Do I really need Facebook?

If you've read this before, please smile tolerantly at those of us who feel the following describes us:

I’ve enjoyed a pretty good life without a cell phone that plays music, takes videos, pictures and communicates with Facebook and Twitter. I signed up under duress for Twitter and Facebook, so my seven kids, their spouses, 13 grand kids and 2 great grand kids could communicate with me in the modern way. I figured I could handle something as simple as Twitter with only 140 characters of space.

That was before one of my grandkids hooked me up for Tweeter, Tweetree, Twhirl, Twitterfon, Tweetie and Twittererific Tweetdeck, Twitpix and something that sends every message to my cell phone and every other program within the texting world.

My phone was beeping every three minutes with the details of everything except the bowel movements of the entire next generation. I am not ready to live like this. I keep my cell phone in the garage in my golf bag.

The kids bought me a GPS for my last birthday because they say I get lost every now and then going over to the grocery store or library. I keep that in a box under my tool bench with the Blue tooth [it's red] phone I am supposed to use when I drive. I wore it once and was standing in line at Barnes and Noble talking to my wife and everyone in the nearest 50 yards was glaring at me. I had to take my hearing aid out to use it, and I got a little loud.

I mean the GPS looked pretty smart on my dash board, but the lady inside that gadget was the most annoying, rudest person I had run into in a long time. Every 10 minutes, she would sarcastically say, "Re-calc-U-lating." You would think that she could be nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me. She would let go with a deep sigh and then tell me to make a U-turn at the next light. Then if I made a right turn instead... well, it was not a good relationship.

When I get really lost now, I call my wife and tell her the name of the cross streets and while she is starting to develop the same tone as Gypsy, the GPS lady, at least she loves me.

To be perfectly frank, I am still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house. We have had them for 4 years, but I still haven't figured out how I can lose three phones all at once and have to run around digging under chair cushions and checking bathrooms and the dirty laundry baskets when the phone rings.

The world is just getting too complex for me. They even mess me up every time I go to the grocery store. You would think they could settle on something themselves but this sudden "Paper or Plastic?" every time I check out just knocks me for a loop. I bought some of those cloth reusable bags to avoid looking confused, but I never remember to take them in with me.

Now I toss it back to them. When they ask me, "Paper or Plastic?" I just say, "Doesn't matter to me. I am bi-sacksual." Then it's their turn to stare at me with a blank look. 

We senior citizens don't need any more gadgets. The TV remote and the garage door remote are about all we can handle.

       [P. S. from LW: Even these last two are a bit much for some of us.]

While you watch The Game . . .

Pastor Jacky Newton in Kentucky is an avid sports fan.  He played varsity ball.

Even so, Jacky recently tried to put things in perspective in one of his daily e-mail devotions.  I quote the following excerpt with Jacky's permission:

Our nation has become obsessed with sports.  Who will win the Super Bowl?  Will the Big Blue of Kentucky win another NCAA basketball title?  Will this recruit or that recruit choose our school?  How is my NFL fantasy team doing?  I’m a huge sports fan, just ask anyone who knows me, but may I remind you of a few things:

While you’re consumed with a game, someone will lose a child;

Another murder will take place;

Some people will learn that they have cancer;

 A wife with children will stand by a flag-draped casket and tell their soldier goodbye;

 A young person will be molested;

Babies will be aborted;

A person will die of starvation or freeze to death; and

Another lost person will die without Christ and spend eternity apart from Christ.

Sports have their place in our society, but many things are far more important.  If you and I spent as much time building a relationship with our family or God, this world may change.  We are consumed by our own desires, never thinking of others or heavenly things.

Many of us are way too concerned with things that don’t matter and not concerned about the things that DO matter.  “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:2).

Thank you, Jacky.  You've given us food for thought.

What is the worst word in the English language?

“The one word more detestable than any other in the English language is the word ‘exclusive.’” 

So said Carl Sandburg, who spent the final twenty-two years of his life at Flat Rock, North Carolina, a suburb of Hendersonville.  This was his answer to a question from the noted CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow.

The poet went on to say, “When you’re exclusive you shut out a more or less large range of humanity, from your mind and heart, from your understanding of them.

Sandburg was born to immigrants from Sweden.  His parents spoke broken English as his father worked long, long hours as a railroad hand. So there’s personal experience in that assessment of “exclusive.”

I saw an example of exclusion or selfishness among some birds in our backyard:

I threw out some scraps, figuring some of God’s critters would come along and eat them.  The leftovers were mostly some stale tortillas. You know how thin tortillas are.  I crumbled the tortillas into little bits and threw them out.  

As I sat at our kitchen table working with my laptop, I glanced up and saw several birds flying around the area where I had tossed the scraps.  I walked to the window to get a better view and was amazed at what I saw:  

       This black bird got one tortilla scrap in his beak, and I thought he would eat it on the spot or maybe fly off to eat it in privacy.  But, no.  He pecked at another scrap and got it in his beak.  I thought surely he would eat them on the spot or maybe fly off to share with his mate.  But no.  This pattern continued until that bird had six or seven pieces balanced in his beak, the ends sticking out either side of his mouth.   

       A bigger bird was right behind him, and this bird wanted to get all the scraps and not leave any for the other.   So the bird with all the stuff in his beak flew off and left the other one to stuff his beak as well.  This second bird flew just a short distance and put his treasure down to eat.  But then a third bird came along and tried his best to get some of the second bird’s feast. There was no willingness to share.  Each bird was out to have exclusive access to the tortilla scraps.

We’re like those birds.  

It’s easy to slide into excluding people who don’t look or talk or act like us:

If we’re white, it’s us against people whose skin is darker.

If we speak English, it’s us on one side and all those others who should learn English.

If we’re Christians, it’s us on one side and Muslims on the other.

If we have enough money to feel comfortable, it’s us on one side and those other folks who ought to go to work.

If we don’t have much money, it’s us on one side and the folks with money on the other.

And the beat goes on.

In the view of the ancient Jews, the world contained only two races of people, Jews on one hand and then everyone else.

St. Paul, a first-century Jew, said,  For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him.  For, "every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved"  (Romans 10:12-13).

Jesus had concern, even for the birds:  He said God is mindful of every little sparrow, none excluded.  

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father's will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows (Matthew 10:29-31).

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas . . .

When someone mentions the Twelve Days of Christmas, most of us think of the song that has nothing to do with Jesus. But here on the Eleventh Day of Christmas, I offer a paragraph from Brett Younger, who tries to teach student preachers (at Mercer University's divinity school) how to preach:

"We cannot make Christmas meaningful, because we are not in charge. The best we can do is take the spotlight off the distractions and look for the star. We stay open to the possibility that God is present. Waiting for a surprise sounds contradictory, but that is how Christmas happens. We give up the lesser expectations of the kind of Christmas we can create and open our hearts to God’s joy.
. . . We join the chorus singing the carols not because everyone expects us to, but because something stirs within us. We give and receive gifts not because it is required, but for the joy of it. We look carefully at the manger and feel what the shepherds felt as earth rose to heaven and heaven stooped to earth."

This is from Dr. Younger's blog at http://peculiarpreacher.com/?p=329

"Fog" for Christmas

The spirit of Christmas is elusive.  It is beyond our grasp.  The beauty, the love which is Christmas hovers over and around us.  It’s so real and so near, we think we can hold it in our fists.  But when we open our hands, it’s not there.   Like fog.

Carl Sandburg wrote a very short poem about the fog.  Twenty-one words.  Pansy knows my strong interest in Sandburg, so several Christmases ago, she had that poem matted and framed for me.

His “Fog” poem starts this way:

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

In that same silent way, the spirt of Christmas settles upon us -- often in spite of ourselves.  We are wrapped in it for a brief time.  Like the fog, the Christmas spirit leaves its imprint.  As with the fog, so with the spirit of Christmas: We feel it, we bask in it, but it doesn’t linger.

Notice, Sandburg likened the fog to a cat’s quiet entrance.  You don’t hear the kitty as she comes into the room.

The carol, “O, Little Town of Bethlehem,” speaks of the silent coming of Christ:

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.

Sandburg also points to the fog’s silent exodus:

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

If you've ever walked in the fog very long, you’re probably glad to get in out of it.  You may feel soggy or soppy.  You may feel that way about Christmas:  Glad when it silently moves on.


But the true Spirit of Christmas is the Spirit of Jesus.   Unlike the fog, and unlike the fleeting feelings of the holidays, Christ’s Spirit always surrounds us. We may not always be aware of the Spirit’s presence, but we need to be sensitive to silent moments as He comes “on little cat feet.”

I'll Be Home for Christmas

[From my book, Christmas Memories from Seven to Seventy, available through amazon.com]

The call to come home is as old as the human race. In the holiday season, that voice reverberates through the echo chambers of our souls.

As my Mother’s brood of six got married and moved away, she often would cite two criteria when neighbors asked whether she had a “good” Christmas: If the weather was “pretty,” and if most of her
children were home, she had had “a good Christmas.”

With those two standards looming large, I learned I was expected to be home for Christmas. So I was with my parents every Christmas for 34 years.

In those 34 years, I had graduated from high school, college, and seminary; I had worked full-time as a minister, college professor and writer-editor; I had taken myself a wife; I had lived in Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.

Still, every year, I returned to my native Texas to be with my parents and assorted siblings, in-laws, and niece and nephews.

Only after I was a father myself did I begin to see “home for Christmas” from a different perspective: home was where my wife and our sons and I lived, rather than half a continent away where my parents lived.

Even after I became a father, a strong inner voice silently yelled, “Let’s go to Texas!” for as long as my parents were alive. Sometimes that call still comes, though Daddy and Mother both have long
since gone to that Eternal Home.

When Johnny Mathis gives out with “I’ll be home for Christmas; you can count on me,” in my mind's eye and in my heart of hearts, I am once again part of a happy throng of six brothers and sisters,
spouses, and children, overflowing one of the modest houses or apartments Mother and Daddy called home over the years.

Now and again, as Russell and Jonathan were growing up, we made the long trip across several states to be with my extended family. But, for the most part, we have been home for Christmas in the various places the four of us have called home: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, New York and South Carolina.

Many times over the years, not just at Christmas, I have felt I was the black sheep of the family. With the exception of years my younger sister Marie and her family spent in Ohio, the rest of the Webb clan could say, “We’re Texas born and Texas bred, and when we die, we’ll be Texas dead.” Marie and Don eventually wised up and went back to our Holy Land.

I have missed a great deal over the decades by not being around my brothers and sisters and their spouses. My one niece and most of my nephews have married and raised families, and I have not
been around to watch that next generation grow up. My sons have little awareness of their extended family.

Now, our sons have followed my example as they live and work in distant cities, far from their parents: New York and Chicago. They have their own individual patterns for the holidays, and I say,
“God bless them for it.”

Russell lives and works in lower Manhattan. He rarely comes South, for Christmas or otherwise.
Jonathan followed my pattern of returning to the nest at Christmas, never missing a season his first 27 years. When he missed year 28, it was not through his choice but through ours.

After Pansy and I both retired, we started talking about another trip to England. For various reasons, the earliest we could get away that year was mid-December.

Knowing Jonathan would probably be expecting to come down from Chicago, we tried to break the news gently: I wrote him a letter, which he never received. So gentle went out the window when I casually mentioned our travel plans in a phone call – first he had heard of it.

After the initial shock of not having home and parents to come back to, he seemed to take it in stride. I invited him to join us in London for at least Christmas weekend. I offered to pay a good share of his expenses. But the whole idea of no home to come back to at Christmas was more than he could adjust to on short notice.

So he stayed in the Windy City, spending extra time with Vicky, the young woman he was thinking of asking to marry him. He didn’t propose just then, but soon he did ask her. She agreed, they got
married, and now they have a son and a daughter.

People often ask, “Don’t you wish your sons would come home for Christmas?” I usually just smile or grimace, but I think to myself: “I would love to see them, but they are at home. They’re away from us, but they have their homes in Chicago and New York.  They have their lives. They have their responsibilities. It isn’t easy to travel long distances, especially with little children.”

In his poem “The House of Christmas,” G. K. Chesterton described the call to come home this way:

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

Those lines suggest that every human being is away from home.

The Christmas story, after all, is about One who left his Father’s home, who was born in a manger, who in adulthood had no place to lay his head, who was buried in someone else’s tomb, who
identified his family as larger than his mother and birth brothers and sisters, a family “born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

So, whether we are with our human families this Christmas or spending the time alone or in a nursing home, we need to listen for the call of God, welcoming us to the warmth of His family. Jesus came to earth in order to call all his brothers and sisters back to his Father’s house.

When I said, "I love you," her first words were, "I don't know whether I love you or not."

[This is a true story from my book, Christmas Memories From Seven to Seventy, available in paperback  from Amazon.com.]

 I gave Pansy an engagement ring a few days before Christmas 1964. But you could say it began at Thanksgiving.

It was the day after Thanksgiving when I first told her I loved her. And I remember her exact words in response: “I don’t know whether I love you or not.” That response stopped me cold in my
tracks, but not for long.

She was teaching high school English in Charlotte, North Carolina. All through the fall months, I had made trips up from Anderson, South Carolina, about 120 miles away, where I was teaching at Anderson College, a small junior college sponsored by the Baptists.

I was beginning to feel something deep within myself which I had never felt for another woman. Because I hadn’t been down that road before, I had little to compare it with, but I thought this was
love. I felt comfortable at the thought of spending the rest of my life with her, and I was hoping and praying she might feel the same toward me.

That began to seem likely when her sister and brother-in-law, Gay and John, invited me to stay with them in Charlotte a couple of nights at Thanksgiving. So, up I went. We had a big traditional
turkey dinner at John and Gay’s. Though I wasn’t in the kitchen to see for sure who was the chief cook, I was optimistic that the sisters were at least equal partners.

The four of us spent some time together, and Pansy and I spent some time alone. Our last moments together were on Friday morning before I headed for home. That’s when I told her how I felt and heard her noncommittal response.

Admittedly, I didn’t choose the most romantic time or place. I was thirty years old, but I could have been a gawky adolescent on his first date when it came to mapping out a plan for opening my heart. 

About all I knew of Charlotte was the route to the place where Pansy was living. As I drove around town, I looked for a safe, quiet place to stop. I discovered a college campus which I correctly
guessed would have no classes during the holiday weekend. So I drove around the campus and found an empty parking lot in broad daylight.

We sat in silence as I was trying to find a way to say what was in my heart. After an eternity, Pansy broke the silence: “A penny for your thoughts.”

I said, “Is that as high as your bidding goes?”

She smiled and said, “Two pennies?”

Then I said, “I was trying to think how to tell you I love you.”

“Are you telling me?” she asked in a voice which did not sound encouraging.

“Yes. I love you.”

More silence. Then her reply which made my heart sink.

Because I hadn’t “been there and done that,” I hadn’t thought through the various possibilities of how she might respond. So I swallowed my Adam’s apple and my pride as I asked, “Well, could I come back to see you next week?”

She said, “That would be fine.”

As I drove along I-85 toward home, I started mentally composing the first real love letter I’d ever written – the first of several I would write during the week, before I would see her again.

The next Saturday, all afternoon and evening as we were together, I kept thinking, “Is this a good time? Is this a good time?”

I tried to say something while we ate supper, but she turned the conversation away. That made me feel less than confident.

When we came to the house where she had a room with an elderly lady, I parked the car and said to myself, “Well, let’s see what happens.” I figured she would at least let me walk her to the door before shaking my hand and telling me, “It was nice knowing you.” I turned off the engine, and we sat in silence a few seconds, my nerves a-jangle.

She looked over at me with her deep, dark eyes and said, “Lawrence, I love you, too.” In the quietness of that moment of our first embrace, I felt sure her landlady would be awakened by
the sound of my heart pounding like a jackhammer.

I never asked, “Will you marry me?” She and I both understood the meaning of my declaration of love the week before and her reciprocal reply that night. So, instead of hurrying to her door, we
sat in the car, exulting in our newly declared mutuality, making preliminary plans for our wedding.

So it all started at Thanksgiving. Or, could you say it started the previous summer when we rediscovered each other, thanks to some mutual friends?

Pansy worked that summer at Ridgecrest, a Baptist conference center near Black Mountain, North Carolina. Those mutual friends asked me to come up to the center on Saturday and Sunday to help
with a workshop they would be leading.

Jim and Dottie and Pansy and I were all in seminary together a few years earlier: Pansy and Dottie were roommates, and Jim and I were close friends.

So I guess you really would have to say it began in seminary. Jim and Dottie got married after seminary. Pansy and I knew each other there but had not dated. Women were a tiny percentage of
the student body at most seminaries. That was true of our school in Louisville, Kentucky. So most of the unmarried men were aware of most of the single women.

After seminary, the next time the four of us were together was at Jim and Dottie’s wedding – Pansy a bride’s maid, and I a groomsman. We acknowledged each other’s presence there, but that was about it.

Pansy had worked at Ridgecrest a summer or two before that year when we all converged for what proved to be a weekend of destiny. I had seen her in those earlier summers and chatted with her when I attended meetings at the center.

I accepted Jim and Dottie’s request to help with their sessions during the summer in question, not suspecting they were praying and scheming for something more significant than my helping them
for a few hours.

Dottie was subtle enough in her Danielle Cupid role: “You remember Pansy Hopkins, don’t you?” she asked me.

“Sure. You and she were roommates in Louisville, weren’t you?”

“Yes, and did you know that she’s working at the registration desk here?”

“Well, I haven’t seen her yet this trip,” I said. “But I knew she worked there other summers when I’ve come up.”

Dottie didn’t say much more than that. She didn’t have to.

I’d gone with a number of girls in college but never had a real steady. Then, during a year of teaching in a small North Texas town before going to seminary, I didn’t find many available young women. In seminary, it was the college story again: some dating but nothing regular.

Still, I never intended to remain a bachelor. I’ve often said, if I didn’t believe anything else in the Bible, I would believe Genesis 2:18 –”Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’” 

But how did it all begin for Pansy and me? It almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if I had gone to seminary in my native Texas instead of coming east to Kentucky and if Pansy hadn’t taken a two-year detour from school teaching to go to that same seminary.

Whatever the ultimate starting point, our plans for life together began to take more definite shape a week or so before Christmas when Pansy came to Anderson for a weekend.

I hadn’t been confident enough to buy the engagement ring before I heard her say the magic words. But that night in my car in front of her house, I offered her my college ring. My knuckles are so big that Pansy could almost put two of her fingers in my ring.

But she took it as an earnest of a smaller, more feminine ring. In the meantime, she stuffed cloth or cotton in my class ring so it would stay on her finger. As I looked at the ring on her finger, the Beatles
song rang in my mind: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Now, with sufficient confidence, I went to a jewelry shop on Main Street in downtown Anderson and had sympathetic support from a sweet, elderly Southern lady who had years of experience helping young men as each struggled to find the right ring at the right price for his Miss Right.

I was one of several faculty and staff members living in an apartment complex owned by the college. Among my colleagues, I discovered a veritable fairy godmother in Anna Hoover, a dorm mother who spent most nights on campus supervising female students. She offered her off-campus apartment for Pansy on the weekends she would come to town.

When Pansy arrived on that first visit, we went to a restaurant for supper and then to Mrs. Hoover’s apartment so Pansy could get settled in. Then, I removed my heavy college ring from her finger
and replaced it with a more permanent one.

On her first visit, the campus was full of the excitement and beauty of Christmas. The college had only a few hundred students, and I knew many of them personally. They knew I was single, and word had quickly spread that I had a lady friend.

That night, after I gave Pansy the ring, we went to a choir concert. As we entered the auditorium, I heard whispers of, “Hey, who’s that Mr. Webb is with?” I felt as if we were in a spotlight and all the students could see the sparkle of the ring.

After the concert, the women’s dorms had open house. Doors were decorated with candy canes and Christmas scenes. Others had shiny wrapping paper and bows, turning the room into a huge gift. I felt I had my gift at my side as girls in the rooms gave knowing grins.

Sunday morning, we went to church, then spent the afternoon giving Pansy a chance to get acquainted with some of my close friends on the faculty.

Later Sunday afternoon, we went back to the campus where we had left Pansy’s car. With the short days of December, it was dark before I realized it. Pansy said little about it, but I knew she was all
too aware that night had fallen as she anticipated two hours-plus of driving home alone on the interstate.

Rather than going directly to her car on the front campus drive, I delayed her departure a bit longer. I found a shadowed spot away from the students where we could kiss and embrace. I told her again that I loved her and heard her say once more, “I love you, too.” 

With those declarations, the sparkle of Christmas hope was in my heart as I held her hand and looked at the sparkling ring – a token of bright anticipation of our life together.