Since retiring to Florida, we have noticed a phenomenon where people who have been disciplined and on time to most everything suddenly find they have to arrive up to 30 minutes before the event.   Even being “on time” to an event might guarantee you that everyone else has left for the planned destination.  It can be frustrating.

This is why I am on-time.  First, it is polite and courteous to be someplace at the time you are expected.  Second, I have been in a disciplined time mode virtually all of my life.  Third, in some places I have been, it can save your life.

I come from a Germanic-Welsh genealogy.  These are people who are fairly strict about being on time.  My parent were both “on timers” and raised their children that way.  All through secondary, high school, college, and beyond, you lived by the schedule.  You were to be in your class at a set time, no exceptions.  Late meant seeing the Principal or worse detention.  Late in my College meant the possibility of losing a letter grade for X number of times late or with an unexcused absence aka “cutting class”.  In many classes, exam questions were often in material covered in the first few minutes of class..  In my era, not getting your date back to the dorm on time meant real problems for both of you.  You weren’t late in getting your papers or projects  to the Professor as the penalty could be as much as a letter grade.

From College, I entered the US Marine Corps.  You were NEVER late under any circumstances .The penalties could be severe and often included loss of rank, humiliation, or financial penalties.  Missing a troop movement could land you in jail.  The strict discipline was all geared to one thing and that was survival in the battlefield.  Remember the earlier comment about saving your life?  In Vietnam, if you arrived, say at an assault point  too early, you could die in preparatory fires.  If you were patrolling and arrived at a checkpoint too early, you could die in friendly H&I fire that was designed to protect you.   The Marine Corps is strict and we were always on time, period, no excuses, and,  end of subject!

When I joined IBM, in the first moments of the orientation, being on time to work was covered as a condition of employment.  IBM started every shift at 8:18 AM.  You had better have hit the clock before 8:18 or spend some ugly face time with your manager.  When hitting the time clock was stopped for professionals, you still needed to be in your office at or before your scheduled start time .  Your arrivals were tracked by the time you logged onto your office computer in many places.  Being on-time was a point in your annual performance plan.  I personally fired four people in iBM for their failure to get to work on time.

In IBM, arriving at meetings on-time was strictly enforced at all levels of the business.  I worked for Managers and Executives who closed the door on time.  If you weren’t in the room, you did not attend the meeting.  I closed my doors for meetings that I called 5 minutes after the meeting was scheduled to start.  Hardly anyone was ever late.

In IBM, I was a frequent global traveler.  You needed to be on-time to catch your flights especially if you had a complicated itinerary as I often did.  With one exception, I always made my flights on time.  I had some early training for this because our family owned a small cottage on Martha’s Vineyard.  You arrived at and left the Island on the Steamship Authority Ferries which is a tough ticket in the high season.  When I was working on the Vineyard during College, I caught the ferry every morning with a truck, drove to a warehouse, loaded it with milk, and caught the noon ferry back to the Vineyard.

Being on time has been ingrained into the fiber of my being.  This discipline remains with me today. and take some pride in time management.  I don’t plan to change because I am retired.

In early June, 2013, I saw a news program about a man who had transcribed the entire Bible.  He was motivated in a deeply religious way.  I thought about that for a while.  Finally, mostly out of intellectual curiosity, I decided that I would write one book of the Bible.  I quickly settled on one of the four Gospels.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels because they include many of the same stories and parables.  They are mostly used for historic information about Jesus.  Church readings, Sunday Schools, and Christian religious schools primarily used these Gospels.  Most of my early memories came out of these Gospels.  I knew that John was still the story of Jesus life but a much deeper insight into His justification of his divine role and the agonizing discussions on getting people to believe in Him and in The Father (God). John was different and this appealed to me.  Additionally, I was named for James and John even though my Grandfather was James John.  My mother once told me that these were two of Jesus’ favorite disciples hence my name.

I was raised in a very religious atmosphere.  My father and his father before him were both Methodist Ministers of an evangelical genre that frankly could, at times, get oppressive.  My early social life revolved around the Methodist Youth Fellowship and organizations that were tied to the Church including our Boy Scout Troop.  Continual prayer was a norm in my little world.  So, my spiritual roots run deep.  However, as with most PKs (Preacher’s Kids), a rebellion set in which despite my parent’s attempts to crush, it continued to develop.  Throughout High School, I tugged a bit at the leash but always seemed to be back in the fold at the end of the day.  When it came time to go to College, I went to West Virginia Wesleyan College, a Methodist School in the Appalachians which was a focus area for the New York and New England Conference of the United Methodist Church.  Even my early declared major was pre-ministerial.

That ship sailed somewhere in the first semester when I discovered that there was fun to be had in College and I had fun.  I was always pretty well focused on scholastic endeavors but there was wine, women, and collegiality that more appropriately balanced my young life.  I didn’t attend Church very much but I still had a well ingrained spirituality that I chose to express in different ways.  I also became very fascinated with Science in College which caused me to think much more broadly about the Universe and its origin.    Eventually, after graduation, I became a combat Marine in Vietnam.  What happened there could uproot one’s entire belief system.  Everyone discovered God again in the foxhole.  However, I have to think of  that a method of trying to survive an ugly situation.

I doubt that I would have come back if it were not for my wife, a devout Lutheran.  She insisted on going to Church and so we did.  We were members of a Church everywhere we lived.  Although my spirituality was never quite the same, we were active.  This changed when we found our little Congregational Church in Brookfield, CT.  I went through a sense of spiritual renewal after a long brutal period in IBM’s transformation.  I actually looked forward to Church time and then came retirement.  We moved to Florida which is the home of the “mega church” with TV screens, thousands of members, and multiple services every Saturday and Sunday.  That was and is a turnoff for me.

So, what did reading the Book of John do for me?  First, I am glad that I went through this experience.  It was spiritually refreshing and somewhat fulfilling.  John recounts the story of Jesus life very differently.  The major events in his life were chronicled but the focus was on “the word made flesh”.  Jesus was the incarnation of God on earth.  The book was about the struggle to make people believe in God and the Holy Spirit.  Jesus performed eight “signs (never called a miracle in John) to inspire trust and confidence in “The Father”.  With this said, I found the communication from Jesus to “the crowd” to be difficult to understand at times.  This is reflected in a thread of misunderstanding and confusion whether it was “the crowd”, His Disciples, The Pharisees and High Priests, or Pilate.  Whether or not this was deliberate to “fulfill the scripture” is a question I leave to others.  If there was anyone who could have used a good PR person, it was Jesus.

There is the question of science.  The “works” or “signs” stretch the scientific mind to an extreme. For example, in a scientific mindset, no one walks on water, raises people from the dead, or feeds 5000 from a few fish and a loaf of bread.  This is a historic theological debate that continues to be played out.  At the end of everything, the answer seems simple to me (I am no theologian); you have to believe and have faith through this belief.   That is where I am  and that  is where I will leave it. 

I should mention something about the task itself.  I wrote 55 full pages and completed almost 16,000 words.  I enjoyed writing and it was a pleasure to start within the time I had allotted each day to the task.  I never got tired of actual writing although it has been easily since College that I wrote one document of this magnitude by hand.  I wrote out the passages, usually about 600 wordss each day.  When I finished writing, I went back and spent some time contemplating what the passage meant.  As the passages in John are almost all narratives, it became very interesting to put yourself into one person’s shoes or another.  I thought, in each case, how could I have done this better, or could I?  I could not know the undercurrents or the politics in depth that surrounded the passage so thinking through these things was also very interesting.  Lastly, it was wonderful to again discover cursive writing rather than typing.  It made the passages come alive for me in a way that I had never experienced.  I recommend it!