Straight Paths -Faithful Are the Wounds of a Friend

Faithful Are the Wounds of a Friend

Loren Hardin

The Ashland Beacon

This is part two of a series about Carolyn who was sixty-nine when she enrolled in outpatient Hospice services with Parkinson’s disease. Her husband, Charlie recounted, “It all started about fifteen years ago with Carolyn falling for no reason and having trouble picking up things.”  Carolyn is now seventy-two and Charlie is picking Carolyn up.

Charlie and Carolyn reflected on their forty-seven years of marriage.  Carolyn stated, “Someone told me I needed to get with Charlie Caplinger, but I told them, ‘There will have to come a thunderstorm with mud up to my ankles before I’d ever go out with Charlie Caplinger. ‘” Charlie interjected, “But that’s exactly what happened!  I took her to the Adam’s County Fair and when we got there the sky was clear, but clouds started moving in and it rained two inches in twenty minutes.  When we walked back to the car the mud was up to our ankles.  I told Carolyn, ‘Honey, you better make sure your words are sweet because you might have to eat them.’”  

         Charlie confessed, “I didn’t know how to be a good husband, but I had a good trainer.”  Carolyn responded, “But It wasn’t easy!” Carolyn pressed the palms of her hands together and looked up towards heaven as if to say, “It’s a miracle! Thank you, God!”  Charlie shared, “But I have learned that one of the secrets of a long marriage is to ‘Kiss an angel good morning and love her like the devil when you get back home,’” (“Kiss an Angel Good Morning”, Charlie Pride, 1971). Charlie grinned like a possum eating a sweet potato, raised his eyebrows at Carolyn, and she smiled back at him. I’ll never be able to look at those two the same again.

         Now to the story at hand. Charlie shared, “My stepdad worked in a metal plating factory in Cincinnati.  A fellow he was working with was reaching into his back pocket to get a big chaw of tobacco and was starting to put it in his mouth. His gloves were wet, and liquid cyanide was dripping off the fingers of his gloves. They used cyanide in one of the processes back then; and it only takes a small amount of cyanide to kill a person. Dad said he didn’t have time to tell him to stop so he smacked the fellow’s hand away from his mouth.   The fellow was mad at first, but he got over his anger pretty quickly.  He just wasn’t thinking.”

         Charlie’s story reminds me of the “Mennen Skin Bracer” TV commercials in the early seventies. Their slogan was, “If you need waking up, slap on some skin bracer…its skin tighteners and chin chillers will wake you up like a cold slap in the face.” The series was a montage of scenarios in which the person, after being slapped in the face with a handful of skin bracer, responded, “Thanks, I needed that!”    Charlie suggested, “That’s how it is with the truth.  Sometimes you have to smack people in the face with it for their own good.”

         Charlie and I engaged in a lengthy discussion about how difficult it is to tell people the truth, especially when they don’t want to hear it.  Charlie suggested “Most people will listen to you if you approach them in the right way.”   But after further discussion we agreed that some people won’t listen to you no matter how you approach them.  After all, look what happened to Jesus.

         Charlie retreated to a back room and returned a few minutes later with a spiral notebook of quotes he’d collected over his thirty years of preaching and teaching. Then Charlie shared the following quote by Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, (1852): “The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.”  

         “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful,” (Proverbs 27:6). 

    “…If the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any person from among them… his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand,” (Ezekiel: 33:6).

         Loren Hardin was a social worker with Southern Ohio Medical Center Hospice for twenty-nine years. He can be reached at 740.357.6091 or at lorenhardin53@gmail.com. You can order Loren's book, "Straight Paths: Insights for living from those who have finished the course", at Amazon.