August 20,2023: Happy 16th Birthday, Shane Walker Hayes!

 There are few things more frightening than getting older, Shane Walker, but I may be (I am) looking at things from my elderly perspective. No matter how long you live or what you determine to do with your life, there is always some fear of the unknown as you enter into your next endeavor. I have been blessed with 72 years and some change so far, and I thank God for every one of them. There are things that I have done during those years that I would love to do over, but I decided long ago not to dwell on them.

The most important advice that I can offer you for your future is to never look back. You will have triumphs and you will make mistakes in life, but be graciously grateful for the wins and learn everything you can from the losses and move on. You can never change the past, so keep your eyes on what is ahead of you, always striving to do the very best that you can in all that you do.

Dream big! If you aim for the stars and fail, you will be far above those who never try. Dedicate your life to God and stay faithful to Him and you will always find yourself on the right path. It has been a blessing to me to know you, and I eagerly anticipate the wonderful things you will accomplish!

Happy 16th birthday!

March 26th, 2021: As the Birds: a Poem

As the Birds

By

M Ray Holloway Jr

It is such a strange thing as things go in this life

That a Christian should ever despair,

For as one who is claimed by God’s infinite Son,

Life should be so much simpler to bear.

It’s just that we can’t get our eyes off this world,

And before long its standards imply

That to live with a faith in someone we can’t see

Is to live with a faith in a lie,

But a bird isn’t taught how to soar in the sky,

And if it, too, would keep looking down,

It would spend all its life in the grass looking odd,

Since it never took off from the ground,

But a bird looks to Heaven and ever keeps looking

To the trees and the skies and the sun.

With a push from its mother and a gift from our Father

The birds and the skies become one.

God knows we are wary, but so is the sparrow

Who looks to the wind with a shake,

But He knows in His wisdom the sparrow must fly,

And we too have our winds we must take,

So He built a foundation beginning with Christ

That is woven in wishes and prayers

Of our brethren in Him who uplift and encourage

And successfully chase our despairs.

Christian, know that God loves you, and look to the skies,

For this world does not know how to live,

For if faith in the Unseen can make a bird fly,

How much more to a man does He give?

November 17th, 2020: The Presence

While searching deep within my soul,

My eyes were drawn to shadow.

A single dove of purest white

Did perch upon my window.

    I marveled at its silky cast

    And reached to touch its wing.

    She skittered back from my caress

    Ere I could soothe a thing.

        I saw a troubled broken heart

        And stretched an open hand,

        But every time I made a move

        The frightened bird just ran.

            Then bold at once, the bird flew in

            And landed in a mess.

            Its wings aflutter did upset

            The candle on my desk.

        The flame was hot; the fire did catch;

        The haunted bird did cry,

        And well before my feet could move

        I saw the creature die.

    The acrid smell of burning flesh

    My nose and eyes did sear,

    And leaning o'er the charred remains

    I bathed her with my tears,

For all I'd had was peace to give;

I'd never meant to harm,

But seeking to admire her

I'd cause her such alarm.

    I gathered up the crumpled form,

    And then was much surprised

    To feel the bird's misshapen shell

    Crack, stir, and then arise!

The form did open as an egg,

And from within revealed

A dove of silver shining through;

Its fears had all been healed.

    It cocked its head and peered at me,

    And wondered at my awe,

    And flew away with graceful wings

    Through dark's cold open maw.

I sat there staring deep in thought

About the things I'd seen;

I knew there was a message here,

But one I could not glean.

    There are such things beyond my touch

    That grip my heart with fear

    But even in  my darkness, He

    Reminds me that He's here...

September 29th, 2020: The Writer's Process

     I've talked before about certain motivations for writing stories. Sometimes it was nothing more than just a crazy idea that occurred to me while I was working. For "Deathburger," I heard an ad on the radio for a spicy new hamburger that a restaurant was coming out with. While I was putting paper into my printer, I wondered to myself, what if someone created a new burger that was so spicy that someone actually died from it? That became the basis for a humorous story about a town that used a tragic event to bring more people into the town.

     "Picture of the Ghost" was a little more involved. My wife Pam likes to watch these paranormal shows where psychic investigators examine a house that people claim to have ghosts in them. Using sophisticated equipment, they go through the house room by room until they get some kind of reading that indicates an otherworldly presence. They then pull out devices that supposedly allow the "ghosts" to communicate with them, and start asking questions to determine if a spirit is present and who it might be. Is it some demonic being, or has Aunt Tillie just come back to say that the family isn't polishing the silverware well enough? The investigator then tells the audience what the ghost has said and sites "research" that "proves" that the ghost is a previous owner of the house who died violently. After watching one of these shows one day, I wondered to myself, "What if they got it wrong? What if they have the wrong person? Maybe they misread what the specter was trying to say. What if the ghost was having trouble operating the equipment?" That lead me to write "The Picture of the Ghost," about a poor country boy who dies in prison and finds himself unable to move on to the next life. When he encounters "The Ghost Sweepers," all kinds of problems develop.

     The Word trilogy that I've been writing for the past few years is based on an observation I made watching science fiction movies. Sometimes, an explorer would land on a distant planet that was occupied by telepaths, people who had no verbal language but spoke to each other's minds. It always seemed really strange to me that they were able to communicate with the earthling in clear English, even though they had never seen an earthling before. So, I wrote about my own race of telepaths, all women, who "spoke" in images rather than words. As I developed what was supposed to be a short story, I kept coming up with more and more "what if's" until the story was big enough to fill three books. It took on a religious tone as the women on the planet had a totally different Garden of Eden story that took place. Instead of giving in to the evil creature and disobeying God, their "Eve" stayed faithful and rebuked their Satan.

     What about my time travel novel, "At Some Point in Time?" Sometimes a writer will draw from his own personal experiences in life or things he has seen. Each story has a question that it tries to answer. For that book, the question was, if you had access to a time machine, where would you want to go? I thought about the life of Christ or some monumental event in history, then I thought, what about something more personal. I began to imagine a brilliant scientist who was in a very unhappy marriage. He had married on the rebound when he lost touch with the girl he had hoped to marry, and the match he settled for was not a good one. So, having invented the world's first time machine, his colleagues keep telling him that he should go back in time and change his life to a happier one. He resists the idea, thinking that it is too selfish a use for his amazing machine, but when an accident occurs, he does indeed get sent back thirty years. The controls were not set properly, so the way he gets sent back is awkward, but he makes the best of it and tries to help his younger self build a better life. It turned into a very popular story, with pseudo-science, history, romance, and Christian elements woven in. If God lets me live that long, I would like to write a sequel to it set twenty years in their future from the end of that book.

     So, many things will inspire an author to write a story, sometimes just a quirky thought that runs through his mind, and sometimes a concept that evolves as the work progresses.

September 4th, 2020: Casualties

September 4th, 2020: Casualties

    I lost some dear friends to the covid-19 virus this week. Oh, no one died, but for reasons mentioned below, they will no longer be with us at our gatherings.

    My friends felt uncomfortable with the number of folks around who did not or would not wear face coverings when we got together in large groups. I know that no one is being malicious about not wearing masks, but nonetheless, there are people out there in the world who are immensely protective of their health under normal circumstances, and with this virus going around, they are even more cautious.

    What do I think of the mask mandate? On the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter, but just for the record, I'm not sure that they do much good, and in some cases, may even be unhealthy rather than healthy.

    Some people resist wearing the masks because they claim it is a scheme by the government to control people. I kind of doubt that is the case, because there is some good documentation that shows that wearing a mask does prevent the spread of communicable diseases, and covid-19 is seriously contagious. I think that if someone is wearing the proper kind of mask, they can protect others and themselves for a period of time. I even saw an experiment where they coughed into petri dishes while not wearing a mask, then while wearing a cloth mask, and finally while wearing a N95 mask such as the kind that health care workers wear. Predictably, the dish of no mask was filled with bacteria, but the dish with a cloth mask showed some bacteria as well, though not as much. The dish from the N95 mask showed no bacteria at all. Granted, if this were a government conspiracy, the test could have been faked to serve as convincing propaganda, but I do not think so. My conclusion is that all the masks circulating out there are not the same. Some home-made cloth masks may not be protecting us at all, while others might work well. I do not recommend wearing the N95 masks; leave them for the very vital health care workers.

    Some people, in their determination to NOT wear a mask latch on to the myriad theories floating around out there that claim to prove how bad wearing a mask is for one's health. There is the claim that putting a face covering over your mouth and nose decreases your oxygen level to 65% or some other unsurvivable level. I have never believed that, but wanted to prove it for myself, so when I found out that I could purchase a pulse oximeter, I did. When I got it home, I read the directions carefully (clip to finger, push button) and checked my oxygen reading. Mine seems to hover around 97% just about all the time. After I had it on for a few minutes, I slipped my face mask on to see what happened. My reading immediately dropped to 94%, but within thirty seconds, rose back up to 97% and stayed there. The mask did not have any effect at all.

    Others refuse to wear masks because, well, "I'm a man, not a sheep, and ain't nobody gone tell ME what to do!" You guys need to just tamp it down, because you're not proving your manhood, your proving your level of stubbornness. A person who wears a mask is not doing so because they are weak and yielded to the dictates of an oppressive government. They are protecting themselves and their family from a very vicious disease that has already killed a lot of people. It is a real threat, and deserves to be treated as such.

    Some folks seem to think that if a person wears a mask, they lack faith in God to protect them. When Jesus rose from the dead, He met some members of His group of followers and revealed who He was to them. Those people ran back and told the rest what they had seen, but the apostles did not believe them. It is said that when Jesus finally caught up with them He rebuked them for their unbelief. My point is that, having seen the death and burial of Christ, they simply could not accept the idea that He was alive once again. These were men who had walked side by side with Christ every day and saw the wonders and miracles and heard the amazing sermons that He preached, which were unlike anything they had ever heard before. But they STILL doubted the veracity of a risen Christ.

    People are scared, and justifiably so. I think that a large majority of us know someone who has died from the covid virus, making it deeply personal to us. We see what is going on around us and tell ourselves, "There, but for the Grace of God..." We stay home, we wear masks, we keep our distance from others near us, and monitor our health day by day. Something that we would have dismissed a year ago as a simple sniffle causes us to start thinking about who we've come in contact with that might have had the virus. Irrational? Maybe, but just as real to us as can be.

    We all cry out to God to protect us and our loved ones from this horrible epidemic, but we also know that the Lord causes the rain to fall upon the wicked and the good. If someone dies of the virus, does that mean that their faith was weak? This puts us back to a time when people believed that if you got sick, you must have done something bad in your life, and God was then punishing you. We have evolved beyond that manner of thinking.

    I think that we should show compassion for those who have the virus as well as those who fear the virus. To me, this is the most Christ-like thing that I can do with my life. You'll see me out there wearing a mask, even though I don't really believe it is protecting me as much as the experts want us to believe. Why do I do that? Because I love my friends and family, and they are concerned. I respect their concern and comply, not just because I can't go into my favorite restaurant without a mask, but because I look at those who pass by me and see the fear in their eyes. If this small act of putting a piece of cloth over my face brings them some sense of comfort, I will do it.

    When I go up on the stage to lead the church in song, I remove my mask. I am far enough away from everyone that I will not spread any illness I might have to you, but when I go sit down in the congregation, you will see me cover my face. It's just one more way I can let everyone know that I truly care about your well-being.

    Disclaimer: This is not intended to be an indictment of anyone or any group of people. It is simply my opinion, and nothing more.

August 21st, 2020: Eulogy for Missy

I was asked to give a testimony at church one day. This is what I said.

    It is very easy in our daily routine to put things aside that are not absolutely beating down our door. Often we pay more attention to the things we want to do before we give thought to the things we should do. Donating to a charity gives way to buying a new car or going to a movie. Spending time with loved ones is often sacrificed for working extra hours on the job. Going to church is put off for an extra couple of hours sleep. There is an idea of precedence that somehow, somewhere has gotten fully turned around down through the ages.
    In this world where man’s ability to do for himself seems to be growing more each day, his dependence upon God seems to be proportionately shrinking.
    There needs to be a return to the ways of the Bible not only in our homes and private lives, but also in our schools, businesses, and government. Has man become so arrogant that he no longer finds a need for God? Have we truly “progressed” to where we are afraid of offending those individuals who resent God? Why have we forgotten that God is every bit as powerful today as He was when He stood before a vast emptiness and commanded our entire universe and everything within it to come into existence.
    But that same God who created our marvelous universe has another side that reaches out to every individual on a much more personal level. God Cares About People.
    God’s love for us as individuals is such that He not only weeps over our sorrows with us, but the Bible teaches that thousands of angels cheer with great jubilation when a lost one finds his way back to God again. God wants us to be happy!
    As a Christian, I feel it is my responsibility to tell people about Christ and how He was the Son of God. You see, God loved us very much. He realized that as sin-filled human beings, we were not capable of raising ourselves to a level even to be in the presence of a God of pure goodness. So, He sent a sacrifice; while still retaining His identity as God, He became a man whose purpose was not only to show men through His life how they should live, but also to die as a substitute, removing all punishment for mankind’s sins. In return, God asked only that men confess their sins to Him, clean up their lives, and believe in His beloved Son, Jesus. With our sins completely removed by Jesus Christ, we can enjoy fellowship with God and the many blessings that He gives us.
    It is with these blessings and the love-filled act God committed just for our benefit that I have tried to convey so many times to people I meet daily. One such person was a lovely nineteen-year-old girl.

    She worked at the same store that I did, although not in the same department. She was a tall, pretty girl with long dark hair and a warmth about her that seemed contagious.
    She and I often talked about God. She seemed to enjoy the conversation and frequently suggested that we get together with some friends after work to go into our discussions in more detail. We never did. My wife and son and her personal life always seemed to prevent us from any discussions afters hours, so we pursued the topic at work, often incurring the wrath of our employer for not completing our work.
    We became good friends over the few short months I knew her. I kidded with her about her rock music and the loose morals it projected, and she kidded me about the antiquity of the hymns I listened to or the opera-style gospel music that came on my radio. We joked a lot, but she knew that my real concern was for her spiritual well-being.
    She was always willing to listen, too. She would never contradict or deny anything I told her. I think she realized that I was quoting from the Bible. She made me realize for the first time what “sharing from the Bible” really meant. I wasn’t telling a co-worker about the Bible; I was sharing a wonderful idea from God’s Holy Word with a dear friend.
    Then one morning, she didn’t come in to work. She was often late in the mornings, due to sickness or sometimes just over-sleeping, so we weren’t too concerned at first, but as it got later and later, we began to worry. After trying for some time to get an answer at her apartment, I grabbed my jacket and asked for her address.
    Moments later, I picked up the phone in her apartment and called for an ambulance. Then, not having any medical training, I did the only thing I could; I knelt beside her bed and prayed for her soul.

    This young girl was the victim of a senseless murder that ended her life at a very early age. Her warmth, kindness, and love for other people had seemingly been overcome by someone’s hatred.
    The questions I faced then were some of the most difficult ones I have ever had to cope with. When a person dies, a Christian naturally wonders whether he or she will spend their eternity in Heaven or Hell. Did they find their way to God, winning peaceful co-existence with Him? Or was the hesitation to accept God’s promises enough to cause an eternity of suffering?
    Was my friend saved? If she wasn’t, did I do all that I could for her? If she was, are there others that will die without God because of my neglect?
    The girl’s friends and family tell me that she knew God. I hope so, although I am certainly not qualified to talk. I do know this, though. I frequently felt the presence of God very strong when she and I talked about His love.
    And if we, as Christians, love our God, is it not right that we do His will? Often all it takes is a word or two, but much too often, this is just too much. We put aside what we should do for what we want to do.
    I have heard a story of a great crusade with a famous evangelist who asked that all the lights in the auditorium be turned out. When they were, he took a match from his pocket and lit it.Being the only light in the auditorium, it was easily seen. The evangelist then instructed everyone else to light a match also. Immediately, the whole auditorium was lit once again, almost as though the lights had come back on. The simple act of thousands of individuals, each lighting only one match had re-lit the auditorium.
    The moral is simple enough. One individual doing good in an evil world will almost always stand out as a match in the darkness. But if everyone reached out and did good for others, there would be a lot less need in the world today.

Eulogy for Missy
Lost one, what hope for you?
Was there ever any more that we could do?
A kind deed, a spoken word;
It’s late to wonder if you heard.
The times we thought, but did not dare
To let you know that we did care.
Should life be changed, or should we try
To speak of God or live the lie
Of caring from safe distances
While holding our indifferences?
One soul is lost, but many more
Can be forewarned of what’s in store.
A life of sin, a life of joy;
Our life’s a gift with which we toy.
Valuable jewel in the hands of a child,
Innocence seeking and carelessly wild.
Reach out and touch them, for only with aid
Can fears be o’ercome and securities made.
The Lord is our conscience, He troubles us not,
But reminds us quite often of things we forgot.
Can we love anymore, can we hate any less?
The Lord forgives all, can we do any less?
Lost one, what hope for you?
Was there ever any more that we could do?
A kind deed, a spoken word;
Too late to wonder if you heard.
M Ray Holloway Jr

July 24, 2020: Beginning

     The blue-eyed fair-haired toddler sits petulantly on the floor, gazing fixedly at the cookie jar on the table above his head. His mind had not developed the concept of words yet, but he knew that he wanted what was there.
     Without really thinking about how or what he would do, he grasped the edge of the table, mouth-watering over the sweet-savory taste he remembered. He pulled on the table, trying to draw the tasty morsels down to him, and to his surprise, they actually came down to him, or so he believed at first, but when he looked around, the floor had fallen away from him somehow.
     Looking down at his body, it was no longer neatly folded in its natural position where it had always been. It was stretched out away from him and his head was way up here by the table. About that time, he heard sounds that he knew came from the Warm Soft One who brought him to this place.
     “Look,” she said. “He’s standing!”
     Puzzling over these strange sounds, he somehow sensed that this was just the start of something….