"Heritage......."

Cody, my oldest grandson turned twenty-one today. He has been holding down a regular part-time job at Fed-Ex since graduating from high-school, and attending classes at Gateway, a local community college, shooting for a degree that will eventually give him a career working with computers. I watched him and his brother play basketball last night in the church men’s league. They make me proud. My own twenty-first birthday was celebrated somewhere in the Med, the exact location depending on what port the Admiral’s flagship was anchored at the time. By then the Navy had already flown me to San Diego for boot-camp, taught me Morse code just across the bay a stone’s throw from Mexico, and stuffed my brain with the equivalent of a four-year course in Serbo-Croatian. Two years sea duty aboard that guided-missile cruiser was like being on extended liberty, home-ported in Nice, France and continually visiting places like Monaco, Barcelona, Lisbon, Naples, Athens, and Istanbul. I had three square meals a day, a space to lay my head down at night, and the security of a paycheck twice a month for entertainment. Life was a game, my only responsibility and the only authority known being my employer. My dog tags were stamped denoting my religion as “N O N E”. I was thirty, with a wife and three kids before something called “reality” knocked on my door. Am I glad my girls and grandchildren were raised to experience a tangible God, One to whom we can turn, One in whom we can rest, His promise never far from us in all things? Our theology may differ slightly; but when we stop to pray, we drink from the same well. We are “hooked”, not just to each other, but to He who keeps us as we go……