Author Archives: Royce

Jun 30 2009

Three cords and the truth…


1818country_music

“Three cords and the truth” is the way one person once described country music. I think it is a fitting description.

On my birthday, June 27th, Carol and I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame in Music City. It is educational, entertaining, and for country music fans, Mecca.

The building is spectacular and alone worth seeing. We chose the audio tour and were able to listen to the stories and music of each display along the way. It is the history of an art form born of the experiences of simple people, the joys of life, but more often the struggles of making a living, relationships, and failed remedies for disappointment and heart ache.

In my childhood it was not uncommon to hear the twangy rhythms of guitars, banjos, and fiddles coming from front porches on summer nights. Atrip to the store often included a concert by the men who were drawn together by the music. The hills of North Carolina (my home), the hollers of West Virgina, and the smoky vistas of East Tennessee were then, and are now, accented by the sometimes mournful and sometimes joyful sounds of country music.

Be it Bluegrass, traditional country, or rock-a-billy, country music tells a story. It is the lives of country people on frets and bows and lyrics, transparent and laid bare. Love found and love lost, fighting and faith, hope and despair, tied to the music of the mountains that grips the human spirit.

Some only see this art form only as songs about dogs, pickup trucks, drinking, and mama in jail. I see it as an expose’ of the human quest for peace and happiness, most often ending in failure. I suppose it is the story of men and women who are looking for love in all the wrong places. (forgive me..)

Friday afternoon we strolled along Broadway in Nashville where wannabes, somebodies and nobodies, ply their trades in hopes of the big break. Street singers, one after another, pick a tune and sing a lyric, for a buck tossed into the guitar case. You will never see them on the Oprystage. But, at Tootsies open mike night, an occasional star is born. Dozens of bars with a stage for singers and players dot the street anchored by Tootsies Orchid Bar and Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop.

The highway from Tootsies or some other small venue to the Opry stage, or the Country Music Hall of Fame, is most often many years long and winds through broken hearts and shattered dreams deep into the valley where only the most determined keep plucking along.

Why do I like country music? It’s the people and places, the sounds and scenes, they tell my story in a unique way that has become part of who I am. No, I don’t endorse the themes of many songs but they are the truth, much more often than we are comfortable admitting.

Royce

Jun 30 2009

The Art of Flyfishing


brookTroutLast week I realized a dream and it was better than I could have imagined.

I went back to my roots in the mountains of Western North Carolina following in the footsteps of my father who was an accomplished fly fisherman.

I joined my good friend Don Yelton (WFR Relief director/AMEN founder) for two outings to hone my very limited skills with a fly rod. I was delighted to catch a native speckled trout on a dry fly, my first ever, and enjoy some of the most beautiful of God’s artistry.

We had contracted the services of a guide who was to take us on a float trip down the Watagua River in East Tenn but that plan was scrapped due to rising water because of power generation at the dam above. Instead we met our guide, a very nice guy named Lou, and traveled far back into the mountains to a secluded stream off the beaten path and only accessible by clients of the outfitters.

I am a novice fly fisherman, that day I believe was only my fourth time to fish with a fly rod. With Lou’s tips and education about the insects the trout were feeding on that morning I started casting the fly and hoping. I didn’t catch many trout, only three for the half day trip, but it was the half day of a life time!

I caught a very rare native brook trout, much like the one in the picture. It was so rare the guide would not have believed it without seeing it with his own eyes. In that stream, in that part of the country, a large native brook is exceptional. The colors were amazing! After admiring the beauty as much as we dared, Lou carefully lowered him into the chilly water and he returned to grow and fight again another day.

The last fish of the day was a gorgeous rainbow, a text book catch. It was the sort of catch a TV fishing host would want broadcast unedited. I cast a minnow impersonating fly in the swift current of a small water fall and let the torrent sweep it along until it settled in the slow water. On my 5th or 6th cast into the same spot, suddenly the line stopped and when I set the hook the fish jumped about five feet out of the water and the fight was on.

 Between me and this fat rainbow was very swift water and a 2 lb test leader. After many runs and more acrobatic jumps, Lou came with his net and finally I guided him into the net. This is the experience that causes men and women to spend hundreds of dollars and stumble on slick rocks in frigid water. Those two to five minutes will never be forgotten.

The day was completed by making a new friend and the fellowship of an old friend and taking in the beauty of creation that reflects the glory of Jesus Christ. “…by Him, and for Him, and it continues to be by His mighty power“.

enjoying the Life,
Royce

Jun 23 2009

The Silence of Scriptures


Tonight I received correspondence from a friend, a preacher at a mission church. A part of the statement that always appears on his posts says in part, “We speak where the Bible speaks and we are silent where the Bible is silent”. I just “googled” this phrase and 44,600 hits came up. Of course, this is a part of the “Restoration plea…..”.

Am I nuts? Wouldn’t almost all of the splits and quarrels among Restoration people not have happend if we practiced this principal? Lets be honest, I must agree with the preacher who quipped “.. and where the Bible is silent we have even more to say!“. How true!

It is most often those things the Bible does not address that become often as important or more important than the gospel.

What is it that drives people to place personal preferences and tradition on the same level of authority as what the Bible clearly teaches? I think it might be that they don’t really know what the Bible does say. Knowing  two dozen or so passages that are used over and over and over to prove up a few particular distinctives is a poor substitute for having  some understanding of the scheme of redemption revealed in the Bible.

NO! I don’t claim to know the whole Bible or even most of it. I do know that much of what some coC folks will fiight to the death over can’t be proved up by the Bible. What is needed in our churches is Bible preachers, not church preachers.

Royce

Jun 19 2009

The Organizer in Chief


ObamaSmug

How is the Organizer in Chief doing?

He promised 4,000,000 jobs in his first two years as president. So far he claims to have created (or saved) roughly 500,000 jobs. The truth is he isn’t doing well in the jobs department. Just in one sector his brilliant organizing of the auto industry squashed multiplied thousands of jobs. He, like other liberals, doesn’t get it. The government only creates jobs that tax money pays for. If the jobs are government expansion or jobs with salaries paid for by government entitlements or grants, those jobs are a net loss to the country at least for the short term.

Jobs flourish and grow when government stays out of business. All you need do is study the track record of the U.S. government’s handling of finances and what you will observe is absolute failure. Government has never been efficient in the area of wealth management. Those facts do not stand in the way of those who believe government policy is the answer to every ill in America.

If at the end of Obama’s first term there is any growth in the private sector it will not be a result of government stuffed suits making brilliant decisions. America achieved its wealth and greatness because its people have historically had the freedom to create, imagine, and achieve their dreams of providing goods and services without government intervention. In every sector where the government has exercised more control that sector has suffered. The problems we face in the auto industry, health care, and the financial sector are a result of government policy gone airy.

After making a mess of the auto industry, now Obama has set his sights on the health care industry. Even liberals like Senator Chris Dobbs are squealing foul at this early stage. The prospects are scary to say the least.

I am not economist but I did graduate from high school. Obama plans to make health care cheaper and available to more Americans. Fine! How is he going to do it? He will spend just over a trillion bucks (far less than the Kennedy plan of $1.6 trillion) to save several billion. Brilliant huh? What do you suppose my wife would say if over dinner tonight I said to her, “Honey, I have a plan to make us financially secure. I am going to invest $100k of our money and that investment will save $75K. Isn’t that great?” That is the logic of the Obama plan for health care in our country. And, here is the worst part, the trillion or so bucks come right out of taxpayers’ pockets. There is no other source for the government to get money but your money. You, your children, and grand children will pay through the nose for this great savings plan and making health care available to more Americans. That is a huge reason to reject the Organizer’s plan.

Another huge problem is that Obama’s plan will still leave about 30% of Americans uninsured. It is a poor idea with gargantuan costs attached to it. I sincerely hope there will be just enough sanity in DC for this idea to go the way of Hillary care.

What American health care needs is pretty simple. Get government out and pass tort reform. While admittedly, drug companies are making tons of money on over priced products they are not the largest problem. Doctors spend a huge amount of money doing government paper work and paying for malpractice insurance. Most of the government required mountain of paperwork is not necessary. States should govern their medical complexes. And, if sleazy lawyers were unable to keep bringing lawsuits for lazy crooks there would be no need for expensive malpractice insurance.

Frivolous lawsuits are one of the largest industries in our country. There is a way to fix this cancer. There should be caps put on medical findings. And, there should be healthy fines and jail terms imposed on those attorneys who file frivolous law suits. A review panel of doctors, judges, and other citizens should be able to say to an attorney, “Squash this action or pay a find and or go to jail”. This is only a dream I am well aware. Almost every suit in DC is an attorney and the Trial Lawyers have most pols, Democrat and Republican, firmly in their pockets. I know this is off topic but I needed to say it. I know there are some good, honest attorneys; I’ve just never met one. If you are one or know one Great! The ones I have known will do anything for a buck and lying is as natural as breathing.

Blame America first. To date, this is the heart of Obama’s foreign policy. If there is an ill on planet earth, America and its policies are the genesis of the problem, but unbelievably his administration’s policies is the answer. Again and again, president Obama tries to appease our enemies by blaming the United States for everything imaginable. His problem is that even people in the Middle East aren’t buying it. His speech in Egypt did not set well with many leaders in the Arab world. They understand, as I do, talk is cheap. They want to see actual policy enacted that matches Obama’s rhetoric. To Obama and other liberals, talk is the same as doing something concrete.

Hollywood types with IQ’s of turnips make teary talks about hungry kids in some faraway place, or a rain forest in South America, and in their minds and the minds of the listeners, they have actually done something to solve the problem. The reality is that the only benefit of most celeb speeches is the confirmation of just how nutty and out of touch with real people they really are.

We will be able to better access Obama’s foreign policy success or failure near the end of his first term in 2012. It isn’t looking very good as of today.

The Organizer in chief, like other left wingers, has odd ideas about morality. If this were not so gravely serious it would be funny. Liberals from Hillary Clinton to John McCain decry water boarding as torture and it is horrible and unacceptable for a moral nation. Ok, that is a fair debate, I’ll give them that. For the sake of this illustration let’s assume water boarding is torture and immoral.

Water boarding involves one person and that person’s life is never threatened. No person has ever died from water boarding; they only think they might die. So, this method of getting information out of thugs is immoral and unacceptable. On this the liberals have declared the moral high ground.

Obama orders an unmanned drone to fly into a village in Afghanistan and bomb some terrorists and many innocent citizens into the Stone Age and this is moral and applauded by liberals. ( I approved too by the way..) The morality or immorality of bombing that includes innocent loss of life is not the question here it is the hypocrisy of saying water boarding of one individual is somehow less moral than killing scores of people including some innocents at one time. Logic and liberal thought are like oil and water, they don’t mix.

A majority of Americans (53%) are against abortion. Even candidate Obama declared that he was in favor of reducing the number of abortions. It is the exact same position of every liberal running for national office. “Reducing the number” of abortions is liberal speak for making abortion as widely spread as possible. Let me be clear, Obama and every other liberal like Clinton did not tell the truth on this front.

Obama didn’t waste any time making it so that your tax dollars will be spent to make killing unborn babies more possible around the globe, not just here at home. How is that for “reducing” the number of abortions? It was the first or second day of Obama’s presidency that I read on the Whitehouse web site that he had reversed a Bush restriction on spending U.S. money for abortions on foreign soil.

Abortion is the holy grail of liberal Democrats. There is nothing more entrenched in the political mindset of left wingers than abortion on demand around the world. Have you ever wondered why? In 2008 why is it true that no person can rise to the upper echelon of Democrat politics that is not in favor of birth control by aborting the unborn?

The answer is twofold. First, as a whole, liberals have no moral compass. Morality to them is as fluid as deciding where to “do lunch” on Tuesday. It is a morality of convenience. The result is a hodgepodge of stupidity and illogical policy that is taking our beloved America down the sewer.

The second answer is votes. There is no definable limit to what Democrats will do to insure they get and keep political power. If they could have illegal aliens, felons, and the inhabitants of grave yards vote in the mid-term elections in 2010 they would do it in a New York minute. History proves this 100%. Mr. Obama, Organizer in chief, got his political feet under him in the gutter world of Chicago politics. He is a product of that underworld of greed, corruption, vote rigging, and more.

Obama ran on one word, Change! We have change! Are you happy now? We are in for a bumpy ride folks. Tighten those seat belts and hide your wallets, you an’t seen nothin’ yet. The chickens will come home to roost and what a price we will pay!

Agree or disagree, this is the view from my front porch.

Royce