celebrating 80 years of ford

This is NOT about the auto industry. This is about a very special person, Ford Reynolds. Yesterday there was a surprise party at Richville Christian Fellowship (RCF) to celebrate his 80th birthday.

I’ve known Ford for over 24 years, ever since I came to Canton. Instrumental in starting Christian Fellowship Center (CFC) in the 1970’s, he was an elder there. I met him the very first time I attended CFC (Sunday of Labor Day weekend in 1984). I went forward for prayer at the end of the service and Ford came up to me and asked if I was “born again.” I told him I wasn’t sure what that meant but that I had accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. With a big smile, he waved his hand in the air and said in his booming voice, “Son, you’re born again!” I fell in love with Ford immediately. Most people do.

Ford Reynolds has had more impact on my walk as a Christian than anyone. No one else is even close. He is like a father to me.

Starting in 1987 or ‘88 Ford and his wife Sarah led cell or home meetings at our house for a number of years. When RCF started in 1992, Ford was of course the pastor and our family of six attended during its first four years before being led to return to CFC. In addition to taking up a row of seats in a new church, we started the “junior church” for the kids and I also did the bookkeeping for 10-years.

I still miss Richville even though I know the Lord doesn’t want me there anymore. To this day when I visit RCF, I find myself more interested in what is happening to the building, the finances, and the people than I am about them at our home church CFC.

Before “retiring” Ford was a dairy farmer. He had never taken a course at a seminary nor at a Bible college, yet no one ever questioned his ordination as a pastor. You didn’t need to be at all spiritual to know that Ford was obviously ordained by God to be a pastor.

If you hang around Ford you’d better be prepared to 1) work hard, and 2) laugh a lot.

Ford is a man without pretense, completely comfortable with himself and with others. All he cares about is seeing God move, to see God do something. He loves to see miracles, especially healings. He has an infectious faith. Although he was saved 40 years ago, Ford still gets excited about individuals coming to Christ and having their lives changed.

Ford is a very bright guy. He had to be to be a successful farmer. However, his most impressive display of intelligence was when he took Sarah as his wife. Sarah is the wisest woman I know. She is very unassuming, not flashy, not outgoing; she seldom speaks – just what you’d expect from a farm girl and farm wife. However, when she speaks you better listen if you have anything at all on the ball. Better yet, go to her for advice and wisdom -- you will not be disappointed. Ask and ye shall receive.

As a pastor, Ford is unusual. At RCF, he would cancel mid-week services while North Country Christian Retreat was in session. He told his flock to go out there and receive the great guest ministry available. Have you ever hear of a pastor telling his people to go elsewhere for preaching and teaching? You see Ford’s ministry, his local church, is about Jesus, not about Ford.

Remember the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) bracelets? With me, it is what would Ford Reynolds do? If I see someone who is sick, I should pray healing. If I see spiritual oppression, I should pray deliverance. If I see despondence, I should speak encouragement.

That is what Ford would do. You see with Ford, things aren’t that complicated. Ford just takes Jesus at his Word and trusts Him.

Be blessed!
RB

this would be my tuesday

I found this video here:



As I watched this for some reason I was reminded of my Tuesday of this week.

That morning I awoke at about 3 a.m. and couldn't get right back to sleep. So I prayed quietly and spent some time with the Lord. I also thought about the best thing to happen to me that week as well as the worse thing to happen. Next the thought popped into my head that today is the best day of the week. Right now should be the best day ever. Christ abides in me and I abide in Christ. The more I abide with Jesus, the better it gets. Therefore, right now should be the best so far.

This realization made me feel especially good, content, almost elated while at the same time also quite relaxed. I soon fell back to sleep.

Later the alarm went off and I awoke feeling pretty good. I remembered an appointment in a little over an hour to have some routine blood work done. Since I had to fast, I had plenty of time to shower, shave and get dressed. I took my time getting up.

After my shower, I found I was running late. As I put the key in the ignition the panic alarm in the car went off. I couldn't get it to go off. The doors were locked and I couldn't get out. Finally the horn stopped. Why it stopped, let alone why it started in the first place, I do not know.

I drove toward the Noble Medical Center. I drove a block past the Nobel Medical Center before I remembered that I missed the driveway.

Later that morning I returned home. I had another appointment a few miles out of town at 10 a.m. The plan was to drive her to work and then go to my appointment. So I dropped her off at work and returned home. Five minutes after ten, I remembered the appointment. After a quick call, I still made it but was more than a bit late.

About this time I had to start laughing. So this is the best day ever?

I decided to stay home for the rest of the day and just read. I would operate no machinery, no electronics, no motor vehicle. I would do nothing more complicated than make a sandwich.

Late in the day I found out that someone (not her) had wasted a large sum of my money. I was a bit peeved. It took about a half hour before I could see this was part of the same thing and could laugh about it.

All in all, I had a very good day. Each day since has been even better.

Faint praise indeed!

Be blessed!
RB

we cannot slip through

I just found this wonderful excerpt on then face to face:

The great Scottish preacher Ebenezer Erskine (1680–1754) once visited a woman on her deathbed and lovingly tested her readiness for heaven. When she assured him that she was ready to depart to be with Christ because she was in that hand from which no one could pluck her, Erskine asked, “But are you not afraid that you will slip through His fingers in the end?”

“That is impossible because of what you have always told us,” she said.

“And what is that?” he asked.

“That we are united to Him, and so we are part of His body. I cannot slip through His fingers because I am one of His fingers. Besides, Christ has paid too high of a price for my redemption to leave me in Satan’s hand. If I were to be lost, He would lose more than I; I would lose my salvation, but He would lose His glory, because one of His sheep would be lost.”

~ Excerpt from Living for God’s Glory

extra-credit test question on auto industry

Last Friday I gave a test in my intermediate microeconomics class with an extra credit question at the end. I thought it was a fairly easy question; a way to boost both scores and morales at the end of a hard test.

EXTRA CREDIT! Due to higher costs to support generous fringe benefits to current and retired employees, the average loss per car is $2000 per vehicle sold for the Detroit 3 (GM, Ford, Chrysler). The foreign nameplate companies also operating in the U.S. (Toyota, Nissan, Honda) have an average profit of $1200 per vehicle. Given this information and assuming a normal profit per vehicle produced in the U.S. is $1000, use economic theory to briefly explain what should happen in the long run to the U.S. auto industry in terms of the number and type of firms.

Except for the $1000 normal profit, the numbers above are real. The answer is that eventually the Detroit 3 would leave or contract in the U.S. (or go broke) while foreign nameplate companies would enter or expand in the U.S. All you need to answer is to know one simple concept concerning firms exiting and entering an industry: higher than normal profits attract and losses repel.

During last week's Congressional grilling of auto execs, Massachusetts Rep. Stephen Lynch asked GM's Rick Wagoner if "...GM was asking China for a bailout too. Mr. Wagoner mildly answered that GM's China operations are profitable. They actually help to underwrite the massive losses in the U.S." (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 26, 2008, p.A13).

POP QUIZ! Here is today's two-part EXTRA CREDIT question:

(A) Why can Ford and GM profitably make cars overseas but not in the U.S? (That is, why doesn't GM need a bailout from China?)
(B) Why do foreign nameplates (Toyota, Honda, Nissan) profitably produce cars in the U.S. but not GM or Ford or Chrysler?
[Hint: (A) and (B) both have the same answer.]

Answer: The $29/hr pay gap. The Detroit 3 have the UAW and the associated legacy costs (generous retirement and health benefits for retired and current workers) in the U.S. while other companies in the U.S., and all companies abroad, do not.

The above is the only answer. No partial credit for mentioning Detroit makes the wrong vehicles with low quality, or dumb CEO's, or lazy workers, or the need for better technology, or CAFE and other government regulations, etc. These are just distractions, side issues, needless complications,that do not explain why the Detroit 3 have higher costs of $3,200 per vehicle only in the U.S.

Any other explanation does not answer both parts (A) and (B).

How'd you do? One of last week's posts had the answer:
random thought....no random walk:
what's with the detroit auto bailout?

There'd be no need for pop quizzes if everyone did the reading.

Be blessed.
RB

P.S. How do you think Congressman Lynch would have done on the quiz?

the audacity of hype

What is with THE OFFICE of the PRESIDENT ELECT?

There is no such thing under the Constitution or under any legal authority.

Sure does look official though.



UPDATE: When posting I thought my title was original, but later found it here, here, and in a million blogs (satirical pic here).

describing obama's fiscal stimulus policy

From Greg Mankiw's Blog: Competing Alliteration

Instead of fiscal stimulus that is temporary, targeted, and timely, John Taylor suggests that it be permanent, pervasive, and predictable.

What the Obama administration is aiming for, it seems, is helpful, hopeful, and humongous.

Critics fear it might end up pointless, political, and pork-filled.

. . . [Obama economic adviser] Larry Summers now calls for stimulus that is speedy, substantial, and sustained.

Other readers think it will be:

* big, bloated, and borrowed.
* immodest, immoral, and imbecilic.
* clumsy, corrupt, and counterproductive.
* expansive, extensive, and expensive.
* weighty, worrisome, and wayward.
* politicized, pandered, and pathetic.
* socialized, silly, and sorry.
* random, record-setting, and ridiculed.
* ultimate utilitarian utopianism.
* absolutely abjectly apocalyptic.

puritian preacher & early american medical scientist

In honor of Thanksgiving Day, Saturday's Wall Street Journal had a selection of the five best rare books on early America. One of which was the tract An Account of the Method and Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox . . . by Puritan preacher Cotton Mather (1722). Here is the description:

Cotton Mather is best known for his incendiary influence on the Salem witch trials, but he was also an intellectual omnivore, a prolific science writer whose interests included rainbows and rattlesnakes, cures for syphilis and Indian methods of keeping time. Having witnessed the devastation of smallpox epidemics, Mather was fascinated when one of his slaves told him of a form of inoculation practiced in his native Sudan. Mather found writings on the subject by Turkish doctors and English scientists eager to try it, and he soon threw his religious passion behind a campaign for inoculation trials in Boston. The campaign faced fierce opposition, but American medical history was born here, in a conversation between a Puritan preacher and his African slave.

Source: Rare Books on Early America
~ As Thanksgiving nears, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim picks her favorite rare books on early America.
» Full Story in Wall Street Journal (November 22, 2008).

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Be blessed!
RB

P.S. Click to see the page images of the original at Harvard University Library.

a chain of bank failures with few links

Yesterday the FDIC announced one of the banks in the town I grew up in, PFF Bank & Trust (formerly Pomona First Federal S&L), went bankrupt. The FDIC just arranged for a Minnesota bank to take it over. Most customers will not know the difference (source).

There have been a lot of comparisons between our current crisis and the Great Depression. PPF was only the 22nd bank to fail this year. There were more failures during the 1930's -- even after the worst of the bank runs in 1933.

There were far, far more bank failures during the S&L crisis of the late 1980's and early 1990's. You can see this by checking out following graph showing the number of bank failures since the creation of the FDIC in 1934.

Click image to enlarge in a new window.

To put this in perspective, there have only been 22 bank failures this year out of over 8,400 FDIC-insured banks.

A big difference today is that banks are much larger so a single bank going under may have a bigger impact. The graph below shows bank failures in terms of deposits (blue) and assets (red):

Click image to enlarge in a new window.

Now this makes the current crisis look much worse than it really is for two reasons. First the dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation.

Second and more importantly, over three-fourths of the dollars in the current year are just from one bank, Washington Mutual (WaMu). The FDIC arranged WaMu to be purchased by JPMorgan Chase Bank at no cost to the insurance fund or taxpayers.

Take out WaMu and 2008 looks not so bad.

There will be more failures coming up but the number and relative dollar amounts should much lower (excluding WaMu) than during the S&L crisis of twenty years ago.

Don't buy into the fear-mongering. We've seen and survived worse. Not to say there aren't bad things coming, but banks are the least of our economic worries.

Be blessed!
RB

Source: Calculated Risk: Graphs: FDIC Bank Failures

10 principles of economics - the rap version

Just click the triangle play button to listen.

Audio file found here and here.

a sustainable auto industry

Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter:

On Sunday, President-elect Barack Obama asked, "What does a sustainable U.S. auto industry look like?"

Well, it looks a lot like the automotive industry run by "foreign" car companies that insource jobs into the U.S. In 2006 these foreign auto makers (multinational auto or auto-parts companies that are headquartered outside of the U.S.) employed 402,800 Americans. The average annual compensation for these employees was $63,538.

At the head of the line of sustainable auto companies stands Toyota. In its 2008 fiscal year, it earned a remarkable $17.1 billion world-wide and assembled 1.66 million motor vehicles in North America. Toyota has production facilities in seven states and R&D facilities in three others. Honda, another sustainable auto company, operates in five states and earned $6 billion in net income in 2008. In contrast, General Motors lost $38.7 billion last year....

Will fewer companies look to insource into America if the federal government is willing to bail out their domestic competitors?

The answer is an obvious yes. Ironically, proponents of a bailout say saving Detroit is necessary to protect the U.S. manufacturing base. But too many such bailouts could erode the number of manufacturers willing to invest here.

Found at Greg Mankiw's Blog: A Sustainable Auto Industry