Dear Fellow Believers,

First of all, I cracked up at the "Comment Corner" feature of this video, which was me riffing at the beginning of the last hour of a Grace Cafe broadcast to the tune of "Pick Up The Pieces" by Average White Band. I must have done about fifteen of these things. This one is about the evils of mouth maintenance. Pretty damn funny.

The audio on this show is a bit "clippy," in that the recording volumes were set too high. That would be our producer Ricardo Johnson's fault. I think he was new to the sound engineering business, so they stuck him on "Summer Nights" duty where he could do the least damage—specifically on "Grace Cafe." Little did anyone realize at the time that "Grace Cafe" was the most truth that ever went out on the air on WCCD in Cleveland, Ohio, in all the twenty-six years (at that time) of its existence. Nothing like it has gone out since. Ricardo Johnson unwittingly facilitated this marvel, for which he MAY get some credit at the Great White Throne Judgment, although the first question to be posed to him from God will be, "What was with those audio levels on Grace Cafe?"

In this broadcast, we are banging out the truth about the Hebrew word "bara," used by Isaiah in chapter 45 and verse 7 of his prophecy, when, quoting God, he writes, "I am the maker of light and the creator ("bara") of evil. I, the Lord, to all these things." For those theologians insisting that "bara" ought to mean "allows" here (failing to grasp the morally neutral nature of evil, the theologians are loathe to credit God with the creation of it) we have a nasty little surprise, proving from other contexts where "bara" appears (namely Genesis 1:1, "Created ['bara']) by the Elohim were the heavens and the earth") that this word CANNOT mean "allows" but must mean "creates." (Can you imagine God "allowing" the heavens and the earth?)

Thanks again to Rodney Paris for bringing another two-decades-old cassette tape back to life so that a new generation can listen to and appreciate these Grace Cafe broadcasts from the grand old year of 1999.

As one year ends and another year—the final year of our existence on the grand old planet earth—begins, I am thankful for all of you who have prayed for and sacrificed for and promoted my work upon the same planet mentioned above, for none of it would be possible without you. I am but the face of a grassroots effort taking the truths of God, found in the Word of God, to as many as possible, making the complex simple and maybe having a few laughs along the way. For as Mary Poppins popularly posited from a balmy bedroom before a Banks' brigade, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

Grace, peace, and love to all of you,

–Martin