Twenty years ago last week, a new Senate chaplain offered a prayer thanking God for his predecessor’s “legacy of faithfulness” and imploring heaven to “give these leaders the gift of discernment that they will know what matters most, and approve what is excellent.”
It was a job Chaplain Barry Black, a retired Navy rear admiral who had spent 27 years ministering to the military, never expected to still be holding in 2023.
“As George Strait puts it so eloquently in one of his songs, in my opinion, this is where the cowboy rides away. So I fully expected for a very brief stint in the legislative branch,” Black said in a July 7 phone interview, 20 years to the day after that first Senate prayer.
