In Kurt Vonnegut’s book, \u201cGod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,\u201d Eliot Rosewater, an eccentric dogooder, was discussing with his wife the birth of twins to a half-witted townsperson named Mary Moody. \u201cI’m baptizing them tomorrow,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn’t know you–you did things like that,\u201d Sylvia replied. \u201cI couldn’t get out of it,\u201d said Eliot. \u201cShe insisted on it, and nobody else would do it. I told her I wasn’t a religious person by any stretch of the imagination. I told her nothing I could do would count in heaven. But she insisted just the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat will you say?\u201d inquired Sylvia. \u201cOh — I don’t know. I’ll go over to her shack, I guess, sprinkle some water on the babies and say, ‘Hello babies. Welcome to the earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of babies: Darn it, you’ve got to be kind.\u2019”<\/p>\n
Maybe that’s the Christian gospel in a nutshell. God has been very kind to us, and to live in God’s sight means we must be very kind to each other. If that is not the end of the Christian faith, it may be the beginning.<\/p>\n
__________<\/p>\n
Charles H. Bayer, WHEN IT IS DARK ENOUGH, CSS Publishing Company, 1994<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Kurt Vonnegut’s book, \u201cGod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,\u201d Eliot Rosewater, an eccentric dogooder, was discussing with his wife the birth of twins to a half-witted townsperson named Mary Moody. \u201cI’m baptizing them tomorrow,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn’t know you–you did things like that,\u201d Sylvia replied. \u201cI couldn’t get out of it,\u201d said Eliot. \u201cShe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[183],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6655"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}