SHE IS STILL MY VALENTINE

A NEW LEARNING
When I first met Christine, I sang her love songs. It’s true. It embarrassed her but I was okay with it. I brought her flowers. I wrote her poems. She still has a couple of them, poems that is. That was 43 years ago and we have been married for 41.

I am retired, at home all the time. I emphasize that because home was my haven and Christine’s domain for all these years. I always had a work environment to which I went for several hours each day.

Christine told me today that I need to relax and loosen my grip and stop trying to control things. It’s not me she is speaking about is it? After running a 150 church denomination for six years and being a lead pastor for 34 years could there be any truth in her statement. All I can say is that it takes one to know one. Through all the years of my focus on career and ministry and other peoples’ issues, the substantial part of home care and childcare was done by Christine and believe me she is a hands on manager. We are both A types and that makes clashes over preferences and opinions inevitable. So they happen. That disturbed me for years. Here I was, this preacher of piety yet with marital abrasions. I recall a couple of receptions for weddings which I officiated, at which the bride or groom spoke glowingly about parents who had never been heard to argue. Guilt washed me like a torrent. Well we have been married for 41 years now so you know we have it sorted out, right? Not! We have learned to make the necessary concessions to enjoy one another, to understand one another. Vacations spent in the car and on the road have been marked by differences of opinion and we learned to concede that “today I will be the wimp and tomorrow it’s your turn”. It works. A couple of other things work as well. Always saying sorry. Makeup hugs. An abiding love that doesn’t want to allow the other person to be hurt – at least not for long.

She's still my valentine and I bought her flowers the other day. Beats doing it on Valentine's Day when the prices are spiked. I sing her love songs too, just like Neil and Barbara did. It's a great duet with tender sentiments which yield the surprise that one wants to say goodbye to the other. But I will never tell Christine goodbye. She's got my heart locked up.

Everybody's Beautiful

A NEW LEARNING
“Everybody’s beautiful in his own way…” “Jesus loves the little children; all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

How many Christians have sung the choruses and songs that contain similar sentiments? Some of those very people stood screaming profane epithets at the black marchers who gathered enough courage to protest in the 1960’s. I watched some historical clips of those days in the southern states when discrimination against blacks was being challenged. Violence and venom spilled from whites and I was horrified to realize that I had forgotten how reprehensible it had been. Generations younger than mine may possess only a cursory knowledge of this demeaning treatment of human beings with another skin colour.

When President Barak Obama was elected, a recurring comment was ‘look how far we have come.’ On one hand great social inequity has been reversed within half a decade. On the other hand in the long history of the United States, how ashamed should white Americans and Canadians be that the changes didn’t happen sooner?

St. Catharines, Ontario, not Alabama, was my childhood home. I grew up in a white family. Yes, it’s true. I attended a Caucasian church with people white like me. The Bell family was the only black family in our church. The Bells had a son named Ralph a few years my senior who was an outstanding person, a role model, an achiever, a high school student body president, and later an associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Team. I admired him very much.

The church wasn’t segregationist, wasn’t intentionally white. That’s the way the societal climate was in the 1950’s. Ethnicities voluntarily practiced a soft exclusivism. Nevertheless ours was a church with an international missions focus. Many of its own members were commissioned to work overseas with other racial, cultural and language groups. We at home relished their stories and pictures.

I will forever be grateful for the opportunity my family had to live in Toronto from 1981-1991 where I pastored a Scarborough church in which Asian, Jamaicans and Caucasians enjoyed one another’s company. Oh we didn’t have integration mastered by any means. But what a socially educational environment in which to raise my children through their teen years as they enjoyed multi-cultural friendships.

INAUGURATION DAY

A NEW LEARNING
It’s here - the 20th of January 2009 - Barak Obama will be inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. This is a remarkable, important, longed-for day, perhaps even a blessed day in the life of the USA.

Obama will be sworn in at midday. Barak Obama will place his hand on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used during his 1861 inauguration. Lincoln arrived in Washington by train and this past Saturday Obama and Biden and their grateful entourage recreated the final Philadelphia to Washington leg of that earlier journey. During his presidency Lincoln emancipated African and American born slaves and ended slavery in America. Obama will swear the oath of office a short distance from the spot from which Martin Luther King spoke his eloquent ‘I have a dream’ speech forty years ago. The inauguration of America’s first black President happens one day after the commemoration of Martin Luther King Day.

The momentous nature of this event and its timing relative to other historic events is neither incidental, nor can it be overlooked by anyone, not even those who despise the notion of a non Caucasian in high office in the USA, or those who simply loathe Americans. Disgusting as it is to consider, white supremacist and terrorist websites bear detestable commentaries. Security is unprecedented and sophisticated for this inauguration. A Prius it is not. The Secret Service has dubbed the new presidential limousine “The Beast.” It’s a Cadillac, customized with five-inch (13 cm.) thick armour, bomb-proof glass, interior impenetrable by chemical attack and puncture proof tires. One of Eleven people in Washington today is ‘Security.’ The security force is estimated at 40,000 people, including 7,500 active duty soldiers, 10,000 National Guard troops and 25,000 law-enforcement officers. Subways have installed explosive and chemical bomb sniffing devices.

Please! Please! I don’t want to live through it again, I can’t do it! John F. Kennedy ushered in an era of hope and promise in 1960 which ended in blood in 1963, followed by Martin Luther King’s assassination and then that of John’s brother Bobby. I was twenty-one years of age in 1963. It was the year when King’s stirring speech in Washington broke the heart of America to bring about this day when Obama with hand on the Bible, becomes the leader of the land of the free and the home of the brave. God bless America.

“Jesus loves the little children; all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

1. If you weren’t old enough to hear King’s courageous oratory, or if you would benefit from a reminder spend 17 minutes listening to this.
2. King's last speech, "I have seen the promised land." is a few minutes in length.

Oh yes, It's Bush's last day at the White House.