Month: August 2019

Saturday morning when my friend came to pick me up for breakfast, I had dozed off in my chair. I got up to put my shirt on to leave and first my right knee and then my left knee popped and gave. It had been quite a while since that had happened so it caught me completely by surprise, but I was able to support myself with my arms until I could sit. I always have some pain when I stand or walk, but it is bearable. I can’t describe to you the sensation of bones shifting in one of your knees and giving under your weight and when you shift your weight to the other leg that knee does the same thing.

It wasn’t the first time the enemy has tried to stop me from fellowship with my Christian brothers, but I have never let him succeed. After sitting and resting my legs for a few minutes I tried again with the same results. I told my friend that I didn’t know if I could make it to his car. Then, I said my usual short prayer, “Walk with me, Lord, and help me make it.” I hesitated on the door step, pushed my rollator down ahead of me and took that first apprehensive step down with my right leg and then with my left. My knees held firm; so I took the next two steps with a little more confidence. By the time I climbed the mountain into his Tahoe, I wasn’t even thinking about it anymore.

Another dear friend picked me up for church Sunday. I told her about my experience but my knees held firm getting to and from her car. Our worship team was in fine form Sunday as usual but when they began one of the songs tears suddenly filled my eyes and ran down my cheeks. Those words described exactly how I had felt the day before. “You make me brave! You make me brave! You take me out beyond the shore into the waves. As your love in wave after wave crashes over me, crashes over me. You make me brave! You make me brave! No fear can hinder now the promises you made.”

Something else happened Sunday that blessed me beyond words. One of the greeters at CLC is a plumber by trade. Last week he looked at my two leaking toilets and was going to give me a written estimate Sunday to submit to VA. When I saw him, he said the Holy Spirit told him to do the work no charge if I could buy the parts. I had put in a call to VA to see if they would cover that cost, but hadn’t heard from them. On Monday I got a call from VA telling me that kind of repairs would not be covered by them. God already knew that so He took care of it through my Christian brother instead.

I know sometimes my blog reads like “The Chronicles of Jim”, but God has shown me that He blesses us so we can be a blessing to others. If this blog post encourages someone going through a difficult situation, I am doubly blessed.   

I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would ever quote Charles Darwin on this blog, but he got this one thing right. “Anyone who can waste an hour has not learned the value of life.” Time is what life is made of. It has been said many times that when you give someone some of your time, you are giving them a valuable piece of your life that cannot be retrieved. Time is not an invention of man. It is something man has discovered as a part of God’s creation. It is based on the rotation of the Earth, the orbit of the Earth around the sun and the orbit of the moon around the Earth. Life was first measured in days, weeks, months and years. As science became more exact, it has been farther divided into hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds (one thousandth of a second) and even nanoseconds (one billionth of a second). However you measure it, the time of your life is priceless.

Life is a “limited time offer” with a specific expiration date that is known only to the Creator (whom Charles Darwyn overlooked). According to 93% of prominent biologists worldwide, life begins at conception. Sadly, many of those biologists believe in abortion rights in spite of that scientific knowledge. You know how I feel about abortion, so I will share these words from Mother Teresa on the subject. “Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three-quarters of its victims are women; half the babies and all of the mothers.” “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

When people devalue life at its beginning, they will also devalue the life of the elderly and handicapped (me). Making the patient “comfortable” is the goal of hospitals and nursing facilities under Medicare guidelines. Seven years ago, my wife was transferred from a hospital to a nursing home for physical therapy to regain her strength for continued cancer treatment. Her first night there, she told the nurse practitioner she was in pain. After seeing cancer on her chart she slapped a very strong pain patch on her. Carol could not stay awake long enough to eat. After getting half a bowl of soup in her before she dozed off again, I called her oncologist and begged him to intervene. He ordered a much lower pain patch and she immediately started eating and looking forward to physical therapy. I noticed full trays of food carried out from her roommate and before Carol was ready to go home, a funeral director came and wheeled out her roommate’s body. When I could get Carol out of there, I left skid marks in their parking lot. It still makes me cringe when I hear someone promote “Medicare for all”. Canada’s health minister has bragged about the millions of dollars they have saved each year since assisted suicide has been legalized there. Evidently America does the same thing with pain patches to make people more comfortable while starving to death. Life is too precious to put a monetary price tag on it.

Before we can value the life of others, we must value every nanosecond of our own life. When we are filled with the love of God, we can easily find meaning and value in a life of service to God and others. We can find comfort and joy in the knowledge that as long as we have life, God is not done with us yet. Life is so precious that God offers to extend it eternally through faith in His Son; providing new, spiritual, life that begins the moment we first believe and continues beyond our physical death.

I am not easily offended by rough language or four letter words, unless they are used around children. I’m sure Jesus was not repelled by the “salty” language of the four commercial fishermen and tax collector he chose as disciples. However, there are two four letter words that I always find offensive; hate and evil. They both came to my attention again when the two mass shootings occurred so close together in El Paso and Dayton recently. There was a lot of chatter on Face Book about gun control and mental illness. I saw one post quoting a black activist, “You tired of the race card? We tired of the mental illness card.” I could not restrain myself. I commented, “OK. I’ll play the EVIL card instead. It isn’t political. The shooter in Dayton was a socialist supporter of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders – that shooting was not their fault. The shooter in El Paso was a supporter of President Donald Trump – that shooting was not his fault. It certainly wasn’t the guns’ fault. The fault lies with hate and evil in the heart of those two men that drove them to take the lives of innocent people. It is the same evil that is in the heart of an abortionist who convinces a mother that it is not only OK to kill her baby, but it is her right to do so, even as the baby struggles to leave her body.”  

I hope you will permit me to trigger another Google search. One of my favorite old time radio dramas began with, “What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” Of course, it is actually God who sees the contents of our hearts – good or evil. It is my experience that evil is nearly always preceded by hate. We are not born with hatred in our heart for an individual or group of people – it is learned from someone who is influential in our life. Once hate is well established, it opens the door to evil thoughts and actions.

Love is my favorite four letter word. It is the antidote for that hate/evil process. I have mentioned before that love is not the opposite of hate. On the love scale, there is love (caring completely) at one end and indifference (not caring at all) at the other end. Hate has its own scale with hate (completely detesting) at one end and indifference at the other end. We must choose between love and hate, because they do not coexist in our mind or heart. I have heard people say they have a love/hate relationship with someone. That would last only a short time until one of those feelings drives out the other.

God is love (1 John 4:16), so once He is in our heart and mind there is no room for hate or evil. One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is, “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” As Christians, love is our choice and it will keep hate and evil on the outside looking in.         

My care giver brought me some movies on DVD that she thought I might enjoy and they have all been great. One in particular was an adventure movie with an interracial love story woven into it. It sort of reminded me of the unlikely love story in the African Queen (another Google search for the age impaired) except for the obligatory sex scene these days. Don’t misunderstand, it was tastefully filmed and I didn’t find it vulgar or offensive; I just found it unnecessary. Some things are better left to the imagination. A deep kiss and fade to a shot of them lying next to each other in bed would have been all my imagination needed. I began to wonder why Hollywood and even TV now leave nothing to the imagination when it comes to blood, gore and sex. Then it dawned on me; we no longer develop an imagination. We no longer read the books or listen to the radio dramas that stimulated my imagination in my youth. Everything has to be in your face to be fully understood. Even online do-it-yourself home projects must be accompanied by a step by step video.

I learned to recognize the difference between history and fiction at an early age, but in either case I was always able to immerse myself in the story and experience what the characters were experiencing. When I began to read the Bible, I was fascinated by the language (KJV was all we had) and the authority with which it was written. I read and reread the Gospels; following Jesus from his heavenly home described in the first chapter of John; to the stable in Bethlehem where he was born into the world he created; to Nazareth where he grew up; to his miracles and ministry; to his trial, crucifixion, burial, resurrection and ascension. By the time I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I felt I already knew him so very well.

Even back then people were assigning the blame for Jesus’ death. Some blamed religious leaders; others blamed the Jewish people (ignoring the fact that Jesus was a Jew); while still others blamed government (Romans) for his death. I knew, even at that young age, that Jesus could have called a legion of angels to save him. He gave up his life willingly and if I ever feel the need to assign blame for his death, I only have to look into a mirror. It is my sins and your sins that drove the nails in his hands and feet. It is his love for us that motivated him to become a once and for all sacrifice in our place.

My imagination is still very active, but it is stretched beyond its limits when I contemplate eternal life with my Lord. As Paul so aptly quoted, “That is what the Scriptures mean when they say, ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.’” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

There was a game going around Face Book recently where people would tell how old they are without using numbers. I commented, “I am Fibber McGee and Molly old”. I’m sure that triggered a lot of Google searches. For those of you who are age impaired (too young to remember); it was a radio show from 1935 to 1959. It was a situation comedy about a married couple who lived at 79 Wistful Vista. There was a running joke when in almost every episode someone would open McGee’s hall closet and there would be 45 seconds of banging and clanging as you would imagine all of the junk and clutter spilling out. I must have heard that over a hundred times and it made me laugh every single time. The great thing about old time radio was that you got to use your imagination.  

I think most people have a “junk drawer” in their kitchen; at least I hope I’m not the only one. Any tool or gadget that may come in handy later, winds up in that drawer until it won’t hold one more thing. It’s sort of a miniature McGee’s closet. My parents were children of the Great Depression and they passed on to me the philosophy, “Waste not – want not.” Nothing would get thrown away unless it was completely useless. In this age when almost everything you buy is designed to be disposable and replaced with a newer model, that philosophy should be dying out; but I suspect it may have become a “generational curse” in some families. A friend of mine decided to try an ancient oriental method for removing clutter. You take hold of something and if you get negative vibes you throw it away. She told me the very first day she got rid of a treadmill, two mirrors and a bathroom scale.

Why am I sharing all of this with you? It is because we also tend to keep a lot of mental and emotional clutter in our lives that we need to recognize and dispose of. Our minds don’t fill to overflowing like my junk drawer or McGee’s closet. According to biologists, we only use a small portion of our mental capacity; so there is plenty of room for us to add new scripture passages, song lyrics and experiences to our memory. What I am writing about is the negative clutter the enemy has sneaked in among our thoughts and feelings. Not all negative thoughts are bad. When I remember the tough times Carol and I lived through, it draws me closer to God and to her memory. It is the negativity that causes me to question my worthiness to be God’s adopted son that needs to be tossed.

As Corrie ten Boom wrote, “We must forget those things which are behind, because God has (Philippians 3:13-14). We need to stop allowing Satan or an overly sensitive conscience dredging up sins that have been previously confessed and forgiven (1 John 1:7-9). Remember, God has cast our sins into the depths of the sea and has placed a sign above them, NO FISHING ALLOWED.” Isn’t it time you and I throw all of our guilt and regrets into that sea along with our sins? It doesn’t have to be spring to do some house cleaning.        

There was a TV show years ago titled, “Kids say the darnedest things”. Art Linkletter used to get young kids to embarrass their parents with answers to his questions. Because children are innocently honest, they can create some awkward moments at times for others. On the other hand, seasoned citizens like me create our own share of awkward moments, but usually at our own expense.

I will never forget the Sunday when our worship team at CLC introduced a new worship song to the congregation. It began, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.” I thought to myself, “There is nothing new about that song. I learned it many years ago as a young Christian.” So, while the rest of the congregation sang the chorus “Christ alone. Cornerstone” from the words on the screen; I was singing, “On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.” You should have seen the puzzled looks I got from the younger folks around me. (Just between you and me, I still sing those original words to myself. I love the reminder that it isn’t safe to stand anywhere else.)

Children are naïve and don’t even recognize those awkward moments they create. Old folks like me are far from naïve, but we are also far beyond being embarrassed. As a matter of fact, we see humor in those situations instead. I have mentioned before that my wife and I vowed to pray together and laugh together at least once every day. The older we got, the easier it was to laugh at ourselves.

As my mobility has worsened, people see me coming and hold the door for me. They invariably say, “Take your time.” I always smile and tell them, “I only have one speed these days and this is it.” It always brings a smile to their faces as well. In this world where people take every little thing so seriously, it is important to find something to smile or laugh about. One of the reasons I love to meet with my Christian brothers for breakfast on Saturday morning is that in addition to prayer and Bible discussions, we laugh together a lot. God has a sense of humor. Sometimes I look in the mirror in the morning at this old face and say, “If that is in your image, Lord, I feel sorry for you.” Then we share a big laugh. I know that God must shake His head and smile at all of the things His kids come up with. 

As you know if you’ve read more than one of my blog posts, the words of hymns, gospel songs and worship music often come back to bless and give me inspiration. Are those words as powerful as God’s word? Of course not, they are powerful because of God’s word. Today it is the simple words of an old hymn, “What a wonderful change in my life has been wrought since Jesus came into my heart. I have light in my soul for which long I had sought since Jesus came into my heart.” A beautiful change takes place in our life when we begin a relationship with God through Jesus. No wonder Jesus compares it to being reborn. (John 3:1-21) Paul tells us that it isn’t just a change of heart, but is a renewing of our mind. (Romans 12:2)

You can’t hide the change. It is evident in everything you say or do. If you listen to the songs “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and “Why Me Lord” back to back you would swear that they were written by two different song writers. I have heard Kris Kristofferson’s testimony and he would be the first to tell you that he was a different song writer after his encounter with Jesus Christ.

When the change took place in my life 65 years ago, most people were attracted to the new person I had become. My parents saw the change and it encouraged them to find a new church for us to attend together. My father had been baptized in his youth, but my mother and I were baptized on the same day. They always were loving parents, but their renewal of faith made our home even more loving and nurturing than ever.  

Today, many people are repelled by the thought of such a transformation. They don’t understand it. Although they envy the peace and serenity they see in you, they don’t want to be tied to a “religion” with beliefs that are at odds with the society they have learned to accept. They don’t understand that Christians are not bound by religious rules and regulations like the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. They falsely stereotype Christians as judgmental, holier than thou, hypocrites. They don’t understand that through our changed heart and renewed mind, we see the world as God sees it and we act according to His love within us. Thankfully, there is nothing more powerful than a changed life and the personal testimony of a Christian to explode those false stereotypes.  Yes, actions do speak louder than words, but sometimes we need to use words to express that it is God who has changed us by His love, mercy and grace.     

At least once a day I like to listen to hymns or gospel music on the Bill and Gloria Gather videos on You Tube. Yesterday I came across a song titled, “Getting Older”. I thought, “That’s an odd Christian song.” It turned out to be a cute little song performed by Bill Gaither and Larry Gatlin, who wrote it. The words of the chorus hit me like a steam roller. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “It seems like just day before yesterday I was a little runny nosed kid. I thought getting older would take a lot longer than it did.”

I just got a new red and black rollator/walker from VA with F-22 on the side. I joked about it sounding like a fighter jet. Then, Saturday morning when my friend picked me up to go to breakfast with the guys, I decided to take it on a maiden voyage. My driveway is on an incline down to the street. When I turned my F-22 onto the driveway it was cleared for takeoff. I had to keep squeezing hard on the brakes and then set them as I got into the car. I thought, “What a perfect picture of what it is like to turn 65. Blink and you’re 76, no matter how hard you have tried to apply the brakes.”

This week has been an exception to the rule. Everything seemed to slow down. I mentioned it to my care giver and she said, “Yes. I woke up Wednesday morning and thought it had to be Friday. I don’t know if it was the weather or just God’s way of giving us a breather before the incline speeds us up again. Either way I appreciated it so much and know it was from God.

One good thing about getting older is that I am thankful to God for each and every new day He adds to my life. I wish I had learned to appreciate and thank Him for each day of my youth. My Lord continues to walk with me every slow and painful step of the way and He will continue to be there when I enter His kingdom on two strong, sturdy legs. As the words of another song declare, “I’m going to leave some glorious morning, yes I am. I’m going to cross old chilly Jordan, yes I am. Though the water is deep and the river is wide, I’m going to stand on the other side. I’m going to live in heaven someday, yes I am.”