My "Thanks" List (partial)...

• Heno Head, for showing me Christ in every smile, and every situation.
• Mee Maw, for actually physically standing on top of the bible in desperate faith, when the pain was so great in her life
• Donna Nicholas, for seeing the stars as they really are one night, and trying to get a blind Glenn to see...
• Lowery and Mary, ever glowing (and occasionally smoldering)
• Grover Gunn, whose early gentleness (without sacrificing sarcasm!) nudged me toward falling in love with the Great Shepherd.
• Jim Pitts, who in the kitchen showed that a Christ-grown love could see past the pettiness and bickering of the earthly church
• Lewis, Bruce, McDowell; who 'trapped me' in the faith, and launched a generation of amateur apologists...
• Francis Schaeffer, whose love bled from every line and whose 'courage' turned out only to be a 'true view' of our God
• Nap Clark, who told me the FIRST week of our friendship to decide what beliefs I would accept a firing squad for...and by whose side I will stand at the 2nd Triumphal Entry, as we shout our hearts out together for Him!
• Doug Herring, who taught me that the metaphor was NOT 'keeping your eyes on the Cross' but rather 'seeing everything in the light of the Cross'
• Charles Corey, the perfect mirror of my early mechanistic view of a personal relationship with the living and loving God (sorry, Charles)
• Bill Boggess, who even now challenges me by his very example of teeth-gritting, hard-headed commitment to obedience...
• Karen Mitchell, the heart of love, warmth, giving--the 'yardstick' I carry around...
• Curtis Hayes, uncompromising --without doubting
• Garry Jones--my Jonathan for a sweet, sweet year...
• Phil Myers, my internal "external" standard of integrity, robustness, consistency...[and thereby, an excellent source of 'guilt on demand'--but only when I REALLY need it...;>) ]
• Mike Sullivan, for one single remark about having to explain away ALL the positive data, if you let ONE negative datum change your mind...
• Walter Bodine, for what the imperative mood in scripture did to him...
• Ed Blum, for that one day he took his stand on Hebrews 12.14 in class...
• Fred Myers, for an instant, unexplainable love
• Bill and Chris (my younger brothers), for commitment to Him whom we all love most...a 'threefold cord'...
• My kids, my first really-inside friends and my most honest critics...

The story is told of young man out walking one day, who comes upon a quite elderly man planting a lone peach tree sapling. The young man chuckled, and said "Friend, I hope you don't plan on eating any peaches from that tree!".
Whereupon, the old man smiled and replied: "Young man, I have eaten a whole lot of peaches in my lifetime, and none of them from trees I planted myself. I'm just trying to give something back to those later than I."

So much of what we are originally came from others. We accepted it, argued with, transformed it a little, and then integrated with it. It is no longer 'them'; it is now 'us'. But the debt is still there, the thanks still owed, and the task of planting peach trees for others lies still ahead of all of us.