Reminiscences on the Life of My Brother: Earl's Last Hunt

My oldest brother Earl's 83rd birthday is tomorrow, June 11. Since both our birthdays are in June, and he was 10 years, 18 days my senior, I never forgot it as I sometime did my other brothers’ birthdays. I had planned to mail him a home-made birthday card produced on my MS Publisher program. Unfortunately, that was too late. Take heed. He willed to me, among other things, the Winchester Model 94, .30-.30 carbine with which I killed my first deer on Red Mountain, East Fork, Trinity River, Trinity County, in 1956. I just realized that I had returned the favor by loaning him my Model 99 Winchester .308 with which he killed his last deer, probably sometime in the 1960s. After that exhausting hunt, he said he realized, "I don't have to do this." He came to prefer to see the beauty of the living animals and rather disapproved my continued willingness to hunt and kill them. Aesthetically, I agree with him, but like biblical Isaac I still have a yen for venison. I last hunted in 2009 and we didn't even see a buck--until we drove back through French Gulch where they hang around on the lawns even (or especially?)in the middle of deer season. Henry David Thoreau had a similar development. While at Walden Pond he liked to catch and eat the pike. Later, he gave up such fare, but he admitted that if he returned to live on the Pond, he would be sorely tempted by those tasty fish. As a Transcendentalist (Pantheist) like Emerson, he probably had spiritual reasons for renouncing the killing of animals. As a Christian, I am free to take and eat meat, whether that of wild game or of livestock. Since the forgiveness of sins, my very salvation is based on the shedding of the innocent blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, I realize that in some circumstances, the shedding of blood is required for life to be preserved. Thoreau thought that boys and young men should be allowed to pursue wild game because it brought them out into nature. But he viewed it as a stage through which they perhaps had to pass on the way to maturity. For myself, I'm not dogmatic, but I think those like my brother who renounce the chase may have the better part. And perhaps those like my young Christian friend Brian, who never wanted to start hunting, have the best of it. On the other hand, in gutting and skinning a deer, with blood up to your elbows, you get some sense of the reality of what happened to Christ on the Cross when he shed his blood for the sins of the world.

Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!

Today I was on the Shasta College campus here in Redding sharing the gospel with students to whom I hand out leaflets raising questions that relate to Jesus Christ. It's easy because many of the students who pause to take a look at the leaflet are willing to volunteer their opinion of who Jesus is in response to my inquiry. By asking questions and listening first, I find that many students are willing to listen to what the New Testament says about sin, salvation and the Savior. And about every other time I go out there, at least one of the students has been prepared by the Holy Spirit to confess Jesus as Lord. That didn't happen today, but a couple of the young men were willing to read from the Scriptures what the Bible says about Jesus and our salvation and let me pray for them. After several hours of leafleting and sharing, I went upstairs to a room off the balcony above the cafeteria where InterVarsity Christian Fellowship was having a Bible study. We started small but soon an alumnus of Pelican Bay State Prison showed up with his guitar and the group leader mentioned that he was a former drug addict who was a graduate of the Redding Mission's recovery program. A couple of black brothers came in and I found myself sitting beside a lovely young woman from Bethel's school of ministry who was from Romania and was reading the scripture from a bilingual Romanian-English Bible. The Bible study was from Matthew 12, a chapter in which the Pharisees criticized Jesus disciples and Jesus himself, calling them Sabbath breakers because Jesus' disciples plucked some stalks of grain and ate the still tender grains and because Jesus insisted on healing the man in the synagogue with a withered hand on the Sabbath Day. Jesus defended his followers and himself summing up his argument by saying, "If you had known what these words mean, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice' (Hosea 6:6), you would not have condemned the innocent" (Matt. 12:7). The main point of the study seemed to me to be that God was more interested in our heart attitude towards him and towards our neighbors than in ritual obedience. After discussing the Scripture, we joined in worship songs with help from the guitarist and the young woman from Romania and prayed for one another. I went out to my table on the quad in front of the cafeteria to eat my lunch and distribute a few more leaflets. Almost immediately, I was tested on the study: Would I put mercy ahead of ministry? And I flunked bigtime. A lovely young woman approached and since I didn't immediately recognize her, she reminded me of her name (say, Natalie) and that we had discussed the teachings of the Jehovah's Witnesses with whom she had been and still was studying. I instantly remembered her and began my apologetic demonstrating that Jehovah's Witnesses are polytheists. Their calling Jehovah "Almighty God" and Jesus "mighty god" (Isaiah 9:6) and "a god" (John 1:1, New World Translation only) leaves them with not one God, but two, a high God and a lesser god. This is rather like the situation of Greek mythology with Zeus as the high god and other lesser gods like Hermes. The Witnesses limit their god count to two, but they are, nevertheless, polytheists, not true monotheists. But providentially, Natalie was interested in bigger game. She innocently asked me why we believe in the Trinity. Now I was ready to lead her to the biblical answers to that question, but our guitarist, my brother from Pelican Bay, offered to help us out. I was none too pleased with his interruption of an ongoing witness I have been working on for a while, but he had a Scripture and Natalie wanted to see it. When I saw that he was taking us to 1 John 5:7 in his King James Version, I lost it. That verse certainly contains the essence of the teaching of the Trinity: To be continued.