Transcript of unplanned and spontaneous Video

Hey, man. This is Chilly Billy Howell.

A very foggy day in the Mississippi Delta. I think it’s the 29th (actually, it was the 30th) of December, 2021, coming pretty much to a close. Anyway…

I’m always careful on Facebook about posting stuff that is political. I respect people that do. And I’m probably to the right of Atilla the Hun, though I don’t share that on there. For me, I don’t think it would make any difference. Plus, I can be rather caustic. So I try to just keep it pretty level, but I respect those who do.

But I did share something to somebody’s page today and I never comment on anybody else’s page. And particularly if I disagree with them. Why would I go crap on their page, particularly if I know we disagree. The internet is no place to break bread over serious issues; that needs to be done in person.

Anyway, I shared a funny video, I thought, in Spanish, to two of my Spanish speaking friends. Kind of jocular about the president, but it was in Spanish. And, of course, I got chastised by Facebook. But it just amazes me that any president prior or anybody was fair game.

So we live in a time of a lot of censorship. It’s troubling. So it made me think back on this book by Charles Colson called The God of Stones and Spiders that I have on my shelf. I read it years ago.

I read most of Chuck Colson‘s books and consider him, after C. S. Lewis, probably, as he greatest thinker of the 20th century. He had worked for Nixon, as a special counsel, convicted during Watergate, became a Christian and a demonstrative one. He started prison fellowship. His writings are just incredible. He uses anecdotes and stories from history that I find fascinating.

Anyway, this book The God of Stones and Spiders, is somewhat talking about how we in the affluent west had become pretty vacuous. And this was 1990. He was talking about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who wrote The Gulag Archipelago. I think he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He moved to the US and he spoke, I think, it was at Harvard’s 327th commencement. Basically, he said that due to the spiritual vacuousness of the West, and our affluence, or being so affluent, that we were becoming pretty base. I think a lot of that played out.

So if you look at some of these Russian writers, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, he said when there is no God, crime is inevitable. There’s no checks and balance. I think we see that today.

But this book, The God of Stones and Spiders, I think her name was Nien Cheng. She had spent seven years during the cultural revolution, in China, Mao’s revolution, when they just killed millions of intellectuals, anybody that did not toe the Communist Party line. She spent seven years in jail. Abused. Beaten.

Basically, she realized that there was a God in prison when all of a sudden, one day, she looked up and saw a spider web and just the intricacy of it. She thought, how could evolution have produced that? God must have equipped that spider to make that intricate web to catch food.

And then her tormentors constantly were telling her, there is no God. So she figured, huh, somebody talking that much about something that doesn’t exist, it probably does. And then she found out.

It’s a good way for us to look at life today. If somebody is beating a Tom Tom, and censoring us and everything, it just requires a little deeper look-see. Like Reagan said, “trust, but verify.”

Y’all have a good day.

Cheers and Happy 2022 coming up.

It’s a beautiful day in my neighborhood. A beautiful day in my neighborhood.

Won’t you be my, won’t you be my neighbor?

Chilly Billy Howell

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