The Greener Grass Conspiracy

"Greener Grass Conspiracy" Trailer - Stephen Altrogge from Crossway on Vimeo.

Testimony – Grace imparted through friendship

Note: As a part of a regular testimony program at our church (Sovereign Grace Church of Indiana, PA) I was asked to share my testimony during the service March 27, 2010.  The "my testimony" part of that seems to me to be an overstatement of my involvement.  Why you ask?  Because its really a story of how God went about saving me - a person who wasn't interested in looking for him or even gave thought to look for him.  Though my story is mediocre compared to others, it is "great" to me!  As you read this I trust that you will see the work of the providential loving God.   By His Grace alone, for reasons He only knows, He sought me out through of all things a friendship.  For which I cannot convey how grateful I am and how undeserving I feel. 



Josh's Bachelor Party

I am 53 years old.  Way back in 1980 while finishing up my college years here at IUP I went to this church.    Two different jobs and eight years after that Sue and I returned to Indiana and have since raised our four children while attending here.  

This past summer I had my first taste of beer in 33 years at my oldest son’s (Josh) bachelor party. That’s right the last beer I had was when I was twenty. I was surprised by two things; the taste of beer hadn’t changed much. And…. this was my first legal beer - ever. I mention this because it makes me smile. Though I have never done drugs or some of the other serious vices, in my heart I wasn’t any different than anyone else.  




The Brown Family

  I was blessed to be raised in a stable family with loving parents. I played little league, pee wee football and other sports. We did things together as a family. We had fun. My brother Bob and I physically fought daily to my mother’s anguish. My father faithfully disciplined us. We regularly went to a Methodist Church as I was growing up. We weren’t Christians but we were consistent in our attendance. We would go to church and then get donuts. We didn’t differentiate one from the other.



I am hiding at the far left second row. 

 

I suppose I was like a lot of people prior to being saved. I had some poorly conceived philosophy about life. It was probably something like a self-centered version of the golden rule. I thought I should be good to others, but at the same time I wasn’t going to make a decision that didn’t benefit me.

When I look back now the gospel was all around me. There was that young married couple that ran our church youth group.  My best friend’s parents along with his older brother and sister.  My Aunt Margaret and those seemingly insignificant brief encounters that are obvious to me now but weren't then.  How could I miss a pink elephant in the room like that? Yet I didn’t see it, give thought to it, or recognize that there was even a difference between knowing God and not knowing God. Given my relatively good life I wasn’t really happy. In high school I would often write in my notebooks the word “help.” I scribbled it everywhere. Sometimes underlining it or repeatedly writing over it. My notebooks were covered with it.  It might seem odd now, but though I would constantly write the word help, it didn’t occur to me to ask “Hey why are you always writing that?”

At times as a teenager I would walk out to our back yard at night where it was completely quiet and looked up at the sky. I would stare at it for a little while noticing how vast and many stars there were. Contemplating what this rock I was standing on might look like to someone on one of those stars. It sounds silly now but I can recall yelling out “What is this place? – Am I real? Am I just a dream? I even recall wondering if the Twilight Zone TV show made any more sense than my life? Do I even really exist I thought?” Whoever wrote the movie the Matrix must have had an experience like this. I wasn’t really talking to anyone in particular. I was just wandering in aimless thought. In a way I suppose crying “help”.



Prior to picking up our dates. 1975 Bethel Park Senior High Prom  

 

In third grade I met a friend named Rob Irwin.  We lived fairly close to each other. Rob would become my best man when Sue and I married. Rob had been raised in a Christian family. Rob’s family made me feel welcome in their home and treated me in a way that made it easy to be around them. I can recall many fun times at his house.

Though Rob’s parents were Christian Rob was not. This is an important distinction. God used Rob and his family in my early life even though Rob would tell you himself that he was not a Christian while we were growing up. Over time God used a series of little events involving Rob’s family that God would use years later. I recall one time while in elementary school I took the Lords name in vain and Rob said to me (remember we’re talking about two ten year olds), He said to me “Hey you don’t want to do that! You’re talking about God! How would you like everyone going around saying Doug this and Doug that every time they stubbed there toe?”  I had one of those movie moments where something significant occurs and one character freezes as action continues around him.  Even at ten years of age it made me stop and contemplate.   

While playing Rock’m Sock’m Robots as kids Rob mentioned in passing how his Dad emotionally told him how fortunate he was to have a mother like his mother.  That movie moment occurred to me again.  I never heard anyone speak so highly of another like that before.  Once as a teenager I was telling Rob what a great time I had the previous weekend with a group of friends getting drunk with one of their Dad’s. Rob’s reaction to my excitement made me realize how sad an event this actually was for a grown adult to participate with underage kids in such a thing. 



That's Rob in the background



These events obviously had an effect on my life. Yet as a 20 year old IUP college student living at Rooney Hall I was still apathetic about God. I was completely unaware of any connection between life and God. Following my first year at IUP in 1978, I went home for the summer and got together with Rob as was our norm. As I implied earlier, Rob was always different from my other friends, but that summer he was even more different. He started talking to me about Jesus and the bible. I had never heard some of things he was saying. I asked what happen to him. Did he get into some cult at college? He continued to tell me about how he came to know Christ at college through of all things a death of college friend. I asked him all kinds of questions. Questions like “you mean to tell me that a good person who honestly believes in God his whole life but doesn’t believe in Jesus will go to hell?”  Though Rob tried he couldn’t answer a single question to my satisfaction. His concern for me however was evident in the kind passion in which he spoke to me. But his answers to my questions made me think he was nuts.

For some reason I was moved by his genuine concern for me. I wish I could communicate the impact that his simple effort had on me. The words didn’t seem to matter but I caught his desire! That night while I laid in bed I began looking up at the stars again so-to-speak and asked this time quietly “God if you are real please let me know. I don’t want to live my life not knowing you.” I asked the same thing the next night and probably several nights thereafter.

Several months later after I returned to IUP Rooney Hall room 204.  (What a special room that is to me now!)   I now had this desire to be a Christian but didn’t know what to do.   Rob sent me a bible to read and encouraged me to start with the book of Mark.  I read and read and read.  The bible became sweet to me.  I was amazed that I could read about God and that I could find out “what this place is” and “what life is all about”.  I began to become more aware of Jesus sacrifice.  But I still didn’t know what to do. Eventually I came to realize that when I asked God to let me know Him in my bedroom months before.  That that’s when I actually was saved.

How do I explain - that after that simple prayer in my bedroom and without any real knowledge of the bible, I started to see things differently, hear things differently, think about things differently, react differently, and I quickly became aware that I was missing something very good and that it was God.  Where just a few days before that I never gave it a thought.  I gained a real sense of contentment in my life that I know now was forgiveness. Think about that! I didn’t do anything but make a simple request after hearing the gospel from someone I respected but didn’t believe and within days my life dramatically changed. It still amazes me.

Robert and Pam Irwin with their daughter who is now in college.  By the way Rob is also in the football photo above same row as me second from the right. 



The family that God worked through Rob to save.



One Last family photo before Josh and Sara moved to New Hampshire.

Brown Family Reunion

Matt had a good summer of baseball

My summer vacation, our house, and Josh's Wedding

After Scraping July 15, 2010

In preparation for Josh and Sara's wedding, which was held in our front yard, I embarked on a mission to paint our house. As you can tell from the photo (above) it needed it - even more than I knew. In the finished photo (below) it’s obvious that we have shutters. While standing on the ladder removing the shutters I sidestepped and ducked… twice. Somewhat unsafe but doable for a fifty plus year old man. Why did I do this? Experience! I knew from previous episodes that Bats would flee. Knowing it though still didn’t stop me from being surprised. The brown spot on the back of your pants kind of surprise. Their bat poo poo left an interesting stain on the house too. Great, I thought a stain on my house and my pants. Thank goodness for high pressure water sprayers. But that scare was nothing like my next one.

During their wedding I was sitting in the front row taking in the wonderful moment and incredible view of my son marrying the love of his life. And the house I raised in him in as the backdrop to the whole event. I briefly reminisced about things that happen in this yard with Josh. Things like catching a baseball with him, playing hide and seek, funny things Josh did and some I did to him. One time I gave him old cough syrup that had exceeded its expiration date. To make matters worse Sue had already, unknowingly to me, given him the correct medicine. Later that night after we were all asleep, Sue woke me up to tell me that she believed that someone was running around our house and was disturbed about it. You guessed it, I was shocked to look out our back door window to see Josh panting and sweating. He could not even explain how he got outside let alone why he was running around our house at 3am. But I kind of knew.

Two seconds later my thoughts turned to the dumbest thing I’ve done. And it occurred just weeks before. The roof that you can see in the photo doesn’t look that steep. I thought so too. If you enlarge the top photo and look at the top right of the roof our chimney top sits about 40 feet off the ground. It had never been painted and showed a hundred years of coal and dirt. Since this would have been somewhat noticeable during the wedding ceremony I decided to paint the backside of chimney. I placed our tallest ladder against our roof just to the right of the front porch. Josh joined me to help, just in case something bad might happen. I’m not completely dumb.

I crawled off the ladder onto the roof with a paint brush and caulking gun in one hand and my paint sprayer gun connected to a fifty foot hose filled with paint in the other. After painfully crawling half way up the roof I started to slide backwards. Josh’s concern was evident in his voice as he called to me come back. Well I was kind of falling back anyway and in one sense his request appealed to me but my other senses were screaming no. I can’t explain but to go backwards was to go blind. Due to the position of my body and slant of the roof I could not turn to see where I was going. I let my full body hug the roof and tried to shimmy up. It seemed that for every inch I was able to move up I slid back the same. I almost panicked. But, believe it or not, I remembered the counsel of my ninth grade health teacher telling us to never panic and keep your senses about you. I didn’t let myself panic but I felt a full fledged conundrum, a catch 22 situation. I couldn't go up and I can’t go back. I know I know you must be thinking that by now I must have discarded my three tools. Nope!

Ignoring Josh’s plea’s I used every bit of my strength and tugged, crept, and scratched inch by inch, with my tools and made it to the top.  I painted the chimney.  Physically shaking, exhausted, bearing burns and scrapes on my arms and legs from the shingles, but I did it. Dumb but alive and sitting watching my son… my son marry his love…my new daughter.  In some respects my trip up the roof was kind of like my years of parenting.  We do it without a net.  God is indeed good.

Brian Regan is the best!

Matt's 2010 Indiana High School Graduation

My view of the President's Health Care Take Over

Because I see this blog, in part, as a historic record for the Brown family, I thought it would be good to go on the record with my views on today’s incredible health care law.

What our President and this Congress has done concerning health care is revolutionary. It’s neither evolutionary nor just a simple adjustment. In fact it is not even a major adjustment; it is an about-face. No it’s not even that, it’s a change to the very foundation of our two hundred year old health care free market system. Our government has just taken control of over a fifth of our economy, made Insurance companies like utilities, and has forced individuals to buy a service at risk of inflated costs or severe penalties, including use of the IRS. It includes a unique use of terms to allow our government to do this. For example, though the IRS is involved the act does not "tax" us but instead "fines" us. Either way a penalty or cost is forced on working Americans. The only way to avoid a "cost" or "penalty" is to not work! That! Thanks to the new health care system is the only inexpensive way to get health care.

Hopefully those that have forced this incredible "Act" of law upon us are well intentioned, since it has some worthy goals. None less worthy than health care for all. However, whether well intentioned or not (does it really matter) I have no doubt that it is naive at its core and will likely hurt our nation. Since this is a fundamental change to our system, if it fails it will affect our very foundation.

Some might say, what’s the big deal? Let’s give it a try at least for a while. If it doesn't work then we repeal it. With all do respect this is a naive position. In the history of our nation we have never once repealed an entitlement. Not once! Ronald Reagan once said that the closes thing to eternal life in this world is a government program.

Medicare and Social Security are in dire need of a foundational change, not health care. Any young adult knows that Social Security won't be there for them without change; Warnings have been given to the "next generation" for years. Why is that? It's because these two entitlements can not survive on its own structure. It needs to change and now. It is irresponsible to ignore it and with each passing year the solution will become more painful to employ. That is obvious to me. It seems our politicians are either not interested in change (Republicans) or they want only to change the here and now without regard to future ramifications (Democrats). My guess is that congress will continue to "adjust" Medicare and Social Security until it falls under its own weight. And it will fall. When it falls it will have a devastating impact on our nation, just like a dam that unexpectedly caves under its own weight. My guess is that congress will continue to "adjust" Medicare and Social Security rather than address its core issues. I really think they got it backwards. We should "adjust" health care and revolutionarily change Social Security and Medicare.

I can't help but ask myself why congress would ignore these two entitlements but want very much to add Health Care as an entitlement. Perhaps it's control. As the saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Or, perhaps they really think it will make a difference. I sure don't. I have multiple reasons for this. Anyone would be sufficient in itself to justify this statement. But I will just use one.

Our nation has essentially been following the same free market health care system since its inception. Over the last half century or so we have added Insurance. This has made some adjustments to our health care process. But it did not change the fundamental principle of medical care. And, that is that everyone one is responsible for his own health care. Of course employers provided health care for their employees, but I believe that this evolved because of capitalism not the goodness of their hearts. That is employers had to provide it for competitive reasons. In other words it was free market driven.

The free market system creates a self leveling system. It's as much a law of the universe as the law of gravity. Nothing equalizes the economy as well. We have over two hundred years of history to prove this. We have the unparalleled success of America in the world to prove this. We have the failure or poor performance of every other economics system in the world in comparison to the free market to prove this. What drives the health care issue is that some people don't trust the employers or insurance companies as much as they do government. I don't understand why people would trust government more than any business, our forefathers certainly didn't, but I digress.

The fact is that we have the greatest health care that any man has ever had. Think about that for a minute. In all of history no one has had the kind of care that we experience today. The poorest people in our nation have far better health care than our grandparents had or even our parents.  And, America is one of the primary reasons the world has benefited from health care advances. This does not sound like a system that needs a revolutionary change. Adjustments are welcome. And, I know that if we can let the free market work everyone will benefit.

It seems so clear to me, but what do I know I'm just a common every day Dad.

Message about this blog

Within the next month I intend to write to this blog much more frequently. I will be including stories of relatives, funny and explanative stories about my family, and interesting pictures new, old, and very old. I have much to share about our interesting ancestry and historical events related to our family. When I pick a subject to blog about I will try to use it to bring different events both pass and present into the same story. I will also be including some personal thoughts on such things as politics, faith, sports, and made up stories for illustrative purposes. These would reflect the humble opinion of a common Dad, but I believe it is important if for that reason only.  Thank you for visiting my blog.