ADVICE TO GRANDCHILDREN

            The biggest mistake people make regarding education is they think of education as a finished product. “I have finished my education” is an example of what you hear people say. Education is a process and never an accomplished fact. Instead of a graduation exercise a commencing exercise is better. When you finish High School you are just commencing a life -long learning process.

            When you are born the first four things you learn are the most important to you. They are foundational to you as quality of life issues. The four vital lessons are:

1. Learning to talk

2. Learning to walk

3. Learning to feed yourself

4. Potty training

           

            There are four learning issues that are vital to you as far as eternity is concerned. Without a proper relationship to God all learning will be of no eternal significance. These four are:

1. Learning of your need for salvation

2. Learning of God’s love for you

3. Learning of God’s provision for your salvation

4. Learning the proper response to receive God’s salvation

           

 This general advice I give to you:

1. Be a lifelong learner.

2. Learn from others. It is said that experience is the best teacher. This is not true. I don’t need to break my leg to know that it is not a good idea. Learning by experience is the most painful way to learn.

3. Learn to postpone pleasure. You do not need to have all the latest gadgets today. If you cannot pay cash wait until you can make the purchase with cash.

4. Pay your tithes and taxes first. Divide the remaining money into a ten-twenty-seventy plan. A. Save ten percent. B. Save twenty percent until you have an amount that is six months of your yearly salary. Invest some of the twenty percent.; then save the twenty percent to buy the things  you want to purchase – go on a cruise, etc. Bless others with some of the twenty percent. C. Live on the seventy percent. Never buy on credit anything except a house to live in and no more than one automobile at a time.

5. Live today for life does not allow practice days in preparation for future days.  ^"This is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118:24, NKJV)”

MAKING DECISIONS

            Sometimes when you make a decision you don’t know you are making a change for all time. At other times you know you are making a decision that will not be revoked. When I went to California I thought that I was going there to work for a time and did not know that I would not return to Arkansas to live. When I committed my life to Christ Jesus I knew that that would be a permanent decision. Of course I did not realize how it would affect every area of my being. I did not think this will determine where I work, what kind of work, where I would live or even what amount of money I would receive for my work. But all of these things were affected by my decision to make Christ the Lord of my life. You cannot say truthfully say, “No Lord”. You can tell God no. However, if God is the Lord of your life, you can only truthfully say, “yes Lord.” The reason is simple when you say “no” you are denying His Lordship over your being. By saying, “no” to the Lord you are saying, “You have no right to tell me what to do.”

            When, as a young boy, I repented of my sin; I confessed to God. “I am a sinner; I ask you to forgive me of my sins and come into my life and be my Lord”. I gave up my right to direct my life. The bible says that if you will confess Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved. Sometimes we say to someone you need to accept Christ as your Savior. The Bible never says that. The Bible says you accept him as Lord. The result of accepting him as Lord is that He then becomes your Savior. There is something fundamentally wrong when you want to be saved for all eternity but not want to have to love Christ enough to accept his Lordship over your life. What woman or man would accept a marriage proposal when the proposal was “I want you to be my lifetime mate but I also want you to know that I will have sexual relationships with other persons when I have the opportunity?”  No one in his or her right mind would consent to such a proposal. God offers salvation on his terms and not ours.

                  I came to Christ as a sinner. Even the good things I did were sin because I was a sinner by choice. My nature was that of a sinner. When I accepted the Lordship of Christ over my life I became, in the Apostle Paul’s words, a saint. This did not happen overnight but the instant Christ entered into my life I became a saint. Paul writes in 1Cor 1:2, “Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours…” (the underlined words are my underlining) As you read the book of 1 Cor you became aware of the sins that this church was struggling with, but Paul did not write to the sinners in Corinth.  He wrote to the saints. He did not call them saints because they lived perfect lives, but because they had been, “sanctified in

Christ Jesus.” There is a difference between a saint who commits a sin and a sinner who can do nothing to please God because of his sin nature. I am a saint who sometimes commits sins for which I am sorry and for which I repent. Our problem with someone saying he is a saint is because of the modern day definition of the word saint. We define the word today as a person who is perfect is his actions. The biblical definition is a person who has been sanctified in Christ Jesus. He is not perfect in himself but has been declared perfect by God because of what Christ did on his behalf.

A change of venue

            In 1955 I graduated from Witts Springs High School with no idea on what my future would be like. I had planned on joining the Air Force when I graduated but changed my mind several months prior to finishing school. My high school coach told me he could get me a full basketball scholarship to attend a small college in Clinton, Arkansas. I had no plans whatsoever to attend college. I was tired of book studies. The principal of the high school wanted me to go into business with him. He would put up the funds to build a store in Witts Springs and I would run the store. It would be a blind partnership. This fell through when another local man opened a store. The principal did not believe the community could support two stores. So what was I going to do?

            My best friend at the time was Sammy Judd and I was also dating his sister who was too young to even consider marriage. Their folks were heading to California to work for the summer months. So I decided to hitch a ride to California. I would live with my older sister and get a job in the Los Angeles area till I could make up my mind as to what I wanted to do with my life.

            I arrived in Compton Ca. sometime in May or June, I don’t remember the exact date. I had no money, no job and no automobile. I began looking for a job in walking distance from where my sister lived. I found a job rather soon after my arrival working for a company that manufactured back yard swing sets. It did not pay very much but boarding at my sister’s home was not very costly. After a few weeks of work I had enough money to buy a used auto.

For fifty dollars I bought a 1939 four door Chevrolet. It was one of my better decisions. It was clean, mechanically sound but needed a paint job. I kept the car for over three years and other than tires, brakes and a carburetor overhaul I had no problems with it. I did the brake job and the carburetor overhaul myself so it was just a matter of buying the parts. Car gas was rather cheap, 17 and 19 cents per gallon.

            After a few months my brother-in law got me a job working for Trojan Battery Co. He had worked for the company for several years and was well thought of by the management. The neighbor who lived across the street also worked at the same place so we car pooled. I drove my car and they paid for my gas. 

A Wagon on the School House

            The Witts Spring School House was built by the WPA in 1935. This may have been the most exciting thing that had happened in our community up to that point. Of course in October of 1936 I was born and for me that was the most exciting thing ever to take place in our community, according to me, myself and I.

            The building was built of native stones. It was a rectangular building, which at first housed first grade through 12^th grade. It also had a gym for basketball with a too short court and a much too low ceiling. There was a crawl space under the whole building which was not tall enough to stand up in, but could house a bunch of things, including benches to be used for seating in the gym for graduation, drama presentations, etc.

            How do you drive a wagon on a building of this height? The answer is you don’t drive the wagon. You wait until Halloween night and get a bunch of country boys who are looking for mischief to perform on their community. They found one of the neighbors who had a rubber tire wagon and after failing at killing themselves by riding it down a curvy hill they came up with the idea to put the wagon on the school house. They roll it up to the school and disassemble it and using ropes they haul it piece by piece to the top. They reassemble it on top of the school. They accessed the roof by finding a window that they could go through into a class room. There was a small room on the stage side of the gym that had a ladder into the ceiling and a trap door onto the roof itself. I don’t know how they got it down. I was not present to witness that event. I assume that adults are as smart as boys and that they reversed the process the boys used to put the wagon there in the first place.

School Dramas

            One bad thing about attending a small school is all the things you miss out on. One good thing about attending a small school is all the great things you get to participate in. I got a part in a school play when I was in the 8^th grade. There were not enough high school boys interested in getting up before a live audience and acting or they did not want to take the time to memorize a three act play. But their slackness became my opportunity.

             The school put on two plays, one in the fall of the year and one in the spring. I  performed in every play for the rest of my years in public school. Back in those days I could memorize my part in a three act play from the time I was given the part on a Friday evening and came to school on Monday morning. My first parts were very small parts with very little dialogue. But by the time I entered high school I had a major role and most times one of the lead roles. Some of the plays were about country hicks so I had no trouble being in character. All I had to do was memorize the words and then just talk naturally. Most of the dramas we did were more laughs than serious stuff.

            We always played to a packed audience. There was not much competition in the way of entertainment in a small community, no television, no Movie Theater, etc. The money we raised paid for the books and the fee that the company who published the plays charged; and the rest, which was most of the funds, went to the school.

Death and funerals

            One thing about living in a small community is that you know everyone who lives there.Therefore when there is a death the whole school can go to the funeral. They are not required to attend but most did. This meant that I went to a good many funerals between first and twelfth grades. Most of them were for old people, some were infants. But the one which affected me the most was when my best friend died unexpectedly.

            His name was Crandfiel D. McGovern. He lacked 3 days being exactly two months younger than myself. He was 9 years, one month and 17 days old when he died. He was on school on Friday and sometime Saturday morning he died. He woke up during the night and told one of his older brothers he was thirsty. His brother got up and went to get him a drink of water. The water bucket was empty so his brother went out of the house to the spring and got a fresh bucket of water and gave him a drink. When morning came, they went to wake him, they found him dead. They never did not know what the cause of his death was.

            My dad went to town on Saturday morning and came home and told my mother that he had died during the night. I overheard him talking with my mother and went and told my older sister and brother that he had died and they accused me of telling a lie.

            At his funeral I looked on my best friend lying in his coffin and seeing the freckles on the bridge of his nose and on his cheeks and thought what a good looking boy he was. His death was a hard thing for me to deal with. This was the first time that I had felt a personal loss at a funeral.

Party games and not dances, closed door and corner kissing, musicals, cross questions and crooked answers

            In the hill country where I grew up there were not a lot of things that were acceptable to the mores of hill people. This was in pre-television days and there was not a lot that a boy and girl could do that would not be censored. The big no-no was dancing. This was a sin that the people looked down on, however it was ok to play games. One game I witnessed was one in which the boys and the girls would stand in a circle and when the music would begin the game would begin. I had never been to a dance of any kind so I did not know what a dance looked like. But since television I have witnessed square dancing so that was what they were doing but it was ok because after all it was just a game set to music.

            Another acceptable game we liked to play was for the girls to go into a room and line up behind the door. The boys would line up outside the door and knock on the door. The girl on the inside did not know who was knocking and the boy knocking did not know what girl was behind the door. The girl would open the door and the boy and girl would lock arms and go outside of the building and walk around the building kissing at every corner. This game was played at night preferable in the school house since it was the largest building in the area. I don’t know if every boy and girl kissed because you would sometimes get paired with someone you did not like. I never did get paired with anyone who did not kiss me. The value of this game is that it gave opportunity to shy girls or shy boys to get to kiss and begin to get to know someone of the opposite sex.

            The most boring thing for me was the musicals. The people who could play an instrument or sing could participate; that left those of us who did neither to just sit and listen. When I could choose I chose to stay home.

            A fun game we played was cross questions and crooked answers. You divided up with girls on one team and boys on the other. You then separated and someone would give the boys the questions and someone else would give the girls the answers. You came back together and stood in line facing each other and the boy would ask the question and the girl would answer. You had to ask and answer the question three times without laughing. An example would be: Boy’s question. Does your mother let you kiss boys? The girl’s answer. I get the hiccups when I laugh a lot. Since the person making up the questions and the person making up the answers do not know what the other person is doing you can get some pretty funny answers to the questions. Then you would switch off and let the girls ask the questions and the boys answer.