Featured I threatened her salvation

I am a single man brought up in a Pentecostal Holiness world. There was a yearly routine that was followed religiously…

1. Mo-Fr – Work hard at some public job
2. Saturday – Go to town Saturday morning and work in the PM
3. Saturday PM – Prayer meetings
4. Sunday – Church AM and a wonderful meal PM
5. Spring – Prepare for a large garden
6. Summer – Garden including putting up hay
7. Fall – Saw trees and prepare firewood for winter
8. Revivals - All through the year.

Not a bad life. I worked my way up to lab technician and am making good money. The women here, though, think I am too strict. I did meet a Christian woman and we started getting close. But the more that woman talked… I finally told her, “You know you can’t do those things and go to heaven!” And she… Being Baptist, replies… “Are you trying to threaten my salvation?” And the relationship went down from there.

If you’re going to do evil… Oh yea… I will most certainly threaten your salvation!

 

In better times...

George Clark Rankin. The Story of My Life Or More Than a Half Century As I Have Lived It and Seen It Lived Written by Myself at My Own Suggestion and That of Many Others Who Have Known and Loved Me

George Clark Ranking was born in 1849 in East Tennessee and became a preacher for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (which would later form into the UMC). Mr. Rankin would move and spend the rest of his years in Dallas, Texas and become a writer and the editor of the Texas Christian Advocate. A good life! Here are some excerpts from his book...

...Excerpts...

CHAPTER III - Describing, like David Sullins, East Tennessee....

In the earlier days, long before the railroads ran through that section, East Tennessee was a country to itself. Its topography made it such. Its people were a peculiar people - rugged, honest and unique. I doubt if their kind was ever known under other circumstances. Hundreds of them were well-to-do, and now and then, in the more fertile communities, there was actual wealth. Especially was this true along the beautiful water-courses where the farm lands are unequaled, even to this good day.

Among them were people of intelligence and high ideals. No country could boast of a finer grade of men and women than lived and flourished in portions of that "Switzerland of America." Their ministers and lawyers and politicians were men of unusual talent. Some of the most eloquent men produced in the United States were born and flourished in East Tennessee.

Those evergreen hills and sun-tipped mountains, covered with a verdant forest in summer and gorgeously decorated with every variety of autumnal hue in the fall and winter; those foaming rivers and leaping cascades; the scream of the eagle by day and the weird hoot of the owl by night - all these natural environments conspired to make men hardy and their speech pictorial and romantic. As a result, there were among them men of native eloquence, veritable sons of thunder in the pulpit, before the bar, and on the hustings.

But far back from these better advantages of soil and institutions of learning, in the gorges, on the hills, along the ravines and amid the mountains, the great throbbing masses of the people were of a different type and belonged almost to another civilization. They were rugged, natural and picturesque. With exceptions, they were not people of books; they did not know the art of letters; they were simple, crude, sincere and physically brave. They enjoyed the freedom of the hills, the shadows of the rocks and the grandeur of the mountains. They were a robust set of men and women, whose dress was mostly homespun, whose muscles were tough, whose countenances were swarthy, and whose rifles were their defense. They took an interest in whatever transpired in their own localities and in the more favored sections of their more fortunate neighbors. They were social, and practiced the law of reciprocity long before Uncle Sam tried to establish it between this country and Canada.

Who among us, having lived in that garden spot of the world, can ever forget the old-fashioned house-raisings, the rough and tumble log-rollings, the frosty corn-shuckings, the road-workings and the quilting-bees?

And when the day's work was over - then the supper - after that the fiddle and the bow, and the old Virginia reel. None but a registered East Tennessean, in his memory, can do justice to experiences like those. No such things ever happened in just that way anywhere on the face of the earth except in that land of the skies.

Therefore, the man who even thinks of those East Tennesseans as sluggards and ignoramuses who got nothing out of life is wide of the mark. They had sense of the horse kind; and they were people of good though crude morals. No such thing as a divorce was known among them. It was rare that one of them ever went to jail in our section; and, if he did, he was disgraced for life.

I never knew, in my boyhood, of but one man going to the penitentiary and it was a shock to the whole country.

 

One of the reasons I do not promote any kind of denomination here is because we have such a wide variety of Christians in each Christian movement. Some are wonderful in manners and saintlike. We have some great and wonderful Senior Pastors and others who will ruin the church if they don't step down. Even in the Apostle Paul's time we have troublesome events...

Beside those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches... - 2 Corinthians 11:28

I can imagine the grief the Apostle Paul experienced when hearing of the carnality that would come down from so-called believers.

 

This woman had a wonderful looking body. And with it much talk of fornication.

 

I knew this lady as we worked together for about three months and we were developing a close friendship. She disappeared from work and I never heard from her again. I would be afraid to know what she got into after that.

 

I was in youth ministry at the time and it consumed all my extra time.If you want to say all my fault! I have no problem with that.

 

As a Christian I had to overcome three desires of the flesh...

1. Acceptance
2. Appreciation
3. Attention

Even among people in my own denomination I have went against the majority to be rejected, criticized, and ignored. But to be rejected of a Calvinist really made my day! I will spend the rest of the day in great joy and delight. Especially after attending such a wonderful get together Friday night...

The Sound of Rockytopva