More Pictures

I am swamped with work this week.  I was at it until 10:00pm last night.  I will have to work this weekend as well.  All my writing goes to designs, code, and release notes.  Meanwhile, I will post a few more pictures you might enjoy.

Can you say, "Whee-doggies!"  These are some of the same people that were in my oldest photo from Monday's post.  I'm guessing this one's about 20 years after the first one.  That's my grandmother in the middle in the dark smock, turned half away from the camera, between the child and the woman in the bonnet.  My grandfather is in the background, upper right, reclining on something.  The young woman in the foreground in the polka dot outfit looks an awfully lot like my mother.  It's not so much the facial features and the build which could match her sister's, but the expression -- those dead level, "serious" eyebrows.  Mom was the kindest person in the world, but she had a plan to kill everyone she met.  Just kidding, sort of.  She's probably barefoot.  I'm not sure who the man is on the other side of her -- he looks familiar.  I wish the guy behind her were facing the camera.  He looks familiar, too, but probably isn't her brother.  I suppose it could be Dad -- the nose looks big enough, but I'm withholding judgment until Sis sees it.  

Hey, look, color!  I actually took this picture and the next one -- probably with the little 110 I used to carry.  The above is not an outhouse.  It's the first house my parents lived in after they were married.  My oldest sister was born there.  It was in a little better shape then.  Notice, however, the foundation consists of dry-stacked, flat rocks.  Dad didn't build this one.  His father sold him this place.  The big selling point -- location, of course.  There is a good-sized and unfailing spring off to the left in the base of the hill.  That was their water source and refrigerator.    

 This is the next place my family lived.  Their first winter here, Dad neglected to get enough firewood cut.  Snow was early and deep.  He started felling trees, but he could not get what he cut to the house using his team and wagon.  Snow packed in the horses' hooves and balled up in the cold.  He resorted to cutting lengths of logs and carrying up them up on his shoulders.  My other two siblings were born here.  Dad didn't build this one, either.  I suppose it goes without saying that neither of these two shacks was sealed or insulated in any way. 

 We're movin' on up in time and digs.  This is the house that my father built himself with lumber from the oaks on that forty acres.  I was born here, literally, not in a hospital.  The little building on the right is the well house.  I'm not sure they had the newer well with an electric pump as yet.  You got water out of that one by hand.  I always loved that porch.  I have one very similar to it on the house we live in now.  The people in the picture are brother and sister.  I believe that is a '50 Chevy on the left, about six or seven years old at the time.  With that dress, we can all be glad this one is B&W.

Fun and Bona Fides

When my father passed away a couple of years ago, there were three things I wanted from the estate.  One was our favorite rifle, the second was a knife I had given him and that he wanted me to have, the third thing was some of the old pictures.  The knife was no problem.  I had to pay a bit of a premium for the rifle, but I’m not complaining.  Best of all I wound up with quite a few pictures.

My good sister will celebrate her birthday in a few days, and she has been after me to make copies of some of the pictures I have.  Since she is not a computer person and is unlikely to become one, I decided to buy her a digital picture frame and load scans of these old photos onto it.  It turns out that you can plug the frame into the USB port of my HP printer/scanner/fax and scan directly into the frame – which the HP sees as a memory device.  All well and good such I did 165 scans in one sitting.  Some of the pictures, though, stored in the memory as only a portion of a larger blank field.  I needed to crop them.  I plugged the frame into my laptop and used the freeware PhotoScape to crop and, in some cases, do some minor editing – mainly color restoration on the more faded images. 

When I was done, I thought it would be wise to backup all those scans, so I pulled them onto my laptop, both the originals and the fixed versions, leaving only the cropped and enhanced copies on the photo frame.  Since they are here, I thought I’d share a couple for your enjoyment and just in case someone thinks I’m joking or exaggerating when I call myself a hillbilly.

This is probably the oldest picture I have.  As best I can estimate, it is just shy of 100 years old.  When I first looked at it, I was struck by the looks of the people on the right hand side – none of whom I could identify, and I wondered why we had it at all.  Then I saw the little girl in the middle standing immediately in front of the man in the bib overalls.  I knew her.  She’s passed on now, but she lived to be well up into her nineties and that face never changed to any great extent.  Once I knew who the little girl was, I looked at the rest of that part of the group and things began to come together. 

The next face that I knew was even more familiar.  The lady in the rather stylish, dark hat and checked blouse holding a baby is my maternal grandmother.  That’s her husband, my grandfather, in the bibs.  His mother, my great-grandmother, is the dark-skinned, hatless lady on the far left.  Those three little girls clustered in front of Grandma and Grandpa are my aunts.  The boy next to them, in the Payne Stewart golf outfit, is my uncle.  I can name all the children standing, but I’m not sure who the baby is.  If my guess is correct, this picture was made about 1912 or 1913 – my mother is still several years in the future.  Assuming no one was left back at the house, it could not be later than that, but it could be a year or two earlier.  My sister will be better able to figure the ages, and two of my grandmother’s nine children are still living – both were too young to be in this picture.  They might know who the other folks are.  The lady on the far right looks familiar and could be my grandmother’s sister.  I also suspect that the child standing in front of the rather severe-looking lady in the middle is a boy too young for drawers.

This next picture is a little later, from somewhere around 1920, so, no, that’s not Jesse James.  The young man was born in 1892.  He’s obviously too tough-looking to be Clyde Barrow and not pretty enough to be Charles Arthur Floyd.  In fact, he is my uncle, my father’s oldest sibling.  He was a rounder.  His little friend looks like a break-open action, possibly a S&W Double Action Fourth Model, or a Harrington & Richardson.

Finally, something much more modern and also typical of my family, we have a baptismal scene.  By the way, I was baptized in that very same hole.  The water comes from an Ozark spring and will turn you blue in July.  That’s my father on the far left.  One of his nephews is standing next to him.  Based on the nephew’s age, I’d say we’re talking late forties.  It could be a little earlier.  I’ll ask my cousin next time I see him.

Hillbilly Heaven

From now on, then, we do not know anyone in a purely human way. Even if we have known Christ in a purely human way we no longer know Him like that. 2 Cor. 5:16

I am not a big Alan Jackson fan. I only buy his CD’s to help him out. The poor guy drives old cars and his house is a running joke around Nashville. Well, that’s one thing. The other is my wife loves him. One of the songs on his latest CD says, “If Jesus walked the world today, He’d probably be a hillbilly.” I wonder.

If you are looking for God to step into this world in some dramatic way, you could be waiting awhile. Someone said the other day they would be satisfied with a “Damascus Road” experience, like Paul. I suggest before you request what Paul got, you might want to find out what it entailed. The Lord said right at the outset that Paul was going to suffer for His sake. The Apostle had a pretty impressive resume if you count imprisonment, being shipwrecked, beaten, whipped, stoned, and going hungry.

As C.S. Lewis once said, thinking of Christ as a great teacher but only human is not an option for us. He either uniquely the Son of God -- as He claimed -- or He was a damned liar. Hebrews calls Jesus the exact expression of God’s nature and the radiance of God’s glory. We can understand why Paul would say he might once have thought of Christ as purely human but now no longer considers Him as such. Paul had seen the Risen Christ – Jesus glorified, His Majesty revealed.

Yet Paul knew Christ the way we must all know Him, by the Spirit.

All this is not what starts the thought, however. He begins by saying “we do not know anyone in a purely human way.” We are temples of the Holy Spirit. We can know others by the Spirit – as the Spirit enables us to discern truth. We can know another person in the Spirit – as our communication and interactions take place at a different level with understanding that transcend the words we speak. We can know God through another person -- and not always the ones we might expect.

Sometimes when another troubles us, we need to realize we do not war against flesh and blood but against spiritual wickedness and spirits of darkness. There are other spirits in the world than God’s. Some will suck the life right out of you if you are not on your guard. In spite of the pain and the danger, we need to remember that God allows evil to exist and turns it, ultimately, for His own purpose. Not all things are good, but all things work together for good, so says Romans 8:28.

When we find difficulties in our lives, we are encouraged to pray. Prayer brings us into the presence of God – reminds us that He is right here, right now. Sometimes the answer to prayer comes when we have a revelation of God in the problem. I don’t mean that a solution to the problem is suddenly revealed – though that happens. I mean God is revealed. We see Him in the midst of our troubles and trials. We see what He is doing in us and through us.

God wanted to make known ... the glorious wealth of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory Colossians 1:27

Seeing Jesus in a hillbilly is a real possibility.