Tax Day (not!) - April 15, 2011

Good Friday morning! I would say something about happy Tax Day, but some holiday out in Washington, (that's D.C.) has moved Tax Day to Monday, which is a rather mean thing to do to folks on a Monday. The other problem is that most of us don't consider a Tax Day as worthy of any kind of celebration. We are under a high wind warning today and of course it is also our trash day, which means that I will be keeping an eye on the trash bins around here so that we don't have a minor environmental disaster in the neighborhood. Did you see that the USPS took an image from the replica Statue of Liberty out in Vegas instead of the real one for their Liberty stamps? I guess the New York folks are a little miffed over that one, but other folks (like in Las Vegas) are delighted. Sitting here in Nebraska... meh, just something that I won't worry about. That sounds like a good thing to implement - a worry filter. I worry about too many things, and there is just the slightest possibility that I am not the only one guilty of this. I figured that out by the fact that Jesus commanded us not to worry about what we will eat or wear in the Bible. In a way the Bible is God's personal message to me and I strive to apply the commands of Jesus to my life. However, the Bible is also a personal message from God to Joe, Bob, Fred, Sheila, Jane, Tony, Edmund, Karen, Clementine... and everyone else who has ever lived since the Word of God was given. That tells me that some of you have this worry problem too. "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?" (Matt 6:25) But it's so easy to worry! Yes, that is true, but I have noticed that pretty much everything Jesus told us to do is harder than not doing it, and everything he told us not to do comes more naturally than saying no to it. Welcome to the club, that is what we know as the lust of the flesh, or the sin nature, or original sin, or the mire, or many other names, some more technically correct than others. Paul reminded us that we would struggle with this all of our lives, but that we no longer are enslaved to this tendency. Worry comes easily, but we don't have to wallow in it. Bucky