Sunday, November
28, 2021
ONLY A VAPOR!
James 4:14
14 Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your
life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth
away.
Yet another birthday has come to me. In 1946, today was Thanksgiving Day. My arrival interrupted
the festive feasting of the doctor as well as my mother but Oneida, Tennessee gained
another son.
It seems like only yesterday I was a shirtless barefoot boy, playing with an old alarm clock in
the black dirt in front of a rented house in Cincinnati. One could smell the
meat packing house not too far away and the noise of the city was a curious mixture
of honking horns, and the rumble of machinery. I would play all day and then turn
the bathwater into muck. Momma would dry my kid-blond hair with a towel and
then off to bed.
A moment later I was a teen in a football uniform and then a cap and gown. Suddenly
I’m a young man working in the parts cage at the Coca-Cola Company with an uneasy
restlessness that later defined itself as a call from God upon my life.
Like a blur I’m kneeling in the tabernacle at the Ohio youth camp after hearing Dr.
David Cavin. Now I’m standing in line registering for classes at
Fifty-three years of
ministry, and church and family are still the core of
my life. The memory of those years swirls about in a cyclone of places and
faces. I sort them like a school librarian after a middle school research
group. It is satisfaction in a strange blend. Now it is sunset, and the colors
are magnificent. A wonderful product of older age is the evaporation of the
need to impress or please others. I’m much more comfortable with who I am.
Dear Lord, teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts
unto wisdom. AMEN
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