{"id":13679,"date":"2025-04-26T16:35:50","date_gmt":"2025-04-26T21:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=13679"},"modified":"2025-04-26T18:49:47","modified_gmt":"2025-04-26T23:49:47","slug":"sermon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/13679","title":{"rendered":"Sermon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Apologies for the long post, but I have to get it out of me. I think it\u2019s important.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll write another blog post later about why I had a stay in the hospital\u2026long story short I was having atrial fibrillation that came and went, and so I went to my cardiologist to see what could be done about it. He and his assistant took one look at my cardiogram and checked me in to the hospital immediately. I was to receive a procedure that shocks the heart back to normal beating the next morning, after a period of observation. That procedure turned out to be unnecessary when my heart went back to normal on its own, but I got an overnight stay out of it. And another pill to take every day.<\/p>\n<p>That hospital stay turned, unpleasantly, into a dialogue\u2026I won\u2019t say argument\u2026on religion. It got particularly energetic when my hospital roommate had a visitor, who turned out to be a minister in their church. Actually they both were but they didn\u2019t out themselves before they had a chance to make their conversation with me seem like just a friendly chat about one\u2019s faith and not a crusade to win my soul to their particular Christ.<\/p>\n<p>I could have thrown it all back at them, but my roommate and I were in the hospital just then because our hearts were acting up, and I didn\u2019t want to have an emotional fight over religion. Or any other time actually. I could say that\u2019s because I\u2019m getting old and tired, but those of us who grew up in homes with someone who was angry all the time avoid getting into heated fights if we can.<\/p>\n<p>So instead while they were winning my soul to Christ I just stood my ground and answered back their theologies with the stories of science as best I knew them, and my own moral values because I\u2019ve nothing to be ashamed of there. I did try to keep the conversation away from my sexual orientation, although in retrospect I think they decided eventually that I wasn\u2019t <em>One Of Those People<\/em> because I didn\u2019t present to their stereotypes. It wasn\u2019t because I\u2019m afraid of those conversations, I just didn\u2019t want it to start being all about that, which it would have. I wanted to keep the conversation where I thought it needed to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Like a lot of deeply fundamentalist, not necessarily religious, people, they came to the conversation serenely confident they had <strong><em>Truth<\/em><\/strong>. Robert Ardrey wrote about another set of dogmas, which he called the Romantic Fallacy [of human consciousness], in <em>African Genesis<\/em> thusly:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cAs we experience it today, the romantic fallacy is a transparent curtain of ingenious weave with a warp of rationality and a woof of sensation that hangs between ourselves and reality. So transparent is its quality that we cannot perceive its presence.\u00a0 So bright in outline do men and affairs appear beyond the curtain that we cannot doubt but that reality is what we observe. Yet in truth every color has been distorted. And rare is the conclusion based on such observations that would not bear re-inspection if the curtain were lifted.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I think that applies to certain kinds of religious fundamentalism. Rose colored glasses, in other words. Or as James Burke once said, what we see is what our knowledge tells us we\u2019re seeing. Eric Hoffer writes that an empty head isn\u2019t really empty, it\u2019s full of rubbish, and that\u2019s what makes it so hard to get anything new into an empty head. Sometimes you see the truth of it the moment people open their mouths. When my roommate started on about the Bible and <strong><em>Truth<\/em><\/strong> I knew where it was going. He and his fellow minister were going to run the usual routine on me once they figured out the best line of attack, and where I wanted to keep the focus of the conversation on was <em>Watch it not working.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What is Truth? You could say in the time of Donald Trump nobody cares what is, or what is not true. But I still care. I care very much.<\/p>\n<p>I also made a choice to be careful that nothing I said sounded like a direct challenge to their religion or their beliefs. I reckoned just standing my ground was challenge enough, and I didn\u2019t want the conversation to become nothing more than a lot of flag waving. Of course they were about to challenge My beliefs. I needed saving after all. Fine. I wanted them to see something that they wouldn\u2019t if I made them get all defensive. I wasn\u2019t interested in changing any minds, because I reckoned those minds were unchangeable. I wanted them to see something.<\/p>\n<p><em>I&#8217;m 71 years old. I&#8217;ve been there and done that. I know what I&#8217;m about better than you know what you&#8217;re about. Now watch it not working&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This all begins when I went for a visit to my cardiologist that turned into a hospital stay. First they took me to the emergency room where monitors were hooked up and a drug administered to slow down my heart rate, which had hit a peak of 170. When they could, they moved me into a hospital room with two beds, one of which was already occupied. I was disappointed, but willing to make the best of it.<\/p>\n<p>I had gay friends who would tell me the reason I was single and lonely was I was too shy. They almost had me convinced when they took me to various clubs and just let me wander around, and I could not work myself up to engaging anyone in a chat because I didn\u2019t know any of them. It was my high school crush who cleared it up for me. He worked in a German themed restaurant in Disney World with Oktoberfest seating, which many Americans don\u2019t like. One day he complimented me on my ability to get a table of standoffish people talking to each other. But in Disney World I had dozens of built-in icebreakers. <em>Hi\u2026where y\u2019all from? This your first time here? What\u2019s your favorite park?<\/em> All I ever needed was an icebreaker, which these \u201cfriends\u201d would never give me because <em>People who look like that want people who look like that<\/em>. But if I have an icebreaker and I can get people talking then it\u2019s actually pretty hard to shut me up.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A hospital room gave me a pretty good icebreaker, but I realized I had to think about how to say it. If I asked \u201cwhat are you in for\u201d, that might sound too much like a bad joke about being in prison. So instead I asked conversationally \u201cwhat brings you here?\u201d In a hospital that\u2019s a kinda personal question, and I was fine if he didn\u2019t want to talk about it. He looked to be an older than me African American male, and I didn\u2019t want him thinking I was uncomfortable being roomed with an African American, so I tried to be friendly. He told me what it was that brought him there; we were both heart patients, although his heart situation was slightly different from mine. It made sense to me that the heart patients would be grouped together.<\/p>\n<p>At first, naturally, our brief chats were about our health and how getting older brings changes in our bodies that we just had to deal with. Those would segue into chats about how much the world around us had changed over the course of our lives. I told him about the work I did, and was doing at Space Telescope, and he was amazed at the pictures that came down from Hubble. How, he asked, did they get those pictures down to earth from a telescope in space. So I explained as much as I understood about the instruments on Hubble, and the way the image files were microwaved back down to Earth. He simply nodded his head, thinking.<\/p>\n<p>I began to suspect we were not on the same page politically when he said later that night that he\u2019d never thought he\u2019d live to see two men kissing on TV. Well neither did I when I was a gay teenager trying to navigate a world that gave me static from practically every direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I could have said something smartass back to him then, but we were on cordial terms just then and I didn\u2019t want any arguments that would raise my heartrate again after the nurses went to all the trouble to slow it down. I pick my battles.<\/p>\n<p>The next morning he had Fox News on his TV. Okay. Fine. Whatever.<\/p>\n<p>When the nurse came that morning I was told the procedure they\u2019d wanted to give me was called off for now because my heart had returned to what they call sinus rhythm all on its own. I mentioned again that the atrial fibrillation and rapid heart rate was a sporadic thing, and I was told I\u2019d be held there longer for observation in case it did come back. I hoped that didn\u2019t mean another overnight stay because the night before between all the wires on me and the activity out in the hallways I got absolutely no sleep, despite how amazingly comfortable that hospital bed was.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A co-worker came the previous evening before I was moved to my room with a charger and cable for my cell phone, which allowed me to stay in touch. Then I discovered the hospital bed had a built-in USB connection to charge a phone.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Nice!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So while my roommate watched Fox News that morning, I doom scrolled, tempted to go find some videos of two men kissing. But mostly I watched cat and train videos.<\/p>\n<p>Lunchtime came and I was told I could have solid food again. We were brought lunch. After that my roommate struck up a conversation with me that quickly turned to religion. Much later I began to wonder if <em>every<\/em> conversation we\u2019d had right from the beginning of our stay together had been just his way of sizing me up for the best approach to saving my soul.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It began with questions about my job. We had another friendly chat about how we watched our space program put men on the moon, and all the changes and improvements we\u2019d seen over the course of our lives in the pictures we got from space. We were the first generations, I said, who have seen the horizons of other worlds. He agreed it was an amazing time to be alive.<\/p>\n<p>Now he began with telling me how amazing it was to see things that were so far away, and deftly segued into wondering how we knew how far away the galaxies were, and what force it was that brought the universe into existence. I talked about the doppler shift in light, what we knew so far about the Big Bang, and the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. He wondered aloud what force existed to produce the bang. Something had to be there before it. That something had to be God.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m 71 and I\u2019ve been proselytized so much over the course of my life I can tell the difference pretty quickly between a simple sincere statement of belief and a prelude to picking the lock on the door to my soul. Okay, thinks I, that friendly chat about my job all this time was just so he could suss me out and figure where to start on me wasn&#8217;t it.<\/p>\n<p>He began talking about the Bible and asked me if I\u2019d read it. I assured him I had. He asked me if I was familiar with Proverbs chapter 8. Not off the top of my head says I. He directs me to Proverbs 8:22-31. He asked me to think about what it said. Read those verses he says to me twice more, and think about what they say.<\/p>\n<p>I call it up on my iPhone and give it a read, then follow up with some of the commentary because it was one of those ambiguous passages you could read just about anything into, and I wanted to see what, if any consensus there was about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>22 The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>23 I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>24 When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>25 before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth,<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>26 before he made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>27 I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>28 when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>29 when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>30 Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>31 rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The commentary I read ranged widely as to its meaning, but it was a passage my roommate said that told us <strong><em>Wisdom<\/em><\/strong> existed before the creation.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, thinks I, the science geek, one way you could look at that is it\u2019s saying the physical laws that emerged in the Bang were there before the Bang, and necessary for the Bang to happen. But I think too long about how to put that to him, and now he\u2019s telling me that <strong><em>Truth<\/em><\/strong> existed before the creation.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Well\u2026okay\u2026I can dig that too. Probably not the way you do though.<\/p>\n<p>Then it turned, oddly, to a discussion about how ancient Hebrew is different from the modern, and how that turned into mistranslations of the original text. Most Bibles he said, are false (no surprise there). But there was one true Bible (yes, of course), and it is based on the ancient Hebrew, that only a few have translated correctly. And of course, thinks I, your religion just happens to have that True Bible translation and none of the others do. The heathens after all, are the people in the church across the street.<\/p>\n<p>I bring up the fact that the New Testament was originally written in other languages. Yes, he says, but that\u2019s not the old Hebrew. Only the old Hebrew is correct, because it was written before the rest of the Bible, closer to creation, and to the Wisdom that existed before the creation. That is why it has <strong><em>Truth<\/em><\/strong>. I just want you to think about that, he says. I don\u2019t reply that I could think about how deep the rabbit hole in <em>Alice In Wonderland<\/em> really went but I\u2019m not tying my brain up on that one either.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>He asks how often I read the Bible. I deflect for the moment and tell him I was raised in a Yankee Baptist household. It seems to surprise him. I add that I have several Bibles at home including a modern English version of Tyndale\u2019s Bible, and the Book of Mormon (I declined to mention my copy of <em>The Satanic Bible<\/em>). At the mention of Tyndale he seems impressed. Did I know that Tyndale was executed for translating the Bible into English? I said I was aware of the story, and that Tyndale\u2019s crime was making the Bible accessible to the common man and woman. Also that I liked Tyndale\u2019s plain spoken English more than the floral Elizabethan of the King James. I bring up the fact that different faiths have different versions of the Bible. This includes the Catholics I say, noting we are in a Catholic hospital (there were Catholic style crucifixes inside every room I was in, above every door). Yes, says he, but there is only one True Bible.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Yes, thinks I. The one you read.<\/p>\n<p>I tell him I recognize the importance of the bible as a historical document, but the bible speaks with many voices. And while the people who wrote its books were just as human as any of us, they lived in a time so long past it\u2019s almost impossible to take the meanings you read in it for granted. I ask him to consider how much detail we have about the culture in America during the Revolutionary War period, and the thinking of the people who lived through all that, and that was only about two-hundred and fifty years ago. The events of the Bible took place thousands of years ago.<\/p>\n<p>I tell him some of my experience trying to learn other languages and what I discovered about how language influences our understanding of our world. English for example does not have gendered nouns, Some languages have two. German nouns come in three genders\u2026male, female and neuter. What is the understanding of the world in a culture where \u201cmirror\u201d is masculine and \u201ccat\u201d is feminine even if it\u2019s male, and \u201cgirl\u201d is neuter. How do you read the poetry of other peoples without knowing you may be missing what the poet intended you to get? It\u2019s risky. I tell him that I\u2019ve heard the poets say that translators are traitors.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s getting on into the afternoon. We are visited by the nurses again, and I am visited by a doctor who says he is working with my Cardiologist on my case. It looks like I will be discharged later in the afternoon if nothing about my heart changes. I am relieved. I want to be done with all this wiring connected to me. It makes if very difficult to move around, let alone go to the bathroom. My roommate is also told he will be discharged soon. He told me previously that he\u2019d been there for four days by then.<\/p>\n<p>Then my roommate gets a younger visitor who I assume at first is a family member. He brings my roommate some fried chicken which smells delicious. Apparently it came from a local eatery, not a chain. Are we heart patients allowed fried chicken? I have no idea but none of the staff seem to have objected. The nurses who came in afterward all knew the name of the place it came from and were enthusiastic about it. I accept my roommate\u2019s offer of a piece of it. It was\u2026okay.<\/p>\n<p>My roommate continues his attempt at salvation while his visitor just listens in. What are atoms he asks me. What force makes them they stay together? It must be God. How is it that a rock and a feather both fall to earth together when they weigh so differently. By now I\u2019m well aware that his questions are rhetorical and intended to elicit a response from me that he can hook into a Bible verse. I have watched this game played so many times. But instead of giving him snark, which I might have in any other setting, I take his questions seriously.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I talk about Albert Einstein\u2019s ideas on how mass curves spacetime. I talk about the difference between mass and weight in a gravity field. But how does gravity make things move, he asks. There must be some force moving them. How can satellites remain in motion around the earth if there is nothing moving them, he asks. I reply with Newton\u2019s first law. Objects in motion will remain in motion unless acted on by some external force. But how can it just stay in orbit around the earth unless there is something to keep it there at that distance. I relate the story of Newton and the apple, adding that it was Newton that gave gravity its name.<\/p>\n<p>His visitor just keeps listening throughout all this, occasionally telling me he finds our discussion very informative. <em>Yes, of course you did<\/em>, I will later think.<\/p>\n<p>My roommate asks me if I believe in God.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So here\u2019s the direct question. Sort of. He doesn\u2019t ask what God but I think it\u2019s a pretty safe bet he means the one he believes in. So here it is, Now it\u2019s either out myself or duck. Kinda proud that I\u2019ve never once ducked whether it was this or my sexual orientation.<\/p>\n<p>I tell them I don\u2019t believe. I don\u2019t use the word <em>Atheist<\/em> because it is such a loaded word amongst the deeply religious and I don\u2019t want all the baggage that comes with it getting into this conversation, and then they stop seeing the person in front of them for a scarecrow stereotype. To the degree I can, to the degree it\u2019s even possible, I want them to keep seeing a person, not a thing. I am an unbeliever. That is enough for them to know.<\/p>\n<p>I mention a favorite quote by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright: I believe in God but I spell it nature. I tell them that for most of my young adult life I considered myself an agnostic. H.L. Mencken once called agnosticism the most beautiful religion because it just trusts, has faith, and doesn\u2019t subscribe to any particular theology (he once called theology an attempt to explain the unknowable in the terms of the not worth knowing). But I eventually grew out of that and now it\u2019s I accept nature as best as science reveals it to us. I think this world and the universe as it is, is beautiful. Nature is beautiful. Reality is what it is. Science, as the physicist Richard Feynman said, is just a way we have of not fooling ourselves. And you, he added, are the easiest one to fool. By which I said I was pretty sure he meant beware of confirmation bias. You see what you expected to see and then you look no further and you miss something important. This was an attempt to keep the conversation on the track I wanted it to stay on.<\/p>\n<p><em>Watch it not working\u2026 You do not have the key and the door will not be forced\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I tell him about my favorite landscape artists, Frederic Church and others of the Luminist movement. Church especially painted stunningly beautiful landscapes that were informed not only by his religion (he was a Calvinist), but also what was called in his day, <em>the volume in stone<\/em>. They believed that everything that was in the Bible is also revealed in nature, and could be understood with careful study.<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t add, then Darwin came along and spoiled it for everyone.<\/p>\n<p>Finally his visitor starts to join in, and now I discover they\u2019re both ministers in their particular church.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re not here to proselytize you, he says, but to give you a better understanding of the biblical Truth. Yes, of course. A difference that makes no difference is no difference. He begins to tell me about how the Bible is authoritative, and that if we follow its teachings we will have the lives God intended for us to have.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Oh\u2026thinks I this is a tag team now is it\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Think about that, he said. Where else can we know life God wants us to have.<\/p>\n<p>I tell them I appreciate they\u2019re not here to proselytize me. I relate again how I was raised in a Baptist (yankee) household, and Baptists (the yankee Baptists we were anyway) offer testimony in lieu of outright proselytization, and hospitality. It isn\u2019t join our church or face eternal fire and brimstone (although I sat in on some tent preaching that were spectacular displays of fire and brimstone), but sit with us and be welcome. And they believe in what they call Soul Competency, which is that every living person has that inner light to guide them to a relationship with God. I say I am not a believer, but I still accept that my responsibility is to let people find their own way, and simply offer my own testimony and hospitality. I am simply giving you my testimony, I say. You teach not by preaching, but by giving testimony, and by setting an example.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But God give us that example in His Word, and His Son.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, yes\u2026 I said I accept a different authority. \u201cMy Book is the volume in stone. It\u2019s there everywhere around us, not just the stars in the sky, but the rocks in the ground (channeling that the lord is my rock quote). If you believe God created everything, okay, then a pebble on the ground is God\u2019s handwriting. God made it, if that\u2019s what you believe. Perhaps Wisdom existed before the creation, but if God created everything, a pebble is God\u2019s handwriting. A grain of sand (channeling Blake here) is the original manuscript. Everything else is commentary.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYour mileage may vary\u201d, I say, \u201cand I\u2019m okay with that because I still accept soul competency and besides I don\u2019t think religion matters. What matters is the heart.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The visitor keeps smiling and says that he can see I\u2019m a good man and that the bible shows us the way to be better men.<\/p>\n<p>And I came back, \u201cThank you. I can see you\u2019re both good men too. And I appreciate what you\u2019re telling me about how the bible is a guide. People who lived thousands of years ago speak to us in it. But that guidance is there throughout the story of mankind\u2019s history (I want to speak my truth as much as I can in their language so they don\u2019t instantly blank out over wokeness). We can read it in other books besides the Bible. And in those other books the people who lived that history speak to us too.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I say, \u201cThat human history tells us what matters is you\u2019re not mean and selfish and cruel. What matters is you\u2019re trustworthy. What matters is you speak the truth, take responsibility, do your share of the work, and chip in and help out when you can. What matters is you\u2019re the sort of person Mr. Rogers was talking about, when he said \u2018look for the helpers\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s the important stuff. Everything else is detail.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And the comeback was \u201cand God shows us in His Book how to become that person.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I could see by then I\u2019d made my point, by how automatically the prefabricated replies were being dispensed. They weren\u2019t prodding and sizing me up anymore, looking for the right pick for the lock. Instead I could see them just waiting as I spoke for the relevant biblical comeback. Which I took to mean they were on automatic pilot now because they\u2019d give up on getting their <strong><em>Truth<\/em><\/strong> into me and now it\u2019s just standing up for theirs, which I wasn\u2019t interested in disturbing anyway. The existence of the likes of me being disturbance enough.<\/p>\n<p>The conversation ended shortly thereafter, when my roommate was told his discharge papers were ready for him to sign. I was told mine were coming. Please I begged, get these darn wires off me then so I can get dressed.<\/p>\n<p>So I\u2019d made my point. The two ministers probably left still confident they\u2019d seen a lost soul in need of salvation, and that I would not be moved probably made them very sad. But what they also had to have seen was an unbeliever who would not be triggered into outright hostility. What they saw was an unbeliever who was willing to patiently explain himself and keep standing his ground. When they asked me to think about what they were telling me, I gave them evidence that at age 71 I\u2019d actually been thinking about it for quite a long time. What they saw, hopefully, was some depth behind the patient face of an old longhaired baby boomer who began dressing himself for discharge with a summer shirt full of cat faces. Whatever it was they took me for to start with, they must have found I was not that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>What they made of it afterward I have no idea and I don\u2019t care. I gave them testimony, and hospitality.<\/p>\n<p>Before he left my roommate gave me a card with a link their church\u2019s website and some bible studies.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe at some point in the future one of them finds themselves doing a little gardening, or sidewalk cleaning, sees a small pebble and remembers what I said. Because whether or not you believe in an almighty creator, the rock has to outrank the word.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>[<em>Update&#8230;<\/em>]\u00a0 In retrospect it occurs to me that neither one of them offered me their testimony. It was all just <em>What The Bible Says<\/em>. At least I might have seen them as more than simply a couple of ministers doing to me what I&#8217;ve had done to me so many times before. Place holders for a type. But I reckon they didn&#8217;t want to be more than that. Testimony might have brought them down to my level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apologies for the long post, but I have to get it out of me. I think it\u2019s important. I\u2019ll write another blog post later about why I had a stay in the hospital\u2026long story short I was having atrial fibrillation that came and went, and so I went to my cardiologist to see what could [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,65],"tags":[13,340,103,157],"class_list":["post-13679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-thumping-my-pulpit","tag-religion","tag-sermonising","tag-the-human-heart","tag-the-old-man-chronicles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13679"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13690,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13679\/revisions\/13690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}