in which lying is constant. It is going to take lots of people willing to imitate Solzhenitsyn by trying to speak unwanted truths, if we hope to defend Christian civilization. I am finishing up a book right now. There will of course be triumphant world tours celebrating Books I Have Loved. But those won’t last forever. I’ll be home again eventually. The book I plan to write next will be entitled One Word of Truth Outweighs the Whole World. I will try to show how dramatically the Bible instructs us that we need to love truth. And I plan to show the cost we are going to have to pay, if we want to be in line with biblical teaching. Are we willing to pay the price? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was willing to pay the price. He changed world history vastly for the better. We can imitate him.

This ends my series on phrases that have entertained me over the years. I hope to try some other topic next week.

Here are a few more phrases which I have enjoyed through the years. We are ready for . . .

73/”Shoot the messenger.”

The need to shoot the messenger seems to be instinctive with mankind. Bad news brought by the messenger? The solution is clear: shoot the messenger. That will fix things. In our current era the need and willingness to shoot the messenger is extremely high, because there is a lot of bad news to bring. I will give two examples. 1/There is large dysfunction in the black community. But to report on that honestly means . . . you must be a bigot. So we shoot the bigoted messenger. Problem solved. 2/American Christianity is pietist, antinomian, truncated, anti-intellectual, and as a result of all its faults not very biblical in its practical behavior, and so American Christianity is 100% the root of our problems in this country. (Okay, maybe just 99%.) If you bring that message, which is clearly true, you must be a mean-spirited enemy of Christianity. So someone who tells us painful truths about American Christianity, like R. J. Rushdoony (Politics of Guilt and Pity–about $24.00 at Amazon) needs to be shot. Problem solved.

74/”We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is from “Pogo” cartoonist Walt Kelly. It is a clever play on the famous phrase, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” That was part of a message from Oliver Hazard Perry after the U.S. naval victory over the British forces at the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. The Pogo quote applies to almost everything we do. Our problems are not brought upon us by outsiders. They are self-inflicted wounds. One example. Our public education system doesn’t really teach our children very well and moreover tends to evangelize them toward left-wing verities. But this is a self-inflicted wound. Why should Christians or conservatives, who supposedly believe in limited civil government, expect taxpayers to pay for the education of their children? Our children are being mis-educated because we gave them to the humanist civil authorities to educate. We have met the enemy and he is us.

75/”Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

We like our bathwater clean. We like to throw out dirty bathwater. But sometimes we forget that there is a baby in the bathwater. And the baby may be worth keeping. One example. The writer George Orwell was no Christian, and some of his behavior–not all of it, by any means–was wrongheaded. But along with his bathwater, there was a lot of valuable baby. Some of his books are really helpful to anybody who wants to think about life honestly. I’ll just list 1984, Animal Farm, and Dickens, Dali, & Others as three examples. The bathwater may be a little grimy, and let’s throw it out. But also let us not forget to remove the baby before we throw out the bathwater. Probably most of us have some dirty bathwater in our lives, but we still would prefer not to be thrown out. I’m just saying we should extend that same courtesy to others.

76/”How did I get in this family?”

This was a favorite phrase of my Aged Parent, my mother. She would use it when one or more of us were thinking or acting in ways which she considered outrageously ridiculous. (Not infrequent.) My answer as to how she got in this family was that, “You were adopted.” Since there were six in our family, counting my mother, I told her that the vote was 3-2 to adopt her, and that my father (her husband) was one of those voting to adopt. (I thought it would encourage her to know that.) But I wouldn’t tell her how the other four of us voted. However, the behavior of all of us was sometimes so nutty, that eventually I began to theorize that all six of us were adopted. I have been heard to say, “I know I was adopted.” Come to think of it, no one has ever contradicted me on that point. Hmm.

77/”I believe; help thou my unbelief.”

This was spoken to Jesus Christ by a father whose son was possessed by a spirit. If You can do anything, please help us, was his plea. Christ quoted “If You can!” back at him, saying all things were possible to him who believes. The father didn’t try to bluster through in response. He said he believed, but he honestly acknowledged that unbelief was mixed in. You will not be surprised to learn that Jesus did cast out the demon (Mark 9:14-29). I am glad there are some, perhaps even many, people, whose faith is very strong. They believe, and that is that. Heaven bless them; they are fortunate. But I suspect there are also a lot of us who have to say, with the father under discussion, “I believe; help my unbelief.” I think it is better to be honest with God and with ourselves, than to pretend to Him and to ourselves, that we are rock solid in our ability to believe. And as Jesus Christ was merciful to the father and his son, I suspect He will be merciful to us as well.

78/”Hope porn.”

This is a very new phrase, coming into existence only in the last few years. Pornography of a sexual nature is, we know, something we should avoid. That type of pornography is self-indulgent. Hope porn occurs when something unrealistically optimistic is portrayed as likely to happen, or certain to happen. The phrase came into existence because of how completely defeated are the forces of freedom and responsibility in the current U.S. This is a very painful situation for a lot of us. We feel defeated, outnumbered, and we don’t enjoy feeling like that. The temptation is to believe that wonderful things are just on the verge of happening. One runs into these “wonderful things” frequently on the Internet. Some politician is going to do this, the military is going to do that. The crooked election will be overturned. Everything will be fixed, very soon. This is self-indulgent hope porn. It is vital to stress that not all hope is hope porn. For example, a few days ago I listened to a presentation which indicated that polls show that Americans in larger numbers are becoming open to the idea of secession. That gave me hope, and I don’t think I was indulging in hope porn. I know that we have a long way to go before Americans are truly ready for secession. I know that, even at best, secession is only 3% to 5% of what needs to be done. (The other 95% to 97% is us getting our Christianity to be more biblical.) But there was a gleam of honest, realistic hope for me, in seeing that the American public–pressed by circumstance as they see their moral values held in contempt by the Powers That Be–is beginning to have some understanding that this nonsense really maybe possibly potentially should not continue. I was able to hope, without giving in to hope porn. This is a good place to point out that dispensationalism is a form of hope porn. “Jesus Christ is coming back in visible power, in a year or three, or in a month or three. We are going to be raptured out of our problems, leaving the non-Christians on the earth while we have a good time in heaven.” Yuck. What drivel. It is hope porn, and it is an insult to God to allow oneself to believe things so counter to what the Bible teaches. God has given us plenty of means to get to a semi-sane society–if/when we are ready to use those means.

So much for part IX. I hope to finish this series with part X next week. Adrian Monk (TV series “Monk”) would be proud of me that I finish with an even ten.

We have been discussing phrases that have entertained me over the years. We are ready for the number which is listed below.

63/”If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his fanny so hard when he landed.”

I learned this phrase from my father. I would be talking to him, and I would say if this happened, then so and so would happen. The phrase above spoken by my father reminded me that “if” something might happen was no guarantee that the desired outcome would occur. I have never forgotten the point he was trying to make. Eventually, many decades later, I wrote a book entitled If. The full title, subtitle included, is If: God’s Covenant of Grace. Of course I quoted my father’s phrase, as the epigraph to the introduction.

64/”I don’t care if school keeps or not.”

This is another phrase I heard from my father. The idea was that someone who didn’t care if school kept or not was independent and not overly concerned with the opinions of others. And it seems to me that we need some of that attitude, especially in the current era when the mainstream beliefs are so often ridiculous. We need a jaunty willingness to stand on our own hind legs and accept the consequences of our beliefs. My guess is that if we have enough people who don’t care if school keeps or not, the elite scumbags destroying civilization may discover that we have put a spanner in their works. The question is, will there be enough of us to make a difference for good? I guess we’ll find out, in the next years. Anyway, I aspire to be a person who doesn’t care if school keeps or not.

65/”A beaten pony.”

I first heard this phrase from the mouth of gifted Cincinnati Reds radio announcer Al Michaels, late in the 1971 season. He was describing the San Francisco Giants. The Giants had done really well, and had been leading the division for much of the year. However, late in the season they had begun to fade, losing many games. The Giants were, Al Michaels said to manager Sparky Anderson on their pregame show, “a beaten pony.” I understood immediately what he was saying. They had gotten as much out of their talent as they could, and now were worn out, simply drifting toward the finish line rather than racing strongly. Kudos to the Giants; they hung on to win the division title despite the fact that they were fading. We can all be a beaten pony at times. Is the U.S. a beaten pony? We seem to be drifting to the finish line.

66/”The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

This was a phrase often used by my mother, to describe how life can contain a lot of variety. We know the origin of the phrase, of course. It was the title of the most spectacular of the three Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” There were three main characters, one of whom was good, one bad, and one ugly. The phrase caught on immediately, and we have heard it a lot since the movie came out in 1966. I’m pretty sure my mother never saw the movie, but she appreciated the phrase. Here is the music and scene just prior to the showdown between the good, the bad, and the ugly. Ennio Morricone is the brilliant composer of this music.

67/”The Great Satan.”

We heard this phrase from the Ayatollah Khomeini, the madcap prankster of Iran of a few decades ago, a man prominent during the Iran hostage crisis. He was referring, of course, to the United States. (History of U.S. behavior toward Iran really was horrific, prior to the hostage crisis. Read Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East, by Wilbur Crane Eveland, published in 1980, if you think U.S. hands were clean in our treatment of Iran.) The good ayatollah, I have come to believe, was close. It is not really true that the U.S. is the great Satan. But I think by now we should be able to see that we are a great Satan. Right now on the world scene there are a lot of great Satans among the various countries. Picking the great Satan would be difficult, at least for me. Still, I get much enjoyment out of the phrase.

68/”It’s just about closing time.”

I remember very well the circumstances of me hearing this phrase. I was at a church building where a church was host to a wonderful lunch for local pastors. I was not a pastor, but I was a guest of a pastor friend. The host pastor said something approximately like this: “I wish I knew more about Bible prophecy. I think it’s just about closing time.” His comment indicated that he was buying into the dispensational belief that world history was coming to a close; the visible return of Jesus Christ was imminent. It was just about closing time. That was a memorable phrase. The man speaking was a man I highly respect, a man of godliness and humility. But he was flat wrong. It is not just about closing time. That is not how God works. (If I’m wrong, fine. Come swiftly, Lord Jesus! I’ll be cheering like a son of a gun, louder than anyone else.) God is going to build and extend His kingdom on earth, partly through the heartfelt obedient behavior of His people–if and when we decide to obey Him. So here we had a very godly man, a man deservedly a leader in the American Christian church, telling us, wrongly, that it was just about closing time. I have gotten a lot of enjoyment through the years, teasing my pastor friend who accompanied me that day about how it is just about closing time. I suspect he is more inclined to agree with the phrase, and with his brother pastor, than with me.

69/”Get a life.”

This phrase is telling us that we need to be living in a truly productive, thoughtful way. Which, it turns out, is sometimes not all that easy to do. We exist as solitary creatures, we major in minors (another lovely phrase), we are metaphorically living in our parents’ basements even if we inhabit full scale houses. On the bright side, if we know that we need to “get a life,” at least we have begun to recognize the problem. So it is a phrase we can use to poke ourselves in the ribs to remind us to get moving.

70/”That’s why I make the big bucks.”

This is a phrase I speak often. I use it when I have done something slightly useful, and have had that act recognized. What makes it funny, of course, is that I don’t really make the big bucks. I earn less than the minimum wage during the rare hours you catch me working. Sometimes, among my family, I will follow “That’s why I make the big bucks” with “It’s not all just my movie star good looks–although that is a factor.”

71/”It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.”

This is very useful in a situation in which you have somehow hit the good fortune jackpot. Example: there is one last piece of pizza, and you have been elected to be the one to finish it off. “It’s a tough job, but someone has to do.” Life often gives us these kind of tough jobs.

72/”Columbus took a chance.”

I can remember when I heard this phrase. It was spoken, many decades ago, by a friend, X, and he was recommending some course of action which might or might not be successful. He was pointing out that sometimes you get to a good end by stepping out in faith, or hope–not knowing for sure that it will work out. Columbus took a chance. He discovered a new world. Maybe we too should be willing to take a chance sometimes. My friend’s use of the phrase was definitely, in context, on the humorous end of the scale. It was extremely appropriate to our situation, which had no major project in mind. The phrase had and has a humorous ring to it–but I think there can be a serious undercurrent of meaning in at least some situations. Anyway, I’ve never forgotten the phrase, although I have no memory as to what prompted my friend to say it.

Lord willing, we will continue with part IX next week.