Psalms 37:4 says; "Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart."

" Son you should write songs."  I could hear my father speaking to me through time as I sat there listening to the last notes of the music tracks for our latest project fade slowly away.  Legendary producer and artist Eddie Crook strode into the sound room and turned his billed cap around backwards, a sign he was through.  He'd played the keyboard and the grand piano for us on our recording.
"That'd bring a tear to a glass eye!"  He jokingly referred to the last song on the project, "What More Can They Do To Him Now?"  The tracks were all finished and all we had to do now was record our vocals!  I breathed a sigh of relief and let my mind trace the twists and turns the journey to this moment had taken. 
 My Father had been a musician and had taught me to sing when I was five years old.  He would play the guitar and our cousin would play the five string Banjo and I would dance and sing, "The Ballad Of The Beverly Hillbillys, "  People though it was so cute.  It's embarrassing to think about it now when I'm Forty-Seven.  But that's how it started.  By the time I was nine I was singing Conway Twitty songs in nightclubs around middle and western Kentucky every weekend with my fathers band.  There I was singing, "Linda On My Mind" without a clue as to what I was singing about.  I was just glad to see the look on my Dad's face.  He seemed so proud of me when I sang.  He always tried to get me to write songs too.  But at that age I hadn't lived long enough or experienced enough of life to write about anything with any truth or authority.
 But his encouragement gave me the desire and the dream to be a singer and a songwriter some day.  That dream almost ended when I was Seventeen.  My Father who was very ill from complications of Diabetes died November 16th, 1978.  With no one to play the music for me anymore I quit singing. 
Then I met my wife Jareta. She had grown up with a similar dream.  Her parents, especially her father encouraged her to sing and play the piano.  She along with her older sister Denise would play piano and organ in their home church.  She would sing Patsy Cline songs with the radio in her room or in the car and let her imagination run wild too.  We married in November of 1986 but it wasn't until May of 1991 that the desire would come alive again for both of us.
The words,"Son you should write songs!" still kept ringing in my ears.  I started writing again during the summer of '91.  I even attended a songwiters camp in Nashville.  After several false starts, I wrote a song that several local musicians in western Kentucky thought was pretty good and so I sent it to a promoter in Nashville, with the hope that it would get recorded by some big name star and I could finally realize my dream of becoming a professional singer and songwriter.  But that didn't happen of course.  Then I got thrown a real curve ball in May of 1994. I was diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer.  With what seemed no hope of a future I decided why bother to write anymore.  So I set my aspirations aside.  But God had other plans.  After two reocurrances of the cancer, several months of extensive treatments with Radiation and Chemo Therapy and a miracle from God, I was healed!  God saved my soul and started me on a new path.  He led Jareta and I to relocate to the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee where we began to sing for Him!  Then we began to pray for the Lord to give us original songs.  And  you know what the Bible says, "Ask and Ye shall receive.  Seek and Ye shall find.  Knock and It will be opened unto you!"  As if a flood gate had been opened the songs began to pour out.  I wrote with Jareta's help some 50 songs in about two years.  We recorded several of them  locally.  God put us in touch with a man who owned an internet radio station and he started playing some of our music.  Then The Eddie Crook Company of Nashville heard us and contacted us.  They wanted to publish our songs and record our music!  I couldn't believe it.  So here it is November 29, 2008, a little over thirty years since my father passed and I'm seated in the sound engineers booth of the Trinity Broadcasting Network's Recording Studio in Nashville Tn. listening to the tracks of our latest project entitled, "One Heart, One Mind and One Accord!  We have a contract, a record label and are recording in what used to be "Twitty City"  Conway Twitty's tourist attraction.   I smile and say in my heart, "Well Dad it's taken me thirty years but with God's help I did it!"  I think he and God smiled too.

My 82 year old Mother in Law was recently in the hospital for a brief stay due to complications from a stroke in March and a heart attack in May.  Some fluid had built up around her heart and she was in congestive heart failure.  She is in poor health because of alzheimers also.  She is in the final stages of that dreadful disease and doesn't recognize friends and loved ones any more.  But on July 10th, which was her birthday, she awoke after a good nights sleep  with a beautiful smile on her face.....

She had been in the hospital for three days and she slept a few hours the night she was admitted, but then she went over 48 hours without sleep and she was totally delirious!  She was imagining all sorts of things and was mumbling incoherently.  We tried everything we could think of to get her to go to sleep, but nothing worked;  Until we prayed!  She finally drifted off to sleep and slept for nearly 12 hours.  That's when she woke up with the the smile.  Now this wasn't just any smile.  It was radiant!  Jareta looked at her and commented on the smile and said, "Little Darling, (That's her nick name for Sue now)  You're smiling awfully pretty this morning."

Sue narrowed her eyes and thought just a moment then looked at Jareta and said something so profound I think I'll have it emblazoned on a Tee-Shirt soon.  It has become my new motto and that's why I'm sharing it in this blog.  The bible says, "Out of the mouths of babes comes perfected priaise."  Well this was as near perfect philosophical advice as you could get.  She said, "Well I do that quite often, ... It just makes things look better!"   So let's take that advice to heart.  Smile often it just makes things look better!

The Preacher And The Red Bird
Current mood:  blessed
Category: Religion and Philosophy

I had delivered a message at a local church recently that I called, "Strength for the journey."  It was about how if the journey we're on is ordered by God then He will sustain us.  He provided for the needs of the children of Israel as they wandered in the wilderness for Forty years, He multiplied the widow's cruse of oil through Elisha, so she could pay off her debts and save her sons from being taken as slaves to satisfy her creditors.  He increased the meal and oil for the widow to sustain Elijah during the famine.  He also commanded the ravens to feed him first. Jesus fed five thousand men(Not including women and chldren!)with five loaves and two fishes and when the multitude was through eating they collected twelve baskets full of the fragments.  So my point was that if we're following God He'll give us strength for the journey and provide for our needs according to his riches in Glory.  I spoke about how with gas prices so high Jareta and I worried sometimes how we could keep traveling for the Lord, but He's never failed to get us where he wanted us to be and back again.  He gives us strength for the journey.  David wrote in psalms, "I once was young and now I'm old but I've never seen the righteous forsaken nor His seed begging bread."  When I finished the sermon I gave the invitation and after the altar call was over the pastor stood and related this story. 
"I had a preaching brother some years ago who was asked to hold a revivial in another state.  He didn't have the money to make the trip.  He went out into his back yard to his personal altar and got down on his knees to pray.  He prayed,"Lord you know I don't have the money to make this trip.  I feel in my heart that you've called me to go so I'm trusting you to supply my...."Before he could finish his prayer he was interrupted by a bird chirping loudly in a nearby tree.  The bird wasn't only chirping it was hopping around and flailing it's wings wildly.  As the preacher observed the bird he realized that the chirping almost sounded like talking.  It seemed as if the bird was saying,"Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up!" The preacher listened for a few moments then decided to investigate the situation further because the flapping and flailing seemed to be an attempt by the bird to get the mans attention.  "Cheer up! Cheer up!  Cheer up!"  The bird kept singing as the preacher came closer.  Finally at the base of the tree the preacher could see what the bird was trying to show him.  There caught in a fork of the tree was a ten dollar bill!  This was back when ten dollars of gas would take a man several miles at twenty five or thirty cents a gallon.  God had provided him with what he needed for his journey.  I couldn't get that story out of my head.  I was mowing my yard a few days later and was meditating on the goodness of God and the story that I had heard.  I began a conversation with the Lord as I often do when I'm mowing.  He gives me a lot of songs during these times.  But we weren't discussing music this particular day.  We were talking about how God uses things like animals to do his will.  He let a donkey speak to a prophet in the old testiment after all. As I was working I realized how tall my grass was.  I had neglected to mow it earlier and now it was nearly knee deep. Now there is a garder snake that lives in my back yard and I hate snakes.  I couldn't help but think,"This grass is so tall you won't even see him coming.  He'll be lurking just the devil waiting to strike when you least expect it!"  The Lord showed me how the grass in my back yard is like sin in our lives sometimes.  If we don't keep it out, it grows up until it's almost too hard to handle and the devil can hide and trip you up!  We have to keep our garden tended.  As I was thinking about the lesson the Lord was sharing I got to thinking about that snake again.  Now every year I kill that snake,(because to my way of thinking the only good snake is a dead one)but every year a new one takes it's place.  The one this year seems to bigger than last year.  I had spotted him sunning himself the last time I mowed but he slithered away before I could finish him off.  So there I was mowing and talking with Jesus but I had one eye pointed towards the tall grass looking for slitherment.  I asked the Lord to send an angel to protect me from that snake because It would see me before I saw it.  I left my request with Jesus and went about my yardwork.  As I made another round with my push mower I began to think back to the Red bird story my friend Pastor Roy Henard had related the Sunday before.  I was singing, "Cheer up! Cheer Up! Cheer up!" to myslef when all of a sudden I noticed a strange commotion off to my left.  It was a large Mocking bird.  It was swooping down to the ground flapping it's wings violently and pecking at something on the ground then it would soar away. It had repeated the strange pattern twice before I recognized what it was pecking at on the ground.  It was the garder snake!  The bird would attack it from the air.  The snake would raise up and strike at the bird as it flew upward.  Then the bird would launch another assault.  I was amazed!  God had answered my prayer in a most unique way!  He sent a bird to answer my prayer just like he had the preacher and the red bird.  I watched this beautiful bird drive that ugly snake away from me, all the way down through my back yard and out through the openings in my chain link fence near the road.  I've never seen anything llike it!  Sometimes we entertain angels unawares, sometimes they're in human form, other times they're birds or donkey's or whatever The Lord chooses.  But isn't it great to know, that no matter what, God is always in control and he'll take care of us if we ask!  Sometimes we miss the greatest blessings because we get too wrapped up in the things of this world to see God's hand guiding us and protecting us.  God help us to always be mindful of your Holy Presence and give you all the priase and glory! 
Charles Sturgell