Flying Out! - October 14, 2009

A hearty g'day mates, from the damp fields of Minnesota! Yes, once more we have a wet, drizzly, rainy, foggy, kind of morning here with patches of snow still on the ground and cold in the air. High plains of Nebraska, you say? Well, ya could've fooled me; our weather has not been what one would call arid these days and winter has already made a strong appearance. Sometimes things (weather, people, animals...) don't act the way we expect them to act. Sometimes things return to the way they were some years ago. What if you returned to a long ago dwelling place and met an old acquaintance who spoke with you a bit and then declared, "you're just the same as you were!"?

To me that might be quite disappointing. Jesus has been working on me for some years now; I would hate to think that all of His work is not apparent to the casual observer. However, a couple of things can work on that impression. Memory tends to change with us as we grow older. The things we remember from way back in the day will not be remembered exactly the same way by others. Events we find distressing because of what we said or did back then may not even be remembered by the other person involved. People also don't always want us to change. They have filed us in a pigeonhole as a certain type of person; and they would rather we didn't take wing and fly out of our little slot in their file of people from back in the day.

In a conversation via e-mail with some of the old gang from college (the first time around) some of the guys were commenting/teasing one of the group who had become a follower of Christ, I never saw a response from him so he may not have read the posts about him. The other extreme of the pigeonhole reminiscence is to find that a person has flown so far out of his former pigeonhole that scorn results. People get uncomfortable with major life changes, such as Jesus makes in us, and either want nothing more to do with us or laugh scornfully at our new state of being. Sometimes old friends will fall away from the circumstances of life, but other times they will flee with that scornful laugh we often hear in showing our faith to the world. Remember that in this new life in Christ we seek only to impress our Lord Jesus. The opinion of the world is now just noise.

Have a wonderful new day in Christ!

Bucky