When I was about sixteen Niles Eikenberry hired me to work in his grocery store. My job was the clean the meat department every night. It was important that I did my job well. If the meat department was not perfectly clean people could become very sick. It was hard work back there and lonely. I worked back all night every night. It was monotonous work and there was no one to talk to. I didn’t do well. I should have but I just didn’t.
[Read more…] about Niles Eikenberry
Pedro Borbon
In the seventies the Cincinnati Reds were playing in massive Riverfront Stadium and they were in their glory. They were known as the Big Red Machine and they were a pennant-producing powerhouse. Summer nights I lay in my bed and listened to the heroics of Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Dave Concepcion, George Foster, Ken Griffey, Joe Morgan, Cesar Cedanio, Don Gullett and company on my little radio. It was lined with leather with a little leather strap across the top and a silver metal face. It was a neat little radio. I set the radio on my headboard, enamored as my Grandpa Shipley always was by electronic gizmos. If the Reds were on the west coast I often fell asleep before I knew the outcome of the game.
[Read more…] about Pedro Borbon
You Have to Do the Miles
On a Friday night before the Ludington Lakestride Half-Marathon we were eating a pre-race meal with the family in a little Italian Restaurant. During our dinner we were talking about my friend Dan, who is a Marathoner. He ran the Boston Marathon this year. He is very, very quick.
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The Roots of Common Civility
I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon, but I still think at is rude to be loud in public as if everyone within blocks is interested in the details of your personal life. I’m still a little surprised that a man would think I would be interested in being an unwilling party to a business transaction he is loudly discussing on his cell phone while I am trying to make sense of the paper in the coffee shop. People play music that can be heard over a three-county area without asking if I am interested.
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Dr. Bill Thrasher Speaking
ARE YOU CLOSE ENOUGH TO DRIVE?
Dr. Bill Thrasher is here this week for a series of Spiritual Enrichment. He will speak at 7:45 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. The meetings are especially for those involved in the programs here but they are open to the public.
Dr. Thrasher has written three great books:
Living the LIfe God has Planned
A Journey to Victorious Praying
Believing God for His Best
The books are available in the Character Inn book store. If you need directions for details call 810-239-1234 or visit our web site: www.characterinns.org
Praying Men
Re-posted from July 2005
When I was growing up my Dad pastored a little country church on a edge of a tiny village in Ohio. In that church young and old alike were together for prayer meeting on Wednesday night. We would sing a hymn or two and Dad would teach and take prayer requests. He would read a missionary prayer letter or two and then divide into two groups. The ladies and the girls would come to the front and the men and boys would go to the back. We would get on our knees and pray.
The image of men on their knees in prayer on a summer evening, windows open to the cool night, is still sweet to my memory. I was about ten years old. I watched the men when they would pray, squeezing their eyes together and pouring out their souls to God. One evening I watched one of the older men of the church kneeling at his pew. Tears ran down his face and dripped off his chin while he prayed.
When I think back on those summer nights in prayer meeting I am reminded of what E. M. Bounds wrote on praying men over a hundred years ago:
“WE are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization. God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men… When God declares that “the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him,” he declares the necessity of men and his dependence on them as a channel through which to exert his power upon the world.
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use — men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men — men of prayer.” (E. M. Bounds, Power through Prayer)
We have camps and conferences and clubs for children. We have children’s books, software, video games, and cleaver Christian films aimed at them. We have catchy music and Christian action heroes for children. We have singing vegetables and Bible action hero dolls. But more then anything children need to see their fathers bent in humility before the Lord. They need to know some praying men.
Ken Pierpont
Riverfront Character Inn
Flint, Michigan
July 5, 2005
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