Chance Encounters

Posted: November 10, 2018 in Life and Memories, My view of the world
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“You wander down the lane and far away, leaving me with a song that will not die…”

                                                                                                                            Nat King Cole

In one of those chance encounters that can happen so unexpectedly in a person’s life, I saw her, my childhood friend and companion of so many years ago. I spotted her immediately as she entered the hallway just a few feet in front of me. I don’t really know why, but I desperately wanted to rush up to her and announce my presence…but I couldn’t. I’m not sure if simple shyness or fear of a cold reception held me back, but whatever the reason, I found myself silently walking along behind her, fearful of approaching. For reasons unknown, she suddenly stopped and turned around and my fears and uncertainties instantly disappeared in a flash as she walked toward me, a smile blossoming across her face.

“Ricky, it’s so good to see you!” she gushed as she unabashedly threw her arms around me, “how have you been? It has been so long.” I despise the name Ricky, having worn it throughout my childhood, but somehow, coming from her it sounded sweet and natural and fitting. We continued to hug like the long-lost friends we were and it lasted for a moment and an eternity and felt amazingly nice. I found myself not wanting to let go but people were beginning to stare, so I reluctantly let go.

I felt the same closeness and affection toward her as I did when we were children. In fact, some of my earliest childhood memories were created with her as we spent many of our formative years together. We sat next to each other in church and also at school, we played together, sang together, discovered the world together and cried together. We  had developed a bond that I have rarely felt with anyone since.

Eventually though, the inevitable happened. At the end of our third grade school year she moved away. I was totally distraught and it seemed like my world was collapsing about me. I still recall the overwhelming sadness I felt the day she left. Life moved on and I moved on with it and even though the emptiness and grief waned, I never quite forgot her.

Thirty years have passed and as we sat and talked, I perceived and experienced the same bond I had felt as a child. It suddenly seemed like only yesterday we were hopping and bouncing on her pogo stick, or playing with stuffed animals or discovering new things and treasures within our yards or walking together to her grandfather’s store to share candy or a coke. I’m not sure whether she felt the same sensations or not, but I suspect she did by the smile on her face as we spoke. Eventually we parted, promising to keep in touch.

This evening as I pause from catching up on work, I can’t help but wonder what life would have been like if she had not moved away all those years ago. I know her life would probably radically different that it is now. She is a successful teacher and mother, happily married to a well respected physician. I am very grateful that I had the chance encounter to meet the grown-up version of my closest childhood companion and I am jubilant she has the wonderful life she has been blessed with. A person can never really know what extreme and considerable differences small changes could have made in our lives. However, as I sit here in the gloaming of the evening twilight, I still wonder though, what it would have been like if she had never moved away.

For Darlene

1996  written under the pseudonym, Richard Corey

Insurance Companies

Posted: November 10, 2018 in Life and Memories, My view of the world
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“and the days dwindle down to a precious few…”

Frank Sinatra

It seems to become more apparent every time I open a statement from an insurance company, that they are blatantly becoming more fearless about raising their consumer rates, often from one statement to the next. In the not too distant past insurance companies would employ surreptitious and covert techniques in raising their rates, to the point we almost had to compare statements to even detect their ploy. They are still fluidly sleek and shark-like in their approach, but now they are completely and overtly informing us of the fact they are, once again, going to be dipping their hands into our wallets (or at least my insurance carrier is).

For example, I received a birthday card from my insurer a few days before my last birthday, which I thought was a nice touch. Their card had a nice, genteel look to it as had all the others I had received over the years…only this card was a little different. Inside was a poem instead of the expected generic greeting that I had come to envisage from my insurance carrier.

It goes as follows:

Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to you. I hope it’s great one, you know that I do.

   Now that I have that out of the way, I’m raising your rates, effective today.

I’ve done you a service, (I’m sure you won’t mind) By installing a siphon from your bank to mine.

Hard monthly payments and nasty old cash. Won’t worry you now, there’s no time for that.

You’re no longer young, life’s passing you by. So stop by and thank me, before you die.

All at once I was sunned, mortified and flabbergasted, by their audacity and boldness, then I sat back and slowly started to realize that they are no different than most any other company that I deal with today. I suppose, what really bothers me about this whole episode, is that they are forcing me to acknowledge the reality that I am getting older. If they hadn’t been so bloody audacious about it all, I possibly could have gone on several more years pretending that death’s winged chariot is not breezing past my front window on a slowly increasing schedule, and that I am still a young, virile, strong twenty-something year old, instead of the old geezer I am swiftly becoming.

It was a nice card though, I have to say.

1998, newspaper article written under the pseudonym Richard Corey

Half The Man

Posted: November 9, 2018 in Life and Memories
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“…I’m going to be like you Dad,

You know I’m going top be just like you”

Cat Stevens

He was born beneath a shimmering winter moon in the old south during the infancy of the roaring twenties. He entered the world as the fourth of five children to his loving, hard-working parents who scratched a living from the rural Middle Tennessee soil. They named him Hubert after a close family friend and for the first seven years of his life he learned the ways of the county as he ran, romped and climbed after finishing his daily chores at his home that his God-fearing father had built by his own hands as a wedding present to his doting wife. At the dawn of his eighth year Hubert’s parent made the decision to move the family to the larger town in the area, to give them a chance for a better education than that which was available to them in the small one-room school house in the community. The family moved to town three years before the crucible of strife and hunger created by the great depression descended upon everyone in America like crashing wave, changing almost everyone’s life, virtually overnight. Hubert’s father was a carpenter and home builder by trade and with several homes owned by him, as well as a garden and a few chickens, their family fared better than others as Hubert learned to hunt and forage to assist in providing sustenance for the family. While growing up in this difficult time he quickly learned to survive by using his wits and his fists and was largely self-educated after quitting school in the eighth grade, he grew up street smart, tough and mean.

When he turned nineteen at the beginning of 1941, his love for animals and nature caused him to turn to the only institution where he could be outdoors and ride horses and get paid for it…he enlisting for a year with the local Nation Guard post, subsequently becoming a member of the US Army National Guard Horse Calvary. Ten months into his tour while relaxing at home on a ten day furlough, he was listening to the family’s Silvertone radio on a chilly Sunday morning in December when the broadcast was interrupted by the announcement the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. He was immediately inducted into the Army and for almost four years following additional training designed to hone his skills as a soldier, he lived in the heat, stink and slime of innumerable South Pacific Islands, dodging bullet, bayonets and bombs. One bomb got too close and he spent the rest of the war traveling from hospital to hospital, finally receiving his discharge papers on November 19, 1945 from Walter Reed Army hospital in Washington, DC.

He finally arrived home to Cookeville, Tennessee to an almost non-existent job market, a young wife and a coping disease called alcoholism. He drifted from job to menial job until the arrival of a beautiful daughter forced him to start fighting the bottle and looking for meaningful work and sobriety, turning his attention and concentration toward providing for his growing family. Not long after the birth of his third and final child, a boy, he opened his own business while struggling to seek ways to balance his time between work and family.

With the birth of his children he became he became a loving father who taught his children independence, responsibility., self worth, strength and kindness. The lessons of life he passed to his children was readily absorbed by the two girls as they grew to become successful and responsible adults and parent. The boy, on the other hand…maybe no so much.

I am the boy and this man is my father. I have watched, respected and attempted to emulate him all my life without too much success, though I still try as I attempt to apply the I moral and social values he taught me. More importantly though, I have learned to fight for myself, fish, hunt, hike, write my name in the snow, (I’ll give you a minute to think about the last one) and how to laugh from him.

He is the foremost of my heroes and I love him. Watching my children grow and develop makes me realize just how daunting the path of being a father really is to follow. I try to view them through his eyes as I attempt to draw upon the lessons that he taught me growing up. If I can learn to be half the man he is, I will be grateful and happy, and I will also consider myself lucky, for I still have a tortuously long way to go.

Written under the pseudonym Richard Corey 1998

Dedicated to my father, Hubert Bussell

Jan 27, 1921 – November 9, 2013

Gazing at Firelies

Posted: January 23, 2018 in Life and Memories
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When I was a child growing up in Middle Tennessee during the sixties, one of the things I really loved to do on a summer evening after supper was finished and the chores were done, was to go outside into the magical back yard of our neighborhood home and crawl up onto the white, wooden picnic table that ruled the middle of the yard and lie there on my back and allow the exquisitely dazzling night to envelop me. There was very little light pollution in our small town in the 1960s and as I lay there, I would first watch the lightning bugs dance and flicker about as I would attempt to follow the trail of a particular one, endeavoring to guess where they would suddenly next appear in a flash of light in this secret hide and seek game we were playing together. Soon however, I would tire of that and turn my attention to the main attraction, the gloriously magnificent stars in the heavens! I learned early on that as I watched other thing at night, the stars would seem to grow brighter and brighter and many more would suddenly seem to start appearing, as if adjusting a light from very dim to dim to bright. All these beautiful celestial objects arrayed themselves from horizon to horizon while twinkling and dotting the inky canvas high above and were always a pleasure and joy to simply study and watch.

In this time period of my life during the sixties in Tennessee, life was blissfully lazy and safe. In our neighborhood, if the weather permitted, our moms would often kick us out of the house in the morning so we kids weren’t in their way as they went about their home-keeping duties, and we would have the day to romp and wander and play, always with one ear cocked, listening for the familiar sound of our mothers calling us home for lunch or supper. I also loved reading in these idyllic years, and every so often, I might earn a dime or even a quarter to spend on candy or comic books that I could open and escape into far away countries or even space as a superhero or a fearless adventurer. Usually sprinkled about throughout within the pages of these comics were ads and one of the ads, in particular, attracted me and I was allowed to snip it out and write to the owners of the ad, the American Seed Company. It just so happened, according to the ad, the American Seed Company would send me seeds to sell at a small profit as well as earning points that were redeemable from their catalog. The more seeds I acquired from them, the more point I accumulated, toward the wonderful prizes they listed in their catalog. Looking though the list of prizes in their big prize book, I quickly spotted what was the best prize of all…a telescope! Oh my…I imagined all the wonderfully, glorious things I could see with that marvelous device!

Momma loaned me the money to get started on this enterprise (15 cents a pack) and when my flower seed packets and the instructions for selling and marketing them arrived, I started canvasing the neighborhood, knocking on doors and touting the beauty of these seeds. I would find myself going back and looking in the prize book at that telescope as I continued to sell my little seed packets, afraid that it would somehow disappear from the pages, for with that telescope, worlds unknown would open up to me and ever-so-more increase my ability to explore the stars. I quickly sold out and ordered more and more seeds and even though it took me all summer, I finally had enough points accumulated to receive what I had been diligently slaving for…the telescope! The telescope ultimately arrived and even though it didn’t quite match the picture from the list, it was still a wonderful thing, for with that small, flimsy paper-tubed telescope, I discovered planets, craters on the moon, moons around Jupiter, Saturn’s rings, the milky way and so, so much more. I would sit or lie out on that picnic table gazing through my telescope and I was instantly out there floating among the stars. I recall staying out there for what seemed like hours evening after evening until Momma would eventually call me back from my adventures to reality, bidding me inside to get ready for bedtime.

Some of those memories came flooding back to me last night as I dutifully went down to the chicken yard located in the field next to the woods of our farm in rural Tennessee to secure the hens in their house. As I started walking back up toward my home, I paused at the edge of the woods in the moonlight and just stood there in the gentle night breeze gazing up and watching the lightning bugs flickering and flashing as they performed for potential mates, attempting to impress them with their aerial phosphorescent displays whilst the clouds and the stars high above were doing a hide and seek dance of their own. After a bit, I continued up toward the house smiling as I remember the old pleasant memories of a childhood long ago and started wondering what ever happened to the little telescope that allowed me to romp among the stars, night after night…

Jim Bussell

7-22-16

Did Satan Miss a Link to the Birth of the Messiah?

Posted: October 20, 2013 in Christian
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Anyone that has had exposure to the Christian religion is aware of the world’s greatest antagonist, Satan and the prominence as the number one bad guy throughout the bible.

Recently, while studying the bible, I have been examining some of Satan’s attempts to thwart the plan of God and I believe I have stumbled across an example where Satan may have missed one of the links and prophecies pointing to the birth of the Messiah. I am becoming convinced that Satan missed this link because the Holy Spirit excluded it from the official record (the Torah), though I think historical record and a little circumstantial evidence proves my point.

From the standpoint of mankind, Satan is an ultra-powerful supernatural being. The bible tells how Satan is an angel and we know from reading the scriptures that angels can wipe out scores of thousands of humans in one fell swoop (read 2 Kings 19:35 where an angel slew 185,000 Assyrians one night). However, that being said, Satan is a creation and is not a god and has limitations which includes the fact that God has to reveal something before Satan can know about it.

We read from the very beginning of the bible to the very end of this greatest historical novel of all times that Satan has attempted to destroy the lineage and the path of the Judean royal line throughout the scriptures to prevent Christ from being able to reign upon David’s throne and to claim the title of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Satan may be supernaturally powerful from our perspective, but he is not all-knowing and uses the holy word of our Lord as a prime source of knowledge to plan his attacks upon the royal line of God. Obviously, God understands this, but adds the information to the scriptures knowing full well Satan will use it in whatever manner he can to thwart the plan of salvation and at times it seems like he has succeeded, but in the end, God always prevails.

I truly believe that Satan missed having the knowledge of watching for the precise signs to point to the location and the time of the birth of The Christ and I feel the information that led the “wise men” to find the Messiah came directly from the prophet Daniel and the book of Daniel is where we first read about the Magi and it is a book that details an historical story line as well as a timeline that I feel is extremely exciting. You will find many links and article and posts about the possible history of the Magi that showed up in Jerusalem, but I know of no one else that has my viewpoint as to why these strangers from a different culture suddenly showed up (the reason for this simply could be that I haven’t looked hard enough).

As a child, knowing the story of Christ’s birth, I always wondered who these guys called the Magi (or wise men) were. I would ask others, but all anyone that I asked could say was they were wise men from the east and they would leave it at that, which meant that I was always left a bit unsatisfied with these answers, so I want to explore a little deeper into just who the Magi were.

Historical research indicates that the Magi were members of the Medeo-Persian Priesthood1 and we find that Daniel was chief of this priesthood according to Daniel chapter 4. Daniel 4:9 “Belteshazzar2, chief of the magicians, because I know that the Spirit of the Holy God [is] in you, and no secret troubles you, explain to me the visions of my dream that I have seen, and its interpretation. (NKJV) This scripture tells us Daniel held the office over these magicians to the court of Darius, the ruler of the known world. At that time in history, Daniel was probably the second or third most powerful man on the globe.

We also read in Daniel 6 the familiar story of the lion’s den. After Daniel leaves the lion’s den and is found unharmed, King Darius created a decree that was sent to all the nations of the earth stating that all nations under his rule must fear and give reverence to the God of Daniel (Daniel 6:25-28). To me, these scriptures seem to set up a series of conditions that gave Daniel the ability to spread the influence of the God of Israel and also importantly (and in my opinion) the specific prophecy he would receive about the birth of Christ in Daniel chapter 9. These conditions cited in the scripture indicate a link to the appearance of the Magi that suddenly appear unannounced in Judea (which creates much consternation and fear in Herod3) bringing gifts for the newborn Messiah. In my opinion, it wasn’t until after the Magi showed up in Jerusalem to request an audience with Herod, that Satan finally received his first clue as to where the baby Messiah was and he wasted no time in reacting, as we read about Herod sending out the command to kill all the male children within a certain age within the area of his rule (of course God already knew about this and had Joseph and Mary skedaddle with the baby Jesus in their arms for Egypt, which places them beyond the influence of Herod’s decree). To me, this is one of those events where the bible implies a Messianic prophecy that didn’t make it out of the Holy Spirit’s editing room for us to read, though Daniel seemingly knew the specifics of it and it seems he taught his dedicated followers to pass on this prophecy down through the centuries to their successors. Remember, Gabriel gave Daniel the specific day Christ would present himself as the Messiah and was told he would be crucified, and it is not a stretch of the imagination to assume he gave him a specific prophecy of the birth of our Savior also…kept out of the official record so Satan would be taken by surprise.

So what happened? The fact that five hundred years later this imposing procession of important foreigners (Magi from Parthia4) suddenly shows up at Herod’s doorstep in Jerusalem while following a special star5 and looking for the new born king of God’s chosen people, means they had to be there following some precise instructions, and the fact they were descendants of the Median Magi priesthood that was under the leadership of Daniel the prophet several centuries earlier, even though their nation worshiped strange gods, screams direct linkage to me.

Where am I going with this? My personal opinion is that Satan is totally familiar with the Holy Word and knows every word, every nuance, every prophecy, every covenant, every commandment and every screw-up of the Israelites in there. My thought is that this prophecy that guided Daniel to instruct the Magi to pass the prophecy down through their ranks from generation to generation was missed by Satan because it was left out of the record, causing him to ignore these pagan priests that are conveying the message of the expectation of a Jewish Messiah appearing under certain miraculous conditions to their following successions of priests. OK, if that’s true, why was it left out? We could throw out conjectures all day, but I believe this visit by the Magi gives us an indication, on a much smaller scale, of what celebrations should have been taking place in Israel if the Jews had paid attention to prophecy and had known to look for the Messiah, is one possibility. Another possibility is their visit was an end-run around Satan’s deception campaign, which in part, was designed to prevent such an announcement to be heralded, but the Magi succeeded at announcing to the Jewish leadership that the Messiah and King was among them. Or maybe it’s a combination of the two thoughts. Regardless whatever could have happened, the Jewish leadership were, once again, asleep at the wheel and ignored this event, which is only one of the most important events this creation has ever witnessed, and the single event that started the clock for the greatest love story ever lived, and the purpose of the creation.

Because Christ as the Messiah was rejected by the nation of Israel, The Lord turned his back on them as prophesied throughout the Torah, (Hosea’s prophecy is my favorite) which resulted in the catastrophe in 70 AD and the diaspora6 of the Jews.

I have a non-traditional view of the scripture, according to many of my acquaintances, so in my mind’s eye, I see God discussing with the others in the Trinity over steaming cups of nectar, his script for our universe before zapping us into existence. We all know what happened…Lucifer (who had become the Satan) threw a wrench into the works, apparently causing the Lord to rewrite the script of our complicated SIM game7, so to speak, even though I feel our Lord set up Satan so he would cause his own fall because of Satan’s addiction to the real killer, pride. I am always looking for patterns and, I guess conspiracies and one pattern that I see is; after the Jews turned chicken and refused to invade Canaan the first time, The Lord sent them wandering for thirty eight years before they were allowed to occupy the land. Fast-forward several hundred years and we have the Jewish nation reject God again by rejecting His Son. Thirty eight years later, the Romans destroyed the temple and massacred over a million Jews in the process of the siege and occupation of Jerusalem. I can’t help but wonder if this was simply a modified script from the original one I had imagined above, one where possibly the Jews accepted him and thirty eight years later, the chosen people, with Christ as their King, started the rule of the earth from Zion. Just as they had captured and occupied the promised land so many years ago.

In hindsight, we can look back and think, “what dorks, these guys had these prophecies about the Messiah, mainly the one from Daniel chapter nine, right there in front of them and they ignored it and see what it got them.”. Before we get all holier-than-thou, we need to look at ourselves. Heck, forget religion, here in America, our leaders ignore and reject our own constitution, they reject moral judgments and teachings, much less the teaching of the scriptures and we’ve only had a couple hundred years to do it in. At least Israel seemed to hold it together a few hundred years longer than that.

God Bless, Jim

1 http://ldolphin.org/magi.html

2 Belteshazzar was Daniel’s Persian name

3 There had to be many, many more than three Magi to cause the apoplexy that Herod seemed to demonstrate over seeing them

4 http://www.biblestudy.org/maps/parthian-empire-large-map.html

5 Numbers 24:17 tells of a star in prophecy, but after reading it in context, I don’t see the link to the prophecy of Christ’s birth…

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora

7 I personally think we are some sort of giant SIM game where our reality is all smoke and mirrors and the real reality is what we refer to as the ‘spirit world’. The apostle Paul supports that view in Ephesians 6:12

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