Friday, November 25, 2011

Held Up For the World To Gloat

Good Friday morning! Whew, I have waded through the "Black Friday" e-mails and sent them where they belong. One small victory to start the day! For those of you already out enduring the lines and traffic, you have my sympathy. Practice your patience and lovingkindness this morning! How did your Thanksgiving feast go yesterday? I couldn't eat the evening meal. There just didn't seem to be a need for it. Sounds like what the Thanksgiving feast is supposed to do. My thanks also to Ric and Cheryl for hosting the feast this year. I saw some others going on around my neighborhood too. Other neighbors had obviously gone somewhere to share Thanksgiving dinner and perhaps the traditional football games. Did you see our famous Husker alum get ejected in the Detroit-Green Bay game? Not a good thing at all.

Whether his actions have been misinterpreted as he claims, or the result of his losing control of his emotions, we can take a lesson from that. The players in the NFL are trained to play with emotion and use emotion. However, this can backfire when emotions get out of control. Large, physically-powerful men can do a lot of damage even to each other out on the football field, let alone what might happen if you or I wandered out onto the playing area. How does one control his or her emotions before we do damage to another person?

The first answer that we can all use and should use is prayer. We must pray for control of our own emotions. Self-control is one of the fruits of the Spirit listed in Galatians. We can also pray for others, especially our brothers and sisters in Christ. Now if someone is calling on 'the man upstairs' as our football player did yesterday, then I very much want to pray for him. As Christians we can make mistakes in ways the world loves to point out and hold up to gloat over. It is sometimes amusing and sometimes tragic that Christians are expected to model perfect moral behavior at all times, and yet we are the ones who have admitted before the cross of Jesus that we are sinners and need the grace of God! Pray earnestly for our brothers and sisters in Christ. You never know when one of us might be next in line to make a mistake in front of the world.

Enjoy the holiday weekend! Bucky

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