Pastor’s Column

In December of 1974 I was nearing the end of my active service with the United States Marine Corps. I was a Sargent then and I spent a few months on loan to the Airforce.

For my last several months of active duty I participated in a special project. We were testing a method of evaluating the accuracy of pilots making bombing runs.

I wasn’t out catching bombs. In fact, the planes weren’t actually dropping bombs. There was a computer mounted under the wing of the jets. The computer would evaluate weather data, and would figure out the position of the plane by using signals from transponders that we placed on the ground around the target.

If the target was a bridge, we typically placed one transponder a mile south of the bridge, one a mile east and one a mile west. The jet would fly in from the north. We set up the transponders on survey markers, so they were located in exactly the correct spot.

We had targets located in Washington State, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, most of the Southern states and North and South Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland.

We rented a six-passenger pickup with a topper. We drove from target to target. There was one simulated bombing run each night. We stayed at hotels along the way. We slept during the day and set up our equipment and waited for the jets at night.

We ate in restaurants and met interesting characters along the way. In West Virginia I ate a meal with a person who is my idea of a Southern redneck stereotype. He was well over six feet tall, and well built. He told me that his granddaddy had been a grand wizard in the Klu Klux Klan.

He took a lot of interest in what we were doing. He knew where our pickup had gone the night before, and it didn’t occur to me until later that we may have been close to an area where someone was operating a still or doing something else that they would just as soon not have discovered.

It was late in December and our conversation turned to plans for Christmas and New Year. I told him that I was a few days away from catching a plane home for a short leave. He told me his plans for the New Year celebration.

I will put this in terms that are less crude than the terms he used. He was planning on having sex with one of his girl friends to end the old year, and on having sex with a different one of his girl friends to begin the New Year.

I suppose there are many ways to mark the New Year. Some involve a considerable amount of revelry. In the early days of the Christianity the New Year was largely ignored by the church. It was a pagan holiday, and the church steered clear of having anything to do with it. Over the years that changed.

During one time period the leaders of the church turned to fasting and prayer to bring in the New Year. Their reasoning was that the wildness associated with the traditional pagan celebrating was a reason to pray. They also reasoned that we ought to set aside a time to thank God for the blessings of the Old Year and to ask God for wisdom, guidance and blessings in the New Year.

I hope that many of you are able to celebrate the arrival of the New Year with some gusto. I don’t want to spoil the fun for anyone who is planning to celebrate, but I also hope that none of you do anything that you will regret, or that you know would not be pleasing to God.

I have many things to thank God for. I feel like I have had more than my fair share of blessings this year. I hope the old year has been like that for many of you.

I also think it would be good to ask God for wisdom and guidance in the New Year. I think it would be good for us as a congregation to pray out the old year with prayers of thanksgiving and pray in the New Year with prayers for wisdom and guidance.

I usually give my wife a hug and kiss at the stroke of midnight. God willing I will do that again this year. I hope you celebrate with those you love as well.

May God bless you and keep you as you celebrate the New Year, and may God continue to bless and keep you all year and every year all through your lives.

Sincerely,

Pastor Birk