Plumbing Woes

Well, I have been to the creek house for a week. We had a lot of rain down there and the creek was overflowing but not too bad. The flooding was caused by Hurricane Alex and tropical depression 2. The water was fresh though so fishing wasn't good. Mostly it was hot and humid and the mosquitoes were plentiful. I returned home Saturday after our annual lot owners meeting which was mostly uneventful.

Last night Martha called me home from church with the announcement of "water, water everywhere" and she couldn't turn it off. By the time I got here she had figured out how and had it under control. It turned out that a compression fitting had rusted through on one of the bathroom sinks but that was no easy task to replace. The fitting had broken off right at the faucet connection and I could not get it out. These faucets are very old and no one had a new one. A plumbing supply store that I went to was able to remove the fitting and replace it and it's companion with new ones so the water is back and I think it will be good. We also had a leak in the kitchen sink drain and I was able to fix that as well.

I have also eaten well today. First there was a men's Bible Study and breakfast at a cafe in town and then HPU hosted a retirees luncheon and meeting of our retired employees assn.

All in all a very sucessful day.

The Christ filled life

Yesterday our study took us to Colossians 3:1-17 as we looked at the discipline of the Christ filled life. Here are a few of the things that I want to remember and focus on,

We must focus our mind and being on Christ. What we fill our mind with defines who we are.

We must put off Christ-less things that we once walked in before we came to Christ.

We must put on:

• The character of Christ. A sympathetic spirit, generosity of mind, non-aggressive reaction, patience in the face of injury or insult, forbearance, the willingness to put up with people for the sake of fellowship. These are simple things but difficult to do.
• The example of Christ. Fellowship will depend entirely on our capacity to forgive.
• Above all else, put on the law of Christ which is love. Jesus gave a great commandment that we love one another.They will know we are Christians by our love.
• The peace of Christ. His peace is to rule the Christian heart.
• The word of Christ. The indwelling word is both individual and social. Paul’s words would indicate that he may be thinking about worship. He speaks of teaching, admonition, singing, one of the ways we can put on the word is through personal and corporate worship.

Only then can we claim the name of Christ and call ourselves Christians.

On Freedom

This definition came to me by way of a preacher friend who wrote it in the fly leaf of a New Testament that I carried at the time. I can't improve on it.

"Freedom is not the right to do what you want to do, but it is the power to do what you ought to do."

On this day in which we celebrate freedom, I hope we have remembered to thank God for what we have, it is Him that has empowered us to do what is right.

The Builder - Chapter 3

Growing up

Dad was literally a jack of all trades, well probably not all but quite a few. He was a great mechanic and was always able to fix our cars and lawnmowers and other mechanical devices. He had a lawnmower sharpener that would automatically sharpen the blades of a reel type mower. He took in that kind of work and often would have several waiting to be sharpened. He also owned a metal lathe and could make all sorts of screws. He was an avid photographer and had his own darkroom where he developed negatives and made pictures. He mixed his own chemicals for that purpose and a good many of his pictures have survived. Occasionally I will attach one or more to these posts. The one here was taken in about 1937. The car is dads and is a 1936 Plymouth, I think.

Growing up in that era of the 1940’s is hard to describe. We lived at the end of a dead end road that was surfaced with crushed oyster shell. That substance was abundant at that time since we were close to the gulf and a source for oysters. Adjacent to our house was a pasture of about 100 acres with a small patch of woods about midway across one edge. We explored these woods and the pasture extensively spending many hours in the role of our favorite cowboy or cowgirl, riding stick horses made from the trunk of a small tree called a coffee bean tree. These were numerous in the pasture and offered an abundant supply of horses for us to use. There wasn’t much TV in those days and TV’s were small and difficult to view. There were a lot of cowboy shows with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans or Gene Autry and many others. They were as violent as TV got in those days. Howdy Doody and Kukla Fran and Ollie were a couple of shows we watched that were entertaining for us young ones. We had nothing like Sesame Street or any of the later shows. All was black and white since color TV wasn’t invented yet, All the programming was clean and there were no ratings, we didn’t need them.

We raised chickens for a few years and one of my tasks was to feed them and gather eggs. We also had a few rabbits and a horse. The horse was named Dan and had been a roping horse at one time but was quite old and gentle by the time we obtained him. We couldn’t saddle him ourselves, we were too small, so we had to wait for Dad to do that and he wanted to supervise our riding anyway. There was a small ditch that ran across the pasture and one day I was riding Dan at a full gallop when we approached the ditch. He jumped the ditch and in the process I became dislodged from the saddle and landed on the ground. Dan sensed that I had gotten off and he stopped in one jump. I was shaken but unhurt except for my pride because a real cowboy never falls off his horse when it is jumping the creek. Another incident with the horse occurred on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. We had just returned from Sunday morning worship and I decided I would rope Dan so we could ride later that afternoon. I made the mistake of trying to sneak up behind him to do the roping. He was startled and as he began to run he kicked his back legs out and a hoof got me in the forehead. I think Dad cleared the fence in one jump and needless to say we spent the rest of the afternoon in the emergency room.

I know this chapter didn’t have much about building but we will get back to that. There are more stories about growing up too but I will share them later. This one has gotten a bit long.

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.