QUARANTINE BLOG # 66

June 4, 2020

I've asked you to be in prayer for Red Dalber.  Today his wife, Beverly, told us that hospice has come in.  Red (his given name is Aristides) has inoperable liver cancer.  The prognosis is that he will complete this mortal journey in about three weeks.  Please keep Beverly and Red in your prayers and in your hearts.

👉  Bill Bryson is one of my all-time favorite authors.  Go to Amazon.com and pull up a list of his books, buy one and read it.  Any one.  I’ve never had a bad read from Bryson.  Here are a couple of personal recommendations: A Walk in the Woods (Bryson and a friend attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail – hilarious, and a good movie was made from it), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (a memoir), One Summer: America 1927 (Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and more), A Short History of Nearly Everything (read this one and try to doubt that there is a Creator), and any of his travel books.  But I digress.  Again.  So what else is new?

I am currently reading Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants (it is my treadmill book, but that’s a story for another time, and another digression).  I offer the following quotation from Chapter 2, “The Outside: Skin and Hair.”

“One of the most memorably unexpected events I experienced in the course of doing this book came in a dissection room at the University of Nottingham in England when a professor and surgeon named Ben Ollivere gently incised and peeled back a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick from the arm of a cadaver.  It was so thin as to be translucent.  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is where all your skin color is.  That’s all that race is – a sliver of epidermis.’

“I mentioned this to Nina Jablonski [professor of anthropology at Penn State University] when we met in her office in State College, Pennsylvania soon afterward (digression: the Sislers lived outside of State College briefly while trying to pastor a church that did not want to be led, but that’s a story for another time).  She gave a nod of vigorous assent.  ‘It is extraordinary how such a small facet of our composition is given so much importance,’ she said.  ‘People act as if skin color is a determinant of character when all it is, is a reaction to sunlight.  Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race – nothing in terms of skin color, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples.  And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights though history because of the color of their skin.’” (italics mine).

Those last three sentences bear rereading.  More than once.

👉  Today is “Hug Your Cat Day.”  Studies show that having a cat lowers blood pressure and stress.  Studies also show that hugging does the same thing.  What better way is there to help your health than to celebrate “Hug Your Cat Day?”  Don’t have a cat?  Well, it just so happens June is also adopt a cat month, so get yourself a cat and hug away!

👉  On this day in 1919, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification.  Eight days later, the 19th Amendment took effect.  In 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was formed to push for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  In 1890, Wyoming became the first state to grant women the right to vote.  The 19th Amendment states that “the rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”  Interestingly, the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1870, gave African American men the right to vote.  It took Congress almost 50 years to extend the same right to women.

👉  The Walt Disney Company produced several frontier/western shows for television, beginning with Davy Crockett in 1954.  Then followed The Saga of Andy Burnett in 1957, and Daniel Boone in 1960.  These are their stories.

David Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier,” was a real life American folk hero, frontiersman, soldier, and politician.  In 1827, he was elected to the U.S. Congress where he opposed President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act which forced tribes off of their ancestral lands so white settlers could move in.  Crockett was the only member of the Tennessee delegation to vote against the Act.  His vote was not popular with his own district, and he was defeated in the 1831 election.  He was re-elected in 1833, lost in 1835, and in 1836, he took part in the Texas Revolution.  There are two versions of his death: one, that he was killed during the Battle of the Alamo; and two, that he was executed after being captured by the Mexican Army following that battle.

Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett starred Fess Parker, with Buddy Ebsen as his friend George Russell.  The show was known for its catchy theme song, and was sung by Parker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txcRQedoEyY  Five hour long shows were broadcast from 1954-1955, and were later edited into two feature length movies.

Check out Davy’s first speech as a congressman (according to the Mouse House): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFN_1Ju7Hak

The Walt Disney Company capitalized on the show’s success by licensing the sale of various types of Crockett paraphernalia, including coonskin caps and flint lock rifles (like the ones worn by the young fan in this photograph on a Christmas morning long ago).  Fess Parker lost millions of dollars from Crockett merchandising because his contract was with Walt Disney personally rather than the company itself.  What, they couldn’t share with the King of the Wild Frontier?

In 1988-89 Disney produced a three-episode revival entitled The New Adventures of Davy Crockett, and in 2002, Disney tried the subject of Davy Crockett and the Alamo one more time with the film The Alamo. The film was a box-office failure.  Tomorrow we’ll look at John Wayne’s successful version of the story of Davy Crockett and the Alamo.

👉  As of yesterday, Italy began welcoming back tourists from Europe – no one from outside the EU yet.  The 500th anniversary exhibition of Raphael reopened, allowing 6 visitors to enter every 5 minutes.  In Florence, visitors to the Duomo – the cathedral – will be required to wear a necklace that will beep when people are too close to each other.

👉   Sin is a bigger disaster than we think it is.  Grace is more amazing than we are able to grasp that it is.  Sin alters every aspect of your personhood.  Every aspect.  So why would ever we think that we could meet God’s standard of perfection?  Grace covers every sin that is brought to Father.  Every sin.

With that understanding of sin and grace in mind, there is obviously no way that we would be able to work our way into acceptance with God.  Paul gives us a reality check in Romans 3:20.  “For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight.”

If we prayed every moment of our lives, we could never pray enough to earn acceptance with God.  If we gave every penny of every dollar that we ever earned in every job we ever had, we could never give enough to earn acceptance with God.  Sin is too big.  God’s bar is too high.

If we obeyed for a thousand years, we would be no more accepted than when we first believed.  Our acceptance is based solely, only, and totally on Christ’s righteousness.  And not on ours.

This is why God sent His Son: “God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 ESV).  There was and there is no other way.  The righteousness of Christ is applied to our account – sinners are welcomed into the presence of a holy God based on that and that alone.  He perfectly fulfilled God’s requirement so that God’s grace completely and forever covers our sin, our weakness, and our failure.  That is what grace does!

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