The Secret of Patience

 

I consider myself a patient man. My Sweet Baboo says it's because I'm easily distracted and perhaps she's right. I've never had a talent for being bored. At a very young age, I became interested in everything. I used to read the encyclopedia. "S" was my favorite volume as it was not only the thickest, but had lots of articles about space and stars and spaceships in it.

Because everything draws my attention, I soon began to build up a backlog of stuff I wanted to do or know or find out about that I didn't have time or the cash to do. Some of it I have, over the years, managed to do. I collected a fleet of canoes and equipment which I left behind for the Pathfinder club back in Texas when I came up here to Washington State. I had a sailboat for a time - a Hobie Cat that could get up and fly in even a light breeze. That too I left behind,

I collected the parts for a six inch telescope on eBay and at optics surplus websites over ten years. I haven't finished putting all the parts together yet, but someday I plan to have the time. Still I have a starfinder program on my computer and a couple of star-watching handbooks and both my basic and advanced star honors from Pathfinders. I became a Master Guide. I expanded my toy soldier collection. I visited the Alamo and put together 80 feet of slot car track. I lost that too along the way and never got to set it up. I also lost my train sets that I collected and never had the time or place to set up a permanent layout for.

I've camped with my family and led Pathfinder campouts. For years I wanted to write a book. I've written 8 and published 5. Working on the others. Wanted to be a writer. I've been doing that for more than a decade, but not very successfully.  I built a working homemade banjo, learned to play it and a guitar that I also rebuilt. It was a Goya which is exactly what I always wanted.

I haven't done everything on my bucket list, but I've done a lot of them. Some of the things I've done were surprises - testifying before the state legislature was something I never aspired to or visiting senators and congressmen in Washington. I wound up a Red Cross water safety instructor trainer and canoeing instructor almost accidentally. Was a teacher, a therapist and started five nonprofit organizations and schools. I even got to fly in a B-17, an unexpected gift for my work on a Special Olympics fundraiser.

Me after my B-17 flight (top row, far left)

It all happened because I made the decision when I was 17 to give my heart to God. I barely believed in Him at the time and still had my doubts. I was the most reluctant baptismal candidate that John Thurber baptized that day in the Jefferson Academy swimming pool. I told God I'd try Christianity out, but only on condition that He make a believer out of me. Like Moses, I wanted to see Him.

And see Him I did. It felt like the devil was after me from the get-go, but God kept showing up as if to say, "I'm still here."  He introduced me to a lovely girl and told me I was to take care of her because He (God) loved her very much and she was to be my responsibility from then on. He kept on showing up. He's given us prophecies, miracles and warnings all along the way and made a believer out of me, not just because of what God has done, but also because of the vehemence with which the devil has dogged us every step of the way.

My bucket list isn't finished yet, but I suspect it won't matter if I don't get everything checked off. I've experienced amazing and wonderful things, had three wonderful kids and a marriage that's lasted more than four decades and weathered storms that would have sunk a whole lot of ships.

After we're done here, there's all those millions of years to do more cool stuff than we can imagine. That I suppose is the thing I'm looking forward to most - time!  Some people think it would be boring to live forever. Not me. I've already got an itinerary that'll take me 40 or 50 thousand years to get through. Being incapable of being bored will be an asset in the New Earth.

© 2017 by Tom King

I Ain't Afraid of No Grim Reaper

I plan to join a band after I'm dead...

I see a lot of introspective, end of life weblogs being written by my peers lately. It seems that as soon as the old peak becomes fully snow-capped, we wax nostalgic and start looking back at our legacy.  Presidents and old people do that a lot.

Psychologist Erick Erickson says coming to terms with your life is the big deal psychological task of people nearing the end of their lives.  You look back fondly at the good stuff you did or experienced and try to make a story out of the heaps of steaming horse manure that inevitably decorate your life with unpleasantness.  It's natural, when we look at the ending of our lives that we want to know whether or not we will be well-remembered and whether or not we'll be the hero of our own story.

My son, Micah, asked a friend once if the friend though anyone would remember him if he died.  He had struggled for 14 years with a seizure disorder and I suppose he was always  aware of his own mortality. Two weeks after he posed that question, he died in his sleep.  There's not a day I don't think about him and miss him. He was 28, six months from graduating from college with his life before him.  He didn't get the luxury of ruminating over his accomplishments nor have the time to write his memoirs.  Yet, he lived his life well, left behind good friends, countless kids he was a mentor too and so many great stories, that his memorial service got more laughs than some standup comedians do. 

Not every old guy does all that ruminating. I suppose, if you figure this life is all there is, you'd like to be remembered for at least a few years. A lot of evil has been done in the name of gaining a place in history over the several millenia of recorded human history.  Being monumentally bad is the cheap way to be remembered in this particular iteration of the world.  Being remembered for good deeds usually requires some form of martyrdom to get your name on the final exam for World History 101.

Me, I have a hard time really getting my mind around the idea of being dead and no longer being busy doing things in the world. I haven't seen everything and done everything yet.  Death would be a monumental hinderance to my plans for world conquest.

It's my Christian faith, you  see.  When Jesus said that if you have faith in Him you have eternal life.  Note: He does not say you will have eternal life after you die and sleep and He comes back to get you.  As my grandpa once noted, "If you're going to wake up from it, then it's not really death."  It's like Burgess Meredith described it in Grumpy Old Men - a dirt nap!

So if death is nothing more than an extended nap in the dirt, then why in the world am I worried about my legacy.  I am, to quote Dan Fogelbert, "a living legacy".  So rather than spending my golden years searching for the meaning of my life, I rather believe I'll just keep on trying to make some meaning out of my life right up until I pitch over nose first into the dirt for that little nap.

Of course, I kind of hope Jesus will come and we can go straight on to the real work of shaping the universe in partnership with God.  How much fun will that be?  So, I currently plan to tool along doing the sort of thing I'll be doing in the New Heavens and New Earth - building things, taking care of the gardening, making music, telling stories, that sort of thing.  I plan to skip dying altogether, but if I do croak, I plan to die busy with all kinds of unfinished projects going.  I plan to wake up busy too.  I figure since I have eternal life promised, I'm already living forever and I really ought to act like it.

Tom

Why This Ad Doesn't Creep Me Out

(c) 2011 by Tom King

There have been a series of ads recently on television from a group called Values.com.  One of the ads always makes me cry....

It's a daughter sitting beside her dying father's hospital bed and remembering back to scenes of the two of them together growing up.  Somebody posted a complaint on Facebook the other day that the ad creeped them out.

"Does the ad mean she thinks her life will be better off without her father?" the poster asked.

It's interesting that someone would fasten on that idea, especially someone who tends to be a conservative. I think he was probably looking for liberal bugaboos in the thing since the commercial runs on the evil mainstream media.

But the ad is not about death panels. Whoever made it is someone who has an aquaintance with death. I've lost two brothers and my dad under tragic circumstances. My wife buried her parents within six months of each other. She and I work with seniors and have stood by more than one bedside while someone 'shuffled off this mortal coil'.

We've seen the families who cling to a dying loved one long past the time they should have let them go. I'm reminded of how my mother-in-law died. Her kids were all around her. She was dying from inoperable cancer and was no longer even fully conscious, yet she clung to life tenaciously. Her youngest daughter had been very close to her and the girl was grieving hard. Recognizing that it was time, my wife and her brother and sister came close and said goodbye. They told their Mama that they loved her and that they would be okay.  But it wasn't until the youngest, was finally persuaded to tell her Mama it was okay that she quietly slipped away. 

Families sometimes go to heroic lengths to keep their loved ones alive, long past the point where life is worth hanging on to.  As a Christian, I believe death is not permanent. I jokingly call it a "dirt nap" because if you believe you are going to wake up, then death is naught but a heavy sleep.  Jesus called it sleep.  What awaits us at the end of our "nap" is something worth getting to. 

No one else should decide when it is your time to go. No one else should make you stay longer than you need to in order to accomplish whatever God had in mind for you to accomplish. And when you go, it's nice if somebody tells you how much they love you and that they'll be alright till they see you again.

That's what that advertisement was all about. There are only two reasons I can see for someone to object to the sentiment in that commercial: 

(1) They can see nothing beyond the grave and for them loss is just loss - nothing more. They must think that making someone you love hang on is somehow the correct way to show love and that letting them go is selfish and creepy.

(2) They really believe that old people ought to hurry up and get out of the way of the young and they're afraid this ad makes that sentiment look callous.

I can't think of another reason why that commercial is a problem for anyone.

Just one man's opinion

Tom King

Three Things I Can Do to Get to Heaven (That I know how to do)

by Tom King - (c) 2010

Since I was a boy I have been told by an endless string of preachers, camp-meeting speakers, radio and tele-evangelists how to get to heaven.

"Fall on the Rock," they say.

"Lean on Jesus," says another.

"Confess your sins and give your life to the Lord."

"Submit yourself unto the Almighty."

"Take up your cross and follow Him."

The problem with all of those exhortations to salvation is that I could never get a satisfactory explanation as to what any of those things meant.

"Preacher," I asked. "What does it mean to fall on the Rock?"

"It means to take up your cross and follow Him."

"What does that mean?"

"It means to submit yourself to the Almighty."

 "How do you do that?"

"Well you confess your sins and give your life to the Lord."

"And how does that work?"

"Well, you lean on Jesus!"

"I don't know how to do that."

"Well, it's easy. You take up your cross and follow Him."

"I don't have a cross!"

"It isn't a literal cross.  What you do is, you see is, uh, you fall on the Rock."

And round and round they went. When finally I came to the Lord, I came as a skeptic. Some may find that a dubious way to start your discipleship, but then, my name is Thomas and Jesus has a history with skeptics named Thomas, so I was baptized, took up my cross and went stumbling after Him looking for answers.

I bought a tiny Bible that fit in my pocket. Not a New Testament, but the whole thing. I wanted the full treatment. I read it cover to cover as I walked back and forth to school, in spare moments when I was working at camp and in my dorm room the next year when I worked my way through Christian boarding academy.

In my reading I found three things that God asks me to do publicly:

1. Be baptized - I'd already done that.
2. Worship Him in fellowship with fellow Christians on the Sabbath (at a minimum). That's easy to figure out how to do.
3. Participate in communion services - I did that even in the summer when I worked at camp. My churchs practices the footwashing ordinance as part of communion and because I ran barefoot all the time at camp, the ground-in dirt on my feet used to turn the foot-washing water black. Awkward at times, certainly a test of humility, but simple to do all the same.

God asks me to do these things without promising me they will get me to heaven. They merely publicly acknowledge that I am His man.

I also found in all my study of the Bible, that there were three other things that God asks me to do personally that I actually knew how to do. I was a bit foggy on how to trust God, have faith in Him, lean on Him and all the rest of those things the pastors exhorted me to do. In my reading I found out where they got all those exhortations by the way - they're all in there in some form or other. So, as I studied, I wrote down only the things God asked me to do that I actually know how to do. They are: 

1. Study: Jesus said to know God was eternal life. How do you know God except by studying his Word and the world that he has made and the way he deals with mankind? Being a rabid and curious reader and habitual student of everything, that wasn't too tough to do.
2. Pray. A somewhat mechanical process at first, but as you gain experience and become comfortable talking to God, you soon find yourself praying constantly; sharing little things with God on the spot instead of waiting to kneel beside your bed. That was pretty easy too.
3. Share what you learned from praying and studying. There I hit a snag. My first experience with this requirement was "witnessing", an exercise in tenacity that my church conducted weekly, where you went around to the homes of people you didn't know and asked them to take "literature" from you. It was a painful exercise for shy people like me and really put me off the sharing bit. But as I continued with praying and studying, the Lord placed me in situations and places where I found opportunity to share what I was discovering about God's character as I prayed and studied. So, he not only gave me a way to communicate with Him, I found that He also took care of setting up all the appointments for sharing my experience with others.

The thing I discovered as I carried out God's program for going to heaven was that I began to change. My tastes began to change. My language changed. My responses to people and events were altered. I found that I did not resist the change. I actually quite enjoyed becoming a decent, kind-hearted person. All the talk about being clay in the potter's hands began to make sense to me. I had tried the "grit your teeth and try to be good" routine, but had failed as miserably at being good on my own hook as miserably as St. Paul and Martin Luther did.

The great thing is that God requires very little of us other than to place ourselves in His presence through the three activities above. Do them consistently and you will be changed. You cannot help but become a new man or woman if you do. The golden rule will be written upon your heart as surely as a child will grow up if you feed it regularly.

But what's really cool is that you will become, not a carbon copy of every other Christian, but the absolutely unique and special individual that God made you to be. Satan's idea for establishing order in the world calls for all men to be all alike except for a few privileged folk like himself who run things. God's idea for the new world order on the other hand, calls for all men to be truly themselves, each contributing his or her own special talents and ideas to the mix. We give ourselves to Him 1,2,3 and He gives us back ourselves better than He found us. Satan wants cookie cutter slaves to serve their masters. God wants free individuals, sons and daughters, who run things for themselves and to whom He can give gifts in abundance.

Not only that, but God makes His children free by doing for them what they cannot do themselves - giving them the power to make choices for themselves, unencumbered by a crummy childhood, environmental factors, genetic predisposition or cultural influence. Freed from the power of heredity and environment, we may then choose to do what we really, really want to do and not what some unsupected subconscious influence pushes us into doing against our wishes.

Talk about an Extreme Makeover.  How unbelievably cool is that?

Tyler, TX