1. The future belongs to those who will work for it.
2. The best thing you can spend on your children is time.
3. The only thing left after fire is the stuff you gave away. –Nan Snider
4. Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you would have preferred to talk.
5. A ship is safe in the harbor, but that isn’t what ships were built for.
The first Don’t Walk sign began operation on this date in 1952. 🙂
Why not Date?
Of course, God must have had some reason for causing us to be male and female, yet also programming us to hesitate, to want to do it right, to hate divorce just as He does. What gives?
God set up the whole marriage relationship as a picture, a sort of parable, of perfection in relationship. You have to admit, when male/female relationships are going right, it can be heavenly, right? And when it all goes south, well . . .
Facts are, God is all about loving relationship. He says He IS love. He is a relationship. Love is everything. Love is all you need. And almost every problem on earth is a relationship problem.
Marriage is so important to God. He set up everything in His kingdom with the idea in mind of it being like a marriage. (Or maybe marriage is like His kingdom?) In fact, in all of His creation, out of all the things He created, there was only one thing He said was not good: That man should be alone, single. Man could never picture Heavenly things if He had no counterpart, no one to love, no one to become one with and be fruitful with.
But what is dating? Is it a loving thing? Or is it using someone just to have a good time? Or is it pretending to be married? Are we fools?
The Bible speaks of only two types of relationships between unmarried, non-familial men and women. One is betrothal. The other is over-anxious, questionable men hanging around loose women.
Guess which one we practice these days?
Humans have been practicing dating on a large scale for around, 50 to 75 years. Before that, no one dated. Some snuck out, but that was sneaking out; it wasn’t dating.
The very idea of two unmarried people spending any time together, alone, was unthinkable to most people, once upon a time.
Why? At least for three reasons.
And there was a time, not so long ago, when all people heeded this universal idea, whether they liked it or not. While there always have been a few out-of-wedlock babies, they were few, just enough to soften the blow of infertility for other people. And people hid the trouble as much as possible. And they were regretful.
Why is marriage universal?
A better question might be, why did God build this program into all people? It is because His Son is a Bridegroom, waiting for a pure bride.
We had another cat, once. It was fond of hunting and spent long days away, causing us to never-mind when it was gone. We reasoned that the Ma cat was teaching it to hunt and it came and went when she did. The Ma cat often spent time away, was not altogether tame, in fact.
We always called this cat “the other cat” because it so resembled Black Jack that we had trouble telling them apart. It was not Black Jack, though, did not have Jack’s and Earl’s hilarious dominance gene.
The Other Cat always held back, if there was a tussle for the food dish. It usually did not prefer petting and seemed somewhat afraid of touch, in general. It ate and hung around with its siblings, but was the odd man out and didn’t seem to care.
I’ve known people like this, too. With people, long ago, we used the term “wallflower”, indicating the loner, the shy one who held back. I remember a classmate who hung around like The Other Cat. Her short hair had transformed nearly into a helmet with hairspray. She wore beige makeup all over her face, including beige lipstick, and didn’t wipe the excess off her eyebrows, which made her face pale and featureless, as if she were about to pass out. Like many popular girls, she sewed her own clothes, but they were—I don’t know—somehow blank-looking. Maybe color hurt her eyes, or something. She probably bathed every Saturday, but she often glistened with the need for a midweek dunking.
She never arrived first and always took the leftover seat. She never spoke much—only if called upon in class. She offered correct but lifeless answers, parroting the textbook but seeming unable to think aloud. When, at the bell, others bolted with gusto from the classroom, she gathered books with limp hands and slipped out onto the fringes of the hallway melee.
No one flattened her, which, now that I think about it, amazes me. Yet, this, too, adds to her persona: A collision, at least, would have proved she existed.
No one took offense at her. Sometimes the kind girls reached out to her, but no one kept it up. Her wan smiles hardly rewarded us enough and we were too young and untrained to care deeply. Boys would walk around her, embarrassed to make eye contact, but never insinuating the ridiculous remarks they saved for targeted girls.
I wonder about her, now. Now that I care about the downtrodden, now that I invest time to draw women out of themselves, I wonder about her home life. Did her parents encourage her? Did they abuse her?
She was absent from our 40th reunion . . .
Our gray cat, Earl Grey, has a big brother that is mostly black, and is the alpha-cat. We call him Black Jack.They are gorgeous, almost identical, except Earl is paler.
Jack has devoted himself to developing his dominance of our property during Earl’s recent trip abroad. With Earl’s return, Jack has sulked at our joyfully cuddling his little brother.
You know, the original Prodigal had an older brother. The older brother never strayed, never wavered in his loyalty to the family agenda.
It was just an agenda though, that held his loyalty. The family, itself, never entered his mind, we might think, from reading the Parable. He stayed home, labored diligently, amassed wealth, and never even asked for a small bit of food for a party with his friends.
Had he no time, at all, for people? Was the agenda so vitally important that he never enjoyed one perk, in all that time?
I imagine a stressed and angry man, telling himself that since Junior decided to bolt, all the work fell on him.
I imagine him using a self-imposed workload to excuse anger so abundant and so freely spent, that his few friends cared little for him.
I imagine he worked so hard, partly, because he would never have to share the results.
I imagine he gloried in all he was building for Dad—and that he would inherit.
In the midst of his wealth and strength, he flirted with self-pity, a serious weakness. Self-pity can cause you to forget the important things. It can cause you to forget to feel sad when your brother goes missing and to forget your dad’s sadness. It can cause you to think wealth is most important, to glory in wealth, to devote your life to self-wealth, self-pampering, and self-excusing.
It can cause you to be glad Junior is gone and to act messed up if he returns.
Both brothers suffered from the same problem: self. The younger spent everything on self-gratification. The older saved everything for self-gratification. Neither used wisdom, thought of Dad, nor were good sons.
The one who left had decided he would return as a servant, would devote the rest of his time to building Dad’s and Bubba’s wealth. Dad proved his righteous joy and reinstated Junior, but Junior would happily have gone without the robe, ring, and sandals.
He would have been satisfied to wash his brother’s feet, instead.
He would have been satisfied to work the rest of his life building up his brother’s “self”, instead of his own.
I can relate to Junior. Junior returned, physically and emotionally but we have no assurance that Bubba ever did return, emotionally. I’m guessing that from that time on, Junior was all the way home, and Dad knew it.
And Bubba had clean feet, but not much else.
Shout with joy to God, all the earth!
Sing the glory of his name;
make his praise glorious!
Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!
So great is your power
that your enemies cringe before you.
All the earth bows down to you;
they sing praise to you,
they sing praise to your name.”
Psalm 66:1-4
1. At first I believed I could. Then I believed I couldn’t. I was right both times.
2. If you removed the rocks, the brook would lose its song.
3. If your mind should go blank, don’t forget to turn off the sound.
4. One thing you can give and still keep is your word.
5. We all face a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.
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