Jacob Bembry's Blog, page 4

I Remember Mama

From left to right: my father, Bobby Bembry; my sister, Abbie Bembry; my mother, Louella Bembry; and my brother, Danny Bembry. Not pictured: me and my sister, Debbie Leutner.

Sixteen years ago today, my life was devastated.

In the early morning hours of January 16, 1999, I was awakened by my father, who said that the nursing home where my mother was doing physical therapy, following her stroke on November 26, 1998, had called. We needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible. I told him we needed to wake my brother, Danny, and my sister, Abbie.

“There’s not time,” he said.

I hurriedly got out of bed. We rushed to the hospital, eight miles away. At the emergency room, a paramedic friend spoke to me and said, “It’s all in God’s hands now. All you can do is pray.”

A couple of minutes afterwards the doctor came out and said, “I’m sorry.”

My mother, Louella Sealey Bembry, had died.

My world shattered around me. I had been praying so long for her to get better and to come home. She was still so young. Now, she was dead at age 59.

Daddy and I went into the emergency room and saw her lifeless body on the table. I planted a soft kiss on her cheeks and told her goodbye.

We went home, where I had to wake Danny and Abbie up with the devastating news.

Mama’s death was hard to deal with. I had lost my best friend. She was the one I had run to when I would have a cut or bruise when I was a kid. She was the one who had taught me to read, and to love reading. She was the one who would recommend me reading a book she had read, or who I would recommend reading a book I had read.

I was angry at God. It took me months to recover from her loss, and I lashed out in anger at my family about her death, with angry, cruel words. Their response to me: keep on loving me.

I think that my recovery began when I went to her graveside one day. I was mourning, and I told God, “God, if I ever did anything to hurt her, please tell her I am sorry.” At that moment, and you may think it’s my imagination, I heard God answer me in a soft, gentle whisper, “She knows.”

Now, both Mama and Daddy are gone, and the role of patriarch of the family rests on me. I help take of my mentally challenged sister, Abbie, and my physically disabled brother, Danny, and they help take care of me. God takes care of all of us.

Get a free copy of my book, Sudden Death: God’s Overtime, on Kindle on Amazon

To order a paperback copy of the book visit My Books or for a signed copy, send $15.99 ($12 plus $3.99 shipping and handling) to Jacob Bembry, P.O. Box 9334, Lee, FL 32059.

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The Last Leg of the Journey

The nurse asked, “Jacob, are you sure you are able to handle all this?” as I stood before her, stressed out, with my nerves frayed, thinking that I just wanted to collapse in exhaustion on the floor in the emergency room.

“Yes, I can,” I answered her, praying to God in my mind for strength but mostly praying for my 77-year-old father who was the very sick patient in the E-R.

“No, he can’t,” my father, Bobby Bembry, with concern in his voice, answered. “He’s sicker than me.”

“No, I’m not,” I answered quietly.

The day had already been busy and overwhelming for me. I had taken my brother to the urologist in Tallahassee. My father and mentally challenged sister, Abbie, were with us. I didn’t want to leave them at the house alone because Daddy had been sick and wasn’t able to take care of Abbie that day.

Abbie was the light of my father’s eyes, as she is of mine and my brother, Danny. God was the center of Daddy’s life, along with his family. He had a special place in his heart for Abbie, and, in, turn, she adored him and doted on him. She was definitely a daddy’s girl.

Abbie and I sat in the car and waited with Daddy, who wasn’t feeling well and had been very weak lately, as Danny went into the urologist’s office. I asked my father repeatedly if I needed to take him to the emergency room at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. He repeatedly refused.

Daddy was still refusing as we began to make the trek back to our home in Lee, approximately 65 miles east of Tallahassee. When we arrived in Madison, we stopped at O’Neal’s Restaurant in Madison, where we stopped to eat. Inside, my father had to go to the restroom. He was weak and I assisted him to the back. As I waited outside the stall, I asked him if he wanted to go to the emergency room and he said he did.

Danny, Abbie and I left immediately left and took Daddy to the emergency room.

At the small hospital in a small town, they deemed that he needed to be transported to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. I told the nurse, who is a friend of mine and who my father had attended church with, I would go to the house and get some needed things and then go over in the car, and then she asked  if I would be able to handle everything.

As EMS arrived, and began to get my father ready for the ride to Tallahassee, I noticed that one of them was the daughter of a former co-worker of mine. She had been a little girl when her mother and I had worked together. I told Daddy who she was and he seemed please, in spite of all the pain he was in at the time.

I knew in my heart that my father was dying but I thought it would be a few months or at least a few weeks away. I didn’t know how soon it would come.  Seven days later, he was released under hospice care.

The next day, January 23, 2014, my hero, the man who loved God, and who loved his family, passed away quietly at home in Lee, from this world into the arms of his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

In the hospital, Daddy had said he would see my mama, who had died January 16, 1999, by Mother’s Day. I thought later how awesome it was that he got to see the woman he loved so much by Valentine’s Day.

It had been a little more than two years before that Daddy had sat by my hospital bed, as I hovered near death after going into cardiac arrest and clinically dying on the floor at Greene Publishing, Inc., where I was working as the editor of the two Madison, Florida newspapers. A miracle from God pulled me through and I ended up writing a book about it, Sudden Death: God’s Overtime . The cover features a photo that a friend took of him sitting at my hospital bed with me hooked to a ventilator. I had my miracle with my recovery. Daddy had his miracle when he saw his Lord.

He had only been on a journey through this world. As the lyrics to one of his favorite songs say, “This world is not my home, I’m only passing through.” He had trod many footsteps through a world that was foreign to him, that was not his home. He had begun the last leg of the journey on January 15, 2014 and he completed it January 23, 2014. He arrived back Home that day.

Read his own personal story of how Jacob Bembry went into sudden cardiac death at work, was revived by EMS and how he hovered near death in the hospital and read about the miracle from God that kept him here.

In honor of my father, I am giving away free Kindle copies of my book, Sudden Death: God’s Overtime through January 19. For paperback copy ordering options, visit My Books or for a signed copy, please send $15.99 ($12 plus $3.99 shipping and handling) to Jacob Bembry, P.O. Box 9334, Lee, FL 32059.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Chicken Mechanism

Sometimes it’s a blessing.

Sometimes it’s a curse.

I just thought of a name for it today. I call it the chicken mechanism.

What is the chicken mechanism?

Part of it is my conscience that allows me to show fear when I have done something wrong. It kicks in and makes me want to make things right. I remember “borrowing” a bat and glove out of a neighbor’s yard when I was a little boy. The chicken mechanism bawked at me for hours for hours. It scratched the ground in search of a kernel of corn to turn up – that one piece of evidence to betray me. Finally, after hours, I went and threw bat and glove back in the neighbor’s yard. Thanks to the chicken mechanism, I was too chicken to become a criminal and it helped soothe my conscience. Who knows? I might be in prison today if I weren’t such a big chicken.

The other part of the chicken mechanism can be a curse. It is the lump that I would feel in my heart when I was in school and asked a girl out, fearing that she would laugh me to scorn, or – worse – that she would put me in the friend zone. Believe me, both happened with regularity.

The chicken mechanism can make you realize that you are doing something wrong, and help you out, or it can rob you of your self-confidence. It’s part reason and part cowardice.

I didn’t realize at the time when I took the bat and ball that it was my conscience bothering me. I knew that stealing was wrong; I just didn’t realize that I would have such a hard time dealing with it. As I grew, my conscience thankfully, by the grace of God, became much stronger. I have seen others who seem to have no conscience at all. They didn’t have their chicken mechanism operating at full cluck, teaching them right from wrong or, more likely, they put cotton in their ears and stopped listening and tuned out what was right, tuning out God in the process. God will let them have their conscience – their chicken mechanism, if you will – if they just ask Him into their hearts.

As I grew older, I was able to grow more self-confident. I became able to communicate with others. I became able to express myself. I can even tell people I know about Jesus Christ being my Savior now. I have to admit that when I was a teenager, I had a problem with that also. That chicken mechanism wouldn’t let me crow like a rooster about Christ saving me and I walked away for a while, but one night, I found my way back.

Do you have your own chicken mechanism? Are you afraid of doing wrong? Are you afraid of telling others about Jesus Christ?

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Don’t Be The Whistle, Be The Train

I saw on a Facebook page I follow where former pro wrestler Eddie Graham had said to go and stand at the railroad track and to listen to the whistle when the train goes by. Listen to the powerful sound and then think about it. That whistle has nothing at all to do with the train running.

I thought, it’s that way with life, isn’t it? We can talk and talk until we are blue in the face but unless we back up what we say with action, then it is all just like the sound of that whistle — just noise!

As Christians, we sometimes use our voices to talk loud about Christ but do our actions back up our words or are we just making noise? It’s great to make noise for Jesus Christ but it is more important to let the world see that we mean what we say by putting action behind those words. Living in the town of Lee, I often hear the train whistle and the rumble of the train in the distance but all I hear is noise. If I were at the tracks, I would see the action.

In 2015, resolve to not just be the train whistle people hear in the distance in your life as a Christian; be the train that people can see coming down the tracks with your actions. Happy New Year.

Please click here to see the books I have available for sale

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Random Musings

It’s Christmas night and it has been a long time since I have published a blog post. All through November, I took advantage of Facebook to post about things I am thankful to God for; from December 1-December 25, I opened a different gift each day on Facebook. Most of them involved a spiritual “gift” from God, the others were lessons I had learned around life’s sometimes bumpy, hard road. On this Christmas, I am going to write about a few things on my own. Here goes:

*One can’t be too careful of the music one listens to, the food one eats, the books one reads, the movies or TV shows one watches and the news (including social media posts) that reads, listens to or watches. Have you ever listened to a song that sounds great, exciting or beautiful, yet later when the song lingers in your mind it can alter your mood. Maybe it makes you lonely or sad or even angry. The same thing can be said of food that we eat. I myself am so bad to eat food that tastes so good to me, but later it makes me feel bad. It may be from heartburn or sickness or just feeling bloated, but the food literally weighs me down as do things that are not good for me that I watch, listen to or read.  We all need to lay aside these “weights that so easily beset us” (Scripture reference Hebrews 12:1)

*Just because one is dirt poor doesn’t mean that one has to have dirt on their body. Resolve that as long as soap and water are readily available to be clean. As evangelist John Wesley said, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” My pastor, Retis Flowers, said that it is in his Bible because he wrote it in there himself in the first verse and the first chapter of the Book of Retis.

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A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Party!

I found the following story when I was going through some books that I am working on. This is from a book of funny things that happened to me when I was working at the newspaper. Maybe I will have it published before Christmas. It is tentatively titled “Stop the Presses!: Funny Stories from My Life as a Reporter.” I wrote it a couple of years ago. It is a story of me as a “cub” reporter and a story that I thought I could not right about. My pale skin was beet red that day. I hope you enjoy this story and the humor in it.

I was shocked when I got the call…I was puzzled…I was mortified…but, I was a little more than intrigued when I got the invitation.

“We would like you to come cover our party and take pictures,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.

My mind couldn’t get ahold of what kind of party that she was talking about. Had I heard her right?

“We would like you to come and take pictures at our breastfeeding party,” she had said.

Okay. One part of me was wanted to say, “We can’t put those photos in the newspaper” and hang up the phone on her. The other part was curious as to what exactly a “breastfeeding party” was. So what if I wouldn’t be able to run the photos?

“What time is the party and where will it be?” was the question that came out of my mouth.

“Two o’clock at the ag center,” was the answer at the other end.

I breathed a sigh of relief. If they were having the party at the agricultural center (known to locals as “the Cow Palace”) it made sense that there would be cows there feeding their calves. I had grown up on a dairy farm and had seen that hundreds of times.

I showed up at the Cow Palace with my trusty old 35 mm camera in hand, as well as a notebook. When I went in, there were women and babies everywhere. I know that I must have turned beet red.

I can tell you however that I never saw a single bare breast that day. I saw potato chips and soft drinks and listened to someone talk how healthy breastfeeding was, compared to bottle feeding. There was not even a slideshow.

I took a few photos of the mothers and babies and ate some chips. I then went back and wrote up the story for the newspaper with relief washing over me.

I did get a memory that I would be able to share – or should I say, mammary?

 

 

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New Features Added

Check out my new Book Table for information on how to buy this book and others I have written.

As an author who is micro-published (self-published), it is difficult to keep up with marketing my books. I use Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and this blog for the majority of my marketing. I have just added MyBookTable to this site. You can click on the menu in right sidebar under MyBookTable on my name, “Jacob Bembry” or click on “Book Table” on the menu above. This will take you to a page featuring my books. It lists all of the online stores where my books may be purchased included Amazon, BooksaMillion, Barnes and Noble and CreateSpace. If you would like to order a signed copy of a certain book from me personally, click on the title or titles of the book(s) at the top of the page. It can take you to a PayPal landing page where you may buy securely with your credit card. You may also order the books from me at Jacob Bembry, P.O. Box 9334, Lee, FL 32059. A special deal that I am offering right now is if you buy all four of my books, it will only be $35 ($30 plus $5 shipping and handling). Happy reading!

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I Will Always Write

 

I need a pen and a composition book with plenty of pages of lined paper that have yet to be written on. I need to go “old school” and write like I used to so many years ago, sitting at the empty kitchen table, putting the words that have been going through my mind down on paper – words that come from dreams and become either poems, stories, books or screen plays; I’ve written them all, but the world has yet to read them.

I wish that I could capture the words that I once wrote. I wish I still had the drive that led a pre-teen boy to pour out his words on looseleaf paper that hung in blue three ring binders again. That boy dreamed of writing the Great American Novel, having bestsellers and being able to support himself and his family on a writing income. Maybe one day…

Through the years, I developed a code of standards and ethics when it came to my writing. I decided that I wouldn’t use language or graphic scenes in anything I created just to make money. I wouldn’t write porn and call it romance. I wouldn’t do anything that would shame me, my family or my God.

Now, I sit at a laptop computer, composing words. I do have a few notebooks but no blue three ring binder, holding looseleaf paper. I still write. As long as I am able to and God is willing to let me, I will always write.

Get a personally autographed copy of my book, “Sudden Death: God’s Overtime” for $12 plus postage and handling. Use the link “Add to Cart” below  to order. You can change the number of copies by entering it in the box and clicking enter. You can buy either one copy, five copies or 500 copies. Send how you want it to read and shipping information and allow 2-4 weeks for delivery. You can also purchase from me through the mail for $12 plus $3.99 shipping and handling at Jacob Bembry, P.O. Box 9334, Lee, FL 32059. If you would like a Kindle version of book, you can order it for a mere $3.99 through Amazon.com. You can also order  non-autographed copies of the book at Amazon.com.

 

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Jacob’s Ladder: Smile

 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27, NKJV)

It’s a trait unique to humans. I have seen dogs who seem to be able to do it but it is, most likely, an illusion. People from all walks of life can perform this simple task and most do. It’s a sad person who never does this. I have heard that you can fool your enemies with this one simple act, and that you can fool yourself, even, into feeling better. I am talking about a smile.

In the western world, we view the smile as something positive. Some cultures view the smile as something negative. I have a hard time figuring that out. When you see someone smile at you, you usually feel warm, unless the smile seems forced or phony like that of some (well, many) politicians.

I was thinking, if God created mankind in His image and that we are the only created beings of His that can smile, God can smile too.

Do you think God is smiling at you?

Let’s do something good today, so God can smile at us.

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Video for Throwback Thursday: Florida State’s Unexpected Upset

Kim Hammond, FSU quarterback

Kenny Stabler, Bama quarterback

 

 

I don’t remember this game but back in 1967 (I was only four at the time), the Florida State Seminoles played the Alabama Crimson Tide, who were riding a 21-game winning streak, in Birmingham and battled to a 37-37 tie against the Tide. The 37 points posted by FSU in the game were more than the Tide had allowed the entire season the year before.

Legendary coaches Bear Bryant and Bill Peterson were on opposite sidelines. Bryant had the most wins of any head coach in Division 1 college history (Eddie Robinson of Grambling had the most of any coach in college) until he was topped by Penn State Coach Joe Paterno and another guy who was on the FSU sidelines that night — Coach Bobby Bowden.

Kenny Stabler was the left-handed gunslinging quarterback for Bama and Kim Hammond was the quarterback for FSU.

Stabler would have a successful NFL career, which included winning the Super Bowl as he quarterback the Oakland Raiders, being named to four pro bowls, leading the league in touchdowns two separate times and being named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player in 1974. Despite his success, he is still not enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Hammond’s pro football career only lasted three seasons; his first with the Miami D0lphins and the last two with the Boston Patriots. He completed only 15 of 32 passes. He had two interceptions and no touchdowns in his brief career. He had a much more successful career after pro football, as he graduated from law school and went into private practice before becoming a judge in Flagler County in 1979.

 

The game was listed in Alabama’s centennial football guide as one of the greatest games that the Tide had ever played and it will go down in the annals of FSU as one of the greatest ever played. Almost, 50 years later, the teams are on top of the college football world sitting number one and number two in many pre-season polls. 

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