P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

GOD'S CHRISTMAS CARDS VI

GOD'S CHRISTMAS CARD TO JESSE VENTURA

Dear Jesse:

If any public figure had to personify the word "meltdown" this year, I guess it would be you. Back on November 3, 1998, you body-slammed your way into the governor's mansion there in Minnesota with a hugely unexpected thrashing of Democrat Skip Humphrey and Republican Norm Coleman. Nobody could believe you had beat the Establishment, but there you were giving an acceptance speech. There you were at the Inauguration. There you were wearing a flamboyant, not-very-governor-like outfit at the inaugural ball. And . . . there you soon were, riding high, enjoying a 73% approval rating from ALL the voters in your beloved state. Admirers across America were thinking about this hulking, take-no-prisoners wrestler as perhaps THE man who could unite the Reform party in the year 2000 and maybe even make a run for the White House.

But all that ended last October. Jesse "The Body" Ventura, who had started to impress his constituents as Governor Jesse "The Mind" Ventura with his sensible proposals, his no-nonsense leadership in the early months — you suddenly had re-inherited the nickname you had as a radio talk-show host: Jesse "The Mouth" Ventura. And your comments given in an interview to Playboy magazine dropped you to the canvas with a twenty-point beating in the polls. "Plummeting," said Newsweek. "His national star has dimmed considerably." Talk-show pundits said you were finished as a national political figure. Even forty-three percent of Minnesota voters suddenly said you were an embarrassment to the state.

"I have a pretty noticeable habit of speaking my mind," you had boasted in your book, I Ain't Got Time to Bleed. "I'm big. I'm loud, and I'm not afraid to say what I think." But what exactly was it you were thinking, and then saying, to Playboy's Lawrence Grobel?

"Organized religion," you told him, "is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers."

A week later you took to the airwaves yourself, on the ABC Sunday morning program with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts.

"Is your position now, as I understand," Donaldson asked, "that only some people who believe in organized religion are ‘weak-minded' and ‘weak-minded' is not necessarily bad?"

And you gave them this answer:

"Exactly. I'll use my wife as an example. My wife will start to doubt herself and she's very religious. She goes to church every Sunday because she needs to go. And when she starts to doubt or have doubts about things in life, that's a weakness. She then goes to church and gains strength from going there."

Just a few moments later in the same TV interview, you tried to explain yourself some more:

"When you say ‘weak' and a ‘crutch' that means you've been injured. You use the crutch until the injury's gone and many people need the faith of organized religion to accomplish that. I DON'T."

Well, Jesse — My friend Jesse Ventura — now it's just you and Me for a few minutes in this Christmas card. Your Friend God. And I DO consider us to be friends. Even though you gave this pretty disastrous interview — and gave it, by the way, to one of My least favorite magazines — I still like you. I still admire you. Not in terms of "Wrestlemania," perhaps . . . but I'm still one of Jesse "The Body" Ventura's very biggest fans.

One thing I like is that you're a great family man.

"I take my job as governor very seriously," you write in your book. "But I'll tell you right now, it's only the second most important job I'll ever do. My very first day at the capitol, I made it clear to everyone that I'm not going to allow this job to interfere with my family. I make all my decisions based first on what is best for them. I told everyone that I'm not taking calls on Sundays — that's my day with Terry and the kids."

You've been married to the same woman for 24 years. You write with obvious, paternal pride about your kids: Jade and Tyrel.

And no one would deny — least of all Me — that you've done a wonderful thing by demonstrating the power and value and worth of the individual.

"There is no such thing as a wasted vote," you write. "If you don't cast your vote, you forfeit your right to whine about the government. . . . We shocked the world with ‘wasted' votes."

Not just in Minnesota, but you taught people everywhere that they could be a part of making their world better. They could impact a government. They could help change things.

"As a citizen of the greatest democracy in the world," you say in your book, "I have a duty to do my small part. . . . That's the truly great thing about our system of government: It's OURS."
However, as my Son Jesus said in a seven-page Christmas card to the churches listed in Revelation, He then added: "But now I have a few things to say to you."

Jesse, you're a strong person. And I like strong people. I can use strong people. My Book is filled with Samsons and Davids, big, tough men who could do 50 one-armed pushups, just like you. They were men who were big in spirit too, born leaders. Men with charisma, just like you've got. People gravitated to them.

I can understand why you say, "I don't need a crutch." In the wrestling ring, and earlier, in the Navy SEALs, you made yourself into one of the strongest physical specimens on earth. You got those huge blisters on your hands — "flappers" — running the obstacles courses, and your drill instructor just reached out and ripped that skin right off. You had tears streaming down your face, the pain was so unbelievable. But you stuck it out. You didn't quit. When you got to Hell Week, you and the other trainees had to go from Sunday night to the next Saturday morning with no sleep. Almost a week — no sleep. Pushing, running, driving, conquering. In the rain, the cold, the mud, at midnight and in the hot noonday sun. And you didn't quit. So you look back on all that and say, "I don't need a crutch." You look at all the votes you've gotten, and all the whispering about Jesse "The President" Ventura, and you say, "I don't need organized religion, because it's for weak people . . . and I'm not weak."

Or are you? You've got the great heft of a pro wrestler; they don't call you "The Body" for nothing. But will you always have that strength, that vitality of life? Will you ever get old, and finally need a cane or a wheelchair?

You have some voters supporting you. But the world has already seen how 20% of them can peel away almost overnight; presidential candidates are dropping out like flies there in America as a fickle voting public looks for the next glamorous man or woman to come along. A man can get to the governor's mansion, or even the White House, and later find that they're not permitted to stay. Term limits or scandals drive them to cover. In other words, all the things you define as "strength," and as "I don't need a crutch," can be gone virtually overnight.

You write in your book:

"My dream of retirement is to sell everything I own, go to one of the Hawaiian Islands, buy a little cottage on the beach, and become the surf bum I pretended to be all those years."

Well, you might get that. But what if you didn't? All dreams built on human possessions, or human bank accounts, or human political fortunes, can slip away like the sand on that beach.

And in the end, of course . . . even the strongest survivor of the World Wrestling Federation faces the twilight of life. Not just being crippled, but the end of life itself. And then muscles or money or votes can't stave off what happens next: DEATH.

So, Jesse, you got it wrong in your interview. You're a strong man . . . but you're crippled. Like all humans, you need a lot more than a Band-aid or a crutch. Your heart beats because I keep it going. You take breaths each morning because I enable you. You'd be dead before December 14 if it weren't for My constant, sustaining power in your life. And the best strong men I was ever able to use were at their strongest when they admitted they were crippled. And that they needed Me.

So Jesse, if you want more than eight years in that mansion, and maybe a shot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and maybe that beach house in Hawaii, then you DO need Me. If you want more than 70 years of life, and then fading applause, and then the silence of the cemetery, then you do need Me. Every crippled son or daughter on earth who wants healing and the eternity of REAL life . . . needs Me. And My Son Jesus — who came down to your world, not as a well-muscled hero but as a tiny, helpless Baby. He came in strength disguised as weakness, and He came to rescue only those who confessed their crippledness. He said to anyone who, in their weakness, reached for that loving strength: "Yes, friend, I DO have time to bleed. For you."

And Jesse, 12 days before we celebrate that unheralded Christmas arrival, let Me say this too. Vince McMahon, your wrestling promoter and agent, loved you for the ten percent he got of your earnings. Movie producers called you if your presence in their film made money for THEM. Voters pick you because THEY feel empowered, because THEY like that bumper sticker: "My governor can beat up your governor." But if you want Someone who will love and treasure you ALWAYS, for YOU, then I'm that Friend.

I'd be proud to give My own interview, and be able to say: "Yes, Jesse Ventura — there's My governor." And to hear you say in return: "And He's my God." We'd be a great tag team.

Merry Christmas, Jesse.

Doug Trouten, writer and reporter for the Evangelical Press News Service, is willing to give a couple of referee points TO the beleaguered governor of Minnesota. "Ventura seems stuck on the idea that faith in God is a sign of weakness," he writes. "Curiously, he may be onto something there. After all, the entrance requirement for the Christian faith consists of acknowledging that all the rugged self-reliance in the world ISN'T enough. The Bible says that Christians serve a God whose ‘strength is made perfect in weakness' (II Corinthians 12:9), and we join those who ‘out of weakness were made strong' (Heb. 11:34). So Ventura may be right to say that religion is a crutch. What he HASN'T figured out yet is that all of mankind is spiritually crippled."

And as you read through this rather lively biography, I Ain't Got Time to Bleed, endlessly flavored as it is by beer, booze, babes, bad words, and body-slams, you can't help but want to say to Jesse "The Body" Ventura, "Mr. Governor, ALL have sinned and fallen short. Including you. You DO need a Savior. Just like all the rest of us here in the UrgentCare Center we call the Christian Church. Why not join us here in the ring marked "Calvary"?

For the Voice of Prophecy and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, this is David Smith.