Welcome to our new web site!

To give our readers a chance to experience all that our new website has to offer, we have made all content freely avaiable, through October 1, 2018.

During this time, print and digital subscribers will not need to log in to view our stories or e-editions.

Hunker Down with Kes

He’s Just A Kneel Away

Posted

If one more person says to me, “I don’t know what our country is coming to” or “How could we, as a nation, get into such a fix” or “What in the world is wrong with those people up in Washington” my head is going to explode. Enough already with the “oh me’s” and “oh my’s”!
We all need a little respite from the president, and raging senator (which could be about anyone of them), and the never ending Congressional Hearings, and the way-overzealous news reporters, and the protesters shouting at the top of their lungs before innocence or guilt has had a chance to be determined, and the late night comics who think there is something funny in any of this...
The way our government is working right now is embarrassing enough—surely we don’t need to be going around reminding each other of it minute by minute!
And I’ve got the solution. To the whole thing. All of our problems. And it’s so simple I can’t possibly think why someone hasn’t already come up with it: We need a lot more bumper stickers in this nation that have JESUS written on them.
When I’d “forgotten” to do my math homework in the fourth grade I figured my goose was cooked. This was way back when you just didn’t “not do it”. But, man, it was a whole page of multiplication! And I willingly chose to play baseball after school and run down to the big ditch and climb that big walnut tree in Miss Boaz’s backyard and listen to “Fibber McGee and Molly” after supper.
I finally confessed to Mom as I started off to school the next morning that Miss Dinwiddie was sure to give me an F-minus because I hadn’t worked one problem. She grabbed my hand before I could take another step and said, “Let’s pray to Jesus”. Mom was praying as hard as she could while I was peeping up with one eye...looking for a miracle! Unless Jesus caught up with me before school with a handful of Arabic numbers on a spreadsheet the grease was in the pan!
We hadn’t hardly gotten through the pledge and roll call before the fire drill warning went off. That took a while! And when we got back to class, the radiator was leaking and hot steam was pouring into the room! We evacuated down to the gym. About the time things settled down after lunch Pam Collins and Suzie Cozart got into a knock down drag out fight. Then Bob Edwards threw up. At 1:45 that afternoon Miss Dinwiddie capitulated, “Boys and girls, we must do our reading classes. We will have to wait until tomorrow to go over the math assignment.”

I ran all the way home shouting, “I have been redeemed!”
Somehow my last year in high school Billie Jean thought I was taking her to the Friday night dance at the National Guard Armory. Mary Hadley called me Tuesday evening to remind me I’d promised to take her THAT SAME NIGHT to the Henry County Fair. I seriously contemplated moving to Paducah. And I was sweating bullets by Friday afternoon when I remembered a “friend who sticketh closer than a brother.” I promised Jesus if he helped me out of this fix, I’d take care of the next one by myself.
Billie Jean called a few minutes later, “Kes, I’ve got the measles. Sorry about tonight.”
I was singing “lift high His royal banner...” when the phone rang again. Mary Hadley had “got a better deal”. She was going to the fair with Bobby Winchester. I spent the evening ALONE pondering on the depth of Jesus’ fairness and discernment.
The first day of my college career a student jumped out of a second story window. I got run over every afternoon at football practice. Each professor demanded more “creditable performance” than I was able to deliver. It was “Shakespeare to the right of me, John Milton to the left”; I was doomed with the Light Brigade “riding with the six hundred into the valley of Death.” Salvation came at the very last second when I discovered Jesus just happened to be going to this same college...AT THE SAME TIME!
You think I married the perfect wife by accident? You think my boys “turned out alright” because of my mature and intelligent raising of them? Do you think I’ve had such a blessed and happy life because I’m smarter and better looking than the rest of you?
Do you think I’m guessing about those Jesus bumper stickers saving our nation?