Planting Hope

by   June 4, 2022 with No Comments

By Doug Creamer

            It has been a tough year for many home gardeners. We had some late frosts and cold spells. I was late getting started. When I had time, it was either too cold or raining. When the weather was good, I was busy with other things and couldn’t get to my garden.

            Over Memorial weekend I finally finished planting my garden. I put some things out at the beginning of May and they are up and growing. I saw my first tomato blossoms. I put in a number of seeds yesterday and now I am excited to see them come up.

            I am trying an experiment this year. I have four raised beds for my vegetables. I tilled two of them earlier. I never got around to tilling the others up. The leaves from last fall are still lying on top of the soil. I didn’t have time to till and I have heard people say it is better not to till the soil. For the remaining two beds, I just pushed the leaves back and planted. It felt wrong, but I had to get my garden planted. I will let you know how it turns out. 

            In one of those beds that I did till early I had hoped to plant my peas. I know peas like cooler weather. I never had the time to get them in. While I was working I was trying to decide if it would be worth it to plant the peas. I have the space and decided to plant them.

            As I planted those peas I thought about why we plant gardens. We plant them because we are hopeful for a good growing season and harvest. It’s hope that sends me out to the garden each day to see if those little seeds sprouted. I believe and am hopeful.

            I realize it takes more than hope to get a harvest. It takes watering, weeding, and keeping the pests out. We need to remember to add fertilizer and lime if we want the conditions to be right for a harvest. My mouth is watering just thinking about what will happen if everything works right.

            Hope is a powerful force. It drives me out there each year to try again. Some years are successful and I enjoy a bountiful harvest. Other years we get heavy rains and the potatoes drown. The rabbits, squirrels, and deer enjoy the harvest instead of me. But I will go out each spring because I hope that I will get to enjoy the harvest.

            Today is Memorial Day, a day that we remember all the men and women who went to fight and defend our nation and did not come home. One has to imagine that they gave their lives in hopes that their children and grandchildren could live in peace and harmony. They died as Americans defending our ideals and principles.

            Sometimes I wonder what is going on? One political party hates the other. How is that united? Families suffer from gun violence in our schools and communities. Where is the peace? There is social injustice in a land that was built on freedom and justice for all. We are divided over how to fight a virus that has claimed a million American lives. These and many other things divide us and keep us from what the people we honor on this day died to protect.

            But me, I like to find hope in the midst of the darkness. I think about neighbors reaching out to help one another in times of need. I think about all the people who rush to the aid of those who are suffering a tragedy, like a hurricane hitting our coast. I think about the many Americans who have gone to Ukraine to feed and clothe the refugees. I think about the many Americans who donate blood in times of tragedy. I think about the people who work with hospice to help in someone’s final days. I think about the police, firefighters, and EMS workers who come to help without asking or caring what you think or believe.

            I want to encourage you to look for the good in other people and to be a part of those who are planting hope. Love and hope have always defeated the darkness in this world. We need to focus on the good. For those of you who have lost family and friends while serving this great nation…I thank you and honor you. Let’s all work to change our corner of the world for the better. I believe that at our core we are a great nation filled with good people. God bless America, and fill us with faith, hope, and love.

Contact Doug Creamer at PO Box 777, Faith, NC 28041or doug@dougcreamer.com

Culture Wars Abound

by   June 3, 2022 with No Comments

By Roger Barbee

The loud voices from every side that are involved in the oft referred to culture wars give me pause, and I remember the experience of my mother.

My mother was a divorced woman of six children in Kannapolis, North Carolina during the 1940’, 1950’s, and 1960’s. She hemmed washcloths in Cannon Plant #1 and attended a local Baptist church. It is that Baptist church during the 1950’s and its treatment of my mother that caused me to remember. While I was only a boy of only eight or so, I was old enough to hear adult talk and old enough to sense something was wrong.

A devout Christian, my mother took her six children to church twice each Sunday and every Wednesday night. She Believed and worked to make sure that her children Believed. The church we then attended accepted our presence in Sunday School and “preaching” and Training Union, and all else. However, my mother was told by church deacons that she would not be allowed to teach children Sunday School because she was a divorced woman. And, as one deacon strongly pointed out, the Bible taught against divorce, and it did not matter that my father was an abusive alcoholic who had deserted his wife and children. She was divorced, so no teaching children for her.

A few years after this ugliness, we moved to an in-town mill-hill house and began attending a Baptist church a few blocks from our new home. My mother confessed that she felt uncomfortable in a woman’s Sunday School class because she was the only divorced woman in the class, and she was often reminded of that either directly or indirectly. However, before long the church announced that an adult was needed to teach the children’s Sunday School and my mother stepped up.  Perhaps she was the only adult who volunteered to teach the class, but no matter, she began teaching the class and for the next fifty years she taught “her children” the Bible. When she retired from teaching the class, the church named the Children’s Sunday School wing in honor of her—the divorced woman who at one time was considered “unfit” to teach in her Baptist church.

All of this occurred over sixty years ago, and now, a divorced man, I have been a deacon and Sunday School teacher in a Baptist church. Some Baptist churches even have pastors who are divorced. There has been a cosmic shift and our culture survives. The issue of “divorcement” is not the only cultural change in these years, but it is the one I am most familiar with, and it demonstrates that things do change, and our culture can and does change as well. And we are no worse off for the cultural change.

For instance, many church attendees are quick to point out the sins of homosexuals. These church goers, while admitting “we are all sinners”, seem to condemn homosexuals because, as I am often told by church goers, “They continue their sinning life style.” Yet, the same church goers will admit  that every church is “Full of sinners”. But perhaps those sinners have a different favored sin than the homosexual– if one’s sexuality is a sin. In fact, I suggest we all have a favored sin, a breaking of a Commandment that we seem to gravitate to. Me? I’ve never met a woman that I have not liked, and I work at controlling that part of me, even at the advanced age of almost 75.  I once saw a church sign that read: “Don’t judge the other person because they sin differently than you do.” Amen to that.

What I find wrong in my mother’s ordeal with her first church and what she initially experienced at her second one is not what the Bible teaches, but how some deacons and church members interrupted its teachings. The Bible is a complex book that teaches simple truths such as “Love one another as I have loved you.”

All of this noise surrounding CRT, LGBT, BLM, and more will pass, but it will take its toll just as the “good deacons” did with my mother. But my mother knew that the battle was not about her, but one within each of the church leaders who were searching for an external enemy instead of looking inward, where the  greater threat stirred. Their names do not appear anywhere honoring their service to either chuch. But the divorced woman’s does.

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