Oh Lord, if I may ask for a moment of Your time, I pray You will encourage the Rev. Dr. John Crooks to go back to doing Your work full-time and get out of politics before he hurts himself. Your servant, Lord, has the political instincts of a barracuda. Amen.

You sent your emissary to the Roswell Street Baptist Church as administrator. You and I both know there are enough challenges in our churches to keep a minister busy for several eons, but for some wild reason he thought he should get himself elected to the Cobb County Board of Education. The Reverend Doctor is a shining example of why the Founding Fathers advocated the separation of church and state. Amen.

Your man may be the second coming of Billy Graham, but as a politician he is the second coming of a bull in a china shop - with apologies to all the bulls You have created. Amen.

Lord, a big deal was made recently about Marietta City Councilman Van Pearlberg serving two masters: Marietta and the Cobb County District Attorney's office. I'm no biblical scholar, but I can't find anything in the Bible about You opposing serving a city and county. But serving God and T-Mobile? I believe You have some very strong feelings about that - only in the Bible, T-Mobile is called Mammon. Same difference. Amen.

Brother Crooks has been trying for months to get a 150-foot Mammon (sorry, T-Mobile) cellular tower approved on the property at Eastvalley Elementary School, located off Lower Roswell Road. Your boy just won't take "no" for an answer. I know You aren't anxious to zap him with lightning to get his attention, but it may come to that. Amen.

Lord, for whatever reason, You have allowed some clumsy politicians to walk this earth, but John the Baptist is a doozie. He's got folks in Eastvalley hotter than You-know-where with his comments. I guess he skipped seminary the day they talked about Proverbs 15:18: ("A hot-tempered man stirs up dissension, but a patient man calms a quarrel."). Amen.

After the Reverend told people in the Eastvalley area that he was going to do some more due diligence on the Mammon/T-Mobile tower, he sneaked the matter on the school board's agenda at the last minute to keep those that he suckered into believing him from having a chance to participate. That doesn't sound very Christian-like to me. He said he wanted to avoid a "circus." Brother John didn't know what a circus was. He does now. He created one bigger than Ringling Brothers ever dreamed of. Amen.

Now, Your servant has managed to get a 30-day restraining order slapped on him and his public relations-deficient colleagues on the school board by several local citizens that prevents the board from moving forward with construction of the tower. And the Marietta Daily Journal is on this thing like white on rice.

That's not good, either. Amen.

In the Book of Genesis, it says the original Tower of Babel was built not for worship and praise of God, but to the glory of man. You didn't like that and You tore down that sucker in a flash. Surely to Heaven if this sinner/scribe (and a Methodist, to boot) knew about that, the Rev. Dr. John Crooks (a certified Baptist) should have known it, too. Now, here he is with his own tower of babble and You can't be real happy with how he's handled the matter.

So I think You see what I'm getting at. Lord help us and help Brother John. He knows not what he does. Amen and amen.

You can reach Dick Yarbrough at yarb2400@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.