Life As A Graduate Student

Just this past Monday, I embarked on a journey I wished I would have started some years ago, and that was my first day of class as a graduate student.   I am currently enrolled at my old alma mater, where I received my Bachelor of Arts in 1996, but I am now in what is called the Master of Arts in Theological Studies, or MATS, program.   Basically, it is a degree that would allow me to either teach in a church setting, an academic setting (provided I pursue a doctoral degree afterward), or to prepare for ordination.   It is very intensive - a lot of reading (I am currently completing almost 172 pages of required reading for just the first class session!), a lot of Greek later, and a lot of writing.   Therefore, over the next 18 months to two years I may not be writing these articles as much!

Despite initial challenges though, I am enjoying being back in the classroom again, as I sure did miss it.   However, even at the college I went to, a lot has changed - the attitude of the professors for one thing has its positives and negatives.  As a positive, they are definitely more approachable as human beings, but on the negative it almost seems as if everything - including cardinal beliefs - is all of a sudden up for grabs and debate.  Perhaps the professors are doing that to challenge us to be stronger in our beliefs and convictions, I don't know, but it can be a little unsettling at times.  What must be remembered though is that any higher education setting is meant to equip the student with the tools necessary for the vocation for which they are preparing, and absolute concurrence with a professor's views is neither required nor expected, not even from the professors themselves.  So, despite the rather "new Evangelical" position of many of the instructors at the college I am attending, I can still remain a staunch conservative traditionalist and don't have to compromise my convictions.  I am there to learn how to be better-equipped to carry out my calling, and not to be indoctrinated (thankfully, many of the professors will substantiate that, as they are not there to indoctrinate you anyway and will readily tell you), and if you are a student reading this now, take comfort in what I have said, because it is something you can benefit from as well.

That being said, I know God ordered my steps in pursuing this graduate-level degree, and it has been long in coming.  For a long time, I actually wondered if it would ever happen, but here I am, three days later after my first class!  It is a lot still to get my head around, being a graduate student now, but it promises to be a rewarding experience.  I bring with me something too now that I didn't have before as an undergrad - I am older, more realistic, and being it was a challenge to do it, I feel more committed to the endeavor than I did as an undergrad.   Those factors, I personally feel, will make this experience a lot more fruitful and worthwhile as well.  An interesting case-in-point is my first class, which is called "Biblical Exposition and Faith Integration," and basically what it is in lay terminology is a graduate-level hermeneutics course.   Back when I first had Hermeneutics (the science, if you will, of interpreting the biblical text by reading out of  {hence the term exegesis} rather than reading into {also known as isogesis} a given text or passage) as an undergrad over 20 years ago, it was one of the dullest, driest, most boring classes I had ever had, and although I passed the course, it was a challenge!   And, I didn't have near the workload with that class that I have with this one.   However, this past Monday night, the class I am in was smaller (we have about 14 I believe total), and the professor is very down-to-earth despite his impressive credentials, and he shows a genuine interest in his students and their success.   That really impressed me from the beginning, because in the past I have had the unfortunate experience of dealing with professors who often came off as aloof, pompous, and "it's your money and your fault if you fail" attitude.   I don't see this at all with my current professor, who actually took the liberty and effort to get to know each of us, and that right there is something that is motivational, because a professor that cares about his students will get good results from his teaching.   It is only the first step on a lengthy journey to walking the aisle and getting the degree, but it is off to a good start thankfully.

That being said, let's see where I am at a year or now, to be realistic.  Will I still have the same enthusiasm for my studies?  Or, will it become routine?  Let us hope to retain that initial passion, because my duty is to finish the course set before me, and I will revisit at times here to let you all know how it goes.   Thanks again for reading, and will be seeing you.

Brunswick, Georgia - Summers In The South.

Downtown Brunswick, GA - I believe this is at Gloucester and Newcastle Streets.

Although I was born, raised, and spent the majority of my youth in West Virginia, I also grew up visiting my dad's family in the South too.  Dad, as did my late grandfather, a couple of aunts and uncles, and some cousins, lived in the small southern Georgia coastal city of Brunswick.  Visiting there as a kid was often a mixed experience, but overall it was a good place to get away for a change of scene.  To this day, I still remember it - the smell of the pulp mills out on US 17, the moss-draped trees, and the taste of those famous battered fries from Twin Oaks Barbecue.  And, I wanted to share a little about that here since some of my cousins have asked about some recollections of my memories with Dad.

I never really figured out how a lot of our family ended up in Brunswick, as my dad's family were originally from Butler and Crenshaw Counties in Alabama.  However, sometime in the late 1940's, Grandad and Granny ended up first in Jacksonville, FL (where my dad was born), and after their separation Grandad somehow ended up in Brunswick while Granny settled in Jacksonville.   And, Dad practically grew up in Georgia, as Grandad raised him more or less.

For a short time after Dad was discharged from his tenure in the Army, he and Mom were still married and we lived there for a fairly short time between 1972-1974.   If I recall correctly, Mom and Dad actually lived in a mobile home then somewhere off of US 17, a little north of town.  I was very young then, so my memory is somewhat fuzzy, but one thing I do remember is that Mom and Dad both worked during the day and I was enrolled in a local preschool in town called Mother Goose Nursery School, which years ago used to be on Norwich Street just across from where Greer Elementary is now.   The school of course closed down many years ago, but surprisingly the building was still standing last I checked into it. 

The original location of Mother Goose Nursery School, on Norwich Street, Brunswick, GA.

Unfortunately, in 1974 Mom and Dad divorced (it was a pretty nasty situation that I won't divulge here out of respect for both my parents) and Mom and I moved to Baltimore where she took care of one of my aunts that had MS then.  So, it was about 5 years or so when I visited Brunswick again, and things were a little different this time. 

In 1977, Dad had married his third wife, a fairly young Southern belle named Deborah Traylor, and a couple of years later my Grandad Thrower was terminally ill with cancer and wanted to see me before he passed on.  So, the arrangements were made, and in December of 1979 Dad and Deborah came up to Martinsburg, WV, where my mother and I were staying with my grandfather Dave, and I went back to Georgia with them.  What was supposed to be a couple of weeks ended up being seven months, as right after Christmas I got a call from Mom saying that it would be best for me to stay there a while because my step-grandmother Goldie also had terminal cancer and wouldn't last the year.  I was not happy about it, but was determined to make the best of it, which I did.  It was a rough go for me personally though, as I had to adjust to a lot of things I had not experienced before, including my overly-compensating new stepmother forcing me to eat stuff I found disgusting (potato salad, etc), and I was also under a strict regimen at school.  In some ways I hated it, but in others many good things came from it.  For one thing, I more or less gained some new grandparents, as Deborah's parents treated me like their own grandchild, and I thought they were the best.  Also, it was good to get to spend some time with Grandad Thrower and my cousins too - Grandad would not live another year, as he passed on in 1980, but at least I got to spend some time with him.  My only regret was that I didn't get to see more of him when he was alive. 

This is my stepmother Deborah, me at age 9, and Dad visiting Deborah's folks at their home.

Also, although Dad and Deborah's marriage ended in 1985, I still remained close to her and her family for many years, as they were good people, and Deborah still treated me like a son.  When I last saw Deborah in 2000, she was in declining health and was unfortunately a shadow of herself as I remembered her, and unfortunately she passed away in 2006.  At the time she lived with Grandmother Traylor, her mother, in Dahlonega, GA (this was where the Traylor family originally came from).  Deborah was young, somewhat inexperienced at the time, but I do have many fond memories of her - her bread pudding, for instance, was to die for!  Also, she wanted to make me into a little Southern gentleman, so she encouraged me to read Georgia history, as well as taking ballroom dancing and golf in school.   She was truly a second mother to me, and I do miss her. 

Speaking of school, when Mom and Dad agreed it would be best for me to finish the year out down by him, I was enrolled in Burroughs Mollett Elementary School, located a few blocks over from the house on Lee Street.   The teacher I had in my third-grade year there was a sweet and very longsuffering Black lady named Mrs. Moran, and at the time she was also expecting a baby and had to take maternity leave before the end of the school year, at which time a strict elderly teacher took her place.   School was actually fun then, and I made two friends right off.  One was a boy named Sim Taylor, who lived over on the next block from us on Union Street.  Sim and I had very similar backgrounds, and for some reason we hit it off and were best friends for the whole time I was there.   The other good friend I had was a girl who was big for her age named Caprice Watkins, and she used to spot me chocolate milk tickets all the time at lunch.  Dad and Deborah encouraged me to have good friends, and once I finished the chores and homework I was assigned, they would let me chat on the phone with them, or in the case of Sim, I could either go to his house or he could come over to ours.   I don't have the foggiest idea what happened to either of them, although Dad said he runs into Sim on occasion and he seems to be doing OK for himself.   Good friends certainly made things easier in what was a pretty crazy time in my young life then.

Dad and Deborah's old place at 2008 Ellis Street in Brunswick.  The place is abandoned now, as Dad sold it many years ago, but except for being painted blue and the lack of upkeep, it still looks pretty much the same.  Such a shame too, as it was a nice house!

Burroughs Molette Elementary School on Lee Street in Brunswick, where I completed my 3rd grade school year.

One other thing Deborah made sure of as well was that we attended church on Sundays, as she was brought up being a fairly devout Baptist.   The Traylors attended Beverly Shores Baptist Church over on Benedict Road, a small highway that ran east-west between US 17 and Altama Avenue, the latter being the shopping strip.  It was the first Southern Baptist church I had ever went to, and to be honest I was pleasantly surprised!  You see, I was brought up by Mom and my other West Virginia relatives in a rather strict, conservative Holiness/Pentecostal tradition, and there were times seriously when going to church with Mom's folks would scare the hell out of me!  Although Beverly Shores was a fairly staunch, conservative congregation, the hellfire and strictness I was used to was not found there, and with Deborah's encouragement, I got involved in the Royal Ambassadors (a boys group that is roughly the Baptist equivalent of the Boy Scouts) and it was fun to have things to do in a Christian atmosphere with other kids my age.   It was a stroke of divine providence, I believe, that when I was born again seven years later, it was also in a Southern Baptist church with much the same spirit.   Of course, faith and church were ingrained in my being from an early age, and later in life I learned to appreciate the hellfire-and-brimstone religion of my past better, but I just had to be ready to accept it.  As far as I am aware, Beverly Shores is still an active congregation today, although they maintain a low profile on the internet.

Beverly Shores Baptist Church, Brunswick, GA

Of course, there were times when Dad didn't have the ambition to take me to my RA meetings at Beverly Shores, so I would attend the boys' group at the Nazarene Church where my buddy Sim and his family went to church over on Union Street.  That was pretty decent too, and the Nazarene version of the RA's was called the Caravans (the Assemblies of God also has a similar thing called the Royal Rangers, but I didn't hear about them as a kid).  Youth groups like that then were different than a lot of the entertainment-oriented junk you see in churches today - we had godly Christian adults and ministers that led those meetings, and you learned something even while you had fun.  That is not to say we didn't have fun in both the Caravans and Royal Ambassadors - we had movie nights too, as well as pizza outings, and that was actually neat.  However, you still were aware that these were church activities, and you behaved yourself accordingly. 

At the time, Deborah worked for the Fuller O'Brien Paint Company, which had a big facility over on US 17, and her dad drove a truck for them around the region.  During April of 1979, we got spring break from school and Grandad Traylor let me go on the big rig with him down to Naples, FL for a week.  That was one of the most fun experiences I have ever had, and that trip took me all the way through the state.  That was also my first actual trip to Tampa and St. Petersburg too, and I remember going over the Sunshine Skyway for the first time.  Now, many years later, Tampa is not one of my favorite places after living there for 13 years, and back then I would not have imagined I would live there one day.  Nonetheless, that big rig tour of Florida was an exciting thing for me then. 

Dad at the time had his own custodial business, where he cleaned a lot of shops and offices.  Often, when he picked me up from school, I got to go on the job with him, and that proved interesting.  One of the places he worked was the Skateland 17 rollerskating rink out on US 17, and I remember two interesting things about that. First, free sodas - got a lot of soda from the tap!  Also, while Dad did the floors in the skating rink, he told me I could occupy myself by looking for spare change, and I made out quite well sometimes.  I of course never actually skated - still can't, nor do I aspire to that either! - but it was still a pleasant memory. 

The old Skateland 17 rink off US 17, one of Dad's busiest clients back in the day.

Another thing I got to look forward to was Saturday night TV.  My weeknight bedtime was normally at 9 PM, but on Fridays and Saturdays I could stay up late.  Saturday was when two of my favorite shows then - "The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" - were on, at 9 and 10 at night respectively.   Another show though Dad and I watched together was Franc White's "Southern Sportsman," which in my own West Virginia pronunciation I called the "South - eren Sportsman."   As of this week, unfortunately, Mr. White passed away, but I still fondly remember watching the show.  Being our family were avid fishermen anyway - Dad and I fished a lot that year, and thanks to him I really learned how to fish and develop the passion for it - it was the perfect show.   I was not allowed, much to my consternation, to collect critters like Mom let me do at home, but Dad and Deborah did allow me to keep a small fiddler crab I caught in a marsh over on St. Simons Island, and I called her Penny.  I had her up until almost when I left to come home that year, but unfortunately she died on me.  

Franc White, host of "The Southern Sportsman" that Dad and I watched on Saturdays together when I was a kid.

A lot of good restaurants that year too, and many of them still exist in Brunswick today.  One is Grandy's, a homestyle buffet restaurant that had been in Brunswick for years.  The other memorable one was Twin Oaks, over on Norwich Street, which was a landmark and Brunswick's most famous barbecue joint.   Twin Oaks was noted particularly for its battered French fries, although they also had some pretty decent fried chicken.  And, in Dad's business travels, he also gave custodial service to one of the local radio stations out on Jesup Highway where at the time my cousin Darlynne's beau, a nice fellow named Richard, worked.  Somehow, on one occasion Dad arranged with Richard to get me on the radio, and there was a contest going on to promote a new softdrink that had come out we all know now as MelloYellow.  I don't remember what I did, but somehow I won a whole case of the stuff!  I also was encouraged by dad to have a bank account, and he opened one for me at First Federal Bank in town, as they had a kids' banking thing then called the Kitty Klub that I got myself enrolled in (that account is long gone of course, but I still have my old Kitty Klub bank book!).  Overall, as I have said, those were some fun times.

Grandy's Buffet in Brunswick

Twin Oaks Barbecue, on Norwich Street in Brunswick.

I could not forget to mention one of the best Christmas gifts I have ever gotten as well.  In honor of my arrival that year, Deborah had worked on a very nice train set for me, and it was indeed something!  I only wish I could have brought it back with me that year, as it was the best thing - it had a little town built around it, and Deborah really outdid herself with it.  Dad, later in a financial bind after the marriage breakup, sold it.  Unfortunate, but at least I still have a good photo of it to remember it by:

My stay with Dad that year ended in June, and Mom and Grandad came down to pick me up and bring me back.  It had both its ups and downs, but overall that year it was a great experience with a lot I will always fondly remember.  I would not get back to Brunswick again for another 9 years, when I went for a couple of weeks in 1988 during my summer break, and then it was even a more memorable experience, but that is all for another chapter.  Although the overpowering and slightly pungent smell of pulpwood cooking could be a pain living there then, the smell of a pulp factory now evokes some pleasant memories too.   If you ever get the opportunity, please visit Brunswick and the outlying islands - called the Golden Isles, they consist of St. Simons, Sea Island, and Jekyll Island, and they are quaint to visit.   The charm of the South also permeates the area, as many store clerks and waitresses greet you with a friendly "Hey y'all!" that is endearing.   Any rate, this is a small slice of my childhood memories, although much more could be said, and hope you enjoyed reading them as I enjoyed remembering some of this stuff. 



















The Great Vision

Tomorrow is going to be August 7th, and it is a significant day because it commemorates the martyrs of the Assyrian people and nation, in particular those who were killed by in the village of Simele in Iraq in 1933 over a rock being thrown through a window, but also the slaughter of over 750,000 Assyrians by the Kurds under their evil leader, Simkoo, in the closing years of World War I.  The latter is particularly significant because one of the Assyrian people's greatest martyrs, their late patriarch Mar Benyamin Shimun, was struck down in cold blood while leaving what was supposed to be peace talks.  For those interested in reading more about the Assyrian Holocaust of World War I, I recommend my dear friend Rosie Malek-Yonan's historical novel, The Crimson Field (Verdugo City, CA:  Pearlida Publishing, 2005).  There are other good books on this as well, including Assyrian author Fred Aprim's two books, Assyrians:  The Continuous Saga (2004) and Assyrians: From Bedr Khan To Saddam Hussein (2006).  Yet a third book is by another dear Assyrian friend of mine, Dr. Sargon Dadesho, and is older and entitled The Assyrian National Question At the United Nations (1988).   What has transpired regarding the Assyrians is about as intense as the Holocaust against the Jews under Hitler, and although not as numerous, as the Armenian Genocide that happened concurrently with the Assyrian tragedies in World War I, and perpertrated by the same people.  So, tomorrow, as you do your prayers or whatever it is you do, please remember the Assyrian nation.

My activism with the Assyrian people has been consistent now for almost 25 years, although I am not quite as active in it as I used to be regrettably.   My first contact with them came sometime around 1988 when I first started to learn about the Armenians, and it came via a quote about some "Assyrian Christians" in a booklet the Armenian Church's Archdiocese had sent me regarding the Genocide.  That piqued my interest, and later in Frank Mead's Handbook of Denominations in The US I found out that the Assyrian Church of the East had a presence here in the US, and I eventually, with help from the Office of Communications at the National Council of Churches, tracked them down in Chicago where one of their priests, Rev. Charles (Qasha) Klutz, was most helpful in supplying me with information on the Assyrian Church in the form of some periodicals and a booklet.   In a short time, I learned that there was a considerable population of Assyrian people in the US, mostly concentrated around Chicago and the cities of Modesto and Turlock in CA, and that they had a number of organizations - I even later found out they had two Pentecostal churches in the US, and in 1995 I had the privelege of actually preaching in the Assyrian Pentecostal Church in Turlock!  It would require a whole separate chapter to really detail the experience and involvement I have had regarding the Assyrian-American community, so I won't elaborate too much on that here.  However, it gives a background to what I want to focus on regarding this current writing, and now I want to continue with that.

Although I initially became aware of the modern Assyrians and their existence back in 1988, it was not until 1990 that it took on a whole new spiritual perspective for me.   Thanks to some exposure and reading of other literature from a couple of Assyrian organizations, I became aware of Isaiah 19:23-25, which states that in the future Assyria, much like the Jewish nation, would be restored, and the Assyrians in that passage are called "the work of My hands" by God Himself.   I of course came to believe that I had a calling to the Assyrians, and wanted to do something great for them and other Middle Eastern minorities that had suffered under Islamic torment for centuries.   Although at the time I was a Pentecostal Protestant and a Bible college student, the calling I felt I had was not necessarily an evangelical one - I came to understand that many Assyrians already knew the Gospel, and all they really needed was renewal of their own churches and not starting yet another cookie-cutter, Americanized denomination among them.  I saw instead that the Assyrians needed something greater than just sermons and religious tracts, and as I really mulled this over, I came to the conclusion that what the Assyrians and others really needed was a place of refuge from persecution until the day when they could see Isaiah 19:23-25 fulfilled.  And, that birthed the vision.

Taking the name of the 10th-century Assyrian Church Father, Saint Isaac of Nineveh, in 1995 I began to envision a village that of course would have been way beyond my control to make happen, but at the time I thought it was from God and proceeded to write down a proposal of several pages about this great experiment I wanted to do.  I called it, naturally, Saint Isaac of Nineveh Village, and the vision I had was of a totally self-sustainable community of approximately 1500 Assyrian Christian families, complete with its own infrastructure, and it would serve as a way-station, if you will, for Assyrian and other Christian refugees fleeing Islamic oppression in their homelands.  I also extended the vision to encompass Copts, Armenians, and others, but primarily it was to be an Assyrian community.  I began to envision so many things about this that my head almost exploded from the sheer overwhelming endeavor of it, and thus began one of the most ambitious dreams of my life.  

The original map I drew of the Saint Isaac of Nineveh Assyrian village I envisioned - I came up with this in 1995.

As I described in my original 1995 proposal, this village was based in part "on the kibbutz system in Israel, but somewhat more democratic," and its purpose was to "instill a new determination in the Assyrian nation, and (it) would ultimately be a beacon of freedom to many who are persecuted."  I envisioned a community then which would be self-governed, and the residents of it would be able to elect their own leadership from among themselves, operate their own churches and schools, and propagate its own cultural life.   And, I thought of it as a spiritual mandate, as I also stated in the little 6-page document I drafted the following:

"God has a wonderful plan for this nation called ASSYRIA, and with Isaiah 19:23-25 as a Biblical foundation, He has chosen me to be an instrument in the realization of His sovereign will."

The original 6-page draft of my vision and proposal

I really felt like this was a divine mandate then, although I was too young to realize the vast complexities it would have taken to make this stuff happen, as great as it was.   For instance, it would have taken literally billions of dollars in resources to even start something this immense, and that was not something I had a lot of access to then as a poor, struggling college student who was just newly-married at the time.   It was, however, a noble idea, and there is still a part of me today that would have loved to have seen this happen.   But, I was not as discerning, and didn't understand in my young, less-experienced state that yes, God may have given me the calling to the Assyrians (I believe to some extent I still have that calling today) but maybe not for something this immense.   Much of it was my imagination getting too far ahead of my limitations (I did that a lot then!).  But, I was driven by a passion that I often wish I still had, and I articulated in the same document two specific reasons why I felt lead to embark on a monumental vision like this:

1.  I attributed (and rightly so) my own heritage as a descendant of the Anusim to the Assyrian people, as I believed Abraham to be an Assyrian himself originally at the time (based on Genesis 11:31 to 12:5) and I used a quote from the late Israeli prime minister, David ben-Gurion, as my basis - he made a statement once, "The Assyrians, our ancestors," that I felt cemented a bond between Jews and Assyrians as blood kin.

2.  I also noted that much of the witness of the Christian Church was a partial fulfillment of Isaiah 19;23-25, based on first that it was in Antioch, an Assyrian-speaking city then, where the disciples of Christ were first called Christians (Acts 2:9).  Secondly, I based the missionary activity of the early Assyrian Christian Church as a premise that the Assyrians were "the work of God's hands" based on the fact that they were used by Him to spread the Gospel to so many people.  I still believe that to an extent even today, although I see it on a lot of other levels too.

One thing I was certain about though, and it is a conviction I carry even today - I was not going to go around shoving tracts in the faces of Assyrian people and trying to make them into cookie-cutter versions of American Evangelicalism, as back then (and to a lesser extent still today) I felt that Evangelicals often threw out the culture of those they ministered to because it wasn't in their eyes "Christian" enough, and thus I saw Evangelical missionary activity as more a spread of Americanization than I did a spread of the Gospel message.  I suppose now that I look at it, I come from roots that were similarly attacked by "Christian missions" in their day, as mainstream churches at the turn of the century often made inroads into Appalachia and would often scorn and condemn the local church traditions in favor of their own, which they viewed often as "enlightened" and "superior."   Unfortunately, there may have been some merit for my concerns, as today I still see it going on and oftentimes it is disturbing - Dr. Loyal Jones,  the renown Appalachian scholar, calls such people who engage in this cultural narcissism "agents of uplift."  I loved the Assyrian people as they were, and to me their Christian traditions were not something to just throw out in favor of some cheap Evangelical substitute, but rather just needed to be revitalized.  In time, I myself would leave the Evangelical/Pentecostal tradition, as even to this day I see ethnocentrism oftentimes being the driving force behind many missionary projects, and I don't see how destroying all the good things in a culture is in any way "spreading the Gospel."  I said then that "I consider myself a biblical Evangelical, not an institutional one," and to this day I believe that pretty much sums up my views.  Any rate, those were some of the convictions that drove my vision then.

Getting into the village itself, I want to describe some things about it I wanted to implement.  I had proposed a system of housing for refugee families that would involve them first living in large condo-like highrise apartments until they received the language and job training, as well as other steps to inculturate them into the community and get them on their feet.  Then, they would be relocated to single-family homes in the main area of the community, where they would take their place as part of the community.   In doing so, they would be allowed to open their own businesses if they wish, with the only stipulations being that each family paid a 1% income-based tax to maintain and upkeep the community infrastructure, and also each family would be required to contribute 10% to a trust, which upon the time they would choose to move on to either settling in the US or elsewhere, this money would be given to them to help them buy a house, set up their businesses, etc.   The idea was to help new Assyrian immigrants become self-sufficient, and in doing so they would be given the choice of either ultimately buying land adjacent to the village and becoming independent that way while still maintaining an active role in the community itself, or they could go wherever they felt led to go, with the full blessing of the ministry, and have a nestegg they themselves earned to set up a new life for themselves in the location of their choice.   I also proposed a co-op system in which the residents of the community would have the infrastructure they themselves built to help out each other.  Looking back on it, it was not a perfect plan, as there would have been bugs to work out obviously, but I saw it as a good plan. 

The spiritual life of the community as a whole would also have been something I would have emphasized, as each religious community would have its own parish church, and it could also operate schools, charitable organizations, etc.   I would have wanted the churches to have an active part in the welfare of the community too, and in doing so the clergy of those churches would also be community leaders.   I would, however, also have a huge cathedral-like church in the center of the village - I envisioned it on its own island in the center of a lake with a bridge leading over to it - based on drawings I had made of what I thought was to be my "dream church" at the time too.   The "big church" would be a shrine dedicated to the Simele martyrs, and would be interdenominational.   The cool part of this, however, was the feast days of the churches - on Good Friday, for instance, a village-wide Stations of The Cross would be said, with each of the individual parish churches being a station on the route, and the big church being the terminus of the Stations.  I actually had a dream about that once.  Ultimately, this would be a fully Christian community, and the faith of the people would be reflected in the community activities as well. 

As I look back on it, the idea itself was good, but it was also the product of the imagination of an idealistic young man who often thought not just outside the box, but outside his own means.  Will something like this ever have the possibility of happening?  Who knows - perhaps, but that is ultimately up to God himself.   However, although not as active in it as I once was, the Assyrian people still hold a special place in my heart, and now that I am older I can do things definitely within my abilities to make people aware of who the Assyrians are and of their national aspirations.   I also still believe there is a prophetic destiny for the Assyrians, and who is to say that maybe this crazy vision of mine might one day become a blueprint for some young Assyrian leader when they do have a homeland again.  That would bless my heart more than anything, and I really hope I live to see the day when a nation called Assyria is a geographic reality. 

As I close, again I make reference to the fact that tomorrow, August 7th, is Assyrian Martyrs Day.   Please keep the Assyrian people in your prayers, because with the rise of Islamic fanaticism these precious people are often innocent victims of genocide still today.   I will always love the Assyrian nation, and treat its people as if they were my own - God bless you, Assyria, the "work of His hands." 





The Thrower Art Gallery

A lot of people don't know that I am an amateur artist, and over the years I have kept some of what I feel are my best work and have decided to do a virtual gallery of them here for your edification.   These go back almost 30 years, as the oldest picture I have is courtesy of one of my former junior high teachers, Mr. Thomas Engleman, who seeing my creation of it back in 1985 offered me a quarter for it.  In 1997, about 12 years later, he sent the picture back to me telling me that it was, to quote "the best quarter he ever invested."  And, that is the picture I will start with here.

The picture is of a big dance band, as at the time I was really beginning to get into that music and was collecting it on LP records.  So, one of the best ways I could express my enthusiasm was to draw it.   There were originally two of these that Mr. Engleman bought from me, and the other one he sent to Henry Boggen, the disc jockey I listened to on Sunday nights on WBT-AM in Charlotte, NC.   Although Henry has since passed away, I always wondered if he still had that picture.

This next picture above I actually won an award in a local high school art contest back in 1987, and it was entitled "Meeting of Concert Violinist and Jazz Orchestra."  I won an Honorable Mention for the artwork, but was also the only person from my high school to win.  

The above picture was created sometime around 1989-1990, during my first year of college when I felt a strong call to the ministry.  This was one representation of the church I wanted to build, but unfortunately my depth perception was a bit off, as you can see by the crooked spire in the center.  Over the next few years, I would create several of the following pictures of this church along the same theme.  Some are more elaborate than others, as on some I omitted windows purposely. 

The story behind the church pictures was a simple one really.  At the time, I was somewhere between being a Southern Baptist (which I would later formally leave in 1989) and a Pentecostal, but I had a vision for a different type of Pentecostal church - it would be a liturgical church!  I could envision the music, the interior, and even the chiming of the carillon in my imagination, and was even convinced that God wanted me to build this.  In a sense, though, I guess I did, but it was in these drawings instead.

   

This picture also dates from around 1989, and is my attempt to fuse a liturgical church with the classic large Pentecostal church as I perceived them in those days.  

The final design I settled on looked like this, and every drawing thereafter would feature a similar design to this, with the twin bell towers and elaborate winding front staircase.  The domes were inspired by my fascination with Eastern Orthodoxy, which I had started to develop at around the time.

As the 1990's progressed, my designs took on more elaboration, if not in detail then in form.  What follows are some similar pictures.

Lest anyone would be denied a shot of the inside of the said church, I also spent some time on detailing that, as the drawing below shows:

A lot of things inspired the above drawing.  At that time, I loved, for instance, watching Dr. D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, which is where the pulpit design and the organ came from.  The Eastern Orthodox dome motif also came into play, as well as a central Eucharistic table.  However, staying true to the church being a "legitimate" Foursquare Gospel congregation (the Pentecostal denomination I was part of then), I also had a large choir loft, prayer rails, and overhead screens, not to mention the huge baptistry in the center with the archway.   I was determined to "do church differently" while remaining faithfully Foursquare, and this was what that vision produced.  

However, I didn't just draw churches, but also loved village scenes.  Two in particular were the small towns of my childhood in West Virginia, and the "Cracker towns" of rural Florida, which also enchanted me.   The drawings below represent those.  The church in some of these drawings is particularly disproportionate, as it was usually the first thing I drew.

A mountain village, representing my roots.  This was a later drawing, as I created this sometime around 1999 or 2000.  

An earlier and smaller village, probably created I would say sometime around 1997. 

I have an interesting story behind the above picture.  I had a dream back in 1995 that I visited a small parish church that looked a lot like this, and I wanted to do as much detail of it as I could remember.  The church was like a small Catholic church, but inside the people were praying over the sick and uttering words of prophecy.  The priest, in particular, had a prophetic calling.  The building in the dream was located on the upper slope of a hill street, and although you could not access the front for some weird reason in the dream, I made provision for a staircase in this drawing as you can see.  

This was my interpretation of a Lebanese coastal village, with the majestic tower of a Maronite parish church in front with a priest praying over the town.   These took some work, as drawing towns from a distance required some strategically-placed angular lines.   But, for some reason, it worked!

My rendition of a Florida Cracker homestead.  I love "Cracker Culture" in Florida, and there is an enchantment about those little towns and villages off the beaten path and away from the congestion of the cities.   It is, to me, a lost attribute of Florida that needs to be recovered.

Another of my older pictures depicting my rendition of a Cracker village on a bayou.  Note the old-time Holiness church on stilts to the left.  Again, church drawings often were the first components I worked on with these types of pictures.

Another mountain village picture.  The huge church-like building in the center dominating the picture is a campmeeting tabernacle.  This was created as I was reminiscing one day about the old campmeetings we used to have back in the day when I was much younger.

This drawing is my representation of an Armenian mountain town in the shadow of Mt. Ararat.  The little bearded man in the foreground is a priest.

By 1998 I had gotten somewhat away from church drawings, although on occasion I did sketch some things.  The one below was a sketch I made on a piece of memo paper at work one day of a closeup of the exterior of that dream church I once envisioned. 

By 2000, I was back to drawing orchestras again, and one thing I love to do is to draw the empty bandstand with representations of where all the instruments would be found.  Like the church, in my early years, I dreamed of being the next Paul Whiteman or Freddy Martin, and often wondered what it would be like fronting a 35-piece orchestra.

Finally, I finish up with one of my most recent landscape drawings:

One of the last pictures of my "dream church" I composed sometime around the year 2000 or so.

I hope this will give you a general idea of my artwork, and although it is not the best way of viewing them (I made snapshots of these for the purpose of this virtual gallery), perhaps it will give you an idea of my artistic style.  I don't claim to be a Picasso or anything like that, and these pictures will probably never hang in the Louvre, but they are a part of me.  And with that, I want to close by including a humorous caricature of one of my former supervisors I made a couple of years ago:

Again, hope you enjoy, and will see you next time.

For Simpler Times And Better Days - More Mayberry Needed and Less Jersey Shore

Lately, with all the fuss going on with the elections, and also living in the urban sprawl for so many years, I have become very contemplative of my own past.  As many of you know, I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and although at times it could be challenging due to the fact I didn't exactly grow up rich, I still miss a lot of things about those days.  As I get older, I really miss them!  There are many people today - mostly 20 and younger - that have no clue about the simpler pleasures in life because they have been spoiled in recent years with smartphones, Playstations, social interaction reduced to MySpace and Facebook, and it just seems as if a cloud of complacency has descended upon many Gen-Yer's.  For instance, I heard a kid in a thrift store one day, as I was perusing LP records to see if anything was worth adding to my extensive collection, say about them "Mommy, what are those?"  The mother, probably in her late 20's, told the kid, "I don't know - maybe it was some sort of frisbee old people played with back in the 1920's."   Just that mentality alone, as humorous as it sounds, says it all. 

Over the past few years, I have been on my own journey of self-discovery, as I have been writing down events of my life as I recall them as well as working on an extensive family tree.  The wealth of knowledge I have discovered (and the internet helps too, as back in the day we never thought to take a lot of pictures, so at least I can find what I am looking for here too!) has made me somewhat more retrospective of my own life.  Looking back on how I grew up, there are a lot of simple pleasures I miss, and sometimes living in the city doesn't help you much to recover a lot of lost territory either.   So today, that is what I wanted to talk about.

I mentioned that I grew up somewhat as what some would call "disadvantaged" - I came from a single-parent home, we didn't have a lot of money, and often in the lack of such things a kid my age then would find solace in reading and then using imagination to explore the world around me.   And, as a kid, I read a lot - by the time I was 12, I had read the whole contents of the World Book Encyclopedia through three times, as well as the entire Old Testament of the Bible, a gourmet cookbook, and three books on World War II history, among other things (for the younger generation, not to sound condescending, but before Kindle we had these things called books made from ink and paper) including a whole 12-volume set of story books called My Book House that was compiled some years earlier by an educator in Illinois by the name of Olive Beaupre Miller.   I also read age-appropriate stuff as well, including Robert Newton Peck's books (I got to know the author as a personal friend over the years, and he is a marvelous person who lives 40 miles from me here in Florida now) and my early exposure to my beloved Armenians, William Saroyan's book My Name Is Aram as well as his two classic short stories, "The Miraculous Phonograph Record of 1921" and "The Parsley Garden."  As a matter of fact, many of the books I read then are now considered "politically incorrect" by the powers-that-be both in Washington and sitting on many public schoolboards, but back then we called them something else - classics!  Do any of you, for instance, ever read the story of the little Black migrant worker kid, Roosevelt Grady?   Those were good stories with solid values!  Many of these things I read due to some initial exposure from school then (our teacher in 5th and 6th grade - I came from a very small school! - was strict but he taught us much) but many of them I also discovered on my own.  And, whether you read them for leisure or as part of a class assignment, they often had the same effect - things in those stories piqued my imagination, and I would often try to put into practice what I had read.   Which leads now to the next part of the discussion.

Reading was by no means the only thing many of us from my generation did.   In those days, we enjoyed doing a lot outside.  Some kids played sports, and although it wasn't my cup of tea personally, that too taught them some important lessons about teamwork.  Play then was not idle entertainment - you learned from it.  Although I wasn't into sports, what I did like to do was fish a lot, as well as learning about wild plants and catching different critters.   Let me spend a few hours around a shallow creek bed, and I would come home with a coffee can chock full of all sorts of things.   Primarily, I caught crayfish (which we called "Crawdaddin'" then), and those were always fun to get your hands on.  Where I grew up at near Grassy Lick Run in Kirby, WV, as a matter of fact, I often found baby crayfish, smaller than a kernel of corn, and caught them by the dozens.  Then there were these odd little critters called water pennies, which looked like tiny pennies under rocks and of course you had to know what you were looking for.   As I read up on those things - I would check out scores of books from the public library about freshwater life (I would have made a great limnologist as a matter of fact!) and then I would see either what I had caught, or I would go looking for some of these things.  That actually made me an ace in Biology later on too.   But, my wildlife collecting was not limited to aquatics, as I also loved haunting a bunch of hazelnut bushes growing just beyond our driveway, where I would often find scores of walking stickbugs, as well as the occasional praying mantis.  I learned from an early age that these stickbugs for some reason loved hazelnut bushes, and come to find out later that is actually one of their favorite foods.  In the fall, I also harvested a lot of the hazelnuts myself - what people will pay $4 a jar for in Wal-Mart these days (hazelnuts, or filberts as some call them, are expensive at times) I got by the bushel for nothing!  And praying mantises - oh what an adventure those were.  For some reason, it was always quite a prize to catch one of those, because then that was probably the biggest bug we had in West Virginia, and it generated fascination.  I remember reading somewhere that people would tie a "leash" on a praying mantis in Vietnam or somewhere, also making it a little house, and of a night it would catch mosquitoes and other pests.  So, I decided to try that, and managed to make a tiny house out of the top of an old Clorox bottle for the next mantis I caught.  I attached the "house" to my bedpost, and when I caught a good-sized mantis, I leashed him with some packing string to the bedpost.  I cannot recall if it worked or not, but it was a good idea (at least at the time!).   When I was around 7 or so as well, I used to also catch Japanese beetles which for some reason loved the flower bushes around my great-grandmother's house in Hendricks, WV.   For some wondering what a Japanese beetle was, it is an invasive species that somehow got loose in the US and would often reek havoc on flowerbeds and gardens.  Back then, we had them all over the place, and they were fun to catch.  They had a glossy brown carapace with a green head, and also had spiky legs.  They were fairly easy to catch, and ironically my catching of those did a great service to my great-grandmother's flowers - she never needed pesticide with me around! 

A major creature that always had my interest as well were toads.  Toads came in all sizes - some were tiny peepers, and others were bigger than my hands.  I mentioned in another story how at times - for some reason it involved church functions! - toads and frogs would get me into trouble.  But, I could not resist catching them.  After a rain, in particular, it was fairly easy to find toads all over the rural roads, and in a night I could sometimes catch a dozen of those.  The last time I actually caught a frog was when I was in my early teens, and that led to a humorous situation.   My family used to like just taking leisurely drives (another lost art today, as everyone is so choked with their own concerns that they don't take time out to just travel - sad really), and on this one particular occasion my grandmother Elsie, my step-grandfather Lonnie, Mom, and I went on one of those trips, exploring the back roads of Hampshire and Hardy Counties.   It was summer, and it had just rained then, and of course the roads were full of toads and frogs.  And, since we were in no hurry, I was catching a bunch of them.   Now, as we were cruising along down these dark country roads in the early evening, one of the frogs got loose, and somehow it made its way to the front seat.   Now, to preface this story,  my grandmother Elsie was not a little woman, OK?  She easily weighed over 300 pounds, and she always wore skirts.  Any rate, we are traveling along, when simultaneously that frog that made its way to the front seat found its way up my grandmother's leg, and at the same time, I opened a can of Pepsi with a "SHHHHHEEEEEEE!" to which Mom hollered "Snake!"  My grandmother went ballistic!  When my step-grandfather brought the car to a screaming halt, my grandmother hops out of the car and is doing some screaming herself as she is jumping around trying to get that "snake" off her leg.  Finally, the frog has had enough of that, and just sort of leaps out of her skirt and lands in some tall grass on the side of the road.  By this time, all of us except my grandmother are laughing hysterically.  That is one of the most fun nights I ever had, and to this day I still chuckle when I picture my rotund grandmother dancing around on that West Virginia country road screaming like a banshee trying to shake a snake off her leg.   If only we had video technology with us then - that would have made a funny YouTube!

Animals were not the only thing I hunted a lot back then either.  For us Appalachian people, wildcrafting is something that is integral to our culture, and from an early age we were taught about certain plants that either were nutritional or medicinal, and it is a passion I still have to this day although I don't do as much of it - wild plants are just not that readily available in the metropolitan Tampa Bay area.   You basically learned the seasons certain things were harvestable, as well as how to find them.   Back in the day, it was more for necessity than it was the hobby it became later when my generation came along, but it was still a good skill to learn.  What I find interesting though is how now these celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay are taking things we used to gather in the wild as a staple and turning them into gourmet delicacies.  Take ramps, for example.   For the person not familiar with mountain culture, ramps are a type of wild leek with broad leaves and a pungent (that doesn't describe it - they reek!) smell that we used to gather in the woods usually after the first snow melt in April.  Back home, a ramp harvest meant at least a month of ramp suppers at churches, fire halls, etc., and many a poor mountain family even made a little extra income off their wild harvest.   The traditional way of cooking them was to saute them in bacon grease or butter, and they were usually cooked with potatoes and/or eggs and served with some sort of beans on the side.   I personally never ate them that way, but also found them to be a great ingredient in soups and sauces though (not to mention they are fairly good raw, but if you are married, do not plan on kissing your wife or husband for a while afterward, because you may be sleeping in a separate bed until the odor wears off!).  Then, a couple of weeks ago, I watched Gordon Ramsay on Master Chef doing a mystery challenge with a bunch of amateur but talented chefs that entailed - you guessed it! - ramps.  Mind you, many of these people had probably never seen a ramp before, so it was actually quite funny to watch them cook with ramps - they really had no idea, not even the best of them!  Any rate, besides ramps I got to know poke greens pretty well, as one summer at my step-grandfather's we ate a lot of those (with a lot of groundhogs too!) and my step-grandfather taught me all about how to harvest them.  Basically, what poke greens (or pokesalad as they are sometimes called) are entail the shoots and tender tops of the pokeweed plant.  The milky substance in the stems of the plant is poisonous, as are the clusters of black berries, but the young leaves are edible and have a similar taste to kale or collards when cooked.   Today, I would not eat them anymore personally, but I would have no problems gathering them.   Also, there was wild garlic, the slightly milder cousin of ramps and much more abundant.  I gathered wild garlic all the way up into my early adult years, as I still value it as a cooking ingredient.   Back in the day though, I would go out and gather whole grocery bags full of it, because it was quite abundant then.  Many people thought of it as a weed, and cattle farmers hated it because it tainted the milk their cows produced, but I thought it was a great commodity.   Any rate, it is really too bad I don't have the access to wild plants like I used to, because there are so many more worth mentioning.

Then there was fishing.  Up until I was about 9, I had never actually fished.  For one I was afraid of water and couldn't swim (still can't to this day) and my contact with a river at that time was skirting the edge and wading in the shallows looking under rocks for critters.  Then, when I was 9, I spent a year with my dad in Brunswick, GA, and he taught me how to fish, and I have enjoyed it since.   My earliest fishing was for crappies and brim in the cattle pond above my grandmother's house in Augusta, WV at the time.  It was fairly easy to catch them, and my favorite fishing spot was an overhanging willow on the shore of the pond that had a deep hole.   I learned to fish two ways then - one was with a conventional rod-and-reel, and the other was with a simpler hand-line.   The hand-line worked fantastic at the pond, because the willow was directly over the hole and I could just drop the line straight down.   Fishing was reserved for the nearby creeks and rivers.   In the Grassy Lick Run in Kirby back then, there was a fairly deep hole almost directly behind our house, and essentially there were two sizeable fish you could catch - chubs and hogsuckers.   Chubs were essentially large minnows that had no real nutritional value and were better as a bait fish, although they could grow up to a foot.   Hogsuckers though were the fun fish to catch.  If you have ever seen one of these fish, they are just plain ugly!  They are often hard to spot, as they are the same coloration as the bottom of the creeks, but they also grew to a good size - some reached 3 feet if you could find them.  They didn't have any nutritional value either - you could eat them, but they were greasy, bony, and by just looking at them you would wonder how anyone could eat something that ugly anyway!  But, some of the poor hillbillies in the area loved them, so when I caught them I would either give them to one of those families that lived in town or feed them to Jill, our dog.   The fun was in catching them, though.  A hogsucker will not bite a baited hook, so you have to be clever with them.  The trick to catching one is to maneuver an unbaited hook as close to their mouth as you can get it, and then give a good yank and snag them.   And, boy, would they put up a fight too!  I guess no one, not even an ugly hogsucker, likes having a hook jabbed in their lip though.   Also, handlines would not work with these - the hole in the creek was too deep where these fish were found, and also you had to be on the lookout for snakes, as the abundant brush and big rocks around would easily harbor both rattlers and copperheads.   So, a rod was much safer.   I later learned how to make my own fishbait too from some fishfood I had from an unsuccessful turn at keeping goldfish at home - the recipe I used was simple; you mixed the fishfood with water and cornmeal, formed it into small balls, and baked it.  Found out later it was a good catfish bait too.   It has literally been years since I fished last, and I have often thought about taking advantage of the many lakes we have here in Polk County, FL, and maybe doing some fishing when the weather cools down in the fall.   There is something therapeutic and relaxing about fishing a quiet lake or stream, and perhaps it would save a lot of people tons of money on therapy if they would learn how to fish.  Besides, these shrinks get paid way too much anyway, if you ask my humble opinion.

The unattractive but fun to catch hogsucker.

Another interesting little fish - less than 5 inches long - that I often caught with my hands in the rock pools in the creek was a curious little thing called a "miller's thumb," or banded sculpin.  A homely little fish, it was a small inedible perch that you could find all over the creeks.  Usually they liked prowling in large rockpiles near or under bridges, and their coloration made them hard to spot.  They were also hard to catch, as they flitted and darted about in such a way that you had to match their speed.  The fact they were a unique little critter made them a prized catch for me as a kid, and I would spend hours sometimes trying to track the little devils down.   They also had voracious appetites, and could crush a small crayfish in their big mouths.   But, you had to be careful catching them, because they hung out in areas that were also perfect hangouts for copperheads.   The creek I first encountered these was Grassy Lick when we first moved to Kirby in 1980 when I was about 10.  Although native to the area, I always was puzzled why they could never be found elsewhere - could have been just the geography of Grassy Lick Run I suppose. 

The elusive "millersthumb," or banded sculpin.

There are many more things that could be said about these simpler times I once knew - sitting up by the radio on summer nights listening to WBT-AM when my big band show was on, building forts in the woods, and hunting down ladyslipper flowers in the pine forest on the ridge above the house.   It was also a time when you didn't have hippies yelling about "global warming" and you still could drink soda out of a glass bottle, and then make ten cents off the empty bottle at the local general store.  And, it was also a time when on Saturday mornings you could look forward to good cartoons (the primetime networks have diminished themselves further by eliminating Saturday lineups like that), and one had a social life - in my teens I was always busy with either church functions or high school band, so I was never bored.   You read books, they sparked the imagination, and you learned something in the process while having fun without some "thought police" telling you that you couldn't do that.   I often miss those days.  Sometimes we didn't have much to work with then, as during part of my childhood I spent at my grandmother's where they didn't even have an indoor bathroom or hot water.  However, I also remember that feel of clothing washed in a wringer washer and air-dried on a clothesline, as well as having homemade piping-hot yeastbread once a week (my grandmother made these huge hotrolls that were delicious, with Robin Hood flour if anyone remembers that).  I often wonder if I am better off now than I was then, or is it the other way around?  I guess I can be thankful for the long way I have come as I have gotten a family, am in graduate school, and have accomplished so much in other areas.  However, those simpler times do beckon at times, and I feel the pangs of homesickness on occasion, but I also know that the best of my experience will always be with me.  And, in writing them down, may they also be a legacy to others, that some may rediscover the simpler way of life one day.