Once upon a time a man lived in a little village that was overrun with skunks. This man was a good hunter and trapper and knew how to entice the skunks into cages. People would ask him to come and remove the skunks that denned up under their houses. He became known as the “SKUNKMAN”! He eventually charged a small fee for his services and most people were happy to pay him to take away the odorous little creatures.

One day, after removing the fifth skunk from a home, the homeowner asked what would happen if he didn’t pay. The SKUNKMAN said he put captured skunks into little cages and gave his clients thirty days to pay. If on the thirty- first day he had not received his money, all the skunks he had collected from under the non-payers home would be returned to the front porch. Needless to say, this policy was seldom enforced.

Our sins are like skunks, they seem to hang around and stink. Satan likes to bring them back to our door, over and over and over. He wants to shove our faces into our mistakes and shortcomings. He wants to keep us captive, ruminating over old failures. It is one of Satan’s biggest tricks, to get people to despair and think there is no way they can be “good enough” to be acceptable to God. The good news is that the price of our “skunkey” sins are paid for by the blood of the Son of God, Jesus Christ! Satan cannot bring back our sins for payment, they have been paid, in full!

“ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8

“…and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” I John. 1:7

My dearest cousin’s husband is dying.  How odd that phrase when , in fact, we are all dying, just at different times.  For an atheist the idea of death must be one of great loss and despair.  To have as your only hope, “like the little dog rover, when you’re dead you’re dead all over,” would not be extremely comforting.  I suspect most atheists don’t remind themselves of death very often.  Yet, we are surrounded by it.  Every day the local paper reports them in the “obit” section.  I am very happy to report that my cousin’s family are not atheists and have a comfort available to them that is not the case for people that prefer to “go it alone” without God.  There are days when my cousin’s husband just wants to go on and leave the old shell behind, but he lingers.  Even in asking, “why,” we know, if we’re honest in our quest for the answer.  I believe the answer is the one given by one actor to another in a movie I saw once.  One asked the other on the occasion of leaving this life for the next, “It’s hard to let go isn’t it?”

Physical life is precious, it’s a gift of God, yet, eternal life is so much more a gift.  The transformation from one to the other is a great mystery.  In his great novel, “If Winter Comes”, A.S.M. Hutchinson describes how a young man named Freddie Perch who had just been killed in the war (WW I) came back to help his mother die.  He was the type of son that would never allow his mother to even cross a road without him.  And here he was to help his mother cross the greatest road in her life.

She was moaning….  That inhabitant of her body had done its preparations and now stood at the door in the darkness, very frightened.  It wanted to go back.  It had been very accustomed to being here.  It could not go back.  It did not want to shut the door.  The door was shutting.  It stood and shrank and whimpered there…..  It was old Mrs. Perch that stood there whimpering, shrinking upon the threshold of that huge abyss, wide as space, dark as night …

Hummingbirds regularly come to our feeder outside the window to partake of the “goodie juice” we provide.  The feeder can be seen by Rhoda and me from our respective vantage points.  We alert each other as visitors arrive, usually unexpectedly, and they leave almost the same way.  One must be on one’s toes to see them, for hummingbirds don’t stay long.

We have noticed an interesting thing about hummingbirds.  When they approach the feeder and if a wasp is there, they don’t land, or if they do and see a wasp they quickly fly away.  Wasps like hummingbird feeders too and apparently like to sting the hummingbirds, or at least the hummingbirds think they do.  When no wasps are at the feeder, the birds land and drink away.  At this very moment, a hummingbird has come for its morning refreshment and refreshed itself.  Why did it stay?  Because there was no wasp there, it had no fear at the feeder!  The hummingbirds have a rule – wasp at the feeder – fly away – wasp not at the feeder – stay and enjoy the gift of the feeder.

Why can’t people be as wise as the hummingbirds?  Some not only don’t fly , in our case, don’t run from an obvious danger.  They fall for Satan’s overtures and often do not see the spider until they’re caught firmly in the web.  Shakespeare said in his great play, The Merchant of Venice, “There is no vice so simple but assumes some mark of virtue on its outward parts”.  If you have read my other works you know that I am a poet and like to use my poems to illustrate a point.  I would like to take that opportunity again in this essay and include a poem I wrote some time ago which I think is germane to today’s topic.

POKER MAN

Why do you condemn this, that’s in?

Why do you maintain it’s a sin?

Why do you stand so hard

Against a little game of cards?

You can’t prove it’s wrong to me

For I’ve closed my eyes and cannot see

That something is amiss

And I can’t hear the serpent’s hiss.

The little English sparrow is a great success story.  The insignificant little bird is actually not a sparrow, but a member of the weaver family of birds.  Brought to America, probably as a stowaway on early ships, it took hold in the New World and became one of the most dominant birds we see. Jesus also spoke of sparrows, the sparrows of Jerusalem.  He remarked in Matthew 10 that two of them sold for just a penny.  Then He makes the astounding observation that not one of them falls to the ground apart from the Father.  The implication is that not only does He know when the tiniest of His creation dies, He is there.  Jesus is making the obvious thing obvious.  If God loves His little sparrows like that, then how much more does He love His children? When we are in trouble, God comes to our rescue.  The psalmist in Psalms 102 considers himself as a sparrow alone upon a housetop facing great danger.  That’s a pretty good picture of a helpless and hapless individual. But in verse 17 he says the Almighty would regard the prayer of the destitute. No one is ever alone who has his Father.

Have you wondered about the guy wandering the highways with the  backpack and run down shoes?  Where’s he going? Where’s he from? Where’s he spending the night,? Is it in a pasture under a  tree?  And how does he  keep warm in the winter? What does he eat and where does he get his water? Who would chose a life with such self imposed deprivation? Who would chose to be homeless?

But people who would never chose to live their physical lives like that make choices  putting them in the same situation spiritually. Jude, verse 13, refers to ungodly individuals who are described as “wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever”. The most tragic thing that can  happen to a human being is to disconnect from God, in computer terminology, “disconnected from the network”.

Several years ago I observed men traveling down the Interstate Highway that cuts through our little town and  wrote a poem about a fictitious man I called “Johnee”.  I hope you enjoy it and see how it describes  an absolute disconnect.

Johnee

by David Allen

They found him last night,
wrapped in his sleeping
blanket. Out on the Interstate,
dead as a hammer, stiff as
a  board.  Died sometime
in the night, all alone, all
by himself.

No I.D., only, “ My name
is Johnee”,  tattooed on his
chest.

Where was he from? Where
was he going?

Well, he’s not going anywhere,
anymore. And somewhere, long
ago, someone bounced him on
their knee
and said,
“ Oh, Johnee, you’ll
go far in this world”.

But, this, this was too far,
Way too far.

Johnee lost his way. The way home grew so dim he could no longer see it. The darkness overcame him and he died. Johnee disconnected. Are you connected?

“What the Old Man Does is Always Right” is a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen which tells of a peasant who trades his horse down to a sack of rotten apples, justifying his trades all the way down.  If you can ignore the original moral it can be repurposed as a powerful parable illustrating the sins of attrition, those sins that slowly result in a drift away from a strong relationship with God.  We can justify our actions all we want, but if in the end we are left with a rotten relationship our eternal reward is at risk.   In an interesting twist, the man’s wife agrees with his actions all the way – showing that our drift can influence others away from God as well.  Really, what the old man does isn’t always right.  Read the full parable below.

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