I wanted to throw this in as a bonus because John brought his name up as one of the people “I rely on” to hear God. It goes without saying that the Lord is most responsible for any change wrought in this sin cursed body, but next to Him, Dr. Scott gets the most credit for setting me on the right path. Few people have ever heard of Dr. Scott (owned largest radio and television stations on the planet) but those that have fall into one of two categories. They really like him or they really hate him. Many years ago in the early days of satellite television, I and a friend were in the business of installing satellite systems (not really - I have no rocket experience) but you get my drift. You may remember the big 10 and 12 foot dishes that have long given way to the small 18 inch models that are so prevalent to day. In those days the stations were broadcast from several geosynchronous satellites in orbit over the equator. The dish needed to move between satellites to receive more than a handful of stations so a mechanical device called a polar mount was used that allowed the dish to move in an elliptical path so it would track between each bird (satellite). Several birds had only a few channels broadcasting during daylight hours and we used them to align the dishes. Three positions of adjustment were needed, the bottom, middle and top most part of the arc. Westar 5 in the middle of the band had only one channel broadcasting 24 hours a day and that was Dr. Gene Scott. I remember the first time I saw him sitting in an overstuffed ugly green arm chair smoking a cigar and reading a Bible. The camera was zoomed in so tight that all you could see was the bottom of his chin to the top of his hat. (Who wears a hat and smokes a cigar when reading a Bible?) Having been raised Methodist and with Grandfather who was a fire & brimstone preacher, I knew Scott had to be a heretic but that didn’t matter as he was always on and I used that channel only to make the adjustments to the dish. One day while tuned to his channel I heard him make a statement about the great pyramid of Giza which caught my attention. The pyramid contains about 2.2 million stone blocks weighing from a couple of tons to over 70 tons. Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), the Greek historian, also referred to as the Father of History, was the first recorded person to make a systematic study of past events in an attempt to explain them. Herodotus claims it took 100 thousands slaves 20 years to build the pyramid. The Nile valley was flooded all but about 4 month of the year which left nowhere enough time to do the construction. Put the calculator to it and you will note it would require each block to be raised and placed into position in about two minutes each all the way to the top at 455 feet. That’s not counting the time it takes to quarry the stones miles from the building site, transport then and cut then in to shape. I could go on for hours on the pyramid but that’s another story for another time. Suffice it to say, that bit of information hooked me and I had to know more.
Dr. Gene Scott
I know this is running long but I’ve got the reins so hang on or jump off the wagon as I am going somewhere with this rant. As I began to listen to Dr. Scott, I started to realize there may be something to this God thing after all. Watching Scott’s antics on TV was perplexing at first but I then began to realize what he was about. He had, like many of us, been burned by religion, which is of course man’s attempt to get to God. With a PHD from Stanford and a PHD minor based on a verbal test. (Who does that?) I discovered that despite the fact he may be somewhat eccentric he was certainly no crackpot. The hat and the cigar were just his way at thumbing his nose at the fundamentalist. I once heard him say, when being rebuked by a caller about the cigar, “the Lord spoke to Moses from a burning bush and that’s all cigar is so it must be pretty spiritual”. The big surprise, at least to me, was that God was not mad at me. I had come to believe, in later years, having been inducted into the flock at The First Great White Church on the corner, where they tell you “once saved, always saved”, then start with the “do dos and the do not’s”, that I was out of luck as I somehow knew I could never make the cut. In the end all they really managed to do was persuade me that what they really meant to say was “if saved, maybe saved”. When I had had my fill of cool aid, I departed the flock with a bit of fleece still attached and went out in search for less greener “pastors”, pun intended. I had always been under the impression I could screw up my relationship with God by some wrong action on my part of which there are too many to count. After all, I had become proficient at screwing up just about everything and everybody else around me. If we are in Christ and He is in us and we’re both in the Father (and that is all true), then it should be obvious you’re as tight as you could ever hope to be with the One that spoke and not anything became everything. (Did you get that?) So using Sweattology I determined I not only had no possibility of getting it right (nor did I need to), I likewise, had no possibility of screwing it up. Can you become “not your mother’s Son? “That, my friend, is the Good News, and the most profound realization ever granted to this grumpy old white guy. Yes Al, I admit it, part of that sentence is plagiarize - sort of. (Inside joke - the rest of you weren’t supposed to get it)