A man walks up to the bar with an ostrich behind him. As he sits down, the bartender comes over and asks for their order. The man says, “I’ll have a beer.” The tender turns to the ostrich and asks, “What’s yours?” “I’ll have a beer, too,” says the ostrich.  The bartender pours the beer and says, “That will be $3.40 please.”

The man reaches into his pocket and pulls out the exact change for payment.

The next day, the man and the ostrich come in again, and the man says, “I’ll have a beer,” and the ostrich says, “I’ll have the same.” Once again the man reaches into his pocket and pays with the exact change.

This becomes a routine until, late one evening, the two enter again.

“The usual?” asks the bartender.

“Well, it’s close to last call, so I’ll have a large scotch,” says the man.

“Same for me,” says the ostrich.

“That will be $7.20,” says the bartender. Once again, the man pulls exact change out of his pocket and places it on the bar.

The bartender can’t hold back his curiosity any longer. “Excuse me sir. How do you manage to always come up with the exact change out of your pocket every time?” the bartender asks.

“Well,” says the man. “Several years ago I was cleaning the attic and found an old lamp. When I rubbed it a Genie appeared and offered me two wishes. My first wish was that if I ever had to pay for anything, I could just put my hand in my pocket, and the right amount of money would always be there.”

“That’s brilliant!” says the bartender, “Most people would wish for a million dollars or something, but you’ll always be as rich as you want for as long as you live!”

“That’s right! Whether it’s a gallon of milk or a Rolls Royce, the exact money is always there,” says the man.

The bartender asks, “One other thing, sir, what’s with the ostrich?”

The man replies, “My second wish was for a chick with long legs.”

I’m happy to report that I’ve discovered the secret to a clean and organized plumbing truck. For sixteen years I’ve struggled with my truck being a mess. Now I think I’ve finally hit on the secret. As you can see, my truck is now the epitome of clean and organized.

And what is the secret to such a clean truck? You just have to dump two-thirds of your junk onto the carport!

People call me nearly every day with a stopped up drain problem, but they almost have to know someone in order to get my phone number. It’s on my web site, but I never advertise in the ordinary sense of the term and, therefore, practically all new customers begin by saying “I got your name from ….”

One day the caller said “I got your name from John Shelton.” I’d never heard of John Shelton, but I didn’t mention that to the customer. I was just glad to get the call and the chance to earn some money. Then such calls continued to trickle in. Finally I asked a caller who “John Shelton” was and found out that he had an appliance repair business in Memphis.

Naturally, I got a call one day from a customer who asked me if I knew someone who repaired appliances. I said I’d check around and I found John in the phone book. I found out from him that we had had a customer in common who told him about me. John’s reaction was “That’s the plumber I’ve been looking for! I often have to refer my customers to a plumber and every time, the plumber ends up doing them wrong.”

We met in person eventually, saw one another occasionally on job sites or at supply houses, worked together on my furnace one evening, but never became actual friends. We were about the same age, but of different lifestyles. We shared a common business philosophy, though, and it caused us to cling together in an informal way and to refer customers to each other constantly. It is very hard to find a trustworthy tradesman, and we who are trustworthy form an alliance nearly as strong as a blood oath. John expected me to treat his customers just as he treated them, and I knew that those customers thought that he was the appliance man from Heaven.

I left a message on his phone a few days ago. This morning the executor of his estate called to inform me that he had died by his own hand on Dec. 18th. Checking back in the Memphis newspaper (which I seldom read), I see that he first shot his estranged wife in a restaurant where she sat with a male friend, then he turned the gun on himself.

Memphis had found something it really needed when it found John. John needed something too, but I guess he never really found it.

So many readers have written in to ask me this question, I decided to just make a blog entry so that I can refer them here.

Recently I and several relatives visited the graveyard where our people are buried. Vandals had gone through the property and kicked over several grave markers, one of which belonged to my aunt’s mother. It pained my aunt to see the monument in this condition, awaiting action by the cemetary’s board. My brother-in-law and I are both pretty strong, but we couldn’t even budge that huge granite slab. It had sat on another granite base and, when toppled, still had its bottom on the base. Its head, however, was now lower than its bottom and the massive weight combined with its position was just beyond the abilities of two men to handle.

We returned later with an eight-foot landscape timber and a number of wooden blocks. We dug out a small hole and poked the end of the timber under the top of the fallen slab. Using a block for a fulcrum, we raised it a few inches and put some blocks in place to keep it up. Then we used a car ramp for a fulcrum and raised it much higher, which made it easier for two of us to grab it by hand and set it completely upright. Once up, it was easy to rock back a little so we could place construction adhesive under it in hopes of discouraging future vandals.

Many have written about this issue recently, therefore I will be brief.

Science, by definition, tends to be atheistic; that is, it denies the existence of any god who matters. To an atheistic scientist, one may posit the existence of a god or gods so long as that god does nothing related to the behavior of the material world. If your child is dying of an inexplicable malady, you don’t want some pious doctor to tell you that God is working a miracle and defying the laws of medicine. No, you would take your child to the atheist doctor down the hall whose attitude is “There must be some natural cause for this problem and I intend to figure it out and save your child’s life.” That would be the scientific approach.

But what if God did work a miracle? If he did, then science would be unable to respond to it correctly. For instance, if God were to create a man today, science would look at that man and see evidence of him being, say, thirty years old. But in fact the man isn’t thirty years old; he’s only one day old. The scientific method assumes that no god has messed with the material world and confused us.

“Intelligent design,” put simply, says that the universe bears undeniable evidence against the theory that it came into being through random processes. Evolutionism says that no god intervened to make the world the way it is. Why do evolutionists say that? Because “science” requires it to be so. To say that God did it would be to depart from the scientific method.

Therefore, even if God did do it, science requires the scientist to deny that God did it.

“Intelligent design” is as obvious as an eastern sunrise. Spiders did not learn to build webs through random processes, trial and error, and natural selection. Heck, I have an I.Q. above 120 and I can’t even keep track of my plumbing tools as well as a squirrel keeps track of the nuts she buried a year ago.

Most pundits do not understand the issues at stake here at all, and they don’t want to.

Our daughter is home from college, a son is coming over with his wife soon, Old Christian Radio is streaming through the computer, and Wonder Wife is producing various dishes in the kitchen that fill the house with appetizing aromas. Yes, it’s Thanksgiving morning at the Barleys’ again.

It won’t always be this way. Already we have one son who didn’t come home for the holiday, so the process of disintegration has taken its toll. Eventually the kids will be all over the world and “the old days” will be a memory. But that’s how it needs to be. God didn’t call us to huddle together like a pile of baby turtles in the pet shop aquarium; he called us to go into all the world and preach the gospel. There’ll be time enough for togetherness once we cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.

Gratitude is a proof of God’s existence. Today is cloudless in Memphis and the temperature is about 60 degrees. Whom does an atheist thank when he perceives natural beauty, and perceives within himself that he has received far better than he deserves? There must be someone to thank, or else gratitude is a perverse condition of the mind. But we know when we experience it that gratitutde is right, not wrong. Therefore, we know that there is a God who grants us the good things we enjoy in this world.

That is an informal logical argument, but I doubt that I have any readers who have studied formal logic enough to be offended by my lack of rigor. I think I developed this argument on my own, but I found out later that G. K. Chesterton articulated it a hundred years ago, and I may have seen it in his writings, or even somewhere else, and simply forgot it. But I know that in my heart I feel profoundly grateful to God nearly every hour of every day. I even believe that I feel more gratitude than the average Christian does, just from casual conversations on the topic.

The Lord said that he who has been forgiven the most will love God the most. We who are saved have all been forgiven more than we can measure, but some of us don’t think about it enough.

Adrian Rogers died in the hospital this morning, succumbing to the combined attacks of double pneumonia, colon cancer, and chemotherapy.

I had heard a little of Dr. Rogers (yes, he had an earned doctorate) before I came to Memphis. I knew that he was a president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a key figure in that denomination’s controversy over whether Christianity or liberalism was to be taught in the seminaries.

When I entered seminary here, I heard him speak a number of times on campus. I came to believe, as I still do, that he was the finest preacher in the the English speaking world. Of course, since I haven’t heard all of the preachers, my opinion is a bit hasty. But I’ve heard quite a few great ones, with large followings, but I’ve never heard one who could match Adrian’s mastery of homiletics.

He was an unrelenting foe of Calvinism, which is the idea that Jesus died only to save a chosen few out of humanity. Adrian believed that he died for the whole world and that every soul was a real candidate for salvation. I heard him preach once “You can say what you will about election, but it’s a wonderful thing to see how many more get ‘elected’ in a red-hot revival meeting.” Only God knows how many thousands came to the Savior through his ministry.

I met him one day. His church numbered nearly 30,000 members, so I guess I had an opportunity that many of his own members never had. It was Thanksgiving morning, 1996. As befalls great and small alike at one time or another, it was a holiday and he had a house full of visiting relatives and no toilets. The sewer at his house on Grove Park Road had stopped up. Whom do you call at such a time? The mayor? The president? The pope? No, you call Kevan. It was quite difficult, but I got him flushing after a couple of hours with the assistance of my fine trainee at the time, Andrew Brawley.

We didn’t find ourselves dealing with a pompous, arrogant boss who considered the grubby plumbers to be a lower form of life. He was gracious and kind, and he gave us each a generous tip for being available on a holiday. Practically all great men whom I’ve met are like that.

I feel dwarfed when I think about Dr. Rogers, not worthy even to clean his sewer. But Adrian would be the first to confess the words of St. Paul. “I am what I am by the grace of God.”

Blogging, along with the rest of life, has been on hold recently as I feverishly work on a paper I have to deliver in Philadelphia this Friday. The Evangelical Theological Society, of which I am a card-carrying member, has its annual meeting in Valley Forge this year and I have to fly out of Memphis early Wednesday. Even at that, I’ll be late since the conference begins Wednesday morning.

I’ve been turning down plumbing calls for several days. I’ve been totally absent from the Internet forums for several weeks. Except for a couple of plumbing jobs today and seeing a guitar student tonight, I’ve been at this computer since 6:00 AM.

This is the price of scholarship. First you have to torture yourself by listening to papers until you become a Ph.D., then you have to write papers and read them out loud to people who have never done you any harm. They have to listen because it’s a part of being a scholar, and you have to listen while they read theirs.

If you don’t crawl around on the rim of this can with the other little caterpillars, you are scholar non grata and The System will make you clean sewers for a living instead of teaching college.

Writing scholarly papers is hard for me because my brain has turned to sewage over the past ten years. I received the Ph.D. degree (they paroled me for good behavior) in December of 1995. Since then I have taught college as an adjunct for a few years, learned to play the dulcimer and banjo a little, and successfully started a business and plumbed a restaurant and a few houses. My idea of reading a hard book is trying to decipher the Shelby County plumbing code.

Alas, I will take my stand this Friday in front of real scholars and follow the maxim that has served me so well for so long: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull manure.” I hate doing anything poorly; but I don’t have the choice of not doing it at all if I ever want to break into academe, so I keep trying. Maybe next year’s paper will be better.

We woke up this morning to hear that Harriet Miers was no longer President Bush’s nominee for Supreme Court judge. They say she withdrew her name, but one can never trust such statements. It might be true or false. We have no way of knowing.

I favored Miers. My favorite columnist, Ann Coulter, opposed her viciously, but I have a lower standard than Ann does. I just don’t think that it takes very much mojo to be one of the Supremes.

Miers had what I wanted in a judge: a clear mind. A judge has to know how to look up the law and how to think clearly. Furthermore, he needs to know the difference between interpreting and legislating. Many of the Supremes obviously don’t know that, but it appears that Miers does.

The conservatives who whined about “qualifications” are wrong, probably misled in the herd mentality that typifies todays conservatism so often. Ann Coulter might have been the cowpoke that got them going. George Will certainly struck a stunning blow with his infamous column.

Conservatives have bemoaned the fact that Miers was an unknown and Bush passed over others who had taken a stand and paid the price over the years. Why all of the subterfuge, they protest? Didn’t Clinton avow that any judges he appointed must favor abortion?

I would answer that the left didn’t take power by announcing their intentions to remake America into something the founders opposed. They are only open now because they’re already in power. They own the courts, the law schools, the universities, the elementary and secondary schools, and even a fair percentage of “Christian” education. If Bush and Miers were open about their intentions, there’d be heck to pay.

Me, I’d be open and let the chips fall. That’s probably why I’m a plumber instead of a college professor. I’ll never sell my right to be open about my thoughts. And anybody like that would probably never get confirmed as a Supreme, either.

The spin machine on the left has swung into action: “The extremists had a litmus test and she didn’t pass it; Bush must not give in to them and bring a more conservative nominee!” It will take firmness and principle to regain the Court, and maybe subterfuge. I’m glad it isn’t my job.

I added another lock to my truck in hope of resisting thieves. My sliding door cannot open with this bolt in place unless the door is cut with a torch or hacksaw. Automobile steel is pretty tough, so I think I’m safe with this.

Here’s a closeup of my handiwork.