STONEHENGE REDUX

In England there is a mammoth circle of massive stones.  It took an incredible amount of effort to bring those stones to that location and place them upright in a precise correlation to one another. No one knows their meaning or purpose (though there are numerous conjectures) and they are no longer used.

In my lifetime I have seen a number of abandoned churches, seminaries, Christian colleges, and other Christian endeavors discontinue their labors and leave abandoned buildings behind them. In Baltimore a Presbyterian Church that had a tremendous ministry for many years was faced with the need for major repairs. The congregation decided to dissolve the church. There is now a McDonald’s on that busy and strategic street corner. In my second pastorate, there had once been a chapel out in the country that served a number of families. A new preacher at the church in town didn’t want to preach twice, so the chapel closed. It is now a hay barn. A church that I was serving closed. It is now a community center.

These are just a few examples. All over this country and all over Europe there are empty church buildings in various states of disrepair. In one sense they are memorial signs marking once vibrant testimonies to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In another sense they are tombstones marking the decline of vital Christianity.

Why is Christianity weakening in its influence and failing to attract the enthusiasm of the current and next generation of young adults and youth? Politics, the struggle for material success, television, social media, and smart phones are the modern day Baals, Ashtoreths, and even Molechs. Just as the ancient Israelites deceived themselves into thinking that they could worship the LORD and Baal, modern Americans think they can love God and mammon. Our faint attempts to keep an allegiance to Christianity that costs little of our time, interferes little with our behavior, and demands no commitment to daily Bible study and prayer will only bring down the wrath of God for our ingratitude.  

CRISES AND CALAMITIES

Our nation has suffered a torrent of crises that have left us drained and confused. We have had thousands of servicemen either returned in body bags or litters or as walking wounded. Terrorists have struck by seizing airliners and crashing into the World Trade Center twin towers and into the Pentagon, by bombs, by gunfire, by poison in letters. The worst damages have come from tropical storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, and floods. A severe financial crisis has left millions homeless, or jobless, and without hope of regaining a comfortable life.

Our response has been to deal with the symptoms of each crisis. Volunteers have gone to storm wrecked communities and helped in meeting the immediate needs of those who survived, cleaning up the debris, helping to rebuild. Law enforcement officials have focused on ways to thwart terrorist plots. Government has created programs to help the wounded warriors and other programs to stimulate the economy.

No one has been heard in the media or otherwise addressing the nation to proclaim an overarching reason behind these multiplying crises. Jesus said, “But when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be troubled; for such things must happen, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be earthquakes in various places, and there will be famines and troubles. These are the beginnings of sorrows.”        (Mark 13:7-8 NKJV)

Thousands of years ago in a similar time of crises, the LORD said, “So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.”   (Ezekiel 22:30 NKJV) We need a man of God who will stand up and declare that only God is powerful enough, only the sovereign God is able to bring these powerful forces upon us. We do not need a man who will say that God is sending these troubles upon us because He is angry about abortion rights, or gay marriages, or Obamacare. We need a man who will tell us to turn our eyes and hearts to God and beg for mercy and let God tell us why He is angry with us.

“O LORD, you have our attention now. Speak to our hearts. Show each of us what we should do, what sins we should forsake. We do not ask what other people ought to be doing or what other nations should be doing. Only You are great enough to have brought these calamities upon us. Only You are great enough to lead us to their solutions. Hear our prayer. Have mercy upon us.  Amen.”

OLD TIME REMEDIES

I have been sick this week. In fact I had to cancel church today because I was too sick to preach. I had a bad head cold and then, as it went to my chest, I started having bad coughing spells. All of the cold medicines and cough syrups had this warning, "Do not use if you have high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart trouble." I have all three.
I began thinking of the old time home remedies my mother used. Having come from a German background, she believed there was a food to treat every illness.
My mother made cough syrup by scraping an onion across a grater until it had been reduced to pulp and a cloudy liquid. She added a spoonful of brown sugar and it was cough syrup. She would give us an oversize spoonful of that concoction. It would transform a tender child into a dragon. Fire would leap out of his nose and even, at times, his ears.
The child who was unfortunate enough to get worms from something he had eaten (like candy from a store), was fed a steady diet of sauerkraut juice every meal until the worms were gone.
Children were not allowed to have coffee or tea in our home. Therefore, we thought that we were partaking of forbidden libation when our mother served us "Cambridge tea" when we were sick. It wasn't until I was grown that I was told that this was made from hot water, canned milk, and sugar.
The comfort food on days you were ill was a piece of black and hard toast placed in a shallow bowl and covered with hot milk. The blackened toast turned the hot milk the color of gravy. If you were a boy, it was sprinkled with salt. If you were a girl, it was sprinkled with sugar.
My mother wasn't a Jewish mother so she hadn't heard of the curative powers of chicken noodle soup. I wish she had!

"ALL THINGS WORK TOGETHER FOR GOOD"

And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28 NKJV)

    This Bible verse has been misunderstood and misapplied by many sincere believers. When things have not worked out good for them, they have wondered if they were to blame for not loving God enough, or it has become their first step in doubting the Bible altogether. Sometimes things do work out for our good, and that seems to vindicate the first part of this verse. We have to acknowledge that this verse has three important caveats.
     The first one is that only God knows fully and perfectly what is good. A person may want a certain job, a certain man or woman as spouse, a house, a car, recognition. These are things that are good in our eyes. God sees all things clearly; He knows the future; He can see into the heart as we cannot. He may see that what we want would be good for us and move everything in place so we can get it. He may see that what we want will not be good for us, and He will block the way.
    The second warning is that what we want may take away some of our love for God. If it can make us happy, satisfied, secure without daily depending upon God, it is understandable that God will not let us have anything that will jeopardize our love for Him.
     Third, in the purposes of God, you may not be the one God has called to fill that job, to have that person as spouse, to own that car or house, or to be given recognition. He may have chosen someone else for those things. If He has, they would not ultimately be your good things. If God has chosen someone else for those good things, He has something else for your good.
      What God has for your good may not appear to be good in human vision. God’s good for you may be poverty, pain, and constant disappointments. If you will serve God, as a living sacrifice, thanking Him always for what He has chosen for you, you will be earning what is the best – “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into your reward.”   

CHILDREN WILL PLAY

My grandfather, Wye Plummer Pritt, was born in 1884. He grew up in a two-story log house that his father, John Hadden Pritt, built with the help of neighbors. For two years his father had been preparing logs. One day he and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Shiflett Pritt and their first three children, Lottie Lee, Elam Carper, and Guy McClung, arrived at the site. All their possessions plus the children were in a horse drawn wagon. Some chickens were in a crate, and a cow followed placidly behind the wagon. In one day my great-grandfather and his neighbors built a two-story log house. That night my great-grandfather, his wife, and the three children slept in their new home.

The second story was an unfinished attic with a partition in the center. The girls slept on one side and the boys slept on the other side. A hole in the floor on each side and two ladders provided both access and heat to the attic. In the winter, snow would come through chinks in the logs. Fifty years later, my grandfather remembered how the snow would tickle his nose when he was in bed.

Washing clothes was done in big kettles hanging over a wood fire. The agitator for their “washing machine” was the handle of a hoe, rake, or shovel. It was also used to transfer clothes from the pot of boiling soapy water to the pot of rinse water. The clothes were wrung out by hand.  

Altogether there were eight children. My grandfather was sixth. When he was born, his two older brothers, Carper and Guy, were twelve and ten years old. When he was seven years old, the youngest brother, Willard Jesse, was born. The four sisters were Lottie Lee, Amy Pearl, Tippie Jane, and Mabel Hannah. There was always a lot of work to be done. The children worked most of the day. There were sewing, washing, cooking, working in the farm fields, tending to the animals, and splitting firewood to be done.

Children will play. In their play they try to copy what they see adults doing. The girls made dolls from a variety of materials. There were corn husk dolls, hollyhock dancing girls, and dolls sewn from scraps of flour sacks which had been used to make skirts and blouses. They made necklaces, coronets, and bracelets from wildflowers.

The boys mowed the lawn using a scythe. This left piles of cut grass on the ground. The boys would pretend that they were a horse-drawn hay rake. Using their fingers spread like a rake, they went across the lawn in rows. They pushed sticks into the ground and made boy-sized hay stacks. Once, the oldest brother, Carper, hid soft cow pies under piles of grass. When the other brothers raked the grass, they got a handful of cow excrement. They remembered that, told that story, and laughed about it every time they came together visiting with their families or attending family reunions.

One day a crew of men stopped at the creek that ran near to the house. The men had a bar of soap (a valuable item at that time). They took off their shoes, socks, and shirts, and unbuttoned their long underwear so that they were bare to the waist. Then they all washed in the creek. When they washed their faces, they snorted loudly like horses. Washing in the creek became the favorite game of the brothers. My grandfather found a very smooth rock, shaped like a bar of soap. They never tired of their game of washing up.

Each time, when they were finished with that game, they carefully hid the rock. After they were grown men, every time they visited the “home place” they would look for that special rock, hold it like a relic, then carefully put it back in its secret hiding place. When they were all grown, had families of their own, their parents had died, and the place had passed into new owners, the special rock could not be found. It was like a death in the family. Whenever two or more of the brothers were together, one sure topic of conversation was, “Wonder what happened to our rock?”

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

Early this year I bought a new car. After I bought it, I began to worry about the payments. I can make the payments with my pensions, but if I die, my wife will have to survive on her Social Security and one-half of just one of my pensions. I determined to pay off the car as soon as possible. A couple months after I bought the car, I sold my shares in a mutual fund that never had shown much growth. That was $1000 and I applied it to the car loan.
A month later, I received my State and Federal income tax refunds. I closed a bank account. Altogether, these amounted to $5000. I sent a check to the bank's auto loan department along with the stub they had provided for principal only payments. The stub had the account number for my auto loan, and I wrote the account number on my check. On April 9 the check was deducted on my checking account online. I waited and waited for it to show up on my auto loan account online.
When the $5000 had not appeared in my loan account by April 18, I called the bank's customer service. They told me (what I already knew) that my account did not show a payment of $5000. The woman told me politely that they could not take my word for it, that I would have to send them proof. She gave me a P O Box and a mail code for where to send the bank's documentation. I mailed the bank's document which showed both sides of the check and gave some routing information.
I have subsequently called the bank twice and sent them an email. The sum of what they tell me is that they are researching the matter. They told me to call back tomorrow if I want to speak to a manager because none of them were available today. 
When my grandfather was a young man, everyone he knew buried their money someplace on their property, because they didn't trust the banks. Wonder why?

RAIN by Troy Lynn Pritt

Police Sergeant Paul Carbon went outside for the paper.

“It looks like rain.”

Rain clouds were stalled over the roof of his life these past months. Several months ago his wife of twenty-eight years had died. Since then, the washer and dishwasher both had quit working. The roof was leaking. He was learning to cook, but half the meals he fixed weren’t fit for dog food. He depended on the dry cleaners to wash or clean and press his uniforms. That didn’t leave much money to eat in restaurants. He poured dry cereal into a bowl, then discovered that there wasn’t any milk in the refrigerator.

Just then the phone rang. It was Marge, the dispatcher.

“Paul, I know that you aren’t scheduled to come on duty for more than half an hour, but we have the report of an auto collision at the intersection of Maplewood and Trace. The other squad cars are either out on call or not answering. Would you cover it? I’ve already called the ambulance and it is on its way.”

Maplewood and Trace was just six blocks away. He left the bowl of cereal untouched, put on his duty belt with pistol and baton, and grabbed his uniform coat. As he stepped outside, the rain was beginning..

“Great! This old police cruiser leaks water through the side window and somehow it comes in onto my leg and foot.”

When he arrived at the accident scene, he saw that it was bad. One car had the hit the other car broadside and had “T-boned” it. The paramedic came up to him.

“The driver in that car is dead. I was waiting for you, in case you need to take pictures. Then we’ll use cutting tools to pry the door open so we can remove the body. The other driver is over there in that store entrance to get out of the rain.”

“Thank you, Steve.”

SGT Carbon went to the patrol car for the camera and tape measure. After taking a half dozen photos from different perspectives, he measured the distance from the stop sign to the point of impact. Then, he walked over to where the other driver was standing.

“Now that you are finally here, I’ll give you my name, address, and telephone number. Then I need to find a telephone and call my wife. She can pick me up and take me home.”

After taking the driver’s name, address, and phone number, SGT Carbon said,

“Tell me what happened.”

“I was just driving to work. I stopped at that stop sign, looked both ways, and started off. That green car just came out of nowhere. I couldn’t stop!”

“There are no marks indicating you tried to stop. Your car could not have reached the speed needed to cause that much damage to the other car if you had stopped.”

“I tell you I STOPPED!”

“A judge will decide that. Let’s take a walk through the rain to my patrol car. I’m placing you under arrest for vehicular manslaughter.”