This is Dave Scherrer and you have reached Backyard Conversations – the blog format of One Hundred-Fold Ministries. It is my honor to introduce our readers to a guest contributor, my friend and cohort in this ministry, Kevin Callison. Kevin and his wife Lynn are founding collaborators and contributors to One Hundred-Fold Ministries before our going public. If in life a person is rich to have a handful of trusted friends of like mind and heart, in Lynn and Kevin, I have found two! I am blessed!

I asked Kevin if I could circulate his personal blog as it has much to do with our current political season and speaks to our Gospel Kingdom focus as well.

Enjoy!

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11/06/2024

Unable to sleep last night, I decided to crack open “Unleashed”, a memoir by Boris Johnson. (You may recall Mr. Johnson as the Prime Minister of Great Britain from 2019 to 2022, who seemed always to be having a bad hair day.)

Mr. Johnson writes:

“I just couldn’t help wondering what the world would be like if so many others had the chance that I had at that wonderful school: the chance to listen to such life-changing teachers, to enjoy the green vastness of the playing fields, to sit in the light and space of the drawing schools, to fool around with the school Gutenberg Bible, the school racquets court, the school cyclotron.

I had also learned by heart Thomas Gray’s famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. You know that one.

The poet is standing at dusk in the churchyard, in what is now the affluent Buckinghamshire commuter-belt village of Stoke Poges, and he meditates in iambic pentameters on the lot of the rural poor. The curfew has tolled the knell of parting day. The lowing herd has wound slowly o’er the lea. It’s 1750, and there is no compulsory primary education, let alone secondary education.

These people all died illiterate, he says as he looks at their mouldering graves. They could have been poets. They could have been politicians or great military leaders. They could have been contenders. They never had the chance.


‘Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear,
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’

So says Thomas Gray, and I am with him. It’s the job of teachers, politicians, leaders to excavate those dark undersea caves and allow that talent to shine.”

Well, reading and peppermint tea did the job. I was able to sleep.

I see this morning that it appears Donald Trump has pulled a Grover Cleveland. I’ve not seen the specifics of the other races and initiatives, but regardless of whether Colorado or the nation goes red or blue this year, the path I must take has been pointed out to me.

It was not recently penned by Boris Johnson nor put into poetry by Thomas Gray in 1750 but spoken by Jesus Christ over 2,000 years ago.

“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

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You can reach Kevin with your comments at Kevin@100fold ministries.org. And next Monday, please consider checking out our new podcast at Kingdom Offerings found on our homepage www.100foldministries.org!

I trust your month is filled with gratitude and contentedness in your thanksgiving!

Peace to you all.

Dave Scherrer, President
One Hundred-Fold Ministries