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The entire congregation came out to hear Rabbi Solomon’s first Shabbat morning sermon. It lasted eight minutes. The next Shabbat, Rabbi Solomon’s sermon was forty-five minutes. His third sermon was two and a half hours. The shul’s ritual committee called Rabbi Solomon in and said, "What is happening here?" Rabbi Solomon replied, "Well, on the first Shabbos I had just had all of my teeth pulled. My mouth was sore, so my sermon was short. The next week, I had my new dentures and I was feeling fine." The ritual committee chair said, "But your third sermon was two and a half hours long!" "Oy," Rabbi Solomon responded. "The third week, I picked up my wife's dentures by mistake."

Chaim Yankel was very lonesome so he decided to buy a parrot from a pet store, complete with cage – the city of Chelm’s first parrot! Before purchasing it, the store owner guaranteed Chaim Yankel that the parrot would talk. Chaim Yankel took the parrot home and the city of Chelm was abuzz. But in a week and a half Chaim Yankel returned to the store very disappointed. "The parrot doesn't talk." "Did you buy a mirror?" "No." "Every parrot needs a mirror." So Chaim Yankel bought a mirror and installed it in the parrot's cage. Another week and a half went by and Chaim Yankel returned. "The parrot still doesn't talk." "Did you buy a ladder?" "No." "Every parrot needs a ladder." So Chaim Yankel bought a ladder and installed it in the cage. Another week and a half passed and Chaim Yankel returned. "The parrot still doesn't talk." "Did you buy a swing?" "No." "Every parrot needs a swing." So Chaim Yankel bought a swing and installed it in the cage. A week and a half later he returned. He was furious! The store owner asked, "Did the parrot talk?" "No!, he died." "Oh, that's terrible. Did he say anything before he died?" "Yes." "What?" "His dying words were, 'Don't they have any food down at that store?'"

Friday afternoon, 5-year-old Moishie Sherman came in while his parents were setting the table for Shabbos Dinner. Quite surprisingly, Moishie asked if he could help. His mother said, "No, but I appreciate your asking." Little Moishie responded, "Well, I appreciate you saying no."

that was a really interesting post, thanks for explaining all that. I recall the days of that Firm Foundation newsletter. Church malcontents would sneak out into the parking lot during church service to put one in everyone's wind shield. Over the years, I have seen many things in EGW writings that appeared to be quite critical of said newsletter; but also of things going on, or not going on in the Church. The over-all tenor of the person's ministry and life does need to be pointed out. There's a time for silence, and a time for shouting it from the roof tops. I would agree, and I would add that we are seeing this very thing from certain church leaders now. Thats where my "Hooey Doctrine" comment was coming from. Political motivations are being brought forth into the Church as "truth," and any dissenters are stigmatized immediately upon their questioning of it. we should be saying a lot more about that at this time. The lines are being drawn in the sand now; and if we wont get involved in helping the cause of Christ, others will.

I think hearing these stories did peek my interest as a child, it made it look like Jesus was really coming soon. But as I went more into my teens, academy and college I learned more about the Bible, Mrs. White, our sinful nature. Also, even as a child I noticed a difference between the Adventism of my grandma, and family that was in the church, and the Adventism of one of my aunts by marriage and an uncle by marriage. And at academy occasionally there was an alumni who would give a weekend service. His parents gave large contributions to the school. They had studied with Elder Wilkinson and the mom had been Elder Wilkinson's reader. In his sermons he just kept complaining of what the church was doing and what the school was doing and what we were learning in Bible class etc. At college there was someone who would hang around college who kept doing the same thing. But he was a odd person in other ways as well. We did not deal much in this since the Walter Rea issue and Desmond Ford issues were the major issues of the day and where our focus was on. Although we would deal some with what professors pointed out as the other side of the coin and we studied how Mrs. White was frustrated because church members tended to go to one extreme or the other. She would write things to one group and the other group would latch on those letters and instead of seeing how she was writing to the one extreme to encourage them to become more balanced, but the other extreme would take those letters as support for their view and push the message on to the church and Mrs. White had to try with them . In class both sides were seen as two sides of the same coin, only that they would take their understanding of truth and use it against the rest of the truth, and that the Desmond Ford and Walter Rea issues were again just a resurgence of the one side. At campmeeting between college a couple from Union College's religion department Ralph and Beatrice (Now I don't remember the correct spelling of their last name, at the time we had two or three Ralphs who had written books released around the same time with the same last name but each had a different spelling, but either Neil or Neal). They gave an excellent study on how Seventh-day Adventist truth has been split in half and how half the church is fighting the other half and that both sides were wrong, and the two sides were the Desmond Ford issue and the Historic Adventists on the other, and how the truth tends to be someplace between . When I was at Andrews, I was aware of the historic adventists, but church seemed to me (and it probably was) to be very much a bell curve with a few people being at the one extreme of Fordism, and few at the other extreme of historic adventism. And except for my one aunt and uncle by marriage, most who I saw in the historic adventist camp tended to be odd in other ways as well. So I passed them off and would focus on things such as the historical, cultural, copying and geographical background to the Bible and life and ministry of Mrs. White, and also on social interactions and these are what my papers would be on. Sometimes if I needed a break from my studies I'd just pick a file at random in the White estate at Andrews and just read through it. They included a lot of Mrs. White's correspondence. In file after file I kept coming upon a bunch of letters between Mrs. White and/or Willie, and others but at first I thought that it was between her and the same man. These letters kept saying the same things. The basic outline of each letter was Mrs. White or Willie would write telling someone that despite their massive quoting of Mrs. White's quotes, that they did not understand her message and thus they were misrepresenting her. If they wrote back to her they tended to be much more polite, and much more rude if they wrote to Willie (especially after Mrs. White's death). Their arguments were that they did indeed understand her message, that they were indeed careful students of her writing and that they do understand her message and that the reason why she was sending them sharp testimonies is because people were polluting her mind against them and that if she saw their work objectively and not through her friends who were polluting her mind against them that not only would she would not only have not written the letter to them but that she would fully support them. They would often share with her some of her quotes that sounded like she agreed with them and was critical and worried of the direction that the church had been going since 1888 full of apostasy and warn Mrs. White that these friends and her son were changing her writings to make it sound like she agrees with these apostasy and that her newer writings have been used to spread these apostasies. They would compare Willie to Nadab and Abihu and Samuel's sons*. Mrs. White and Willie would often write back about how she would write strong to one group but the other group would take these strong writings as a one size fits all that needed to be followed by the whole church, and would mention some about what inspiration did and did not do to her. They would write back that she was a prophet and what she wrote was the perfect, infallible message from God and that she was denying her prophetic ministry and in danger of being lost, but they will continue to faithfully deliver God's message that she wrote. And I noticed that the messages they were sharing was the same as the so-called historic adventists. As I said I first thought that they were all one person. The name started with "W" (sometimes they had the name, other times the full name was removed and only the first letter). But after a while I noticed that not all the letters were to an "Elder W" or if the name was there, there were at least two or three names that started with "W" and I'd be surprised because when I expected the letter W or the names of those two or three that started with "W" I would find other letters or names and was surprised that there were a number of pastors who were writing these letters since you probably could have removed the names and find the letters interchangeable. Now I did not find this in the correspondence, but in the files I also found copies of filers that were floating around the church in the early 1900s. These were vicious. They said that Mrs. White had apostatized, and no longer believed that she was a prophet because she believed and was teaching that her writings are not the inerrant infallible message from the almighty God, and that she is saying that some of her writings apply to some people and some to others and not necessary everyone, while God was using her to tell these messages because he did want everyone to live up to these. Some of these fliers suggested that maybe a Jesuit spy had gotten into her inner circle and was controlling her. Some suggested that the Jesuit spy might be any or all of (and the most common names were Willie, Prescott and/or Daniels). One or two even suggested that Mrs. White herself may have been converted to Catholicism and has become a Jesuit spy to destroy the good work that she used to do until she got involved with Jones and Wagner and how after compromising there the result was that she soon there after accepted and started to write and preach teaching the heresy of the trinity. These fliers suggested that members protect themselves by stopping the reading of Mrs. White directly, but to read her as quoted and then named the pastors who she had been writing those letters to. That these pastors were sharing the true message that God gave through Mrs. White and that the members were in danger of being lost if they did not turn to these pastors to share the truth with them. After Andrews, I joined the Army as a chaplain assistant. I was stationed at Ft. Lewis Washington. In visiting the churches there, several members would give me a journal "Our Firm Foundation" of which I read many copies of and believe I had a one year subscription to and read each issue. I noticed that this journal sounded like I had read it before, their message was VERY familiar. Sure enough as I read the references for the articles time after time they refer to the pastors who Mrs. White and Willie wrote those letters to and who the flyers warned people that they better turn to to understand true Adventism instead of the heresy that were creeping into the church. After the Army and then Air Force training, I started to work for Loma Linda Medical center. There I was able to get a book "With Cloak and Dagger" which was a repeat of the same issues as in the letters and flyers and "Our Firm Foundation" but blamed these problems not on the elderly Mrs. White, and her Nadab and Abihu son Willie, and other common targets from the early 1900s, such as Daniels and Pescott. This book pictures their views as being normative Adventism until the 1950s when our Adventist leaders of the 1950s. Reading "With Cloak and Dagger" had me loose respect for the book because I knew that the same things that book complained about was complained about 50 years before the time that the author saw as the origin of these ideas. Also, at Loma Linda I got a paper mailed out by the so called "Historic Adventists" all lamenting activities they saw in the church. In one part of the paper, there were two articles side by side. Now neither of these were lamenting anything, but one article was a long one on the importance of the color "red" in the Catholic church. The next article was just a straightforward announcement that Loma Linda University was going to be having activities and community education based on Red Ribbon week. I noticed with a number of people, a couple of my classmates, one in my class when I was student teaching, but they would keep doing a flip flop. At one time they would be highly religious, but focus on "Historic Adventism" and their comment after comment in class was constantly complaining about things that the school was doing and what the church was doing. Then they would become non-religious and one classmate would work on his car in front of the boys dorm smoking , or they would drink, go into drugs, live a very un-adventist lifestyle. Then have a religious conversion but again it is the very strict view and constantly pointing out problems that our schools and churches are doing. And they are living their life in these flip flops. When I run across them I never know which of these two sides they are on. I should apologize some to B/W photodude as I had seen scenes of the event on facebook, but it was edited in a way that really bothered me, but I thought "There must be more here than this is sounding" . I have to admit when I read and saw B/W's post and link, he did put it into perspective which was not given on facebook. The event made much more sense and was much more acceptable in what B/W posted, and much of my reaction comes from the background I wrote about above and the contrast between how the event in Florida was presented on Facebook and in B/W's post. But even in both posts I keep finding the same spirit that I saw in those letters to Mrs. White or Willie, in those flyers from the early 1900s, the book "With Cloak and Dagger" and these classmates and that student of mine and others that I have known in the church who keep living that flipped flop life. I think the worst part is seeing these people who live the flipped flop life. I pray for them and worry about them. And I am critical of this spirit. * Oh, just a theological note about Samuel's sons: There is Biblical evidence that the complaints of Samuel's sons were more politically motivated than their actual actions. Long before David there was a split between the northern and southern tribes. It looks like there were 7 years that David was King of Judah until becoming King of Israel. And that Saul and David were more kings over the two kingdoms rather than a united kingdom. And Samuel tended to be more popular in the north, his sons appear to have preferred the south, and his grandson worked for the Southern kingdom and temple. So Samuel's sons may not have been as bad as their critics made them sound.

You continue to trash a current sitting president based on what is mostly simply based on the lies of haters. And if even true, you cannot know all truth. If you do not know all truth, then you are telling an incomplete truth which is a lie. Consider a thought from the book Thoughts from the Mount of Blessings, "These words condemn all those meaningless phrases and expletives that border on profanity. They condemn the deceptive compliments, the evasion of truth, the flattering phrases, the exaggerations, the misrepresentations in trade, that are current in society and in the business world. They teach that no one who tries to appear what he is not, or whose words do not convey the real sentiment of his heart, can be called truthful." Quite frankly, I do not believe you even know what truth is. The hatred you spew toward the president says a lot. NO CURRENT INDIVIDUAL can really know enough about any politician to speak in the way you do towards the president.

I do not really believe the Africans are the only "defenders of the faith" on the earth. However, it seems that the church remains purest when it is under duress such as persecution. This reminds me of a story I heard one time and I may not get all the details right. But it seems that in a certain communist country with heavy persecution of Christians, soldiers came to church one day. Many of the attendees started slipping out the side doors and disappearing. Eventually it was just the soldiers and a few members who remained in their seats. One of the soldiers was then heard to say, "Now, we can have church!"

So no one has an idea?? Where are all those so-called patriotic posters?? D. Wearing the flag as apparel Wearing the flag as apparel -- including on those ubiquitous 4th of July bikinis and tees -- is considered disrespectful, according to the Code. Source: various web sites.