I’ve always enjoyed watching the flag of the United States of America unfurl and flow in the sky. I often feel a little patriotic pride whenever I pass a Perkins Restaurant as their large flag waves at me. While there isn’t a standard “Perkins flag size,” they often go for the most massive flag possible, at times exceeding 30 x 50 feet. It’s just beautiful! Additionally, my father’s military service fostered a sense of patriotism as he enlisted in the Navy in WWII and continued as a reservist for 25 years of military service. The flag given to my mother by the Navy Honor Guard at my father’s graveside is in its display case in my home.
My fascination for the U.S. flag likely developed from my grandfather coming to live with us when I was eight years old. He moved from California and must have left a flag behind. As a result of Big Pop’s request, my dad put up a rudimentary flagpole fashioned out of galvanized steel pipe with a pulley mounted on top and the halyard laced through it. He set the pole in a concrete-filled post hole, and a sturdy, stitched, 100% cotton flag flew from that 8-foot pole. Every morning my grandfather raised the flag and lowered it each evening. I often sat with him on the front porch and enjoyed our conversations, watching my Toy Fox Terrier chase squirrels and feel the gentle breeze as it lifted the flag in our shaded front yard.
We headed for church one Sunday morning before Big Pop raised the flag. A short time later, a church member arrived and, having passed our house on the way to church, asked if everything was okay at our home. Confused, my mother said, “Yes. Why do you ask?” He responded that the flag was flying upside down, a sign of distress. Mom quickly called to check on my grandfather, and the flag was right-side up when we returned home. In his remaining years, Big Pop never made that mistake again. After he died in 1969, we continued to raise the flag, but not with the consistency he did.
In my late twenties, I took a church position in Memphis and had the opportunity to move back into that childhood home. The flagpole still stood, and the flag was stored in the living room closet. I was astonished that the flag’s colors were still vibrant (likely from never flying in direct sunlight), and its stitching remained intact. It was a treat for my daughters to raise the flag occasionally. My wife began to make birthday flags to fly on the flagpole to commemorate each year’s noteworthy milestones. Unfortunately, at some point in our nine years in that home, a child (who will be nameless) was holding the halyard as she walked in circles and wrapped the rope around the pole. At some point, the fatigued metal at the base of the pole snapped, never to be reinstalled.
The old flag traveled with us to Iowa in 1994, and it continued to fly on holidays in special memory of my grandfather, whose hand so lovingly cared for it all those years ago. It last flew on July 4, 2024, but I forgot to bring it in that night. The next morning, I retrieved in only to find several tears and a large hole in the field of blue. I wrapped it back around its wooden pole and placed it in the closet to never fly again.
As Memorial Day approaches, I want to resume the tradition of flying the flag for at least the patriotic holidays. I researched and purchased a well-stitched and reinforced flag that is appropriately “Made in the U.S.A.” The flag arrived today, and it is on my deck railing. While the local V.F.W. and Boy Scouts have an annual flag retirement ceremony, I’m not sure I can let go of this cloth that is truly our family’s nearly 60-year-old “Old Glory.”
The new flag from Allegiance Flag Supply will hopefully give me another 60 years of patriotic good vibes. Well…I won’t push it that far.
I was driving through West Texas yesterday and listening to the radio. Since it was February 13, there were a lot of references to Valentine’s Day, which made me especially miss my lifelong Valentine. As I listened to the love songs, I felt regret that I had never written a love song to/about Myra. While she loved to hear me sing and play my guitar, the songs I sang to her were written by others.
Our life together and love would have generated a song if I had just committed the time to it. Myra could have been a collaborator because she was the resident lyricist. While I always knew the tune, she was the one who remembered the lyrics to fill in my lapses. When I thought about our life together, several key thoughts came to mind, and I quickly recorded them on my iPhone’s “Notes” app.
I opened that app this morning and thought, “I wonder what AI would do with these memories. I found a site that had me pick a genre (Country), write a brief description of the song’s theme, and then click “generate.” Within seconds, a three-verse, choruses, bridge, and outro emerged. With a bit of tweaking of the first two verses, this was the result:
Startin’ Our Life on a Sunday Night
(Verse 1) I remember that church, On a December Sunday night, With poinsettia arrangements, And the candles burnin’ bright. You wore my sister’s dress, You didn’t mind that it’d been worn, You didn’t want a diamond, Just love in simple form.
(Chorus) Oh, we made it simple, Just love and a song, In the glow of those candles, Where we both belong. You didn’t need the jewels, Just a heart that sings true, In a world full of chaos, It was just me and you.
(Verse 2) Your smile was like sunshine, As I strummed my old guitar, Singing love songs penned by others, They came right from my heart, Though I never wrote a verse, Just for you to hold near, But in that quiet moment, Your laughter filled my ear.
(Chorus) Oh, we made it simple, Just love and a song, In the glow of those candles, Where we both belong. You didn’t need the jewels, Just a heart that sings true, In a world full of chaos, It was just me and you.
(Verse 3) Your eyes sparkled like starlight, As the preacher spoke slow, With our friends all around us, And the sweet scent of hope. You’d have eloped in a heartbeat, But my folks had their say, Yet we danced through the night, In our own special way.
(Chorus) Oh, we made it simple, Just love and a song, In the glow of those candles, Where we both belong. You didn’t need the jewels, Just a heart that sings true, In a world full of chaos, It was just me and you.
(Bridge) Now every time I play, I catch a glimpse of your smile, In our little world, Babe, We’ve traveled every mile. No diamonds, no big wedding, Just a love that won’t fade, In the echoes of that night, Our sweet memories made.
(Chorus) Oh, we made it simple, Just love and a song, In the glow of those candles, Where we both belong. You didn’t need the jewels, Just a heart that sings true, In a world full of chaos, It was just me and you.
(Outro) So here’s to the moments, The laughter, the tears, In our simple love story, We’ve conquered our fears. With no diamond in sight, Just soul’s pure embrace, In this simple forever, You’ll always find your place.
There are still a few things that I would change, but overall, I was amazed at how this captured the simple essence of our relationship. I sent the lyrics to my daughters and received a quick response from my middle daughter: “Well, I’m already crying after the first line!”
AI’s impact on society is hotly debated. My oldest daughter is a creative writer and enjoys the process of crafting her words. Thus, she avoids the help that AI might give her. My youngest daughter is in a corporate management role where quick correspondence and decisions are frequently needed. She often utilizes AI, from generating emails to comparing annual employee performance reviews to quickly analyze changes in performance. As I did with the above song lyrics, she uses AI suggestions as a springboard for her spin on things.
I can somewhat rationalize the use of AI in this songwriting endeavor. My original thoughts prompted AI’s first draft, which served as a springboard for my revisions. Most musicians collaborate in song development. However, the problem is, who would know AI was involved in the first place? How many songs are already being generated by AI?
What are your thoughts about using AI in the area of creativity?
NOTE: I started this account four days after our 46th Wedding Anniversary on December 18, 2023. Myra died five days later. It sat in my draft folder for a year and I post it now on the 1st anniversary of Myra’s death for the sake of documentation and as an account of our Parkinson’s journey.
Myra’s grave decorated for Christmas 2024
On Tuesday, December 18, 2023, my wife, Myra, and I celebrated our 46th Wedding Anniversary. I use “celebrate” loosely since she was in bed all day, and I was addressing Christmas cards. You see, Myra was at the end of her 30+ year battle with early onset Parkinson’s Disease. We always knew that a time would come when she would succumb to the degenerative brain disease that impacts motor functions.
Still, she had several other symptoms, which we were not expecting with the initial diagnosis. She was spared the common symptom of tremors but had stiffness, slowness of movement, and uneven and unstable gait…sometimes resulting in falls. In fact, complications from falls are a leading cause of death in the disease process. She had several trips to the hospital for falls, resulting in lacerations, a fractured nose, and a concussion. Our friend and physician once said that Parkinson’s patients seem to fall in slow motion, which was true of Myra. Once, while she was still ambulatory, I left her for a bit only to find her after a tumble at the bottom of the basement stairs. Amazingly, her only injury was a hyper-extended finger.
A walk on the Big River Crossing of the Mississippi River in Memphis.
She also developed orthostatic hypotension, a medical condition that results in a drop in blood pressure when standing up. This condition led to occasional fainting episodes. While generally controlled by medication and compression stockings, it was never totally mitigated and resulted in her first significant loss of independence: driving. Additionally, the condition made her more uncomfortable holding her infant grandchildren for fear of fainting while they were in her arms.
A candid photo of Myra after being told by the neurologist that her driving days were over.
Another problem in advanced PD is swallowing difficulties, resulting in choking or aspiration. A weak cough prevents clearing aspirated liquids/food and can lead to pneumonia. Pneumonia is a more common cause of death among people with PD than the general population. While Myra struggled with some aspiration of liquids, we, fortunately, had only one serious choking incident in which a large piece of beef obstructed her airway. I was able to remove it, avoiding a horrific death experience.
But the hallucinations, the imagining of children playing outside or sitting in the bedroom, were an unexpected and disconcerting part of the journey. While the sightings were primarily non-threatening, they were so prevalent that she often didn’t even inform me of the apparitions’ frequency. Usually, they were our own daughters as children, who appeared at night in bed with her. When two of our daughters traveled from Texas for a surprise visit, she was genuinely uncertain when they appeared at the door and asked, “Are they real?” Another time, I was in a neighboring community when I received a cell call from one of the women attending a Bible study that Myra was leading in our home that night. When Myra took the phone, she told me a woman was dancing in the backyard and igniting the grass on fire with a torch. She was assured by the women at the house it was not real. I arrived home after the Bible study, but a few women remained with Myra. After they left, she confided that a “man” had been standing in the corner of the room all evening.
In the final years, we began dealing with dementia. Myra began to think there were “three Chucks: Chuck the husband, Chuck the pastor, and Chuck the photographer.” She would often talk about one of the other Chucks in my presence. We were driving back from visiting our children in Texas one late night. I pointed out an airliner that was on course to transit the moon. I commented that I would have liked to capture it if we had not been on the turnpike. Her response was, “Chuck likes to get those pictures.” Another time, as I left to take care of a ministry responsibility, she asked the caregiver, “Which Chuck was that?” One night, as I got her ready for bed, Myra looked at me and said, “I haven’t seen you for six months. I’m glad you’re back.” I’m unsure which Chuck had taken care of her during the preceding months…but I am pretty sure it was me.
Over time, there was a growing loss of recognition of her family. It was only occasional, or Myra covered it well (which I think she did), but by August of 2022, it was more apparent. Two of our daughters and families were in town, and when we returned from a day at the Iowa State Fair, Myra implored her caregiver, “Don’t leave me with those people.”
It was hard to see her grapple with the confusion that set in. She was uncertain where she lived for years, thinking it was an institution rather than our home. She would ask how long she had lived in “this place,” who was in charge of it, and how many others lived there. She was very concerned about our marital status and was uncomfortable sharing a bed with me if we were not married. I put our marriage license in a frame so she would know we were “legally and morally upright.” She repeatedly asked if I had a brother, having previously known I only had four older sisters. I finally asked her if another man who looked like me cared for her. Myra replied, “Yes.”
God provided a wonderful an incredibly knowlegable and caring neurologist, Dr. Lynn Struck, who treated Myra for decades. Additionally, a group of volunteers from our church stayed with her Sunday morning while I had church services and other occasions when I needed to be engaged in evening ministry activities. When we came to a point that Myra could not be alone, we contracted a paid service and excellent caregiver, Janet Webb, who came in for 20 hours a week, giving me additional time to engage in ministry outside the home. Finally, home hospice care was a timely resource in Myra’s last year and a half of life, bringing in a nurse, massage therapist, and a bathing aide several times a week, as well as making available supplies as Myra’s condition worsened.
Janet Webb, Home Sweet Home Care and Services owner, was an invaluable help for almost two years.
I had made a commitment to care for Myra at home. Thus, I was genuinely grateful that I could fulfill my pledge to her. After staying up all night and monitoring her condition, I dozed off between 5 and 6 a.m. on December 27, 2023. I awakened to find Myra had passed peacefully by my side.
There is no way to fully prepare for that transition of one’s spouse from the mortal to the immortal. Having lost her over time, our family often spoke of the grief we had already experienced in not having Myra as she had been. Even though she was still present, she was not the creative and fun grandmother to her grandchildren as she had been to her daughters. She could not be the gifted Bible teacher to children and women as she had been even as late as her early 50s. We lost our dreams of retiring together and traveling to see family and the sights we always longed to behold.
But that final “loss” of her presence has been different. The aloneness is palpable. Even though a day may be filled with friends or family, there is always a sense of something missing. I remember walking into the funeral home with my mother as she went for the first viewing of my dad after 62 years of marriage. Though she wanted to view him alone, one sister and I insisted that we accompany our 85-year-old mother. As she stood there, weeping at my dad’s casket, she said, “I feel like a part of me has been ripped out.”
I get that now.
When God brought the first man and woman together, the biblical idea was that they became one flesh (Genesis 2:24). Jesus reiterated that idea when he said regarding a husband and wife, “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate” (Matthew 19:6). God’s ideal point of breaking the one-flesh union is “til death do us part.”
My consolation is that I know I will see Myra again. Her faith in Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior guaranteed her eternal life even before she breathed her last breath. John 5:24 says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.” That hope sustains me, my children, and all who loved Myra.
A family celebration of Myra’s 1st Birthday in Heaven -August 2, 2024
While I have some vague remembrances of Christmas Eve as a child, they are mostly family gathered by the tree, my father reading the Christmas story from Luke 2 and heading off to bed with great anticipation of what the following day would bring. I don’t recall our Southern Baptist Church ever having a Christmas Eve service.
Even after I became a minister, neither of the two churches in which I served had Christmas Eve Services. So, Myra and I had our own traditions of always being home on Christmas Eve, enjoying a BIG Christmas Eve dinner, driving around town to see Christmas lights, allowing the girls to open one gift, and reading the Christmas passage from the Gospel of Luke. For our last Christmas in Memphis and for the first time, we attended a Christmas Eve service at First Evangelical Church, where Myra taught Precepts Upon Precepts (a women’s Bible study developed by Kay Arthur). The following year, I was in seminary in Fort Worth, and our church also had a Christmas Eve gathering. Little did I know my next pastoral posting would come with the expectation that I lead that annual celebration of the Light of the World.
Upon arriving at Crest Baptist Church in August of 1994, I found the membership had various denominational backgrounds, with most having had some experiences with Advent, the four-week season in the Church calendar dedicated to anticipating the arrival, or “advent,” of Jesus of Nazareth, the long-awaited Messiah and King. I was the ONLY “cradle roll” Southern Baptist. I soon discovered that the celebration of Advent and a Christmas Eve service were expected responsibilities of my ministry. While I had no theological objection to this expectation, they were out of my wheelhouse from previous church leadership roles. I searched for resources to guide me in discovering the themes of Advent and colors of each candle in the Advent wreath. Ultimately, I found this addition to my Christmas celebration, merging my family and church family traditions, very fulfilling.
However, as much as we tried to continue some of the family traditions we began in Memphis, we discovered the realities of an Iowa climate changed things. Having had a busy schedule and no chance for Christmas shopping, we were planning a late shopping trip to Des Moines on Monday, December 23, 1996. We awoke to an ice storm and could not make the 60-mile trip to the malls. The girls were devastated at the idea of no presents under the tree, but I assured them we would leave before dawn on Christmas Eve and go to the early opening stores before going to the mall.
The following day, at 7:00 a.m., we found Best Buy, Kohl’s, and Target essentially vacant and were at the Valley West Mall when they opened at 9:00 a.m. Around 10:00 a.m., I took up residence on a comfy couch by the escalator and was the touchpoint for Myra and the girls to bring their loot as they continued their forays into other shops.
After completing our shopping by 11:30 a.m., we had lunch and returned to Creston. The afternoon was filled with the busyness of gift wrapping by Myra and the girls while I made the last-minute preparations for the Candlelight Christmas Eve service. The feeling of accomplishment after finishing our shopping and the anticipation of the upcoming service filled us with a sense of satisfaction and joy.
What seemed like a huge risk in waiting until the last minute to do the bulk of our gift buying became a point of family bonding as we went on an adventurous trek in the dark of Christmas Eve morning. It was a tradition that we maintained for the rest of the years that our girls were in Iowa for Christmas.
So, when Anna told me last night that her family was going shopping at 7:30 a.m. this Christmas Eve, I thought I’d pass and sleep in. However, I was awake and ready to go on the shopping adventure. Happily, I treated the Harrison family to Cracker Barrel brunch at 11:30 a.m. as we rekindled some of our special Christmas Eve memories.
Rural Iowa Pastor 