Neal Humphrey

The message from dispatch was confusing so I asked for the incident commander's phone number and called him as I drove to the scene. The Sheriff's Sergeant said, "Hello, Padre. The funeral home guys are here but the family won't let them remove the body until a holy man does his thing." I was a little less confused, but still wondered what I was getting into.

At the time I was part of an association of clergy who had received specialized training and certification from the International Conference of Police Chaplains. We served the county sheriff's office and several municipal police agencies. Our primary ministry portfolio was to provide pastoral care for cops, much like military chaplains. But some of our training prepared us to work alongside deputies and officers. An unattended death in a home was among those occasions.

Here behind the Zion Curtain conversations that contain the words "freedom" and "religion" are usually joined by the preposition "from." The context, of course, is the muscle the Mormon Church either overtly or covertly exerts over governmental policies that affect every citizen, Mormon or not.

Still, we're enjoying a fresh debate about getting the Mormon-dominated government of Utah out of the socialized liquor sales business. Teetotaling state legislators have finally noticed that a state-run liquor agency with its maze of abstruse regulations is contrary to both the exercise of free agency and the purity of their conservative values. And we finally have evidence that Utah's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control is also hopelessly corrupt.

I've spent a lot of money on advertising.

For decades before changing my vocation to professional ministry I had a career in business. Like any person in business I used advertising to attract customers. During an interlude that I refer to as my "Ski Bum Period" I was the general manager of a multi-million dollar mountain sports store. We used newspaper space advertising, television and radio spots, and even produced and sponsored a winter sports television program.

I had no ethical qualms about our advertising message because our purpose was to equip people so they could safely enjoy such healthy outdoor recreation activities like hiking, climbing, backpacking, snowshoeing, and skiing. Using the stuff we sold was good for a person's mental and physical health.

Our advertising mix didn't use that most ancient of advertising media, the billboard. Not that I don't have an abiding testimony about the efficacy of billboards. We just needed a more dynamic and flexible advertising medium.

When you're dealing with an adversary among the key questions you have to have the answers to, "What does the opposition expect me to do?" Or, more importantly, "What does the opposition want me to do?"

Military leaders win battles with tactical surprises their foes cannot counter.

Business leaders prosper when they offer product or service innovations with pricing their competitors can't match.

Lawyers persuade juries with information the attorneys at the other table cannot overcome.

In 1990, I endured a grueling 10-day sojourn in Utah. It was strenuous not because of the location in downtown Salt Lake City, but because I was a delegate to an annual denominational dogfight called a Presbyterian General Assembly. Like all delegates, I found the experience exhausting because sometimes the moderator's gavel did not fall to dismiss us from our day's legislative work until the wee hours of the next morning.

But the brightest light of the whole experience was the illumination of world events. What used to be called the Eastern Bloc countries of Europe were knocking down the both the Berlin wall and the so-called Iron Curtain. The Soviet Union was dissolving back into Russia and a cluster of independent nations. Marxist socialism had failed and was being consigned to its proper place as a quirk of history.

It's the Bible God Wrote ...

... replied the Rev. Dr. William Johnson when I asked my pastor why one of the two Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols services of worship used the King James Version. He was being wry, admitting to the cultural power and popularity of the then 373-year-old translation of the Bible.

I know a song. I can't say it's among my favorites, but I read the words of the song from time to time.

It's a long song. When I have sung it from beginning to end in English it takes about 20 minutes. However, when I've sung it in the original language it's only 8 minutes. That's because typical English rendering requires about 2,300 words to translate the original 949.