Stain Free Media Interview, Nov 18, 2007

INCOMING EMAIL

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

INCOMING EMAIL

I just received an email from a lady, thought it might be interesting for some of you to read.

It seems too many Christians are looking for Christ\'s return as an easy out as far as the worlds problems go, particularly environmental problems i.e. global warming.  As a self described "old hippie", hopefully you're not one of them.

Hi Lisa,

Well, I don't know about Christ's soon physical returning.  People have been thinking He's going to be coming back any minute for the last two thousand years.  For me, and Mari, He's already come back!  He lives within us and we live in Him as best we can.  The ancient scriptures say, "we live, breathe, move, and have our being in Him."  Our constant goal is to stay focused on this present moment, and to pour one hundred percent of our energy and attention into the demands and requirements of each moment we experience, like answering this email right now.  Taking no thought of yesterday or projecting nothing into the mysteries that await us tomorrow.  This present moment is all we have.  If we can't find our salvation NOW, the second coming isn't going to do much for us.

Although I am a surrendered disciple of Christ, I can't call myself a Christian.  To me, that would be like calling myself a "humble".  Like saying, "Oh yes, I belong to the church of humility.  We're all humbles over there."  I would be honored if someone saw enough of Christ in my life to call me by His name, a Christ-ian.  So many acts of hypocrisy and greed and depraved murder have been perpetrated in the name of Jesus, it's very difficult these days for anyone to see Him as He actually IS.  A forgiver of all mankind, every one, every single soul in the world has been forgiven, the problem is, so few know it.  And guilt and greed seem to be the killers of mankind and all life on our planet.

Wow, I didn't know I was going to get on a roll, but the question you asked got me going.

Barry

Easter Sunday, April 16th, 2006

9.25 p.m. Pacific time

I just received this Easter Peace Poem from a dear friend who lives in Wisconsin.  I asked him if I could post it on my blog page for all to read and he graciously said yes.  So as you read it, what does it make you think about?

“I submit the attached and pasted writing for your consideration. May the

blessings of Peace be with you this Easter season.”

 Joe Hovel

Easter Peace Poem 

Somewhat routine-

tanks in the desert,

fighter jets,

cluster bombs,

cruise missiles.

Painful agonizing death,

torturous death.

Macabre  reality-

living human beings,

bleeding , groaning,

suffering.

Torn from family and friends,

collateral damage or grim witness.

A nasty job-

ordered to soldiers,

but necessary ?

Business of killing-

part of  maintaining empire.

WAR-

 population control,

 absolute power,

 corporate dominance,

 valueless life.

 The bottom side of  capitalism,

 in public display.

 Signature event:

 PAX AMERICANA.

 Peace American style.

 render to the USA

 or face the consequence.

 Business as usual,

 another day,

 another killing.

 HO-HUM !

 But alas;

 Jesus crucified;

 Jesus resurrected.

 All nations take notice-

 a greater power upon us.

 Oppressed peoples;

 awaken,

 a new way is  available,

 PEACE is promised.

 Only one option-

 [ to power and  authority,  mislead no more]

 Non violent resistance.

 Faith in the living GOD ,

 is  resistance.

 Jesus, revolutionary-

 exposed governmental rulers

 as bloody murderers,

 as illegitimate usurpers of Moral authority.

 Jesus  calls us;

 count the costs,

 weigh allegiances,

 recognize a Greater Power.

 PAX CHRISTI or pax americana.

 Life                 or      death.

 Choose life eternal.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Why my Wife and I Have Cell Phones

In 1977, Mari and I lived in Silvercreek, Washington with our six-month-old son Brennon. We lived on an isolated, twenty acre piece of land in a little five room farmhouse that shook when you walked across the floor.

Silvercreek is about five miles down the road from Mossyrock, just fifty miles or so North of Mt St. Helens.

In those early days of our marriage, we had only one car, a Dodge panel van; it was a hundred miles to the nearest airport. I was doing two concerts a week on a pretty regular basis, Friday and Saturday nights, so that meant leaving home early Thursday morning and not returning until late Sunday evening. That left Mari (no cell phone) stranded without a car for four days a week. We only knew two or three families living in the area and of course, there in southern Washington, it rained for weeks at a time without a break.

It was early spring, and I was singing at a youth convention in Oshkosh Wisconsin. My part of the program ended on a Saturday night. I had been talking with Mari (no cell phone) on a land-line (that’s all we had in those days), and I knew she was really feeling alone, vulnerable, and abandoned. So I told her I’d try to catch an earlier flight the next morning and do my best to get home before dark.

So, instead of leaving Oshkosh at 9:A.M., I left at 6:A.M. That meant I had to leave my hotel room at 4:30 to catch the shuttle to the airport. Not wanting to wake up my roommate, I didn’t even turn on the lights that morning. I just tiptoed around the room getting my stuff together and then quietly pulled the door shut behind me as I left.

On the connector flight from Oshkosh to Chicago O’Hare, I realized I had left my van keys back in my hotel room. As soon as we landed, I called Mario, my roomy (no cell phone), to tell him about the keys, but he was already off into his day. So, I left a message for him at the desk, telling him what I had done and asked if he could send the keys out to the Portland Air Terminal (PDX) on the next flight. Then I called my concert coordinator, Jerry (no cell phone) Melrose, who lived in Los Angeles. I told him about my situation, and asked if he could follow up on my call to the hotel in Oshkosh and try to get my keys sent out to PDX. Then I called Mari (no cell phone), telling her all that had happened and I told her I would do my best to get home as soon as possible.

They called my flight to Portland and off I flew.

Upon my arrival at PDX I once again called the hotel in Oshkosh, trying to get in touch with (no cell phone) Mario. I was out of change, so I asked the operator if she would charge the call (no cell phone) to my home number. She went off line for a moment and then came back on saying, yes, the charge had been accepted, and my call was put through. Mario was still not in his room and nobody knew where he was. So I asked the desk attendant if anyone there had received a call from Melrose about my car keys.  He asked around and came back with a big “NO”, nobody knew anything about a phone call from a Jerry Melrose.

So there I was, at the Portland Air Terminal, nearly a hundred miles from home with no keys to my van.

I went out to the gas station located in the airport parking lot; and asked the attendant if he knew how to hot wire a car. He said, “no, he didn’t”.  I asked if I could use his phone (no cell phone) to call the Police station, maybe they could tell me how to get my car started. The Police told me they didn’t give out that kind of information. I told them I couldn’t find any car thieves listed in the phone book and that’s why I’d called them.  Then the officer got a bit snippety with me and that was the end of our conversation.

The gas station manager had a thought saying, maybe his boss might know how to hot wire the car. So he gave him a call (no cell phone). Yes!  His boss came right over and wired up my car. Then using a screwdriver to short the starter motor, zoom, zoom my car was running. The only problem was I had to break the wind wing on the passenger’s door to gain access to the inside of the van, but hey, I was on my way home, so I really didn’t care.

I pulled out onto I-5 heading north and I was one happy camper… thinking all my troubles were behind me; I was on my way home.

Then it started to rain... Hard. A hard, hard, downpour. I couldn’t use my windshield wipers because my ignition wasn’t turned on. I could barely see where I was going so I thought I’d better turn on my headlights so no one would run into me. But because my van was hot wired, when I turned my lights on, a full charge from the alternator totally bypassing the voltage regulator, zapped its way into my electrical system through the light switch. Instantly, every light bulb in my van blew out. As soon as I saw the lights flaring I turned off the lights, but it was too late. The electrical surge had fused the points in the distributor and I was now running on two barely firing cylinders.

Popity, popity, Chugady, pop, Chugady, pop, chug, chug. I was driving a doomed automobile and I knew it. The best I could do was get this thing off to the side of the road. As I pulled onto the apron, the rattling engine gave up the ghost and totally died.

In order to try and restart the car I knew I’d be getting soaking wet in the downpour. So, I popped the hood, grabbed my screwdriver and opened the door. Just as I swung the door open, a big eighteen wheeler doin’ about sixty-five miles an hour went roaring past and the back draft caught my door and slammed it all the way forward, springing the hinges and warping the door.  So, now my driver’s side door is sprung and won’t close properly.  I get out of the van and slam the door shut half a dozen times trying to bend the hinges back so the door will stay closed. Then I’m off around the front of the van with my screw driver and start shorting out the starter motor, trying to get the engine running again. It’s like standing under a waterfall but I do get the engine, cough, cough, sputter, sputtering and I run around trying to get my foot on the gas peddle before the motor stops.  I’m pump, pump, pumping the peddle like crazy, the engine rattles and sputters and then it backfires to a stop. So I get a packing box from the back of the van and wedge it against the accelerator, grab my screwdriver and I’m back out in the rain doing my newly learned car starting trick. This time when it kicks over, it actually starts to rev up a bit, so I slam the hood and charge around leaping into the van slamming my right foot down on the accelerator and pop sputter pop I have a barely running engine and it’s five miles to the next off ramp. But I had just passed an off ramp so I decided to back up and exit off the on ramp.  It was still raining so hard I couldn’t see what I was backing into so I ran into the guardrail and wiped out the right side of my van.

Finally, I got back on I-5 heading south and found a service station that was open. As I pulled into the parking area my van once again died a horrible coughing and wheezing death.

I used their phone to call Mari (no cell phone) at home. She was worried sick, not knowing what had become of me. I found out that when I called Oshkosh and billed it to my home phone, the operator had phoned her and asked if she would accept a long distance charge from Barry McGuire. She said, yes she would, and then waited for me to say “hello”. She waited and waited.  She thought I was calling home.  I wasn’t, I was calling Oshkosh, but she didn’t know that.  She wanted to tell me that she had Kathy take a set of van keys to the Greyhound bus station and they were waiting for me at the Portland bus station. Also, Jerry Melrose had called her and asked if I had picked up the keys that were waiting for me at the United Baggage claim at PBX. He had reached Mario after all, and the keys had been sent out on the next flight to Portland.

Mari called Kathy, asked if she would drive down to pick me up, and give me a ride home.

I finally got home that night about midnight. Three days later, they called me and told me my van was ready for me to come and pick it up.

And that’s why my wife and I have cell phones.

That’s it for now.

BMcG

Thursday, December 15th, 2005

11.10 pm. U.S. Pacific Time

In December of 2002, my wife, Mari received news from New Zealand that her middle brother, Peter, was in an intensive care ward with a staph infection that had seated itself in his spine.  At that time he’d been in a coma for several days and the prognosis was very dim indeed. 

There was no question or conversation, we both knew she had to go to be with her family.  The earliest flight she could book left LAX early January and she spent the next two weeks with her Mom living at the hospital in Whangarei.  Her other two brothers, Ian and Graham were in constant attendance.  Pete was in a drug induced coma and on every life support system in the ICU.

Mari returned home at the end of January, thinking Peter was on the mend, but within a few days, his condition worsened and she thought she would have to fly back to New Zealand again, but this time to attend his funeral.

We spent many mornings in prayer for Pete and somehow I was prompted to tell Mari that Pete was going to get well, I just knew it in the depths of my being that God’s Spirit was at work within Pete healing his body.  I knew if God’s Spirit hadn’t been there doing its healing work, Pete would have already been dead.

One morning Mari told me she felt like she was being torn in half, half of her wanted to be in New Zealand with her 80 year old, widowed Mom and her brothers, and the other half wanted to be here in the States with our family.  So I, not hearing all that she had said, half here, half there, only heard the part about living in New Zealand. 

The following few weeks gave us some direction as to what we were to do.  First of all, I had a concert booked in Salt Lake City, I got a call from Randy Sparks asking if I could do a date with him and the New Christy Minstrels, and that date fell on the SLC date.  So I called Salt Lake.  They said they could move the date to another time.  I called Randy, said it was a “go.”  About a month later, Randy called me and said the date had fallen through.  So I had nothing on that weekend.  A couple of days later, I got a call from an old friend I hadn’t heard from in several years inviting me down to his church in Carlsbad, California.  I told him I guessed I was supposed to be there because his was the third booking I had for that weekend.  The other two bookings had fallen through.

After the concert was over in Carlsbad, I was standing in front of the church talking to folks.  A young man came up to me and as soon as he said hello, I knew he was from New Zealand.  He said he knew Mari.  I said, “Well, she’s standing right over there selling cds.”  So he walked over, struck up a conversation with her, reminding her of how they had met and reminiscing about all their mutual friends.  Mari told him we were planning on moving to New Zealand, where we would probably be building a house.  He said, “My brother’s a builder, give him a call.”  We thought, “How amazing!”  He told us he’d seen a promotional flyer in a bookstore for the concert, he didn’t even go to this church.

So, we called his family who put us in touch with some old friends who lived in the very area we were planning on moving to.  One of them was a phenomenal architect, and the other, a master builder. 

We arrived in New Zealand at 6 a.m. on a Friday in November of 2003.  We had a quick reunion with Mari’s Auntie and family, brothers, cousins, uncles and aunts and then off to Orewa to our motel room.  We had a 2 p.m. appointment with the bank who told us they were unable to open our account unless we had proof of an address in the States.  Well, we had sold our house in the States, so we didn’t have an address, except for a box number.  About a month before, I had lost my driver’s license in California, something I haven’t done in 20 years, so I had to get a new one, and it had our box number address on it.  I just had the temporary license in my wallet.  The bank manager said, “That’ll do,” and opened the account.

From the bank we went back to our motel room, where Mari’s youngest brother showed up with the real estate section from the local newspaper.  As the girls knocked some food together for lunch, I was looking through all the different pictures of properties that were available.  And lo, there it was, the perfect place.  We drove up, had a look at it, Mari’s Mom said, “This looks like McGuire land to me.”  We drove back to the motel, called the real estate lady, and said “We’ll take it.”  So, by Saturday night we had purchased the property and found our architect and builder, all within 48 hours of landing in Auckland.

We spent another couple of weeks with family and friends and returned to the States to finish my concert commitments before moving to New Zealand.

It took from April 2004 to January 2005 to build, and so we moved in.  All was going along fine until I started getting negative feedback from the New Zealand Immigration authority, inferring that because of my age and the fact that I had a pacemaker, they thought I would be a burden on the socialized health care system.

The New Zealand system forces you to actually be in New Zealand before you can apply for a permanent resident’s visa.  Because Mari and I had been married for 31 years at the time, and she’s a citizen, we didn’t think there would be any problem at all with me getting a permanent resident’s visa, it wasn’t even a consideration for us.  But they had me jumping through all these medical tests, with months of waiting and then more tests and papers and more waiting. 

One of the test results showed my cholesterol was a bit high.  My whole family has high cholesterol and they all lived well into their eighties and even mid-nineties, but the doctor wanted to get my cholesterol down to where he thought it should be, so he put me on a cholesterol lowering medication.

The second pill I took, blew my heart into arrhythmia so off we went to the hospital where they hooked me up to all the machines and put a drip in my hand to give me some more medication, (amiodarone) that was supposed to level out the arrhythmia.  But instead, I went into a violent reaction, thrashing around on the table, vomiting, my heart went berserk, I had huge red blotches come up all over my body, my lips swelled up like somebody had punched me in the mouth, the whites of my eyes went totally bloodshot. 

Meanwhile the doctor and nurses were banging on the medication dispenser because it wasn’t working.  It had only managed to put a drop or two in my veins when it broke down.  If it had continued working, I’m sure it would have killed me.  Another miracle in our adventure!

After vomiting the poison out of my stomach, and the doctors detaching the intravenous feed to my hand, my body settled right down, heartbeat went back to normal, red blotches started disappearing, breathing was normal, blood pressure was normal, and the doctor’s comment was, “This appears to be an anomaly, we’ve never seen anything like this before.”

They did tell me I was only the second person in that hospital that had ever had a violent reaction to that particular medication. 

I wanted to go home, but they said, “No, you need to stay for observation.”  I said, “Who’s going to pay for it?”  They said, “Aren’t you a resident?”  I said, “No.”  They said, “Don’t you have medical insurance?”  I said, “I do have private insurance, but it doesn’t cover my cardiovascular system because of my pacemaker.”  That was the end of the conversation.

Three days later, they put me on a treadmill, and released me with a discharge letter stating, “Next line of investigation would be coronary angiogram.  This has been discussed extensively with Mr McGuire but he has opted not to have further investigation in this country and would pursue this further in America due to financial reasons.  On discharge, he was well and had no symptoms of chest pain or palpitations.”

So after this little episode, we felt it was time to “get out of Dodge” before something serious happened.  Since I’m fully covered with Medicare and Aarp here in the U.S. we thought, that’s the next step for us.

We sold our brand new, just built, beautiful house, set Mari’s Mom up in a lovely little two-bedroom cottage where we can go visit her two or three months every summer (winter in the US).  We packed the rest of our stuff into a twenty foot container and shipped it on to Fresno.

Somebody just asked me, “How does it feel to be back in Fresno?”  I told him, “Well, you really don’t go back to anywhere, you may go to some place you’ve been before, but it’s not the same place it was when you left, everything is changing all the time, including us all.”

So, that’s the sequence of events from start to finish on the New Zealand episode.  We wouldn’t change a minute of it.  Relationships have been established and nurtured.  We now have a US winter/NZ summer place to go to for holidays and time with Mari’s family, so it’s just win, win, win.  Only God could do something like that – what a great ride this last couple of years has been, and it just keeps on coming down the pike.

Hope this satisfies any of you who might be wondering, “What happened?”

Blessings on you all.

I’ll be back, maybe?

BMcG