As a pastor, I am often called upon to conduct funeral services for members of our church family or for extended members of their families. Every once in a while, I get a phone call from a local funeral home about a family who has no pastor, and am given the opportunity to come and minister to them. It’s something I welcome, and know that it might be a divine appointment for a grieving family to hear about God’s love for them.
TWO BROTHERS AND ONE MAD DOG
I am eternally grateful for the spiritual heritage and upbringing I received from my family. Passed down to me and to my siblings was the truth about Jesus Christ, and a solid faith in His Word. My parents took seriously the biblical admonition from Deuteronomy 11:19: “You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”
But spiritual precepts are not all that my family passed down to us. Oral history is a part of the fabric of our family. The following is another excerpt from a book I am presently penning about my late father, Coolidge Sims. His last days in an assisted living center gave me a brief season to hear him again rehearse the stories of his childhood that I had heard all of my life. One evening in June of 2012, I joined Dad for supper in the dining hall of his final residence, The Oaks.
Our conversation that memorable evening includes his version of one of my favorite family stories. Enjoy!
SID IN THE SPIRIT
“Make no mistake about it, I believe in the supernatural– miracles, dreams and visions. Yes, to believe in the God of the Bible is to believe in His ability to do “anything.” But not everything that God does looks like a miraculous healing, a dream 
or a vision. His agenda is much deeper than that. He is most interested in transforming lives– resurrecting the spiritually dead to new life in Christ.
Here is the question: If God can do anything, then can He also use anyone in getting His message across? You’d better believe it! Have you ever read the biblical story of Balaam and his donkey? In the Autumn of 1978 I clearly saw it first hand. I’ll never forget the night I had a brief encounter with a bona fide “hippy” named Sid. Here’s the story.
FAKE NEWS NOT NEWS
It’s all the rage to talk about right now– “fake news.” What’s so crazy is that people tend to think that it’s a new thing. Oh, no. It’s been happening for a very long time, only it’s been historically called by different names: “yellow journalism,” “communist propaganda,” “disinformation,” “media hack,” and more recently “digital deception.”
As soon as Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439, “fake news” became a staple commodity in selling papers. Some would print almost anything to increase circulation and readership. In 1835, The Sun (a small, struggling news outlet in New York City) began printing fake stories about an alien civilization on the moon, even presenting scientific facts and multiple endorsements from well-respected scientific communities as proof. It was all a lie, but it established The Sun as a leading, profitable New York morning newspaper. Later it all became known as “The Great Moon Hoax,” but The Sun remained a major news outlet until 1950! For 115 years The Sun laughed all the way to the bank!
SKIN A CAT, AND MORE THINGS SOUTHERN
In last week’s post, Snake Doctors and All Things Southern, I shared some of my family’s most colorful Southern sayings. It’s just part of the Southern way of communicating, and each is full of meaning. Today I want to continue with other sayings that were heard often in the Sims household. My sister, Donna, and I were sharing a ride to the town of our birth, and had so much fun reaching back into time and pulling these sayings out of our memory banks. Some of them were common to many people around us, but a few were only spoken in our family circle. Enjoy.
