I'm Loving Losing

I usually don't like to lose, but lately I've been loving losing. I have lost a little over 13 pounds in the past two weeks. Pray for me that I keep losing weight.

Weight is the only thing that I love losing because I am competitive. I believe that my competitiveness is motivating me to keep losing the weight. I am setting some goals for myself, which may seem farfetched at this point but I know that if I keep striving for them, they can be attained.

Don't laugh but one of my goals is to be able to run a half-marathon by next year. I hope to be able to run a 5K and a 10K before that.

I have been learning how to control my appetite and push away from the table earlier. I've joined Weight Watchers and I have been counting points.

I went to O'Neal's with my family the other day and I will continue to go. I enjoyed a piece of baked chicken (after taking the skin off), some beans, a salad and a little rice. As always, it was delicious but I was able to push away from the food. I was surprised when my sister, Abbie, out-ate me.

The one thing that I will try not to eat anymore at O'Neal's is their ribs and barbecue sauce. I can actually take or leave the ribs, but their barbecue sauce is the food of the angels. I don't know what owner Danny Croft puts in it, but it is delicious. I could sit and drink the stuff, but I will not do it. It's kind of like KFC cole slaw. You can forget the chicken but the slaw is divine.

I have felt better since I have started losing weight and I find myself meeting and beating little challenges (such as not eating Danny Croft's BBQ sauce). It feels good when I get on that scale once a week and see if I have lost anything.

I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:13). With Christ on my side, I know I can reach my goals! In the meantime, I will keep on being a loser and losing with pride.

Advice For Graduates

I have been working on a surprise for two students at my church. One of them has already graduated from high school, thanks to the GED test; the other will graduate next week.
One of the things that my “surprise” consists of is advice that I have learned over the years. Much of the advice has come because of scars, bruises and black eyes (not literally, but figuratively) in the boxing match called life.
My advice for Erika and Cody, both from Suwannee County, as well as for all the graduates this year, includes the following:
*Read the Bible through from cover to cover as often as you can. Please read it at least once. If you have to, you can always find CDs or MP3s with the Bible on them. You can even find audio Bibles on the Internet.
*Always remember that without Jesus Christ, you can’t accomplish anything. You can’t even pray without invoking Jesus’ name because he is the advocate between God the Father and us.
*I can’t stress this enough because it is something I did not do and something that I don’t have a chance to do now. Save some money each time you get paid. Put it aside for a rainy day. Believe me, the rainy days will come. Everything may look bright and sunny now, but the rain’s going to fall at times that you least expect it.
*Please remember to exercise and eat right. Right now, you may be able to eat anything that you want and not gain a pound, In high school, I weighed 165 pounds. You don’t want to be as big as I am right now.
*You can’t change other people no matter how hard you try. That is God’s business. He is the only person who can change hearts.
*Always be kind to others even when it’s hard and it does get so hard at times.
*Hold on tight to your dreams, but this doesn’t mean you always have to have the same dream. If you decide to follow another dream, think it over carefully, and if you decide to follow the new one, go ahead and do it.
*Be proud of your accomplishments (like graduating from high school) but be humble when it comes to things like your looks, your brains, etc. “Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; A stranger, and not your own lips.” (Proverbs 27:2, New American Standard Bible)
Remember, your family is proud of you, your church is proud of you and Jacob is proud of you.

Two Gentleman And A Lady

Bernard Wilson was a gentleman, no matter what he said about it. He said that he could not be a gentleman because he was only an enlisted man in the military. To be a gentleman, he said, you had to be an officer. Otherwise, you were called a dogface or a GI. That may be how the military saw Bernard Wilson. I saw him as a true gentleman.


I met Bernard Wilson after I began working at the newspaper. He wrote the veterans and military news column for the paper. He would bring it into the office for me to type. While there, he would always speak for a few moments, peppering the conversation with wisdom he had learned in his life as a rear tail gunner during World War II, as a manager for Florida Power, as a city commissioner, as the Veterans Service officer and as a Christian.

One story that still sticks out to me to this day is the one that he told me about the turkey shoots they held while he was growing up in South Georgia. He pointed out that back then, they didn't shoot at a target. They put a bunch of turkeys in a pen and the first one that stuck his neck out got his head blown off. The story stuck with me and serves as an example of how we should be humble. He did later tell me, however, that sometimes you do have to stick your neck out. The second story reminds me of how sometimes you have to make a sacrifice for the good of others. You have to be willing to get your head shot off.

Bernard Wilson was a gentleman until the end when he died last week.

Ruth Hagen was a lady. She was also the fastest typist I believe that I have ever seen. She also had the unique ability to edit as she typed. Last week, when we ran her obituary on the front page, I was tempted to use the headline "World's Greatest Typesetter" passes away.

I have missed Mrs. Ruth since she retired. She had an innate ability to take stuff that had been handed her from off the street and make it flow like Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck had written it. She could also interpret Andy Denonn's writing.

Andy, who died years ago, was a bit eccentric but he was great at gathering news. He was not, however, good at writing it in a form that made sense. That was left to others, including Mrs. Ruth who could turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Andy banged away at the typewriter (he wasn't allowed near computer keyboards) with his two index fingers (and he was almost as fast as Mrs. Ruth, only with a lot fewer correct words per minute) and he would turn it in. When Mrs. Ruth retired, I inherited her duties with Andy's stories. That, however, is not why I missed her. She had a delightful sense of humor and she was not afraid to say what she wanted.

Wilmer Bell was also a gentleman. A friend of my father's and a cousin of my mother (and myself), he was always one who entertained with a story and he always provided fruit from his adopted hometown of Vero Beach each Christmas. He and my father used to run a candy route together and my daddy tells a story of how, while on the candy route, they came up on a dead man, who had left John Hill's bar on 53 South and had been hit by a truck, hauling a load of wood chips to Foley.

Wilmer's death last week affected my father profoundly and, I know, that it had to have affected his close family members even more profoundly.

All three of these people will be missed. Each one had a way of showing in different ways how others should be treated. I believe that each of them did like Jesus and did unto others as they would have done unto them.

Something Special Happened In Madison County

"I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this Book that you can by reason and the balance by faith, and you will live and die a better man. It is the best Book, which God has given to man." —Abraham Lincoln

Last week, something special happened in Madison. While people were sleeping safely in their beds, it was still happening. While school children were sitting in class, listening to their teachers or reading their books, it still happened. As the floodwaters began to recede, it was happening.

The Word of God was being read aloud in the Four Freedoms Park in Madison for everyone to hear. Sometimes, the words were enjoyable and sometimes they were not so enjoyable. There were promises of blessings and warnings of curses.

Nevertheless, God's Word was read and I believe that Madison County benefited because of it.

Everyone who had a part in the reading of God's Word, from the readers to the organizers to those who handled the sound equipment, my applause goes out to you.

The Bible says: "So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." (Isaiah 55:11)

Madison County will be blessed by the reading of the Holy Bible during Four Freedoms Week.

If Life Gives You Lemons, Throw Them Out the Backdoor

I was maybe three years old. My brother, Robert, was maybe two. Rob died when he was three because he had cystic fibrosis.
I have always been the kind of person who has to look at things and analyze them. I have to turn them over and over again in my mind before I accept them. Rob must have been the same way.
We had found a bag of lemons that day in my grandmother’s kitchen. We looked at them. They looked pretty, all small and yellow. Surely, they would fit in our small mouths. We had analyzed them in our minds. We had turned them over in our minds. Now, we would turn them over in our mouths.
Being curious, we bit into the lemons. If my face looked like Rob’s, which I’m pretty sure that it did at the time, we looked just like we had been sucking on lemons.
“Blech!” we said.
One of us decided that we needed to throw them out. We lugged them out on the back porch. We began throwing the lemons out in the yard.
Mama came looking for us and saw us throwing the lemons in the backyard.
“Why are you throwing the lemons out?” she asked.
“They’re spoiled,” I answered, throwing another one in the yard.
“Yeah,” Rob said. “They’re sour.”
To our little toddler minds, just because they tasted sour, we thought they were no good. We didn’t think that anything that tasted so sour could be good.
It’s funny how our tastes change over the years. Nowadays, whenever I go eat at O’Neal’s, my sister Abbie’s favorite restaurant (and one of mine), I have to have lemons in my iced tea. When I go to Pizza Hut, I want lemons in my Diet Pepsi. I like the bitter taste and I can even eat a lemon straight, without making a face. (It’s a secret how I do it, though.)
Have you ever found yourself in a situation that has made your life sour? Perhaps you have found yourself hanging around with the wrong people.
When I say “the wrong people,” I’m not necessarily talking about people who will ask you, or force you, into doing things that are wrong. The wrong people I am referring to may actually be good people. They may be your best friends, but they can cause you trouble if you are around them too much. Perhaps, they’re the kind of people who constantly bring you down. They’re not like Nelly Forbush in South Pacific who proudly sang the song, “I’m a Cockeyed Optimist.” You can look in Webster’s Dictionary and see their photo there when you look up the word pessimist.
I’ve got to be honest. Sure, there are times when I’ve been down and I’ve expressed my feelings to my friends. Most of my friends are kind and will take the time to listen. It’s hard, though, to tell your problems to a person who constantly tells you about their problems. They don’t want to listen to you. They are consumed with their own problems. My best advice to you if you are having a problem that has got you down is to speak to a minister or a person who you know is a Christian or a licensed counselor.
“The wrong people” can also be those who are users. They use us up and then throw us away. We feel burned time and time by them, but we keep returning to our lemons.
In John, Chapter 4, we meet a woman who kept returning to her lemons. Nothing seemed to make her happy. She’d had five husbands, and she now had one at home that wasn’t her husband.
Marriage wasn’t her problem. It was the style of life that she had chosen to live that caused her problems. She met a man that day, however, when she went to the well who would change her life forever.
Jesus sat at Jacob’s Well. The story goes like this:
He came to a city of Samaria which is called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink." For His disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. Then the woman of Samaria said to Him, "How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, "Give Me a drink,' you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water." The woman said to Him, "Sir, You have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where then do You get that living water? Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?" Jesus answered and said to her, "Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life." The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw."
She wanted the water He offered. She wanted her life to change, but there were some other things that Jesus wanted to deal with her about. He told her to go get her husband and bring the husband to her. She said that she didn’t have a husband.
Jesus told the woman He could tell that she was being truthful with Him and that He, who had never seen the woman before, knew that she had been married five times before and that she wasn’t married to her current husband.
The woman threw all of her lemons out the back door that day. Her life changed. I don’t know if she went home and kicked her man out the door, or if she went and told him about Jesus and he repented and married her. I just know that the woman’s life was never the same again.
An interesting thing about the story in John, chapter 4, is that it says that she went to the men in the city. The women there probably had their own lemons that they’d been sucking on and their faces were all perched up with disgust for this woman, because of the lifestyle she had lived. I wonder how they felt when their husbands went home, after they had gone to see Jesus at her behest. I imagine their lives were changed, also.
Have you got a problem that has caused your life to sour? Go, get a lemon, stand on your back porch, pray to God to take that problem away and just hurl that sour lemon as far as you can across the yard.

Word To My Bugalugs

Word To My Bugalugs

It’s amazing how some words can be turned around and mean something totally different than their intended use.
I have a friend named Adrienne, who I went to high school with. She has lived in Australia for over 20 years. Adrienne and I keep in contact through Facebook, an Internet social networking site. One day, on there, she asked me if I had kept up with a classmate whom she referred to as “bugalug.” She explained to me that “bugalug” was an Australian term of endearment. Curious, I decided to look up the term on Google. My search led me to the Urban Dictionary, which I discovered had the definition of the Australian term, as well as an urban term. Apparently, in street language, a bugalug is a male prostitute. Adrienne’s bugalug, however, was a term of endearment, such as a parent would use for their child.
Slang words confuse me sometimes. It was two years before I found out that the word “homey” did not mean homosexual. I had heard my Latin American friends use the word “esai.” I thought that they were asking me to write essays for their children’s school assignments. It took writing five essays for me to figure that out. (Just kidding!)
Other words with alternative definitions include:
“Hot,” which can mean the temperature is high or that someone is sexy. Another definition is that someone is doing very well on his or her job, such as a baseball player who is hitting well, has a “hot” bat.
“Cool,” which can mean that the temperature is moderate but more towards the cold side than the hot side. It can also mean that a person has appeal or charm.
“Warm,” which can mean that the temperature is moderate but more towards the hot side than the cold side. It can also indicate that a person is nearing the proximity of an object, such as in a guessing game or blindfold game, when you tell someone, “You’re getting warmer.”
“Word” is another word that can mean something different. It can mean the words you see on this page or it can be a message, like Paul Revere had to get word to the minutemen that the British were coming. It can also be used in hip-hop street language, such as “word to your mother!”
Some terms in the Bible also have different definitions than what we would think of today. One word is “corn.” It does not mean maize, what we know as corn in America, but it means the head of a wheat or grain plant. The term “wine” has different meanings in the Bible. One term means an alcoholic beverage; the other means grape juice, basically. Also, when God refers to man in the Bible, he usually refers to mankind, including women, and not just men.
I hope that my readers are all my bugalugs (Adrienne’s Australian term of endearment and not the street vernacular) and that are all enjoying the season, which celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

A Table Before Me

I was having my usual stressful and hectic week. I was headed to work listening to a preaching tape when the guy, who I had never heard of before, said that God had prepared a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.
I seized hold of his message with both hands and my whole heart.
“Yes,” I thought, “God has prepared a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.”
It doesn’t matter what devils of Hell and Earth assail me, I can still sit eating from the smorgasbord of spiritual gifts that God has for me. In the 23rd Psalm, I am told that God has prepared a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.
Earlier in the week, I was made painfully aware of the depths that my enemies will stoop to. Still, God calls me to love them, no matter how bad they mistreat and use me. Still, God has a table set before me in their presence.
I thought that the enemy had won, but, once again, the devil had lied. I have won and they don’t even realize it yet.
It is so amazing what God does for you. The food at His table tastes so good. Come and dine with me.