….to say this wonderful and powerful prayer. The people of Japan need
our prayers…..
Thanks
LORD, I just want to say THANK YOU, Because this morning I woke up and
knew where my children were.
Because this morning my home was still standing,
Because this morning I am not crying
Because my spouse, my child, my brother or sister, my parent does not
need to be buried or to be pulled out from underneath a pile of concrete,
Because this morning I was able to drink a glass of water,
Because this morning I was able to turn on the light,
Because this morning I was able to take a shower,
Because this morning I was not planning a funeral,
But most of all I thank you this morning because I still have life and a
voice to cry out for the people of Japan.
Lord I cry out to you, the One that makes the impossible, possible,
The One that turns darkness in to light,
I cry out that You give those mothers strength,
That You give them peace that surpasses all understanding,
That You may open the streets so that help can come,
That You may provide doctors, nurses, food, water, and all that they need
in a blink of an eye.
For all those that have lost family members, give them peace, give them
hope, give them courage to continue to go on!
Protect the children and shield them with your power.
I pray all this in the name of Jesus!!!
To all friends, please continue to forward this so that we can pray
together for the people in Japan.
you brother know my struggles and i just wanted to take time to thank you for your prayers and your support
see you next tuesday
Love ya
Steve
April 10 at 2pm. “We have found a number of our people have a desire to get married, but financially they did not feel it was possible.” Said Pastor Sharon Barnsdale, director of Christian Education at Legacy. “Most every woman dreams of a beautiful church wedding. While the church has always offered couples a chance to come into our offices and get married for free, we felt this would be a wonderful opportunity to give them an actual church wedding instead.” All couples have to do to get married, is to get their marriage license from the county clerk’s office. After the ceremony there will be a reception for all the couples with finger foods and a beautiful wedding cake. “We want our people who are currently living together, some for many years, to get their lives right before God and their family,” said Senior Pastor Steve Smothermon, who will preside over the ceremony. “We feel this will allow them the opportunity to be an example to their children and families of what it means to truly follow Christ.” We want to give people an opportunity to honor God through marriage (Genesis 2:24). Legacy Church is located at 7201 Central Avenue, Northwest (just west of Coors).
This is a piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and former president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It is well worth reading, and a few good chuckles are guaranteed. Here goes…
************************************
My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.
He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”
At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
“Oh, bull—-!” she said. “He hit a horse.”
“Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.
My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that.
But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
But, sure enough , my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.
It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother.
So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.
(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)
He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.
If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”
If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”
“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.
“No left turns,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.
As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”
“What?” I said again.
“No left turns,” he said. “Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”
“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support.
“No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.”
But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”
I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing.
“Loses count?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”
I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.
“No,” he said ” If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90.
She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102.
They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.
A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.” At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”
“You’re probably right,” I said.
“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.
“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said..
“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.” He stayed in bed all the next day.
That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night.
He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said:
“I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet”
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
“I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”
A short time later, he died.
I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.
I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life,
Or because he quit taking left turns.
Life is too short to wake up with regrets.
So love the people who treat you right.
Forget about the ones who don’t.
Believe everything happens for a reason.
If you get a chance, take it and if it changes your life, let it.
Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.”
ENJOY LIFE NOW – IT HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE!
Gordette DuBois brought her boyfriend, Tony Oliva, home to the burgh of Hitchcock, S.D., for the first time over the Christmas holiday in 1965.
“There was a movie around that time, ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,'” Gordette said. “A couple of our grandchildren saw the movie for the first time the other day. I told them, ‘That was Tony and me 45 years ago.'”
Gordette laughed and said: “Truthfully, it was never an issue in my hometown once people met Tony. Who doesn’t love Tony?”
The only possible answer would be: pitchers employed in the American League from 1964 through 1971, before Tony O’s right knee was destroyed making a diving catch in Oakland.
Gordette and Tony were married in Hitchcock in 1968.
“All my relatives were there, which means the whole town was there,” she said.
The Olivas bought a house in Bloomington from Tony’s teammate Sandy Valdespino, who is also Cuban. In 1972, the Olivas moved a few blocks to another house in Bloomington and remain there today.
“We have many of the same neighbors,” Gordette said. “We have a great neighborhood. We love it here.”
The Olivas have three children and four grandchildren, age 3 through 20. “Our kids and the grandkids all live within 10 minutes of us,” Gordette said. “You won’t meet a person where family is more important than with Tony.”
This is both with the immediate circle of Olivas in Bloomington, and with the family he left behind — unknowingly — when he came to the United States to play baseball in the spring of 1961.
He was born in 1938 as Antonio Oliva Lopez (maternal name), the third-oldest child and oldest boy among 10. When he got to the U.S. his paperwork was changed to reflect the name and birthdate of his brother Pedro Jr., born in 1941.
“That’s the way the scouts did it then,” Gordette said. “The thought was if a team felt it had a younger player, they were more likely to keep him.”
The Twins saw Oliva among a group of Cubans sent by scout Papa Joe Cambria. They were mortified by his outfield play and released him. A man named Rigelberto Sanchez intervened. And Phil Howser, who ran the Charlotte franchise for Calvin Griffith, took up the cause and Tony was sent to the low minors at Wytheville, N.C.
“He tore the cover off the ball,” Gordette said. “He has a silver bat for that, for hitting .410.”
When he first came to the U.S., Oliva figured he would be back in Cuba for the winter, playing winter ball and being with his family. Except, Fidel Castro shut down the country and through the decades it took much paperwork for Tony or his family to visit one another.
“For quite a while now, Tony has been able to go in once a year,” Gordette said. “We go the first two weeks in February.”
There are six surviving siblings and dozens of nieces, nephews and other relatives.
“How much family? I took 61 little gifts with me this time,” she said.
“We fly to Havana, spend a day with family that lives there, then we go to Rio del Pinar, the area where he grew up. Tony has a smile on his face for the whole two weeks, seeing the farmland, being with family.
“Tony’s dad worked in the tobacco factory and was famous for rolling the leaves to make the best cigars. I’m sure, if he was permitted to stay that long, Tony would spend a couple of months in Cuba, until it was time to go to Fort Myers and be with the Twins’ minor leaguers.
“Tony would never miss being part of that. He loves being with the young Spanish-speaking players that are new to baseball here. Tony is a godfather to them.”
It has been easy to be a legend attached to the Twins in this decade, with the winning seasons and now with Target Field. It wasn’t so easy from 1993 through 2000, during those eight wretched summers of losing inside the Metrodome. And yet Tony was there, to mingle with fans, to make P.R. appearances for a team that had almost nothing going for it.
“It’s 50 years right now since Tony became part of the Twins’ organization,” Gordette said. “The Twins have been great to Tony, but it’s a two-way street. He has been great to the Twins.”
For sure.
And that’s why the unveiling of the Tony Oliva statue this morning near Gate 6 at Target Field will be in honor of a great hitter but also a great godfather, family man, neighbor and Minnesotan.
AMEN!
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