Done Stopped Preachin'

 

      A Louisiana grandmother sat in the aisle seat located on the right side halfway between the front and back rows of her small Baptist church. That morning the preacher was cranked up about venal personal sins.
     "All of you that are drinking beer are in danger of hellfire!" he roared.
     "Amen!" Grandma shouted back, glancing over at Grandpa.
     "And all of you who are drinking that moonshine whiskey that Tolley O'Flaherty sells out of the still behind his barn are preparing your souls for eternal damnation!" he shouted. Scattered hands went up across the congregation.
     Grandma turned a sharp look at Grandpa and in a level voice fraught with meaning responded with a ladylike growl. "Amen brother. Preach it!"
     "And all of you brothers wasting your money smoking cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco have fallen into Satan's trap!" the pastor soldiered on down his list of condemnations of sin. A goodly assortment of female hands went up.
     "AMEN!" shouted Grandma tottering to her feet and shaking her fist. "You tell 'em, Reverend!" she croaked.  
     Finally the preacher fixed a stern eye upon the rest of the huddled parishioners. "And don't you dare let the Lord catch you dipping snuff!" A gasp ran through the crowd.
     Grandma sat down abruptly, apparently stunned. She looked around at her friends and neighbors, about half of them nodding in agreement and the other half frowning along with the whiskey drinkers and cigar smokers.
     "Hmmph," Grandma shook her head disapprovingly and turned to Grandpa, "Preacher's done stopped preaching and done started meddlin'.

© 2004 by Tom King (from a story told me by a friend)

Loyde "Snake" Arender: Warrior Poet

Read this again today. Sheila was with him during his final illness providing care. His wife is her cousin. Sheila learned a lot about Loyde and I put together this compilation of this brave Marine's poetry and stories about him for his memorial. I posted it online as a PDF file and from 5 to 7 people a week drop by to read it. Loyde should have got the Medal of Honor, but the Lieutenant who wrote the commendation and recommendation was killed a day or two later. 

There are some dates and things in the news articles and tributes to Loyde by men who knew and respected him. At some point I'd like to publish this. I'll correct the couple of errors made by friends of his.

Here's a link to his very excellent poetry - a tribute I put together for Loyde and to all the men who served in Vietnam.


© 2016 By Tom King and Loyde "Snake" Arender

God Still Watches Out For Us

When God's children face trials and the petty harassments of the Prince of this world, he looks on approvingly. He absolutely hates God's children. CS Lewis captured that in Screwtape Letters where he showed the devils hatred for any bit of pleasure or comfort we draw from life - be it a good meal or a hot shower.

Today I witnessed just this sort of petty demonic harassment as the devil threw everything but the kitchen sink at us in an attempt to ruin a lovely and special opportunity we had to experience a once in a lifetime joy. It is our 50th wedding anniversary and my daughter and son-in-law paid for a cruise to Alaska with them and they are bringing the grandson along to play with Grammy and Poppy. We are so looking forward to the trip. The last days before the trip, however, the demons attacked us to try and destroy even this happiness for us. 

We leave tomorrow, on Monday.  A week ago I contacted my HMO about getting Sheila's most critical medication sent early so she wouldn't run out during the week. The pharmacy said they'd handle it. Having that med is serious. To run out of that medicine in the middle of the trip would have resulted in panic attacks, seizures, and possible hospitalization at sea. We leave on the 20th, but her schedule 4 medication would not be released until the 23rd. The doctor has to approve early release. She was going to run out and she can't do that.  I checked to make sure the medication had been shipped Friday afternoon and to my shock, it had not even been approved. Someone in the system dropped the ball and failed to forward the request to release her meds early in time for the trip.

The next morning I got on the phone to find out what happened and to try and get her medicine released. That's when I began to hit brick wall after brick wall. The upshot was that the consulting nurse said it couldn't be done. So did the customer service lady, the chat utility person and the nurse at the one clinic that was actually open on the weekend. They told me we couldn't even get help at the emergency room because of this new federal law restricting schedule 4 meds. I finally arranged a video chat with the HMO's on duty emergency tele-medicine doctor and after explaining the situation he put me on hold and when he came back sometime later, he told me that the med had been approved and was being filled, but that the note requesting "early release for travel" had inexplicably been left off. He talked to the pharmacy for us but couldn't prescribe that med himself because of a new federal law that makes schedule 4 meds much harder to prescribe and get delivered. Dr. D. finally said we could go pick it up, but we'd have to go to the Tacoma HMO pharmacy nearly 30 miles away. He was right about that. He was wrong about us being able to "pick it up."

The 30 miles presented another problem as we no longer have a car, are on a very fixed income, are both disabled and public transportation to a whole other city is really problematic on weekends. It takes 3 days just to get a paratransit bus to the bus stop. And her psychiatrist's office is closed on the weekend and apparently they don't have on-call docs in an emergency for psychiatrists.

I'm going a bit off my story here. It seems the feds are okay with legalizing marijuana, opening borders for the drug mules, and even allowing some pharmacies to carry over-the-counter morphine. But my wife's prescribed by a doctor anti-anxiety medication requires practically an act of congress to get a few days early so we can celebrate our 50th anniversary. (end of rant)

Our neighbor, Dan, a wonderful human being, when I asked if he could drive us down to the bus stop, immediately left his supper and said he was going to take us all the way to the Tacoma clinic. God bless that man for his kindness. When we got to the clinic, we hit road blocks again and again. The pharmacy wouldn't release the medication to us. so we had to go to the urgent care clinic there and wait an hour or so to see a doctor. All the nurses and receptionists at the urgent care told us they weren't going to be able to release her meds. One even chided us for not planning our trip properly.  

What she meant by planning our trip better was to go through all 15 medications and determine when each ran out and then plan our cruise for the window in the dates when nothing was going to run out. There was no sense from these unpleasant women that the HMO should adapt to our schedule and maybe give us the extra we needed to last the length of the cruise. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the cruise lines' sailing dates are planned more than a year ahead and that the ships are highly unlikely to move around their embarkation dates based on 6000 passengers' medication refill schedules. I'm afraid I lost my temper a bit and threatened to sue somebody.

I went back to the exam room and found poor Sheila prepared to just stay home and send me on the cruise without her. It seemed pretty hopeless. So we did what we always do when things seem  hopeless. We prayed and asked God to help us, for without God's intervention, it looked very much like Sheila wasn't going to be able to go on our 50th anniversary cruise. Her most critical medication would run out 2 days into the trip and our HMO was adamantly denying our request to get the refills before we leave Monday. Without that med her life would be placed at risk on a boat out at sea. It looked very like she was going to have to stay behind while our family went on our 50th anniversary cruise without her and I wasn't going without her so everyone on the cruise would be celebrating our anniversary without us. I wasn't going to let that happen, so I kept fighting to get her meds, taking on every naysayer who popped up to tell us it wasn't going to happen.

After we prayed in the urgent care examination room, a young doctor came in a short time later. Although every HMO staff member had told us no way were we getting her medicine, the doc took pity on us. Turns out he kind of stuck his neck out to get her meds covered for the trip. If her psychiatrist didn't back his play, he could have been in real trouble for what he did. He ordered enough of her meds to get us through the trip and home. It took some doing, but this kind man got it done. God bless him.

What Satan means for evil, God works out for good. The devil works in broad strokes to corrupt our culture, our political system and our religions, but as time grows shorter, he grows desperate and is reduced to turning the forces evil loose in ever more petty attempts to harass good people. Petty demons try hard to spoil any good and worthy thing; every bit of joy we may have if they can. 

So, we had a little miracle yesterday. Today we're packing for the boat. Tomorrow we leave at 7 am for the Royal Caribbean Cruise Terminal, an hour away in Seattle. We've never been on a cruise before. We've never been to Alaska or Canada. We've never seen the northern lights, glaciers, whales or brown bears. And we get to travel all that way in comfort, even though our knees and hips are wrecked, our mobility is limited, and we live on a fixed income. Our children are good to us, our neighbors are good to us and God especially is good to us. I've got a great pair of binoculars and my grandson and I are looking forward to watching whales from the balcony of our cabin and Sheila and I to spending time with our kids who live 3000 miles away. Sabbath we will spend at sea in the midst of God's natural beauty. Even as the world winds down, our loving Savior is there for us to give us joy and encouragement amidst the storms of life.

God is so very good.

© 2024 by Tom King

Pro-Hamas Students Offered a Free Ride.............to Iran!

I know. Let's try one of these protests in Teheran! They'll love it!

 Iran's Shiraz University Iran has announced a scholarship program offering free tuition to American students kicked out as a result of their pro-Palestinian protests. Oh, mercy, I do hope the whole bunch of them take the deal. We should start a Gofundme to buy airline tickets to Teheran for all of them and encourage the to go try out Iranian education. What an experience that will be. Can't wait till....

1. The girls step out in bikinis and halter tops.
2. The girls go burkha free.
3. The guys try chatting up a female Iranian (probably won't be a student though - they don't like women attending college).
4. The women try speaking up in class, if they aren't banned from attending classes because they are female.
5. They try protesting because some LGBTQ folks were tossed headfirst off the science building.
6. They try to rock that purple hair, navel piercings and tatoos of naked people, serpents and skulls smoking cigarettes in public.
7. They complain about a "unfair" pronouncement by the Ayatollah.
8. They pitch their tents on the quad for a quick fun protest.
9. They show off that tramp stamp.

Well, given the cultural practices of this gang of hooligans, at least we won't have to worry about making it a round trip plane ticket!

© 2024 by Tom King

Is Rejecting Religion for Spiritualism a Good Thing?

The dictionary defines religion as a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith. So what is your objection to a system of beliefs? Progressivism, Marxism, socialism, communism, and spiritualism are all "systems of beliefs." These are all faith-based systems. The only commonality between all these religions is that they have no God to trouble them or offer them guidance. They are all self-centered systems of belief, not God-centered. You get to make up your system of comfortable beliefs, principles and causes.

The ardor and faith of the God-free religions is obvious if you dare challenge their beliefs or (worse yet) defend your own beliefs. They work up all kinds of ardor and with total faith in whatever herd ascribes to their shared beliefs. Don't ask them to go to church, though. A nice peaceful riot or burning a federal building, however, is a wonderful spiritual solidarity building activity. Just don't call it a religion. That implies you might be expected to sit in a pew.

The demonization of "religion" is, in my humble opinion, a strategic tactic of the forces of the dark side. Basically it says forsake the assembling of yourselves together as Christian denominations do and go out and worship in "nature" or assemble yourselves together to "peacefully" protest organized religion because organized religion is a bad thing.

Bad for who?

No question that some members of the would-be leader class have claimed religious authority and abused it for their own purposes. The devil, always a good military strategist, never attacks from just one direction. Even today he attacks conservatives from below and liberals from above.

And by encouraging us to disparage each other and fight interminably he causes the sort of chaos that helps his guerilla campaign against God. He has to make God and God's followers the bad guys. He does this, I believe, by introducing this nebulous spiritualism in which we get to believe we can find our own truth from within ourselves. No objective truths. No firm principles and only one's own self-defined "truth". Be wary. Religions as systems of belief provide us with an external framework. It assumes original sin - that we aren't by nature really good people. Spiritualism assumes we are by nature, good from birth. Well, we aren't. Don't believe that? Try raising a two year-old. Hard to find a more stubborn self-centered creature in all creation. If they weren't so cute, many toddlers would never survive to become adults. Our jobs as parents are to civilize the wee barbarians. In the same manner, God's job is to prepare us for eternity. We need His guidance. We don't carry goodness within ourselves.

That all comes from God and even when we think it comes from our own naval gazing, we find we become better people only by adopting into our lives external principles like the 10 commandments and the principles we learned in Sabbath school. By beholding we become changed. We are saved by Grace, not by sitting on a pole contemplating our own goodness. It doesn't work.

Eliminating "religion" wholesale is a very bad idea. Even the rhetoric of those who would selectively eliminate religious ideas and getting rid of institutions that make me uncomfortable, encourages pride and a haughty spirit. Spiritualism isn't about rapping on walls in the Fox sisters' bedroom in upstate New York. It's about turning inward for truth and rejecting the outward search for God and the assembling of ourselves together for mutual support in becoming better people.

When I took counseling studies in graduate school, I learned that one of the best ways to change our behavior was through studying, positive self-talk and performing ritual acts which challenged our own negative behavior. It struck me how similar much of the behavioral change techniques advocated by psychology were strikingly similar to those practices and rituals in many Christian churches. Apparently, when Jesus set up the Christian church, He knew rather a lot about how the human brain works.

Seek Him and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart. Searching for some sort of ultimate truth within your "spirit" is a pathway to what Yoda in Star Wars called the "dark side".

Okay, by now my anti-religionist friends are locked and loaded. You may fire at will.......

© 2024 by Tom King

God''s Mercy to a Partially Tone Deaf Would-Be Musician

I am not a natural musician. My wife, Sheila, has perfect pitch and in high school her band teacher offered to get her a college music scholarship for the oboe, a particularly difficult instrument to play. I envy her. Me? I can barely hold a tune in a fair-sized bucket, but it helped a lot when Bob LeBard, my Valley Grande Academy chorale director, stood me between Dave Dameron and Steve Urich, two strong basses. It took me two years to learn to hear notes well enough to tune my guitar by ear. 

Before that I made use of a principle of physics/acoustics that allowed me to hold down the 5th fret of the sixth string and adjust the fifth string so that it vibrates when you strike the sixth string. Then I'd follow the pattern down to the first string. I could only get the guitar in the neighborhood of in tune. Dave would ask me, "Can't you hear that?" when I played my "tuned" guitar.  I couldn't. I just handed him my guitar. Eventually, I got to where if I struck the fretted sixth and the open 5th string at the same time I could adjust the 5th string till the note didn't warble.
 

God gave me this guitar. When I was first starting out playing guitar I had bought a beautiful solid blonde Mexican guitar from Kim Holdridge for $6. The strings were broken and the nut was missing. I replaced the nut and bought new strings and found I had a most lovely sounding classical guitar. Sadly a couple of summers later someone knocked it off the counter in the camp store and broke the neck. The lovely folk I worked with at Lone Star Camp all chipped in and surprised me with a new Yamaha classical. It died a few years after that in an accident - broken neck again. 

 

At the time, Mickey Thurber played a classical Goya guitar with the AYA team and I always wanted one. I've had two 12 string guitars. One died the same way as the little Mexican. My son lost the other one. I carried my instruments everywhere so it was kind of inevitable that wear and tear would have its toll. I lost 3 banjos one way and another over the years and I'm on my 4th and 5th. David Dameron who lived through a year of listening to me learn the guitar across the hall in the dorm at VGA. He gave me a banjo he had that needed repair. I bought some tools and repaired it not knowing what I was doing. I even straightened up the neck. Before that, I had built a Squared-Eel homemade longneck banjo from a kit my friend Mike Gregory sent me because he felt sorry that I'd lost my last banjo. I was getting good, because I extended the neck to make a longneck out of it. The head was a 2 liter pop bottle I tacked over the frame and shrunk with a hair dryer. Totally cool.

 

My best guitar (the one in the picture above) I found on eBay. It was a Swedish Goya like Mickey's, built in Gothenberg, Sweden before 1972. Some fool had tried to put steel strings on it and ripped off the bridge. I replaced the broken bridge by reading about bridge placement and my little Goya sings as beautifully as my old Mexican. God has been good about keeping me in good musical instruments and I've learned a lot about repairing and building instruments. I'm hoping to build a church dulcimer soon. It's rectangular rather than hourglass or oval shaped. I suspect it has a more low tone.

I've got the tools and I've got the web address of StewMac, a luthier supply place and a membership at Banjohangout.org where the guys love to give out advice if you get stuck. They turned out for me to be kindred spirits, which for banjo players is kind of like when your wife leaves you home alone without competent supervision. 

 

The best part of my musical journey is that I learned you don't have to be a professional musician or be in a band if you're too lazy to practice. I never got very good, but if, like me, you play off and on for 45 years you can follow along with "Awesome God." You can just play well enough to be in the church song service band and Kumbaya for campfires. Learn some chords. Simplify the arrangements. Make yourself a notebook of all the songs you like and do like our ancestor did and sit out on the porch where you won't bother your wife with the perfect pitch. The dogs will howl along with you. It's so special.

 

 

(c) 2024 by Tom King