2007 Christmas Edition: Celebrating the “Reason for the Season” in Ashe County.
W
828-263-0095 MainStreetMarketingAshe.com
Scared Religion Isn’t Worth a Plugged Nickel
hen I was 14 my Daddy taught me the meaning of work. He needed me to help him, but he gave me a gift, whether he knew it or not. It was a valuable gift for a blind man to find out I didn’t have to sit in the corner. I was 14 when I started learning hard work. We were cutting wood with a crosscut saw when a block came off and bumped my shin, and I said a bad word I won’t repeat here. “Son, hold your temper!” he said. “A man without one ain’t worth a plugged nickel, and man that’s got one and don’t control it is worth less.” He was pretty wise in that way. He had them temper fits himself every now and then, but I didn’t dare say what I was thinking. It got quiet for a minute. I think he read my mind. Temper fits and outright meanness are two different things: meanness lasts all the time, because the devil’s got you in his control. I’ve known people that I’ve liked, but they let their temper rule them. Now Jesus had righteous indignation when he run that bunch out of the temple with a whip. The Bible says, “In your anger sin not” (Ephesians 4:26). Willful sin is when you don’t turn loose of your anger, you keep pushing it and turn it
into something bad. It was about that time I went through the motions of the church, went to the altar, and was baptized, so I considered myself a Christian. I knew God was the Creator of all things, but I thought of God as a tyrant who could kill you if you batted your eye wrong. Part of the time I would try to live the Christian life. I would do something wrong and it would bother me, but it didn’t convict me to get on my knees and find what I needed to really change. In 1966 my son Merle drove me to help the Flatt & Scruggs team to do an album. While I was there I woke up in the middle of the night with pain I thought was food poisoning. The next day I went to see Earl Scruggs’s doctor and found I had a ruptured appendix. After the operation the surgeon said, “We won’t know for sure whether this was successful or not, but you’ll know in three days.” I went into the isolation ward and from what I could tell was going on, I knew I was going to die. Then all at once I found myself, not in the ward, but in the presence of God Almighty and his Son. I was suspended between the world and eternity. I could almost reach out and touch them. It didn’t scare me, like He did when I was a boy. (Cont. on Pg. 3)
Doc Watson in concert in Todd, NC