We don't write papers, we build scrapbooks
We don't write papers, we build scrapbooks
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Spring is starting to wind down and summer is knocking on the door. For some reason, this has been one of the most beautiful Springs in my recent memory. When everything turned green a few weeks ago, it turned a deep, lustrous green. Around Easter we had a blast of summer that lasted a few days with sunshine and temperatures in the 70’s and 80’s. Many farmers went crazy in the fields planting their crops. But then it turned wintry again for a few days, and those same ambitious farmers had som...
Ten years before I became pastor of Martintown Community Church, I spoke from the pulpit there as a guest. It was August 28, 1983. I chose to speak from Genesis, chapter five on the person of Enoch. My uncle was visiting our family at that time. He was a missionary in Kenya, East Africa for 35 years and had plenty of experience preaching from God’s Word. I told him about my plans to speak on Enoch. He gave me the title for my sermon: “Don’t Knock Enoch.” Some ten years later, the Martintown chur...
Graduation season is upon us. Time to spread your wings and fly. The world is waiting. There is great anticipation in the air as the new graduates put their hands to the plow and don’t look back. It’s that time of year when the invitations arrive in the mail and we start planning to attend the graduation parties. We get a lot of pleasure out of attending those events. When I graduated from high school, my parents invited the relatives and a few close friends over to the house after the cer...
We live in a world of instant everything. Russian immigrant and comedian Yakov Smirnoff said the first time he went grocery shopping in America he saw powdered milk, powdered eggs, powdered potatoes and even powdered cheddar cheese. As he took all this in he was just amazed. His translator said: “All you have to do is add water.” Then they went down the baby aisle and he picked up a container of baby powder - all he could say was: “Wow! What a country!” We're used to instant. We don’t like wait...
Some random thoughts … A few years ago we replaced the roof on our house. It was a DIY project. It’s a two story house, and not being in the roofing business, it was a big job for a novice. I’ve helped replace a few roofs in my lifetime - both shingle and steel. The biggest project I ever did was to put steel on my 50 x 100 foot machine shed. I had some help, but it was my project all the way. About that same time, we reshingled our house roof with asphalt shingles. Over the years, we’ve replace...
I subscribe to a magazine called The Progressive Farmer. On the last page of each edition the editor prints a bunch of quotes from people, mostly of whom I’ve never heard of, but some of them are famous people from the past or present. The following quote by self-proclaimed radical atheist Douglas Adams (1952-2001) caught my attention. He said: “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary a...
About three weeks ago we had 15 inches of snow. As I type these words, we've now had a week of 80 degree weather. Looking ahead to what is now this week, it looks like the temps are going to drop about 25 degrees. I even see snow in the forecast. So, we go from 85 degrees to snow. Some people say, “what is going on with our weather. We’ve never had weather like this before.” Ah, but we have. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the great outdoors and who has any kind of memory, can attest...
I recently watched the Jesus Revolution movie in the theater. It’s a good movie about the Jesus movement and is set in the late 60’s at the height of the Hippy era. It’s a story about a young man in search of meaning in life who first reached out to drugs, and then to Jesus. It’s a very worthwhile movie to see if you get the chance. I don’t know how they did it, but “they” assembled a whole arsenal of cars consistent with that period of time. I was just a young lad then - about 8 years old, but...
As a child, my parents rarely missed taking me and my siblings to church on Sunday morning. By rarely, I mean, I don’t recall ever missing a single Sunday. We always dressed up in our Sunday best which meant our shoes were polished on Saturday night, mom laid out our clothes for Sunday morning, and after chores, we jumped into our best duds and rushed off to church in our family station wagon. On Easter, we dressed just a little nicer with perhaps a new pair of socks or a necktie. There’s a fam...
It seems like election season never ends. A few decades ago, when my wife and I first reached voting age, we were living in California and the voters in our precinct voted in our neighbor’s garage, which was the official venue. After we got home from work on election day, we took a stroll down the street, chatted with the neighbors, flashed our driver’s licenses, cast our ballots and walked back home. I suppose, there was a lot of emotion and rhetoric somewhere during the candidates’ campaigns,...
Last week my wife and I were on vacation in Florida. Our daughter who lives in Tennessee joined us and we made a week of it. The first thing we did was pick her up at the airport and then we went straight to The Melting Pot restaurant. The Melting Pot is not only good eating, but it’s also entertainment. It starts out with a bowl centered on top of your table with a stove burner under it. When the waiter comes, he turns on the burner and pretty soon it’s sizzling hot. He then dumps some shr...
Several years ago, I needed a rim for one of my old tractors. It’s a 1958 IHC 330 loader tractor. After I bought the tractor, I took the loader off and it (the loader) has been sitting in the corner of the shed ever since. We were busy restoring the old gem when we noticed it had a cracked rim on the right rear. I called a place a few miles up north in Wisconsin and they had one, so I made the trek up there to pick it up. I’ve done business with these guys before, and I like them. It had bee...
Random Thoughts - Part 2 Time - It’s that time of year again - Daylight Saving Time (Saving - not Savings). The clocks go ahead in order to give us more daylight. But we all know moving the clocks around doesn’t add or take away any amount of time. We also know there is no such thing as making time or losing time. Time is constant. There are only so many hours of daylight in a day no matter where the hands of the clock are. Everyone has exactly the same amount of it. It is a resource the gov...
February 17 found me and some friends in Louisville, Kentucky at the National Farm Show. I was there with the Fellowship of Christian Farmers International (FCFI). This is the largest indoor farm show in the United States. It is held every year during the second week of February. FCFI had rented a room where we invited people to come and hear speaker, Ron Miller, talk about farming and the struggles farmers are facing today with, not only the economics of farming, but the mental stress that...
Some random thoughts … Taxes and Family - Every year our accountant painstakingly reviews every check we’ve written in the last 12 months. Every expenditure has to have an explanation. We must have a paper trail for every deduction and every write-off. I really don’t care for tax season. It’s usually cold, wet, and messy. She told us that she can tell our whole life story just by looking at our checkbook and credit card statement. They tell her where we went on vacation, what restaur...
Subjectivism and Objectivism in a culture of relative truth ... Digital communication has its advantages. Text messaging is easy and convenient. Convenient because you can choose to answer when it’s convenient for you to answer. Of course, anything can be read into any text message at any time. It’s difficult to show emotion and sarcasm in a text message and it is quite easy to unintentionally misrepresent yourself, which seems to happen to me fairly frequently. Of course, sometimes when you don...
I was on an airplane a few days ago flying home from Florida. My seat was a window seat in row 7. I’m never in a hurry to board the plane because once you get on, you are stuck in there for the next three or four hours with hardly any room to move, walk or stretch. By the time I boarded, the aisle and middle seat were already occupied so those two people had to get out and let me in. As the guy in the next seat was sitting down, he leaned over and said to me: “It’s this guy’s first time flying....
The nurse came in and said "Doc, there's a man in the waiting room who thinks he's invisible." The doctor said, "Tell him I can't see him today." We are in the gray, dreary days of winter. My dad always said the third week of January is always the worst of winter. As I write this I am sitting poolside in sunny Southwest Florida. It’s 72 degrees. The locals call this a cold front. Usually the pool area is packed with sun worshipers but as it turns out, I’m the only sun (and Son) worshiper her...
A few weeks ago, I went on a one-day road trip to Kokomo, Indiana. I don’t follow a map anymore - just my GPS. The beauty of GPS is that if you take the shortest route, you usually end up on the backroads somewhere. Such was the case on this trip. It was early in the evening on the way home in gray, post-dusk December darkness. I was driving through Indiana on narrow roads that I had never been on before. On the outskirts of a small town in the middle of nowhere, a railroad crossing gate went d...
I grew up a farm kid. My folks started out in Indiana as grain farmers and eventually became dairy farmers. That’s just the opposite of most people in the farming business. Usually, a person dairy farms first, sells their cattle, then becomes a grain farmer until they retire. When dad first started out, he worked an off-farm job in the winter in the steel mills on the western shores of Lake Michigan just east of Chicago. He’d work there all winter and farmed in the spring, summer, and fall. But...
On Thursday, January 5, 2023 my dad woke up in the Land of Glory! This is from my journal from last week ... My dad is in the last hours of his earthly life. We got him home from the hospital on Monday evening. Since then, we’ve been gathering around his bedside day and night. One or more of us is with him 24/7. The Hospice nurses believe he has a few hours to as many as a couple of days to live. But Dad’s a tough old guy and he may surprise them. Regardless, God has given us this time with him...
Merry Christmas Everyone! I hope your Christmas is great and memorable. What would a perfect day look like? This past Sunday turned out to be a pretty great day in my life. It started at about 6:45 a.m. when I arrived at church. Several of us get together every Sunday morning about that time as we prepare for our Sunday services. One gentleman in particular, arrives 15 minutes before any of us, and unlocks the doors, turns all the lights on, gets the coffee pots fired up, and sets the...
Christmas is weird. What other time of the year do you sit in front of a dead tree and eat candy out of your sock A few weeks ago on a nice, warm fall day, my wife strung Christmas lights up outside on the trees and bushes near the house and shop, then ran extension cords to the nearest outlets. One thing about outside Christmas lights is when it’s time to go to bed at night, they need to be turned off. The catch is, I hate going outside to unplug them. It’s worse if I have to bundle up and go o...
I have never understood why women love cats. Cats are independent, they don't listen, they don't come in when you call, they like to stay out all night, and when they're home they like to be left alone and sleep. In other words, every quality that women hate in a man, they love in a cat. Our refrigerator went on the blink a few days ago. It all started when we decided to defrost it and give it a regular cleaning. Everything went fine at first. We loaded all the food and frozen items in coolers...
With the rise of self-driving vehicles, it's only a matter of time before we get a country song where a guy's truck leaves him too. As I write this, my wife and I are in southwest Florida where Hurricane Ian struck in late September. They say it was the worst hurricane in Florida’s history. I guess I wouldn’t argue that much, except, how do they know? The earth has been around for some 6000 years and the indigenous people who lived here before us, didn’t have ways to track the storms like we do...
