500 and still counting

Hard as it is to believe, this is the 500th column I have written and submitted for publication in the McCook Daily Gazette

When I wrote the first one, published Dec. 8, 1999, I had no idea what was soon to come.

However, beginning in early 2000, and on every regularly scheduled Wednesday since, omitting holidays and vacation days, Dawn of a New Day, aptly named by my editor, Bruce Crosby on Dec. 28, 1999, has appeared.

Column writing is no mean feat. Sometimes, Tuesday afternoons would suddenly come upon me and I would face a blank word processing screen and have no idea what to write. At other times, I've begun the next week's column before this week's even made the newsstand, the words cascading like spring melt off the mountain. My official deadline is 5 p.m., Tuesday, but Bruce and I both have learned that it is best to wait until Wednesday morning for the final draft. I've even been known to change things at the very last moment, hang the deadline. Once I remember pulling the entire scheduled column for one that emerged long after I had left work on Tuesday, completed just in time for Wednesday morning.

My home office is piled high with notebooks of every description, the pages containing scribbles of one idea or another, left to percolate. I find it interesting that the columns that I thought were too pedestrian, uninteresting or otherwise below par, would be the very ones that inspired letters of gratitude, the message resonating with at least one soul in the multitude.

Not all columns have received praise, however. Some readers have responded with comments of dismissal and disdain, and it was in some of this feedback that I was once accused of being "disingenuous." I had to look it up -- "Not candid or sincere, typically by pretending to know less about something than one really does." A high dollar word, but one I trust misses the intended mark.

In these pages, readers and now listeners as well, have met my children, my grandchildren, sisters and brothers, in-laws, friends and chance acquaintances encountered during my ordinary daily routines. They have shared the joys discovered in a marriage that has survived hurricane force winds to emerge cleansed, strengthened and ready to stand again and the sorrows wrought by human relationships gone awry.

In these pages I have bemoaned the abundance of weeds in my lawn, always wondering "does a tare know it's a tare or does it just want to live, like any other living thing?" while pulling them out by the roots. During the worst of the drought that plagued us for most of the last decade, I celebrated every rain drop and greening field, thanking God for the life-giving moisture finally released from his sky. Nothing, it seems, is taboo, not even the deeper issues of life and death, mourning those who have died and celebrating the emergence of new life. Five of my grandchildren have been born since the advent of my first column, and I have been present for four of the six births that guarantee that a small part of me will continue here long after I am gone, all carefully chronicled.

In these pages I have wrestled with some of the serious issues that divide us in this nation. Being unapologetically pro-life, disdaining abortion regardless of society's and even religion's named allowances, I have spoken to defend all life, even the lives of those condemned to death. Politicians and the sorry state of affairs that exists now between the governed and those that govern has come under intermittent fire and Corporate Christianity and the apostasy that breeds it has never been off-limits. I have even dared to address the homosexual agenda, refusing to fail to "rescue the perishing." Gently, I warn them that what was once considered evil is evil still and no amount of political correctness, nor religious acceptance can change that truth. Take note of the word "gently." In every column, I seek to speak first the language of love, because love wins and woos, it does not, unnecessarily, wound.

It is no coincidence, I believe, that this 500th column is slated for publication on Veterans' Day. Due to the often controversial subjects, and the unique slant this column takes, thanks are due, not only to God, but to those who stand and sometimes die, to protect the freedoms that allow me to pen these missives and the freedoms that allow the newspaper to publish them, the recent hate crimes legislation that may silence some, notwithstanding.

When I pause to consider the wonder of who I am, where I am and that I have been given this platform, I am brought to my knees before the One who has created me. It has been and will continue to be my heartfelt prayer as week follows week, that readers and listeners alike, would find in these words glimpses of that same One, who has loved them with an everlasting love, who has treated them with kindness and longsuffering even in the face of their dismissal and disdain, and who has given his all to assure them that "I go to prepare a place for you ... that you also may be where I am." (John 14:2, 3)

After all, he has taken a rebellious child, a high school dropout, raised just this side of the label "poor white trash" and has made something new in me with every new dawn. If he has done it for me, he will do it for anyone.

"'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.'" Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)