Everyday Patriots

 Everyday Patriots

We run into everyday patriots everywhere. They surround us: when we shop, when we go out to eat, or when we go to church. These people for the most part go about their business everyday without a thought of the important ideals they uphold. From farmers to food service workers, from truckers to teachers, from healthcare workers to hairdressers; all contribute to the fabric of society. We literally bump into them as we go to work, come home from work, and when we go on vacation. We may meet them because we have problems. If we need someone to repair a leaky roof or a leaky faucet, we can find them. In times of disaster or extreme weather conditions, we have utility linesmen, we have those who drive the snowplow trucks, and we have the National Guards. If we need emergency care they come to us: firemen, police, ambulance drivers, and paramedics. These men and women work hard, earn money, pay taxes, and create a stable environment. They form a national entity, a form of government, a national language, and core values that hold our country together.

An everyday patriot may be a farmer who daily works his farm, the postman who faithfully delivers the mail, the person who delivers fresh bread to the grocery store, the person who provides the produce at a roadside stand, or stocks the snacks in our minimarts. They are the folks who grease the gears and keep the cogs engaged that supply our daily needs. They are the checkout cashiers. They are the men and women who fill the shelves. They may be the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers. They could be our vehicle’s mechanics. They could be the janitors who clean the schools or job sites. They could be mothers, grandmothers, fathers, or grandfathers. They can be the people whom we meet on the streets walking their dogs.

These everyday patriots are not superheroes in bold costumes, they are everyday patriots. They work, vote, raise their families, and make a community. They can be neighbors, workmates, and even strangers who do some kind deed or show a courtesy. They do their best to create a better world and share it with others. They are the people upon whom we rely to keep our country functioning. So I say, hooray to our everyday patriots and unsung heroes. May God continue to bless their daily efforts to keep America strong and independent.

Heaven or Hell

 Heaven or Hell

I just read a post that a priest believes Hell was invented by religion to control people. But more is said about Hell than Heaven in the New Testament. Hell is a reward for those who do not accept the gift of salvation offered by God Himself. This loving God sent His offspring, His only begotten Son to lay aside His glory, come to Earth in the form of a man, and to die on a cross to expunge our sins. Hell is the Word  God uses to describe a place of eternal torment, a place of darkness and pain, a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth for all who reject that gift.

I wonder what books this person studied in seminary school. Did he ever read the Bible? Does he believe that the Bible is the Word of God, written in its entirety with inspired truth? How can he say that Hell is not a real place with so many warnings about it? Since he doesn’t believe in Hell, does he believe that Heaven is the reward for those who choose the redemptive powers of Christ’s blood? If this priest does accept that there is a place called heaven, how can he selectively choose which subjects he will believe in and which ones he won’t? Either the entire Bible is true in its entirety or it is not. Handpicking which ideas match yours and tossing out all others is wrong and just foolish. He puts himseelf above God.

I’ve heard arguments that “It was just men” who wrote the Bible. It’s true, men wrote as they were led by the Creator. But without divine inspiration, how can we explain that thirty-nine books of the Old Testament and twenty-seven books of the New Testament were written by almost as many men and yet coincide without contradiction or error? If there was even one lone error, non-believers would be shouting it from the rooftops.

If this person believes the Bible upon which his religion is based is false, how can he continue to call himself a priest of that religion? Wouldn’t it make his entire religion false? How can he be faithful to the teachings of his own false religion? Doesn’t it make the garb that he wears a lie as well? Why is he even wearing the frock? Truth, faith, and belief are the core precepts of the Gospel. How can he continue to call himself a man of God when he doesn’t believe one of the Bible’s fundamental tenets?

Hard Shoes to Fill

 .Hard Shoes to Fill

                My dad’s father Edison Thomas Beck was quite a man. I marvel at the number of hats that he wore in his life and that he was able to do them so well. He was a farmer and ran a saw mill on the side. He was a justice of the peace, magistrate, bookkeeper, accountant, and a lay speaker. He started a small church between Jones Mills and Somerset, Pennsylvania. Not too far from the red Insulbrick church was my grandfather’s home place, on land above the ski resort Hidden Valley. It had several natural springs. They were named after the family, Beck Springs. The flow of water was abundant and pure.

            My granddad, when he was much younger had a tooth problem. It wasn’t the norm to visit a dentist and he lived far from the dentist. The decayed tooth gave him so much pain, that he bent the rat-tail handle of a file, heated it to red-hot, and burned the nerve out of the tooth. I couldn’t imagine doing that. Why he didn’t pull it instead? I don’t know. This is the story my dad told me.

            Granddad was blind in one eye since he was about twenty-one years of age. He had learned to compensate; driving his car, doing bookkeeping, and building a home for himself and his oldest daughter. It seemed that there was little he couldn’t do.

            His penmanship was superb and the wills, deeds, and other legal papers that he wrote as a magistrate, were works of art.

            In later years, of life, the vision in his “good eye” started to go blind. Facing total blindness, he visited a very prominent ophthalmologist.

            The doctor took him into the examination room. After looking into both eyes, the physician said, “There is tissue growing over your optic nerve.” The doctor began to examine the eye that had been blind for over fifty years.

            He laid aside his ophthalmoscope and asked, “Where have you been, man? We’ve been able to fix that problem for nearly ten years.”

            “What is happening to your seeing eye is what happened to your blind eye when you were young. What I suggest is that I do surgery on your blind eye and allow the other eye alone for now. If you eventually have problems with the repaired eye, we can always repair the other eye. We have it to fall back on.”

            He had his surgery. With new glasses, his once blind eye could now see. He never had surgery on his once seeing eye. He had been so used to living, working, and driving with vision in only one eye he was quite capable of doing so after the surgery.

Cindy’s Grandparents Johnson

 Cindy’s Grandparents Johnson

Cindy’s grandparents lived in a small white house near Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Her grandfather’s name was Truman Johnson. He was a short statured man, built much like my granddad Miner. Truman’s nickname was King and that’s the name by which most people knew him. He loved to laugh, loved his garden, and loved to get his grandkids to comb his hair. He would pay them a nickel to do it. I believe that he worked in the coal mines and was retired by the time I met him. He came from a large family, but supposedly the family moved west leaving him and one brother behind. His brother Henry, owned a carnival and lived near Columbus Ohio. Cindy and her mom would make a trek out to visit him and his family while making a “school-clothes shopping run” to the J.C. Penny outlet.

Cindy’s grandmother was Mabel Agnes Hiltabitel. Her grandmother was Amanda. That is where we got the name for our older daughter Amanda. (One of my great-grandmother’s name was also Amanda.) Mabel also warned us if we used either of her names to name one of our girls, she’d be upset. She was a slender woman who kept her house spotless, but always welcomed people to visit, very friendly and pleasant. She had a candy dish on her dining room table that was filled with those pink, wintergreen flavored lozenges. One thing I never could understand. My wife said that Pepto Bismol made her sick, but she could suck on those wintergreen candies and enjoy them. Mabel had Forsythia bushes that lined her driveway. She would tease my wife saying they were her For-Cynthia bushes.

Her house was not very far from where my father-in-law Bud and Retha lived. Bud always teased that his Mother-in-law snooped on him and he was glad their bedroom was on the opposite side of the house. After Mabel moved to a nursing home, Bud found a pair of binoculars in her kitchen, near the window with the best view of Bud’s house. He said that confirmed that she was watching them. In her defense, there were birds and animals that frequented her backyard. Now the funniest part of this “snooping” story is that when Bud died, he was laid to rest in the cemetery plot right next to Mabel Agnes and his body will spend eternity beside her.

Mabel passed away at the ripe-old age of ninety-three, still loving to have her hair curled and done just-so. We have photos of her with a party hat and a birthday cake of her and her cake on her 90th birthday.

Don't Mind Me

 Don’t Mind Me

Last ewwk for some reason my brain warped and went haywire. I don’t know why or how, but I have to say, I didn’t like it. I know that it was functioning well except for a pause in reality. Wednesday went off normally. I drove to the Chestnut Riddge Gistorical Society and put in the time for my voluneer work. My four hour shift went well and I played nicely with two of my coworkers. We did some paperwork and accomplished some filing duties before lunch.

Lunch was our usual potluck. Each person brings a surprise food and we share. It is rare that two people bring similar foods, but it has happened. Wednesday was an unusual day. All three of us brought sandwich spread and crackers. Two were seafood salads and one chicken salad were our choices. I also had some spare cookies that I brought, so we did have dessert.

Wednesday eveniing was prayer meeting and all went well there.

Thursday I had a meeting with a health insurance agent. My present supplement was due to go up $100.00 per month and that wasn’t something that I could financially handle. That went well and my agent was someone who knew my wife.

Now the warp in my mind begins. I was thinking of going shopping on Thursday, then changed my mind. For some odd reason my brain registered that I could do my shopping on Saturday when I went to the Historical Society to be a docent for my four hour tour. Instead Friday slipped away and my brain thought Saturdday was Friday and didn’t self correct. At 2:39 my brain came back into focus when I got a message on my cell about a men’s gathering that evening. Well, I missed opening the Historical Center. I felt bad that I missed my “tour of Duty,” but there was nothing more I could do.

Then came the rain storm with its powerful winds and the men’s get-together got cancelled. The storm damage caused electriccal blackouts and tree damage blocked some roads, however our church has a generator and the men’s prayer meeting could be held there. Great.

My brain went into another fog-zone. I was watching television and the time slipped away. I was clock watching, but my brain was malfunctioning and misread my analog clock and when I realized that it was too late to go tto the meeting.

I don’t know what happened to cause my brain to short circuit, but it was certainly discouraging.

Daisy, Daisy

 Daisy, Daisy

Daisy, daisy, the daisies are now in bloom. That innocent white petaled posey with a bright yellow center, was my wife Cindy Morrison Beck’s favorite flower. While walking up to my mailbox this afternoon I saw those precious blooms are just now appearing in numbers that are too many to miss. For those who have known me for a long period of time, know that I am frugal, except my children who say I am cheap. I say, why spend more money than you don’t have to?

The best thing about being frugal and having a wife who loved dasisies was that once the wild daisy becan to display their flowers, it cost me nothing more than to spend a few minutes of time to pick a bouquet of them, interspacing them with anyt other wild flowers that were in season to place a surprise bouquet waiting for her when she would come home from teaching at the Mount Zion Christian School. It was an unexpected pick-me-up for her and was easy on the wallet for me.

When she passed away, baskets of daisies surrounded her casket. A daisy bouquet at her feet had three pink rose buds, one for each of our kids, Amanda Beck Yoder, Andrew Beck, and Anna E. Prinkey. At her head was another basket of daisies with a single yellow rose from her mom Retha Johnson Morrison. There was a large spray that was placed on the top of the lid of the casket from me.

The coincidence of the blooming daisies and an event that happened yesterday brought these thoughts to mind. Because my supplemental health insurance rate increased nearly $100.00 per month was stunned. Me being exceptionally frugal was shocked at the tremendous rate of increase.

I decided it waas time to seek another choice in health insurance supliment to my Medicare. I made an appointment to meet with a health insurance agent. When I met my agent, I was surprised to find out that Cindy had her as a student. My agent only had nice things to say about Cindy. I shared about Cindy’s diagnosis and death from ovarian cancer. So, the convergence of the two thoughts congealed and pushed me to create todays blog.

Addictionss

Addictions

Addictions appear in many shapes and sizes and in a variety of guises. Some are disguised as hobbies or minor distractions. But anything that creeps into a life and eats up the precious time a person has left to live on earth could be labeled an addiction. Television, the internet, Facebook, on line games, pornography, drugs, alcohol, even food can supplant the necessary temperance in a person’s life.

Many people were wondering why I stayed away from Facebook without responding in my usual warped sense of humor to Facebook postings. It was because another friend issued a challenge to me. He suggested that I avoid the venue of Facebook for a day. It was for an entirely different reason than an addiction, but none-the-less, I accepted.

Because I uncoupled myself from the computer, I was able to go to the Chestnut Ridge Historical Society and put in 4 hours of sorting and storing maps, photos, and newspaper articles. I wasn’t able to thoroughly review the many interesting things that passed before my eyes, but I was surprised at the variety and depth of the small number of things that I processed.

War photos by Jack Pletcher, deeds, proclamations, interesting articles on local crimes, local heroes, school pictures, and a steady progression of maps showing the expanding towns and the dividing of the land into townships over the centuries, all passed through my hands.

As a child, I loved to snoop into the drawers of the old, dark oak bureau in my Grandmother Rebecca Miner’s dining room. The drawers were filled with hair swatches, pencils, fountain pens, hair pins, small and many other amusing things. Most of these items were nearly worthless, but seemed remarkable in my small fingers and fascinating. I was also intrigued with a pair of lamps with dangling crystal prisms that sat on the bureau creating rainbows to dance on the ceiling.

A similar feeling of nostalgia poured over me as I sorted through boxes at the Historical Society filled with unknown treasures. My childhood curiosity returned seeing these reminders of the history of yesteryear. It was a wonderful to feel the reemergence of those youthful feelings.

All of this was said to share that I felt much freer, away from the addicting quality of Facebook. It was a cleansing of sort; a purging of my soul. Perhaps I can now limit the time I spend on line and avail myself to the task of writing more, praying, and reading my Bible. I need to allow my creativeness to be freed. My next challenge is to limit my time time watching the boob-tub and its continual attempt to dumb me down and the American public.