daily java

Daily Java:

Wisdom will multiply your days
      and add years to your life.
If you become wise, you will be the one to benefit.
      If you scorn wisdom, you will be the one to suffer. (Proverbs 9:11-12)

I just received word that an old friend had died. I haven’t seen him in a long time and found out by accident that his wife had died a few years ago.

Gene and I were good friends once upon a time, but when I left the Church of Christ we kind of drifted apart. We went to seminary together, and maintained the friendship for a couple of decades.

We were a lot a like, both of us subject to some problems in our lives, and both of us seemed to share certain viewpoints automatically. We tended to look at things the same, even though our backgrounds were totally dissimilar.

Six or seven years ago, we found out that his wife had died of cancer. She and Ella were good friends. Since that time, we haven’t seen him. He looked pretty bad then, and I didn’t figure he would live a whole lot longer.

He wasn’t much older than me, but when she died, it took all the color out of his life. He always had health problems anyway, including a predisposition to stroke with extremely high blood pressure. Couple that with the fact that he ate like a horse and was quite large and it didn’t help any.

There were some funny things w shared. When we were younger, he and I were built a lot alike except that he was several inches shorter. And we liked to go shop at thrift stores. I would always get him to try on the sports coats first, so if they were too long on him, they were fine on me. It would get him so irritated that I could always dupe him into being the coat model. And we would laugh.

We laughed a lot. I still have a pocket handkerchief I bought from a Goodwill when he was with me in 1979 in Spokane, WA.

We ate together, studied together in school, talked a lot for a while, he was a good friend. Then we just kind of dropped away.

We learned a lot together and together gained a lot of wisdom. He, for a while, was always more forward thinking than I was, then I passed him up. I was always smarter, he was always more practical.

With four daughters, his wife, Marsha, was a master at stretching a food dollar, and showed Ella how to be more frugal with the grocery money.

We were in school one day in about 1975 when one of the guys – Chuck I think – was trying to read the Bible out loud. He was reading about the phylacteries the religions leaders of Jesus’ day wore (little boxes with a  scripture inside tied to their wrists and foreheads). Chuck accidentally read “prophylactics” instead of phylacteries in the passage But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments (Matthew 23:5 KJV). We laughed until we had fallen off our chairs at the reading “But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their prophylactics, and enlarge the borders of their garments.” It embarrassed the fool out of Chuck but we were having too good a time to care.

From then on we formed an official society of those people in the New Testament who were for (pro) those little scripture boxes (phylacteries). We were the prophylacieries. From then on, every time we talked on the phone or saw each other, we would remember that.

I loved him and still do. Even though we have not seen each other in almost a decade, I feel the pain of the loss greatly.

I look forward to seeing him in heaven. May he rest in peace.