There is a baking company located in Tennessee that produces a number of little snack cakes that you have almost certainly sampled. In fact, it is very likely that you have a box of these little goodies in your pantry right now. I will not tell you the name of these delicious treats, but I used to work for them.  

          Since I am not blest with personal wealth I had to work my way through school. That explains why it took me just over two decades to finally earn my doctorate. My jobs were somewhat varied, although I managed to be involved mostly in the auto repair field. There was a time, however, when I was out of work and needed a job. Nearby to where we lived in Tennessee there was a bakery that made snack cakes and little treats that are sold around the country. Being someone who had sampled their wares many times, I went there and applied for a job.

          As it happened, they were hiring and I got a job. The plant manager was taking me around and introducing me to the various heads of departments, and at the same time giving me a tour of the place. It really was fascinating.

          What was really fascinating, though, was what happened when the plant manager started walking me up a circular flight of stairs that wound up a very large tank. At the top of the stairs was a platform and on the platform was a very large, very unkempt man sitting in a chair and smoking a huge cigar. Before him was a control panel that had a couple of buttons and a couple of gauges. I didn’t know what he did, but I know he didn’t have to work too hard to do it.

          I looked over the edge of the platform and down into the tank. The tank itself was enormous. Coming down from the ceiling were two massive metal beaters (for lack of a better word) that constantly rotated on their own axis while moving on tracks laid into the ceiling. It took me a second to realize what these monster beaters were mixing. It was a huge vat of brownie mix. The mix was churned up and then came out on a metal conveyor belt at the bottom. The mix passed through an oven where it was baked while still moving. Then it was cut into pieces and packaged. To see that vat of mix was like a step into heaven. The man’s job there was simply to keep the mixers running and the temperature even.

          The plant manager spoke. “Cecil, I want you to meet the new man.”

          Cecil turned to me and extended a large, greasy hand. “Hey,” he said. Then he pulled the cigar from his mouth and tossed the whole thing over into the vat. The plant manager never said a word about that, but he did ask how the equipment was running. I watched the cigar fall and then float on the top of the mix until a beater pulled it under. It was disgusting.

          My job there was to keep the place clean. That may mean one thing to you and me, but it meant an entirely different thing to the company.

          We have in our minds a gleaming area where snack cakes are made in a germ-free environment. Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle. Keeping the place clean meant scraping dropped oatmeal cookies or little cakes or brownies or whatever off the floor with a snow shovel. If there were piles, the stuff on the top would be thrown back into the various mixes while the rest was usually sold to a couple of local hog farmers to be fed to their hogs. A couple of times a week we hosed the place down. Sometimes, if a machine was down for maintenance, we would wipe it down. But, there was precious little actual cleaning going on.

          At the conveyor belts, there would be women sitting in chairs maybe ten feet apart down one side of the belt with a counterpart directly across the belt from them. Their job was, depending on the type of snack cake coming down the belt, to either keep the cakes straight on the belt so they would go through the wrappers cleanly or squirt the cream into the cream pies. Periodically, the belt would stop for one reason or the other and the ladies with the hoses that delivered the cream would shoot the stuff directly into their mouths. These were the coveted jobs and only the ladies with the highest seniority got those positions. Company policy was, eat whatever you want. The thinking was that after a couple of days you would be sick of the stuff. (It only took the cigar to do that for me.) But the ladies on the belts never seemed to slow down on the munching.

          And the rats. Like little German Shepherds. Fat little German Shepherds. And slow. No problem whatsoever to whack them with the snow shovels. All that did, though, was make them mad.  

          What I learned in that place was that no matter how attractive the packaging is on something, it is what is inside that counts. I have applied that to everything, from foodstuffs to people. It was a good lesson to learn.

          Keep in mind, this was 1976. I am sure that since that time conditions have improved greatly. Still, I rarely ever eat packaged snack cake type goodies.  

          Enjoy.                                  

If you would like to drop me a note you can do so at oldirishguy51@yahoo.com

          A reminder to check out Mary Earle's blog at http://mary-marysmoments.blogspot.com/

          WOW!!! SUPER BOWL SUNDAY!!! SUPER BOWL 51!!!

          There was a time when that would have meant something to me. I would have arranged my whole day around the game. I would have thought of nothing else during church. Later on, when I was a pastor, Super Bowl Sunday would be the shortest sermon of the year. I had no concentration for the message. It was all directed to the Game. Back in the day, my team, the Cleveland Browns, was great. Playoffs every year. But they always faltered in the playoffs and thus never have made the Game. But, oh my, I still loved it!

          I well remember the first Super Bowl. It wasn’t called Super Bowl I. The Roman numerals started later. Actually, that first game was officially called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, although at the time the news people were calling it either the Ultimate Bowl or the Super Bowl. Before it was the Super Bowl it was the NFL Championship Game. But then in the early 1960s another league came into existence. The American Football League was born. All of us National Football League fans just considered AFL football to be sub-par. No one took them seriously. They were just an oddity. They didn’t even have a national TV contract, unlike the powerful NFL and their partnership with CBS.

          Then things changed. The AFL partnered with NBC and the war started. The AFL started to garner a national audience. The NFL had to do something in order to maintain their control. So, negotiations started and a deal was hammered out. The NFL and the AFL would merge. The first step was to hold an ultimate championship game after the two leagues had their own championship games. Three years of that and then the leagues would fully merge. As I recall, the original plan was to call it the Super Bowl until the merger was complete and then it would just go back to be called the NFL Championship Game. It was called a ‘bowl’ instead of a championship because the big college games of the time were called bowls. The Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and a few others. That first Super Bowl was played just two weeks after the college bowl games, so it just seemed right.

          The contestants for that first Super Bowl were the Green Bay Packers from the NFL and the Kansas City Chiefs from the AFL and the game was played in Los Angeles. It was broadcast on both CBS and NBC. I remember watching the first half on one network and the second half on the other. For that first game, each player on the winning team received a $15,000 bonus, which was thought at the time to be huge. The Packers won, 35-10. Finally, just to show how little people thought of these transitional games, there were 30,000 empty seats.

          Of course, that changed pretty quick. Now it is almost like a national holiday. The big build up, all the sportscasters expounding like the experts they aren’t, all the hype about commercials and half time shows and who said what. It is kind of crazy. But I used to love it.

          However, during the build up to Super Bowl VI, the Dallas Cowboys star running back, Duane Thomas, was asked if this was his ultimate thrill playing in this, the ultimate football game. (They still hadn’t quite gotten rid of the ‘ultimate’ title.) Thomas’ reply shocked a lot of people, me included. "If it's the ultimate game, how come they're playing it again next year?" How rude! But it stayed with me.

          One day I realized that I was trying to worship two G/gods. The one true God of the Bible and the great sports god. I was in church several times a week, but I had to admit that my favorite house of worship was a stadium. My two high holy times each year were the World Series and the Super Bowl. I was a preacher with divided loyalties. I had to do something.

          Overnight, pro football died to me. I haven’t watched a complete pro game since sometime in the 1990s. I am still a baseball fan, but not like I was. During this last season, I listened to maybe one game a week on the radio and watched exactly four games on TV, all during the playoffs. I wouldn’t have done that except that my Indians made a run. I find that if I get to involved then the sports god starts to interfere with the true God. Not everyone is like that, but for me, I have to stay focused.

          So, it is Super Bowl Sunday. But, "If it's the ultimate game, how come they're playing it again next year?"

Back in my seminary days we had to take a course called Biblical Ministries. Seems obvious. If you are going to be a minister, you take a course on ministry. We learned about ministering to people, meeting them at their Spiritual, and sometimes physical, need. Throughout this course, which was very extensive, we only spent one day on funerals and dealing with people in grief and one day on weddings and dealing with people who had no idea what they were getting into. This didn’t strike me as odd at the time. I had been to a couple of funerals and I had been to my own wedding. (At least, I think so. There was a baseball game that day. Cleveland at Minnesota. Minnesota won.) How hard could it be?

          I do believe that the Lord has a sense of humor. In 1988 I was pastoring in Warren, Ohio, a city of about 48,000 people. One of our folks passed away and I had the funeral at one of the larger funeral homes in town. As it happened, the minister who had been doing funerals for them for families that had no church had retired. A few days later the funeral home called me and asked me if I would do such a funeral for them. (In the funeral home industry, this is referred to as an unchurched funeral.) I said I would only if it was OK to do follow up. The funeral home agreed and I did the unchurched funeral. For the next seven years, I did at least forty funerals a year for them. When we moved to a church in Geneva, Ohio, a much smaller city on the shores of Lake Erie, I got into a similar situation, only with all three funeral homes in town. Again, thirty to forty funerals a year. I left our church there at the end of 2006 and went tom work for the biggest of those funeral homes, primarily at the beginning, as the person who did follow ups with the grieving families. This funeral home had two locations and I did most of the unchurched funerals for the next nine years. Around forty am year. So, from 1988 through the end of 2015, when I began the process to re-enter the pastorate full time, I did between thirty five and forty funerals a year. Being conservative, that would be just under a thousand funerals. One day of training at seminary. It was a great ministry though. I got to deal and witness to people I would never have been able to otherwise.

          Normally, there is nothing very humorous about a funeral. Sometimes something will happen, say a cell phone rings or a baby burps loudly, that brings some chuckle, but mostly it is a solemn time. But then there are other times.

          The funeral home in Warren called me one day to do a funeral for a woman who was in her 70s. The twist here was that there was a minister who was going to do the funeral, but he woke up on the day of the funeral sick with the flu. The service was in an hour, so it would have to be a rush job by me.

           I got to the funeral home and discovered that the lady had no family, only a long time companion who was in the viewing room with the deceased. No one else was there yet, so I went to talk to the man and get some idea about this woman so I could make the funeral personal.

          I found a bent, white haired man standing next to the casket, looking lovingly at the sweet little white haired lady inside. I stepped up to the man, introduced myself and told him I was sorry for his loss. Was there anything he could tell me about his dear friend that I could bring out in the funeral?

          "Well, Reverend, she was the best stripper I ever saw."

          Knowing I had not heard correctly, I asked him to repeat what he had just said. Looking at me with the kind of pitying look people reserve for those who cannot hear well, he repeated himself.

          "I SAID, SHE WAS THE BEST STRIPPER I EVER SAW."

          In the adjoining room there was another viewing going on at the same time. That room suddenly got very quiet.

          Now I am just shocked. “What?” I asked, not because I didn’t hear him but because I couldn’t believe him. His answer was even louder.

          "I SAID, SHE WAS THE BEST STRIPPER I EVER SAW."

          "Uh, well, I don't know if that would be appropriate for a funeral," I replied.

          Still very loudly because I was, apparently, deaf. "WHY NOT? IT WAS HER WHOLE LIFE. SHE ONLY GAVE IT UP A FEW YEARS AGO."

          That was all he could give me. I went to the funeral director's office, only to find him bent double in laughter because he could hear the man all the way down the hall. That was all the old man had given them, as well. It was a very difficult funeral.  

          The printed word. Years ago, they said that the printed word would be gone from existence by 2020. Everything would be electronic. That may happen eventually, but I think we will still have plenty of print left by 2020.

A typical paperback book has 300 to 320 words to a full page; that is, a page that has no pictures or the page that begins or ends a chapter. The typical paperback book has at least 300 pages, usually more. So, the typical paperback book will have 90,000 to 110,000 words. The King James Version of the Bible has 788,280 words. There are other numbers, depending on which version of the English Bible you use. Some shorten verses, some take verses out and some add verses. But, essentially, there are over 788,000 words in the Bible. All the tens of thousands of publications account for billions and billions of words, all vying for our attention. And then there are the videos and audio downloads and people talking and yelling and making NOISE! All have the answer to life’s issues, yet, for the most part, they don’t agree.

          For me, I believe that there is one set of writings for each application. For life, I say the Bible is the book to follow. And not just follow, but adhere to, word for word. If I am putting something together, I want the instructions for that item. When my son was a teenager I was trying to assemble a gift for him. The instructions made absolutely no sense. It finally dawned on me that whoever packed that particular box put the wrong instructions in it. I was really irritated and in my mind, I could see some bored guy at some factory somewhere telling his buddies about the day he put the wrong directions in a box. In my mind all of them are laughing. If I am going to play a game, I want the rules down in black and white. Baseball without a rule book is mayhem. We used to play a game when I was a kid called “Murder the Guy with the Ball.” It was football without rules. Everything has to have a set of rules and regulations to live by, even if those rules and regulations go on and on.

          Now we look at our society and we see anger and frustration and confusion. There are those calling for the reversal of the election results. There are those calling for the arrest of the previous office holders. There are those making outrageous claims about this or that and saying something should be done. And yet, there is a document of less than 7,800 words, easy to read and readily available at no charge that can settle all this nonsense once and for all. Yet, only about one percent of the people in this country have read it. It is called the Constitution of the United States of America.

          One man was breathing fire at me one day, snarling about what was right and wrong. I asked him what the Constitutions said about them issue. He just looked at me like I was an idiot. “I don’t have time to read the Constitution! We have people who do that!” Why do we need people to tell us what is in a document that is less than 30 pages long? It is not technical, it is not boring and it is not full of legalese. It is the document our country was founded on. It is our rule book and you can read it in a few hours! Why do we need people to tell is what it says?

          Wait a minute, you say. I have read the Constitution! OK, here is a test. If you are as old as I am, you had to learn the beginning words of three documents when you were in elementary school.

          “Four score and seven years ago……”

          “We the People of the United States…...”

          “When in the Course of human events……”

          What is each of those phrases from? Who wrote them? When was the last time you read any of them? Sing the song from “Gilligan’s Island.” That last one is the easy one, but don’t feel proud of yourself if you knew the song but didn’t know what documents the phrases are from.

          Some years ago I sat with my Elders and shared with them the sinful acts that their denomination was involved in. Our Elder chair looked at me in disbelief. “Don’t they read their Bibles?” My answer was, “No.” The same is true with the political unrest in this country. People are running around screaming that this or that is unconstitutional, yet they themselves do not read the document. Often, they even call themselves Constitutional attorneys. That doesn’t mean they have read the document.

          When a soldier, sailor, airman or Marine takes the enlistment oath, they say, “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.” I have said that one myself, and meant every word. The key to the oath is supporting and defending the Constitution. Many have paid with their lives living up to that promise.

          Make the effort. The Constitution is available on-line. The government gives them out for free. If you are a Christian, you dishonor God if you don’t know the Bible. If you are an American, you dishonor those soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines if you don’t know your Constitution.

Proverbs 18:24---A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a Friend who sticks closer than a brother.

          Actually, I had my doubts about that once upon a time. It only took one lesson for me to learn that He always has me on His heart and mind. But there was that time………

          January 1976. There was a lot going on that January. Marsha and I were still newlyweds. It had only been five months. We were living almost 700 miles from where we had grown up. I was a Bible college student and Marsha was working to put me through school. I was serving a church as interim pastor 85 miles away from where we lived. I was 20 and she was 19 years of age. It was a frantic time, a time when I always felt I was a little boy trying to catch up to the big kids. And then Marsha got sick one night. I took her to the ER where they checked her out. The doctor came out and told me that Marsha was very sick and needed surgery right away. If not, she would die. What did I want to do? Well, what I really wanted to do was wake up and find myself back in Ohio in my old bed at a time when my responsibilities were not so overwhelming. At that moment, I did not want to be making life and death decisions, I didn’t want to have people depending on me, I did not want to be almost desperate for money and I did not want to be living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. But I told the doctor the only thing I could tell him. Do the surgery.

          The surgery was a success. That was a Monday night. Back then you were kept in the hospital for more than a day or two. Saturday came and Marsha was still in the hospital. She was doing well and would be released on Tuesday afternoon. I had to go up to where the church was and do my Saturday visits and spend the night so I would be ready for church on Sunday morning. Actually, I would be going up to the church without enough gas to get home, so I was worried. I stopped at the hospital on the way out, gave Marsha the all happy act, then got in the car and took off. All the way up I felt the burden of everything that was going on. I questioned God all along I-75. He had either completely forgotten me or He figured I was such a sad excuse for a servant that He was tossing me out. I was alone and in trouble.

          I got to the little town the church was in and did my visiting. It was cold in the mountains that day. Snow began to fall around dusk. I slept on the floor of one of the Sunday school rooms and it was a miserable night. The wind howled, the windows leaked and it was really cold. Sunday morning was dreary and heavy snow covered the streets in the little town. Only a small handful of people made it to church that morning. When we took the offering, there were a few pennies over five dollars. That was the money that was to pay for my gas to go home on, which was enough. Gas was less than sixty cents a gallon. But I had eaten the last of the food I had brought from home the night before and I had no way to buy more. The one family we usually ate with on Sunday afternoon was snowed in and no one else offered. Normally, we had church on Sunday night, too, then we headed home. But we cancelled the night service and I planned to leave right after church. Then I found that I-75 was closed for the day in the mountains. Truly, God was ignoring me. I was forgotten.

          Just before church ended that morning a lady walked in whom I didn’t know. In her 50s and well dressed, she looked totally out of place in our little store front church. Within five minutes of coming in we were singing the final song. She came up to me and introduced herself as Mrs. Miller and explained that she was a member of the Methodist church, but when she got there she found that they were closed. She drove to every church in town and found that all of them were closed. Then she remembered hearing about the little store front and she plowed her way over. We were opened. She was just grateful to be in church that morning. She asked about me and I told her I was a student and lived in Chattanooga, my wife was in the hospital and I needed to get home, but that would have to wait till morning. Well, she told me, I would have to come to her house and have dinner with her and her husband. I tried to say no but she said I had to go. There was no way she could drive in the snow now that it had snowed more. I agreed and drove her Lincoln across town to their beautiful home. At least, I told God, today I won’t starve.

          The Super Bowl was played that day and they insisted I stay and watch. They let me call Marsha and tell her I was alright, not to worry, then settled in to watch the game (which back then was played at the decent hour of 2 in the afternoon). After the Steelers beat the Cowboys I asked Mr. Miller if he would drive me back to the church. It had quit snowing and the roads were passable. They wouldn’t have it, though. I still couldn’t head for home until the next morning and so I would just have to spend the night. That night in bed I finally thanked the Lord for a good day.

          The next morning Mr. Miller was out early. He had a car dealership and had to see to it that it got cleared of snow and opened. Mrs. Miller made me eggs and bacon and talked a mile a minute. After I ate we started to put our coats on to head back over to the church. Then she nodded her head, looked at me and asked me to sit back down at the table. She had something for me. She came back with a box in one hand and a ten dollar bill in the other. The money was for gas, she told me. What was in the box was for me.

          I opened the box, which was the size of a book. Inside was something wrapped in what looked like butcher paper. Lying on the paper was a new, yet old, one hundred dollar bill. I jerked my head up and looked at her, but she just said for me to open the paper. Inside the paper was a brand new, though not new, Bible with the richest leather cover I had ever seen. She sat down across from me and told the story.

          In 1945 the war had ended. She and Mr. Miller were not married yet, but would be once he got home from the Pacific. She had put money away and was very excited that she would soon be Mrs. Miller. But one morning when she woke, she had a heavy heart. She went to the Lord in prayer. She had a strong feeling that she needed to go down to Knoxville that very morning and buy the best Bible she could find. She felt the Lord impress on her that He would show her who was to have it. After she bought the Bible she again felt the Lord impress on her to put the one hundred dollar bill in with the Bible. In 1945 that was a big deal. To me in 1976 it was a huge deal. She had put the Bible away and never opened it again. And that morning, over eggs and bacon, the Lord impressed her to give it to me.

          I had felt the Lord had forgotten me. But back in 1945, eleven years before I was born and 31 years before this very day, He was taking care of a servant who thought he was forgotten. I have never forgotten the lesson of the day.

          On July 6, 2013, I retired my old Bible. Tattered and worn and frayed, the cover has lost its richness. Pages fall out when I open it. It has been my companion all these years and deserves the rest. But this last Sunday morning as I got ready for church, I glanced at it and thought, why not? So, my old cohort and I went to church together once again. I was blessed. And, like always, it reminded me that there is a Friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Blessings.

          I walked into Wal-Mart on December 28^th for my first after Christmas visit. I usually don’t go in that early, but I needed to pick up a prescription. What greeted my eyes was surprising.

          A rather large display for Valentine’s Day.

          It is a personal opinion that if stores didn’t go all crazy for special days, they wouldn’t be celebrated the way they are celebrated. Valentine’s Day, Easter, Sweetest Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Halloween and Christmas. “Tell her you love her this Valentine’s Day with a diamond.” Really? The only way my wife is going to know I love her is if I buy her a diamond? Commercials for Easter center on candies, principally the Cadbury Eggs. Sweetest Day is the ‘later in the year’ Valentine’s. Mother’s Day commercials aren’t aimed at kids urging them to buy a new coffee mug for Mom. They are aimed at Dad’s urging us to buy something expensive to show her you are glad she is the mother of your children. Father’s Day commercials are nothing more than an attempt to sell power tools. Halloween is rejoicing day for Hershey and Nestle. And, of course, Christmas is everything. Just buy it while supplies last!

          Imagine these holidays if there were no commercials. A husband quietly taking his wife out to eat without the kids for Valentine’s Day. Easter morning spent in church with kids not hyped up on sugar. Sweetest Day wouldn’t exist. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day would celebrate parents instead of spending. Halloween would be trick or treating with some candy, but apples, too. And Christmas wouldn’t seem to last forever and would not put people deeper into debt.

          Back to Valentine’s Day. The ministry has allowed me to see love from many angles. As a counselor, I have seen people struggle with love. Maybe it is a parent/child relationship. Sometimes the teenage years can cause a parent to question their love for their child and a child to question their love for the parents. It usually works out in the end, but it can be dicey for a while. Husbands and wives often come to odds. Mistakes are made, misunderstandings are everywhere, someone feels unappreciated. Often, the two adults act like children and the marriage comes apart. For some reason, parents will come for counseling almost immediately when their kids are giving them trouble but when it is an issue between the spouses, they tend to wait till hope is gone. Very frustrating. Love can be a hard way to go.

          There is another side of love. That is the grief side. For nine years the ministry had me doing ministry with a funeral home. In that capacity I saw the desperation and pain that the loss of a loved one can bring. Parents losing a child. Children losing parents. Spouses losing spouses. These were things I dealt with while pastoring, but for those nine years I was immersed in the part of love that entailed loss.

          During those nine years, however, I found the truest expressions of love. Nothing at all like the commercials tells you how to express love. I watched a Mom watching the funeral director start to get ready to close the casket of her teenaged son. She stepped up to the director and said, “Is it OK if I watch?” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and said, “No. You can’t watch. But you can help.” He quietly talked her through adjusting the son’s clothes, pulling the afghan up just so, tucking everything into the casket that needed tucking in. He allowed her that time to be a mommy one more time. All three of us stood there in tears. Once a young mother wanted to hold her baby one last time. I lifted the baby from the tiny casket and placed the child in the mother’s arms, then led her to a rocker. The mother rocked that baby for twenty minutes, then was finally able to give her back to me. So many instances of so much grief giving over to so much love.

          Then, there was the couple who had been married over 60 years. What happened with this was, for me, the purest expression of love I ever saw between a man and a woman.

          The town our funeral home was in was Madison, Ohio. The next town to the west was Perry, Ohio, the town I grew up in. The next town to the east was Geneva, Ohio, the town I had pastored in for eleven years. It occasionally happened that someone would pass that I had known forever or for whom I had been their pastor. Sometimes those families would want me to take care of their loved one’s body. I was not a mortician, so I couldn’t embalm, but I did become fairly proficient with the other aspects of preparation. I had known this couple that had been married for over 60 years almost my whole life. The wife had been a friend of my mother. Really good, Christian folks. When her husband passed, she wanted me to do as much of the preparation as I could.

            She brought me the clothes she wanted him buried in and she brought their wedding picture. In the picture she was a beautiful young woman and he was a dashing, slender young man. He had gained a lot of weight during the marriage and it was interesting to see him as that young fellow.

          She then gave me the clothes. “Larry, you know Doug never, ever wore a suit. The only time he ever wore a suit was when we got married. This is that suit. I want him to buried in his suit.” If it had been someone I hadn’t known, I might have pointed out that getting him into that suit might be hard. After all, clothes do age and seams become weak. I could have given her a true reason to try and talk her out of him wearing that suit. But, she was my mother’s friend. Her son and I had played on the same football team. I just smiled and told her I would do the best I could.

          The fact is, at a funeral home we can make most anything fit. It might have to be cut and then fitted to the individual, but we can do it. In this case, though, he was a lot larger than the suit. By the time I was done with it all and had him in the casket and dressed, I just felt it looked rough. No one could have done it better. The owner of the home came and looked and said it was the best that could be done. It just was not possible to make that suit look like it fit. It was just too small and he was just too large. I was so disappointed in my efforts and I knew that this dear, dear wife would not be pleased.

          She came in and I walked with her to the casket. She stepped up and looked in. She caught her breath and then she began to cry. She stared at him for several seconds, then she turned to me and took me into her arms. “Oh, Larry! He looks just like he did the day we were married!”

          Real love is blind. Real love transcends earthly knowledge. Real love never goes away.

          Just as an addition to the story; when they were married all she got was a simple gold band. They were starting out, the diamond would have to come later. It never did, though. She never needed that diamond to know he loved her.

          My educational journey started out at a Bible college in Tennessee. I briefly mentioned the school in one of last week’s articles. Extremely strict in all aspects. But, when you know the rules going in, you play by the rules. A baseball game would be chaos if Team A decided in the 4^th inning that from now on they would get three balls and four strikes per hitter instead of four balls and three strikes. And, this rule change wouldn’t apply to Team B. You can’t change the rules during a game or a presidential election or at a strict college. You agreed before you got there. So this school was strict. Among other things, we were required to go to either the Campus Church or some local church that was approved of by the school. Obviously, they wanted you to attend the Campus Church. As strict as the school was, the church was even more so.

          Laughing was frowned upon. Married men and women sitting next to each other had to be at least the length of a songbook apart. If you were not married you had to sit even further apart. Outside of calling out a hearty 'Amen' or 'Preach it, Brother' you were to remain both emotionless and motionless.

          When we had services there the choir remained in the choir loft for the entire service. The choir loft was situated just below the baptistery, which was elevated up the back wall. While the baptisms were going on (we baptized by immersion) the choir would hum a song, which, I suppose, was intended to imitate the heavenly host.

          On one particular Sunday there were seven or eight people to be baptized. (They baptized every Sunday. It was kind of neat.) The second to last was a nine year old boy who could not get out to the pastor by walking, so he started to dog paddle. The whole front of the baptistery was clear acrylic and you could see down to the pastor’s feet, so it was sort of cute to see the little guy swim. There were a few titters in the crowd of about 3,000. The pastor reached out and grabbed the boy and then stared at the congregation. After a fifteen second glare he told us that this was a sacred moment and not a time for levity. While he was lecturing us he was holding the little fellow up by the shirt and we were treated to seeing the boy’s legs kick furiously under the water. It made the whole situation extremely funny, but we were doing our best to not even smile. Finally, he was baptized. 

          The last person baptized was a jolly man who was simply overjoyed with his new salvation. He only stood about 5'5", but he was also just about that same size around. When he stepped down into the water he was so happy that it made most of us smile, which further angered the pastor. He took the man and said, "My Brother, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Buried in His likeness..." At that point he pushed the man backward under the water. We all saw his feet leave the bottom of the baptistery. The next part of the phrase is, “Raised to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus.” As the pastor said the word 'Raised' the man’s highly buoyant body surged to the surface and broke water. As his body shot upward it pushed a lot of water before it. When he got to the surface the water kept going, surging out of the baptistery and washing over the choir. The quite humming turned into gasps and squeals and screams. The congregation, already on the verge of forbidden merriment, broke out in actual laughter. The pastor was furious and kept us there an extra thirty minutes scolding us by preaching an intense sermon on proper decorum in the church. He preached this sermon while standing in the water of the baptistery, which just made it all the funnier.

          The way the baptistery was set up there lent itself to humor anyway. As I said, the front was clear. When anyone went forward at the close of the sermon for salvation, they were baptized immediately. Since you only went forward due to the moving of the Holy Spirit, it was unplanned. Therefore, when folks were baptized they were baptized in their street clothes. Women were not allowed to wear slacks at that church, so women were baptized in their skirts or dresses. When a woman stepped into the baptistery she was to keep her arms rigid to her sides to hold the dress down. She was to stay like that the whole time, even while she was put under. Now, the natural reaction to being pushed over backward and forced under the water is to reach up and grab the person's arm that is pushing you under. It happened about half the time, which allowed the dress or skirt to float up. You would think that after all those years they would have caught on. But then again, maybe not.