The Lord is My Shepherd

The Lord is My Shepherd
By Bobby Neal Winters
Charlie, our rescue springer spaniel has passed away.
I did not love Charlie.
I’ve given up loving pets.  It hurts too much.  We get them for the children.  And we can’t have just one because they need company. We’d had Buttercup, and Buttercup was alone, so we got Obadiah--aka Obie--to be a companion for Buttercup.
Then Buttercup died on a hot Labor Day weekend.  The ground was like a brick, but I dug a grave along the fence in the backyard to Buttercup in the baked ground.  It was a hard thing.  I used tools for digging that one ordinarily uses for mining. But I got Buttercup buried.
I had only one request when it was done: Anymore animals we get should fit in a boot box, and preferably a shoe box.
Then they brought back Charlie from the Humane Society.  While he wasn’t a huge dog, he definitely didn’t fit in a boot box.
We hadn’t had him too long before we learned he was a jumper and a climber.  He loved to jump out of our backyard fence.  He didn’t have any place he particularly wanted to go when he jumped out and he never went far, but this was the beginning of a time of “growth” for us.  We had to grow in our thinking of how to keep him in our backyard.
We’d kept Buttercup chained up before we built the fence for our backyard, and I’d decided that I would never do that again.  The fence was enough for Buttercup, but not for Charlie.
So we put in a radio fence.  You may recall that with a radio fence you bury copper wire in the ground to enclose the area where you want your dog to stay.  You then put a shock-collar on the dog so he receives a jolt of electricity whenever he crosses the line.  This was enough to keep him in the yard.
That is, it was enough to keep him in the yard until it was a thunderstorm or the Fourth of July or a home football game.  The football games were in some sense the worst.  As you may know, we shoot off a cannon whenever we score.  Charlie hated that.  Eventually, he came to associate the sounds of tail-gating and the crowd with it, so a game was enough to throw him into a panic.  We didn’t even have to score for him to endure the pain of the shock collar.
But he began to get older and fatter, and I think calmer too. He settled down and was happy with his life in the backyard.
He had his favorite spots around to rest.
He loved people.
And he loved squirrels, though in ways that weren’t always so fortunate for the squirrels.
And he and Obadiah were good companions.  He had the calm disposition of an Irishman in a pub, and Obadiah the more regimented personality of a German prison guard, the schnauzer that he is.  Obie is getting blind and senile and barks at things that aren’t there, and Charlie took that in his stride.
But Charlie’s bark began to change.  He sounded like someone was trying to start a broken chainsaw.
Jean took him to the vet and he had congestive heart trouble and tumors on his lungs, probably cancer.  She was given some medicine for him, but we knew it wasn’t long.
He had good days and bad days for a while, but it was getting worse.  Yesterday, before I went home from work, I told my boss that I would be taking the morning off today because I would probably be taking Charlie to the vet to be put to sleep.
Last evening he died.  He was here; then he wasn’t here.
It hasn’t rained in a few weeks so we let the water run on a spot along the fence for about an hour.  Then this morning Jean I I dug the grave together.
We put him in a bag and lowered the bag in the ground.  Then as we tossed shovels of dirt on top of him, I began to say, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...”
I will not love another animal again.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

Going around in a circle on our journey to God

Going around in a circle on our journey to God
By Bobby Neal Winters
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by
There's a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky
--Charles Gabriel
There are some people who say that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament are different Gods, but it just ain’t so.  Having said that, I will say that I’ve never seen anyone who believed they are different change their minds, so I am not going to try.  Go on believing whatever you want to.
Man is on a journey.  From the Biblical account it starts in the Garden of Eden, and if you go all the way to the Revelation of St. John, it ends in a city, the New Jerusalem. 
I say the Garden of Eden and the New Jerusalem are the same place when looked at from the correct perspective: The Presence of God.
Adam and Eve were very childlike in the Garden.  They enjoyed an easy intimacy with God.  Have you noticed that little children aren’t respecters of persons?  They will throw up on the King of Spain with as much ease as they throw up on old Aunt Alice. 
This is the sort of relationship Man had with God in the Garden. And God, the supposedly mean, vicious, hateful God of the Old Testament dealt with them as one does with small children.  He threatened their very lives to keep them from breaking a rule.  When Adam and Eve broke the rules and were ashamed of their nakedness, he didn’t kill them.  He made them better clothes.  It was a teachable moment and He took advantage of it.
And he gave them a start on their journey.
Yes, there are places on the journey where God seems to be cruel, but we need to remember that the Bible was written by Man.  It documents this journey, this struggle with God from Man’s side.  The cruelty was Man looking in a mirror seeing himself and not window onto God.
If you read it, struggle with it, persist with it, you will see Man’s understanding of God sharpen, come into focus.  It is much like how we increase our understanding of our parents as we grow up ourselves.
There is this poem, this meme, whatever called “Footprints in the sand.”  There were two sets of footprints, one belonging to the poet and the other to God.  The poet remarks that during one period of his life there was only one set, so where were you God.  The poet has God reply, “I was carrying you.”  Okay, God might very well have replied, “I was letting you learn to walk by yourself.” (Yes, I have read Butt-prints in the Sand.  Google it.)
So when Man was young in his journey with God, he understood him as a child, so presumably when we close the circle we will understand God more like we understand our parents when we grow up. We will put away childish things.
We absolutely cannot separate the New Testament God from that of the Old.  When the writers of the New Testament referred to the scriptures, they were referring to the Old Testament:  The Books of the Law, the Books of the Prophets, and the Books of the Writings.  Those writings draw a map which the authors of the New Testament believed to be completed in Jesus.  They present Jesus as a New Adam, a new beginning for Man.
It is a journey, a circular journey.  At the end we find the God we left behind, but by virtue of the journey, we will understand his perfect love because we will have learned it ourselves.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

With me There is Tea

With me There is Tea

By Bobby Neal Winters
I am still studying my Spanish every day on Duolingo.  I’d studied Latin for a while, but it didn’t go very far.  I also took up Hindi because I think the way the writing looks is pretty.
Hindi has been rewarding for me.  Not because I can speak it because no, no, no I can’t.  I tried some of it on some faculty from India I work with.  They couldn’t understand a word.  I know because they are very polite and respectful to old people and if they could’ve possibly understood me they would have.  But I said, “Raj lurka heh,” which means “Raj is a boy,” and they looked like springer spaniels who’d been told Maxwell’s equations. Utter incomprehension. 
On one hand, Hindi is an Indo-European language.  This means it is part of the same family of languages that Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, and English belong to. As a consequence there are some grammatical similarities you can hold on to.  On the other hand, there is virtually no vocabulary in common.  Nada, null, zilch.
The word order is different.  In English we typically will use subject-verb-object (SVO) order: Raj eats bananas.  In Hindi, it is typically subject-object-verb (SOV): Raj bananas eats.
Hindi has been rewarding for me because I’ve been able to move from utter incomprehension to knowing a little. It’s like trying to climb a wall that seems to be made out of glass.  At first my fingernails slide off, but then my nails finally dig in.
The way having something is handled differently.  In English we say, “I have tea.” In Spanish it is, “Tengo tea.”  “Tengo” is “I have.”  We handle ownership with a verb dedicated to it.  In Hindi, this is different.  You are taught to say, “Meyrey pas chai heh.”  This more or less literally comes out as “Near me tea is.”
This made a bell go off in my brain. It reminded me of something from years ago.  
Twenty years ago this month, I was on a Rotary group study exchange in Russia.  For four months before going, my group mates and I studied Russian.  Russian, like Hindi, has a different writing system.  It’s not as alien as Hindi, but it was alien enough for us GSE team members. 
In Russian, when you have tea you say, “oo menya yist chai,” which comes over literally as “With me there is tea.”  This is to say, Russian doesn’t do ownership with a verb either.  It makes prepositions do the work. (In Hindi, it is post positions, which are prepositions on the other side.)  I want you also to notice that they use “chai” for tea in both Russian and Hindi.
Anyway, this made me want to take up Russian again. So I have.
It has been a real trip down memory lane.  I’ve been surprised at the things I remember, the things I’ve forgotten, and the things I’ve forgotten that have come back so easily that I mustn’t have really forgotten.
I’ve remembered Russia.  I’ve remembered my GSE Team. I’ve remembered road trips across the vast Siberian plains and steam baths with folks who were darned near naked.
It’s been work, but it’s been worth it.
See you around. Adios. Namaste. Do svidanya.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

Raise an Ebenezer

Raise an Ebenezer

By Bobby Neal Winters

Here I raise my Ebenezer

Here there by Thy great help I've come

And I hope, by Thy good pleasure

Safely to arrive at home

--Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

This is a column about racism.  We’ll get there eventually, but bear with me.

One of the first sermons I remember hearing in a Methodist Church (given by a man named David Weible for those who know him) was about conversion as a continuing process.

This was a revelation to me.  I was still relatively young at the time (I was 26 years old--a baby!) and the only experience I had seen of conversion was that in the Baptist Church I’d grown up in.  It was modeled after Paul’s conversion on the Road to Damascus: He was blinded by a great light and everything changed.

He is some irony for folks that are looking for it.  At the moment I learned about conversion as a continuing process, everything suddenly changed for me.  It gave me a framework to put things in.  This has slowly grown over time and this way of looking at things has gotten into every part of my life.  Small changes, persisted in, build up over a period of time to make large changes.

Here is where we come to race.

My mother had an uncle named Frank, so he was my Uncle Frank too.  Uncle Frank was from Alabama, but he was the first man I remember talking eloquently about race in anything like an enlightened way. While any talking head today would dismiss Uncle Frank as a racist, Uncle Frank liked black people.  He didn’t tolerate them; he liked them.  He spoke with them.  He listened to them.  He repeated their words back to us: “Look at the palms of my hands, they are as white as yours.  Look at my tongue and the inside of my mouth; it is the same color as yours. Why am I treated differently?”  

There were other stories involving the horrible way his own father had treated blacks that I won’t repeat here as it would lead us too far afield. Suffice it to say, he was ashamed of it. He recognized the wrong of it and he improved his behavior over that of his father’s.  And his sons’ behavior and attitudes improved with respect to Uncle Frank.  

This was part of the slow conversion as a continuing process that I first learned about in that Methodist sermon 30 years ago.  This involves converting Man as opposed to converting men.  And it is good.

But.

But there are some things the Baptists got right.  There are times when you have to throw away the whiskey bottles, burn the address book that has your pusher’s number in it, break ties with all your old partying buddies, and march up to the front of the church to make a declaration that it is all going to change.  And then do it!

There are times when you have to march your troops across the river and burn the bridges behind them.  You have to unload your troops from the boats and set the boats afire. You have to cross the Rubicon and yell, “Alea iacta est!”

There are times when the Son of God has to call out, “My God, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Or when a black man dies gasping for breath, calling for air.

We are like people who have hardened our hearts, but sometimes pain and injustice is so severe it can break our hearts of stone so that they may feel as the heart of a human ought to feel.

We don’t have to wait for another verse of “Just as I am.” The time has come as a country to walk to the front and declare that today everything changes.  We will turn away from our national sin.  We will raise our Ebenezer and make a sign that we will change.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )