Bob Barney-A Personal Note (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: BOB BARNEY A PERSONAL NOTE

If you listen to this morning’s broadcast, there was a tribute to my wife’s birthday. It was actually a program about birthdays and what the birthdays mean to God in the Bible and what it doesn’t mean, things like that. But I gave a tribute to my wife of some 44 years, soon to be 45 years next year, because it’s her birthday today. And so I was going to have a shorter show noontime today. The long show was this morning. The 7-Eleven short show is going to be here at noontime.

And I wanted to talk a little bit about my wife’s birthday. And I know I keep saying this show is not about me and it’s not about my family, but sometimes it sounds like it is because there’s a reason for it. I don’t want you to think that the plain truth is about us. And I don’t say too much about us. But there’s times I think there are people who are listening who want to know where I come from, what I believe, and what my life’s like. And do I practice what I preach? Do I walk the walk and talk the talk? Or am I a B-Ser like so many other people doing these kinds of broadcasts? Well, I do make a lot of mistakes and I’m still a sinner. We’re all still sinners. If we’re not, if we say we’re not a sinner, the Bible in 1 John tells us we’re a liar because we can’t please God by trying to live a righteous life because our righteousness, another biblical quote, is like filthy rags to God the Father and Jesus Christ. So I think it’s sometimes important to realize when people listen to me and they think that maybe I have some kind of knowledge that they could never have, or maybe I’m better than they are, or maybe I’m not, maybe they think I’m worse than I am, whatever they think.

I think sometimes when you give a personal story about yourself and about how you have lived and what you believe and what you tried to do, I think a lot of people who are wondering about their existence, wondering about their future, wondering about who is God, if there is a God, wondering about what they should do, what they should believe. Should they believe the Bible or is the Bible a bunch of fairy tales? And what does Bob really think? Well, Bob believes the Bible. He didn’t want to start believing the Bible. I started out as a person who truly believed in God as a young boy, but I went away, I went into science, and I believed in my high school years, especially in the beginning of my college years, that science answered all questions, and evolution was proven fact as far as I knew, and then I had an education. And a lot of that education, and I don’t hide this fact. Other people do want to hide the fact where they learned a lot of their stuff from, but I learned a lot of stuff about evolution, about God, the Bible, and everything from a person called Garner Ted Armstrong, and that’s a name that most people don’t even know today.

But back in the 1970s, Garner Ted Armstrong had a bigger audience than Rush Limbaugh had at his height. Think about that for a minute. And he made me start questioning everything that I believed, and he made me see that much that I believed was not real, was not the plain truth. And I started opening my eyes, and I started studying, and I did not want to believe the things that I was finding out, because I wanted to be like everybody else. I’m not a person who likes to stand out in a crowd. I’m a very shy person in person. If you met me, you probably would not believe that I’m the person that I am. I’m shy, and I see things the way God sees things now. I’ve changed. I’ve changed all the way through my life, but one of the big changes of my life was my wife. I’ve known my wife Tammy since she was 15 years old, a waitress that I had a crush on, even though I was seven years older, so I guess I would be like a pedophile in some people’s ideas today, but we didn’t do anything. We were friends. We were best friends. I remember typing the menu because she was a waitress at a diner, and she couldn’t type worth a darn, and so she would spend two or three hours in the morning typing the big menu for the windmill diner, and I felt sorry for her because I’m a two-finger typist, but I can type pretty fast, and I could do that menu in about 25 minutes, and it took her about two and a half to three hours, and she was making no tips at the time, and back then, I think waitresses made a dollar an hour plus tips. I mean they were they didn’t make the money they made today if they weren’t working because they had to survive off their tips, and so I started typing the menu for her.

I did all kinds of things to impress her because I was really taken with Tammy, and it took three years before Tammy became taken with me. We had moved to Florida. I had been working for a paint company. She had come down as my friend, and one day she told me she was in love with me. I was in love with her for the last three years, but my life today is what it is. The successes I have and the person I am is a lot to do with my wife Tammy. She’s a beautiful woman physically as well as inside. She is a beautiful woman, and she’s a great mother, and she’s a great wife to me, and she’s been the reason that I go on when our life has not always been perfect. We’ve had a lot of tribulation in our life, not personally, but professionally. I worked for a lot of different people that were pretty hard to work for. I didn’t work for easy people. I made up my mind that my family, my children, when they grew up, were going to have a family business, and they didn’t have to work for the idiots that I had to work for, and that’s what I did.I tried to make, and it took us a long time. It took us 20 years to really turn our company into something that’s worldwide known. We’re actually exporting products starting this year all over the world.

I don’t know what the tariffs are going to do to us, but anyway, we’re going to be doing that, and that’s my tribute. My wife Tammy is what I live for, and her in God. I want to please her, and I want to please her children, and I want the world to know that she’s a great woman, and she deserves a very happy birthday, and I want to, again, not get into other people’s birthdays, just hers. She makes me what I am. I’m doing all of this stuff. I get up 3.30 in the morning to exercise. I’m 70 years old in another month and a half, and I’ve lost a lot of weight. I’m healthier now than I probably was since I’ve been 40, and I’m weighing less than I was when I was 40, and I feel great. I get up early, do two hours of exercises, the sauna, then I go to work, and I work all day long, making paint, doing everything I can do, because it’s hard to get people to work today. Anyway, happy birthday, Tammy Barney. I love you very much, and that’s about as most personal as I’m going to get on this broadcast. Thank you for listening. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, and I appreciate everyone out there, and I hope I never let you down. Bye-bye.