The Resurrection...a Leveler of Men

                                       The Resurrection … a Leveler of Men

                                   

                                                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal March 27, 2916

Charles “Chuck” Colson was a distinguished lawyer.  Anyone who remembers the Watergate scandal of the 1970’s will recall that Colson was President Richard Nixon’s Special Counsel who went to prison for his part in the Watergate cover up.

            The much younger Lee Strobel is a former Chicago Tribune investigative reporter and legal editor.  An avowed atheist, he held disdain for all people of faith.  He was particularly scornful of creationists.

Lit Ursry was neither educated nor at the height of a profession as were Colson and Strobel.  He was a small cotton farmer, always struggling to make ends meet.  His godly wife and two small children seldom missed church.  But somebody usually gave them a ride because Lit was too drunk to drive on weekends.

            Easter is a good time to ponder how different these men were and how the Resurrection message changed their lives, rendering them far more alike than one could ever imagine.

            I’ve never met Colson or Strobel, but I knew Ursry and his small family.  From their very public lives and the books they have written, I learned that both Colson and Strobel experienced a life transformation that was undeniably real and continues to produce good fruit that affirms its authenticity.  Because I was there when it happened, I can affirm that Lit Ursry experienced a life change also, one for which Colson and Strobel would rejoice.

            In 1972 the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Building kept Americans glued to their newspapers and television.  The break-in was eventually linked to Nixon’s re-election committee.  Nixon resigned and several members of his administration were jailed.

            Colson was the first member of Nixon’s administration to go to jail, having pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.  He was considered Nixon’s “hatchet man” and was admittedly the keeper of Nixon’s infamous enemies’ list.

            Just before he was arrested, Colson joined a Washington, D.C. prayer group.  Because of the influence of men in the group and the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, Colson became a Christian.  Referring to the Apostles and the effect of Christ’s resurrection on them, Colson declared that no 12 men anywhere would give their lives for a hoax, but 12 men would and did give their lives for one whom they saw alive, dead, and alive again.  Time would tell whether Colson was genuine or was having a pre-prison conversion.

            Lee Strobel’s belief in the resurrection resulted from two things: the transformed life of his wife who became a Christian (“She changed; she became more loving, caring and authentic”) and the strong belief of some West Virginia Christian fundamentalists who were protesting science textbooks.

            The same year that Colson was jailed, Strobel was sent by the Chicago Tribune to cover the textbook battle in Campbell Creek, West Virginia.  Expecting to find reporter-hating hillbillies, Strobel was surprised when he was welcomed to one of their protest gatherings.  Though he banged out his newspaper article with as much disdain for anti-evolutionists as ever, he was struck by one comment from a local businessman: “If Darwin’s right, then we’re all just sophisticated monkeys.”

            In time, after incessant reading and discussions with his wife, Strobel abandoned his atheism, embraced the resurrection and penned many books including the New York Times bestseller, The Case for Creation.

            Lit wasn’t Lit Ursry’s real name.  His real name was Holder.  He was called Lit, though indecorously, because he was more often drunk than not.   He knew his wife’s church family didn’t look down on him.  They prayed for him and often took food and clothes to his family.

            It was the resurrection message that changed Lit.  Delivered by a young “preacher boy” from a nearby Christian college on Easter Sunday, the sermon led Lit to later remark, “I just had to believe it.  I don’t want no god that can’t overcome death.”

Far from being a “poser” trying to influence his prison sentence, Colson became one of America’s most well-known Christian writers and apologists.  After his release from prison, he founded Prison Fellowship which supports families of the imprisoned.  Lee Strobel, no longer trapped in the purely material, changed from a smarty atheist and evolutionist to a prolific Christian writer, teacher and speaker.  Within months of that Easter Sunday, Lit Ursry’s nickname began to fade.  His drinking ceased and everyone started calling him Holder.

That’s what the resurrection did for these three quite different men who now have a great deal in common.  They are now Christian brothers.  In a sense all three of them got a new name.  All because of an empty grave.

Roger Hines

3/23/16

Sticks and Stones May Break my Bones but Words...Can Kill or Enliven

              Sticks and Stones May Break my Bones but Words … Can Kill or Enliven

                                                   Published in Marietta Daily Journal March 20, 2016

            Words matter.  When I was 14, spring time found my father and me dealing with barbed wire.  We weren’t building a fence; we were “sticking beans.”   

 My father, a good man who said little unless the topics were faith, crops, or politics, was a neat-nick.  Newspapers, once read, had to be placed back in order, and magazines - Progressive Farmer, Farm Journal, and U.S. News and World Report - had to be stacked neatly.  His diaries, in which he faithfully wrote nightly from January of 1943 to only a few months before his death in 1979, were kept at the end of the mantel.  We never touched them except when he was away from the house.  Occasionally we would peep into the diaries to settle arguments about dates.   Those diaries didn’t lie.

My father made up words.  On the morning that we gathered up a mall, oak posts, barbed wire, staples, crowbar, and hammer for the bean sticking, he cautioned me that the job was going to be a “worriation.”  A lover of words, I knew he didn’t get that one from Noah Webster.  The closest word to “worriation” that I could find in the dictionary was “worriment” which to this day I have still never seen or heard used.

Anyhow, on to that spring day of our worriation. When you stick beans “southernly,” (honestly, I’ve heard him say that one too), you don’t just stick a spindly sweet gum sapling in the ground beside the bean plant, hoping the runner will run up the sapling.  Oh, no. Even a mild wind would level such a piddly effort as that.  “Piddly” is in honor of my father.  Mr. Webster lists it, but refers you to “piddling.”  I’m with my father on this one. “Piddling” is too citified, if not … British.

Of course to do anything “southernly” really meant to do it the “W.E. Hines” way.  But that way always worked and always made things look pretty, too.  People didn’t drive from town late in the afternoon to pass by and look at his fields and gardens for nothing.

Ok, here’s “southernly.”   First you drive posts down at the 2 ends of each row and at every 6 yards in between.  Next you unroll and stretch barbed wire from one end post to the other and hammer staples over the wire and onto the every-six-yards posts.  With barbed wire stretched taut and stapled down, you can then “stick” a trimmed sapling beside each bean plant, tie it to the secured wire, and in time, train the bean vine to grow up the sapling.

With gloved hands I began to unroll the wire.  Halfway down the row I lost control of the heavy roll, causing it to whirl swiftly back toward my father at the other end of the row.  One of the barbs plowed deep into his ungloved hand and drew blood.  Shaking his hand and scattering blood, he yelled, “Son, you can’t do anything right.”

For a few years I believed him.  The words didn’t exactly hurt; they stung and numbed.  They initiated a long period of self-doubt.  But even their negative import could not diminish my respect for my intelligent, hardworking, tenant farmer father who nobly bore his responsibilities and raised 17 children to adulthood.

Eight years later on a spring Sunday morning I asked him if he still planned to go with me that afternoon 90 miles away to my college graduation.  The recent death of my mother had turned him into a sad, non-communicative man.  At age 72 he still worked hard.  His answer made me realize that for eight years I had wrongly and foolishly internalized his words, allowing them to stymie me, even though they were spoken quickly out of physical pain, not out of thought or belief.

“Son, I don’t believe I can make that trip, but I want you to know I love you and I’m proud of you,” he said.  Instantly my mind flashed back to that “worriation” of sticking beans and the words spoken on that day.

“Some say a word is dead once it is said / I say it just begins to live that day,” wrote the poet.  True, but words can also cancel previously spoken ones when the latter ones are spoken sincerely.  My father spoke sincerely.

Words are the vehicles on which our thoughts ride.  Ill-chosen, those vehicles can hit the ditch and do damage.  Luckily my self-imposed damage was reversed.  Many are those whose damage is not.

Roger Hines

3/16/16

America Has a Man Problem

            America Has a Man Problem

                                                                 Published in Marietta Daily Journal March 13, 2016

            When Terrelle stood to give his talk, his fellow inmates listened intently.  Terrelle was thirty-eight, handsome, intelligent, and much loved by all his classmates.  He was the type of guy who makes you wonder how he could ever have done anything that led to a state prison.

             Terrelle’s English course required students to give one talk.  He chose to talk about growing up in the ‘hood.  Among other heartbreaking but revealing details, Terrelle stated he had never seen his father.  Of his mother he said, “She pretty much pushed me off on my grandmother, and my grandmother left every day for work so I had to take care of my younger brother.”

            These details were wrought with emotion, but were quite familiar.  Familiarity can breed a ho-hum attitude toward a situation that needs anything but.  I had heard stories like Terrelle’s not just from other inmates but from quite a few high school and college students outside of prison.  However, toward the end of his talk, Terrelle added something that made his story different: “My family wuz my street buddies, but as far as my real family was concerned, I just about didn’t know who I wuz.”

            Those words rang in my ears for the remainder of the day.  To me, they were profound,  revealing that fatherless homes can lead to an identity crisis even in the mind of a small child.  They can also rob a child of his or her childhood, forcing children to function as parents of younger brothers and sisters.

            Yes, America has a man problem.  Perhaps that’s the reason forty percent of American children will go to bed tonight without fathers.  Today we care more about defending same-sex marriage than we do fixing our man problem.  School systems in several major cities, instead of standing for common sense, are grappling with the issue of “correct restrooms” and how to deal with transgenderism, as though there weren’t enough societal problems without the silly ones brought on by sexual chaos.

            Statistics are cold things.  If they reveal information that saddens or frightens, we shake our heads in despair and go on.  But the statistics stubbornly remain.  They indicate that before our nation’s children reach the age of eighteen, more than half of them will have spent a significant portion of their childhood apart from their fathers.

            But our male prison population isn’t the only indicator.  The general population is trending in directions that show we are becoming a nation of “men without chests.”  As C.S. Lewis further put it, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.”

            There are two foundational questions that pertain directly to our man problem.  One of them is “What is first in nature?”   One doesn’t have to believe the Genesis account of creation (“Male and female created He them”) to know that life is sexually transmitted.  Yet in our tinkering with human sexuality (transgenderism, homosexuality, same-sex marriage) we are consequently killing off masculinity and femininity.  The collateral damage is the denigration of fatherhood.  Does anyone remember the highly touted book for children titled “Heather Has Two Mommies”?  It didn’t exactly elevate fatherhood.

            Something else that is first in nature is that beautiful little unit of government called the family. “Male and female” does often lead to children.   As the writer John Allen puts it, humans are “a species of homebodies.”  Marriage, family, and home are not just the American psyche but the human inclination. (You know – a mom, a dad, and some kids.)  But if you believe in this time-honored arrangement today, you are “on the wrong side of history,” a nonsensical phrase if there ever was one.

            The other foundational question is “Who am I?”  We should readily see how fatherlessness leads to this question.  Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic in America today.  But not all of it is caused by sorry men who flee from responsibility.  The culture itself is either questioning or denigrating fatherhood.  Television comedy presents fathers who are doofuses.  Masculinity itself is suspect and viewed with hostility.  It doesn’t fit modern androgyny.

            Anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that the supreme test of any civilization is whether or not it can “socialize its men” by teaching them to be fathers and to willingly nurture their offspring.  As far as social stability or law and order are concerned, no issue has higher stakes than fatherlessness.

            “ … I just about didn’t know who I wuz,” Terrelle said.  And so it will continue to be as long as governmental policies weaken the family and as long as religious values are driven from the public square.

           

Roger Hines

3/9/16

Change? Where, When, and By Whom?

                          Change?  Where, When, and By Whom?

                                   

                                                                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal March 6, 2016

            Anyone who thinks Donald Trump is arrogant needs to watch Fox News and read the Wall Street Journal, both of which, for what it’s worth, are owned by Rupert Murdoch.  If Murdoch’s minions really can’t understand Trump’s growing army, they might consider the following recent history.

            In August of 1992 at the Republican convention in Houston, President George H.W. Bush, seeking re-election, repeated the issues his party would continue to address.  Among them were school choice, term limits, and tax cuts plus a host of others with which Republicans have always been associated.

            In his nomination acceptance speech, Mr. Bush uttered 8 words that received little attention, probably because the 8 words embodied standard Republican orthodoxy with which Republicans were so familiar.  Republicans had heard these words before.  But a national convention is a pep rally, so the nominee’s main purpose was to gin up excitement by repeating the standard, though neglected, orthodoxy.

            Those 8 words were “Government is too big and costs too much.”

            Fast forward to January of 1995 and President Clinton’s state of the union address.  In the midterm election of ’94, his party had received a shellacking with Republicans taking control of Congress.  In response to that shellacking, Clinton at the beginning of his address said slowly and deliberately, “The era of big government is over.”

            Fast forward again to a Republican administration, that of George W. Bush.  With his Medicare Plan D, government costs (which the President’s father had criticized) were increased.  With his No Child Left Behind law, the federal government now had its foot in the door of every classroom in the country.   No Child Left Behind certainly didn’t reduce government’s size and scope.  It did reduce localism and ignored the 10^th amendment.

            Once more fast forward, this time to another Democrat President, Mr. Obama.  Recall the so-called Affordable Care Act and its consequent increase of government reach and costs.  Recall Mr. Obama’s re-definition of marriage.

  Why can’t the WSJ and certain Fox “contributors” see the pattern of steady growth of government under both parties as well as its connection to last Tuesday night’s primary results?  Despite differences in professed principles, is there a dime’s worth of difference between our two major parties?  Today, a quarter of a century after Bush I’s Houston address, is government any less expensive?  Any less intrusive?  If Bush I was serious, why did domestic spending and regulations explode during his first term? 

            As for Mr. Clinton’s assertion that big government had gone bye-bye, we see in retrospect that it was his first of many effective uses of triangulation.  Still a believer in big government, he was actually thinking and applying “ ‘Come into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly.”  Mr. Clinton’s carefully chosen statement was a ruse.

            There actually is more than a dime’s worth of difference between what the two parties profess.   But as far as what they produce or achieve, how different have their presidents been between 1992 and 2016?  Has the size of government decreased?  Has the collar of regulation been loosened?  Have “family values,” which the Houston convention wallowed in, been fostered and fought for?  Is the middle class being any less gut-punched than ever?

            The answer to all of these questions is no.  Neither party has reined in government’s scope or attended to our debt or borders.

From this past week’s primaries, it seems that voters are saying, “Why not give Mr. Trump a chance?  The political class has had theirs.”  And to those voters, the Republican establishment (Speaker Ryan, Leader McConnell, the WSJ, and others) are saying, “You are absolutely ignorant.” 

Political parties are political conveniences.  George Washington opposed them.  Even so, the nation started out with Federalists and anti-Federalists.  Of course, neither exists today.

Enter the Whig Party which prevailed for two decades, only to be capsized by Lincoln and his new Republican Party.  Even though they gave us such lights as Daniel Webster, where are the Whigs today?   No, parties are not forever.  If the GOP is about to implode, it is simply following the natural course of political party history.  When parties don’t respond to their voters, they morph or fade.  The conservative intellectuals at WSJ and National Review don’t understand this?

Our present situation raises the question: can the culprit be the cure? If the culprit is our two parties that continue to deliver the same goods, then it’s time for one of Jefferson’s “little revolutions.” 

Whether that revolution comes from a distinctly different type candidate within our existing parties or a new party altogether, we must face the fact that since Houston in 1992 little to nothing has changed, including the continuing tone deafness of party leadership.

Roger Hines

3/2/16