It has been one of those August days in Mid to West Texas. Hot by 10am and climbing throughout the day until it reaches 90-100 degrees. Tonight will even be an uncomfortable warm although, we are mid-way through the month of August. Early in the morning, there is a feeling of fall, just something you feel inside nothing external. It's like the old story, The Ant and the Grasshopper, if you don't know the story, ask me sometime.
In a couple of weeks the jumpies I call it, will take over most everyone. For a season in the spring and again in the fall, people get this urge to jump. This urge usually lasts a little longer in autumn. I think it has to do with our." nature man", who is still tied to the natural world, instinct, I guess you would call it. It can be a dangerous time for people who are not led by the Holy Spirit. Baby Christians, (not just babies by the length of time they have been saved ), but babies by the lack of knowledge and patience they possess. They and the lost have a tendency during the jumpies to make big moves or decisions that can effect their lives forever. I have seen those thought to be very mature leaders who think a major move can be made at their discretion, without carefully praying for God's will. God does transplanting and we know this and are content to know that fact when moving in to a new place, but moving out we tend to think it is no big deal to just up and move. There are only about ten thousand places in scripture, where God makes it clear He wants to involved in these decisions. I actually heard a man who was heading up a relatively large group of excited believers with new ones coming every week, say, "if you can't provide for your family in one place you need to move to where you can". Sadly enough he and his family moved and I don't think it has been any easier after the move and maybe worse. I assure you if you think this way you will never be Established or strengthened, according to scripture. If the enemy knows you feel like you should move if things are tough, he will throw every weapon he can at you to try to get you to move against God's will. If we had been shaken by hard times I would have never known most of the people dearest to me now. I think the whole host of hell was trying to get us to move from Brady. The best thing you can do is to make a circle with your family and profess out loud that you are thankful of your new home and will only leave if you are sure God wants you to move. This tells the enemy to back off and know that only God has the right to move you.
This brings me to an important point and this has to do with changing churches, (the building ), one meets in. If you think you can get up and move without a clear unction and mission from God, just because you are offended or not entertained, I think there may be a maturity problem. I do have to say that maybe within your first few meetings, if you find you just don't fit and see that there are vast differences in the way you believe, it is probably no problem. I watch more and more where the entertainment factor is possibly the reason long time members of one place move to another. I tend to think lack of maturity. Leaders, ( the men behind the pulpit ), seem to change around now, where in years back, (through my younger years), they stayed in one place, many times until death. I remember the one and only church I ever attended more than three times while young, had a man who was in his eighties. He was the grandfather of my best friend growing up. He was a preacher and he lived in their house, in his own separate little room. I remember spending the night there and making too much noise after 9pm and in a little while here he was fully dressed in his suit ready to go to church. He couldn't hardly remember his grandchildren because of dementia, but he could fire out a message loaded with scripture without ever opening his bible. He lived for Church services. They let him speak as he wished and gave him a whole meeting once a year I think. He smoked camel cigarettes and had an ashtray on the front pew where he sat. This was an American Baptist church. I went to church with my best friend because my parents didn't go. His mom worried about me up until after I went wild in the years following my mothers suicide. Then she tried to keep him away from me. That might not be factual, but it was what I believed. I remember when at the age of nine one preacher moved and a new one moved in. I think there may have been a scandal as this all happened over about a six month period and there were many special meetings. If my friend and I wanted to be together we had to go, (to the meetings), even though we just played catch or talked outside. Somewhere in all this the Preacher at the time moved and for the next few months the Church was without a full time minister. Somehow I think this all ties to my original point. I call them preachers where today you seldom hear that word, they are pastors, leaders or something else but not usually preachers--by description. I think there is a reason for this and maybe we lost something when we lost the word preacher. I know the Pastor left and there was a period of months where different men from the church spoke. I will never forget a young man, about to graduate high school, surrendered his life to the ministry. This was a big thing to me for some reason. I asked many questions and got few answers that satisfied my curiosity. I spoke to several including the young man. How do you know that you should surrender your life to the ministry? It was just answered with things like, "it is just something you know", or," God tells you". It stuck for many years in my mind. It was the part about God just telling you. I remember being alone before starting school. There were no boy's in my neighborhood, only girls. I chose to play alone most of the time. I always had to be the daddy if I played with the girls, or I was the one who was being made up or having my hair done. I remember hearing a voice in my head. This has never changed through my entire life. I just knew things and as I got older the noise of the world just tended to crowd out that sweet voice. Nothing has changed, if you desire to have a two way conversation with God you have to be willing to listen. I was willing to stop everything and just wait for answers. In time I have learned to block out interference in a group and hear the voice of God through surrounding noise. I think it is misconstrued by some as me not being attentive to them. It is usually them God is speaking to me about. I thought everyone did this. I know things about peoples lives and I pray. I am not telling anyone the things I know, except the person involved and not even them most of the time. I have known about sickness in certain people and for some reason they choose not to share it with others close to them. I have known of some that have sought prayer from other bodies and not the one they belong to. It is not my right to speak out such things. My next blog will be dealing more about these things.
Brother Simpson moved to Midland with His wife and three daughters. He was a squatty little man with a strong accent. I guess an Arkansas accent. He and his family had all been born in Arkansas and I think about it now I wonder how we ever connected with him. I really liked him as a person, he was fun to be around not like most preachers. He knew everyone in Midland, I think, and this was within two or three years. He screamed quite a bit while preaching and something was very different. He laughed from behind the pulpit, and others also laughed with him, in Church. There was a choir and they all wore robes of the same color. I guess there was a leader as he was usually standing in front of them waving his arms and hands, he didn't wear a robe. He owned a business in town so song leader was just his way of helping out in church. My friends grandpa was brother Lowry. When the other guy wasn't there, Brother Lowry led. He had a very loud voice for an aged gentleman. So loud he could out noise the rest of the Church. The thing I remember was we couldn't stop laughing. My friends mother was stuck in the choir and his dad didn't go to church, so during the singing, we were unsupervised except for the LOOK. The LOOK meant that I was going straight home after Church and my best friend, David would get it when he got home by his dad. I never heard a raised voice in that home and that had a profound effect on me, to this day. I still don't like screaming or arguing at any level. It comes from being in a house where there was a lot of it. His dad always did the discipline and it usually included an automatic licking with a heavy leather belt used just for that purpose and hanging on a wall in the hallway. I was there only once when David and His older brother both got it. It was loud and long and they both came out crying. We had our coats on in the summer and were shooting each other with our Daisy BB guns. I don't know how we got caught, maybe the coats in hundred degree weather or it could have been David's screaming after he held his hand out as to signal time out and Keith his brother shot him in the middle of his hand. In those days even young children played for hours outside and never saw a parent or another adult. We were being watched just not aware of it. I had a boundary of where I was allowed to go and that was it. If I was not found within that boundary, it usually meant you would get a spanking.I had a tattle-tale dog named Sox. He would follow me everywhere. If I tried to venture out of my huge yard, he would pull me back or bark so wildly that my mother was on top of it. I was allowed to pick him out when I was only four. We went to the dog pound and they had puppies which were allowed to live until they grew and no one wanted them. I had been given a dollar and after I picked out my dog I had to pay for him. I think there were several pens each full of puppies. He was the only one that just laid there when I went in. He just looked at me somehow different from all the others. I picked him up and the adults who had been watching from a distance tried to get me to put him back and get a lively one. Mom and Dad were there. It is one of the few good memories I have of my mom and I was little. She told them to leave me alone and that if he was sick we would make him better. He and I grew up together and I think if not for that dog I might have not made it through some of my childhood.
The boundary grew larger as you aged. I was in the fourth grade, ten years old before I was allowed to go very far on my bicycle. My dad had taught me to patch my on bike tubes by then and I was in charge of keeping it running. It was a big deal to get a new tube, so usually I had a tube with fifty patches on it. I remember one day when tightening the nuts while putting my bike back together, I heard the voice in my mind. All I had was this huge crescent wrench. In my mind I heard the voice telling me to stop. It was very clear, just as if someone was standing there. I ignored the voice and tightened just a little bit more and the bolt stripped. This was a death sentence to the six dollar used bike I rode. Until I was saved I don't remember hearing that voice that clearly again. I know now it was the Holy Spirit. After the hard licking, David and his older brother went straight to their rooms and for an hour or so I watched a game with David's dad. I cried too and I still really don't know why. Davids dad seldom spoke to us unless he was telling us to stop doing something. That day he rubbed my head as to say it's not a big deal. I always touch children, because I can remember every man that ever touched me. There wasn't a lot of touch by the depression, WWII generation. If you were touched it was because you did something well or they just didn't have any words to speak, but wanted you to know everything was alright. If the men talked in a group we boy's wanted to listen. Every now and then they would talk about the war and it made a lasting impression on my generation. Once David and I were trying to mow his other grand dads yard. They had this cool new mower you wound up and pushed a release thing and it started itself. We were already arguing over which of our dads was the most important in the war. He was telling me about how his dad flew in a plane and bombed the Germans. We hadn't seen his dad and he had been listening. I am not sure why, but he came over and said,"David I almost flew over and bombed the Germans, but the planes were all breaking. I knew how to fixum, so I started doing that and realized I could help more by being a mechanic that a flier. They had lots of fliers and not many mechanics". He was a hero to both of us that day. He put gas in the mower and it started. I received quite a bit of touch from my dad, and watched my brother get very little touch, as I remember. Things went on with my family after my mother died and I never knew the details. I thought about it for years and still think it affected my brother and dads relationship. It is over now. I also think that as my brother was born while dad was in the war, 1942 it was kind of assumed he was stronger than I was, which is very true. My brothers gift or at least one of them is wisdom. He doesn't say a lot unless spoken to and there is no doubt of his supernatural wisdom. I have listened to him every time he spoke to me. I don't remember any thing he has told me to be wrong. It takes little time, but a rub of the head or pat on the back with a smile is a very strong reinforcement to children. It shows acceptance by someone that is not a family member. I have watched with pleasure as our body has touched and hugged my kids over the years. More probably in Andrew than the others. It has made them belong and they all know there is a home Church where they are accepted.
It was impossible not to laugh when Brother Lowry led the music. It was like he was screaming the words to the familiar songs, maybe so God could hear him. I saw other men laugh along with us just a little better at hiding it. Back to moving around. I don't think people changed churches and I don't think preachers moved unless a scandal happened or they died. The old Church moved when I was Eleven or twelve, about 1963-64.
After I was saved in 1978 and had moved back to Midland for a season, I got a call from Brother Simpson. He wanted me to be the song leader and possibly the new youth minister. I was blown away that out of the clear blue he was willing to entrust me with this position. To this day I don't know what was going on behind the scenes. I have no idea he even knew I was back in town. It was after Tammy and I were married in 1979. I had never played or sang in front of a Church and could not see me as a minister to anyone, well not youth. I didn't even know he knew I played the guitar. The last days were preached everywhere and we all expected Jesus anytime. Hal Lindsey's book The Late Great Planet Earth was in every store you went into. I think it might still hold the record for the top selling Christian book ever. He was removed from the Trinity Broadcasting Network, because He was speaking about radical Islam and if I am getting it right, he showed from the Koran that all Islam is against Christianity. He said on the news that there were no hard feelings between Jan and Paul, just a disagreement. I pray for him to get a place in mainstream media so he can be heard by everyone not just believers. We attended an Independent Baptist Church and I loved the people and the man behind the pulpit. He was a preacher, and sometimes called by that title. He was also called a pastor, even though his gift was evangelism. His name was Curtis Hollis and had been a very successful insurance salesman. He shared his testimony to me and again I heard those words, "surrendered his life to the ministry". This time I pinned him down and finally had a clear answer. People and preachers had started moving around fairly often by then. People talked about all three persons of the Godhead often, but I really wondered if they actually could hear any of them. I know a few people did, especially our pastor. I mentioned that he was operating in the role of Pastor, yet it was clear his main gift was evangelism. He hung in there until his health forced him to retire, but he was always a part of that Church. It was years later before I would know enough about gifts to know about his awesome gift of evangelism. Many men behind the same pulpit every week are really evangelists. I wouldn't fight over this, but it is one thing to have a Pastor who likes to evangelize or maybe has evangelism as a second gift. It is something else to have an evangelist as a pastor or as the human head of a body. The evangelist has a desire to be of help to souls in a way that seems near to being pastoral. It might even be something God gives for a time. He will tire fast at long termed problems. The evangelist is on the prowl for the lost, so much so, he can fill a whole building with converts, one at a time.
They are salesmen with a gift from God. They often have musical talents or they will have the best musicians in front of the Church. It is part of a gifted show, especially for the lost, but enjoyed by the congregation. People will leave other Churches to come to the life and the show. It is all real and from God. The problem is that as more and more want to hang on to the evangelist and use him as a pastor, he starts to feel tied down. He is not a counselor to the saved as much as a leader to the lost. In many of these cases the man will move on and many of those clinging to him will fall away with a bitterness of spirit. In the best case, while the evangelist is still around there will be a true pastor ready to step into that role and he can be of the personality to build confidence in the people. The people are strong enough hopefully to realize the difference between evangelist and pastor, and start to trust the pastor with the job of counsel. Pastor is a shepherd, who cares about the health of the believers and the lost. This is all the time and not for just a season. He is comfortable as long as the church is strong and has a need for him. If it becomes the same people over and over, with much the same problems time and again, the pastor will start feeling inadequate and feel it is time to leave. He leaves for the good of the body, but leaves hurt, many times never voicing his reason for leaving. This might happen several times in his life and eventually a man of God called to be a shepherd will never try again in an organized Church. There are not that many true pastors. Pastor was our Lords predominant gift, I get this by His often being referred to as a Shepherd. I have only known three true pastors in my lifetime, at least that had a part in my life.
Brother Hollis didn't like jumpy people and spoke often about them with a really loud voice. There was constantly in Midland a fight for souls. I even remember a church giving away bicycles to all the children very publicly so every child knew he could get a free bike if his parents would go to that Church. The loud voice was the trademark of those called preachers. It was not an offensive thing then and always had a measure of truth, I think. There were some toes stepped on, but the congregation usually were guilty,as was he and it made you think about the issue preached about. Somewhere it became a custom and many tried to copy it. If it is not from the Holy Spirit, it offends and chases people away. I think if someone yelled in most places today he would offend everyone there. I wonder if a spirit filled preacher speaking loud would do the same. I feel like yelling some times, just to see if people are listening. It seems like the world has the power of distraction even in the Church. I often see families that have not been able to spend much time together during the week, engulfed while in church trying to catch up. Most of the yellers now are trying to use guilt to hang on to members or trying to build himself up.
Jumping back to my younger years. I don't remember understanding any of the messages until after I was saved in 1978. All the years as a child I never listened, even though I tried and David just played like it I thought. It was nearly a year after my mothers death. One day I was at home alone after school. I was almost fourteen I think. I still was going to church some Sundays with David and his family. There was a knock on the door of my house and it was David, Brother Simpson, and another man I didn't know. Brother Simpson asked me if they could come in and visit and I told him my dad wasn't there. I thought I was in some kind of trouble. In those days small stuff could bring the adults, especially the preachers to your door, I thought. They visited everyone's homes anyway and Brother Simpson was well liked in my home. This day it was announced to me that David had been saved. There was a revival at the Church that week and it was the revival preacher who was telling me this. He gave me the option of being saved also. I was looking at David and evidently not with very nice looks, Brother Simpson told us to go talk about it for a few minutes alone. We went into my bedroom which was only fifteen feet from the living room of our small two bedroom house. I could hear Brother Simpson humming in the bathroom as you could hear the water hitting the toilet. I remember whispering and that's about it other than David telling me he was to be baptized Sunday Night and didn't want to be alone. Sunday was also the last night of the revival. Every Church or denomination had some sort of yearly revival or fair and always had vacation bible school. It was a blur as the two ministers spoke to me and asked me to pray after one of them. I knew about prayer, as less than a year from then I had lost my Mother. For three years before that I lived in a house, alone with two screaming, fighting adults. There was not much religious stuff in my house. In my room there was a set of Bible Story books, that my mom purchased when I was really young. My religious aunt had given me two wall plaques, one with John 3;16 printed out and the other with the now I lay me down to sleep prayer. My Mother was always drunk in those days. As my parents fought I would say John 3;16 over and over. I had a real tall bed and I would crawl between it and the wall and cover my ears.
That day I repeated what the revival preacher said and was asked to be baptized the next Sunday with David. I agreed although I didn't understand why and assumed David didn't either. I guess the revival hadn't worked very well because we were the only two. I remember stripping down to undies and putting on this white robe thing, like a remade bed sheet. We were dunked and everyone including Brother Simpson cried for a long time. I know from a later conversation that it was because of me. Everyone talked forever while David and I kicked rocks around in the parking lot waiting to go home. Everyone knew my circumstances, all the way back to when my mother started drinking. They had all been at the funeral and brother Simpson had spoken that day. I guess they all thought all was well that ends well and salvation was the happy ending. It sure could have helped if I had only understood. I think maybe my age was much of my problem, thirteen- fourteen is a hard age. I was seldom in the church after my baptism and I would bump into Brother Simpson every now and then, he was nice and would just say," we sure miss you", and that was about it.
I made a drastic change another August evening in about 1967. I talked my dad into buying an electric guitar and a very small amplifier. I still remember that new varnish smell. We were in White's a chain of stores carrying a lot of neat stuff. We were getting our yearly set of new tires another tradition of those times. He decided he wanted this big long console stereo. I had a record player but it wouldn't play stereo, as this was a fairly new technology. I am not sure, but I think he bought it mainly for me. It cost $300.00 I picked several rock and roll albums that night. It was not like my dad to charge that much stuff. I also bought other records as I did some yards and helped in the local convenience store for a little spending money. Dad worked longer hours than usual for a couple of years and we kind of lost touch. I skip to the ninth grade and Seven Eleven. They bought out the local convenience store and the man who was the supervisor, later my stepbrother asked me to work on the grocery delivery truck. It came every Friday from El Paso. I had to be excused from the junior high half a day every Friday. It was agreed to by the school administration as long as my grades were good. I got to know all the store managers and there were seven or eight stores I believe. I was ask by the manager of the last stop if I would stay and help him stock the new merchandise. I agreed. I remember Ernie, the supervisor patting me on the back often. Earl the store manager I helped stock also often patted me on the back. They were the only two at that time. I would get acquainted with a beautiful woman manager that started at the store near my home. She had a boyfriend and he was tough. He was a Texas state trooper with a large West Texas area.I grew to be friends with two troopers that had all of West Texas. One night Sues husband was shooting cats on the long wood fence behind their trailer. He was turned in by his neighbors, everyone was laughing about it. I had gone there every night for several years and stocked the walk-in cooler and just hung out until closing time, eleven pm. They paid me five bucks every night and at my age that added up and allowed me to buy my first car eventually. I was really learning the guitar and when my cousin visited he was amazed at this guitar thing. I had bought these Ventures albums that would teach you how to play some of their simple songs. The songs were not what we wanted to play but they were songs everyone liked. My cousin begged his mother for an electric guitar. She worked as a nurse and his dad worked in the oilfield, so he was able to get a much better guitar than mine. He started working on his in Wink, Texas and became a rock musician. He was all American in football and was probably the most popular boy in Wink High. He dated the High School Principles daughter. He,(the principal) was the most important man in Wink and seemed like the wealthiest. He approved of my cousin for a while, but it kind of got bad as we got older. Somehow music became the most important thing in my life. All of this leads to this. I couldn't go to Woodstock, because I did have to work. I lived in my own little apartment one and a half rooms, $45.00 per month, bills paid. I had a new car payment on my 1968 Camaro. I was seventeen and had lived on my own for two years. I was having a hard time in school and was about to enter my senior year. I actually worked two jobs, one in a Seven Eleven grocery store and at night at a Shell station until midnight, every night. I was dependable help and occasionally got a weekend off. I worked mainly days, because I had dropped out of school. I at least had week-end nights off. I also had a full time girl and a wild bunch of friends. I had a bootlegger who would buy me beer. The bootlegger was my brothers age. He had been accidentally shot when in his teens and was paralyzed on one side of his body. He was probably the closest childhood friend I had. We had been on the same land every night from my ages 12 to 16. He set me straight many times and I still live by some things he taught me. I would ice down the beer and drive to Wink and pick up my cousin and his stuff. We then would drive to Pyote, Texas to practice in an old unused gym many times until dawn. My life was a confusing blur. I have to get Jethro Tull in here. There was a guy named Steve I think. He worked across from the Shell station at Enco, another gas station. He walked across the street on Friday as I was about to get off. I had my cousin and Dennis, (another good friend) with me, waiting for me. He looked like a nerd big black framed glasses and all. He wanted us to go to his house to listen to a guy named Jethro Tull. We had never seen Steve before up close, but to his house we went. My guys and I really didn't like Jethro much, but somehow we all came up with a late Friday afternoon plan to Go to Mexico. We took off and went. Dennis was supposed to work the station the next morning, but decided it would be worth it to get fired. Old Mexico was a rough place. Across the border from Del Rio, Texas lies ,"Cunia" we called it. When you got to Cunia you were attacked by men wanting to take you to boystown. It was an area away from the main town through residential poverty, (shacks). There was a whole street lined with clubs. You had to pay someone to watch your car and you were allowed to drink and do other things also. It was two hours before daylight when we were ready to leave. Dennis had borrowed my keys while we were being entertained. I didn't even think about it. When we were back at the car ready to leave, we noticed the guard was gone. Your stereo eight track player was what thieves would steal by knocking out a window. Some lost their cars to never get them back. The eight track player was still there and the Santana tape was in it. I heard this noise as we were about to try to find our way through the residential district of town alone. It sounded like the back of the car was falling off. I stopped after only going a hundred yards and went to the back of the car. Someone was kicking and screaming from inside the small trunk. I opened to find this cute chunky, but small Mexican Girl. Dennis was talking in English, she was talking in Spanish. They had hatched a plan for her to escape Mexico. She chickened out. Dennis was devastated and up ran our guard. He had been looking for us to get the girl out. We let her go and with our guard and leader, we set off through the back streets with houses and people asleep in their homes. My rear tire on my side went flat. They were special tires for my special car so I had to stop. The guard kept saying go, go and was in a panic. I stopped and he got out and ran. Ahead I saw about ten guys running towards us and we all thought this was it. They came up and none could speak English. They used the jack and tools and put on my regular spare tire, which was like new. They reloaded the trunk and waved us off. WHEW! We drove straight ahead, scared to death and we made it to the main town which was closed down, except for a small noisy bar or two. We had driven until the sun came up and now on the interstate, we had another blowout. It was the new spare. A guy stopped and took Dennis back to the last town, got the right tire fixed and we were moving in an hour and a half. Many details are missing here because I really can't remember everything in it's place. I added the Mexico trip to show a big step towards my final transition into radical rebellion. Dennis and I got in trouble by the station owner, who had to work in the place of Dennis. His name was Ronnie, he was a Korean war veteran with a bad leg and he leased two Shell stations in great locations. We were young, but we really ran the stations. I was offered a job as manager for a Seven Eleven store. I was six months from being eighteen and they had to get a special permit to allow me to sell beer. I left Shell and ran a grocery store. My store was in a very new neighborhood by the pretty new high school. Midland Lee. The store boomed and it made me look really good. I had a promising career that I have fallen back on several times in my life. I always was promoted quickly and it seemed through normal eyes this was my destiny. It just never worked out and I didn't like it. Jethro Tull, the name of the band, not any individual and Steve would form a new side to the music. Steve had an amazing bunch of sound equipment and knew how to use it. I learned to professionally produce music and operate elaborate recording equipment. It helped our band to be good, but I never had the urge to buy all the equipment and Steve just sat around and listened to underground rock. Jethro Tull was a very soft side of his music. We were The Brimstone Cult and were really not that evil. We had several of our own songs, but learned a wide spectrum of other music, so we could get playing jobs. My cousin and I had both lost our girls and for a season we had a lot of time to practice. We had a bass guitar player from Pyote, a drummer, who was older by a few years than us, and a keyboard. My cousin played rhythm and sang lead, I played lead and sang backup. We almost toured with The Guess Who from Canada, it was a deal set up by our unpaid manager. We mostly drank a lot of beer and practiced. I guess we were pretty good, we always had a big following or maybe it was the beer. We knew about Woodstock and had the same philosophy of all those dirty hippies. We had hair about as long as teens wear it now. We just combed it down over our foreheads. We were called Hippies. Midland didn't have many other hippies, they were all in uniform fighting in Viet Nam. We couldn't be draft dodgers. Seriously we were just a year younger than most hippies. Most of the hippies at Woodstock were college students with an educational deferments. we were seventeen year old hippies and would have to fight overseas if we got drafted at eighteen. I had a few friends that didn't make it back from Viet Nam alive. The ones that did just sort of hid out. Music was the common denominator of the rebellion and Woodstock was the ultimate showdown with the establishment. We never understood that the future establishment was trying to make money at Woodstock. I am going to stop here for tonight and just remember other things I've kind of dredged up. I did go to the Army in 1972. I was to be drafted. They used a number system to figure out which eighteen year olds would go. It was drawn at random from 365 days of the year. My number was 166 and they drew up to 169. I was going to be drafted. I went to the recruiter and he convinced me to join for an extra year to at least have a pick of jobs. If I could pass the tests for the job I wanted I might get a better place in Viet Nam. I tested out in electronics and chose teletype operator. I was on orders three different times to go to Viet Nam and somehow got out of it all three times. Two times they just changed the orders and the last time I was actually on the side of a runway and they called the last names starting with A-M and they loaded on planes. I had to haul all my gear back to base at three am and go to work at five. They were bringing guts home and many of them came to Ft. Carson in Colorado Springs. They assigned to our units and it was not even their job. They had never seen a teletype and they didn't have clearance to enter the vans. I have skipped around a lot. I hope you can make some since out of it all. The movie Forest Gump was probably the best way to understand what it was really like through many of those days. I watched that movie and thought that it was amazing someone from my time actually remembered all that stuff. I probably was more like Lt. Dan than anyone else in the movie. I spent my time screaming at God, of course in private.
Wednesday august 26, 2009
Well, I guess it is just a part of the way we live now. I write as I think and I am not sure this blog thing is going to work. I was sending emails. I sent them as I saw something or was reminded of something. So far, by the time I find and sign in to the blog I forget what I needed to say. Somehow pages were lost. If I write something I work off the top of my head and if it is lost it is lost forever. I never will return to that time again and only portions can be reclaimed from my mind. My intentions are not to do my bio, yet I feel like reading something someone writes and not knowing that person to some extent makes no since. I read a lot of information and I take much to heart by the way I feel about the person. I might read something Ted Kennedy writes and for the most part forget it. I don't know him as a real person, I have based my opinion about him by a combination of things going back many years in his life. I imagine if I met him I would probably like him. I like just about everyone, and tolerate the others. The list of those I tolerate is a short one and are of people I have actually had dealings with. The tolerated used lies to attack my family. I can pray for their best and that's about it right now. The spell checker goes nuts with King James English. I close this topic with, forget Woodstock it was just a weird accident, that no one was killed or overdosed. Those were times in my life I must remember, just to know some of where I came from. I have proofread and corrected this too many times, this is the final version. Those that know me can figure it out or just ask me questions. Please comment so I know if this is even read by others. I need this stuff out of me and to know others know me for what I am and know part of what made me. I almost stopped everything last night, August 27,2009. The reason is because I feel useless. I don't think anyone in the world has time to read anything, little on the babbling of an old prophet, better said old man. I asked God for validation of my existence and this mess. He and I know the validation. He gave the validation for me to continue. In separate stories I will fill in a lot of pieces. I guess it was a big thing to me, I surrendered my life to the ministry in the Independent Baptist Church in 1980. I was ordained by quite a few men of God. It changed my life in many ways and still is part of God and I.
Psalm 82
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