Carl Wells Books

Indiana has long been famous for its love of basketball. That is true especially of high school basketball. Someone has probably figured out why Indiana fell so hard for basketball, but I haven’t heard why it happened. Maybe it’s just that really smart people tend to love basketball, and thus we Hoosiers had an unfair advantage. Our honorable and intelligent cousins just over the river to the south, people in Kentucky, are similar in their love of the game. Good for them.

When we go to a basketball game in Indiana, we don’t just attend the game–we review it. No critic attending opening night on Broadway takes his responsibilities any more seriously than we do. The game needs to be played in the right way, and if it is not we are quick to point that out.

For many years Indiana had a one-class high school basketball tourney at the end of the season. Out of 400 plus teams (more before consolidations began to occur), only one team emerged as a winner.

Things changed somewhat in 1997-98. That was the first year of class basketball. The state tourney split into four tourneys. Class 4A was for the biggest schools, 3A for the next biggest, then of course 2A, with the smallest schools in 1A.

This was a controversial decision, and still is. Some people loved the single class tourney. They still do, although it is long gone and not likely to come back. In all of the United States, only Kentucky and Delaware continue to have a single class tourney.

My own feelings are . . . well, complicated. I prefer the four-class tourney. It gives smaller schools a chance to win a title against schools of similar size. It is still hard to win a championship. Only one team emerges as a champion, out of about 100 competitors in each class. My local school has never won a title–neither a boys nor a girls title–in 20 plus years. Most schools have never won a title. But our local school might win one some day, if I live to be fairly old, say 350.

But I am not adamantly opposed to a single-class tourney. If it came back, I would not complain.

Cards on the table: I don’t believe in public education. How dare Christians expect our neighbors, friends, and enemies to pay for the education of our children? But I enjoy high school basketball, and attend local games constantly. I have a season ticket to our home games, both boys and girls. I am basketball fan, and I root for the local team–unless their laziness and incompetence occasionally causes me to root for the other team. Remember, I’m a reviewer as well as a fan.

Anyway, I repeat that I am not opposed to having a single-class tourney. What I am seriously, adamantly, and violently opposed to is pretending you have a four-class tourney, then massaging the rules so that modestly successful teams are kicked up a class, and thus end up playing in the tourney against bigger schools.

Here is what the Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) has started doing in recent years. (They did not do this beginning in 1997-98.) If a team in 1A, 2A, or 3A has a certain amount of success in the tourney for two consecutive years, they are bumped up a class for at least two years. This is done, I suppose, so that teams who have their feelings hurt by losing to a good team in their own class, can see that good team be kicked out of the way by throwing them out of the class. This seems to me to be a wretched way to treat good teams, and a good way to train losing teams to be sissies.

How much success is required? Not all that much, really. If a team finishes as runner-up or better in their class tourney two years in a row, the next year they are bumped out of their natural class. So that a team which finishes second place two years in a row, will not have a chance to win a state title in their own class for the next two years. Their chances of winning a state title in the new class with bigger schools, are much, much smaller.

Alas, this is not just theoretical. It has happened. And it stinks.

It happened to North Harrison, a high school in southern Indiana.

Looking back to 2011-12, North Harrison’s girls teams had, moving forward year by year, records of 11-11, 7-14, 11-10, 17-10. Decent but not outstanding seasons.

That was all pre-Lilly Hatton. Beginning in 2015-2016, freshman Lilly Hatton joined the team. For any school in the state, a player like Lilly Hatton comes along once in a generation–if then. She has excellent fundamental skills, is tall, is a skilled shot blocker, rebounder, and scorer.

The luminous Lilly Hatton immediately led North Harrison to a superb season. They are a 3A team, and got all the way to the state championship game in her freshman year. They lost 45-51 to Heritage Christian. They finished with a record of 28-3.

Her sophomore year was deja vu all over again. Once again they reached the 3A state championship game, where they lost 49-57 to South Bend St. Joseph. North Harrison’s record that year was 27-3.

You know what happened next. Their two runner-up finishes in a row meant that they were bumped upstairs into class 4A, with bigger schools.

In 2017-18 North Harrison had another superb regular season. When it came to tourney time, they were forced by IHSAA rules to play in the class 4A sectional. The result was a 39-47 loss in their first and only tourney game. Their final record was 21-3–but with no long tourney run.

In 2018-19 they were good again, although Lilly Hatton’s supporting class was not quite as scintillating. Once again they lost their first 4A tourney game, by a decisive score of 35-56. Basically a slaughter. They finished 17-7.

Lilly Hatton moves on to play college ball at Wofford. She is pre-med, and is intelligent as well as gifted athletically. I predict she will flourish in life. I appreciated being able to watch her play a few times. (North Harrison is in our conference.)

The IHSAA cheated Lilly Hatton and her teammates, they cheated the coaches, they cheated the school of North Harrison, and they cheated their myriad supporters in Harrison county. They cheated them out of a chance to compete for a state championship. There was no guarantee that North Harrison would win a 3A state championship in 2017-18. They fell short the two previous years, and might have fallen short again. But they deserved to have a chance to bring home a state championship. That year was their best shot. Lilly Hatton’s supporting cast was pretty strong. They might have done it. They might have done something that Harrison County, and indeed all of us in southern Indiana would have celebrated. They were cheated by the unjust bureaucrats running the IHSAA.

When a Christian civilization loses its sense of justice, the consequences on the ground show up in big ways (killing unborn children, preemptively attacking foreign countries, constructing a welfare state that destroys lives) and in small ways. Cheating a high school team out of a chance to compete for a state championship is I suppose a small thing, at least relatively speaking. But it is a symptom. And did I mention, it stinks.

What is most scary, perhaps, is how routinely the stench is accepted with no complaint. I did read one sportswriter who understood that the current rules are wrongheaded. Heaven bless him. But there doesn’t seem to be any outcry raised, statewide, to change the ridiculous rule that cost North Harrison a chance at a run for the state championship. If we lose our sense of justice, we are in deep do-do. We seem to have misplaced it, at least temporarily. I hope we get it back. It will be too late for North Harrison, but not too late for countless coming generations. That is, if we get it back. If we continue to shrug and say “Whatever” to unjust things big or small, who can predict if or when we will get our sense of justice back in working order?

Last week I listed six potential advantages to growing old. I continue to stress that these advantages can be potential only. We can avoid the advantages if we choose to do so. Anyway, here are a few more potential advantages to growing old.

7/Growing old can give one an increased appreciation of godly behavior by others. Most of us, including most Christians, operate at a very low level of spiritual wisdom and practical behavior. As we get older I think we can become at least slightly more able to see how some few people shine as examples. We see how rare true godliness is, and thus are able to appreciate it all the more when we see it in other people.

8/As we grow older, we can become much less concerned about having a really high income. Having a lot of money becomes unimportant to us. We know that time and the determination to do right are the most important assets that we can muster. We don’t need to impress the Jones family with our possessions. We have learned how to get by on a moderate income.

9/As we grow older we can begin to understand our own personal nature. God gives each of us a certain personality, certain gifts. Which means in turn that He does not give us certain other gifts. We need to learn to work with what we have, not with what we don’t have and are unlikely ever to have. We can learn this, but often it takes us a long time. Which means that growing old can give us an increased insight to who we are and what we can do or should do. Do we learn this too late to accomplish much, since after all we are getting old? Well, sort of, but wisdom about how life is put together is hard to come by, and we may still be given enough time to get a lot done. If we learn about ourselves at age 60 what we should have known at age 40, that is too bad, but God still may give us another 20 years to put our belated knowledge to work.

10/Growing older, I find myself more willing to step out a little bit in my reading. In searching out new and possibly good authors, in my life, I have done only a mediocre job. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 the highest, I have not been horrible, but I have not been great either. As a rough guess, I have been about a 6. That means I could have done a lot worse, but I could have done a lot better. Now that I’m older, I can see where I’ve failed. Which also means that I can do better in the future, and if I am given enough years I still might make up some ground. Do I regret my failure to be adventurous in the past? Yes, and what makes it worse is that instinctively at my best I was stepping out even in my younger years. But I’m not dead yet, and I have an opportunity to do better with what time I have left. At the absolute worst, here I am alerting other readers not to make the mistake I made. Maybe #10 will help other people be more adventurous than I was.

11/As I get older, I think I have a deeper appreciation of simple courtesy. Courtesy respects the humanity of other people. It says, “You are made in the image of God, life is hard and challenging, and I respect you as a person with potential for good or evil. I will show my respect for you by the way I treat you.” Surely even non-Christians can learn to treat other people with courtesy. Recently I heard on the Internet, someone describe how he watched, from a distance so that he could not hear the words, a phone conversation of Dr. Theodore Dalrymple. He could tell that Dr. Dalrymple was interacting courteously with the person on the other end of the line. Having read numerous books by Dr. Dalrymple, that is exactly what I would expect of him. The thing is, he makes no claim to be a Christian. But perhaps Dr. Dalrymple does “instinctively the things of the Law” and his conscience will bear witness in a very honorable manner when he stands in the presence of God (Romans 2:12-16). What we can say with certainty is that common courtesy is much more rare than we could wish. Growing old, I find myself being grateful for courtesy when I see it. And reminded of how I need to behave when I speak to, or somehow interact with, others.

12/Growing old forces one to concentrate the mind on what needs to be done. As I approached 60, it became more and more clear to me that my books were not going to get published unless I took active steps to publish them at my own expense. No publisher, mainstream or fringe, was going to call me up begging to have a look at some of my manuscripts. No publisher would likely be willing to look at the sort of books I was writing, and if they looked at them they would reject them. I knew that as age 60 approached. I had to decide, and fairly quickly (because I could not be sure of many more years, or of any more years for that matter), whether to publish the books at my expense, or just go on as I had been for a lifetime. Time was running out. I realized that not-publishing would be worse for me than publishing, even if the books were not good. So, belatedly, I did what I could have done at 40. It was a good decision, even if belated. I still am not sure the books are good, although I readily confess I think they are good, but these my declining years have been more enjoyable because I stepped up to the bar and paid the man, rather than spent another 15 or 20 years piddling around. Approaching death concentrated my mind, and forced me to make a decision that could be put off no longer.

13/As we grow older, we really do have the potential to grow in practical wisdom about how the world is put together. There is a darkly humorous but also frustrating flip side to all this. As one sees more and more clearly what the Bible teaches about how to behave, it becomes increasingly easy to see, as one grows older, of how refusal to obey the Bible’s teaching brings disaster. Individuals, families, churches, states, nations, civilizations can be seen to be doing foolish things which are going to lead, and indeed do lead, to bad consequences. We bring avoidable disasters upon ourselves. But individuals, families, nations are unwilling to think from the Bible’s point of view, and are unwilling to be honest about what they are doing. They can’t be reached by me or by anyone. It is very sad, and painful. Most of our disasters, personal, familial, or otherwise, could be avoided. This is true for us, and it is true for our family, our friends, our enemies, our nation, and our civilization. It is discouraging to realize that we refuse to do what seems obviously (now in old age) the right thing to do. But such behavior is built into how God created reality. It was discouraging for Jeremiah. He tells us often that he wept, and he is sometimes called the weeping prophet. Am I smarter and wiser and better than Jeremiah? Not likely. It is a great benefit to learn, as one grows older, how obeying God is sensible and brings good consequences. But it is also a bit frustrating. No one is too interested in learning the simple and obvious things that it has taken me a lifetime to learn. (So apparently they weren’t so obvious after all.) With Jeremiah, I sometimes feel like weeping. But overall, it is a great blessing to put together 2 plus 2 and finally begin to come close to figuring out that the answer is 4. So once again we have a blessing of growing old.

This concludes my two-part series on some of the advantages of growing old. Doubtless there are others, but perhaps these few will help reconcile us to the undoubted problems which old age can bring.

We all know some of the disadvantages of growing old. We begin to experience a loss of energy. We can’t get as much done, physically, as we used to. We may begin to experience many more physical problems, including chronic pain, trips to the hospital for surgery, trips to the emergency room, and so forth, world without end, amen. We may have to be taking pills. Our mental faculties may begin to go, then keep on going, then be gone completely. My Aged Parent has pointed out the similarity between old age and hockey–neither one is for sissies.

But there also can be some potential advantages to growing old. It is crucial to stress that these potential advantages are potential only. We can avoid the advantages, if we insist. But the ordinary garden variety person really can find some good things about growing old. This is true especially for Christians, but I think it can be true in some sense even for non-Christians. Here, in no particular order, are some of the advantages of growing old.

1/Old age can bring more free time. Most people spend long decades working at least 40 hours a week. Usually when we get old our hours of working outside the home can be cut to zero, or at least can be cut drastically. I am in the codger stage, and I still have to work outside the home for a certain serious number hours per week. But you will not be shocked to hear that working 18 to 20 hours is a lot less time-consuming than working 40. I find I have plenty of time to spend on things I care about. All of my books have been published, and most of them written, after age 60. I am still cranking them out, and I have plenty of time to crank–although the pace is not great, clearly.

2/As we get old, we can learn what is important in life, and have the opportunity to not waste as many hours. In my case, two things that have gotten better for my budgeting of time are a/I no longer watch much television, and; 2/I don’t follow baseball as much as I did when I was younger. At this stage of life, I think I know better what it is important to do. I could be wrong, of course, but I think experience has taught me some things. That doesn’t mean I hate baseball and think it is a complete waste of time. But the hours I devote to following the game have become more sensible. And I still watch certain television shows, typically via DVD series sets. But I don’t waste much of my life in front of the boob tube. There are more important things in life.

3/By growing old and by reading the Bible over and over, we begin to develop a deeper understanding of what biblical Christianity consists of, and what is just tradition unconsciously pretending to be biblical exegesis. This category of course is a perfect example of how growing old does not automatically permit us to accomplish something. If we refuse to read the Bible, refuse to obey God (John 7:17), refuse to think honestly about what the Bible teaches, we can of course remain immature Christians (or, of course, not Christians at all). “But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.” (Hebrews 5:14)

4/As one grows older, one is closer to death–and thus closer to the joys of the afterlife. Life can be very challenging. Some people seem to flourish and succeed most of the time, but others, possibly even most of us, struggle. As we grow old, we know the years of struggle are coming to an end soon. “I can’t go on; I’ll go on,” (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable) pretty much sums up life for many of us. We hope we have fought the good fight (2 Timothy 4:7), but whether we have or not, at least we will be able to lay down our weapons soon. It is a relief to know that old age brings us closer to that time when we can rest and relax after death. With, quite possibly, some well-earned lashes as well (Luke 12:43-48). But after the lashes, there could be an eternity of joy.

5/As one grows older, we often come to a stage where we are more willing to stand for what we believe to be the truth, and to be hated for standing by that belief. We don’t care if school keeps or not, as the old saying goes. Or, we may as well be hung for a sheep as for a goat, as another old saying has it. Maybe we are just becoming grumpy old men and women, or maybe there is at least just a glimmer of understanding that truth is everything, and if the enemies of truth don’t like it, well, so be it.

6/As we get older, we are slightly more able to accept failure. This is not easily done, and maybe I am kidding myself that it is done at all. It is really hard for us to accept that we have failed. I have written about this before, but the oddness of it all makes the topic worth discussing again. In my case, I can readily admit that I have failed to sell books or to have an influence on the world around me with my writings. But deep in my heart of hearts I believe my books are good, and so I believe that I have not really failed, although it may look like I’ve failed to others. Failure and I have come to an uneasy compromise. I pretend to admit that I’ve failed, and failure doesn’t rub it in if I really have failed. Meanwhile, I really am admitting that I failed in some categories of life. Of course, if circumstances had been slightly different . . . Oops. Yes, it is difficult to admit we have failed. I suppose the only time we will really understand our failure is when we face God, and He strips away our self-deception. It will be hard to bear, no doubt, but it will also be necessary. Maybe seeing our failure, and understanding God’s grace to us despite our failure, will humble us sufficiently to enable us to live in a thoughtful manner in the afterlife.

Next week I hope to offer up part II on some of the advantages of growing old.

We often read that a lot of young people brought up in Christian homes end up leaving the faith. We would expect Christian families to be a superb place for young people to become anchored in the faith. But it happens less often than we would hope. What is going on here?

Well, a lot, and probably a lot more than I can cover in a brief blog post.

For one thing, the world is strong. The climate of opinion enveloping all of us is not Christian. One writer commented that the de facto religion of much of the U.S. (including in supposedly Christian circles) is really “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” That seems pretty true to me. Our Christianity is not very real. There’s no there there, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland. Young people sense that the supposed Christian faith doesn’t really seem to have a lot to do with real life.

I’m going to list a few things that I think Christian parents can do to encourage their children to become Christians too. This may be a completely quixotic quest. After all, I never had any children, and that may well have been a piece of wisdom on the part of God. So who am I to make recommendations on the topic? In my own defense, all I can say is that while I have never had children, I do watch how people behave, and I come to certain conclusions as a result. Use your own judgment as to whether the advice is good or bad or somewhere in between. I will list a handful of things I think are important, in no particular order.

1/Get out of public education. We have no right to expect our neighbors to pay for the education of our children. That is fundamental. But there are other reasons to get out as well. Public schools are a bad environment for children. Public schools don’t teach kids well. Public schools permit the parents to shun their responsibility to educate their own children–which teaches those kids to shun responsibility as well. Lots of young people can barely read, at an age when they should be proficient. Read with your children, and help them learn to read well. Reading well is a vital tool for living.

2/Help your children learn what is in the Bible. Most kids have close to zero Bible knowledge. A pastor once told me that the Bible knowledge of the children in his church was very weak. The parents were not seeing that the young people learned the Bible. This was not a liberal, anti-Christian church. This was a church better than many. Yet the children were basically clueless about the Bible.

3/You example is crucial. Your behavior in every aspect of life can be for good or ill. Take point 2, for example. Are you reading the Bible? No? Then how can you expect your kids to want to read the Bible? Are you a truly godly person living by a solid biblical ethic? If not, don’t be surprised that your children become like you.

4/You need to be objective about your children. They are more rotten than you realize. You think they are not, just because they are yours. Sin needs to be rebuked. Our lack of objectivity about our children is one of the things that strikes me most as I see how Christian parents behave toward their children.

5/Be conscious that your children need to learn to participate in the worship service, not just sit there like bumps on a log while the adults sing. Watch the young people at a worship service, in many churches. They are not participating, not singing. They may be sitting quietly, but they are not taking part in the worship. Wake up, adults. Don’t think that just because your kids are in the service, that they are Christians.

6/Teach your children to tithe. That is, to pay 10% of their increase to the church. But if you are going to do that, you are going to have to tithe yourself, or you will be a hypocrite. Tithe. The children need to learn at as young an age as possible that while God’s covenant of grace is free to all who want it, it brings with it concomitant responsibilities. One of the easiest is to tithe.

7/Parents, treat one another with love and respect. This example will teach your children that Christianity is real. When they see how unkind is the personal interaction in many families, they will begin to appreciate that maybe Christianity is something real and something that affects how we behave for the better.

8/Need a Savior. If you are so godly that you don’t need a Savior, your children will understand that they too do not need a Savior. But if you need a Savior, they might begin to sense that they need a Savior too. This will involve recognizing your own sin, and facing it squarely and honestly. You may have to explain to your children where you messed up. Admitting you have been wrong, then striving to change that wrong, helps young people think through their own need of a Savior.

9/Be regular in your attendance at church, and on time. Lots of families are sporadic in their attendance. Any excuse will be sufficient to stay home on Sunday. Let your children see that the worship service is not optional. It is something we do, without fail, and on time, unless providentially hindered.

10/Organize family worship. It doesn’t have to be long, but it should be consistent. The variety of ways family worship can be done are endless.

11/Pray out loud before meals. Do it at home and do it when you eat out at a restaurant. If you are uncomfortable praying before meals in public, join the crowd. Do it anyway. Don’t deny your Savior. You will get stronger as the years unfold.

12/Get to know and interact with as many high-principled people as you can. Your children need to know that the standard of behavior need not be mediocrity. There are some fine people out there. Your children need to know they exist. So do you. My experience has been that we Christians taken as a whole are horrible at taking advantage of spending time with strong Christian people. Christian fellowship is much more important than we seem to realize.

13/Help your children understand that we are at warfare with evil. There is good in the world, but there is also evil. The children I see in church are clueless about this fact. Help them learn what is at stake.

14/Develop a big vision about the future, and help your children develop that vision as well. If you do not develop that vision, how can you expect your children to develop it? Find something big to care about. The options are endless. End nutritional blindness? End war? End torture? Convert the entire population of Papua New Guinea? Clean litter off the face of the earth completely? We may say such goals are quixotic, but I don’t think they are. Don’t despise the day of small beginnings (Zechariah 4:10). Start from where you are. Choose something big that fits your interests and personality. Help your children see that life is about more than just them and their personal success.

We are going to keep losing our children to the world, unless we develop a faith that is true and practical, and a faith that challenges them. God wants us to be mature, with our senses trained to discern good and evil (Hebrews 5:14). The Christian faith is vital to each of us, and vital to civilization. Our children need to learn that. If we teach ourselves first, then we will be better enabled to teach our children.