An Arkies Musings

My An Arkie's Faith column from the February 22, 2017, issue of The Mena Star. My Daddy is a long-time collector and seller of classic and collector cars. In the business of classic cars, barn finds are the holy grail. Anyone with a healthy bank account and a computer can find the car of their dreams, but barn finds are a special kind of magic. Barn finds are cars that are intact and have been untouched and out of sight for years. Finding a special car, left untouched for years or even decades is a rare thing. In the collector car world, barn finds come in all shapes and sizes. But one thing remains constant; a great barn finds make all the effort worthwhile. In 2014 a remarkable barn find of rare automobiles was made on a farm in the West of France. After the owner had died, the children inherited the estate, which included a collection of old cars that had been untouched for many years. Wanting to determine the value of the cars, they called France's leading antiques a...

One of the biggest stories of 2016 was fake news. More than 100 questionable websites featuring fake news about US politics were found to be based in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. During the final three months of the presidential campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. During the same three months, the 20 best-performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook. Fake news was hugely popular. It was more popular than real news. Our President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as fake news. The creator of the comic strip Dilbert, Scott Adams, weighs in with a question. "Does fake news matter in a world in which humans don’t use facts and reason to make decisions in the first place?" Why are facts so meaningless to so many of us? Why don't we care about the truth?  ...

When I was in school, I learned that the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. Ever since the Pilgrims arrived millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her faith. Unfortunately, this isn’t true.  The arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England in the early 1600s was indeed a response to persecution that these religious dissenters had experienced in England. But the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not tolerate opposing religious views. Their colony was a dictatorship that allowed no dissent, religious or political. The most famous dissidents within the Puritan community, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, were banished following disagreements over theology and policy. From Puritan Boston’s earliest days, Catholics were banned from the c...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the February 15, 2017, issue of The Mena Star. When I was in high school, I was too shy to talk to girls. I was almost too shy to talk to boys. When I first went to high school, it was at a private school that only went to the tenth grade. When I transferred to another school at the beginning of my junior year, the only people that I would talk to were those whom I knew from my previous school. Although I was too shy to talk to girls, that didn’t mean that I wasn’t interested. At the beginning of my senior year, there was a girl who stole my heart the first time she walked into Mr. Brost's history class. Because I was so shy, it was almost a year before she had any idea that I was interested. I think that God knew that I needed all of the help I could get, so he made it so that our paths crossed in several ways that year. Mr. Brost selected five students to work together each week producing learning packets for history class. The special g...

I love history and learning.  Many things we learn about history are a bit uncertain, but it is always a little frustrating when you can't find out with any certainty the history of someone or something. The origin of St. Valentine and Valentine's Day is one of those topics. Who was Saint Valentine?  According to the website Catholic Online , The origin of St. Valentine, and how many St. Valentines there were, remains a mystery. One opinion is that he was a Roman martyred for refusing to give up his Christian faith. Other historians hold that St. Valentine was a temple priest jailed for defiance during the reign of Claudius. Whoever he was, Valentine really existed because archaeologists have unearthed a Roman catacomb and an ancient church dedicated to Saint Valentine. In 496 AD Pope Gelasius marked February 14th as a celebration in honor of his martyrdom. It is unclear how the modern idea of celebrating Valentine's Day by giving gifts to your romantic partner s...

Don and Donna Mohl, performing as Folk Mountain Gospel , will be in concert at the Mena Seventh-day Adventist Church on Fairgrounds Road on Saturday, February 11th at 11:00 A.M. Don and Donna have been traveling around the country since 1988, sharing the love of Jesus through song. Their music is a blend of “mountain” style and folk style gospel. They travel about 25 weekends of the year, which allows them to continue their "day jobs" during the week. They have held concerts in Mena many times over the last 20 years. Their unique style of music blends biblical and traditional instruments such as the hammered dulcimer, bowed psaltery, zither, mountain dulcimer, mandolin, and guitar with their voices to provide a down-home, family oriented message of the love and grace of Jesus. Don and Donna sing the good old hymns of faith, more recent gospel songs and some songs that they have written related to family values, the grace of Jesus, and the love of God.  Don Mohl hand ...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the February 8, 2017, issue of The Mena Star. Some years ago I came home from work one day and my wife met me at the door. "Do you hear that," my wife asked. “Yes,” I answered, “it sounds like a kitten.” Meow, Meooooow, Meooooooooow. “You better go check it out,” my wife said, “it sounds like a kitten is in trouble.” We walked down the hill to the creek behind our house. The pitiful cries grew louder and louder. They were coming from a small gray kitten. He was caught in a tangle of roots on the creek bank. The kitten was on the far side of the creek. This meant that I had to walk down the creek to a place narrow enough to cross. I found a place where I could wade across the creek; then I fought my way through a mass of bushes and briars. When I finally reached the drenched kitten, he frantically held on to the roots. I had to pull with all my strength to get him out. I was afraid that the kitten would fight like a little tiger b...

My favorite band is Smokey and the Mirror . I have seen them in concert many times. The most recent concert that I attended was last month at South on Main in downtown Little Rock. Because I am so familiar with their music, I always find it interesting to hear a new song for the first time. The South on Main concert was the first time I heard the song, The Edge of Night. I really like the new song.  It was one of several songs that I videoed that night. Recently Bryan Hembree of Smokey and the Mirror posted a story about the song, The Edge of Night on social media. The story filled the song with new meaning and understanding for me. I contacted Bryan and asked him for permission to share his story on An Arkie's Musings. He graciously agreed. This is his story. "Last May, Bayard Blain and I got caught on the road in the middle of a tornado on the road to the Kerrville Folk Festival. I was terrified. There I was with my good buddy, in the Sprinter van. Bayard had been...

My An Arkie's Faith column from the February 1, 2017, issue of The Mena Star. A couple of years ago I received a phone call from a customer in Alexandria, Louisiana. He had a 1965 Chevrolet pickup, and he wanted to get it painted. I gave him a price for painting a pickup and didn’t think much more about it. Why would someone from Alexandria have a vehicle painted in Mena?  A few weeks later he called back and said that he was planning to drive the pickup to Mena to drop it off to be painted. The day that he was supposed to drop off the vehicle, he called and said that he was running late. He had been having some mechanical problems. After several calls with updates on his problems he let me know that he would be in town around 10:00 p.m. We made arrangements to meet at my shop. It was a dark rainy night, but even in those conditions I could see that the pickup was in very rough shape. I considered telling my customer that the condition of his truck was so bad that I d...