Scuttlebutt

#1761

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Henry Thomas Buckle

            Apparently, no one can be shocked anymore by anything. Our senses are bombarded everyday by things that the science fiction writer of my youth, could never have dreamed. From the talking head newscaster, politician, pastor, everyone talks "slivers" of solution... just chasing one thing until another comes up.

            This writer is always listening, everyone's talking... no secrets anymore. I am told that every living/breathing person, from the school child to the grandmother, either has a telephone in front of their face or they are looking down talking on their phone with their fingers (texting.) I have personally let several female employees go because they had their eyes and mind focused on a telephone rather than the dictation I was giving them for the computer. I went through eight years of university training, the most difficult courses of study in the world, working jobs at night so I could go to classes during the day. Never once during those eight years did I ever have a telephone call from home. I don't believe many students did at that time in our countries history. We knew the real joy of the mail man, "letters from home." During all my years of military service, there were very few telephone calls. The phone was for emergency-business, not visiting. One of my friends told me that his daughter, age 8, wanted a cell phone. I said, "You tell her that I was reared in a time where there was only one telephone for many miles." My cousin had a telephone at his country store. Everyone for miles used that telephone to call the doctor, the funeral home or to get an emergency message from somewhere.

            Scuttlebutt, where the happy hour at the pool haul, the golf links at the country club, women's mission circle at your church, was, is and will always be just scuttlebutt... talking-visiting. Human beings are the same, the world over, very social animals. This writer has traveled every continent, whether the desolate areas of India, crowded streets in Egypt, people talking-gesturing and body language. I was never one to waste my valuable time in idle conversation. I was always, perhaps, too brutally sharp on the phone. Professional people do not have time for the leisure of idle conversation. I can tell very quickly, the future of any professional man by his attitude on the telephone... friendly, fair, fast. I am told that every billionaire gets there because he is fast with a decision.

            There is two things that bother me the most about people engaged in idle conversation. If a person is sick enough to be in a hospital, the patient does not need visitors. People coming in, spreading their germs, talking and bothering a tired patient with unnecessary narrative.

            The other, a place of worship. The church house, the inter court is not a place for conversation. The worst, the Baptist. Their visiting-conversations should take place in the outer-court, the churchyard. I still like the denominations that have kneeling benches. You come into the sanctuary and get immediately and completely in the mode of worship. I often listen to the local Baptist church on the morning radio. Often, there is a interlude between the radio and the church house. The noise from the sanctuary is anything but worship. Talking, laughing, one is a place of worship... to honor god.  All attention to Christ, the cross. So many churches no longer have a cross and the Christian service is no different than that of a civic club, the same noise of a sports arena.

            I was on the staff of the Army hospital, fort McClellan, Alabama. A long desire of my life has been to worship at the Baptist tabernacle, peach tree St. Atlanta, Georgia. I drove the long distance one weekend to attend the service. The great tabernacle was everything I expected, the great choir singing without any hymn books. The great organ, grand piano, great preacher, the thing that ruined in all... before and after, the noise of the people come to worship. I do not know how or why this silly matter of running around shaking everyone's hands during the worship service. We are in the church to honor Christ, not to compliment one another.

           

            The history of the world started with conversation. From nothingness to something-ness, God spoke and the world was formed. God spoke and man was formed and the other animals, all life with its ability to participate.

            In other articles, I have described much of my world travel, many around the world trips... every continent... both the north and south pole. I want to bring two places to your attention, The Great Barrier Reef, near Australia. a 1300 mile coral reef made up of bodies of articulating animals. We are told that all around this great miracle of nature, marine animal life, can be heard to the educated ear. Like the great humpback whales, all marine life has a language and of course this is true with bird life near the great reef, rain island (known for its birds, their noises.) I was in the Indian ocean, bird island, another sanctuary. The place was alive with their communication skills. Life would be tragic indeed if not for the SHARING of tone sounds (music) whether in the great opera halls or in cheap radio. It is the universal language of mankind. The letters may be different on the type writer, in different countries, but the notes are always the same anywhere on a musical instrument.

            Talk radio has revolutionized the world of communication during the past 20 years. It is now an established fact that more people enjoy the different sounds-cadences of the human voice of people talking, than ever enjoyed music. The success of a talk show, radio-TV-platform, is completely dependent on a variety of speakers. Words mean something, words have a way of changing the mind, changing the world. 

Growing and Dying

The difference in a tree and a post is the fact that the tree is growing. In most cases, the post is dead and dying. In some places in Central America, where the topsoil is still full of nutrients I saw posts that had been put in the ground sprouting limbs, living again.

My Great Grandfather, for whom I was named, on his plantation, had grafted so many fruit trees which produced unusual and wonderful products. Grafting is a system whereby you fuse the plant tissues of two trees, used by horticultural to produce new lines of product. For instance, on the farm, we had a pear apple which was delicious beyond words to describe simply because this man had the intelligence and enlightenment to experiment with such plants and trees. From Romans 1 to Philemon, we find everything we need to know about living the Christian life. In Romans 11:13-26 the Apostle Paul used as an analogy how Gentiles can become one with spiritual Israel. Paul also explains why many of physical Israel cannot see, because "that blindness in part has happened to Israel." It's why many cannot understand, yet (those of Israel who could, but rejected the Truth, are another matter).

As recent as todays newspaper the difference in Zionism and Judaism, most church goers know nothing about this. There are about 60,000,000 Jews in the world. A very large number are Atheist, they do not believe in God at all. In America, many group together just as a cultural not a religious experience. In the America Judeo Christian traditions (the foundation of Christianity is Judaism) evangelicals have become the nation of Israels greatest support. From 1948 when the British and the Palestinians were driven out of the ancient Holy lands Israel and America have become united in the preservation in the nation Israel...a Zion state... to the extent that America sends 10,000,000 dollars a day to Israel...at the very time that Native Americans (Indians) suffer from lack of electricity and military veterans...many of whom are disabled...get the same disability pension as a college ROTC student grant.

The Christian church, Gentiles, know little of the growth of Christianity from Christ until the present. I often wondered, as “the world” walked by or drove by a Christian church would the unsaved think, “I wonder what goes on there”? Even today, as when I was a child, you see grown men standing outside the Christian church smoking cigarettes talking about yesterdays' ball game telling jokes about women young or old entering the edifice and I thought, what possible relationship do these 45 minute church goers have to do with the center of worship on the inside of the building? (Many so called worshipers enter the service ten minutes late and then get up and leave five minutes before the service is over. The service only lasts one hour. All church activities for the week center on this one hour and yet these playing church cannot last one hour a week) Inside the building, it was more or less a matter of routine or habit. People singing about a savior to whom they had no relationship at all...actually putting money into a collection plate for which they could care less about why the money was given or where the money is going. Just being dragged in by habit “it is the politically correct and expected thing for decent people to do on a Sunday morning” never having been touched by thoughts of sins ruin and Christs' redemption, never having experienced the death barrel and resurrection of Christ in the greatest experience of Christian faith, Baptism by immersion.

Often, this totally blind Christian laying in bed at night listening to the blessed hymns of the faith on radio and then outside on the street, hearing the rap music from an over modulated radio which would fit in better at an insane asylum, I know the difference in “growing and dying”.

In the Broadway play Noises Off, a play within a play, we learn the values of noise. Sounds should have meaning. There is nothing as beautiful as quietness. My grandmother, living five miles from the nearest town where a train went through could predict the weather very accurately from the sound of the train.

In the military, when homesick, I could relay my mind back to the country home where we slept at night with the windows open and I could hear the symphony of the frogs in the creek of the cow pasture near the house. I could even hear the cows munching on the green grass.

Once, at the Baptist Tabernacle in Atlanta, I had gone there for a worship service from a nearby military post, there was so much noise in the sanctuary that all reality of worship escaped. I later wrote the pastor and asked the question, “do the people of your church know anything at all about the sacredness of quietness in a sanctuary of worship?” I have certainly been in secular clubs much quieter. The average church congregation, the average pastor, never realizes that the average church member knows nothing at all about the history of Christianity or behavior in the church...the magnificence of worship, the growth of discipleship. I was in a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka where Buddhas' tooth is displayed, there was much noise, bands playing, a side show. With all of the problems of Catholicism, they have some things right, the attitude of worship, the crucifix which reminds us of our reason for worship, the catechism...in which Catholics learn something of their belief...and above all the sanctity of life through their anti-abortion stance. I could get excited about the new Senator from Massachusetts if he were PRO-LIFE not pro-abortion. Bad enough to have fat, ugly Teddy Kennedy as a pro-abortion Catholic for 47 years. Bad enough, to have 54% of Catholics vote for the most pro-abortion president in history. Bad enough, to have solid Democrat North Carolina support a state and national political party promoting murder. “God will not be mocked” (Galatians 6:7). I want you Democrat Baptists and Catholics to know that you are not growing but are dying because God, and God alone, still determines everything. Faith, is a two sided coin. A coin is worth nothing unless it has both sides. Faith, is action, based on belief sustained by confidence. One side of the coin is action,the other side is belief.

The most beautiful sound in the world is the sound of ocean waves. I can hear the ocean waves from my beach house, from the beginning of time, until the end of time, never growing, never dying, always the same...the sound of eternity...the sound of forever.