Live Fire with Chuck Holton

For anyone who was wondering…

*This story appeared in the September/October, 2001 issue of Countryside & Small Stock Journal*

There are several “barn cats” that live on our farm. We don’t see them much, as they are quite wild. Once in awhile you might walk into the woodshed and surprise one or two of them, and they will instantly turn into little furry pinballs flying around the shed trying to get out. Sometimes one will sneer at you from across the yard before disappearing under the house. That’s about all we see of them. That’s about all we want to see of them.
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It’s summer! I should be grilling, but instead I’m getting grilled!

Just kidding. I’m doing a one-hour interview this evening with KGFT Radio in Colorado Springs, Colorado. If you’re coming here from there, welcome!

Take a look around – I’m available to come and speak to your church or military unit, to schedule an event contact Emily Stamper at 615-370-4700.

If you’d like to contact me directly you can send me an email. I’d love to hear from you!

This very informative article in the Washington Post spells out one big problem people have today – not enough friends. Sure, we have Oprah and Myspace, but studies show that Americans have fewer people to confide in than ever.

The article points out that one big reason is something called “Path Dependency,” that is, our innate tendency to follow the momentum created by the thousands of little urgencies that assault us every day.

I see this momentum in my own life – I was coming home from our rental house in Beckley the other day, and made a wrong turn – well not wrong, but I knew the traffic would be worse by going the way I did, and it would take me much longer to get home. If I had turned around, even several miles after I’d realized my mistake, I still would have gotten home quicker.

But I didn’t turn around. Why? I’m not sure. It’s just that since I was already going one direction, the momentum I had created made it too hard to turn around. Maybe it was just in my head. Maybe it was a pride issue. I don’t know.

But this “momentum” is apparent in many people’s lives. I heard a story the other day about a great Christian kid who got hooked on drugs, and KNEW it would kill him if he didn’t get clean, but just couldn’t. I have another friend who struggles with Alcohol, and he KNOWS it will destroy his life if he doesn’t break the cycle, but somehow despite that knowledge, still chooses to drink.

How to break path dependency? From the article:

Another experiment has shown how undergraduates who agree to get a tetanus shot seldom actually do so, but if you make them an appointment and hand them a map to the clinic, the odds that they’ll comply leap tenfold.

So apparently encouragement and accountability help these problems. This is one good reason for going to church. Church, done right, isn’t a courtroom, it’s a community. It’s a place where I go to be encouraged to be, not just good, but better. I like that.

Okay, file this under “Gotta get me one of these!”

It’s not flying. It’s “falling with style.”

Just in case you ever start feeling too old to make a difference – read this story about William Bernhard – A retired Army doctor who, at age 75, is headed to Afghanistan on a combat tour as a MASH medic. Did you get the part about him being 75 years old!

It’s not the first time, either. Last year he was in Iraq doing the same thing, and at one point found himself wielding a shotgun in a 10-hour firefight. In a way, it’s kind of unfortunate that the military medical corps is so short-handed that they are sending septugenarians into battle, but hey, for a guy like me who is surprised not to already be in one of these, it’s quite encouraging. Go Doc!

Sorry it’s been kinda quiet here lately – I’m trying to get my hay in, and pouring every spare minute into TFV II – Island Inferno. Stay tuned.

I had the chance to hear Dr. Jim Fritz speak this morning – he’s a member at our church and has a very compelling personal story. In his talk, he mentioned that the MPAA has determined that strong religious content alone qualifies a movie for a PG rating - even if it is squeaky clean in other respects. And that’s just what happened to this movie.

I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing, though. Research shows that people are less likely to go see a movie which is rated G. And as fully devoted followers of Christ, watching movies should be pretty low on our list of things to do anyway. Shouldn’t they?

Another story tells of some Christians who are pushing cable companies to allow their customers to choose their cable service on a channel-by-channel basis, which would allow Christian families to exclude channels like MTV and showtime from their homes. Other Christian organizations oppose them, however, because they say such a la carte channel choosing would allow people to exclude Christian Programming from their homes. Drat! I guess you can’t have it both ways, can you?

How about this, parents? Instead of trying to filter or dilute the filth that you let into your home, how about eradicating it altogether? Grab the TV remote and hit the large red button at the top – that’s it, the power button. Don’t panic, the fact that your television is no longer talking to you is not a national emergency. You have not experienced a major power failure. On the contrary, shutting the idiot box down for a week, a month, or for good may just leave you with more time to support the things you claim are important to you – like your family and your faith.

If you watch as much television as the average American, you’ll spend nearly 12 years of your life parked in front of the tube. I’d love to hear somebody try and justify that in light of scriptures like Psalm 39:4. and Ephesians 2:10

Maybe the MPAA is on to something – as long as believers look just like the world around them, perhaps they should come with a warning label:

Seekers strongly cautioned: This person might just care more about who wins American Idol than they do about your eternal fate. Take anything they say to you in that context, and don’t be fooled into thinking that they represent Christ. If you want to know what Christ is about, don’t ask this person – go to the source.

I’ve spent the last couple of days working to get a new church website up and running for our church here in Beckley, West Virginia.

I think it’s very important for churches to have a good website, since anyone who moves into your community and wants to find a church is far more likely these days to do a google search than grab the yellow pages. My pet peeve is a church website that shows pictures of the building, but no people. News flash! The church is not the building!

But a church website can, and should be much more than an online brochure. There should be compelling, dynamic content that will bring the community of believers you worship with closer together, and allow for rapid dissemination of information.

Does your church have a website? post it in the comments here. If you’re looking to make yours better, may I suggest a visit to Dean Peters’ healyourchurchwebsite.com. Dean is an uber-guru when it comes to web design, and helped out on WVFaith.com.

President Bush is “aiming the spotlight” this week on the defense of traditional marriage, that being defined as a union between one man and one woman. While I certainly applaud these efforts, and stand with Focus on the Family and CBN in support, I do believe it amounts to slamming the barn door after the horses have escaped. This is something that should have happened decades ago, but back then, nobody could have fathomed the attacks that would come against things that they simply took for granted.

As I listened to some ACLU hack on NPR this morning whining about how the proposed amendment is “naked bigotry” and “pushing laws that reflect one religious belief ,” I understood even more clearly that we, as believers need to start to redefine the way we talk to non-believers.

Everyone has a worldview – that is, a belief system with which they process the world around them. For Christians, this worldview is founded on time-honored principles and traditions which were handed down from God himself. It’s a fixed standard which originates from outside of humanity, and therefore isn’t subject to the whims of humanity.

Non-believers (by which I mean those who do not adhere to a worldview described above) also HAVE a worldview - but it’s based on a moving target – their own desires and feelings. In the final analysis, it isn’t exactly based on nothing – but on what C.S. Lewis would have called the “sense of ought” that God put in every human being as proof of His existence. But the non-believer doesn’t ascribe this sense of what SHOULD be to God, he just thinks he made it up himself.

Now, it’s asinine to claim that the federal marriage protection amenment is foisting one religious view, not because it isn’t the truth, but because ANY and ALL laws are the codification of a worldview. It’s like accusing someone near you of getting you wet when you are already swimming in the lake.

But for some reason, non-believers think that religion shouldn’t define our worldview - that if you allow your worldview to be defined by your religion, it is somehow less valid than their worldview which is defined by whim. Perhaps this is the result of so many “Christians” acting like their religion is just that – a hobby. Hobbies shouldn’t be life-defining. Your relationship with the Most High God should be.
When we start pointing out to the world that, like noses, everyone has a worldview, maybe we can get this debate back on a footing that is a little more logical. But don’t be surprised when the whining continues.

The bottom line of this debate should be this: Are you an anarchist? No? Then don’t advocate a legal system based on whim.
Do you believe YOU should be the final arbiter of truth for every person in this country? No? Then don’t advocate change based on standards YOU created.
How about this: Let’s quit arguing about this with non-believers. That’s not the way to change minds anyway. Let’s instead start allowing our faith to permeate every level of our lives and our being, instead of treating it like monday night football, and maybe then people will see that it’s a legitimate basis from which to take a worldview.

Besides, nature is on our side on this issue. Unions between members of the same sex don’t tend to self-perpetuate.

I have a question: Which comes first, ignorance or destructive
behavior?

According to an article by Frank Pellegrini on Time.com;

“Individuals who earn less than
$30,000 a year pay only one percent in the total amount of income taxes, but 47
percent of the total cigarette taxes. And smoking is least prevalent among those
with 16 or more years of education, confirming what intuition suggests —
that those most likely to indulge in quick-fix, deadly-in-the-long-term
behavior are those whose long-term prospects are least promising. (Emphasis mine)
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“Nothing is random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishingly frigid winter after another.
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