A Beloved Crackpot? - April 11, 2011

Uh-ohhh, the intrusion has begun. Yes, it's a good Monday morning and the morning sun has reached the first screen on my computer. That means that spring is moving on and summer will be here one day. We look forward to the changing of the seasons and it is interesting that Jesus also used this as an illustration of his second coming. Whatever time of the year it is, we always have another season to look for. That's a good thing because I find that a couple of the seasons are just long enough for me to get really tired of each one. By the end of July, I'm usually quite ready for the heat of summer to give way to fall, and in September or perhaps October I get my wish... most of the time; as winter moves on into May, I am ready for spring and sometimes we don't have any snow in May. Out here on the high plains we usually get a month of spring around late May and into June-ish, and then we endure the hot summer. Winter is often from November to May and comes anytime after our 3 weeks of autumn. But the seasons do change each year. Why am I thinking about all of this? The house was really cold this morning and we are nearing the middle of April. The seasons are a bit relative to our position on the Earth and the year. Age is relative too, and I speak not of the approach of my sister's birthday here! Did someone mention 45 at any time? In the Reader's Digest this month, I see that the so-called baby boomers are saying that old age starts at 72 now. Back in the day old age used to start much earlier, say at 60 or so, but the times have changed it seems. Still, like our seasons, the next birthday or old age, if you qualify, will arrive on or near the day it is due. If you want to treat your next birthday's date of arrival as kind of optional like our seasons then by all means do so. Skip a year or two if you want and say that you are not quite 60 or so. Time is kind of optional that way too. Almost everyone who has ever learned about time zones and fast airplanes has arrived at the conclusion that if you just had the fuel and jet to fly fast enough to the west, you could gain days or reverse time or some such thing. You may have seen this in that old Superman movie. Unfortunately, if you take off and fly really, really fast for two days and land back at home, you will have flown for two days and we'll be here two days later to greet you along with the rest of the world. If you want we'll even let you add pages to your calendar and play with your watch, but if you don't mind we'll just keep marking off the same old days on our calendar. Each of us can say that the year is 1905, that the season is summer, and that we are 29 years old today and getting younger with each passing day. Not that anyone will believe us if we say that, but we can say it. The world looks at us in much the same way when we tell them that Jesus is coming again soon. In fact, we might be accepted as just one of the world's beloved crackpots if we claimed to be getting younger each day through using a backward calendar. Try to claim that Jesus will come soon though and the world holds up the hand and says, "Oh, you're one of them..." I heard a news report on NPR today about the arrest of Christians in China. It seems that repression is still going on over there, and we should not be surprised at that. Communist governments are famously, or infamously, atheistic and have always been quick to suppress Christianity with particular zeal. The news of the arrests brought it back to me that I need to be praying often and fervently for my brothers and sisters in Christ all over the world. The world may laugh at us when we say that Jesus is coming soon, but the signs that our Lord spoke of are showing up each day in the news. Have a great new week in Christ! Bucky