Last week I wrote that Easter Sunday will be our last day in this church where we have served since September of 1990. In mid-May I will become the Director of Missions for the Baptist Association of Greater New Orleans (BAGNO). Having pastored since 1962, I expect the transition to be difficult at first, but am excited at the opportunity to spend more time with the local ministers and to get to know all our 125 (or so) churches and missions.

The question has already arisen: What will happen to ‘The Matter of Fax’ article we’ve been producing each Tuesday since late 1996 (and which our church office staff has been e-mailing to some 3,000 recipients)? Thanks to my sons Neil and Marty, we do have an answer.

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Earl Hodges has taught physical education in our weekday school for all the years I’ve been at this church, nearly 14 now. On the side, he runs a karate school. And writes for the Times-Picayune. And serves local churches as a part-time minister of education. At the moment, Earl is enrolled in a local theological school where he is taking a course on great revivals through the centuries. And he’s studying Spanish. At 55, Earl Hodges has found the secret to staying young: never stop learning. Keep on expanding, learning, growing, pushing yourself.

Carl J. McKeever has long been my role-model in this. Dad will be 92 on April 13 and his mind is as sharp as ever. He reads constantly—not books, but newspapers, magazines, and articles people send him. Every morning he works the puzzles in the paper with his coffee, just after devouring the newspaper. Granted, the (Jasper, Alabama) Daily Mountain Eagle is not a five-pounder like the Washington Post, but it’s Mom and Dad’s lifeline to the outside world. I’ll spend this Friday night with them, and about the time I sit down, Pop will hand me a stack of clippings he has cut out and saved. He’s always growing new wood. Staying young. Considering that he cut short his formal education at the seventh grade in the early 1920s to go to work in the coal mines—where he labored for the next 35 years without missing a day from sickness or injury—he’s fairly impressive. If I do say so myself.

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The play “Thunder Rock” flopped in New York City, but in London, England, inthe fall of 1940 it became a sensation. In the story, a lighthouse-keeper on Lake Michigan reflects on the passengers whose ship went down near there in 1848. Throughout endless days and lonely nights, he re-creates these forlorn passengers who had fled Europe as immigrants and now in this wreck had lost what little they owned. They were discouraged, the world was against them, their hope was used up.

The lighthouse-keeper imagines he is personally addressing the passengers. He urges them to hold on. There is plenty of reason for hope, he assures them, because at that very moment in Illinois there is a young man named Abraham Lincoln. Madame Curie has been born. Florence Nightingale is alive. Pasteur is in Paris. Lift up your spirits, he calls to them. There is good news just ahead.

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“The Miracle” is a movie about the 1980 USA Olympic hockey team’s win over the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War. I was one of the millions who watched the original—camped out in front of my television on that Friday night, sweating and cheering and chanting “USA, USA.” I will never forget the drama and exhilaration of that event. So I went to the cinema the other afternoon, knowing more or less what to expect. What I got was a sermon on leadership.

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I’m grieving again. The morning newspaper confirmed the late night phone call telling of the death of a 14 year old boy, the son of a long-time friend. He was riding one of those accursed ATVs, the four-wheelers supposedly for farmers and hunters but which we mostly see kids riding alongside highways. He took his eyes off the road and hit a tree. A senseless, needless death of a precious young man.

I remember the first time a young person in my church wrecked while riding one of those monsters. She survived the accident, but after scraping the highway with her face, she left part of herself there forever. That was 20 years ago and I still grieve for her.

This puts me in a predicament. I want to urge parents not to allow your children to ride these suicide machines, but I do not want to dump more pain on moms and dads who made this ultimate mistake and will carry their sorrow to their grave. If you’re in that category, please forgive me for the bluntness of what’s coming.

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We can’t know for certain what happens after death. We just have to accept some things by faith. Some knowledge God has reserved for Himself and is off limits to earthlings. We ought to close our mouths and humble our hearts when we come to sacred matters. Whether we are saved and what happens when we die are up to God.

God has revealed Himself in His Word, the Holy Bible. Scripture says, “We know that we know Him.” As with any good parent, God wants His children certain of their relationship with Him. It is possible to know you are saved, to know Jesus Christ personally, and to know that when you die you go straight to Heaven. It is not presumption if God revealed it.

Most church members subscribe to one of these two views concerning salvation and eternity. Is one right and the other wrong?

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Mark Eberhart earned a Ph.D. from MIT, proving he is smart. He wrote a fascinating book onscience that is accessible to everyone, proving he is intelligent. In “Why Things Break,” Eberhart helps us understand our world by the way things come apart. Who would have thought this was a field of scientific study? After reading this book—and actually understanding a good bit of it, a tribute to the author—I find myself talking about it to everyone I meet. I even brought a sermon to our people based on some of the book’s insights. Here is one of them.

Most people will tell you the Titanic sank in the waters of the North Atlantic because it hit an iceberg. But the ship was designed to handle such a collision without sinking. To be sure, the Titanic’s situation was compounded by too few lifeboats, no binoculars for lookouts, and a captain who persisted in racing through dangerous waters when other ships had anchored for the night. But it was the brittle metal in the ship’s hull which proved the ship’s undoing.

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I remember when Michael Jackson was the coolest thing on the planet. Every new song he recorded generated trainloads of money, radio stations outdid each other in their adulation, everything the young star did was hip, cool, imitated, worshiped, and talked about. But it is not his record sales or his videos that forever froze him in my mind from that period 20 years ago. It was a young lady in my church who had a major crush on him. Holly pinned posters with his likeness all over her bedroom, she played only his music, and since she was unable to get to the man himself, she did the next best thing: turned her affection toward a Michael-Jackson-lookalike at her school. Her family worried about her for a while, wondering if this was normal and hoping it was a phase. It was probably normal and it was a phase.

I thought about this the other day while watching a television special about Jackson’s serial cosmetic surgeries. Not to belabor the obvious, but he went from looking like a thousand healthy teenage males to the bizarre figure we see on our television screens today. In between, at a couple of stages, he seems to have gotten it right. The problem was, he did not know when to stop. I sat there thinking that when Jackson was 25, there! You look terrific. Stop right here. But alas, he kept on authorizing more surgery until finally there’s not much left of his face to carve.

The handsome 25-year-old Michael Jackson is not the first great-looking person not to like the way he looks. Ask any resident of Hollywood, USA. Ask a thousand plastic surgeons. Ask the mother of any teenage girl.

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Our Matter-of-Fax for December 30, 2003, was on 25 ways to change our world. At the end, we invited you to send your suggestions. Here they are.

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