- Pastors
make people angry from time to time. Their words can cut, grate and incite, but
it’s not often what they say very literally saves lives. Pastor Larry Wright,
who leads the Heal the Land Outreach Ministries in Fayetteville, North
Carolina, is the exception to that rule. Wright was delivering his New Year’s
message to the masses, ironically enough talking about the senseless deaths in
his community, when a rifle-toting man walked into the church. According to
Wright, the man carried a gun in one hand and an ammo magazine with shiny
rounds in the other. As a former Army staff sergeant, Wright quickly recognized
that the weapon was real, but he sprung into action immediately. "I'm the
first person to see him and when I saw him, I thought it was a dummy gun, but
then I saw the bullet clip in his hand and the bullets were shining," the
pastor said. He approached the man, asking if he could help in some way, and
planned to use his 6-foot-2, 270-pound frame to subdue the man were he
antagonistic. Rather than respond with violence, the man asked Wright to pray for him, the
pastor said. Wright took the rifle and handed it to a deacon and several others
came to hug the man and make him feel loved. "And then I began to minister
to him and pray to him and talk with him," Wright said. This all went down
20 minutes before midnight Wright actually finished the New Year's Eve sermon while
the man with the gun sat quietly in the front row. "I finished the
message, I did the altar call and he stood right up, came up to the altar, and
gave his life to Christ," Wright said. He informed the man that police
were waiting in the vestibule because he had scared a lot of people, but the
man first apologized to the congregation, telling them when he set out that
evening he intended to do something terrible that night. Instead, disaster was
averted……….
- Do
you know who John Scott is? Even for faithful NHL fans, the answer to that
question could well be a resounding no. Yet Scott has succeeded in a) inspiring
his own mass movement, b) accomplishing something most of the league’s best
players didn’t and c) inspiring a pretty funny tweet from one of the best to
ever play the game. Scott was announced as one of four captains for the NHL All-Star
Game on Jan. 31 alongside Patrick Kane, Jaromir Jagr and Alex Ovechkin. The
other three players are established stars, while Scott has been waived by the
Arizona Coyotes three times this season. Yet when the league held a fan vote to
select one player from each division to captain the four teams in the new
three-on-three tournament format, the veteran enforcer was among those chosen.
Fans rallied behind his candidacy using the hashtag #VoteJohnScott and
amazingly, the 6-foot-8, 260-pounder scored a win that surprised even him. "At first, it was one of those things
that I thought was a joke, but now it happened, so I've kind of got to go with
it, have some fun with it and try to do the best I can," Scott said. His
selection inspired another of the captains, Jagr, to tweet about how he worried
the 3-on-3 format would kill an old guy (43 years old) like him, but now his
perspective has changed. “Fans-I was afraid,that
3on3 all-Star game may kill me,now,I am more afraid,fighting John Scott 6,8 300
during All-Star, kill me for sure,” Jagr tweeted. Not bad for a guy like Scott,
who has spent time in the minors this season and now gets to be a captain for a
team comprised of the best of the best………..
- Riot
Watch! Riot Watch! Turkey tends to be a tense place even on good days on
account of its geographic location and political and religious dynamics, but
life has gotten noticeably testier in recent days thanks to curfews and
operations in mainly Kurdish cities and towns in southeastern Turkey, where
security forces and Kurdish militants are locked in an intensifying conflict. According
to the Turkish military, 261 militants have been killed since the start of
operations in mid-December and believe it or not, there are quite a few people
who aren't down with that. Among them are members of the pro-Kurdish People's
Democratic Party, many of whom decided that this weekend was a damn good time
for an uprising and staged what turned out to be a disappointingly peaceful
demonstration in Istanbul. Maybe it was a good thing that a relatively small
crowd showed up and chanted, “Long live the resistance of Kurdistan,” while
calling for an immediate resumption of negotiations between the government and
Abdullah Ocalan, the detained leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.
After all, when riot police outnumber rioters, that’s a dicey situation for
those looking to stick it to The Man. However, seemingly insurmountable odds
are the fuel that propels the fires of opposition and if you can’t get angry
about hundreds of people dying in what you believe to be an unjust and unfair
conflict, then it’s time to take a serious look inside…. and then go mix a
Molotov cocktail, find a lighter and look for something to blow up or burn down………
- Both
the next season of "Game of Thrones" and the book series that spawned
the hit show are blanketed in great uncertainty right now. The sixth season of
HBO’s popular drama doesn't have an official premiere date and now, author George
R.R. Martin has revealed that his next book won't be done in time to be
published before the new season debuts. Martin wrote a blog post in which he explained
that he originally had an October deadline to turn in the manuscript in order
to ensure that "The Winds of Winter" would be in bookstores before
HBO debuted the next season of the show. That schedule would have allowed him
to stay ahead of the series, whose next season will cover roughly the same stretch
of Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" saga. He fell behind, so his publisher
pushed the deadline back to Dec. 31, but still no dice for the book. “The book
is not done, not delivered. No words can change that. I tried, I promise you. I
failed,” Martin wrote. “I blew the Halloween deadline, and I've now blown the
end of the year deadline. And that almost certainly means that no, THE WINDS OF
WINTER will not be published before the sixth season of GAME OF THRONES
premieres in April (mid April, we are now told, not early April, but those two
weeks will not save me).” Martin noted in the post that he believed he could
make both deadlines as they approached, but “the days and weeks flew by faster
than the pile of pages grew, and (as I often do) I grew unhappy with some of
the choices I'd made and began to revise.” Weeks and months passed and Martin
blames no one but himself for the delay, but said how fans handle the show now
being ahead of the books is “up to you." Start the complaining/lamenting
now, “Thrones” fans……..
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