Dr. Charles Stanley has gone Home

"Well done, My good and faithful servant."

 

Let us be thankful for the very long time that God let him be among us.  A lot of people came to Christ... and drew closer to Him... because of this man's seemingly tireless efforts.  Dr. Charles Stanley truly had a servant's heart.  I for one learned quite a lot from watching his In Touch weekly series on television.

I got to meet him once.  It was January 2001, some friends and I went to a service at First Baptist Church of Atlanta.  Stanley struck me as one of the kindest people I've ever encountered.  He asked where was I from and I told him Reidsville, North Carolina.

"Oh I know where Reidsville is!" he replied.  "That's right down the road from Danville!", where he grew up.

I asked him if he could sign my Bible and he did on the inside front page.  Below his name he wrote "Isaiah 64:4".  It reads as thus, from the New International Version:

 

Since ancient times no one has heard,
    no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
    who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.

In hindsight, I should have taken that verse more to heart.  I am thankful now though, that I get to appreciate it anew.

See you later Dr. Stanley.

EDIT 04/19/2023: my best friend since forever, Chad Austin, is managing editor of Biblical Recorder.  He just published an excellent article about Dr. Stanley's early years, from his first devoting his life to Christ on through serving as pastor of several churches and becoming a teacher.  It's a very inspiring read and I felt truly moved by it.  Click here to read "Stanley's global ministry has deep, formative roots in NC".

 

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Anyone else feeling this way too? (Spoilers for Stranger Things)

The very last shot from "The Piggyback", the finale of Stranger Things season four:

Click to enlarge

That's the overwhelming sense of things that I've had for much of this past year and I imagine it has been for a lot of other people too.  The visual metaphor is a most fitting one.  Many of our heroes, who have just gone through an incredibly exhaustive tribulation that spanned the width of America, enjoying a brief moment of joy and reunion.

And then they see the particles floating downward, not just them but everyone else in Hawkins.  It builds up to the final scene as Hopper and Joyce lead the others out of the woods... and toward the inescapable reality that for all their effort they have failed after all.  All they can do is stand from afar and look on as the Upside Down begins its invasion of the world.

Here's the sequence in its entirety, from the goosebumps on the back of Will's neck on through the devastating conclusion:

 

That, for me, is the thematic encapsulation of what I've had to watch unfold around us these past couple of years especially.  Growing darkness.  For each apparent win it becomes apparent that it hasn't been good enough.  That the battles may be won but the war is far from over.

I feel like I'm in that field, standing at a distance away from the chaos and turmoil that's threatening to engulf everything.  Looking onward toward the encroaching darkness and the world really is being turned upside-down and inside-out.

It's a powerful sense to be hit with.

But that's not all that scene conveys.

Joyce and Hopper are holding hands, bracing themselves for what is to come.  They've gone through so much for each other and they're going to be together now, too.  They aren't giving up.

Neither is Eleven.  The very last closeup of her shows her face in grim determination that this is not the end.  That the fight isn't over.  That she's going to do whatever it takes to face the threat of the Upside Down.  Eleven is going to finish this.  She's standing between her friends and evil unleashed: literally as well as figuratively.

I look at that final shot and see a battle that has been lost.  Things look bad now.  Very horribly wrong.

But there is still hope.

I don't think this present darkness around us is insurmountable, unconquerable.  I think it can be held at bay, if only for a little while.  Maybe that's all it will take for things to begin to be set right.  We look at how circumstances are now and we're going to acknowledge that the situation is dire.  But that's the furthest we'll allow it to get.

What comes next will be difficult.  The darkness will not give quarter to us.  Many people are going to be hurt in some capacity.

I think of scripture, and the promises of God.  We just had the Easter season.  Remembering a time when things seemed beyond all hope... and then God intervened and turned grief into immeasurable triumph and victory.

That's what we have to cling to, as we stand in our own field looking out upon the world that's being engulfed in evil.

We don't have to win.  We only have to stand.

If there is strength to do just that much, it will be enough.

 

 

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The April Fools prank I helped a friend with

The other week my very good friend Eric Smith (yes, the same one who also made a campaign commercial during that VERY wacky school board race years ago) approached me with a project.  Could I help him pull off an April Fools stunt this year?  I said absolutely, that it would be an honor and a pleasure to work with him.

Along with being an expert welder, Eric is also a professional Santa Claus (the reason his beard is so big and bushy).  And he's a certified beer expert (no really, you can get certifications for that) who regularly posts videos on YouTube as "Beer Santa".  So he came up with the idea for Duke's Mayonnaise Beer.

Here's the video he published two days ago.  Looks and sounds pretty convincing aye? :-)

Maybe next year I'll come up with another prank.  It's been too long since I've pulled off something.  I think my favorite was when I got everyone thinking that I was joining the Amish and turned this site into "Plain Blog by Brother Christopher Knight".  And then there was that other year's prank that got the Vatican's attention... but we won't go there.

So on your way home this evening, stop by your local grocer and pick up some all-natural Duke's Mayonnaise Beer.  Made by Sloof Brewing in Piedmont, Georgia.

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49

 Well, I'm feeling pretty good, here on the home stretch to the half century mark.  Tonight at 6:09 PM EST I officially turned forty-nine years old.

I had come to dread having a birthday.  They used to be something that I looked forward to.  But at least since 2000 it has come with pain preceded by the notion that I really haven't done much with my life.  It probably has something to do with my 26th birthday.  That was spent at my grandmother's funeral.  I was one of the pallbearers.  It also happened to take place a few months after the symptoms of manic depression first manifested and at that moment I was having a depressive episode.

But in the past few months and weeks it's been... different.  There has been no dread at all.  In fact, I've been feeling pretty good about things.  I like to believe it's because I'm finally at long last able to manage having bipolar disorder.  I'll never fully conquer it, but the episodes are getting further and further apart.  I had a manic episode this past fall, and I was able to tell that it was coming.  I got to act accordingly.  Fifteen or twenty years ago that wasn't possible.

I'm still hoping that God might let me have family.  Call me a hopeless romantic or a daydreamer or a fool like Don Quixote.  If He does, I will be able to take care of them in ways that I hadn't before.  Speaking of which, I'm finally coming to forgive myself for some of the things that I did during my lesser moments.

So, I've some reasons to be hopeful, and am eager to embrace life, however it is that I find it.  Getting older isn't a bad thing at all.  I wouldn't want to go back to when I was younger, and I likely wouldn't do anything to make all the pain that happened be as if it hadn't.  Like John Locke said on Lost: "I needed that pain to get to where I am now."

Better days are ahead.  I know they are.  I wasn't able to sit at Microsoft Word for the past month and a half because of some things that arose in real life, but I have been "sussing it out" in my head.  I'm also considering a new job: one that would be entirely different from anything that I have done before in my life.  The people I would be working with very much want to bring me aboard, they have said that my experiences with mental illness and my training as a mental health professional would make me a unique member of their force.  I'm thinking about it, praying about it especially.  Should I take this job you will DEFINITELY be reading about it here.  I'll give you a hint: as part of the training I will be hit in the face with pepper spray.  I doubt my love of Tabasco Sauce is going to make me immune to that.

So, my orbit around the Sun has made it's 49th circuit.  Now on to fifty.  Ever closer to what I've asked God for all these years: to please let me live long enough to see the return of Halley's Comet in 2062.  I'll be 88 years old then.  And hopefully my eyesight will be good enough to view it.  The appearance in 1986 was kind of a letdown.

Maybe it will be better next time.

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The Storm of the Century: Thirty years later...

It was this day, March the 12^th, thirty years ago.

I was eighteen, taking first year classes at the local community college.  I worked part time at Subway, but I didn’t have to go in that night.  About 4 that Friday afternoon Dad asked if I wanted to ride with him to Ridgeway, across the state line in Virginia.  There was this little convenience store there that EVERYONE in Rockingham County seemed to go to when they played the lottery.  I said sure, I’d come along.  It was a cold and cloudy day for mid March.

Looking back, I now recall the sound of the air around us before we hopped into the truck.  It had a very muffled characteristic.  I hadn’t heard air like that in a long time.  That should have been the first clue, about what had already begun to transpire.

We got back home a little over an hour later.  And as I got out of Dad’s truck I saw it: the first flakes of snow.  Something we had not seen fall in three years.

Well, two nights earlier at Boy Scout leadership training, the scoutmaster of my troop made a halfway-joking reference to the weather for the next few days.  How there may be snow.  I didn’t really take him seriously.

But here it was.  Snow.  And more flakes were starting to come down.

It didn’t stop.  It was only falling harder.  By 6:30 the ground was almost completely covered.  We drove to Short Sugar’s in Reidsville a little while later to pick up my sister, who was working there.  She drove cautiously behind our car.  By that point it was undeniably the harshest snowfall that we had seen in quite some time.  I don’t know how Mom drove through that as she did.  We could barely see the highway at all.  But we got back home, a little after 9.

The snow was still falling when I looked out the kitchen door about midnight.

It hadn’t stopped falling when we woke up.  And it continued on and on throughout the day.  No one was driving on our road.  There was nowhere to go.  I had to call my manager and tell her I couldn’t get to Subway tonight.  Saturday afternoon brought the wind.  It sounded like a hurricane.  And it blew the flakes hard against the side of the house.  There was zero visibility if anyone was so daring as to try to get out in that mess.

The power stayed on at our house.  The same could not be said for several hundred thousands of others throughout the area, including one television station in Greensboro that went off the air.  The ABC station was hardly functioning, which I remember because there was something coming on that night that I had been looking forward to catching and the signal barely penetrated the storm.

It was weather on an almost apocalyptic scale.  I finally fell asleep probably around 2 a.m., the wind still howling and barraging the house with frozen precipitation.

Finally, Sunday morning dawned.  The wind had ceased.  The first real sunlight in two days revealed our home, the fields around it, our cars, the trees… everything covered by a pure unspoiled brilliant
blinding white sheet of snow nearly two feet deep.  I got out of the house for a little while to get some fresh air and behold it all.  Our cocker spaniel puppy, Bridget, went out also.  I don’t know how she kept from sinking into the snow.  She looked like a miniature polar bear, she was walking across it so easily.

That was how I experienced the Storm of the Century.  The 1993 Super Storm.  The Great Blizzard of '93.  Whatever you want to call it.  It was a convergence of several weather systems that produced a meteorological monstrosity.  At its height it stretched all the way from Central America to Canada up and across the Eastern Seaboard.  Roughly half the population of the United States was impacted one way or another by the event.  No storm since then has approached it in size and ferocity.

Things had been brought to a standstill for the next few days.  But the weather turned warmer and by Friday all roads were completely passable.  There was only the barest vestige of the blizzard to be found in shady spots as I drove back from the Boy Scout camp the following Sunday morning, at the conclusion of leadership training.

The Storm of the Century was thirty years ago.  But I still think of it, whenever it snows.  I’ve no doubt that many who are reading this will also remember where they were during those several days in March of 1993, when winter showed us that it wasn’t finished yet.

 

 

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The closest person I had to a grandfather

 A few nights ago I was propped up in bed, just randomly looking up things with my iPad.  And I came upon something truly, truly special.  It is for me anyway...

It's on the website for the Order of the Arrow lodge of the Boy Scout council that I was in.  This photo dates to 1954.  The man on the right, in the light uniform shirt, is Allan "Doc" Lewis.  He was a lifelong educator and advocate for Scouting.  In the photo he and the other man (C. Lin Adams) are wearing their Order of the Arrow sashes, which indicate that they were Vigil rank.  The OA was especially near and dear to Doc's heart, as it symbolized true brotherhood and service.

I know these things about Doc, and much more, because he was the grandfather that I never got to have.  I suspect a lot of young men felt the same way about him.

I first wrote about Doc fifteen years ago, on the occasion of what would have been his one hundredth birthday.  Doc was born in January 1908, so he would have been about 46 in this picture.  That was thirty-one years before he and I met for the first time.  I was eleven and a half and a newly minted real Boy Scout.

I'll never understand why Doc took a shine to me as he did.  How it came to be that he brought me under his wing.  I think we definitely had a "master and apprentice" relationship going on.  Doc would often tell me stories of his interesting younger years (he once took Katherine Hepburn out to dinner, he used to hang out with George Burns and Gracie Allen, and he served on a committee with Norman Rockwell).  Doc was a well traveled man too and I think I inherited some wanderlust from him.  That year-long meandering across America that my dog and I did a few years back?  I was definitely channeling pure Doc for that one.  He often shared his witty sense of humor, and his belief in chivalry toward the opposite sex.

There isn't much to say that hasn't been already.  Doc Lewis really did fill a role in not just my life but the lives of many others.  He was very dear to me.  He still is.  And that's the earliest photo I've come across of him.  Seeing that, it's like I can still hear his voice speaking across the decades.

Well, it was just a neat find and I had to blog about it.  Doing what I can to keep his spirit alive and well in our hearts.  Thanks for reading this :-)

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My latest Warhammer 40,000 miniature

Behold my new Ork big mek with kustom force field:

This is a model that I assembled three years ago, in the initial days of the COVID pandemic.  It seemed there wasn't going to be much travel for awhile, and there were a few Warhammer 40,000 minis that I had accumulated but never gotten around to giving much attention toward.  It was as good a thing as any to occupy myself with.  I put this together and it finally dawned on me that the lockdown could last months instead of weeks.  So he just kinda lingered unpainted on a shelf.

Anyway it's now 2023 and Warhammer 40K is hotter than ever and poised to get even bigger.  And I wanted to see if I still had my mad mini-painting skillz.  I'm rather pleased with how this little fella turned out.  So far as in-game mechanics goes, a big mek carrying a force field bestows a good level of protection for nearby friendly forces against enemy fire.

I need to come up with a name for him though.  I like to name my minis.  Gives them a little personality as they fight their way across the board.  I've already got my warboss Kaneegutz (left).  He's a character that I cobbled together from eight different kits.  That's a photo from a few months ago though.  Since then I've widened the base he's standing on with an adapter, and textured the base with astrogranite technical paint (available on Games Workshop's website and many game stores).  So he's "good 'n proppa" for battle.

Next up: a box of the new Ork boyz.  Unfortunately they don't have the pose-ability of the previous boyz minis (which I love) but I'm going to give the new guys a similar paint scheme and spread them around the units.  Infuse my squads with a little extra flavor.  Or maybe I should grant my lads some heavy support and get a deff dread.  That's one of the things why this is such a fun hobby: there's no one correct way to play.  Just go however it feels right for you.  Who knows, if I get good again I may put together a list and enter a tournament sometime.  That would be a lot of fun :-)

EDIT 02/19/2023 12:57 a.m.: I've decided to name my new big mek Erk DeffWelda.  After my good friend, true renaissance man, master welder and professional Santa Claus, Eric Smith.  Who has taught me much about life and he deserves being immortalized as a Warhammer miniature.  I look forward to unleashing him on the field of battle!

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