Shade Trees

Psalm 63:3 King James Version (KJV)

3 Because thy loving kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.

Trials no less than comforts--are the tokens of God's love. All is regulated by His infinite wisdom. You will find cause to praise Him even for the severe afflictions.

Cisterns must be broken--but the fountain of living waters is always full and always flowing!

Gourds must wither--but the tree of life has shade and fruit sufficient for us all, and at all times!

Creatures must die--but the Lord lives!

Creatures are like candles; while they burn--they waste away; and when they are extinguished, those who depend upon them are covered with darkness. But the Lord is a Sun to His people, and His bright beams of consolation can well supply the lack of the candlelight of creature comforts!

"I know, O LORD, that in faithfulness You have afflicted me. May Your unfailing love be my comfort." Psalm 119:75-76

At a meeting of Christian friends recently, I asked the question, "In my writings, do you object that I mix current events into God's word and God's message?" I do not want the cross of our Blessed Lord to become a BULLETIN BOARD on which we pin all our frustrations, our wants, needs and fears. The poet has written, "More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." God knows all about my disability, the frustrations I go through in just living, much less getting things done. He knows what I go through with repairs on buildings, the daily challenges of running a business. I do not believe God objects to my asking him to assist me in keeping all those A/C units running in rental properties, finding people to work on buildings. I ask him, with humility, to keep water pipes from bursting, electrical wiring from wearing out. When you are blind, you must depend on other's eyesight to advise you about everything. I have found, over the years, that most of my employees do not inform me about anything because they know I might tell them to "take care of it". Everyone just wants to go through the motions in order to get a paycheck. With everything in life, not just my frustrations, every person who is productive, those on whom the employer must depend (no person can run a business by himself) must realize that cheating the one who pays you, in any way possible, leads to your spending a life walking around with a bag with holes in it, Haggai 1:6 "You have sown much, but harvest little; you eat, but there is not enough to be satisfied; you drink, but there is not enough to become drunk; you put on clothing, but no one is warm enough; and he who earns, earns wages to put into a purse with holes." God is a perfect accountant. Living a life of integrity is not complicated, just tough, regardless of your position on the ladder. You can be sure that you will not go very far up the ladder, even working for someone else, when you have no investment-risk involved you lose sight of all honesty. If sighted, you see yourself in the middle.

I come from a time before air conditioning, even electric fans. We so prized shade trees that around our old country home where both me and my father were raised, were eight giant oak trees. They had been planted by my great grandfather. These great trees gave shade during the hot summer months. I still picture the shade trees in the pasture, where the cows and mules found shade from the hot sun. Under shade trees, one of the rewards of relief from hard work that instilled in many of us, life's character.

In my lifetime (84), people just want comfort, can no longer appreciate the escape from hardships and trials. We always knew that working in the hot sun would result in rest under the shade trees. In a day, I am told, where people ride around in air conditioned cars with an ice drink in one hand and a cell phone in the other, music blasting from a radio, government handouts and subsidies, no shame or concerns about anything, WHO NEEDS GOD?

My parents were children during the Great 1918 Flu Epidemic when one hundred million people died around the world. God warned us to beware of the little foxes. Song of Solomon 2:15 King James Version (KJV): "15 Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes." We have so many little foxes called viruses, that are spoiling everything. There are no cures for viruses. I understand China is concocting new, better armed viruses for biological warfare. You see, in biological warfare, just life is destroyed, the enemy keeps all the wealth of buildings and THINGS. I still remember my grandmother telling me about the death of Aunt Caddy, my great Aunt for whom my own mother was named. Aunt Caddy was the teacher at the two room school, which all the children in the community attended. When she got the 1918 Flu, my grandmother said Aunt Caddy heard them building her coffin in the barn because everyone knew when they got that flu that they would soon die. Dr. Hayes who was brave enough to venture into the community, died from the flu. With all of our knowledge and comfort, let us not forget the shade tree of salvation, redemption which God has provided for his own.

Burnout

Delores was one of the most remarkable women of any skin color that I have ever known. Delores was black, 70 years old, when I met her.

Back in another life, I would leave my practice and lecture to the tenth grade biology students at the local high school once or twice each year. They were a real challenge. My friend Geraldine, the biology teacher who asked me to speak to her classes each year, had a very good friend, Delores Mitchell. Delores had been teaching third grade for 50 years. Delores invited Geraldine and myself to her house for a Sunday afternoon lunch. This is when I heard my first description of “burnout”.

Delores still lived in the same house in which she had been born and reared, a three-bedroom bungalow-type structure. Her house had a front porch, living room, dining room, kitchen, the same type of house you will find all across the south. An only child, Delores was extremely bright. She graduated from high school at 16, went immediately to Shaw University and graduated at age 19. She entered a graduate program, started teaching during the school year, earning two master degrees during the summer months. She had taught in the same room, at the local consolidated school, for 50 years.

Over the years, she had lost both parents. It was not necessary for her to work, since they had left her the home and much farmland and rental houses. Instead, she worked continuously. Her mother had been known far and wide for cooking cakes which she sold in the local town. So, Delores continued this practice of her mother's: getting up every morning at 4 o'clock, cooking, preparing for the day until it was time for her to drive to the schoolhouse. One family who had worked for her father still lived on her farm, helping her with gardening, freezing, chickens, and her many rental properties. She said, “I handle everything. It does not take much for me to live, so I have established several philanthropies in the school and in the church.”

In addition, Delores was the organist/pianist at her church, and she had taught piano for many years. She was so interested in any young girl with talent learning to play the piano. Delores was often called upon to play at weddings and funerals--perhaps this constant movement had kept her in good health. She was well known as an accomplished musician, but she was better known as one of the world's best school teachers. Every parent wanted their child in her class, no student in her third grade class had ever failed.

These were her words which I will never forget, “I have done everything right: studied, worked, paid taxes, never been involved with any man. Now, nearing the end of my life, I am totally burned out. Other than going to a teachers' meeting, seminar, or post-graduate course of some type, I have never enjoyed a vacation, never spent many nights away from my home.” Because I met such individuals as Delores, and many others as you will find on previous commentaries, I am writing this, #1000, in which I am describing my own burn out after a long life.

The thing that has always amazed me most is that some individuals, so anxious to fulfill the goals set for them by God, have been so productive, while others are so incredibly lazy. I suppose I was destined for burn out...I was the first of four children, I had incredible parents, hard working, God-fearing, productive citizens, ancestry from North Carolina's first colonial families.

My parents put me to work doing chores as soon as I was able to understand such. My ancestors, early settlers, had founded Morristown, New Jersey, the poor side of the family had moved down to North Carolina. They were just land-poor, hard working dirt farmers. I worked my way through 8 years of university education, was commissioned as a medical officer in the Army, returned 100% disabled. Before total blindness, I practiced for a while. I was a community activist, busy as a Christian lay-leader, speaker, and writer. I became an active investor early in life (real estate, securities, etc.). I made every minute of every day count. When I could no longer practice, I was involved in many other business interests as an entrepreneur. During these years I traveled the world, and to this very day have personally handled all my business, philanthropic, and other affairs. I have thoroughly tested the resourcefulness of God...I have failed God many times, but God has never failed me.

Our government is a big Ponzi scheme, 59% of our citizens depend on a subsidy or entitlement from the government. I am glad to remember those who did not and do not believe in a “free lunch”. The “free lunch” mentality has taken over...social security, socialized healthcare, college grants, etc. During the Great Depression, and FDR's flight toward communism (crop controls, acreage allotments), my grandfather was the last farmer in the county to sign the papers giving the agriculture stabilization corporation legality over his land. He said, “the time will come when the farmer will have no freedom at all. The time will come when most of the people in the world will be hungry.” He was 100% right, for a bowl of pottage, sold out, the farms left are under government control.

Watching my country in its infancy, hard working people everywhere, not depending on government for anything. There were even bivocational pastors...our small churches could not afford a full-time pastor. From England, the old fashioned pounding of the preacher, members loading the preacher's buggy or car with farm products. The preacher had another job in order to make a living. The laymen in their church were also bivocational, assuming pastoral duties in the community...my first experience with servitude.

15 of the 35 parables in the Bible show servitude. The first doctors were slaves, the disciple Luke, short for Lucian, was a slave. Jesus taught servitude to everyone, teachers in our early country schools, including the one I attended, would practice servitude in the community, (helping with the sick, disabled, etc.). It is easy to have burnout in a home when someone is ill for a long period of time. So bivocational teachers, bivocational laypeople, assisted these families in distress, keeping them from burnout.

Government admits to a $14 trillion debt, but all economists claim the debt is nearer $75 trillion. This conservative, consecrated Christian veteran is tired, burned out, fighting the fight of responsibility when most of the people around him are having a good time...politically correct, living the life of ease, perversion, decadence. If you could squeeze $50,000 out of every man, woman and child in America, you could pay 20% of the national debt. Warfare and revolts leading to higher oil prices, higher oil prices leading to more inflation, higher food prices leading to revolution in the poorer countries...leading to even higher oil prices, leading to even more inflation. The less than 50% of us who pay all taxes are burned out by the stress.

The two things that cause all sickness are food and stress. It is hard to argue with a holy life; the resourceful, responsible, holy life is always associated with Godliness and beauty. The decadent, ugliness of things and people always associated with Satan. Truth is now on the scaffold, evil on the throne. Men will die for truth, but not for a lie. I have become burned out realizing that the world, the flesh, the devil is grabbing at fraud, religion and things around the world, while Christians cling to the promises of the old, rugged cross.

So I'll cherish the old rugged cross,

till my trophies at last I lay down.

Old Rugged Cross (Hymn)

Classical Conditioning

#674

Russian scientist, physiologist, physician Ivan Pavlov, famous for his research with dogs, classical conditioning in which he proved that if you ring a bell at a time of feeding dogs, that even when you don't feed the dog, and yet ring the bell, the dog will salivate. One thing never disclosed in the Pavlov experiments; after such conditioning, in the case of severe panic such as a fire or earthquake, the conditioning will be lost.

One of my friends, like many of us, climbing life's ladder as rapidly as possible, hoping the ladder is propped on the right house, always carried home a briefcase full of work. One night his young son asked him why he always brought home so much work from his office. He said, “I have to work very hard and fast in order to provide all the things I want to provide for my family”. His son asked him why his teacher had not put him in a slow class. One night, at his desk in the living room working late hours, having earlier told his wife he felt that he was on the road to their financial security, she asked him if he was ready to go to bed. He said, “you go ahead, I'm going to finish up this work. I feel I am well on the way and it will not always be like this”. During the night she awakened and found that he was not in the bed. She went in the living room, and there he was, still at the desk, his head on the desk. She thought, “he has gone to sleep still at work”. She went over and touched him to awaken him, but he was permanently at sleep.

To the world that does not understand faith, Christianity is nutty. To those in the wold who do not want to excel and succeed, hard work is nutty.

As a student, working in the medical school at UNC-CH, I noticed the same professors were always working in their offices, in the library, in the research labs, late at night. They worked the entire day and most of the night … Their entire philosophy of life was to succeed through research papers, peer reviewed articles in national journals, their name forever written in the pages of academic and medical history.

I remember one, he always wore a bow-tie. One night he lamented to me, “my work is more important than anything else in life now that I have lost my wife and children”. His secretary told me that his wife and children had gone back West to her parents because his work was more important than they. He wanted to heal the entire world but could not recognize the cancer in his own life which was eating away at his own family.

So it is with most of us … At least those of us who are “wired” to succeed. The important thing is to keep everything in perspective. Always, without exception, from my study of the biogrophies of productive people, it is always those “alpha” personalities who have made the discoveries, who have the resilience, the mental drive to keep working in spite of the world, the flesh, the devil. Pitiful the world if all men were just bums, laid back, just taking anything that comes along.

I have known many women, married to men who had the looks, the personality (he is so cute), the popularity to sweep them off their feet and yet after they had lived with him for a while and found his traits of incompetence, knew they were married to a “dud”. The best place for these duds is politics or employment with a company that cuts corners … Either places where integrity and honesty is not an involvement.

In and out of my office, my life, have been big pharmacy representatives … where a 2000% markup is not unusual. You can always tell them, any office, any restaurant … Boisterous, hilarity, never serious about anything, true salesmanship. Lying is as natural as breathing. Most could care less that the poor people going into the doctors office, or the drug store are having to do without food to buy these exorbitantly priced pharmaceuticals. It is like the American entrepreneur retailer of designer clothing. Selling a shirt for $150 which costs just a few pennies from China, China, where most exports are manufactured by slave labor. I know, I have been there three times since the revolution. Huge buildings … Laborers working constantly to turn out export junk.

I know that people will not believe this, you only believe things that you have seen, and it is impossible to even describe such decadence but I have seen Asians weaving the expensive designer clothing you wear and for which you paid a small fortune on machines which were powered by their own legs pumping a mechanism constantly. Much of the sewing is done under tents in almost unbearable weather. I have photographs, throughout Asia, of entire families sitting on the ground, weaving. I was told, that because of the poor lighting and other horrific working conditions, most die or are blind at an early age.

I was reared in the poverty of Eastern North Carolina where tobacco and cotton fields exhibited the same horrendous living standards. Mothers picking cotton by hand, dragging a large bag along the cotton row on which a small child survived … women standing all day long, under a shelter, stringing green tobacco leaves onto sticks for curing. (This picture includes my own mother, grandmother and their children working under these conditions.)

As in Asia, poverty in America is always present if no longer physical, conditioned in the mind. You never get over it. Just as it is difficult to get over the conditioning of life's poverty, it is difficult to get over the conditioning of life's acceptable, indecent behavior.

A gentleman told me recently that he was in the grocery store and at the checkout counter, he noticed that the young woman ahead of him in line, had a scorpion up at the back of her neck. Just as he was about to hit her neck to knock the scorpion off he realized that it was a tattoo. Instead of young people accepting and appreciating the trouble and trials of their ancestors that has given them a better life, they seem to have been conditioned by the Satanic powers always present in world culture to go in the opposite direction.

Until Christ came into the world, women were little more than slaves. In my lifetime, I have seen liberated women try their best to hit bottom … Semi-nakedness, escape from feminine qualities (tattoos, piercings, course language etc.), forsaking motherhood in favor of abortion.
When I was young, divorce was a very rare thing. Now 55% of all marriages end in divorce. The last year for which figures are available, 1999, 700,000 of America's children were in foster homes. In the county in which I live, there are 1200 children in foster homes. Can we even imagine the price America is paying and what God will require for the treatment of these precious, sensitive gifts to the world?

The United Kingdom was the center of the Protestant reformation. Today, more caskets than cradles are used in England … Churches are closed every day. On May 4th, a Baptist street preacher, Dale Mcalpine, was arrested by a homosexual police officer and jailed for handing out leaflets on the street about the evils of the gay lifestyle. Last week, Franklin Graham, evangelist son of Dr. Billy Graham, was dis-invited from this week's National Day or Prayer at the Pentagon, because, after the 9-11 episode he had made statements concerning the Muslim religion.

In another city, a church Christian marriage counselor was arrested for refusing to give marriage advice to a same-sex couple about to get married. Next to black babies (52% of all black babies are aborted), the most endangered person in America is the white, male Christian … Particularly if he is a “TEA Party” participant or white male military veteran. Even the Mayor of New York, and the national news broadcasters are conditioning the American people to suspect white, Christian, male “TEA Party” participants of every suspected terrorist event.

I understand this old, white Christian male, who just happens to be a totally blind, 100% disabled veteran, is on the no-fly list simply because I have traveled around the world several times, have been in most Communist and Muslim countries and have written extensively concerning the horrors of Communism. Probably, I would have not been allowed on the plane in New York. When will America awaken to the conditioning that is taking place … Daily, minute by minute, from the national power brokers who are so anxious for America to become a controlled, collectivist, totalitarian, socialist police state?