An old joke in which names can be easily changed up to fit your circumstances: Writer Bill Reel of the New York Daily News did a story this summer on a New York Mets reserve player named Clint Hurdle. Hurdle was telling several hundred people sitting in the parking lot of the Salem Evangelical Free Church in Staten Island, N.Y., of the change that Jesus Christ had brought in his life. Faith in God, he said, had made him a happy man.

"I dreamed last night I died and wen…