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