I’m a couple months short of hitting the birthday some have named Eighty.  Oh, my goodness.  That’s a huge number.  As one who was often the youngest in the room or the youngest to do a lot of things, reaching this age comes as a mild surprise. It happened so quickly–and effortlessly.  All I did to achieve it was to keep on breathing.  (I’ve gotten rather good at that, and hope to keep it up for a while longer.)

April of 2021 will mark sixty years since God called me into the ministry. So, you’d think I would have learned a few things by now.  I sure hope so.

Here are some of the lessons the Lord has been trying to teach me over these decades…

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Baseball used to be called the National Pastime.  Whether it qualifies for that accolade now is a good question.

My opinion is the level of excitement generated in the typical game of football is twice that of baseball.  And that leads many to conclude that baseball is boring.  It is not.

On the other hand, the baseball season is six months long and involves 162 games. Whew.  The NFL’s regular season lasts from September to January and has only 16 games.  That means baseball has ten games for every one football game.

Baseball is not boring.  It’s quiet and relaxing much of the time, and downright exciting the rest of the time. (Reminds me of how an airline pilot described flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.)

My wife Margaret would accompany me to games, but not to watch.  She did not understand or care for the game, but she would take along a novel she was reading.  And she was a people-watcher.  Meanwhile, I was totally into the game.  And she was fine with that.

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The kid in me is romping and playing today.

Oaky Doaks was my favorite cartoon as a child.  It’s the reason I’m a cartoonist today.

Cartoonist R. B. Fuller was an accomplished artist. His work is so perfectly executed, unlike the hastily done stuff of at least half the stuff on the comics pages these days.  As a child in West Virginia in the late 1940s, I came across the daily strip “Oaky Doaks” and fell in love with it.  In the strip, Oaky was a farm boy who, using some equipment from the barn, hammered himself some armor and went off riding his plow-horse Nellie to do battle with dragons, rescue damsels in distress, and confront evil everywhere.  I loved everything about this strip.

When I would read the strip each day–remember, I was 8 or 9 years old at the time–my mind went into overdrive.  I seriously entered that tiny world of the medieval knight with his silly sidekick King Cedric.  It was delightful in every way.  And, may I say, Mr. Fuller sure could draw beautiful women!

Then, when I was 11, we moved back to the Alabama farm where our newspapers did not carry that strip.  I hardly noticed, I realize now, as I was involved in a hundred things.  Only years later did I look back and remember my old friend Oaky and find that something inside me was treasuring him and missing him. 

So, I went online.

On her Facebook page recently a friend asked, “Tell us something you have done which no one else in our group has done.”  She got the type of responses you might expect: hang gliding, jumping from planes, singing in Carnegie Hall, etc.

That started me thinking about these years of service to the Lord since He called me  in 1961.  I’m confident I’ve done nothing no one else has, but it may be worthwhile to reflect on some of the almost one-of-a-kind things that have taken place in my ministry. (I’ve not ever done this kind of reflection before, so we’ll see how it goes. Smiley-face here.)

For what it’s worth, here are some that come to mind…

I have drawn a comic book for the missionaries in Singapore. 

In the mid-1970s, I saw a note in The Commission magazine where they were looking for a cartoonist to draw an evangelistic comic for their work in Singapore.  While I mulled it over, the phone rang.  My wife said, “Honey, have you seen this? They need a cartoonist in Singapore!”

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