Forgiveness

Sunday morning our topic in Bible study was Relationships and it centered around the subject of forgiveness. Here are two things that I came away with.

God wants us to be a forgiving people. It is clear from scripture (Matthew 6:12, 14-15, Matthew 18:35 and others) that in order to receive forgiveness we must forgive others. That is hard to do because we still want to retain the law of revenge, we want to get even, not forgive, but God didn't give us an option, he made it a command.

Second, forgiveness is unlimited. Peter asks the question "How many times must I forgive my brother if he sins against me?" Peter was being generous and suggested 7 times but Jesus replies with a huge number that basically says there is no limit. It isn't 77 or 70 times 7 but it is limitless.

Failure to forgive separates us from fellowship with the Father. Jesus told us that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and the second was to love our neighbor as ourself. Love always forgives.

Project Sweat

Each Summer the youth from several churches in our area give up a week to help folks in our town. They work on houses and yards doing work that the homeowner can't afford to do. These tasks, such as painting, roofing, yard work, and sometimes minor repairs are often carried out in the sweltering Texas heat. This year there are close to 100 young people with leaders from 4 different churches and the weather has given them a break. Yesterday it rained but the temperatures are only around 90 this whole week. Today our adult class provided lunch for our team. Since I am retired and free I was able to help. Here are a few of them enjoying their lunch break.

The Builder - Chapter 2

Church & Home


The year 1946 brought several things into our life. The end of the war made it easier to buy things and the economy was improved, also due to the war, so more was available. It also brought a move. Mom & Dad bought a home in northwest Houston with about 2 acres of land. The house wasn’t very big but the plan was to enlarge it. The family joined White Oak Baptist church that year and attended regularly. They needed space for education and before long decided to build a 2 story building. The builder volunteered of course and for several Saturdays a large group of men gathered to raise the walls and put the roof on. Not long after the building was dry, the building crowd dwindled to the point where it was the pastor, the builder and occasionally 1 or 2 others. The work was slow and as I remember the building was never completely finished out. We used it for quite a few years in pretty rough condition. A few months after the church building started, dad decided to start on our house. He about doubled the size and added 3 bedrooms, a new bath, a large kitchen expansion and a big walk-in closet. The preacher and dad would work on the church in the morning and our house in the afternoon. Eventually it was finished. There were windows everywhere and an attic fan drew air in the windows and exhausted it out a vent on the front porch, we had no air conditioner. The house was heated by floor furnaces which hung beneath the house and extended down below the ground surface into small brick lined holes. It never failed that when it was coldest and we needed heat the most it would also rain and the holes would flood and put out the pilot light. That meant someone had to man the manual pump and keep the water pumped out. That pumper was usually me. We eventually solved the problem by stopping the water from flowing under the house. We also built a garage and workshop behind the house. Once the house was finished dad moved his railroad inside in one of the front rooms for a while and we could once again watch the trains run. We lived in this house until 1965, almost 20 years and there are many memories. I probably won’t share them all but in a future chapter I will try to give you a glimpse of growing up in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

Worship

Worship at it's simplest definition is to "give worth to something or someone". In Christian circles it is defined as the central act of Christian identity, the purpose of which is to ascribe honor and worth to God. I liked a post that I read on another blog that said;

God is creative and relational. Because he is creative, we are unique. No two of us are the same. Because he is relational, we are desperate to hear from him for our next step.

If we are His, we are related to Him through spiritual birth and because of that we worship Him. We desire to draw near and hear His voice. When we hear, we must respond, there is no other option. That response can be positive as in the case of Isaiah in chapter 6, or it can be negative as in the case of Jonah chapter 1. How will we respond?

I encourage you to spend time in worship, both private and public, this next week.

The Garden

The garden is doing great in spite of the heat. Temperatures are in the 90's most days and we have hit 100 a couple of days. Some of the corn is now over 6 ft tall and is putting on ears. The tassels are out and I can see silk around the new ears of corn. The green beans are producing a bowl a day and we will eat the first of them tonight. We have already cleaned out the radishes but they are kind of hot so Martha is not fond of them. The tomatoes and peppers have lots of blooms and a few actual tomatoes and peppers. they are coming along. The squash is starting to produce and I expect to see a watermelon any day. So we are happy with the garden, it will be good to be able to eat fresh produce from our own garden.

The Builder - Chapter 1

Airplanes and Railroads


I don’t really remember doing this but mom told me that I would sit on dads lap or at least where I could see him and he would build models. Dad was always a model builder and my earliest recollections are of some of those models. Model airplanes played a part in both our lives even many years later. The early ones in the first years of my life were balsa and paper creations that were powered by a rubber band and propeller. He had made many of them and they hung from the ceiling of the house where we lived. Some were even in the room where I slept. I could see them flying through the air, they were hung that way so that they appeared to be flying.

One day, I am not sure when or how but I was told about it later, I got my hands on one without his supervision and promptly broke some part of it. Mom rescued the remains and when dad came home he was very angry to say the least. He put a lot of effort into those and didn’t want them broken needlessly. They all actually flew and the best times were when we went out to the yard and he wound up the propeller and let them fly.

Another thing he built in those early days was kites. He built box kites and his favorite, (and mine), the upside down buzzer kite. This was a 3 stick conventional looking kite but it flew upside down and had a bow like structure that buzzed when it flew. I have one hanging in my room today at home.

The thing I liked best was that my dad ran a railroad. Not only did he run it, but he built it. It was on a table about 5 feet wide and 10 feet long. It hung from ropes in the garage and at his touch it would glide down out of the ceiling or go back up into it. It was fascinating. There were 2 oval tracks and some switch yards and a couple of towns. He would spend hours building the locomotives with all their wheels and parts. They were mostly the old steam type engines and they were very detailed. They were HO gauge which defines the size or scale that they were built to. He also built the houses in the villages and laid the track rail by rail. He had a control panel that enabled him to control several trains at the same time. The real fun was watching him make up a train with certain cars and then run it from place to place even though it just went around the oval track and stopped in the same place it started. I loved those trains and I have some of his trains in a box still and someday I will set them up so they will remind me of him. He also had a Lionel electric train that went under the Christmas tree. It was there from my first Christmas and I don’t remember when he quit doing it, but many years later after he retired he had another one that he setup for the grandkids and I have that put away as well.

The other thing he built during those years was me. Of course I didn’t know it at the time but now I see how many of these experiences shaped me into who I am. His faith and belief system was instilled in me during these years. As you will see in future chapters the lessons were not always learned the first time.

The Builder – an introduction

It was December, the year was 1940. War raged in Europe and the US would be forced to enter that fray. No one knew that a scant year in the future we would be plunged headlong into war with Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor, or that 4 days later on December 11, 1941 Hitler would declare war on the United States. Even with this uncertainty, the builder and his wife Thelma brought their new son home from the hospital and laid him under the Christmas tree. Life was good for the moment, even if they didn’t know what the future held. The total bill at the hospital was $38.

The builder worked at repairing typewriters and adding machines and was considered to be in a critical defense role so as it turned out he was exempt from the draft. He had held this job for 15 years and was considered to be very good at it. The builder was my dad and this story is about him, and about how his life as a builder. Life in the early 1940’s was not easy. The country was not fully out of the depression years yet and the war and the restrictions on everything from food to gasoline to tires, made life difficult. Even color movie film was rationed and could not be bought. It was into just such a world that the builder brought four children, the last coming in January 1946. The second, a girl named Abigail, lived only a short 4 hours and we never knew her.

These stories are about the builder and the things he built. They are true to the best of my memory and recollection. They will cover over 60 years and I cannot say with certainty how many there will be nor how often. I only know that I must write down the legacy that he left me and I think this will be a meaningful way to do it. If you choose to tag along, I can assure you that there will be tears because they are there now as I write this introduction.