I got a message from God yesterday.  It must have been from Him.  It was posted on my Facebook page and said just as plainly as the nose on my face, “Message From God” right beside the bold print that said “God wants you to know…”.  One of my old friends seems to like the messages and posts them daily, so I get a message from God every day.

The only problem is, I’m pretty sure these messages never saw the inside of God’s Book.   They tend to be a lot like the horoscopes I used to read once in awhile in the newspaper.  All fluff and no pie.  Sorry.  It’s just that the image comes to mind of the “pie in the face” stunts that are popular today.  They’re not really pies; just a pie pan filled with whipped cream.  Give me a good old pie in the face like the “Three Stooges” or “Laurel and Hardy” used to throw.  That was pie!  At least, it looked like real pie to me.  But, as usual, I find I’m off following a rabbit trail.  What I’m trying to say is that if I’m to be hit in the face with a pie, make it pie.  Don’t use a bit of fake flavoring mixed with fake cream and tell me it was something it really wasn’t.

So, the message from God was really something repackaged to sound good, to tickle my ears and make me feel good.  It didn’t.  I’m looking for more.  And, it’s right there, in front of me.  It doesn’t always feel good, doesn’t always make me feel all gooey inside.  Sometimes, it even makes me sad or angry, but I know it’s the truth, the real pie…and I’ll take that over the saccharine-sweet fake fluff any day.

You know, I did get a message from God tonight.  I was watching Monday Night Football, well known for its lessons from our Creator.  Wes Welker took a pass from Tom Brady, his teammate on the New England Patriots, in a play starting on the one-foot line of the opposing team.  Mr. Welker ran the pass all the way to the other end-zone to score a touchdown.  At first, the announcers were excited, proclaiming that at ninety-nine yards, the play tied the record for the longest play from scrimmage in the books.  Before long though, they were actually a little cynical in their banter, realizing that it was a record held by countless teams, and one that could never be broken.  The laudable achievement was reduced to a footnote, nothing more than just another pass play, just another six points on the scoreboard.  Given the deprecatory way they were describing the play, one had to wonder if Mr. Welker, given the chance, would like to go back a few moments into the past and simply get fifteen or twenty yards on the play to shift his team out of the hole they were in.  Maybe that would have been more of an achievement.  It certainly didn’t seem as if he had accomplished anything earth-shattering with his ninety-nine yard streak down the field.

I’m pretty sure that the young man will gladly take the tie in the record books, regardless of how many other players he is sharing that honor with.  And, here’s where the message from God comes in.  Whatever the task, whatever anyone else has done with the same task in the past, we’re given the responsibility to do the job in front of us.  We don’t decide that because it won’t be the best or greatest, we’ll try something else.  We don’t desert our obligation because there is no glory to be gained in the achievement.  We stick to the chore and finish the job.

Okay, that was the fluff, my way of communicating the message.  Now here’s the pie, the real “message from God”:  Let us also lay aside every weight and the sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.  (Hebrews 12:1).  Years before God told His apostle to write that, he had another messenger who reminded us that “there is nothing new under the sun.”  Chances are, your task has been accomplished by someone before you, too.  Topping the record books isn’t the goal; finishing the job is.  Cross the goal line with your head held high, realizing that the glory was never intended to be ours anyway.

And seriously, if anyone is ever going to hit me in the face with a pie, could you make it coconut cream?  Turns out, just a little fluff makes the rest of the pie taste a little better sometimes.

“The truth is incontrovertible.  Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.”
“Winston Churchill~British orator and Prime Minister~1874-1965)

I glanced at the clarinet case which the young lady had set upon my counter top.  “It was fine when I put it away for the summer,” she averred.  I asked her what was wrong with it now.  “I don’t know!  It won’t play anything except a high-pitched squeak.”  Now, those of you who know clarinets, know that it is the best instrument in the band on which to play the high-pitched squeak.  If ever there was an instrument custom-built for sounding the high pitched squeak, the clarinet is it.  But, I can’t afford to get sidetracked here.  The young lady knew how to play a clarinet.  This one worked fine when it went into her closet in May, but now in September, it responded to her manipulations with a constant and unwelcome high-pitched squeak.

“Let’s take a look,” I said, opening the lid.  With a peremptory glance inside the case, I winced involuntarily.  All it took was a couple of seconds and I was sure of the cause of her problems.  Scattered around the black interior of the case was a whitish powder.  It was most prevalent right along the place where the pad cups rested in the case, leading me to the obvious conclusion that the young lady’s clarinet had been attacked by the larvae of bugs which feed on wool, the material which supplies the padding for most traditional clarinet pads.  Since the little critters love the dark and damp, a closet is prime real estate for them to find and make a feast of anything left there. I like to think that an instrument case left in a closet is very much like a luxury hotel placed in a highly popular vacation spot for these wool munchers.  If the dark and damp of your closet is good, then the darker and damper of the case is perfect!  The larvae often wreak the same kind of damage to your sweaters and suits in the warmer months too, in between times of heavy usage.  Technically, they are called “carpet beetles” and they are present in most homes.  While the adult stage of this little varmint is only ten to twenty days, the larval stage can be up to 370 days!  Just in case you were wondering, that’s the stage where they eat.  And eat.  And eat.  Whatever we leave in the dark damp places for them.

There was a day when I would have asked the young lady what her band director had expected from her in the way of practice over the summer months.  You see, if she had practiced the instrument regularly, the chances of damage like this would be miniscule.  The bugs (and therefore their larvae) hate light and will not stay in a location which is open to either sunlight or artificial light on a regular basis.  Just like the old joke that asks what it takes to get to Carnegie Hall, all it takes to avoid these voracious little pad crunchers is to practice, practice, practice.  Over the years though, I’ve become a bit more circumspect in my questioning of teenagers when it comes to embarrassing subjects, simply because I want them to feel comfortable coming back to me the next time they have a problem. Therefore, I speak of the bug’s damage in generic terms, plainly enough that she will get the point, but not so pointedly that her spirit is crushed and finds ways to avoid further contact with insensitive music shop proprietors in the future.

I will tell you today that the unvarnished truth is that the two hundred dollar repair job we will be doing on the young lady’s clarinet could have easily been avoided if she had done what she knew was expected of her.  It’s the kind of unvarnished truth we all need to remember daily.  It’s also the kind of truth which we forget frequently, simply because we don’t like to do the things we know are right for us to do.  If I do my bookwork daily, I don’t forget to pay my accounts.  But, I don’t…so I do.  If I do my repairs instead of spending time enjoying myself with social networking on the Internet, customers don’t come in angry because their instrument is still unusable after weeks of waiting.  But, I don’t…and they do.

Here’s the bottom line…Actions have consequences.  We may not see them immediately.  It is possible that we may not see them at all.  That doesn’t mean the consequences don’t occur.  I thought of this principle today when one of my grandsons left the area of the toy cupboard in haste.  He never realized that as he passed by, he bumped the step stool which stands against the wall in that room.  It fell over with a resounding crash, but he was already outside, demanding a ride on the back of the tricycle his brother was pedaling down the sidewalk.  Since he didn’t hear or see the crash, does that mean that he didn’t cause it?  Of course not!  Just because we don’t see the results of our unthinking actions (or inaction), they still occur and we are still responsible.

The implications of this lesson are legion and I can’t begin to enumerate all of them.  I’m not even going to try.  You’ll know best how to apply the lesson if you decide to take it to heart.  Of course, if you need help with the bugs, I’ll be glad to help.  I’ll even try to bite my tongue about the cause.  Since I’ve got an infestation of my own, maybe we can work to shine the light on the problems together.

“I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it.  Instead, I do what I hate.”
(Romans 7:15~New Living Translation)

It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong.”
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow~American poet~1807-1882)

The days shorten and the nights are growing chilly.  Somewhere, far away, the North Wind is marshaling its various breezes and gales to start blowing away the leaves and the sunshine, leaving us with naught but bare trees and bleak skies.  I have imagined that I’m looking forward to cold weather, but the first two or three days will probably be my limit.  After that, my place will be by the fire soaking up the barely adequate warmth and dreaming of hot Summer afternoons.  It seems just yesterday that I was bemoaning the extreme heat of the long, simmering season that was Summer for us this year.  We may even see a few more of those sultry, steamy days before Fall is here in full force, but the mind is already turning to the harbingers of a dreary season still to come.

If you had stopped reading at the paragraph break above, you might have gone away thinking that I was once again showing my disdain for the cold dreary months that make up that season we call Winter.  And, you would be partially right.  But today my mind has been captured by thoughts of the passing of time.  Several divergent occurrences have dragged my spirit to take a peek forward to that time which we are programmed to fight with everything that is in us.  From the moment we become adults…No, even before that…as teenagers, we are warned that old age is a curse.  We taunt the caricature of senility and secretly fear the reality of that dreaded condition.  Strong, healthy bodies are worshiped, while the crippled and decrepit are shunned.  Hair is a thing of glory, the talisman of our self-expression, and baldness and gray hair are the subject of jokes and derision.  The inevitability of old-age and the toll it will take on body and mind are pushed as far away from our erstwhile immortal minds as possible.  Well, over the last few days, some subtle messages have been arriving, each in different costume, but all with the same communication for me:  If it hasn’t taken place yet (and I don’t think it has), the season is beginning to change.  Summer is past, the Autumn is fast approaching.  And if Autumn is in the air, can Winter be far behind? 

An old friend, himself approaching the same season as I, reminded me gently this week that, in spite of a good time of worship at church on Sunday, it might be time to pass the baton on to the younger generation.  I have thought this for some time now and his willingness to speak the truth only serves to reinforce the resolve to push more quickly toward the hand-off point.  And, over the past few weeks, the body has reminded me in several ways that it doesn’t work quite as well as it once did, taking longer to recover from setbacks.  Before you know it, I’ll be sitting around the table with the other oldsters, having the “organ recitals” for which that generation is becoming famous.  You know, the woes of the kidneys, and heart, and lungs, and a few we don’t want to discuss here at all.  Aches and pains will be completely acceptable subjects of conversation for parties and mealtime alike.

The knockout blow, the one that dragged my mind to the serious contemplation of the process of growing old, arrived in the mail today.  My name and address plastered clearly on the envelope (No “occupant” or “to our friend at:”), the window normally reserved for a return address proclaims for all the world to read: “SENIOR BENEFITS DEPARTMENT”.  As if that weren’t enough, the line under that declares just as brazenly: “TIME SENSITIVE MATERIAL”.  I will admit to being a bit amused at the “senior benefits” line, but the “time sensitive” blurb brought pause to my usually dismissive attitude toward becoming old.

Time sensitive?  What does that mean?  Quite obviously, from my normal, skeptical perspective, one would assume that the offer this organization wishes to extend to me is one which will expire soon.  Oh!  Expire isn’t such a good word to use when broaching this subject, is it?  It does drive home the point though, doesn’t it? 

Time has a way of moving inexorably forward, unlike we fickle humans.  Oh, we all develop physically and then grow older steadily, but our maturity level follows a somewhat different pattern.  Okay…mine does anyway.  All of my life, periods of progress have been interrupted, sometimes sporadically, sometimes frequently, by times of stagnation and even a few intervals of regression.  My childish behavior demonstrates itself in more sophisticated ways, but it is childish behavior nonetheless.  At fifty-some years of age, my response to not getting my way still matches that of my two-almost-three year old granddaughter frequently.  The note on the piece of mail delivered to me today serves as a stark reminder that the time left to finish growing up is becoming shorter constantly. 

Seasons change.  The world keeps turning from one year to the next, from one age to another.  Nothing we will do can stop that.  I’m not unhappy with the process.  I just hope that the batons I am going to pass on to the next runners are worth their trouble to carry.  I’m pretty sure there’s still time to work on that.  I trust that it will be so.

Would you run alongside me for awhile?  My knee hurts a little.  And, I’ve got a little pain in my shoulder when I turn like this…

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child; I thought like a child; I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I put childish things behind me.”
(I Corinthians 13:11~NIV)

I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago,
and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet and voices at the door. 
(J.R.R. Tolkien~British author and educator~1892-1973)