I never watched the old TV show Cheers, but I was always attracted to the theme song. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. As an 11-year-old kid, I worked at a grocery store next to Harmony Bar. The building was owned by my boss, so I ended up doing some chores on the property. My dad took me there once. I didn't witness a lot of harmony in the darkness of that sad room.

The pandemic has reminded me of the gift Open Door Bible Church is. We had to meet online for several weeks in the early spring of 2020. It was a novelty. Got to interact on Zoom with some past members and missionaries in distant places and see the faces of local people I was already missing. But it was clearly missing the dynamic of genuine, face-to-face fellowship. After 39 years, maybe I had begun to take the gift of our fellowship too much for granted. When Jimmy Leonard was alive, he called us "The Best Kept Secret in Memphis."

Our tagline, A Common People with an Uncommon Love,  has been illustrated in fresh ways over the past two weeks. Exhibit A was the Baby Dedication of Kesler Jones. And yesterday came Exhibit B, the 70th Wedding Anniversary Celebration of Frank and Virginia Buck. Kesler's legacy stretches my memory of God's goodness back nearly four decades. Kesler's great grandparents' surname became his given name a year ago. And a whole series of good memories are crowded into that moniker. The Bucks legacy merged into our own a good number of years ago. Our world largely ignores the treasure living among them. What could be learned from the stories of old people? Frank told me of visiting his elderly grandfather at Christmas back in the 1930s. I did the math and observed that his grandpa had been alive during the Civil War. Turns out, Gramps lied about his age and joined the Union Army! Frank himself, is a Navy veteran of World War 2 and the Korean War. The Bucks have lived faithfully and well, and we get to enjoy their godly joy on a regular basis. But they are also a treasure trove of eyewitness history. Ken Burns could learn at their feet.

I'm thankful for my salvation. And I am thankful for the community of fellow believers I'm blessed to be a part of.

Gary