Blog # 79 ALL

Blog # 79 ALL This is a transcript of an essay I wrote years ago when I was Pastor of St. Francis de Sales Church in Idabel, OK. It seems like only last week! As I sit here in the office, the new First Baptist Church is being constructed directly across the street. Two men on the roof are hammering nails. A third man is climbing up the scaffold to join them. It is a beautiful sunny day. It occurred to me to think of this same church building ten years from now. It is a typical Sunday evening service. The church is full. The music is beautiful. The message is clear and consoling. People are happy and thankful for the opportunity of expressing their faith, praise, and thanks. Then my thoughts came back to today, as the church building is being constructed. Many nails are being hammered into the roof. Each nail is a part of the church, though small in itself and not doing the work of other parts of the church or of other nails. Ten years from now there may be hundreds of people at the service I envisioned a few moments ago. Yet I think none of them will be thinking of the nails being used today in the church's construction. It is not that anyone would deny the existence of the nails or say they are not useful or important to the building. They are merely not remembered, unthought of, and as a result to some extent unreal. A similar experience as this is common in other areas of our lives. Unless we take time to reflect, unless we train ourselves to be observant, unless we are ready to see and appreciate all there is around us, the danger is we will see only part of it, observe a small portion of it, see and appreciate too little of it to be as happy and appreciative as God and the world around us call us to be. I look again across the street. So much more is going on than the construction of a building. I think of the person who invented the hammer and appreciate the great gift this has been to all who work with wood and nails. The buttons on each shirt, the shoes on each foot, the hats, jackets, and jeans are there before me. The tailors, the shoemakers, all are real. All of them are part of me if I permit them to be so. I think of several people who are possibly reading these reflections. I pray for you to the Lord, that you may rejoice in all God is doing in your life, that you may know and love the Lord more perfectly every day, that you might be happy in your faith, that the Lord will bless you with a deep appreciation of creation, the things and people around you whom God has given us as a reminder and expression of His presence among us and of God's infinite love for us all. Thanks be to God for every nail in the roof of my home, for every pane of glass in the windows, for every inch of the path that leads to the street, and every person I will ever meet, and above and in them all thanks be to Thee, O Lord, for Your love and Your salvation. Amen!