By Royce DeGrie
TBC Senior Graphic Designer

I have found in daily life, that people don’t like to talk about health issues because they are embarrassed or don’t want to seem “weak” so they just don’t talk about it. Your health is a deeply personal issue, especially for men. Men don’t want to come across as weak, so they “suck it up” and press on through the suffering. Many won’t go to a doctor because they are embarrassed or want to be seen as “strong.” Well, that’s just stupid and is why I am writing this very lengthy, deeply personal, and somewhat embarrassing column. This is my story of suffering for many years before finding the cause of all my health issues and I hope it helps someone else who is suffering in silence or the lonely solitude of chronic illness.

Some of my earliest memories in life are of really bad, recurring ear infections that started when I was a baby and lasted until early teen years. I had tubes put in my ears when I was about 2 years old and continued to have so many bad ear infections that my ear drums ruptured repeatedly, leaving scar tissue and resulting in poor hearing. [Read more…]

By Johnnie Godwin
Contributing Columnist, B&R

“We can do it!” greeted me from every mobile that hung from the ceiling of a fast-food chain. It was their motto, and I loved it. So I located the manager and told him I wanted to buy one of those mobiles. His reply? “We can’t do that!” I told him his store’s motto said they could. But policy and procedure wouldn’t let him do that.

Recently I located a double-file drawer on casters for sale in an office store chain. It fit my needs and measurements exactly and was listed for $79.99. I told manager John I wanted that filing cabinet and had the money and my truck right then. John said, “I can’t do that!” He told me he couldn’t sell me the store’s floor display, and the cabinet was available only online. So later I went online to order the freight-free item. Online it cost $89.99 with freight-free included. I did an online chat with a rep of that chain store. The store chatter told me the sales team sets the price, which often varies online from the price listed in the store. You surely get the “Catch-22” I faced. [Read more…]

By Lonnie Wilkey
Editor, Baptist and Reflector

As many of our readers know, the Baptist and Reflector is celebrating its 180th anniversary this year.

One of our features has been “Glimpses of the Past.” We find articles and editorials from past issues and reprint them.

It has been fascinating as I have gone through those issues. And it has been amazing to find that many of the issues that we think are unique to our generation today have been around for decades, whether it be worship and music style or evangelism. [Read more…]

By Lonnie Wilkey
Editor, Baptist and Reflector

In the April 8 issue of the Baptist and Reflector, we reported that the legal fate of marriage in the United States will be debated April 28 before the Supreme Court.

With that date just six days away, it is imperative that Tennessee Baptists and Christians fall on our knees to pray for those nine justices of the Supreme Court who will make a landmark decision.

The article noted that the decision likely will be made by the justices before they adjourn this summer. [Read more…]

By Greg McCoy
President-Elect, TBCH

It was in 1894 that the Tennessee Baptist Convention first asked its churches to donate to the Tennessee Baptist Children’s Homes (then called the Tennessee Baptist Orphanage.) This was our first statewide offering, but it was far from our last.

Since 1963, The Mother’s Day Offering (MDO) has been the biggest single way for Tennessee’s Baptist churches to give to the Tennessee Baptist Children’s Homes. This annual statewide offering accounts for about 36 percent of TBCH’s operating budget — funds that go directly toward the care of children.

Last year we launched the Denise and George Shinn Foster Care Program, along with our Caring Community Ministries of churches. Our residential care program has received some much-needed updates, too: technology upgrades, building maintenance, and increased staff. Our ministry has expanded to fill a gap in our state’s efforts to care for children and families in crisis. This expansion comes at a cost, though, and with our recently reduced allotment from the Cooperative Program, that cost will have to be made up elsewhere. [Read more…]

By Larry Robertson
Sr. Pastor, Hilldale Baptist Church, Clarksville

As pastors, we are often confronted with issues that we don’t necessarily feel equipped to handle.

Addictions might fall into such a category for many of us.

It’s easy to preach salvation to a fictional addict we’ve never met. But through the years I’ve witnessed the slavery aspect of sin and it’s made me reconsider how we as pastors, Christians, and churches should respond to addicts and their addictions.

First, humility marked with grace should be our guide. How quickly we rail against others’ addictive behaviors without really considering our own. Those who give themselves to alcohol, drugs, or sexual immorality become easy targets for Sunday sermons. But what about gluttony, lust, or pride? Can we really boast because our sin is different from someone else’s? “There but for the grace of God go I” was one of the most valuable phrases I ever learned. [Read more…]

By Randy C. Davis
TBC Executive Director

Stop.

Just pause what you’re doing for a few minutes and think with me about a couple of very important things.

Have you ever stopped to consider, I mean really consider, what’s important in life? I feel one of the lesser qualities we as Americans seem to have in our DNA is that we scurry from one place to another — one activity to another — never stopping to get introspective. Our lives are too often like the shell game you find played on the street corners in New York, and we’re the ball chaotically being shuffled from one place to another!

More importantly, have you ever stopped to consider what God feels is important in your life? I believe we tend to overcomplicate what we think God expects of us when Scripture lays it out pretty clearly in Micah 6. “He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” [Read more…]

By Lonnie Wilkey
Editor, Baptist and Reflector

WEBER CITY, Va. — Johnny Morelock makes it very clear. He is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic.

As a result he is able to relate to both groups and that has opened numerous doors for him to share how God rescued him from the grips of alcohol and drugs.

“I can talk to an addict. They respond to like-minded people,” Morelock noted. “They won’t listen to people who haven’t been there themselves,” he added. [Read more…]

By Lonnie Wilkey
Editor, Baptist and Reflector

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides several definitions for the word “addiction.”

Among them:

• a strong and harmful need to regularly have something (such as a drug) or do something (such as gamble);

• an unusually great interest in something or a need to do or have something;

• the quality or state of being addicted; and

• compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance (such as heroin, nicotine, or alcohol) characterized by tolerance and by well-defined physiological symptoms upon withdrawal; broadly persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful.

This issue of the Baptist and Reflector provides articles on addictions. Why? Does the Bible even mention “addiction?” It does but it uses the more common description of “sin.” [Read more…]