By Dr. Ted Baehr

There is a banquet in heaven with a special place reserved for those who know Him and love Him, as we know because Jesus told us so. This year many of the good guys from the Golden Age of Hollywood have gone ahead of us to join the festivities. We know that there is rejoicing and probably a lot of wonderful conversations with their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who has wiped away all their tears.

Some of the good guys are very well-known, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Jimmy Stewart. Others were very well-known in their time, too and my father, Bob "Tex" Allen, the original Texas Ranger, ranks among them, having won a Box Office award for his lead in "Love Me Forever" and rated next to Tim McCoy with his western series that still airs on Turner Network Television.

Regrettably, we live in a cynical age which has drifted away from good and evil, as Nietzsche told us it would, when we forgot God. So, we look back at that Golden Era and sometimes don’t realize that these men not only manifested virtue on the screen, but also in their lives off the screen.

A great rider and roper, my father was born in 1906 when the cowboys still existed, before the last U.S. Cavalry battles with the Comanches and Apaches from 1910 to 1912. And, unlike the portrait painted in today’s movies, I remember the stories from those old timers who said that in the Old West, when one was in a world where death was so close and danger was just around the corner, you lived in awe of God. Therefore, these real cowboys were good guys who wore high white hats and didn’t curse, who kept their word, and who manifested love and compassion.

In his personal life, my father manifested so much integrity, virtue and compassion that his example helped me to know God the Father, and the truth of Jesus Christ. Among other wonderful virtues, he was a mentor and a friend, giving and decent, full of kindness and grace. Rudeness and crudeness so shocked him that I am relieved that he has gone on to glory before we expose the degradation of our government and the officials who act like rude barbarians and hooligans.

It is hard for us to remember, but there was a Golden Age. There were those who tried to live by standards. Perhaps if we truly love them, we can tell the truth of their stories instead of dragging those stories into the filth of our Freudian decadence. If we love them, we can try to emulate the virtue that so easily and so well suited them.

It is a legacy worth considering….