New Suit For Preacher

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

Snake In The Grass

The phrase “snake in the grass” was first used by the poet Virgil referring to a deceitful person. I have always had a morbid fear of snakes (ophidiophobia), on one of the worst days of my life, in the bush in Africa, I almost stepped on one of Africa's most poisonous snakes. Already that day, our camp had been threatened by a rogue elephant.

Living on the farm, I always enjoyed going barefoot, I never could understand why my father always put his shoes on, and kept them on, regardless of where he was, relaxing or working. Even when working on my aunt's home at White Lake, I noted that he never removed his shoes.

Then, his oldest sister told me the story, on the large farm (400 acres) where I was reared and where he was reared before me, a farm completely isolated from most of the civilized community, there were three large tobacco curing barns, both when he was a boy and when I was a boy. During the tobacco curing season, these barns were hanging with green tobacco which was cured, the large furnaces in the barn were stoked with wood night and day, to keep the heat at a curing temperature.

When I was young, the procedure had been changed to oil, but when he was a boy, the fires were kept going with wood. He was 15, his turn during the night to go to the barns and put in more wood, he went running down the path barefoot, stepped on a large rattlesnake, which, after biting him, slithered off into the dark night.

He returned to the house, my grandmother, knowing the certain results of such a large rattlesnake's venom, made incisions at the snake's perforation and began to suck out the blood and poison. Of course, in the first years of the 20th century, there were no telephones, few vehicles. His oldest brother, Patrick, hitched the horse to the buggy and raced to the nearest town for the doctor. The doctor had a car, one of the few in the county, and before long he was chugging into the yard. There was not much that he could do that my grandmother and grandfather had not already done, the same treatment I have used on many patients, wood ashes in hot water, compresses, trying to draw out the poison. They worked on his limbs incessantly, night and day, such a snake bite usually kills, but he survived.

The psychological fright of stepping on that large snake with bare feet was etched on his brain forever. I noticed afterwords, his entire life, working in the woods, on the land, anywhere, he always had a gun. He probably shot more snakes than any other man. One day, he and I were moving some timbers. I almost put my hand on a large rattlesnake, I'll never forget how he beat that snake with an iron rod. If only we could eliminate the snakes from our lives. Even our Blessed Lord showed scorn for serpents and scorpions, crawling, deceitful creatures (Luke 10:19).

It is the serpents and scorpions who walk upright that we must fear the most. In their greed, both for power and for money have they deceived as they slither around in their own debauchery.

When I was young, on the farm, we plowed to rid the fields of grass and weeds, we used blades to kill weeds, exposing their roots to the cleansing and killing heat of the sun. For the past 40 years, chemical sprays have been used to control weeds on the farmlands. Allelopathy is the academic study of chemicals in agriculture. Monsanto is the company which has produced the zillions of gallons of this poison used in cropland, pasture land, along highways and railroads, and even in deforestation. Nearly 50 years ago, my cousin was using his plane to spray this type poison over large agriculture areas growing soybeans, cotton, tobacco, etc. I told him then, wear a mask to keep as much of this poison as possible from your lungs, he thought he was indestructible and died of throat cancer at a very early age. We are just learning how toxic these chemicals are, not only to those who use them in farming, but to those who eat the animals that have eaten the grass and grains where such weed control was used.

When I was a young doctor, there were very few cases of cancer, diabetes very rare, today both are epidemic. At the same time, 1 out of 10,000 children were diagnosed with autism; today 1 out of 100 students have autism, ADHD, or one of the other problems from which they will never escape, and which costs them, their families, their nation, untold misery and millions in treatment and money. Are we so stupid as a people, as a nation with some scientific knowledge, that we think we can escape by poisoning our own country with toxins: fluoride and chloride in our drinking water, spraying agriculture with poisons such as Round-Up, and poisoning other countries with depleted uranium? (DU is waste from nuclear plants, and is used in defensive armor plating, weaponry for increased piercing ability, this radiation is left to poison everything: ground, water, aircraft)

There is almost no limit to the snakes in our lives, deceitfulness that has taken over our education system, our banking and housing economy, the posers in our political parties, the pretenders in our churches.

Search all literature, you will never find a greater story than the story God gave us about the Prodigal Son. The Prodigal Son, like selfish mankind, selfish nations, wanted a life of ease from the work/sweat of someone else. It was only after he lost all, it was only after this Jewish boy found himself feeding hogs that he came to his senses (Luke 15:17)...starving, looking at the “slop” he was feeding to hogs, garbage, that only stupid hogs would eat, he came to his senses. If he had been hungry enough, he would have eaten the hog slop, but he did not have a taste for slop, for garbage. In his home, in his rearing foundations, he had a taste for better.

When did we as a people, as a nation, lose our taste for the best? When did we lose our taste for good music, a good education, decency in government, controls of poisons whether in our food, or warfare toward our enemies? When did we as a people, as a nation, cease to be afraid of, cease to learn that we can walk around snakes without getting hurt? When did we cease to have a taste for the physical and spiritual ideals of God, in whose image we are made? I could not worship a God which I understand, but God understands, and as was the case with those before the flood and many times afterward, He will allow us to self-destruct.