Continued from March 23, 2006
I might ad something here about the process of producing newspapers today. There is no comparison at all. Today it is possible to send digital files from NYC to LA in seconds and have the New York Times on the streets of LA in a matter of hours. It is possible to go from your computer directly to the press, eliminating several steps of labor intensive labor. Technology is changing so fast, that no one can keep up with it. As for me, I am proud that I learned the old method and was in on the ground floor of the new method. I have done everything around a newspaper except own one. Well, I don't think there is a possibility of that now, but To the Point blog is just as good. And it was free.
Okay, back To the Point.
There I was in the composing room when the business manager came through. He stopped at my spot and asked, “Buddy, how would you like to be editor of the Stanton Reporter?” I don’t know if at first he was really serious or not, but I responded with, “Why not.” I said I’d take the job for a year and then see. . . . Both papers were owned by the same family, the Reporter was a weekly paper.
We eventually moved to Stanton, ten miles away, by way of Valley View. I was pastoring Valley View Baptist Church at the time. Plus, Todd, our youngest was only a few weeks old. Why we do some things as opposed to others will forever be a mystery. I should have had my head examined before taking the Stanton job. It turned out to be a 60-hour-a-week walk through the swamp. My staff was one office girl and one linotype operator, who said up front, “This is all I do.” He didn’t stay long; however, he made more mistakes and had more squirts than a gaggle of monkeys eating green bananas.
An editor of a weekly newspaper has many responsibilities to the community. One is to support the school system. If the school needs new buildings, athletic fields, or higher salaries for teachers, the editor shows that need to the public and tries to sell them on the need. An editor does not have many friends, especially when the taxpayers don’t want a new school. The school needed new buildings, badly, but the deal was voted down twice. The editor was threatened bodily harm if he didn’t stop supporting the bond issue. “Taxes, don’t raise my taxes.” Too many memories there, let’s move on. We sold a lot of newspapers, but didn’t get the school built. So, in that respect, the editor didn’t get the job done.
At the end of the year I had a fairly good routine going, still working hard, but the church had fallen by the wayside of lunacy. I couldn’t do the paper and pastor the church at the same time. Brenda didn’t think about divorcing me, but murder, yes.
Then one day the new business manager came over for a visit. He told me to stop endorsing politicians and to get all that “religious stuff” out of the paper. “And besides all that,” he said,
“I couldn’t make any sense of your last column.”
“No,” I thought to myself, “You couldn’t make sense of that one.” The title of that column was, A Little Knowledge Can be Dangerous. (We'll do a rerun on that one, with current stuff in mind.)
Thoughts of migrating to Lubbock began to surface. We both wanted to go back to school anyway. So, we packed To the Point away until another day.
* * *
Today is another day and this is a new era. Widowed and retired, but certainly not dead, there is still much to say. I’ve become an activist, as if I wasn’t one already. Our world is sick, it needs help. Our culture is sick, we need help. We live in a state of fear: from terror, crime, global warming, disease, apathy and threat of nuclear war (more terrorism). Our schools have been inundated by New Age atheists. Our churches have been infiltrated by those who would divide and destroy the fellowship. Absolutes are being blighted: bad is good and good is bad, and don’t you dare say that Christ is the only way to God. They say, “God is dead, but that’s okay, we can all be gods.” The Antichrist is waiting in the wings, ready to move once God says it’s time.
The point is: It’s later than we think, and our work is undone. We can still reclaim what has been taken by the enemy. He is defeated and he knows it. Yet he is still trying to convince us that God is an unjust ruler, just as he did to Eve in the Garden of Eden. Many Christians have already been deceived into believing many of Satan’s lies. And I’m sorry to say, many of them are in positions of authority and leadership in our Christian denominations, schools and churches.
We got where we are by playing church in our sanctuaries of plush comfort. A sanctuary is a refuge. In the Middle Ages certain categories of lawbreakers could take refuge from pursuers inside church buildings. Today, we are the lawbreakers holed up inside our sanctuaries. Our pursuer, however, has no respect for the walls of the church building. He has come inside with us bringin his subtle evil into the church. We need to cleanse our church buildings of worldly ways and reclaim them as houses of worship.
It’s time for us to open our eyes and ears and learn what is happening in our culture, and in our world. For the past two years I have been researching the schemes of Satan and how he uses them to prevent people from going to God, and from staying with God. And guess what, he has no new tricks. Why would he need new tricks, his old ones work fine? He still deceives his prey with the same old garden tricks. We’re like Mallards who fall for the hunter’s decoys. Except we have more than tail feathers to lose.
I invite you to tune in as I share what I have learned from this research. My eyes have been opened, wide, to what is going on right under our noses and by people I never suspected of being the slightest bit evil.
This To the Point, on March 25, 2006. Hold your head up and your mouths closed. That way you won’t scrape your chin on the ground or catch a passing bug, or something else. God bless.
BN
posted by To The Point at 2:09 PM
|
3 comments
