MAILMAN ED'S ANSWER TO PRAYER

"For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith." (Mark 11:23)

My close friend Ed D. is a former Assemblies of God minister and a rural letter carrier in Texas. He sent the following out as an e-mail to several friends and relatives. I don't have too many people do "guest posts" on my blog, and Ed did not request it, but I thought his story was so good that I forwarded his e-mail on to a few people and I decided to "publish" it her. Ed entitled it, "UNBELIEVABLE but it is TRUE!" Here it is:

Driving and delivering mail in a postal truck has its unpleasant moments
when vehicles block access to a mailbox and the mail carrier must stop,
put vehicle in park and set the emergency brake and dismount. Believe me, it
happens more often than we as carriers would wish.

For at least a month now, near the end of my route, I have had to deal with a
white sports car park within a few feet of the mailbox but close enough I could
not drive up to the mailbox. I would leave notes asking that "they back up their
vehicle five feet" so I would not have to get out my truck to put the mail in their box.
I did this 3-4 times but no response. Car never moved.

This past Monday, I finally reached my limit of frustration with this hinderance.
After the umteenth dismount for this mailbox, I verbalized these words.
" I wish this car was not there " and then asked God to move it out of my way !!

I then continued down the street delivering to other boxes. I got to the street's end
and found I had missed delivering a magazine to a house near the white sports car
and turned my truck around. I got to that mailbox, put in the magazine, and looked
down at the white car which now had another vehicle in front of it.

That new vehicle was a flatbed tow truck and it hauled off that white sports car.
It's been gone all week!

Two points I want to make clear. When I asked God to move that white car, God had
the tow truck enroute. God permitted me to miss that magazine so I would turn around
and witness His answer to prayer. Otherwise, on Tuesday I would have assumed the resident finally agreed to do what was in my note.

I have shared this story with several other carriers in my office who have
expressed both joy and surprise that prayer moved a problem vehicle.

Do you have any hinderances in your way ??? "God may not steer a parked car"
but He can get it moved !!!! But we gotta ask !!!!

You know, I've had a smile on my face the other five days this week, I have
passed that house and the mailbox isn't blocked.

ed

THE CURE FOR WEEDS GROWING UP IN YOUR DRIVEWAY, CONCRETE PATIO, WALKWAYS, ETC.

"...Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them..." (from Matthew 13:30))

THIS IS A BLOG POSTING RERUN FROM JULY 7, 2008. IF YOU ARE BOTHERED BY WILD GRASSES AND WEEDS GROWING UP IN CRACKS IN YOUR DRIVEWAY, WALKWAYS, SIDEWALKS, ETC. I HAVE A GREAT NATURAL CURE FOR THIS PROBLEM FOR YOU TO TRY:

This is around the time of year that many of us are bothered with crabgrass, wild grasses, and all sorts of other weeds growing up through cracks in our driveways and walkways or through cracks in the sidewalks and curbing in front of our residences. Sometimes the weeds can grow a foot or more high or spread out (like crabgrass) all over the place and look TERRIBLE. If you’ve ever tried digging up and pulling out the weeds you know how frustrating that is, and many times you’ve done further damage to your driveway in the process! My father used to pour gasoline on such growth. Gasoline kills the weeds but it’s hazardous, and will potentially do damage to asphalt. There ARE some pretty good weed killers sold at hardware stores. The problem is, many of them are at least somewhat environmentally hazardous, also, and most of them cost a lot of money.

Seven years ago, my friend Dave Connell gave me a WONDERFUL tip! He told me the thing to use on that unwanted weed growth in your driveway cracks, walkway cracks, and sidewalks and curbing is VINEGAR! That sounded crazy, but I tried it and IT WORKS! In fact, vinegar works better on those weeds than conventional weed killers do, and vinegar is NOT harmful to the environment!

The thing to do is buy the vinegar in gallon jugs. You can find vinegar in gallon jugs in the salad dressing aisle in almost any supermarket in America. Prices do vary widely. I will say that the place with usually sells it for the lowest price in the Boston area is Market Basket, but I did get some jugs of vinegar on sale a few days ago at Stop & Shop. I usually buy the white vinegar, but cider vinegar works just the same. Depending on how much of an area you need to treat, buy two or three or four jugs, and pour vinegar directly on the weeds you want to kill. Within 24 hours you’ll see them dying and in 3 days they’ll be brown, wilted, and dead! In the past I’ve told people not to do a vinegar application just before the torrential rains of a thunderstorm as that could weaken the effects of the vinegar. Well, this week, I applied the vinegar just a couple of hours before the torrential rains of a thunderstorm. The vinegar worked just fine and all that water on top of it seemed to have NO detrimental effects!

I’m so glad Dave Connell gave me this great tip! Hope you’ll try it and share it with a friend!

"I SWEAR..."

"Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers." (Ephesians 4:29)

"I Swear" is the title of a very popular soft rock love song by the group "All-4-One". It was a Number One hit in 1994. But that's not what this posting is about! It's really about SWEARING. You know: #^$&(@($#, #@!#@&*, +%&##%&, etc.

The Town of Middleborough, MA (pronounced: "Middleboro") in southeastern Massachusetts near Cape Cod recently passed a bylaw invoking fines on people who swear in public. Our state's Attorney General Martha Coakley is already carefully researching this, trying to figure out if the law is constitutional. When I was a kid, you NEVER heard swearing on television. NEVER. This was the era of the George Carlin "Seven Deadly Words" (or whatever he entitled that monologue). Occasional "damns" and "hells" began to pop up on television dramas in the mid-1960s to a LOT of raised eyebrows. It was "All in the Family" in the 1970s that brought swearing commonly into a popular sit-com, but even that show could and would NEVER use the "F-word". My parents did swear on occasion, but it was usually when something REALLY bad happened, and was not so much commonplace speech for them.

I'm not proud of it, but in my early teens, I had a mouth like a cesspool. Around my friends and my peers I probably swore around two hundred or three hundred times A DAY! I honestly thought nothing of it. My friends and peers did the same...if anything they swore even more. At age 15 and a half, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Personal Lord and Savior. The young man who "witnessed" to me of Christ told me, "Christians don't swear". I though this would be the HARDEST part of being a born-again Christian. HOW was I going to go all day without swearing?! Yet, amazingly I almost never swore after becoming a born-again Christian, and when I DID swear, I felt very bad about it. In those days, you could hang around at any evangelical church and never, and I mean NEVER hear anybody swear. NEVER. I spent thirty years as an Assemblies of God minister, and in that time, I was privy to a lot of "stuff" behind the scenes, AND I've heard so many horror stories of abuse of children and crimes and all kinds of things. I feel like not too much shocks me. Yet, about a year ago, I read in a Christian magazine that a new trend in many "emergent" and "relevant" and (my terms here) cool and hip churches that attract mostly people under age 35 is that they not only dress casually and feature hard rock music in the services, but that they ROUTINELY swear and see NOTHING wrong with it! Folks, this is just NOT the Evangelical Baptist Church of 1973! Frankly, many of my friends and acquaintances consider me culturally (not politically) liberal and would think I'd have NO problem with this trend. WRONG!! I do have a major problem with it! I know for instance that Bono of U-2 fame professes to be a born-again Christian and yet as an emergent, relevant, hip and cool guy drops F-bombs like confetti; but I have a major problem with that.

The Bible DOES say in passages such as the one above that we are to let NO corrupt communication come out of our mouths. Is my speech perfect? Far from it. But I DO desire for my words to be pleasing to the Lord. "Positive Confession" preachers such as Kenneth Copeland and the late Kenneth Hagin, Sr. have been reviled by mainstream evangelicals for their emphasis on the importance on "EVERY WORD" that comes out of your mouth. Listen, they may not be right about EVERYTHING, but they're actually far more RIGHT than wrong about speech and what comes out of your mouth. Words are powerful. They can bring life or death. Back in the 1990s, I used to hear the guy who lived next door to me dressing down his elementary school aged son, using the vilest of language, and calling him stupid, etc. What do you suppose that's DONE to that young man? I guarantee it's done a lot of damage! The Book of James in chapter three warns of people that praise the Lord one minute and then have profanity coming out of their mouths the next. It makes it clear that there is NO place for that!

Now this next part is going to SHOCK a lot of people, especially YOUNG people: In God's eyes the WORST swearing is NOT the F-Word, nor is it the four letter word for excrement. Nor is it the vulgar term for a woman's vagina, or a man's penis. I actually quoted above what God considers the WORST words: "Hell" and "Damn". It's ironic that I would not dare spell out the F-word on my blog, but I know it's not going to be controversial to write "Hell" or "Damn." In fact, they are FAR more vile and offensive terms than the F-Word. Have I ever used them, even since I became a born-again Christian? I'm ashamed to say, "Yes". I'm not proud of that at all. I should never use those words. Never! "Hell" refers to the place where those who die without a personal commitment to Christ will spend a horrific eternity of suffering beyond anything we can imagine. "Damn" refers to the act of punishment of people being sent to Hell. "Goddamn" refers to the act of God allowing people to go to Hell or sending them there (depending on your exact theological views about this). There will be millions and millions of people lost and suffering for all eternity. Do you think this is FUNNY?! Is this something to speak flippantly about? Should you say, "Oh dammit, I lost my car keys!"? NO! When we do this we're saying, "You know what, God, You're a JOKE and your ways STINK! So I'm going to speak flippantly about you and about your ways!".

I don't ever want to communicate that to or about God.

How about "Suck" and "Sucks". No kidding, in the 1970s, "Suck" was SUCH an offensive and profane term that the ONLY one worse was the F-Word. Do you think I would EVER have said in my parents' presence something like "My school sucks" or "All old teachers suck"?! My father would have backhanded me. It was considered very vile. I know, I know, but we can say, "The vacuum cleaner sucked up all the dirt". Fine, That's a totally different usage. Does God know the difference? Well, YEAH!

The Christian film, "Joshua" is a great film. Yet, in that film, a priest uses "Suck" and "Sucks" and the Jesus character of Joshua does, too! They would never have included those words in a film like that back in the 1970s!

My friend Dave has kids who are my kids' ages (20s). He was frustrated with his own kids' usage of "Suck" and "Sucks". One time he commented to me, "My kids say those words are not swears anymore, but to me, they ARE!". David is correct. They are. For any of you who don't know this, "Suck" and "Sucks" are vulgar terms for oral sex.

Sometimes, we think we can skate away from swearing by using euphemisms. People will say, "I hate these friggin' taxes" and figure it's OK. Listen, my wife called me on getting angry and using the word "Blank". I would say things like, "I hate this Blank car!!" or "The Blank policies of the liberals are disgusting!" She said when I said that stuff, I was actually swearing. Know what? She's right. In God's sight, I was. I have purposed to stop saying that.

I know I strongly implied above that the WORST things you can say are "Hell" "Damn" and "Goddamn". Well, they're among the worst, but the very worst is taking the Lord's name in vain. A guy named Gary was an active Member at the church I pastored in Framimgham. Gary said the way he KNEW he was TRULY saved was that when he played softball shortly after he'd "gotten saved" he missed an easy catch.

"JESUS CHRIST!" he yelled.

He had to walk away from the game, weeping and ashamed. He had just blasphemed the God who loved Him and saved him. He never used that name profanely again.

And, as silly as this may sound, the valley girl thing of "Oh, my God" is something that in my book's gotta go.

I don't expect to win a lot of acclaim for writing this, and I have admitted that my own speech is not always perfect. But for those of you who have received the Lord as your Savior, he really wants our speech to be HIGHER than the world's and honoring to Him. And, for those of you average people in the world who think (as I once did) that you could never get through a day without swearing two hundred times, you'd be amazed at what the Lord could do in your life.

NUT FREE ENVIRONMENT?

"For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God." (I Corinthians 1:18)

Yesterday, I visited New Hope Community Church (Assemblies of God) in Marlborough, MA which is pastored by my friend, the Rev. Rob Woods. They're meeting in the third location of the church's history which is at 204 Main Street in Marlborough's downtown. New Hope actually rents their space from a Brazilian Baptist Church. (Don't let "storefront" fool you! It's a very modern, attractive facility. The church's sanctuary seats about 300!) The service was great! I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Perusing through their bulletin before the service, I got a chuckle from one heading I saw. In bold capital letters (and underlined) it read: "NUT FREE ENVIRONMENT"! That phrase seemed ironic at a Pentecostal church! Granted, today's "classical Pentecostal" churches have "toned down" quite a bit from what they were forty plus years ago. It was to the Pentecostals of one hundred years ago that the derogatory name, "Holy Rollers" was applied. At one time you would hardly enter a Pentecostal church without seeimg "swinging from the chandeliers" behavior. Now, I don't think anybody really SWUNG from the chandeliers, but there could be some pretty excessive stuff. Pentecostal churches also attracted a large number of "God's PECULIAR people". It was commonly believed that Pentecostals were "a bunch of nuts"; hence "NUT FREE ENVIRONMENT" seemed comical to read!

The sentence following the heading read, "Due to nut allergies we are a NUT FREE church." I guess more and more we're being asked to be sensitive to people with nut allergies, and allergies to perfume and cologne, for that matter. I remember visiting a Pentecostal church in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island ten years ago where it was announced on the church's Power Point that people were asked to NOT wear perfume or cologne due to the allergies of others.

This morning for my devotional reading it was on my Bible reading schedule to read Acts chapter 26. That's the chapter where the Apostle Paul appears before King Herod Agrippa and Roman Governor Festus. Paul was a prisoner at the time. He had appealed his case to Caesar in Rome, and Festus asked Agrippa to hear him because Festus was trying to figure out exactly what the charges should be and exactly what he should write to the Emperor about Paul. During that hearing, in which Paul gave his testimony of encountering the risen Christ, Festus yells out that he is "mad" and postulated that all his higher education had driven him mad. Putting it more casually, Festus said he was "nuts". There is also a scene in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus' own family comes to "get" him, saying "He is out of his mind" (see Mark 3:21).

I've always "marched to the beat of a different drummer". In life, that can be difficult. My good friend the Rev. Dick Germanine got pretty upset with me a few years ago when I described myself as a "weirdo". I just kind of calmly looked at him, and replied, "It's OK, Dick, I really AM a weirdo, but God loves me just the way I am!"
I used to describe myself as "eccentric" for on-line profiles, and some folks who are close to me got quite upset by that. I ended up toning it down and describing myself as "unconventional"! When you "think different", (and incidentally, I prefer MAC computers and am writing on one now!) life can be difficult. You can honestly feel "not wanted" in a lot of places. Seriously. You CAN be left out in certain situations. I've had people uncomfortably change the subject when I've been talking with them and awkwardly move to get away from me. It's kinda, well, tough to take.

I supposed I could feel that "NUT FREE ENVIRONMENT" means I'm not welcome, but thank God, New Hope Church just meant, "please be sensitive to people with nut allergies"! Yeah, sometimes I'm a "fool for Jesus" but you know what?! I am so thankful and grateful that the Lord Jesus Christ has loved me and accepted me. That gives me a reason to put a smile on my face and go out to "seize the day" this morning!

WOULD WBZ GIVE BOB BARIL A CHANCE?

"...ye have not, because ye ask not." (from James 4:2)

It was a great surprise to WBZ listeners that the station's popular overnight host Steve LeVeille announced this week that he is RETIRING at age 57! I'm also 57. There are a host of reasons that I could not remotely imagine retiring at my age- chief of them is that I have no money. Well, technically, I HAVE a retirement account which I could deplete in about seventeen months and then I'd be back to nothing.

It's ironic Steve LeVeille is RETIRING at age 57.

Why?

Listen, it's ironic because there are scores of people who'd love to BEGIN as his replacement at age 57! The chief of those is ME!

Seriously, I'd love to do it!

For those of you who already believe I'm completely crazy, I do understand the odds. The likelihood is that Steve LeVeille will either be replaced by one of the guys who usually "guest hosts" for him, or by someone with an impressive and extensive background in radio broadcasting. Most probably, the person would be someone who has recently worked at a major market or medium market radio station and who is represented by an agent. I know with that kind of competition, I'd be like the fanatical southern lady who is running as this year's Prohibition Party candidate for President of the United States. (There really IS such a person!) She'll get 1% of the vote (mostly write ins) and she'll probably be taken more seriously as a Presidential candidate than I'd be taken as a job candidate to be a radio talk show host on WBZ!

Despite the odds, I'd like to state reasons why I WOULD be a good overnight host on WBZ:

First, I have an outstanding speaking voice. It's loud, clear, and powerful. In the past I had an extreme Boston accent. THAT will kill a broadcasting career unless you're Eddie Andelman. Admittedly traces of that accent may still come through but I have worked very hard to lose the accent.

Second, I'm a great storyteller. That comes from my family background. My Dad was a great storyteller, and my Uncle Raymond was an even better storyteller. These guys would have you RIVETED listening to them, and they'd tell stories you'd NEVER forget. I'm the same way.

Third, I do have extensive public speaking experience. As an Ordained Assemblies of God minister, I probably preached from church pulpits and in other public settings at least 1500 times!

Fourth, I have SOME broadcasting experience. One of my finest memories was of the time in early 1989 that I was an in-studio guest on WBZ's "David Brudnoy Show". I was only supposed to be on for one hour, but David was enjoying it so much, he asked me to stay on for a second hour. In addition, I worked part-time for the now defunct J-LIGHT Christian Radio and did a fair amount of broadcasting there. Broadcast pro Tim Horton who ran the station could vouch for the fact that I did a good job there.

Fifth, I have a good sense of humor; and a good way of connecting with people.

Sixth, I'm interested in the news and what's going on in the world.

If anyone (including any big shots from WBZ) would like to sample what I sound like they can check out a couple of postings on youtube. One is MITT ROMNEY COMEDY THEME SONG located at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZlzX4Qa_do

Another is You HARASS Him!!! located at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAeUtvpV1V0

Say, would YOU please e-mail and call and send this link to the folks at WBZ?! Could I, Bob Baril, be considered for a broadcast position there? Well, if that little lady from the South can run for President on the Prohibition Party platform, WHY NOT?!