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The roach flips over. My number two son, Kiel, who lives with his mother in Abita Springs, called to chat with me and the subject of roaches came up—well, actually, we began with one roach in particular. He had come home after high school and no one was home and in the middle of his bedroom floor was a dead roach, on its back, of course. In central New York, I still haven't seen any roaches, although I'm sure they are here, but recalled the frequency of my contacts with the creatures in Louisiana and Florida, from the little German roaches to the big flying Palmetto bugs. And when they die, they always end up on their backs. They don't just expire, or tip over on their side—they actually go through a whole process of flipping over onto their backs. What's up with that? We pondered this for a while.

Columnist Clay Thompson (Arizona Republic, August 12, 2003) thinks that the roach's exoskeleton makes it top heavy, forcing them to stay on their backs after their flip-flop of death. I think something more may be going on here, especially since the roach usually leaves its corpse in a visible, public way: as if to announce its death.

God has a unique place for every creature, from the virus to the behemoth and everything on the fringe. When I am home with the Father, I will have some interesting questions to ask.

Today I thought of my friend Cheryl, a minister in a small community in Florida, who in December 2000 expressed to me her excitement that the decreed the winner of the presidential election was, she said, "God's man." I didn't see it that way then, and I don't see it that way now. What she meant was that a sincere Christian was given the reigns of power—not some heathen. But what we really have is a US president who has traded God's gift to us for a powerful package of patriotism. American patriotism is a good thing, but not when it shrouds the message of hope that God has given us in Jesus Christ, when by a sleight of hand it gives out hate, not love.

Bush's speech at the American Legion annual convention today was chock full of this rhetoric of hate, with suggestions of more aggressive tactics, more pre-emptive strikes: "We've adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war,'' said Bush. "We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again. We will strike them in their camps or caves or wherever they hide, before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens.'' [New York Times, August 26, 2003]  At the same time, Bush promised no retreat from this path in Iraq, hinting at a "peace with honor" exit strategy, but that evokes another kind of horror.

And it is also sad and shameful that we are going to ask our children to pay for this. The Congressional Budget Office announced today that the federal budget will top $5 trillion (yes, trillion) over the next 10 years if we stay on the same fiscal course.