An Invitation to Adventist Writers

If you would like to be a guest blogger on The Journal of Hairy Chested Adventism, please contact me through this website's comment section or message me through my Facebook Account. I'd love to get some input from other Adventist men with suggestions.

The point of The Journal is to help Adventist men, particularly those new to the church, discover what it is exactly an Adventist man can do as a fully participating member of his local congregation and his church at large.




Subjects can include things like:

1. Deacon duties
2. Supporting women's activities with practical things like carpentry, plumbing, electrical and technical expertise.
3. Teaching duties
4. Youth Ministries
5. Pathfinders - particularly our "Camping Genius" series on great tips for managing youth campouts.
6. Mentoring
7. Raising sons
8. Raising daughters
9. Lay ministry ideas

I'd really love to put up more stuff and improve the site, but with everything else I'm doing now, I could really use some help. I am the sole editor. I am not associated with the GC or local conference or even a local church in any official capacity. The content of JHCA is my sole responsibility and does not reflect the official position of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In other words, our opinions here are our own. If you have a good idea or an article I can use and that I think is consistent with Adventist philosophy, I'd love to publish it.  Click on the Facebook link above and message me through my Facebook page. I don't dare put my email on here. The robots would steal it and smack me with spam.

I look forward to hearing from Adventist writers, men and women, who have something to say on the subject of Hairy-Chested Adventism.

Thanks,

Tom King, Texan
Puyallup, WA

Christian Manhood: Women are Lovely Creatures

Women are beautiful. I'm not talking physically, although there is that. I'm talking about their very nature, their instincts and drives. It's not politically correct to talk about the differences between men and women these days, unless, of course, you are a comedian. A lot of comedians make a good solid living pointing out that men and women are fundamentally different. They get laughs because people recognize the truth of what they are saying about our differences.

Women are not men and thank God for that. I was reading today in Matthew 8, starting with verse 14, the story of Simon Peter's mother-in-law. Jesus came by Peter's house to visit and found the poor woman in a terrible state. She was running a high fever and couldn't get out of bed.

It's interesting the words that Jesus used next. He didn't wave his hand and say "Be healed." He didn't mix up any mud or say "Your sins be forgiven thee." Matthew says he "rebuked" the fever. I can see that in my head. Jesus seeing this lovely elderly woman in distress, he tells the fever "Shame on you for bothering this lovely woman. Get out of here and don't come back!"

He rebuked a sickness.

I remember when my daughter was in about 8th grade, a young man approached her in the hallway of her school and began talking trashy to her. My daughter, who has all the self-confidence of a bull rhino, brushed him off, turned and stalked away in a huff. When the young man turned around, he came face to chest with Meghan's older brother, then a senior in the high school which shared the building with the junior high and elementary.

I say face to chest because Micah was about 6'3" or so at the time and weighed around 250 pounds, played basketball and ran track and had been recruited by several high school football coaches who wanted him rather badly. 

The young man looked up into Micah's face and his grin faded. Micah caught him by the front of his shirt and with one hand lifted him off the floor and brought his face level with Micah's own.

Then he rebuked him.

"You do NOT talk to my sister that way," Micah said in an eerily calm, albeit deadly serious voice. "Do you understand?"

The young man nodded. He was sweating bullets.

Micah lowered him to the ground. His feet were moving before they touched the floor.

One would hope he had learned his lesson.

That is how men should treat women. It's not because they are weak or helpless. Far from it. My daughter is one of the most capable young women I know. It is because women are capable and talented and capable of thinking in ways that we men are not that we should be protective of them. We are, after all, bigger than they are and I've always believed that if you are given the gift of great strength, you should use it to protect those weaker than yourself. I think that was the lesson God was trying to teach Samson, Saul and David.

The best part of the story of Peter's mother-in-law is what happened after Jesus healed her. A man would have thanked Jesus profusely and spent the next hour telling everyone about the experience he'd just had. Not Peter's mother-in-law. The first thing she does is get up and run off to the kitchen to fix some food and feed Jesus and everyone else who was a guest in her home.

Women do that kind of thing. Men would let you starve before the thought would occur to them to fix supper. We just don't think like that. Women bring an essential skill and a unique viewpoint to any enterprise we undertake. It is they who worry whether we're dressed warmly, have enough to eat or our bed is comfortable.

I'm like Jesus. If anyone or anything troubles a woman, my first instinct is to rebuke it. I think that's one of the instincts God put into us males.  Women take care of the children, the family, guests, the poor, the widows and the orphans. Men? We take care of our women. If we don't, who will?

Tom King
© 2014

Star Honor Series: Part 6 - Building a Reflector Telescope

John Dobson introduced his wonderful homemade low-cost, non-equatorial plywood telescope mount for large homemade reflector telescopes in the 1950s.  Telescope mounts can be as expensive as the telescopes themselves, if not more so. The simple Dobsonian mount was able to handle even relatively large telescopes is wonderfully cheap and works really well.

Having a cheap mount allows amateur astronomers to spend their money on larger, more expensive, high-quality scopes rather than on the mount. The design below is for a 10 inch “Dob” that will fit on the mount described in part 1 of this series. You can collect the parts for the scope on eBay and other online sites if you are patient. This can be a long term project for your Pathfinder club.

Here's what you need:

Materials:

Painted sonotubes.

• 12-inch tube about eight feet long. You can get a sonotube at a concrete supply store. They are used as forms for making concrete pillars.
• 10-inch telescope mirror
• 10-inch mirror mounting cell
• 10-inch Spider mount for the secondary mirror
• Secondary mirror
• 2 inch focuser
• Eyepiece
• 4 by 8 foot sheet of half inch plywood
• 1-inch screws, 1 box
• 2 old phonograph records
• 1 half inch carriage bolt, 3 inches long with nut and flat washer
• Felt strips

Tools:

• Drill and bits
• 2 inch drill hole saw bit
• Saber Saw
• Screwdrivers
• Scissors
• Wood glue

The Scope:

This will be a quick run-through of the process. You can find a more detailed description of the project with pictures and dimensions of things at this link to a blog of mine on another site. Here's a quick description of how to do this so you can get an idea of what all is involved.

Step 1

Cross section of mirror mount

Mount the telescope mirror first. It should come with a mirror-mounting cell that allows you to fix the mirror at the lower end of the you to adjust the angle of the mirror to line it up with the secondary mirror and eyepiece.  Follow the instructions that came with the cell.  Drill holes in the lower end of the Sonotube to match the mounting screws and screw the mount into the end of the tube.  Here's a more detailed description of the process. 

Step 2

Figure out the focal length of the mirror.  It will be in the specifications that come with your mirror.  Subtract 6 inches and the length of the focuser from the total focal length of the mirror. Measure from the center of the mirror up the side of the Sonotube.  Mark the side of the tube at the distance you computed above. Measure four more inches up the tube and cut off the rest of the Sonotube.  Hold the tube upside down while cutting so that the dust falls away from the mirror. 

Step 3

Mirror spider mount

Drill a 2-inch hole in the side of the tube at the mark you made on the side of the tube (the adjusted focal length).  Screw the spider mount for the secondary mirror so that the mounted mirror is directly below the 2-inch hole you just drilled.

Step 4

Screw the focuser assembly directly over the 2-inch hole in the tube. You will have to collimate (align) the optics so that the focuser lines up with the center of the secondary mirror. There should be detailed instructions that come with your optics for collimating the focuser. Once you've screwed down the focuser, put a low power eyepiece in the end of the focuser. Point the tube at something distinctive during the daylight and make sure you can focus on the object to make a sharp image. You may have to adjust the primary mirror a bit, but if you got the measurements right, it shouldn't take much. You also may have to adjust the angle of the main mirror to make sure the image is projected directly off the secondary mirror and through the secondary.

Step 5

Focuser

Next mount the finder scope a quarter of the way around the tube from where you mounted the focuser. You'll need to calibrate the finder scope during daylight so that the finder points at the same place in the sky that the telescope does. You can do this by pointing the scope at a small object a few hundred yards away and then lining up the finder scope to point it's crosshairs at the same object.  Your finder scope probably comes with instructions.

Now that you're done, the next thing we'll do is mount the tube in the Dobsonian Mount you built in Part 5 of this series. 

References:

Refracting finder scope

Here are some cool links to some other telescope building resources.

1. Mother Earth News: A Homemade Telescope 
2. Larry Brown: Homemade Astronomy
3. Scopemaking:  Plans for a Homemade Dobsonian Telescope
4. Howdy Ya Dewit:  A Homemade Telescope: A Quick Run-Through

© 2014 by Tom King 

Christian Manhood: A Man's Purpose

I live, I breathe, I exist by the grace of a God who has called me for a purpose. As my life winds down through it's latter half I find that in searching for that purpose, I may have accidentally accomplished it already.

God may not have had such lofty a purpose for me as I once supposed He did, nor so elevated a place among my fellow humans that I should complain if my accomplishments weren't as grand as I figured they should have been.

Perhaps my purpose was simply to plug up a hole or prop up a pillar at such a time as it was needed. If that's it, I am content that I was there when God required my hands or even, just that one finger!.

© 2014 by Tom King

Camping Genius: Swimmer's Ear Protection

Lone Star Camp Waterfront circa 1966

One of the hazards of taking a youth group on an outing to the lake is the risk of kids contracting swimmer's ear. Here's a simple solution to help prevent it that is inexpensive and easy to use.

Simply bring along dropper bottles of a homemade solution of Boric Acid and isopropyl alcohol. You can get the bottles and the ingredients at any pharmacy. You can make it up yourself and it really does work.

I got the recipe from Bud Bradley, the East Texas Director of Water Safety Services for the American Red Cross back in the 70s. We used it at Lone Star Camp for years. Every kid leaving the swimming area had to go through a gate where two lifeguards waited armed with bottles of the stuff.

Two or three drops in each ear worked quite well. The boric acid creates the proper pH balance in the ears to prevent certain germs and fungi from growing.

Click on this link for the formula and directions for making it and using it.

Adventist Film-Making - If Not Now, When?

The director managed to produce something good enough to
win an award - even though the film was unreleased. Surely
With the level of involvment by GC, they could have got
the message right.

The Record Keeper's been canceled by the General Conference. The innovative web-series has fallen victim to attempts to make a movie without really understanding how to make a movie. It's a shame they canceled the series , but I understand the reasoning. In a prepared statement, the General Conference cited biblical inaccuracies that would have contradicted the study guides that went with the film. 

If the GC were to encourage our schools to train more screenwriters, film-makers, cinematographers, sound engineers etc., perhaps we'd get some actual believers involved in these kinds of creative projects next time. We need to get more Adventist young people trained up well enough to do "quality" film work. Instead of discouraging them as in this case, we need to be empowering them.  In the name of controlling content, lets not make the mistake of trying to convert ministers into film-makers or, worse yet, producers.  Those are different skills sets.

The GC statement, killing the project, did come with assurances that the General Conference wanted to promote more such creative projects in the future. That will remain to be seen. I have my doubts. To me the GC's statement about believing in creative outreach sounds more like face-saving than a genuine desire to actually be creative in our outreach. I expect heads to roll at GC over blowing a million bucks on a failed film. If the past is any indicator, the failure of the Record Keeper series is likely to put a damper on any future church-sponsored films of this sort.

In order to get these kinds of projects done in the future, they'll likely have to be done by independent Adventist film-makers raising funds on their own. I know of one SDA film-maker doing a retrospect on the life of Sam Campbell. It's a difficult and time consuming process even for a single one hour documentary film. A quality feature film or television series is even more so. 

Perhaps it's time to organize SDA film-makers and would-be film-makers, animators and other creative types into some sort of film studio of our own. Then if the GC wanted to do a film, they could use us if they wished. AND we could do documentaries and independent films all on their own without having to go through committee to get approval.

One of the advantages a studio run and staffed by SDAs would have is a sense of purpose, mission and, hopefully, a profound lack of the kind of greed that drives up the costs of film-making. Set up as a not-for-profit, somewhere near film services, resources and excellent locations, a self-supporting film company could grow into a powerful tool for outreach and witness. I can think of several places that would be good home bases.  The Dallas-Ft. Worth area has quite a lot of film resources with a lot of great locations for filming fairly close by.  The Pacific Northwest is fast becoming a hub for film-makers, especially in television. Check out how many TV series are being filmed in Oregon, Washington State and British Columbia. We have universities in both areas.

The idea of doing outreach through a web-series such as the Record Keeper was really quite a good one. Faith for Today pioneered such an approach through it's Westbrook Hospital series. With today's technology an enthusiastic tech-savvy youth, well-trained in the cinematographic arts, we could literally reach every corner of the Earth. We could sell material to the GC media department, 3ABN and local churches to play on their local cable community access channels. We could put up really good material on places like Youtube where we're being pounded by critics and enemies of the faith who put up almost twice as many videos as we do.

An SDA film studio with an outreach program could also provide technical support for local church outreach programs. We could develop a stable of our own actors and actresses, camera crews and technical people, drawn from churches world-wide.

Okay, now I'm excited. If anyone is interested in being a part of such a project, please contact me directly. The link will take you to my email address. Perhaps the association of Adventist-Laymen's Services and Industries needs a new member organization.  

It is too bad this effort at media outreach misfired. Perhaps from the ashes of this debacle, God will raise up something far more powerful than we ever thought possible. He tends to do that sort of thing if you look at the history. Perhaps it's time we believers went ahead and did what needs to be done and let our leaders run along behind shouting, "Wait for me I'm your leader."

Tom King
© 2014

The Christian Life: Problems With the Prosperity Gospel

Apparently God does not want me to be wealthy. That's my cross to bear. Yours may be different. One of the hazards of committing your life to Christ is that Satan doesn't like it when you do. You may pay your tithe, you may go to church faithfully and you may do the best you can to treat others as you would want to be treated, but sometimes the cannibals still eat you.

Someone asked me today what I thought of the so-called gospel of prosperity. The Prosperity Gospel says to trust in God, enlarge your tents and God will fill up you storehouses.So, to answer this question, I went back to the Scriptures and I asked myself, "If being a follower of God is a guarantee of prosperity, how do you explain Job or Joseph or Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, Mikaiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Habakkuk, John the Baptist, all 12 apostles and Jesus.  Here is a breakdown of the prosperous lives of these faithful men of God.

• Job - Bankrupted, houses wrecked, crops burned, cattle stolen, his children killed and his best friends told him it was all his own fault.
• Joseph - Sold into slavery and imprisoned on false charges.
• Isaiah - Sawed in half
• Jeremiah - Tradition says he was stoned by Jews in Egypt
• Zechariah - Murdered in the temple by Joash between the altar and the Holy Place
• Mikaiah -  Slain by Joram the son of Ahab
• Ezekiel - Stoned by Babylonian Jews
• Amos - Martyred under the ill-treatment of Amaziah the priest of Bethel and his son
• Habakkuk - Stoned by Jews in Jerusalem
• John the Baptist - Beheaded
• Stephen - Stoned by the Jews
• Peter - Crucified upside down
• James - Stabbed with a sword by Herod Agrippa
• Andrew - Hanged from an olive tree
• Thomas - Stabbed with spears, tortured with red hot plates, then burned alive
• Phillip - Tortured AND crucified
• Matthew - Beheaded by the Jews
• Nathaniel - Flayed AND crucified
• James the Lesser - Thrown off the temple, then bashed in the head with a club till dead
• Simon the Zealot - Crucified by the governor of Syria
• Judas Thaddeus - Beaten to death with sticks
• Matthias - Stoned to death WHILE hanging on a cross
• Paul of Tarsus - Beheaded
• John the Revelator - Boiled in oil, imprisoned on a barren island and then died of old age (the only apostle to do so). 
• Jesus of Nazareth - Crucified without even his clothes.  

So no, I don't buy the prosperity gospel. Either that or God's got a very different idea of what "prosperity" means. As far as I'm concerned, the gospel of prosperity is little more than religious snake oil. The fact is, that if you commit your life to Christ, it's very likely to really make someone angry enough to not only financially destroy you if possible, but also to find some way to bump you off in the most unpleasant manner possible. Sinners don't like to be called on their sins. It makes 'em cranky and even more so as the time of the end approaches.

In Ellen White's book "Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing" she cites Christ's warning that if they did such things to the sinless Son of God, they will likely do as much to his followers as well. C.S. Lewis once observed that the cause of Satan "is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do (God's) will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

Apparently, as he did with Job, Satan often tries to break such people. Someone once told me when I was going through a series of very public trials and disasters that it might not be about me at all. She said, "People are watching to see what you'll do."


Being a witness for Christ is often not a comfortable thing at all. Anyone who promises you riches in this world in exchange for your service to Christ is selling something.


© 2014 by Tom King