David Yeagley is the great-great-grandson of Comanche leader Bad Eagle. 
Well, we finally got hit–bad! A true, honest to goodness blizzard. This Christmas will represent only the 13th time in recorded Oklahoma history when actual snow was on the ground. If anything, it’s usually freezing rain or ice storms. This is real snow! together with wind–gusting from 55 to 65 mph. Drift city!
And the show was just staring! From Randy Klein, published in the Oklahoman online, Thursday, December 24, 2009. View the whole gallery.
Everyone is frantically trying to get home. Many stranded on the roads, as well as airports. All Oklahoma airways are closed. It all just reminds us all of how much Christmas really means to families. That’s basically what Christmas is, as a holiday: family. And, isn’t that a grand thing? Most holidays bring families together, indeed. Christmas is, of course, supposed to be a bit beyond that. We’re talking eternity here. We’re talking about having family, having those you love, with you forever.
While Grinchters abound, they will ever only envy those who are loved. They can deny Christ all they want, but, they can’t deny those who are loved, and who love because of Christ.
I and my brothers and sister were all born with a double exposure of love. No one could ever love us more than our mother and father. But, our mother also shared with us the love of God. Feeling that love, from a mother, is the grandest love I’ve ever known. For that, I am forever grateful to my mother. The love of God, overwhelming as it is, shall perhaps always carry a sense of the person who first shared it with us. It seems inexorably bound up in a relationship of some kind.
Me and my Mongolian-looking mother, a couple of years before she passed (on April 9, 2005). Comanches naturally have a great family love. Add to that the love of God, and the child feels quite special.
I learned love of country from my parents, as well. The Old Glory, our beloved flag, shall ever bring to mind the love of my mother and father. Essentially, parents share what they love with their children. We were lucky, then, my brothers and my sister. True love, from parents to children, I believe stays with the children forever. They inevitably begin to share the same with their own children.
I’ve often wondered how and if a person who was never loved could ever know what it was. If no loving mother shared the love of God, the love of Christ, with her child, could that child ever really know it? Is love spontaneously generated in the human heart? I think not. If the child does, at some later point in life, encounter the Lord, personally, will his experience in fact be more authentic than those of us who learned it ’second hand,’ so to speak?
Well, in as much as the love of God is not generally learned from the wind, it seems that there is always another human person involved. Indeed, the Lord has arranged this human bonding. The love of God intimates a relationship–not only with Him, but with at least one other human being.
So be it. I must say, this Christmas, with the storm here in Oklahoma, and the political disaster in Washington, DC, it is a disciplined holiday, to say the least. I’ve never known such a disappointing prospect in American leadership. It is a judgement upon the land, upon the people, necessarily. We the people have allowed it. Yes, it snuck up on us, but, it’s here now, in our face. What shall we do? Think of what our government is doing to us. Betrayed on Christmas Eve. Fancy that. And quick-frozen by a hoar-frosted blizzard we are, here in Oklahoma.
I think some profound sacrifice is called for. A beautiful little baby was once born, in really hard times, but “no crying he makes.” Perhaps if we’re willing to sacrifice, all, a wonderful new beginning can happen for us, today, in our own country.
I know my mother dedicated me, and my brothers and sister, to the Lord. She said she gave us to the Lord when we were born, like Hannah gave Samuel (I Sam. 1:27,28.) I certainly believe her. I know she was a believing, loving woman, as were all in her Comanche family.
And while the killer cold wind is blowing around here in Oklahoma, there’s this great news from Kings Mountain, North Carolina! The Indian Chief is ready to roll! The old Indian Motorcycle company is marketing the new “Indian Chief” is now sold (for $26,000) in sixteen states and counting. The first Indian model was made in 1901, so let’s hear it for a hearty revival of the Indian image. (And let’s hope the Communist-trained professional Indian protesters don’t do more of their self-effacing act.)
The Indian Spirit model, 2003.
Here’s a rare photo of my father’s father, the “white” side of the family, on his classic Indian, of the 1900’s.
William Clyde Yeagley and his Indian, ca. 1910-1920, somewhere in Ohio, presumably. Like, mid-Ohio? Note the mountain in the distance.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Thrasymachus // Dec 24, 2009 at 6:37 pm
“Feeling that love, from a mother, is the grandest love I’ve ever known. For that, I am forever grateful to my mother. The love of God, overwhelming as it is, shall perhaps always carry a sense of the person who first shared it with us. It seems inexorably bound up in a relationship of some kind.”
Excellently spoken! Well said! The very same thing is true for me.
2 David Yeagley // Dec 24, 2009 at 7:15 pm
My mothers sisters and her one brother, all had a huge capacity for love. They all loved each other’s kids as if the kids were their own. It was amazing.
You know, maybe it’s just all a Comanche thing. An extended family. Maybe I should consider that part of the explanation.
I don’t know that the love of God makes us something other than what we are…in terms of the clay. The red earth. The adam. The love of God in a Lithuanian, is it the same as the love of God in a Hawaiian? There is flavor here. There is taste, style, and difference. Yet, inside, when we know it, we’re knowing the same thing.
I take a lesson from Mary. “Mary kept all things things, and pondered them in her heart.” “His mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” Luke 2: 19, 51. There are things we just can’t communicate to another human being, things about our personal experience with Christ.
There is simply personal experience which is non-communicable. Even Edgar Allan Poe wrote of such a dimension, in a strange account called “The Island of the Fay.“
3 johnnymac // Dec 24, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Merry Christmas Doctor Yeagley and to all the good folks here. Have a great day today and enjoy all the blessings of it.
4 David Yeagley // Dec 25, 2009 at 9:55 am
And the sun shines today in Oklahoma! The storm is over. It is a bright, brilliant, and beautiful day. Can you believe it? A stunning Christmas day.
We all certainly prefer the sunshine! That’s one beauty trip we’ve all been on. It never fails to encourage us.
Yet, somehow, the ‘Son’ of Righteousness seems not so universally appreciated. That, in a way, appears to be quite odd in the world. Everyone, all people, had a sense of right and wrong. How would Christ be foreign to any human soul?
5 David Yeagley // Dec 25, 2009 at 10:46 am
Don’t ask me why I spun off on the Indian motorcycle thing, but it probably has to do with Grandma Yeagley’s Christmas cookies. Clyde’s wife, Wanda (ne Myers) made the best Christmas cookies known to man. She was able to package them, and send them to OKC, in unbroken perfection.
Here is another picture of the Indian motorcycle:
Note the name on the gas tank. I have looked at the Indian Motorcycle site(s). I have to place Grandpa Clyde’s bike somewhere between 1901 and 1920.
Model 1901-1909
Model 1910-1919.
Clyde’s bike seems a bit souped. Note the front fender, and the higher, longer handlebars. Yet, he doesn’t have white-walls. I guess we need an older expert here.
6 David Yeagley // Dec 25, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Back to the storm.
It moved on before dawn. Today, December 25, Christmas Day, is the most spectacular, crystal-clear blue sky you can imagine. Sun is brilliant on all this snow.
It was a quick freeze, and now all the shovelling!
Governor Henry (D) declared an emergency, and early applied for federal funds. I can’t see it, though. We cry to the federal government every time it rains, it snows, it’s too hot, too cold, etc. Federal emergency.
This is not right. It leads to a FEMA sort of take-over, really. The state becomes a “ward” of the State, so to speak. Totally dependent.
We need to re-assess the War of Northern Aggression, and get our concepts straight here.
7 Sioux // Dec 27, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Merry Christmas, Dr. Y – I was wondering how you made out in the Blizzard of 2009! How lucky you are to have had a mother who truly loved God and made no bones about letting her children or anyone else know.
I remember a few years back (or was it last year) you posted a beautiful work of art of Mary lying in the arms of the Sphinx — she and Joseph had to flee the murderous rampage of Herod –Egypt provided a safe haven. I was very touched by that painting and what it symbolized.
Good question about how we learn to love God (and hence each other): I don’t know what either of my parents really believe(d), but it was definitely not felt on any personal level – just “doing your duty” by going to church. I was 50 years old when I became a born-again Christian after a long and meandering road. I am still quite intellectual about it all because that is my comfort zone. How can I be the 100% loving gushy Mom who isn’t ashamed to shout her beliefs from the rooftop — without the role model, it is very hard to go against type.
8 David Yeagley // Dec 27, 2009 at 8:08 pm
Sioux, I was tempted to post that French Romantic painting yet again.. It is still my very favorite. I’m going to do another piece on Mary, maybe next blog. In the mean time,
Le Repose en Egypte, by Luc Olivier Maison (1879).
A young child can tell whether mother or father really believes. When mother reads a Bible, the child knows, unconsciously. The child can feel the believe, if it’s there. I never once confused any Bible story with any “fiction” story. The Bible was not “make-believe.” Now, my mother was a great jokester, or make-believer. But, that was a completely different dimension. When it came to the Bible stories, she communicated a most exact belief.
I think a parent can bequeath a disposition of belief. Eventually, the child has to make his own decision, however. It’s just than, even when you do, you still hear mom’s voice in the background of the mind, echoing in the heart, in the soul.
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