Ruthlace

IRAQ

2012-01-23T05:59:00.001-05:00

Interesting Facts recently reported about Iraq.

1. The Garden of Eden was in Iraq.

2. Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq , was the cradle of civilization!

3. Noah built the ark in Iraq.

4. The Tower of Babel was in Iraq

5. Abraham was from Ur, which is in Southern Iraq!

6. Isaac's wife Reb ekah is from Nahor, which is in Iraq!

7. Jacob met Rachel in Iraq.

8. Jonah preached in Nineveh - which is in Iraq.

9. Assyria, which is in Iraq, conquered the ten tribes of Israel.

10. Amos cried out in Iraq!

11. Babylon, which is in Iraq, destroyed Jerusalem.

12. Daniel was! in the lion's den in Iraq!

13. The three Hebrew children were in the fire in Iraq.

14. Belshazzar, the King of Babylon saw the "writing on the wall" in Iraq.

15. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, carried the Jews captive into Iraq.

16. Ezekiel preached in Iraq.

17. The wise men were from Iraq

18. Peter preached in Iraq.

19. The "Empire of Man" described in Revelation is called Babylon, which was a city in Iraq!

And you have probably seen this one. Israel is the nation most often mentioned in the Bible. But do you know which nation is second? It is Iraq! However, that is not the name that is used in the Bible The names used in the Bible are Babylon, Land of Shinar, and Mesopotamia The word Mesopotamia means between the two rivers, more exactly between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The name Iraq, means country with deep roots.

Indeed Iraq is a country with deep roots and is a very significant country in the Bible.

No other nation, except Israel, has more history and prophecy associated it than Iraq.

The following verse is from the Koran, (the Islamic Bible)
Koran (9:11 ) - For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah; and there was peace .

(Note the verse number!) Hmmmmmmm?!

Love Thy Neighbor

2012-01-22T07:02:00.002-05:00

Neighbors were an important part of life in the twenties and thirties. Our neighbors were in and out of our home all the time. Sometimes it was to borrow a cup of sugar or an egg to finish out a recipe. Sometimes a neighbor would stop in to share vegetables or cookies.

But often the visits were just to sit and talk. It was not uncommon for several neighbor women to visit with my mother on our front porch late afternoons after a long day of work.

On evenings our front porch seemed to also be the gathering place for men, women and children after the evening meal (referred to as "supper") at night. The porch had several inviting rocking chairs as well as a swing with space enough to seat three adults.

While the adults were talking, the children played "hide and seek" or "kick the can" out in the front yard or on the unpaved road in front of our house.

I have fond memories as a child of being in and out of the homes of the Finchers, the Parnells, the Moores, the Hornings. And they visited with us daily.

Then there was a quaint lady from out of town, who, with her children, would visit us overnight and sometimes for two or three days several times a year. I remember sitting on our front porch (along with various friends and neighbors) near sundown one afternoon.

We looked down the street and saw this lady and her children coming toward our house. I said to Mama, "Here comes Mrs. Johnson (I'll call her)."

Someone asked Mama why Mrs. Johnson and her children often came to our house. They lived miles away. The answer seemed simply enough to Mama. "We were neighbor to them on the farm," Mama said.

As I have told in another post, Papa made the difficult decision to move off their farm into a nearby Textile community after the onslaught of boll weevils that all but destroyed their annual cotton profits as the South was trying to recover from the devastation of the Civil war.

The former neighbor lady, Mrs Johnson was short and heavy. Her dark hair was pulled straight back in a bun. Her only daughter and older child was "Mae." Mae was thin and very subdued. She was even more shy than I! Mae walked just a little behind her mother on the sidewalk as they made their way down our street. The three little brothers followed their mother and sister in a procession.

I can visualize them now as they walked toward our house. Mama welcomed them, gave them supper, found a bed for the lady, and put pallets of folded quilts and a feather pillow each on the floor for Mae (and me). Mrs. Johnson sleep in my bed. Mama also put a comfortable pallet of quilts on the floor for the three little boys.

I do not remember what, if anything, Mae and I talked about before we fell asleep side by side on the floor. The lady had a husband but we never saw him. I overheard someone say her husband was "sorry’ and "no account".

Children were "seen and not heard " in those days. So, of course, I did not ask. But I learned by listening. In these days before Television, this was a mystery somewhat like a soap opera.

While visiting with us, Mrs. Johnson would always get up early, and she would come to the place where Mae and I were sleeping on the floor and say, "Rise, Mae." I thought this was "funny."

Incidentally, we sometimes referred to mentally ill people as someone who "acted funny" or had "gone crazy." I thought the Johnsons "acted funny" and we both laughed at some of their ways and cried for them.

Looking back it may have been wife and/or child abuse that caused them to leave their home so suddenly, walk five or six miles and show up at our house. As far as I know they came and went without explanation. If Mama knew, she kept her own counsel and always treated Mrs. Johnson and her children with respect, preparing food and bedding for them as respectfully as she did when her own sisters visited.

After all, we had been "neighbor to them" on the farm.

How Do Women Preachers Dress?

2012-01-18T15:39:00.001-05:00

I am going to be a preacher,” she told me. “Wonderful,” I said. Of course, I knew that she was talking about her role in the upcoming youth Easter drama, but I was excited for her nonetheless. Then she asked, “Should I dress as a woman or a man?” I told her that she should dress as a woman and that she was going to be a great preacher.

I was troubled because her question represented an uncertainty as to whether or not a woman could be a preacher, so much so that she considered dressing as a man necessary to more accurately portray the role she had been given in the play.

Her church ordains women as Deacons. From time to time, women even fill the pulpit as guest preachers, though obviously not enough to give her a clear impression that she did not need to dress as a man in order to play a preacher in the Easter drama.

The uncertainty about women in pastoral roles demonstrates just how effective the culture in which we live is undermining the teachings of a local church. The Bible we read gives us countless examples of women working for the Lord and leading young churches. Our scriptures are bold to say that “. . .in Christ, there is neither male nor female. . .,” and that in the last days God will pour out God’s spirit on all flesh so that our “. . .sons and our daughters shall prophesy.”

How then do we find ourselves, at times, uncertain and ambivalent about who God can call to do God’s work? Consider for a moment that women have been allowed to vote in our country for less than a hundred years. Generally speaking, the arguments against women voting sounded high-minded and moral. The Holy Scriptures were often invoked to undergird arguments against women voting. Of course, voting was not the only thing that women were not allowed to do. There were any number of professions and careers that were off limits to women simply because they were women. Preaching was high on the list of occupations unsuitable for women.

Today, the list of careers that women cannot pursue is whittled down to one – preaching — and then only in certain pockets of the Christian faith. Of all the activities that society once deemed off limits to women, preaching remains.

Those opposed to women preaching unfailingly state their position with passages from the Bible that would seem to suggest that women should not have leadership roles in the church. I would grant that there are such passages of scripture, but there are also passages of scripture that would suggest just the opposite.

So then, the question becomes not so much what the Bible says, but how do we read what the Bible says. Will we read it as people who long for the days when women were denied freedom and opportunity, or will we read it as a people who believe that the God who said His spirit would be poured out on all flesh is, in fact, doing that very thing even as we speak?

Today the pastor of Pingdu Christian Church in Pingdu, China is a woman. This church was started in 1885, when a tiny woman from Virginia ventured, on her own, 120 miles inland to share the Gospel in a city that had no Christian witness. That woman’s name was Lottie Moon.

Lottie Moon was appointed as a missionary to China by the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. No, she would not have been allowed to pastor a church in the United States at that time, but it was fine for her to go where no man was willing to and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Today, pastor Wang Xia, leads multiple congregations and meeting points, along with her pastoral associates, telling the same story that was told the residents of her city long ago by Miss Lottie Moon.

Baptists have had women preachers throughout our history. We have just not always appreciated them as such. Even today, as Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary prepares to reconstruct Miss Moon’s Pingdu house into an on-campus historical display, the living legacy of Miss Moon’s devotion to the cause of Christ is ignored and rejected by Southern Baptists. They have trademarked her name, but they have shackled her spirit.

They are happy to use their fundamentalized version of Lottie Moon to raise money for their enterprise, even while they ignore and demean the gifts and callings of her spiritual descendants.
We honor the legacy of Lottie Moon, and others like her, when we help our children, our sons and our daughters, listen to whatever God is saying in their lives. We keep that legacy alive when in faith we, along with our children, say yes to God’s call in our lives.
No doubt Catherine B. Allen says it best in this months Baptists Today, “The stones in Fort Worth will cry out a message the seminary has officially rejected. Ye who have ears, listen to what the Spirit says!”
(The article above copied from a Baptist paper)

The "White Experience" during Secregation.

2012-01-14T05:10:00.001-05:00

Remembering the " White Experience " during Segregation in America. African American friends tell us it is difficult for white people to understand the "Black experience." This was the phrase my husband and I heard over and over from Black friends in the Fifties and Sixties in church and civic groups and in our home when African Americans were visiting with us. It is true. This lack of understanding by any of us who have not walked in the shoes of another is the stuff of which hostility and even riots are made!

Perhaps some will find it interesting to hear something of the "White Experience." Of course none of us, whatever the color our skin happens to be, can speak for all. I was born in 1923, when the South was still trying to recover from the destruction of the Civil War and the beginnings of the Great Depression.

In our town many Caucasian workers worked from "sunup to sundown," twelve hour days for a meager living in one of the textile mills or anywhere they could find employment.

Cotton farmers all over the South during the Great Depression and the Boll weevil epidemic were giving up on trying to make a living in farming. My older cousin Aubrey Simms's told me he remembered as a boy of six, the very night in 1922 when my father told his father about his decision to sell his farm and move to town. Aubrey said his Dad replied, "Uncle Wilson, I will go to share cropping before I will raise my family in a Mill town."

Apparently my father, a hard working and intelligent Christian man in failing health, thought this his only option. I am told he worked in the Old Porterdale mill until he became disabled. He was bedridden for over a year and died when I was nine.

Most of the Black men we saw were the collectors of garbage or worked as unskilled laborers in one of the cotton factories. Textile Mills had been moved South for cheap black and white labor after the Civil War. They found plenty. Many southerners can point back to the hard working "Cotton Mill" experience as a part of their inheritance.

Many Black women worked as cooks and housekeepers and in child care for the poor white workers.

Sad to say, we each had our own schools and churches. Most of our schools had been destroyed and school tuition and books for high school and college were beyond he means of most of the people, Black and White.

It was customary and considered proper to socialize with ones own race. Thus Black workers come into the homes of White people through the back door to distinguish it as a service rather than a social call.

Class distinctions were also important, but were not always so obvious, nor so rigid. As Margaret Mitchell had Rhett Butler to illustrated in Gone with the Wind, with white skin, one could possibly make money by hook or by crook and sooner or later get legal and/or "respectful" and move up the social ladder. Possible but not likely?

The white experience was that many, if not most, white men and women were also poorly educated (or schooled...some, like my father who was "self-educated") and worked 12-hour days. In those days, it took both paychecks to survive. Most children stopped school and went to work as soon as they were old enough. The burning of schools and churches in the South after Sherman's march through Georgia at the end of the Civil War had taken its toll.

When I came on the scene, this was the custom. This I saw and pretty much accepted in my childhood as "just the way things are." We had no social contact with African-American people at all. We had never heard the term “segregation, "integration "nor "discrimination.”

All the black people we knew were servants who seemed accepting of their status. As a child, I had noticed that Mama always treated kindly the "Colored" women who sometimes worked in our kitchen. My intelligent and hard working widowed mother worked as a weaver in the Cord Weave Shop of Osprey Mill in our small town. The "Cord Weave Shop" made heavy cloth used for tent making, to reinforce auto, truck and tank tires among other such uses.

In those days it was a common practice for the Colored or Negro cook to eat at a "cook table" rather than with the family. A cook table was a table on the side of the wall where we mixed and rolled our bread, etc. The dining table was in the center of the room and sometimes nearer the stove and therefore warmer. Mama would always ask the Black lady, much to her seeming dismay, to sit at the dining table with us in cold weather. I suppose this seemed the same kind of paternalism that white workers dealt with from textile officials who gave out Christmas bags of candy, fruit and nuts to everyone in town - black and white - and who built schools and churches and tried to be good to all their "mill hands."

The textile mills jobs also required feet, eyes and brain but the workers were referred to as "hands." We referred to Black people as "Colored people" or "Negroes" – often with the Southern pronunciation "Negra" close to the sound of the "N" word. We were corrected in school (and sometimes in home) and told to fully pronounce the last vowel, "Negro." We thought it would be insulting to say "black, " as in "old black Joe". And it was considered ignorant by educated Caucasians then as now it is considered insulting and criminal to say the "N" word.

Incidentally "color," as on a "color chart" is not a good way, in my judgement to define any of us. I have never seen anyone with "black" skin. On a color chart, skin might be discribed as dark brown to light beige. Neither have I seen "white" skin. Caucasian might accurately be described as having light ivory to dark beige skin. ( But snow is "white" and it is no compliment nor insult for Christians to be told they can be washed "whiter than snow." We are taking about " soul" washing not skin.) Perhaps one day we will describe ourselves as either Caucasian or Negroid, instead of the inaccurate description of "Black" or "White" or the divisive "European American" and "African American" ?

Being from a Christian family, I never saw any African American person being physically mistreated. But in addition to many kindnesses, I also observed some indignities against them. Whether we are African American or Caucasian, many of us are sad to know that our intelligent, hard working and good parents and/or grandparents had little to no educational opportunities in the south until after World War II.
When I was a young teen, an attractive and bright young "Negro" girl came into our kitchen and said something to me (not to my mother) to let me know coming into our house by the back door was discrimination rather than just "custom." I had never before thought about this.

My husband Charles, 4 years older than I, remembered one young Negro man having rocks thrown at him as he ran away from “stealing” some apples from an apple orchard. Charles was a young boy at the time and didn't know for sure, but his fear was that the young man might have been seriously injured. Remembering these kinds of treatment against African Americans is tragic. This made a profound impression on Charles, although he did not know the people who owned the Apple tree or any of the people throwing rocks at the young man as he ran away down a railroad tract. Charles said he stood there as a little boy feeling afraid and ashamed and knowing in his heart the horror of the situation.

Charles and I often talked about this. This kind of behavior was so foreign to the Christian concept and the experience of Peter and Cornelius in the Bible that God is no respecter of persons. Even earlier, the Jewish law of gleaning taught that even a sojourner and a stranger was to be cared for and allowed to pick grain or fruit to eat from others' fields as he passed by.

Yes, there has been world wide slavery and class distinctions from the beginning of written history. It was still a fact in Bible times but never condoned in the Bible as some have claimed. After all, the major celebration in the Old Testament is the Passover of the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt slavery into freedom.

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, slavery was already a world wide practice along with “survival of the fittest.”

As G.K. Chesterson said, "the end of slavery was begun when Jesus died … although it took the church years to become powerful enough to defeat the powerful slave trade."

The South was only beginning to recover from the Civil War when the economic depression hit. After World War II, when things began to get better, and Charles and I became committed Christians, we spoke out for Civil Rights long before it became a politically correct posture for whites to take. We took some licks for this stance from those who did not see the need for such "quick change."

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , A gifted Christian minister began to "speak out" with conviction, many Caucasians became informed and educated enough to join him in his fight to the death. Then in the Methodist Church we had white men and women like "Mrs M. E. Tilly" and others who held Methodist feet to the fire until most of us woke up and saw the evil of segregation.

In the 60's my husband, Charles Shaw was pastor of Trinity Methodist Church. Silas McComb had been the church caretaker for many years. His wife died and Mr. McComb asked my husband to participate in her funeral at their church, the Metropolitan Church, an African- American Methodist Church. Miss Lottie Duncan, our Trinity Methodist Church secretary, and I went to the funeral. The people in the church welcomed us warmly. I observed they read from the same Bible and sang from the same Methodist Hymnal as we did. Why were we not friends and co-workers?
Perhaps we can recover from some of the bitterness when we realize the issue of slavery is not altogether a Black and White issue! Less than 8 percent of the people in the South had “owned” slaves. Most were white but a few wealthy Black people and a few Native Americans also owned slaves.

History reveals there were white Abolitionists who gave their life for freedom and Civil Rights from the beginning of African people being sold by some Black Africans to some White slavers. From my own experience, I know of many white people who worked and prayed tirelessly and some who died for the end of segregation and for equal rights for all people. Today we see some White and some Black "racists." Hopefully it is a minority and most of us want the best life possible for all people.

A FALLEN SOLDIER RETURNS HOME

2012-01-08T16:02:00.000-05:00

AIRLINE CAPTAIN writes:
" My lead flight attendant came to me and said, "We have an H.R. on this flight." (H.R. Stands for human remains.) "Are they military?" I asked. 'Yes', she said. 'Is there an escort?' I asked. 'Yes, I already assigned him a seat'.
'Would you please tell him to come to the flight deck. You can board him early," I said.

A young army sergeant, the image of the perfectly dressed soldier, entered the flight deck and introduced himself. I asked him about his soldier. The escorts of these fallen soldiers talk about them as if they are still alive and still with us. 'My soldier is on his way back to Virginia ,' he said.

He proceeded to answer my questions, but offered no words. I asked him if there was anything I could do for him and he said no. I told him that he had the toughest job in the military and that I appreciated the work that he does for the families of our fallen soldiers. The first officer and I got up out of our seats to shake his hand. He left the flight deck to find his seat. We completed our preflight checks, pushed back and performed an uneventful departure.

About 30 minutes into our flight I received a call from the lead flight attendant in the cabin. 'I just found out the family of the soldier we are carrying, is on board', she said. She then proceeded to tell me that the father, mother, wife and 2-year old daughter were escorting their son, husband, and father home. The family was upset because they were unable to see the container that the soldier was in before we left. We were on our way to a major hub at which the family was going to wait four hours for the connecting flight home to Virginia .

The father of the soldier told the flight attendant that knowing his son was below him in the cargo compartment and being unable to see him was too much for him and the family to bear. He had asked the flight attendant if there was anything that could be done to allow them to see him upon our arrival. The family wanted to be outside by the cargo door to watch the soldier being taken off the airplane. I could hear the desperation in the flight attendants voice when she asked me if there was anything I could do. 'I'm on it', I said. I told her that I would get back to her.

Airborne communication with my company normally occurs in the form of e-mail like messages. I decided to bypass this system and contact my flight dispatcher directly on a secondary radio. There is a radio operator in the operations control center who connects you to the telephone of the dispatcher. I was in direct contact with the dispatcher. I explained the situation I had on board with the family and what it was the family wanted. He said he understood and that he would get back to me.

Two hours went by and I had not heard from the dispatcher. We were going to get busy soon and I needed to know what to tell the family. I sent a text message asking for an update. I saved the return message from the dispatcher and the following is the text: 'Captain, sorry it has taken so long to get back to you. There is policy on this now and I had to check on a few things. Upon your arrival a dedicated escort team will meet the aircraft. The team will escort the family to the ramp and plane side. A van will be used to load the remains with a secondary van for the family. The family will be taken to their departure area and escorted into the terminal where the remains can be seen on the ramp. It is a private area for the family only. When the connecting aircraft arrives, the family will be escorted onto the ramp and plane side to watch the remains being loaded for the final leg home.

Captain, most of us here in flight control are veterans. Please pass our condolences on to the family. Thanks.' I sent a message back telling flight control thanks for a good job. I printed out the message and gave it to the lead flight attendant to pass on to the father. The lead flight attendant was very thankful and told me, 'You have no idea how much this will mean to them.'

Things started getting busy for the descent, approach and landing. After landing, we cleared the runway and taxied to the ramp area. The ramp is huge with 15 gates on either side of the alleyway. It is always a busy area with aircraft maneuvering every which way to enter and exit. When we entered the ramp and checked in with the ramp controller, we were told that all traffic was being held for us. 'There is a team in place to meet the aircraft', we were told. It looked like it was all coming together, then I realized that once we turned the seat belt sign off, everyone would stand up at once and delay the family from getting off the airplane.

As we approached our gate, I asked the copilot to tell the ramp controller we were going to stop short of the gate to make an announcement to the passengers. He did that and the ramp controller said, 'Take your time.' I stopped the aircraft and set the parking brake.

I pushed the public address button and said, 'Ladies and gentleman, this is your Captain speaking. I have stopped short of our gate to make a special announcement. We have a passenger on board who deserves our honor and respect. His Name is Private XXXXXX, a soldier who recently lost his life. Private XXXXXX is under your feet in the cargo hold. Escorting him today is Army Sergeant XXXXXXX. Also, on board are his father, mother, wife, and daughter. Your entire flight crew is asking for all passengers to remain in their seats to allow the family to exit the aircraft first. Thank you.' We continued the turn to the gate, came to a stop and started our shutdown procedures.

A couple of minutes later I opened the cockpit door. I found the two forward flight attendants crying, something you just do not see. I was told that after we came to a stop, every passenger on the aircraft stayed in their seats, waiting for the family to exit the aircraft. When the family got up and gathered their things, a passenger slowly started to clap his hands. Moments later more passengers joined in and soon the entire aircraft was clapping.

Words of 'God Bless You', I'm sorry, thank you, be proud, and other kind words were uttered to the family as they made their way down the aisle and out of the airplane. They were escorted down to the ramp to finally be with their loved one. Many of the passengers disembarking thanked me for the announcement I had made. They were just words, I told them, I could say them over and over again, but nothing I say will bring back that brave soldier.

I respectfully ask that all of you reflect on this event and the sacrifices that millions of our men and women have made to ensure our freedom and safety in these United States of AMERICA .
Foot note: As a Viet Nam Veteran I can only think of all the veterans including the ones that rode below the deck on their way home and how they we were treated. When I read things like this I am proud that our country has not turned their backs on our soldiers returning from the various war zones today and give them the respect they so deserve. I know every one who has served their country who reads this will have tears in their eyes, including me.

Prayer chain for our Military.
Prayer: 'Lord, hold our troops in your loving hands. Protect them as they protect us. Bless them and their families for the selfless acts they perform for us in our time of need. Amen.

School in the Southland in the 1890's.

2011-11-04T22:10:00.002-04:00

My mother was only 18 months old when her father, Charles Dick, died - leaving a pregnant wife and seven little children. As a child, Ieula Ann Dick never knew her paternal relatives, but she was told her Grandfather Dick had been the "first sheriff of Clay County, Alabama." I am told her Grandfather Dick's picture is still on the wall of the Clay County Courthouse.

Mama's young father, Charles Dick had gone hunting late on a cold Christmas Day. He became very ill with a cold that turned into pneumonia and proved fatal for Charles Dick and for many others in that year. (1886)

Soon after her father's untimely death, her maternal grandfather, Bogan Mask, moved his daughter, Elizabeth, and her children from Clay County Alabama to a small house on his large farm in Inman, Georgia. Inman was a farming community in Fayette County, Georgia, where the grieving widow, Elizabeth, gave birth to her eight child, a son. I do not know how Charles Dick in Clay County Alabama met Elizabeth Mask in Inman Georgia? But apparently Bogan Mask thought Charles Dick worthy to marry his oldest daughter?

Mama loved her Grandfather Mask who apparently tried to be a father to his oldest daughter's fatherless children. He was hard working and prosperous for the times - a farmer and a Methodist preacher. Bogan Mask also is credited with beginning Ebenezer Methodist Church in Fayette County and Friendship Methodist Church in Clayton County.

Aunt Cora, Eula's (my mother was called "Eula") older sister thought Elizabeth and her eight little children were overlooked often by their more prosperous relatives. But Mama said her mother was aware of her dependance and was timid about making her father aware of their needs.I do not know all of what was going on during the "Reconstruction of the South". But certainly Rev. Bogan Mask had his heart and hands full with farming and family as well as pastoring several churches.

My mother said she remembered the first pair of shoes she ever had. She told me how one time when her mother mentioned her feet were cold, she got down at the foot of the bed to rub her mother's feet until they were warm. Apparently the younger children were sleeping with their mother. My mother, whose IQ was at least as high as mine, had to stop her schooling after about ninth grade.

Mama had grown up to marry Wilson Baird when she was 18. Wilson was, according to Eula , "a young over 40. " Mama adored him and resented any inference that she married an "old man." I remember once visiting on our front porch with a neighbor lady gossip who told about a girl marrying an older man, she turned to Mama and said, "did you marry and old man?" Mama said quickly, "No, I did not." Mama was not a gossip. She was a good neighbor who talked about ideas (politics and religion and family history) and not people.

Wilson was the youngest son of William and Mary Baird. William had served as an officer in the Confederate Army and was wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness. William Baird was said to be a Methodist Exorter. In the history of the Methodist Church at Oak Hill, He was known as Colonel William Baird. He was listed as the Sunday School Superintendent and was one of their literate members before the devastation of the schools during the War Between the States. My father, Benjamin Wilson Baird's father had been wounded and his older sister's husband had been killed while serving in the Confederate Army, leaving his wife with a child to raise.

My understanding it that Wilson Baird, my Papa stayed on to work the farm (he was said to be a good farmer) and help his mother and widowed sister in the care of his niece, and so waited until after age of 40 to marry. I am the youngest of Wilson and Ieula's 11 children, nine of whom survived into adulthood.

I grew up realizing the personal cost of the Civil War to my family as well as others, both Black and White families in the devastated Southland. My father, who died when I was nine, was a devote Christian man nad church lay leader. He was a good farmer and although with little formal education read widely.

Mama told me a little about the school she attended. As was typical in the South, this bright little girl went to school only too briefly in the war-torn South where many of the schools and houses had been torched as General Sherman and his Army moved through the Southland "all the way to the Sea."
We need to see how we did overcome many of these problems and not continue down the road to bitterness and political division of class and ethnicity and also not continue the destruction of our hard won life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Recently,(7-8-10) I heard a member of the New Black Panthers say he hated "all white people. " (If so he hates the Caucasian descendents of Abolitionists. From the beginning of Africans being sold into slavery to some White slave owners and even some African American and some Native American Slave owners, there were many White people who were working tirelessly and some giving their life to abolish what John Wesley and other white Christian men and women called "the vile institution of Slavery. G.K Chesterson said, "When Jesus died, Slavery was defeated but it took the church many years to become powerful enough to defeat the powerful slave trade.")

Mama told me about Professor Culpepper who taught her though all the arithmetic books and into much of algebra in the little one room schoolhouse near Inman before, all too soon, she had to leave school to work in the fields and on the farm. School was a luxury few in the South could afford. When I asked Mama what grade she completed, she told me they did not have grade levels then (1890's) as we then had when i was in school (early 1930's). However, her formal education was probably somewhat equal to a ninth grade education. Strangely, this was more education than many of the women in our neighborhood had at the time my family moved there in 1922, a year before my birth.

Mama revered Professor Culpepper and told me how he took time to teach algebra to her in that one room schoolhouse. Mama was also glad to tell me, in a world divided by class as well as race and gender, her father and her mother's family "came from good stock." They valued education for the girls as well as the boys.

My Cousin, S.J.Overstreet sent me this 1904 picture of the one room Inman Schoolhouse in Fayette County Georgia. Dr. Culpepper is shown on the back row. My mother was 19 in 1904 and had long since had to drop out of school and had married. When I think of how valuable family history is to me, I know the need for all of America's children to hear the unique history of America at a time of world wide slavery and later illiteracy, class divisions and racial segregation.

Our First Student Pastorates

2011-10-20T21:29:00.002-04:00

In 1950 my husband, Charles, our four children and I moved to Kentucky for Charles to enroll in Asbury College to begin preparation for Christian ministry. Asbury was a college offering New Testament Greek for the undergraduate ministerial student. Charles's study of new Testament Greek continued while he was a student at Candler School of Theology 1954-1958.
Charles had come home just a few years earlier, after two years as a Marine in World War II. He had obtained a good paying job with Calloway Mills. We had bought a house in his home town. So this was a difficult decision.

To make it more difficult, a long time friend and neighbor of his parents, stopped him one day and said, “Charles …you are crazy to take your religion so seriously as to give up a good job and go to preaching”

But Charles had a strong sense of the Lord's call concerning this major step. Soon after coming home from World War II, he had talked about this with our pastor Rev. W.D. Spence. Rev Spence invited Charles to preach his first sermon at Mt. Tabor Methodist, a small church on the same circuit with Charles' home church.
Then Charles was offered the opportunity to serve as pastor at the small rural North Covington Methodist Church for the summer before moving to Kentucky.
Charles had a genuine love for God and people so had a good Summer as pastor at North Covington Methodist Church.

Charles had a good singing voice where he became locally "famous" singing Stuart Hamblin"s new Gospel Song, "It is no Secret What God can Do."
1. "The chimes of time ring out the news...Another day is through...Someone slipped and fell...Was that someone you? You may have longed for added strength...Your courage to renew...Do not be disheartened...For I have news for you!

Chorus: It is no secret what God can do...What He's done for others...He'll do for you...With arms wide open...He'll pardon you...It is no secret what God can do.

2.There is no night for in His light...You never walk alone...Always feel at home...Wherever you may rome. There is no power can conquer you...While God is on your side...Take Him at His promise...Don't run away and hide. Chorus:..by Stuart Hamlin

In this little small informal church, they would take up a small offering for the pastor each week. This was in the days before a printed bulletin. Nearly every Sunday, Charles had his sermon on his mind and did not think of the offering. As he would stand up and open his Bible, one of the men would remind him, "Brother Shaw, you forgot the offering."
One unforgettable happening at that first little church was on the last Sunday we were there before we were to leave to move to Kentucky for Charles to start preparing for full time ministry. An elderly women in the congregation, dressed simply in a plain cotton print dress, came up to me at the end of our last Service. She handed me an envelope and told me it was a tithe of her butter and egg money. She said she believed " The Lord has certainly called Brother Shaw to preach" and she told me she wanted to help a little.
It was five dollars! It did help more than a little. Every five dollar bill I have seen since then, even now, I see as money that has been on the Altar of God as someone's tithe. We took as our theme song; “Living by faith…In Jesus above…Trusting, confiding…in His great love.”

During his second year in college, Charles was appointed as a pastor of three small churches in Southern Ohio, the Portsmouth Conference. One of the interesting observations about the connectional church system is that a novice pastor is often the one appointed to pastor three or more churches. Later, after more experience, he is sent to only one church with an associate pastor to help.

In the Portsmouth Ohio area, at 9:30 am each Sunday we all attended and Charles conducted the service and preached at a beautiful little church in the countryside called Cedar Mills. Then on to an 11 o’clock service each Sunday at Dunkinsville and then to Jacksonville Methodist Church at 7:00 pm. The study and serious praying involved in preparing to pastor and preach three times each Sunday was an expansive and growing experience for Charles as a preacher and as a pastor.

The Dunkinsville Church owned the parsonage down the street from the church. It was a nice little cottage of 5 rooms and a path. The short cement path led to a comfortable small “outhouse.” The parsonage kitchen had a cold water foset at the sink where we had plenty of cold water when we finally learned how to prime the pump.
Each Friday afternoon after Charles’s last class at the college, we loaded up the car and made the three hour adventuresome drive to Dunkinsville.

This, plus our few weeks at North Covington was the beginning of getting to know and love many of the “salt of the earth” Christian people who make up the small church families who gather in church buildings all over our nation. I am told there is at least one Methodist Church (United Methodist since 1968) in every county in the United States.

After the Morning worship service at the Dunkinsville Methodist Church each Sunday, one family from the congregation would invite the pastor and his family to go home with them for a bountiful Sunday afternoon dinner. These dear people treated their young novice pastor and his family with love and respect and we returned the compliment. This attitude of cooperate ministry went with us throughout our active ministry in working with many talented and dedicated lay people in churches large and small.

At 7:00 each Sunday evening, we were at the Jacksonville Church for Charles to lead their weekly Sunday service. One of the unforgetable things about the Jacksonville Methodist Church was a remarkable elderly man, hard of hearing , who was determined not to miss a word of the pastor’s sermon. So when the pastor started the sermon, Brother Brown always moved up on the platform and sat next to Charles with his hand holding his ear out as close to the preacher as possible. Charles finally got used to it, but the first time Brother Brown jumped up and shouted “Amen,” his young inexperienced pastor nearly jumped out of his skin and forgot his sermon.

God bless the memory of dear old Brother Brown. Several years after leaving that student pastorate, Charles and I had an occasion to go back through that part of Ohio so took a sentimental detour to drive by Cedar Mills, Dunkinsville and Jacksonville churches,

As we neared the Jacksonville church and community, Charles said, “I wonder about old Brother Brown…he must be well over 90 now and is probably already in heaven.” Charles had hardly gotten the words out of his mouth as we looked to the left and there was the elderly Brother Brown mowing his lawn with a push mower!

It was during this time that we witnessed a miraculous answer to prayer. Our fifth child, a daughter, Deborah was born on November 14, 1951. When she was two months she became critically ill. We had taken her to a doctor in Nicholusville who told us it was just a cold.
Two days later, a doctor in Lexington told us, Debi was not likely to recover from "Double Pneumonia." We were devastated and sent word to friends, class mates and teachers, asking for prayer. We were told there was special prayer for Deborah in chapel. Later three of Charles’s classmates came to the hospital, stood with Charles at her oxygen tent crib to pray. When they opened their eyes, Deborah opened her eyes, looked up at them and began to recover.
The next September, Charles was appointed to a another student pastorate; this one in Kentucky near enough to the college for him to commute to classes. We moved from the small apartment on Asbury campus into the nice Mackville Methodist Parsonage, a nice Cape Cod style house in Mackville KY.

Charles began his Junior year at Asbury, driving the 30 miles each school day from our parsonage in Mackville through Harrodsburg to Wilmore. He preached at Mackville at 10 each Sunday and at Antioch, 5 miles away, at 11 each Sunday morning. He also preached every Sunday night alternating between the two churches. So continued preaching three times each Sunday. These dear folks also prepared meals for their pastor and his family each Sunday. We continued to serve the Mackville-Antioch circuit until graduation in May, then prepared to moved back to Georgia to pastor the Midway, Sunnyside-Vaugh churches in Griffin.

We moved into their parsonage on Ninth Street in Griffin where we lived for four years while Charles started and finished work on a master of Divinity Degree from Candler School of Theology at Emory in Atlanta.

But we never forgot that first little North Covington church family in Georgia, those three small church families in Southern Ohio, the two precious ones in Kentucky nor the three in Griffin Georgia who loved us as we did them and believed in the Lord and believed that the Lord could call and use even student pastors.

Bed and Bath in the 1920's and 30's.

2011-10-19T21:15:00.000-04:00

Bed and Bath in the 1920's and 30's. My family keeps asking me to write more about life when I was a child. I would like to hear from BLOGGERS of my generation and about their memories of life in the 1920's and thirties. My father died when I was nine, and so I was raised by a widowed mother. My memories may not be typical of everyone in the Southern United States.

I never had a room of my own. Never even a bed of my own. After Papa died, we moved to a smaller house. I slept in the bed with my mother. There was also a single bed in this bedroom and my sister, Mary, slept there. My brothers, Charlie, Tom, and Jack, slept in a room across the hall. My youngest brother, Jack, was five years older than I. My sister, Mary, was ten years older; so I was almost raised alone as far as sibling playmates was concerned. (The picture to the left is Ruth Baird Shaw (about age 8) with her nephew Lavay McCullough, (age 2) who contacted Polio as an infant.)

Although we were poor, it was not "poverty" in the sense of poverty today. It is said that "poor" was proud (not un-Christian pride, of course) in the South after Sherman's successful march through Georgia and all the way to the sea. It left much of the South in ashes and ended the War between the States. At least "poor" meant you were honest and not a "carpetbagger" or a "bootlegger."

In a world of class, as well as race divisionisms, my mother told me, "You came from good stock." She was pleased to then tell about her grandmother who traced her lineage back to the Revolution and her maternal grandfather who had been a hard working and prosperous (for the times) land owner and a Methodist preacher.

And we, as well as nearly every Southern family had a story of some brave woman or child facing the soldiers from the North, seemingly bent on burning the South to the ground and thus ending the horrible war. In November, 1997, I read a part of our family history when a woman ancestor faced Northern soldiers, who were about to torch their house. She let the Yankee soldiers know that her husband was also a member of the Masonic lodge. Apparently this was a common ground respected by both North and South .

In our small town, most of the people worked for Bibb Manufacturing Company. Most were hard working and glad to have a job of any kind. It took all the members of the family working to have enough income to survive. They lived on their meager incomes and helped one another in times of emergency. Almost everyone we knew had about the same income and opportunities. If someone was out of work or sick, the neighbors collected money for them or made up a "pantry shower." There was no sick leave nor other such benefits and none expected.

My mother was hardworking and resourseful, She knew how to "stretch a dollar" so we always seemed to have plenty to eat and to share with neighbors and most of what we needed. I do remember that on many occasions Mama was instrumental in collecting food supplies (pantry showers) for neighbors who had to be out of work because of sickness or other problems. Mama also lent money (without interest) to neighbors between paydays.

I remember that there was one man in the neighborhood who would make loans with interest to his less fortunate neighbors. This was considered unneighborly and un-Christian.

The salary for a full week's work was $9.90 for some and $10.80 for other jobs. I remember people jokingly saying, "If you can't make $10.80, $9.90 will do." We did "make do." To put this in focus. The overseers in the Cotton factories were paid about $100. weekly. The overseers and other mill officials were given bigger and better houses to rent on larger lots in their own part fo town. It is difficult for my grandchildren and the younger generation to understand but the word "egalitarian" was yet to be added to our vocalulary. But we were looking forward!

In the bedroom where I slept with my mother and sister, there were a couple of rocking chairs and some "straight" chairs because this was also a sitting room. The parlor or "front room" was across the hall in our house before my mother converted it into a bedroom to accommodate "boarders". This is another story.
Before going to bed, we sat around the heater at the "fireplace" and talked, or in my case, listened. I was a painfully shy child. If one decided to go to bed, it was no problem. One just went over in a corner or behind a door, undressed and put on night clothes. I remember warm flannel gowns.Today we remind our children to go to the bathroom before going to bed. In those days a "slop jar" was brought into the bedroom, and the children were reminded to"go to the slop jar before you go to bed."

Sometimes this vessel was called a "chamber pot" or just a "chamber." It was not my regular job, as I remember, but I was often told to "bring in the slop jar" or sometimes "go bring the chamber in." My mother usually did the more unpleasant job of taking it out, emptying it in the commode which was in a bathroom off the back porch, and washing it out.

The bathroom had a large footed bathtub and a commode. The "out house" in our community was before my time. However, this indoor plumbing had been added to one end of the back porch after the house was built (this smaller house on 45 Hazel Street being one of the older ones we moved into after my father's death).

At one point a gas heater was put in the bathroom, but that may have been in my later childhood. I do remember that sometimes, in cold weather, we brought a large wash tub or a smaller "foot tub" into the warm kitchen or bedroom to take a bath. The bathroom was not as well sealed as the other rooms, so it was not suitable for bathing in very cold weather. We sometimes took sponge baths. This involved bringing a large “washpan” of warm water with cloth, soap, and towel into some private corner of a room. Every part of the body was thoroughly washed and rinsed but not all at the same time. Mama believed "cleanliness was next to Godliness."

My earliest memory of bedding were sheets that were made at home with seams down the middle. I think that textile looms that would weave cloth 54 or 60 inches wide were developed much later. I remember a few straw mattresses. These were homemade mattresses filled with straw to put on beds. I remember such a mattress on a small odd-sized bed in one of the rooms. Probably there were no mattresses that size on the market. The other mattresses were factory-made, cotton-filled mattresses.

We were fortunate to also have feather bed mattresses to put on top of all the cotton mattresses. Mama was resourceful. Feather mattresses were made at home. One would buy pillow ticking cloth (pillows were made at home also), sew it the length and width of the bed and fill it with feathers. On a cold winter night it was good to sink down in a bed of feathers and under the weigh of numerous handmade and home-quilted quilts. In the 1930's we called them "feather beds" and put them on top of the cotton mattresses. This added to the bed-making time every morning. One had to fluff up the feathers and smooth it out, often turning it over, and frequently taking it out in the sun to“air the bed out."

When innerspring mattresses were added to the market, most people were glad to retire the feather bed to history.

Homemade quilts? We had large stacks of them, home-pieced and home-quilted by Mama and the women in the neighborhood. In cold weather one was weighted down under warm quilts. In summer, when company came, quilts were folded on the floor to make mattresses for the children and sometimes for adults to sleep on after all the beds were filled.

We children loved these temporary beds. To make the quilts, quilting frames were hung from the four corners of the ceiling of our bedroom and drawn up at night. I have slept many nights with an unfinished quilt suspended above. Neighbors would come to visit and help with the quilting. Any unoccupied house in the village was often put into service for quilting bees. The quilting frames were hung from the ceiling, and six to eight women would take a chair and sit on all sides of the quilt, making fine stitches in a quilt pattern that one of them had drawn.

There was much talk and laughter as these women visited while working on a quilt. The younger children played at their feet, and the older children were in and out of the house.The advantage of the empty room was that the quilt would not have to be lifted up at night and walked around in the daytime. In the evenings Mama would cut and sew various patterns for future quilting. The children would play around and sometimes be allowed to make a few stitches and were complimented if they could manage small stitches. If the stitches were too long, the mother would remove the stitches, often after the child left the room. Everyone took pride in fingers nimble enough to make practically invisible stitches.

I was allowed to make a few stitches occasionally but was not often invited to quilt, so I assume my stitches were far from invisible.

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month

2011-09-27T19:26:00.006-04:00

Every school day in America, 46 children are diagnosed with cancer, the #1 disease killer of children ages 0-15. Help these Rally Kids, children who have fought or are fighting cancer, raise at least $500 each for the Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research this September, National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.

When my great-granddaughter, Lily, was in second grade, she began experiencing excruciating back pain. After three trips to the ER and many visits to the pediatrician, Lily was diagnosed with leukemia (Pre-B ALL) on December 1, 2008.

In February 2011, she completed over two years of treatment - including daily chemo. It has been a long road and one that has had its ups and downs. During treatment she was hospitalized numerous times for treatment and infections. She has also been diagnosed with AVN, or bone death, one of the side-effects of the high dose steroids that are part of the protocol for treatment. She missed an entire year of school, but she's now in fifth grade and able to attend school full time again.

Lily is dedicated to raising money to support childhood cancer research because, as she says, "no kid should have to be sick like this." Her long-range goal is to raise a million dollars for childhood cancer research.

She likes acting, swimming and dancing. She also likes riding horses and playing with her three dogs, Rosie, Bogey and Yogi. She has a younger sister, Sophie, who has been a big support during her treatment. They are truly best friends.

Going To School in the 1930's

2011-09-21T06:31:00.000-04:00

I started school in January before my sixth birthday in 1929. This was the year of the stock market crash and the Great Depression. I suppose we had "poverty" but not in the sense of poverty today. Most people were in the same boat and helped one another. We were fortunate not to have 24 hour news, so we did not learn until later that people were jumping out of skyscraper windows to kill themselves.

The first five grades in our school were divided into 10 grades. We had low first grade and high first, low second, high second. etc. I contracted measles and missed the last two weeks of school in the Low Fifth.

When my teacher came by to visit a few days after school was out for the summer she brought my report card. (Yes teachers, doctors and pastors were expected to make house calls.) Mama asked my teacher if I was to go back in the fifth grade or skip to the sixth grade. She gave me a test and skipped me to the sixth grade. That is how I happened to be the youngest in my class for the rest of my elementary and high school. Elementary School was called "Grammar School" back then.

School dress: In Grammar School in those days, girls always wore dresses to school with knee stockings and oxford-type shoes or high top shoes. I remember a few of the girls wore high-top stockings. These were dark, thick, stockings, often black, that came above the knee and were held secure by elastic circles. In fact these garters were called "elastics." (We had only one pair of shoes that were usually worn until they fell apart. I have worn shoes that had cardboard put in to cover holes in the soles of the shoe. ) I remember being thankful that my mother did not make me wear those "old fashioned stockings."

Incidentally, a little later when we did wear sheer hose (with a seam down the center of the back that had to be kept straight), we made our own elastics to keep our hosiery up. We just took a piece of elastic and measured around the leg just above the knee and sewed the ends of the elastic together. This was before garter belts were in use.By the time I got to high school, girls were beginning to wear anklets that turned down at the ankle so were more comfortable.

Discipline: As I was writing this, a long time friend called. When he learned I was writing about school in the 1930's, he asked if I had written about "whippings." I told him that "whippings were a "boy thing". After we joked around a bit, we both agreed that in his school in South Carolina and mine in Georgia, the teachers had 12 inch rulers that were used for something besides measuring distance. The disobedient child held his/her hand out with palm up to be smacked with a ruler. For major misbehavior, a razor strop or a hickory switch was used on the child's bottom. Parents typically told children that if they "got a whipping" at school, they would "get another one" at home. Litigation against teachers and/or schools was not considered.

School Room: The student desks were attached to one another in rows. They were also attached to the floor. All student desks faced the large teacher's desk. The wall behind the teacher desk was covered with black boards for writing. The blackbords had narrow little shelves at the bottom to hold chalk and erasers. Each of the student desk tops had a small round hole that our ink wells fit into. We had to fill our pens with ink from the ink wells for writing before fountain pens came on the market. We also used pencils and lined tablets for Math, spelling and much of our writing. Every week, two students were selected to take the erasers outside to "dust the erasers" to get all the chalk dust out so they would be clean enough to keep the blackboard clean for clear writing.
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Social Class: The word egalitarian had never been spoken! I remember clearly sitting in class while the teacher told us there were three classes of people: the upper, the middle and the lower class. We did not, for the most part, question this custom. Socially, people associated with their own class as well as their own race.

Transportation: How did we get to school? Two words. We walked! In our school, most of the teachers also walked. Many were single women who lived in town. In our town we have a large house called the "teacher's cottage." The teacher's house was "across the river" from the school building. There were no parking lots at the schoolhouse.

Report Cards: In our small-town Georgia school, we were graded A, B, C, D or F. I do not remember anything about the grading system or how I scored in First and Second grades. I do know that I never received a D or an F and do not remember many A's. I was generally a B student. I usually sat quietly and went unnoticed in class, speaking only when spoken to.

Miscellaneous Thoughts: We were then taught that the atom was the smallest particle. It was not until 1945 that we learned that that microscopic atom could be split and inside was power beyond comprehension.

One of my readers asked about “school dinners.” There was not a cafeteria in the Elementary school I attended, nor the High Schools I attended. But there was a Home Economics Class where all the girls took lessons in homemaking; basically in cooking and sewing.

In our “Grammar School”, we could “take milk” for three cents a day. It consisted of a small bottle of milk and peanut butter spread on two very thin slices of white bread. Most of the children brought a lunch from home (a biscuit with sausage or fried meat or jelly
The group picture above is the Ninth Grade graduation class. The Ninth Grade was the last grade offered in our community in the 1930's. It was in the 40's that Porterdale High School was established. Yours truly (Ruth Baird) was fourth girl on the left, front row.

If one desired to attend school after Ninth Grade Graduation, he/she had to pay tuition. buy their books and find transportation to Covington, our Newton County seat, to finish tenth and eleventh grade and receive a High School Diploma. Ninth Grade was the end of school for many students in the thirties. I ended up attending three different high schools.
My widowed mother somehow managed the tuition cost for me to attend Covington high School and another small transportation fee to a girl in my class who had managed to buy a car.

I rode with her (Louise Walton) to Covington every school day for a full semester. Alas, she dropped out - decided not to continue in school. ( Four girls in High School cap and Gown- LtoR: Ruth Baird Shaw, Clara Shaw Daniel, Lenora Ferrel Mills, Gladys Newman)
With no transportation to Covington after the first semester in the tenth grade, I then transferred to Livingston High School, a county High School. I walked with 2 other girls and a boy (Julia Sellers, Hilda Mitchell, Ernest Bennett) the mile or so every morning to the far end of our community to catch the school bus to ride to the country school where I finished the tenth grade with only two units left to graduate. In the 1930's, the Eleventh Grade was the last grade to finish to receive a High School diploma.

Porterdale established a High School in 1940. Older students were allowed to attend, so my husband went back to classes and graduated in 1942 and I in 1943. We had two precious little girls at the time I graduated. But I needed only two units so it required little of my time. When I finally managed to enroll in college classes, I learned my high school experiences had been well enough preparation.

One of the things I remember about Covington High School in the semester I attended was an assignment to write a story of fiction. As far back as I remember, I have loved to write and enjoyed writing rhymes. I remember working on the story but do not remember anything about it. As I remember it was basically a lazy rearrangement of something I had read (which is probably why I do not remember anything about the story.) When we take short cuts or cheat on anything, we only cheat ourselves. Strangely, I have never taken time to try to write fiction again.

Another day while I was a student at Covington High, we went to Chapel where someone introduced a blind and deaf lady and illustrated how she communicated. This memory is too vague for me to be sure of details. I keep thinking it must have been Helen Keller and her teacher? Did Keller and her teacher visit High Schools in Georgia in 1938? Who else could it me? I believe that the famed Annie Sullivan, Helen's first teacher died in 1936. Polly Thomson assisted Sullivan later and became Helen's teacher after Annie Sullivan’s death.
An earlier chapel experience I told about in the first or second grade is being chosen to walk up on the large stage in the Grammar school auditorium to tell the Bible story of the sick man whose four friends took him, bed and all, to Jesus to be healed.

Teachers: I especially remember one of the teachers at Livingston High School, (the school where I transferred after my friend with a car left Covington High). One unforgettable teacher at Livingston was a widow in perpetual black dress. She was always openly counting the days until the end of the school year. I do not know how long she had been a widow, but this thin and sad looking lady in her "widow's weeds" each day would tell us how she was counting the days until the end of her days as a teacher. Then she would remind us how many days were left in the school year. She called herself the "walking calendar."

Another teacher I remember more fondly was Miss Willie Hayne Hunt, my seventh grade teacher in Porterdale. She tried to encourage me by telling me I was probably the “best mathematician that ever walked in the school door." This kind of remark from a teacher made a big difference in the way I saw myself as a student. I began to find algebra and geometry problems not just easy but fun to do.

Sports: Schools in the thirties had "field days" with competition between classes and between schools. This included relay races, 100-yard dashes, high jumps, broad jumps, etc. My brothers, Charlie, Tom, and Jack, excelled in all the races. I was also a very fast runner and played basketball, but did not broad jump or high jump.My brother, Tom, was one of the fastest runners in the school. He would run in his regular pants with the shirttail flying rather than putting on the shorts and sleeveless tee shirt that was the usual attire.

Family: One of our family stories is about my brother, Tom winning the race for the school and winning a great deal of local fame running the race in his regular school clothes.

One day just a few years before he died, I asked Tom why he ran the race that Field Day in his regular clothes. He said he had to rush home to lift Papa out of bed and had hurried back to school because they expected him to run in the race. Apparently, he appeared on the school grounds just in time to run the race. Tom was stronger than Jack or Charlie, so it fell his lot to lift Papa out of bed and back into bed after Papa became disabled. Tom told me he would go to school every morning and answer the roll call. Soon after, he would leave school and go home to lift Papa out of bed and into a chair and later he could go home again to lift Papa back into bed.

GLIMPSE OF ROMANCE DURING WORLD WAR II

2011-08-18T18:04:00.001-04:00

During World War II, I made a week long train trip from Georgia to San Diego, California to be with my Marine husband before he was to be shipped out for action in the South Pacific.

Charles told me “girls” were a major topic of conversation among these young marines in the barracks. This close knit unit of men passed around and pinned up pictures of girl friends and wives for the admiration of their brothers.

“The greatest generation” is a label that was later to be conferred on them. At this point they were just "men in the making" and still preparing for overseas duty and combat.

My husband was happy to announce to his buddies that a real Georgia peach was on her way to California. It was a week long train trip with crowds of soldiers and their wives as weary travelers.

Alas, soon after my arrival, I was quarantined at the Naval Hospital with Scarlet Fever. My Marine could only come over to sit on a wall outside the hospital window and look longingly inside and speak through the window.

One afternoon he brought a buddy to see his “pin up girl.” On this afternoon, the “Georgia Peach” was lying on her stomach with her feet toward the window.

The only thing my husband's buddy could think to say was, “She sure has beautiful feet."

Cooking From Scratch in the 1930's

2011-08-01T07:30:00.001-04:00

Cooking From Scratch in the 1930's. When one "cooked from scratch" in the thirties, it was from the first "scratch" of a match. We had a large iron cookstove in our kitchen when I was a child. The iron cookstove burned wood. (The picture to the left looks much like the stove in our kitchen in the late 1920's and early 30'except our stove had white metal on the oven door and warming closet doors)

Wood had to be cut in "stove wood" lengths, brought from the backyard into the house and stacked in wood boxes behind the stove. A fire had to be started with crumpled up newspaper and kindling wood. Then the fire was kept burning by the constant additon of larger pieces of "stove wood."

The stove had , what we called "a warming closet" near the top. It had two decorative iron doors to open and place cooked food to keep warm until time to set on the table. A large reservoir was built in on the side to heat water. I remember one of my jobs was to keep water in the reservoir. The "eyes" on top of the stove could be removed to build the fire. There was a little iron utensil to fit into a hole in the stove eye to lift it and then put back in place so large pots of beans or potatoes or meat could be cooked on top of the stove. I remember my mother cooking beef roast, pork roast, and chickens on top of the stove in water. We called them "roasts", but they were sometimes boiled or simmered on top of the stove. This was used possibly for tougher cuts of meat than the roasts we cook today.

Chicken, pork chops, and cubed steak was fried in a large iron skillet. I have seen my mother take a hammer to pound steak to tenderize it. She would then flour and fry it in serving size pieces. Meat was not served every day.

Some kind of dried beans (a wonderful sourse of protein) were cooked almost every day - large butter beans, small limas, pinto beans, navy beans, or black-eyed peas. Salt pork was plentiful and added to the dried vegetables for seasoning. Potatoes were boiled with butter and sometimes dumplings...probably bits of leftover dough from the biscuits that were cooked at every meal. The term "low-fat" had never been spoken!

Large pans of sweet potatoes were baked often. Sweet potatoes seemed plentiful and were sometimes fried or made into pies or puddings. In the summer fresh vegetables were cooked in place of or in addition to the dried beans which were a staple and inexpensive proten food nearly every day, Fresh vegetables were seasoned with fat meat (uncured bacon). Thankfully my mother did not add the fat meat to fresh vegetables as lavishly as some cooks did.

My favorite summer vegetable plate was fresh crowder peas with a few tiny pods of okra boiled on top of the peas, corn freshly cut fine off the cob, and sliced tomatoes. On a cold winter day nothing was better than chicken and dumplings, one of Mama's really great dishes. What kind of bread? Cornbread, of course and hot buttered biscuits.

Mama made great vegetable soup from fresh tomatoes and an assortment of vegetables from summer gardens. She also made soup in the winter using canned tomatoes and canned corned beef with potatoes, rice, or macaroni and any vegetables she had. We had canned salmon made into patties fairly often and sometimes fried fish. The fish meal was often fish that Mama caught from the nearby Yellow River. ( My father died when I was nine after being bedridden for a years, so I was reared by a widowed mother. My two older brothers , Grice and William Bogan...whom we called "Willie B "and two older sisters Louise and Vera (whom we called Sis and Vek) were already married when my father died. I was nine and my youngest brother Jack was 14.)

Cheese and macaroni, rice, and rice pudding were common dishes in the 30's. Grits and eggs were often served for breakfast with fried salt pork or streak-o-lean. Sometimes we had ham to go along with biscuits and butter and jelly or jam that had been prepared and put away in jars in quantity during the summer. It was not uncommon to have pork chops or fried chicken for breakfast along with the regular homemade buttered biscuits. Real butter.

The first margarine I saw looked like a hunk of lard, and, for a long time, tasted like lard to me - as it did to anyone who had been raised on country buttered biscuits. The margarine of the late thirties was white and came with a vial of yellow coloring. To make it look more like butter, the margarine had to be left out of the refrigerator to soften at room temperature. The yellow coloring had to be worked in. I suppose the butter lobbyists mandated this. In a few years the margarine people prevailed and they were allowed to make margarine that looked as yellow as butter.

An after dinner speaker named Baldy White was popular when I was young. He was a big man and used to keep his audience laughing with such comments as, "We were so poor when I was a boy, all we had for breakfast was ham, eggs, buttered grits and hot biscuits with an assortment of homemade jellies and preserves. We didn't know there was such a thing as Post Toasties!"

I remember Aunt Cora bringing her two granddaughters my age, Mildred and Allene, down from their home in Atlanta one week-end and how excited they were to have homemade biscuits for breakfast. I was amazed. I would have been more excited to have cereal and milk or toast made with "store bought" bread. Rare!

Thirteen Things You Do Not Know About Me.

2011-07-30T17:16:00.001-04:00

Thirteen Things You May not Know, nor Want to Know about Me?

My niece Jane Lathem of Cozy Reader fame wrote “Thirteen Things You May Not Know About Me.” I was challenged to answer the same questions.

Many of the 13 things on Jane's list apply also to me. How about you? Are they "relative" things or simply human attributes?

1. You may not know that I was afraid of the dark as a child.
I still do not like to sleep in complete darkness. As far as I know there were no “nightlights” in the 30’s but a small kitchen light burned all night at our home. My mother said that before electricity she always burned a lamp with the wick turned low at night. She started that, Mama told me, when she had small babies that required feedings and diaper changes in the night.

2. As a child I was painfully shy.
I am still an introvert but I finally overcome shyness by seeing it as “self-consciousness," the emphasis being on “self," thus related to selfishness and sinfulness. “Sin” can be defined as anything that hurts or damages a person and thus something one needs to dismiss from ones life.

3. I like to write. Did I mention that I am also a philosopher, or a person given to philosophizing? Also I have liked to write and have written "poems" since early childhood.

4. I agree with Jane. I have never eaten sushi!

5. Siblings? The siblings nearest my age were three brothers. My youngest brother was five years older than I so he played mostly with our brothers. So I, as the youngest daughter and the youngest child of nine, was virtually raised like an only child. Translation: SPOILED!!

6. Having dinner with A celebrity? I have never met nor had dinner with Jeff Foxworthy as did Jane! But I did have dinner and a friendship with Guy Sharpe!Guy was recently voted into the Georgia Hall of Fame . I found the photo of Guy with his dog in the article about the Hall of Fame awards)
Guy was music director and choir leader at Park Street United Methodist Church. He and his wife Virginia were both talented soloist and in church with us the four years we were at Park Street (1975-1979). Guy came over to College Park and sang a solo at the Funeral Service for Charles in 1986. Guy Sharpe, as all Georgians know, was a well known and popular Atlanta Weatherman television personality! Guy was, in fact, offered the opportunity to go national as a TV Weatherman, while we were with him at Park Street. But he chose to stay in Atlanta.

7. I have never appeared on a national talk show! I was interviewed and seen on an Atlanta Television Station in 1993 during the four years while I was pastor of East Point Avenue United Methodist Church. Does that count?

8. Broken bones? Jane broke one little toe. I broke both arms! I fell backward, getting tangled up in a vacuum cleaner cord. This means I spent 6 weeks with one arm in a cast and the other arm in a splint. Fortunately my husband was still living. As one can imagine, when he was home, we became very close! He even went to the bathroom with me and once put curlers in my hair after shampooing it one day. That was a riot but fun!

9. My feet grew one size with each of my children? I started out wearing a 6 1/2 and I went to a 7 with my first pregnancy and to a 7 1/2 with the second. Fortunately my feet did not continue growing with every child at that rate. I ended up with seven children and now wear a size 8 ½ shoe.

10. None of my OB/GYN doctors had a famous brother like John Birch, as far as I know? I had a different doctor with each of my seven pregancies, not by choice (theirs or mine) but because of several moves.

11. Singing voice? My singing voice is good (it is a family thing). But my voice was never as beautiful as Jane’s! One of the most welcome compliment I ever received and I gladly relate here is that the Music Director at Grantville UM Church said my voice range was perfect! She encouraged me to sing solos while I was pastor there but I did not continue. So you have to take my word for it. I did sing in the Candler Choral in seminary! Does that count?

12. Formal Education? I went back to school after my children were grown and earned a Bachelor and a Master's degree after age 60. I aged into the study of Gerontology and was also certified in Gerontology at Georgia State University.

13. I am a preacher? The last thing I ever wanted to be or expected to be was a preacher? I have been a Christian believer as far back as I remember and a definite experience and decision at age 11. For a long time I postponed the call to preach that both my husband and I recognized as early as 1975. But I am a woman? It is a problem to some. One awesome day in 1986, the Lord opened a door and pushed me into the pulpit and into Christian leadership. God has enabled me to do and to do well the task He called me to do! I retired only becaue I reached the age of mandatory retirement. I would like to have more invitaions tp preach and have never tired of telling the Story of God's amazing love and grace!"

College Women from 1904 to 2010.

2011-07-26T07:57:00.000-04:00

Wesleyan College, at Macon, Georgia was the first college chartered to award degrees to women. It was a Methodist school chartered in 1836 as the Georgia Female College.

The present name of Wesleyan College was adopted in 1919.

These pictures of our Cousin Blance Burch Harp's 1904 Wesleyan College graduation and pictures of other Wesleyan College's 1904 students.

Blance Burch Harp in her Graduation Dress at her graduation from Wesleyan College in 1904.

How does Blance Burch Harp graduation from Wesleyan College in Macon Georgia in 1904 compare with College women graduating this year?

My granddaughter, Lillian Matthews Shaw graduated from Mercer University, Macon Georgia on May 29, 2010.

I do not know the history of the change from women wearing evening dress for Graduation to the beginning of todays Cap and Gown attire?

Lillian's graduation took place in the same city, just a few miles across town and 108 years after the 1902 graduation of her cousin, Blance Burch Harpe.

School Days, Dear Old Golden Rule Days.

2011-07-13T16:00:00.001-04:00

School days in the late 1920 and early 1930 could well be described as “School days, school days, dear old Golden Rule days.”

Golden Rule days? Yes. We learned about the "Golden Rule" in public school in the 1930's as well as in Sunday School.

When I was in what was then called, "Grammar School", we "went to chapel" three times a week. We referred to the school auditorium as “the chapel.”

In chapel we sang church hymns and patriotic songs. We stood to place our hands over our hearts and pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America. We prayed the Lord's Prayer. We memorized whole chapters of scripture and repeated them in unison.

Some of Bible readings I leared in school included, Psalm 1, Psalm 23, Psalm 24 and Psalm 100. We memorized and repeated in unison, I Cor. 13 and Romans 12 as well as the Mattthew and Luke account of the birth of Jesus.

In 1930 I stood on the stage in Chapel and told a Bible story. In my mind’s eye, I see myself as a seven-year-old, walking up the steps to the stage on the left of the large school auditorium. I remember beginning the story by saying in rote fashion, “Once there was a sick man. He was so sick he could not walk. He was so sick he could not sit up. But he had four friends who took him to Jesus.”

I do not know why I remember so clearly walking up the steps to the stage and the words of the beginning of the story. The rest of my recitation is foggy. It is a familiar Bible story found both in Luke 5:18-25 and Mark 2:1-12.

Mark and Luke tell us the paralyzed man had four friends who took him on a mat where he lay to the place where Jesus was teaching. When they could not get into the house because of huge crowds surrounding Jesus, these four friends carried the crippled man up on the roof of the house, pried off enough of the tiles to let their friend down through the ceiling. They placed their paralyzed friend on his mat at the feet of Jesus.

Jesus told the sick man to “stand up, take up your bed and go home.” The man got up, picked up his mat and walked away praising God.

The large school auditorium floor slanted down toward the stage and had theater style individual seats that lifted up so we could pass by. The floor of the autitorium was oiled clean and smelled of polish.

We walked in long lines to chapel with each class sitting together. Then standing to sing and participate in all the educational, patriotic, moral and Christian chapel activities .

Have you Read the Latest "Best Seller" book?

2011-07-13T11:01:00.004-04:00

Reading the "Best Seller" is Attacking Cultural Illiteracy. The Bible is still the world's "best seller" book. From a literary standpoint alone, there is no way that students today can function as well-informed and educated people without Biblical knowledge.

For example, a public high school English teacher said to her class, "In the short story we just read, there's a reference to one of the characters 'washing his hands' of the situation. Does anyone know where that phrase comes from?" Many students stared blankly, but several sheepishly raised their hands. "The Bible," said one student nervously. ( As silly as it sounds, some people are afraid of uttering the word "Bible" for fear of offending.) "Exactly," said the teacher, who went on to explain how Pontius Pilate washed his hands to symbolize that he was not responsible for Jesus's death and and also explained the meaning of the allusion in the story.

As a CHICAGO TRIBUNE editorial put it, "Trying to understand American literature and history without some knowledge of the Bible is like trying to make sense of the ocean despite a complete ignorance of fish." Western culture was built on the Bible. Our literature, music, history, and politics are permeated with biblical themes and biblical language. Commenting in the LOS ANGELES TIMES, David Gelernter asked, "Can you understand American culture without knowing the biblical context of 'covenant,' 'promised land,' 'shining city on a hill'?" The answer is a resounding, no. Cultural literature begins with Bible literacy. THE BIBLE AND ITS INFLUENCE is a great resource for anyone looking for a comprehensive academic understanding of the roots of modern civilization,

We so often hear the term "Separation of Church and State" as a reason to stop reading the Bible in public school events which had been a part of school events from our founding until the 1960's. "Separation of Church and State did not mean that we were not to continue the historic invocation and benediction prayers at public school or "State" events.

The "Separation of Church and State "simply meant the United States is not to have a "State Church" as in England. The Episcopal Church was then and still is "The Church of England." Our forebears chose not to have one demonination to be " The Church of the United States."

Typhoid and Kudzu

2011-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Dr. Joseph Chambers was said to be a top graduate of Emory Medical School in 1899. He was said to have two professional claims to fame. One was his work with typhoid. The other was his part in bringing the kudza vine to Georgia. Picture above is the Joseph Chambers' house and hospital at Inman in Fayette County, Georgia in early 1900's. I grew up hearing about our accomplished Chambers and Mask relatives.

My mother, Ielua Dick Baird (3-5-1885-12-7-1973) 's father, Charles Dick, died when she was a baby and while her mother was pregnant with her youngest brother. So she and her seven siblings were raised in a house on the Inman Georgia farm of their maternal grandparents, Bogan and Mary Chambers Mask. (More details are on my blog post about school in the 1890s). My mother always told us children that we came "from good stock."

This was at a time when the word "egalitarian" was yet to be spoken. I grew up learning in school about three classes of people: (1) The Upper Class, (2) The Middle Class and (3) The Lower Class. People socialized with their own class as well as their own race. When the segment about "Classes of People" was taught in our Civics school class, one little boy said to the teacher, "We are middle class, aren’t we?” The teacher did not answer. I remember realizing the teacher thought we were not middle class but part of the lower class. After all, our community, Porterdale, Georgia was a "mill town."

The Civil War had taken it's toll. While most of the workers in our town and in the South had little to no opportunity for education or learning skills, the work of many, including what my intelligent widowed mother did as a weaver in the Cord Weave Shop was far from unskilled. The cord weave department, as the name implies wove heavy material of various widths for military tents or to reiforce tank and airplane tires.

The accomplished Chambers family included the "good stock" ancestors of which Mama was pleased to tell me about. Even though the Mask family, the Dick family and the Bairds were "good stock" also. Or so we thought? As a matter of fact, most of our neighbors were hard working people of intelligence and high morals. Unfortunately, Southern families had kept going downhill in educational and financial opportunities after the destruction of the South called "the War between The States." Mama's Chambers great grandparents had died before she was old enough to know them but she grew up knowing and revering Uncle Daniel and Aunt Rebekah Chambers McLucus as well as Grandpa and Grandma (Bogan and Mary Chambers Mask). They were hard working farmers, managing large farms and leaders in church and community. Bogan Mask was also a Methodist preacher who did not "own" slaves but was said to have bought one slave in order to gain his freedom.

One of the stories Mama told about her childhood was on Sunday afternoons when she and her siblings would watch for any young couple riding in a horse and buggy dressed like were on their way to get married. She said many Sunday afternoons she and her sibings and other children would run to Grandpa's house and take turns peeping in the widow and excitedly watching as Bogan Mask performed weddings. Mama told me that her Grandma Mary Chambers Mask was a small slim woman who always wore a neat little bonnet on her head and a long dress and long clean apron.

Dr. Joseph Chambers was said to be a top graduate of Emory Medical School in 1899. He was remembered by Sara Jane’s Grandmother Overstreet as a very kind man with two professional claims to fame. One was his work with typhoid. He figured out that human waste needed to be buried at least 18 inches down in order not to spread typhoid which was a big deal at the time. His other claim to fame might not be considered a good thing by Kudzu haters. It is said Dr. Chambers was among the first to have Kudzu imported from the Orient in the 1930s after farmers had lost about a couple of feet of topsoil. Kudzu would (and does) grow fast and hold the dirt on the land. It was very necessary. Unfortunately, kudzu got out of hand with no natural enemies in this area. But in the 1890's the topsoil did not wash away with kudzu to hold it. Dr. Chambers was a doctor by profession and a farmer by interest and necessity.

Happy Birthday Dear David on May 9!

2011-05-08T13:00:00.010-04:00

Happy Birthday to David Baird Shaw, a good and talented man! My husband and I brought David home from the hospital to 333 South Ninth Street in Griffin Georgia on Mother's Day in 1958.

David's may 9th birthday falls on the day after Mother's Day this year 2011! (The picture to the left is David happily holding his day old grandson, Alexander James Rogers. Alex was born April 6, 2010.)

David was born on a Friday afternoon at 3:00 p.m. the seventh child and the of a Methodist Pastor and his wife. This was at a time when pastors salaries were very low even though ordination required 3 years of Post Graduate Seminary education.

David was welcomed as enthusiastically as if he was an only child. We brought him home from the hospital on Mother's Day over 50 years ago and I am still proud to be his mother.

David was a bright and happy boy who took seriously the fact that in the Bible "seven" is the number of perfection as well as completion.

As a boy, David preferred peanut butter sandwiches to vegetables and tried to live on them. This fact caused his Daddy to consult with a doctor friend. The doctor said he had heard of children who tried to survive on worse and David would grow out of it.

So he continued to push his veggies around on his plate and drop as many as possible on the floor thinking his mother would not notice.

His sisters like to tease him at all family gatherings to this day that David never made his own peanut butter sandwichs. They report he enlisted one or another of his indulgent siblings to do it for him. As Carol said, "He was just so cute."

So David never needed "self esteem" lessons nor "diversity" training. He played the guitar and drum in the RSV (Revised Standard Version) Youth Group at church, so he was popular with his classmates and especially the girls as a teenager.
David is now a hard working business man and and lay leader in his church.

David is married to his lovely childhood sweetheart and the proud father of three beautiful daughters and now a son-in'law (in small picture below) and Grandfather to one year old Alex.

The World Wide Web.

2011-01-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

The World Wide Web! It has been suggested to me that when one maintains a Weblog, they are writing for the whole World. After checking the Ruthlace sitemeter for just a few weeks, it indicates readers from most (if not every) states in the United States and many places in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India as well as all the countries listed below.

Many of the countries also added the name of one of the locations (or cities) listed. I added the names of some of the cities listed. Some of the countries who check out the Ruthlace blog never list a city or location beyond the name of the country. This has been a learning experience for me, as some countries have been listed on my site meter I am only now learning about. I put them in alphabetical order.

1.Algeria
2. Argentina-Santa Fe)
3. Aruba-(Oranjestad)
4. Australia-(Sydney, New South Wales)
5. Austria-(Kremsmnster, Oberosterreich)
6. Azerbaijan- (Baku, Baki)
7. Bahamas- Nassau, New Providence
8. Bahrain-(Manama, Al Manamah)
9. Bangledash-(Dhaka)
10. Barbados-( Bridgetown, Saint Michael)
11.Belarus-(Minsk)
12.Belgium-(Koningshooikt, Antwerpen)
13.Bermuda-(Hamilton )
14.Bosnia and Herzegovina Visoko-(Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina)
15. Brazil-(Braslia, Distrito Federal)
16. Brunei Darussalam-(Brunei)
17. Bulgaria-(Gran Sofiya, Plovdiv)
18. Canada-(Edmonton, Alberta)
19. China-( Beijing )
20.Chile (Santiago, Region Metropolitana)
21. Columbia-(Medelln, Antioquia)
22. Costa Rico-(Alajuela)
23. Croatia-(Dubrovnik, Dubrovacko-Neretvanska)
24.Cyprus-(Nicosia)
25.Czech Republic- (Prague, Hlavni, Mesto Praha)
26. Damascus
27. Denmark-(Copenhagen, Staden Kobenhavn, Nrum)
28. Dominican Republic- (Santo Domingo, Distrito Nacional)
29. Estonia-(Tallinn, Harjumaa)
30. Egypt-(Cairo, Al Qahirah)
31. El Salvador- (San Salvador)
32. Eucador- (Guayaquil, Guayas)
33. Europe- (Europe listed a "country". btw... 17 minutes blog time)
34. Finland-(Mikkeli, Eastern Finland, Western Finland)
35. France- (Paris, Ile-de-France)
36.Germany-(Stade, Niedersachsen)
37.Georgia-(Tbilisi, Dushet'is Raioni)
38. Ghana
39. Greece-(Athens, Attiki)
40.Guadeloupe- (Baie-Mahault
41.Guam-(Barrigada)
42. Guatemala-( Guatemala City)
43. Guyana-( Georgetown, Demerara-Mahaica
44.Honduras-(San Pedro, Sula, Cortes)
45. Hong Kong-(Central District)
46. Hungary-(Budapest, Pcs, Pecs)
47. Iceland- (Yeykjavk, Gullbringusysla)
48. India-(Ludhiana, Punjab)
49. Indonesia-(Jakarta, Jawa Barat)
50. Iraq
51. Ireland-(Cork, Dublin)
52. Israel-(Jerusalem, Yerushalaym)
53. Italy-(Rome, Lazio, Milan, Lombardia)
54. Jamaica- (Kingston, Saint Andrew)
55. Japan-(Narashino, Chiba)
56 Jordon-(Amman)
57. Kenya -(Mombasa, Coast )
58. Korea, Republic of (Seoul, Seoul-t'ukpyolsi)
59. Kuwait-(Khaitan, Al Kuwayt)
60. Latvia-(Riga, Liepaja, Liepja) \
61. Lebanon-(Beirut,Beyrouth)
62. Libyan Arab Jamahiriya-
63. Lithuania-(Vilnius, Vilniaus Apskritis)
64. Macedonia-(Skopje, Karpos)
65. Madagascar-(Antananarivo)
66. Malaysia- (Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan)
67. Malta - (Birkirkara )
68. Mexico-(Tlaxcala, Cuernavaca, Morelos)
69. Mauritius-( Baie Du Tombeau, Pamplemousses)
70. Maldives-(Male)
71. Morocco-(Casablanca, Rabat, Rabot-Sale)
72. Myanmar -(Yangon)
73. Nepal-(Kathmandu
74. Netherlands-(Amsterdam, Noord-Holland)
75. New Zealand-(Christchurch, Hamilton, Gisborne)
76. Northern Mariana Islands-(Saipan)
77. Norway-(Trondheim, Sor-Trondelag)
78. Nigeria
79. Oman-(Muscat, Masqsat)
80. Pakistan-(Islamabad)
81. Palestinian Territory-(Gaza, Jenin)
82. Paraguay- (Asuncin, Central)
83. Peru-(Lima)
84. Poland-(Krakw, Malopolski)
85. Portugal-(Pao De Arcos, Lisboa)
86. Philippines-(Cavite, Cavite City)
87. Puerto Rico
88. Qatar-(Doho, Ad Dawhah)
89. Romania- (Pitesti, Arges, Bucharest, Bucuresti)
90. Russian Federation-(Arkhangelsk, Arkhangel'sk)
91. Saint Kitts and Nevis- (Charlestown, Saint John Figtree)
92.Satellite Provider
93. Singapore- (Singspore)
94. Saudi Arabia-(Riyaah, Ar Riyad)
95. Slovakia-(Bratislava, Cfer, Trnava,Nitra)
96. Slovenia-(Maribor, Brezovica)
97. South Africa-(Pretoria, Gauteng)
98. Spain -(Barcelona, Cataluna)
99. Sri Lanka- (Galle)
100. Sudan
101. Sweden-(Stockholm, Stockholms Lan)
102.Switzerland-(Zrich, Zurich)
103. Syrian Arab Republic-(Damascus, Dimashq)
104. Taiwan-(Taipei, T'ai-pei)
105.Thailand -(Bangkok, Krung thep)
106.Trinidad and Tobago
107.Tunisia
108.Turkey-(Trk, Burdur, Erzurum)
109. Uganda- (Kampala)
110. Ukraine
111. United Arab Emirates-(Sharjah, Ash Shariqah)
112. United Kingdom-(Kings Langley, Hertford)
113. United States of America-(Ketchikan, Alaska)
114. Uzbelistan-(Tashkent, Toshkent)
115. Venezuela-(Caracas, Distrito Federal)
116. Vietnam-(Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh Municipality)
117. Virgin Islands, U.S. -(St Thomas)
118. Yemen- (Sana, Hadramawt)
119. Zimbabwe

Happy New Year 2012

2011-01-20T20:16:00.000-05:00

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012! What will 2012 bring? It lies before us as an unexplored continent...full of uncertainty but also full of possibilities.

I love to quote the eight lines of poetry below to illustrate the fact that the difficulties of life are often used by God to teach us important life lessons. This has been true in my own life. It began at the age of nine, when I stood at the bedside of my dying father and witnessed the Christian peace and love that, not only sustained him, but gave him joy in the midst of death. I remembered; "when I grow up, I want to be that kind of Christian."

"I walked a mile with pleasure,
She chatted all the way.
But left me none the wiser,
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with sorrow
And n'er a word said she.
But Oh the things I learned from her,
When sorrow walked with me."

~Robert Browning Hamilton~

A few years ago a piece with a similiar theme passed through the internet. It was tiltled "I wish you Enough."

This is something to think about as we began a New Year, "I wish you Enough". Recently I overheard a mother and daughter in their last moments together at the airport. They had announced the departure. Standing near the security gate, they hugged and the mother said "I love you and I wish you enough." The daughter replied, "Mom, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I wish you enough, too, Mom."

They kissed and the daughter left. The mother walked over to the window where I was seated. Standing there I could see she wanted and needed to cry.

I tried not to intrude on her privacy but she welcomed me in by asking "Did you ever say good-bye to someone knowing it would be forever?"

"Yes, I have, "I replied. "Forgive me for asking but why is this a forever good-bye?"

"I am old and she lives so far away. I have challenges ahead and the reality is - the next trip back will be for my funeral," she said.

"When you were saying good-bye, I heard you say 'I wish you enough'. May I ask what that means?" She began to smile. "That's a wish that has been handed down from other generations.
My parents used to say it to everyone." She paused a moment and looked up as if trying to remember it in detail and she smiled even more. "When we said 'I wish you enough' we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with just enough good things to sustain them." Then turning toward me she shared the following as if she were reciting it from memory --

"I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright. I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.

I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive. I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.

I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting. I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.

I wish you enough faith in God to get you through the final good-bye."

To all my friends and loved ones,
I WISH YOU ENOUGH...A HAPPY NEW YEAR OF GRACE AND PEACE.
Ruth<><

Happy New Year's Resolutions.

2011-01-20T05:04:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year. New Year’s resolutions, is said to be something that goes in one year and out the other.

Below are what others have said about New Years and resolutions:

1.Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me....“He who has an ear, let him hear..." (Jesus ) Revelation 3:20-22

2.Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to. (Bill Vaughan)

3.Now there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average … which means, you have met your New Year's resolution. (Jay Leno)

4.New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time. (James Agate)

5.An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves. (Bill Vaughn)

6.Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right. (Oprah Winfrey)

7.New Year's Day … now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. (Mark Twain)

8.May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions! (Joey Adams)Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account. (Oscar Wilde)

9.We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives ... not looking for flaws, but for potential. (Ellen Goodman)

10. One resolution I have made, and try always to keep is this: To rise above the little things. (John Burroughs)

11. The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul ... Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective ... Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. (G.K. Chesterton)

You Don't Have to Shovel Sunshine

2011-01-11T11:39:00.002-05:00

SNOW EXCITMENT IN GEORGIA! Pictured is the snow covered grave of Ellen Axson Wilson, wife of President Woodrow Wilson in Myrtle Hill Cemetery Rome Georgia.

Woodrow Wilson described "Miss Ellie Lou" as having, "what splendid laughing eyes!" when they first met in downtown Rome.

The historical information was given and the picture was taken by my son, Terrell Shaw during his three hour walk through downtown Rome's rare five inch snowfall on the early morning January 10, 2011.

I have been a widow for 24 years. A few years ago I was friends with a man who had retired and with his wife had moved from Michigan to Georgia. His wife had been dead a couple of years when I met him at a church conference. He told me they moved to Georgia because in Georgia he "did not have to shovel sunshine."

At this point in my life, I am glad to not have to shovel snow or try to walk on ice or snow. But so many of our best family memories when our children were young are tied up with the few snow storms here in the “land of sunshine and cotton.”

My husband and I were always as excited as the children when we had a rare snow storm. He would gather up the children and some hastily makeshift sleds and hurry to Shorter Hill or some other special place. Even if there was only a little snow, we all pitched in to make a snow man.

My job was often to stay home, prepare a pot of nourishing soup, put out a clean sheet to catch fresh snow for snow ice cream, dry out wet gloves, serve hot soup and keep the home fires burning.

Today, as someone too old to shovel snow, I am enjoying the snow covered landscape on this second " snowed in day" and looking for someone to shovel my driveway and remembering " you do not have to shovel sunshine!"

What Child is This?

2010-12-27T23:12:00.000-05:00

What Child Is This? Epiphany.
Much has been said about the last words of Jesus from the cross. In our scripture lesson today (Luke 2:31-52) , we are given the first recorded words of Jesus.

Doctor Luke would have us know the importance of home as formative institutions in the development of Jesus. The Law of Moses was kept at every point: circumcision on the eighth day, Mary’s purification and the dedication of Jesus and in today’s lesson the family’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Passover when Jesus was twelve.

In our church’s sacrament of infant baptism. We ask the parents, “Will you keep this child under the ministry and guidance of the church until he or she, by the power of God, shall accept the gift of salvation for himself or herself when they reach the age of accountability.

In the christening part of the ceremony, the church names the baby. I was baptized as a baby and given the name Sarah Ruth. They is why we refer to our given name as our ‘Christian” name. When I was baptized in the Methodist Church where my parents were members in 1923, one of our neighbors said to another neighbor, "Did you know they let that little baby join the church." No! I became a member of the church after I accepted Christ as my Savior when I was eleven.

At my baptism as an infant, my parents and my church family promised that by precept and example to keep me under the ministry of the church.

When we find the syllable “bar” in the scripture, it means “son of.” Bartimayus means “Son of Timayous.” Bar Mitzvah means “son of Moses” or “son of the law.” So in verse 42 we read that Jesus being at the age of 12, the age of the Bar Mitzvah, accompanies his parents to Jerusalem for the Passover feast (2:42).

When Charles and I were in Jerusalem in 1969 one of the most moving things we saw was the bringing of twelve-year-old boys out at the old Jerusalem wall for their Bar Mitzvah ceremony and the opening of the scripture - the law of God for these twelve year olds to read for themselves.

Jesus lingering behind at the temple is an indirect testimony to the deep faith in the family and the fulfillment of the act of dedicating the child to the Lord earlier in Luke 2:22-23. These verses (22-40) that I read this week and first thought to use today are very moving verses where the old prophet Simeon came up and took the baby Jesus in his arms and prophesied that Jesus was to be a light to the Gentiles and the Glory of Israel. Then we read the 84-year-old prophet Anna came up and also prophesied to "all who were looking for the redemption of Israel." So Simeon and Anna both testified that day to the special relationship of Jesus to God.

In today’s lesson Jesus is 12 years old and is claiming for himself that special relationship to God which was symbolized in His dedication as an infant. Up to this point in scripture, all signs of the unusual nature of Jesus and His mission as the Messiah of God has been through the testimony of others. The angel Gabriel testified telling Mary that she would have a Son and he would be the son of the “Most High God.” Mary testified, “My soul does magnify the Lord.” Elizabeth testified to Mary about the divinity of Jesus. The wise men testified; the shepherds testified; Simeon and Anna testified – all these have testified to the divine uniqueness of Jesus. But now, in today’s passage, we see Jesus in the temple claiming it for Himself.

He has gone there for the feast of the Passover. The Passover was the Jewish festival celebrated each Spring in commemoration of the Exodus account in Egypt when the Lord passed over the firstborn Israelite slaves down in Egypt when the Egyptian first born had been slain.

The last supper was a Passover meal, and our communion service was instituted at Passover time. As Christians we see the crucifixion of Jesus as the fulfillment foreshadowed by the Passover. It was the aim of every Hebrew sometimes in his lifetime to attend the feast of the Passover in Jerusalem. Actually it was laid down by law that every Jewish male who lived within 20 miles of Jerusalem must attend. A Jewish boy became a Son of the Law at age twelve. Jerusalem, the holy city, and the temple and the sacred ritual was important.

Much has been written about when Jesus realized His true identity and mission on Earth. This brief vignette of the boyhood of Jesus is the only record about Jesus between His birth, babyhood, and manhood. This scripture does want us to know that Jesus was nurtured in His obedience and worship, unwavering in His observance of the demands of home, synagogue and temple.

Jesus had gone to the temple with Mary and Joseph and other neighbors and kin people. When the feast of the Passover was over, they traveled in a caravan back to their home. thinking that Jesus was in their company. This was not as unusual as it might be thought. Usually the women in the caravan went ahead, so Mary thought Jesus was with Joseph, and Joseph thought He was with Mary.

One of the most amusing stories in our family is about the time that we left our daughter, Deborah, at a service station in Ohio! Debi said that when their family moved to Rome in 1989 and went to church at Trinity, a woman who was introduced to her said, “Oh, you are the one they left at a service station.” Our son Terrell and his wife Sheila had been members at Trinity for several years and had told this dramatic story to some people at the church.

We were on a camping trip through Kentucky and Ohio. We stopped for gas at a station in Louisville, right at the bridge that crosses the Ohio River. All the children had been to the bathroom and were back in the station wagon. Debi suddenly remembered that she had left a hair barrette in the rest room, so she slipped out of the car to get it. I was feeding baby David in the front seat. Charles came back from paying the bill and started the car. He turned the few yards onto the long bridge that spanned the Ohio River.

Carol saw a huge ship on the river and said, “Look, Everybody. look, Debi! Mama! Where’s Debi?” I panicked, We all panicked but we could not make a U-turn on the bridge. If there had been any physical way to turn around on that bridge, anyone who know Charles Shaw, knows he would have found it. I was ready to get out of the car and run back to the station. But we could not even stop on the bridge because of the heavy traffic. Charles pulled the 9-passenger Chevrolet station wagon into the first place to turn around, and only a few cars behind us, much to our relief, was the service station man bringing Deborah to us.

Debi later told the story to her children in her own dramatic way. She says that the man in the service station probably thought, “These Georgia crackers have probably been dropping off children all the way from Georgia; but they are NOT leaving one here.” Anyway, when Debi came out of the restroom to see us crossing the bridge, the service station owner put Debi in his pickup truck and brought her to us. I will never forget the joy of seeing her little head in that truck and the kindness of the station owner.

Children have a way of keeping you on your toes, and apparently Jesus was no exception. In the hymn “Away in a Manger” we have the phrase, “The little Lord Jesus no crying He makes”, but the baby Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine. One of the glorious truths of the Christmas message we have just celebrated is that the Infinite God so loved the world of finite human beings that He came into the world as a helpless baby, unable to hold his head without the help of the finite human being. So I am sure that Jesus developed his lungs by crying as other babies do.

When Mary and Joseph discovered Jesus missing, they turned around and went back; and they found 12-year-old Jesus talking with the learned men in the house of God. Barclay reminds us that we must realize that during the Passover, it was the custom of the Sanhedrin to meet in public in the Temple. Here they would discuss, for all who cared to listen, religious as well as theological questions. So this scripture is not telling us that Jesus as a boy was dominating a crowd of seniors. “Hearing and asking questions” is a regular Jewish phrase for a student learning from his teachers. Jesus was hearing the teachers and asking questions, the Bible tell us.

The reply of Jesus to Mary and Jospeh has gone down in history as expressing an early awareness of His special identity. He replied that they should understand that He must be about the business of his Father in heaven. He must be about God’s business. Mary said, “Your father and I have been searching for you. Jesus takes the name, Father, and gives it to God. “Did you not realize that I must be about my Father’s business?” The Father must have revealed to Him at this early age his role as Savior and Redeemer.

But there is another part of the “Father’s business” in this scripture lesson – going home with Mary and Joseph and “being subject to them.” Another part of the Father’s business was Jesus increasing in wisdom and knowledge and in favor with God and man. In this scripture, Jesus said, “I must be about my Father’s business.” The Father’s business for Jesus at age 12 was not preaching and working miracles but remaining at home as an obedient child and developing in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and people.

There are times in the life of every person when he must submit to the discipline of preparation – the discipline of studying the scripture, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, not coming to the Bible with pre-conceived ideas and unloving attitudes. Sometimes there is the discipline of waiting, or the discipline of staying in the background. I certainly had done a lot of all of this for many years before I ever stood in a pulpit.

Paul was not converted one day to sit down and write the amazing and beautiful theological Book of Romans the next. Paul was already well-versed in scripture and the classics, but we read that Paul was led in the wilderness for three years to be taught by God after his encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road. The devil likes to get new converts side-tracked into thinking that they have all the answers and do not need the discipline of Bible study, church attendance, and prayer as well as study of other good literature and church history. God performed many miracles in the life of Paul and in others through Paul; but God also required some years of preparation from Paul.

This is a mystery, as great as the mystery of the incarnation, the Christmas mystery,. Why did Jesus become human when He could have stayed God? Why was He crucified when He could have saved Himself the grief and pain? Why was He crucified when He could have called ten thousand angels? Because He loves us. Because He has come to lead us through the waters of life and death into life eternal.

In Pilgrim’s Progress, the man named “Christian” arrives in his journey at the heavily-guarded palace. It will be a battle to seek entry. A man sits at the door to take down the names of those who would dare to enter. Many are hanging back, reluctant and afraid (just as today many hang back from making a firm decision for Jesus Christ. It may seem easy to those of us raised in a church who accepted Christ when we were young, but even walking into a church building is difficult for some people.) Many are reluctant to stand up and be counted as a Christian.

I have never had difficulty in identifying myself as a Christian, but I have had a hard time identifying myself as a preacher. I know how people set you apart and expect you not to even act human. I found it hard enough to be a preacher’s wife, but it is more demanding to be a pastor. Some people are uncomfortable around preachers, and I never feel it is important to volunteer the information in a social situation; but I finally came to the conclusion that I might as well be tarred with the same brush as the rest of the preachers.

In John Bunyan’s classic book, Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is standing near the gate of the palace, reluctant and afraid. But then, with a stout countenance he makes a decision. He walks up to the guard at the gate and says, “Set my name down, Sir.”

“Set my name down, Sir.” This is what baptism and public confession is. It is setting our name and our life on the line for Jesus Christ and His Kingdom. It is taking a stand for Christ and His church. It is identifying with the people of God.

Live Nativity at Trinity

2010-12-20T05:00:00.000-05:00

At Trinity Church in Georgia's Rome, a live Nativity Scene has been a Christmas tradition since 1957 when Mary Craven, a Children's Sunday School Teacher, suggested the project to make Christmas a more Christian event for children. Paul Carven, a Trinity member and Rome contractor built the first set.

After two successful years, in 1959 Mr. Craven added 4’ by 20’ wings to the set.When Paul and Mary Craven retired, Frank Craven and Allen Storey took the responsibility for building the set and Eulaine Camp directed the production. The Live Nativity has continued as a church wide cooperative project with more people than we can name.

For Christmas 2011 Karen Candler Tucker will be directing. Last year and for 10 Years, Judy and Lamar Allen directed the event each Christmas. Frank Craven and family build the set each year!

The live nativity scene is presented each December for the five nights preceeding Christmas Day. Each scene is continuous and 13 people are in the scene at any one time. All characters are live with the exception of the babe and the camel. However, Trinity was blessed with a live camel for the 2000 and 2001 event. New angel wings were added in 1999 and 2000 while Eulaine Camp was Director.

Inside activity includes helping to arrange turbans and halos on heads; heating bricks upon which cold wise men and shepherds stand; and making hot chocolate or coffee for tired workers.Kathy, deaf from birth, was a child when my family moved to Trinity in 1962. Kathy loved to play the angel. And she was, in spite of the clever way she had of seeming not to see her parents when they were about to “sign” a reprimand to her.

As I wrote the poem below, I could envision the face of Kathy and the other young people in Trinity church, those in our household and the community who loved to stand in the Nativity Scene and the adults who participate with great enthusiasm in this annual event each Christmas, December 20 through Christmas Eve on December 24.

CHRISTMAS AT TRINITY

Our Nativity scene is live
In living color too!

With teen-aged Mary dressed
Of course, in blue!

She sits beside the manger
Carol, Beth or Anne,

With Joseph standing by

There's Terry, Bill or Dan.

The shepherds stand alert

A turban on each head.

There’s John and Sam or

Allen, Cleve and Fred.

The wise men are bedecked

In jeweled crowns alike -

That hide - the tousled hair

Of Robert, Karl and Mike.

The angels, Kathy, Fran,

Deborah... truly dear
But they can only qualify
As angels - once a year!

I watch the twisted halos
And am amazed to feel
In spite of pomp and pageantry

They somehow make Him real!

Happy Birthday to my Precious Daughter, Beth!

2010-12-18T02:29:00.000-05:00

I am the mother of seven. Each one has a very special place in my heart. There are all kinds of stories to tell, as all of you who are parents know.
Beth is our baby girl. I know what it is like to be the baby in a family. People like to imply or say outright that the baby girl or boy in a family is a "spoiled brat." It was said about our youngest, our son David, and it was said about Beth, our youngest daughter. When I was a child it was said about me as the youngest of 11. Not true!

Each one of our children also had a special place in their Daddy's heart and life. Beth's Daddy was a pastor and was told on the day of her birth he had plenty of time to go to church and get back to me at the hospitaHowever, Beth got in a hurry to make her appearance and came into the world at 12 noon on a Sunday, December 19, just as her father was pronouncing the benediction and hurrying out the church door to go back the few miles to the hospital. Her Daddy's first words to me after visitng the nursery to see his fifth daughter was, "She is easily the most beautiful baby in the nursery, and I heard a man say, 'Look at that baby! One can tell she is a girl - look at those beautiful lips.'" Beth was and is feminine - all woman

Beth and her younger brother, David were members of the UMC Youth choir where she was a soloist with David at the keyboard. Her high school Choral Director predicted she would "go places" with her "big beautiful" voice for such a small girl. She's only a little over 5 feet tall.
Pictured below is Beth with her son Josh and daughter Amanda when they were small. The other picture is of Beth and her bother David in a concert at the Joyful Noise Supper Club.

I Remember Pearl Harbor

2010-12-07T07:30:00.000-05:00

I remember the early Sunday morning on December 7, 1941 when President Franklin Roosevelt came on the radio to announce that the Japanese had attacked a base in Honolula called Pearl harbor! There are really no words to describe the feelings of surviving veterans, spouses and widows of World War II.

In the photo of the Marine Corps Platoon on the right, my husband Charles Columbus Shaw is on the first row, second from the end going left.)

They tell me that over a thousand WWII veterans are dying daily now. Those living are in their late eighties or nineties but to me they are still young men like my grandson, Josh, who is a a Captain in the Army , serving in Fort Benning now after a year in Germany and over a year in Iraq.

My generation of WWII soldiers are still, to me, those idealistic, brave, vital, young soldiers who willingly went off to war believing that they were helping to assure the safety and freedom of their families. They were willing to serve in spite of great personal sacrifice. They were certainly a part of one of the greatest generations in our country’s history.

Three of my school friends were killed in WWII, James Homer Cook, An Army Airplane Pilot, killed in the South Pacific March 17, 1944; Quentin "Red " Cole, killed in Italy , March 9, 1944; Carroll Adams, killed in France , July 27, 1944 and the brother of a school classmate , a few years older than I, J.W. Rye was killed in Africa January 21, 1943. God bless their memory.

Two of my brothers were soldiers in World War Two. Tom, served in the infantry in Europe and survived the D. Day battle that took the lives of many of his compatriates. My brother, Jack, was in the Army Air Force and served in the South Pacific. These who survived the rigors of war to come back home we also remember as we celebrate and honor our brave soldiers who gave " the last full measure of their devotion."

When President Roosevelt came on the radio early Sunday morning December 7, 1941 and announced that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, life in the towns and cities of America was forever changed. I vividly remember the terror and anxiety I felt as I listened to President Franklin Roosevelt tell of the Japanese attack. We’d never before been in war in my 18 year lifetime.

No one knew what might be next, so days were filled with fear and uncertainty. We were afraid that our mainland would be bombed next.

In the days, weeks, and months that followed, the entire population rallied around the president and our national leadership. Patriotism was strong. Citizens supported whatever the president felt should be done. The immediate response of our nation to the bombing of Pearl Harbor was somewhat like the national response to the events of September 11, 2001, when everyone pulled together and supported one another. But his patriotism lasted thoughout the long war.

We were all uncertain what would happen next and wondered how our individual lives were going to be impacted. Winning the war seemed to be the only focus of the entire population. Soon the military draft was begun. Able-bodied young men were eager to sign up. It was the right and patriotic thing to do. They felt a desire, a need, and an obligation to protect their families and their country from threat and to insure our way of life. Charles was in line early – the morning they opened the draft. Because of this he got a low draft number. However, before his number came up and he could be drafted, he, like many others, opted to volunteer instead so that he could choose his branch of service. Women were never drafted, but many volunteered to serve in the WACS and WAVES.

In 1943 Charles and three other young men from our hometown, Grover Foster, Roy Connell and Charlie Miller, were sent to Cherry Point, NC. Later they were stationed in San Diego. Charlie Miller was wounded in the battle of Iwo Jima and was never well again. These four young fathers joined countless others giving years of their lives for the good of their country. When we learned that Charles was to be shipped to the South Pacific without a furlough, I went out to be with him in San Diego. On the way there (a four day train ride), I came down with scarlet fever. The next day after I arrived at the Marine base, I was quarantined for 21 days. The Marines gave Charles a furlough after all so he could come home with me before he was sent overseas.
His first assignment was in the South Pacific. He served in the Makin, Caroline and Solomon Islands.

He was a Marine, and as it is with the Marines, he remained a Marine the rest of his life. He was enormously proud of his service to the country and at the same time humble about his contributions. As men do, he rarely if ever talked about it in any detail.

Back at home, food and gasoline were in short supply because the nation’s resources were going toward the war effort. The government issued ration books to citizens who then had to use the coupons to get supplies such as sugar and gasoline.

Some textile plants switched over to making strong canvas for tents instead of fabrics for civilian clothing, and some of the mills made cord which was used to reinforce tires for military vehicles. Almost all the nations factories switched from making goods for regular civilian use to making needed military supplies.

The focus of daily life was to keep abreast of what was happening “overseas.” I remember reading the newspapers from cover to cover every day to find out what was happening and discussing the events with other adults with whom I came into contact in the course of the day. All ears were tuned to the radio anytime a report or a speech came on. There were great, inspiring, and encouraging speeches by Roosevelt and Churchill.

Every night I sat down and wrote a letter to my Marine. Every morning I dressed my two little girls and walked to the Post Office to mail that letter and see if we had a letter from “Daddy.” We wrote as often as he could. He was a great letter writer.

Citizens spent whatever “free time” they had doing whatever they could to help with the war effort. Some worked for the Red Cross. Patriotic and Christian groups frequently had rallies and services to support the troops and to encourage each other.

Children’s lives were very different with few male influences in their lives, and the constant talk of war made many of them fearful. A whole generation of children lived without the benefit of their fathers. And those fathers gave up precious early years of their children’s lives in order to preserve freedom for our country.

Finally the war was over. There were community and church celebrations throughout the country. I clearly remember the celebration service our community held. The entire community gathered at the Baptist church in Milstead to thank the Lord for the end of the war. It was quite a celebration!

Charles often said in the years after the war that “Buddies” in the service are not just buddies – they are brothers. They all seemed to feel a strong sense of brotherhood and connection with each other, realizing that their very lives were in each other’s hands.

This is what Pearl Harbor Day , Memorial Day , Veterans Day , Independance Day and every day means to me. It means recognition of the sacrifices made – and still being made by soldiers, their families, their children, and the nation as a whole.

It means appreciation for what thousands of our fellow citizens have done for me – for all of us – for their country – not just in WWII but in other wars our country. And the conflicts continue!

Our mainland was not attacked after Pearl Harbor on 12-3-1941 during World War II but was viciously attacked on 9-11-01 with nearly three thousand lives taken.

So today in 2011 we are blessed to have men and women are willing to fight in a new kind of war with hidden enemies inside and outside the United States. So we need to also remember today's living soldiers, airmen and sailors who continue to sacrifice to protect our freedoms even in some places where they are not respected.

God grant us strength, wisdom and righteousness that our freedom may be preserved and that this great country "shall not perish from the world."

The Chronicles of Ruth - Available NOW!

2010-11-26T10:37:00.000-05:00

The Chronicles of Ruth, my new book based on this blog, Ruthlace, is available now. You can order your copy by sending a check for $14 to R.B. Shaw, P.O. Box 2092, Rome Georgia 30164. The price includes postage.

The book will be available from Amazon and other commercial outlets in a few weeks. It will cost $14.98. So this is your opportunity to get your copy at a discount.

Please "like" The Chronicles of Ruth on Facebook as well.

Happy Birthday to our Precious daughter Joan on November 24.

2010-11-23T02:19:00.000-05:00

Our beautiful Lynda Joan is the second of our seven children born to my husband and me. Words and/or pictures are inadequate to tell how much each of our children fills my heart to overflow with love and how much

Joan has a special place in my heart as she did in her Daddy's heart. Joan calls her Web Log, " Daddy's Roses." (Picture on right is Joan and Jim's 6 grandchildren)

There are all kinds of stories to tell about Joan as a child and as a beautiful and outstanding adult.
The picture to the right shows Joan as "A Georgia Peach" published in the Atlanta Sunday paper.

Joan was a rising senior in High School when we uprooted her from Griffin High School, a small city school where her friends, including a “boy friend” lived. We moved to Ellijay, a small mountain town in North Georgia. If you have ever had to move a teen away from friends you know Joan was not a happy camper.

Ellijay was(and is ) a wonderful town but a town we had never heard of in 1958 when my husband, an ordained Itinerant Elder in the Methodist Church was sent to pastor a church there.

The word, “itinerant“ in the Methodist Church then as now means “traveling” and pastors then even more than now were ask to “travel” to any place where the Bishop and Cabinet thought would best serve the overall church. Without much notice, but with committment to Christ and the church we were assigned to The Church in Ellijay. As an aside, an old friend from Charles home town was a quaint never married nurse who was the epitomy of the Hollywood stereotype of “Old Maid. When our wonderful "Miss Weaver" heard we were moving to Ellijay she remarked, “I've heard they sure mash a lot of corn up there.” We did not see much evidence of "mashed corn" in our four year tenure in Gilmer county! We did meet some of the most oustanding and good people I have ever had the privilege of knowing.

The Annual North Georgia Conference moving day was a "fruit basket turn over" day. One pastor family moved out of a Methodist Parsonage and another moved in, sometimes just minutes apart. So with our moving van (actually a truck) following, we were finally on our way to a town we had never seen.

We had lived in Griffin four happy years so we had a week of sad good byes and “ going away parties” and packing and cleaning. Moving out of a parsonage and getting it ready for another family to move in immediately is work, work, work! The picture to the right was Joan holding a rabbit, raised for food but never eaten!
(The picture below of me holding Joan with Janice 2 years older is one of my favorite of Joan as a baby.)So Charles and I, committed to the Itinerancy, were happy to finally be on our way. The younger children were excited about “moving to the mountains and kept saying things like, “Mama, are those our mountains” as we drove nearer and nearer to a place which did finally become "our mountains and our home town."

Finally we got to the Ellijay city limits. Charles, in his own exuberant way said, “The population of Ellijay has now increased by nine.“ Joan, who had been very quiet finally spoke, “It has probably doubled.”

But Joan adjusted greatly to her last year of High School there, was elected treasurer of her Senior Class and even had the fun being on the Homecoming Court (Homecoming queen) and a cheer leader for Gilmer High. She , along with all of us made life long friends with some of the finest people this world ever produced.

The picture below is of her wedding to Jim Turrentine at Trinity Methodist Church where her daddy, Charles Shaw was pastor. Her sisters Janice, Carol and Deborah were among the bridesmaids. Joan is a wife, mother of a daughter and son, Lyn and Steven , gifted school teacher and now the loving and buy grandmothersix Picture on left shows Joan and Jim's six grandchildren. Picture on right is Joan with her of her four ganddaughters, Natalie and Brianne Davis.

Thanksgiving

2010-11-20T14:14:00.000-05:00

Dr Luke tells the story (1) in Luke 17 about 10 men with leprosy being healed by Jesus. Only one came back to say "thanks." Only one moved up to the level of Thanksgiving. Only one of the men gave thanks and by giving thanks, he gained more than just physical healing .

The one who gave thanks is 10 percent of the ones healed. They tell me that in the average church ... only about 10 percent of the people give most of the time, talent and tithe to keep the place of worship operating. Here we see 9 of the lepers...90 percent taking their blessings for granted.

Most of us in America took our freedom for granted until Sept 11. Then after the shock has worn off…we are back to usual...not realizing the danger still with us.

Jesus was stopped by ten men who had been quarantined by their community as a menace to public health. At least one in the group was gentile. In those days Jews and Gentiles had no dealings with one another. Have you ever noticed that common problems…common worries often put enemies together? I think our enemies here in the United States thought they would get Democrats and Republics fighting each other after the Sept 11 tragedy. However people of good will all over America joined together in the common problem of terrorism briefly. Now, it seems, we have slipped back into fighting one another.

These lepers had heard of Jesus, and asked for His help. They followed His instructions were healed and went to the local health officer to get a Clean Bill of Health...but only one came back to thank Jesus! Where were the nine, we ask? Perhaps they were too busy fo thanksgiving? Perhaps they intended to do so but did not get around to it? Most of us intend to someday do the right thing. We just keep putting it off! However good intentions are not enough. As Sam Jones loved to say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions!

Anyway, this striking story points up a lack of gratitude in our world. One of the vanishing virtues seems to be the grace of thanksgiving. In our own times, some of us seem to have the “Archie Bunker” attitude saying “I do not say grace at the table…because I buy the food and Edith cooks it."

We often do not stop to realize where our strength and ability comes from....not realizing how dependent we are on God for the very air we breathe. One important thing we need to know is THAT Jesus was not disappointed because he was “hurt” not to be thanked in the sense that we might be hurt to extend ourselves for someone and feel it was not appreciated.

Jesus told the one who came back...”You faith has made you well or, or “ your faith has made you whole” In other words, ten were healed but only one was made well…and that is far more important than just being healed physically. The point is ...that unless gratitude is a part of us…we cannot be “whole”

Jesus told the man who came back...praising God and giving thanks for his healing...”your faith has saved you. The Greek word, “sozo” can either be physical or spiritual healing.
this one man experienced…not only healing but the grace of the Savior. This one man’s thankful response indicates the depth of his thought and experience. Gratitude is the most natural reaction to grace! A well person has a sense of gratitude for all and any good fortune, So thanksgiving of our time, our talent and our tithes seems the least we can do.

One of my favorite stories is about an immigrant shopkeeper whose son came to see him on day and complained, ”Dad, I don’t understand how you run this store. ....you keep your accounts payable in a shoe box, your accounts receivable on a spindle, all you cash is in the register... how do you ever know where your profits are?”

The father replied, “Son, when I came to this country, all I owned was on my back. Now your sister is an art teacher, you brother is a doctor, you are a CPA. Your mother and I own a house and a car and this small store. Add all of that up and subtract, the clothes on my back and there is your profit.

I suspect that many of us could give similar testimonies. I thought about that recently when my daughter called and told me about our oldest grandson was giving his thesis for his PhD in Aerospace engineering before an audience at the University of Maryland . And I thought Praise God...Hundredfold profit. This among many other blessings makes that first house Charles and I found hard to give up to answer the call of the Lord to for full time ministry so insignificant.

We need to go back and read the Book of Acts and learn to Praise God. One of the men healed of leprosy came back praising God and in a loud voice, the scripture reports. He glorified God. W e might call him a fanatic but Jesus called him a faithful whole man. Remember, he was praising God while he still had enormous problems. His leprosy was healed but he had been living as an outcast with no money, no job, no home and no village.

The longer I live, the more i see the need and the joy of moving up to the level of praise. This is what I tried to tell a young man recently who came to me with problems. After our talk and prayer. I tried to tell him to start praising God and living the victory…knowing that God will answer prayer. In other words, praise God for answered prayer,
even before the answer comes. Ingratitude is like a disease that needs to be cured. W e get so wrapped up in our problems that we forget the power that is available in Christ!

The Christian faith is nurtured in gratitude! Thanksgiving is a vital part of the make up of a truly well balanced person. The early church grew in spite of all its hardships and persecution…because it kept the spirit of gratitude and praise....who can say but that we, the United States became a great and powerful nation because of this spirit and lifestyle of thanksgiving and praise that began on that first Thanksgiving celebration in 1621.

Often in Paul’s writings, we read “he thanked God and took courage” This could also be said of our pilgrim fathers.

Paul was a master of words...but words failed him on one occasion when it came to thanksgiving. Paul said...”thanks be to God......thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift.” (2)
Millions of words have been written and spoken to try to describe this gift of grace through Jesus Christ and i keep trying to find the right combination of words to tell the story about this “unspeakable gift.” …this indescribable gift of grace.

I think this one leper who was healed physically...went back to Jesus for this gift of grace...this unspeakable gift…this indescribable gift of grace.

Note
1. Luke 17:11-192

Hallow-Thank-mas

2010-11-19T19:38:00.000-05:00

One of the first words we teach to our children is ”Thank You.” When someone does something for them or gives them a gift, we say, “Honey, what do you say? Say Thank you.” "Tell Aunt Mary, ‘Thank you.’…tell Grandmother 'thank you'.” And when they finally say, “Thank You,” in their little baby voice, we hug them and tell them how sweet they are.

The season we are in has been called “Hallow-thank-mas". It starts each year before Halloween with increasingly elaborate Halloween decorations and continues through the many festivities of Christmas. Sometimes it seems Thanksgiving get squeezed out.Thanksgiving Day as a Holiday began in the fall of 1621…as the Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers in America were facing their second winter. Half of them had died that first winter. The wheat and the peas they had brought with them failed to germinate. At one point the daily rations were 5 grains of corn.

When Fall came in 1622, it looked like the few who had survived that dreadful first winter would have enough food and shelter to survive a second winter.They still had problems...they had not reached Utopia. But they were filled with gratitude to God. And that level of gratitude was to carry them a long way.

I heard a Presbyterian minister tell about a time when he and a friend took a bicycle tour of Hawaii one Summer. They pedaled up a hill just as a rainbow arched across the horizon and to make it even more awesome it was just as a cooling rain began to fall while the sun was still shining!And in awe, he turned to his friend and said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could bottle this up and bring it out some dreary November day. The friend replied, ”You need to do what my father taught me. My father told me to “remember my goose bumps.”

This is what the Apostle Paul did. When Paul was an old man, writing from a Philippians jail, chained to guards, he kept remembering and rejoicing, ”In the Lord.”This is what many of us do as in memory we have sunshine even in the storms of life.This is what Moses reminded the children of Israel to do.

The Israelites had been wandering in the desert for 40 years. Finally they are standing on the verge of Jordon and Moses is telling them what kind of people they are to be if they are to keep the freedom God had given them by bringing them out of slavery in Egypt. They were to remember. They were to memorize their history and teach it to their children.We see them standing in the door of the Promised Land recounting their history in a beautiful liturgy. They are reciting, "A homeless Aramean about to perish was our ancestors and we had bad times. We were enslaved ... we were oppressed ... we were afflicted.”“But we have a God! God brought us out of Egypt with an outstretched hand...We are no longer a “no people”...we are God’s people”

Back in the 1950's, when my husband was a student pastor, he had driven to church to preach about 90 miles away. The children and I usually went with him for a week-end stay in a non furnished five room “parsonage with a path”. But that is another story to tell later.That Thanksgiving Sunday in 1952 I was home with a sick baby. I had lost a great deal of sleep and it was a cold and dreary day in a small apartment on a college campus.

A little after eleven, the baby was asleep and I decided to turn on the radio (no TV) while washing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen.A preacher was in the midst of sermon about things for which to be thankful. He said, “Have you ever thanked God for dirty dishes.” And tired as I was, I thought, “as a matter of fact, I don’t believe I ever have” But another thought followed and I realized …“If one has dirty dishes that means they have eaten ... People with no food do not have dishes to wash.” Have you ever thought that the beggar out on the park bench has no dishes to wash, no floors to mop or furniture to dust?The preacher read a poem written by a teen aged girl. I have never seen the poem in print but remember it as something like this:

“Thank God for the dirty dishes

For they’ve a story to tell

And from the stack I have to wash

We’ve eaten very well.

While folks in other lands,

Are glad for just a crust

From this stack of evidence

God’s mighty good to us.”

Thanking God for the things we usually take for granted is a step in the right direction on Thanksgiving Day and every day. A good place to start is to begin with zero and move up to the level of being grateful for ordinary things of life, food to eat, a clean bed, a warm house, fresh apples, turnips greens and cornbread, the smell of flowers, a Christmas tree, a church. And freedom!

I think I may have gotten a new idea of what Zero is when I saw women in Afghanistan, a few years ago, being thankful for just being able to uncover their faces and men being free to shave or grow a bread as they wish.God has made beauty and not just utility. Food could have all been tasteless and flowers without color or smell. Thank God. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said “there is a profound democracy in creation…there are some things we all inherit.”

All of us, rich and poor, men and women, have inherited the possibility of knowing God through Jesus Christ who has broken down the wall of separation and offers us life here and life eternal in the next life.Helen Keller, blind and deaf, said, “I thank God for my handicaps. Through them I have found myself, my work, my God.” Whatever it take, find God.

One source of ingratitude is lack of thought! “Think” in the Anglo-Saxon is related to “Thank.” A “thank” is a “thought.” To “think” is to “thank”The Psalmist tells us “Bless the Lord, O my souls and forget not all His benefits,” Forget not…remember. Thoughtful people are thankful people!

2010-11-14T13:45:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday to my precious daughter, Deborah Ruth Shaw Lewis, on November 14!
Deborah was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky and welcomed as our fifth child.

My oldest sister, Louise, who was called Sis by all her siblings and later Aunt Sis by nieces and nephews, came up to Wilmore by train to help me for a couple of weeks. Sixty years ago, people thought women had to rest two weeks from childbirth.

When Deborah was two months she became critically ill. We had taken her to a doctor in Nicholasville who told us it was just a cold. Two days later, a doctor in Lexington told us Debi was not likely to recover from "double pneumonia." It was during this time that we witnessed a miraculous answer to prayer.

We were devastated and sent word to friends, classmates and teachers, asking for prayer. We were told there was special prayer for Deborah in chapel. Later three of Charles’ classmates came to the hospital, stood with Charles at her oxygen tent crib to pray. When they opened their eyes, Deborah opened her eyes, looked up at them and began to recover.

The photo on the right shows Debi in her Wedding dress in 1973 at Epworth United Methodist Church in Atlanta where she was a member and her father was the pastor. The snapshot below shows her petting our little dog Hercules while her sister Carol looks on.

Deborah is our fifth child and has been a joy to her Daddy and to me all her life. Debi was a good student, the recipient of the Governor's Honor Award in High School and aStar Student honor graduate of Fairburn High School.

One of the family stories that has been told over and over is about the time we actually drove off and left our little daughter, Deborah, at a service station in Louisville, Kentucky near the Ohio River!

Debi tells me when she and her husband, Gregg Lewis, and their family moved to Rome in 1988 and went to church at Trinity, a woman who was introduced to her said, "Oh, you are the one they left at a service station in Ohio!"

Our son, Terrell, and his wife, Sheila, had been members at Trinity United Methodist Church for several years and had told this dramatic story to friends at church.

My husband, Charles Shaw, had served as Trinity's pastor 1962-1968 and we lived in Trinity's parsonage for 6 years which were high school years for Terrell, Carol and Deborah.

Both Deborah and Terrell are noted story tellers so my unvarnished account of the incident may not be as exciting as theirs. When our five youngest children were small, we were on a camping trip - traveling from our home in Ellijay, Georgia to Kentucky and Ohio. We stopped for gas at a service station within a few feet of the bridge that crosses the Ohio River.

All the children had been to the bathroom and were back in our nine-passenger station wagon. I was to learn later that Debi ( age 6) suddenly remembered she had left her hair barrette in the rest room. So she slipped out of the car to get it while I was feeding baby David in the front seat and while all her siblings were getting settled in their places. (Note; even her sibling seat mates had not noticed her leaving the car.)

Charles came back from paying the bill and started the car, turning the few yards onto the long bridge that spans the Ohio River.

Carol, just two and a half years older than Debi, saw a huge ship on the Ohio River and said, "Look at that ship, Mama! Look everybody, look Debi...Mama, where's Debi?"

I panicked...Charles panicked...we all panicked, quickly realizing we could not make a u-turn on the bridge. If there had been any physical way to turn around on that bridge, everyone who knew Charles Shaw knows he would have found it! We wanted to stop the car, so I could walk back to the service station but the traffic made this impossible.

Charles pulled the Chevrolet station wagon into the first turn around place on the Ohio side and was turning our car around when much to our delight and relief the service station owner pulled in right behind us - bringing Debi to us.

Debi now tells the story to her children and to other children and adults in her own dramatic way. She tells that "the man in the service station probably thought, 'These folks have been dropping off children all the way from Georgia, but they are not leaving one here!'"

Whatever the service station owner thought, when Debi came out of the rest room to see us crossing the bridge, the service station owner put her in his truck and brought her to us. The picture of that beautiful little face looking out that truck window is one that in still etched on my memory. I will never forget the joy and thanksgiving of seeing her little head in that truck and the kindness of the gas station owner.

Happy Birthday to my wonderful daughter, Deborah Ruth Shaw Lewis!!!

Veterans Day on 11-11-11

2010-11-06T21:48:00.000-04:00

There are really no words to describe my feelings and probably the feelings of many widows of World War II veterans as we contemplate Veterans Day, 2011 on 11-11-11!

They tell me that over 1000 WWII veterans are dying daily now. Those living are in their late eighties or nineties. But to me they are still young men like my grandson, Josh, who is serving in the Army now at Fort Benning after a year in Iraq and another in Germany.

The photo below is of Cpt. Joshua Hearn holding the hand of his little daughter, Emma, as they walk away from the Cemetery where his friend and fellow soldier, Cpt. Kyle Comfort, was laid to rest. Captain Comfort was killed in the Helmand Province of Afganistan on May 2, 2010.

This story of Captain Comfort's death in 2010 brings tears to my eyes. He reminds us of the "greatness of this generation" of soldiers.

Comfort and his troups were out on patrol. One of the privates stepped on a mine. Kyle saw it and pushed the private to safety taking the blast of the IED himself. He managed to pull himself out of the hole that has been created by the blast...crawling on his elbows because his legs were blown off. His troops said their Captian yelled, "They got my legs but I'm okay." They got him on an evacuation helicopter, but he bled to death within 15 minutes of the blast. Captian Kyle Comfort left a wife and a six month old daughter.

Looking back to 1941 when I was 18, the World War II veterans are still, to me, those idealistic, brave, vital, young soldiers who willingly went off to war after the Pearl Harbor Attack believing they were helping to maintain the safety and freedom of their families. Some were willing to serve in spite of great personal sacrifice. They were certainly a part of one of the greatest generations in our country’s history.

Four of my school friends were killed in WWII: May God bless their memory as we continue to recognize their sacrifice made in 1943 and 1944: James Homer Cook was an airplane pilot whose airplane was shot down in the South Pacific on March 17, 1944.
Quinton " Red "Cole was killed fighting the enemy in Italy on March 9, 1944. Carroll Adams was killed in Frances July 27, 1944.
J.W, Rye was gave his life in Africa on January 21, 1943.

My brother, Tom (John Thomas Baird), served in the infantry in Europe. He and his wife, Rowena, married just before he went into the Army. Rowena lived with my mother, her new mother-in-law and gave birth to their son Jack Thomas Baird while Tom was away. My brother, Jack (Jackson Irvin Baird), served in the Army Air force in the South Pacific. These are just some of the brave men whom we honor this Veteran’s Day.

When President Roosevelt came on the radio early Sunday morning December 7, 1941 and announced that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, life in the towns and cities of America was forever changed. I vividly remember the terror and anxiety I felt. We’d never before been in war in my lifetime. No one knew what might be next, so days were filled with fear and uncertainty. We were afraid that our mainland would be bombed next.

In the days, weeks, and months that followed, the entire population rallied around the president and our national leadership. Patriotism was strong. Citizens supported whatever the president felt should be done.

The immediate response of our nation to the bombing of Pearl Harbor was somewhat like the national response to the events of September 11, 2001, when everyone pulled together and supported one another. This kind of public response lasted until th end of the war in August of 1945.

We were all uncertain what would happen next and wondered how our individual lives were going to be impacted. Winning the war seemed to be the only focus of the entire population.

Soon the military draft was begun. Women were never drafted, but many volunteered to serve in the WACS and WAVES. Able-bodied young men were eager to sign up. It was the right and patriotic thing to do. They felt a desire, a need, and an obligation to protect their families and their country from threat and to insure our way of life.

My husband Charles got a low draft number. However, before his number came up and he could be drafted, Charles, like many others, opted to volunteer instead so that he could choose his branch of service.

In 1943 Charles and three of his buddies from his hometown chose the Marines, Grover Foster, Charlie Miller and Roy Gunnell. The four of them were sent to Cherry Point, NC. Later they were stationed in San Diego. Charlie Miller was wounded in the battle of Iwo Jima. Although he did live to come home , Charlie was never well again.
These young fathers joined countless others giving years of their lives for the good of their country.

When we learned that Charles was to be shipped to the South Pacific without a furlough, I went out to be with him in San Diego. It was four day train ride crowded with soldiers.

Soon after I arrived at the Marine base, I came down with Scarlet Fever and was quarantined for 21 days in the Naval Hospital. The only way Charles and I saw each other was when he came out to the hospital and sat on a ledge outside my room and talked throught the window. Charles first assignment overseas was in the South Pacific in the Caroline Islands.

Back at home, food and gasoline were in short supply because the nation’s resources were going toward the war effort. The government issued ration books to citizens who then had to use the coupons to get supplies such as sugar and gasoline.

In additon to all the "Bomber Plants,"other plants to build airplanes and supplies needed to wage war sprung up all over the nation. Textile mills in the South switched over to making strong canvas for tents instead of fabrics for civilian clothing. Some of the mills made cord which was used to reinforce tires for military vehicles. Almost all the cotton mills in the South, I am told, switched from making goods for regular civilian use to making needed military supplies.

The focus of daily life was to keep abreast of what was happening “overseas.” I remember reading the newspapers from cover to cover every day to find out what was happening and discussing the events with other adults with whom I came into contact in the course of the day. All ears were tuned to the radio anytime a report or a speech came on. There were great, inspiring, and encouraging speeches by Roosevelt and Churchill.

Every night I sat down and wrote a letter to my Marine. Every morning I dressed my two little girls and walked to the Post Office to mail that letter and see if we had a letter from “Daddy.” We often did. He was a great letter-writer.

My two small children and I lived near my parents-in-law and always stopped by their house with any news from their oldest son. They had two other sons in Service. James was in the Army. Grady Jr. was in the Army Air Frorce.

American citizens spent whatever “free time” they had doing whatever they could to help with the war effort. Some worked for the Red Cross. Patriotic and Christian groups frequently had rallies and services to support the troops and to encourage each other. Oe thing that bothers me about Captian Kyle Comfort's death and the many others reported daily now is that, it seem to be, we, as a nation is not on a wartime basis as we were during World War II.

Finally the war was over. There were community and church celebrations throughout the country. I clearly remember the celebration service our community held. The entire community gathered at the Baptist church in Charles's hoe town to thank the Lord for the end of the war. Charles was home on furlough at the time, and our complete family attended together. It was quite a celebration!

Charles had to return to Cherry Point and be mustered out before he could come home for good.

Charles often said in the years after the war that “Buddies” in the service are not just buddies – they are brothers. They all seemed to feel a strong sense of brotherhood and connection with each other, realizing that their very lives were in each other’s hands.

This is what Veteran’s Day each year means to me. It means paying individual tribute to those who gave their young lives. It means recognition of the individual loss and sacrifices made – by the soldiers, their families, their children, and the nation as a whole. War is about individual persons! I posted the death date of young men from my school and home town to focus on personal loss.

It also means appreciation for what thousands of our fellow citizens have done for me – for US – for their country – not just in WWII but in other wars our country has fought to preserve our freedoms and the freedoms of people throughout the world. I pray that they shall not have lived and died in vain.

You Don't Have to Shovel Sunshine.

2010-11-03T17:39:00.000-04:00

Alas, the last of our exciting Georgia snow melted from a shady spot on my patio a few days ago. Pictured above is my young friend, Raiford Crews playing in the brief 2010 Georgia snow.

One of my favorite Web Logs is a lady, who, among her many other talents is her professional looking photography. Her post sometimes carries pictures of SNOW from her kitchen window “all fresh and new and very, very white!” She writes from Michigan, the land of snow.

I have been a widow for since 1986. For several years, I went out with a man who had retired and with his wife had moved from Michigan to Georgia. His wife had been dead a couple of years when I met him at a church conference. He had a great sense of humor. He told me they moved to Georgia because in Georgia he "did not have to shovel sunshine."

At this point in my life, I am glad to not have to shovel snow or try to walk on ice or snow. But so many of our best family memories (and pictures) with our children are tied up with the few snow storms here in the “land of sunshine and cotton.”

My husband was always as excited as the children when we had a rare snow. He would gather up the children and some hastily makeshift sleds and hurry to Shorter Hill or some other special place. If there was only a little snow, we all pitched in to make a snow man.

My job was often to stay home, put out a clean sheet to catch fresh snow for snow ice cream, dry out wet gloves, serve hot soup and keep the home fires burning.

So, school children and teachers, while you are watching the Georgia skies and wishing for a snow day, remember, " you do not have to shovel sunshine!"

ONE SUNDAY MORNING,

2010-10-21T13:00:00.000-04:00

ONE SUNDAY MORNING
My husband Charles Shaw had been a pastor in the Methodist Church for thirty five years when he had a second heart attack which left him with heart damage. He had to retire from his work as a full time pastor.

About a year later, Rev. Harold Gray, District Superintendent (an Elder who helps with seeing that each church in his district has a pastor) called one Sunday morning and asked Charles if he would go to preach at a small United Methodist Church, whose preacher could not continue. Charles said "yes" and he and I drove about 22 miles to the beautiful Rico United Methodist Church in Palmetto Georgia where only about a dozen members were present, not knowing whether or not they would have a preacher with them that Sunday.

Neither the Church nor the Bishop ever sought a replacement so Charles continued to pastor and preach at Rico for over a year. Attendance and membership grew with Charles as their gifted preacher and loving pastor. The First Sunday in Advent in 1986, Charles preached his last sermon, suffering a fatal heart attack three days later.

Two weeks after my husband's death, I was told the Rico congregation had made a request to the church cabinet that I be appointed as their pastor. So I stood there to preach my first sermon as a pastor only three Sundays after my husband had stood in that same pulpit to preach his last.

Even though I had been on the periphery of ministry a long time, the role of pastor was a new one! When Rev. Marion Pierson, called and asked me to take on the pastorate; First, I was surprised the people would call a woman pastor. Second, I knew I would continue in ministry in some way as long as I lived because of my strong sense of calling. (My husband an I had recognized my call to preach earlier. He had asked me to preach a couple of Sundays when he was not able) Third, this was the open door the Lord was calling me to walk through!

I learned also that the Lord does enable those whom He calls. The Lord blessed us richly as I continued to serve the Lord in that place nearly four years while I enrolled and finished seminary, (Emory's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta). I drove back and forth the 30 or so miles three days a week for three years to earn the Master of Divinity degree and enjoyed the classes and the learning opportunity. But my love and top priority was preaching and serving Christ and the people in the Rico community.

The Rico United Methodist Church (photo above) is located in the beautiful open
countryside and is only a hundred yards or so from Providence Baptist Church, (photo to the right).

When I first went to Rico, I was interested to learn that the Baptist and Methodist congregations join together for worship services at least three times a year and also cooperate with each other in other ways.

For example, each has an annual homecoming and both congregations come together for the fellowship dinner after the Worship Service. They attend each other's weddings and “showers” and other special services. Why so much fellowship across denominational lines? When I read the Rico Church History I found at least one answer.

In 1902 when a man by the name of Shannon gave an acre of land adjoining the new Baptist church to build the Methodist Church he said, “The Baptist and Methodists should cooperate on earth as well as in heaven.” Then in 1954 in an updated history this story is re-told with the comment, “It is said that there is no place on earth where Methodists and Baptists cooperate more than in the Rico Community.” So, at least for the old timers in the area, they took pride, perhaps even “un-Christian pride” in recounting their history of cooperation.

One of the joint ventures between this Baptist and Methodist congregation is a service at the Masonic Hall on the third Sunday of each September. I have not polled “the whole world” but I suspect there may be no other “place on earth” where Baptists and Methodists unite for a Sunday Worship Service in a Masonic Hall.

This includes the two pastors preaching in alternating years. The Masonic Lodge is equidistant from the two churches, in a triangle with the three buildings near one point on the triangle. The Masonic structure is a little nearer the Methodist than the Baptist, a fact that I understood was pleasing to some of the Baptists who considered the Masonic movement a work of the devil.

It was Sunday morning and my turn to preach. I had been a pastor less than a year and was a student in seminary. I had put all the time I could in preparation and felt it was not enough. The Baptist preacher would lead the singing and the pastoral prayer. After Sunday school both congregations walked the few yards to gather for this service. All of our Methodist people were present.

One family had even postponed a vacation to “support Ruth” in my first attempt to preach to the Baptists. We had about an equal number from each of the two congregations. They were seated in clusters in what could be described as a “theater-in-the -round.” I do not know if this arena style is typical of Masonic structures.

Rev. Glenn Dow, the Baptist minister, was seated on my left on the slightly raised stage at the wall in front of the entrance.

We were into the service and our Methodist Children’s Choir was singing. (Yes. We did have a Children's Choir by this time...thanks to Judy Henderson, who with her husband Ernie had joined Rico Church, bringing their three children and also neighborhood children)

A man came to the door of the Masonic Building and motioned. Rev. Dow went to the door. It seemed like an eternity before he returned to the platform visibly shaken. He walked to the podium and said, "I have a very sad announcement to make. I wish it could wait until after the service. But in my judgment it needs to be told now. There has been a terrible accident out on Garrett’s Ferry Road. It was Charlene Lewis (a member of Providence Baptist) and her children on the way to church. The children were rushed to Grady...Charlene is dead...it is time for prayer and they need prayer . . .we all need prayer. Let us pray.”

There were audible gasps and cries all over the building. I found myself in tears. I had met Charlene and her two young daughters just eight days earlier at a wedding shower at our Methodist church for a Baptist friend. She was young and very much alive.

The shock of sudden death is staggering. We were all reeling. My mind was in turmoil as I was bowed low listening to Dow and silently praying for the grieving congregation and for myself. What in the world could I say?

Painfully I struggled to remember some of the sermon notes folded in my Bible. Would it be appropriate?

Should I try to explain why an “all powerful" and “all loving God” would allow a young mother to be killed on the way to church? We did not know at the time that the only child of a neighbor had also been in the car and killed. A drunken man had driven his car on the wrong side of this peaceful and picturesque country road.

I do not remember Dow’s prayer. I do remember thinking he was handling it well. I had and still have great respect for this man of God. His pastoral care and concern was evident. Rev. Dow finished the prayer and sat down like a man whose sentence was served and looked expectantly toward me.

It was all too soon my turn to speak. I could not just “be with the people.” I knew if there were to be any ultimates to be spoken by a human being, for God’s sake and for ours it must be said. I was not adequate but I knew the Eternal God was with me in a powerful way.

It was not a funeral. It was a Sunday Morning Worship Service. But we were crying for Charlene and for our own humanness. I said something like this; “I met Charlene at the shower for Linda last week. I remember her as vivacious and friendly.” I turned to my right where several persons were sobbing. “I grieve with you. I am so sorry…so very sorry. I grieve for all of us in trying to understand how a loving, all powerful God would allow a young mother to be killed on the way to church.

“We know, of course, thousands of persons drove to church safely today and every Sunday drive to church without accident, but that does not make it easier today. And in our humanness, we take our safety, our life for granted. We only stop to question God when an accident or sudden death occurs.

God has given us freedom. We are in a highly mechanized, fallen world and it seems to me many persons' lives are cut short needlessly. I remember a few lines I read some time ago: “The grass withers, the flowers fade…you and I die. How I wish it were not so. How I wish things were different. But if things were different, it is entirely possible that we would not possess whatever it is...we wish would never die.” (that phrase had stood out in my reading a few days earlier and seemed important to me)

Moses wrote in Psalm 90, “A thousand years in God’s sight are but as a day when it is past and as a watch in the night.” It seems to me that measuring the length of life in the light of eternity - whether we live a hundred years or just twenty or thirty years - we have only a brief time. This is why it is so important to learn from God. The eternal God is our dwelling place and underneath are the everlasting arms. This is why what we do at church is of supreme importance.“

Before beginning the sermon, I also said a few things I had planned about my respect for the Baptist church and a few words about my call as a woman. Very few! When faced with the mystery of death, the disputes between denominational understanding and between the place of men and women in the church seemed insignificant. This Baptist pastor invited me to speak at his church and we had Bible studies with both churches participating. When I finished seminary and was sent to another community as a full time pastor, I had the same type of relationship with the Baptist pastor and his congregation. God bless these dear men and women of God. They may have a different understand of the Lord's call for Chrisitan women in the church but were respectful and loving.

BTW, I have observed that in churches where Christian women are not allowed to "preach," they preach and call it "Bible teaching" or "speaking" or "witnessing." In churches where women are allowed to preach, we teach the Bible and speak and witness and call it "preaching." Churches that preach that women should not preach, allow women to "witness, speak and teach" on the mission field. Hopefully we, as Christians, can continue to love and respect one another and fight our common enemy and not one another.

It has been one of the heartwarming and faith building experiences of my life to look at the message the Lord gave me during that week. I did not know what would be happening on that Sunday morning but it seemed evident the Lord did. From the opening story to the final illustration, the sermon spoke to all of us in the crisis situation in which we found ourselves that day.

Everyone stayed to complete the Celebration of Worship until the last amen of the benediction. Then they came forward in tears to put arms of love around Dow and around me and each other and to say affirming things about the service and about their faith.

Random Thoughts about Courtship in The 1930"s

2010-10-14T07:28:00.000-04:00

Random Thoughts about Courtship in The 1930"s . What do you think about the quote, "the Poet looks at the world like a man looks at a woman" ? One man responded to this quote in the "Word A Day" column by saying "Does that mean poets are afraid of the world?"

One day, when the first of our five daughters was a teenager, my husband watched the smiles and excitement as she talked on the phone with a young male school friend. He remarked, "I wish I had known when I was a teen that girls were waiting at the phone for boys to call."

When he was a kid, he told me, he thought he had to persuade girls to go out with him. He said he had no idea girls were waiting close by the phone for boys to call.
I am told that these days girls do not wait by the phone but initiate the calls themselves. They tell me further, boys do not call a girl that does not call them first. Does this mean males are afraid of females?

Recently I wrote a post about a time when my mother was a fatherless child in the stricken South during reconstruction after The Civil War. Before the South recovered from the terrible destruction of war, it was also faced with the Boll Weevil's destruction of cotton fields at a time when cotton was a major money crop in the South. Then the Great Depression.

But men and women loved and respected one another. Life seemed good in our little corner of the world in spite of all the deprivation. The Christian gospel of Grace brought the beauty of much "graciousness" into our community. The Christian gospel preached by Methodist Circuit Riders and others, in spite of any flaws they may have had, brought about enough "civility" that we could build civilization in our communities. We worked hard and played hard.

I have written about cooking from scratch and how clothes were made at home with long hours of sewing with needle and thread and/or a foot operated Singer sewing machine. No fast foods. No washing machines. Clothes were rubbed by cold chapped hands on a "rub" board and hung to freeze sometimes before they would dry on an outdoor clothes line.

But it seems relationships between male and female was not so complicated.

My husband, Charles, and I were teen agers in the thirties. I can testify that the thirties were not a time when boys were afraid of girls. If they were afraid, they were brave enough to call anyway.

The teen aged boy I married tells me that when he looked across his school gym and saw me, he said to his buddy nearby, "I am going to ask that girl for a date." A good line? He said he and his friends were taking a look at all the girls on my side of the large gymnasium. The basketball game was in his school's gym playing my school's team. We lived sixteen miles apart.

Are some couples just "meant for each other"? It so happened that Charles had relatives living in my town. I was a school friend of his cousin, Clara. Clara and I were not close friends but did visit back and forth occasionaly. One day, a close friend and I happened to be visiting with Clara when Charles and his family came for a Sunday afternoon visit.

Charles was still a teenager and did not have a car but managed to get back to my town on occasion. It was a time when hitchhiking was common, When Charles was unable to hitch a ride one time he actually walked the 16 miles.

His friend, Bill, finally owned a car (with a rumble seat) and the problem was solved. Charles brought Bill down to my town and introduced Bill to my best friend, Julia. Problem again. Bill and Julia got married two months later. So Charles was back to hitching a ride when he could not borrow his Dad's car. Was Julia and Bills marriage so soon after meeting a bad mistake? Not in this case. The marriage lasted over 50 years until Bill's death.

One late afternoon, Charles came down to a pound party. What is a pound party? During these "depression years," the hostess would invite all the kids to her home for a party. Everyone who came, pitched in with refreshments by bringing a "pound of cookies" or fruit or part of a cake or whatever they had on hand. The hostess made a large pitcher of something to drink...punch or cool-aid or ice tea. We played games that would be called "mixers" today, These games would have the boys and girls talking to one another. Parents were nearby but basically out of sight.

It so happened that it was at a pound party when Charles asked me to marry him. One of the games that early evening, had couples to take a walk together. The walk was along a well lighted street with modest frame houses close together and people all along the short walk. Not a great deal of privacy.

While we were walking, he suddenly turned to me and asked, "Will you marry me?" My reply was, "Oh, I am too young to even think about marriage." Charles said, "I do not mean, marriage right now. Could we be engaged? " In retrospect, I suppose it is laughable to think of our innocence and ignorance. But as young we were, we talked quite seriously about what we expected in marriage.

As they say, the "the rest is history."

Life With Wings, Ruth's 2010

2010-10-13T11:27:00.000-04:00

A few copies of Life With Wings, publised in 2010 is available for purchase!

"Life with Wings includes some of Ruth's best poems and homilies, along with recipes collected by Ruth during 35 years as a pastor's wife in the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church."

The book is available at Barnes and Noble, on Amazon and from Lulu Marketplace for $10.95 per copy.

A limited number of books are also available for $10.00, postage free special from Ruth Baird Shaw at her home address in Rome, Georgia.

Click the photo above to link directly to the Life With Wings page on Lulu.com.
Paperback, 134 pages
Price: $10.95
Ships in 3–5 business days
FREE Shipping on orders over $19.95 on Lulu.com (some restrictions apply)

The Widow's Might

2010-10-12T07:39:00.000-04:00

Reading Miriam Neff’s article, “The Widow’s Might” (Christianity Today, January 2008) brought tears to my eyes. Neff’s husband, whom she married while still a teen, died after 41 years. You can read more about Miriam Neff at her website, Widow Connection.

Miriam Neff tells us that widows are of the fastest growing demographic in the United States. “We are targeted by new home builders and surveyed by designers. We are a lucrative niche for health and beauty products, and financial planners invite us to dinners. It is no wonder the marketers are after us: 800,000 join our ranks every day.”

“Loneliness and solitude are not descriptive enough of the space that becomes the cocoon of the widow.”

Many of us identify with Neff. Recently, when a retired minister died, the email I received gave the address of the daughter and the granddaughter so that condolences could be written but apparently did not even think to give the address of his elderly wife. The wife, now a widow is the one left alone. The rest of the family, of course are grieving. But the widow’s is grieving while also seeing her life changed dramatically.

Studies show that widows lose 75 percent of their friendship network when they lose a spouse.

But, as Miriam Neff points out, we are not invisible to God. There are 103 Scripture passages referencing widows. Widows are close to the heart of God and in James 1:27, we read that God judges others by the way they treat widows.

The Civil War Parade.

2010-10-08T16:27:00.001-04:00

THE CIVIL WAR PARADE.
I love a parade! The first parade I ever saw was a Civil War Parade! I may be one of a few persons living in 2011 to tell of a parade featuring Civil war Soldiers(1861-1865).
The Civil War Parade passed down the streets in our small town when I was a small child in the 1920's. It was a small parade as parades go.

But any parade in our small southern hometown was exciting! This 1920's parade featured the soldiers who had answered the call to arms and last survivors of the "disappearing soldiers"of the few who had survived the Civil War to come back home to a devastated Georgia and Southland.

In those 1920-1930 days, we still referred to the tragic Civil War of "brothers against brothers" as “The War between the States."

It is hard for this generation or even my generation of black and white people who finally won the battle for equal rights to put ourselves back in the time of worldwide slavery and class and racial separation. Today white and black people have associated with one another in school, church and work situations. Most thoughtful people have come to respect our common humanity and to appreciate our differences.

The Civil War Parade of my childhood moved slowly as it passed our house. There were a few horses and wagons in the parade but the three elderly Civil War veterans with long grey hair were sitting on chairs in the back of a slow moving truck. These Civil War soldiers were not waving or smiling as I remembeer them but were looking rather serious. I was standing near the road holding my mother's hand.

I asked Mama, "Who are those poor old men?" "Those elderly men," I was told, were among the last of the Civil War soldiers.

These men had probably seen many of their brothers maimed and killed in an "uncivil" war of "brothers fighting brothers." General Sherman is quoted as saying, "War is hell." If they had not learned it earlier, after Sherman's march through Georgia, who could deny the truth of Sherman's words.

Unfortunately, the American Civil War was seen by many in the south as a "states rights" issue. We are told that less than ten percent of the people in America's southland were slave holders. Most of the slave owners were caucasion, but records reveal there were a few African American as well as a few Native Americans who were slave owners.

History also reveals while all "Christians" were not Abolitionists, all Abolitionist were Christians. There is no record of any Muslin, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist or persons of other religions who had tried to do anything about the world-wide system of slavery.

It was in the Christian Bible that Christians finally became literate enough to learn that God is "no respector of persons" and much later powerful enough to defeat the evil institution of slavery .

When Jesus was born, class and racial discrimination, slavery and survival of the fittiest" was already a world wide practice. As G.K. Chesterson said, "the end of slavery was begun when Jesus died … although it took the church years to become powerful enough to defeat the powerful slave trade."

Many of the Confederate soldiers had never owned nor even seen a slave. My grandfather, Col. William Baird, a Methodist "exhorter" and teacher, like 90 percent of people in the South, never owned slaves. Methodist ministers were prohibited from slave ownership.

The first battles for equal right were fought in Christian conferences.In fact, when Georgia Methodist Bishop Andrews' wife inherited a slave , it caused a riff in the church that separated the Northern part of the church from the Southern part.

The Northern members of the Methodist General Conference in 1840 took away Bishop Andrew's credentials without hearing about his plans of how to divest himself of slave ownership. The Southern delegates took the side of the Georgia bishop, The "slave" Bishop Andrews' wife inherited was the now famous "Miss Kitty" and “freeing" her with a place for her to go was a problem. In fact she continued to live with them after her freedom, and after their death, she continued to live in her own cottage.

Rev. Bogan Mask, A Methodist preacher and my maternal great grandfather is said to have bought one slave for the purpose of freeing him. This old family story is told in more detail by Ferrel Sams in his book of fiction, "Epiphany. " In Sam's book he tells us the son of the former slave who was freed by Rev. Bogan Mask was one of the first African American medical doctors.

The Southern men had been called to arms in a war that was seen then by many as "states rights" and "northern hostility toward the South." In reading the tragic history of the conflict today, we know the issue of Slavery was primary to whether or not we could "live out our creed" and become the United States.

The few young soldiers who lived to return home saw their countryside devastated. Many of their schools, church buildings and homes had been destroyed.

At age 88, I am the youngest and the only living granddaughter of William Baird, a Confederate Army officer in the tragic "Civil War." My father, Benjamin Wilson Baird, was the youngest son of Col. William Baird and his wife, Mary Marks Baird. I am the youngest of the 11 children born to Wilson and Ieula Ann Dick Baird. My father, Benjamin Wilson Baird was 63 when I was born.

William Baird was wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness in North Carolina. His daughter's husband had been killed in the war, leaving her with a child to raise. My dad stayed on the farm to help his wounded father, mother and widowed sister and did not marry until he was forty.

Most of my contemporaries are three generations removed from the Civil War. My husband had two great-grandfathers in the Confederate Army. However, although I am four years younger than my husband, I was only two generations removed from the tragic toll of that war.

I thought of that Civil War Parade of my early childhood with its few surviving elderly Civil War soldiers this week while reading about the rapid "disappearance" of our American World War II (1941-1945) generation. My generation! The World War II generation is my husband Charles Shaw and my brothers Jackson Irvin Baird and John Thomas Baird's generation. They, along with many school friends, went off to World War II. Young men were drafted to fight in response to Hilter's Germany attack on Europe beginning with France and then Japan's deadly attack on America at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

My husband and brothers lived to come home. Three of my school classmates were killed: Homer Cook, Carroll Adams , Quinton "Red" Cole and J. W. Rye. God bless their memory and the memory of all the young men (and the few women) who went off to fight a war they hoped would be the last war!

These World War II soldiers, part of the generation labeled a few years ago as the "Greatest Generation" are also now "the disappearing generation" as were those three old men in the Civil War Parade of my childhood.

Mary and Martha

2010-10-02T18:39:00.000-04:00

In 1979, Charles and I visited the Holy Land. On Sunday morning we drove out to the Eastern slope of the Mount of Olives for a worship service.

We had a breathtaking view of Jerusalem across the Kidron Valley.

Alvis Waite from the South Georgia Conference United Methodist Church read the scripture and Charles preached.

Afterward we made a pilgrimage to see Lazarus’s tomb and the site of the home of Martha, Mary and Lazarus.

Who could visit Bethany and not write something about Mary and Martha?

Mary and Martha.

When I was a child
I loved the story best
Of Mary and Martha.
When Jesus was their guest
Martha prepared
The bread and the meat,
While Mary kept sitting
At Jesus feet.

Somehow in the reading,
The thought was inferred
That women, like children
Should be seen and not heard!

And I thought like a Martha,
Stayed in my place,
Tended my household,
Took care of my face.

One day reading further
With a strangely warm heart,
I heard Jesus say
Mary has chosen that good part.

How I long to be Mary
Disciple devout,
While I’m more often Martha
Cumbered about.

Much hurry and serving
I stay on the . . . run,
For a Martha’s work
Is never all done.

One day reading closer
In lovely retreat,
I learned even Martha
Can sit at His feet!

~1979

Do Blogs Create a Poverty of Attention?

2010-09-20T21:00:00.001-04:00

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the over-abundance of information sources that might consume it."

So said Herbert Alexander Simon (1915-2001), American social scientist, economist and Nobel Laureate.

When I read the above quote, it occurred to me we could substitute the word "Blog" or "internet" for "information" in the piece. I sometimes think we are all drowning in the over-abundance of information at our finger tips.

My father died when I was nine. My mother kept his memory alive in my mind by telling me many things about him. She thought he, Benjamin Wilson Baird, was very wise and often mentioned to me his beliefs and his understanding of issues.

In Mama's amazing love and respect for this man, she seemed to think her husband and my father, Benjamin Wilson Baird, had the last word on matters of faith and values.

For example, she told me one time, in conversation about theology, "I don't think your daddy would agree with that."

In conversation Mama mentioned to me about a time early on when their church was questioning about the influence of "movies" or "picture shows" on the lives of adults as well as children. Mama told me about my father's view on this issue about whether or not Christians should be spending time at the movies.

This was before Hollywood's binge on violence and gratuitous sex. Even before Clark Gable and Gone With the Wind's famous "damn." We have a different set of issues today.

Anyway, Mama said Papa did not see movies as a problem as such for Christians to see and enjoy. The major problem with movies ,Wilson Baird thought, she told me, was our taking time away from more important ways one could be spending our precious allotment of time which brings us back to the quote by Alexander Simon.

Psalms 90 reminds us that in the eyes of God, "1000 years is as a day when it is past," and goes on to tell us "so teach us to number our days." If we should live to be 100, it is a brief time in the light of eternity. So life here is a preparation for life eternally.

But this does not mean we are to keep our noses to the grindstone. We all need recreation and leisure time. From my mother's point of view, Papa had a good sense of humor and they found much to enjoy and laugh about.

But we have to make some choice about how we spend our precious allotment of time.

Weeding out Leukemia in Lily's Garden!

2010-09-14T18:48:00.000-04:00

September is Childhood Cancer Month! We neeed to get serious about raising money to fund reseach into a cure for Childhood Cancer!

It has been over two years since our precious great -grand-daughter, Lily at age seven was diagnosed with Pre-B ALL (Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia) on December 1, 2008.

Lily has learned a lot since this picture was taken. She has shown incredible courage beyond her years.

I recently filled in for the pastor at Beech Creek United Methodist Church, who took a well-deserved day off to visit family. While at Beech Creek I met a beautiful 4 year old boy named Nick who was born with brittle bones (osteogenesis imperfecta). In fact ,Nick was baptised by Dr. Bob Ozment signifying he is a child of God until he reaches the age of accountability when he can accept Jesus for himself. Nick is a beautiful and intelligent child. I do not know his complete diagnosis but, depending on the severity, osteogenesis imperfecta can significantly shorten one lifespan. This is only one of Childhood diseases we do to do serious reseach to find the cause and cure.

As Lily's family, we have become acquainted with more and more children, like Nick, suffering from some form of cancer or terminal illness! We ask for prayer for Nick and Lily and all these children and to consider supporting vital research to find causes and cures.

Lily's doctor explained leukemia by telling her that the leukemia cells are like weeds that crowd out the good flowers in a garden. Lily has passed some important milestones in her treatments in order to kill all the weeds so that only healthy and beautiful flowers will grow in "Lily's Garden." Lily and her family are reaching out and working and raising funds to find a cure for childhood cancers that attack children in frightening numbers.

WOMEN PREACHERS

2010-09-12T15:50:00.000-04:00

This is for those who want to know what the Bible has to say about Women as Preachers, rather than what "tradition" has said or what they have heard preached about women's place in the church.A man who identified himself as a preacher, wrote a letter to the Rome News-Tribune,(published May 19, 2004) , stating that women preachers violated the clear teachings of Scripture and were a "cancer" on the church. He did not give any scripture references on the subject. Let me do so?

Starting in the Genesis of our Bible, Chapter 1, the Bible makes it plain that it takes both male and female to make up the image of God, and the generic word "man", includes both. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female, he created them."(Genesis 1:26-27 KJ version) I am female of the species, man. The scripture thus makes it clear that we of the female sex are part of mankind. That Biblical verse in the first chapter alone should end the argument but there is much more.

Many New Testament passages show that it was Christ's intention to reverse the widespread subjugation of women, which began when the cancer of sin (speaking of cancer) entered the world. (Genesis 3). In Genesis 3, we read that both man and woman lost the joyful liberty God had given them in creation when they abused that freedom in prideful disobedience. Sadly, God's intention for mutuality and equality among man and woman went awry. Thus, the image of God became distorted with sin and our world became 'fallen' (full of sin). Jesus came to save us from sin. (Matthew 1:21)
In a culture that refused to allow women as teachers, learners, or even as witnesses in court, Jesus assures Martha and Mary that Mary sitting at His feet and learning was a good thing (Luke 10:41-42). 'Sitting at the feet' of a master is a phrase used for a 'learner' or 'disciple'.

It is difficult for our generation to understand the amazing freedom (and grace) Christ's coming brought to the world of women as well as men. In many of Jesus' parables, when He used male images and activities, He also used a parallel involving women. In the four Gospels there are 633 verses in which He refers to women, most of them in a positive way.

Jesus allowed women to be the first witnesses to the resurrection. In fact, it was Jesus Himself who told Mary Magdalene to 'go and tell.' I read recently that Ann Graham Lotz, daughter of Billy Graham, was at a gathering where she had been the invited guest speaker. As she stood to speak, some men in the audience stood up in protest and moved their chairs to face away from her. (So it is not just "ordained pastors" they reject. Ann Graham Lotz is neither "ordained" nor a pastor.)

After that experience, while in prayer about her call, Ann recalled the Bible verse (John 20:17) about Jesus sending Mary Magdalene to tell the Good News of the resurrection to all, including the 11 male disciples.

I have observed that in churches where Christian women are not allowed to "preach," they preach and call it "Bible teaching" or "speaking" or "witnessing." In churches where women are allowed to preach, we teach the Bible and speak and witness and call it "preaching." Churches that preach that women should not preach, allow women to "witness and teach" on the mission field.

God help us! Whatever we call it, I stand in awe and humility that the Lord would call and enable me to tell this greatest good news humans ears have ever heard and to win others to Christ.

In the picture on the left above, My husband (as pastor) was presenting me with a certificate and gold pin in recognition of work in the WSCS (women's society of Christian Service) given to me by the Rome District Women. He was pastor of Trinity Methodist Church at the time (1962-1967) and I active in our woman's work. This was long before I was ever labeled "a preacher."

Another example: At the Ellijay Methodist Church (the first church my husband served after his ordination and Master of Divinity degree from Emory) I was asked to fill in to teach an adult Sunday School Class one Sunday. A woman came up afterward with several complimentary statements about my teaching, including, "I did not know that you were also a preacher." All of this to belabor the point of the fine line between teaching, preaching, witnessing and Missionary efforts of dedicated Christian women.

"And it shall come to pass, says God. That I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions. Your old men shall dream dreams. And on My menservants and My maidservants, I will pour out My spirit in those days. And they shall prophesy." (Acts 2:17-18) The prophet Joel's words that women as well as servants will one day prophesy came true at Pentecost.

God has imparted His gifts to each person 'just as He determines' (I Corinthians 12:11). We do not tell God to whom He can or cannot give any gift, including the gift of preaching. Pentecost represents God's sanction for prophetic ministry by women as well as men.

It is God who calls a person (whether man or woman) to preach. In Galatians 3:22-28 we read: "For we are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:16-28). Paul goes on to say that Christ came to redeem those under the law (Greek, slave, female) that we (all) might receive the full rights of sons (whoever will).

The masculine noun (son) and pronoun (he) was used for both genders in the original and so translated into English by Biblical scholars in places when the intent was son/daughter, he/her or children. At other times the gender is specified when read in the original language. Paul tells us in I Corinthians that a woman is not to pray or prophesy without a 'head covering'. This certainly means that if a woman dresses decorously, she can both pray and prophesy. (I Corinthians 11:5)

Paul goes on to say, "as a woman came from man, so also man is born of woman." Both genders were loved and honored equally by God in the three decisive events of: ..Creation (Genesis 1:26-27), ...Incarnation (Matthew 1:21) and ...Pentecost (Acts 2:17-18).8. All my life I have heard people quote Paul's words in I Corinthians 14:34, "let your women keep silent in church." Some incorrectly used this as a proof text to forbid women to preach or teach. To "keep silent" would not allow singing, speaking to your child sitting nearby, saying "hello" to a friend, testifying or even getting down on her knees to say, "God be merciful to me, a sinner."

In the context of chapter 14, Paul admonishes the women at Corinth to be quiet, not because it is wrong for women to speak out loud in church service. He has just told them they can pray or prophecy as long as they act and dress circumspectly. (I Corinthians 11:5). Paul goes on to explain that "God is not a God of disorder but of peace ... everything should be done decently and in order." (I Corinthians 14:33-40). So untaught women were not to disrupt the service by asking questions out of order. Better these women should 'ask their husband' at home.

Ephesians 5:22-24 is one of Paul's five 'hupotasso' passages, (I Corinthians 14:34, Colossians 3:18, I Timothy 2:11, Titus 2:5) so named because of the Greek word translated 'submit' or 'submission'.

A full discussion of male/female roles would require a careful exegesis of all five passages. The idea of submission was nothing new. These women had been taught 'submission' from their mother's knee. Submission was a part of Jewish life for women since the tragic event of 'the Fall' in Genesis 3. What is new? The new is seen as we read the rest of the story. Christain men are also taught 'to submit as to the Lord'.

Paul , more "politically correct" than Jesus was careful not to upset the delicate cultural fabric of his day. But Paul was a 'new creation in Christ' since the hour he met Jesus on the Damascus road. Paul recognized that 'submit' is a good word. So do I.

What is new in Paul's theology is how women are to submit; they are to submit 'in the Lord'. In fact, Paul requests the same submission of the entire church body at Ephesians. They are all to 'submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.' (Ephesians 5:21).

I Timothy 2:11:12 is another example; "Let a woman learn in silence and submission, in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.'' In the context, the Corinthian women were speaking so as to create disorder in the worship. It is often said generally, 'women like to talk'.

Paul is maintaining that untaught women should be taught (manthaneto is imperative). The silence and 'full submission' (again to the church body or teacher). Silence and "full submission is what any teacher would ask of his pupils.

A correct rendering of I Timothy 2:11-12 (of the original into English) would be: "I command that women learn (be taught) in quietness and full submission (to the teaching authority). I am (presently) not permitting a woman to teach and she is not to exert evil influence over a man." Women (or men) who 'exert evil influence' are not to teach.10. When we study the whole of Paul's letters, we realize that the great Apostle Paul was not chauvinistic toward women as some have claimed.

It was Paul who referred to Julia as 'outstanding among the apostles'. It was Paul also who called Phoebe 'a minister of the church'.

Of the 29 people Paul greets in Romans 16, many are women whom he addressed by name, which is contrary to Jewish custom; Phoebe, Tryphosa, Julia, Mary. This passage of scripture definitely tells us that the woman Phoebe was a minister. In Romans 16:1, Paul says, "I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a diakomos (translated into English as 'servant' only for Phoebe) of the church in Cenchrea." Paul uses the word, diakomos, a masculine term with no article.
When Biblical scholars translated the word 'diakomos' into English, they translated it 'deacon' (3 times) or 'minister' (18 times). Only in the case of our sister Phoebe is it translated from the original into English as 'servant'. In fact, in Romans 16:1-2, Paul refers to Phoebe as 'prostatis pollon', which if addressed to a man would likely be translated into English as 'ruler of many'.

Ordination is not a call to authority or to be a "ruler of many." It is a call to Christian servanthood. Scripture references include:

Genesis 1:27...John 20:17, Galations 3:22...28 Ephesians 5:22-24

I Corinthians 14:34... Colossians 3:18, I Timothy 2:11... Titus 2:5...Romans 16:1

Come Into God's Presence With Singing

2010-08-28T16:36:00.000-04:00

In Psalm 100, one of a number of Psalms I memorized as a child, we are told: ” Make a joyful noise unto the Lord all ye lands...Serve the Lord with gladness. ..Come into his presence with singing.

Hymn singing in church has been and still is a vital part of our worship and our discipleship. Our hymnals, next to the Bible have been our most formative resource.

Christians have been singing as long as there have been christians. After finishing his last supper with his disciples, Jesus, on the very night when he was betrayed, sang a hymn with his disciples before they all went out to Gethsemane.

Our Jewish spiritual ancestors sang. The 150 Psalms in the Old Testament is the Jewish “book of hymns.”

John Wesley in 1761 wrote “The 7 directions for Singing “ and they continue in our Methodist hymnals. In our current United Methodist Hymnal.1. Wesley directed us to, “Have an eye to every word.” and to “above all to sing spiritually with an eye to pleasing God more than ourselves or anyone else. We are to direct our singing to the Lord. So our hymn singing is “To the Lord.”

I am not a musician. But I keep singing anyway. I enjoy singing and was allowed to sing in the Candler chorale in Seminary at Emory University.

I love to sing and I love to cook. So I sing around the house, especially in the kitchen. My daughter Beth likes to laugh and tell that every time she brought a boy into the house after a date, I would be in the kitchen banging pots and pans around and singing, “His Eye is on the Sparrow and I know He watches me.”

One learns more than they want to know about themselves when they have grown children.

My parents loved to sing. My mother sung solos in church as a young woman but she was 38 when I was born. I never heard her sing in church but, from my earliest memories, I learned every hymn in the hymnal from hearing my mother sing them as she did household chores.

As a teen, it embarrassed me to bring friends home when Mama was in the kitchen singing hymns. Today my dear mother’s singing is one of my happiest memories.

I do not have a great many memories of my father as I was only nine when he died after being bed ridden for over ayear. But his witness in life and song had a profound influence on me and some of it tied up with his gospel singing.

I remember hearing Papa sing several hymns still in our UM Hymnal. Also he sang other hymns like, “I’m a Child of The King.” My sister, Louise told me that on his deathbed, Papa sang all the verses of “Palms of Victory,” an old hymn about the first Palm Sunday.

G.K Chesterson wrote a few lines of poetry about the lowly donkey that Jesus rode that first Palm Sunday. Chesterson has the donkey to say:
“Fools! For I also had my hour…
One far fierce hour and sweet…
There was a shout about my ears
And palms before my feet.”

The donkey was telling us…Whatever or whomever Christ touches he dignifies…whether a lowly donkey or a lowly person.

In the devastated South still struggling to recover from the Civil War and in the Great Depression, I did not need lessons in "self esteem." We were taught in church that we were so loved and important that Jesus died to save us." My dying father was so sure that heaven was his destination as if his ticket was already in his hand. And I was a witness as I learned the lyrics and tune to:
“Never Grow Old:” by hearing Papa sing:
“I have heard of a land
In the far away strand
Tis a beautiful home of the soul
Built by Jesus on high
There we never shall die
Tis a land where we’ll never grow old”

Charles Wesley, the Bard of Methodism wrote over 65 hundred hymns. When we learn the words of Wesley hymns we are also learning Bible truth. For example, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” is truly a “message of the Holy Spirit” in song. It contains 14 references or allusions to scripture passages.
“Breath, O breath thy loving spirit
into every troubled breast!
Let us all in thee inherit,
let us find that second rest.
Take away our bent to sinning;
Alpha and Omega be;
end of faith as its beginning,
set our hearts at Liberty.”
“Finish then thy new creation
Pure and spotless let us be
Let us see thy great salvation,
Perfectly restored in thee
Changed from glory into glory
Till in heaven we take our place
Till we cast our crowns before thee
Lost in wonder, love and praise.”

Bishop Arthur Moore, A South Georgia native and one of our greatest bishops said about Charles Wesley’s “O For A thousand Tongues to Sing.” “We sing “O for a thousand tongues to sing” and do not use the one tongue we have.”

Wesley’s “A Charge to Keep I Have” reminds us as Christians have been given a “charge to keep and a God to glorify.” We have also been given a particular charge or calling that is unique.

When we sing, “When I survey the Wondrous Cross, by Isaac “we are also hearing a good sermon about the cross and the doctrine of the atonement.
“When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the prince of glory died
My richest gains I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride.
“See from his head, his hands, his feet,
sorrow and love flow mingled down.
Did ev’er such love and sorrow meet,
or thorns compose so rich a crown.”

One of the hymns I connect with my parents singing is “He Keeps me Singing.” The hymn is still on page 110 in Cokesbury,

The words and music were written by Luther Bridges,(1884-1948) a Methodist pastor and evangelist from Georgia. He was away in a revival meeting in Kentucky when his wife and three children were burned to death in a house fire. Bridges was so devastated and dismayed he stayed to himself for many months.
My mother told me about them meeting Bridges and hearing him preach and tell the sad story about how he came to write “He Keeps Me Singing” in the midst of this great sorrow.
The first words are; “There’s within my heart a melody.” Jesus whispers sweet and low
Fear not I am with you
Peace be still
In all of life’s ebb and flow,
“Jesus, Jesus , Jesus,
Sweetest name I know.
Fills my every longing.
Keeps me singing as I go.”

Many of our most beautiful and effective hymns were written and sung in the midst of tragedy. It is in crisis times that we are stopped in our tracks and say, “Where is God when bad things happen.” Strangely, we do not stop often think to say, “where is God when good things happen.”

When things are going smoothly, we tend to focus on other things, our work, our vacation, holidays or the latest movie or ball game.

But let sometime happen… losing a spouse, a job, or discovering you or a loved one may have heart failure or cancer and suddenly life changes and God is back in the picture. Crisis and tragedy serve the function of bringing us back to the recognitions of our limits and our mortality.

My brother Tom dropped out of church for a few Sundays as an older teen. One day he ran into our town’s mayor who told Tom he had been missing him at church. Then he said, half in fun, to Tom, “One day you are going to die and I will say, “poor Tom, he had to die before we could get him back in church.” Tom came home, told Mama about the conversation and asked her to wake him up in time for church the next day.

Some of our favorite hymns were written in times of distress. The hymn, “What A Friend We have in Jesus“ was written by Joseph Striven after his fiancée was drowned the night before their scheduled wedding.

It is said that George Matheson wrote “O Love That will Not Let Me Go” after his fiancée’ broke her engagement to him when she learned of his impending blindness.

In reflecting on my spiritual journey, I was influence by hymn singing. As a child of 11, I was sitting in the Methodist Church where I had been baptized as an infant, listening to the words of a hymn we were singing and pondering the first Biblical question I ever remember giving thought to. We were singing:
“Alas and Did My Savior Bleed.
And did my sovereign die,
would He devote that sacred head
for such a worm as I.”
A few years later some of our church musicians, contrary to Wesley’s advice, took liberties with Isaac Watts’ hymn and deleted “such a worm as I” and replaced it with the more palatable “sinners such as I.”

We might debate the question of whether or not someone should change the lyrics in a hymn after the poet has died. But most of us think it is a nice change. We do not mind being “a sinner.” We may even brag about being a sinner, but none of us relish the idea of being called a “worm”.
This was before WWII, a time when we believed that human beings were getting better and better. All we needed was better education and more bathtubs.
Then we learned about the Holocaust in Germany, where one of the most enlightened and educated nations killed 6 million Jews. We learned about the atrocities of Japan, another educated and prosperous nation…and on and on. Worms?

The evidence is in. Education and prosperity and even social action ...all good things…all much needed things but they cannot save us. They sometimes only may increase our capacity and opportunity for evil?

That day at age 11, sitting in church I was paying attention to all the words of this old Isaac Watts hymn and especially the words, “was it for crime that I have done… Christ died upon the tree… amazing pity, grace unknown… and love beyond degree. “

I was thinking…”how in the world could the sins I commit today have anything to do with Jesus dying on a bloody cross 2000 years ago?”
I was then a thoughtful obedient child. More serious than many I think because of the illness and death of my beloved Papa two years earlier. I suppose I was somewhat like the little 8 year old girl who wrote her pastor one Monday morning.
“Dear Pastor. Yesterday you preached about loving our enemies. I do not have any enemies yet. But I hope to have some by the time I am nine. Love, Mary.”

I could not think of specific sins I had committed, but somehow I grasped a profound truth. I accepted the mystery that God to be God could see into the future as well as the past and Jesus had shed his blood on the cross for me and my generation as well as those of his generation.

I have not mentioned everyone’s favorite hymn, “Amazing Grace,” by John Newton who had been a slave trader and became a Christian and an Abolitionist. (Note: this is important...not every "Christian " was an abolitionist but every "Abolitionist" was a Christian. No other religion had seen the evil of slavery and worked to defeat the powerful world wide slave trade)

I have not mentioned two of my favorite hymns, “Great is Thy Faithfulness” and “All Hail the Power of Jesus Name.” We must also include the greatest of all, Handel’s “Messiah” and the “Halleluiah Chorus” that lifts us to our feet in awe and praise!

And let me mention Fanny J. Crosby (1820-1915) the blind poet who wrote the lyrics and music to over 8 thousand hymns…many of your favorites and mine. Many Cosby hymns still in our Cokesbury and United Methodist Hymnals, are, “To God be the Glory;“ “
“Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord,
Let the earth hear His voice.
Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord,
Let the people rejoice.”
Come to the Father
Through Jesus the Son
And give him the glory
Great things he has done.”

Cosby also wrote the words and music to: Blessed Assurance”;
"Blessed assurace...Jesus is mine...Oh, what a fortaste of Glory Divine...Heir of salvation...purchased above...Born of His spirit...Washed in His blood."

Thank God, we can come into God’s awesome presence with singing and say with the Psalmist, “let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.“ May we say with our life and with our words, “This is my story, this is my song, Praising my Savior all the day long.” AMEN.

1. United Methodist Hymnal, Roman Numeral page 7.

Happy Birthday Carol on August 26.

2010-08-25T08:58:00.000-04:00

Happy Birthday to my precious daughter, Carol, on August 26!
Carol is our middle child with a brother and two sisters older than she and two sisters and a brother younger. Carol has titled her popular weblog,"The Median Sib," but there is nothing middle about her except being the fourth of seven children born to her daddy and me. On a scale of one to ten, she is a ten! Never a four!

Carol was a beautiful baby and a very feminine little girl with blond curly hair. She was as beautiful and wonderfully precocious as her own son and daughter and the three precious little granddaughters she now loves to be with and often writes about.

Carol is more like me in size (four other daughters being short in height as was their paternal grandmother and other women in the family). Carol is about five feet six as am I. Carol also shares my love for cooking. She is a fabulous and innovative cook. Also, as Joan of Daddy’s Roses fame pointed out, Carol (and Joan) share my reserved nature so they may actually “understand me” somewhat better than their 5 more gregarious siblings. However as we all know, none of us are limited by being “reserved” or “gregarious” but all of us are a combination of both with unlimited possibilities though the grace of Christ.

All those who have grown children know that they all think (whether they are reserved or gregarious) that they understand their parents only too well.

The picture below is Carol and her husband Ron's wedding in 1969 in Fairburn First United methodist Church. The picture on the right is Carol with her three younger siblings.

Happy Birthday, Carol! Carol is an outstanding teacher and writer and has a great “Erma Bombeck” sense of humor illustrated in many of her articles published in the Nashville paper a few years ago.

The photo on the left is Carol and Ron's three adorable grandgirls. Lily, Sophie and Evey.
One the right is her son Joey and daughter-in-love Meleah with baby Evey. One the left is Carol's daughter Larisa with granddaughters Lily and Sophie.

In 2001 Carol (on the right) took time off to drive me to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore from my home in Georgia for TriGeminal surgery by Dr Ben Carson. Carol and I spent a few days of recuperation with daughter Janice and her family in Maryland. The picture shows Carol and Janice with me in the hospital.

Weave Shop Ran 24 Hours a day in World War II

2010-08-24T00:22:00.000-04:00

My father died during the great depression in 1932. When the Japanese attached Pearl harbor in 1941 and President Roosevelt declared war, my mother worked as a weaver in the Osprey Mill in Porterdale Georgia.
The Cord Weave Shop looms ran 24 hours a day During World War II to weave the heavy cloth used in making truck and tank tires.

Mama, an intelligent and hard working woman became quite expert as a weaver in the Cord Weave Shop. She seemed to be one of the few people who knew all about how to thread the warps and looms to begin a new supply of heavy cord material.

As I understand it, when a bolt of cloth was cut off the looms to be bundled up and shipped out, a new bolt of cloth could be begun in a relatively simple way. But to begin a different width of cloth required the loom to be threaded in a different way.

During World War II, with so many men away in Europe or the South Pacific, the word went out to recruit everyone who would work in the textile plants. I worked for a few months and was assigned to work in the Cortd Weave Shop and saw for myself Mama was exceedingly knowledgeable about all the workings of the warps and weaving of the heavy cloth.

Mama was no longer young and had deep concern her two youngest sons who were everseas in the Army. My brother Tom was in the Army Infantry in Europe and Jack was in the Army Air Force serving in the South Pacific. Mama was working in the Textile plant Mondays through Friday. She handled the massive looms with energy and skill. The woven cord was used in the production of tires for trucks and tanks as well as for tents.

Long after Mama retired and was no longer on the payroll, on several ocassions the Bibb Manufacturing Company officials sent a car to her home on Hazel Street to take Mama back into the Osprey Mill to thread the looms for a new batch of cloth. She was always happy to go back into the building to thread the looms and teach the skill to other weavers.

I do not remember that Mama was ever paid for this service. But to Ieula Dick Baird, the lady who collected food for families "out of work, " the women who helped deliver babies or visit the sick when the need arose, the lady who told me we came for "good stock," this deed was typical of her. So going back to her old job in the Cord Weave Shop to help someone learn the skill was just another neighborly thing to do.

Ann Southern and Me

2010-08-22T22:14:00.000-04:00

Ann Southern and Me.

At one point after the death of my father, my mother took in boarders. The sofa in the living room (called the "front room" or "parlor") was brought into the wide hall that went down the middle of the house and beds were set up in the front room to make a bedroom for the boarders.
The women boarders slept in this bedroom (our former parlor) across the hall from where my mother, my sister Mary and I slept.

I remember also a young man that came by looking for room and board. Mama put him in the bedroom with my brothers. This was a needed service in those days and a way for a widow to make extra money. Mama cooked regular meals and the boarders ate at the table with us.

My mother provided room and board for two to four people for several years and thus increased the family income. There was no Social Security nor welfare, and borrowing would have been unthinkable. Mama was a talented and innovative woman who still had children to support.

One thing I remember about the boarders was being embarrassed almost to tears one day when they laughed at me.

When I was about twelve, someone had told me that I looked like Ann Southern, a current movie star. I had not seen her in the movies but had seen pictures of her in our daily newspaper.

WOW! I went home and stood in front of the large dresser mirror in the bedroom I shared with my mother and sister. For a time I combed my hair in several styles, smiling and turning back and forth at I primped in front of the mirrow trying to see if I really did look like this famous movie queen.
Suddenly I was brought back to reality by laughter coming from across the hall!

Laughter! I was one mortified little girl to realize that some boarders from across the hallway had been watching my antics in front of the mirror.

Pioneer Clergywomen,

2010-08-21T18:06:00.000-04:00

Georgia Harkness, Ruth Rogers and Me.
I went back to school after my children were grown. In one of my early history classes at Georgia State University, a professor showed a great deal of interest in a paper I had submitted and asked, “What do you plan to be?”

The question of “to be” was unexpected. I had “already been.” I was an older “sometimes” student, pursuing a hobby of learning .

However, when the question of “to be” came up, for strange reason I thought about Georgia Harkness and Ruth Rogers. I suppose they were the only woman theologians I knew about at that time. Far back in the recesses of my mind I must have been slowly preparing for Christian ministry.

As a lifelong Methodist I had read Harkness articles and had even filed some of her work when ministry for me was beyond my thoughts or wildest dreams.
Dr. Georgia Harkness (photo left) was the theologian who kept holding the Methodist General Conference’s feet to the fire until in 1956 they voted for full ministerial rights for all qualified women. Her many books and articles as a Professor of Theology provide a wealth of information about her long career as a theologian, author, and clergywoman.
Harkness believed and taught that women’s rights is more than a matter of justice, It is also a theological issue. What does the church really believe about the Christian God? The theological themes that Harkness expresses in her writings were also lived out in the experiences of Ruth Rogers and other Christian women who spent much of their talents and energy in trying to find a place to serve in answer to a strong calling from God.

On the issue of ordination for women, Harkness believed that ordination with all rights and responsibilities belonged to women as well as men and offered three reasons. Her first reason was a Biblical one. In Jesus Christ all barriers that separate persons from one another have been destroyed. She quotes Paul’s well-known passage in Galations that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond or free, male or female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galations 3:28)

Harkness further noted that ordination for women could be argued from a “practical” standpoint. She pointed out that a portion of the church’s constituency was alienated and the gifts and graces of women were being lost to the mission of the church to the world. The third reason as a spiritual one. Harkness pointed out that the richest and most intimate experiences in the life of the Christian are those that have to do with church membership, the sacraments, marriage, baptism, and bereavement. She said that so long as a person is debarred by reason of gender from acting as an agent in the church in these high spiritual moments, no matter what other opportunities are opened to her, she is debarred from the largest Christian service.

Yet, Harkness remained aloof to issues regarding inclusive language. The personal nature of God, for Harkness, seem to demand a personal pronoun reference. She said, “I see little sense in trying to change the terminology of the ages.”

At the heart of her theology seems to be a “responsible concern for persons everywhere and in every condition.” This includes men! Her idea of the partnership of the sexes emerges whereby the goal of shaping society in the direction of the kingdom of God relies upon mutuality and good will between Christian men and women.

In that same historical year of 1956, Dr. Ruth Rogers was the first woman to be ordained elder in the North Georgia Conference of the Methodist Church and my husband, a rising senior at Chandler School of Theology was ordained deacon.

Although my husband and I had sat in large Methodist conferences with her, I had never met Ruth Rogers until I, as Atlanta-College Park District Communication Chairperson in 1988, interviewed her for an article in the Wesleyan Christian Advocate.

The Rev. Dr. Ruth Rogers(photo to the left -made in 1958) believed, as do I, that the call from God is what makes a preacher, not whether one is a man or a woman. The deaths of two close family members had a great impact on her. Ruth Rogers had adopted a nephew, but in 1945 lost him at the age of 14 to bone cancer. Among his last words to her, “Aunt Ruth, you are going to have to do my preaching.” Then in 1947, her beloved mother died in her arms saying, “Don’t you see Christ? I can see him. He’s right on the edge of a crowd . . . He’s opening the eyes of the blind. "

After her son Billy’s death, Dr. Rogers did a great deal of thinking “and more praying” about it, but was not quite willing “to take on the enmity...” to answer the call to preach. But after the experience of Christ at her mother’s death bed, Rogers, who came from a family of Methodist ministers, said: “I felt I had to tell the story whether I wanted to or not.” After she preached at a District Conference, the vote was unanimous to accept her call. But she was to learn that the “enmity against women as preachers did not stop there.

When I interviewed her, Rogers was 84 years old and walked on crutches because of a fall on ice at the front of a church some years before. But she still had a twinkle in her eyes and a lovely smile and she indicated to me that she has forgiven those who rejected her for whatever reason.

And I? I was a happy wife, a devoted mother and an enthusiastic teacher of Woman's mission studies and Sunday School Bible lessons! I was unaware that Georgia Harkness and Ruth Rogers were paving roads over which I would one day be called to travel.

How can I briefly tell the story that led to my identity as pastor and as theology student? (photo taken in 2004)The path that led to that incredible day in December, 1986 when I first stood in the pulpit of a United Methodist Church as “pastor” and to a bewildering day in Chandler’s Commons in August 1987 as “student.”

Go with me briefly to my childhood. I am nine years old and my father is dying. He has been ill for a year with a heart and kidney ailment. He is a committed Christian. Earlier, he had put his arm around me as i stood by his bedside and told me to never leave our yards without "leave" from my mother. Then he reminded me to always tell the truth and went on to explain the importance of truth. I am profoundly impressed by the faith my wise and good father lived. I am thinking, “When I grow up, I want to be that kind of Christian.”

I found it interesting to note that both Georgia Harkness and Ruth Rogers were also profoundly affected by a dying parent’s last words and/or actions. Harkness had told in her autobiography about returning home to nurse her father in his final illness. He had asked about her many successful books and remarked, “. . . but I wish you would write more about Jesus Christ.” Harkness understood these remarks to be a “directive from an eternal realm” and saw this experience as a turn in her thinking and writing to a more “Christ-centered approach to religious truth.” (Gilbert, p. 18)

Two years after my father’s death, I was sitting with my mother in a worship service at our small town Methodist Church, the same church in which I had been baptized as a small baby. The congregation was singing an old gospel song entitled “At the Cross.” The song later fell into disrepute because of an offensive verse that went like this: “Would he (Christ) devote his sacred head for such a worm as I?” The Hymnal committee later deleted “such a worn as I” and substituted “sinner such as I.” I do not know about changing the words of a poem after the author's death but I ,along with the hymnal committee did not know any “worm like” people. We didn’t even lock our doors at night in my home town. The Psalmist had written that we were created just a little lower than angels!

But one phrase did capture my attention during the singing and I began to ponder the first theological question I ever remember giving thought to. It is a big one. As the singing continued, I was listening to: “Was it for crimes that I have done, Christ died upon the tree?” I thought, “How could my sins today have anything to do with the death of Jesus on the cross nearly 2000 years ago?” Yes! The mystery of God in Jesus Christ became a real part of my life ... my story.”

This was before Hitler, the Holocaust and World War II. The New Deal was beginning to work. Education was going to do away with crime, disease, and discrimination. Later, when I read about the extent of Hitler’s crimes I thought back to that day in church. “Is it possible,” I thought with great sadness, “For human beings to act like ‘worms?’” The jury is in. Education and prosperity are not enough. Germany and Japan excelled in both education and prosperity when they plunged us into World War II. Only Christ can solve our sin problem.

Becoming a preacher is the last thing I even expected or aspired to do. Charles recognized my call to preach early on and mentioned it to me before i said anything to him about it... in 1975. He as pastor and the church (Park Street UMC) recommended me for license to preach, which was then and still is the starting point for Ordained Ministers in our United Methodist Church.

Charles began to have health problems and after a second heart attack and bi-pass surgery he retired on disability in 1983. A year later the District Superintendent needed someone to fill in at Rico Church in Palmetto and called one Sunday morning and asked Charles to go down that morning to preach and conduct the service. He did and kept preaching every Sunday except on two occasions when he asked me to go down and preach.

Charles preached his last sermon the first Sunday in advent in 1986 and 3 days later "went home to be with the Lord." Two weeks later the D.S. called me and told me the congregation had asked to have me appointed to finish the conference year. The Bishop and Cabinet agreed. Would I do it? After much prayer, I knew this was an open door the Lord wanted me to walk through.

In spite of grief and responsibilities, I began as their pastor the 4th Sunday in Advent and continued to serve as pastor at Rico while I started and finished the work for a Master of Divinity degree from Candler School of Theology at Emory.

During my years of "telling the good news of Jesus" behind a pulpit instead of a Sunday School classroom or a Missionary platform, I have sought to learn how to communicate this good news of Jesus. The love and power of God in the hearts of people is able to bring people together across all kinds of barriers as Paul tells tells the people of Galatia in Galations 3:22-28. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female ; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. "(Galations 3:28)

Ordination is not a right to which any of us, male or female are entitled. It is an unmerited call and an unexpected gift of the Lord's mercy. It is not a call to authority but a call to service.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gilbert, Paula Elizabeth. Choice of the Greater Good: The Christian Witness of Georgia Harkness. Graduate School of Duke University, 1984.
Harkness, Georgia. Religious Living. Association Press, New York, 1957.
Harkness, Georgia. The Church and Its Laity. Abingdon Press, New York, Nashville, 1962.
Harkness, Georgia. Grace Abounding, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1969.
Harkness, Georgia. Christian Ethics, Abingdon Press, New York 1957.
Harkness, Georgia. The Ministry of Reconciliation. Abingdon Press, New York, 1971.
Harkness, Georgia. Women in Church and Society: A Historical and Theological Inquiry. Abingdon Press, Nashville. 1972.
Johnson, Helen. “Georgia Harkness: She Made Theology Understandable.”

The Bible

2010-08-19T18:28:00.000-04:00

The Christian Bible include the books of the Hebrew Bible, but arranged in a different order: Jewish Scripture ends with the people of Israel restored to Jerusalem and the temple and the Christian arrangement ends with the book of the prophet Malachi.

When I was a child, I learned to name all 66 books of the Christian Bible in order from Genesis (The first book of the 39 books of the Old Testament) to Revelation (the last of the 27 books in the New Testament.) As with most things we learn early, I can still name the 66 books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

The Old Testament or the Jewish Bible, or Tanakh, is divided into three parts:

1. The five books of the Torah ("teaching" or "law") comprise the origins of the Israelite nation, its laws and its covenant with the God of Israel;

2. The Nevi'im ("prophets") containing the historic account of ancient Israel and Judah plus works of prophecy; and

3. The Ketuvim ("writings"), poetic and philosophical works such as the Psalms and the Book of Job.

Christian Bible is divided into two parts. The first is called the Old Testament, containing the 39 books of Hebrew Scripture.The second portion is called the New Testament and contains 27 books. The first Four, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are The Gospels , telling the story of Jesus. A Physician named Luke writes the book of Luke and Acts, telling the story of the early church and the conversion of Jewish persecutor of the church named Saul who was converted in a vision of Christ on the Damascus Road and became the great apostle Paul. Paul became the preacher to the Gentiles and the author of most of the New Testament.

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES.

2010-08-12T21:20:00.000-04:00

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES:
My mother, Ieula Ann Dick Baird was born in 1885. She was married to Benjamin Wilson Baird in 1903 and widowed in 1932.

Mama was only 18 when she married this man in his 40s. I suppose psychologists would say she was looking for a “father figure” as her father had died when she was only two years old. However, It proved to be a very happy marriage.

My father (a devout Christian and articulate churchman) became seriously ill with a heart-kidney ailment when I was eight and died when i was nine. Papa had been bedridden for nearly a year before he died. Mama cared for him tenderly. She adored this man and he treasured her. She grieved his passing as long as she lived.

I have seen the love in her eyes as she stood looking at his framed picture on her mantle above the fireplace. I remember all the positive words she told me about him as I was growing up.

A few years before she died, my mother told me this story. She said she had cried inconsolable for many days after my father's death and had not been able to sleep. Then one night, Papa came back to her in a dream that seemed to her more like a vision.

Mama told me how he talked with her, telling her all about heaven and the music in heaven and the hymn that was being sung when he arrived in his Heavenly Home. Then he sang the amazingly beautiful hymn to her (my parents both loved to sing).

My mother said she thought it was the most wonderful hymn she had ever heard. She told how she had joyfully sang the words over and over in her dream and felt sure it was a song she would never forget!

Mama told me that after singing to her the beautiful hymn being sung in heaven when he arrived, Papa put his hands on her shoulder, as he had done many times in life. Papa then told her of his love and told her to dry her tears and go to sleep, because he was alright and she would be too.

Mama said, for the first time since her husband's passing, she went soundly to sleep in peace, still feeling his hand on her shoulder and singing the words of the hymn over and over.

My intelligent and practical mother awoke refreshed the next morning and remembered the story above as I related here. But she told me she could not remember a word or a note of the hymn heaven was singing when her precious husband arrived there.

She remembered only that it was the most beautiful hymn she had ever heard!

The Apostle Paul wrote: “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the human heart what God has prepared for those who love him."
(1 Corinthians 2:9).

Sew and Sew

2010-08-10T14:32:00.000-04:00

SEWING IN THE 1920'S ,
Among my early memories of the late 1920's, is my mother sitting at her old Singer sewing machine, peddling away! Sewing was a vital part of her daily chores. She made her clothes, (dresses as well as cotton slips).

Mama also made most, if not all of the dresses and slips my sister Mary and I wore. And early on she has sewed dresses for my two older sisters as well as shirts for my five brothers.

But Mama did not consider herself an accomplished seamstress as was Aunt Cora. It was said that Aunt Cora (Mama's older sister) could go into a dress shop, look at a dress, then come home and make a duplicate.

Mama always said she did just "plain sewing." However,I remember the younger women in the neighborhood would often come to get Mama's help with their sewing.

Mama told me she learned to sew, like Penelope , by "sewing all day and picking out stitches all night." She said she just "kept dabbling with it until I got it right." She did "get it right." The finished dress was well done.

I did not realize this until later in life, but my mother never thought of herself as a pretty woman because her eyes did not focus properly. She was embarrassed that her eyes were "crossed." She always wore glasses, but she had a good figure even into old age.

One of the stories I remember from childhood is that of a neighbor lady who came over one day to borrow a pattern to make a dress like Mama had made for herself. After the lady left with the pattern, my father turned to Mama and said, "She need not think when she finishes her dress like yours, she will look as good in the dress as you do."

Perhaps this helps to explain why Mama never found any fault with Papa! I told this story in a sermon one Father's Day in East Point United Methodist Church to illustrate the fact that Christian men usually know how to love and treat a woman. A few compliments go a long way! Following the Golden Rule would solve many of our interpersonal relationships.

Cotton print dresses were the usual daily attire for women in our small town. These outfits had to be washed, starched,and ironed. No drip-dries nor wrinkle-proof material in those days.

I especially remember Mama working against a deadline to get my Girl Reserve Camp dresses finished. Every year, we made a long train trip to Savanah.

The first time I saw the ocean was on one such trip. The first time I ate in a resturant was on a Girl Reserve trip to Savanah. This was an event that required preparation.

Mama was always working with some of the other mothers in the neighborhood to get us girls ready for camp. In my memory I see Mama sitting at the old sewing machine and peddling away with Blanche Fincher and other young mothers in the room consulting with one another about how the Girl Reserve dresses and scarves needed to be fashioned just right for the event. The dresses were shirtwaist pattern. Each little girl was to pack two white dresses with blue scarfs and two blue dresses with white scarfs to wear for the trip.

The Giles Girls

2010-08-07T18:55:00.000-04:00

When I think of quilts, I always think of the Giles sisters. My mother had cousins she and her sisters called the "Giles girls." They raised their own vegetables for year round use and canned vegetables and dried or canned fruits for winter use I remember sitting at their dining table one time as a child with bowls of fresh

garden vegetables, platters of fried chicken and a huge bowl of fresh sliced country tomatoes, not to mention the plate of perfectly browned cornbread and "just out of the oven" buttermilk biscuits.

Their mother, Aunt Elmira was a sister to Mama's mother, Elizabeth. Elmira and Elizabeth were the daughters of the prosperous (for the times) farmer and Methodist preacher Bogan Mask. They could (and did ) trace their family history back to the Revolution. Family history was important as "Class" was valued in the South with so many other things "gone with the wind" after the Civil War.

It is strange and of little importance to me now but my mother told us on more than one occasion, when we were "poor as church mice" during the Great Depression, "we came from good stock."

One of the Giles daughters had married, and their only brother had married; but Annie, Pearl, and Lula never married. When Mama and her sisters, Aunt Molly, Aunt Cora and Aunt Fannie visited together, they sometimes remarked about how "pitiful" it was that the Giles girls had never married.

I was a child but remember, Aunt Cora pointing out that it was because their papa, Uncle Bill Giles was so "peculiar." They said Uncle Bill Giles was "curious". This did not mean the dictionary reference for the word as eager to learn or inquisitive.

Uncle Bill , they remarked, was " flat out cure-rus" which meant strange in that he would never let his daughters date. It was said that he "ran off" every man who showed an interest in courting one of his daughters.

It seems that the youngest daughter, Odell had "run off and got married."

I remember the Giles sisters visiting in our home a few times. My mother had great love and respect for these dignified ladies. But the family lore is full of stories of the "Giles girls" as typical "old maids." One of the stories tells of a visit when we were all visiting together with them at bedtime in the "sitting room - bedroom." As I told in the Ruthlace post, "Bed and Bath in the Pre-World War II South" we always brought a "slop Jar" into the bedroom on cold winter nights rather than use the unheated bathroom which had been built on the back porch.

I do not remember all the circumstances but my four year old nephew was asleep on one of the beds. Lula said to Mama, in her slow speech typical of the Hollywood stereotype of the Southern drawl, "Eula do you think it would be alright for me to use the slop jar with that little boy in the room."
One of their special talents was quilt making. In one of the bedrooms in their country home (near Fayetteville) there was a stack of beautiful quilts that reached all the way to the ceiling. Not just an eight foot ceiling, but a country ceiling! And the platform that held the quilts was just a few inches off the floor. When I went with my family to visit as a child, I was always awestruck to see such a mountainous stack of quilts. And they were folded only once, and the corners matched perfectly.

Whenever anyone mentioned the Giles sister, someone would say, I wonder whatever happened to all those quilts. I do not know. With no children nor grandchildren to wear the quilts out, folded for sleeping on the floor, they may be heirlooms in some home. Hopefully some of the nieces or nephews have them.

But life goes on. God bless the memory of these dear Giles sisters who were such a fascinating part of my childhood.

Post Script about Women in Ministry.

2010-07-20T15:30:00.000-04:00

POST SCRIPT- People have asked me what my parents would think of me as a pastor. My father, was a Christian man who died when I was 9. The memory of him on his death bed for the last year of his life had a profound and positive influence on me in wanting to be a Christian. I have no idea what he thought about Christian women's place in the church. But as an intelligent and thoughtful man, who read the Bible and quoted whole chapters of Scripture on his deathbed, He would know that when Jesus said, “whosoever,” He included women.

My mother, a Christian, although not as active or as positive about the local church as was my father, was hard working and intelligent. She raised me and loved me and was devoted to me and to all her children. Mama died when I was in my fifties. I think Mama might have been somewhat uncomfortable with the thought of me as a preacher. Mama tended to be critical of women in what she considered the limelight in any way.

But Mama was not one to take Bible verses out of context or easily influenced by public opinions. She would have been OK with it, but certainly not "proud" of it. As a matter of fact, I have never been “proud” of my calling. I have learned that a woman preacher, generally speaking, has to be twice as committed and work twice as hard to get half the credit as male pastor with the same dedication, talent and energy. I gave up more than a little popularity when I answered the call to preach. I have learned more than I wanted to know about forgiveness.

If I may editorialize, I think that where my parents are now (where the scales of tradition and pre-conceived ideas are removed from their eyes -- and where the Bible is understood in the original language and all things are clear) they would know that when Jesus said, "Whosoever will", out Lord had no subordinate list for women.

As far as women preachers were concerned, Mama did speak very highly of Mrs. Carlock, (Elizabeth Harris's mother) who was a preacher and the wife of their pastor. She was said to be a “better preacher” than her husband, and Mama thought they both were good ministers of the Gospel.

I remember also Mama relating to me about a Missionary speaker commenting of the Corinthian passage that says, "Let your women keep silent in church ...If they would learn, let them ask their husbands at home." Mama said that the missionary (a very dedicated male Christian missionary doctor) said that in Paul's day, women (like children) were not educated and sometimes asked questions out loud in church. According to this missionary, the women in his mission field did the same. They might yell out to their husbands, "John, what did he mean?" This missionary said he often felt like Paul at these kinds of interruptions: "keep your women silent, if they would learn anything, let them ask at home -- or at least at break time!" and let everything be done decently and in order." (I Corinthians. 14:40.)

In other words, the missionary said, this passage did not mean that women had to keep silent. See Galations 3:28, Luke 8:1-3; Acts 2:17-18; and Romans 16:1 for other relevant passages. If women kept silent in church, silent would also mean not sing, teach, speak, testify, preach or even say hello, whisper "no" to a noisy child or get down on her knees and pray, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”
It simply meant to teach your women (as you teach your children) order and manners in private for public behavior so they will not interrupt the meetings.

Galatians 3:28 settles the question! “There is no longer Jew nor Gentile, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male nor female; for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Of course, when Mama related this missionary talk to me, I had no personal interest in women preaching. It was certainly the last thing in the world this girl would ever expect to do. I am still amazed that the Lord would call me to preach. I am even more amazed that I ever found the grace and mercy to answer such a call. I am in awe as well as joy that the miracle of the Lord’s blessings is on such a call. I am told that one man at Trinity said, "I never believed women should preach until I heard Ruth Shaw." Of course, the fact that the Lord has greatly blessed my preaching is not the issue but a correct understanding of the Biblical teaching.

It was interesting to me what someone told me what my brother, Tom, said when he heard I was preaching. Tom remarked that it was an answer to Papa's prayers, for Papa had always prayed that the Lord would call one of his sons to become a preacher. "Imagine", Tom said, "the preacher in the family turned out to be his baby daughter!" I think my children already know this, but perhaps a personal word about women in ministry would be appropriate for posterity. It has been a part of my story since 1954 (when wives stood with their husbands when they were ordained) but more directly (the preaching part) since December 1986.

I have no personal agenda in preaching. I am in it because of a compelling call from the Lord. Certainly not Mama called nor self called nor "husband called" even though Charles recognized my called to preach about the same time I did. He recommended me for license to preach in 1976.

While I do not understand the hostility and arrogance of some people who preach against women in ministry, I am more in harmony with those who oppose my ordination out of their misunderstanding of the Scripture and their interpretation of God's will than with those who applaud me out of loyalty to a humanistic social agenda.
Ordination is not a women's rights issue. Ordination is not a right to which any of us is entitled. It is an unmerited call and an unexpected gift of the Lord's mercy. It is not a call to authority but of servanthood.

2010-07-04T20:32:00.000-04:00

MY COUNTRY TIS OF THEE
My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From every mountain-side
Let Freedom ring!

My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free,
Thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills:
My heart with rapture thrills
Like that above.

Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees,
Sweet Freedom's song;
Let mortal tongues awake,
Let all that breathe partake,
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.

Our fathers' God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To thee we sing;
Long may our land be bright
With Freedom's holy light;
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King..Lyrics by Samuel Francis Smith

Remember

2010-07-01T17:22:00.000-04:00

When I was working on a degree at Georgia State University, I also earned a certificate in Gerontology for work done with the aging and did an internship at a large complex for retired people. The large Retirement Complex located a few miles South of the Atlanta Airport included single houses for older people who wanted to get away from the upkeep of larger homes with lawns to maintain.

Also included was a six story building of apartments for people in need of assisted living. Then there was a large Convalescent Center for those who needed nurse care . The complex also included a large building with fenced yard for patients with some sort of dementia or Alzheimer’s.

At the Convalescence center, one of the activities I tried with the clients was a poetry class every Saturday morning for 6 weeks for those who wished to try their hand at writing poetry.

Many of these senior citizens had arthritic hands and could not hold a pencil. So, with a large yellow tablet, I acted as secretary. They would tell me their poem or story. I would write their stories down in poetic form and read it back to them and to their classmates.

One seriously disabled lady who was confined to a wheel chair had been for many years a nurse. Her poem was about her childhood going back nearly 90 years. She told about her love for climbing trees as a child and about her mother calling her to dinner one day when she was on the "highest limb of the tallest tree " on their farm. Nurse Rose, smiled broadly as she recouned this tree climbing event to me and her poetry classmates; a happy memory for the now wheelchair bound nurse.

An elderly man, a Mr. Roberts, told me his poem and as he did so, his face lit up with joy in the remembering. He said:
"Everything was not good
In the good old days.
Everything was not safe
In the good old days.
One day when i was…
About that high…
Not more than four years old
I took a big stick of dynamite
Out to the railroad track nearby.
My father used dynamite
To clear our land for plowing.
Dynamite made a loud noise.
I wanted to make it Make a loud noise.
My mother looked out and saw me
My mother trembled
As she came to get me.
She was afraid to call me
My mother's hands trembled
As she reach out to me
And took the dynamite."

Mr. Roberts smiled broadly as I read his poem back to him and to his classmates. As I read, I saw an old man in a wheel chair but I also envisioned more. I saw a small precocious boy, a child who had loving parents, a father he wanted to emulate and a mother who would risk her very life to protect him.

I suggest that in Mr. Robert's earlier memories, he thought primarily of the danger he had encountered in this childhood escapade. Now, elderly and disabled, the smiling Mr. Roberts was remembering a young mother's love for him and her bravery on his account. He was remembering his story to people around him now who had been strangers until they were all brought together in a large nursing home. The telling of his story gave him added status in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of these new cohorts who heard his story.

One Sociologist, working with the elderly suggests we hyphenate the word remember to "re-member" to distinguish it from ordinary recollection or reminiscing. Re-membering is more than "Backward, turn back O man in your flight. Make me a child again just for tonight."

"Re-membering" is the reconstructing of one’s members, the figures who properly belong to one’s prior selves. Through re-membering, a life is given shape and form. It extends back into the past and forward into the future as an edited story. Without re-membering, we lose our history and ourselves.

In the book of Deuteronomy, we read how the Lord God knew about the value of remembering long before the Sociologist found out about it! Yahweh kept telling the children of Israel to re-member. "And you shall remember all the ways which the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart." (1) We see the Israelites, standing on the "verge of Jordon" with slavery and forty years of wilderness behind them. The "Promised Land" is in their sight and they are told to remember their story, to re-member their roots which included their spiritual history.

They are standing in the door of the "Promised Land" recounting their history and it is a beautiful liturgy. They are reciting "A homeless Aremean, about to perish were our fathers and we had bad times...we were oppressed...we were enslaved. But we re-member we are no longer a "no people," we are "God’s people."

I learned in working with the elderly there is a difference in the mental and emotional health of persons who just recollect or reminiscence about their past and those who re-member. The great stories of life, the great deeds of God were kept alive in memory. People remembered and told, and retold. They marked the place. They made a sanctuary. Sometimes a simple reminder would be set up like a stone. In that way, the great truths were passed on from generation to generation by those who had found God in that place. Or as Elton Trueblood says,"in finding God we have a place to stand while we look for ourselves." (2)

Notes:
1.Deuteronomy 8:17
2.Trueblood, Elton. "A Place To Stand."

Moo-nure

2010-07-01T13:46:00.000-04:00

As I wrote in an earlier post, I started to school in 1929, the year of the "Stock Market Crash." It was also a time of "Class" divisions.

We are taught in school about three classes of people as far as finances is concerned; the Lower classs, the Middle class and the Upper Class. But "bad language " was considered ignorant and "low class'' even if you were high class financially.

I thought of that yesterday when I read about the bags of cow manure being sold for garden fertilizer now being renamed "moo-nure. It is absolutely amazing how much one learns when one has a large family face booking and blogging.

My daughter, Carol wrote on facebook, " So we bought some "Moo-nure" for our garden. They have written on the outside of the bags, "We're number 1 in the Number 2 business." Then my great-nephew Jared wrote back " They stole that motto from my Dad." And I thought, "how clever of Jared's Dad, Warren to come up with that name."

My grandddaughter Larisa replied on facebook, "That must be the standard poop logo. My doggie poop patrol uses that too." So it is not just "cow poop" but all "poop" that are renamed "moo-nure." Note: they have a Doggie Poop Patrol" business in Tennessee.

Those of us who had wanted to have "class" in the 1920-30's did not call them bags of "manure" but bags of "compost" to fertilize our gardens. Manure in my Webster's is defined as "animal encrement or other substance for fertilizer. Compost is a mixture of deposing vegetable and manure.

President Harry Truman became President when Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945 in his fourth term as President of the United States( 1933-1945.)

Truman was known to slip into fowl language at times. He is said to have referred to fertilizer as manure one time and received negative press for his use of English. His wife Bess is said to have replied, "It took me a long time to get him up to the refinement of saying "manure."

Kirstie Alley is said to have dropped "an S-Bomb " when she was on 'Dancing with the Stars' a few days ago. It was discussed with the casual remark, "that is what we have bleep folks for. They are to listen and bleeped. Anyone can make a 'slip up' like that...it can be " bleeped out." Anyone?
The happy picture of Kirstie with her hand over her mouth is above. Perhaps we can educate Kirstie to give up the S-bomb for an M-bomb?

Fresh off the Farm

2010-07-01T13:00:00.000-04:00

FRESH OFF THE FARM
Mama always said that the boll weevil ran them off the farm. The farm was in the community of Oak Hill. Oak Hill is in Newton County near the Henry County line and also near Rockdale County. Cotton was then king in the South!

When the boll weevil infested the cotton plants, it wiped out cotton as the major crop and as the farmers' profits. Many farmers lost their whole years wages.

My father, Wilson Baird was in failing health when he got a job in one of the three mills in Porterdale and moved his family "fresh off the farm" into that model mill town in the fall of 1922.

I was born soon after the move to Porterdale, on February 19, 1923 and was only 6 weeks old when my family faced the sadness of the death of my three year old brother, James Leon Baird who died of measles complicated by pneumonia. Leon is buried in the Liberty Methodist Cemetery in Porterdale where Mama and Papa are also buried.

Liberty Cemetary, I am told, was near Porterdale's first Methodist church building (Liberty) had been. I vaguely remember seeing the small white frame building which was burned down in 1935 after being vacant for several years

I am told my father, Wilosn Baird worked in the Old Porterdale Mill located on the Yellow River (picture above) as long as he was able. My father died in 1932, when I was nine.

My mother continued to work in the Cord Weave Shop in Osprey Mill unitl after World war II. The Cord Weave Shop wove heavy cloth for items like army tents and tank tires and ran three eight-hour shifts all all during the war. Ieula Baird, my mother was proficient as as a weaver and in handling the massive looms and especially in threading up the looms for new widths of cloth.

Long after she retired, mill officials (1) would send a car to her home to take my mother back to Osprey Mill to teach the skill to others while she threaded up the looms for a new batch of the heavy cloth.

In the early 1920's the thriving Textile industry moved South looking for cheaper labor. They found plenty of hungry workers needing jobs among the White and Colored people in the Civil War torn part of the United States.

After the hour and wage labor laws in the mid 1940's, the industy closed down most of their "looms and twisters" and moved farther South outside the United States.

Two of my brothers, John Thomas (Tom) Baird and Jackson Irvin (Jack) Baird served in World War II. Tom served in the Army in Europe. Jack served in the Air Force in the South Pacific.

They both spoke so highly and longed so fervently to get back to their hometown, many of their World War II buddies vowed they would someday visit Porterdale. My brothers came home from the war, but Carroll Adams, Neal "Red" Cole, and Homer Cook, my friends and classmates, were among those who did not live to come back home from World War II.

With no jobs in their hometown, my brothers and others had to look elsewhere. My brother, Tom worked briefly as a policeman in Porterdale after WW II and later was a State Patrol trooper. Tom lived with his family in Cedartown as a Sergeant in the Georgia State Patrol until his death in 1998.

My youngest brother, Jack Baird worked as short-order cook in a restaurant in Savanah for a time, as a pipe -fitter and later as the supervisor of pipe fitters at large Mall construction sites in South Carolina until his death in 1989.

However, my brothers and schoolmates thought and so did I that Porterdale was a great place to grow up in the 1920s and 30’s. Our school teachers were the best.

I has started to school at five, skipped a half grade and was the youngest in my class from the Fifth grade on. (2) We had to pay tuition and find transportation to go to high school. The ninth was the last grade in Porterdale School in the late thirties. (The picture of Porterdale School had classrooms for First Grade through Grade Nine. There was also a Home Economics classroom with sewing machine and stove and a Music Room.) I tell in anotehr post about my high school experiences and much later about college.

In Porterdale, I loved being a member of the Girl Reserves, (more details in another post) a civic club provided by Bibb Manufacturing Company for all the girls in town. It was similar to Girl Scouts in that we had regular meetings and wore uniforms. Our uniforms were white dresses with blue belts and blue scarves and blue dresses with white belts and scarves. The shirtwaist type dresses were made by our mothers or a dressmaker from cotton material woven in one of the mills and sold at a discount. I loved being in the Girl Reserves.One of the advantages of belonging to the Girl Reserves was the opportunity to make a trip each summer. I remember at least two trips to Savannah by train. The first time I saw the ocean and the first time I stayed in a hotel was in Savannah on one of those outings when I was about ten or eleven years old. I especially remember the large formal dining room in the Desoto Hotel in Savannah. It was at the Desoto where, for the first time, we were served fish that still had its head. None of us would eat the fish, and we little girls giggled and whispered into the night about the ridiculous idea of eating a fish while it looked at us.

Our neighbors, who were so much a part of my life, included Obie and Grace Moore, Albert and Blanche Fincher, the Hornings, Capes, Moodys, Johnsons, Parnells, Martins, and Loyds.My mother used the term "We were neighbor to..." instead of saying "We lived next door to..." or "We lived near..." so and so. I have fond memories as a child of being in and out of the homes of the Finchers, the Parnells , ther Hornings and the Moores. And they visited with us daily. We did not lock our doors - even at night. Neighbors were in and out all the time - often to borrow a cup of sugar or flour or an egg or two to finish out a recipe for a cake. Often they stopped in to share vegetables or cookies or cake. Mama also always had an extra dollar or two to loan to a neighbor who ran out of cash before the next payday.

Our house seemed to be the gathering place where neighbors would sit on the porch swing that hung from the celling and seat 3 people and the big porch rocking chairs that mama had made cushions for comfortable seating. Neighbors sat the steps after the swing and all the chairs were filled. Sometimes the visits lasted late into the evening; the adults sitting on the front porch and talking while the children played "hide and seek" or "kick the can" out in the front yard or on the unpaved road in front of the house. (3)

Notes:
1. Bibb Manufacturing Company. Built the three large factory buildings, all the housing for employees, the schools, business, churches...the whole town. We had three large churches that were filled every Sunday for church and Sunday School and prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. We even had a community doctor, nurse and social worker. People rarely locked their doors, even at night.

2.My teachers in Porterdale School were: First Grade - Miss Jones; Second Grade - Miss Wright; Third Grade - Miss Webb; 4th Grade - Mrs. Tommie Hood; 5th Grade - Miss Bura Bohanan; 6th Grade - Mrs. Pearl Hacket; 7th Grade - Miss Willie Hayne Hunt; 8th Grade - Mr. John F. Allumns; 9th Grade - Mrs. Willie Hayne Hunt. Miss Ethel Belcher was principal of the school when I started to school. Miss Maud King was principal when I finished at Porterdale and started to Covington High.

3.My Hazel Street playmates included Dorothy, Hazel and Lamar Fincher, Mamie Miller, E. F. Parnell, Obie and Billie Moore. Hazel and Sybil Horning, Jeanette and Betty Martin. Other Hazel Street friends were Julia Sellers, Mildred Yancey and Frank Ingram. I kept in touch with Julia Sellers Smith until her death in 2000 but have not heard from most of the others in many years. I think of them often and would like to hear from them and their family and friends.

Think About These Things by Jane Merchant

2010-06-19T14:14:00.000-04:00

There is not space on any of my many book shelves to hold the books I already have. Nevertheless, I stopped by one of our Floyd County Library's "Friends of the Library" book sales and bought two boxes of books. It helps that I spent less than twelve dollars. Total.

Because of space, I wavered back and forth before putting some of the books in my "to buy" box.

But I found , tucked down between two larger books, a little book of poems by Jane Merchant. I knew immediately I would have bought that book for many times the price.

"Think About these Things" (Published in 1956 by Abingdon Press) was not the best seller of Jane Merchant 's books, even though both Carl Sandburg and Jesse Stewart endorsed the little book of poems on the back cover. Her prize wining volumn and first book was " The Greatest Of These."

I sat down for just a brief few minutes this morning with "Think About These Things" and read several of her little poems. The poem "Experience" is not the best one but is as up-to -date as the morning newpaper:

EXPERIENCE

What happened today?
The newsmen tell
The tidings so:
A government fell.

A statesmman was killed,
An airplane crashed,
A City cowered,
Hurricane lashed.

But here upon
This quiet street
An old. old lady.
Grave and sweet,

Handed a rose
To a crying child.
And sunlight sparkled
As they smiled.

I must beleive
The clamorous, raw
News; but the smile
Is what I saw.

Jane Merchant? I remember reading about Jane Merchant in a magazine with a picture of her many years ago. She was bedriden and being cared for by her widowed mother. The article said she was a semi -invalid, almost deaf and with poor eyesight. I do not know why but I can still see the picture, her bright eyes smiling while looking through thick glasses.

Jane was from Knoxville Tennessee. She was never able to attend formal school except the Sunday School of Inskip Methodist Church. Her many poems were published in many publication of her day including the New York Herald -Tribune.

In the 96 pages of Jane Merchant's Think about These Things poems, She wrote a prayer at the bottom of each page. On page 19 at the end of Experience she wrote;
"Lord, we would not close our eyes to wrong or be selfishishly at peace while others are beset by disaster. Let not our hearts grow callous we beseech thee, to news of suffering in any place. May we be ever responsive to need, seeking ways in which we can help. But , Lord, in a world where bad news travels faster than good, let us never forget that gentleness and kindness are also true. In Christ's name. AMEN.

Robert Frost was quoted this week: "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. -Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)

Happy Father's Day.

2010-06-15T15:31:00.000-04:00

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY June 19, 2011TO ALL FATHERS. The picture on the left is my father Benjmain Wilson Baird , The picture on the right is the father of my seven children, Charles Columbus Shaw.

Happy Father's Day especially my two sons, Terrell Shaw and David Shaw and five sons in law, Gilbert Crouse, Jim Turrentine, Ron Johnston, Gregg Lewis, and Chuck Roszel, all of whom are good fathers to my grandchildren. I do not want to make readers dizzy with numbers but I also report that four of my grandsons. Gilbert Crouse, jr., Steven Turrentine. Joshua Hearn and Joey Johnston and four of my grandsons-in-law, Jack Yoest, Ricky Davis, Steven Hensiek and Philip Rogers are also wonderful father's to our 18 great grandchildren. Our family is blessed with wonderful men.

Father's Day is a holiday for all of us because each one of us comes to Father's Day as we came to Mother's Day thinking of our own Dad or Mom or some special man or woman in our life who was father ot mother to us, rather than some honor due us if we are also a father or a mother.

David Blankenship has written a book entitled, Fatherless America.” Blankenship states that when a father dies, his fatherhood lives on in the head and the heart of his child if the family and friends seek to keep his memory alive and when they finds ways to help compensate for the father’s absence.

He says that in this sense the child is still fathered.

Looking back I know I was profoundly influenced by my mother telling me about my father who died when i was nine. My dear mother told me what a great farmer he was... hard working for his family...how he prayed for me…how on his death bed he prayed for each child by name…that they would come to know Jesus.

I read an article recently entitled, “A Father’s Death Leaves Love Behind.” William Maddox writes about his father-in-law, a man he never met because the dad died when his wife was only three.

His wife’s Dad had been a musician who sang in a quartet and had cut a few records. Maddox said his wife’s father’s legacy lived on because his words and music had a profound influence on his wife’s upbringing.

My father, Benjamin Wilson Baird had a profound influence on me even though he died when I was nine. I would hear other children say, “I want to be a nurse “or “I want to be a policeman when I grow up” and I would think, “I want to be a Christian like Papa.” His Christian influence was a greater legacy for me than any amount of money or property he could have left me.

My mother’s dad also died when she was a baby. Mama told me one day, when other children would wear a new dress or shoes and say, “my papa bought them for me” she would feel sad and think, “If my Papa was still alive, I would have new things…”

I am glad for movements like “PROMISE KEEPERS” and other movements among men to help them and to help us all to realize how much men are needed in the lives of children and how rewarding it is for men to grow old with offspring who love and respect them because of the love and attention they gave to their children when they were young.

I especially remember one man in our congregation at East Point Avenue Church, who had two daughters. Both were beautiful young married women with 2 children each when I knew them. For the four years I was pastor there, on every Father’s day, these two daughters and their entire family drove a great distance to proudly sit with their Dad on Fathers Day.

These daughters loving attention to their Dad in his old age spoke volumes to me about a Father’s legacy.

At a Memorial Service at our church Conference a few years ago, Bishop Bevel Jones preached and one of the things he said was about Aristotle Onnasis, who amid his millions, never had a cause he supported. Jones said, “To leave no estate is not a disgrace but to leave no legacy is a tragedy.

The influence of a father cannot be over emphasized. Studies have shown that when a father is missing, absent from the home, there is a hole in the child that cannot quite be filled. I believe one of the greatest gifts a mother can give her child is to love his or her father. The commandment to love one another is not an arbitrary law, but directions for joyful and happy living.

Fortunately, the Bible teaches there is a remedy. Many of the great leaders of past generations have filled this space, this hole left by an absent father with the Heavenly Father. The Psalmist David tells us even if my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up. God is able to take all kinds of tragedy and bring about good when we commit our live to him. But the number of single women raising children without a father or God in their lives is sad.