Happy New Year
We are suddenly reaching the end of a fantastic year. Our country elected a new nonpolitical conservative president who believes in God. In one year he has turned our economy around and put just about everyone who wanted a job to work. He has had no cooperation from a Republican controlled Congress. He has been his own personal ambassador to businesses and has stirred investment in industries in our country that has caused them to build new factories and employee more people.
There is a lot more to be done, and we may have to elect new members of Congress before we can get more of the President’s program enacted. He stated during the campaign that he wanted to go to Washington to drain the swamp. I don’t think he realized then exactly who was thriving in the swamp. There has been a quotation that I have heard many times: “When you are up to your waist in alligators, it is hard to remember that your original intent was to drain the swamp.” The elected Republicans, the elected Democrats and the professional bureaucrats are all living comfortably in the swamp. It needs to be changed, but the citizens of the swamp do not plan to have it changed.
Making a lot of New Year’s resolutions is not something that I have done during my lifetime. As a young man, I usually started the New Year off on my knees asking for the blessings of God for the next year. I have been extremely blessed in that I have a wonderful wife and a loving family from my parents. I have been very proud of my son and his accomplishments in gospel music. Since we are retired, we have watched the ball in New York come down on television laying in the bed. My wife and I would hold hands and pray but we were not actively celebrating the New Year. Last year, we celebrated the New Year with our church family at Heritage Baptist Church and again saw the New Year come in while we were praying and acknowledging God. We plan to do the same thing again this year.
Age at the New Year does make a difference. In earlier years, when we were young, there were not many close friends and close relatives in our age bracket that passed on during the year. As a retiree, many of my friends are gone at the end of each year. We have a high school class reunion on the first Saturday in August. I believe that we lost three that we honored at the last reunion and we have had several to pass since the last reunion. When we look around for our friends in Calhoun that were close to us in the past 50 years we have lived here, it saddens us. I can’t begin to list names of those that are gone because it is a very long list. I am well aware that I have already lived past my life expectancy. My Dad died when he was about 17 years younger than I am today. The life expectancy of a person who lives to be my age is about nine years older than I am now. I am a believer and when my time comes I will go without fear, but I am going to live as if I have many more years to go.
The years bring changes in how you live your life. I have been retired for a number of years. My body does not respond the same way that it did 30 years ago. When I was a young man, I played golf a few times and never used a cart. To walk the 18 holes was not even tiring. When I was living in Saudi Arabia, I was out of the house at 5: 30 every morning and walked two miles before breakfast. Now, it is difficult to walk all the way around the inside of Walmart. My wife gets angry with me at church because when I sit for an extended period of time, it is easy to drop off to sleep. She gives me an elbow to the ribs when she thinks I am asleep. Sometimes she seems to bump me when I just blink my eyes. It does not seem to matter if I get eight hours of sleep or just five hours of sleep, if I sit down and get quiet, I get sleepy.
This year has been a wonderful year. Just as He promised, God has supplied all of our needs. We have been blessed physically, mentally, spiritually and with material blessings. We love our comfortable home. We love Calhoun. We love our church. I enjoy writing these columns each week and appreciate Brandi at the Calhoun Times for publishing them. My wife and I are enjoying having two wonderful great grandsons that are pleasant and beautiful. They show the same good nature that is prominent in their mother, who is our granddaughter Alex, and their father Jason Ray.
Our son Kenny, Jr. was remarried this year. The story of the romance was beautiful and very unusual. Brenda was living in Jackson, Tennessee and working in Memphis. A mutual friend met Brenda and told her about Kenny. He called Kenny and told him about Brenda. They started talking on Facetime on the telephone where they could see each other and fell in love. They met for the first time in Nashville and spent a Saturday together. Since that time, she quit her job in Memphis, sold her home in Jackson, took a job in Atlanta and she and Kenny were married. They have bought a condo in Calhoun and furnished it. She is a good Christian and believes that God caused this marriage to happen. We also believe this.
We celebrated Christmas not because of all the wonderful things that He has done for us; we celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ because He is God. He does not owe us blessings. The blessings we receive are not because we are good. They come to us because He is good. May God bless all of you who read this column. Have a Happy New Year.