Pastor's Message, March 2009

I was in fourth grade, ten years old, and standing by the swings during recess unwrapping a Baby Ruth candy bar. Two older women approached me. They were sixth graders. “Give us a bite and we will bring you two candy bars tomorrow,” one of them said. I gave them a bite. They took the whole candy bar. I waited a long time the next day in the same place, but they did not show up. I decided never to let that happen to me again.

In many ways it was probably a very good learning experience about not letting myself be so gullible, but I suspect it also called me to miss the goodness of trusting and sharing in many other relationships. It is easy to take one or two bad experiences and turn them into a life-long decision that affects us forever.

Mark Twain once wrote, “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it, and stay there. Otherwise we are like the cat that sat down on the hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again…but also, she will never sit down on a cold one either.”

Do we really want to be ruled forever by decisions that we made at a younger age? Probably not. Yet I hear some folks give these kinds of reasons for keeping God at arm’s length: “As a child I didn’t like church,” or “Bible study didn’t make sense to me,” or “I prayed and prayed when I was young and it didn’t help.” So then they have never revisited those decisions or as a adult gone back into the scriptures to see if that decision was still valid.

It might be easier and also make you feel safer to never challenge your old decisions. But at the same time you and I might be missing the joy of experiencing life to the fullest. Lent is the season to open up our life for inspection. And maybe this year it is a good time to weed out some old decisions that are more hurtful than helpful.

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