Last week I published my first column in a long time. Apparently, I was a little rusty because I made a faux pas. When discussing my infant daughter, Nora, I stated that she tended to look like Peter Boyle from the back. Although the line was greeted with much laughter, I was urged to write something a little nicer about her.

It’s been an interesting week, hasn’t it? I was looking for a way to describe it in last week’s Citizen and settled for “interesting.” Now “momentous” seems better.

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, he will do so in the 30th anniversary year of the founding of the so-called Religious Right.

Here is a quick election recap. For some reason, 12,041 registered Fayette County voters decided not to show up to vote, but an 83.16 percent turnout is quite good.

One year ago, Clayton State University opened its new satellite location at 1200 Commerce Drive in Peachtree City. As County Commission Chairman Jack Smith said, it was a “dream come true” for many people who had worked through the years to bring higher educational opportunities to the county.

A while back, Mama, Louise, Rodney and I visited with some good friends of ours up in the mountains.

Their standard of living is simpler than you’re liable to find in places far south of their mountains, and that river that ambles lazily through the couple of hundred acres that is home to a family compound of sorts. That means that as the kids grew up, they didn’t move away. They simply walked across the hill, the holler, the river or the pasture and set up housekeeping. Some are within hollering distance while a couple can be back at the family homestead in less than two minutes.

A man stopped into my office a couple weeks ago. He said a profound thing. “It may not be a good time to talk about money right now ... but it’s the proper time.” I couldn’t agree more.

“Does Obama’s victory, as a black man, make you feel that you can do anything?” Someone asked me that on election night.

This article was written two weeks prior to the 2008 presidential elections, so unless there is a “hanging chad” issue or problems with voter fraud, or an intensely close vote count, we have a President-elect and a Vice-President-elect. Whether your man won or lost, whether President-elect McCain and Vice-President-elect Palin are preparing to assume office or it’s President-elect Obama and Vice-President-elect Biden preparing to lead the country, the election is over, done, fini.

If ever there was an election that was not worth winning, it was the contest of 2008. While it was hard-fought on both sides, had John McCain won, it might have spelled the end of the Republican Party. As it is, the party is well-situated to come back in 2010 and in 2012, if it learns the lessons of this year.

Oh, all right. The Republican party didn’t manage to sell Americans on the need to elect John McCain as their maximum leader. Forget the small stuff: Republicans are happier people than Democrats. We have it on reliable authority, that of the non-partisan Pew Research Center. I invite fellow McCain voters to put aside their melancholia of the moment to wallow in the good news.

They’re here; they’re everywhere. We’ve all had the sheer enjoyment of working either with them or for them. Some of us are even unfortunate enough to have them as family members.

Once upon a time, the thought of Barack Obama becoming president was downright audacious.

In the early days of his campaign, Obama had to persuade people that casting a vote for him was not a waste of time, a sad joke or a hopeless cause.

Last year I wrote a book that dealt a little with time travel (Time Killer - available now at Lulu.com) and one of the things that happens in the book is that the present version of the hero meets up with the past version of himself. This also happened recently on the great new television show (based on a BBC show of the same name) “Life on Mars.” The same type of thing happens in all sorts of programs involving time travel, from “Back to the Future,” to “Quantum Leap” and beyond. It’s pretty trippy stuff, because one often has to wonder what would happen if you, meaning the you of today, met up with the you of some time in your past. What kind of advice would you impart on yourself and how would your life be different afterwards?

Ants. Ants everywhere. Teeny, tiny little ants that don’t bite, but nonetheless ants.

We first noticed them on the galley sink and the stove, down in one of the food bins, across the top edge of the fridge.

Notes on the UNplanned nanny city:

Here they come again, those nameless, faceless bureaucrats out of the bowels of Peachtree City who are determined — even after past rebukes — that you will get a single trash pickup service forced onto you, and it will be the one the city picks.

Global stock markets have been plummeting. Where the bottom is, nobody knows. There will be gut-wrenching zigs and hopeful zags along the way; they will be of larger magnitude and — in our digital age of instant response — will occur with greater rapidity than ever before.

Near the conclusion of the second presidential “town-hall” style debate, a questioner from the audience asked each candidate what he would do if Iran attacked Israel.

This past summer, NPR polled its listeners of “All Things Considered,” asking how their daily lives had changed since the economic downturn. Many responded by saying they were using their public libraries more — and true to form, public libraries across the country are reporting a recent surge in circulation.

A fracas erupted during the McCain-Obama competition. The battle was not political, but religious.

In September, around 30 pastors across the country, including one in Georgia, mailed copies of their sermons to the IRS denouncing Barack Obama and supporting John McCain. The pastors’ actions were a direct challenge to a federal law enacted in 1954 stating that nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations cannot participate in political campaigns for or against candidates for public office.

More than the economy has melted down. What remains of big media credibility has also liquefied and won’t recover anytime soon, if it ever does.

It has taken me all the years – proving that you can always learn important new things – to realize how sensitive men can be.

Answers to your questions about life, religion and the Bible

Pastors get some of the most interesting questions from people they meet and people in their congregations. Here are a few that I’ve gotten during my years of ministry and via email for this column.

For the U.S. Congress, news media, pundits and much of the American public, a lot of economic phenomena can be explained by what people want, human greed and what seems plausible. I’m going to name this branch of economic “science” wackonomics and apply it to some of today’s observations and issues.

It is Oct. 31, 2008, and here we are at the end of the road … the last page of the final chapter … the final "Finding Your Folks" genealogy column. I'm giving you the date because one of the biggest problems with our website when it changed back in 2005 was that there were no dates on the "blog" type stories. The old website, which can only be accessed through a special link, featured a date with each story, making it easer to reference them. However, you can estimate the dates by going back a week for each one. They were published each Friday on the Web.

In the early part of 1994, Regina Garrett and Vicki Smith made an appointment and came to my office. At the time, I was the pastor of Trinity Fellowship, an Assemblies of God congregation in Sharpsburg. They proposed that we begin a Christian school at Trinity and they were willing to do the leg work necessary to try to make it happen.

I can’t at this point think of anything new to say about the election. Here’s something old, in that case: McCain’s the one, and not just because, when it comes to “old,” he qualifies.

Eight years is a long time to wait for anything, but soon the wait will finally be over. Halloween has once again fallen on a Friday night.

Some elections are routine, some are important and some are historic. If Senator John McCain wins this election, it will probably go down in history as routine. But if Senator Barack Obama wins, it is more likely to be historic — and catastrophic.

Who and what I'm voting for

I can remember one other election since 1964 that has as much import as this year’s: 1980 and the seismic shift to a man of hope, Ronald Reagan.