Author Archives

    jackieholness

    Posted on

    Like a pimp…

    Hello World!!!

    Bishop Thomas Weeks. Man, I can’t believe it. Just over a year ago, this man of the Lord beat down his ex-wife (Prophetess Juanita Bynum) in the parking lot of an Atlanta hotel but last week the bishop told the AJC newspaper that he is looking for love! Ain’t that just precious? But not only is the good bishop searching for love, he is chronicling his search for love on a reality show, “Who Will Be the Next Mrs. Weeks,” which will air on his Web site bishopweeks.com. The 10 streaming video “Web episodes” will air on Tuesdays at noon.

    Apparently, he developed the idea after receiving numerous e-mails from his customers- ahem, excuse me – I mean followers, offering advice on the search for a THIRD wife. (I’ve been following this story since the whole debacle started last summer, and I never realized that he had been married before. But hey, that is what the AJC is reporting.) Through his show, the bishop wants to offer a Christian perspective on dating, and he plans to release a book on the subject “Finding Yourself While in Transition.” Yeahhh, that’s the ticket! Any woman that wants to audition to be his third wife may find herself in a head lock if she’s not careful.

    Seriously though, domestic violence is no joke, and I just cannot imagine he is trivializing what occurred in his life just over a year ago and the subsequent divorce by putting himself on the reality TV circuit. I mean, has enough time passed for him to have properly dealt with his violent behavior against women? I have a friend who works with women who have experienced domestic violence, and after talking about the incident last summer, she pointed out that this probably wasn’t the first time that he got violent with her. And how could he already be over his ex-wife? I hate to say it. Actually I don’t. It seems to me that he is pimpin’ his pain! I’m not going to question his salvation, but has the Lord really led him to conduct his search this way or even be searching for a wife so soon! Wow, it’s just crazy!

    And I was kind of disturbed when I heard that his ex-wife was going to be on “Divorce Court” discussing domestic violence earlier this year. I won’t get into that right now, but something about it screams self promotion, but hey, I don’t know for sure. However, you can check out the video below.

    Any thoughts?

    Posted on

    Crime and God’s Punishment…

    Hello World!!!

    After reading a newspaper story yesterday about the sentencing of former Georgia state Rep. Ron Sailor Jr., who was also a pastor, I started thinking about a topic that has often haunted me. Does God punish us when we do wrong, or do we just experience the natural consequences of our actions?

    The 33-year-old Sailor was convicted of money laundering and defrauding the church where he once led. He will spend five years and three months in jail for his actions…Um, um, um, I wonder what’s going through his mind this morning. I remember hearing about Sailor when I was in high school. He went to a nearby high school and was talked about as a young man “destined for success.” It probably helped that his father was a prominent TV and radio personality at the time. Ironically, his father is also a pastor as well.

    The fact that he was a pastor and his father is a pastor leads me to believe that he was probably raised in the teachings of the Lord.  At some point, however, he obviously decided to put what he learned aside and commit crimes. In this case, Sailor accepted money from who he thought was a drug dealer and promised to launder it. The drug dealer turned out to be an undercover agent. The agent struck a deal with Sailor and asked him to help in a corruption investigation involving other public officials. This deal was supposed to help in reducing Sailor’s prison time at sentencing. However, soon after the deal was made, authorities discovered that Sailor went on to initiate a fraudulent loan and used his church as collateral.  Apparently, he had large personal debts to pay off.

    Is this sentencing indicative of God’s punishment as he is a man of God or did he just get what was coming to him. In talking about this subject with my father, he told me to look up two passages in the Bible – Psalm 103: 8-13 and Hebrews 12: 5-6. In the first passage, “the Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will He harbor His anger forever; He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities.” In the second passage, we are told not to “make light of the Lord’s discipline…the Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes everyone He accepts as a son.”

    I have many friends who are on this spiritual path with me, and we often discuss our conception of God. Several of my friends don’t think that God is a punishing God; however, they do feel we reap what we sow. I remember a few years back, I was in the midst of applying for a job that I thought I really wanted at the time. I had already made it successfully through two interviews and was waiting to hear if I had gotten the job. While I was waiting to hear the news, I sinned. (I won’t tell you how. I’m into self-disclosure but this is the Internet.) I asked my father if God was going to punish me for my sin by not rewarding me with the job. He told me that God was not capricious and wasn’t going to zap me just because I did something wrong. Well, I didn’t get job, ha,ha. However, in looking back, the job wouldn’t have been the best (as in good, better, best)fit for me anyway, and God had a better job coming my way.

    Anywho, I would like to know what you think about God’s punishment. When we do something wrong or outside of God’s will, should we expect to be punished or is what happens to us just a result of our actions? I am so quick to talk about the rewards of God – His Favor, His Protection, His Wisdom. But everyone knows there is a yin and a yang…

    Any thoughts?

    Posted on

    God Can Speak Through Cute Boys – The Post, Not the Chapter!

    Hello World!!!

    Last Wednesday during Bible Study, my Bible Study teacher asked all of us a question that he obviously meant for us to ponder. “What have you searched for your whole life?” Even after a minute or so, no one said anything. Since no one volunteered to answer the question, he asked us to answer the question one by one around the whole table.

    As each person answered the question, I wondered what I was going to say when he finally got to me. By the time he looked at me, I still had nothing to say, so I asked him a question.
    “What do you mean by ‘searched for your whole life,'” I said, hoping to deflect the question.
    “What do you think it means,” he retorted.
    “Hmm,” I said before I answered. “Well, if you mean, what have I been interested in for most of my life, I can tell you that,” I offered. “I don’t know if I have been necessarily searching for anything my whole life.”
    “Okay,” he said.
    “Well, when I was six years old or so, I knew that I wanted to be writer,” I said. “Shortly after that, I liked this little boy in my first grade class named ‘Jimmy,’ and I knew from then on that I liked boys too. And after I graduated college, I became interested in God.”
    Everyone chuckled! Yeah, I’m an amateur, very amateur, comedian!

    So there you have it. Writing, Boys & God. Even today and to my sometime dismay, I find myself thinking about one of those three categories, if you will, most of the time. (You’re probably laughing or at least smiling as you read this. Hopefully…)

    But the really funny thing is because God is God and He is all knowing, He knew how to get my attention in 1996 when I decided to rededicate my life to Jesus Christ just after graduating from college. He managed to combine all three of my loves to solidify my seedling faith. Shortly after my altar call experience (you can read about my experience on the What page of this blog. Check the excerpt link. ), Tupac Shakur, the best rapper ever, was shot on my birthday. (I still have a life-sized poster of him in my office. The image of which appears in this post!) Tragically, about a week later, he died. I decided I wanted to write a novel based on the life of the rapper, but I realized that I knew very little about the history of rap and hip hop. A friend of mine introduced me to a friend of his who was virtually a walking encyclopedia about rap and hip hop. At a downtown Atlanta coffeehouse one night, we discussed the history of rap and hip hop while I took notes. And although I was listening to him, I couldn’t help but notice his milk chocolate skin,  curly black hair and deep voice. And later in the conversation, I discovered he was a Christian – and a real one at that – like my parents even. I mean he actually read the Bible, prayed, submitted his life to God and went to church on a regular basis. Yep, I had a big ole crush by the end of the night.

    And while we were never “boyfriend and girlfriend,” we went out on a few dates. During those dates, he got his “witness” on, and we discussed what having a personal relationship with God looked like, how to pray and have a regular devotional time, and how to be a cool Christian. I was so gone! (That means, I was really diggin’ him for real!”) My parents were amazed to find me at the kitchen table reading the Bible from time to time when I used to sleep through the sermons at church almost each and every Sunday for years- little did they know that I was reading up to debate scripture on dates! I was still living at home then.)

    Eventually though, he went on a “woman fast” and decided to stop going on dates with several women, including me, for a while. (Okay, I really thought he was just riding with me, but that’s another story for another day.) However, we remained cordial, and he took me to a Christian hip hop convention, CRU-VENTION ’97, where I discovered that he wasn’t the only man out there who was cute, had swagger and actually sold out to Jesus Christ! It was crazy. And I decided then, that I could really follow Jesus – no turning back, no turning back (A take off on the hymn “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.”)

    This story, in its more descriptive and eloquent entirety, is told in the chapter, “God Can Speak Through Cute Boys” in the book “After the Altar Call: A Young Black Woman’s Journey of Faith.” You can read it once the book is published. Again, does anyone have the hook up?

    Any thoughts?

    P.S. I never did write that novel based on Tupac Shakur, but as I said before, as I have a life-sized poster of him in my office, he is never far from my memory.  R.I.P. Tupac! 1971-1996