Musings Part 6

Terminal

It was one of those rare gentle cerulean days in London that cause the British to flee the confines of being indoors and take in expansive lung-fulls of fresh air in the invigorating outdoor world. As it so happens, I planned to make use of this fine benevolent air to fly five thousand miles west to my home in the Eastern United States. For one who sees flying as an uncertain gamble at best, I figured a flight starting out in such bucolic circumstances could only end well. I took time to count my blessings at drawing such a fine day for flying, if I actually got to fly.

Several of the North American airlines were on strike this particular Saturday. It seems all the stranded refugees from these carriers had ended up in the British Airways terminal to compete for a few exceedingly rare seats. As I waited in an anxiety-inducing pedestrian gridlock, the two hours of margin I had allowed myself soon became perilously reduced to fifteen minutes. I had visions of missing flight #2196 and forfeiting my ticket; joining the growing ranks of stranded refugees, and being a good bit poorer for the experience.

While watching time race by as the crowds stood still, I witnessed something at least as unsettling as severe turbulence near a level-five thunder storm or missing my flight. In the line of people next to me a faceless woman with her back to me, faced her husband as he loudly berated her before an audience of hundreds. Jennifer was castigated by this over-bearing monster who pretended to be all knowing and all wise. Her spirit wilted at least as much as mine does when I face the haunting weightlessness that comes in severe clear air turbulence. I watched her posture slump as he systematically dismantled her self-esteem there in front of us. He went on and on about what he viewed as a major behavioral quirk that was in reality utterly trivial.

I could take comfort in knowing that the anxiety produced by air turbulence ends the moment the landing gear touch down safely at the far end of a long journey. For Jennifer, landing at the far end probably did not offer promise of respite from her tormentor. The closed doors of her home at the far end most likely represented a prison in which her spirit would feel crushed and lifeless. How I would like to have been able to deliver Jennifer from her terrible trial. All I could do was pray for her.

Moments later I learned that deliverance can come in the twinkling of an eye with no warning. After all I still had my own challenge; getting onto a plane that was close to departure with hundreds of unmoving people between me and passage home. Something that struck me as miraculous occurred.

A uniformed man came out of nowhere, came up to me and asked me if I was going to Charlotte. I told him that had been my hope but I was now uncertain if I would be able to accomplish this. He said "Follow me." He took me around the other side of the terminal, bypassing this huge crush of humanity, and instructed me to wait in a queue of two people and told me that I would soon be taken care of. Three times in the next moments I was asked by wandering attendants if I was going to Charlotte. Answering affirmatively, I was reassured I would be taken care. When I got to the counter in a few minutes I commented on the crowds and the fact the flights would be oppressively full, the gracious woman checking me in said "It doesn't really matter, we are going to bump you up into first class." In wonderment I savored my incredible good fortune. Not only would I make my flight, I would spend ten hours in a fine recliner with several stewards doting on me.

I realized that something remarkable had happened for my benefit in which I had played no part; something for which I could offer no rational explanation. For certain, I did not have a cardboard on my back saying "Ride wanted to Charlotte, NC, USA." The man from nowhere did not seek out any others in that huge crowd. I have no understanding of why the airline put me in first class when I had a confirmed seat in the coach section for more than three months. And the air was gentle and smooth for the ten hours I was in that plane.

It occurs to me that perhaps someone was praying for me as I was making my journey home. I have the great fortune of having several faithful saints who pray for me every day, without fail. It dawned on me that I could offer Jennifer the vast gift of prayer. Perhaps, as a result, without warning or expectation, the twin miracles of healing for her estranged relationship and her crushed spirit will arise in her life, much the way a vermillion sunrise drives away the darkness of night. It just might be that Jennifer could have an encounter with the Numinous that would reignite the hopes and dreams she had for her future, before they were extinguished in the airless void of abuse.

In the London terminal which we shared that recent Saturday morning, we could only go to places accessible by jet turbine and airfoil. Yet, there's another terminal accessible only through prayer and from that terminal it's possible to enter into the very Kingdom of God. I hope, and pray, that I can see Jennifer, and her husband, there one day. For those who believe, there is the promise of a city of gold where there is no night and no tears. In such a place, Jennifer's spirit can only soar.

"Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore, comfort one another with these words."


Last Crew

For seven years I have lived in a small South Carolina town that has some of the same monuments of municipal waste that are to be found in the largest of American cities, abandoned school buildings. It is a widespread belief in America that the key to improvements in the quality of education is the construction of new high-profile high-tech facilities, often in the safety of the suburbs.

Somewhere long ago I got the idea that successful learning came from having a well-trained teacher with a vision and excitement for teaching who could arouse a thirst for learning in their students. I went to perfectly ordinary public schools in Los Angeles County in rather old non-descript buildings and got a perfectly splendid education that stood me in good stead through some of the most challenging of American universities. I simply can't imagine that windowless rooms with sterile florescent lighting and hermetically sealed environments would have been more conducive to my learning than those old classrooms with their tall windows, brilliant sunshine, and the breezes rustling the blinds.

The grandest old brick school buildings with their clock towers and architectural distinctiveness have long since been reduced to fading images on curling black and white photographs. Only one older building still clings to survival in my current place of residence. True, it has been abandoned for seven years and the weather allowed to destroyed its once magnificent maple gymnasium floor, but the building's structure is essentially intact.

This morning a number of us had the opportunity to walk through the entirety of this once-grand school which seems to have been caught in some kind of cosmic time warp. Typewriters, desks, sewing machines, bulletin boards, and chalk boards once in daily use are now sublimating under the weight of decades of dust, peeling paint, and water damage. The school is so very much like the ones I was educated in; same stucco walls, same light fixtures, same ceiling tiles, same blinds. Strolling through that sad building was a bit like seeing my childhood thrown away as no longer having any value. Curiously, most of the grand universities and private academies in Europe are housed in buildings centuries older than this forlorn school I visited today. All the schools I have visited in Mexico, South America, or Asia have been house in far inferior buildings to the one I just came from down the street.

It seems the county is now making a modest attempt to salvage the structure and allow various non-profit agencies to take over one or more rooms and pay for renovations to them and make on-going use of them. As president of the local community theater I was interested in determining if the school could be used for a theater and craft facility. In the course of our wanderings, we passed through the cafeteria and kitchen. Both have long since become archives for all the cast off and abandoned kitchen equipment of the entire school district. I wondered about the number of schools in the world that have no kitchens, no cafeterias, no food to cook, no real buildings. Yet, a grand facility here has been abandoned as obsolete and millions of dollars in equipment, furniture and materials have been allowed to begin the long journey back to dust and iron oxide.

In the midst of all the culinary detritus of the Anderson County school district I found a treasure of great archaeologic value. I suspect it would stand as a memorial to a society that is no more. While surveying the kitchens I noticed a pillar between two large stoves that got my undivided attention. On it were the names of all the twenty-some kitchen workers who had worked the last warm day in the life of this now cold desolate kitchen, written in myriad shades of now-faded felt marker. Above them was the phrase "last crew."

I slipped into a covert revere, pretending to pay attention to the city and county officials around me. I privately wondered how much laughter had gone on in that kitchen over the years; who the people were that fed a school family of hundreds each day. I speculated how many kids had been fed a hot meal by that crew during the fifty years this kitchen was in service. I marveled at the esprit de corps that would have developed between those workers after decades of shared service to the next generation. I puzzled about those in the next generation that threw away their school.

At one time job security was a given in America. One can only speculate, but I suspect those kitchen workers in the old McCants Middle School enjoyed decades of job security. IBM was legendary for having never let an employee go in a lay-off. It has now purged more than two hundred thousand employees. Personnel departments are now called Human Resources departments. Humans are assets to be bought, sold, and discarded as needed, just as are corporations bought up in hostile take overs. Job security has gone the route of our once-grand school buildings.

Much has been written about the loss of loyalty among workers who are more motivated by salary than most any other factor. It is difficult to fault workers for a lack of loyalty when it is quite apparent that workers are retained only at the convenience of management, to be summarily dismissed when expedient. Employee needs for top-down loyalty, security, and certainty do not enter into the decision trees used by management. Earnings per share is a ruthless measure of success that has no room for humane considerations. Countless factories have been shuttered and entire cities turned into ghost towns because earnings per share demanded the supreme sacrifice on the part of workers and their communities; enriching stock holders and management while impoverishing those that created the profits in the first place.

Those twenty-some kitchen workers have their names scrawled on a pillar of concrete and plaster but as time passes they will fade from view all together. Even names deeply carved into tombstones erode into oblivion, given sufficient time. Throughout much of recorded history mankind has heard promise of another place where names are written indelibly, legible for all eternity. Those who have their names inscribed here have ultimate top-down loyalty from the One Who paid the ultimate price to make a contract with them for the gift of Eternal Life. I can only hope and pray that those kitchen workers have found true security by having their names written somewhere else besides on that pillar.

"He who overcomes shall thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father, and before His angels."


Maslow's Need Hierarchy Revisited

Millions of people around the world now face the full-time daunting task of finding enough calories from any source to merely survive. Many millions will fail at this task and will simply pass into eternity unremembered. It is reported that more than forty-four million Russians have slipped into poverty, as calculated by the severest of measures. It's expected that more than one hundred million Indonesians will slip into the financial abyss this year alone. For these people, needs consciousness rarely rises above survival and safety issues. That some people would be pre-occupied with belonging, meaning, and self-actualization needs rather than survival might be viewed as an impossible joke in much of the world.

Yet, these are precisely the needs that I am pre-occupied with, most of the time. I spend essentially no time at all looking for food and perhaps .5% of my income to buy it. I work little more than an hour per month to earn the money needed to purchase food for thirty days. Acquisition of food has been a non-issue for me for many years.

It seems it's a non-issue for those I work with, as much of the food placed in the shared refrigerator is simply allowed to transform itself into mysterious new shapes and colors, mostly blues and greens. A sacred gift from the universe is then simply discarded as just more American waste. Some estimates indicate only half the food in America is ever actually consumed. Perversely, many Americans are dying from diseases of obesity while enough food is discarded to feed hundreds of millions, many of whom are dying each year from diseases of malnutrition.

For three days recently I could be found lying on my bed in a pyretic stupor after catching some mysterious contagion during an eleven-hour trans-Atlantic plane ride. When I thought of where the people on the plane came from, I shuddered. I could well have been targeted by one of those newly emerging tropical monster bugs that has a ninety percent kill rate in seven days. The affliction that plagued me felt like a combination of Dengue Fever and cholera. For certain, I was no longer concerned with belonging, meaning, and self-actualization needs. I had joined ranks with the millions who wonder about merely making it through a day, surviving.

On the third day, in the late afternoon, despite careful rest, lots of fluids, and anti-pyretics, I was most concerned to find my temperature had climbed further to 102. I became nearly panicked when in a matter of another fifteen minutes it rose further to nearly 103. It soon seemed like the mercury was going to come squirting out the end of my glass harbinger of doom. Strangely, I did not feel especially hot or uncomfortable, aside from an impending sense of destruction. This made the whole thing even more unsettling to me.

I began to have unsavory imaginations about septic shock and occult abscesses leaking their poisons into my blood, encouraged by a tropical viral monster. I got terrorized at the idea of going to the hospital and having spinal taps, and who's knows what manner of other invasive tortures, in order to come up with a name for my unwelcome equatorial visitors. I called the Emergency Room and the triage nurse agreed my temperature was nearing a panic value and I might need to come in. I was now a full-fledged wimp.

An astounding thing then happened. A dear friend called from another state, just as I was in this fearful predicament, feeling compelled to pray for me. We had not spoken in nearly five months. Jan almost immediately launched into some kind of all-powerful supplication. I soon felt like I had been given a strong sedative; her rhythmic but earnest prayer profoundly soothing. During her petitions on my behalf, I kept a thermometer in my mouth, except to pop it out periodically to flick the mercury down, to see if this was really going to work. When she finished praying, my temperature was 98.5. I was dumbfounded. It has now stayed there for more than three weeks.

In my post-pyretic post-miracle state of contemplation I thought about what our true needs really are. During my feverous days I did not lack for any survival needs. I had a fine warm bed, abundant splendid food brought to me by attentive friends, plenty of clean safe water, access to good hospital care. But it could have gone the other way for me and I not survive. A very good friend of mine had his life and dreams snatched from him just last month by an unnamed viral monster that destroyed his lungs.

In my musings I realized that at some point in time I am going to square off with something that is going to win. The choicest foods, purest water, strongest medicines, and most skilled of physicians are going to fall short. I will die to this life. Extinction will become an ultimate reality. Or will it?

Maslow in his need hierarchy presented the concept that a higher- level need could only be addressed when all lower-level needs had been met. The need to belong can only be fulfilled when survival needs and safety needs have been met. The esteem and self-actualization needs can only be fulfilled when needs for belonging are met. Maslow would suggest that death would render belonging needs moot; there's no chance of survival needs being met.

It's our good fortune that Someone else had a different idea about this. He Who created the world before the foundations of time promised that those who belong to Him will live forever. By focusing on my need to belong to Him I can not only feel connected, I can live for eternity and feel good about myself as well. I can transcend survival issues for all time. Death here in this life becomes little more than a promotion to the highest ideals of self-actualization. I can't help but believe our needs to belong are more essential than our needs to eat, drink, and find safety.

"He shall dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be among them, and he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there shall no longer be any death, there shall no longer be any mourning or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away."


Spectral Wonders

Being what experts would call a 'visual learner' I've always been tantalized by brilliant colors. From my earliest years of life I readily remember those fleeting moments of wonder when I viewed the world through a colored bit of plastic, especially those intense ruby, sapphire, emerald, and gold index tabs on the dividers in my school notebooks. By putting one of these tabs right up to one eye while closing the other, I could change my world.

Even now, four decades later I can recall the warm glow that spread inside of me when looking at the ordinary in a different light. One year, the only illumination on the white-flocked Christmas tree came from an intense blue floodlight and for two weeks a depressing, often lifeless childhood was made magical. The transformation in my soul was much like that a grimy northern industrial city undergoes when the first gentle snowfall of the season covers the deep scars of hard living.

As one who found great fascination with intense colors, growing up in California in the 50s and 60s with cheap electricity was a happy quirk of fate. It was quite common for people to decorate their houses at night with colored flood lights. I often found refuge at night from alcoholism in the impossible red, blue, green, and yellow shadows cast by the fronds of California's ubiquitous palms and ferns.

My spectral fascination with vibrant hues never has faded. Today my living room and hall are painted museum red and the dining room is green. A bathroom is cobalt blue. The wine cellar is red and black and the other rooms are appropriately intense. I've had two houses with intense orange living rooms.

Realtors like to offer sage wisdom about selling houses which often includes recommendations to paint all the rooms a marketable drab off-white. Most builders specify off-drab paints. My present house with its fourteen stark white rooms stayed on the market for nearly a year, despite being priced far below fair value. I came along with my cans of impossible pigments and transformed the place before it was even mine. Three other houses on the street in my ultra-conservative southern town now have red living rooms and a couple of them have green dining rooms.

My first house with its orange living room and lime green and cobalt kitchen had five offers within three days of being listed, one of them for $5,000 more than the listing. The second house I owned had an orange living room. It sold in two days for twice what I paid for it.

I suspect that our relationship to color says something about our lives. When life is bleak and hopeless such as at times of death, divorce, and endless winter, we often wear black or grays. People living in the cold bleak climates of the United Kingdom often wear dark somber clothing. Many of the listless young people on both sides of the Atlantic can be found wearing black, gray, olive drab. Depressed people often don't even bother to dress.

Yet, the first warm days of spring and new Easter dresses reveal a vibrant palette of happy pastels. June weddings and summer outings in the park find women wearing brilliant equatorial colors. Fortunate souls living in the tropics were vivid color all year. The Christmas holidays are a cacophony of brilliance. The world takes on a spectral patina of holiday hopes for peace and good will.

All cultures relate strongly to these visual barometers of well being. Housing in cold northern Europe is often drab gray stone. Dwellings in the tropics are impossibly rich in their spectral diversity. Fashion guidelines even set boundaries as to when it is acceptable to wear certain colors and who can wear them. Militaries throughout the world have strict guidelines on the wearing of 'summer whites' and 'winter blues.' Violating these rules can bring ridicule and scorn. We all can recall jokes made about Florida polyester leisure suits. Woe if one wears white pants during the winter. One's colors can be telling.

Recently when in Bath, England, an older middle-aged man in an intense purple blazer with black pants gave an impromptu program of street theater. The theater we experienced turned out very differently than he planned. A group of about ten idle foul-mouthed teenagers with nothing to do, wearing black and gray pants and shirts twelve sizes too large, made repeated attempts to disrupt this man's performance on the sidewalks. As we moved about his several pre-selected venues, these slobs of the upcoming generation followed and continued their disruptive profanity. Amazingly, they keyed in on the fact this man was wearing purple. At one point they tried to incite street fights and one of the young women in our group went out to take on one of these sewer-mouthed street urchins. I could tell our thespian was shaking inside as he attempted to keep us occupied and these hooligans from ruining his show. Eventually the police were summoned.

Much of the color that should exist in a happy childhood was washed out of mine by parental alcohol and drug abuse. I suspect it was also true for these hooligans who couldn't stand the bright color in the lives of others. I saw the color drain out of the face of our street comedian when he was blasted by the profane insults hurled at him.

It's evident these lost youth have profound unresolved anger to sift through. I've had far more than my share of anger towards an alcoholic family to sort through and it's still a work in progress for me. Forgiveness is a hard thing to come by. These kids haven't gotten there yet and I suspect that our performer will have a hard time with forgiveness, especially if these kids torment him again. Forgiveness doesn't come easy for me either.

There is another who knows about color, torment and forgiveness to a degree I can scarcely imagine. For one who never had anything but the welfare of others at heart; for one who only dreamed of a world of peace and justice for all; for one who performed works of mercy and healing the likes of which had never been seen before or since, to be spit on, beaten, imprisoned, ridiculed in the streets, and given a common criminal's execution would be tough to handle. Would I be as understanding and tolerant of the anger, frustration, ignorance, and fear that drove such behavior on the part of my tormentors? Not likely.

For Jesus, the new snow melted and the needles fell off his tree. He had the ultimate abuse hurled at him and through Him. He endured the ultimate alienation and abandonment when forsaken by his father. He experienced the depth of scarring that exists in the soul of every one of us that has ever lived or will yet live. He felt it on his lacerated back and through his very bones. Yet, from the top of a Roman cross, he could say 'Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.' He showed His true colors.

Like me, Jesus and His Father see the world differently through brilliant color. I recall the impossible richness of the world when viewed through that ruby red index tab. But unlike me, it seems when the Father sees the world through blood red, he sees white.

"Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool."


Long Distance

Halloween is now the fastest growing holiday in America in terms of consumer spending. It's estimated that more than $4.5 billion was spent on decorations, pumpkins, candies, and plastic toys to make the day a ghostly success. It's rather haunting to see orange and black 'nativity' scenes populated with ghosts, goblins and other assorted spooks adorning lawns and porches. With the increasing secularization of the American culture and its anti-religious sentiment, it is conceivable that Halloween might eventually give Christmas a run for its money. After all, Halloween has not been declared a violation of the non-existent separation of church and state clause in the Constitution. Its legal to have ghosts, devils, spirits, skeletons, jack-o-lanterns, and the like in classrooms and on court house lawns, but forget about angels, saints, or anyone else of Heavenly origin showing up in a school near you.

Conservative fundamental churches have long offered Halloween alternatives where children dress as Bible characters and attend a social activity in the fellowship hall. My church does something rather different. Each year on the Sunday following Halloween we have a remembrance service in our small church. At this service attendees are invited to light a remembrance candle and to make whatever comments they wish about those who have died in the past year. From the small group of seventy-five participants present today, some twenty-five names were offered along with about forty minutes of heart-felt comments. It has, indeed, been a very bad year for us.

Because there were so many losses during the year, a second large dish of sand had been placed on the table as the original dish had become a blazing Dante's inferno with no room for further candles. Several people nearly set themselves on fire trying to reach down into that raging dish to place their memorial lights. As it turns out, only two candles were needed from the second dish.

After the remembrances were completed the service continued on with several meditations offered by assorted members. The myriad candles were allowed to burn. It was during this time I noticed a phenomenon that seared a principle into my awareness. It's sometimes better to make a solitary journey in life and be positioned to give full focus to a life call. Distractions from others can often burn away our resolve to follow our destiny.

The candles in that first dish collectively produced a lot of heat and a swirling convection thermal above them. In the turbulent air every last one of those candles burned away completely, leaving nothing but a tiny black wick in the sand. These candles would normally burn for some hours but under their crowded torrid conditions they burned away in fifteen to twenty minutes, leaving a desert of vaporized possibilities. The other dish, barely two feet away provided the object lesson. The two candles therein burned quietly and evenly. At the end of the service they continued to offer their brightness while the crowd in the other dish had gone cold and dark; their usefulness spent.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was Richard Bach's huge best-seller that described an uncertain seagull willing to break away from the expectations of the multitude and explore new possibilities. In his courageous solo, Jonathan learned of infinite new potentialities for himself. In wonderment he explored new realms and wondered at his former contentment. He also learned of the loneliness that can come from flying far above the crowd.

When Jesus submitted to the brutality of Roman executioners, he wasn't looking to boost chocolate egg sales each year at Easter. He did this to stamp our visas for a journey of the highest order. He promised us a level of abundance, contentment, and fullness that can scarcely be conceived in this life.

Yet His promises for abundant life start this side of the tombstone, not the other. There are infinite possibilities when we yield to God's call on our lives. He can and will empower each of us to do a distinctive unique life work. Some of these tasks will require a help mate. Others will not. We live in a culture where marriage and parenting are viewed as all-important destinations in life. Those that fail to tag these bases are held in the highest suspicion. As one nearing the half-century mark and having never married or sired children, I can speak from personal experience. I am viewed as damaged goods in my town and neighborhood.

Yet there are people who have left a vast imprint on humanity without benefit of marriage or children. Jesus, Mother Teresa, the apostle Paul, countless priests, and myriad missionaries made incalculable differences with their lives. They stayed focused and stayed the course. They steered clear of relational distractions, mortgages, consumer debt, mounds of dirty laundry, daily taxi service to soccer practice, yard work, car repairs, PTO meetings, addicted spouses, and conflicting goals. They left a long-lasting spiritual legacy that counts.

Nearly three decades of adult living tell me that these spiritual giants were really onto something. My encounters with hundreds of families and couples over the years suggest that maintaining marriage and family in a consumption-driven materialistic culture is exhausting work, even under the best of conditions. It is many a wife that has lamented to me her complete lack of any time whatsoever for herself; no time for prayer, volunteerism, writing. She's too busy running the minivan and enhancing the cash flow of countless merchants in the strip mall. Countless men feel driven to work two or three jobs to underwrite their family addictions to 'stuff.'

Paul, the man who ended up writing down the second half of the New Testament, made the point that people who stay single are more able to follow a spiritual life calling of the highest order. St. Paul points out that relationships and family require a whole lot of overhead and produce many encumbrances. For decades I was haunted by his commentary on marriage, resenting his thoughts on it; believing myself the cultural myth of my completeness coming only from a spouse. "But I want you to be free from concern. One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the woman who is unmarried and the Virgin, is concerned about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

Like Jonathan and Paul, I encounter times of loneliness and isolation, yet I savor a richness of life experience that is rare. The flexibility and autonomy that I enjoy have allowed me a diversity of experiences that most will never know in this life. It has been my great fortune to travel in thirty-one countries, forty-two American states, and seventeen Mexican ones. With vivid recall, magnificent sunsets from the turrets of the British castle I once lived in, come back to memory. I have the freedom to choose to spend my income on hospital projects in South American and schools in India rather than on mini-van payments, mortgages, cable TV, rare Beanie Babies, Big Macs, and computer games. I can clean out the closets and basement without raising howls of protest.
In my anecdotal experience, it's a rare married person who would not trade life circumstances with me in a nano-second. American divorce rates suggest my anecdotal observations may have high-order statistical significance. I can't help but wondering if many of us have our relational ladders up against the wrong wall. I can't help but wondering if Paul hadn't figured that out about twenty centuries ahead of us.

As sumptuous as my life has been, it seems I have yet been running only in the prelims. I have hope that I will soon be able to finish my preparations and enter into the true contests of life. If I am real lucky I might hear someone tell me at the far end "Well done, good and faithful servant." I don't expect I will be able to hear this if I am carrying a bag of Beanie Babies and Tickle-me-Elmos on my back or making daily runs to the drive-thru in my mini-van.
"Not that I have already obtained it, or have already become perfect, but I press on in order that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet, but one thing I do, forgetting that which lies behind, and reaching forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."