These are the best of times.

In my earliest recollections of the man, he was driving a 1948 Chevrolet Stylemaster. It was a four door model. To me, the Stylemaster and my dad were a natural pair – they even looked alike, as I saw it – through the eyes of a three year old boy.

When I was five, my dad brought home a 1953 Plymouth Belvedere four door sedan. It sported a fresh coat of mustard-gold colored paint. It was a real beauty and, it too, was five years old. The paint looked so good, I swore the car was brand new. My dad and his friend assured me it was not – but I was relentless. If a five-year old boy could see it, why didn’t my dad understand he had bought a brand new car and didn’t even know it!

One day while riding in the new Belvedere, mom made a note of the strange noise. Dad said it was the brakes. We had this car only a few months before this episode and it occurred to me, dad must have been right when he said the car was used. Even though I was a young man of five, I knew if the car was new, the brakes would not have been worn this quickly. It was at this point, the luster of the new paint did not thrill me anymore – and I also decided in the future, if my dad said a car was used, I would give him the benefit of the doubt.

Both these cars were nearly new when my dad bought them and they cost him less than five hundred dollars. Ten years later, he would purchase a brand new car for more than five times that price.

During those used car years, we lived in a suburban World War Two block house, in Mountlake Terrace, Washington. To me, it was a palace but my parents often complained it was too small and crowded. What can be crowded about a nine-hundred square foot house with four kids? The garage was clear in the back of the house. If you drove to it, there would be no backyard. So my dad closed up the garage, fenced the backyard and parked the car in the front – he made a parking area on the side lawn. The yard seemed huge to me but a few years ago, I was standing in the front yard on the sidewalk and a man was washing his car on the concrete driveway, in what used to be the backyard, and I think if we both put our arms out, we could have touched.

A few years later, I was in the sixth grade. One day, my teacher, who was always a well-spring of not-so-positive ideas dropped a bomb on us. She told us she felt sorry for her class because most of us would never know the joy of home ownership. The reason was the median price of housing just went above the ten thousand dollar mark! That was depressing. But I decided I would buy myself a house no matter what the price had climbed to. Nine years later, I became a home builder.

Between the twenty years from my dad’s used cars and the first year I purchased a brand new truck, 1975, the cost of living – or what the dollar could purchase – had gone up sixty-one percent. That truck in 1975, cost me just over four thousand dollars. In 1980, I purchased another new truck which cost me over ten thousand dollars. That was unreal and I swore I would never pay ten thousand dollars for a new truck ever again. I was right – but not in the respect I had in mind. Fifteen years later, I would spend three and one-half times that price.

The decade of the 70s, we saw huge inflation. The dollar in 1980 bought less than half what it did in 1970 because the cost of living had gone up over one hundred twelve percent.

Between the 80s and the early years of the new millennium, I don’t remember much about the trucks and homes I bought and sold because I was raising my family – so everything is just a blurr. However, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even during years of rising prosperity, inflation held fast and our dollar did not deteriorate as it had in past decades. From 1980 to 1990, the cost of inflation was down from the previous decade to fifty-eight percent; from 1990 to 2000, it was thirty-one percent and for the nine years from 2000 to now, it is less than twenty-five percent. And the 2009 dollar actually buys more than the 2008 dollar!

Of course, only God knows the future and we don’t know what harm all the bailouts and money printing will do to our economy. But we can look back to the last three decades and see inflation – or the bite in the spendability of our dollar – has been softening. This is a positive trend.

Unemployment is up but at a slower rate than the month before and it is still lower than mid-1975 and most of 1982 and 1983. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current eight and one-half percent unemployment includes figures for illegal aliens and those who have stopped looking for work. This is a major change from computing the older statistics – and inflates the unemployment rates. Meanwhile, the average hourly earnings were up point three percent for the month of March.

The translation of this is that most of us still have our jobs. Most of us are seeing our dollar go further. We still have our cars and our homes, our clothes and our gadgets – and our families.

There is good news all around us! Always remember, God watches the sparrow and He cares about you. Don’t live in fear but be thankful for all God has given us!

THESE ARE THE BEST OF TIMES! Yesterday, my wife, Robin, and I were traveling to Seattle. It was snowing in Hayden, windy in Post Falls, cloudy in Liberty Lake, clearing in Spokane, and sunny from Cheney to Ellensburg! As we traveled up the east side of the pass, there was snow on the ground but it did not snow until we arrived near the top. Going down the west side of the pass, it was a blizzard! It is usually the other way around.

Half-way down the pass the traffic was congested and then we came to a complete stop – for almost an hour. It did not take us long to realize there was an accident up ahead. We prayed for the people involved and then we started talking about emergency response and we realized times had really changed for the better. Twenty years ago, there were few car phones and no cell phones. If this accident had happened then, someone would have had to drive to the nearest phone – almost twenty miles – to call for help.

Twenty-one years ago, I purchased my first truck phone. Before that, I had to stop at pay phones several times a day to track contractors, order supplies and communicate with clients. If no one was available, I had to do the same thing all over again, later on.

One day after purchasing the phone, I was driving west on the Highway 2 trestle. The road faces due west and on the few afternoons that the sun is out, it can be blinding. But this was the morning – and the sunshine filtered all the brake lights. The road was full and the road was fast – and I should mention, the trestle has a twelve inch curb. I was driving my brand new Ford Ranger, when – though I could not see any brake lights, I did notice everyone’s fanny popping up in the air (car fannies, that is). So I hit my brakes, my truck slid and hit the curb and knocked my truck over!

It was comforting there was no odor of fuel! I stood up on the driver’s side window and popped my head out of the passenger window and started to make a call on my truck phone. Just them, three other guys flashed their car phones and offered to make the emergency call. I raised mine and we all rejoiced.

This was a new thing – to be able to call for help at the scene of an emergency. Now we take it for granted.

Today, we send emails around the world. My sister lives in Austria. A letter cost a buck to send and takes two weeks to get there. Now we can email – and if I am up early in the morning, we can communicate in real time! If we Skype – we can talk! A generation ago, we would have never thought this possible.

A little over a year ago, I joined Facebook at the request of three of my nieces. I thought this would be a good thing, as we could communicate through the social network. However, they never sent me messages, they just threw things at me and I had to sign up for applications that made a mess of my home page to receive them. I no longer do applications but I do peruse their home pages and their photos and see what is going on in their lives. In a small way, I am keeping up with them and they are starting to communicate more and throw less.

These are the best of times – we can communicate in real time around the world, for a cost far less than we used to pay for postage. We can post our lives on Facebook or MySpace and our friends and relatives can stay up to what is going on in our lives. We can call friends and relatives at any time, no matter where they are because of cell phones.

Think this is amazing? Now, we have Twitter. We can upload a message to Twitter and all our friends can know what we are doing right now – by sending a text message to their cell phones. Businesses can use this as a way to keep in contact with their clients. This is an amazing world we live in. At Unique Motif, we just starting to use this for spur-of-the-moment specials. Sign up to follow us. The link is at the top of the right hand column. One of these days, I will give you a half hour to come in and receive a free gift card of some enormous value – you will want to be signed up and ready!

While everyone who listens to the news is glooming and in despair over the bad economy, do we ever stop to think that we are not yet a third world nation and even if we have to tighten our belt, we still have these amazing communication devices at our disposal? Not to mention, we still have our dishwashers, wash machines and dryers – and running water. We come home and relax in front of the television (not me, though). So what is all this bad news?

You might want to tell me about the Spokesman-Review headline this week telling us that unemployment is up worse than ever, at a faster rate than ever and “swelling” – even though it was less than a third the rate of December! The headline also said we are at the worst point in twenty-five years. But the news does not remind you we have had the longest sustained boom in the history of the world and that started over twenty-five years ago.

So, at worst, we are where we were before the boom. The economy is still not as bad as it was in the 70s. Will it get worse? I don’t know. I do believe if the media continues to harp on it and if the politicians continue to steal from the taxpayers to bailout those who waste the funds, it could get worse. But I am not going to worry about this – I am going to keep working and trusting God to make up the difference.

Always remember, God watches the sparrow and He cares about you. Don’t live in fear – be thankful for all God has given us!

THESE ARE THE BEST OF TIMES! You probably don’t feel that way after listening to the nightly news. However, you need to remember the news makes more money on bad news than it does on good news. So, don’t be surprised they aren’t generous with the good news of the day.

But where is the good news? – you might ask. After all, yesterday the stock market dipped under 7000 – an eleven year low! Well, today the stock market is up again and it will continue to go up and down throughout our lifetimes, will it not? When the stock market goes down, it means investor confidence is low – it is hardly a measure of the quality of your life.

Even if your fortune is tied to the stock market – you still possess enough life and health to be reading this newsletter. Which leads me to one of the reasons I believe these are the best of times. We may argue about the affordability of American health care and we may argue how we should pay for it, but we cannot argue against the fact that our health care is the best in the world – and it is the best in generations.

Two years ago, I fell – rather flew – off a roof while de-icing. The drop was over fourteen feet and because of the speed, I landed over twelve feet away from the eaves, also. My pelvis was shattered and I had to wait six days for the emergency operation. If this would have happened even twenty years ago, I would have died. Today, there are three bars of steel and twenty-four screws holding my pelvis together and a bolt holding the pelvis to the spine. Even though my movements are limited, I am thankful to be alive and able to walk. God is good to me.

Each of us has a story to tell. Some stories are more dramatic than others – some more than mine. But each of us can look at how God has helped us in our life – by health, provisions, relationships or other means and areas. This is what we should look at and remember. Recessions come and go – but they do not make our life. We live in the best of times and God made each day for us to rejoice and enjoy!

Always remember, God watches the sparrow and He cares about you. Don’t live in fear – be thankful for all God has given us!