Bob Barney on The end of summer, school, life, and the cruelty of death

Hi, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, a place to go to to find out what’s happening in today’s world and what it may mean for you, your family, and your friends. That’s theplaintruth.com. You know, when I was a younger child, I don’t know if people were like me or if you’re like me when I say this, but I can remember this particular day, and I’m recording this on August 31st, and I might play this on every August 31st because it has a special meaning to me, and that is when I was going to school, and I was a young boy, 12, 13, 14 years old, I remember the day that I got out of school in the springtime. It’s usually around June the 20th, and I would get out of school, and I was very happy to go to school.

I loved school. I did well in school, but I enjoyed my summer vacations just as much as I enjoyed school, and so the last two or three weeks of the school season, I would stare out the window on nice days and wish I was outside, and once in a while, of course, recess or other reasons, gym class, we would go outside on nice days, and I would just love the outdoors in the spring in Connecticut. However, when the time we got out of class, that day that we got out of the class for the summer, I really looked forward to the summer.

We had a very nice, at the time in the 1960s, what was called a Hendon above ground pool, and it had a ladder that came down. It had a privacy fence all around it and a deck all around it. It was like an in-ground pool, but above ground.

You climbed up stairs to get to it, and I’m talking about a stairway stairs. You didn’t climb stairs with your hands and legs. It was a very, very comfortable pool to go into, and I worked on a farm.

It was the same farm my father used to run before he went to the Nestle company, and I had a horse at the farm, and I just enjoyed my summers as well, like I said, as I enjoyed going to school. The ironic thing is I always dread going to the next year. I always fell in love with the year that I was in, and the teachers that I had that year, if it was sixth grade, I didn’t want to go to seventh grade.

If it was seventh grade, I didn’t want to go to eighth grade, but within a week or two of being in the eighth grade, I was happy to be there, but the summers we went camping, mainly to Vermont, like St. Catherine or other state parks. We camped with a tent, and usually the first couple weeks of July, but I remember when I first got out of class for the last day of school for the summer, I would think to myself, I got two and a half months of vacation before I had to think about school, but even as a 12, 13 year old, the next thought I thought of was, you know, this two and a half months are going to go by so fast. There’s going to be a day that I look back right before school and say, boy, this summer went by fast, and I remember this day of getting out of school and thinking how fast the summer would go by, because I would have so much fun, that I wouldn’t want to go back to school yet, and of course, around August 31st to September 1st, right before Labor Day, that is what would hit me, and Labor Day, of course, so I had a big party.

My uncle Will, my father’s brother, had a big Labor Day party every year. It was really fun, but even that was a kind of a double-sword party to go to, because the very next day after Labor Day is when school started when I was growing up. It always started the day after Labor Day, always on a Tuesday, and so it would start all over again, but the one thing I remember as a child, I’m getting somewhere here, folks.

I’m sorry, I’m taking a long way to get there, but I’m getting to a point. When I was a child, I do remember that I never wished that time would go by faster. I always wanted time to slow down.

I never wanted to be 16 years old to get a driver’s license when I was 13 years old. I wanted to enjoy 13 as long as 13 could last, and I wanted 13 to last like forever, and I wanted 14 years old to act like forever. I never wanted to grow older than I was quicker, and I can remember even as a 12-year-old, and I might explain why this may be the case, and maybe everybody thought this, maybe not, but I have to remember that the thing I thought of was what someday, here I’m 12, 13 years old, I’m going to be an old man ready to die, and my life is going to be like the summer vacation.

It’s going to go by so fast that I’m going to look back at the day of the summer vacation and remember about what I thought about, there would be a day that I’m old and I’m ready to die. It was very sad, and I used to dwell on that about this day some 60 years ago now, and I would think about it constantly at that time, and so this show is about death, aging, dying, the cruelty of it all, and the idea that it just seems sad in a way, growing old, pain, not being able to enjoy your life like you used to. The other day my wife and I sat by a very nice pool that we have, and the sun knocks you out, and you feel tired, and you go in the middle of the afternoon on the Sabbath day and fall asleep on the bed because the sun wore you out.

Well, that didn’t happen when you’re young, so you understand what it is to age, and all of this is part of God’s plan. Unfortunately, it’s a part of God’s plan, and we are the pots, and he’s the potter, and we have to accept this plan, but I will tell you from a human perspective, it’s hard to understand. I understand where people come from who don’t want to believe in a God who allows aging, suffering, death, the death of children, or tragedies like the tragedies we’ve just seen around the world with floods, and typhoons, and you name it, hurricanes, tornadoes.

These kind of tragedies happen over and over again. Innocent people are killed, and it’s very sad, and I can understand when people say, I don’t want to have anything to do with a God like that, but like it or not, we got a God like that, and we have to deal with it, and we have to in prayer talk to God about our fears, about our frustrations, and about our concerns, and God is our friend, and God wants us to talk with him, to communicate with him. I talk to God every morning, every afternoon, seven times a day now.

I’m always finding myself talking to God, telling God what I think when I’m mad, when I’m not mad, when I don’t understand something God is doing, and I think God expects that. God expects us to bring our problems to God, who is God the Father and Jesus Christ are the two gods of the Godhead, and to bring him your problems, and you know, when I was 12, 13 years old, I figured I had 60, 70 years of life left, and so you still had this feeling of invincibility, that you’re going to live a long life, and so the summers go by faster than you want them to be, but you have many more summers to go, until you graduate high school, that is. There’s a famous song, I remember one of the lines in that song is, life gets complicated when you get past 18, and I think most people listen to me that’s over 18, that left high school, knows the words of that song is definitely true.

Life does get complicated once you start going to work, and all of a sudden, before you know it, you have a family, and before you know it, you have bills that you never had as a child, and before you know it, you’re working, and there’s another song about a singer who’s a musician who’s always on the road writing a letter or a song for his wife about how he doesn’t like to be away all the time traveling, but he did say in the song, but you can’t live, your dreams can’t live without dollars, and the dollar sign is what keeps you going, it keeps your family going. I never forget, my father said to me, a lot of people like to say they put their family first, and then they put their job second, and I know a lot of people today, and that is younger people today, definitely do that. I see that with my employees.

I see that with my own children sometimes, but my father had a good answer to that. Any man or any woman, but he was talking about men were the breadwinners when I was growing up, any man who put his family first or claimed he did in front of his job was sentencing his family to poverty, because the truth of the matter is if you want to take care of your family, if you truly love your family, you’re going to put your job first. You’re going to make sure you do the best you can do at work.

You’re going to work as much as you can so your father or your family, I’m sorry, can get ahead and not suffer like you did. I tell the story many times, and I’ll be right back after this commercial, but I tell the story many times about what my father went through and how he swore his kids would not. Hi, Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today and theplaintruth.com, the place to go to to find out what’s happening in today’s world.

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And we’re back, and my father grew up in a very bad time in a depression. His father died when he was young. He was, him and his brother were farmed out like slaves to another farm family who didn’t pay them, just gave them room and board while they went to school.

They had to work their butts off on the farm. And even when Christmas time came, they were not allowed to go into the living room with the farmer’s children to open any presents. In fact, they got no presents.

They stood in the kitchen and watched the kids of the farmers open up their presents, and they could not have any. Well, my father, that was a traumatic experience for him as a young boy of only 13 years old dropping out of school in order to work on a farm for free, for room and board, and then be treated like a slave. And so after he got himself ahead in the world, and he worked very hard to do so, he finally became an executive for the Nestle company.

He wanted to make sure his family never went through what he went through. And so, you know, we were the first family, because he worked all the time, we were the first family to have a color TV set back in 1963. I remember watching the Virginian the first night we had it.

So that means it was put in on a Wednesday. And we had the first, a second car. Anybody in the whole neighborhood, anybody had one car.

We had two. And then we were the first person to put in a swimming pool in our entire neighborhood. And this was only because my father always worked two, three, and sometimes four jobs.

He was an executive at the Nestle company. Different shifts, sometimes he worked six to two, sometimes two to ten. I don’t remember him working midnight to six.

I don’t think he ever had to do that. But at nighttime, he drove the mail truck, not to your house, between houses, but between mail delivery places, between post offices. That happens around 11 o’clock to 3 o’clock in the morning.

He did that. On the weekends, he mowed people’s lawns in order to make money on the weekend. And it wasn’t because my father loved to work and didn’t want to be around his family.

It was the exact opposite. He wanted to be around his family, but he understood that his family had to come behind the dollar, because the dollar makes it all happen for your family if you really love them. But Sundays, he very seldom worked on a Sunday.

Sometimes he had to, but when he didn’t, he would sit around our pool with us. We would listen to baseball on the radio. He would be holding my mom, hugging her around his arm, watching us play in the pool, and truly enjoy being alive.

And you knew he wanted to do that all the time, but he could not, because he was making a living for us. So his form of love was not putting the family above his job. It was to put his job above anything else, so he could love his family with all the things we wanted.

And I want to tell you something. We lacked nothing, absolutely nothing growing up. Our parents made sure we had every gift we wanted.

We were never surprised at Christmas time. I used to follow a Christmas before I learned better. We always had great birthday presents, all because my parents worked hard, so we would never live like my father had to live.

And that is a kind of a love that I understand. I think today many people do not understand. But back to the big subject here.

I knew back then when I was young that there would be a day that I would be 71 years old or older and close to my death, and I did not want time going by fast. But here I’m 71 years old looking back, and guess what? I’m like that child of 13 that the summer went away too fast. Well, my life went away too fast.

What did I find myself doing? I found myself being like my father. Working my life away. Working and working and working and trying to take care of my family, which I think I did a pretty good job doing.

But at the cost of being away a lot, there was a time back in the 1990s, I traveled two weeks out of every month for four years visiting customers. I was a traveling paint rep. It was horrible to be away from my wife who I love so dearly and my children.

And only be there on weekends. Two weeks out of the year, the whole time except for weekends, I was on the road. Didn’t know.

I wake up in the morning not knowing what city I was in. It was pretty bad. But anyway, to get back to this idea, I still never wanted the time to go by the way it did.

But because I worked the way I did and worked constantly a lot, my life’s gone by fast and I’m 71 years old and I’m looking back over my life and I look back at something that happened 25 years ago. You know, 25 years ago was 9-11 and it seems like it was yesterday. 35 years ago, you know, we’re looking at 1989, or 1991, I’m sorry.

In 1991, I was living in Jupiter Farms. The kids were in elementary school, the middle school, and it was like yesterday. I think when I was first married to Tammy in the early 1980s and my first daughter was born in 1983 in May, on my birthday basically, Pentecost even, I remember that like it wasn’t so long ago.

And it is. And I realize my life has gone by and there’s going to be a day not too far in the future when you look at the whole scheme of things. I hope I can live another 15-20 years.

Probably can’t, but I hope I can. But the point being, the majority of my life is in the rear view mirror and it’s not a pleasant sight. And that is the thing I’m talking about, about the cruelty of death.

One of the things, if I could ever sit down and talk with God, like Abraham could, like Adam and Eve did actually, like other people, other prophets did, Moses talked to God. If I could only sit down and have a two-way, not a one-way, right? I have a lot of one-way conversations with God. I talk to God all day long.

I ask Him this, I ask Him that. Look for signs. Sometimes I think I get signs.

I got a little yes-no coin when I want to do something and say, should I do this? I flip the coin. I figure God can make it say yes or no. If it says yes, I do it.

If it says no, I’ll take God was in charge of it. If God is or not, I’m not saying it’s the case, but it doesn’t harm to think that maybe God’s taking care of you and listening to you. I hope He’s listening to all of us when we pray to Him.

But you know, there’s a part of the Bible that said God promises He won’t hear your prayers. And why won’t He hear your prayers? If you practice lawlessness, if you’ve refused to obey God’s laws. Yet, what do we have today? We have religions that tell you you don’t have to follow God’s laws.

God’s laws have been abolished. Christ nailed them to the cross. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Read the last four chapters of Isaiah. Just read the last four chapters of Isaiah and every commentary that you read will tell you that that is the millennium being talked about. Well, you’re not in the millennium.

That’s in the future date. And look at all of the condemnation that the Lord God tells Isaiah He has against His people. And see if you don’t fit in the wrong side of that equation.

If you’re going to Sunday school or Sunday church, you’re on the wrong side of that equation. If you’re following Easter, you’re on the wrong side of that equation. If you’re following Christmas, you’re on the wrong side of that equation.

You get the point here? Read those last four chapters and you tell me you think that God did away with the law on the cross. Because it’s the same God who was on that cross that was talking to Isaiah at a time of the before the millennium, before the tribulation, that was so mad that people weren’t following His laws, did not respect His laws, turned their back on His laws. And that is the crime that America has done today.

And so the cruelty of death has a sting. And it all started because we refused to obey God back in the garden. I’ll be right back.

Bob Barney for the Plain Truth Today. The Plain Truth Today has a section called Your Health Today. And lately we’ve been doing some shows on health matters, the diet you should be following according to God, lifestyle things that you should be doing according to God in the Bible.

We also have stories of modern medicines and modern research to help you understand your body, to help you understand what’s going on within your body, how you can improve your body, your life. We’re talking today about how you can improve your life that goes by so fast, and how maybe you can make that life last a little longer, maybe slow down a little bit. Well, those are the kind of stories and articles we put on Your Health Today, which you find from the main page of theplaintruth.com. It’s right up above.

You look across and you’ll see the message board. You’ll see the podcast, but you’ll also see a little button to push, Your Health Today. Go there every day and you will see stories that will really inform you about health issues from God’s perspective, as well as the recent scientific experiments that prove things.

There was a time, however, when mankind didn’t have his life running away quickly for him. First of all, the average lifespan of a person before the flood was almost 900 years to the least, and probably more than a thousand. A lot of the people who lived old ages all died at the same time.

They didn’t make it through the flood, if you really understand the genealogies talked about in the book of Genesis. So, not only did man originally in the garden have an unlimited lifespan. He was not immortal, was not born with an immortal soul, as people try to tell you.

They were mortal and they were going to die, or they could die at any time, but they were living long lifespans. And inside that garden there was no fear of a snake. There was no fear of a lion tearing you apart.

There was no wars. There was no weeds growing in your garden. You went out to your garden, you picked your banana, or your peach, or your cucumber, or your watermelon.

That was how you lived. You had no fears. You had no worries.

You had no bills to pay. You didn’t have to worry about money. There was no need for money, because everything was given to you by God Almighty, who became Jesus Christ.

And when you think about it, isn’t that exactly what this new generation, and this AI, and this utopia, and these democrat socialists of America are trying to offer you? They’re actually coming in disguise of Satan the devil, because that’s who is behind all of this nonsense. Satan the devil is the god of this world, and what they’re offering us is eternal life, a utopia. This whole idea of AI.

They’re saying AI is not going to replace you. It’s going to replace your job. You’re going to be able to stay home all the time, and live life of luxury, and have parties, and go on vacations all the time.

You’re never going to have to work, because some machine’s going to do it for you. Then why are you needed? Why won’t those machines decide to do away with you? Or why won’t the government officials say, well, do we need seven, eight, nine billion people? No, we just need us elite. We’re going to kill off the whole mass population.

Maybe we’ll do that with vaccines. Maybe we’ll do that with COVID. Maybe we’ll do that with diseases.

Maybe we’ll do that with wars. But we need to reduce the population to a few million. Just us.

And we don’t have to work, because machines will do it for us. Well, they haven’t watched many Twilight Zones to find out what happens when the machines realize that they don’t need us either. But that’s something in the future.

But what they’re promising you is what the devil took away from you in the first place in the garden. He took away your chance for eternal life. He took away your chance to live without fear, without dying, without disease, without pestilence.

That’s what Adam and Eve had in the garden. They lost it because the devil deceived them. And now you’re being deceived if you’re falling for AI and this new world order that everybody’s promoting, that they’re going to make a garden and even without the inconvenience and having God or God’s laws to have to follow.

That’s really what’s going on here, and it’s not going to happen. I know it’s not going to happen, and if you’re smart and you believe in the God of the Bible, you know it’s not going to happen either. There is not going to be a utopia on the face of this earth until Jesus Christ returns and forces you to be happy.

You’re not probably going to be happy when Christ returns, but God is going to force you to be happy. God is going to force you to obey his laws which brings happiness. God is going to take away your diseases.

God’s going to take away your infirmities, your aging, your arthritis, your heart condition. All of that’s going to be gone. If you’re a Christian, you’re going to be a spiritual being anyway.

You’re going to be literally God, the son of God’s. That’s what you’re going to be. But if you’re not a Christian and you make it through the tribulation, you’re going to live this life with absolutely no influence from the devil, and you’re going to live a perfect life, no fear of anything.

You don’t have no fear of a snake biting you or an animal attacking you or your next door neighbor killing you, because everyone, without the influence of Satan who will be bound up for a thousand years, everyone is going to live in a totally perfect life, because they will have no bad influences on them, and they will have no fear of death. The fear of death drives mankind. Well, you know, Adam and Eve at first didn’t have a fear of death, and even when they were condemned to death after they sinned, they probably didn’t realize the finality of death until the death of their son Abel by the hands of their own other son, Abel’s brother Cain, and that’s when the realization of death and this long time sleeping in the ground first hit them, and they realized just exactly how horrible their existence was going to be.

But even after they sinned, Adam and Eve and their children all the way up until past the flood were still living five, six, seven, eight, nine hundred years, and so they had long lifespans to pretty much have a pretty good life. Most of those people living then were still refusing to follow God, and that’s why there became a flood to get rid of all the world because of the sin that was going on. But people had long lives.

It wasn’t until after the flood that God limited the lifespan of a human being to 120 years, and I don’t care about any commercial or anything you want to tell me and want to send me, don’t bother. Nobody has ever been documented to live past 120 years. Not those Russians that claim in the Ural Mountains that they are 150 years old.

They can’t prove that. Anybody with birth certificates and actual court records or good documented records, right now we have a woman alive. She’s 117 years old.

She will not live past 120. Usually when you become the world’s oldest person, you hold that crown for less than four or five months, and because when you hit 115, 116, 117, you’re going to die within a few months to a year. And that’s usually what happens.

She was named the oldest person in the year about a month and a half ago, and probably within a year she’s going to be gone, and there’ll be another 114 year old to be the oldest or 115 year old. But you’re never going to hear of 120 year old. And this whole idea of modern science that all of these billionaires are promoting, and they think they’re going to live forever.

I mean, you see all of these billionaires, they’re pouring money into research how they can live beyond, you know, 100 years, and they don’t realize lifespan is actually going to shorten, not increase in the next 50 years. It’s actually going to decrease if you believe God in the Bible, and I do. And so, you see, the devil is trying to fool you with the utopia that you’re only going to get when Jesus Christ returns, and that’s the plain truth.

However, the cruelty of death is that sting that God uses you to put fear in you, so you, if you’re smart, learn to start to obey. And once you start to obey, things change. God will take note of that, and God will bless you.

Not always in this lifetime. Most of the time it will be in this lifetime. I’m an example of that.

But it will be in the life to come. Well, this is Bob Barney on the cruelty of death, and on going to school, spring breaks, and Labor Day, going back to schools, saying thank you for listening. I appreciate everyone who does listen and sends me notes what they liked or didn’t like about a show.

I like to hear about it, but I do appreciate everyone. Until tomorrow, Bob Barney for the Plain Truth today, saying bye-bye.