In my pre-teenage and early teenage years, I lived on a dead-end street in the West University area of Houston.\u00a0\u00a0On our one block, there was a vacant lot, owned by the man who lived next to it.\u00a0\u00a0One year, after Christmas, he gave us permission to build a Christmas tree fort on his lot.\u00a0\u00a0The five boys who lived on our street collected all the post-Christmas trees and constructed a fabulous fort – off limits to the few girls who shared our street.\u00a0\u00a0If a girl somehow got inside our hallowed ground, we quickly evicted her, and if one dared try to enter, we quoted the rules to her and barred her from entrance.\u00a0\u00a0Never mind that our rules were insensitive, and maybe even poorly written.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cRules is rules!\u2019 we said to each other.\u00a0\u00a0Best I can remember, I was the only Baptist in our \u201cgood-ole-boys-club.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0However, had the others become Baptist over the years, we could have had a reunion in New Orleans last week at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIf anyone has ears to hear . . ..\u201d (Mark 4:23).\u00a0\u00a0Jus\u2019 saying!<\/p>\n
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In my pre-teenage and early teenage years, I lived on a dead-end street in the West University area of Houston.\u00a0\u00a0On our one block, there was a vacant lot, owned by the man who lived next to it.\u00a0\u00a0One year, after Christmas, he gave us permission to build a Christmas tree fort on his lot.\u00a0\u00a0The five boys…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3345,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344\/revisions\/3345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}