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My Friend

By John F. Bulharowski
October 1, 1999
Tape FT99-10

I do want to make a comment about the music in general. Hopefully we have hit upon something that everyone appreciates and really likes and enjoys. This was my intention in scheduling the music and doing the planning for it because I realize that there is a great deal of variation and taste.

This particular piece was kind of ambitious considering that the choir has no opportunity to sing during the year. We just come together and they do a really wonderful job, really good. I would say for me it is a very fulfilling kind of experience, although I do indeed experience anxiety beforehand and keep wondering, "Am I going to mess things up? How well am I going to lead?" But it worked out extremely well.

One of the things that occurs with the choir with which I am directly involved is that over the hours of practicing and doing the performances, we get to know each other and we are kind of in the trenches, so to speak, not unlike the experiences all of the men in times past used to have in the Spokesmen Club. I'm sure practically everyone will remember when we were kind of in the trenches, slugging it out with everyone else, knowing that each man had to experience the same kind of thing, the same kind of apprehension and nervousness.

But we develop what I think is a strong bond of friendship which transcends age and sex and everything else. As you can see we have people who are very young, and some of us are not so young. It is always amazing to me because I reflect on times when I was young, when I was a teenager. We were very, very narrow in our friendship age range. If you were fifteen years of age, maybe you had friends who were sixteen or fourteen, but you didn't go out beyond that range very much. But I see young people, older people, and this seems quite transparent to them. It is very exhilarating and satisfying for me.

This leads in very well to the subject that I have chosen this morning because I am talking basically about friendship. My planned introduction will salt throughout the sermon some comments and little anecdotes regarding a very, very close friend of mine. This was not only my own personal friend, but a close friend of my family.

We knew him extremely well. We knew him. We loved him. I say this in the past tense because he is now dead. He's been dead for almost twelve years. We spent a lot of time together. We had a lot of good experiences. We had a lot of questionable experiences, some that we had to turn the other cheek and say "I'm sorry" or allow the friend in his way to say "I'm sorry."

I personally feel that I have learned a great deal from this friend of ours although he didn't know it. It's not as if he lectured or told or anything like that because he was quite incapable of it. As usual when one has a friend or someone close that dies (passes on or whatever euphemism you want to use) one always wishes he could have paid more attention to them. "I could have been more loving. I could have been less critical. I could have been less difficult." — all the negative kinds of things that one wishes he could go back and have his shots over again so that he could make things better. But as I started to say, this friend was incapable of lecturing or telling or teaching in that way because he was our dog.

Buckwheat was his name. A rather strange name, and we'll get back to that. Now I realize that all people don't share the same thoughts and ideas and feelings for animals, for pets, for dogs or cats, whatever you like. Some people couldn't care much at all about them. Other people can't live without having pets and animals around them.

I think I fall somewhere in the midst of that. I do not have a dog now and I hopefully will have time to get into that as to the why's and wherefore's. When I was a young child, I did have a small dog. In any case, if you're one of those folks who don't particularly care about dogs and animals and pets, just bear with me for awhile, because I think I do have a good message that I learned from Buckwheat that I hopefully can convey to you, if my speaking is with skill.

I felt a very deep bond, I would say a love, for this animal. For thirteen years he lived in my household and we had all kinds of experiences with him right from the start. But the question comes into my mind, and I thought about this a number of times, if it's possible, if it's easy for me to develop a really strong bond of a friendship with this little animal who couldn't speak (but he made his wants and thoughts and his ideas known), if it so easy for me, and for the whole family as a matter-of-fact, to develop this kind of intense close bond of love with a dumb animal, why then when we turn to fellow human beings, to other people in the church, do we find it difficult to do the same thing, to build the same kinds of bonds, to be friends? Hopefully, I can cover that.

Now a little background regarding Buckwheat. It was really the result of a kind of a conspiracy that I conceded to allowing the dog in the house in the first place, because when we got him, our children were probably my grandchildren's age now (hint, hint) and their mother came to me and said, "They really ought to have a dog and learn the responsibility of caring for a dog, a pet, and learning how to deal with it and have a friendship with the dog." And I said, "No, no, it's nothing but trouble. You have to train him. You have to feed him. You have to care for him. If something happens you have to take him to the veterinarian. When you go to the Feast, what do you do with them? You have to take them to the kennel somewhere and pay out good money."

But this woman that God gave me went over my head. She went right to the top. She prayed about it and she has been known to pray for some things. When she goes before the Most High it is frequently with a specification. Now she had a specification for the dog that she wanted. I mentioned that I had a dog when I was a child and she knew about it and she knew basically what the dog looked like. It was a small, black dog. So she thought if she could find a black dog, not too big, some dog that would be big enough, though, to have strength to deal with the growing children so he wouldn't be hurt by their rough playing. There were a number of other things that she had asked for.

So lo and behold she's driving home from grocery shopping or something one day, and about a block and a half down the street she comes by this yard that has a handwritten sign on the gate of their fence, "Free Puppies." I emphasize the free. As you will see in a moment, it was anything but free. So she stopped and here are these (I don't know how many there were at the time, three or four) little black puppies, barely weaned, crawling around in the box. She convinced me that I had to go over to just look at them. "Jack," she said, "Just look at them." "Okay."

It's too late to make a long story short, but we came home with Buckwheat, a little black male, and he sat on Bobbie's lap on the way home in the car and he never did break of that. He always thought any time he was in the car with us he had to be on her lap, and he never sat still, (so it was sort of a payback.)

In regard to the name, I suppose I better talk about the name now. Being black (there wasn't a non-black hair on his body) he sort of had a shiny look to him. He was a close-haired dog. Bobbie and I come from Eastern Pennsylvania originally. Those of you who know your geography may be aware that Eastern Pennsylvania is the anthracite coal region. That is hard coal. Hard coal is just one step away from diamond. It's almost pure carbon and it's very black and very shiny. We were considering a name and she said in her very womanly way, "Why don't we call him Anthracite?" That just didn't really set well with me.

So I thought on the theme and it was a reasonable direction to go because he was this small, shiny, black puppy. I thought about the anthracite coal and what it was like — shiny and black. And I thought in the industry what they do is mine the coal, and they bring it up to the collieries and they grind it and sort it according to sizes. When I was a child at home we used to use pea coal. It was actually bigger than peas. I don't know why they called it pea coal. And they had others that they called chestnut coal, and some other grades that they would name after grains. There was rice coal. All these things didn't quite fit for a name.

But then, I remembered Buckwheat coal. Buckwheat was a small ground-up variety of coal. So it had the nice ring and it fit. So he became Buckwheat forever.

Now the "free" puppy started right at the very beginning. We brought it home and it wasn't too long before he started scratching. Of course dogs scratch. They usually do that as a matter of course, but he was scratching more than I expected that he should. So I watched him for a day or two and he was scratching and pretty soon I could see that he was irritating himself and even scratching some of the hair out, and I said we better take him to the veterinarian and find out what was bothering him.

So Bobbie took him to the veterinarian and come to find out he was infected with scabies. Does everybody know what scabies are? Scabies, for your information, are tiny parasitic mites that feed on dry, dead skin, humans or animal; it doesn't matter. What they do is get on your skin and they burrow just under the surface of the skin and they feed on the dead tissue which we all, whether we like it or not, have on us. The veterinarian gave her some soap to wash the dog and some medicine to give him.

But then we found out that humans are susceptible to contracting scabies. Guess which only member of the family was infected with scabies? I'll tell you these things will drive you crazy. They wake up probably at about 11:00 or 11:30 at night just when you are in bed, and you never felt anything itch like that in your life. But fortunately the veterinarian fixed me too. He told us what to do with it and it worked. It took good care of it very quickly.

A slight digression for the moment — a couple years later, which made it more interesting, the Ambassador College in Pasadena campus area was infected, I think twice over a couple year period, with scabies and everybody went through kind of a quarantine period. We didn't shake hands and all this sort of stuff, and they made quite a big deal about it. I guess if they had come to me I could have told them what to do.

But in any case, that's the free puppy and that's the beginning of it. I'll tell you a few other things later on.

Now back to my question? How come it it's so easy, if it comes so naturally that very quickly we develop a bond of affection that grows and grows and grows into love for a little animal like this, then why is it so difficult for us when we deal with one another to develop the same kinds of bonds? Well, I guess by way of reasons, I'll throw out a first one that comes to mind. And the reasons that I give you, by the way, are not intended to be exhaustive. You may think of other reasons. If I can illicit your thought and get you prodded, or (what does Charles Whitaker say? — goad) goad you to thinking, maybe you can come up with other ideas.

But as I mentioned, Buckwheat was in our household and he lived with us every day and we saw him. He was at the door in the morning. He ultimately got to sleep in the garage, but he came in the house during the day when we were there. He would be there bright and early in the morning, except Sabbath, asking to come in, and he would spend the time with us.

So that is the first thing. You have to spend time, just as we did with Buckwheat. That should be apparent. We have a lot of stories. As I say, it's been almost twelve years since Buckwheat died, and we still talk about him quite a bit. We think about him. A lot of things will trigger a memory of the dog. We start telling the stories over and over again. My daughter-in-law kind of pretends that she doesn't like it, but I know she really likes it. She's heard all of the stories.

Buckwheat would come to the door early in the morning. We were usually moving around at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning. He knew what time. He was there ready by the time we got up and were moving around so that he could be admitted to the house, except for the Sabbath day. Somehow he learned that things were different on the Sabbath day and he didn't come to the door at 5:00 or 5:30. Some say dogs are dumb. He figured it out. Of course it may have helped that Bobbie would get a special bone for him and she would cook it up for him and that would be his Sabbath treat. Just before we would leave for services, he would get his bone and he would be out in the yard happy for the rest of the day.

Somehow he knew, I think, when the Feast was coming along because he would show his agitation and I guess his excitement. He knew where he was going when I would take him in the car to go to the kennel. He knew where he was going, and we would be three or four blocks from the kennel and he recognized where he was. And it was a year between trips — our church dog.

Again, why do we have difficulty with each other? Let's talk about another reason — the negative experiences. I was going to call this a more narrow category, but let's talk negative experiences as opposed to the things you can laugh about at the time. At the time they seemed like huge crisis.

As far as our interpersonal relations (people-to-people) we expect perfection. I think we still, to a large degree, expect perfection from each other. I can recall, just as I am sure every one of you will tell the same story, when you first were called into God's church and you started coming to the meetings or the presentations that they would have, the Bible studies for new contacts and things like that, and you would find church people around and you would find the suits and the ties and the smile on the face and it was perfection. You finally found the "Nirvana," the place where people were all perfect and friendly. And then it wasn't too long before you would find that it really wasn't so. You would find people that would show a flaw, a chink in the armor, something that didn't sit quite right with you, and you would feel, "Oh, I don't like that, but I'll go on anyway."

We had negative kinds of things with Buckwheat as well. I can recall (I forget how long we had had him but) he started showing signs of being sick, more than a normal kind of thing. He got listless, and this was not usual for this dog, because he was so energetic. I remember my wife asking the veterinarian, "Will he always be this way?" or "How long will he stay hyper like this?" He was energetic, full of energy, bounding around. And the response was, "Oh, maybe a year. Maybe two years. Maybe he'll always be this way." And the last response was the correct one as far as Buckwheat was concerned.

But this was totally unusual for Buckwheat to be listless and just lying around. He wasn't eating properly. So, again, I took him to the veterinarian and left him there, and when I went back the next day, he showed me an x-ray that he had taken of him and he said, "There's some kind of something in there in his intestines and it's blocking. Look at this x-ray." And sure enough there was this thing about the size of a quarter, a perfect circle that made a nice bright spot on the x-ray. It was a negative, and the object was dense, so it didn't expose the film. He said, "I don't know what it is. I've never seen anything like this before."

So I gave him the okay to go ahead and at least do some exploratory surgery and see what was going on. But then I come to find out my younger son had been playing with Buckwheat in the back and he, my son Paul, had the center core of a golf ball. All kids have to take golf balls and baseballs and things and cut them apart to see what's in them. Of course, a golf ball has got a hard center core with what looks like rubber bands tightly wound around it. Well, this was just the dense core which happened to be the rubber core and Paul was bouncing it off the wall in the back yard and catching it (you know how boys will frequently do), but Buckwheat decided he would play and he would jump in the middle and he would intercept the ball.

So at one of these interceptions he swallowed it. Now Paul found that he had regurgitated half of it, but the other half remained in Buckwheat and just totally gave him problems because he couldn't pass anything through his tract. In any case it was kind of a negative experience inasmuch as we were concerned about Buckwheat being sick. And it cost me about $300 I think to get this thing cut out of him. That was probably twenty years ago. I wasn't making that much at the time. It was not a totally positive experience, but we can look back at it now and it is really even somewhat humorous.

Now the word I avoided in titling this particular section was the word offense. We have been hearing about offenses during these last few days and offenses among each other, and that, too, is part of the formula. During the last spring holy days I gave a split sermon in Anaheim. I spoke about offenses in regard to being careful not to cause offenses because it's so easy to do. It's so easy in a flippant sort of way, in a jesting manner, to say something that's intended to be funny, and it comes out totally unfunny and quite offending sometimes.

What I wanted to look at is the flip side of this coin, and say, "Well, I am not going to be offended. I will realize that this person who did whatever, or said whatever, didn't mean it, wasn't thinking. Or even if he was thinking, I'm not going to let it break into this relationship that we have and stop the growth of the bond of affection and love that we have started."

I guess I better turn to a scripture before I spend the whole time telling stories — Matthew 18:21. This is a very interesting scripture by the way. Again, I think it is a scripture that can probably can be skimmed over and not taken to the depths that it deserves. In verse 21 of Matthew 18, it says sort of matter-of-factly,

Then Peter came to Him [Jesus] and said, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?"

And of course we know the famous response.

Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven." (Matthew 18:22)

Now I told Edith Oliver yesterday that she was up to 488. But actually looking at it, the thought didn't occur to me immediately so I didn't have time to research it totally, but even Peter's comment, "Shall I forgive seven times?" implies kind of a non-specific number. I don't think he really meant seven times. We have our modern day versions of this kind of thing: scads, or jillions, or hundreds of people over there, when you know there weren't hundreds of people there. It was just some definite number used in an indefinite manner. And I kind of think that probably Peter had this in mind. He said should we forgive a lot of times. And Jesus did him one better. He said, no, no — lots and lots and lots of times. Of course we know the seventy times seven is not a definite number. It means you just keep going. You don't count.

Another interesting aspect of the scripture is it almost seems like an afterthought or something that doesn't quite fit in the chapter, but it fits magnificently, because if you go back to the beginning of the chapter it says,

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, "Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" (Matthew 18:1)

They were always concerned about who was the greatest, and I guess we're not different from them. Who's the big cheese? Who's the great guy? Who's the guru?

They were thinking the same thing. So Jesus started giving the answers and he spends the whole time talking about the greatest in the kingdom, and this fits right smack in the middle of the whole discussion. If you want to be among the greatest in the kingdom, you're going to have to develop whatever it is to be able to say, "I forgive you seventy times seven" and not necessarily even saying, "I forgive you" because a lot of people like to do that. "I forgive you" putting the guilt trip on a person, but forgiving in the way of just putting it out of your mind, never mentioning the incident or word again.

Another thing that I have to mention, of course, is brought out in Hebrews 10:24. This is another point, another thing that we have to get in practice doing if we're going to learn and be able to build the bonds such as I'm describing that we had in our family with Buckwheat our dog.

Hebrews 10:24-25,

and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, (25) not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near. (NASB)

Evidently, these people had the same kinds of problems that we have now with assembling together. Do not forsake it. We are here assembled together. I'm sure everyone had the great anticipation I had coming together and seeing people and renewing friendships that were just voices on the telephone. But now I have faces to apply to attach to the voices I hear on the telephone every week, and just get together again, and work together on building.

But here again as John said, we have seven days. We hopefully have used it to the max. There probably have been times when somebody did something that was one of what I was saying, negative kinds of things. Hopefully we have gone beyond it. Hopefully we look through it, and when we go back from the Feast we will just take the positive aspects of the whole Feast with us.

Now there is again another interesting scripture. I guess they are all interesting, but I didn't realize the interesting aspect, at least the thing that I think as being interesting, until my time that I was preparing for this sermon back home and I thought about this idea of dealing with friendship. There was a very common scripture that everybody refers to all the time when they are talking about friendship. So I checked my concordance and I said okay I'll flip to it to double check to see if it says what I think it says, what I remember it saying, and I opened my New American Standard Bible only to find out it said something radically different. And the scripture that I am referring to is Proverbs 18:24. Now if you have a King James Authorized Version, it will read something like this:

A man who would have many friends, must first show himself friendly.

. . . which is a good idea, a good principle. But I read my New American Standard and it said

something like this:

A man of many friends comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

I thought that can't be right so I started looking at other translations. They all seemed to say the same things. I checked the New International Version, the New English Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, a few of the other translations, and started checking words. There must be something wrong, and it seems that the sense of the scripture is what I just read from the New American Standard. A man of many friends comes to ruin. I got to thinking about it. Well, okay, I see what it's saying.

Now this is a double-edged sword. I'm not telling you to neglect the masses. I would like, for example, to meet everyone and be on a close personal basis with everyone, but I just can't do it. You can't do it. If you try to do it, you will be like the rock skimming over the surface of the water and never really quite penetrating the depth. You will be there as we used to be in the large congregations on the Sabbath with our coat and tie and our pasted on Sabbath smile never really penetrating. I think this is the sense of it.

He says if you try to spread yourself too thin, try to have too many friends, you're going to lose it; you're going to ruin, it won't work. But there is a friend. You can work on close friendships with a few. This brings me to a positive aspect of things, the situation as we have it now. I'm not a Pollyanna, but I try to look at the other sides of stories and I see the dividing asunder of our old church that we used to know. We don't have large congregations to go to on the Sabbath. We don't have huge Feast sites, and on and on it goes.

So we ask questions. Why? And here is a positive reason for it. I mean not to be argumentative, but looking at the whole situation I see a positive reason. This being now we can not hide in a large congregation. The first Feast I attended was in Mt. Pocono in 1972 and there were 12,000 people. That's 1, 2, with three zeroes after it, people. Yes, it sounded grand when we sang songs. Yes, it was kind of impressive to see the large group. Yes, it was a pain in the neck when we had to drive in and drive out the three or four roads that they had coming in to Mt. Pocono.

Now we are forced with our small groups to interface with the people that we are with. We have a small group. In Anaheim we have, on a good day, twenty people at Sabbath services and we're there until the sun goes down. We're there until the cows come home.

I'm not boasting on this, but we have a potluck. We sit around and talk, and it's almost forcing us to work on these bonds of friendship, bonds of affection, the love that we would otherwise not be able to develop. You can't hide in a group of twenty. You can't hide in a group of ten or twelve — a positive aspect if you want to look for positive things.

Well, we were very, very close to our little dog, Buckwheat. I didn't mean to bore you with some of the stories. Once again, if you talk to my daughter-in-law, she can fill you in on all of the rest of the stories, depending upon how much time you have and how elaborate she wants to be with the stories. But, hopefully, I got a little bit across regarding the things that I think are important as far as developing the kind of relationships that we should have, developing friendships that we should have, developing into that person which really can be called a friend, a friend that sticks closer than a brother.

Let me lead you to another scripture. I don't want to leave you on a negative note, but it's sort of a sober kind of thing. Turn to Matthew 24. We know the whole of Matthew 24 is kind of sober. Matthew 24 is one of the indications of the end times. Verse 12,

And because lawlessness [or iniquity] is increased [or as the King James says abounds, that is there is lots of it around, and my Bible says], most people's love will grow cold.

"And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many will wax cold" as the King James says. Now I think God is multi-faceted in all of the scriptures and the things that He inspires to be written in scriptures. He's talking about the world out there. It's kind of cold out there. It's very, very cold and it's getting worse.

But at the moment I don't care about the world. I care about us here. My admonition is let's try to do these things. Let's try to do these things that hopefully I've been getting you thinking about — the ways in which we can break the boundaries and barriers so that we can develop the close friendship, the close love such as you would have with your own little Buckwheat. Don't let Matthew 24:12 apply to us.

JFB/jjm/

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