Straight From The Hart

One of my preacher friends on Facebook reported last week that  one of the children in his Sunday School class brought his Bible to him with a very puzzled look on his face.  The young man said, “Pastor, I’m having trouble finding the Thanksgiving story in my Bible.  Is it in the New or the Old Testament?” That may bring a smile to the faces of those of us who are Bible students but it illustrates a very important truth  - that it is impossible to separate the true meaning of Thanksgiving from some very profound tenets of the Judeo-Christian belief system, i.e. that God is sovereign, that He hears and answers prayer, and that He is faithful to the nations whose people are faithful to him. There are many parts to a traditional American Thanksgiving celebration.  If we wanted to alphabetize them it would be easy because  we could put them all under the letter “F”. First and foremost to some is the Food.  We Americans love our turkey and dressing and gravy, potatoes (both Iri

A document with a vague sounding name like Paris Agreement being bandied about in the cable news doesn’t garner much attention from the general public, even somebody like me who lives and breathes this stuff about 15 hours every day in one form or another. The “mentions” have become more prominent now as the Agreement has become a source of contention between our outgoing president and the incoming Trump administration. The Paris Agreement has to do with global warming, or climate change as the proponents now choose to call it.  The Agreement stems from a meeting in Paris held in December, 2015 at the 21st Conference of the Parties by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The language of the agreement was negotiated by representatives of 195 countries and adopted by consensus on December 15 of that year.  It went into effect on November 4 of this year, which explains the more than usual interest in recent weeks. The goal of the Agre

 You will notice this is dated in 2012. Facebook sent it to me this morning to remind me what I had written back then. Although I have often referred to Kay's death in my writings, this one goes into detail about what happened that night but also sets forth how and why our family handled it and other tragedies we have had, including a word study on happiness contrasted with joy. On the  Tuesday night before Thanksgiving in 1964, just a week after Milan and I had celebrated our first wedding anniversary, we were at the Taylor Avenue Church of God practicing with the youth for our Thanksgiving service to be held the next night. We received a phone call at the church for Milan and me to go immediately to my grandmother’s home because something had happened to my youngest sister, Darella Kay Rowden, then 16 years of age and a junior at LHS. We arrived only minutes before Dorsey Howe, who sadly informed us that Kay had been killed in an automobile accident out on East Hwy 32, an

It’s almost Thanksgiving so let’s talk turkey.  I was reading through some back issues of my Bittersweet magazines and found a great artic le written by Doug Sharp based on an interview he had done with John Earl Kays of Falcon MO back in 1978, known at the time to be one of the best turkey hunters in the area.  Doug’s informational essay detailed the amount of patience and skill required of the hunter to harvest “the big one” and it certainly made me appreciate the convenience of buying my turkey at the grocery store. We had a skilled turkey hunter in the church I pastored in Farmington and when he invited Milan and me to his home in Doe Run to eat fried turkey, we didn’t hesitate, although we had no idea what we were in for. Usually his wife did the cooking but when it came to frying the wild turkey fresh from the hunt, John took over the kitchen.  He sliced up the turkey breast into small thin pieces about the size of a large potato chip, breaded them in his own seasoned f

The most recent Executive Order signed by President Obama was done on November 4 and entitled “Advancing The Global Health Security Agenda to Achieve a World Safe and Secure from Infectious Disease Threats” based on the premise that “promoting global health security is a core tenet of our national strategy for countering biological threats.” It is a lengthy document with multi-paragraph subsections beginning with instructions to convene a Global Health Security Agenda Interagency Review Council.  It goes on to provide  separate directions to the heads of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security.  Also to the  Office of Management and Budget, Agency For International Development, Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and “such other agencies as the agencies set forth above deem appropriate.” The purpose of  this column today is not

In case you are not a Facebook person, you may not know that every day they send you a status post from several years back just to remind you of what you have written.  This is the one I received today which I wrote on November 15, 2013.  It is still a true today as it was then. This was such an exciting time for us 50 years ago. 2 days away from our wedding. Every night after work Milan would drive down to Wood St and pick me up and we would work on cleaning and arranging our little house we rented from Francis Murphy. Then he would take me back home and every house we passed had a light on and people were eating, or working in the kitchen, or watching TV (these were the days of picture windows) and we would talk about how lucky these people were to  have their home and eat together, and we were just counting literally the hours until we would be like those people. The wedding was exciting of course because back in those days the wedding meant something, but the anticipation those l

In December 2015 a presumed Russian cyber-attacker successfully seized control of the Prykarpattyaoblenergo Control Center (PCC) in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Western Ukraine, leaving 230,000 without power for up to 6 hours. This marked the first time that a cyber weapon was successfully used against a nation’s power grid. The attackers were skilled strategists who carefully planned their assault over many months, first doing reconnaissance to study the networks and siphon operator credentials, then launching a synchronized assault in a well-choreographed dance. The control systems in Ukraine were surprisingly more secure than some in the U.S., since they were well-segmented from the control center business networks with robust firewalls, emphasizing just how vulnerable power systems are globally. The above paragraph was written by Daniel Wagner in the Huffington Post on May 24 of this year.  He goes on to warn that most Americans have a false sense of security and are becoming co

And Then The Rains Came For several days we’ve watched with joy the colors of the Fall; The reds, the golds, the bronzes, and we have loved them all; So vivid, they took our breath away, beauty beyond compare; Each oak and maple a worship scene, each fire in the bush a prayer. But then the rains came. The leaves let go as the storms blew in, not able to sustain Their grip on the branch which had held them fast, but that was before the rain. Unlike the showers of spring and summer which cause the leaves to grow; The cold November rains of fall with frosty breath do blow; As seasons change, the rains come. It isn’t just the leaves of trees which dread the cold cold rains; God’s people live and laugh and love, have losses as well as gains; While all the time we know, in time, we’ll have our sorrows, too; That we must prepare to keep holding on when the storms of life blow through. Because the rains will come. But if we’ve built an ark of safety as directed