Category: Newsletter

My grandfather had a dread of nursing homes. He’d seen too many people he knew who had to go into one…especially his sister Allie. 

Allie was my great-aunt. I’m not sure how it started, but once to make her laugh I stuck out my tongue and blew “raspberries” at her. She got such a kick out of it that I did it every time I saw her or talked to her on the phone. She actually would be disappointed if I didn’t blow “raspberries” at her. 

Aunt Allie developed dementia and had to be put in a nursing home. For a while she still laughed when I blew “raspberries”. But after a while even that didn’t make her laugh anymore.   

My grandfather saw all of that, and he began to say to us, “Don’t ever put me in a nursing home!” And we never wanted to. 

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I recently bought what’s called a “Reader’s Bible”. It’s an edition of the Bible that doesn’t have verse divisions or footnotes of any kind. The chapter divisions are there, but in very light print, out to the side of the Biblical text. The idea is to allow you to read the text free from distraction, much like someone in centuries past might have read the Scriptures from a scroll.

This is a great way to experience God’s Word, and one I would recommend to you. I first did this on vacation last year when I took a copy of The Reader’s Gospels with me, and read all four Gospels in two weeks. You tend to read longer portions at one sitting, and it’s easier to see the flow of the text, especially in the narrative portions of the Bible.

Now let me tell you why I’m going to stop doing this.

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I still miss Ginny Franklin. I still hear her feisty, playful voice in my memory sometimes. I’ll say, “Well, I’m trying.” … and I’ll hear her say, “Yes; you’re very trying!” Or I’ll say, “I’m going to go.” …and I’ll hear her say, “Go-right-ahead…gourd-head!” Virginia Franklin was the first person to make my wife and I feel at home in the First Baptist Church of Linton. She was a corker!

One Sunday after church, she took my wife and me out to lunch (again!). This time, we were joined by Max and Katie Slough. Max was the long-time pastor of the Glenburn United Methodist Church; I’d known him before, and we became reacquainted when we moved to Linton.

Sitting there over what was left of our lunch, I breathed a huge sigh and commented how tired I was after the morning’s services. Max responded, “Of course you are! You preached this morning; virtue has gone out of you, just like when Jesus healed.” He was referring to three references in the King James Bible: Mark 5:30, Luke 6:19 and Luke 8:46.

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Recently I read again an article that described how our church began. I keep a file on the history of our church, and it contains various bulletins, newspaper articles and records from our church’s past. This particular article was written in 1963 by one of my predecessors, Reverend Dale T. Heinbaugh, for the 75^th anniversary of our church’s founding. Reverend Heinbaugh was the pastor of First Baptist Church of Linton from 1960 to 1969. I shared this with our Sunday night crowd recently, but I thought it needed a wider circulation.

I had been told, and had told others, that our church was started in 1888 by the Olive Branch Baptist Church, which is just west of the Linton city limits. That is both true and not precisely true. What actually happened is told in the following excerpts from Pastor Heinbaugh’s article.

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I had a “Leave It to Beaver” childhood. We had a nuclear family in the best sense of that word. It was a wonderful, stable, happy family setting. It wasn’t perfect, but it was very, very good. I will always be grateful to God for my parents.
My Dad didn’t talk all that much while I was growing up. If you wanted to talk out a problem, you went to Mom. Dad was an engineer. He’d tell you a joke and buy you an ice cream cone, and he’d carry you to bed when you fell asleep in the back of the car. But you had your long conversations with Mom.
That changed after Mom went to Heaven. We had a lot more in-depth conversations with Dad in the ten years after Mom died. It was good. Up until that time, Dad would talk to you, and you could talk to him, but the conversations tended to be of the “here’s the problem, here’s the solution” variety. Beyond that, he didn’t say a lot.
But Dad modeled some wonderful things for us. Here are a few things I learned from my Dad:

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As I write this, Christmas 2018 is hurtling at us at high speed. But aside from all the scheduling conflicts and budgetary juggling, I still anticipate it keenly. The little boy in me still delights in the lights and the presents. The grown-up part of me looks forward to family gathered and young ones all excitedabout the festivities.

Someone wrote an article once in which they stated, “Christmas time is to churches what Black Friday is to retail stores.” Honestly, that is true more often than not. That’s why a few years ago our leadership decided to purposely steer our church away from show business-like extravaganzas and toward simpler, more scaled-back ways of celebrating Christmas. If we have to act in an un-Christ-like manner in order to prepare to celebrate Christ’s birth, I’m not sure that really honors Jesus. So we’ve tried in recent years to celebrate Christmas as a church in ways that don’t add more hurry and stress to people’s lives.

But I do love Christmas. And I love Christmas at our church.

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   One of my all-time favorite guitar heroes is Phil Keaggy. He is a phenomenal player who has literally moved me to tears with his artistry and the sheer joy and abandon with which he plays. He was on the rise back in the early 1970s, making a name for himself in secular rock music. But he became a Christian, and to the dismay of many, he walked away from the threshold of rock stardom and devoted himself to Christian music. He has played and sung original Christian music ever since, eventually recording and distributing his albums independently of any record label. He lives in Nashville, TN with his wife Bernadette, still tours, and I have had the privilege of seeing and hearing him play live twice.

   Keaggy has released over 50 albums in his career. On one of his albums released back in the 1990s, at the end of the liner notes thanking various people, Phil Keaggy wrote these words: “After all this time, I still believe.” I think I knew immediately what he meant.

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I have a confession to make. I hesitate to say it. I really don’t want it to be misunderstood. But here it is:

I dread Pastor Appreciation Month.

Ever since Dr. James Dobson’s Focus On the Family organization started promoting October as “Pastor Appreciation Month” back in the early 1990s, it has become more and more of an annual event on church calendars. Hallmark prints greeting cards just for the occasion (of course). Christian bookstores have big displays promoting it. You can even buy T-shirts that say things like “World’s Greatest Pastor”. (And they look an awful lot like the ones that say “World’s Greatest Dad” and “World’s Greatest Mom.”)

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate being appreciated. I was brought up to honor pastors, and I have expressed my appreciation to my own pastor, and others who have mentored me over the years, more times than I can count.

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