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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
When I was a little eeper I was sent to visit my Grandma who lived across a big field from our house on the edge of Small Town. After a time I wandered downstairs to watch her work with what was even then an old-fashioned wringer washer. It’s the kind with actual rollers twisting and smashing the clothes out of and back into the wash or rinse water.
I was just over 4 years old, probably old enough to know better than to put my fingers on the clothes near the rollers. But of course I did so and, you guessed it, I didn’t let go in time. In a manner of seconds my arm was drawn into the rollers along with the clothes.
I guess I started yelling or crying or both because Grandma ran (make that flew) down the stairs to the rescue yelling or screaming or both louder than me. By then my arm was into the wringer almost up to my elbow. I remember her flipping a lever on the right side of the washer, which released the rollers and freed my arm.
This is one of my earliest vivid memories. I can see the washer, my bare arm, the wet clothes, and Grandma wearing white. I can see the basement steps, clothes hanging on a nearby line, and the old furnace. I can hear the washer and remember Grandma’s excitement. But I can’t remember being all that shaken myself, or in pain, just something between befuddled, scared, and Oh Yeah Man, That Was Cool.
I don’t remember either, but Mom does, that this happened when she was in the hospital with a newborn sister scheduled to come home the next day. She did and I’m told Grandma was still so worried my arm would be permanently damaged she didn’t have it in her to help care for a newborn. So another relative came to help and gave my sister her first bath. Meanwhile, I returned to boy-land, roaming wild and free and oblivious to the fact that a New Sheriff had arrived in my home.
You’d think this would be the end of the story, but it’s not. Years later in college I met this girl who’d grown up in the next state, West Virginia, two and one-half hours from me. We sort of got along well. Actually, we got along really well and still are after thirty-six plus years of marriage.
The amazing thing: when she was about 7 years old she also got her arm caught in a neighbor’s wringer washer. Unlike me, who bears no physical remembrance, she wears a small scar on her right hand pointer finger. This, we speculate, is because she rescued herself, pulling her arm back out of the rollers. Whoa, I doubt if I would’ve had the smarts or the moxie to do that. Good thing Grandma was upstairs.
So what are the odds that two kids who ran their arms through wringer washers would get together?
But who cares? We got together.
Years hence, like most people, we’ve been “run through the wringer” more than once by the vagaries and vicissitudes of life.
But who cares? We’re still together.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow Dr. Rogers at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
Christmases Remembered
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
There’s so much about Christmas that’s worth enjoying and remembering that no one will ever run out of stories, songs, or sonnets.
Christmas is special because it’s the time we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the babe in the manger who is Savior of the world.
Beyond this greatest of all Christmas gifts most of us add family, tradition, faith and worship, love, hope, goodwill, and peace on earth. We add coming home for the holidays and times just as poignant when we can’t come home. We think of lights and decorations, gifts and giving, holiday music, snow, food and feasting, excited children, seeing loved ones long unseen, and so much more.
Christmas is the best time of year and one of the things that make’s it so are the memories of Christmases past. Even Ebenezer Scrooge knew that much.
Recently I recalled a few of our Christmas memories. Few recollections are more fun. I commend it to you.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow Dr. Rogers at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
Ten P’s in a Pod: A Million-Mile Journal of the Arnold Pent Family (The Vision Forum, 2004) is a remarkable and heart-warming story of how a family of ten traveled across two nations to share salvation in Christ.
Ten P’s in a Pod was compiled from journals written by Arnold Pent III during his seventeenth to nineteenth years. First self-published in 1965, the book became a word-of-mouth success nationwide among Christian families inspired by this engaging story of dedicated parents, a musically talented family of eight siblings, a vision for evangelism, and God’s blessings.
Arnold Pent III is the third child and second son of Arnold and Persis Pent Jr. His account is therefore personal, funny, poignant, and respectful, and its spiritual depth is a testimony to the parents’ instruction and the Scripture’s impact upon the teenage author.
The story reveals a Father who was a man of astounding faith, innovative spirit, and vision for evangelism, along with a Mother who was a person of equal faith, faithfulness, and servant’s heart. How these two were able to take a family of eight children across both the United States and Canada throughout the 1950s in various old cars is a story worth reading.
The family eventually earns the sobriquet “the world’s most unusual family.” Their incredible facility with long, memorized passages of Scripture, their musical presentations, and their 10 P’s story of making their way without knowing how or when necessary funds would come, all while driving thousands of miles, is, in a word, amazing.
The Pent family home-schooled their children before home-school became a verb. They traveled as a family music program and reached all manner of churches and people with God’s message. Their story demonstrates that it’s possible for siblings to love one another and for a family to stay together as a productive unit during a time when cultural trends began pulling families apart.
Lessons are apparent throughout the book: God is faithful, God provides, exercise and good eating habits really can preserve health, Scripture memorization is good for the soul as well as practice of the Christian life, family matters, the Good News can reach the seemingly most hardened individuals.
Not long ago I happened to become acquainted with Arnold Pent III, so I can attest that his love for the Lord and his desire to reach the lost continue fifty years later. His family’s story is engaging and enjoyable. I recommend it, both as a “good read” and as a source of inspiration.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow Dr. Rogers at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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Jim Samra’s The Gift of the Church: How God Designed the Local Church to Meet Our Needs as Christians (Zondervan, 2010) is a pastor’s passionate answer to the question, “What benefit is the church?” In his first book, Samra states his conviction early: “Nowhere is God as present as he is in the midst of his gathered church.”
Samra cares about the universal Church, but his heartbeat is the local church, the one we attend or should be attending on a regular basis. Samra acknowledges the value of other Christian organizations, parachurch ministries, and gatherings of two or more believers, all of which matter to the Christian life. But in Samra’s view only the church is created by God for specific purposes of community, and Jesus proclaimed this uniqueness when he said, “I will build my church,” (Matthew 16:18).
Samra argues the church offers an opportunity for God to speak in a special way. Through the Holy Spirit, Samra believes people hear from God other than simply in the preacher’s actual words. He relates several anecdotes about people who later credited him with spiritually energizing statements he never made, yet some of these people had the statements documented in their notes. Samra believes this is evidence of God’s unique presence in the church.
Church is a place where God brings believers together in concert with him and others, a place where diverse talents are combined in productive unity. Church is the City of God or place of koinonia, God’s design for countering the lonely crowd and alienation so often characteristic of the City of Man. Despite the flaws in the church, the result of sinful human beings gathered together, Samra strongly contends the church is God’s vision, an organization and an organism of great beauty.
The book’s theological analysis is interspersed with stories and illustrations drawn from the author’s church experience both as a parishioner and as a pastor. The stories are especially helpful making the otherwise scholarly text more interesting and understandable.
Overall the book is a love letter to the church. It’s written by a pastor with a clear sense of calling. It’s written with a great appreciation for the spiritual blessings of family, of home church, and of church-as-family. It’s written with both a faith and an empirically based confidence in the profound benefits awaiting all believers who accept the gift of the church.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow Dr. Rogers at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
God@Heaven.Divine
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
In this day of text messaging and email addresses for everyone, wouldn’t it be great to email the Lord at his address:
Since I was a small boy growing up in a Christian family and taken to a church every time the door was open I’ve heard preachers and teachers exhort me to read my Bible and pray. Participating in these activities is part of the practice and tradition of the Christian faith. Not to read your Bible or pray is in a very real sense not to know what it means to live the Christian life.
God, his Word says, likes to hear from us. He wants us to talk to him, to share our needs and express our gratitude. The Sovereign Creator God of the universe invites a relationship with those he created. He desires communion with you and with me, just as he wanted it with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden long ago.
Reading the Bible lets us learn God’s will for his world. Once we learn it we become his ambassadors, carriers of a message of reconciliation to a lost and hurting world. We know truth and are able to make it known. We can do this because our confidence and our competence are rooted in the Spirit of God’s grace in our lives, not in our own strength.
We may not be able to contact the Lord by emailing him via
Revised “Making a Difference” program #462.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow Dr. Rogers at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.
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- Written by: Rex M. Rogers
The Church Universal (or universal Church or catholic Church) is a title or phrase used by theologians and church scholars to refer to what the Scripture calls the Body of Christ. It represents the sum total of all Christians, genuine believers in Christ, in all times, countries, and cultures.
So to refer to the American Church or the Middle East church is a way of describing a subset of the entire Body. These terms encompass Christians who live in the United States or who live in the countries generally considered part of the Middle East, respectively.
There’s much Americans don’t seem to know about their brothers and sisters in Christ in the Middle East, some of what they think they know that’s incorrect, and much more to say about what God is doing in the Church in the Middle East. To address this issue I recently wrote a column, a beginning commentary, on “What the American Church Should Know About the Middle East Church.”
The column refers to SAT-7, which is a Cyprus-based Christian satellite television ministry for whom I work. SAT-7 broadcasts daily in Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and its mission is to strengthen the Church in the region.
If God chooses to bless SAT-7’s efforts and those of other Christian ministries, if he builds his Church in the Middle East, than it is truly possible for us to see spiritual and cultural transformation in the region in our lifetimes. This is our hope our prayer and our focus at SAT-7 and its support offices, SAT-7 Europe, SAT-7 UK, SAT-7 Canada, and SAT-7 USA.
I encourage you to learn more about the Middle East Church. While the Church isn’t featured everyday in the news like the region is, the Church is there and it is about the Father’s work.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow Dr. Rogers at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.