Tara: An Essay in Beauty and Class

 

“Oh Jacob. That is so special. I adore you. You are one of God’s gifts too. Thank you for being a friend to me. It means more than you know.”  Tara Burtchaell, May 2, 2019

I didn’t know it at the time, but I would also speak to Tara (a friend from my days at Florida State University) via social media once more. Six months and five days later, she would be dead. Death sometimes can play cruel games with the living and I didn’t discover my beautiful friend’s fate until this past Saturday, January 4, 2020. That is the day a celebration of life service was held in her memory at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church in Atlanta. Of course, life can sometimes appear to be cruel, and, amid all those in-between months, I was busy as my brother had one massive heart attack in July, and another four days after Tara was ushered into Eternity. During this turmoil, a childhood friend and the valedictorian of my senior class, passed away. I guess it can be overlooked that I hadn’t checked in on Tara more.

The conversation I had with Tara that evening had been shortly after the death of her mother. Tara absolutely doted on her mother and had sat by her side during her illness. She was distraught over her death and told me she was struggling with the loss. I shared with her that I had lost both of my parents, and that I care for my brother and sister, Abbie Gail, who has developmental disabilities. I explained how Abbie has been like a daughter to me, although she is only six years younger. That is why she responded the way she did during the conversation.

For all intents and purposes, Tara and I should have never been friends. She came from class. I was a dirt-poor farm boy. She was beautiful. I was just me. Tara and I would go to plays together, and occasionally, to dinner or lunch together, but it was always as just friends, although I had the biggest crush in the world on her.
Miles, years, and circumstances separated us. She left and went to New York City before she returned to her home in the Atlanta area. I settled in the north Florida area to a life that was nowhere near as exciting as hers.

Tara went on to work on and produce such TV shows as Good Eats with Alton Brown, Dancin’ the Dream and Dance Crash with Brandee Evans. My favorite work she produced and wrote was a cartoon based on the Elf on the Shelf books titled Elf on the Shelf: An Elf’s Story.

I wish life had afforded me the opportunity to talk more with Tara. I wish I had known her more than I did. She was such a beautiful person. More Important that that, she was a kind person.

The Pocketbook Is the Address to Send the Hurt To

First, let me start off by saying that I am NOT a gun control advocate. Our Founding Fathers gave us the Second Amendment because they knew there would come times when we would need to defend our property, our freedoms and our lives. They even understood that there may come a time when we needed to protect ourselves from an out of control government.
Throughout history, there are lands where gun control by anyone except the military has been made mandatory. One of these was in Stalin’s Russia. Another was in Hitler’s Germany. If you are a student of history, you know how that turned out.
Second, let me say that I do not think we should deport Piers Morgan or anyone else for speaking their mind. Before the Second Amendment, there is the First Amendment, which guarantees a person the right to free speech.
Instead of deporting Morgan, why don’t you turn the channel when he is on. I have done this to a number of people who I grew tired of listening to. When enough people stop trying to get a petition to deport him, and letting his fame and celebrity reach zenith heights, and instead just tune him out, ratings will drop. Sponsors will drop him. The sponsors who do stick with him, why not boycott their products? The pocketbook is the address to send the hurt to.
My heart still aches for the parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends who lost loved ones in Newtown, Connecticut. I feel that there is a problem with violence in our country, but was the violence caused by guns? Or was it caused by video games, TV, movies? Or, is it caused by deviant lifestyles? Or, is it just caused by depraved minds who have never accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior?
When those planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, they were used as weapons of mass destruction. Did anyone start crying that airplanes should be banned?
I urge people to stop this ridiculous movement to try to get a man deported for speaking what he believes in. Use an alternative method. Write letters to the network, write letters to the sponsors, write letters to newspapers, write letters to websites. We live in a free country (at this time anyway) and we all the freedom to say what we want to, as long as it does not slander or libel anyone.
Think with your head. Think with your pocketbook. Think.

A Different Approach

Today has been a somber day. Twenty-seven people dead, seven of them children, in the tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn.

My day began with a childhood friend from Monticello telling me that the father of three more childhood friends had died that day. I was also praying and remembering my first cousin, Rick Sealey, who is in a hospital in Tuscon, Ariz., showing the fighting Marine spirit embedded in him as he battles to get well. I was also praying and thinking about my friend, Jean Carroll, who fell the other night and broke her shoulder and her ankle. On top of that, my father and brother have been battling their own illnesses.

Decembers always seem to be eventful months in my family. For the last four years, I believe, someone has been hospitalized with something serious and life-threatening. My father and my brother, in years before, and myself last year after going into cardiac arrest. All four times, God has shown up and performed miracles for my family.

I know there are some sad people right now in Newtown, Conn., that need their own miracles to happen. They need emotional healing. There are people around the nation, including myself, who are hurting for them. While we can sympathize with them, we can’t really empathize with them and feel the same hurt and anguish that they are feeling.

The area where I live in north Florida has never experienced a school shooting. While bad things happen at the schools, as they have for years, no one has drawn a gun out and decided to kill the people they are angry at or kill little children. It does not mean we’re immune from it, however.

Love him or hate him, Mike Huckabee made a valid point when he said he wasn’t surprised because we are “systematically removing God from America.” We have taken Him out of our public schools. We have taken Him out of public places, such as courthouses and county commission and school board meetings. We do not even allow HIm in prayers before football games anymore.

A few years ago, the ACLU got upset and had prayer removed from Madison County High School Cowboy football games. However, a brave group of students decided the prayers would be said from the stands at each game. Nothing could be said because the prayers were not initiated by the school. Students did it on their own. Still, such groups cry out that we, as Christians, are violating other people’s rights when we do such things as pray in Jesus’s name. They try to break our resolve and say Christians are to blame for every thing, while they see nothing wrong with music and video games which glorify raping women, murder and cursing God.

I’m also positive that the gun control advocates will begin shouting that guns need to be outlawed, but the emphasis should be on a different approach. Shouldn’t we look to what we are doing wrong, in schools, in Hollywood, in the music business, in the video game business, in the choices we make? Why don’t we fall to our knees and ask God to forgive us as a nation and bring back Christ into our homes and into every facet of our lives, including school?

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14

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

Trying to Give Away Tickets to the Game

He couldn’t even give the tickets away. Who would think that giving away a ticket to see a major college football team play would be so hard? It was the problem the coach faced. One day, he went to the barbershop to get his hair cut. Having a couple of extra tickets, he figured out an easy way to get rid of them. He put them under someone’s windshield wiper on their car. Smiling he went inside and got the haircut. His smile turned into a frown when he returned to his car after getting his ears lowered. There, under his windshield wiper were the two tickets he had left on someone else’s car.
One couldn’t really blame the fans. The year before, the team had won only one game and only three games the year before that. The previous head coach had sat in the press box instead of being down on the field with his team. Something funny happened with the new coach, though — he started to win. Sure, they only won five games that first season the new coach was in town but they won 10 games the next year, including a bowl victory over Texas Tech. Then, they played in the Orange Bowl two years in a row against powerhouse Oklahoma. Most importantly, they were finally able to compete against their dreaded rivals from Gainesville, beating the Gators four years in a row.
Bobby Bowden had brought winning to Tallahassee and those tickets he had once tried giving away were now valuable. The Florida State University Seminoles have not had a losing season since 1975 and have won two national titles and had two Heisman Trophy winners, Charlie Ward and Chris Weinke.
` Throughout October 23, I will be giving away free Kindle editions of my book “Higher Call.” Join readers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and Canada who have read the book. Remember after tomorrow, it will go back to the original full price of $2.99 for a Kindle edition. The regular book edition is available at Amazon.com for $10 plus shipping and handling. If you would like me to sign a copy of the book, you can order them directly from me for $10 plus $3.99 shipping and handling. They will make great Christmas presents and stocking stuffers as I share stories of faith, family and some funny and poignant stories about my mentally challenged sister Abbie, who I love dearly. I also tell the story of God’s miraculous healing of me when I literally died one day at work. To order directly, send $10 plus $3.99 shipping and handling to Jacob Bembry, P.O. Box 9334, Lee, FL 32059 and indicate if you want the book signed.

Spanish Moss, Concrete and Asphalt Carpets and Florida State Memories

Strange interludes of madness seem to softly walk by me. Memories of yesterday blend in with now and create the fabric of which my life is made.

Memories of Tallahassee begin to flicker like the beginning of a motion picture in a darkened movie theater; memories of Spanish moss hanging from oak trees, near Lafayette Circle; memories of canopied roads off side streets down Mahan Drive.

As the motion picture begins to start, and the memory becomes less clouded, canopy roads and Spanish moss give way to a carpet made of asphalt and concrete, surrounded by curtains of steel and bright lights.

The city becomes more clinical looking each day, but parts of it still retain a rural, genteel Southern charm. There are still women who say, “Bless your little heart,” old men who call all women “honey” and young people who answer their elders with “yes, sir,” “no, sir,” “yes, ma’am,” “no, ma’am.”

As Mahan becomes Tennessee Street and you go farther into Tallahassee, you come up on Florida State University. Turn down Macomb Street and then College Avenue and you will see the Westcott Building with its historic fountain. Memories of being a student at the College of Communication seem to emerge on the silver screen, as I watch frat boys in a Jeep drive by and throw a pledge into the fountain and drive off. Minutes later, the frat boys are back, throwing another pledge into the fountain. (At least, I hope they were pledges and not students the guys had decided to kidnap.)

I also see the scene where I was thrown into the fountain by three girls but that was pre-planned as a stunt for a TV show (1800 Seconds) that the students produced for WFSU-TV. Unfortunately, that footage never aired because there was too much background noise from the fountain.

The fountain that the unfortunate students and I (who actually had fun being thrown in by three cute girls) were thrown in was replaced by an exact replica of the original fountain in 1988 because of failure in the support structure of the original. I remember lazy days spent sitting at the fountain, talking with friends. I even remember sitting there, talking to my friend, Nicole (Nicky), on my birthday.

I was a student at FSU during 1986 and 1987, transferring from North Florida Junior College (now North Florida Community College). Football reigned, although FSU was struggling like a newborn calf to find its legs to stand on. Bobby Bowden was the head coach but he had not yet reached his legend status. Mark Richt, current University of Georgia head coach, was a grad assistant for the Seminoles, having formerly been a backup quarterback for the University of Miami.

On the evening of Saturday, Sept. 13, 1986, FSU did not have a football game. A 21-year-old starting offensive tackle for the team was shot following an argument at a dance outside of Montgomery Gym. Pablo Lopez died at the hospital at 1:30 a.m. the next day. Nicky and I spoke briefly that Monday about the death of the young man who she knew but that I never met.

A longer conversation about Pablo’s death took place between Mark Richt and Coach Bowden and Richt gave his heart to the Lord. Today, he is an example to young men everywhere, especially in Athens, Ga.

It has been a long time since I have been back to FSU but I will return next Saturday as the Seminoles continue their proud football heritage under Coach Jimbo Fisher. It will be my birthday and I hope to celebrate in victory as the Seminoles defeat Murray State. Go, Seminoles!

Larry the Cable Guy and the Hot Dogs

I just saw Larry the Cable Guy at Love’s Travel Stop in Lee. His credit card wasn’t working and I bought two hot dogs for him. For $2.39, Larry got a blessing but I got a bigger blessing from God because actually, it was a truck driver. It was an honor for me to help him out because as Merle Haggard sang in the theme song to the TV show, “Movin’ On,” “The white line is backbone of this country.” Let’s support our American farmers, American businesses and American truckers. And, the guy actually looked like Larry the Cable Guy. How cool is that?