From WARCHICK archives--ISRAEL, AMERICA, AND THE HISTORY OF ONE VERY WICKED MAN

From December 14, 2007:

SAME OLD SAME OLD ISRAEL, AMERICA & HISTORY OF ONE WICKED MAN By: Resa LaRu Kirkland I know, you've heard it before.   And yet, here we are...again. As a history lover, I cannot help but notice the trends, cycles, behaviors, and consequences that humanity has repeated since leaving Eden. Oddly enough, in spite of the diversity of this planet, there are some things that are the same no matter where, when, or to whom they happen. Those are the things of eternal consequence, the things that truly matter when all the fluff and distraction of life is tossed aside. They are what happens when good people choose evil. Yea, and we also see the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause to take place among the children of men.--Book of Mormon, Alma 46:9 It has never ceased to amaze me that no matter which tribe of Israel you study--the Bible is about the tribe of Judah and the Book of Mormon is about some of the descendants of Judah's little brother Joseph, who left Jerusalem in about 600 BC and traveled by ship to the promised land of America--there is the same cycle. The people start out righteous, constantly seeking to do good. As a result, God blesses them with great gifts of knowledge, technology, wealth, abundance, peace and wisdom.  But then a curious thing happens, a thing that inevitably leads to THE ONE INEXORABLE TRUTH, a truth that Father knows but that we have to learn over and over again, and usually the hard way. Please follow me through the progression, as there are several steps that lead to the final, full understanding of this eternal truth. ***NOTE*** For those of you new to WARCHICK writings, the above is why I refer to America and Israel as the "Joes" and the "Jews." Nearly all archaeologists and historians agree that the peoples who wound up in England, Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Western Europe descend from the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, the two sons of Joseph; that's not even counting the group mentioned above who were already in America when Europe landed, those who came to be known as the American Indians. That means that every Founding Father was of the House of Israel through the tribe of Joseph, thus fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy about the Stick of Judah and the Stick of Joseph, and Daniel's talk of the "Big branch" and the "Little Branch" of the same tree: Israel. This also indicates that the "New Jerusalem" and "New Zion" spoken of over and over again in the scriptures is in America, which makes perfect sense when you understand that nothing can stop God's plan, not even blood-thirsty Muslims stealing Jerusalem. ("16 The LORD also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem; and the heavens and the earth shall shake: but the LORD will be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of Israel. 17 So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain: then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more." Old Testament | Joel 3:16-17. Zion roars and Jerusalem utters? AFTER Zion shall Jerusalem be holy and Israel restored to the House of Israel by Zion, no less? Sounds like America and Israel in the past 100 years to me! America certainly roars, and I am always in awe of the way Israel quietly goes about being the most remarkable nation on earth.)Those of you who read me know that I am fond of saying, "We must stick together, the Jews and the Joes, in the war against the great evil of Islammunism." Whether you like it or not, America, you are the prophesied Joes. What, you thought it was just a coincidence that the whole world refers to our warriors as "Joes?" Not only from His mouth shall we know the truth, but from the mouths of millions shall it be eternally confirmed. And for those of you in full "Why I never!" gasping, I have one question: Do you honestly believe that God would command only ONE of the tribes of Israel to write their history?   If so, where in the OT did He command ONLY Judah to write, or forbid any of the other tribes of Israel from writing?  Yeah, that's what I thought.  I swear to you this day that He commanded ALL 12 tribes to write their histories, and the day will come that we discover the Sticks of Reuben, Simeon, Dan, Gad, Levi, etc.) Rather than these gifts inspiring man to be even more righteous, they cause him to begin to believe in his own knowledge, power, wisdom, and wealth. The more he gains, the more he credits himself. He begins to dismiss God, leaning instead unto his own understanding, and engaging in the only practice that divided Heaven in the pre-existence: the evil tongue. Through the gift of this same free will that he will come to viciously suppress in others, this man will start planting little seeds of discontent among the righteous, stirring up emotions in order to disarm the logic center of the brain, as he knows all too well that logic and truth are NOT on his side. He will take little wounds and pick at them until they are red, swollen, and infected. Even when he gets his way, it will not be enough. He will use his free will to force others to do things his way over and over again and again, to greater and greater extremes of evil and insanity, focusing on tiny, imaginary, or long-ago offenses in order to try to justify unjustifiable behavior. (Think of the femmies, hippies, and minorities of the past 40 years. Even when the majority have agreed that there were wrongs in need of righting--and acted upon them--it was not enough. What generally starts as a just cause that most can see--equality--inevitably morphs into wretched elitism--affirmative action.) By this point he will be too mentally stunted to even recognize that by destroying the free will of the righteous, he is cannibalizing his own, for one of the foundations of THE ONE INEXORABLE TRUTH is this: what starts with one group never ends with that group. He who seeks to deprive the righteous of free will for his own selfish gains shall inevitably be enslaved by those very same mandates. Thus we see that a group that once dwelt in righteousness and peace begins to chip away at its own foundation. It is Satan's ultimate, gleeful, low-down double-cross: convince one man to obliterate the free will of another man, then enslave and cannibalize the man who aided and abetted you. Two destructions for the price of one. And it all begins with one free man, one good man, who chooses to become one wicked man.

At this point, the remaining righteous-- still the majority-- will go to their Father and ask for direction in dealing with the growing group that is beginning to murmur and to harass those who believe in God and in His precept of "live and let live." 


Reading through the scriptures, I find several steps that occur when dealing with the wicked who cannot and will not live and let live. The first step is that of limitation.
God will tell his people that these wicked children have the right to choose to do the wrong thing, and that none of His children has the right to force them to do anything, EVEN the right thing, for force was the plan put forth by Lucifer and rejected by all who dwell in this mortal realm. Instead His command would be for the righteous to limit their interaction with the wicked; not because the righteous couldn't handle it, but because the wicked's intentions and dealings with the righteous could not be trusted.(Hmmm...sounds a lot like those nations who have NEVER kept a single peace treaty, cease fire, truce, etc., while America and Israel have faithfully stood by theirs.)


So the righteous go back among those who were once their friends, watching carefully and praying as much for their fallen brethren as they do for themselves.

And it came to pass...


But it didn't take long--in any of the scriptures--for this first step to no longer be enough. The harassment of the righteous by the wicked would escalate as more were easily led to the side of fools, and the field begins to tilt to the other side. What started as tauntings become deliberate cruelty, attacks, lies, theft, defrauding and subjugation. These junior high antics are the only weapons the wicked have, for with each step they take away from the light and toward the darkness their levels of maturity and intelligence actually drop, until they have regressed to perpetual adolescence, delighting in cruelty, name-calling, forcing, and fighting.

And the righteous return to Father for help.

The next step the scriptures often repeat in this constant and vicious cycle is the "cut off" stage. This is the stage where things have become bad enough to warrant cutting all ties and dealings with the wicked but not yet a mortal danger. The righteous cut all business, merchant, political, association, and minglings with those who seek their destruction. They keep to themselves, buying and trading only with those who will allow them to do so in peace and doing nothing against an enemy who is now thirsting for their blood.

By this point in scripture, most of us can see what's coming, and if you're like me, you're always puzzled as to what bug crawled up the wicked's butts. The righteous are doing nothing to hurt them, interfere with their freedoms, provoke them, or stop their choice to be complete and utter assholes. They are simply existing, living, loving, defending and unlike the wicked, they are prospering. 

For the wicked--since time began--existing IS the offense. Prospering just aggravates it. When you choose evil, it would seem, the ability to put two and two together hitches a ride with your rapidly exiting conscience. You are unable--and unwilling--to connect the actions of the righteous with their prosperous outcome, and seethe with jealousy and hatred for what the good have and the wicked want.

So now it's back to Father for help. The attacks are growing violent, constant, and too often life-threatening. Freedoms, possessions, and rights are being stripped with ravenous frequency from the righteous, every offense greatly amplified if it is committed by one of the righteous, but covered up, ignored, justified, or rapidly glossed over if the offender is one of the wicked, (often hidden under code words like "Oppressed minorities, apartheid, racism, sexism, or any cowardly words they can invent in order to call good evil or evil good")and all of this in spite of protest, reason, and even the law. At this point--throughout all history, both scripture and secular--a split occurs. The righteous are either run out of town by the wicked--now the majority--or choose to leave because staying means certain death, or even worse: slavery.

If they've listened to Father, the split comes as the next step: fleeing into the wilderness. By now the wicked are in full decadence and wretched consumption. They no longer have to be lured or eased into hell; they are now the proud owners of it. This step inevitably causes the loss of many righteous, who have grown at ease in Zion, and don't want to be bothered with sacrifice and difficulty. Unless they come to their senses and starting walking what they talk, they will inevitably be consumed by the wickedness they were too apathetic to flee.

Father will lead them to a safe place to build up a city fortress, for He knows what the righteous don't: this is merely buying them some time. The wicked WILL come.

Now keep in mind that these steps usually take place over many generations, even centuries. They have rarely occurred in a matter of a decade or two. And for those of you wondering why bother with all the steps when Father knows from the beginning what will happen, I remind you that what goes on here on earth is for our benefit, not Father's. WE are the ones who need to learn, NOT Father.

The moment of truth is now upon the righteous in the final step: Defending Zion and freedom. The one constant throughout history has been the showdown that must always happen so long as evil dwells among us. We have a choice to make then: risk death to defend the freedoms that God gave us but Satan seeks to steal, or choose to live under wretched slavery.

And here we are again, at that final step. Now if you ask anyone who has ever lived under Islam or communism--or Islammunism, given their Hitler/Stalin-esque Non-Aggression pact while they carve up the world between them--they will cry freedom. But it is a quirky thing that those who have had freedom and abundance have a tendency to choose "moderate slaver" or "slowly encroaching slavery" rather than risk pain, suffering, and losing their stuff.

Never once in history has any group unwilling to defend itself survived. Not once. Diplomacy, negotiations, reason, decency--all of these have only stalled the inevitable, and are useless against an indecent enemy. The War in Heaven--fought between those who wished to have the free will to choose and those who demanded you do it their way--has followed us to earth, and will always be here until the father of that war--Satan--is bound. Until then, we must re-defeat him and his followers over and over again, because he will never stop on his own, and neither will those who subscribe to the Satanic belief of force over free will. Every war in history has been between these two forces, and every war in the future will be the same until force is fully rejected by us.

And the One Inexorable Truth that all of these steps lead to? The answer is simple, and explains why we must keep fighting the same war over and over again. 

Islammunists/hippies would have you believe that the righteous, Judeo/Christian groups are an oppressive bunch who impose their will upon those who choose not to believe. While there have certainly been individuals and groups in our history who have done so, the steps outlined here prove that to be completely wrong. You see, it isn't good that will not live with evil. Good can tolerate evil, and always has. It is evil that will never, ever, ever tolerate good. There could be one righteous man in a far off corner of the world, living on his own and interacting with no one and evil would seek him out with ravenous carnage. 

That is why war with evil is inevitable; there is no permanent appeasement for those who never intend to let you live. And that is why any treaties signed by a follower of Islammunism can't be trusted. No matter how strictly you adhere to your side of the bargain, they will break theirs the minute they think they can hurt you, then hurry and promise to do it for real this time, no crossies count.

You need only look at restored Israel--who has kept every word it has ever given--and the Islamic stain they must live with. Out of every promise, treaty, truce, cease fire, etc., the phony-baloney Palestinians have ever signed, they have yet to keep one. This what God meant when he spoke, "But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived." It has always fascinated me that Father put both--deceiving and being deceived--on the same level. Surely one is the sinner and the other the victim, right?

Wrong. When God has given you signs of the type of people to be wary of, when those people show over and over again their true intent while we play "Let's pretend they're not lying" when the only evidence you have is lies, broken promises, and murderous intent, sounds to me like maybe the victim's guilt is even higher. To be deliberately deceived is indeed wicked because we know better, and are too lukewarm to do things right.

No matter how many Oslos, Road Maps, or Annapolis's you have, so long as the House of Israel breathes, evil will come, for good doesn't follow evil. Evil will always, inevitably, follow good. So this whole dealing with Abbas instead of Hamas is like sending billions of weapons to Himmler to defeat Hitler: delaying the inevitable and helping them kill us. Israel could abandon all land on earth and take to the sea on giant pontoons and Islammunists would STILL seek them out and wipe them from the earth.

This has never been about land; it has been about life, and the fact that the House of Israel has one. If we don't defeat evil and keep it from us you can be sure that it will defeat us.

Just look at history; one very wicked man is all it has ever taken. And right now, we are overrun with many very wicked men.

Keep the faith, bros, in all things courage, and no substitute for VICTORY.

Sentimental and worth the re-post

***Given the recent passing of my mom, I thought I'd repost the piece I wrote on the 1 year anniversary of my dad's funeral.***

WHAT A DAUGHTER LEARNED, What a Father Taught

By: Resa LaRu Kirkland

***From January 25, 2006 edition of Etherzone.com****

As I sit here, January 22, 2006 is fading into history. It is doing so in the normal manner; light begins to dwindle, cool air replaces warm, the sun slips behind a mountain cuing stars to twinkle and the moon to take over. A night like so many others.

Yet it is one I have dreaded to see come and now dolefully bid farewell. It isn’t the day itself that has caused such emotional duality, but what it represents.

It is the one year anniversary of the day we buried my dad, the last of those first anniversary dates that all mourners mark the year after losing a loved one. After tonight, I will no longer lament "A year ago at this time…" Instead I will fall into the verbiage of those long gone: "Back when dad was alive…"

The pain of such a loss has been at times unbearable. This is nothing unique. All of the "If only we’d gotten him to a doctor sooner" or "If only they’d found the problem sooner" that torture the soul of those left behind rip open wounds barely healed over, racking a broken heart with guilt and burdening a spirit with desperate thoughts of turning back the hands of time, if only for a moment.

But my dad deserved better than that. He would be in pain at the thought of my pain, because that is the kind of man he was. I don’t think I ever asked him for help in anything that he didn’t try his best to give, or wish he could if he was incapable of doing anything. His voice was usually tinged with compassion and apology for what he couldn’t do. That always touched me so.

So as this final anniversary ticks away toward finality, I will end it with a more fitting tribute to a man whose life mattered, at least to a daughter who watched, listened, and learned.

Dad was a southern boy, through and through. Raised the redneck way, he loved guns and hunting, swimming holes and alligators, pulling pranks and playing war. Born during the depression and raised during WWII, he first fell in love with the Navy at Jacksonville Beach. The large ships never left him, nor he them. They bred in him a desire for a Navy career, which he attained briefly as a young man.

He was raised by a family who had a strong lineage in southern history. Being raised as a Yankee by him and my mother in the northwest, it was hard for me to fully grasp the fervent southern loyalty of his family. They puzzled me; often hard to understand in speech, even more confusing in their friendly admonition that the south had won the war. Dad had a love/hate thing going on with his heritage. He loved the reunions, the barn dances, the word usage that only another good ol’ boy could possibly understand, boiled peanuts, sugar cane and maple syrup, and fresh watermelon from his grandfather’s farm—but only the heart. The rest went to the hogs. He had a wonderful sense of humor, something I’ve noticed seems far more prevalent among Southerners than Northerners. So full of southern pride, his first words to my mother were, "I hear they teach ya’all up here that the North won the war." Everyone in the south knew "the war" had nothing to do with the one America was currently fighting. So long as a drop of southern blood flows, "the war" will mean what it means even in the middle of Armageddon. It makes me smile every time.

But there were sides of the south that left Dad cold. While he was raised in a family who had owned slaves, fought for the Confederacy, and who raised him to fear "coloreds," parents, cousins, and extended family who said "nigger" with the same ease they said "boy howdy!", he did not like the use of the word, and rarely used it himself unless he was quoting or telling a joke. His family wasn’t necessarily using the word with malice; it was a word used for generations like so many other words, and in the beginning, had validity. In fact, if I listened closely, his families’ rendition of the word sounds far more like "niggra." This makes sense if you know anything of the history of the word.

I once listened to a lecture on the roots of this modern day pariah. There are many who claim its origins are the Latin adjective niger, which means black, but this speaker said it had its roots in something far less formal. Given the normalcy of illiteracy among so many at the genesis of America, it should be no surprise that "niggra" was merely the southern dialect way of pronouncing Nigre, which according to this speaker, was the name of the river where most of the slave ships would pick up their "valuables." When the advertisements for slave sales were posted, it wasn’t unusual for them to note something along the lines of "Fresh from the River Nigre." Hence the southern drawl would speak of these "Niggras" because that is how they thought the word Nigre was pronounced. It doesn’t justify this most hated of all words, it simply tells a curious people how such a thing came about, as with most eventual perversions, in an innocent manner. I don’t know how much of this is true, because the spelling and pronunciation of some of these words have changed since the time she was speaking of, but it certainly sounds plausible.

Regardless of its beginnings, it became a word that meant far more than a ship’s landing point or a race of people. This was a side of southern life that left Dad cold. He remembered the white lines down the middle of the bus, the colored bathrooms and drinking fountains, the whites only restaurants. One story he told me always stood out in my mind. One day at the local five and dime, he was browsing through the toys and candies, fondling a quarter and trying to decide what to buy. The shopkeep waited on a woman, because in the South, etiquette dictated that women are waited on first, then men, and children last. That was just polite, and had been engrained into my dad since birth. Respect for elders was never up for debate.

On this day there were four people waiting their turn: the white woman, a white man, my dad, and a sweet black lady that everyone knew and liked. Of course my dad obediently waited while the adults went before him, but was stunned when after serving the man, the clerk turned to him and said, "Are you ready?"

My dad froze. He turned to look at the black woman he knew. She was his elder and a woman; why wasn’t she being waited on first? He pointed at her, his mouth unable to make the "Ladies first" rule he knew by rote. But the clerk took the small toy from his hand, completely oblivious to the childish, ignorant faux pas. My dad had never seen a child waited on before an adult, and he continued to look at the woman. She must have felt his confusion and seen the red hot shame that was creeping up his neck, because with the class and decorum of a woman who knows what is wrong with the situation but cared more for the feelings of an innocent child, she quietly whispered, "Go on ahead now."

My dad didn’t remember how he got out on the sidewalk, but he always remembered how he felt. This was wrong. The message was loud and clear: woman, then man, then child, and then colored, and something deep inside a boy not yet a double digit age churned with the dull ache of a great rudeness. In that one day he had been taught the double standard, the unspoken hypocrisy of rules for whites and rules for blacks, and he hated it. So when I would come home from school and ask him about Little Rock or Civil Rights or Civil War, he would get quiet and teach me in a way I would never forget.

That didn’t mean he supported everything blacks did. He recognized the wrongs that our society had heaped upon a people simply because they looked different, but that went both ways. Equality, he taught, means you also have the responsibility to accept criticism when it is warranted, and this was an area where blacks have too often dropped the ball. Too many want only the good stuff equality provided, but none of the responsibility for said equality. While he taught me of the evils of enslaving one’s fellow man, he also taught the wrong of the Watts riots, the Black Panthers, Luis Farrakhan, and those who think it’s alright to defile whites but blasphemy to call blacks on such duplicity. He despised bussing because it was a law of force, and as he said, "You can’t legislate love." He felt that forcing people together was more likely a recipe for contention than cohesion, and while he had friends from just about every race on the planet, he was quick to point out that it was by choice, not by force. Force, after all, had been the plan Lucifer put forth before the War in Heaven, and the plan that
God—and the rest of us—soundly rejected. He felt that too many of the hippy generation of blacks were behaving exactly the same despicable way he’d seen too many southern whites behave. Wrong was wrong in his book, and that book was written in both black and white.

Dad knew history and loved it. To get to know him and to get him to like me, I spent multiple Saturdays on our family room floor, watching VICTORY AT SEA and WORLD AT WAR with him. I knew more about WWII by the age of 12 than I did about Andy Gibb. He was constantly reading history books, red marking pen in hand, taking notes and writing in the edges, and the only books he read more than those on WWII were the scriptures. He loved our Father in Heaven with all his heart, and studied Him with a ravenous hunger. This combination of knowledge and love made him the best teacher I’ve ever known.

When I came home from 11^th grade history one day and ranted at him about my humiliation during our Civil War lesson, he wanted to know why. I pointed to the Confederate States of America badge hanging on the wall of our family room. "Kirklands owned slaves and fought for the South. I slide down in my chair in class, hoping that no one in there knows that your family did that!" It was true; I had felt shame at being not just white, but southern.

My dad looked hurt, but in classic style taught me again. "Yes, we owned slaves. Not our finest moment, but not quite the evil it’s made out to be." He showed me a will of his great-great-great grandfather. He turned past the section that divided his land and worldly goods to the pages that referenced his slaves. I read as my ancestor carefully divvied out his slaves to his children. If this was supposed to make me feel better, it had failed miserably.

"Look! Dividing up his slaves like pirate booty!" I could feel my Politically Castrated education rolling to a boil.

"Read more," he said quietly.

I did so. This man was careful with his slaves, stating that they were to be distributed equally among his children, the only conditions being that they were not to be separated from parents or children, and that they were to be treated fairly and kindly as he had always done. I looked at my dad. We’d watched Roots together only a few years earlier, and the horrible scene of Kizzy being taken from Toby had always disturbed us both.

"So he kept the families together and didn’t whip them. He still treated them like possessions."

This time he said nothing, pressing the document toward me yet again. I rolled my teenage eyes and sighed heavily as I read the paragraph before me. "In regard to my favored slave, Big Black Tom," it began.

"Dad!" I cried out. "Big Black Tom??? For crying out loud!" I couldn’t help it; I just had to smile. It was just such a stereotype. Dad had to smile too. He usually found a way to make something uncomfortable into something palatable.

"That’s how they spoke back then. It wasn’t meant to be cruel."

I knew that. I mean, my relatives even referred to me as "boy." It was just how they spoke.

I read on. Big Black Tom was to go to Grandpa’s oldest son, and was to be given a portion of his land for his own inheritance. "He has been my friend all my life, and has been faithful and true. That is why I leave him to you, son, and expect you to both treat him as he deserves and seek out his knowledge, for he will run things better than you can."

My face felt red. This man had been more than Grandpa’s slave; he’d been his friend. It didn’t justify slavery in any way, shape, or form, but it did show a side to the south that I had never, ever seen before. I turned page after page, learning that unlike other slave owners, the Kirklands did not have separate cemeteries for their slaves; they were buried together, master and slave—and apparently, friend and friend. I went to the genealogy box, pulling out papers that showed slaves taking on the Kirkland name, a name from Scotland and exclusively white until it came to America—to southern America.

This was the way my dad often taught me. On one of those documentary Saturdays while watching about John F. Kennedy, I asked my dad if he had been a good President.

"Some people thought so," he quietly replied, going back to watching and learning. While I knew that my dad was no fan of the Kennedys, he always allowed me to choose what I would believe. That meant he would teach me right from wrong, but not propagandize, so that when my moment of truth came, my choice would be just that: my choice.

He always tried to be fair, and loved a good laugh. When he was Deputy Director for Job Corps, he dealt with many troubled inner city black youth, for whom the summer spent fighting fires in Cottonwood, ID was often a last chance. Never once did he refer to them as anything other than young men. He was delighted in the 1970’s when he watched "Smilin’ George" Foreman fight. He loved to tell about the summer that George had spent in Cottonwood, still struggling with who he was and where he was going. I remember mostly how he would grin and say, "Yep, that name fit him. He had a nice smile."

Dad saw the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, as he stepped out into his morning paper route. Even from El Paso, the flash from Alamogordo lit the sky, and was later explained as an "ammunition explosion." He was thrilled when his love for history caused him to find out that he had witnessed this all important moment in history in that brief, child-time instant.

Dad loved deep fried food, hated vegetables, was an avid gun collector, always wanted to be a pilot—even after he gave up being a Navy fighter pilot for his family’s sake—gave up hunting when he had to kill a deer up close and saw big tears roll down its eyes, loved America and its warriors, despised hippies, femmies, and commies, and gladly fought in our first war against communism. He supported the need to hunt so long as you used what you shot, believed the caribou could handle us drilling oil in Alaska, cheered when the nation of Israel was restored to the earth, loved our heritage through Israel’s son Joseph, lost his best friend in Korea, suffered from terrible asthma as a child and breathing problems that dogged him until his death. He hurt me at times, but probably less than I hurt him. Neither of us deserved it, both of us knew better, and I hope we’ve both forgiven and been forgiven. I have no doubt he has.

He cried when he saw the children in Romania, raged at the horror of the Holocaust, and marveled at the birth of each grandchild. He loved the law but hated lawyers. His head was bowed in humble prayer as often as it was flung back with a hearty laugh. He loved TV and reading, spending the bulk of his time in the depths of the History Channel, the Military Channel, A & E, FOX News, the Discovery Channel, and local news. He never missed a daily paper, read every magazine that worked its way into the house, and was reading new books on WWII up until he went into the hospital. He spent his last months waiting on my mother, who was also in the hospital fighting for her life after a diabetic reaction sent her falling down the stairs, shattering her leg and putting her in the hospital from the end of August 2004 until the night before Dad’s funeral. Every day he would go to her side, sitting and reading when she was sleeping, talking and praying with her when she was awake. He did this selflessly as his own health ferociously deteriorated, placing him in the hospital with my mom for the last six weeks of his life. When he was told on January 4, 2005, that there was no hope for recovery, and that he only had a few months to live, he was at peace with it, telling me, "I can’t hold on much longer, but it’s OK; I’m not afraid."

He really wasn’t. He held on for 12 more days, saying final goodbyes to old friends and family. On the morning he died, he waited until my brother showed up to say his goodbyes. Dad waited for the final words from the last of his children to let him go, then sat up, took his oxygen mask off of his face, and quietly died. Seventy years of an extraordinary life ended with little fanfare.

And now I am down to the last hours of this final one year anniversary. It has turned out to be a night like no other. I have smiled and laughed as much as I have cried while writing this; I guess it’s kind of like life. We smile, we laugh, we love, we fight, we pray, we hope, we believe, and eventually, we die. The best we can hope for is that it wasn’t all for naught. Dad’s best will remain just that: best.

On June 29, 1934, Robert Talmage Kirkland was born. On January 16, 2005, Robert Talmage Kirkland died. On January 22, 2005, Robert Talmage Kirkland was laid to rest. And on January 22, 2006, Resa LaRu Kirkland finally let him go. In between all of those dates were the days that really mattered, the days of sharing and learning. What he taught me then I now teach to my sons, knowing someday the cycle of parent and child I experienced with Dad will befall my sons when they say goodbye to me. Teacher to student who becomes teacher to new students. What a wonderful cycle; what a wonderful teacher.

What a wonderful life.

Keep the faith, bros, and in all things courage.