No Excuses

Forty years ago, November 30, 1972, I thought my little nine-year-old heart would break into a million pieces. Sally, the youngest of my parents’ seven children, became the third of us to die at 20 months old.
Sally, like my brother, Robert, had five years earlier, died from cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease. (Another sister, Susie, was born premature and died a couple of months after her birth.) I cried and cried on through the funeral. I was the oldest. She was the youngest and things like that were not supposed to happen. My young life was filled with tragedy at a tender age. As we were riding home from the cemetery, my mama told me that I had to get a grip on myself and, miraculously, I was able to stop crying.
If anyone had ever endured tragedy in their lives, it was my parents. Both of them were raised in poverty, in the years following the Great Depression. They had to endure rationing of such staples as flour and sugar during World War II as the battle was not only fought in Europe and in the Pacific, but brave soldiers (fathers, mothers, children) at home had to sacrifice for the war effort. At an early age, they were picking cotton, cropping tobacco and plowing farm rows with mules.
When they got older and got married, they had to endure the hardship of losing three children and raising four more, including my mentally challenged sister, Abbie, who had open heart surgery when she was six years old. Back then, heart surgery was a much more difficult procedure than it is today.
For years, my parents worked at Bassett’s Dairy in Monticello and, when they returned to Lee, they began working where they had before going to Monticello, on chicken farms; first, for Stanley Williams, then after the tornado in 1989, which blew away the chicken houses, for the Cherrys.
In 1994, my mother’s diabetes began giving her problems and she lost the toes on her right foot. She was unable to work after that. Later that year, Daddy, who had been by mama’s side at the hospital during her stay, had quadruple bypass surgery. He was unable to work after that.
Through it all, I never heard my parents use any excuse to do something wrong, or to do anything wrong. They didn’t become drug addicts or alcoholics. They never complained about God giving them a raw deal. They made no excuses. They never had a lot and they were grateful for what they did have. They do have the undying admiration of the four children who are still here and I know that my other two sisters and brother loved them also.
I get angry when I see people do wrong things and then blame it on a bad childhood or not having anything when they were children. I didn’t have a lot growing up myself, but I thank God for what I did have and I thank God for the parents who have made me the man I am today.

My Crush On Kathy Ireland

         I used to have this really huge crush on Kathy Ireland. Okay, I’ll admit it. I still have a slight crush on Kathy Ireland, but not in the way that you may think or in the way that my huge crush was.

            These days, I don’t go all gaga over Kathy Ireland’s beauty or her pretty green eyes or her long legs. (I call it being more mature. I’m sure that you’re thinking that I’m just getting old.) What attracts me to Kathy Ireland these days is more her viewpoints and her stance on some things and the fact that she has taken a pair of socks and parlayed them into millions of dollars.

            Some of you may remember all the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues that she was in during the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of you may remember seeing her in the movie, Necessary Roughness, or in the movie, Miami Hustle (renamed from Hello, She Lied.) I remember all this stuff.

            Kathy took her fame and opened a clothing line with Kmart. Later, she got into the furniture and home design business, with a Midas touch that turned everything she touched to gold.

            While I admire her as a smart businesswoman, I admire her most as a Christian. She is a wife and mother and she has taken a staunch stance against abortion. She also proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ through a website named “I Am Second” (www.iamsecond.com).

            During a conversation on Twitter once, I complimented her on the website. She responded to me, “Thank you. http://iamsecond.com  is my truth. Grateful they captured it and that it speaks to your heart.”

            Despite being six months older than me, Kathy has kept her beauty and it glows even more because her inside beauty (with the love of Christ) is so much more beautiful than her outward appearance. 

An Open Letter To Jon Acuff

Dear Jon Acuff,
I have been listening with rapt attention to your book “Quitter” on my iPod Touch. Actually, a good deal of attention goes toward my driving and I listen passively at times while I am driving too and from work.
I jest when I say passively because I do pay attention to the book. It is filled with sage advice as I would expect it to be. It has commanded time away from listening to Christian music on Way FM every morning and taking time away from The Wally Show on the radio station. I enjoy the banter between sarcastic host Wally and his colleagues, Zac, Katie Rose and Betty Rock. I also enjoy the times that you appear on the station, but like I have said, I have been listening to “Quitter” lately.
I listen to you talk about following your dreams and advice honed from experience. I want to tell you about an experience I had that should have convinced me to follow my dreams regardless of what it may cost me and I would like to talk about some of the roadblocks that hit me like a 325 pound defensive lineman, who gloats with glee as he does a dance over me after sacking me and driving me into the ground.
My experience was that I died last December.
Let that soak in for a minute.
I actually died last December.
I did not nearly die. I was literally dead last December – at least for a few seconds, or maybe it was minutes. I have the audio tape of the 911 call from my office where Kristin Finney, one of the reporters at the small town newspapers where I serve as editor, tells the dispatcher that I am turning blue and not breathing. I have a copy of the report from EMS where my blood pressure is listed at 0 over 0, my pulse rate is listed at 0 and my respiration is listed as 0.
Dead.
I cannot remember the next five days, but there are pictures of me hooked to a respirator. There are accounts that I have been given that doctors told my father, my oldest sister, my brother and my pastor that I was not going to live.
I have pictures that my friend, Bryant, took of me hooked to a respirator. I also have a picture that he took of me writing my Christian column “Jacob’s Ladder” for that week’s newspaper.
I do not remember writing it. I don’t remember being packed in ice in a process doctors called Arctic Sun, which preserves the brain function of those who go into cardiac arrest. I don’t remember Bryant visiting me or my publisher and friend, Emerald Greene, coming to see me or any number of friends and colleagues who showed up, not knowing if it would be the last time either of us saw each other again.
I do remember waking up one day and seeing the pastor of a local Baptist church and his wife and daughter in the room with my father. From then on, I remember.
One thing stands out vividly for me. I was wheeled in a room, where doctors were to put a stent in my heart (my family had been told they would not even be able to do bypass surgery on me, my heart was so far gone). When they went to put the stent in, they couldn’t find enough blockage to do that. I went from having a heart that was useless, according to the doctors, to having a healthy heart.
I call that a miracle.
Excitement coursed through my body the next few months. God had left me here on Earth to fulfill a mission. He had a greater purpose for my life. After being encouraged to write about my experience by my friend, Carol Taylor, I began working on a book. I got a number of chapters done before being sidetracked again.
It felt as if I had followed the offensive line on an option play to the right but that the line was penetrated by a stalwart defensive end that came and drove me to the Earth once more before I could pitch the ball to the fullback.
Life is the defensive lineman who keeps trying to destroy any momentum I pick up. It’s a life that I have chosen and one that I enjoy most of the time, but it keeps trying to wreck my dreams.
I know that you have probably heard just about every story there is about why dreams go unfulfilled and you may think that I am just another complainer. Maybe I am, but let me share my story and then you can decide.
I think the power of prayer, in Jesus’ name, works miracles. I know it works miracles and I think that when people have a purpose to pray, miracles happen even faster.
My friends and family and even people that I just barely know and some that I don’t even know at all had a purpose in praying for me when they thought I was going to die and I know from speaking to many of them their prayers were fervent.
I am a middle-aged single adult who has chosen to dedicate his life to helping his mentally challenged sister, as well as his elderly father and his disabled brother. I do all of this and hold a full-time job, which I got back to as fast as the doctors would let me after my incident last December. I had family to take to doctor’s appointments. I had bills to pay. I had stories to write.
Not only do I take care of my own family, I also have to help out a cousin who is slightly mentally challenged and his mother at times. Neither of them drive, nor do my brother and sister and my father (who is 77) didn’t renew his driver’s license last time for safety’s sake. To add to all this, I sometimes have people who want me to cover events or to do things for them from my position as a newspaper editor or they want to yell at me about something in the newspaper that made them mad. I got an email a couple of weeks ago from someone whose father had been shot and killed by law officers. She was venting and threatened the officers and me. I don’t worry about that, though. I did worry for about five minutes when a law officer came to my office and told me that the FBI would be paying the woman a visit.
So many times, Jon, I feel the stress I felt before last December returning. I feel the tightness in my chest…then, I take a deep breath and let it pass.
If you have any advice on how to handle it when it feels like the world is sending earthquakes to crumble my dreams (and I do appreciate the fact that you say, “Stay at your job. Stay focused. Work longer hours. Work smarter.” It’s hard to do with so many things that not only demand my attention, but LITERALLY NEED my attention), I would appreciate it.
In the meanwhile, I always managed to someone get up and dust myself off and get back to following that dream again.
While my book about my experience hasn’t been finished, I have managed to compile a number of my newspaper columns and other writings into a book called “Higher Call.”
I have so many ideas for new books, so little time, but I know the words of Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
If one day, I awake and find that the dreams I dream never come true, I can have a smile on my face and contentment in my heart because I did all that I could do for the people and the job that I love.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.
In Christ,
Jacob Bembry

Seeds

Cold morning as frost battles it out with green and the temperature remains four degrees above the tipping point.
As the first freeze of the year has not hit the Suwannee Valley region yet, I remember a moment frozen in time over 43 years ago. Miss Mary had asked us kindergartners to put water in a tin can. The can was left outside. The next morning, we oohed and ahhhed that we had made our own ice without a refrigerator.
Most of us being farm kids, we may have been more impressed with the ice than we were with planting a seed in a cup a few months later and getting a bean sprout. The sprouts in each cup were transported to the ground outside and grew a nice row of beans. That’s the nature of things, we knew. If we planted a bean seed in dirt, we would get beans.
Sometimes, God asks us to plant the seed of God’s Word in people’s hearts and sometimes to plant seeds with money. Sometimes, we are asked to plant seeds in the dirt. Through each and every thing we plant, if we plant it right and if it is God’s will, we grow things. We grow Christians. We grow missions. We may even grow beans.