The Christmas season is over except for the exchanging of unwanted gifts, spending of gift money, gift certificates, and taking advantage of sales. Over and over during the Christmas holidays, we heard the refrain, “sales will be down because of the unprecedented recession, the greatest since the great depression.”
This recent recession in no way compares to the great depression, I was there, I lived through it. My folks did not stop talking about it until their dying day. It is like religion, you know the real from the false. When your Christianity is real, you cannot hide it, one can tell if you are His workmanship (Ephesians 2:10), you are anxious to share it with others.
My father came from two of North Carolina's first families: the Lucas family, prominent in Eastern North Carolina, and the Morris family who had founded Morristown, New Jersey, but all were just hardworking, landed people. My father, a dirt farmer, farmed during the week, cut hair in a barbershop on weekends and on holidays, built houses during the winter, non-crop months. He was not ashamed to tell anyone about his Christ, even a politician. he cut the hair of one state senator, and had presented the gospel to him. I once said, “Daddy you have to be careful who you talk with, some get offended.” Significant, one of the pastors who helped preach my father's funeral had pastored the church through the great depression. One of the nicer memorial wreaths had a card from the senator which read, “in memory of the only man who was ever concerned about my soul.”
I was driven to this pastor's funeral, dying at 95 after pastoring for 75 years. He had told me that my great grandfather took him and his trunk on his buggy to the train station, leaving for college, a college which today would not be that many miles by car, but at that time a good distance by train.
It is significant that the young preacher, following college, was the pastor of this family church. It was the depths of the great depression, 1930-1940. His suit was so patched that the women of the church raised money for a new suit from their sale of chickens and eggs. I could not help but think about that, and many other things at his funeral, as well as my own father's funeral, when he talked about the number of hair cuts for ten cents each.
I was just a child, but I remember this pastor on his knees in the pulpit, I remember the old men of the church and the community on their knees around the pulpit. Times were desperate, I can still see relatives, children who today are prospering, wealthy citizens arriving at the church on a wagon pulled by a mule, wrapped in quilts to keep out the cold.
I have talked and written about these things many times, my highfalutin, stuck up relatives tell me they do not want to hear about it, they are from outstanding ancestry, educated in great colleges, members of country clubs. They do not want the memory of such long-ago poverty which so affected their families and community. Such times did not defeat anyone, it only made them stronger, better. Fire strengthens and purifies the metal. June 24 was the day in Ireland that Christians would run through the fire, proving that they were chosen of God. In New Guinea, I have seen men walk through the fire. Every thing that may abide the fire, ye shall make it go through the fire, and it shall be clean. (Numbers 31:23)
We all need to watch the potter, what he can do with fire, he never takes his eyes of the wheel. God, the supreme potter, never takes his eyes off the earth, those who are His, who He is fashioning to do His work.
How well I remember the hand cranked corn sheller, the buckets of grains of corn which my mother cooked in an outside iron pot, making hominy grits for the hungry people of the community. I remember the sweet potato hills, where potatoes were stored for the hungry of the community. I remember the “rabbit boxes”. Hungry people were anxious to eat anything edible. The butter churn, the buttermilk, the dried beans planted along every fence.
Some books have published pictures of eastern North Carolina towns, just carts pulled by mules, or one-horse wagons, my grandparents were better off, they had horses and surreys (a two-seated horse-drawn buggy). This was a depression, not a today's recession when perhaps a family may be limited to one color television.
Most of the world's poverty is below the 30th parallel. 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day, most on less than $1. If you live in a house, have an automobile, you live better than 95% of the world's population. God wanted me to see the world, to see conditions in the world, every continent, I traveled through 157 countries. The poorest countries are those with the Islamic religion (47). Those that live in communist countries, countries without any type of religion, if fortunate, have one pair of shoes and perhaps a change of clothing.
The moral character of any country can be determined by the treatment of it's citizens: abortion of it's youngest, euthanasia of it's oldest. A country as blessed as America will not escape the abortion holocaust, nor the treatment of old people in nursing homes. God knows what is happening in His universe. It is much too expensive to keep watch of the entire sky, but meteorites are slipping through, we usually just see those at night because of the light they cause. The financial status of our nation, the world, the individual, makes little difference when we consider our eternal destiny
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