Palladium Coins

Palladium Coins

            Would anyone who knows me well say I sought the Lord with all my heart? AND, as the writer C.S Lewis has said, "There is nothing as perplexing as asking a question that has not been thought through." This writer recently revised his obituary. It had been 20 years and matters do change. I had decided many years ago that this totally blind, 100% disabled, service connected medical officer veteran of the Korean conflict would not have any final services of any type. Such has been my total disappointment with the attitude of government, church, family, toward my life-service, to God, family, country. Every time, family members, friends, acquaintances, when I saw a minister put some dirt on a casket before it went into the ground, I was reminded of Bunyan's pilgrim's progress, the long trip of its characters uphill to the celestial city. This writer has become so cynical toward political, physical and spiritual activity in one's life that I certainly do not want government spending one penny on my burial, do not want others who have pretended to be interested in my struggle to have the satisfaction of knowing about anything except an obituary in the paper. You see, I have found over the years most people I know do not realize that they are on death row....have never learned that they are in battle against the forces of darkness in the world (Eph 6), have never realized that the only difference in their demise and that of the criminal, the death row inmate is given chemicals that kill instantly, where as, particularly in America, our deaths are chemical but slow and expensive.

            We live in a world of pretending: POLITCIANS pretending to be interested in our lives, PREACHERS pretending to be interested in our living and dying. Today's evangelical churches, those in pulpits and pews, never converted, pretending.

            God wanted this writer to travel the world, challenged me to be successful in business...the courage of a blind man. You would have thought and I certainly thought for a long time, that colleges (especially a Christian college where I had given so much money for awards and scholarships), high schools, churches, would so want to present a disabled person of success, a source of encouragement to anyone who, too,  might find themselves disabled, a source of encouragement-challenge-courage for the disabled. After all, disability can happen to anyone and the disabled, more than anyone else, need to know that there are those who have met the challenge. You can read about Helen Keller, but there is nothing like seeing and hearing Helen Keller. I heard her, blind-deaf (a women birth to death, never seen or heard anything) speak before she died in 1968.  A blind woman who I did not know helped me more than any family member has even thought of helping me while this blind veteran was in a hospital.

            I get so tired of the constant masquerade party, putting a veneer of decency-acceptability on everything. Now, a nation mired in debt, debts that can never be repaid, going through the silliness of proclaiming a palladium coin worth $1 trillion dollars.

            The world's greatest need is to have faith in something. Faith in the American democratic republic has been almost erased. The Christian's faith in God should see him through every trial. Even an unbeliever knows the difference in the absolutes of decency and indecency. Even the unbeliever knows the foolishness-pretention of Godless evolution. (Chances of a tornado going through a large junkyard and producing a remarkable airplane, chances of an explosion in a printing house turning out a dictionary.) Even the world's greatest atheist-agnostic would admit that the greatest expression of love, God's atonement for the sin of mankind allowing his only son who had lived a perfect life, to suffer the death he suffered for the sin of the entire world, past, present, future. When will we get down to life's basics instead of this pretending? One of my friends, a successful mortician, described to me how he would buy all the odd sized men's clothing from a factory or department store...extra long shirts, large and small collars, etc., new clothing that he could buy for almost nothing. He said, "When we dress the body, we cut the clothing all to pieces anyway, just to make it look right in the casket. Just the cuffs of the shirt sleeves are seemed. The collar can be adjusted to any size, the shirt coat, etc, always cut down the back. You do not dress a dead man as you would a live man. We can adjust the clothing as we see fit. Of course the family pays well for cheap clothing and our services."

            There is 3 1/2 billion items of information available in any one person's DNA. God's chief creation, man, and I believe mankind was created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26) to have a personhood, reliable-dependable, a creature of integrity. Don't we get tired of the pretending, counterfeit money (palladium coin), hypocrites at the church house, school house, court house, your house? Life for most of us is an uphill struggle, one way or another. It would be so wonderful, before my demise, to see truth somewhere. At least in a personal relationship with Jesus, HE IS TRUTH (John 14:6, John 17:17).