Welch's or Wine: No Comment - Well, Not Much

Now Bobby Welch has weighed in, among other things, on the alcohol resolution. In many ways, there is nothing much worth commenting on. As far as I can tell, he doesn't start out defending his position, as some of those who have weighed in before him have. He simply begins by attacking his opponents. When I got up yesterday morning, all of the blogs I read had his name somewhere in the title or first paragraph of their posts. There has been adequate commentary, so I don't feel the need to comment on his statements. Here is a list of those posts.

• Grace and Truth to You
• The View from the Hill
• 12 Witnesses
• Baptist Blogger
• Founders Ministries Blog
• Caught in the Middle

I do feel the need to comment on one thing. I believe in providence. I don't know why things happen when and the way they do, but I do not believe that anything happens by accident. Last week a friend, just out of the blue, brought me a VHS cassette of the movie The Untouchables, with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and Robert De Niro. He said he thought I would like it. I had never seen the 1987 movie, which is not uncommon for me. There are many movies I have not gotten around to watching, for a number of personal reasons. For some reason, I decided to watch this movie. The Untouchables is all about America's prohibition of alcohol, and the mob. The story is set in Chicago in 1930, and Robert De Niro is Al Capone, while Kevin Costner plays Eliot Ness. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to draw a one-to-one correlation here, on any level, but there was something that sent chills through me viewing the character played by Robert De Niro. Al Capone was so suave, so charming in public, especially with the press, but you could tell, just barely, that there was more to the man than just charm and dimples. I got that same uneasy feeling upon first seeing Bobby Welch and Paige Patterson at Greensboro this spring. First impressions mean a lot to me. Some people call it prejudging, but I call it carefully reading the minutiae: the tiny details of someone's mannerisms, a smile, a wink, a word. I am often wrong in pegging a bad guy as good, but never the other way around. I'm not saying these men are evil, I'm just saying they like to win, and don't and won't take loosing lying down. I wonder if either of them has a baseball bat in his office.