Have you ever been so tired your eyeballs hurt? Well, me neither, but Mary and I are close. Moving is character building. There's little left to say good about it, actually. Oh, not the move itself, not the new home which we find to be the best house we've ever lived in and the neatest little town and incredibly new churches I can't wait to preach in.
But boxes, clothes I didn't realize I had any longer, traumatized pets who still don't get the whole thing and are following us around like lemmings to the death.
I got to thinking about the advice Jesus gave us about moving. Try this on for size: "After the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, 'the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. God! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Do not take a purse of bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.'"
Get all that? Don't take your stuff. I suspect He's saying don't collect stuff either. Don't keep that last bit of memory that means so much to you that you didn't realize you still had it. Don't horde. Don't do all that sort of stuff. Don't. Just don't.
David Rockefeller once said of stuff, "I am convinced that material things can contribute a lot to making one's life pleasant, but, basically, if you do not have very good friends and relatives who matter to you, life will be really empty and sad and material things cease to be important."
Seems about right. All the stuff in all the boxes in the world isn't worth the time spent one day with someone you truly love.
1 comment:
I was thinking about that verse in a sort of political-cultural sense: Many people want to cling to the past, often it's a "golden age" that never existed and now exists only in the imagination of memory. But when the future battles the past, the future always wins! So, even if we can't drag the past along with us, if we "travel light" we can go into the future without leaving the best parts of the past behind us. Hmmm. Well, I guess you see why I'm not a theologian or a philosopher or a poet! God bless you and yours Billy. You can't know how much I admire your resilience and your courage to go forward at all times. Surely it is a gift of God's Grace!
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