THOUGHTS

May 21, 2020

"So many thoughts, so little words."

A revision of a reprint from my blog 2013

Oliver Twist, "Please sir..."

"He was a poor wretch of a little boy who didn't seem to have a chance.  His dad was in debtor's prison, he'd only gotten to go to school for four years, and he was often hungry.  As a young man he went to work in a rat infested warehouse putting labels on bottles.  He found lodging in a drafty attic with two other boys from the slums of London.

But he wanted to write.  He mailed his first manuscript in the middle of the night so no one would laugh at him, and the story came back to him rejected.  Finally, when his first story got accepted, he was paid nothing, but the editor praised his work.  The young man was so overjoyed he wept.  That one bit  of encouragement changed his whole life.

Without that editor's first words of praise, the young man might have stayed in the dark factories, and the world would have been much poorer for the lack of his writing."  His name was Charles Dickens.

"Art is being free from all the world's heaviness."

"Hope itself is like a star - not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity,

and only to be discovered in the night of adversity."

Cheri Fuller

"Some books are to be tasted,

Others to be swallowed  and

Some few are to chewed and digested."

Charles Spurgeon

"A house without books is like a room without windows."

Heinrich Mann.

"Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God

not to wrangle about words, which is useless, and leads to the ruin of the hearers.

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth."

II Timothy 3:14-15

The back hills of Tennessee were different from the slums of London, but sometimes education was just as out of reach to those living in poverty.  This was true of my great grandfather, Reuben Robinson, better known as Uncle Bud.  Born in 1860, my great grandfather moved as a youth with his widowed mother and many siblings from Sparta, Tennessee, to the Dallas, Texas, area where he became a cowboy.  When he got saved in a brush arbor meeting, he threw away his pistol and his deck of cards in the sagebrush and eventually headed to Georgetown University in Texas and enrolled while in his late twenties or early thirties.  They put him in third grade.  Needless to say, that didn't last long, but he was put in contact with a tutor who had been under the religious teaching by one of Sam Houston's daughters in the Methodist Church there in Georgetown, Texas, (where my great-great grandfather was a doctor as well as a lay preacher.)  However, this young man fell in love with his tutor, and they married.   Even with little formal education and a terrible disability of stuttering and seizures so strong that they pulled his arms out of joint, "He gave 62 years to the ministry...During this time, he preached 33,000 times, working among people of 72 denominations (even in the South in black congregations and to Indians surrounded by teepees.)  He led over 100,000 souls to Jesus Christ.  He traveled over two million miles in his evangelistic labors (though he never learned to drive and had friends and family drive him, including my grandmother Ruby Wise and my grandpa George Wise).  He wrote 14 books and sold over one half million of them....He helped 115 young people with part or all of their expenses through holiness colleges at a cost (back then) of $85,000.  He was listed in Who's Who in California." (George Wise).   Not bad for a third grade education.

As many parents have been forced to homeschool during this pandemic, take heart.  Out of this shall come some delightful gifts to mankind regardless of their imperfect schooling.