Category: True Stories

I would like to be able to say that I was a fan of Saturday Night Live from the very beginning.  In the fall of 1975, I was 13 years old.  It was also the days of no cable and only 3 networks.  I regularly studied the TV Guide for information about all shows, especially the new shows for the season.  There were two shows beginning that fall that had “Saturday Night” in the title.  The one that I was really interested in was called “Saturday Night Live”.  Actually the full title of the show was “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell”.  I remember seeing the premiere, which was on September 20, 1975.  I don’t remember the cast of regular comedy performers on the show, which included Bill Murray. The main thing that I remember about the show was that it included the highly touted first American performance by a Scottish Group called the Bay City Rollers.  They were being promoted as the next Beatles and this performance was supposed to be the equivalent of the Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan.  I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I enjoyed their song “Saturday Night” enough to buy the 45.  But Howard Cosell was no Ed Sullivan.  And The Bay City Rollers was the high point in the run of the show.  It was soon obvious that whatever CBS was showing before Mary Tyler Moore/Bob Newhart/Carol Burnett line-up was preferable to Howard Cosell. 

I have used a Franklin Planner since the late 1980’s at work.  I use it to keep up with appointments and tasks for work activities as well as my personal life.  Over the years, I have come to rely on computers and tools like Outlook to manage my time but I still carry a planner.  I still find it useful and enjoy going back to look at my past.

Most of the years, I have used the standard green shaded pages with a daily quote from some noteworthy person at the top of the notes page.  In the late 1990’s, the Franklin Planner people made available filler pages that featured Dilbert comic strips.  This was right around the time that Dilbert was possibly at the height of its popularity.  I read it regularly and it was one of my favorites.  I think the Dilbert planner fillers were available for two years and I used them both years.  At the end of 1999, I was ready to purchase my planner filler for 2000 and found out that Dilbert pages were no longer available.  I enjoyed having something other than the standard green fillers but very few of the ones available for 2000 appealed to me.  The cartoon related fillers they carried that year didn’t appeal to me.  The only licensed product filler that appealed to me was the ESPN planner pages.  I’m not a big sports fan, but I thought it might be worth checking out at least for a year.

First, want to let you know that I take my Christian faith seriously.  I believe that Jesus has made a significant positive difference in my life to the extent that I would want that for anyone and everyone that I know and meet.  That being said, I think that there are ways that we Christians share our faith that are completely ineffective.  Sometimes we use the language of our faith that is completely alien to the person we are speaking to.  Maybe they’ve never been to a church.  Maybe they are a member of another faith.  Maybe their experience in church is negative and our choice of words reminds them of the things they don’t like about Christianity.  Sometimes our approach is more about focusing on how “bad” they are and using scare tactics.  There are lots of ways that our approaches make assumptions about these people that doom our efforts to failure even before the first word leaves our mouth.

I have a Christian friend that had an encounter with another Christian and told about it on Facebook.  His story made me think about ineffective evangelism.  Here is the content of his original post:

Here are 10 fond memories I have of my mom in honor of her birthday on September 18:

1. She cooked all moisture and most nutrients out of all of the food she cooked.
2. She was my first music teacher.  She taught me a little about how to play piano and a lot about how to play ukulele.
3. She laughed out loud when she watched the Peter Sellers movie The Party.  She also laughed out loud when she read the book “The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N” by Lenard Q. Ross.  
4. She smoked Belair cigarettes and she wouldn’t smoke in front of her parents.
5. She liked to tickle her grandkids’ backs with her long fingernails.
6. She woke up before everyone else in the morning, sat at the kitchen table and drank instant coffee.
7. She wore contact lenses.
8. She loved growing flowers.
9. She loved decorating our house for Halloween and Christmas.  Especially Christmas.  In addition to the decorations for Christmas, she would bring out her extensive collection of Christmas sheet music to play during the holiday season.
10. She loved her dogs as much as she loved her husband, children and grandchildren.

I have very vivid memories of the morning of September 11, 2001.  I was supposed to fly out of Jackson, Tennessee through St. Louis to Indianapolis that morning.  When I got out of the shower, my wife came into our bathroom and told me that she was watching Good Morning America and they had reported a fire at the World Trade Center.  By the time I made it into our bedroom where the television was on, they had confirmed that a plane had crashed into the building although they thought it was a small commuter plane.  When they mentioned that it was a plane, I told my wife, “I bet I have a hard time making it through the airport today.”

Last week, my youngest child got her driver’s license.  This is reason enough for me to reflect on the differences in driver’s licenses today at back in 1978 when I got mine.  At that time, getting a learner’s permit consisted of filling out forms and paying money.  You didn’t have to take any test.  The main thing that you had to do was to bring in evidence that you were 15.  I don’t remember getting a copy of the Tennessee Drivers Handbook until I have been driving for a while.  I only got it then so I could study for the questions on the test.  There was no need to know the rules before you learned the skill.  What good was it knowing the laws if you didn’t know how to drive already?

Everyone has a story to tell about the day they got their driver’s license and here is mine.  The names that I mention below are not the real names of the people that I encountered.  One, I don’t wish to expose anyone’s wrongdoing and second, I don’t remember the names.  

When I was in elementary school, my mother’s family seemed to get together almost every other weekend during the spring and summer.  I have three male cousins that are really close to my age that would always be at these family reunions.  It was also good that we had each other to keep entertained.  Some of these reunions were held at the old school houses in the rural West Tennessee communities that were barely recognized as communities anymore.  Some of these buildings had been re-purposed as community centers but some were barely safe to be in.  I don’t know that any of them had air conditioning, some were without electricity and I don’t know that any of them had indoor plumbing.  It was an adventure just getting into some of these buildings.