In the Beginning

All over, it is coming up on 10 o'clock, a Pacific time on the evening of March 17th, 2024. It's a Sunday night, and I'm not on the West Coast. I'm sitting in my study just having a thought or two, and this is the thought. I love how Scripture begins and not to repeat myself in the beginning. You've heard me say this a hundred times on this podcast that we all have stories, but not just half stories. We are stories, and all of our stories have a beginning, somewhere, sometime, in some moment of time. I happen to be looking at a certified copy of a birth record for Richard Bruce Photh. Today is the day I was born in a different year, and I'm looking at this birth record, and it says the city of Alameda. Alameda County, that's the county in which you find Oakland, California, in Northern Cal. Says the father is Oliver L. Photh, age 28, birthplace Dynuma, California. Dynuba is a central valley town, a number of miles south of Fresno. Says the mother is Gwendolyn V, that stands for Vance. Gwendolyn V. Boyd, age 31. Her birthplace was also Dynuba, California. Tenant Maternity Hospital, March 17, 1942, about three months after Pearl Harbor. And the time was 1010 PM, Pacific time. The attending physician was Dr. Alice B. Burke. I never met Alice B. Burke, except at that moment. The conversation in our family was that my birth for my mother was a difficult birth. She had no idea how difficult it would be going forward. That time she sent me down to the corner store, Jack's Market, to get 10 pounds of apples so she could make some apple pies. And somehow in that 300 feet of a city block from 5209 Congress Avenue in East Oakland, California, down to Foothill Boulevard where Jack's Market was 300 feet. In my young mind, my fifth grade mind, I translated 10 pounds into 10 dozen. And the store owner, as I went to check out, because that was a day in which you could keep a tab at a corner grocery, at a mom and pop grocery. He looked at me and said, that's a lot of apples. I said, when my mom wants me, she said, you sure that's a lot of apples. I took him up the street, rang the doorbell of our little bungalow house, and my mom came to the door and almost passed out as you can appreciate. And she took one bag, and I wheeled the cart with the other bags back down the hill, and as I came in the door, he looked back over his shoulders. He said to the cash register, waiting on another customer, and said, in a rather loud voice, I told you that was a lot of apples. That's just one modest incident that Gwendolyn Vance Boyd Footh had to put up with in my years. So now, on this night, as I'm about to start my 83rd trip around the sun, I just am contemplating our beginnings. I don't know where you were born. I don't know what your circumstances were, but it was a start of something. And I would submit it was the start of something good, something created in God's image. And when that baby is born, their brand spanking new, no pun intended, and they have smooth skin, and their brains are growing like crazy, and they learn a ton in the first three or four years. And then you go through the seasons of life, and now as a friend of mine says both, we're not in the fourth quarter, we're in the two minute drill here. But I told some university students the other night, and I've probably said this on a podcast before. You know, it's 583 million miles around the sun in a year, this planet orbits the sun in that many miles. And I've done that 82 times, just coming down on approach in the next hour or so, closing out the 82nd trip. If you do the math on that, it's somewhere over 47 billion miles in my 82 years, and at 14 pounds per square inch of atmospheric pressure. But it used to be a smooth face and a slim body and dark hair and a mustache and horn rim glasses has changed substantially. And I told the students, I used to look like you, and I just came tonight to bring you hope, as I speak to you. Fortunately, they laughed, but they have no idea what time will tell and what time will take. But I'm grateful for these years, and especially the years when I have focused on following Jesus, because it makes it rich beyond imagining. And I have a chance, I think, to go at it for another year, so I'm grateful. Thank you for listening to this little soliloquy, this little reflection on the eve of my launch of an 83rd trip around the sun. God bless you on your trip around the sun here in 2024, and I'll be back to you soon, as a dick-foath. Signing off, we'll catch you later. Bye-bye.