Opinion

With any sport, the most exciting time is the postseason playoffs when teams must win or go home. The playoffs begin this week for local and area high school teams with the emphasis on soccer and baseball.

Baseball is an American born, American bred sport that has become popular in other parts of the world. The local high school teams are perennial participants in the baseball playoffs and this year is no exception. [Full Story »] 

Have you ever participated in the Stations of the Cross? If you’re a Christian, you should. It is a spiritually enriching and challenging experience. If you’re not a Christian, you’ll still find it an interesting and possibly moving experience.

The Stations of the Cross is an exercise in following Jesus as he moves toward his crucifixion. The First United Methodist Church offers the opportunity to engage in this exercise from Tuesday, April 16 through Good Friday, April 19 from 3:00-7:00 p.m. and Saturday from 9:00 a.m.-noon in the sanctuary.
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Last week, I was privileged to sit through a presentation on Southern Rivers Energy’s Operation Round Up. Through this program, members of the cooperative can have their bills rounded up to the nearest dollar and the money goes into a fund for distribution to needy applicants in SRE’s service area.
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My Good Wife and I recently traveled to Champion Stadium at ESPN’s Wide World of Sports at Walt Disney World to watch the last two Atlanta Braves Spring Training games ever to be played at that venue.

It’s the end of an era that lasted twenty-two years. The Braves moved their Spring Training headquarters from West Palm Beach to Lake Buena Vista in 1997. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

It’s early in 2019. So far, roughly 197 Democrats have announced that they will be candidates in the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, a couple of Republicans are reportedly weighing the possibility of running for their party’s nomination against the incumbent president who really isn’t a Republican—c’mon now, you have to admit he isn’t—but who won their nomination and the presidency in 2016. [Full Story »] 

Life is full of little, aggravating things. These can be human behaviors that flip your switch or pesky little things that crop up - many of them technology based.

For example, my iPhone is three or four years old. It constantly wants to be updated or backed up or something. I charge my phone all night as I assume most do. Some days, the battery will be nearly dead by midmorning despite the fact that I almost always close out apps when i am done with them.

This amounts to a minor aggravation - something that burrows just deep enough under the skin to perturb me.
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Dear Isabella,

Welcome to the world! We are so glad you are here and that you are part of our family!

You are a gift we don’t deserve, but we gratefully receive you as the sign of grace you are. Every time we look at you or think of you, we are reminded of how good God is.

We love you. We don’t love you because of who you are or because of what you are. We love you just because you are.

As you grow, you’ll discover who and what you are, and we look forward to encouraging and supporting you in your journey of self-discovery. It matters who and what you become, because only as you do so will you be able to realize your full potential. [Full Story »] 

By Walter Geiger
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Sports fishermen and fishing guides who concentrate on inshore or flats fishing don’t care much for celebrity chef/restaurateur Emeril Lagasse. He has done well enough at the celebrity chef business that he is just Emeril - no last name needed. That puts him right up there with Herschel and Elvis, at least in some circles.

With all due respect to the late Julia Child, the first of the genre, I’m not much into cooking shows but I am into eating. One of my favorite dishes is blackened redfish. Emeril introduced that delicacy to the masses and, in just a few short months, the masses fell in love with it. This simple creation put Emeril on the map and blackened redfish began to appear on every upscale - and many low scale - menus around the world.

Suddenly, the lowly redfish, whom many had viewed as a trash fish for generations, was - sorry, Charlie - King of the Sea. Demand for redfish went up.

Commercial fishermen with long lines and nets targeted them in order to cash in on the craze and, you guessed it, redfish populations which had thrived since creation rapidly declined. [Full Story »] 

“The older you get, the colder you get.” Those words of wisdom - the only words of wisdom from him I remember - were imparted to me by Grandaddy Lonnie.

We were living in Ailey, Ga. at the time. We had a burn barrel behind the house for burning trash. It was a cold day and I had trash duty. Once upon a time, trash duty for me led to a wildfire in the adjoining broom sedge field but that is story for another day.
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By Mike Ruffin

I don’t remember my first haircut. I don’t know how old I was when it happened, but I have short hair in every picture of little me that exists, so I must have been real young.

I also don’t remember who gave it to me, but it was probably Mr. Spears, whose barbershop was located at the corner of Market Street and the Main Street alley. [Full Story »] 

By Walter Geiger

On one of the first really cold mornings of the winter, I walked out to my Jeep to head to work only to find it would not start. Dead as a doornail a they said back in the day.

I hooked my fancy charge box to the Jeep battery and it immediately took the box from near full charge down to 40%. Despite that power draw, the usually trusty Rubicon still would not start.

I arranged for alternative transportation and called for help. When I returned later in the afternoon, there was a new battery in the Jeep and it started right up so I drove it back to the office that evening. I worked for about 90 minutes before calling it quits. I headed into the cold night and, you guessed it, the new battery was likewise doing its doornail impression.

To paraphrase the shortest verse in the Bible, Walter cursed.
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By Mike Ruffin

In a recent service at the First United Methodist Church of Barnesville, Pastor Cyndi McDonald led us to remember our baptism. At the end of the service, she invited us to dip our hands in the water in the baptismal font as a way of doing so.

During her excellent sermon, Pastor Cyndi explained that Methodists baptize in three ways: sprinkling (which requires just a little water), pouring (which requires more water), and immersion (which requires a lot of water).

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By Walter Geiger

One day last week, I was performing my morning ritual of getting coffee from a local convenience store to enjoy at my desk while dealing with the daily assault of e-mail - mostly junk. I encountered a woman whom I thought was addressing me.

It turned out she was carrying on a phone conversation through some sort of Bluetooth device though I could see neither phone nor earbuds. She cavorted about the store speaking of things most of us would not think of uttering in public and was apparently oblivious to the fact everyone in the store could hear her. [Full Story »] 

By Mike Ruffin

1968 was a tough year. The Vietnam War was raging. Assassins struck down Dr. King and Sen. Kennedy. Riots tore apart major American cities. The divisions between people were sharp.

But something happened at the end of that year that showed us something we really needed to know. And many of us watched it on television.

I was ten years old, sitting on the floor in front of our nineteen-inch black and white television set in the little den of the little house on Memorial Drive. I joined millions of other people in watching the images of the moon’s surface being beamed to Earth by the astronauts aboard Apollo 8. I listened as the three explorers— Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders—read the opening verses of the creation poem found in the first chapter of the biblical book of Genesis.
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