Walking Into Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church

Another Sunday morning at Oak Grove Baptist Church in Piedmont, South Carolina, twenty minutes before ten o’clock and the musicians are already playing between Sunday school and church. They have the windows rattling. The sun, at forty-five degrees, reveals shafts of blinking dust through the clear top part of the windows. The bottom windows were frosted at the factory. Stained glass was for richer, more ritualistic churches in town.

                  

Our Black and Red 56 Plymouth sits among Fords, Chevys, Buicks and other Plymouths. It’s 1963, the early part, still Camelot. Grandpa just opened granny’s door and he’s helping her out of the car. We see them and then they see us. Granny was smiling, although getting out of the car was not easy at her size. She was not tall, not even five feet, but she tipped the scales way over two hundred pounds. As the years went by, she would get even bigger, until real late in life she would lose some and then her whole body would be covered with chicken-neck skin.

                 

Mama’s purse, the size of a small suitcase, had lifesavers and other mysteries, so I walked with her and whispered for one. She walked toward the church with us, digging. I could never help myself by running my hand down in mama’s purse. She always told me, “Never get in a woman’s purse.” My guess is it had something to do with feminine hygiene products.

                  

“What are you digging for Joyce?” Grandpa asked in his wry way.

                  

“Michael wants a lifesaver, and he decides to ask me right now as we are walking in to the church. He couldn’t have asked me when we were still in the car you know,” mama said, making me look bad to Grandpa for wanting a lifesaver.

                  

“Here, I have a pack right here in my pocket, and the lord knows it’s not nearly as big as that feed sack you’re carrying,” Grandpa said, holding out his lifesavers.

                  

Grandpa Spearman reached me a lifesaver with his tan-leathered hand. I didn’t wait for the usual, “What do you say”. I said thanks pretty loud. Grandpa patted me on the head. I’m certain I took both the candy and the pat for granted. If I could go back there now, I would reach up and grab his hand and dwell on how it was like a baseball glove. I might pretend like a fortune teller and read his palm, trying to figure how long he would be with us. It turns out he would be with us only about nine more years, an eternity to a child my age, but what I now know to be a blink of the eye.

                  
The song coming down the aisle, out through the vestibule and then to where we were on the outside of the blond wood double doors, was, The Eastern Gate. All the instruments the church had to throw at the music were involved, a banjo, three kinds of guitars, a piano, an organ, a harmonica, a tambourine and a set of drums. They held nothing back. They flaunted musical machines the way the Church of Christ avoided them. Sometimes during morning worship service, when the weather was warm and the windows raised, you could see people sitting in their cars on the side of the road with their windows rolled down, smoking cigarettes and listening to the old-time gospel music.

                  

Daddy had fallen in stride with Junior Bryant, Frankie Bryant’s daddy. Frankie was the one playing the piano we were walking in to. This would have been the same Junior Bryant that usually played the guitar and two harmonicas at the same time, one with his nose and one with his mouth. It was also the same man that would, twenty-five years later, expose himself to granny Spearman, in the choir loft of another church. Granny told me about it and almost cried, because she felt so sorry for Junior, who had obviously lost his mind. Junior Bryant was not in the band playing yet, because his wife was sick at home and he had come just for worship service.

                  

The screen door slapped together as Cathy reached out to get it. She was always the first one in the church. She wanted to get with her friends and sit. I suppose it would have killed her to have to sit with her family. They let her get away with sitting somewhere else, but they had to keep an eye on me, so I sat right between mama and daddy. Earl sat on the other side of mama, to keep us separate.

                  

Earl was a toddler in daddy’s arms. Brenda was behind Cathy, trying to get a knot out of her hair. Her face was all twisted up, partly from the sunshine, but partly from the fact that she had both hands behind her head trying to gouge a bobby pin out of her hair, so she could get her brush through the tangle.  Before we got to the front door of the church, she had the tangle out and the bobby pin back in. The brush was in one of her hands. She slipped it in her purse, right before walking into the vestibule. I was glad I was not a girl. They had to mess with their selves way too much, ever time you went anywhere. It never made sense to me. Girls were way prettier than boys, but they usually acted like they were ugly and worked at fixing their hair or face, and the guys who really were ugly, did nothing to look better.

                  

We found seats near the front of the church. Grandpa and Granny sat with me and Earl and mama and daddy. We had not got there in time to get a back seat, but daddy didn’t want a back seat anyway, the way most of the other church families did. Some people would just about fight you over the back few pews. Cathy and Brenda found separate seats in the back with their friends. I had friends, but I couldn’t sit with them. I had cut up too many times in church. Junior Bryant went on up to the stage behind the pulpit stand, picked up his electric guitar and just like that, the Eastern Gate got louder and better.

                  

Everybody was standing around, coming in, milling about, shaking hands, some entering from the back of the church where they had been in Sunday school, walking down off the stage through the musicians, probably a little embarrassed at having to walk in time to the music and therefore almost feeling like they were dancing - a sin. We usually were there for Sunday school too, but on this morning we had woke up in plenty of time but then after mama and daddy had a fuss, she had gone in the bedroom to pout. By the time she was done pouting and we all got dressed, it had been time for Sunday school to be about over. It was nice to finally be in the church, listening to Oak Grove’s band music, instead of mama and daddy arguing over whose fault it was we had missed Sunday school.

What's up with the frightened white U.S. males?

I went to the post office this afternoon and I noticed a tall Caucasian-looking guy with a shaved head looking at me from where he was standing – out of the line me and the three people in front of me were in. When I looked back at him, he sort of nodded and started looking in another direction. When the person being helped by one of the two clerks left, the clerk called him up, she said, did you stand in line like the rest of the people and he said, no I thought I was behind the lady that just left. She said, yes, but there is only one line. He wheeled around while she was still talking and said: “Stuff like this is the reason I’m moving to South Africa.” In an otherwise quiet post office, that is an attention getter.

He came and got in the line behind me and I said: “You were here before me, do you want to go ahead of me?”

He said: “Nah, I’m not in any hurry.”

He stood there a minute and then he said to no one in particular, but I guess mostly to me since I was closest: “This country is not the way it used to be when I was growing up. I spent 16 years in the military and now I have come back and this country is not the same, that’s why I am moving to South Africa.”

I said: “So, you have a place there and everything?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, “I am leaving in two weeks. This country is not the same country I left.”

I said nothing else. I was determined to not egg him on, but if I was going to say something, I had it picked out and it would have been: “No, you are right, this country has changed. I don’t think people are quite as racist as they used to be, or at least they can’t be and get away with it.” I am so glad I didn’t say that. Who knows how he might have responded and in some ways, I would have been joining him rather than somehow “correcting” him.

One day last week I received a text from my wife in the middle of the morning saying they were in a lockdown situation at the learning resource center of the Tipton County center of Dyersburg State Community college, where she works, because a fugitive was thought to be in the area. They spent the rest of the day in lock down, with students finally escorted out in the middle of the afternoon and then my wife left around an hour early, escorted out to her car by police officers. They were afraid he might try to steal someone’s car in the parking lot. He had already stolen a police cruiser and abandoned it, a few days before. They caught him two days later, near the center where my wife works.

It was all over the news and in the papers and from the coverage we learned he was: “anti-government and anti-police”, “a survivalist,” that he had a stash of guns in his mother’s basement, which was in a subdivision just behind where my wife worked. Pictures of him in the paper showed long white hair and a long white beard, although in the picture taken of him after they caught him, he had shaved all but his mustache and goatee, his hair was darker and shorter and he appeared to have lost a lot of weight – it was about 10 degrees the night he was caught in an abandoned house.

I know a number of white males who have lots of guns and who often say things such as: “I hate the government,” “I hate paying taxes,” “I just want to be left alone,” “This country is headed in the wrong direction” and so on. A few months after President Obama was elected, we were at a wedding of a friend and a white male at a table behind us was talking to people at his table loud enough for everyone to hear and he said: “People, I am telling you, we are in big trouble. This country is in deep trouble.”

I know people are paranoid about a number of things, but I am not sure I have seen so much fear among white males in the south of the U.S. until a black man became President. It is as if they are living their worse nightmare.

Is racism the primary driver of their fear? Such an accusation can easily be denied and of course, not all white males who think our country is in deep trouble are equally concerned over race. Some of them would cite high taxation, some would bring up that: “They are coming for our guns”, others would say: “This country has not been the same since they took prayer out of the schools”, and I am sure there would be a lot of other things on their list too.

But one thing they have in common is an apparent belief that their backs are to the wall, that things cannot get worse, that something has to be done. Some of them get so far gone with this thinking that they start taking action, like the fugitive who caused my wife’s school to be locked down.

They seem desperate, ready for a fight, ready to join a militia; to want to do something, anything, to join an action to redress wrongs. They are believers in grand conspiracies, defenders of the true values of this country, lovers of some sort of myth that things were better but got worse and that a lot of people who could have done something, did nothing; and that they cannot allow themselves to do nothing too.

I have spent my entire life around men (I suppose the occasional woman too) who think this way. I am not sure of the best way to handle it, because most of them are blowhards, but once in a while one of them will do something violent. I suppose the best we can hope for is if we are in a line with one at the post office, he is the blowhard type and not the action type, unless of course his action involves moving to South Africa; in which case I'd say: enjoy your new life.

On Love

In a clip available on Youtube, Jacques Derrida, admonishes girls who were trying to interview him that they should try to ask him questions rather than have him simply talk about love, but when they asked questions such as what do you think of what Plato said about love, he did not like the questions; so he asked one of his own: can you actually love someone or do you love the person’s qualities. His answer seemed to be that Fred can only love Frieda’s qualities and when he gets to know her better or if she changes while he knows her and he no longer sees her as having the qualities with which he fell in love, he will cease to love her and move on to someone else.

He also got into the issue of love and being. He said the most important question pertaining to being was what is being and the most important question regarding love is what is love.  It was at this point he moved in the direction of asking whether you could actually love a person rather than their qualities.

He did not wish to get into clichés regarding love and I certainly understand his desire to avoid them, but I can think of no other subject so prone to the use of cliché language, than that of love. Any subject written and sung about as much as love, will inevitably suffer from tired and hackneyed expressions (tired and hackneyed, how tired and hackneyed, huh?).

But really, what is love? Does it differ from infatuation? Is it possible to completely love someone, without regard to the qualities we perceive? If someone has a few great qualities we desire in a person, but many others we do not prefer; do we weigh them on a scale and see which weighs more, the ones we love or the ones we do not love? Is it possible to fall in love with a few desirable qualities of a person and then no matter how our perceptions or the qualities change from then on, to love that person without regard to these changes?

If we were to do this, would we wind up being in love with the idea we once had of the person, rather than the person? What does it mean to be in love with the idea of a person? What if the person is mean or unlikeable, but we have fallen in love with him or her? Might we do the person a disservice by continuing to love the idea we had of him or her, and do nothing to help him or her change for the better?

Is the purpose of love merely to make us feel good, to feel needed, desired by someone else and for us to make the other person feel the same, or should it be more? Should love also involve each person making the other person better in some way, serving as a source of inspiration?

I think love that does not result in mutual development is inferior. In other words, I believe the best love has an instrumental part to it. We are all headed in various directions at any given time. In some ways we are moving toward goals, toward something better, and in other ways, we are moving toward bad outcomes, toward something worse. We should each seek to help those we love be better people, to have good futures, to move in the right directions.

This means our love is neither neutral nor unconditional, but rather, it is judgmental. At first this may seem to be a bad thing, after all; Carl Rogers’s term “unconditional positive regard” is one of the nicest sounding phrases I have ever heard. But when you think on the subject a little, you might come to see that positive regard might just be sufficient. Unconditional positive regard suggests I accept you totally, just the way you are; but what if you are doing things that are dangerous to yourself and others? Should I love you without setting any conditions? I don’t think I should.

The conditions of our love should be healthy, not unhealthy, that is, they should center around helping the loved one avoid bad outcomes and to realize good ones. Clearly, what is good or not good will have to be worked out between the two people. Some lovers (people who love one another) will fight over this, but I still say it is better to have such a contested love than a love without conditions.

What Derrida was discussing may be this sort of objectified version of love, one where we look at a person much the way we would a car or a house. We know the characteristics we want in a car, big motor or fuel efficiency, color, reliability and so on. We know what we want in a house, nice closets, or a gourmet kitchen. Should we apply this sort of reasoning to our evaluation of the people in our lives, I would say we are not talking about love as much as evaluative appraisal.

I disagree with Derrida in this respect. I believe we can appreciate a car even though it does not have all the qualities we desire, the same with the house; and I believe we can appreciate a person in spite of the presence of qualities we do not like and the absence of those we do. In either case, we are talking about appreciation or a type of evaluation. In the special case of love though, not only can we ignore missing good qualities and present bad ones, our love for the person transforms all these qualities into positives. That, I believe, is the definition of love: the imaginative process by which we transform another person into a perfect state. The people I truly love, I love entirely, just as they are, warts and all; because, when I love a person, her warts become beauty marks.

So how is it I can love someone constructively, love a person critically so as to help him or her improve; when I have defined love as not seeing anything wrong with the person’s qualities? When I love someone who has faults, the fault, habit, whatever it may be does not cause me to judge her negatively, it inspires me to compassion and I will work tirelessly to help that person change for the better. I can evaluate and love at the same time because love endows me with compassion so I avoid the contempt I feel for flawed people I do not love.

Faith, hope and charity

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Consider the big three: faith, hope and charity. The first two can be entirely selfish, but not the third. The first, faith, is belief without evidence. The second, hope, is belief with evidence. The third, charity, is belief in oneself or others.

Faith is all you have when no evidence of what you believe is available. Faith is related to hope since it is the belief that someday the evidence you long for will become available. So, faith is a subset of hope.

Hope is searching for and clinging to any evidence you can find that things will turn out okay or get better. Hope is similar to faith in that both are based in an abiding desire for something better.

Charity, in some ways, does not appear to belong in a list with the other two, since it is not obviously related to desiring something better. However, if we look at it more closely, we see that it can be construed as putting ones energy into creating conditions for things to get better for someone else or yourself rather than merely having faith or hoping for things to get better. It is in this way that charity is superior to faith and hope. It is selfless when applied to others and self-forgiving when applied to yourself. I am defining charity not as giving things to people in need, but in a more general sense, as loving others, loving life in all its forms, including yourself.

Even though charity should be our goal, charity alone is hollow without hope, and hope is not possible without evidence of things getting better. Faith is available whether one has hope or not and whether one has evidence of things getting better, or not. Faith gets us by when things are the bleakest. Once evidence becomes available, hope takes over and once we have ample hope, we can begin to turn our attention to the needs of others. But even faith relies on charity.

As I have said, charity includes love for ourselves, but we should also broaden the meaning of faith to include belief in others and our meaning of hope to include hope for others.

If I have faith in you, that means I believe in you without evidence available for why I should do so. If I have hope in you, I have some evidence on which to base my belief in you. For example, I may have faith you can drive across the country even though I do not know what sort of driver you are. But once I get a report from you that you have stopped halfway for a night’s stay in a hotel, your success gives me hope my faith was justified.

If I extend charity to you I might do so without any faith in you or without any hope for you. Charity for others is sort of like faith in oneself. It is being gracious toward someone, perhaps even in the presence of evidence that the person is not worthy of your faith in him or her or hope for him or her.

If I have faith in myself I am believing in myself without evidence that I should do so, but if a little evidence becomes available, I am given hope. More basic than faith is charity toward myself. If I do not have charity toward myself, I will not likely be inclined toward faith in myself and thus I will never be able to muster hope because I will not be searching for evidence to support my faith.

The Apostle Paul said charity was the greatest of these and I would have to agree. Charity lays the groundwork for faith just as faith does for hope. You might say faith and hope are relatively luxurious perspectives because they both assume charity. If I have no charity for myself or someone else, I will not spend the energy necessary to develop faith and if I have no faith, I will not be looking for evidence enough to establish hope for others or myself.

Charity is better than the other two both in that it is selfless when it applies to caring for others and in that it is necessary for the other two. Until you consider what underlies hope, you might be inclined to believe hope is the most fundamental.

It might also be said that one cannot love or extend charity toward oneself or others without faith or hope, but I do not believe this to be the case. If I have faith in you that assumes I have charity toward you, otherwise, why would I bother? If I have not charity for someone else or myself, I will not care enough to adopt a position on the issue of whether things will get better for that person, with or without evidence.

Fortunately, we spend most of our days in hope, because others had faith in us that grew out of the charity they bestowed us. And others get their hope from us too, because we had faith in them before the evidence was available and we did that because we loved them or had charity toward them.

Charity without the other two is a pretty bleak circumstance, but it is what we rely on once we have lost faith and hope. On some level we might all be considered hopeless and even faithless. After all, we are nothing but these individual selves seeking to make our way in a vast universe with no real evidence on which to base decisions on which way to so things will turn out well for us. We do not even know how we might define “turn out well.”

So, charity is what is left once all hope is gone and after we have lost our faith. We extend charity toward ourselves and others in the absence of the other two and wait for our belief in ourselves and others to return so we can begin the process of finding evidence on which to base hope.

Those who have lost hope can survive on faith. Those who have lost faith can survive on charity (love for ourselves or love we get from someone else). Those without charity cannot survive.

On this the first day of 2014, at the least, I wish you a supply of charity on which to build faith enough to sustain you until you find hope - evidence things are getting better.

Making the Most of Disagreement

            Conflict often cracks the door that leads to healthy dialogue and we must put our foot in the opening. David Bohm (1994) said that conflict was incoherence. People never have legitimate grounds on which to differ, only confusion. War is sustained incoherence, sustained confusion, so too are feuds between families and disagreements of all sorts.

            There is a simple, elegant solution to every dilemma that presents itself to symbol processing systems or social systems and it is understanding, unraveling the knot of incoherence. Bohm said that confusion is analogous to a thought cancer. It begins to destroy the good cells of clarity around it.

            We drag our thoughts (thinking we did before) into our current life situation, along with our felts (feeling we did before) and together they pre-empt our understanding of the reality that is being presented to us now. It is in this way that confusion is handed down from generation to generation, that is, from episode to episode of our lives. Conflict has the capacity to cause people to think rather than drag in what they have already thought, to feel, rather than to load their brains with the chemicals of feelings they had before. When conflict arises, we should seize the moment and not let it pass without investing it with thinking and feeling.

            Not only do we tend to use thoughts and felts rather than thinking and feeling, we often raise monuments to systems of thoughts and felts and worship at their alters. Science, rationality, divine authority and even intuition, have their own hallowed traditions. Most people worship at one or the other of these “churches”. 

            Imagine if you will, four people who believe themselves to be authoritative on the same subject. One relies on “scientific evidence” another on rational thought, a third on a scriptural text and yet another on her intuitive capacity. Their conversation is likely to be conflicted because they cannot agree on something as basic as what they will treat as knowledge or wisdom.

            A person who believes in knowledge derived from science and another who believes in God-breathed understanding, will have countless non-starting discussions, when they seek to reason together. They might as well be thousands of physical miles apart for all the good being together in one room will do them, because the distance between the thought systems in which they believe is so great.

            Still the situation sits there to be readily resolved. Two fresh human beings, two human beings who were not so far gone down the narrow paths of their disparate knowledge traditions, could comprehend the reality and fix on a solution without much effort. However, our two combatants are likely to rage at one another for days, weeks, years, for lifetimes. Incoherence is their inheritance.

            Dialogue (conversational attack on confusion) can be achieved between the separate traditions our combatants worship in. Conflict opens doors on each side. All they need do is open the door and enter.

            Genuine dialogue entails listening without referring the messages to thoughts and feelings from your sacred traditions. It means speaking coherently about what you are thinking, what you are feeling, especially as these are determined by what you are hearing from the other person. The telltale product of dialogue is that both people (all people, if there are more than two) reach new understanding.

            One person at the table says, “I hear what you are saying, and it sounds plausible, but it violates the memory of my ancestors, and I am their representative at this table.” Another person at the table says, “I could not care less about your ancestors, I have my own ancestors of thought and felt to defend.” Everyone at the table is an ambassador for different traditions of thoughts and felts and determined to defend the flags and honor of their kingdom of origin.

            They might just as well be speaking in different languages without interpreters, for all the good their time talking does them. Wisdom sits there in the middle of the table, winking at them, nodding knowingly, but alas, frowning in sadness when the conversation winds down, everyone pushes back from the table and all walk out of the room.

            Rather than hailing from different knowledge traditions, they may be from different power positions. Locally, one person may be talking from the position of authority given to him by the organization.  “Do the rest of you not understand?”, he says. “Can you not hear that mine is the voice being raised on behalf of the organization for which we all work?”

            Another person at the table says, “Do the rest of you not understand? I am speaking as the smartest person in my college graduating class. Another speaks from the power of her experience recalling what she believes to be this same conversation before when subsequent events proved her correct (not realizing that those events are gone forever and that these are new events), another from the mountaintop of his emotion believing that what he says must be correct or otherwise why would he believe it so emotionally.

            Real conflict, times when those sitting at the table begin to change because they are forced to react to the input of others, provide learning opportunities, fleeting seconds when the person with organizational authority sees that there may be understanding beyond the bounds of that protected by his title, when the self-proclaimed “smartest person in the room” realizes that these commoners may have struck on pearls of insight, the person with vast experiences notices the “newness” of the current case, when the emotional mountain climber looks around and sees that the others are climbing the same mountain.

            In this precious present, it would be so healing for one of those at the table or perhaps someone new to the table, to throw down a heavy object breaking the quiet with sound and announce that for the next little while, no one will be permitted to speak or listen in the spirit of anything more than the sense flowing from the mouths of those in the room. No more grandmotherly nostrums, no more of grandfatherly clichés, no more homespun platitude from the mind of a great aunt or uncle.  For the sake of understanding, we will speak and listen in a way that defies tradition.

           

Reference       

Bohm, David. (1994). Thought as a system. London: Routledge.

Let Me Tell You About My Nephew Noah McCullough

Lots of people have nice nephews so please don’t take this the wrong way, but my nephew Noah could beat your nephew in basketball, blindfolded. One night he, his father – my brother - and I were playing basketball on an outdoor court in Nicholasville, Kentucky, one of those with the double ring rims that do not give at all, and just after dark; we did not want to quit so we were still there and Noah decided to shoot free throws and he hit nine out of 10 in the dark. I’d like to see your nephew do that.

Also, my nephew Noah – that sounds better than just calling him Noah- is now several inches taller than his father – my brother – Earl, making him a little taller than me. In fact, the last time I saw him he was growing rapidly and we have not talked for a few weeks, so he may be well over six feet tall by now, making him – I suspect – virtually impossible to guard.

I have not seen him play many games, but I saw him win the MVP of an all-star game in Somerset, Kentucky this past year. After only a couple of minutes into the game, he had three, three pointers – at which point the opposing coach decided they needed to guard him a little more closely. In the two games that day, he hit something like 11 three pointers out of 17 tries and, as I said, walked away with the MVP trophy, his team winning by large margins in both games and he serving as the steady, calming influence as point guard against players who were, at that point, mostly taller and considerably heavier than him.

We knew Noah was going to be a good basketball player several years ago when he started telling us he was going to someday play in the NBA – I mean, how cool is confidence, right? I helped send him to a summer camp in Chapel Hill, NC about six years ago, where he met Kenny the-jet Smith and got to learn from several sharp instructors. We sent him to that camp because since he was a wee lad he has liked North Carolina, for some reason.

Kentucky won the championship the spring of the year he was born and then won it again two years later, but of course, he was too young to be aware of those teams, so by the time he became a fan of college basketball, North Carolina was the best team, so I suppose that is why he adopted them as his favorite.

When he was about 10 years old, I saw him play organized basketball for the first time and although he was one of the smallest players on the floor, he was a deft ball handler and he hit a back over the head layup that any NBA guard would be proud of – without even stopping to admire it or show off, returning to defensive stance immediately - always a good sign.

As you can tell, I know how it feels to take pride in a nephew, so I don’t blame you for thinking your nephew is terrific and I am sure in his own way, he might well be. But my nephew Noah is handsome – look his picture up on facebook if you don’t believe me, has a charming personality – ask anyone in my family or that he goes to school with, if you don’t believe me; and not only that, he is a soul winner.

By the time I was eleven years old I had won six people to the lord. Noah may not have done it that early, but he has kept it up and I am sure he has passed me by now, since I quit winning souls and started living like someone who needs his soul won, in my late teens and early twenties. I kid him that he will end up like Chris “Birdman” Anderson of the NBA, with all that body art on his neck and face, but so far he is walking the straight and narrow and seems destined to be like his father and grandfather, a man close to his Biblical upbringing.

So, if your nephew is under six feet tall, cannot hit ninety percent of his free throws in the dark, has never won MVP of an all-star game, is not the best player in his high school basketball league, and is not a Bible believing soul winner, do me a favor, when your nephew’s birthday comes around, call him up and tell him you love him and that you are proud of him, because if he knows my nephew Noah, his self-esteem may be suffering from the comparison.

But if your nephew compares well to my nephew Noah – with the looks, charming personality and humility – which I don’t think I mentioned before, but yes, on top of everything else he is unassuming and humble in his attitude; then you should be proud of your nephew and have him contact my nephew Noah. Maybe they could hang out and learn from another how to be even more awesome.

I am sorry if I have turned this into a competitive birthday wish for my nephew Noah, but then, nephews only turn seventeen once, are only seniors in high school once and are only the pride of the family for a little while until some other young person comes along and takes center stage in holiday conversations.

The last thing I want to say about my nephew Noah is that he loves his grandmother – my mother with great passion, cried like a baby when his grandfather - my dad, died on mother’s day in 2006, is almost as devoted to his father – my brother Earl as he is to his heavenly father, and perhaps most importantly, in almost every way, he reminds me of myself when I was his age.

Happy Birthday, Noah.

Letter from the Future to 11 year-old Raleigh Mark Kincaid

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Greetings on the occasion of your birthday in 2013 from the skinny slick-haired pointy-nosed guy who one day just showed up in your sixth-grade math class at Beattyville Grade School and is still alive and, GOOD NEWS, so are you!!! I am writing this note to you on the occasion of your birthday, sealing it until time transport is available years later, at which point I will send it to you along with the demand that you reveal none of the things from the future of which I inform you. Even though from the day you read this letter forward you will have foreknowledge of much of what will happen, you will be expected to only nod and smile when events you anticipated unfold, making everyone else think you are just as in the dark as they are. Occasionally it will cause people to refer to you as aloof or condescending, but don’t let that bother you. It is not that you are better than they, only that you have been forewarned; and eventually they will understand what they took to be smugness actually resulted from your having received this correspondence detailing events from decades to come.

Big events will begin to unfold soon, such as two more U.S. national figures being shot down in cold blood, MLK, RFK; only a few years after the murder of JFK. Shortly before the first of these tragedies, your high school basketball team will go the state tournament and lose to Glasgow after winning the first two games! Five years later your high school basketball team will return to the state tourney only to lose in the first game, a game in which you will score one point.

You and I will lead the high school baseball team to the regional tournament in our senior year of high school as first baseman and pitcher/short stop respectively. We will also sing a duet of “No man is an Island” at our high school graduation, but later that same year, Richard Nixon will resign as president and test the theory espoused in that beautiful little song.

That same spring you and I will star as Emile Debeque and Joe Cable in the HS musical, South Pacific, making us stars of a HS musical before it became cult movie years later. We will also sing in a combo that ultimately wins a 4-h club award and plays at the Kentucky state fair. This after us each being selected to All-State chorus in our junior year of HS. We were the second coming of Simon and Garfunkel, without all the hoopla.

As the doctor told your mother, you grew to be tall, really tall, around 6’ 6” or so. I only reached 5’ 11”, which would make me taller than the average, only to be forced to play Jeff to your Mutt. This, along with the fact that you would marry Kim Brown, no shorty in her own right, would result in your bearing most impressive offspring, such that when the four of you entered your church on Sunday morning newcomers would look at the four of you in awe, such tall, regal looking parishoners.

As we are playing baseball one day in Powell County and you tag the base with the ball in your hand the runner will spike your middle finger and I will go over and called him a son of a b***h. Yes, me the preacher’s kid. It turns out I will steadily grow away from religion, but you will not and your mama would always be proud of you, but my daddy will puzzle over me.

You and I will go to College at Morehead and you will major in vocal performance, even staying around for a Masters Degree in Music and it’s a good thing you do stay around because you fall in love with your future wife while you were both in the play Shenandoah, you playing the main role – Charlie Anderson. Yep, you will become quite the ladies man around that time, teaching yourself to play the guitar, having the ladies swooning over your rich baritone voice and ultimately breaking the hearts of all but one: Kim Brown.

A few years later you will marry her and be blessed with those two most gorgeous children I mentioned, just like they draw it on the board, a boy and a girl, both with yellow hair, charming faces and pleasant personalities. You would turn out to have those children after you had sworn to me when we roomed together at college that you would not have any because you did not like the direction the world was going. I guess you will have changed your mind and decided the world needed two more people to help tip the balance back in the right direction.

Yes, we will room together at college but shortly after we graduate our lives will take us to different places and we would never live in the same town again. However, we will write many letters to one over the years and in the late 1980s, we would start sending one another electronic mail from our personal computers. I know, that’s crazy, right, electronic mail? All sorts of inventions impact us as we get older, too much for me to tell you here. But another computer-related one that occurred was Facebook, beginning in 2004, something that allows our friends to view this letter I am writing to you all at the same time.

You will go to Indiana University to get your doctorate in vocal performance, training to be an opera singer, only that does not prove to be your passion, so you will come back to Kentucky and eventually get your graduate degree in marriage and family therapy at the University of Kentucky. During this same time, the United States will turn against poor people and start honoring only the wealthy and this will last until it reaches as sickening apex around the time I am writing this.

Men will go to the moon a few years from the time you are reading this, but they will stop doing that after a while and return to pummeling people from other nations with weapons of mass destruction, owing in part to the fact that shortly after the new millennium, one of the nation’s largest cities will be hit by a brutal attack from people of middle-eastern extraction, an event  about which I will not be specific; but suffice it to say, it will be gruesome.

So hunker down, my friend, there are lots of crazy things coming to the nation you love, but your mama will live a long life and no, she will never disappoint you and she will go to her reward knowing you became an upstanding citizen with near renaissance-man capacity for variety from golf, to music, to parenting, to fly fishing, to husbanding, to counseling the suffering.

And know that I, your BFF (sorry for that future reference, but it means best friend forever) will as long as we both live, honor you as one of the greatest people he has ever known. So I hope you appreciate this day, the day you have received this letter from the skinny little slick-haired pointy-nosed boy who just now entered your 6^th grade math class. But don’t tell anyone our little secrets.