Fwd: John 3:16

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joe Adams <americaohyes@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 22, 2009 4:45 PM
Subject: John 3:16
To: Roff Graves <graves@gravescountry.com>

We've been Presbyterians for hundreds of years on my Father's side so
my first experiences with church was at a nearby Presbyterian place.
The woman next door to us would take me to church. She had a Ford
Coupe Convertible with a rumble seat which she would unfold and where
I would ride. I have to admit that the ride to and from church was
the most exciting part of Sunday mornings.

One Sunday we studied John 3:16. As an only child, I tended to talk
more than I listened. When the lesson was over, the Sunday
school teacher looked at me and said, "Joe, why don't you tell us what
you have to do to go to Heaven?" I was stunned into silence.

I gave it some thought as she impatiently waited for an answer.
Finally I said, "Love Jesus."

She went nuts! "No, no," she screamed, "You don't have to love Jesus.
That's not what John 3:16 teaches us. You do NOT have to love Jesus.
You have to believe. That's what it says."

I truly wanted to cry. She was so mean. But finally, with my lips
trembling, I said, "Well I don't think it would hurt to love Jesus a
little bit."

She threw her Bible on the table and ran out of the room. Some people
shouldn't be kindergarten teachers.

I got my first Bible by learning to say John 3:16 by heart. But it's
not me that's writing John 3:l6 on walls all over America.

Momma's Doughnut Hole

Once or twice a year --- but never in the summer when it was hot ---my
Momma would find her special pot that she used for cooking doughnuts.
It had a wide open mouth and was fairly deep. She would put a whole
can of fresh lard into the pot and melt it. She saved used lard in a
jar, but she never used this to cook doughnuts.

"You don't want doughnuts that taste like fish," she would say. And
that's true. We didn't want hamburgers that tasted like fish either,
but that didn't seem to bother her.

Doughnut making time meant that I got to go in the kitchen to help.
We would roll out the dough and then cut the doughnuts out. We used a
biscuit cutter but it had a special little center piece that you could
attach that automatically made it into a doughnut cutter. Or if you
left it in, as we sometimes did, you had biscuits with holes in the
middle.

One of my jobs was to cut the doughnuts out. I had to cut as close as
possible to each doughnut so we didn't waste any dough. Then I would
pick out the dough from the hole cutter. I would collect the pieces
of dough (not the doughnut part) and the holes, wad them up and roll
the dough out again. I kept repeating the process until there was
practically no dough left. I would try to make the smallest doughnut
in the world with the final leftovers. I thought people might pay me
to see something like that but apparently people weren't as curious as
I was.

My other job was to carefully put the doughnut dough into the sizzling
lard. The doughnuts cooked fast and the lard could pop up on you. We
had some chopsticks from a Chinese restaurant that we had gone to once
(nobody in our family could eat with two skinny sticks) and the
chopstick was perfect for flipping the doughnuts when they were done
on one side. Then I used them to pick up the
doughnuts and put them on a large platter.

One they had cooled a little, I took the sifter full of powdered sugar
and would cover the doughnuts with a snowstorm of sugar.

These were cake doughnuts...nothing like those air-filled things you
could get at the Krispy Kreme shop. "Sweet air!" my Daddy called
those.

He soaked his doughnut in his coffee. And one doughnut could easily
suck up half a cup of coffee. I soaked mine in milk.

We made little plates of doughnuts to deliver to the neighbors. This
was done mainly so if they made doughnuts, they would share with you.