Page 33 - MFM MARCH 2015

Montana Freemason March 2015 Volume 91 Number 1
Page 33
and help you. I said, ‘Bless you.’ So he came up and he
has been working with me on this house. He was there,
thank goodness, on the day we took all of the lath off
one of the walls in the kitchen. We pulled all of the
lath off and looked at it. I am looking at this wall and
all there is are 2x4, but the people who built this house
decided if one 2x4 is good then two halves of 2x4 is
better. I said to my friend, ‘What held this wall up?’ He
said the lap. As we were talking the 2x4 start bowing,
it started coming down.. You could see it start to sag.
I am figuring the upstairs is going to be the downstairs
of my house and we’re going to be in there with a
bulldozer in a week. I asked my friend what we were
going to do and he said no problem. He runs over and
grabs two 2x8, grabs a saw and goes rip, rip, rip, rip.
Plywood in the middle, he sandwiches them together
with a nail gun, creates a header, puts it up there and
four 4x4 later, wedges them into place, lifts that floor
into place and I am sure it’s there for another hundred
years. He did that in about 20 minutes while I stood
there just slack-jawed. If I had been there by myself,
I would have been dead. The point is that after I saw
that happen, it occurred to me that there is a lesson
for us here. The lath is coming down in our lodges. We
use some of those old construction methods to build
what we did in lodges and the lath is coming down.

In the lodge I am in, the past number of years the
old members laid down their working tools and they
were the laths that held that wall up. They were the
laths that held that lodge together, they were the
contributors, and they were the attendees. Now new
young men are coming into that lodge and they are
not lath material. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good
men, it means they don’t focus or function the way
the construction was done. They work in new ways,
they use the Internet. They communicate over email,
they have Blueberries, they have everything and they
are wired. We say we need to communicate with our
members, these guys are bristling with communication.
Unfortunately if you just rely on the old guys, guys
like me, we go ‘huh?’ How do I talk to them? At the
Masonic Education Conference somebody said that
if you are not on the Internet, you’re not there, you
don’t exist. I think that is probably true. We’ve got
to find new ways to communicate, but as the old
lath comes down, we’ve got good men to put those
headers up. We have good men ready to renovate
and make it happen. That’s why I say to you today,
what the Grand Master has made his theme Aim high.
Be all you can be as a lodge, as a man as a Mason.

Never forget what it is like to come in that door, kneel
in someone else’s pajamas and say, ‘My faith is in
God. My trust is in God.’ You have all done it. If that
isn’t the first step in Masonry, I don’t know what is.