Friday morning, October 4, 2025

I’m writing before I’ve checked today’s news. I don’t know what’s going on in Washington, D.C. or in Seattle, Washington, the nearest city to my home, or in any other place on the globe. When I checked yesterday, U.S. government offices were still closed, and people were protesting in various places in the U.S. Various threats were made by various people, political groups, and political leaders.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the time the government shut down when I was stationed at a U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia in the early part of this century (an age ago, it seems.) We were concerned about people needing emergency visas or new passports to travel to the U.S. How closed were we to those folks? And were we stuck forever in our foreign posts, with no orders coming out of the State Department? Eventually, things were sorted out, and normalcy more or less returned.

We’re concerned now about where federal troops may be stationed in the United States and who of our neighbors may be carried off and forcibly returned to their countries of origin, even if they may face persecution there for their political or religious beliefs. We don’t know what to do about our seeming inability to live within our means.

Pray and take care of your neighbors until we sort things out.